Ogg Theora is a product of a single company. It has not been standardized by any recognized standards organisation. That indeed makes it "proprietary". Proprietary \Pro*pri"e*ta*ry\, a. [L. proprietarius.] Belonging, or pertaining, to a proprietor; considered as property; owned; as, proprietary medicine.
Theora may be the product of a company, but that is not enough to make it proprietary; the question is whether the company maintains control over it as its own property. As it stands, while the company could change or supersede the current standard and people would probably follow along to the extent that the changes are reasonable, this is not owing to any special "intellectual property" rights they have, but only their social position. Moreover, if Theora was adopted as the standard, it would then be standardized by a recognized standards organization. By your logic here, the C language would have been proprietary before its standardization, yet its status at that point was the polar opposite of what is normally called proprietary (e.g., the.doc format). This is a severe abuse of language.
People are convinced that nuclear is a dangerous, dirty, and impossible to maintain power source.
Nuclear power leaves people's safety in the hands of distant, nameless technicians. People don't like that. They will never like it—at most they may tolerate it or head-in-sand ignore it. While it is possible for a nuclear plant not to kill people, surely you do agree that radioactive material is dangerous.
Apparent \Ap*par"ent\, a. [F. apparent, L. apparens, -entis, p. pr. of apparere. See {Appear}.]
3. Appearing to the eye or mind (distinguished from, but not necessarily opposed to, true or real); seeming; as the apparent motion or diameter of the sun.
That is not the way it actually happens. The monopolized market itself becomes irrelevant as technology progresses, but rarely does this mean the market is no longer monopolized. And the social damage previously done by the monopoly is not erased, even if it does not continue.
A free market abhors competition. Two companies are always better off either merging or dividing up territory than destroying each others' profit margins with competition -- and CEOs know this. Read some game theory. Like nations in war, companies only compete when they disagree about where lines of territory can be sustained (or when they have nothing to lose).
I took another look at Day of the Tentacle recently, via the free software ScummVM. The game feels like it was made by an animator with aspirations of film-making -- with a programmer offering only a little assistance. Entertaining writing, consistent and attractive visual style (far better than anything created through a 3D graphics card), childish game-play... but it was a kid's game.
Games are made poorly probably because they're made by the wrong people, viz.: programmers. Game production should perhaps be something like movie production -- the programmers should correspond to the set designers, not the director or writer.
Don't you feel a bit silly saying all this in a discussion about Google?
Now imagine looking out of your office and every person you see is able to feed their families because of your continued track record of not screwing up, and that companies you couldn't even name are also depending on you to not screw up. Bit more pressure, eh?
If any real CEO thinks like that he'll be fired as soon as the company needs to lay off 20% of the work force.
The real pressure of being a CEO is the need to treat employees as numbers, without a trace of humanity. That is why the CEO bonuses have to go up whenever major layoffs happen. Humans don't act that way without a major personal payoff.
I've got a simple standard regarding listening to somebody's economic opinions: has the person ever held a job with a regular paycheck and had to pay rent/buy food/pay bills every month? If not, their opinions are borderline worthless. The same standard writ large applies to corporate management: if you haven't had to meet payroll every month, your opinions about the tasks and difficulty involved with running a company are basically shit.
Are you really so illogical, to judge opinions based on their sources? If a person can justify his opinions, he should be believed, even if he is insane. (Most people's opinions are just copies and refinements of other people's, anyways).
I think it's incredibly immature to equate the size and power, or even the ambition of a company, with evil.
I think it's incredibly naive to suppose there is any moral differentiation at all between publically-owned corporations -- or even private ones. The nature and extent of evil practiced by a corporation will always be precisely that which maximizes profit: no more, no less. That is the legal obligation of the CEO.
