Right, but did Milton Friedman think that? I honestly don't know, but I would have assumed he would (like most orthodox economists) believe that interpersonal comparison of utility is impossible - so the two situations you describe are incomparable. (Which, in my view, is just as daft, and arguably just as right wing, but in a different way.)
If you read my comment, you will notice that I say absolutely nothing either in favour of, or against, Milton Friedman's ideas. I merely point out that the grandparent has not understood them. That would be you, eh? My economics is not great, but at least I know what a zero-sum game is.
Others have already pointed out that you have no idea what Milton Friedman actually said. As for the claim that critics of OLPC really hate poor people, this has zero evidence to back it up. Here's an astounding thought: maybe they sincerely believe there are better ways to help the poor?
Sure. You have to balance free speech rights against protecting the rights of producers. Of course, that's not because producers deserve special status but simply because otherwise, certain things will not be produced.
I don't consider the right to copy other people's work, against those people's will, an important free speech right. But you may differ.
I guess the simple answer is "You don't know that". You have absolutely no way to back that statement.
I can back it by reference to standard economic theory: public goods are underprovided, because there is an incentive to freeride on others' contributions.
Why won't IBM pay for it? If it gives them a competative advantage they *will* do it, even if it means that their competitors follow (months or years later...) giving IBM a first-mover advantage. Let's also remember that making CPUs has a natural barrier to entry: you need a billion dollar fab to actually make them. This means that they don't have to worry that (other than a handful) of other companies are even going to try and compete...
This is a fair point. It's not that no innovation would ever happen. The problem is that because other people can exploit your innovations, you will underinvest in innovation - not "never invest at all". Again, with public goods, we normally see suboptimal provision but not no provision.
Re: Linux. I gotta call you on this. With my last computer, I moved back to Windows XP after 5 years on Mandrake, Suse and Debian, because I still couldn't plug and play devices without a lot of faffing around. There are complex reasons for all of this - and I dig open source, don't get me wrong - but the bottom line is you can't just assert "Linux is superior". For a lot of people it isn't. That's why it has not yet been the long-anticipated "year of the Linux desktop".
Finally, a little anecdote a friend told me.
In the furniture business, there are long lead times for sofas. This is because the big cost of sofas is the wood. So companies buy the wood, and cut it into shapes for all their sofas. Doing this right (minimizing wood wastage) is difficult. Companies tend to buy wood, make what they can, then wait for more wood. A friend of my friend wrote some software to optimize the woodcutting pattern & minimize wastage. He reckons it will save companies $millions.
My point is: which idealistic hacker is going to spend months writing sofa-optimization software? I suggest we rely on the profit motive to get this mundane and tedious work done. If so, then we should let people get the profit from their hard work, by forbidding Jo Schmo from copying their software and selling it for $1.50 a CD. That seems fair. It also means that a few people will actually do that work.
Suppose you disagree. Fine. Write open source software. If you're right, it will be more efficient and closed source will die out. But don't try and legislate away my right to protect my intellectual property by selling it on my chosen terms. Reform patents, sure, but don't destroy them.
Er.. it's just a service. You can capture its value the same way a barber captures the value of his labor: by finding someone willing to pay him for doing it.
Nobody can copy a barber's haircuts, whereas I can copy someone's chip designs. I am not claiming that nobody would get paid at all in the absence of IP, just that they would get underpaid compared to a reasonable system of IP.
And who'd be willing to pay for it? Anyone who stands to benefit from advancing the state of computers: computer manufacturers, chip fabricators, and consumers.
This is just the issue. The point is that we all stand to benefit but we would rather freeride on other people's contributions. Somewhere else I've referenced Wikipedia on "public goods". Go take a look.
The parlimentary system is much less stable, judging from the way you in Europe burn through governments, and is short sighted.
Acksherly, political scientists who have crunched the numbers find that parliamentary systems are more stable than presidential ones (think of all those Latin American presidents who become dictators). I think Lijphardt has something on this.
To this and other posters making the same point: that's great. Of course we depend for our ideas on other people's ideas. Does that mean that the individual doesn't contribute anything? Of course not. An industry takes inputs and turns them into outputs. We still think it's reasonable to pay for that. Similarly, people take ideas and build on other people's ideas, and they should be rewarded for that. Either because they deserve it, or, if you don't like that notion, because if they aren't, people will not have ideas. (Yes, I know great geniuses will still work for the love of it, and I know that Joe Bloggs has written an open source IRC client. Unfortunately modern society also depends on a whole lot of non-great-geniuses doing quite mundane, boring, difficult intellectual work, for profit. That's why there is no open source cure for haemorrhoids - or cancer.)
