"The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse. The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate"
I like how you state all these statistics, did you pull them out of your ass? In any event the issue is assuming that domestic violence is against women and women only:
The rates of physical violence against both sexes by either sex are closer to being approximately the same than not in many cases. Here is a a few quick links, you may want to look at the biblography provided to cross check the stats as one should do with any statistics:
"Open Source is a failure. No, that's not me saying it, that's what the report says."
Actually what the report says is open source is such a good model that 1) copyright/patents on software should be removed and 2) government can/should fund FOSS software development. The report goes on to say if closed source software is really good then people will pay for it, without government interference (copyright) or not.
There is the, unusual in my perspective, viewpoint that government is evil in the United States. Perhaps with good reason when it does syphilis experiments on black men with out their experiments and other attrocities. But in Canada, where I live, government is seen as a force of great good (free healthcare, promoting the public good and not corporations, the legitimate arbritator of force). In Canada if the free markets can do something better then the they do it, if government can do it better then government does it.
In this case it seems the U.S. government could save ~$80,000,000,000 - $180,000,000,000 to tax payers in the United States and finance it though the savings it self will receive by not having to pay for inflated price software. Sounds like a good deal if only it will work in the public good instead of for the corporate good.
Not being able to have propritary applications run/interact on KDE without a license to TrollTech is a problem. It gives too much control to them and limits the potential of people choosing closed alternatives (games etc.) from intracting fully. What stops TrollTech from charging super high prices if/when Linux becomes popular? Too much uncertainty for SuSE/RedHat to be at their mercy.
There is no reason why Gnome cannot be as good as KDE given enough time and resources, assuming it is not as good as or better than KDE now.
>> I'm waiting for the day when we can raise the speed of light so we can
go faster.
> I'm not sure this technology can be pushed in that direction
Let us hope that the speed of light cannot be changed as it is vital to the
operation of the universe as we know it. For example, the
fine structure
constant of the universe (alpha) depends on the speed of light, and if the
f-s contstant changes since c changes then funny things could happen, like
electron having too much energy to orbit an atom, or fusion no longer occuring
in stars.
There is also
talk about the speed of light changing in the past, being faster than today
and it could be slowly slowing down. If this were true then life might no longer
exist in the far future given the effects of the changes in constants that depend on c. The link is an
article from Scientific American about the possibility that physical constants (like light) aren't constant after all.
If the trolls are going to be submitting misrepresented stories as a part of their bag of tricks then the editor's here will have to read / check the stories now. That and or use Karma as a factor when choosing stories as it is time comsuming to build up Karma just to blow away to troll submit a story.
"It's not free as long as someone has to LET me use it."
The GPL is an attack against copyright and it will work in the long term. It builds an effective wall between full copyright and the GPL commons.
The price paid for the long term combat against full copyright is essentially one thing in the short run: you must give your users the same rights you do when you distribute GPL code. If you want to have the freedom to take away the freedoms of others then you'll have to wait until copyright acts are repealed (so you can do what you want with public domain code).
"Life, I suspect, is fairly commonplace. I have no idea if intelligence is."
Of course we have an idea if intelligent life is common place out side of our solar system and the answer is: it is not. If it were very common then we would have likely picked up a signal by now if they were within a few hundred light years.
Why isn't it common place? There are many possible answers, one of them which I think is that it is much easier to destroy then create so any intelligent civilization eventually reaches the point where it is both easy and capable of destroying itself. We are pretty much at that point right now with nuclear weapons, and with advances in life creation as this article suggests killer viruses will eventually be able to be made by anyone with $100 bucks in equipment in their home.
Is everyone in the world sane enough not to create this virus shit and kill everyone? I dont think so in the long run;).
"The costs and difficulty of copying and publishing content have been greatly reduced, but the risks have not."
Of course the risks of discreased. Before the publisher would print up 500,000 copies at tremendous cost, and if only one person bought a copy then would be out the excess. Since classical publishing only works in volume, to get the presses set etc., they really had no alternative but to charge high to allieve the risks they lost on.
Now a days there is no upfront risk of losing large sums of money if you releaes your material online or with micropublishing. Thus less risks = less incentives necessary, incentives such as copyright.
"But the first time I saw this happen, it made me think: piracy in general can have more economic impact that you realize at first."
This connection seems incidental. Seems to me the problem isnt piracy per say but the fact that it is illegal to share certain kinds of information and some people break the law to share.
Making file sharing legal for personal use, or doing away with copyright altogether, would resolve your problem of people breaking into your server to share currently copyrighted material. The problem is solved since I'd guess most would simply share it off their own computer instead of trying to conceal their actions by breaking into your servers.
