ways in which intelligent folks can adapt an existing franchise
Answer: You can't. It's copyrighted, patented, and trademarked, and will remain so until you are worm food. Only medialopolies have the money and connections needed to get rights, and they do their square best to avoid hiring intelligent folks (BSG was a regrettable accident - they had planned to hire the drooling neanderthals that did Enterprise), so piss off before you get yourself sued.:)
But those are bad, and the CC license is good, and they share the same ambush-applicability feature.
I'm sure it's because I'm too simpleminded to comprehend the difference, but it seems to me that poison for the goose ought to be poison for the gander.
Not simple-minded. You just don't know how the license works. Just a lack of information, which is not a bad thing, and easily remedied. To wit:
CC licenses do not restrict the behavior of anyone who obeys traditional copyright. That is, you cannot, without authorization, redistribute the copyrighted material. In this case, the magazine in question did redistribute the material in question.
So what does the CC license have to do with it then? isn't it a simple copyright case?
In this case, the owner of the copyrighted material offered additional rights. The owner effectively said, "Under certain conditions, I will grant you authorization to redistribute this material."
That is, copyright says what you can and cannot do with the material, and you are free to treat CC'd material 100% according to copyright law. No problem.
If, however, you would like to do something that is not allowed by copyright law but is granted by the CC license, then you must abide by the conditions set out in the license.
Shrinkwrap agreements are different. They say that you are not allowed treat the product according to copyright law.
The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It's not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things.
hahahahahahahah. P2P, BitTorrent, MP3, fuel cells, social networks, MMOs, RAC, mesh networks, VoIP, Sudoku, VTEC, reality TV, must I go on?!? Outta the way old man, time for you to retire.
Horseshit! IT support IS about users and you'd better learn how to talk to them if you want to keep working in IT. RTFM as a response to stupid user questions will eventually get you your walking papers.
Seems you've answered your own rant right in your own rant. IT support is about talking to customers, particularly hot customers who have just had a problem that they therefore think is the single most important problem. IT support is about understanding angry customers, filing change requests, battlefield user-training, and smoothing ruffled feathers. IT support is a people position. IT support is not IT. Most of the best IT support people I've known wouldn't make 3rd string in IT, and most of the best IT people I've known wouldn't make 3rd string in IT support. If you're demanding angry customer skills from your IT staff, you're going to have to pay a lot of money to get IT people who are dual-skilled. IT support people need to be able to communicate with an upset customer. IT people need to be able to make the information go. Those are vastly different skills.
Mind you, I'm not saying IT shouldn't talk to the customers - far from it. I think direct, unfiltered communication between IT and customers is critical to creating a quality product. But that communication makes the most sense when the IT person and the customer are both calm, focused, and there to talk through needs and potential solutions. Not when the customer is focused on one problem that just happened, and not when the IT guy is in the middle of an algorithm. When the user has just experienced a problem and needs some (unknown to the customer) combination of venting of frustration, user training, and change request submission, the right person to talk to is IT support, not IT.
Yes, but I don't see the investors complaining. The only ones I see complaining are analysts.
Be that as it may, that is precisely what the analysts are trying to affect. By telling the stockholders that this is having a negative impact on shareholder value, they are attempting to foment a coup - to bring Google in line with Wall Street's mantra, "maximize profit regardless of evil."
"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source product," he continued. "Every open source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from commercial IT operations like IBM and Oracle and Intel and others."
I may be willing to grant that, if you squint, big businesses have been significantly involved in every major enterprise-impacting OSS project. Even projects like Hibernate, Tomcat, and JBoss, which were not born of major corporations (AFAIK) have had significant contributions from major corporations or at least from software engineers working at major corporations on company time.
But that only begs the question; which is the chicken and which is the egg? I would posit that at the very least many major OSS projects are synergistic relationships - big business makes a big contribution, but they do so because the product is already solving some of their problems and has the potential to solve more or to solve them more efficiently. And that is a fine thing, probably the best way for it to go. In fact, I would even posit that it virtually can't go otherwise: Big businesses are chock full of big needs; won't they inherently find new levels of performance or functionality to which a particular piece of software can be driven? Given the nature of OSS doesn't it just make sense for them to participate?
Does that mean that OSS wouldn't be what it is without those corporations? Sure, but not because the software needs to be what it becomes, it becomes what it becomes because of feedback and involvement from its customers. In this case, when a corp needs a feature, the fastest cheapest way is to build it and contribute it or to pay to have it done. Does that mean OSS can't be successful without big corps? It depends on your definition of success; if you define success as meeting all the needs of one specific set of customers (big business in this case), and given the inherent social nature of OSS development, then obviously those customers must be involved in the development. That's really just restating one of the definitions of Open Source; developers scratching where it itches.
wanted to prompt industry-wide discussion about what the consumer experience is.
Consumer experience? Consumer experience?!? Look, the corporations are the corporations because they know what makes a good consumer experience. They wouldn't be so rich, and they wouldn't be running this country if they didn't know what was best for us. Now buy what they tell you to, the way they tell you to, and quit your bitching. Why can't you people just see it their way?
When he says it covers all "rich media" he really means it covers rich media GENERATOR/EDITOR applications in said rich media, not all apps or the technology itself.
The patent describes a system for creating what basically is a Flash IDE with clipart online.
Sadly, I must disagree with your conclusion.
From the patent:...and wherein said modifying an existing rich-media application comprises one or more of the following: accessing account information;...
