It would be really nice to get a break on small transactions, especially ones that don't incur CC costs.
The thing is, if you accept credit cards, then you've got to sign a contract with Visa and/or Mastercard. And that contract is going to say that you have to charge the same fee regardless of whether or not the person uses their credit card.
So you really have to choose one or the other. Micropayments, and no credit cards, or credit cards, but no micropayments.
Maybe Google will take the road less travelled and go with micropayments, but that'd be a big risk on their part.
Domain squaters are no better than the lowest type of Spsmmer, they are just the lowest forms of life.
Why in the world would you say that? I mean, OK, if you register a name belonging to someone else and hold it for ransom that's one thing. But just registering what you think is a good name with the hopes that you'll be able to resell it for a profit, I don't see the harm in that.
Is a real estate investor the second lowest form of life? Is a baseball card collector the third worst?
Visa, Mastercard, etc issue the cards, why can't I deal with them directly?
Well, Visa and Mastercard don't issue the cards. You can deal with a merchant bank account, which is pretty direct, but if you're just running some rinky dink website either your application is going to be denied or you're going to pay pretty much the same fees you pay with paypal plus some start up costs and monthly fees.
The problem is much bigger than Paypal, though. Visa and Mastercard are the real duopoly, and the shit rolls down from there. And once you've agreed to accept Visa/Mastercard, they force you to charge the same fees whether the person pays by credit card or not. Unfortunately, I don't think even Google has enough power to successfully fight Visa/Mastercard, so I doubt Google payments will be revolutionary.
Sounds great. Let's make it as hard to buy something from a store as it is to file a tax return. As a paid tax preparer, my profits would go through the roof.
So after re-reading your original post again after having read that article your original post starts to make sense. It is strange/interesting that there's another dichotomy between the physics of the big and the physics of the small. Another interesting thing is that life seems to work in some ways in the opposite direction. Is life actually moving backwards in time? I don't grasp the concept well enough to say what that would mean, it certainly doesn't *feel* like I'm moving backward in time. I suppose life would have to be made of positrons and such for it to be true. But when you think about human intelligence, a lot of times it does seem like things are moving backwards (sort of like that movie Memento). We start out with something that makes no sense, and then "piece together" the parts to make something simpler.
Anyway, I probably sound like a crackpot right now because I'm running with just a tiny bit of information and speculating as to what it might mean. So where would I go to get more information on this? Where did you learn it?
I like the fact that "Microsoft makes it easy" is linked to a page which says "We're sorry, but there is no Microsoft.com Web page that matches your entry."
Something I don't think a lot of people really grok is that the laws of physics are time symmetric (actually the full symmetry is CPT, charge+parity+time, an electron going back in time would be a positron for example) so the fundamental weirdness is why we perceive time to flow in one direction in the first place.
A closed timelike loop is essentially the equivalent of a monkey popping out of thin air, and then disappearing a few seconds later.
How so? I would think if backward time travel is going to work, it's still going to be continuous. IOW, you can't just set the Delorean to 1985 and pop back there, you have to go through 2004, 2003, 2002, etc. first.
so long as you know he is happily sitting in his chair when you leave him in the present, you can be sure that something will prevent you from murdering him in the past
You say that as though there are two opposing forces, you and the universe. But if time really is just a dimension which we are free to travel in both directions, this seems to lead inevitably to determinism. In order for the universe to have come into existence, it had to be consistent. A universe in which someone goes back in time and kills his grandfather could never form in the first place. Anyway, that's my take on it, of course I'm of the opinion that determinism and uncertainty are in no way mutually exclusive.
Which you are (or, more accurately, we are, in the aggregate) by buying products from the advertisers who pay for the content.
Maybe. Although in today's society there's little choice. Pretty much no matter what you buy you're going to be indirectly funding something you oppose. In my opinion the best thing you can do is just buy the least expensive product you can find, and then use what you save to help make the world a better place according to what you believe. If everyone did that, there wouldn't be any corporate profits in the first place.
But getting back to something a bit closer to the topic, just watching the show isn't going to change anything. Unless maybe if you're a Nielson family. On the web it's a bit more complicated, though.
