As I understand it, sin(x) can have values between positive 1 and negative 1. Is my x going to be positive or negative?
A little bit of background: I have a value of x somewhere between 0 and pi.
Snark aside, this really isn't an issue where you should be guided by ancedotal evidence posted to Slashdot. You're working for a Fortune 100 company, for crying out loud--you need a carefully-planned methodology, not a bunch of yammering 'experts' giving you off-the-cuff advice on a very complex problem...
I haven't played it, and yes I am feeling lazy...what is the point of this game? How does one "win"?
...one "wins" by growing the katamari (ball o' crap) to a certain diameter before time runs out.
You should really just go out and rent/buy a copy. There's just no good way to describe the game using mere words--you really need to experience whole the giddily bizzare thing for yourself.
WTF. The first game was 20 bucks. Just because the game was a underground hit doesn't mean the maker should sell out and over price the game. 50 dollar games make baby jesus cry.
Yeah--the worst part is that giant robotic arm that comes out of nowhere, grabs you by the waist, carries you to the nearest game retailer, and forces you to buy it.
The injustice of it all, I tell you! If only there were some way of not buying these horribly overpriced games!
Through ultra-secret inside contacts, I've managed to get my hands on some never-released audio clips from Katamari Damacy 2. Here's the transcript of the "intro" dialog:
When I first read the closing line of the article, I chuckled.
Then I felt dismayed.
It really is a shame when the prevailing "geek" attitude towards agencies like the FBI is mistrust and fear, not confidence and respect.
The More Things Stay The Same
on
USB Fundue Set
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· Score: 1
You can also look into the new iPod accessory iCopulate which allows intimacy between mp3 players never before fantasized. And for the suit that has everything, Executve Pong.
Y'know, the onomatopoeic, self-deprecating April Fools' jokes about Slashdot's predilection for duplicate articles were funnier the first time around, back in 2003.
It's kinda sad that one of Slashdot's most glaring faults remains alive and healthy a full two years later. Would it kill you to get your collective act together and hire an actual editor? Y'know, the kind of person who can proofread, keep track of what's been posted and other heinously challenging tasks?
I agree, we're talking in circles. I'll ask only one more response of you: what your advice to me would be in a free-market economy, where intangibles have no value?
I'm a programmer. During the day, I write and maintain code for an educational institution. It's a good job, and the pay is enough for a comfortable life, but what I'd really like to do is write games for a living. It's not simply a pipe dream--my latest game was quite well received, and I'm working hard on the next game--but I'm lucky if I can eke ten hours out of a week to work on it, what with my job, wife, errands, home maintenance and all eating into my time. I dream of being able to devote myself solely to working on these games; I'd be a happier person, and I'd be able to give a lot more to the community than I have time for now. I just don't know how I can make my passion my trade, since I can't sell my game for any significant amount.
What can I do? I've found my skill, and I'm itching to expand on it, but I don't see how to go about doing it without forever relegating it to a hobby. It isn't like I can give live performances, and while I do receive the odd donation from grateful fans, it's hardly enough to sustain my relatively simple livelihood. What hope do I have of ever being able to do what I truly love for a living?
There IS no issue with you making changes to a work you own. The issue is only whether you misrepresent the value of the product by using disinformation when you sell it to someone else. That is fraud, whether or not the product you sell has "intellectual property" encoded on it, and is orthogonal to the issue of intellectual property.
...but again, this remains key to the issue. How is the value of the product being changed by altering the title and author of a book? What is the value of authorship, when the purchaser of an artistic work is given full control over the work itself? How can authorship have "value" in a free-market economy if there is absolutely no onus on the "owner" of a book to give compensation, financial or otherwise, to the author?
There are a lot of people who give up years of their life to try and start small businesses, but because of bad luck, bad decisions, or aggressive competition, they lose everything (including possibly any personal assets). Nobody assumes that these people should receive government handouts or special government laws to protect them to make sure their endeavor suceeds. Just the same as the work someone does to put together a small business, there's nothing special about the work that your hypothetical software developer did, either. If he/she can't sell it to anyone for a price that's worth all the effort, then the developer made a bad investment of their time & resources. There's no reason for government enforcement to make sure that such activities succeed.