Nope. All you need is a restriction on the supply of the ability.
(Also, it's important to distinguish between the supply of all ideas that ever will be produced, and the supply of one idea that already has been produced. The former is restricted inherently, due to the fact that not everyone can or will come up with every possible idea. The latter is not restricted, except by copyright and patent laws, because sharing an idea costs nothing and doesn't deplete any resources.)
That's missing the point. We know that the ability to supply goods is valuable. The question is, will it be correctly valued in a world without IP? Answer: no, because nobody will be able to capture that value, hence it becomes a public good, hence there is underinvestment in it.
The GP is right on the money. Even in a world where selling copies of artistic works is impossible, the ability to produce those works would still be in demand, so the producers could still make money at it. They'd just have to do it by charging for their time directly, like a barber or an accountant, rather than by performing the labor for free and selling copies of the resulting work afterward. It'd basically mean turning the marketing machine upside down, because the goal would now be to get people to contribute to the creation of a work, instead of getting them to buy a product.
This addresses part of the issue. Yes, if (say) IBM needs knowledge of how to optimize its business process, then it will pay for that knowledge - and nobody else would be interested anyway, as the knowledge is only useful to IBM. But suppose you develop a new faster computer chip. Then who will pay for it? IBM? No, because the knowledge will be available to their competitors. The consumers directly? Not unless they have chip fabs in their back yard. (Could the consumers band together and pay for this kind of research? Possible but unlikely: too much temptation to free ride. Put it this way: it is as possible as any other form of public good being provided without compulsion. There are ways to do this, but it is not as simple as getting a private good provided.)
We actually have a perfectly viable form of IP socialism right now. It's called the patent system. You get a temporary right to exploit your idea. Thereafter, it's common property - reflecting the thought that eventually, someone else would have come up with it. I am not saying the patent system doesn't have problems - I know about e.g. the patent to amuse a cat with a laser pointer. But it needs reform, not wholesale destruction.
Some friends of friends in Shropshire - a wild place on the Welsh borders - actually built a catapult and used it to fire dead cows. NASA should hire them.
1 ISPs will deliberately throttle bandwidth for websites that don't pay up. I doubt this makes sense. In a competitive market, an ISP who deliberately slows down websites will lose customers.
2 ISPs will offer faster access to websites that pay for it, thus forcing websites into a zero sum competition and allowing the ISPs to reap monopoly rents. Well, fast access to consumers is certainly valuable to websites but there is no room for zerosum competition here. Websites will not pay to be "faster than the competition" beyond a certain point (once everyone is reasonably fast, there are better things to compete on). And I don't believe any company has a monopoly on fibre, so websites can always move if they feel they are paying too much.
Bottom line: I see no reason why the market for bandwidth should not be as efficient as any other - say, the market for website design or other things that make your website convenient to your users - so long as there's no monopolist.
Well, I am going to shout "racist" and "xenophobe", as well as "idiot". How utterly prejudiced to describe all muslims as freeloaders and complainers! You claim that "[t]he Muslims are demanding a political change in Europe from Western-style democracy to Sharia Law". There are certainly some muslims who want that, just as there are some Europeans who vote for Le Pen, but the idea that all do is ridiculous. (Here's the proof: attitudes toward sex, not democracy, divide the West and Islam. Incidentally the same article shows that, although muslims are on the whole less keen on sexual equality, 55% of them still support the idea. So much for your claim that islam promotes the beating and repression of women.)
Islam is not perfect - nor is Christianity, which has historically persecuted those opposed to it and continues to exhibit bigotry towards gays and lesbians. But this sort of over-generalized nonsense should stay where it belongs, on the BNP website. I find it depressing that you received "+5 insightful" for this ignorant crap. Let me display my own prejudices - are you an American, by any chance?
At first sight they do seem the same. But after a year or two of constant use (I'm writing my thesis with it), I can confirm that OpenOffice sucks donkey balls, and I would far prefer Office, with which I also have extensive experience.
I accept that responsibility and as it happens, my card works fine - after I downloaded the source which has been around for about 2 years and still not made it into the kernel tree. But that attitude will not get Linux far on the desktop.
Microsoft: "We'll sell you our software and hardware manufacturers will bundle drivers that work with it"
Linux: "We bundle some drivers for free, but not until the hardware is maybe a year old, and we won't provide a stable API for manufacturers to write drivers, and if your hardware doesn't work, tough."
