This isn't quite true. DVD uses MPEG2 for video encoding, which is a lossy algorhytm. Every time you encode it, the quality gets worse. The video on a DVD disk has already been compressed once. Decompressing it to a raw bitmap and then recompressing it is going to cause it to lose another generation in quality (due to lossy compression).
I'm not sure about this. I don't know a great deal about compression techniques, but I'm under the impression that lossy compression is (conceptually) a two pass technique:
1) Drop details that undermine the effectiveness of some lossless compression technique on the data.
2) Run that lossless compression scheme on the simplified data stream that resulted from step 1.
After aquiring the decrypted & decompressed data from, say, your bogus video driver, you effectively have the result of step 1 of the compression sequence above. So when you go to re-compress, you skip step 1: Configure your codec to do strictly lossless compression (I'm assuming here that your codec uses the same lossless compression algorithm as the original process). Your decrypted/compressed result should be of roughly the same size and identical quality to the original encrypted/compressed version.
Let's at least be fair here. Windows 2000 has not even been released yet. 49 days ago they were at beta 2 or something like that. Let's at least wait until it's released before we start bitching about how much it sucks. I mean, we don't want to sink to their level and start spreading FUD now do we??
While this is true, it points to another criticism of MS operating systems. They seem to require upgrades. Whereas one can install FreeBSD or Linux on a machine and rely on it for years, ignoring new versions, one is apparently compelled to always have the latest-and-greatest version of Windows. This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that aquiring a new version of FreeBSD or Linux need not cost a thing, while there's a price associated with every new version of Windows.
How many of you slashdotters out there had many childhood memories of anticipation and desire about christhmas morning. The addition of wrapping paper also enhances the experience and allows for more interest and immagination.
I remember one Christmas morning, when I was 10 or 11. I'd wanted a pellet rifle. I got up around 5:30, and slipped quietly out to the living room, where the presents were left. I groped around in the dark, and I found an oblong box among my gifts. "My pellet gun!", I thought. I knew my parents wouldn't be ready to get up, so I went back to bed, warm and happy in the knowledge I'd gotten what I wanted.
A couple of hours later, everyone got up, and we started opening gifts. It was then that I discovered that the oblong box contained... a tent.
I still haven't recovered from the disappointment. As far as I'm concerned, those kids gave Santa just what he deserved.
That's simply because that "good chunk" are the people who do not have high-speed net access or CD burners. Go take a look at the hard drive of a local college student. You will see gigs of illegally obtained mp3s and software.
In addition to the net access you speak of, college students also have more time than money. Is someone who is working a full-time job (which generally leaves one with less spare time and energy than being a student does) and making good money going to be as likely to expend effort on pirating music and software as a student? I doubt it. Those college students you refer to probably wouldn't have bought the CDs or software they're pirating, anyways, so this can't really be counted as lost sales.
Very few people have enough respect for the work that goes into software, music, etc. to pay the artist when they don't have to. Companies know this and they obviously must implement copy protection.
I'm not convinced the lack of respect you cite is prevalent: I think you'll have a hard time finding examples of widespread individual (i.e. non-organized crime) piracy, except among populations like the college students you mentioned earlier: plenty of spare time, little disposable income.
But even if it is: Why attack this problem by assuming the worst of people and thus attempting to force them (in a top-down manner) to pay for music/software/whatever, via a combination of copy protection and law? Why not take a more bottom-up approach and try to educate them about the work that goes into making good music, convince them that they *ought* to contribute to the artist if they enjoy his music? Do you also believe that it is only the laws against murder and theft that prevent most people from committing those crimes?
Finally, I'd like to point out that music (and professional composers) existed long before CDs. Bach never sold a single CD, tape, or phonograph in his lifetime, but despite this, somehow managed to feed himself and his family. In order that good music be created, artists must be able to make a living at it. But the means by which this is accomplished is up for grabs - it need not be through control of the music's physical distribution, as it (mostly) is currently. Artists could be funded by wealthy patrons, or employed by religious institutions (or secular ones, I suppose). They can compose soundtracks to movies, or collect royalties from radio stations and dance clubs that play the music. They can take a 'shareware' approach: post music for free download on the web, and then solicit relatively small donations from a large number of listeners.
