Doesn't legally emulating a platform mean you have to have access to the ROMs (ie own the thing you're emulating) - eliminating the need to actually emulate it when you can get a far better experience from actually using it?
Having legal access to the ROMs is different from having a playable system. For instance, say you have an old Rygar arcade machine where one of the buttons is broken, it smells like cat piss, and the monitor goes out after you play for five minutes. After you burn a hole in your arm messing with the CRT, you might decide you are better off running Rygar on a MAME box with a joystick, buttons etc hooked up to it. Perfectly legal, since you own the ROMs, and with a much reduced chance of scorched flesh.
For the medication dispenser, they are probably worried about people putting Tylenol in with a differnt amount of active ingredient, making the dosages on the box wrong. Also, I wouldn't be suprised if it was an FDA regulated device and it actually would be illegal to not use the "approved dose"
I don't think the same thing applies to ink cartridges though. That's more of a "void the warrenty" at most.
Got paid to create their art, was it amateur, or "PROFESSIONAL-LEVEL ART" as Ellison put it? they got paid a lot, but they didn't get paid over and over again.
Why should modern works be different?
Well, despite the general stupidity of most "popular" art and literature, I still prefer our current system to one where only the rich, governments, and the church support artists.
Flint is presenting, good, qualitative data on book sales and the free library. I don't care how many hundreds of letters he received, that's a self-selected population that makes drawing any conclusions from it invalid. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence. I'm not saying that Napster didn't increase CD sales, I'm just saying that his logic: "A) I sold more books when I offered some for free B) Some people told me Napster made them buy more CDs C) Therefor, muscians would sell more with Napster" isn't valid. Plausible, but not the obvious conclusion he presents it as.
Very true. I think his point is valid in the context of book publishing, but I think his attempts to generalize to the music industry don't have sufficent basis.
I also wonder what his attitude would be if, for instance, Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he's put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
" You contradict your own logic on the soda front. You say that it is okay to take the soda because there is no reasonable way to prevent the vendor suffering the loss, then go on to present a scenario which does just that which you explicitly state is reasonable. Thus, your rationalization for stealing dissolves."
You are confused. I stated that the argument for the scenario was reasonable, not that I considered the argument correct and the scenario reasonable (I admit, it was phrased unclearly).
"Also, I don't see how the loss is by the vendor's 'own mistake'."
Simple. They used a machine that either through design or poor maintanance sometimes dispenses extra sodas.
"If the lock on the machine broke, do you imagine that it is the moral thing to do to raid the machine for free soda? I doubt it. Yet that is the logical extension of your argument"
No, that's the illogical extension of my argument. The greater the magnitude of the loss to the soda company, the more trouble you are morally obligated to take to prevent that loss. If the lock is broken, you certainly shouldn't take all the soda. You should probably even notify someone immediately.
"The arguments I've read so far on this, that strict honor codes just lead to more rule-breaking, and honor codes should be flexible, are essentially just moral relativism"
When I stated my belief that a good honor code should be "flexible" I wasn't taking a position that "the rest of the world is evil, so we should be too." Instead, I was arguing that any "honor code" should not be applied in a mechanical fashion. The major part of this applies to the Georgia Tech case, where it seeems from the somewhat skimpy Post writeup where it seemed the letter of the rules contradicted the spirit.
The Davidson soda machine incident bothered me only because it seemed to be setting standards of conduct that seem arbitrary and not based on any commonly accepted sense of "honor"* I went to Harvey Mudd, which also had a very strong honor code. There were definetly some problems, but overall I think it added a lot to the experience--in big ways, like being able to take a test back to your room to type an essay, agreeing not to use the spell checker, and in small ways, like being able to leave your bookbag in the dorm lounge or dining hall. However, students had a great degree of input into the process, and there was a seperate system for rule infractions where the adminstration/other accuser didn't think you'd violated your agreement to uphold the honor code.
(*)Soda: A morally relatavistic position would be "it was OK for him to take the soda because someone else would have taken it later had he left it" My position is "it was OK for him to take the soda because there was no reasonable way for him to prevent the soda machine vendor from suffering the loss caused by its own mistake." Perhaps you feel that he should have left the soda, perhaps with a note, and then that all other students, etc. should have left the can alone until someone came to restock the machine, at which time it could be replaced. That would be a reasonable argument. However, I think the philosophical differences between that position and my own are too narrow to apply to something like an honor code which is supposed to bind a large community together.
