Images float through my head; the paradise of the end of scarcity, the oligarchs chanting that scarcity is what motivates the free market and so must be protected, then hiring legislators to pass laws to increase artificial scarcity, while capitalizing on the new option of non-scarcity to get free tools for advancing the market penetration of their artificially scarce goods.
It seems apparent that they would rather be kings in hell than peers in heaven.
My inclusion of Singapore, as I already said, was a mistake.
Hong Kong unskilled labor wages are much lower than US and EU labor wages. That is because HK unskilled labor wages are tightly coupled to mainland China labor wages. US and EU labor wages are much higher, because they are only moderately impacted by mainland China wages. Meanwhile, HK, US, and EU business labor wages are similar for similar roles, because HK business labor wages are heavily focused on international commercial banking and international trade. Therefore, the HK income distribution (the portion of the HK economy which is implicitly being discussed when "Gini" is mentioned) is dramatically more hybrid than the US or EU.
A major part of the reason is that only manufacturing labor wages are significantly impacted in the US and EU, and even that force is tempered by shipping costs. In HK, all labor costs -- including direct service labor costs -- are impacted, and shipping is a much smaller component of the cost of goods produced in mainland China.
Finally, I would not classify either the US or EU as pure free market or pure capitalist economies, any more than I would classify the HK economy as a pure hybrid. HK is more hybrid, because a major component of its economy, unskilled labor wages, is tightly coupled to communist price levels, while business labor wages are more tightly coupled to free market prices.
If your point is that the Kindle is, itself, a restricted medium and therefore a threat to increasing the breadth of information distribution, I can see your point. And I think we are fundamentally thinking in the same context; that the question is not how it affects any person or group of people, or even all people in the short run, but how it affects society in the long run. Since it creates a fiat restriction on the private actions of citizens, it must be justified by bedrock societal benefits.
If that is what you are saying, then I can see your point. I think though that it gets a little muddled with the statement, "Books are universally available to anybody now."
That statement seems to be saying that lending of electronic media would not expand the reach of science and the useful arts. I think that angle would fall somewhere between false and difficult to demonstrate -- more difficult to demonstrate than would be necessary to justify the fiat restriction on private actions of citizens. Further, unfortunately, it is currently the official position of the Librarian of Congress that electronic lending is, in fact, harmful to expanding the reach of science and the useful arts, and is therefore not covered by first sale doctrine. If that is what you are saying, that you think electronic lending should not be covered by first sale doctrine, then I cannot concur.
I think your post could benefit by being more clear about why you disagree. I am not even clear which side you are advocating.
Yes. The influence on labor income in Hong Kong is far stronger, of course, and affects direct service labor as well as manufacturing labor, but it is the same influence.
one Kindle blog listed out the top advantages to having them available in libraries.
It is an interesting blog entry, that points out a bunch of the selfish little things that blogger gets out of it, but he missed one advantage:
It is in the long-term best interests of society to make works of science and the useful arts available for borrowing to all. In fact, broadening the reach of such information is the only reason we suffer copyright to exist in the first place. The profit creators are granted through the right of first sale is just a means to that end.
The amazing part of this story is not the wondrous new opportunity we have to borrow published materials from others after the first sale -- it is the chutzpah of the kleptocracy that kept it from happening on day one. And that selfish little kleptocrat blogger is no better. The point of this is not what it does for you, little man, it is what it does for society.
Poverty in Hong Kong and Singapore resulting from communism. Do you really mean that?
Hong Kong, yes -- my brother lived there for a while and I visited for three weeks. There is a very broad chasm between the business community and the unskilled labor class. My hypothesis is that this is because unskilled labor wages are heavily influenced by labor income in mainland China, while the business wages are more closely coupled to first world business wages abroad.
Singapore, no -- I was confused. I thought Singapore had the same economic background as Hong Kong. Another poster corrected me. I would have to do further research to present a revised hypothesis.
GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said, "Class warfare may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics."
Class warfare, in the strict sense of guns and bombs, is -- like all civil war -- bad for the economy. Labor resources spending time shooting at each other, and getting shot, is potential productivity lost. Similarly, spending time on arguments that have no basis in reality is a waste of resources. There is evidence, however, that reducing the Gini (a measure of income disparity -- higher Gini means higher disparity) in the United States would increase the GDP growth rate. Here is one example set of data:
America's Gini has been rising steadily since the early 1970's (it started before Reagan, because the tax brackets didn't keep up with the rapid inflation resulting from the oil embargo). Our Gini is now high enough to make our PPP (GDP per capita) an outlier. Most nations with our level of income disparity are third world nations. Only Hong Kong and SIngapore -- hybrid economies which mix successful free market economies with the stark poverty resulting from communism -- are in the first world ballpark and have Ginis as high as ours.
