The usual OSS response usually does not include calling others "people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses" or similar, as Mr.Assange apparently did.
The OSS response is most often a plain "do it yourself if you care, I am not interested in this" or maybe a "I don't have time to do support, figure it out yourself". Straight-forward, but not rude. You also got the bit about "the "basic ideals behind OSS" and OSS communities wrong. Open source licenses grant freedoms related to the right to develop software, and the community most OSS developers want to build -if any at all- is most often a developer's community. Application support is not included, unless whoever does it specifically wants to offer it. It still is OSS, and in line with the "basic ideals behind OSS", just as much as it is in line with people being free to do what they want in their own time...
The same argument could and was made for keeping slavery legal, but it was simply not true. Giving people some noticeable part of the profits some work creates is not a problem for anyone but for slavers.
No reason to be scared by off-shoring and the like. Off-shoring is not that practical and not well-tolerated by society - with the additional logistics and other practicality concerns that usually really spoils the equation vs paying minimum wages. It is not like a supermarket or burger stand over in China will do you much good. But of course, to keep the playing field level domestically, one must actively combat black market employers (and only employers). Not that it takes much effort... if theoretically exploited employees have the power to immediately bring their employer down by law, employers definitely will not be able to exploit them badly.
Cheaper than trucks? Yes. Trains / Boats, not so sure. If you want raw cargo per driver (or the likelihood that you can fly it entirely "by wire" or autonomously), fuel per km, or even probable average speeds, trucks will loose in many cases.
Also, if you think of less developed areas, these should be highly attractive. The hydrogen or whatever you want to employ for lift -other than helium, of course- can be cheap and mostly or entirely home-produced. There's maybe a need for high-quality materials initially, but wear and need for service can be very low... the propellers can even realistically be solar-powered if you don't need much more than that it gets to its destination eventually.
One reason this neighborhood delivery system doesn't currently exist is the impulse buy.
The current US companies doing this service are too small to really offer an alternative, they don't carry enough goods and do not present them well.
But this type of thing does exist, including competition (not english). All the things that made these stores work, such as being able to piggy-back on the national postal services for rapid and efficient delivery (warehouse to any home), being able to process electronic payments, and home broadband connectivity to serve a web page with many images, can be just as easily met in the US as they were met in Switzerland. If you look at other online stores, for instance Newegg (and the Swiss pendants) is exactly the same, rapid growth due to increasing demand. Plenty of people don't want to try out electronic parts first, they just to get them cheaply and with minimum effort and be quite generously treated if there are complaints.
Another is that for it to be as efficient as possible, everyone in the neighborhood would have to sign up. Another is that a lot of people are picky about their meats/produce and want to select it themselves.
Valid points, but the system does not fail if some don't sign up or don't participate immediately. Of course no one will get rid of many of the physical shops until demand for them is low and until then these still need to be supplied, but it still saves nearly exactly a car for each person that orders and lives nearby.
All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia, [...] Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue
It only means that you can reliably whitelist.
But as soon as you need to communicate with what are essentially strangers (almost any professional work has to, but also when you, say, talk to some buying or selling stranger about some online auction or many other things, or simply sometimes make new acquaintances whose certificate you don't exchange on-the-spot), you'll still get spam'd. Spammers can easily create as many certificates as they want, much as they can create as many email accounts or forum logins or domains, as they can right now. Also, your acquaintance's computers will still get compromised, including certificates...
Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments.
Yes, it could have been a revolution, and I myself was hoping for the overall mode of communication to become more like Wave described it. Maybe it still will happen.
But if Wave had been picked up in its current state, it would have been a disaster. Neither the server(s) nor the client(s) were ready with regards to ease-of-use, stability, security, administration & customization, documentation, scalability in order to succeed in taking over even niche areas of communication with low requirements...
Also, there are many other factors that are a problem in practice, such like that it is not all an open or easy-to-implement or even a somewhat technology-stack-compatible standard (see here for a brief, nice and simple explanation / illustration of Wave's structure). That would have gotten very much in the way of retrofitting/extending existing programs with Wave or healthy competition between servers and clients.
This is not a problem with Android, but only the current sources where you get these phones from (you can already buy phones with root-level access as a specialty thing and anyone can sell root-level access enabled phones with Android). Try that with iOS.