Currently, not just illegal drugs are illegal to possess - I believe under Federal law (not sure about State laws - but probably many of them as well) it is illegal to possess immediate pre-cursor chemicals/compounds to illegal drugs.
Only if you possess them with the intent to distribute. There are no federal laws against simple drug possession without intent to distribute.
Part of the reason MS is so successful is because they are monopoly they can charge much higher prices than a free market can support. I suspect prices for Windows (both versions) would probably drop drastically as they had to compete with each other.
Of course they would, but they're unlikely to drop below profitability.
And if you want to argue overall market effects, what will the effect of half-priced Windows be for the operating costs of every company that runs it in the entire world?
I don't think the cost of Windows would drop in half, not by a long shot. It's too horribly inefficient to have two different companies producing the exact same piece of software. Just look at the cost of OS X. It isn't half the cost of Windows, in fact, it's probably higher when you factor in all the hidden costs.
We're not eliminating money here, just moving the power back to the market and no longer siphoning quite as many billions from the world economy and spending it to halt all progress in the computing field.
Unless we let the two Microsofts share their technologies (which would essentially defeat the purpose of splitting Microsoft up in the first place), we'd be creating a tremendous inefficiency. That has real world costs, and isn't merely moving money from one group to another.
I know politicians are really poor at looking at things from a long term perspective, but doing this is actually a win for the U.S. economy.
Actually I think in the long term Microsoft is doomed to lose to open source software anyway, and a win for open source software is a win for the U.S. and world economy.
Breaking up the Windows monopoly might actually make some of these foreign companies/nations rethink moving away from Windows.
You're acting as though the world economy is a zero sum game. That's not at all the case. What's good for those foreign companies/nations can also be good for local companies/nations. If open source software wins, it's a win for the whole world. And that's actually exactly why I think in the long run open source is destined to win.
If he wins, one could conceivably argue that merely "viewing" (ahem, listening to) audio/video files does not constitute illegal copying.
What do you mean conceivably argue? Listening/viewing audio/video files obviously doesn't constitute illegal copying. What would constitute illegal copying is copying those files from one computer to another (i.e. downloading them).
If he loses, one can argue that a number of industries already allow the (temporary) copying of copyrighted material because they show it on the web.
If you RTFA you'll see that this is a very serious question with broad implications. Many laws are written in terms of possession, and there isn't a good definition of possession that works for things like browser caches.
This was said in the writeup too, and I'm not sure what is being alleged here? Other than child porn, what information is illegal to possess? I mean, yeah, possession of things like drugs is illegal (in most states, anyway), but you can't store drugs in your browser cache, so I'm just not sure what broad implications there are.
If you have kiddie porn in your browser cache, do you possess it? What if someone mails you some raunchy spam and your mail client caches a copy on your disk -- do you possess it?
In both cases I think it's obvious you do possess it. The question is whether or not you knowingly possess it.
If there is a murder on my street and I take a picture of it, I show it to the police. It helps them track down the murderer.
If there is someone abusing a child, someone takes a picture, the police gets the picture.
The flaw in your analogy is in one case you "show it to the police" and in the other "the police gets the picture." If, after coming into possession of the picture of child abuse, you took it to the police station, you wouldn't be guilty of anything. Likewise, if you took a picture of a murder, never told anyone about it, and then one day the police found it in your closet, you'd most likely be guilty of a crime.
Generally, if something you own or that is under your control causes something that results in some form of law-breaking and/or civil problems, you are considered accountable. If your car breaks go out and you hit someone, you're almost certainly going to be considered at fault.
If your car breaks, then it's not under your control. Anyway, you can generally only be held criminally liable for an accident if you were grossly negligent or reckless. Civilly, simple negligence is enough, and sometimes we even have strict liability. But criminally there needs to be some element of mens rea to be found guilty.
