L
Lew
Bent said:
You have yet to explain how mandating what is now a free choice is in any way
not a socialist development.
You have yet to explain how mandating what is now a free choice is in any way
not a socialist development.
B
Bent C Dalager
How is mandating anything in itself socialist? All societies make laws
and mandate whatever they feel like. This includes modern democracies
as well as authoritarian dictatorships.
But whatever the case, there is no free choice. Under the current
regime, you are required by law not to copy copyrighted material. You
have no choice in the matter whatsoever, unless you want to break the
law. My proposal would restore free choice in the matter.
Cheers
Bent D
L
Lew
Bent said:
You are not required to copyright your work, or if you do, you are not
required to not copyleft it. Your proposal would remove free choice in the
matter.
You acknowledge that society needs laws to mandate the common good, then in
the next breath propose your socialist notion to abolish copyrights.
Copyrights exist to promote commerce and protect the author. If you don't
feel you need the protection, don't copyright. If you don't like copyrighted
works, only use ones that aren't. That's free choice. If the non-copyright
model is better for business, it will prevail. Your idea would remove that
free competition. Hence, socialist.
K
~kurt
Bent C Dalager said:
Actually, it is more of a communist one. Right out of the Communist
Manifesto: "...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property."
The idea being, only the rich will benefit from actually being able to own
anything. So, eliminate private property because the rich are, of course,
evil, since they obviously have made all of their money off the hard work
of others and don't deserve their money....
In this case, we are talking about eliminating intellectual property
through eliminating copyright.
I personally like copyright - I believe the entity who develops the
software should be able to choose any form of copyright. The user
can choose to if it is acceptable or not. GPL protects intellectual
property - I'm using it for some of my own personal stuff. But, I wouldn't
want to force it on anyone.
Now, software patents - they should be done away with. Software patents
are a joke.
- Kurt
B
Bent C Dalager
Anything anyone ever does that can be covered by copyright is
automatically copyrighted. There are no well established methods of
explicitly putting a work into the public domain and even if there
were, you are burdened with having to ensure that such a waiver always
accompanies your work everywhere because if it ever gets separated
from it, people have to assume that the work is under copyright.
This is a tremendous restriction on intellectual freedom because
pretty much everything you come across that you could have used for
your own work is copyrighted by default and so you cannot use it.
It would remove the freedom to pointlessly coerce other people. I tend
to consider this a good thing.
Again with the socialism ranting. Get a dictionary, learn new swear
words, live a happier life.
No, they do not. They exist to promote the arts and ensure we get more
and better works of art. As of very recently, the best way to do that
is to abolish copyright.
This is not possible since everything I ever write will automatically
be copyrighted.
It is a perverted notion of free choice a la "you can choose any
colour you like so long as it's black". Copyright removes my freedom
to choose works to use because its effect is to ensure that a great
number of them are out of bounds. It has no opposite effect - that is,
there are no works that I could not use without copyright but that I
can use with it. It therefore causes a net loss in freedom.
Something that does not exist can hardly "prevail". It would have to
come into existence first.
Copyright removes free competition because at its very basis, it
grants monopolies. I don't know which text books you are using, but I
advise you to look up "free competition" and "monopoly" and try to
figure out how, exactly, they relate to one another.
Cheers
Bent D
B
Bent C Dalager
This refers to physical property. What we are discussing is copyright,
which is not property at all.
There exists a wide-spread misunderstanding that copyright establishes
ownership to an artistic work. It does not, and an artistic work is
never anyone's "property" because abstract ideas cannot be owned. What
it does establish is a set of limited and exclusive rights to the
artistic work, mostly to do with duplication and performance.
Cheers
Bent D
J
Joshua Cranmer
Taking your suggestion elsewhere to look up in the dictionary, here is
the pertinent definitions of property in the OED:
property (n.)
3b. A (usually material) thing belonging to a person, group of persons,
etc.; a possession; (as a mass noun) that which one owns; possessions
collectively; a person's goods, wealth, etc.
3d. orig. and chiefly N. Amer. A literary work considered with regard to
its commercial production (esp. film) rights.
a copyright belongs to a person, ergo, a copyright is property.
B
Bent C Dalager
Two immediate points of interest would be:
1) The OED does not define the meaning of the legal constructs of
copyright and property. It describes the everyday meanings. It is
generally not constructive to mix the two in a debate about legal
concepts.
2) Even if I were to accept the OED's definition in the context of a
copyright debate, the quote from the OED specifically states that its
entry is only relevant for a relatively small part of the world. It
would seem silly to base the debate on an interpretation that is
obviously under construction and not particularly well accepted in the
world at large.
