wow, even more, it costs less to fuckup with nuclear hazards than it does to illegally copy a movie.
I hear you on the voters, I don't get upset at any of this anymore, clearly the voters want the kind of government they vote for over and over, I just sit and watch it all in amazement. Crazy world we live in but you're absolutely correct, the citizens actively fuck themselves over, and seem to enjoy it.
After a number of hardware changes/reinstalls they won't let you activate online. Once you get to that point even changing 1 ram chip will be enough to have to call up Microsoft.
Thats what I was thinking. I guess I could set a pc aside and make it a dedicated "don't change" machine, but I'm hoping that I can just get a windows 2000 somewhere and just not worry about xp.
I think its going to get to the point that if you run XP for a few months and it gets hit with spyware or other viruses, your activation will be considered "broken" by your own bad network behavior and you'll have to buy a "new" activation to replace the one you "broke," sort of when your cd-rom eats a cd, you have to replace that physical cd. I guess it makes sense in a way, but in the meantime, I can reinstall linux over and over, it being better quality just doesn't "wear out" or "get broken" like microsoft product activations. Wierd to talk that way about software though;-)
do all users really need that service pack? For my home use, linux tends to let me get on most web sites and even more so, many web destinations seem to recognise that not everyone runs windows.
I also think we can thank apple some for this or else there'd be a commercial monoculture out there and it'd be internet explorer or nothing. Microsoft even helped by the extraordinarily predictable way they let IE win the browserwars then sink into complacency and let firefox sneak up on them and steal mindshare. (PS., thats a good argument against monopolies, IE currently sucks bad as a browser and its all because for a while there was no competition.)
So whats stopping me from running an older nonpatched windows with older windows software if I feel the need? Sure, that solution may not last forever, and I was really close to buying XP, but since I love to install every distro of linux that comes around, I'm going to be wiping my pc lots and paying money for XP just got a lot less realistic for me with this change of policy.
For crying out loud, I'm a pc enthusiast, I like reinstallable software, but I guess thats not Microsoft's target market.
You can't count on Microsoft not suing. They're so anti competitive that its a given that they'll do the most evil thing possible while trying to avoid antitrust attention, the only thing keeping them even a barely reasonable company.
This looks like TT staked a claim on a process that would have been obvious to someone reasonably skilled in the area of electronic trading. Its a good thing for TT that theres nothing in patent regulations that prevents this.
oh bullshit. Families get tax credits for dependents of school age, whereas in reality, they should be accessed a school tax because I as a single male do not make use of the school system yet of course pay school taxes.
Any compiler that rearranged the members of the gamestate structure would need to be scrapped in a hurry. As for cross-platform, any binary game save format has the potential for creating problems there. Am I going to complicate my code by converting binary data (which already exists) to some other format... not on your life.
Is this for real? Can somebody speak for this?
From my limitted knowledge, machine code not being able to align variables on word boundaries for instance makes for some fairly severe performance hits. Do you really count on your structs (and objects) to serially line up the individual members exactly without aligning on various boundaries?
I'm currently doing a very small records management routine and I'm specifically writing serialization for ints and other stuff within each struct (object) to avoid this very issue. I thought it was a given that you just can't memcpy a struct (object) and assume its going to be cross platform, not to mention edianedness.
I already have done this type of thing before, I used to rent video tapes, enjoy the flick, then return the tape without recording it. Some folks might buy into it just to enjoy a big catalog of stuff.
I spotted my first open office user in the wild yesterday, she raved on the functionality and loved the price (the time spent downloading). When I say "in the wild" I mean face to face as I'm in a smaller town where the only linux users I know are at the job.
Microsoft may still lead the way in really really boring products or stuff that really needs millions of manhours but really, OS's, databases, languages, office suites, the fact that theres free versions out there should worry any proprietory version producing entity of same.
Regarding upgrade revenue, whats the difference between access 2003 and access 97? The fact that access 2003 has less functional versions of database calls (ado vs dao)? The fact that the import wizard in '03 was delivered broken? The fact that it needs more resources? That they finally removed clippy? I like microsoft products but they need to get profitable in some new, growth markets fast.
Another aside for me, you can't sustain 10 percent growth forever, the planet isn't that big.
