What about initial development costs? You, like the grandparent poster I originally responded to, seem to assume there is no cost of development, only a small cost of production per unit.
I assume no such thing. I'll tone it down a bit and we'll go into mini-tut on economics which apply regardless of their actual expenses. There are only one of two scenarios:
a) They are under selling in some markets in hopes of over selling in others so that a total profit is made
b) They are vastly overselling in some markets and making a lower profit in others
Whichever of these are true, a global market will normalize the cost across markets. If the cost of games in Russia go up so much that they cannot afford them on their current salary rates, then initially no one will buy them. However, if there is enough demand for that product at that cost to exert market pressure the laborers there will exert an economic pressure on their employers to raise wages to afford the product they want. Of course, this means Russian products will also rise in price. End effect? Economic normalization.
This is the exact line of reasoning used to justify out sourcing to cheap labor by corporations. Sure, wages in the U.S. will go down but overall cost of products also goes down resulting in the same buying power. However, when corporations are able to control sales markets while having unrestricted access to pools of cheap labor, they can keep costs in some areas artificially high and keep labor in other markets artificially cheap. Thus the consumer gets screwed. Everywhere.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. It's a really good read, cross reference that with a couple of 100 years of experience in slowly more globalized markets and you'll understand what I'm getting at. There is only one reason for regionalization in a market that allows for open access to global labor pools: Gouging customers for greater profit then the market would otherwise sustain.
[quote]No, they'd lose money if they sold it at $10 EVERYWHERE. [/quote]
Bullshit. Utter and complete bullshit. They may make less of a profit, but they're damn sure making a profit. You know why they're making less of a profit? Because, as you noted, the economy there can't sustain a 50 dollar per game rate.
But as many have pointed out, this is a global market. You know what happens to laborers in nations that demand more pay then overseas? They have to either adjust their pay expectations to a degree where it is appealing enough to offset the hassle or expenses with exporting the labor elsewhere. Or they lose their jobs.
The exact same should happen here. Valve needs to adjust their rates to a degree where it is more appealing for me to buy from the corner store or a local online store or.....lose the local sale.
It's called capitalism. Open markets and Fair trade...all those banners we see raised high over corporate America (and corporate EU and corporate China....). A global market leads to normalized prices globally as well as normalized cost of labor, products, and expenses. The day that this can be considered in any way just is the day that labor can demand that all products be made locally. I, as a staunch advocate of capitalism, hope to never see a day when either of these slip under the radar.
I'll also respond point by point...and cheers for civil discussion!
1. Programs: yes, they should only be paid for once and service and updates to the software are what should be monetized by either the programmer or the company employing him.
Paid for by who? Remember, we're talking about a single sale. Not per customer single sale...but one sale for the entire world. Take something like Matlab, Maya, Photoshop Suite, etc. These have years of labor investment by 100's of programers. If they were to say "Ok, we want to sell this tech to one person" the bill would be astronomical. It would take a full blown billionaire philanthropist to lay down that kind of cash for the benefit of others.
2. Authors: producing a bound volume has manufacturing costs, and books tend to not be complete ripoffs. Most people will pony up for the physical book. Most people give shit all about a CD's physical media. Reading a physical book is far preferrable to reading it on a screen.
Yes, it has manufacturing costs, but have no doubt there's a profit in there too. CD's may not be compelling as a delivery medium, but after all what we're supposed to be paying for (and what the profits are for) is the content. Just like with novels and other traditional media. As far as one being reasonably priced and one being excessive, this does not invalidate the model itself...only the pricing which is a different issue all together.
3. Engineers (me): I do only get paid once for designs. By the company who I produce the design for. Then the company that produces that product gets paid for the physical product they produce. So we already have the situation you describe, yet there seem to be products out there. There are a few examples of those that manage to bootstrap it themselves, but it is (in fact) a proof to the model I'm describing because when the means of production create a scarcity, then you're adding value. (physical manufacturing).
Right, but depending on the product the company who pays you most assuredly does make a profit off of each sale. The model has not changed, only the role of certain individuals in the overall scheme. If you were to branch out on your own, you would be in the position of the "salesmen" rather then solely an employee. (I've been made keenly aware of this as me and a partner are currently investigating business opportunities for some bio-tech we've designed.)
