Would James Joyce have been able to write "Ulysses" while holding down his part-time job at the pub?
What do I care? I never read the damn thing.
If you think a world full of part-timers will produce works as enjoyable as those of the current system, I think you are seriously underestimating how hard it is to make good art, and how important it is to allow someone to pursue their craft full-time through profiting from controlling the copying and distribution of their own works.
None of your examples were particularly popular works of art. They were all works of art that I've either never witnessed, or could easily do without.
Furthermore, I think you underestimate the many different ways that people can be compensated for producing art other than copyright. Perhaps that's because copyright itself interferes with these ways. If we mega-pop-stars were eliminated, people would demand more live music from local musicians. As for painters, I don't suggest that fraud be made legal. It seems clear to me that an original copy made by the actual artist would go for a lot more money than someone's xerox copy.
With fiction literature it might be a little harder. Perhaps copyright isn't such a horrible idea there. Makes sense, since initially that's the reason that copyright law was created.
That's the difference between "statistical inference" and what people who have had a probability class tend to do.
I don't know if it matters as much whether or not the person has had a probability class as whether or not the person is trying to legally boost MTBF ratings.
Sure, you can get better figures using different methods, but those better figures most likely will be lower, so why bother if you want to sell your product.
Well, here's the thing. The way the numbers work, you don't have to wait to see each drive fail before calculating the MTBF. As soon as one drive fails, you can make a calculation. In fact, that's one of the reasons that hard drives usually have unrealistically high MTBFs. They test 500,000 drives for 1 hour, and only see 1 failure, so they call the MTBF 500,000 hours. But in reality the expected lifetime of a hard drive is not so cut and dry. It might have very low probability of failing after 1 hour, but much higher probability of failing after 1000 hours.
Does P2P file sharing hurt record sales more than a slow economy and fewer new titles?
Who cares which hurts more? All that matters is that P2P hurts sales at all.
I agree that copyright as we know it is fundamentally broken, but what alternative model gives authors an incentive to create works without copyright's drawbacks?
Why should we be giving authors incentives to create works in the first place?
I know of patronage (that is, commissioning of original works for use in advertising) and the Street Performer Protocol (which is useful for series), but are there other models with as wide applicability as copyright?
Depends on the product. For operating systems, the incentive to create the product is that you want an operating system, and the incentive to release it is because you want someone to help test it and write drivers. The incentive to share your changes is because you don't want to reapply a patch every time you upgrade.
Some products will probably not be created without copyright law. Brittney Spears records, for instance. I don't see that as a big loss, though.
Price elasticity is for the measure of demand of a product, not a particular brand.
Now with software, each piece of software is unique (to some extent). But that's a component of price elasticity. "Products that have few good substitutes generally have a lower elasticity of demand than products with many substitutes."
There are no good free zipping programs. I've used PowerArchiver, but I didn't like it very much. If I remember correctly, you couldn't just double-click on the file and have it unzip in a new folder in the current directory. But maybe I'm thinking of one of the other ones. Right now I actually use stuffit expander. They all suck though, as far as I'm concerned.
Granted, but lint's examples were no better. I agree the price of photoshop isn't going to go down much, if at all, but the price of other less expensive software applications probably will.
It'll probably survive now that it's supported by most browsers. Had the gif patent never been enforced, it probably would have never became popular in the first place. I guess patents can spur on innovation after all!
Slashdot Mirror
Just post the whole thing. It's not like it matters. Bill Gates' social security number is 539-60-5125. So what?
If you want to pay for data by the gig, rather than by the pipe size, just sign up with an ISP which allows that.
It's not completely cooperative, if you actually keep track of points, but it's mostly cooperative, in the same sense as Contra.
Oh come on. You think the average slashbot would think that far?
So now it'll take me 1 hour every time I want to set up a Slashdot troll account.
Many of us must maintain contact addresses in the global whois database - so that people can contact us when something is broken.
Has anyone actually ever seen such an address used for a legitimate purpose?
The simple and obvious solution is not to break anything so basic, or just set up a script to automatically notify you of any breakage.
most spam today is sent through open relays.
