It sure would be easier than trying to throw out the whole system of government/corporate cronyism that this country has been running under for the past 150 years. That just ain't gonna happen.
They're talking about creating a new law to oversee the abuses that the NSA has performed on recording phone records of citizens. Reviewing the text of the bill shows that the new law would give the NSA complete power to record anything they want -- with a secret court "watching" over them.
The law, if created, will only create more monopoly power in the name of net neutrality. I'd rather have 5000 providers offering their own version of the Internet competitively than what would happen if the net was neutral the way Congress would decree. Can you imagine it? "AT&T -- The ONLY neutral network!" ads running, when we all know that AT&T (or whoever) was given massive power through the law.
how many choices of providers do you have available to you right now? if i want decent speed and prices, that list for me consists of one company.
Post your zip code and I'll show you one reason that is the case -- the State (meaning the government at some level) requires that one to be the sole monopoly provider. Numerous regulations, restrictions, licensing and mandates prevent competition.
The government can not fix ("net neutrality") what it broke ("regulating one monopoly.")
Call customer retention and demand it (if the changes are reasonable, of course). We don't have 1000s of phones but we do communications consulting so we likely do account for a few hundred -- not much more than your number.
That is ridiculous. As I said in this post, I am not anti-DRM, nor am I pro-DRM. I am for the right to perform your labor in the way you want, as long as your customer is willing to accept any reductions in their rights (usually for a discount). DRM is not bad, not evil, and definitely not anti-consumer. If a DRM'd product or service allows a company to produce a product for a customer at a HUGE discount, isn't the price decrease pro-consumer? No one can know each and every consumer's desired outcome of a product or service -- you're just afraid of the State-mandates that back up DRM, not the DRM itself.
They don't follow the issues, they are unaware that their is even any type of debate over this subject, and and they are unlikely to ever encounter any issues with DRM because they all use Windows and are the type to be highly loyal to a brand, so probably wouldn't ever buy a music player from another company.
To paraphrase this quote: They don't care to waste time following non-issues in their lives, they're extremely happy with the product they have, and the price is perfect so they're not in a rush to change anything. The problem isn't the DRM or the consumer, in your case, though, it is the law that reduces your private-property rights: you are not free to act and labor in the way you want to with your time (you are not free to waste time trying to remove the DRM).
While I myself am vehemently anti-DRM, your post assumes two things;
You forgot one: if an individual or business wants to obfuscate something in order to sell more of the items themselves, they're free to, ignoring the laws. If an individual or business wants to de-obfuscate something they've bought in order to learn to duplicate it, they should be free to, ignoring the laws. Again, it is the LAW that is evil, not the DRM. Most people on slashdot are confusing one three letter word for another.
You're confused. DRM is about you keeping customers away from their data, not you keeping customers away from your data.
We offer all our customers non-proprietary services as well, but for significantly more money (150% costlier, actually). Our rates on our proprietary services are about 40% cheaper than the competition and we've proven our reliability by being in business for 16 years without a loss in that time frame.
If I buy an accounting and compliance package, and it timebombs six months into full use, I should be able to buy another one, and transfer my data. I should be able to pay someone else to transfer that data because I feel the first vendor was untrustworthy.
If you buy an accounting package that time-bombs, you go into that purchase realizing that risk. What if the reward for using that package was a 40% savings, or more? If you're a new company, you might be willing to take that risk -- depending on what YOU decide you want and need and are willing to pay for. My own contract with my customers stipulates that if my company goes out of business, we will relinquish the proprietary services to them for their purpose. I did NOT put this stipulation in the contract -- I had customers demand it. In order to close the sale, I had to add this line. Do you read every contract that you sign? You should.
DRM means I must pay the first vendor, or go out of business (compliance laws). Never mind what happens if they go out of business- I have no options anymore.
How ridiculous can you get? You must have absolutely ZERO experience with running a business. No one who wants to stick around for a long time signs an agreement that hampers their ability to self protect. Even with my recent T-Mobile re-contracting, I made sure to make changes to their contract, which I had their customer retention and sales department approve. Only someone lacking in business sense signs an agreement without understanding what the repercussions might be.
Now, you might think the government has no business protecting people from incompetent companies, what if the vendor did this on purpose? What if that company deliberately set up their accounting package to explode so that they could underbid the competition and recoup the costs later? Isn't that tantamount to extortion?
Depends on what both parties agreed to. When I buy services from someone, I'll set up my expectations within the contract. My work agreement with my subcontractors contains over 4 paragraphs of assumptions like "You will not attempt to defraud [Company] or its customers." and "You will not attempt to harm, destroy, erase or reduce in functionality..." If you're buying services or items without a contract, I would consider that an "as-is" sale, and you better get a really good deal on it.
The market is providing for every consideration you threw at me here, keep them coming so I can find one that really requires the State to regulate.
I'm a vocal pro-market advocate, and I don't see any problems with DRM. If you have something you want to keep out of prying eyes, you should be free to protect it in any way possible -- including making it ultra-proprietary.
The big issue I have with the entire DRM debate is that EVERY side forgets where the evil comes into play with DRM: the State. I have many "trade" secrets in the businesses I own and run. In order to keep others from learning the secrets, I perform the actions in private -- away from prying eyes. I'll often mask the output in order to make it not time-effective for my customers to learn the secrest -- and they do continue to hire me so it means they're generally happy with my prices. If they weren't happy, they wouldn't hire me again.
The State, though, removes the market of competition from DRM. If one of my customers took the time to disassemble my services or products, they should be free to use their hands and their tools to mimic the same product or service. The same is true of any DRM -- once you have an item you bought, you should be free to learn to reproduce it at will, regardless of what that item or service is. But the State has created laws preventing us from using our labor in the way we deem best for our needs.
