"Movies are full of huge non-recurring set costs that nobody thinks about."
Oh, there are people thinking about it, it's just that it doesnt really factor into the current economy of movies which is based on getting a specific limited number of movie visits spent on their particular movie over any other movie. The huge spending and waste is an artifact of copyright and the specifics of these distribution channels.
But I'll betcha the Open Content movement will make use of this economy of reuse possibilities materializing with CGI/bluescreen/other developments and absolutely wipe the floor with the movie industry over the next decade as people move not only visual arts watching into their living room, but visual arts creativity into their home-office.
"This is not about bug fixes. This is about actual support."
Standard end-user 'support', ie, no-source support, is different of course, and it's more or less similar for FOSS and proprietary software. Corporations will have internal or outsourced support and private individuals/small companies tend to use what free support is available in friends, relatives or google.
So to differentiate between the variants at all, it becomes a source issue. Which tends to stretch into bug-fix and/or actual changes to the code territory.
"If you want to talk bug fixes, let's talk about the cost of hiring someone or a group of people to fix the program."
If you run into a bug in an OSS program it tends to be in a range between one of two things; either it's something common that many people run into, in which case the bug will be solved eventually, wether you do it or someone else does it (take your cost/benefit ratio and decide). Or it's something very rare that more or less only you get hit by (in which case, you can again use that cost/benefit ratio to decide wether to ignore it, work around it, notify the developers fix it yourself or actually pay to fix it).
Now, if you get a bug in a proprietary application that only affects you, you're more or less stuck in the same place, except you dont have the option to fix it or pay to fix it. Or if you do, the 'off-shore-the-problem' certainly wont be a solution; I've run in to support for less mainstream products who have actually offered to fix the problem. At cost. Their cost. Which isnt in India. As far as I'm told.
And that's when I've been in the big-company seat. When the seats have been reversed, I've actually had problems the vendor has refused to fix. At all.
You run into the same kinds of problems with both F/OSS software and proprietary software. The difference with F/OSS software is you actually have the freedom to chose some solutions you dont get at all with proprietary software. This doesnt mean it's free or useful for everyone, but the choice is yours, not someone elses.
"The most likely reason is that the F/OSS companies don't yet have the size of (paying) customer base necessary"
Perhaps. But consider this; with proprietary software _everyone_ has (for certain values of has) to pay for the support, wether they need it or not. With F/OSS, those who really want and/or need the support have to carry their own weight as the rest do without.
"I very much doubt it is that the F/OSS companies are milking excessive profits off support."
The proprietary companies are milking excessive profits off of the monopoly value of copyright tho, easily allowing them to subsidize certain groups of users at the expense of others. Yet another example of the conflict between free market economy and IP.
"But there aren't any notification bars or status tickers in full-screen mode,"
And there you come to the core of the problem. Full screen is a specific UI mode that deliberately says 'there's nothing more important than this'.
You could, of course, create an UI status feature that displayed even over full-screen (or use alternate notification routes like sound), but then the recipients of that powerpoint session would know they're not the priority, even now.
"So in those cases the computer still has to make a judgement call:"
The user already has made that judgement call; they might just not want to acknowledge it.
"It's actually a really hard thing to do, so I don't criticize Microsoft too much."
No, really, it isnt.
Unrequested drastic UI and focus alterations are _always_ undesired. You dont need to query anything about wether the user should be interrupted; the user should _not_ be interrupted. For anything. At any time.
Nobody _ever_ has so much spare time these days that they sit around doing nothing but wait for random suggestions, be it from telemarketers or syslogs. They're always doing something, and unless 'looking at the system messages' has reached their priority queue, whatever they're doing is always more important.
(Actually, there is one time where an interruption is appropriate; notification that they're going to be a whole lot more interrupted in a short while, such as notifying the user that a system shutdown is imminent or the battery is about to explode)
There. Now that we've concluded that interruptions with push-information are more or less always inappropriate, the question instead becomes 'how do we quickly and unobtrusively notify the user that there is information available when his attention strays'?
