Is it sexist to mention that as computer science is no longer the gateway to financial riches that it was once seen to be (new motto: "we outsource you") that more people who would not otherwise be drawn into it, well, don't and that this might have something to do with it?
Sigh. Highly dubious to you. Not to the rest of the world, where academically and in practice the link has shown to be about as solid as anything that can be proven in the world of economics.
Your "tiger" tale basically tells me that you are at undergraduate level of cluelessness in this. which is fine - we were all there once - but please stop being so belligerent.
Yes, countries go from IP rebelliousness to adopting IPR as they become prosperous. However, this is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is the actual amount of innovation produced. In case you did not notice, "tiger" economies grow by what economists call FACTOR GROWTH, not by actually doing anything new. In other words, tiger economies grow because local or outside companies decide they can do something CHEAPER that is done on the outside - be it build cars, transistor radios, or software. However, in case you didnt notice this, the real story of tiger economies is that they have this amazing growth AND THEN THEY LEVEL OF AT, or typically JUST BELOW the level of "developed" countries. Why? Because the growth was due to basically COST EFFICIENCIES, and at that point the cost efficiencies are all realized.
Now, take this one step forward: which tiger economies have actually surpassed or equaled the developed countries? EXACTLY THOSE THAT HAVE ENACTED STRONG IPR, and thus encouraged actual innovation.
In other words, who has actually brought you more advances? Singapore (where there is strong IPR or Taiwan? hint: singapore by a factor of 10. while taiwan is great at producing clone PCs, innovation does not actually come from there. who has brought you more INNOVATIVE goods that actually improve the state of the art - Japan or China? (JAPAN, duh).
Look, it's nice because you are still have beginner thoughts about all this. And you're right, there are legitimate debates about the length of protection required and so forth. But the basic idea that IPR promotes innovation in economies in general is as obvious to economists (and many others) as evolution is to biologists.
Your initial point was that the size of his donation was not that large. Then, you proceed to make excuses why his is not bigger. So, his is bigger in both absolute and percentage terms. You also neglect to mention that a) the guy actually follows through where his money goes so that it is used wisely and b) that he has plans to basically give away EVERYTHING by the time he's gone.
I mean really. See beyond your jealousy and hatred of IE's "broken HTML" and other assorted technical-philosophical gripes for one minute.
The link points to basically an idiot denunciation of the TRIPS protocol - basically some economically illiterate screed by the same people who badly photocopy "socialist news" and leave copies at smoky coffee shops. Overthrow the proletariat another day, buddy. Today, get your head out of your ass long enough to congratulate a man who not only gives huge sums of money for the right cause, but has the integrity to follow it to make sure it's going where it is needed.
Unless you can honestly claim to give a larger percentage of your salary to charity than bill gates has, then I encourage you to please enjoy a hearty slice of shut the hell up.
Or maybe Roman Abramovich is a model citizen, because, while he wastes his money on football teams, yachts, and whores, at least he hasn't made (gasp! horror!) a closed-source operating system? That's really what it's about, isn't it?
Here's a simple example: compare the number of new pharmaceuticals developed in countries with strong IP regulations compared to those that don't.
Now, expand your 'test' into virtually any avenue of economic endeavour that you can think of: aviation, automotive, medical devices, consumer electronics, manufacturing process, chemical production, etc etc and you will see that in essentially every case, the systems with stronger IPR have historically done better in providing a better quality and quantity of items for their citizens. EVERY TIME.
Just because you have no actual knowledge of the subject and therefore subject me to the silliest of challenges does not make you right.
You're right about the duplicity of "typical slashdot logic" (yes, expect the usual reply about how "slashdot is not one person, but many and there are many opinions here", though we all known damn well what the underlying mentality that is "slashbot" thinks and you hit the nail on the head)
However, you are completely off the mark about the consumer getting screwed.
