If you write music, you're borrowing a notational system, a musical scale, and knowledge of other pieces of music.
If you write a play, you're using a language, an alphabet, idiom, plot device, and other things that you did not develop.
If you invent a better mousetrap you're looking at designs of old ones to do so. If you invent a wonder-drug, you're looking at public-domain gene sequences, sequenced by others, with a history of medical knowledge that took thousands of years to accumulate.
And you want total control of something? I think not. You'll get limited protection, and you'll like it. If everyone got unlimited protection over any IP they had a part in, we wouldn't be able to do anything without paying royalties to many people for something their ancestors did centuries ago, which was in turn based off something developed before that.
Trust a philosophy student to make broad sweeping, and ultimately empty statements.
There is no such thing as 'universal morals', that would require a god. Perhaps celibacy or suicide would be bad if practiced by a whole race - for that race. But the universe would continue on.
The *only* principles people use are self interest, hopefully enlightened self interest. People help the poor because it makes them happy, or because they want to avoid class warfare. If it makes them happy it's because of conditioning, not universal morality. That's the reason 'we' eat cow and not cat.
The reason I can say that the *only* principle used is self interest is because there are no other principles. 'Morality' is just an open-ended social contract that people enter into out of self interest.
On other topics, which type of programming, Fraiser or WWF gets the most expensive ads? WWF, by far. And the superbowl (not very intellectual) tops that.
Maybe an ad on fraiser slightly influences someone to buy a lexus, maybe a twice a lifetime purchase, for a very small group of people. The value to the company is the % of people who wouldn't have bought, but now would, multiplied by the profit on that item. Very small numbers of people multiplied by a fairly high profit. The problem (for Lexus) is that they aren't an impulse purchase, people who buy $50k cars tend to do a little research, or buy what everyone else is buying. Either way, they aren't going to be very swayed by a commercial. The commercials are more of a break-even thing.
Then consider the WWF, or superbowl. Millions, hundreds of millions of viewers. Many of the products pitched are VERY impulsive buys. Soft-drinks, razors, etc. They also pitch them with very emotional means, comedy or endorsements by the stars. It's unlikely someone will buy a $50k car because Tiger Woods has one, but they may buy a $2 razor because he uses it, especially when they're all essentially the same anyways. Do the math for that, $1 profit (tiny plastic items are nearly all mark-up) times fifty million, or so.
That's why superbowl airtime goes for upwards of a million dollars per minute. Advertisement during pan-flute recitals, if these even made it to TV, would be dirt cheap.
How about if someone picks something that a small minority does, like, anal sex, or golden showers, or nose picking, or (not) breastfeeding, depending on who you're targetting.
You pick your target, note everything they do, and pick the thing that the least number of people do. Start a public opinion campaign to convince people that it's a nasty nasty thing.
Yes, if you pick something nearly everyone does, like sex, you won't be able to stir up a witch hunt. But if you pick a fringe activity you could convince people it was really sick (or more people would be doing it.)
And, even if someone did do something weird and 99% of people would agree that it was sick, is it relevant? If it doesn't come out in the course of their work, do we have the right to discriminate based on it?
I don't see how you're comparing PP to IP, all I see is how you say that they're distinct because there's no unit cost for IP.
I think all three ideas for distributing IP will work depending on the circumstance.
#1 works with a patron, either just to spur creation like an art fan sponsoring a picture, or to donate it to the community as advertising like IBM contributing to Linux.
#2 is basically the street performer idea. You pick up and leave if the tips aren't good, people know this and tip accordingly.
#3 if like now, except that like now, it's hard to enforce.
There's aother, which I saw proposed by RMS and imho, it's a good idea in many ways...
#4 tax blank media - accept the customer's word about what they're going to copy onto it (which artist's music, or which computer game, etc). Based on that, the tax is distributed fairly. There's no incentive to lie because supposedly if someone likes something enough to copy it, they want to see more of it get made.
Note that the assumption for #4 falls apart with hated companies like MS... But, then, if I got a copy of Win2k for the $.50 tax on a blank CDR, I'd probably consider it worth it and not bother lying, where I wouldn't pay $300 for it.
I don't mind limited patents (and IP protection in general). I do mind total "hands off!" statements like the original poster made.
IMHO, that discovery may be only 10% you, 90% history, but that's not to say you don't deserve any protection on your work. I just don't believe that copyrights and patents should never expire, which would be a valid view if you accepted that they were 100% the work of the current person.
I'd agree, especially with the last line of quoted material. Sounds like something I'd say myself.
I still mean what I said when I said all comparisons are flawed, but I should clarify that as, all analogies that are used to show how our behaviour with one must follow the behaviour with the other merely because both end with 'property'.
So yes, you were right to call me on it, my phrasing was incorrect.
Please provide the URL of that full piece, your arguments are quite compelling and I'd like to be able to show them to others.
I posted the DNFT because trolls are a real pain. I posted the content in the same way you post an OBHack on alt.hackers... I wanted to comment on the s/n ratio, but without lowering the s/n ratio to do so.
I actually mentioned this in my post "replies to troll that complain, without providing any content" are the problem.
As in, if someone asks "vi vs Emacs - provide factual data" it's not a troll, though it might provoke a mighty huge discussion, because people are going to be saying useful things. ("I like vi because...") Now, if someone just says "Linux sucks, 31337 d00ds use BSD", that'll just turn into a content-free flame-fest.
So my message was to encourage 1) moderators to not mod up trolls and 2) people to include content if they feed the trolls.
And something you have to feed trolls, sometimes they are serious people, and sometimes you just don't want their stupid question to go unanswered because it'll look to outsiders like they have a point nobody can refute. This is why people get good at feeding the trolls really dull food. ("This is refuted in FAQ #12 - RTFM")
A lack of privacy won't make people tolerant of others, it'll simply enable them to persecute others for their differences.