By the way, I would also say "the mainstream" does not really want or require to root the phone. You should not confuse its demand to run the applications it wants with the need or competence to deal with OS-level problems. Sure, they want OS updates (without particular modifications, just what's required to run new applications and such), but any decent vendor will provide it with the standard Android updates. You'd have to have a large and illegal conspiracy of vendors not to compete with software updates for this to be otherwise.
I see yet another problem, this surely can't easily by-pass sites of accidents either way, and if the pictures are accurate, there is a guiding rail very similar to a guardrail in the middle of the street? Isn't that precisely what many cars do crash into?
Not at all. Many jobs will still be location-specific, and many will still drive - but it could be far less than now.
There is not only many jobs that actually don't need physical presence at all, such as most forms of banking transactions and many services.
We also gave the opportunity to serve more people with the same car at the same time for many common tasks, especially shopping. Let us think of a food store. Food can be delivered once or twice a day from the warehouse, to the whole street and surrounding streets, instead of everyone getting into a car and fetching their own. This not avoids a real lot of smaller cars in traffic between the shop and homes by simply having a larger one there (of which far less is space that is being used rather than empty), but also may avoid many cars that first travel to an additional point of sales, sometimes maybe not even fully loaded in order to restock things that ran out. And there can be a further reduction of surprises in logistics not only by having a larger volume of sales, but by delivering only once a day, and the next day at the earliest - a thing possible even with perishables that require refrigeration/cooling these days, as well-insulated containers with dry ice or frozen water or outdoor fridges can keep things frozen/cold enough until people are home.
And this became only feasible because only the internet makes it somewhat adequate to shop online. It gives a well-verifiable, fast, and safe way to buy or sell things right down to payment, with many perks for either buyer and seller.
I believe that politically, the average European indeed does not like many of the things the US government (most strongly the legislative branch, but also the executive and judicative) did in the last decades. I might also add whatever US government decisions are disliked by Europeans, the sentiment is generally in line with the rest of the World, often including the majority US citizens at a later point in time. But I do not think this affects consumer behavior very much, because overall, the USA producing useful things and trading them with the EU is perceived as a very good thing and in no way necessarily tied to things that cause offense. Specifically, I simply see the relevance of this change in the browser market this way:
The EU, taken as a whole, is the worlds largest economy, the largest trade partner of the USA, and its consumers have very similar needs. The "product" Firefox became more popular there for what I think are very often practical reasons (features provided by the browser or plugins), so I say there is a really good chance the same will happen in the USA. Granted, Microsoft does probably suffer from image problems, but it is surely not simply because they're an US American corporation. All other US corporations -even the ones in the same industry sector- seem pretty much unaffected.
Windows Server has made few dents in the domination of UNIX. Solaris is still a force to be reckoned with.
UNIX / Solaris? They're both rarely chosen, by now. See WP for a handful of market research results None is bound to be entirely accurate, but I think we can agree that Solaris and even UNIX is not really much of a "force to be reckoned with" anymore.
I agree with that. I see a great deal of use in having well-paid teachers - they're currently underpaid, because government does not really want to have highly qualified teachers, even though it would be in the best interest of us all, usually within less than 20 years. Teachers should get paid much better. A good teacher makes at least 20, usually way more people, better suited to do various work for more than 40 years (and with rising life spans, I think we'll raise the retirement age soon enough).
And probably more or less the same can be said about having good text book authors - but that is not a real conflict with not seeing much use in having textbook authors to write down very similar books times and again, instead of improving the ones already out there. Government and the people should long have owned its education books' copyright, not just a license - that it constantly funnels money into re-doing the same work from scratch is absurd. How many un-editable math books with constant royalty payments did it fund by now? And worse, how many of these were not as good as they probably would have been had they been editable / improvable by other authors and teachers? Well, if governments don't do it, a private initiative like this is the way to go - maybe it is even better this way, as it will more likely end up being an international project, rather than some national one, even if -hopefully- governments join in later...
Or maybe, we should teach kids how to do and read the programming of modern Computer Algebra Systems instead of further going into the futility of paper-based mathematics.
There is no way to do calculations faster and "better' than with a CAS. Everything is better. You can have documentation right there with the algorithm. A huge library of mathematical knowledge that can be tapped into for problem solving. Systematic verification becomes easier - besides that you don't make simple errors in calculating things, only conceptual errors.
