Though I'm not familiar with the details of their reports, some research economists are beginning to discover that there WAS no productivity growth during the tech boom, or at least no more than the trend line (3-4%).
I can tell you ONE of the reasons for this. In the USA's GDP figures, software was counted as an/investment/ instead of an/expense/. This made billions of dollars of software spending look like "productivity".
It's not that IT is being *undervalued* today, it's that it was so *overvalued* yesterday that it seems bad now in comparison.
But old habits die hard, and IT is still a money sink for a lot of companies. I work at a state college, and we just spent over $600,000 (of student IT fee money!) on three huge Sun servers and accoutrements, to fill a need we don't have, never mind that we could have matched their power with some Linux clustering.
The thing is, putting P4's on the desktops of workers with decent P3's isn't going to make anyone more productive. What might is getting them software that doesn't suck, better input devices and bigger monitors. But good luck getting your CIO/VP of IT/whomever to understand that.
As for spending being restrained on useful projects like in-house apps, that's a real shame. But it's something of our own fault for preaching for so long that technology was a business miracale. Think "boy who cried wolf", we've bulshitted the suits for far too long and now they don't believe us when the company has a true IT need.
From page 2: "4. Cable broadband is not restrained by competition 5. Cable broadband has not been restrained by regulation"
These statements are mutually exclusive. Allow me to elaborate. It is partially true that cable is not subject to competition. The reason for this is that it has indeed been "restrained by regulation". Throw a rock in a room full of US cities and you'll hit one with a legally-protected cable monopoly. My city sure has one. If you don't allow multiple cable companies to operate, how can you chide them for lack of competition? It makes no sense. It's also preposterous to suggest that the solution is MORE regulation rather than less. You cannot produce the effects of competition by writing laws. The failure of socialism proved that one.
But this logical breakdown hardly matters, as the entire premise of their concern is faulty. From page 1: "The danger is that the Internet will come under private control. Core American liberties such as freedom of speech are of no value if the forums where such rights are commonly exercised are not themselves free."
I don't know what country these guys have been living in, but it ain't the USA. Every avenue through which free speech is exercised is under private control. Newspapers, TV, radio, even if you just stand on a soapbox and shout, the ground you're standing on is owned by someone. Even our precious internet runs on cables and computers owned by individuals. Quite simply, "free speech" on the internet doesn't exist. You can only post on Slashdot what the Slashdot owners will allow you to. It's the same at ArsTechnica, Shacknews, SomethingAwful, or any other online forum system or moderated usenet group. And unmoderated usenet only acts "free" because the designers and operators of the system and the individual groups decided it should be so. There is nothing, I repeat, NOTHING "public" about the internet, and that changes not regardless of whether you use dial-up or cable.
And didn't we address this already recently, in the story on making 'net access a public utility? There the fear was that it's in the competitive interest of providers to limit access. As I said re: that story, that's bullshit. If what consumers want is unfettered access to anything and everything, then providing that is what gives competitive advantage. Limiting access is how you/give up/ your competitive advantage.
The value of the internet is in how decentralized it is in terms of content provision. The value of the web isn't on Yahoo or MSN.com or anything owned by AOL/TW, it's on Geocities, lonestar.org homepages, stupid Tripod sites, small community forums, etc etc etc. It would only ever be in the interest of providers to limit access if they could limit access to just things that they own. But no provider could ever own enough of the internet to be useful on its own.
"Connectivity is the fundamental service of the Internet, yet it is connectivity that suffers first when network providers compete for users and services."
Anyone else see something grievously wrong with that? The way to compete for users is to deny them the product/service they're seeking? Preposterous. No one, not DSLcos, cable companies, other ISPs, is going to abridge your connectivity and get away with it. Not in the long run, and not without the aid of the force of law.
So Roadrunner has decided to block Kazaa. Any of their customers that really care about it are going to jump ship. But the real culprit there is not business but government, since if there were no potential legal trouble looming (trouble which is brought on by bad law, not bad business), there would be no incentive to block Kazaa or any other service. Some will point to the "IM wars" as an example of broken connectivity. Bogus. In IM, the nodes connecting aren't/computers/ they're/people/. So long as you can run multiple services' clients simultaneously (or better yet, Trillian), you have meaningful connectivity.