One possible reason is this: In any economic system there is an optimal market price to pay for any resource. If that economic system overpays for some resource or class of resources, it will operate less efficiently. There may be systemic biases in place which cause us to pay more for the labor (and/or capital lending) of our wealthy than their labor (and/or capital lending) is worth. Of course the chart above is insufficient to show the causal relationship, but it would explain why our PPP (GDP per capita) growth rate has fallen during the same period that our Gini has been increasing (I have more charts that show the temporal relationship, but they are not yet ready for publication).
If, in fact, the increasing Gini is a cause of falling PPP, then increasing the taxation on upper income brackets would increase the GDP growth rate. If that is the case, and assuming one believes (as I do) that the ideal free market is GDP maximizing, there is only one possible explanation: some degree of progressive taxation actually increases the accuracy of our approximation of the free market, by offsetting a systemic bias.
Disagree? Good, I'd love to see your empirical evidence. Show me the data.
Do we scale down the language to the point of developers not having to debug their errors or perhaps no mechanism for a program to even crash?
Not in all cases. There is a time and place for a language like that. Squeak comes to mind; an outstanding environment in which to start kids off with programming. But I don't think most production languages should be like that.
I think production languages should run the spectrum from Squeak to pure Lisp (or whatever is on the "OMFG that's peculiar and powerful" end of the spectrum). Java falls pretty solidly in the area that I would frame as; companies want to hire programmers without working too hard on the interview process, and still get workable production code out the door.
That kind of business objective covers a big chunk of the commercial programming space these days. Most companies want an engaging Internet presence, but they're not trying to shave microseconds off the record speed for calculating the singular value decomposition of a 50x50 matrix. They need "good enough" code, written by "good enough" programmers.
If you are a rookie there is no way to put a value as a noob to a language making mistakes, debugging your code, stepping through it, finding the errors and learning from your wicked ways.
Completely agreed. There is a huge amount of value in this.
There is also value in a language that is more inviting, encouraging, and tolerant of errors.
The trick is finding the appropriate balance for a given nascent hacker. Some people find programming to be a frustrating experience because of its sometimes pedantic nature. Learning to program can be quite standoffish. And while the best programmers may be those who find the debugging intriguing, there is certainly room for programmers who find that aspect tiresome.
The defense against it is simple. Do your research and publish it ALL to the public. Release it and get it out there Creative commons licensing eliminates the possibility of your idea being patented and stolen from you.
Stop being selfish asshats. Invent and release it to the wild.
The problem with this is that the system favors those with money, and those who do not release to the wild are given a monopoly that allows them to take money from other people. So those who are not selfish asshats, in aggregate, progressively lose system favor to those who are selfish asshats.
Said slightly differently, our system is selecting for the antisocial, and the antisocial are being granted favored opportunity to set the rules for each successive round. They use this opportunity to create rules that favor what they see as good -- and their perception of good is, of course, somewhat informed by their antisocial nature. It is a natural flow of any societal system, as is the fruitless and noble attempt by good men and women to offset the increasing antisociality of the system by being more prosocial. The truly tragic part is that the increased prosocial behavior by the good results in the antisocial having more fertile feeding stock and may actually increase the rate at which the system destabilizes.
Interestingly, the GPL is designed exactly to combat that last step in the vicious cycle.
All that said, I do not know the right solution. So I guess I'm just kvetching.
The purported advantage of the new way is that it's a lot easier to prove having filed first than to prove having reduced it to practice first.
Which is a bit like looking under the streetlight for the car keys you dropped -- regardless of where you dropped them -- because it is easier to find them under the streetlight.
the reason that java still does not allow or never intended you to overload operators? Simply because they say so and that's that.
The reason Java does not allow operator overloading is to make it harder for rookies to shoot themselves or others in the foot. Same as Java's typing; duck-typing is more powerful, but more subject to pebkac errors.
Speak about the "freedom" of the free market all you want
Thank you, I will. Probably at length, as I do so love the freedom of the free market, and the free market itself. It is one of the things I hold most dear, in fact. The very notion of the free market possesses a sublime beauty that rivals the considerable allure of free speech.
You see -- the "free" in free market is like the "free" in Free Software, in that it is broadly misunderstood and -- or perhaps because -- many attempt to usurp its meaning. "Free" in free market means that value (typically embodied in cash, goods, or services) is free to flow according to the rational self-interest of the owner of the value. If there is any biasing force in the market, it results in biased trade, which is not a free market.