DRM is perfect for many markets -- business can use just the right amount of DRM to deter reverse engineering or disassembly, just long enough until they release their next product to their market. Some industries just need 6 months in order to bring the newer product to market -- if the competition or the customer base wants to waste their time taking something apart rather than buy the original, they should be free to.
Let us look at the real evil in the DRM market -- the one group that wants to prevent us from using our hands and tools in the way we want to. Companies should be free to use any tools (including DRM) to protect their trade secrets; consumers and competition should be free to use their tools to discover how to reproduce a product or service themselves. The State has no right to regulate, require or subsidize either party.
There was no vote here to reduce government's intrusion -- there was a public outcry and thousands of individuals who were prepared to just violate the law and become criminals. This is what I like to see.
When people tell me to take my anarcho-capitalist viewpoints and shove it because I refuse to vote, I always strike back by proving to them that all voting does is create more government, bigger government, madder government, and more tyrannical government. You can not vote to downsize government, you can only vote to increase their power.
Here is proof that voting is irrelevant -- you can change government by demanding that they stop what they are doing. Put yourself forward and refuse to accept their law and their regulations and their restrictions on your inherent rights that all humans are born with regardless of their citizenship. You have the right to speak freely using your body, your tools and your property. No law and no politician can change that.
Good going, Indians. I just returned from a business trip to India back in March, and I also noticed that most Indian entrepreneurs ignore the business regulations, tax requirements and licensing regulations, too. Here's a competitive country that we should be watching very carefully. They might be living in our mansions and driving our leased cars in a few years. I guess they deserve it, they're the ones loaning us the money to splurge.
Yes, but you are talking about a "standard" of 3 or 4 things -- call them "attributes" if you like. For screws, let's enumerate them as headtype={robertson,philips,flathead,torx} and for bulbs let's do the same as basetype={edison,miniature,LEDstyle,etc}. It's still a screw in a screw-hole, and a bulb in a socket.
I don't agree here, either. They're different socket types made by different manufacturers -- some of them are ultra proprietary (my lamps for my lawn and garden can only use bulbs from the manufacturer), some of them are fairly standardized (the 60watt table lamp bulbs) and some are standardized but more rare (the bulbs we use in our halogen downlights over the kitchen counter).
I look at another situation I use every day -- projectors. I own 3 projectors: one for my home theater, one for presentations that I take on the road, and one for my office (I have a huge XVGA projector that has all my RSS feeds, bullion prices, and other information realtime). All 3 projectors are made by the same company -- all 3 use different bulbs with different interfaces. Sure, bulbs would be WAY CHEAPER for projectors if there was only one standard, but then all projectors would be limited in what they can do. My projectors each have a certain need (one needs to be very bright with almost no real contrast ratio, one must be very dim but have a huge contrast ratio, one needs to be able to be cooled down quickly for disassembly and transport).
Competitive bulbs in the projector market give us MANY more options, and even though each bulb is totally proprietary, the fact that each projector still competes with others means that bulbs are still fairly inexpensive (yes, you can say that US$500 for a bulb is a lot, but these bulbs push the envelope of technology always).
Headlamps in cars don't even have any standard connector most of the time, but I can buy headlamps for US$20 for my car.
If anything, bulbs are one area where there exists almost NO standard in terms of all the bulbs in use. If we had 20 standards of web layout rendering, we'd likely see many more competitors trying to beat one another in the easiest to use/cheapest/most capable for whatever need the user and creator has.
Lots of people want to follow other standards. It allows for their product to be interoperable with existing (read: not their own) products. The ones that usually oppose said interoperability are trying to preserve a monopoly on their format.
I disagree! In my businesses, we often have to create something new not in order to preserve a "monopoly" on our previous work, but because there are always new things to try that the public standards don't allow. Because of this I get rehired since I can give my clients new efficiencies even though they are using a closed standard versus an open one. The reason for private standards isn't "monopoly" but competitive forces that require everyone to build a better wheel, even if from scratch.
The problem with this approach is that it's a mess. Can you imagine if all of the nails used to build your house required a different hammer? Each light bulb had a different sized socket? Each automobile required a different sequence to start the engine? There's a reason why things are standardized. In this case, a standardized display format for websites should make it easier for everyone involved... if implemented properly.
When I have to use screws to fix my deck, each screw tends to have its own screwhead for the driver -- competitive forces that allow us to have variety for our screws. Each light bulb definitely does not have the same socket -- look at halogen and LED and fluourescent and incandescent and PAR 64s and all that. Even in my own home I have 4 different bulb sockets I use all the time -- competitive forces that allow me to use the most efficient design for what I need done.
Different purposes. I shudder to think of a PDF-based Internet.
I'm not saying we should use PDF itself, but maybe Adobe can create something akin to Flash (without the animations, maybe) that would combine vector, text and bitmap better. When I render a PDF in any format it is perfect -- PERFECT. When I render CSS or HTML, it is rarely perfect, and HTML/CSS seems to have fewer purposes for content distribution than a slim PDF might. Sure, there are audio/video formats, and hyperlinks too, but I see no reason why those can't be encapsulated into some slimPDF variety.
Thanks for the insight, though.
Re:Standard versus Proprietary?
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Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Doesn't it seem that MOST public and open standards are difficult to implement and are lacking in terms of the most current "push the envelope" technology?