IE: the patent claim is that accessing account information is a sufficient modification of an exisiting rich-media application to be considered under the purview of this patent. I agree that the abstract is talking about rich media editors, but the specific claims are vastly broader (as is so often the case). If that particular piece of claim 2 holds up then this patent covers, for example, every AJAX application that involves client log-in.
If you need to sign a contract that says you agree not to copy it, as copyright does, then you have *talked terms*, and agreed to mine.
The point of copyright is to provide a fiat (as opposed to natural law) such that a non-negotiated contract can be enforced. Non-negotiated contracts are not enforceable because they cannot be fair (look into contract law theory for more info). EULAs are non-negotiated, and hence non-enforceable (and let's avoid the pointless question of whether some court or other has found them enforceable - I'm talking about contract law theory, which is very clear on the non-enforceability of non-negotiated contracts). Hence copyright law. Copyright law is not whatever the author wants it to be.
Negotiated contracts, such as non-disclosure agreements, are enforceable because they rest on negotiation and consideration, not copyright law. Copyright law is a democratically decided issue because it involves the infringement of my natural rights, and as such is open for debate. But I must insist that the debate not start by rehashing fundamental scientific principles of economics or law. If it's accepted scientific theory, I'm going to point you to the body of work that has gone before. That's not arrogance, it's science; standing on the shoulders of giants; the core principle of the advancement of human knowledge.
Its a free market,
No, it is not. It is a fiat monopoly. There is nothing wrong with not knowing the difference, but there is something wrong with you saying my theory is unworkable if you do not understand the field of study we are discussing. Say, "I don't agree with what you're saying, but I must learn more about these so-called scientific principles," and we'll have done with it for now.
Thers simply no excuse to buy it, then copy it anyway,
I'm not advocating piracy. Stop with the straw men. It's tedious. I have no question that you can defeat the straw men you keep erecting. Let's move past it.
And you can cut the arrogance as well, although its clear you may find that difficult.
What arrogance? The arrogance that says that if you are going to question my economic and legal theoretical proposition, that you should first have a rudimentary understanding of economics and contract law? Yes, I will find that very difficult. Economics and contract law are big subjects. I can't re-prove their founding principles in this forum nor do I wish to. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Do you want to learn about them, or do you just want to keep on with what you have already convinced yourself to be true? I'm trying to point out the places where people have long since found the optimal answers. Science, not my opinion. Like your statement that potential profit motivates investment. I can't ask you to defend your statement because it's a scientific fact, it needs no defense unless I can show evidence that it's not a scientific fact. If you can't accept the scientific principles, this is a meaningless discussion. It's not arrogance, it's science.
You dont behave this way with physical goods, and if you do, you end up in jail.
Physical ownership is natural law. Look it up in Google. The core concept in this context is that physical goods involve transfer of ownership. IE: two people cannot have independant free use of one physical object at one time (see: Billy v. Johnny, "It's Mine! / Gimme!"). Natural law does not apply to objects which have a zero cost of reproduction. Comparing such items to physical goods is irrational.
What is so beneath you about paying for the creative works of someone rather than the physical works?
Nothing. I have about 350 CDs, 75 DVDs, and nothing pirated. I was in a garage band, and about 15% of my closest friends now are in bands of various levels of success. I'm not advocating piracy. My hyperbolic comment about copying was to contrast your hyperbolic comment, to maintain a healthy balance of stupidity.
When someone writes a hit song, they dont do it in 10 minutes. They might have been writing duds for 10 years and end up with one hit. You would pay them the equivilant of 10 minutes work, for that lucky bit of inspiration.
Your 10 year statement is a polemic, not a rational analysis. Your statement of what I am willing to pay is both inaccurate and fails to reflect the near zero marginal cost of production of IP. If the musician gets $0.50 per song from me, and from 10,000 other people (very small sales), the musician gets $5,000 per song. That's 100 man-hours at $50 per hour, for a song that only reaches 10,000 people, and doesn't count pay for live performances. 10 minutes pay? I suggest you revisit your algebra textbooks.
So whose going to spend 10 years honing their craft as a creative person?
For $50 per hour? About 90% of the population, and that's assuming garage-band level sales.
Nobody
Your math is wrong.
This isnt rocket science. People write books, music and make movies hoping to one day have a hit, hoping to offset a high probability of failure. Tats a basic risk/reward situatrion. You are basically taking away the big reward. That means its all risk and no compensatory payback. Your end result is to kill the market.
Wrong. The broken market we currently have is what leads to Clear Channel, record label abuse of musicians, and payola. A more rational market would lead to more musicians that approach their music as a real endeavor, and less binge-drinking child-endangering idiots who spend 10 hours a week on music and 50 hours a week at parties.
If they get popular enough through high volume sales, they will be able to sell out large venues and make tens of thousands of dollars per performance. Beyond the practical garage band level, that's enough to motivate potential superstars unless they have a massive opportunity cost (look that term up before you comment on it).
Or you think that this is one of those special cases where the free market magically stops working.
Yes, obviously. The free market has not been dominant in recorded media for dozens of years, since back when marginal cost of production of recordings was a large part of the overall cost. IP isn't a free market. Free markets are based entirely on natural law. IP is almost a pure fiat monopoly now that marginal cost is arbitrarily clost to zero.
If your goal is a rational discourse, read up on fiat monopolies, marginal cost, and natural law. Then we can try again.
