The energy sector deregulation is a bad example, because it's not a case of the government going in and messing with a free market, it's with them taking something very far from a free market and trying to turn it into one overnight.
Anyways, the way the world works, there's really no such thing as a free market, and across various industries I think that various levels of "free market" ideals make sense. For a utility like energy or water it doesn't make sense for many reasons. As is usually the case, ideologues screaming for one side or the other tend to drown out the useful discussion we should be having about the middle ground, and really dumb decisions end up being made.
The government shouldn't force a company to support certain standards by making other formats illegal, what they should do is impose certain open formats/standards on government IT operations, and then companies can choose whether or not to support those standards, and then as a result of that support be able to sell their product to the government.
Governments are generally large enough customers that by adopting something internally, it will create a significant incentive for the market to follow.
I think they bought into their own hype. They thought they could make a machine so powerful that the Xbox 360 wouldn't be able to touch it, and that people would pay a ton of money for it. They also convinced themselves that the world was hungry for Blu-ray the same way that it had been for DVDs.
It turned out that $500-$600 was excessive for many people, the Cell processor didn't provide an insurmountable advantage, and PS3 games are not always graphically superior to 360 games. And while the Blu-ray player was certainly a selling point for some, most people are not nearly as interested in replacing their DVD's with Blu-ray movies. The difference to the consumer isn't nearly as a significant or compelling as the jump from VHS to DVD was.
Some consumers are demanding it, most don't care. And until Apple starts seeing customers purchasing non-Apple devices because of Flash, then they aren't "demanding" it in a way that matters to Apple.
No, it's just an explanation of why the whole flash argument (particularly Adobe's constant whining) was so silly. We're just now starting to see usable Flash on any mobile devices. If Flash is so useful on a mobile phone, why hasn't Adobe shown us?
While Apple has presented a number of different reasons why they don't want flash on iOS, one of their main examples is that flash would be a buggy, CPU and battery hog. And people have been saying that about flash since before the iPhone was even announced. If Adobe can show the world that they can write a good flash client for Android or whatever smartphones, then they blow a big hole in Apple's argument. Sure, that might not convince Steve Jobs, but if flash is as important and useful as Adobe says, then eventually consumers will demand it, and Apple will adapt or lose out.
I agree that there are many things wrong with how IP law currently works, and patents seem to be the most seriuosly flawed area. That being said, I think it's important to understand that copyright is very different from patents, and mixing them both into a discussion only serves to confuse the issues.
That's not to say that copyright doesn't have problems. But in this lemmings case, copyright law doesn't really do anything to keep this developer from making the type of game that he wants to make. It just means that he has to come up with his own name and his own art assets. Now making art assets isn't trivial, but it's not a particularly difficult problem. This compares rather favorably to the situation we see with patents where you have a hard time building anything even moderately complicated without violating patents from lots of different people.
Anyways, I agree with you at some level, IP law is flawed, especially in how it deals with software. But in this particular case, I don't really see any justification for this developer to feel that he has any rights to distribute a game using the Lemmings name or art assets.
No, I'm just saying that even though I have an ipad, there might be a few cases where I still want to print directions. This isn't a flaw with the iPad, it's not like I'm suggesting that Apple should give everyone a free printer to make up for it. But if I've got a printer on my home network already, why shouldn't the iPad be able to take advantage of it?
I expect that Apple will eventually develop a better system for printing from the iPad. It certainly wasn't a priority for them for the first gen, and that probably wasn't a bad decision. But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be useful.
*yawn* I don't know why you're worried, people like you keep telling everyone how much better Android is and how it's only a matter of months before Apple is eclipsed and irrelevant.
But whatever. If it wasn't for Apple and their iOS, Android would probably still be the same crappy blackberry ripoff that it was when Google bought it, actual useful tablets would still be years away, and the US mobile phone landscape would still totally suck, instead of just mostly sucking like it does now.
Yeah, I bought an iPad for two main reasons. One was to make Steve Ballmer cry himself to sleep, and the other was to make me better than my friends. My favorite hobby is to carry the iPad around at parties, show it off, and then explain to my friends how much better I am than them. Occasionally some jerk at the party will try to touch my iPad, and then I have to get all angry and storm out of the party and go home, but then I just get on internet message boards and tell random strangers how much better I am than them.
No kidding. These people couldn't possibly actually be enjoying something. That's unthinkable. They're just playing the role that their great leader Steve demands of them. This iPad crap is just a shiny fad. Just like the iPhone, and the iPod before it. Give it a year, and nobody will even remember these garbage devices, and Apple will continue it's slow sad slide towards irrelevance and bankruptcy.
Maybe I'm printing up directions to some lake a couple hours away where I'm going to go canoeing. I don't particularly want to take the iPad out on the water, and I also don't like the idea of leaving it back in my car baking in the sun in the parking lot.
