How to fix? The obvious fix would be signing the flash BIOS, but this completely locks out homebrewers wanting to do something different.
Why not just have the hardware detect an unsigned BIOS and print a message on every boot that says "Modified firmware detected, press F7 for ten seconds to restore to factory default"? Then you can modify it if you like and you just ignore the message.
I'm pretty sure the Republicans are right there with them on that one.
I wouldn't be so sure. The Republicans are rarely, if ever, the ones introducing those bills. They just don't fight them because it doesn't win them points with enough people -- it's not like Republicans can expect to win over a bunch of ACLU members by sticking up for free speech while they're condemning abortion and gay marriage. And the individual candidates don't want to piss off the media companies for voting against their darling censorship bills if the Democrats have a majority and the bill is going to pass either way.
Which is simply to say, that kind of stuff is less likely to happen with a divided Congress, since it generally won't get introduced on the side controlled by Republicans.
1. The Republicans are against any regulation of companies at all, so they'll never support it.
You mean like Bush-appointee Michael Copps?
What Republicans are against is "a way to censor 'unpopular' thought from the 'net (read: anything remotely conservative)." Which is why that will never pass. Real network neutrality, EFF-style? Neither party has anything to lose -- what will probably happen is that after the Republicans are done demonizing "network neutrality" (i.e. Democrats censoring Republicans), someone will come up with what we call network neutrality, but call it something else, and then everyone will agree to it but the ISPs.
This isn't a fight between Democrats and Republicans. It's a fight between people and lobbyists.
To play devil's advocate: the fact that I didn't lock my front door is not a reasonable assumption that I am inviting you to enter my apartment.
I can never understand why people keep pushing this argument. The assumption in the analogy is that the door leads to a private space, because otherwise the analogy establishes nothing: an unlocked door that leads to a public space (a public parking garage, a library, a store) very much does mean that you can go inside. You're assuming that the door leads somewhere the public is not allowed to access even though that's the point of contention you're trying to establish.
It isn't about doors. An locked door explicitly shows that you are not allowed access without authorization (i.e. a key). A lack of one doesn't automatically mean that you have access, but it means you have to look at the nature of the thing.
In this case the thing is a website. It is under the control of the owner. An agent of the owner. It isn't a door, it's a doorman. If a member of the public goes to the website and says, "give me this page," and that person is not supposed to have access to that page, the server is supposed to respond with HTTP 503 FORBIDDEN. If the public is supposed to have access, it is supposed to respond with "OK" and provide the page.
Now, yes, if you put your secret documents on a publicly-accessible web server, you did not intend for the public to access them. But you did instruct your equipment to allow them to. You can't mistakenly pay the New York Times to run an ad about your new product which was supposed to stay secret for another six months and then expect any recourse when the Times publishes the ad and the public reads it. Newspapers are public. Websites are public. You don't want it publicly accessible, don't configure your website to make it publicly accessible. Is it really that hard?
I get so sick and tired of people beating up on people for wanting to close tax loopholes. Ireland's taxes do not exist for corporate reasons. They exist to do one thing: make money. If they can't make money, they can't exist. Trashing them is not going to change that, it's only going to make you sound like you don't understand basic economics.
The problem is that "tax loopholes" exist for a reason. They're intentional -- it's how legislators create a de facto low corporate tax rate without getting crucified for voting for a bill that lowers the corporate tax rate.
Governments really have three options: They can have a high corporate tax rate with loopholes, a high corporate tax rate with no loopholes, or a low corporate tax rate. The first is what we have now: In theory corporations pay taxes, in practice they don't. The problem with "making" them pay is that we can't actually make them -- if you can't have an operation in California which reports its profits in Ireland or Asia in order to avoid high California taxes, companies will stop building operations in California. You lose more tax revenue through capital flight than you gain through closing the loopholes.
So closing the loopholes doesn't help. The real problem is that leaving them is also stupid: If you have a 10% tax rate and some other place has a 1% tax rate, a corporation is going to report 100% of its profits in the place where it pays 1% instead of 10%. If you instead lower the tax rate to 1% then you become the destination for profit reporting and you get 1% of hundreds of billions of dollars instead of 10% of nothing.
Of course, then you run the risk of race to the bottom where the most competitive place has a 0% tax rate. But maybe that's not so bad: A lot of other countries are stupid enough to maintain higher tax rates than you. If you can attract companies and jobs with low taxes and in so doing achieve the same tax revenue from payroll and sales tax than they achieve from payroll, sales and corporate tax, you still come out ahead, do you not?
