A true Chinese proverb: "I don't care if it is black cat or white cat. You can still pass it off as Kung Pao Chicken"
FYI, cat meat does not taste at all like chicken (light or dark meat). The texture and flavor of cat meat is quite different, and even a liberal dose of spices cannot mask this difference.
Hence the Chinese proverb: "damn, that's the worst chicken I ever tasted!"
...admitting that "whole of the internet" is a meaningless term in terms of bandwidth...
But what a beautiful unit it would make! "Their internal network has a bandwidth of 2.3 gazillibits/second, or about three and a half wholes of the internet"... and before long we'd have a standard whole of the internet unit based upon the internet of 1/1/2010 or something and a few years down the road you'd be talking kilo-wholes of the internet and mega-wholes of the internet! The possibilities!
Darknets, of course, would be measured in black wholes of the internet, a related unit.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
This is a bit of a distortion of history. We did build a Thorium breeder reactor early on at Shippingport. In this case the "we" are Naval Reactors, directed by Rickover. The concept was intended to be purely for civilian use.
There is a company who is developing similar technologies and trying to market it all over the world as proliferation resistant fuel, called "Thorium Power".
There were some difficulties with Thorium. One of them was the fact that while the activity of the fuel had a short half-life, it was much higher initial activity, making maintenance a bit more of a challenge. Other issues as well. My point is that your statement about commercial motives is a bit of a distortion of history.
On the contrary, your own text supports my point: we put the bulk of our efforts into developing uranium/plutonium based reactor designs and marginalized potentially cleaner thorium designs. Sure, some have pursued those regardless, such as India, but they are working with very limited resources and international interest is also very modest. The truth of the matter is, if you couldn't table some Cold War military benefit for your nuclear programme you just wouldn't be seeing very big budgets back there in the industry's formative years. And to create a whole new nuclear reactor design from scratch you/need/ those big budgets because, as you say, there are considerable challenges in doing so.
(...) The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
Ask Lee Iaccoca about about making you want to quit. Ford wanted to get rid of him but for some reason preferred to have him quit. They demoted him but kept his pay unchanged. Gave him a small office in a warehouse and when he asked what he was to do, they responded nothing. They did require that he be physically present in that office 8 hours a day. Boredom quickly took its toll.
But but but... this sort of situation is/exactly/ why they invented Nethack!
If you write a story about a school called Hogwarts for wizards one of whom is named Harry Potter, you can expect to get sued for infringement under the theory that your story is a derivative work of J.K. Rowling's -- even though you've only copied ideas, not expressions.
The main reason nuclear energy hasn't been clean is that the ones we have had up to now have by and large been optimized for one single primary concern: producing weapons-grade fissionable materials. Manufacturing energy has been a welcome by-product of that and the waste an accepted cost.
If we were to instead design nuclear plants optimized for green energy production we could make them almost arbitrarily clean. We would use efficient breeder reactors that burn up almost all their fuel, and we'd sequester any remaining waste for proper disposal rather than spew the radioactive waste into the air for all to enjoy like our coal plants are doing today.
I hate this word. The word just reeks of passivism, acceptance, and defeat. With apologies to George Orwell, all a consumer does is choose which color of corporate boot is stamping on his face forever.
I prefer the word "citizen".
"Citizen" is not what they mean however. Convicted felons are consumers, visiting foreigners are consumers and children are consumers. None of these are necessarily citizens. If pressed I would go for customer although it doesn't quite fit all uses.
Technically speaking the professors aren't doing their jobs if they're duplicating work in different courses.
Let's say in one course you're required to write an essay on the economics of crime and in another you are asked to write about US society during the Great Depression. These are rather different topics for different courses so it's difficult to say that they are duplicated. Within those broad topics you get to pick a more specific subject as you like. So you write about gangsters, smuggling, gambling and the illegal entertainment industry in the Chicago of the early '30s. You turn in the same paper for both courses. Profit! (If you're enterprising you might write two slightly different versions, each geared towards a specific course for those extra credits, but hey - there's a party tonight and who cares about top grades anyway.)
