The problem...is that copyright was never designed with software in mind.
Which is why copyright in software should be abolished and patents should be used instead. (Ducks behind heat-absorbent shield.) No, really; there are some actual benefits to this.
Patents expire. (Copyrights seem to be going on forever.)
Modern software is far more like the interlocking gears of a machine than like the mystic gestalt of a painting.
Copyright cares about where code came from (which is a pain). Patent only cares about what code does.
Copyrights are automatic, but most stuff that gets invented is never patented.
Every piece of code written before 1984 would instantly be public domain.
True. Those sorts of numbers are for big businesses. (The PTO has for a long time used two fee schedules: one for small entities and a different one for large entities.)
However, I am intending by these fees that people who aren't using their patent to make money should abandon it to the public domain sooner than later. I'm hoping that some one else will then make better use of the invention.
...implying the medium is incapable of more is shortsighted and wrong.
Games have victory conditions, or at least goals. How do you design game goals when religions vary so wildly about what is desirable and undesirable? Doesn't every possible choice endorse or reject some religion's views? Justice v mercy; great deeds v self-enlightenment; acclamation v anonymous servitude. Plus, every simplification of some point of doctrine offends some one -- this is not like simulating tire friction on a racetrack and leaving out the effects of race-day air temperature.
The difficulty may go beyond whether gaming is a young art or whether the designers are sufficiently talented. There seem to be constraints on the video-game medium that make it a poor medium for exploring religion. I'm not convinced that it can be done or that the resulting game would be interesting to play.
0. I presume by "don't acutally sue", you don't mean that people who concientiously license their patent around don't get screwed.
2. Others have explained that there are no more submarine patents.
3. It's not cheap to sit on your patent. It costs $10000+ to get the patent in the first place. After that, patents have increasing maintenance fees due every 4 years ($910, $2090, $3220). If you don't pay, you lose your patent. The idea is that patents that have been forgotten about or aren't making money will expire sooner. (Of course, they should probably be much, much higher, like $5000, $25000, $125000, $625000, so that the fee tracks the value of the patent.)
4. If you sit on your rights after some one puts a product on the market, you can only sue for the most recent 6 years of sales. It's called laches.
This article is flawed at best and insulting at worst. 1. The controls on this 'study' are horrid.... the PC Mag forum... Macintouch...
I'm glad that _somebody_ said it. To do this "right", find one group of people who are writing under one set of circumstances and are divided only by the type of computer they use. That is, all variables except computer type must be held constant. Variables affecting quality of writing include nature of topic, presence or absence of moderation, nature of audience, available time, type of written work (e.g. web comments, letter to editor, article, essay).
Looking just at Slashdot comments, you'd find a variation in scores depending on how much contempt the posters had for the article/event/person they were commenting on. It wouldn't have been hard for this author to find better samples to investigate his Mac v PC proposition. Poorly done!
Oh, thank You! That summary was better than the whole Yahoo article.
One could tell from the self-contradictions that they'd garbled something important, but finding the actual Order to read it seemed like... well... work.
Yeah, I'm stretching "predict" a little.:) A better contrast of the various available synomyns is here.
However, since whether a prediction must be made "in advance" of an event's occurence or "in advance" of knowing the result is something that all dictionaries don't agree on, it's not such a big stretch. After all, from the speaker's point of view, the process is the same.
--Yours for an unambiguous lexicon, PMuse;)
(Oh, and for the AC's benefit, those example predictions were all hypotheticals and were chosen to illustrate various time sequences and various kinds of "knowledge" that would eventually be used to decide if they were correct. The use of "I" was a style choice, not a statement of belief.)
... if you read the article he's actually claiming that the idea of local portable storage will be dead. That everything will be networked and centralised. He makes the point that why would we carry around some fragile copy of the data when we can just have it delivered across the network to whichever device requires it. This is the microsoft vision now, computers+network access in everything.
Of course DVD will be an inadequate storage medium in 2014. Just consider how many doublings of storage capacity we'll see between now and then.