What the consumer gets is new and better inventions - walkmen in this case. Point to ANY technological field - be it automobiles, machine parts, washers/dryers, consumer electronics - whatever! and try telling me honestly that the consumer hasn't been the ultimate winner thanks to a patent system that has, for all its faults, encouraged innovation well. It would take an incredible amount of self-deception to convince oneself that we'd have EVEN better cars and EVEN better everything else were it not for the patent system giving companies and individuals incentive over the years to invest as heavily in R&D as they did.
Actually, that's the complete OPPOSITE of what the story says. Rather, it says that the inventor stood up for his rights and won, eventually, and now will receive more money than you will ever see in your lifetime despite actually producing ZERO units himself and doing a step that some might characterize as marginally novel.
But dont worry! Keep belieiving your junior-high school grade korporation konspiracy. I'm sure there will be plenty of other stories on slashdot where you'll get modded insightful for it!
While we're piling on ebay here, someething should be said about the comedy that is "negative feedback."
Of course, it works like this: if you leave negative feedback for a scammer, he leaves it for you. Sure, if you're lucky, the scammer will be de-registered and your negative feedback will disappear. However, you have no guarantee of this. Hence, you play it safe and do not leave negative feedback for fraudsters, and everybody loses.
fair enough on your style comments. though writing on slashdot is sometimes like pissing into an ocean. after a while, you just stop caring if you offend anybody..
my criticism is for "emotional design." If I had the time, I could point out a dozen critical flaws in the first chapter alone, some of which border on intellectual dishonesty by the author (or at least serious leaps of logic). "everyday things" goes in my list of best books ever. "emotional design", while containing many good bits, needs to be taken wit several large grains of salt and because of this should be kept as far away from those academically studying or relatively new to usability as possible.
Alas, I simply don't have the time, and slashdot gives me the forum to bleat out my opinion like this without bothering to actually back them up. a crime, I know. but this is slashdot, not a book.
Should we lock up hackers who break into bank computers and transfer money to their own accounts?
Should we lock up white collar criminals like corrupt CEOs?
Both may have committed only computer crimes involving ones and zeroes. And the results of both may be completely reversible. Yet every society in the world agrees that jail is an option for such people. Likewise, while no serious person proposes jail time for the act of downloading a few songs off the internet, large-scale distributors of copyright infringing material on the net are basically involved in an organized crime and should be subject to the same criminal penalties as somebody who, for example, runs a major counterfeiting operation. You dont need to be an expert criminologist to figure out that the threat of fines alone are a sufficient deterrent to such people.
Society has developed white collar prisons for a legitimate reason. And yes, the number does matter. I understand what you are trying to say, but you are wrong.
Incidentally, nice work in trying to subtly shift the topic from "CDs" to "digital piracy." Yay unethical discussion technique!
Sigh. Your tired argument has been dismantled so many times at so many levels of court cases it's not even funny. Stop it already. It doesn't work It's not true. It doesn't hold water. GIVE UP YOUR OLD AND BUSTED MYTH ALREADY. It's BULLSHIAT.
Repeat after me:
SIGNIFICANT, LEGITIMATE NON-INFRINGING USES.
To anybody with a brain, it's obvious that the Kazaa business rests entirely on getting large numbers of people into the product, and the only way they get large numbers of people into the product is by being a gateway to illegal items. All those other theoretical uses for kazaa exist at the margins.
That must be some universtity, where a researcher asks slashdot users about usability. slashdot is where usability goes to die. Viva the CLI! Users are idiots! Consistency is for the simple minded! et cetera ad infinitum.
For god's sake, woman. Read some Norman for the theoretical background (his older book, not his newer shite which pisses all over his previous work without any real reason to other than to shine his own "i'm a high priced consultant" knob now. Then, and this is serious though it's bound to not be seen as such here: read the MS stuff on usability. What MS stuff? Their design guidelines for apps. Or, read apple's. Forget the details - look for the philosophical points they emphasize there since whatever you get there certainly is a distilled version of what they have learned through years of getting it right.
(did I say MS got something right? ooh.. into the "troll" basket i go!)