Personal opinion is that over the long haul, Android will NOT do well. They have not the control over the usage it.
Open vs. closed, open wins out over the long run. AOL vs. the web, Unix vs. Linux, closed winning is an outlier. It tends to happen in short bursts: A company that wants control comes up with something cool, they keep their control for a while, then people who don't want to live under someone else's thumb create a substitute for their product and the controlling party either has to open their platform (as Microsoft has generally done just enough to stay on top) or lose market share to the open competitor.
Right now the parties pushing for control (Apple excepted) are mostly the carriers. But some day soon someone is going to start selling an Android phone for $200 at retail that allows you to make Google Voice calls and browse the web, both using 802.11, whether you have a carrier or not. Then the 80% of people who are almost never out of range of an 802.11 access point are going to start wondering WTF they're paying $500/year to the carriers for. The only thing stopping that from happening right now is that the phones cost $600 instead of $200 at retail, and people would rather pay $50/month for two years for plan+phone than pay $600 up front. But eventually the price of the phones will come down.
At that point the carriers lose their leverage. The advantage in having a carrier at all is no longer to have a mobile device or make phone calls or browse the web or use mobile apps, since you can have those without them. It's so that you can use Google Maps from wherever you are when you get lost, or call a tow truck from the side of the road. For which paying a one-time fee for non-expiring prepaid for emergencies starts to look pretty attractive compared to a $500/year plan that you only use once every few months when you're outside WiFi range.
And if we still have open phones popularly available when that day comes, the carriers aren't going to be in a position to tell you what updates you can install or which browser you can use any more than Comcast is in a position today to stop you from using Ubuntu on your PC.
You mean like Linux helped to bring down locked alternatives like Windows and Mac OS. Yeah, that's working out amazingly well as a plan, especially for the desktop.
You're forgetting what keeps Linux off the desktop: Third party apps that run on Windows but not Linux and training costs for learning a new environment. Do you expect those to be a problem for Android? There is no quarter century history of third party Win32 applications or 90% installed base of Microsoft software that people already know how to use. Everything is new. It's a level playing field instead of one in which incumbents use a huge installed base plus lock-in to keep out new competitors.
Now, that doesn't mean Android is going to win. But it means the comparison to Linux On The Desktop is inapt.
No kidding. Google is an advertising company. Every company wants the markets complementary to their primary products and services to be commodity markets, because it lowers prices (which increases demand) in those markets, which in turn increases demand for the complementary products and services the company sells. And keeping the margins low and competition high in those markets ensures that you don't get a company like Apple who could potentially leverage a large market share in devices into a competing advertising business.
No matter if you remove "lawyer" as a profession, there will always be trained legal experts.
True, but much of what draws sociopaths to the profession is that it is lucrative. And it is lucrative because supply is artificially scarce due to unnecessarily difficult licensing requirements (which, in turn, involve unnecessarily high education requirements). And that is half the problem, because you get a settlement letter demanding $5000 and it would cost $25,000+ in attorneys' fees to make it go away if you're innocent, which leads to these extortion mills because being innocent and paying the settlement is five times cheaper than being innocent and winning in court.
Make it so any paralegal can compete with the people with $100,000+ in student loans and the cost of hiring one will be less than it costs to get your sink to stop leaking.
* "stole my words" * "stole my idea" * "stole my code"
These are all the thing you're trying to defend, so any argument that says it's right because these things are right is circular.
* "stole my focus" * "stole my heart" * "stole a look"
These are all acts not punishable by law or otherwise actionable. This is not the meaning the MPAA is going for. They clearly don't intend for anyone to hear "steal a movie" and think "steal a look." They run ads that say "you wouldn't steal a car" and equate grand larceny with downloading a movie. Their intent is not to use a legally spurious colloquialism, their intent is to conflate copyright infringement with criminal thievery.
Devil's advocate: those do in fact include copyright.
They also include operating the Post Office. That doesn't mean Congress can pass a law requiring the Post Office not to carry your mail if you're a member of the Pirate Party.
The problem isn't enforceability. Everybody knows it's unenforceable. The problem is the precedent it sets. The US would be saying that all foreign websites have to comply with US law. Now what happens when foreign governments say that all US websites have to comply with all foreign laws?
Moreover, where's the motivation for Apple to "choke" the internet? How does that make them more money?
They have "partners" like the Sony and AT&T. If one of them wants that a certain app not be allowed (e.g. can you currently get a BitTorrent client for an iPhone?), in theory Apple can allow it anyway. But that risks making their partner unhappy, and unhappy partners can charge higher rates or start looking to do business with other people. In other words, not banning the stuff their partners want banned can end up costing them money. Which gets weighed against the approximately zero dollars that one single (possibly free) disruptive app would make them, and the app gets banned.
