"I survived four years of New Math - it was so easy that you couldn't do anything wrong. Straight A's in math..... Millions of adults are now math-illerates because of these oh-so-pure mathematicians."
I agree but I think the whole problem is that we don' start with a geometric interpretation of math, the mayan's used shapes for numerals, and arabic symbols hide mathematical truths that are expressed better in images, visual geometric shapes.
We already do math unconsciously else we could not navigate, we could not determine is this distinct from that. (Boolean logic, yes it is there, no it is not)
"You joke, but I think the best solution would be a macro scale physical recording medium. I wouldn't trust magnetism over 25 years, I wouldn't trust microscopic silicon SRAM for 25 years, and I know for a fact that CDRs deteriorate after about 10 years."
This leads me to believe cloud storage is a much better option then individual storage if one has a LOT of data, it would get very expensive to store data permanently on your own. Either that or someone is going to have to pay some company SPECIFICALLY to store data in a SAN off the internet, but that's going to cost $$$.
I noticed this when I was in photoshops if you pick a circular brush and choose white on a black background you can "paint", quasi-3D ish landscapes, because of the way perspective works. And you can turn it into a height map, Supreme commander uses a similar/same method.
It sounds like they just figured out how to use photographic techniques to make a height map.
Privoxy is open source so I thought I'd post it, more people that can make it better the better. The only way people are going to know it exists is exposure. The only thing it really needs is an easy to use GUI front end I think in terms ease of custom configuration.
The Founding Fathers (of the US) discoursed endlessly on the meaning of "republicanism." John Adams in 1787 defined it as "a government, in which all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws."
Problem is corporate money buys laws and finances government. To people who are rich, the law doesn't mean much since they have the most powerful insiders anyway. It is impotent because they can afford to buy lawyers and politicians. So they can simply make the law and reorganize the economies in their favor, so the law doesn't really sting because they can block it, anull it or buy new ones.
I'm not sure if there can ever be corporate responsibility. The profit motive is too corrupting I think. I'm reminded of John adams...
"Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that "the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic." But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, "even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce." As a result, there was "a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there."
"IMHO such people are shirking an important responsibility to society; especially the smart ones. The Bible writers had it right-- go forth and multiply!"
It's not that the smart don't want to, it's that the women don't like the smart ones.
"You were making a ridiculous universal statement to support your point. A fallacy in a universal statement is still a fallacy, even when there is an otherwise good point being made. And no, the subtext was not lost on me. I just didn't care in light of your bad argument."
You were misapplying my statement, taking it out of it's context, again, it is totally lost on you, the subtext that is.
"Employers aren't responsible for an employee's children."
Yet employers are the source of income for most families in society, the reason we have rights is because our ancestors fought them to gain their rights in the first place and got better pay from them. We'd still be slaved if everyone thought like that.
Personally I think we have it backwards, we all a part of the same world and universe and if we don't look out for each other at least partially we're setting a precedent that will reach ourselves.
"This is kind of my point. Do companies keep libraries of pr0n, video, music? Sure, if you're a media company you will. But say you're a plumbing distributor. You'll have the usual accounting stuff, and media for marketing, and some BS overhead, but don't tell me it adds up to a TB much less a PB."
That's true for small companies but places like Digg and any site that gets a lot of comments would very quickly fill up that TB.
"they used to contain basically the address and perhaps logs from calls they made to the call center. Now whole phone conversations are logged as well as faxes and letters that are scanned, together with images and video that is available."
You don't have to believe me or internalize any of what I said, of course. But your post's central thesis was that...
No my central thesis actually was:
Just because you have the skills to develop a game, does not mean you know how to develop a gaming experience.
I actually work in game development,
Which doesn't mean a thing, what I mean is sure you work in game development (I respect you for that big time btw) but just because you work in game development doesn't mean you know the truth about everything in game development. Why would John Carmack be speaking about new engine technologies to enable artist to naturally do what they do best and abstract the technology away from them partially so they can focus on what they do best, art? It's obvious that there are still many advances to be made to make development pipeline much better then it is today, and I think you can agree with that.
Truth stands on it's own, regardless of where it comes from, whether or not it comes from a bum in the street, anyone can make accurate observations. Or would you like to deny that?
These are actually different jobs in game development.
Which is quite irrelevant the whole of a game is all connected in the end, if someone fucks up on the assembly line they can cause the whole thing to collapse, don't believe me? Go read some post mortems at gamasutra.
