Believe me, Alex El-Ali (the videographer) got sick of hearing me complain about this. And Richard Stallman's talk was pulled from the web because he didn't want his image to appear in a proprietary format like real. (It's now available audio-only in ogg vorbis format).
I've been trying to find a convenient way to convert my collection of the videos to mpeg, but Real is pretty damned closed, and my efforts so far have involved trying to sync screen captures with audio, which have failed miserably.
The University happened and I attended it. There were some funding issues halfway through the year but they came through on their commitments.
It was a great experience and I hope that the idea will be picked up again someday by another corporation that feels guilty about its sudden wealth.
read about it at aduni.org if you're curious. You can watch/download pretty much all the lectures on line, do the problem sets, etc.
In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.
Interesting that their numbering is keeping pace with Redhat's numbering schema. Probably just a coincedence, but iirc Redhat is selling a version of PostGreSQL as the Redhat Database or somesuch.
It would be pretty funny if they started mimicking Microsoft instead: PostGreSQLXP, PostGreSQL98, PostgreSQL2000AdvancedServer, etc. But I digress.
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
You're right, I should have said "slower", rather than "older".
But then, it wasn't all that well developed of a thought to begin with.
Re:complexity of supercomputers approaching brain
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those, even using older hardware like Keanu Reeves or GW Bush.
The fact that it's law, means it's not an artifical harm. You are doing something you've agreed not to do. That means your word is worthless. They should start posting the names of the people who attempt to pirate, so that the rest of us know not to deal with them.
Think about what you're saying here. You're saying "if it's the law, it must be right". There are unjust laws, like laws that say that drinking fountains should be segregated by race. Violating these laws is not immoral.
Oh, and I could apply your theory to money theft. "They can just print more."... But that's bullshit, because it affects future value.
This is a subtle point. Currency is artificially scarce for a better reason than ideas. Currency represents the scarcity of value. Printing more of it dilutes the value of the currency. But ideas aren't like currency. Spreading ideas *increases* their social utility. It is the authors share of that value (or more often, that of the immortal corporation for whom the author works) which is diluted when the ideas are redistributed. But that's rather obvious, isn't it- if the government takes away your monopoly, your share over what you used to have a monopoly over is lessened.
But here's the catch- while the distribution of bits need not be scarce, it is the *creation* of that content which is scarce. An efficient market will reward creation but not distribution, because that's where the bottleneck lies.
Pretty much every legal system recognizes that labour has just as much value as a physical item, and you're taking their labour for free.
It's funny, people usually accuse *me* of being the marxist- I assure you, in western society people are most definitely alienated from the fruits of their labor. To some extent, we agree - the labor has value. But a "pirate" is not taking the labor. The labor's already been done. No more labor is gonna happen. That's when the paying should have happened, because that's the scarce part. Everything afterwards is just an excuse for idea ownership lawyers to make a living on the backs of the content industries, and a bizarre way to reward artists after the fact rather than allowing the simple magic of supply and demand to do its work in assigning prices.
Yes. The way commercial software is created today depends on the creation of government-sponsored monopolies.
I suggest that different forms of payment that recognize the scarcity of *creation* as opposed to *distribution* would be more efficient and spur innovation.
So, you pay in advance for writing software, or you patronize (in the good way) people who write software you like in hopes they will write more.
Not a chicken and egg problem so much as a farming methodology problem. Imagine is you bought a chicken from a farmer who demanded that you pay her every time that chicken laid an egg, and every time any chicks hatched from its eggs laid eggs, and so on? Ok maybe that metaphor just doesn't stretch that well...
You make a clever argument, and I don't think you give it much credit. But let's dissect it.
First, your premise that the penalty would be $250,000 and 5 years of jailtime is flawed. Please point to an instance where this has happened. It would be great press for free software if it did.
More likely the penalty would be a plea to buy the software. I'd bet if you studied the number of people who continue to use software that has already been created but is covered by a government-imposed monopoly (i.e., "pirate) once caught, the number would be vanishingly low.