Except we aren't talking about a loophole, we're talking about an explicit contractual term.
Actually, no. The contract doesn't say that you are free to ruthlessly exploit the returns clause for your own benefit and established social norms dictate that you shouldn't. For this reason your day in court may end up a disappointment to you.
I'd argue my original point: you could say he's not tracking the people, he's not tracking the truck, he's tracking his phone.
I don't think there's anyway that defense is going to fly or law enforcement would have used it decades ago. "No, Your Honor, we weren't tracking the suspect we were tracking the tracking device that we initially put in the booth of his car."
Eh? If I buy a product that comes with a contract saying "you can return it for whatever reason within the first 30 days for a full refund" then returning it for any reason is _not_ fraud.
Taking advantage of the agreed terms of a contract is perfectly legal.
The following is a good rule of thumb: A contract is not a computer program. (Also, a law is not a computer program.)
A contract is an agreement between human beings and as such all sorts of social constructs and cultural traditions come into play that are usually not specifically mentioned in the contract. If a judge finds that you entered into a contract dishonestly, or in bad faith, or with the intention of sticking it to the contractual counterpart, he is quite likely to come down on you like a ton of bricks. That sort of business environment is just not healthy to society at large and needs to be aggressively guarded against. (Also: judges aren't computer programmers, they're lawyers. It's a different discipline even if there may be similarities.)
As a corollary for programmers: Just because you think you have found an exploitable loophole in the "system" doesn't mean that you actually/have/.
Regardless of the lunatic fringe for whom no level of deterrent is enough, the number of would-be scammers would be put off by a potential life (or 150 year) prison sentence than would be put off by a 3-10 year sentence.
It destroys one of the fundamental aspects of the calculation, which has generally been, "even if I get caught (and I don't think I will, but just in case), I'll do a few years, and once I'm out I'll dig up my hidden stash."
Throughout this case it has been clear that Madoff was not going to defend himself, that he would take whatever punishment the judge would give him and that he would do so without complaint. I suspect the central actors in this little play all realize that Madoff is presenting himself as the perfect fall guy and that for this reason he simply cannot do anything to try and reduce his punishment. Even Madoff's nearest family didn't speak up for him in court, perhaps because they/really/ need him to be the fall guy lest his infamy rub off on them as well. Moreover, whether Madoff gets 25 or 150 years has no practical significance since he's going to die in prison anyway. All these factors made it perfectly safe for the judge to slap the maximum possible punishment on him because it was just not going to be appealed or protested and he knew it.
This is also why this is not an effective deterrent. Any would-be scamster is going to/know/ that the Madoff verdict was a phony one, not the harbinger of a new tough-on-scams era.
Moving 65 billion dollars is a big feat, and will leave a big-assed papertrail.
Madoff never had 65 billion, that's just the sum of what he told his clients they had on account with him(*). If he had actually/had/ the 65 billion it wouldn't have been a scam because he would/actually/ have been doing what he/said/ he was doing (i.e. generating 10-12% interest on invested capital year after year).
More likely, $15-20-ish billion went through the system and most of it has likely been spent paying off investors etc. while he still pretended to be legit.
* If you give me one dollar to invest, I spend it buying bottled water, and then send you a letter saying "your investment has now grown to $65 billion" I would be in somewhat the same position as Madoff is now as far as the media and, apparently, the Law is concerned: I would be a $65 billion scam artist. It's pretend money.
I don't understand why cable networks think that we need to pay for their content twice. I mean, I'm already paying for their content via the cable subscription fee
No, you're not. You are paying for 40% of their content via the subscription fee.
so why should I even have ads?
To cover the remaining 60%.
(Numbers are examples only. Actual percentages may vary from network to network.)
To be honest, Your debunks 1 & 2 don't hold any merit for me.
Just because others do it didn't get me any slack in kindergarten, I don't see why it should for companies.