While I agree that the odds are high in some cases, my point was that you cant prove that any sales were lost.. You can only assume..
And assumption doesnt work well in the courts when its put to the test..
I agree with you in the strictest theoretical way possible but I also will bet that most US courts will go with whatever estimates the victim cares to offer.
Say that I'm a copyright holder for "x". In one situation, I'm the sole publisher for x, and if 10 people want it and will pay the price, I'll get 10 sales. Thats case one, no copyright infringement.
In case 2, copyright infringement, there are two publishers, I'm the legitimate one and Joe Schmoe is the infringing publisher, I have to share those 10 sales between me and Joe, and if Joe distributes any cheaper, he's got a good chance of getting a fraction of of those 10 sales, especially if any of those 10 purchasers don't mind a bit of cheating to avoid paying my full price.
Odds are, by Joe distributing x illegally, I lose sales. Not proof, but thats generally how copyright violations tend to impact legal publishers. Trackers, and those participating in torrents for copyright infringing copies of files are the "illegal publishers." Additionally, they contribute to the tarnishing of the Bittorrent project which is a major method of publishing legitimate media, especially that sort of media produced by grassroot (noncommercial) organizations, think of the savings on hosting/bandwidth costs. I say good riddence to the site.
Good point. For me, since I don't drive very often, I'm not required to carry ID that often either. Not really a national ID then if I'm not required to carry it.
My working theory is that "there is always a race condition." What happens is that a message reader could read the message, the message writer could then mark the message as read, then the reader immediately crashes.
Well, bear in mind that with regards to copyright -- which seems to be the narrow area we've focused in on -- there was pretty much a total market failure. Right now we don't have a healthy market in creative works. All we've got are a lot of small monopolies at best, sometimes these monopolies are associated together.
Whats wrong with the market that we can blame on ip law?
The public domain is where the market shines: everyone competes on how efficiently they can get works out to the market. But of course, the market screws up royally when it comes to creating original works; it manages some, but not many. It's pretty good with derivative works, though, and of course maximizes the public interest in unencumberance of the works that there are. In order to tweak the natural state of affairs more to our liking, we regulate the market heavily with copyright.
Why can't these times with the best distribution system the world has ever seen be a boon to creativity? Why do intellectual property considerations need to put a damper on this?
How does copyright "regulate" the market?
I agree that some of todays law is pretty miserable, but I'm not seeing support for eliminating intellectual property law. Theres plenty of movies being made, DVD's aren't really that oppresive a medium, and if you don't like RIAA sponsored music, go hunt for the millions of self published out there. Folks are finding a happy medium with copyright, many musicians happily choose a creative commons variant and happily jam on. Folks can record their own music and self publish for almost nothing. I've known young musicians that are having a go, they're knowledgeable about copyright, they like to sell cds and have no use for info anarchy or unrepentent copying of their work.
If you want to talk about a stunted marketplace, I'll happily spend my time talking about many more problems than copyright, as a matter of fact, to lay any blame on intellectual property to explain away poor marketplace performance is to just let big business and big government off the hook. But yeah, I know thats an easy choice to make nowadays.
You do realize, right, that that turn of phrase really only makes sense as an observation. I.e. that information has a natural tendancy to spread, much like water seeks its own level only means that it flows downhill.
You'll have to demonstrate that information is not an entirely artificial construct for me to buy that it "has a natural tendancy" to do anything.
I'm glad that you're giving at least a token amount of consideration at the mundane world of the working class.
I believe part of the problem is that you're a lawyer (as says in your post) and by virtue of which, you've lost all connection to the simple nuts and bolts of holding a regular job and making a living. You're in a world of high minded rhetoric that seems to be forgetting the day to day basics of what makes society tick. You talk about benefitting society, yet you as a professional member of the legal practice fails to understand even the basic unit of societal participation, ie., work for wage. The "public domain", while culturally important in a very long term view, has zilch to do with the current firestorm of the IP debate, zero day warez and trading of pop media.
Its just as bad in the software world, look at some of the crazy arguments RMS makes. I don't really know how to change the ivory towers of academia, although I recommend that such folks at least consider a course in economics to appreciate how the world runs outside of their narrow view of things. Once you get the hang of societies in general, you can consider tangling how market economies work and how the importance of information in general has necessitated viewing intangible products as valid units of production.