Rigid "honor codes" lead to ridiculous situations. I am reminded of a story from a friend who went to Davidson, where someone she knew was disciplined for honor code violations after taking an extra can of soda that a machine mistakenly dispensed. A true honor code should be flexible. Otherwise, what is the point? Everyone knows what they are supposed to do when the rules are cut-and-dry, the purpose of an honor code should be to foster honorable/moral behavior in situations the rules do not cover.
OK, the "command voice" shared by Jedi and Bene Gesserit adepts is a good comparison. I wasn't trying to imply that there were no connections between Star Wars and Dune as critizing the articles presentation of it.
I agree that many of the "Star Wars"/myth correspondences are pretty streched. However, the Salon writer stretches things just as thin. Tatooine as Dune? Why, because they are both deserts? Common, why don't you compare it to Lawerence of Arabi The skeleton in the desert like a sandworm? Sure, only a completely different shape.
His comparisons to the Lensman series are better, though the disdain in which he apparently holds it would seem to mitigate against his conclusion that Lucas should credit the pulps.
"This reminds me far too much of MPAA/RIAA tactics"
Really? Recommending that authors don't link to a page that an organization feels shafts their members is the same thing as sueing? Trying to have a reasonable dialogue is the same thing as campaigning for restrictive legislation?
"what will we see next, ranting against libraries because they allow people to share books"
Yes, in the world where the slippery slope fallacy is a foundation of logic--oh wait, we're on Slashdot.
Used book sales may indeed help overall. I certainly like to think so, as I buy a lot of my books used. However, that's not really what the authors are complaining about here. They mainly object to the fact that new books, which have only been in print for a few months, are being advertised side by side on Amazon with used copies. They recommend linking to Barnes and Noble instead, who apparently have a seperate used books section.
Every pay period I get a statement showing how much money has been withheld for various taxes, medicare, etc. This has been the case with every company I work for. Furthermore, it sounded like the employees knew by that point that their paycheck company had dropped them for failure to pay--at that point, I'd start demanding a lot of terms in writing, or I'd just walk.
Regardless, however, "loaning" money to people instead of paying them is highly unorthodox, and probably is illegal unless they sign a contract agreeing to it.
Heh--having read a bunch of Stephenson, I know what you mean. I have to say, however, that I thought Zodiac had a great ending. The Big U, which I just read, had a pretty solid ending, though overall it's not as great as his later works. Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon both ended way to abruptly. The very last line of Diamond Age was great, but other than that the last few chapters felt like they had been cut down by about 80% from the original draft.
I can't answer your keypad question, but if you didn't like the keypad on the demo model you could always go for a 180g, which has the normal graffiti area.
What the hell are you talking about? The APS article stated that the temperatures produced by caviation were widely accepted. They criticized other parts of the experiment, pointing out some inconsistencies in the detection times for related events and possible sources of noise.
I got one or two as gifts, but it wasn't all bad. A couple of them had games (mostly bad) that weren't on any local BBSs, allowing me to gain download credit by uploading them.
Your analogy isn't fair. Say that by entering http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?supercra shstring=% 20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20 into your web browser you can bring down slashdot. Are you claiming it _isn't_ a denial of service if you "check if its been fixed" every five minutes?Once you find out that what you are doing is crashing someone elses system, you should make a good faith effort to stop doing it, or you are commiting a DoS attack.
Of course, as of this writing there is no "RFC" for this, although the group has published a few Internet Drafts. They are probably worth reading if you are interested in the issue, but they don't even have the authority of an "informational" RFC--they require no consesus from the IETF community.
Ideas are not, have not, never will be "property".
Nor are "ideas" patentable. Nowhere in my post did I claim ideas were property. I did use the verb "steal" because it describes a diversion of money from one corporation to another by illegal means.
Over 80% of *all* big-Pharm R&D (top 7 pharmaceutical companies in the US) is funded by the gov't.