You're oversimplifying the argument in both directions.
That being said, I'd rather see the true costs of our civilization reflected in higher prices than in direct taxation or willfully ignored environmental damages.
Like the OP said, we're going to end up paying for it one way or another at the end of the day. I'd rather see the costs upfront so that I can make more informed purchasing decisions.
As a stockholder, you would have legal channels with which to pursue your complaints within Sony. But a company making business decisions that you disagree with does not give you permission to ignore their IP rights.
It's already legal to create clones of games, irregardless of when it was released. There are lemmings clones available already for many platforms. You just can't use the title and artwork straight from the game that you're copying.
In this particular case, you might say that it's obvious that Sony isn't interested in releasing lemmings for these other platforms, but that's a fairly subjective claim. Maybe they've had a couple of teams working on and off on an awesome new lemmings game for years, a la Duke Nukem Forever, yet mismanagement has caused it to continually fall through. I'll admit that that is a rather unlikely scenario for the Lemmings franchise, but it illustrates some of the problems with making assumptions about their intentions and then using those assumptions to justify overturning their IP rights.
Because they can be used to accomplish the same task, which is to provide me with video media that I feel like watching. How they technically go about accomplishing that task isn't as important to me as the end result, how easily I get to watch that video content.
A bicycle and a car are different in a lot of ways, but in the context of taking me down to the corner store to get a pack of gum, I can certainly compare the two in a useful manner.
The fact of the matter is that none of that stuff matters. Maybe they're restricting the platforms that they release it on because they think it will drive sales of the particular platforms where the game is available? That's their right.
It's interesting how Nintendo hasn't released any Mario games on the Xbox360. They most certainly could do it, they've easily got the resources to hire people to do the port, and they've had years and years of time in which they could have done it. And heck, they probably would've sold millions of copies that way. And yet they've chosen not to, because they'd rather use the games to drive sales of their hardware.
While you can certainly argue whether or not Sony restricting lemmings to their hardware is a good business move, it doesn't give you the authority to decide that their IP rights are suddenly irrelevant.
I disagree with you. I think it's perfectly acceptable to compare Hulu with torrents. The differences that you listed are basically irrelevant to me for 99% of the video I watch over the internet. I very rarely feel the need to watch a TV show more than once, so keeping the file is of no interest to me. That being the case, how I might choose to organize those files is irrelevant. And as for software, if it doesn't run in the web browser I already have installed on my computer, than it's not worth my time.
As for the iPad vs. eInk issue, I fail to see why you couldn't compare them in a useful way, depending on what your priorities are.
There's a difference between being sold defective product and knowingly selling said defective product. Will Daily Kos likely and deservedly lose some credibility from this? Probably. But to say that they're a culprit is to imply that they were knowingly complicit in the fraud that they are alleging.
It's still probably a bigger market than the $100k+ roadster model. While it's by no means certain that they'll become profitable and ultimately successful, I think that if you take a longer-term view, their plan makes sense. They'll keep working hard and continue to push the costs of the good technology down, rather than creating a piece of garbage version just for the sake of being cheap. And in the meantime, their higher priced vehicles will appeal to wealthier consumers, for whom the financial risks of buying less proven technology are less dangerous.
Ok, well if that's your point then you probably should have said that. But either way, I fail to see how the fact that people differently prioritize the various aspects of marriage makes all of those aspects irrelevant.
What's the point of playing a sport, considering the high probability that your team might lose? What's the point of starting a business, considering that most new businesses end up failing? What's the point of having kids, considering the high probability that they'll one day die?
Everything has risks and rewards. It's up to the individual to prioritize the rewards and judge the risks before making their decision.
I've only been married a few years, but it has been great so far, and the thought of having this amazing person around for the rest of my life compares pretty well to the potential suffering that I might have to go through if our marriage falls apart.
For most people, religious or not, marriage is a commitment between two people that has a basis more in emotion than in tax codes and legal ramifications. The specific terms of the commitment may vary depending on the individuals, and while some people are happy with open marriages, the expectation of fidelity is not restricted to those with religious beliefs.
If you got married strictly because of tax codes and legal ramifications, then that's a shame, because you're missing out on a lot of the good other reasons to get married.
Agreed, and this applies to other sports as well. A lot of the news of baseball over the past month or so dealt with perfect games by pitchers, in which the complete lack of offense by one of the teams was the interesting thing.
I think the mindset of more scoring = better game is mostly born out of casual fans, because scoring is generally exciting. Not that there's anything wrong with being a casual fan, but if that's all you're interested in being you should just accept that there are aspects of the game that you've chosen not to understand, and refrain from making your under-informed judgments about how the game should be played.
Slashdot Mirror
The energy sector deregulation is a bad example, because it's not a case of the government going in and messing with a free market, it's with them taking something very far from a free market and trying to turn it into one overnight.