Large corporations are inherently more evil, not because the corporate managers are actually more evil as people, but because they are in a position to be more successful in their practice of evil. For example, Wal-Mart is the paradigm of monopolistic evil not because it is more monopolistic than any of its competitors, but because it is more successfully monopolistic than them; it succeeds in evil, where other corporations fail. But they are all trying to do the same thing -- including Mom & Pop shops, for the most part.
Most people here seem to misunderstand the real dangers of monopoly. Google's monopoly (so-called) on search is not a problem in the arena of search engines at all. Rather, the problem is that if Google wants to launch, for example, a free email service, it is assured of far greater success than any small competitor even if the product is identical. This power is wielded by every large corporation -- generalized, it is just the advantage of the rich over the poor, the large over the small. The rich can buy the same things for less money, sell the same things for more money, and sell them to more people with less advertising. Sometimes that is exactly what they will do, and sometimes instead they will sell something worse. Either way, though, there is an advantage that translates, somewhere, into increased profitability for the larger body, and thus decreased efficiency in overall production -- since that profit has to come from a buyer somewhere, who otherwise would have received a cheaper or better product. (In the case of Google, this is the advertiser, not the user).
If Microsoft's products were better than their competitors, their monopoly would still translate into loss for end-users, because they would be able to charge too much -- more than a market rate (and naturally they charge as much as they're able). As it happens, they use some of their advantage to charge more, and some of it to produce less -- but the underlying economics is the same for both.
Google produces more, no doubt, than its competitors. It is still guaranteed more financial success than its production justifies, though -- I mean, more than it could receive on a free market, more than a competitor could receive for producing an identical product. Google's essential resource is popularity, and their business model is to address markets that require this resource for entry -- i.e., those with the least competition. This is the same as any corporation. No one enters a competitive market when there is a non-competitive market available to them. You can call this evil, or not. In any case, Google can and does live on inertia, not productivity, and this is -- at the least -- not efficient. The capitalist system does not really provide to avoid this inefficiency, though (popularity is a natural monopoly), so it's either Google, someone else, or nobody -- which means no production at all.
The natural monopoly of popularity applies even where nobody is profiting from it; e.g., Linux is bound to succeed in the free Unix market, not because it is technically superior to any other free Unix implementation, but because it is the most popular, which is what is really important in an operating system. This means it doesn't have to be as technically good -- although the nature of the free software model is to provide the best programming to the most popular projects, so the problem is self-correcting, somewhat.
Men and women are different, and there are subjects where they generally feel different about (note that I say generally, this does not hold for individuals, of course). I strongly suspect the highly individualistic, abstract, stressful computer-related jobs are one of those subjects.
More likely, men are in IT and women are not because boys play video games and girls do not. In fact I will go out on a limb and say that if you control for hours spent playing video games in youth the disparity will disappear (you still have to explain the video game disparity).
I sure as hell didn't learn BASIC at age 12 because I thought it would get me a highly-individualistic, abstract, stressful job. I just wanted to make the computer do cool things.
My guess - based on more than 20 years of purely anecdotal evidence - is that it has something to do with the rampant immaturity and mysogynism of a significant minority of the males who choose some sort of computer work for a profession.
Nonsense. The vast majority of self-taught programmers under the age of 15 who have never met another programmer are surely boys. Please explain that -- or deny it and tell me what happens to all those girls who know how to program, but don't.
By the way, I've met huge numbers of programmers who are not in IT in any way -- they are all males. The only female programmers I know program for a living and for nothing else.
(I'm not denying there are females programming free software; I know for a fact there are. I just don't know any of them).
Take those expressway billboards and put up Amber Alerts on them. Instead of the dot matrix text message we have on highway overpass displays, we can do full color pictures with the child's stats. The technology allows us to easily change and remove the image when the child is found (via Wi-Fi or cellular connection to Police headquarters).
More likely: high-way ads start looking like doubleclick ads, until accidents result in a class-action suit.
The one interesting application is in cheap portable computers, but the oligopy in place knows very well that serving the low-end market would be suicide for the high-end.
