Why? Because Linux is not yet user-friendly. If Linux were easy for each person or organization to customize, there would be one distribution and the work of customization would be left to the installer.
It doesn't and can't work that why for the average person right now.
last of all: "Allen has been selling his Microsoft shares since he left the company, but still owns more than $3 billion worth.", sounds like somebody started to loose faith in the company there...
Well, if he wants to own anything other than a piece of microsoft, he'll have to sell those shares. Living in a shack with $3 billion in paper wealth is silly. Of course he wants to turn those shares into other things.
Ok, but do you have studies to back that 80%? Or are you just guessing?
Ultimately everything is a guess. There are only levels of certainty.
I do have some support for the 80% figure, though it doesn't come from a study published in some journal. It is the result of experiment. Hey, there's nothing wrong with that, is there? That's the whole point of science. It doesn't depend on what some authority or journal says. You can do the experiment yourself and see what happens.
The experiment was set-up suprisingly well. A single variable is altered, and that is also done randomly to prevent biasing.
Basically the author tries to determine how many people will "voluntarily" pay him for his software if they don't have to. When given the option, only about 20% actually pay him.
I'd love to know how software piracy hurts software vendors without spin put on it. Lately I tried a rom of Final fantasy Tactics Advance. On Monday I'll be going into the local game shop to purchase it. I've done this countless times on games I wouldn't have played other wise.
This is wonderful and you're a great person for giving money to people that are working hard to make you happy.
The trouble is with the 80% of the people out there that aren't like you. They're selfish, short-sighted, and simply have the "you made it, I want it" philosophy. They enjoy the game that someone else worked to create and never will do anything for that person that helped make their life a little more enjoyable.
See, most slashdotters are (moderately) bright. They can be trusted to behave the way you do because they know money will keep the good games, gadgets, toys, and tech, coming. But most of the public aren't that bright. Piracy laws are for them.
"So how does piracy actually HURT software vendors?", you might ask. Well, what they lose is their time and effort. It's sort of like someone taking money out of your wallet. You haven't actually been hurt, but all that effort and work that went into earning that money was for naught. A bit of your life was wasted.
People that work hard to make software waste their time in a culture full of piracy. Oh, they figure it out soon enough and move on to other things.
The only thing that could possibly complicate this is a greedy corporation who has the patent and wants to enforce it and make tons of money. So rather than use government and philanthropist and charity money to cure a LOT of cancer, this company will be making billions off of a potentially life saving natural drug.
Any company that finds a way to cure 2/3rd of cancers deserves to be rich.
Jeez. We make young men that can hit or throw or catch a ball instant millionaires, yet complain that someone might get rich from curing cancer.
The problem is that for some industries a free market simply doesn't work. For example, it doesn't make sense to have five different gas pipes comming to your house, five different roads leading to your drive, and five different telephone lives either.
And yet, the same argument could be used to claim that there should only be one supermarket, or one gas station, or one auto maker. You're making an argument for monopoly.
Re:"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"
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The Demise of IP?
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These people should dump their fucking sense of entitlement and realize that when someone does you a favor and you spit in their face, they might just want to take their favor back!
Oh, and just who is doing whom a favor here?
When someone creates a new invention or a new song or a new story, they're the ones doing a favor for the rest of us. We thank them by giving them a temporary monopoly on the creation of the think they'vs created.
Re:"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"
on
The Demise of IP?
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Exactly! The only thing the government could possibly be "confiscating" is the monopoly it granted in the first place! These people should dump their fucking sense of entitlement and realize that when someone does you a favor and you spit in their face, they might just want to take their favor back!
The same can be said about land ownership and capital ownership.
It's a dangerous and historically a big mistake when people start treating property ownership less as a right and more as a "favor" granted by government.
Re:So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitali
on
The Demise of IP?
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When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
Wait. Are you saying that corporations stealing IP is a GOOD thing because it creates companies like Nestle?