The other positions which play into the technical knowledge vs. fun tug-of-war you mentioned are engineers and producers, for the most part.
This is the whole point though, the tug-of-war, the technology is still a barrier. How many failed or bad games are pushed out or cancelled? A lot.
My real point is just that your tirade is... slightly uninformed.
My real point is that, you have no point you just don't understand what I said, and because some of what I said rubbed you the wrong way, you just had to post your response.
Not totally devoid of merit
Of course it's not because I know people in the game industry, I know how it works. Claiming "I'm uninformed" on generalizations was your mistake. You misunderstood my post and read in implications that were not there to begin with.
I'd dispute that, I bet if we did statistical studies, evidence would emerge of a consensus of a baseline of what is considered fun vs what is not. Politics ("subjectivity") is now becoming a science in and of itself:
I'm sure we'll soon have a science of fun, the studies are not there yet, but I'm certain we'd find statistical consensus of what fun is, and what isn't interesting if we had many decades to do serious research.
Just because you have the skills to develop a game, does not mean you know how to develop a gaming experience.
There are developers that know how to develop entertaining gaming experience, and their are dev's that just know how to make games without a decent ability to judge whether or not what they are developing is exciting, interesting and entertaining and doesn't suck.
This is a big problem in the industry as far as I'm concerned, there is just too many clueless people (pub's and developers) about how to build entertainment. I think the biggest problem is still the technology. There is so much time and money consuming technical engineering that it overtakes the money and time needed to develop the entertainment aspect. Too much on art and engines, not enough on developing interesting things and connecting them with skill.
Striking a balance is hard, I agree, but that's the business you're really in: Entertainment. Game developers have to be good at knowing entertainment as well as engineering. It's hard, no doubt... and sometimes you just want to keep trying just doing your own thing (which is also valid) but if you want to do your own thing, you got to go back to small time games and understand what aspects of both the art, and the interaction of the objects, makes the game. Some indie game developers know this, they know what is wrong with the industry.
Who said forever? You're introducing something new here.
No I'm not see Disney and the music industries endless copyright extension lobbying to prevent works from going public domain. Google it, it's not "new" by any means.
In the case of game developers, I suspect they'd be happy with a three to five years. By the end of that time, any money from sales will have been booked and technology will have made the game long since obsolete.
See: Crytek (IP police), many other game dev's I'm sure would be glad to but they are under publicly traded companies, in the ideal world yes, but this is not the ideal world - companies own devs and whoever has the money makes the rules.
It appears that your argument in support of piracy also provides an argument in support of the settlers who took native people's land. Interesting.
The point of the argument was to demonstrate the world is based on bullshit, we invent concepts de novo and try to justify them and backwards rationalize our imaginary worlds into reality, in objective reality they don't exist, do you agree? I think you would. We eliminate humans - suddenly all of our poppycock disappears. But that is the point -- it's decided by the groups who have power over the groups who don't -- might makes right.
The whole "property is a social construct" line is true, but adds nothing useful to the debate. Property is a social construct that is (in most countries) enforced by political, economic and military means. You can't just say "all this land is mine" any longer, because anarchy would quickly result.
Information is not land though, your argument holds for land but not for IP. I can't steal numbers from you (1, 2, 3) they operate under entirely different laws and behave entirely differently -- land, water, food, that's scarce, information is not, the labour is, but the product is not once produced, socialism is entirely possible under the laws of information.
So there is no economic rational at all except for to pay the producers, the market/socialism/communism is a social construct, the world is not an ideology, it behaves according to physical laws and spacial geometric relationships. I wish more people would question what they hold dear to see where it would lead, but too few people do, or even have the skill to ferret out the implications, very time consuming. To realize that our vague notions about ideas are not how the world actually works and we have some say in how it turns out.
So we are the problem, human beings are too selfish and too self-centered and that is the real problem. Not anything else, but people who know the truth are outnumbered by people who don't care, and so we must go with the median... which is mediocre. No one is interested in moderation, and because everyone is flying blind unfortunately. If you don't think so: Just look at the world, war, poverty, disease, ignorance, religion, ideological extremism, etc.
My point is we've seen how money triumphs over the common good and the public good with extension after extension and the public is way too disorganized to get the lobbyists out of their governments. Too many greedy children (and yes I mean the adults are children in terms of maturity) there from the upper classes.