3 & 4 sound horrible, but not particularly illegal. They would convince me not to play the game, even though I pretty much always pay on time.
I would say that if it is indeed the case that these policies are hidden from the customer then 1-4 are probably outright fraudulent. I have no idea how well such a claim may hold up though.
In Norway there are some companies that advertise ring tones, cell phone themes and such at about $5 a piece (or so you may think). You send them an SMS, they send you the stuff back, and your cell phone bill is docked the charge. Except what you may not realize when you are placing the order is that you have/actually/ subscribed to their program, which costs $5 a month - or more - until you actively cancel it. They will dock your cell phone bill every month (or even week) until then. This has been in the media recently and it was quite clear that if these companies did not/very clearly/ explain the subscription nature of the purchase in their advertising then they would be in trouble with Norwegian consumer protection laws. The public shaming also prompted some to pledge to stop advertising in children's magazines (which is a slightly different matter, as children aren't actually legally able to enter into binding contracts anyway).
The farmer sells crops - but he didn't construct the seeds ex-nihilo, he didn't sit down and design the genetics, he didn't create the sunlight or the soil. Therefore, farmers should not be entitled to sell crops. They should not have the benefit of laws that prevent people from taking them without paying him, because he was not 100% responsible for creating the food.
The real difference is that in the crops example it took real people real effort to create each single piece of corn. If we had a magical corn duplication device that we could just plug into the wall and have it output corn, then certainly we shouldn't be paying any/farmer/ for each corn that we produce with that machine!
Likewise, since a digital copy of a digital work does not involve any actual work for anyone other than myself (having to type the copy command or whatever) then there is no fundamental reason anyone needs to be paid for the production of that copy.
Piracy / no copyright, then, eliminates the creator's ability to negotiate at all, and gives the consumer complete and total control over the transaction - no matter how unreasonable they want to be.
You won't be negotiating directly with each customer but then that is probably not something you want to do anyway. What you are doing is setting a price point and seeing that some amount of people choose to buy from you at that price point. If you choose to lower the price you will probably see that you get more sales and if you increase it you will get fewer. This can be considered a form of negotiation even if economists tend to call it price elasticity and such. This is how business on a larger scale has been done for many decades and there is nothing really new here.
The one aspect that/is/ somewhat new with digital products is that some number of those people who choose not to buy from you will choose to pirate the material instead of doing without. This does not change the basic nature of your price elasticity curves though. It may or may not shift them around in some direction or the other but that's basically it.
The one problem you/will/ probably have with piracy of digital goods is that you will feel upset about people getting access to your work for free. This is moral outrage and has nothing to do with your business decisions. If you are letting such moral outrage interfere with your business decisions then this is a deficiency in your economic strategy that is likely to cause you a net monetary loss.
As an example of the latter, a Norwegian author recently announced that he was going to refuse his publisher the right to make an audiobook of one of his works, because of piracy. In the interview he managed to complain that in refusing to give these rights he knew he would be losing out on around $10k in income from the audiobook but this was obviously the fault of the pirates. In essence, he is deliberately setting fire to $10k that could have been his in order to spite the pirates and then blames the pirates for him having burnt up that money. This is not a sound business decision. (Note: monetary amounts converted to USD and heavily approximated from memory. For Norwegian readers, this was in Dagens Næringsliv some days ago as I recall.)
Slashdot Mirror
Every time you kick a puppy, God kills a kitten.
Every time God kills a kitten, I kick a puppy.
A true Chinese proverb: "I don't care if it is black cat or white cat. You can still pass it off as Kung Pao Chicken"
FYI, cat meat does not taste at all like chicken (light or dark meat). The texture and flavor of cat meat is quite different, and even a liberal dose of spices cannot mask this difference.
Hence the Chinese proverb: "damn, that's the worst chicken I ever tasted!"
We should call this the War on MP3s. It will be about as effective as the War on Drugs.
Call it what it is: the war on culture.
Why should you have the right to use my programs for free?