When the means of production are in everyone's hands, you're not adding any value. If it is difficult or time consuming enough (like food production) someone will pay you to do it, if its a matter of hitting a button and waiting, you're sol. FIND ANOTHER BUSINESS MODEL BECAUSE THE BASIC ECONOMICS ARE AGAINST YOU.
I think you were much closer to the crux of the situation when you hit on pricing. The issue with the music industry today is that production costs have plummeted while prices have not reflected that. I'm not sure what the "sweet spot" is for the music industry, but they need to find it. And when folks can download content easily and freely in conjunction with mass production only costing as much as the bandwidth to get it to me....that price should be pretty damned low.
I find torrents slightly annoying. Yeah, sometimes you get incredible download rates. But often they're not even near the max my connection can handle. Also, if your a "good torrenter" you maintain a decent upload ratio which ties up the connection a good bit or keeps my computer running all night. I've calculated the monthly power consumption of a workstation and it's not entirely trivial. Compound that with my experience that torrenting can often bog a network even if not exhausting bandwidth capacity and there are some tangible drawbacks to stealing. This provides an opportunity for the music industry to provide a value add service that would be compelling for a reasonable price.
Position is that I fail to see a significant moral difference between crashing a plane of passengers and handing out sanctions that only serve to starve the poor, young, old, and sick except that one takes a few thousand lives and the other may be counted in the millions.
Perhaps instead of focusing on the belief that "they are evil, plain and simple and must be extinguished" and forming our (very expensive) policies around this extremely simplistic view we should be asking ourselves "why do so many people want us dead so badly?". This is not to suggest that the blame lies on the victims of terrorism, but perhaps a change in our destructive, aggressive, and state sanctioned terrorism of 3rd world nations might wittle down the shear numbers of people who view us as evil.
For example, infant mortality has increased six-fold since 1990 in Iraq and 32% of children under 5 are malnourished. facts & myths (with citations). Impacts on Iraq population since 1990 have been devastating.
There's no doubt Saddam was a classic "mad dictator", but only in his wildest dreams could he have effected the level of destruction seen over the past 17 years. Further, despite our beliefs that Iraq was a backwards nation full of dolts the population used be quite educated by global standards with literacy rates reaching the upper 80 percent. A good portion of the pop is quite aware of the US's (Rumsfield and the first Bush administration's) contribution to Saddams domination by supplying the tools needed to carry out his attacks against certain sections of the population and Iran.
I am not defending the actions of terrorists in any way, but we're making it pretty damned easy for various groups to attract new recruits.
No, I agree that artists should be paid. I think they should be paid for experiences that I cannot reproduce myself (live performances). I also think that painters should be paid for the paintings they produce by their hand. I don't think I should pay for a photo of that painting to show on my desktop.
Ignoring where I stand on this, your position seems a bit convoluted. By your estimation then,
a programmer should only be able to sell his program once.
An author should only be able to sell his book once
An engineer who comes up with a unique design that increases proficiency by 300 fold can only sell that idea once
All of this despite the fact that a book, application, or unique design may take years of education, development, and debugging.
I feel sorry for the sucker who pays for this first since it'd cost exponentially more then selling many copies to individuals. I have a feeling though, that we'd either have a) a lot of really good products gathering dust on shelves since no one wants to pony up the premium so the whole world can use it or b) a lot of starving inventors, entrepreneurs, authors, and programmers.
The above has absolutely nothing to do with whether you think the music/record industry is gouging it's customers and greatly over charging. Your position is that professionals who create products that are easily reproducible should only be paid for the original. I would challenge you to find a product that is not comparably easily reproducible after all the hard work of ingenuity has been done.
Why doesn't everyone (Apple, Microsoft, Linux/Unix people) work together on security? Its the one thing that everyone benefits from.
Microsoft is free to use any and every security feature ever developed by the open source community. This includes virtually 100% of Linux/bsd's development and lion's share of OSX's security features as well.
The reason we can't say the same for a Microsoft->open source is because for a lot of security in windows...no one has access at all.
This is the old cart and horse problem their going after and should serve as some heavy food for thought for any of those that don't understand the importance of privacy and fall back onto the "if you don't have anything to hide" tripe.
If P2P is illegal, only criminals will use P2P. The line between criminal and law abiding citizen is only a congress away.
I think a little Thoreaux quote is rather apropos:
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, he true place for a just man is also a prison."
How about some well thought out in-game universe product adverts?