If you want to sue infringers, you basically have two choices:
Sue them for the cost of the item stolen. In other words, pirate a $10 CD, pay $10.
Sue them for much more than this, for its deterrent / punitive value. Pirate a $10 CD, pay $1000.
The problem, of course, that #1 amounts to no deterrent at all (what would be the point of paying for the something if the maximum penalty for stealing it is just paying anyway) and #2 makes you seem like the bad guy and all the slashdot idiots are screaming and hollering bloody murder as to how you're going after grannies.
So here we see a case where they're *gasp* going after the actual source of much of the infringement and *surprise surprise* some idiot on slashdot tries to find yet another way to justify them. This time, it's by basically trying some sort of perverted comparison to murderers and rapists and then making the economically dubious statement that such activity "doesn't hurt anybody."
Note to idiot: Kazaa basically engaged in making "digital copies for profit." It's basically ALL they did, plus or minus some pseudophilosophical smokescreen.
I have absolutely no doubts that you personally can wax intellectual on IP issues. However, slashdot as a whole has shown itself to be a morass of ignorance, superstition, and bullshiat "folk wisdom" or equally bullshiat "new thinking."
Not that the lawyers are often right, but to dismiss them out of hand simply BECAUSE they are lawyers, politicians, or, (like myself), an actual trained economist (who happens to run a small software company), is ludicrous.
Oh, I just KNEW there would be one person out there who would reply as you have.
I will treat your first sentence as a legitimate question asked in the spirit of honest enqiry.
Basically, no. While being fast and effective are attributes of good usability, they are hardly the only ones (well, "effective" is such a generic word it's possible to turn that into anything.) Other factors include ease of learning how to use it, and ease of remembering how to use it after you've been away from it for a while, and suitability for the tasks.
Here's something that I hope should make the light bulb click on for you, since once you really get this, it should make you a better technologist:
It's not really hard to make a system that is FAST, but is poor in other areas. For example, a CLI can be FAST and suitable for a wide range of task, but is piss poor when it comes to learnability and ease of remembering after a while.
Likewise, it is not hard to make a system that is easy to learn, but is poor and inflexible, like a really stupidly designed wizard.
The WRONG way of thinking is to consider the two as tradeoffs. "If you want fast, you MUST give up on other areas" is bullshit.
The RIGHT way of thinking is that "good design is where I can gain in one area without losing in another." Yes, usability design is HARD. It requires THOUGHT, PROTOTYPING, and (here's the real kicker): TESTING ON ACTUAL USERS.
This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome^H^H^H^H^H Linux is a disease.
In all seriousness, as a long time Linux critic (mainly for reasons related to immaturity on a number of fronts, technical, philosophical, marketing, usability, and otherwise), I applaud this statement. Really. Hopefully "that Torvalds said it" will mark some sort of turning point in the Linux world in general towards the realization that usability and design matter, and that the CLI (for example), no matter how fast and effective in the hands of a highly experienced, frequent user, is the antithesis of usability.
"Those who review films for a living are notoriously unreliable, and in many cases, they miss the whole point altogether."
This is the main slashdot arrogance. Basically, "everybody who disagrees with my view is an idiot, shortsighted, underinformed. I, as a coder, am much more capable of being objective and have a wider ken than credentialed or recognized professionals in:"
Law (especially pertaining copyright, etc.)
Politics
Economics (especially the economics of copyright, etc.)
Business (especially when it involves telling copyright holders how to run theirs..)
and now... movie reviews!
Double plus extra my comment if the subjet matter involves one of the following:
intellectual property / copyright
geek lore ("Aeon Flux", "Star Wars", "Lord of the Rings", "Simpsons").
I have several times found content through google cache that the original publisher has taken down. If you make the argument that google is simply only pointing to a live site, then I think google has a responsibility to absolutely not publish out of date material or material that the original author has "unpublished." Otherwise, google are, in my opinion, very clearly engaging in copyright violation. I think the right to unpublish is an important one. Yes, "information wants to be free" is a good shibboleth, but if that's your rebuttal, then at least admit that google does, in fact reproduce content.
