Yeah, but their influence isn't as big. European politicians already got the message that passing into law whatever crap GEMA and BREIN wants effectively means giving their parliament seat to the local Pirate Party.
This example doesn't really exlcaim "IP is bad for everybody!"
The example screams this: "The copyright system is so ridiculously complicated that even its biggest supporters can't follow the rules properly." (Or worse, they don't even bother to.)
Try living in Zimbabwe or North Korea for a day and then see if you think you live in a democracy or not.
Dictatorship in North Korea doesn't make our corrupt political system a democracy.
The system you are citing is utterly untenable in the complexity of the modern world. We would do *nothing* else all day long except vote on issues we would barely understand.
We don't need to vote on everything. All you need to make democracy work is to give people the power to overturn any decision made by representatives. IMHO politicians should do the boring paperwork part of running the country. When it comes to important decisions for everybody, the people need to have the final say.
Everything is part of our culture, therefore we would have to share everything, not just art.. I didn't think communal ownership of property was too popular around here.
Culture is composed of ideas, not physical objects. Physical objects just sometimes serve as containers for ideas. But if you want to print stuff using a 3D printer, I'll be happy to share printing blueprints. BTW, I'm really looking forward to when 3D printers will be able to print electronics. That's gonna be one hell of a ride.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, why should artists be singled out and made unable to earn any money from their labour? You'll just be heading back to the days of art being produced by the elite for the elite.
Selling copies is not the only way to make money from art. I write software for a living and I don't earn any money from selling copies. The only difference between writing software and making movies that matters in this debate is that movie makers are 20 years behind software developers when it comes to alternative sources of income. And while big studio execs are crying rivers over how they won't be able to make any money (which is quite funny given that the most pirated movies also break one box office record after another), independent artists are working hard to catch up with software developers in getting paid without relying on selling copies. For example, Kickstarter looks very promising right now.
Which is why there are explicit copyright clauses in the constitution? Yea, ok.
Read the US constitution carefully. It says that copyright is a tool to promote progress. It's supposed to be a very limited exception so that there is more to copy, more to build on after a short delay. But a delay of two entire human lifetimes is way too long and keeps getting extended even more. The goal for which the tool has been created in the first place was thrown overboard so that the tool can be applied ever more broadly and make more money to a small self-appointed elite which doesn't even include the creators.
And if you know history, you should also know that giving exclusive power to shape the future of mankind to some small self-appointed elite is extremely dangerous.
Those laws protect the artists who product the product that the public wants.
Protects the artists from what, their own marketing ineptitude? Hey, I'd like to sell air to everybody on Earth. But that obviously won't work as long as people are allowed to breathe for free. So where do I apply for a law which says nobody is allowed to breathe unless they pay me first?
Only what you can defend with a stick belongs to you. If you claim ownership of something big, you need a big stick to defend it. However, there is no stick big enough to defend a monopoly on an idea.
Your ideas sound nice and seem grand, but they utterly fail to address the issue of compensation. Artists need to eat, they cannot work without compensation of some sort for what they produce. If you have a problem with how much they are asking for their material then simply don't purchase it- taking it is not ethical nor is it moral. If society really does benefit in the ways you mention, then society should be required to compensate the artists for what they produce.
That's because the issue of compensation is utterly insignificant. Many great advances in art, science and technology were made without any expectation of compensation. Those creators did it just for the sake of creating something new. If you say that compensation somehow has to be an integral part of the creative process, you basically say that creators who don't do it for the money should always bend over for the industry that's in the same field only for the money and doesn't give a shit about creating something new.
No. Progress comes first. If you can make money from it, good for you. But if you can't, it's your problem. You don't get to dismantle fundamental building blocks of our society through legislation just because your business model sucks. And I'm writing this as somebody who writes software for a living.
Hes advocating breaking the law as a good thing, which it basically isnt except for a small set of corner cases. Laws are what allow society to function, and breaking them chips away at that. If "civil disobedience" were ok for every single minor thing you disagreed with, we would cease to have any kind of government whatsoever and would have anarchy.