Efficiency as well as better actual understanding instead of wasting time on exercising "perfectly" processing algorithms by hand could very much be gained. Instead of kids and even university students spending most of the time on learning how to be able to rapidly execute individual algorithms by hand or imperfectly on a CAS by drilling them until they can do that, they may be taught how to read and use algorithms and maths on a way more important, conceptual level. And way more efficiently too, given proper care you can have extremely powerful tools to investigate or visualize individual steps and partial algorithms, for instance, essentially a lot more people would even be able to understand why things work as they do, why they are correct, when and how to use them... you could to terrific bits of experimenting on parameters and such to get a real understanding of what it is that is done.
Ah really? But what we already do with their dead bodies otherwise is absolutely not by their choice either. It is the choice of a rational adult, taken to reduce the health risks decaying bodies pose.
Really, I can believe most of the kids do or would want to help the suffering. Of course some more might rather be buried like cinderella or encased in a lollipop, heck, maybe some of the kids might want to be fed to their favorite dog. But I can not imagine any kid that, on its own, would actually want to be locked in a box, and put under the earth to eaten by worms or incinerated.
Well, we know why we bury or burn them instead of doing any of the other things, out of practicality or for disease control reasons. But, while that was not an useful thing to do until just recently, taking organs and using them to heal people is amongst the very rational things we should obviously do prior to disposing of bodies these days. Essentially, there is no way anyone has proven organ donations to be to the detriment of anyone, and it is immediately apparent that it not only helps much, but actually saves life. We otherwise always expect people to save lifes even to the possible detriment of some of their health (eg. letting a bleeding person that you know has aids die because stopping the bleeding was a major possible health risk to yourself will not be acceptable)...
Each copyright owner has a monopoly on his own copyrighted work, whereas free market is based on competition. I can only get a Harry Potter book written by Rowling, and whoever happens to be her publisher. There is no possibility of competition. Similarly, I can only get a game from its publisher/developer. There may be other similar games, and there is competition in that sense, but this is indirect competition. You can't replicate the exact experience you get with a piece of software with another.
This is not indirect competition. This is direct competition. Copyright does not prevent anyone from doing similar work, as long as they do it independently. It is allowed to have the goal of creating a novel about some wizard kid and villains, even one that will probably appeal to a Harry Potter audience, as long as you do it from scratch (which is going to be judged by how credible your claims are that you did do the work yourself, which again is primarily judged by how similar it ends up being - it is simply not credible that you would start independently and give all your characters the same or nearly the same names, pick the same settings, or have the same events in the same sequence). Copyright is not a barrier to competition and a free market, it is only a barrier to ripping off someone else's work in a direct fashion. You have to realize that if an audience wants ONLY Harry Potter despite you having a similar product, you failed to convince them that your product is equivalent or better, and that this was a consumer choice - not that competition was made impossible by law.
Software is no different in terms of copyright. You are allowed to re-do software, even more similarly as would be possible with works of art since you will not have problems proving that you did the actual work yourself (there's going to be a lot of differing source code in case you get sued)... The only problem here is that here is that no legislation enforcing the formats of any stored data and settings generated for or by users has to be known and not unnecessarily complex. A migration will always have negative business value as long as you cannot keep a company's own work valuable. Introducing such law enforcing access to data for customers and competition, rather than abolishing Copyright would make more sense.
Patents, on the other hand, are different, and can easily be considered anti free-market monopolies. Anyone but its holder will be barred from doing whatever is in a patent as well as things similar enough that they, in the eyes of a judge, infringe upon the patent's claims. That most definitely is a monopoly that allows for no competition.
Quote: "Disk drives are going to get denser. Just as perpendicular recording was developed in the early part of the last decade and a growth spurt followed, some new technology such as heat-assisted recording will come along and do the same thing again.The need for more and more data storage at a low cost is not going away [...]".
So its future technology that will enable this to happen - but on HDD, because they are currently cheaper. How can that be valid reasoning?
Actually, even politically democracies mainly do what's popular at the very moment. Not what was popular a year ago.
Also, for everything halfway popular, usually there are seeds left even after a long time, often years. But of course then you're more strictly bound to the available bandwidth of a few persons and you'll have to live with the fact that you're probably not the only person who wants something from the people who still have old files.
Don't worry, people are (I think, without proof) far less likely to care about these false studies or the rebuttals than Bittorrent or other file sharing services.
