Uh, the distro I use didn't exist in 1998, nor did anything quite like it...
My opposition isn't to doing things in a new way - it is to the concept of a big central distro that pushes everybody to do things one way, and which tends to depend on a lot of non-FOSS stuff to deliver the full experience, or which isn't community-driven. A distro that depends on their users to develop it is better (in my mind) than one which is independently financed and thus can focus more on users they don't even have.
I agree, but I also think Canonical need to start making a profit or else there really will be no Ubuntu in the future.
That's just a problem with their operating model. Lots of distros sustain themselves without making a profit. However, Ubuntu gained a lot of market share from those who can't really contribute back development effort, and as a result the distro is forced to sell their privacy away in order to pay for those who can do the development. Most other distros just focus on those who can contribute back and as a result they are self-sustaining with very little in the way of capital.
This is the problem with "success" of open projects as they grow they require more and more money to continue to reinforce their expansion and it only snowballs downhill from there.
I think a big line to cross is when you hire your first full-time developer. My distro hasn't crossed that line, and it is pretty careful even about expense reimbursements (not completely adverse to it, but it isn't about to pay for PCs just for developers to install the distro on). Distros that don't hire full-time devs tend to be limited to users who are nearly capable of being developers themselves, if they aren't actually official developers for the distro. Hiring full-time devs lets users who have more money than time/skills/etc donate and let somebody else do the work for them. However, it leads to a community of developers who isn't as connected to the community of users. Stuff like Unity is almost inevitable when that happens.
Granted, not all FOSS projects that pay somebody full-time have problems, but there definitely is a different character to projects that do this.
Well, what is the most popular Linux distro out there?
Among people like me? Not Ubuntu. Not even Mint. Debian is getting closer.
Sure, Ubuntu has lots of users, but most of them don't really contribute much to FOSS. They just want something shiny and packaged, and Ubuntu sells them a product that works. It isn't really a community - well, other than in the sense that things like OSX and Windows have communities.
To me a Linux distro needs to be about community, which means that a substantial portion of those using the distro contribute to it in some way. That means that a distro cannot depend on hired labor to do the work.
I doubt a successful Linux distro will ever get a lot of market share. The things that make a distro successful tend to make it less popular among the general public.
Most linux distros do just fine without making money. It only matters if you're trying to live off of it. Well, if Ubuntu's reason for being is so that Shuttleworth can afford a bigger yacht then there is nothing wrong with that, but it isn't like I owe him any help. I don't think that is what Shuttleworth is really about, and as a result it doesn't really matter if Ubuntu is a commercial success.
Lots of people invest their own money to make linux a success without any expectation of return. That's why they're called donations, and not investments. Most of these people just don't have millions to give.
All of this snidery is coming from people who don't understand that not everyone want to hand compile their own OS and don't think Richard Stallman is the Second Coming.
It isn't that they don't understand - it is that they don't care. They also don't care if Linux ever gains market share or becomes self-funding. They care that it works for them, and for others like them.
The challenge will be if Ubuntu actually makes it more practical to make binary-only software/drivers/etc for Linux that it may become harder to run pure open-source, as many companies that release driver source now might stop doing so. That could lead to a lot of forking and re-inventing the wheel, and you'll end up with two camps - those who are paid to work on Linux, and those who aren't.
That being said, I do not understand the ire which comes out every time anything is posted about Ubuntu.
I think the fear (one which I share) is over the mainstreaming of Linux.
Right now if you want to make your software available on Linux you need to either support many platforms, or more ideally just offer a source tarball. You get your applications from your distro.
If one Linux distro really takes off then you might find more and more applications that are binary-only linked against the libraries that particular distro uses. Suddenly you end up with less choice, because many parties would rather do it that way than publish their sources. The same thing would likely happen if Linux had a stable module ABI - suddenly people can still buy your server hardware if you don't publish your sources, and thus less source gets published. Selling a server without kernel support is a kiss of death for sales, since Linux has real market share in that domain.
Not sure I get what the problem with that is. The distro I use will likely never be able to hire a full-time developer, and yet it is a strong following. Not making money isn't a bug.
Sure, it would be nice to have the manpower to just go it alone and build whatever you want, but often this tends to make distros turn out like, well, Ubuntu.
