Re:well, not effortlessly
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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Doublestac
I remember Doublestac! That was the one where the USPTO gave out two patents for the same technology - and Microsoft held one, and Doublestac held the other. Microsoft having deliberately searched for compression technology that wouldn't infringe on Doublestac's patents, found this one, bought it, and then found out that "oh no they di'n't".
You might want to stop using that one as an example. It's a great one of the ineffectiveness of the US Patent Office, and how software patents suck. It's a lousy one of Microsoft wrongdoing - because it shows nothing of the sort.
You might want to do a little research too before spouting off the same old same old.
Parts of the autistic condition are severe ADHD and the inability to read or express thru facial or body expressions. The hyperactivity alone (fidgetyness) can be interpreted as sneakiness or a deceptivity-give-away. Other body language miscues produced will result what appears to be "vague, evasive responses - fear shows itself. When you do this long enough, you see it right away." Areas crowded with people cause me anxiety by itself, especially if more than one person is trying to talk to me - such as companions, plus airline checkin personnel, and now the body-language gestapo....oops, didn't mean Godwin this, sorry.
Do a search for "FACS" and "micro expressions".
Trust me, they're not looking for vagueness, anxiety, hyper or hypoactivity. They're looking for "single frame" (about 10-20ms long) expressions which appear on your face when you think you're getting away with something. They've been used by the secret service for years, and are amazingly accurate; they can detect lies with 99% accuracy. (It's all 'cause of mirror neurons and the fusiform gyrus being a two-way street, dontcha know).
They've had several years to build their own advertising model, and any failures are strictly their own.
I feel the same way about Netscape - in fact you can document it to the hilt how they completely faceplanted right around the IE3 timeframe (including telling Quicken that they basically weren't interested in helping them with their UI). However, for some reason, people around here just don't agree with me.
I took the time to get to you this message everybody's been trying to convey. I hope you get it this time. IT's not stealing because they have already millions of dollars in their pockets (big companies) and they are really surviving this by making some of us pay. For example universities, other companies, instituitions! They are paying for every bit of software.
So why are these people making such a big deal about copyright? Because they are greedy, with their greasy hands, they wanto to squeeze every single penny from our pockets. From ordinary guys like you and me.
And I really find it difficult to understant why you are being such a.ussy about it.
Ahhh... the Robin Hood excuse.
Here's the thing, right...
Stealing content doesn't just hurt the companies. It hurts the artists, writers, programmers, animators, actors, etc. who rely on that work to make a living.
The big companies' models are broken (look at the Writer's Strike for examples of why). The big companies deserve to be taken down. Copyright needs to be shrunk back down to 25 years maximum (that seems more than fair and reasonable to me).
However, if you do it this way, you hurt the creators of the content as well. And they (for the most part) can't afford to do it by themselves - they need deep pockets to support and finance their projects while they're still works in progress.
Without a return to some kind of literal patronage system, there's no other way around it - unless Daddy's rich, in which case you can go play and do what you want. (Which is why most of the company owners I know of have rich parents - they didn't need to worry about money while they were taking their 'risk').
It's a knotty, thorny problem. And no, I'm not being a pussy about it. I'm just someone who thinks that if I spend 3 years writing a book, and I charge for it, you should either pay what I ask, or not read it. That's fair. Why should you have the right to read it? You didn't write it. You didn't put out any effort to create it. All you're doing is leeching off my work. Freeloading. If you really cared about the company aspect, you'd copy things, and then contact the people who created them and pay them directly. But no, you don't. All you want is a free ride, and this is how you're trying to rationalize it.
Bit of a close-minded approach, isn't it? I mean if you can't possibly be wrong, what's the point in even debating any of it?
Let's try a different approach...
You spend 3 years working on a novel after you get home from your job at the QuickieMart; a page a night, plus time for redrafts and editing. It's great - you get a publishing deal and it comes out as an ebook. However, instead of buying it, for every 100 people who pay for a copy, 900 download it.
Add to this that in an ideal world each site would scale to almost any screen resolution (I, and many other users, absolutely detest 800x600-px layouts. Any cell-phone and PDA users out there care to weigh in?) and you have a recipe for frustration when trying to work in various "hacks" to have different code displayed by different browsers.