And why do we care? Just because DVD will be obsolete does not mean we'll be unable to watch the ones we have. My VHS is surely obsolete, but I can still watch those tapes. Must we quibble simply because the statement came from Gates's mouth?
Just to be pedantic, it is possible to make predictions about the present and the past. For example,
I predict that this water sample contains an unsafe level of arsenic
I predict that the mass extinction that killed most of the dinosaurs was caused by a meteorite impact and that the diameter of the impact basin would be X
I predict that the assasin was a partisan of the Y cause
I predict that the kidnapper is the child's estranged father
I predict that there are an infinite number of primes
Whatever the original intention of the quote may have been, it is accurate to say that making predictions about events that have not happened yet is more difficult than making predictions about facts not yet known concerning events that have already happened. This is hardly surprising -- the more information available before hand, the better a prediction will be.
Don't let me off the hook too easily. It's possible that all children in L.W. are above the national average.
You are right, there are fun games to be played with finely-tuned example sets: clustered data with wierd outliers; sets with equal means, medians, modes, and midranges, but far-flung deviations; deceptive sets that hide the nature of their members behind bland-seeming summary data; etc.
Come to think of it, Keillor's tagline is: Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above-average.
Personnally, I'm one of those people who doesn't think statistics really qualifies as mathematics, but can some once demostrate a set to me where all the members lie above some average of the set?
If he was, he'd know that it's completely possible for most people at Lake Wobegone to be above (or below) average.
Consider an exam taken by 4 people. 3 people score a 10. 1 person scores a 2. That makes an average SCOREof 8 (10 + 10 + 10 + 2 = 32. 32/4 = 8). Most of the people scored above average.
You have successfully demonstrated how a majority of scores can be above (or below) the mean score. The original statement wasn't about scores.
Fair enough. 8, 4, whatever. I see movie prices rising over time, regardless of format (theatre ticket, rental price, etc.), so I picked a bleak 8. (Personnally, I get my movies from the local library and NetFlix. I'm cheap. The masses, though, it's amazing what they'll pay in ignorance.)
This much we know: degradables are slightly more expensive than durables just for the disc, have modestly higher packaging costs to stay fresh, and equal costs for package inserts, etc. They'll have to be priced a little above what rentals are priced to generate equal margins. That won't be hard to sell, though; for instance, no late fees and you can hold it for a few weeks before watching it (allowing it to be bought as a gift).
Kiosks! I hadn't thought of that. Well, we'll see if that catches on. I suppose I can see the synergy of dinner sellers wanting to sell movies; after all, BBuster sells snackfood. Still, once the novelty of the concept wears off, I'd be surprised that kiosks (expensive shelf space) could compete with other retail (cheap shelf space).
"Listen. Easy now," said the old man gently. "I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. Now, pick up you feet, into the firehouse with you! We're twins, we're not alone any more, we're not separated out in different parlors, with no contact between. If you need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum making notes!"
It's sad that most consumers won't 'get it'.... I really see it as THE WORST invention in many years..
It's part of the broader trend toward pay-every-time business models. No company wants to sell any reusable, durable product anymore. Instead, they want you to pay a subscription or a use fee at every viewing. This includes planned obsolescence of physical products, frequent format changes requiring both new hardware and repurchasing media, and now degradable media.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of ubiquitous computing lowering transaction costs is that companies can now afford to bill you at every transaction instead of wrapping the whole price into a one-time purchase price. It's going to get worse as soon as businesses get us weaned off the idea of _owning_ anything and turn us into one-song-at-a-time renters.
...appear marketed at movie studios that might wish to drive up the price of DVD rentals. Presumably, once throw-away DVDs catch on, the studios can... prevent price competition between rental and sales of DVDs by charging more for a regular DVD (rentable and re-saleable) and having the retail sales copies disappear 8 hours after opening so that no one can re-sell them, lend them,...
You may want to loosen that tin-foil hat a little--it's cutting off more than just the spy-waves.
What self-degrading DVDs do is allow a whole bunch of retailers (Walmart, Target, gas-stations, etc.) to sell 1 viewing of a movie. That's a new product for them. That allows them to hit the $8 pricepoint for single viewings and the $30 pricepoint for durable DVDs. It's not like the durable retail DVDs we have now are going away any time soon. (All of which is bad for consumers, of course.)