If you absolutely hate the idea of other people benefiting from your software then you just keep it to yourself. It's that simple.
...admitting that "whole of the internet" is a meaningless term in terms of bandwidth...
But what a beautiful unit it would make! "Their internal network has a bandwidth of 2.3 gazillibits/second, or about three and a half wholes of the internet" ... and before long we'd have a standard whole of the internet unit based upon the internet of 1/1/2010 or something and a few years down the road you'd be talking kilo-wholes of the internet and mega-wholes of the internet! The possibilities!
Darknets, of course, would be measured in black wholes of the internet, a related unit.
In the past being a Windows dev was compared to serfdom. If that's true, then what's being an iPhone developer like?
Ever see The Matrix? :-)
(Disclosure: I own an MBP and an iMac but wouldn't touch an iPhone or an iPod with a ten-foot pole)
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
This is a bit of a distortion of history. We did build a Thorium breeder reactor early on at Shippingport. In this case the "we" are Naval Reactors, directed by Rickover. The concept was intended to be purely for civilian use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Reactor
There is a company who is developing similar technologies and trying to market it all over the world as proliferation resistant fuel, called "Thorium Power".
There were some difficulties with Thorium. One of them was the fact that while the activity of the fuel had a short half-life, it was much higher initial activity, making maintenance a bit more of a challenge. Other issues as well. My point is that your statement about commercial motives is a bit of a distortion of history.
On the contrary, your own text supports my point: we put the bulk of our efforts into developing uranium/plutonium based reactor designs and marginalized potentially cleaner thorium designs. Sure, some have pursued those regardless, such as India, but they are working with very limited resources and international interest is also very modest. The truth of the matter is, if you couldn't table some Cold War military benefit for your nuclear programme you just wouldn't be seeing very big budgets back there in the industry's formative years. And to create a whole new nuclear reactor design from scratch you /need/ those big budgets because, as you say, there are considerable challenges in doing so.
(...) The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
Ask Lee Iaccoca about about making you want to quit. Ford wanted to get rid of him but for some reason preferred to have him quit. They demoted him but kept his pay unchanged. Gave him a small office in a warehouse and when he asked what he was to do, they responded nothing. They did require that he be physically present in that office 8 hours a day. Boredom quickly took its toll.
But but but ... this sort of situation is /exactly/ why they invented Nethack!
If you write a story about a school called Hogwarts for wizards one of whom is named Harry Potter, you can expect to get sued for infringement under the theory that your story is a derivative work of J.K. Rowling's -- even though you've only copied ideas, not expressions.
More likely you'll be in violation of trademark.
Well, he doesn't change the book around
Actually, he does, every time the Vatican approves a new translation of it.
Nuclear energy is not clean.
The main reason nuclear energy hasn't been clean is that the ones we have had up to now have by and large been optimized for one single primary concern: producing weapons-grade fissionable materials. Manufacturing energy has been a welcome by-product of that and the waste an accepted cost.
If we were to instead design nuclear plants optimized for green energy production we could make them almost arbitrarily clean. We would use efficient breeder reactors that burn up almost all their fuel, and we'd sequester any remaining waste for proper disposal rather than spew the radioactive waste into the air for all to enjoy like our coal plants are doing today.
This teaches your cat that getting on the keyboard is bad even if humans aren't watching.
Or more likely, given that this is cats we're talking, it trains your cat to walk on your keyboard in patterns that won't be caught by the software.
consumer
I hate this word. The word just reeks of passivism, acceptance, and defeat. With apologies to George Orwell, all a consumer does is choose which color of corporate boot is stamping on his face forever.
I prefer the word "citizen".
"Citizen" is not what they mean however. Convicted felons are consumers, visiting foreigners are consumers and children are consumers. None of these are necessarily citizens. If pressed I would go for customer although it doesn't quite fit all uses.
Technically speaking the professors aren't doing their jobs if they're duplicating work in different courses.
