To be quite honest, my grandmother isn't particularly good with computers. But then, most grandmothers are not.
She is currently very impressed with herself because she can press the power button, wait for windows to start, double-click on a particular icon on her desktop, wait for the application to load -- which automatically loads the appropriate documents for her, and provides very big named links to switch from one to the other -- and proceed to type text into the various fields, and then click "print" and get the paper out of the printer.
I tried to explain the concept of a start button. Not happening. I tried to explain the difference between "The Computer", "The Program", and "The Document" -- but it's not happening.
She isn't going to be able to figure out how to log into a Linux box, even if its already completely configured and installed and running in RunLevel 5. She definitely wouldn't be able to put it in RunLevel 5 if it weren't already.
Also, Linux only works well with modern, mainstream hardware, not the stuff that was crammed into my grandmother's old laptop in about 1996 when it was built.
Thing 1: IE just kinda happens to have the browser market. This means that if it doesn't render right on IE, 97% of the population won't see it right.
If it doesn't render on FireFox/Mozilla correctly like 1% of the population doesn't see it right.
It is sometimes NOT POSSIBLE to get it to render ideally on both. Which browser do you think I'm going to support?
Thing 2: About i in every 20 times I load a page that has a size-constrained table (you know, one where the table AND its rows have "width=" values) mozilla decides to render the middle part of the table completely broken. The top 100 pixels are right, the botton 100 pixels are right, the rest is all messed up. Hitting refresh fixes it. This is just a simple bug -- but its been around sice I first used mozilla, over 2 years ago. So shut up about stupid IE not being perfect, K?
-- Fareq
P.S. Your hope that Mozilla/FireFox never becomes fully compatible with the #1 player in the market (and not just #1, but with almost 100x as many users -- especially among that most important demographic -- those willing to pay for things, and who don't think that making money selling stuff is evil) is the same thing as hoping that Linux on the Desktop remains a toy eternally. -- The former guarantees the latter, you see.
A large variety of useful applications are simply not available on things like the red hat network (so there goes up2date).
Up2date is great for upgrading packages that I already have installed during the first little while after I buy the operating system (at the moment, I think I have 3 years, but only because I bought "Enterprise Linux" which costs more than MS Windows, so there goes the cheaper concept.
Up2date will get me new software if I happen to know what the package name that I want is. For instance I wanted to install GVIM. The redhat network package for Enterprise Linux was compiled without support for the GUI, alas. This is what I had to do to get GVIM.
$ su - Password: # up2date --get-source vim (lots of output) # cd/usr/src/redhat/SPECS # vi vim.spec (change the option in the specfile that says compile without the GUI) # rpmbuild -bb vim.spec (lots of output) # cd../RPMS/i386 # rpm --install vim-X11-6.2.98-1.i386.rpm (lots of output) # exit $ gvim my_file (good, it works)
I suppose I could have gone to the VIM website, and download their version of the vim RPMs, and ran rpm --install on that. It probably even would have worked, but I don't know for sure that vim.org has the same RPM version, if it installs everything in the same place, and what up2date would think about that package. I have only been using Linux for approximately 2 years at this point, so it is perhaps understandable that a complete newbie like myself would find the various methods of software installation extremely complex.
Next topic: configuration
My biggest complaint against linux on the desktop is the extreme absurdity of some types of configuration. My linux workstation is my work machine, and so it has to do things like run apache and our application server (Interchange if you are curious -- http://www.icdevgroup.org).
Well... Installing apache was easy. Installing Interchange was hard. It requires nonthreaded perl, but a gazillion things require the existing threaded perl 5.8.3 that came with the OS. So, I build my own perl from source, and then copied into/usr/local instead of/usr, and then hacked at the Interchange source so that it looked in this new location...
Why not just uninstall the old perl? Because I can't. When I issued the
rpm -e perl-5.8.0
command, I encountered dozens of errors. And I couldn't upgrade -- they were the same version, just with different compiler switches set.
Oh, then I got an error that my system was set to the incorrect language encoding. I'm not 100% sure I understand what that means even having fixed it -- but here's what I had to do
$ su - Password: # cd/etc/sysconfig # vi i18n (remove a.UTF-8 from the LANGUAGE= line)
Ok... so... exactly what does i18n stand for? Having a normal computer user find the i18n configuration file and hack at it isn't reasonable. Especially if you don't tell them that the error is in i18n. Now a normal user might not be trying to install Interchange, but hell, even our sysadmin wasted 4 hours figuring out what config file to change.
