(B) Look at this as MEDIA, and notice that people feel that when they have the choice of a DVD or a CD, the DVD costs less and has more value for money.
(C) The media is into a TRADITIONAL decline. The media business is traditionally cyclic; you'll notice that the movie attendance is also down, and this is part of a traditional Hollywood cycle, where you get more followups and expensive movies, less attendance, bust, and then more low-budget experimental movies, and increased attendance, increased budgets, then more and more safe movies and followups, and bust again. This goes over decades.
I see these as more likely explanations for the decline, and I absolutely see them as necessary factors to look at when going from global numbers to guessing at what effect piracy has.
I choose the remedy of not buying anything from the RIAA.
However, I also question the validity of the argument, as the RIAA are putting things into culture, and are deriving the value to a large part from this being part of culture.
I feel that this change the rational ownership position; the ownership is partially with the originator of the thing (in this case represented by the RIAA or their members) and partially by society as part of culture. This means that there are definitive tradeoffs involved, very different from the case where the originator kept the stuff private in the first case.
Heh, I hadn't noticed Avalanche; I've done some thought about this a couple of years ago without working out the mathematical details of how to do it, though.
As I see it, the interesting point is not when you use a pure Avalanche model and need all the blocks to get a copyrighted file. The interesting point is what happens when you start to mix in blocks from legally redistributable files. Implemented to the extreme, there is no way to know if somebody is uploading or downloading an infringing file or a free file without looking at what they do on their own machine, as they'll be shuffling around the same data and discarding either free data or infringing data.
And I don't see any particular reason that the MP3 or video player couldn't directly do this operation as things was played, and keeping a cache of downloaded blocks (from which several things could be extracted) would be reasonable for seeding. Effectively, you have a caching peer to peer network for distribution of any kind of data, where the data is anonymized until the last step.
But there is no evidence a substantial amount of damage is being done. No admissible or inadmissible evidence.
Oh, please. That line is about as credible as the RIAA claiming $150,000 per infringing track.
I've tried to look carefully at the evidence. To me, it is not clear that there is damage. There may be, and less probably it may be substantial - but there isn't any evidence showing either clearly. The evidence seems to indicate that file sharing lead to decreased purchases among teenagers and children (with low disposable income) and increased purchases among the older and more affluent crowd. Anecdotally, I can say that when I was pirating music with Napster, I also purchased much more music, as I got into listening to new music all the time.
If you feel that there is clear evidence available showing that the situation is different from what I've understood, I'll be glad to accept and read a reference.
When the legislative process - and that include the electoral process - is working properly, this check and balance is not needed. Alas, since there are design flaws in the election system, it doesn't work, and the check and balance is needed.
Most companies only need functionality from software, not rights - their strategic advantage. Contributing back to the core open source project will usually give tactical advantages, such as other people maintaining the code. The competitors usually don't even run the same software.
This even goes for proprietary derivates of BSD licensed open codebases; FreeBSD has gotten a ton of stuff (e.g, the SCSI stack, the netgraph stack) from proprietary derivates.
I have, the last four or five times I've bought music. I stopped buying music apart from this when I stopped pirating music, as I lost my interest in getting new music due to not sampling new music all the time. However, when I drop by a concert, I sometimes pick up the CDs afterwards.
Yeah, because people can now read or mod the code, which is an additional choice; I think that was what the parent was referring to. It is also a perspective I personally like - always think in terms of creating more freedom, ie more choice.
Block 'em all from being in the box. Make people have to go out and get their OS themselves. MS will have to fix their install process and driver issues; though on them for making it shitty in the first place. If MS wants to work with vendors to make it possible to auto-detect the vendors hardware and auto-install on it from the stock Windows DVDs/CDs, more power to them.