What all of you grand theorists and information anarchists fail to realise is the size of the information economy and its importance in todays marketplace. But then again, you don't have to, you by virtue of your legal profession, and RMS by virtue of his bits and bytes orientation simply get lost in the details and paradoxically, casually muse about the grand scheme of things, and however this process comes about in yalls minds, completely forget the basics.
You're getting blindsided by software, which is highly unusual in how rapidly it ages. And even then, there is a thriving emulation scene working with some of the oldest software they can get their hands on.
Your forgetting that its the most transient IP of all, zero day software and media that is at the center of the storm and has zilch to do with the public domain. I'll hazard a guess that nobody in congress gives the public domain any thought at all.
All proponents of IP have won this debate because of its importance to the business of making a living. Since nobody wants to get off their high horses and bring some sanity to the debate, we have nutcases like RMS posing as some stoned saint and families bankrupted by outrageous judgements for the RIAA because nobody cares to give ground. We either have the info-anarchists with no care for the economy, no respect for the working folks, or the coldblooded capitalists with no care for individuals and again no respect for the working folk. In the US at least, the anarchists have lost.
In principle you're probably correct. But society likes this new information economy and no amount of grand semantic debates is going to change that. The next time someone tells you that information wants to be free, ask them for their credit card number.
I again have to disagree here. On a superficial level I do have to grant that trademarks are to reduce confusion, but the big picture still rules here, brands are simply identification of who to reward. A company puts much effort into its brand and if this effort could not be protected by its brand (say, a micros0ft could repackage linux for instance), then why bother with establishing a relationship with your customer by, oh i don't know, doing a good job maybe?
But yes, I'll concede, that we do not directly reward trademark artists, they are usually hired by companies interested in establishing their branding image, etc...
Yes, one of the purposes of patents and copyrights is to encourage the creation of inventions and works. But another, equally important purpose is to have those inventions and works to be unencumbered. Where it is unencumbered, it can be used to the maximum extent possible, for the least possible cost. This means having works enter the public domain immediately, or at least as soon as possible. And it means that the exclusive rights should be as minimal in scope as possible.
Easily dismissed. For one, you need to have the works themselves before they can be unencumbered. Secondly, and more clearly, society has demonstrated a distinct disinterest in much entering the public domain at all. Much of the most obsolete of copyrighted materials seems to be safely tied up in company archives.
I'm also sure you can bring up any number of historical references demonstrating the importance of produced art entering the public domain as soon as possible, but it still remains that the produced works are initially protected as a motivation to their creators.
While its true that some truly great works were produced as an act of selfless love of the arts, much of the world runs on mundane creations by us poor working slobs with rent to pay and stomachs to fill.
Again, not good enough. Getting things that we want requires them to be useful to us. If I have to pay for a copy of a book, it is less useful to me than one that is free. If I cannot make and give away copies of a book, it is less useful to me than one that I can. If I cannot write a sequel to a book, then it is less useful to me than one that I can.
I find books that I pay for more useful then the ones I get for free on average. The books that I pay for are just nicer, more informative on average then the ones that I get for free, because the paid for books simply are produced by folks with more resources on average because of course, those folks get paid;-)
But again, you for some reason that I cannot understand are arguing against renumeration to the people or companies producing the intellectual property to be protected. If you somehow could produce a successful argument on why you should punish creators of intellectual property or even let others punish creators of intellectual property then I could then at least understand the root of your argument. Remember, society wants these intangible goods to be produced. And for much of todays products and their extremely brief periods of usefulness, the public domain is pretty well irrelevent.
The norm in human commerce is trade. Gifts surely happen (linux, tsunami aid), but for the most part, folks work to eat.
We certainly cannot compel people to create or invent. But if they do so freely, there is no absolute requirement that they be rewarded for it. After all, people often engage in labor to no useful end. Whether any reward is given by the public should be measured by whether that reward serves the public interest.
Thats my point. The reasoning behind IP law is to encourage creation of IP. This doesn't mean that IP will not be created without opportunity for reward but clearly some IP costs money and society still wants it produced. If society didn't think that rewarding work would encourage that same work then why protect IP in the first place?
