Oliver said:
The way you phrase this paragraph makes it sound like you're
egocentric pirate: "I should be allowed to download all movie, software,
games, etc. I want, because I wasn't gonna pay for those things ANYWAY, so
it's not like they're losing any profits, etc."
Your putting words in my mouth does not a cogent argument make.
I disagree with this philosophy.
Feel free to. I don't have a problem with that -- it's called free
speech. I just have a problem with people whose philosophy is
totalitarian control and communistic monopolizing and price-fixing
being able to actually impose their wishes unilaterally on everyone
else, which is unfortunately currently the case.
[NDA-like contracts, which like all contracts are not automatically
transitive to bind on every third party that happens upon a copy
somehow]
Which is an entirely different matter. IANAL, but I believe this is
essentially how copyright laws work in my country and I'm satisfied with
it. (Incidentally, I thought I'd mention that you seem to take an overly
America-centric view of things).
I'm fairly sure UK copyright law is binding on third parties, and also
has the niggling issue of being automatic on everything, the default
option not requiring an explicit notice, with all the bad consequences
that that has (outlined elsewhere in this thread, primarily by Bent).
Factually false. I'm guessing what you're referring to is my argument
that software developers should be allowed to charge money for their
software. I have nothing against other software developers making
competing products, even when those competing products are
"fully-substitutable" (though in practice, virtually no software is
fully-sbustituable with another software unless the two are identical).
Exactly my point. IN PRACTISE the only alternative a user has is to
"buy from the company store". That's called "a goddamn monopoly", and
therefore violates one of the fundamental principles of a free market
economy, aka capitalism -- namely that there actually be this thing
called "a free market". Having to buy from the company store or do
without is emphatically not a free market and smells like communism.
Any case of state-granted subsidies, monopolies, and other perks being
sprinkled around like there's no tomorrow smacks of socialism.
Guess what? The enforcement side, snooping on and interfering forcibly
with downstream uses and third-party transactions involving copies,
violates the OTHER fundamental principle of a free market economy,
strong property rights! (And in that light, calling copyrights or
patents "property rights" themselves is a complete travesty. They're
"monopoly privileges" and they actually *erode* property rights.)
Questions are based on false premise.
Stop dodging my questions with this repetitive, vaguely insulting, and
annoying non-answer. It doesn't help your case any.
This is a common mistake: to assume that games are interchangeable or
fully substitutable.
It's also a mistake I never make.
A lot of community content sucks.
A lot of community content rocks.
Do you have a point here?
The vast majority
of games (and I'm counting a player submitted mod as a "game") I've played
were free, and yet the vast majority of games I've actually enjoyed cost
money.
90% of everything is crap. You've proven nothing, save that you make
more careful decisions about spending serious money than you do about
using small amounts of bandwidth and time, which is perfectly normal.
You just avoided the vast majority of commercial games that were crap
and a smaller fraction of the free ones that were crap, because trying
free ones cost so much less.
This is a common mistake for amateurs to make when trying to use
statistics as evidence of something, BTW.
What "price-protection" do you perceive for games? The request from
the developers to not make copies of their software and distribute it over
the internet?
The request from the developers (and its being enforced by the fucking
government!) to have an effective noncompete agreement with everyone
who happens upon a copy, and therefore a monopoly, yes.
The sole effect of allowing arbitrary use and redistribution by users
would be that market forces would drive the price of a copy down to
zero. Therefore trying to strongarm this into not happening is an
attempt at price protection, nothing more and nothing less.
Can you support this assertion?
Eh, have you looked out a window lately?
Productivity tools: Red Hat Inc.
Culture needs to be participatory: notice the mass civil disobedience
in creating unauthorized mashups, sequels, and the like to assorted
things. Also notice that the "corporate sanctioned" subset of modern
culture is all pap, Britney and suchlike, but that it wasn't always
this way, e.g. thousands of years ago. Culture is turning into
monoculture, and when media concentration reaches the point of there
being only one media company left standing unabsorbed by another, it
will have become one. Or rather, it won't have because the mass civil
disobedience will turn into frank revolt before that happens.
Windows is not indispensible. Many people make it through life just
fine without ever owning a personal computer (I'm not counting things like
computers which may be in their wristwatches or microwave ovens),
nevermind a copy of Windows.
Strawman argument. Windows is emphatically indispensible for certain
things or under certain circumstances.
