T
Twisted
And claiming ownership and the right to control third-party use of
large integers is simply, baldly, ridiculous.
Thanks for the reductio ad absurdum making my point.
And claiming ownership and the right to control third-party use of
large integers is simply, baldly, ridiculous.
Thanks for the reductio ad absurdum making my point.
T
Twisted
And you don't find this abusive and wrong? So-called submarine
patents, launched from stealth like torpedoes, are among the more
universally-derided patent system abuses.
This doesn't validate Unisys's behavior, or by extension patent law,
either from a public-benefit or even a Unisys-benefit point of view.
Just because in this case they reinvented the wheel and came up the a
round one due to someone's obstructive patent on the square wheel
doesn't make patents in general any less awful.
What assumptions? All I depended on there in the way of assumptions
was that the laws of arithmetic we all learned in grade school, and
the definition of ROI as "some amount of money that you have as a
result of an investment and that you didn't have before, less the
amount invested".
Positive ROI is enough, and can be achieved without ironclad (pardon
what's arguably a pun here) control over downstream uses.
This is an excellent argument AGAINST making there be enormous legal
liability risks from NOT doing such a search, as is currently the
case. An excellent example of one of the numerous independent and
simultaneous ways that patents stifle innovation instead of promoting
it as intended. You don't date innovate without doing a patent search
first. You don't dare do a patent search unless you've got a ton of
spare money to blow on it. Therefore you don't dare innovate unless
you're already rich. So much for incentivizing the poor, penniless
inventor eh? And just one more way to artificially raise the barrier
to entry to favor cartels over competitive markets too. And we already
discussed how cartelization of an industry stifles innovation in that
industry all on its own, by removing any incentives to do so (no more
danger that if you don't a competitor will beat you to it, because no
more competitors).
I've obviously taken more chemistry than you have. Platinum is a
surface catalyst. It's damned near inert chemically; it exerts its
effects by physically arranging atoms in contact with it in ways that
enhance certain types of chemical reaction such as attaching and
detaching hydrogen atoms. It is not consumed in the reaction, even if
the reaction does not complete. Platinum ions may occasionally break
free into solution, but even so a given thin sheet platinum should,
with proper care, last a very long time and through very many uses.
Especially as its inert nature also makes it quite easy to
decontaminate for reuse.
Then it's a poorly designed machine. The coolant's absence should just
mean the magnet isn't superconducting and is therefore too weak to do
its job, and may overheat and be damaged if you try to run the machine
without coolant. But it should be possible to idle it without keeping
it cool if it's well-designed, and cool it down to temperature in
preparation for each use.
In a similar vein, I would want my money back if I got an oven but it
would be broken by allowing it to sit idle at room temperature and
only preheating it before each instance of cooking in it, meaning this
particular oven had to be always left on wasting electricity, costing
through the nose, and causing a continually elevated fire risk.
In the real world it always does.
What are you babbling about now? The hypothesis is an IP-free company
that does research and development of new products so yes, it does
have R&D employees.
No, they are business moguls capable of funding medical breakthroughs.
Are you trying to claim that without IP there would not be anyone with
the knowledge or expertise? Rather there'd be more, because access to
knowledge, information, education, and training would be much cheaper
than now.
I'm not sure about the agricultural subsidies, unless they help
provide third-world access to food they otherwise couldn't afford, and
I don't think they currently do. OTOH the other stuff is essential
social services. Social Security is even paid for out of someone's own
income, some of it having been siphoned off and invested. Axing it is
robbing the people that already paid into those funds and now won't
get it back with interest in their golden years. Depriving people of
money they already had got fair and square? That definitely IS theft.
How is any of this relevant?
I have far too many things on my plate to check out every website
someone mentions in a usenet post I happen to end up reading.
Especially when they neglect to supply a URL so I'd have to
additionally spend time googling first. Double especially when I have
reason to suspect that someone is simply trying to push me to a biased
source of propaganda contrary to my own beliefs and, since my beliefs
are founded on actual empirical evidence and on basic principles of
"greatest good for the greatest number", therefore contrary to reason
itself.
Hah! The local library is a 45-minute trip from here, reducible only
if I pay through the nose. The Library of Congress is a $600 or so
plane ride away, and an equally expensive ride back, plus putting me
temporarily in the very den of the lion with a very bad bunch of
constitution-shredding wannabe-fascists currently running the show,
right where their powers would be greatest. Given the opinions I've
expressed (including that last, but lots of others) I'd probably
quietly disappear and my bones turn up in some dusty Eastern European
archaeological site where some future scientists are investigating the
age-old remains of CIA black sites a thousand years hence.
[calls me names; ignored]
This is so off-base it's hilarious. What is so wrong with favoring
competitive markets? Anyways, if you want to continue to argue why the
patent system is great and we should all love patent law, try arguing
it to 5,000,000 children infected with HIV in Africa who are denied
access to potentially life-saving medication simply because they can
ONLY afford to pay the marginal cost of producing their doses, and not
the giant extra premium demanded by Big Pharma to pay for their next
bunch of Superbowl ads for heartburn medication and dick stiffeners
for rich Westerners.
Your assumptions, so near as I can tell:
* Poor people don't matter, unless they happen to be inventors,
whereupon they become rich people anyway.
* Turning a profit in six years is not good enough. That company is
entitled to turn a profit in three even at the expense of everyone's
freedoms.
* It's just fine if the barrier to entry is artificially very high
through expensive patent searches, enormous liability risks, and cozy
cross-licensing arrangements so that a cartel forms. Competition is so
messy and inefficient anyway.
* Everyone should stop whining and just pay for stuff that's been
priced at anywhere from 50% above to 5000%(!) above cost so that the
three-piece-suit wearing elite are kept in silk suits and golf balls
for life, free jet travel and five-star hotel stays every week, and
obscenely long yachts and limos that compensate for their tiny
shrivelled dicks -- after all, it's the American way!
I don't see that these are at all acceptable. Sorry.
T
Twisted
*choke* *sputter* ROTFLMAO !!
You obviously don't know Usenet very well!
Stick to fascist-moderated webboards if you don't like free speech!
T
Twisted
Oh, holy Christ no. You didn't reply with ANOTHER huge attack post.
You did.
*sob*
There goes my next three hours or so...
And what about all the stuff that won't work afterward? I am entitled
to continue using it. I don't see any justification for being required
to pay Microsoft to be able to use this third-party software that
isn't by Microsoft. Even assuming there was some justification for
having to pay Microsoft to use software that is by Microsoft, despite
such use still not adding anything to Microsoft's costs.
An alternative, yes. A perfect one, no.
Your conclusion does not follow. The game content and software would
be driven down to marginal cost in an ideal world. So? Here's how to
make money making commercial games anyway:
* Let Coke and Pepsi bid for which appears on in-game vending machines
and billboards and such.
* Promise to use all kinds of nifty hardware OpenGL features in
exchange for some money from nVidia and/or ATI. Your game will help
them sell video cards, which are expensive and scarce physical goods
they make a profit on. Everyone wins.
* For online-type games, create an official tournament and get
sponsorship and sell tickets (since spectating burdens their server
bandwidth, there's nothing wrong with them charging for the
privilege). This works for sports. People play baseball without paying
anyone royalties all the time, and it doesn't mean baseball is
unprofitable just because anyone can play for free! Look at the money
MLB rakes in. Just look at it. Even if they stopped what abusive IP
crud they currently do, there's still tickets in limited-space
stadiums to sell for a profit, and sponsorships. They make oodles off
those alone. So could an online game that was good enough to be a
cybersport.
* For online-type games, a constantly-evolving online world with
interaction with other users ala MMORPGs is a viable model either for
the entire game or for a game mode. Easy copyability of the game
software doesn't stop you making a killing charging for bandwidth to
your game servers for this MMOG mode.
* Costs can be reduced by crowdsourcing more content. In the extreme
case the commercial aspect is reduced to acting as a crap-filter and
charging for the privilege. Game development can be open sourced and
crowdsourced. At this point the role of the corporation can reduce to
a low-expenses recommendation service in effect.
* Recommendation/crapfiltering can be crowdsourced. Pass free games
through a filter like this and skim off the top, for free.
* Makers of free games have an incentive to pass such filtering,
especially if they have got product placement plugs or similarly in
the game content, or sell ancillary goods or services such as some of
the things described above.
How much of that is due to artificially generated hype via marketing
though?
Quake 1 capture the flag comes to mind (user-made and free if you
already had Quake). And Enemy Territory got pretty popular (free). A
lot more good free games are just obscure, because there isn't a big
corporate marketing push behind them. If the worst came to the worst,
and big corporate game making did die off, that marketing noise would
disappear and people would start having to seek out games via google,
and would start up clubs and recommendation engines and the like to
spread the word about good ones. And there'd no longer be as big a
commercial incentive to game the system on ratings sites and the like
either. Game marketing, such as it was, would be more meritocratic in
character, and there'd be plenty of high quality ones. Which you'd pay
less for.
Everywhere, if you'd only bother to look for them, but I guess you'd
rather not do so and risk seeing evidence that might overturn your
precious dogma.
There is no evidence that this would happen and plenty of reasons to
believe it wouldn't, and high quality games would continue to be
produced.
And even if you were RIGHT -- is losing (or maybe just delaying) the
top tier of games -- GAMES -- too high a price for society to pay for
much greater freedom, much reduced costs of living, much richer
culture generally, and much more innovation in productive technology?
You assume it wouldn't have been. You have no evidence. It might have
been made but the makers had a different business model. You don't
know!
"We" don't? *I* do. *You* do not, probably because you don't look, or
refuse to believe your eyes when you do.
And people have done all of those things to top notch quality too. *I*
have done top notch level design AND art asset design PERSONALLY. Free
mods for games have done more or even most of those things. Source
port derivatives and whole-cloth free engines have been made -- and
distributed for free -- so even engine programming is covered.
Not a one of the talents you just listed is precluded by a game not
being a commercial one with a business model dependent on restricting
copying. NOT A ONE.
No, you only need "a game" in the first place. And certainly "a
commercial game" that just so happens not to be funded by a
restrictive business model would suffice.
On what basis? Many have as good or even superior gameplay to typical
commercial games. It's not always about glitz and top-of-the-line
graphics you know. Even when it is, free can compete.
You neglected the point I was making, which was that Quake 1 was used
as the base for developing these new, free engines, rather than these
games being "simply" Quake 1.
First we have Tenebrae. It's Quake 1's gameplay and levels with Doom 3
quality visuals. In other words, a Quake 1 updated for the 21st.
Then we have such games as Nehahra. That is a quite-large, high-
quality single-and-multiplayer FPS built on an engine called
Darkplaces. Another Q1 source port. It's recent and Nehahra is
competitive in quality with commercial games of the same vintage as
Nehahra.
It may have excelled on gameplay (and price competitiveness) more than
on visuals, but so what? See above re: eye candy not being everything.
Screenshots selected by you that would favor your side of the argument
do not mean a damn thing. I could use the D3 engine to make some
outright horrible-looking screenshots, even ones full of visual
glitches and ugliness, and post links to them here, and they would
likewise prove nothing.
A few potentially-biased samples proves nothing.
And this would change when the company used another business model
than per-copy pricing and copy restrictions how, exactly?
In your worst case scenario of no more commercial games, obviously
that talent would have nowhere to go but into free games, and free
games would improve to take up the slack.
Nobody said anything about the talent not getting paid. Does the
talent on a typical top-notch commercial game get any royalties from
copyrights?
NO!
Not that I've ever heard of, anyway!
And we've already seen that companies can still make money from
content without copyright law. They just can't do it in a particular
common, lazy, and frequently abusive manner anymore.
You aren't the judge of that, you arrogant twit. The person who has a
particular goal they need to achieve using computer software is the
judge of that.
HIGH END I said.
It is, however, a market failure that there's no alternative in such a
case, even though such an alternative would cost no more and save some
people money.
I am against market failure and uncompetitive markets. I am not
against businesses making an honest buck. If my suggestions have some
side effects such as making it harder for some businesses to make a
dishonest buck, well, so what?
Not on the books, but there seems to be one in practise -- either pay
the Microsoft tax or pay in subtler ways by missing out on certain
things. There is no reason whatsoever for a just society to enable
such a thing to be, in effect, enforced on everyone to enrich someone
WHO IS ALREADY THE WORLD'S RICHEST MAN -- WHAT MORE DOES HE POSSIBLY
NEED OR CAN HE POSSIBLY DESERVE!? JESUS H. CHRIST JUMPING ON A FUCKING
POGO STICK YOU ARE DENSE OLIVER WONG!
I do too -- but only where they cost someone without that someone's
consent. If I take money from A's pocket without A's permission,
that's wrong, same if I kill or injure A against his wishes. If I let
B copy an object of mine, using resources B and I legally possess, and
B chooses to do so, then no wrong can possibly have been committed
under any sane theory of natural justice.
That's what this whole discussion is about -- a particular proposal
for making the world a better place. If your response to that sort of
thing is "So what?" then buzz off already -- this thread is no longer
discussing anything that you are interested in. On the other hand, if
you are interested, and you object and believe that the world, if it
were that way, would be worse rather than better than the world we
have now, then please muster arguments AND EVIDENCE supporting your
theory if you choose to continue to argue in this thread.
Nice try, but I already know the answer: color management in
particular is thinly-supported to nonexistent under unix in general,
and particularly using only free software.
Your claimed "logical inconsistencies" are founded on false
assumptions on your part. For example in the games stuff you think one
of the things I said is logically nonsense because it assumes there'd
be games like Quake. My assumption is safer than yours -- an
assumption backed by zero evidence that no such games would ever be
made.
I find this remarkable. You seem wholly critical of it most of the
time. What specific details though? There are proven business models
for no-copying-restricted commercial software (Red Hat). There are
proven business models for you-can-play-for-free commercial games
(baseball, admittedly not a computer game, but I don't see that
distinction as being relevant). There are also proven downsides,
abuses, rampant problems, and issues with the existing system most of
which cannot be fixed except either by superficial bandaids or by
tossing that whole system into the recycle bin as inherently flawed
and proven not fit for purpose.
It is very strongly supported by evidence. I noted costs of living
would go down, perhaps drastically -- a phaseout rather than abrupt
repeal might be in order to protect the economy from deflation, never
mind to protect it from a too-violent transitional phase. I'd suggest
setting a date a decade or less in the future at which time all
existing IP rights expire, save keeping trademarks around, with a firm
foot put down to limit trademark infringement liability to where it
actually confuses a typical consumer as to who made or endorsed the
product; none of this dilution or defending-the-mark BS; continuing to
use the mark in marketing suffices to ensure continued ownership of
the mark, and use of the mark to sell unauthorized similar merchandise
to the same market remains infringement. McDonald's burgers and
McDonald's car repairs can coexist peacefully. The fast-food chain
need not sue the car repair company frivilously or risk losing its
mark for not defending it; continuing to sell burgers under the brand
name suffices to ensure they get to keep the mark. No consumers are
going to eat a McDonald's sparkplug or dring McDonald's windshield-
washer fluid and then complain that their burger was rock-hard stale
and their drink poisoned, after all; there's no risk of confusion in
this scenario.
Now picture this -- copyrights and patents all expire on say January 1
2012. Companies have five years to adjust and start positioning
themselves for the post-IP future, developing alternate business
models. They can even get new copyrights and patents, but with the
full knowledge that they'll only be good for a handful of years.
There'll be a mad scramble; so be it.
And then costs for everyone for almost everything drop. Costs of R&D
drop. Government does the big, expensive Phase III clinical trials
instead of Big Pharma starting even before the expiry date of January
1 2012 on the pharma patents, so R&D costs for Big Pharma ALREADY
dropped.
Soon, between thinner margins and improving filtering software and on-
demand internet services killing traditional broadcast media, the
traditional obnoxious, intrusive advertisement is doomed; sponsorship
arrangements and product placements take their place, along with
classifieds and referral/recommendation services and the like. Madison
Avenue goes the way of the dodo. Companies like eBay and Craigslist
and Google dominate the field, along with specialists in auctioning
product placement rights and designing plugs, and such.
Innovation speeds up enormously. Huge new wealth is created as a
consequence.
Lots of people lose their jobs sometime during the shakeup, but job
security has been lousy for a decade plus anyway, so nobody much
notices. Unemployment probably doesn't change much at first, but
eventually begins to drop. Lower costs mean people need less money,
and part-time work becomes the major thing. Statistics-keepers change,
then change again the definition of unemployment as the full-time 9-
to-5 job goes the way of the dinosaurs. The typical working week is 3
days with a fair amount of flexibility at roughly the pre-existing
hourly pay rates; this is a pay increase relative to the cost of
living when compared to pay and cost of living now. One went down; the
other went down even more.
Lack of fat margins and especially presence of competition not only
reinvigorates innovation but also makes companies have to roll profits
into R&D and pass on savings to consumers. There is no longer a viable
business model that blows a quarter's earnings on oak-panelling the
entire penthouse floor of Corporate HQ on the CEO's whim and letting
the CEO vote himself a seven-figure pay raise on their already eight-
figure salary to finance that enormous new yacht they wanted.
Advertising is also an expense to trim; making a good product and
getting it a small amount of initial attention, then letting the
recommendation engines promote it, is far more cost effective.
A few sectors besides advertising are seriously shaken up. Mainly
luxury sectors.
The economy becomes leaner and meaner, more streamlined and efficient.
The first nation on Earth to run itself this way is going to rapidly
outproduce all rivals and will probably play host to the technological
singularity when that happens.
Right now, the likeliest candidate is ...
China.
USA, you'd better watch out, or you will become a has-been!
[snip "stylistic criticism"]
Actually, it was a reference to the Matrix, you uncultured ... so-and-
so.
Not much into the public domain per se, but some (quality!) game
content with a copyleft, and plan to copyleft some software I'll
release when (if) I get around to finishing it.
So yes I am willing to put my money (well, time and effort) where my
mouth is.
I argue that the order of presentation of items is "how it behaves
semantically". Especially when it makes a big difference to user
convenience. For example, weeding out duplicates and near-duplicates
from digital photos. The photos need to be positioned side by side in
the Explorer window and one double-clicked, and then you can just
arrow back and forth in the previewer to flip between them and compare
them visually. This doesn't work if they are not first positioned side
by side, e.g. if one is where it should be and the other is way the
hell down at the bottom of the list. The user has to make a SECOND
drag to move the latter file to where they want it (or the first file
to the end of the list). This is annoying. Worse, it's SLOOOOOW;
Windows doesn't let you drag the file way above the top border of the
window to scroll faster and bring it down to almost back inside the
window to scroll slower. It just scrolls fairly slowly no matter what.
Try it 50 or 60 times. It is *very* intermittent.
I've also got the show shadowses, smooth-scroll list boxes, and
background images. None of which should affect positioning or sorting
of icons in Explorer windows. The only one that should affect icons at
all is the last of the show shadows options.
The options I kept are the ones that actually make things more
legible, and help active menus and other things stand out from
background clutter, aside from maybe background images. I think
disabling that prevented desktop wallpaper from working or something.
Drop shadows on icon names makes icon names easier to find and read to
compensate anyway.
All the animation options that slow stuff down or consume unneeded
resources or simply annoy went bye-bye of course. Especially the
search puppy -- it would actually not accept input during some of the
animations until the animation completed, which is just plain
irritating, nevermind pointless. Slowing down my workflow just so your
animation can't possibly glitch from a new animation being cued while
an existing one isn't finished is a classic example of inversion of
priorities and not one you can blame on the kernel scheduler either!
I agree that the vast majority of those that merely annoy users but
lack security implications have not.
And some people (yourself included) seem reluctant to accept evidence
in favor of the claim. I wonder why?
That might actually be legitimate, given that it's a condition of
receiving the beverage.
The usual commercial software EULA is more comparable to a vending
machine that accepts your quarter and spits out a can. Then you go to
pop the tab and the can forces you to accept a EULA before you can
take a swig. OTOH the can is your personal property along with its
contents according to all applicable sales law since your purchase
from the vending machine was valid. Puncturing the can's side and
filling a glass with the contents thus released appears to be a
perfectly legal end-run around accepting the EULA, especially since
it's very unlikely you can refuse the EULA and then put the unopened
can into a slot in the vending machine and get your quarter back.
When the typical commercial software EULA is transformed (retaining
the semantics intact) to an analogy like the above, it becomes clear
how absolutely ridiculous it is, and how absurd and harmful making
them actually legally binding would be.
And it does retain intact semantics. Your newly-purchased CD is also
your private property, and you have certain rights in it. Including
via 17 USC section 117(a)(1) an affirmative fair use defense for
installing and running any software that's on that CD, even where such
activities create some private copies. No permission from the
copyright holder need be sought, so nothing need be agreed to in
exchange for that permission. The EULA offers no consideration.
Bypassing it somehow and installing and running the software anyway is
exactly analogous to puncturing the extortionate cola can with the
bogus EULA described above.
And if the EULA only pops up when you try to pop the tab, AFTER you've
lost your quarter? I rather suspect you'll question its legitimacy
then!
If a company wants to further restrict a customer beyond what their
copyrights already limit, or prevent a customer exercising customary
rights to seek remedy through the courts and the like, then I think
they should have to get the customer to physically sign something. And
they should have to have fully-substitutable competition. As a check
on abuse.
Yes, IF the one wishing to hold you to the agreement can produce a
signed-by-you bit of paper saying you accepted the terms. No software
EULA results in the manufacturer having any such signed document to
produce as evidence that you agreed to anything, however.
Your signed tax return is sent to the government, who can later use
the tax return with your signature on it as evidence of something if
it has some reason to want to do so.
Your click on the "accept" button on some dialog on your computer in
the privacy of your home was witnessed by noone else AND produced no
such lasting evidence. At most, this is like agreeing verbally to
something without the other guy getting it in writing. While the other
guy was listening to his iPod and deaf to the world.
New Zealand then? -- forget it; this guessing game is pointless.
[some HTML gobbledygook that looked like a google link to somewhere
uninterpretable due to all the tags and punctuation snipped]
No, it's only when your reply is critical of that something that it
means you disagree with it. So, for example, if you posted "Me too!"
you'd probably be an AOLer but you wouldn't be disagreeing with
anything.
Nice try with the weasel words, but no cigar. You can believe with all
your heart that I'm an idiot or consider it "merely your opinion" that
I'm nuts, and if you call me an idiot or crazy in public it's still
insulting.
Either provide a plausible alternative theory for what happened or
agree. You should certainly be interested in it now, because the
censor has broadened his horizons somewhat. This posting of yours that
I'm replying to? It got attacked in precisely the same way as my last
TWO postings to this branch of the thread (yes, it's now TWO, THREE if
you count the repost attempt of the first one separately, and so a
total of FOUR separate messages, three by me and one by you).
Yep. Attacked. The same NNTP server I use to check propagation doesn't
show the post you wrote that I'm currently responding to. It is
visible on Google Groups, and maybe some larger subset of Usenet, but
it failed to reach all of Usenet, and it is one of only four news
postings I'm aware of to have done so in this newsgroup in the past
MONTH. All in the same thread, all one of us replying to the other,
all on the same controversial topic.
Damned selective if you ask me.
At least it likely exonerates you, unless it's a very clever decoying
strategy. But my guess is it's someone else.
It's worth noting that the latest message by you is the first one that
suggests strongly that you might not be wholly averse to IP law going
down the tubes. So it's when you displayed signs of having some anti-
copyright views, and only when you did so, that you became a target.
Interesting also. Also indicates a human is reading the message. A bot
would have a hard time identifying a copyright-related argument as
being anti-copyright rather than pro- and also distinguishing your
posts quoting my arguments against copyright from your actually making
your own independent anti-copyright remarks.
If a software bug, glitch, spam-filtering program, hardware error, or
anything else in any NNTP server or any other machine is responsible,
it is apparently an AI-complete bug, glitch, spam-filter, hardware
error, or whatever, and that technological singularity I mentioned
earlier is already upon us, but I find this much less likely than that
the "glitch" is one of the carbon-based and bipedal components of the
infrastructure instead, presumably one with an axe to grind.
I think that this is pessimistic at least, and in all likelihood just
plain wrong.
Any amount at all intrudes into my home and tells me what I can and
cannot do in the privacy of same with only consenting partners. It's
as bad as the sodomy laws that are occasionally used to prosecute
consenting adults, for ****'s sake (no pun unintended).
No, just implied it. *sigh*
That's a very fragile state of affairs by the nature of the physical
laws of this universe. It is unwise to depend on it lasting, and it is
foolish bordering on actively dangerous for law enforcement in a
democracy to indulge such unwise persons in their wishes that the laws
of physics be different. Alice is well advised to stop being such a
greedy so-and-so and make what they can of the valuable and more
robust fact of being the FIRST person to have it.
I'm not so sure. I may not have objected to such laws, but it would be
interesting to see if they can be done without. Of course, it would
require decentralizing command-and-control in battles; judging by the
evidence, decentralized-C&C guerrilla insurgents are superior to
traditional top-down armed forces in capability, even when
substantially outnumbered and outgunned. There are three likely
factors at play:
Flexible, decentralized C&C is a benefit itself.
Those fighting for their land or their lives are much more motivated
than those fighting for far off puppet masters; call it the home field
advantage.
Insurgents are willing to fight dirty and hide among hostages.
Eliminate the third and a decentralized army may still be a powerful
thing. Of course the powers that be would never stand for it, because
a decentralized army would be much more capable of turning quickly on
*them* if they started to look like they were among the bad guys
rather than the good guys. The thing Bush and co fear more than
anything else is a decentralized armed service that's unswervingly
loyal to the American ideal and its constitution and bill of rights!
Such a service might be especially good at defending the borders, but
it's likely to turn on the current crop of kleptocratic elites and it
certainly wouldn't go fight a pointless land war in Asia on their say
so without solid evidence of a military threat there to the homeland.
The sort of threat Iraq's WMDs would have posed, had they not
possessed a most inconvenient (for Bush) property, that of
nonexistence...
Given a decentralized, flexible-response armed forces the need for
battle plan secrecy laws goes away. Battle plans form closer to the
front lines and are only timely for hours. Also, they are likely still
encrypted and sent mainly locally. By the time anything of the plans
get to the general citizenship that battle's already over. Traitors
among the citizens get any such info too late. Traitors at the front
lines get battle info in a timely fashion, but would have done anyway.
So with radical military restructuring secrecy of battle plans can
rely purely on crypto and sensibility on the part of the troops. In
fact security of battle plan info goes UP, when traitors back behind
the lines and maybe even high up in the leadership no longer even know
the plan until it's too late, rather than seeing the plan with TOP
SECRET stamped all over it and being restrained only by the
possibility of being caught and punished if they misuse it. Such a
restructuring, in particular, makes a mole in the White House or
Pentagon a non-problem! No amount of lawmaking or traditional
enforcement methods can do that; only decentralization can. That alone
is a significant thing.
WMD information is dangerous where it is easy for a two-bit operator
to make a WMD and hold a city hostage with it, or use it just to get
attention or make a point. However it might be counterable with
information, rather than security through obscurity. For example, a
transparent world (all information is free) makes it easy to see who's
digging up and refining uranium, and where the plutonium from that
breeder reactor is going. This makes it easy to keep an eye on and
preempt anyone's making and using a bomb, or at least to keep an eye
on who currently has their finger on the button. Bioweapons info is
generally a coin whose flip side is info on how to cure or protect
against the same weapon. Transparency also enables the ingredients and
tools needed to make the weapon to be easily tracked and their use
monitored -- by those who know the secret recipe of course. And so
forth. Mutual watchdogging is the result of enough transparency, and
the current road of secrecy may be a dead-end. Security through
obscurity has a dismal track record in the cyber arena. Nuclear
nonproliferation is imperfect and leaks keep springing. Sooner or
later trying to plug them is no longer the optimum strategy for risk-
minimization. That point might have been passed, or might be yet to
come; wiser heads need to decide that question.
Private information about a person is dangerous insofar as its
disclosure can harm that person. Such dangers can be greatly reduced,
however:
* Drop all victimless crimes from the law books and add a
constitutional amendment forbidding the creation of more. Now
someone's harmless sexual or other recreational behavior is no longer
a legal risk if it is exposed.
* Transparency itself will force people to grow up and grow a layer of
tolerance for other peoples' sexual kinks and other differences and
preferences and even peccadilloes. Stigmas associated with medical
issues, including mental health ones, and sexuality go away and having
health information or sexual preferences revealed to the world ceases
to be a biggie.
* Some stuff, such as ability to hide involvement in a victimful crime
or concealing having breoken a promise to one's wife, is not worthy of
protection anyway.
* Financial information that can be used to defraud is the real
hotbutton issue right now with constant leaks of CC#s. The problem
here is actually the woefully inadequate security of the payment
mechanism itself. Fancy that -- a single number that must be revealed
to the other side of a transaction is the secret key to your money.
We've had public-key crypto for years and can replace every existing
non-cash payment method with a cryptographically secure mechanism
based on digitally signed transaction objects that act like
unforgeable cheques drawn on assorted accounts. Some of these will be
certified good for the amount of money -- essentially, unforgeable
emoney that's potentially as good as cash. Not untraceable of course,
just unforgeable. Some can be drawn on credit. They can be
interchangeable, aside from someone's potential unwillingness to
accept a non-certified version. A certified version just escrows the
money though to keep you honest, and maybe has a slightly higher
transaction cost as a result. This is a natural area for banks to R&D
but I don't see any evidence of it even starting to be researched.
Once financial information even up to account details can no longer
easily enable fraud (and indeed WOULD make fraud *detection* easier)
the reasons for keeping it private also dwindle to nearly nil.
* What remains? Peoples' own ineffable feeling of needing to keep
things about themselves secret. A rude and intolerant world is the
cause of that, and transparency puts the shoes on the other feet.
Going hostile due to someone else's private peccadilloes or whatever
would be mutual assured destruction for someone who has some such
skeletons in their own closet and all the closet doors are wide open.
* The risk of physical violence to people with certain lifestyles can
be addressed by the vastly increased risk of the violent getting
identified and prosecuted if information is easily available.
* Addresses readily available will enable spam. But transparency
exposes the hated spammers and they can no longer hide!
Upshot: in the longer term secrecy can be made obsolete with due care.
In the short term copyright and patent can be made obsolete right
fucking now.
Temporarily, at least; see above.
Note that what I suggested was nontransferable. It doesn't create a
property right as such, just a stronger affirmative privacy right,
since property must be alienable.
If it takes them more and they sell for less, the other one can
undercut them and bleed at a slower rate until the one is forced to
raise prices again or simply goes out of business. The market will
ultimately favor those who can make the product the most cheaply and
efficiently at a given quality point. This is economics 101.
That's such bad programming it deserves to blow up in your face. The
cure for such problems is, as everyone in this froup should be well
aware, Java. The only downside: it takes away your excuses for
platform discrimination, and it's unsuited to small apps.
If it does, then Microsoft has no reason to fear such competition and
derives no benefit from IP rights. Their IP rights are a security
blanket in this scenario, and society and law enforcement indulging
this childishness is outrageous.