Explain how a programmer--any programmer--could possibly make a living by plying their trade if it is given that anybody could take a copy of their work and give it away for free. Explain how an individual could possibly accumulate the years of experience and expertise necessary to become a skilled programmer and still manage to feed, clothe and shelter themselves. The only plausible scenario I see is that programmers go to work for entities large enough to employ them to build internal systems. There is simply no impetus beyond altruism to produce applications for the general populace in your system. There would exist only freeware and Open Source software in the public sector--and while this may seem a tantalizing prospect, consider what the state of Open Source computing would be today if it weren't for the many advances provided by the private sector. How is it somehow natural that the carpenter be presented with the opportunity to strike out on his own, but the programmer cannot be given an even remotely reasonable chance of ever being able to make a living from his trade without relying on an employer to commission his work?
Yeah, yeah - the old "property is just a legal definition too" comeback...just about every stable civilization on the planet has strong laws against the use of violence, as just about stable society in history has agreed that the use of violence as a mechanism for social order has not resulted in a net benefit to the society as a whole. Once you eliminate the "might makes right" social structure, then the "natural" behavior of private property & free markets becomes apparent. "I can't take that thing from you by force, so to get it from you, I have to offer you something that you will think is of equal value."
...and likewise, just about every stable society on the face of the planet today recognizes that there is value in intellectual property and other intangible assets. That it is a more recent advancement of government than personal property does not mean it is any less significant or beneficial to society. To me, "natural" behavior dictates that if somebody else worked to create something, it is neither ethical nor just to assume control of that thing without their consent.
I think that someone who expects to be paid a lot of money just because they worked hard, whether or not the thing they produced or the service they provided was
Make all the changes you want. Just don't try and misrepresent to a potential buyer that the product hasn't been changed. That would be fraud, and is orthogonal to the issue of private property rights.
But this is key to intellectual property rights. If I truly and completely own the book I purchase, there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to make any changes to that work I see fit. There should be no issue whatsoever with me making changes to a work I own. Fraud only matters when there is value in authorship; if there is value in authorship, it really is not that extreme of a jump to suggest that an author retain rights beyond simply having his name protected.
By "fundamentally different", I assume you mean "more valuable than people would be willing to pay for in a normal free market system". I believe that you (and intellectual property proponents) have a grossly-inflated view of the "value" of such works.
A fair enough divergence of opinion. I happen to believe that a software developer who spends two years of his life developing a complex, well-written, useful, popular application deserves something more than to have random strangers pick his product up and give it away for free on the Internet. You clearly disagree. One man's visionary entrepreneur is another man's worthless freeloader.
In the absence of government enforcement of artificial monopoly, the value of such work is exactly dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. This is the "natural" value of any product or service. If your "product" has to receive special privileged enforcement by the government to be worth a higher price, then it isn't worth as much as you think it is.
That's a specious argument. In the absence of government enforcement of artificial order, the value of a person's home is exactly dictated by what that person is willing to do to protect it. In the absence of the government's enforcement of artificial moral standards, the punishment for taking another man's life is exactly dictated by the value that person had in the eyes of his family and community--and just how much they're willing to do in retribution. In the absence of government enforcement of artificial contract law, the value of a contractual agreement between two parties is exactly dictated by your ability to enforce the terms of the contract should the other party fail to meet their end of the deal.
Everything a government does is an artificial construct. By your reasoning, it's absurd to grant the physically weak protection from the highwayman, and it's absurd to give the mentally deficient protection from the huckster. After all, the "natural" balance grants success to the quick, the strong, and the cunning. If one person's interests need to receive special privileged enforcement by the government to be protected, then that person isn't worth as much as one may think he is.
If you want to see what happens when you remove the artifice of law and let things run their natural course, you need only watch a pack of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.
This attempt at an emotional appeal is irrelevant to the argument.
...It's probably just me being cynical, but I was under the impression that the use of the phrase "most honest, hard-working people" isn't so much a way to bolster one's argument with fact as it is a way to implicitly denegrate the opposing group as a group of people who are neither honest nor hard-working--otherwise, what would be the point of bothering to distinguish the first group as honest and hard-working? But again, that's probably just the cynic in me coming out. I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that musicians, authors, artists, computer programmers and other beneficiaries of intellectual property law are dishonest and lazy bunch.
I apologize for using emotional appeals to bolster my own opinion. It's a cheap and disingenuous trick, and I'll try to refrain from doing it in the future.
We're talking past each other, here. I agree with you; all I'm saying is that the simple fact of the matter is that the driving force behind P2P software today is illegal file sharing. I don't think P2P software should be made illegal, but I do think that the vast majority of P2P traffic has been, and continues to be, illegal.
Mispresenting who wrote a work falls under "fraud" laws, which is a separate issue from private property rights.
...waaaaait a minute. Why should it be illegal for me to change the title and author? I own that book. What does it matter who wrote it in the first place if I own it? Who the heck are you to tell me I can't change it however I see fit? How can it be a crime for me to make changes to my own book?