The law we're talking about is criminalizing the very thing that has made our current society possible in the first place. The thing that brought humanity from a cold damp cave to the Moon was unchecked copying of ideas. When a law conflicts with such an essential building block of our society, the law has to go.
"It's not bad because it's good" is hardly a compelling argument.
Allow me to elaborate on the "because it's good" part. Progress has two major parts: technical and social. Technical progress makes our lives comfortable. Social progress makes our society work. Technical progress depends on sharing inventions and discoveries. Pick any major technical breakthrough and imagine how the world would look today if all of its inventors decided not to publish it. Social progress depends on storytelling. Even decades and centuries after their deaths, the greatest authors influence how people treat each other through their art. William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, George Orwell and others have influenced whole generations because their art shows people consequences of certain actions. Technology removes limits on what we are able to do. Culture defines who we are and how we use technology. Culture is the art that we have in common. Culture is what we share with each other. That's why imposing artificial limits on sharing art is wrong.
Stallman seems to think that society doesn't have the ability to define right and wrong. Apparently he ascribes to solipsism. He thinks that HE is empowered to determine right and wrong for society. How narcissistic is that?
The process of society defining right and wrong requires people like Stallman saying their ideas about right and wrong out loud. There's nothing narcissistic about that, that's how it works.
Development can make exactly what was requested, and regardless, they will want something different.
The main cause of this problem is that what the client wants and what he needs are two completely separate things. Pay no attention to what the client says he wants. Make him teach you the process as it is done at the moment without the software and then design the software around what you've learned. Chances are the process itself will need some serious rethinking.
If a number formatter is supposed to default to 0, it's supposed to default to 0.
The problem is that defaulting to 0 was undocumented behavior. Which makes the bug reporter a moron, his problem a textbook case of PEBKAC and WONTFIX the only appropriate response from PHP developers. Relying on undocumented behavior is equivalent to playing Russian roulette with semi-automatic pistol.
Perhaps that is because you are not a visionary? I guarantee you that eventually someone will out-Google Google.
I can see many areas where search could be improved - pictures, videos, sound and music... but I can't see any way to deliver web page search results with noticeably more relevance than Google does right now. There may be a thousand little tweaks to make Google deliver better results, but even all of them combined won't make enough of a difference to make people switch to another service. Because Google is good enough. If people already have "good enough", they won't bother switching to "perfect" when it finally arrives.
Google was 1997 and Lycos was 1994. Mod parent down.
That's the company founding date. Lycos got a web search engine in 1998 when it acquired HotBot. HotBot launched in May 1996. Meanwhile, Google was in development since January 1996 and started first experiments with crawling the web in March 1996. The proof of concept system was working by August 1996. The domain google.com was registered in September 1997 and the company itself was founded a year later.
And the most important thing: The only other search engine that was using backlinks to rank search results before September 1998 was RankDex. Ever heard of it? Crawler bots were NOT the killer feature of web search engines. Backlink-based ranking was.
I'm fairly certain automated web crawling preceded google. There were manual aggregation sites (like Yahoo), but most others (lycos, altavista, loads more) were just crawling and counting links. Google got market share because it's algorithm cut through all the spam sites that worked out how to get to the top of the list (which wouldn't have happened if there was a genuine manual crawl occurring).
Lycos and AltaVista preceeded Google by only a few months and their ranking system was extremely inferior to Google's PageRank. Lycos and AltaVista were ranking by page content, not by external links pointing to the page. Google was the first company to get it right and I don't see any space for noticeable improvement.
You mean like Google? In the 90s they were the "small startup" you describe, and they faced-off against the mighty monopoly that is Microsoft.
What? Microsoft didn't enter the web search market until 2009. So how exactly did Google face Microsoft in the 90s?
Now both Google and Apple are whipping MS's butt in the operating system/browser market (Android, iOS, webkit). No monopoly lasts forever not even Microsoft which used to have 90% share, but has now dropped to around 50% overall.
Yeah, especially monopolies which never existed in the first place don't last very long. Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop market is still strong at 85+% worldwide. It's true Microsoft lost its web browser monopoly but only because they didn't bother to improve MSIE for almost a whole decade. Also, the monopoly was broken by free software (Mozilla Firefox), not by a startup or any other for-profit competition. As for mobile OS market, Microsoft never had any monopoly there.