Other than that, I can't think of a single example of connectivity-breaking. On the most basic level, the more a service provider limits the usefulness of the internet, the less value they provide their customers, giving their customers an incentive to switch to a competitor or do without.
But you should read the statutes before you go about waving anti-trust law like it were real law. American anti-trust does not conform to the Rule of Law, that is, it is not objective. When you as a corporate agent, whether executive, shareholder, peon, whatever, undertake some action, you CANNOT KNOW if it will violate the Sherman act or the Clayton act, etc. These laws are deliberately written in the vaguest conceivable terms, using undefined jargon, to give the Feds the power to stomp on whoever they want and let alone who they want.
Furthermore, the acts criminalized by anti-trust law are made illegal, but they are not immoral. Anti-trust laws are on the same plane of moral illegitimacy as laws against drug use and oral sex (betcha didn't know THAT was illegal!).
"Squeezing out the little guy" is GOOD if the little guy is inefficient. People bitch about Wal-mart putting Mom & Pop stores out of business. BFD! Their prices were higher and their selection sucked, why SHOULDN'T they go under?
Yes it's possible that fees will go up. It's also likely that fees SHOULD go up. Paypal's fees have been rising anyway, not because of market power but because they needed to adjust their business model to include (gasp!) profitability. I should also point out that I've been using Paypal for years and never paid them a red cent, so long as you use bank transfers there are no fees.
Plus, people can always go back to using money orders and personal checks, and finding junk through local classifieds. The fact that they don't PROVES that they prefer eBay and Paypal, at whatever price they happen to pay. The only price that's "too high" is the one you pass on.
These are people that support policies that keep the world poor, and slow the adoption of all kinds of technology worldwide. Hell, some of them actually advocate returning the entire world's populace to subsistence farming.
You'd think jamming these people's radios would be doing them a favor, introducing some much-needed logical consistency to their "arguments"!
Remember when RAM prices nearly doubled? When 128MB of RAM went from $100 to like $185? Here's what happened, as I understand it.
Micron is the only American memory maker. The rest are concentrated in southeast Asia. The governments of the countries those companies are in subsidize them like crazy. Our cheap RAM comes at the expense of Malaysian et al. taxpayers. Anyway, Micron, having to pay overpriced American labor and lacking any equivalent corporate welfare, was having trouble competing. So what else, they whined to the FTC. BAM! Gigantic punitive tariff slapped on RAM imports. And now they're being pursued for "anti-competitive" practices?
Of course, using the violence of government to support your inefficient uncompetitive business certainly *is* anti-competitive, but you wouldn't think the US government would be ready to admit that;)
This is in fact the bulk of the problem with antitrust. Alleging that Company X "harms consumers" requires a comparison of reality to fantasy. We don't know what Industry Z would be like "if there were competition", because Industry Z isn't like that. And NO, there are no valid economic models that can remotely accurately predict that.
Summary 1. An RPM-based distribution is risky to upgrade.
The author has a strange conception of how often "risky" distro upgrades are necessary. I've been using Turbolinux, and RPM distro, through versions 3.6, 4.x, 6.x, and 7.x. For each major revision, I've fresh-installed my box. But between major revisions, I can just d/l the rpms from the update directory and install them, no worries. Is the process for upgrading from RH X.1 to X.2 so different, so much more complicated?
2. A more complex binary RPM package is often hard, if not impossible to install.
The simple solution is, don't install 3rd-party binary RPMs. In fact, don't install 3rd-party binaries period, unless that's your only option. Any software that's too big of a pain to compile from source (like XFree) is going to be on your distro CD.
3. The incompatibilities between different versions of the RPM Package Manager added another layer of complexity.
Solved by above solution to #2. Half the problems the author has with RPM are caused entirely by the use of 3rd-party packages.