I think we're talking past each other, then. I'm trying to tell you
what the world is like right now, and you're trying to tell me what you
think the world should be.
Nice try. No, you're not merely telling me what it's like right now,
you're defending that state of affairs as somehow being right or just.
I'm pointing out that it isn't, and why it isn't by the principles of
the capitalist democracies we live in.
Can you produce a screencast demonstrating the problem? I can't
reproduce your bug on my WinXP SP2 machine.
That's impossible, since you're using the same software I am, and
there's no logical reason for this behavior to depend on the hardware
or things like the MAC address or the user's name or anything.
So in other words, "no". And you wonder why your bug (which I'm unable
to reproduce) hasn't gotten fixed for over 10 years?
Same reason almost none of the others have -- Microsoft doesn't
provide an easy way to freely give them bug feedback, and furthermore
ignores nearly all of what feedback it does nonetheless receive.
You can't actually violate a "law of nature", else it wouldn't be a
"law of nature" by definition. Therefore, charging money for access to
information is not against a law of nature.
You're right -- you can't actually violate a law of nature. That is
why DRM schemes and other attempts to perfectly enforce copyright are
doomed to failure, and why they are observed in actual fact to have a
100% failure rate with copies escaping in every single significant
(reasonably popular) instance -- they are attempting to violate a law
of nature.
More specifically, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, via one of its
information-theory implications.
If you relax your statement a bit, to something like "It's unnatural
for information to not be free", then there's the usual counter of "lots
of things humans do is unnatural, such as developing cure for diseases,
etc."
There's the double-counter that "curing diseases is not harmful;
curtailing peoples' freedom to do harmless things is".
Okay, so that's one deal: You give the store money, and they give you
whatever's in the box.
But without any of the onerous conditions the manufacturer later tries
to claim.
You really should read the labels on buttons before you click on them.
I suspect the button you had clicked on had a label like "I AGREE" or
something similar. This is the deal that I'm talking about.
That's not a deal, that's interacting with an insentient piece of
software. A deal requires that I communicate with a living sentient
being my understanding and acceptance of foobar, in return for
quuxmumble.
What you're describing is my solo interaction, unwitnessed, with some
bits and bytes on MY COMPUTER, gyrating somewhere in its memory core,
and not even receiving any quuxmumble in exchange (since the right to
install and use the software is already granted by 17 USC Section
117(a)(1)).
If I made a "deal" with anything at all, it was with my own computer.
I'm fairly sure I am not legally bound by the terms of deals I make
with my computer, and even if I am, so what? My computer won't sue --
it isn't programmed to.
The argument "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" is invalid. The analog would be "This so called 'contract' is a dumb
piece of paper. It's not possible to make a deal with a piece of paper
anymore than it's possible to make a deal with a rock."
Clicking a button, unwitnessed, in a solo interaction with a piece of
software and signing, with a witness, a document after negotiating
with somebody are two very different things.
The piece of paper and the piece of software is presenting you with
text explaining to you the nature of the deal, and with whom you are
making the deal (or it should, or else it's poorly written).
Except that there is nobody there making a deal with me in one case.
The manufacturer is God knows where, and isn't offering me any
consideration in exchange anyway since copyright law already gives me
the right to use the software.
This applies to you in the UK too. Visit
http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ipr/IntellectualProperty.htm
and text-search for "Making temporary copies". Though it uses the
specific examples of viewing Web pages and sending faxen, it applies
to any transient copy that's part of normal use of a work -- such as
when installing and running software. You don't need to make any extra
deal with the copyright holder to be able to do so, so unless the so-
called "agreement" governs your doing something copyright law normally
restricts, such as distributing copies or derivative works, it isn't
providing you any consideration in exchange for what it asks of you,
and that makes it null and void under the contract laws of most
countries EVEN IF you accept the theory that something clicking in
some software on your computer autonomously actually constitutes the
signing of a binding contract.
And besides, what if a minor, or my cat, or somebody that can't read
English clicking randomly, or something accidentally falling on the
keyboard triggers the "Accept" button?
Who has "agreed" to anything then?
What for that matter if Bob clicks the button and Alice later
decompiles the code -- Alice didn't agree to anything, and Bob may
have agreed (under your theory) not to decompile the code but didn't
decompile the code. Hmm.
