We all know that SOPA is all about the money (I'll ignore the "everything is" argument, for now). Money the *IAAs feel they are losing, money the politicians have accepted in campaign contributions... Even the advertisements trying to drum up support for SOPA are about all the jobs (money) that will be lost if this doesn't become law...
Every argument I've heard has been about ideals and technology... We all know how politicians and corporations feel about ideals. Freedom of speech, Impossible to implement, Would break the very foundation of the web, etc... All meaningless to these people without a dollar sign attached to them.
This is the first argument I have heard that directly turns the tables. "Pass SOPA, and we will no longer trust any software produced by a US company." This would affect many more than just MS, Apple, and Google... How many PCs will Dell, (or HP, or Acer, or...) sell outside of the US if they are not allowed to sell them with (or without) Windows? If Dell et. al. are forced into producing computers with Windows installed for the US market, and %NotWindows% for the rest of the world, how long before they decide it isn't worth the effort, and just pick their favorite %NotWindows% for the entire line? How many jobs will be lost if no one in Europe is allowed to use Photoshop, MS Office, iTunes, AutoCAD,... The list goes on and on.
Do I think this is likely to happen? Not really.. But it makes for a good advertising campaign against SOPA.
You are thinking too small. To be truly effective, each of these sites should have a total blackout for one day. Coordinate, and choose one day that they actively refuse every connection made to any of their servers. 24 house for the entire world to see what it will be like to have no Google, no YouTube, No Gmail, no Facebook, No Zynga (kinda redundant with no Facebook, I know...) Heck, cut off all those useful Android utilities while you are at it.
24 hours worth of profits to most of these companies is chump change... 24 hours of profits lost by those other companies who rely on these services though would make a huge impact. One that could not be ignored.
While I have family on the outer banks in NC, and I wish everyone the best... I can't help but think that poor Irene doesn't have a chance of living up to the media coverage... The sad part isn't that the media has latched onto it and is hyping it to no end. (We're used to that, after all...) But that it really is a prime example of "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf". Hype it up and it fails to meet expectations, and nobody will believe you next time... When it IS that bad.
To play devil's advocate here... Aren't these same "competitive mechanisms" the same arguments that are regularly cited as the reason open source software is better than closed source? Whoever makes the best product or implementation wins? The only difference being that it is somehow assumed that profit is never a motive for any open source project. (Easily proven false, but that is always the assumption...)
I agree that the article is in fact standard issue Forbes free market trolling.. but you should really come up with a better argument for it. OSS proves that competitive mechanisms don't always favor groups that cut costs, reduce quality or undercut "higher quality" competitors. Or at least that they don't HAVE to favor those things.
Spam is no longer profitable! Tell Everyone! Failure to forward this story to at least 15 people will result in... more spam! But if you add your name to the bottom of this story, and send one dollar to each person whose name appears above yours you will make millions! And have a larger penis too!
I'm IT director for a TV station. I spend all day buying, installing, troubleshooting, configuring, fixing, and explaining everything from video servers to telephones... Most of the servers are Linux based (a couple of Windows thrown in to keep things interesting) Most of the desktops are Windows based (with a couple of Macs and one Linux system thrown in for good measure) and the phones.. don't get me started on that end of things!
When I go home.. I just want my stuff to work. I want it to connect to all the stuff AT work that DOESN'T work, and I want have to work on it as little as possible. Mac, OSX all the way.
And to put in my bit with the ongoing car analogy... Yes, it is always a good thing to know how stuff works, and how to fix it when it doesn't.. A little knowledge goes a long way. But when you want a reliable car, you go ask the mechanic what he drives. Sure, they might have a project car to tinker with (and brag about how much horsepower and how much over it is bored and how much torque and how many PSI of boost etc...) But Odds are the car they drive 90% of the time is the one they don't have to mess with constantly to keep running...
I suffer from occasional severe insomnia, and burning a full CD that gradually slowed the binaural beats down into the deep sleep stage was the ONLY non-narcotic solution to ever work.