This doesn't mean that every law makes sense to me, it does mean that I understand why "intellectual property" exists as a concept and why I believe these laws serve a purpose.
People love to jump on the argument that theres no different between "The Matrix" on DVD and a random string of bytes on that same DVD, but in reality, one has a huge budget invested in producing the master copy and the other one doesn't. The question is, how do we encourage the kind of society that invests effort into producing things (or intangible streams of desireable bytes) that we want? We set up legal structures to allow an opportunity for rewarding these efforts.
Obviously I can be sniped for all sorts of invalid legal typing, but at least I'm not mystified on why society has decided on having laws supporting the concept of intellectual property.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear you on the voters, I don't get upset at any of this anymore, clearly the voters want the kind of government they vote for over and over, I just sit and watch it all in amazement. Crazy world we live in but you're absolutely correct, the citizens actively fuck themselves over, and seem to enjoy it.
Thats what I was thinking. I guess I could set a pc aside and make it a dedicated "don't change" machine, but I'm hoping that I can just get a windows 2000 somewhere and just not worry about xp.
I think its going to get to the point that if you run XP for a few months and it gets hit with spyware or other viruses, your activation will be considered "broken" by your own bad network behavior and you'll have to buy a "new" activation to replace the one you "broke," sort of when your cd-rom eats a cd, you have to replace that physical cd. I guess it makes sense in a way, but in the meantime, I can reinstall linux over and over, it being better quality just doesn't "wear out" or "get broken" like microsoft product activations. Wierd to talk that way about software though ;-)
I also think we can thank apple some for this or else there'd be a commercial monoculture out there and it'd be internet explorer or nothing. Microsoft even helped by the extraordinarily predictable way they let IE win the browserwars then sink into complacency and let firefox sneak up on them and steal mindshare. (PS., thats a good argument against monopolies, IE currently sucks bad as a browser and its all because for a while there was no competition.)
So whats stopping me from running an older nonpatched windows with older windows software if I feel the need? Sure, that solution may not last forever, and I was really close to buying XP, but since I love to install every distro of linux that comes around, I'm going to be wiping my pc lots and paying money for XP just got a lot less realistic for me with this change of policy.
For crying out loud, I'm a pc enthusiast, I like reinstallable software, but I guess thats not Microsoft's target market.
You can't count on Microsoft not suing. They're so anti competitive that its a given that they'll do the most evil thing possible while trying to avoid antitrust attention, the only thing keeping them even a barely reasonable company.
This looks like TT staked a claim on a process that would have been obvious to someone reasonably skilled in the area of electronic trading. Its a good thing for TT that theres nothing in patent regulations that prevents this.
The act of xor'ing a cursor against its background is patented, sorry.
oh bullshit. Families get tax credits for dependents of school age, whereas in reality, they should be accessed a school tax because I as a single male do not make use of the school system yet of course pay school taxes.
I'd buy a slashdot subscription if there were someway to hide the fact that I did.
Is this for real? Can somebody speak for this?
From my limitted knowledge, machine code not being able to align variables on word boundaries for instance makes for some fairly severe performance hits. Do you really count on your structs (and objects) to serially line up the individual members exactly without aligning on various boundaries?
I'm currently doing a very small records management routine and I'm specifically writing serialization for ints and other stuff within each struct (object) to avoid this very issue. I thought it was a given that you just can't memcpy a struct (object) and assume its going to be cross platform, not to mention edianedness.
where did you get the idea that maintaining roads is cheap?
ok, stupid decision maker, president of the united states, somehow I don't like them being so closely linked.
If you don't want folks deep linking your site, check the referrer and act accordingly.
I already have done this type of thing before, I used to rent video tapes, enjoy the flick, then return the tape without recording it. Some folks might buy into it just to enjoy a big catalog of stuff.
Microsoft may still lead the way in really really boring products or stuff that really needs millions of manhours but really, OS's, databases, languages, office suites, the fact that theres free versions out there should worry any proprietory version producing entity of same.
Regarding upgrade revenue, whats the difference between access 2003 and access 97? The fact that access 2003 has less functional versions of database calls (ado vs dao)? The fact that the import wizard in '03 was delivered broken? The fact that it needs more resources? That they finally removed clippy? I like microsoft products but they need to get profitable in some new, growth markets fast.