My point? Linux on the desktop is a freaking toy until a user can do everything they need to without opening a terminal or becoming root ever.
This includes installing software,
configuring the machine, and running applications.
Incidentally, Windows crashes since I installed XP (2 years): at least 10, at most 15.
Linux crashes since I installed Red Hat Linux (first v. 7.2, now EL 3 WS, approx 18 months): at least 10, at most 15.
My definition of a crash is anything that goes wrong to which the only easy solution is either pressing the power button or typing "init 6".
If Mexico's government remains as completely corrupt as it is, there is little hope that the population will be able to follow that nice upward spiral -- the government could simply steal all of the gains.
As it stands, most of the "economic growth" in Mexico is the shipping of money (usually physical bills -- US paper currency) from immigrants (legal and otherwise) to family in Mexico.
However, a more educated populace *is* more likely to demand (and get) a less corrupt leadership.
---
As for ancestor's whine about Bush... STFU! you have no idea what you are talking about... recall Clinton's firing cruise missiles on Iraq? Remember why that happened? (Other than the Monica Lewinsky thing... there actually was a second reason). Fact check before you post that kind of drivel, eh?
1: Large-scale distribution of material to which *I* own the copyright. Maybe I wrote a book, maybe I made a movie or a videogame, or maybe I wrote some usefull piece of software.
2: Large-scale distribution of copyright material with the express permission of the copyright holder(s). (for instance, Linux ISOs)
3: High-Speed distribution of files from my computer at home to other computers around the world (kind of like an external hard drive that I dont have to carry).
4: Downloading something that I just bought (software, in the future perhaps a movie) in seconds instead of minutes/hours.
5: Downloading something free in seconds/minutes instead of hours (Linux ISOs, patches & updates for various software applications)
6: Network no longer a consideration or limitation in the implementation of video games, this also decreases the need to waste CPU power compressing & reformatting the data for network transmission.
7: Set up a media streaming service that allows me to watch any movie or listen to any song that I own from anywhere around the world (authentication required so that its only me)
8: Run permanent servers for all your favorite games all at the same time (one or two per computer, times how ever many computers you have)
9: Infinitely many fascinating new uses for global-scale networks that nobody ever thought of because the amount of data generated was so absurd that it was dismissed as "try again in 2150"
10: Really interesting new types of distributed computing, such as the SETI project, which can have individual machines on the network communicate with each other during processing. It will now be possible to send both to the initiating server and to other clients, large quantities of data generated from whatever the current "work unit" is.
11: Name anything that a business might want with high-speed internet service, add the words "home-based" in front of the word "business"
12: This message would post to slashdot in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds, or something like that.
I need to get back to work, so I will leave this list off here, but if I had to I could go on.
I'm dead serious about this too... It'd be really cool to have my external hard drives with me wherever I go without having to lug 7 pounds of crap with me, just because I have 200 GB of stuff that I might want. Just because people would use the item to commit crimes does not mean that it is a criminal device.
Consider: A crowbar is used for more than just theft.
A gun is used for more than just murder.
A camera/photocopier/scanner/printer/... is used for more than juist making illegal copies of printed materials.
A computer is used for more than copyright infringement.
The internet is used for more than copyright infringement. In fact, it is used for legitimate businesses all the time. (see Amazon.com, or iTunes Music Store, or eBay, or...)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most *nixers tend to use half-finished bug-ridden software because its free, instead of running the expensive, windows-only products that *gasp* work
I seem to recall a speech from ayear or two ago where a head of some broadcasting company or another said that not watching commercials was theft (skipped or just channel-surfed)-- but that he'd make an exception for people getting up from the couch to go to the bathroom. maybe.
Actually, it is never appropriate to make such a statement.
I am glad the one you quote holds an opposing opinion. You know why? His inability to argue (resorting to insult) makes him look stupid, which makes his viewpoint look stupid.
conceivably, I could build a CPU that took chunks of the data off the DVD and interpreted them as instructions.
That said, you are right. DVDs are not computer programs, though the menu system would fit some generous definitions. In fact, I would argue that the DVD contains 2 things: A program (menu system) written in a special DVD-specific language, and a large data file containing the movie.
On a different front, there is a piece of copyright law that everyone is forgetting to quote. I'm not going to quote it, but simply remind you all to read it.