In that case some people should find FPU code working on their 486SXs
and have a happy bonus. I'm not aware of that happening, however, and
I do distinctly recall reading that Intel physically mutilated 486
chips destined to be sold as 486SX chips. Gratuitously damaging the
product of your factories is not something a sane and competitive
market would reward, and is evidence of something THAT ISN'T EVEN IN
DISPUTE, that Intel had an effective monopoly at that point in time.
Yes. But I recall reading somewhere that your suggested strategy is
not what they actually did. Also selling some 486DXs as SXs is still
sneaky; selling only FPU-brokens as SXs and all the rest as DXs may
bring the DX price down sometimes but the market would tend to keep
supply and demand in step if functioning properly, and keep prices
sensible. Heavy demand for the DX would raise its price. Chipmakers
(we're assuming a hypothetical competitive market that didn't occur in
actuality) would increase manufacturing capacity to be able to
undercut the raised price, and prices would drop. They'd still
underproduce the DX but not by as much -- producing to full demand
would overproduce the SX and create a glut there, so the coupling of
production of the SX and DX tends to somewhat wedge their prices
apart, keeping the DX a touch expensive and the SX quite cheap. This
is what I summarized before by saying that the marginal cost of one
working chip would be around the average of the two prices, but the SX
price would be below and the DX price above. Rents are extracted from
the continued scarcity of DX chips, but they are competitive rents,
not monopoly rents.
A competitor would be producing a compatible chip by definition. A
case where Intel can make these chips but no competing company yet can
is a case where Intel has a brief first-mover advantage and another
opportunity to extract rents (monopoly rents this time, but only for a
short time). Again without doing anything abusive, or using patent
laws.
But that requires special equipment and expertise, and is difficult
and dangerous.
Each chip should be clocked at the maximum speed it runs without
errors at, and sold in that state. If the market is currently letting
a company get away with selling intentionally-underclocked chips
(relative to that), then it's clearly insufficiently competitive since
that's just as silly as intentionally-damaged 486s.
The abuse in this case comes from nondisclosure and underclocking and
similarly.
Test all batches of olive oil, grade them, and sell them, and let the
market price the various grades. Sometimes the price for a high grade
is lower because you're producing quality stuff more cheaply than
before or demand slackened. If producing quality stuff is expensive
and demand at the high end is weak, you lower your QA and save, but
still grade the same. If producing quality stuff is cheaper than
before, you sell quality stuff for less than before, and the savings
get passed to the consumer; you still get your margins; everybody
wins.
Everybody wins. It's hard to argue convincingly against a no-lose
scenario!
In the chip case, you test each chip while turning up the speed knob
until it starts to show erratic behavior, then lower the speed until
it's running perfectly; your cooling system measures its heat
dissipation. The chip is left clocked at the top speed it will run
properly at and is graded by documenting for this particular chip this
speed and the observed heat dissipation requirements. System builders
use this information when constructing a computer using that
particular CPU or whatever. For example the 4GHz chip is wasted in the
system with the 300MHz bus, so put it in the one with the really fast
bus, and this one needs a BIG cooling fan, and that one doesn't,
and ...
Market sets prices again. Consumers set prices on computers, whose
costs factor in the extra cooling on (predominantly) the fast CPUs and
other characteristics. Computer makers balancing costs, prices,
competitors' prices, and the like go for particular grades of CPUs.
Particular combinations of CPU speed and heat production rate get
particular prices by this mechanism. Speed is rewarded as is lower
heat dissipation, somewhat offsetting one another. The pricing ends up
reflecting the value proposition and cost tradeoffs. Of course,
there's feedback to chipmakers. Slack demand at the high end suggests
not to spend as much on making the chips fast or on QA; slack demand
at the low end suggests boosting QA and developing process
innovations.
This is how it should be.
Imperfect information distorts pricing. Better information makes the
market and its players more efficient and in the long run everybody
wins.
True, IF the lowest price point is below the marginal cost of one more
working chip. I'd assumed otherwise above though.
Suppose they test all the chips and clock them all as high as they
will run. Suppose further, to simplify, that this is always either
exactly 2 or exactly 3GHZ. Their process control and QA ensures that
on average at least fifty chips will come out as 3GHz. One particular
batch has 53. They sell these at the high price point, but maybe due
to their number it's a slightly lower price point than if there'd been
just 50. The other 47 get the low price point. But it might be a bit
higher. Market demand and price inelasticity will most likely just
keep the prices at $300 and $100 or some such pair that averages to
$200, rather than constantly fluctuating based on production numbers,
especially as price-buffering from chips of various ages being all
through the distribution chain will be a factor. A long term trend in
chip speeds, though, such as towards 75% of them tending to be 3GHz,
will shift the prices so that 3*high plus 1*low = 800 -- so the prices
move closer together, and the high price is not as much above $200 as
the low price is below it, whereas before they bracketed $200
symmetrically.
The big thing is consumers know exactly what they're getting, and all
the chips capable of being clocked at 3GHz and working properly
actually are, straight out of the factory, clocked at 3GHz, improving
downstream efficiency at no additional cost to the chipmaker.
And he is an expert because?
But I really meant someone who makes a business of reviewing stuff
like this. On the net. A blogger say. Whose opinion of Vista I can
actually browse to and read, and get an idea for why he's gotten such
a funny notion into his head such as that Vista is better than XP.
No, refuting my argument requires the upsides versus downsides be
lopsided in favor of Vista. They're lopsided in favor of XP. Halo 3
just means they aren't MAXIMALLY lopsided that way.
It was a joke. Nevermind.
They grow long when the same thing needs to be repeated ten million
times because once, twice, and even ten times doesn't seem to be
enough. Also, when every paragraph of mine spawns TWO in a response
purporting to refute it, and requiring my defense, producing two in my
response in turn...
Deadwood quoted material is all I see either of us trimming much of
the time. At least one response paragraph is being written for each
input paragraph on average. Or these posts would be growing shorter
instead.
If you're not making it clear when you're singling out a particular
point then you need to communicate more clearly.
Then I have no idea WTF you're arguing for.
I think that zero is not too little IP and gave plenty of sound
reasons and mountains of evidence to buttress that claim.
No; only Vista objectively sucking is evidence that Vista objectively
sucks. Vista doing hardly anything XP can't do faster cheaper and
better (and that one exception a frivolous game!) certainly seems to
qualify as "objectively sucks".
No, it's proof that it does not subjectively suck for you. It still
objectively sucks, trust me.
Then why are you arguing it to me?
What evidence did you give? Oh, yes, nothing but some subjective
feelings. In other words, no evidence at all. If you have some
evidence you're not sharing, real evidence that Vista is better, by
all means cough it up!
That kind of vagueness is a cop-out and you know it.
2+2 is 1 in these, true. 4 is also 1 in these, and so 2+2 is still 4.
Sorry, nice attempt though.
I'm also relying on the fact that it's enshrined in Constitutional law
as the sole purpose of duly constituted government around here.
Solipsism is also of no pragmatic relevance here. Solipsism has no
reason to oppose copyright abolition, since it's all inconsequential
changes to some dream world with no real existence anyway, and the
solipsist now gets lots of free stuff. Indeed we should expect a
solipsist to be a sociopath and to favor abolishing all law so he can
do as he damn well pleases, even rape and kill; my own suspicion is
that there are very few genuine solipsists, who actually fervently
believe solipsism to be true. And that this might be the result of
Darwin's version of the Invisible Hand.
I don't consider the use of common English-language idioms of
widespread nature to detract from my clarity. But if you'd rather
avoid them, or even communicate in one-syllable words, I guess that's
your preference.
You're kidding. Chinese name; English obviously not quite as strong as
you make it out to be and weak in areas native speakers have no
problems at all; and a tendency to geographic assumptions* that seem
to eliminate North America, and you claim to be in Canada?
* For example competitive broadband that provides decent NNTP service
is mainly a European and Southeast Asian thing. Most North American
communities have the cable company and the phone company, and maybe a
high-latency low-upspeed satellite service, plus an underbrush of
various dial-up providers. Of these, the dial-up providers might still
provide NNTP. You implied that your immediate environment resembles
the former more than the latter, and combined with your name that
suggested Southeast Asia. But maybe you're in some west coast Canadian
place that has progressive stuff like free municipal wifi or something
that most of us don't have?
Offshore support might fake good English but they'll never fake good
customer service or knowing what the **** they're talking about. If
they could fake *that*, they could program a computer to do it, and
since that's gotta be AI-complete...
I'm typically "genuinely interested" only when I can experiment and
try it at no (financial, spam, or otherwise) risk to myself. And not
necessarily even then; it depends on lots more.
Apparently it was only a ruse to buy time while plotting an ambush,
since this ... thing appeared for me to reply to two days later
continuing the same argument with nothing apparently resolved.
[snip nitpicking with the exact wording of something, which is a
strawman attack and entirely beside the point. Insane corporations
with brain tumors are not at all "best modeled as rational
utilitarians" or however else you wish to phrase it. My original point
stands.]
Jesus H. Christ, then what were you trying to refute originally when I
wrote a paragraph, days ago, saying that Microsoft couldn't hack it at
producing quality goods and so resorts to legal and technical measures
to frustrate the competition instead, and you threw up all over it?
Those people are nuts, and IIS is in fact shoddy however it is
perceived by anyone. I don't give two puffs of intestinal gases if the
fucking Pope says IIS is superior to Apache -- IIS is still a turd and
an official benediction by the world's biggest religious nut and quack
psychologist isn't going to change hard facts. All it will do is
further lower the credibility of the Vatican in my eyes, if such a
thing is actually possible without causing an integer underflow
exception to be thrown.
I never said IIS was anything but a steaming pile of unspeakable offal
from the bowels of a bile demon from the deepest pits of Hell. Well,
modulo paraphrasing.
I said Apache is better than IIS, and I said that IIS is shoddy. Those
are confirmable by direct scientific observation of IIS-hosted web
sites being hacked and just plain crashing and misbehaving far more
than their Apache counterparts. Heavy endorsement of use of Apache
(and only Apache) by Web masters on their own site pages is further,
albeit circumstantial evidence, but the opinions of experts in the
trenches carry much more weight with me than either nonexperts or
ivory-tower experts in these cases.
As mud.
Got evidence that it isn't? If not, we should try it and see. Then
we'd have evidence, one way or the other.
Your serotonin and dopamine levels. Obviously they're all out of whack
but it will take a qualified physician to tell me why; I haven't a
clue.
Whatever the **** it is, it's something-ML and my (standards-
compliant, natch) newsreader chokes on it and leaves me swimming in
markup and gobbledygook so please stick to plain text, as per normal
usenet netiquette.
I have independent opinions, thank you very much, and it is my
professional opinion as someone with PhD level knowledge of physics
that Vista being anything but a turdpile is as impossible as all the
air in a room suddenly ending up in the same half of it -- technically
not quite *impossible*, but violating the second law of thermodynamics
nonetheless. Microsoft is not physically capable of producing a
feeping creature while being dragged by several conflicting agendes
for its development every-which-way (their own bean counters, their
lawyers, their customers, and the RIAA make at least four, so consider
them drawn and quartered) and generating something that smells like
roses. Nobody else is either.
I can't, not without destroying one of my computers and wiping out
half my bank balance just to experiment. And if you honestly expected
me to do it, then you're a fucking nutjob. Anyway, I'd much sooner
install Linux if I were going to wipe one of my computers.
And after you've said that, examples STILL often contain details
irrelevant to the larger point being made, without being irrelevant
themselves.
I never promised any such thing, and I'd much rather not expose myself
to the risk of getting a letterbomb, steaming pile of manure, or
(worse) Windows Vista or something in the mail TYVM.
You did.
*sob*
There goes my next three hours or so...
Oliver said:
And what about all the stuff that won't work afterward? I am entitled
to continue using it. I don't see any justification for being required
to pay Microsoft to be able to use this third-party software that
isn't by Microsoft. Even assuming there was some justification for
having to pay Microsoft to use software that is by Microsoft, despite
such use still not adding anything to Microsoft's costs.
An alternative, yes. A perfect one, no.
Your conclusion does not follow. The game content and software would
be driven down to marginal cost in an ideal world. So? Here's how to
make money making commercial games anyway:
* Let Coke and Pepsi bid for which appears on in-game vending machines
and billboards and such.
* Promise to use all kinds of nifty hardware OpenGL features in
exchange for some money from nVidia and/or ATI. Your game will help
them sell video cards, which are expensive and scarce physical goods
they make a profit on. Everyone wins.
* For online-type games, create an official tournament and get
sponsorship and sell tickets (since spectating burdens their server
bandwidth, there's nothing wrong with them charging for the
privilege). This works for sports. People play baseball without paying
anyone royalties all the time, and it doesn't mean baseball is
unprofitable just because anyone can play for free! Look at the money
MLB rakes in. Just look at it. Even if they stopped what abusive IP
crud they currently do, there's still tickets in limited-space
stadiums to sell for a profit, and sponsorships. They make oodles off
those alone. So could an online game that was good enough to be a
cybersport.
* For online-type games, a constantly-evolving online world with
interaction with other users ala MMORPGs is a viable model either for
the entire game or for a game mode. Easy copyability of the game
software doesn't stop you making a killing charging for bandwidth to
your game servers for this MMOG mode.
* Costs can be reduced by crowdsourcing more content. In the extreme
case the commercial aspect is reduced to acting as a crap-filter and
charging for the privilege. Game development can be open sourced and
crowdsourced. At this point the role of the corporation can reduce to
a low-expenses recommendation service in effect.
* Recommendation/crapfiltering can be crowdsourced. Pass free games
through a filter like this and skim off the top, for free.
* Makers of free games have an incentive to pass such filtering,
especially if they have got product placement plugs or similarly in
the game content, or sell ancillary goods or services such as some of
the things described above.
How much of that is due to artificially generated hype via marketing
though?
Quake 1 capture the flag comes to mind (user-made and free if you
already had Quake). And Enemy Territory got pretty popular (free). A
lot more good free games are just obscure, because there isn't a big
corporate marketing push behind them. If the worst came to the worst,
and big corporate game making did die off, that marketing noise would
disappear and people would start having to seek out games via google,
and would start up clubs and recommendation engines and the like to
spread the word about good ones. And there'd no longer be as big a
commercial incentive to game the system on ratings sites and the like
either. Game marketing, such as it was, would be more meritocratic in
character, and there'd be plenty of high quality ones. Which you'd pay
less for.
Everywhere, if you'd only bother to look for them, but I guess you'd
rather not do so and risk seeing evidence that might overturn your
precious dogma.
There is no evidence that this would happen and plenty of reasons to
believe it wouldn't, and high quality games would continue to be
produced.
And even if you were RIGHT -- is losing (or maybe just delaying) the
top tier of games -- GAMES -- too high a price for society to pay for
much greater freedom, much reduced costs of living, much richer
culture generally, and much more innovation in productive technology?
You assume it wouldn't have been. You have no evidence. It might have
been made but the makers had a different business model. You don't
know!
"We" don't? *I* do. *You* do not, probably because you don't look, or
refuse to believe your eyes when you do.
And people have done all of those things to top notch quality too. *I*
have done top notch level design AND art asset design PERSONALLY. Free
mods for games have done more or even most of those things. Source
port derivatives and whole-cloth free engines have been made -- and
distributed for free -- so even engine programming is covered.
Not a one of the talents you just listed is precluded by a game not
being a commercial one with a business model dependent on restricting
copying. NOT A ONE.
No, you only need "a game" in the first place. And certainly "a
commercial game" that just so happens not to be funded by a
restrictive business model would suffice.
On what basis? Many have as good or even superior gameplay to typical
commercial games. It's not always about glitz and top-of-the-line
graphics you know. Even when it is, free can compete.
You neglected the point I was making, which was that Quake 1 was used
as the base for developing these new, free engines, rather than these
games being "simply" Quake 1.
First we have Tenebrae. It's Quake 1's gameplay and levels with Doom 3
quality visuals. In other words, a Quake 1 updated for the 21st.
Then we have such games as Nehahra. That is a quite-large, high-
quality single-and-multiplayer FPS built on an engine called
Darkplaces. Another Q1 source port. It's recent and Nehahra is
competitive in quality with commercial games of the same vintage as
Nehahra.
It may have excelled on gameplay (and price competitiveness) more than
on visuals, but so what? See above re: eye candy not being everything.
Screenshots selected by you that would favor your side of the argument
do not mean a damn thing. I could use the D3 engine to make some
outright horrible-looking screenshots, even ones full of visual
glitches and ugliness, and post links to them here, and they would
likewise prove nothing.
A few potentially-biased samples proves nothing.
And this would change when the company used another business model
than per-copy pricing and copy restrictions how, exactly?
In your worst case scenario of no more commercial games, obviously
that talent would have nowhere to go but into free games, and free
games would improve to take up the slack.
Nobody said anything about the talent not getting paid. Does the
talent on a typical top-notch commercial game get any royalties from
copyrights?
NO!
Not that I've ever heard of, anyway!
And we've already seen that companies can still make money from
content without copyright law. They just can't do it in a particular
common, lazy, and frequently abusive manner anymore.
You aren't the judge of that, you arrogant twit. The person who has a
particular goal they need to achieve using computer software is the
judge of that.
HIGH END I said.
It is, however, a market failure that there's no alternative in such a
case, even though such an alternative would cost no more and save some
people money.
I am against market failure and uncompetitive markets. I am not
against businesses making an honest buck. If my suggestions have some
side effects such as making it harder for some businesses to make a
dishonest buck, well, so what?
Not on the books, but there seems to be one in practise -- either pay
the Microsoft tax or pay in subtler ways by missing out on certain
things. There is no reason whatsoever for a just society to enable
such a thing to be, in effect, enforced on everyone to enrich someone
WHO IS ALREADY THE WORLD'S RICHEST MAN -- WHAT MORE DOES HE POSSIBLY
NEED OR CAN HE POSSIBLY DESERVE!? JESUS H. CHRIST JUMPING ON A FUCKING
POGO STICK YOU ARE DENSE OLIVER WONG!
I do too -- but only where they cost someone without that someone's
consent. If I take money from A's pocket without A's permission,
that's wrong, same if I kill or injure A against his wishes. If I let
B copy an object of mine, using resources B and I legally possess, and
B chooses to do so, then no wrong can possibly have been committed
under any sane theory of natural justice.
That's what this whole discussion is about -- a particular proposal
for making the world a better place. If your response to that sort of
thing is "So what?" then buzz off already -- this thread is no longer
discussing anything that you are interested in. On the other hand, if
you are interested, and you object and believe that the world, if it
were that way, would be worse rather than better than the world we
have now, then please muster arguments AND EVIDENCE supporting your
theory if you choose to continue to argue in this thread.
Nice try, but I already know the answer: color management in
particular is thinly-supported to nonexistent under unix in general,
and particularly using only free software.
Your claimed "logical inconsistencies" are founded on false
assumptions on your part. For example in the games stuff you think one
of the things I said is logically nonsense because it assumes there'd
be games like Quake. My assumption is safer than yours -- an
assumption backed by zero evidence that no such games would ever be
made.
I find this remarkable. You seem wholly critical of it most of the
time. What specific details though? There are proven business models
for no-copying-restricted commercial software (Red Hat). There are
proven business models for you-can-play-for-free commercial games
(baseball, admittedly not a computer game, but I don't see that
distinction as being relevant). There are also proven downsides,
abuses, rampant problems, and issues with the existing system most of
which cannot be fixed except either by superficial bandaids or by
tossing that whole system into the recycle bin as inherently flawed
and proven not fit for purpose.
It is very strongly supported by evidence. I noted costs of living
would go down, perhaps drastically -- a phaseout rather than abrupt
repeal might be in order to protect the economy from deflation, never
mind to protect it from a too-violent transitional phase. I'd suggest
setting a date a decade or less in the future at which time all
existing IP rights expire, save keeping trademarks around, with a firm
foot put down to limit trademark infringement liability to where it
actually confuses a typical consumer as to who made or endorsed the
product; none of this dilution or defending-the-mark BS; continuing to
use the mark in marketing suffices to ensure continued ownership of
the mark, and use of the mark to sell unauthorized similar merchandise
to the same market remains infringement. McDonald's burgers and
McDonald's car repairs can coexist peacefully. The fast-food chain
need not sue the car repair company frivilously or risk losing its
mark for not defending it; continuing to sell burgers under the brand
name suffices to ensure they get to keep the mark. No consumers are
going to eat a McDonald's sparkplug or dring McDonald's windshield-
washer fluid and then complain that their burger was rock-hard stale
and their drink poisoned, after all; there's no risk of confusion in
this scenario.
Now picture this -- copyrights and patents all expire on say January 1
2012. Companies have five years to adjust and start positioning
themselves for the post-IP future, developing alternate business
models. They can even get new copyrights and patents, but with the
full knowledge that they'll only be good for a handful of years.
There'll be a mad scramble; so be it.
And then costs for everyone for almost everything drop. Costs of R&D
drop. Government does the big, expensive Phase III clinical trials
instead of Big Pharma starting even before the expiry date of January
1 2012 on the pharma patents, so R&D costs for Big Pharma ALREADY
dropped.
Soon, between thinner margins and improving filtering software and on-
demand internet services killing traditional broadcast media, the
traditional obnoxious, intrusive advertisement is doomed; sponsorship
arrangements and product placements take their place, along with
classifieds and referral/recommendation services and the like. Madison
Avenue goes the way of the dodo. Companies like eBay and Craigslist
and Google dominate the field, along with specialists in auctioning
product placement rights and designing plugs, and such.
Innovation speeds up enormously. Huge new wealth is created as a
consequence.
Lots of people lose their jobs sometime during the shakeup, but job
security has been lousy for a decade plus anyway, so nobody much
notices. Unemployment probably doesn't change much at first, but
eventually begins to drop. Lower costs mean people need less money,
and part-time work becomes the major thing. Statistics-keepers change,
then change again the definition of unemployment as the full-time 9-
to-5 job goes the way of the dinosaurs. The typical working week is 3
days with a fair amount of flexibility at roughly the pre-existing
hourly pay rates; this is a pay increase relative to the cost of
living when compared to pay and cost of living now. One went down; the
other went down even more.
Lack of fat margins and especially presence of competition not only
reinvigorates innovation but also makes companies have to roll profits
into R&D and pass on savings to consumers. There is no longer a viable
business model that blows a quarter's earnings on oak-panelling the
entire penthouse floor of Corporate HQ on the CEO's whim and letting
the CEO vote himself a seven-figure pay raise on their already eight-
figure salary to finance that enormous new yacht they wanted.
Advertising is also an expense to trim; making a good product and
getting it a small amount of initial attention, then letting the
recommendation engines promote it, is far more cost effective.
A few sectors besides advertising are seriously shaken up. Mainly
luxury sectors.
The economy becomes leaner and meaner, more streamlined and efficient.
The first nation on Earth to run itself this way is going to rapidly
outproduce all rivals and will probably play host to the technological
singularity when that happens.
Right now, the likeliest candidate is ...
China.
USA, you'd better watch out, or you will become a has-been!
[snip "stylistic criticism"]
Actually, it was a reference to the Matrix, you uncultured ... so-and-
so.
Not much into the public domain per se, but some (quality!) game
content with a copyleft, and plan to copyleft some software I'll
release when (if) I get around to finishing it.
So yes I am willing to put my money (well, time and effort) where my
mouth is.
I argue that the order of presentation of items is "how it behaves
semantically". Especially when it makes a big difference to user
convenience. For example, weeding out duplicates and near-duplicates
from digital photos. The photos need to be positioned side by side in
the Explorer window and one double-clicked, and then you can just
arrow back and forth in the previewer to flip between them and compare
them visually. This doesn't work if they are not first positioned side
by side, e.g. if one is where it should be and the other is way the
hell down at the bottom of the list. The user has to make a SECOND
drag to move the latter file to where they want it (or the first file
to the end of the list). This is annoying. Worse, it's SLOOOOOW;
Windows doesn't let you drag the file way above the top border of the
window to scroll faster and bring it down to almost back inside the
window to scroll slower. It just scrolls fairly slowly no matter what.
Try it 50 or 60 times. It is *very* intermittent.
I've also got the show shadowses, smooth-scroll list boxes, and
background images. None of which should affect positioning or sorting
of icons in Explorer windows. The only one that should affect icons at
all is the last of the show shadows options.
The options I kept are the ones that actually make things more
legible, and help active menus and other things stand out from
background clutter, aside from maybe background images. I think
disabling that prevented desktop wallpaper from working or something.
Drop shadows on icon names makes icon names easier to find and read to
compensate anyway.
All the animation options that slow stuff down or consume unneeded
resources or simply annoy went bye-bye of course. Especially the
search puppy -- it would actually not accept input during some of the
animations until the animation completed, which is just plain
irritating, nevermind pointless. Slowing down my workflow just so your
animation can't possibly glitch from a new animation being cued while
an existing one isn't finished is a classic example of inversion of
priorities and not one you can blame on the kernel scheduler either!
I agree that the vast majority of those that merely annoy users but
lack security implications have not.
And some people (yourself included) seem reluctant to accept evidence
in favor of the claim. I wonder why?
That might actually be legitimate, given that it's a condition of
receiving the beverage.
The usual commercial software EULA is more comparable to a vending
machine that accepts your quarter and spits out a can. Then you go to
pop the tab and the can forces you to accept a EULA before you can
take a swig. OTOH the can is your personal property along with its
contents according to all applicable sales law since your purchase
from the vending machine was valid. Puncturing the can's side and
filling a glass with the contents thus released appears to be a
perfectly legal end-run around accepting the EULA, especially since
it's very unlikely you can refuse the EULA and then put the unopened
can into a slot in the vending machine and get your quarter back.
When the typical commercial software EULA is transformed (retaining
the semantics intact) to an analogy like the above, it becomes clear
how absolutely ridiculous it is, and how absurd and harmful making
them actually legally binding would be.
And it does retain intact semantics. Your newly-purchased CD is also
your private property, and you have certain rights in it. Including
via 17 USC section 117(a)(1) an affirmative fair use defense for
installing and running any software that's on that CD, even where such
activities create some private copies. No permission from the
copyright holder need be sought, so nothing need be agreed to in
exchange for that permission. The EULA offers no consideration.
Bypassing it somehow and installing and running the software anyway is
exactly analogous to puncturing the extortionate cola can with the
bogus EULA described above.
And if the EULA only pops up when you try to pop the tab, AFTER you've
lost your quarter? I rather suspect you'll question its legitimacy
then!
If a company wants to further restrict a customer beyond what their
copyrights already limit, or prevent a customer exercising customary
rights to seek remedy through the courts and the like, then I think
they should have to get the customer to physically sign something. And
they should have to have fully-substitutable competition. As a check
on abuse.
Yes, IF the one wishing to hold you to the agreement can produce a
signed-by-you bit of paper saying you accepted the terms. No software
EULA results in the manufacturer having any such signed document to
produce as evidence that you agreed to anything, however.
Your signed tax return is sent to the government, who can later use
the tax return with your signature on it as evidence of something if
it has some reason to want to do so.
Your click on the "accept" button on some dialog on your computer in
the privacy of your home was witnessed by noone else AND produced no
such lasting evidence. At most, this is like agreeing verbally to
something without the other guy getting it in writing. While the other
guy was listening to his iPod and deaf to the world.
New Zealand then? -- forget it; this guessing game is pointless.
[some HTML gobbledygook that looked like a google link to somewhere
uninterpretable due to all the tags and punctuation snipped]
No, it's only when your reply is critical of that something that it
means you disagree with it. So, for example, if you posted "Me too!"
you'd probably be an AOLer but you wouldn't be disagreeing with
anything.
Nice try with the weasel words, but no cigar. You can believe with all
your heart that I'm an idiot or consider it "merely your opinion" that
I'm nuts, and if you call me an idiot or crazy in public it's still
insulting.
Either provide a plausible alternative theory for what happened or
agree. You should certainly be interested in it now, because the
censor has broadened his horizons somewhat. This posting of yours that
I'm replying to? It got attacked in precisely the same way as my last
TWO postings to this branch of the thread (yes, it's now TWO, THREE if
you count the repost attempt of the first one separately, and so a
total of FOUR separate messages, three by me and one by you).
Yep. Attacked. The same NNTP server I use to check propagation doesn't
show the post you wrote that I'm currently responding to. It is
visible on Google Groups, and maybe some larger subset of Usenet, but
it failed to reach all of Usenet, and it is one of only four news
postings I'm aware of to have done so in this newsgroup in the past
MONTH. All in the same thread, all one of us replying to the other,
all on the same controversial topic.
Damned selective if you ask me.
At least it likely exonerates you, unless it's a very clever decoying
strategy. But my guess is it's someone else.
It's worth noting that the latest message by you is the first one that
suggests strongly that you might not be wholly averse to IP law going
down the tubes. So it's when you displayed signs of having some anti-
copyright views, and only when you did so, that you became a target.
Interesting also. Also indicates a human is reading the message. A bot
would have a hard time identifying a copyright-related argument as
being anti-copyright rather than pro- and also distinguishing your
posts quoting my arguments against copyright from your actually making
your own independent anti-copyright remarks.
If a software bug, glitch, spam-filtering program, hardware error, or
anything else in any NNTP server or any other machine is responsible,
it is apparently an AI-complete bug, glitch, spam-filter, hardware
error, or whatever, and that technological singularity I mentioned
earlier is already upon us, but I find this much less likely than that
the "glitch" is one of the carbon-based and bipedal components of the
infrastructure instead, presumably one with an axe to grind.
I think that this is pessimistic at least, and in all likelihood just
plain wrong.
Any amount at all intrudes into my home and tells me what I can and
cannot do in the privacy of same with only consenting partners. It's
as bad as the sodomy laws that are occasionally used to prosecute
consenting adults, for ****'s sake (no pun unintended).
No, just implied it. *sigh*
That's a very fragile state of affairs by the nature of the physical
laws of this universe. It is unwise to depend on it lasting, and it is
foolish bordering on actively dangerous for law enforcement in a
democracy to indulge such unwise persons in their wishes that the laws
of physics be different. Alice is well advised to stop being such a
greedy so-and-so and make what they can of the valuable and more
robust fact of being the FIRST person to have it.
I'm not so sure. I may not have objected to such laws, but it would be
interesting to see if they can be done without. Of course, it would
require decentralizing command-and-control in battles; judging by the
evidence, decentralized-C&C guerrilla insurgents are superior to
traditional top-down armed forces in capability, even when
substantially outnumbered and outgunned. There are three likely
factors at play:
Flexible, decentralized C&C is a benefit itself.
Those fighting for their land or their lives are much more motivated
than those fighting for far off puppet masters; call it the home field
advantage.
Insurgents are willing to fight dirty and hide among hostages.
Eliminate the third and a decentralized army may still be a powerful
thing. Of course the powers that be would never stand for it, because
a decentralized army would be much more capable of turning quickly on
*them* if they started to look like they were among the bad guys
rather than the good guys. The thing Bush and co fear more than
anything else is a decentralized armed service that's unswervingly
loyal to the American ideal and its constitution and bill of rights!
Such a service might be especially good at defending the borders, but
it's likely to turn on the current crop of kleptocratic elites and it
certainly wouldn't go fight a pointless land war in Asia on their say
so without solid evidence of a military threat there to the homeland.
