I have always run my own DNS server... Couple of years ago i found my internet access was much faster than usual one weekend, and then the following week i received an email from the ISP apologising for the "outage" that had occurred during the weekend, apparently their DNS servers had failed which meant that 99% of their customers couldn't do anything.
If anything, copyright terms should actually have decreased... 200 years ago, reproducing a piece of work and distributing it was a time consuming and extremely costly process... Now you can publish online, worldwide, for the price of the bandwidth. Software for instance is totally worthless once it becomes 14 years old, it will be well out of support, thoroughly superseded and may not even run anymore on currently available hardware.
Who's to say the quality would decrease? If anything, it might actually increase... Quantity would certainly decrease, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is a lot of shovelware media out there, garbage movies, poor quality software, poor music etc mostly written by people with no real love for their work, just wanting to make a quick buck... If there were no bucks to be made, then the only people who would create media are those who enjoy doing so.
Facebook basically is a monopoly, if all your friends are there then you have no real choice... And your friends are probably in the same boat, with it being too impractical to move them all en masse.
Unfortunately, a service of this kind basically ensures a monopoly... I don't know how such a service could be offered in a decentralised way.
A service like that was being offered in China by Nokia not so long ago if i recall... Because they have to compete against widespread piracy in china, the end users actually get better deals... In other countries, they try to suppress piracy through legal means so they can gouge everyone else on price.
And you get them from a single server, which you may have had to pay to subscribe to.. I don't see why they don't go after the big nntp server providers and try to subpoena logs out of them.
Might work in the short term, especially if lots of your customers are locked in and have no choice... But it won't help you get any new customers, and the ones you already have will gradually drop off.
And why is the upgrade from firefox 4.0.1 to firefox 5.0 so much harder than the move from 4.0 to 4.0.1? Both are minor updates, and both bring security updates... If your complaining that 4.x won't have security updates, then surely that means you were actually planning to install such updates as/when they came out... So why not just install 5 instead of 4.0.2?
As i recall, Oracle actually runs somewhat better on Linux than it does on Solaris...
And while Oracle may be better than the competition for very large applications, it is often used for much smaller applications and while technically it's perfectly capable, financially it's completely unsuitable.
As for why places run MSSQL, its about marketing and fear of the unknown... The people who set that up probably didn't know anything other than MS, and certainly were not technically skilled enough to choose the best tool for the job.
While Oracle may well have been the best choice in your example, there are plenty of situations where it is used unnecessarily, and the cost of Oracle massively outweighs the benefits of using it. For instance a case recently where the database will never grow to more than 100mb.
Companies already rely on third parties, and have done for a long time....
Who provides your Internet? Who provides your power? Who provides your telephone lines?
Many companies already outsource all or some of their IT. Most companies run single-source software.
Cloud is just a buzzword, the idea of having parts of your infrastructure hosted by a third party is nothing new whatsoever, and thousands of companies already do that.
There are other, more reliable ways to push software out to windows workstations... AD is also horrendously insecure, not due to unpatched boxes but due to design flaws in the protocols and authentication methods it uses.
Of course, if you're moving to cloud based apps, you should gradually be able to migrate away from the windows workstations entirely.
You'd be paying for materials and labour for making a copy in either case... The only difference is that software, being a "virtual" item has trivially low reproduction costs while a car requires a considerable quantity of physical materials to build.
Why should someone pay for the initial creation, when that has already been done? Your auto manufacturer also spent a lot of time designing your car, and yet copying it can be done cheaply compared to the cost of design and testing etc. Would you be willing to buy a car, if the manufacturer said that each car he sells comes for the price of materials and initial development costs?
And there are a lot of clone cars out there, so long as you don't try to sell your clones under someone else's branding its not a problem, and the auto manufacturer cant really do anything.
The problem is that you are putting people with zero technical knowledge, in charge of extremely complex machines... All current operating systems are utterly unsuitable for the average end user, and windows is generally the worst of the lot.
Apple actually has a better idea with the walled garden approach, which is actually quite good for end users - take the complexity out of their hands, and have someone competent (in this case apple) manage the system. Ofcourse this shouldn't be the only option, there should be multiple walled gardens for non technical users, and advanced options for those who actually know what they're doing.
Even if the virus was stored in the bios, or in a flash rom on some kind of pci device... Would it necessarily be able to function if you were to run a completely different OS on the system?
