You're right. I remember reading a study in a psychology class about how sociopathic CEOs tended to be. If not a sociopath, they tend to be obsessive compulsive. Think about it: most people, if paid as much as a Fortune 500 CEO, would retire after one year. Being a CEO is extremely stressful and most will never utilize the vast amounts of wealth they acquire. For them, business is a game that they just can't put down.
I would put it this way: a sensible person doesn't really want that much power, because (to steal from Stan Lee) with great power comes great responsibility. Having lots of responsibility is extremely unpleasant; it's impossible to be sure that you're doing everything you can, and people will inevitably get hurt. There are reasons to take on responsibility, such as financial reward, satisfying some compulsion to achieve something, or satisfying a perceived obligation. However, it's still unpleasant, and a sensible person won't seek to continue to hold responsibility for longer than is needed. Therefore, that sensible person also won't seek extreme amounts of power.
The exception are people who don't really care about fulfilling their responsibilities. If you don't care about whether you're doing everything you can, and if you don't care about other people getting hurt, then having responsibility isn't unpleasant. If you don't care about the ramifications of your actions and you are entirely self-serving, then the only thing that will matter is the accrual of additional power.
So that's my quick and dirty explanation of why psychopaths keep getting themselves into positions of power: they're the ones who really want it. The only solution is to keep power dilute.
You know, On2 has been around a while now in the video codec game. I wonder how many patents they hold that MPEG-LA are violating with their video codecs.
I hadn't thought of it, but it seems to me that this is yet another problem with software patents: everyone is probably infringing on lots of patents, but it might be that you're most likely to get prosecuted for it if you're an open source project threatening an entrenched interest. While On2 has probably been infringing on these patents for a while, I'd imagine that it's harder to be sure with a closed-source competitor.
I think that is pretty optimistic. My first thought upon reading about the "portable hotspot" feature was, "Huh, so how are the carriers going to block that then? Are they going to make sure all manufacturers disable the feature, or are they going to forbid manufacturers from supporting v2.2 altogether?"
Ultimately the problems with hooking up a computer to the TV isn't as much about the technology or usability, it's about the content. Most of the big electronics companies just won't invest in building sleek set-top boxes because they need a content feed, and there are only a few options: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and iTunes.
All of those services have limited content, and Hulu actively tries to prevent set-top-box support because they don't really want you watching Internet content on your TV. Hulu is owned by the TV networks, and neither the TV networks nor the Cable companies particularly like the idea of shows being distributed via the Internet rather than broadcast networks.
If content owners allowed their shows to be streamed in an open video format via an open protocol, you would see a gold rush of manufacturers building TVs and set-top boxes that supported that format and protocol. Aside from building fast enough Internet access and having big enough datacenters to serve all that video (or using a bittorrent-like P2P technology to handle the bandwidth on the server end), providing TV and movies over the Internet is not a technological problem at all.
It comes down to this: The powerful people and businesses in TV and movies are invested in TV networks and cable companies. Though they may provide some services online, they'll try to make sure they're substandard and crippled in order to make sure you keep paying your cable bill.
In my own opinion (and I've seen others state it, too), Windows 7 is just Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft had to break from the Vista brand because everyone (including the lay user) "knew" that Vista was a broken pile of junk.
Well that, and because they couldn't get away with charging for an upgrade to SP3.
For myself, I still haven't migrated. Something about DRM running in the background, not wanting to support companies that treat their customers like the criminal, etc./me dons tinfoil hat.
One of my major gripes is "activation". I've tried Windows 7 and I've tried Office 2010, and they're pretty nice. I might well be willing to buy them, except that I refuse to buy any piece of software that will phone home and decide whether I'm allowed to continue using it. What's more, I don't feel that I can trust a company that thinks it's worthwhile to put their development resources into that kind of phoning-home scheme.
Until Microsoft drops their activation scheme, I'll be sticking with Windows XP and Office 2007, or else migrating away to non-Microsoft products.
I don't think you have to posit a "right to consume".
Let's start off my clearing something up: I don't "consume" media. I view it or listen to it, and those activities do not consume anything. When you consume something, it's gone. The music I listen to is just as intact when I'm done listening than before I started listening.
Second, I don't need to claim a right to listen to music and watch movies since as a practical matter, I can do those things. I just can. It's like I don't need to assert a specific right to walk down the street unless someone is preventing me from walking down the street, at which point the question becomes "what right do they have to prevent me from walking down the street?"