Sad to realize all these years later, the only reason it worked is because it was my gateway to ambien...~
I actually agree with you that it is not stealing... my bad, perhaps I should have put "steal" in"quotes"... Though my main point still stands. If copyrights were more reasonable, we wouldn't be having this argument in this big of an arena to begin with.
And despite the popular claim of the opposite, you can prove a negative, generally by proving a different paradoxical positive, but still...
For my actual thoughts on it... I think there is a balancing act to be had in it. If you work is good enough that enough people will buy it to make it a success, then enough people will be willing to pirate it to hurt sales also. One of the big reasons for the online "pirating" today isn't the ease of copying (though it contributes) it is that the balance on the opposite side (copyright) has grown too heavy.
With copyrights as long as they are now, there is very little content that CAN'T be pirated, by definition. With shorter copyrights, more content would be available unencumbered. If you knew that you could get it legally, for free in a couple of years, (wait for it to come out on DVD... Wait till it is out on TV... etc arguments) would you be in such a rush to steal it? Again, only if the work was "good enough" to warrant the risk. Even then, the risk would have to be seen as less than the costs of buying it legally.
Not really the whole answer, but enough for a/. post
I may be playing the devil's advocate here, but one of the advantages of consoles is the locked down hardware. And I don't mean because it makes it easier for developers. I think when the hardware is locked in place, or otherwise restricted, that pushes software development to new heights. Developers have to learn to be more creative, more efficient when they start running into the limits of the hardware's abilities. As long as developers know that next year there will be something around that is twice as fast, with twice as much memory, they know they can get away with being sloppy. (Thank you Windows)
Like social security? Yeah.. we all know THAT's going well!
Not to discount a lot of the work they did.. I live within spitting distance of Hoover Dam. There are a lot of lasting works started in, if not completed during the new deal.
It didn't do too terribly much in the short term. And no matter what either side argues, nobody knows whether it would have eventually played out as fixing the economy or tanking it, because WWII came along and put all of us to work. (off-topic, but that fact is partly responsible for the theory that the government intentionally ignored warnings and intelligence about the attack on pearl harbor. They needed the attack to happen to justify the policy change of joining in the war... but that is another topic entirely!)
agreed.. but I'm not holding my breath. Apple has just never really shown much interest in the enterprise market. If they had, they would undoubtedly have more... enterprise features... the tools are certainly out there, and Apple really wouldn't have that hard a time implementing them, I wouldn't think...
It is kind of a vicious circle in a way.. lack of tools prevents wider enterprise acceptance, lack of acceptance means the company has less reason to focus on the category and make improvements...
But I really think it all starts with Apple not really caring about that segment of the market.
I work at a small (now half the peopl ewe had 2 years ago) TV station, but most other TV stations seem to follow the same route. Engineering.
Especially in smaller stations, they are the ones with the most equipment, the most technical skill... and the dumping grounds for anything that nobody else can figure out how to fix, whether it is a bookshelf, a coffee maker, a phone, or a multi terabyte SAN...
SuRun is a great little utility. Effectively brings 'sudo' to windows. They weren't the first people to have the idea, they just did it better than everyone else. Not a shill, just a pleased customer (like anywhere, we have some really 'computer-dumb' people working here...)
Another one for the "Mass Transit Sux" crowd. I live in a metropolitan area of about 2 million right now, and it takes almost 2 hours to go the 10 miles for my morning commute. (no joke, but I do it anyway) And this is one of the better systems I have had to use. Most of the places I have lived before either didn't have ANY mass transit at all (population 6k or less, so pointless anyway) or only sporadically, and only in very restricted areas of town (population 200k) Until I can truly work from home, with a 10 minute walk to my nearest neighbor's house (who happens to live in a grocery store) I'd rather drive, thank you very much.
I'm amazed that I seem to be the first one to say anything about minority report...
Assuming us arrogant bastards in the USA don't want to give up our cars (likely) and you can convince us to simply give up DRIVING our cars (NOT likely, perceived lack of control is one of the main reasons cited by people nervous of flying) such a system really would be the ideal. We'd likely have to black out all the windows though, because people tend to get nervous seeing other cars cross traffic with mere inches to spare while traveling at high rates of speed. The trick is not in creating the system to do it (no easy task in itself, mind you) but in getting it deployed, then accepted by the public. Being the arrogant bastards that we are, at least a couple of us will be convinced that we can do it better, or at least be able to program our own cars to do it better.