That would be the fair use portion of the law. There is a section of the copyright act (of 1976, I think) that defined "fair use" as a somewhat-vaguely defined set of copyright violations that don't count as copyright violations.
For instance, the right to parody a work. Well certainly a parody is a derivative work. And that is a copyright violation. But if it is a parody, then it is still legal (under certain vague limitations)
However, this would *still* not be buying the music. As far as the law is concerned, you have stolen the music and then given a gift to the artist.
While I feel it is an unwise business decision for the RIAA to go suing its customer base, it has the legal right to. If it were made irrelevant, then they would have no disincentivy to just sue everybody with a pair of headphones
just... have your P2P client act as a real webserver -- passing the data back and forth via simple HTTP requests and HTML documents that *just happen* to have the relevant data...
just request http://foo.bar.com/dir/file.html
and have the server spit back to you an HTML document that contains the MP3 embedded in it somehow. you could even be more clever and do things like file.4016.html -- implying that you want the 4016th "chunk" of the file.
Wasteful, yes. Tricky to detect? Probably yes.
If you got really desperate, you could reverse the process so that you could send the MP3 embedded in 1 or more valid-looking HTTP requests and have the user respond with an HTML doc that requests the next packet.
But it's better to pay more for consumer-grade stuff you can afford, even if it requires a little more saving (though if the wages would go up because of the job market saturation, won't necessarily be that much in term of man-hours required to make enough money to buy it).
I'll take my best shot at this... its kinda late, and I'm in a hurry, but... here goes... why is selling software for money not the same as hurting someone else (lets say financially).
Here ya go.
When a person buys a product that I created (in this case, a software package. Lets say, Microsoft Office 2003) they are giving me some of their dollars, and I am giving them a piece of software.
There are two important bits at work here. The first is a bit of simple economics:
The person who shelled out the, say $400 for my product (thats about right for office, right?) decided that they would be better off with my product than they would be with the $400. If this is untrue, than the purchaser is foolish, they should have not bought the software.
The other piece of this is the purpose behind copyright law: incentive to invent.
If there is no money to be made from the creation of a new product, then fewer novel products will be created. After all, why should I spend millions of dollars building a piece of software if anyone can just copy it? I would be foolish for doing so.
There are free alternatives to many popular purchased software. In the Office Productivity market, I can think of OpenOffice only, although I assume there are others. If you look at market-share, you will see that Microsoft Office is by an enormous margin, the most popular package. This is because more people decided that Microsoft Office was worth $400 than decided that it was better to save the $400 and use Free Software instead.
If I may go out on a limb here, generally speaking, corporations and individuals actively try to improve their financial situation by avoiding overpriced alternatives. Obviously MS Office is "worth it" to a very, very large number of people feel that Office is worth $400.
And guess what. If OpenOffice were a truly superior product (to the point that there was not any significant debate over which is better) then Microsoft would lower the price, or simply exit the market.
I seem to have wandered a little bit away from the main point, but my intention is to explain that trade between 2 organizations is not an evil thing. Even if one of those organizations makes lots of money.
If you want me to try again, lemme know what's wrong, and I'll give it another go.
I will hire you if you can do the work either better for the same price, or just as well for less...
Well, I won't because I already have all the employees I need -- none -- but almost any company on the planet will if they are convinced of either of those options.
It is NOT evil or immoral to want to keep US jobs in the USA. I (and many others here) believe that in the long run, it is bad for the American economy (that is, bad FOR US) to prevent some jobs from going oversees. In the end, we believe that the cheaper better goods will benefit us more on the whole than protecting certain industries (artificially increasing the cost of the goods/services they produce)
Contrary to popular opinion, throughout history the rich have gotten astronomically richer, and the poor have... gotten astronomically richer...
Think about the average man's standard of living, say, 100 years ago. Now look at it today. You wanna trade?
Didn't think so.
Yes, the big guns have gotten richer, but hey... almost everyone can now afford a car, and pretty damn good food and clothing, and most can even manage a decent house/condo/apartment with cool things like air conditioning, heating, running water, and computers with Internet connections.
This is not unique to our current time, this growth has pretty much been constant.
The fallacy is that there is $X worth of "value" in the world, and if the CEOs get more, then there is less for everyone else. The fact is that every time somebody creates something that someone else wants, the total value of all goods & services in the world is increased. This means that the whole pie is growing, so even if your percentage of the wealth remains the same, your actual wealth will increase.