Competition is important for production but when it comes to milestones in technology, the emphasis is nearly always on cooperation not competition. That's why the truly significant and most important discoveries come from universities, not private companies.
No, most truly significant and important discoveries come from bright people. They exist in both the private and public sectors.
And I've seen no evidence that universities are less competitive than private companies.
Oh, and plenty of universities are cashing in on IP. Not only do they get government subsidies, but they also get patents for for these inventions paid for by the government!
If anything, they're worse than private companies since they force people to pay them through taxes, then force people to pay them again for what they developed while at the university.
Oh stop it already. We're used to Economics-101 ignorant, occasionally semi-tongue-in-cheek-I-hope paranoioa from slashdot, but this is really too much.
Economics 101:
Any time you as a seller of a good price an item at other than a profit-maximizing value, your profit decreases. This is true regardless of whether the item is a luxury good or a commodity.
You're missing the point. The point is that, for many things, demand can actually GO UP as price goes up over a certain range.
Just recall the NASDAQ as it was moving towards 5,000. The increase in the prices for stock actually stimulated more, not less demand.
Well, until it went "pop", at least.
Still, the fact remains, sometimes higher prices increase demand and profits at the same time.
In fact this situation is possible and not funny at all.
There is probably very little to worry about. Afterall, it's likely that there have already been mice born in the wild with a mutation that does the same thing. How far did their fearlessness get them?
If mice born with a fearlessness mutation don't survive to pass it on and spread it, it's unlikely an engineered mouse would.
"Actually speaking as a Brit, we all believed WMD exist"
Except for the millions of us who marched against the war. And many of those who couldn't be bothered. And the media. In fact, far fewer than 50% of the people I spoke to before the war believed that Iraq posed a credible threat to the UK.
At least be honest. The millions that marched against the war did it because they tend to be anti-war. WMDs or not, they opposed the war. C'mon. Admit it. It had nothing to to with believing that there were no WMDs.
And don't twist his words. He said "we all believed WMD exist", and most people did. That's not the same thing as believing that Iraq posed a threat to the UK.
This obsession people seem to have with democracy is silly. Do doctors and nurses in the operating room vote on how to proceed with an operation? Should pilots ask for a vote on how to land a plane?
There are plenty of things democracy is good for, but sometimes you have to leave decisions in the hands of people more qualified than the average person.
Is it possible to assume that the widow or her husband paid taxes on that millon when it was earned? In theory (assuming that other loopholes were not used), the principle on the investment was taxed when it was first earned.
Oh certainly. My point is that we have to be cautious when we talk about "taxing the rich".
For example, it's possible that in the future to pay the debt income taxes might be made much higher than they are now.
The trouble is that, by taxing income, you're not really putting the burden on the people that built up their wealth in the low-tax environment. Those people get to build their wealth while debt rises up. Then when the bill comes, current earners get saddled with the burden of paying the debt, while those that built up capital get to relax.
Another example concerns corporate income tax rates. If these are different that personal rates, then the owners of the corporation (shareholders) build up wealth by taking corporate profits and "putting them back into the company". The shareholders wealth increases and they get to pay a lower tax to boot.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm as free-market capitalist as they come. But to me this sort of thing seems simply unfair. If I had my way, there would be a national property tax on wealth to pay for things like the military. The more stuff you have that needs protecting, the more you should pay.
Of course I also believe that people "own" themselves and the cities they live in (assuming they have the right to vote) and should also pay for the protection of themselves and the community assets they control through voting. Ownership is just a form of control, isn't it? You don't own what you can't control and you control what you own.
Finally, consider just how hostile Europeans get when you point out that, in terms of GDP, Europe is as "poor" as the poorest states in the USA. Their per capita income is very low.
But this is another variation of the confusion between wealth and income. Europeans really have nothing to be ashamed of. They're like the rich capitalists enjoying their (communally owned) wealth. How much is Big Ben worth? Or the city of Paris? What is a city with half the murder-rate of the US worth? They're like the rich widow with $1,000,000 in the bank earning 3%. Low income, but wealthy still.