Anyway, this is clearly patently absurd (no pun unintended). You can't
form a binding contract by simply clicking some stuff in your
software. At minimum a network transaction of some kind would seem to
be required, and likely a human witness, under any sensible
interpretation of contract law.
If not, by reading this message and clicking "reply" you agree to wire
me the amount of $1,000,000 (one million) USD, payable in monthly
installments of $20,000 (twenty-thousand), with 25% annual interest
compounded monthly. If you reply, I will provide a P.O. box address to
which you may send U.S. money orders.
Yes, I think you do have a "weird" idea of what actually constitutes a
deal, in this context at least. First of all, a deal is not necessarily a
"binding contract", as you seem to imply.
A deal that isn't a "binding contract" is not legally enforceable. The
most someone can do for my violating such a deal is to not do business
with me anymore. So a Web forum can ban people that violate its AUP.
An ISP might stop serving someone who violates theirs. A software
vendor who ships me a bucket of bits with a "deal" I don't like can
shove their "deal" -- and if they don't like it they're free to refuse
to sell to me ever again (though I probably bought from a retail
outlet rather than the vendor themselves anyway, so it likely won't
matter).
And even a "deal" that is not a "binding contract" is still by
definition "you give me X and I'll give you Y". I don't notice the
software vendor offering me anything as my half of the so-called
bargain. I already have the software. I already even have the right to
install and use it under Title 17 Section 117(a)(1). They aren't
offering anything else, besides things I already have. Where's the
"deal" there? Only the GPL and its ilk offer me something new -- the
right to redistribute subject to certain conditions, which under
copyright law I did not legally have before.
The only case I can think of where a "deal" has been made at all is if
the "agreement" occurs via a Web form that guards access to the
download link. Then the deal is apparently in exchange for receiving
the copy, rather than in exchange for absolutely nothing. Even so, I
don't see what makes it remotely resemble "legally binding" given the
lack of a "meeting of the minds", any ability whatsoever to negotiate,
or any bargaining power on my side of the "deal". Those are generally
enough to void a supposed "contract". Lack of a signed piece of paper
they can cite as evidence of my having agreed to their "deal" might
also pose a wee problem; there's no proof I ever "agreed" to anything
whatsoever. Maybe I knew the download URL and pasted it into the
browser address bar, bypassing the form. Maybe I even found the
installer on a p2p net and never got it from their Web site at all, in
case the site is configured to block access to the download URL until
the same IP submits the "agree" form. The best they might do if I did
click that form is have their server log all such form submissions,
then find it later, print a copy, and show that as evidence that I
"agreed". I can then point out that with no witnesses, they don't know
it wasn't a cat, a glitch in my computer, or someone other than me.
Maybe I saw the "agreement", left the room without clicking anything,
came back, and found this file downloaded. Maybe this means someone
else agreed to it and then left me the file as a gift, no strings
attached.
If you make a promise to your
friend to meet up in at your "secret spot" 20 years later, that's a deal.
There's no signature, and no witnesses (other than the two parties
involved).
And they can't sue me or have me arrested for not showing up, either,
under the laws here, or under UK law. They can decide not to be my
friend anymore. Perhaps I can live with that.
Why are you bringing all this up? I can only guess that you're trying
to argue that what you're doing is legal or something along those lines.
What I'm doing is writing Usenet posts to combat a torrent of bogosity
that might affect impressionable persons. That isn't illegal here --
we have this nifty thing called the First Amendment that, your
accusing tone implies, you rightpondians evidently lack.
I never claimed what you were doing was illegal. You're just
unnecessarily bringing in irrelevant points into the discussion, things
which are not even under dispute.
You certainly appear to be disputing them.
Of course, you've made it fairly obvious that you have a vested
interest here. And now you've accused me of having an agenda beyond
simple argumentation and bogosity-combat.
Well, here I think the water gets muddier... Earlier, you mentioned
that matter-based products and information-based products should receive
the same treatment, right? Well, if someone acquires a laptop illegally
(e.g. it fell off the back of a truck), and then sold it to me, and the
police eventually track down the laptop to me, they are allowed to
confiscate it from me to return it to its original owner even if *I*
personally did not break any laws (that's the law in my country, anyway).
There's a big difference here: in the CD-copying case nothing was
stolen.