4. The developers are forced to consider differences between distributions and create multiple binary packages.
This depends on what kind of software we're talking about. If it's and end-user app, and the developers want new users to be able to install it, then yes, they probably have to work out multiple versions for each distro. But it seems they'd have to do that anyway what with different library versions and file locations in each distro. The fact that you can't issue a single binary tarball (term used generically) for all distros exists apart from any problems with RPM, it is a systematic problem with all distros.
The author also seems to think Debian is a magic bullet. I quit using Debian right as apt-get was being introduced. At that point, the distro swelled beyond a single CD, which at the time was a horrendous amount of crap to come in-the-box. I also didn't have broadband. However, though hard drives have sinced passed 100GB and I have cable, I still don't like the "Debian way". I'm one of those people that wants something physical, even if I'll only use it once. It's not a big deal to download new versions nightly and just archive the packages on disk, but if that disk goes then I'll have to get my entire distribution over again, instead of being able to install from physical media. But questions of update method aside, the author also ignores the horrendous problems with Debian package dependencies. Debian packages have, shall I say, comprehensive dependencies. That is, the.deb for any given app is going to depend on every library that app can conceivably be linked against, regardless of whether you intend to use that function. This is what led me to start compiling stuff from source. And what happens when you get an app that requirse a library version higher than what Debian currently offers? You either have to wait, or install that library from source yourself. Excep that breaks hundreds of dependencies! Joy! The Debian way is not for everyone, and Debian fanboys are seriously deluded as to the relative merit of their system.
The solution to RPM's shortcomings isn't to switch distros, or tack on apt4rpm etc, or anything as drastic as that. It is:
1. don't use 3rd-party RPM's.
2. upgrades...
a. if it's mission-critical, test it in a lab first, for pete's sake
b. if not, just do a fresh install, you learn something every time you do it
I'll also plug a little program I use, called pack. Pack is a replacment for/usr/bin/install, that logs the files installed when you run make install. It's extremely handy for managing the apps you install from source. Unfortunately development was discontinued some time ago, not that it lacked any features or had any bugs, but it may be unavailable.
If by "Iceland" we mean "Iceland's government", then this is the exact opposite of voluntary, because anything a government does is by nature and definition coercive.
It's terrible. I used the SO6 beta for a while, and switched to OpenOffice 1.0 when it came out, and ye gods the checker is awful. It's better than it was in the older betas, but it's nowhere near the quality of the one in commercial SO releases.
Actually, there is something much worse than privatizing a monopoly, keeping it public. I'd prefer I be gouged by a legitimate businessman than a government-protected one.
And if removing legal barriers to market entry doesn't induce "competition", then that's what we call a "natural monopoly", where economies of scale exist to the point where few, large firms is the efficient market structure.
And on another level, privitization is/always/ good because government control of industries invades our rights to do peaceful business how we see fit. Unless of course you don't/want/ to live in a free society...
If someone takes my A-paper and represents it as their own work, then that's/fraud/ and it does bother me. (Note that I'm refering to fraud in the abstract/conceptual sense of what fraud really IS, not the concrete sense of what/legally/ constitutes fraud). However if someone takes my A-paper, says "someone else wrote this", and they get their A, then more power to them, because quite simply, that paper is not my property.
Similar reasoning can be applied to CD burning. If I burn a CD for a friend, and scrawl the title on it with a Sharpie and slip it in a paper sleeve, that's one thing. It's another thing if I make a master, and start running them off at a pressing facility, with perfect copies of the CD art and liner notes as well, and pass these off (for sale, in the market) as legit. Now, I'm not going to say here that one is moral and one isn't (although you can guess what I think), I'm just saying that on a certain moral level, these acts are/DIFFERENT/.
...developing and testing devices whose sole purpose is to/further/ destroy useful resources. This entire endeavor is an economic drain on the world, not only for its diversion of useful means, but for the ends to which they are (mis-)applied.
Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard are turning over in their graves...
The fact that every existing computer, operating system, and most pieces of software (including all OSS), even the internet itself, would instantly become illegal should be argument enough. This law mandates the adoption of systems and technologies that simply do not exist.