Plus, as every criminologist knows, the penalty alone is not enough- you must multiply the severity of the penalty against the likelihood of getting caught. In this case: almost zero. And once caught; convicted. Even smaller chance now.
Also keep in mind that many of the people using this government-monoplied software are under 18 and wouldn't be subject to the most serious penalties anyway.
The real fear is not that you'll get in trouble today, but that 20-30 years down the road microsoft.gov will resurrect all the old server logs and start hunting down people who pirated software in the '90s, and torturing/enslaving them in for-profit prisons. They already outsource some of their software packaging to prisons today (Source: Michael Moore, Downsize This, p. 142), and we both know how seriously they take the justice department at this point, so it's not so far-fetched. Problem is, such a government would be so arbitrary, and most of us have already "pirated" *something* anyway, that one more infraction probably won't be the one that makes the difference.
So the math works out that if you don't feel guilty about pirating the stuff, there's not really much reason not to do it, economically speaking. Richard Posner would be shocked.
In a free market, you pay the software author to write the software, then you use it.
You don't pay *to* use it. That is not the service that the *author* provides, that is the service the software provides.
If software providers want to get paid and not rely on government monopolies over information, they have to get paid for the *creation* of software (which is scarce), not the redistribution of it (which is only scarce due to government-sponsored monopolies, modulo the cost of serving information over a peer to peer network, i.e., essentially nothing).
Fake libertarians, beware. Copyright and patent are government-imposed monopolies which disrupt the free market. Stick to your ideals.
It's not Microsoft overcharging that upsets people, it's their artificial monopoly.
In a truly free market, the government would not grant monopolies to corporations which allow them to own ideas. So maybe you'd buy your windows disk from microsoft to support their work, or maybe you'd just copy/download it, but it would be your choice.
And the price of goods would have to do with the marginal cost of their reproduction. The cost of creation of goods would have to be funded in some way other than a guaranteed government monopoly over those goods.
Linux makes it obvious that even in a market saturated with such monopolies, it's possible to motivate people to create effective software.
If no one had those monopolies, entry barriers would be lower and there would be no advantage to preventing interoperability since you couldn't sue somoene for writing software that works with yours.
What people don't like is that Microsoft wants first to control the market rather than simply to compete in it.
You can't have fair price determination when markets aren't free. Sure we can tell Microsoft to go screw themselves anyway, but what we're complaining about is that they are able to inflate their prices unfairly due to a government-imposed monopoly of idea ownership.
Look, Ambrosia makes good software and it's in your interest to give them money if you like their work.
But there is a fundamental flaw in their argument, and it's the one the RIAA and MPAA are getting away with too.
The fact that someone has misappropriated your content most assuredly does *NOT* mean that they would have bought it otherwise.
All you can really say is that if the product was free, that many people would have used it. And you can't really even say that- I know folks who have "pirated" stuff just for spite, with no intention of ever personally using the software they grab.
So, you can cry and say that people are "stealing" your bits of data, or you can say "we're making a sequel to the software 200 of you liked, pay us in advance and we'll develop it, don't and we won't". It's your creative energy that's scarce, not the software once you've made it. That's what a truly free market would look like.
So stop playing these dishonest games that equate number of users with number of potential paying customers, because those two numbers have precious little to do with each other.
This is a little off topic, but not much so bear with me.
A friend of mine found physics easy in high school, but found his teacher unbearable. So he would always convert his (generally correct) answers into inconvenient units, you know, pico-thises, nano-thats.
One time the question was "what is the speed of light?"
I agree. I've finally switched from Konqueror. Konqueror is still a little faster on my machine (200mhz pentium, 196M ram - don't laugh:), but the tabbed browsing feature just rocks *so* hard, and at this point they are about equal in terms of stability. Since I use blackbox, Konqueror isn't really any better integrated into my system, but I do kind of miss the way that it operated directly as a file browser and autocompleted things for me- it's just ever so slightly less convenient to use mozilla for such things.
But I have to tell you the Mozilla project has done a tremendous job since I first tried it out last year and couldn't get my mail accounts to work properly. It is basically a mature browser, and it's only getting better.
