Louis Savain (Nemesis, MOBE) is a scientific and mathematical illiterate. More information on Mr. Savain can be found by doing a google groups search. In summary Savain believes that one "cannot move in spacetime."
Mr. Savain fails to realize that math does not lie, and, no matter how little he likes it, if you throw a clock really hard it slows down.
You might want to run and get your introductory physics books and start Mr. Savain from first principles, and see where he wiggs out - like this
"Hey, Savain, do all observers see light move at the same speed?"
You see, he dosen't wig out here, because then he just gets ignored. No, he wiggs out somewhere randomly between here and E=MC^2, so that he can try to argue philosophy instead of math (he dosen't understand math, you see.)
When you move really fast time slows down, neener neener neener. It's a fact!
Carmack does not promise weightlessness, rather he's shooting for the view first, and free-fall weightlessness afterwards. His orbital timeframe, if I remember correctly, was around 15 years - there are other, better prospects on that timeframe - the japanese project, detailed earlier on slashdot. I'm not going to be redundant and link it - every fing karma whore already did that.
In fact, everyone who linked that slashdot story should get marked redundant.
Carmack's presenetation was interesting, to say the least. His project is not the most interesting contender from an engineering standpoint, but the remote control vehicles looked more than adequate for the purposes intended.
Certainly, Carmack's thoughts on timing for moderatly inexpensive (I think his "expense" standards are broken, but whatever) spaceflight are optomistic, but if the inventor of doom says I get weightlessness, I expect weightlessness.
I think the real problem, however, is in carmack's approach - he's aiming for a suborbital manned shot first, before he goes for a true orbit - whereas the prospace people (they have a good update here are aiming direct for a full orbital launch in the next 5-7 years at costs in the affordable range for well off people (as long as you don't get hit with the AMT as opposed to the incredibly rich (where it is now)
Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth on the radio, but the internet is not constrained currently.
Also, when 10 billion people have email and 20 dollars in disposable income, the world will be drastically different than it is today. Applying your figures to rational numbers of users (like, say 100 million) you make $200,000. Hardly covers your fixed costs on the hardware you had to buy to send all that email, let alone the Really Fast Connection it's going to take.
As one of the folks who *enjoys* complaining about spam, why exactly do you want it stopped? Also, your proposed aggreement, in addition to being unenforcable, also fails to define the nebulous term "spam."
Does mail from an old high-school friend begging me for a job count as spam? How about if the guy sent it to all of his friends? How about if he sent it to all of his friends and mistyped on of the addresses and sent it to you instead of me (because our email addresses are so close?) How about if a game company sent a message to people who regularly posted on a newsgroup asking them to beta test a new game for free? How about if it later asked those beta testers if they wanted to buy the game at a low price?
How about if the second message was misadressed and went to me instead of you.
This spam stuff is so confusing. It's really too bad that people can't filter.
In Superman, not only do they accept Homosexuality (Jimmy Olsen), but they also allow for intelligent black people (That computer guy) and also start the whole thing out by blowing up an entire planet filled with good guys. Man of Steel may as well be Man of School Violence. John is going to go nutz.
There's another two ways to approach attacking the CIPA.
1. Remove the impetus. You've got money - donate it. Give to your library on the condition they not take the tainted federal money. Give more than the feds do. I'll guarentee that the library will take your money - if it dosen't, then sue the trustees for violating their duties to the library.
Libraries have already been taken to court for implimenting blocking. Having a donation from the feds that requires the library to do illegal things in no way makes the things legal. Go to your library, try to connect to peacefire. If you fail, demand to be allowed to connect. If you fail, sue the library along the lines of london county, VA.
2. Protest non-violently. Bring hustler into your library's lounge and read it. Complain loudly if thrown out. Print out packets of censored web sites at home, and leave them by the computers. All of these are free-speech acts, and are protected under the rights circumscribed when a place becomes open to public access.
Hell - bring your own computer and a portable modem. Offer uncensored internet access to people. Write up a home forwarding server, and offer uncensored internet acess through your library. The law requires they use a technical protection measure? Write one - have it filter out McCain's home page only (he's harmful to minors - he might cave into the communists.)
Also, the ACLU isn't as pessimistic about it's chances as Slashdot is.
Yes, the plane for 3 will take more "fuel" (it's about a year of plane uptime for a geosync of the same mass, give or take), but the *energy* budget is significantly different.