Uh, when the brain's inner workings are figured out, you'll do whatever your robot overlord tells you to do. If the guy who figures it all out is nice you might be allowed to live - unless it is as a pet you won't be of any actual use to him, just like everybody else.
Well you're wrong about your claim that virtually all software is sold, that is just pure ignorance on your part.
This is incorrect. Virtually all software is sold, but is claimed by the vendor to be licensed.
What software have you bought rather than licensed?
Oh, just about anything would work as an example. I just bought FTL via Steam the other day. Like all software it comes with an incorrect 25-page-long document that claims it was licensed and not sold, but this is not the case. I paid money once with the expectation that I can make use of the software forever, and thus it is a sale. I didn't even read the big document that came with it - nothing in it not already supported by law is likely to be legally enforceable.
Anyway the prevailing point relevant here is that the XBox software is not sold to you, it is licensed.
The XBox was sold, along with everything inside the box. By law I can't distribute copies of any software inside without a license, but I own it just the same.
Can you point to a law that says otherwise? I'm not interested in documents written by software vendors. I can write a nice long document that says anything I'd like it to, as can they.
Those of us that actually have to Get Stuff Done use Ubuntu, and are up and running in ten minutes.
That very much depends on your definition of "Get Stuff Done." If you are only using your OS as a platform to run common applications like Libreoffice, Eclipse, etc, then sure you're up and running fast.
If getting stuff done means building an embedded system, or something else that is off the beaten path, then a distro like Gentoo is likely to be far more useful. You're going to have to rebuild half the system from source anyway, so you might as well use a distro that makes it easy.
Oh, and most people running Gentoo don't see any compiler output unless something goes wrong. It is suppressed if you're building in parallel.
I used to have a senior teacher that spent his past time involved with an organisation trying to decimalize time for SI. They gave up, primarily because they ruled that even if they 'base 10'ed' smaller time units like hours and minutes, they couldn't base 10 days or months or years without having to mix metric and imperial, it was simply impossible.
That is what should have happened to this.
Agreed. However, nobody defined a megasecond as 1209600 seconds because it lines up neatly with the fortnight, or a kilosecond as 3600 seconds to make it an hour.
A kilosecond IS 1000 seconds. That prefix doesn't get much use with time, but the unit is perfectly valid and if I used it everybody would know exactly what I'm talking about.
If the pioneers of computer science created the term "kibibyte" we'd be talking about how they were such geniuses. The fact that they didn't doesn't make them dumber, but I think the world would be better off if we didn't overload the SI prefixes.
As far as measuring in bits vs bytes - I think ditching the factor of 8 makes a lot of logical sense, but just as with seconds and minutes and 1024-byte kilobytes it is a tradition that we're likely stuck with. There is no reason we have to work with bits in groups of 8.
And just because you say that doesn't make it untrue, the fact is virtually all software is licensed, not sold, to customers. If you owned it you would be free to do whatever you wish with it, which you are not.
Just because you say that doesn't make it true, the fact is virtually all software is sold, and some is also licensed, to customers. The fact that you own it means that you ARE free to do whatever you wish with it, subject of course to law (which does limit your ability to distribute copies of it).
Obviously, because that isn't a power they are granted in the license agreement.
License agreements do not grant powers to those issuing them - they grant powers to those who wish to copy/distribute the software. If the Windows license agreeement stated that if you didn't name your firstborn Bill that they could tell you to stop using Windows, a court would never enforce the provision. Companies might put down on paper that they have various powers, but they have no power to enforce them except as already provided by law.
The fundamental point is that SI units are designed to make working across multiple domains of measurements simple and less prone to error (like the one that crashed that probe designed to orbit Mars).
Sometimes that means the units aren't ideal for every particular application. That doesn't change the fact that they're generally the best ones to use.
And, FWIW, storage on rotational media isn't particularly tied to binary in the first place. If it makes sense to ignore international standards for units in domains where it is less convenient, then it only makes sense to ignore standards within the domain of computer science when they are less convenient for particular elements of computing. If you're using 7-bit character sets just define a byte to be 7 bits...:)
Not sure if you noticed, but there is a steam overlay for Gentoo and I found that it basically "just works". Some games have issues with bundled libstdc++ which have impacted many distros, and removing that library often fixes the issues.