As I said in this post, I have more faith in PDF as a "layout standard" than I do in CSS. My OP talked about Flash and how well it seems to work across every platform on every OS -- here we see two proprietary formats that work better than the open one (let's not even talk about any iteration of HTML and overall compliance).
I know for my "foes" here it just seems like another slam on anything "public performed" but in this case I think it still holds water. When the masses try to agree on anything, we rarely see anything working well. When it does work we should be surprised, but how many manhours are wasted on trying to create these standards that make everyone happy? Yes, there are some public standards that seem to work great (MP3, but that can be argued that it is also a proprietary standard written by a company for a reason), but for every 1 public standard that we see "working" we see dozens of proprietary ones that work better. Someone just IM'd me about this thread and said "XViD," but I look at XViD which some consider public but a good portion of its structure was taken from a proprietary standard. Do public standards work, ever, and if they do work on occasion, is the amount of man hours "volunteers" worth it compared to the man hours involved in creating a proprietary standard?
The troubles you are experiencing are not CSS problems, per se, but rather piss-poor browser implementations of CSS. If browsers followed the specs, you'd probably eliminate 99% of the issues right off the bat.
You're right, but this is one of the natural "phenomena" of the market -- no one wants to really follow anyone else's standards. It seems to be a shortcoming, but it allows for new features and options to be released before anyone can "finalize" on a standard. I think this is a Good Thing in some ways because that is how things get better -- competitive standards rather than an all-in-one standard.
IE gets blamed the most, which may be right because they are probably the worst at supporting the standard. My concern is that Firefox also does not comply with the standards at all -- why? Any breach of a standard makes that standard virtually worthless for me.
Maybe Adobe can release a style-sheet standard of their own a la PDF: I think I have more faith in PDFs rendering properly on ANY platform (PDA, phone, screen, TV, printer, plotter) than CSS or HTML.
Standard versus Proprietary?
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Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I can't believe the guy is still writing. The only reason I ever browsed through PcMag back in the bookstore days was to catch his commentary -- to me he was still the first real tech comedy print blogger before the term was coined.
I have to agree with him here 100%. Back in my SysOp days running a multinode BBS, I remember the hassles of the design interface -- we had 80 x 25 characters to use and we had (at most!) 2.4K/s download speed. Any remember using TheDraw to animate ANSI? What fun those days were.
All those hours and hours of editing in edlin and then TheDraw and then the RipTerm editor were always a big hassle, but today's multimedia standards are absolutely horrible. Once something finally gets to the ideal stage, it is replaced by something new that doesn't work well. CSS is probably the worst "standard" ever created in terms of design -- the idea is great but I'm starting to see that "freely created" standards are more and more garbage, no matter what the ubergeek thinks.
I'm in the process of starting our CSS layout from scratch for all of our blogs (I hired one graphic designer and have 2 more volunteers). We've spent 40 hours in the last week testing a few ideas on a variety of browsers and they're a mess. I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it, but many people are becoming comfortable with the whole Web 2.0 interface and it is almost expected. I can accept that, but it seems that CSS does more harm than good, especially with the massive number of browsers out there. I really think we should consider each browser application and each version number as a totally seperate entity. I have to keep an entire set of different installs of various browsers (when possible) just to test all the different versions.
I'm a pro-market kind of guy, so I can accept these stumbling blocks because I do know that it is better for the market to have all the competition, buggy or not. Many standards do work eventually, but they have to be replaced because something new was released that everyone wants. I look at Flash (which was mostly proprietary for a long time) and I was much more luckier in designing a flash interfaced site (in terms of compability over the long haul) than I have been with any of the public standards.
I'm wondering: is the future not a public standard but a mess of proprietary ones that may work better, even if they require plug-ins and additional software to work? Standards bodies have NO REASON to try to make something work in even one platform -- they can blame the developer of the platform for the mess. Proprietary formats, on the other hand, often times will see any bugs being blamed on the developer of the format, not the developer of the platform using the format. When Flash first came out, the great majority of problems we had were always blamed on Macromedia, not on IE or Netscape. While I'm not saying this is necessarily an area that competition (of relatively proprietary standards) is the best for the short term, it might be for the long term. Who is competing against CSS in terms of proprietary standards for basic text and graphic layout? Will HTML be replaced by a variety of other formats that require some other application to be bought to create them?
(FWIW, I know that making a good CSS means documenting and comments everywhere -- even when that is done properly there still seem to be a ton of problems across the various platforms. I also have spent time on csszengarden.com for some insight in overcoming the problems).
YES!! Thank God for the Free Market! After all, it is the free market that abolished slavery when "the people" had enough and decided it was a bad thing.
It was the free market that abolished slavery. In every country but one, slavery was abolished because of industrialization and the fact that workers were more efficient with machinery and industrial applications than slaves were. In every country but one, slavery was abolished without war. In the US, we had a war not over slavery, but over corporate welfare. Lincoln hate blacks, he wanted them "exported" to Haiti. He supported the Illinois law that banned blacks from entering the state. Slavery was never abolished because of the State.
Its the free market that finnaly integrated the United States in the 60s.
The integration of the 60s was as prejudiced and racist as before it. Before the 60s riots, we had GOVERNMENT LAWS enforcing segregation. Now we have government laws that provide for preferential treatment of one race over another. I know, I'm not white and I get offers for government grants and subsidies for my business every week. I always turn them down.
Its the free market that surpressed Hitler before he was able to slaughter millions.
Hitler was the State. Hitler isn't even in the top 10 of dictators who have killed citizens of the State -- there are significantly more State employees who have killed more than Hitler has. The reason a war was fought against HItler is because he wanted to take over the monopoly of force and death that other State tyrants were in control of.