The answer to that, of course, is things like notification bars, system trays, tickers, etc. Unobtrusive UI features requested and placed appropriately by the user.
"It's a significant challenge."
No, really, it isnt. Anyone who's been in a classroom should be able to solve it; thirty unruly programs need to learn to raise their hand and wait to get asked, rather than blurt out whatever's on their mind.
"you don't understand why "Americans" think it's ok for artists and actors to get paid..."
Except, of course, what's actually happening is the artists and creators get ripped off by the middle men 'owners' who take the vast bulk of the money spent.
Paying creative talent does naturally follow by giving someone else a monopoly.
Then again, the whole point of IP was never about the artists and creators, they're just the excuse. The actual purpose was to protect merchants from competition, in exchange for favours for the crown. A purpose which the IP constructs serve admirably.
That's the efficiency part. You're not comparing with zero, you're comparing with alternatives.
As, for example, pharmaceutical patents give between 15-20% of their funding to R&D, that means we'd get the same R&D for a fifth of the cost if we paid for it outright. Or five times the current R&D. And this is without even looking at the other negative aspects of monopoly rights.
And music is even worse, particularly as it intentionally marginalizes most produced music in the interest of funneling the significant part of the revenue stream towards a few investments.
"with nothing new being added?"
I understand you're not using linux, only listen to mainstream music and none of it classical, and never read any blogs.
The level intellectual material constantly generated without any hope of economic incentive from the monopoly rights indicates that even if we completely ended the IP incentives, the force of creative desire would be unstoppable.
But that's not really the question; the only relevant question is, are we getting our money's worth?
And any look at the economic state of the IP industries gives you the answer; not even close.
Essentially, it's down to the cost structures of labor and the economy as a whole. The levels of indirect expenditure on non-productive organizations absolutely kills the ability to remain competetive; spending on everything from intellectual 'property' through military expenses have to be paid for out of the pockets of the productive areas of the economy.
Indeed. For an extreme example, try implementing an exclusive right on air, then imagine yourself being the 'air industry' trying to exact money for the right of breathing.
Betcha you'll come up with a whole lot of reasons involving employing hundreds of thousands of people counting breaths taken by the citizens everywhere.
The fact that those hundreds of thousands of people would be far more usefully employed elsewhere might even escape you completely. And such inconvenient facts like oxygen being produced by trees and naturally occuring would be considered to be somewhere between preposterous through treasonous propaganda.
Actually, quite the opposite. Considering that the IP industries are particularly inefficient in their production as protected entities, the economy as a whole _gains_ from the failure to enforce their monopoly priviliges.
Piracy means the economy as a whole gains _both_ the wealth inherent in an extra copy of a certain material for the particular consumer _plus_ the wealth inherent in whatever else the money is spent on.
Translation: The numbers made up by the industries are completely irrelvant, IP is merely a method of redistributing wealth to achieve a specific purpose, similar to taxes, and as such the only interesting measure is wether a) the money actually goes to it's intended recipient and b) wether it's an efficient use of resources.
Of course, voting for 'another candidate' might just mean voting for _the_ other candidate who might also be pro-torture/detention-camp/wiretapping.
Without proportional representation the US will never get real alternatives for its voters. (Oh, and for anyone claiming proportional representation leads to fringe groups getting power, take a damn look at the US political field.)
Well, obviously. After all, those terrorists did it because they 'hate our freedom'. Now that the government has rid us of that pesky thing, there's no reason to fear anymore.
Well, you might experience occasional unscheduled emergency demolition work, but dont worry, anyone suggesting it wasnt's in any way legitimate will be immediately detained and umm... humanely umm... treated.
Just got an M-Audio card myself (Revolution 7.1), and I must say I'm perfectly happy with it. A large improvement in quality over the sound I got from the integrated NVidia card.
"This new memory might help also with quad cores and beyond."