Mark Twain really pisses people off... If he were pissing people off for something other than the use of the word "nigger" then I think he would be proud. I wonder what he would have to say about the uproar over things like this...
here at the TV station, we actually have a couple of devices with NT4 on them.. it is practically an embedded system though (Master control switcher, for example, loads from a flash card) I have found NT4 to be fairly common in some of these devices. I'm guessing companies can easily write device drivers for it, and it is now oddball enough that they don't have to worry about other "engineers" messing with the system too much, or loading a bunch of extra crap onto it, etc.
Build a product that is easy to use, reliable, has easy access to all the content most average people want, and is pretty to boot... and people keep buying it! It isn't rocket science.
I can't really think of many examples, and the article certainly doesn't provide any examples.. Not even a "worst case scenario" type of doomsday prophecy. And only one of the things I can think of amount to a "leak"...
If all the worlds' financial data suddenly became truly public, or disappeared entirely (they amount to the same thing, either was they would have to start all over) could be bad, I suppose.. at least for a lot of people. Good for others.
If all of the weapons data in the US ("ICBMs for Dummies" "The Complete Idiot's Schematics for Nuclear Weaponry") the things could get ugly in a hurry.. Either that, or everyone would have nukes, and we would be back into the MAD scenario... or they would simply lose all effectiveness as a threat,since everyone had them...
Slashdot Mirror
We all know that SOPA is all about the money (I'll ignore the "everything is" argument, for now). Money the *IAAs feel they are losing, money the politicians have accepted in campaign contributions... Even the advertisements trying to drum up support for SOPA are about all the jobs (money) that will be lost if this doesn't become law...
Every argument I've heard has been about ideals and technology... We all know how politicians and corporations feel about ideals. Freedom of speech, Impossible to implement, Would break the very foundation of the web, etc... All meaningless to these people without a dollar sign attached to them.
This is the first argument I have heard that directly turns the tables. "Pass SOPA, and we will no longer trust any software produced by a US company." This would affect many more than just MS, Apple, and Google... How many PCs will Dell, (or HP, or Acer, or...) sell outside of the US if they are not allowed to sell them with (or without) Windows? If Dell et. al. are forced into producing computers with Windows installed for the US market, and %NotWindows% for the rest of the world, how long before they decide it isn't worth the effort, and just pick their favorite %NotWindows% for the entire line? How many jobs will be lost if no one in Europe is allowed to use Photoshop, MS Office, iTunes, AutoCAD,... The list goes on and on.
Do I think this is likely to happen? Not really.. But it makes for a good advertising campaign against SOPA.
You are thinking too small. To be truly effective, each of these sites should have a total blackout for one day. Coordinate, and choose one day that they actively refuse every connection made to any of their servers. 24 house for the entire world to see what it will be like to have no Google, no YouTube, No Gmail, no Facebook, No Zynga (kinda redundant with no Facebook, I know...) Heck, cut off all those useful Android utilities while you are at it.
24 hours worth of profits to most of these companies is chump change... 24 hours of profits lost by those other companies who rely on these services though would make a huge impact. One that could not be ignored.
While I have family on the outer banks in NC, and I wish everyone the best... I can't help but think that poor Irene doesn't have a chance of living up to the media coverage... The sad part isn't that the media has latched onto it and is hyping it to no end. (We're used to that, after all...) But that it really is a prime example of "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf". Hype it up and it fails to meet expectations, and nobody will believe you next time... When it IS that bad.
To play devil's advocate here... Aren't these same "competitive mechanisms" the same arguments that are regularly cited as the reason open source software is better than closed source? Whoever makes the best product or implementation wins? The only difference being that it is somehow assumed that profit is never a motive for any open source project. (Easily proven false, but that is always the assumption...)
