You don't seem to get it. I've never heard of Alcoa, but Microsoft was "giving away" a lot of stuff like IE and Media Player to the detriment of competitors like Netscape and Real. Are you next going to argue that the regulators cracked down on the practice to protect us from getting this stuff for free?
Getting back to the topic at hand... if you're going to allow your VOIP service to communicate both ways (inbound and outbound calls) with people using POTS telephones, you need to bridge the gap. That means using the phone networks, and it means issuing extra telephone numbers.
Which means that while other VOIP providers are required to pay the existing carriers like Bell Canada for the use of their services, the existing carriers are under no such financial pressure. So they can undercut the startups until they fail, then start adding in "service fees" until we're back right where we started in terms of cost.
If you want to have competition between the monopoly that owns the lines and their competitors that rent the lines from them, you NEED regulation. How else are you going to do it?
Did anyone else find amusement in their description of "Primus Telecommunications, Vonage, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Vidéotron" as startups?
Personally, I think the way to go is to seize control of the wires back from the telcos and give it to the government, then take advantage of the "efficiencies of the market" by hiring the private sector to maintain and improve it. Same as we do with roads, sanitation, etc.
I find it hard to believe that this guy would treat someone who's leaving an IT job this way. I have found more than one manager who preferred to pay me for the two weeks and hustle me out the door when I give them notice than so they can secure their networks against me, which is something that I consider a wise move.
Not to say that you should sully yourself and your reputation with backdoor hacks and retribution, but it's a dumb manager that leaves you in a position to do so then provides incentive to do so by acting like a jerk. Your boss needs to be hit with a clue stick... there aren't too many ppl that can fuck up a business like an IT guy with inside knowledge and a chip on his shoulder.
I notice the photographs on your website are 'Copyright Benjamin Kaufman 2004'. You will be just as meekly accepting if I rip those off and put them on my website as by myself then?
If you want good co-op games you can play with your wife, you can't go wrong with Bioware. The Baldurs Gate series in particular is great for playing with chicks... the ability to pause the game at any time is great for those who don't have the highly developed fast-twitch mousing ability:P
Actually, most people don't have a problem with the patent system because they are
a) Too stupid to understand the problem b) Too ignorant to understand the problem c) Not imaginative enough to concieve that there could be something better d) Already using the patent system to screw society to their own advantage.
The stupid and the ignorant don't see the corelation between things like retardedly overpriced drugs and patents. They don't see the problem with patents on lifeforms. They don't see the ramifications of the actions of companies like Monsanto. They just don't understand, because they're either too stupid to understand, or they aren't interested enough to inform themselves, or they aren't imaginative enough to concieve that there is any other way of doing things.
I'd give the benefit of the doubt and place Nathan Myhrvold somewhere between c) and d)
No, KDE developers aren't complaining about Apple...
Comments like this are just an aside:
We shouldn't be afraid of saying that yes, Safari works on maps.google.com and Konqueror doesn't, but this is so because somebody took thousands of hours of coding's worth of fine library code and threw heavy money at it in a diverging effort meant to instill mischeavious competition. (At least that's my interpretation of what happened even though I can't understand why they'd choose so).
When you're moving a story from one medium to another, there's supposed to be a common element to the two: the story. If they use the same name and market it as though it was the same, but use a completely different story, that's called "misleading and lying to people". The fact that we're all used to it and accept it doesn't change anything.
It's really simple. If you're going to release your code under a license that makes it easy for them to fork your codebase, you'd better be setting the pace.
If KHTML was a strong, vibrant project that was making steady advances, there would be a motivation for Apple to fold their changes back into the trunk so they can continue to reap the benefits of other peoples improvements. If Apple aren't making an effort to fold their changes back in, it indicates that they don't feel having easy access to future KHTML improvements is worth the trouble.
Improve the KHTML code enough that Apple is losing out by not being able to easily fold changes into the next version Safari and see their stance change. Complaining isn't going to get respect from Apple or from anyone else.
I've have more sympathy for his views if he didn't start off the article by demonstrating that he didn't even understand 'Starship Troopers':). Geez, how could anyone have thought it was a serious movie, rather than a comedy taking the piss out of American militarism?
Perhaps they read the book before they watched the movie, and expected something intelligent. It was a serious book that was absolutely ruined, after all. Kind of like I, Robot.
It is significant that when you are using intel dualcore vs dual intel processors, they are both sharing the same path to memory and bottlenecking there in either case
But when you are using amd dualcore vs dual amd processors, the dualcore is sharing one hypertransport link to the memory and bottlenecking while the dual processor option has a distinct memory bank w accompanying hypertransport for each processor. So the dual amd64 processor option has twice the memory bandwidth that the dualcore option has.