I'll never understand why people would want to watch movies on their desktop. Laptops - sure, I can understand that. But given the option between my 17" monitor and my 35" TV, I'm going with the TV. Not to mention my home theater's sound system is worlds better.
I live in a small apartment. While I want to rent movies from time to time, there isn't much on television that interests me. Why should I waste money (and more importantly, space) on a television, good sound system, and 'console' DVD player, when I've already got a PC with a fast processor, good A/V capabilities, and a DVD-ROM drive?
If you've got plenty of space and money to burn, I guess a big home theater system is worth it. But for those of us who like to keep things simple, DVDs on the desktop make sense.
Doesn't that indirectly ADMIT that you would have no legal case. And furthermore that the open source community infringed on this group's intellectual property?
No. It admits that regardless of what the law actually says, an organization with a lot of money to spend on lawyers has a good chance of getting a judge to interpret it in a way that is favorable to them.
It's not the lawyers who make the laws : it's those pesky politicians. Ever heard of the separation of powers: executive branch, judicial branch and legislative branch. Lawyers are not in the legislative branch that makes the laws. They are in the judicial branch that uses these laws to sue people.
Aside from the fact that most legislators are lawyers (as others have pointed out), you must consider the role that the judicial branch's interpretation of the legislature's words plays in determining the 'de facto' law. It is a judge that will determine the outcome of the eToys/etoy case, and of the Amazon case. Whatever decision is made, these will set precedents that can be used in arguing future cases. If the judiciary demonstrates willingness to support patents like Amazon's, we'll likely see a whole new flurry of absurd patents. If eToys loses against etoy, large companies with deep pockets will be a little less prone to push around smaller organizations or individuals.
In theory, the US is more or less governed by and for the people. In practice, the judicial branch's task of interpretation can lend a distinctly authoritarian tint to law as it exists in practice (i.e. as an influence on the behavior of people and corporations, rather than as words on paper).
If you want to see other examples of the judicial branch being used to undermine the democratic ideal, look at the current fad of lawsuits against gun manufacturers. In the US, the second amendment grants a right to firearms ownership. The constitution also clearly lays out a mechanism by which this amendment could be repealed, a mechanism which is heavily democratic in nature. However, if a precedent is set allowing gun manufacturers to be sued, held responsible, and made to pay damages for shootings, it will eventually become impossible for these manufacturers to sell to the civilian market. At this point, it will be effectively impossible for a civilian to buy a firearm, even if there is no law on the books explicitly preventing him from doing so.
(Please note that I'm well aware that the US is a republic, not a democracy. I'm using the term 'democratic' in a more generic sense, to mean a government in which the common man has some say, even if not direct.)
Most of my conversations I've had during my visits in France have followed a pattern: I carefully think up how to say something, rehearse it in my head, then say it in passable French. The person then answers me in French, using much more complicated vocabulary than I can understand. Upon seeing my blank stare, they laugh a little and say "English?".
My experience was not identical, since I speak no French at all, really. But I prefaced every conversation with "Parle vous anglais?", and consistently got polite affirmative responses. I left Paris wondering where the Parisian's reputation for snobbery had come from.
Don't assume right off the bat that whoever you're addressing speaks english, and you won't have any trouble.
The bottom line is: Linux developers are building Red Hat's product for them for free. You may be having fun doing it, and it may make you many things, but one thing for sure that it makes you in my mind: a chump.
I like working on cars, but I'm going to go down to Chevy and build their cars for them.
Suppose, given one car, you could press a few buttons and have an exact duplicate of the first, at no real cost to yourself. Would you still feel this way? If this was how the physical world worked, Chevrolet wouldn't be selling cars: They'd be selling warranties on cars.
This is in essence what Red Hat does. Linux is not their product.
Quit trying to apply values from the physical world to the world of software. The rules are different here, and values from the physical world don't make sense.
