You're full of it. Just the usual patent proponent hand-waving with no basis in reality. e.g. Video codecs in their entirety are nothing but an algorithm, a computer program, for transforming one collection of bits to another collection of bits. The fact that you don't recognize that shows how deluded you are.
For example, if someone too the MP3 patent and swapped out the key algorithms, they'd be infringing the patent. Conversely, you can take the compression algorithm out of MP3 and use it in something else without violating the patent.
Yep, completely out of touch with reality. When you extract some part of an algorithm all you've got is another smaller algorithm. Distinctions between "idea" and "algorithm" in this context are simply patent office fantasy. Just like their dishonest pretense they can objectively decide whether two ideas are the same or different when they can't even objectively decide whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different.
---
It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
You've got some breathtaking chutzpah there. The patent parasites usually arrive after some particular technological area is going gangbusters. Not surprising, the parasites go where the money is.
Patents get the ideas out in the open.
Shows how little you know about technological innovation. Almost all is incremental, "ideas whose time as come," that will be independently reinvented hundreds of times as technology in different areas progress simply to get first mover advantage. As is true in most areas of business. Patents in most technological areas are a hindrance, not a help.
---
It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
Number of patents isn't the only criteria for balance of power. A key, defendable patent in a particular area could completely outweigh many weak patents.
The number of MPEG-LA patents sounds impressive but my guess is that many of them are junk and of little value to the "owning" companies. Most patents are.
---
It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
... and even if you can see the source, you still can't trust it.
The decision is not binary. You can trust it more. Depending on the source a lot more.
AND you are willing to spend several dozen hours doing a line-by-line review of all of the source code
Astroturfers love to push this dishonest nonsense. Again pushing the false dichotomy. And pretending that open source doesn't give the entire world, billions of people, access for review.
Closed source means only the vendor can review it. Open source means any number of groups can review it, including the original source. At the very least it is no worse than closed source.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
The desire for profit becomes a much stronger force than the desire to do the right thing, because corporations are not people, and will never care about the "right thing". This is the disconnect that gives the lie to any "free market" benefit to society.
Yes. Another disconnect is the way that corporate structures give perverse monetary incentives. Corporate structures are supposed to protect shareholder's investment from going below zero. Problem is, that risk doesn't go away, it's simply transferred to the entities that the corporation deals with, employees, customers and suppliers. That creates disincentives for shareholders to care about the the operation of the company as much as they should and makes life more risky for everybody else. While technically it's illegal for a company to trade while insolvent in practice it happens all the time because of the difficulty of rationally valuing things like customer good will or prospects and the natural human tendency of directors to hide their failures.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
So why is it so horrendously inefficient? Seems to me it's time for some research on how to improve the efficiency of clinical trials, not on drugs per se.
The drug industry as a whole is extraordinarily inefficient and wasteful, spending huge amounts of money on marketing instead of research, and on pushing drugs that have been shown not to work instead of real treatments. Drug companies today are far too often little more than the snake oil peddlers of old with shiny white coats.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
nearly everyone today is they are buying a package for $500
The government is not buying one package for $500, they are frequently buying a million identical packages for $500,000,000. Less some virtually useless feel-good discount.
That pays for an awful lot of in-house development or open-source tweaking.
---
Any large public or private organization paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
but ~31.5% the size of the real productive economy which has to bear the burden.
Not that simple. The government (one person, one vote versus one dollar, one vote) does a lot of productive work just like private industry. There is waste in both sectors but sometimes for different reasons. The question is how much waste.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
Copyright law give profit per copy (rewarding the distributors appropriately) not profit per unit of creative effort (rewarding the creators appropriately).
Since distribution costs virtually nothing (whatever marketing parasites might like to claim) copyright is intrinsically biased against creators and for middlemen.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
So please, don't blame the kind people a MPEG for MPEG-LA.
The MPEG people created a standard without considering the patent impact, including costs both explicit and hidden. That's at least negligent and makes for a potentially poor standard if for no other reason than it can't be freely used.
Personally, I wish it wasn't so but unfortunately because of the rise of the patent parasites all technical standards have to consider this now.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
No, it's not an SDK if you can't run the resulting code on your device. It's largely just a useless pile of bits providing some free advertising for Apple. If the law on truth-in-advertising were actually enforced Apple would get done for that.