True, and if AMD had waited with the platform upgrade until memory starvation did become an issue, the newer motherboards would have had a greater advantage compared to the old ones. So, complaining about the incremental nature of the change and lackluster performance increase means complaining about AMD being proactive and adressing the potential problem before it becomes serious.
I suspect some reviewers are a bit bored and are just fishing for hits, because as far as I can tell, if AM2 isnt living up to expectations in some particular fashion, it's the expectations that are off, not the actual hardware.
"normal physical property is just a monopoly right"
On the disposition of a particular piece of property. The fundamental idea of the capitalistic free market is to maximize the production of such pieces in the most efficient way and/or maximize yield of use of a particular piece, thus increasing the overall wealth in the economy.
IP instead is the monopoly on the production/duplication of a particular piece, which is inherently the right to _limit_ the production of those particular pieces, putting it fundamentally and irreconcileably at odds with the intent of a free market economy. It redistributes wealth while actually decreasing the total amount of wealth, making it even worse than other redistribution methods like taxes.
Indeed. I really dont get the point. AM2 is simply a platform change; basically just a couple of lines drawn differently on the motherboard. And a new memory standard that's just not that big a deal (and, iirc, the reason it was a big deal at the Socket A introduction was that ordinary SDRAM performance really sucked and nobody wanted to touch RDRAM with a ten foot pole even if they could afford it, creating a huge up market demand for that specific change).
The only consumers who have a reason to care at all about AM2 are people who look to standardize on a single platform for multiple upgrades, with the advantages of interchangeable components that brings. Separated platforms like 754/939 stink for that as you cant mix cheap and higher performance components, which makes AM2 a much better choice. But really, it's not that'll amount to that many.
Ultimately, the exclusivity of certain console games and the proprietary divergence of the various consoles depend on various forms of intellectual monopoly legislation which _is_ enforced by force. Without that specific exercise of force we might very well have a dozen or five dozen of 'PS/3' models produced by different vendors, all capable of playing the same games.
Mr. TooMuchEspressoGuy is perhaps not forced to actually buy a PS/3, but alternative PS/3 makers who would cater to his desires are certainly forced to refrain from that.
"a winner-takes-all election system leads to more moderate parties."
No it doesnt. That particular assumption is based on a one-dimensional view of politics, where only a single issue is of overriding importance. WTA systems lead to moderate positioning on one or a few major issues, like economic policy, but after that they can easily cater to extremists on secondary issues. For example, where a WTA system offers tax cuts and anti-abortion vs education spending and pro-abortion, a proportional system would offer several more parties, covering various axis like tax cuts _and_ pro-abortion, creating a situation where each issue would have a much more accurate representation in the legislative branch.
Not to even mention that more people vote when they have a choice they actually find acceptable, without having to swallow a bunch of views they abhor.
"the National Front got nearly 20% of the vote in France"
Ironically, in the US, where the current majority party has the voted support of less than 20% of the actual eligible voters, that level of support is enough to put them in charge. While in a PR system, that would leave a majority of 80% solidly against the NF.
And, of course, the French presidential election is really a completely irrelevant example, as that also is a winner-takes-all position, altho it is two-round runoff election.
"The Greens keep them for moving closer to the center."
More to the green center? More to the family values center? More to the what center? The greens are primarily on a completely different axis, and in a PR system would tend towards the center in non-environmental issues, while _both_ other parties would tend towards dealing with environmental issues in internally consistent ways, to keep voters from defection, leading to much more multi-axis voter centralized politics.
Two party systems are good for one thing; offering easy management for antidemocratic interests. Much easier to influence and buy politicians if there are fewer to pay, and you dont have to worry about your pets getting kicked out by a third party in the next election. So take a good hard look at those sources espousing the wonders of two party systems, and ask what they might have to lose if politicians serve the voters instead.
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. The nature of monopolistic competition such as in the music market is that there's a limited total amount of money being spent in the market. For players with large catalogues this means that for maximum profitability they want to obtain as large piece of that pie as possible while producing and promoting as few albums as possible.