But I am sure they want to get MORE money than they would with larger expansions as was done up until now...
So what do they presumably get from this move?
DL on LIVE => No resale.
Many people will just buy anything without considering reviews, believing 1.99$ is not worth proper consideration.
Maybe they plan to exploit multiplayer gameplay to constantly create forced buys. You do not want to be barred from playing the game with your friends because of missing maps or game mode, do you?
Of course only having to create this content for games as long as they're still popular. Live will help them quite accurately measure popularity. If the competition comes out with a hit game that takes most of their market share, their losses are lower than with larger expansions.
Only if you consider porn illegitimate, but in my opinion, you need to be politically/religiously insane to do that. Average people can watch porn or even directly visit prostitutes and otherwise be normal members of society just fine.
[...] famously sowing their land with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again. [...]
Famous yes, but this is likely a myth. Check here. Simply imagine how futile an act that would be. How much area of land do you want to salt at how much expense? (Hint, it takes an awful amount of valuable salt to get people even to move a day's walk away. Killing your victims outright or enslaving them and destroying and plundering property is so much easier, comparatively.)
Yes, I do have many uses for my many cores (I need about the equivalent of an i7 920 that I have to work efficiently with my machine and indulge in my hobbies, right now) , and I also do find these product naming schemes the CPU vendors employ quite useless. But they can't really be useful - it is the specifications are the actually useful, since the presence / absence of various features is just the bare minimum to roughly determine how fast these high tech devices are. CPU are highly complex devices that are attached to more highly complex devices and that perform highly complex tasks. Ultimately, they exhibit complex performance metrics. Gigahertz or the amount of cores are only very, very roughly indicative of what actually makes a CPU of the current generation good - usually its new co-processors or other tricks that may actually be the most important performance feature, conditional on your software using these.
Obviously, I doubt most people who don't know the marketing numbers would understand the specifications any better. But this difficulty in assessing performance is just the nature of the beast.
So how to deal with it? Simple, you can approach it by either a) buying more or less blindly, most probably a CPU(machine in the mid-price range), b) running casual performance tests at an assembled machine, or c) getting an informed opinion from a hobbyist or professional on how well a given CPU performs on your software / hardware setup vs how much it costs.
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The usual OSS response usually does not include calling others "people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses" or similar, as Mr.Assange apparently did.
The OSS response is most often a plain "do it yourself if you care, I am not interested in this" or maybe a "I don't have time to do support, figure it out yourself". Straight-forward, but not rude.
You also got the bit about "the "basic ideals behind OSS" and OSS communities wrong. Open source licenses grant freedoms related to the right to develop software, and the community most OSS developers want to build -if any at all- is most often a developer's community. Application support is not included, unless whoever does it specifically wants to offer it. It still is OSS, and in line with the "basic ideals behind OSS", just as much as it is in line with people being free to do what they want in their own time...
The same argument could and was made for keeping slavery legal, but it was simply not true. Giving people some noticeable part of the profits some work creates is not a problem for anyone but for slavers.
No reason to be scared by off-shoring and the like. Off-shoring is not that practical and not well-tolerated by society - with the additional logistics and other practicality concerns that usually really spoils the equation vs paying minimum wages. It is not like a supermarket or burger stand over in China will do you much good. But of course, to keep the playing field level domestically, one must actively combat black market employers (and only employers). Not that it takes much effort... if theoretically exploited employees have the power to immediately bring their employer down by law, employers definitely will not be able to exploit them badly.
Here.
Cheaper than trucks? Yes. Trains / Boats, not so sure. If you want raw cargo per driver (or the likelihood that you can fly it entirely "by wire" or autonomously), fuel per km, or even probable average speeds, trucks will loose in many cases.
Also, if you think of less developed areas, these should be highly attractive. The hydrogen or whatever you want to employ for lift -other than helium, of course- can be cheap and mostly or entirely home-produced. There's maybe a need for high-quality materials initially, but wear and need for service can be very low... the propellers can even realistically be solar-powered if you don't need much more than that it gets to its destination eventually.
One reason this neighborhood delivery system doesn't currently exist is the impulse buy.
The current US companies doing this service are too small to really offer an alternative, they don't carry enough goods and do not present them well.