Yes and how is that any different between Apple and other vendors?
If anyone can make an app and post it on their web page, and anyone with an open phone can go to that web page and install the app, there is no curator to lean on to have the app banned.
The danger of market dominance of a single company is abuse. The danger of market dominance of a business model is umm, well there really isn't one. Does your vendor lock you down too much? Get a different vendor.
And if the business model of every vendor is to "lock you down too much"? Competition only works when the competitors don't have sufficiently shared interests to all behave in the undesired way.
Ahh, but they can. With multiple vendors that means there is interoperability and if one doesn't pick up a disruptive new app, a new player can enter the market suing it as a differentiator and start to take market share. That's how the free market works.
That only works if the new app, before it has an installed base or network effects, can provide enough value to at least one of the companies to outweigh the pressure being applied to have it banned.
Apple doesn't limit apps because app sales are so profitable.
That wasn't really my point. It doesn't really matter whether they're making megabucks from selling apps, or even why they're limiting what apps can be installed. The point about network effects is valid: They need to maintain a high volume of sales in order to make sure developers have a large installed base and therefore an incentive to make apps for their devices, since nobody is going to pay 3X the price for a device that does mostly the same thing as the cheaper one and has fewer good apps. Which implies they may have to compete no price in a way they don't elsewhere, which means apps could become a larger part of their revenue.
But none of that really changes the result anyway, which is that they control what apps people can make for their devices. Even if consumers want a curated experience, it still puts the curator up as a choke point for other players to kill disruptive innovation. Hollywood can say they don't want P2P apps or Slingbox clients. Telecoms can say they don't want VOIP apps. Governments can prohibit applications that don't have back doors built in.
The best argument you're impliedly making is that Apple is going to willingly relegate itself to the high end, therefore not achieve market dominance and therefore ensure that there is a choice of open platforms at the low end. But that is not guaranteed. If "everyone but geeks" wants the curated experience, what matters isn't market dominance of a single company, it's market dominance of that business model. No one can write a disruptive app if Apple owns the entire market and rejects the app, but neither can anyone write one if two or three "competitors" with the same business model together own the market and each rejects the disruptive app.
Apple right now and for the foreseeable future makes their money selling hardware.
This is less true as time goes on. Apple's traditional business model is to sell Apple software tied to expensive hardware with high margins. But now they're getting a cut of everything sold in their App Stores. Once there are Android phones available for $150 or less, Apple has to decide whether compete at that price point. The old Apple would say no. The new Apple has to weigh the lower margins on hardware against all the revenue they would lose by having fewer iOS devices out in the world to sell apps for, plus the network effects when they sell more devices and therefore people write more and better apps for them and therefore they sell more devices and more apps.
But the trouble for freedom with that model is that it's predicated on Apple getting a cut of all the software that anyone sells for an Apple device. Which means you can't just make software and distribute it on your own, you have to sell it through Apple. And then Apple gets to break out the ban hammer whenever they want if your app is disruptive to the business model of Apple or Hollywood or the phone company or the Chinese government or anybody else who can exercise more leverage over Apple than Apple benefits from selling your app.
Something I've come to see and realize over the years (yeah I'm getting a little older) is that as long as the market is free, there will always be competition. Always. No matter how big, no matter how dominant a company might seem, there is always some other equally big and successful company - usually in a slightly different market and looking for new opportunities.
The example I like to use in refutation of this is agriculture. Assume for a moment a world without antitrust laws. The most successful agribusiness corporation decides that it should reinvest all of its profits into buying more farmland, if necessary by buying its competitors outright. Some number of years later it owns all the arable farmland. All. As in people are planning to knock down buildings in order to have a place to start a small farm to compete with them, except that every time they do, the company offers them five times the value of the land so they can keep their monopoly.
How is that monopoly, once established, ever going to end without government intervention?
And it's hardly limited to farmland. Any time government grants a property right in a scarce resource, that is the long-term consequence: Land, wireless spectrum, copyright, patents, it doesn't matter. Someone with enough money can buy up all of the resources and use the government-granted monopoly on the resource as a cash cow and leverage market dominance into other industries.