In your scenario, the original owner of the laptop is deprived of it
until it is returned. In the case that Kevin copies a CD for me, no
recording industry corporation is missing a CD they deserve to get
back. They are missing a CD Kevin bought, but Kevin paid for it (by
hypothesis). If they want it back they can always buy it back from
Kevin at whatever price Kevin is willing to accept for it. As for
little old me, in this hypothetical scenario I have an mp3 file, or a
burned CD, but I don't have any CD the recording company used to
possess, unless they sell blank CDs, and if so I paid for that too. If
they want it back I might be willing to sell it to them ...
Kevin also still has his CD despite the copy being made. I don't have
anything of Kevin's he might want back, either.
Here we assume that each transactions was consensual with respect to
the two parties involved in it -- Kevin bought the CD, Kevin permitted
me to have the copy, and any blank CD I burned I purchased too.
The question is what is the closest analog to this when applied to
information-based goods?
If I take Kevin's CD without asking, and sell it to Katie, the police
can take the CD from Katie and return it to Kevin.
Back to your laptop scenario, if Alice has a laptop, Bob takes it
without asking, and Bob sells the stolen laptop to Charlie, the police
can take the laptop from Charlie and return it to Alice.
What happens if, instead, Alice has a laptop and Bob buys parts and
builds a clone of Alice's laptop with them, then sells this new laptop
to Charlie? Is there any logical reason for the police to take
Charlie's laptop and give it to Alice in this scenario? Is there any
logical reason for a sane and just society to empower them to do so?
I personally don't see the relevance. Let's say I agree with you and
that yes, businesses are trying to create a "no-lose" situation. So what?
This doesn't conflict with anything said earlier.
It means it's not a proper free market, which is bad, mmkay?
More like if I had predicted what your future (now past) postings
would have been... Previously, it sounded like you wanted all software
developers to give away their software for free. Only now did you clarify
that you, instead, wanted to abolish copyright. These are two completely
different desires.
Then you have a poor reading comprehension ability. But then, everyone
here surely already knows that. Right at the start I objected to the
OP's desire to cripple the functionality of some software they were
developing in order to annoy users and extort money from them, rather
than just sell freely-redistributable copies ala Red Hat *or even just
sell copyright-encumbered (but DRM-free) copies*.
I disagree. Crappy products can exist in a free market too, you know.
Therefore, the existence of crappy products does not necessarily indicate
a market failure.
No, it's the absence of less crappy alternatives in many cases that
points to market failure.
Also, it's a symptom of market failure when a crappy product is crappy
not because they put in X effort to make it cheaply instead of the
much bigger amount Y of effort to make a good product, but because
they actually put in Y effort and then Z *more* effort to make it
*worse* to price discriminate and artificially segment the market.
In a smoothly functioning free market, a company that puts in Y effort
to make a product Foobar, then sells this at price P and puts in Z
*more* effort to make a crummy Foobar Lite to sell at price Q << P, is
going to be eaten alive by a competitor that puts in Y effort to make
a product Bazquux interchangeable with Foobar and sells Bazquux at
price Q. It has more power than Foobar Lite, and the same power as but
a lower price than Foobar, which makes it compete successfully with
both, one on quality and the other on price. Both companies are
putting in at least Y effort but Foobar's maker is putting in more.
Bazquux's maker is putting out a product that by itself is superior to
TWO of Foobar's maker's products with lower operating costs, which is
an obvious case of superior efficiency.
So no company with half a brain pulls shenanigans like Foobar Lite
unless it has a monopoly on all substitutable goods. A monopoly is
prima facie evidence of market failure, so the existence of products
like Foobar Lite is likewise evidence of market failure.
It doesn't have to involve copyright. Before Intel had competitors
like AMD making interchangeable CPUs, they made the 486DX, at a
certain amount of effort Y per chip. Then they put in effort Z on some
chips to damage the FPU component and sold those more cheaply as a
486SX. Unless they were selling the 486SX at a loss, which I doubt,
they could have not crippled them and still been profitable. That
means the difference in price between the SX and DX was pure rent. If
AMD had been around then, they'd have put in Y effort to make a 486DX
clone and sold it at the SX price point to eat Intel alive. Intel only
dared do something this awful to its customers (give them less while
doing more work) because they had a monopoly at that time on x86-
compatible CPUs. You don't see them pulling these kinds of shenanigans
now, do you?
[snip more stuff as a result of me describing the world as it is and
Twisted describing the world as it "should" be.]