But make the user CHOOSE. I think even including an install CD in the box is too much. Make the user deliberately choose, complete with everything, no possibility of dealmaking between the MS and vendor on the price issue or the availability issue.
look how long it took to get to a point where we had a genuine 32-bit operating system that practically didn't crash Yeah, in 1978 or so? The VMS release was in October, 1977, and it may have been a few months before it reached real stability, like the "yeah, you turned the computer off, what reason is that for actually losing state?"
The point is that a source of the difficulty you describe is the shitty architecture of the tools people work with - those tools being Windows and before that DOS. Yeah, the problem is hard - and it's made way harder by MS.
We ended up with a monoculture for a bunch of reasons, including illegal monopoly use, lies from vendors (Intel), and the fact that people that have learned MS systems thinks that this stuff is hard, and they're afraid of learning because they've found that learning gets useless fast in that environment. Unix geeks are OK with investing time in learning, because they have experienced that much they learned 10-15-20 years ago still has a lot of value.
Assuming customers actually consciously make a choice so it is a free, working market with no anti-competitive tie ins, that is true. How economy actually work (including psychology and market assumptions) are part of Econ 102; seems you need to take a couple of more courses before having an opinion.
I'm sorry, but I really don't see how anyone is going to learn something from a non-interactive lecture on the internet that they couldn't learn from a book in a library....The value of a university isn't the lectures, it's the resources available to someone when they don't understand something they're studying.
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests different people learn better with different approaches.
Is there a growing body of evidence favoring a "dominant sensory system"? 'cause when I checked up this about a year and a half ago, there was a strong body of evidence showing that there was no such thing as a dominant sensory system, and it seemed fairly clear this particular aspect of NLP was plain wrong. If there has come in evidence pointing to the contrary, I'm very interested - anything that can convince me that I was wrong about something means I've learned something new:)
Have you ever known anybody to say: "There are just too many girls to choose from, I guess I'll go hide in the basement."? Yes, though they're saying it with their actions. And the people that say it are many, maybe most, single men. They don't try with any particular girl, because it hasn't gone as great as they hoped so far, and they won't take the risk of trying.
With the GPL, you're removing the end user freedom of using standard economic means to trade away risk and get changes done (in trade for accepting certain restrictions, like paying money up front and not redistributing/changing.) You are instead "protecting" the right to change the derivative works of the software.
With the BSD license, you're keeping the freedom of using standard economic means, and you're dropping the protection of not-yet-created works from what their author would want to do with them (which likely would be the reason they would be created at all).
These are different freedom tradeoffs, including for the (potential) end user. They both have benefits and drawbacks.
Having worked both directly with hardware developers (as an embedded systems developer) and with kernel development, this is not quite that clear to me. In some cases, the hardware knowledge side is the most important; in others, the kernel side. Mostly, the kernel side of things is harder to learn than the hardware side, though, so the kernel development skills is the important side. Also, kernel developers often have more experience with working with different kinds of hardware, so they will know how to trick around the particular piece.
And, importantly: For a LOT of the hardware on the market, what's important is the chipset used, not wiring around it. And the "hardware manufacturer" has often only done the wiring.
mdwh2, they need to know the subject area. This has e.g. been a problem with the neuro linguistic programming area, where there have been a number of people that have been specifically trying to dig up anything they can to discredit NLP. Now, it is fairly easy to discredit large areas of NLP, yet they've kept digging up directly false references and using them to add in discredit - e.g, citing summarizers that claim that parts of Scientology is included in NLP and central to it (I don't remember the exact term used at the moment). Those of us that are familiar with NLP can immediately tell that this false - however, digging up references that say "XYZ is not part of NLP" is roughly impossible, as the definition of NLP is fairly vague.
So, people can "squat" a topic area and push it towards an ideological direction, and they can do so by the investment of time - and defending against it can be harder than doing the attack. Expertise in the area is needed. (I actually asked in the talk page, point blank, if the people doing this was doing it on purpose to attempt to discredit NLP by association. The people doing it did not answer that question.)
