I'll do it. I run a company (tiny) that is totally dependent on OSS. OSS that I'm sure is covered by an MS patent, or more.
Hell, to make this more fun. Let me pre-declare that I am sure I am using their patents, I would even if I did know, and even being ordered to stop will not stop me from using their patents knowingly in future projects and incorporating them into any and all of my projects.
If the courts were to try to uphold software patents, or really, many of the patents being granted these days, the USA would grind to a halt. If Microsoft really has a patent that Linux is infringing, it is *impossible* that this is actually because Microsoft had a good idea and Linux used it - which would be the point of a patent. That may not mean much to you, or to the judge, but what does reality matter anyways?
If Linux infringes Microsofts patents, then realistically every software project infringes on a hundred patents. Nobody but trolls want to enforce them, and nobody will, because cooler heads realize that this way is madness. The law could grant ownership of the moon to the first poet to mention it, and the courts could fight over this for years, but try collecting the moon now that the court says it's your. Try keeping squatters off. See what I mean about reality?
Software patents are just as ridiculous. Either everything infringes and everyone, including Microsoft, owes the patent trolls of the world umpteen bazillion dollars, or this is just a big joke and only the first few people caught up in it will have a problem.
So yes. I have a business and personal assets I value. I'll put these on the line to say that Microsoft doesn't have anything and Ballmer us just blowing hot air. If they could actually prove and enforce patents against anyone for Linux creation, use, promotion, or sale, the USA economy would freeze overnight on the legal precedent. Microsoft's current court case may be this precedent, we will see.
But this is a joke. I'm willing. Sure. But Microsoft doesn't want to find a good test case of a real offense to prove the issue - they want FUD to scare everyone into paying the Microsoft tax. Like how you can buy your PC with any OS you want, as long as you also want Windows. The last thing Microsoft wants is someone willing to stipulate to the facts and let them win the case. I'm willing to be one of these first, but if Microsoft does this I'll turn around and counter-sue. I've own a share in three broad software patents myself. I know I could find as valid a case against Microsoft, or at least take sixty years and a few billion dollars in discovery, reading each line of source code and amending my filings every week. The EFF and donations would pay for as comfortable a life as I have now, but instead of wishing I could retire I'd be laughing every day, knowing that I could cost them so much more than they could cost me. Maybe I'd win, maybe I'd just be the first of a million monkey wrenches bringing down the system.
Doesn't matter to me, I find foreign currencies to be a good risk in today's market anyways. If the USA wants to make it a lot better, so be it.
But, again, we both know they wouldn't take me up on it. The last thing they want is to really go to court. I want to. They don't. The fame would make me forever - the adsense payout from being slashdotted as the little guy against Microsoft - it's more money than I currently make - I couldn't lose. The fact that I couldn't possibly lose just makes it sweeter. And if I lost, on paper, I still wouldn't and my later years I'd be sitting on my huge Indian investments while laughing about the US courts thinking they controlled the tides.
Please feel free to forward this to MS. I'm sure they'll call first thing.
The grandparent post made a boxing reference, and then parent replied that even in Boxing, intentional murder is illegal.
Even if I could be said to accept an EULA, which I wouldn't, the clause says to indemnify them if anything should happen. That implies that they don't know for a certainty that something will happen. If they do, perhaps because they plan to do it, then this clause doesn't apply. I didn't agree to have my data wiped, I *may* agree to not hold them liable for it if caused by accident.
I agree to enter the ring, which does have some risk, but not to "be killed", which is risk free, in that the outcome is guaranteed.
His tool is largely for piracy, I gather. Most people I know pirated DVD X Copy (those who didn't use the freeware tools I mean) because nobody respects the copyright on a copyright-abusing program. That's just be ridiculous. I mean, this guy expects to get paid for his work letting people copy videos without paying their creators.
Fuck. At least the #warez guys aren't hypocritical about it.
Maybe if he open sourced it and asked for donations to continue funding development...
Yeah, Ayn Rand said that. But what makes you think that you're creative and the world is going to give a rat's ass if you and your program vanish into a puff of non-profitability? Are the masses in India, who pirate all programs, going to be one iota poorer for being in a world without your proprietary software? Because they sure as hell are going to be richer for pirating the best our industry has to offer.
You still don't address the reality angle though. For all that you can't see another way to make money in intellectual domains without IP laws, that doesn't mean that I respect your copyright more. I can't find a way to make being sarcastic in Slashdot posts pay, but my lack of guaranteed income isn't your problem... Information is fundamentally different than physical property and all the whining about how it isn't profitable that way is going to change it.
You know, maybe piracy will kill the software market. Wah. What has proprietary software *ever* done for me? Doesn't run my servers, doesn't control my programing environment, isn't rendering web pages for me. Doesn't route my packets... Photoshop makes my photo manipulation a little easier, but only runs in an OS that supports DRM, which I only have because the laptop I got required it, because there are laws forbidding the open-sourcing of its wireless chipsets. Do you see what I mean? If you and you $5 software, Adobe and their $1000 software, and Oracle and their million-dollar software all just vanished overnight, the internet and the computing world would continue. In fact, without the horrible monopoly abuses and such, we're probably be better off.
As for why people pirate your software despite the price, it's probably because buying it and then proving to it that it was legitimately bought is a much larger component of the price than the $5 you mention. When I buy a game it crashes a lot and requires the DVD, bitches when it doesn't have it, makes me enter weird codes... When I crack a game it just works. It doesn't check the disk (which often doesn't work on the legit stuff I own) and thus can't fail. It doesn't ask for the code that's on the disk, so I don't have to eject it, read it like some bizarre captcha and type it in, etc. It just works. I do still buy games and such, but I often wonder why when I end up cracking most of them anyways just to play them my way, and the developers (Blizzard particularly, assholes!) still consider cracking a crime without understanding that they released a product that didn't work and I was only able to get it working by my expert-level tweaking (registry tweaks and cracks aren't that hard, but well beyond 95% of their customers who would have had the same problem I did).
If only the pain would stop when the price was paid. Cracked software doesn't even show EULAs... How wonderful.