Not sure where microsoft's responsibility figures into any of that... Personally, I'd blame CSS, which frankly is an unwieldy, terribly designed piece of crap the moment you try to do any kind of layout with it.
Which is terrible, because that's what it was supposed to be the solution for.
I, with a number of people who think like me, will continue to share information until all the software/music/film industries understand that what they're doing is not only ridiculous but also selfish and ignorant.
Nice transference there. You don't just happen to possibly be willing to consider the idea that you're the one being selfish and ignorant?
After all, it's you who's getting something for nothing that other people worked on that you didn't do anything to deserve.
Software companies do sue people - but they do it through the BSA.
I bought a full copy of Adobe Creative Suite a couple of years ago. From a store, no less.
Shortly after registering it, I got a nasty threatening letter from the BSA saying they were going to audit me for piracy.
Needless to say, I no longer have any respect for Adobe. I've not pirated their software. Yet. But that kind of behavior certainly makes me consider it as a course of action for the future. After all, I actually bought the real deal in the first place - they shouldn't try to punish me for that.
I for one, have gotten into computing thanks to the fact IP is non-existant, I was introduced to this world by pirated software and right now learn everything from pirated books, because of this I plan that if I ever make some relevant work I will release it under GPL, I know enough about these things to know that DRM (what you imply with your paragraph) is worthless.
Cool! In that case, because you're ignoring their copyright, I can ignore your GPL, and use your code (which I doubt you'll create) in my own works while ignoring your rights.
But saying that companies are losing all the value of piracy is preposterous (not saying you said it, but companies that claim $x billion dollars of loss) because it's hard to determine how much of it people would have paid for the stuff they pirated.
I totally agree, but to be honest, it's the only metric they can use that's grounded in anything remotely factual, whether it's realistic or not.
Intellectual property is not a natural right. It is an artificial right created solely to encourage the advancement of society.
If you want to argue natural rights... what's to stop me from hitting you with a billy club in a dark alley and taking everything you have?
If we're talking natural rights, nothing. The only "natural right" that exists is survival of the fittest. The bigger, meaner animals kill the smaller, weaker ones. Most of the time for food. Everything else is artificially conjured up by human society.
Haven't the record labels made enough? Every time I hear their stories, All I can think of is "Go blow it your ass."
Who cares about the record labels? Their industry is broken. Ideally, the government would step in and hit them hard for usury.
I care about the artists who make the recordings. They should be getting paid for their work. Just because the middle man is corrupt, doesn't mean that you get a free ride to do whatever you want with their work - it just means that you need to fix the middle man.
The argument that developers/artists/etc are losing money from piracy is debatable since if the person pirating didn't have the money to buy the software (eg. Photoshop) they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Thing is, apparently it has some worth to the person pirating it, because otherwise why would they bother?
Which means... dan dan daarn... that the people writing Photoshop should at least get that much back.
copyright, and patents too. last 5 years. no extensions. no exceptions. you get a 5 year monopoly on your creation or idea.
after that its fair game. public domain. and no. you cant gouge the hell out of us on price to make up for it. create more crap and get another 5 years for that instead.
The only problem here is that it may take you more than 5 years to create it. 15 to 25 years sounds about right (knowing how hard it is to write that first novel unless you're independently wealthy)... and without Disney and Sonny Bono screwing things up, that's what we had originally.
There's a lot of bad logic here; primarily the assumption that you still own software you have sold to a customer. You have very little moral right to that software; that software now belongs to the customer, and it's the customers moral right to copy and sell on what he owns.
You're defending submarine patents? On Slashdot? Wow. Sir, you have balls made of brass.
There's a lot of bad logic here; primarily the assumption that you still own software you have sold to a customer. You have very little moral right to that software; that software now belongs to the customer, and it's the customers moral right to copy and sell on what he owns.
Not quite.
Say it takes 1000 people 3 years to make a version of Office. Each of those people makes about, say, $80,000 a year. They need to get paid - without paying them, you won't get your Office. (Assuming you want it, but let's hold that assumption for the sake of this argument).
That's $240,000,000. Would you like to pay cash, or check?