Most honest, hard-working people expect to get compensated for providing a desired good or service. They also understand that they will not get compensated if people do not find their good or service desirable enough at the price that they are charging. [...] Only "intellectual property owners" expect to get paid over and over, every time their "property" is distributed by 3rd parties, even though the effort to create that product only occurred once. And the government enforces such a business model by riding roughshod over private property rights.
So you're basically saying that while it's normal for honest, hard-working cabinetmakers to expect to be paid for each widget they sell to a person, your honest, hard-working author or musician can only be expected to be paid the first time they sell their product to somebody, simply because the fruits of their honest, hard work can be reproduced with trivial effort whereas the cabinetmaker's finished product cannot.
I simply don't agree with you. I believe that intangible things like music and software are fundamentally different from physical goods, and that it is perfectly reasonable for an artist's work to enjoy legal protection from having some large, rich entity simply appropriate their work and pass it off however they see fit, with no compensation to the creator whatsoever.
Something of a tangent: should counterfeiting be illegal? After all, a dollar bill nothing is more than a piece of printed cloth with some ethereal concept of value attached to it. Why shouldn't I be allowed to make copies of the dollar bill I have in my wallet and sell them for fifty cents each? I own that dollar bill, and I can't imagine why I shouldn't be allowed to do whatever I like with it, including make and sell copies of it.
Printer shares, file shares, web servers, email servers, and DNS servers aren't peer-to-peer applications--they're client/server applications.
Client/server is a fundamentally different architecture from peer-to-peer. In a client/server environment, there are many individual client applications that connect to a central server application, and the two types of applications have very different functionality from one another. In a peer-to-peer model, you have a single application that acts as both client and server; instead of users accessing a central server, they tie into existing P2P nodes. Think of the C/S model as a hub and spokes, where the hub is the server and the spokes are the clients; think of the P2P model as a fishing net, where each knot is a P2P node. Yes, there are aspects of the two that overlap, but there's still a very real technical difference between C/S apps and P2P apps.
The reason this distinction is important is that it is much more difficult to track down an infringing P2P user than it is to track down an infringing server in a C/S model. What's more, when you shut down an infringing server, you've shut down the entire infringing network--a client app won't work without first connecting to a server. With P2P, shutting down a single node has no real effect on the rest of the network; shutting down a P2P network is the computing equivalent of killing a hydra. This is what makes P2P such a hot issue.
Don't be so obtuse. Can you really not see any tangible difference between a physical good and an artistic work?
Intellectual property doesn't have "special" privieges over physical goods. It has different privileges, because it is a different thing. If I spend two years of my life developing an awesome piece of software, should I really be expected to only ever sell it to one person? Because by your reasoning, once I've sold a copy my software, whoever bought it is perfectly justified in kicking it up onto the 'Net and handing it out to whomever the hell they please, because they paid for a copy of it, right? Would you argue that it's OK for me to buy a copy of The Shining, by Stephen King, change the title and author to Apocalypse, Baby!, by Jimmy Phallus, and sell it online for fifty cents a pop? After all, I bought the book--it's mine, and I can do whatever I damn well please with it, right?
P2P is like the the kitchen knife: You can use it to cook or you can use it to kill people, but just because you can kill people doesn't mean we should prohibit everyone from using a knife to cook.
I like the analogy, but I'd say that modern P2P is more like the broadsword--you can use it to cook or you can use it to kill people, but you can be damn sure that it was designed with a specific purpose in mind...
Yes, P2P is used for plenty of legal activity. A P2P application, in and of itself, does not violate the law. You're lying to yourself, though, if you suggest that the driving force behind P2P is anything other than illegal file sharing.
I, too, think that the court will find in favor of P2P, but honestly, there are no good guys in court today. One side is a pack of morally bankrupt, lying weasels who claim to be looking out for the little guy but are really in it for the money--but I don't care too much for the other side, either.
Y'know, the United Nations is worthy of plenty of criticism. There are a ton of things they could do much better than they do, and they've made plenty of bad decisions.
But "as evil as INGSOC"? Show me one example of the General Assembly actively and willfully seeking to do harm for the sake of doing harm. Show me one case where the U.N. took action because it was the morally wrong thing to do.
If you really must go around spouting bromidic hyperbole, at least pick a slur that makes some sense.
Re:Nintendo's Approach
on
The Best Of GDC
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem nintendo has is the fact that alot of people wish to Apear ""COOL"" and nintendo is yet to shake off its For-Children image.