Remember. Money has no value except as a medium of exchange for goods. If there are more good-quality highly-desirable and inexpensive goods to be had, you will become wealthier.
Eeek... I'm turning into a capitalist. Oh, wait. That's a good thing.
P.S. If you prefer socialism, in which the primary responsability of business is to provide people with jobs, and wealth-gaining is secondary, I invite you to move to a western-European nation. You will have to pay almost twice as much in taxes though... That's not to say Socialism is evil -- its not. I personally feel that it is less ideal than capitalism. More Americans agree with me than, say, those among the French, Spanish and English. They tend to lean more Socialist.
Your life would be much more expensive if all your shirts cost the extra $30-$1000 that they would if they all had to be made in America where the actual cost of a single employee is at minimum on the order of $10/hr.
And your VCR would still cost $400, and that shiny television too, and the Microwave, and the fridge that your soda is in, (but probably not that soda).
In fact, the only thing that would escape first-pass price hikes is food. But driving up cost of living would make farming more expensive, and thus... you guessed it... food would be more expensive.
If you think that the corporations are making an absolute killing exploiting us all, I encourage you to start your own company (relying on only U.S. equipment, buying nothing from overseas) and you tell me if you can do better than twice the price of your competitors.
Remember, that means no foreign cars, no foreign electronics. And no foreign-built anythings.
I would very much like to hear/see the results, in all seriousness... and if you can make it work, then guess what, you will be filthy rich, and will finally have that political clout to help change our evil practices
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I didn't know that.
i18n = internationalization huh...
8n could be "ation" I suppos
but i1 = "internationaliz"?
woah.
oh, wait... someone just told me its i + 18 letters + n
WTF! I'm not even going to bother to count that its really 18 letters... thats just wrong.
Well, hey... thanks. Thats +1 magic for me now!
-- Fareq
Yes, yes you are right.
That was the point I was trying to make.
I fit into that category, so I can usually muddle through, and Linux makes some things very nice and spiffy for those of us that can figure out.
It does take a long time to learn all the rituals and prayers though...
-- Fareq
Don't know about parent, but I'm running:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 WS
Started from the Update 2 ISOs, then ran 1.25 gazillion updates
Didn't see that option, dosen't mean its not there.
-- Fareq
really? How?
-- Fareq
That's OK, we won't miss you
Incidentally, my OEM laptop came with a video capture card. In fact, these days almost every SONY computer does.
Since SONY has a reasonable marketshare, video-capture is a reasonable feature to request.
-- Fareq
I call bullshit.
To be quite honest, my grandmother isn't particularly good with computers. But then, most grandmothers are not.
She is currently very impressed with herself because she can press the power button, wait for windows to start, double-click on a particular icon on her desktop, wait for the application to load -- which automatically loads the appropriate documents for her, and provides very big named links to switch from one to the other -- and proceed to type text into the various fields, and then click "print" and get the paper out of the printer.
I tried to explain the concept of a start button. Not happening. I tried to explain the difference between "The Computer", "The Program", and "The Document" -- but it's not happening.
She isn't going to be able to figure out how to log into a Linux box, even if its already completely configured and installed and running in RunLevel 5. She definitely wouldn't be able to put it in RunLevel 5 if it weren't already.
Also, Linux only works well with modern, mainstream hardware, not the stuff that was crammed into my grandmother's old laptop in about 1996 when it was built.
-- Fareq
Ok, here we go.
Thing 1:
IE just kinda happens to have the browser market. This means that if it doesn't render right on IE, 97% of the population won't see it right.
If it doesn't render on FireFox/Mozilla correctly like 1% of the population doesn't see it right.
It is sometimes NOT POSSIBLE to get it to render ideally on both. Which browser do you think I'm going to support?
Thing 2:
About i in every 20 times I load a page that has a size-constrained table (you know, one where the table AND its rows have "width=" values) mozilla decides to render the middle part of the table completely broken. The top 100 pixels are right, the botton 100 pixels are right, the rest is all messed up. Hitting refresh fixes it. This is just a simple bug -- but its been around sice I first used mozilla, over 2 years ago. So shut up about stupid IE not being perfect, K?