You think we'll stop demonizing politicians for cheating when we see our own spouses cheating? Or will we take a copy of that video to court in order to win a favorable divorce settlement?
Will people be free to do what they want, or will their employers and neighbors discriminate based on what they do on their own time?
Maybe your boss will fire you for checking out a porno site on your own time. Maybe the cops won't help you because they know you visited a counter-culture site that was critical of some Rodney King-esque brutality.
Mass spying is bad enough, but automate it and let people have a computer tabulate certain events... That's a sure recipe for a totalitarian state where everyone follows the strictest people's morality for fear of being labelled a pervert or deviant and ostracized.
When AI systems can recognize faces they'll follow people from camera to camera. And then you'll have AI designed to spot behaviour, sex, eating, nose picking, etc. Whatever someone wants to make the social evil of the week will be recorded and used against their enemies.
Any 'intellectual property physical property' comparison is a troll. IP can be copied and still exists for the original creator, physical property can't be magically duplicated. Until you adress that issue you're just adding to the N side of the S/N ratio.
Your IP is based on the collective history of the world. Where would be be if Shakespeare had the courts uphold a broad copyright on the idea of a tragedy, and his heirs sued people for creating derivative works? What if Calculus was patented and mathmeticians were sued for using it?
That's the kind of bullshit you're arguing for. Your IP is not an island. It exists on the foundation of other works, you don't deserve a universal monopoly on your ideas anymore than everyone your derivative life (and everyone else's) is based on deserve royalties when you do something that's unoriginal.
The *ONLY* viable alternative to limited and expiring IP protection is *NO* IP protection. If everyone's IP was treated as special just because they were the first to take it to court, there'd be nothing new done.
Accept that your precious 'IP' is really 10% yours and 90% based on the previous work of others. You're lucky to get the protection you do.
If Ruby is a 'correct' language, how does it compare to Python, which I heard described the same way? Python might be stricter in syntax, but are they otherwise similar?
btw, isn't PHP useful for static pages with some dynamic content, as opposed to almost completely dynamic pages? I mean, if you want to take a standard template and stick the current news story into it, isn't PHP easier because you do up the page and insert of PHP where you want the news story to go, instead of writing the page in perl, were you have more work to wrap an existing page around dynamic content?
For example - Blue's News (www.bluesnews.com) would be a good case for PHP, where slashdot (with completely customizable pages) makes more sense to go all the way and do the whole thing in perl (or the cgi language of your choice). I didn't think they were targeted at the same area, just that they overlapped in the middle.
I haven't used PHP, nor really had anyone explain its purpose in life, so this is just speculation.
Ugh - quit moderating trolls up. People ranting about them (without providing any real information) block any real content.
Exploits are very valuable. I was explaining to my co-worker about teardrop a year or two ago. He thought it was moderately interesting, but that nobody would have made that error, making the bug theoretical. It wasn't until I downloaded a ready-made exploit and took out his server, twice, with him watching, that he decided it was worth getting a patch for.
Now, if some hacker hadn't written that exploit, which enabled a bunch of no-skill kiddies to crash computers at random, some skilled attacker could have combined it with other exploits to reliably remove any computer on demand as the part of a larger coordinated attack.
When WinNuke still worked I got hit twice, a small price to pay to now be able to run a semi-reliable ftp server from the windows machine at work.
(And the same thing effects Linux servers, but there you don't have to impress every user, just Linus, AC, or the maintainer of whatever code base is weak and it'll go into the main codestream. Exploits still help though, so they can see an attack isn't just a theoretical posibility, but a skilled user could use it NOW.)
Any type of taxation can be automatic. The BBC could get an automatic $100/citizen, or %.02 of income tax, or anything else. As long as the BBC doesn't employ the actual TV-Tax collectors, it's still in the position of dealing with the government for its money.
If you can turn a TV Licensing Officer away, why do people ever pay the fines? While I don't believe some of the stories in this thread, the officers must have some power to enter and search the homes of unwilling people.
Ummm, I beg to differ. It *is* good that the CPU doesn't burn itself out - yes. But it is bad that the CPU kicks into this mode on common applications.
If Intel is selling this chip as a performance solution then I want to be able to run it at 100% for 4-6 hours, for a kicking game of Q3 at a LAN party. I want to be able to do FP work 24/7 while I render an animation. If their CPU can't do these perfectly reasonable things they should mark it as such.
Look at it this way - if Intel was selling a CPU for use in WebTV (or some other embedded application) and the user was able to do something, rapidly opening and closing a window for example, that overheated the CPU and it slowed down - that'd be fine. It'd still function as a WebTV box, and while the user was screwing with the CPU it wouldn't be doing anything else.
Contrast that with them selling a CPU that they claim is a performance monster, better than any other x8 CPU. People expect to run their x86 machines at 100%, many servers at my work have been up for months and have been at nearly 100% load the entire time. When I installed a bunch of dual celerons a few years back as a rendering farm, they were at 100% for 18 months, running FP rending - about the hottest code you can get.
If the P4 is sold to a market that expects this performance, it had better perform.
If the only way to get a chip to overheat was to execute a tight loop of CPUID instructions, or something else that had no real purpose, then I would accept it kicking in thermal limiting. That's beyond reasonable operating specs (as in, performs no function, exists just to stress the product.)
To use a car as an example - if I buy a car, I expect it to be capable of highway speeds for prolonged times. It's not okay that the company profiled drivers and decided that 99.2% of the time, a duty cycle of 70% 30mph, 20% 50mph, and 10% 60mph was all that was required. I'd expect the car to be capable of handling 65mph 100% of the time, for 8-10 hours. If it couldn't do this, I would like a thermal limiter where it warned me gracefully instead of blowing up, but I'd still take it back as defective.