Further, the OED entry is little more than a symptom of the
wide-spread misunderstanding that I brought up earlier. The nature of
language is such that misunderstandings become normative once they
become sufficiently wide spread.
Cheers
Bent D
K
~kurt
Lew said:
There was a time when communists at least admitted to being communists. Now,
one can apparently think like one, but still not be one....
- Kurt
T
Twisted
I don't see that people who are not burdened at all have any right to
intrude into the privacy of my home or wherever. I don't believe I
should need permission to do anything from anyone it doesn't take away
from. (And I don't consider not-yet-earned profits something I can be
taking away from someone who doesn't have them yet; there is no
entitlement to profits. If I take money from their pocket that they
already had that's stealing. If I don't buy something they're selling,
they end up making less profit than if I do, but that can hardly be
stealing, or it is "stealing" to not buy everything we see for sale
until we go bankrupt, which would be downright silly. So there cannot
be an entitlement to profit, only to try. And if there's no
entitlement to profit, there's no justification for restraint of trade
on the grounds that I might undercut someone's price or something --
oh woe is them! They only have a market capitalization of three
billion dollars instead of four because of dastardly competition! All
they're left with is more riches than most of us will ever see in our
lifetimes plus the first-mover advantage in the marketplace, and the
shirt on their backs! Who perpetrated this horriffic crime upon them
and left them impoverished so! Who??
Sure you are. You've got a more efficient manufacturing process and
you can therefore compete on price. Good for you.
You're the one suggesting that information products be treated
specially by disallowing making fully-substitutable products. Why?
Just because the market will drive the price actually to zero given a
chance? Let it. Free software enriches us all, and can be a loss-
leader for a business. Commercial software sales can still exist;
there are ways to compete with free. Just ask Dasani.
Some model would be. Games could be funded with a market price that
rapidly drops to zero if the cost drops to near-zero, e.g. by
community-sourcing content. (Look at the proliferation of third-party
Quake 3 maps and other add-ons if you don't think that's possible.)
There are other funding models than pay-per-copy and I see no sensible
economics-derived reason to create what amounts to price-protections
for this class of products.
Productivity tools can derive money from support. They're the things
it's most important that society manage to fund. Entertainment is
frivolous and not so important to ensure gets funded somehow. At the
same time entertainment is the popular subset of culture, and culture
needs to be participatory for the health of society. Culture that is
locked up behind paywalls (keeping out the poor) and that restricts
contribution (via copyright) is not participatory to any kind of
healthy degree. Culture that is participatory is largely self-
sustaining, because it will be produced by the people encouraged to
participate not by the prospect of cash reward but by the simple
natural human desire to participate in making and experiencing culture
-- a desire archaeologically documented by its end products to go back
at to least thirty thousand years before anyone invented any ideas
remotely resembling copyright, I might add.
A free market would let everyone choose whether to use something with
Big Brother features or not. We don't have a free market. Some stuff
requires recent versions of Windows that cannot legally be had without
the Big Brother features, so Windows can be indispensible and not
substitutable with a non-Big-Brotherish alternative. This is a market
failure -- the lack of a Big Brother free otherwise 100% compatible
Windoze substitute. There are bugs I'd like fixed that haven't been,
too. This is also a market failure. Like most market failures these
are the result of government distortion of the market via artificial
restraints of trade.
No; if you'd bothered to read the whole thing you'd notice that the
system is a pyramid. The parasites at the very top siphon off the
money and get rich; the people in the middle are forced to engage in
equally nasty behavior sometimes just to make ends meet; the ones at
the bottom, Joe Consumer, just plain get screwed. With sharp
implements. And no lube.
You're one of the people in the middle, one of those "just following
orders" types but not a highly-placed member of the party that will
all hang for their crimes some day. You're like the soldier in the
totalitarian regime that will have to testify against those really
evil ones and will end up with a lighter sentence.
You miss the point of my argument. Corporations are trying to benefit
themselves. Public policy is supposed to benefit the public, not
corporations other than to the extent that it is in the public
interest to aid or subsidize them. Making and enforcing public
policies that favor big business at the expense of Joe Consumer is
therefore immoral and should be illegal to legislate (unconstitutional
even). Repealing such policies in favor of pro-consumer ones should be
a high priority. But the government has been bought at auction...and
the Second Civil War now looms in our near future, its onset less than
ten years away now.
(Remember, you heard that here first.)
I'm not a moron; I know this. What I mean is, you get an Explorer
window and sort the files by name, say. Now they appear sorted by
name. Drag and drop a new file to move it and the I beam shows where
it should appear when dropped. Drop it and 90% of the time it goes
where the I beam indicates. 10% of the time it goes at the end of the
list of files instead. (Switch to List view from Tiles and that jumps
to 100%, by the way.)