Well, the entire idea behind hellgate is that the universe is...our universe. Just 25 years in the future. I'm sure Coca Cola and Nestles will still be alive and well when the demons come.:)
It's not that big a deal. Subways with bare walls would be very odd. Extremly odd and not even close to realistic. So you have a game whose environment includes add ridden subways (just like in real life). Now the developer has to ask a question: Which adds do we display in the subways? You can choose at random or you can do what the subways do: whoever pays.
If, for the sake of realism, you have to put adds in the subway stations, why not make money off of it? The game experience is the same, the only difference is instead of seeing "Moca Mola" and "Nickers" adds you see the same ones your used to in real subways (Coca Cola and Snickers).
Now if we started seeing the "Legendary Snicker Hammer of Pwnage" and the "Coca Cola Champion's Sword" I'd be put off....but this isn't the case at all.
[quote]Sure, this flies in the face of Apple's current business model but this would be a HUGE nail in the coffin for Microsoft.[/quote]
Not true. It flies in the face of their philosophy of computing. One of the reasons Apple has been able to hold on to its reputation as a rock solid, low to nil issues os is the extremely controlled hardware configurations. I'll be the first to admit that a large portion of MS's issues with their OS is the diversity of hardware and being reliant on vendors to fill the driver gaps. NVIDIA drops the ball on Vista drivers? MS catches the lash back.
This is at the same time the largest draw back and greatest strength of Apple systems. It puts off the gear heads who want to fiddle and throw anything off the shelf into their boxes...but also results in a very controlled, maintainable, and ever increasing stability with quick development cycles to boot.
interesting. I manage macs in my lab and at home. At the lab we get up to 3-4 megabytes (yeah, bytes) per second. On my home connection 1.1 megabytes per second (100 kylobytes more then advertised).
No dropped connections ever. I haven't seen a single one that was client specific and not due to a router failure/reboot.
This depends on your definition of free. With the strictest definition of free, no one no where is ever free. Ever. Unless your a hermit completely removed from society. But that self imposed isolation would take from you the freedom to see an concert, a good movie, or find love. So even there your not free.
Many a philosopher has posed this question and discussed it in depth. In general, all come to some variation of the conclusion that ultimate/true freedom is defined by the ability to take any action you wish so long as it does not hurt another individual through direct intentional action.
It's not a great mental challenge to extend that to the business world. And just like with individuals, the degree of restriction and penalty (if any) will vary. Within capitalist ideology, that boundary stops when companies become anti-competitive in their actions and practices. Or when lack of restrictions/regulations facilitate a non-fair market.
Supporting non-fair markets is anti-Capitalist. It is, in fact, a sign of Corporatism. I am not a Corporatist which carries its own brand of anti-free legislation and restrictions that favor large corporate entities, but a Capitalist. Whose restrictions favor fair trade and equal competition.
Look, it's simple: either you believe in the free market, in which case deregulation is a good thing as it will open up the market that regulation is currently closing off, or you believe in fascism. It's that simple.
Yeah! that's telling them! Your either Good or Evil, Capitalist of Communist, good with God or a baby eater!
Don't be a dunce. There's no such thing as complete deregulation except in anarchy. In any system of government, local, federal, you name it any system of government there is regulation. And there is enforcement of regulations. That's what government is. For example, "You may not use monopoly status to leverage competition in other markets." This is a regulation that maintains free and equal competition, the very core of Adam Smith's capitalism.
I love how many self proclaimed capitalists and free market advocates fail to understand their founders work.
Here's some quote's from Smith that clearly outline his feelings on keeping big business in check:
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state....[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price.
And my personal favorite:
"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters."
So yeah, buddy, I'm a Capitalist with a capital C. I advocate free and fair markets. And I, like the father of capitalist theory and the invisible hand, am not so dense as to think that deregulation, for the simple fact of being deregulation, is a good thing.
We have Protestantism. This is a tough target though, since there's no central organization to point to. Rather we must look to the communities efforts to gain their stance:
Those are just a couple links I found that sited some of the more public debates. Coming from the Southern States, I assure you, Protestants have no doubt about who God is and how wrong "scientists" are. That pretty much covers Western society. We could go into Islam, but really that part of the world has a lot more to fear from their religious leaders then whether they are against evolution. . . the ones in power anyway. Hinduism has always been a fairly "open" religion by it's very nature. Much more likely to just incorporate then denounce.