If you punch someone in the face and put them in the hospital, you don't get to say,"Oh, one punch to the face put you in the hospital? You really need to toughen up!" and get out of it. You still get arrested and go to jail.
Actually, you get booked, then released on a very small bail, and then you end up paying a fine.
Punching somebody in the face is a misdemeanor, unless a dangerous weapon is involved (we're talking a knife/gun too - not even a baseball bat unless you really go to town on somebody).
If Aaron assaulted a security guard on the way into the building he'd get far less time for that then hooking up the computer. That's why computer crimes are out of whack.
I dunno - I'd think that most cars driving hard on a track like that would have vastly shorter ranges than they would on a highway. Is a Honda Civic an impractical commuter car because it only gets 10mpg if you drive it at its maximum speed?
If they stated that these weren't serious reviews I think there would be less complaining. However, there is nothing on the show that suggests that when they put a car on a track that they're aren't intending to do a serious review on it.
I'm not sure I see the connection between price and acceptable levels of serviceability. Is it that if it's cheap and breaks, you can buy another so it's no big deal; but if it's expensive then you should be able to repair it? I'm sorry, but I'm not sure many people agree with you.
If a $30 toy car breaks, I buy a new one. It just isn't worth the effort to fix it.
If a $30k car breaks, I fix it or sell it to somebody who will fix it. That isn't exactly a throwaway item.
The more you pay for something, the longer you're likely to want it to live. A $1000 tablet that lasts 6 years is a much less expensive investment than a $1000 tablet that lasts 2 years.
The person doing the spoofing doesn't know what signal to expect in either case. However, in one case the radar operator knows exactly what signal to expect. That is definitely an element of asymmetry that favors the active radar operator.
Imagine a radar pulse that consisted of nothing more than a crytographically signed digest of the time. Nobody can generate that signal but the operator, though you could try to replay it (which means the operator gets two returns, and the first one is the non-spoofed one). You could never get a replayed signal back to the radar in less time than your reflection, because everything is limited to the speed of light.
Passive radar has its own advantages though that favor the operator. Nobody knows that it is operating, or where the receivers are. You can have multiple receivers and they can compare notes, which makes spoofing MUCH harder as it would be almost impossible to get a consistent picture to all of the receivers which can be anywhere. It also tends to defeat stealth since many forms of stealth only protect against reflections back to the transmission source.
It is also is something anybody can implement. In theory I can build my own passive receiver in my home, and nobody would ever know I had it. You can't go transmitting radar signals over long ranges without an FCC license without getting busted fairly quickly.
Just because Microsoft puts something in writing doesn't make it true. They can claim that they haven't sold the software to you, just like all those agreements at ski resorts say that you aren't allowed to sue them if you break a leg. It is nothing more than words unless a court agrees.
In general courts tend to only uphold stuff like that to the degree that they don't actually interfere with the purchaser's rights as an owner, or in situations where software is used more as a service than as a product. If MS told you that they decided you can't use a paid copy of Windows any longer and you never owned it to begin with, chances are a court would tell them to back off.
When a product changes hands, and a one-time payment of money changes hands, it is a sale. You own your software just like you own your car - you're not allowed to sell replica Camry's either but that doesn't mean that you don't own one if you buy it.
Yup, and stuff like this isn't unheard of. Chemists mounted a revolt over IUPAC's naming of element 106. However, in that case it was a matter of two bodies assigning two different never-before-used names to the same thing. The issue with the SI prefixes is that they were in use long before they were applied to bytes, which makes reaching a compromise harder.
No, but it doesn't exist where that property - in this case the software - doesn't belong to you, you are misinterpreting it. Can i do anything i want with your property? Can I do anything i like with public property? No, because it doesn't belong to me. You can do anything you like with your xbox, because it belongs to you.
So, it is rent-seeking behavior that is enabled by law. I've yet to see you give a single example of rent-seeking behavior anywhere and how it some how differs from what game console vendors are doing.
You actually do own software that you buy, just as you own books that you buy. You don't have the right to distribute copies of it without a license, but that doesn't change the fact that when you buy something you own it.