Planes can use cheaper components for the solar power supply. Planes can use standard issue servers. Planes don't require nuclear backup for when it gets dark. Planes don't crash into earth once every 5 years and need to be releaunched.
There was a comparison between satellites and planes issued when irridium went up, and some economics department somewhere did this comparison - in irridum's case the telling factor was the desire to have it over africa make it cost effective - in this case the easy availability of landing and takeoff strips (and the better quality of fuel/repair) pushes it over the edge.
This seems like a fairly efficient way of providing this service - certainly more so than irridiumizing would be.
1. Fuel efficiency
If you spend a couple of minutes thinking about it, and get out your trusty college physics textbook, you'd soon realize that on an equivalent energy basis you can keep an object at 20,000 feet for three years for the same energy budget as a geosync orbit.
2. Space efficiency
Yeah, it's over used, but geosync orbital space over the us and europe is pretty crowded. Do we need to fit more up there?
3. Technological efficiency
When you launch a satelite, you lose the ability to upgrade the hardware. Not so with a plane.
The real question, however, is the safety of the plane - I mean, they do make you turn your cell phone off when the cabin doors are closed, and while there's no scientific evidence, I thought that the statistical coorelation was undeniable, unless of course I am mistaken and it's acutally just a scam to get you to use those airphones.
I would argue that all of your points demonstrate that Capitalism both works and is the system we operate under.
Large monopolies and conglomerates are probably efficient, and thus would be what our system would head to. For instance, let's look at AOL/TW. The concept behind the merger was the attaching the creation of content (TW) to the distribution of content (AOL) was going to improve service. AOL felt that having TW content was going to be worth the price it paid.
The correctness or not of that statement is unclear. However, there's no evidence they have asserted market power, or that they even have the ability to do so.
On everyones favorite monopoly, Microsoft, we've got to wonder what keeps them around. I hate to say it, but Microsoft has created a product that the average Joe can install on his computer.
Microsoft, however, demonstrates a market inneficiecny - a network externality - every customer that buys microsoft makes microsoft more valuable to other customers (Played Diablo II on Linux lately?). As such, microsoft can charge rent on this, and that's not right. Thus, I feel they should operate under a price cap, or pay a tax on rent profits to the govt.
Reducing the number of companies in a market certainly does not increase "competition." The goal, however, is not to increase "competition," but rather to decrease price and increase quality. As individuals with introductory economics know, we reach the minimum on an average cost curve *NOT* at an infinite number of small companies, but rather at a finite number of companies sized by the intersection of their individual MC/MB curves. As long as each faces a flate MB curve, everything works just fine. Most industries work like this, and mergers are merely a way of growing efficient companies to a more efficient scale.
Patents are an interesting application of game theory. The question is "Would this have been created without the patent system?" and "Does the sharing of this with licence costs increase societal benefit more than having it a trade secret?"
I would argue that much of corporate *REAL* science relies on patent protection (and now, some of educational institutions, also). As such, you remove the incentive to innovate without patents. I would argue that the patent timeframe might be too long (10% discount, 25 years means that the corporate is essentially taking all the present value out of a pattented project.) Copyright is a different kind of entity, and I'd argue it should last to infinity. Here's why.
A copyright is given on material that people other than the author would be entirely unable to create. As such, the author should have *ALL* the rights. A patent is considered an invention that someone else *could* create, so the inventor should get only (from a fairness perspective, not an incentive perspective) the rights he gives up by releasing early. That's the origional timeframe argument.
At the same time, copyright infringement costs should, IMHO, be limited to the cost incurred by the violation. Download a game from 1990? Fine. 2000? Not fine. An MP3 of a CD still being pressed? Not fine. An MP3 of a CD that is out of production? Fine. That's my opinion, not law.
Campaign finance contributions have an interesting economic history. One side would argue that money as an election method is *MORE FAIR* on a distribution system than votes - there's no incentive to restribute, and thus there's no time wasted rent seeking. However, I don't aggree with that. In the case of campaign finance reform, we sacrifice Efficiency for Equity - the "last vote is all that counts" inneficiency in vote-buying is balanced by the implied right to spend.
I feel that I live in a highly capitalist society. Areas where I feel there are faults are not in property rights, but rather in income distribution - rent fixing (I live in NYC) and "progressive" taxation/Social "security."
The fact is, there's no incentive for corps. to come down on the side of copy protetion, especially after the napster "thing" goes away. Napster use, by recent estimates, takes up upwards of 5% of bandwidth - it's the massive driver of broadband sales, according to some.
