Are you confusing popularity with monopolies?
Nobody is stopping you from using those other search engines.
Popularity is often used to determine whether a company is deemed to be a monopoly. The definition varies according to jurisdiction--and is difficult to apply in this case anyway, because the main criterion is generally whether the firm can raise prices without affecting sales--but market share is definitely a factor. For example, when Microsoft was in the dock, it couldn't simply say, "Well, nobody is stopping people from using Linux." It holds a position of market dominance even though it has competitors. Genuine one-company, no-competitor monopolies are exceedingly rare, outside of those that are legally mandated.
That apparent paradox is the key to the media companies' strategy.
It used to be media companies were content to simply abide by copyright law. If someone broke copyright law, the companies would go after them. But aside from that, we customers could do what we wanted with their products.
Then technology made it increasingly easy for people to break copyright law, and harder for media companies to find out who broke it and stop them. So they started implementing technology of their own: copy protection.
Naturally, this was poorly implemented and caused more trouble for real customers than for pirates. But the media companies realized it was very useful, because it allowed them to separate what people were legally entitled to do from from what the companies let them do. So media companies grew to rely less on copyright law -- which provides a relatively small set of prohibitions -- and more on physically preventing customers from doing anything the media companies didn't like.
Because the technology was still pretty crappy, people could crack it. So the media companies lobbied governments to make cracking these technologies illegal. And here's the really sneaky part: they didn't just get protection for technologies that prevented copyright infringement. They got protection for pretty much anything they can dream up. All they need to do is bundle it all together and claim it's meant to help protect copyright.
The end result: media companies can effectively write their own copyright laws! They decide what they want to allow us to do and what they want to prohibit, they implement a technological measure to this effect, and it's illegal for anyone to circumvent it. They've ended up with the best of both worlds: the ability to dictate terms to customers how they use their media, and the legal right to enforce compliance.
I remember hearing about a guy who took his groceries through the supermarket checkout one item at a time, to benefit from rounding on each individual item, not just on the total. (The supermarket's policy was to always round down, never up -- most large Aussie retail stores seem to do this.)
So after however long it took to do all that, he maybe saved, what, a buck. The supermarket honoured this, then banned him.
Technically it's not compulsory to vote in Australia. It's only compulsory to turn up at a voting station. You may then take your ballot papers, crumple them up, and walk out.
Oh yeah, in geological terms, human history is less than the blink of an eye. With fossils unearthed recently showing _tropical_ weather in Northern Canada, I think it's safe to say that the Arctic ice cap is a temporary feature.
I think it's safe to say that humankind is a temporary feature.
I'm surprised by how strongly the Slashdot crowd is against this, and how nobody seems to understand the basic economics of it.
So here is a quick primer on external detrimentalities.
A for-profit business naturally attempts to maximize its revenues while minimizing costs. One method is to pass (some of) the costs off to someone else. The classic example is a factory pumping its waste into a nearby river, thereby transferring the disposal costs to other people, whose enjoyment of or utility from the river is diminished by its pollution.
This is known as an external detrimentality. It's good for the business, and probably even good for the business's customers, because it gets to sell its products cheaper. But that's only because it hasn't had to account for the true costs of manufacture. It's effectively getting subsidized. And subsidies skew natural market forces, resulting in inefficiency. For example, if there's a rival industry that properly paying for waste disposal, its products will be less competitive than they should be, and the industry will attract less investment.
The government's job--generally speaking, if it's interested in an efficient economiy--is to eliminate external detrimentalities and force businesses to account for their true costs of manufacture. It might do this by making it illegal to dump waste in rivers, or placing limits on acceptable pollution, or charging money for the use of radio bandwidth.
Today, if I buy a car and drive it around, I'm probably paying less than that behavior really costs, because I don't have to pay for most of the pollution I'm responsible for. That is, non-car owners in society are subsizing me, if only via their reduced enjoyment of smog-free days. Whether or not that's a moral issue, it's certainly an economic one, because we have made driving a car cheaper than it really is.
Certainly you can disagree with the specific method California is using here, but unless you believe other people should have to pay for your car, you shouldn't fault the general intent.