Maybe Red Hat will make a huge profit from the efforts of open source developers, but I doubt it. The sort of services Red Hat offers will very easily become commodified: Anyone who wants to can put together and sell service for a Linux distribution, so the barriers to entry are quite low. A similar situation will hold for any company that builds a business around OS-related services. The current insane stock prices for RHAT and LNUX are a result of irrational exuberance on the part of investors who don't understand this. Your view of volunteer OS developers as 'chumps' is also partly a result of your failure to understand this.
Another thing to consider: Red Hat can't require volunteer developers to dress in a particular way, be present in a particular office at particular times, deal with people they dislike, or work on a piece of code that does not interest them. My company doesn't pay me to write software: Rather, they pay me for the amount of control I permit them over how I spend my weekdays.
I should point out that they don't have to triple the work, just double it-- compute everything twice, and throw out the result if the two disagree. (and then investigate without tipping off the people running the bogus clients right away)
You may not even have to double it. If we can safely make the assumption that a client will either produce bad results on a relatively 'visible' percentage (i.e. at least 1 in 10) of blocks, or on none at all, then you can do this: Have the first block and, say, every 10th block thereafter that is handed to a client for processing be a block that was already processed by a 'trusted' client (that is, one you set up and operate yourself, and whose results you trust). If the results don't match, go back and mark all of the blocks that the untrusted client processed previously as 'unprocessed' so that they will get shipped out to other clients for re-execution, mark the client that gave the bad results as 'flawed' so that no further blocks are sent to it, and a note will go to whoever is running the show that something's up, so that he or she can deal with the client's owner, if necessary.
Of course, this doesn't guarantee perfect results, since a client may have a subtle bug that happens to only show up on blocks where it wasn't tested. But running everything twice doesn't, either, since two untrusted clients may both be wrong in the same way.
This sort of approach is probably only safe for non-critical applications: say, distributed rendering for those who do it as a hobby. But I suspect that the same holds true for any sort of volunteer-based distributed computing system.
Maybe I'm wrong on all this, but your average 14-15 year old isn't going to waste time saving money for something that their freinds are all passing around for gratis.
This depends heavily on exactly what is GPL'd. If it's the whole deal (code, wads, and anything else), then you're correct. But if only source code is GPL'd, it won't do much good for those average 14-15 year olds you're thinking of: they need the wads as well for a playable game.
The other reason to keep the engine source closed, is to avoid helping out possible competitors. If id GPL'd the engine source a couple of years ago, someone could easily take it, put together their own set of (closed) wads, and sell the result, in direct competition with one of id's games.
But IIRC, Carmack himself pointed out in a recent interview that engine coding skills are becoming irrelevant, thanks to the widespread availability of inexpensive 3D accelerator cards. So GPLing your engine source isn't going to help out your competitors too much.
I still think that instead of 1+1=2 you're getting 1+1=1.5... more productive than just one person but still not as productive as 2 people coding separately. Yes it's faster, cleaner, better than just one person sitting there and coding their stuff by themselves, but by how much? Certainly not double time.
On the contrary, I could easily imagine pair programming leading to a 1+1=2.5 increase in productivity. One of the basic points Fred Brooks makes in The Mythical Man-Month is that there is not some intrinsic amount of effort that a software development task 'ought' take. (Indeed, this is the source of the book's title.) Not all man-hours are created equal. Of course this is obvious, since not all programmers are of equal skill. But even for a single programmer, some hours are more productive than others. He may hit upon an abstraction that drastically simplifies coding for the bulk of what his program must do, and as a result accomplish a great deal in a very short period. Or he may hit a wall, get frustrated, and go off to stew and play solitaire for an hour. Though I've never tried it, I suspect that pair programming could increase the productivity of the average man-hour sufficiently to more than make up for the halving of programmer resources: With two minds working on a problem, the chances of finding a useful abstraction increases quite a bit. And when a wall is hit, the bystander's presence will motivate the coder to either keep working and find a solution, or at least go off and work on some other part of the code that isn't affected by that wall.