Look at the wireless industry: A few major companies own all the spectrum allocated for consumer wireless. When more goes up for auction, the incumbents buy all of it -- and right now we're at a point when spectrum is being reallocated. Once it's gone, it's gone; at least as long as the government doesn't intervene by revoking their licenses. No opportunity would be left for a new wireless company. And so the oligopolists do their thing: Discouraging unlocked phones, preventing use of 802.11 to make VOIP phone calls, mandatory updates, you can't have root on your own phone and if you do you're a criminal, etc.
The trouble is that if a resource is scarce and treated as property, sooner or later a single entity will attempt and succeed at buying all of it. And that situation, once reached, is exceptionally stable. Having a monopoly on a resource raises its value to the monopolist since it allows monopoly prices to be charged, which means the monopolist never has an incentive to sell part of the resource to a prospective competitor.
And antitrust as it is today isn't much more than a band aid. It stops AT&T from merging with Verizon, but it doesn't allow a third party to start a new wireless carrier once all the spectrum is allocated to the incumbents.
But the "monopolies" from TFA are different: They aren't property-based monopolies, they're network effects-based. In theory those work more like what you're imagining -- especially if the government doesn't "interfere" by allowing e.g. Facebook to sue someone who copies all of the data out of a user's Facebook account with the user's permission and imports it into a competing service, or by granting thousands of stupid patents that allow incumbents to sue anyone who makes any competing products whatsoever. Not that we're so lucky.
However, when we're talking about a "deal" to settle a lawsuit, it's a whole different game.
The only reason to ever license a patent is to avoid a lawsuit by the patent holder. What difference does it make if the agreement is made before or after they file the lawsuit?
The only legitimate reason an agreement must be kept secret is to cover illegal activity
No it isn't. It allows parties to negotiate a deal which is more favorable to one of them than the other usually gives to most people, without causing everyone who the second party negotiates with in the future to demand the same deal.
Something I've learned as an old IT guy is that employee comfort is very under-rated. How comfortable an employee is with their work space is critical to productivity. I'm talking everything from the chair they sit in to what's on their monitor. If they're comfortable with windows and office and become uncomfortable with gmail and open office then you'll just kill productivity and whatever money you saved will be meaningless.
These things are relative. New software has a learning curve, but that is a one-time cost. If you can transition to something that, once people learn it, is just as good, and will save you a million dollars a year in license fees from now until the end of time, let's not be too focused on quarterly profits to see the big picture eh?
Having an open Wi-Fi is not any more an open invitation than having an unlocked door is an invitation for strangers to walk into your house.
If you unlock the door to your house and there is a sign out from that says "Open House" you're going to have a damn sight of trouble trying to have anyone prosecuted for trespassing.
Wow. He cut taxes for the rich, lowered food/water standards, gutted constitutional protections from unreasonable search, invaded two states and threatened more. And now he's called left wing by trolls? Life is harsh sometimes.
This is the problem: Those are not Republican ideals. Republicans are not supposed to be in favor of foreign occupations and violating the constitution. What happened during Bush was not Republicans, it was lunatics who called themselves Republicans. And many of them still do. But let's not forget what Republicans are supposed to be, because otherwise who is going to do that stuff? I ask in all seriousness, who is going repeal the Patriot Act if the people who call themselves "Republicans" are to the left of the Democrats (in the sense that "the left" wants expansion of government power)?
All of those agencies do what they are supposed to. Are you complaining because they aren't 100% absolutely perfect in every way? If that's your standard, then I concede the point.
Obviously they are neither 100% effective nor 100% useless. The real question is, are we getting our money's worth?
And the answer is obviously complicated. Take social security: The basic premise is sound, and it undoubtedly helps millions of people. But at the same time, the program as implemented is just too expensive, and the structure of social security tax is preposterous. Raise the retirement age, impose means testing, eliminate social security tax by raising the income tax by an equivalent amount. Then it would be a sensible program. Right now the government is mailing social security checks to millionaires who paid a lower social security tax rate while they were working than the poor people who receive smaller checks. That's not a smart use of tax dollars.
What was really amazing was the number of medicare recipients protesting against universal healthcare.
Why is that even slightly unexpected? Providing government healthcare to more people will raise everyone's taxes but not provide a benefit for anyone who already has it. They're hypocrites, not idiots.
Are you kidding? EPA: Still can't get 40 year old coal power plants offline or cleaned up. FCC: Still no network neutrality. FTC: Do we even pretend to enforce antitrust laws anymore?
But he said "programs" rather than "agencies" anyway. And there are plenty of failed programs too: No Child Left Behind, Social Security and Medicare (you like it, but can you pay for it?), and let's not even get started on the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer-funded security theater industry.
Slashdot Mirror
How to fix? The obvious fix would be signing the flash BIOS, but this completely locks out homebrewers wanting to do something different.