I think the mistake your making though is to assume that most people think about religion at all. So you picked up a few philosophy books, yeah yeah, I got that feather in my cap too. I've even sat down at the table, drank coffee, and chit chat'd philosophical with some of the leaders in Philosophical Religion today, Alviin Plantinga. He was attributed with single handedly reinvigorating the debate in philosophical circles over the rationality of believing in god with his symbolic logic book written in the 90's (long considered a dead horse). Not as impressive as it sounds, he teaches over and Notre Dame and I'm sure you could do the same if you wanted to drop by.
Most people don't think about religion, they believe in it. So what better describes religion as it is? A few intellectuals writing books, investigating possibilities, and chit chatting over coffee or the other 99% of the believing masses? I think the answer is obvious.
There are two properties of the HFS+ filesystem which rsync had problems with (that I am aware). metadata and ACL's. Neither of them are essential for data recovery itself and rsync had issues with them on any platform, not just osx.
It bears noting that the reason no one in the linux world cared about metadata until rsync began developing patches for it was due to the fact that linux didn't have them until 2.6 (or 2.5 for the brave). In fact, the idea of metadata (file attributes in linux parlance) was taken from osx's success and proven utility in using them. Reference: http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2004-June/009937.html
Further as soon as metadata and acl support was available to the linux world, it was to the osx world as well.
The last niggling problem with osx is resource forks. There have been patches for resource fork support in rsync since at least 2002 (when rsyncX was copyrighted).
If I am mistaken about the features that are apparently lacking via HFS+ and rsync (and the fact that they existed for all users of rsync regardless of platform), please correct me.
Finally, we've just been talking about some unix utils that needed a bit of time to catch up with the current trends in filesystem design. There have been command line utilities for creating bootable restores and preserving metadat for a while in osx besides the ones listed above such as ASR and PAX.
I believe the mistake your making is to assume that an osx admin is limited by the pre-compiled software offered on osx by default, but this is simply not the case. No more then it is the case for any *nix install that leverages open source. I also find it peculiar (unless you bring to light issues which I have not covered here) that your major complaint about said backup solutions is that they could not back up extra information with HFS+ that was not even existent in prevailing *nix file systems (e.g. metadata). This is more of a reflection on the lack of features in said *nix solutions then in OSX.
I will now use the opportunity to promote my favorite hard link / cp based backup solution which I use for both Tiger and Panther backups without issue: BacupPC
I've run into these in other areas as well, such as free downloaded content and music. . . . or if, say, someone has ripped their entire cd collection with windows media player then switched to linux only to find they can't play any of it.:P
I crack every game I buy specifically because of issues like this and that annoying lag I see in so many games when every once in a while it's "checking for media".
Every time I see DRM related problems all I can think is: How can business types be so incredibly stupid? They're obviously not complete dullards as the company is successful. But doesn't anyone ever speak up at board meetings and say "Excuse me, Mr. Pointy Head. You do realize all this R&D is going to go straight down the toilet when some 12 year old from russia cracks it in the first day?"
Here's a link to a guy on macosxhints talking about the issue. Seems he found a work around, but it's not something grandma would think up on her own.:P
Maybe it's time we stop worrying about all these little details that sap so much of our focus and actually, I don't know...do something of value.
Maybe because the last time we tried that an entire race of people were enslaved and oppressed. And before you suggest that we oh so much more enlightened now, try and remember that the same folks who perpetrated these crimes against humanity are still alive and well. Some are even in positions of power in our country.
Fortunately, there are also a fair representation of the people who fought to end that black mark in our countries history.
The reason we have laws like this is because when the good people stop worrying about the details, the ass wipes that would love to write off people of different ethnicities and disabilities never give up.
If it's a specialty format that VLC or mPlayer cannot read, then it can probably only be read in some proprietary program that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Bet you pirated that, didn't you?
To my knowledge (this may have changed), you cannot play certain wmv formats. I run into these in avi containers every once in a while. Very annoying.
Here's why. Company Y files a patent in country X. Company A located in country B sees patent, but could give a shit less. Company A copies product adding a few innovations to make it better and then sells the superior product for less to every country except X.
Who loses out in this scenario? Every company in country X except Y. Since there, the technology is completely off limits.
You want a lock on your tech, keep it a trade secret. If it's easily backwards engineered and mass produced, it probably wasn't that huge a leap anyway.
Why? The case was cut n dry, she broke the law and she lost.