Another aside for me, you can't sustain 10 percent growth forever, the planet isn't that big.
And assumption doesnt work well in the courts when its put to the test..
I agree with you in the strictest theoretical way possible but I also will bet that most US courts will go with whatever estimates the victim cares to offer.
**Prove** they have lost compensation . You cant.
Say that I'm a copyright holder for "x". In one situation, I'm the sole publisher for x, and if 10 people want it and will pay the price, I'll get 10 sales. Thats case one, no copyright infringement.
In case 2, copyright infringement, there are two publishers, I'm the legitimate one and Joe Schmoe is the infringing publisher, I have to share those 10 sales between me and Joe, and if Joe distributes any cheaper, he's got a good chance of getting a fraction of of those 10 sales, especially if any of those 10 purchasers don't mind a bit of cheating to avoid paying my full price.
Odds are, by Joe distributing x illegally, I lose sales. Not proof, but thats generally how copyright violations tend to impact legal publishers. Trackers, and those participating in torrents for copyright infringing copies of files are the "illegal publishers." Additionally, they contribute to the tarnishing of the Bittorrent project which is a major method of publishing legitimate media, especially that sort of media produced by grassroot (noncommercial) organizations, think of the savings on hosting/bandwidth costs. I say good riddence to the site.
for me, I don't have a need for federal buildings or national parks, I just view them as foreign countries that I pay taxes to.
Good point. For me, since I don't drive very often, I'm not required to carry ID that often either. Not really a national ID then if I'm not required to carry it.
You warez'ers will rationalize anything!
So am I wrong here? This is a serious question :-)
Whats wrong with the market that we can blame on ip law?
The public domain is where the market shines: everyone competes on how efficiently they can get works out to the market. But of course, the market screws up royally when it comes to creating original works; it manages some, but not many. It's pretty good with derivative works, though, and of course maximizes the public interest in unencumberance of the works that there are. In order to tweak the natural state of affairs more to our liking, we regulate the market heavily with copyright.
Why can't these times with the best distribution system the world has ever seen be a boon to creativity? Why do intellectual property considerations need to put a damper on this?
How does copyright "regulate" the market?
I agree that some of todays law is pretty miserable, but I'm not seeing support for eliminating intellectual property law. Theres plenty of movies being made, DVD's aren't really that oppresive a medium, and if you don't like RIAA sponsored music, go hunt for the millions of self published out there. Folks are finding a happy medium with copyright, many musicians happily choose a creative commons variant and happily jam on. Folks can record their own music and self publish for almost nothing. I've known young musicians that are having a go, they're knowledgeable about copyright, they like to sell cds and have no use for info anarchy or unrepentent copying of their work.
If you want to talk about a stunted marketplace, I'll happily spend my time talking about many more problems than copyright, as a matter of fact, to lay any blame on intellectual property to explain away poor marketplace performance is to just let big business and big government off the hook. But yeah, I know thats an easy choice to make nowadays.
You do realize, right, that that turn of phrase really only makes sense as an observation. I.e. that information has a natural tendancy to spread, much like water seeks its own level only means that it flows downhill.
You'll have to demonstrate that information is not an entirely artificial construct for me to buy that it "has a natural tendancy" to do anything.
I believe part of the problem is that you're a lawyer (as says in your post) and by virtue of which, you've lost all connection to the simple nuts and bolts of holding a regular job and making a living. You're in a world of high minded rhetoric that seems to be forgetting the day to day basics of what makes society tick. You talk about benefitting society, yet you as a professional member of the legal practice fails to understand even the basic unit of societal participation, ie., work for wage. The "public domain", while culturally important in a very long term view, has zilch to do with the current firestorm of the IP debate, zero day warez and trading of pop media.
Its just as bad in the software world, look at some of the crazy arguments RMS makes. I don't really know how to change the ivory towers of academia, although I recommend that such folks at least consider a course in economics to appreciate how the world runs outside of their narrow view of things. Once you get the hang of societies in general, you can consider tangling how market economies work and how the importance of information in general has necessitated viewing intangible products as valid units of production.