Many geeks work for companies who provide services or sell physical products too... When one market becomes inviable, a new one typically opens up.
Record companies and distributors would be able to screw the original source of the media, but they would also be forced to compete against each other... They would make far less profit because they would have to sell with a very thin margin, unlike today where a cd that costs a couple of cents to produce sells for $10.
Physical property can be physically held, and physically protected from other people taking it...
Imaginary property is the same, you can keep it in your head or on physical media and stop anyone from taking it away.
What you can't do with either, is stop someone who has sufficient access to it from making a copy. If someone sees your wooden house, and decides they want to build an identical wooden house for themselves somewhere else... Would you have a problem with that?
You have control of your imaginary property so long as you keep anyone else from seeing it... Same as with physical property.
Once you let someone else get access to a copy of your property, be it physical or imaginary they can try to copy it without depriving you of the original. The only difference is that physical goods are often impractical to copy while digital data is trivially easy.
If you lent me your car, and i looked it over thoroughly, produced a copy of it and then returned the original to you, would you care?
It's not about not being paid for the "products of our minds"... It's about the immorality of coming up with one such product, and receiving a never ending stream of payment for it which is entirely disproportional to the work involved.
What ever happened to "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay".
Also most of this content created by geeks, is done by geeks who are paid a fixed salary, while some fat cat creams the huge profit margins. If the first thousand copies pay off the cost of development, any subsequent sales are pure profit... You couldn't get away with profit margins like that with anything else... Imagine if Intel priced all their processors in the same category as their "extreme edition" models and never let the prices fall once the initial development was recovered.
The parking analogy is not a very good one, by not paying for the parking space you did not directly deny the city anything assuming there wasn't another paying customer ready to fill that parking space... But you did fill the space, such that it wasn't available to anyone else for the time you were in it. Downloading data does not deny other people who have copies of that data anything at all.
A tax on media is a terrible idea... It punishes anyone who needs blank media, regardless of what they use that media for... Even if those people never consume any copyrighted content at all, or purchase if legitimately. Also with a guaranteed income from tax, what incentive do content producers have to actually produce decent content? They can instead pump out endless streams of complete crap and still collect their cash, and doing so would be far more profitable.
It's akin to taxing motor vehicles in order to pay blacksmiths... Poor blacksmiths not getting any business anymore because the evil cars have come along to take it all away. The real problem is your business model is obsolete, so either get with the times or go bankrupt.
You make some good points, and it's not just PCI, but various government security standards too...
You have a list of "approved products", a list which is very expensive and time consuming to get on to. As a result, the approved products tend to be several releases behind and often have known vulnerabilities.. You also ensure that only a few vendors will bother to go through the process thus creating a cartel and forcing smaller players or open source out of the market. Few of those vendors will bother certifying all versions of their products either.
As for what the certification entails, the process is as expected, utterly flawed... The vendor supplies a list of features and an auditor verifies that those features exist.... No checking is done as to the actual security of the product, no audit is done of the source code, no check is done to see if those features are easily circumvented etc... For instance, various versions of Windows got through some of these evaluation criteria, despite gaping security holes such as effectively storing user passwords in plain text.
As for bailouts, there is a simple answer to that... If a company is "too big to fail" then that company is simply "too big"... The government should investigate any company of substantial size and determine the potential economic impact should they collapse... If that impact is too damaging, then the company should be split up into smaller competing parts. This would also break up monopolies and increase competition, a big win for everyone else. The idea of bailouts is ridiculous, since it effectively eliminates any risk... These companies are now free to take any gamble they want, safe in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if they fail, while letting them keep the profits if they win.
The problem with ARM, is that many people are locked into closed source applications which have only ever been compiled for x86... ARM is great when you have sourcecode and can compile your applications for it.
You will have extremely high unemployment as people's jobs are replaced by robots. Businesses will choose to employ robots because they are cheaper, can be turned off, won't join unions or go on strike etc.
For the average guy on the street, the first fine hurts and then the escalations hurt more...
For corporations the fines don't escalate as much, and so long as the fines are lower than the profit made by doing the illegal act, then it's just good business to continue doing it and consider the fine a cost of doing business.
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I have always run my own DNS server...
Couple of years ago i found my internet access was much faster than usual one weekend, and then the following week i received an email from the ISP apologising for the "outage" that had occurred during the weekend, apparently their DNS servers had failed which meant that 99% of their customers couldn't do anything.