Some of the possible biasing forces in an otherwise free market are: 1. The ability to use force or seize assets (such as is held by the government). 2. The ability to influence production or distribution (as might be held by a monopoly). 3. The ability to influence collections of labor (such as might be held by a union). 4. The ability to influence the informed-ness of consumers (as might be held by a religious group or implemented through deceptive advertising)
There are many things that can make a market not free.
If you want to reference the type of market that believes removal of government influence is the primary objective, that is called "laissez-faire."
As an aside: A quick test to run past anyone who claims to believe in laissez-faire: Ask them if they support the Federal Reserve, copyright, patent, or trademark. Those are all forms of government interference in trade. A person who supports any of those notions is not a believer in the principle of laissez-faire. But I digress.
The notion of a free market is an extremely valuable concept in the study of economic systems. It is a market which is not influenced by any extra-transactional force. A market in which each individual transaction perfectly embodies the unbiased will of the parties involved, and which perfectly reflects all values exchanged whether internal or external to the transaction.
It is critical to protect that notion because it is mathematically sound. It is provable that a free market (which is strictly an abstract concept, and cannot exist in reality) is the GDP maximizing system for a society to enact. That is incredibly important to have as a reference point. It does not follow that GDP maximization should be the purpose of society, but when society is considering what it wishes to maximize, it must have some notion of which systems maximize each of it's diverse major objectives.
All this is to say -- please do not succumb to the economic anarchists who claim that the free market holds government non-interference as the primary objective. It does not. Laissez-faire is the belief in total governmental non-interference, and it, too, is an important reference point among economic systems. But do not let them be confused; they are distinct and the distinction between them is a bedrock principle of economic science.
While I completely agree with the sentiment of your post, I am afraid I must point out that you are accepting a flawed definition. In fact, competition is a required element of free markets.
it's arguable whether a market dominated by a private monopoly is actually free. Free from governmental force, sure, but that isn't the only kind of freedom that is implied by the term free market.
Lack of monopoly bias is, itself, part of the only kind of freedom implied by the term free market. The "free" in free market means that value is allowed to flow without hindrance or bias by non-market forces. Whether it is the government biasing the market, or a monopoly, union, criminal organization, social stigma, or any other extra-market force is irrelevant. Biased markets are not free markets.
The term for a market which holds as its highest objective that the government not influence trade is "laissez-faire." Don't let the economic anarchists dilute the term "free market." Like "Free Software" is to information science, the term "free market" is far too important in seeking economic prosperity to allow it to be twisted by those who place their right to engage in biased transactions above the maximization of GDP.
Moreover, most people who claim to endorse laissez-faire are inconsistent. Most who claim to support laissez-faire support the Federal Reserve, copyright, patent, and trademark -- all of which are forms of government interference in trade.
Is it possible this will finally spell Righthaven's doom?
I don't think so. I think that the founders of Righthaven have taken one approach at mining the flaws in the copyright system that have become so apparent with the advent of the Internet. They were told, "You did not get the contract right." From Righthaven's perspective, this is nothing more nor less than new market information. They have learned one of the angles that does not work. Every startup has cases like this.
The next step for a startup is to analyze the failure, consider alternatives, and develop a new approach. Of course, that depends on whether they have the operating capital to continue. They may have it in their war chest. If they do not, they would have to seek a new round of funding.
Can Righthaven find some angels or VCs that would be interested? I think the answer to that is a clear, "Yes." Investors want a return on their money. Copyright enforcement has been made extremely lucrative through more than a decade of increasing strictness and penalties. That vein of cashflow exists, and is waiting to be mined. Righthaven has some existing experience in the field. Now Righthaven asks you for funding. Suppose that you believe that this kind of copyright enforcement is not wrong, or that you are antisocial; what would you decide?
Righthaven will exist for at least as long as Darl McBride. And in the unlikely event that Righthaven itself closes its doors, a clone (or several) will rise.
When the government creates revenue opportunities, they get mined. That is what our economic system is designed to do. The only sure solution, assuming one wishes to change the outcome, is to remove the revenue opportunity.
The browser maker wants to put a stop to behavioral targeting and pervasive tracking on the Web.
I want to be a fairy princess, and to live in a castle on the moon!
Does Mozilla have any idea how much money this stuff is worth? Let me put it into perspective: I did a two month test run of some hard-core personalization code on a tiny little backwater advertising system. It ran on one tiny little out-of-the-way placement of that tiny little backwater advertising system. The projected annual change in profit for that one little placement on that one little system? Six point five million dollars per year.
I'd put the annual take at a company like Google or Facebook in the billions, easily. That is why Facebook's initial reaction to Heise's two-click-like from a week or two ago was "YOU CAN'T DO THAT WE'RE SHUTTING YOU DOWN IT'S A VIOLATION OF OUR ToS AHHHHH NOOOO NOOO NNOOOOO NOOOO NOOOOOOOO!!!!"