The idea that the people should support public broadcasting, something without a strong commercial slant is a good one. A tax on TV purchases and imports seems a reasonable way collect that. (IMHO, I favor using regular taxes, because like education, I think it benefits the whole country, but...)
What isn't at all reasonable is the TLA vans patrolling the streets, the automatic search warrants...
The *only* time I see automatic right-to-enter being reasonable is in "hot pursuit". If a police officer sees someone they are pursuing enter a building, they should be able to follow. But there are no other reasons in my mind that they should be able to enter without the owner's permission, or a judicially granted warrant. And I mean something a judge really investigates and approves, not something they rubber-stamp.
Godwin's Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There's nothing in there about losing an argument.
There are people who would say that unwarranted comparisons to Hitler or Nazis would lose the argument, but in this case, the Hitler reference was on topic.
".. no history of totalitarianism, unlike much of the rest of Europe."
".. Hitler would have loved this." (To paraphrase)
Yes, he would have. That's the point the original poster made when they said that England had a different view than Germany, or Poland, or France, might have on this subject. To say that Hitler would have liked this would be like saying that Stalin would have liked it - factually accurate and on topic.
Wasn't it in France where the Nazis used the gun registrations to round up the weapons from the locals? Think of how innefective the resistance would have been if there'd been CCTV cameras everywhere with facial-recognition AI.
So, Intel is basically selling a crippled product, and yet you aren't annoyed at this?
They know it'll never reach 100% of its power, that it can't be upgraded to the next gen, that it underperforms the lower-priced chips from both companies, and it costs more, requires a new botherboard, power supply, and case.
And all you do is say "It'll be better next year."
Well, screw that. I didn't buy a K6-2 because it didn't perform well, I won't buy a P4 because it's crap. If they change that, I may change my mind in the future.
I'm not buying a technology, or a product line. I'm buy a CPU, one that I expect to perform well for the things that I do. If the P4 doesn't, I don't care if it's got super long pipes, or pixie dust, it's still crap.
Yes, the early Pentiums sucked, and then the line got better. And the PPro was overpriced and underperforming, and then became the P2 and P3. But if you bought that first gen chip you were screwed. You had a crap product, for four times the price and no boost in performance, that required a brand new motherboard and ram, which were all pricey and would be obsolete by the time anything worth upgrading to came along.
Call me when the P4 doesn't get demolished by the P3 and the Athlon. Call me when it costs less and performs better.
The OEMs always charge $100 - $250 more for a system than it could be built for, with quality parts, if you did it yourself.
And maybe I'm just really fast, but I've rarely had a new PC take more than an hour to assemble from parts.
You could be talking about how they come with the OS pre-installed or something, but I've rarely seen a business that's used the pre-installed OS. Everyone I've worked for has wiped it and reinstalled something else. They've also usually had something like Norton's Ghost to automate this procedure. (Not like installing takes very long, base Win2k is a 30 minute install, Win98 takes 15, and *nobody* uses WinME...)
But, you go ahead and pay those companies an extra couple hundred dollars, and accept the low quality parts you're likely to get. (Dell and Compaq both have custom mobos that are trash, and tend to ship with the slowest HD and Video you can buy, just to save a buck.)
I'd rather spend a few hours on research (not too much, because I keep caught up for my own purchases) and then specify, to the specific parts, the exact computer I want. And then get a local store to send me exactly that. Hell, assembly is free on a full system, so there's that much less to do.
It's nice, knowing you've got quality parts that you'll be able to find a BIOS upgrade for, or replace with off-the-shelf components in the future. Nicer yet when you realize it was much cheaper.
Re:So, basically what you're saying is ...
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The K6-2 was very crippled by the chipsets out for it at the time. It wasn't a stellar performer on its own, but the chipsets would have held anything back.
I played with an ASUS P5A (Super 7, Ali chipset) at work recently when I put a 233MMX in. What a dog. Slower than the 166MMX next to it on a XP55-T2P4. (A bunch of data entry terminals, speed not terribly important.)
You need special IDE drivers, AGP Drivers, etc. It's like a Via chipset, except that Via actually makes decent drivers. Maybe Ali and ATI are the same company? They both make hardware that should be good, yet prevent anyone from ever using it properly by withholding stable drivers.
But I've also seen a K6-2 do very well on some real-world things... I think it's largely the mobo.
Copyrights are intended to be a *limited term* monopoly. Certain uses are also intended to be allowed with those works, quoting, etc.
By making copyrights essentially unlimited in term (longer than the average human lives) and still increasing them, as well as trying to remove the rights of people to quote and copy for non-infringing purposes, that limited monopoly gets a lot less limited.
That monopoly was granted with the idea that the public (government) would protect the work to encourage production in trade for the public's small use (quotes, etc) and eventual full use of the work.
That trade is no longer in place, you'll never have access to a work released during your life, and you don't have any ability to use the works in a legal manner.
So why are you paying taxes for the police forces that protect those right?
It not like a property crime, where the law exists to ensure that nothing is taken from the original creator. Information can be copied, so the creator still has the work. But they also have a nearly unlimited government monopoly preventing anyone else from having it as well.
In any contract I've heard of, both parties have to uphold their end of the bargain or it's void. The content publishers aren't living up to their end of the bargain... (And no, bribing politicians doesn't form a new agreement.)
I will support any technological measures necessary to remove any access control measures from media. By preventing a consumers legal access to media they purchased, these companies are defaulting on their copyright contract. If the politicians won't do anything about it, the people will.
I agree wrt U5, it's one of the most finished games I've played.