We create an entire legal construct to control people's behaviours to avoid this. Property is a social construct, as are justice, rights and economics.
Exactly my point they are arbitrary, they are made up by someone else to control someone else for their benefit. We inherited them, most of us don't have the time to sit down and sift through them and question them to see if they are poorly conceived and whether or not they need to be updated, revised or tossed out due to new changes in the environment but it's a big job and way too much for the average lifetime of most people I'm sure.
"Nope. Apple won't poof. Microsoft's day in the sun was due to the cheapness of their products. Now that everyone has a computer they would like to get a GOOD one. Thats where Apple's Mac OS X comes in."
Sorry but while apple is decent, they're going to have to get a lot more apps people want on their OS, they've practically ignored the gaming industry entirely, that in itself speaks volumes about how much apple "cares".
Oh, please. This analogy gets brought up into every single fucking IP discussion on this site, and it is always way the hell off base.
Oh, so supply and demand is off base is it? You seem to be a little inconsistent in your economic principles there. If food were able to be replicated from matter in your own back yard, the entire food industry would go under, same goes for power. The thing is it happened to information first.
I'm reminded of an American friend of mine who said "Son, there are no capitalists. They are ALL socialists, if it's not socialism for the poor it's socialism for the rich, if it's not socialism for the rich, it's socialism for the middle class, they all want to find the golden egg and exploit the others".
He certainly was correct for the majority of them, people want to find the golden egg and sit on it forever. Who cares if you do work, the market (supply and demand) is supposed to determine it's value not the producers. i.e. free choice. Not some autocratic monopoly capitalist (or rather quasi capitalist-socialist) dictators.
There is no brave new industry that is making something better than what the software makers are making now...
You must have missed the digital revolution, we invented hardware that made supply of information practically limitless -- supply and demand again.
People are just taking what they make for free.
Maybe you need a history lesson, all states and all peoples took for free, land and resources that was not really there's to begin with. Property is a social construct to help us solve problems and dominate other peoples and groups for the dominant ideology of the age in history one lives.
You technically really never "own" anything, in the ultimate sense, we just pretend to do so because it's pragmatic. Whenever you "create" something, you're just re-arranging pre-existent matter and energy, so I don't think that entitles one to eternal ownership, ownership yes, eternally, no.
When someone is making a new type of thing which obsoletes software, get back to me, and then you can use the buggy whip analogy. Until then, stuff it, because it doesn't apply one bit.
I think you don't really grasp the full nature of the problem, in our world, the whip and buggy industry (information "engineering" industries, movies, music, whatever else, etc) just got replaced by a replicator, a REAL world replicator. The PC and the net.
In startrek it is a machine capable of creating (and recycling) objects. Replicators were originally seen used to synthesize meals on demand, but in later series, they are used for lots of other things.
But in our world they exist for information, sorry, humans have been innovating since the dawn of time. Just because a bunch of whiny kids (and yes many capitalists are childish) had their intellectual property party ruined by technology doesn't mean much.
You guys are fighting Prohibition and we all know how that worked out. It's not going to happen, the genie is not going back.
Yes, and that is because the work in those areas is the reproduction of the product. The work in IP is actually creating the thing you wish to sell, reproduction is and always has been effortless.
No reproduction has not always been effortless, songs and theater before the advent of camera's, recording media, radio and microphone, not to mention all it's spin off technologies. You had to travel to see people, or communicate using more primitive technologies (letters, etc).
I'm not sure how I got modded down, there just must be a lot of ideologues on today.
Good point! But each of them plays their part, i.e. virus's on the net, etc.
No software dev could have predicted everything their software would be used or abused for, so I think we should cut them a break. Like piracy and cracks. No one has the money and resources combat and to know every aspect of everything (at least not yet). Hopefully A.I. will take over for our limited minds and memories and do a better job once we get there.
Slashdot Mirror
"I survived four years of New Math - it was so easy that you couldn't do anything wrong. Straight A's in math. .... Millions of adults are now math-illerates because of these oh-so-pure mathematicians."
I agree but I think the whole problem is that we don' start with a geometric interpretation of math, the mayan's used shapes for numerals, and arabic symbols hide mathematical truths that are expressed better in images, visual geometric shapes.
We already do math unconsciously else we could not navigate, we could not determine is this distinct from that. (Boolean logic, yes it is there, no it is not)
I always quickpar files in CD's / DVD's, it takes extra time but re-finding and redownloading data is even more time consuming.
