I wonder what would happen if you got rid of all the middle-aged judges, lawyers, and record industry execs, and replaced them with geeks.
It'd fail just as miserably as if you had those same people doing the geeks' jobs.
Well, let's not even go that far. What if we replaced the judges with a few ordinary citizens of the 18-30 crowd -- people who grew up on the internet.
What does technical know how have to do with legal and political points of view? Speaking for myself, and many others, I'd be willing to bet that I know more about technology than the vast majority of slashdot users, especially napster users, yet I definitely see Napster as a threat to the greater interests of society. Likewise, there are a great many engineers, computer programmers, and others that are well out of their thirties, often have a better grasp on technology, and take a similar view point.
Are they really representing public opinion?
This is the LEGAL system we're talking about here, it's never ever been about public opinion, it's about the rule of law. The very notion is absurd. If the founders intended the majority to decide legal cases, they'd simply have voting machines as the courts, instead of lawyers, judges, etc. The founders, and most other stable societies, decided long ago that this was a very dangerous system.
I wonder what will happen when the internet generation gets control.
Very little. First, you mistake slashdot and similar forums with your "generation". Second, the generation(s) that you refer to are actually relatively conservative when you compare them to your parents', and the vast majority of their rhetoric went up in smoke once they got a real job.
If we make a law that assures that is the only way such an exchange would take place, then we're not talking about a free market anymore. In fact, your arguing for my point.
Well I'm not really arguing that we SHOULD require it, but I do assert that it is better than the alternative that you proffer, that we FORCE everyone to maintain their privacy. What's more, those legally ENFORCED conditions still have the same fundamental characteristic, insofar they still allow the person the freedom to exchange their information, albiet in a different method. We routinely structure our financial and securities industries in similar fashion, and it works well. It may not be the Libertarian perception of a "free" market, but, at its heart, it's the same. Why can't we do the same with privacy?
Sometimes, by luck, the local and global minimum coincide. In the case of strikes, the contract is social and does carry substantial penelties for violation (ranging from ostrisization and loss of benefits (in recent times) to being beaten to a pulp (earlier in the history of unions).
Umm, I'd argue that they really don't coincide. If we take the shops, for example, there is no law saying that their customers can't use the parks. In all likelyhood, their customers won't even know that they're part of the group. So what's the draw back from sitting on the sidelines, saving a little money, and still enjoying the same benefits? I don't see this as being a
meeting of local and global minimums.
Anyways, I'd argue that your argument that the local and global minimums meet in any of my examples, are because of tertiary factors that often take care of those problems without the need for any sort of leap of faith. i.e., your friends, family, coworkers, community, business, or what have you, make your reconsider what might otherwise be a myopic and self-centered approach. In fact, I'd argue that these kinds of situations are more real world oriented than the laboratory or psuedo-socialist inspired ideas of the counterexamples, not to mention more common than you think. Did you ever consider that they're all around you, just that you don't notice them because you take them for granted?
Cleaning up parks has little to do with the discussion since it has none of the elements of the prisoner's dilemma or the tragedy of the commons. Cleaning up the park can happen even if 90% DON'T buy in.
Whether it can or not is debatable, but it DOESN'T happen that way. Participation is the norm with many of these successful projects.
Actually, I would argue that many of those people have no knowledge of making any choice regarding privacy. Most companies are very secretive about how they share personal information and with whom. Some deny any such sharing in the face of evidence to the contrary. I use variations on my name when I subscribe to magazines. Shortly after, I start getting junk mail addressed to that particular variant of my name when I never did before. Nowhere in the subscription card did they mention selling my name and address on a mailing list. The card listed the terms of the subscription. I pay $X and I get Y issues of the magazine. There was nothing about I pay $X and allow them to sell my name and address and I get Y issues. I have yet to see a magazine subscription card that makes any statement at all about privacy.
Many people might do so without their explicit approval, however that doesn't mean that most people still don't often sacrifice privacy for the right incentive. In fact, there have been a large number of studies, both in society and in the lab, where the majority of people explicitely agree to the incentive in exchange for loss of privacy. Anyways, the initial argument was never that the consumer should be put in the dark, it's that two parties (including the customer) know what the conditions of the agreement are, live by it, and both profit from it. We should certainly enforce violations of it, but those violations are largely extraneous to the argument. Furthermore, your dilema example is entirely different; if the individual does not know, it's simply not up to the individual to seek any minimum in this context.
I do not ignore that choices happen independant of the community as a whole. In fact, that's my point! That's THE problem.
But I think you do. On one hand you'll imply that the credit card situation is a problem of global minumums, while on the other hand claiming that the consumer is ignorant. If the consumer is ignorant, then it's not the "Dilema", that's a problem of ignorance. Frankly, I think it's both. Consumers sometimes do some things out of ignorance--what the industry does not tell them (and there, I argue we should regulate out). But othertimes they very definitely agree, both explicitely or implicitely, to the conditions. When they agree, it simply is not a minimum at all.
Now I know you argue that they have no "choice", but I simply disagree with that. The industry did not roll out some cannon and say "you all will accept this". They can't do that any more than they can impose an abitrary price, unless they are a monopoly, in which case they're already in the justice departments sites. The only way it can possibly reach the kind of critical mass that you describe is if the majority of people either do things out of ignorance (less common then you think) or if they willingly agree to give up their privacy--which, I would argue, is a global minimum.
What's more, to the extent that there are competitive markets, if there is a truely substantial demand (which I really don't believe there is) for privacy, there will be a market for that. Companies will try to meet those demands if it is economical and ultimately desirable to those same customers [i.e., if they're really willing to pay what privacy costs].
I know plenty of people who value their privacy. There are plenty on/. Every few weeks, the news talks about corperate violations of privacy, so there must be some interest (even if the news is lowest common denominator TV at it's 'finest'). I don't see a lot of businesses making offerings catering to those who want their privacy respected. The closest I've seen is that mail order medical supplies commercial where they offer to ship in an unmarked box (but make no promises about sharing your info with other companies). How many do you see?
Interest != Demand. People are also interested in charity, but by and large, most people would rather have a new car. The same goes for privacy in my opinion. They may like the idea of privacy in theory, but when it comes time to actually shop, and they have a choice between something that costs 5% less or privacy (especially when it's something as inane as Cola preferences), they generally decide the former.
I know plenty of people who value their privacy. There are plenty on/. Every few weeks, the news talks about corperate violations of privacy, so there must be some interest (even if the news is lowest common denominator TV at it's 'finest'). I don't see a lot of businesses making offerings catering to those who want their privacy respected. The closest I've seen is that mail order medical supplies commercial where they offer to ship in an unmarked box (but make no promises about sharing your info with other companies). How many do you see?
Again, this is pretty much the same argument. Most people aren't willing to pay what it costs. Slashdot and your probably liberally oriented friends are hardly representive of the population as a whole, but even there, I'd argue that they take the discount route. Anyways, there are a large number of websites and such that "gaurantee" your privacy, especially where people might care, like on a porn site.
This is an entirely seperate argument than the one presented, that "poor" people are essentially too desperate to make a rational decision. That said, I simply disagree with your premises and your conclusions.