I'm not a libertarian, but I object to you offering government as the solution to all these problems, just because it coincided with the solutions.
Consumer goods aren't safer because of a government inspector, they're safer because they get certified by consumer safety agencies (look at the label on the bottom of a blender, or the box a toy comes in). The expanding government now regulates this for us, but there are ways to see how the market would regulate this, as it does in other parts of the world.
The first, as you say, is to not. Ouch.
The second is for people to rely on a smaller government (not none) providing trademark protection and legal recourse for fraud so that they can buy a brand like GE or whoever, with the appropriate inspection/certification symbols on it, even if those have no special legal meaning to their government.
There certainly are some private organizations I trust more than any government, in their areas. Some of these are even for-profit businesses.
I think we'd all be safer if every year we demanded that Wal-Mart, K-Mark, etc, simply refuse to carry toys without this year's new certifications... ToySafe2007 (tm). And then get Consumer Reports and a few parent's groups to oversee a scientific study of injuries and deaths from toys, and write a detailed and changing spec to cope with new situations and abuses of old rules.
That would make our kids safe. You know - see what hurts them and prevent it. Not our current blind "think of the children" legal flailing.
But instead, our complacency means we get a one-size-fit's all nanny state, which still fails to keep us safe and uses its absolute power to send us to die in foreign wars. You know, ones in deserts, for oil.
There are small government solutions to these problems. But small government means you, and me. That's the cost - they don't tax you to pay for it, but you have to decide what's worthwhile and make it happen. With other people's money maybe, but voluntarily.
But if the code died as soon as the value was out of range testing would be more likely to find the root problem.
I don't know why people take asserts out of "production" code. I'd always rather something failed the instant there was a problem rather than dying ten minutes later when I try to save my data. Of course, an assert in a user application could trigger a dump of their data to a recovery file or something.
Stallman proposed something along these lines that, if you feel the need to have a confiscatory monopoly-granting copyright program, at least seem pretty fair.
1) Determine what copyrighted works should earn (this is the ?? socialism step) 2) Poll people to determine which copyrighted works they have 3) partition tax funds according to #1/#2
If we're going to have the tax-and-redistribute policies, we might as well run them properly. Instead of trusting companies as to whose product is the most popular and thus deserves the most, poll users on what products they use most often. As the use would be legal, there'd theoretically be little motivation to lie.
Perhaps we should reduce copyright to something reasonable (2-10 years from first disclosure) and then have a small tax-and-reward policy that rewards creators of popular culture who have been overlooked (slow initial sales, etc). But, the genius of my system is we'd tax the copyright holders' earning on copyrighted materials. Make the system provide its own safety net.
In other words. Let's say you write Snow White in 2000, and it becomes PD in 2010. Disney picks it up and makes a billion. They pay x% (10, let's say) or $100 million, in entertainment tax. This tax gets distributed to the creators of popular media. Let's assume that $1 million gets allocated for the Disney version of Snow White, to be shared amongst the creators. As the work is still derived from your work, you are assessed to have moral rights, let's say 25%, in the final movie because of the contribution of your plot compared to everything else. So you'd get $.25 million and Disney would get the rest. Other money from the $100M they paid out would come back, as a tax payout for their other movies. This would be all profits, not just initial, so you'd keep getting paid as long as you were alive and people still used something based on your creations in a substantial way.
The payouts would be minimal for already rich companies, who indeed would be providing the lions share of the tax by getting rich, but would be a huge windfall for the "little guy". Any share in millions beats a 9-5. So more people would be encouraged to create. Now copyrights are used as a tool to forbid derivative work, in this system they'd be used like patents - in order to produce a work useful enough that someone would base something off of it. As the licensing would be free (the tax would be paid regardless) it wouldn't be avoided, leading to an "ideal" (customer-driven) rehashing of the newly created commons.
Doing the caching through freenet seems appropriate in some ways, but it's not really appropriate for changing media afaik. You'd want the cache to be as anonymous as Wikipedia's (lack?) of logs are now, or at least plausibly deniable.
I'd also like to see something like this for hosting overlay information. Like hoodwink.d - a way to associate a forum with another site. I'm sensitive to censorship of forums and feel there needs to be a way for people to keep communicating despite a loss of official channels. Perhaps this could be combined with caching. Return the page and the most highly rated extra content (forum posts, "related links", etc). Like BT you could connect to multiple others, and perhaps proxy requests.
But "cheating" is only distracting because people view the levels they've climbed as a price, not a reward, and are jealous of those who don't have to pay the price. That should tell you something about the game. Certainly, if you're trying to stretch a game out to 100 hours, it makes sense to take it slowly. But the point is that most games aren't that good. WoW might hold my attention for a while, but not if I had to play yet another fantasy RPG killing endless identical creatures just to be allowed to see all the monster.
Why does WoW have to suffer in the slightest from "cheaters"? In the real world there were many untrained knights with fancy armor (high-level n00b) and they were very popular with people who wanted armor... Why does the game have to be any different? At worst it's a funny joke. At best it lets someone pay some kid $50 to level a character up so they can join their friends in another MMO without having to grind a month or two to find out they don't like the high-level raid dynamics or something.
Personally I miss games like Quake1. In a few seconds you could grab a weapon and armor and be as powerful as the guy who'd been playing all day. Most MMOs consist of people voluntarily doing stuff I wouldn't want to do for work, just to get the stuff to be allowed to play later. Wow indeed.
As for paying extra for games, oh certainly. I'm actually feeling ripped off on this with Oblivion. I bought it not knowing they'd do an incremental release. The game out of the box is absolutely drivel, respawning monsters that are always as tough as you, etc. They expect me to pay them an extra $5 every few months for crap, when the game is only made playable by 3rd-party mods they bully the community into not selling. Jerks.
I suppose. I've seen it go from a tiny little joke site to the largest reference site in the world. Each individual bit of content is a bit problematic, but overall I do like the direction 95% of WP is going.
The problem is one of continuity - newer editors don't know what you had in mind so their little changes do eventually break your meaning. If people documented their work more in the talk pages it'd be easier to avoid...