You ask, "Why should a right to consume trump a right to control the distribution of your ideas?" One problem with that question is that nobody has the right to control the distribution of their own ideas. "Copyright" is a particular artificial power that the government gives you so that you can try to profit from a particular expression of your ideas. The intention behind "copyright" was never to allow you to control what happened to those ideas. If you wrote a book, you could demand a profit for each copy that was printed, but you couldn't stop people from sharing your book, talking about your book, or being inspired by your book. Once you put your ideas into the world, they are not yours anymore.
So it's not about the "right to consume", but about what rights an author/creator has to restrict the free interchange of ideas. If a company doesn't want to sell something under reasonable terms, under normal circumstances, I can look elsewhere for the same product. In order to allow creators to profit, the government grants the creators of art some limited rights to restrict access so that those creators can profit. If those creators' plans to profit is not harmed by sharing and distribution, then they have no right to complain.
People would want to design cars, just to show off. The fact is they are doing it right now [google.com], even without the benefit of a universal duplicator.
Not just to show off. The fact is that if we had universal duplicators and you wanted a design of car that didn't already exist, you'd have to design it somehow. That's actually how a lot of FOSS improvements get funded-- some person/company says, "I like this program, but I need it to do [whatever]. Let's hire a programmer to do it, and then submit the improvements back to the project so it gets maintained properly."
Entertainment products (movies and music) might also be made for similar reasons. Once upon a time, musicians had sponsors, and they were commissioned to write music for events. Obviously musicians would be paid to produce music for commercials, even if they couldn't sell CDs. Movies might be funded somehow by companies like Apple and Netflix because they make money off of having a steady feed of new content. There might be a limit, but it could work to some degree.
Beyond that, I really don't think that people are unwilling to pay for content. I think that some people won't pay, but lots of people will pay if you just offer them what they want at a decent price.
Physical distribution for music is virtually dead unless you're selling to the >40 crowd. Even then... I know 60-year-olds who use iTunes. iTunes is the single largest music retailer in the US. Record stores are dead, unless perhaps you go to a niche shop in a trendy neighborhood, for the kind of people who still want to buy vinyl.
For my personal shopping habits, I won't even look on Amazon (or other online stores) for CDs. If it's not on iTunes, I basically consider it "out of print". Sorry, I just don't see the point. It'll take days to reach me, at which point I'll pretty much rip it to AAC and toss the actual CD. I don't want the hunk of plastic, and shipping it is a waste of resources.
I own the copyright to the text in this post. You are not allowed to copy it. If your actions cause this post to be copied or cached anywhere, then you have copied this. Therefore, if you're reading this, you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Of course, you can't take this interpretation of the situation seriously. Loading a website doesn't seem to us intuitively to be "copying", nor could you hope to enforce copyright this way.
So I generally don't really "pirate", and it's for a couple of reasons. First, I often do want to support the people who bring these products to market. Second, I don't really want to go hunting around the Internet for a good copy of something; I'd rather go to a site, pay a couple bucks, and be done with it.
But here's the thing: I watch "Dexter" (a show on Showtime, if you don't know), and they recently finished their 4th season. I don't have cable, so if I wanted to watch the fourth season of "Dexter", I would need to order cable and Showtime just for that show (something in the neighborhood of $50/month for as long as the season takes).
Now I already pay for Netflix, I watch things on Hulu and make no effort to skip the ads, and I sometimes even buy stuff on iTunes. I'd probably buy more stuff on iTunes if it were slightly cheaper, didn't have DRM, and everything were available in HD, but I think the price iTunes charges for video generally isn't worth the product you get. Dexter wasn't available for any of these. I was going to wait a year for it to show up on iTunes as I have done in the past, but then I started hearing spoilers about what happened during the season, pretty much ruining the whole thing.
So I went looking to see if Showtime was putting Dexter online in any form, and I put, "watch dexter season 4 online" into Google. Within the top could of hits, there was a site that had the entire season available to watch in a Flash player. The quality wasn't good, but I didn't need to download anything and it was as easy as watching Hulu. It's not even clear to me that I was doing anything wrong-- I didn't distribute anything or copy anything. I went searching for a legitimate way to watch a show online, and I found a site offering the show. Is it really my responsibility to ensure that the site had distribution rights?
So anyway, I watched the season. If Showtime had bothered to offer their own distribution channel, I would have been willing to watch ads or to pay them. I bought a previous season of "Dexter" on iTunes. The *only* reason why Showtime didn't get any money from me in this case is that they weren't willing to take my money. They'd rather play marketing games with pricing and availability.
Similarly, there have been one or two times in the past few years that I've downloaded music through unauthorized channels. And when I say "one or two times", I mean something like maybe as much as 1 album per year. But again, here's the thing: Every one of those albums were unavailable for online purchase. I went to iTunes and Amazon, and it wasn't available. Again it's, "Here, record company, take my money," and they say, "no thanks." Ok, fine, if you insist I'll just download it somewhere.
