Let me take this silly argument to its full comical potential:
If you're a programmer, I guarantee that you're using SEP (Spiritual Extrusion Programming) even if you don't use a SEP language.
Consider the Unix read() function, which can read from any file descriptor: regular file, block or character special, socket, and so on. If you were to write such a function in C, you'd write some code to determine the underlying type of descriptor. Then, based on that type, you'd call a helper function - read_file(), read_special(), read_socket() - to perform the actual read.
Guess what? That's SEP. The file descriptor is the Spititual Manifestation of a Concept. The code at the top of read() is determining the object type (or Spiritual Element). And the helper functions are Spiritual Invocations. If this is a big project, odds are you'll put all the helper functions for sockets in socket.c, for files in file.c, and so on. And there we have Spiritual Encapsulation (of the namespace variety) too.
As noted many times, you can write an SEP in any language. It's just easier to do it in a language that's designed for it.
And so on, etc.
Newsflash: all of the concepts you describe are 1) long in existence before your favourite paradigm arrived on the scene so that you can try to contort them into it, and 2) can be interpreted ad infinitum with any of the millions of "paradigms" one can concoct on the spot. That is because your paradigm is merely a perspective and not an universal (and only) truth. The whole point of abstract formulations, such as computer software, is that they can conform to nearly infinite number of perspectives and can be projected onto the real, physical universe in an equally large number of ways, which is what makes this whole Information Technology thing so powerful.
But I fear that long after OOP has been relegated to the dusty bin of history, some ctr2sprt of the future will still argue about how you are really always writing "Quantum Parallax" code, even if you are you are not...
I don't want to start an OOP war, but am just suggesting that people not use objects just because somebody says to (unless they are your boss and order you).
I am with you on this one, although, unlike you, I used to be swept up at one time in all the early OO hype to a degree (back in the Smalltalk days - which by the way is probably the only coherent OO environment), only to realise, by experience, that it was for the most part just that: unsubstantiated hype. Object Orientation has applications, notably in situations close to its original aims of simulation of physical universe (as in the Simula language which started it all), which in modern software is found in things like PC games. But this paradigm has been overused, abused and stretched beyond its breaking point to try to cover all possible cases, no matter how ill fitting. And in the process it has consistently failed to deliver on most of its promises (other then to pad pockets of various charlatans and OO "framework, IDE, grill and taco stand" makers). My experience has thought me that contrary to what OOP priests wish us to believe, "complexity hiding" (usually by masking it by more OO-gunk complexity) is not the answer to reusability, cooperative maintenance and so on. The answer is: simplicity. That is the most maintainable code is the one which can be fully understood, with ease, by the programmer. OOP does not do that. In fact it introduces a whole new gamut of problems dealing with the hidden workings of pyramidal heaps of classes found in any OOP "framework", each with its own weird quirks and inconsistencies, from which you are supposed to "derrive" your own, as long as you adhere to a million of unwritten and poorly documented rules of use of these, supposedly, "reusable" and "extensible" components. Not to mention that it actively encourages creation of massive, incomprehensible class jungles as one can easily see in places like the JDK.
Speaking of PHP, its success can be attributed to its simplicity, ease of use and short learning curve. If they keep continuing to "innovate" new piles of ever more trendy crap into the language, it will soon (already is?) lose this advantage. It won't be long before someone comes up with another simple server-side language to replace the morass and the enthusiatic crowds will move onto this new "lighning fast, low footprint" language and begin to "improve it". Rinse, repeat.
Under corporate auspices of course. That is you can produce (certain kinds of, approved by your computer and its true owners) contents all you want, but you cannot distribute it unless you become a contractee (read: a serf) of one of the feudal information brokers of the future. They will approve for distribution by certifying your contents, perhaps distribute it themselves, or even promote your stuff and send you the cheque for the 2% cut of the profit, after taking their 98% "Intellectual Property Facilitation" fee. You will have no choice but either to comply or not to distribute anything using any sort of the information processing equipment (read: home enterntainment systems, disk players, Internet, or home computers). You could still use a typewriter + a hand-cranked printer to distribute your works (all computer printers will be Treacherous Computing enabled) and mail it or post it on lampposts as a distrubution system. Just don't do it in the view of the new "Civic Improvement Cameras" which the police is already proposing to be installed on every corner and in people's homes as per the other Slashdot story just a few days back.
So what? Unless prevented, individuals will compete. Dominance in a market by a single player creates an opportunity for profits. Unless prevented by force, that profit will be exploited.
Geography has nothing to do with it, because again there are always alternatives. If the only source of titanium is in South Africa, in a mine owned by DeBiers, then don't use titanium. The development of fiber optics for carrying information has reduced the demand for copper. Oil too expensive? Alternatives are low-grade atomics, ocean thermal difference engines, thermal depolymerization, esterized veggie oil, alcohol, even wood. "Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without." To not buy the monopolists product is always a choice, unless not buying is against the law (such as taxation).
I find it rather curious, that you have dropped all pretense of adhering to any of the economic models you espoused earlier, and are now instead rooting for eminence of raw power of one individual over others, albeit only if such force is via wealth and control of economy, rather then physical. You not only no longer pretend that monopolies are harmful to the marketplace, you see them now as drivers of progress, as producing conditions which force people to innovate to get away from them. I have news for you Sir, monopoly is a form of force, used by the monopolists against the marketplace and the consumer.
Just listen to yourself: Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without...
And how, pray tell, telling millions to "do without" just because some crook has decided to corner the marketplace, is not force?!
Where people are not restrained by force, a monopoly cannot exist because the erstwhile monopolist can never gain the power to force people to buy their product.
See above. The whole point of a monopoly is to force people to buy your product at prices which they would not normally have paid. That is what all monopolists do. And they can achieve that without co-opting the force of the state, as you now acknowledge yourself in accepting my examples. You are no longer even rational, in both accepting this and even providing your own examples, and then, at the same time, deciding, against clear evidence of whole centuries, that no monopoly is possible, unless it involves the use of force of arms of the state. This mode of thinking goes by the name of Cognitive Dissonance.
I object to the use of force.
No you don't. You only object to the use of force by the state, or by any common societal agency. You have no problem with it at all, if it is used by a monopolist or a trade cartel as your own statements above clearly indicate.
It is coercion which reduces efficiency, by preventing people from following a course of action which they deem to be of greatest value to them.
Two points: 1. monopoly is a form or coercion, that of forcing people to either pay prices much higher then that of free marketplace or as you yourself had said to "do without", and 2. allowing people to follow any course of action which they "deem to be of greatest value to them" under all circumstances, without any other consideration, is nothing short of a barbaric jungle. Because you failed to have any concern about the rights of others around that person who arbitrarily decides on whatever actions, solely by "greatest value to him". That means that killing someone for profit is quite all right in your books, as that action happened to be a move of "greatest value" to the perpetrator, and the victim is at fault for not defending himself effectively. Again, newsflash: your rights to swing your fist, end at the tip of my nose! That is, you will be coerced by the society to behave within its societal norms!
This, combined with the sudden turn of your entire philosophy, and your new-found embrace of monopolies, cartels, trusts and oligopolies, and in fact nothing short of neo-feudalism, prompts me to sa
Which prevention, as I explained, with examples, can occur for a variety of reasons, having to do with government interference, geopolitics, geography, physical locations of deposits, technological measures and so on.
The "one entity owns the entire supply of X" argument requires that there is no alternative to "X". I don't know of anything for which there is no alternative.
It only requires that there is no longer a direct competition between comparable suppliers. Smith and others never considered existence of alternative technologies or some other elaborate work-arounds in one field as an excuse to form a monopoly in another. The fact that there is no directly comparable competition, is sufficient to satisfy the definition of monopoly. Planes are indirect competitors to ships, but if someone were somehow to obtain a mandate from the UN to be the only owner of ships on the planet, it would still constitute a monopoly. One can use horses and buggies to get around but if someone had somehow obtained an exclusive license to make motor vehicles from the US government, it would still be a monopoly, like any other. Otherwise the term "monopoly" has no meaning at all, as in all cases, there is always some work-around, no matter how costly and impractical.
The definition of monopoly is simply "an ability to artificially set prices" (obtained for whatever reason) on some particular class of goods or services. All of the above examples, and the ones I provided earlier, qualify.
By what possible leap of imagination is the provision of medical service improved by being a government monopoly?
I think you might be woefully misinformed about the state of medicine on this planet. USA is the only G7 country without a Universal Medicare and has the most costly and inefficient system from all the industrialized countries by far. Not to mention that around 40% of US citizens are underinsured and therefore in dire risk of bankruptcy in case of medical problems or even a complete inability to obtain services. Also, I am sure that you keep hearing all sorts of horror stories about our Canadian Medicare over here, spread by people who want to make the same profits out of us as they do out of you. Rest assured, they are nothing but fabrications and moaning of rich people who despise not being able to get their scratched pinkie treated ahead of a working class child with a broken neck. I do know our system from personal experience and there is no correspondence between the horrendous press reports and reality. People wait for non essential and elective procedures, as it should be in any medical system in favour of those who have urgent problems. The system is governed by a medical concept of triage, instead by the thickness of the wallets of the patients. And some poeple do hate this idea with a great, fiery passion, because they see themselves as "naturally superior" to all others, and thus cannot stand not being always treated first. And so they moan and disparage and sue and otherwise do their damnest to screw us all Candians back into disease and poverty so that they can get their priviledged treatment back.
If you are truly interested in comparing the performance of public and private systems, here is the British Government study based on the OECD data comparing the systems in the G7 countries, complete with an explanation of sources of funding and diagrams of the flow of funds. For more specific focus on the Canadian and US systems, here is a presentation made based on the OECD and additional data, like surveys of patients in the G7 countries. Take a particular note of the difference in pay of physicians in the US and everywhere else and this (in addition to the insurance company profits, presented on the chart dealing with adm
The requirement to be a monopoly is to be able to restrict output and thereby charge a higher price. Yet this can only occur where competition is also restricted.