The idea of copyright law is that it lets certain works that would otherwise be too expensive for average Joe Schmoe to buy, to be sold at a price that is averaged out over everyone who wants a copy. It allows them to sell it for $120 a copy instead of $240,000,000 to the first buyer.
The rest of the discussion is all free market forces, and the fact that there's inertia to getting a company up and running so you can do such a thing. Your first product can't be done for free, so you need to get paid while you're making it, which is why the margins have to be higher. Theoretically as your company grows, your prices drop closer and closer to your actual costs, because your momentum is higher, and your risk drops. That, and people are greedy, and will milk any opportunity for as much as they can.
I don't believe in IP and I don't think they deserve it. Is the amount of effort they are putting to produce a song, really worth the millions of dollars they are claiming that they must make?
Let's take a look at that idea then...
If I write a novel, and you don't think it's worth paying me for it, what are your options?
Don't pay me for it, but take it anyway.
Pay me for it, begrudgingly
Don't pay me for it - obviously it's not worth it to you at the asking price
What kind of fantasy land do you live in that you think (1) is perfectly valid?
Now let's say I'm a technoguru of immense proportion, and I figure out a way to key the book to your DNA so you're the only person who can read it. You now only have the 2nd or 3rd option.
This is why DRM happens - because people like you arbitrarily decide "well, if I don't think it's worth my money, I'm going to take it anyway".
You know why people should be paid for their IP? Ultimately, because they spent part of their life creating it. If you don't think it's worth it, you're well in your rights to complain loudly, say so, and not buy it. If you think it's worth stealing anyway, you should at least be honest enough to know that you should pay for it - otherwise, why would you want it at all?
Slashdot Mirror
you're probably trying to be funny, but, sadly, there are people ready to believe such outrageous shit.
nope. Not trying to be funny.
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/fast-execute.cgi/article-page.html?article=79300009 has a good article on the subject.
You could also read Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell.
Doublestac
I remember Doublestac! That was the one where the USPTO gave out two patents for the same technology - and Microsoft held one, and Doublestac held the other. Microsoft having deliberately searched for compression technology that wouldn't infringe on Doublestac's patents, found this one, bought it, and then found out that "oh no they di'n't".
You might want to stop using that one as an example. It's a great one of the ineffectiveness of the US Patent Office, and how software patents suck. It's a lousy one of Microsoft wrongdoing - because it shows nothing of the sort.
You might want to do a little research too before spouting off the same old same old.
Parts of the autistic condition are severe ADHD and the inability to read or express thru facial or body expressions. The hyperactivity alone (fidgetyness) can be interpreted as sneakiness or a deceptivity-give-away. Other body language miscues produced will result what appears to be "vague, evasive responses - fear shows itself. When you do this long enough, you see it right away."
Areas crowded with people cause me anxiety by itself, especially if more than one person is trying to talk to me - such as companions, plus airline checkin personnel, and now the body-language gestapo....oops, didn't mean Godwin this, sorry.
Do a search for "FACS" and "micro expressions".
Trust me, they're not looking for vagueness, anxiety, hyper or hypoactivity. They're looking for "single frame" (about 10-20ms long) expressions which appear on your face when you think you're getting away with something. They've been used by the secret service for years, and are amazingly accurate; they can detect lies with 99% accuracy. (It's all 'cause of mirror neurons and the fusiform gyrus being a two-way street, dontcha know).
Si
I think you totally missed my point. My response was mainly to the 2nd half of that statement - not the first.
Yep, it looks like I fat-fingered it. Sorry!
Who says consumers don't want FOSS? So far as I can tell, they've not had any real choice in the matter until only in the last 5 years.
I dunno about that... I was running Slackware back in 1992. That was 15 years ago.
They've had several years to build their own advertising model, and any failures are strictly their own.
I feel the same way about Netscape - in fact you can document it to the hilt how they completely faceplanted right around the IE3 timeframe (including telling Quicken that they basically weren't interested in helping them with their UI). However, for some reason, people around here just don't agree with me.
I took the time to get to you this message everybody's been trying to convey. I hope you get it this time. IT's not stealing because they have already millions of dollars in their pockets (big companies) and they are really surviving this by making some of us pay. For example universities, other companies, instituitions! They are paying for every bit of software.