As this is inherently undesireable by both musicians and consumers, control of distribution channels becomes necessary to perpetuate and enforce the situation, and the perpetuation of the current situation necessary to retain profitability.
It might not be the intent of the law, but it is an unavoidable consequence. Which is one of the reasons that granting monopoly rights on anything is fundamentally incompatible with free market economics and a really idiotic way to attempt to redistribute resources towards desireable activities.
"For a company to make money, it costs consumers money."
While this may seem obvious to you, it's a fact that most proponents of intellectual 'property' in general prefer to utterly ignore.
They get a much more compelling argument if they say 'we can create X amount of wealth in your economy if you give us monopoly rights', instead of 'take X amount of money from everyone else and give it to us so we make more money'.
It may amount to the same thing, but the presentation is important.
See, as long as they can hide the actual cost they dont have to justify it, nor will the public and politicians question why these specific costs give so little value for the money.
I mean, how would it look if they had to justify a cost of $40 billion of what is essentially public funding and produce something that can barely compete with free opensource software? That'd buy a lot of healthcare, education or infrastructure, were those resources spent elsewhere instead.
"Thank goodness we have guys like this to point out these secrets of the Economy."
With the amount of willful ignorance and intentional misdirection going on among the IP related lobbyist crowds, unfortunately it does seem necessary.
Fair use has nothing to do with non-profit purposes. Fair use is strictly limited to such aspects as reviewing material, extracting reasonable-length quotes from material, and other similar meta-aspects of a specific work.
Use of the whole work in such a case as this, without permission, does not fall within traditional fair use exceptions.
"none of these students is actually producing anything that's inherently valuable"
Well, obviously. No 'intellectual property' is inherently valuable, that's the very nature of infinitely zero-cost duplicatable work. That doesnt change the fact that politicians have thought that making a non-scarce resource scarce is a useful way to make it valuable, despite the socioeconomic consequences of such laws. Laws which apply equally to the work of Dan Brown, Britney Spears and Joe Random Student.
The value of copyright doesnt derive from the usefulness of the constituent material, but from the right to prevent others from reproducing that material. As turnitin apparently does want the reproduction done, the value of the material derives from the ability to deny turnitin that right.
"Their proprietary attitude towards the utterly useless things they're writing is kind of amusing."
Yes, well, I suggest you take that discussion up with the RIAA and MPAA and see how well it goes over.
And I'd suggest companies like turnitin and any schools supporting them start supporting IP reform, in case the want to be able to continue doing these things.
There's nothing preventing you from complying with the FCC. The GPLv3 would just prevent you from refusing to run modified drivers for the scanner.
"But GPLv3 says you can't unless you make your DVD drive region-free."
It doesn't say that. It says you cant use GPL code, unless you dont prevent someone else from modifying and running it. _You_ dont have to ship region-free code, you're just not allowed to prevent anyone else from doing it.
"But please face it, huge amount of the free software development is now backed by corporations and without their support, Linux would be far from where it is today."
The corporate support Linux has today is _because_ of the GPL's forced levelled playing field. If you want an example of what happens without that enforcement, take a look at the BSD history and the UNIX flavour wars.
Corporate management is full of cover-your-ass control freaks who'd rather go down fighting over a piece of a shrinking pie they want total control over, rather than live with a free market where they have to live with the uncertainty of the much bigger pie.
The GPL enforces a free market and a level playing field, preventing the free riders who'd force the big corporate supporters out in protection of their competetive advantage. With the GPL equality, the corporate supporters cant use the code as a proprietary weapon, but neither can they get their donations used against them by someone else, allowing them instead to compete in other fields they find more attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
"Movies are full of huge non-recurring set costs that nobody thinks about."
Oh, there are people thinking about it, it's just that it doesnt really factor into the current economy of movies which is based on getting a specific limited number of movie visits spent on their particular movie over any other movie. The huge spending and waste is an artifact of copyright and the specifics of these distribution channels.
