Right, but as you pointed out yourself, Big Media still seems to be doing just fine financially, so apparently they can.
Then they still have this rather anachronistic idea of region based licensing. It's the old model, but it looks a little silly on the internet.
Why? Most people don't even realise when it's happening, and there are different situations in different places. Taxes alone can easily make 20-30% difference in the real cost of something from one place to another. And of course some markets have lower cost of living and spending power, so advertising at your normal price for a well developed first world area in those markets might just be a waste of time.
You keep saying it, but I'll need some evidence of this.
We have pretty clear evidence in my little businesses that not even full DRM but just making it more or less obvious how to download and save things on a web site has a dramatic effect on how many people do it (dramatic as in almost an order of magnitude). It's inconceivable that the big players in a multi-billion dollar industry don't have vastly more and more detailed data than anything my little systems can tell me.
They give the full appearance of wanting things to stay exactly the same as they are and have a dreadful track record of trying to prevent the future while damaging themselves.
It's rather ironic that perhaps the most successful uses of new technologies for distributing content have been the streaming media libraries like Netflix and Spotify, which of course both use DRM to help enforce their pricing model. If my businesses were "damaging" themselves as lucratively as Netflix, I'd probably be pretty happy.
Unauthorised distribution of copyrighted works might be illegal in some of our countries, but often it isn't actionable in practice. This is the big problem faced by many rightsholders, particularly small ones without international contacts.
DRM doesn't necessarily make it impossible to rip content, but it does make casual infringement significantly more difficult, and that is already a big win in many cases. I'm in two minds about the current anti-circumvention provisions in places like the US and EU, but their upside is that it is much more realistic to take enforcement action against a small number of clearly defined targets who are facilitating infringement by many people than against a large number of hard-to-reach targets who are individually infringing on too small a scale to be effectively challenged.
Well, it might be, but the only way to find out is to try it.
But some people have tried experiments in this area, right down to "pay whatever you want, including nothing". They typically seem to raise very little money, with the more successful cases mostly being work by creators who had already become established and developed a large fan base built with a more traditional funding model. I'm not saying it's impossible that there are exceptions, but the trend looks pretty clear and it would be a brave studio that spent 8-9 figures on producing some new content and then offered it for sale at less than 10% of the normal price in the hope of getting more than 10x as many paying customers.
It doesn't make me take a black hat approach – IMHO, piracy is ethically bankrupt – but I won't pay those prices. So I don't see a lot of new movies until they're quite old, resulting in them landing in the group that a reasonably priced streaming service will include.
And that's fine, and it's why you can watch the movies legitimately for a significantly lower price after the initial rush. Immediacy has a value when it comes to new content, and pricing models often reflect that.
The executives have a proven track record of having no insight, simply wishing to protect the model as it is today.
One of those does not follow from the other. If the current model is working for them and they can protect it, why wouldn't they?
It seems that your argument is based primarily on what industry people say in marketing and/or lobbying efforts. It's important to remember that those are about putting forward the message they think will work best, which is not necessarily what they actually believe or what their data actually tells them. As I said before, if DRM were demonstrably harming their revenues as many of its critics claim, they would have dropped it long ago.
If a company (say a game studio, for example) wants to enforce an always-on internet connection as part of their DRM control over their software, then at the same time it is only fair that the same studio commit to hosting the on-line services required to play that game for a minimum period, even after sales of the game stop. Either that or the studio must issue a "final update" patch to allow players to continue to play the game in solo mode.
I wonder whether transparency would suffice, rather than requiring changes in the underlying model.
Obviously plenty of people are willing to rent a movie or watch one-off pay-per-view events, even though they are restricted compared to buying a permanent copy. I don't really have a problem with that if it's clear what the deal is and they're paying what they consider a fair price for what they get.
However, I think it does have to be clear what the deal is. IMHO, perhaps the biggest problem with some modern games and other online services is that there is no obligation on the supplier to maintain facilities essential to the service working at all and yet they don't disclose this when taking customers' money. There's an element of deception involved, and I suspect that's why a lot of customers really get upset when things get switched off.
If "sales" that actually rely on online functionality had to be clearly and prominently marked as such, with the guarantees (or lack of them) about the availability of that functionality also clearly marked and robust measures to prevent just setting up a different company to run each function and folding it at the end, I suspect it would soon become clear that there were markets for both short-term and more permanent systems, and perhaps for selling a final update to unlock ongoing use by the user community if and when some online component is discontinued by the original functionality.