So you're saying we should stifle Google with oppressive regulations to give the little guys like Bing a chance?
Bing doesn't need it because Microsoft has enough money to make its search services profitable before they run out of cash. But we definitely need heavy regulations to make sure that Google, Facebook and other such companies don't become evil.
Or are you saying that the only possible way to make money in online search is to sell ads to display alongside search results, and any other solution is doomed to failure?
No, I just find it VERY hard to imagine how to make money from online search when you don't get any search requests.
Or are you saying that Google is the one company in the history of the world that is, absent government intervention, incapable of being challenged by a competitor, because they're just magically immune?
Refresh my memory, how did Google start? Did they immediately have a billion dollars in hardware and years of web crawl data?
No they started small (at least compared to the existing players), crawled the web for a while and began developing their own search algorithm.
A startup that does the same thing with a better algorithm will fine people who will use it and they can grow the way Google did if they're better.
What existing players? Google was the very first company to use automated crawling to build a search database. Before that, every other competitor in the search market was employing an army of low-salary workers to crawl the web by hand! You can build your own datamining empire with nothing but a hundred bucks in your pocket when you're the first one to do it well enough. If you're the second or third, you need billions of dollars from day one and years to even catch up with the competition, even if your solution is much better than the established competitors' "good enough" solution. Remember that the worst enemy of perfection is good enough.
A natural monopoly is limited in its ability to raise prices due to potential and indirect competition. Government monopolies on the other hand...
Only if a small startup can eat your lunch. Good luck competing with Google without a billion dollars worth of hardware and at least 2 years of web crawling to fill your search database.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but their influence isn't as big. European politicians already got the message that passing into law whatever crap GEMA and BREIN wants effectively means giving their parliament seat to the local Pirate Party.
The disease already hit Europe, we just had success fighting back up until now.
This example doesn't really exlcaim "IP is bad for everybody!"
The example screams this: "The copyright system is so ridiculously complicated that even its biggest supporters can't follow the rules properly." (Or worse, they don't even bother to.)
Try living in Zimbabwe or North Korea for a day and then see if you think you live in a democracy or not.
Dictatorship in North Korea doesn't make our corrupt political system a democracy.
The system you are citing is utterly untenable in the complexity of the modern world. We would do *nothing* else all day long except vote on issues we would barely understand.
We don't need to vote on everything. All you need to make democracy work is to give people the power to overturn any decision made by representatives. IMHO politicians should do the boring paperwork part of running the country. When it comes to important decisions for everybody, the people need to have the final say.
Everything is part of our culture, therefore we would have to share everything, not just art.. I didn't think communal ownership of property was too popular around here.
Culture is composed of ideas, not physical objects. Physical objects just sometimes serve as containers for ideas. But if you want to print stuff using a 3D printer, I'll be happy to share printing blueprints. BTW, I'm really looking forward to when 3D printers will be able to print electronics. That's gonna be one hell of a ride.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, why should artists be singled out and made unable to earn any money from their labour? You'll just be heading back to the days of art being produced by the elite for the elite.
Selling copies is not the only way to make money from art. I write software for a living and I don't earn any money from selling copies. The only difference between writing software and making movies that matters in this debate is that movie makers are 20 years behind software developers when it comes to alternative sources of income. And while big studio execs are crying rivers over how they won't be able to make any money (which is quite funny given that the most pirated movies also break one box office record after another), independent artists are working hard to catch up with software developers in getting paid without relying on selling copies. For example, Kickstarter looks very promising right now.
Which is why there are explicit copyright clauses in the constitution? Yea, ok.
Read the US constitution carefully. It says that copyright is a tool to promote progress. It's supposed to be a very limited exception so that there is more to copy, more to build on after a short delay. But a delay of two entire human lifetimes is way too long and keeps getting extended even more. The goal for which the tool has been created in the first place was thrown overboard so that the tool can be applied ever more broadly and make more money to a small self-appointed elite which doesn't even include the creators.
