From the customer's point of view, assignment of the copyright to the customer would be preferable to any open source licence.
Not necessarily. Assignment of the copyright might be desirable, but an open source license may be the most cost effective solution either way.
Consider if you pay for the development for a non-strategic part of a product you're producing, say, a fairly simple driver for a piece of hardware you sell.
If you go the closed source way you'll have to pay for any modifications to track your supported platforms revisions, effectively burdening you with extra costs for support and bugfixing. If you go the bsd open way, a competitor would get the code for free and could improve it without contributing back, effectively putting you at a disadvantage. If you go with the GPL tho, you can get the advantage of kernel developers maintaining compatibility through some changes, bugfixes for odd cases from users, and any improvements and/or widened support put into the driver by competitors (who may not either regard it as strategic) or users would be shared back to you.
Different licenses serve different purposes, and the business case varies between sectors, companies and individuals.
Overwriting the data is pointless; anyone wanting you to decrypt the data will clone the disk before trying out anything you volunteer on it.
Plausible deniability with multiple decryptions is pretty much the only way to get around the rubber hose attack. Give them one key and it decrypts to one thing. Give them another and it decrypts to something else. Put something you might plausibly want encrypted in the first one (pictures of naked cats or whatever would be reasonably innocent but perhaps slightly embarrasing), and the real stuff in the secondary encryption. This could of course be done in multiple layers too, with the end result that they can never know or prove that you have not disclosed the complete key.
The reason for IT's growth during late 90's and early 2000's was because it was new, great technology.
Actually I'd say it was because the cost/benefit ratio came within reach for a large number of applications that could benefit from IT solutions. Computers had already existed for a long time, but replacing phones, typewriters and hordes of analysts, accountants and other 'manual-IT' workers with computers that'd do the same job for a vastly higher price wasn't very useful.
This doesn't really make sense. IT has lots of opportunities too.
Indeed. IT for ITs sake has never been much more than a scam. IT is something you use to address various needs. In, for example, health care, where IT is vastly underutilized (systems to assist medical diagnosis, to prevent misdiagnosis, track drug interaction to a larger extent, computer assisted surgery, etc, etc). If other fields have opportunities, IT has opportunities in those fields.
Growth rates may become more tied to specific industry segments, but that's because most of the current useful things that 'everyone' was doing, communications, bookkeeping, typing and presentations, wont experience the same mass-affordability and cost/benefit threshold traverse anymore. But the fields that do grow are likely to also do so through IT improvements, in everything from food and water logistics, farm automation, healthcare IT, smart energy usage/production, etc.
Having not dropped a cellphone in water, do they actually reliably break from freshwater incidents? Most components should be water proof, and any stray currents due to, at least, freshwater conductivity should be far below tolerance and very unlikely to actually damage anything permanently.
I've had several keyboards, an mp3 player and flash memories subjected to various fluid exposures and none of them suffered more than at most temporary mechanical failures, easily dealt with by cleaning and/or room temperature fan-assisted drying.
Further, I doubt that the kind of water indicators they seem to be using would be any sort of reliable; chemical moisture indicators might very well get triggered by spending time outside on a foggy day and/or by simple condensation when subjected to temperature differences.
but periodicals like Wall Street Journal or The Economist
It might be easier to get payment for comprehensive publications covering a specific field, but those aren't very common. Even for fairly narrow fields of interest you'll usually be better of reading parts of a dozen publications rather than one good.
Trolls don't pay money to view content.
True. But how long will the more insightful commenters accept paying money to write comments tho? If the paper charges, it might be entirely reasonable to demand payment for contributions.
For most news I personally find much more value in the commentary than in the articles, something that would most likely be severely curtailed in a pay site due to lack of an active community of significant size, making them largely worthless.
In the end the problem for newspapers isn't the lack of pay walls anyway, but the vast overproduction of material. With the current balance of production/consumption rate it simply isn't possible to generate a positive revenue stream for most material.
And business death is the natural and correct response to overproduction and unprofitability...
True, but while the actual bombers may be silent and invisible to radar, the preceding media build up is unlikely to be, so you'll get that as a trigger instead. Seems like we're entering the age of pre-emptive nuclear strikes used as 'self-defence'.
Of course, bombers heading for ICBM bunkers would be a strong incentive for emptying those ICBM bunkers, so that use case may be a bit counter productive.
I'm frankly surprised that they're still allowed to sell li-ion batteries. Vent with flame is starting to look like a standard mode of operation for them, and it's certainly not limited to some few manufacturers.
They're a good argument for legislating the use of standardized and exchangeable batteries. Consumers really should have the choice to power their appliances and gadgets with the less incendiary options.
In the cases where actual source code wouldn't be released, decompilers work reasonably well for many purposes even as is today. With a lack of copyright I'd expect them to rapidly improve if there was a need. Perhaps obfuscation would gain popularity, but in the end, the added legitimacy of reverse engineering would more than make up for the need for it.
Code wouldn't be immediately adaptable either way, and I'd suggest the integration difficulties would present more of a challenge than getting close-to-human-readable code. For full replication you could just copy the code, but for integrating in diverging codebases you may not have more use of the actual source than you have of reasonable-quality decompiled code. Sure, comments might be an advantage, but I'm not really certain that they're common or good enough to make a difference in commercial code...