The jury's job is to determine if she broke the law, not determine if the law makes sense
This is a common misconception about American law, heavily promoted by the legal system but patently false.
Every aspect of the american legal system is permeated with checks and balances. The Jury is the ultimate check against the legal system. It allows the people to determine is someone is worthy of punishment. It protects the accused against a corrupt legal system or unjust laws. . . not enforces them. The true power of a Jury is not the ability to enforce law, but to veto it. They are the final say. The ultimate check.
Here's a nice link with some citations which illuminate the true role and intent of the jury. Role of the JuryFor every case, in every court, the jury not only judges the facts of the case, but sits in judgement of the law itself. The courts and legal system has often tried to subvert this epitome of "power by the people" through various denouncements of this...but the legal history is clear.
It is a true travesty of the current state of our system that the courts and schools neglect to inform the general population that their role of Jury is not only to determine if the defended, in fact, did what the prosecution claims they are guilty of. But also if the law itself is worthy of being upheld.
[quote]So you've had to edit your registry to get the GUI working properly?[/quote]
I have never had to do anything to get the GUI up. I have often had fight the os to get various hardware or software to work. And you essentially need a second computer to get a pre SP2 install up to date. The 'ole you need IE7 to install sp2, but you can't get SP2 in windows update without IE7 retardation. This isn't an issue at work where I have plenty of workstations to flip back and forth to, but at home with a brand new pc and no other. . . huge inconvenience. Yes, yes, I avoid it with a slipstreamed image and normally the workarounds can be found with some searching and a little technical knowledge, but all of this is every bit as technically advanced and difficult as any of the "gotchas" I've had in linux (never seen them, ever in osx).
There is a reason that the average computer user is willing to pay $80+ to have windows installed for them.
Sorry to hear that you have had to edit "strange text files" to get your GUI running properly under windows.
I find text files to be clear, concise, well commented/documented, and human readable. Contrast that with the registry, which I have had to dig into on more then one occasion.
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I assume no such thing. I'll tone it down a bit and we'll go into mini-tut on economics which apply regardless of their actual expenses. There are only one of two scenarios:
a) They are under selling in some markets in hopes of over selling in others so that a total profit is made
b) They are vastly overselling in some markets and making a lower profit in others
Whichever of these are true, a global market will normalize the cost across markets. If the cost of games in Russia go up so much that they cannot afford them on their current salary rates, then initially no one will buy them. However, if there is enough demand for that product at that cost to exert market pressure the laborers there will exert an economic pressure on their employers to raise wages to afford the product they want. Of course, this means Russian products will also rise in price. End effect? Economic normalization.
This is the exact line of reasoning used to justify out sourcing to cheap labor by corporations. Sure, wages in the U.S. will go down but overall cost of products also goes down resulting in the same buying power. However, when corporations are able to control sales markets while having unrestricted access to pools of cheap labor, they can keep costs in some areas artificially high and keep labor in other markets artificially cheap. Thus the consumer gets screwed. Everywhere.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. It's a really good read, cross reference that with a couple of 100 years of experience in slowly more globalized markets and you'll understand what I'm getting at. There is only one reason for regionalization in a market that allows for open access to global labor pools: Gouging customers for greater profit then the market would otherwise sustain.
Bullshit. Utter and complete bullshit. They may make less of a profit, but they're damn sure making a profit. You know why they're making less of a profit? Because, as you noted, the economy there can't sustain a 50 dollar per game rate.
But as many have pointed out, this is a global market. You know what happens to laborers in nations that demand more pay then overseas? They have to either adjust their pay expectations to a degree where it is appealing enough to offset the hassle or expenses with exporting the labor elsewhere. Or they lose their jobs.
The exact same should happen here. Valve needs to adjust their rates to a degree where it is more appealing for me to buy from the corner store or a local online store or.....lose the local sale.
It's called capitalism. Open markets and Fair trade...all those banners we see raised high over corporate America (and corporate EU and corporate China....). A global market leads to normalized prices globally as well as normalized cost of labor, products, and expenses. The day that this can be considered in any way just is the day that labor can demand that all products be made locally. I, as a staunch advocate of capitalism, hope to never see a day when either of these slip under the radar.