And if you know history, you should also know that giving exclusive power to shape the future of mankind to some small self-appointed elite is extremely dangerous.
Those laws protect the artists who product the product that the public wants.
Protects the artists from what, their own marketing ineptitude? Hey, I'd like to sell air to everybody on Earth. But that obviously won't work as long as people are allowed to breathe for free. So where do I apply for a law which says nobody is allowed to breathe unless they pay me first?
You can't share what doesn't belong to you.
Only what you can defend with a stick belongs to you. If you claim ownership of something big, you need a big stick to defend it. However, there is no stick big enough to defend a monopoly on an idea.
Your ideas sound nice and seem grand, but they utterly fail to address the issue of compensation. Artists need to eat, they cannot work without compensation of some sort for what they produce. If you have a problem with how much they are asking for their material then simply don't purchase it- taking it is not ethical nor is it moral. If society really does benefit in the ways you mention, then society should be required to compensate the artists for what they produce.
That's because the issue of compensation is utterly insignificant. Many great advances in art, science and technology were made without any expectation of compensation. Those creators did it just for the sake of creating something new. If you say that compensation somehow has to be an integral part of the creative process, you basically say that creators who don't do it for the money should always bend over for the industry that's in the same field only for the money and doesn't give a shit about creating something new.
No. Progress comes first. If you can make money from it, good for you. But if you can't, it's your problem. You don't get to dismantle fundamental building blocks of our society through legislation just because your business model sucks. And I'm writing this as somebody who writes software for a living.
Hes advocating breaking the law as a good thing, which it basically isnt except for a small set of corner cases. Laws are what allow society to function, and breaking them chips away at that. If "civil disobedience" were ok for every single minor thing you disagreed with, we would cease to have any kind of government whatsoever and would have anarchy.
The law we're talking about is criminalizing the very thing that has made our current society possible in the first place. The thing that brought humanity from a cold damp cave to the Moon was unchecked copying of ideas. When a law conflicts with such an essential building block of our society, the law has to go.
"It's not bad because it's good" is hardly a compelling argument.
Allow me to elaborate on the "because it's good" part. Progress has two major parts: technical and social. Technical progress makes our lives comfortable. Social progress makes our society work. Technical progress depends on sharing inventions and discoveries. Pick any major technical breakthrough and imagine how the world would look today if all of its inventors decided not to publish it. Social progress depends on storytelling. Even decades and centuries after their deaths, the greatest authors influence how people treat each other through their art. William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, George Orwell and others have influenced whole generations because their art shows people consequences of certain actions. Technology removes limits on what we are able to do. Culture defines who we are and how we use technology. Culture is the art that we have in common. Culture is what we share with each other. That's why imposing artificial limits on sharing art is wrong.
Stallman seems to think that society doesn't have the ability to define right and wrong. Apparently he ascribes to solipsism. He thinks that HE is empowered to determine right and wrong for society. How narcissistic is that?
The process of society defining right and wrong requires people like Stallman saying their ideas about right and wrong out loud. There's nothing narcissistic about that, that's how it works.
1: Upper management understand whose fault it is, and acts accordingly. In this case, consider staying with the company.
It's the management's fault because they didn't have a software analyst write the specification. Marketers are not qualified for this job.
Development can make exactly what was requested, and regardless, they will want something different.
The main cause of this problem is that what the client wants and what he needs are two completely separate things. Pay no attention to what the client says he wants. Make him teach you the process as it is done at the moment without the software and then design the software around what you've learned. Chances are the process itself will need some serious rethinking.
CSV?
Which one single command line utility does those plus adjust the resolution and aspect ratio? I don't think it exists.
CLI user can manage with a hammer, saw and screwdriver. Typical GUI-only user is completely helpless unless somebody gives him a hammersawdriver.
Not dumb, lazy.
If a number formatter is supposed to default to 0, it's supposed to default to 0.
The problem is that defaulting to 0 was undocumented behavior. Which makes the bug reporter a moron, his problem a textbook case of PEBKAC and WONTFIX the only appropriate response from PHP developers. Relying on undocumented behavior is equivalent to playing Russian roulette with semi-automatic pistol.