But I'll betcha the Open Content movement will make use of this economy of reuse possibilities materializing with CGI/bluescreen/other developments and absolutely wipe the floor with the movie industry over the next decade as people move not only visual arts watching into their living room, but visual arts creativity into their home-office.
And I'll betcha it'll be driven by pr0n.
"This is not about bug fixes. This is about actual support."
Standard end-user 'support', ie, no-source support, is different of course, and it's more or less similar for FOSS and proprietary software. Corporations will have internal or outsourced support and private individuals/small companies tend to use what free support is available in friends, relatives or google.
So to differentiate between the variants at all, it becomes a source issue. Which tends to stretch into bug-fix and/or actual changes to the code territory.
"If you want to talk bug fixes, let's talk about the cost of hiring someone or a group of people to fix the program."
If you run into a bug in an OSS program it tends to be in a range between one of two things; either it's something common that many people run into, in which case the bug will be solved eventually, wether you do it or someone else does it (take your cost/benefit ratio and decide). Or it's something very rare that more or less only you get hit by (in which case, you can again use that cost/benefit ratio to decide wether to ignore it, work around it, notify the developers fix it yourself or actually pay to fix it).
Now, if you get a bug in a proprietary application that only affects you, you're more or less stuck in the same place, except you dont have the option to fix it or pay to fix it. Or if you do, the 'off-shore-the-problem' certainly wont be a solution; I've run in to support for less mainstream products who have actually offered to fix the problem. At cost. Their cost. Which isnt in India. As far as I'm told.
And that's when I've been in the big-company seat. When the seats have been reversed, I've actually had problems the vendor has refused to fix. At all.
You run into the same kinds of problems with both F/OSS software and proprietary software. The difference with F/OSS software is you actually have the freedom to chose some solutions you dont get at all with proprietary software. This doesnt mean it's free or useful for everyone, but the choice is yours, not someone elses.
"The most likely reason is that the F/OSS companies don't yet have the size of (paying) customer base necessary"
Perhaps. But consider this; with proprietary software _everyone_ has (for certain values of has) to pay for the support, wether they need it or not. With F/OSS, those who really want and/or need the support have to carry their own weight as the rest do without.
"I very much doubt it is that the F/OSS companies are milking excessive profits off support."
The proprietary companies are milking excessive profits off of the monopoly value of copyright tho, easily allowing them to subsidize certain groups of users at the expense of others. Yet another example of the conflict between free market economy and IP.
"you can get it directly from the company that makes the software."
Unless they're out of business. Or have discontinued the product. Or most of the development team has quit.
The difference between opensource and proprietary software is that with proprietary software only one company is legally allowed to fix any bugs.
"But there aren't any notification bars or status tickers in full-screen mode,"
And there you come to the core of the problem. Full screen is a specific UI mode that deliberately says 'there's nothing more important than this'.
You could, of course, create an UI status feature that displayed even over full-screen (or use alternate notification routes like sound), but then the recipients of that powerpoint session would know they're not the priority, even now.
"So in those cases the computer still has to make a judgement call:"
The user already has made that judgement call; they might just not want to acknowledge it.
"It's actually a really hard thing to do, so I don't criticize Microsoft too much."
No, really, it isnt.
Unrequested drastic UI and focus alterations are _always_ undesired. You dont need to query anything about wether the user should be interrupted; the user should _not_ be interrupted. For anything. At any time.
Nobody _ever_ has so much spare time these days that they sit around doing nothing but wait for random suggestions, be it from telemarketers or syslogs. They're always doing something, and unless 'looking at the system messages' has reached their priority queue, whatever they're doing is always more important.
(Actually, there is one time where an interruption is appropriate; notification that they're going to be a whole lot more interrupted in a short while, such as notifying the user that a system shutdown is imminent or the battery is about to explode)
There. Now that we've concluded that interruptions with push-information are more or less always inappropriate, the question instead becomes 'how do we quickly and unobtrusively notify the user that there is information available when his attention strays'?
The answer to that, of course, is things like notification bars, system trays, tickers, etc. Unobtrusive UI features requested and placed appropriately by the user.