Read your facts -- in each case it was the free market that brought the end to a State-created crime, or it was always a State-created crime and still is.
Even today we are seeing the benifits of the free market. There is no overfishing of threatened fish spiecies. The free market has put a complete stop to the selling of Ivory, so the elephants are safe. Im quite sure that without the free market the government would have trashed the eccosystem by now.
I think zoning laws are some of the worst laws in existence -- private property should not be regulated as long as actions on that property don't harm another's property physically. I believe if my generator made noise that affected my neighbors, there should just be tort laws that cover it (and I believe tort can be provided for in a free market without the legal system!). If I pollute my neighbors property, fine. But if I want to paint my home pink with stripes, I should be free to. If I want to build it all the way up to my neighbor's property, I should be free to.
The Medicare thought of my is NOT disingenous. Look at this WashTimes article:
Its true that things like the phone companies aren't natural monopolies, but do you really want wires running everywhere through the city, so many that you likely couldn't walk?
Straw man argument -- it won't happen. The local copper line monopolies were the sole reason that wireless took 6 decades to become efficient. The technology has been there since the 40s, but no one spent R&D money on it because the local monopolies were "cheaper" looking (but more expensive once you saw the hidden costs) and the FCC restricted wireless communications significantly. It wasn't until recently that some deregulation happened that let wireless providers compete. We'd have been there years earlier I believe.
Did he or did he not establish regional monopolies without the force of the state to back him up?
He did not. In fact, he constantly had new competition pop up that he had to work hard to overcome. Sometimes he bought out competition -- which brought more competition into various markets that competed strongly with him in hopes that they, too, would get bought out. He bought some of his competitors out repeatedly -- he'd buy one company of theirs that was doing a great job competing, they'd open up another line that he bought.
In the entire scheme of things, customers KEPT saving money. When farmers on his line were having problems, he paid them to move to other regions still on his line. He bought processing companies and built others for his customers.
Everyone made money. Look at the railroads today -- oversubsidized to the point of irrelevance.
I can... Microsoft. In fact one of the reasons there arent too many monopolies is that most states have monopoly-control laws.
As I've said about 200 times before, Microsoft is not a monopoly. If they have a large control of the market it is mostly due to the consumers getting what they want more from Microsoft than anyone else.
I'll be publishing an article in few months showing how little Microsoft has to do with most people's IT productivity. I run about 400 software applications monthly, including my cell phone OS, my church's audio/visual system, my computers at my offices, servers, Wordpress for my blogs, Apache for my web server, etc. Out of the 400, only 3 are Microsoft products. Out of all the hours my employees, volunteers, and myself spend using a PC, we directly use Microsoft products significantly less than 1% of the time.
Microsoft's operating system is preferred because of all these programs available for it. Without Windows, we could theoretically run each app on its own, but we want to do them all at once.
I think Microsoft's biggest concern for me is their use of copyright and patenting -- which are both State-forced monopolistic powers. Without them, would Microsoft still be on top? Likely.
I can not name ONE private corporation that doesn't have to meet the needs of their consumers in order to exist -- each and every day.
I can also not name ONE private corporation that has attained anything close to a monopoly without the State backing them up -- the very State that you voters democractically elected on your behalf. Natural monopolies do not exist, can not exist and would never exist without a State backing them up completely.
Yet the snow-plow driver was forced on me, in this case, against my will. My town has no public-paid snow plow: each block pays for its own company. The town next door to ours has their own plows, and they pay about 600% more per street than we do (we have about 10 different companies competing for our services). So you keep a snow plow driver employees, and your average resident pays 6 times more for it -- more people are harmed than helped.
But the Left and the Right are almost identical all over the world -- both sides are just vying for personal power of the politician. Neither side has any ideology that differs much from the other in the long run.
I remember when the Right in the US was against public schooling, public health care and welfare. That is no longer true. I remember when the Left in the US was against Big Business, internal improvements and war. Again, no longer true. By "center" you just mean "center-Statist." There are two sides of the political coin: those who believe in the market of competition and those who believe in the monopoly of force. Center/Left/Right-ists are aligned on the monopoly of force side of the coin.
the state does NOT want people working around it, and left unchecked it will flex it's growing muscle to PREVENT those who do work around it - with manipulation, increasing force, and eventually simply locking up, toturing and killing those who rebel.
Of course it doesn't, but when the State gets too aggressive, it falls apart. The USSR fell apart because communications were growing, technology was freeing people from the State's monopoly over them, and the government got too big to spy on everyone. I was in the USSR as a teen before the collapse and there was a HUGE black/free market in any good you wanted (clothing, food, toilet paper, sex, drugs, cigarettes, even cars and homes!). My last visit to India showed me a HUGE black market in the housing market. When I wanted to buy a house, I was told to pay 20% of the cost in "white money" which the State taxed. The rest (80%) was paid in "black money" under the table.
what about state sponsored health care? road/sewer/water/electricity maintence? I fail to see how any of these create criminals.
State sponsored health care kills thousands if not millions of people every year. Try releasing a much needed experimental drug to people who are willing to try it -- you'd go to jail. Try charging less to a poor patient than you charge the State -- you'll go to jail (the US government has an entire office dedicated to finding doctors that charge less than they charge Medicare). Try bringing more doctors to the market than the AMA/US wants -- it is illegal.
Try providing alternative water or electricity in your neighborhood -- you'll go to jail. In my previous town I spoke with various neighbors about uniting together to get a large generator installed on our block (this was pre-Y2K, and some people were concerned). We received various competing bids but were told that the local town wouldn't allow it. When we asked for a variance we were told we couldn't do it, and when we tried to do it anyway we were threatened with fines. When we asked what would happen if we didn't pay the fines we were threatened with court and jail time. True story.