There are three ways behavioral targeting could be put back in the bottle: 1. It becomes uncommon for companies to have a CEO who behaves as though he has an antisocial personality disorder. 2. Onion routing (like Tor) with advanced request sanitizing becomes the standard way to browse the web. 3. A law or other coercive force threatens greater risk*cost for tracking than the profit from behavioral analysis.
As a bonus, here's a dose of reality: Neither option 1 nor option 2 will happen. Here's one more: The U.S. government is getting paid an awful lot of money -- both legitimately, through taxes, and legally-but-illegitimately, through campaign contributions -- to not write and enforce a law to stop it.
So, unless you want to go join Anonymous or the nutjobs calling for revolution; get used to it. This is your role in society now.
Although you knowingly play a critical role in stealing thousands of identities, you don't can't be implicated in any single instance of theft because you didn't know that individual theft was going to happen.
Consider that principle, and consider the idea of criminal copyright infringement. Would MegaUpload be a copyright infringement racketeer? What about Amazon S3? Who would decide which data storage providers would be targeted?
How would it apply to ISPs that allow Tor nodes, darknet nodes, VPNs, or proxies?
Will the intent and application of Cyber-RICO be concrete and public, or will it be secretly interpreted by the executive and veiled in state secrets, like Senators Paul and Wyden have claimed is the case with the PATRIOT Act?
I agree with everything you are saying, if one believes that the government intends what you claim and will not broaden its intent over time. Some may not agree, however, who have watched such new laws pass from claims of narrow interpretation to in-practice straining of the limits.
Presumably you are familiar with the Kennedys, the Walker-Bushes, and the Hiltons. Obviously I could go on to create a very long post, but I think three sufficiently demonstrates the point.
Is your assertion that all of the progeny of those and the other American Dynasties have earned their positions in society 100% on their own individual merit?
> No. It expects people to be able to act rationally and in their long-term best interest. That's still not how people work.
Hear Hear.
It also expects perfect information and perfect competition if it is to reach its maximal state, and at least expects the government to constantly work toward those objectives if it is to operate with increasing efficiency. When the oligarchs usurp the government to prevent the protection of those principles, then exploit the gaps in the protection of the free market, the system destabilizes.
A giant corporation with huge market power is pointing out that another giant corporation with huge market power is creating a barrier to entry that, gasp, favors inferior technology?
Does Sony not know what barriers to entry are? Do they think barriers to entry are used to protect superior goods and services? (hint: superior goods and services do not need protection) What -- if not such barriers -- do they think is the cost of entrenched incumbency?
Let me present the rough outline of the economic cost of entrenched incumbency: The problem with entrenched incumbents is that they use their market biasing power to create barriers to entry that favor their inferior-value goods and services over superior-value competition (eg: disruptive competition). That is what an entrenched incumbent is. It is the definition. Water is wet. Vacuums suck. Entrenched incumbency implies protection of inferior-value goods and services.
OK, perhaps I am being too hard on them. Well done, Sony: Typically entrenched incumbents avoid pointing out the fundamental problem with entrenched incumbents for fear that their own entrenched incumbency will be threatened. Bravo, Sony, for pointing out that the kettle is black. Would that it were truly self-sacrifice; I suspect they simply believe the public and/or government will not grasp that Sony is a pot.
And this is a prime example of why government subsidies of production are a bad idea.
Haven't read the rest of your post yet, but that is one of the most poignant sentences I have read in quite some time. Thank you.
Read the rest now. Good points.
I do have to slightly disagree, though. There are two good economic cases for production subsidies; positive externalities and getting over initial hurdles. I don't know that either applies here, but both are backed by solid math. Some goods or services have positive societal benefits beyond the individual value, and so a production subsidy internalizes that external benefit (eg: immunization). Other things have an initial hurdle to get over before the value curve makes sense to the consumer -- like the telephone system or other things which are subject to network effect.
I hesitate to throw the production subsidy baby out with the solar production subsidy bathwater so easily, but I do like how you framed the question.
You are acting like the fact this guy was running a Tor exit node somehow means it was impossible for him to commit the crime.
No, he is acting like the fact that this guy's IP address appeared in somebody's log is not probable cause for search and seizure. He is acting like running a Tor node is not probable cause for search and seizure. He is acting like common carriage of Tor traffic does not imply responsibility for the content of the packets -- something that was found to be critical to the protection of First Amendment rights when the telephone companies were treading this very ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Good discourse. While I don't fully agree, we've also gotten far enough afield that I no longer feel strongly enough to argue the point.