See above.
[...]
It's factually false
**** you. This is unproductive and it's insulting. You're basically
calling me a liar, and in public too.
I claim that there are other "experts" (but note that you've avoided
answering my question as to what criterias you consider an necessary to
receive the title of "expert") who support Vista.
Name an "expert" (IYHO) who publicly claims Vista is a better choice
for the average consumer than XP SP2. (Any SP2, including regular,
pro, media center edition, 32-bit or 64, etc.)
Would you consider me an independent, consumer-minded software
evaluator? Why or why not?
Of course not. You're a pro-Microsoft nut. I don't even know why
you're hanging out here rather than at the C# newsgroup. Or maybe it's
because C# doesn't rate its own newsgroup yet? (Does it, in fact, have
one yet?)
I should also note that some people buy Vista to try it without
necessarily deciding to stick with it, or buy it and try it out of
sheer morbid curiosity. Myself, when I want to derive entertainment by
observing the minutiae of a slow-motion train wreck, I prefer to do it
from elsewhere than standing in the middle of the tracks, but that's
probably just me.
Some are probably already being forced to use it at work, the poor
souls, and maybe even at home to stay in synch with their work
computers with respect to Office version and suchlike.
None of these are evidence of Vista's superiority to anything higher
on the evolutionary ladder than the common cockroach.
Oh, not this again... Are you going to snip every argument you are
unable to address, labelling it "insults"?
I quoted your line. I can't "address" it because it is basically
content-free. It made no attempt to actually argue against my
preceding point. In fact it is similar to what you just accused me of,
posting a boilerplate content-free response to arguments you are
unable to address.
If some of the arguments I make are beyond you, I can't offer much
assistance I'm afraid. Technology that provably increases IQ scores,
even temporarily, simply isn't available off the shelf to the average
consumer yet. Nevertheless, with repeated study you might eventually
have an insight into them and be able someday to comprehend and thus
to respond more intelligently.
If you ask a question which is based on a false premise, how am I
supposed to answer it, except to tell you that it is a false premise?
You could start by making a cogent argument stating what the premise
is and your reasons for believing it to be false, instead of making a
blanket assertion that some unspecified premise somewhere in what I
wrote is false without evidence. I can't rebut that, because I don't
even know what premise you're referring to. I'd gladly bolster it with
more evidence in its favor if I did. But I'm guessing you'd prefer I
just shut up and let you have the last word instead, bogus though that
last word would therefore likely be.
If I
were to ask you "Why is copyright and intellectual property the greatest
thing in the world?" you could not actually answer the question because it
is based on the premise that copyright and intellectual property actually
is the greatest thing in the world, whereas you believe it isn't.
Yes, but I'd explain why I disagreed, rather than simply say some
unspecified premise of yours was false.
I could have responded to your WHOLE POST with "Based on a false
premise and nonsensical." since I disagree with just about everything
in it, but I chose to give a detailed response instead. For that
matter, you could have responded to any of mine in like fashion, since
you seem to disagree with everything in them, yet you choose to do so
only in response to a narrow subset of paragraphs in each of my posts
and give detailed attempts at rebuttals to the rest. I find this
interesting and will now be looking for patterns in which you respond
to with argumentation and which you respond to with a handwave that
essentially just means "I don't agree".
If that's your criteria for "everyone that matters", then I've met
some counter-examples to your claim.
BTW, my criteria for "everyone that matters" is "the people who are
making the buying decisions"
Well, it's easy to see where you went wrong, then. The original
question was which was the superior Web server, IIS or Apache?
Obviously the one that works better when employed as a Web server. The
one that crashes less, screws up responding to requests less, admits
fewer intruders that proceed to deface the site or add spam or a 1x1
iframe that loads malicious code when visitors subsequently arrive who
have vulnerable browsers, and so forth. Which happens to be Apache.
IIS admits far more intruders, crashes all the time, screws up (with
e.g. spurious 500-series errors) more often, collapses under heavy
traffic and stops responding at lower traffic volumes given the same
hardware strength than Apache ... Every benchmark, every security
comparison, and the everyday decisions of millions of web masters all
point to Apache being superior. It's also worth noting as I've said
before that it's the only one of the two with the property that a
substantial fraction of web masters feel proud enough of using it to
trumpet the fact publicly on every page of their site.
since the context that generated this
subdiscussion is you're wondering whether Microsoft is seriously trying to
compete against Apache using IIS.