If all you want is an email saying that lazy people aren't being allowed to have any fun, I'll provide one.
If I played WoW, I wouldn't be competing with you. I might choose to buy a fancy character, or grind my own, but either way it not like I'll be taking a prize from you, just playing the same game. I can see that if there was a prize, you'd want someone who didn't play not to win it, for playing. That would be annoying.
I dislike MMOs (the MM part) so this isn't likely to happen, especially with all the censorship crap Sony, Blizzard, and now Eve's company all partake in. But, in single-player I cheat like crazy. I played a bit of Oblivion, but the game sucks. Seriously 3/10. So I added a ton of mods, some made it harder, some easier, but they all screwed with the rules. Then I played Gothic3. Wow, another stink-fest. It crashed so much and (honestly) took three minutes to QUICKLOAD I gave up and god-moded through the last 95% of the game because I was a bit curious about the story...
I feel those who base their success on that of others (everyone who competes against others, for "fun" (ie, not the stock market)) are a bit sick. If you can't enjoy yourself without worrying that I might be enjoying myself too much, comparative to the work I've put in, you could have a problem.
Are you my ex boss? He was always saying really idiotic things like, "if you can afford to do it, you can afford to do it well."
This is wrong. I *can* code a rails hack that looks a lot like the final app pretty quickly, sure. But that's a lot different than the million little checks that go into writing a real project, properly.
Trust me, I *am* an expert software developer. The quick back-of-napkin hacks I do as a proof of concept as as stable as a building an architect would sketch in similar conditions. If you try to sell this as a finished product, you're a crook.
We developers hack things out quickly so that honest bosses can see a proof of concept and have input. Dishonest bosses take these unfinished products and sell them based on bullshit excuses like "business realities". The reality is that if you don't have a product that works, you're a good for nothing snake-oil saleman is you claim otherwise. Regardless of the looming bankruptcy, or whatever problem you've gotten yourself into.
Are you sure your developer wasn't trying to tell you the truth? That good code really does take longer and napkin sketches aren't supposed to stand up.
That you worked with someone who didn't know what API meant, and you hadn't noticed sooner, means either they merely didn't recognize the acronym but were competent, or that that your company (you?) hired someone without a clue. Neither of these support your point very well.
Do you want to hire a tester? I'm good, and I will find problems.
Seriously though, I've heard the unsinkable claim before...
imho, unbreakable should mean, "when it breaks, nothing is lost and restarting is trivial". Nothing else is real, so it'd just be a false sense of security.
I imagine that your way of coding leads to triple-checked user input, verified fields, proper argument quoting. At a minimum. This and much I've never heard of. But it will have flaws you've never heard of either.
I'd assume instead that the system was swiss cheese and I'd concentrate on making sure I didn't actually put the customer's CC # on disk, ever, cache or anything, so that when a hack happened I didn't lose every CC I'd ever processed.
Then I'd go through and secure it as best as I could. But only by understanding the inherent insecurity of every line of code written and that failures happen. Maybe internal, maybe with 0-day bugs in the kernel, maybe just because I forgot to validate input yet again on the hundredth similar, yet not quite close enough to be the same, code that I've written. Just maybe.
Which experts were these, who were unable to explain their views? Seems to me the ones who get in trouble are those who explain their view all to well...
Besides, if someone was claiming the Earth was hollow, wouldn't you want proof that you could verify? You act as if experts should be accepted, sans understandable proof, because of credentials. I disagree. I'd rather believe in a flat earth until reading about how to test it myself, than believe in crystal nonsense and everything else, just because some "expert" mumbles something unintelligible.
Totally. Eventually even the worst articles can be rolled into what ends up being *the best site on the Internet*, which is Wikipedia. Or, brilliant articles can be rolled into a site that nobody remembers.
It's not like Wikipedia has no flaws, but it's precisely because it is in the vernacular that it has so much value to me. If I couldn't change the problems I noticed I probably wouldn't bother logging in, especially if I had to hoop jump to make an account. And in all the time I've sent error reports and science-oopses to websites, I've only ever gotten one that replied with an "oops, thanks" - nothing from the rest. Given that history, why would I try again at yet another site, this one staffed with a volunteer who felt run ragged by keeping up with idiotic requests. No thanks, I've had my daily dose of futility.
Not every article on Wikipedia is a gem, but where else is consistently better on as many things? If you had an example, let me spider its data on Wikipedia (ie CIA fact book) and ask you the same question again? If I see something on the CIA's website I know it's right, as right as everything the US government tells me. If I see it on Wikipedia I get to read all the views, even if they're only bitching that they aren't represented, and I at least know the scope of the issue.
Advertising can also serve to educate you as to options and make the market more efficient. You know, the ads you see everyday that are relevant, don't blink, and don't make false claims.
Statistically, they must be there, but they're hidden under the pile of crap that's designed to make us buy something against our better judgment. And at that, I totally agree. Theoretical ads may be one thing, but I dare anyone to point me to an ad that makes a testable, useful claim. (Same sort of rule as a real theory - testable, etc...) With a few notable exceptions it's impossible to find such a beast in modern advertising. As such, I too totally can not support Wikipedia being host to these reality-distortion devices. Advertisers are willing to pay because they know their twisted psych ploys work and sell product to the brainwashed - that's the kind of thing that I don't want done to me though...
Ads, atleast 99% of what we see on a day to day basis, do *not* belong on Wikipedia in any way as they are, by design, devices intended to trap the unwary before they read an honest review. However, as Wikipedia is often where I go to read about things, I would like an optional way to show relevant ads, so that my online purchase paid someone other than just froogle.
And the reason answers.com isn't making as much money as the many blinking ads would suggest is that they aren't half as relevant as Wikipedia. Due, perhaps to blinking ads outweighing content...
I agree. Wikipedia is relevant because it takes pains to not be what so many armchair business men would turn it into - answers.com. In 1995, I might have welcomes a corporate mix between answers.com and a wiki and contributed to it. I did enter a few CDs into CDDB before they went evil... But now, the bar is much higher. Wikipedia has proven that we can do this without glitzy ad crap thrust in our faces. We, the people, can and have created the most remarkable "book" ever. Already. That it's not as cash-positive as some people think it should be...