Quickpar
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/
Quicksvf
http://www.quicksfv.org/index.html
"You joke, but I think the best solution would be a macro scale physical recording medium. I wouldn't trust magnetism over 25 years, I wouldn't trust microscopic silicon SRAM for 25 years, and I know for a fact that CDRs deteriorate after about 10 years."
This leads me to believe cloud storage is a much better option then individual storage if one has a LOT of data, it would get very expensive to store data permanently on your own. Either that or someone is going to have to pay some company SPECIFICALLY to store data in a SAN off the internet, but that's going to cost $$$.
I don't see why someone couldn't simply bury a notebook with it, then everything is compatible, etc.
I noticed this when I was in photoshops if you pick a circular brush and choose white on a black background you can "paint", quasi-3D ish landscapes, because of the way perspective works. And you can turn it into a height map, Supreme commander uses a similar/same method.
It sounds like they just figured out how to use photographic techniques to make a height map.
"18th century mercantilism is so much better."
I would like to hear your solutions to corruption.
Privoxy is open source so I thought I'd post it, more people that can make it better the better. The only way people are going to know it exists is exposure. The only thing it really needs is an easy to use GUI front end I think in terms ease of custom configuration.
"The term is corporate responsibility."
The Founding Fathers (of the US) discoursed endlessly on the meaning of "republicanism." John Adams in 1787 defined it as "a government, in which all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws."
Problem is corporate money buys laws and finances government. To people who are rich, the law doesn't mean much since they have the most powerful insiders anyway. It is impotent because they can afford to buy lawyers and politicians. So they can simply make the law and reorganize the economies in their favor, so the law doesn't really sting because they can block it, anull it or buy new ones.
I'm not sure if there can ever be corporate responsibility. The profit motive is too corrupting I think. I'm reminded of John adams...
"Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that "the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic." But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, "even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce." As a result, there was "a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there."
"IMHO such people are shirking an important responsibility to society; especially the smart ones. The Bible writers had it right-- go forth and multiply!"
It's not that the smart don't want to, it's that the women don't like the smart ones.
http://www.privoxy.org/
"You were making a ridiculous universal statement to support your point. A fallacy in a universal statement is still a fallacy, even when there is an otherwise good point being made. And no, the subtext was not lost on me. I just didn't care in light of your bad argument."
You were misapplying my statement, taking it out of it's context, again, it is totally lost on you, the subtext that is.
I.e. reading between the lines.
"Employers aren't responsible for an employee's children."
Yet employers are the source of income for most families in society, the reason we have rights is because our ancestors fought them to gain their rights in the first place and got better pay from them. We'd still be slaved if everyone thought like that.
Personally I think we have it backwards, we all a part of the same world and universe and if we don't look out for each other at least partially we're setting a precedent that will reach ourselves.
But that's just me.
It's not a fallacy because you were ignoring the context in which I said it. i.e. the hidden subtext was lost on you.
"This is kind of my point. Do companies keep libraries of pr0n, video, music? Sure, if you're a media company you will. But say you're a plumbing distributor. You'll have the usual accounting stuff, and media for marketing, and some BS overhead, but don't tell me it adds up to a TB much less a PB."
That's true for small companies but places like Digg and any site that gets a lot of comments would very quickly fill up that TB.
"they used to contain basically the address and perhaps logs from calls they made to the call center. Now whole phone conversations are logged as well as faxes and letters that are scanned, together with images and video that is available."
Reminds me of David brin's Transparent society
http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html
http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-Privacy/dp/0738201448/
"I do. Granted, I'm feeling particularly pedantic right now.
There are several reasons why not everyone can make accurate observations."
But this is irrelevant to my claim, I was in a position to make such.
"It does you no good to be able to process 16 billion pixels / second, when you can only get the data for 4 billion per second from your memories."
Which can be summed up with one term: Memory bandwidth.
You don't have to believe me or internalize any of what I said, of course. But your post's central thesis was that...
No my central thesis actually was:
Just because you have the skills to develop a game, does not mean you know how to develop a gaming experience.
I actually work in game development,
Which doesn't mean a thing, what I mean is sure you work in game development (I respect you for that big time btw) but just because you work in game development doesn't mean you know the truth about everything in game development. Why would John Carmack be speaking about new engine technologies to enable artist to naturally do what they do best and abstract the technology away from them partially so they can focus on what they do best, art? It's obvious that there are still many advances to be made to make development pipeline much better then it is today, and I think you can agree with that.