You say its not mine? if I write a novel, its mine
Correct. And so long as you never publish it, it remains yours. The original copy may remain yours if you so choose. But when you sell me a copy, that copy is not yours. Your desire to restrict what I do with my copy is the basis of the negotiated agreement. You want to restrict what I do with my copy? Fine, let's talk terms.
if I make a chair, its mine.
That is natural law. If I make an identical chair, it is not yours. That is copying. Now we want to put r
But please, people, a $50 computer and a $10-a-month dial-up connection will get you all the porn you want at your house. Stop making this an issue.
The issue is not pornography, nor whether viewing it in a library is acceptable. The issue is whether DHS is authorized and trained to police it. Are pictures of breasts pornography? What if you have breast cancer and are learning about the disease? What if you're doing a report on mammalian reproduction and child rearing? What if you're doing a report on the state of obscenity on the Internet?
Not only is DHS not qualified to decide, no gov't official is. That's what the whole freedom of expression thing is about. If you are over 18, the US gov't is not granted the right to choose what you read or see except where the material in question is illegal for non-obscenity reasons, such as child porn (consent/abuse), top secret documents (homeland security), stolen goods (copyright infringement), etc. Libraries are the place where people who would otherwise be unable to afford media are granted the opportunity to learn - the raison d'etre of libraries is unfettered access to information.
People shouldn't look at porn in public libraries -- at least, not where there's a significant chance of it disturbing other patrons, including children.
Libraries provide privacy screens, on request of either the viewer of the questionable material or of other people in the Internet area of the library.
if you dont like it, dont buy it, or better still, write your own.
It's not yours. You don't want me to copy it? Don't publish it. Copyright is not a natural right. It's a fiat monopoly granted as part of an exchange. We grant you the right to forbid me to sing a song in exchange for something. It's a trade. You don't want to negotiate? Don't enter the market.
The moment any of them write a song thats good enough to be a hit, we should punish them as much as we can and ensure they dont make any cash.
Straw man. I didn't say zero. I said five years. And I'm saying it to benefit the poor upstart musicians you claim to be defending. Cover bands without license from the original artists are illegal. Put a five year limit on copyright and those poor startup musicians you are talking about will be able to cover bands from five years ago to put food on the table and pay for studio time while they work out their first CD. It also gets the labels out of the picture - if the musician can support him/her self and pay for the studio, they don't need to get screwed by a record exec to cover their expenses.
I'd be interested to know which of the arts they're studying.
The two examples used as the touchstones in the story were sculpture and violin.
As a classicaly trained musician and teacher of counterpoint and voiceleading, I'm painfully aware of how much memorization is crucial to both performance and (surface level, at least) understanding.
As a classically trained musician, I agree that some beautiful music comes from significant technical knowledge. As a garage metal hacker, I would also posit that some truly inspiring music comes from just feeling it. Bach's music can bring a mathematician to tears just looking at it. The Ramones can do the same by bashing away at three power chords.
I am endlessly fascinated by jazz because the best practitioners have run the gamut from uneducated drug addicts to intensely focused formal musicians. Or take Randy Rhoads versus Kirk Hammett - opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of formal music education, but both legendary giants in lead guitar in a narrow segment of a single musical genre. How cool is that?
I guess I'm thinking primarily of higher education, given that this study is talking about comparative levels of education. My impression is that in the past, bachelors degrees, and particularly masters and higher degrees, were primarily undertaken by researchers. Over the past 50 years or so, as economic standards have brought 8 year educations into the reach of a vastly larger percentage of the population, advanced degrees have necessarily become more focused on high-volume and standardization. As volume increases and standardization increases, I feel that mastery of theory must become less critical than ability to demonstrate mastery in an increasingly quantifiable way.
I completely accept your supposition that grade school in the US has always been about cookie cuttering, and only recently have we started to seriously question that practice.
If when you say "software engineer" you mean an actual engineer,
I was using it in the sense of "applied scientist" as opposed to computer scientist or information scientist (theoretical and research work), or software developer (applied programming below the level of science or engineering). I think as it relates to the rest of your comment, there are applied scientists in software engineering who work based on large amounts of book knowledge, others who work based on large amounts of practical experience, and everywhere on the spectrum in between. I would call both applied scientists and hence engineers. They can both solve the same kind and level of problems, with similar time and budget constraints, though their approach is often vastly different, and the results can often have different balances of cost/benefit.
Which is to say, I was using the practical or general definition which includes all those who engineer solutions at or above some given level of difficulty, regardless of formal training. My experience with engineering in school was that it was heavy on rote. I believe that it needn't have been that way, and probably is not that way at all schools.
Why, yes. And I'm terrified that my subscription to Motorcyclist is going to expire. And I'm terrified that my insurance policy will expire. Don't they realize that now I'm going to have to spend more money to get new magazines and spend more money to get renewed coverage? Shouldn't I just be able to buy some terminal product once and continue to benefit from it forever, even if I know going in that it will expire? The evil insurance company is just trying to get out of their responsibility to cover me forever once I pay them once.
Evil lying bastards, twisting the soft, smooth brains of our politicians. You know what spurs innovation in music? I mean beyond experience, suffering, love, anger, pain, joy, and a burning need to create that won't let actual musicians not make music? Short-term copyrights that require entertainers and labels to make an ongoing effort in order to earn a living. A couple million dollars for "Oops I Did It Again"? When the money comes that easy, I wouldn't put any more effort into it than she does.
You want musicians to put blood, sweat, and tears into their music on an ongoing basis? You want them to put the same dedication into their jobs that we do? Make them work for a living. Cut copyright to five years.