A 'natural' right of first-to-market is reasonable either way. As long as it doesn't hinder longer-term interoperability and the constant advancement of the state of the art it would do nowhere near the harm that copyright is doing today. So exchanging the enforcability of copyleft for the end of copyright would be a fair deal and an advantage for human development as a whole.
from actually finding the artists that could be something
Which, considering that music taste is varied, is something the audience does a much better job of itself. Particularly with modern tools like social networks.
providing them studio time and sponsoring them so they can get their job done
Studio time ain't exactly that expensive any more. Especially if you're reasonably prepared beforehand.
making the music videos
Somehow I doubt the wisdom in wasting money on videos that there's barely any market for at all. Subsidizing it from the main product is certainly one reason it's hard to make money from the product.
doing promotion
Certainly not something that should be encouraged by copyright. Too much promotion in the industry as a whole is one of the reasons you need more promotion, and when you're distributing more promotion materials than product you should realise there's a problem.
making sure the actual product is somewhat quality (yeah, quality can be argued!)
And much in the mind of the listener. One persons quality can be another persons boredom.
to actually delivering the products to retailers, tv and radio stations and whatever other places.
If they want them they can pay for the delivery. Or use electronic delivery. It's not as if transport costs need to be significant today.
But lets face it, all that usually needs lots of money and time and work.
It's always easy to spend money. The trick of free market economics is that they encourage producers to spend less money, becoming more efficient. Monopoly rights on the other hand encourage spending more money and you end up with the absurd current situation where some have trouble making money selling many expensive copies of things that can demonstrably be produced at almost no cost.
With monopoly rights and the ability to exact huge revenue streams from the economy, many movies become hideously expensive to make.
Without monopoly rights (if you believe in free markets) we'd see far more efficient use of the money, and movies would become much cheaper to make. Perhaps the pure technical quality would trail a bit, but then again, without copyright it would be much cheaper and easier to build upon older works, removing costs for double work.
Darknet is a catch-all term used to describe covert networks.
More recently, it's begun to be used to describe friend-to-friend and small-world theory based distributed networks. In these networks the users connect only to their closest friends by sharing encryption keys with each other, but as those friends then connect to their own friends you eventually get a vast encompassing network that is untraceable, anonymous and yet globally searchable and reachable.
Quite similar to cell based covert organizations used by intelligence agencies and various insurgent groups. Close to impenetrable, yet able to communicate throughout the structure.
Personally I think the evolutionary pressure put on free communications by various governments the last few years have made the mass migration to these kinds of networks unavoidable. For better or worse. Pandering to a few special interests desire for monopoly and some industries fear mongering will ultimately and permanently cost governments the ability to monitor any communications at all.
1) If you wish to distribute your code, you must distribute it under the GPL.
That's not actually accurate and usually the misconception about the GPL being 'viral'. The correct formulation would be:
1) If you want to distribute the GPL code, you must distribute it under the GPL.
You're entirely free to distribute your own code however you want, the fact that you may not distribute the GPL code with it, and the possibility that your own code may not be useful without the GPL code doesn't make the GPL code more 'viral' than any other code which you do not have the right to distribute. You could base your own OS off the Windows code base and not be allowed to distribute that either; maybe you could call Microsoft and assign copyright to them to have it distributed, but the fundamental issue is the same in both cases: you can distribute your code but you can't distribute the other code without complying with the copyright holders requirements.
Those requirements may be 'anyone else must be allowed to do the same to your code as you did to ours', or 'give the code to us'. But either way it's copyright that forces you to have permission, and it's your decision to make your code dependent on someone elses copyrighted code that together form the 'viral' aspect, not the license terms (spelled out, or negotiable) themselves.
Yes, see, they've been following the trend 'away from technology to the business end'.
It rather illustrates the whole problem with that idea; there are a lot of IT people who understand enough of the business end to work out solutions to business problems, but few business people who understand enough technology to even know what their options are. Instead they find themselves listening to salesreps and getting sold on very expensive rectal probes, despite the lack any urgent business need for mass colonic inspection.
"Wait, didn't we have virtualization before?"
Sort of like when CIOs went 'now we've implemented virtualization!' in 2007, when in fact they'd been running it since 2001 or earlier.
I have little doubt that most IT people who've been in the business for at least a decade and managed to stay relevant have more than enough ability to adapt to most changes; the Forrester analysts comment: "Somebody who is smart at CRM is not easily retrained on datacenter automation," would reflect more on himself than on most IT professionals; if your employees can't be retrained from CRM to datacenter automation I'd seriously question their ability with CRM solutions in the first place. (Hmm, although, having seen a few CRM solutions, that would explain some things).
Most likely not beyond what it would have either way. Research is a cost with very unpredictable ROI, and total funds available to pay for medical payments don't necessarily increase much just because there are more patents (monopoly economics; you're always charging what the market can bear so there's never 'more' money available unless the consumers become wealthier). Instead they cannibalize each other, which means the pharmaceutical industry is better off not researching more than absolutely necessary (the classic 'twist a molecule one step to the left' and apply for a new patent) and fighting it out with marketing. Which is why you see more patent money funding marketing than funds research.
I'd rather have the ability to test myself for a disease for $X than to not be able to test for it no matter what the cost.