It's certainly not too late to affect the specific provisions of this law. The Attorney-General's office is currently calling for comments on it. We can influence what it ends up looking like.
The scope of the scheme is limited to preventing circumvention of TPMs designed to stop copyright piracy. The scheme will not cover TPMs which are not designed to prevent or inhibit people from infringing copyright. The scheme will not apply to TPMs solely designed for other purposes, such as market segmentation (eg region coding) or the protection against competition in aftermarket goods (eg spare parts) where the TPM does not have a connection with copyright.
Comments will be accepted until Monday 25th Sep 2006.
Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.
Christ, the last thing you want is to start putting questions like that on a census.
Almost all social research can deliver highly accurate findings using a relatively small sample. Interviewing one thousand people will give you extremely high levels of confidence in the results, providing of course you don't fuck up the methodology. After that, you're mostly wasting everybody's time.
Australians are required to complete the census by law. Even if you make the questions optional, adding a bunch of "nice-to-know"s is a big misuse of national manpower. And just imagine the kind of push-polling you'd get if you opened the floodgates and let government departments throw in social-research questions. ("Do you support the government protecting the lives of unborn babies by banning stem cell research?")
There's a need for social research, and governments already do enormous amounts of it. But you don't need to interview 20 million people to find out that most people don't like the idea of drinking recylcled sewerage.
Don't you WANT the government to know how you feel on the issues?
That's the point, though. Whether you want them to or not, they're finding out via this CD. (And not just them, apparently; also whoever can hack this public, unsecured web site.)
My opinions--that is, my beliefs; my thoughts--are the most private data I have. Some I'm happy to share with the world at large, but some I'm not. I'm a lot more concerned about letting government into my head than into my luggage.
customers are telling us that they are hitting a wall with Linux, experiencing significant reliability issues resulting in higher total cost of ownership," said Martin Taylor, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft.
Well, that's what you'd expect. Take the set of companies that are/were running Linux but are now Microsoft customers: do you think they might have encountered a problem with Linux?
Companies that were Windows shops but are now Red Hat customers aren't likely to be thrilled with MS, either.
There are a few different reasons behind the absence of TiVo in Australia. One is that if they can't make a profit in the UK, they're unlikely to here. Another is that the Australian courts have deemed raw TV guide data to be IP (Telstra vs Desktop Marketing), so you can't produce one without the networks' permission. There's no way in hell they'll give that to a PVR manufacturer, and without TV guide data, PVRs aren't so useful.
The same issue makes it a little harder to set up something like MythTV; you need to use slightly dodgy open/volunteer TV guide data or (technically) break the law with a Perl script that scrapes it from the networks' web sites.
Yes, the the protocol imposes different targets on different countries, but this is as you'd expect. For example, you would never expect India, which puts out one-fifth of the CO2 of the US despite having 3.6 times the population, to cut its emissions by the same percentage. Ditto China, which puts out 40% less CO2 than the US, but has 4.4 times more people. And Brazil! Brazil has 62% of the US's population, and 5% of the CO2 emissions. Look for yourself.
You could more plausibly argue the opposite: that every country should be allowed to emit, say, 20 tons of CO2 per capita. That sounds fair. But that would mean allowing massive increases by every undeveloped country, while imposing cuts on the US. Because developed countries are responsible for many times more per-capita emissions than undeveloped ones.
The Kyoto Protocol targets aren't especially difficult anyway. The US target was a 7% decrease over 20 years. That's 0.35% p.a. And less than the reduction target accepted by the European Union (8%). The idea, obviously, is not to make countries shut down important industries, but to encourage the use of cleaner technologies where they are appropriate. To begin taking steps in the right direction.
But Republicans apparently believe that the environment is nothing more than an infinitely exploitable resource, so while 153 countries do their part, the world's #1 greenhouse gas polluter continues to belch out 25% of the world's CO2.
What!? Dude. Every single country in the UN signed the Kyoto protocol, including Russia. Two, the US and Australia, have since changed their minds and won't ratify it. There are only four other countries that haven't yet ratified it: Croatia, Kazakhstan, Monaco, and Zambia.
The Kyoto Protocol isn't some little thing. It's a pact between 141 countries to tackle global warming, even though the planet's #1 greenhouse gas polluter refuses to help.
