They want the ability to use the idea how they see fit. Restricting that prevents society from generating new ideas, works, and research. In short, restricting ideas leads to a halt of human advancement.
The common counterargument to that is that copyright and patent encourage exploration of a larger fraction of the hyperspace of ideas. Patent design-arounds lead to alternative designs that are often more fit than the originally patented one. For example, PNG is more efficient rate/distortion-wise than still GIF, as is Vorbis than MP3. Copyright workarounds likewise lead to the development of more distinctive art styles.
The tragedy of the anticommons that you describe comes into play when there is a thicket, that is, when enough of the space around an idea is claimed that it's difficult to find space in which to stake a new claim. One might use combinatorics to suggest that music is already a thicket, such as the "105 million melodies" proof derived from seven pitch classes (do, re, mi through si), two duration classes (short and long), and an estimate of eight notes (seven intervals) to make a song's hook identifiable and protectable. Thus there are 14 different intervals from one note to the next, and 14^7 = 105.4 million, of which publishers represented by BMI and ASCAP already control over ten million.
young new drivers aren't buying cars since they aren't getting drivers licenses at a young age [...] Its cheaper to public transportation
Until they find that they can't keep a job when employers are unwilling to accommodate the limited hours of operation of public transportation, with no service at night or on 58 days per year of scheduled downtime. Is "Reason for leaving: Poor schedule fit" valid?
or ride with friends
Until they find that friends also "aren't getting drivers licenses at a young age".
Creators should have the right to pursue (or revoke) monetization of their efforts.
My answer depends on what you meant by "or revoke". If you meant that a work's author should have power to grant a royalty-free license to the public, I'm all for it. But if you meant that an author of a published work should have power to take it out of print entirely, acting like the proverbial dog in the manger toward historically significant films such as Song of the South and toward fans' ability to participate in culture, that's where I have to disagree.
The real reason is that they want control and access.
There exist alternatives to Windows 10 that are not as demanding of control by the publisher. But when one evaluates the viability of deploying said alternatives, the following issue is likely to come up:
For an OS to outright deny control to the user is a huge fail.
Federal law requires such "a huge fail." The vast majority of laptop and tablet computers sold nowadays include IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) technology, commonly branded as "Wi-Fi", as well as a short-range peripheral network technology called Bluetooth. A WLAN or Bluetooth transceiver includes a radio transmitter, and under FCC regulations, the transmitter's firmware must be secured against end-user modifications that might cause the transmitter to violate Part 15. So any operating system supporting WLAN or Bluetooth has to deny at least some control to the user.
Or would you prefer to use an operating system that does not support WLAN or Bluetooth?
You could just bypass the middleman and rent your ass out for XXX a week.
I'm not sure there's much of a market for renting donkeys in the industrialized world now that bikes, cars, and trucks exist, apart from some fairly small niches. And in the less-industrialized world, where pack animals are still regularly used to move goods over rugged terrain, wages are lower anyway so you might not make much money that way either.
There should be options to prompt the user (yes, no, remind later) or to completely disable all automatic updates, all automatic reboots, all update nags and all reboot nags, leaving the user to do it manually.
My best guess for Microsoft's rationale for forcing updates on Internet-connected computers is that if an unpatched computer is left connected to the Internet, it can be compromised to spread malware to other computers on the Internet. So to prevent automatic correction of security vulnerabilities, disconnect the computer from the Internet.
defect in Windows 10
You cannot defend any of this shit
Agreed. As I said, Windows 10 is defective, and the defects show incompetence at best. The inability to treat Ethernet as metered shows that Microsoft, a company headquartered in a city next to Seattle, is somehow unaware of the horrid state of Internet access in Seattle due to its backward utility right-of-way law. I was trying to assume good faith to the best of my ability. But that's a defect that I can't defend, and defects like this are part of why I wiped Windows 10 from a used ThinkPad that I bought.
Hell, in the early days of D3D you literally couldn't plot a pixel over a 3D display without using GDI!
That or by uploading a texture containing the pixels you want to plot and drawing it as a quad, right?
The other thing that helped D3D proliferate was Microsoft's game consoles [...] With that said, any indie developer who uses Direct3D is a dildo.
Was this true even during the seventh generation, when the only major game console open to indie developers was Xbox 360 with XNA? The PC could run OpenGL, but connecting a PC to a TV wasn't common yet, and crowding two to four players holding USB gamepads around a desktop or laptop monitor is a pain.