It's easy to reproduce. Make two dummy directories with a load of
dummy files in each and drag files back and forth for a while. Within
20 or so you should get an instance of one jumping to the bottom of
the list instead of going where you dropped it and where the I beam
indicated it would go.
I know the files will be arranged by name or something again when the
directory is navigated away from and then back to, but sometimes I
want to arrange related files close together temporarily to do some
work, before later re-sorting them, and this is really annoying when
it happens.
Last time I checked, Microsoft had started to charge money for the
privilege of complaining to them. Nevermind that they ignore all bug
reports anyway, except maybe security hole reports.
I'm ENTITLED by constitutional law to a free market, which by its
nature should tend to result in prices near marginal cost shortly
after something is no longer brand-spanking-new. I see prices that are
clearly hugely inflated over marginal cost, I see it as prima facie
evidence that it is not a free market, and therefore my constitutional
rights are being violated.
I see that despite broken laws, the invisible hand is still tirelessly
seeking to correct the bogus pricing on many information objects;
check out your favorite torrent tracker site for things that are
available at closer to marginal cost thanks to the amazing robustness
of the invisible hand to perform its works even in the face of serious
attempts to actually handcuff it by law. The market itself has made
its opinion clear; it's time for the law to catch up and to better fit
the constitutional intent in this, which the founding fathers clearly
planned to be a free-market democracy.
(It's not just software; seen the price tags on iPods lately? Not
coming down, unlike on most electronics. Apple gleefully claims to get
a 40% margin on each iPod sold; bank robbers don't dare gleefully
announce that they just cracked a safe to the tune of $50 million
because society in its wisdom made bank robbery illegal. Highway
robbery such as Apple perpetrates, for some mysterious reason, remains
perfectly legal however.)
Actually, what I'm saying is that information, once published,
actually IS free, and that it is violating the very laws of nature to
try to chain it or to charge money merely for access to it. It also
tramples on my property rights in my hardware, in my copies of
information, and the like, and in my free speech rights, and in my
right to be in a free market democracy as enshrined in the
constitution.
I don't remember any such deal ever being made. I do recall seeing
retailers sell software in the usual manner -- give me this money and
we'll give you this box with this disc of information in it, subject
to whatever return policies and such. I do also recall seeing notices
put inside that box claiming to be a binding contract between me and
the manufacturer, but which obviously can't be, since there's been no
meeting of the minds, no negotiation, and no signatures or witnessing
of same. Similarly notices on download sites or appearing when
software is installed or run, again with no negotiation, no
signatures, no witnesses. I certainly have not seen a deal made with
the manufacturer by a user, or anything other than an attempt by a
manufacturer to claim that a deal is already in place that isn't, or
that clicking a button on a GUI somewhere somehow constitutes making a
deal, even though I know darn well that it's a piece of dumb software
and it's not possible to make a deal with it any more than it's
possible to make a deal with a rock, and the manufacturer is nowhere
in sight, nor online or on the phone in some manner, so I'm certainly
not making a deal with the manufacturer.
Of course, maybe I have a weird idea of what actually constitutes a
"deal", or a binding contract. Maybe it's quaint to imagine it
actually involving negotiation, compromise by both sides, a meeting of
the minds, consideration for both sides, and signed and witnessed
agreements on both sides. Yet I suspect that does go on in the support-
contract space.
I don't believe though that a typical shrink-wrapped software purchase
is governed by any kind of contract except with the retailer. You
receive the goods (a disc with some software on it) after having
negotiated with the retailer, and before hearing any so-called
"license agreement" pap from the manufacturer. The manufacturer
including such a notice is in essence trying to unilaterally change
the existing contract you have with them (namely none beyond the law's
requirements of a manufacturer and a consumer, generally that the
manufacturer warrants their product for merchantability and fitness-
for-purpose and is liable for direct damages only, so the price tag of
the software only). Remember at this point you already have the disc.
If the manufacturer required you to sign an agreement in exchange for
receiving the disc you might have a point. However, you have already
received the disc and are entitled to all the usual rights under
copyright law. This includes the right to install the software and
make transient copies and whatever copies are generally incidentally
produced as part of normal use of the software, in case you were
unfamiliar with the law*. This means that not only your purchase of
the software, but your installation and normal use of the software is
lawful without requiring any further negotiation with its
manufacturer. Consequently, any "license agreement" that does not
provide you additional rights beyond those you have under copyright
law is one-sided in the legal sense of the term, which normally would
make it void even if you actually had negotiated and signed it. You
didn't even do that. The only "license agreements" I've seen that look
at all legitimate therefore are the GPL and its ilk, which grant you
additional rights (such as distribution rights) subject to certain
conditions. These agreements provide consideration for both sides
supposedly agreeing to something, and even THOSE don't involve
negotiation and signing, at least that I've noticed. Commercial
software agreements are, to the very last one of them, one-sided and
if they were binding would provide consideration for the manufacturer
but none for the user, the other party to the transaction, who would
without the agreement have all the rights under copyright law
including to install and use the software, and to remedies for defects
up to the price of the software, and with it generally loses most of
those rights, including the fair-use right to reverse engineer and
disassemble and the right to any remedy at all for defects. Nobody
sane would sign such a thing, so no judge that isn't bought should
uphold any of these so-called "contracts".