You're making that up out of whole cloth. You claimed that Apache was
not superior to IIS, which I am rebutting. Apparently because I'm not
only right, but cleaning your clock in that particular department,
you've decided to try to redefine it to be about something that I
never argued against.
Microsoft is, of course, seriously trying to compete against Apache
using IIS, albeit miserably failing.
I'm genuinely surprised that you think Microsoft is not trying to
compete against Apache.
You're just making that up. At no time did I ever claim anything of
the sort, in this thread or anywhere else, ever.
Why not? The Enron Scandal had started in the 1990s and was only
discovered around 2001. Sounds like pretty sneaky behaviour to me.
A rational crook would have embezzled a fair bit and then floated away
on a golden parachute to a non-extradition-treaty country. This one
stuck around greedily trying to grab more and more until the amount
missing became so large that it could not possibly be concealed
anymore, then promptly got caught.
Also, not true, and I recommend you read the Corporation, a book I had
recommended to you earlier this thread.
If you know of a download URL (cannot be behind a paywall or
registerwall) of the full text of the book I may well do so. Otherwise
you cannot use it as that's not fighting fair. I'm certainly not
paying money (and for all I know, it will end up going to you!) just
to debunk some of the BS you've been posting in cljp lately! Letting
you cost me money would also be letting you win.
In any event, the logic in the paragraph I wrote that you quoted
directly above appears to be impeccable. If you have a reason to
believe it is flawed, provide some reasoning rather than handwaving it
with a reference to a (probably unfree) document that none of the rest
of us has likely ever read and that none of the rest of us likely have
ready access to.
It's your theory. If you disagree, are you therefore abandoning it and
capitulating this silly fight? If so, I win, and feel free to shut up
now.
If you mean you don't think that it torpedoes your theory, think
again. A rational self-maximizing corporation would not embezzle from
itself and then get totally destroyed while hemmorhaging money,
ticking off customers, ruining shareholders, and ending up a smoking
pile of cinders, which is what appears to have happened in this case.
Regarding it as a monolithic entity, it appears to have spontaneously
decided to commit suicide one bright sunny day without any prior
warning or any obvious intolerable externally-imposed circumstances
that might provoke a rational being to make the pain stop in the only
way they could.
A person in good health, with no problems at work or in their love
life, millions of dollars, no skeletons in the closet or legal issues,
and many years of these remaining true to expect statistically, jumps
to their death from a 17th-story balcony. Was that person rational? If
you say they were, please justify this with some reasoning.
I think you failed to understand what my "theory" is (but actually, I
never gave a theory, I gave a model). I'll repeat what I said for your
benefit:
Theory, model, whatever -- it tries to predict and it fails miserably.
Shall we try again now?
Later on, I said (but cannot find the exact quote, so this is a
paraphrasing): "A Rational utilitarian is a better model for corporations
than an emotional anthropomorph".
Don't tell me this is you redefining "better" again. Earlier you
redefined "IIS is better than Apache" as "IIS is marketed more
aggressively than Apache", for all intents and purposes, and switched
to discussing how Microsoft is trying aggressively to compete with
Apache as if that somehow proved your claims. Are you now claiming
that your model is "better" because you are trying aggressively to
compete with my model, or something like that, rather than claiming
that it actually makes better predictions?
Actually, if that's what they thought, it'd still be rational.
No, it isn't. The hypothetical promise of liability-shielding came
from a politician. The promises of politicians are composed of over
99% pure LI3. Therefore it is not rational for anyone who isn't very
young and naïve to believe any such promise without some serious
evidence that it's actually true. This particular (hypothetical)
promise obviously wasn't. And I doubt you believe it at all likely
that the embezzler was young and naïve given that they successfully
rose to a high place in a multi-billion-dollar corporation's inner
executive class and held it for some time.
In fact, the embezzler was irrational in precisely the same manner
exhibited by a chronic gambler who expects to eventually beat the
house and loses his shirt at the craps tables for his efforts. Only
the gambler harms at worst his family and himself, while the embezzler
did much greater damage to a far larger assortment of affected
parties.
If they thought the Bush Administration would protect them with
probability 60%, and that the utility they'd gain is 100 "profit points",
that's an expected utility of 60pp. If the alternative was a more
conservative approach which gave a 90% probability of gaining 65 "profit
points", this alternative action gives only 58.5 utility. Better to take
the first action.