Let's say in one course you're required to write an essay on the economics of crime and in another you are asked to write about US society during the Great Depression. These are rather different topics for different courses so it's difficult to say that they are duplicated. Within those broad topics you get to pick a more specific subject as you like. So you write about gangsters, smuggling, gambling and the illegal entertainment industry in the Chicago of the early '30s. You turn in the same paper for both courses. Profit! (If you're enterprising you might write two slightly different versions, each geared towards a specific course for those extra credits, but hey - there's a party tonight and who cares about top grades anyway.)
Except we aren't talking about a loophole, we're talking about an explicit contractual term.
Actually, no. The contract doesn't say that you are free to ruthlessly exploit the returns clause for your own benefit and established social norms dictate that you shouldn't. For this reason your day in court may end up a disappointment to you.
I'd argue my original point: you could say he's not tracking the people, he's not tracking the truck, he's tracking his phone.
I don't think there's anyway that defense is going to fly or law enforcement would have used it decades ago. "No, Your Honor, we weren't tracking the suspect we were tracking the tracking device that we initially put in the booth of his car."
Eh? If I buy a product that comes with a contract saying "you can return it for whatever reason within the first 30 days for a full refund" then returning it for any reason is _not_ fraud.
Taking advantage of the agreed terms of a contract is perfectly legal.
The following is a good rule of thumb: A contract is not a computer program. (Also, a law is not a computer program.)
A contract is an agreement between human beings and as such all sorts of social constructs and cultural traditions come into play that are usually not specifically mentioned in the contract. If a judge finds that you entered into a contract dishonestly, or in bad faith, or with the intention of sticking it to the contractual counterpart, he is quite likely to come down on you like a ton of bricks. That sort of business environment is just not healthy to society at large and needs to be aggressively guarded against. (Also: judges aren't computer programmers, they're lawyers. It's a different discipline even if there may be similarities.)
As a corollary for programmers: Just because you think you have found an exploitable loophole in the "system" doesn't mean that you actually /have/.
I heard the same thing about Sweden... then suddenly The Pirate Bay went down after police raided the building that housed the servers.
It would appear that the Spanish entertainment cartel isn't competent enough to be able to get a hard-line copyright lobbyist for judge.
Regardless of the lunatic fringe for whom no level of deterrent is enough, the number of would-be scammers would be put off by a potential life (or 150 year) prison sentence than would be put off by a 3-10 year sentence.
It destroys one of the fundamental aspects of the calculation, which has generally been, "even if I get caught (and I don't think I will, but just in case), I'll do a few years, and once I'm out I'll dig up my hidden stash."
Throughout this case it has been clear that Madoff was not going to defend himself, that he would take whatever punishment the judge would give him and that he would do so without complaint. I suspect the central actors in this little play all realize that Madoff is presenting himself as the perfect fall guy and that for this reason he simply cannot do anything to try and reduce his punishment. Even Madoff's nearest family didn't speak up for him in court, perhaps because they /really/ need him to be the fall guy lest his infamy rub off on them as well. Moreover, whether Madoff gets 25 or 150 years has no practical significance since he's going to die in prison anyway. All these factors made it perfectly safe for the judge to slap the maximum possible punishment on him because it was just not going to be appealed or protested and he knew it.
This is also why this is not an effective deterrent. Any would-be scamster is going to /know/ that the Madoff verdict was a phony one, not the harbinger of a new tough-on-scams era.
Moving 65 billion dollars is a big feat, and will leave a big-assed papertrail.
Madoff never had 65 billion, that's just the sum of what he told his clients they had on account with him(*). If he had actually /had/ the 65 billion it wouldn't have been a scam because he would /actually/ have been doing what he /said/ he was doing (i.e. generating 10-12% interest on invested capital year after year).
More likely, $15-20-ish billion went through the system and most of it has likely been spent paying off investors etc. while he still pretended to be legit.