* To quote chapter and verse, in the US, 17 U.S.C. Section 117(a)(1)
provides a defense against copyright infringement for anyone who (i)
owns a physical copy of a computer program, (ii) makes an adaptation
"as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in
conjunction with a machine," and (iii) uses it "in no other manner."
This covers installation and the transient copies made during normal
use of software.
I don't want to force anyone to do anything. I don't think I should be
able to force Joe to release his software for free. If he wants to
sell it to Kevin for $50,000, take-it-or-leave-it, he has the right
to. If he wants Kevin to have to sign a contract perhaps forbidding
Kevin from redistributing it, he has the right to. He can sue Kevin
for breach of contract if he did have Kevin sign such a contract and
then Kevin sold or gave me a copy anyway. On the other hand he should
have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the copy I got
from Kevin, as I never signed any contract with him and I never
received anything from him (I received something from Kevin).
In fact, I'm not sure society should even allow NDA-like contracts
muzzling speech to be enforceable. Society doesn't allow contracts
selling oneself into slavery to be enforceable, and I think this
should extend to all contract terms that would limit one's
constitutional rights, including one's First Amendment rights.
It is not a straw man and it is relevant. That is what is happening
now: businesses trying to create a "no-lose situation" by lobbying and
lawyers so they don't have to be able to compete in the market and can
just lazily sit there releasing shoddy products with sappy names like
Vista and rake in cash all day long.
If you'd bothered to read my previous posting you'd know it was
relevant. It is the logical outcome of shackling information and
privatizing everything, even ideas, until every single action and
every bit of knowledge has a fee attached, payable to someone who
isn't cost anything incrementally be each use. It's the result of a
society that lets trolls set up camp under bridges and terrorize
travelers to extort fees from them, despite not doing anything to
actually keep the bridges maintained properly, and indeed often
deliberately misdesigning the bridges not to maximize its utility to
travelers but to maximize the ability of trolls to terrorize travelers
that use that bridge instead. Not to mention dynamiting the hill road
that is the alternate route, blocking it with an "accidental"
rockfall, to force people to use their bridge instead of taking the
(free) long way around.
Meanwhile it galls me to see someone new pop up here every week asking
how they can make the Java software they're developing less useful,
buggier, and more expensive than it needs to be. It's continuing
visual evidence that efficient free markets have failed in this part
of the world, and that a nasty struggle and possible strife lies in
the near future.
We see the demand in the sense of why it would benefit corporations to
have stronger clubs in their trollish mitts to use when terrorizing
bridge crossing travelers.
We don't see demand in the sense of why it would benefit the public. I
content that it does not in fact benefit the public, certainly not now
in the information age; it probably never has.
Recall that laws are (supposed to be) written to benefit the public,
not corporations or any other special interests except to the extent
that doing so benefits the public at large. There are many strong and
cogent arguments, some from economics (Against Monopoly), some from
empirical observation (the success of open source software; the
existence of invention and innovation and culture before copyright and
patent), and some from cultural needs (participatory culture and
copyright are inherently incompatible; read anything associated with
"free culture" in Google that is from the pro-free-culture side of the
debate to find detailed arguments and evidence), that so-called
"intellectual property" laws are harmful to the public rather than
beneficial to the public, and therefore are or should be
unconstitutional. In particular, the free software and free culture
movements' successful products have proven beyond a reasonable doubt
that the minimum level of copyright and patent protection needed to
satisfy the needs of the Progress Clause is in fact zero, and that
means that the First Amendment trumps it and in my considered opinion
these two pieces of the constitution, as written, make copyright and
patent laws beyond the minimum necessary unconstitutional; the
evidence then makes them all unconstitutional and furthermore meets
the standard of evidence required to convict them in criminal court.
That should be sufficient to get them struck down. It isn't, of
course, because lots of judges are in the hip pockets of various $3000
suits (suits whose very existence proves there are gross market
inefficiencies and therefore failures) right next to senators,
congressmen, and in at least one case (the Halliburton CEO? An oil
company executive?), the President.