That is correct.
To maintain a free market "monopoly", a seller would have to continuously innovate such that no competitor would be able to undercut their price and/or gain customers by quality. But that is not technically a "monopoly" at all, because the entrenched seller could not restrict output in order to charge more. Doing so would instantly signal to others that there are profits to be made, and attract entrepreneurs like sharks to a bleeding corpse.
Ah yes but you missed what I said before, this only works if there is indeed a competition between the players. That is if there are a number of available suppliers of the same product and the consumer is able to choose between them. Consider this scenario: a conglomerate buys all the known deposits of a rare ore. How is a "competitor" then possible? Or on a smaller scale, a businessman buys the land through which the only land access to a busy harbour city is possible. Now he is in a position to build a toll road and charge nearly arbitrarily high toll because the only other access is via air or sea. I am sure there are many such examples possible. The point is that only in idealised market conditions monopolies are incapable of forming, as there is no "barrier to entry" for a market player imposed by physics or other factors. So in a market composed of a vast number of moderately sized companies, each incapable of owning natural resources such as ore deposits or crucial land pieces or integer numbers, and all of them competing vigorously on similar products in their respective markets, this is indeed the case. Add to this a progressive taxation scheme which catches all those who somehow figure out a way to get away from competition and then indeed a monopoly becomes impossible.
On the other hand, if one does not do anything at all, and only rely on the properties of idealised, theoretical free market, while operating under real life conditions, departing significantly from that model, monopolies will indeed form quickly and with ease.
Any system of central planning cannot be as efficient in the allocation of resources because they have no "profit and loss" measurement to know whether or not they are allocating well.
That is why in the system I described, there is no provision for "central planning" of "allocation" of resources by the state, with the possible exception of Medicare. The natural resources owned by the state are sold on the market in accordance with global commodity prices. No planning or any specific control is exacted over individual businesses or industries, other then to enforce some common sense regulations, applied uniformely and without exception to the whole marketplace (environmental and health etc). Certainly one cannot expect the free market forces to be responsible for estabilshing rules about use of materials like asbestos or low level toxic emissisons and what not? In short no "central planning" other then adjustment of coarse macro-economic variables (pretty much equivalent to todays control of interest rates by national banks and taxation rates) is being performed. The main difference being the shape of the taxation curves and types of taxation (for example, sales taxes would not be present under the system I described).
That is why larger companies reorganize into smaller business units, to minimize bureaucratic management and maximize the opportunities to run things in an entrepreneurial manner.
Today that is exceptionally rare and only happens in case of seismic shifts in technology or some other external factors, such as loss of access to extremely advantageous monopoly-inducing circumstance. Most companies grow (faster the bigger they are) until they have undue influnce on national governments and are able to take advantage of uneven conditions caused by the sai
I'm sure from your posts that you would have no problem in telling them that they are wrong, fundamentally, although of course it's not them, but the system that needs to go.
I indeed would not. There is simply no helping it. They have been misled into believing a lie and I can prove that it is so. Now, again, that only means that a different solution has to be found and implemented, not that they are somehow banished into permanent poverty and that no artist can make a living ever again, just because a looney legal construct they relied upon so far has been toppled.
At the end of the day, people have to eat.
Which is why we are discussing ways to provide artists with income
No, but it is perfectly possible for two cases to result in contradictory verdicts. Equally the law often proposes contradictory 'rights' with no indication as to which has precedence until established in court.
Such conflicts are resolved as soon as a lawsuit occurs which is focing a choice, and then one of these rights has to be either curbed or dropped. Logic simply must prevail in the end, or we may as well give up on the whole thing.
I did not reply in depth to much of your post because I realized the that much of your arguments flow from the following:
I simply disagree that patronage will form an effective replacement for copyright as a system of compensation for artists.
I'm rather cheered by the fact that the current UK No.1 album is available for commercial download on good old plain MP3 - even after much of it had been freely available. I guess you could call that 'voluntary contribution' in action.
In summary - I prefer the idea of direct contribution over patronage.
I think we have some mis-understanding here as to what "patronage" means. My definiton encompassed things such as admission fees and direct donations to artists by individuals, such as PayPal in addition to institutionalised foundations, large scale patrons and corporate funding. Each small PayPal contributor is in fact a small-time "art patron". The difference is that there would not be any involvment of an overreaching and illogical law which governs the use of the resulting information a.k.a. Art.
Then you really owe it to yourself to try something (most anything) by Murray Rothbard. His _For A New Liberty_, http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty.asp is excellent reading.
I will look into this as soon as I get some time to do so.
Keynes has one truly fatal flaw to his work: It changes.... As those premises were demonstrated to be false, because events and data changed, rather than admit he had been wrong he either pretended that he hadn't meant what he said before, or simply ignored data that contradicted him.
He did not exactly impress me either.
Capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production. I own what I have, you own what you have, we engage in trade solely because both of us consider what we gain to be greater than what we lose. (I want your apple more than I want my nickel, for example.)
This definition is incomplete, as it would also cover all the previous forms of trade systems like mercantilism for example and so it is not specific to Capitalism. So there has to be some additional considerations, which in my understanding of Smith's premises would be structuring the marketplace in such a way as to aim at the system to become in effect a meritocracy, as trade/private ownership alone are simply a wholly unsatisfying description of societal goals.
Socialism: Collective ownership of the means of production. What I have, earn, can acquire, all defined by central authority. You and I engage in trade not because we want to, but because that is what the plan says we do.
That is of course a caricature of Socialism and in fact pretty much the definition of Communism. My understanding of a Socialist society (or perheaps more accurately called a "Social Conscience" based society) would be where the means of production are private but their macroscopic operation is shaped by a set of social boundaries which prevent their activities to exceed certain globally set limits, beyond which their actions produce more negative then positive effects. The governing rule of such a place is an attempt to follow the premise of meritocracy to its logical ends in the structure of the marketplace and also a premise of a certain base "social contract" understanding between the citizens and the society are taken into consideration. In the case of the meritocracy-based marketplace, you would see things like very steep estate taxes, to prevent kids of rich people to acquire fortunes without the attendant contributions to society, you would see all natural resources (but not their extraction and processing) being nationalized as there is no merit but only a danger of monopolistic gouging to society provided by an idle ownership of a coal deposit, you would see exponentially progressive taxation to prevent runaway market singularities and to forster more uniform distribution of production amongst a large number of competing smaller companies instead of a few massive conglomerates, you will also see very aggressive anti-monopoly actions of the market oversight authorities and a significant effort being made to prevent the government from assisting and inducing monopolistic behaviour (which is doubly checked by the progressive taxation slowing down unlimited growth of individual companies), etc. From the "social contract" side you would see things like Universal Medicare and significant assistance in acquiring education. Note that nowhere there is anything about "collective ownership" of any means of production, with the exception of things not subject to regular rules of competition in the marketplace, as Universal Medicare for example (people do not shop for doctors when in cardiac arrest -- no competition and thus no marketplace here). Also the few "government monopolies" (such as the natural resource ownership and Medicare) are strictly confined to specific areas, constituting a small fraction of the economy.
Note that most of this is consistent with Adam Smith
Hidden watermark in the movie describing which security key it came from?
Which would not work for them since if I crack a device key, I then get the media key for that movie and there could be only one of those on each disk. So all they can do is to have a movie watermarked to say which batch of disks it came from. Not much good for tracking it down as it only tells them that I bought mine at BestBuy. Even if they watermark and encrypt each indvidual disk with its own unique key (highly unlikely as it would cost them a fortune in manufacturing costs -- no more mass pressing of disks) then all they got is a serial number of the disk the movie came from. Which is utterly useless for them unless they will not only serialize the disks but also put that information on BestBuy bills and then tie it to your Credit Card # or what not. Then I will pay cash. So they have to demand my personal info and driver license or retina scan or fingerprints each time I buy a movie. I am sure that it is what they want in the end, but somehow I dont see even an apathic NASCAR-watching Joe Sixpack not being put off by this turn of events.
Don't know if it works that way. If it doesn't, I hope I didn't bring up any suggestions;-X
No, it does not work that way. In public cryptography you have a key with 2 halves, 1 (secret) decrypton key, and 1 (public) encryption. You send the public part to someone and he has to encrypt messages to you unsing your public key. So when he sends the same message to many people... guess what?... he has to encrypt them individually with each person's public encryption key. There is no "shared" key in this scenario. But the media companies cannot do that because they have to make disks with only one copy of the movie on them. So they have to cheat by ecrypting only once and then somehow hide the decryption key (which in the case of email would be secret and never sent) on the disk. So they encrypt the key (not the movie, which is already encrypted with that key) with another set of keys, but this time they make one copy for each vendor/licensee (the so called device keys). So now on the disk you have: encrypted (once with AES) movie, and many copies of its decryption key, each encrypted with a key which individual manufacturers have licensed. So if a FOOBAR player wants to play the movie, it finds the copy of the encrypted key meant for FOOBAR on disk and decrypts it with an embedded secret key, only supposedly known to FOOBAR and the HD-DVD people. Then it gets out of this the real AES key for the movie. That is how it works.
So even if they use copious amounts of keys (a unique one per device), HDCP will fail all the same and their blacklists won't matter.
Good news indeed.
But this is the video stream, not the data encrypted on the disk (analogous to CSS) so the "per disk" comment you made isn't applicable. HDCP & AACS are two separate issues/battles.
I understand completely, CSS/AACS deal with media encryption and HDCP with the video/audio path. But the GP post was talking about BlueRay/HD-DVD standards demanding HDCP and what not and that is how come we got to this discussion of disks, which is what my post was about.
This was pretty much my understanding of the situation. Basically a universal one-for-all DeCSS style hack will no longer be possible but each new extraction of keys will render the whole body of all previously released disks readable by anyone. I think this scheme will backfire for them pretty badly because it is a very little effort on our part to have a few hundreds of keys instead of a 3-liner program being hauled around Linux boxes to decrypt hundreds of previously released disks (assuming that a fair number of individual devices get cracked) and at the same time each new crack will cost them massively as now we will be talking about huge swaths of hardware being rendered unuseable and the conusmers freaking out and looking for blood unless the vendors replace them free of charge.