Two caveats:
1. if Konqueror gets tabbed browsing, I may starve to death trying to choose between them.
2. Mozilla folks: PLEASE give us a (preferably one-handed) keyboard shortcut for "next tab". So we can, you know, hold our mice while switching tabs:)
It might be a better chess match if you do it in the reverse order...
I'd say you should stagger the rounds, but as a former boxer, I can tell you that untaping and retaping your wrist bindings is a giant pain in the ass and would take quite a long time. I suppose you could have pieces big enough to be moved by a boxer wearing gloves though- maybe that would be better for TV anyway.
Maybe comedy central will pick this idea up and run with it. "Beat the Geek" would take on a whole new meaning:)
I've been reading the sunday paper this morning in front of my computer with my digital convergence CueCat:, and I keep swiping the ads- no deals! What's up with that?
Oh well, at least I can still check the price of transistors at radio shack with my free barcode rea^H^H^H CueCat:!
I tried running my cuecat: across a printout of slashdot's website, and it took me to some weird goat site, not sure what's up with that...
This is true in the general case, but there are exceptions. Try comparing Courier size 36 between MS Word XP and Openoffice. I updated my resume this morning in openoffice, then tried opening it in word at work: and the Courier font at size 36 in Openoffice looked like letters while in word it looked like one of those 50x50 pixel digital photos you used to pay $10 for at the science center in the '80s.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me, Alex El-Ali (the videographer) got sick of hearing me complain about this. And Richard Stallman's talk was pulled from the web because he didn't want his image to appear in a proprietary format like real. (It's now available audio-only in ogg vorbis format).
I've been trying to find a convenient way to convert my collection of the videos to mpeg, but Real is pretty damned closed, and my efforts so far have involved trying to sync screen captures with audio, which have failed miserably.
Bryguy
Are also arguments against absentee ballots. Perhaps we should get rid of those too- wonder who the president would be today.
one theory- they had *lots* of aeron chairs :)
The University happened and I attended it. There were some funding issues halfway through the year but they came through on their commitments.
It was a great experience and I hope that the idea will be picked up again someday by another corporation that feels guilty about its sudden wealth.
read about it at aduni.org if you're curious. You can watch/download pretty much all the lectures on line, do the problem sets, etc.
In fact, if someone out there is interested in mirroring about 40 gigabytes worth of video content from this server I believe that there is still a need for additional storage space.
How do you think they enforce their "no gay scoutmasters" rule without scanning their members hard drives to see what kind of porn they look at?
so naive, so naive....
Interesting that their numbering is keeping pace with Redhat's numbering schema. Probably just a coincedence, but iirc Redhat is selling a version of PostGreSQL as the Redhat Database or somesuch.
It would be pretty funny if they started mimicking Microsoft instead: PostGreSQLXP, PostGreSQL98, PostgreSQL2000AdvancedServer, etc. But I digress.
You're right, I should have said "slower", rather than "older".
But then, it wasn't all that well developed of a thought to begin with.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those, even using older hardware like Keanu Reeves or GW Bush.
An ordering of bits on a disk is a property of nature.
You'll have to be more specific.
just not two stories in one day.
That's never stopped them before...
:)
The fact that it's law, means it's not an artifical harm. You are doing something you've agreed not to do. That means your word is worthless. They should start posting the names of the people who attempt to pirate, so that the rest of us know not to deal with them.
... But that's bullshit, because it affects future value.
Think about what you're saying here. You're saying "if it's the law, it must be right". There are unjust laws, like laws that say that drinking fountains should be segregated by race. Violating these laws is not immoral.
Oh, and I could apply your theory to money theft. "They can just print more."
This is a subtle point. Currency is artificially scarce for a better reason than ideas. Currency represents the scarcity of value. Printing more of it dilutes the value of the currency. But ideas aren't like currency. Spreading ideas *increases* their social utility. It is the authors share of that value (or more often, that of the immortal corporation for whom the author works) which is diluted when the ideas are redistributed. But that's rather obvious, isn't it- if the government takes away your monopoly, your share over what you used to have a monopoly over is lessened.