Ah, but you don't want to test yourself for _that_ disease. You want to get tested for _this_ disease. Your tanned doctor certainly recommends getting tested for _this_ disease, and he's been on a week long ski, er, 'conference' trip to the alps, so he certainly knows the kickbacks, er, symptoms... and no questions of why he's got lipstick smudges in the same tone that the pharmarep who just left wore.
In the end you may still not get that test you want; the classic argument for patents has very little evidence to indicate that it actually works as intended. There is, however, a lot of evidence that monopolies become very ineffective, and you don't need to go further than a pharmacorps investor relations material to note that most money derived from those patents goes to completely different things.
The pharmas like to claim it's expensive to do medical research. You don't need to look much to note that most everything monopolies do eventually becomes 'very expensive', so it's an open question whether patents needed because R&D is expensive or R&D is expensive because there are patents.
I'd be interested in hearing Prometheus Labs' pricing scheme.
Revenue, when you have a monopoly, is always maximized at what the market can bear. You jack up the prices until you lose money from the lost customers than you gain from the increased per customer profit. It's not as if someone could undercut you...
What motive do they have... without a monetary incentive
What motive does anyone have in a free market economy? Either you improve your products or your competition will wipe the floor with you. Many industries live with exactly those conditions.
If being handed free money by the state (or monopoly rights, which isn't much different in anything but name) was a prerequisite for anyone having an incentive to do anything we might as well skip the pretence of a free market.
I had the same experience with MSI K9N Neo (one of the early AM2 motherboards). No BIOS flash without Windows.
That turned me off of MSI permanently; I'm not going to spend hours on their website to figure out what mobos I can safely buy (and I mean, it's not like this is a don't-have-windows issue, there are all sorts of ways that this is a PITA even if you do have Windows).
Being used to ASUS variants where you can stick any USB disk with a BIOS in a USB port and update, and where you even have a secondary BIOS loader, I was quite appalled. Not even any way to update the BIOS from a legacy floppy:(. (And yes, that mobo is bricked now, on a shelf with a dead BIOS).
Well, cats and babies use what works. If a specific sound is what gets you going, then that's the sound you'll get when they want something. Which is why your approach is perfectly fine; as long as you know there's nothing really wrong, training them to sound like something's horribly amok all the time isn't desirable.
On the other hand, sometimes it's good to reinforce nice ways of asking for attention. Personally I give in and play a bit when my cats roll over on their backs and purr (just far enough out of reach so I can't pet them), or when they bring their toys to me. Or I'll look what they want if they tug at my elbow. The only annoying sound that will get them something is the plaintive meow accompanied by scratching the floor near the litter box. That one means 'the litterbox is dirty, change it or I'm gonna piss on the floor', and considering they usually have a point and a reasonable tolerance, I'll accept that one.
Well, I'd rather say we don't want to cope. And by we, I mean the political class which is stuck in the scarce era of redistribution politics.
a huge unemployment problem.
Unemployment isn't in itself a problem; it's basically free time. Distribution of unemployment is a problem.
The thing is, if person A has to work 4 hours to earn a decent income, but then has to work 4 hours more to pay for two other people to subsist it doesn't really matter if the money goes to make work or outright benefits without work. It may feel better to imagine the recipients of the benefits are working for the money they get, but the fundamental problem remains; person A has to work (with real productive work) much more than he might actually want because someone else isn't doing productive work.
Personally I'd rather see a more reasonable division of labour than the creation of unnecessary work or payments to the long term unemployed. I think it's eventually necessary to go that way, but it's not easy to shift that way either, especially as many of today's economic measurements are flawed and don't work in a post-scarce economy.
And that money isn't exactly wasted.
Oh, true, the money doesn't go away, it's the time spent by the farmer that's 'wasted' and lost to the economy.
Also, I'm not seeing an important difference between paying $16 instead of $3 for a car wash
The fundamental difference is that nobody can flip a bit to give you that $13 extra worth of sparkle that you value. Somebody can flip a bit in a millisecond to get you the virtual gold, and you could pay for your car wash _and_ have the gold without anyone else in the economy being deprived of that value. IE, the economy as a whole would gain $26 of value (both products value for you) over that economic cycle instead of just $13 (wash or gold).
Either way, I'm paying someone $13 for hard work (that I could easily to myself if I cared to) just for my slight amusement.
Yep, but economic theory isn't that concerned with the contents of the value, only that something has a perceived value to someone and a (perceived) cost to someone else. As long as each transaction maximizes perceived value to the purchaser and costs as little as possible to produce, the economy as a whole grows and we all become richer (without saying anything about wealth distribution).
Conversely, when we start messing around with making things cost more than they actually would cost to produce, well, then we're in the end making someone and everyone have to work a little bit more to get to the level of wealth we want to achieve.
I know it's estoteric, but I hope I explained reasonably well:).
Without copyright there'd be nothing but open source text books; the exclusionary aspect of copyright is only mitigated to a very limited extent by the ability of individual authors to 'copyleft' or revoke copyright.
a more than ample demand (one that outstrips the competition due to their price)
From what I've seen of the textbook market the demand is mainly driven by staff using other peoples (students) money to suck up or as friends doing favours. With monopoly pricing (which copyright ensures) the revenue is always maximized at a pricing point where some customers cannot afford the product, and when those paying are not the ones to decide what product to buy the price will reach the absolute pain limit for the customer group. Such pricing has almost nothing to do with free market supply-demand.
that they have a functioning free market
As noted, the textbook market is nowhere near anything like a functioning market. I fact, it's barely possible to get further away from one (customers not deciding on product/product not subjected to competitive tenders/product replication restricted).