This could so easily be a win-win situation for everyone, in the same way that some people like to have box sets of their favourite TV shows to keep but others are happy paying a relatively low price each month for Netflix's time-limited but all-you-can-watch model. But you can only do that if everyone knows the deal and does get what they signed up for.
You're describing the crowd-sourcing model. That is one of the more interesting and reasonable possible alternatives to the current regime, but on the evidence so far it seems to be about 1-2 orders of magnitude less effective at raising funding to supporting creating that new content.
Home taping did not kill the music industry. VCRs did not kill the movie industry.
Home taping and VCRs also didn't allow a single source to provide unlimited 100% perfect reproduction of the original works and redistribution of those copies to large numbers of people within a matter of hours.
It's reasonable to debate how copyright should work, or even whether it should be replaced, in our modern age. However, it won't get us anywhere to talk about the concerns of 2017 in the context of the technology of 1987.
The conclusions of Doctorow seem to be based on fantasy, especially about the UK.
Yes, this just looks like wishful thinking.
Brexit might mean that changes to the law to better allow for some reasonable personal uses, which were blocked a little while ago, could be viable. That would be a good thing, I think.
However, I see no sign of any political will for more fundamental changes that would undermine DRM. Most of the talk is always about strengthening copyright protection and supporting the creative industries, which are a significant part of the UK economy.
Depressingly, the on-the-record high level discussions show that many politicians and bureaucrats just see the whole thing as a numbers game. If someone tells them this or that provision of IP law will raise more business revenue, typically they don't even consider whether the basic premise of restricting people's actions by law is reasonable or appropriate for our modern online age, never mind any subtleties about balancing incentives for creators with freedom for the general public.
There's only one thing that will kill DRM: when content producers realise how much power it gives to content distributors.
But these are increasingly the same people. TV production companies are running their own online streaming services. Bands are providing digital downloads from their own web sites or via marketplaces that work for them. Authors are self-publishing e-books.
It is probably in the interests of both smaller creator/distributors and streaming services for something equivalent to DRM to exist.
DRM on music is completely gone now. Why?
Because you can sell copies of music tracks at sub-dollar impulse purchase prices and still make a profit anyway. Sadly, that is not true for many other kinds of creative works.
I quite enjoy the fact that the organisations insisting on DRM are the ones most harmed by it.
People keep saying things like this, but believe it or not, the executives running these massively successful businesses are neither stupid nor ignorant. If DRM was causing them obvious harm, it would be gone faster than their next quarterly earnings report.
Exactly. If you're taking 9-figure investments, you ought to have a sustainable business model sorted out by now. At that level, raising more is supposed to be for things like accelerating growth in existing markets or expanding into lucrative new markets that have high barriers to entry, i.e., work that builds on an existing successful formula. Investing that kind of money in a business that couldn't survive without it was always a dubious proposition.
That is often very much what being on a salary means in practice: you get X money per day/month/whatever, and X doesn't increase if you work more than your normal hours. However, it's also not unusual for salaried employees to have those normal working hours specified in their employment contracts, effectively putting a lower bound on the amount of working time expected in exchange for the salary.
Again, though, this all depends very much on where you are and how your local labour laws work. For example, the US system of at-will employment is actually closer to what most of the world would consider contract or freelance work than employment, typically involving very little commitment to continuing the relationship by either side and relatively low benefits for employees beyond their pay cheque. What is particularly unusual in that case is that in much of the US such an arrangement seems to be the norm even for entry-level and low-paid work. Elsewhere, employment tends to involve much more of a commitment from both sides for those kinds of jobs, while the lighter touch arrangements tend to be used more for skilled professional work. In that context, abusive hiring and firing is usually less of a problem, and all parties may benefit from the greater flexibility, including flexibility about compensation arrangements.
Obviously if it's authorised 20% time or something then it's fine (but watch the IP agreements, because anything you create on that basis might well belong to your employer legally).
Otherwise, if you want to be paid for your results and not your time, become a freelancer or start your own company and work business-to-business, and have appropriate clauses in your contract about the basis of payment and what is included and not included. Don't be an employee and then try to not be an employee.
Some of the rationalisations of this that you can see on the original Quora discussion and the related discussions today on sites like Reddit are just bizarre, and there seem to be a disturbing number of people who are mighty confident about their legal position but who probably ought to have checked with a lawyer themselves before getting into this.