And this of course does not even cover this fun scenario: I crack my unit and do not release the keys so that they do not know which one it is, then I simply keep releasing the actual movies in.avi format. Oops. How are they going to put an end to that?
The content isn't encrypted with a key, but with multiple keys. If one is compromised (like in DVDs), then they simply stop using it and replace it.
This can't work. You can't simply stack encryption that way. The multiple keys they refer to are the device keys not the disk (i.e. media) keys. You simply cannot have the same contents (i.e. a huge movie file) encrypted multiple times with AES on the same disk with different keys and then expect any one of them to decrypt it as it would be required in different players. AACS is simply a refined version of CSS where they use AES instead of a proprietary (and buggy) encryption and where the device keys are per unit/model instead of whole class of devices and there are provisions for revoking keys remotely. Other then that, nothing much revolutionary.
There seems to be indeed a lot of confusion about these schemes. But it was my understanding that the encryption path for HDCP has to be selaed all the way from the disk, that is for the hardware to be compliant with the HD-DVD/BlueRay you will need a HDCP path all the way from the drive to the pixels of the display. What I was discussing is the disk/media side of the scheme. If HDCP works only on the card-monitor connection, it would be utterly senseless and futile as it would allow anyone to intercept the graphics data in the video driver path. Yet, somehow, I do not think that these crooks are that dumb. The whole kerfufle about the Nvidia cards not conforming to the motherboard side of HDCP and only fully Trecherous Computing embraced brand-name systems doing so, seem to confirm my suspicion.
It would be a much harder battle to fight, if the target was artists who had self-funded their own recordings and books - although of course, such artists are equally your target, given that they mistakenly believe they have a right to compensation for their costs and work, or that they 'own' anything they can sell.
No they are not, the copyright system is. You are doing what most people who did not examine the details do, that is conflating two separate issues by assuming that an attack on the copyright system must constitute an attack on livelyhood of individual artists. There are however alternative schemes to that of copyright, one of them being patronage, which do not have the same vastly negative social and technological implications as copyright does. So please leave the poor, suffering, starving artists out of this, as they were never a part of the equation, other then in the minds of misguided politicians of old.
I still don't believe anyone has put forward a viable alternative.
Patronage was (successfully being responsible for immense amount of art, still filling all of the major museums of the planet and endless private collections) and still is a viable alternative. It simply fails to bring sufficient profits for the middlemen and distributors of knowledge and, in the long term, fails to deliver totalitarian controls over humanity's ability to communicate and learn to various corporate and governmental stakeholders. That is why any discussion on the subject in any public forum must start with insinuations of "Thieves! Pirates!" followed by "Why wont someone think of poor starving artists!" followed by painting the copyright in the most divine light possible, or by trying to present its illogical gory nature as "par for the course" in law, as "law does not adhere to logic". Sort of like what you just engaged into.
I'm not quite sure about violation of free-market principles. As far as I'm concerned they state that if there is no way of making a significant margin on production (i.e. generally speaking, in a situation of over-production) then the market will correct itself - either people move into profit making markets, consolidate (reduce costs / increase margins) or fail. On an individual level, it implies that if someone can't make money from a book, they will have to work doing something else to pay the rent. If the capitalist forces behind publishing companies can't make money out of books - they will take their capital into copper mining. The closest thing I can think of to 'zero cost for additional copies' is the broadcast radio and TV model - all the cost is before broadcast, but there is no additional cost for each additional customer. You should consider very carefully how conducive this has been to art vs commerce.
You missed the point entirely. The violation occurs because a "trade" is being conducted in a "property" which cannot fulfill the required characteristics of something capable of being "traded". That is wholly separate from "profitability" of information, or art in particular. Art is not business, it is not commerce, and it has nothing to do with marketplace. You are making an egregious assumption that everything in life must obey the principles of the free market. Art exists outside of Capitalism and is not governed by the rules of that economic system, just as information in general is not.
I've often seen repeated the idea that musicians could make more income from playing live...
Artists making more income then presently has never been a point of any of this. The only issues that concern me are that the knowledge of humanity and its ability to freely communicate does not become a victim of totalitarian DRM-empowered entities, and that a fair and logical system for promotion of art exists. That is all.
the only real issue is that public patronage introduces the notion of gatekeepers, and of course an army of people wh
Most certainly. I am looking for ways to not only cripple this scheme but, most importantly, do so at a maximum possible cost to these slime-covered would be usurers who concocted it. That is why I see HDCP as something we can still dance with, as in "we are not dead yet". But I fear soon we will need to start getting serious about this stuff and build some rather sophisticated hardware like microscope-based chip probes and software to perform cryptographic analysis of circuits.
NO, IT'S NOT! Jeez, how many times do I have to repeat this?! Microsoft et. al. figured out a way around this. If the key gets cracked, they shut it off and any hardware that uses it stops working. It's called "Remote Attestation," and it's part of Treacherous Computing. Read up on it and then you'll be able to make an intelligent contribution to the conversation
What I dont get is how is this possible from the cryptographic point of view. The contents of the disk is encrypted with a key, which has to be only done once, otherwise you would need to duplicate the contents on the disk as many times as you have keys. So, the way I understand it, there is a master key somewhere here, which is then doubly encrypted via a set of device/vendor unique keys. Once you crack one of those, you get the master key for all the HD disks produced so far. All the goons can do is to change the master key for all future releases and then invalidate the particular device/vendor key. But that does not get them all their previous contents back, only locks the new products, until another device key gets cracked and the new master is out. Rinse, repeat.
The only way I can see this working for the goons is to demand that each device continuously downloads new keys from their center, and have a unique per-device keys + unique per disk keys. I.e. each disk having its own key, so that a break of one will not affect any other. But this means that no consumer device can ever work off-line.
I am sure that this is the long term plan, but I do see a number of opportunities to at least run interference and foul things up for them in the short term. That is of course not a solution, but something to keep in mind as a part of a strategy, as driving their costs into stratosphere can only help.
that many members of the CPUSA and others were spying for the Soviets were factually correct.
Well, no, unless you are willing to redefine "many" as "less then 1%". CPUSA was rather popular in some areas in the period before WWII (and during WWII, when the Soviets were "noble allies" in fight against Nazism). I think its peak card-carying membership was at one time 85,000. And then of course there are the affiliates or rival socialist and communist movements of that time, like the Socialist Workers Party etc and so on. Now add various disorganised and fragmented student movements and you got a good chance of more then a half a million people involved in some small degree. All in all, there were no more then a few dozen of confirmed spies total originating from any direction of these organizations.
However, some (certainly not 100%) of his suspicions that many members of the CPUSA and others were spying for the Soviets were factually correct.
And it came recently to my attention that some Arabs might be members of Al-Queda. And also, equally shockingly, that some Americans can be members of right wing terrorist organisations involved in bombing of federal buildings and abortion clinics. So if I proceed to treat every Arab and American as a terrorist, I will, according to glorious investigative logic of McCarthy's, be "100% correct" in "some" of my suspicions. Am I missing something? This could bring a revolution in crime fighting. I mean some blacks and South Americans are for certain drug dealers. All one has to do to get this crime problem sovled is to round up all blacks and South Americans! And all husbands, as they might be wife-beaters. And wives because they might be engaged in gambling. Etc and so on. "100% accuracy" in "some of my suspicions" whole "100% of the time!". Great plan or what?
The whole logic of your argument (and those writing various silly revisionist books) is hopelessly faulty. Yes, there were some in CPUSA who were recruited. But they were rare and low priority material, because as I explained already, they make lousy spies. The best spies are those who are not in any way related to the movment and beyond suspicion. If I were a KGB recruiter, I would look for some "underappreciated", egoistical, megalomaniac and greedy Young Republicans (those KGB dudes must have been spoiling for choice all the time). And for all kinds of people of all sorts of affiliations except socialist/communist ones. Which is apparently precisely what KGB did, judging from the spies actually caught after they have already done substantial damage. It got so bad that the self-proclaimed "spy" loons like Agee had to go look for the KGB (who were not exactly thrilled at the prospect).
(Your list of "All American Spies" contains names that came decades after McCarthyism swept the nation, by the way.)
That is likely because the list was labeled "most famous Soviet spies". Who happened to operate and be eventually discovered long after McCarthy (with the exception of Rosenbergs).
But I've often wondered if his some of his earlier persecutions were fueled by information gleaned from the VENONA project. Did he have his own inside person in the FBI (perhaps on the VENONA project) feeding him those names?
VENONA and most of the activities of FBI of that time were highly suspect and there were many vicious right-wing ideologues in the ranks of organisations like FBI (and still are) who saw it their mission in life to stomp out all the "Godless Atheistic Communist Vermin" by any means neccessary. McCarty was a natural ally and an excellent conduit for their vendettas. So there would be no surprise that some frustrated FBI operative, whose efforts to lock up all leftists were thwarted by things like the habeas corpus and so he sought to circumnavigate the "problem" by feeding McCarthy names and other info on his "suspects". I personally take findings of VENONA and similar projects with a gigiantic grain of salt, not only
Just to offer a corollary to your rosy scenario there, although it is a topic which was beaten to death back when HL2 came out, I had so much pain with Steam that I got pissed off enough to drive back to the store and get EB to take HL2 back (I had the Vivendi packaged version). I even went as far as to try to download it cracked, for I was sufficiently mad at Valve to try to stick it to them, but the download took longer then my fury lasted. So in the end I did not play HL2 and Valve did not get my money. And Valve is now permanently in my blacklist of publishers. They can make the Game To End All Games and I will still skip it for I am getting mad again just thinking about that fury I felt at them back then. And I am not alone, the Steam forums had to be put off-line repeatedly that week, and hosts of people banned and posts removed.