Will ANY of these browsers render the Shacknews comments system (in threaded mode) correctly? There's no way I can use anything but IE so long as that's the only browser that Shacks correctly...
Yes I realize it's as much a problem with the 'shack as it is with these browsers, but that makes no practical difference.
In the fictitious "perfectly competitive" market, products are sold at a price equalling marginal cost (ie: the cost of producing the last unit). However, this does not preclude the existence of accounting profits, that is, products being sold for more "green american dollars" than they cost to produce on average. This is because when economists say "cost" we're including opportunity costs. So when in a "perfectly competitive" market a product is sold at a price that's equal to some cost, that cost includes the difference between this use and the next-best use of all the inputs involved.
The practical upshot of all this is that if a company's accounts say the product's average cost of production is $47.15 and it gets sold to distributors or customers at $49.99, that doesn't necessarily represent an economic profit. More practically, it's important that "sold at cost" and "price = marginal cost" are not confused to mean the same thing, because they don't.
Criminalizing alcohol sure made that disappear real fast. And seeing as how we've been fighting the War on Drugs for over 20 years, it sure is hard to get a bag of dope these days. And piracy! With all the laws against making copies of music, movies, and software, that's not a problem at all!
Making spam illegal won't make it go away. A law is just words in a book somewhere, and has no effect unless enforced. And enforcement means finding people and locking them away. 1. do you really want that to happen? REALLY? 2. do you think it's actually possible to find these people and prove them guilty? 3. holy christ man, put a man away for 10 years in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison just for sending you a toner ad? You've got issues.
If you can do this, there's aboslutely no reason why the roads couldn't then be fully privatized, and all gas taxes and other road funding be repealed.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I'm not familiar with the details of their reports, some research economists are beginning to discover that there WAS no productivity growth during the tech boom, or at least no more than the trend line (3-4%).
/investment/ instead of an /expense/. This made billions of dollars of software spending look like "productivity".
I can tell you ONE of the reasons for this. In the USA's GDP figures, software was counted as an
It's not that IT is being *undervalued* today, it's that it was so *overvalued* yesterday that it seems bad now in comparison.
But old habits die hard, and IT is still a money sink for a lot of companies. I work at a state college, and we just spent over $600,000 (of student IT fee money!) on three huge Sun servers and accoutrements, to fill a need we don't have, never mind that we could have matched their power with some Linux clustering.
The thing is, putting P4's on the desktops of workers with decent P3's isn't going to make anyone more productive. What might is getting them software that doesn't suck, better input devices and bigger monitors. But good luck getting your CIO/VP of IT/whomever to understand that.
As for spending being restrained on useful projects like in-house apps, that's a real shame. But it's something of our own fault for preaching for so long that technology was a business miracale. Think "boy who cried wolf", we've bulshitted the suits for far too long and now they don't believe us when the company has a true IT need.
As an economist, the very concept disgusts me.
YOU CANNOT QUANTIFY HUMAN BEHAVIOR.
The insistence that you can is at the root of much of the politico-economic evils of the modern era.
From page 2:
/give up/ your competitive advantage.
"4. Cable broadband is not restrained by competition
5. Cable broadband has not been restrained by regulation"
These statements are mutually exclusive. Allow me to elaborate. It is partially true that cable is not subject to competition. The reason for this is that it has indeed been "restrained by regulation". Throw a rock in a room full of US cities and you'll hit one with a legally-protected cable monopoly. My city sure has one. If you don't allow multiple cable companies to operate, how can you chide them for lack of competition? It makes no sense. It's also preposterous to suggest that the solution is MORE regulation rather than less. You cannot produce the effects of competition by writing laws. The failure of socialism proved that one.
But this logical breakdown hardly matters, as the entire premise of their concern is faulty.
From page 1:
"The danger is that the Internet will come under private control. Core American liberties
such as freedom of speech are of no value if the forums where such rights are commonly
exercised are not themselves free."