Images float through my head; the paradise of the end of scarcity, the oligarchs chanting that scarcity is what motivates the free market and so must be protected, then hiring legislators to pass laws to increase artificial scarcity, while capitalizing on the new option of non-scarcity to get free tools for advancing the market penetration of their artificially scarce goods.
It seems apparent that they would rather be kings in hell than peers in heaven.
My inclusion of Singapore, as I already said, was a mistake.
Hong Kong unskilled labor wages are much lower than US and EU labor wages. That is because HK unskilled labor wages are tightly coupled to mainland China labor wages. US and EU labor wages are much higher, because they are only moderately impacted by mainland China wages. Meanwhile, HK, US, and EU business labor wages are similar for similar roles, because HK business labor wages are heavily focused on international commercial banking and international trade. Therefore, the HK income distribution (the portion of the HK economy which is implicitly being discussed when "Gini" is mentioned) is dramatically more hybrid than the US or EU.
A major part of the reason is that only manufacturing labor wages are significantly impacted in the US and EU, and even that force is tempered by shipping costs. In HK, all labor costs -- including direct service labor costs -- are impacted, and shipping is a much smaller component of the cost of goods produced in mainland China.
Finally, I would not classify either the US or EU as pure free market or pure capitalist economies, any more than I would classify the HK economy as a pure hybrid. HK is more hybrid, because a major component of its economy, unskilled labor wages, is tightly coupled to communist price levels, while business labor wages are more tightly coupled to free market prices.
I like your perspective. It is an important angle worth considering.
If your point is that the Kindle is, itself, a restricted medium and therefore a threat to increasing the breadth of information distribution, I can see your point. And I think we are fundamentally thinking in the same context; that the question is not how it affects any person or group of people, or even all people in the short run, but how it affects society in the long run. Since it creates a fiat restriction on the private actions of citizens, it must be justified by bedrock societal benefits.
If that is what you are saying, then I can see your point. I think though that it gets a little muddled with the statement, "Books are universally available to anybody now."
That statement seems to be saying that lending of electronic media would not expand the reach of science and the useful arts. I think that angle would fall somewhere between false and difficult to demonstrate -- more difficult to demonstrate than would be necessary to justify the fiat restriction on private actions of citizens. Further, unfortunately, it is currently the official position of the Librarian of Congress that electronic lending is, in fact, harmful to expanding the reach of science and the useful arts, and is therefore not covered by first sale doctrine. If that is what you are saying, that you think electronic lending should not be covered by first sale doctrine, then I cannot concur.
I think your post could benefit by being more clear about why you disagree. I am not even clear which side you are advocating.
Yes. The influence on labor income in Hong Kong is far stronger, of course, and affects direct service labor as well as manufacturing labor, but it is the same influence.
one Kindle blog listed out the top advantages to having them available in libraries.
It is an interesting blog entry, that points out a bunch of the selfish little things that blogger gets out of it, but he missed one advantage:
It is in the long-term best interests of society to make works of science and the useful arts available for borrowing to all. In fact, broadening the reach of such information is the only reason we suffer copyright to exist in the first place. The profit creators are granted through the right of first sale is just a means to that end.
The amazing part of this story is not the wondrous new opportunity we have to borrow published materials from others after the first sale -- it is the chutzpah of the kleptocracy that kept it from happening on day one. And that selfish little kleptocrat blogger is no better. The point of this is not what it does for you, little man, it is what it does for society.
Poverty in Hong Kong and Singapore resulting from communism. Do you really mean that?
Hong Kong, yes -- my brother lived there for a while and I visited for three weeks. There is a very broad chasm between the business community and the unskilled labor class. My hypothesis is that this is because unskilled labor wages are heavily influenced by labor income in mainland China, while the business wages are more closely coupled to first world business wages abroad.
Singapore, no -- I was confused. I thought Singapore had the same economic background as Hong Kong. Another poster corrected me. I would have to do further research to present a revised hypothesis.
Thanks for the heads up!
GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said, "Class warfare may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics."
Class warfare, in the strict sense of guns and bombs, is -- like all civil war -- bad for the economy. Labor resources spending time shooting at each other, and getting shot, is potential productivity lost. Similarly, spending time on arguments that have no basis in reality is a waste of resources. There is evidence, however, that reducing the Gini (a measure of income disparity -- higher Gini means higher disparity) in the United States would increase the GDP growth rate. Here is one example set of data:
http://beach.traxel.com/img/gdp-gini-4.png
America's Gini has been rising steadily since the early 1970's (it started before Reagan, because the tax brackets didn't keep up with the rapid inflation resulting from the oil embargo). Our Gini is now high enough to make our PPP (GDP per capita) an outlier. Most nations with our level of income disparity are third world nations. Only Hong Kong and SIngapore -- hybrid economies which mix successful free market economies with the stark poverty resulting from communism -- are in the first world ballpark and have Ginis as high as ours.