Yes, yes, and yes. We have two virtually identical products with different approaches to DRM, etc, and the results are basically a 100% certainty. We're talking about tens of thousands of purchaed products in the field and data points so obvious that they're basically undeniable. I dont mean to be so clear cut, and this being slashdot I dont want to spill who we are, etc. but I can say with all honesty that yes, a strong DRM solution has 100% (or within 10 sigma or whatever other metric of "well beyond reasonable doubt certainty") absolutely been in this case beneficial from a business standpoint in making one product significantly more profitable than the other.
Incidentally, the product without strong DRM was that way at first because we had figured that the user base was 'professional' and was unlikely to pirate. this turned out to be a false assumption. v2 of that product has had strong DRM and sales have gone up many more times despite the fact that the product is essentially similar.
In short, you can question my methodology and this being slashdot you will reach some point where I just wont tell you because this is slashdot and i'd rather preserve my relative anonymity than spill all the beans, so please just trust me when i honestly say that DRM has paid off for our small/medium company in a very very very obvious way.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it sexist to mention that as computer science is no longer the gateway to financial riches that it was once seen to be (new motto: "we outsource you") that more people who would not otherwise be drawn into it, well, don't and that this might have something to do with it?
Yes, I most certainly can imagine this.
Your "tiger" tale basically tells me that you are at undergraduate level of cluelessness in this. which is fine - we were all there once - but please stop being so belligerent.
Yes, countries go from IP rebelliousness to adopting IPR as they become prosperous. However, this is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is the actual amount of innovation produced. In case you did not notice, "tiger" economies grow by what economists call FACTOR GROWTH, not by actually doing anything new. In other words, tiger economies grow because local or outside companies decide they can do something CHEAPER that is done on the outside - be it build cars, transistor radios, or software. However, in case you didnt notice this, the real story of tiger economies is that they have this amazing growth AND THEN THEY LEVEL OF AT, or typically JUST BELOW the level of "developed" countries. Why? Because the growth was due to basically COST EFFICIENCIES, and at that point the cost efficiencies are all realized.
Now, take this one step forward: which tiger economies have actually surpassed or equaled the developed countries? EXACTLY THOSE THAT HAVE ENACTED STRONG IPR, and thus encouraged actual innovation. In other words, who has actually brought you more advances? Singapore (where there is strong IPR or Taiwan? hint: singapore by a factor of 10. while taiwan is great at producing clone PCs, innovation does not actually come from there. who has brought you more INNOVATIVE goods that actually improve the state of the art - Japan or China? (JAPAN, duh).
Look, it's nice because you are still have beginner thoughts about all this. And you're right, there are legitimate debates about the length of protection required and so forth. But the basic idea that IPR promotes innovation in economies in general is as obvious to economists (and many others) as evolution is to biologists.
I mean really. See beyond your jealousy and hatred of IE's "broken HTML" and other assorted technical-philosophical gripes for one minute.
The link points to basically an idiot denunciation of the TRIPS protocol - basically some economically illiterate screed by the same people who badly photocopy "socialist news" and leave copies at smoky coffee shops. Overthrow the proletariat another day, buddy. Today, get your head out of your ass long enough to congratulate a man who not only gives huge sums of money for the right cause, but has the integrity to follow it to make sure it's going where it is needed.
Or maybe Roman Abramovich is a model citizen, because, while he wastes his money on football teams, yachts, and whores, at least he hasn't made (gasp! horror!) a closed-source operating system? That's really what it's about, isn't it?
Here's a simple example: compare the number of new pharmaceuticals developed in countries with strong IP regulations compared to those that don't.
Now, expand your 'test' into virtually any avenue of economic endeavour that you can think of: aviation, automotive, medical devices, consumer electronics, manufacturing process, chemical production, etc etc and you will see that in essentially every case, the systems with stronger IPR have historically done better in providing a better quality and quantity of items for their citizens. EVERY TIME.