I guess, but in such a world we're going to end up with devices where various pieces of software give various measures of size, and when you have a 1TB data cap you will have no real idea what that means unless it is in the fine print.
The fact is that there is no consistently-used standard, even if we all want there to be one.
I dispute that your interpretation of such a concept applying to somebody else's property, it's Microsoft's network, not yours.
You didn't answer the question. What IS rent-seeking behavior? I didn't ask what it wasn't.
I don't dispute that the X-Box network is Microsoft's property. However, all instances of rent-seeking behavior involve somebody's property. Rent-seeking behavior usually isn't illegal. That's why everybody does it. It is still anti-consumer and should be illegal.
Wrong, clearly you don't understand hardware at all. How exactly do you think you're going to execute coded designed for a custom tri-core PowerPC architecture on a Cell 1x6 CPU?
By rewriting it for the correct architecture. Of course, it won't actually run on a PS3 in that case because simply writing it for the correct architecture is not sufficient - you need to have the code signed by Sony in that particular case. That is another case of rent-seeking behavior.
It's Microsoft's network, not your network, they choose what they offer on their network, they don't have to open it up to you just like you don't have to just open up your house to anybody. You are quite welcome to hack the hardware to make it run on another network if you so choose.
The issue isn't with Microsoft's network, but with MY X-Box (well, if I owned one) refusing to use any network BUT Microsoft's network. Sure, I can hack it, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's behavior is rent-seeking.
Again, if all this stuff isn't rent-seeking behavior, then what is? Do you simply dispute that the phenomenon exists? Most economists recognize it. They would disagree more about what to do about it, but I don't think many economists would consider it controversial to call the X-Box Live service a form of economic rent. Some might argue like you that there is nothing wrong with it, but I doubt anybody who understand the concept would argue that it doesn't apply.
Your argument seems to me like walking into a debate about whether professional soldiers killing other professional soldiers in the course of their duty is murder, and arguing that soldiers don't kill anybody.
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Uh, the distro I use didn't exist in 1998, nor did anything quite like it...
My opposition isn't to doing things in a new way - it is to the concept of a big central distro that pushes everybody to do things one way, and which tends to depend on a lot of non-FOSS stuff to deliver the full experience, or which isn't community-driven. A distro that depends on their users to develop it is better (in my mind) than one which is independently financed and thus can focus more on users they don't even have.
I agree, but I also think Canonical need to start making a profit or else there really will be no Ubuntu in the future.
That's just a problem with their operating model. Lots of distros sustain themselves without making a profit. However, Ubuntu gained a lot of market share from those who can't really contribute back development effort, and as a result the distro is forced to sell their privacy away in order to pay for those who can do the development. Most other distros just focus on those who can contribute back and as a result they are self-sustaining with very little in the way of capital.
This is the problem with "success" of open projects as they grow they require more and more money to continue to reinforce their expansion and it only snowballs downhill from there.
I think a big line to cross is when you hire your first full-time developer. My distro hasn't crossed that line, and it is pretty careful even about expense reimbursements (not completely adverse to it, but it isn't about to pay for PCs just for developers to install the distro on). Distros that don't hire full-time devs tend to be limited to users who are nearly capable of being developers themselves, if they aren't actually official developers for the distro. Hiring full-time devs lets users who have more money than time/skills/etc donate and let somebody else do the work for them. However, it leads to a community of developers who isn't as connected to the community of users. Stuff like Unity is almost inevitable when that happens.
Granted, not all FOSS projects that pay somebody full-time have problems, but there definitely is a different character to projects that do this.
Well, what is the most popular Linux distro out there?
Among people like me? Not Ubuntu. Not even Mint. Debian is getting closer.
Sure, Ubuntu has lots of users, but most of them don't really contribute much to FOSS. They just want something shiny and packaged, and Ubuntu sells them a product that works. It isn't really a community - well, other than in the sense that things like OSX and Windows have communities.
To me a Linux distro needs to be about community, which means that a substantial portion of those using the distro contribute to it in some way. That means that a distro cannot depend on hired labor to do the work.
I doubt a successful Linux distro will ever get a lot of market share. The things that make a distro successful tend to make it less popular among the general public.
ubuntu has to start making money at some point.