Of course, this all depends on both the qualities of the two individuals, their abilities to work together, and the nature of the task at hand. If the task at hand is relatively simple (i.e read a bunch of records in from a database table, generate a neatly formatted report), that second pair of eyes won't improve productivity much. But for more complex programs, it probably will.
Fact is a lot of these sites may be "asking for it" with their poor admins and shaky security, but that doesn't make it right. If a tourist gets mugged because they're seen carrying large amounts of money is that right? If a person is wearing "suggestive" clothing and gets assaulted, is that right?
This is true. Nonetheless, attention needs to be paid to the role that poor security plays, to prevent a public overreaction. To continue with your analogy: How would you like it if, after your neighbor leaves his front door unlocked and his house is cleaned out, a police state is instituted to prevent it from happening again?
I haven't seen any real moves towards an online police state, yet. But sensationalistic articles like these that fail to mention that many of these 'hackers' are exploiting easily repaired security flaws could easily lead to a public outcry for the institution of a police state.
The point that Bill Curry of Amazon makes is an important one. If 1-Click was such an obvious technology, as RMS claims, why is it that no major e-commerce site came up with it and implemented it before Amazon?
And if this hypothetical other company X(company X) beat Amazon to the idea, then patented it and sued a competitor for infringement, would you then agree that the idea was obvious? Why? What's special about Amazon that makes any idea they are first to come up with and implement non-obvious?
Someone has to be first, no matter how obvious the idea is. It can't be turtles all the way down.
Show of hands -- who here is willing to drop vi or emacs for Word2K? Nobody? I didn't think so.
Huh?
Emacs and vi are text editors. Word is a word processor. They serve two significantly different functions. I wouldn't want to use Word to edit source code, and I wouldn't want to use emacs or vi to produce a term paper.
If MS were to release Word for Linux, at a reasonable price, I'd probably buy it and use it, and have one less reason to boot Windows. But I wouldn't stop using emacs.
Really, I suspect in twenty years that suitably large, high resolution displays for the home will be rather cheap.
All you will need is the time to download (for a price) a one-view copy of the movie to your home computer (the amount of time will vary by your bandwidth, obviously).
I can think of plenty of reasons for prefering to see movies in theatres over at home, no matter how good and inexpensive home theatre equipment gets.
One is space: Why waste a lot of space in my home on equipment for watching movies, when I probably won't use it more than 2-4 hours per week? And no matter how big my home theatre gets, it's going to pale in comparison to what one finds at a decent theatre.
A second is 'respect' for the movie: If you see a movie in the theatre, there are fewer distractions. I go to the bathroom before going to my seat, so that I won't have to get up and miss part of the movie. At home, I'd just pause it. In the theatre, there are fewer distractions: No ringing phone (unless some idiot forgets to turn off his mobile). The other people in the theatre are generally as interested in seeing the movie as you are, and usually won't try to engage you in conversation while you're watching - no such guarantee at home. So the upshot is that watching at a theatre gives you a much better chance at uninterupted viewing, which is how a movie is best seen.
While the studios' and distributors' costs fall, the exhibutors' will cost rise dramatically and they will have to raise ticket prices to stay profitable. This will lead to a reduction in attendance and thus lower returns to the studios.
If attendance declines due to increased ticket prices, then this will affect exhibitors as well as studios. They may not remain profitable despite increased ticket prices. Which would mean that it was effectively impossible for a digital theatre to be profitable, unless the studios 'pass on the savings' from digital by permitting theatres to keep a larger percentage of box office take.
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I'm not sure about this. I don't know a great deal about compression techniques, but I'm under the impression that lossy compression is (conceptually) a two pass technique:
1) Drop details that undermine the effectiveness of some lossless compression technique on the data.
2) Run that lossless compression scheme on the simplified data stream that resulted from step 1.
After aquiring the decrypted & decompressed data from, say, your bogus video driver, you effectively have the result of step 1 of the compression sequence above. So when you go to re-compress, you skip step 1: Configure your codec to do strictly lossless compression (I'm assuming here that your codec uses the same lossless compression algorithm as the original process). Your decrypted/compressed result should be of roughly the same size and identical quality to the original encrypted/compressed version.