Yeah, and going to jail has a utility of minus how many pp? Also,
believing the protection probability is anything above a sliver of one
percent when the promise came from a politician is obviously not
rational itself, regardless of how rational they might have been in
using the dubious number 60 subsequently.
Also, anyone savvy engaged in this sort of situation should expect
that their benefactor's loyalties will do an abrupt 180 the instant
the benefactor's own self or close minions becomes at risk of scandal
or criminal investigation. At that moment, the rational benefactor
shreds all of the evidence that they were in any way complicit and
leaves the would-be benefactee standing alone to face whatever may
come. And doesn't warn them. Of course, they earlier made sure the
benefactee retained no evidence of the benefactor's aid...supposedly
as part of trying to get rid of "some of the evidence against us", one
assumes...
After scanning below, I don't see an answer. Typing either "Yes" or
"No" would have taken less effort than typing "See below." So which is it?
Is it "Yes"? Or is it "No"?
What you didn't see below was my mentioning that my model predicts
Enron-like events to occur frequently and yours predicts them to occur
rarely; in fact they appear to now occur frequently, but didn't
apparently used to.
I've never quite agreed that my model is best described by the term
"emotional anthropomorph", but to the extent that it isn't, your
question above is irrelevant and can only serve to attack a straw man
instead of what I have actually said here recently.
This is a scathing indictment of the current law then.
Yes. [Attempts to sell me something again -- I think]
If you agree, then why are you continuing to argue against my
suggested reforms and reasons for these to be superior to the current
legal landscape?
This is your guess. You don't have actual figures.
It is a very strongly educated guess. We have all of the following
evidence:
* They could use tighter QA to cut down on support costs. Satisfied
customers don't complain much. Tighter QA on software is a ridiculous
no-brainer since the added QA costs are fixed instead of proportional
to usage, but the removed support costs are proportional to usage.
Added QA for software always wins in the long term.
* Offshoring support will cost X% of your customer retention rate and
will alienate potential new customers. If you gain customers at a
certain rate, and furthermore each customer buys N items on average,
you end up with eventually having had some number K of customers for
the product and KN sales at whatever margin, for a profit proportional
to KN. Offshoring support reduces N more or less directly and reduces
K at the same time by making customers warn would-be customers that
support is awful and they should shop elsewhere. It doesn't take a
genius to note that the loss is quadratic rather than linear. That's
bad news. The savings might be quadratic too, since one supposes
support costs proportional to KN, but this only comes out to be a win
if the expected support costs per unit exceed the expected margin per
unit. If that's the case your real problem was that you either priced
too low, or you suck. Either way, you save even more money by
eliminating support entirely in this case, and maybe more still by not
even trying to sell this particular line of products at all.
It follows that we should mainly expect offshoring support by a
rational company for products that are loss-leaders and whose
dependent is supported onshore -- even offshoring support for the
razor but not for the blades may be bad, since razor sales being hurt
will hurt the blade sales you make money on.
* There's also the empirical evidence: companies that offshored
support often run into financial trouble shortly after due to sagging
sales volumes; some are stupid enough to actually wonder why. Some
onshore their support again and recover. Some die. Some have a
monopoly lock-in, and tell the customers to go **** themselves, and
the customers have to just grin and go hunting for some lube. These
last, of course, make my original point.
Actually, no, quite the opposite. My *model* predicts that companies
will try to do whatever they think will make their them the most profit.
Enron followed my model (they made nearly 50 billion of pure profit
according to your figures).
I don't know what the actual figures are, but I think it's safe to say
they were forced to give up at least as much as they embezzled. Also,
Enron didn't make anything, some embezzlers at the top may have gotten
away with some money. More got caught and the company name is
certainly ruined as it's synonymous with "a catastrophically bad
investment" these days.
You say "Mine" implying that you have a model and/or a theory? If so,
can you actually state what it is? Is your model that corporations are
emotional anthropomorphs?
I stated what it was in an earlier posting; if you want to reread it
go ahead and reread it as I'm not stopping you. I would not agree that
your description is the most accurate possible, though, no.
Okay, good. Earlier, it sounded like you *were* doubting that.
That's probably because you have an IQ somewhere between that of a
stone and that of a larger rock with river moss growing on it. It
certainly isn't because it was true, or I'd said anything to imply or
suggest that it was.