Why does your political leaning have anything to do with whether you believe humankind is causing global warming? If you're that far gone, you're not judging the issue on the evidence; you're believing whatever fits most comfortably with your pre-established worldview.
I assume, of course, there will be a thumbs-down button so I can indicate I have no intention of ever purchasing the product featured in a particular ad, and will be never shown it again.
Just because some people are arguing a case badly doesn't mean that there isn't a case to argue.
Funny, isn't it, how when Iraq was the bogey, it was of the utmost urgency that we act now, now goddammit, and only a fool or idiot would sit around waiting for definitive, iron-clad evidence.
But when it's only global warming, with consequences ranging from the loss of entire island countries to mass species extinction... well, no need for action until all the facts are in. Let's just wait until they've managed to prove, without doubt, that there is no tiny chance of any conceivable alternative solution. One that, you know, doesn't require us to do anything.
What's with everyone classifying the Japanese as a single entity? "The Japanese military did some terrible things, so it's fine to kill Japanese civilians." That logic can justify the murder of innocents in any country you want to name, including the US (except then, of course, we'd call it terrorism).
For Christ's sake, people are individuals, not units of a nation-state hive mind.
Khrushchev didn't bang his shoe while yelling, "We will bury you!" Those were two separate incidents. Since you're so keen for others to educate themselves, maybe you could read up on what really happened.
According to this article, the widely reported study showing unanimous 'scientific consensus' on Global Warming ('not a single paper asserted otherwise') is not only deeply flawed, but that same consensus is artificially maintained by Science and Nature rejecting any papers which disagree with it.
Exactly! And they claim there's a "consensus" that there's no such thing as an Invisible Pink Unicorn, but that's just because all my papers proving Her existance keep getting rejected! Bias! Bias!
You're assuming the girl was sufficiently mature to make reasonable decisions about her sexuality. Since she was 15 and he was 23, this is doubtful.
The point of laws like statutory rape is that young teenagers aren't mature enough to give informed consent, and are vulnerable to being exploited by those older and more experienced than them. Even if the girl *did* string him along, she was not the aggressor: as the adult, he was required to behave responsibly, not her.
Slashdot Mirror
Popularity is often used to determine whether a company is deemed to be a monopoly. The definition varies according to jurisdiction--and is difficult to apply in this case anyway, because the main criterion is generally whether the firm can raise prices without affecting sales--but market share is definitely a factor. For example, when Microsoft was in the dock, it couldn't simply say, "Well, nobody is stopping people from using Linux." It holds a position of market dominance even though it has competitors. Genuine one-company, no-competitor monopolies are exceedingly rare, outside of those that are legally mandated.
That apparent paradox is the key to the media companies' strategy.
It used to be media companies were content to simply abide by copyright law. If someone broke copyright law, the companies would go after them. But aside from that, we customers could do what we wanted with their products.
Then technology made it increasingly easy for people to break copyright law, and harder for media companies to find out who broke it and stop them. So they started implementing technology of their own: copy protection.
Naturally, this was poorly implemented and caused more trouble for real customers than for pirates. But the media companies realized it was very useful, because it allowed them to separate what people were legally entitled to do from from what the companies let them do. So media companies grew to rely less on copyright law -- which provides a relatively small set of prohibitions -- and more on physically preventing customers from doing anything the media companies didn't like.
Because the technology was still pretty crappy, people could crack it. So the media companies lobbied governments to make cracking these technologies illegal. And here's the really sneaky part: they didn't just get protection for technologies that prevented copyright infringement. They got protection for pretty much anything they can dream up. All they need to do is bundle it all together and claim it's meant to help protect copyright.
The end result: media companies can effectively write their own copyright laws! They decide what they want to allow us to do and what they want to prohibit, they implement a technological measure to this effect, and it's illegal for anyone to circumvent it. They've ended up with the best of both worlds: the ability to dictate terms to customers how they use their media, and the legal right to enforce compliance.
I remember hearing about a guy who took his groceries through the supermarket checkout one item at a time, to benefit from rounding on each individual item, not just on the total. (The supermarket's policy was to always round down, never up -- most large Aussie retail stores seem to do this.)