I'm convinced that all of these media companies would make more money if they simply made everything available for sale online in a high-quality DRM-free version. Not only could they sell more product, but they wouldn't have the pay the salaries of whatever marketing geniuses are spending their days deciding not to offer "Dexter" for sale online.
I think the key is in keeping protocols and interchange formats open. In short, the key important thing is not that any one product is open or even that the dominant product is open, but that you have the ability to create a new product that can access the same data.
I think that portable device and cell phones will ultimately open up a bit more if the networks themselves become open. If anyone could buy a networking chipset and built their own device, you'll see some real open alternatives, which will cause Apple/Microsoft to open up a bit in order to stay competitive. Therefore, I think we should keep pushing for open Internet infrastructure (including wireless) and net neutrality.
I definitely want freedom from persecution. I wish I could be freed from dealing with whiners. I'd like to be freed from needing to install Microsoft products to do my work.
What's wrong with "freedom from"? "Freedom" itself is a tricky concept. A lot of smart people still get tripped up in trying to think about "free will" and such.
I don't think Jobs himself would particular advise that, not unless you're someone who doesn't already use a computer today. Jobs made it pretty clear in the original announcement that the iPad is not built to be an all-purpose computer.
The problem with the original Macs is that they required someone to actually use a computer. Now that he's turned computers into toys, he can finally get "Grandma." But this doesn't really change anything in the computer world.
I know you're trying to deride what Apple's doing by using the word "toy", but I think you're kind of right and I think Jobs would even agree with you on a certain level. What Apple has been aiming at since the original Mac is that they're trying to take the computer out of computing.
Jobs' vision for the future of computing, like it or not, seems not to include people consciously thinking about computers as computers. Instead you just have various devices and tools which do various things using fairly natural interactions. You're imagining that, in the future, you'll still be thinking, "Oh, I want to look something up online. Let me sit down at my computer. Oh, I want to check my calendar. Let me sit down at my computer. Oh, I want to type up a report. Let me sit down at my computer."
Jobs, on the other hand, is imagining a future where you think, "Oh, I want to look at a web page. Good thing I have my handy web-page-viewer-thingy. Oh wait, I want to check my calendar. My calendar-thingy is in the other room, let me go grab it. Oh, I want to write a report. I'll go use my report-writer-thingy that's sitting on my desk."
Now many of those thingies may actually be the same physical device, but that's not the point. The concept is that, when you're working with your calendar-thingy, it's a calendar. It's not a computer running a calendar application. In your mind and in how you interact with it, it *is* a calendar. It looks like a calendar and works like a calendar, and it's no harder to use than it is to use a paper calendar. The report-writer-thingy would have the capabilities of a real word-processor, but it wouldn't be any more confusing than using a typewriter; adding a picture is no more confusing to our monkey brains than cutting a picture out of a magazine and gluing it into your report.
So it's not really that he's trying to turn computers into toys, but he's trying to turn them into tools. You want your computer to be a blank slate to fill in with whatever tools you want, and I understand that. Jobs wants to make computers that are ready-made tools, developed to do specific things very well, and I understand that too.
By giving up the right to make "grander" or "higher-level" choices, the user gains the perception that his device will be taken care of for him as far as its software is concerned.
Now I'm not a fan of Apple's software lockdown on the iPad/iPhone, but I don't see the problem in general with a consumer electronic device making some "higher-level" choices for the customer. I know the Linux guys here get all fussy about things like Apple not making their GUIs completely customizable and skin-able, but at a certain level, providing too much control is bad for most users.
I know, you think I'm completely crazy, but at a certain point there is such a thing as "too much choice". It becomes confusing and even paralyzing, and from most users' perspective, it's completely unimportant. People don't need or want the control. Something like being unable to swap out iPhoneOS's kernel for a kernel that supports btrfs or whatever-- you may as well be asking people if they care which gate a specific electron is passing through.
Most people don't care whether the PS3 can run Linux because they're using it to watch movies and play games. If it plays movies and runs games, and if it doesn't give people significant problems, they don't care if they can move around the GUI widgets. It just is what it is. Most people don't really want to alter the menu system on their TVs; they just want to watch their TVs. Most people don't wish that they could telnet into their wireless routers, since all they want out of a router it to be able to forget the router exists and assume that magic fairies are loading web pages into their computers.