If anything, copyright terms should actually have decreased...
200 years ago, reproducing a piece of work and distributing it was a time consuming and extremely costly process... Now you can publish online, worldwide, for the price of the bandwidth.
Software for instance is totally worthless once it becomes 14 years old, it will be well out of support, thoroughly superseded and may not even run anymore on currently available hardware.
Who's to say the quality would decrease? If anything, it might actually increase...
Quantity would certainly decrease, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
There is a lot of shovelware media out there, garbage movies, poor quality software, poor music etc mostly written by people with no real love for their work, just wanting to make a quick buck... If there were no bucks to be made, then the only people who would create media are those who enjoy doing so.
Facebook basically is a monopoly, if all your friends are there then you have no real choice... And your friends are probably in the same boat, with it being too impractical to move them all en masse.
Unfortunately, a service of this kind basically ensures a monopoly... I don't know how such a service could be offered in a decentralised way.
A service like that was being offered in China by Nokia not so long ago if i recall...
Because they have to compete against widespread piracy in china, the end users actually get better deals... In other countries, they try to suppress piracy through legal means so they can gouge everyone else on price.
And you get them from a single server, which you may have had to pay to subscribe to..
I don't see why they don't go after the big nntp server providers and try to subpoena logs out of them.
And in other news, a 13 year old boy in belfast has committed another robbery... The victim reports their xbox was stolen.
And you think any self respecting cloud provider won't be doing all of those things too?
Might work in the short term, especially if lots of your customers are locked in and have no choice...
But it won't help you get any new customers, and the ones you already have will gradually drop off.
That was sun4c (sparcstation 2 era hardware)...
Sun4m and newer hardware (sparcstation 5, 10, 20, ipx etc) was fine.
And why is the upgrade from firefox 4.0.1 to firefox 5.0 so much harder than the move from 4.0 to 4.0.1?
Both are minor updates, and both bring security updates... If your complaining that 4.x won't have security updates, then surely that means you were actually planning to install such updates as/when they came out... So why not just install 5 instead of 4.0.2?
As i recall, Oracle actually runs somewhat better on Linux than it does on Solaris...
And while Oracle may be better than the competition for very large applications, it is often used for much smaller applications and while technically it's perfectly capable, financially it's completely unsuitable.
As for why places run MSSQL, its about marketing and fear of the unknown... The people who set that up probably didn't know anything other than MS, and certainly were not technically skilled enough to choose the best tool for the job.
While Oracle may well have been the best choice in your example, there are plenty of situations where it is used unnecessarily, and the cost of Oracle massively outweighs the benefits of using it. For instance a case recently where the database will never grow to more than 100mb.
Companies already rely on third parties, and have done for a long time....
Who provides your Internet?
Who provides your power?
Who provides your telephone lines?
Many companies already outsource all or some of their IT.
Most companies run single-source software.
Cloud is just a buzzword, the idea of having parts of your infrastructure hosted by a third party is nothing new whatsoever, and thousands of companies already do that.
There are other, more reliable ways to push software out to windows workstations...
AD is also horrendously insecure, not due to unpatched boxes but due to design flaws in the protocols and authentication methods it uses.
Of course, if you're moving to cloud based apps, you should gradually be able to migrate away from the windows workstations entirely.
You'd be paying for materials and labour for making a copy in either case... The only difference is that software, being a "virtual" item has trivially low reproduction costs while a car requires a considerable quantity of physical materials to build.
Why should someone pay for the initial creation, when that has already been done? Your auto manufacturer also spent a lot of time designing your car, and yet copying it can be done cheaply compared to the cost of design and testing etc.
Would you be willing to buy a car, if the manufacturer said that each car he sells comes for the price of materials and initial development costs?
And there are a lot of clone cars out there, so long as you don't try to sell your clones under someone else's branding its not a problem, and the auto manufacturer cant really do anything.
The problem is that you are putting people with zero technical knowledge, in charge of extremely complex machines...
All current operating systems are utterly unsuitable for the average end user, and windows is generally the worst of the lot.
Apple actually has a better idea with the walled garden approach, which is actually quite good for end users - take the complexity out of their hands, and have someone competent (in this case apple) manage the system. Ofcourse this shouldn't be the only option, there should be multiple walled gardens for non technical users, and advanced options for those who actually know what they're doing.