Robert G. Cooper, a well known researcher on new product development, states that there are several core factors (listed in order of importance) for any successful new product design process:
1. A unique, superior and differentiated product with good value-for-money for the customer.
2. A strong market orientation - voice of the customer is built in
3. Sharp, early, fact-based product definition before product development begins
4. Solid up-front homework - doing front end activities like market analysis well
5. True cross functional teams: empowered, resourced, accountable, dedicated leader
6. Leverage - Where the project builds on business's technology and marketing competencies
7. Market attractiveness - size, growth, margins
8. Quality of the launch effort: well planned, properly resourced
9. Technological competencies and quality of execution of technology activities.
Many companies in the Late Business era already emphasize a few of these factors. However, there are some differences. Notice how technical competencies are important, but last on the list. Notice also, how that creating a solution to customer needs is first on the list.
I look forward to seeing the resulting products in a couple years. Five years ago I started on a project that was initially focused on technical proficiency. Then a shift occurred. For the last three years the only thing that was allowed to guide work was customer feedback (I switched projects about two years ago). Technical profiency of the developers for the past three years has been considered nice, but not critical. Technical CRs were explicitly disallowed by the project management. It is a multimillion dollar application suite pushing two million lines, which is the primary application of about 8,000 people - roughly half our labor force. It is currently under review and may be scrapped.
Why? Because the code is dying. The features are there, and it looks good, but it is extraordinarily expensive to maintain, is overly tolerant of corrupt data, and every time someone looks at it funny it breaks. Adding new features has become an exercise in chasing an induced bug through dozens of classes.
The initial approach of technical isolation was wrong - we needed closer contact with the customers and it would have made the product much better earlier in the lifecycle. Now, however, it is precisely the lack of technical proficiency that is killing it. Relegating the user experience or the infrastructure to the back seat is a road to ruin. There is no point in creating software that doesn't solve the customer's problem. But there is also no point in creating software that is more costly than the problem the customer is trying to solve. Discounting technical proficiency is a direct path to cost-ineffective solutions.
This is interesting. I would love to see a comparison between those with traditional American educations (which I assume is what this study focused on) and those who are similarly capable (perhaps who hold similar titles in similarly challenging fields), but who have followed less traditional paths in learning.
For example, I can point to five people at my current job - each a very skilled software engineer, and each very skilled in debating other topics in current events; among those five people are 1 PhD, 2 Masters, 1 college drop-out, and 1 high school drop out. The one thing we all agree on? Much of traditional American education has become primarily a matter of rote memorization - there is very little teaching of theory and problem solving involved.
Further, I saw a different study some years ago that showed a strong correlation between studying the arts late in life and delaying the onset of Alzheimers. Proficiency in the arts tends to require lots of understanding of abstract concepts, akin to studying theory in more technical fields, and requires little rote memorization.
That is to say, is it possible that the study hit on people whose minds have become less plastic as a result of education? People whose brains have been conditioned to be crystalizable by massive repetition instead of adaptable to new situations? Or, to take the nature instead of nurture angle, was the study skewed heavy on people with more crystaline brains, because such people are more proficient in an educational environment heavy on rote memorization?
10 x 6 bits = 60 bits. A 60 bit private key takes half of 35 years at 1 gigakey per second on average (assuming a decent algorithm - use the private key with a hard algorithm to encrypt a longer private key used in a fast algorithm). That's a 10 character password randomly generated from a set of 64 characters. Each additional character increases time by a factor of 64. 16 characters puts it happily into the realm of "not in my lifetime." But that's not even what I'm interested in - 8 characters puts it in the realm of "you can't check everyone."
My opposition to government or corporate invasion of privacy lies in the ease with which it is done. Frankly, I don't have secrets that are worth 17 desktop computer years of effort, so I'm not worried about that. But I do have things that I would like to remain inconvenient for others to know, and which, if it were free, the gov't and corps would like to know.
--Robert N. Clayton, The University of Chicago, for his contributions to geochemistry and cosmochemistry that provided insight into the evolution of the solar system.
I believe that's a typo - should read "insight into the intelligent design of the solar system."
In short, the absence of Linux pre-installs on desktop machines from the large OEMs is not evidence of a dastardly conspiracy.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the rest of your argument is cogent, how do you explain the lack of OS-free machines? Why can't I get the same machine with no OS for $50 less? I've got no problem installing Linux on my own, but as things stand I have to build a machine from parts to get it without paying for Windows.
It's necessary for a feature they're offering (searching your files across multiple computers).
No it isn't. They could store the data encrypted (index data and documents), using a private key known only to the user. Not only would it work, it would be easy to implement. And you could toss in a compression algorithm to reduce bandwidth and storage overhead. And Google has far more than enough sharp minds to have thought of this. Assuming the EFF's report is accurate, Google chose to keep the data in accessible form. The only good reason to do so is to leave an open path to data mining. And they're doing it while the Gov't has them in court demanding access to other data generated by their customers.
I don't know what the price of an OC-12 let alone an OC-48 is but I can guarantee you that it sure as heck isn't free.
T-1's are a couple hundred dollars a month - OC-48s are about 1350 T-1s. Assume a big break for buying the big pipe, and that comes out to... several buttloads of cash per month.
Slashdot Mirror
ways in which intelligent folks can adapt an existing franchise
:)
Answer: You can't. It's copyrighted, patented, and trademarked, and will remain so until you are worm food. Only medialopolies have the money and connections needed to get rights, and they do their square best to avoid hiring intelligent folks (BSG was a regrettable accident - they had planned to hire the drooling neanderthals that did Enterprise), so piss off before you get yourself sued.