What are the chances geeks will be able to get individual screens with an open interface? Pretty slim for now, but if it happens I'll put one on a waysmall and build my own cheaper, smaller, energy-efficient laptop.
Er, well yes, you really can't rule out random chance. But in general, the more probable explanations are more frequently correct. (Now how was that for a tautological statement?)
This is not about the probability of the explanation, though, it is about the probability of collision resulting in a 3-star planet. If the probability of such collision for a given star is 1/x, and we observe x stars and see exactly one occurrence, then a competing explanation with greater probability of occurrence than chance collision is less probably correct.
In any case, I was not seriously suggesting collision as an explanation, since I have no idea what the probability of that would actually be -- but I do not think it can be ruled out without calculating that probability, either.
As for the system being thrown together after forming seperately, that's highly unlikely. First of all, space is mostly... well, space. The chances against two star systems colliding at all, nevermind doing so in a way that forms a stable three-star system are, no pun intended, astronomical.
So? The chances against would have to be much, much greater than astronomical to rule out random chance -- on the order of astronomical^2, at least.
Obviously you missed a few of your history classes.
"Free Market" is meant to describe that the market is free for all players to compete and the better ones should prevail.
You missed your economics classes. The better players are, in the long run, the bigger players -- not those that produce better product.
It was not meant to describe "You are free to do as you damn well please!" The government tries to stay out of things unless the flaunting of the free market is unbelievibly blatant. That is why they have things like antitrust laws.
I believe your model of government behavior to have substantially less predictive power than mine.
Until you reminded me, I had totally forgotten that they were enacted for the benefit of Bethleham Steel, GM, and such. Silly me.
There are powers other than corporations. When the anti-trust legislation was enacted, muck-raking progressive journalists, radical labor organizers, even anarchist terrorists, and so forth, had real power, which government officials had good cause to fear. That is why there was anti-trust; but the reason the anti-trust laws were so lax was very definitely because of the opposing power of the monopolists over government. Their influence is a matter of documented fact.
Very often the powerful have arguably good interests at heart (even churches and terrorists) -- in fact this is probably the ordinary case everywhere except corporate power -- but that does not alter the fact of the matter. Laws are enacted for the benefit of the powerful.
As a completely unrelated example of the principle, consider statuatory rape laws. Do they exist to benefit the politically powerless young women, or their politically powerful fathers? What sort of laws maximize the benefit to young women, and what sort maximize the benefit to fathers?
I realize that example is subjective. Public Choice III provides an objective example (dozens in fact); voting power through a game-theoretic model numerically predicts the distribution of federal crop subsidies to amazing accuracy.
Only on slashdot is stealing* encouraged and applauded when it involves Television, music, and movie copyrights, but God forbid anybody violates the GPL.
Does anybody really think the GPL really implies some sort of endorsement for copyright? The GPL is just like public domain*, except public domain allows someone else to take your stuff and copyright it. The GPL is clearly even more anti-copyright than public domain -- it only uses copyright to prohibit copyright. That's what makes it such a clever hack. If nobody could copyright anything, it would be like everything was GPL'd*.
* Exempting attribution and source availability requirements, which really have nothing to do with this.
But to the production companies, the networks are the customer, and the shows (or after-market films) are the product. It's interesting to see the large blend of contradictory motives at work: the networks want advertisers; the production companies want to make profitable media, though they sell to the highest bidder whether that's a network or not; the viewers want programming, but not ads; the producers want reputation and money in some proportion; likewise the writers, but they also may have some artistic or journalistic purpose, and always want artistic liberty; and the actors as often as not probably just want fame.
It's a bizarre union of interests.
It's not about revenue...
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I'd like to see media companies do something cool: if the product is no longer generating revenue, turn it loose on the web. Maybe that's just a dream, because they're hoping TV Land will pay royalties to air old TV shows, so since there's a *potential* revenue stream, the shows sit on the shelf.