-- Fareq
P.S. Your hope that Mozilla/FireFox never becomes fully compatible with the #1 player in the market (and not just #1, but with almost 100x as many users -- especially among that most important demographic -- those willing to pay for things, and who don't think that making money selling stuff is evil) is the same thing as hoping that Linux on the Desktop remains a toy eternally. -- The former guarantees the latter, you see.
A large variety of useful applications are simply not available on things like the red hat network (so there goes up2date).
Up2date is great for upgrading packages that I already have installed during the first little while after I buy the operating system (at the moment, I think I have 3 years, but only because I bought "Enterprise Linux" which costs more than MS Windows, so there goes the cheaper concept.
Up2date will get me new software if I happen to know what the package name that I want is. For instance I wanted to install GVIM. The redhat network package for Enterprise Linux was compiled without support for the GUI, alas. This is what I had to do to get GVIM.
I suppose I could have gone to the VIM website, and download their version of the vim RPMs, and ran rpm --install on that. It probably even would have worked, but I don't know for sure that vim.org has the same RPM version, if it installs everything in the same place, and what up2date would think about that package. I have only been using Linux for approximately 2 years at this point, so it is perhaps understandable that a complete newbie like myself would find the various methods of software installation extremely complex.
Next topic: configuration
My biggest complaint against linux on the desktop is the extreme absurdity of some types of configuration. My linux workstation is my work machine, and so it has to do things like run apache and our application server (Interchange if you are curious -- http://www.icdevgroup.org).
Well... Installing apache was easy. Installing Interchange was hard. It requires nonthreaded perl, but a gazillion things require the existing threaded perl 5.8.3 that came with the OS. So, I build my own perl from source, and then copied into /usr/local instead of /usr, and then hacked at the Interchange source so that it looked in this new location...
Why not just uninstall the old perl? Because I can't. When I issued the
command, I encountered dozens of errors. And I couldn't upgrade -- they were the same version, just with different compiler switches set.
Oh, then I got an error that my system was set to the incorrect language encoding. I'm not 100% sure I understand what that means even having fixed it -- but here's what I had to do
Ok... so... exactly what does i18n stand for? Having a normal computer user find the i18n configuration file and hack at it isn't reasonable. Especially if you don't tell them that the error is in i18n. Now a normal user might not be trying to install Interchange, but hell, even our sysadmin wasted 4 hours figuring out what config file to change.
My point? Linux on the desktop is a freaking toy until a user can do everything they need to without opening a terminal or becoming root ever.
This includes installing software, configuring the machine, and running applications.
Incidentally, Windows crashes since I installed XP (2 years): at least 10, at most 15.
Linux crashes since I installed Red Hat Linux (first v. 7.2, now EL 3 WS, approx 18 months): at least 10, at most 15.
My definition of a crash is anything that goes wrong to which the only easy solution is either pressing the power button or typing "init 6".
You are right, excepting the costs of corruption.
If Mexico's government remains as completely corrupt as it is, there is little hope that the population will be able to follow that nice upward spiral -- the government could simply steal all of the gains.
As it stands, most of the "economic growth" in Mexico is the shipping of money (usually physical bills -- US paper currency) from immigrants (legal and otherwise) to family in Mexico.
However, a more educated populace *is* more likely to demand (and get) a less corrupt leadership.
---
As for ancestor's whine about Bush... STFU! you have no idea what you are talking about... recall Clinton's firing cruise missiles on Iraq? Remember why that happened? (Other than the Monica Lewinsky thing... there actually was a second reason). Fact check before you post that kind of drivel, eh?
Thanks
</RANT>
-- Fareq
Ok, I'll bite.
...)
1: Large-scale distribution of material to which *I* own the copyright. Maybe I wrote a book, maybe I made a movie or a videogame, or maybe I wrote some usefull piece of software.
2: Large-scale distribution of copyright material with the express permission of the copyright holder(s). (for instance, Linux ISOs)
3: High-Speed distribution of files from my computer at home to other computers around the world (kind of like an external hard drive that I dont have to carry).
4: Downloading something that I just bought (software, in the future perhaps a movie) in seconds instead of minutes/hours.
5: Downloading something free in seconds/minutes instead of hours (Linux ISOs, patches & updates for various software applications)
6: Network no longer a consideration or limitation in the implementation of video games, this also decreases the need to waste CPU power compressing & reformatting the data for network transmission.