I *strongly* support the idea of Wikipedia getting ads on a voluntary basis though. I buy many products online and I research them at Wikipedia. I'm there. I'm going click an ad link... Why can't there be a "show relevant ads" button down at the bottom, at least!? When I'm going to buy a $2500 piece of equipment, that click is worth a *lot* of money. Certainly more than I'm willing to donate that often. I would do this myself, if I could figure out a legal way to do it in their name and make it a firefox pluggin that would fetch ads, payable to Wikimedia's donations account.
Jimbo! I WANT TO CLICK! $$$! PLEASE LET ME!
Also, I've been thinking about how people could cache Wikipedia, or something, to help bandwidth costs. Like coral cache, but signed like bit-torrent. I currently use less than 1% of the bandwidth I pay for, the other 1.5 TB is available for something like this. Not much alone, but I doubt I'm the only one willing to help. Is there something like this?
Did you explain why your change mattered. Someone probably rewrote your sentence because of a spelling error and didn't realize your wording was important.
I find it hard to believe that you've had a comment in the talk page saying "Stop deleting the word 'foo' from section 3, it means... which is relevant" and actually had to deal with anything other than the same kind of code rot that I experience at work with skilled well-meaning developers.
No, not at all. If you knew me you'd know that I'd *never* mean that.
All I mean is, explain why your paragraph ordering seems important. Chances are the other guy just never thought it mattered. If you're adding real content to a real page, like anything science, history, or factual, specifically excluding anything relating to hollywood or current politicians, you're not going to have any problems at all.
Many of my little edits get wiped out in someone else's refactorings, but the page is always better in the end. Sure, I may have to re-apply a specific fix, but I end up re-fixing bugs in my day job. Complex problems are hard to do right, once, forever. If I have to re-add something I add a note in a talk page explaining what I see the value in it as being. That way, if I'm wrong or someone else says it better, the content can be replaced (I don't have to "own" it) but I make sure people don't throw it out thinking it's unwanted.
And at that, I've *never* had a problem getting my opinion about something into an article with someone I directly disagree with. We both state our sides as "People self-labelled as (myself) tend to feel (my feelings)." Everyone gets their issue presented to the reader, which is really all any non-vandal wants - representation. I 've never really seen this contentious Wikipedia people mention, outside of the off non-partisan flame (some people just need a good flaming) no articles other than GW Bush and Paris Hilton are battle-grounds. It's perfectly healthy for the page to say "contents in dispute - see talk page" as long as people are actually willing to work, which, imho, is nearly always.
Get into the talk page and disagree. Many deletes go through because nobody contests, or does so for some emotional reason that're outside of general wiki policy.
Little articles do come and go quickly. Until an area gets well defined people often refactor and delete stubs regularly.
But was the deletion of that page the end of your data, of could you just stuff it into the closest related article for now?
There are various ways for people to chat/message on other peoples' servers, but they're all a little awkward?
We need something like hoodwink.d, coral cache, and freenet. With threaded messaging, and reputations. Then the conversation could happen just as easily at on company sites, but without them having any admin power.
Funny joke, but you didn't tell it properly. In your version the Newfie says "Doc, I think I got Sars". That would only be true if he was unsure of what he had - but the punchline reveals that he knows he is sore.
I don't mean to, as much as to point out what seems to be your overstatement.
I also do mean "publicly traded stock markets and related media frenzy" when I say "Stocks", as it is what I feel most people would refer to as the "Stock Market".
I'm advocating a balanced point of view (portfolio). Most people shouldn't have all their money in stocks, just like they shouldn't have have all their net worth invested in their home (especially with higher end and more expensive housing). However, I also think most of the population would be silly not to have any money invested in the stock market (provided they do it intelligently).
I think we're largely in agreement about our personal finances. But when I see people say things like "people would be silly to not be invested (somewhat) in stock" I start imagining the people for whom this means buying Apple because they announce a cool product.
Stock payouts are quite volatile, many people go home with $0, or less. In housing you're likely to be able to recoup some of your purchase price, but are unlikely (in the long term) to make much. In stock you're more likely to make more, but more likely to lose it as well.
If you expect "normal" volatility (if you have a TV, it still works just as well even if it's now half the cost - ditto your house) in the stock market then you're going to invest badly, almost guaranteed. Stocks have devices (index funds, hedges, etc) to avoid any piece of risk you wish but these aren't half as obvious as "possession is 9/10ths of the law". Even if you go upside down on your mortgage and are stuck with your crappy house for twenty years, you've still got a roof. If you invest in stocks in the way that 99% of people would (and aren't discouraged from by the other players) you will lose.
Fiscally they're about the same. Emotionally, losing your home is probably worse.
If they're took out a large loan with a floating interest rate, then they're insane.
What do you think is supporting the huge boom in real-estate prices? They aren't producing much more money via rent... Cheap mortgages let anyone into the game and loose credit standards (as if this wasn't the goal) let people adopt way too much debt.
When I bought (2004, way too late, but still ended up well) I paid 100k and got a mortgage on aprox 2/3 at a very nice line-of-credit interest rate (with 1-month lock-in). I sold at 145k 18 months later, that guy had almost twice my mortgage on a similar salary, without the backup of another wage earner available, and in a market with rapidly climbing interest rates. My only complaint is that I don't hold his mortgage.
This is everywhere, and this is the level of investment savvy people are bringing to stocks.
I've read a few hundred articles on corporate value, stock, most of Wikipedia on finance, etc, and I'm still a total newb to trying to value a company, let alone the market forces surrounding it. To suggest that the average Joe try this is inviting their scalping, like taking them to a high-stakes poker game.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll do it. I run a company (tiny) that is totally dependent on OSS. OSS that I'm sure is covered by an MS patent, or more.
Hell, to make this more fun. Let me pre-declare that I am sure I am using their patents, I would even if I did know, and even being ordered to stop will not stop me from using their patents knowingly in future projects and incorporating them into any and all of my projects.