First, you presume that we CAN'T contract on the whole. Now maybe contracting is less efficient, but it is sufficiently efficient. Even if it's not, we could make a law that assures that is the ONLY way such an exchange would take place. If it's not sufficiently efficient, then the exchange of privacy would not happen ( at least no more so than if we were ban it outright ). Furthermore, the market tends to present solutions to these kinds of problems. For instance, rather than pooling a communal rainy day fund, we have these entities called insurance companies. Rather than contracting with the community as a whole, each person contracts with an entity that takes care of enforcement, payment, etc.
Second, it's not proven that the system will "always" seek, as you call it, a local minimum in favor of a global minimum. It may tend to happen as the environment gets larger, but it's not assured. If it is, then how do you explain various strikes and protests without those binding contracts (i.e., mandatory union strikes)? How do you explain local shops banding together to clean up a parks in numerous cities, where the city itself has proven itself incapable? There are many other similar examples.
Third, just to be clear, the tragedy of the commons is not that any particular individual is irrational. The individual is rational in the context of the situation of which he operates. When you refer to the "system", you're referring to the result of low coordination of that system.
Third, you refer to the masses of individuals CHOOSING lack of privacy, all the while ignoring that it is a choice that the majority of them make independent of the community as a whole. When we're talking about sharing resources, those examples are relevant. But when we're talking about a choice that two parties make privately amongst themselves that has no direct negative bearing on any third party, it's largely immaterial.
Now you might say that maybe if 9 in 10 of those individuals choose plan A (reduced privacy), then 1 in 10 individuals will probably has less choice in the matter. This may be true, but you can't get around the fact that each and every person saw it wiser to choose plan A. In essense, it's a vote, one that was just won by a landslide.
But even there, if there is a sizable minority, there is a market for meeting those demands. That solution may not be perfect, but it's better than denying everyone else their say.
Fourth, more empirically speaking, who says most people really prefer privacy? I'd argue from the evidence, that people consistently choose cheap and convenient over privacy.
Fifth, I think you're largely mistaken if you think there ever was a viable choice between privacy and credit. The key word is credit, meaning that someone is giving you money before you pay them back with interest. People simply don't do this blind. They require information. The less information you give them, the less likely it is that you'll recieve credit, not because the credit card companies or banks are mean, or because of a "commons" situation, but rather because it's a necessary element of lending and credit. Risk and return are tied together at the hip. If you put the industry in the dark, you increase their risk in many different ways. The only way to obtain additional credit in this situation is to increase their return (read: your interest rate and/or penalties)
That is not opposite. In fact, it's essentially the same phenomenon. In both situations, all involved parties may theoretically benefit more, as an individuals, if they COORDINATE their actions. They do not, because in their own little, immediate, and self-centered microcosms it does not benefit them. [One could take this argument even further and argue the theoretical outcome versus the intuited and the empirical outcomes--where a person might not be a "moron" at all, because the theory is impossible.]
Whether you wish to call this irrationality or not is a semantic argument that is largely irrelvent to the underlying question. There is a large, but subtle distinction to be made. In the "tragedy of the commons" and in the "Dilema", you involve an outside universe, beyond just self, that necessarily involves a great many additional factors. None of this says that a person cannot decide, for instance, whether he'd rather have 4 dollars or 5 dollars. Likewise, it also does not say that a person is too irrational as to decide if he'd rather have 5m (or any number) dollars [in exchange for interested business entities knowing his shopping habits] or his "privacy".
The tragedy of the commons is not a demonstration of irrationality, quite the contrary, it's a demonstration of rationality and self centeredness. It is an apt demonstration of one of the reasons why socialism and communism fail. If I am rational and self-centered, and if sharing costs me something, I simply won't share unless I profit as a result of sharing. Put simply, you have no assurances if you share that you'll gain anything; the only assurance is that you'll lose something in the process of sharing.
If most other people don't share, it's a losing proposition. Though it may be true that we would be better off if everyone shared (this is debatable), it presumes COORDINATION of interests. Rationality simply does not gaurantee this, that is a seperate issue entirely. We are rational as individuals. Thus the example is not proof that people are irrational.
You might call someone irrational, if they can share 1 unit and are assured to get 3 unit in return, and refuse to share, but this is simply not the case with the tragedy in the commons. People are generally good when they can directly control their own welfare. Leaving it up to the individual makes sense when the effects of their action primarily just affect and benefit themselves. This privacy issue is just such a case.
There are of course times where we require a certain coordination and enlightened self-interest, where we require by law or as a society that a person MUST do a thing (i.e., taxes, speed limits, other laws, etc), but these do not contradict rationality--they contradict COORDINATION. A libertarian might reject the arguments for them, but they aren't, or shouldn't be, making them solely on the grounds of rationality.
Anyways, I am a capitalist and, if anything, a Republican, not a Libertarian.
PS: People may not be perfectly rational, but we don't need perfection to do a vastly better job on the aggregate. For that matter, we're not perfect in anything, so why should presume our reasoning for our laws are any better?
Let me put it to you this way, you have two seperate universes.
In universe A, you have rich people and you have poor people. None of them are allowed sell their privacy--privacy is MANDATORY!
In universe B, you have equally rich and poor people. The difference, of course, would be that the poor person now has a choice to make themselves a little bit richer by sacrificing a little bit of their privacy.
Unless you presume that person irrational, that person is better off in universe B. If poor person makes a rational decision, the poor person is better off in his eyes. The key word being "better".
Your problem is the poorness in the first place. What you fail to realize is that that poor person would be poor anyways. If the person's situation is so down and out as to have to "prostitute" his privacy, the thing that sucks is his poverty, not his choice. In other words, put bluntly, his life already sucks, but in universe B, his life sucks a little less.
Anyways, you presume that this would break down along those lines. I simply don't see it that way. I'd be willing to sacrifice a little bit of my privacy for the right incentive, hell I already do, I'm sure you do too. Speaking for myself, it's not for want of money (I'd be considered rich by most anyone's definition), intelligence, education, etc. I don't see MANDATORY privacy as being a basic human right. In fact, I don't even see it as desirable.
We can have RIGHTS without them being MANDATORY. We have the RIGHT to own land, but we can also sell it. We can OWN money, but we can sell it. We have freedom of speech, but we can sell some of it for a price. We have the right to liberty, but most every person willingly reports to a boss. This is not too dissimilar.
Furthermore, I'd also like to add that people have been selling their privacy for so long. When you advertise your business, you're giving just a little bit of your privacy up. When you put your ad in the personals, same. And so on and so on.
Ahem, care to backup the 75% of "resources" claim? This always struck me as being rather bogus. What exactly does "resources" mean in this case? And how is it measured?
Now I'm sure we take up vastly more fuel per capita than people in China, India, etc, but what about the real staples, like food and water? If we truely takeup so many resources, then you must also assume that the vast majority of those staples lie in those regions where the "excessive" consumers live, because very little is imported from places like India, China, Russia, etc.
I suspect people are measuring the "resources" by any number of backwards methods, like by GDP, imports and exports, commercial production, etc. They assume zero sum games, they assume that producivity would be as high in the near socialist environment required to make it vastly more "even", and so and so on. These are all invalid for any number of reasons, but I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth.
It's not that easy, especially if WEP is employed. Combine this with a decent VPN encryption algorithm and you have pretty decent effective security--especially if your name is Joe Schmoe. Who really wants to break into your dialup network when there are much better and softer targets out there? What's more, if you're using your network primarily to access the internet, the threat from the internet is far greater than the threat from the wireless side. If you think any and all encryption that can be employed on a wireless setup is "worthless", then the internet should be similarly worthless.