So please, no rosy-colored stories, for I was there and have still scars to prove it.
And for those interested in what went wrong, in involved glorious explosions of the Steam CD-KEY authentication and decryption servers, their crashing, farting, catching fire and rolling over to die and what not. All of it resulting in hours upon hours of screwing around to only end up with an unplayable, partially decrypted game and an invalidated CD KEY which prevented any possiblity of recovery. This coupled of course with the worst customer support experience I had in my many decades of dealing with computer software and hardware vendors, and that is saying something.
Unless you consider a "patron" to be "anyone who attends a performance".
Yes I do. Anyone who pays at the gate to get into a performance is a patron of arts in general, and that of the art of the performer in question in particular.
The problem is, I don't believe that. Talk to any shareware author and ask them how much they get back
Yes indeed, ask Carmack and ID software about the millions of pure profit they made off the original Doom (which was one of the prime examples of shareware). No distribution costs, no advertising, the customers did all for them. It was one of most profitable games ever and launched ID Games as a prime-time software company (who then promptly forgot its origins and proceeded to play by the rules dictated by hollywood - the result: steady decline into mediocracy ever since).
I don't mean that they should be *guaranteed* anything back, but of 100 downloads I'd expect at least a couple to think it's worth keeping it installed. Shareware authors generally get much less subscriptions than that.
Shareware authors make money, but it is not millions unless they can do something as innovative as Doom was. WinZip makers and others successfully live off shareware. Which is precisely the desired state of affairs. Unless you are producing something unique and/or very useful, don't expect to make a living off of it. It will at best be a supplemental income. Same applies to art. Unless you are really good, or show exceptional promise (in which case you will get sponsored by someone), as the saying goes: "... don't quit your day job". As it should be.
You clearly don't know how widespread musical ability (and other forms of artistic expression) is! Unless you consider a "patron" to be "anyone who attends a performance".
I think you are trying to have the cake and eat it to. I responded to your assertion that the top artists, like Mozart, were rare and had no incentive to share their work. I provided a counterpoint involving a large number of patrons seeking these top author's work. Now you are saying that your original premise was completely false and art is in fact is a common thing and not so rare and valuable after all. Which is it?
The word in this case is not "amateur". It's "dillettante".
I am as much of a "dilettante" as you are an infant. I have 25+ years experience coding in more languages then I care to remember, in more environments then I care to remember, from mainframes with punchcards, to single-chip microcontroller embedded systems. The fact that I enjoy sharing my rather considerable experience in the field for free with others, does not make me an amateur. When I say that I would have to get more serious about my "art" to get hired by OSDL (which is not something I desire, btw) I mean the GPL code exlusively as I now rarely code for a living, having long since moved onto consulting work.
What I *do* want though is the opportunity to make a living off my art, such that I can spend my days doing nothing but my chosen art. I've been lucky enough to do something approximately like that with my software; I'm starting to consider trying to do the same with the music. Note the word "living" - not "riches", not "wild extravagance", but "living". I don't consider it unreasonable to attempt that.
Then the traditional music studios and the copyright based publishing system are your mortal enemies. They are not interested in anything which cannot be mass marketed, flogged endlessly via a homogenuous ClearChannel network of drone radiostations and which will not yeld at least a $100 million return. Otherwise you will be publishing at your own expense, with the added bonus of all your work belonging to the studio, should you somehow get successful. Your best bet is to set up your own site and start promoting youself on indie music sites and take direct PayPal donations and make custom, hand signed or what not CDs for people. You can also do some demeaning stuff like offer to perform modified versions of songs for people and record them for their special occasions and what not for a more significant fee. That is... patronage, a small-time artist's best friend.
I believe that your position would be greatly enhanced if you did some reading on what capitalism actually is.
I read the essential works of Adam Smith and some of Keynes, Heyek and Friedman, I could not stomach more then a few pages of Zhinovievna's (a.k.a. "Rand"). You should realise that even the very definition of "capitalism" is disputed and in flux, and all of these above have their own take on it. That is why I nearly exclusively rely on Smith, becasue he is the one who proposed the cornerstone tenets of the theory, he had the insight to see the beneficial side-effects of free-marketplace and he did so as a phillosopher whose focus was ethics and logic, not as a politically charged apologist for the rich and the supremely greedy, like most of the later "re-interpreters" of his work. He was also not ecnumbered with the psychotic anti-socialist paranoias of these later generations (hello Hayek, Friedman and Rand). So I am afraid that pointing me to some modern day re-massager (particularly rabidly Libertarian or Anarcho Capitalist -- which the site seems to me at a first glance) of the basic principles is not going to do much good in "educating" me as to the premises of capitalism, and will only make me develop more disdain for the ways in which the unscrupulously greedy wish to make "capitalism" into their own image.
It is with a good reason that Smith was weary of the wealthy and the businessmen when discussing the system and that his focus was on labour and on small business, rather then land and natural resource ownership or large enterprise, combined with his demands for forcible destruction of monopolies of all kinds. Smith did not believe, like his naive re-interpreters, that monopolies can magically dissipate due to market forces alone -- but he also saw the government as foolishly not only not destroying monopolies but helping to establish them, and it is only the latter part onto which Libertarians and Anarcho Capitalists latch on desperately, studiously ignoring the first.
Also, while somehow the modern re-inventers are consumed by glorification of personal greed and avarice, Smith was talking abought "enlightened self-interest" and discussed "sympathy and compassion" as being the cornerstone of human interactions in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments". Etc. and so on. I do not accept all of the Smith's premises, particularly when his religion gets involved in his reasoning, but on the whole I must say he makes heck of a lot more sense then the modern spinners.
It becomes very clear that your opinion of these people is based upon envy.
You are projecting your own state of mind onto me. I have no desire whatsoever to become a large scale crook for the purpose of making myself feel "superior" to others. I simply lack your reptilian sensibilities for such a thing to be appealing to me.
Can you support your assertion that the IKEA founder is a crook?
His wealth is all the proof I need. As I already explained, ad nauseum, that in a capitalist society, operating by the rules Adam Smith (and other theoreticians) laid down, such a massive wealth disparity is impossible. So its existence is by itself a damning evidence. You even use the same argument, when it suits you, to describe how monopolies are supposedly not possible.
Who did he swindle?
The consumers, the foreign slave labour and the human race in general for consuming vast amounts of natural resources to produce mountains of disposable crap. Like most other major corporations.
Who was forced at gun point to buy his product?
You assume, quite incorrectly, that all forms of connivery involve knuckle-dragging knee-breakers.
A monopoly requires government enforcement.
No it does not. Purchasing all the deposits of a rare ore globally produces an instant monopoly. So does owning the land straddling the only access corridor to a busy harbour. Making sure that your dominant product becomes more dominant by elaborate technological lock-in schemes and formation of cartels with suppliers of related equipment does so quite effectively (hello Microsoft!). And so on.
Otherwise, competition is always dogging the heals of the successful.
Do explain how would competition "dog your heals" in the scenario of you owning all of the deposits of, say, nickel. And please, no rocket-ships and moon mining fantasies.
Globe-spanning multinationals certainly are possible in a truly free market, because everything is possible in a truly free market.
Including monopolies, slavery, and feudal fiefdoms, right? When people refer to "free market" they mean a market in manufactured goods and materials, not in slaves.
However, such a company would always have to be more efficient, more effective at producing products that their customers want at a price they wish to pay, or their customers will go elsewhere.
Or better at creating barriers for others to compete and thus slowly turning into a monopoly or a part of an oligarchic cartel. I love it how the stalwart defenders of unrestricted free market always forget this little "barrier to entry" tidbit.
I'm not surprised you equate force with "making it inconvenient to buy a system without Windows", because you envy Gates his fortune.
No, it is because restricting access to choice via a cartel is a form of abuse of consumers, i.e. force.
Apple has always been there.
Trying desperately to impose its own monopoly but being far too late into the game and thus thwarted by the said "barrier to entry". If this was truly a free market, there would be tens of (comparably popular) microsoft-like products makers and tens of Apple-like competing complete solution providers. Instead you are straining to make hay with a sample of 1 (read: monopoly) of each.
White-box makers have always been there.
All of which supply Microsoft as their OS as they know their consumers have little choice but to use it and they have little choice but to provide it. And your point was?
It has always been possible to buy a mainframe, and not even from IBM, and hang dedicated terminals off of it and thereby bypass Microsoft entirely since Microsoft didn't make any software for that environment.
That means, that thanks to Microsoft, the progress in many technologies was halted at a mainframe scale (and thus priced out of reach of most) and remained so until very recently.
That is precisely why patronage is a much more effective and mature system today. The information technology and our societal structure helps more and more with each technological advance, allowing a large number of small scale patrons to contribute directly to their favourite atists, as opposed to breaking down more and more as it is the case with copyright.
It wouldn't have worked 100 years ago, because the only method of non-artist-present dissemination was to release the score. And they wouldn't do that, because that would limit their income from performing said score.
They did that anyway, because no artist could perform in 4 places at once and there were far more patrons then artists. Besides they did not get paid per performance in most cases but per score (which removed the incentive to keep it secret), and most were on permanent salary paid by their patrons, which was independent on their score "output". Please do get your facts straight.
Also note that this could never work for books (unless we're supposed to go and listen to Arthur C Clarke read his books aloud to us, a more tedious fate than which I really can't imagine).
Book printing is a service. Once the work was commisioned by a foundation and has immediately become public, any publisher could print it. The publishers would compete on the quality of print, price, format etc., that is on the quality of transmission which is what a book really is. The books of today are a relic, and electronic formats will soon replace them completely, pushing book makers to niche "nostalgy" markets for people who find that archaic format pleasureable. For which they will be willing to pay a premium independent of the contents of the book.