Not for that - I like Wikipedia, and generally find it reliable, and last time I looked the NLP article had been fairly much fixed. However, it had problems for a long while - I think at least a year. So, the process isn't perfect - real knowledge is needed. Fortunately, it seems to accumulate:)
You're assuming that ALL changes would be contributed back under the BSD license. Tactical changes get contributed back; strategic changes get kept. Now, with the GPL you cannot have strategic changes. This means that companies that are interested in having strategic changes choose BSD licensed software, or choose to purchase a commercial codebase.
Fortunately, most development that is of interest to the free operating systems is tactical; the value for the company is primarily in having the functionality available, not in getting strategic advantage from having the functionality and denying it to competitors. The net result, as far as I have been able to observe (though I've been on the BSD side of the fence with only interested-bystander observation of Linux) is that we get more contributions back from the commercial side - and WAY more contributions back compared to developer mind/market share.
Maybe what makes companies that make proprietary derivates today contribute back? Like, for instance, the SCSI subsystem of FreeBSD, or netgraph, or a bunch of other changes.
Penalty for your distribution of misinformation about this on Slashdot: To compensate, you have to post the correct information - BSDs get contributions back from their derivates - at least 10 times. This will, hopefully, dispel the damage you ahve done by publicly supporting the incorrect meme.
2: Written to the understanding level of the common man (or slightly above if they don't use crayon), but woefully inaccurate and filled with assumptions and self-fulfilled hypotheses. Stuff that a generation ago, would have been laughed out of most scientific journals. An "in depth" study that winds up within a 15 percent confidence? Sorry, but 5% used to be considered shaky, but publishable. Lax standards and sensationalism now rule the roost. Hasn't the required confidence interval always varied by field (and sometimes area within that field)? Are you looking at the same field?
Smalltalk requires replacing your entire environment, including editor, access to files, etc. It also has a "weird" syntax. Ruby plugs nicely into the Unix environment.
I suspect that's why Smalltalk is "more or less dead", and Ruby is taking the world fairly much by storm.
Slashdot Mirror
(B) Look at this as MEDIA, and notice that people feel that when they have the choice of a DVD or a CD, the DVD costs less and has more value for money. (C) The media is into a TRADITIONAL decline. The media business is traditionally cyclic; you'll notice that the movie attendance is also down, and this is part of a traditional Hollywood cycle, where you get more followups and expensive movies, less attendance, bust, and then more low-budget experimental movies, and increased attendance, increased budgets, then more and more safe movies and followups, and bust again. This goes over decades.
I see these as more likely explanations for the decline, and I absolutely see them as necessary factors to look at when going from global numbers to guessing at what effect piracy has.
Eivind.
However, I also question the validity of the argument, as the RIAA are putting things into culture, and are deriving the value to a large part from this being part of culture.
I feel that this change the rational ownership position; the ownership is partially with the originator of the thing (in this case represented by the RIAA or their members) and partially by society as part of culture. This means that there are definitive tradeoffs involved, very different from the case where the originator kept the stuff private in the first case.
Eivind.
As I see it, the interesting point is not when you use a pure Avalanche model and need all the blocks to get a copyrighted file. The interesting point is what happens when you start to mix in blocks from legally redistributable files. Implemented to the extreme, there is no way to know if somebody is uploading or downloading an infringing file or a free file without looking at what they do on their own machine, as they'll be shuffling around the same data and discarding either free data or infringing data.
And I don't see any particular reason that the MP3 or video player couldn't directly do this operation as things was played, and keeping a cache of downloaded blocks (from which several things could be extracted) would be reasonable for seeding. Effectively, you have a caching peer to peer network for distribution of any kind of data, where the data is anonymized until the last step.
Eivind.
But there is no evidence a substantial amount of damage is being done. No admissible or inadmissible evidence.
Oh, please. That line is about as credible as the RIAA claiming $150,000 per infringing track.