Could I get a source on this? I'm curious. I find the point irrelevant, however. The subsidizing governments are not the ones making the decisions.
multinational corporations, many of whom don't pay taxes (or pay very little)
Hmmm. So why does
Pfizer's report "provisions for taxes on income" at a rate of 35%? Do I misunderstand the fiscal meaning of this term?
I would also like to address your discussion of rights. I agree that a way should be found to make basic medical care available to everyone. I simply do not feel that the best way to do this is to entirely dismantle this system of patent monopolies.
Another interesting topic is why the same antibiotics sold to humans cost such-and-such/pill, while they are sold at 1-10% of the price when sold to animals
Products for animals are less regulated. Testing and modeling drug interactions is much less expensive. Many animal medications are sold direct in bulk to farmers. The cost of animal care isn't inflated by comprehensive insurance or by as extensive malpractice suits. Many of these factors apply to all aspects of animal medicine. If you look at the prices to do a CBC (complete blood count) for a human vs a dog, you will probably be tempted to send your little red topped tube off with the vet and just look up the reference ranges for humans in a textbook.
The arguments presented vis a vis patents don't make any sense. First, he makes a big deal about how not respecting other countries patents encouraged economic growth in Switzerland. However, this isn't really a debated point. Stealing gets you more money. So does exploiting child labor. That doesn't mean either should be allowed.
He also claims that despite patents, Switzerland produced many important innovations in food production. However, I don't see any evidence, either in the article or from looking up various descriptions of the inventions, that these innovations were made public. Patent protection is granted only in exchange for publishing the details of your invention so that others can build on and be inspired by it (this is why patents are not supposed to be granted for obvious extensions of the art). Something like a chocolate receipe can be kept a trade secret for far longer than 20 years, in the end producing less public good than a patented invention.
Just because providing medicine to poor countries that need it is the right thing to do doesn't mean stealing from the companies who developed the medicine is the right way to do it. If people are stealing bread because their families are starving (a la Jean Valjean) the correct thing to do is not to legalize burglary but to provide food to the poor at the public expense. The companies whose years of R&D and millions of dollars created a safe and effective medicine need compensation for this, or they won't produce drugs for diseases that effect mainly the Third World. If this cannot be provided from the poor nations themselves, the purchase should be subsized by richer nations.
Slashdot Mirror
Having legal access to the ROMs is different from having a playable system. For instance, say you have an old Rygar arcade machine where one of the buttons is broken, it smells like cat piss, and the monitor goes out after you play for five minutes. After you burn a hole in your arm messing with the CRT, you might decide you are better off running Rygar on a MAME box with a joystick, buttons etc hooked up to it. Perfectly legal, since you own the ROMs, and with a much reduced chance of scorched flesh.
(note: may be drawn from personal experience)
For the medication dispenser, they are probably worried about people putting Tylenol in with a differnt amount of active ingredient, making the dosages on the box wrong. Also, I wouldn't be suprised if it was an FDA regulated device and it actually would be illegal to not use the "approved dose"
I don't think the same thing applies to ink cartridges though. That's more of a "void the warrenty" at most.
Why should modern works be different?
Well, despite the general stupidity of most "popular" art and literature, I still prefer our current system to one where only the rich, governments, and the church support artists.
Oh how I wish we could give -1, Troll to editors who post stupid fake shit like this
Flint is presenting, good, qualitative data on book sales and the free library. I don't care how many hundreds of letters he received, that's a self-selected population that makes drawing any conclusions from it invalid. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence. I'm not saying that Napster didn't increase CD sales, I'm just saying that his logic: "A) I sold more books when I offered some for free B) Some people told me Napster made them buy more CDs C) Therefor, muscians would sell more with Napster" isn't valid. Plausible, but not the obvious conclusion he presents it as.
Very true. I think his point is valid in the context of book publishing, but I think his attempts to generalize to the music industry don't have sufficent basis.
I also wonder what his attitude would be if, for instance, Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he's put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
"You did read the article right?"
You do realize your on Slashdot, right?
" You contradict your own logic on the soda front. You say that it is okay to take the soda because there is no reasonable way to prevent the vendor suffering the loss, then go on to present a scenario which does just that which you explicitly state is reasonable. Thus, your rationalization for stealing dissolves."
You are confused. I stated that the argument for the scenario was reasonable, not that I considered the argument correct and the scenario reasonable (I admit, it was phrased unclearly).