I don't know what country these guys have been living in, but it ain't the USA. Every avenue through which free speech is exercised is under private control. Newspapers, TV, radio, even if you just stand on a soapbox and shout, the ground you're standing on is owned by someone. Even our precious internet runs on cables and computers owned by individuals. Quite simply, "free speech" on the internet doesn't exist. You can only post on Slashdot what the Slashdot owners will allow you to. It's the same at ArsTechnica, Shacknews, SomethingAwful, or any other online forum system or moderated usenet group. And unmoderated usenet only acts "free" because the designers and operators of the system and the individual groups decided it should be so. There is nothing, I repeat, NOTHING "public" about the internet, and that changes not regardless of whether you use dial-up or cable.
And didn't we address this already recently, in the story on making 'net access a public utility? There the fear was that it's in the competitive interest of providers to limit access. As I said re: that story, that's bullshit. If what consumers want is unfettered access to anything and everything, then providing that is what gives competitive advantage. Limiting access is how you
The value of the internet is in how decentralized it is in terms of content provision. The value of the web isn't on Yahoo or MSN.com or anything owned by AOL/TW, it's on Geocities, lonestar.org homepages, stupid Tripod sites, small community forums, etc etc etc. It would only ever be in the interest of providers to limit access if they could limit access to just things that they own. But no provider could ever own enough of the internet to be useful on its own.
"Connectivity is the fundamental service of the Internet, yet it is connectivity that suffers first when network providers compete for users and services."
/computers/ they're /people/. So long as you can run multiple services' clients simultaneously (or better yet, Trillian), you have meaningful connectivity.
Anyone else see something grievously wrong with that? The way to compete for users is to deny them the product/service they're seeking? Preposterous. No one, not DSLcos, cable companies, other ISPs, is going to abridge your connectivity and get away with it. Not in the long run, and not without the aid of the force of law.
So Roadrunner has decided to block Kazaa. Any of their customers that really care about it are going to jump ship. But the real culprit there is not business but government, since if there were no potential legal trouble looming (trouble which is brought on by bad law, not bad business), there would be no incentive to block Kazaa or any other service. Some will point to the "IM wars" as an example of broken connectivity. Bogus. In IM, the nodes connecting aren't
Other than that, I can't think of a single example of connectivity-breaking. On the most basic level, the more a service provider limits the usefulness of the internet, the less value they provide their customers, giving their customers an incentive to switch to a competitor or do without.
This guy failed Econ 101.
I'm no MS apologist.
But you should read the statutes before you go about waving anti-trust law like it were real law. American anti-trust does not conform to the Rule of Law, that is, it is not objective. When you as a corporate agent, whether executive, shareholder, peon, whatever, undertake some action, you CANNOT KNOW if it will violate the Sherman act or the Clayton act, etc. These laws are deliberately written in the vaguest conceivable terms, using undefined jargon, to give the Feds the power to stomp on whoever they want and let alone who they want.
Furthermore, the acts criminalized by anti-trust law are made illegal, but they are not immoral. Anti-trust laws are on the same plane of moral illegitimacy as laws against drug use and oral sex (betcha didn't know THAT was illegal!).
"Squeezing out the little guy" is GOOD if the little guy is inefficient. People bitch about Wal-mart putting Mom & Pop stores out of business. BFD! Their prices were higher and their selection sucked, why SHOULDN'T they go under?
Yes it's possible that fees will go up. It's also likely that fees SHOULD go up. Paypal's fees have been rising anyway, not because of market power but because they needed to adjust their business model to include (gasp!) profitability. I should also point out that I've been using Paypal for years and never paid them a red cent, so long as you use bank transfers there are no fees.
Plus, people can always go back to using money orders and personal checks, and finding junk through local classifieds. The fact that they don't PROVES that they prefer eBay and Paypal, at whatever price they happen to pay. The only price that's "too high" is the one you pass on.
These are people that support policies that keep the world poor, and slow the adoption of all kinds of technology worldwide. Hell, some of them actually advocate returning the entire world's populace to subsistence farming.
You'd think jamming these people's radios would be doing them a favor, introducing some much-needed logical consistency to their "arguments"!
Remember when RAM prices nearly doubled? When 128MB of RAM went from $100 to like $185? Here's what happened, as I understand it.