Perhaps the dev does not derive enough revenue from a particular site to buy a Mac mini with enough RAM to run a Windows VM. One needs the Windows VM for Edge and IE 11 and the Mac for Safari. So where should the dev of a site similar to the ones with which you have got annoyed find an adequate QA budget?
prompt before checking for updates, prompt before downloading updates
In Settings > Update & security > Windows Update > Advanced options > Choose how updates are installed, the explanation states: "Updates won't download over a metered connection (where charges may apply)." "Metered" is the clue for delaying update downloads, as explained in articles on Lifehacker and How-To Geek. In Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > (your SSID) > Advanced options, you should be able to set a particular SSID as metered.
The Lifehacker article does acknowledge a defect in Windows 10: it never lets the user set a wired Ethernet connection as metered, even if wired Ethernet's upstream is a satellite or cellular connection with a 5-10 GB/mo cap or a cable connection with a 300 GB/mo cap.
and prompt before rebooting
In Settings > Update & security > Windows Update > Advanced options > Choose how updates are installed, change the value to "Notify to schedule restart".
Or at least you couldn't until console makers introduced achievements (Xbox) or trophies (PlayStation) as a means of comparing your e-PINGAS to those of your friends.
Do you consider multiplayer sports to be pointless too?
Consider that televised sports are the biggest thing keeping people from "cord cutting" (ending a multichannel pay TV subscription). But when this is pointed out in Slashdot comments, advocates of cord cutting often reply along the lines "and nothing of value was lost." Perhaps iamacat is among the users with this attitude.
And how are the rules of a computer game any more or less "made up" than the rules of tennis
Because a computer game's rules are subject to copyright, unlike the rules of lawn tennis. The Tennis Company lacks grounds to sue unlicensed makers of tennis equipment that imply no USTA affiliation, unlike The Tetris Company.
or the rule that a marathon is 26.2 miles and not some other length, etc?
A physical sport or tabletop game can be "modded" provided that all participants agree. This allows for exploration of a larger space of forms of play that has chess as a subset, such as nonstandard starting positions and nonstandard pieces. Video game publishers, on the other hand, use copyright to block use of mods.
But it doesn't help as much for testing on Safari, whose Software License Agreement forbids use in a VM on anything but a Mac. To avoid contract-after-sale particularities, let's for the sake of argument assume that the box of OS X has a conspicuous warning: "By purchasing this product, you agree to the Software License Agreement at http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1011.pdf. This agreement forbids copying this program into the RAM of any non-Apple computer." Use in a VM on your Windows or Linux PC would then be a breach of contract, making you liable for damages as specified in the agreement. And because some kext files in OS X are encrypted, decrypting the installer without Apple's permission might expose you to criminal penalties pursuant to 17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts.
Similarly, if I get a copy of Mac OS X from Apple and install it on my own computer, there is nothing illegal about that.
You are correct that it technically isn't copyright infringement. To avoid accusation of moving the goalposts, I will take my revised legal theory to another reply.
Then let me rephrase: Those features whose implementation in standard HTML and CSS requires parts of the standard that widely deployed browsers implement either A. incompletely, B. incorrectly, or C. (for parts marked as implementation-defined) in a manner that is not identical among Chrome for desktop, Chrome for Android, IE 11, Edge, Safari for OS X, and Safari for iOS.
Why would you need to change your OS or have your friends change theirs just to play online together? You just need the same game
You wouldn't need to have your friends change their operating system. You'd need to have your friends change their games to games also available for your operating system. And if changing their games is too much for your current friends, you might need to change friends.
And if your computer reboots without you explicitly telling it to
You told it to by setting a time. That's the new way it works in Windows 10: it tells you it needs to reboot to finish installing upgraded components, and you tell the computer when to reboot.
If shutdown or power loss results in loss of work, the application that you are using is broken. It ought to be saving uncommitted changes to your document to a log file, the same log file it uses for Undo and Redo. Then after the computer restarts, it can replay the Redo log and get you back to where you were.
Slashdot Mirror
They want the ability to use the idea how they see fit. Restricting that prevents society from generating new ideas, works, and research. In short, restricting ideas leads to a halt of human advancement.
The common counterargument to that is that copyright and patent encourage exploration of a larger fraction of the hyperspace of ideas. Patent design-arounds lead to alternative designs that are often more fit than the originally patented one. For example, PNG is more efficient rate/distortion-wise than still GIF, as is Vorbis than MP3. Copyright workarounds likewise lead to the development of more distinctive art styles.