One possible reason is this: In any economic system there is an optimal market price to pay for any resource. If that economic system overpays for some resource or class of resources, it will operate less efficiently. There may be systemic biases in place which cause us to pay more for the labor (and/or capital lending) of our wealthy than their labor (and/or capital lending) is worth. Of course the chart above is insufficient to show the causal relationship, but it would explain why our PPP (GDP per capita) growth rate has fallen during the same period that our Gini has been increasing (I have more charts that show the temporal relationship, but they are not yet ready for publication).
If, in fact, the increasing Gini is a cause of falling PPP, then increasing the taxation on upper income brackets would increase the GDP growth rate. If that is the case, and assuming one believes (as I do) that the ideal free market is GDP maximizing, there is only one possible explanation: some degree of progressive taxation actually increases the accuracy of our approximation of the free market, by offsetting a systemic bias.
Disagree? Good, I'd love to see your empirical evidence. Show me the data.
Do we scale down the language to the point of developers not having to debug their errors or perhaps no mechanism for a program to even crash?
Not in all cases. There is a time and place for a language like that. Squeak comes to mind; an outstanding environment in which to start kids off with programming. But I don't think most production languages should be like that.
I think production languages should run the spectrum from Squeak to pure Lisp (or whatever is on the "OMFG that's peculiar and powerful" end of the spectrum). Java falls pretty solidly in the area that I would frame as; companies want to hire programmers without working too hard on the interview process, and still get workable production code out the door.
That kind of business objective covers a big chunk of the commercial programming space these days. Most companies want an engaging Internet presence, but they're not trying to shave microseconds off the record speed for calculating the singular value decomposition of a 50x50 matrix. They need "good enough" code, written by "good enough" programmers.
If you are a rookie there is no way to put a value as a noob to a language making mistakes, debugging your code, stepping through it, finding the errors and learning from your wicked ways.
Completely agreed. There is a huge amount of value in this.
There is also value in a language that is more inviting, encouraging, and tolerant of errors.
The trick is finding the appropriate balance for a given nascent hacker. Some people find programming to be a frustrating experience because of its sometimes pedantic nature. Learning to program can be quite standoffish. And while the best programmers may be those who find the debugging intriguing, there is certainly room for programmers who find that aspect tiresome.
The defense against it is simple. Do your research and publish it ALL to the public. Release it and get it out there Creative commons licensing eliminates the possibility of your idea being patented and stolen from you.
Stop being selfish asshats. Invent and release it to the wild.
The problem with this is that the system favors those with money, and those who do not release to the wild are given a monopoly that allows them to take money from other people. So those who are not selfish asshats, in aggregate, progressively lose system favor to those who are selfish asshats.
Said slightly differently, our system is selecting for the antisocial, and the antisocial are being granted favored opportunity to set the rules for each successive round. They use this opportunity to create rules that favor what they see as good -- and their perception of good is, of course, somewhat informed by their antisocial nature. It is a natural flow of any societal system, as is the fruitless and noble attempt by good men and women to offset the increasing antisociality of the system by being more prosocial. The truly tragic part is that the increased prosocial behavior by the good results in the antisocial having more fertile feeding stock and may actually increase the rate at which the system destabilizes.
Interestingly, the GPL is designed exactly to combat that last step in the vicious cycle.
All that said, I do not know the right solution. So I guess I'm just kvetching.
The purported advantage of the new way is that it's a lot easier to prove having filed first than to prove having reduced it to practice first.
Which is a bit like looking under the streetlight for the car keys you dropped -- regardless of where you dropped them -- because it is easier to find them under the streetlight.
the reason that java still does not allow or never intended you to overload operators? Simply because they say so and that's that.
The reason Java does not allow operator overloading is to make it harder for rookies to shoot themselves or others in the foot. Same as Java's typing; duck-typing is more powerful, but more subject to pebkac errors.
Speak about the "freedom" of the free market all you want
Thank you, I will. Probably at length, as I do so love the freedom of the free market, and the free market itself. It is one of the things I hold most dear, in fact. The very notion of the free market possesses a sublime beauty that rivals the considerable allure of free speech.
You see -- the "free" in free market is like the "free" in Free Software, in that it is broadly misunderstood and -- or perhaps because -- many attempt to usurp its meaning. "Free" in free market means that value (typically embodied in cash, goods, or services) is free to flow according to the rational self-interest of the owner of the value. If there is any biasing force in the market, it results in biased trade, which is not a free market.