;)
Micron is the only American memory maker. The rest are concentrated in southeast Asia. The governments of the countries those companies are in subsidize them like crazy. Our cheap RAM comes at the expense of Malaysian et al. taxpayers. Anyway, Micron, having to pay overpriced American labor and lacking any equivalent corporate welfare, was having trouble competing. So what else, they whined to the FTC. BAM! Gigantic punitive tariff slapped on RAM imports. And now they're being pursued for "anti-competitive" practices?
Of course, using the violence of government to support your inefficient uncompetitive business certainly *is* anti-competitive, but you wouldn't think the US government would be ready to admit that
This is in fact the bulk of the problem with antitrust. Alleging that Company X "harms consumers" requires a comparison of reality to fantasy. We don't know what Industry Z would be like "if there were competition", because Industry Z isn't like that. And NO, there are no valid economic models that can remotely accurately predict that.
Summary
.deb for any given app is going to depend on every library that app can conceivably be linked against, regardless of whether you intend to use that function. This is what led me to start compiling stuff from source. And what happens when you get an app that requirse a library version higher than what Debian currently offers? You either have to wait, or install that library from source yourself. Excep that breaks hundreds of dependencies! Joy! The Debian way is not for everyone, and Debian fanboys are seriously deluded as to the relative merit of their system.
/usr/bin/install, that logs the files installed when you run make install. It's extremely handy for managing the apps you install from source. Unfortunately development was discontinued some time ago, not that it lacked any features or had any bugs, but it may be unavailable.
1. An RPM-based distribution is risky to upgrade.
The author has a strange conception of how often "risky" distro upgrades are necessary. I've been using Turbolinux, and RPM distro, through versions 3.6, 4.x, 6.x, and 7.x. For each major revision, I've fresh-installed my box. But between major revisions, I can just d/l the rpms from the update directory and install them, no worries. Is the process for upgrading from RH X.1 to X.2 so different, so much more complicated?
2. A more complex binary RPM package is often hard, if not impossible to install.
The simple solution is, don't install 3rd-party binary RPMs. In fact, don't install 3rd-party binaries period, unless that's your only option. Any software that's too big of a pain to compile from source (like XFree) is going to be on your distro CD.
3. The incompatibilities between different versions of the RPM Package Manager added another layer of complexity.
Solved by above solution to #2. Half the problems the author has with RPM are caused entirely by the use of 3rd-party packages.
4. The developers are forced to consider differences between distributions and create multiple binary packages.
This depends on what kind of software we're talking about. If it's and end-user app, and the developers want new users to be able to install it, then yes, they probably have to work out multiple versions for each distro. But it seems they'd have to do that anyway what with different library versions and file locations in each distro. The fact that you can't issue a single binary tarball (term used generically) for all distros exists apart from any problems with RPM, it is a systematic problem with all distros.
The author also seems to think Debian is a magic bullet. I quit using Debian right as apt-get was being introduced. At that point, the distro swelled beyond a single CD, which at the time was a horrendous amount of crap to come in-the-box. I also didn't have broadband. However, though hard drives have sinced passed 100GB and I have cable, I still don't like the "Debian way". I'm one of those people that wants something physical, even if I'll only use it once. It's not a big deal to download new versions nightly and just archive the packages on disk, but if that disk goes then I'll have to get my entire distribution over again, instead of being able to install from physical media. But questions of update method aside, the author also ignores the horrendous problems with Debian package dependencies. Debian packages have, shall I say, comprehensive dependencies. That is, the
The solution to RPM's shortcomings isn't to switch distros, or tack on apt4rpm etc, or anything as drastic as that. It is:
1. don't use 3rd-party RPM's.
2. upgrades...
a. if it's mission-critical, test it in a lab first, for pete's sake
b. if not, just do a fresh install, you learn something every time you do it
I'll also plug a little program I use, called pack. Pack is a replacment for
I am at work waaaaaaaaaaaay too early.
...unless decided unanimously by individuals.
If by "Iceland" we mean "Iceland's government", then this is the exact opposite of voluntary, because anything a government does is by nature and definition coercive.