Just because you have no actual knowledge of the subject and therefore subject me to the silliest of challenges does not make you right.
However, you are completely off the mark about the consumer getting screwed.
What the consumer gets is new and better inventions - walkmen in this case. Point to ANY technological field - be it automobiles, machine parts, washers/dryers, consumer electronics - whatever! and try telling me honestly that the consumer hasn't been the ultimate winner thanks to a patent system that has, for all its faults, encouraged innovation well. It would take an incredible amount of self-deception to convince oneself that we'd have EVEN better cars and EVEN better everything else were it not for the patent system giving companies and individuals incentive over the years to invest as heavily in R&D as they did.
But dont worry! Keep belieiving your junior-high school grade korporation konspiracy. I'm sure there will be plenty of other stories on slashdot where you'll get modded insightful for it!
Of course, it works like this: if you leave negative feedback for a scammer, he leaves it for you. Sure, if you're lucky, the scammer will be de-registered and your negative feedback will disappear. However, you have no guarantee of this. Hence, you play it safe and do not leave negative feedback for fraudsters, and everybody loses.
my criticism is for "emotional design." If I had the time, I could point out a dozen critical flaws in the first chapter alone, some of which border on intellectual dishonesty by the author (or at least serious leaps of logic). "everyday things" goes in my list of best books ever. "emotional design", while containing many good bits, needs to be taken wit several large grains of salt and because of this should be kept as far away from those academically studying or relatively new to usability as possible.
Alas, I simply don't have the time, and slashdot gives me the forum to bleat out my opinion like this without bothering to actually back them up. a crime, I know. but this is slashdot, not a book.
- Should we lock up hackers who break into bank computers and transfer money to their own accounts?
- Should we lock up white collar criminals like corrupt CEOs?
Both may have committed only computer crimes involving ones and zeroes. And the results of both may be completely reversible. Yet every society in the world agrees that jail is an option for such people. Likewise, while no serious person proposes jail time for the act of downloading a few songs off the internet, large-scale distributors of copyright infringing material on the net are basically involved in an organized crime and should be subject to the same criminal penalties as somebody who, for example, runs a major counterfeiting operation. You dont need to be an expert criminologist to figure out that the threat of fines alone are a sufficient deterrent to such people.Society has developed white collar prisons for a legitimate reason. And yes, the number does matter. I understand what you are trying to say, but you are wrong.
Incidentally, nice work in trying to subtly shift the topic from "CDs" to "digital piracy." Yay unethical discussion technique!
Repeat after me:
SIGNIFICANT, LEGITIMATE NON-INFRINGING USES.
To anybody with a brain, it's obvious that the Kazaa business rests entirely on getting large numbers of people into the product, and the only way they get large numbers of people into the product is by being a gateway to illegal items. All those other theoretical uses for kazaa exist at the margins.
Who suggested jail time for ONE CD stolen? The people who modded you up for making a bullshit scarecrow response should be ashamed of themselves.
For god's sake, woman. Read some Norman for the theoretical background (his older book, not his newer shite which pisses all over his previous work without any real reason to other than to shine his own "i'm a high priced consultant" knob now. Then, and this is serious though it's bound to not be seen as such here: read the MS stuff on usability. What MS stuff? Their design guidelines for apps. Or, read apple's. Forget the details - look for the philosophical points they emphasize there since whatever you get there certainly is a distilled version of what they have learned through years of getting it right.
(did I say MS got something right? ooh .. into the "troll" basket i go!)
If you want to sue infringers, you basically have two choices:
The problem, of course, that #1 amounts to no deterrent at all (what would be the point of paying for the something if the maximum penalty for stealing it is just paying anyway) and #2 makes you seem like the bad guy and all the slashdot idiots are screaming and hollering bloody murder as to how you're going after grannies.