You don't have to be a big income earner to be wealthy. There are plenty of big income earners in the US that spend it all on "bling-bling" or hummers. But are they as wealthy as the citizens of a beautiful, clean, safe city?
I'm not anti-American, by the way. I'm usually very supportive of my country. But I do often dispair at just what kind of wealth all our income has produced. We earn so much money, but we'll probably never have a Sistine chapel.
We will have a lot of people with plenty of "bling bling" and Escalades with nice rims, though.
Every tax proposal I see somehow provides extreme benefit to the extremely wealthy. Is the fair tax any different?
Don't confuse income and wealth. They're not the same thing at all.
Compare the widow that owns her home and has $1,000,000 in the bank making 3% interest and the programmer making $50,000 with a mortgage.
Her income is just $30,000/year compared to the programmer's $50,000, yet it's obvious she's more wealthy.
This is how rich New England Democrats can get away with advocating "taxing the wealthy", because in reality they don't really want that. They want to tax income eaners instead.
Whatever the cause it is evident that something is wrong with the market. As others have pointed out, the oil companies are reporting overwhelmingly huge profits.
They aren't "overwhelmingly huge". They are average or below when compared to other industries. ExxonMobil, which leads the pack, makes about $0.10 per $1 revenue. That's below average for US companies.
The only reason profits seem so large now is because they were small a short time ago. If a billion dollar company makes $1 one year and then makes $3 the next year, then their profits have increased 200% and that increase sounds impressive. But $3 profit is hardly impressive.
It's interesting to note that every time someone (a liberal, of course) yells about our dependency on foreign oil and how we have to reduce it (generally via alternate energy sources, and buying less SUVs), the "party line" is that we have signifigant domestic stocks of oil, stop being Chicken Little, consumerism is American, blah blah blah. But whenever the issue is controlling the price of crude, the "party line" is supply and demand, OPEC are the bad guys, etc, etc. Surely there is some sort of discrepency somewhere?
You have a distorted picture of what the "party line" is. If you're talking about economic conservatives, then the "party line" is that the market should be allowed to work. Price controls are historically a terrible idea and a failure. They lead to supply shortages.
There are some people that believe domestic supply is still significant, and it probably is. The trouble is that it's expensive to produce oil domestically. The price has to go up to make extracting it economical.
So there really isn't any contradiction. We have significant domestic supply, but the price must be high to bring those supplies on line.
Is there a reason, beyond political cronyism and/or idealism that we haven't nationalized our oil reserves like everyone else?
If you're worried about cronyism, nationalization is exactly what you don't want to do. Just who's going to end up in charge of the oil? Look what happend to FEMA when Bush put one of his cronies in charge. You want some buddy of the president in charge of domestic oil?
If we really essentially have to eat a 300% increase in oil price in *one year*, the vast majority of which is fuelled by gouging and speculation, isn't that a *really good reason* to take a long look at our energy usage and policies?
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation? How can you say the price is "wrong"? Define "gouging".
The "right price" is the price that balances the supply of oil with the damand for oil. If the price is too low, producers aren't willing to produce enough to supply all the people that want the oil. And people don't conserve since the oil is too cheap. So you have both waste and undersupply. That's exactly the wrong thing to have.
As much as people hate high prices, that's the only realistic way to get both conservation and more production. Perhaps even production of alternatives like biodiesel.
Re:I don't care what they call it, it ain't Ma Bel
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Ma Bell is Back
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Hey, even the BabyBells were also as guilty as MaBell in terms of slowing down the adoption rate of new technologies. I think back to the fact that my Atari 1040ST back in 1986 was compatible with ISDN straight out of the box, but did Pacific Bell offer residential ISDN service back then? Nope. When did Pacific Bell get semi-serious about residential ISDN? Oh, try 1998.
Yeah, but legal barriers prevent competitors from coming in and running their own wires.