3-408. DRAWEE NOT LIABLE ON UNACCEPTED DRAFT. "A check or other draft does not of itself operate as an assignment of funds in the hands of the drawee available for its payment, and the drawee is not liable on the instrument until the drawee accepts it." [emphasis mine]
3-502. DISHONOR. "If a draft is payable on demand and paragraph (1) does not apply, the draft is dishonored if presentment for payment is duly made to the drawee and the draft is not paid on the day of presentment."
3-414. OBLIGATION OF DRAWER. "If an unaccepted draft is dishonored, the drawer is obliged to pay the draft (i) according to its terms at the time it was issued or, if not issued, at the time it first came into possession of a holder, or (ii) if the drawer signed an incomplete instrument, according to its terms when completed, to the extent stated in Sections 3-115 and 3-407. The obligation is owed to a person entitled to enforce the draft or to an indorser who paid the draft under Section 3-415."
Your employer is the drawer. The bank is the drawee. You are the "person entitled to enforce" the instrument. The drawee (the bank) is under no obligation to accept the draft (unless they entered into a contractual obligation with the drawer, which isn't something you have standing to sue over). If the drawee (the bank), refuses to accept the draft, the draft is dishonored (the check bounces). It is then the obligation of the drawer (your employer, not the bank) to compensate you for the bounced check. Your employer might then have a case against the bank for breaching the terms of its banking agreement, but then again if they agreed that the bank could charge such a fee upon presentment maybe not. What's more likely in any case is that the employer can just take its business elsewhere, to do otherwise is to intentionally write bad checks, i.e. to commit check fraud.
More likely, I think, is that this will constitute prior art to enable Google to withstand challenges from other patent applicants for infringement.
If all they wanted was to prove prior art, they could have just written up these ideas and published them, avoiding all the costs of actually patenting the idea. No, the only purpose of getting the patent is to stop others from using these techniques without permission. Just because Google is doing it doesn't make it any less harmful.
Google's Site Ranking algorithms reveal how hard they are making it for spam sites to get listed (on Google).
And provides a list of techniques for spam sites to use that guarantee them positions on every search engine but Google (in fact, if you use these techniques it's illegal for other search engines to penalize you for them.
This could be an especially evil technique for spammers.
Set up search engine.
Build some spam sites using search engine optimization techniques.
Modify your search engine to penalize people using your optimization techniques.
Get a patent.
Profit, either from your increased search results in Google, or from suing Google for violating your patent.
Hmm, I guess I just didn't understand how the proposed split was supposed to work... I guess if they all (both) had the full rights to the Windows source code that'd pretty effectively kill the monopoly power (as long as they were barred from collusion, which is to be assumed).
So the public would benefit from the removal of the monopoly power. But the public would also be hurt by the fact that all the software development costs would now be duplicated. I'm not sure the benefits would outweigh the detriments. Let's look at Microsoft's financials:
Microsoft had 37 billion in revenue in 2004. They had costs of revenue of 7 billion, and operating costs of 21 billion. Now assume the competing companies have to duplicate all the costs of revenue (after all, it costs just about as much to make 10,000 copies of Windows as it does to make 20,000), and that they can cut the operating costs in half. So the new companies would have costs of revenue of 7 billion, and operating costs of 10.5 billion. Let's further assume that the non-monopoly companies can earn a mere quarter billion in profits, putting them in line with Apple Computer. So that's 17.75 billion in revenues for each company. Multiply by two, and the public still pays 35.5 billion for Microsoft products, for a savings of 1.5 billion. In other words, the costs of Windows products go down by 4%. Meanwhile, Microsoft shareholders lose about 200 billion dollars, assuming a rather generous P/E ratio of 40 for the companies. Vanguard mutual fund owners alone lose 4 billion dollars.
I'm just not sure it's worth it, unless you ensure that the Microsofts don't have to duplicate costs. In other words, both Microsofts would have full rights to all derivative works created by the other company. If you did that, well, I guess I'd support it. It'd suck for those mutual fund owners, though.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be really nice to get a break on small transactions, especially ones that don't incur CC costs.
The thing is, if you accept credit cards, then you've got to sign a contract with Visa and/or Mastercard. And that contract is going to say that you have to charge the same fee regardless of whether or not the person uses their credit card.