I find torrents slightly annoying. Yeah, sometimes you get incredible download rates. But often they're not even near the max my connection can handle. Also, if your a "good torrenter" you maintain a decent upload ratio which ties up the connection a good bit or keeps my computer running all night. I've calculated the monthly power consumption of a workstation and it's not entirely trivial. Compound that with my experience that torrenting can often bog a network even if not exhausting bandwidth capacity and there are some tangible drawbacks to stealing. This provides an opportunity for the music industry to provide a value add service that would be compelling for a reasonable price.
Position is that I fail to see a significant moral difference between crashing a plane of passengers and handing out sanctions that only serve to starve the poor, young, old, and sick except that one takes a few thousand lives and the other may be counted in the millions.
Perhaps instead of focusing on the belief that "they are evil, plain and simple and must be extinguished" and forming our (very expensive) policies around this extremely simplistic view we should be asking ourselves "why do so many people want us dead so badly?". This is not to suggest that the blame lies on the victims of terrorism, but perhaps a change in our destructive, aggressive, and state sanctioned terrorism of 3rd world nations might wittle down the shear numbers of people who view us as evil.
For example, infant mortality has increased six-fold since 1990 in Iraq and 32% of children under 5 are malnourished. facts & myths (with citations). Impacts on Iraq population since 1990 have been devastating.
There's no doubt Saddam was a classic "mad dictator", but only in his wildest dreams could he have effected the level of destruction seen over the past 17 years. Further, despite our beliefs that Iraq was a backwards nation full of dolts the population used be quite educated by global standards with literacy rates reaching the upper 80 percent. A good portion of the pop is quite aware of the US's (Rumsfield and the first Bush administration's) contribution to Saddams domination by supplying the tools needed to carry out his attacks against certain sections of the population and Iran.
I am not defending the actions of terrorists in any way, but we're making it pretty damned easy for various groups to attract new recruits.
Ignoring where I stand on this, your position seems a bit convoluted. By your estimation then,
- a programmer should only be able to sell his program once.
- An author should only be able to sell his book once
- An engineer who comes up with a unique design that increases proficiency by 300 fold can only sell that idea once
All of this despite the fact that a book, application, or unique design may take years of education, development, and debugging.I feel sorry for the sucker who pays for this first since it'd cost exponentially more then selling many copies to individuals. I have a feeling though, that we'd either have a) a lot of really good products gathering dust on shelves since no one wants to pony up the premium so the whole world can use it or b) a lot of starving inventors, entrepreneurs, authors, and programmers.
The above has absolutely nothing to do with whether you think the music/record industry is gouging it's customers and greatly over charging. Your position is that professionals who create products that are easily reproducible should only be paid for the original. I would challenge you to find a product that is not comparably easily reproducible after all the hard work of ingenuity has been done.
Microsoft is free to use any and every security feature ever developed by the open source community. This includes virtually 100% of Linux/bsd's development and lion's share of OSX's security features as well.
The reason we can't say the same for a Microsoft->open source is because for a lot of security in windows...no one has access at all.
This is the old cart and horse problem their going after and should serve as some heavy food for thought for any of those that don't understand the importance of privacy and fall back onto the "if you don't have anything to hide" tripe.
If P2P is illegal, only criminals will use P2P. The line between criminal and law abiding citizen is only a congress away.
I think a little Thoreaux quote is rather apropos:
It's not that big a deal. Subways with bare walls would be very odd. Extremly odd and not even close to realistic. So you have a game whose environment includes add ridden subways (just like in real life). Now the developer has to ask a question: Which adds do we display in the subways? You can choose at random or you can do what the subways do: whoever pays.
If, for the sake of realism, you have to put adds in the subway stations, why not make money off of it? The game experience is the same, the only difference is instead of seeing "Moca Mola" and "Nickers" adds you see the same ones your used to in real subways (Coca Cola and Snickers).
Now if we started seeing the "Legendary Snicker Hammer of Pwnage" and the "Coca Cola Champion's Sword" I'd be put off....but this isn't the case at all.
Not true. It flies in the face of their philosophy of computing. One of the reasons Apple has been able to hold on to its reputation as a rock solid, low to nil issues os is the extremely controlled hardware configurations. I'll be the first to admit that a large portion of MS's issues with their OS is the diversity of hardware and being reliant on vendors to fill the driver gaps. NVIDIA drops the ball on Vista drivers? MS catches the lash back.