Not most spam I receive. Then again, I have a filter against known open relays.
I figure the recprd companies owe me about $4000.
You should have protested the settlement.
Would James Joyce have been able to write "Ulysses" while holding down his part-time job at the pub?
What do I care? I never read the damn thing.
If you think a world full of part-timers will produce works as enjoyable as those of the current system, I think you are seriously underestimating how hard it is to make good art, and how important it is to allow someone to pursue their craft full-time through profiting from controlling the copying and distribution of their own works.
None of your examples were particularly popular works of art. They were all works of art that I've either never witnessed, or could easily do without.
Furthermore, I think you underestimate the many different ways that people can be compensated for producing art other than copyright. Perhaps that's because copyright itself interferes with these ways. If we mega-pop-stars were eliminated, people would demand more live music from local musicians. As for painters, I don't suggest that fraud be made legal. It seems clear to me that an original copy made by the actual artist would go for a lot more money than someone's xerox copy.
With fiction literature it might be a little harder. Perhaps copyright isn't such a horrible idea there. Makes sense, since initially that's the reason that copyright law was created.
That's the difference between "statistical inference" and what people who have had a probability class tend to do.
I don't know if it matters as much whether or not the person has had a probability class as whether or not the person is trying to legally boost MTBF ratings.
Sure, you can get better figures using different methods, but those better figures most likely will be lower, so why bother if you want to sell your product.
Well, here's the thing. The way the numbers work, you don't have to wait to see each drive fail before calculating the MTBF. As soon as one drive fails, you can make a calculation. In fact, that's one of the reasons that hard drives usually have unrealistically high MTBFs. They test 500,000 drives for 1 hour, and only see 1 failure, so they call the MTBF 500,000 hours. But in reality the expected lifetime of a hard drive is not so cut and dry. It might have very low probability of failing after 1 hour, but much higher probability of failing after 1000 hours.
I meant had the gif patent never been enforced, PNG never would have become popular.
If full use of SOHO cannot be regained, it will set space weather forcasting back 20 years.
Which, if that's anything like earth weather forcasting, won't mean very much at all.
Yeah, that's great if you're distributing to people who know what the hell .tar.gz is.
Does P2P file sharing hurt record sales more than a slow economy and fewer new titles?
Who cares which hurts more? All that matters is that P2P hurts sales at all.
I agree that copyright as we know it is fundamentally broken, but what alternative model gives authors an incentive to create works without copyright's drawbacks?
Why should we be giving authors incentives to create works in the first place?
I know of patronage (that is, commissioning of original works for use in advertising) and the Street Performer Protocol (which is useful for series), but are there other models with as wide applicability as copyright?
Depends on the product. For operating systems, the incentive to create the product is that you want an operating system, and the incentive to release it is because you want someone to help test it and write drivers. The incentive to share your changes is because you don't want to reapply a patch every time you upgrade.
Some products will probably not be created without copyright law. Brittney Spears records, for instance. I don't see that as a big loss, though.
For example?
Price elasticity is for the measure of demand of a product, not a particular brand.
Now with software, each piece of software is unique (to some extent). But that's a component of price elasticity. "Products that have few good substitutes generally have a lower elasticity of demand than products with many substitutes."
for professional image editing, not for all image editing.
It works best on commoditized goods, and works worst on pure monopolies. For products that are somewhere in between, it works somewhere in between.
There are no good free zipping programs. I've used PowerArchiver, but I didn't like it very much. If I remember correctly, you couldn't just double-click on the file and have it unzip in a new folder in the current directory. But maybe I'm thinking of one of the other ones. Right now I actually use stuffit expander. They all suck though, as far as I'm concerned.
I think Photoshop has something pretty close to [a monopoly on image editing applications].
For the high end market, yes, I agree.
Granted, but lint's examples were no better. I agree the price of photoshop isn't going to go down much, if at all, but the price of other less expensive software applications probably will.
Well, there is the little problem that that's illegal.
It'll probably survive now that it's supported by most browsers. Had the gif patent never been enforced, it probably would have never became popular in the first place. I guess patents can spur on innovation after all!
Maybe now I can stop stealing WinZip!