Some of the possible biasing forces in an otherwise free market are:
1. The ability to use force or seize assets (such as is held by the government).
2. The ability to influence production or distribution (as might be held by a monopoly).
3. The ability to influence collections of labor (such as might be held by a union).
4. The ability to influence the informed-ness of consumers (as might be held by a religious group or implemented through deceptive advertising)
There are many things that can make a market not free.
If you want to reference the type of market that believes removal of government influence is the primary objective, that is called "laissez-faire."
As an aside: A quick test to run past anyone who claims to believe in laissez-faire: Ask them if they support the Federal Reserve, copyright, patent, or trademark. Those are all forms of government interference in trade. A person who supports any of those notions is not a believer in the principle of laissez-faire. But I digress.
The notion of a free market is an extremely valuable concept in the study of economic systems. It is a market which is not influenced by any extra-transactional force. A market in which each individual transaction perfectly embodies the unbiased will of the parties involved, and which perfectly reflects all values exchanged whether internal or external to the transaction.
It is critical to protect that notion because it is mathematically sound. It is provable that a free market (which is strictly an abstract concept, and cannot exist in reality) is the GDP maximizing system for a society to enact. That is incredibly important to have as a reference point. It does not follow that GDP maximization should be the purpose of society, but when society is considering what it wishes to maximize, it must have some notion of which systems maximize each of it's diverse major objectives.
All this is to say -- please do not succumb to the economic anarchists who claim that the free market holds government non-interference as the primary objective. It does not. Laissez-faire is the belief in total governmental non-interference, and it, too, is an important reference point among economic systems. But do not let them be confused; they are distinct and the distinction between them is a bedrock principle of economic science.
Competition > free markets
While I completely agree with the sentiment of your post, I am afraid I must point out that you are accepting a flawed definition. In fact, competition is a required element of free markets.
it's arguable whether a market dominated by a private monopoly is actually free. Free from governmental force, sure, but that isn't the only kind of freedom that is implied by the term free market.
Lack of monopoly bias is, itself, part of the only kind of freedom implied by the term free market. The "free" in free market means that value is allowed to flow without hindrance or bias by non-market forces. Whether it is the government biasing the market, or a monopoly, union, criminal organization, social stigma, or any other extra-market force is irrelevant. Biased markets are not free markets.
The term for a market which holds as its highest objective that the government not influence trade is "laissez-faire." Don't let the economic anarchists dilute the term "free market." Like "Free Software" is to information science, the term "free market" is far too important in seeking economic prosperity to allow it to be twisted by those who place their right to engage in biased transactions above the maximization of GDP.
Moreover, most people who claim to endorse laissez-faire are inconsistent. Most who claim to support laissez-faire support the Federal Reserve, copyright, patent, and trademark -- all of which are forms of government interference in trade.
Is it possible this will finally spell Righthaven's doom?
I don't think so. I think that the founders of Righthaven have taken one approach at mining the flaws in the copyright system that have become so apparent with the advent of the Internet. They were told, "You did not get the contract right." From Righthaven's perspective, this is nothing more nor less than new market information. They have learned one of the angles that does not work. Every startup has cases like this.
The next step for a startup is to analyze the failure, consider alternatives, and develop a new approach. Of course, that depends on whether they have the operating capital to continue. They may have it in their war chest. If they do not, they would have to seek a new round of funding.
Can Righthaven find some angels or VCs that would be interested? I think the answer to that is a clear, "Yes." Investors want a return on their money. Copyright enforcement has been made extremely lucrative through more than a decade of increasing strictness and penalties. That vein of cashflow exists, and is waiting to be mined. Righthaven has some existing experience in the field. Now Righthaven asks you for funding. Suppose that you believe that this kind of copyright enforcement is not wrong, or that you are antisocial; what would you decide?
Righthaven will exist for at least as long as Darl McBride. And in the unlikely event that Righthaven itself closes its doors, a clone (or several) will rise.
When the government creates revenue opportunities, they get mined. That is what our economic system is designed to do. The only sure solution, assuming one wishes to change the outcome, is to remove the revenue opportunity.
The browser maker wants to put a stop to behavioral targeting and pervasive tracking on the Web.
I want to be a fairy princess, and to live in a castle on the moon!
Does Mozilla have any idea how much money this stuff is worth? Let me put it into perspective: I did a two month test run of some hard-core personalization code on a tiny little backwater advertising system. It ran on one tiny little out-of-the-way placement of that tiny little backwater advertising system. The projected annual change in profit for that one little placement on that one little system? Six point five million dollars per year.
I'd put the annual take at a company like Google or Facebook in the billions, easily. That is why Facebook's initial reaction to Heise's two-click-like from a week or two ago was "YOU CAN'T DO THAT WE'RE SHUTTING YOU DOWN IT'S A VIOLATION OF OUR ToS AHHHHH NOOOO NOOO NNOOOOO NOOOO NOOOOOOOO!!!!"