Also, if your name is Joe Schmoe, I suspect the physical security of your person, your home, your car, and other personal property is of greater concern, yet I doubt you expend the same amount of paranoic energy at them.
I was thinking of doing a little bit of reverse engineering using OLE/COM to iterate through the various classes, properties, methods and defined constants (in the type libraries and such) then saving them and doing a diff, of sorts, on the file and saving them in a database. Of course it'd probably require a little more human intervention then that, but still...
Do you think that approach would be enlightening at all? I haven't studied the BIFF specs at all, other then to determine the scope of the documentation. And I certainly haven't put any real time understanding it. It's just been a thought thus far...
First, there are a great many in there that aren't at all printer specific. i.e., headers, footers, basic orientation (i.e., Landscape or Portrait). Second, it's been my experience that Excel doesn't care what printer you have or how it's setup when you use any of these properties, it just does them. If it's too big, small, or unsupported by the printer, you deal with it when you print it, not when you set the properties. Third, Excel files are often used for sharing, just because you can't print on your own, doesn't mean you don't want to leave the document without those formatting. Fourth, that "feature" is NOT documented, at least no where in the common sources. Fifth, the error message is obscure, if they're going to restrict you from doing certain things because of the printer, they can tell you just that. The PageSetup issue is just one of many.
Anyways, the requirement that I both install Excel (and all it's dlls) and have a printer installed is sufficient reason to want to avoid COM in certain instances. In one such scenario, I'd like to run it unattended on a server--possibly even on *Nix. In the other, we use it within a widely distributed database application. When the latest and "greatest" Excel version comes out for those applications, we either force the user to use the more outdated version, constantly upgrade and recompile for the latest version, or do other such things--none of which are convenient and reliable. It's been my experience that, while the latest Excel file format may change, they maintain a large amount of backwards compatibility. When the user needs to edit and save, we don't care if they save in the latest format or not.
The bottom line is that while COM may be good for many things, it has serious drawbacks that can be better answered by other solutions.
Haha. First, I've done quite a lot of COM and OLE programming. Second, you really should look at MS's knowledge base, if you don't believe me. There are tons of bugs that will happen no matter what interface you use or how "good" you program. For instance, I just recently stumbled into a bug where any properties in the PageSetup class could not be read or altered. The cause: No printer installed. Of course, it gave the typical non-obvious generic MS error message and since this app was totally automated and sending the files via email, it never occured to me to setup the printer. Imagine someone wanting to format a document without printing it?!? Gasp.
Granted, writing the file directly has its drawbacks too, but there are undeniable benefits. For instance, when MS upgrades their interfaces, they frequently break things that are supposed to remain compatible, whereas the MS seems maintain a modicum of file interoperability. There is also the potential for vast speed increases, stability, straight forwardness for simple documents, portability (such as writing a lightweight graphical reporter in *nix), cost savings, not having to install MS Office, zero supervision, freedom from type libraries, dlls, etc.
Anyhow, I've read the basic BIFF specs before, but how about support for the more advanced features? Such as pivottables? filtering? charts? autosums? advanced formatting? etc etc. I don't necessarily _need_ all of these, but the more the better. I've been considering writing my own file level interface or object to handle a wide range of reports styles.
I agree, this is a very valid point, especially towards DoS-type attacks. However, I'd also like to add multiple different daemons have their own drawbacks, insofar as there is more potential bugs that can hit you. For instance, if you're running two different name servers on the same unprotected subnet, you might well have just doubled your exposure, since it only takes one bug to break your entire subnet wide open. Conversely, (towards your point) more singular cultures also increase the reward factor for would be hackers. In other words, if every site ran its own home brewed name server, the hacker would have to put in effort just to crack that one site. Smaller sites like, say, Edogpoo.com may enjoy a poor cost benefit relationship, from the would-be hacker's perspective.
The bottom line is that there are oppositional forces and tradeoffs, like so many other things in security and in the computing world. One setup is not always the best, it depends greatly on the entirity of the situation.
No, I don't think we "need" that bit of information, because it is largely immaterial. We know that mass storage and bandwidth (i.e., centralized file distribution) is plenty affordable now because of the presence of so many of entities of that type online that have much as much or less revenue opportunity. We can also do reasonable approximations to prove the point. The point being that if an mp3.com type model costs mere pennies, the most napster could save is those pennies. If there is a choice between mass appropriation of copyright or saving a few pennies for the rare small artist, the choice should be pretty clear. If the situation is different than this, then it should be up to Napster to prove otherwise.
I'm not saying the ONLY use for P2P is piracy, what I am saying is that:
A) Most people associate P2P with piracy, hence the word synonymous.
B) The industry has sued P2P piracy agents, not just P2P concepts.
C) The industry is NOT just suing any new distribution model; they're suing agents that have a direct affect on their own copyright. If there is some overlap (assuming you could really call napster a new distribution model with a straight face), it's coincidental.
Yes, but killer applications are generally DISTINCTIONS that seperate the product from the rest of the flock. This is, hopefully, one LESS killer application for MS. In all likelyhood though, this will not prove as stable, fast, compatible, etc. In other words, if you want to play games, Windows will still be your platform of choice; this just makes Linux that more viable for those who are already using Linux and like to play games.
And to those who consistently point to the French revolution and the lack of copyright at that time leading only to the production of dreck, that hardly an airtight counterexample. What you imply is that the only way high quality creative works get made is when there is a copyright system in place (and, by extension, that an author of such a work gets paid), and I don't believe that's the case at all. You will be hard pressed to prove that the only motivation for creation of high quality works is monetary.
Though I disagree with almost everything you have said, I'll make one point. If the artist is NOT motivated by monetary concerns, they are free in today's society to distribute the song for free. In fact, if their concerns are not monetary at all, they'd have every reason to make it as affordable as possible, as it'd make it easier for their listeners to acquire. Our system allows both (heh, if you actually believe that are many artists that can work a real job and perform) monetary and "non-monetary" artists to exist. Banning the copyright only allows one. It's quite clear to me what the preferable choice is.
Yes, I'd say that argument has _some_ merit, but it's not sufficiently significant to society. For one, in order for Napster to facilate this, they have had to impliment a complex database structure. This may well cost more than just providing the mp3s themselves, especially when you stop and consider that 99% of their searches and database are for pirated material. In other words, there is a great deal of waste there.
The only way I can see that argument applying substantially is if the sampling to payment ratio is extremely high. e.g., 1000 downloads for 1 payment. That, of course, would beg the question of the small artists' benefit. This also assumes that there would be no supplemental revenue such as banner adds....
Put simply, to whatever extent that people believe the small artist can benefit from Napster (which i'm extremely skeptical of), I believe can be done better and cheaper for all involved with a centralized structure. Witness mp3.com or, somewhat related, tucows.com and the like. That kind of bandwidth and indexing is quite affordable these days, especially since the presumed revenues would scale with the demand.
Anyways, even if you presumed this off-loading of quality to be a good thing, the same fundamental offloading of bandwidth could be achieved while essentially blocking piracy through the use of enumerated legitimate indexing. For instance, the small artist would go to some website on Napster, and upload their OWN songs, sign a document saying that it belongs to them and that they agree to be held liable if it is not their own song (complete with contact information, etc), Napster would then produce a checksum of sorts such that the song could be verified to be that same song for every search and index. Thus Napster could serve the small artist well, mantain indexes of quality songs, and prevent any measurable piracy.