Why would Google have any control or visibility of anyone's connections, unless either that person also independently uses Google services in some sort of ISP capacity or the sites they are visiting independently use Google services in some sort of hosting capacity?
Since then, Google has seen a 23 percent reduction in the fraction of navigations to HTTP pages with password or credit card forms on Chrome for desktop.
Just ask yourself how Google can possibly know that and you can get a pretty good idea of where it really stands on the spyware/privacy issue.
I'm not sure we should be dictating commercial restrictions on the supply of all creative content to an entire continent based on the three people in that continent who are studying film or music analysis.
In any case, lots of people are commenting here as if forcing sales to the entire EU to be at the same price will bring the cheaper prices to the richer nations. It seems far more likely that it will bring the more expensive prices to the poorer nations. Your "background music" licence is exactly the kind of expendable luxury that could suffer under the more uniform regime.
Firstly, market segmentation is absolutely routine, including by purchaser power. There are countless ways to appeal to people who can afford to spend more, and businesses do this all the time. Have you ever seen a box for a "coupon code" when you ordered something online? That's market segmentation in action. Post coupons to everyone on the poorer street in your example, and now everyone isn't paying the same price.
Secondly, as someone who actually runs some online facilities at-cost, I can tell you that it is a real problem for people in less well-off nations if your price online is the same everywhere. You can't lower the headline price because if everyone was paying the lower price then you literally couldn't afford to keep these services running at that point. However, then the people where salaries and costs of living are generally lower can't keep up, so they lose out. The kind of adjustment we're talking about here is the online equivalent of posting coupons to all the homes in the poor part of town.
The genuine, uniform market price you're talking about doesn't exist in most real markets, because most real markets are not uniform.
You're talking about a monopoly situation. For works covered by copyright, that already exists in the sense that for any given work the rightsholders can decide to offer it only via certain channels.
However, unless those works are also essential, the customer still has the option not to buy them at all, and if the price is too high they will choose to spend their money elsewhere.
Moreover, while individual works may have a monopoly supplier, most creative works will be in competition with other works for providing information, entertainment, etc. Those competitive effects also moderate pricing, preventing the kind of "extraction" model you're talking about.
Around here, Amazon won the pricing war for most CD/DVD/Blu-ray content long ago, yet today it would still be cheaper for me to binge-watch a lot of TV shows through Netflix than through buying all the box sets. Amazon's prices for buying permanent copies of films or shows I really like on disc aren't much different to what they were a few years ago when you could still easily buy the same things in bricks and mortar stores.
It seems unlikely that EU law will prevent a vendor from selling something at all in selective member states if there is a good reason not to. We looked into this issue when the EU VAT mess was the big news a couple of years ago, fearful that some sort of anti-discrimination provisions would say otherwise. The experts made some straightforward arguments that, for example, declining to sell to customers elsewhere in the EU would be OK if the costs of operating the new tax scheme were prohibitive, because that would be a strictly commercial decision. Presumably complying with the law of the land would also be considered an acceptable basis for making such a decision.
The EU is working being a common market, where it started.
That's lovely, and when the economic situation in all EU member states is similar, maybe they'll achieve it. In the meantime, it is far from clear that this is a good thing.
At least in the sort of context we're talking about here, the "real market price" you mentioned is what someone is prepared to pay for something, no more and no less. Forcing people from areas with very different economic situations to pay the same price just means a lot of things won't be accessible to people from those places that can't afford the same rates as their wealthier neighbours.
I'm going to argue there are no special cases that don't fit.
In a strictly mathematical sense, yes, various things are equivalent and various patterns are universal. However, that's a bit like saying you can do anything with sequencing, selection and repetition. While true in a sense, realistically it doesn't necessarily represent the clearest way to express everything. In practice, I have sometimes found that while I might build individual parts of a complicated algorithm from tools like folds, it may be clearer and easier to write the "big picture" using explicit recursion rather than trying to adapt everything to fit some standard algorithm.
As a practical example, not so long ago I was working on some code that would take some information in a certain format as input, and update a rather complicated graph-like data structure to incorporate that extra information. This algorithm involved walking the graph, and depending on the properties of each node reached and of the information to be merged in, either updating that single node "in place" or changing the structure of the graph around it. Each such step would typically transfer some of the remaining information into the graph, and then continue walking the rest of the graph to merge in the rest of the information until one or the other ran out. No doubt with enough mathematical machinations this could have been shoe-horned into some standard pattern, but in practice it was far simpler and more transparent to write a small set of mutually recursive functions that implemented the required behaviour at each step. And of course each of those functions then received information about the state of the graph walk and the state of the information being merged in through parameters.