Try starting up your own cable provider/ISP company, for example. Chances are you won't find a city willing to let you in. They've already sold a monopoly franchise to TimeWarner/BrightHouse etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Because Linux is not yet user-friendly. If Linux were easy for each person or organization to customize, there would be one distribution and the work of customization would be left to the installer.
It doesn't and can't work that why for the average person right now.
Well, if he wants to own anything other than a piece of microsoft, he'll have to sell those shares. Living in a shack with $3 billion in paper wealth is silly. Of course he wants to turn those shares into other things.
Sure. It's 1940's technology, but really, has there been anything else that has created so much social change and is STILL creating social change?
We still don't know what the long term social effects will be, on the West especially, for another 50 years.
Ok, but do you have studies to back that 80%? Or are you just guessing?
Ultimately everything is a guess. There are only levels of certainty.
I do have some support for the 80% figure, though it doesn't come from a study published in some journal. It is the result of experiment. Hey, there's nothing wrong with that, is there? That's the whole point of science. It doesn't depend on what some authority or journal says. You can do the experiment yourself and see what happens.
Anyway, the experiment is described here.
The experiment was set-up suprisingly well. A single variable is altered, and that is also done randomly to prevent biasing.
Basically the author tries to determine how many people will "voluntarily" pay him for his software if they don't have to. When given the option, only about 20% actually pay him.
This is wonderful and you're a great person for giving money to people that are working hard to make you happy.
The trouble is with the 80% of the people out there that aren't like you. They're selfish, short-sighted, and simply have the "you made it, I want it" philosophy. They enjoy the game that someone else worked to create and never will do anything for that person that helped make their life a little more enjoyable.
See, most slashdotters are (moderately) bright. They can be trusted to behave the way you do because they know money will keep the good games, gadgets, toys, and tech, coming. But most of the public aren't that bright. Piracy laws are for them.
"So how does piracy actually HURT software vendors?", you might ask. Well, what they lose is their time and effort. It's sort of like someone taking money out of your wallet. You haven't actually been hurt, but all that effort and work that went into earning that money was for naught. A bit of your life was wasted.
People that work hard to make software waste their time in a culture full of piracy. Oh, they figure it out soon enough and move on to other things.
The only thing that could possibly complicate this is a greedy corporation who has the patent and wants to enforce it and make tons of money. So rather than use government and philanthropist and charity money to cure a LOT of cancer, this company will be making billions off of a potentially life saving natural drug.
Any company that finds a way to cure 2/3rd of cancers deserves to be rich.
Jeez. We make young men that can hit or throw or catch a ball instant millionaires, yet complain that someone might get rich from curing cancer.
And yet, the same argument could be used to claim that there should only be one supermarket, or one gas station, or one auto maker. You're making an argument for monopoly.
These people should dump their fucking sense of entitlement and realize that when someone does you a favor and you spit in their face, they might just want to take their favor back!
Oh, and just who is doing whom a favor here?
When someone creates a new invention or a new song or a new story, they're the ones doing a favor for the rest of us. We thank them by giving them a temporary monopoly on the creation of the think they'vs created.
Exactly! The only thing the government could possibly be "confiscating" is the monopoly it granted in the first place! These people should dump their fucking sense of entitlement and realize that when someone does you a favor and you spit in their face, they might just want to take their favor back!
The same can be said about land ownership and capital ownership.
It's a dangerous and historically a big mistake when people start treating property ownership less as a right and more as a "favor" granted by government.
When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
Wait. Are you saying that corporations stealing IP is a GOOD thing because it creates companies like Nestle?
Competition is important for production but when it comes to milestones in technology, the emphasis is nearly always on cooperation not competition. That's why the truly significant and most important discoveries come from universities, not private companies.
No, most truly significant and important discoveries come from bright people. They exist in both the private and public sectors.
And I've seen no evidence that universities are less competitive than private companies.
Oh, and plenty of universities are cashing in on IP. Not only do they get government subsidies, but they also get patents for for these inventions paid for by the government!