It may be a little more complex but it is very much dooable. It would have virtually all the presumed benefits of today's Napster with little to no costs for the established artists and industry.
Then everyone could smoke cigarettes and not worry.
Huh? I don't get where you're going with this.
AIDS would not be an epidemic if people had self-control. Anyone who can see people dying around them and not take precautions, much less abstain, is going to die of something rather quickly. If not AIDS, then something else.
If we had to subsidize the repair of every self-inflicted wound, the world would be bankrupt, at least the responsible and prudent portion would be bankrupted at the expense of the debauched.
Are you being facetious or not? I don't disagree with much of this, though I'd take a different tone. i.e., if a country can't feed itself or do the relatively basic task of stopping mass infection then they're certainly not capable of the requirements of a massive AIDS medication program for existing victims. I'd argue that, given the kinds of resources Brazil had to spend (440m in one year) to even appropriate these patents, we'd be better spending that kind of money towards getting those governments and society's in order (if at all possible). Things like BASIC sanitation, transportation, medication, education, infrastructure, etc would do far more to improve their welfare than a failed medication program.
OTOH, I think it would be an interesting experiment for some countries to reject the western idea of Patent protection. Remember that they were necessary to do trade (East India Co., South Seas).
Uh, until most recently, only a few developed Western nations supported IP. While the West had experienced massive innovation, they stagnated. If they were lucky, they were able to copy us. Witness India, China, Russia, etc. [Hint: This is not for skilled or intelligent people.]. Meanwhile, in recent years, as IP is starting to gain international support, we are seeing actual spending towards legitimate R&D in those same countries for the first time ever. Witness India's generic drug companies of today and others. In other words, I'd argue that, this experiment has been done on both sides, in a thousands different ways, by hundreds of different countries.
But before you get to easy with the idea, you end up with a might-makes-right in the IP world. Whoever can bribe or buy the largest DNS service could usurp slashdot.com or any other domain name. You could have a competing DNS server with duplicate entries, but there would be chaos.
I'd argue it's the other way around. Except for in the case of outstanding trademarks, popular domains like slashdot have not been stolen. If this were true intellectual anarchy, assuming the internet infrastructure would even be a possibility, slashdot would be up for grabs to the strongest or wealthiest or dirtiest bidder.
Conversely, if some drugs are that important, maybe Emminent domain should be used on IP (I wonder how many patents the NSA violates without compensation). Basically have government pay a one time fee based on the projected value of the patent to create a public-domain drug.
This would have the effect of killing, or at least being a force against, research where ever the government might decide to appropriate the patent. By definition, if that one time fee is less than the earnings the innovator can make now, that is less incentive to take risk. Also, if that payment is just as great, the consumer pays just as much on the aggregate, only it'd show up in their taxes instead. If you truely believe the government is vastly superior at R&D, without being burdened by the likes of marketing and administration (heh), then certainly the two can operate side by side; government would presumably out innovate the commercial companies. [Though I don't believe this for a moment]
They probably won't. I wonder how many slashdot readers approve of the "endangered species" act basically taking property WITHOUT compensation. This is convienient because the government kills any value of the land and it doesn't put a hole in the budget, Everyone is happy except the landowners and the endangered species that are burned out as people turn their plots into desert before anything is discovered.
I do have concerns about this kind of regulation. Although I'm not sure about the endangered species act itself, the courts have historically awarded damages to the land owner in similar cases where it can be proven that government decisions/regulation hurt the value of the land after it was purchased, on the grounds that it constitutes a taking.
Or maybe some people on slashdot really are hypocrits. Maybe they simply don't have a single, consistent, line of reasoning. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want mass marketed goods, but love to attack it because it's chiq. They want to listen to pop music, but they don't want to pay for it. They want to ban copyright entirely, but ignore that major stipulation in GPL that insists on you open your source. I'm not saying every single one of these applies to everyone, but many points can be applied to the most vocal critics here.
as I see it is marketing and a form of specialized investment, not distribution per se. Frankly, I suspect they'd love nothing more than enjoy that higher profit margins that would come to digital distribution.
Also, P2P and direct artist to consumer sales are not one in the same. In fact, they're almost mutually exclusive. P2P is probably not going to facilate actual sales, that'd much better suited towards centralization. P2P hasn't brought micropayments and the like any closer. The artist is just as capable of doing that today as they were before P2P emerged. So suing P2P outfits will do little to nothing to stop increased artist independence. Even if the industry wanted to, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on [if they wanted to sue an unsigned artist using a respectable website, something akin to mp3.com, that simply isn't getting near their copyrights] In short, they're quite seperate issues.
Now I know you realize the importance of marketing, but I don't see Napster and the like as being a marketing tool. Personally, I think the "just personal channel" aspects are overhyped these days. We may see increased personal targeting of marketing, but I don't think the majority of consumers will ever be there own DJs--it's just too much work. What we may see is increased specialization, i.e., 50 MTV channels...but even there there would be a lot of homogenization and crossover. Witness the perseverence of the likes of MTV.
Though this isn't my field of expertise by any means, it's pretty clear to me that the real reason is that people like to have things in common with their peers, whether it be music, sports, movies, politics, or whatever. People need to talk to each other and these things provide grounds to talk. In other words, even if they were willing to devote the time and energy, there is a natural force that pushes people back together.
One - bandwidth - lots of kiddies grabbing the newest Korn means big pipes on your server.
The problem with that argument is any business whose business model revolves around downloads is going to scale with that demand, because that's how they make their money. Witness mp3.com.
Anyways, I'd say the only bandwidth that matters is from the consumers perspective, how fast the consumer can attain the song of the quality that they desire after they decide to initiate a search for it. With Napster you're obliged to find a fast and reliable share. I'd argue that this tends to be much slower for most people than a reasonably well configured server would be, especially if they went to an Akamia-style configuration.
Two - scalability - can't beat the scalability of a distributed architecture.
Uhuh, and this is why Napster has to segregate their users to seperate databases?
Three - security - although you mention the benifit of preventing piracy, I think this is perhaps mislead. Piracy will continue, centralized server or not. Also, you are now a fat juicy target for every pissed-off kiddie that can't get into the site to d/l the new Korn, due of course to every other kid doing the same thing...see first point.
Which really doesn't happen at all -- see my response. Also "piracy" != "piracy". Napster and kin revolutionized piracy, in the sense that it brought it to the masses. Yes, before you could go to IRC, usenet, ftps, etc for them, but the barriers to entry are too high and the scalability too low for the average user. Empirically speaking too, piracy was just for those with the time to waste and the requisite skills. If you don't believe me, just sample your average university's bandwidth consumption patterns....
The only feature of "P2P" that most every person give a damn about is that it facilitates piracy. This is a common feature of all the (psuedo) P2P methods that the music and recording industry has litigated against. Lessigs statement clouds the matter, the industry couldn't give a rat's ass about "new models of distribution", they care about piracy of their own materials. If these "new models of distribution" didn't, as a matter of fact, focus around piracy then the industry would have a much harder time in court. The innovators of these "models" put more effort into facilitating piracy than they do into stopping it.