Strawman. Read my paragraph again and consider e.g. RIM v. NTP and
other recent high-stakes patent infringement cases. And read
everything Bent has been posting to this thread. And Against Monopoly,
if you still haven't gotten around to it.
No, it's factually true. The only experts that claim Vista is anything
anyone should buy are Microsoft marketing department experts and
various people whose opinions are bought and paid for. Independent,
consumer-minded software evaluators choose XP over Vista. Every last
one of them.
[snip some mild, unprovoked insultage]
Stop being insulting and rude.
Everyone that matters (professional, independent-minded web site
administrators whose primary concern is the site working properly and
who aren't required to toe some MS-only line by management. Just about
all non-corporate site admins in particular. And every security expert
outside Steve Ballmer's hip pockets. IIS security is a dismal failure
-- it's the logical server-side counterpart of Internet Exploder;
every week a new exploit discovered and every month a new batch of
patches. And you can't make the usual "there's more exploits for the
Microsoft stuff because it's what the majority are using" argument in
this case because Apache's market share is the LARGER one and Apache
is still more secure DESPITE having the "being a bigger target"
disadvantage.)
A two year old expects to raid the cookie jar and not get caught, even
when they're the only child in the house and they take half the
cookies that were in the jar.
A grown man should not expect to be able to embezzle fifty billion
dollars and have it go unnoticed, or be able to pocket it without the
bulge being noticed eventually. (Metaphorically, anyway.)
If the guys running the show at Enron thought they'd get caught, they
acted in an irrational, non-self-maximizing manner.
If they thought they wouldn't, they have single-digit IQs and should
have been drooling and in diapers still, in a padded room somewhere
where they get regular doses of feel-good chemicals like Thorazine.
That people with this level of incompetence in basic arithmetic and
other life skills were hired and ended up actually in charge of a
major energy company is proof of incompetence or irrationality in the
hiring department and on the part of the shareholders, in that case.
Sooner or later, if you follow the chain back, you run into someone
who knew what they were doing and who had to be simply irrational, and
who nonetheless had a position of responsibility.
Regardless, the corporation itself should have had the information
that this couldn't go undetected and the perpetrators uncaught, and
acted to self-maximize, per your theory. It didn't. Too bad for your
theory then; one counterexample is all it takes to torpedo a universal
claim such as the one you made.
Actually, I'm guessing they thought the Bush administration would
shield them and they turned out instead to be fall guys. Still
irrational or stupid; they played with fire and expected not to get
burned just because one of the flames made promises to that effect.
See below.
This is a scathing indictment of the current law then. It actually
forces corporations to choose between breaking some laws and breaking
other laws and fails to even offer them a straight and narrow path
they can walk. That in turn guarantees moral turpitude. Once they are
forced to break the law they have less respect for the law itself for
being obviously broken, and they are also now on the slippery slope of
all criminal behavior, where there's a reinforcing pattern of more law
breaking to try to eliminate evidence of the initial lawbreaking, more
lawbreaking forced by the initial lawbreaking rendering them
susceptible to blackmail, and so forth. For insensible laws, taxes
were evaded. For evasion of taxes, documents were forged. For forging
of documents, blackmail occurred. For blackmail's occurrence, money
was embezzled. For embezzlement of money, auditors were bribed. For
bribing of auditors, more money was needed. For want of more money, a
bank was robbed. For robbing a bank, security guards started shooting.
For the getaway, security guards got shot. For the shot security
guards, a murder was covered up. For covering up a murder, the mob got
involved. For mob involvement, drugs had to be warehoused ...
You get the picture.
I know of no case where this is actually true except where customer
loyalty is a complete non-issue. One-off products might qualify.
Anything with consumables or upgrades to generate a future revenue
stream is clearly a nonstarter here.
Well, your theory predicts that Enron-type events should be rare. Mine
predicts that they should be common. Interestingly, they used to be
rare, but now are common. Your theory describes the behavior of
corporations before the late 1990s, and mine describes their current
behavior. An interesting research question is: what caused this change
in behavior? A hint on a possible research direction: it's notable
that this change coincides roughly with Clinton leaving office and the
next iteration of the Shrub Dynasty beginning.
You *have* gone off the deep end, then.
You said you saw a lot of banners promoting IIS. I don't doubt it; I
don't doubt MS is promoting IIS heavily.
I said I didn't see the banners and you should really get Adblock, on
the grounds that I figured you found constantly being bombarded by
distracting flashing animated things while you're trying to find and
read information online was annoying.