A 'Trusted' computer in this context is one that can be trusted not to copy music or movies or programs or whatever...
For those who do not know, 'Trusted' in this context means:
"We cannot ensure it is secure and are vulnerable to it if it is not, therefore, despite any misgivings we may have about the fact, we are currently trusting it."
He's going to make episodes 7, 8 and 9. Yeah yeah, he said he wouldn't, but when has anyone in Hollywood ever left a franchise to rot on the vine when there's a dollar left to be squeezed out of it?
Well, there are definately laws against international cartels price fixing in Canada, there have been some pretty hefty fines.
A recent reference
Here in Canada conspiring to isolate Canada from foreign markets so you can jack up the Canadian prices without competition is definately illegal. I would imagine most countries have some means of protecting themselves from this sort of activity.
The whole dodge is, make the discs region coded and encrypted with css to make them useless when played in the wrong player and make it illegal to sell multiregion drives because they circumvent copy protection and most countries are receptive to that sort of thing these days. Just like that, you've got your price fixing in effect, but you're doing it all to "protect against piracy". Selling DVDs for a $1 in Asia and not being vulnerable to competition from your distribution chain when you sell them for $20 in other countries is just a side benefit....
CSS is a big problem. It's how they implement their illegal price fixing.
It's illegal to sell the same product for different prices in different markets and attempt to prevent enterprising individuals from reselling the product if the price difference is sufficient to make it profitable.
Like selling discs in the east for a buck, selling them in North America for 20 and using region coding to prevent us from ordering discs from overseas. Or selling them in North America and preventing them from being resold in Europe.
CSS and region coding aren't about copy protection at all. Copy protection is just the excuse they use to justify their price fixing measures.
It's not really that different from that RAM price fixing story that ran the last couple of days, and if there was any justice, the perps would be dealt with the same way. But, of course, there isn't any justice, just goons in government uniforms acting on behalf of the highest bidder.
So now that the common desktop has more computing power than the servers of yesteryear, they're integrating the tech that has been around in server versions of windows for ages into the desktop versions of windows.
That's some pretty innovative, off-the-wall stuff. Wonder if they can pull it off.
Unless IE7 is going to implement all the functionality of the multitude of extensions I use in Firefox, they're not going to get me back on board. If it includes at a minimum tabs, adblock, nuke any object, gestures, Venkman and a search bar as good as Firefoxs, maybe I'll consider it. Can't see that happening though.
"You may not use this idea unless you pay money" would certainly motivate most people and organizations I know to look for alternatives.
You go on to talk about how people design around patents. That is exactly my point. People intentionally avoid using ideas because of the patent system. A lot. How can you say this is promoting innovation?
Granted I only took one Intellectual Property course at University, but aren't patents supposed to allow the holder to profit by them by disclosing them to the public for the benefit of all?
This is where it gets sticky. No, not profit by disclosing them, profit despite disclosing them, but that's a very fine point. Yes, it does achieve this goal of disclosure. The question is: Is it worth the price? And THAT is where the discussion should lie. What is the cost to society of creating a motivation not to use good ideas for x number of years, are we getting a good return in exchange, and could we get that return in another fashion.
The goal of IP law has always been to find a way to incentivize innovation without unduly burdening society. If you learn about all the equitable doctrines involved in copyright and patent law, you'll see it's true. There is a real effort to be fair and equitable.
What is innovation though? Is it having an idea, or using an idea? If I come across a way to dramatically improve say telecommunications, but the highest return for me lies in pricing it so high that only a small segment of society uses it and the rest stick with the old way which wasn't as good but doesn't cost anything, have we promoted innovation? I submit that we haven't, that what we've done is actually created a strong barrier to prevent it.
How many would chose NOT to create stuff then based on the fact that a big company could just come up and copy that and reproduce it without any royalties whatsoever.
That's a good question. I have my opinion on the subject, but yes, I definately think that we should have some sort of a concrete answer to that and create our policies to accomodate.
Another good one might be "How can we motivate those who would choose not to create stuff based on the fact that a big company could just come up and copy that and reproduce it without any royalties whatsoever to continue to create stuff without also motivating big companies not to use the best ideas out there."
Although, to tell you the truth, I'm inclined to think that such anti-social people should simply be left to rot, and that we'd be better off throwing our resources behind enabling people to pursue their passion wherever it takes them rather than hanging carrots in front of selfish bastards who would withhold knowledge from their peers just out of spite. That's just my opinion though.
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You don't seem to get it. I've never heard of Alcoa, but Microsoft was "giving away" a lot of stuff like IE and Media Player to the detriment of competitors like Netscape and Real. Are you next going to argue that the regulators cracked down on the practice to protect us from getting this stuff for free?