So you really have to choose one or the other. Micropayments, and no credit cards, or credit cards, but no micropayments.
Maybe Google will take the road less travelled and go with micropayments, but that'd be a big risk on their part.
Domain squaters are no better than the lowest type of Spsmmer, they are just the lowest forms of life.
Why in the world would you say that? I mean, OK, if you register a name belonging to someone else and hold it for ransom that's one thing. But just registering what you think is a good name with the hopes that you'll be able to resell it for a profit, I don't see the harm in that.
Is a real estate investor the second lowest form of life? Is a baseball card collector the third worst?
Allowing the unwashed masses to comment on news? That'll never work.
Visa, Mastercard, etc issue the cards, why can't I deal with them directly?
Well, Visa and Mastercard don't issue the cards. You can deal with a merchant bank account, which is pretty direct, but if you're just running some rinky dink website either your application is going to be denied or you're going to pay pretty much the same fees you pay with paypal plus some start up costs and monthly fees.
The problem is much bigger than Paypal, though. Visa and Mastercard are the real duopoly, and the shit rolls down from there. And once you've agreed to accept Visa/Mastercard, they force you to charge the same fees whether the person pays by credit card or not. Unfortunately, I don't think even Google has enough power to successfully fight Visa/Mastercard, so I doubt Google payments will be revolutionary.
Actually, according to this theory, that bump would be what causes your particular sperm to be the winner.
What's really gonna bake your noodle later on is would you have broken the vase if I hadn't said anything.
Sorry, it had to be said.
Sounds great. Let's make it as hard to buy something from a store as it is to file a tax return. As a paid tax preparer, my profits would go through the roof.
So after re-reading your original post again after having read that article your original post starts to make sense. It is strange/interesting that there's another dichotomy between the physics of the big and the physics of the small. Another interesting thing is that life seems to work in some ways in the opposite direction. Is life actually moving backwards in time? I don't grasp the concept well enough to say what that would mean, it certainly doesn't *feel* like I'm moving backward in time. I suppose life would have to be made of positrons and such for it to be true. But when you think about human intelligence, a lot of times it does seem like things are moving backwards (sort of like that movie Memento). We start out with something that makes no sense, and then "piece together" the parts to make something simpler.
Anyway, I probably sound like a crackpot right now because I'm running with just a tiny bit of information and speculating as to what it might mean. So where would I go to get more information on this? Where did you learn it?
And clearly a screenshot (an image) is not a derived work of the program, so that's fine too.
Actually, what seems clear to me is that a screenshot (an image) is a derived work of the program.
I like the fact that "Microsoft makes it easy" is linked to a page which says "We're sorry, but there is no Microsoft.com Web page that matches your entry."
Something I don't think a lot of people really grok is that the laws of physics are time symmetric (actually the full symmetry is CPT, charge+parity+time, an electron going back in time would be a positron for example) so the fundamental weirdness is why we perceive time to flow in one direction in the first place.
So what about the second law of thermodynamics?
A closed timelike loop is essentially the equivalent of a monkey popping out of thin air, and then disappearing a few seconds later.
How so? I would think if backward time travel is going to work, it's still going to be continuous. IOW, you can't just set the Delorean to 1985 and pop back there, you have to go through 2004, 2003, 2002, etc. first.
so long as you know he is happily sitting in his chair when you leave him in the present, you can be sure that something will prevent you from murdering him in the past
You say that as though there are two opposing forces, you and the universe. But if time really is just a dimension which we are free to travel in both directions, this seems to lead inevitably to determinism. In order for the universe to have come into existence, it had to be consistent. A universe in which someone goes back in time and kills his grandfather could never form in the first place. Anyway, that's my take on it, of course I'm of the opinion that determinism and uncertainty are in no way mutually exclusive.
Which you are (or, more accurately, we are, in the aggregate) by buying products from the advertisers who pay for the content.
Maybe. Although in today's society there's little choice. Pretty much no matter what you buy you're going to be indirectly funding something you oppose. In my opinion the best thing you can do is just buy the least expensive product you can find, and then use what you save to help make the world a better place according to what you believe. If everyone did that, there wouldn't be any corporate profits in the first place.