At this point I think purity allows for laziness and laziness demonstrates a lot of the advantages of purity.
If you only care about the result of evaluating a function, sure, but if you also care about the performance characteristics of your program, I don't think it's so simple. Laziness can be both a blessing and a curse.
As for lazy with large amounts of data, Hadoop is lazy. So I'm not sure what you are saying.
In short, unrestricted laziness can cause huge increases in the amount of working memory required to run a program, until finally something triggers the postponed evaluations and restores order. As I recall, there was even a simple tutorial example in Real World Haskell that could wind up exhausting the available memory just by scanning a moderately large directory tree because of the accumulated lazy thunks.
Until functional programmers start speaking the same language as people in industry, we'll keep rolling our eyes and ignoring you.
I'm pretty sure maths has been around longer than programming, so who is really redefining the language here?
Also, false dichotomy is false. Functional programming concepts are widely and effectively used in industrial programming. The idea that what we're talking about is some academic, ivory tower idea is decades out of date.
It was a simplified example, but I think the point would still be valid in some more complicated case that doesn't fit one of the everyday functional programming patterns. The state is still there, it's just conveyed by accumulating function argument(s) in recursive, functional code instead of storing it in loop control variable(s) in imperative code.
The other thing is you don't want to be "doing stuff" and iterating. You want to be computing stuff and then "doing stuff" on the entire set of output. The system as it pulls output will drive the iteration on the computation.
I think you're conflating lazy evaluation with functional programming here. In any case, I think that sort of claim needs some qualification. Haskell-style laziness is nice for composition in theory and sometimes it lets us write very elegant code in practice, but it can also become a liability, particularly if you're working with very large amounts of data or anything time-sensitive.
On the other hand, if you've used a language that is designed to support functional programming, you probably wouldn't be in much doubt.
For example, here's the all-positive check written in Haskell:
all_positive = all (>0) [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]
which is just a convenient notation for:
all_positive = all (\x -> x > 0) [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]
where the backslash is Haskell's general syntax for introducing a lambda.
Criticising the ideas of functional programming because, for example, C++'s syntax for lambdas is horrific is like criticising OOP because setting up dispatch via vtables is a bit messy in assembly language. It's just not the right tool for the job, and it's unlikely to give great results no matter what you do with it. You have to look at the underlying principles to see whether they're useful or not.
Again, it seems we basically agree on this one in principle, but again, I'm perhaps a little wary in practice. When we start talking about regulating software development, and so recognising accepted good practice in some way, that implies that there is someone qualified to judge what good practices actually are and some reasonable basis for determining what the regulations should be. My personal view is that I'm optimistic about the future but we're not there yet.
In particular, suppose we tried to move in that direction tomorrow, or maybe we even went as far as making software development a proper engineering discipline and a licensed profession. I think the kind of people who would find their way into the influential regulatory positions probably would not be the people who were actually best qualified to advise on such issues, not least because they're busy building useful software. Instead, I think you'd get the dreaded consultants -- not the legitimate ones who really do have wide experience and now make a living sharing it to help others, but the ones who are more politician than engineer, engaging speakers and writers, always quick to tell others how they should write software, yet typically having built relatively little of their own and having little actual data to support their recommendations. (I have this vision in my head now of some Extreme Agile Craftsmanship Consultant telling guys who have been writing security-sensitive networking stacks for 30 years how in future they should TDD their way to the basic functionality and then add "security" on later, and as long as the tests are still passing they can just ship right away.)
This isn't to say that the underlying problem is not serious. The idea that everything should be connected and the idea that security and privacy concerns are being adequately addressed by today's market is a terrifying and potentially extremely dangerous combination. As a geek, I'm able to protect myself and my family to some extent by avoiding a lot of the junk, but obviously most people don't have that advantage and general public awareness of the real implications of these modern trends is still disturbingly low.
I wonder whether a useful way forward in the near future would be some sort of voluntary endorsement system to help raise that public awareness. You don't have to absolutely require following lots of specific regulations, but maybe those who can demonstrate that they at least meet some basic, uncontroversial standards get to label their products with some sort of reserved mark, and then maybe customers start asking why some other product doesn't come with, say, a money-back guarantee and extra compensation in the event of certain bad things happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you want to, doesn't mean you can.
Right, but as you pointed out yourself, Big Media still seems to be doing just fine financially, so apparently they can.