Why?
Most linux distros do just fine without making money. It only matters if you're trying to live off of it. Well, if Ubuntu's reason for being is so that Shuttleworth can afford a bigger yacht then there is nothing wrong with that, but it isn't like I owe him any help. I don't think that is what Shuttleworth is really about, and as a result it doesn't really matter if Ubuntu is a commercial success.
Lots of people invest their own money to make linux a success without any expectation of return. That's why they're called donations, and not investments. Most of these people just don't have millions to give.
All of this snidery is coming from people who don't understand that not everyone want to hand compile their own OS and don't think Richard Stallman is the Second Coming.
It isn't that they don't understand - it is that they don't care. They also don't care if Linux ever gains market share or becomes self-funding. They care that it works for them, and for others like them.
The challenge will be if Ubuntu actually makes it more practical to make binary-only software/drivers/etc for Linux that it may become harder to run pure open-source, as many companies that release driver source now might stop doing so. That could lead to a lot of forking and re-inventing the wheel, and you'll end up with two camps - those who are paid to work on Linux, and those who aren't.
That being said, I do not understand the ire which comes out every time anything is posted about Ubuntu.
I think the fear (one which I share) is over the mainstreaming of Linux.
Right now if you want to make your software available on Linux you need to either support many platforms, or more ideally just offer a source tarball. You get your applications from your distro.
If one Linux distro really takes off then you might find more and more applications that are binary-only linked against the libraries that particular distro uses. Suddenly you end up with less choice, because many parties would rather do it that way than publish their sources. The same thing would likely happen if Linux had a stable module ABI - suddenly people can still buy your server hardware if you don't publish your sources, and thus less source gets published. Selling a server without kernel support is a kiss of death for sales, since Linux has real market share in that domain.
Not sure I get what the problem with that is. The distro I use will likely never be able to hire a full-time developer, and yet it is a strong following. Not making money isn't a bug.
Sure, it would be nice to have the manpower to just go it alone and build whatever you want, but often this tends to make distros turn out like, well, Ubuntu.
Uh, when the brain's inner workings are figured out, you'll do whatever your robot overlord tells you to do. If the guy who figures it all out is nice you might be allowed to live - unless it is as a pet you won't be of any actual use to him, just like everybody else.
Well you're wrong about your claim that virtually all software is sold, that is just pure ignorance on your part.
This is incorrect. Virtually all software is sold, but is claimed by the vendor to be licensed.
What software have you bought rather than licensed?
Oh, just about anything would work as an example. I just bought FTL via Steam the other day. Like all software it comes with an incorrect 25-page-long document that claims it was licensed and not sold, but this is not the case. I paid money once with the expectation that I can make use of the software forever, and thus it is a sale. I didn't even read the big document that came with it - nothing in it not already supported by law is likely to be legally enforceable.
Anyway the prevailing point relevant here is that the XBox software is not sold to you, it is licensed.
The XBox was sold, along with everything inside the box. By law I can't distribute copies of any software inside without a license, but I own it just the same.
Can you point to a law that says otherwise? I'm not interested in documents written by software vendors. I can write a nice long document that says anything I'd like it to, as can they.
Those of us that actually have to Get Stuff Done use Ubuntu, and are up and running in ten minutes.
That very much depends on your definition of "Get Stuff Done." If you are only using your OS as a platform to run common applications like Libreoffice, Eclipse, etc, then sure you're up and running fast.
If getting stuff done means building an embedded system, or something else that is off the beaten path, then a distro like Gentoo is likely to be far more useful. You're going to have to rebuild half the system from source anyway, so you might as well use a distro that makes it easy.
Oh, and most people running Gentoo don't see any compiler output unless something goes wrong. It is suppressed if you're building in parallel.
I used to have a senior teacher that spent his past time involved with an organisation trying to decimalize time for SI. They gave up, primarily because they ruled that even if they 'base 10'ed' smaller time units like hours and minutes, they couldn't base 10 days or months or years without having to mix metric and imperial, it was simply impossible.
That is what should have happened to this.
Agreed. However, nobody defined a megasecond as 1209600 seconds because it lines up neatly with the fortnight, or a kilosecond as 3600 seconds to make it an hour.