This is a general problem. Many companies advertise "free" software packages that are nothing of the sort and it's about time the law caught up with them.
Of course there are consequences. A closed source cartel becomes more firmly entrenched, money gets redirected away from more worthwhile things, a free market is stunted etc.
Fanatics like you, those who claim OSS people are somehow more hardline than e.g. businesses that have an M$ only policy, really need to expose themselves to alternative points of view more.
we, as a society, decided that this situation was unfair since it puts the people with distribution systems (publishers/printers) in an enormously unfair position over the painter.
And this situation applies even more so for copyright distribution cartels today. At least without copyright others, including the original artist, can distribute under their own terms.
The reward of copyright is proportional to the amount of distribution, not the amount of creative effort, by many orders of magnitude. That's wrong and has lead to severe market distortion.
but I really want to shoot down this pernicious idea that copyright decisions are independent of moral decisions.
Nothing pernicious about it, just you trying to impose your moral judgements on others. The law frequently has little to do with morals and copyright is but one example amongst many.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600).
No, they lost money to a certain type of piracy - pirates who substituted piracy for purchase. Not piracy in general. And that's ignoring the whole piracy generates publicity effect.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Not in the slightest. Why do you automatically assume that artificial scarcity, blocking the cultural enrichment of billions of people so that one (1) person can have additional profit, is a good thing? People quite sensibly have been sharing since the dawn of time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Not to mention the idiocy of denying yourself an activity that, no matter how much copyright holders whine, does no harm at all because the purchase was not going to happen anyway.
Personally, my rule of thumb is that I avoid copying small producers but freely copy large scale producers and anything that's more than about a decade old. This is because copyright is inherently unfair, rewarding wide distribution, not amount of effort, by many orders of magnitude. That's broken and getting more broken all the time as the world's population increases and markets coalesce, reducing in number and increasing in size.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
The decision-makers only stand to lose their jobs.
This is a problem with companies in general. Corporate structures are supposed to insulate shareholders from the risk of the company value going below zero. Problem is, that risk doesn't disappear, it's merely transferred to all those who deal with the company including buyers, sellers and employees.
Because the risk has been arbitrarily reallocated this means that financial incentives are out of whack and you get market failures of various kinds e.g. Shell companies engaging in unstable high risk, high return strategies because the downside is bounded.
---
DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
Not really. You spend half your waking life at work. If you don't enjoy that no amount of compensation in the other half of your waking life or retirement is going to help much and smart people realize that.
Plus monetary benefit has diminishing returns as you get more of it and in addition scientists have discovered that income above a fairly low level is not correlated with happiness. e.g. Lottery winners go back to their old level of happiness after about two years on average.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot is not immune, like most social networking sites it is full of lying astroturfers dishonestly pretending to be objective third parties rather than paid company propaganda.
Dismissing websites that have actually been designed
You are are using a different meaning for the word "design" than many. Websites are about communication and having yet another different, unfamiliar font impedes that communication.
Pre-web somebody did a study to work out what was the clearest font. They discovered it was whatever font the local newspaper used.
Having a variety of fonts may be entertaining but it is not useful.
"If this was coming down the slope [toward you], you'd want to get out of the way," said NASA's Kenneth Edgett, a scientist with Malin Space Science Systems. "This is the squirting gun for water on Mars"
And numerous other similar comments by the scientists involved.
So basically your whole rant about "science by press release" is baseless slander
Actually, it's the "scientists" who should be reprimanded.
In fact, the article says that more work needs to be done to determine if what they discovered was definitely water.
One cop-out sentence at the end of the article does not somehow make it okay when the basic thrust of the article was the exact opposite.
Some people love to put obscure modifiers in the small print and pretend that that justifies a dishonest main article/ad/whatever. It doesn't.
---
How many million manhours has the unsolicited advertising industry cost today?
Re:don't mock the Notepad++
on
Zen Coding
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, god forbid someone pay money for software they use and like.
The price and license are important software characteristics whether you like it or not. A non-zero price can make it a practical impossibility to use in many organizations because of the paperwork involved. A license that doesn't allow you to install it where ever you need it, as you need it can also be a problem.
Since their are many free alternatives available in this category it's easily possible that the pay software is more trouble than it's worth even if it is otherwise superior, as the GPP was implicitly pointing out.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
The former was not disingenuous, it's just a perfect example of the widespread use of malicious interface design.