Then they still have this rather anachronistic idea of region based licensing. It's the old model, but it looks a little silly on the internet.
Why? Most people don't even realise when it's happening, and there are different situations in different places. Taxes alone can easily make 20-30% difference in the real cost of something from one place to another. And of course some markets have lower cost of living and spending power, so advertising at your normal price for a well developed first world area in those markets might just be a waste of time.
You keep saying it, but I'll need some evidence of this.
We have pretty clear evidence in my little businesses that not even full DRM but just making it more or less obvious how to download and save things on a web site has a dramatic effect on how many people do it (dramatic as in almost an order of magnitude). It's inconceivable that the big players in a multi-billion dollar industry don't have vastly more and more detailed data than anything my little systems can tell me.
They give the full appearance of wanting things to stay exactly the same as they are and have a dreadful track record of trying to prevent the future while damaging themselves.
It's rather ironic that perhaps the most successful uses of new technologies for distributing content have been the streaming media libraries like Netflix and Spotify, which of course both use DRM to help enforce their pricing model. If my businesses were "damaging" themselves as lucratively as Netflix, I'd probably be pretty happy.
Unauthorised distribution of copyrighted works might be illegal in some of our countries, but often it isn't actionable in practice. This is the big problem faced by many rightsholders, particularly small ones without international contacts.
DRM doesn't necessarily make it impossible to rip content, but it does make casual infringement significantly more difficult, and that is already a big win in many cases. I'm in two minds about the current anti-circumvention provisions in places like the US and EU, but their upside is that it is much more realistic to take enforcement action against a small number of clearly defined targets who are facilitating infringement by many people than against a large number of hard-to-reach targets who are individually infringing on too small a scale to be effectively challenged.
Well, it might be, but the only way to find out is to try it.
But some people have tried experiments in this area, right down to "pay whatever you want, including nothing". They typically seem to raise very little money, with the more successful cases mostly being work by creators who had already become established and developed a large fan base built with a more traditional funding model. I'm not saying it's impossible that there are exceptions, but the trend looks pretty clear and it would be a brave studio that spent 8-9 figures on producing some new content and then offered it for sale at less than 10% of the normal price in the hope of getting more than 10x as many paying customers.
It doesn't make me take a black hat approach – IMHO, piracy is ethically bankrupt – but I won't pay those prices. So I don't see a lot of new movies until they're quite old, resulting in them landing in the group that a reasonably priced streaming service will include.
And that's fine, and it's why you can watch the movies legitimately for a significantly lower price after the initial rush. Immediacy has a value when it comes to new content, and pricing models often reflect that.
The executives have a proven track record of having no insight, simply wishing to protect the model as it is today.
One of those does not follow from the other. If the current model is working for them and they can protect it, why wouldn't they?
It seems that your argument is based primarily on what industry people say in marketing and/or lobbying efforts. It's important to remember that those are about putting forward the message they think will work best, which is not necessarily what they actually believe or what their data actually tells them. As I said before, if DRM were demonstrably harming their revenues as many of its critics claim, they would have dropped it long ago.
If a company (say a game studio, for example) wants to enforce an always-on internet connection as part of their DRM control over their software, then at the same time it is only fair that the same studio commit to hosting the on-line services required to play that game for a minimum period, even after sales of the game stop. Either that or the studio must issue a "final update" patch to allow players to continue to play the game in solo mode.
I wonder whether transparency would suffice, rather than requiring changes in the underlying model.
Obviously plenty of people are willing to rent a movie or watch one-off pay-per-view events, even though they are restricted compared to buying a permanent copy. I don't really have a problem with that if it's clear what the deal is and they're paying what they consider a fair price for what they get.
However, I think it does have to be clear what the deal is. IMHO, perhaps the biggest problem with some modern games and other online services is that there is no obligation on the supplier to maintain facilities essential to the service working at all and yet they don't disclose this when taking customers' money. There's an element of deception involved, and I suspect that's why a lot of customers really get upset when things get switched off.
If "sales" that actually rely on online functionality had to be clearly and prominently marked as such, with the guarantees (or lack of them) about the availability of that functionality also clearly marked and robust measures to prevent just setting up a different company to run each function and folding it at the end, I suspect it would soon become clear that there were markets for both short-term and more permanent systems, and perhaps for selling a final update to unlock ongoing use by the user community if and when some online component is discontinued by the original functionality.