Current rental shops, BTW, should _hate_ degradable DVDs. First, they cost more per sale than rerentable durable DVDs. Second, rental shops _love_ late fees, which degradables don't have. Third, rental shops love returns because it causes people to go to their store. Fourth, degradables allow big-box retailers to enter the rental shops' price range, eating their business.
The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively.... That's why the courts aren't just going to say "Every work published from 1976 to now is public domain!"
Well, the last part's right (the works since 1976 would get at least the 1976 amount of copyright), but the first part is up in the air. If the recent laws were overturned, then the old law would return to force unless congress were to pass something to replace it. One of the likely effects would be that works whose term would necessarily have expired under the 1976 act (even assuming they'd been registered) would flow into the public domain quickly.
Congress would almost certainly pass some bill giving all copyright holders a period of time to get their registrations back in order before the new/old regime took effect. Thus, the abandoned video games (which are young still) wouldn't go public domain immediately, but they would go after not too long.
Why don't we just pay them off? Suppose we create a tax deduction that says, "If you donate a work to the public domain, you may deduct the last 5 years of revenue from that work from your taxable income this year."
This would encourage corporations to donate a work whenever the expected profit on the remaining life of the copyright is less than the taxes on the revenue of the last 5 years. It won't do much for old works that already earn zero/year, but it'll do wonders for middle-aged works nearing the end of profitability. Right at the point where the rights-holder is ceasing to make much money off of them, they'll flow into the public domain. Goodness knows, bean-counters will do almost anything for a tax break.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why copyright in software should be abolished and patents should be used instead. (Ducks behind heat-absorbent shield.) No, really; there are some actual benefits to this.
Patents expire. (Copyrights seem to be going on forever.)
Modern software is far more like the interlocking gears of a machine than like the mystic gestalt of a painting.
Copyright cares about where code came from (which is a pain). Patent only cares about what code does.
Copyrights are automatic, but most stuff that gets invented is never patented.
Every piece of code written before 1984 would instantly be public domain.
Hear hear! We need something to drive hardware upgrades.
Besides, we wouldn't want the game to be obsolete before it's released, would we?
True. Those sorts of numbers are for big businesses. (The PTO has for a long time used two fee schedules: one for small entities and a different one for large entities.)
However, I am intending by these fees that people who aren't using their patent to make money should abandon it to the public domain sooner than later. I'm hoping that some one else will then make better use of the invention.
...implying the medium is incapable of more is shortsighted and wrong.
Games have victory conditions, or at least goals. How do you design game goals when religions vary so wildly about what is desirable and undesirable? Doesn't every possible choice endorse or reject some religion's views? Justice v mercy; great deeds v self-enlightenment; acclamation v anonymous servitude. Plus, every simplification of some point of doctrine offends some one -- this is not like simulating tire friction on a racetrack and leaving out the effects of race-day air temperature.
The difficulty may go beyond whether gaming is a young art or whether the designers are sufficiently talented. There seem to be constraints on the video-game medium that make it a poor medium for exploring religion. I'm not convinced that it can be done or that the resulting game would be interesting to play.
So, will Microsoft sit on the Lindows name? Or release a product under it?
MS Lindows, anyone?
0. I presume by "don't acutally sue", you don't mean that people who concientiously license their patent around don't get screwed.
2. Others have explained that there are no more submarine patents.
3. It's not cheap to sit on your patent. It costs $10000+ to get the patent in the first place. After that, patents have increasing maintenance fees due every 4 years ($910, $2090, $3220). If you don't pay, you lose your patent. The idea is that patents that have been forgotten about or aren't making money will expire sooner. (Of course, they should probably be much, much higher, like $5000, $25000, $125000, $625000, so that the fee tracks the value of the patent.)
4. If you sit on your rights after some one puts a product on the market, you can only sue for the most recent 6 years of sales. It's called laches.
This article is flawed at best and insulting at worst. 1. The controls on this 'study' are horrid. ... the PC Mag forum ... Macintouch...