I agree that the article is in fact standard issue Forbes free market trolling.. but you should really come up with a better argument for it. OSS proves that competitive mechanisms don't always favor groups that cut costs, reduce quality or undercut "higher quality" competitors. Or at least that they don't HAVE to favor those things.
Spam is no longer profitable! Tell Everyone! Failure to forward this story to at least 15 people will result in... more spam! But if you add your name to the bottom of this story, and send one dollar to each person whose name appears above yours you will make millions! And have a larger penis too!
Amen to this whole thread!
I'm IT director for a TV station. I spend all day buying, installing, troubleshooting, configuring, fixing, and explaining everything from video servers to telephones... Most of the servers are Linux based (a couple of Windows thrown in to keep things interesting) Most of the desktops are Windows based (with a couple of Macs and one Linux system thrown in for good measure) and the phones.. don't get me started on that end of things!
When I go home.. I just want my stuff to work. I want it to connect to all the stuff AT work that DOESN'T work, and I want have to work on it as little as possible. Mac, OSX all the way.
And to put in my bit with the ongoing car analogy... Yes, it is always a good thing to know how stuff works, and how to fix it when it doesn't.. A little knowledge goes a long way. But when you want a reliable car, you go ask the mechanic what he drives. Sure, they might have a project car to tinker with (and brag about how much horsepower and how much over it is bored and how much torque and how many PSI of boost etc...) But Odds are the car they drive 90% of the time is the one they don't have to mess with constantly to keep running...
Anyone else ever mess with the "Brainwave Syncronizer" In Cool Edit?
I suffer from occasional severe insomnia, and burning a full CD that gradually slowed the binaural beats down into the deep sleep stage was the ONLY non-narcotic solution to ever work.
Sad to realize all these years later, the only reason it worked is because it was my gateway to ambien...~
I actually agree with you that it is not stealing... my bad, perhaps I should have put "steal" in"quotes"... Though my main point still stands. If copyrights were more reasonable, we wouldn't be having this argument in this big of an arena to begin with.
now.. can you prove God doesn't exist?
And despite the popular claim of the opposite, you can prove a negative, generally by proving a different paradoxical positive, but still...
For my actual thoughts on it... I think there is a balancing act to be had in it. If you work is good enough that enough people will buy it to make it a success, then enough people will be willing to pirate it to hurt sales also. One of the big reasons for the online "pirating" today isn't the ease of copying (though it contributes) it is that the balance on the opposite side (copyright) has grown too heavy.
With copyrights as long as they are now, there is very little content that CAN'T be pirated, by definition. With shorter copyrights, more content would be available unencumbered. If you knew that you could get it legally, for free in a couple of years, (wait for it to come out on DVD... Wait till it is out on TV... etc arguments) would you be in such a rush to steal it? Again, only if the work was "good enough" to warrant the risk. Even then, the risk would have to be seen as less than the costs of buying it legally.
Not really the whole answer, but enough for a /. post
I may be playing the devil's advocate here, but one of the advantages of consoles is the locked down hardware. And I don't mean because it makes it easier for developers. I think when the hardware is locked in place, or otherwise restricted, that pushes software development to new heights. Developers have to learn to be more creative, more efficient when they start running into the limits of the hardware's abilities. As long as developers know that next year there will be something around that is twice as fast, with twice as much memory, they know they can get away with being sloppy. (Thank you Windows)
Like social security? Yeah.. we all know THAT's going well!
Not to discount a lot of the work they did.. I live within spitting distance of Hoover Dam. There are a lot of lasting works started in, if not completed during the new deal.
It didn't do too terribly much in the short term. And no matter what either side argues, nobody knows whether it would have eventually played out as fixing the economy or tanking it, because WWII came along and put all of us to work. (off-topic, but that fact is partly responsible for the theory that the government intentionally ignored warnings and intelligence about the attack on pearl harbor. They needed the attack to happen to justify the policy change of joining in the war... but that is another topic entirely!)
"creating jobs" is easy... Creating productive, long term jobs is the trick.
Hire one guy to make bricks all day. You created a job!
Hire another guy to smash bricks all day. You've created TWO jobs!