And you know what: fair enough. I don't spend much of my day thinking about what minerals make up the bricks in my house. I'm more or less happy so long as my house keeps standing and I can live in it without worrying about the bricks. I don't have any kind of political or ideological attachment to my bricks. I also don't think about the chemicals in my shaving cream, so long as I'm having no trouble shaving. Does that mean I'm a slave to the brick manufacturer and the shaving cream company, since I'm "forced" to use whatever materials they've chosen? Or does that mean that I've been freed from needing to worry about that sort of thing? It's kind of hard to say, but I'm not too worried about it.
First and most importantly, the idea that Apple isn't doing anything unique, interesting, or original because they were inspired by previous designs: hogwash. Every creation is inspired by things that came before it, and there's no escaping that. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. When we praise someone for being unique and original, we're really praising them for what they have chosen to steal, and how well they've adapted the stolen ideas to a new setting.
Second, it's kind of silly to slam Jobs for not creating these designs all by himself and there's nothing "mere" about "merely overseeing those who did." You have a guy who got himself into the position of having a high degree of influence over the computing world. From there, he managed to recognize and hire some very talented people, and then he put them together and managed them in such a way that they've put out some very impressive products. That aint easy.
Yeah, they could. But then they'd be doing the same thing that browser vendors have been doing for the object element since the 1990s.
Not necessarily. The problem with using the object element was not that it passed the video stream to another player per se, but that it didn't really provide good ways for web developers to control the display and controls of the video. It was more like passing the video off to an external player and saying, "Do whatever you want with this."
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the web browser still use the HTML5 tags and options, providing more of the controls that web developers want, while still passing the video stream off to some other application or plugin for decoding?
I would rather say that improving the welfare of the people is the goal of society, and both education and economic improvements are means to that goal. There are, however, many means to that goal, and focusing too much on one of those means at the exclusion of others isn't a good idea.
The further problem is that we have very little consensus on what a real education is. Many academics that I know focus a bit too much on the memorization of trivia. Most of the non-academics that I know focus too much education as vocational training. So the problem is not only that we're probably spending too much money on college educations to the exclusion of other improvements (even other improvements in education), but that the money we are spending is a big unfocused mess of funding.
As with many things, the issue is not simply about spending more money or less money, but setting clear goals and taking sensible steps toward meeting those goals. Proclaiming, "I want everyone in society to be smart, and money is no object!" will get you a bunch of educational snake-oil salesmen who will take as much money as you'll give them without necessarily achieving the goals you'd hoped for.
If basic needs are being met (which they are), then surplus capacity should be directed
The problem is that the surplus is being directed into the pocketbooks of the wealthiest people. One of the methods for directing that surplus is to convince parents that they need to use up their entire savings by sending their offspring to very expensive 4-year-long summer camps. What's left of those savings after 4 years of an indulgent lifestyle are used to fund research which will be copyrighted and patented by private companies, fund sports teams which will further distract the populace from their bilking, etc.
We could be instead putting the money into better education earlier in life, (primary/secondary schools), infrastructure (our crumbling bridges, public transportation, improved Internet), and other needs like better healthcare. By improving the overall economic and social outlook of our country, we could actually increase the opportunities for people to educate themselves.
But apparently 001 was too hard for some high school graduates; a Math010 course was developed to teach things like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In &$#%#%*ing college!
Well why bother trying to teach those things in primary or secondary school? The purpose of primary and secondary school is merely to prepare you for college, but college is where you're supposed to learn everything, right?
College isn't a trade school, you're supposed to get a well-rounded education.
I agree with you that it shouldn't be a trade school, but it's often treated like a trade school. Even liberal arts degrees are (often enough) treated like you're in a trade school to become a liberal arts professor.
What's more, most people don't *want* real well-rounded educations. Most people I talk to don't even seem to understand the concept of a well-rounded education. They think a well-rounded education is where you learn to sit down, shut up, and recite the exact dates that random historical events happened, or recite word-for-word quotes from old books.
In my experience, from when I went to college and from talking to younger people today, most kids are going to college for two reasons: (a) they want to get a decent job someday; and (b) they want to get drunk and have sex for 4 years. It's not that I have a real problem with either of those goals, but there are cheaper ways to achieve them.
Why can't we admit that not everyone gets to be a fashion model, a football star, or a CEO?
Well you have a bunch of rich workaholic CEOs running things, and they go around telling everyone that rich workaholic CEOs are the only valuable people in the world and everyone else is a useless piece of crap. Surprise!
One of the problems a culture who believes that "capitalism" is an ethical/moral system rather than simply an economic system. For example:
I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it.
If "wages represent the value that a worker provides to others", then implicitly no one can ever be underpaid or under-appreciated. Rich people are rich because they're good people who deserve all that life has to offer. If a garbage man or janitor is poor and suffering, it must be that he is a bad and worthless person who isn't contributing anything to society.... right?