At this point, open source becomes a cost not a benefit.
I suggest that the Borg-like approach of absorbing all drivers into the One True Kernel Tree is not scalable or sensible when hardware is a moving target.
That's great if you're on the server end. As a laptop user, I'd rather have a low-quality driver for my wifi card than none at all - and no, I do not want to be pointed to a list of cards that work with Linux, I just want the card I have already bought to work, thank you!
Similarly, attributes are defined to accept values that conform to certain syntaxes, but it is possible for authors to violate these constraints.
Authors must not do this. User agent implementors may curse authors who violate these rules, and may persecute them to the full extent allowed by applicable international law.
You can tell these guys have experience doing real implementations...
But as Miguel points out, pretty much all software, written in any language, has patent problems. That's just the kray-zee world we live in. If anything, GPLed projects may be safer, because IBM and Novell have threatened to use their patent arsenals in retalation against anyone trying to sue open source projects for patent infringement.
What, everyone who writes GPLed software is a music pirate?
Unlike all those Windows users who, undoubtedly, have never broken IP laws by, say, borrowing somebody's copy of Office or downloading a Dreamweaver zipfile?
Well, I swapped the other way and I now use Gnome not primarily for developing but for a standard office desktop. And its simple to use and easy on the eye. But I respect your choice.
They are about what it takes to get two groups to embrace Free Software: proprietary software vendors, and know-nothing bozos. The former will never embrace Free Software because, frankly, they have little to offer it, and less all the time. The latter will use what they're given and like it, as they always have. Everybody else already sees the advantage, and has switched or is planning to switch.
This is the stupidest, most arrogant comment I've ever heard. Everyone who isn't already planning to switch to Linux is an ignorant bozo? You clown. You're dissing about 99% of the world's computer users. Well, welcome to the exciting world of Mr 1%. Enjoy non-existent hardware support, meaningless feelings of superiority and being laughed at as a geek for the rest of eternity. I suggest you take it a step further: dismiss Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Atheos users as foolish sheeple, and write your own kernel. Presumably you have plenty of free time on your hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but did Milton Friedman think that? I honestly don't know, but I would have assumed he would (like most orthodox economists) believe that interpersonal comparison of utility is impossible - so the two situations you describe are incomparable. (Which, in my view, is just as daft, and arguably just as right wing, but in a different way.)
If you read my comment, you will notice that I say absolutely nothing either in favour of, or against, Milton Friedman's ideas. I merely point out that the grandparent has not understood them. That would be you, eh? My economics is not great, but at least I know what a zero-sum game is.
er, if you RTFA you'll discover that this is an actual anecdote taken off OLPC's own website?
Others have already pointed out that you have no idea what Milton Friedman actually said. As for the claim that critics of OLPC really hate poor people, this has zero evidence to back it up. Here's an astounding thought: maybe they sincerely believe there are better ways to help the poor?
Sure. You have to balance free speech rights against protecting the rights of producers. Of course, that's not because producers deserve special status but simply because otherwise, certain things will not be produced.
I don't consider the right to copy other people's work, against those people's will, an important free speech right. But you may differ.
I guess the simple answer is "You don't know that". You have absolutely no way to back that statement.
I can back it by reference to standard economic theory: public goods are underprovided, because there is an incentive to freeride on others' contributions.
Why won't IBM pay for it? If it gives them a competative advantage they *will* do it, even if it means that their competitors follow (months or years later...) giving IBM a first-mover advantage. Let's also remember that making CPUs has a natural barrier to entry: you need a billion dollar fab to actually make them. This means that they don't have to worry that (other than a handful) of other companies are even going to try and compete...
This is a fair point. It's not that no innovation would ever happen. The problem is that because other people can exploit your innovations, you will underinvest in innovation - not "never invest at all". Again, with public goods, we normally see suboptimal provision but not no provision.
Re: Linux. I gotta call you on this. With my last computer, I moved back to Windows XP after 5 years on Mandrake, Suse and Debian, because I still couldn't plug and play devices without a lot of faffing around. There are complex reasons for all of this - and I dig open source, don't get me wrong - but the bottom line is you can't just assert "Linux is superior". For a lot of people it isn't. That's why it has not yet been the long-anticipated "year of the Linux desktop".
Finally, a little anecdote a friend told me.
In the furniture business, there are long lead times for sofas. This is because the big cost of sofas is the wood. So companies buy the wood, and cut it into shapes for all their sofas. Doing this right (minimizing wood wastage) is difficult. Companies tend to buy wood, make what they can, then wait for more wood. A friend of my friend wrote some software to optimize the woodcutting pattern & minimize wastage. He reckons it will save companies $millions.