I'm glad that _somebody_ said it. To do this "right", find one group of people who are writing under one set of circumstances and are divided only by the type of computer they use. That is, all variables except computer type must be held constant. Variables affecting quality of writing include nature of topic, presence or absence of moderation, nature of audience, available time, type of written work (e.g. web comments, letter to editor, article, essay).
Looking just at Slashdot comments, you'd find a variation in scores depending on how much contempt the posters had for the article/event/person they were commenting on. It wouldn't have been hard for this author to find better samples to investigate his Mac v PC proposition. Poorly done!
DRM man
DRM man
DRM man hates person man
They have a fight, DRM wins
DRM man
Where's Universe man when we need him?
Oh, thank You! That summary was better than the whole Yahoo article.
... well ... work.
One could tell from the self-contradictions that they'd garbled something important, but finding the actual Order to read it seemed like
Support those candidates who aren't in bed with the RIAA (are there such people?)
Yes, there are. For instance, Rick Boucher, D-Va and John Doolittle, R-Ca.
Yeah, I'm stretching "predict" a little. :) A better contrast of the various available synomyns is here.
;)
However, since whether a prediction must be made "in advance" of an event's occurence or "in advance" of knowing the result is something that all dictionaries don't agree on, it's not such a big stretch. After all, from the speaker's point of view, the process is the same.
--Yours for an unambiguous lexicon, PMuse
(Oh, and for the AC's benefit, those example predictions were all hypotheticals and were chosen to illustrate various time sequences and various kinds of "knowledge" that would eventually be used to decide if they were correct. The use of "I" was a style choice, not a statement of belief.)
... if you read the article he's actually claiming that the idea of local portable storage will be dead. That everything will be networked and centralised. He makes the point that why would we carry around some fragile copy of the data when we can just have it delivered across the network to whichever device requires it. This is the microsoft vision now, computers+network access in everything.
Am I crazy, or did he just say, "The network is the computer?" Whatever will he think of next?
Of course DVD will be an inadequate storage medium in 2014. Just consider how many doublings of storage capacity we'll see between now and then.
And why do we care? Just because DVD will be obsolete does not mean we'll be unable to watch the ones we have. My VHS is surely obsolete, but I can still watch those tapes. Must we quibble simply because the statement came from Gates's mouth?
Nothing to see here. Move on.
I predict that this water sample contains an unsafe level of arsenic
I predict that the mass extinction that killed most of the dinosaurs was caused by a meteorite impact and that the diameter of the impact basin would be X
I predict that the assasin was a partisan of the Y cause
I predict that the kidnapper is the child's estranged father
I predict that there are an infinite number of primes
Whatever the original intention of the quote may have been, it is accurate to say that making predictions about events that have not happened yet is more difficult than making predictions about facts not yet known concerning events that have already happened. This is hardly surprising -- the more information available before hand, the better a prediction will be.
SFU? I read that as "SNAFU"
Seems like a perfectly appropriate name for an MS product to me.
Don't let me off the hook too easily. It's possible that all children in L.W. are above the national average.
You are right, there are fun games to be played with finely-tuned example sets: clustered data with wierd outliers; sets with equal means, medians, modes, and midranges, but far-flung deviations; deceptive sets that hide the nature of their members behind bland-seeming summary data; etc.
Come to think of it, Keillor's tagline is: Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above-average.
Personnally, I'm one of those people who doesn't think statistics really qualifies as mathematics, but can some once demostrate a set to me where all the members lie above some average of the set?
If he was, he'd know that it's completely possible for most people at Lake Wobegone to be above (or below) average.
Consider an exam taken by 4 people. 3 people score a 10. 1 person scores a 2. That makes an average SCORE of 8 (10 + 10 + 10 + 2 = 32. 32/4 = 8). Most of the people scored above average.
You have successfully demonstrated how a majority of scores can be above (or below) the mean score. The original statement wasn't about scores.
Why are we messing with perfectly good sarcasm here? "All of the children are above average" is a perfectly lovely description of a parent's utopia.