I'll grant you that the fundamental idea behind P2P is cool in and of itself. However, realistically, what additional advantage does Napster (et al.) offer to the consumer or the artist over and above the traditional centralized client server architecture (which has the added, and well established, benefit of preventing piracy)? It's actually worse for the artist. Ok, so they can stick their song on their own computer and serve it. Maybe if they get really lucky someone will randomly stumble across and download it. Of course, in the mean time, the song may be renamed, damaged, replaced, etc. A central server can do all of this and more. Storage is cheap, certainly cheaper than the expensive database systems that napster employs. You can still get the "random search"--if you believe that important. What's more, you can insure consistent quality, information on the artist, etc. You can also create indexing systems, web pages, common tastes/suggestions (similar to what Amazon does), etc.
In my opinion, until the proponents of P2P can offer a convincing cost versus benefit argument for society that doesn't thumb its nose at copyright, it won't stand a chance. Like it or not, copyright is an integral and important feature of our society. Limiting or regulating P2P to preserve the intent of copyright may well make more sense than just allowing P2P to ride roughshod over copyright. Sometimes inaction can do far more violence than action. It is ridiculous to assume that inaction of the law is necessarily the safer course just because there are some legal complexities.
No, it's largely incoherant because your writing there literally didn't make much sense. Anyways, it's funny you mention Prozac. Eli Lilly lost a legal battle last year over their patent on Prozac, the end result is that generics are going to cut their price by 2/3rds. You ever heard of Zoloft? Well it's the competing medication now. As of March of last year it actually out sold Prozac in new prescriptions. The net result is a loss to Eli Lilly. I'd also like to remind you, that although Prozac was certainly a profitable project when taken on it's lonesome, for every popular drug like Prozac there are many many more that don't and cost just as much to develop.
Although the drug industry certainly has returned some healthy profits, it's also had its share of failures. The bottom line is that if you were to map it out with all other investments and securities, its return is very much in line with its riskiness. This means that they really don't have fat that can be trimed that wouldn't result in an exodus of shareholders into less risky ventures and/or ventures of the same risk that simply return more. Translation: Cutting what you regard as excess profits in your casual examination can actually hurt the consumer.
As for Intel's patents, they can be every bit as broad. You confuse the age of the semiconductor industry with a difference in patents. Intel has patents on any number of things, not just an exact design, but manufacturing technology, R&D, chemical compounds, chip design, etc.
As for charity, I'm certain there is more you can do. How new is that computer of yours? Your car? Your apartment? Your stereo? I find it difficult to believe that you live a lifestyle below most Americans (which is well above the "average" world wide) Anyways, I'm sure you know the truth, even if you won't admit it at this moment.
Slashdot Mirror
What does technical know how have to do with legal and political points of view? Speaking for myself, and many others, I'd be willing to bet that I know more about technology than the vast majority of slashdot users, especially napster users, yet I definitely see Napster as a threat to the greater interests of society. Likewise, there are a great many engineers, computer programmers, and others that are well out of their thirties, often have a better grasp on technology, and take a similar view point.
This is the LEGAL system we're talking about here, it's never ever been about public opinion, it's about the rule of law. The very notion is absurd. If the founders intended the majority to decide legal cases, they'd simply have voting machines as the courts, instead of lawyers, judges, etc. The founders, and most other stable societies, decided long ago that this was a very dangerous system.
Very little. First, you mistake slashdot and similar forums with your "generation". Second, the generation(s) that you refer to are actually relatively conservative when you compare them to your parents', and the vast majority of their rhetoric went up in smoke once they got a real job.
Umm, I'd argue that they really don't coincide. If we take the shops, for example, there is no law saying that their customers can't use the parks. In all likelyhood, their customers won't even know that they're part of the group. So what's the draw back from sitting on the sidelines, saving a little money, and still enjoying the same benefits? I don't see this as being a
meeting of local and global minimums.
Anyways, I'd argue that your argument that the local and global minimums meet in any of my examples, are because of tertiary factors that often take care of those problems without the need for any sort of leap of faith. i.e., your friends, family, coworkers, community, business, or what have you, make your reconsider what might otherwise be a myopic and self-centered approach. In fact, I'd argue that these kinds of situations are more real world oriented than the laboratory or psuedo-socialist inspired ideas of the counterexamples, not to mention more common than you think. Did you ever consider that they're all around you, just that you don't notice them because you take them for granted?
Whether it can or not is debatable, but it DOESN'T happen that way. Participation is the norm with many of these successful projects.
Many people might do so without their explicit approval, however that doesn't mean that most people still don't often sacrifice privacy for the right incentive. In fact, there have been a large number of studies, both in society and in the lab, where the majority of people explicitely agree to the incentive in exchange for loss of privacy. Anyways, the initial argument was never that the consumer should be put in the dark, it's that two parties (including the customer) know what the conditions of the agreement are, live by it, and both profit from it. We should certainly enforce violations of it, but those violations are largely extraneous to the argument. Furthermore, your dilema example is entirely different; if the individual does not know, it's simply not up to the individual to seek any minimum in this context.
But I think you do. On one hand you'll imply that the credit card situation is a problem of global minumums, while on the other hand claiming that the consumer is ignorant. If the consumer is ignorant, then it's not the "Dilema", that's a problem of ignorance. Frankly, I think it's both. Consumers sometimes do some things out of ignorance--what the industry does not tell them (and there, I argue we should regulate out). But othertimes they very definitely agree, both explicitely or implicitely, to the conditions. When they agree, it simply is not a minimum at all.
Now I know you argue that they have no "choice", but I simply disagree with that. The industry did not roll out some cannon and say "you all will accept this". They can't do that any more than they can impose an abitrary price, unless they are a monopoly, in which case they're already in the justice departments sites. The only way it can possibly reach the kind of critical mass that you describe is if the majority of people either do things out of ignorance (less common then you think) or if they willingly agree to give up their privacy--which, I would argue, is a global minimum.
What's more, to the extent that there are competitive markets, if there is a truely substantial demand (which I really don't believe there is) for privacy, there will be a market for that. Companies will try to meet those demands if it is economical and ultimately desirable to those same customers [i.e., if they're really willing to pay what privacy costs].
Interest != Demand. People are also interested in charity, but by and large, most people would rather have a new car. The same goes for privacy in my opinion. They may like the idea of privacy in theory, but when it comes time to actually shop, and they have a choice between something that costs 5% less or privacy (especially when it's something as inane as Cola preferences), they generally decide the former.
Again, this is pretty much the same argument. Most people aren't willing to pay what it costs. Slashdot and your probably liberally oriented friends are hardly representive of the population as a whole, but even there, I'd argue that they take the discount route. Anyways, there are a large number of websites and such that "gaurantee" your privacy, especially where people might care, like on a porn site.
This is an entirely seperate argument than the one presented, that "poor" people are essentially too desperate to make a rational decision. That said, I simply disagree with your premises and your conclusions.
First, you presume that we CAN'T contract on the whole. Now maybe contracting is less efficient, but it is sufficiently efficient. Even if it's not, we could make a law that assures that is the ONLY way such an exchange would take place. If it's not sufficiently efficient, then the exchange of privacy would not happen ( at least no more so than if we were ban it outright ). Furthermore, the market tends to present solutions to these kinds of problems. For instance, rather than pooling a communal rainy day fund, we have these entities called insurance companies. Rather than contracting with the community as a whole, each person contracts with an entity that takes care of enforcement, payment, etc.