That's not why at all. If media companies had to compete with the entire library of past media, on even ground, nobody would buy anything new (you may not think this is true in televsion, but if the entire library of film history were available at your fingertips, would you really ever turn on Celebrity Cribs?). The old fashions have to be buried to make the very phenomenon of fashion possible.
This is most blatent in clothes, pop music, and novels, but the same principle applies to television and film -- just slightly less so, since there is a little more justification for new works there. No doubt a lot more money could be made selling old media than is currently, but it would undermine the whole marketing strategy of newer is better, which is the real cash cow. The old is obscure by design.
First law of history: laws are enacted for the benefit of the powerful.
Free markets reward size and power more than anything else. It would be better for everyone except the powerful if they rewarded only constructive competition, and to a large extent this could be changed, by making markets less free (outlawing all anti-competitive practices for all firms in all circumstances, rather than just when they lead to muck-raking and uproar). But the powerful have the most influence over laws, and they know that where companies compete constructively, profit margins tend to zero. It should be no mystery to see a law that does nobody any good except for the powerful. C.f. the first law of history.
This was nothing to do with free speech but it was everything to do with someone bragging on the internet about a £100000 vandalism they'd committed and the Police duly investigating it.
Nonsense. All information about submissions on IndyMedia servers is publically available through the web site. If this were merely an "investigation" then the police could have connected through any internet browser and obtained all the information there is to obtain.
If the police had reason to believe there was secret information on the IndyMedia servers, they could have obtained a court order to allow them to send an expert to copy all the information on the servers, and not seize anything.
Look at what actually happens when servers are seized for the purpose of "investigation": the site goes down for six months, the server comes back in pieces if at all.
The investigation is mere subterfuge. Don't be fooled. If it was just an investigation, they'd need only a complete copy of the hard drives, which would require six hours of downtime. The seizure is the purpose of the investigation, not the other way around. When the server is not returned tomorrow, or the next day, or week, or month, this will be as good as proved.
Re:And Paramount's response?
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How is allowing a company to stop this from seeing the light of day a promotion?
Because they paid for it and most likely own the license for it, they get to say what they want to do with it
Answer the question.
How is that promotion of the arts?
The Long Tail
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This is the end of advertising-sponsored media -- not Tivo or illegal torrent downloading. Advertising-based media, which always must seek the largest audience possible for every program, simply cannot compete once broadcast distribution is no longer a scarce commodity. The larger the target audience, the lower the quality.
The full implications of the long tail are astounding, once you really work them out. Imagine the end of huge movie stars, of "hits", of fame in entirety -- it will simply not be profitable -- imagine what that would mean, in any medium! How will we decide what to watch, listen to, or read when there is nobody who can make money deciding for us?
Please state which two comparatively priced chips, one from Intel, one from AMD, are actually considered in competition. I think it's been standard knowledge that most, if not all, of AMD's lineup runs cooler and is far cheaper than anything Intel has put out in the last few years.
This is only true for retail CPU prices, which Apple doesn't have to pay. Intel can offer Apple better performance per dollar than AMD can, even if they won't offer that price to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Theora may be the product of a company, but that is not enough to make it proprietary; the question is whether the company maintains control over it as its own property. As it stands, while the company could change or supersede the current standard and people would probably follow along to the extent that the changes are reasonable, this is not owing to any special "intellectual property" rights they have, but only their social position. Moreover, if Theora was adopted as the standard, it would then be standardized by a recognized standards organization. By your logic here, the C language would have been proprietary before its standardization, yet its status at that point was the polar opposite of what is normally called proprietary (e.g., the .doc format). This is a severe abuse of language.
Nuclear power leaves people's safety in the hands of distant, nameless technicians. People don't like that. They will never like it—at most they may tolerate it or head-in-sand ignore it. While it is possible for a nuclear plant not to kill people, surely you do agree that radioactive material is dangerous.
This criticism is general to information from any source.
The two are only alternative forms of the same root word...