If anything, they're worse than private companies since they force people to pay them through taxes, then force people to pay them again for what they developed while at the university.
Geez, this is the movie that first showed us Robby the Robot!
Oh stop it already. We're used to Economics-101 ignorant, occasionally semi-tongue-in-cheek-I-hope paranoioa from slashdot, but this is really too much.
Economics 101:
Any time you as a seller of a good price an item at other than a profit-maximizing value, your profit decreases. This is true regardless of whether the item is a luxury good or a commodity.
You're missing the point. The point is that, for many things, demand can actually GO UP as price goes up over a certain range.
Just recall the NASDAQ as it was moving towards 5,000. The increase in the prices for stock actually stimulated more, not less demand.
Well, until it went "pop", at least.
Still, the fact remains, sometimes higher prices increase demand and profits at the same time.
In fact this situation is possible and not funny at all.
There is probably very little to worry about. Afterall, it's likely that there have already been mice born in the wild with a mutation that does the same thing. How far did their fearlessness get them?
If mice born with a fearlessness mutation don't survive to pass it on and spread it, it's unlikely an engineered mouse would.
to cut off their ponytails.
Something tells me they'll be waiting just as long for this current generation of geeks to stop wearing T-shirts to work.
"Actually speaking as a Brit, we all believed WMD exist"
Except for the millions of us who marched against the war. And many of those who couldn't be bothered. And the media. In fact, far fewer than 50% of the people I spoke to before the war believed that Iraq posed a credible threat to the UK.
At least be honest. The millions that marched against the war did it because they tend to be anti-war. WMDs or not, they opposed the war. C'mon. Admit it. It had nothing to to with believing that there were no WMDs.
And don't twist his words. He said "we all believed WMD exist", and most people did. That's not the same thing as believing that Iraq posed a threat to the UK.
The rule is quite different in the US. In the US this company would have to prove what she wrote was false.
In Canada or even the UK, it's the person making the damaging claims that must prove what they wrote was true.
That's the rule in the USA, but not in Canada, or other places like the UK.
In those countries you have to prove what you said/wrote is true.
I think it's time to admit that we're all in a race with each other to use fossil fuels.
The fact is most of the coal and petroleum will be burned, one way or another. The question is, who gets the benefit?
Those that race to burn it first get the benefit. Anyone that reduces their consumption suffers with a competitive disadvantage.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons situation.
This obsession people seem to have with democracy is silly. Do doctors and nurses in the operating room vote on how to proceed with an operation? Should pilots ask for a vote on how to land a plane?
There are plenty of things democracy is good for, but sometimes you have to leave decisions in the hands of people more qualified than the average person.
Is it possible to assume that the widow or her husband paid taxes on that millon when it was earned? In theory (assuming that other loopholes were not used), the principle on the investment was taxed when it was first earned.
Oh certainly. My point is that we have to be cautious when we talk about "taxing the rich".
For example, it's possible that in the future to pay the debt income taxes might be made much higher than they are now.
The trouble is that, by taxing income, you're not really putting the burden on the people that built up their wealth in the low-tax environment. Those people get to build their wealth while debt rises up. Then when the bill comes, current earners get saddled with the burden of paying the debt, while those that built up capital get to relax.
Another example concerns corporate income tax rates. If these are different that personal rates, then the owners of the corporation (shareholders) build up wealth by taking corporate profits and "putting them back into the company". The shareholders wealth increases and they get to pay a lower tax to boot.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm as free-market capitalist as they come. But to me this sort of thing seems simply unfair. If I had my way, there would be a national property tax on wealth to pay for things like the military. The more stuff you have that needs protecting, the more you should pay.
Of course I also believe that people "own" themselves and the cities they live in (assuming they have the right to vote) and should also pay for the protection of themselves and the community assets they control through voting. Ownership is just a form of control, isn't it? You don't own what you can't control and you control what you own.
Finally, consider just how hostile Europeans get when you point out that, in terms of GDP, Europe is as "poor" as the poorest states in the USA. Their per capita income is very low.