How happy are @home and RCN going to be when it turns out they can't pawn cable service off on users because there's no content they need?
The same thing come up here. Would you buy a hard drive with *optional* copy protection? No. A CD burner that didn't allow mp3's to be burnt? No! The only reason DVD's are how they are is because the format was defined by content creators rather than hardware creators.
But, you might ask - what if all the software vendors banded together to demand copy-protection? Fact is, they won't. Because if the software dosen't work on heritage machines, Corps. won't buy it, and there will be no sales. Thus, copy protected hard drives will never make it. Period.
Yeah, they might make an easy to use personal home controller internet applicance xbox. But that's not going to replace what wageslaves use at work, and you'll sill be able to get those. FUD about copy protected hard drives is bull untill one hits the market, sells well *AND* has software that can only be used with it. See anything requiring the "secure audio" on windows yet? Neither have I.
As long as there's legacy hardware with new software and PCs on work desks, I have no fear.
Now, It's been some time since my last microeconomics class, but I can recollect the important bits.
In systems with fixed levels of goods, free trading and rational people, pareto optimality is assured, if I recollect correctly. (I do, in fact, recollect correctly.)
Your argument is that if I leave napster on over the weekend others are made better off while I am unnefected.
Sadly, I believe this to be untrue for what I see as 3 reasons.
1. Pareto optimal Napster would not have equivlant peer-loads.
2. Electricity has *serious* cost where many of us live
and 3. Leaving Napster on exposes me to risk.
1. Hundres of thousands of 56k modem users are on napster daily, either labeled as 56k modems or as "unknowns," if not worse. Every time a fast connection attempts to download a file from these users, the faster connection has wasted it's users time. Thus, 56k modem users whou just have copies of Ja Rule's "Baby Girl Put it On Me," should *NOT BE SHARING FILES* because the napster server is slowed down in it's indexing. Now, if the 56k is serving a file which is not widely held, or there is a glut of downloaders (making the 56k modem have the possibility of, at one time, being the fastest avalible conection to a song) then it should stay up. Otherwise, don't share.
2. I have a computer that I self-label as a cable modem because I am a good person. As an experiment (and due to high CA elect prices) I fixed my electricity usage to a high degree over two months, the difference being that in month 1 I left the box on 24/7, and in month 2 I left it on only when at home and awake.
The savings was $20. The benefit to napster, because I'm just a cable modem user with a bunch of copies of Jay-Zee's "Money, Cash, Hoes," was negligible (there are other, faster places to get Money, Cash and Hoes than my house. Pun intentional)
3. In addition to MPAA deleting my files risk, and Haxors breaking into my computer risk, and My Girlfriend Finding Porn risk, there's also the most serious "My ISP disconnecting me for serving too much traffic" risk.
So, while I believe p2p is pareto inoptimal, I feel it's optimal from a too *much* serving frame rather than a too little. Additionally - who cares? Pareto optimality is a dead theory anyway - it's game theory now, isn't it? Don't you think a better question is "who in their right mind serves files?"
"Who in their right mind serves files? If we don't why are we? Is it just incomplete information about serving - IE - do I not know my mp3's are being shared? (I do). Explain, assuming rationality and not altruism. (I think altruism is a copout - I certainly don't contribute money to protect-rich-kids-using-computers funds, but I do let them download my music at risk to myself.")
Profitiability is not an appropriate mesaure of the value of a project. Let's look at it from the perspective of an MBA.
1. The project has costs and expenses directly related to it - materials that are consumed, salaries, promos and what not. The difference between the revenues and these costs is what you call "profit."
2. The project also has a level of "working capital" attached to it - accounts receivable that must be financed, inventory on hand that also must be financed and facilities that could otherwise be sold. While the value of these is not included in "profit," it's certainly worth evaluating. I would imagine that this reason (the working capital intensiveness of a software buisness) is why they cut the division.
For a more mathematical approach, here's how I'd go about evaluating the buisness.
Cash flow from software buisness=
sales + benefit to other departments - COGS - R&D - !(Working Capital * WACC)!.
I imagine the working capital, while not included in a "profitiability" analysis, pushed the "cash benefit" of the job negative. There's a lot of back-office involved in actually selling physical software product - something they don't do anymore.
It also cuts an entire distribution channel for them, and allows them to focus on the core buisness - the more time the S&M department focuses on software retailers, the less time they can deal with bookstores. There's that auxilary benefit.