The tragedy of the anticommons that you describe comes into play when there is a thicket, that is, when enough of the space around an idea is claimed that it's difficult to find space in which to stake a new claim. One might use combinatorics to suggest that music is already a thicket, such as the "105 million melodies" proof derived from seven pitch classes (do, re, mi through si), two duration classes (short and long), and an estimate of eight notes (seven intervals) to make a song's hook identifiable and protectable. Thus there are 14 different intervals from one note to the next, and 14^7 = 105.4 million, of which publishers represented by BMI and ASCAP already control over ten million.
You keep paying my salary for 70 years after I'm dead and I'll consider paying for your fucking IP.
There are life insurance companies that offer this service.
young new drivers aren't buying cars since they aren't getting drivers licenses at a young age [...] Its cheaper to public transportation
Until they find that they can't keep a job when employers are unwilling to accommodate the limited hours of operation of public transportation, with no service at night or on 58 days per year of scheduled downtime. Is "Reason for leaving: Poor schedule fit" valid?
or ride with friends
Until they find that friends also "aren't getting drivers licenses at a young age".
Yet what counts as "specific performances" can be considered fairly broad, as in the case of Tetris .
Creators should have the right to pursue (or revoke) monetization of their efforts.
My answer depends on what you meant by "or revoke". If you meant that a work's author should have power to grant a royalty-free license to the public, I'm all for it. But if you meant that an author of a published work should have power to take it out of print entirely, acting like the proverbial dog in the manger toward historically significant films such as Song of the South and toward fans' ability to participate in culture, that's where I have to disagree.
what "usually" happens when you you use a collection of preused ideas is that you create something that is unoriginal, at best
True, standing on the shoulders of giants is unusual, as Isaac Newton wrote about it in 1676, and Bernard of Chartres five centuries before that.
The real reason is that they want control and access.
There exist alternatives to Windows 10 that are not as demanding of control by the publisher. But when one evaluates the viability of deploying said alternatives, the following issue is likely to come up:
For an OS to outright deny control to the user is a huge fail.
Federal law requires such "a huge fail." The vast majority of laptop and tablet computers sold nowadays include IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) technology, commonly branded as "Wi-Fi", as well as a short-range peripheral network technology called Bluetooth. A WLAN or Bluetooth transceiver includes a radio transmitter, and under FCC regulations, the transmitter's firmware must be secured against end-user modifications that might cause the transmitter to violate Part 15. So any operating system supporting WLAN or Bluetooth has to deny at least some control to the user.
Or would you prefer to use an operating system that does not support WLAN or Bluetooth?
You could just bypass the middleman and rent your ass out for XXX a week.
I'm not sure there's much of a market for renting donkeys in the industrialized world now that bikes, cars, and trucks exist, apart from some fairly small niches. And in the less-industrialized world, where pack animals are still regularly used to move goods over rugged terrain, wages are lower anyway so you might not make much money that way either.
Has Nintendo Network even been hacked? Its competitor sure has.
There should be options to prompt the user (yes, no, remind later) or to completely disable all automatic updates, all automatic reboots, all update nags and all reboot nags, leaving the user to do it manually.
My best guess for Microsoft's rationale for forcing updates on Internet-connected computers is that if an unpatched computer is left connected to the Internet, it can be compromised to spread malware to other computers on the Internet. So to prevent automatic correction of security vulnerabilities, disconnect the computer from the Internet.
defect in Windows 10
You cannot defend any of this shit
Agreed. As I said, Windows 10 is defective, and the defects show incompetence at best. The inability to treat Ethernet as metered shows that Microsoft, a company headquartered in a city next to Seattle, is somehow unaware of the horrid state of Internet access in Seattle due to its backward utility right-of-way law. I was trying to assume good faith to the best of my ability. But that's a defect that I can't defend, and defects like this are part of why I wiped Windows 10 from a used ThinkPad that I bought.
Hell, in the early days of D3D you literally couldn't plot a pixel over a 3D display without using GDI!
That or by uploading a texture containing the pixels you want to plot and drawing it as a quad, right?
The other thing that helped D3D proliferate was Microsoft's game consoles [...] With that said, any indie developer who uses Direct3D is a dildo.
Was this true even during the seventh generation, when the only major game console open to indie developers was Xbox 360 with XNA? The PC could run OpenGL, but connecting a PC to a TV wasn't common yet, and crowding two to four players holding USB gamepads around a desktop or laptop monitor is a pain.
Perhaps the dev does not derive enough revenue from a particular site to buy a Mac mini with enough RAM to run a Windows VM. One needs the Windows VM for Edge and IE 11 and the Mac for Safari. So where should the dev of a site similar to the ones with which you have got annoyed find an adequate QA budget?