The sort of threat Iraq's WMDs would have posed, had they not
possessed a most inconvenient (for Bush) property, that of
nonexistence...
Given a decentralized, flexible-response armed forces the need for
battle plan secrecy laws goes away. Battle plans form closer to the
front lines and are only timely for hours. Also, they are likely still
encrypted and sent mainly locally. By the time anything of the plans
get to the general citizenship that battle's already over. Traitors
among the citizens get any such info too late. Traitors at the front
lines get battle info in a timely fashion, but would have done anyway.
So with radical military restructuring secrecy of battle plans can
rely purely on crypto and sensibility on the part of the troops. In
fact security of battle plan info goes UP, when traitors back behind
the lines and maybe even high up in the leadership no longer even know
the plan until it's too late, rather than seeing the plan with TOP
SECRET stamped all over it and being restrained only by the
possibility of being caught and punished if they misuse it. Such a
restructuring, in particular, makes a mole in the White House or
Pentagon a non-problem! No amount of lawmaking or traditional
enforcement methods can do that; only decentralization can. That alone
is a significant thing.
WMD information is dangerous where it is easy for a two-bit operator
to make a WMD and hold a city hostage with it, or use it just to get
attention or make a point. However it might be counterable with
information, rather than security through obscurity. For example, a
transparent world (all information is free) makes it easy to see who's
digging up and refining uranium, and where the plutonium from that
breeder reactor is going. This makes it easy to keep an eye on and
preempt anyone's making and using a bomb, or at least to keep an eye
on who currently has their finger on the button. Bioweapons info is
generally a coin whose flip side is info on how to cure or protect
against the same weapon. Transparency also enables the ingredients and
tools needed to make the weapon to be easily tracked and their use
monitored -- by those who know the secret recipe of course. And so
forth. Mutual watchdogging is the result of enough transparency, and
the current road of secrecy may be a dead-end. Security through
obscurity has a dismal track record in the cyber arena. Nuclear
nonproliferation is imperfect and leaks keep springing. Sooner or
later trying to plug them is no longer the optimum strategy for risk-
minimization. That point might have been passed, or might be yet to
come; wiser heads need to decide that question.
Private information about a person is dangerous insofar as its
disclosure can harm that person. Such dangers can be greatly reduced,
however:
* Drop all victimless crimes from the law books and add a
constitutional amendment forbidding the creation of more. Now
someone's harmless sexual or other recreational behavior is no longer
a legal risk if it is exposed.
* Transparency itself will force people to grow up and grow a layer of
tolerance for other peoples' sexual kinks and other differences and
preferences and even peccadilloes. Stigmas associated with medical
issues, including mental health ones, and sexuality go away and having
health information or sexual preferences revealed to the world ceases
to be a biggie.
* Some stuff, such as ability to hide involvement in a victimful crime
or concealing having breoken a promise to one's wife, is not worthy of
protection anyway.
* Financial information that can be used to defraud is the real
hotbutton issue right now with constant leaks of CC#s. The problem
here is actually the woefully inadequate security of the payment
mechanism itself. Fancy that -- a single number that must be revealed
to the other side of a transaction is the secret key to your money.
We've had public-key crypto for years and can replace every existing
non-cash payment method with a cryptographically secure mechanism
based on digitally signed transaction objects that act like
unforgeable cheques drawn on assorted accounts. Some of these will be
certified good for the amount of money -- essentially, unforgeable
emoney that's potentially as good as cash. Not untraceable of course,
just unforgeable. Some can be drawn on credit. They can be
interchangeable, aside from someone's potential unwillingness to
accept a non-certified version. A certified version just escrows the
money though to keep you honest, and maybe has a slightly higher
transaction cost as a result. This is a natural area for banks to R&D
but I don't see any evidence of it even starting to be researched.
Once financial information even up to account details can no longer
easily enable fraud (and indeed WOULD make fraud *detection* easier)
the reasons for keeping it private also dwindle to nearly nil.
* What remains? Peoples' own ineffable feeling of needing to keep
things about themselves secret. A rude and intolerant world is the
cause of that, and transparency puts the shoes on the other feet.
Going hostile due to someone else's private peccadilloes or whatever
would be mutual assured destruction for someone who has some such
skeletons in their own closet and all the closet doors are wide open.
* The risk of physical violence to people with certain lifestyles can
be addressed by the vastly increased risk of the violent getting
identified and prosecuted if information is easily available.
* Addresses readily available will enable spam. But transparency
exposes the hated spammers and they can no longer hide!
Upshot: in the longer term secrecy can be made obsolete with due care.
In the short term copyright and patent can be made obsolete right
fucking now.
Temporarily, at least; see above.
Note that what I suggested was nontransferable. It doesn't create a
property right as such, just a stronger affirmative privacy right,
since property must be alienable.
If it takes them more and they sell for less, the other one can
undercut them and bleed at a slower rate until the one is forced to
raise prices again or simply goes out of business. The market will
ultimately favor those who can make the product the most cheaply and
efficiently at a given quality point. This is economics 101.
That's such bad programming it deserves to blow up in your face. The
cure for such problems is, as everyone in this froup should be well
aware, Java. The only downside: it takes away your excuses for
platform discrimination, and it's unsuited to small apps.
If it does, then Microsoft has no reason to fear such competition and
derives no benefit from IP rights. Their IP rights are a security
blanket in this scenario, and society and law enforcement indulging
this childishness is outrageous.
In that case some people should find FPU code working on their 486SXs
and have a happy bonus. I'm not aware of that happening, however, and
I do distinctly recall reading that Intel physically mutilated 486
chips destined to be sold as 486SX chips. Gratuitously damaging the
product of your factories is not something a sane and competitive
market would reward, and is evidence of something THAT ISN'T EVEN IN
DISPUTE, that Intel had an effective monopoly at that point in time.
Yes. But I recall reading somewhere that your suggested strategy is
not what they actually did. Also selling some 486DXs as SXs is still
sneaky; selling only FPU-brokens as SXs and all the rest as DXs may
bring the DX price down sometimes but the market would tend to keep
supply and demand in step if functioning properly, and keep prices
sensible. Heavy demand for the DX would raise its price. Chipmakers
(we're assuming a hypothetical competitive market that didn't occur in
actuality) would increase manufacturing capacity to be able to
undercut the raised price, and prices would drop. They'd still
underproduce the DX but not by as much -- producing to full demand
would overproduce the SX and create a glut there, so the coupling of
production of the SX and DX tends to somewhat wedge their prices
apart, keeping the DX a touch expensive and the SX quite cheap. This
is what I summarized before by saying that the marginal cost of one
working chip would be around the average of the two prices, but the SX
price would be below and the DX price above. Rents are extracted from
the continued scarcity of DX chips, but they are competitive rents,
not monopoly rents.
A competitor would be producing a compatible chip by definition. A
case where Intel can make these chips but no competing company yet can
is a case where Intel has a brief first-mover advantage and another
opportunity to extract rents (monopoly rents this time, but only for a
short time). Again without doing anything abusive, or using patent
laws.
But that requires special equipment and expertise, and is difficult
and dangerous.
Each chip should be clocked at the maximum speed it runs without
errors at, and sold in that state. If the market is currently letting
a company get away with selling intentionally-underclocked chips
(relative to that), then it's clearly insufficiently competitive since
that's just as silly as intentionally-damaged 486s.
The abuse in this case comes from nondisclosure and underclocking and
similarly.
Test all batches of olive oil, grade them, and sell them, and let the
market price the various grades. Sometimes the price for a high grade
is lower because you're producing quality stuff more cheaply than
before or demand slackened. If producing quality stuff is expensive
and demand at the high end is weak, you lower your QA and save, but
still grade the same. If producing quality stuff is cheaper than
before, you sell quality stuff for less than before, and the savings
get passed to the consumer; you still get your margins; everybody
wins.
Everybody wins. It's hard to argue convincingly against a no-lose
scenario!
In the chip case, you test each chip while turning up the speed knob
until it starts to show erratic behavior, then lower the speed until
it's running perfectly; your cooling system measures its heat
dissipation. The chip is left clocked at the top speed it will run
properly at and is graded by documenting for this particular chip this
speed and the observed heat dissipation requirements. System builders
use this information when constructing a computer using that
particular CPU or whatever. For example the 4GHz chip is wasted in the
system with the 300MHz bus, so put it in the one with the really fast
bus, and this one needs a BIG cooling fan, and that one doesn't,
and ...
Market sets prices again. Consumers set prices on computers, whose
costs factor in the extra cooling on (predominantly) the fast CPUs and
other characteristics. Computer makers balancing costs, prices,
competitors' prices, and the like go for particular grades of CPUs.
Particular combinations of CPU speed and heat production rate get
particular prices by this mechanism. Speed is rewarded as is lower
heat dissipation, somewhat offsetting one another. The pricing ends up
reflecting the value proposition and cost tradeoffs. Of course,
there's feedback to chipmakers. Slack demand at the high end suggests
not to spend as much on making the chips fast or on QA; slack demand
at the low end suggests boosting QA and developing process
innovations.
This is how it should be.
Imperfect information distorts pricing. Better information makes the
market and its players more efficient and in the long run everybody
wins.
True, IF the lowest price point is below the marginal cost of one more
working chip. I'd assumed otherwise above though.
Suppose they test all the chips and clock them all as high as they
will run. Suppose further, to simplify, that this is always either
exactly 2 or exactly 3GHZ. Their process control and QA ensures that
on average at least fifty chips will come out as 3GHz. One particular
batch has 53. They sell these at the high price point, but maybe due
to their number it's a slightly lower price point than if there'd been
just 50. The other 47 get the low price point. But it might be a bit
higher. Market demand and price inelasticity will most likely just
keep the prices at $300 and $100 or some such pair that averages to
$200, rather than constantly fluctuating based on production numbers,
especially as price-buffering from chips of various ages being all
through the distribution chain will be a factor. A long term trend in
chip speeds, though, such as towards 75% of them tending to be 3GHz,
will shift the prices so that 3*high plus 1*low = 800 -- so the prices
move closer together, and the high price is not as much above $200 as
the low price is below it, whereas before they bracketed $200
symmetrically.
The big thing is consumers know exactly what they're getting, and all
the chips capable of being clocked at 3GHz and working properly
actually are, straight out of the factory, clocked at 3GHz, improving
downstream efficiency at no additional cost to the chipmaker.
And he is an expert because?
But I really meant someone who makes a business of reviewing stuff
like this. On the net. A blogger say. Whose opinion of Vista I can
actually browse to and read, and get an idea for why he's gotten such
a funny notion into his head such as that Vista is better than XP.
No, refuting my argument requires the upsides versus downsides be
lopsided in favor of Vista. They're lopsided in favor of XP. Halo 3
just means they aren't MAXIMALLY lopsided that way.
It was a joke. Nevermind.
They grow long when the same thing needs to be repeated ten million
times because once, twice, and even ten times doesn't seem to be
enough. Also, when every paragraph of mine spawns TWO in a response
purporting to refute it, and requiring my defense, producing two in my
response in turn...
Deadwood quoted material is all I see either of us trimming much of
the time. At least one response paragraph is being written for each
input paragraph on average. Or these posts would be growing shorter
instead.
If you're not making it clear when you're singling out a particular
point then you need to communicate more clearly.
Then I have no idea WTF you're arguing for.
I think that zero is not too little IP and gave plenty of sound
reasons and mountains of evidence to buttress that claim.
No; only Vista objectively sucking is evidence that Vista objectively
sucks. Vista doing hardly anything XP can't do faster cheaper and
better (and that one exception a frivolous game!) certainly seems to
qualify as "objectively sucks".
No, it's proof that it does not subjectively suck for you. It still
objectively sucks, trust me.
Then why are you arguing it to me?
What evidence did you give? Oh, yes, nothing but some subjective
feelings. In other words, no evidence at all. If you have some
evidence you're not sharing, real evidence that Vista is better, by
all means cough it up!
That kind of vagueness is a cop-out and you know it.
2+2 is 1 in these, true. 4 is also 1 in these, and so 2+2 is still 4.
Sorry, nice attempt though.
I'm also relying on the fact that it's enshrined in Constitutional law
as the sole purpose of duly constituted government around here.
Solipsism is also of no pragmatic relevance here. Solipsism has no
reason to oppose copyright abolition, since it's all inconsequential
changes to some dream world with no real existence anyway, and the
solipsist now gets lots of free stuff. Indeed we should expect a
solipsist to be a sociopath and to favor abolishing all law so he can
do as he damn well pleases, even rape and kill; my own suspicion is
that there are very few genuine solipsists, who actually fervently
believe solipsism to be true. And that this might be the result of
Darwin's version of the Invisible Hand.
I don't consider the use of common English-language idioms of
widespread nature to detract from my clarity. But if you'd rather
avoid them, or even communicate in one-syllable words, I guess that's
your preference.
You're kidding. Chinese name; English obviously not quite as strong as
you make it out to be and weak in areas native speakers have no
problems at all; and a tendency to geographic assumptions* that seem
to eliminate North America, and you claim to be in Canada?
* For example competitive broadband that provides decent NNTP service
is mainly a European and Southeast Asian thing. Most North American
communities have the cable company and the phone company, and maybe a
high-latency low-upspeed satellite service, plus an underbrush of
various dial-up providers. Of these, the dial-up providers might still
provide NNTP. You implied that your immediate environment resembles
the former more than the latter, and combined with your name that
suggested Southeast Asia. But maybe you're in some west coast Canadian
place that has progressive stuff like free municipal wifi or something
that most of us don't have?
Offshore support might fake good English but they'll never fake good
customer service or knowing what the **** they're talking about. If
they could fake *that*, they could program a computer to do it, and
since that's gotta be AI-complete...
I'm typically "genuinely interested" only when I can experiment and
try it at no (financial, spam, or otherwise) risk to myself. And not
necessarily even then; it depends on lots more.
Apparently it was only a ruse to buy time while plotting an ambush,
since this ... thing appeared for me to reply to two days later
continuing the same argument with nothing apparently resolved.
[snip nitpicking with the exact wording of something, which is a
strawman attack and entirely beside the point. Insane corporations
with brain tumors are not at all "best modeled as rational
utilitarians" or however else you wish to phrase it. My original point
stands.]
Jesus H. Christ, then what were you trying to refute originally when I
wrote a paragraph, days ago, saying that Microsoft couldn't hack it at
producing quality goods and so resorts to legal and technical measures
to frustrate the competition instead, and you threw up all over it?
Those people are nuts, and IIS is in fact shoddy however it is
perceived by anyone. I don't give two puffs of intestinal gases if the
fucking Pope says IIS is superior to Apache -- IIS is still a turd and
an official benediction by the world's biggest religious nut and quack
psychologist isn't going to change hard facts. All it will do is
further lower the credibility of the Vatican in my eyes, if such a
thing is actually possible without causing an integer underflow
exception to be thrown.
I never said IIS was anything but a steaming pile of unspeakable offal
from the bowels of a bile demon from the deepest pits of Hell. Well,
modulo paraphrasing.
I said Apache is better than IIS, and I said that IIS is shoddy. Those
are confirmable by direct scientific observation of IIS-hosted web
sites being hacked and just plain crashing and misbehaving far more
than their Apache counterparts. Heavy endorsement of use of Apache
(and only Apache) by Web masters on their own site pages is further,
albeit circumstantial evidence, but the opinions of experts in the
trenches carry much more weight with me than either nonexperts or
ivory-tower experts in these cases.
As mud.
Got evidence that it isn't? If not, we should try it and see. Then
we'd have evidence, one way or the other.
Your serotonin and dopamine levels. Obviously they're all out of whack
but it will take a qualified physician to tell me why; I haven't a
clue.
Whatever the **** it is, it's something-ML and my (standards-
compliant, natch) newsreader chokes on it and leaves me swimming in
markup and gobbledygook so please stick to plain text, as per normal
usenet netiquette.
I have independent opinions, thank you very much, and it is my
professional opinion as someone with PhD level knowledge of physics
that Vista being anything but a turdpile is as impossible as all the
air in a room suddenly ending up in the same half of it -- technically
not quite *impossible*, but violating the second law of thermodynamics
nonetheless.
Microsoft is not physically capable of producing afeeping creature while being dragged by several conflicting agendes
for its development every-which-way (their own bean counters, their
lawyers, their customers, and the RIAA make at least four, so consider
them drawn and quartered) and generating something that smells like
roses. Nobody else is either.
I can't, not without destroying one of my computers and wiping out
half my bank balance just to experiment. And if you honestly expected
me to do it, then you're a fucking nutjob. Anyway, I'd much sooner
install Linux if I were going to wipe one of my computers.
And after you've said that, examples STILL often contain details
irrelevant to the larger point being made, without being irrelevant
themselves.
I never promised any such thing, and I'd much rather not expose myself
to the risk of getting a letterbomb, steaming pile of manure, or
(worse) Windows Vista or something in the mail TYVM.
B
Bent C Dalager
Er, almost. They snuck some in through the back door, I think by
making patents for a "gadget" that consists simply of a computer
running particular software. Anyone actually running similar software
on a computer and using it for whatever such software is for infringes
these patents, even if technically it's not a patent on the software
itself.
Software patents as such are not allowed in Europe.
"As such" turn out to be very important words and a lot of creativity
has gone into describing a piece of software as not being software "as
such" in order to make it patentable.
The most generic approach seems to be to try and describe it as
software "running in a general computing device" or somesuch in order
to make it seem like a physical invention (i.e. the software as an
idea is not patented, but when it's actually running on some hardware
it is).
This meets with varying success in the various EU member nations so
that in some countries you can get software patents and in some you
cannot.
The details are at
http://www.european-patent-office.org/legal/epc/e/ar52.html :
----
(1) European patents shall be granted for any inventions which are
susceptible of industrial application, which are new and which involve
an inventive step.
(2) The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions
within the meaning of paragraph 1:
(a) discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
(b) aesthetic creations;
(c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing
games or doing business, and programs for computers;
(d) presentations of information.
(3) The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the
subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the
extent to which a European patent application or European patent
relates to such subject-matter or activities as such.
(4) Methods for treatment of the human or animal body by surgery or
therapy and diagnostic methods practised on the human or animal body
shall not be regarded as inventions which are susceptible of
industrial application within the meaning of paragraph 1. This
provision shall not apply to products, in particular substances or
compositions, for use in any of these methods.
---
Computer programs are not patentable by 2c, and the "as such" language
is in 3, both above. Lawyers are having a field day.
Cheers
Bent D
B
Bent C Dalager
GPL ensures freedom to the end user by taking freedom away from the
developer. Its target audience is Joe User, not the denizens of
c.l.j.p. It is therefore not surprising that many software programmers
are hostile to it (it removes their dictatorial powers), the
surprising part is how many programmers actually like it despite this
effect.
Cheers
Bent D
B
Bent C Dalager
It seems to me that there are basically two compelling reasons to have
a system of patents:
1) to encourage the development of useful inventions
2) to encourage the inventors of such to fully disclose how their
inventions work
Now (1) above seems superfluous since an invention that is actually
useful is more likely than not to turn out profitable to its inventor
anyway, but let's keep it in for completeness.
Based on the considerations of the effect of allowing software
patents, I have reached the following conclusions wrt the patent
system.
Ad (1) above, I find that any area of invention that is readily
available to the common man (e.g. something anyone can afford to do as
a hobby without significant investment) should not be patentable. This
is because when you have 1 billion+ potential inventors in the field,
good ideas will not be a scarce resource and you do not need to
actively encourage invention for it to happen. Today, that would cover
programming since pretty much anyone can afford a computer and if they
can't, they can probably find a servicable model lying around in the
trash somewhere. Some electronics may come into this category a decade
or two down the line when we get affordable electronic circuitry
printers.
Ad (2) above, any invention from which its internal workings can
trivially be deduced from operating the invention should not be
patentable. There is no need to encourage the disclosure of something
that /must be disclosed anyway/ in order to profit from the
invention. As an example (and leaving aside the question of whether or
not this is a bogus patent in the first place), consider the Amazon
one-click patent: there is no way Amazon could have deployed this idea
without any programmer who uses it understanding how it works. There
is therefore no need to actively encourage Amazon to disclose its
internal workings.
How this all relates to sectors other than programming, I will not
hazard to guess.
Cheers
Bent D
J
John W. Kennedy
Martin said:
Not so. There was a copyright law; it just didn't apply to damfurriners.
The situation was slowly improved, but it took the Tolkien scandal of
1965 to embarrass the US into joining the Berne Convention.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Though a Rothschild you may be
In your own capacity,
As a Company you've come to utter sorrow--
But the Liquidators say,
'Never mind--you needn't pay,'
So you start another company to-morrow!"
-- Sir William S. Gilbert. "Utopia Limited"
T
Twisted
s/improved/worsened but otherwise accurate.
T
Twisted
But it makes perfect sense when you consider that the end users that
most value that freedom are those that might someday want to hack the
source and fix bugs themselves and such in their software and when
that software is open source they can do so; and when it's GPL,
outright free software, they can do so without someone else making a
closed-source derivative and further improvements on that derivative
not being available to this developer as a result.
The programmer gives up some freedom in exchange for being able to
cherry-pick any bugfixes and features from all forks and derivatives,
in other words.
The freedom they gave up was the freedom to denywhoever is further back up the chain the same ability.
T
Twisted
Interestingly, this has a plausible exception -- process innovations
in a factory can be profited from without this automatically causing
effective disclosure, no matter how obvious it is from observing the
assembly line machinery at work.
OTOH, I'd argue that just about nothing should be patentable. Trade
secrecy is difficult to successfully maintain on anything important
for any nontrivial length of time these days (giving 2, disclosure
soon) but lasts long enough to be sufficient to get a decent first-
mover advantage (giving 1, incentive to innovate).
To see why trade secrecy is no longer a biggie, consider how easy it
soon will be for a competitor to sneak a tiny robocam into someone's
factory or wherever, nevermind reverse engineer shipped product.
B
Bent C Dalager
Yes. I failed to specify that I am largely referring to consumer items
and the like in my text. While I'm sure all sorts of distinctions will
need to be drawn up in practice (many of them presumably from case
law), the above does present the general gist of my thoughts.
As for whether a patent system makes sense at all: I don't really care
to speculate on it. I have too little knowledge of the various fields
of technology to have a very informed opinion on the matter.
Cheers,
Bent D
M
Matthias Buelow
Someone said:
Maybe I don't but do you? The fact is, Usenet has seen the likes of you
come and go literally for decades and it's still going on. You're
insignificant, despite (cross-)posting to various groups like a madman.
You maybe think of yourself as the center of the online world but you
don't even post under your real name and you're noticed only by a few
and forgotten by all in no time at all.
T
Twisted
Or better yet, have the law (case law or otherwise) get the heck out
of the way and out of the business of regulating innovation and let
businesses innovate and try to copy one another and whatnot, in a
competitive marketplace, freely. Their mandate should be to step in
when there's insufficient competition, or there's a consumer hazard,
public hazard, or environmental hazard or something of that sort, and
otherwise not interfere with free enterprise.
T
Twisted
Did you have a point?
If so, you forgot to include it.
If not, you forgot to not hit Send.
O
Oliver Wong
Twisted said:
Depends on your definition of "entitled", I guess.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=define:+entitled
<quote>
qualified for by right according to law
</quote>
I'm not aware of any country which has a law guaranteeing that when
you switch OSes, all your old apps will still work.
So only pay Microsoft for software made by Microsoft (e.g. Windows).
Alternatively, don't buy Windows; use MacOSX or Linux instead.
Alternatively, whine on Usenet how you don't want to pay for Windows,
but you want to run applications which require Windows anyway and hope
that something productive comes out of it.
So there we go. Software does not need to be 100% compatible in order
to be an alternative.
[...]
Very little, depending on what you include in marketing. If you show a
video demonstrating the gameplay, is that merely "marketing hype", or are
you actually giving the viewer and useful information about what the game
would be like?
Have your typical gamer view a video of Halo 3, Assassin's Creed,
Metal Gear Solid, etc., and have that same gamer view a video of Frozen
Bubble, Nethack, Penguin Solitair, etc. and see which one they are more
enthusiastic about playing.
I don't recall the crowdsource going crazy for Q1CTF, but I do
remember them going crazy for ET. Okay, so 2 or 3 games.
Marketing push isn't everything. There's a lot of marketting push for
the Transformer games, for example, but hardly anyone is going crazy over
it. Believe it or not, some commercial games are genuinely good, and win
attention via that merit.
Your before-last assertion, "and there'd be plenty of high quality
ones", I disagree with.
List some of them, so that I may play them.
There is also plenty of reasons to believe it would.
False dilema fallacy: You're acting as if we can only have one or the
other.
Most games don't have much replay value and are only interesting
within 1 year of their release. We agree that 60 years of copyright (or
whatever it currently is in your country) is "bad". I claim that 0 years
of copyright is bad. So why not have 4 years of copyright? Then, you get
advantages that you cited (reduced costs of living, richer culture, etc.),
and I get good quality commercial games.
As above, please list some examples.
Link to them, please.
Yes, but they tend to be worse than their commercial equivalents.
There are basically 2 free mods that are even comparable to commercial
games: CounterStrike (which became good enough that they decided to no
longer have it be free, and instead sell it, rebranding it "CounterStrike:
Source"), and Enemy Territory. These are two free mods that are good
enough that they could have been commercial games (maybe a bit more polish
would be needed for ET, and it was lacking a lot of content when I played
it, with only 4 maps or so). They are the exceptions. The vast majority of
mods are simply not good enough to be commercial games.
I did not claim they were precluded. I'm saying that level design is
not enough. I'm saying a LOT of talent is needed to make a good game. I'm
saying the odds are in the favour of commercial games, because being able
to pay people tends to attract better talent than begging people to work
on your game project for free.
You're right. Slip of the toungue there. You need a game (any game) in
the first place, and it helps if that first game is of decent quality.
Making a mod with crappy engine *usually* yields an equally, if not more,
crappy mod-game. Every mod that had quality comparable to a commercial
game was for the engine of a commercial game: Counterstrike came from
HalfLife; ET came from Castle Wolfenstein.
If you think Nethack, Sokoban, Frozen Penguin, Bejeweled etc. is what
gaming is all about, then I can see why you feel if nobody made money from
games, "good" games would still be made.
If you don't believe that there exist an enjoyment to playing games
like the Metal Gear Solid series that isn't present in Nethack et al.,
then nothing I say will convince you.
Hahaha, yes... Tenebrae... We'll get to discussion that in a moment:
"Nehahra is competitive in quality with commercial games of the same
vintage as Nehahra". Is that a fancy way of saying "Nehahra is just as
good as any commercial game, as long as you pick commercial games which
are as good as Nehahra"?
Taking a look at Nehahra:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nehahra_encounter.jpg
Oh. I see now why you needed to add that qualifier.
Nehahra is not comparable to today's commercial games.
Here's what characters in Nehahra, a free game, look like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nehahra_encounter.jpg
Here's what characters in Crysis, a commercial game, look like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Crysisface3d.jpg
So the gameplay was better than the visuals, but it wasn't actually as
fun as Warcraft 3 nor SC. Okay.
The screenshots I posted for Tenebrae were from the project's
homepage's gallery. That is, these are THE BEST screenshots that the
developers of Tenebrae were able to generate. These are the screenshots
that the developers chose to showcase the strength of their engine.
http://www.tenebrae2.com/tb2_screenshots.html
Notice the URL? I even did you a favor and I'm comparing Tenebrae 2 to
Doom 3, instead of merely Tenebrae 1.
Contrast this with the screenshots I posted for Doom 3:
http://images.google.ca/images?q=doom 3
Look at the URL. This is a google image search. I am not picking the
screenshots; Google is.
In other words, I am comparing the ABSOLUTE best screenshots from the
*SEQUEL* to the game you are talking about, and I am comparing it to a
COMPLETELY RANDOM assortment of Doom 3 screenshots.
I am giving your game every possible advantage I can, and it is still
losing.
Pwned.
When the companies make less money (and face it, putting ads in games
generates a lot less income than selling the boxes), less money can go to
the employees. When less money goes to the employees, talented people
start looking elsewhere for better jobs.
Wrong. They could go into movies, or literary writing, or
business-software programming.
[...]
There is no judging involved. This is not a subjective statement. I'm
not saying "Some people feel Windows is not indispensible". I'm saying
"Windows IS NOT indispensible".
Okay, so there's no law forcing people to pay Microsoft to play
certain non-Microsoft games. Good. I'm glad we're in agreement.
[...]
Yes, either pay for something, or "pay in the form of not having that
something".
Uh... I think all of economy is based on the concept of paying for
something, or else you don't have that something.
I'm guessing you're referring to Bill Gates. Your use of swear words
and all caps leads me to believe this is an emotional subject for you.
That is to say, perhaps you are letting the fact that you don't like Bill
Gates influence your feelings towards Microsoft products (among other
things).
When I buy a Microsoft product, I don't say to myself "Wait a minute.
I'm just handing my money over to the richest guy in the world, and he
doesn't need any more money, so really, I shouldn't buy this product at
all!"
And when I don't buy a Microsoft product, I don't say to myself "Haha,
take that, Gates! Once again, I have withheld money from you! Soon you
will be powerless".
I just buy the products I need (Microsoft or otherwise), and if that
makes Bill Gates richer, well, good for him. I don't really care one way
or the other.
Okay, I'm glad we're in agreement.
Stuff like "I shouldn't have to pay Microsoft in order to use
applications which require Microsoft Windows". A lot of minor stuff like
that, that is hardly worth even remembering.
I didn't dispute that, (and so here again, we see yet another major
pillar of your argument I'm in agreement with, and so you shouldn't be
overly surprised when I say it's only minor details that I disagree with).
I think the distinction is relevant. But this is an example of a
"minor detail" in which we disagree, and I don't think it's very important
to the overall ideal of reducing IP. So again, we're generally in
agreement, but here's a detail which I disagree with.
Again, I'm not disputing this. So again, we see that I am in agreement
with your "core ideas".
Yes, this is actually a topic that was brought up in my discussion
with my friends. We found that at the very least, Trademark, as you say,
would probably need to stay. Otherwise it would be legal for me to sell
snuff-bestiality-porn in a DVD box that looks identical to "Disney's Snow
White And the Seven Dwarves", since Disney no longer owns the term
"Disney", nor the particular font or style of writing the text "Disney's
Snow White And the Seven Dwarves", nor the pictures of that appear on
those boxes, etc.
Clearly, such things would be "bad" for society. This, incidentally,
was one of the reasons I felt "zero IP" was a bad idea. I'm glad you are
no longer advocating zero IP.
What you've presented here is strategy (e.g. let's not make the change
suddenly, but phase it out over 10 years) and speculation (in the end,
everyone will have 3 day workweeks). You've not presented evidence. It'd
be nice if things turn out the way you said they will, but I feel there is
not enough evidence to believe that they WILL turn out that way.
[...]
And yet I seem to have released more into the public domain than you
have. Does this mean I'm a stronger advocate for the reduction of
copyright than you are? Do you see now that I am not a "Microsoft
employee", or a "middle man, following orders", or whatever other
accusations you've thrown at me so far?