This is at the same time the largest draw back and greatest strength of Apple systems. It puts off the gear heads who want to fiddle and throw anything off the shelf into their boxes...but also results in a very controlled, maintainable, and ever increasing stability with quick development cycles to boot.
interesting. I manage macs in my lab and at home. At the lab we get up to 3-4 megabytes (yeah, bytes) per second. On my home connection 1.1 megabytes per second (100 kylobytes more then advertised).
No dropped connections ever. I haven't seen a single one that was client specific and not due to a router failure/reboot.
This depends on your definition of free. With the strictest definition of free, no one no where is ever free. Ever. Unless your a hermit completely removed from society. But that self imposed isolation would take from you the freedom to see an concert, a good movie, or find love. So even there your not free.
Many a philosopher has posed this question and discussed it in depth. In general, all come to some variation of the conclusion that ultimate/true freedom is defined by the ability to take any action you wish so long as it does not hurt another individual through direct intentional action.
It's not a great mental challenge to extend that to the business world. And just like with individuals, the degree of restriction and penalty (if any) will vary. Within capitalist ideology, that boundary stops when companies become anti-competitive in their actions and practices. Or when lack of restrictions/regulations facilitate a non-fair market.
Supporting non-fair markets is anti-Capitalist. It is, in fact, a sign of Corporatism. I am not a Corporatist which carries its own brand of anti-free legislation and restrictions that favor large corporate entities, but a Capitalist. Whose restrictions favor fair trade and equal competition.
Yeah! that's telling them! Your either Good or Evil, Capitalist of Communist, good with God or a baby eater!
Don't be a dunce. There's no such thing as complete deregulation except in anarchy. In any system of government, local, federal, you name it any system of government there is regulation. And there is enforcement of regulations. That's what government is. For example, "You may not use monopoly status to leverage competition in other markets." This is a regulation that maintains free and equal competition, the very core of Adam Smith's capitalism.
I love how many self proclaimed capitalists and free market advocates fail to understand their founders work.
Here's some quote's from Smith that clearly outline his feelings on keeping big business in check:
- Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
- People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
- As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
- The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
- The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state
....[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.
- Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
- We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price.
And my personal favorite: So yeah, buddy, I'm a Capitalist with a capital C. I advocate free and fair markets. And I, like the father of capitalist theory and the invisible hand, am not so dense as to think that deregulation, for the simple fact of being deregulation, is a good thing.But you keep drinking that cool aid.
Let's see which few these are:
We have Catholocism:
- Archbishop Denounces Evolution as 'Unguided'
- Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design
We have Protestantism. This is a tough target though, since there's no central organization to point to. Rather we must look to the communities efforts to gain their stance:- Tennessee Evolution Statutes
- Anti-Evolution and the Law
Those are just a couple links I found that sited some of the more public debates. Coming from the Southern States, I assure you, Protestants have no doubt about who God is and how wrong "scientists" are. That pretty much covers Western society. We could go into Islam, but really that part of the world has a lot more to fear from their religious leaders then whether they are against evolution. . . the ones in power anyway. Hinduism has always been a fairly "open" religion by it's very nature. Much more likely to just incorporate then denounce.I think the mistake your making though is to assume that most people think about religion at all. So you picked up a few philosophy books, yeah yeah, I got that feather in my cap too. I've even sat down at the table, drank coffee, and chit chat'd philosophical with some of the leaders in Philosophical Religion today, Alviin Plantinga. He was attributed with single handedly reinvigorating the debate in philosophical circles over the rationality of believing in god with his symbolic logic book written in the 90's (long considered a dead horse). Not as impressive as it sounds, he teaches over and Notre Dame and I'm sure you could do the same if you wanted to drop by.
Most people don't think about religion, they believe in it. So what better describes religion as it is? A few intellectuals writing books, investigating possibilities, and chit chatting over coffee or the other 99% of the believing masses? I think the answer is obvious.
There are two properties of the HFS+ filesystem which rsync had problems with (that I am aware). metadata and ACL's. Neither of them are essential for data recovery itself and rsync had issues with them on any platform, not just osx.
It bears noting that the reason no one in the linux world cared about metadata until rsync began developing patches for it was due to the fact that linux didn't have them until 2.6 (or 2.5 for the brave). In fact, the idea of metadata (file attributes in linux parlance) was taken from osx's success and proven utility in using them. Reference: http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2004-June/009937.html
Further as soon as metadata and acl support was available to the linux world, it was to the osx world as well.