"Music, information, entertainment should be free!... If the owner of said item wants it to be."
We, the public, are the owners. It is just on loan to the so called creators for a limited period of time, the period being copyright length.
I think it's time to severely reduce that copyright length. It may have made sense before but not when when costs, and thus the risks, of publishing is reduced due to online avenues for distribution.
"the media threw a shitfest over it because it was SEX."
Yes, because dipictions of murder and violence is ok but if a dinky goes into a yahoo that's intollerable.
What is the root of this stupidity? A lot of it was exported to India when the British ruled them, and hermaphrodites there who were once a revered type of people (because Vishnu has sex with his female half to create the other gods) are now much less tolerated, and a crack down on non procreative sex occured.
A lot of it appears to be the Christian/Victorian viewpoint since in Thailand it is much more open to different sexual identity (they recognize more then 2 genders as far as I know with the difference being that Thailand and other similiar countries were never directly ruled by a european type power.
It seems that each distribution becomes a little more flexible when people use these tools / launchpad allowing the differences between distributions to be minimized to a certain extent.
It's a good idea. I was thinking of a meta-distribution where you check off what you want in it and then the program makes it. If the build you are about to make happens to be close to an existing distribution it will tell you so.
If in this meta-distribution you want it to conform to some stand (like LSB) just click that off and it will be sure to include elements that allow the build to adhere to the standard.
" Yeah, that explains why so many software companies have gone out of business due to competition from OSS"
Yes, like RISC. Although they are not bankrupted quite yet;).
You'll see other companies go bankrupt since people are no longer wanting to pay to give up their freedom for closed products which are increasingly only marginally, and in some cases less, better then FOSS alternatives.
>>Plus his competitors will have to compete against free/open source. He, and >>others, may be able to reenter the market if the community advances the code.
>So, open source is bad for commercial business, or is it good? Because you're >making 2 conflicting claims.
There isn't two conflicting claims. Either a software business embraces free / open source in one way or another or they will eventually be snuffed out.
When using a closed software development process its hard to keep up with FOSS in the long run.
" and giving all of his IP away for free will fix this?!?"
What does he have to lose? Plus his competitors will have to compete against free/open source. He, and others, may be able to reenter the market if the community advances the code.
"Monoplolists don't have the "ability to absolutely set the price to whatever the producer wants"."
Of course they have the ability to set the price to what ever they want, since they are the sole producer. Either you pay their price or you forgo their product.
"There's still a supply and demand curve, and the producer still optimizes profit by setting the price where the curves meet."
Wrong. There is a demand curve but no suply curve for a good or service produced by a monopoly as the monopolist chooses exactly how much to produce, they set the supply. Thus they can produce a given quanitity that maximizes the profit at a given price, or equilivantly set the MR=MC price and produce the given amount demanded at that price. In either case they control supply.
So where would a monopolist set the price? They'd set it to the point where marginal revenue = marginal cost, that's the price that maximizes profit.
"DVD's and movies are not something we need, so competition isn't required to set the market price."
You are going down the difficult path to try and determine if monopoly exists or not. You could make a nice arguement about there being substitutes to CDs and DVDs but economists being the lazy, i mean economizing;), people they are have a simple way to determine if monopoly exists. Monopoly power exists if a producer has the ability to control/set the price.
The ability to absolutely set the price to whatever a producer wants means it is a pure monopoly. The inability of a producer to set the price in anyway (meaning it is determined by the market as a whole) is perfect competition.
Since the DVD sellers can set the price to the level they wish (as they are the sole owners of that product) and there is no direct substitutes for that particular good (e.g. if you want to a Gili DVD you'll have to buy it) then they are a monopoly / monopolistic.
In contrast, a chicken egg farmer who wants to set his price at say $1.00 above everyone else could not. Not if he wanted sales as buyers would just go down the street to buy other farmers' eggs for a buck less.
The monopoly power that the DVD / MPAA companies exert depends, as you say, on how close the substitutes are. If you really want to specifically watch Gili then there are no close substitutes and they can set the price. If you want to just watch a horrible movie then there are many substitutes for Gili;).
"They're going to take a business model (Pay Per View), add value by giving more to the consumer, rather than less (the ability to purchase the DVD), and deliver it at market prices."
That would be a terribly interesting feat indeed - to some how arrive at a market price on a monopoly (though copyright) good. Make no mistake, even though some DVDs are less than others they are still maximizing profit by leverging their monopoly power by pricing the product to gain maximum profit given the demand *for each type of DVD*. This is not (free) market pricing, it is monopoly price discrimination.