Fair enough. 8, 4, whatever. I see movie prices rising over time, regardless of format (theatre ticket, rental price, etc.), so I picked a bleak 8. (Personnally, I get my movies from the local library and NetFlix. I'm cheap. The masses, though, it's amazing what they'll pay in ignorance.)
This much we know: degradables are slightly more expensive than durables just for the disc, have modestly higher packaging costs to stay fresh, and equal costs for package inserts, etc. They'll have to be priced a little above what rentals are priced to generate equal margins. That won't be hard to sell, though; for instance, no late fees and you can hold it for a few weeks before watching it (allowing it to be bought as a gift).
Kiosks! I hadn't thought of that. Well, we'll see if that catches on. I suppose I can see the synergy of dinner sellers wanting to sell movies; after all, BBuster sells snackfood. Still, once the novelty of the concept wears off, I'd be surprised that kiosks (expensive shelf space) could compete with other retail (cheap shelf space).
"Listen. Easy now," said the old man gently. "I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. Now, pick up you feet, into the firehouse with you! We're twins, we're not alone any more, we're not separated out in different parlors, with no contact between. If you need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum making notes!"
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
It's sad that most consumers won't 'get it'.... I really see it as THE WORST invention in many years..
It's part of the broader trend toward pay-every-time business models. No company wants to sell any reusable, durable product anymore. Instead, they want you to pay a subscription or a use fee at every viewing. This includes planned obsolescence of physical products, frequent format changes requiring both new hardware and repurchasing media, and now degradable media.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of ubiquitous computing lowering transaction costs is that companies can now afford to bill you at every transaction instead of wrapping the whole price into a one-time purchase price. It's going to get worse as soon as businesses get us weaned off the idea of _owning_ anything and turn us into one-song-at-a-time renters.
...appear marketed at movie studios that might wish to drive up the price of DVD rentals. Presumably, once throw-away DVDs catch on, the studios can ... prevent price competition between rental and sales of DVDs by charging more for a regular DVD (rentable and re-saleable) and having the retail sales copies disappear 8 hours after opening so that no one can re-sell them, lend them, ...
You may want to loosen that tin-foil hat a little--it's cutting off more than just the spy-waves.
What self-degrading DVDs do is allow a whole bunch of retailers (Walmart, Target, gas-stations, etc.) to sell 1 viewing of a movie. That's a new product for them. That allows them to hit the $8 pricepoint for single viewings and the $30 pricepoint for durable DVDs. It's not like the durable retail DVDs we have now are going away any time soon. (All of which is bad for consumers, of course.)
Current rental shops, BTW, should _hate_ degradable DVDs. First, they cost more per sale than rerentable durable DVDs. Second, rental shops _love_ late fees, which degradables don't have. Third, rental shops love returns because it causes people to go to their store. Fourth, degradables allow big-box retailers to enter the rental shops' price range, eating their business.
The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively. ... That's why the courts aren't just going to say "Every work published from 1976 to now is public domain!"
Well, the last part's right (the works since 1976 would get at least the 1976 amount of copyright), but the first part is up in the air. If the recent laws were overturned, then the old law would return to force unless congress were to pass something to replace it. One of the likely effects would be that works whose term would necessarily have expired under the 1976 act (even assuming they'd been registered) would flow into the public domain quickly.
Congress would almost certainly pass some bill giving all copyright holders a period of time to get their registrations back in order before the new/old regime took effect. Thus, the abandoned video games (which are young still) wouldn't go public domain immediately, but they would go after not too long.
Why don't we just pay them off? Suppose we create a tax deduction that says, "If you donate a work to the public domain, you may deduct the last 5 years of revenue from that work from your taxable income this year."
This would encourage corporations to donate a work whenever the expected profit on the remaining life of the copyright is less than the taxes on the revenue of the last 5 years. It won't do much for old works that already earn zero/year, but it'll do wonders for middle-aged works nearing the end of profitability. Right at the point where the rights-holder is ceasing to make much money off of them, they'll flow into the public domain. Goodness knows, bean-counters will do almost anything for a tax break.