Street Figter 2 was the first game with any real depth that let you play against another human.
Ahem. Karate Champ. Ahem.
I mean I know it's old school, but don't you whippersnappers know what mame is:?)
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
·
· Score: 2
name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet. Sure, we're communicating faster, but has it actually provided a clear social change? Not to say it never will, but so far there just hasn't been much.
I don't think you can ignore Napster. A whole generation got to see, for a brief moment, what the world could be like if no one owned information. Yes yes, I know someone will complain that without intellectual property no one would bother to have any intellect. But that's not the point- Napster was a fait accomplit, and the terms of the debate have been changed forever.
You know, conservative Senator from Utah, former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee? I believe he even helped write the DMCA.
Go look up Hilary Rosen's Senate testimony regarding Napster, and read the exchange between them. Orrin says basically "is it fair use if I make a copy for my wife to play in her car?" Rosen hems and haws, and Hatch says something to the effect of "It is."
Now, sharing anonymously over a network is a whole different ball of wax, and that's what's got the RIAA and MPAA in a tizzy.
Of course I am entitled to make a living programming
Are you entitled to make a living as a one-string violinist, even if there's no market for it?
What if the government started handing out one-string violinist jobs. Then you may be legally, but not morally, entitled.
You're not entitled to anything in a market economy, you provide a service to meet a demand or you pray for a responsible safety net. But idea ownership creates government-sponsored monopolies which artificially inflate the value of programming skill. That's a bad thing in the long run, even if it serves your narrow interest now.
A patent is the exact opposite of propietary knowledge. Its supposed to promote the science of progress and the useful arts.
It is supposed to do that, but it does not. It locks that knowledge away (in plain view, no less!) for 17 years, which in the software field is nearly always longer than the useful life of the knowledge. (LZW and RSA being notable exceptions) Consider Wizards of the Coast's patent on collectible card games and Amazon's patent on one-click shopping. Engines of innovation they are not.
In a monopoly, a single company is the sole provider of a product or service and has no competition. The basic idea of licensing a product is to provide other channels of distribution for that product. That channel could even compete with the original provider much in the same way that ISP's compete when they are sourced from the same provider. The secondary distribution channel is the opposite of a single provider. So to create a monopoly, the company has to explictly disallow the licensing of the product. That decision is made without the help of any government sponsors.
That is a weak argument. It's like saying "Standard oil contracted out with local gas stations, so they weren't a monopoly". The fact that they *need not* license the technology for which they've been granted a monopoly is sufficient to give them monopoly bargaining power.
Now lets say that the inventor offers a free public license for anyone to use the patent. In this scenario, there is no cost associated with utilizing the invention and now the ability to use it is free as well. In this case, where is your contention?
This is fine, so long as the license truly is free. It is the abuse of idea ownership, not the mere fact of it, which is the problem. If patent law required that everyone do this, there would be no problem with patent law. The problem with idea ownership is practical, not metaphysical or religious.
It must be with trade secrets. Thats where information is never released and anyone is free to determine the secret and use it. They just have to be clever enough to use their freedoms to figure it out.
I think you're saying "trade secret law would flourish if patents went away"? I'm not totally sure. But although keeping secrets is not a very friendly thing to do, so long as others are not prohibited from independently discovering the secret, it doesn't seem nearly as sinister as patent and copyright law are today.
This is a worthwhile discussion. But I think you're wrong.
The difference in our analogies is that my tree isn't explicitly owned by anyone- in fact, I imply that everyone can eat from it, but the caretakers must make sure it bears the most fruit possible by pruning it correctly.
Your analogy implies that only one pereson is gonna get the fruit, and by right it should be the person that owns the tree.
But your analogy implies that the person owned the tree before it bore fruit. However, it's more akin to someone walking up to a tree in a forest and announcing to everyone that can hear, "I found this tree first, therefore it's mine and you can't have any of its fruit. In fact, if you see another tree that looks kind of like it, you can't have any fruit off of it either unless you check with me first."
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" maxim applies here. You imply that the person owns the tree because they did the work to find the codec. But the I argue that the finding of the codec is but a branch-node of centuries of science, and that the degree to which the inventors are responsible for it (and, under current idea ownership law, all ideas that are related to it), is minimal. Hence my analogy about pruning branches- the momentum of science is strong, but each time someone owns an idea, they remove a whole class of related ideas from the commons, and magnify the entry barrier for those individuals who do science not for profit but for the good of humanity.