But getting back to something a bit closer to the topic, just watching the show isn't going to change anything. Unless maybe if you're a Nielson family. On the web it's a bit more complicated, though.
Currently, not just illegal drugs are illegal to possess - I believe under Federal law (not sure about State laws - but probably many of them as well) it is illegal to possess immediate pre-cursor chemicals/compounds to illegal drugs.
Only if you possess them with the intent to distribute. There are no federal laws against simple drug possession without intent to distribute.
Part of the reason MS is so successful is because they are monopoly they can charge much higher prices than a free market can support. I suspect prices for Windows (both versions) would probably drop drastically as they had to compete with each other.
Of course they would, but they're unlikely to drop below profitability.
And if you want to argue overall market effects, what will the effect of half-priced Windows be for the operating costs of every company that runs it in the entire world?
I don't think the cost of Windows would drop in half, not by a long shot. It's too horribly inefficient to have two different companies producing the exact same piece of software. Just look at the cost of OS X. It isn't half the cost of Windows, in fact, it's probably higher when you factor in all the hidden costs.
We're not eliminating money here, just moving the power back to the market and no longer siphoning quite as many billions from the world economy and spending it to halt all progress in the computing field.
Unless we let the two Microsofts share their technologies (which would essentially defeat the purpose of splitting Microsoft up in the first place), we'd be creating a tremendous inefficiency. That has real world costs, and isn't merely moving money from one group to another.
I know politicians are really poor at looking at things from a long term perspective, but doing this is actually a win for the U.S. economy.
Actually I think in the long term Microsoft is doomed to lose to open source software anyway, and a win for open source software is a win for the U.S. and world economy.
Breaking up the Windows monopoly might actually make some of these foreign companies/nations rethink moving away from Windows.
You're acting as though the world economy is a zero sum game. That's not at all the case. What's good for those foreign companies/nations can also be good for local companies/nations. If open source software wins, it's a win for the whole world. And that's actually exactly why I think in the long run open source is destined to win.
If he wins, one could conceivably argue that merely "viewing" (ahem, listening to) audio/video files does not constitute illegal copying.
What do you mean conceivably argue? Listening/viewing audio/video files obviously doesn't constitute illegal copying. What would constitute illegal copying is copying those files from one computer to another (i.e. downloading them).
If he loses, one can argue that a number of industries already allow the (temporary) copying of copyrighted material because they show it on the web.
This is obviously true as well.
If you RTFA you'll see that this is a very serious question with broad implications. Many laws are written in terms of possession, and there isn't a good definition of possession that works for things like browser caches.
This was said in the writeup too, and I'm not sure what is being alleged here? Other than child porn, what information is illegal to possess? I mean, yeah, possession of things like drugs is illegal (in most states, anyway), but you can't store drugs in your browser cache, so I'm just not sure what broad implications there are.
If you have kiddie porn in your browser cache, do you possess it? What if someone mails you some raunchy spam and your mail client caches a copy on your disk -- do you possess it?
In both cases I think it's obvious you do possess it. The question is whether or not you knowingly possess it.
If there is a murder on my street and I take a picture of it, I show it to the police. It helps them track down the murderer.
If there is someone abusing a child, someone takes a picture, the police gets the picture.
The flaw in your analogy is in one case you "show it to the police" and in the other "the police gets the picture." If, after coming into possession of the picture of child abuse, you took it to the police station, you wouldn't be guilty of anything. Likewise, if you took a picture of a murder, never told anyone about it, and then one day the police found it in your closet, you'd most likely be guilty of a crime.
By viewing the images of exploited children you are creating a demand.
So when I watch the 6 O'Clock news I'm creating a demand for war, arson, murder, and genocide?
No, you're only creating a demand if you're paying for the item.
Generally, if something you own or that is under your control causes something that results in some form of law-breaking and/or civil problems, you are considered accountable. If your car breaks go out and you hit someone, you're almost certainly going to be considered at fault.