But here's the catch- while the distribution of bits need not be scarce, it is the *creation* of that content which is scarce. An efficient market will reward creation but not distribution, because that's where the bottleneck lies.
Pretty much every legal system recognizes that labour has just as much value as a physical item, and you're taking their labour for free.
It's funny, people usually accuse *me* of being the marxist- I assure you, in western society people are most definitely alienated from the fruits of their labor. To some extent, we agree - the labor has value. But a "pirate" is not taking the labor. The labor's already been done. No more labor is gonna happen. That's when the paying should have happened, because that's the scarce part. Everything afterwards is just an excuse for idea ownership lawyers to make a living on the backs of the content industries, and a bizarre way to reward artists after the fact rather than allowing the simple magic of supply and demand to do its work in assigning prices.
Good point. So the strongest we can claim in this case is "If it was free, this many people would use it".
We still can't say that more would pay for it, and we *definitely* can't say they all would.
Yes. The way commercial software is created today depends on the creation of government-sponsored monopolies.
I suggest that different forms of payment that recognize the scarcity of *creation* as opposed to *distribution* would be more efficient and spur innovation.
So, you pay in advance for writing software, or you patronize (in the good way) people who write software you like in hopes they will write more.
Not a chicken and egg problem so much as a farming methodology problem. Imagine is you bought a chicken from a farmer who demanded that you pay her every time that chicken laid an egg, and every time any chicks hatched from its eggs laid eggs, and so on? Ok maybe that metaphor just doesn't stretch that well...
You make a clever argument, and I don't think you give it much credit. But let's dissect it.
First, your premise that the penalty would be $250,000 and 5 years of jailtime is flawed. Please point to an instance where this has happened. It would be great press for free software if it did.
More likely the penalty would be a plea to buy the software. I'd bet if you studied the number of people who continue to use software that has already been created but is covered by a government-imposed monopoly (i.e., "pirate) once caught, the number would be vanishingly low.
Plus, as every criminologist knows, the penalty alone is not enough- you must multiply the severity of the penalty against the likelihood of getting caught. In this case: almost zero. And once caught; convicted. Even smaller chance now.
Also keep in mind that many of the people using this government-monoplied software are under 18 and wouldn't be subject to the most serious penalties anyway.
The real fear is not that you'll get in trouble today, but that 20-30 years down the road microsoft.gov will resurrect all the old server logs and start hunting down people who pirated software in the '90s, and torturing/enslaving them in for-profit prisons. They already outsource some of their software packaging to prisons today (Source: Michael Moore, Downsize This, p. 142), and we both know how seriously they take the justice department at this point, so it's not so far-fetched. Problem is, such a government would be so arbitrary, and most of us have already "pirated" *something* anyway, that one more infraction probably won't be the one that makes the difference.
So the math works out that if you don't feel guilty about pirating the stuff, there's not really much reason not to do it, economically speaking. Richard Posner would be shocked.
In a free market, you pay the software author to write the software, then you use it.
You don't pay *to* use it. That is not the service that the *author* provides, that is the service the software provides.
If software providers want to get paid and not rely on government monopolies over information, they have to get paid for the *creation* of software (which is scarce), not the redistribution of it (which is only scarce due to government-sponsored monopolies, modulo the cost of serving information over a peer to peer network, i.e., essentially nothing).
Fake libertarians, beware. Copyright and patent are government-imposed monopolies which disrupt the free market. Stick to your ideals.
But that's the point- the harm consists *solely* in breaking a law. It's an artificial harm.
Also, my original point stands- even if a law was broken, the software firm was *not* deprived of a paying customer.
It's not Microsoft overcharging that upsets people, it's their artificial monopoly.
In a truly free market, the government would not grant monopolies to corporations which allow them to own ideas. So maybe you'd buy your windows disk from microsoft to support their work, or maybe you'd just copy/download it, but it would be your choice.