Apparently you are crazy enough that:
a) You don't find it annoying.
b) You actually believe what the flashy thingies whisper in your ear
while someone tries to stick their hand in your pocket
c) You actually therefore believe that IIS is superior to Apache. It
isn't. The only thing the flashy things and their favoring of IIS
prove is that the IIS marketing budget is superior to the Apache
marketing budget, a good hint that the IIS fixing-things-and-making-a-
quality-product budget might be the worse for it. All the quiet, non-
revenue-generating "powered by Apache" buttons (which I don't block,
by the way), on the other hand, and the lack of comparable "powered by
IIS" ones, indicate which of the two web site operators themselves
actually find preferable and generally praiseworthy. The fact that the
only people widely promoting IIS on the web are the ones being paid by
Microsoft to do so is a damning indictment of IIS. And the fact that
IIS is worse than Apache but Apache is free (as in beer and as in
speech) is a damning indictment of "intellectual property" law.
I never claimed that. I certainly expect that Microsoft doesn't treat
it as such. Microsoft's marketing department certainly doesn't.
I claimed that Vista WAS a downgrade, not that it was PERCEIVED by any
particular group to be a downgrade. I then cited feature differences
to prove that in fact Vista IS a downgrade, since some things don't
work properly under Vista that do under XP, but Vista doesn't let you
do anything XP doesn't let you do, or do anything more efficiently, or
even AS efficiently. Except play that one DirectX 10 game. Unless you
weight that game working very heavily versus e.g. your CD burning and
media player working, other stuff working, and your hardware not
acting like it turned into a pumpkin (with "486SX 25" stamped on the
case) at midnight, and Big Brother not being inside. Most people's
weightings should lead to the rational, utilitarian choice to stick
with XP, which indicates that yes, Vista is indeed a downgrade.
Vista's poor sales (by Microsoft's own expectations) are another piece
of evidence, and also support the thesis that a substantial fraction
of savvy computer users do perceive it (accurately) as a downgrade.
To rebut bogus and inaccurate information, and to advise people who
appear to be erring in judgment or in their declaratory knowledge
base. There's a particularly strong bogohazard in this thread for some
reason, which has therefore required significant attention from my
higher functions of late. Unfortunately, at around this same time
Google's dropped the ball on providing proper usenet access and
support. Discovering a workaround is now also occupying substantial
higher functional attention. Data on alternative free news sources,
preferably proper NNTP servers, is lacking. Google may not be a
disinterested party so the next logical move is a search using a non-
Google search engine. That is pending but other concerns are more
pressing, such as defragging, consolidation, and tuning some higher
functions whilst running them through the simulator loop a few times.
Fuel acquisition and certain financial transactions also come ahead in
the priority queue, pending daylight hours and various retail stores
and business offices opening. Meanwhile inclement weather requires
that I disconnect my external network connections and go to internal
power for several hours or risk a destructive surge. The time can
fortunately be used for the aforementioned internal optimization
tasks, and for other internal data processing.
T
Twisted
This is ludicrous.
You buy, and it works forever, assuming you don't change or upgrade
the hardware or OS too much. It's not like a car; it shouldn't "wear
out" unless deliberately timebombed by the author, in which case it
should be avoided in favor of the competition anyway.
You rent, and it only works until you stop paying.
In effect, you buy and you pay once, or maybe infrequently when a new
version is released and you can't avoid upgrading perhaps because only
the new version works on MS Windows Pista or some such reason.
You rent and you pay every goddamn month all over again.
Also, you buy and when the vendor inevitably stops supporting the
product, you can still continue to use it although you can't expect
there to be any further updates for compatibility, so eventually as
you move on with your hardware and OS it will die, but it will last
years first.
You rent and when the vendor inevitably stops supporting the product
it instantly stops working, or lasts at most one more month.
And of course, you use FOSS you can pay as little as zilch, and there
is no single vendor who if they stop supporting the product they cause
the product to no longer be supported at all. Vendors that want money
will have support contracts you can sign up for IF YOU WANT TO or need
it because your use is mission-critical. FOSS vendors with pay support
contracts on offer are far nicer and more honest than anyone selling
"software as a service". For one thing, you can use the software as
much and as long as you want to without paying, though without vendor
support. If you want vendor support you can pay for it. If the vendor
goes under or quits supporting it you can likely find ANOTHER company
offering support, instead of being up the creek. You don't have to
change to a different program to continue to have support, and pay for
the new program, and deal with migrating data, retraining users, and
all of those additional hassles, which are also an expense in a
business context. If the worst comes to the worst, and it's mission
critical for you, has no known alternatives that are good substitutes
for your usage, and no longer has any vendors providing support at
all, you can hire a few geeks to provide your own in-house support
because you have (or should have) the full unobfuscated source code
and low-level documentation! FOSS is therefore especially important if
you're a business user, because a huge amount of risk and uncertainty
with regular commercial software, which gets worse with "rental"
software like you advocate, simply disappears with FOSS.