I argue that "how the data looks" can make a big difference to user
convinience. Consider a listing of a billion numbers compared to a
bar-chart. The data is behaving semantically in the exact same way, and
yet one "look" is more useful than the other "look".
Thus the fact that A is more useful than B is not enough to show that
A is behaving in a semantically different manner than B.
[...]
Earlier, you said 1 in 10, and then you said every single time. Now
it's 1 in 50 or 60?
It depends on a lot of things, actually, and I think we may be
beginning to stretch the analogy too far. If a EULA really did pop up when
I tried to open the can, we'd probably be in some sort of super high tech
society where it's plausible that the can itself is monitoring me, perhaps
sending a live video feed of my actions to some corporations. I'd behave
differently in that society than I would in the one where I currently
live.
Hmmm... I must be really dense, because I still don't see the answer
to my question. If you sign a document, and there is no one to witness you
signing the document, do you consider the document to be worthless? I'm
expecting a "yes" or a "no" here. I'm not expecting something like "If a
company wants this or that", etc. Whether or not you consider something to
be worthless should be independent of what a fictional company wants or
does not want, right?
So it sounds like you feel there's a difference between signing a
piece of paper, and clicking on a button labelled "agree", but you concede
that in the case of signing a piece of paper, whether or not a witness is
present to see you sign the paper is irrelevant. Am I correctly presenting
your position here?
I've neither called you an idiot, nor crazy.
said:
I don't really care, because for the most part, my reply is direct at
you, and given that you've replied to it, you've read it. It doesn't
bother me whether or not anyone else in the world can see my messages. I'm
not posting here to try to persuade people towards my position.
[...]
I disagree, but I think it's a minor point and not worth arguing over.
[snip stuff we seem to agree on]
This happens in Java too. There are bugs in Sun's Java compiler, for
example (I've posted a few to this newsgroup). Sun's Javac simply does not
actually follow the language specifications. That means you are now
effective writing for a programming language which is similar to, but not
quite identical to, Java, and you don't have the specifications for that
language you're programming for.
So you just fiddle around with the source code, adding random brackets
here, an unnecessary cast there, all just to get try and get the code to
works. And when it works, you add a comment saying /*DO NOT TOUCH THIS
CODE UNTIL JAVA 1.7 IS RELEASED!!! (see bug #882833)*/.
Or at least, that's essentially what I did.
[...]
Really? All I have to do is hit DEL when my computer boots up, and I'm
dumped into the motherboard setup screen. It'll say something like the
frontbuss is currently set to 233Mhz (for example), and allow me to bump
it up to 300Mhz in increments in 1Mhz.
That is essentially what happens now, with the exception of when
there's a demand for slower chips, and Intel has an excess of faster chip,
Intel may downclock the chip and sell it as if it were a slower chip. (If
there is no such excess of faster chips, then Intel may just say "Sorry,
there's a shortage right now. Try again later.")
If you get one of those downclocked chips, you're lucky, 'cause it
means you can safely overclock it (as mentioned above) and get the
performance of the faster chip for the price of the slower chip (and the
cost of voiding your warranty).
[...]
This is why I asked you to please state the criteria you require to
earn the label of "expert" repeatedly, and only after your nth refusal did
I finally decide to go ahead and name some random person to force a
criteria list out of you.
He's an "expert" in the same sense that most computer enthusiasts are
experts: They typically know more about computers, and thus OSes, than the
general public. When a specific task on a computer is running slow, they'd
know whether it was because of low RAM, slow CPU, slow harddrive, slow
Internet connection, malware, etc., whereas the general public would not.
Well, why didn't you say so?
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars
<quote>
In the light of these difficulties, many people wrote Vista off. Though
still some ways off, it was deemed a pointless failure and not worth
bothering with. This is unfortunate. Even after the false starts and
scaled-back plans, Vista is still a huge evolution in the history of the
NT platform, and that's not something to be sniffed at. The fundamental
changes to the platform are of a scale not seen since the release of NT.
[...]
In the following pages, I'll be talking about these big new features-the
graphics stack and the new APIs-and why they're so important for the
Windows platform. In addition to these revolutionary features, Vista
includes a host of evolutionary improvements that together make it a
hugely compelling release
</quote>
[...]
Yes, that would qualify if it were true that Vista can't do anything
XP can't do faster, cheaper and better. Luckily, it isn't.
BTW, there's more than one game which is Vista only. DirectX 10 itself
is Vista only, and there's a good handful of games coming out which are
DX10 only, with more coming along the way.
[...]
Because you asked me to. When you say things like "Please show me an
expert who likes Vista", if it isn't too much trouble for me, I'll do it.
I'm nice like that.
Vista is NOT better. That would be an objective statement. I'm saying
*I* like Vista better, and that I am not the only one. The fact that I am
willing to say "I like Vista" despite all the mockery that it invites is
pretty strong evidence, I think, to support the claim that yes, I really
do like Vista.
Otherwise, what possible evidence can I produce that will demonstrate
to you that I really do like Vista? I cannot display the contents of my
mind, and you cannot read it.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=define:+cop+out
<quote>
opt out: choose not to do something, as out of fear of failing
</quote>
Yes, it I *am* choosing not to do something (namely convince you of my
position), and yes I do think that if I tried to convince you of my
position, that I would fail to do so. So what?
There is no 4 in the ring of integers modulus 3, nor the trinary
integers.
[...]
You're also relying on the assumption that if something is enshrined
in "Constitution Law", that it's a good thing. But notice I'm not
disagreeing with you; I'm merely answering the questions you've asked. (I
feel I need to always explicitly highlight when I'm not disagreeing with
you, otherwise you will falsely assume that I am).
The relevance is that it demonstrates a belief system in which doing
public good is not necessarily a good thing. I'm trying to show highlight
to you what your axioms are, because it's very easy to otherwise just take
them for granted.
Also, again, note that I am not disagreeing with your axioms. Just
highlighting them.
[...]
I argue you are not qualified to judge whether an idiom is "of
widespread nature", since you are not familiar with most societies (e.g.
Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, Chinese, etc.) where English
may be spoken.
If you want clarity, avoid idioms.
Canada may be more multicultural than you think.
Most Canadians do not speak American English as well as Americans do,
just like most Americans do not speak Canadian English as well as
Canadians do.
I guess Internet service is better in Canada than where ever it is you
live.
Offshore support might fake good English but they'll never fake good
customer service or knowing what the **** they're talking about. If
they could fake *that*, they could program a computer to do it, and
since that's gotta be AI-complete...
I suggest that offshort support knows just as much about what they're
talking about as inhouse support. Both are just reading through a script.
In other words, offshore is not necessarily any worse than inhouse, and is
cheaper. Therefore supporting my argument that it is occasionally rational
for a company to use offshort support. Phew. I'm glad we got that settled.
Okay, noted for now, though I may eventually forget and one day
recommend you stuff which... you know... costs money.
Apparently it was only a ruse to buy time while plotting an ambush,
since this ... thing appeared for me to reply to two days later
continuing the same argument with nothing apparently resolved.
I'm too busy to post on the weekend, so you'll usually see a two-day
pause in my posts between Friday and Monday.
You still win the argument, by the way. Again, I don't really care
about "winning" or "losing" arguments. I argue to exchange information;
not to score points. So if winning makes you happy, then I declare you the
winner, since it costs me nothing to do so.
Jesus H. Christ, then what were you trying to refute originally when I
wrote a paragraph, days ago, saying that Microsoft couldn't hack it at
producing quality goods and so resorts to legal and technical measures
to frustrate the competition instead, and you threw up all over it?
Re-read the above carefully.
I agree that you did indeed say "MS is unable to compete in an open
market". I'm not necessarily agreeing that "MS is unable to compete in an
open market". Our disagreement seems to have stemmed from our difference
in the definition "compete": I meant "compete" as in "engage in a
contest", and you mean "compete" as in "win". Now that we know each
other's definitions, I suspect we understand what each the other person is
saying. In my case, there is no need for further clarification, so I don't
feel the need to argue any further. In other words, this is me hand-waving
and dismissing the argument as "not important".
This, by the way, is why I find it amusing when you insult my reading
comprehension.
Got evidence that it isn't? If not, we should try it and see. Then
we'd have evidence, one way or the other.
That snuff-porn example mentioned above, which you seem to agree with,
shows that trademark (which is a form of IP), might be a good idea.
Therefore, zero IP might be a bad idea.
Your serotonin and dopamine levels. Obviously they're all out of whack
but it will take a qualified physician to tell me why; I haven't a
clue.
Maybe this will help you understand: You do not need to even know what
serotonin nor dopamine is, in order to understand the sentence "I disagree
with it, but you win the argument". Hopefully this will help guide you to
understanding the sentence.
Whatever the **** it is, it's something-ML and my (standards-
compliant, natch) newsreader chokes on it and leaves me swimming in
markup and gobbledygook so please stick to plain text, as per normal
usenet netiquette.
My markup is a subset of plain-text.
If your newsreader display bugs when it encounters the characters "<"
or ">", then perhaps you should use a different newsreader, or report bugs
to its author. This is a suggestion, not an order. I'm giving you this
suggestion to (marginally) improve the quality of your life. Feel free to
ignore the suggestion.
I don't think you can violate the second law of thermodynamics, and
certainly, all the air in the room suddenly ending up in the same half of
it would not be a violation. It states that "The entropy of an isolated
system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a
maximum value at equilibrium." Since "tend to" and "over time" provides a
lot of leeway, it is in fact, very difficult to violate the second law of
thermodynamics.
feeping creature while being dragged by several conflicting agendes
for its development every-which-way (their own bean counters, their
lawyers, their customers, and the RIAA make at least four, so consider
them drawn and quartered) and generating something that smells like
roses. Nobody else is either.
I never claimed that Vista smells like roses.
[...]
And again, I am asking you what was the point of that example, then,
if not to mislead its reader.
I never promised any such thing, and I'd much rather not expose myself
to the risk of getting a letterbomb, steaming pile of manure, or
(worse) Windows Vista or something in the mail TYVM.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/50c09dae42a950ac
<quote writer="Twisted">
If you reply, I will provide a P.O. box address to
which you may send U.S. money orders.
</quote>
- Oliver
T
Twisted
[snip a whole lot of BS]
Aww, crap. Did you have to!?
Here we go again...
This is entirely beside my point. My point is that it serves no useful
public purpose for the government to enforce that I can only do
certain things if I have Windows, and in effect copyrights have that
as one of their many useless against-the-public-interest consequences
by a) letting software vendors refuse to port to any other platform,
b) letting the same vendors refuse to allow someone else to make such
a port, c) letting Microsoft refuse to allow some other vendor to make
a perfect Windows-substitute, and d) making law enforcement actually
enforce b and c.
This doesn't seem like policy in the service of the public interest to
me. It looks like policy in the service of Bill Gates, who is rich
enough that if anything he should be expected to completely fend for
himself and be given no considerations by the people whatsoever beyond
the most basic protections against violence and robbery.
And no, someone copying Windows to their hearts' content is not
robbery since it takes nothing away from him that he already had.
Believe it or not, some free games are genuinely good, but have a much
harder time getting any attention via corporate-controlled media,
partly because free game makers generally don't pay for advertising
but partly because corporate-controlled media exhibit a strong pro-
paying-for-things bias. There are levels of cartelization and one of
the weakest but most-inclusive of these is that for-profit
corporations protect their own against such outsiders as hobbyings,
freebie-distributors of any kinds, and anything else that might
compete with them all. Not to mention against ordinary consumers;
keeping them in the dark and fed shit, and limiting their choices
artificially, helps keep all of their bottom lines healthy.
I see the way the system works, you know. It isn't even, by and large,
through intentional conspiracy so much as through a "subconscious"
that has evolved in response to the environment's pressures; the
process by which companies come to act partly with a common agenda of
screw-the-customer and hide-all-the-free-stuff-as-much-as-possible is
just as blind and unthinking as the process that produced and
eventually got rid of dinosaurs.
And to the extent that that system fails to serve its ultimate
purpose, which is to empower and provide maximum utility to the
people, and do the greatest good for the greatest number, I oppose it
and seek to disrupt it or cause it to change, preferably by informing
people so that eventually the collective behavior of consumers
"selectively breeds" the system to behave more in keeping with its
purpose -- which is that government and business were created by the
people to serve the people, and not the other way around. The best way
for government to do that is to not be too bloated, or too indifferent
to the poor, or too opaque and secretive, or insensitive to the polls.
The best way for businesses to do it is to be encouraged to self-
maximize but be forced to do so in open and fair competition on a
level playing field and to be answerable for any harms they perpetrate
in trying to maximize the bottom line; a major function of government
is to maintain that playing field as level in various ways, and to
enforce the criminal code.
Without evidence.
I don't have a big off-the-top-of-my-head list; GIYF, so JFGI.
Stop arguing for the sake of arguing will you? This is ludicrous.
"This should never be done because I think something bad might happen,
even though I have no evidence at all to suggest such a thing" is not
a sensible way to decide matters of policy. It certainly doesn't
outweigh "This should be done because it is provable that X, Y, and Z
will all happen, and those are all good things, and nobody has proven
anything bad will happen, let alone enough to outweigh X, Y, *and* Z
together."
What the **** are you babbling about now? Either we have those
freedoms through the removal of so-called IP law, or we don't. If we
do, it may be that we lose or delay the creme-de-la-creme of games,
although I personally think it not especially likely. And then the
question is, is that one thing -- slower release of computer games --
a good reason to give up lots of possible freedoms? I'd argue that the
answer is no.
There is no fallacy there unless you're suggesting either that we can
have those freedoms and IP law too (we can't) or that we can have
those freedoms and top-tier games too (in which case you're actually
CONCEDING my point there, and I win!)
I dispute your claim that 0 is bad. Even 1 year loses us all sorts of
freedoms with our things and our technology. Even 1 DAY does that;
justifies intrusive DRM and private attempts at enforcement.
Encourages a kind of digital feudalism with everybody answerable to
corporate lawmakers and corporate mercenaries with no accountability
to we, the people; the sort of thing revolutionary wars have been
fought to eliminate. Remember the medieval age? The big
"corporations", the owners of the "means of production" then were
landowners who owned the bulk of Europe's arable land at the time.
They were rich, they acted as (and were) aristocrats, and had all
kinds of noble titles. And mercenaries: each their own army of thugs
with swords and plate mail to enforce their decrees on the tenants of
their land.
Copyrights and patents make all of us in the 21st century who use
technology into tenants with no protections. DRM amounts to the same
sort of feudal lords again being able to unilaterally decree the law
without any public recourse, and the use of technological methods as
well as coopting of normal law enforcement (e.g. via the DMCA) to
enforce these corporate-made "laws" amounts to again enforcing it
through mercenaries. Mercenaries because in effect they are enforcing
privately-made law and acting on behalf of private agents, rather than
on behalf of we, the people.
How undemocratic.
It may not be as bad -- no rape and pillage, at least as of yet -- but
it's still not good and shortening the term won't make it go away
either.
I'm not sure they're currently hosted anywhere; good, stable hosting
is so hard to find these days. There are references though; google
"twq3tourney2" and "twq3tourney3" and there are references and
screenshots in one or two places.
Ignore the ones a commercial entity would never publish and compare
only the rest. You'll find they're on a par, and that there are plenty
of free ones.
And top-notch examples ALL of those talents can be found in free game
content and free game engines. Not just level design. I said that
already but obviously you didn't want to hear it, but it bears
repeating even if you are simply going to ignore it again as
unpalatable.
Who ever claimed that it isn't possible to develop a game on a) a
we're-not-basing-our-business-model-on-restricting-copying or even b)
a non-profit model and still hire talent? I certainly didn't. If you
are claiming that, you're obviously insane; nonprofits hire people all
the time, as do for-profit businesses that don't restrict copying
(e.g. restaurants; the fashion industry) but do depend on innovation
(recipes, new designs). (Both can and do use trademark law but that's
entirely beside the point as interoperable knockoffs thrive and so do
both industries.)
You're forgetting Nehahra, whose engine was based off a very old Quake
engine and probably largely rewritten. That's an engine of far greater
quality than any commercial engine it can claim as an ancestor.
[snip straw-man argument implying the ludicrous claim that the only
type of game that would survive the abolition of copyright would be
that exemplified by Nethack and online Flash games]
It's comparable to commercial cames made in the same time period.
Comparing an older free game with commercial games made for and
running on hardware six years more advanced is an obvious case of
cheating.
[snip nonsense]
IYHO. You may be comparing apples and oranges. Do they look good? Yes
-- both. Do they look the same? Of course not. So what?
But it's a damn sight more honest an income than selling the boxes for
3000 times what they cost to make!
That might be true if you did something as stupid as to abolish video-
game copyrights only instead of all the copyrights. Of course
they'd go to where they can command inflated salaries because the
companies can command inflated prices. They'd also need more money
because that cost of living decrease wouldn't really be there. In my
proposed world, though, their costs would plummet at the same time as
the salaries they could command would plummet. Also, a lot of
artificial costs (such as for unfree development tools) of the
gamemaker would go away. Also, the freer competition would necessarily
mean they'd be forced to cut the fat in the upper echelons of
management, and pay less to the suit-wearing types. Clearly a much
larger proportion of the gamemaker's revenues (whatever its business
model) would go to paying the talent.
Right now, your video game $10 is split up something like this (it's
probably actually quite a lot worse, especially at high volumes, as
they keep raking it in per-copy and only pay most of these expenses
including the talent salaries once):
$0.10 paying the talent.
$0.01 towards paying off the ludicrous royalties on the game company's
development tools, as artificial-scarcity pinch has been passed on to
them by their suppliers.
$0.04 pays operating expenses and the like
$0.10 pays for annoying advertisements you have to tune out while
trying to surf the web, watch your favorite show, or whatever.
$0.10 pays for distribution costs, disc-stamping, and the like
$0.70 tax
$9.00 is the profit, so lines the pockets of executives.
Suppose the post-copyright business model generates only 1/20 the
revenue; if each $0.50 is split up as follows the talent gets paid
just as much:
$0.03 paying the talent
$0.04 operating expenses
$0.04 tax (generous)
$0.01 distribution costs (seeding one torrent; generous)
$0.37 profit
It's still largely profit! Note that costs are reduced drastically
because they can deep-six marketing, paying royalties themselves, and
distribution costs. Not having a business model based on selling
copies means restricting copies is pointless and suddenly seeding a
torrent is cheap and very efficient distribution that doesn't
undermine the business model. So distribution costs are slashed. We
assume a post-copyright world so they owe no royalties. Since their
business model isn't based on selling individual copies hawking copies
of this game is a useless expense with no ROI anymore and gets dumped.
So much for the annoying ads. Tax shrinks proportionately to total (I
assumed a 7% tax for the first, and rounding up for the second or an
8% tax). Profits are much less but are positive, so this business is
viable.
Of course cutting the fat further allows them to pay the talent more
than the copyright-using business did.
The 74% profit margin is still obscene, but not nearly as ludicrous as
the 90% profit margin before. In practise easy copying would force
price competition and whatever their revenue stream their margins
would be driven down to a sliver, to something like this:
$0.05 paying the talent (more than before) (competition to attract
talent is fiercer)
$0.03 operating expenses (some efficiency improvements forced by
having real competition)
$0.01 tax
$0.01 distribution costs (seeding one torrent; generous)
$0.02 profit
Total $0.12, a bit more than a dime. This business is lean, mean, and
efficient now, and still profitable. Whatever it charges for, it's
fairly cheap. Copies of the software are free. A lot of useless
expenses are gone, including outmoded inefficient distribution and
marketing methods. What marketing they do is for whatever they sell
that the game is a loss-leader for. Marketing may even be their
revenue source rather than an expense. Most likely they rely on a bit
of narrowcast advertising that seeds word-of-mouth spread, and being
findable in Google and on The Pirate Bay or something. Of course this
requires a quality product so the incentive to make a quality product
is still there. The talent makes 66% more money than before. The only
losers are lawyers and executives, who make merely reasonable salaries
now (in "operating expenses" going down a percentage and in no longer
lining their pockets from "profit").
We note that the "profit" category above included a lot of executive
salary fat as well as what actually went on the books as profit.
Anything that just lined pockets and didn't pay for additional useful
work in other words. A "good enough" salary for each non-talent
employee is included in "operating costs" and any additional amount of
salary for any of these that the market wouldn't bear in the presence
of genuine competition is included in "profit". The profit penny left
goes to shareholders or into expansion, rather than wood-paneling the
CEO's new 50' yacht.
Then you are claiming that if every copy of Windows out there
mysteriously transmogrified into a Red Hat install overnight, it
wouldn't cause more than a bit of bafflement and retraining, rather
than just about everything grinding to a halt.
I find that frankly unbelievable.
But it's illegitimate! That something being required is gratuitous
rather than an unshakable fact of nature, and that something being
priced 3000-times cost is equally gratuitous! It's as if to protect
the buggy whip industry a law were passed requiring that all drivers
purchase a buggy whip to be allowed to drive certain common classes of
vehicle including the workhorse 18-wheeler trucks on which all
commerce depends (gratuitous since a truck driver gets much more use
out of the pedals than a buggy whip) and furthermore the buggy whips
themselves were made immune to price competition somehow (resulting in
gratuitously inflated per-whip prices). And subjected to planned
obsolescence...
The economy depends on paying the costs of something. It does not
depend on, nor should it make a stable state of affairs, paying
thousands of times the costs for only one rather than thousands of the
item in question. Only lack of effective competition in an area
enables that kind of pricing abuse to persist. And it is worst in
areas where laws explicitly provide for anticompetitive business
practises. Copyright is even responsible for the inflated price of the
iPod, since the main place to get legal online tunes is iTunes, which
naturally works with iPods and which makes getting the music in any
form other than 128-bit AAC with Apple DRM artificially difficult (you
have to waste a blank CD to turn them into mp3s, but it's possible)
and non-iPod hardware won't play AAC with Apple DRM. The result of
anticompetitive behavior on the part of a) music labels (music
copyrights) and b) Apple itself (AAC licensing, or rather refusal to
do same) results in Apple having a defacto monopoly on interoperable
hardware and getting to jack the price up to be made up mainly of
fatty margins with relatively little meat paying the ordinary daily-
grind employees of Apple or any other company.
So even hardware is infected with artificially raised prices, even
before we start considering patent law's effects as well.
The "emotional subject" is your sheer density. Why haven't you
imploded and fallen within your own event horizon and, consequently,
shut up (aside maybe from Hawking radiation that'd be
indistinguishable from noise) yet? That you continue to profess the
ludicrous belief that Bill Gates somehow is owed a single red cent
more by any user of Windows or of any other software, no matter how
many future copies might (at no cost to Bill Gates I might add!) be
made, simply beggars belief, yet here you are.
When the government continues to enforce a copyright on a Microsoft
product, it is basically saying (and enforcing) that making more
copies still entitles Bill to more money despite the sheer lack of any
compelling public interest in further enriching the man.
So much for copyright law then, since it prohibits me from doing some
things purely with my own materials, time, and money, behind closed
doors, without any involvement of the copyright holder and without my
touching any of the copyright holder's things or money.
No, the point I was trying to make, but which is too sensible to ever
avoid flying right over your head, is that there should not BE any
applications that REQUIRE Windows. That very thing by itself is
objectionable, and is an artificial constraint on the market place
enforced by law that is not in the public interests and only
marginally even in Bill Gates' interests now, since the marginal
increase in his expected earnings from perpetuating this sorry state
of affairs is a minuscule fraction of what he's already hoarded.
No it isn't. The same business model can profitably exploit a video
game with sports-like elements.
For example s/stadium/server and stadium seats/server bandwidth for a
scarce resource you can sell tickets to without evilly creating
artificial scarcity. Making money off live spectating is this
possible. (Live spectating might give advantages over television
spectating e.g. interactive control of your own personal virtual
camera.)
Advertising and sponsorship would be almost EXACTLY unchanged, aside
from the potentially enormous amount of ad space in the virtual arena,
compared to the limits on physical space. (Admittedly, seeing my
favorite game maps defaced with billboards plastered everywhere might
not be so nice, but if it pays their bills, and is only on the
official event games and not home games...)
I don't see term length shortening being either necessary (to "promote
the progress...") or sufficient (to avoid these downsides).
Superficial bandaids other than short term lengths are subject to
loopholes. Term length reductions might even be subject to loopholes,
for example game's copyright running out so release a mandatory update
-- don't let the auth servers auth anyone to play who doesn't have it
-- and copyright the update => another year of raking in free money!
Trademark isn't urgently in need of being destroyed but it does need
to be brought down to earth. On the other hand I can see getting rid
of it entirely, perhaps by making misrepresenting stuff in product
labeling be considered full-blown fraud and prosecuted as such, rather
than using existing wimpy truth-in-advertising laws. This somewhat
levels the playing field -- it is in the hands of the criminal justice
system and cases would generally be brought by the AG and their crack
legal team on behalf of aggrieved consumers, rather than a) up-front
fees to register marks and b) civil "let the most expensive legal team
win!" lawsuits that clearly stack the odds in favor of big business
over either small and medium businesses or aggrieved consumers.
I don't consider trademarks, once rationalized, to be real IP. They
create a right of a company not to have its brand misrepresented. They
have about as much in common with copyrights as academic no-plagiarism
rules do, w.r.t. their effects and purpose. Making them inalienable
(non-transferable) might even make sense, since all too often a bad
company buys up a trademark in good repute and uses it to sell a load
of horseshit to unwitting consumers for a while before they wise up
(Norton brand software just about heads up the list). That still
doesn't stop a change of management at a company from running a
formerly-respected product line directly into the ground, mind you.
Perhaps tying a trademark to a set of warranty terms that must be
honored for any authentic product bearing that mark? Don't honor the
warranty terms, lose protection for the trademark, or even get charged
with infringing it yourself?
You've not presented evidence that the world after such a 2012 will be
shitty and no longer have games as good as counterstrike being made.
So I think we're even there. As it is, though, even if copyright's
unchanged or even worse in 2012 we'll probably have 4-day workweeks.
Much of the trend in unemployment and part-time vs. full-time work is
preexisting anyway; sooner or later the spotty distribution of
salaries (here a full-time one, there a part-time one, and over there
none at all) and working hours (here 40 a week, there as much as 120 a
week and for less pay and more stress, and over there none at all)
will reach some instability threshold and get a "market correction" of
some sort. (The market in question being the labor market I suppose.)
If there's only around 32 hours of work a week to go around, a 4 hour
work week might emerge. Of course all those people with "mandatory
overtime" and similar BS might mean it's still around 40 and just not
as smoothly distributed as before for some reason. Regardless, in the
employment area something has to give and soon. And in the fatcat
profits area too, because people simply can't afford what is asked of
them in the way of cost of living anymore. That WILL self-correct, one
way or another, and I'm betting on "soon" when it comes to
"when?"...perhaps overpriced products with cheaper alternatives (e.g.
Windows) will see growing disuse. Perhaps there'll be a growing
backlash against anticompetitive behavior in general, especially as
people increasingly feel directly the restrictions that enable these,
through frustratingly user-hostile HD-DVD players beholden to
Hollywood via DRM rather than their own owners. People finding that
their stuff increasingly no longer is theirs to control and use as
they see fit but instead increasingly embodies the agendas and goals
of some distant organization with ulterior financial motives will rise
up against oppression. Or something like that.
I'm not even telling you what should be done. I'm telling you what
probably will happen, soon, regardless. The system is wound as tight
as it can get, and fatcats have their hands wedged as deeply into the
pockets of the people as they can reach without coming out empty
because the people have no more money for them to take. It's
unsustainable; they pay domestically less than they reach for
domestically, and the less they get the less they pay and the more
they lay off, and the cycle will just spiral down into a black
economic depression -- except that there'll be lots of room for new
and innovative businesses with novel business models to horn in and
provide genuinely useful, non-artificially-scarce goods and services
at a reasonable price. Once it's clear that clearing the patent
thickets and other anticompetitive deadwood so as to let them is the
only way to stave off the worst depression since the thirties,
government will cave. Or else it will sit stupidly and let the
depression happen, likely followed by world war three. After that
people will rebuild and resolve not to make the same mistakes as last
time. This time they'll use constitutions to shackle businesses AND
government to be beholden to the public interest in some way, perhaps
simply by having a Progress Clause that *prohibits* the legislature
from granting exclusive rights to any idea, invention, software,
writings, or other art or design or plan or blueprint.
I think the evidence is that people will manage and muddle through
somehow like they always did with regard to the "difficulties" of
funding R&D type activities, such as the good old-fashioned getting
venture capital to fund product A, plowing product A's profits into
expansion and funding product B instead of lining a few pockets with
it, and so on ... you know, the good old-fashioned way of doing
business.
The benefits are all just about guaranteed. The downsides are vague
speculations with little evidence. Perhaps best is a pilot project.
Maybe some progressive European country will abolish IP inside itself.
But then, a non-self-sufficient nation may not make a good test,
partly because it might be attacked (embargoed, if not physically
attacked) by the US at the behest of Big Business and a false
correlation of no-IP=bad-consequences might arise as a result.
China is an interesting candidate.
But the US would be best. China still is somewhat hamstrung by relics
of communism and antidemocratic attitudes, but if it shakes off the
last of that funk it's world superpower in no time, running
competitive rings around the US once it gets its burgeoning industrial
base matured and starts building off free software and suchlike to
enter the information age for real. The US has a window of opportunity
to keep its world prestige and leadership, but it's rapidly closing.
It needs to streamline its laws, free its content, and throw out the
shrubs and all the other business-bought crooks and start being run by
representatives of the citizenry again in order to make that window.
Because if it gets worse (or no better) and China does get better
(while possessing a much larger labor force, a much larger domestic
market for goods and services, and a general disinterest in American-
style IP laws) ...
I don't know what the hell you are. I think you act like or pretend to
be whatever suits you. You're a debating chameleon -- you assume any
position you like and appear to be anything that has a vested interest
in that position winning; then you change, even in the middle of the
same debate; and change again...
Which as far as I am aware makes you one thing and one thing only --
an argumentative prick.
The UI clearly has different semantics, regardless of the data-level
semantics being identical.
I never said 1 in 10, and I said it does it every single time in list
(and I believe details) view. It's quite random and sporadic in icons
and tiles view; just TRY IT AND SEE. It should happen eventually. Now
I've mentioned it you should sooner or later notice it during normal
use of your Windoze machines anyway.
How you'd behave is immaterial. It's whether such behavior by the soft
drink manufacturer strikes you as at all legitimate, whether it's at
all true that current law could reasonably consider this hypothetical
EULA to be binding on the drink-purchaser, and whether it is in the
public interest for law enforcement to provide remedies for the soft
drink manufacturer if you violate the questionable "agreement" or
dodge it by puncturing the can or whatever.
If the corporate behemoth that tried to screw you gets to watch
helplessly while you get what you wanted and they get only what is
their reasonable due but no more, despite their nasty attempt at
overreaching and control, well so much the better.
I answered that already. This is a paper document you sign, and the
company gets to keep a copy. Later they can produce it in court as
evidence that you entered into a binding agreement with them, if they
want to sue you for breach of contract.