But those are bad, and the CC license is good, and they share the same ambush-applicability feature.
I'm sure it's because I'm too simpleminded to comprehend the difference, but it seems to me that poison for the goose ought to be poison for the gander.
Not simple-minded. You just don't know how the license works. Just a lack of information, which is not a bad thing, and easily remedied. To wit:
CC licenses do not restrict the behavior of anyone who obeys traditional copyright. That is, you cannot, without authorization, redistribute the copyrighted material. In this case, the magazine in question did redistribute the material in question.
So what does the CC license have to do with it then? isn't it a simple copyright case?
In this case, the owner of the copyrighted material offered additional rights. The owner effectively said, "Under certain conditions, I will grant you authorization to redistribute this material."
That is, copyright says what you can and cannot do with the material, and you are free to treat CC'd material 100% according to copyright law. No problem.
If, however, you would like to do something that is not allowed by copyright law but is granted by the CC license, then you must abide by the conditions set out in the license.
Shrinkwrap agreements are different. They say that you are not allowed treat the product according to copyright law.
The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It's not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things.
hahahahahahahah. P2P, BitTorrent, MP3, fuel cells, social networks, MMOs, RAC, mesh networks, VoIP, Sudoku, VTEC, reality TV, must I go on?!? Outta the way old man, time for you to retire.
Horseshit! IT support IS about users and you'd better learn how to talk to them if you want to keep working in IT. RTFM as a response to stupid user questions will eventually get you your walking papers.
Seems you've answered your own rant right in your own rant. IT support is about talking to customers, particularly hot customers who have just had a problem that they therefore think is the single most important problem. IT support is about understanding angry customers, filing change requests, battlefield user-training, and smoothing ruffled feathers. IT support is a people position. IT support is not IT. Most of the best IT support people I've known wouldn't make 3rd string in IT, and most of the best IT people I've known wouldn't make 3rd string in IT support. If you're demanding angry customer skills from your IT staff, you're going to have to pay a lot of money to get IT people who are dual-skilled. IT support people need to be able to communicate with an upset customer. IT people need to be able to make the information go. Those are vastly different skills.
Mind you, I'm not saying IT shouldn't talk to the customers - far from it. I think direct, unfiltered communication between IT and customers is critical to creating a quality product. But that communication makes the most sense when the IT person and the customer are both calm, focused, and there to talk through needs and potential solutions. Not when the customer is focused on one problem that just happened, and not when the IT guy is in the middle of an algorithm. When the user has just experienced a problem and needs some (unknown to the customer) combination of venting of frustration, user training, and change request submission, the right person to talk to is IT support, not IT.
Yes, but I don't see the investors complaining. The only ones I see complaining are analysts.
Be that as it may, that is precisely what the analysts are trying to affect. By telling the stockholders that this is having a negative impact on shareholder value, they are attempting to foment a coup - to bring Google in line with Wall Street's mantra, "maximize profit regardless of evil."
"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source product," he continued. "Every open source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from commercial IT operations like IBM and Oracle and Intel and others."
I may be willing to grant that, if you squint, big businesses have been significantly involved in every major enterprise-impacting OSS project. Even projects like Hibernate, Tomcat, and JBoss, which were not born of major corporations (AFAIK) have had significant contributions from major corporations or at least from software engineers working at major corporations on company time.
But that only begs the question; which is the chicken and which is the egg? I would posit that at the very least many major OSS projects are synergistic relationships - big business makes a big contribution, but they do so because the product is already solving some of their problems and has the potential to solve more or to solve them more efficiently. And that is a fine thing, probably the best way for it to go. In fact, I would even posit that it virtually can't go otherwise: Big businesses are chock full of big needs; won't they inherently find new levels of performance or functionality to which a particular piece of software can be driven? Given the nature of OSS doesn't it just make sense for them to participate?
Does that mean that OSS wouldn't be what it is without those corporations? Sure, but not because the software needs to be what it becomes, it becomes what it becomes because of feedback and involvement from its customers. In this case, when a corp needs a feature, the fastest cheapest way is to build it and contribute it or to pay to have it done. Does that mean OSS can't be successful without big corps? It depends on your definition of success; if you define success as meeting all the needs of one specific set of customers (big business in this case), and given the inherent social nature of OSS development, then obviously those customers must be involved in the development. That's really just restating one of the definitions of Open Source; developers scratching where it itches.
wanted to prompt industry-wide discussion about what the consumer experience is.
Consumer experience? Consumer experience?!? Look, the corporations are the corporations because they know what makes a good consumer experience. They wouldn't be so rich, and they wouldn't be running this country if they didn't know what was best for us. Now buy what they tell you to, the way they tell you to, and quit your bitching. Why can't you people just see it their way?
When he says it covers all "rich media" he really means it covers rich media GENERATOR/EDITOR applications in said rich media, not all apps or the technology itself.
...and wherein said modifying an existing rich-media application comprises one or more of the following: accessing account information;...
The patent describes a system for creating what basically is a Flash IDE with clipart online.
Sadly, I must disagree with your conclusion.
From the patent:
IE: the patent claim is that accessing account information is a sufficient modification of an exisiting rich-media application to be considered under the purview of this patent. I agree that the abstract is talking about rich media editors, but the specific claims are vastly broader (as is so often the case). If that particular piece of claim 2 holds up then this patent covers, for example, every AJAX application that involves client log-in.