Shakespeare, we're lucky to have a lot of his works. Many (especially his poems) have been taken from a single copy found stashed in someone's library/attic. A classic example of my point. Ditto most composers - all of them were happy to perform (for money), but they weren't as happy about dishing out the score to all and sundry. As a result, there's an awful lot of composers for whom we have very little material, even though they were world-famous at the time - their work died with them. Paganini is a particularly good example.
That is a limitation of the ancient technology, not of the patronage system itself. Quilted pens dipped in ink at every word are at fault here, not patronage. And it gets worse further we go back in time. Today we would have a digital recording of the first performance and the dissemination begins from there.
So an artist should have no expectation of making a living from his/her art.
Precisely. Art is not a form of commerce. It is not a form of employment. There is no such thing as "art industry" (one of the greatest oxymorons ever). Art results from an intrinsic desire to share things of profound importance with others. Most artists are amateurs and do what they do because it gives them satisfaction. Only a crook would think of art as a "profit opportunity". Note that this does not mean poverty for the artist because the quality of his work can bring wide-scale recognition which in turn attracts patrons and fans. And that is how an artist can make a living. But the money and art are not directly related in any way! They are on completely different planes of existence, just like information is.
And one best advantage would be using your art to make a living, so you don't have to piss your life away doing some shitty dead-end job when you could be working on improving your artistic skills. It'd be nice for the universe to say "hey, you've got mega musical skills, so let's give you what you need to stay alive". But it don't work like that...
Mozart, for instance. Sure, Mozart was obsessed by music, and was vastly talented. So what did he do? Answer: he used that talent to get himself patronage (!), get performances sold out, an
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a programmer, I guarantee that you're using SEP (Spiritual Extrusion Programming) even if you don't use a SEP language.
Consider the Unix read() function, which can read from any file descriptor: regular file, block or character special, socket, and so on. If you were to write such a function in C, you'd write some code to determine the underlying type of descriptor. Then, based on that type, you'd call a helper function - read_file(), read_special(), read_socket() - to perform the actual read. Guess what? That's SEP. The file descriptor is the Spititual Manifestation of a Concept. The code at the top of read() is determining the object type (or Spiritual Element). And the helper functions are Spiritual Invocations. If this is a big project, odds are you'll put all the helper functions for sockets in socket.c, for files in file.c, and so on. And there we have Spiritual Encapsulation (of the namespace variety) too.
As noted many times, you can write an SEP in any language. It's just easier to do it in a language that's designed for it.
And so on, etc.
Newsflash: all of the concepts you describe are 1) long in existence before your favourite paradigm arrived on the scene so that you can try to contort them into it, and 2) can be interpreted ad infinitum with any of the millions of "paradigms" one can concoct on the spot. That is because your paradigm is merely a perspective and not an universal (and only) truth. The whole point of abstract formulations, such as computer software, is that they can conform to nearly infinite number of perspectives and can be projected onto the real, physical universe in an equally large number of ways, which is what makes this whole Information Technology thing so powerful.
But I fear that long after OOP has been relegated to the dusty bin of history, some ctr2sprt of the future will still argue about how you are really always writing "Quantum Parallax" code, even if you are you are not ...
I am with you on this one, although, unlike you, I used to be swept up at one time in all the early OO hype to a degree (back in the Smalltalk days - which by the way is probably the only coherent OO environment), only to realise, by experience, that it was for the most part just that: unsubstantiated hype. Object Orientation has applications, notably in situations close to its original aims of simulation of physical universe (as in the Simula language which started it all), which in modern software is found in things like PC games. But this paradigm has been overused, abused and stretched beyond its breaking point to try to cover all possible cases, no matter how ill fitting. And in the process it has consistently failed to deliver on most of its promises (other then to pad pockets of various charlatans and OO "framework, IDE, grill and taco stand" makers). My experience has thought me that contrary to what OOP priests wish us to believe, "complexity hiding" (usually by masking it by more OO-gunk complexity) is not the answer to reusability, cooperative maintenance and so on. The answer is: simplicity. That is the most maintainable code is the one which can be fully understood, with ease, by the programmer. OOP does not do that. In fact it introduces a whole new gamut of problems dealing with the hidden workings of pyramidal heaps of classes found in any OOP "framework", each with its own weird quirks and inconsistencies, from which you are supposed to "derrive" your own, as long as you adhere to a million of unwritten and poorly documented rules of use of these, supposedly, "reusable" and "extensible" components. Not to mention that it actively encourages creation of massive, incomprehensible class jungles as one can easily see in places like the JDK.
Speaking of PHP, its success can be attributed to its simplicity, ease of use and short learning curve. If they keep continuing to "innovate" new piles of ever more trendy crap into the language, it will soon (already is?) lose this advantage. It won't be long before someone comes up with another simple server-side language to replace the morass and the enthusiatic crowds will move onto this new "lighning fast, low footprint" language and begin to "improve it". Rinse, repeat.
Under corporate auspices of course. That is you can produce (certain kinds of, approved by your computer and its true owners) contents all you want, but you cannot distribute it unless you become a contractee (read: a serf) of one of the feudal information brokers of the future. They will approve for distribution by certifying your contents, perhaps distribute it themselves, or even promote your stuff and send you the cheque for the 2% cut of the profit, after taking their 98% "Intellectual Property Facilitation" fee. You will have no choice but either to comply or not to distribute anything using any sort of the information processing equipment (read: home enterntainment systems, disk players, Internet, or home computers). You could still use a typewriter + a hand-cranked printer to distribute your works (all computer printers will be Treacherous Computing enabled) and mail it or post it on lampposts as a distrubution system. Just don't do it in the view of the new "Civic Improvement Cameras" which the police is already proposing to be installed on every corner and in people's homes as per the other Slashdot story just a few days back.
Geography has nothing to do with it, because again there are always alternatives. If the only source of titanium is in South Africa, in a mine owned by DeBiers, then don't use titanium. The development of fiber optics for carrying information has reduced the demand for copper. Oil too expensive? Alternatives are low-grade atomics, ocean thermal difference engines, thermal depolymerization, esterized veggie oil, alcohol, even wood. "Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without." To not buy the monopolists product is always a choice, unless not buying is against the law (such as taxation).
I find it rather curious, that you have dropped all pretense of adhering to any of the economic models you espoused earlier, and are now instead rooting for eminence of raw power of one individual over others, albeit only if such force is via wealth and control of economy, rather then physical. You not only no longer pretend that monopolies are harmful to the marketplace, you see them now as drivers of progress, as producing conditions which force people to innovate to get away from them. I have news for you Sir, monopoly is a form of force, used by the monopolists against the marketplace and the consumer.
Just listen to yourself: Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without ...
And how, pray tell, telling millions to "do without" just because some crook has decided to corner the marketplace, is not force?!
Where people are not restrained by force, a monopoly cannot exist because the erstwhile monopolist can never gain the power to force people to buy their product.
See above. The whole point of a monopoly is to force people to buy your product at prices which they would not normally have paid. That is what all monopolists do. And they can achieve that without co-opting the force of the state, as you now acknowledge yourself in accepting my examples. You are no longer even rational, in both accepting this and even providing your own examples, and then, at the same time, deciding, against clear evidence of whole centuries, that no monopoly is possible, unless it involves the use of force of arms of the state. This mode of thinking goes by the name of Cognitive Dissonance.
I object to the use of force.
No you don't. You only object to the use of force by the state, or by any common societal agency. You have no problem with it at all, if it is used by a monopolist or a trade cartel as your own statements above clearly indicate.
It is coercion which reduces efficiency, by preventing people from following a course of action which they deem to be of greatest value to them.
Two points: 1. monopoly is a form or coercion, that of forcing people to either pay prices much higher then that of free marketplace or as you yourself had said to "do without", and 2. allowing people to follow any course of action which they "deem to be of greatest value to them" under all circumstances, without any other consideration, is nothing short of a barbaric jungle. Because you failed to have any concern about the rights of others around that person who arbitrarily decides on whatever actions, solely by "greatest value to him". That means that killing someone for profit is quite all right in your books, as that action happened to be a move of "greatest value" to the perpetrator, and the victim is at fault for not defending himself effectively. Again, newsflash: your rights to swing your fist, end at the tip of my nose! That is, you will be coerced by the society to behave within its societal norms!
This, combined with the sudden turn of your entire philosophy, and your new-found embrace of monopolies, cartels, trusts and oligopolies, and in fact nothing short of neo-feudalism, prompts me to sa
Which prevention, as I explained, with examples, can occur for a variety of reasons, having to do with government interference, geopolitics, geography, physical locations of deposits, technological measures and so on.
The "one entity owns the entire supply of X" argument requires that there is no alternative to "X". I don't know of anything for which there is no alternative.
It only requires that there is no longer a direct competition between comparable suppliers. Smith and others never considered existence of alternative technologies or some other elaborate work-arounds in one field as an excuse to form a monopoly in another. The fact that there is no directly comparable competition, is sufficient to satisfy the definition of monopoly. Planes are indirect competitors to ships, but if someone were somehow to obtain a mandate from the UN to be the only owner of ships on the planet, it would still constitute a monopoly. One can use horses and buggies to get around but if someone had somehow obtained an exclusive license to make motor vehicles from the US government, it would still be a monopoly, like any other. Otherwise the term "monopoly" has no meaning at all, as in all cases, there is always some work-around, no matter how costly and impractical.
The definition of monopoly is simply "an ability to artificially set prices" (obtained for whatever reason) on some particular class of goods or services. All of the above examples, and the ones I provided earlier, qualify.
By what possible leap of imagination is the provision of medical service improved by being a government monopoly?