What all of you grand theorists and information anarchists fail to realise is the size of the information economy and its importance in todays marketplace. But then again, you don't have to, you by virtue of your legal profession, and RMS by virtue of his bits and bytes orientation simply get lost in the details and paradoxically, casually muse about the grand scheme of things, and however this process comes about in yalls minds, completely forget the basics.
You're getting blindsided by software, which is highly unusual in how rapidly it ages. And even then, there is a thriving emulation scene working with some of the oldest software they can get their hands on.
Your forgetting that its the most transient IP of all, zero day software and media that is at the center of the storm and has zilch to do with the public domain. I'll hazard a guess that nobody in congress gives the public domain any thought at all.
All proponents of IP have won this debate because of its importance to the business of making a living. Since nobody wants to get off their high horses and bring some sanity to the debate, we have nutcases like RMS posing as some stoned saint and families bankrupted by outrageous judgements for the RIAA because nobody cares to give ground. We either have the info-anarchists with no care for the economy, no respect for the working folks, or the coldblooded capitalists with no care for individuals and again no respect for the working folk. In the US at least, the anarchists have lost.
In principle you're probably correct. But society likes this new information economy and no amount of grand semantic debates is going to change that. The next time someone tells you that information wants to be free, ask them for their credit card number.
But yes, I'll concede, that we do not directly reward trademark artists, they are usually hired by companies interested in establishing their branding image, etc...
Yes, one of the purposes of patents and copyrights is to encourage the creation of inventions and works. But another, equally important purpose is to have those inventions and works to be unencumbered. Where it is unencumbered, it can be used to the maximum extent possible, for the least possible cost. This means having works enter the public domain immediately, or at least as soon as possible. And it means that the exclusive rights should be as minimal in scope as possible.
Easily dismissed. For one, you need to have the works themselves before they can be unencumbered. Secondly, and more clearly, society has demonstrated a distinct disinterest in much entering the public domain at all. Much of the most obsolete of copyrighted materials seems to be safely tied up in company archives.
I'm also sure you can bring up any number of historical references demonstrating the importance of produced art entering the public domain as soon as possible, but it still remains that the produced works are initially protected as a motivation to their creators.
While its true that some truly great works were produced as an act of selfless love of the arts, much of the world runs on mundane creations by us poor working slobs with rent to pay and stomachs to fill.
Again, not good enough. Getting things that we want requires them to be useful to us. If I have to pay for a copy of a book, it is less useful to me than one that is free. If I cannot make and give away copies of a book, it is less useful to me than one that I can. If I cannot write a sequel to a book, then it is less useful to me than one that I can.
I find books that I pay for more useful then the ones I get for free on average. The books that I pay for are just nicer, more informative on average then the ones that I get for free, because the paid for books simply are produced by folks with more resources on average because of course, those folks get paid ;-)
But again, you for some reason that I cannot understand are arguing against renumeration to the people or companies producing the intellectual property to be protected. If you somehow could produce a successful argument on why you should punish creators of intellectual property or even let others punish creators of intellectual property then I could then at least understand the root of your argument. Remember, society wants these intangible goods to be produced. And for much of todays products and their extremely brief periods of usefulness, the public domain is pretty well irrelevent.
The norm in human commerce is trade. Gifts surely happen (linux, tsunami aid), but for the most part, folks work to eat.
Thats my point. The reasoning behind IP law is to encourage creation of IP. This doesn't mean that IP will not be created without opportunity for reward but clearly some IP costs money and society still wants it produced. If society didn't think that rewarding work would encourage that same work then why protect IP in the first place?
This doesn't mean that every law makes sense to me, it does mean that I understand why "intellectual property" exists as a concept and why I believe these laws serve a purpose.
People love to jump on the argument that theres no different between "The Matrix" on DVD and a random string of bytes on that same DVD, but in reality, one has a huge budget invested in producing the master copy and the other one doesn't. The question is, how do we encourage the kind of society that invests effort into producing things (or intangible streams of desireable bytes) that we want? We set up legal structures to allow an opportunity for rewarding these efforts.
Obviously I can be sniped for all sorts of invalid legal typing, but at least I'm not mystified on why society has decided on having laws supporting the concept of intellectual property.
Its no wonder people argue on slashdot :-D