There are three ways behavioral targeting could be put back in the bottle:
1. It becomes uncommon for companies to have a CEO who behaves as though he has an antisocial personality disorder.
2. Onion routing (like Tor) with advanced request sanitizing becomes the standard way to browse the web.
3. A law or other coercive force threatens greater risk*cost for tracking than the profit from behavioral analysis.
As a bonus, here's a dose of reality: Neither option 1 nor option 2 will happen. Here's one more: The U.S. government is getting paid an awful lot of money -- both legitimately, through taxes, and legally-but-illegitimately, through campaign contributions -- to not write and enforce a law to stop it.
So, unless you want to go join Anonymous or the nutjobs calling for revolution; get used to it. This is your role in society now.
Although you knowingly play a critical role in stealing thousands of identities, you don't can't be implicated in any single instance of theft because you didn't know that individual theft was going to happen.
Consider that principle, and consider the idea of criminal copyright infringement. Would MegaUpload be a copyright infringement racketeer? What about Amazon S3? Who would decide which data storage providers would be targeted?
How would it apply to ISPs that allow Tor nodes, darknet nodes, VPNs, or proxies?
Will the intent and application of Cyber-RICO be concrete and public, or will it be secretly interpreted by the executive and veiled in state secrets, like Senators Paul and Wyden have claimed is the case with the PATRIOT Act?
I agree with everything you are saying, if one believes that the government intends what you claim and will not broaden its intent over time. Some may not agree, however, who have watched such new laws pass from claims of narrow interpretation to in-practice straining of the limits.
There is no class structure in America,
Presumably you are familiar with the Kennedys, the Walker-Bushes, and the Hiltons. Obviously I could go on to create a very long post, but I think three sufficiently demonstrates the point.
Is your assertion that all of the progeny of those and the other American Dynasties have earned their positions in society 100% on their own individual merit?
> No. It expects people to be able to act rationally and in their long-term best interest. That's still not how people work.
Hear Hear.
It also expects perfect information and perfect competition if it is to reach its maximal state, and at least expects the government to constantly work toward those objectives if it is to operate with increasing efficiency. When the oligarchs usurp the government to prevent the protection of those principles, then exploit the gaps in the protection of the free market, the system destabilizes.
A giant corporation with huge market power is pointing out that another giant corporation with huge market power is creating a barrier to entry that, gasp, favors inferior technology?
Does Sony not know what barriers to entry are? Do they think barriers to entry are used to protect superior goods and services? (hint: superior goods and services do not need protection) What -- if not such barriers -- do they think is the cost of entrenched incumbency?
Let me present the rough outline of the economic cost of entrenched incumbency: The problem with entrenched incumbents is that they use their market biasing power to create barriers to entry that favor their inferior-value goods and services over superior-value competition (eg: disruptive competition). That is what an entrenched incumbent is. It is the definition. Water is wet. Vacuums suck. Entrenched incumbency implies protection of inferior-value goods and services.
OK, perhaps I am being too hard on them. Well done, Sony: Typically entrenched incumbents avoid pointing out the fundamental problem with entrenched incumbents for fear that their own entrenched incumbency will be threatened. Bravo, Sony, for pointing out that the kettle is black. Would that it were truly self-sacrifice; I suspect they simply believe the public and/or government will not grasp that Sony is a pot.
This is different than the Apple patents, which theoretically can be worked around.
Yes -- I've been thinking about developing a tablet computer with a triangular screen...
And this is a prime example of why government subsidies of production are a bad idea.
Haven't read the rest of your post yet, but that is one of the most poignant sentences I have read in quite some time. Thank you.
Read the rest now. Good points.
I do have to slightly disagree, though. There are two good economic cases for production subsidies; positive externalities and getting over initial hurdles. I don't know that either applies here, but both are backed by solid math. Some goods or services have positive societal benefits beyond the individual value, and so a production subsidy internalizes that external benefit (eg: immunization). Other things have an initial hurdle to get over before the value curve makes sense to the consumer -- like the telephone system or other things which are subject to network effect.
I hesitate to throw the production subsidy baby out with the solar production subsidy bathwater so easily, but I do like how you framed the question.
You are acting like the fact this guy was running a Tor exit node somehow means it was impossible for him to commit the crime.
No, he is acting like the fact that this guy's IP address appeared in somebody's log is not probable cause for search and seizure. He is acting like running a Tor node is not probable cause for search and seizure. He is acting like common carriage of Tor traffic does not imply responsibility for the content of the packets -- something that was found to be critical to the protection of First Amendment rights when the telephone companies were treading this very ground.