So yes.
If however it's a computer dialog produced by software running on your
local machine, there's no evidence that the company can later produce
in court to prove that you entered into any binding agreements with
them.
In the worst case that they rig it to phone home and only work if it
succeeded, they have an IP address, which they can't even turn into a
particular internet service account holder's name without probable
cause and a subpoena, if then. Given even such a name, they may be
able to claim in court sensibly that something is binding on that
person, but not some other person -- e.g. a family member that used
the same computer.
I think there's no way that it can ever make sense to give anywhere
near the same amount of legal weight to a EULA button-click as to a
signature on a real written contract with a copy (with the signature
evident) retained by each interested party. Even a EULA button-click
associated with an IP address.
Not quite. Witnesses are sometimes required, presumably where more
weight is needed than an unwitnessed signature would provide.
Maybe not, but you've sometimes implied it.
Why ARE you posting here, then? Not to persuade other people, you
claim. Obviously not to persuade me, which you must have realized by
now is futile since it takes actual evidence to persuade me and you
clearly have none.
BTW, my previous posting was again subjected to restricted
propagation, as was your most recent posting. That makes two of yours
now. How soon will you become incensed that someone is restricting the
distribution of your own postings without cause? It's damned rude of
them to decide on your behalf how far you want your message
distributed, is it not? And when it's posted to an unmoderated group,
to boot!
Remember: When it comes to usenet, only a) spam and b) postings to
moderated groups are at all legitimate to use technical means to block
or cancel. Others may be grounds for flaming or even complaining to a
poster's ISP, but generally none are legitimate to unilaterally
cancel.
Do Java programmers generally write code that will break if the bugs
are fixed though? Or only code that adheres to the subset of the JLS
that actually works in current javac, and therefore adheres to the
JLS?
Note that part of the reason is the expectation that bugs will
actually get fixed, making it unsafe to rely on them. Obviously this
factor is yet another one that doesn't apply when coding to Microsoft
tools and APIs. Another reason why "the cure is Java".
Yep, and keep it valid within the JLS at the same time so it won't
outright break when Java 7 is released either.
That's the bus speed, not the CPU speed, you n00b. Two different
things. (A clue: typical CPU speeds these days are measured in GHz.)
Can you overclock THE CPU by fiddling in your BIOS? And can you do any
of this in such a way that you can easily back out a change that has a
deleterious effect, without lasting damage to your hardware or to your
data?
Why not just NOT downclock the chip and sell it at the slower-chip
price? A faster chip is a perfectly good substitute for a slower chip.
Artificially degrading something in the manner described is repugnant,
not to mention inefficient and a sign of market failure or simple
nastiness and a will to withhold things for no good reason than that
you are greedy.
Let me guess -- he's a big Windows enthusiast but has no real concept
of anything else. IOW, a biased source. Or maybe easily swayed by eye
candy. Anyway, VISTA IS WORSE:
http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista
Stick THAT in your fucking pipe and smoke it wisearse!
Vista is worse than Windows XP. It can not do as much as well, on
average. It is full of nastiness meant to enrich MS. It constitutes
spyware, indeed appears to be the largest piece of spyware software in
history, and one of the first shrink-wrapped pieces of spyware, where
the main danger used to be exclusively free online downloads of
dubious software from dubious sites and online browser exploits. And
there's the DRM ... the poorer performance ... the likelihood of lots
of incompatibilities with your existing hardware and software ...
No rational utilitarian migrates from XP SP2 to Vista or from anything
else to Vista for that matter. Not on a production machine.
Well if they haven't discovered that Vista's slow performance is due
to malware (namely, Vista) then they have clearly got blinkered vision
or simply aren't the expert you claim they are.
It sucks, but it's pretty -- therefore it still sucks.
Aha! There were "difficulties".
Aha! There were MAJOR difficulties.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a huge evolution in the
history of the staph aureus "platform" and is definitely not something
to be sniffed at, not unless you want to start sneezing and then drop
dead despite being given massive doses of antibiotics.
That something has had "fundamental changes" does not make it
automatically good, or even anything you want to touch with a ten-foot
pole.
Because no matter its deep-seated faults and unfixable performance
issues, a little eye candy is all it takes to magically make it a
machine offering superior productivity for all of your practical needs
once more.
This is either Microsoft, or someone copying wholesale from MS ad
copy. No self respecting independent reviewer uses marketroid language
like the above paragraph! It's revolting! It's sugary filling and no
substance; self-serving (well Microsoft-serving) praise with no
evidence to support it; it's about as far from proper investigative
journalism as it's possible to get without going to the extremes
epitomized famously by sentence "You take the pictures; I'll furnish
the war".
That's like arguing that my claim that the ketchup is red because,
well, it's red is circular. Maybe it is, but that's simply because
it's a pretty much fundamentally true thing you can't divide much
deeper. It's self-evident except of course to the red-green
colorblind. You obviously have a kind of sucks-rocks colorblindness if
you can't likewise see that Vista is a small lump of cat feces that
somehow escaped removal from the litter tray and ended up sold on
store shelves.
Er, I take that back. Vista is not at all small, it's a fucking
elephant of fatty bloat and it's the size of a small moon. But the
rest of it is true.
Games again. You a hardcore gamer? You say copyright law is good
because abolishing it would make everything else better but make all
the games suck. You say Vista is better than XP because although XP
does everything else better it won't run a handful of Vista-only
games.
I don't think that it is sound public policy for our government to
base its laws and enforcement activities around what's good for
hardcore gamers, any more than if you substituted any other small
minority for "hardcore gamers" there.
Thing is, if Vista rocks and XP sucks because of gamers, and copyright
law rocks because of gamers, then lynchings rock because of Klansmen,
and so does abolishing civil rights, and blowing up tall buildings
rocks because of the minority of Al Qaeda sympathizers among us, and
so forth. Your argument leads to a very dangerous place!
How many now? Of course this is all moot; a DX10 emulation for XP will
arise sooner or later whether Microsoft wants one to or not. So even
these games don't pull Vista up out of the toilet, even if you really
esteem games over all other considerations, even if you esteem them
even over much more practical considerations.
You're supposed to come up empty handed, numbskull. Instead you find
some Microsoft mouthpiece with a tiny amount of implausible
deniability that he's a Microsoft mouthpiece? And babble on and on
about games?
Sucks-rocks colorblindness confirmed then. That or you're a flaming
nut.
You need to furnish evidence that Vista is the rational choice of a
utilitarian, rather than sticking with XP. So far you've failed
miserably.
You're not even trying to defend your position. In fact as far as I
can tell you have no position, unless "whatever position is oppose
Twisted's" is your position or something.
There is if you define it to be 3+1, as would be the standard
definition of 2, 3, 4 ... in a system (0 is the additive identity, 1
is the multiplicative identity, 2 is 1+1, 3 is 2+1, 4 is 3+1...). It
just happens that 4 = 1 in this ring, and doesn't ordinarily.
There's also the little matter that one ordinarily is referring to the
normal integers and not some modular ring by default, unless
explicitly stated otherwise.
I'm considering particular things in the constitution that have a
proven track record of doing good far outweighing any harm they do to
be good things. There is no such track record for copyrights or
patents; no evidence that they have made a whit of difference for the
common good though there's all manner of evidence for serious,
frequent harmful consequences.
It's like a drug of no proven efficacy and demonstrable, common and
deleterious side effects. As such, the FDA would yank it in a week if
it ever mistakenly approved it in the first place.
Instead this drug is being forcibly administered to the body politic,
increasingly over its own objections from a growing size and variety
of parts, and at ever increasing doses. Why do they keep increasing
the dose? Because it seems insufficiently effective at the lower dose,
that's why! That's because it is in fact ineffective at any dose --
and indeed, the symptoms it's being adminstered to cure (slow
innovation and suchlike) are actually being caused by the drug itself,
and would go away if they'd only let the patient be and quit drugging
them.
Solipsism is prima facie evidence that someone is not a good candidate
for public office, so I daresay it is not relevant. Public policy
clearly must be based on the theory that the public that is to be
served exists. There's a simple utilitarian argument and payoff
matrix.
Top row is public's existence; left column is whether public policy
assumes its existence
N Y
N 0* 0**
Y 0*** 1****
* Nothing happens so no costs or payoff
** Here we assume (generously) no harm if the public is treated as not
existing.
*** Here there is no harm because the tax money that is paid for the
benefit of the nonexistent public is equally nonexistent!
**** Here we assume public policy sufficiently non-braindead that
benefits exceed costs by one unit.
The payoff matrix makes it clear that the outcome is no worse, but
possibly better, if you assume the public exists and behave
accordingly.
(Similar payoff matrices prove that you may as well assume the
nonexistence of any given religious type entity, good or bad. Given
the contradictory religious information out there, the speculative
negative payoff from wrath of god type stuff is risked uniformly and
can be subtracted from every alternative choice; if you pick Catholic
and the Muslims were right you're in for it, but if you pick Islam and
the Buddhists were right, or the Jews ...; The costs of practising
religion become the only remaining factor, and most are nonzero aside
from the choice of ignoring religion entirely, unless you're in an
intolerant society. So the logical choice is Christian during the
inquisition, Islam in Iran, agnostic/atheist in most secular
democracies, and so forth, and to minimize costs by doing the minimum
necessary to "pass" in all cases; and not being outspokenly
irreligious may be beneficial in some of the secular democracies. A
related argument decides the facts of the matter: atheism. Anything
discernible from noise has pattern by definition; a pattern by
definition forms the basis for a mechanistic understanding of and for
the technological control of a phenomenon. So all phenomena can be
decomposed into two components, one indistinguishable from noise and
one that is amenable to rationalist and naturalist approaches. The
noise is where anything supernatural or divine gets relegated, and is
also amenable to rationalist and naturalist approaches because it can
be modeled as noise! To the extent that it can't be, you obviously
didn't decompose the noise and the signal correctly; try again. So we
can use a hardware source of white noise such as television snow or
radio static as an acceptable substitute for God. So much for
religious truth; religion is 100% divorced from any pragmatic concern
and actually is what it always suspiciously resembled: a matter of
fashion and culture and nothing deeper, even if an inspiration for all
sorts of interesting architecture and philosophy at times. Outweighed
by its frequent historical use as en excuse for bloodshed and
oppression...the identity of indiscernibles is one philosophical
position that would actually make strictly equal the radio static and
supposed creator using the reasoning given above. No doubt some
credulous type neurologically prone to feelings of rapture and awe
will now start a whole cult that gets off on tuning between stations
in the middle of nowhere along I-95 to receive wisdom and instructions
from on high...)
Axioms, hell -- they're theorems; see the payoff matrix above.
In general, no. When it's English, yes.
[snip list of countries]
Half of those are not English countries. Of the ones that are, most
are much smaller than the US in population. Certainly the idioms I see
in wide use are widespread in English generally, as adding even a full
50 million people that don't use the idiom isn't going to dilute it
more than 20% or so, and equally the ones that I don't see are
probably used by a population no larger than that of Mexico City and
that the Los Angeles Valley in California alone will see (and likely
raise somewhat).
I'm fairly sure the idiom I used is not America-specific. It's
sufficiently generally English that your unfamiliarity with it points
to English not being your primary language.
I don't think so. I checked, and Internet service in Canada is mostly
the usual pattern of phone/cable duopolies just as it is in the
states.
It might be rational for a company to use shoddy offshore support in
place of shoddy onshore support, but it is not rational for them to
use shoddy support in place of decent support IF repeat business is at
all important in their line of work and they have real competition.
It's not about free, it's about risk-free and not paying ludicrous
margins above cost and free speech.
Same as with software. Same as with a lot of what I've been arguing.
I argue in the interests of bringing the light of truth and reason
into dark corners. Being argued back at is like some jerkoff following
me turning off all the lights I'd just turned on. Being argued back at
by someone who apparently doesn't even have a stake in the outcome is
like the same jerkoff claiming it's for reasons of energy efficiency
even though the light of truth and reason has probably got net
negative carbon emissions.
There's plenty of evidence: whenever they have real competition their
market share goes directly into the toilet and someone hits "flush".
And they spend far more effort on artificially blocking competition
from happening than they do on product R&D, to judge by such
expensive, crummy, over-budget, and past-due turdpiles as Vista. That
XP is mostly usable must be a fluke; everything else was about as
execrable by the standards of the time, from windows 1.0 right up to
millennium <bletch> edition. Maybe they used up all of XP's evilness
budget allocation on pushing the world's first "product activation" BS
on everyone and a few of the more annoying bugs and crashes, and on
shoddy unfree support, lack of fixes for most bugs without security
implications, and the stupid half-open connection limit in SP2, or at
least not making it sysadmin-configurable, and then rigging every
SINGLE windows update batch since a third-party patch for that was
released to unpatch it.
There's nothing amusing about it; it's frankly bad. You misunderstand
one out of every three things I say, by my estimate, and I'm writing
in plain English, not Cockney fucking rhyming slang or something!
I suggested alternatives even to trademark, and reasons why trademark
is entirely unlike IP.
Saying in the same sentence that I'm wrong and that I win the argument
is like capitulating a game of field hockey while believing the score
currently favors your team over mine, or maybe while simply accusing
me of cheating. It's somewhat insulting, and it's also just plain
nonsensical. I was wondering what physiological abnormalities in your
brain chemistry would lead you to behave in such a manner.
Sentences like this make my head spin and convince me that you are not
normal. I don't think it's some Canadian thing either; I've met
Canadians and the vast majority of them, like the vast majority of
Americans, are not nuts.
Now get thee hence to w3c.org and educate thyself on the many
differences between HTML, XML, and plain text.
It doesn't wig out; it just doesn't interpret the markup into whatever
kind of fancy nice rich-text display you had in mind. I end up seeing
what looks like web page source -- text interspersed with html type
tags that make it hard to read and generally uglify everything. In
other words the usual behavior when you feed markup to a tool that
expects normal text, especially markup that's nonstandard and not
preceded by an appropriate DTD reference header.
[nit-picky BS snipped]
You're a literal-minded, obtuse, argumentative arsehole.
To inform, engage, and educate its reader, obviously.
That was in response to a particular challenge nobody met the criteria
for, in case you'd forgotten. You conveniently quoted only the one
condition involving replying. Oh, and I suppose I should add the
following:
LEGAL NOTICE:
By reading this message with appended legal BS, you hereby agree:
a) Not to censor or in any way modify this message, nor impair its
distribution via normal usenet propagation mechanisms;
b) Not to selectively remove it from or prevent it entering your own
news spool while leaving most other posts to this thread alone, if you
are a news administrator and your spool carries cljp;
c) Not to cancel it retroactively;
d) That this message is distributed AS IS, without warranty including
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE; the sender
accepts no liability for any damages, including incidental and
consequential damages, arising from your use of this message; and
e) That to the extent that applicable state law supersedes some of the
terms and conditions above, the others will remain in full force and
effect.
So there.
Aww, crap. Did you have to!?
Here we go again...
This is entirely beside my point. My point is that it serves no useful
public purpose for the government to enforce that I can only do
certain things if I have Windows, and in effect copyrights have that
as one of their many useless against-the-public-interest consequences
by a) letting software vendors refuse to port to any other platform,
b) letting the same vendors refuse to allow someone else to make such
a port, c) letting Microsoft refuse to allow some other vendor to make
a perfect Windows-substitute, and d) making law enforcement actually
enforce b and c.
This doesn't seem like policy in the service of the public interest to
me. It looks like policy in the service of Bill Gates, who is rich
enough that if anything he should be expected to completely fend for
himself and be given no considerations by the people whatsoever beyond
the most basic protections against violence and robbery.
And no, someone copying Windows to their hearts' content is not
robbery since it takes nothing away from him that he already had.
Believe it or not, some free games are genuinely good, but have a much
harder time getting any attention via corporate-controlled media,
partly because free game makers generally don't pay for advertising
but partly because corporate-controlled media exhibit a strong pro-
paying-for-things bias. There are levels of cartelization and one of
the weakest but most-inclusive of these is that for-profit
corporations protect their own against such outsiders as hobbyings,
freebie-distributors of any kinds, and anything else that might
compete with them all. Not to mention against ordinary consumers;
keeping them in the dark and fed shit, and limiting their choices
artificially, helps keep all of their bottom lines healthy.
I see the way the system works, you know. It isn't even, by and large,
through intentional conspiracy so much as through a "subconscious"
that has evolved in response to the environment's pressures; the
process by which companies come to act partly with a common agenda of
screw-the-customer and hide-all-the-free-stuff-as-much-as-possible is
just as blind and unthinking as the process that produced and
eventually got rid of dinosaurs.
And to the extent that that system fails to serve its ultimate
purpose, which is to empower and provide maximum utility to the
people, and do the greatest good for the greatest number, I oppose it
and seek to disrupt it or cause it to change, preferably by informing
people so that eventually the collective behavior of consumers
"selectively breeds" the system to behave more in keeping with its
purpose -- which is that government and business were created by the
people to serve the people, and not the other way around. The best way
for government to do that is to not be too bloated, or too indifferent
to the poor, or too opaque and secretive, or insensitive to the polls.
The best way for businesses to do it is to be encouraged to self-
maximize but be forced to do so in open and fair competition on a
level playing field and to be answerable for any harms they perpetrate
in trying to maximize the bottom line; a major function of government
is to maintain that playing field as level in various ways, and to
enforce the criminal code.
Without evidence.
I don't have a big off-the-top-of-my-head list; GIYF, so JFGI.
Stop arguing for the sake of arguing will you? This is ludicrous.
"This should never be done because I think something bad might happen,
even though I have no evidence at all to suggest such a thing" is not
a sensible way to decide matters of policy. It certainly doesn't
outweigh "This should be done because it is provable that X, Y, and Z
will all happen, and those are all good things, and nobody has proven
anything bad will happen, let alone enough to outweigh X, Y, *and* Z
together."
What the **** are you babbling about now? Either we have those
freedoms through the removal of so-called IP law, or we don't. If we
do, it may be that we lose or delay the creme-de-la-creme of games,
although I personally think it not especially likely. And then the
question is, is that one thing -- slower release of computer games --
a good reason to give up lots of possible freedoms? I'd argue that the
answer is no.
There is no fallacy there unless you're suggesting either that we can
have those freedoms and IP law too (we can't) or that we can have
those freedoms and top-tier games too (in which case you're actually
CONCEDING my point there, and I win!)
I dispute your claim that 0 is bad. Even 1 year loses us all sorts of
freedoms with our things and our technology. Even 1 DAY does that;
justifies intrusive DRM and private attempts at enforcement.
Encourages a kind of digital feudalism with everybody answerable to
corporate lawmakers and corporate mercenaries with no accountability
to we, the people; the sort of thing revolutionary wars have been
fought to eliminate. Remember the medieval age? The big
"corporations", the owners of the "means of production" then were
landowners who owned the bulk of Europe's arable land at the time.
They were rich, they acted as (and were) aristocrats, and had all
kinds of noble titles. And mercenaries: each their own army of thugs
with swords and plate mail to enforce their decrees on the tenants of
their land.
Copyrights and patents make all of us in the 21st century who use
technology into tenants with no protections. DRM amounts to the same
sort of feudal lords again being able to unilaterally decree the law
without any public recourse, and the use of technological methods as
well as coopting of normal law enforcement (e.g. via the DMCA) to
enforce these corporate-made "laws" amounts to again enforcing it
through mercenaries. Mercenaries because in effect they are enforcing
privately-made law and acting on behalf of private agents, rather than
on behalf of we, the people.
How undemocratic.
It may not be as bad -- no rape and pillage, at least as of yet -- but
it's still not good and shortening the term won't make it go away
either.
I'm not sure they're currently hosted anywhere; good, stable hosting
is so hard to find these days. There are references though; google
"twq3tourney2" and "twq3tourney3" and there are references and
screenshots in one or two places.
Ignore the ones a commercial entity would never publish and compare
only the rest. You'll find they're on a par, and that there are plenty
of free ones.
And top-notch examples ALL of those talents can be found in free game
content and free game engines. Not just level design. I said that
already but obviously you didn't want to hear it, but it bears
repeating even if you are simply going to ignore it again as
unpalatable.
Who ever claimed that it isn't possible to develop a game on a) a
we're-not-basing-our-business-model-on-restricting-copying or even b)
a non-profit model and still hire talent? I certainly didn't. If you
are claiming that, you're obviously insane; nonprofits hire people all
the time, as do for-profit businesses that don't restrict copying
(e.g. restaurants; the fashion industry) but do depend on innovation
(recipes, new designs). (Both can and do use trademark law but that's
entirely beside the point as interoperable knockoffs thrive and so do
both industries.)
You're forgetting Nehahra, whose engine was based off a very old Quake
engine and probably largely rewritten. That's an engine of far greater
quality than any commercial engine it can claim as an ancestor.
[snip straw-man argument implying the ludicrous claim that the only
type of game that would survive the abolition of copyright would be
that exemplified by Nethack and online Flash games]
It's comparable to commercial cames made in the same time period.
Comparing an older free game with commercial games made for and
running on hardware six years more advanced is an obvious case of
cheating.
[snip nonsense]
IYHO. You may be comparing apples and oranges. Do they look good? Yes
-- both. Do they look the same? Of course not. So what?
But it's a damn sight more honest an income than selling the boxes for
3000 times what they cost to make!
That might be true if you did something as stupid as to abolish video-
game copyrights only instead of all the copyrights.
Of coursethey'd go to where they can command inflated salaries because the
companies can command inflated prices. They'd also need more money
because that cost of living decrease wouldn't really be there. In my
proposed world, though, their costs would plummet at the same time as
the salaries they could command would plummet. Also, a lot of
artificial costs (such as for unfree development tools) of the
gamemaker would go away. Also, the freer competition would necessarily
mean they'd be forced to cut the fat in the upper echelons of
management, and pay less to the suit-wearing types. Clearly a much
larger proportion of the gamemaker's revenues (whatever its business
model) would go to paying the talent.
Right now, your video game $10 is split up something like this (it's
probably actually quite a lot worse, especially at high volumes, as
they keep raking it in per-copy and only pay most of these expenses
including the talent salaries once):
$0.10 paying the talent.
$0.01 towards paying off the ludicrous royalties on the game company's
development tools, as artificial-scarcity pinch has been passed on to
them by their suppliers.
$0.04 pays operating expenses and the like
$0.10 pays for annoying advertisements you have to tune out while
trying to surf the web, watch your favorite show, or whatever.
$0.10 pays for distribution costs, disc-stamping, and the like
$0.70 tax
$9.00 is the profit, so lines the pockets of executives.
Suppose the post-copyright business model generates only 1/20 the
revenue; if each $0.50 is split up as follows the talent gets paid
just as much:
$0.03 paying the talent
$0.04 operating expenses
$0.04 tax (generous)
$0.01 distribution costs (seeding one torrent; generous)
$0.37 profit
It's still largely profit! Note that costs are reduced drastically
because they can deep-six marketing, paying royalties themselves, and
distribution costs. Not having a business model based on selling
copies means restricting copies is pointless and suddenly seeding a
torrent is cheap and very efficient distribution that doesn't
undermine the business model. So distribution costs are slashed. We
assume a post-copyright world so they owe no royalties. Since their
business model isn't based on selling individual copies hawking copies
of this game is a useless expense with no ROI anymore and gets dumped.
So much for the annoying ads. Tax shrinks proportionately to total (I
assumed a 7% tax for the first, and rounding up for the second or an
8% tax). Profits are much less but are positive, so this business is
viable.
Of course cutting the fat further allows them to pay the talent more
than the copyright-using business did.
The 74% profit margin is still obscene, but not nearly as ludicrous as
the 90% profit margin before. In practise easy copying would force
price competition and whatever their revenue stream their margins
would be driven down to a sliver, to something like this:
$0.05 paying the talent (more than before) (competition to attract
talent is fiercer)
$0.03 operating expenses (some efficiency improvements forced by
having real competition)
$0.01 tax
$0.01 distribution costs (seeding one torrent; generous)
$0.02 profit
Total $0.12, a bit more than a dime. This business is lean, mean, and
efficient now, and still profitable. Whatever it charges for, it's
fairly cheap. Copies of the software are free. A lot of useless
expenses are gone, including outmoded inefficient distribution and
marketing methods. What marketing they do is for whatever they sell
that the game is a loss-leader for. Marketing may even be their
revenue source rather than an expense. Most likely they rely on a bit
of narrowcast advertising that seeds word-of-mouth spread, and being
findable in Google and on The Pirate Bay or something. Of course this
requires a quality product so the incentive to make a quality product
is still there. The talent makes 66% more money than before. The only
losers are lawyers and executives, who make merely reasonable salaries
now (in "operating expenses" going down a percentage and in no longer
lining their pockets from "profit").
We note that the "profit" category above included a lot of executive
salary fat as well as what actually went on the books as profit.
Anything that just lined pockets and didn't pay for additional useful
work in other words. A "good enough" salary for each non-talent
employee is included in "operating costs" and any additional amount of
salary for any of these that the market wouldn't bear in the presence
of genuine competition is included in "profit". The profit penny left
goes to shareholders or into expansion, rather than wood-paneling the
CEO's new 50' yacht.
Then you are claiming that if every copy of Windows out there
mysteriously transmogrified into a Red Hat install overnight, it
wouldn't cause more than a bit of bafflement and retraining, rather
than just about everything grinding to a halt.
I find that frankly unbelievable.
But it's illegitimate! That something being required is gratuitous
rather than an unshakable fact of nature, and that something being
priced 3000-times cost is equally gratuitous! It's as if to protect
the buggy whip industry a law were passed requiring that all drivers
purchase a buggy whip to be allowed to drive certain common classes of
vehicle including the workhorse 18-wheeler trucks on which all
commerce depends (gratuitous since a truck driver gets much more use
out of the pedals than a buggy whip) and furthermore the buggy whips
themselves were made immune to price competition somehow (resulting in
gratuitously inflated per-whip prices). And subjected to planned
obsolescence...
The economy depends on paying the costs of something. It does not
depend on, nor should it make a stable state of affairs, paying
thousands of times the costs for only one rather than thousands of the
item in question. Only lack of effective competition in an area
enables that kind of pricing abuse to persist. And it is worst in
areas where laws explicitly provide for anticompetitive business
practises. Copyright is even responsible for the inflated price of the
iPod, since the main place to get legal online tunes is iTunes, which
naturally works with iPods and which makes getting the music in any
form other than 128-bit AAC with Apple DRM artificially difficult (you
have to waste a blank CD to turn them into mp3s, but it's possible)
and non-iPod hardware won't play AAC with Apple DRM. The result of
anticompetitive behavior on the part of a) music labels (music
copyrights) and b) Apple itself (AAC licensing, or rather refusal to
do same) results in Apple having a defacto monopoly on interoperable
hardware and getting to jack the price up to be made up mainly of
fatty margins with relatively little meat paying the ordinary daily-
grind employees of Apple or any other company.
So even hardware is infected with artificially raised prices, even
before we start considering patent law's effects as well.
The "emotional subject" is your sheer density. Why haven't you
imploded and fallen within your own event horizon and, consequently,
shut up (aside maybe from Hawking radiation that'd be
indistinguishable from noise) yet? That you continue to profess the
ludicrous belief that Bill Gates somehow is owed a single red cent
more by any user of Windows or of any other software, no matter how
many future copies might (at no cost to Bill Gates I might add!) be
made, simply beggars belief, yet here you are.
When the government continues to enforce a copyright on a Microsoft
product, it is basically saying (and enforcing) that making more
copies still entitles Bill to more money despite the sheer lack of any
compelling public interest in further enriching the man.
So much for copyright law then, since it prohibits me from doing some
things purely with my own materials, time, and money, behind closed
doors, without any involvement of the copyright holder and without my
touching any of the copyright holder's things or money.
No, the point I was trying to make, but which is too sensible to ever
avoid flying right over your head, is that there should not BE any
applications that REQUIRE Windows. That very thing by itself is
objectionable, and is an artificial constraint on the market place
enforced by law that is not in the public interests and only
marginally even in Bill Gates' interests now, since the marginal
increase in his expected earnings from perpetuating this sorry state
of affairs is a minuscule fraction of what he's already hoarded.
No it isn't. The same business model can profitably exploit a video
game with sports-like elements.
For example s/stadium/server and stadium seats/server bandwidth for a
scarce resource you can sell tickets to without evilly creating
artificial scarcity. Making money off live spectating is this
possible. (Live spectating might give advantages over television
spectating e.g. interactive control of your own personal virtual
camera.)
Advertising and sponsorship would be almost EXACTLY unchanged, aside
from the potentially enormous amount of ad space in the virtual arena,
compared to the limits on physical space. (Admittedly, seeing my
favorite game maps defaced with billboards plastered everywhere might
not be so nice, but if it pays their bills, and is only on the
official event games and not home games...)
I don't see term length shortening being either necessary (to "promote
the progress...") or sufficient (to avoid these downsides).
Superficial bandaids other than short term lengths are subject to
loopholes. Term length reductions might even be subject to loopholes,
for example game's copyright running out so release a mandatory update
-- don't let the auth servers auth anyone to play who doesn't have it
-- and copyright the update => another year of raking in free money!
Trademark isn't urgently in need of being destroyed but it does need
to be brought down to earth. On the other hand I can see getting rid
of it entirely, perhaps by making misrepresenting stuff in product
labeling be considered full-blown fraud and prosecuted as such, rather
than using existing wimpy truth-in-advertising laws. This somewhat
levels the playing field -- it is in the hands of the criminal justice
system and cases would generally be brought by the AG and their crack
legal team on behalf of aggrieved consumers, rather than a) up-front
fees to register marks and b) civil "let the most expensive legal team
win!" lawsuits that clearly stack the odds in favor of big business
over either small and medium businesses or aggrieved consumers.
I don't consider trademarks, once rationalized, to be real IP. They
create a right of a company not to have its brand misrepresented. They
have about as much in common with copyrights as academic no-plagiarism
rules do, w.r.t. their effects and purpose. Making them inalienable
(non-transferable) might even make sense, since all too often a bad
company buys up a trademark in good repute and uses it to sell a load
of horseshit to unwitting consumers for a while before they wise up
(Norton brand software just about heads up the list). That still
doesn't stop a change of management at a company from running a
formerly-respected product line directly into the ground, mind you.
Perhaps tying a trademark to a set of warranty terms that must be
honored for any authentic product bearing that mark? Don't honor the
warranty terms, lose protection for the trademark, or even get charged
with infringing it yourself?
You've not presented evidence that the world after such a 2012 will be
shitty and no longer have games as good as counterstrike being made.
So I think we're even there. As it is, though, even if copyright's
unchanged or even worse in 2012 we'll probably have 4-day workweeks.
Much of the trend in unemployment and part-time vs. full-time work is
preexisting anyway; sooner or later the spotty distribution of
salaries (here a full-time one, there a part-time one, and over there
none at all) and working hours (here 40 a week, there as much as 120 a
week and for less pay and more stress, and over there none at all)
will reach some instability threshold and get a "market correction" of
some sort. (The market in question being the labor market I suppose.)