...this is only a problem for a fairly narrow demographic, though. The folks who get hung up on "cool" tend to range from their teens to their early twenties; both before and after that, there's a whole slew of gamers who care more about whether or not a game is fun than whether or not you can beat hookers with a severed leg in time to Franz Ferdinand. Adults don't have trouble enjoying "kiddie" games, so long as they're fun and entertaining. Adults don't feel nearly the same need to adhere to what's "cool"; it's a waste of energy, and frankly, we've learned by experience that whatever is cool now will just be embarassing in another couple years, anyhow.
Cool is a factor, but I think it's far more to Nintendo's credit that they're decidedly not trying to pander to that factor. "Cool" is fickle, costly, fleeting and very easy to screw up--and it drains time and resources that can be better spent on making a game or system "good".
I think Nintendo has it right. Let the other dogs fight over being King of Cool; Nintendo has better things to worry about.
Because unless you've got mad wealth, mad marketing skills or mad clout, there's absolutely no way you're gonna be able to get your game "out there" as well as a publisher can.
Rags-to-riches Internet stories like Counter-Strike do exist, but it's simply bad business to assume that the same will happen to your game. If you're anything more than a hobbyist, odds are you'll gain more than you'll lose by getting a publisher.
Okay, anybody who has read my past posts on Tribes knows that I'm about as close as they come to a slavering fanboy when it comes to Tribes. Tribes is the very definition of What A Game Should Be in my book, and I love it in the same way other people love opera, collectible figurines, and reality television. Tribes is what gaming should be. That said, I'm about to propose something that's sure to piss pretty much everybody off:
Tribes, on balance, was made measurably worse by the community.
I'm not just talking about griefers, lamers and TKers; that's universal and understandable. I'm also talking about server admins and modders. There were some fantastic mods floating about out there--well thought-out, balanced mods that made the game substantially different, better and/or cooler. There were also some decent but decidedly less-thought out mods out there, mods which nerfed heavies/snipers/pilots/etc, mods which made weapons entirely too deadly, mods which presented poorly planned, poorly executed maps, mods that futzed with physics in a way that was amusing for five minutes then tedious--you've played 'em. What's more, there were junior modders who'd take a good mod and add their own little melange of spices, spawning 'renegades' variants and the like.
All well and good, but once this got underway, it became a serious challenge to find a decent game to join. The vast majority of servers would be running some mod or other--and if you didn't know the mod, you'd get your ass handed to you on a silver platter for several hours until you learned all the various idiosyncrasies therein. Other servers required client-side downloads--a real annoyance when all you want to do is hop on a game and play. It was not uncommon to find only two or three servers running a "standard" game--and these servers would generally either be packed to capacity or dead empty.
I know it's not cool to rail on the community, but I honestly think that it played a real role in making the game less playable overall. Yes, there are tons of other factors in play--for example, Dynamix/VU could have shelled out for a couple dozen dedicated base servers. Yes, I could have S'ed the FU and run my own server (which I did for some time back in the day, by the way--admittedly with my own half-baked mod...) Yes, a number of clans did original, stunning, amazing work worthy of mountains of praise. But when it comes right down to it, I really think that Tribes as a game was hurt more than it was helped by the community at large.
Nah, they're not asking the wrong crowd. You represent a subset of geeks in general; the Slashdot crowd includes design geeks, EE geeks, trekkies, anime geeks, code geeks, theory geeks, math geeks, cool hack geeks, and others.
I know a fair number of hardcore, bits-under-the-fingernails geeks who really, really like their PowerBooks. It's not that they don't enjoy building their own machines, or that they can't handle combing through core dumps; rather, they feel that Apple has given them a heckuva nice package with their OS X laptops.
Until a couple years ago, my primary development/mucking about machine was a home-built AMD T-Bird. I still use it--but mainly for legacy apps and cross-platform compiling; these days, I do most of my code wrangling on my PowerBook. Yes, there are a good number of folks here who can't stomach the thought of plunking down a scandalously hefty $500 for a new Mac mini or an unheard-of $1500 for a professional-grade laptop, but I'd wager there are even more people who really don't give a damn which religion their computer belongs to--so long as it does the job well. For me, the PowerBook has done "the job" far, far better than any computer I've ever owned.
Once I realized that I didn't really need a desktop to do all the things I wanted to do, the appeal of a 100-pound setup started to fade. It's nice to be able to huck my entire development environment into my backpack and set up shop while I'm waiting for my wife to get off work. It's nice to be able to wander out to the couch to code when I'm sick of sitting in the office. Start looking at laptops, and you'll quickly see why Apple is such a contender amongst geeks.