This could so easily be a win-win situation for everyone, in the same way that some people like to have box sets of their favourite TV shows to keep but others are happy paying a relatively low price each month for Netflix's time-limited but all-you-can-watch model. But you can only do that if everyone knows the deal and does get what they signed up for.
You're describing the crowd-sourcing model. That is one of the more interesting and reasonable possible alternatives to the current regime, but on the evidence so far it seems to be about 1-2 orders of magnitude less effective at raising funding to supporting creating that new content.
Home taping did not kill the music industry. VCRs did not kill the movie industry.
Home taping and VCRs also didn't allow a single source to provide unlimited 100% perfect reproduction of the original works and redistribution of those copies to large numbers of people within a matter of hours.
It's reasonable to debate how copyright should work, or even whether it should be replaced, in our modern age. However, it won't get us anywhere to talk about the concerns of 2017 in the context of the technology of 1987.
The conclusions of Doctorow seem to be based on fantasy, especially about the UK.
Yes, this just looks like wishful thinking.
Brexit might mean that changes to the law to better allow for some reasonable personal uses, which were blocked a little while ago, could be viable. That would be a good thing, I think.
However, I see no sign of any political will for more fundamental changes that would undermine DRM. Most of the talk is always about strengthening copyright protection and supporting the creative industries, which are a significant part of the UK economy.
Depressingly, the on-the-record high level discussions show that many politicians and bureaucrats just see the whole thing as a numbers game. If someone tells them this or that provision of IP law will raise more business revenue, typically they don't even consider whether the basic premise of restricting people's actions by law is reasonable or appropriate for our modern online age, never mind any subtleties about balancing incentives for creators with freedom for the general public.
There's only one thing that will kill DRM: when content producers realise how much power it gives to content distributors.
But these are increasingly the same people. TV production companies are running their own online streaming services. Bands are providing digital downloads from their own web sites or via marketplaces that work for them. Authors are self-publishing e-books.
It is probably in the interests of both smaller creator/distributors and streaming services for something equivalent to DRM to exist.
DRM on music is completely gone now. Why?
Because you can sell copies of music tracks at sub-dollar impulse purchase prices and still make a profit anyway. Sadly, that is not true for many other kinds of creative works.
I quite enjoy the fact that the organisations insisting on DRM are the ones most harmed by it.
People keep saying things like this, but believe it or not, the executives running these massively successful businesses are neither stupid nor ignorant. If DRM was causing them obvious harm, it would be gone faster than their next quarterly earnings report.
Exactly. If you're taking 9-figure investments, you ought to have a sustainable business model sorted out by now. At that level, raising more is supposed to be for things like accelerating growth in existing markets or expanding into lucrative new markets that have high barriers to entry, i.e., work that builds on an existing successful formula. Investing that kind of money in a business that couldn't survive without it was always a dubious proposition.
It's not just free overtime.
That is often very much what being on a salary means in practice: you get X money per day/month/whatever, and X doesn't increase if you work more than your normal hours. However, it's also not unusual for salaried employees to have those normal working hours specified in their employment contracts, effectively putting a lower bound on the amount of working time expected in exchange for the salary.
Again, though, this all depends very much on where you are and how your local labour laws work. For example, the US system of at-will employment is actually closer to what most of the world would consider contract or freelance work than employment, typically involving very little commitment to continuing the relationship by either side and relatively low benefits for employees beyond their pay cheque. What is particularly unusual in that case is that in much of the US such an arrangement seems to be the norm even for entry-level and low-paid work. Elsewhere, employment tends to involve much more of a commitment from both sides for those kinds of jobs, while the lighter touch arrangements tend to be used more for skilled professional work. In that context, abusive hiring and firing is usually less of a problem, and all parties may benefit from the greater flexibility, including flexibility about compensation arrangements.
Exactly.
Obviously if it's authorised 20% time or something then it's fine (but watch the IP agreements, because anything you create on that basis might well belong to your employer legally).
Otherwise, if you want to be paid for your results and not your time, become a freelancer or start your own company and work business-to-business, and have appropriate clauses in your contract about the basis of payment and what is included and not included. Don't be an employee and then try to not be an employee.
Some of the rationalisations of this that you can see on the original Quora discussion and the related discussions today on sites like Reddit are just bizarre, and there seem to be a disturbing number of people who are mighty confident about their legal position but who probably ought to have checked with a lawyer themselves before getting into this.
Sure, but how would any of that give rise to the original statistic?