If the games your friends have are Windows-only, there are no "games that you have in common".
prompt before checking for updates, prompt before downloading updates
In Settings > Update & security > Windows Update > Advanced options > Choose how updates are installed, the explanation states: "Updates won't download over a metered connection (where charges may apply)." "Metered" is the clue for delaying update downloads, as explained in articles on Lifehacker and How-To Geek. In Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > (your SSID) > Advanced options, you should be able to set a particular SSID as metered.
The Lifehacker article does acknowledge a defect in Windows 10: it never lets the user set a wired Ethernet connection as metered, even if wired Ethernet's upstream is a satellite or cellular connection with a 5-10 GB/mo cap or a cable connection with a 300 GB/mo cap.
and prompt before rebooting
In Settings > Update & security > Windows Update > Advanced options > Choose how updates are installed, change the value to "Notify to schedule restart".
special video game and it turns out that it was a real recruitment tool
So it wasn't The Last Starfighter (1984)?
You can't actually cheat in a single player game
Or at least you couldn't until console makers introduced achievements (Xbox) or trophies (PlayStation) as a means of comparing your e-PINGAS to those of your friends.
Do you consider multiplayer sports to be pointless too?
Consider that televised sports are the biggest thing keeping people from "cord cutting" (ending a multichannel pay TV subscription). But when this is pointed out in Slashdot comments, advocates of cord cutting often reply along the lines "and nothing of value was lost." Perhaps iamacat is among the users with this attitude.
And how are the rules of a computer game any more or less "made up" than the rules of tennis
Because a computer game's rules are subject to copyright, unlike the rules of lawn tennis. The Tennis Company lacks grounds to sue unlicensed makers of tennis equipment that imply no USTA affiliation, unlike The Tetris Company.
or the rule that a marathon is 26.2 miles and not some other length, etc?
A physical sport or tabletop game can be "modded" provided that all participants agree. This allows for exploration of a larger space of forms of play that has chess as a subset, such as nonstandard starting positions and nonstandard pieces. Video game publishers, on the other hand, use copyright to block use of mods.
A VM helps for testing on Edge and Internet Explorer 11, for which Microsoft provides virtual machine images.
But it doesn't help as much for testing on Safari, whose Software License Agreement forbids use in a VM on anything but a Mac. To avoid contract-after-sale particularities, let's for the sake of argument assume that the box of OS X has a conspicuous warning: "By purchasing this product, you agree to the Software License Agreement at http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1011.pdf. This agreement forbids copying this program into the RAM of any non-Apple computer." Use in a VM on your Windows or Linux PC would then be a breach of contract, making you liable for damages as specified in the agreement. And because some kext files in OS X are encrypted, decrypting the installer without Apple's permission might expose you to criminal penalties pursuant to 17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts.
Similarly, if I get a copy of Mac OS X from Apple and install it on my own computer, there is nothing illegal about that.
You are correct that it technically isn't copyright infringement. To avoid accusation of moving the goalposts, I will take my revised legal theory to another reply.
Then let me rephrase: Those features whose implementation in standard HTML and CSS requires parts of the standard that widely deployed browsers implement either A. incompletely, B. incorrectly, or C. (for parts marked as implementation-defined) in a manner that is not identical among Chrome for desktop, Chrome for Android, IE 11, Edge, Safari for OS X, and Safari for iOS.
A license that is non-binding (in common law jurisdictions) because the contract was already sealed by the exchange of money for the software package.
Unless the condition was printed on the package. Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Ass'n Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l Inc., 421 F.3d 981 (9th Cir. 2005)
Why would you need to change your OS or have your friends change theirs just to play online together? You just need the same game
You wouldn't need to have your friends change their operating system. You'd need to have your friends change their games to games also available for your operating system. And if changing their games is too much for your current friends, you might need to change friends.
And if your computer reboots without you explicitly telling it to
You told it to by setting a time. That's the new way it works in Windows 10: it tells you it needs to reboot to finish installing upgraded components, and you tell the computer when to reboot.
Windows 10 will run Windows 7 drivers.
Then why does the Get Windows 10 app blame NVIDIA for keeping my Acer Aspire X1 PC with an nForce chipset incompatible with Windows 10?
If shutdown or power loss results in loss of work, the application that you are using is broken. It ought to be saving uncommitted changes to your document to a log file, the same log file it uses for Undo and Redo. Then after the computer restarts, it can replay the Redo log and get you back to where you were.