I fail to see why it was necessary to throw in a dig at this company that is doing neat things just because they want to profit from their invention.
It's not because they want to profit from their invention, it's because they want to control other people's use of the codec just because they publicly identified it first. There are a number of ways to get paid without abusing our idea ownership system (street performer protocol, support contracts, etc.) that don't violate the freedom of others by taking a government-sponsored monopoly.
I guess it's true what they say, if you have to ask, you'll never know. Proprietary knowledge *is* bad precisely because it's not free. It cuts off an entire branch of human inquiry, like pruning all the best branches off a tree before they've been given the chance to mature and bear fruit.
Even worse, the beast may have infringed on Be's trademarks.
According to legal opinion in Redmond, "Lindows" may confuse consumers into thinking they're getting "Windows". So switching the first letter of your product name with that of another player is bad, right?
Well, "Be" only had two letters to begin with, and MS went and took one of them for their shiny new consumer OS! It's like the David and Bathsheba of the software world. Truly shocking.
Capitalism is a way to remove individual bias from the distribution of resources by allowing markets to decide prices among competing vendors. Monopolies cause this system to fail because one person decides the price of a given good.
The idea ownership system people refer to as "intellectual property" is nothing but a set of government-sponsored monopolies over goods.
Intellectual property requires a monopoly, monopolies are inconsistent with free markets. As Linus is fond of saying, "...repeat until enlightened."
It would be like the end of the Dark Crystal when the Skeksis and the Mystics merged into those weird light-beings after the restoration of the crystal.
The only question is, if Craig Mundie falls into a pit of fire, does ESR disappear, or is it RMS?
coyote-san has the right idea. We hear about it all the time- Teenager suspected of piracy has every computer in her home taken by the authorities, is told it is evidence and may not be returned for 180 days or more.
They ought to just stroll right into Redmond and do the same damned thing.
Maybe there'd be a WACO-style standoff. Think of the tv movie they could make out of that. Maybe they'd send in Noah Wiley (reprising his role as Steve Jobs) to try to convince Bill Gates to surrender the source code peacefully.
Or not. But I can still dream, can't I?
Maybe we could get the guy who played the 1st Stage Guild Navigator in Dune to inform Bill that he'll be "living out the rest of his life in a pain amplifier" instead of sending Noah Wiley in. Add in a dramatic scene where Bill reveals his Borg machinery and you'd have a hell of a TV movie, even if none of it will ever come true:)
As if it weren't obvious, this has tremendous implications. But perhaps it's worth pointing one of them out.
Currently, abortion is legal until the fetus has reached a point of viability- that is, until it could conceivably live outside of its mother's womb on its own. Advances in medical science have been pushing that date back slowly since Roe v. Wade, but this is very big.
It's a pretty arbitrary line to begin with, and this makes it even farther from being grounded in modern science.
I'm not interested in having the yet another abortion debate, but I am curious how folks think this will change the rhetorical landscape for politicians, religous figures and ethicists. And, of course, for women.
It was a certificate program from the start. Everyone in the program already had a bachelor's degree in something (it was an admission requirement- there were a few lawyers, doctors, and other advanced degree-holders in the mix as well).
We didn't do it for the piece of paper. We did it because we wanted to know.
You don't need permission to mirror them. They are under an open license. Of course it would be polite of you to request a hard disk instead of leeching the bandwidth, but there it is.
Perhaps individuals would like to volunteer to host only one course each.
Regarding a sane format, does anyone have any useful advice for converting realvideo files to a more sane format? I would love to hear how it is done. I have tried with very little success to convert them to mpeg (form which one could, presumably, convert them to quicktime/whatever).
Slashdot Mirror
News flash, public: The Sun, our source of life and energy, is "Nuclear". In fact, it's just one big "Reaction".
SO as long as you don't launch the rocket until it's as far away as the sun, we've got nothing to fear but sunburn itself.
Street Figter 2 was the first game with any real depth that let you play against another human.
:?)
Ahem. Karate Champ. Ahem.
I mean I know it's old school, but don't you whippersnappers know what mame is
name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet. Sure, we're communicating faster, but has it actually provided a clear social change? Not to say it never will, but so far there just hasn't been much.
I don't think you can ignore Napster. A whole generation got to see, for a brief moment, what the world could be like if no one owned information. Yes yes, I know someone will complain that without intellectual property no one would bother to have any intellect. But that's not the point- Napster was a fait accomplit, and the terms of the debate have been changed forever.