Getting back to the topic at hand... if you're going to allow your VOIP service to communicate both ways (inbound and outbound calls) with people using POTS telephones, you need to bridge the gap. That means using the phone networks, and it means issuing extra telephone numbers.
Which means that while other VOIP providers are required to pay the existing carriers like Bell Canada for the use of their services, the existing carriers are under no such financial pressure. So they can undercut the startups until they fail, then start adding in "service fees" until we're back right where we started in terms of cost.
If you want to have competition between the monopoly that owns the lines and their competitors that rent the lines from them, you NEED regulation. How else are you going to do it?
Did anyone else find amusement in their description of "Primus Telecommunications, Vonage, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Vidéotron" as startups?
Personally, I think the way to go is to seize control of the wires back from the telcos and give it to the government, then take advantage of the "efficiencies of the market" by hiring the private sector to maintain and improve it. Same as we do with roads, sanitation, etc.
Ok, what the hell is TAG supposed to stand for?
Nevertheless, you do see my point... as a manager, it's irresponsible to leave someone in such a position and provoke them...
I find it hard to believe that this guy would treat someone who's leaving an IT job this way. I have found more than one manager who preferred to pay me for the two weeks and hustle me out the door when I give them notice than so they can secure their networks against me, which is something that I consider a wise move.
Not to say that you should sully yourself and your reputation with backdoor hacks and retribution, but it's a dumb manager that leaves you in a position to do so then provides incentive to do so by acting like a jerk. Your boss needs to be hit with a clue stick... there aren't too many ppl that can fuck up a business like an IT guy with inside knowledge and a chip on his shoulder.
I notice the photographs on your website are 'Copyright Benjamin Kaufman 2004'. You will be just as meekly accepting if I rip those off and put them on my website as by myself then?
What makes you think he took those pictures?
If you want good co-op games you can play with your wife, you can't go wrong with Bioware. The Baldurs Gate series in particular is great for playing with chicks... the ability to pause the game at any time is great for those who don't have the highly developed fast-twitch mousing ability :P
Actually, most people don't have a problem with the patent system because they are
a) Too stupid to understand the problem
b) Too ignorant to understand the problem
c) Not imaginative enough to concieve that there could be something better
d) Already using the patent system to screw society to their own advantage.
The stupid and the ignorant don't see the corelation between things like retardedly overpriced drugs and patents. They don't see the problem with patents on lifeforms. They don't see the ramifications of the actions of companies like Monsanto. They just don't understand, because they're either too stupid to understand, or they aren't interested enough to inform themselves, or they aren't imaginative enough to concieve that there is any other way of doing things.
I'd give the benefit of the doubt and place Nathan Myhrvold somewhere between c) and d)
Pete Townshend said it best. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
You're in for quite a suprise should you ever find out how wrong you are.
Revolutions aren't peaceful. Expect a lot of death.
No, KDE developers aren't complaining about Apple...
Comments like this are just an aside:
We shouldn't be afraid of saying that yes, Safari works on maps.google.com and Konqueror doesn't, but this is so because somebody took thousands of hours of coding's worth of fine library code and threw heavy money at it in a diverging effort meant to instill mischeavious competition. (At least that's my interpretation of what happened even though I can't understand why they'd choose so).
Who was the jerk again?
Yeah right.
When you're moving a story from one medium to another, there's supposed to be a common element to the two: the story. If they use the same name and market it as though it was the same, but use a completely different story, that's called "misleading and lying to people". The fact that we're all used to it and accept it doesn't change anything.
It's really simple. If you're going to release your code under a license that makes it easy for them to fork your codebase, you'd better be setting the pace.
If KHTML was a strong, vibrant project that was making steady advances, there would be a motivation for Apple to fold their changes back into the trunk so they can continue to reap the benefits of other peoples improvements. If Apple aren't making an effort to fold their changes back in, it indicates that they don't feel having easy access to future KHTML improvements is worth the trouble.
Improve the KHTML code enough that Apple is losing out by not being able to easily fold changes into the next version Safari and see their stance change. Complaining isn't going to get respect from Apple or from anyone else.
I've have more sympathy for his views if he didn't start off the article by demonstrating that he didn't even understand 'Starship Troopers' :). Geez, how could anyone have thought it was a serious movie, rather than a comedy taking the piss out of American militarism?
Perhaps they read the book before they watched the movie, and expected something intelligent. It was a serious book that was absolutely ruined, after all. Kind of like I, Robot.
It is significant that when you are using intel dualcore vs dual intel processors, they are both sharing the same path to memory and bottlenecking there in either case
But when you are using amd dualcore vs dual amd processors, the dualcore is sharing one hypertransport link to the memory and bottlenecking while the dual processor option has a distinct memory bank w accompanying hypertransport for each processor. So the dual amd64 processor option has twice the memory bandwidth that the dualcore option has.