I think it's my favorite of the Ultimas, the 3d ones (imho) were lousy. U5 had a nicer interface than 4, where you could target a monster in combat and hit it even if you or it moved, or if it wasn't in one of the four cardinal directions. Very nice stuff. U4 was also a bit heavy on the virtues, very (very!) hard to keep in control. (Accidentally talk to a beggar? Gotta give him something, or you'll lose virtue.)
I can't really disagree with the original poster re: later Ultimas. U7 or 8 (the last one I played in mid 94 or so) was so buggy it would barely install, let alone play. It also had interface issues (too much mousing required, lame pack-style inventory, etc) but those might have been okay if the game was stable enough to play.
I played U1 (a tiny bit), U3 (quite a ways), and U4 and U5 to the finish. I don't know where the interface in the later games was introduced.
I really think there's no excuse for releasing a game as buggy as the later games. I don't care how broke you are, provide the product described on the box or don't provide anything. I work in a phone company and we provide a system with guarantees, it can't drop every 20th call just because we can't afford to find the bugs.
I never tried later ultimas because I'm really a fan of the non-realtime, SSI or OSI late 80s games, where there's no emphasis on clicking on the monster, or anything. As such, most of the later stuff is a bit accademic.
But, U5, now there was a game. Wow!
I almost flunked grade 8 because of it. And I wasted tons of graph paper.
Hey, maybe you'll find this funny... U4 was the first game I really tinkered with. I was fiddling with Copy2+ one day in the sector editor, and I was scrolling down a sector. It seemed odd, but a pattern of bytes caught my eye. Turns out that it was the shape of one of the little islands (off to the far east, Moonglow, was it?). I figured out roughly where I was and with a bunch of searching (later I learned how this related to sextant coordinates (in U4 or 5, don't remember)) I found the bay outside of British's castle...
That was cool, it let me make a perfect map of any area. But, even better, it let me edit the map. (I backed up the disks first.) I put roads of grassland between all the cities, especially the annoying ones (north-west, surrounded by forests). Then, while experimenting with what values equated to what landscape, I noticed more things, towns, castle segments, horses, and ships (and more).
I was trying to determind which of these tiles could be walked across (building bridges to the islands) and I walked on the horse... I hit 'B'oard and lo and behold, I was on the horse... I walked off the tile and was still on the horse, but it was also still there.
So then I went around, putting a horse outside of every city and a ship next to the closest water.
Insta-transport.
I noticed, when trying to collect huge numbers of ships, that a whirlpool would start to swallow them when I got 12 or more on screen at once.
Tons of other cool stories, but basically, U4 and U5 are the games that got me interested in how they're done, instead of just playing them.
I'm sure glad that SK considers it a success. I'm sure that everyone who paid to download the story, with the understanding that a whole product would be provided, would disagree. But, he might as well make a lot of money at the expense of the fans.
And I don't think it was 'dumb', I think SK intended to stop at some point. He knew he had a flop of a story, but if he flogged it chapter by chapter he could eventually blame the lack of sales on 'pirates', instead of the fact the story sucked.
If he was doing this, for real, he wouldn't have guilt-tripped the paying users into paying more to cover the supposed 'theft' by the nasty 'pirates'. He'd have had a reasonably robust system implemented to make sure that people actually got the section they intended to download, and that replacements could be provided for a reasonable price (free, or $.05 for the bandwidth, etc) for people who lost the original copy.
Instead he set up a system with insane rules, knowing that when it screwed up, he'd be a good bit richer and wouldn't have to actually provide the product.
For starters, you're arguing falaciously. Someone can recognize a bad idea without necessarily having a better idea of their own. To point out that someone hasn't had any great ideas in a field does not discredit their statement that someone else's idea is bad. (And, I'll also point out that the/. editors have built the biggest geek site on the net... not a trivial accomplishment.)
Second, The Plant was a stupid idea - for the consumers. Pay 2-3 times the price for a paper book, have insane restrictions on redownloading multiple copies (SK's head is *so* far up his ass on issues like multiple copies of an e-book being equated to a physical book.) and a lack of guarantee of a finished product.
Sure, SK made a shitload of money. So do many other conmen every day. He sold a product he clearly didn't intend to actually provide and guilt-tripped the innocent into covering the supposed 'theft' of others. (He counted multiple downloads as a theft, without even considering that downloads fail every now and then, let alone that downloading a second copy for the Palm isn't an offense anyone with a clue would care about, and furthermore, that 'theft' is not a word that applies to making *copies* of something.)
He obviously went into it for a quick buck, intending to quit whenever it wasn't profitable, regardless of all the users he screwed by leaving them with a partial story.
Ad companies consider it a success whenever anyone recognizes their brands, regardless of what the opinion is...
By their standards, you're a success story. Weird, no?
I feel the same as you do. They may have achieved brand recognition, but I use that to avoid purchasing products from companies I dislike.
I really should be more vocal about it, calling the 1-800 numbers of these companies and explaining why I'm not buying their products. Maybe they'd get the picture. But, I doubt it...
I really think advertising is a scam; that the ad agencies have convinced companies that showing some droolers happily using a product is going to convince more people to buy that. Especially those lame commercials where they only name the product in the last second.
But, maybe I'm odd - I don't buy by brand, I shop by price and features, as directly verified as possible. (ie, not "5/7 doctors prefer..." but "128MB of RAM". The only concession I make to brand shopping is to weed out the products of companies who use annoying advertising, or companies who hide product info. (Making it hard to comparison shop.)
They can call me a success if they want, but all brand recognition lets me do is enter them into juckbuster.
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To what extent do you create something?
If you write music, you're borrowing a notational system, a musical scale, and knowledge of other pieces of music.
If you write a play, you're using a language, an alphabet, idiom, plot device, and other things that you did not develop.