So after however long it took to do all that, he maybe saved, what, a buck. The supermarket honoured this, then banned him.
Technically it's not compulsory to vote in Australia. It's only compulsory to turn up at a voting station. You may then take your ballot papers, crumple them up, and walk out.
I think it's safe to say that humankind is a temporary feature.
I'm surprised by how strongly the Slashdot crowd is against this, and how nobody seems to understand the basic economics of it.
So here is a quick primer on external detrimentalities.
A for-profit business naturally attempts to maximize its revenues while minimizing costs. One method is to pass (some of) the costs off to someone else. The classic example is a factory pumping its waste into a nearby river, thereby transferring the disposal costs to other people, whose enjoyment of or utility from the river is diminished by its pollution.
This is known as an external detrimentality. It's good for the business, and probably even good for the business's customers, because it gets to sell its products cheaper. But that's only because it hasn't had to account for the true costs of manufacture. It's effectively getting subsidized. And subsidies skew natural market forces, resulting in inefficiency. For example, if there's a rival industry that properly paying for waste disposal, its products will be less competitive than they should be, and the industry will attract less investment.
The government's job--generally speaking, if it's interested in an efficient economiy--is to eliminate external detrimentalities and force businesses to account for their true costs of manufacture. It might do this by making it illegal to dump waste in rivers, or placing limits on acceptable pollution, or charging money for the use of radio bandwidth.
Today, if I buy a car and drive it around, I'm probably paying less than that behavior really costs, because I don't have to pay for most of the pollution I'm responsible for. That is, non-car owners in society are subsizing me, if only via their reduced enjoyment of smog-free days. Whether or not that's a moral issue, it's certainly an economic one, because we have made driving a car cheaper than it really is.
Certainly you can disagree with the specific method California is using here, but unless you believe other people should have to pay for your car, you shouldn't fault the general intent.
It's certainly not too late to affect the specific provisions of this law. The Attorney-General's office is currently calling for comments on it. We can influence what it ends up looking like.
I found some more good links:
One very interesting provision is this:
Comments will be accepted until Monday 25th Sep 2006.
I emailed my federal member of parliament about this. He replied the next day.
All you need to do is say that you live in their electorate and you disagree with this legislation. This is our last chance to block DMCA-style law.
Aussies, get your MP's email addy here!
Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.
Christ, the last thing you want is to start putting questions like that on a census.
Almost all social research can deliver highly accurate findings using a relatively small sample. Interviewing one thousand people will give you extremely high levels of confidence in the results, providing of course you don't fuck up the methodology. After that, you're mostly wasting everybody's time.
Australians are required to complete the census by law. Even if you make the questions optional, adding a bunch of "nice-to-know"s is a big misuse of national manpower. And just imagine the kind of push-polling you'd get if you opened the floodgates and let government departments throw in social-research questions. ("Do you support the government protecting the lives of unborn babies by banning stem cell research?")
There's a need for social research, and governments already do enormous amounts of it. But you don't need to interview 20 million people to find out that most people don't like the idea of drinking recylcled sewerage.
That's the point, though. Whether you want them to or not, they're finding out via this CD. (And not just them, apparently; also whoever can hack this public, unsecured web site.)
My opinions--that is, my beliefs; my thoughts--are the most private data I have. Some I'm happy to share with the world at large, but some I'm not. I'm a lot more concerned about letting government into my head than into my luggage.
I know several teachers who use NationStates in class. Funnily enough I'm also aware of many schools who ban us outright.
We got so many enquiries from teachers that we made a special page for them.
Well, that's what you'd expect. Take the set of companies that are/were running Linux but are now Microsoft customers: do you think they might have encountered a problem with Linux?
Companies that were Windows shops but are now Red Hat customers aren't likely to be thrilled with MS, either.
There are a few different reasons behind the absence of TiVo in Australia. One is that if they can't make a profit in the UK, they're unlikely to here. Another is that the Australian courts have deemed raw TV guide data to be IP (Telstra vs Desktop Marketing), so you can't produce one without the networks' permission. There's no way in hell they'll give that to a PVR manufacturer, and without TV guide data, PVRs aren't so useful.