Why not just have the hardware detect an unsigned BIOS and print a message on every boot that says "Modified firmware detected, press F7 for ten seconds to restore to factory default"? Then you can modify it if you like and you just ignore the message.
I'm pretty sure the Republicans are right there with them on that one.
I wouldn't be so sure. The Republicans are rarely, if ever, the ones introducing those bills. They just don't fight them because it doesn't win them points with enough people -- it's not like Republicans can expect to win over a bunch of ACLU members by sticking up for free speech while they're condemning abortion and gay marriage. And the individual candidates don't want to piss off the media companies for voting against their darling censorship bills if the Democrats have a majority and the bill is going to pass either way.
Which is simply to say, that kind of stuff is less likely to happen with a divided Congress, since it generally won't get introduced on the side controlled by Republicans.
1. The Republicans are against any regulation of companies at all, so they'll never support it.
You mean like Bush-appointee Michael Copps?
What Republicans are against is "a way to censor 'unpopular' thought from the 'net (read: anything remotely conservative)." Which is why that will never pass. Real network neutrality, EFF-style? Neither party has anything to lose -- what will probably happen is that after the Republicans are done demonizing "network neutrality" (i.e. Democrats censoring Republicans), someone will come up with what we call network neutrality, but call it something else, and then everyone will agree to it but the ISPs.
This isn't a fight between Democrats and Republicans. It's a fight between people and lobbyists.
To play devil's advocate: the fact that I didn't lock my front door is not a reasonable assumption that I am inviting you to enter my apartment.
I can never understand why people keep pushing this argument. The assumption in the analogy is that the door leads to a private space, because otherwise the analogy establishes nothing: an unlocked door that leads to a public space (a public parking garage, a library, a store) very much does mean that you can go inside. You're assuming that the door leads somewhere the public is not allowed to access even though that's the point of contention you're trying to establish.
It isn't about doors. An locked door explicitly shows that you are not allowed access without authorization (i.e. a key). A lack of one doesn't automatically mean that you have access, but it means you have to look at the nature of the thing.
In this case the thing is a website. It is under the control of the owner. An agent of the owner. It isn't a door, it's a doorman. If a member of the public goes to the website and says, "give me this page," and that person is not supposed to have access to that page, the server is supposed to respond with HTTP 503 FORBIDDEN. If the public is supposed to have access, it is supposed to respond with "OK" and provide the page.
Now, yes, if you put your secret documents on a publicly-accessible web server, you did not intend for the public to access them. But you did instruct your equipment to allow them to. You can't mistakenly pay the New York Times to run an ad about your new product which was supposed to stay secret for another six months and then expect any recourse when the Times publishes the ad and the public reads it. Newspapers are public. Websites are public. You don't want it publicly accessible, don't configure your website to make it publicly accessible. Is it really that hard?
I get so sick and tired of people beating up on people for wanting to close tax loopholes. Ireland's taxes do not exist for corporate reasons. They exist to do one thing: make money. If they can't make money, they can't exist. Trashing them is not going to change that, it's only going to make you sound like you don't understand basic economics.
The problem is that "tax loopholes" exist for a reason. They're intentional -- it's how legislators create a de facto low corporate tax rate without getting crucified for voting for a bill that lowers the corporate tax rate.
Governments really have three options: They can have a high corporate tax rate with loopholes, a high corporate tax rate with no loopholes, or a low corporate tax rate. The first is what we have now: In theory corporations pay taxes, in practice they don't. The problem with "making" them pay is that we can't actually make them -- if you can't have an operation in California which reports its profits in Ireland or Asia in order to avoid high California taxes, companies will stop building operations in California. You lose more tax revenue through capital flight than you gain through closing the loopholes.
So closing the loopholes doesn't help. The real problem is that leaving them is also stupid: If you have a 10% tax rate and some other place has a 1% tax rate, a corporation is going to report 100% of its profits in the place where it pays 1% instead of 10%. If you instead lower the tax rate to 1% then you become the destination for profit reporting and you get 1% of hundreds of billions of dollars instead of 10% of nothing.
Of course, then you run the risk of race to the bottom where the most competitive place has a 0% tax rate. But maybe that's not so bad: A lot of other countries are stupid enough to maintain higher tax rates than you. If you can attract companies and jobs with low taxes and in so doing achieve the same tax revenue from payroll and sales tax than they achieve from payroll, sales and corporate tax, you still come out ahead, do you not?
Personal opinion is that over the long haul, Android will NOT do well. They have not the control over the usage it.