If you invent a better mousetrap you're looking at designs of old ones to do so. If you invent a wonder-drug, you're looking at public-domain gene sequences, sequenced by others, with a history of medical knowledge that took thousands of years to accumulate.
And you want total control of something? I think not. You'll get limited protection, and you'll like it. If everyone got unlimited protection over any IP they had a part in, we wouldn't be able to do anything without paying royalties to many people for something their ancestors did centuries ago, which was in turn based off something developed before that.
Trust a philosophy student to make broad sweeping, and ultimately empty statements.
There is no such thing as 'universal morals', that would require a god. Perhaps celibacy or suicide would be bad if practiced by a whole race - for that race. But the universe would continue on.
The *only* principles people use are self interest, hopefully enlightened self interest. People help the poor because it makes them happy, or because they want to avoid class warfare. If it makes them happy it's because of conditioning, not universal morality. That's the reason 'we' eat cow and not cat.
The reason I can say that the *only* principle used is self interest is because there are no other principles. 'Morality' is just an open-ended social contract that people enter into out of self interest.
On other topics, which type of programming, Fraiser or WWF gets the most expensive ads? WWF, by far. And the superbowl (not very intellectual) tops that.
Maybe an ad on fraiser slightly influences someone to buy a lexus, maybe a twice a lifetime purchase, for a very small group of people. The value to the company is the % of people who wouldn't have bought, but now would, multiplied by the profit on that item. Very small numbers of people multiplied by a fairly high profit. The problem (for Lexus) is that they aren't an impulse purchase, people who buy $50k cars tend to do a little research, or buy what everyone else is buying. Either way, they aren't going to be very swayed by a commercial. The commercials are more of a break-even thing.
Then consider the WWF, or superbowl. Millions, hundreds of millions of viewers. Many of the products pitched are VERY impulsive buys. Soft-drinks, razors, etc. They also pitch them with very emotional means, comedy or endorsements by the stars. It's unlikely someone will buy a $50k car because Tiger Woods has one, but they may buy a $2 razor because he uses it, especially when they're all essentially the same anyways. Do the math for that, $1 profit (tiny plastic items are nearly all mark-up) times fifty million, or so.
That's why superbowl airtime goes for upwards of a million dollars per minute. Advertisement during pan-flute recitals, if these even made it to TV, would be dirt cheap.
How about if someone picks something that a small minority does, like, anal sex, or golden showers, or nose picking, or (not) breastfeeding, depending on who you're targetting.
You pick your target, note everything they do, and pick the thing that the least number of people do. Start a public opinion campaign to convince people that it's a nasty nasty thing.
Yes, if you pick something nearly everyone does, like sex, you won't be able to stir up a witch hunt. But if you pick a fringe activity you could convince people it was really sick (or more people would be doing it.)
And, even if someone did do something weird and 99% of people would agree that it was sick, is it relevant? If it doesn't come out in the course of their work, do we have the right to discriminate based on it?
I don't see how you're comparing PP to IP, all I see is how you say that they're distinct because there's no unit cost for IP.
I think all three ideas for distributing IP will work depending on the circumstance.
#1 works with a patron, either just to spur creation like an art fan sponsoring a picture, or to donate it to the community as advertising like IBM contributing to Linux.
#2 is basically the street performer idea. You pick up and leave if the tips aren't good, people know this and tip accordingly.
#3 if like now, except that like now, it's hard to enforce.
There's aother, which I saw proposed by RMS and imho, it's a good idea in many ways...
#4 tax blank media - accept the customer's word about what they're going to copy onto it (which artist's music, or which computer game, etc). Based on that, the tax is distributed fairly. There's no incentive to lie because supposedly if someone likes something enough to copy it, they want to see more of it get made.
Note that the assumption for #4 falls apart with hated companies like MS... But, then, if I got a copy of Win2k for the $.50 tax on a blank CDR, I'd probably consider it worth it and not bother lying, where I wouldn't pay $300 for it.
I don't mind limited patents (and IP protection in general). I do mind total "hands off!" statements like the original poster made.
IMHO, that discovery may be only 10% you, 90% history, but that's not to say you don't deserve any protection on your work. I just don't believe that copyrights and patents should never expire, which would be a valid view if you accepted that they were 100% the work of the current person.
I'd agree, especially with the last line of quoted material. Sounds like something I'd say myself.
I still mean what I said when I said all comparisons are flawed, but I should clarify that as, all analogies that are used to show how our behaviour with one must follow the behaviour with the other merely because both end with 'property'.
So yes, you were right to call me on it, my phrasing was incorrect.
Please provide the URL of that full piece, your arguments are quite compelling and I'd like to be able to show them to others.
Heh, was kinda funny.
...") Now, if someone just says "Linux sucks, 31337 d00ds use BSD", that'll just turn into a content-free flame-fest.
I posted the DNFT because trolls are a real pain. I posted the content in the same way you post an OBHack on alt.hackers... I wanted to comment on the s/n ratio, but without lowering the s/n ratio to do so.
I actually mentioned this in my post "replies to troll that complain, without providing any content" are the problem.
As in, if someone asks "vi vs Emacs - provide factual data" it's not a troll, though it might provoke a mighty huge discussion, because people are going to be saying useful things. ("I like vi because
So my message was to encourage 1) moderators to not mod up trolls and 2) people to include content if they feed the trolls.
And something you have to feed trolls, sometimes they are serious people, and sometimes you just don't want their stupid question to go unanswered because it'll look to outsiders like they have a point nobody can refute. This is why people get good at feeding the trolls really dull food. ("This is refuted in FAQ #12 - RTFM")
A lack of privacy won't make people tolerant of others, it'll simply enable them to persecute others for their differences.
You think we'll stop demonizing politicians for cheating when we see our own spouses cheating? Or will we take a copy of that video to court in order to win a favorable divorce settlement?