While this is true, it points to another criticism of MS operating systems. They seem to require upgrades. Whereas one can install FreeBSD or Linux on a machine and rely on it for years, ignoring new versions, one is apparently compelled to always have the latest-and-greatest version of Windows. This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that aquiring a new version of FreeBSD or Linux need not cost a thing, while there's a price associated with every new version of Windows.
I remember one Christmas morning, when I was 10 or 11. I'd wanted a pellet rifle. I got up around 5:30, and slipped quietly out to the living room, where the presents were left. I groped around in the dark, and I found an oblong box among my gifts. "My pellet gun!", I thought. I knew my parents wouldn't be ready to get up, so I went back to bed, warm and happy in the knowledge I'd gotten what I wanted.
A couple of hours later, everyone got up, and we started opening gifts. It was then that I discovered that the oblong box contained... a tent.
I still haven't recovered from the disappointment. As far as I'm concerned, those kids gave Santa just what he deserved.
That's simply because that "good chunk" are the people who do not have high-speed net access or CD burners. Go take a look at the hard drive of a local college student. You will see gigs of illegally obtained mp3s and software.
In addition to the net access you speak of, college students also have more time than money. Is someone who is working a full-time job (which generally leaves one with less spare time and energy than being a student does) and making good money going to be as likely to expend effort on pirating music and software as a student? I doubt it. Those college students you refer to probably wouldn't have bought the CDs or software they're pirating, anyways, so this can't really be counted as lost sales.
Very few people have enough respect for the work that goes into software, music, etc. to pay the artist when they don't have to. Companies know this and they obviously must implement copy protection.
I'm not convinced the lack of respect you cite is prevalent: I think you'll have a hard time finding examples of widespread individual (i.e. non-organized crime) piracy, except among populations like the college students you mentioned earlier: plenty of spare time, little disposable income.
But even if it is: Why attack this problem by assuming the worst of people and thus attempting to force them (in a top-down manner) to pay for music/software/whatever, via a combination of copy protection and law? Why not take a more bottom-up approach and try to educate them about the work that goes into making good music, convince them that they *ought* to contribute to the artist if they enjoy his music? Do you also believe that it is only the laws against murder and theft that prevent most people from committing those crimes?
Finally, I'd like to point out that music (and professional composers) existed long before CDs. Bach never sold a single CD, tape, or phonograph in his lifetime, but despite this, somehow managed to feed himself and his family. In order that good music be created, artists must be able to make a living at it. But the means by which this is accomplished is up for grabs - it need not be through control of the music's physical distribution, as it (mostly) is currently. Artists could be funded by wealthy patrons, or employed by religious institutions (or secular ones, I suppose). They can compose soundtracks to movies, or collect royalties from radio stations and dance clubs that play the music. They can take a 'shareware' approach: post music for free download on the web, and then solicit relatively small donations from a large number of listeners.
I live in a small apartment. While I want to rent movies from time to time, there isn't much on television that interests me. Why should I waste money (and more importantly, space) on a television, good sound system, and 'console' DVD player, when I've already got a PC with a fast processor, good A/V capabilities, and a DVD-ROM drive?
If you've got plenty of space and money to burn, I guess a big home theater system is worth it. But for those of us who like to keep things simple, DVDs on the desktop make sense.
No. It admits that regardless of what the law actually says, an organization with a lot of money to spend on lawyers has a good chance of getting a judge to interpret it in a way that is favorable to them.
Aside from the fact that most legislators are lawyers (as others have pointed out), you must consider the role that the judicial branch's interpretation of the legislature's words plays in determining the 'de facto' law. It is a judge that will determine the outcome of the eToys/etoy case, and of the Amazon case. Whatever decision is made, these will set precedents that can be used in arguing future cases. If the judiciary demonstrates willingness to support patents like Amazon's, we'll likely see a whole new flurry of absurd patents. If eToys loses against etoy, large companies with deep pockets will be a little less prone to push around smaller organizations or individuals.