"Also, I don't see how the loss is by the vendor's 'own mistake'."
Simple. They used a machine that either through design or poor maintanance sometimes dispenses extra sodas.
"If the lock on the machine broke, do you imagine that it is the moral thing to do to raid the machine for free soda? I doubt it. Yet that is the logical extension of your argument"
No, that's the illogical extension of my argument. The greater the magnitude of the loss to the soda company, the more trouble you are morally obligated to take to prevent that loss. If the lock is broken, you certainly shouldn't take all the soda. You should probably even notify someone immediately.
"The arguments I've read so far on this, that strict honor codes just lead to more rule-breaking, and honor codes should be flexible, are essentially just moral relativism"
When I stated my belief that a good honor code should be "flexible" I wasn't taking a position that "the rest of the world is evil, so we should be too." Instead, I was arguing that any "honor code" should not be applied in a mechanical fashion. The major part of this applies to the Georgia Tech case, where it seeems from the somewhat skimpy Post writeup where it seemed the letter of the rules contradicted the spirit.
The Davidson soda machine incident bothered me only because it seemed to be setting standards of conduct that seem arbitrary and not based on any commonly accepted sense of "honor"* I went to Harvey Mudd, which also had a very strong honor code. There were definetly some problems, but overall I think it added a lot to the experience--in big ways, like being able to take a test back to your room to type an essay, agreeing not to use the spell checker, and in small ways, like being able to leave your bookbag in the dorm lounge or dining hall. However, students had a great degree of input into the process, and there was a seperate system for rule infractions where the adminstration/other accuser didn't think you'd violated your agreement to uphold the honor code.
(*)Soda: A morally relatavistic position would be "it was OK for him to take the soda because someone else would have taken it later had he left it" My position is "it was OK for him to take the soda because there was no reasonable way for him to prevent the soda machine vendor from suffering the loss caused by its own mistake." Perhaps you feel that he should have left the soda, perhaps with a note, and then that all other students, etc. should have left the can alone until someone came to restock the machine, at which time it could be replaced. That would be a reasonable argument. However, I think the philosophical differences between that position and my own are too narrow to apply to something like an honor code which is supposed to bind a large community together.
Rigid "honor codes" lead to ridiculous situations. I am reminded of a story from a friend who went to Davidson, where someone she knew was disciplined for honor code violations after taking an extra can of soda that a machine mistakenly dispensed. A true honor code should be flexible. Otherwise, what is the point? Everyone knows what they are supposed to do when the rules are cut-and-dry, the purpose of an honor code should be to foster honorable/moral behavior in situations the rules do not cover.
OK, the "command voice" shared by Jedi and Bene Gesserit adepts is a good comparison. I wasn't trying to imply that there were no connections between Star Wars and Dune as critizing the articles presentation of it.
I agree that many of the "Star Wars"/myth correspondences are pretty streched. However, the Salon writer stretches things just as thin. Tatooine as Dune? Why, because they are both deserts? Common, why don't you compare it to Lawerence of Arabi The skeleton in the desert like a sandworm? Sure, only a completely different shape.
His comparisons to the Lensman series are better, though the disdain in which he apparently holds it would seem to mitigate against his conclusion that Lucas should credit the pulps.
"This reminds me far too much of MPAA/RIAA tactics"
Really? Recommending that authors don't link to a page that an organization feels shafts their members is the same thing as sueing? Trying to have a reasonable dialogue is the same thing as campaigning for restrictive legislation?
"what will we see next, ranting against libraries because they allow people to share books"
Yes, in the world where the slippery slope fallacy is a foundation of logic--oh wait, we're on Slashdot.
Used book sales may indeed help overall. I certainly like to think so, as I buy a lot of my books used. However, that's not really what the authors are complaining about here. They mainly object to the fact that new books, which have only been in print for a few months, are being advertised side by side on Amazon with used copies. They recommend linking to Barnes and Noble instead, who apparently have a seperate used books section.
"they would probably have doubled their sales if it wasn't for the users."
Actually, they wouldn't have had any sales if it wasn't for the users.