Second, it's not proven that the system will "always" seek, as you call it, a local minimum in favor of a global minimum. It may tend to happen as the environment gets larger, but it's not assured. If it is, then how do you explain various strikes and protests without those binding contracts (i.e., mandatory union strikes)? How do you explain local shops banding together to clean up a parks in numerous cities, where the city itself has proven itself incapable? There are many other similar examples.
Third, just to be clear, the tragedy of the commons is not that any particular individual is irrational. The individual is rational in the context of the situation of which he operates. When you refer to the "system", you're referring to the result of low coordination of that system.
Third, you refer to the masses of individuals CHOOSING lack of privacy, all the while ignoring that it is a choice that the majority of them make independent of the community as a whole. When we're talking about sharing resources, those examples are relevant. But when we're talking about a choice that two parties make privately amongst themselves that has no direct negative bearing on any third party, it's largely immaterial.
Now you might say that maybe if 9 in 10 of those individuals choose plan A (reduced privacy), then 1 in 10 individuals will probably has less choice in the matter. This may be true, but you can't get around the fact that each and every person saw it wiser to choose plan A. In essense, it's a vote, one that was just won by a landslide.
But even there, if there is a sizable minority, there is a market for meeting those demands. That solution may not be perfect, but it's better than denying everyone else their say.
Fourth, more empirically speaking, who says most people really prefer privacy? I'd argue from the evidence, that people consistently choose cheap and convenient over privacy.
Fifth, I think you're largely mistaken if you think there ever was a viable choice between privacy and credit. The key word is credit, meaning that someone is giving you money before you pay them back with interest. People simply don't do this blind. They require information. The less information you give them, the less likely it is that you'll recieve credit, not because the credit card companies or banks are mean, or because of a "commons" situation, but rather because it's a necessary element of lending and credit. Risk and return are tied together at the hip. If you put the industry in the dark, you increase their risk in many different ways. The only way to obtain additional credit in this situation is to increase their return (read: your interest rate and/or penalties)
That is not opposite. In fact, it's essentially the same phenomenon. In both situations, all involved parties may theoretically benefit more, as an individuals, if they COORDINATE their actions. They do not, because in their own little, immediate, and self-centered microcosms it does not benefit them. [One could take this argument even further and argue the theoretical outcome versus the intuited and the empirical outcomes--where a person might not be a "moron" at all, because the theory is impossible.]
Whether you wish to call this irrationality or not is a semantic argument that is largely irrelvent to the underlying question. There is a large, but subtle distinction to be made. In the "tragedy of the commons" and in the "Dilema", you involve an outside universe, beyond just self, that necessarily involves a great many additional factors. None of this says that a person cannot decide, for instance, whether he'd rather have 4 dollars or 5 dollars. Likewise, it also does not say that a person is too irrational as to decide if he'd rather have 5m (or any number) dollars [in exchange for interested business entities knowing his shopping habits] or his "privacy".
The tragedy of the commons is not a demonstration of irrationality, quite the contrary, it's a demonstration of rationality and self centeredness. It is an apt demonstration of one of the reasons why socialism and communism fail. If I am rational and self-centered, and if sharing costs me something, I simply won't share unless I profit as a result of sharing. Put simply, you have no assurances if you share that you'll gain anything; the only assurance is that you'll lose something in the process of sharing.
If most other people don't share, it's a losing proposition. Though it may be true that we would be better off if everyone shared (this is debatable), it presumes COORDINATION of interests. Rationality simply does not gaurantee this, that is a seperate issue entirely. We are rational as individuals. Thus the example is not proof that people are irrational.
You might call someone irrational, if they can share 1 unit and are assured to get 3 unit in return, and refuse to share, but this is simply not the case with the tragedy in the commons. People are generally good when they can directly control their own welfare. Leaving it up to the individual makes sense when the effects of their action primarily just affect and benefit themselves. This privacy issue is just such a case.
There are of course times where we require a certain coordination and enlightened self-interest, where we require by law or as a society that a person MUST do a thing (i.e., taxes, speed limits, other laws, etc), but these do not contradict rationality--they contradict COORDINATION. A libertarian might reject the arguments for them, but they aren't, or shouldn't be, making them solely on the grounds of rationality.
Anyways, I am a capitalist and, if anything, a Republican, not a Libertarian.
PS: People may not be perfectly rational, but we don't need perfection to do a vastly better job on the aggregate. For that matter, we're not perfect in anything, so why should presume our reasoning for our laws are any better?
Let me put it to you this way, you have two seperate universes.
In universe A, you have rich people and you have poor people. None of them are allowed sell their privacy--privacy is MANDATORY!
In universe B, you have equally rich and poor people. The difference, of course, would be that the poor person now has a choice to make themselves a little bit richer by sacrificing a little bit of their privacy.
Unless you presume that person irrational, that person is better off in universe B. If poor person makes a rational decision, the poor person is better off in his eyes. The key word being "better".
Your problem is the poorness in the first place. What you fail to realize is that that poor person would be poor anyways. If the person's situation is so down and out as to have to "prostitute" his privacy, the thing that sucks is his poverty, not his choice. In other words, put bluntly, his life already sucks, but in universe B, his life sucks a little less.
Anyways, you presume that this would break down along those lines. I simply don't see it that way. I'd be willing to sacrifice a little bit of my privacy for the right incentive, hell I already do, I'm sure you do too. Speaking for myself, it's not for want of money (I'd be considered rich by most anyone's definition), intelligence, education, etc. I don't see MANDATORY privacy as being a basic human right. In fact, I don't even see it as desirable.
We can have RIGHTS without them being MANDATORY. We have the RIGHT to own land, but we can also sell it. We can OWN money, but we can sell it. We have freedom of speech, but we can sell some of it for a price. We have the right to liberty, but most every person willingly reports to a boss. This is not too dissimilar.
Furthermore, I'd also like to add that people have been selling their privacy for so long. When you advertise your business, you're giving just a little bit of your privacy up. When you put your ad in the personals, same. And so on and so on.
Ahem, care to backup the 75% of "resources" claim? This always struck me as being rather bogus. What exactly does "resources" mean in this case? And how is it measured?
Now I'm sure we take up vastly more fuel per capita than people in China, India, etc, but what about the real staples, like food and water? If we truely takeup so many resources, then you must also assume that the vast majority of those staples lie in those regions where the "excessive" consumers live, because very little is imported from places like India, China, Russia, etc.
I suspect people are measuring the "resources" by any number of backwards methods, like by GDP, imports and exports, commercial production, etc. They assume zero sum games, they assume that producivity would be as high in the near socialist environment required to make it vastly more "even", and so and so on. These are all invalid for any number of reasons, but I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth.
It's not that easy, especially if WEP is employed. Combine this with a decent VPN encryption algorithm and you have pretty decent effective security--especially if your name is Joe Schmoe. Who really wants to break into your dialup network when there are much better and softer targets out there? What's more, if you're using your network primarily to access the internet, the threat from the internet is far greater than the threat from the wireless side. If you think any and all encryption that can be employed on a wireless setup is "worthless", then the internet should be similarly worthless.
Also, if your name is Joe Schmoe, I suspect the physical security of your person, your home, your car, and other personal property is of greater concern, yet I doubt you expend the same amount of paranoic energy at them.