If there's only around 32 hours of work a week to go around, a 4 hour
work week might emerge. Of course all those people with "mandatory
overtime" and similar BS might mean it's still around 40 and just not
as smoothly distributed as before for some reason. Regardless, in the
employment area something has to give and soon. And in the fatcat
profits area too, because people simply can't afford what is asked of
them in the way of cost of living anymore. That WILL self-correct, one
way or another, and I'm betting on "soon" when it comes to
"when?"...perhaps overpriced products with cheaper alternatives (e.g.
Windows) will see growing disuse. Perhaps there'll be a growing
backlash against anticompetitive behavior in general, especially as
people increasingly feel directly the restrictions that enable these,
through frustratingly user-hostile HD-DVD players beholden to
Hollywood via DRM rather than their own owners. People finding that
their stuff increasingly no longer is theirs to control and use as
they see fit but instead increasingly embodies the agendas and goals
of some distant organization with ulterior financial motives will rise
up against oppression. Or something like that.
I'm not even telling you what should be done. I'm telling you what
probably will happen, soon, regardless. The system is wound as tight
as it can get, and fatcats have their hands wedged as deeply into the
pockets of the people as they can reach without coming out empty
because the people have no more money for them to take. It's
unsustainable; they pay domestically less than they reach for
domestically, and the less they get the less they pay and the more
they lay off, and the cycle will just spiral down into a black
economic depression -- except that there'll be lots of room for new
and innovative businesses with novel business models to horn in and
provide genuinely useful, non-artificially-scarce goods and services
at a reasonable price. Once it's clear that clearing the patent
thickets and other anticompetitive deadwood so as to let them is the
only way to stave off the worst depression since the thirties,
government will cave. Or else it will sit stupidly and let the
depression happen, likely followed by world war three. After that
people will rebuild and resolve not to make the same mistakes as last
time. This time they'll use constitutions to shackle businesses AND
government to be beholden to the public interest in some way, perhaps
simply by having a Progress Clause that *prohibits* the legislature
from granting exclusive rights to any idea, invention, software,
writings, or other art or design or plan or blueprint.
I think the evidence is that people will manage and muddle through
somehow like they always did with regard to the "difficulties" of
funding R&D type activities, such as the good old-fashioned getting
venture capital to fund product A, plowing product A's profits into
expansion and funding product B instead of lining a few pockets with
it, and so on ... you know, the good old-fashioned way of doing
business.
The benefits are all just about guaranteed. The downsides are vague
speculations with little evidence. Perhaps best is a pilot project.
Maybe some progressive European country will abolish IP inside itself.
But then, a non-self-sufficient nation may not make a good test,
partly because it might be attacked (embargoed, if not physically
attacked) by the US at the behest of Big Business and a false
correlation of no-IP=bad-consequences might arise as a result.
China is an interesting candidate.
But the US would be best. China still is somewhat hamstrung by relics
of communism and antidemocratic attitudes, but if it shakes off the
last of that funk it's world superpower in no time, running
competitive rings around the US once it gets its burgeoning industrial
base matured and starts building off free software and suchlike to
enter the information age for real. The US has a window of opportunity
to keep its world prestige and leadership, but it's rapidly closing.
It needs to streamline its laws, free its content, and throw out the
shrubs and all the other business-bought crooks and start being run by
representatives of the citizenry again in order to make that window.
Because if it gets worse (or no better) and China does get better
(while possessing a much larger labor force, a much larger domestic
market for goods and services, and a general disinterest in American-
style IP laws) ...
I don't know what the hell you are. I think you act like or pretend to
be whatever suits you. You're a debating chameleon -- you assume any
position you like and appear to be anything that has a vested interest
in that position winning; then you change, even in the middle of the
same debate; and change again...
Which as far as I am aware makes you one thing and one thing only --
an argumentative prick.
The UI clearly has different semantics, regardless of the data-level
semantics being identical.
I never said 1 in 10, and I said it does it every single time in list
(and I believe details) view. It's quite random and sporadic in icons
and tiles view; just TRY IT AND SEE. It should happen eventually. Now
I've mentioned it you should sooner or later notice it during normal
use of your Windoze machines anyway.
How you'd behave is immaterial. It's whether such behavior by the soft
drink manufacturer strikes you as at all legitimate, whether it's at
all true that current law could reasonably consider this hypothetical
EULA to be binding on the drink-purchaser, and whether it is in the
public interest for law enforcement to provide remedies for the soft
drink manufacturer if you violate the questionable "agreement" or
dodge it by puncturing the can or whatever.
If the corporate behemoth that tried to screw you gets to watch
helplessly while you get what you wanted and they get only what is
their reasonable due but no more, despite their nasty attempt at
overreaching and control, well so much the better.
I answered that already. This is a paper document you sign, and the
company gets to keep a copy. Later they can produce it in court as
evidence that you entered into a binding agreement with them, if they
want to sue you for breach of contract.
So yes.
If however it's a computer dialog produced by software running on your
local machine, there's no evidence that the company can later produce
in court to prove that you entered into any binding agreements with
them.
In the worst case that they rig it to phone home and only work if it
succeeded, they have an IP address, which they can't even turn into a
particular internet service account holder's name without probable
cause and a subpoena, if then. Given even such a name, they may be
able to claim in court sensibly that something is binding on that
person, but not some other person -- e.g. a family member that used
the same computer.
I think there's no way that it can ever make sense to give anywhere
near the same amount of legal weight to a EULA button-click as to a
signature on a real written contract with a copy (with the signature
evident) retained by each interested party. Even a EULA button-click
associated with an IP address.
Not quite. Witnesses are sometimes required, presumably where more
weight is needed than an unwitnessed signature would provide.
Maybe not, but you've sometimes implied it.
Why ARE you posting here, then? Not to persuade other people, you
claim. Obviously not to persuade me, which you must have realized by
now is futile since it takes actual evidence to persuade me and you
clearly have none.
BTW, my previous posting was again subjected to restricted
propagation, as was your most recent posting. That makes two of yours
now. How soon will you become incensed that someone is restricting the
distribution of your own postings without cause? It's damned rude of
them to decide on your behalf how far you want your message
distributed, is it not? And when it's posted to an unmoderated group,
to boot!
Remember: When it comes to usenet, only a) spam and b) postings to
moderated groups are at all legitimate to use technical means to block
or cancel. Others may be grounds for flaming or even complaining to a
poster's ISP, but generally none are legitimate to unilaterally
cancel.
Do Java programmers generally write code that will break if the bugs
are fixed though? Or only code that adheres to the subset of the JLS
that actually works in current javac, and therefore adheres to the
JLS?
Note that part of the reason is the expectation that bugs will
actually get fixed, making it unsafe to rely on them. Obviously this
factor is yet another one that doesn't apply when coding to Microsoft
tools and APIs. Another reason why "the cure is Java".
Yep, and keep it valid within the JLS at the same time so it won't
outright break when Java 7 is released either.
That's the bus speed, not the CPU speed, you n00b. Two different
things. (A clue: typical CPU speeds these days are measured in GHz.)
Can you overclock THE CPU by fiddling in your BIOS? And can you do any
of this in such a way that you can easily back out a change that has a
deleterious effect, without lasting damage to your hardware or to your
data?
Why not just NOT downclock the chip and sell it at the slower-chip
price? A faster chip is a perfectly good substitute for a slower chip.
Artificially degrading something in the manner described is repugnant,
not to mention inefficient and a sign of market failure or simple
nastiness and a will to withhold things for no good reason than that
you are greedy.
Let me guess -- he's a big Windows enthusiast but has no real concept
of anything else. IOW, a biased source. Or maybe easily swayed by eye
candy. Anyway, VISTA IS WORSE:
http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista
Stick THAT in your fucking pipe and smoke it wisearse!
Vista is worse than Windows XP. It can not do as much as well, on
average. It is full of nastiness meant to enrich MS. It constitutes
spyware, indeed appears to be the largest piece of spyware software in
history, and one of the first shrink-wrapped pieces of spyware, where
the main danger used to be exclusively free online downloads of
dubious software from dubious sites and online browser exploits. And
there's the DRM ... the poorer performance ... the likelihood of lots
of incompatibilities with your existing hardware and software ...
No rational utilitarian migrates from XP SP2 to Vista or from anything
else to Vista for that matter. Not on a production machine.
Well if they haven't discovered that Vista's slow performance is due
to malware (namely, Vista) then they have clearly got blinkered vision
or simply aren't the expert you claim they are.
It sucks, but it's pretty -- therefore it still sucks.
Aha! There were "difficulties".
Aha! There were MAJOR difficulties.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a huge evolution in the
history of the staph aureus "platform" and is definitely not something
to be sniffed at, not unless you want to start sneezing and then drop
dead despite being given massive doses of antibiotics.
That something has had "fundamental changes" does not make it
automatically good, or even anything you want to touch with a ten-foot
pole.
Because no matter its deep-seated faults and unfixable performance
issues, a little eye candy is all it takes to magically make it a
machine offering superior productivity for all of your practical needs
once more.
This is either Microsoft, or someone copying wholesale from MS ad
copy. No self respecting independent reviewer uses marketroid language
like the above paragraph! It's revolting! It's sugary filling and no
substance; self-serving (well Microsoft-serving) praise with no
evidence to support it; it's about as far from proper investigative
journalism as it's possible to get without going to the extremes
epitomized famously by sentence "You take the pictures; I'll furnish
the war".
That's like arguing that my claim that the ketchup is red because,
well, it's red is circular. Maybe it is, but that's simply because
it's a pretty much fundamentally true thing you can't divide much
deeper. It's self-evident except of course to the red-green
colorblind. You obviously have a kind of sucks-rocks colorblindness if
you can't likewise see that Vista is a small lump of cat feces that
somehow escaped removal from the litter tray and ended up sold on
store shelves.
Er, I take that back. Vista is not at all small, it's a fucking
elephant of fatty bloat and it's the size of a small moon. But the
rest of it is true.
Games again. You a hardcore gamer? You say copyright law is good
because abolishing it would make everything else better but make all
the games suck. You say Vista is better than XP because although XP
does everything else better it won't run a handful of Vista-only
games.
I don't think that it is sound public policy for our government to
base its laws and enforcement activities around what's good for
hardcore gamers, any more than if you substituted any other small
minority for "hardcore gamers" there.
Thing is, if Vista rocks and XP sucks because of gamers, and copyright
law rocks because of gamers, then lynchings rock because of Klansmen,
and so does abolishing civil rights, and blowing up tall buildings
rocks because of the minority of Al Qaeda sympathizers among us, and
so forth. Your argument leads to a very dangerous place!
How many now? Of course this is all moot; a DX10 emulation for XP will
arise sooner or later whether Microsoft wants one to or not. So even
these games don't pull Vista up out of the toilet, even if you really
esteem games over all other considerations, even if you esteem them
even over much more practical considerations.
You're supposed to come up empty handed, numbskull. Instead you find
some Microsoft mouthpiece with a tiny amount of implausible
deniability that he's a Microsoft mouthpiece? And babble on and on
about games?
Sucks-rocks colorblindness confirmed then. That or you're a flaming
nut.
You need to furnish evidence that Vista is the rational choice of a
utilitarian, rather than sticking with XP. So far you've failed
miserably.
You're not even trying to defend your position. In fact as far as I
can tell you have no position, unless "whatever position is oppose
Twisted's" is your position or something.
There is if you define it to be 3+1, as would be the standard
definition of 2, 3, 4 ... in a system (0 is the additive identity, 1
is the multiplicative identity, 2 is 1+1, 3 is 2+1, 4 is 3+1...). It
just happens that 4 = 1 in this ring, and doesn't ordinarily.
There's also the little matter that one ordinarily is referring to the
normal integers and not some modular ring by default, unless
explicitly stated otherwise.
I'm considering particular things in the constitution that have a
proven track record of doing good far outweighing any harm they do to
be good things. There is no such track record for copyrights or
patents; no evidence that they have made a whit of difference for the
common good though there's all manner of evidence for serious,
frequent harmful consequences.
It's like a drug of no proven efficacy and demonstrable, common and
deleterious side effects. As such, the FDA would yank it in a week if
it ever mistakenly approved it in the first place.
Instead this drug is being forcibly administered to the body politic,
increasingly over its own objections from a growing size and variety
of parts, and at ever increasing doses. Why do they keep increasing
the dose? Because it seems insufficiently effective at the lower dose,
that's why! That's because it is in fact ineffective at any dose --
and indeed, the symptoms it's being adminstered to cure (slow
innovation and suchlike) are actually being caused by the drug itself,
and would go away if they'd only let the patient be and quit drugging
them.
Solipsism is prima facie evidence that someone is not a good candidate
for public office, so I daresay it is not relevant. Public policy
clearly must be based on the theory that the public that is to be
served exists. There's a simple utilitarian argument and payoff
matrix.
Top row is public's existence; left column is whether public policy
assumes its existence
N Y
N 0* 0**
Y 0*** 1****
* Nothing happens so no costs or payoff
** Here we assume (generously) no harm if the public is treated as not
existing.
*** Here there is no harm because the tax money that is paid for the
benefit of the nonexistent public is equally nonexistent!
**** Here we assume public policy sufficiently non-braindead that
benefits exceed costs by one unit.
The payoff matrix makes it clear that the outcome is no worse, but
possibly better, if you assume the public exists and behave
accordingly.
(Similar payoff matrices prove that you may as well assume the
nonexistence of any given religious type entity, good or bad. Given
the contradictory religious information out there, the speculative
negative payoff from wrath of god type stuff is risked uniformly and
can be subtracted from every alternative choice; if you pick Catholic
and the Muslims were right you're in for it, but if you pick Islam and
the Buddhists were right, or the Jews ...; The costs of practising
religion become the only remaining factor, and most are nonzero aside
from the choice of ignoring religion entirely, unless you're in an
intolerant society. So the logical choice is Christian during the
inquisition, Islam in Iran, agnostic/atheist in most secular
democracies, and so forth, and to minimize costs by doing the minimum
necessary to "pass" in all cases; and not being outspokenly
irreligious may be beneficial in some of the secular democracies. A
related argument decides the facts of the matter: atheism. Anything
discernible from noise has pattern by definition; a pattern by
definition forms the basis for a mechanistic understanding of and for
the technological control of a phenomenon. So all phenomena can be
decomposed into two components, one indistinguishable from noise and
one that is amenable to rationalist and naturalist approaches. The
noise is where anything supernatural or divine gets relegated, and is
also amenable to rationalist and naturalist approaches because it can
be modeled as noise! To the extent that it can't be, you obviously
didn't decompose the noise and the signal correctly; try again. So we
can use a hardware source of white noise such as television snow or
radio static as an acceptable substitute for God. So much for
religious truth; religion is 100% divorced from any pragmatic concern
and actually is what it always suspiciously resembled: a matter of
fashion and culture and nothing deeper, even if an inspiration for all
sorts of interesting architecture and philosophy at times. Outweighed
by its frequent historical use as en excuse for bloodshed and
oppression...the identity of indiscernibles is one philosophical
position that would actually make strictly equal the radio static and
supposed creator using the reasoning given above. No doubt some
credulous type neurologically prone to feelings of rapture and awe
will now start a whole cult that gets off on tuning between stations
in the middle of nowhere along I-95 to receive wisdom and instructions
from on high...
)Axioms, hell -- they're theorems; see the payoff matrix above.
In general, no. When it's English, yes.
[snip list of countries]
Half of those are not English countries. Of the ones that are, most
are much smaller than the US in population. Certainly the idioms I see
in wide use are widespread in English generally, as adding even a full
50 million people that don't use the idiom isn't going to dilute it
more than 20% or so, and equally the ones that I don't see are
probably used by a population no larger than that of Mexico City and
that the Los Angeles Valley in California alone will see (and likely
raise somewhat).
I'm fairly sure the idiom I used is not America-specific. It's
sufficiently generally English that your unfamiliarity with it points
to English not being your primary language.
I don't think so. I checked, and Internet service in Canada is mostly
the usual pattern of phone/cable duopolies just as it is in the
states.
It might be rational for a company to use shoddy offshore support in
place of shoddy onshore support, but it is not rational for them to
use shoddy support in place of decent support IF repeat business is at
all important in their line of work and they have real competition.
It's not about free, it's about risk-free and not paying ludicrous
margins above cost and free speech.
Same as with software. Same as with a lot of what I've been arguing.
I argue in the interests of bringing the light of truth and reason
into dark corners. Being argued back at is like some jerkoff following
me turning off all the lights I'd just turned on. Being argued back at
by someone who apparently doesn't even have a stake in the outcome is
like the same jerkoff claiming it's for reasons of energy efficiency
even though the light of truth and reason has probably got net
negative carbon emissions.
There's plenty of evidence: whenever they have real competition their
market share goes directly into the toilet and someone hits "flush".
And they spend far more effort on artificially blocking competition
from happening than they do on product R&D, to judge by such
expensive, crummy, over-budget, and past-due turdpiles as Vista. That
XP is mostly usable must be a fluke; everything else was about as
execrable by the standards of the time, from windows 1.0 right up to
millennium <bletch> edition. Maybe they used up all of XP's evilness
budget allocation on pushing the world's first "product activation" BS
on everyone and a few of the more annoying bugs and crashes, and on
shoddy unfree support, lack of fixes for most bugs without security
implications, and the stupid half-open connection limit in SP2, or at
least not making it sysadmin-configurable, and then rigging every
SINGLE windows update batch since a third-party patch for that was
released to unpatch it.
There's nothing amusing about it; it's frankly bad. You misunderstand
one out of every three things I say, by my estimate, and I'm writing
in plain English, not Cockney fucking rhyming slang or something!
I suggested alternatives even to trademark, and reasons why trademark
is entirely unlike IP.
Saying in the same sentence that I'm wrong and that I win the argument
is like capitulating a game of field hockey while believing the score
currently favors your team over mine, or maybe while simply accusing
me of cheating. It's somewhat insulting, and it's also just plain
nonsensical. I was wondering what physiological abnormalities in your
brain chemistry would lead you to behave in such a manner.
Sentences like this make my head spin and convince me that you are not
normal. I don't think it's some Canadian thing either; I've met
Canadians and the vast majority of them, like the vast majority of
Americans, are not nuts.
Now get thee hence to w3c.org and educate thyself on the many
differences between HTML, XML, and plain text.
It doesn't wig out; it just doesn't interpret the markup into whatever
kind of fancy nice rich-text display you had in mind. I end up seeing
what looks like web page source -- text interspersed with html type
tags that make it hard to read and generally uglify everything. In
other words the usual behavior when you feed markup to a tool that
expects normal text, especially markup that's nonstandard and not
preceded by an appropriate DTD reference header.
[nit-picky BS snipped]
You're a literal-minded, obtuse, argumentative arsehole.
To inform, engage, and educate its reader, obviously.
That was in response to a particular challenge nobody met the criteria
for, in case you'd forgotten. You conveniently quoted only the one
condition involving replying. Oh, and I suppose I should add the
following:
LEGAL NOTICE:
By reading this message with appended legal BS, you hereby agree:
a) Not to censor or in any way modify this message, nor impair its
distribution via normal usenet propagation mechanisms;
b) Not to selectively remove it from or prevent it entering your own
news spool while leaving most other posts to this thread alone, if you
are a news administrator and your spool carries cljp;
c) Not to cancel it retroactively;
d) That this message is distributed AS IS, without warranty including
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE; the sender
accepts no liability for any damages, including incidental and
consequential damages, arising from your use of this message; and
e) That to the extent that applicable state law supersedes some of the
terms and conditions above, the others will remain in full force and
effect.
So there.
O
Oliver Wong
Twisted said:
But it is not entirely besides mine.
[...]
I never said otherwise.
You've snipped too much, and we've lost the context. Plenty of
high-quality what?
My claim is that there are no free games which are as good as the top
notch commercial games. Your claim is that there are. I'm asking you to
list a couple as evidence, and you're asking me to find them myself. Is
this a fair summary of what just happened here?
You claim that you've *proven* that good things will happen if we
eliminate IP, and that *nobody* has proven bad things will happen if we
eliminate IP? I think you and I have a different definition of "proven";
either that, or you're not holding your own proofs to the same standards
that you expect from others.
It sounds like you haven't considered the possibility of having
freedom via something other than the complete removal of IP laws.
You've already won, remember?
I think you falsely assume that IP justifies intrusive DRM.
[...]
Using the search terms you provided, there's only 1 screenshot, and
it's 150x113 pixels, which makes it difficult to get an idea of the
quality:
http://www.serverspy.net/bin/map.mpl?m=twq3tourney2&g=2
So "get rid of all the crappy free games, and you'll find that the
ratio of crappy free games to good free games (which is now 0:1) is now on
par with the ratio of crappy to good commercial games"?
Note that I wasn't talking about ratios, but absolute quality of
games. Getting rid of crappy free games does not magically make the good
free games become better.
Show me a free game which is "on par" with any of: Assassin's Creed,
Metal Gear Solid 4, Crysis, Bioshock, etc.
And I've already explained to you that there existing a handful of
person who published a handful of quality work for free in each of this
domain does not necessarily imply that these people will all get together
and make a good game. I've also explained to you that having money
involved greatly increases the probability that talented people will
actually get together and go through with producing a good game.
If you're still having trouble understanding my point, consider this:
You've claimed that you are a top notch level designer, and I think you
mentioned some other forms of art (texturing? I don't recall). So now, try
to find a talented programmer, a talented musician, a talented modeller, a
talented animator, and so on, and produce a game that is "on par" with the
commercial games that are being released today. Produce that game and
release it for free. See how far you get.
There are two possible outcomes this experiment will have:
(1) You actually do produce a really good game for free, and I will
find myself to be mistaken about a couple of my beliefs.
(2) You fail to produce a really good game for free, and hopefully you
will now gain some insight into the issue, and perhaps realize that it's
not quite as easy to get talented people to work together as you initially
imagined.
[...]
Nehara is not a mod, and so I didn't forget it. In fact, you will have
seen that I mentioned it in the next few paragraphs.
I ask you to list a free game comparable to the top notch commercial
games, and I warned you that "Nethack" and the online Flash games are not
comparable to top notch commercial games. So far, you have failed to name
any such free games.
It's comparable to commercial cames made in the same time period.
Comparing an older free game with commercial games made for and
running on hardware six years more advanced is an obvious case of
cheating.
Nehahra is currently under active development.
http://nehahra.planetquake.gamespy.com/nehindex.html
<quote>
May 19, 2006 - Development Underground
Nehahra development still continues but at a slow rate. We'll release it
when it's finished. Life and work, these things continue to intrude.
Luckily, for those of you interested, we long passed the point of no
return. However, there will be no further updates until release is
imminent.
</quote>
In other words, the Nehahra engine is a 2006-2008 engine, and thus should
be compared to other engines developed in 2006-2008.
Here are screenshots from Nehahra, selectively chosen by the developers of
the engine as being the very best screenshots they've got, to maximally
demonstrate the power of their engine:
http://nehahra.planetquake.gamespy.com/xscreens.html
Here are screenshots from Crysis, another game engine also developers in
2006-2008:
http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_incgallery&Itemid=29
Nehara is not comparable to commercial games developed during the same
time period.
You keep snipping my URLs as if they embarrass you. I agree with you
that they do not look the same. I stress that the Quake 3 screenshots look
significantly better than Tenebrae screenshots.
I agree with you that I'm comparing apples and oranges: What you're
essentially saying is that the free game engine Tenebrae is not comparable
with Quake 3. I fully agree with that. Quake 3 is much, much better.
Here are the URLs again, so that each individual reader of this thread
may judge for themselves which engine looks better.
<quote>
The screenshots I posted for Tenebrae were from the project's
homepage's gallery. That is, these are THE BEST screenshots that the
developers of Tenebrae were able to generate. These are the screenshots
that the developers chose to showcase the strength of their engine.
http://www.tenebrae2.com/tb2_screenshots.html
Notice the URL? I even did you a favor and I'm comparing Tenebrae 2 to
Doom 3, instead of merely Tenebrae 1.
Contrast this with the screenshots I posted for Doom 3:
http://images.google.ca/images?q=doom 3
Look at the URL. This is a google image search. I am not picking the
screenshots; Google is.
In other words, I am comparing the ABSOLUTE best screenshots from the
*SEQUEL* to the game you are talking about, and I am comparing it to a
COMPLETELY RANDOM assortment of Doom 3 screenshots.
I am giving your game every possible advantage I can, and it is still
losing.
A brand new top notch commercial game typically retails for $60. $60
divided by 3000 equals $0.02. I find it laughable that you think it costs
$0.02 to produce the boxes.
That might be true if you did something as stupid as to abolish video-
game copyrights only instead of all the copyrights.
It would also be true if you abolished all copyrights. Or perhaps you
have a different definition of "would have nowhere to go but into free
games" than I do? Is this another one of your idioms?
[...]
Please cite where you got these figures (and note that even these
figures you've given contradict your claim of "selling the boxes for 3000
times what they cost to make!").
[...]
Strawman, taking the statement out of context. You claimed everyone
*had* to pay Microsoft because everyone *must* buy a copy of Windows
because it is indispensible. I claimed that this is simply not true, and I
told you to go to comp.os.linux.advocacy as evidence of people who are
able to survive without ever purchasing a copy of Windows, thus showing
Windows is not indispensible.
[...]
Strawman, I don't claim Bill Gates is owed anything.
You seem to be confusing Bill Gates (the person) with Microsoft (the
corporation). I've tried to warn you about anthropormophizing corporations
and how it'd would end up confusing you.
I don't think the government does (or "should") treat Microsoft any
differently from any other corporation. If the laws are such that
copyright need be enforced, then it should be enforced for Microsoft
products just as much as it might be enforced for any other corporations.
How "rich" a corporation is should not be a factor in whether or not the
government helps protect their IP.
Again, it seems you're resenting Bill Gates for being rich, and using
this resentment to try to change laws, changes which will probably not
change the fact that Bill Gates is richer than you are. If your goals are
to make Bill Gates poor, abolishing copyright is not the way to go. If
your goal is not to make Bill Gates poor, then why are you even bringing
this off-topic stuff up?
Well, being a "should" statement, I have no comment on it. I
acknowledge that this is how you wish the world is. Shall we move on?
Notice that with your least unreasonable business model (subscription
based games), you are guaranteed that the auth server won't allow anyone
to play unless they pay more money. So at worst, my term length reduction
plan is as bad as your plan, and there's a good chance it's better.
Unenforceable, I think. Let's say my porn video is about a person
named Snow White and and includes seven dwarves, which justifies my
labelling it "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves", and the name of my porn
company is "Disney". If you're going to say "Well, you can't name your
porn company 'Disney' because it could be confuse with the other 'Disney'
which produces family-friendly movies", then you might as well just stick
with Trademark, since you're recreating it in all but name.
I think it's naive to believe that "the most expensive legal team win"
doesn't occur in criminal cases, and only occurs in civil ones.
So in other words, we are in agreement, but we just had different
definition of "IP".
[...]
Well, no one has asked me to yet.
We're not even; you've won, remember?
[...]
I don't think I've ever changed my position in this particular debate
(e.g. I started off, always was, and still am of the idea that zero IP is
a bad idea, I started off, always was, and still am of the idea that Vista
does not objectively suck, etc.)
I think you just occasionally make false assumptions about my
position. For example, because I think zero IP is a bad idea, perhaps you
assume that I think lot and lots of IP is a great idea. Or because I think
Vista does not objectively suck, perhaps you assume that I think Vista is
objectively great. Don't make these assumptions, as you'll only end up
confused when they turn out to be false.
Tried it twice in List view, and could not reproduce the bug. So it's
not "every single time" on this side. Have you considered posting a video
demonstrating the bug?
http://www.google.ca/search?q=define:+legitimate
Legitimate means "In accordance with the law", so if the laws of the
hypothetical world we were in said that softdrink cans were allowed to do
that, then yes, it'd be legitimate.
In other words, I think "legitimate" is not the word you intended.
"Yes, the document is worthless", you say. How do you reconcile that
view with all the documents you need to fill out for which there are not
witnesses, such as filing an income tax return?
[...]
You've explicitly called me an idiot and crazy. How do you justify
that? It's because you believe that my beliefs and statements are that of
an idiot and a crazy person, yes?
Well, I did not ever say you were an idiot, nor that you were crazy. I
simply responded to your arguments, and from reading these responses,
you've inferred yourself to be an idiot and/or crazy.
I am not trying to make you sound like an idiot or crazy, but I cannot
control what you write.
I'm reminded of the common middle-school tactic of calling someone a
"chicken" in order to get them to do something they might otherwise not
wish to do.
I've already explained to you why I am posting: to get clarifications
about your beliefs from you. As long as *you* are able to read my posts
and I am able to read your replies, I am satisfied.
It may be a while...
I guess you're assuming someone is intentionally doing this, and I'm
assuming that's just how USENET works.
[...]
http://www.basichardware.com/how_to_overclock.html
<quote>
First consider your default speed. For simplicity, lets say it's 1 GHz. If
this is an Athlon processor, it would most likely be running at the 133
MHz bus speed with a multiplier of 7.5 (100x7.5 = 1000 MHz = 1 GHz) or at
the 100 MHz bus speed and multiplier of 10 (10x100 = 1000). Let's use the
latter instance as an example - 100 MHz bus and 10 multiplier.
[...]
If you wanted to increase the bus speed and the motherboard supported the
higher MHz bus speeds, you could do something like 10x120 for 1200 MHz.
Calculate your new speed by multiplying the bus speed by your CPU's
multiplier.
</quote>
I guess you've never overclocked before.
Yes, and I explained to you how in the previous post.
Technically speaking, simply powering your computer on causes "lasting
damage" (although it's very minute damage). But I'm going to assume you
malphrased the question and so I'll answer "Yes". As a beginner, you'll
probably want to do a lot of reading on overclocking before you try it for
the first time, though, because if you "do it wrong", there is a chance of
completely frying your CPU, and possibly the motherboard along with it.
Factually false (unless that chip is downclocked). Some software
relies on the chip running at a specific speed to operate correctly. If
someone orders a 1.5Ghz chip and receives a 2.0Ghz chip instead, most such
"someones" will be happy, but there exists some which will be very upset.
It's safer from a customer satisfaction, legal, etc. standpoint to
just sell the customer exactly what they ordered.
Or perhaps you have a different definition of "perfectly good
substitute" than I do?
Incorrect.
What's with the excited, agitated tone and vulgar language?
BTW, I find it amusing you complain of a biased source, and then post
a link to the FreeSoftwareFoundation's criticism of a Microsoft product.
I disagree.
I guess you didn't even follow the link, despite having asked me to
post such an article. I find that somewhat rude on your part. If you read
the headline, it says: "Windows Vista: more than just a pretty face". I
guess you didn't even get that far.
Aha! This is a balanced and fair review of Vista, and not just glowing
praise sponsored by Microsoft themselves!
Aha! This is a VERY balanced and fair review of Vista, and not just
glowing praise sponsored by Microsoft themselves!
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a huge evolution in the
history of the staph aureus "platform" and is definitely not something
to be sniffed at, not unless you want to start sneezing and then drop
dead despite being given massive doses of antibiotics.
That something has had "fundamental changes" does not make it
automatically good, or even anything you want to touch with a ten-foot
pole.