Open vs. closed, open wins out over the long run. AOL vs. the web, Unix vs. Linux, closed winning is an outlier. It tends to happen in short bursts: A company that wants control comes up with something cool, they keep their control for a while, then people who don't want to live under someone else's thumb create a substitute for their product and the controlling party either has to open their platform (as Microsoft has generally done just enough to stay on top) or lose market share to the open competitor.
Right now the parties pushing for control (Apple excepted) are mostly the carriers. But some day soon someone is going to start selling an Android phone for $200 at retail that allows you to make Google Voice calls and browse the web, both using 802.11, whether you have a carrier or not. Then the 80% of people who are almost never out of range of an 802.11 access point are going to start wondering WTF they're paying $500/year to the carriers for. The only thing stopping that from happening right now is that the phones cost $600 instead of $200 at retail, and people would rather pay $50/month for two years for plan+phone than pay $600 up front. But eventually the price of the phones will come down.
At that point the carriers lose their leverage. The advantage in having a carrier at all is no longer to have a mobile device or make phone calls or browse the web or use mobile apps, since you can have those without them. It's so that you can use Google Maps from wherever you are when you get lost, or call a tow truck from the side of the road. For which paying a one-time fee for non-expiring prepaid for emergencies starts to look pretty attractive compared to a $500/year plan that you only use once every few months when you're outside WiFi range.
And if we still have open phones popularly available when that day comes, the carriers aren't going to be in a position to tell you what updates you can install or which browser you can use any more than Comcast is in a position today to stop you from using Ubuntu on your PC.
You mean like Linux helped to bring down locked alternatives like Windows and Mac OS. Yeah, that's working out amazingly well as a plan, especially for the desktop.
You're forgetting what keeps Linux off the desktop: Third party apps that run on Windows but not Linux and training costs for learning a new environment. Do you expect those to be a problem for Android? There is no quarter century history of third party Win32 applications or 90% installed base of Microsoft software that people already know how to use. Everything is new. It's a level playing field instead of one in which incumbents use a huge installed base plus lock-in to keep out new competitors.
Now, that doesn't mean Android is going to win. But it means the comparison to Linux On The Desktop is inapt.
"Harvard Business Review" needs more research
No kidding. Google is an advertising company. Every company wants the markets complementary to their primary products and services to be commodity markets, because it lowers prices (which increases demand) in those markets, which in turn increases demand for the complementary products and services the company sells. And keeping the margins low and competition high in those markets ensures that you don't get a company like Apple who could potentially leverage a large market share in devices into a competing advertising business.
No matter if you remove "lawyer" as a profession, there will always be trained legal experts.
True, but much of what draws sociopaths to the profession is that it is lucrative. And it is lucrative because supply is artificially scarce due to unnecessarily difficult licensing requirements (which, in turn, involve unnecessarily high education requirements). And that is half the problem, because you get a settlement letter demanding $5000 and it would cost $25,000+ in attorneys' fees to make it go away if you're innocent, which leads to these extortion mills because being innocent and paying the settlement is five times cheaper than being innocent and winning in court.
Make it so any paralegal can compete with the people with $100,000+ in student loans and the cost of hiring one will be less than it costs to get your sink to stop leaking.
Let's break it down:
* "stole my words"
* "stole my idea"
* "stole my code"
These are all the thing you're trying to defend, so any argument that says it's right because these things are right is circular.
* "stole my focus"
* "stole my heart"
* "stole a look"
These are all acts not punishable by law or otherwise actionable. This is not the meaning the MPAA is going for. They clearly don't intend for anyone to hear "steal a movie" and think "steal a look." They run ads that say "you wouldn't steal a car" and equate grand larceny with downloading a movie. Their intent is not to use a legally spurious colloquialism, their intent is to conflate copyright infringement with criminal thievery.
Devil's advocate: those do in fact include copyright.
They also include operating the Post Office. That doesn't mean Congress can pass a law requiring the Post Office not to carry your mail if you're a member of the Pirate Party.
The problem isn't enforceability. Everybody knows it's unenforceable. The problem is the precedent it sets. The US would be saying that all foreign websites have to comply with US law. Now what happens when foreign governments say that all US websites have to comply with all foreign laws?
Moreover, where's the motivation for Apple to "choke" the internet? How does that make them more money?
They have "partners" like the Sony and AT&T. If one of them wants that a certain app not be allowed (e.g. can you currently get a BitTorrent client for an iPhone?), in theory Apple can allow it anyway. But that risks making their partner unhappy, and unhappy partners can charge higher rates or start looking to do business with other people. In other words, not banning the stuff their partners want banned can end up costing them money. Which gets weighed against the approximately zero dollars that one single (possibly free) disruptive app would make them, and the app gets banned.