I was thinking of doing a little bit of reverse engineering using OLE/COM to iterate through the various classes, properties, methods and defined constants (in the type libraries and such) then saving them and doing a diff, of sorts, on the file and saving them in a database. Of course it'd probably require a little more human intervention then that, but still...
Do you think that approach would be enlightening at all? I haven't studied the BIFF specs at all, other then to determine the scope of the documentation. And I certainly haven't put any real time understanding it. It's just been a thought thus far...
First, there are a great many in there that aren't at all printer specific. i.e., headers, footers, basic orientation (i.e., Landscape or Portrait). Second, it's been my experience that Excel doesn't care what printer you have or how it's setup when you use any of these properties, it just does them. If it's too big, small, or unsupported by the printer, you deal with it when you print it, not when you set the properties. Third, Excel files are often used for sharing, just because you can't print on your own, doesn't mean you don't want to leave the document without those formatting. Fourth, that "feature" is NOT documented, at least no where in the common sources. Fifth, the error message is obscure, if they're going to restrict you from doing certain things because of the printer, they can tell you just that. The PageSetup issue is just one of many.
Anyways, the requirement that I both install Excel (and all it's dlls) and have a printer installed is sufficient reason to want to avoid COM in certain instances. In one such scenario, I'd like to run it unattended on a server--possibly even on *Nix. In the other, we use it within a widely distributed database application. When the latest and "greatest" Excel version comes out for those applications, we either force the user to use the more outdated version, constantly upgrade and recompile for the latest version, or do other such things--none of which are convenient and reliable. It's been my experience that, while the latest Excel file format may change, they maintain a large amount of backwards compatibility. When the user needs to edit and save, we don't care if they save in the latest format or not.
The bottom line is that while COM may be good for many things, it has serious drawbacks that can be better answered by other solutions.
Haha. First, I've done quite a lot of COM and OLE programming. Second, you really should look at MS's knowledge base, if you don't believe me. There are tons of bugs that will happen no matter what interface you use or how "good" you program. For instance, I just recently stumbled into a bug where any properties in the PageSetup class could not be read or altered. The cause: No printer installed. Of course, it gave the typical non-obvious generic MS error message and since this app was totally automated and sending the files via email, it never occured to me to setup the printer. Imagine someone wanting to format a document without printing it?!? Gasp.
Granted, writing the file directly has its drawbacks too, but there are undeniable benefits. For instance, when MS upgrades their interfaces, they frequently break things that are supposed to remain compatible, whereas the MS seems maintain a modicum of file interoperability. There is also the potential for vast speed increases, stability, straight forwardness for simple documents, portability (such as writing a lightweight graphical reporter in *nix), cost savings, not having to install MS Office, zero supervision, freedom from type libraries, dlls, etc.
Anyhow, I've read the basic BIFF specs before, but how about support for the more advanced features? Such as pivottables? filtering? charts? autosums? advanced formatting? etc etc. I don't necessarily _need_ all of these, but the more the better. I've been considering writing my own file level interface or object to handle a wide range of reports styles.
I'd love to write a report generator that creates raw, but well formated, Excel files without having to depend on OLE/COM and the ever buggy MS Excel.
Do not open that IP in your web browser, you'll regret it. It's almost as bad as goats.ex...
I agree, this is a very valid point, especially towards DoS-type attacks. However, I'd also like to add multiple different daemons have their own drawbacks, insofar as there is more potential bugs that can hit you. For instance, if you're running two different name servers on the same unprotected subnet, you might well have just doubled your exposure, since it only takes one bug to break your entire subnet wide open. Conversely, (towards your point) more singular cultures also increase the reward factor for would be hackers. In other words, if every site ran its own home brewed name server, the hacker would have to put in effort just to crack that one site. Smaller sites like, say, Edogpoo.com may enjoy a poor cost benefit relationship, from the would-be hacker's perspective.
The bottom line is that there are oppositional forces and tradeoffs, like so many other things in security and in the computing world. One setup is not always the best, it depends greatly on the entirity of the situation.
No, I don't think we "need" that bit of information, because it is largely immaterial. We know that mass storage and bandwidth (i.e., centralized file distribution) is plenty affordable now because of the presence of so many of entities of that type online that have much as much or less revenue opportunity. We can also do reasonable approximations to prove the point. The point being that if an mp3.com type model costs mere pennies, the most napster could save is those pennies. If there is a choice between mass appropriation of copyright or saving a few pennies for the rare small artist, the choice should be pretty clear. If the situation is different than this, then it should be up to Napster to prove otherwise.
I'm not saying the ONLY use for P2P is piracy, what I am saying is that:
A) Most people associate P2P with piracy, hence the word synonymous.
B) The industry has sued P2P piracy agents, not just P2P concepts.
C) The industry is NOT just suing any new distribution model; they're suing agents that have a direct affect on their own copyright. If there is some overlap (assuming you could really call napster a new distribution model with a straight face), it's coincidental.
Yes, but killer applications are generally DISTINCTIONS that seperate the product from the rest of the flock. This is, hopefully, one LESS killer application for MS. In all likelyhood though, this will not prove as stable, fast, compatible, etc. In other words, if you want to play games, Windows will still be your platform of choice; this just makes Linux that more viable for those who are already using Linux and like to play games.
Yes, I'd say that argument has _some_ merit, but it's not sufficiently significant to society. For one, in order for Napster to facilate this, they have had to impliment a complex database structure. This may well cost more than just providing the mp3s themselves, especially when you stop and consider that 99% of their searches and database are for pirated material. In other words, there is a great deal of waste there.
The only way I can see that argument applying substantially is if the sampling to payment ratio is extremely high. e.g., 1000 downloads for 1 payment. That, of course, would beg the question of the small artists' benefit. This also assumes that there would be no supplemental revenue such as banner adds....
Put simply, to whatever extent that people believe the small artist can benefit from Napster (which i'm extremely skeptical of), I believe can be done better and cheaper for all involved with a centralized structure. Witness mp3.com or, somewhat related, tucows.com and the like. That kind of bandwidth and indexing is quite affordable these days, especially since the presumed revenues would scale with the demand.
Anyways, even if you presumed this off-loading of quality to be a good thing, the same fundamental offloading of bandwidth could be achieved while essentially blocking piracy through the use of enumerated legitimate indexing. For instance, the small artist would go to some website on Napster, and upload their OWN songs, sign a document saying that it belongs to them and that they agree to be held liable if it is not their own song (complete with contact information, etc), Napster would then produce a checksum of sorts such that the song could be verified to be that same song for every search and index. Thus Napster could serve the small artist well, mantain indexes of quality songs, and prevent any measurable piracy.
It may be a little more complex but it is very much dooable. It would have virtually all the presumed benefits of today's Napster with little to no costs for the established artists and industry.
Huh? I don't get where you're going with this.
Are you being facetious or not? I don't disagree with much of this, though I'd take a different tone. i.e., if a country can't feed itself or do the relatively basic task of stopping mass infection then they're certainly not capable of the requirements of a massive AIDS medication program for existing victims. I'd argue that, given the kinds of resources Brazil had to spend (440m in one year) to even appropriate these patents, we'd be better spending that kind of money towards getting those governments and society's in order (if at all possible). Things like BASIC sanitation, transportation, medication, education, infrastructure, etc would do far more to improve their welfare than a failed medication program.