If your car breaks, then it's not under your control. Anyway, you can generally only be held criminally liable for an accident if you were grossly negligent or reckless. Civilly, simple negligence is enough, and sometimes we even have strict liability. But criminally there needs to be some element of mens rea to be found guilty.
Read the UCC again.
3-408. DRAWEE NOT LIABLE ON UNACCEPTED DRAFT. "A check or other draft does not of itself operate as an assignment of funds in the hands of the drawee available for its payment, and the drawee is not liable on the instrument until the drawee accepts it." [emphasis mine]
3-502. DISHONOR. "If a draft is payable on demand and paragraph (1) does not apply, the draft is dishonored if presentment for payment is duly made to the drawee and the draft is not paid on the day of presentment."
3-414. OBLIGATION OF DRAWER. "If an unaccepted draft is dishonored, the drawer is obliged to pay the draft (i) according to its terms at the time it was issued or, if not issued, at the time it first came into possession of a holder, or (ii) if the drawer signed an incomplete instrument, according to its terms when completed, to the extent stated in Sections 3-115 and 3-407. The obligation is owed to a person entitled to enforce the draft or to an indorser who paid the draft under Section 3-415."
Your employer is the drawer. The bank is the drawee. You are the "person entitled to enforce" the instrument. The drawee (the bank) is under no obligation to accept the draft (unless they entered into a contractual obligation with the drawer, which isn't something you have standing to sue over). If the drawee (the bank), refuses to accept the draft, the draft is dishonored (the check bounces). It is then the obligation of the drawer (your employer, not the bank) to compensate you for the bounced check. Your employer might then have a case against the bank for breaching the terms of its banking agreement, but then again if they agreed that the bank could charge such a fee upon presentment maybe not. What's more likely in any case is that the employer can just take its business elsewhere, to do otherwise is to intentionally write bad checks, i.e. to commit check fraud.
More likely, I think, is that this will constitute prior art to enable Google to withstand challenges from other patent applicants for infringement.
If all they wanted was to prove prior art, they could have just written up these ideas and published them, avoiding all the costs of actually patenting the idea. No, the only purpose of getting the patent is to stop others from using these techniques without permission. Just because Google is doing it doesn't make it any less harmful.
Google's Site Ranking algorithms reveal how hard they are making it for spam sites to get listed (on Google).
And provides a list of techniques for spam sites to use that guarantee them positions on every search engine but Google (in fact, if you use these techniques it's illegal for other search engines to penalize you for them.
This could be an especially evil technique for spammers.
Hmm, I guess I just didn't understand how the proposed split was supposed to work... I guess if they all (both) had the full rights to the Windows source code that'd pretty effectively kill the monopoly power (as long as they were barred from collusion, which is to be assumed).
So the public would benefit from the removal of the monopoly power. But the public would also be hurt by the fact that all the software development costs would now be duplicated. I'm not sure the benefits would outweigh the detriments. Let's look at Microsoft's financials:
Microsoft had 37 billion in revenue in 2004. They had costs of revenue of 7 billion, and operating costs of 21 billion. Now assume the competing companies have to duplicate all the costs of revenue (after all, it costs just about as much to make 10,000 copies of Windows as it does to make 20,000), and that they can cut the operating costs in half. So the new companies would have costs of revenue of 7 billion, and operating costs of 10.5 billion. Let's further assume that the non-monopoly companies can earn a mere quarter billion in profits, putting them in line with Apple Computer. So that's 17.75 billion in revenues for each company. Multiply by two, and the public still pays 35.5 billion for Microsoft products, for a savings of 1.5 billion. In other words, the costs of Windows products go down by 4%. Meanwhile, Microsoft shareholders lose about 200 billion dollars, assuming a rather generous P/E ratio of 40 for the companies. Vanguard mutual fund owners alone lose 4 billion dollars.
I'm just not sure it's worth it, unless you ensure that the Microsofts don't have to duplicate costs. In other words, both Microsofts would have full rights to all derivative works created by the other company. If you did that, well, I guess I'd support it. It'd suck for those mutual fund owners, though.