7: Set up a media streaming service that allows me to watch any movie or listen to any song that I own from anywhere around the world (authentication required so that its only me)
8: Run permanent servers for all your favorite games all at the same time (one or two per computer, times how ever many computers you have)
9: Infinitely many fascinating new uses for global-scale networks that nobody ever thought of because the amount of data generated was so absurd that it was dismissed as "try again in 2150"
10: Really interesting new types of distributed computing, such as the SETI project, which can have individual machines on the network communicate with each other during processing. It will now be possible to send both to the initiating server and to other clients, large quantities of data generated from whatever the current "work unit" is.
11: Name anything that a business might want with high-speed internet service, add the words "home-based" in front of the word "business"
12: This message would post to slashdot in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds, or something like that.
I need to get back to work, so I will leave this list off here, but if I had to I could go on.
I'm dead serious about this too... It'd be really cool to have my external hard drives with me wherever I go without having to lug 7 pounds of crap with me, just because I have 200 GB of stuff that I might want. Just because people would use the item to commit crimes does not mean that it is a criminal device.
Consider: A crowbar is used for more than just theft.
A gun is used for more than just murder.
A camera/photocopier/scanner/printer/... is used for more than juist making illegal copies of printed materials.
A computer is used for more than copyright infringement.
The internet is used for more than copyright infringement. In fact, it is used for legitimate businesses all the time. (see Amazon.com, or iTunes Music Store, or eBay, or
</rant>
-- Fareq
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most *nixers tend to use half-finished bug-ridden software because its free, instead of running the expensive, windows-only products that *gasp* work
I seem to recall a speech from ayear or two ago where a head of some broadcasting company or another said that not watching commercials was theft (skipped or just channel-surfed)-- but that he'd make an exception for people getting up from the couch to go to the bathroom. maybe.
-- Fareq
Actually, it is never appropriate to make such a statement.
I am glad the one you quote holds an opposing opinion. You know why? His inability to argue (resorting to insult) makes him look stupid, which makes his viewpoint look stupid.
Let him keep talking, it does us so much good!
The friends are where the dollars come from.
The people are where the dollars go to so that you can get more out of each "friend"
Keep it straight.
As for cents, bah! They are all mine anyway
conceivably, I could build a CPU that took chunks of the data off the DVD and interpreted them as instructions.
That said, you are right. DVDs are not computer programs, though the menu system would fit some generous definitions. In fact, I would argue that the DVD contains 2 things: A program (menu system) written in a special DVD-specific language, and a large data file containing the movie.
On a different front, there is a piece of copyright law that everyone is forgetting to quote. I'm not going to quote it, but simply remind you all to read it.
That would be the fair use portion of the law. There is a section of the copyright act (of 1976, I think) that defined "fair use" as a somewhat-vaguely defined set of copyright violations that don't count as copyright violations.
For instance, the right to parody a work. Well certainly a parody is a derivative work. And that is a copyright violation. But if it is a parody, then it is still legal (under certain vague limitations)
You are correct.
However, this would *still* not be buying the music. As far as the law is concerned, you have stolen the music and then given a gift to the artist.
While I feel it is an unwise business decision for the RIAA to go suing its customer base, it has the legal right to. If it were made irrelevant, then they would have no disincentivy to just sue everybody with a pair of headphones
Not the result you want, probably.
Ok, fine...
just... have your P2P client act as a real webserver -- passing the data back and forth via simple HTTP requests and HTML documents that *just happen* to have the relevant data...
just request http://foo.bar.com/dir/file.html
and have the server spit back to you an HTML document that contains the MP3 embedded in it somehow. you could even be more clever and do things like file.4016.html -- implying that you want the 4016th "chunk" of the file.
Wasteful, yes. Tricky to detect? Probably yes.
If you got really desperate, you could reverse the process so that you could send the MP3 embedded in 1 or more valid-looking HTTP requests and have the user respond with an HTML doc that requests the next packet.
But it's better to pay more for consumer-grade stuff you can afford, even if it requires a little more saving (though if the wages would go up because of the job market saturation, won't necessarily be that much in term of man-hours required to make enough money to buy it).
woah. is this an argument that inflation is good?
Holy Shit. I never thought I'd hear one of those.
OK...
I'll take my best shot at this... its kinda late, and I'm in a hurry, but... here goes... why is selling software for money not the same as hurting someone else (lets say financially).
Here ya go.
When a person buys a product that I created (in this case, a software package. Lets say, Microsoft Office 2003) they are giving me some of their dollars, and I am giving them a piece of software.