Cause China and Cuba have these and they are doing just great in terms of having a free market
Having visited both in recent years, I can tell you that both DO have a growing free market. China has one of the least resistant licensing/zoning/regulating bodies. Anyone can open a business in ONE DAY in most of China. I am repeatedly amazed at how far from sovietism China has come in recent years -- mostly because of the Internet and the opportunities that globalism provides.
Cuba isn't as bad as some would think. One of the biggest detriments to MORE free market expansion in Cuba is the US. Our embargo of the country is one of the prime reasons why the Cuban black market sees less expansion than most socialist/communist countries. Because of the US embargo, much of the world refuses to trade with Cuba. Here we see one State working with another to keep harming their people.
Slashdot Mirror
Or OpenIcthus.
With a PageRank of 8 and an age of 4 years, that domain will sell to some SEO company very VERY fast. I wonder what they'll get for it.
It sure would be easier than trying to throw out the whole system of government/corporate cronyism that this country has been running under for the past 150 years. That just ain't gonna happen.
They're talking about creating a new law to oversee the abuses that the NSA has performed on recording phone records of citizens. Reviewing the text of the bill shows that the new law would give the NSA complete power to record anything they want -- with a secret court "watching" over them.
The law, if created, will only create more monopoly power in the name of net neutrality. I'd rather have 5000 providers offering their own version of the Internet competitively than what would happen if the net was neutral the way Congress would decree. Can you imagine it? "AT&T -- The ONLY neutral network!" ads running, when we all know that AT&T (or whoever) was given massive power through the law.
No thanks.
how many choices of providers do you have available to you right now? if i want decent speed and prices, that list for me consists of one company.
Post your zip code and I'll show you one reason that is the case -- the State (meaning the government at some level) requires that one to be the sole monopoly provider. Numerous regulations, restrictions, licensing and mandates prevent competition.
The government can not fix ("net neutrality") what it broke ("regulating one monopoly.")
Call customer retention and demand it (if the changes are reasonable, of course). We don't have 1000s of phones but we do communications consulting so we likely do account for a few hundred -- not much more than your number.
To paraphrase this quote: They don't care to waste time following non-issues in their lives, they're extremely happy with the product they have, and the price is perfect so they're not in a rush to change anything. The problem isn't the DRM or the consumer, in your case, though, it is the law that reduces your private-property rights: you are not free to act and labor in the way you want to with your time (you are not free to waste time trying to remove the DRM).
You forgot one: if an individual or business wants to obfuscate something in order to sell more of the items themselves, they're free to, ignoring the laws. If an individual or business wants to de-obfuscate something they've bought in order to learn to duplicate it, they should be free to, ignoring the laws. Again, it is the LAW that is evil, not the DRM. Most people on slashdot are confusing one three letter word for another.
You're confused. DRM is about you keeping customers away from their data, not you keeping customers away from your data.
We offer all our customers non-proprietary services as well, but for significantly more money (150% costlier, actually). Our rates on our proprietary services are about 40% cheaper than the competition and we've proven our reliability by being in business for 16 years without a loss in that time frame.
If I buy an accounting and compliance package, and it timebombs six months into full use, I should be able to buy another one, and transfer my data. I should be able to pay someone else to transfer that data because I feel the first vendor was untrustworthy.
If you buy an accounting package that time-bombs, you go into that purchase realizing that risk. What if the reward for using that package was a 40% savings, or more? If you're a new company, you might be willing to take that risk -- depending on what YOU decide you want and need and are willing to pay for. My own contract with my customers stipulates that if my company goes out of business, we will relinquish the proprietary services to them for their purpose. I did NOT put this stipulation in the contract -- I had customers demand it. In order to close the sale, I had to add this line. Do you read every contract that you sign? You should.
DRM means I must pay the first vendor, or go out of business (compliance laws). Never mind what happens if they go out of business- I have no options anymore.
How ridiculous can you get? You must have absolutely ZERO experience with running a business. No one who wants to stick around for a long time signs an agreement that hampers their ability to self protect. Even with my recent T-Mobile re-contracting, I made sure to make changes to their contract, which I had their customer retention and sales department approve. Only someone lacking in business sense signs an agreement without understanding what the repercussions might be.
Now, you might think the government has no business protecting people from incompetent companies, what if the vendor did this on purpose? What if that company deliberately set up their accounting package to explode so that they could underbid the competition and recoup the costs later? Isn't that tantamount to extortion?
Depends on what both parties agreed to. When I buy services from someone, I'll set up my expectations within the contract. My work agreement with my subcontractors contains over 4 paragraphs of assumptions like "You will not attempt to defraud [Company] or its customers." and "You will not attempt to harm, destroy, erase or reduce in functionality..." If you're buying services or items without a contract, I would consider that an "as-is" sale, and you better get a really good deal on it.
The market is providing for every consideration you threw at me here, keep them coming so I can find one that really requires the State to regulate.
I'm a vocal pro-market advocate, and I don't see any problems with DRM. If you have something you want to keep out of prying eyes, you should be free to protect it in any way possible -- including making it ultra-proprietary.
The big issue I have with the entire DRM debate is that EVERY side forgets where the evil comes into play with DRM: the State. I have many "trade" secrets in the businesses I own and run. In order to keep others from learning the secrets, I perform the actions in private -- away from prying eyes. I'll often mask the output in order to make it not time-effective for my customers to learn the secrest -- and they do continue to hire me so it means they're generally happy with my prices. If they weren't happy, they wouldn't hire me again.