A matter of definitions I guess but to me malicious interface design is disingenuous, in this case claiming the something is available by clicking on the link (full text pdf) when further steps are actually required. It's usually fairly clearcut whether an interface is dishonest or not - it's just that many dishonest people try to wiggle out of it.
The article writer likely has no control over who the WWW Conference chooses to publish their materials, and if they did you know they wouldn't use a company that has such malicious interfaces.
The writer was claiming a paper was available by clicking on the link when for the vast majority of the slashdot readership it was not. Having said that I blame the ACM web designer more than the writer.
For what it's worth, the full text feature of ACM.org is not in any way malicious towards a subscriber who regularly uses the service to read published papers.
If link labels accurately reflect what each link does then sure. Subscribers do suffer from the above problem though; erroneously saying papers are available to non-ACM subscribers when they're not. This is a common problem for academics in institutional settings not aware that the institution has subscribed on their behalf.
All it would take is a "(subscription required)" note next to the PDF and it would no longer be a trap.
Better "(paid subscription required)" but yes.
And the above is not even getting into the open access scientific publishing discussion...
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Yes, but not as much as having to pay / pay more for content. I'll put up with commercials just fine if it means I pay little to nothing for it.
Ah, you subscribe to the fiction that ad's pay for anything. Who do you think pays for marketer salaries? You do via higher cost products. In fact you're paying twice over, once in time to avoid/skip the ad (billions of manhours each year are lost due to useless advertising drivel) and twice to pay for the ad.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Commercials are what pay for (or at least subsidize) the programming.
No they don't. They just hide the cost and foolish people think they're not actually paying because the costs are hidden in the products they buy. Not to mention taking billions of manhours per year watching/avoiding advertising drivel.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Slashdot Mirror
Algorithms cannot be patented.
You're full of it. Just the usual patent proponent hand-waving with no basis in reality. e.g. Video codecs in their entirety are nothing but an algorithm, a computer program, for transforming one collection of bits to another collection of bits. The fact that you don't recognize that shows how deluded you are.
For example, if someone too the MP3 patent and swapped out the key algorithms, they'd be infringing the patent. Conversely, you can take the compression algorithm out of MP3 and use it in something else without violating the patent.
Yep, completely out of touch with reality. When you extract some part of an algorithm all you've got is another smaller algorithm. Distinctions between "idea" and "algorithm" in this context are simply patent office fantasy. Just like their dishonest pretense they can objectively decide whether two ideas are the same or different when they can't even objectively decide whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different.
---
It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
and it's largely because of patents.
You've got some breathtaking chutzpah there. The patent parasites usually arrive after some particular technological area is going gangbusters. Not surprising, the parasites go where the money is.
Patents get the ideas out in the open.
Shows how little you know about technological innovation. Almost all is incremental, "ideas whose time as come," that will be independently reinvented hundreds of times as technology in different areas progress simply to get first mover advantage. As is true in most areas of business. Patents in most technological areas are a hindrance, not a help.
---
It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
Number of patents isn't the only criteria for balance of power. A key, defendable patent in a particular area could completely outweigh many weak patents.
The number of MPEG-LA patents sounds impressive but my guess is that many of them are junk and of little value to the "owning" companies. Most patents are.
---
It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
The decision is not binary. You can trust it more. Depending on the source a lot more.
AND you are willing to spend several dozen hours doing a line-by-line review of all of the source code
Astroturfers love to push this dishonest nonsense. Again pushing the false dichotomy. And pretending that open source doesn't give the entire world, billions of people, access for review.
Closed source means only the vendor can review it. Open source means any number of groups can review it, including the original source. At the very least it is no worse than closed source.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
The desire for profit becomes a much stronger force than the desire to do the right thing, because corporations are not people, and will never care about the "right thing". This is the disconnect that gives the lie to any "free market" benefit to society.
Yes. Another disconnect is the way that corporate structures give perverse monetary incentives. Corporate structures are supposed to protect shareholder's investment from going below zero. Problem is, that risk doesn't go away, it's simply transferred to the entities that the corporation deals with, employees, customers and suppliers. That creates disincentives for shareholders to care about the the operation of the company as much as they should and makes life more risky for everybody else. While technically it's illegal for a company to trade while insolvent in practice it happens all the time because of the difficulty of rationally valuing things like customer good will or prospects and the natural human tendency of directors to hide their failures.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
Phase-II would be about ten times that.