Why would Google have any control or visibility of anyone's connections, unless either that person also independently uses Google services in some sort of ISP capacity or the sites they are visiting independently use Google services in some sort of hosting capacity?
Since then, Google has seen a 23 percent reduction in the fraction of navigations to HTTP pages with password or credit card forms on Chrome for desktop.
Just ask yourself how Google can possibly know that and you can get a pretty good idea of where it really stands on the spyware/privacy issue.
I'm not sure we should be dictating commercial restrictions on the supply of all creative content to an entire continent based on the three people in that continent who are studying film or music analysis.
In any case, lots of people are commenting here as if forcing sales to the entire EU to be at the same price will bring the cheaper prices to the richer nations. It seems far more likely that it will bring the more expensive prices to the poorer nations. Your "background music" licence is exactly the kind of expendable luxury that could suffer under the more uniform regime.
Sorry, but that just isn't how economics works.
Firstly, market segmentation is absolutely routine, including by purchaser power. There are countless ways to appeal to people who can afford to spend more, and businesses do this all the time. Have you ever seen a box for a "coupon code" when you ordered something online? That's market segmentation in action. Post coupons to everyone on the poorer street in your example, and now everyone isn't paying the same price.
Secondly, as someone who actually runs some online facilities at-cost, I can tell you that it is a real problem for people in less well-off nations if your price online is the same everywhere. You can't lower the headline price because if everyone was paying the lower price then you literally couldn't afford to keep these services running at that point. However, then the people where salaries and costs of living are generally lower can't keep up, so they lose out. The kind of adjustment we're talking about here is the online equivalent of posting coupons to all the homes in the poor part of town.
The genuine, uniform market price you're talking about doesn't exist in most real markets, because most real markets are not uniform.
You're talking about a monopoly situation. For works covered by copyright, that already exists in the sense that for any given work the rightsholders can decide to offer it only via certain channels.
However, unless those works are also essential, the customer still has the option not to buy them at all, and if the price is too high they will choose to spend their money elsewhere.
Moreover, while individual works may have a monopoly supplier, most creative works will be in competition with other works for providing information, entertainment, etc. Those competitive effects also moderate pricing, preventing the kind of "extraction" model you're talking about.
Around here, Amazon won the pricing war for most CD/DVD/Blu-ray content long ago, yet today it would still be cheaper for me to binge-watch a lot of TV shows through Netflix than through buying all the box sets. Amazon's prices for buying permanent copies of films or shows I really like on disc aren't much different to what they were a few years ago when you could still easily buy the same things in bricks and mortar stores.
It seems unlikely that EU law will prevent a vendor from selling something at all in selective member states if there is a good reason not to. We looked into this issue when the EU VAT mess was the big news a couple of years ago, fearful that some sort of anti-discrimination provisions would say otherwise. The experts made some straightforward arguments that, for example, declining to sell to customers elsewhere in the EU would be OK if the costs of operating the new tax scheme were prohibitive, because that would be a strictly commercial decision. Presumably complying with the law of the land would also be considered an acceptable basis for making such a decision.
The EU is working being a common market, where it started.
That's lovely, and when the economic situation in all EU member states is similar, maybe they'll achieve it. In the meantime, it is far from clear that this is a good thing.
At least in the sort of context we're talking about here, the "real market price" you mentioned is what someone is prepared to pay for something, no more and no less. Forcing people from areas with very different economic situations to pay the same price just means a lot of things won't be accessible to people from those places that can't afford the same rates as their wealthier neighbours.
I'm going to argue there are no special cases that don't fit.
In a strictly mathematical sense, yes, various things are equivalent and various patterns are universal. However, that's a bit like saying you can do anything with sequencing, selection and repetition. While true in a sense, realistically it doesn't necessarily represent the clearest way to express everything. In practice, I have sometimes found that while I might build individual parts of a complicated algorithm from tools like folds, it may be clearer and easier to write the "big picture" using explicit recursion rather than trying to adapt everything to fit some standard algorithm.
As a practical example, not so long ago I was working on some code that would take some information in a certain format as input, and update a rather complicated graph-like data structure to incorporate that extra information. This algorithm involved walking the graph, and depending on the properties of each node reached and of the information to be merged in, either updating that single node "in place" or changing the structure of the graph around it. Each such step would typically transfer some of the remaining information into the graph, and then continue walking the rest of the graph to merge in the rest of the information until one or the other ran out. No doubt with enough mathematical machinations this could have been shoe-horned into some standard pattern, but in practice it was far simpler and more transparent to write a small set of mutually recursive functions that implemented the required behaviour at each step. And of course each of those functions then received information about the state of the graph walk and the state of the information being merged in through parameters.