Dollar for dollar, Apple is making some of the best damn laptops I've ever seen. They're rugged, responsive, light, compact, reliable, have great batteries, and are aesthetically pleasing, to boot--all this before you even start talking about the system and software you get with the package. That's why I (and a fair number of other folks) "switched"; as far as laptops go, Apple is currently the company to beat.
There are two advantages of owning a house: tax benefits (at least in the US), and less restrictions. I have a big dog at my feet as I type this. The cats are sleeping somewhere around here though I can't see them.
Consider, too, that a careful house hunt is an investment in and of itself. Depending on where you choose to live, your house can skyrocket in value--as an extreme example, a significant number of Baltimore townhouses that sold for $50,000 five years ago are worth over $300,000 today. A person who rented and invested the difference over that same period of time would be looking at a fairly significant net loss.
When you buy a house, you can end up sitting on a gold mine in a matter of years--and maintain roughly the same monthly payment for as long as you live there. (Caveat: local property taxes are a mitigating factor--you'll want to keep an eye on those...)
Friend, if everyone could take their one W-2 form and fill out the 1040 EZ in the comfort of their one-bedroom apartment, do you really think companies like H&R block would be in the business of helping people out with their income taxes?
I've got small business income, two mortgages, interest income from my bank account, a W-2 from my day job, a W-2 from my wife's old job, and the unreported student stipends my wife receives as a grad student. You figure out how to file long form with a dozen-odd extra schedules tagged on in under an hour, by hand, and you've got yourself the single most profitable invention/business plan known to mankind.
Kids: Remember, don't take tax advice from a guy who thinks it's OK to just not do your taxes if you're not a government employee. We have a name for people like this. They're called "future inmates".
Take a quick trip through some of the IRS' 1400 PDFs. You'll find over 400 megabytes of tax forms and instructions.
The tax code is updated every year.
Unless you're looking at a fairly trivial tax calculator, trying to write and maintain an Open Source, Community-Driven tax program would be a positively Herculean undertaking. It'd dwarf the Mozilla and Apache projects. If you are looking at a fairly simple tax program, then you can probably wrap your taxes up by hand in the time it takes to download, install, and do your taxes on your PC.
What's more, code errors and oversights can mean audits, overpayments, smaller returns and penalties for your users.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, I'm a total freakin' idiot when it comes to basic trigonometry.
Where do I go to turn in my geek badge?
As I understand it, sin(x) can have values between positive 1 and negative 1. Is my x going to be positive or negative?
A little bit of background: I have a value of x somewhere between 0 and pi.
Snark aside, this really isn't an issue where you should be guided by ancedotal evidence posted to Slashdot. You're working for a Fortune 100 company, for crying out loud--you need a carefully-planned methodology, not a bunch of yammering 'experts' giving you off-the-cuff advice on a very complex problem...
You should really just go out and rent/buy a copy. There's just no good way to describe the game using mere words--you really need to experience whole the giddily bizzare thing for yourself.
Yeah--the worst part is that giant robotic arm that comes out of nowhere, grabs you by the waist, carries you to the nearest game retailer, and forces you to buy it.
The injustice of it all, I tell you! If only there were some way of not buying these horribly overpriced games!
*skritcha-skritcha skratchitta-rachitta skOOOWP-a skritch skratch skratchitta-skritchitty-skritchitta skewww scratch skritchitta-sratcha-ratch sritch*
When I first read the closing line of the article, I chuckled.
Then I felt dismayed.
It really is a shame when the prevailing "geek" attitude towards agencies like the FBI is mistrust and fear, not confidence and respect.
Y'know, the onomatopoeic, self-deprecating April Fools' jokes about Slashdot's predilection for duplicate articles were funnier the first time around, back in 2003.
It's kinda sad that one of Slashdot's most glaring faults remains alive and healthy a full two years later. Would it kill you to get your collective act together and hire an actual editor? Y'know, the kind of person who can proofread, keep track of what's been posted and other heinously challenging tasks?
I'm a programmer. During the day, I write and maintain code for an educational institution. It's a good job, and the pay is enough for a comfortable life, but what I'd really like to do is write games for a living. It's not simply a pipe dream--my latest game was quite well received, and I'm working hard on the next game--but I'm lucky if I can eke ten hours out of a week to work on it, what with my job, wife, errands, home maintenance and all eating into my time. I dream of being able to devote myself solely to working on these games; I'd be a happier person, and I'd be able to give a lot more to the community than I have time for now. I just don't know how I can make my passion my trade, since I can't sell my game for any significant amount.