"It's a significant challenge."
No, really, it isnt. Anyone who's been in a classroom should be able to solve it; thirty unruly programs need to learn to raise their hand and wait to get asked, rather than blurt out whatever's on their mind.
"you don't understand why "Americans" think it's ok for artists and actors to get paid..."
Except, of course, what's actually happening is the artists and creators get ripped off by the middle men 'owners' who take the vast bulk of the money spent.
Paying creative talent does naturally follow by giving someone else a monopoly.
Then again, the whole point of IP was never about the artists and creators, they're just the excuse. The actual purpose was to protect merchants from competition, in exchange for favours for the crown. A purpose which the IP constructs serve admirably.
That's the efficiency part. You're not comparing with zero, you're comparing with alternatives.
As, for example, pharmaceutical patents give between 15-20% of their funding to R&D, that means we'd get the same R&D for a fifth of the cost if we paid for it outright. Or five times the current R&D. And this is without even looking at the other negative aspects of monopoly rights.
And music is even worse, particularly as it intentionally marginalizes most produced music in the interest of funneling the significant part of the revenue stream towards a few investments.
"with nothing new being added?"
I understand you're not using linux, only listen to mainstream music and none of it classical, and never read any blogs.
The level intellectual material constantly generated without any hope of economic incentive from the monopoly rights indicates that even if we completely ended the IP incentives, the force of creative desire would be unstoppable.
But that's not really the question; the only relevant question is, are we getting our money's worth?
And any look at the economic state of the IP industries gives you the answer; not even close.
"might not be private property."
Hence the IP lobbyists adoption of the misnomer intellectual 'property' rather than intellectual monopoly, despite the actual nature of the subject.
"that they can compete in?"
Essentially, it's down to the cost structures of labor and the economy as a whole. The levels of indirect expenditure on non-productive organizations absolutely kills the ability to remain competetive; spending on everything from intellectual 'property' through military expenses have to be paid for out of the pockets of the productive areas of the economy.
Indeed. For an extreme example, try implementing an exclusive right on air, then imagine yourself being the 'air industry' trying to exact money for the right of breathing.
Betcha you'll come up with a whole lot of reasons involving employing hundreds of thousands of people counting breaths taken by the citizens everywhere.
The fact that those hundreds of thousands of people would be far more usefully employed elsewhere might even escape you completely. And such inconvenient facts like oxygen being produced by trees and naturally occuring would be considered to be somewhere between preposterous through treasonous propaganda.
"The economy wasn't hurt."
Actually, quite the opposite. Considering that the IP industries are particularly inefficient in their production as protected entities, the economy as a whole _gains_ from the failure to enforce their monopoly priviliges.
Piracy means the economy as a whole gains _both_ the wealth inherent in an extra copy of a certain material for the particular consumer _plus_ the wealth inherent in whatever else the money is spent on.
Translation: The numbers made up by the industries are completely irrelvant, IP is merely a method of redistributing wealth to achieve a specific purpose, similar to taxes, and as such the only interesting measure is wether a) the money actually goes to it's intended recipient and b) wether it's an efficient use of resources.
Of course, voting for 'another candidate' might just mean voting for _the_ other candidate who might also be pro-torture/detention-camp/wiretapping.
Without proportional representation the US will never get real alternatives for its voters. (Oh, and for anyone claiming proportional representation leads to fringe groups getting power, take a damn look at the US political field.)
Well, obviously. After all, those terrorists did it because they 'hate our freedom'. Now that the government has rid us of that pesky thing, there's no reason to fear anymore.
Well, you might experience occasional unscheduled emergency demolition work, but dont worry, anyone suggesting it wasnt's in any way legitimate will be immediately detained and umm... humanely umm... treated.
Just got an M-Audio card myself (Revolution 7.1), and I must say I'm perfectly happy with it. A large improvement in quality over the sound I got from the integrated NVidia card.
"This new memory might help also with quad cores and beyond."