There are two important bits at work here. The first is a bit of simple economics:
The person who shelled out the, say $400 for my product (thats about right for office, right?) decided that they would be better off with my product than they would be with the $400. If this is untrue, than the purchaser is foolish, they should have not bought the software.
The other piece of this is the purpose behind copyright law: incentive to invent.
If there is no money to be made from the creation of a new product, then fewer novel products will be created. After all, why should I spend millions of dollars building a piece of software if anyone can just copy it? I would be foolish for doing so.
There are free alternatives to many popular purchased software. In the Office Productivity market, I can think of OpenOffice only, although I assume there are others. If you look at market-share, you will see that Microsoft Office is by an enormous margin, the most popular package. This is because more people decided that Microsoft Office was worth $400 than decided that it was better to save the $400 and use Free Software instead.
If I may go out on a limb here, generally speaking, corporations and individuals actively try to improve their financial situation by avoiding overpriced alternatives. Obviously MS Office is "worth it" to a very, very large number of people feel that Office is worth $400.
And guess what. If OpenOffice were a truly superior product (to the point that there was not any significant debate over which is better) then Microsoft would lower the price, or simply exit the market.
I seem to have wandered a little bit away from the main point, but my intention is to explain that trade between 2 organizations is not an evil thing. Even if one of those organizations makes lots of money.
If you want me to try again, lemme know what's wrong, and I'll give it another go.
-- Fareq
I will hire you if you can do the work either better for the same price, or just as well for less...
Well, I won't because I already have all the employees I need -- none -- but almost any company on the planet will if they are convinced of either of those options.
I think this is important, so I'll say it loud:
It is NOT evil or immoral to want to keep US jobs in the USA. I (and many others here) believe that in the long run, it is bad for the American economy (that is, bad FOR US) to prevent some jobs from going oversees. In the end, we believe that the cheaper better goods will benefit us more on the whole than protecting certain industries (artificially increasing the cost of the goods/services they produce)
Contrary to popular opinion, throughout history the rich have gotten astronomically richer, and the poor have... gotten astronomically richer...
Think about the average man's standard of living, say, 100 years ago. Now look at it today. You wanna trade?
Didn't think so.
Yes, the big guns have gotten richer, but hey... almost everyone can now afford a car, and pretty damn good food and clothing, and most can even manage a decent house/condo/apartment with cool things like air conditioning, heating, running water, and computers with Internet connections.
This is not unique to our current time, this growth has pretty much been constant.
The fallacy is that there is $X worth of "value" in the world, and if the CEOs get more, then there is less for everyone else. The fact is that every time somebody creates something that someone else wants, the total value of all goods & services in the world is increased. This means that the whole pie is growing, so even if your percentage of the wealth remains the same, your actual wealth will increase.
Remember. Money has no value except as a medium of exchange for goods. If there are more good-quality highly-desirable and inexpensive goods to be had, you will become wealthier.
Eeek... I'm turning into a capitalist. Oh, wait. That's a good thing.
P.S. If you prefer socialism, in which the primary responsability of business is to provide people with jobs, and wealth-gaining is secondary, I invite you to move to a western-European nation. You will have to pay almost twice as much in taxes though... That's not to say Socialism is evil -- its not. I personally feel that it is less ideal than capitalism. More Americans agree with me than, say, those among the French, Spanish and English. They tend to lean more Socialist.
This is entirely untrue.
Your life would be much more expensive if all your shirts cost the extra $30-$1000 that they would if they all had to be made in America where the actual cost of a single employee is at minimum on the order of $10/hr.
And your VCR would still cost $400, and that shiny television too, and the Microwave, and the fridge that your soda is in, (but probably not that soda).
In fact, the only thing that would escape first-pass price hikes is food. But driving up cost of living would make farming more expensive, and thus... you guessed it... food would be more expensive.
If you think that the corporations are making an absolute killing exploiting us all, I encourage you to start your own company (relying on only U.S. equipment, buying nothing from overseas) and you tell me if you can do better than twice the price of your competitors.
Remember, that means no foreign cars, no foreign electronics. And no foreign-built anythings.
I would very much like to hear/see the results, in all seriousness... and if you can make it work, then guess what, you will be filthy rich, and will finally have that political clout to help change our evil practices
They aren't idiots... they're just wrong.
be nice. it makes idiots seem dumber.