I'm amused that you find natural immunity to ads to be a form of
craziness.
What natural immunity? You noticed and remembered the extravagant pro-
IIS claims in a bunch of them, so you're hardly naturally immune to
their somewhat-dubious charms.
You went on to dispute my claim that
Apache is a better choice of Web server software, which implies that
you're not only not immune to the ads getting some fraction of your
attention (thus distracting it away from focusing on something
relevant to your task at the time), but furthermore you're not even
immune to being persuaded by the fucking things.
Just what ARE you immune to, then? Besides chicken pox, polio, mumps,
and rubella that is?
I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for that in
my post.
Your defense of IIS over Apache despite its obvious inferiority is
evidence aplenty.
I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for that in
my post.
I said that IIS was worse than Apache and you disagreed. I call that
evidence.
Hmm... Well, I disagree with your claim, then.
That's as insane as disagreeing with my claim that IIS is inferior to
Apache. I already TWICE mentioned that you can do less, more slowly,
with Vista and given hardware than you can with XP SP2 and the same
hardware, except for one single game you can play on Vista but not on
XP, and which a third-party thing might soon make XP able to run
anyway. If that's not evidence enough of Vista's inferiority (oh, and
did I mention it costs money versus sticking with your existing copy
of XP, and that it's full of crummy DRM that eats system resources and
can't be turned off despite you, the system administrator, considering
it unwanted, and a whole bunch of other stuff?) I don't know what the
**** it would take to convince you that it was. Documented evidence of
a computer bursting into flames shortly after Vista was installed
perhaps? Given the oft-reported gratuitous heavy continuous DRM-
related CPU use by Vista and a growing tendency for the cheaper
computer manufacturers to install inadequate CPU cooling to save a
buck and in the hopes that the buyer will never run it at near-100%
utilization for any length of time, it shouldn't be hard to find as
much Vista-linked porno for pyros on Youtube as it will take to
convince you. Search for some ... I dare ya.
At the Turing-Equivalent level, it may be true that Vista doesn't let
you do anything which XP doesn't let you do. From a more practical
perspective, your statement is false. I'll give you one example: The Vista
start button now has a search feature...
I just clicked the Start button. The second to last item on the right
hand side was Search, with a cute magnifying glass logo next to it. On
a WinXP SP2 box I keep around.
A wise "rational utilitiarian" person would not assume that everybody
has the same utility function that they do, and thus would not try to make
subjective statements into objective ones.
Even easier access to the "search", if it were true (and it clearly
isn't) that Vista provided such, would not be worth gobs of DRM. You
can find third-party search tools and add them to XP's Start menu
(including not in a submenu, by adding a shortcut to the top left part
of the main menu) anyway, which makes them just as accessible, and the
search tool can be perfectly good.
Meanwhile XP SP2 has better hardware support, better system
requirements/stability, better (i.e. much less) DRM, ...
Anyone choosing Vista for production use rather than just testing or
kicks despite this stuff is clearly irrational.
I guess you wouldn't consider me to be a savvy computer user, then.
You show few signs of being a savvy anything. Computer user, flame
warrior, copyright defender ... as far as I can tell you're mediocre
at all of these.
Well, not anymore. I got kind of fed up with their rhetoric tactics by
the beginning of the third chapter. I think the line that really got my
eyes rolling was:
<quote>
Competition is a good thing. That is why the NBA and the
Tour de France are so popular, and why we give our all at the
annual interdepartmental basketball game.
</quote>
You're going to ignore tons of cogent arguments because you don't like
the authors' *style*? That is irrational to the nth degree.
Oh, well. Your loss.
fallacies sprinkled throughout their treatise. "Hey, I love Basketball! I
guess I should support the abolishment of intellectual property too!"
Straw man, caricature, and about ten other things. They never
suggested such a chain of reasoning was valid and you know it.
And what information have you perceived to be "bogus and inaccurate"
so far in this thread, other than perhaps my claim that "Vista sucks" is
subjective?
Oh, such bogosity as suggestions that copyrights aren't bad, claims
that IIS is better than Apache (not just better-marketed), and
accusations that I lied (once) or wrote "nonsense" (numerous
times) ... that kind of thing. The usual twaddle and BS you run into
on usenet despite having killfiled every blatant spammer you saw.