But this type of thing does exist, including competition (not english). All the things that made these stores work, such as being able to piggy-back on the national postal services for rapid and efficient delivery (warehouse to any home), being able to process electronic payments, and home broadband connectivity to serve a web page with many images, can be just as easily met in the US as they were met in Switzerland.
If you look at other online stores, for instance Newegg (and the Swiss pendants) is exactly the same, rapid growth due to increasing demand. Plenty of people don't want to try out electronic parts first, they just to get them cheaply and with minimum effort and be quite generously treated if there are complaints.
Another is that for it to be as efficient as possible, everyone in the neighborhood would have to sign up. Another is that a lot of people are picky about their meats/produce and want to select it themselves.
Valid points, but the system does not fail if some don't sign up or don't participate immediately. Of course no one will get rid of many of the physical shops until demand for them is low and until then these still need to be supplied, but it still saves nearly exactly a car for each person that orders and lives nearby.
And they do want to jailbreak iPhones?
That is not at all something I said. Neither in the sentence you quoted, nor the following sentence(s), nor anywhere.
All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia, [...] Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue
It only means that you can reliably whitelist.
But as soon as you need to communicate with what are essentially strangers (almost any professional work has to, but also when you, say, talk to some buying or selling stranger about some online auction or many other things, or simply sometimes make new acquaintances whose certificate you don't exchange on-the-spot), you'll still get spam'd. Spammers can easily create as many certificates as they want, much as they can create as many email accounts or forum logins or domains, as they can right now.
Also, your acquaintance's computers will still get compromised, including certificates...
Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments.
Yes, it could have been a revolution, and I myself was hoping for the overall mode of communication to become more like Wave described it. Maybe it still will happen.
But if Wave had been picked up in its current state, it would have been a disaster. Neither the server(s) nor the client(s) were ready with regards to ease-of-use, stability, security, administration & customization, documentation, scalability in order to succeed in taking over even niche areas of communication with low requirements...
Also, there are many other factors that are a problem in practice, such like that it is not all an open or easy-to-implement or even a somewhat technology-stack-compatible standard (see here for a brief, nice and simple explanation / illustration of Wave's structure). That would have gotten very much in the way of retrofitting/extending existing programs with Wave or healthy competition between servers and clients.
This is not a problem with Android, but only the current sources where you get these phones from (you can already buy phones with root-level access as a specialty thing and anyone can sell root-level access enabled phones with Android). Try that with iOS.
By the way, I would also say "the mainstream" does not really want or require to root the phone. You should not confuse its demand to run the applications it wants with the need or competence to deal with OS-level problems. Sure, they want OS updates (without particular modifications, just what's required to run new applications and such), but any decent vendor will provide it with the standard Android updates. You'd have to have a large and illegal conspiracy of vendors not to compete with software updates for this to be otherwise.
I see yet another problem, this surely can't easily by-pass sites of accidents either way, and if the pictures are accurate, there is a guiding rail very similar to a guardrail in the middle of the street? Isn't that precisely what many cars do crash into?
Not at all. Many jobs will still be location-specific, and many will still drive - but it could be far less than now.
There is not only many jobs that actually don't need physical presence at all, such as most forms of banking transactions and many services.
We also gave the opportunity to serve more people with the same car at the same time for many common tasks, especially shopping. Let us think of a food store. Food can be delivered once or twice a day from the warehouse, to the whole street and surrounding streets, instead of everyone getting into a car and fetching their own. This not avoids a real lot of smaller cars in traffic between the shop and homes by simply having a larger one there (of which far less is space that is being used rather than empty), but also may avoid many cars that first travel to an additional point of sales, sometimes maybe not even fully loaded in order to restock things that ran out. And there can be a further reduction of surprises in logistics not only by having a larger volume of sales, but by delivering only once a day, and the next day at the earliest - a thing possible even with perishables that require refrigeration/cooling these days, as well-insulated containers with dry ice or frozen water or outdoor fridges can keep things frozen/cold enough until people are home.
And this became only feasible because only the internet makes it somewhat adequate to shop online. It gives a well-verifiable, fast, and safe way to buy or sell things right down to payment, with many perks for either buyer and seller.