So why is it so horrendously inefficient? Seems to me it's time for some research on how to improve the efficiency of clinical trials, not on drugs per se.
The drug industry as a whole is extraordinarily inefficient and wasteful, spending huge amounts of money on marketing instead of research, and on pushing drugs that have been shown not to work instead of real treatments. Drug companies today are far too often little more than the snake oil peddlers of old with shiny white coats.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
high-quality, professional
Anything with DRM is defective by design. That is neither high quality nor professional.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
nearly everyone today is they are buying a package for $500
The government is not buying one package for $500, they are frequently buying a million identical packages for $500,000,000. Less some virtually useless feel-good discount.
That pays for an awful lot of in-house development or open-source tweaking.
---
Any large public or private organization paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
but ~31.5% the size of the real productive economy which has to bear the burden.
Not that simple. The government (one person, one vote versus one dollar, one vote) does a lot of productive work just like private industry. There is waste in both sectors but sometimes for different reasons. The question is how much waste.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
Copyright law give profit per copy (rewarding the distributors appropriately) not profit per unit of creative effort (rewarding the creators appropriately).
Since distribution costs virtually nothing (whatever marketing parasites might like to claim) copyright is intrinsically biased against creators and for middlemen.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
So please, don't blame the kind people a MPEG for MPEG-LA.
The MPEG people created a standard without considering the patent impact, including costs both explicit and hidden. That's at least negligent and makes for a potentially poor standard if for no other reason than it can't be freely used.
Personally, I wish it wasn't so but unfortunately because of the rise of the patent parasites all technical standards have to consider this now.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
You can download the SDK for free
No, it's not an SDK if you can't run the resulting code on your device. It's largely just a useless pile of bits providing some free advertising for Apple. If the law on truth-in-advertising were actually enforced Apple would get done for that.
This is a general problem. Many companies advertise "free" software packages that are nothing of the sort and it's about time the law caught up with them.
---
DRM - destroying free markets one step at a time.
there's no consequences
Of course there are consequences. A closed source cartel becomes more firmly entrenched, money gets redirected away from more worthwhile things, a free market is stunted etc.
Fanatics like you, those who claim OSS people are somehow more hardline than e.g. businesses that have an M$ only policy, really need to expose themselves to alternative points of view more.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
we, as a society, decided that this situation was unfair since it puts the people with distribution systems (publishers/printers) in an enormously unfair position over the painter.
And this situation applies even more so for copyright distribution cartels today. At least without copyright others, including the original artist, can distribute under their own terms.
The reward of copyright is proportional to the amount of distribution, not the amount of creative effort, by many orders of magnitude. That's wrong and has lead to severe market distortion.
but I really want to shoot down this pernicious idea that copyright decisions are independent of moral decisions.
Nothing pernicious about it, just you trying to impose your moral judgements on others. The law frequently has little to do with morals and copyright is but one example amongst many.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600).
No, they lost money to a certain type of piracy - pirates who substituted piracy for purchase. Not piracy in general. And that's ignoring the whole piracy generates publicity effect.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
And that doesn't make you feel dirty at all?
Not in the slightest. Why do you automatically assume that artificial scarcity, blocking the cultural enrichment of billions of people so that one (1) person can have additional profit, is a good thing? People quite sensibly have been sharing since the dawn of time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Not to mention the idiocy of denying yourself an activity that, no matter how much copyright holders whine, does no harm at all because the purchase was not going to happen anyway.
Personally, my rule of thumb is that I avoid copying small producers but freely copy large scale producers and anything that's more than about a decade old. This is because copyright is inherently unfair, rewarding wide distribution, not amount of effort, by many orders of magnitude. That's broken and getting more broken all the time as the world's population increases and markets coalesce, reducing in number and increasing in size.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
The decision-makers only stand to lose their jobs.
This is a problem with companies in general. Corporate structures are supposed to insulate shareholders from the risk of the company value going below zero. Problem is, that risk doesn't disappear, it's merely transferred to all those who deal with the company including buyers, sellers and employees.