Nope. The cleanliness of your car actually is a scarce product; it probably wont clean itself, nor can it be effectively cleaned without labour. Now, if you were paying another guy to dirty it at the same time, that would at least be make-work.
What more does a deal need to be legit?
Nothing. I have no complaints about gold farmers or gold purchasers. It's making them necessary that's a problem.
Virtual gold and other virtual products can be created by flipping a few bits in a database. They're not scarce. The entire purpose of an economy is to decrease scarcity. Enforcing rules that mean that many hours of human labour is spent flipping those bits creates a net loss to the economy; the money spent employing people to instantiate non-scarce items means that money isn't spent employing people to produce actual scarce items.
Without anyone losing anything, you could have both the gold and a clean car, which for the purposes of an economy, would be the optimal outcome.
If you want to see a game played the way that you think is right
I don't really care what way the games are being played, but when virtual problems translate into real-world economic effects then it becomes an issue outside the games as well. If players are bypassing boring parts of the game by, to a noticeable extent, actually directing economic resources towards bypassing those parts of the game, then it becomes an actual problem for the outside economy: if the $1 billion worth of work is accurate, then we're not talking chump change, that's $1 billion that could have been spent doing something else, had the game actually worked as the players obviously desire. I mean, can you imagine what 400k workers can accomplish if they're not taking 8 hours a day to manually do a very very very slow database update?
Personally I think the developers should deal with the problem themselves; when people find parts of the game tedious enough to be 'work' they'd rather pay someone else to do there's obviously a problem. But if they have too little incentive to solve that (in one of the many possible ways to solve it), and the problem goes on to this extent, then perhaps some mandated solution would be in order. If not by mandating non-scarcity, then by other variants like selling the gold and scarce items with the proceeds going to charity or something that doesn't actually involve wasting human labour on a non-problem.
As these 'goods' are only artificially scarce I'd tend to equate such livelihoods with other make-work; the need to do the labour at all is artificially generated, the good could be produced automatically without human labour, and so it's a drain on the economy.
Still, banning it is pointless. If they actually wanted to stop gold farming there's a vastly superior way to do it: simply require any game available to Chinese citizens to be without any limits on availability of items or medium of exchange.
Personally I'd like to see that on MMORPG's in general; set up a few servers without any limits to player funds and items, let the 'challange' people play on the real servers and those currently paying for farmed gold play on the 'easy' servers.
As the articles noted, 38 years at the EPA, and as he was asked to respond to the drafts his opinion was obviously valued and relevant within the EPA. Frankly I can't think of many ways anyone could be more qualified than that. It's exactly this type of highly politicised and selective behaviour that makes me very sceptical about any conclusions or predictions about climate change.
And I say that with a thorough conviction that we should quit using fossil fuels ASAP; if the corruption, socio-economic misery and cost in human lives isn't reason enough to quit using them, the fact that they'll run out within a fairly short time is more than reason enough.
I'm just worried that highly political, high profile, and not entirely rigorous 'science' will give all science a bad name as a whole, that if the 'predictions' turn out invalid, it'll get to be a permanent case of the boy who cried wolf, and any necessary future adjustments might get completely ignored.
I don't know where you got your ridiculous 2X IB idea,
My bad, I meant DDR IB, and didn't mean the statement to say anything about actual number of adapters. The number of connectors you can stick in a single 'system' isn't really interesting; the definition of 'system' is simply so fungible that it doesn't mean much. Particularly if you're not selling the product as a single system image solution, but a consolidation server in which case it's completely irrelevant, as a distributed architecture used for consolidation would scale up to any number of adapters you want.
To put it in perspective, modern consumer grade x86 systems like Intel X58 based motherboards have 40 switched PCIe 2.0 lanes, with a capacity of 500MBps per lane. A single consumer grade motherboard can support 40 DDR IB links.
Attach a bunch of encrypted truly random data to every mail you send. It would be unbreakable, yet almost impossible to prove it's not simply very good encryption. They're then faced with the problem of either white listing everything you send, or getting a pile of unbreakable crap stacking up with no way to easily sort out which, if any, of the mails contain anything they're even remotely interested in.
what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Structure of marketing, lack of benchmarks and pricing model.
Hardware wise, last I looked, it had POWER equivalent CPU's with minor fixes for mainframe quirks, DDR2-667 memory, internal bus bandwidth comparable to Hypertransport, and 2x IB for outward connections. Nice enough, but nothing special. The days of 'mainframes have massive I/O' are gone.
As far as costs go, from the information I've actually been able to find in the form of mainframe related benchmarks and some equivalency info, what you can infer from the hardware, etc, generic x86 using modern paravirtualization (reaching load levels close to the batch-processing mainframes like to do) will reach about 60 times better price for the CPU capacity delivered. Even if you're wasting most of your servers and don't virtualize, you're still end up spending a fifth of the cost per CPU capacity used on generic hardware.
Jeff Savit did a fairly through analysis of mainframe realities and comparisons with open systems (yes, he currently works for Sun, but he's been a mainframe guy and his statements certainly match what data I've been able to find).
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From the customer's point of view, assignment of the copyright to the customer would be preferable to any open source licence.