It's terrible. I used the SO6 beta for a while, and switched to OpenOffice 1.0 when it came out, and ye gods the checker is awful. It's better than it was in the older betas, but it's nowhere near the quality of the one in commercial SO releases.
Actually, there is something much worse than privatizing a monopoly, keeping it public. I'd prefer I be gouged by a legitimate businessman than a government-protected one.
/always/ good because government control of industries invades our rights to do peaceful business how we see fit. Unless of course you don't /want/ to live in a free society...
And if removing legal barriers to market entry doesn't induce "competition", then that's what we call a "natural monopoly", where economies of scale exist to the point where few, large firms is the efficient market structure.
And on another level, privitization is
Do they still exist?
Anyway, I remember they wrote all their own linux drivers for their scsi cards...
If someone takes my A-paper and represents it as their own work, then that's /fraud/ and it does bother me. (Note that I'm refering to fraud in the abstract/conceptual sense of what fraud really IS, not the concrete sense of what /legally/ constitutes fraud). However if someone takes my A-paper, says "someone else wrote this", and they get their A, then more power to them, because quite simply, that paper is not my property.
/DIFFERENT/.
Similar reasoning can be applied to CD burning. If I burn a CD for a friend, and scrawl the title on it with a Sharpie and slip it in a paper sleeve, that's one thing. It's another thing if I make a master, and start running them off at a pressing facility, with perfect copies of the CD art and liner notes as well, and pass these off (for sale, in the market) as legit. Now, I'm not going to say here that one is moral and one isn't (although you can guess what I think), I'm just saying that on a certain moral level, these acts are
...developing and testing devices whose sole purpose is to /further/ destroy useful resources. This entire endeavor is an economic drain on the world, not only for its diversion of useful means, but for the ends to which they are (mis-)applied.
Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard are turning over in their graves...
The fact that every existing computer, operating system, and most pieces of software (including all OSS), even the internet itself, would instantly become illegal should be argument enough. This law mandates the adoption of systems and technologies that simply do not exist.
StarOffice lets me re-assign the Enter key to toggle edit mode in spreadsheets (instead of move to the next cell).
Can Gobe do that?
I have but one question...
Will ANY of these browsers render the Shacknews comments system (in threaded mode) correctly? There's no way I can use anything but IE so long as that's the only browser that Shacks correctly...
Yes I realize it's as much a problem with the 'shack as it is with these browsers, but that makes no practical difference.
In the fictitious "perfectly competitive" market, products are sold at a price equalling marginal cost (ie: the cost of producing the last unit). However, this does not preclude the existence of accounting profits, that is, products being sold for more "green american dollars" than they cost to produce on average. This is because when economists say "cost" we're including opportunity costs. So when in a "perfectly competitive" market a product is sold at a price that's equal to some cost, that cost includes the difference between this use and the next-best use of all the inputs involved.
The practical upshot of all this is that if a company's accounts say the product's average cost of production is $47.15 and it gets sold to distributors or customers at $49.99, that doesn't necessarily represent an economic profit. More practically, it's important that "sold at cost" and "price = marginal cost" are not confused to mean the same thing, because they don't.
Criminalizing alcohol sure made that disappear real fast. And seeing as how we've been fighting the War on Drugs for over 20 years, it sure is hard to get a bag of dope these days. And piracy! With all the laws against making copies of music, movies, and software, that's not a problem at all!
Making spam illegal won't make it go away. A law is just words in a book somewhere, and has no effect unless enforced. And enforcement means finding people and locking them away.
1. do you really want that to happen? REALLY?
2. do you think it's actually possible to find these people and prove them guilty?
3. holy christ man, put a man away for 10 years in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison just for sending you a toner ad? You've got issues.
I don't normally complain about this, but why is this story in "Your Rights Online"?
Unless, the Slashdot authors have finally acknowledged that spammers have rights too, but I doubt that.
(And no, I'm not trolling.)
If you can do this, there's aboslutely no reason why the roads couldn't then be fully privatized, and all gas taxes and other road funding be repealed.
;)
Not that that'll happen, but I can dream