Yeah, so that really sucks, but that belief system persists, largely because the rich and powerful are egocentric enough to actually believe that they deserve everything they've gotten, as well as being powerful enough push that belief system into our culture as an absolute truth.
People don't get college degrees in order to go cut down trees, they get them in hopes of making a career in their chosen field.
I think you might be missing the point. People often don't go to college in the hopes of making a career in their chosen field. They go to college because everyone tells them they're supposed to go to college, and everyone warns them they'll end up working behind the counters at McDonald's if they don't have a college degree.
So just to give a hypothetical scenario: You get a degree in art history or something and then end up working in a random company's HR department. The company produces widgets of some kind, and you don't even really care what they produce because your job is pushing paperwork around. Nothing about your job has anything do art or history or art history. Your training in writing academic papers has very little relevance to your job. Maybe you picked up some work habits an people skills in college that help you in your job, but mostly you got drunk and partied and learned trivia that you thought was kind of interesting at the time.
Now that scenario doesn't cover everyone's college experience, but it's far from unusual. I wouldn't go as far as to say that college is a waste of time and money for those people, but it's hardly an efficient way of "making a career in your chosen field".
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You're right. I remember reading a study in a psychology class about how sociopathic CEOs tended to be. If not a sociopath, they tend to be obsessive compulsive. Think about it: most people, if paid as much as a Fortune 500 CEO, would retire after one year. Being a CEO is extremely stressful and most will never utilize the vast amounts of wealth they acquire. For them, business is a game that they just can't put down.
I would put it this way: a sensible person doesn't really want that much power, because (to steal from Stan Lee) with great power comes great responsibility. Having lots of responsibility is extremely unpleasant; it's impossible to be sure that you're doing everything you can, and people will inevitably get hurt. There are reasons to take on responsibility, such as financial reward, satisfying some compulsion to achieve something, or satisfying a perceived obligation. However, it's still unpleasant, and a sensible person won't seek to continue to hold responsibility for longer than is needed. Therefore, that sensible person also won't seek extreme amounts of power.
The exception are people who don't really care about fulfilling their responsibilities. If you don't care about whether you're doing everything you can, and if you don't care about other people getting hurt, then having responsibility isn't unpleasant. If you don't care about the ramifications of your actions and you are entirely self-serving, then the only thing that will matter is the accrual of additional power.
So that's my quick and dirty explanation of why psychopaths keep getting themselves into positions of power: they're the ones who really want it. The only solution is to keep power dilute.
You know, On2 has been around a while now in the video codec game. I wonder how many patents they hold that MPEG-LA are violating with their video codecs.
I hadn't thought of it, but it seems to me that this is yet another problem with software patents: everyone is probably infringing on lots of patents, but it might be that you're most likely to get prosecuted for it if you're an open source project threatening an entrenched interest. While On2 has probably been infringing on these patents for a while, I'd imagine that it's harder to be sure with a closed-source competitor.
I think that is pretty optimistic. My first thought upon reading about the "portable hotspot" feature was, "Huh, so how are the carriers going to block that then? Are they going to make sure all manufacturers disable the feature, or are they going to forbid manufacturers from supporting v2.2 altogether?"
Ultimately the problems with hooking up a computer to the TV isn't as much about the technology or usability, it's about the content. Most of the big electronics companies just won't invest in building sleek set-top boxes because they need a content feed, and there are only a few options: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and iTunes.
All of those services have limited content, and Hulu actively tries to prevent set-top-box support because they don't really want you watching Internet content on your TV. Hulu is owned by the TV networks, and neither the TV networks nor the Cable companies particularly like the idea of shows being distributed via the Internet rather than broadcast networks.
If content owners allowed their shows to be streamed in an open video format via an open protocol, you would see a gold rush of manufacturers building TVs and set-top boxes that supported that format and protocol. Aside from building fast enough Internet access and having big enough datacenters to serve all that video (or using a bittorrent-like P2P technology to handle the bandwidth on the server end), providing TV and movies over the Internet is not a technological problem at all.
It comes down to this: The powerful people and businesses in TV and movies are invested in TV networks and cable companies. Though they may provide some services online, they'll try to make sure they're substandard and crippled in order to make sure you keep paying your cable bill.
In my own opinion (and I've seen others state it, too), Windows 7 is just Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft had to break from the Vista brand because everyone (including the lay user) "knew" that Vista was a broken pile of junk.
Well that, and because they couldn't get away with charging for an upgrade to SP3.
For myself, I still haven't migrated. Something about DRM running in the background, not wanting to support companies that treat their customers like the criminal, etc. /me dons tinfoil hat.