What can I do? I've found my skill, and I'm itching to expand on it, but I don't see how to go about doing it without forever relegating it to a hobby. It isn't like I can give live performances, and while I do receive the odd donation from grateful fans, it's hardly enough to sustain my relatively simple livelihood. What hope do I have of ever being able to do what I truly love for a living?
There are a lot of people who give up years of their life to try and start small businesses, but because of bad luck, bad decisions, or aggressive competition, they lose everything (including possibly any personal assets). Nobody assumes that these people should receive government handouts or special government laws to protect them to make sure their endeavor suceeds. Just the same as the work someone does to put together a small business, there's nothing special about the work that your hypothetical software developer did, either. If he/she can't sell it to anyone for a price that's worth all the effort, then the developer made a bad investment of their time & resources. There's no reason for government enforcement to make sure that such activities succeed.
Explain how a programmer--any programmer--could possibly make a living by plying their trade if it is given that anybody could take a copy of their work and give it away for free. Explain how an individual could possibly accumulate the years of experience and expertise necessary to become a skilled programmer and still manage to feed, clothe and shelter themselves. The only plausible scenario I see is that programmers go to work for entities large enough to employ them to build internal systems. There is simply no impetus beyond altruism to produce applications for the general populace in your system. There would exist only freeware and Open Source software in the public sector--and while this may seem a tantalizing prospect, consider what the state of Open Source computing would be today if it weren't for the many advances provided by the private sector. How is it somehow natural that the carpenter be presented with the opportunity to strike out on his own, but the programmer cannot be given an even remotely reasonable chance of ever being able to make a living from his trade without relying on an employer to commission his work?
Yeah, yeah - the old "property is just a legal definition too" comeback...just about every stable civilization on the planet has strong laws against the use of violence, as just about stable society in history has agreed that the use of violence as a mechanism for social order has not resulted in a net benefit to the society as a whole. Once you eliminate the "might makes right" social structure, then the "natural" behavior of private property & free markets becomes apparent. "I can't take that thing from you by force, so to get it from you, I have to offer you something that you will think is of equal value."
I think that someone who expects to be paid a lot of money just because they worked hard, whether or not the thing they produced or the service they provided was
But this is key to intellectual property rights. If I truly and completely own the book I purchase, there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to make any changes to that work I see fit. There should be no issue whatsoever with me making changes to a work I own. Fraud only matters when there is value in authorship; if there is value in authorship, it really is not that extreme of a jump to suggest that an author retain rights beyond simply having his name protected.
By "fundamentally different", I assume you mean "more valuable than people would be willing to pay for in a normal free market system". I believe that you (and intellectual property proponents) have a grossly-inflated view of the "value" of such works.
A fair enough divergence of opinion. I happen to believe that a software developer who spends two years of his life developing a complex, well-written, useful, popular application deserves something more than to have random strangers pick his product up and give it away for free on the Internet. You clearly disagree. One man's visionary entrepreneur is another man's worthless freeloader.
In the absence of government enforcement of artificial monopoly, the value of such work is exactly dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. This is the "natural" value of any product or service. If your "product" has to receive special privileged enforcement by the government to be worth a higher price, then it isn't worth as much as you think it is.
That's a specious argument. In the absence of government enforcement of artificial order, the value of a person's home is exactly dictated by what that person is willing to do to protect it. In the absence of the government's enforcement of artificial moral standards, the punishment for taking another man's life is exactly dictated by the value that person had in the eyes of his family and community--and just how much they're willing to do in retribution. In the absence of government enforcement of artificial contract law, the value of a contractual agreement between two parties is exactly dictated by your ability to enforce the terms of the contract should the other party fail to meet their end of the deal.
Everything a government does is an artificial construct. By your reasoning, it's absurd to grant the physically weak protection from the highwayman, and it's absurd to give the mentally deficient protection from the huckster. After all, the "natural" balance grants success to the quick, the strong, and the cunning. If one person's interests need to receive special privileged enforcement by the government to be protected, then that person isn't worth as much as one may think he is.
If you want to see what happens when you remove the artifice of law and let things run their natural course, you need only watch a pack of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.
This attempt at an emotional appeal is irrelevant to the argument.
I apologize for using emotional appeals to bolster my own opinion. It's a cheap and disingenuous trick, and I'll try to refrain from doing it in the future.
(Not that I have anything against pedantry, mind you.)
We're talking past each other, here. I agree with you; all I'm saying is that the simple fact of the matter is that the driving force behind P2P software today is illegal file sharing. I don't think P2P software should be made illegal, but I do think that the vast majority of P2P traffic has been, and continues to be, illegal.