.ussy about it.
So why are these people making such a big deal about copyright? Because they are greedy, with their greasy hands, they wanto to squeeze every single penny from our pockets. From ordinary guys like you and me.
And I really find it difficult to understant why you are being such a
Ahhh... the Robin Hood excuse.
Here's the thing, right...
Stealing content doesn't just hurt the companies. It hurts the artists, writers, programmers, animators, actors, etc. who rely on that work to make a living.
The big companies' models are broken (look at the Writer's Strike for examples of why). The big companies deserve to be taken down. Copyright needs to be shrunk back down to 25 years maximum (that seems more than fair and reasonable to me).
However, if you do it this way, you hurt the creators of the content as well. And they (for the most part) can't afford to do it by themselves - they need deep pockets to support and finance their projects while they're still works in progress.
Without a return to some kind of literal patronage system, there's no other way around it - unless Daddy's rich, in which case you can go play and do what you want. (Which is why most of the company owners I know of have rich parents - they didn't need to worry about money while they were taking their 'risk').
It's a knotty, thorny problem. And no, I'm not being a pussy about it. I'm just someone who thinks that if I spend 3 years writing a book, and I charge for it, you should either pay what I ask, or not read it. That's fair. Why should you have the right to read it? You didn't write it. You didn't put out any effort to create it. All you're doing is leeching off my work. Freeloading. If you really cared about the company aspect, you'd copy things, and then contact the people who created them and pay them directly. But no, you don't. All you want is a free ride, and this is how you're trying to rationalize it.
Good luck with that. It's not sustainable.
NO
Bit of a close-minded approach, isn't it? I mean if you can't possibly be wrong, what's the point in even debating any of it?
Let's try a different approach...
You spend 3 years working on a novel after you get home from your job at the QuickieMart; a page a night, plus time for redrafts and editing. It's great - you get a publishing deal and it comes out as an ebook. However, instead of buying it, for every 100 people who pay for a copy, 900 download it.
How do you feel? Personally I mean?
Add to this that in an ideal world each site would scale to almost any screen resolution (I, and many other users, absolutely detest 800x600-px layouts. Any cell-phone and PDA users out there care to weigh in?) and you have a recipe for frustration when trying to work in various "hacks" to have different code displayed by different browsers.
Not sure where microsoft's responsibility figures into any of that... Personally, I'd blame CSS, which frankly is an unwieldy, terribly designed piece of crap the moment you try to do any kind of layout with it.
Which is terrible, because that's what it was supposed to be the solution for.
I, with a number of people who think like me, will continue to share information until all the software/music/film industries understand that what they're doing is not only ridiculous but also selfish and ignorant.
Nice transference there. You don't just happen to possibly be willing to consider the idea that you're the one being selfish and ignorant?
After all, it's you who's getting something for nothing that other people worked on that you didn't do anything to deserve.
Software companies do sue people - but they do it through the BSA.
I bought a full copy of Adobe Creative Suite a couple of years ago. From a store, no less.
Shortly after registering it, I got a nasty threatening letter from the BSA saying they were going to audit me for piracy.
Needless to say, I no longer have any respect for Adobe. I've not pirated their software. Yet. But that kind of behavior certainly makes me consider it as a course of action for the future. After all, I actually bought the real deal in the first place - they shouldn't try to punish me for that.
In my analog world, free performances of intellectual property were given all the time. I was free to record them as I saw them
Went to a lot of Phish and Grateful Dead concerts did you?
Newsflash: That's not the general case, that's an exception.
I for one, have gotten into computing thanks to the fact IP is non-existant, I was introduced to this world by pirated software and right now learn everything from pirated books, because of this I plan that if I ever make some relevant work I will release it under GPL, I know enough about these things to know that DRM (what you imply with your paragraph) is worthless.
Cool! In that case, because you're ignoring their copyright, I can ignore your GPL, and use your code (which I doubt you'll create) in my own works while ignoring your rights.
But saying that companies are losing all the value of piracy is preposterous (not saying you said it, but companies that claim $x billion dollars of loss) because it's hard to determine how much of it people would have paid for the stuff they pirated.