But how does one defend "nearly identical" independently created source code from a copyright infringement lawsuit?
Simple: Spend ten times as much on lawyers than the plaintiffs. Same way any court case is decided.
Grandparent: Nothing. I have about 350 CDs, 75 DVDs, and nothing pirated.
Parent: Making one of them freely copyable
Straw man. Boring.
If you need to sign a contract that says you agree not to copy it, as copyright does, then you have *talked terms*, and agreed to mine.
The point of copyright is to provide a fiat (as opposed to natural law) such that a non-negotiated contract can be enforced. Non-negotiated contracts are not enforceable because they cannot be fair (look into contract law theory for more info). EULAs are non-negotiated, and hence non-enforceable (and let's avoid the pointless question of whether some court or other has found them enforceable - I'm talking about contract law theory, which is very clear on the non-enforceability of non-negotiated contracts). Hence copyright law. Copyright law is not whatever the author wants it to be.
Negotiated contracts, such as non-disclosure agreements, are enforceable because they rest on negotiation and consideration, not copyright law. Copyright law is a democratically decided issue because it involves the infringement of my natural rights, and as such is open for debate. But I must insist that the debate not start by rehashing fundamental scientific principles of economics or law. If it's accepted scientific theory, I'm going to point you to the body of work that has gone before. That's not arrogance, it's science; standing on the shoulders of giants; the core principle of the advancement of human knowledge.
Its a free market,
No, it is not. It is a fiat monopoly. There is nothing wrong with not knowing the difference, but there is something wrong with you saying my theory is unworkable if you do not understand the field of study we are discussing. Say, "I don't agree with what you're saying, but I must learn more about these so-called scientific principles," and we'll have done with it for now.
Thers simply no excuse to buy it, then copy it anyway,
I'm not advocating piracy. Stop with the straw men. It's tedious. I have no question that you can defeat the straw men you keep erecting. Let's move past it.
And you can cut the arrogance as well, although its clear you may find that difficult.
What arrogance? The arrogance that says that if you are going to question my economic and legal theoretical proposition, that you should first have a rudimentary understanding of economics and contract law? Yes, I will find that very difficult. Economics and contract law are big subjects. I can't re-prove their founding principles in this forum nor do I wish to. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Do you want to learn about them, or do you just want to keep on with what you have already convinced yourself to be true? I'm trying to point out the places where people have long since found the optimal answers. Science, not my opinion. Like your statement that potential profit motivates investment. I can't ask you to defend your statement because it's a scientific fact, it needs no defense unless I can show evidence that it's not a scientific fact. If you can't accept the scientific principles, this is a meaningless discussion. It's not arrogance, it's science.
You dont behave this way with physical goods, and if you do, you end up in jail.
Physical ownership is natural law. Look it up in Google. The core concept in this context is that physical goods involve transfer of ownership. IE: two people cannot have independant free use of one physical object at one time (see: Billy v. Johnny, "It's Mine! / Gimme!"). Natural law does not apply to objects which have a zero cost of reproduction. Comparing such items to physical goods is irrational.
What is so beneath you about paying for the creative works of someone rather than the physical works?
Nothing. I have about 350 CDs, 75 DVDs, and nothing pirated. I was in a garage band, and about 15% of my closest friends now are in bands of various levels of success. I'm not advocating piracy. My hyperbolic comment about copying was to contrast your hyperbolic comment, to maintain a healthy balance of stupidity.
When someone writes a hit song, they dont do it in 10 minutes. They might have been writing duds for 10 years and end up with one hit. You would pay them the equivilant of 10 minutes work, for that lucky bit of inspiration.
Your 10 year statement is a polemic, not a rational analysis. Your statement of what I am willing to pay is both inaccurate and fails to reflect the near zero marginal cost of production of IP. If the musician gets $0.50 per song from me, and from 10,000 other people (very small sales), the musician gets $5,000 per song. That's 100 man-hours at $50 per hour, for a song that only reaches 10,000 people, and doesn't count pay for live performances. 10 minutes pay? I suggest you revisit your algebra textbooks.
So whose going to spend 10 years honing their craft as a creative person?
For $50 per hour? About 90% of the population, and that's assuming garage-band level sales.
Nobody
Your math is wrong.
This isnt rocket science. People write books, music and make movies hoping to one day have a hit, hoping to offset a high probability of failure. Tats a basic risk/reward situatrion. You are basically taking away the big reward. That means its all risk and no compensatory payback. Your end result is to kill the market.
Wrong. The broken market we currently have is what leads to Clear Channel, record label abuse of musicians, and payola. A more rational market would lead to more musicians that approach their music as a real endeavor, and less binge-drinking child-endangering idiots who spend 10 hours a week on music and 50 hours a week at parties.
If they get popular enough through high volume sales, they will be able to sell out large venues and make tens of thousands of dollars per performance. Beyond the practical garage band level, that's enough to motivate potential superstars unless they have a massive opportunity cost (look that term up before you comment on it).
Or you think that this is one of those special cases where the free market magically stops working.
Yes, obviously. The free market has not been dominant in recorded media for dozens of years, since back when marginal cost of production of recordings was a large part of the overall cost. IP isn't a free market. Free markets are based entirely on natural law. IP is almost a pure fiat monopoly now that marginal cost is arbitrarily clost to zero.
If your goal is a rational discourse, read up on fiat monopolies, marginal cost, and natural law. Then we can try again.