A kilosecond IS 1000 seconds. That prefix doesn't get much use with time, but the unit is perfectly valid and if I used it everybody would know exactly what I'm talking about.
If the pioneers of computer science created the term "kibibyte" we'd be talking about how they were such geniuses. The fact that they didn't doesn't make them dumber, but I think the world would be better off if we didn't overload the SI prefixes.
As far as measuring in bits vs bytes - I think ditching the factor of 8 makes a lot of logical sense, but just as with seconds and minutes and 1024-byte kilobytes it is a tradition that we're likely stuck with. There is no reason we have to work with bits in groups of 8.
And just because you say that doesn't make it untrue, the fact is virtually all software is licensed, not sold, to customers. If you owned it you would be free to do whatever you wish with it, which you are not.
Just because you say that doesn't make it true, the fact is virtually all software is sold, and some is also licensed, to customers. The fact that you own it means that you ARE free to do whatever you wish with it, subject of course to law (which does limit your ability to distribute copies of it).
Obviously, because that isn't a power they are granted in the license agreement.
License agreements do not grant powers to those issuing them - they grant powers to those who wish to copy/distribute the software. If the Windows license agreeement stated that if you didn't name your firstborn Bill that they could tell you to stop using Windows, a court would never enforce the provision. Companies might put down on paper that they have various powers, but they have no power to enforce them except as already provided by law.
The fundamental point is that SI units are designed to make working across multiple domains of measurements simple and less prone to error (like the one that crashed that probe designed to orbit Mars).
Sometimes that means the units aren't ideal for every particular application. That doesn't change the fact that they're generally the best ones to use.
And, FWIW, storage on rotational media isn't particularly tied to binary in the first place. If it makes sense to ignore international standards for units in domains where it is less convenient, then it only makes sense to ignore standards within the domain of computer science when they are less convenient for particular elements of computing. If you're using 7-bit character sets just define a byte to be 7 bits... :)
+5 Funny? :)
Not sure if you noticed, but there is a steam overlay for Gentoo and I found that it basically "just works". Some games have issues with bundled libstdc++ which have impacted many distros, and removing that library often fixes the issues.
If you punch someone in the face and put them in the hospital, you don't get to say,"Oh, one punch to the face put you in the hospital? You really need to toughen up!" and get out of it. You still get arrested and go to jail.
Actually, you get booked, then released on a very small bail, and then you end up paying a fine.
Punching somebody in the face is a misdemeanor, unless a dangerous weapon is involved (we're talking a knife/gun too - not even a baseball bat unless you really go to town on somebody).
If Aaron assaulted a security guard on the way into the building he'd get far less time for that then hooking up the computer. That's why computer crimes are out of whack.
I dunno - I'd think that most cars driving hard on a track like that would have vastly shorter ranges than they would on a highway. Is a Honda Civic an impractical commuter car because it only gets 10mpg if you drive it at its maximum speed?
If they stated that these weren't serious reviews I think there would be less complaining. However, there is nothing on the show that suggests that when they put a car on a track that they're aren't intending to do a serious review on it.
I'm not sure I see the connection between price and acceptable levels of serviceability. Is it that if it's cheap and breaks, you can buy another so it's no big deal; but if it's expensive then you should be able to repair it? I'm sorry, but I'm not sure many people agree with you.
If a $30 toy car breaks, I buy a new one. It just isn't worth the effort to fix it.
If a $30k car breaks, I fix it or sell it to somebody who will fix it. That isn't exactly a throwaway item.
The more you pay for something, the longer you're likely to want it to live. A $1000 tablet that lasts 6 years is a much less expensive investment than a $1000 tablet that lasts 2 years.
The person doing the spoofing doesn't know what signal to expect in either case. However, in one case the radar operator knows exactly what signal to expect. That is definitely an element of asymmetry that favors the active radar operator.
Imagine a radar pulse that consisted of nothing more than a crytographically signed digest of the time. Nobody can generate that signal but the operator, though you could try to replay it (which means the operator gets two returns, and the first one is the non-spoofed one). You could never get a replayed signal back to the radar in less time than your reflection, because everything is limited to the speed of light.