Will people be free to do what they want, or will their employers and neighbors discriminate based on what they do on their own time?
Maybe your boss will fire you for checking out a porno site on your own time. Maybe the cops won't help you because they know you visited a counter-culture site that was critical of some Rodney King-esque brutality.
Mass spying is bad enough, but automate it and let people have a computer tabulate certain events... That's a sure recipe for a totalitarian state where everyone follows the strictest people's morality for fear of being labelled a pervert or deviant and ostracized.
When AI systems can recognize faces they'll follow people from camera to camera. And then you'll have AI designed to spot behaviour, sex, eating, nose picking, etc. Whatever someone wants to make the social evil of the week will be recorded and used against their enemies.
There is *no* freedom is constant surveilance.
Oh yawn! Go troll another one.
Any 'intellectual property physical property' comparison is a troll. IP can be copied and still exists for the original creator, physical property can't be magically duplicated. Until you adress that issue you're just adding to the N side of the S/N ratio.
Your IP is based on the collective history of the world. Where would be be if Shakespeare had the courts uphold a broad copyright on the idea of a tragedy, and his heirs sued people for creating derivative works? What if Calculus was patented and mathmeticians were sued for using it?
That's the kind of bullshit you're arguing for. Your IP is not an island. It exists on the foundation of other works, you don't deserve a universal monopoly on your ideas anymore than everyone your derivative life (and everyone else's) is based on deserve royalties when you do something that's unoriginal.
The *ONLY* viable alternative to limited and expiring IP protection is *NO* IP protection. If everyone's IP was treated as special just because they were the first to take it to court, there'd be nothing new done.
Accept that your precious 'IP' is really 10% yours and 90% based on the previous work of others. You're lucky to get the protection you do.
If Ruby is a 'correct' language, how does it compare to Python, which I heard described the same way? Python might be stricter in syntax, but are they otherwise similar?
btw, isn't PHP useful for static pages with some dynamic content, as opposed to almost completely dynamic pages? I mean, if you want to take a standard template and stick the current news story into it, isn't PHP easier because you do up the page and insert of PHP where you want the news story to go, instead of writing the page in perl, were you have more work to wrap an existing page around dynamic content?
For example - Blue's News (www.bluesnews.com) would be a good case for PHP, where slashdot (with completely customizable pages) makes more sense to go all the way and do the whole thing in perl (or the cgi language of your choice). I didn't think they were targeted at the same area, just that they overlapped in the middle.
I haven't used PHP, nor really had anyone explain its purpose in life, so this is just speculation.
Ugh - quit moderating trolls up. People ranting about them (without providing any real information) block any real content.
Exploits are very valuable. I was explaining to my co-worker about teardrop a year or two ago. He thought it was moderately interesting, but that nobody would have made that error, making the bug theoretical. It wasn't until I downloaded a ready-made exploit and took out his server, twice, with him watching, that he decided it was worth getting a patch for.
Now, if some hacker hadn't written that exploit, which enabled a bunch of no-skill kiddies to crash computers at random, some skilled attacker could have combined it with other exploits to reliably remove any computer on demand as the part of a larger coordinated attack.
When WinNuke still worked I got hit twice, a small price to pay to now be able to run a semi-reliable ftp server from the windows machine at work.
(And the same thing effects Linux servers, but there you don't have to impress every user, just Linus, AC, or the maintainer of whatever code base is weak and it'll go into the main codestream. Exploits still help though, so they can see an attack isn't just a theoretical posibility, but a skilled user could use it NOW.)
Forget the Alamo, it's 2001, get over it.
Any type of taxation can be automatic. The BBC could get an automatic $100/citizen, or %.02 of income tax, or anything else. As long as the BBC doesn't employ the actual TV-Tax collectors, it's still in the position of dealing with the government for its money.
If you can turn a TV Licensing Officer away, why do people ever pay the fines? While I don't believe some of the stories in this thread, the officers must have some power to enter and search the homes of unwilling people.
"This is not a bad thing, but a good thing."
Ummm, I beg to differ. It *is* good that the CPU doesn't burn itself out - yes. But it is bad that the CPU kicks into this mode on common applications.
If Intel is selling this chip as a performance solution then I want to be able to run it at 100% for 4-6 hours, for a kicking game of Q3 at a LAN party. I want to be able to do FP work 24/7 while I render an animation. If their CPU can't do these perfectly reasonable things they should mark it as such.
Look at it this way - if Intel was selling a CPU for use in WebTV (or some other embedded application) and the user was able to do something, rapidly opening and closing a window for example, that overheated the CPU and it slowed down - that'd be fine. It'd still function as a WebTV box, and while the user was screwing with the CPU it wouldn't be doing anything else.
Contrast that with them selling a CPU that they claim is a performance monster, better than any other x8 CPU. People expect to run their x86 machines at 100%, many servers at my work have been up for months and have been at nearly 100% load the entire time. When I installed a bunch of dual celerons a few years back as a rendering farm, they were at 100% for 18 months, running FP rending - about the hottest code you can get.
If the P4 is sold to a market that expects this performance, it had better perform.
If the only way to get a chip to overheat was to execute a tight loop of CPUID instructions, or something else that had no real purpose, then I would accept it kicking in thermal limiting. That's beyond reasonable operating specs (as in, performs no function, exists just to stress the product.)
To use a car as an example - if I buy a car, I expect it to be capable of highway speeds for prolonged times. It's not okay that the company profiled drivers and decided that 99.2% of the time, a duty cycle of 70% 30mph, 20% 50mph, and 10% 60mph was all that was required. I'd expect the car to be capable of handling 65mph 100% of the time, for 8-10 hours. If it couldn't do this, I would like a thermal limiter where it warned me gracefully instead of blowing up, but I'd still take it back as defective.