You say its not mine? if I write a novel, its mine
Correct. And so long as you never publish it, it remains yours. The original copy may remain yours if you so choose. But when you sell me a copy, that copy is not yours. Your desire to restrict what I do with my copy is the basis of the negotiated agreement. You want to restrict what I do with my copy? Fine, let's talk terms.
if I make a chair, its mine.
That is natural law. If I make an identical chair, it is not yours. That is copying. Now we want to put r
But please, people, a $50 computer and a $10-a-month dial-up connection will get you all the porn you want at your house. Stop making this an issue.
The issue is not pornography, nor whether viewing it in a library is acceptable. The issue is whether DHS is authorized and trained to police it. Are pictures of breasts pornography? What if you have breast cancer and are learning about the disease? What if you're doing a report on mammalian reproduction and child rearing? What if you're doing a report on the state of obscenity on the Internet?
Not only is DHS not qualified to decide, no gov't official is. That's what the whole freedom of expression thing is about. If you are over 18, the US gov't is not granted the right to choose what you read or see except where the material in question is illegal for non-obscenity reasons, such as child porn (consent/abuse), top secret documents (homeland security), stolen goods (copyright infringement), etc. Libraries are the place where people who would otherwise be unable to afford media are granted the opportunity to learn - the raison d'etre of libraries is unfettered access to information.
People shouldn't look at porn in public libraries -- at least, not where there's a significant chance of it disturbing other patrons, including children.
Libraries provide privacy screens, on request of either the viewer of the questionable material or of other people in the Internet area of the library.
if you dont like it, dont buy it, or better still, write your own.
It's not yours. You don't want me to copy it? Don't publish it. Copyright is not a natural right. It's a fiat monopoly granted as part of an exchange. We grant you the right to forbid me to sing a song in exchange for something. It's a trade. You don't want to negotiate? Don't enter the market.
The moment any of them write a song thats good enough to be a hit, we should punish them as much as we can and ensure they dont make any cash.
Straw man. I didn't say zero. I said five years. And I'm saying it to benefit the poor upstart musicians you claim to be defending. Cover bands without license from the original artists are illegal. Put a five year limit on copyright and those poor startup musicians you are talking about will be able to cover bands from five years ago to put food on the table and pay for studio time while they work out their first CD. It also gets the labels out of the picture - if the musician can support him/her self and pay for the studio, they don't need to get screwed by a record exec to cover their expenses.
I'd be interested to know which of the arts they're studying.
The two examples used as the touchstones in the story were sculpture and violin.
As a classicaly trained musician and teacher of counterpoint and voiceleading, I'm painfully aware of how much memorization is crucial to both performance and (surface level, at least) understanding.
As a classically trained musician, I agree that some beautiful music comes from significant technical knowledge. As a garage metal hacker, I would also posit that some truly inspiring music comes from just feeling it. Bach's music can bring a mathematician to tears just looking at it. The Ramones can do the same by bashing away at three power chords.
I am endlessly fascinated by jazz because the best practitioners have run the gamut from uneducated drug addicts to intensely focused formal musicians. Or take Randy Rhoads versus Kirk Hammett - opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of formal music education, but both legendary giants in lead guitar in a narrow segment of a single musical genre. How cool is that?
Has become? When did you go to school, 1875?
I guess I'm thinking primarily of higher education, given that this study is talking about comparative levels of education. My impression is that in the past, bachelors degrees, and particularly masters and higher degrees, were primarily undertaken by researchers. Over the past 50 years or so, as economic standards have brought 8 year educations into the reach of a vastly larger percentage of the population, advanced degrees have necessarily become more focused on high-volume and standardization. As volume increases and standardization increases, I feel that mastery of theory must become less critical than ability to demonstrate mastery in an increasingly quantifiable way.
I completely accept your supposition that grade school in the US has always been about cookie cuttering, and only recently have we started to seriously question that practice.
If when you say "software engineer" you mean an actual engineer,
I was using it in the sense of "applied scientist" as opposed to computer scientist or information scientist (theoretical and research work), or software developer (applied programming below the level of science or engineering). I think as it relates to the rest of your comment, there are applied scientists in software engineering who work based on large amounts of book knowledge, others who work based on large amounts of practical experience, and everywhere on the spectrum in between. I would call both applied scientists and hence engineers. They can both solve the same kind and level of problems, with similar time and budget constraints, though their approach is often vastly different, and the results can often have different balances of cost/benefit.
Which is to say, I was using the practical or general definition which includes all those who engineer solutions at or above some given level of difficulty, regardless of formal training. My experience with engineering in school was that it was heavy on rote. I believe that it needn't have been that way, and probably is not that way at all schools.
the copyright owners are of course terrified
Why, yes. And I'm terrified that my subscription to Motorcyclist is going to expire. And I'm terrified that my insurance policy will expire. Don't they realize that now I'm going to have to spend more money to get new magazines and spend more money to get renewed coverage? Shouldn't I just be able to buy some terminal product once and continue to benefit from it forever, even if I know going in that it will expire? The evil insurance company is just trying to get out of their responsibility to cover me forever once I pay them once.
Evil lying bastards, twisting the soft, smooth brains of our politicians. You know what spurs innovation in music? I mean beyond experience, suffering, love, anger, pain, joy, and a burning need to create that won't let actual musicians not make music? Short-term copyrights that require entertainers and labels to make an ongoing effort in order to earn a living. A couple million dollars for "Oops I Did It Again"? When the money comes that easy, I wouldn't put any more effort into it than she does.