In theory, the US is more or less governed by and for the people. In practice, the judicial branch's task of interpretation can lend a distinctly authoritarian tint to law as it exists in practice (i.e. as an influence on the behavior of people and corporations, rather than as words on paper).
If you want to see other examples of the judicial branch being used to undermine the democratic ideal, look at the current fad of lawsuits against gun manufacturers. In the US, the second amendment grants a right to firearms ownership. The constitution also clearly lays out a mechanism by which this amendment could be repealed, a mechanism which is heavily democratic in nature. However, if a precedent is set allowing gun manufacturers to be sued, held responsible, and made to pay damages for shootings, it will eventually become impossible for these manufacturers to sell to the civilian market. At this point, it will be effectively impossible for a civilian to buy a firearm, even if there is no law on the books explicitly preventing him from doing so.
(Please note that I'm well aware that the US is a republic, not a democracy. I'm using the term 'democratic' in a more generic sense, to mean a government in which the common man has some say, even if not direct.)
My experience was not identical, since I speak no French at all, really. But I prefaced every conversation with "Parle vous anglais?", and consistently got polite affirmative responses. I left Paris wondering where the Parisian's reputation for snobbery had come from.
Don't assume right off the bat that whoever you're addressing speaks english, and you won't have any trouble.
The bottom line is: Linux developers are building Red Hat's product for them for free. You may be having fun doing it, and it may make you many things, but one thing for sure that it makes you in my mind: a chump.
I like working on cars, but I'm going to go down to Chevy and build their cars for them.
Suppose, given one car, you could press a few buttons and have an exact duplicate of the first, at no real cost to yourself. Would you still feel this way? If this was how the physical world worked, Chevrolet wouldn't be selling cars: They'd be selling warranties on cars.
This is in essence what Red Hat does. Linux is not their product.
Quit trying to apply values from the physical world to the world of software. The rules are different here, and values from the physical world don't make sense.
Maybe Red Hat will make a huge profit from the efforts of open source developers, but I doubt it. The sort of services Red Hat offers will very easily become commodified: Anyone who wants to can put together and sell service for a Linux distribution, so the barriers to entry are quite low. A similar situation will hold for any company that builds a business around OS-related services. The current insane stock prices for RHAT and LNUX are a result of irrational exuberance on the part of investors who don't understand this. Your view of volunteer OS developers as 'chumps' is also partly a result of your failure to understand this.
Another thing to consider: Red Hat can't require volunteer developers to dress in a particular way, be present in a particular office at particular times, deal with people they dislike, or work on a piece of code that does not interest them. My company doesn't pay me to write software: Rather, they pay me for the amount of control I permit them over how I spend my weekdays.
You may not even have to double it. If we can safely make the assumption that a client will either produce bad results on a relatively 'visible' percentage (i.e. at least 1 in 10) of blocks, or on none at all, then you can do this: Have the first block and, say, every 10th block thereafter that is handed to a client for processing be a block that was already processed by a 'trusted' client (that is, one you set up and operate yourself, and whose results you trust). If the results don't match, go back and mark all of the blocks that the untrusted client processed previously as 'unprocessed' so that they will get shipped out to other clients for re-execution, mark the client that gave the bad results as 'flawed' so that no further blocks are sent to it, and a note will go to whoever is running the show that something's up, so that he or she can deal with the client's owner, if necessary.
Of course, this doesn't guarantee perfect results, since a client may have a subtle bug that happens to only show up on blocks where it wasn't tested. But running everything twice doesn't, either, since two untrusted clients may both be wrong in the same way.
This sort of approach is probably only safe for non-critical applications: say, distributed rendering for those who do it as a hobby. But I suspect that the same holds true for any sort of volunteer-based distributed computing system.
Maybe I'm wrong on all this, but your average 14-15 year old isn't going to waste time saving money for something that their freinds are all passing around for gratis.
This depends heavily on exactly what is GPL'd. If it's the whole deal (code, wads, and anything else), then you're correct. But if only source code is GPL'd, it won't do much good for those average 14-15 year olds you're thinking of: they need the wads as well for a playable game.