I totally agree, but to be honest, it's the only metric they can use that's grounded in anything remotely factual, whether it's realistic or not.
Remphasized that first word for you there.
Intellectual property is not a natural right. It is an artificial right created solely to encourage the advancement of society.
If you want to argue natural rights... what's to stop me from hitting you with a billy club in a dark alley and taking everything you have?
If we're talking natural rights, nothing. The only "natural right" that exists is survival of the fittest. The bigger, meaner animals kill the smaller, weaker ones. Most of the time for food. Everything else is artificially conjured up by human society.
Haven't the record labels made enough? Every time I hear their stories, All I can think of is "Go blow it your ass."
Who cares about the record labels? Their industry is broken. Ideally, the government would step in and hit them hard for usury.
I care about the artists who make the recordings. They should be getting paid for their work. Just because the middle man is corrupt, doesn't mean that you get a free ride to do whatever you want with their work - it just means that you need to fix the middle man.
No, sorry. When only four out of a thousand people believe something is wrong, it's not wrong any more. Society has changed its mind on this issue
Cool! In that case, slavery was ok then? I'd bring up concentration camps in Germany, but I don't want to godwin the thread.
Information that wants to be free? That'd be the phonebook sir.
You seem to be conflating data and data with structure.
The argument that developers/artists/etc are losing money from piracy is debatable since if the person pirating didn't have the money to buy the software (eg. Photoshop) they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Thing is, apparently it has some worth to the person pirating it, because otherwise why would they bother?
Which means... dan dan daarn... that the people writing Photoshop should at least get that much back.
copyright, and patents too. last 5 years. no extensions. no exceptions. you get a 5 year monopoly on your creation or idea.
after that its fair game. public domain. and no. you cant gouge the hell out of us on price to make up for it. create more crap and get another 5 years for that instead.
The only problem here is that it may take you more than 5 years to create it. 15 to 25 years sounds about right (knowing how hard it is to write that first novel unless you're independently wealthy)... and without Disney and Sonny Bono screwing things up, that's what we had originally.
There's a lot of bad logic here; primarily the assumption that you still own software you have sold to a customer. You have very little moral right to that software; that software now belongs to the customer, and it's the customers moral right to copy and sell on what he owns.
You're defending submarine patents? On Slashdot? Wow. Sir, you have balls made of brass.
There's a lot of bad logic here; primarily the assumption that you still own software you have sold to a customer. You have very little moral right to that software; that software now belongs to the customer, and it's the customers moral right to copy and sell on what he owns.
Not quite.
Say it takes 1000 people 3 years to make a version of Office. Each of those people makes about, say, $80,000 a year. They need to get paid - without paying them, you won't get your Office. (Assuming you want it, but let's hold that assumption for the sake of this argument).
That's $240,000,000. Would you like to pay cash, or check?
The idea of copyright law is that it lets certain works that would otherwise be too expensive for average Joe Schmoe to buy, to be sold at a price that is averaged out over everyone who wants a copy. It allows them to sell it for $120 a copy instead of $240,000,000 to the first buyer.
The rest of the discussion is all free market forces, and the fact that there's inertia to getting a company up and running so you can do such a thing. Your first product can't be done for free, so you need to get paid while you're making it, which is why the margins have to be higher. Theoretically as your company grows, your prices drop closer and closer to your actual costs, because your momentum is higher, and your risk drops. That, and people are greedy, and will milk any opportunity for as much as they can.
Let's take a look at that idea then...
If I write a novel, and you don't think it's worth paying me for it, what are your options?
What kind of fantasy land do you live in that you think (1) is perfectly valid?
Now let's say I'm a technoguru of immense proportion, and I figure out a way to key the book to your DNA so you're the only person who can read it. You now only have the 2nd or 3rd option.
This is why DRM happens - because people like you arbitrarily decide "well, if I don't think it's worth my money, I'm going to take it anyway".
You know why people should be paid for their IP? Ultimately, because they spent part of their life creating it. If you don't think it's worth it, you're well in your rights to complain loudly, say so, and not buy it. If you think it's worth stealing anyway, you should at least be honest enough to know that you should pay for it - otherwise, why would you want it at all?
The rest is just haggling over price.