The same issue makes it a little harder to set up something like MythTV; you need to use slightly dodgy open/volunteer TV guide data or (technically) break the law with a Perl script that scrapes it from the networks' web sites.
Why do people keep saying things like this? There are only 2 countries in the UN that refuse to join the Kyoto Protocol: the US and Australia.
Yes, the the protocol imposes different targets on different countries, but this is as you'd expect. For example, you would never expect India, which puts out one-fifth of the CO2 of the US despite having 3.6 times the population, to cut its emissions by the same percentage. Ditto China, which puts out 40% less CO2 than the US, but has 4.4 times more people. And Brazil! Brazil has 62% of the US's population, and 5% of the CO2 emissions. Look for yourself.
You could more plausibly argue the opposite: that every country should be allowed to emit, say, 20 tons of CO2 per capita. That sounds fair. But that would mean allowing massive increases by every undeveloped country, while imposing cuts on the US. Because developed countries are responsible for many times more per-capita emissions than undeveloped ones.
The Kyoto Protocol targets aren't especially difficult anyway. The US target was a 7% decrease over 20 years. That's 0.35% p.a. And less than the reduction target accepted by the European Union (8%). The idea, obviously, is not to make countries shut down important industries, but to encourage the use of cleaner technologies where they are appropriate. To begin taking steps in the right direction.
But Republicans apparently believe that the environment is nothing more than an infinitely exploitable resource, so while 153 countries do their part, the world's #1 greenhouse gas polluter continues to belch out 25% of the world's CO2.
What!? Dude. Every single country in the UN signed the Kyoto protocol, including Russia. Two, the US and Australia, have since changed their minds and won't ratify it. There are only four other countries that haven't yet ratified it: Croatia, Kazakhstan, Monaco, and Zambia.
The Kyoto Protocol isn't some little thing. It's a pact between 141 countries to tackle global warming, even though the planet's #1 greenhouse gas polluter refuses to help.
That you think a scientist's knowledge of economics would be relevent to his opinions about the nature of climate change says a lot.
Why does your political leaning have anything to do with whether you believe humankind is causing global warming? If you're that far gone, you're not judging the issue on the evidence; you're believing whatever fits most comfortably with your pre-established worldview.
I assume, of course, there will be a thumbs-down button so I can indicate I have no intention of ever purchasing the product featured in a particular ad, and will be never shown it again.
Funny, isn't it, how when Iraq was the bogey, it was of the utmost urgency that we act now, now goddammit, and only a fool or idiot would sit around waiting for definitive, iron-clad evidence.
But when it's only global warming, with consequences ranging from the loss of entire island countries to mass species extinction... well, no need for action until all the facts are in. Let's just wait until they've managed to prove, without doubt, that there is no tiny chance of any conceivable alternative solution. One that, you know, doesn't require us to do anything.
What's with everyone classifying the Japanese as a single entity? "The Japanese military did some terrible things, so it's fine to kill Japanese civilians." That logic can justify the murder of innocents in any country you want to name, including the US (except then, of course, we'd call it terrorism).
For Christ's sake, people are individuals, not units of a nation-state hive mind.
Khrushchev didn't bang his shoe while yelling, "We will bury you!" Those were two separate incidents. Since you're so keen for others to educate themselves, maybe you could read up on what really happened.
Certainly Krushchev was an aggressive leader. But today the U.S.'s stated aim is to not only maintain military supremacy, but to build up so much military strength that no other nation can even consider trying to compete. If you don't live in America, that sounds a lot like a plan to rule the world, too.
And if you want to go way back... stone tools.
Many more here: http://www.whitehat.com.au/Australia/Inventions/In ventionsA.html
Not bad for a country half the age and with less than one tenth the population of the US!
You're assuming the girl was sufficiently mature to make reasonable decisions about her sexuality. Since she was 15 and he was 23, this is doubtful.
The point of laws like statutory rape is that young teenagers aren't mature enough to give informed consent, and are vulnerable to being exploited by those older and more experienced than them. Even if the girl *did* string him along, she was not the aggressor: as the adult, he was required to behave responsibly, not her.