Uh, until most recently, only a few developed Western nations supported IP. While the West had experienced massive innovation, they stagnated. If they were lucky, they were able to copy us. Witness India, China, Russia, etc. [Hint: This is not for skilled or intelligent people.]. Meanwhile, in recent years, as IP is starting to gain international support, we are seeing actual spending towards legitimate R&D in those same countries for the first time ever. Witness India's generic drug companies of today and others. In other words, I'd argue that, this experiment has been done on both sides, in a thousands different ways, by hundreds of different countries.
I'd argue it's the other way around. Except for in the case of outstanding trademarks, popular domains like slashdot have not been stolen. If this were true intellectual anarchy, assuming the internet infrastructure would even be a possibility, slashdot would be up for grabs to the strongest or wealthiest or dirtiest bidder.
This would have the effect of killing, or at least being a force against, research where ever the government might decide to appropriate the patent. By definition, if that one time fee is less than the earnings the innovator can make now, that is less incentive to take risk. Also, if that payment is just as great, the consumer pays just as much on the aggregate, only it'd show up in their taxes instead. If you truely believe the government is vastly superior at R&D, without being burdened by the likes of marketing and administration (heh), then certainly the two can operate side by side; government would presumably out innovate the commercial companies. [Though I don't believe this for a moment]
I do have concerns about this kind of regulation. Although I'm not sure about the endangered species act itself, the courts have historically awarded damages to the land owner in similar cases where it can be proven that government decisions/regulation hurt the value of the land after it was purchased, on the grounds that it constitutes a taking.
Or maybe some people on slashdot really are hypocrits. Maybe they simply don't have a single, consistent, line of reasoning. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want mass marketed goods, but love to attack it because it's chiq. They want to listen to pop music, but they don't want to pay for it. They want to ban copyright entirely, but ignore that major stipulation in GPL that insists on you open your source. I'm not saying every single one of these applies to everyone, but many points can be applied to the most vocal critics here.
as I see it is marketing and a form of specialized investment, not distribution per se. Frankly, I suspect they'd love nothing more than enjoy that higher profit margins that would come to digital distribution.
Also, P2P and direct artist to consumer sales are not one in the same. In fact, they're almost mutually exclusive. P2P is probably not going to facilate actual sales, that'd much better suited towards centralization. P2P hasn't brought micropayments and the like any closer. The artist is just as capable of doing that today as they were before P2P emerged. So suing P2P outfits will do little to nothing to stop increased artist independence. Even if the industry wanted to, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on [if they wanted to sue an unsigned artist using a respectable website, something akin to mp3.com, that simply isn't getting near their copyrights] In short, they're quite seperate issues.
Now I know you realize the importance of marketing, but I don't see Napster and the like as being a marketing tool. Personally, I think the "just personal channel" aspects are overhyped these days. We may see increased personal targeting of marketing, but I don't think the majority of consumers will ever be there own DJs--it's just too much work. What we may see is increased specialization, i.e., 50 MTV channels...but even there there would be a lot of homogenization and crossover. Witness the perseverence of the likes of MTV.
Though this isn't my field of expertise by any means, it's pretty clear to me that the real reason is that people like to have things in common with their peers, whether it be music, sports, movies, politics, or whatever. People need to talk to each other and these things provide grounds to talk. In other words, even if they were willing to devote the time and energy, there is a natural force that pushes people back together.
Anyways, I'd say the only bandwidth that matters is from the consumers perspective, how fast the consumer can attain the song of the quality that they desire after they decide to initiate a search for it. With Napster you're obliged to find a fast and reliable share. I'd argue that this tends to be much slower for most people than a reasonably well configured server would be, especially if they went to an Akamia-style configuration.
Uhuh, and this is why Napster has to segregate their users to seperate databases?
Which really doesn't happen at all -- see my response. Also "piracy" != "piracy". Napster and kin revolutionized piracy, in the sense that it brought it to the masses. Yes, before you could go to IRC, usenet, ftps, etc for them, but the barriers to entry are too high and the scalability too low for the average user. Empirically speaking too, piracy was just for those with the time to waste and the requisite skills. If you don't believe me, just sample your average university's bandwidth consumption patterns....
The only feature of "P2P" that most every person give a damn about is that it facilitates piracy. This is a common feature of all the (psuedo) P2P methods that the music and recording industry has litigated against. Lessigs statement clouds the matter, the industry couldn't give a rat's ass about "new models of distribution", they care about piracy of their own materials. If these "new models of distribution" didn't, as a matter of fact, focus around piracy then the industry would have a much harder time in court. The innovators of these "models" put more effort into facilitating piracy than they do into stopping it.
I'll grant you that the fundamental idea behind P2P is cool in and of itself. However, realistically, what additional advantage does Napster (et al.) offer to the consumer or the artist over and above the traditional centralized client server architecture (which has the added, and well established, benefit of preventing piracy)? It's actually worse for the artist. Ok, so they can stick their song on their own computer and serve it. Maybe if they get really lucky someone will randomly stumble across and download it. Of course, in the mean time, the song may be renamed, damaged, replaced, etc. A central server can do all of this and more. Storage is cheap, certainly cheaper than the expensive database systems that napster employs. You can still get the "random search"--if you believe that important. What's more, you can insure consistent quality, information on the artist, etc. You can also create indexing systems, web pages, common tastes/suggestions (similar to what Amazon does), etc.
In my opinion, until the proponents of P2P can offer a convincing cost versus benefit argument for society that doesn't thumb its nose at copyright, it won't stand a chance. Like it or not, copyright is an integral and important feature of our society. Limiting or regulating P2P to preserve the intent of copyright may well make more sense than just allowing P2P to ride roughshod over copyright. Sometimes inaction can do far more violence than action. It is ridiculous to assume that inaction of the law is necessarily the safer course just because there are some legal complexities.
No, it's largely incoherant because your writing there literally didn't make much sense. Anyways, it's funny you mention Prozac. Eli Lilly lost a legal battle last year over their patent on Prozac, the end result is that generics are going to cut their price by 2/3rds. You ever heard of Zoloft? Well it's the competing medication now. As of March of last year it actually out sold Prozac in new prescriptions. The net result is a loss to Eli Lilly. I'd also like to remind you, that although Prozac was certainly a profitable project when taken on it's lonesome, for every popular drug like Prozac there are many many more that don't and cost just as much to develop.
Although the drug industry certainly has returned some healthy profits, it's also had its share of failures. The bottom line is that if you were to map it out with all other investments and securities, its return is very much in line with its riskiness. This means that they really don't have fat that can be trimed that wouldn't result in an exodus of shareholders into less risky ventures and/or ventures of the same risk that simply return more. Translation: Cutting what you regard as excess profits in your casual examination can actually hurt the consumer.
As for Intel's patents, they can be every bit as broad. You confuse the age of the semiconductor industry with a difference in patents. Intel has patents on any number of things, not just an exact design, but manufacturing technology, R&D, chemical compounds, chip design, etc.
As for charity, I'm certain there is more you can do. How new is that computer of yours? Your car? Your apartment? Your stereo? I find it difficult to believe that you live a lifestyle below most Americans (which is well above the "average" world wide) Anyways, I'm sure you know the truth, even if you won't admit it at this moment.