Not necessarily. Assignment of the copyright might be desirable, but an open source license may be the most cost effective solution either way.
Consider if you pay for the development for a non-strategic part of a product you're producing, say, a fairly simple driver for a piece of hardware you sell.
If you go the closed source way you'll have to pay for any modifications to track your supported platforms revisions, effectively burdening you with extra costs for support and bugfixing. If you go the bsd open way, a competitor would get the code for free and could improve it without contributing back, effectively putting you at a disadvantage. If you go with the GPL tho, you can get the advantage of kernel developers maintaining compatibility through some changes, bugfixes for odd cases from users, and any improvements and/or widened support put into the driver by competitors (who may not either regard it as strategic) or users would be shared back to you.
Different licenses serve different purposes, and the business case varies between sectors, companies and individuals.
Overwriting the data is pointless; anyone wanting you to decrypt the data will clone the disk before trying out anything you volunteer on it.
Plausible deniability with multiple decryptions is pretty much the only way to get around the rubber hose attack. Give them one key and it decrypts to one thing. Give them another and it decrypts to something else. Put something you might plausibly want encrypted in the first one (pictures of naked cats or whatever would be reasonably innocent but perhaps slightly embarrasing), and the real stuff in the secondary encryption. This could of course be done in multiple layers too, with the end result that they can never know or prove that you have not disclosed the complete key.
The reason for IT's growth during late 90's and early 2000's was because it was new, great technology.
Actually I'd say it was because the cost/benefit ratio came within reach for a large number of applications that could benefit from IT solutions. Computers had already existed for a long time, but replacing phones, typewriters and hordes of analysts, accountants and other 'manual-IT' workers with computers that'd do the same job for a vastly higher price wasn't very useful.
This doesn't really make sense. IT has lots of opportunities too.
Indeed. IT for ITs sake has never been much more than a scam. IT is something you use to address various needs. In, for example, health care, where IT is vastly underutilized (systems to assist medical diagnosis, to prevent misdiagnosis, track drug interaction to a larger extent, computer assisted surgery, etc, etc). If other fields have opportunities, IT has opportunities in those fields.
Growth rates may become more tied to specific industry segments, but that's because most of the current useful things that 'everyone' was doing, communications, bookkeeping, typing and presentations, wont experience the same mass-affordability and cost/benefit threshold traverse anymore. But the fields that do grow are likely to also do so through IT improvements, in everything from food and water logistics, farm automation, healthcare IT, smart energy usage/production, etc.
Having not dropped a cellphone in water, do they actually reliably break from freshwater incidents? Most components should be water proof, and any stray currents due to, at least, freshwater conductivity should be far below tolerance and very unlikely to actually damage anything permanently.
I've had several keyboards, an mp3 player and flash memories subjected to various fluid exposures and none of them suffered more than at most temporary mechanical failures, easily dealt with by cleaning and/or room temperature fan-assisted drying.
Further, I doubt that the kind of water indicators they seem to be using would be any sort of reliable; chemical moisture indicators might very well get triggered by spending time outside on a foggy day and/or by simple condensation when subjected to temperature differences.
but periodicals like Wall Street Journal or The Economist
It might be easier to get payment for comprehensive publications covering a specific field, but those aren't very common. Even for fairly narrow fields of interest you'll usually be better of reading parts of a dozen publications rather than one good.
Trolls don't pay money to view content.
True. But how long will the more insightful commenters accept paying money to write comments tho? If the paper charges, it might be entirely reasonable to demand payment for contributions.
For most news I personally find much more value in the commentary than in the articles, something that would most likely be severely curtailed in a pay site due to lack of an active community of significant size, making them largely worthless.
In the end the problem for newspapers isn't the lack of pay walls anyway, but the vast overproduction of material. With the current balance of production/consumption rate it simply isn't possible to generate a positive revenue stream for most material.
And business death is the natural and correct response to overproduction and unprofitability...
True, but while the actual bombers may be silent and invisible to radar, the preceding media build up is unlikely to be, so you'll get that as a trigger instead. Seems like we're entering the age of pre-emptive nuclear strikes used as 'self-defence'.
Of course, bombers heading for ICBM bunkers would be a strong incentive for emptying those ICBM bunkers, so that use case may be a bit counter productive.
I'm frankly surprised that they're still allowed to sell li-ion batteries. Vent with flame is starting to look like a standard mode of operation for them, and it's certainly not limited to some few manufacturers.
They're a good argument for legislating the use of standardized and exchangeable batteries. Consumers really should have the choice to power their appliances and gadgets with the less incendiary options.
For most purposes, yes.
In the cases where actual source code wouldn't be released, decompilers work reasonably well for many purposes even as is today. With a lack of copyright I'd expect them to rapidly improve if there was a need. Perhaps obfuscation would gain popularity, but in the end, the added legitimacy of reverse engineering would more than make up for the need for it.
Code wouldn't be immediately adaptable either way, and I'd suggest the integration difficulties would present more of a challenge than getting close-to-human-readable code. For full replication you could just copy the code, but for integrating in diverging codebases you may not have more use of the actual source than you have of reasonable-quality decompiled code. Sure, comments might be an advantage, but I'm not really certain that they're common or good enough to make a difference in commercial code...