The idea that the people should support public broadcasting, something without a strong commercial slant is a good one. A tax on TV purchases and imports seems a reasonable way collect that. (IMHO, I favor using regular taxes, because like education, I think it benefits the whole country, but...)
What isn't at all reasonable is the TLA vans patrolling the streets, the automatic search warrants...
The *only* time I see automatic right-to-enter being reasonable is in "hot pursuit". If a police officer sees someone they are pursuing enter a building, they should be able to follow. But there are no other reasons in my mind that they should be able to enter without the owner's permission, or a judicially granted warrant. And I mean something a judge really investigates and approves, not something they rubber-stamp.
Godwin's Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There's nothing in there about losing an argument.
There are people who would say that unwarranted comparisons to Hitler or Nazis would lose the argument, but in this case, the Hitler reference was on topic.
".. no history of totalitarianism, unlike much of the rest of Europe."
".. Hitler would have loved this." (To paraphrase)
Yes, he would have. That's the point the original poster made when they said that England had a different view than Germany, or Poland, or France, might have on this subject. To say that Hitler would have liked this would be like saying that Stalin would have liked it - factually accurate and on topic.
Wasn't it in France where the Nazis used the gun registrations to round up the weapons from the locals? Think of how innefective the resistance would have been if there'd been CCTV cameras everywhere with facial-recognition AI.
So, Intel is basically selling a crippled product, and yet you aren't annoyed at this?
They know it'll never reach 100% of its power, that it can't be upgraded to the next gen, that it underperforms the lower-priced chips from both companies, and it costs more, requires a new botherboard, power supply, and case.
And all you do is say "It'll be better next year."
Well, screw that. I didn't buy a K6-2 because it didn't perform well, I won't buy a P4 because it's crap. If they change that, I may change my mind in the future.
I'm not buying a technology, or a product line. I'm buy a CPU, one that I expect to perform well for the things that I do. If the P4 doesn't, I don't care if it's got super long pipes, or pixie dust, it's still crap.
Yes, the early Pentiums sucked, and then the line got better. And the PPro was overpriced and underperforming, and then became the P2 and P3. But if you bought that first gen chip you were screwed. You had a crap product, for four times the price and no boost in performance, that required a brand new motherboard and ram, which were all pricey and would be obsolete by the time anything worth upgrading to came along.
Call me when the P4 doesn't get demolished by the P3 and the Athlon. Call me when it costs less and performs better.
Really? You make over $100 an hour? Wow!
The OEMs always charge $100 - $250 more for a system than it could be built for, with quality parts, if you did it yourself.
And maybe I'm just really fast, but I've rarely had a new PC take more than an hour to assemble from parts.
You could be talking about how they come with the OS pre-installed or something, but I've rarely seen a business that's used the pre-installed OS. Everyone I've worked for has wiped it and reinstalled something else. They've also usually had something like Norton's Ghost to automate this procedure. (Not like installing takes very long, base Win2k is a 30 minute install, Win98 takes 15, and *nobody* uses WinME...)
But, you go ahead and pay those companies an extra couple hundred dollars, and accept the low quality parts you're likely to get. (Dell and Compaq both have custom mobos that are trash, and tend to ship with the slowest HD and Video you can buy, just to save a buck.)
I'd rather spend a few hours on research (not too much, because I keep caught up for my own purchases) and then specify, to the specific parts, the exact computer I want. And then get a local store to send me exactly that. Hell, assembly is free on a full system, so there's that much less to do.
It's nice, knowing you've got quality parts that you'll be able to find a BIOS upgrade for, or replace with off-the-shelf components in the future. Nicer yet when you realize it was much cheaper.
The K6-2 was very crippled by the chipsets out for it at the time. It wasn't a stellar performer on its own, but the chipsets would have held anything back.
I played with an ASUS P5A (Super 7, Ali chipset) at work recently when I put a 233MMX in. What a dog. Slower than the 166MMX next to it on a XP55-T2P4. (A bunch of data entry terminals, speed not terribly important.)
You need special IDE drivers, AGP Drivers, etc. It's like a Via chipset, except that Via actually makes decent drivers. Maybe Ali and ATI are the same company? They both make hardware that should be good, yet prevent anyone from ever using it properly by withholding stable drivers.
But I've also seen a K6-2 do very well on some real-world things... I think it's largely the mobo.
To skip the commercials at the start of many DVDs.
Or, do you like being forced to watch commercials on media that you payed for?
But all 'compliant' DVD players (which they have to be to get decryption codes) disable the navigation controls during the forced advertisements.
If you use DeCSS you can view the movie with a non-compliant player.
Copyrights are intended to be a *limited term* monopoly. Certain uses are also intended to be allowed with those works, quoting, etc.
By making copyrights essentially unlimited in term (longer than the average human lives) and still increasing them, as well as trying to remove the rights of people to quote and copy for non-infringing purposes, that limited monopoly gets a lot less limited.
That monopoly was granted with the idea that the public (government) would protect the work to encourage production in trade for the public's small use (quotes, etc) and eventual full use of the work.
That trade is no longer in place, you'll never have access to a work released during your life, and you don't have any ability to use the works in a legal manner.
So why are you paying taxes for the police forces that protect those right?
It not like a property crime, where the law exists to ensure that nothing is taken from the original creator. Information can be copied, so the creator still has the work. But they also have a nearly unlimited government monopoly preventing anyone else from having it as well.
In any contract I've heard of, both parties have to uphold their end of the bargain or it's void. The content publishers aren't living up to their end of the bargain... (And no, bribing politicians doesn't form a new agreement.)
I will support any technological measures necessary to remove any access control measures from media. By preventing a consumers legal access to media they purchased, these companies are defaulting on their copyright contract. If the politicians won't do anything about it, the people will.