I think you might be woefully misinformed about the state of medicine on this planet. USA is the only G7 country without a Universal Medicare and has the most costly and inefficient system from all the industrialized countries by far. Not to mention that around 40% of US citizens are underinsured and therefore in dire risk of bankruptcy in case of medical problems or even a complete inability to obtain services. Also, I am sure that you keep hearing all sorts of horror stories about our Canadian Medicare over here, spread by people who want to make the same profits out of us as they do out of you. Rest assured, they are nothing but fabrications and moaning of rich people who despise not being able to get their scratched pinkie treated ahead of a working class child with a broken neck. I do know our system from personal experience and there is no correspondence between the horrendous press reports and reality. People wait for non essential and elective procedures, as it should be in any medical system in favour of those who have urgent problems. The system is governed by a medical concept of triage, instead by the thickness of the wallets of the patients. And some poeple do hate this idea with a great, fiery passion, because they see themselves as "naturally superior" to all others, and thus cannot stand not being always treated first. And so they moan and disparage and sue and otherwise do their damnest to screw us all Candians back into disease and poverty so that they can get their priviledged treatment back.
If you are truly interested in comparing the performance of public and private systems, here is the British Government study based on the OECD data comparing the systems in the G7 countries, complete with an explanation of sources of funding and diagrams of the flow of funds. For more specific focus on the Canadian and US systems, here is a presentation made based on the OECD and additional data, like surveys of patients in the G7 countries. Take a particular note of the difference in pay of physicians in the US and everywhere else and this (in addition to the insurance company profits, presented on the chart dealing with adm
That is correct.
To maintain a free market "monopoly", a seller would have to continuously innovate such that no competitor would be able to undercut their price and/or gain customers by quality. But that is not technically a "monopoly" at all, because the entrenched seller could not restrict output in order to charge more. Doing so would instantly signal to others that there are profits to be made, and attract entrepreneurs like sharks to a bleeding corpse.
Ah yes but you missed what I said before, this only works if there is indeed a competition between the players. That is if there are a number of available suppliers of the same product and the consumer is able to choose between them. Consider this scenario: a conglomerate buys all the known deposits of a rare ore. How is a "competitor" then possible? Or on a smaller scale, a businessman buys the land through which the only land access to a busy harbour city is possible. Now he is in a position to build a toll road and charge nearly arbitrarily high toll because the only other access is via air or sea. I am sure there are many such examples possible. The point is that only in idealised market conditions monopolies are incapable of forming, as there is no "barrier to entry" for a market player imposed by physics or other factors. So in a market composed of a vast number of moderately sized companies, each incapable of owning natural resources such as ore deposits or crucial land pieces or integer numbers, and all of them competing vigorously on similar products in their respective markets, this is indeed the case. Add to this a progressive taxation scheme which catches all those who somehow figure out a way to get away from competition and then indeed a monopoly becomes impossible.
On the other hand, if one does not do anything at all, and only rely on the properties of idealised, theoretical free market, while operating under real life conditions, departing significantly from that model, monopolies will indeed form quickly and with ease.
Any system of central planning cannot be as efficient in the allocation of resources because they have no "profit and loss" measurement to know whether or not they are allocating well.
That is why in the system I described, there is no provision for "central planning" of "allocation" of resources by the state, with the possible exception of Medicare. The natural resources owned by the state are sold on the market in accordance with global commodity prices. No planning or any specific control is exacted over individual businesses or industries, other then to enforce some common sense regulations, applied uniformely and without exception to the whole marketplace (environmental and health etc). Certainly one cannot expect the free market forces to be responsible for estabilshing rules about use of materials like asbestos or low level toxic emissisons and what not? In short no "central planning" other then adjustment of coarse macro-economic variables (pretty much equivalent to todays control of interest rates by national banks and taxation rates) is being performed. The main difference being the shape of the taxation curves and types of taxation (for example, sales taxes would not be present under the system I described).
That is why larger companies reorganize into smaller business units, to minimize bureaucratic management and maximize the opportunities to run things in an entrepreneurial manner.
Today that is exceptionally rare and only happens in case of seismic shifts in technology or some other external factors, such as loss of access to extremely advantageous monopoly-inducing circumstance. Most companies grow (faster the bigger they are) until they have undue influnce on national governments and are able to take advantage of uneven conditions caused by the sai
I indeed would not. There is simply no helping it. They have been misled into believing a lie and I can prove that it is so. Now, again, that only means that a different solution has to be found and implemented, not that they are somehow banished into permanent poverty and that no artist can make a living ever again, just because a looney legal construct they relied upon so far has been toppled.
At the end of the day, people have to eat.
Which is why we are discussing ways to provide artists with income
No, but it is perfectly possible for two cases to result in contradictory verdicts. Equally the law often proposes contradictory 'rights' with no indication as to which has precedence until established in court.
Such conflicts are resolved as soon as a lawsuit occurs which is focing a choice, and then one of these rights has to be either curbed or dropped. Logic simply must prevail in the end, or we may as well give up on the whole thing.
I did not reply in depth to much of your post because I realized the that much of your arguments flow from the following:
I simply disagree that patronage will form an effective replacement for copyright as a system of compensation for artists.
I'm rather cheered by the fact that the current UK No.1 album is available for commercial download on good old plain MP3 - even after much of it had been freely available. I guess you could call that 'voluntary contribution' in action.
In summary - I prefer the idea of direct contribution over patronage.
I think we have some mis-understanding here as to what "patronage" means. My definiton encompassed things such as admission fees and direct donations to artists by individuals, such as PayPal in addition to institutionalised foundations, large scale patrons and corporate funding. Each small PayPal contributor is in fact a small-time "art patron". The difference is that there would not be any involvment of an overreaching and illogical law which governs the use of the resulting information a.k.a. Art.
I will look into this as soon as I get some time to do so.
Keynes has one truly fatal flaw to his work: It changes. ... As those premises were demonstrated to be false, because events and data changed, rather than admit he had been wrong he either pretended that he hadn't meant what he said before, or simply ignored data that contradicted him.
He did not exactly impress me either.
Capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production. I own what I have, you own what you have, we engage in trade solely because both of us consider what we gain to be greater than what we lose. (I want your apple more than I want my nickel, for example.)
This definition is incomplete, as it would also cover all the previous forms of trade systems like mercantilism for example and so it is not specific to Capitalism. So there has to be some additional considerations, which in my understanding of Smith's premises would be structuring the marketplace in such a way as to aim at the system to become in effect a meritocracy, as trade/private ownership alone are simply a wholly unsatisfying description of societal goals.
Socialism: Collective ownership of the means of production. What I have, earn, can acquire, all defined by central authority. You and I engage in trade not because we want to, but because that is what the plan says we do.
That is of course a caricature of Socialism and in fact pretty much the definition of Communism. My understanding of a Socialist society (or perheaps more accurately called a "Social Conscience" based society) would be where the means of production are private but their macroscopic operation is shaped by a set of social boundaries which prevent their activities to exceed certain globally set limits, beyond which their actions produce more negative then positive effects. The governing rule of such a place is an attempt to follow the premise of meritocracy to its logical ends in the structure of the marketplace and also a premise of a certain base "social contract" understanding between the citizens and the society are taken into consideration. In the case of the meritocracy-based marketplace, you would see things like very steep estate taxes, to prevent kids of rich people to acquire fortunes without the attendant contributions to society, you would see all natural resources (but not their extraction and processing) being nationalized as there is no merit but only a danger of monopolistic gouging to society provided by an idle ownership of a coal deposit, you would see exponentially progressive taxation to prevent runaway market singularities and to forster more uniform distribution of production amongst a large number of competing smaller companies instead of a few massive conglomerates, you will also see very aggressive anti-monopoly actions of the market oversight authorities and a significant effort being made to prevent the government from assisting and inducing monopolistic behaviour (which is doubly checked by the progressive taxation slowing down unlimited growth of individual companies), etc. From the "social contract" side you would see things like Universal Medicare and significant assistance in acquiring education. Note that nowhere there is anything about "collective ownership" of any means of production, with the exception of things not subject to regular rules of competition in the marketplace, as Universal Medicare for example (people do not shop for doctors when in cardiac arrest -- no competition and thus no marketplace here). Also the few "government monopolies" (such as the natural resource ownership and Medicare) are strictly confined to specific areas, constituting a small fraction of the economy.
Note that most of this is consistent with Adam Smith
Which would not work for them since if I crack a device key, I then get the media key for that movie and there could be only one of those on each disk. So all they can do is to have a movie watermarked to say which batch of disks it came from. Not much good for tracking it down as it only tells them that I bought mine at BestBuy. Even if they watermark and encrypt each indvidual disk with its own unique key (highly unlikely as it would cost them a fortune in manufacturing costs -- no more mass pressing of disks) then all they got is a serial number of the disk the movie came from. Which is utterly useless for them unless they will not only serialize the disks but also put that information on BestBuy bills and then tie it to your Credit Card # or what not. Then I will pay cash. So they have to demand my personal info and driver license or retina scan or fingerprints each time I buy a movie. I am sure that it is what they want in the end, but somehow I dont see even an apathic NASCAR-watching Joe Sixpack not being put off by this turn of events.
No, it does not work that way. In public cryptography you have a key with 2 halves, 1 (secret) decrypton key, and 1 (public) encryption. You send the public part to someone and he has to encrypt messages to you unsing your public key. So when he sends the same message to many people ... guess what? ... he has to encrypt them individually with each person's public encryption key. There is no "shared" key in this scenario. But the media companies cannot do that because they have to make disks with only one copy of the movie on them. So they have to cheat by ecrypting only once and then somehow hide the decryption key (which in the case of email would be secret and never sent) on the disk. So they encrypt the key (not the movie, which is already encrypted with that key) with another set of keys, but this time they make one copy for each vendor/licensee (the so called device keys). So now on the disk you have: encrypted (once with AES) movie, and many copies of its decryption key, each encrypted with a key which individual manufacturers have licensed. So if a FOOBAR player wants to play the movie, it finds the copy of the encrypted key meant for FOOBAR on disk and decrypts it with an embedded secret key, only supposedly known to FOOBAR and the HD-DVD people. Then it gets out of this the real AES key for the movie. That is how it works.
Good news indeed.
But this is the video stream, not the data encrypted on the disk (analogous to CSS) so the "per disk" comment you made isn't applicable. HDCP & AACS are two separate issues/battles.