One of my major gripes is "activation". I've tried Windows 7 and I've tried Office 2010, and they're pretty nice. I might well be willing to buy them, except that I refuse to buy any piece of software that will phone home and decide whether I'm allowed to continue using it. What's more, I don't feel that I can trust a company that thinks it's worthwhile to put their development resources into that kind of phoning-home scheme.
Until Microsoft drops their activation scheme, I'll be sticking with Windows XP and Office 2007, or else migrating away to non-Microsoft products.
I don't think you have to posit a "right to consume".
Let's start off my clearing something up: I don't "consume" media. I view it or listen to it, and those activities do not consume anything. When you consume something, it's gone. The music I listen to is just as intact when I'm done listening than before I started listening.
Second, I don't need to claim a right to listen to music and watch movies since as a practical matter, I can do those things. I just can. It's like I don't need to assert a specific right to walk down the street unless someone is preventing me from walking down the street, at which point the question becomes "what right do they have to prevent me from walking down the street?"
You ask, "Why should a right to consume trump a right to control the distribution of your ideas?" One problem with that question is that nobody has the right to control the distribution of their own ideas. "Copyright" is a particular artificial power that the government gives you so that you can try to profit from a particular expression of your ideas. The intention behind "copyright" was never to allow you to control what happened to those ideas. If you wrote a book, you could demand a profit for each copy that was printed, but you couldn't stop people from sharing your book, talking about your book, or being inspired by your book. Once you put your ideas into the world, they are not yours anymore.
So it's not about the "right to consume", but about what rights an author/creator has to restrict the free interchange of ideas. If a company doesn't want to sell something under reasonable terms, under normal circumstances, I can look elsewhere for the same product. In order to allow creators to profit, the government grants the creators of art some limited rights to restrict access so that those creators can profit. If those creators' plans to profit is not harmed by sharing and distribution, then they have no right to complain.
People would want to design cars, just to show off. The fact is they are doing it right now [google.com], even without the benefit of a universal duplicator.
Not just to show off. The fact is that if we had universal duplicators and you wanted a design of car that didn't already exist, you'd have to design it somehow. That's actually how a lot of FOSS improvements get funded-- some person/company says, "I like this program, but I need it to do [whatever]. Let's hire a programmer to do it, and then submit the improvements back to the project so it gets maintained properly."
Entertainment products (movies and music) might also be made for similar reasons. Once upon a time, musicians had sponsors, and they were commissioned to write music for events. Obviously musicians would be paid to produce music for commercials, even if they couldn't sell CDs. Movies might be funded somehow by companies like Apple and Netflix because they make money off of having a steady feed of new content. There might be a limit, but it could work to some degree.
Beyond that, I really don't think that people are unwilling to pay for content. I think that some people won't pay, but lots of people will pay if you just offer them what they want at a decent price.
Physical distribution for music is virtually dead unless you're selling to the >40 crowd. Even then... I know 60-year-olds who use iTunes. iTunes is the single largest music retailer in the US. Record stores are dead, unless perhaps you go to a niche shop in a trendy neighborhood, for the kind of people who still want to buy vinyl.
For my personal shopping habits, I won't even look on Amazon (or other online stores) for CDs. If it's not on iTunes, I basically consider it "out of print". Sorry, I just don't see the point. It'll take days to reach me, at which point I'll pretty much rip it to AAC and toss the actual CD. I don't want the hunk of plastic, and shipping it is a waste of resources.
Oh, so then you don't know that Dexter is really an alien from the planet Thweeboop?
Oops. Sorry. No point watching season 4 now.
I own the copyright to the text in this post. You are not allowed to copy it. If your actions cause this post to be copied or cached anywhere, then you have copied this. Therefore, if you're reading this, you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Of course, you can't take this interpretation of the situation seriously. Loading a website doesn't seem to us intuitively to be "copying", nor could you hope to enforce copyright this way.
So I generally don't really "pirate", and it's for a couple of reasons. First, I often do want to support the people who bring these products to market. Second, I don't really want to go hunting around the Internet for a good copy of something; I'd rather go to a site, pay a couple bucks, and be done with it.
But here's the thing: I watch "Dexter" (a show on Showtime, if you don't know), and they recently finished their 4th season. I don't have cable, so if I wanted to watch the fourth season of "Dexter", I would need to order cable and Showtime just for that show (something in the neighborhood of $50/month for as long as the season takes).
Now I already pay for Netflix, I watch things on Hulu and make no effort to skip the ads, and I sometimes even buy stuff on iTunes. I'd probably buy more stuff on iTunes if it were slightly cheaper, didn't have DRM, and everything were available in HD, but I think the price iTunes charges for video generally isn't worth the product you get. Dexter wasn't available for any of these. I was going to wait a year for it to show up on iTunes as I have done in the past, but then I started hearing spoilers about what happened during the season, pretty much ruining the whole thing.