The State, though, removes the market of competition from DRM. If one of my customers took the time to disassemble my services or products, they should be free to use their hands and their tools to mimic the same product or service. The same is true of any DRM -- once you have an item you bought, you should be free to learn to reproduce it at will, regardless of what that item or service is. But the State has created laws preventing us from using our labor in the way we deem best for our needs.
DRM is perfect for many markets -- business can use just the right amount of DRM to deter reverse engineering or disassembly, just long enough until they release their next product to their market. Some industries just need 6 months in order to bring the newer product to market -- if the competition or the customer base wants to waste their time taking something apart rather than buy the original, they should be free to.
Let us look at the real evil in the DRM market -- the one group that wants to prevent us from using our hands and tools in the way we want to. Companies should be free to use any tools (including DRM) to protect their trade secrets; consumers and competition should be free to use their tools to discover how to reproduce a product or service themselves. The State has no right to regulate, require or subsidize either party.
There was no vote here to reduce government's intrusion -- there was a public outcry and thousands of individuals who were prepared to just violate the law and become criminals. This is what I like to see.
When people tell me to take my anarcho-capitalist viewpoints and shove it because I refuse to vote, I always strike back by proving to them that all voting does is create more government, bigger government, madder government, and more tyrannical government. You can not vote to downsize government, you can only vote to increase their power.
Here is proof that voting is irrelevant -- you can change government by demanding that they stop what they are doing. Put yourself forward and refuse to accept their law and their regulations and their restrictions on your inherent rights that all humans are born with regardless of their citizenship. You have the right to speak freely using your body, your tools and your property. No law and no politician can change that.
Good going, Indians. I just returned from a business trip to India back in March, and I also noticed that most Indian entrepreneurs ignore the business regulations, tax requirements and licensing regulations, too. Here's a competitive country that we should be watching very carefully. They might be living in our mansions and driving our leased cars in a few years. I guess they deserve it, they're the ones loaning us the money to splurge.
I don't agree here, either. They're different socket types made by different manufacturers -- some of them are ultra proprietary (my lamps for my lawn and garden can only use bulbs from the manufacturer), some of them are fairly standardized (the 60watt table lamp bulbs) and some are standardized but more rare (the bulbs we use in our halogen downlights over the kitchen counter).
I look at another situation I use every day -- projectors. I own 3 projectors: one for my home theater, one for presentations that I take on the road, and one for my office (I have a huge XVGA projector that has all my RSS feeds, bullion prices, and other information realtime). All 3 projectors are made by the same company -- all 3 use different bulbs with different interfaces. Sure, bulbs would be WAY CHEAPER for projectors if there was only one standard, but then all projectors would be limited in what they can do. My projectors each have a certain need (one needs to be very bright with almost no real contrast ratio, one must be very dim but have a huge contrast ratio, one needs to be able to be cooled down quickly for disassembly and transport).
Competitive bulbs in the projector market give us MANY more options, and even though each bulb is totally proprietary, the fact that each projector still competes with others means that bulbs are still fairly inexpensive (yes, you can say that US$500 for a bulb is a lot, but these bulbs push the envelope of technology always).
Headlamps in cars don't even have any standard connector most of the time, but I can buy headlamps for US$20 for my car.
If anything, bulbs are one area where there exists almost NO standard in terms of all the bulbs in use. If we had 20 standards of web layout rendering, we'd likely see many more competitors trying to beat one another in the easiest to use/cheapest/most capable for whatever need the user and creator has.
I disagree! In my businesses, we often have to create something new not in order to preserve a "monopoly" on our previous work, but because there are always new things to try that the public standards don't allow. Because of this I get rehired since I can give my clients new efficiencies even though they are using a closed standard versus an open one. The reason for private standards isn't "monopoly" but competitive forces that require everyone to build a better wheel, even if from scratch.
When I have to use screws to fix my deck, each screw tends to have its own screwhead for the driver -- competitive forces that allow us to have variety for our screws. Each light bulb definitely does not have the same socket -- look at halogen and LED and fluourescent and incandescent and PAR 64s and all that. Even in my own home I have 4 different bulb sockets I use all the time -- competitive forces that allow me to use the most efficient design for what I need done.
I'm not saying we should use PDF itself, but maybe Adobe can create something akin to Flash (without the animations, maybe) that would combine vector, text and bitmap better. When I render a PDF in any format it is perfect -- PERFECT. When I render CSS or HTML, it is rarely perfect, and HTML/CSS seems to have fewer purposes for content distribution than a slim PDF might. Sure, there are audio/video formats, and hyperlinks too, but I see no reason why those can't be encapsulated into some slimPDF variety.
Thanks for the insight, though.
Doesn't it seem that MOST public and open standards are difficult to implement and are lacking in terms of the most current "push the envelope" technology?
As I said in this post, I have more faith in PDF as a "layout standard" than I do in CSS. My OP talked about Flash and how well it seems to work across every platform on every OS -- here we see two proprietary formats that work better than the open one (let's not even talk about any iteration of HTML and overall compliance).
I know for my "foes" here it just seems like another slam on anything "public performed" but in this case I think it still holds water. When the masses try to agree on anything, we rarely see anything working well. When it does work we should be surprised, but how many manhours are wasted on trying to create these standards that make everyone happy? Yes, there are some public standards that seem to work great (MP3, but that can be argued that it is also a proprietary standard written by a company for a reason), but for every 1 public standard that we see "working" we see dozens of proprietary ones that work better. Someone just IM'd me about this thread and said "XViD," but I look at XViD which some consider public but a good portion of its structure was taken from a proprietary standard. Do public standards work, ever, and if they do work on occasion, is the amount of man hours "volunteers" worth it compared to the man hours involved in creating a proprietary standard?