Pain is still optional but for you, recommended.
:)
You know, conservative Senator from Utah, former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee? I believe he even helped write the DMCA.
Go look up Hilary Rosen's Senate testimony regarding Napster, and read the exchange between them. Orrin says basically "is it fair use if I make a copy for my wife to play in her car?" Rosen hems and haws, and Hatch says something to the effect of "It is."
Now, sharing anonymously over a network is a whole different ball of wax, and that's what's got the RIAA and MPAA in a tizzy.
I thought WindowsXP solved all our DOS problems...
ba-dum pshhhhhh
Of course I am entitled to make a living programming
Are you entitled to make a living as a one-string violinist, even if there's no market for it?
What if the government started handing out one-string violinist jobs. Then you may be legally, but not morally, entitled.
You're not entitled to anything in a market economy, you provide a service to meet a demand or you pray for a responsible safety net. But idea ownership creates government-sponsored monopolies which artificially inflate the value of programming skill. That's a bad thing in the long run, even if it serves your narrow interest now.
Under slavery, many people labored, one person benefitted.
Under the patent system, the science of centuries culminates in a particular invention, one person benefits.
I'm all for rewarding ideas. But giving people a monopoly over those ideas is not the way to do it.
How the fuck are people supposed to support themselves by writing software if everything has to be free?
I suppose the same way plantation owners supported themselves when everyone had to be free.
Thank you for your relatively respectful reply.
A patent is the exact opposite of propietary knowledge. Its supposed to promote the science of progress and the useful arts.
It is supposed to do that, but it does not. It locks that knowledge away (in plain view, no less!) for 17 years, which in the software field is nearly always longer than the useful life of the knowledge. (LZW and RSA being notable exceptions) Consider Wizards of the Coast's patent on collectible card games and Amazon's patent on one-click shopping. Engines of innovation they are not.
In a monopoly, a single company is the sole provider of a product or service and has no competition. The basic idea of licensing a product is to provide other channels of distribution for that product. That channel could even compete with the original provider much in the same way that ISP's compete when they are sourced from the same provider. The secondary distribution channel is the opposite of a single provider. So to create a monopoly, the company has to explictly disallow the licensing of the product. That decision is made without the help of any government sponsors.
That is a weak argument. It's like saying "Standard oil contracted out with local gas stations, so they weren't a monopoly". The fact that they *need not* license the technology for which they've been granted a monopoly is sufficient to give them monopoly bargaining power.
Now lets say that the inventor offers a free public license for anyone to use the patent. In this scenario, there is no cost associated with utilizing the invention and now the ability to use it is free as well. In this case, where is your contention?
This is fine, so long as the license truly is free. It is the abuse of idea ownership, not the mere fact of it, which is the problem. If patent law required that everyone do this, there would be no problem with patent law. The problem with idea ownership is practical, not metaphysical or religious.
It must be with trade secrets. Thats where information is never released and anyone is free to determine the secret and use it. They just have to be clever enough to use their freedoms to figure it out.
I think you're saying "trade secret law would flourish if patents went away"? I'm not totally sure. But although keeping secrets is not a very friendly thing to do, so long as others are not prohibited from independently discovering the secret, it doesn't seem nearly as sinister as patent and copyright law are today.
This is a worthwhile discussion. But I think you're wrong.
The difference in our analogies is that my tree isn't explicitly owned by anyone- in fact, I imply that everyone can eat from it, but the caretakers must make sure it bears the most fruit possible by pruning it correctly.
Your analogy implies that only one pereson is gonna get the fruit, and by right it should be the person that owns the tree.
But your analogy implies that the person owned the tree before it bore fruit. However, it's more akin to someone walking up to a tree in a forest and announcing to everyone that can hear, "I found this tree first, therefore it's mine and you can't have any of its fruit. In fact, if you see another tree that looks kind of like it, you can't have any fruit off of it either unless you check with me first."
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" maxim applies here. You imply that the person owns the tree because they did the work to find the codec. But the I argue that the finding of the codec is but a branch-node of centuries of science, and that the degree to which the inventors are responsible for it (and, under current idea ownership law, all ideas that are related to it), is minimal. Hence my analogy about pruning branches- the momentum of science is strong, but each time someone owns an idea, they remove a whole class of related ideas from the commons, and magnify the entry barrier for those individuals who do science not for profit but for the good of humanity.