If the courts were to try to uphold software patents, or really, many of the patents being granted these days, the USA would grind to a halt. If Microsoft really has a patent that Linux is infringing, it is *impossible* that this is actually because Microsoft had a good idea and Linux used it - which would be the point of a patent. That may not mean much to you, or to the judge, but what does reality matter anyways?
If Linux infringes Microsofts patents, then realistically every software project infringes on a hundred patents. Nobody but trolls want to enforce them, and nobody will, because cooler heads realize that this way is madness. The law could grant ownership of the moon to the first poet to mention it, and the courts could fight over this for years, but try collecting the moon now that the court says it's your. Try keeping squatters off. See what I mean about reality?
Software patents are just as ridiculous. Either everything infringes and everyone, including Microsoft, owes the patent trolls of the world umpteen bazillion dollars, or this is just a big joke and only the first few people caught up in it will have a problem.
So yes. I have a business and personal assets I value. I'll put these on the line to say that Microsoft doesn't have anything and Ballmer us just blowing hot air. If they could actually prove and enforce patents against anyone for Linux creation, use, promotion, or sale, the USA economy would freeze overnight on the legal precedent. Microsoft's current court case may be this precedent, we will see.
But this is a joke. I'm willing. Sure. But Microsoft doesn't want to find a good test case of a real offense to prove the issue - they want FUD to scare everyone into paying the Microsoft tax. Like how you can buy your PC with any OS you want, as long as you also want Windows. The last thing Microsoft wants is someone willing to stipulate to the facts and let them win the case. I'm willing to be one of these first, but if Microsoft does this I'll turn around and counter-sue. I've own a share in three broad software patents myself. I know I could find as valid a case against Microsoft, or at least take sixty years and a few billion dollars in discovery, reading each line of source code and amending my filings every week. The EFF and donations would pay for as comfortable a life as I have now, but instead of wishing I could retire I'd be laughing every day, knowing that I could cost them so much more than they could cost me. Maybe I'd win, maybe I'd just be the first of a million monkey wrenches bringing down the system.
Doesn't matter to me, I find foreign currencies to be a good risk in today's market anyways. If the USA wants to make it a lot better, so be it.
But, again, we both know they wouldn't take me up on it. The last thing they want is to really go to court. I want to. They don't. The fame would make me forever - the adsense payout from being slashdotted as the little guy against Microsoft - it's more money than I currently make - I couldn't lose. The fact that I couldn't possibly lose just makes it sweeter. And if I lost, on paper, I still wouldn't and my later years I'd be sitting on my huge Indian investments while laughing about the US courts thinking they controlled the tides.
Please feel free to forward this to MS. I'm sure they'll call first thing.
I think his reply made perfect sense.
The grandparent post made a boxing reference, and then parent replied that even in Boxing, intentional murder is illegal.
Even if I could be said to accept an EULA, which I wouldn't, the clause says to indemnify them if anything should happen. That implies that they don't know for a certainty that something will happen. If they do, perhaps because they plan to do it, then this clause doesn't apply. I didn't agree to have my data wiped, I *may* agree to not hold them liable for it if caused by accident.
I agree to enter the ring, which does have some risk, but not to "be killed", which is risk free, in that the outcome is guaranteed.
His tool is largely for piracy, I gather. Most people I know pirated DVD X Copy (those who didn't use the freeware tools I mean) because nobody respects the copyright on a copyright-abusing program. That's just be ridiculous. I mean, this guy expects to get paid for his work letting people copy videos without paying their creators.
Fuck. At least the #warez guys aren't hypocritical about it.
Maybe if he open sourced it and asked for donations to continue funding development...
Yeah, Ayn Rand said that. But what makes you think that you're creative and the world is going to give a rat's ass if you and your program vanish into a puff of non-profitability? Are the masses in India, who pirate all programs, going to be one iota poorer for being in a world without your proprietary software? Because they sure as hell are going to be richer for pirating the best our industry has to offer.
You still don't address the reality angle though. For all that you can't see another way to make money in intellectual domains without IP laws, that doesn't mean that I respect your copyright more. I can't find a way to make being sarcastic in Slashdot posts pay, but my lack of guaranteed income isn't your problem... Information is fundamentally different than physical property and all the whining about how it isn't profitable that way is going to change it.
You know, maybe piracy will kill the software market. Wah. What has proprietary software *ever* done for me? Doesn't run my servers, doesn't control my programing environment, isn't rendering web pages for me. Doesn't route my packets... Photoshop makes my photo manipulation a little easier, but only runs in an OS that supports DRM, which I only have because the laptop I got required it, because there are laws forbidding the open-sourcing of its wireless chipsets. Do you see what I mean? If you and you $5 software, Adobe and their $1000 software, and Oracle and their million-dollar software all just vanished overnight, the internet and the computing world would continue. In fact, without the horrible monopoly abuses and such, we're probably be better off.
As for why people pirate your software despite the price, it's probably because buying it and then proving to it that it was legitimately bought is a much larger component of the price than the $5 you mention. When I buy a game it crashes a lot and requires the DVD, bitches when it doesn't have it, makes me enter weird codes... When I crack a game it just works. It doesn't check the disk (which often doesn't work on the legit stuff I own) and thus can't fail. It doesn't ask for the code that's on the disk, so I don't have to eject it, read it like some bizarre captcha and type it in, etc. It just works. I do still buy games and such, but I often wonder why when I end up cracking most of them anyways just to play them my way, and the developers (Blizzard particularly, assholes!) still consider cracking a crime without understanding that they released a product that didn't work and I was only able to get it working by my expert-level tweaking (registry tweaks and cracks aren't that hard, but well beyond 95% of their customers who would have had the same problem I did).
If only the pain would stop when the price was paid. Cracked software doesn't even show EULAs... How wonderful.
I'm not a libertarian, but I object to you offering government as the solution to all these problems, just because it coincided with the solutions.