And fundamental changes is not automatically bad either. You have to
actually read the article to find out which one they intended (but I'll
give you a hint: they think Vista is good).
Because no matter its deep-seated faults and unfixable performance
issues, a little eye candy is all it takes to magically make it a
machine offering superior productivity for all of your practical needs
once more.
This is either Microsoft, or someone copying wholesale from MS ad
copy. No self respecting independent reviewer uses marketroid language
like the above paragraph! It's revolting! It's sugary filling and no
substance; self-serving (well Microsoft-serving) praise with no
evidence to support it; it's about as far from proper investigative
journalism as it's possible to get without going to the extremes
epitomized famously by sentence "You take the pictures; I'll furnish
the war".
You may say that, but you claimed there did not exist any professional
blogger who liked Vista, and I gave you a counter example.
If you claim "Ketchup is red because it's red", then yes, that is a
circular claim. And while the fact that kechup *IS* red may be
self-evident to non-colour blind people, *WHY* it is red is not
necessarily self-evident. For example, some people might falsely assume
that it is red because it contains tomato, but this typically an incorrect
belief. Most ketchup solutions (for example Heinz's) contains food
coloring to make it red.
[...]
Strawman: I didn't say copyright law is good.
Stawman: I didn't say Vista is better than XP.
Ah, I was wondering when you would come to this strategy. "I know;
I'll accuse Oliver of being a terrorist. That'll probably help strenghten
my arguments!"
That's like asking how many games will come out in 2008. I don't know,
and probably nobody else does either. But if you want evidence that
there's more than one, I can supply it by naming two: Halo 3 and Crysis.
[...]
Oh. So when you ask me for proof, you're actually hoping I don't come
up with any proof so that you can feel good about yourself? Sorry.
I don't see how Vista being the choice of a utilitarian (any random
utilitarian?) would be evidence that I personally like Vista. I can embark
on the proof, if you wish, but I'd hate to do it and then have you say
"Well, that doesn't really prove that you actually like Vista anyway, so I
was just wasting your time".
I know. I've been telling you this repeatedly. I was wondering when
you would start to grasp this concept.
[...]
If you did define 4 to be 3 + 1, then you'd no longer be in the ring
of integers modulus 3, nor the trinary integers.
That's like saying "10 = 16". This is a false statement. What you
really meant is "10 in hexadecimal = 16 in decimal". You really shouldn't
be imprecise when dealing with mathematics. There is no "4" in the ring of
integers modulus 3. There is a "4" in decimal. You can create a mapping
from the decimal integers to the integers modulus 3, such that "4" maps
onto "1", but that does not mean there is an element "4" in the ring of
integers modulus 3.
That's exactly my point. You seemed to assume that 2+2=4 is always
true, no matter what. I'm telling you it's truthfullness depends on some
assumptions and axioms, such as the assumption we're working with decimal
integers. Then you remember "Oh, right, yeah, there exists sytems where
2+2=4 is not true, but I wasn't thinking of those systems" which is
exactly what I was trying to point out to you.
You are too closed minded. You think if something is true for you, it
must be true for everyone. You think this even when presented with
evidence to the contrary.
This thread wasn't about who is or is not a good candidate for public
office. It was about whether or not doing "public good" is necessarily a
"good thing". I claimed a lot of things were subjective, including the
concepts of "good" and "evil". Since you are disagreeing with me, I assume
you think the concepts of "good" and "evil" are objective.
Incidentally, this would explain why you get into so much conflict
with other people. Since you think "good" and "evil" are objective,
whenever someone does something you don't like, you figure they must be
objectively evil, and so you fail to communicate effectively with them.
I listed the same countries you listed while trying to guess my
nationality (plus Canada, and minus US). That is to say: Canadian,
British, Australian, New Zealand, Chinese. Also, I'm curious as to how you
define "English countries". I'd assume it was something like "Countries
for which 'English' is one of the official languages".
Canada has English as an official language.
Britan has English as an official language.
Australia has English as an official language.
New Zealand has English as an official language.
China doesn't.
4 out of 5 sounds like more than "half" to me. Or do you have a
different definition of half than I do?
Oh, right. 'Cause the US is the final arbiter of what is or is not
English. I forgot.
said:
Ok. My only evidence is your surprise in the high quality of our
Internet service.
This surprises me, since you've used a lot of strawman and other
tactics I'd consider dishonest (e.g. associating me with terrorism).
[...]
Hmm... I wonder how many of the things I've said you've misunderstood.
For example, you seem to think that I like copyright.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#Overview
<quote>
Intellectual property laws are designed to protect different forms of
subject matter, although in some cases there is a degree of overlap.
[...]
A trademark is a distinctive sign which is used to distinguish the
products or services of different businesses.
I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm just saying that I disagree with
you. There's a difference.
Can you cite one particular difference that you think I am ignorant
of?
I think you are assuming that I had some kind of fancy nice rich-text
display in mind.
I suspect, then, that you saw exactly what I intended for you to see.
I find it amusing that you would call me names after making such a big
deal when you perceive other people to call you names.
If it wishes to inform the reader that the fact that "basketball is
'good'; therefore market competition is 'good'", then I think the authors
are not reliable source for logically coherent arguments.
What were the criteria? From what I understand, the only criteria was
to reply to the thread.
P.S. Recall your claim that IIS could not compete with Apache? It
looks like people are switching from Apache to IIS.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/08/06/august_2007_web_server_survey.html
- Oliver
T
Twisted
[snip]
Oh, wonderful. MORE of this argument. *sigh*
Yes, but yours is the wrong point. My point is that I should not have
to pay a "Microsoft tax" just to use a given piece of (non-Microsoft)
software. A perfectly competitive market would not impose such a tax.
Nor would any just society.
Your point seems to be that there are workarounds. And any good
programmer would know that the existence of a workaround for something
does not make that something stop being a bug!
Games. See a doctor. There are some new treatments that can slow the
progression of Alzheimer's.
Yes. You asked for them. I don't recall any offhand, other than what
I've already mentioned. So you could probably find lots with a little
googling. It's been several days; if you haven't found anything by now
it must be because you never even bothered to look, and simply lazily
asked me to point you to them even though that just means me
performing the same searches you could have been doing.
You're joking. It's plainly obvious that, for starters, the prices for
a ton of useful stuff and cultural stuff will tumble down to close to
marginal costs, making them much more available and in the case of
productivity-enhancing things accelerating the wealth-generation of
the economy. Cultural participation will no longer be gatekept by a
few large corporations like Disney with ulterior motives. Filesharers
won't be randomly sued for ludicrous sums of money. And so forth. So
yes, it's proven that good things will happen. So far the only people
that look set to lose out are lawyers and fatcat executives in record
labels and similar places; oh how I weep. Society should probably
consider redistributing wealth from these types to society in general
to also be a good, rather than a bad, thing. And it's not even
communist redistribution! It's not taking away what they already have
forcibly to redistribute it; it's simply forcing them to actually
compete in the marketplace and let the market force their prices down
out of the stratosphere. Good old fashioned capitalism in other words.
I don't see how. At minimum, IP laws have to be limited to regulating
the for-profit reuse of material only; there, there's a paper trail.
Allowing IP laws to regulate individual, private, non-profit use of
stuff means they intrude into the home and into private matters, and
so do any enforcement efforts. It means individuals lose some of their
property rights in storage media, hardware, and the like, and in
objects such as books.
Funny that you keep arguing then.
I don't think either IP *or* intrusive DRM have any justification. But
my point is that any IP at all results in my not having the absolute
right to do as I please with a disc, a computer, a book, or whatever
that I own with only consenting parties, and that corporations will
seek to safeguard their IP with intrusive DRM. And of course will use
their temporary(?) monopoly to limit consumer choice to expensive and
shoddy, expensive and DRM-riddled, or expensive, shoddy, AND DRM-
riddled. Just like they do now, all too often. Not to mention they
will lobby for term extensions with their ill-gotten gains. Any amount
of IP at all is provably a slippery slope towards increasingly
intrusive DRM, increasingly intrusive IP laws (e.g. the DMCA), and
increasing scope and term of monopoly protection. The past hundred-
plus years are proof of that, as an initial system with copyrights and
patents lasting only 14 years and applying only to books and tangible
inventions got extended over and over again. First copyrights became
able to be renewed for 14 years. Then expanded to music. Patents
became 17 years, and later 20. Copyrights expanded to cover all kinds
of other stuff. Noncommercial private copying began to be targeted.
Copyrights became 28 years renewable for another 28. Then 56 years.
Then 70. Then life. Then life + 50. Recently life + 70, and DRM became
common, and the DMCA. Meanwhile patents get granted for chemical
processes; then just for the end products however arrived-at
(egregious!), then genes, business methods, and software. Vaguer and
broader patents too. Patents that don't provide the disclosure of
blueprints, source code, or whatever supposedly motivating the whole
idea of patents. And so on.
I tell you, if a 1 day copyright was all they had left tomorrow, it
would soon expand to a week, then a month, then to cover databases and
other compilations with no original material, then a year, then a
century, then effectively forever via mandating "trusted computing"
aka a government backdoor into every computer enabling perfect
enforcement of anti-DRM-circumvention together with DRM ...
There isn't much that I can do about that. There are no non-evil
places to host this sort of material anymore that I can find. None of
the old FTP sites accept anonymous uploads (even to be vetted before
becoming downloadable) anymore...
The whole point is that the crappy ones simply don't matter. Consider
only the good ones. There'll be just as many, and some that were
expensive will be cheap or free.
I don't know of one offhand, but google and ye shall find.
Why wouldn't they? Talented teams coalesce on free projects all the
time in the FOSS world, or hadn't you noticed?
I'm not having any trouble understanding your point. I just don't
think you are correct!
There is no onus on me to actually produce one just to support my
claim that it is possible. Especially when it's already been done.
IYHO. And of course you can always just fucking google a bit to find
some more quality free games. You obviously are refusing to out of
fear of being proven wrong.
So?
[snip further badmouthing of Nehahra]
I see you have no real argument to make here, just bashing a perfectly
good game. Buzz off.
No, they simply aren't relevant. The point is that you are wrong. You
are AUTOMATICALLY wrong, simply because you're disagreeing with me.
What part of that don't you get yet? This is getting ridiculous. I
know what I am talking about and I don't lie. Your insulting
implication that that is not true does not stand up to scrutiny.
In your aesthetic judgment.
[snip a pointless repetition of an earlier bogus and irrelevant
argument]
Grr. STOP ATTACKING ME ALREADY! Will you just leave me alone?!
It would cost roughly $0.02 per user to deliver it by Internet
download, especially if you seeded a torrent so that the bandwidth
burden was spread onto the downloaders and didn't fall exclusively on
your own servers. This is a vastly more efficient means of
distributing game content.
Guess what? Blizzard uses it to deliver World of Warcraft related
materials, although they probably gratuitously encrypt it and then
charge an arm and a leg for decryption keys, despite it being not very
useful without (a paid subscription to access) their game servers
anyway. Blizzard is apparently somewhat more hip than some game
companies. Also way more efficient in the costs department. If you're
their competition, that's gotta hurt!
You are intentionally missing my point and attacking a straw man here!
And your obstinacy is starting to make me mad.
IF GAME COPYRIGHTS WERE ABOLISHED THEY'D GO ELSEWHERE BECAUSE THEY
COULD STILL MAKE INFLATED AMOUNTS OF MONEY ELSEWHERE BUT NOT MAKING
GAMES.
IF ALL WERE, THEY'D BE UNABLE TO MAKE INFLATED AMOUNTS OF MONEY
ANYWHERE AND WOULD RETURN TO WHERE THEIR NATURAL INCLINATIONS AND
TALENTS TOLD THEM TO -- GAME MAKING.
It's a concept from economics called "opportunity cost". Perhaps
you've heard of it? Anyway, asymmetrical abolition might very well
change the opportunity cost landscape for this type of work to
wherever copyrights remained in force, but symmetrical abolition would
not. It could only change the relative opportunity costs of e.g. game
work and e.g. burger flipping or some such. Given that right now
people working with information make far, far more than people doing
brute labor under high-stress conditions, that might not be such a bad
thing.
They were a made-up example assuming the usual hideous inefficiencies
as well as obscene profits, which perhaps underrepresent the true
severity of the problem. I was contrasting them with the post-IP
version where I showed greatly reduced *costs* as well.
No, asshole, it cuts to the very heart of the matter of why it or
perfectly compatible substitutes should be available from a variety of
vendors.
Go to sub-Saharan Africa as evidence of people who are able to survive
extreme poverty, lack of clean drinking water, lack of efficient
markets or rule of law (even the crummy, semi-efficient markets and
semi-rule of law we have here), and of course lack of Windows.
Do they survive?
Yes.
Do you envy them?
Doubtful.
Just because it is possible to survive without something doesn't
justify withholding it arbitrarily from large numbers of people. Would
you say we shouldn't have a right to clean drinking water? Would you
say that because Africans manage to do without, it would be okay if it
cost $300 a glass just to fatten the wallet of one executive of one
megacorporation in the west?
No? Well, although Windows isn't quite as indispensible as clean
drinking water, I wouldn't say you can easily switch away from it
without consequence or being in some ways cramped or deprived, either.
By supporting IP, you claim exactly that, among other things.
I am not confused. You are. Stop insulting me.
My point was that Microsoft provides an egregious example to show that
they need to NOT be enforced, precisely because the alternative leads
to absurd consequences that are to the detriment of the public good.
And of course that laws are enacted for the public good. Or at least,
are supposed to be; it's increasingly apparent that they no longer
are, and are instead enacted for the purpose corporate welfare these
days. For shame.
That you support corporate-welfare laws is something I find appalling.
[nonsensical conclusions derived from arguments that begin and end in
midair snipped]
[non-agreement non-disagreement snipped]
None of them are unreasonable, except the ones currently used that
depend on preventing private copying through legal means or, worse, on
DRM.
I don't see how any of this follows, least of all the unproved
assertion you make here that my "plan" is "bad".
Except that casting it in light of fraud law gets rid of the three
glaring problems with trademarks:
1. They're treated as a form of property, with all the usual nasty
consequences that come from treating as someone's property any *copy*
of something they devised (such as a logo).
2. Trademarks are lost if not aggressively defended, thus creating a
perverse incentive for frivolous lawsuits even in cases where there's
no chance of consumer confusion.
3. The whole theory of "trademark dilution" that also incentivizes
aggressively "defending" the mark from uses that are, or should be,
non-infringing.
I never claimed that. But the imbalance is much more apparent in civil
cases, where there's no public-defender right for the small guy, and
where it might also be the small guy trying to sue the big bad
corporation. The civil case has:
Small guy: no or very little representation
Big corp: expensive, big representation
The criminal case has:
Small defendant: at least a public defender
Big corp: expensive, big representation
State: expensive, big representation
It's more evenly matched if the state charges the big bad corp with
something nasty than if a small guy has to prove something with a
lawsuit for action to be taken. Class action lawsuits don't help much,
as the small guys get jack, the corporation gets a slap on the wrist,
and a whole lot of lawyers get rich. Criminal cases might even send
corporate executives to prison, or generate huge fines, or a court
order breaking up the company or otherwise messing with its structure
if it became a big monopolistic one with too much power for the public
good.
The small defendant has at least a public defender and the fact that
the prosecution has a heavier burden of proof. In a lawsuit, the small
guy is forced to settle without any chance to even plead their case
before a jury, all too often! In a criminal case they have a right to
a jury trial, a right to an attorney, a right to a defense, and it's
much harder for them to get pressured into pleading no contest or
something if they are not actually guilty of a serious wrongdoing.
And if they are, well, let them be stuck with the bill for it.
That said, it is true that money can buy you better criminal court
representation too, and this should really not be the case. I'd
suggest requiring criminal defendants, and perhaps all lawsuits, use
lawyers picked by whoever's represented and paid for by government.
That would require price controls, and other limits, basically making
legal practise a more regulated and less free-market thing, but it's
increasingly looking like legal advocacy is like health care and
working roads and the like -- key infrastructure that should be
government-funded and outsourced, rather than privately funded.
Keeping the state as opponent in a criminal action and the state as
paying the defense lawyer's salary from causing abuse remains an
issue; there's a conflict of interest there. Making prosecuting
criminal actions part of the executive branch, setting standards
legislative (e.g. power to fire), and paying judicial (e.g. power to
hire), with choice up to what the judiciary is willing to pay up to
the defendant, seems to minimize the danger of abuse. And the
potential conflict of interest already exists with public defenders
now; it may be worse than if they just paid your legal fees for you
and you used a private defender.
I've pointed out time and again that you keep asserting these
hypothetical bad consequences without proof.
So you keep saying. And then posting again.
Then you're simply wrong, wrong wrong wrong a whole lot.
You dare insult me again?
I don't have the means to create videos, and I sure the **** don't
have the means to host such enormous files. Sorry.
Anyway, you're simply lying if you say you dropped an item in the
middle, between two other items, in Explorer in list view and it
appeared where it was dropped, between the two other items. In my
experience that simply never, ever happens. And Explorer is Explorer;
I'd believe you if you said it worked as expected in the Mac Finder
while I observed broken behavior from Explorer. User interface is one
thing Apple has usually done a better job on. Well, aside from the
execrable decisions to stick the menu at the top of the screen instead
of the application windows having separate ones, and the one-button
mouse, and the god-awful Dock ...
Let's say they've done well at making what does work, work
consistently at least. Broken by design is within their repertoire;
bugs seem to be much rarer than with MS. (MS has broken by design and
bugs both occur especially often, by contrast.)
The laws of this world don't allow a software EULA to be binding. You
already purchased a copy. Nowhere did you agree in the store at time
of purchase that you were buying only a "license" with certain
restrictions; it's clearly a purchase of a box with a disc in it. As
such, you have full rights at that point under copyright law to e.g.
install and use it; see USC 17 section 117(a)(1). The EULA then tries
to take away many of your rights, and offers nothing in exchange
except that the *dialog box will go away*. You already have the right
to install and use the software without agreeing to anything. The only
reason you agree is because the box gets in the way of using the
software otherwise. This is morally and legally equivalent to someone
stopping you from, e.g., reading a book until you sign something and
forcibly getting in your way until you do, despite your having bought
the book legitimately and having the normal copyright privileges as
owner of a copy. It doesn't matter if it's a publishing company exec
or lawyer or even the author himself; they have no right to interfere
and coerce you into signing something that doesn't give you any new
rights but does take away your existing ones.
Stop deliberately misreading me. I didn't say there had to be
witnesses. Just a signed document and a copy retained by whoever would
later make a claim you breached an agreement with them.
The tax return is filed with the government. If they later want to
challenge you and use that tax return in some way, presumably they
produce a copy as evidence, with your signature on it to be verified.
This lets them prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you did sign
that tax return and file it with them.
Software companies have nothing of the kind to support the legitimacy
of their claims. No signed document they can later produce as evidence
that you "agreed" to anything.
Also your steadfast refusal to be swayed by the perfect, crystalline
logic of my arguments, and the evidence, of which I have lots
bolstering my side and you have virtually none.
[claims I believe something nasty about myself]
Wrong! Didn't I tell you I have strong defenses against being tricked
into negative or self-destructive self-beliefs?
I asked you to suggest an alternative theory to explain a mystifying
event and you refused. This after you demanded that everyone reject my
theory, which happens to fit the facts. The only grounds for rejecting
a theory that fits the facts is having a superior theory (one that
fits the facts better, or fits the facts and is simpler or has fewer
assumptions), or the original theory being untestable. You've
established neither.
And you need these clarifications for?
I'll mention now that whoever it was similarly blocked distribution of
your latest "masterpiece" here.
Of course someone is doing this. It's too selective to be the result
of a bug or misconfiguration of any kind, or even an overzealous spam
filter. I don't think there's any words or phrases common to all of
the censored posts at this point, let alone any that might be
considered indicative of spamminess. It's also the case that once a
person's postings to this thread branch began to be blocked, they were
systematically blocked without exception. So *every one* of mine for a
while *and* your last three *all* look like spam, and yet not because
of a common (say, repeatedly quoted) phrase or word? Right. It seems
to be based on the subthread itself and the author and date. That is
everything after day X with author Y and a references: containing
messageID Z. That is the simplest criterion on semantically relevant
parts of the post's headers and bodies that fits the observed pattern.
But it is not the pattern any sane spam filter would use, nor a
plausible pattern for triggering a bug. In particular, who chooses
days X and Y? Why everything referencing a particular messageID -- and
why that particular messageID? Why is blocking of a particular author
only started at a certain time, and then persistent? The pattern
better fits a killfile, a sophisticated one that allows matching
messageID as well as userID, and someone killfiled me in this
subthread a while back and killfiled you, or the entire subthread, a
bit later in time. Only killfiles aren't supposed to affect
propagation, only the one user's newsreading view.
It's censorship; provably so. No other explanation isn't cockamamie in
some way. A bug that cares how recently messages were posted? Well,
the date the bug was introduced might count, but TWO DIFFERENT DATES?
Neither of them Y2K or any other known "gotcha" date, to boot?
Sensitivity to a particular messageID being referenced?? WTF kind of
code would care about any of these things, such that a bug in such
code could conceivably drop messages in the pattern observed? Even
code in a spam filter.
Randomly dropping articles, dropping articles that meet spam criteria
(mainly excessive multi/crossposting), and such are normal usenet
behavior. Systematically dropping non-spam articles is not normal
usenet behavior.
[snip a bunch of irrelevant stuff re: overclocking]
I don't need a technical primer to overclocking; the most I need to
know about it is that it's too risky for me to risk my data and
expensive hardware doing myself instead of delegating to an expert.
If you'd be so kind as to quit insulting me every few paragraphs,
asshole?
A good reason to leave it to the professionals then. And a good reason
why consumers have, or should have, the right to the chips they buy
already being clocked at their best speed and this being properly
documented.
The whole overclocking/pricing issue arises from asymmetrical
information, as usual with these sorts of problems. Disclosure of the
top speed at which the chip tested OK should be required when selling
the chip, same as grocery store products are required to list their
ingredients.
STOP BLUNTLY ATTACKING ME!
Such software is itself broken as designed, so you are overruled!
Any such "problem" can easily be fixed by fixing the buggy software to
properly time things that are supposed to occur at a fixed rate by
wall-clock time. Mostly older games. Oh, well, they could be, if
copyright law would let the bugs be fixed in orphaned products.
Regardless, the 2GHz chip can surely be safely downclocked, which
makes it a perfect substitute.
What the customer ordered or better, subject to their approval?
STOP INSULTING ME. WHENEVER YOU SAY SOMETHING LIKE THIS YOU ARE
AUTOMATICALLY WRONG ANYWAY. WHY PERSIST???
Because you're making me mad? Your steadfast refusal to accept the
evidence that ...
Oh, I get it. You bought a copy, didn't you! You poor sap...suckered
again by Microsoft. Well that'll learn ya. But only if you accept that
you bought a lemon, instead of continuing to irrationally defend your
in-hindsight-poor investment. Your current behavior is understandable
but in the long run only leads to throwing good money after bad.
They don't make money from Microsoft's products losing market share,
unlike the reverse. They have no financial ulterior motive. Unlike
Microsoft and its shills, er, I mean, fans.
No rational utilitarian with perfect information then. But then, what
rational utilitarian fails to research a big-ticket high-risk (of
incompatibilities or worse) purchase before putting down their money?
No, I did. And despite the headline, ultimately its main reasons for
touting Vista boil down to eye candy and other frivolities, or
interface stuff that is either useless (a 3D alt-tab substitute that's
probably slower and certainly less informative than the normal alt-tab
display?) or easily had on an XP system with (frequently free) third-
party software addons.
(By the way, the real fix for the usability problems of alt-tab is to
realize people don't use 640x480x8bpp video modes any more on their
desktop computers and make the grey box a bit bigger, with vertical
columns and names beside each icon. The one Vista thing that looks
like a real enhancement not readily supplied to XP users by third
parties is alt-tab showing thumbnails of windows. And still only the
name of the selected item. A modeless floating alt-tab-like palette
would be useful too sometimes, for the things that don't show in the
taskbar that you want to reach.)
Don't take me for a fool. Microsoft surely knows that a shill review
saying their product is perfect won't be believed, but a shill review
saying that it's great despite some minor problems actually might be,
and will admit to some of the less egregious bugs and deliberate
misfeatures in order to be believed. Half the truth is often more
believable than a pure lie.
Fundamental changes that you can't easily undo and that affect a
machine you administer are.
No, I said an independent blogger. A professional one is probably in
it for the money, and can therefore, like mainstream media, be
expected to slant things in favor of big business. Not only do they
get paid under the table to do so, but they also make more advertising
money that way.
About the only downside of Firefox Adblock, in fact, is that the
presence of potentially-corrupting advertising on a site isn't always
immediately apparent, and should affect my estimate of the site's
credibility, as advertiser interests can compromise editorial
integrity. Split incentives and suchlike.
(On the other hand, being able to block all those bogus links in some
blogs' articles from appearing while preserving the real ones just by
nuking the whole intellitxt domain is worth it all by itself! The
bogus links come from a .js file on that domain, rather than from
purely local files on the server hosting the content you want to read
uncluttered by phony hyperlinks that just try to sell you stuff
instead of pointing anywhere relevant. Then again, it also hides a
significant black mark against a site, their willingness to make a
corrosive mixture of advertising and content instead of keeping them
cleanly separated. But I take everything I read online with a grain of
salt anyway.)
[some pointless digression about ketchup snipped]
Hrm. Another one for the WTF file.
You said having none was bad, which implies it.
You disputed my claim that XP is better than Vista. And they're surely
not equal!
Well, it was that or violate Godwin's Law. Fact is, claiming that
something is great because these people, all three of them, support
it, is simply not a valid argument.
So much for your claims that Crysis is an excellent game then. If it's
unusable without losing your useful Windows XP system and replacing it
with a crummy, broken, DRM-infested, slow, wonky, and too-expensive
Vista one then it's terrible; just awful. Thanks, but no thanks.
This assumes you install Vista on your existing hardware. If you mean
to suggest buying a whole additional computer just to play Crysis,
well you have a FUCKING HUGE burden of evidence that the game is
amazing to meet before people will be interested. In effect that makes
Crysis the $1600 video-game. It's amazing that people pay that kind of
money for useful productivity software like Photoshop CS2, when it
must cost all of 3 cents to press each disc, Corel is cheaper, and the
GIMP is free. Plonking that kind of money down for a game? You're out
of your mind. Even your existing machine likely needs hardware
upgrades just to cope with Vista, then more to cope with a cutting
edge game, so we're looking at maybe a $600 game (including 60 for the
game, 240 for hardware, and 300 for Vista; it might actually be
worse). That's still on the pricey side, and for a single game? Versus
upgrading an XP box once for the sake of lots of separate games. And
using your existing machine means losing the use of half of what you
already have on it, by all reports on the subject of Vista
(in)compatibility I've read lately. Software and hardware, sometimes
including expensive hardware the manufacturer claims to still support.
No, when I ask you for proof of something that's wrong (and usually
outright absurd) I expect you to come up empty because it's physically
impossible for you to produce any genuine proof. Unfortunately you
insist on producing cheap facsimiles and other so-called "evidence"
that, of course, doesn't hold up under close examination, but does
prolong this miserable thread.
No, I was discussing evidence that Vista actually is superior to XP,
of which of course there's none since it's not true.
Your personal likes and dislikes are irrelevant. Stop changing the
subject from "Vista sucks" to "Oliver likes Vista"; the one has
nothing to do with the other. The original discussion was whether
Vista was in fact worse than XP, not whether any given person
*thought* it was or wasn't.
[some more insulting verbiage snipped in the interests of brevity]
Bullshit. You define all of the symbols 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. to be
whatever in normal integers, and to be whatever mod N in the ring of
integers mod N. And then 4 = 1 in the ring of integers mod 3, since 4
~ 1 (mod 3) in the normal integers. Or formally, 4 and 1 belong to the
same element (a set, in fact an equivalence class) of the integers mod
3.
And 2 + 2 = 4, 2 + 2 ~ 4 (mod 3), and 2 + 2 = 4 (= 1) mod 3.
No, it's like saying 10 and 16 are the same mod 6, which is clearly
true.
[wrongly chides me for being imprecise]
I wasn't imprecise. And it is wrong to chide me. Ever.
There is an element to which 4 corresponds.
[snip a bunch of insulting twaddle impugning both my education in the
mathematical areas and my intelligence and honesty]
Go away. You're bothering me.
Is deliberately ignoring the forest for the trees a type of straw man
argument? I suspect so.
THE WHOLE GODDAMN POINT WAS THE PURPOSE SERVED BY THE PUBLIC SECTOR
AND OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES! This purpose is to serve the public
good. I don't give a shit what solipsists think -- they shouldn't care
what the representatives that they don't even believe exist do (or
rather, don't do, since they supposedly don't exist). Which means the
representatives should act based on the best interests of the people
generally, regardless of what solipsists think.
If you seriously think that public policy should be swayed by any
notions originating from solipsism, you really need to get your head
examined. What if it's an epidemic? Sometimes I look at the current
situation in the world and think maybe it is. And if it spreads ...
before long we'll all be living in places that resemble North Korea
more than they do anywhere anyone sane would want to live.
Get checked for contagious brain-altering parasites before it's too
late and civilization is doomed!
Nope. Wrong again. I merely figure they are hostile towards me when
they act hostilely towards me (i.e. in a manner intended to damage me
or with callous disregard for the consequences to me). And if someone
is hostile towards me my strategy changes appropriately; nothing they
say can be trusted as its purpose is likely to be inimical to my
interests, so it could be a booby-trap. Nor can its inverse be trusted
since they might try reverse psychology. Indeed, it's mostly just
noise. This is why emails from hostiles are ignored; the safest thing
to do is to delete them. Their content can be of no use to me, since
the source is provably unconcerned with my well-being and there are
also no obvious legal or other repercussions to restrain them from
making the content actively harmful. Usenet posts from hostiles
unfortunately present a bigger problem, because other people might
believe every word in them, so a rebuttal is often required when
something is said with the property that other people reading and
believing it would be counter to my interests. Such as an insult
targeted at me. Still I won't believe anything they say, or indeed
change my beliefs about much of anything, save that some things can be
inferred safely: overt insults indicate continued hostility, and
confirm the initial assessment as hostile; their behavior itself is a
matter of fact and may be used as evidence against them; etc. (e.g.
Jack T's appearing solely to post flamage, rather than being a regular
contributor of "normal" posts to this newsgroup like I am).
Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, the US, and the UK are the
six that I am aware of.
You listed other countries originally.
Not really, but if you mean *de facto*, then, well, yes, more or less.
Ultimately it's how English is used in the majority case that counts
when determining how well it's being used to communicate, unless you
have specific information about the composition of the audience.
This is ridiculous. You just keep on randomly insulting me or else
claiming to neither agree nor disagree whenever you can't prove your
point.
More examples of your poor communication skills. Elsewhere you seem to
support a nonzero term length, yet this sentence seems to imply that
you don't. In one place you said very explicitly that you thought
abolishing copyright was a bad idea, and implied this included phase-
out approaches as well as cold-turkey. None of this makes much sense
unless you don't mean some of the things you seem to mean, in which
case you must be the one communicating faultily, because I of course
am perfectly fluent in English.