More like:
"Someone set us up the credit card debt!"
"Judge Turn on."
"Goodevening, paupers."
"All your hard assets are belong to bank."
"You have no change to mortgage, make your time."
You'd be surprised the kind of stuff you can get from 363 bankrupcy sales. In addition to raiding your local urban center's weekly used junk sale (chelsea in NYC on Sundays has a wealth of sometimes valuable 2600 carts marked cheap) and scouring ebay/yahoo/whatever for mediumsized bulk auctions, check the fililings in the Deleware Bankrupcy Couty to see if any largish game retailers or manufactures go under. If they do, you can take the whole old inventory off them at the cheap.
Additionally, if you offered people 1 NQA for their old games, I imagine you would get hundreds of takers. Some of the games you get in might actually be saleable.
Having fought about this in my undergraduate years, I was surprised that the numerous individuals who were identified by various message boards and scholastic institutions (Bonsaikitten, anyone?) were not more forceful in dealing with their revelers.
Napster needs not "remove" anything, as they are not being accused of direct infringement, rather contributory. They are required to "block" copyrighted songs. The actual order has not been placed online to the best of my understanding, but if the press release is taken at face value, Napster is required to block specific *file names.*
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, issuing an injunction she reworked
on the order of an appeals court, said the recording industry will have to
notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name
of the file containing the infringing material.
As such, and if the order is infact worded in a very point way (IE - the RIAA has to specify exact names, not fuzzy search type names,) it will be cat-and mouse as I add bitchx to the front of all of any theoretical copyrighted music I own. It would appear from the last paragraph (the remanding with the overbroad provision) that the current order does very little and is clearly circumventable. I'm not sure that the cat-mouse game that will occour is the best thing - perhaps Napster comes off looking proactive if they block fuzzily and then announce they have gone above and beyond to prevent the illegal use of their service.
IE: bitchx-Eminem-Stan.m3, Still searchable if the RIAA submits an obvious list, but napster might want to block from a PR perspective.
If anyone has a link to the actual order, plese post it!
A careful reading of the DCMA would show that it's not going to protect you, sadly. The relevent passage reads:
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
The problem, obviously, is that the encryption is not desgiend to protect a copyright holder, sadly enough.
I would kill to have a portable atari 2600 emulator. Pitfall, one of my favorite games of all time, was on the 2600 (I actually maintain a 2600 just to play pitfall.) In fact, lots of old 2600 games have avid followings. I mean, there's a guy who has acheived a nearly flawless play of pitfall. There was story about him on slashdot which had a host of useful links to all kind of other great 2600 games.
Anyway, the classic 2600 game was not pong, it was combat. Imagine how cool combat would be if you could link up the players via that new radio talk feature the phones have and play the "three little planes vs one big plane" game over the airwaves. Good times would be had by all!
I wonder if cannonical tomes get half way there by just the first mover advantage.
I mean, much of what people feel *must* be read is actually just stuff that everyone else has - what linguists call creating common language rather than actually expanding knowledge. As such, to rely on common knowlege to create a list of common knowledge might create stagnancy rather than a dynamic work.
Not that I'm saying having a set of liturature people are expected to read is a bad thing - rather, that cannonizing that liturature via plebian masses might stifle the ability for others to truly create.
As such, though I hate sounding so incredibly elitist, creating the sight for "everyman" to decide the cannonical works is less meaningful than just letting the college professors do it - at least they are going out there to find the new stuff, and include works that challenge traditional thought - even if they personally find those works "wrong."
What's a class on government without facsim, for instance? But, who'se going to be the gutsy one to add "My Struggle" to the list of political works? Certainly not me!
At the same time, however, this does open the "cannonical" list up to works that would not otherwise see play - things like "stomp" as a cannonical play, as opposed to "le mis," or something. It's certainly a project that I'll watch, if not participate in!
How many times do we have to go through the same thing before someone decides that the *framework* is done and the real work can begin? I love gstreamer a great deal, but it's sad that Linux dosen't have what windows does in this area.
I mean, we have xine, xmms, oms and gstreamer,
but we don't have waht "video for windows" had what, like 3 years ago?
1. Extensibility through platform independent codecs.
2. Access to hardware accelerators and capture cards.
3. Network transparancy for remote displaying.
I don't know how we can get there, but if someone put the amount of work into one project that was being put into 5 or 6, we'd be there already!