Even if the virus was stored in the bios, or in a flash rom on some kind of pci device... Would it necessarily be able to function if you were to run a completely different OS on the system?
Many geeks work for companies who provide services or sell physical products too... When one market becomes inviable, a new one typically opens up.
Record companies and distributors would be able to screw the original source of the media, but they would also be forced to compete against each other... They would make far less profit because they would have to sell with a very thin margin, unlike today where a cd that costs a couple of cents to produce sells for $10.
Physical property can be physically held, and physically protected from other people taking it...
Imaginary property is the same, you can keep it in your head or on physical media and stop anyone from taking it away.
What you can't do with either, is stop someone who has sufficient access to it from making a copy.
If someone sees your wooden house, and decides they want to build an identical wooden house for themselves somewhere else... Would you have a problem with that?
You have control of your imaginary property so long as you keep anyone else from seeing it... Same as with physical property.
Once you let someone else get access to a copy of your property, be it physical or imaginary they can try to copy it without depriving you of the original. The only difference is that physical goods are often impractical to copy while digital data is trivially easy.
If you lent me your car, and i looked it over thoroughly, produced a copy of it and then returned the original to you, would you care?
It's not about not being paid for the "products of our minds"...
It's about the immorality of coming up with one such product, and receiving a never ending stream of payment for it which is entirely disproportional to the work involved.
What ever happened to "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay".
Also most of this content created by geeks, is done by geeks who are paid a fixed salary, while some fat cat creams the huge profit margins. If the first thousand copies pay off the cost of development, any subsequent sales are pure profit... You couldn't get away with profit margins like that with anything else... Imagine if Intel priced all their processors in the same category as their "extreme edition" models and never let the prices fall once the initial development was recovered.
The parking analogy is not a very good one, by not paying for the parking space you did not directly deny the city anything assuming there wasn't another paying customer ready to fill that parking space... But you did fill the space, such that it wasn't available to anyone else for the time you were in it. Downloading data does not deny other people who have copies of that data anything at all.
A tax on media is a terrible idea...
It punishes anyone who needs blank media, regardless of what they use that media for... Even if those people never consume any copyrighted content at all, or purchase if legitimately.
Also with a guaranteed income from tax, what incentive do content producers have to actually produce decent content? They can instead pump out endless streams of complete crap and still collect their cash, and doing so would be far more profitable.
It's akin to taxing motor vehicles in order to pay blacksmiths... Poor blacksmiths not getting any business anymore because the evil cars have come along to take it all away. The real problem is your business model is obsolete, so either get with the times or go bankrupt.
You make some good points, and it's not just PCI, but various government security standards too...
You have a list of "approved products", a list which is very expensive and time consuming to get on to. As a result, the approved products tend to be several releases behind and often have known vulnerabilities.. You also ensure that only a few vendors will bother to go through the process thus creating a cartel and forcing smaller players or open source out of the market. Few of those vendors will bother certifying all versions of their products either.
As for what the certification entails, the process is as expected, utterly flawed... The vendor supplies a list of features and an auditor verifies that those features exist.... No checking is done as to the actual security of the product, no audit is done of the source code, no check is done to see if those features are easily circumvented etc... For instance, various versions of Windows got through some of these evaluation criteria, despite gaping security holes such as effectively storing user passwords in plain text.
As for bailouts, there is a simple answer to that... If a company is "too big to fail" then that company is simply "too big"... The government should investigate any company of substantial size and determine the potential economic impact should they collapse... If that impact is too damaging, then the company should be split up into smaller competing parts. This would also break up monopolies and increase competition, a big win for everyone else.
The idea of bailouts is ridiculous, since it effectively eliminates any risk... These companies are now free to take any gamble they want, safe in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if they fail, while letting them keep the profits if they win.
The problem with ARM, is that many people are locked into closed source applications which have only ever been compiled for x86... ARM is great when you have sourcecode and can compile your applications for it.
You will have extremely high unemployment as people's jobs are replaced by robots. Businesses will choose to employ robots because they are cheaper, can be turned off, won't join unions or go on strike etc.
For the average guy on the street, the first fine hurts and then the escalations hurt more...
For corporations the fines don't escalate as much, and so long as the fines are lower than the profit made by doing the illegal act, then it's just good business to continue doing it and consider the fine a cost of doing business.