So here we see a case where they're *gasp* going after the actual source of much of the infringement and *surprise surprise* some idiot on slashdot tries to find yet another way to justify them. This time, it's by basically trying some sort of perverted comparison to murderers and rapists and then making the economically dubious statement that such activity "doesn't hurt anybody."
Note to idiot: Kazaa basically engaged in making "digital copies for profit." It's basically ALL they did, plus or minus some pseudophilosophical smokescreen.
Would it be too gratuitous to mention that at least some percntage of the fault lies with the unethical idiots actually doing the theft?
I have absolutely no doubts that you personally can wax intellectual on IP issues. However, slashdot as a whole has shown itself to be a morass of ignorance, superstition, and bullshiat "folk wisdom" or equally bullshiat "new thinking."
Not that the lawyers are often right, but to dismiss them out of hand simply BECAUSE they are lawyers, politicians, or, (like myself), an actual trained economist (who happens to run a small software company), is ludicrous.
I will treat your first sentence as a legitimate question asked in the spirit of honest enqiry.
Basically, no. While being fast and effective are attributes of good usability, they are hardly the only ones (well, "effective" is such a generic word it's possible to turn that into anything.) Other factors include ease of learning how to use it, and ease of remembering how to use it after you've been away from it for a while, and suitability for the tasks.
Here's something that I hope should make the light bulb click on for you, since once you really get this, it should make you a better technologist:
It's not really hard to make a system that is FAST, but is poor in other areas. For example, a CLI can be FAST and suitable for a wide range of task, but is piss poor when it comes to learnability and ease of remembering after a while.
Likewise, it is not hard to make a system that is easy to learn, but is poor and inflexible, like a really stupidly designed wizard.
The WRONG way of thinking is to consider the two as tradeoffs. "If you want fast, you MUST give up on other areas" is bullshit.
The RIGHT way of thinking is that "good design is where I can gain in one area without losing in another." Yes, usability design is HARD. It requires THOUGHT, PROTOTYPING, and (here's the real kicker): TESTING ON ACTUAL USERS.
In all seriousness, as a long time Linux critic (mainly for reasons related to immaturity on a number of fronts, technical, philosophical, marketing, usability, and otherwise), I applaud this statement. Really. Hopefully "that Torvalds said it" will mark some sort of turning point in the Linux world in general towards the realization that usability and design matter, and that the CLI (for example), no matter how fast and effective in the hands of a highly experienced, frequent user, is the antithesis of usability.
This is the main slashdot arrogance. Basically, "everybody who disagrees with my view is an idiot, shortsighted, underinformed. I, as a coder, am much more capable of being objective and have a wider ken than credentialed or recognized professionals in:"
- Law (especially pertaining copyright, etc.)
- Politics
- Economics (especially the economics of copyright, etc.)
- Business (especially when it involves telling copyright holders how to run theirs..)
- and now... movie reviews!
Double plus extra my comment if the subjet matter involves one of the following:1993 called and wanted its "+5, insightful" laptop comment back.
/ and also my hip language.
Did you hear the one about the news reporter / famous male actor who stuck the hamster up his butt? I heard that's also true.
O RLY?
I have several times found content through google cache that the original publisher has taken down. If you make the argument that google is simply only pointing to a live site, then I think google has a responsibility to absolutely not publish out of date material or material that the original author has "unpublished." Otherwise, google are, in my opinion, very clearly engaging in copyright violation. I think the right to unpublish is an important one. Yes, "information wants to be free" is a good shibboleth, but if that's your rebuttal, then at least admit that google does, in fact reproduce content.
Incidentally, the product without strong DRM was that way at first because we had figured that the user base was 'professional' and was unlikely to pirate. this turned out to be a false assumption. v2 of that product has had strong DRM and sales have gone up many more times despite the fact that the product is essentially similar.
In short, you can question my methodology and this being slashdot you will reach some point where I just wont tell you because this is slashdot and i'd rather preserve my relative anonymity than spill all the beans, so please just trust me when i honestly say that DRM has paid off for our small/medium company in a very very very obvious way.