Anyways, the way the world works, there's really no such thing as a free market, and across various industries I think that various levels of "free market" ideals make sense. For a utility like energy or water it doesn't make sense for many reasons. As is usually the case, ideologues screaming for one side or the other tend to drown out the useful discussion we should be having about the middle ground, and really dumb decisions end up being made.
The government shouldn't force a company to support certain standards by making other formats illegal, what they should do is impose certain open formats/standards on government IT operations, and then companies can choose whether or not to support those standards, and then as a result of that support be able to sell their product to the government.
Governments are generally large enough customers that by adopting something internally, it will create a significant incentive for the market to follow.
I think they bought into their own hype. They thought they could make a machine so powerful that the Xbox 360 wouldn't be able to touch it, and that people would pay a ton of money for it. They also convinced themselves that the world was hungry for Blu-ray the same way that it had been for DVDs.
It turned out that $500-$600 was excessive for many people, the Cell processor didn't provide an insurmountable advantage, and PS3 games are not always graphically superior to 360 games. And while the Blu-ray player was certainly a selling point for some, most people are not nearly as interested in replacing their DVD's with Blu-ray movies. The difference to the consumer isn't nearly as a significant or compelling as the jump from VHS to DVD was.
Some consumers are demanding it, most don't care. And until Apple starts seeing customers purchasing non-Apple devices because of Flash, then they aren't "demanding" it in a way that matters to Apple.
No, it's just an explanation of why the whole flash argument (particularly Adobe's constant whining) was so silly. We're just now starting to see usable Flash on any mobile devices. If Flash is so useful on a mobile phone, why hasn't Adobe shown us?
While Apple has presented a number of different reasons why they don't want flash on iOS, one of their main examples is that flash would be a buggy, CPU and battery hog. And people have been saying that about flash since before the iPhone was even announced. If Adobe can show the world that they can write a good flash client for Android or whatever smartphones, then they blow a big hole in Apple's argument. Sure, that might not convince Steve Jobs, but if flash is as important and useful as Adobe says, then eventually consumers will demand it, and Apple will adapt or lose out.
I agree that there are many things wrong with how IP law currently works, and patents seem to be the most seriuosly flawed area. That being said, I think it's important to understand that copyright is very different from patents, and mixing them both into a discussion only serves to confuse the issues.
That's not to say that copyright doesn't have problems. But in this lemmings case, copyright law doesn't really do anything to keep this developer from making the type of game that he wants to make. It just means that he has to come up with his own name and his own art assets. Now making art assets isn't trivial, but it's not a particularly difficult problem. This compares rather favorably to the situation we see with patents where you have a hard time building anything even moderately complicated without violating patents from lots of different people.
Anyways, I agree with you at some level, IP law is flawed, especially in how it deals with software. But in this particular case, I don't really see any justification for this developer to feel that he has any rights to distribute a game using the Lemmings name or art assets.
No, I'm just saying that even though I have an ipad, there might be a few cases where I still want to print directions. This isn't a flaw with the iPad, it's not like I'm suggesting that Apple should give everyone a free printer to make up for it. But if I've got a printer on my home network already, why shouldn't the iPad be able to take advantage of it?
I expect that Apple will eventually develop a better system for printing from the iPad. It certainly wasn't a priority for them for the first gen, and that probably wasn't a bad decision. But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be useful.
*yawn* I don't know why you're worried, people like you keep telling everyone how much better Android is and how it's only a matter of months before Apple is eclipsed and irrelevant.
But whatever. If it wasn't for Apple and their iOS, Android would probably still be the same crappy blackberry ripoff that it was when Google bought it, actual useful tablets would still be years away, and the US mobile phone landscape would still totally suck, instead of just mostly sucking like it does now.
Yeah, I bought an iPad for two main reasons. One was to make Steve Ballmer cry himself to sleep, and the other was to make me better than my friends. My favorite hobby is to carry the iPad around at parties, show it off, and then explain to my friends how much better I am than them. Occasionally some jerk at the party will try to touch my iPad, and then I have to get all angry and storm out of the party and go home, but then I just get on internet message boards and tell random strangers how much better I am than them.
Best five hundred bucks I ever spent.
So what? As long as you're upfront about the inherent bias in your sample, there still might be some value in your poll.
No kidding. These people couldn't possibly actually be enjoying something. That's unthinkable. They're just playing the role that their great leader Steve demands of them. This iPad crap is just a shiny fad. Just like the iPhone, and the iPod before it. Give it a year, and nobody will even remember these garbage devices, and Apple will continue it's slow sad slide towards irrelevance and bankruptcy.
Maybe I'm printing up directions to some lake a couple hours away where I'm going to go canoeing. I don't particularly want to take the iPad out on the water, and I also don't like the idea of leaving it back in my car baking in the sun in the parking lot.