Every pay period I get a statement showing how much money has been withheld for various taxes, medicare, etc. This has been the case with every company I work for. Furthermore, it sounded like the employees knew by that point that their paycheck company had dropped them for failure to pay--at that point, I'd start demanding a lot of terms in writing, or I'd just walk.
Regardless, however, "loaning" money to people instead of paying them is highly unorthodox, and probably is illegal unless they sign a contract agreeing to it.
Heh--having read a bunch of Stephenson, I know what you mean. I have to say, however, that I thought Zodiac had a great ending. The Big U, which I just read, had a pretty solid ending, though overall it's not as great as his later works. Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon both ended way to abruptly. The very last line of Diamond Age was great, but other than that the last few chapters felt like they had been cut down by about 80% from the original draft.
I can't answer your keypad question, but if you didn't like the keypad on the demo model you could always go for a 180g, which has the normal graffiti area.
What the hell are you talking about? The APS article stated that the temperatures produced by caviation were widely accepted. They criticized other parts of the experiment, pointing out some inconsistencies in the detection times for related events and possible sources of noise.
I got one or two as gifts, but it wasn't all bad. A couple of them had games (mostly bad) that weren't on any local BBSs, allowing me to gain download credit by uploading them.
Your analogy isn't fair. Say that by enteringa shstring=% 20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?supercr
into your web browser you can bring down slashdot. Are you claiming it _isn't_ a denial of service if you "check if its been fixed" every five minutes?Once you find out that what you are doing is crashing someone elses system, you should make a good faith effort to stop doing it, or you are commiting a DoS attack.
Of course, as of this writing there is no "RFC" for this, although the group has published a few Internet Drafts. They are probably worth reading if you are interested in the issue, but they don't even have the authority of an "informational" RFC--they require no consesus from the IETF community.
Nor are "ideas" patentable. Nowhere in my post did I claim ideas were property. I did use the verb "steal" because it describes a diversion of money from one corporation to another by illegal means.
Over 80% of *all* big-Pharm R&D (top 7 pharmaceutical companies in the US) is funded by the gov't.
Could I get a source on this? I'm curious. I find the point irrelevant, however. The subsidizing governments are not the ones making the decisions.
multinational corporations, many of whom don't pay taxes (or pay very little)
Hmmm. So why does Pfizer's report "provisions for taxes on income" at a rate of 35%? Do I misunderstand the fiscal meaning of this term?
I would also like to address your discussion of rights. I agree that a way should be found to make basic medical care available to everyone. I simply do not feel that the best way to do this is to entirely dismantle this system of patent monopolies.
Another interesting topic is why the same antibiotics sold to humans cost such-and-such/pill, while they are sold at 1-10% of the price when sold to animals
Products for animals are less regulated. Testing and modeling drug interactions is much less expensive. Many animal medications are sold direct in bulk to farmers. The cost of animal care isn't inflated by comprehensive insurance or by as extensive malpractice suits. Many of these factors apply to all aspects of animal medicine. If you look at the prices to do a CBC (complete blood count) for a human vs a dog, you will probably be tempted to send your little red topped tube off with the vet and just look up the reference ranges for humans in a textbook.
The arguments presented vis a vis patents don't make any sense. First, he makes a big deal about how not respecting other countries patents encouraged economic growth in Switzerland. However, this isn't really a debated point. Stealing gets you more money. So does exploiting child labor. That doesn't mean either should be allowed.
He also claims that despite patents, Switzerland produced many important innovations in food production. However, I don't see any evidence, either in the article or from looking up various descriptions of the inventions, that these innovations were made public. Patent protection is granted only in exchange for publishing the details of your invention so that others can build on and be inspired by it (this is why patents are not supposed to be granted for obvious extensions of the art). Something like a chocolate receipe can be kept a trade secret for far longer than 20 years, in the end producing less public good than a patented invention.
Just because providing medicine to poor countries that need it is the right thing to do doesn't mean stealing from the companies who developed the medicine is the right way to do it. If people are stealing bread because their families are starving (a la Jean Valjean) the correct thing to do is not to legalize burglary but to provide food to the poor at the public expense. The companies whose years of R&D and millions of dollars created a safe and effective medicine need compensation for this, or they won't produce drugs for diseases that effect mainly the Third World. If this cannot be provided from the poor nations themselves, the purchase should be subsized by richer nations.