I know which gives the most value for the money, and which the least.
If you don't, or you're simply wrong, well, I guess that's just your
tough luck.
T
Twisted
Feel free to suggest a better newsgroup for that issue then.
R
Roedy Green
1. the cost of copying was very high.
2. there was no way to record a performance and later write a
transcript.
3. there was no way to pirate a performance identical to the original.
T
Twisted
This is evidence in support of my more general thesis that copyright/
patent systems like we have now are unsustainable. Unenforceable,
inefficient*, and they make the "path of least resistance" for
businesses require them to both be exceedingly customer-hostile and be
"hit-driven" and ultimately unsustainable themselves.
* E.g. companies spend effort to make a product, then extra effort
sabotaging it, and charge extra for it, instead of just make the
product, leave it in good shape, and charge less for it -- nevermind
crippleware that comes on a disc, remember the 486 SX chip, back when
Intel still had a monopoly on the x86 architecture? Their key patent
expiring saved everyone a lot of money and grief. Well, everyone
except Intel anyway.
I'm not arguing against basic safety regulations. Government should do
at least these four things:
* Defend the realm from outside attack, and violent internal
minorities and criminals. But not defend the leadership from changes
in the will of the people by force, other than defending them from
violent force.
* Maintain the basic infrastructure that gives the market players a
level playing field. This includes providing and maintaining roads,
networks, health maintenance, education, and sundry stuff like that,
so everyone has a decent opportunity from the start and access to
basic services and to information and education.
* Tweak the market to account for diffuse negative externalities, e.g.
with carbon cap-and-trade schemes, safety regulations, smoking bans/
taxes, and similarly, and support legal action or actually pursue
criminal charges in cases of concentrated negative externalities. This
way polluters pay the costs their polluting has for the public as a
whole, for example.
* Raise funds to support the above, but without burdening the poor. A
progressive income tax seems to work OK; poll taxes, sales taxes, and
similarly do not work as well because they hit the poor hard.
And it should do very little else, aside from represent the people and
debate issues and the like in order to guide the above behaviors.
Note that I suggest its market intervention be limited to:
* Providing some services itself, which will obviously compete with
any private industries doing likewise. In practise it is likely to
contract out to these same private industries much of the time. I'd
like to see broadband fiber nationalized but the maintenance and
building-out of the infrastructure contracted back out to the same
companies that currently own the fiber, but have little incentive to
build it out further, and lots to squeeze existing customers by nickel-
and-diming them to death. Private companies would also provide actual
services over the line, and compete rather than have monopolies. The
government fiber would be "naked", i.e. respecting the end-to-end
principle and not caring what runs over it. Capacity would be rented
to service providers, generating revenue. This would pay the
contractors that maintain the fiber and build out more fiber.
* Regulating negative externalities. Tobacco or pot smoking in public
is a negative externality. Crack vials in the streets also. Smoking in
private is not, or is up to the landowner to regulate. Pollution and
toxic spills are negative externalities. So is abrupt climate change
and its various associated violent weather events. Same with products
that are dangerously unsafe, or fraudulently promoted. So is the theft
of physical property, freeloading off services where it
proportionately increases someone's costs (electricity, fiber
bandwidth), and violent crime. Someone privately copying a music CD
and giving someone else or selling them the copy is not. Some of the
negative externalities can be taxed; others can be outlawed, with
varying penalties; others may be subjected to insurance premium
increases, cap-and-trade systems, or other forms of regulation.
Antitrust should get more teeth, too. Corporate mergers and
acquisitions better scrutinized; often blocked. The breakdown of a
free market for a product or service is also a negative externality
for those consumers affected by the loss of competition in the
affected space.
Not really. Not unless anyone who wants public roads to be publicly
maintained out of the public purse is a socialist.
The US has a lot of the road network maintained publicly, but it is
currently one of the most right-wing countries you can find on earth.
Mind you it has privatized health care and bandwidth, and antitrust-
regulated those to ensure competitiveness and efficiency far too
little.
This is why some types of infrastructure need to be government-owned,
even though they're about the only things that should be. Competition
benefits consumers, but privately owned networks result in lack of
competition or lack of efficiency. If there's multiple parallel
networks it's hugely inefficient; if there's a single network, and its
owner naturally refuses to let its own competitors use it, then
there's no competition. Right now we actually have both -- parallel
cable and DSL networks almost everywhere, and not enough competition
to boot, with only two choices of broadband provider per residence or
business.