Most honest, hard-working people expect to get compensated for providing a desired good or service. They also understand that they will not get compensated if people do not find their good or service desirable enough at the price that they are charging. [...] Only "intellectual property owners" expect to get paid over and over, every time their "property" is distributed by 3rd parties, even though the effort to create that product only occurred once. And the government enforces such a business model by riding roughshod over private property rights.
So you're basically saying that while it's normal for honest, hard-working cabinetmakers to expect to be paid for each widget they sell to a person, your honest, hard-working author or musician can only be expected to be paid the first time they sell their product to somebody, simply because the fruits of their honest, hard work can be reproduced with trivial effort whereas the cabinetmaker's finished product cannot.
I simply don't agree with you. I believe that intangible things like music and software are fundamentally different from physical goods, and that it is perfectly reasonable for an artist's work to enjoy legal protection from having some large, rich entity simply appropriate their work and pass it off however they see fit, with no compensation to the creator whatsoever.
Something of a tangent: should counterfeiting be illegal? After all, a dollar bill nothing is more than a piece of printed cloth with some ethereal concept of value attached to it. Why shouldn't I be allowed to make copies of the dollar bill I have in my wallet and sell them for fifty cents each? I own that dollar bill, and I can't imagine why I shouldn't be allowed to do whatever I like with it, including make and sell copies of it.
Client/server is a fundamentally different architecture from peer-to-peer. In a client/server environment, there are many individual client applications that connect to a central server application, and the two types of applications have very different functionality from one another. In a peer-to-peer model, you have a single application that acts as both client and server; instead of users accessing a central server, they tie into existing P2P nodes. Think of the C/S model as a hub and spokes, where the hub is the server and the spokes are the clients; think of the P2P model as a fishing net, where each knot is a P2P node. Yes, there are aspects of the two that overlap, but there's still a very real technical difference between C/S apps and P2P apps.
The reason this distinction is important is that it is much more difficult to track down an infringing P2P user than it is to track down an infringing server in a C/S model. What's more, when you shut down an infringing server, you've shut down the entire infringing network--a client app won't work without first connecting to a server. With P2P, shutting down a single node has no real effect on the rest of the network; shutting down a P2P network is the computing equivalent of killing a hydra. This is what makes P2P such a hot issue.
Too late!
Intellectual property doesn't have "special" privieges over physical goods. It has different privileges, because it is a different thing. If I spend two years of my life developing an awesome piece of software, should I really be expected to only ever sell it to one person? Because by your reasoning, once I've sold a copy my software, whoever bought it is perfectly justified in kicking it up onto the 'Net and handing it out to whomever the hell they please, because they paid for a copy of it, right? Would you argue that it's OK for me to buy a copy of The Shining, by Stephen King, change the title and author to Apocalypse, Baby!, by Jimmy Phallus, and sell it online for fifty cents a pop? After all, I bought the book--it's mine, and I can do whatever I damn well please with it, right?
I like the analogy, but I'd say that modern P2P is more like the broadsword--you can use it to cook or you can use it to kill people, but you can be damn sure that it was designed with a specific purpose in mind...
Yes, P2P is used for plenty of legal activity. A P2P application, in and of itself, does not violate the law. You're lying to yourself, though, if you suggest that the driving force behind P2P is anything other than illegal file sharing.
I, too, think that the court will find in favor of P2P, but honestly, there are no good guys in court today. One side is a pack of morally bankrupt, lying weasels who claim to be looking out for the little guy but are really in it for the money--but I don't care too much for the other side, either.
Y'know, the United Nations is worthy of plenty of criticism. There are a ton of things they could do much better than they do, and they've made plenty of bad decisions.
But "as evil as INGSOC"? Show me one example of the General Assembly actively and willfully seeking to do harm for the sake of doing harm. Show me one case where the U.N. took action because it was the morally wrong thing to do.
If you really must go around spouting bromidic hyperbole, at least pick a slur that makes some sense.
Cool is a factor, but I think it's far more to Nintendo's credit that they're decidedly not trying to pander to that factor. "Cool" is fickle, costly, fleeting and very easy to screw up--and it drains time and resources that can be better spent on making a game or system "good".
I think Nintendo has it right. Let the other dogs fight over being King of Cool; Nintendo has better things to worry about.
Rags-to-riches Internet stories like Counter-Strike do exist, but it's simply bad business to assume that the same will happen to your game. If you're anything more than a hobbyist, odds are you'll gain more than you'll lose by getting a publisher.