Consumer goods aren't safer because of a government inspector, they're safer because they get certified by consumer safety agencies (look at the label on the bottom of a blender, or the box a toy comes in). The expanding government now regulates this for us, but there are ways to see how the market would regulate this, as it does in other parts of the world.
The first, as you say, is to not. Ouch.
The second is for people to rely on a smaller government (not none) providing trademark protection and legal recourse for fraud so that they can buy a brand like GE or whoever, with the appropriate inspection/certification symbols on it, even if those have no special legal meaning to their government.
There certainly are some private organizations I trust more than any government, in their areas. Some of these are even for-profit businesses.
I think we'd all be safer if every year we demanded that Wal-Mart, K-Mark, etc, simply refuse to carry toys without this year's new certifications... ToySafe2007 (tm). And then get Consumer Reports and a few parent's groups to oversee a scientific study of injuries and deaths from toys, and write a detailed and changing spec to cope with new situations and abuses of old rules.
That would make our kids safe. You know - see what hurts them and prevent it. Not our current blind "think of the children" legal flailing.
But instead, our complacency means we get a one-size-fit's all nanny state, which still fails to keep us safe and uses its absolute power to send us to die in foreign wars. You know, ones in deserts, for oil.
There are small government solutions to these problems. But small government means you, and me. That's the cost - they don't tax you to pay for it, but you have to decide what's worthwhile and make it happen. With other people's money maybe, but voluntarily.
But if the code died as soon as the value was out of range testing would be more likely to find the root problem.
I don't know why people take asserts out of "production" code. I'd always rather something failed the instant there was a problem rather than dying ten minutes later when I try to save my data. Of course, an assert in a user application could trigger a dump of their data to a recovery file or something.
The story about the local news station being bullied by the police seems more likely to get attention in the big city than a dangerous street.
btw, Record the calls. Who cares if it's illegal, it's also the only proof you have.
Stallman proposed something along these lines that, if you feel the need to have a confiscatory monopoly-granting copyright program, at least seem pretty fair.
1) Determine what copyrighted works should earn (this is the ?? socialism step)
2) Poll people to determine which copyrighted works they have
3) partition tax funds according to #1/#2
If we're going to have the tax-and-redistribute policies, we might as well run them properly. Instead of trusting companies as to whose product is the most popular and thus deserves the most, poll users on what products they use most often. As the use would be legal, there'd theoretically be little motivation to lie.
Perhaps we should reduce copyright to something reasonable (2-10 years from first disclosure) and then have a small tax-and-reward policy that rewards creators of popular culture who have been overlooked (slow initial sales, etc). But, the genius of my system is we'd tax the copyright holders' earning on copyrighted materials. Make the system provide its own safety net.
In other words. Let's say you write Snow White in 2000, and it becomes PD in 2010. Disney picks it up and makes a billion. They pay x% (10, let's say) or $100 million, in entertainment tax. This tax gets distributed to the creators of popular media. Let's assume that $1 million gets allocated for the Disney version of Snow White, to be shared amongst the creators. As the work is still derived from your work, you are assessed to have moral rights, let's say 25%, in the final movie because of the contribution of your plot compared to everything else. So you'd get $.25 million and Disney would get the rest. Other money from the $100M they paid out would come back, as a tax payout for their other movies. This would be all profits, not just initial, so you'd keep getting paid as long as you were alive and people still used something based on your creations in a substantial way.
The payouts would be minimal for already rich companies, who indeed would be providing the lions share of the tax by getting rich, but would be a huge windfall for the "little guy". Any share in millions beats a 9-5. So more people would be encouraged to create. Now copyrights are used as a tool to forbid derivative work, in this system they'd be used like patents - in order to produce a work useful enough that someone would base something off of it. As the licensing would be free (the tax would be paid regardless) it wouldn't be avoided, leading to an "ideal" (customer-driven) rehashing of the newly created commons.
Doing the caching through freenet seems appropriate in some ways, but it's not really appropriate for changing media afaik. You'd want the cache to be as anonymous as Wikipedia's (lack?) of logs are now, or at least plausibly deniable.
I'd also like to see something like this for hosting overlay information. Like hoodwink.d - a way to associate a forum with another site. I'm sensitive to censorship of forums and feel there needs to be a way for people to keep communicating despite a loss of official channels. Perhaps this could be combined with caching. Return the page and the most highly rated extra content (forum posts, "related links", etc). Like BT you could connect to multiple others, and perhaps proxy requests.
But "cheating" is only distracting because people view the levels they've climbed as a price, not a reward, and are jealous of those who don't have to pay the price. That should tell you something about the game. Certainly, if you're trying to stretch a game out to 100 hours, it makes sense to take it slowly. But the point is that most games aren't that good. WoW might hold my attention for a while, but not if I had to play yet another fantasy RPG killing endless identical creatures just to be allowed to see all the monster.
Why does WoW have to suffer in the slightest from "cheaters"? In the real world there were many untrained knights with fancy armor (high-level n00b) and they were very popular with people who wanted armor... Why does the game have to be any different? At worst it's a funny joke. At best it lets someone pay some kid $50 to level a character up so they can join their friends in another MMO without having to grind a month or two to find out they don't like the high-level raid dynamics or something.
Personally I miss games like Quake1. In a few seconds you could grab a weapon and armor and be as powerful as the guy who'd been playing all day. Most MMOs consist of people voluntarily doing stuff I wouldn't want to do for work, just to get the stuff to be allowed to play later. Wow indeed.
As for paying extra for games, oh certainly. I'm actually feeling ripped off on this with Oblivion. I bought it not knowing they'd do an incremental release. The game out of the box is absolutely drivel, respawning monsters that are always as tough as you, etc. They expect me to pay them an extra $5 every few months for crap, when the game is only made playable by 3rd-party mods they bully the community into not selling. Jerks.
I suppose. I've seen it go from a tiny little joke site to the largest reference site in the world. Each individual bit of content is a bit problematic, but overall I do like the direction 95% of WP is going.
The problem is one of continuity - newer editors don't know what you had in mind so their little changes do eventually break your meaning. If people documented their work more in the talk pages it'd be easier to avoid...