[snip irrelevant wikipedia quote]
So you're calling it a tie game? And it's over?
Well, you seemed to think you'd not posted anything with markup when
you had.
This is typical for Outlook Exploder users, whose software (execrable
piece of shit that it is) tends to add markup without asking, but not
google groups users, to my knowledge, so I find it somewhat peculiar.
FWIW your latest post had tags in it as well, and it didn't seem to be
any sort of well-formed SGML descendant despite the <foo> tag form.
(No DTD identification on the first line, for starters.) Given the tag
unfamiliarity, and what's currently popular, it looks like some kind
of mangled XML schema based off XHTML but adding custom tags, used in
a piss-poor fashion. I very much doubt that any proper standards-
compliant software could ever properly interpret your posts as your
authoring software apparently did. And of course as with any rich-text
email or news post those of us using a normal newsreader (or worse,
Google Groups) only see the raw source, with raw tags everywhere
cluttering up the text and making it nigh-on unreadable...(Thunderbird
+ read-only NNTP server and Firefox + Google Groups both show me tag
soup instead of rich text for your posts by the way.)
Well, duh -- your post is full of XML tags. Unsupported even by GG,
which given it views in a web browser would probably cope with the
usual HTML cruft generated by OE users. What in God's name are you
actually using to post? I take it you're composing these behemoths in
something else and then posting the source code into the GG box?
Eh. You appear to be claiming to have intended for me to see the raw
source of web code rather than the actual properly-formatted document.
Given that we're not discussing web coding this is illogical. You show
people web source when trying to get help with an HTML problem or some
XML schema or some such, not randomly in the middle of the discussion
of an unrelated topic in a newsgroup where BOTH are off-topic.
The difference being that it's not false. ;P
[snip some weird basketball obsession thing that's not relevant here]
Microsoft is obviously stepping up the marketing machinery. It
probably helps that they're spreading a lot of software patent
liability FUD about Linux lately, too. Microsoft's dirty fighting
doesn't prove a whit about the relative merits of the two pieces of
software as regards actual pragmatic concerns by users of such
software, regardless.
Oh, wonderful. MORE of this argument. *sigh*
Yes, but yours is the wrong point. My point is that I should not have
to pay a "Microsoft tax" just to use a given piece of (non-Microsoft)
software. A perfectly competitive market would not impose such a tax.
Nor would any just society.
Your point seems to be that there are workarounds. And any good
programmer would know that the existence of a workaround for something
does not make that something stop being a bug!
Games. See a doctor. There are some new treatments that can slow the
progression of Alzheimer's.
Yes. You asked for them. I don't recall any offhand, other than what
I've already mentioned. So you could probably find lots with a little
googling. It's been several days; if you haven't found anything by now
it must be because you never even bothered to look, and simply lazily
asked me to point you to them even though that just means me
performing the same searches you could have been doing.
You're joking. It's plainly obvious that, for starters, the prices for
a ton of useful stuff and cultural stuff will tumble down to close to
marginal costs, making them much more available and in the case of
productivity-enhancing things accelerating the wealth-generation of
the economy. Cultural participation will no longer be gatekept by a
few large corporations like Disney with ulterior motives. Filesharers
won't be randomly sued for ludicrous sums of money. And so forth. So
yes, it's proven that good things will happen. So far the only people
that look set to lose out are lawyers and fatcat executives in record
labels and similar places; oh how I weep. Society should probably
consider redistributing wealth from these types to society in general
to also be a good, rather than a bad, thing. And it's not even
communist redistribution! It's not taking away what they already have
forcibly to redistribute it; it's simply forcing them to actually
compete in the marketplace and let the market force their prices down
out of the stratosphere. Good old fashioned capitalism in other words.
I don't see how. At minimum, IP laws have to be limited to regulating
the for-profit reuse of material only; there, there's a paper trail.
Allowing IP laws to regulate individual, private, non-profit use of
stuff means they intrude into the home and into private matters, and
so do any enforcement efforts. It means individuals lose some of their
property rights in storage media, hardware, and the like, and in
objects such as books.
Funny that you keep arguing then.
I don't think either IP *or* intrusive DRM have any justification. But
my point is that any IP at all results in my not having the absolute
right to do as I please with a disc, a computer, a book, or whatever
that I own with only consenting parties, and that corporations will
seek to safeguard their IP with intrusive DRM. And of course will use
their temporary(?) monopoly to limit consumer choice to expensive and
shoddy, expensive and DRM-riddled, or expensive, shoddy, AND DRM-
riddled. Just like they do now, all too often.
Not to mention theywill lobby for term extensions with their ill-gotten gains. Any amount
of IP at all is provably a slippery slope towards increasingly
intrusive DRM, increasingly intrusive IP laws (e.g. the DMCA), and
increasing scope and term of monopoly protection. The past hundred-
plus years are proof of that, as an initial system with copyrights and
patents lasting only 14 years and applying only to books and tangible
inventions got extended over and over again. First copyrights became
able to be renewed for 14 years. Then expanded to music. Patents
became 17 years, and later 20. Copyrights expanded to cover all kinds
of other stuff. Noncommercial private copying began to be targeted.
Copyrights became 28 years renewable for another 28. Then 56 years.
Then 70. Then life. Then life + 50. Recently life + 70, and DRM became
common, and the DMCA. Meanwhile patents get granted for chemical
processes; then just for the end products however arrived-at
(egregious!), then genes, business methods, and software. Vaguer and
broader patents too. Patents that don't provide the disclosure of
blueprints, source code, or whatever supposedly motivating the whole
idea of patents. And so on.
I tell you, if a 1 day copyright was all they had left tomorrow, it
would soon expand to a week, then a month, then to cover databases and
other compilations with no original material, then a year, then a
century, then effectively forever via mandating "trusted computing"
aka a government backdoor into every computer enabling perfect
enforcement of anti-DRM-circumvention together with DRM ...
There isn't much that I can do about that. There are no non-evil
places to host this sort of material anymore that I can find. None of
the old FTP sites accept anonymous uploads (even to be vetted before
becoming downloadable) anymore...
The whole point is that the crappy ones simply don't matter. Consider
only the good ones. There'll be just as many, and some that were
expensive will be cheap or free.
I don't know of one offhand, but google and ye shall find.
Why wouldn't they? Talented teams coalesce on free projects all the
time in the FOSS world, or hadn't you noticed?
I'm not having any trouble understanding your point. I just don't
think you are correct!
There is no onus on me to actually produce one just to support my
claim that it is possible. Especially when it's already been done.
IYHO. And of course you can always just fucking google a bit to find
some more quality free games. You obviously are refusing to out of
fear of being proven wrong.
So?
[snip further badmouthing of Nehahra]
I see you have no real argument to make here, just bashing a perfectly
good game. Buzz off.
No, they simply aren't relevant. The point is that you are wrong. You
are AUTOMATICALLY wrong, simply because you're disagreeing with me.
What part of that don't you get yet? This is getting ridiculous. I
know what I am talking about and I don't lie. Your insulting
implication that that is not true does not stand up to scrutiny.
In your aesthetic judgment.
[snip a pointless repetition of an earlier bogus and irrelevant
argument]
Grr. STOP ATTACKING ME ALREADY! Will you just leave me alone?!
It would cost roughly $0.02 per user to deliver it by Internet
download, especially if you seeded a torrent so that the bandwidth
burden was spread onto the downloaders and didn't fall exclusively on
your own servers. This is a vastly more efficient means of
distributing game content.
Guess what? Blizzard uses it to deliver World of Warcraft related
materials, although they probably gratuitously encrypt it and then
charge an arm and a leg for decryption keys, despite it being not very
useful without (a paid subscription to access) their game servers
anyway. Blizzard is apparently somewhat more hip than some game
companies. Also way more efficient in the costs department. If you're
their competition, that's gotta hurt!
You are intentionally missing my point and attacking a straw man here!
And your obstinacy is starting to make me mad.
IF GAME COPYRIGHTS WERE ABOLISHED THEY'D GO ELSEWHERE BECAUSE THEY
COULD STILL MAKE INFLATED AMOUNTS OF MONEY ELSEWHERE BUT NOT MAKING
GAMES.
IF ALL WERE, THEY'D BE UNABLE TO MAKE INFLATED AMOUNTS OF MONEY
ANYWHERE AND WOULD RETURN TO WHERE THEIR NATURAL INCLINATIONS AND
TALENTS TOLD THEM TO -- GAME MAKING.
It's a concept from economics called "opportunity cost". Perhaps
you've heard of it? Anyway, asymmetrical abolition might very well
change the opportunity cost landscape for this type of work to
wherever copyrights remained in force, but symmetrical abolition would
not. It could only change the relative opportunity costs of e.g. game
work and e.g. burger flipping or some such. Given that right now
people working with information make far, far more than people doing
brute labor under high-stress conditions, that might not be such a bad
thing.
They were a made-up example assuming the usual hideous inefficiencies
as well as obscene profits, which perhaps underrepresent the true
severity of the problem. I was contrasting them with the post-IP
version where I showed greatly reduced *costs* as well.
No, asshole, it cuts to the very heart of the matter of why it or
perfectly compatible substitutes should be available from a variety of
vendors.
Go to sub-Saharan Africa as evidence of people who are able to survive
extreme poverty, lack of clean drinking water, lack of efficient
markets or rule of law (even the crummy, semi-efficient markets and
semi-rule of law we have here), and of course lack of Windows.
Do they survive?
Yes.
Do you envy them?
Doubtful.
Just because it is possible to survive without something doesn't
justify withholding it arbitrarily from large numbers of people. Would
you say we shouldn't have a right to clean drinking water? Would you
say that because Africans manage to do without, it would be okay if it
cost $300 a glass just to fatten the wallet of one executive of one
megacorporation in the west?
No? Well, although Windows isn't quite as indispensible as clean
drinking water, I wouldn't say you can easily switch away from it
without consequence or being in some ways cramped or deprived, either.
By supporting IP, you claim exactly that, among other things.
I am not confused. You are. Stop insulting me.
My point was that Microsoft provides an egregious example to show that
they need to NOT be enforced, precisely because the alternative leads
to absurd consequences that are to the detriment of the public good.
And of course that laws are enacted for the public good. Or at least,
are supposed to be; it's increasingly apparent that they no longer
are, and are instead enacted for the purpose corporate welfare these
days. For shame.
That you support corporate-welfare laws is something I find appalling.
[nonsensical conclusions derived from arguments that begin and end in
midair snipped]
[non-agreement non-disagreement snipped]
None of them are unreasonable, except the ones currently used that
depend on preventing private copying through legal means or, worse, on
DRM.
I don't see how any of this follows, least of all the unproved
assertion you make here that my "plan" is "bad".
Except that casting it in light of fraud law gets rid of the three
glaring problems with trademarks:
1. They're treated as a form of property, with all the usual nasty
consequences that come from treating as someone's property any *copy*
of something they devised (such as a logo).
2. Trademarks are lost if not aggressively defended, thus creating a
perverse incentive for frivolous lawsuits even in cases where there's
no chance of consumer confusion.
3. The whole theory of "trademark dilution" that also incentivizes
aggressively "defending" the mark from uses that are, or should be,
non-infringing.
I never claimed that. But the imbalance is much more apparent in civil
cases, where there's no public-defender right for the small guy, and
where it might also be the small guy trying to sue the big bad
corporation. The civil case has:
Small guy: no or very little representation
Big corp: expensive, big representation
The criminal case has:
Small defendant: at least a public defender
Big corp: expensive, big representation
State: expensive, big representation
It's more evenly matched if the state charges the big bad corp with
something nasty than if a small guy has to prove something with a
lawsuit for action to be taken. Class action lawsuits don't help much,
as the small guys get jack, the corporation gets a slap on the wrist,
and a whole lot of lawyers get rich. Criminal cases might even send
corporate executives to prison, or generate huge fines, or a court
order breaking up the company or otherwise messing with its structure
if it became a big monopolistic one with too much power for the public
good.
The small defendant has at least a public defender and the fact that
the prosecution has a heavier burden of proof. In a lawsuit, the small
guy is forced to settle without any chance to even plead their case
before a jury, all too often! In a criminal case they have a right to
a jury trial, a right to an attorney, a right to a defense, and it's
much harder for them to get pressured into pleading no contest or
something if they are not actually guilty of a serious wrongdoing.
And if they are, well, let them be stuck with the bill for it.
That said, it is true that money can buy you better criminal court
representation too, and this should really not be the case. I'd
suggest requiring criminal defendants, and perhaps all lawsuits, use
lawyers picked by whoever's represented and paid for by government.
That would require price controls, and other limits, basically making
legal practise a more regulated and less free-market thing, but it's
increasingly looking like legal advocacy is like health care and
working roads and the like -- key infrastructure that should be
government-funded and outsourced, rather than privately funded.
Keeping the state as opponent in a criminal action and the state as
paying the defense lawyer's salary from causing abuse remains an
issue; there's a conflict of interest there. Making prosecuting
criminal actions part of the executive branch, setting standards
legislative (e.g. power to fire), and paying judicial (e.g. power to
hire), with choice up to what the judiciary is willing to pay up to
the defendant, seems to minimize the danger of abuse. And the
potential conflict of interest already exists with public defenders
now; it may be worse than if they just paid your legal fees for you
and you used a private defender.
Well, no one has asked me to yet.
I've pointed out time and again that you keep asserting these
hypothetical bad consequences without proof.
So you keep saying. And then posting again.
Then you're simply wrong, wrong wrong wrong a whole lot.
You dare insult me again?
I don't have the means to create videos, and I sure the **** don't
have the means to host such enormous files. Sorry.
Anyway, you're simply lying if you say you dropped an item in the
middle, between two other items, in Explorer in list view and it
appeared where it was dropped, between the two other items. In my
experience that simply never, ever happens. And Explorer is Explorer;
I'd believe you if you said it worked as expected in the Mac Finder
while I observed broken behavior from Explorer. User interface is one
thing Apple has usually done a better job on. Well, aside from the
execrable decisions to stick the menu at the top of the screen instead
of the application windows having separate ones, and the one-button
mouse, and the god-awful Dock ...
Let's say they've done well at making what does work, work
consistently at least. Broken by design is within their repertoire;
bugs seem to be much rarer than with MS. (MS has broken by design and
bugs both occur especially often, by contrast.)
The laws of this world don't allow a software EULA to be binding. You
already purchased a copy. Nowhere did you agree in the store at time
of purchase that you were buying only a "license" with certain
restrictions; it's clearly a purchase of a box with a disc in it. As
such, you have full rights at that point under copyright law to e.g.
install and use it; see USC 17 section 117(a)(1). The EULA then tries
to take away many of your rights, and offers nothing in exchange
except that the *dialog box will go away*. You already have the right
to install and use the software without agreeing to anything. The only
reason you agree is because the box gets in the way of using the
software otherwise. This is morally and legally equivalent to someone
stopping you from, e.g., reading a book until you sign something and
forcibly getting in your way until you do, despite your having bought
the book legitimately and having the normal copyright privileges as
owner of a copy. It doesn't matter if it's a publishing company exec
or lawyer or even the author himself; they have no right to interfere
and coerce you into signing something that doesn't give you any new
rights but does take away your existing ones.
Stop deliberately misreading me. I didn't say there had to be
witnesses. Just a signed document and a copy retained by whoever would
later make a claim you breached an agreement with them.
The tax return is filed with the government. If they later want to
challenge you and use that tax return in some way, presumably they
produce a copy as evidence, with your signature on it to be verified.
This lets them prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you did sign
that tax return and file it with them.
Software companies have nothing of the kind to support the legitimacy
of their claims. No signed document they can later produce as evidence
that you "agreed" to anything.
Also your steadfast refusal to be swayed by the perfect, crystalline
logic of my arguments, and the evidence, of which I have lots
bolstering my side and you have virtually none.
[claims I believe something nasty about myself]
Wrong! Didn't I tell you I have strong defenses against being tricked
into negative or self-destructive self-beliefs?
I asked you to suggest an alternative theory to explain a mystifying
event and you refused. This after you demanded that everyone reject my
theory, which happens to fit the facts. The only grounds for rejecting
a theory that fits the facts is having a superior theory (one that
fits the facts better, or fits the facts and is simpler or has fewer
assumptions), or the original theory being untestable. You've
established neither.
And you need these clarifications for?
I'll mention now that whoever it was similarly blocked distribution of
your latest "masterpiece" here.
Of course someone is doing this. It's too selective to be the result
of a bug or misconfiguration of any kind, or even an overzealous spam
filter. I don't think there's any words or phrases common to all of
the censored posts at this point, let alone any that might be
considered indicative of spamminess. It's also the case that once a
person's postings to this thread branch began to be blocked, they were
systematically blocked without exception. So *every one* of mine for a
while *and* your last three *all* look like spam, and yet not because
of a common (say, repeatedly quoted) phrase or word? Right. It seems
to be based on the subthread itself and the author and date. That is
everything after day X with author Y and a references: containing
messageID Z. That is the simplest criterion on semantically relevant
parts of the post's headers and bodies that fits the observed pattern.
But it is not the pattern any sane spam filter would use, nor a
plausible pattern for triggering a bug. In particular, who chooses
days X and Y? Why everything referencing a particular messageID -- and
why that particular messageID? Why is blocking of a particular author
only started at a certain time, and then persistent? The pattern
better fits a killfile, a sophisticated one that allows matching
messageID as well as userID, and someone killfiled me in this
subthread a while back and killfiled you, or the entire subthread, a
bit later in time. Only killfiles aren't supposed to affect
propagation, only the one user's newsreading view.
It's censorship; provably so. No other explanation isn't cockamamie in
some way. A bug that cares how recently messages were posted? Well,
the date the bug was introduced might count, but TWO DIFFERENT DATES?
Neither of them Y2K or any other known "gotcha" date, to boot?
Sensitivity to a particular messageID being referenced?? WTF kind of
code would care about any of these things, such that a bug in such
code could conceivably drop messages in the pattern observed? Even
code in a spam filter.
Randomly dropping articles, dropping articles that meet spam criteria
(mainly excessive multi/crossposting), and such are normal usenet
behavior. Systematically dropping non-spam articles is not normal
usenet behavior.
[snip a bunch of irrelevant stuff re: overclocking]
I don't need a technical primer to overclocking; the most I need to
know about it is that it's too risky for me to risk my data and
expensive hardware doing myself instead of delegating to an expert.
If you'd be so kind as to quit insulting me every few paragraphs,
asshole?
A good reason to leave it to the professionals then. And a good reason
why consumers have, or should have, the right to the chips they buy
already being clocked at their best speed and this being properly
documented.
The whole overclocking/pricing issue arises from asymmetrical
information, as usual with these sorts of problems. Disclosure of the
top speed at which the chip tested OK should be required when selling
the chip, same as grocery store products are required to list their
ingredients.
STOP BLUNTLY ATTACKING ME!
Such software is itself broken as designed, so you are overruled!
Any such "problem" can easily be fixed by fixing the buggy software to
properly time things that are supposed to occur at a fixed rate by
wall-clock time. Mostly older games. Oh, well, they could be, if
copyright law would let the bugs be fixed in orphaned products.
Regardless, the 2GHz chip can surely be safely downclocked, which
makes it a perfect substitute.
What the customer ordered or better, subject to their approval?
STOP INSULTING ME. WHENEVER YOU SAY SOMETHING LIKE THIS YOU ARE
AUTOMATICALLY WRONG ANYWAY. WHY PERSIST???
Because you're making me mad? Your steadfast refusal to accept the
evidence that ...
Oh, I get it. You bought a copy, didn't you! You poor sap...suckered
again by Microsoft. Well that'll learn ya. But only if you accept that
you bought a lemon, instead of continuing to irrationally defend your
in-hindsight-poor investment. Your current behavior is understandable
but in the long run only leads to throwing good money after bad.
They don't make money from Microsoft's products losing market share,
unlike the reverse. They have no financial ulterior motive. Unlike
Microsoft and its shills, er, I mean, fans.
I disagree.
No rational utilitarian with perfect information then. But then, what
rational utilitarian fails to research a big-ticket high-risk (of
incompatibilities or worse) purchase before putting down their money?
No, I did. And despite the headline, ultimately its main reasons for
touting Vista boil down to eye candy and other frivolities, or
interface stuff that is either useless (a 3D alt-tab substitute that's
probably slower and certainly less informative than the normal alt-tab
display?) or easily had on an XP system with (frequently free) third-
party software addons.
(By the way, the real fix for the usability problems of alt-tab is to
realize people don't use 640x480x8bpp video modes any more on their
desktop computers and make the grey box a bit bigger, with vertical
columns and names beside each icon. The one Vista thing that looks
like a real enhancement not readily supplied to XP users by third
parties is alt-tab showing thumbnails of windows. And still only the
name of the selected item. A modeless floating alt-tab-like palette
would be useful too sometimes, for the things that don't show in the
taskbar that you want to reach.)
Don't take me for a fool. Microsoft surely knows that a shill review
saying their product is perfect won't be believed, but a shill review
saying that it's great despite some minor problems actually might be,
and will admit to some of the less egregious bugs and deliberate
misfeatures in order to be believed. Half the truth is often more
believable than a pure lie.
Fundamental changes that you can't easily undo and that affect a
machine you administer are.
No, I said an independent blogger. A professional one is probably in
it for the money, and can therefore, like mainstream media, be
expected to slant things in favor of big business. Not only do they
get paid under the table to do so, but they also make more advertising
money that way.
About the only downside of Firefox Adblock, in fact, is that the
presence of potentially-corrupting advertising on a site isn't always
immediately apparent, and should affect my estimate of the site's
credibility, as advertiser interests can compromise editorial
integrity. Split incentives and suchlike.
(On the other hand, being able to block all those bogus links in some
blogs' articles from appearing while preserving the real ones just by
nuking the whole intellitxt domain is worth it all by itself! The
bogus links come from a .js file on that domain, rather than from
purely local files on the server hosting the content you want to read
uncluttered by phony hyperlinks that just try to sell you stuff
instead of pointing anywhere relevant. Then again, it also hides a
significant black mark against a site, their willingness to make a
corrosive mixture of advertising and content instead of keeping them
cleanly separated. But I take everything I read online with a grain of
salt anyway.)
[some pointless digression about ketchup snipped]
Hrm. Another one for the WTF file.
You said having none was bad, which implies it.
You disputed my claim that XP is better than Vista. And they're surely
not equal!
Well, it was that or violate Godwin's Law. Fact is, claiming that
something is great because these people, all three of them, support
it, is simply not a valid argument.
So much for your claims that Crysis is an excellent game then. If it's
unusable without losing your useful Windows XP system and replacing it
with a crummy, broken, DRM-infested, slow, wonky, and too-expensive
Vista one then it's terrible; just awful. Thanks, but no thanks.
This assumes you install Vista on your existing hardware. If you mean
to suggest buying a whole additional computer just to play Crysis,
well you have a FUCKING HUGE burden of evidence that the game is
amazing to meet before people will be interested. In effect that makes
Crysis the $1600 video-game. It's amazing that people pay that kind of
money for useful productivity software like Photoshop CS2, when it
must cost all of 3 cents to press each disc, Corel is cheaper, and the
GIMP is free. Plonking that kind of money down for a game? You're out
of your mind. Even your existing machine likely needs hardware
upgrades just to cope with Vista, then more to cope with a cutting
edge game, so we're looking at maybe a $600 game (including 60 for the
game, 240 for hardware, and 300 for Vista; it might actually be
worse). That's still on the pricey side, and for a single game? Versus
upgrading an XP box once for the sake of lots of separate games. And
using your existing machine means losing the use of half of what you
already have on it, by all reports on the subject of Vista
(in)compatibility I've read lately. Software and hardware, sometimes
including expensive hardware the manufacturer claims to still support.
No, when I ask you for proof of something that's wrong (and usually
outright absurd) I expect you to come up empty because it's physically
impossible for you to produce any genuine proof. Unfortunately you
insist on producing cheap facsimiles and other so-called "evidence"
that, of course, doesn't hold up under close examination, but does
prolong this miserable thread.
No, I was discussing evidence that Vista actually is superior to XP,
of which of course there's none since it's not true.
Your personal likes and dislikes are irrelevant. Stop changing the
subject from "Vista sucks" to "Oliver likes Vista"; the one has
nothing to do with the other. The original discussion was whether
Vista was in fact worse than XP, not whether any given person
*thought* it was or wasn't.
[some more insulting verbiage snipped in the interests of brevity]
Bullshit. You define all of the symbols 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. to be
whatever in normal integers, and to be whatever mod N in the ring of
integers mod N. And then 4 = 1 in the ring of integers mod 3, since 4
~ 1 (mod 3) in the normal integers. Or formally, 4 and 1 belong to the
same element (a set, in fact an equivalence class) of the integers mod
3.
And 2 + 2 = 4, 2 + 2 ~ 4 (mod 3), and 2 + 2 = 4 (= 1) mod 3.
No, it's like saying 10 and 16 are the same mod 6, which is clearly
true.
[wrongly chides me for being imprecise]
I wasn't imprecise. And it is wrong to chide me. Ever.
There is an element to which 4 corresponds.
[snip a bunch of insulting twaddle impugning both my education in the
mathematical areas and my intelligence and honesty]
Go away. You're bothering me.
Is deliberately ignoring the forest for the trees a type of straw man
argument? I suspect so.
THE WHOLE GODDAMN POINT WAS THE PURPOSE SERVED BY THE PUBLIC SECTOR
AND OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES! This purpose is to serve the public
good. I don't give a shit what solipsists think -- they shouldn't care
what the representatives that they don't even believe exist do (or
rather, don't do, since they supposedly don't exist). Which means the
representatives should act based on the best interests of the people
generally, regardless of what solipsists think.
If you seriously think that public policy should be swayed by any
notions originating from solipsism, you really need to get your head
examined. What if it's an epidemic? Sometimes I look at the current
situation in the world and think maybe it is. And if it spreads ...
before long we'll all be living in places that resemble North Korea
more than they do anywhere anyone sane would want to live.
Get checked for contagious brain-altering parasites before it's too
late and civilization is doomed!
Nope. Wrong again. I merely figure they are hostile towards me when
they act hostilely towards me (i.e. in a manner intended to damage me
or with callous disregard for the consequences to me). And if someone
is hostile towards me my strategy changes appropriately; nothing they
say can be trusted as its purpose is likely to be inimical to my
interests, so it could be a booby-trap. Nor can its inverse be trusted
since they might try reverse psychology. Indeed, it's mostly just
noise. This is why emails from hostiles are ignored; the safest thing
to do is to delete them. Their content can be of no use to me, since
the source is provably unconcerned with my well-being and there are
also no obvious legal or other repercussions to restrain them from
making the content actively harmful. Usenet posts from hostiles
unfortunately present a bigger problem, because other people might
believe every word in them, so a rebuttal is often required when
something is said with the property that other people reading and
believing it would be counter to my interests. Such as an insult
targeted at me. Still I won't believe anything they say, or indeed
change my beliefs about much of anything, save that some things can be
inferred safely: overt insults indicate continued hostility, and
confirm the initial assessment as hostile; their behavior itself is a
matter of fact and may be used as evidence against them; etc. (e.g.
Jack T's appearing solely to post flamage, rather than being a regular
contributor of "normal" posts to this newsgroup like I am).
Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, the US, and the UK are the
six that I am aware of.
You listed other countries originally.
Not really, but if you mean *de facto*, then, well, yes, more or less.
Ultimately it's how English is used in the majority case that counts
when determining how well it's being used to communicate, unless you
have specific information about the composition of the audience.
This is ridiculous. You just keep on randomly insulting me or else
claiming to neither agree nor disagree whenever you can't prove your
point.
More examples of your poor communication skills. Elsewhere you seem to
support a nonzero term length, yet this sentence seems to imply that
you don't. In one place you said very explicitly that you thought
abolishing copyright was a bad idea, and implied this included phase-
out approaches as well as cold-turkey. None of this makes much sense
unless you don't mean some of the things you seem to mean, in which
case you must be the one communicating faultily, because I of course
am perfectly fluent in English.
[snip irrelevant wikipedia quote]
So you're calling it a tie game? And it's over?
Well, you seemed to think you'd not posted anything with markup when
you had.
This is typical for Outlook Exploder users, whose software (execrable
piece of shit that it is) tends to add markup without asking, but not
google groups users, to my knowledge, so I find it somewhat peculiar.
FWIW your latest post had tags in it as well, and it didn't seem to be
any sort of well-formed SGML descendant despite the <foo> tag form.
(No DTD identification on the first line, for starters.) Given the tag
unfamiliarity, and what's currently popular, it looks like some kind
of mangled XML schema based off XHTML but adding custom tags, used in
a piss-poor fashion. I very much doubt that any proper standards-
compliant software could ever properly interpret your posts as your
authoring software apparently did. And of course as with any rich-text
email or news post those of us using a normal newsreader (or worse,
Google Groups) only see the raw source, with raw tags everywhere
cluttering up the text and making it nigh-on unreadable...(Thunderbird
+ read-only NNTP server and Firefox + Google Groups both show me tag
soup instead of rich text for your posts by the way.)
Well, duh -- your post is full of XML tags. Unsupported even by GG,
which given it views in a web browser would probably cope with the
usual HTML cruft generated by OE users. What in God's name are you
actually using to post? I take it you're composing these behemoths in
something else and then posting the source code into the GG box?
Eh. You appear to be claiming to have intended for me to see the raw
source of web code rather than the actual properly-formatted document.
Given that we're not discussing web coding this is illogical. You show
people web source when trying to get help with an HTML problem or some
XML schema or some such, not randomly in the middle of the discussion
of an unrelated topic in a newsgroup where BOTH are off-topic.
The difference being that it's not false. ;P
[snip some weird basketball obsession thing that's not relevant here]
Microsoft is obviously stepping up the marketing machinery. It
probably helps that they're spreading a lot of software patent
liability FUD about Linux lately, too. Microsoft's dirty fighting
doesn't prove a whit about the relative merits of the two pieces of
software as regards actual pragmatic concerns by users of such
software, regardless.
R
Roedy Green
That's because you were daft enough to install Vista.
Not quite. It's because I was daft enough to buy
a new machine which gives you no choice in OS.
There are no new machines being shipped with XP
any more in my neck of the woods.
The only alternatives I can think of would be:
1. wait a year to buy the new machine and hope Vista is more mature.
2. wait a year to save up the $450 for a free-standing copy of XP.
3. toss my investment in Windows software, and writing code
for Windows customers, retire the windows-specific parts
of my website and start afresh with Linux.
Not quite. It's because I was daft enough to buy
a new machine which gives you no choice in OS.
There are no new machines being shipped with XP
any more in my neck of the woods.
The only alternatives I can think of would be:
1. wait a year to buy the new machine and hope Vista is more mature.
2. wait a year to save up the $450 for a free-standing copy of XP.
3. toss my investment in Windows software, and writing code
for Windows customers, retire the windows-specific parts
of my website and start afresh with Linux.