Because the risk has been arbitrarily reallocated this means that financial incentives are out of whack and you get market failures of various kinds e.g. Shell companies engaging in unstable high risk, high return strategies because the downside is bounded.
---
DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
It makes sense,
Not really. You spend half your waking life at work. If you don't enjoy that no amount of compensation in the other half of your waking life or retirement is going to help much and smart people realize that.
Plus monetary benefit has diminishing returns as you get more of it and in addition scientists have discovered that income above a fairly low level is not correlated with happiness. e.g. Lottery winners go back to their old level of happiness after about two years on average.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot is not immune, like most social networking sites it is full of lying astroturfers dishonestly pretending to be objective third parties rather than paid company propaganda.
Dismissing websites that have actually been designed
You are are using a different meaning for the word "design" than many. Websites are about communication and having yet another different, unfamiliar font impedes that communication.
Pre-web somebody did a study to work out what was the clearest font. They discovered it was whatever font the local newspaper used.
Having a variety of fonts may be entertaining but it is not useful.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
"If this was coming down the slope [toward you], you'd want to get out of the way," said NASA's Kenneth Edgett, a scientist with Malin Space Science Systems. "This is the squirting gun for water on Mars"
And numerous other similar comments by the scientists involved.
So basically your whole rant about "science by press release" is baseless slander
Actually, it's the "scientists" who should be reprimanded.
In fact, the article says that more work needs to be done to determine if what they discovered was definitely water.
One cop-out sentence at the end of the article does not somehow make it okay when the basic thrust of the article was the exact opposite.
Some people love to put obscure modifiers in the small print and pretend that that justifies a dishonest main article/ad/whatever. It doesn't.
---
How many million manhours has the unsolicited advertising industry cost today?
Yeah, god forbid someone pay money for software they use and like.
The price and license are important software characteristics whether you like it or not. A non-zero price can make it a practical impossibility to use in many organizations because of the paperwork involved. A license that doesn't allow you to install it where ever you need it, as you need it can also be a problem.
Since their are many free alternatives available in this category it's easily possible that the pay software is more trouble than it's worth even if it is otherwise superior, as the GPP was implicitly pointing out.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
The former was not disingenuous, it's just a perfect example of the widespread use of malicious interface design.
A matter of definitions I guess but to me malicious interface design is disingenuous, in this case claiming the something is available by clicking on the link (full text pdf) when further steps are actually required. It's usually fairly clearcut whether an interface is dishonest or not - it's just that many dishonest people try to wiggle out of it.
The article writer likely has no control over who the WWW Conference chooses to publish their materials, and if they did you know they wouldn't use a company that has such malicious interfaces.
The writer was claiming a paper was available by clicking on the link when for the vast majority of the slashdot readership it was not. Having said that I blame the ACM web designer more than the writer.
For what it's worth, the full text feature of ACM.org is not in any way malicious towards a subscriber who regularly uses the service to read published papers.
If link labels accurately reflect what each link does then sure. Subscribers do suffer from the above problem though; erroneously saying papers are available to non-ACM subscribers when they're not. This is a common problem for academics in institutional settings not aware that the institution has subscribed on their behalf.
All it would take is a "(subscription required)" note next to the PDF and it would no longer be a trap.
Better "(paid subscription required)" but yes.
And the above is not even getting into the open access scientific publishing discussion...
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Yes, but not as much as having to pay / pay more for content. I'll put up with commercials just fine if it means I pay little to nothing for it.
Ah, you subscribe to the fiction that ad's pay for anything. Who do you think pays for marketer salaries? You do via higher cost products. In fact you're paying twice over, once in time to avoid/skip the ad (billions of manhours each year are lost due to useless advertising drivel) and twice to pay for the ad.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Commercials are what pay for (or at least subsidize) the programming.
No they don't. They just hide the cost and foolish people think they're not actually paying because the costs are hidden in the products they buy. Not to mention taking billions of manhours per year watching/avoiding advertising drivel.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The first Malicious Interface Design: Exploiting the User was just published this week at the 2010 WWW Conference.
And has a helpful demo of malicious interfaces ACM have a pay login link deceptively labelled "Full text Pdf".
The other is from IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, Malicious Interfaces and Personalization's Uninviting Future. (PDF)
This at least is genuine.
---
DRM; you don't control it means you don't own it. It reduces the value and that means the vendor gets less for it.