Look at these things on a quarter by quarter basis. A big part of MS's success this last quarter was Halo2. These things usually pay off in the long run for MS.
One thing these guys know how to do is LEARN and implement what they learn.
When the MMORPG publishers realize that they can sell the virtual items with zero overhead. They can be a broker and have no acquasition costs. Some are doing this now - Second Life?
OR when they create a game where the only ingame commodity is ingame skill. PLanetside did a good job of leveraging this against time-spent ingame. It balanced beause even if you had no twitch skill, you could still have a roll, like engineer or medic.
Just look at the Opera results for a moment. Notice how the later versions are actually slower.
But aren't later versions better, more capable, more adverse-effects resistant?
Also, a browser can render much more quickly if it doesn't care how badly it renders what you see. How does this balance with the loading times in the article?
I actually used that site to get a lot of stuff - but not stuff that was protected by law. Unfortunately people kept DLing music and movies, ruining another good source of arcana and public tv episodes.
I imagine if the OS could prevent you from writing a program that deleted files in a directory and enabled a keystroke logger, you clowns would whine that MS is limiting your ability to use their OS.
You *should* be able to install such a program on your computer. You *should* also be smart enough to know what you decide to put on your machine.
without having to find someone with the coincidence of that skill along with extremely good video game skills - especially so with twitch gaming.
I wrote about 40 video game reviews for a now defunct zine. I was a pretty good writer - but not so great at the game. Without cheating or win-trading, I had a StarCraft ladder rating of 1240 or so. That's and a few moments of brilliance here and there are all I can claim.
Being a good writer is extremely imporant to writing readable reviews. I wish I could remember the names of two gaming magazines that got canceled but had excellent writing - one was called something like "insight" and the other was "pc extreme" or something. Any suggestions? Extreme went first, then the second one did. I could go through a PCGamer mag in about 20 minutes - these other ones would take hours because I would read every written word.
So you post up all your source code from your client's projects? Or you would assist one of their employees in taking that software code?
Your sort of broken in your understanding of IP, why it's identical to real P, and my definition of natural monopoly isn't just mine, but that of Allan Greenspan and the rest of the econ department at the University of Chicago. It's also the one held up by the courts in every civilized nation in the world, and by their legislatures. Even the movement towards open source in some areas is an acknowledgement of the necessity of the software's creator's control in determining it's use (Ie - anyone can use it if they abide by GPL, etc.) You don't see governments or corporations (read: people who make the world go round) making it their policy to run cracked versions of Photoshop.
The parent here does make a good point - I really don't know why this had to be modded down.
From reading/., you get the sense that a majority of people here
Hate Bush
Do not believe IP should be protected.
Think MS should be put out of business.
And add Blizzard to the list for their anti-Bnet emulation (OR whatever it was exactly).
The question is other than whining about it, what do these people do about it? I'm sure there are some true purist, like the dirty hippy parent here who got unfairly moded down to flamebait. But most of you guys whine and moan on here before logging off to go play WoW on an MS Machine that you paid for with W's tax cut.
The dirty hippy parent here is bringing this up and rubbing it in your faces - and he gets modded down for it. Where's the justice?
As an aside, I now metamoderate every day. I don't even read the posts, I just rate all negative mods as unfair and all positive mods as fair. It all takes about 30 seconds. This is based on my belief that there is too much modding down here and not enough modding up.
So one way or another, I will avenge the dirty hippy parent.
Maybe you just define uses of government force that you personally disapprove of as "coercive", while you define uses of government force that you personally approve of as "not coercive".
True. And morality is the basis of my personal approval.
Again FALSE. How do you think authors, composers, et al were compensated BEFORE copyright became widespread (circa Gutenberg - and even then it was primarily a means of taxation, not compensation). You can't seriously contend that no artistic creation occurred before the printing press was invented.
Heheheh. Because there was no means of enforcing IP, works were created by commission. Someone had to pay for them, and there was only one. Also, the number of people who could be sustained by the market was minimal - IP wasn't much of an issue because distribution wasn't possible. Even today, you are not 'allowed' to take photography in an art museum - and with good reason. And if you were caught, you would go to jail.
It's like you have your own little world - you define reasonable force, you define economic terms. etc. Reasonable force can't prevent people from communicating?
You are lucky that it can be, else you might have to reap what you sow if you'd deny copyright/IP protection - a pretty miserable country and planet. You are also lucky you will have to earn a living from debating - in court or elsewhere, else your dissociation with reality might become as apparent to you as it would to anyone other than the/. losers who similarly hate IP because they never really created any.