A 'Trusted' computer in this context is one that can be trusted not to copy music or movies or programs or whatever...
For those who do not know, 'Trusted' in this context means:
"We cannot ensure it is secure and are vulnerable to it if it is not, therefore, despite any misgivings we may have about the fact, we are currently trusting it."
The trustworthiness is irrelevant.
Did the article just ask me to go on a mass shooting spree while wearing a firefox shirt?
Yes. In Redmond.
He's going to make episodes 7, 8 and 9. Yeah yeah, he said he wouldn't, but when has anyone in Hollywood ever left a franchise to rot on the vine when there's a dollar left to be squeezed out of it?
Well, there are definately laws against international cartels price fixing in Canada, there have been some pretty hefty fines. A recent reference
Here in Canada conspiring to isolate Canada from foreign markets so you can jack up the Canadian prices without competition is definately illegal. I would imagine most countries have some means of protecting themselves from this sort of activity.
The whole dodge is, make the discs region coded and encrypted with css to make them useless when played in the wrong player and make it illegal to sell multiregion drives because they circumvent copy protection and most countries are receptive to that sort of thing these days. Just like that, you've got your price fixing in effect, but you're doing it all to "protect against piracy". Selling DVDs for a $1 in Asia and not being vulnerable to competition from your distribution chain when you sell them for $20 in other countries is just a side benefit....
CSS is a big problem. It's how they implement their illegal price fixing.
It's illegal to sell the same product for different prices in different markets and attempt to prevent enterprising individuals from reselling the product if the price difference is sufficient to make it profitable.
Like selling discs in the east for a buck, selling them in North America for 20 and using region coding to prevent us from ordering discs from overseas. Or selling them in North America and preventing them from being resold in Europe.
CSS and region coding aren't about copy protection at all. Copy protection is just the excuse they use to justify their price fixing measures.
It's not really that different from that RAM price fixing story that ran the last couple of days, and if there was any justice, the perps would be dealt with the same way. But, of course, there isn't any justice, just goons in government uniforms acting on behalf of the highest bidder.
So now that the common desktop has more computing power than the servers of yesteryear, they're integrating the tech that has been around in server versions of windows for ages into the desktop versions of windows.
That's some pretty innovative, off-the-wall stuff. Wonder if they can pull it off.
Color me unimpressed.
Unless IE7 is going to implement all the functionality of the multitude of extensions I use in Firefox, they're not going to get me back on board. If it includes at a minimum tabs, adblock, nuke any object, gestures, Venkman and a search bar as good as Firefoxs, maybe I'll consider it. Can't see that happening though.
There aren't enough pictures
Is that really what patents are for?
No, it's not.
Is that really the general effect they have?
"You may not use this idea unless you pay money" would certainly motivate most people and organizations I know to look for alternatives.
You go on to talk about how people design around patents. That is exactly my point. People intentionally avoid using ideas because of the patent system. A lot. How can you say this is promoting innovation?
Granted I only took one Intellectual Property course at University, but aren't patents supposed to allow the holder to profit by them by disclosing them to the public for the benefit of all?
This is where it gets sticky. No, not profit by disclosing them, profit despite disclosing them, but that's a very fine point. Yes, it does achieve this goal of disclosure. The question is: Is it worth the price? And THAT is where the discussion should lie. What is the cost to society of creating a motivation not to use good ideas for x number of years, are we getting a good return in exchange, and could we get that return in another fashion.
The goal of IP law has always been to find a way to incentivize innovation without unduly burdening society. If you learn about all the equitable doctrines involved in copyright and patent law, you'll see it's true. There is a real effort to be fair and equitable.
What is innovation though? Is it having an idea, or using an idea? If I come across a way to dramatically improve say telecommunications, but the highest return for me lies in pricing it so high that only a small segment of society uses it and the rest stick with the old way which wasn't as good but doesn't cost anything, have we promoted innovation? I submit that we haven't, that what we've done is actually created a strong barrier to prevent it.
If you disagree, why?
How many would chose NOT to create stuff then based on the fact that a big company could just come up and copy that and reproduce it without any royalties whatsoever.
That's a good question. I have my opinion on the subject, but yes, I definately think that we should have some sort of a concrete answer to that and create our policies to accomodate.
Another good one might be "How can we motivate those who would choose not to create stuff based on the fact that a big company could just come up and copy that and reproduce it without any royalties whatsoever to continue to create stuff without also motivating big companies not to use the best ideas out there."
Although, to tell you the truth, I'm inclined to think that such anti-social people should simply be left to rot, and that we'd be better off throwing our resources behind enabling people to pursue their passion wherever it takes them rather than hanging carrots in front of selfish bastards who would withhold knowledge from their peers just out of spite. That's just my opinion though.