And the price of goods would have to do with the marginal cost of their reproduction. The cost of creation of goods would have to be funded in some way other than a guaranteed government monopoly over those goods.
Linux makes it obvious that even in a market saturated with such monopolies, it's possible to motivate people to create effective software.
If no one had those monopolies, entry barriers would be lower and there would be no advantage to preventing interoperability since you couldn't sue somoene for writing software that works with yours.
What people don't like is that Microsoft wants first to control the market rather than simply to compete in it.
You can't have fair price determination when markets aren't free. Sure we can tell Microsoft to go screw themselves anyway, but what we're complaining about is that they are able to inflate their prices unfairly due to a government-imposed monopoly of idea ownership.
Look, Ambrosia makes good software and it's in your interest to give them money if you like their work.
But there is a fundamental flaw in their argument, and it's the one the RIAA and MPAA are getting away with too.
The fact that someone has misappropriated your content most assuredly does *NOT* mean that they would have bought it otherwise.
All you can really say is that if the product was free, that many people would have used it. And you can't really even say that- I know folks who have "pirated" stuff just for spite, with no intention of ever personally using the software they grab.
So, you can cry and say that people are "stealing" your bits of data, or you can say "we're making a sequel to the software 200 of you liked, pay us in advance and we'll develop it, don't and we won't". It's your creative energy that's scarce, not the software once you've made it. That's what a truly free market would look like.
So stop playing these dishonest games that equate number of users with number of potential paying customers, because those two numbers have precious little to do with each other.
No, you incredibly idiotic dipshit. You are going to be Bubba's bitch because you hacked government websites, and in fact admitted it.
Way to celebrate anal rape in for-profit prisons, you "idiotic dipshit". Get a soul.
policyboy
This is a little off topic, but not much so bear with me.
A friend of mine found physics easy in high school, but found his teacher unbearable. So he would always convert his (generally correct) answers into inconvenient units, you know, pico-thises, nano-thats.
One time the question was "what is the speed of light?"
His answer? "1 lightyear/year"
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites? And this is different exactly how?
The answer is simple. Standards compliance.
I agree. I've finally switched from Konqueror. Konqueror is still a little faster on my machine (200mhz pentium, 196M ram - don't laugh :), but the tabbed browsing feature just rocks *so* hard, and at this point they are about equal in terms of stability. Since I use blackbox, Konqueror isn't really any better integrated into my system, but I do kind of miss the way that it operated directly as a file browser and autocompleted things for me- it's just ever so slightly less convenient to use mozilla for such things.
:)
But I have to tell you the Mozilla project has done a tremendous job since I first tried it out last year and couldn't get my mail accounts to work properly. It is basically a mature browser, and it's only getting better.
Two caveats:
1. if Konqueror gets tabbed browsing, I may starve to death trying to choose between them.
2. Mozilla folks: PLEASE give us a (preferably one-handed) keyboard shortcut for "next tab". So we can, you know, hold our mice while switching tabs
It might be a better chess match if you do it in the reverse order...
:)
I'd say you should stagger the rounds, but as a former boxer, I can tell you that untaping and retaping your wrist bindings is a giant pain in the ass and would take quite a long time. I suppose you could have pieces big enough to be moved by a boxer wearing gloves though- maybe that would be better for TV anyway.
Maybe comedy central will pick this idea up and run with it. "Beat the Geek" would take on a whole new meaning
I've been reading the sunday paper this morning in front of my computer with my digital convergence CueCat:, and I keep swiping the ads- no deals! What's up with that?
Oh well, at least I can still check the price of transistors at radio shack with my free barcode rea^H^H^H CueCat:!
I tried running my cuecat: across a printout of slashdot's website, and it took me to some weird goat site, not sure what's up with that...
This is true in the general case, but there are exceptions. Try comparing Courier size 36 between MS Word XP and Openoffice. I updated my resume this morning in openoffice, then tried opening it in word at work: and the Courier font at size 36 in Openoffice looked like letters while in word it looked like one of those 50x50 pixel digital photos you used to pay $10 for at the science center in the '80s.