Apparent \Ap*par"ent\, a. [F. apparent, L. apparens, -entis, p. pr. of apparere. See {Appear}.]
3. Appearing to the eye or mind (distinguished from, but not necessarily opposed to, true or real); seeming; as the apparent motion or diameter of the sun.
That is not the way it actually happens. The monopolized market itself becomes irrelevant as technology progresses, but rarely does this mean the market is no longer monopolized. And the social damage previously done by the monopoly is not erased, even if it does not continue.
A free market abhors competition. Two companies are always better off either merging or dividing up territory than destroying each others' profit margins with competition -- and CEOs know this. Read some game theory. Like nations in war, companies only compete when they disagree about where lines of territory can be sustained (or when they have nothing to lose).
Games are made poorly probably because they're made by the wrong people, viz.: programmers. Game production should perhaps be something like movie production -- the programmers should correspond to the set designers, not the director or writer.
The real pressure of being a CEO is the need to treat employees as numbers, without a trace of humanity. That is why the CEO bonuses have to go up whenever major layoffs happen. Humans don't act that way without a major personal payoff.
Are you really so illogical, to judge opinions based on their sources? If a person can justify his opinions, he should be believed, even if he is insane. (Most people's opinions are just copies and refinements of other people's, anyways).I think it's incredibly naive to suppose there is any moral differentiation at all between publically-owned corporations -- or even private ones. The nature and extent of evil practiced by a corporation will always be precisely that which maximizes profit: no more, no less. That is the legal obligation of the CEO.
Large corporations are inherently more evil, not because the corporate managers are actually more evil as people, but because they are in a position to be more successful in their practice of evil. For example, Wal-Mart is the paradigm of monopolistic evil not because it is more monopolistic than any of its competitors, but because it is more successfully monopolistic than them; it succeeds in evil, where other corporations fail. But they are all trying to do the same thing -- including Mom & Pop shops, for the most part.
Most people here seem to misunderstand the real dangers of monopoly. Google's monopoly (so-called) on search is not a problem in the arena of search engines at all. Rather, the problem is that if Google wants to launch, for example, a free email service, it is assured of far greater success than any small competitor even if the product is identical. This power is wielded by every large corporation -- generalized, it is just the advantage of the rich over the poor, the large over the small. The rich can buy the same things for less money, sell the same things for more money, and sell them to more people with less advertising. Sometimes that is exactly what they will do, and sometimes instead they will sell something worse. Either way, though, there is an advantage that translates, somewhere, into increased profitability for the larger body, and thus decreased efficiency in overall production -- since that profit has to come from a buyer somewhere, who otherwise would have received a cheaper or better product. (In the case of Google, this is the advertiser, not the user).
If Microsoft's products were better than their competitors, their monopoly would still translate into loss for end-users, because they would be able to charge too much -- more than a market rate (and naturally they charge as much as they're able). As it happens, they use some of their advantage to charge more, and some of it to produce less -- but the underlying economics is the same for both.
Google produces more, no doubt, than its competitors. It is still guaranteed more financial success than its production justifies, though -- I mean, more than it could receive on a free market, more than a competitor could receive for producing an identical product. Google's essential resource is popularity, and their business model is to address markets that require this resource for entry -- i.e., those with the least competition. This is the same as any corporation. No one enters a competitive market when there is a non-competitive market available to them. You can call this evil, or not. In any case, Google can and does live on inertia, not productivity, and this is -- at the least -- not efficient. The capitalist system does not really provide to avoid this inefficiency, though (popularity is a natural monopoly), so it's either Google, someone else, or nobody -- which means no production at all.
The natural monopoly of popularity applies even where nobody is profiting from it; e.g., Linux is bound to succeed in the free Unix market, not because it is technically superior to any other free Unix implementation, but because it is the most popular, which is what is really important in an operating system. This means it doesn't have to be as technically good -- although the nature of the free software model is to provide the best programming to the most popular projects, so the problem is self-correcting, somewhat.