Pardon me, I misread your original post to suggest you were this boss.
But yes, I do agree. A lackluster test does not guarantee a hack project is high quality.
If all you want is an email saying that lazy people aren't being allowed to have any fun, I'll provide one.
If I played WoW, I wouldn't be competing with you. I might choose to buy a fancy character, or grind my own, but either way it not like I'll be taking a prize from you, just playing the same game. I can see that if there was a prize, you'd want someone who didn't play not to win it, for playing. That would be annoying.
I dislike MMOs (the MM part) so this isn't likely to happen, especially with all the censorship crap Sony, Blizzard, and now Eve's company all partake in. But, in single-player I cheat like crazy. I played a bit of Oblivion, but the game sucks. Seriously 3/10. So I added a ton of mods, some made it harder, some easier, but they all screwed with the rules. Then I played Gothic3. Wow, another stink-fest. It crashed so much and (honestly) took three minutes to QUICKLOAD I gave up and god-moded through the last 95% of the game because I was a bit curious about the story...
I feel those who base their success on that of others (everyone who competes against others, for "fun" (ie, not the stock market)) are a bit sick. If you can't enjoy yourself without worrying that I might be enjoying myself too much, comparative to the work I've put in, you could have a problem.
Are you my ex boss? He was always saying really idiotic things like, "if you can afford to do it, you can afford to do it well."
This is wrong. I *can* code a rails hack that looks a lot like the final app pretty quickly, sure. But that's a lot different than the million little checks that go into writing a real project, properly.
Trust me, I *am* an expert software developer. The quick back-of-napkin hacks I do as a proof of concept as as stable as a building an architect would sketch in similar conditions. If you try to sell this as a finished product, you're a crook.
We developers hack things out quickly so that honest bosses can see a proof of concept and have input. Dishonest bosses take these unfinished products and sell them based on bullshit excuses like "business realities". The reality is that if you don't have a product that works, you're a good for nothing snake-oil saleman is you claim otherwise. Regardless of the looming bankruptcy, or whatever problem you've gotten yourself into.
Are you sure your developer wasn't trying to tell you the truth? That good code really does take longer and napkin sketches aren't supposed to stand up.
That you worked with someone who didn't know what API meant, and you hadn't noticed sooner, means either they merely didn't recognize the acronym but were competent, or that that your company (you?) hired someone without a clue. Neither of these support your point very well.
Do you want to hire a tester? I'm good, and I will find problems.
Seriously though, I've heard the unsinkable claim before...
imho, unbreakable should mean, "when it breaks, nothing is lost and restarting is trivial". Nothing else is real, so it'd just be a false sense of security.
I imagine that your way of coding leads to triple-checked user input, verified fields, proper argument quoting. At a minimum. This and much I've never heard of. But it will have flaws you've never heard of either.
I'd assume instead that the system was swiss cheese and I'd concentrate on making sure I didn't actually put the customer's CC # on disk, ever, cache or anything, so that when a hack happened I didn't lose every CC I'd ever processed.
Then I'd go through and secure it as best as I could. But only by understanding the inherent insecurity of every line of code written and that failures happen. Maybe internal, maybe with 0-day bugs in the kernel, maybe just because I forgot to validate input yet again on the hundredth similar, yet not quite close enough to be the same, code that I've written. Just maybe.
Which experts were these, who were unable to explain their views? Seems to me the ones who get in trouble are those who explain their view all to well...
Besides, if someone was claiming the Earth was hollow, wouldn't you want proof that you could verify? You act as if experts should be accepted, sans understandable proof, because of credentials. I disagree. I'd rather believe in a flat earth until reading about how to test it myself, than believe in crystal nonsense and everything else, just because some "expert" mumbles something unintelligible.
Totally. Eventually even the worst articles can be rolled into what ends up being *the best site on the Internet*, which is Wikipedia. Or, brilliant articles can be rolled into a site that nobody remembers.
It's not like Wikipedia has no flaws, but it's precisely because it is in the vernacular that it has so much value to me. If I couldn't change the problems I noticed I probably wouldn't bother logging in, especially if I had to hoop jump to make an account. And in all the time I've sent error reports and science-oopses to websites, I've only ever gotten one that replied with an "oops, thanks" - nothing from the rest. Given that history, why would I try again at yet another site, this one staffed with a volunteer who felt run ragged by keeping up with idiotic requests. No thanks, I've had my daily dose of futility.
Not every article on Wikipedia is a gem, but where else is consistently better on as many things? If you had an example, let me spider its data on Wikipedia (ie CIA fact book) and ask you the same question again? If I see something on the CIA's website I know it's right, as right as everything the US government tells me. If I see it on Wikipedia I get to read all the views, even if they're only bitching that they aren't represented, and I at least know the scope of the issue.
Honestly. One site that comes even close?
Advertising can also serve to educate you as to options and make the market more efficient. You know, the ads you see everyday that are relevant, don't blink, and don't make false claims.
Statistically, they must be there, but they're hidden under the pile of crap that's designed to make us buy something against our better judgment. And at that, I totally agree. Theoretical ads may be one thing, but I dare anyone to point me to an ad that makes a testable, useful claim. (Same sort of rule as a real theory - testable, etc...) With a few notable exceptions it's impossible to find such a beast in modern advertising. As such, I too totally can not support Wikipedia being host to these reality-distortion devices. Advertisers are willing to pay because they know their twisted psych ploys work and sell product to the brainwashed - that's the kind of thing that I don't want done to me though...
Ads, atleast 99% of what we see on a day to day basis, do *not* belong on Wikipedia in any way as they are, by design, devices intended to trap the unwary before they read an honest review. However, as Wikipedia is often where I go to read about things, I would like an optional way to show relevant ads, so that my online purchase paid someone other than just froogle.
And the reason answers.com isn't making as much money as the many blinking ads would suggest is that they aren't half as relevant as Wikipedia. Due, perhaps to blinking ads outweighing content...