So I went looking to see if Showtime was putting Dexter online in any form, and I put, "watch dexter season 4 online" into Google. Within the top could of hits, there was a site that had the entire season available to watch in a Flash player. The quality wasn't good, but I didn't need to download anything and it was as easy as watching Hulu. It's not even clear to me that I was doing anything wrong-- I didn't distribute anything or copy anything. I went searching for a legitimate way to watch a show online, and I found a site offering the show. Is it really my responsibility to ensure that the site had distribution rights?
So anyway, I watched the season. If Showtime had bothered to offer their own distribution channel, I would have been willing to watch ads or to pay them. I bought a previous season of "Dexter" on iTunes. The *only* reason why Showtime didn't get any money from me in this case is that they weren't willing to take my money. They'd rather play marketing games with pricing and availability.
Similarly, there have been one or two times in the past few years that I've downloaded music through unauthorized channels. And when I say "one or two times", I mean something like maybe as much as 1 album per year. But again, here's the thing: Every one of those albums were unavailable for online purchase. I went to iTunes and Amazon, and it wasn't available. Again it's, "Here, record company, take my money," and they say, "no thanks." Ok, fine, if you insist I'll just download it somewhere.
I'm convinced that all of these media companies would make more money if they simply made everything available for sale online in a high-quality DRM-free version. Not only could they sell more product, but they wouldn't have the pay the salaries of whatever marketing geniuses are spending their days deciding not to offer "Dexter" for sale online.
I think the key is in keeping protocols and interchange formats open. In short, the key important thing is not that any one product is open or even that the dominant product is open, but that you have the ability to create a new product that can access the same data.
I think that portable device and cell phones will ultimately open up a bit more if the networks themselves become open. If anyone could buy a networking chipset and built their own device, you'll see some real open alternatives, which will cause Apple/Microsoft to open up a bit in order to stay competitive. Therefore, I think we should keep pushing for open Internet infrastructure (including wireless) and net neutrality.
I definitely want freedom from persecution. I wish I could be freed from dealing with whiners. I'd like to be freed from needing to install Microsoft products to do my work.
What's wrong with "freedom from"? "Freedom" itself is a tricky concept. A lot of smart people still get tripped up in trying to think about "free will" and such.
I don't think Jobs himself would particular advise that, not unless you're someone who doesn't already use a computer today. Jobs made it pretty clear in the original announcement that the iPad is not built to be an all-purpose computer.
The problem with the original Macs is that they required someone to actually use a computer. Now that he's turned computers into toys, he can finally get "Grandma." But this doesn't really change anything in the computer world.
I know you're trying to deride what Apple's doing by using the word "toy", but I think you're kind of right and I think Jobs would even agree with you on a certain level. What Apple has been aiming at since the original Mac is that they're trying to take the computer out of computing.
Jobs' vision for the future of computing, like it or not, seems not to include people consciously thinking about computers as computers. Instead you just have various devices and tools which do various things using fairly natural interactions. You're imagining that, in the future, you'll still be thinking, "Oh, I want to look something up online. Let me sit down at my computer. Oh, I want to check my calendar. Let me sit down at my computer. Oh, I want to type up a report. Let me sit down at my computer."
Jobs, on the other hand, is imagining a future where you think, "Oh, I want to look at a web page. Good thing I have my handy web-page-viewer-thingy. Oh wait, I want to check my calendar. My calendar-thingy is in the other room, let me go grab it. Oh, I want to write a report. I'll go use my report-writer-thingy that's sitting on my desk."
Now many of those thingies may actually be the same physical device, but that's not the point. The concept is that, when you're working with your calendar-thingy, it's a calendar. It's not a computer running a calendar application. In your mind and in how you interact with it, it *is* a calendar. It looks like a calendar and works like a calendar, and it's no harder to use than it is to use a paper calendar. The report-writer-thingy would have the capabilities of a real word-processor, but it wouldn't be any more confusing than using a typewriter; adding a picture is no more confusing to our monkey brains than cutting a picture out of a magazine and gluing it into your report.
So it's not really that he's trying to turn computers into toys, but he's trying to turn them into tools. You want your computer to be a blank slate to fill in with whatever tools you want, and I understand that. Jobs wants to make computers that are ready-made tools, developed to do specific things very well, and I understand that too.
God: Who is this God? Even if he existed, what has he developed for computers?
He made all the electrons. Oh, and he invented math, which is kind of awesome.
By giving up the right to make "grander" or "higher-level" choices, the user gains the perception that his device will be taken care of for him as far as its software is concerned.