Passive radar has its own advantages though that favor the operator. Nobody knows that it is operating, or where the receivers are. You can have multiple receivers and they can compare notes, which makes spoofing MUCH harder as it would be almost impossible to get a consistent picture to all of the receivers which can be anywhere. It also tends to defeat stealth since many forms of stealth only protect against reflections back to the transmission source.
It is also is something anybody can implement. In theory I can build my own passive receiver in my home, and nobody would ever know I had it. You can't go transmitting radar signals over long ranges without an FCC license without getting busted fairly quickly.
Just because Microsoft puts something in writing doesn't make it true. They can claim that they haven't sold the software to you, just like all those agreements at ski resorts say that you aren't allowed to sue them if you break a leg. It is nothing more than words unless a court agrees.
In general courts tend to only uphold stuff like that to the degree that they don't actually interfere with the purchaser's rights as an owner, or in situations where software is used more as a service than as a product. If MS told you that they decided you can't use a paid copy of Windows any longer and you never owned it to begin with, chances are a court would tell them to back off.
When a product changes hands, and a one-time payment of money changes hands, it is a sale. You own your software just like you own your car - you're not allowed to sell replica Camry's either but that doesn't mean that you don't own one if you buy it.
No you don't, you buy a licence to use software, you own the license, not the software.
Incorrect, you buy the software. You need a license to distribute copies of software, not to use it.
Yup, and stuff like this isn't unheard of. Chemists mounted a revolt over IUPAC's naming of element 106. However, in that case it was a matter of two bodies assigning two different never-before-used names to the same thing. The issue with the SI prefixes is that they were in use long before they were applied to bytes, which makes reaching a compromise harder.
No, but it doesn't exist where that property - in this case the software - doesn't belong to you, you are misinterpreting it. Can i do anything i want with your property? Can I do anything i like with public property? No, because it doesn't belong to me. You can do anything you like with your xbox, because it belongs to you.
So, it is rent-seeking behavior that is enabled by law. I've yet to see you give a single example of rent-seeking behavior anywhere and how it some how differs from what game console vendors are doing.
You actually do own software that you buy, just as you own books that you buy. You don't have the right to distribute copies of it without a license, but that doesn't change the fact that when you buy something you own it.
I guess, but in such a world we're going to end up with devices where various pieces of software give various measures of size, and when you have a 1TB data cap you will have no real idea what that means unless it is in the fine print.
The fact is that there is no consistently-used standard, even if we all want there to be one.
I dispute that your interpretation of such a concept applying to somebody else's property, it's Microsoft's network, not yours.
You didn't answer the question. What IS rent-seeking behavior? I didn't ask what it wasn't.
I don't dispute that the X-Box network is Microsoft's property. However, all instances of rent-seeking behavior involve somebody's property. Rent-seeking behavior usually isn't illegal. That's why everybody does it. It is still anti-consumer and should be illegal.
Wrong, clearly you don't understand hardware at all. How exactly do you think you're going to execute coded designed for a custom tri-core PowerPC architecture on a Cell 1x6 CPU?
By rewriting it for the correct architecture. Of course, it won't actually run on a PS3 in that case because simply writing it for the correct architecture is not sufficient - you need to have the code signed by Sony in that particular case. That is another case of rent-seeking behavior.
It's Microsoft's network, not your network, they choose what they offer on their network, they don't have to open it up to you just like you don't have to just open up your house to anybody. You are quite welcome to hack the hardware to make it run on another network if you so choose.
The issue isn't with Microsoft's network, but with MY X-Box (well, if I owned one) refusing to use any network BUT Microsoft's network. Sure, I can hack it, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's behavior is rent-seeking.
Again, if all this stuff isn't rent-seeking behavior, then what is? Do you simply dispute that the phenomenon exists? Most economists recognize it. They would disagree more about what to do about it, but I don't think many economists would consider it controversial to call the X-Box Live service a form of economic rent. Some might argue like you that there is nothing wrong with it, but I doubt anybody who understand the concept would argue that it doesn't apply.
Your argument seems to me like walking into a debate about whether professional soldiers killing other professional soldiers in the course of their duty is murder, and arguing that soldiers don't kill anybody.