I can't really talk right now because I have to go running. But there is a big difference between a company deciding itself to encourage economic development through having a single delivery rate than the government wanting to satiate rural congressmen and making delivery to them cost the same. Besides, back in the day those rural areas DID pay a hell of a lot more for postage - not in money but in time as they maybe saw the mailman once a month or less. So your whole argument falls apart.
CA power dereg was not privitization. Please.
Was I really up to 4? It was -1 at one point. Besides, you are a dirty hippy. Take a bath.
The reason I reacted as I did was that it was not relevent to the statement. You could have asked "Is that reasoning in line with what is conteporarily considered libertarianism?"
For the record, and to satiate you, I don't belong to their party and don't really care for them, but we do share many of the same government policies.
I'm going to take one last crack here at stating the obviouse. Your argument is becoming more rhetoric than reason:
Which is false and demonstrably so - see any BSD licensed software and to a lesser extent, GPL software (lesser only that the GPL is a "hack" of copyright, intended to use copyright to avoid copyright and would not be necessary in a world with no copyright).
BSD/OSS/etc. are examples of people exercising property rights over something intellectual. They choose to use those liscences that way. GPL actually does exercise property rights because it requires mods to be made public. That is a developer, using the GPL, exercising his rights to control the use of his creation.
And GPL is not a hack. An associate of mine specializing in these laws did a study on the enforcability of GPL for the World Bank. His conclusion was that it passed all the necessary tests to stand up in the US and elsewhere - and he has also counseled his developer clients not to use GPL for this reason - because they may be forced to open up their otherwise closed software.
Second, you make (the designed in) mistake of equating "intellectual property" with real property. I say "designed in" because calling ideas "property" is only a recent phenomenon (early 1960s) and has been promulgated by the people and businesses that benefit from people making that error. From an economic perspective, real property is congestible, exhaustible and excludable - ideas are not, they are completely non-rival thus treating them like real property when they have so few fundamental attributes in common is probably an inefficient use of them.
So what do you tell authors? Or composers? If their deal is this - I will only create if you allow me to profit in the free market from my creation, and you tell them they can't, do you really think that entire industries of employed, productive people would exist anymore around these industries? The test of an idea is it's effect. The effect of elimintating IP protections is the equivilant of eliminating real property protections.
Given reasonably sufficient force and resources, you can defend real property without the aid of law. However, you can not do the same for ideas. Once another person "has" your ideas, you can not reasonably prevent them from telling other people your ideas. Someone seeing your car does not automatically enable them to drive off with it -- your car is excludable, your ideas are not.
This is where I decide to stop and ignore you. Reasonably sufficient force can only be used to defend real property but not IP? That's... silly. I can use the same force to defend IP. It's the same kind of force the law would use - I'd come to your house and tear your computer through the wall. Or disconnect your electricity. It's the same kind of force I'd use to prevent you from stealing my car.
However a point to consider, if you actually treat your ideas like real property by keeping them under "lock and key" and not giving anyone access to them (equivalent of not "giving away" your real property), then it is reasonably possible to prevent them from being disseminated without resorting to law. In other words, "intellectual property" and "real property" are roughly equivalent if treated in an equivalent manner. Of course this treatment severely curtails the usefulness of any ideas treated so, but then so does government enforcement of the copyright monopoly on ideas too.
If I could not take the profit from my restaurant, it would not exist. If I could not control the use of my IP, I would not release it. Property - real or I, has a causal relationship with the ability of the value adder/creator to control it.
So, ultimately copyright, and the economics of it, only exists by the will of the government, but real property would exist without a government and would still be be subject to the same laws of economics. Therefore, MS's business is built on (by your definition) unnatural copyright.
Same for regular property. It only exists because SOMEONE is standing up to defend it.
But ultimately all property is dependant on enforcement by the law/courts. That doesn't make my ownership of my car coercive if I turn to the gov'ment to help me preserve my ownership of it.
Hahah - clever. However, in the first example, I went on to give an explanation. In the second case, he just sort of impugned me.
See, it's ok to call someone a retard if you explain why. Although I really should apologize... to all the retards out there who were offended by me comparing the poster to them.
Your ignorance of history is astounding. You sound like one of those posters on slashdot... oh wait, nm.
Ever heard of the Pony Express?
Also, doesn't it make sense to charge more to deliver to the middle of nowhere?