Tribes, on balance, was made measurably worse by the community.
I'm not just talking about griefers, lamers and TKers; that's universal and understandable. I'm also talking about server admins and modders. There were some fantastic mods floating about out there--well thought-out, balanced mods that made the game substantially different, better and/or cooler. There were also some decent but decidedly less-thought out mods out there, mods which nerfed heavies/snipers/pilots/etc, mods which made weapons entirely too deadly, mods which presented poorly planned, poorly executed maps, mods that futzed with physics in a way that was amusing for five minutes then tedious--you've played 'em. What's more, there were junior modders who'd take a good mod and add their own little melange of spices, spawning 'renegades' variants and the like.
All well and good, but once this got underway, it became a serious challenge to find a decent game to join. The vast majority of servers would be running some mod or other--and if you didn't know the mod, you'd get your ass handed to you on a silver platter for several hours until you learned all the various idiosyncrasies therein. Other servers required client-side downloads--a real annoyance when all you want to do is hop on a game and play. It was not uncommon to find only two or three servers running a "standard" game--and these servers would generally either be packed to capacity or dead empty.
I know it's not cool to rail on the community, but I honestly think that it played a real role in making the game less playable overall. Yes, there are tons of other factors in play--for example, Dynamix/VU could have shelled out for a couple dozen dedicated base servers. Yes, I could have S'ed the FU and run my own server (which I did for some time back in the day, by the way--admittedly with my own half-baked mod...) Yes, a number of clans did original, stunning, amazing work worthy of mountains of praise. But when it comes right down to it, I really think that Tribes as a game was hurt more than it was helped by the community at large.
I know a fair number of hardcore, bits-under-the-fingernails geeks who really, really like their PowerBooks. It's not that they don't enjoy building their own machines, or that they can't handle combing through core dumps; rather, they feel that Apple has given them a heckuva nice package with their OS X laptops.
Until a couple years ago, my primary development/mucking about machine was a home-built AMD T-Bird. I still use it--but mainly for legacy apps and cross-platform compiling; these days, I do most of my code wrangling on my PowerBook. Yes, there are a good number of folks here who can't stomach the thought of plunking down a scandalously hefty $500 for a new Mac mini or an unheard-of $1500 for a professional-grade laptop, but I'd wager there are even more people who really don't give a damn which religion their computer belongs to--so long as it does the job well. For me, the PowerBook has done "the job" far, far better than any computer I've ever owned.
Once I realized that I didn't really need a desktop to do all the things I wanted to do, the appeal of a 100-pound setup started to fade. It's nice to be able to huck my entire development environment into my backpack and set up shop while I'm waiting for my wife to get off work. It's nice to be able to wander out to the couch to code when I'm sick of sitting in the office. Start looking at laptops, and you'll quickly see why Apple is such a contender amongst geeks.
Dollar for dollar, Apple is making some of the best damn laptops I've ever seen. They're rugged, responsive, light, compact, reliable, have great batteries, and are aesthetically pleasing, to boot--all this before you even start talking about the system and software you get with the package. That's why I (and a fair number of other folks) "switched"; as far as laptops go, Apple is currently the company to beat.
Consider, too, that a careful house hunt is an investment in and of itself. Depending on where you choose to live, your house can skyrocket in value--as an extreme example, a significant number of Baltimore townhouses that sold for $50,000 five years ago are worth over $300,000 today. A person who rented and invested the difference over that same period of time would be looking at a fairly significant net loss.
When you buy a house, you can end up sitting on a gold mine in a matter of years--and maintain roughly the same monthly payment for as long as you live there. (Caveat: local property taxes are a mitigating factor--you'll want to keep an eye on those...)
I've got small business income, two mortgages, interest income from my bank account, a W-2 from my day job, a W-2 from my wife's old job, and the unreported student stipends my wife receives as a grad student. You figure out how to file long form with a dozen-odd extra schedules tagged on in under an hour, by hand, and you've got yourself the single most profitable invention/business plan known to mankind.
Kids: Remember, don't take tax advice from a guy who thinks it's OK to just not do your taxes if you're not a government employee. We have a name for people like this. They're called "future inmates".
The tax code is updated every year.
Unless you're looking at a fairly trivial tax calculator, trying to write and maintain an Open Source, Community-Driven tax program would be a positively Herculean undertaking. It'd dwarf the Mozilla and Apache projects. If you are looking at a fairly simple tax program, then you can probably wrap your taxes up by hand in the time it takes to download, install, and do your taxes on your PC.
What's more, code errors and oversights can mean audits, overpayments, smaller returns and penalties for your users.