I agree. Wikipedia is relevant because it takes pains to not be what so many armchair business men would turn it into - answers.com. In 1995, I might have welcomes a corporate mix between answers.com and a wiki and contributed to it. I did enter a few CDs into CDDB before they went evil... But now, the bar is much higher. Wikipedia has proven that we can do this without glitzy ad crap thrust in our faces. We, the people, can and have created the most remarkable "book" ever. Already. That it's not as cash-positive as some people think it should be...
I *strongly* support the idea of Wikipedia getting ads on a voluntary basis though. I buy many products online and I research them at Wikipedia. I'm there. I'm going click an ad link... Why can't there be a "show relevant ads" button down at the bottom, at least!? When I'm going to buy a $2500 piece of equipment, that click is worth a *lot* of money. Certainly more than I'm willing to donate that often. I would do this myself, if I could figure out a legal way to do it in their name and make it a firefox pluggin that would fetch ads, payable to Wikimedia's donations account.
Jimbo! I WANT TO CLICK! $$$! PLEASE LET ME!
Also, I've been thinking about how people could cache Wikipedia, or something, to help bandwidth costs. Like coral cache, but signed like bit-torrent. I currently use less than 1% of the bandwidth I pay for, the other 1.5 TB is available for something like this. Not much alone, but I doubt I'm the only one willing to help. Is there something like this?
Did you explain why your change mattered. Someone probably rewrote your sentence because of a spelling error and didn't realize your wording was important.
... which is relevant" and actually had to deal with anything other than the same kind of code rot that I experience at work with skilled well-meaning developers.
I find it hard to believe that you've had a comment in the talk page saying "Stop deleting the word 'foo' from section 3, it means
No, not at all. If you knew me you'd know that I'd *never* mean that.
All I mean is, explain why your paragraph ordering seems important. Chances are the other guy just never thought it mattered. If you're adding real content to a real page, like anything science, history, or factual, specifically excluding anything relating to hollywood or current politicians, you're not going to have any problems at all.
Many of my little edits get wiped out in someone else's refactorings, but the page is always better in the end. Sure, I may have to re-apply a specific fix, but I end up re-fixing bugs in my day job. Complex problems are hard to do right, once, forever. If I have to re-add something I add a note in a talk page explaining what I see the value in it as being. That way, if I'm wrong or someone else says it better, the content can be replaced (I don't have to "own" it) but I make sure people don't throw it out thinking it's unwanted.
And at that, I've *never* had a problem getting my opinion about something into an article with someone I directly disagree with. We both state our sides as "People self-labelled as (myself) tend to feel (my feelings)." Everyone gets their issue presented to the reader, which is really all any non-vandal wants - representation. I 've never really seen this contentious Wikipedia people mention, outside of the off non-partisan flame (some people just need a good flaming) no articles other than GW Bush and Paris Hilton are battle-grounds. It's perfectly healthy for the page to say "contents in dispute - see talk page" as long as people are actually willing to work, which, imho, is nearly always.
Get into the talk page and disagree. Many deletes go through because nobody contests, or does so for some emotional reason that're outside of general wiki policy.
Little articles do come and go quickly. Until an area gets well defined people often refactor and delete stubs regularly.
But was the deletion of that page the end of your data, of could you just stuff it into the closest related article for now?
Have you seen hoodwink.d?
There are various ways for people to chat/message on other peoples' servers, but they're all a little awkward?
We need something like hoodwink.d, coral cache, and freenet. With threaded messaging, and reputations. Then the conversation could happen just as easily at on company sites, but without them having any admin power.
Funny joke, but you didn't tell it properly. In your version the Newfie says "Doc, I think I got Sars". That would only be true if he was unsure of what he had - but the punchline reveals that he knows he is sore.
Just change that to "Doc! I got Sars".
My point is that you're overstating your case.
I don't mean to, as much as to point out what seems to be your overstatement.
I also do mean "publicly traded stock markets and related media frenzy" when I say "Stocks", as it is what I feel most people would refer to as the "Stock Market".
I'm advocating a balanced point of view (portfolio). Most people shouldn't have all their money in stocks, just like they shouldn't have have all their net worth invested in their home (especially with higher end and more expensive housing). However, I also think most of the population would be silly not to have any money invested in the stock market (provided they do it intelligently).
I think we're largely in agreement about our personal finances. But when I see people say things like "people would be silly to not be invested (somewhat) in stock" I start imagining the people for whom this means buying Apple because they announce a cool product.
Stock payouts are quite volatile, many people go home with $0, or less. In housing you're likely to be able to recoup some of your purchase price, but are unlikely (in the long term) to make much. In stock you're more likely to make more, but more likely to lose it as well.
If you expect "normal" volatility (if you have a TV, it still works just as well even if it's now half the cost - ditto your house) in the stock market then you're going to invest badly, almost guaranteed. Stocks have devices (index funds, hedges, etc) to avoid any piece of risk you wish but these aren't half as obvious as "possession is 9/10ths of the law". Even if you go upside down on your mortgage and are stuck with your crappy house for twenty years, you've still got a roof. If you invest in stocks in the way that 99% of people would (and aren't discouraged from by the other players) you will lose.
Fiscally they're about the same. Emotionally, losing your home is probably worse.
If they're took out a large loan with a floating interest rate, then they're insane.
What do you think is supporting the huge boom in real-estate prices? They aren't producing much more money via rent... Cheap mortgages let anyone into the game and loose credit standards (as if this wasn't the goal) let people adopt way too much debt.
When I bought (2004, way too late, but still ended up well) I paid 100k and got a mortgage on aprox 2/3 at a very nice line-of-credit interest rate (with 1-month lock-in). I sold at 145k 18 months later, that guy had almost twice my mortgage on a similar salary, without the backup of another wage earner available, and in a market with rapidly climbing interest rates. My only complaint is that I don't hold his mortgage.
This is everywhere, and this is the level of investment savvy people are bringing to stocks.
I've read a few hundred articles on corporate value, stock, most of Wikipedia on finance, etc, and I'm still a total newb to trying to value a company, let alone the market forces surrounding it. To suggest that the average Joe try this is inviting their scalping, like taking them to a high-stakes poker game.