My point is: which idealistic hacker is going to spend months writing sofa-optimization software? I suggest we rely on the profit motive to get this mundane and tedious work done. If so, then we should let people get the profit from their hard work, by forbidding Jo Schmo from copying their software and selling it for $1.50 a CD. That seems fair. It also means that a few people will actually do that work.
Suppose you disagree. Fine. Write open source software. If you're right, it will be more efficient and closed source will die out. But don't try and legislate away my right to protect my intellectual property by selling it on my chosen terms. Reform patents, sure, but don't destroy them.
Er.. it's just a service. You can capture its value the same way a barber captures the value of his labor: by finding someone willing to pay him for doing it.
Nobody can copy a barber's haircuts, whereas I can copy someone's chip designs. I am not claiming that nobody would get paid at all in the absence of IP, just that they would get underpaid compared to a reasonable system of IP.
And who'd be willing to pay for it? Anyone who stands to benefit from advancing the state of computers: computer manufacturers, chip fabricators, and consumers.
This is just the issue. The point is that we all stand to benefit but we would rather freeride on other people's contributions. Somewhere else I've referenced Wikipedia on "public goods". Go take a look.
I was just giving an example. The argument made by Lijphardt relies on solid data and regression analysis, as far as I am aware.
The parlimentary system is much less stable, judging from the way you in Europe burn through governments, and is short sighted.
Acksherly, political scientists who have crunched the numbers find that parliamentary systems are more stable than presidential ones (think of all those Latin American presidents who become dictators). I think Lijphardt has something on this.
Wikipedia:Public good
To this and other posters making the same point: that's great. Of course we depend for our ideas on other people's ideas. Does that mean that the individual doesn't contribute anything? Of course not. An industry takes inputs and turns them into outputs. We still think it's reasonable to pay for that. Similarly, people take ideas and build on other people's ideas, and they should be rewarded for that. Either because they deserve it, or, if you don't like that notion, because if they aren't, people will not have ideas. (Yes, I know great geniuses will still work for the love of it, and I know that Joe Bloggs has written an open source IRC client. Unfortunately modern society also depends on a whole lot of non-great-geniuses doing quite mundane, boring, difficult intellectual work, for profit. That's why there is no open source cure for haemorrhoids - or cancer.)
Nope. All you need is a restriction on the supply of the ability.
(Also, it's important to distinguish between the supply of all ideas that ever will be produced, and the supply of one idea that already has been produced. The former is restricted inherently, due to the fact that not everyone can or will come up with every possible idea. The latter is not restricted, except by copyright and patent laws, because sharing an idea costs nothing and doesn't deplete any resources.)
That's missing the point. We know that the ability to supply goods is valuable. The question is, will it be correctly valued in a world without IP? Answer: no, because nobody will be able to capture that value, hence it becomes a public good, hence there is underinvestment in it.
The GP is right on the money. Even in a world where selling copies of artistic works is impossible, the ability to produce those works would still be in demand, so the producers could still make money at it. They'd just have to do it by charging for their time directly, like a barber or an accountant, rather than by performing the labor for free and selling copies of the resulting work afterward. It'd basically mean turning the marketing machine upside down, because the goal would now be to get people to contribute to the creation of a work, instead of getting them to buy a product.
This addresses part of the issue. Yes, if (say) IBM needs knowledge of how to optimize its business process, then it will pay for that knowledge - and nobody else would be interested anyway, as the knowledge is only useful to IBM. But suppose you develop a new faster computer chip. Then who will pay for it? IBM? No, because the knowledge will be available to their competitors. The consumers directly? Not unless they have chip fabs in their back yard. (Could the consumers band together and pay for this kind of research? Possible but unlikely: too much temptation to free ride. Put it this way: it is as possible as any other form of public good being provided without compulsion. There are ways to do this, but it is not as simple as getting a private good provided.)
We actually have a perfectly viable form of IP socialism right now. It's called the patent system. You get a temporary right to exploit your idea. Thereafter, it's common property - reflecting the thought that eventually, someone else would have come up with it. I am not saying the patent system doesn't have problems - I know about e.g. the patent to amuse a cat with a laser pointer. But it needs reform, not wholesale destruction.
Some friends of friends in Shropshire - a wild place on the Welsh borders - actually built a catapult and used it to fire dead cows. NASA should hire them.