I believe that politically, the average European indeed does not like many of the things the US government (most strongly the legislative branch, but also the executive and judicative) did in the last decades. I might also add whatever US government decisions are disliked by Europeans, the sentiment is generally in line with the rest of the World, often including the majority US citizens at a later point in time. But I do not think this affects consumer behavior very much, because overall, the USA producing useful things and trading them with the EU is perceived as a very good thing and in no way necessarily tied to things that cause offense. Specifically, I simply see the relevance of this change in the browser market this way:
The EU, taken as a whole, is the worlds largest economy, the largest trade partner of the USA, and its consumers have very similar needs. The "product" Firefox became more popular there for what I think are very often practical reasons (features provided by the browser or plugins), so I say there is a really good chance the same will happen in the USA.
Granted, Microsoft does probably suffer from image problems, but it is surely not simply because they're an US American corporation. All other US corporations -even the ones in the same industry sector- seem pretty much unaffected.
Windows Server has made few dents in the domination of UNIX. Solaris is still a force to be reckoned with.
UNIX / Solaris? They're both rarely chosen, by now. See WP for a handful of market research results None is bound to be entirely accurate, but I think we can agree that Solaris and even UNIX is not really much of a "force to be reckoned with" anymore.
Why is it just infantile? This is the shape minor political activism takes.
In this case, I am pretty sure a whole demonstration would not have better effect than this prank. Even if it probably won't reach most people, still.
I agree with that. I see a great deal of use in having well-paid teachers - they're currently underpaid, because government does not really want to have highly qualified teachers, even though it would be in the best interest of us all, usually within less than 20 years. Teachers should get paid much better. A good teacher makes at least 20, usually way more people, better suited to do various work for more than 40 years (and with rising life spans, I think we'll raise the retirement age soon enough).
And probably more or less the same can be said about having good text book authors - but that is not a real conflict with not seeing much use in having textbook authors to write down very similar books times and again, instead of improving the ones already out there. Government and the people should long have owned its education books' copyright, not just a license - that it constantly funnels money into re-doing the same work from scratch is absurd. How many un-editable math books with constant royalty payments did it fund by now? And worse, how many of these were not as good as they probably would have been had they been editable / improvable by other authors and teachers? Well, if governments don't do it, a private initiative like this is the way to go - maybe it is even better this way, as it will more likely end up being an international project, rather than some national one, even if -hopefully- governments join in later...
Or maybe, we should teach kids how to do and read the programming of modern Computer Algebra Systems instead of further going into the futility of paper-based mathematics.
There is no way to do calculations faster and "better' than with a CAS. Everything is better. You can have documentation right there with the algorithm. A huge library of mathematical knowledge that can be tapped into for problem solving. Systematic verification becomes easier - besides that you don't make simple errors in calculating things, only conceptual errors.
Efficiency as well as better actual understanding instead of wasting time on exercising "perfectly" processing algorithms by hand could very much be gained. Instead of kids and even university students spending most of the time on learning how to be able to rapidly execute individual algorithms by hand or imperfectly on a CAS by drilling them until they can do that, they may be taught how to read and use algorithms and maths on a way more important, conceptual level. And way more efficiently too, given proper care you can have extremely powerful tools to investigate or visualize individual steps and partial algorithms, for instance, essentially a lot more people would even be able to understand why things work as they do, why they are correct, when and how to use them... you could to terrific bits of experimenting on parameters and such to get a real understanding of what it is that is done.
Ah really? But what we already do with their dead bodies otherwise is absolutely not by their choice either. It is the choice of a rational adult, taken to reduce the health risks decaying bodies pose.
Really, I can believe most of the kids do or would want to help the suffering. Of course some more might rather be buried like cinderella or encased in a lollipop, heck, maybe some of the kids might want to be fed to their favorite dog. But I can not imagine any kid that, on its own, would actually want to be locked in a box, and put under the earth to eaten by worms or incinerated.
Well, we know why we bury or burn them instead of doing any of the other things, out of practicality or for disease control reasons. But, while that was not an useful thing to do until just recently, taking organs and using them to heal people is amongst the very rational things we should obviously do prior to disposing of bodies these days. Essentially, there is no way anyone has proven organ donations to be to the detriment of anyone, and it is immediately apparent that it not only helps much, but actually saves life. We otherwise always expect people to save lifes even to the possible detriment of some of their health (eg. letting a bleeding person that you know has aids die because stopping the bleeding was a major possible health risk to yourself will not be acceptable)...