Yes and how is that any different between Apple and other vendors?
If anyone can make an app and post it on their web page, and anyone with an open phone can go to that web page and install the app, there is no curator to lean on to have the app banned.
The danger of market dominance of a single company is abuse. The danger of market dominance of a business model is umm, well there really isn't one. Does your vendor lock you down too much? Get a different vendor.
And if the business model of every vendor is to "lock you down too much"? Competition only works when the competitors don't have sufficiently shared interests to all behave in the undesired way.
Ahh, but they can. With multiple vendors that means there is interoperability and if one doesn't pick up a disruptive new app, a new player can enter the market suing it as a differentiator and start to take market share. That's how the free market works.
That only works if the new app, before it has an installed base or network effects, can provide enough value to at least one of the companies to outweigh the pressure being applied to have it banned.
Apple doesn't limit apps because app sales are so profitable.
That wasn't really my point. It doesn't really matter whether they're making megabucks from selling apps, or even why they're limiting what apps can be installed. The point about network effects is valid: They need to maintain a high volume of sales in order to make sure developers have a large installed base and therefore an incentive to make apps for their devices, since nobody is going to pay 3X the price for a device that does mostly the same thing as the cheaper one and has fewer good apps. Which implies they may have to compete no price in a way they don't elsewhere, which means apps could become a larger part of their revenue.
But none of that really changes the result anyway, which is that they control what apps people can make for their devices. Even if consumers want a curated experience, it still puts the curator up as a choke point for other players to kill disruptive innovation. Hollywood can say they don't want P2P apps or Slingbox clients. Telecoms can say they don't want VOIP apps. Governments can prohibit applications that don't have back doors built in.
The best argument you're impliedly making is that Apple is going to willingly relegate itself to the high end, therefore not achieve market dominance and therefore ensure that there is a choice of open platforms at the low end. But that is not guaranteed. If "everyone but geeks" wants the curated experience, what matters isn't market dominance of a single company, it's market dominance of that business model. No one can write a disruptive app if Apple owns the entire market and rejects the app, but neither can anyone write one if two or three "competitors" with the same business model together own the market and each rejects the disruptive app.
Apple right now and for the foreseeable future makes their money selling hardware.
This is less true as time goes on. Apple's traditional business model is to sell Apple software tied to expensive hardware with high margins. But now they're getting a cut of everything sold in their App Stores. Once there are Android phones available for $150 or less, Apple has to decide whether compete at that price point. The old Apple would say no. The new Apple has to weigh the lower margins on hardware against all the revenue they would lose by having fewer iOS devices out in the world to sell apps for, plus the network effects when they sell more devices and therefore people write more and better apps for them and therefore they sell more devices and more apps.
But the trouble for freedom with that model is that it's predicated on Apple getting a cut of all the software that anyone sells for an Apple device. Which means you can't just make software and distribute it on your own, you have to sell it through Apple. And then Apple gets to break out the ban hammer whenever they want if your app is disruptive to the business model of Apple or Hollywood or the phone company or the Chinese government or anybody else who can exercise more leverage over Apple than Apple benefits from selling your app.
Something I've come to see and realize over the years (yeah I'm getting a little older) is that as long as the market is free, there will always be competition. Always. No matter how big, no matter how dominant a company might seem, there is always some other equally big and successful company - usually in a slightly different market and looking for new opportunities.
The example I like to use in refutation of this is agriculture. Assume for a moment a world without antitrust laws. The most successful agribusiness corporation decides that it should reinvest all of its profits into buying more farmland, if necessary by buying its competitors outright. Some number of years later it owns all the arable farmland. All. As in people are planning to knock down buildings in order to have a place to start a small farm to compete with them, except that every time they do, the company offers them five times the value of the land so they can keep their monopoly.
How is that monopoly, once established, ever going to end without government intervention?
And it's hardly limited to farmland. Any time government grants a property right in a scarce resource, that is the long-term consequence: Land, wireless spectrum, copyright, patents, it doesn't matter. Someone with enough money can buy up all of the resources and use the government-granted monopoly on the resource as a cash cow and leverage market dominance into other industries.