Not that I'm saing gstreamer is bad - it looks to be the best of the lot.
But a kind of sorry lot. Let's wipe the floor of that "Windows Media Player!"
As a consultant who has installed a number of Oracle databases over other lower priced offerings, the concept is the same as SAP vs. anything else.
1. Oracle will support you. No matter what time of day it is, Oracle tech support mans the phones and consistantly is there to make things work again. That's of primary import for a company with a nearly unlimited checkbook.
2. Oracle is currently a little slower, but has a significantly larger feature set (most importantly, multiple versioning and transactions).
3. Wall Street like to hear you say "our Oracle order database allows us to blah blah blah..." Don't underestimate the power of the banker!
There's a really good comparison at this site
Slashdot Mirror
Louis Savain (Nemesis, MOBE) is a scientific and mathematical illiterate. More information on Mr. Savain can be found by doing a google groups search. In summary Savain believes that one "cannot move in spacetime." Mr. Savain fails to realize that math does not lie, and, no matter how little he likes it, if you throw a clock really hard it slows down. You might want to run and get your introductory physics books and start Mr. Savain from first principles, and see where he wiggs out - like this "Hey, Savain, do all observers see light move at the same speed?" You see, he dosen't wig out here, because then he just gets ignored. No, he wiggs out somewhere randomly between here and E=MC^2, so that he can try to argue philosophy instead of math (he dosen't understand math, you see.) When you move really fast time slows down, neener neener neener. It's a fact!
Sorry - I just want to make a minor correction.
Carmack does not promise weightlessness, rather he's shooting for the view first, and free-fall weightlessness afterwards. His orbital timeframe, if I remember correctly, was around 15 years - there are other, better prospects on that timeframe - the japanese project, detailed earlier on slashdot. I'm not going to be redundant and link it - every fing karma whore already did that.
In fact, everyone who linked that slashdot story should get marked redundant.
Certainly, Carmack's thoughts on timing for moderatly inexpensive (I think his "expense" standards are broken, but whatever) spaceflight are optomistic, but if the inventor of doom says I get weightlessness, I expect weightlessness.
I think the real problem, however, is in carmack's approach - he's aiming for a suborbital manned shot first, before he goes for a true orbit - whereas the prospace people (they have a good update here are aiming direct for a full orbital launch in the next 5-7 years at costs in the affordable range for well off people (as long as you don't get hit with the AMT as opposed to the incredibly rich (where it is now)
Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth on the radio, but the internet is not constrained currently. Also, when 10 billion people have email and 20 dollars in disposable income, the world will be drastically different than it is today. Applying your figures to rational numbers of users (like, say 100 million) you make $200,000. Hardly covers your fixed costs on the hardware you had to buy to send all that email, let alone the Really Fast Connection it's going to take.
As one of the folks who *enjoys* complaining about spam, why exactly do you want it stopped? Also, your proposed aggreement, in addition to being unenforcable, also fails to define the nebulous term "spam."
Does mail from an old high-school friend begging me for a job count as spam? How about if the guy sent it to all of his friends? How about if he sent it to all of his friends and mistyped on of the addresses and sent it to you instead of me (because our email addresses are so close?) How about if a game company sent a message to people who regularly posted on a newsgroup asking them to beta test a new game for free? How about if it later asked those beta testers if they wanted to buy the game at a low price?
How about if the second message was misadressed and went to me instead of you.
This spam stuff is so confusing. It's really too bad that people can't filter.
In Superman, not only do they accept Homosexuality (Jimmy Olsen), but they also allow for intelligent black people (That computer guy) and also start the whole thing out by blowing up an entire planet filled with good guys. Man of Steel may as well be Man of School Violence. John is going to go nutz.
There's another two ways to approach attacking the CIPA. 1. Remove the impetus. You've got money - donate it. Give to your library on the condition they not take the tainted federal money. Give more than the feds do. I'll guarentee that the library will take your money - if it dosen't, then sue the trustees for violating their duties to the library. Libraries have already been taken to court for implimenting blocking. Having a donation from the feds that requires the library to do illegal things in no way makes the things legal. Go to your library, try to connect to peacefire. If you fail, demand to be allowed to connect. If you fail, sue the library along the lines of london county, VA. 2. Protest non-violently. Bring hustler into your library's lounge and read it. Complain loudly if thrown out. Print out packets of censored web sites at home, and leave them by the computers. All of these are free-speech acts, and are protected under the rights circumscribed when a place becomes open to public access. Hell - bring your own computer and a portable modem. Offer uncensored internet access to people. Write up a home forwarding server, and offer uncensored internet acess through your library. The law requires they use a technical protection measure? Write one - have it filter out McCain's home page only (he's harmful to minors - he might cave into the communists.) Also, the ACLU isn't as pessimistic about it's chances as Slashdot is.