A 'natural' right of first-to-market is reasonable either way. As long as it doesn't hinder longer-term interoperability and the constant advancement of the state of the art it would do nowhere near the harm that copyright is doing today. So exchanging the enforcability of copyleft for the end of copyright would be a fair deal and an advantage for human development as a whole.
from actually finding the artists that could be something
Which, considering that music taste is varied, is something the audience does a much better job of itself. Particularly with modern tools like social networks.
providing them studio time and sponsoring them so they can get their job done
Studio time ain't exactly that expensive any more. Especially if you're reasonably prepared beforehand.
making the music videos
Somehow I doubt the wisdom in wasting money on videos that there's barely any market for at all. Subsidizing it from the main product is certainly one reason it's hard to make money from the product.
doing promotion
Certainly not something that should be encouraged by copyright. Too much promotion in the industry as a whole is one of the reasons you need more promotion, and when you're distributing more promotion materials than product you should realise there's a problem.
making sure the actual product is somewhat quality (yeah, quality can be argued!)
And much in the mind of the listener. One persons quality can be another persons boredom.
to actually delivering the products to retailers, tv and radio stations and whatever other places.
If they want them they can pay for the delivery. Or use electronic delivery. It's not as if transport costs need to be significant today.
But lets face it, all that usually needs lots of money and time and work.
It's always easy to spend money. The trick of free market economics is that they encourage producers to spend less money, becoming more efficient. Monopoly rights on the other hand encourage spending more money and you end up with the absurd current situation where some have trouble making money selling many expensive copies of things that can demonstrably be produced at almost no cost.
Many movies are hideously expensive to make.
With monopoly rights and the ability to exact huge revenue streams from the economy, many movies become hideously expensive to make.
Without monopoly rights (if you believe in free markets) we'd see far more efficient use of the money, and movies would become much cheaper to make. Perhaps the pure technical quality would trail a bit, but then again, without copyright it would be much cheaper and easier to build upon older works, removing costs for double work.
Darknet is a catch-all term used to describe covert networks.
More recently, it's begun to be used to describe friend-to-friend and small-world theory based distributed networks. In these networks the users connect only to their closest friends by sharing encryption keys with each other, but as those friends then connect to their own friends you eventually get a vast encompassing network that is untraceable, anonymous and yet globally searchable and reachable.
Quite similar to cell based covert organizations used by intelligence agencies and various insurgent groups. Close to impenetrable, yet able to communicate throughout the structure.
Personally I think the evolutionary pressure put on free communications by various governments the last few years have made the mass migration to these kinds of networks unavoidable. For better or worse. Pandering to a few special interests desire for monopoly and some industries fear mongering will ultimately and permanently cost governments the ability to monitor any communications at all.
1) If you wish to distribute your code, you must distribute it under the GPL.
That's not actually accurate and usually the misconception about the GPL being 'viral'. The correct formulation would be:
1) If you want to distribute the GPL code, you must distribute it under the GPL.
You're entirely free to distribute your own code however you want, the fact that you may not distribute the GPL code with it, and the possibility that your own code may not be useful without the GPL code doesn't make the GPL code more 'viral' than any other code which you do not have the right to distribute. You could base your own OS off the Windows code base and not be allowed to distribute that either; maybe you could call Microsoft and assign copyright to them to have it distributed, but the fundamental issue is the same in both cases: you can distribute your code but you can't distribute the other code without complying with the copyright holders requirements.
Those requirements may be 'anyone else must be allowed to do the same to your code as you did to ours', or 'give the code to us'. But either way it's copyright that forces you to have permission, and it's your decision to make your code dependent on someone elses copyrighted code that together form the 'viral' aspect, not the license terms (spelled out, or negotiable) themselves.
selling to the upper management above IT
Yes, see, they've been following the trend 'away from technology to the business end'.
It rather illustrates the whole problem with that idea; there are a lot of IT people who understand enough of the business end to work out solutions to business problems, but few business people who understand enough technology to even know what their options are. Instead they find themselves listening to salesreps and getting sold on very expensive rectal probes, despite the lack any urgent business need for mass colonic inspection.
"Wait, didn't we have virtualization before?"
Sort of like when CIOs went 'now we've implemented virtualization!' in 2007, when in fact they'd been running it since 2001 or earlier.
I have little doubt that most IT people who've been in the business for at least a decade and managed to stay relevant have more than enough ability to adapt to most changes; the Forrester analysts comment: "Somebody who is smart at CRM is not easily retrained on datacenter automation," would reflect more on himself than on most IT professionals; if your employees can't be retrained from CRM to datacenter automation I'd seriously question their ability with CRM solutions in the first place. (Hmm, although, having seen a few CRM solutions, that would explain some things).
will surely skyrocket
Most likely not beyond what it would have either way. Research is a cost with very unpredictable ROI, and total funds available to pay for medical payments don't necessarily increase much just because there are more patents (monopoly economics; you're always charging what the market can bear so there's never 'more' money available unless the consumers become wealthier). Instead they cannibalize each other, which means the pharmaceutical industry is better off not researching more than absolutely necessary (the classic 'twist a molecule one step to the left' and apply for a new patent) and fighting it out with marketing. Which is why you see more patent money funding marketing than funds research.
I'd rather have the ability to test myself for a disease for $X than to not be able to test for it no matter what the cost.
Ah, but you don't want to test yourself for _that_ disease. You want to get tested for _this_ disease. Your tanned doctor certainly recommends getting tested for _this_ disease, and he's been on a week long ski, er, 'conference' trip to the alps, so he certainly knows the kickbacks, er, symptoms... and no questions of why he's got lipstick smudges in the same tone that the pharmarep who just left wore.