* If you give me one dollar to invest, I spend it buying bottled water, and then send you a letter saying "your investment has now grown to $65 billion" I would be in somewhat the same position as Madoff is now as far as the media and, apparently, the Law is concerned: I would be a $65 billion scam artist. It's pretend money.
I don't understand why cable networks think that we need to pay for their content twice. I mean, I'm already paying for their content via the cable subscription fee
No, you're not. You are paying for 40% of their content via the subscription fee.
so why should I even have ads?
To cover the remaining 60%.
(Numbers are examples only. Actual percentages may vary from network to network.)
To be honest, Your debunks 1 & 2 don't hold any merit for me.
Just because others do it didn't get me any slack in kindergarten, I don't see why it should for companies.
3 & 4 sound horrible, but not particularly illegal. They would convince me not to play the game, even though I pretty much always pay on time.
I would say that if it is indeed the case that these policies are hidden from the customer then 1-4 are probably outright fraudulent. I have no idea how well such a claim may hold up though.
In Norway there are some companies that advertise ring tones, cell phone themes and such at about $5 a piece (or so you may think). You send them an SMS, they send you the stuff back, and your cell phone bill is docked the charge. Except what you may not realize when you are placing the order is that you have /actually/ subscribed to their program, which costs $5 a month - or more - until you actively cancel it. They will dock your cell phone bill every month (or even week) until then. This has been in the media recently and it was quite clear that if these companies did not /very clearly/ explain the subscription nature of the purchase in their advertising then they would be in trouble with Norwegian consumer protection laws. The public shaming also prompted some to pledge to stop advertising in children's magazines (which is a slightly different matter, as children aren't actually legally able to enter into binding contracts anyway).
The farmer sells crops - but he didn't construct the seeds ex-nihilo, he didn't sit down and design the genetics, he didn't create the sunlight or the soil. Therefore, farmers should not be entitled to sell crops. They should not have the benefit of laws that prevent people from taking them without paying him, because he was not 100% responsible for creating the food.
The real difference is that in the crops example it took real people real effort to create each single piece of corn. If we had a magical corn duplication device that we could just plug into the wall and have it output corn, then certainly we shouldn't be paying any /farmer/ for each corn that we produce with that machine!
Likewise, since a digital copy of a digital work does not involve any actual work for anyone other than myself (having to type the copy command or whatever) then there is no fundamental reason anyone needs to be paid for the production of that copy.
Piracy / no copyright, then, eliminates the creator's ability to negotiate at all, and gives the consumer complete and total control over the transaction - no matter how unreasonable they want to be.
You won't be negotiating directly with each customer but then that is probably not something you want to do anyway. What you are doing is setting a price point and seeing that some amount of people choose to buy from you at that price point. If you choose to lower the price you will probably see that you get more sales and if you increase it you will get fewer. This can be considered a form of negotiation even if economists tend to call it price elasticity and such. This is how business on a larger scale has been done for many decades and there is nothing really new here.
The one aspect that /is/ somewhat new with digital products is that some number of those people who choose not to buy from you will choose to pirate the material instead of doing without. This does not change the basic nature of your price elasticity curves though. It may or may not shift them around in some direction or the other but that's basically it.
The one problem you /will/ probably have with piracy of digital goods is that you will feel upset about people getting access to your work for free. This is moral outrage and has nothing to do with your business decisions. If you are letting such moral outrage interfere with your business decisions then this is a deficiency in your economic strategy that is likely to cause you a net monetary loss.
As an example of the latter, a Norwegian author recently announced that he was going to refuse his publisher the right to make an audiobook of one of his works, because of piracy. In the interview he managed to complain that in refusing to give these rights he knew he would be losing out on around $10k in income from the audiobook but this was obviously the fault of the pirates. In essence, he is deliberately setting fire to $10k that could have been his in order to spite the pirates and then blames the pirates for him having burnt up that money. This is not a sound business decision. (Note: monetary amounts converted to USD and heavily approximated from memory. For Norwegian readers, this was in Dagens Næringsliv some days ago as I recall.)