You want musicians to put blood, sweat, and tears into their music on an ongoing basis? You want them to put the same dedication into their jobs that we do? Make them work for a living. Cut copyright to five years.
Robert G. Cooper, a well known researcher on new product development, states that there are several core factors (listed in order of importance) for any successful new product design process:
1. A unique, superior and differentiated product with good value-for-money for the customer.
2. A strong market orientation - voice of the customer is built in
3. Sharp, early, fact-based product definition before product development begins
4. Solid up-front homework - doing front end activities like market analysis well
5. True cross functional teams: empowered, resourced, accountable, dedicated leader
6. Leverage - Where the project builds on business's technology and marketing competencies
7. Market attractiveness - size, growth, margins
8. Quality of the launch effort: well planned, properly resourced
9. Technological competencies and quality of execution of technology activities.
Many companies in the Late Business era already emphasize a few of these factors. However, there are some differences. Notice how technical competencies are important, but last on the list. Notice also, how that creating a solution to customer needs is first on the list.
I look forward to seeing the resulting products in a couple years. Five years ago I started on a project that was initially focused on technical proficiency. Then a shift occurred. For the last three years the only thing that was allowed to guide work was customer feedback (I switched projects about two years ago). Technical profiency of the developers for the past three years has been considered nice, but not critical. Technical CRs were explicitly disallowed by the project management. It is a multimillion dollar application suite pushing two million lines, which is the primary application of about 8,000 people - roughly half our labor force. It is currently under review and may be scrapped.
Why? Because the code is dying. The features are there, and it looks good, but it is extraordinarily expensive to maintain, is overly tolerant of corrupt data, and every time someone looks at it funny it breaks. Adding new features has become an exercise in chasing an induced bug through dozens of classes.
The initial approach of technical isolation was wrong - we needed closer contact with the customers and it would have made the product much better earlier in the lifecycle. Now, however, it is precisely the lack of technical proficiency that is killing it. Relegating the user experience or the infrastructure to the back seat is a road to ruin. There is no point in creating software that doesn't solve the customer's problem. But there is also no point in creating software that is more costly than the problem the customer is trying to solve. Discounting technical proficiency is a direct path to cost-ineffective solutions.
This is interesting. I would love to see a comparison between those with traditional American educations (which I assume is what this study focused on) and those who are similarly capable (perhaps who hold similar titles in similarly challenging fields), but who have followed less traditional paths in learning.
For example, I can point to five people at my current job - each a very skilled software engineer, and each very skilled in debating other topics in current events; among those five people are 1 PhD, 2 Masters, 1 college drop-out, and 1 high school drop out. The one thing we all agree on? Much of traditional American education has become primarily a matter of rote memorization - there is very little teaching of theory and problem solving involved.
Further, I saw a different study some years ago that showed a strong correlation between studying the arts late in life and delaying the onset of Alzheimers. Proficiency in the arts tends to require lots of understanding of abstract concepts, akin to studying theory in more technical fields, and requires little rote memorization.
That is to say, is it possible that the study hit on people whose minds have become less plastic as a result of education? People whose brains have been conditioned to be crystalizable by massive repetition instead of adaptable to new situations? Or, to take the nature instead of nurture angle, was the study skewed heavy on people with more crystaline brains, because such people are more proficient in an educational environment heavy on rote memorization?
10 x 6 bits = 60 bits. A 60 bit private key takes half of 35 years at 1 gigakey per second on average (assuming a decent algorithm - use the private key with a hard algorithm to encrypt a longer private key used in a fast algorithm). That's a 10 character password randomly generated from a set of 64 characters. Each additional character increases time by a factor of 64. 16 characters puts it happily into the realm of "not in my lifetime." But that's not even what I'm interested in - 8 characters puts it in the realm of "you can't check everyone."
My opposition to government or corporate invasion of privacy lies in the ease with which it is done. Frankly, I don't have secrets that are worth 17 desktop computer years of effort, so I'm not worried about that. But I do have things that I would like to remain inconvenient for others to know, and which, if it were free, the gov't and corps would like to know.
--Robert N. Clayton, The University of Chicago, for his contributions to geochemistry and cosmochemistry that provided insight into the evolution of the solar system.
I believe that's a typo - should read "insight into the intelligent design of the solar system."
In short, the absence of Linux pre-installs on desktop machines from the large OEMs is not evidence of a dastardly conspiracy.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the rest of your argument is cogent, how do you explain the lack of OS-free machines? Why can't I get the same machine with no OS for $50 less? I've got no problem installing Linux on my own, but as things stand I have to build a machine from parts to get it without paying for Windows.
It's necessary for a feature they're offering (searching your files across multiple computers).
No it isn't. They could store the data encrypted (index data and documents), using a private key known only to the user. Not only would it work, it would be easy to implement. And you could toss in a compression algorithm to reduce bandwidth and storage overhead. And Google has far more than enough sharp minds to have thought of this. Assuming the EFF's report is accurate, Google chose to keep the data in accessible form. The only good reason to do so is to leave an open path to data mining. And they're doing it while the Gov't has them in court demanding access to other data generated by their customers.
I don't know what the price of an OC-12 let alone an OC-48 is but I can guarantee you that it sure as heck isn't free.
T-1's are a couple hundred dollars a month - OC-48s are about 1350 T-1s. Assume a big break for buying the big pipe, and that comes out to... several buttloads of cash per month.