In the end you may still not get that test you want; the classic argument for patents has very little evidence to indicate that it actually works as intended. There is, however, a lot of evidence that monopolies become very ineffective, and you don't need to go further than a pharmacorps investor relations material to note that most money derived from those patents goes to completely different things.
The pharmas like to claim it's expensive to do medical research. You don't need to look much to note that most everything monopolies do eventually becomes 'very expensive', so it's an open question whether patents needed because R&D is expensive or R&D is expensive because there are patents.
I'd be interested in hearing Prometheus Labs' pricing scheme.
Revenue, when you have a monopoly, is always maximized at what the market can bear. You jack up the prices until you lose money from the lost customers than you gain from the increased per customer profit. It's not as if someone could undercut you...
What motive do they have ... without a monetary incentive
What motive does anyone have in a free market economy? Either you improve your products or your competition will wipe the floor with you. Many industries live with exactly those conditions.
If being handed free money by the state (or monopoly rights, which isn't much different in anything but name) was a prerequisite for anyone having an incentive to do anything we might as well skip the pretence of a free market.
I had the same experience with MSI K9N Neo (one of the early AM2 motherboards). No BIOS flash without Windows.
That turned me off of MSI permanently; I'm not going to spend hours on their website to figure out what mobos I can safely buy (and I mean, it's not like this is a don't-have-windows issue, there are all sorts of ways that this is a PITA even if you do have Windows).
Being used to ASUS variants where you can stick any USB disk with a BIOS in a USB port and update, and where you even have a secondary BIOS loader, I was quite appalled. Not even any way to update the BIOS from a legacy floppy :(. (And yes, that mobo is bricked now, on a shelf with a dead BIOS).
Well, cats and babies use what works. If a specific sound is what gets you going, then that's the sound you'll get when they want something. Which is why your approach is perfectly fine; as long as you know there's nothing really wrong, training them to sound like something's horribly amok all the time isn't desirable.
On the other hand, sometimes it's good to reinforce nice ways of asking for attention. Personally I give in and play a bit when my cats roll over on their backs and purr (just far enough out of reach so I can't pet them), or when they bring their toys to me. Or I'll look what they want if they tug at my elbow. The only annoying sound that will get them something is the plaintive meow accompanied by scratching the floor near the litter box. That one means 'the litterbox is dirty, change it or I'm gonna piss on the floor', and considering they usually have a point and a reasonable tolerance, I'll accept that one.
we don't know how to cope.
Well, I'd rather say we don't want to cope. And by we, I mean the political class which is stuck in the scarce era of redistribution politics.
a huge unemployment problem.
Unemployment isn't in itself a problem; it's basically free time. Distribution of unemployment is a problem.
The thing is, if person A has to work 4 hours to earn a decent income, but then has to work 4 hours more to pay for two other people to subsist it doesn't really matter if the money goes to make work or outright benefits without work. It may feel better to imagine the recipients of the benefits are working for the money they get, but the fundamental problem remains; person A has to work (with real productive work) much more than he might actually want because someone else isn't doing productive work.
Personally I'd rather see a more reasonable division of labour than the creation of unnecessary work or payments to the long term unemployed. I think it's eventually necessary to go that way, but it's not easy to shift that way either, especially as many of today's economic measurements are flawed and don't work in a post-scarce economy.
And that money isn't exactly wasted.
Oh, true, the money doesn't go away, it's the time spent by the farmer that's 'wasted' and lost to the economy.
Also, I'm not seeing an important difference between paying $16 instead of $3 for a car wash
The fundamental difference is that nobody can flip a bit to give you that $13 extra worth of sparkle that you value. Somebody can flip a bit in a millisecond to get you the virtual gold, and you could pay for your car wash _and_ have the gold without anyone else in the economy being deprived of that value. IE, the economy as a whole would gain $26 of value (both products value for you) over that economic cycle instead of just $13 (wash or gold).
Either way, I'm paying someone $13 for hard work (that I could easily to myself if I cared to) just for my slight amusement.
Yep, but economic theory isn't that concerned with the contents of the value, only that something has a perceived value to someone and a (perceived) cost to someone else. As long as each transaction maximizes perceived value to the purchaser and costs as little as possible to produce, the economy as a whole grows and we all become richer (without saying anything about wealth distribution).
Conversely, when we start messing around with making things cost more than they actually would cost to produce, well, then we're in the end making someone and everyone have to work a little bit more to get to the level of wealth we want to achieve.
I know it's estoteric, but I hope I explained reasonably well :).
It certainly isn't copyright,
Without copyright there'd be nothing but open source text books; the exclusionary aspect of copyright is only mitigated to a very limited extent by the ability of individual authors to 'copyleft' or revoke copyright.
a more than ample demand (one that outstrips the competition due to their price)
From what I've seen of the textbook market the demand is mainly driven by staff using other peoples (students) money to suck up or as friends doing favours. With monopoly pricing (which copyright ensures) the revenue is always maximized at a pricing point where some customers cannot afford the product, and when those paying are not the ones to decide what product to buy the price will reach the absolute pain limit for the customer group. Such pricing has almost nothing to do with free market supply-demand.
that they have a functioning free market
As noted, the textbook market is nowhere near anything like a functioning market. I fact, it's barely possible to get further away from one (customers not deciding on product/product not subjected to competitive tenders/product replication restricted).