True, and if AMD had waited with the platform upgrade until memory starvation did become an issue, the newer motherboards would have had a greater advantage compared to the old ones. So, complaining about the incremental nature of the change and lackluster performance increase means complaining about AMD being proactive and adressing the potential problem before it becomes serious.
I suspect some reviewers are a bit bored and are just fishing for hits, because as far as I can tell, if AM2 isnt living up to expectations in some particular fashion, it's the expectations that are off, not the actual hardware.
"normal physical property is just a monopoly right"
On the disposition of a particular piece of property. The fundamental idea of the capitalistic free market is to maximize the production of such pieces in the most efficient way and/or maximize yield of use of a particular piece, thus increasing the overall wealth in the economy.
IP instead is the monopoly on the production/duplication of a particular piece, which is inherently the right to _limit_ the production of those particular pieces, putting it fundamentally and irreconcileably at odds with the intent of a free market economy. It redistributes wealth while actually decreasing the total amount of wealth, making it even worse than other redistribution methods like taxes.
Indeed. I really dont get the point. AM2 is simply a platform change; basically just a couple of lines drawn differently on the motherboard. And a new memory standard that's just not that big a deal (and, iirc, the reason it was a big deal at the Socket A introduction was that ordinary SDRAM performance really sucked and nobody wanted to touch RDRAM with a ten foot pole even if they could afford it, creating a huge up market demand for that specific change).
The only consumers who have a reason to care at all about AM2 are people who look to standardize on a single platform for multiple upgrades, with the advantages of interchangeable components that brings. Separated platforms like 754/939 stink for that as you cant mix cheap and higher performance components, which makes AM2 a much better choice. But really, it's not that'll amount to that many.
"I don't see I'll need to get a passport for any reason"
With the rate things are deteriorating, you'll probably need it to avoid spending a week or two on ice when the goons go 'papieren bitte! schnell!'...
"You aren't forced."
Ultimately, the exclusivity of certain console games and the proprietary divergence of the various consoles depend on various forms of intellectual monopoly legislation which _is_ enforced by force. Without that specific exercise of force we might very well have a dozen or five dozen of 'PS/3' models produced by different vendors, all capable of playing the same games.
Mr. TooMuchEspressoGuy is perhaps not forced to actually buy a PS/3, but alternative PS/3 makers who would cater to his desires are certainly forced to refrain from that.
"a winner-takes-all election system leads to more moderate parties."
No it doesnt. That particular assumption is based on a one-dimensional view of politics, where only a single issue is of overriding importance. WTA systems lead to moderate positioning on one or a few major issues, like economic policy, but after that they can easily cater to extremists on secondary issues. For example, where a WTA system offers tax cuts and anti-abortion vs education spending and pro-abortion, a proportional system would offer several more parties, covering various axis like tax cuts _and_ pro-abortion, creating a situation where each issue would have a much more accurate representation in the legislative branch.
Not to even mention that more people vote when they have a choice they actually find acceptable, without having to swallow a bunch of views they abhor.
"the National Front got nearly 20% of the vote in France"
Ironically, in the US, where the current majority party has the voted support of less than 20% of the actual eligible voters, that level of support is enough to put them in charge. While in a PR system, that would leave a majority of 80% solidly against the NF.
And, of course, the French presidential election is really a completely irrelevant example, as that also is a winner-takes-all position, altho it is two-round runoff election.
"The Greens keep them for moving closer to the center."
More to the green center? More to the family values center? More to the what center? The greens are primarily on a completely different axis, and in a PR system would tend towards the center in non-environmental issues, while _both_ other parties would tend towards dealing with environmental issues in internally consistent ways, to keep voters from defection, leading to much more multi-axis voter centralized politics.
Two party systems are good for one thing; offering easy management for antidemocratic interests. Much easier to influence and buy politicians if there are fewer to pay, and you dont have to worry about your pets getting kicked out by a third party in the next election. So take a good hard look at those sources espousing the wonders of two party systems, and ask what they might have to lose if politicians serve the voters instead.
Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. The nature of monopolistic competition such as in the music market is that there's a limited total amount of money being spent in the market. For players with large catalogues this means that for maximum profitability they want to obtain as large piece of that pie as possible while producing and promoting as few albums as possible.
As this is inherently undesireable by both musicians and consumers, control of distribution channels becomes necessary to perpetuate and enforce the situation, and the perpetuation of the current situation necessary to retain profitability.
It might not be the intent of the law, but it is an unavoidable consequence. Which is one of the reasons that granting monopoly rights on anything is fundamentally incompatible with free market economics and a really idiotic way to attempt to redistribute resources towards desireable activities.
"For a company to make money, it costs consumers money."
While this may seem obvious to you, it's a fact that most proponents of intellectual 'property' in general prefer to utterly ignore.
They get a much more compelling argument if they say 'we can create X amount of wealth in your economy if you give us monopoly rights', instead of 'take X amount of money from everyone else and give it to us so we make more money'.
It may amount to the same thing, but the presentation is important.
See, as long as they can hide the actual cost they dont have to justify it, nor will the public and politicians question why these specific costs give so little value for the money.
I mean, how would it look if they had to justify a cost of $40 billion of what is essentially public funding and produce something that can barely compete with free opensource software? That'd buy a lot of healthcare, education or infrastructure, were those resources spent elsewhere instead.
"Thank goodness we have guys like this to point out these secrets of the Economy."
With the amount of willful ignorance and intentional misdirection going on among the IP related lobbyist crowds, unfortunately it does seem necessary.
"You can easily make a fair use argument"
Fair use has nothing to do with non-profit purposes. Fair use is strictly limited to such aspects as reviewing material, extracting reasonable-length quotes from material, and other similar meta-aspects of a specific work.
Use of the whole work in such a case as this, without permission, does not fall within traditional fair use exceptions.
"none of these students is actually producing anything that's inherently valuable"
Well, obviously. No 'intellectual property' is inherently valuable, that's the very nature of infinitely zero-cost duplicatable work. That doesnt change the fact that politicians have thought that making a non-scarce resource scarce is a useful way to make it valuable, despite the socioeconomic consequences of such laws. Laws which apply equally to the work of Dan Brown, Britney Spears and Joe Random Student.
The value of copyright doesnt derive from the usefulness of the constituent material, but from the right to prevent others from reproducing that material. As turnitin apparently does want the reproduction done, the value of the material derives from the ability to deny turnitin that right.
"Their proprietary attitude towards the utterly useless things they're writing is kind of amusing."
Yes, well, I suggest you take that discussion up with the RIAA and MPAA and see how well it goes over.
And I'd suggest companies like turnitin and any schools supporting them start supporting IP reform, in case the want to be able to continue doing these things.
"(think FCC in the case of the scanner)."
There's nothing preventing you from complying with the FCC. The GPLv3 would just prevent you from refusing to run modified drivers for the scanner.
"But GPLv3 says you can't unless you make your DVD drive region-free."
It doesn't say that. It says you cant use GPL code, unless you dont prevent someone else from modifying and running it. _You_ dont have to ship region-free code, you're just not allowed to prevent anyone else from doing it.
"But please face it, huge amount of the free software development is now backed by corporations and without their support, Linux would be far from where it is today."
The corporate support Linux has today is _because_ of the GPL's forced levelled playing field. If you want an example of what happens without that enforcement, take a look at the BSD history and the UNIX flavour wars.
Corporate management is full of cover-your-ass control freaks who'd rather go down fighting over a piece of a shrinking pie they want total control over, rather than live with a free market where they have to live with the uncertainty of the much bigger pie.
The GPL enforces a free market and a level playing field, preventing the free riders who'd force the big corporate supporters out in protection of their competetive advantage. With the GPL equality, the corporate supporters cant use the code as a proprietary weapon, but neither can they get their donations used against them by someone else, allowing them instead to compete in other fields they find more attractive.