The last niggling problem with osx is resource forks. There have been patches for resource fork support in rsync since at least 2002 (when rsyncX was copyrighted).
If I am mistaken about the features that are apparently lacking via HFS+ and rsync (and the fact that they existed for all users of rsync regardless of platform), please correct me.
Finally, we've just been talking about some unix utils that needed a bit of time to catch up with the current trends in filesystem design. There have been command line utilities for creating bootable restores and preserving metadat for a while in osx besides the ones listed above such as ASR and PAX.
I believe the mistake your making is to assume that an osx admin is limited by the pre-compiled software offered on osx by default, but this is simply not the case. No more then it is the case for any *nix install that leverages open source. I also find it peculiar (unless you bring to light issues which I have not covered here) that your major complaint about said backup solutions is that they could not back up extra information with HFS+ that was not even existent in prevailing *nix file systems (e.g. metadata). This is more of a reflection on the lack of features in said *nix solutions then in OSX.
I will now use the opportunity to promote my favorite hard link / cp based backup solution which I use for both Tiger and Panther backups without issue: BacupPC
I've run into these in other areas as well, such as free downloaded content and music. . . . or if, say, someone has ripped their entire cd collection with windows media player then switched to linux only to find they can't play any of it. :P
I crack every game I buy specifically because of issues like this and that annoying lag I see in so many games when every once in a while it's "checking for media".
Every time I see DRM related problems all I can think is: How can business types be so incredibly stupid? They're obviously not complete dullards as the company is successful. But doesn't anyone ever speak up at board meetings and say "Excuse me, Mr. Pointy Head. You do realize all this R&D is going to go straight down the toilet when some 12 year old from russia cracks it in the first day?"
Here's a link to a guy on macosxhints talking about the issue. Seems he found a work around, but it's not something grandma would think up on her own. :P
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060103193926854
My friend used to watch a lot of anime and the wmv9 codec is very popular in that area apparently (I'm not a big anime fan).
Maybe because the last time we tried that an entire race of people were enslaved and oppressed. And before you suggest that we oh so much more enlightened now, try and remember that the same folks who perpetrated these crimes against humanity are still alive and well. Some are even in positions of power in our country.
Fortunately, there are also a fair representation of the people who fought to end that black mark in our countries history.
The reason we have laws like this is because when the good people stop worrying about the details, the ass wipes that would love to write off people of different ethnicities and disabilities never give up.
Here's why. Company Y files a patent in country X. Company A located in country B sees patent, but could give a shit less. Company A copies product adding a few innovations to make it better and then sells the superior product for less to every country except X.
Who loses out in this scenario? Every company in country X except Y. Since there, the technology is completely off limits.
You want a lock on your tech, keep it a trade secret. If it's easily backwards engineered and mass produced, it probably wasn't that huge a leap anyway.
This is a common misconception about American law, heavily promoted by the legal system but patently false.
Every aspect of the american legal system is permeated with checks and balances. The Jury is the ultimate check against the legal system. It allows the people to determine is someone is worthy of punishment. It protects the accused against a corrupt legal system or unjust laws. . . not enforces them. The true power of a Jury is not the ability to enforce law, but to veto it. They are the final say. The ultimate check.
Here's a nice link with some citations which illuminate the true role and intent of the jury. Role of the JuryFor every case, in every court, the jury not only judges the facts of the case, but sits in judgement of the law itself. The courts and legal system has often tried to subvert this epitome of "power by the people" through various denouncements of this...but the legal history is clear.
It is a true travesty of the current state of our system that the courts and schools neglect to inform the general population that their role of Jury is not only to determine if the defended, in fact, did what the prosecution claims they are guilty of. But also if the law itself is worthy of being upheld.
I have never had to do anything to get the GUI up. I have often had fight the os to get various hardware or software to work. And you essentially need a second computer to get a pre SP2 install up to date. The 'ole you need IE7 to install sp2, but you can't get SP2 in windows update without IE7 retardation. This isn't an issue at work where I have plenty of workstations to flip back and forth to, but at home with a brand new pc and no other. . . huge inconvenience. Yes, yes, I avoid it with a slipstreamed image and normally the workarounds can be found with some searching and a little technical knowledge, but all of this is every bit as technically advanced and difficult as any of the "gotchas" I've had in linux (never seen them, ever in osx).
There is a reason that the average computer user is willing to pay $80+ to have windows installed for them.