There is still a lot of features lacking in Thunderbird, partly because I do not see many people incorporating other GPL software into it (are there still licensing issues, or is it fully GPL/LGPL now?).
Things that Thunderbird lacks is: *Any type of attachment based filters (if it has an attachment, size, etc.). For fuck sakes, even outlook *express* has attachment based filters. *Auto compacting of folders. When you delete something it really isn't deleted and your folders can grow to huge sizes unless it is 'compacted'. *Auto expirary of mail. Kmail has it (http://kmail.kde.org/features.html) why not Thunderbird? *A lot more, just look at some features that have been requested over the past few *years*.
A little less self congradulations, especially with regards to Thunderbird, is in order I think.
"I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world
would I need 30 gigs?"
If you belong to a lot of yahoo and
google groups, and the
groups you belong to like to send a lot of attachments (porno) you can fill up 2
gigs in a couple of days.
With a box that big you could, if you developed a network, work out an eMail p2p system.
Simply upload the stuff you want to trade and forward it to people who need it. How do you know who would want the stuff you've uploaded? You'd need to develop a network where your node advertises what it has available, and autoforwards the file when someone requests it.
After the initial uploading there is really no more bandwidth costs for you as you can forward the files for free - the email providers' servers handles the load.
"Unfortunately in this case, "priceless" literally means they wont make a dime!"
And if they were to get into a contract with the RIAA they are shafted then for sure. At least this way an unknown band has a chance of making it to the top without having to sell their soul, and their fans can benefit in the mean time with free music.
"I'm at 4 mbit/sec and my pipe is maxed out. Hot damn!"
And it's easy to contribute just by leaving your torrent on to upload for others. Even if you didn't like the album you can show your support for artists (and tweek the nose of the RIAA) who support free(dom) content by acting as seeders for the file.
Slashdot Mirror
"The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse.
- sydneys-domestic-violence/2005/10/27/1130367990858 .html
The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate"
I like how you state all these statistics, did you pull them out of your ass? In any event the issue is assuming that domestic violence is against women and women only:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/sharp-rise-in
>A surprising number of incidents involve male victims - outnumbering female >victims in cases were the victim is under 15 or over 39.
The rates of physical violence against both sexes by either sex are closer to being approximately the same than not in many cases. Here is a a few quick links, you may want to look at the biblography provided to cross check the stats as one should do with any statistics:
http://www.mensactivism.org/dv_flyers.shtml
http://www.mensactivism.org/search.pl?topic=dv
"Open Source is a failure. No, that's not me saying it, that's what the report says."
Actually what the report says is open source is such a good model that 1) copyright/patents on software should be removed and 2) government can/should fund FOSS software development. The report goes on to say if closed source software is really good then people will pay for it, without government interference (copyright) or not.
There is the, unusual in my perspective, viewpoint that government is evil in the United States. Perhaps with good reason when it does syphilis experiments on black men with out their experiments and other attrocities. But in Canada, where I live, government is seen as a force of great good (free healthcare, promoting the public good and not corporations, the legitimate arbritator of force). In Canada if the free markets can do something better then the they do it, if government can do it better then government does it.
In this case it seems the U.S. government could save ~$80,000,000,000 - $180,000,000,000 to tax payers in the United States and finance it though the savings it self will receive by not having to pay for inflated price software. Sounds like a good deal if only it will work in the public good instead of for the corporate good.
Not being able to have propritary applications run/interact on KDE without a license to TrollTech is a problem. It gives too much control to them and limits the potential of people choosing closed alternatives (games etc.) from intracting fully. What stops TrollTech from charging super high prices if/when Linux becomes popular? Too much uncertainty for SuSE/RedHat to be at their mercy.
There is no reason why Gnome cannot be as good as KDE given enough time and resources, assuming it is not as good as or better than KDE now.
>> I'm waiting for the day when we can raise the speed of light so we can go faster.
> I'm not sure this technology can be pushed in that direction
Let us hope that the speed of light cannot be changed as it is vital to the operation of the universe as we know it. For example, the fine structure constant of the universe (alpha) depends on the speed of light, and if the f-s contstant changes since c changes then funny things could happen, like electron having too much energy to orbit an atom, or fusion no longer occuring in stars.
There is also talk about the speed of light changing in the past, being faster than today and it could be slowly slowing down. If this were true then life might no longer exist in the far future given the effects of the changes in constants that depend on c. The link is an article from Scientific American about the possibility that physical constants (like light) aren't constant after all.
This didn't deserve a troll and if you metamoderate I hope the moderator is punished.
:\.