The other reason to keep the engine source closed, is to avoid helping out possible competitors. If id GPL'd the engine source a couple of years ago, someone could easily take it, put together their own set of (closed) wads, and sell the result, in direct competition with one of id's games.
But IIRC, Carmack himself pointed out in a recent interview that engine coding skills are becoming irrelevant, thanks to the widespread availability of inexpensive 3D accelerator cards. So GPLing your engine source isn't going to help out your competitors too much.
On the contrary, I could easily imagine pair programming leading to a 1+1=2.5 increase in productivity. One of the basic points Fred Brooks makes in The Mythical Man-Month is that there is not some intrinsic amount of effort that a software development task 'ought' take. (Indeed, this is the source of the book's title.) Not all man-hours are created equal. Of course this is obvious, since not all programmers are of equal skill. But even for a single programmer, some hours are more productive than others. He may hit upon an abstraction that drastically simplifies coding for the bulk of what his program must do, and as a result accomplish a great deal in a very short period. Or he may hit a wall, get frustrated, and go off to stew and play solitaire for an hour. Though I've never tried it, I suspect that pair programming could increase the productivity of the average man-hour sufficiently to more than make up for the halving of programmer resources: With two minds working on a problem, the chances of finding a useful abstraction increases quite a bit. And when a wall is hit, the bystander's presence will motivate the coder to either keep working and find a solution, or at least go off and work on some other part of the code that isn't affected by that wall.
Of course, this all depends on both the qualities of the two individuals, their abilities to work together, and the nature of the task at hand. If the task at hand is relatively simple (i.e read a bunch of records in from a database table, generate a neatly formatted report), that second pair of eyes won't improve productivity much. But for more complex programs, it probably will.
This is true. Nonetheless, attention needs to be paid to the role that poor security plays, to prevent a public overreaction. To continue with your analogy: How would you like it if, after your neighbor leaves his front door unlocked and his house is cleaned out, a police state is instituted to prevent it from happening again?
I haven't seen any real moves towards an online police state, yet. But sensationalistic articles like these that fail to mention that many of these 'hackers' are exploiting easily repaired security flaws could easily lead to a public outcry for the institution of a police state.
And if this hypothetical other company X(company X) beat Amazon to the idea, then patented it and sued a competitor for infringement, would you then agree that the idea was obvious? Why? What's special about Amazon that makes any idea they are first to come up with and implement non-obvious?
Someone has to be first, no matter how obvious the idea is. It can't be turtles all the way down.
Huh?
Emacs and vi are text editors. Word is a word processor. They serve two significantly different functions. I wouldn't want to use Word to edit source code, and I wouldn't want to use emacs or vi to produce a term paper.
If MS were to release Word for Linux, at a reasonable price, I'd probably buy it and use it, and have one less reason to boot Windows. But I wouldn't stop using emacs.
I can think of plenty of reasons for prefering to see movies in theatres over at home, no matter how good and inexpensive home theatre equipment gets.
One is space: Why waste a lot of space in my home on equipment for watching movies, when I probably won't use it more than 2-4 hours per week? And no matter how big my home theatre gets, it's going to pale in comparison to what one finds at a decent theatre.
A second is 'respect' for the movie: If you see a movie in the theatre, there are fewer distractions. I go to the bathroom before going to my seat, so that I won't have to get up and miss part of the movie. At home, I'd just pause it. In the theatre, there are fewer distractions: No ringing phone (unless some idiot forgets to turn off his mobile). The other people in the theatre are generally as interested in seeing the movie as you are, and usually won't try to engage you in conversation while you're watching - no such guarantee at home. So the upshot is that watching at a theatre gives you a much better chance at uninterupted viewing, which is how a movie is best seen.
If attendance declines due to increased ticket prices, then this will affect exhibitors as well as studios. They may not remain profitable despite increased ticket prices. Which would mean that it was effectively impossible for a digital theatre to be profitable, unless the studios 'pass on the savings' from digital by permitting theatres to keep a larger percentage of box office take.