You're oversimplifying the argument in both directions.
That being said, I'd rather see the true costs of our civilization reflected in higher prices than in direct taxation or willfully ignored environmental damages.
Like the OP said, we're going to end up paying for it one way or another at the end of the day. I'd rather see the costs upfront so that I can make more informed purchasing decisions.
As a stockholder, you would have legal channels with which to pursue your complaints within Sony. But a company making business decisions that you disagree with does not give you permission to ignore their IP rights.
It's already legal to create clones of games, irregardless of when it was released. There are lemmings clones available already for many platforms. You just can't use the title and artwork straight from the game that you're copying.
In this particular case, you might say that it's obvious that Sony isn't interested in releasing lemmings for these other platforms, but that's a fairly subjective claim. Maybe they've had a couple of teams working on and off on an awesome new lemmings game for years, a la Duke Nukem Forever, yet mismanagement has caused it to continually fall through. I'll admit that that is a rather unlikely scenario for the Lemmings franchise, but it illustrates some of the problems with making assumptions about their intentions and then using those assumptions to justify overturning their IP rights.
Because they can be used to accomplish the same task, which is to provide me with video media that I feel like watching. How they technically go about accomplishing that task isn't as important to me as the end result, how easily I get to watch that video content.
A bicycle and a car are different in a lot of ways, but in the context of taking me down to the corner store to get a pack of gum, I can certainly compare the two in a useful manner.
The fact of the matter is that none of that stuff matters. Maybe they're restricting the platforms that they release it on because they think it will drive sales of the particular platforms where the game is available? That's their right.
It's interesting how Nintendo hasn't released any Mario games on the Xbox360. They most certainly could do it, they've easily got the resources to hire people to do the port, and they've had years and years of time in which they could have done it. And heck, they probably would've sold millions of copies that way. And yet they've chosen not to, because they'd rather use the games to drive sales of their hardware.
While you can certainly argue whether or not Sony restricting lemmings to their hardware is a good business move, it doesn't give you the authority to decide that their IP rights are suddenly irrelevant.
It certainly does matter, and if you don't see the difference it's only because you've decided not to.
I disagree with you. I think it's perfectly acceptable to compare Hulu with torrents. The differences that you listed are basically irrelevant to me for 99% of the video I watch over the internet. I very rarely feel the need to watch a TV show more than once, so keeping the file is of no interest to me. That being the case, how I might choose to organize those files is irrelevant. And as for software, if it doesn't run in the web browser I already have installed on my computer, than it's not worth my time.
As for the iPad vs. eInk issue, I fail to see why you couldn't compare them in a useful way, depending on what your priorities are.
There's a difference between being sold defective product and knowingly selling said defective product. Will Daily Kos likely and deservedly lose some credibility from this? Probably. But to say that they're a culprit is to imply that they were knowingly complicit in the fraud that they are alleging.
It's still probably a bigger market than the $100k+ roadster model. While it's by no means certain that they'll become profitable and ultimately successful, I think that if you take a longer-term view, their plan makes sense. They'll keep working hard and continue to push the costs of the good technology down, rather than creating a piece of garbage version just for the sake of being cheap. And in the meantime, their higher priced vehicles will appeal to wealthier consumers, for whom the financial risks of buying less proven technology are less dangerous.
Ok, well if that's your point then you probably should have said that. But either way, I fail to see how the fact that people differently prioritize the various aspects of marriage makes all of those aspects irrelevant.
What's the point of playing a sport, considering the high probability that your team might lose? What's the point of starting a business, considering that most new businesses end up failing? What's the point of having kids, considering the high probability that they'll one day die?
Everything has risks and rewards. It's up to the individual to prioritize the rewards and judge the risks before making their decision.
I've only been married a few years, but it has been great so far, and the thought of having this amazing person around for the rest of my life compares pretty well to the potential suffering that I might have to go through if our marriage falls apart.
For most people, religious or not, marriage is a commitment between two people that has a basis more in emotion than in tax codes and legal ramifications. The specific terms of the commitment may vary depending on the individuals, and while some people are happy with open marriages, the expectation of fidelity is not restricted to those with religious beliefs.
If you got married strictly because of tax codes and legal ramifications, then that's a shame, because you're missing out on a lot of the good other reasons to get married.
Wait a minute... so you're saying that when things need to be paid for, people end up paying for it? Wow, that's some amazing insight there.
Agreed, and this applies to other sports as well. A lot of the news of baseball over the past month or so dealt with perfect games by pitchers, in which the complete lack of offense by one of the teams was the interesting thing.
I think the mindset of more scoring = better game is mostly born out of casual fans, because scoring is generally exciting. Not that there's anything wrong with being a casual fan, but if that's all you're interested in being you should just accept that there are aspects of the game that you've chosen not to understand, and refrain from making your under-informed judgments about how the game should be played.