Truth stands on it's own, regardless of where it comes from, whether or not it comes from a bum in the street, anyone can make accurate observations. Or would you like to deny that?
These are actually different jobs in game development.
Which is quite irrelevant the whole of a game is all connected in the end, if someone fucks up on the assembly line they can cause the whole thing to collapse, don't believe me? Go read some post mortems at gamasutra.
The other positions which play into the technical knowledge vs. fun tug-of-war you mentioned are engineers and producers, for the most part.
This is the whole point though, the tug-of-war, the technology is still a barrier. How many failed or bad games are pushed out or cancelled? A lot.
My real point is just that your tirade is... slightly uninformed.
My real point is that, you have no point you just don't understand what I said, and because some of what I said rubbed you the wrong way, you just had to post your response.
Not totally devoid of merit
Of course it's not because I know people in the game industry, I know how it works. Claiming "I'm uninformed" on generalizations was your mistake. You misunderstood my post and read in implications that were not there to begin with.
"What's entertaining is subjective."
I'd dispute that, I bet if we did statistical studies, evidence would emerge of a consensus of a baseline of what is considered fun vs what is not. Politics ("subjectivity") is now becoming a science in and of itself:
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
I'm sure we'll soon have a science of fun, the studies are not there yet, but I'm certain we'd find statistical consensus of what fun is, and what isn't interesting if we had many decades to do serious research.
Just because you have the skills to develop a game, does not mean you know how to develop a gaming experience.
There are developers that know how to develop entertaining gaming experience, and their are dev's that just know how to make games without a decent ability to judge whether or not what they are developing is exciting, interesting and entertaining and doesn't suck.
This is a big problem in the industry as far as I'm concerned, there is just too many clueless people (pub's and developers) about how to build entertainment. I think the biggest problem is still the technology. There is so much time and money consuming technical engineering that it overtakes the money and time needed to develop the entertainment aspect. Too much on art and engines, not enough on developing interesting things and connecting them with skill.
Striking a balance is hard, I agree, but that's the business you're really in: Entertainment. Game developers have to be good at knowing entertainment as well as engineering. It's hard, no doubt... and sometimes you just want to keep trying just doing your own thing (which is also valid) but if you want to do your own thing, you got to go back to small time games and understand what aspects of both the art, and the interaction of the objects, makes the game. Some indie game developers know this, they know what is wrong with the industry.
Who said forever? You're introducing something new here.
No I'm not see Disney and the music industries endless copyright extension lobbying to prevent works from going public domain. Google it, it's not "new" by any means.
In the case of game developers, I suspect they'd be happy with a three to five years. By the end of that time, any money from sales will have been booked and technology will have made the game long since obsolete.
See: Crytek (IP police), many other game dev's I'm sure would be glad to but they are under publicly traded companies, in the ideal world yes, but this is not the ideal world - companies own devs and whoever has the money makes the rules.
It appears that your argument in support of piracy also provides an argument in support of the settlers who took native people's land. Interesting.
The point of the argument was to demonstrate the world is based on bullshit, we invent concepts de novo and try to justify them and backwards rationalize our imaginary worlds into reality, in objective reality they don't exist, do you agree? I think you would. We eliminate humans - suddenly all of our poppycock disappears. But that is the point -- it's decided by the groups who have power over the groups who don't -- might makes right.
The whole "property is a social construct" line is true, but adds nothing useful to the debate. Property is a social construct that is (in most countries) enforced by political, economic and military means. You can't just say "all this land is mine" any longer, because anarchy would quickly result.
Information is not land though, your argument holds for land but not for IP. I can't steal numbers from you (1, 2, 3) they operate under entirely different laws and behave entirely differently -- land, water, food, that's scarce, information is not, the labour is, but the product is not once produced, socialism is entirely possible under the laws of information.
So there is no economic rational at all except for to pay the producers, the market/socialism/communism is a social construct, the world is not an ideology, it behaves according to physical laws and spacial geometric relationships. I wish more people would question what they hold dear to see where it would lead, but too few people do, or even have the skill to ferret out the implications, very time consuming. To realize that our vague notions about ideas are not how the world actually works and we have some say in how it turns out.