You're right, but this is one of the natural "phenomena" of the market -- no one wants to really follow anyone else's standards. It seems to be a shortcoming, but it allows for new features and options to be released before anyone can "finalize" on a standard. I think this is a Good Thing in some ways because that is how things get better -- competitive standards rather than an all-in-one standard.
IE gets blamed the most, which may be right because they are probably the worst at supporting the standard. My concern is that Firefox also does not comply with the standards at all -- why? Any breach of a standard makes that standard virtually worthless for me.
Maybe Adobe can release a style-sheet standard of their own a la PDF: I think I have more faith in PDFs rendering properly on ANY platform (PDA, phone, screen, TV, printer, plotter) than CSS or HTML.
I can't believe the guy is still writing. The only reason I ever browsed through PcMag back in the bookstore days was to catch his commentary -- to me he was still the first real tech comedy print blogger before the term was coined.
I have to agree with him here 100%. Back in my SysOp days running a multinode BBS, I remember the hassles of the design interface -- we had 80 x 25 characters to use and we had (at most!) 2.4K/s download speed. Any remember using TheDraw to animate ANSI? What fun those days were.
All those hours and hours of editing in edlin and then TheDraw and then the RipTerm editor were always a big hassle, but today's multimedia standards are absolutely horrible. Once something finally gets to the ideal stage, it is replaced by something new that doesn't work well. CSS is probably the worst "standard" ever created in terms of design -- the idea is great but I'm starting to see that "freely created" standards are more and more garbage, no matter what the ubergeek thinks.
I'm in the process of starting our CSS layout from scratch for all of our blogs (I hired one graphic designer and have 2 more volunteers). We've spent 40 hours in the last week testing a few ideas on a variety of browsers and they're a mess. I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it, but many people are becoming comfortable with the whole Web 2.0 interface and it is almost expected. I can accept that, but it seems that CSS does more harm than good, especially with the massive number of browsers out there. I really think we should consider each browser application and each version number as a totally seperate entity. I have to keep an entire set of different installs of various browsers (when possible) just to test all the different versions.
I'm a pro-market kind of guy, so I can accept these stumbling blocks because I do know that it is better for the market to have all the competition, buggy or not. Many standards do work eventually, but they have to be replaced because something new was released that everyone wants. I look at Flash (which was mostly proprietary for a long time) and I was much more luckier in designing a flash interfaced site (in terms of compability over the long haul) than I have been with any of the public standards.
I'm wondering: is the future not a public standard but a mess of proprietary ones that may work better, even if they require plug-ins and additional software to work? Standards bodies have NO REASON to try to make something work in even one platform -- they can blame the developer of the platform for the mess. Proprietary formats, on the other hand, often times will see any bugs being blamed on the developer of the format, not the developer of the platform using the format. When Flash first came out, the great majority of problems we had were always blamed on Macromedia, not on IE or Netscape. While I'm not saying this is necessarily an area that competition (of relatively proprietary standards) is the best for the short term, it might be for the long term. Who is competing against CSS in terms of proprietary standards for basic text and graphic layout? Will HTML be replaced by a variety of other formats that require some other application to be bought to create them?
(FWIW, I know that making a good CSS means documenting and comments everywhere -- even when that is done properly there still seem to be a ton of problems across the various platforms. I also have spent time on csszengarden.com for some insight in overcoming the problems).
YES!! Thank God for the Free Market! After all, it is the free market that abolished slavery when "the people" had enough and decided it was a bad thing.
It was the free market that abolished slavery. In every country but one, slavery was abolished because of industrialization and the fact that workers were more efficient with machinery and industrial applications than slaves were. In every country but one, slavery was abolished without war. In the US, we had a war not over slavery, but over corporate welfare. Lincoln hate blacks, he wanted them "exported" to Haiti. He supported the Illinois law that banned blacks from entering the state. Slavery was never abolished because of the State.
Its the free market that finnaly integrated the United States in the 60s.
The integration of the 60s was as prejudiced and racist as before it. Before the 60s riots, we had GOVERNMENT LAWS enforcing segregation. Now we have government laws that provide for preferential treatment of one race over another. I know, I'm not white and I get offers for government grants and subsidies for my business every week. I always turn them down.
Its the free market that surpressed Hitler before he was able to slaughter millions.
Hitler was the State. Hitler isn't even in the top 10 of dictators who have killed citizens of the State -- there are significantly more State employees who have killed more than Hitler has. The reason a war was fought against HItler is because he wanted to take over the monopoly of force and death that other State tyrants were in control of.
Read your facts -- in each case it was the free market that brought the end to a State-created crime, or it was always a State-created crime and still is.
Even today we are seeing the benifits of the free market. There is no overfishing of threatened fish spiecies. The free market has put a complete stop to the selling of Ivory, so the elephants are safe. Im quite sure that without the free market the government would have trashed the eccosystem by now.
I think zoning laws are some of the worst laws in existence -- private property should not be regulated as long as actions on that property don't harm another's property physically. I believe if my generator made noise that affected my neighbors, there should just be tort laws that cover it (and I believe tort can be provided for in a free market without the legal system!). If I pollute my neighbors property, fine. But if I want to paint my home pink with stripes, I should be free to. If I want to build it all the way up to my neighbor's property, I should be free to.
The Medicare thought of my is NOT disingenous. Look at this WashTimes article:
No Charity Allowed
Its true that things like the phone companies aren't natural monopolies, but do you really want wires running everywhere through the city, so many that you likely couldn't walk?