I used fuel where I meant "energy."
Yes, the plane for 3 will take more "fuel" (it's about a year of plane uptime for a geosync of the same mass, give or take), but the *energy* budget is significantly different.
Planes can use cheaper components for the solar power supply. Planes can use standard issue servers. Planes don't require nuclear backup for when it gets dark. Planes don't crash into earth once every 5 years and need to be releaunched.
There was a comparison between satellites and planes issued when irridium went up, and some economics department somewhere did this comparison - in irridum's case the telling factor was the desire to have it over africa make it cost effective - in this case the easy availability of landing and takeoff strips (and the better quality of fuel/repair) pushes it over the edge.
This seems like a fairly efficient way of providing this service - certainly more so than irridiumizing would be.
1. Fuel efficiency
If you spend a couple of minutes thinking about it, and get out your trusty college physics textbook, you'd soon realize that on an equivalent energy basis you can keep an object at 20,000 feet for three years for the same energy budget as a geosync orbit.
2. Space efficiency
Yeah, it's over used, but geosync orbital space over the us and europe is pretty crowded. Do we need to fit more up there?
3. Technological efficiency
When you launch a satelite, you lose the ability to upgrade the hardware. Not so with a plane.
The real question, however, is the safety of the plane - I mean, they do make you turn your cell phone off when the cabin doors are closed, and while there's no scientific evidence, I thought that the statistical coorelation was undeniable, unless of course I am mistaken and it's acutally just a scam to get you to use those airphones.
I want one.
I would argue that all of your points demonstrate that Capitalism both works and is the system we operate under.
Large monopolies and conglomerates are probably efficient, and thus would be what our system would head to. For instance, let's look at AOL/TW. The concept behind the merger was the attaching the creation of content (TW) to the distribution of content (AOL) was going to improve service. AOL felt that having TW content was going to be worth the price it paid.
The correctness or not of that statement is unclear. However, there's no evidence they have asserted market power, or that they even have the ability to do so.
On everyones favorite monopoly, Microsoft, we've got to wonder what keeps them around. I hate to say it, but Microsoft has created a product that the average Joe can install on his computer.
Microsoft, however, demonstrates a market inneficiecny - a network externality - every customer that buys microsoft makes microsoft more valuable to other customers (Played Diablo II on Linux lately?). As such, microsoft can charge rent on this, and that's not right. Thus, I feel they should operate under a price cap, or pay a tax on rent profits to the govt.
Reducing the number of companies in a market certainly does not increase "competition." The goal, however, is not to increase "competition," but rather to decrease price and increase quality. As individuals with introductory economics know, we reach the minimum on an average cost curve *NOT* at an infinite number of small companies, but rather at a finite number of companies sized by the intersection of their individual MC/MB curves. As long as each faces a flate MB curve, everything works just fine. Most industries work like this, and mergers are merely a way of growing efficient companies to a more efficient scale.
Patents are an interesting application of game theory. The question is "Would this have been created without the patent system?" and "Does the sharing of this with licence costs increase societal benefit more than having it a trade secret?"
I would argue that much of corporate *REAL* science relies on patent protection (and now, some of educational institutions, also). As such, you remove the incentive to innovate without patents. I would argue that the patent timeframe might be too long (10% discount, 25 years means that the corporate is essentially taking all the present value out of a pattented project.) Copyright is a different kind of entity, and I'd argue it should last to infinity. Here's why.
A copyright is given on material that people other than the author would be entirely unable to create. As such, the author should have *ALL* the rights. A patent is considered an invention that someone else *could* create, so the inventor should get only (from a fairness perspective, not an incentive perspective) the rights he gives up by releasing early. That's the origional timeframe argument.
At the same time, copyright infringement costs should, IMHO, be limited to the cost incurred by the violation. Download a game from 1990? Fine. 2000? Not fine. An MP3 of a CD still being pressed? Not fine. An MP3 of a CD that is out of production? Fine. That's my opinion, not law.