I bet you are a dirty hippy who dislikes suburban sprawl and snarled traffic from people trying to live an hour away from work and cloging highways on their commute into the city. Ever wonder whose fault that is?
It's the governments, for subsidizing people's ability to live like that - for artificially lowering the cost of the commute by building these monster highway systems and beltways around cities. If the gov'ment had not gotten involved, people would be living in much smaller office parks where you could walk to the office/to school/and home. It would also have made telecommuting even more cost competitive.
You have a similar result with the goverment doing what it thinks it knows is best and subisidizing long range mail at the expense of overcharging short range mail.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing these guys know how to do is LEARN and implement what they learn.
OR when they create a game where the only ingame commodity is ingame skill. PLanetside did a good job of leveraging this against time-spent ingame. It balanced beause even if you had no twitch skill, you could still have a roll, like engineer or medic.
No, it wasn't. Read it again. Look at warm start.
But aren't later versions better, more capable, more adverse-effects resistant?
Also, a browser can render much more quickly if it doesn't care how badly it renders what you see. How does this balance with the loading times in the article?
I actually used that site to get a lot of stuff - but not stuff that was protected by law. Unfortunately people kept DLing music and movies, ruining another good source of arcana and public tv episodes.
That's not a very /.-like attitude.
But others could do this, too? So maybe Wiki can limit the ability of others to do this, and give this ability exclusively to Google?
What I am trying to ascertain is what value can Wiki give google other than advert space, which is apparently not part of the current deal?
You *should* be able to install such a program on your computer. You *should* also be smart enough to know what you decide to put on your machine.
I wrote about 40 video game reviews for a now defunct zine. I was a pretty good writer - but not so great at the game. Without cheating or win-trading, I had a StarCraft ladder rating of 1240 or so. That's and a few moments of brilliance here and there are all I can claim.
Being a good writer is extremely imporant to writing readable reviews. I wish I could remember the names of two gaming magazines that got canceled but had excellent writing - one was called something like "insight" and the other was "pc extreme" or something. Any suggestions? Extreme went first, then the second one did. I could go through a PCGamer mag in about 20 minutes - these other ones would take hours because I would read every written word.
Your sort of broken in your understanding of IP, why it's identical to real P, and my definition of natural monopoly isn't just mine, but that of Allan Greenspan and the rest of the econ department at the University of Chicago. It's also the one held up by the courts in every civilized nation in the world, and by their legislatures. Even the movement towards open source in some areas is an acknowledgement of the necessity of the software's creator's control in determining it's use (Ie - anyone can use it if they abide by GPL, etc.) You don't see governments or corporations (read: people who make the world go round) making it their policy to run cracked versions of Photoshop.
I think this limits greatly your download ability. And since many BTs are now tracked carefully you could loose access.
You must be so glad one of your own is being electing chairman of the DNC. And so am I.
From reading /., you get the sense that a majority of people here
The question is other than whining about it, what do these people do about it? I'm sure there are some true purist, like the dirty hippy parent here who got unfairly moded down to flamebait. But most of you guys whine and moan on here before logging off to go play WoW on an MS Machine that you paid for with W's tax cut.
The dirty hippy parent here is bringing this up and rubbing it in your faces - and he gets modded down for it. Where's the justice?
As an aside, I now metamoderate every day. I don't even read the posts, I just rate all negative mods as unfair and all positive mods as fair. It all takes about 30 seconds. This is based on my belief that there is too much modding down here and not enough modding up.
So one way or another, I will avenge the dirty hippy parent.
True. And morality is the basis of my personal approval.
Heheheh. Because there was no means of enforcing IP, works were created by commission. Someone had to pay for them, and there was only one. Also, the number of people who could be sustained by the market was minimal - IP wasn't much of an issue because distribution wasn't possible. Even today, you are not 'allowed' to take photography in an art museum - and with good reason. And if you were caught, you would go to jail.
It's like you have your own little world - you define reasonable force, you define economic terms. etc. Reasonable force can't prevent people from communicating?
You are lucky that it can be, else you might have to reap what you sow if you'd deny copyright/IP protection - a pretty miserable country and planet. You are also lucky you will have to earn a living from debating - in court or elsewhere, else your dissociation with reality might become as apparent to you as it would to anyone other than the /. losers who similarly hate IP because they never really created any.
CA power dereg was not privitization. Please.
Was I really up to 4? It was -1 at one point. Besides, you are a dirty hippy. Take a bath.