At this point I think purity allows for laziness and laziness demonstrates a lot of the advantages of purity.
If you only care about the result of evaluating a function, sure, but if you also care about the performance characteristics of your program, I don't think it's so simple. Laziness can be both a blessing and a curse.
As for lazy with large amounts of data, Hadoop is lazy. So I'm not sure what you are saying.
In short, unrestricted laziness can cause huge increases in the amount of working memory required to run a program, until finally something triggers the postponed evaluations and restores order. As I recall, there was even a simple tutorial example in Real World Haskell that could wind up exhausting the available memory just by scanning a moderately large directory tree because of the accumulated lazy thunks.
Until functional programmers start speaking the same language as people in industry, we'll keep rolling our eyes and ignoring you.
I'm pretty sure maths has been around longer than programming, so who is really redefining the language here?
Also, false dichotomy is false. Functional programming concepts are widely and effectively used in industrial programming. The idea that what we're talking about is some academic, ivory tower idea is decades out of date.
That's just bad functional code.
It was a simplified example, but I think the point would still be valid in some more complicated case that doesn't fit one of the everyday functional programming patterns. The state is still there, it's just conveyed by accumulating function argument(s) in recursive, functional code instead of storing it in loop control variable(s) in imperative code.
The other thing is you don't want to be "doing stuff" and iterating. You want to be computing stuff and then "doing stuff" on the entire set of output. The system as it pulls output will drive the iteration on the computation.
I think you're conflating lazy evaluation with functional programming here. In any case, I think that sort of claim needs some qualification. Haskell-style laziness is nice for composition in theory and sometimes it lets us write very elegant code in practice, but it can also become a liability, particularly if you're working with very large amounts of data or anything time-sensitive.
On the other hand, if you've used a language that is designed to support functional programming, you probably wouldn't be in much doubt.
For example, here's the all-positive check written in Haskell:
all_positive = all (>0) [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]
which is just a convenient notation for:
all_positive = all (\x -> x > 0) [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]
where the backslash is Haskell's general syntax for introducing a lambda.
Criticising the ideas of functional programming because, for example, C++'s syntax for lambdas is horrific is like criticising OOP because setting up dispatch via vtables is a bit messy in assembly language. It's just not the right tool for the job, and it's unlikely to give great results no matter what you do with it. You have to look at the underlying principles to see whether they're useful or not.
Again, it seems we basically agree on this one in principle, but again, I'm perhaps a little wary in practice. When we start talking about regulating software development, and so recognising accepted good practice in some way, that implies that there is someone qualified to judge what good practices actually are and some reasonable basis for determining what the regulations should be. My personal view is that I'm optimistic about the future but we're not there yet.
In particular, suppose we tried to move in that direction tomorrow, or maybe we even went as far as making software development a proper engineering discipline and a licensed profession. I think the kind of people who would find their way into the influential regulatory positions probably would not be the people who were actually best qualified to advise on such issues, not least because they're busy building useful software. Instead, I think you'd get the dreaded consultants -- not the legitimate ones who really do have wide experience and now make a living sharing it to help others, but the ones who are more politician than engineer, engaging speakers and writers, always quick to tell others how they should write software, yet typically having built relatively little of their own and having little actual data to support their recommendations. (I have this vision in my head now of some Extreme Agile Craftsmanship Consultant telling guys who have been writing security-sensitive networking stacks for 30 years how in future they should TDD their way to the basic functionality and then add "security" on later, and as long as the tests are still passing they can just ship right away.)
This isn't to say that the underlying problem is not serious. The idea that everything should be connected and the idea that security and privacy concerns are being adequately addressed by today's market is a terrifying and potentially extremely dangerous combination. As a geek, I'm able to protect myself and my family to some extent by avoiding a lot of the junk, but obviously most people don't have that advantage and general public awareness of the real implications of these modern trends is still disturbingly low.
I wonder whether a useful way forward in the near future would be some sort of voluntary endorsement system to help raise that public awareness. You don't have to absolutely require following lots of specific regulations, but maybe those who can demonstrate that they at least meet some basic, uncontroversial standards get to label their products with some sort of reserved mark, and then maybe customers start asking why some other product doesn't come with, say, a money-back guarantee and extra compensation in the event of certain bad things happening.