I agree wrt U5, it's one of the most finished games I've played.
I think it's my favorite of the Ultimas, the 3d ones (imho) were lousy. U5 had a nicer interface than 4, where you could target a monster in combat and hit it even if you or it moved, or if it wasn't in one of the four cardinal directions. Very nice stuff. U4 was also a bit heavy on the virtues, very (very!) hard to keep in control. (Accidentally talk to a beggar? Gotta give him something, or you'll lose virtue.)
I can't really disagree with the original poster re: later Ultimas. U7 or 8 (the last one I played in mid 94 or so) was so buggy it would barely install, let alone play. It also had interface issues (too much mousing required, lame pack-style inventory, etc) but those might have been okay if the game was stable enough to play.
I played U1 (a tiny bit), U3 (quite a ways), and U4 and U5 to the finish. I don't know where the interface in the later games was introduced.
I really think there's no excuse for releasing a game as buggy as the later games. I don't care how broke you are, provide the product described on the box or don't provide anything. I work in a phone company and we provide a system with guarantees, it can't drop every 20th call just because we can't afford to find the bugs.
I never tried later ultimas because I'm really a fan of the non-realtime, SSI or OSI late 80s games, where there's no emphasis on clicking on the monster, or anything. As such, most of the later stuff is a bit accademic.
But, U5, now there was a game. Wow!
I almost flunked grade 8 because of it. And I wasted tons of graph paper.
Hey, maybe you'll find this funny... U4 was the first game I really tinkered with. I was fiddling with Copy2+ one day in the sector editor, and I was scrolling down a sector. It seemed odd, but a pattern of bytes caught my eye. Turns out that it was the shape of one of the little islands (off to the far east, Moonglow, was it?). I figured out roughly where I was and with a bunch of searching (later I learned how this related to sextant coordinates (in U4 or 5, don't remember)) I found the bay outside of British's castle...
That was cool, it let me make a perfect map of any area. But, even better, it let me edit the map. (I backed up the disks first.) I put roads of grassland between all the cities, especially the annoying ones (north-west, surrounded by forests). Then, while experimenting with what values equated to what landscape, I noticed more things, towns, castle segments, horses, and ships (and more).
I was trying to determind which of these tiles could be walked across (building bridges to the islands) and I walked on the horse... I hit 'B'oard and lo and behold, I was on the horse... I walked off the tile and was still on the horse, but it was also still there.
So then I went around, putting a horse outside of every city and a ship next to the closest water.
Insta-transport.
I noticed, when trying to collect huge numbers of ships, that a whirlpool would start to swallow them when I got 12 or more on screen at once.
Tons of other cool stories, but basically, U4 and U5 are the games that got me interested in how they're done, instead of just playing them.
I'm sure glad that SK considers it a success. I'm sure that everyone who paid to download the story, with the understanding that a whole product would be provided, would disagree. But, he might as well make a lot of money at the expense of the fans.
And I don't think it was 'dumb', I think SK intended to stop at some point. He knew he had a flop of a story, but if he flogged it chapter by chapter he could eventually blame the lack of sales on 'pirates', instead of the fact the story sucked.
If he was doing this, for real, he wouldn't have guilt-tripped the paying users into paying more to cover the supposed 'theft' by the nasty 'pirates'. He'd have had a reasonably robust system implemented to make sure that people actually got the section they intended to download, and that replacements could be provided for a reasonable price (free, or $.05 for the bandwidth, etc) for people who lost the original copy.
Instead he set up a system with insane rules, knowing that when it screwed up, he'd be a good bit richer and wouldn't have to actually provide the product.
What a complete ass.
For starters, you're arguing falaciously. Someone can recognize a bad idea without necessarily having a better idea of their own. To point out that someone hasn't had any great ideas in a field does not discredit their statement that someone else's idea is bad. (And, I'll also point out that the /. editors have built the biggest geek site on the net... not a trivial accomplishment.)
Second, The Plant was a stupid idea - for the consumers. Pay 2-3 times the price for a paper book, have insane restrictions on redownloading multiple copies (SK's head is *so* far up his ass on issues like multiple copies of an e-book being equated to a physical book.) and a lack of guarantee of a finished product.
Sure, SK made a shitload of money. So do many other conmen every day. He sold a product he clearly didn't intend to actually provide and guilt-tripped the innocent into covering the supposed 'theft' of others. (He counted multiple downloads as a theft, without even considering that downloads fail every now and then, let alone that downloading a second copy for the Palm isn't an offense anyone with a clue would care about, and furthermore, that 'theft' is not a word that applies to making *copies* of something.)
He obviously went into it for a quick buck, intending to quit whenever it wasn't profitable, regardless of all the users he screwed by leaving them with a partial story.
Ad companies consider it a success whenever anyone recognizes their brands, regardless of what the opinion is...
By their standards, you're a success story. Weird, no?
I feel the same as you do. They may have achieved brand recognition, but I use that to avoid purchasing products from companies I dislike.
I really should be more vocal about it, calling the 1-800 numbers of these companies and explaining why I'm not buying their products. Maybe they'd get the picture. But, I doubt it...
I really think advertising is a scam; that the ad agencies have convinced companies that showing some droolers happily using a product is going to convince more people to buy that. Especially those lame commercials where they only name the product in the last second.
But, maybe I'm odd - I don't buy by brand, I shop by price and features, as directly verified as possible. (ie, not "5/7 doctors prefer..." but "128MB of RAM". The only concession I make to brand shopping is to weed out the products of companies who use annoying advertising, or companies who hide product info. (Making it hard to comparison shop.)
They can call me a success if they want, but all brand recognition lets me do is enter them into juckbuster.