Campaign finance contributions have an interesting economic history. One side would argue that money as an election method is *MORE FAIR* on a distribution system than votes - there's no incentive to restribute, and thus there's no time wasted rent seeking. However, I don't aggree with that. In the case of campaign finance reform, we sacrifice Efficiency for Equity - the "last vote is all that counts" inneficiency in vote-buying is balanced by the implied right to spend.
I feel that I live in a highly capitalist society. Areas where I feel there are faults are not in property rights, but rather in income distribution - rent fixing (I live in NYC) and "progressive" taxation/Social "security."
The fact is, there's no incentive for corps. to come down on the side of copy protetion, especially after the napster "thing" goes away. Napster use, by recent estimates, takes up upwards of 5% of bandwidth - it's the massive driver of broadband sales, according to some.
How happy are @home and RCN going to be when it turns out they can't pawn cable service off on users because there's no content they need?
The same thing come up here. Would you buy a hard drive with *optional* copy protection? No. A CD burner that didn't allow mp3's to be burnt? No! The only reason DVD's are how they are is because the format was defined by content creators rather than hardware creators.
But, you might ask - what if all the software vendors banded together to demand copy-protection? Fact is, they won't. Because if the software dosen't work on heritage machines, Corps. won't buy it, and there will be no sales. Thus, copy protected hard drives will never make it. Period.
Yeah, they might make an easy to use personal home controller internet applicance xbox. But that's not going to replace what wageslaves use at work, and you'll sill be able to get those. FUD about copy protected hard drives is bull untill one hits the market, sells well *AND* has software that can only be used with it. See anything requiring the "secure audio" on windows yet? Neither have I.
As long as there's legacy hardware with new software and PCs on work desks, I have no fear.
Now, It's been some time since my last microeconomics class, but I can recollect the important bits.
In systems with fixed levels of goods, free trading and rational people, pareto optimality is assured, if I recollect correctly. (I do, in fact, recollect correctly.)
Your argument is that if I leave napster on over the weekend others are made better off while I am unnefected.
Sadly, I believe this to be untrue for what I see as 3 reasons.
1. Pareto optimal Napster would not have equivlant peer-loads.
2. Electricity has *serious* cost where many of us live
and 3. Leaving Napster on exposes me to risk.
1. Hundres of thousands of 56k modem users are on napster daily, either labeled as 56k modems or as "unknowns," if not worse. Every time a fast connection attempts to download a file from these users, the faster connection has wasted it's users time. Thus, 56k modem users whou just have copies of Ja Rule's "Baby Girl Put it On Me," should *NOT BE SHARING FILES* because the napster server is slowed down in it's indexing. Now, if the 56k is serving a file which is not widely held, or there is a glut of downloaders (making the 56k modem have the possibility of, at one time, being the fastest avalible conection to a song) then it should stay up. Otherwise, don't share.
2. I have a computer that I self-label as a cable modem because I am a good person. As an experiment (and due to high CA elect prices) I fixed my electricity usage to a high degree over two months, the difference being that in month 1 I left the box on 24/7, and in month 2 I left it on only when at home and awake.
The savings was $20. The benefit to napster, because I'm just a cable modem user with a bunch of copies of Jay-Zee's "Money, Cash, Hoes," was negligible (there are other, faster places to get Money, Cash and Hoes than my house. Pun intentional)
3. In addition to MPAA deleting my files risk, and Haxors breaking into my computer risk, and My Girlfriend Finding Porn risk, there's also the most serious "My ISP disconnecting me for serving too much traffic" risk.
So, while I believe p2p is pareto inoptimal, I feel it's optimal from a too *much* serving frame rather than a too little. Additionally - who cares? Pareto optimality is a dead theory anyway - it's game theory now, isn't it? Don't you think a better question is "who in their right mind serves files?"
"Who in their right mind serves files? If we don't why are we? Is it just incomplete information about serving - IE - do I not know my mp3's are being shared? (I do). Explain, assuming rationality and not altruism. (I think altruism is a copout - I certainly don't contribute money to protect-rich-kids-using-computers funds, but I do let them download my music at risk to myself.")
1. The project has costs and expenses directly related to it - materials that are consumed, salaries, promos and what not. The difference between the revenues and these costs is what you call "profit."
2. The project also has a level of "working capital" attached to it - accounts receivable that must be financed, inventory on hand that also must be financed and facilities that could otherwise be sold. While the value of these is not included in "profit," it's certainly worth evaluating. I would imagine that this reason (the working capital intensiveness of a software buisness) is why they cut the division.