It's enough of an outrage that I feel the need to post
"There is no complaint. The submitter is an idiot who has misrepresented what TFA is about."
7 &tid=95&tid=187
Indeed. Six stories up from this one another submitter misrepresented what Wikipedia was doing in their write up as well:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/24/16721
If the trolls are going to be submitting misrepresented stories as a part of their bag of tricks then the editor's here will have to read / check the stories now. That and or use Karma as a factor when choosing stories as it is time comsuming to build up Karma just to blow away to troll submit a story.
"It's not free as long as someone has to LET me use it."
The GPL is an attack against copyright and it will work in the long term. It builds an effective wall between full copyright and the GPL commons.
The price paid for the long term combat against full copyright is essentially one thing in the short run: you must give your users the same rights you do when you distribute GPL code. If you want to have the freedom to take away the freedoms of others then you'll have to wait until copyright acts are repealed (so you can do what you want with public domain code).
"Life, I suspect, is fairly commonplace. I have no idea if intelligence is."
;).
Of course we have an idea if intelligent life is common place out side of our solar system and the answer is: it is not. If it were very common then we would have likely picked up a signal by now if they were within a few hundred light years.
Why isn't it common place? There are many possible answers, one of them which I think is that it is much easier to destroy then create so any intelligent civilization eventually reaches the point where it is both easy and capable of destroying itself. We are pretty much at that point right now with nuclear weapons, and with advances in life creation as this article suggests killer viruses will eventually be able to be made by anyone with $100 bucks in equipment in their home.
Is everyone in the world sane enough not to create this virus shit and kill everyone? I dont think so in the long run
"The costs and difficulty of copying and publishing content have been greatly reduced, but the risks have not."
Of course the risks of discreased. Before the publisher would print up 500,000 copies at tremendous cost, and if only one person bought a copy then would be out the excess. Since classical publishing only works in volume, to get the presses set etc., they really had no alternative but to charge high to allieve the risks they lost on.
Now a days there is no upfront risk of losing large sums of money if you releaes your material online or with micropublishing. Thus less risks = less incentives necessary, incentives such as copyright.
"But the first time I saw this happen, it made me think: piracy in general can have more economic impact that you realize at first."
This connection seems incidental. Seems to me the problem isnt piracy per say but the fact that it is illegal to share certain kinds of information and some people break the law to share.
Making file sharing legal for personal use, or doing away with copyright altogether, would resolve your problem of people breaking into your server to share currently copyrighted material. The problem is solved since I'd guess most would simply share it off their own computer instead of trying to conceal their actions by breaking into your servers.
"Music, information, entertainment should be free! ... If the owner of said item wants it to be."
We, the public, are the owners. It is just on loan to the so called creators for a limited period of time, the period being copyright length.
I think it's time to severely reduce that copyright length. It may have made sense before but not when when costs, and thus the risks, of publishing is reduced due to online avenues for distribution.
"the media threw a shitfest over it because it was SEX."
Yes, because dipictions of murder and violence is ok but if a dinky goes into a yahoo that's intollerable.
What is the root of this stupidity? A lot of it was exported to India when the British ruled them, and hermaphrodites there who were once a revered type of people (because Vishnu has sex with his female half to create the other gods) are now much less tolerated, and a crack down on non procreative sex occured.
A lot of it appears to be the Christian/Victorian viewpoint since in Thailand it is much more open to different sexual identity (they recognize more then 2 genders as far as I know with the difference being that Thailand and other similiar countries were never directly ruled by a european type power.
It seems that each distribution becomes a little more flexible when people use these tools / launchpad allowing the differences between distributions to be minimized to a certain extent.
It's a good idea. I was thinking of a meta-distribution where you check off what you want in it and then the program makes it. If the build you are about to make happens to be close to an existing distribution it will tell you so.
If in this meta-distribution you want it to conform to some stand (like LSB) just click that off and it will be sure to include elements that allow the build to adhere to the standard.
" Yeah, that explains why so many software companies have gone out of business due to competition from OSS"
;).
Yes, like RISC. Although they are not bankrupted quite yet
You'll see other companies go bankrupt since people are no longer wanting to pay to give up their freedom for closed products which are increasingly only marginally, and in some cases less, better then FOSS alternatives.
>>Plus his competitors will have to compete against free/open source. He, and >>others, may be able to reenter the market if the community advances the code.
>So, open source is bad for commercial business, or is it good? Because you're >making 2 conflicting claims.
There isn't two conflicting claims. Either a software business embraces free / open source in one way or another or they will eventually be snuffed out.
When using a closed software development process its hard to keep up with FOSS in the long run.