I fail to see why it was necessary to throw in a dig at this company that is doing neat things just because they want to profit from their invention.
It's not because they want to profit from their invention, it's because they want to control other people's use of the codec just because they publicly identified it first. There are a number of ways to get paid without abusing our idea ownership system (street performer protocol, support contracts, etc.) that don't violate the freedom of others by taking a government-sponsored monopoly.
I guess it's true what they say, if you have to ask, you'll never know. Proprietary knowledge *is* bad precisely because it's not free. It cuts off an entire branch of human inquiry, like pruning all the best branches off a tree before they've been given the chance to mature and bear fruit.
Even worse, the beast may have infringed on Be's trademarks.
According to legal opinion in Redmond, "Lindows" may confuse consumers into thinking they're getting "Windows". So switching the first letter of your product name with that of another player is bad, right?
Well, "Be" only had two letters to begin with, and MS went and took one of them for their shiny new consumer OS! It's like the David and Bathsheba of the software world. Truly shocking.
Capitalism is a way to remove individual bias from the distribution of resources by allowing markets to decide prices among competing vendors. Monopolies cause this system to fail because one person decides the price of a given good.
The idea ownership system people refer to as "intellectual property" is nothing but a set of government-sponsored monopolies over goods.
Intellectual property requires a monopoly, monopolies are inconsistent with free markets. As Linus is fond of saying, "...repeat until enlightened."
It would be like the end of the Dark Crystal when the Skeksis and the Mystics merged into those weird light-beings after the restoration of the crystal.
The only question is, if Craig Mundie falls into a pit of fire, does ESR disappear, or is it RMS?
:)
ROX rox! It just rox!
Eliminate sexism from his language
I wonder if you could point me to that portion of the U.S. Code? Then we'd finally have a way to unseat that idiot from Texas!
deserves to spend some quality time with Bubba
Who mods this crap up?
Web defacement is NOT justification for prison rape. Prison rape is an unconscionable atrocity.
You may not like the guy, but even in an eye for an eye system you don't rape someone for defacing a web site. Get a soul.
coyote-san has the right idea. We hear about it all the time- Teenager suspected of piracy has every computer in her home taken by the authorities, is told it is evidence and may not be returned for 180 days or more.
:)
They ought to just stroll right into Redmond and do the same damned thing.
Maybe there'd be a WACO-style standoff. Think of the tv movie they could make out of that. Maybe they'd send in Noah Wiley (reprising his role as Steve Jobs) to try to convince Bill Gates to surrender the source code peacefully.
Or not. But I can still dream, can't I?
Maybe we could get the guy who played the 1st Stage Guild Navigator in Dune to inform Bill that he'll be "living out the rest of his life in a pain amplifier" instead of sending Noah Wiley in. Add in a dramatic scene where Bill reveals his Borg machinery and you'd have a hell of a TV movie, even if none of it will ever come true
This is like the balance between boxing and not-getting-punched-in-the-face.
If you want a free market, don't sponsor monopolies that wouldn't exist without government-approved idea ownership.
Why do I feel like these meetings are going to go over like a Mike Tyson press conference?
Bryguy
As if it weren't obvious, this has tremendous implications. But perhaps it's worth pointing one of them out.
Currently, abortion is legal until the fetus has reached a point of viability- that is, until it could conceivably live outside of its mother's womb on its own. Advances in medical science have been pushing that date back slowly since Roe v. Wade, but this is very big.
It's a pretty arbitrary line to begin with, and this makes it even farther from being grounded in modern science.
I'm not interested in having the yet another abortion debate, but I am curious how folks think this will change the rhetorical landscape for politicians, religous figures and ethicists. And, of course, for women.
The way people kick RMS around these days, you'd think he was JonKatz or something :)
It was a certificate program from the start. Everyone in the program already had a bachelor's degree in something (it was an admission requirement- there were a few lawyers, doctors, and other advanced degree-holders in the mix as well).
We didn't do it for the piece of paper. We did it because we wanted to know.
Bryguy
You don't need permission to mirror them. They are under an open license. Of course it would be polite of you to request a hard disk instead of leeching the bandwidth, but there it is.
Perhaps individuals would like to volunteer to host only one course each.
Regarding a sane format, does anyone have any useful advice for converting realvideo files to a more sane format? I would love to hear how it is done. I have tried with very little success to convert them to mpeg (form which one could, presumably, convert them to quicktime/whatever).
Bryguy