I understand completely, CSS/AACS deal with media encryption and HDCP with the video/audio path. But the GP post was talking about BlueRay/HD-DVD standards demanding HDCP and what not and that is how come we got to this discussion of disks, which is what my post was about.
And this of course does not even cover this fun scenario: I crack my unit and do not release the keys so that they do not know which one it is, then I simply keep releasing the actual movies in .avi format. Oops. How are they going to put an end to that?
This can't work. You can't simply stack encryption that way. The multiple keys they refer to are the device keys not the disk (i.e. media) keys. You simply cannot have the same contents (i.e. a huge movie file) encrypted multiple times with AES on the same disk with different keys and then expect any one of them to decrypt it as it would be required in different players. AACS is simply a refined version of CSS where they use AES instead of a proprietary (and buggy) encryption and where the device keys are per unit/model instead of whole class of devices and there are provisions for revoking keys remotely. Other then that, nothing much revolutionary.
There seems to be indeed a lot of confusion about these schemes. But it was my understanding that the encryption path for HDCP has to be selaed all the way from the disk, that is for the hardware to be compliant with the HD-DVD/BlueRay you will need a HDCP path all the way from the drive to the pixels of the display. What I was discussing is the disk/media side of the scheme. If HDCP works only on the card-monitor connection, it would be utterly senseless and futile as it would allow anyone to intercept the graphics data in the video driver path. Yet, somehow, I do not think that these crooks are that dumb. The whole kerfufle about the Nvidia cards not conforming to the motherboard side of HDCP and only fully Trecherous Computing embraced brand-name systems doing so, seem to confirm my suspicion.
No they are not, the copyright system is. You are doing what most people who did not examine the details do, that is conflating two separate issues by assuming that an attack on the copyright system must constitute an attack on livelyhood of individual artists. There are however alternative schemes to that of copyright, one of them being patronage, which do not have the same vastly negative social and technological implications as copyright does. So please leave the poor, suffering, starving artists out of this, as they were never a part of the equation, other then in the minds of misguided politicians of old.
I still don't believe anyone has put forward a viable alternative.
Patronage was (successfully being responsible for immense amount of art, still filling all of the major museums of the planet and endless private collections) and still is a viable alternative. It simply fails to bring sufficient profits for the middlemen and distributors of knowledge and, in the long term, fails to deliver totalitarian controls over humanity's ability to communicate and learn to various corporate and governmental stakeholders. That is why any discussion on the subject in any public forum must start with insinuations of "Thieves! Pirates!" followed by "Why wont someone think of poor starving artists!" followed by painting the copyright in the most divine light possible, or by trying to present its illogical gory nature as "par for the course" in law, as "law does not adhere to logic". Sort of like what you just engaged into.
I'm not quite sure about violation of free-market principles. As far as I'm concerned they state that if there is no way of making a significant margin on production (i.e. generally speaking, in a situation of over-production) then the market will correct itself - either people move into profit making markets, consolidate (reduce costs / increase margins) or fail. On an individual level, it implies that if someone can't make money from a book, they will have to work doing something else to pay the rent. If the capitalist forces behind publishing companies can't make money out of books - they will take their capital into copper mining. The closest thing I can think of to 'zero cost for additional copies' is the broadcast radio and TV model - all the cost is before broadcast, but there is no additional cost for each additional customer. You should consider very carefully how conducive this has been to art vs commerce.
You missed the point entirely. The violation occurs because a "trade" is being conducted in a "property" which cannot fulfill the required characteristics of something capable of being "traded". That is wholly separate from "profitability" of information, or art in particular. Art is not business, it is not commerce, and it has nothing to do with marketplace. You are making an egregious assumption that everything in life must obey the principles of the free market. Art exists outside of Capitalism and is not governed by the rules of that economic system, just as information in general is not.
I've often seen repeated the idea that musicians could make more income from playing live ...
Artists making more income then presently has never been a point of any of this. The only issues that concern me are that the knowledge of humanity and its ability to freely communicate does not become a victim of totalitarian DRM-empowered entities, and that a fair and logical system for promotion of art exists. That is all.
the only real issue is that public patronage introduces the notion of gatekeepers, and of course an army of people wh
3. Boot into alternative operating system, copy RAM image
Wont happen on a Trecherous Computing computer.
4. Extract unencrypted executable code from RAM image
The assumption being that the image is not encrypted up to yazoo, which on a TC computer it very likely would be.
Most certainly. I am looking for ways to not only cripple this scheme but, most importantly, do so at a maximum possible cost to these slime-covered would be usurers who concocted it. That is why I see HDCP as something we can still dance with, as in "we are not dead yet". But I fear soon we will need to start getting serious about this stuff and build some rather sophisticated hardware like microscope-based chip probes and software to perform cryptographic analysis of circuits.
What I dont get is how is this possible from the cryptographic point of view. The contents of the disk is encrypted with a key, which has to be only done once, otherwise you would need to duplicate the contents on the disk as many times as you have keys. So, the way I understand it, there is a master key somewhere here, which is then doubly encrypted via a set of device/vendor unique keys. Once you crack one of those, you get the master key for all the HD disks produced so far. All the goons can do is to change the master key for all future releases and then invalidate the particular device/vendor key. But that does not get them all their previous contents back, only locks the new products, until another device key gets cracked and the new master is out. Rinse, repeat.
The only way I can see this working for the goons is to demand that each device continuously downloads new keys from their center, and have a unique per-device keys + unique per disk keys. I.e. each disk having its own key, so that a break of one will not affect any other. But this means that no consumer device can ever work off-line.
I am sure that this is the long term plan, but I do see a number of opportunities to at least run interference and foul things up for them in the short term. That is of course not a solution, but something to keep in mind as a part of a strategy, as driving their costs into stratosphere can only help.
Well, no, unless you are willing to redefine "many" as "less then 1%". CPUSA was rather popular in some areas in the period before WWII (and during WWII, when the Soviets were "noble allies" in fight against Nazism). I think its peak card-carying membership was at one time 85,000. And then of course there are the affiliates or rival socialist and communist movements of that time, like the Socialist Workers Party etc and so on. Now add various disorganised and fragmented student movements and you got a good chance of more then a half a million people involved in some small degree. All in all, there were no more then a few dozen of confirmed spies total originating from any direction of these organizations.
However, some (certainly not 100%) of his suspicions that many members of the CPUSA and others were spying for the Soviets were factually correct.
And it came recently to my attention that some Arabs might be members of Al-Queda. And also, equally shockingly, that some Americans can be members of right wing terrorist organisations involved in bombing of federal buildings and abortion clinics. So if I proceed to treat every Arab and American as a terrorist, I will, according to glorious investigative logic of McCarthy's, be "100% correct" in "some" of my suspicions. Am I missing something? This could bring a revolution in crime fighting. I mean some blacks and South Americans are for certain drug dealers. All one has to do to get this crime problem sovled is to round up all blacks and South Americans! And all husbands, as they might be wife-beaters. And wives because they might be engaged in gambling. Etc and so on. "100% accuracy" in "some of my suspicions" whole "100% of the time!". Great plan or what?
The whole logic of your argument (and those writing various silly revisionist books) is hopelessly faulty. Yes, there were some in CPUSA who were recruited. But they were rare and low priority material, because as I explained already, they make lousy spies. The best spies are those who are not in any way related to the movment and beyond suspicion. If I were a KGB recruiter, I would look for some "underappreciated", egoistical, megalomaniac and greedy Young Republicans (those KGB dudes must have been spoiling for choice all the time). And for all kinds of people of all sorts of affiliations except socialist/communist ones. Which is apparently precisely what KGB did, judging from the spies actually caught after they have already done substantial damage. It got so bad that the self-proclaimed "spy" loons like Agee had to go look for the KGB (who were not exactly thrilled at the prospect).
(Your list of "All American Spies" contains names that came decades after McCarthyism swept the nation, by the way.)
That is likely because the list was labeled "most famous Soviet spies". Who happened to operate and be eventually discovered long after McCarthy (with the exception of Rosenbergs).
But I've often wondered if his some of his earlier persecutions were fueled by information gleaned from the VENONA project. Did he have his own inside person in the FBI (perhaps on the VENONA project) feeding him those names?
VENONA and most of the activities of FBI of that time were highly suspect and there were many vicious right-wing ideologues in the ranks of organisations like FBI (and still are) who saw it their mission in life to stomp out all the "Godless Atheistic Communist Vermin" by any means neccessary. McCarty was a natural ally and an excellent conduit for their vendettas. So there would be no surprise that some frustrated FBI operative, whose efforts to lock up all leftists were thwarted by things like the habeas corpus and so he sought to circumnavigate the "problem" by feeding McCarthy names and other info on his "suspects". I personally take findings of VENONA and similar projects with a gigiantic grain of salt, not only
So please, no rosy-colored stories, for I was there and have still scars to prove it.
And for those interested in what went wrong, in involved glorious explosions of the Steam CD-KEY authentication and decryption servers, their crashing, farting, catching fire and rolling over to die and what not. All of it resulting in hours upon hours of screwing around to only end up with an unplayable, partially decrypted game and an invalidated CD KEY which prevented any possiblity of recovery. This coupled of course with the worst customer support experience I had in my many decades of dealing with computer software and hardware vendors, and that is saying something.
Unless you consider a "patron" to be "anyone who attends a performance".
Yes I do. Anyone who pays at the gate to get into a performance is a patron of arts in general, and that of the art of the performer in question in particular.
Yes indeed, ask Carmack and ID software about the millions of pure profit they made off the original Doom (which was one of the prime examples of shareware). No distribution costs, no advertising, the customers did all for them. It was one of most profitable games ever and launched ID Games as a prime-time software company (who then promptly forgot its origins and proceeded to play by the rules dictated by hollywood - the result: steady decline into mediocracy ever since).
I don't mean that they should be *guaranteed* anything back, but of 100 downloads I'd expect at least a couple to think it's worth keeping it installed. Shareware authors generally get much less subscriptions than that.