Government should own the actual infrastructural hardware but contract
its maintenance and growth out to private industry. Telcos that
currently have no incentive to build out in rural areas will have --
the government is offering them money to do so. They won't however be
able to deny the right of competitors to coexist on the one network of
lines, and so they'll have to, well, compete. They'll have to bid for
those government contracts, as well as for customers. The government
obviously has to be completely neutral regarding the network traffic
-- no censorship, no terms of service save that the service providers
that directly rent the bandwidth from them must pay their rent on
time, and no snooping without a warrant and whatever other applicable
due process of law.
Actually, I'd technically hold the weaker position that key
infrastructure like roads and fiber (and health care and education!)
needs to be owned by (if not really operated by) non-profit
organizations, but in practise for anything critical to the whole
populace it should be government, held accountable by the usual
mechanisms involving polling booths, legislative assemblies, and all
that stuff. Private organizations are often accountable to basically
no-one, and even when nonprofit are not obligated to bow to the will
of the people. (Wikimedia foundation comes to mind.)
You completely misread me. I don't think "sin taxes" per se, or
imposing morality of the sort people largely don't agree on, is a good
idea either. I was suggesting, rather, that things that end up
imposing on the health system or environment get taxed. Things with
proven negative externalities. I'd be the last one to suggest taxes
for sleeping with someone else's wife or things like that; that's for
private people to decide and cope with privately -- up until someone
decides to actually get violent, which happens all too often, mind.
Actually I probably am more centrist than anything else. Left on
infrastructure not being privately owned; right on not too much market
meddling except key infrastructure and regulating the areas where the
market doesn't naturally correct negative externalities by making the
manufacturer bear the costs in some indirect way (e.g. pollution;
global warming; unsafe products that place other people besides the
user at risk, e.g. badly-designed automobiles); civil libertarian,
etc.
So, for data, I should therefore expect to pay for bandwidth? Well
guess what -- I do, in fact, pay for the bandwidth that I use. Ditto
the storage space/media where the data gets put.
T
Twisted
No, but the law is (or rather, was supposed to be) developed to
maximize the benefit to society.
Corporations can try to screw the customer and create artificial
scarcity. The government should, up to a point (outright fraud and
actual violence/theft), let them. The government should not actually
assist them, or obstruct or even criminalize customers getting around
these corporations' attempts. The government should be neutral in this
case. Instead it sides with big business in this case.
T
Twisted
I'm not against companies having trade secrets and TRYING to keep them
secret. I am against government assisting/enforcing any such secrecy,
or criminalizing consumers' and competitors' prying into the secrets.
Those trying to create artificial scarcity should be on their own in
their fight against the "evil" consumer; without government
assistance. In fact the government should be neutral, neither helping
the consumer nor the vendor in these cases, although it should step in
with antitrust legislation if mergers or other market activities would
leave one vendor lacking competition.
G
Gordon Beaton
L
Lew
It's not our responsibility here to do your off-topic research. That is
incredibly arrogant of you. How about you show some respect?
Fortunately for you, Gordon is a very nice person.
incredibly arrogant of you. How about you show some respect?
Gordon said:
Fortunately for you, Gordon is a very nice person.
O
Oliver Wong
Bent C Dalager said:
This is already happening, actually. Google for "Private WoW Server"
and the 3rd hit is entitled "World of Warcraft top 100 - Private servers",
implying that there is a sufficiently greater than 100 private servers
available such that a top 100 list is meaningful.
[snip stuff I don't disagree with and have no further comments]
I guess you're wealthier than I am. $20 a month is enough to make me
stop and think "Is this really worth it?"
There are a couple of pseudo-free MMOs: You download the software and
play for free as much as you want. However, you need to pay (real life)
money for certain things. This may be merely cosmetic things like
clothing, or it may be arguably-critical things like a weapon powerful
enough to make overcoming your next challenge of "reasonable difficulty",
or it may be objectively-critical things like an item which is simply
required by the game rules to continue advancing your character.
I play around with some of them, but I find I tire of them relatively
quickly.
- Oliver
M
Mark Rafn
Wrong. With the subscription, he can laugh all the way to the bank.
The vendor is under very little obligation at all. With the vast majority of
software, though, it will run forever, but your needs will change sooner or
later.
Sure. It didn't stop working under vista; it NEVER worked under vista.
It'll run forever under whatever OS you bought it for.
Not at all. The rental model makes no more guarantees about long-term
upgrades, the company staying in business or continuing to work on the
product, etc. than the sale model does.
Roedy Green said:
The vendor is under very little obligation at all. With the vast majority of
software, though, it will run forever, but your needs will change sooner or
later.
Sure. It didn't stop working under vista; it NEVER worked under vista.
It'll run forever under whatever OS you bought it for.
Not at all. The rental model makes no more guarantees about long-term
upgrades, the company staying in business or continuing to work on the
product, etc. than the sale model does.