Hire another guy to sort the rubble, and prepare it to be recycled by the first guy to make more bricks. You've created THREE GREEN jobs!
Take away the federal money, and all three of them are out of work again, with absolutely nothing to show for all the money spent.
I guess this is the answer to all of those people who always ask "Won't they ever learn?"... Those who can't do.. teach.
agreed.. but I'm not holding my breath. Apple has just never really shown much interest in the enterprise market. If they had, they would undoubtedly have more... enterprise features... the tools are certainly out there, and Apple really wouldn't have that hard a time implementing them, I wouldn't think...
It is kind of a vicious circle in a way.. lack of tools prevents wider enterprise acceptance, lack of acceptance means the company has less reason to focus on the category and make improvements...
But I really think it all starts with Apple not really caring about that segment of the market.
I work at a small (now half the peopl ewe had 2 years ago) TV station, but most other TV stations seem to follow the same route. Engineering.
Especially in smaller stations, they are the ones with the most equipment, the most technical skill... and the dumping grounds for anything that nobody else can figure out how to fix, whether it is a bookshelf, a coffee maker, a phone, or a multi terabyte SAN...
SuRun is a great little utility. Effectively brings 'sudo' to windows. They weren't the first people to have the idea, they just did it better than everyone else. Not a shill, just a pleased customer (like anywhere, we have some really 'computer-dumb' people working here...)
Another one for the "Mass Transit Sux" crowd. I live in a metropolitan area of about 2 million right now, and it takes almost 2 hours to go the 10 miles for my morning commute. (no joke, but I do it anyway) And this is one of the better systems I have had to use. Most of the places I have lived before either didn't have ANY mass transit at all (population 6k or less, so pointless anyway) or only sporadically, and only in very restricted areas of town (population 200k) Until I can truly work from home, with a 10 minute walk to my nearest neighbor's house (who happens to live in a grocery store) I'd rather drive, thank you very much.
I'm amazed that I seem to be the first one to say anything about minority report...
Assuming us arrogant bastards in the USA don't want to give up our cars (likely) and you can convince us to simply give up DRIVING our cars (NOT likely, perceived lack of control is one of the main reasons cited by people nervous of flying) such a system really would be the ideal. We'd likely have to black out all the windows though, because people tend to get nervous seeing other cars cross traffic with mere inches to spare while traveling at high rates of speed. The trick is not in creating the system to do it (no easy task in itself, mind you) but in getting it deployed, then accepted by the public. Being the arrogant bastards that we are, at least a couple of us will be convinced that we can do it better, or at least be able to program our own cars to do it better.
Mark Twain really pisses people off... If he were pissing people off for something other than the use of the word "nigger" then I think he would be proud. I wonder what he would have to say about the uproar over things like this...
here at the TV station, we actually have a couple of devices with NT4 on them.. it is practically an embedded system though (Master control switcher, for example, loads from a flash card) I have found NT4 to be fairly common in some of these devices. I'm guessing companies can easily write device drivers for it, and it is now oddball enough that they don't have to worry about other "engineers" messing with the system too much, or loading a bunch of extra crap onto it, etc.
Build a product that is easy to use, reliable, has easy access to all the content most average people want, and is pretty to boot... and people keep buying it! It isn't rocket science.
Just, for the love of god, don't build it in Flash! ;-)
Build a better website, and you won't need an iPhone app.
I can't really think of many examples, and the article certainly doesn't provide any examples.. Not even a "worst case scenario" type of doomsday prophecy. And only one of the things I can think of amount to a "leak"...
If all the worlds' financial data suddenly became truly public, or disappeared entirely (they amount to the same thing, either was they would have to start all over) could be bad, I suppose.. at least for a lot of people. Good for others.
If all of the weapons data in the US ("ICBMs for Dummies" "The Complete Idiot's Schematics for Nuclear Weaponry") the things could get ugly in a hurry.. Either that, or everyone would have nukes, and we would be back into the MAD scenario... or they would simply lose all effectiveness as a threat,since everyone had them...
if he only talks for 20 minutes a month or so.. why should he pay for 200 on contract for 2 years...