" and giving all of his IP away for free will fix this?!?"
What does he have to lose? Plus his competitors will have to compete against free/open source. He, and others, may be able to reenter the market if the community advances the code.
"Monoplolists don't have the "ability to absolutely set the price to whatever the producer wants"."
Of course they have the ability to set the price to what ever they want, since they are the sole producer. Either you pay their price or you forgo their product.
"There's still a supply and demand curve, and the producer still optimizes profit by setting the price where the curves meet."
Wrong. There is a demand curve but no suply curve for a good or service produced by a monopoly as the monopolist chooses exactly how much to produce, they set the supply. Thus they can produce a given quanitity that maximizes the profit at a given price, or equilivantly set the MR=MC price and produce the given amount demanded at that price. In either case they control supply.
So where would a monopolist set the price? They'd set it to the point where marginal revenue = marginal cost, that's the price that maximizes profit.
"DVD's and movies are not something we need, so competition isn't required to set the market price."
;), people they are have a simple way to determine if monopoly exists. Monopoly power exists if a producer has the ability to control/set the price.
;).
You are going down the difficult path to try and determine if monopoly exists or not. You could make a nice arguement about there being substitutes to CDs and DVDs but economists being the lazy, i mean economizing
The ability to absolutely set the price to whatever a producer wants means it is a pure monopoly. The inability of a producer to set the price in anyway (meaning it is determined by the market as a whole) is perfect competition.
Since the DVD sellers can set the price to the level they wish (as they are the sole owners of that product) and there is no direct substitutes for that particular good (e.g. if you want to a Gili DVD you'll have to buy it) then they are a monopoly / monopolistic.
In contrast, a chicken egg farmer who wants to set his price at say $1.00 above everyone else could not. Not if he wanted sales as buyers would just go down the street to buy other farmers' eggs for a buck less.
The monopoly power that the DVD / MPAA companies exert depends, as you say, on how close the substitutes are. If you really want to specifically watch Gili then there are no close substitutes and they can set the price. If you want to just watch a horrible movie then there are many substitutes for Gili
"They're going to take a business model (Pay Per View), add value by giving more to the consumer, rather than less (the ability to purchase the DVD), and deliver it at market prices."
That would be a terribly interesting feat indeed - to some how arrive at a market price on a monopoly (though copyright) good. Make no mistake, even though some DVDs are less than others they are still maximizing profit by leverging their monopoly power by pricing the product to gain maximum profit given the demand *for each type of DVD*. This is not (free) market pricing, it is monopoly price discrimination.
There is still a lot of features lacking in Thunderbird, partly because I do not see many people incorporating other GPL software into it (are there still licensing issues, or is it fully GPL/LGPL now?).
Things that Thunderbird lacks is:
*Any type of attachment based filters (if it has an attachment, size, etc.). For fuck sakes, even outlook *express* has attachment based filters.
*Auto compacting of folders. When you delete something it really isn't deleted and your folders can grow to huge sizes unless it is 'compacted'.
*Auto expirary of mail. Kmail has it (http://kmail.kde.org/features.html) why not Thunderbird?
*A lot more, just look at some features that have been requested over the past few *years*.
A little less self congradulations, especially with regards to Thunderbird, is in order I think.
"No this just proves that Windows actually has a negative retail value."
No. This just proves that Microsoft is paying Dell to jack up the price on systems without Windows on it. There are few other explanations.
Dell should want to make money, selling the box for *more* when it does *not* have the Windows tax doesn't make much sense.
"I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?"
If you belong to a lot of yahoo and google groups, and the groups you belong to like to send a lot of attachments (porno) you can fill up 2 gigs in a couple of days.
Not that I know from experience or anything...
With a box that big you could, if you developed a network, work out an eMail p2p system.
Simply upload the stuff you want to trade and forward it to people who need it. How do you know who would want the stuff you've uploaded? You'd need to develop a network where your node advertises what it has available, and autoforwards the file when someone requests it.
After the initial uploading there is really no more bandwidth costs for you as you can forward the files for free - the email providers' servers handles the load.
"Unfortunately in this case, "priceless" literally means they wont make a dime!"
And if they were to get into a contract with the RIAA they are shafted then for sure. At least this way an unknown band has a chance of making it to the top without having to sell their soul, and their fans can benefit in the mean time with free music.
"I'm at 4 mbit/sec and my pipe is maxed out. Hot damn!"
And it's easy to contribute just by leaving your torrent on to upload for others. Even if you didn't like the album you can show your support for artists (and tweek the nose of the RIAA) who support free(dom) content by acting as seeders for the file.