Straw man argument -- it won't happen. The local copper line monopolies were the sole reason that wireless took 6 decades to become efficient. The technology has been there since the 40s, but no one spent R&D money on it because the local monopolies were "cheaper" looking (but more expensive once you saw the hidden costs) and the FCC restricted wireless communications significantly. It wasn't until recently that some deregulation happened that let wireless providers compete. We'd have been there years earlier I believe.
Did he or did he not establish regional monopolies without the force of the state to back him up?
He did not. In fact, he constantly had new competition pop up that he had to work hard to overcome. Sometimes he bought out competition -- which brought more competition into various markets that competed strongly with him in hopes that they, too, would get bought out. He bought some of his competitors out repeatedly -- he'd buy one company of theirs that was doing a great job competing, they'd open up another line that he bought.
In the entire scheme of things, customers KEPT saving money. When farmers on his line were having problems, he paid them to move to other regions still on his line. He bought processing companies and built others for his customers.
Everyone made money. Look at the railroads today -- oversubsidized to the point of irrelevance.
I can ... Microsoft. In fact one of the reasons there arent too many monopolies is that most states have monopoly-control laws.
As I've said about 200 times before, Microsoft is not a monopoly. If they have a large control of the market it is mostly due to the consumers getting what they want more from Microsoft than anyone else.
I'll be publishing an article in few months showing how little Microsoft has to do with most people's IT productivity. I run about 400 software applications monthly, including my cell phone OS, my church's audio/visual system, my computers at my offices, servers, Wordpress for my blogs, Apache for my web server, etc. Out of the 400, only 3 are Microsoft products. Out of all the hours my employees, volunteers, and myself spend using a PC, we directly use Microsoft products significantly less than 1% of the time.
Microsoft's operating system is preferred because of all these programs available for it. Without Windows, we could theoretically run each app on its own, but we want to do them all at once.
I think Microsoft's biggest concern for me is their use of copyright and patenting -- which are both State-forced monopolistic powers. Without them, would Microsoft still be on top? Likely.
I can not name ONE private corporation that doesn't have to meet the needs of their consumers in order to exist -- each and every day.
I can also not name ONE private corporation that has attained anything close to a monopoly without the State backing them up -- the very State that you voters democractically elected on your behalf. Natural monopolies do not exist, can not exist and would never exist without a State backing them up completely.
Yet the snow-plow driver was forced on me, in this case, against my will. My town has no public-paid snow plow: each block pays for its own company. The town next door to ours has their own plows, and they pay about 600% more per street than we do (we have about 10 different companies competing for our services). So you keep a snow plow driver employees, and your average resident pays 6 times more for it -- more people are harmed than helped.
But the Left and the Right are almost identical all over the world -- both sides are just vying for personal power of the politician. Neither side has any ideology that differs much from the other in the long run.
I remember when the Right in the US was against public schooling, public health care and welfare. That is no longer true. I remember when the Left in the US was against Big Business, internal improvements and war. Again, no longer true. By "center" you just mean "center-Statist." There are two sides of the political coin: those who believe in the market of competition and those who believe in the monopoly of force. Center/Left/Right-ists are aligned on the monopoly of force side of the coin.
the state does NOT want people working around it, and left unchecked it will flex it's growing muscle to PREVENT those who do work around it - with manipulation, increasing force, and eventually simply locking up, toturing and killing those who rebel.
Of course it doesn't, but when the State gets too aggressive, it falls apart. The USSR fell apart because communications were growing, technology was freeing people from the State's monopoly over them, and the government got too big to spy on everyone. I was in the USSR as a teen before the collapse and there was a HUGE black/free market in any good you wanted (clothing, food, toilet paper, sex, drugs, cigarettes, even cars and homes!). My last visit to India showed me a HUGE black market in the housing market. When I wanted to buy a house, I was told to pay 20% of the cost in "white money" which the State taxed. The rest (80%) was paid in "black money" under the table.
what about state sponsored health care? road/sewer/water/electricity maintence? I fail to see how any of these create criminals.
State sponsored health care kills thousands if not millions of people every year. Try releasing a much needed experimental drug to people who are willing to try it -- you'd go to jail. Try charging less to a poor patient than you charge the State -- you'll go to jail (the US government has an entire office dedicated to finding doctors that charge less than they charge Medicare). Try bringing more doctors to the market than the AMA/US wants -- it is illegal.
Try providing alternative water or electricity in your neighborhood -- you'll go to jail. In my previous town I spoke with various neighbors about uniting together to get a large generator installed on our block (this was pre-Y2K, and some people were concerned). We received various competing bids but were told that the local town wouldn't allow it. When we asked for a variance we were told we couldn't do it, and when we tried to do it anyway we were threatened with fines. When we asked what would happen if we didn't pay the fines we were threatened with court and jail time. True story.
Cause China and Cuba have these and they are doing just great in terms of having a free market
Having visited both in recent years, I can tell you that both DO have a growing free market. China has one of the least resistant licensing/zoning/regulating bodies. Anyone can open a business in ONE DAY in most of China. I am repeatedly amazed at how far from sovietism China has come in recent years -- mostly because of the Internet and the opportunities that globalism provides.
Cuba isn't as bad as some would think. One of the biggest detriments to MORE free market expansion in Cuba is the US. Our embargo of the country is one of the prime reasons why the Cuban black market sees less expansion than most socialist/communist countries. Because of the US embargo, much of the world refuses to trade with Cuba. Here we see one State working with another to keep harming their people.