But this is another variation of the confusion between wealth and income. Europeans really have nothing to be ashamed of. They're like the rich capitalists enjoying their (communally owned) wealth. How much is Big Ben worth? Or the city of Paris? What is a city with half the murder-rate of the US worth? They're like the rich widow with $1,000,000 in the bank earning 3%. Low income, but wealthy still.
You don't have to be a big income earner to be wealthy. There are plenty of big income earners in the US that spend it all on "bling-bling" or hummers. But are they as wealthy as the citizens of a beautiful, clean, safe city?
I'm not anti-American, by the way. I'm usually very supportive of my country. But I do often dispair at just what kind of wealth all our income has produced. We earn so much money, but we'll probably never have a Sistine chapel.
We will have a lot of people with plenty of "bling bling" and Escalades with nice rims, though.
Every tax proposal I see somehow provides extreme benefit to the extremely wealthy. Is the fair tax any different?
Don't confuse income and wealth. They're not the same thing at all.
Compare the widow that owns her home and has $1,000,000 in the bank making 3% interest and the programmer making $50,000 with a mortgage.
Her income is just $30,000/year compared to the programmer's $50,000, yet it's obvious she's more wealthy.
This is how rich New England Democrats can get away with advocating "taxing the wealthy", because in reality they don't really want that. They want to tax income eaners instead.
Whatever the cause it is evident that something is wrong with the market. As others have pointed out, the oil companies are reporting overwhelmingly huge profits.
They aren't "overwhelmingly huge". They are average or below when compared to other industries. ExxonMobil, which leads the pack, makes about $0.10 per $1 revenue. That's below average for US companies.
The only reason profits seem so large now is because they were small a short time ago. If a billion dollar company makes $1 one year and then makes $3 the next year, then their profits have increased 200% and that increase sounds impressive. But $3 profit is hardly impressive.
It's interesting to note that every time someone (a liberal, of course) yells about our dependency on foreign oil and how we have to reduce it (generally via alternate energy sources, and buying less SUVs), the "party line" is that we have signifigant domestic stocks of oil, stop being Chicken Little, consumerism is American, blah blah blah. But whenever the issue is controlling the price of crude, the "party line" is supply and demand, OPEC are the bad guys, etc, etc. Surely there is some sort of discrepency somewhere?
You have a distorted picture of what the "party line" is. If you're talking about economic conservatives, then the "party line" is that the market should be allowed to work. Price controls are historically a terrible idea and a failure. They lead to supply shortages.
There are some people that believe domestic supply is still significant, and it probably is. The trouble is that it's expensive to produce oil domestically. The price has to go up to make extracting it economical.
So there really isn't any contradiction. We have significant domestic supply, but the price must be high to bring those supplies on line.
Is there a reason, beyond political cronyism and/or idealism that we haven't nationalized our oil reserves like everyone else?
If you're worried about cronyism, nationalization is exactly what you don't want to do. Just who's going to end up in charge of the oil? Look what happend to FEMA when Bush put one of his cronies in charge. You want some buddy of the president in charge of domestic oil?
If we really essentially have to eat a 300% increase in oil price in *one year*, the vast majority of which is fuelled by gouging and speculation, isn't that a *really good reason* to take a long look at our energy usage and policies?
How do you know it's fuelled by gouging and speculation? How can you say the price is "wrong"? Define "gouging".
The "right price" is the price that balances the supply of oil with the damand for oil. If the price is too low, producers aren't willing to produce enough to supply all the people that want the oil. And people don't conserve since the oil is too cheap. So you have both waste and undersupply. That's exactly the wrong thing to have.
As much as people hate high prices, that's the only realistic way to get both conservation and more production. Perhaps even production of alternatives like biodiesel.
Yeah, but legal barriers prevent competitors from coming in and running their own wires.
Try starting up your own cable provider/ISP company, for example. Chances are you won't find a city willing to let you in. They've already sold a monopoly franchise to TimeWarner/BrightHouse etc.