I've tried to look carefully at the evidence. To me, it is not clear that there is damage. There may be, and less probably it may be substantial - but there isn't any evidence showing either clearly. The evidence seems to indicate that file sharing lead to decreased purchases among teenagers and children (with low disposable income) and increased purchases among the older and more affluent crowd. Anecdotally, I can say that when I was pirating music with Napster, I also purchased much more music, as I got into listening to new music all the time.If you feel that there is clear evidence available showing that the situation is different from what I've understood, I'll be glad to accept and read a reference.
Eivind.
Eivind.
When the legislative process - and that include the electoral process - is working properly, this check and balance is not needed. Alas, since there are design flaws in the election system, it doesn't work, and the check and balance is needed.
This even goes for proprietary derivates of BSD licensed open codebases; FreeBSD has gotten a ton of stuff (e.g, the SCSI stack, the netgraph stack) from proprietary derivates.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I'd say kneejerk doubt is slightlybetter, as science runs on skepticism.
Very nice post. Thanks.
But make the user CHOOSE. I think even including an install CD in the box is too much. Make the user deliberately choose, complete with everything, no possibility of dealmaking between the MS and vendor on the price issue or the availability issue.
Eivind.
The point is that a source of the difficulty you describe is the shitty architecture of the tools people work with - those tools being Windows and before that DOS. Yeah, the problem is hard - and it's made way harder by MS.
We ended up with a monoculture for a bunch of reasons, including illegal monopoly use, lies from vendors (Intel), and the fact that people that have learned MS systems thinks that this stuff is hard, and they're afraid of learning because they've found that learning gets useless fast in that environment. Unix geeks are OK with investing time in learning, because they have experienced that much they learned 10-15-20 years ago still has a lot of value.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests different people learn better with different approaches.
Is there a growing body of evidence favoring a "dominant sensory system"? 'cause when I checked up this about a year and a half ago, there was a strong body of evidence showing that there was no such thing as a dominant sensory system, and it seemed fairly clear this particular aspect of NLP was plain wrong. If there has come in evidence pointing to the contrary, I'm very interested - anything that can convince me that I was wrong about something means I've learned something newEivind.
Eivind.
With the GPL, you're removing the end user freedom of using standard economic means to trade away risk and get changes done (in trade for accepting certain restrictions, like paying money up front and not redistributing/changing.) You are instead "protecting" the right to change the derivative works of the software.
With the BSD license, you're keeping the freedom of using standard economic means, and you're dropping the protection of not-yet-created works from what their author would want to do with them (which likely would be the reason they would be created at all).
These are different freedom tradeoffs, including for the (potential) end user. They both have benefits and drawbacks.
Eivind.
And, importantly: For a LOT of the hardware on the market, what's important is the chipset used, not wiring around it. And the "hardware manufacturer" has often only done the wiring.
Eivind.
So, people can "squat" a topic area and push it towards an ideological direction, and they can do so by the investment of time - and defending against it can be harder than doing the attack. Expertise in the area is needed. (I actually asked in the talk page, point blank, if the people doing this was doing it on purpose to attempt to discredit NLP by association. The people doing it did not answer that question.)
Not for that - I like Wikipedia, and generally find it reliable, and last time I looked the NLP article had been fairly much fixed. However, it had problems for a long while - I think at least a year. So, the process isn't perfect - real knowledge is needed. Fortunately, it seems to accumulate :)
Eivind.
Fortunately, most development that is of interest to the free operating systems is tactical; the value for the company is primarily in having the functionality available, not in getting strategic advantage from having the functionality and denying it to competitors. The net result, as far as I have been able to observe (though I've been on the BSD side of the fence with only interested-bystander observation of Linux) is that we get more contributions back from the commercial side - and WAY more contributions back compared to developer mind/market share.
Eivind.
Penalty for your distribution of misinformation about this on Slashdot: To compensate, you have to post the correct information - BSDs get contributions back from their derivates - at least 10 times. This will, hopefully, dispel the damage you ahve done by publicly supporting the incorrect meme.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I suspect that's why Smalltalk is "more or less dead", and Ruby is taking the world fairly much by storm.
Eivind.