For a more mathematical approach, here's how I'd go about evaluating the buisness.
Cash flow from software buisness= sales + benefit to other departments - COGS - R&D - !(Working Capital * WACC)!.
I imagine the working capital, while not included in a "profitiability" analysis, pushed the "cash benefit" of the job negative. There's a lot of back-office involved in actually selling physical software product - something they don't do anymore.
It also cuts an entire distribution channel for them, and allows them to focus on the core buisness - the more time the S&M department focuses on software retailers, the less time they can deal with bookstores. There's that auxilary benefit.
More like:
"Someone set us up the credit card debt!"
"Judge Turn on."
"Goodevening, paupers."
"All your hard assets are belong to bank."
"You have no change to mortgage, make your time."
Additionally, if you offered people 1 NQA for their old games, I imagine you would get hundreds of takers. Some of the games you get in might actually be saleable.
Having fought about this in my undergraduate years, I was surprised that the numerous individuals who were identified by various message boards and scholastic institutions (Bonsaikitten, anyone?) were not more forceful in dealing with their revelers.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, issuing an injunction she reworked on the order of an appeals court, said the recording industry will have to notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name of the file containing the infringing material.
As such, and if the order is infact worded in a very point way (IE - the RIAA has to specify exact names, not fuzzy search type names,) it will be cat-and mouse as I add bitchx to the front of all of any theoretical copyrighted music I own. It would appear from the last paragraph (the remanding with the overbroad provision) that the current order does very little and is clearly circumventable. I'm not sure that the cat-mouse game that will occour is the best thing - perhaps Napster comes off looking proactive if they block fuzzily and then announce they have gone above and beyond to prevent the illegal use of their service.
IE: bitchx-Eminem-Stan.m3, Still searchable if the RIAA submits an obvious list, but napster might want to block from a PR perspective.
If anyone has a link to the actual order, plese post it!
`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
The problem, obviously, is that the encryption is not desgiend to protect a copyright holder, sadly enough.
Anyway, the classic 2600 game was not pong, it was combat. Imagine how cool combat would be if you could link up the players via that new radio talk feature the phones have and play the "three little planes vs one big plane" game over the airwaves. Good times would be had by all!
I want one. I want one now.
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I mean, much of what people feel *must* be read is actually just stuff that everyone else has - what linguists call creating common language rather than actually expanding knowledge. As such, to rely on common knowlege to create a list of common knowledge might create stagnancy rather than a dynamic work.
Not that I'm saying having a set of liturature people are expected to read is a bad thing - rather, that cannonizing that liturature via plebian masses might stifle the ability for others to truly create.
As such, though I hate sounding so incredibly elitist, creating the sight for "everyman" to decide the cannonical works is less meaningful than just letting the college professors do it - at least they are going out there to find the new stuff, and include works that challenge traditional thought - even if they personally find those works "wrong."
What's a class on government without facsim, for instance? But, who'se going to be the gutsy one to add "My Struggle" to the list of political works? Certainly not me!
At the same time, however, this does open the "cannonical" list up to works that would not otherwise see play - things like "stomp" as a cannonical play, as opposed to "le mis," or something. It's certainly a project that I'll watch, if not participate in!
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How many times do we have to go through the same thing before someone decides that the *framework* is done and the real work can begin? I love gstreamer a great deal, but it's sad that Linux dosen't have what windows does in this area. I mean, we have xine, xmms, oms and gstreamer, but we don't have waht "video for windows" had what, like 3 years ago? 1. Extensibility through platform independent codecs. 2. Access to hardware accelerators and capture cards. 3. Network transparancy for remote displaying. I don't know how we can get there, but if someone put the amount of work into one project that was being put into 5 or 6, we'd be there already! Not that I'm saing gstreamer is bad - it looks to be the best of the lot. But a kind of sorry lot. Let's wipe the floor of that "Windows Media Player!"
1. Oracle will support you. No matter what time of day it is, Oracle tech support mans the phones and consistantly is there to make things work again. That's of primary import for a company with a nearly unlimited checkbook.
2. Oracle is currently a little slower, but has a significantly larger feature set (most importantly, multiple versioning and transactions).
3. Wall Street like to hear you say "our Oracle order database allows us to blah blah blah..." Don't underestimate the power of the banker! There's a really good comparison at this site