Each copyright owner has a monopoly on his own copyrighted work, whereas free market is based on competition. I can only get a Harry Potter book written by Rowling, and whoever happens to be her publisher. There is no possibility of competition. Similarly, I can only get a game from its publisher/developer. There may be other similar games, and there is competition in that sense, but this is indirect competition. You can't replicate the exact experience you get with a piece of software with another.
This is not indirect competition. This is direct competition. Copyright does not prevent anyone from doing similar work, as long as they do it independently. It is allowed to have the goal of creating a novel about some wizard kid and villains, even one that will probably appeal to a Harry Potter audience, as long as you do it from scratch (which is going to be judged by how credible your claims are that you did do the work yourself, which again is primarily judged by how similar it ends up being - it is simply not credible that you would start independently and give all your characters the same or nearly the same names, pick the same settings, or have the same events in the same sequence). Copyright is not a barrier to competition and a free market, it is only a barrier to ripping off someone else's work in a direct fashion.
You have to realize that if an audience wants ONLY Harry Potter despite you having a similar product, you failed to convince them that your product is equivalent or better, and that this was a consumer choice - not that competition was made impossible by law.
Software is no different in terms of copyright. You are allowed to re-do software, even more similarly as would be possible with works of art since you will not have problems proving that you did the actual work yourself (there's going to be a lot of differing source code in case you get sued)... The only problem here is that here is that no legislation enforcing the formats of any stored data and settings generated for or by users has to be known and not unnecessarily complex. A migration will always have negative business value as long as you cannot keep a company's own work valuable. Introducing such law enforcing access to data for customers and competition, rather than abolishing Copyright would make more sense.
Patents, on the other hand, are different, and can easily be considered anti free-market monopolies. Anyone but its holder will be barred from doing whatever is in a patent as well as things similar enough that they, in the eyes of a judge, infringe upon the patent's claims. That most definitely is a monopoly that allows for no competition.
Quote: "Disk drives are going to get denser. Just as perpendicular recording was developed in the early part of the last decade and a growth spurt followed, some new technology such as heat-assisted recording will come along and do the same thing again.The need for more and more data storage at a low cost is not going away [...]".
So its future technology that will enable this to happen - but on HDD, because they are currently cheaper. How can that be valid reasoning?
Actually, even politically democracies mainly do what's popular at the very moment. Not what was popular a year ago.
Also, for everything halfway popular, usually there are seeds left even after a long time, often years. But of course then you're more strictly bound to the available bandwidth of a few persons and you'll have to live with the fact that you're probably not the only person who wants something from the people who still have old files.
Don't worry, people are (I think, without proof) far less likely to care about these false studies or the rebuttals than Bittorrent or other file sharing services.
So what do they presumably get from this move?
Not on the internet, we're not.
Only if you consider porn illegitimate, but in my opinion, you need to be politically/religiously insane to do that. Average people can watch porn or even directly visit prostitutes and otherwise be normal members of society just fine.
[...] famously sowing their land with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again. [...]
Famous yes, but this is likely a myth. Check here. Simply imagine how futile an act that would be. How much area of land do you want to salt at how much expense? (Hint, it takes an awful amount of valuable salt to get people even to move a day's walk away. Killing your victims outright or enslaving them and destroying and plundering property is so much easier, comparatively.)
Yes, I do have many uses for my many cores (I need about the equivalent of an i7 920 that I have to work efficiently with my machine and indulge in my hobbies, right now) , and I also do find these product naming schemes the CPU vendors employ quite useless. But they can't really be useful - it is the specifications are the actually useful, since the presence / absence of various features is just the bare minimum to roughly determine how fast these high tech devices are.
CPU are highly complex devices that are attached to more highly complex devices and that perform highly complex tasks. Ultimately, they exhibit complex performance metrics. Gigahertz or the amount of cores are only very, very roughly indicative of what actually makes a CPU of the current generation good - usually its new co-processors or other tricks that may actually be the most important performance feature, conditional on your software using these.
Obviously, I doubt most people who don't know the marketing numbers would understand the specifications any better. But this difficulty in assessing performance is just the nature of the beast.
So how to deal with it? Simple, you can approach it by either a) buying more or less blindly, most probably a CPU(machine in the mid-price range), b) running casual performance tests at an assembled machine, or c) getting an informed opinion from a hobbyist or professional on how well a given CPU performs on your software / hardware setup vs how much it costs.