Look at the wireless industry: A few major companies own all the spectrum allocated for consumer wireless. When more goes up for auction, the incumbents buy all of it -- and right now we're at a point when spectrum is being reallocated. Once it's gone, it's gone; at least as long as the government doesn't intervene by revoking their licenses. No opportunity would be left for a new wireless company. And so the oligopolists do their thing: Discouraging unlocked phones, preventing use of 802.11 to make VOIP phone calls, mandatory updates, you can't have root on your own phone and if you do you're a criminal, etc.
The trouble is that if a resource is scarce and treated as property, sooner or later a single entity will attempt and succeed at buying all of it. And that situation, once reached, is exceptionally stable. Having a monopoly on a resource raises its value to the monopolist since it allows monopoly prices to be charged, which means the monopolist never has an incentive to sell part of the resource to a prospective competitor.
And antitrust as it is today isn't much more than a band aid. It stops AT&T from merging with Verizon, but it doesn't allow a third party to start a new wireless carrier once all the spectrum is allocated to the incumbents.
But the "monopolies" from TFA are different: They aren't property-based monopolies, they're network effects-based. In theory those work more like what you're imagining -- especially if the government doesn't "interfere" by allowing e.g. Facebook to sue someone who copies all of the data out of a user's Facebook account with the user's permission and imports it into a competing service, or by granting thousands of stupid patents that allow incumbents to sue anyone who makes any competing products whatsoever. Not that we're so lucky.
However, when we're talking about a "deal" to settle a lawsuit, it's a whole different game.
The only reason to ever license a patent is to avoid a lawsuit by the patent holder. What difference does it make if the agreement is made before or after they file the lawsuit?
The only legitimate reason an agreement must be kept secret is to cover illegal activity
No it isn't. It allows parties to negotiate a deal which is more favorable to one of them than the other usually gives to most people, without causing everyone who the second party negotiates with in the future to demand the same deal.
Something I've learned as an old IT guy is that employee comfort is very under-rated. How comfortable an employee is with their work space is critical to productivity. I'm talking everything from the chair they sit in to what's on their monitor. If they're comfortable with windows and office and become uncomfortable with gmail and open office then you'll just kill productivity and whatever money you saved will be meaningless.
These things are relative. New software has a learning curve, but that is a one-time cost. If you can transition to something that, once people learn it, is just as good, and will save you a million dollars a year in license fees from now until the end of time, let's not be too focused on quarterly profits to see the big picture eh?
Having an open Wi-Fi is not any more an open invitation than having an unlocked door is an invitation for strangers to walk into your house.
If you unlock the door to your house and there is a sign out from that says "Open House" you're going to have a damn sight of trouble trying to have anyone prosecuted for trespassing.
Wow. He cut taxes for the rich, lowered food/water standards, gutted constitutional protections from unreasonable search, invaded two states and threatened more. And now he's called left wing by trolls? Life is harsh sometimes.
This is the problem: Those are not Republican ideals. Republicans are not supposed to be in favor of foreign occupations and violating the constitution. What happened during Bush was not Republicans, it was lunatics who called themselves Republicans. And many of them still do. But let's not forget what Republicans are supposed to be, because otherwise who is going to do that stuff? I ask in all seriousness, who is going repeal the Patriot Act if the people who call themselves "Republicans" are to the left of the Democrats (in the sense that "the left" wants expansion of government power)?
All of those agencies do what they are supposed to. Are you complaining because they aren't 100% absolutely perfect in every way? If that's your standard, then I concede the point.
Obviously they are neither 100% effective nor 100% useless. The real question is, are we getting our money's worth?
And the answer is obviously complicated. Take social security: The basic premise is sound, and it undoubtedly helps millions of people. But at the same time, the program as implemented is just too expensive, and the structure of social security tax is preposterous. Raise the retirement age, impose means testing, eliminate social security tax by raising the income tax by an equivalent amount. Then it would be a sensible program. Right now the government is mailing social security checks to millionaires who paid a lower social security tax rate while they were working than the poor people who receive smaller checks. That's not a smart use of tax dollars.
What was really amazing was the number of medicare recipients protesting against universal healthcare.
Why is that even slightly unexpected? Providing government healthcare to more people will raise everyone's taxes but not provide a benefit for anyone who already has it. They're hypocrites, not idiots.
Are you kidding? EPA: Still can't get 40 year old coal power plants offline or cleaned up. FCC: Still no network neutrality. FTC: Do we even pretend to enforce antitrust laws anymore?
But he said "programs" rather than "agencies" anyway. And there are plenty of failed programs too: No Child Left Behind, Social Security and Medicare (you like it, but can you pay for it?), and let's not even get started on the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer-funded security theater industry.
Who is talking about natural rights here? I thought we were talking about copyright.