My thoughts exactly. Two fears might be:
1 ISPs will deliberately throttle bandwidth for websites that don't pay up. I doubt this makes sense. In a competitive market, an ISP who deliberately slows down websites will lose customers.
2 ISPs will offer faster access to websites that pay for it, thus forcing websites into a zero sum competition and allowing the ISPs to reap monopoly rents. Well, fast access to consumers is certainly valuable to websites but there is no room for zerosum competition here. Websites will not pay to be "faster than the competition" beyond a certain point (once everyone is reasonably fast, there are better things to compete on). And I don't believe any company has a monopoly on fibre, so websites can always move if they feel they are paying too much.
Bottom line: I see no reason why the market for bandwidth should not be as efficient as any other - say, the market for website design or other things that make your website convenient to your users - so long as there's no monopolist.
Well, I am going to shout "racist" and "xenophobe", as well as "idiot". How utterly prejudiced to describe all muslims as freeloaders and complainers! You claim that "[t]he Muslims are demanding a political change in Europe from Western-style democracy to Sharia Law". There are certainly some muslims who want that, just as there are some Europeans who vote for Le Pen, but the idea that all do is ridiculous. (Here's the proof: attitudes toward sex, not democracy, divide the West and Islam. Incidentally the same article shows that, although muslims are on the whole less keen on sexual equality, 55% of them still support the idea. So much for your claim that islam promotes the beating and repression of women.)
Islam is not perfect - nor is Christianity, which has historically persecuted those opposed to it and continues to exhibit bigotry towards gays and lesbians. But this sort of over-generalized nonsense should stay where it belongs, on the BNP website. I find it depressing that you received "+5 insightful" for this ignorant crap. Let me display my own prejudices - are you an American, by any chance?
At first sight they do seem the same. But after a year or two of constant use (I'm writing my thesis with it), I can confirm that OpenOffice sucks donkey balls, and I would far prefer Office, with which I also have extensive experience.
hmm. how many hours have you been using it?
I accept that responsibility and as it happens, my card works fine - after I downloaded the source which has been around for about 2 years and still not made it into the kernel tree. But that attitude will not get Linux far on the desktop.
Microsoft: "We'll sell you our software and hardware manufacturers will bundle drivers that work with it"
Linux: "We bundle some drivers for free, but not until the hardware is maybe a year old, and we won't provide a stable API for manufacturers to write drivers, and if your hardware doesn't work, tough."
At this point, open source becomes a cost not a benefit.
I suggest that the Borg-like approach of absorbing all drivers into the One True Kernel Tree is not scalable or sensible when hardware is a moving target.
That's great if you're on the server end. As a laptop user, I'd rather have a low-quality driver for my wifi card than none at all - and no, I do not want to be pointed to a list of cards that work with Linux, I just want the card I have already bought to work, thank you!
Similarly, attributes are defined to accept values that conform to certain syntaxes, but it is possible for authors to violate these constraints.
Authors must not do this. User agent implementors may curse authors who violate these rules, and may persecute them to the full extent allowed by applicable international law.
You can tell these guys have experience doing real implementations...
But as Miguel points out, pretty much all software, written in any language, has patent problems. That's just the kray-zee world we live in. If anything, GPLed projects may be safer, because IBM and Novell have threatened to use their patent arsenals in retalation against anyone trying to sue open source projects for patent infringement.
"You guys?"
What, everyone who writes GPLed software is a music pirate?
Unlike all those Windows users who, undoubtedly, have never broken IP laws by, say, borrowing somebody's copy of Office or downloading a Dreamweaver zipfile?
Dear me.
Well, I swapped the other way and I now use Gnome not primarily for developing but for a standard office desktop. And its simple to use and easy on the eye. But I respect your choice.
They are about what it takes to get two groups to embrace Free Software: proprietary software vendors, and know-nothing bozos. The former will never embrace Free Software because, frankly, they have little to offer it, and less all the time. The latter will use what they're given and like it, as they always have. Everybody else already sees the advantage, and has switched or is planning to switch.
This is the stupidest, most arrogant comment I've ever heard. Everyone who isn't already planning to switch to Linux is an ignorant bozo? You clown. You're dissing about 99% of the world's computer users. Well, welcome to the exciting world of Mr 1%. Enjoy non-existent hardware support, meaningless feelings of superiority and being laughed at as a geek for the rest of eternity. I suggest you take it a step further: dismiss Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Atheos users as foolish sheeple, and write your own kernel. Presumably you have plenty of free time on your hands.
Written from Firefox on Debian.
or indeed Maypole?