I sure as hell didn't learn BASIC at age 12 because I thought it would get me a highly-individualistic, abstract, stressful job. I just wanted to make the computer do cool things.
By the way, I've met huge numbers of programmers who are not in IT in any way -- they are all males. The only female programmers I know program for a living and for nothing else.
(I'm not denying there are females programming free software; I know for a fact there are. I just don't know any of them).
The one interesting application is in cheap portable computers, but the oligopy in place knows very well that serving the low-end market would be suicide for the high-end.
What are the chances geeks will be able to get individual screens with an open interface? Pretty slim for now, but if it happens I'll put one on a waysmall and build my own cheaper, smaller, energy-efficient laptop.
In any case, I was not seriously suggesting collision as an explanation, since I have no idea what the probability of that would actually be -- but I do not think it can be ruled out without calculating that probability, either.
Very often the powerful have arguably good interests at heart (even churches and terrorists) -- in fact this is probably the ordinary case everywhere except corporate power -- but that does not alter the fact of the matter. Laws are enacted for the benefit of the powerful.
As a completely unrelated example of the principle, consider statuatory rape laws. Do they exist to benefit the politically powerless young women, or their politically powerful fathers? What sort of laws maximize the benefit to young women, and what sort maximize the benefit to fathers?
I realize that example is subjective. Public Choice III provides an objective example (dozens in fact); voting power through a game-theoretic model numerically predicts the distribution of federal crop subsidies to amazing accuracy.
* Exempting attribution and source availability requirements, which really have nothing to do with this.
But to the production companies, the networks are the customer, and the shows (or after-market films) are the product. It's interesting to see the large blend of contradictory motives at work: the networks want advertisers; the production companies want to make profitable media, though they sell to the highest bidder whether that's a network or not; the viewers want programming, but not ads; the producers want reputation and money in some proportion; likewise the writers, but they also may have some artistic or journalistic purpose, and always want artistic liberty; and the actors as often as not probably just want fame.
It's a bizarre union of interests.
This is most blatent in clothes, pop music, and novels, but the same principle applies to television and film -- just slightly less so, since there is a little more justification for new works there. No doubt a lot more money could be made selling old media than is currently, but it would undermine the whole marketing strategy of newer is better, which is the real cash cow. The old is obscure by design.
First law of history: laws are enacted for the benefit of the powerful.
Free markets reward size and power more than anything else. It would be better for everyone except the powerful if they rewarded only constructive competition, and to a large extent this could be changed, by making markets less free (outlawing all anti-competitive practices for all firms in all circumstances, rather than just when they lead to muck-raking and uproar). But the powerful have the most influence over laws, and they know that where companies compete constructively, profit margins tend to zero. It should be no mystery to see a law that does nobody any good except for the powerful. C.f. the first law of history.
If the police had reason to believe there was secret information on the IndyMedia servers, they could have obtained a court order to allow them to send an expert to copy all the information on the servers, and not seize anything.
Look at what actually happens when servers are seized for the purpose of "investigation": the site goes down for six months, the server comes back in pieces if at all.
The investigation is mere subterfuge. Don't be fooled. If it was just an investigation, they'd need only a complete copy of the hard drives, which would require six hours of downtime. The seizure is the purpose of the investigation, not the other way around. When the server is not returned tomorrow, or the next day, or week, or month, this will be as good as proved.
This is the end of advertising-sponsored media -- not Tivo or illegal torrent downloading. Advertising-based media, which always must seek the largest audience possible for every program, simply cannot compete once broadcast distribution is no longer a scarce commodity. The larger the target audience, the lower the quality.
The full implications of the long tail are astounding, once you really work them out. Imagine the end of huge movie stars, of "hits", of fame in entirety -- it will simply not be profitable -- imagine what that would mean, in any medium! How will we decide what to watch, listen to, or read when there is nobody who can make money deciding for us?