Shareware authors make money, but it is not millions unless they can do something as innovative as Doom was. WinZip makers and others successfully live off shareware. Which is precisely the desired state of affairs. Unless you are producing something unique and/or very useful, don't expect to make a living off of it. It will at best be a supplemental income. Same applies to art. Unless you are really good, or show exceptional promise (in which case you will get sponsored by someone), as the saying goes: "... don't quit your day job". As it should be.
You clearly don't know how widespread musical ability (and other forms of artistic expression) is! Unless you consider a "patron" to be "anyone who attends a performance".
I think you are trying to have the cake and eat it to. I responded to your assertion that the top artists, like Mozart, were rare and had no incentive to share their work. I provided a counterpoint involving a large number of patrons seeking these top author's work. Now you are saying that your original premise was completely false and art is in fact is a common thing and not so rare and valuable after all. Which is it?
The word in this case is not "amateur". It's "dillettante".
I am as much of a "dilettante" as you are an infant. I have 25+ years experience coding in more languages then I care to remember, in more environments then I care to remember, from mainframes with punchcards, to single-chip microcontroller embedded systems. The fact that I enjoy sharing my rather considerable experience in the field for free with others, does not make me an amateur. When I say that I would have to get more serious about my "art" to get hired by OSDL (which is not something I desire, btw) I mean the GPL code exlusively as I now rarely code for a living, having long since moved onto consulting work.
What I *do* want though is the opportunity to make a living off my art, such that I can spend my days doing nothing but my chosen art. I've been lucky enough to do something approximately like that with my software; I'm starting to consider trying to do the same with the music. Note the word "living" - not "riches", not "wild extravagance", but "living". I don't consider it unreasonable to attempt that.
Then the traditional music studios and the copyright based publishing system are your mortal enemies. They are not interested in anything which cannot be mass marketed, flogged endlessly via a homogenuous ClearChannel network of drone radiostations and which will not yeld at least a $100 million return. Otherwise you will be publishing at your own expense, with the added bonus of all your work belonging to the studio, should you somehow get successful. Your best bet is to set up your own site and start promoting youself on indie music sites and take direct PayPal donations and make custom, hand signed or what not CDs for people. You can also do some demeaning stuff like offer to perform modified versions of songs for people and record them for their special occasions and what not for a more significant fee. That is ... patronage, a small-time artist's best friend.
But the amount of time avai
I read the essential works of Adam Smith and some of Keynes, Heyek and Friedman, I could not stomach more then a few pages of Zhinovievna's (a.k.a. "Rand"). You should realise that even the very definition of "capitalism" is disputed and in flux, and all of these above have their own take on it. That is why I nearly exclusively rely on Smith, becasue he is the one who proposed the cornerstone tenets of the theory, he had the insight to see the beneficial side-effects of free-marketplace and he did so as a phillosopher whose focus was ethics and logic, not as a politically charged apologist for the rich and the supremely greedy, like most of the later "re-interpreters" of his work. He was also not ecnumbered with the psychotic anti-socialist paranoias of these later generations (hello Hayek, Friedman and Rand). So I am afraid that pointing me to some modern day re-massager (particularly rabidly Libertarian or Anarcho Capitalist -- which the site seems to me at a first glance) of the basic principles is not going to do much good in "educating" me as to the premises of capitalism, and will only make me develop more disdain for the ways in which the unscrupulously greedy wish to make "capitalism" into their own image.
It is with a good reason that Smith was weary of the wealthy and the businessmen when discussing the system and that his focus was on labour and on small business, rather then land and natural resource ownership or large enterprise, combined with his demands for forcible destruction of monopolies of all kinds. Smith did not believe, like his naive re-interpreters, that monopolies can magically dissipate due to market forces alone -- but he also saw the government as foolishly not only not destroying monopolies but helping to establish them, and it is only the latter part onto which Libertarians and Anarcho Capitalists latch on desperately, studiously ignoring the first.
Also, while somehow the modern re-inventers are consumed by glorification of personal greed and avarice, Smith was talking abought "enlightened self-interest" and discussed "sympathy and compassion" as being the cornerstone of human interactions in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments". Etc. and so on. I do not accept all of the Smith's premises, particularly when his religion gets involved in his reasoning, but on the whole I must say he makes heck of a lot more sense then the modern spinners.
You are projecting your own state of mind onto me. I have no desire whatsoever to become a large scale crook for the purpose of making myself feel "superior" to others. I simply lack your reptilian sensibilities for such a thing to be appealing to me.
Can you support your assertion that the IKEA founder is a crook?
His wealth is all the proof I need. As I already explained, ad nauseum, that in a capitalist society, operating by the rules Adam Smith (and other theoreticians) laid down, such a massive wealth disparity is impossible. So its existence is by itself a damning evidence. You even use the same argument, when it suits you, to describe how monopolies are supposedly not possible.
Who did he swindle?
The consumers, the foreign slave labour and the human race in general for consuming vast amounts of natural resources to produce mountains of disposable crap. Like most other major corporations.
Who was forced at gun point to buy his product?
You assume, quite incorrectly, that all forms of connivery involve knuckle-dragging knee-breakers.
A monopoly requires government enforcement.
No it does not. Purchasing all the deposits of a rare ore globally produces an instant monopoly. So does owning the land straddling the only access corridor to a busy harbour. Making sure that your dominant product becomes more dominant by elaborate technological lock-in schemes and formation of cartels with suppliers of related equipment does so quite effectively (hello Microsoft!). And so on.
Otherwise, competition is always dogging the heals of the successful.
Do explain how would competition "dog your heals" in the scenario of you owning all of the deposits of, say, nickel. And please, no rocket-ships and moon mining fantasies.
Globe-spanning multinationals certainly are possible in a truly free market, because everything is possible in a truly free market.
Including monopolies, slavery, and feudal fiefdoms, right? When people refer to "free market" they mean a market in manufactured goods and materials, not in slaves.
However, such a company would always have to be more efficient, more effective at producing products that their customers want at a price they wish to pay, or their customers will go elsewhere.
Or better at creating barriers for others to compete and thus slowly turning into a monopoly or a part of an oligarchic cartel. I love it how the stalwart defenders of unrestricted free market always forget this little "barrier to entry" tidbit.
I'm not surprised you equate force with "making it inconvenient to buy a system without Windows", because you envy Gates his fortune.
No, it is because restricting access to choice via a cartel is a form of abuse of consumers, i.e. force.
Apple has always been there.
Trying desperately to impose its own monopoly but being far too late into the game and thus thwarted by the said "barrier to entry". If this was truly a free market, there would be tens of (comparably popular) microsoft-like products makers and tens of Apple-like competing complete solution providers. Instead you are straining to make hay with a sample of 1 (read: monopoly) of each.
White-box makers have always been there.
All of which supply Microsoft as their OS as they know their consumers have little choice but to use it and they have little choice but to provide it. And your point was?
It has always been possible to buy a mainframe, and not even from IBM, and hang dedicated terminals off of it and thereby bypass Microsoft entirely since Microsoft didn't make any software for that environment.
That means, that thanks to Microsoft, the progress in many technologies was halted at a mainframe scale (and thus priced out of reach of most) and remained so until very recently.
My installat
That is precisely why patronage is a much more effective and mature system today. The information technology and our societal structure helps more and more with each technological advance, allowing a large number of small scale patrons to contribute directly to their favourite atists, as opposed to breaking down more and more as it is the case with copyright.
It wouldn't have worked 100 years ago, because the only method of non-artist-present dissemination was to release the score. And they wouldn't do that, because that would limit their income from performing said score.
They did that anyway, because no artist could perform in 4 places at once and there were far more patrons then artists. Besides they did not get paid per performance in most cases but per score (which removed the incentive to keep it secret), and most were on permanent salary paid by their patrons, which was independent on their score "output". Please do get your facts straight.
Also note that this could never work for books (unless we're supposed to go and listen to Arthur C Clarke read his books aloud to us, a more tedious fate than which I really can't imagine).
Book printing is a service. Once the work was commisioned by a foundation and has immediately become public, any publisher could print it. The publishers would compete on the quality of print, price, format etc., that is on the quality of transmission which is what a book really is. The books of today are a relic, and electronic formats will soon replace them completely, pushing book makers to niche "nostalgy" markets for people who find that archaic format pleasureable. For which they will be willing to pay a premium independent of the contents of the book.
Shakespeare, we're lucky to have a lot of his works. Many (especially his poems) have been taken from a single copy found stashed in someone's library/attic. A classic example of my point. Ditto most composers - all of them were happy to perform (for money), but they weren't as happy about dishing out the score to all and sundry. As a result, there's an awful lot of composers for whom we have very little material, even though they were world-famous at the time - their work died with them. Paganini is a particularly good example.
That is a limitation of the ancient technology, not of the patronage system itself. Quilted pens dipped in ink at every word are at fault here, not patronage. And it gets worse further we go back in time. Today we would have a digital recording of the first performance and the dissemination begins from there.
So an artist should have no expectation of making a living from his/her art.
Precisely. Art is not a form of commerce. It is not a form of employment. There is no such thing as "art industry" (one of the greatest oxymorons ever). Art results from an intrinsic desire to share things of profound importance with others. Most artists are amateurs and do what they do because it gives them satisfaction. Only a crook would think of art as a "profit opportunity". Note that this does not mean poverty for the artist because the quality of his work can bring wide-scale recognition which in turn attracts patrons and fans. And that is how an artist can make a living. But the money and art are not directly related in any way! They are on completely different planes of existence, just like information is.
And one best advantage would be using your art to make a living, so you don't have to piss your life away doing some shitty dead-end job when you could be working on improving your artistic skills. It'd be nice for the universe to say "hey, you've got mega musical skills, so let's give you what you need to stay alive". But it don't work like that... Mozart, for instance. Sure, Mozart was obsessed by music, and was vastly talented. So what did he do? Answer: he used that talent to get himself patronage (!), get performances sold out, an