So we are the problem, human beings are too selfish and too self-centered and that is the real problem. Not anything else, but people who know the truth are outnumbered by people who don't care, and so we must go with the median... which is mediocre. No one is interested in moderation, and because everyone is flying blind unfortunately. If you don't think so: Just look at the world, war, poverty, disease, ignorance, religion, ideological extremism, etc.
My point is we've seen how money triumphs over the common good and the public good with extension after extension and the public is way too disorganized to get the lobbyists out of their governments. Too many greedy children (and yes I mean the adults are children in terms of maturity) there from the upper classes.
We create an entire legal construct to control people's behaviours to avoid this. Property is a social construct, as are justice, rights and economics.
Exactly my point they are arbitrary, they are made up by someone else to control someone else for their benefit. We inherited them, most of us don't have the time to sit down and sift through them and question them to see if they are poorly conceived and whether or not they need to be updated, revised or tossed out due to new changes in the environment but it's a big job and way too much for the average lifetime of most people I'm sure.
Okay
"Nope. Apple won't poof. Microsoft's day in the sun was due to the cheapness of their products. Now that everyone has a computer they would like to get a GOOD one. Thats where Apple's Mac OS X comes in."
Sorry but while apple is decent, they're going to have to get a lot more apps people want on their OS, they've practically ignored the gaming industry entirely, that in itself speaks volumes about how much apple "cares".
Oh, please. This analogy gets brought up into every single fucking IP discussion on this site, and it is always way the hell off base.
Oh, so supply and demand is off base is it? You seem to be a little inconsistent in your economic principles there. If food were able to be replicated from matter in your own back yard, the entire food industry would go under, same goes for power. The thing is it happened to information first.
I'm reminded of an American friend of mine who said "Son, there are no capitalists. They are ALL socialists, if it's not socialism for the poor it's socialism for the rich, if it's not socialism for the rich, it's socialism for the middle class, they all want to find the golden egg and exploit the others".
He certainly was correct for the majority of them, people want to find the golden egg and sit on it forever. Who cares if you do work, the market (supply and demand) is supposed to determine it's value not the producers. i.e. free choice. Not some autocratic monopoly capitalist (or rather quasi capitalist-socialist) dictators.
There is no brave new industry that is making something better than what the software makers are making now...
You must have missed the digital revolution, we invented hardware that made supply of information practically limitless -- supply and demand again.
People are just taking what they make for free.
Maybe you need a history lesson, all states and all peoples took for free, land and resources that was not really there's to begin with. Property is a social construct to help us solve problems and dominate other peoples and groups for the dominant ideology of the age in history one lives.
You technically really never "own" anything, in the ultimate sense, we just pretend to do so because it's pragmatic. Whenever you "create" something, you're just re-arranging pre-existent matter and energy, so I don't think that entitles one to eternal ownership, ownership yes, eternally, no.
When someone is making a new type of thing which obsoletes software, get back to me, and then you can use the buggy whip analogy. Until then, stuff it, because it doesn't apply one bit.
I think you don't really grasp the full nature of the problem, in our world, the whip and buggy industry (information "engineering" industries, movies, music, whatever else, etc) just got replaced by a replicator, a REAL world replicator. The PC and the net.
In startrek it is a machine capable of creating (and recycling) objects. Replicators were originally seen used to synthesize meals on demand, but in later series, they are used for lots of other things.
But in our world they exist for information, sorry, humans have been innovating since the dawn of time. Just because a bunch of whiny kids (and yes many capitalists are childish) had their intellectual property party ruined by technology doesn't mean much.
You guys are fighting Prohibition and we all know how that worked out. It's not going to happen, the genie is not going back.
Yes, and that is because the work in those areas is the reproduction of the product. The work in IP is actually creating the thing you wish to sell, reproduction is and always has been effortless.
No reproduction has not always been effortless, songs and theater before the advent of camera's, recording media, radio and microphone, not to mention all it's spin off technologies. You had to travel to see people, or communicate using more primitive technologies (letters, etc).
I'm not sure how I got modded down, there just must be a lot of ideologues on today.
Good point! But each of them plays their part, i.e. virus's on the net, etc.
No software dev could have predicted everything their software would be used or abused for, so I think we should cut them a break. Like piracy and cracks. No one has the money and resources combat and to know every aspect of everything (at least not yet). Hopefully A.I. will take over for our limited minds and memories and do a better job once we get there.