Perhaps that is because you are not a visionary? I guarantee you that eventually someone will out-Google Google.
I can see many areas where search could be improved - pictures, videos, sound and music... but I can't see any way to deliver web page search results with noticeably more relevance than Google does right now. There may be a thousand little tweaks to make Google deliver better results, but even all of them combined won't make enough of a difference to make people switch to another service. Because Google is good enough. If people already have "good enough", they won't bother switching to "perfect" when it finally arrives.
Google was 1997 and Lycos was 1994. Mod parent down.
That's the company founding date. Lycos got a web search engine in 1998 when it acquired HotBot. HotBot launched in May 1996. Meanwhile, Google was in development since January 1996 and started first experiments with crawling the web in March 1996. The proof of concept system was working by August 1996. The domain google.com was registered in September 1997 and the company itself was founded a year later.
And the most important thing: The only other search engine that was using backlinks to rank search results before September 1998 was RankDex. Ever heard of it? Crawler bots were NOT the killer feature of web search engines. Backlink-based ranking was.
I'm fairly certain automated web crawling preceded google. There were manual aggregation sites (like Yahoo), but most others (lycos, altavista, loads more) were just crawling and counting links. Google got market share because it's algorithm cut through all the spam sites that worked out how to get to the top of the list (which wouldn't have happened if there was a genuine manual crawl occurring).
Lycos and AltaVista preceeded Google by only a few months and their ranking system was extremely inferior to Google's PageRank. Lycos and AltaVista were ranking by page content, not by external links pointing to the page. Google was the first company to get it right and I don't see any space for noticeable improvement.
You mean like Google? In the 90s they were the "small startup" you describe, and they faced-off against the mighty monopoly that is Microsoft.
What? Microsoft didn't enter the web search market until 2009. So how exactly did Google face Microsoft in the 90s?
Now both Google and Apple are whipping MS's butt in the operating system/browser market (Android, iOS, webkit). No monopoly lasts forever not even Microsoft which used to have 90% share, but has now dropped to around 50% overall.
Yeah, especially monopolies which never existed in the first place don't last very long. Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop market is still strong at 85+% worldwide. It's true Microsoft lost its web browser monopoly but only because they didn't bother to improve MSIE for almost a whole decade. Also, the monopoly was broken by free software (Mozilla Firefox), not by a startup or any other for-profit competition. As for mobile OS market, Microsoft never had any monopoly there.
So you're saying we should stifle Google with oppressive regulations to give the little guys like Bing a chance?
Bing doesn't need it because Microsoft has enough money to make its search services profitable before they run out of cash. But we definitely need heavy regulations to make sure that Google, Facebook and other such companies don't become evil.
Or are you saying that the only possible way to make money in online search is to sell ads to display alongside search results, and any other solution is doomed to failure?
No, I just find it VERY hard to imagine how to make money from online search when you don't get any search requests.
Or are you saying that Google is the one company in the history of the world that is, absent government intervention, incapable of being challenged by a competitor, because they're just magically immune?
Startup-sized competitor? Yes. Microsoft/Facebook/Apple-sized competitor? No.
Refresh my memory, how did Google start? Did they immediately have a billion dollars in hardware and years of web crawl data?
No they started small (at least compared to the existing players), crawled the web for a while and began developing their own search algorithm.
A startup that does the same thing with a better algorithm will fine people who will use it and they can grow the way Google did if they're better.
What existing players? Google was the very first company to use automated crawling to build a search database. Before that, every other competitor in the search market was employing an army of low-salary workers to crawl the web by hand! You can build your own datamining empire with nothing but a hundred bucks in your pocket when you're the first one to do it well enough. If you're the second or third, you need billions of dollars from day one and years to even catch up with the competition, even if your solution is much better than the established competitors' "good enough" solution. Remember that the worst enemy of perfection is good enough.
A natural monopoly is limited in its ability to raise prices due to potential and indirect competition. Government monopolies on the other hand...
Only if a small startup can eat your lunch. Good luck competing with Google without a billion dollars worth of hardware and at least 2 years of web crawling to fill your search database.
Sorry, but I'm the other archetype of geek.