This is artificially generated labor, right?
Nope. The cleanliness of your car actually is a scarce product; it probably wont clean itself, nor can it be effectively cleaned without labour. Now, if you were paying another guy to dirty it at the same time, that would at least be make-work.
What more does a deal need to be legit?
Nothing. I have no complaints about gold farmers or gold purchasers. It's making them necessary that's a problem.
Virtual gold and other virtual products can be created by flipping a few bits in a database. They're not scarce. The entire purpose of an economy is to decrease scarcity. Enforcing rules that mean that many hours of human labour is spent flipping those bits creates a net loss to the economy; the money spent employing people to instantiate non-scarce items means that money isn't spent employing people to produce actual scarce items.
Without anyone losing anything, you could have both the gold and a clean car, which for the purposes of an economy, would be the optimal outcome.
If you want to see a game played the way that you think is right
I don't really care what way the games are being played, but when virtual problems translate into real-world economic effects then it becomes an issue outside the games as well. If players are bypassing boring parts of the game by, to a noticeable extent, actually directing economic resources towards bypassing those parts of the game, then it becomes an actual problem for the outside economy: if the $1 billion worth of work is accurate, then we're not talking chump change, that's $1 billion that could have been spent doing something else, had the game actually worked as the players obviously desire. I mean, can you imagine what 400k workers can accomplish if they're not taking 8 hours a day to manually do a very very very slow database update?
Personally I think the developers should deal with the problem themselves; when people find parts of the game tedious enough to be 'work' they'd rather pay someone else to do there's obviously a problem. But if they have too little incentive to solve that (in one of the many possible ways to solve it), and the problem goes on to this extent, then perhaps some mandated solution would be in order. If not by mandating non-scarcity, then by other variants like selling the gold and scarce items with the proceeds going to charity or something that doesn't actually involve wasting human labour on a non-problem.
destroy the livelihood of 400K people
As these 'goods' are only artificially scarce I'd tend to equate such livelihoods with other make-work; the need to do the labour at all is artificially generated, the good could be produced automatically without human labour, and so it's a drain on the economy.
Still, banning it is pointless. If they actually wanted to stop gold farming there's a vastly superior way to do it: simply require any game available to Chinese citizens to be without any limits on availability of items or medium of exchange.
Personally I'd like to see that on MMORPG's in general; set up a few servers without any limits to player funds and items, let the 'challange' people play on the real servers and those currently paying for farmed gold play on the 'easy' servers.
He's had a career; what does it consist of?
As the articles noted, 38 years at the EPA, and as he was asked to respond to the drafts his opinion was obviously valued and relevant within the EPA. Frankly I can't think of many ways anyone could be more qualified than that. It's exactly this type of highly politicised and selective behaviour that makes me very sceptical about any conclusions or predictions about climate change.
And I say that with a thorough conviction that we should quit using fossil fuels ASAP; if the corruption, socio-economic misery and cost in human lives isn't reason enough to quit using them, the fact that they'll run out within a fairly short time is more than reason enough.
I'm just worried that highly political, high profile, and not entirely rigorous 'science' will give all science a bad name as a whole, that if the 'predictions' turn out invalid, it'll get to be a permanent case of the boy who cried wolf, and any necessary future adjustments might get completely ignored.
I don't know where you got your ridiculous 2X IB idea,
My bad, I meant DDR IB, and didn't mean the statement to say anything about actual number of adapters. The number of connectors you can stick in a single 'system' isn't really interesting; the definition of 'system' is simply so fungible that it doesn't mean much. Particularly if you're not selling the product as a single system image solution, but a consolidation server in which case it's completely irrelevant, as a distributed architecture used for consolidation would scale up to any number of adapters you want.
To put it in perspective, modern consumer grade x86 systems like Intel X58 based motherboards have 40 switched PCIe 2.0 lanes, with a capacity of 500MBps per lane. A single consumer grade motherboard can support 40 DDR IB links.
Attach a bunch of encrypted truly random data to every mail you send. It would be unbreakable, yet almost impossible to prove it's not simply very good encryption. They're then faced with the problem of either white listing everything you send, or getting a pile of unbreakable crap stacking up with no way to easily sort out which, if any, of the mails contain anything they're even remotely interested in.
what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Structure of marketing, lack of benchmarks and pricing model.
Hardware wise, last I looked, it had POWER equivalent CPU's with minor fixes for mainframe quirks, DDR2-667 memory, internal bus bandwidth comparable to Hypertransport, and 2x IB for outward connections. Nice enough, but nothing special. The days of 'mainframes have massive I/O' are gone.
As far as costs go, from the information I've actually been able to find in the form of mainframe related benchmarks and some equivalency info, what you can infer from the hardware, etc, generic x86 using modern paravirtualization (reaching load levels close to the batch-processing mainframes like to do) will reach about 60 times better price for the CPU capacity delivered. Even if you're wasting most of your servers and don't virtualize, you're still end up spending a fifth of the cost per CPU capacity used on generic hardware.
Jeff Savit did a fairly through analysis of mainframe realities and comparisons with open systems (yes, he currently works for Sun, but he's been a mainframe guy and his statements certainly match what data I've been able to find).