The reason I reacted as I did was that it was not relevent to the statement. You could have asked "Is that reasoning in line with what is conteporarily considered libertarianism?"
For the record, and to satiate you, I don't belong to their party and don't really care for them, but we do share many of the same government policies.
Which is false and demonstrably so - see any BSD licensed software and to a lesser extent, GPL software (lesser only that the GPL is a "hack" of copyright, intended to use copyright to avoid copyright and would not be necessary in a world with no copyright).
BSD/OSS/etc. are examples of people exercising property rights over something intellectual. They choose to use those liscences that way. GPL actually does exercise property rights because it requires mods to be made public. That is a developer, using the GPL, exercising his rights to control the use of his creation.
And GPL is not a hack. An associate of mine specializing in these laws did a study on the enforcability of GPL for the World Bank. His conclusion was that it passed all the necessary tests to stand up in the US and elsewhere - and he has also counseled his developer clients not to use GPL for this reason - because they may be forced to open up their otherwise closed software.
Second, you make (the designed in) mistake of equating "intellectual property" with real property. I say "designed in" because calling ideas "property" is only a recent phenomenon (early 1960s) and has been promulgated by the people and businesses that benefit from people making that error. From an economic perspective, real property is congestible, exhaustible and excludable - ideas are not, they are completely non-rival thus treating them like real property when they have so few fundamental attributes in common is probably an inefficient use of them.
So what do you tell authors? Or composers? If their deal is this - I will only create if you allow me to profit in the free market from my creation, and you tell them they can't, do you really think that entire industries of employed, productive people would exist anymore around these industries? The test of an idea is it's effect. The effect of elimintating IP protections is the equivilant of eliminating real property protections.
Given reasonably sufficient force and resources, you can defend real property without the aid of law. However, you can not do the same for ideas. Once another person "has" your ideas, you can not reasonably prevent them from telling other people your ideas. Someone seeing your car does not automatically enable them to drive off with it -- your car is excludable, your ideas are not.
This is where I decide to stop and ignore you. Reasonably sufficient force can only be used to defend real property but not IP? That's ... silly. I can use the same force to defend IP. It's the same kind of force the law would use - I'd come to your house and tear your computer through the wall. Or disconnect your electricity. It's the same kind of force I'd use to prevent you from stealing my car.
However a point to consider, if you actually treat your ideas like real property by keeping them under "lock and key" and not giving anyone access to them (equivalent of not "giving away" your real property), then it is reasonably possible to prevent them from being disseminated without resorting to law. In other words, "intellectual property" and "real property" are roughly equivalent if treated in an equivalent manner. Of course this treatment severely curtails the usefulness of any ideas treated so, but then so does government enforcement of the copyright monopoly on ideas too.
If I could not take the profit from my restaurant, it would not exist. If I could not control the use of my IP, I would not release it. Property - real or I, has a causal relationship with the ability of the value adder/creator to control it.
So, ultimately copyright, and the economics of it, only exists by the will of the government, but real property would exist without a government and would still be be subject to the same laws of economics. Therefore, MS's business is built on (by your definition) unnatural copyright.
Same for regular property. It only exists because SOMEONE is standing up to defend it.
Case closed.
But ultimately all property is dependant on enforcement by the law/courts. That doesn't make my ownership of my car coercive if I turn to the gov'ment to help me preserve my ownership of it.
Recipes are excluded. Not really sure why. But recipies for, say, a chemical are protected.
See, it's ok to call someone a retard if you explain why. Although I really should apologize... to all the retards out there who were offended by me comparing the poster to them.
I discuss IP in an earlier post if you'd like to scroll up a bit.
No, but your attack on me rather than my argument is evidence that I have one this debate with you.
Ever heard of the Pony Express?
Also, doesn't it make sense to charge more to deliver to the middle of nowhere?
I bet you are a dirty hippy who dislikes suburban sprawl and snarled traffic from people trying to live an hour away from work and cloging highways on their commute into the city. Ever wonder whose fault that is?
It's the governments, for subsidizing people's ability to live like that - for artificially lowering the cost of the commute by building these monster highway systems and beltways around cities. If the gov'ment had not gotten involved, people would be living in much smaller office parks where you could walk to the office/to school/and home. It would also have made telecommuting even more cost competitive.
You have a similar result with the goverment doing what it thinks it knows is best and subisidizing long range mail at the expense of overcharging short range mail.
Would MS prosecuting you for breaking into their office and stealing all their keyboards make them coercive?