Now I'm not a fan of Apple's software lockdown on the iPad/iPhone, but I don't see the problem in general with a consumer electronic device making some "higher-level" choices for the customer. I know the Linux guys here get all fussy about things like Apple not making their GUIs completely customizable and skin-able, but at a certain level, providing too much control is bad for most users.
I know, you think I'm completely crazy, but at a certain point there is such a thing as "too much choice". It becomes confusing and even paralyzing, and from most users' perspective, it's completely unimportant. People don't need or want the control. Something like being unable to swap out iPhoneOS's kernel for a kernel that supports btrfs or whatever-- you may as well be asking people if they care which gate a specific electron is passing through.
Most people don't care whether the PS3 can run Linux because they're using it to watch movies and play games. If it plays movies and runs games, and if it doesn't give people significant problems, they don't care if they can move around the GUI widgets. It just is what it is. Most people don't really want to alter the menu system on their TVs; they just want to watch their TVs. Most people don't wish that they could telnet into their wireless routers, since all they want out of a router it to be able to forget the router exists and assume that magic fairies are loading web pages into their computers.
And you know what: fair enough. I don't spend much of my day thinking about what minerals make up the bricks in my house. I'm more or less happy so long as my house keeps standing and I can live in it without worrying about the bricks. I don't have any kind of political or ideological attachment to my bricks. I also don't think about the chemicals in my shaving cream, so long as I'm having no trouble shaving. Does that mean I'm a slave to the brick manufacturer and the shaving cream company, since I'm "forced" to use whatever materials they've chosen? Or does that mean that I've been freed from needing to worry about that sort of thing? It's kind of hard to say, but I'm not too worried about it.
I think you're misunderstanding some things.
First and most importantly, the idea that Apple isn't doing anything unique, interesting, or original because they were inspired by previous designs: hogwash. Every creation is inspired by things that came before it, and there's no escaping that. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. When we praise someone for being unique and original, we're really praising them for what they have chosen to steal, and how well they've adapted the stolen ideas to a new setting.
Second, it's kind of silly to slam Jobs for not creating these designs all by himself and there's nothing "mere" about "merely overseeing those who did." You have a guy who got himself into the position of having a high degree of influence over the computing world. From there, he managed to recognize and hire some very talented people, and then he put them together and managed them in such a way that they've put out some very impressive products. That aint easy.
Yeah, they could. But then they'd be doing the same thing that browser vendors have been doing for the object element since the 1990s.
Not necessarily. The problem with using the object element was not that it passed the video stream to another player per se, but that it didn't really provide good ways for web developers to control the display and controls of the video. It was more like passing the video off to an external player and saying, "Do whatever you want with this."
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the web browser still use the HTML5 tags and options, providing more of the controls that web developers want, while still passing the video stream off to some other application or plugin for decoding?
I would rather say that improving the welfare of the people is the goal of society, and both education and economic improvements are means to that goal. There are, however, many means to that goal, and focusing too much on one of those means at the exclusion of others isn't a good idea.
The further problem is that we have very little consensus on what a real education is. Many academics that I know focus a bit too much on the memorization of trivia. Most of the non-academics that I know focus too much education as vocational training. So the problem is not only that we're probably spending too much money on college educations to the exclusion of other improvements (even other improvements in education), but that the money we are spending is a big unfocused mess of funding.
As with many things, the issue is not simply about spending more money or less money, but setting clear goals and taking sensible steps toward meeting those goals. Proclaiming, "I want everyone in society to be smart, and money is no object!" will get you a bunch of educational snake-oil salesmen who will take as much money as you'll give them without necessarily achieving the goals you'd hoped for.
If basic needs are being met (which they are), then surplus capacity should be directed
The problem is that the surplus is being directed into the pocketbooks of the wealthiest people. One of the methods for directing that surplus is to convince parents that they need to use up their entire savings by sending their offspring to very expensive 4-year-long summer camps. What's left of those savings after 4 years of an indulgent lifestyle are used to fund research which will be copyrighted and patented by private companies, fund sports teams which will further distract the populace from their bilking, etc.
We could be instead putting the money into better education earlier in life, (primary/secondary schools), infrastructure (our crumbling bridges, public transportation, improved Internet), and other needs like better healthcare. By improving the overall economic and social outlook of our country, we could actually increase the opportunities for people to educate themselves.
But apparently 001 was too hard for some high school graduates; a Math010 course was developed to teach things like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In &$#%#%*ing college!
Well why bother trying to teach those things in primary or secondary school? The purpose of primary and secondary school is merely to prepare you for college, but college is where you're supposed to learn everything, right?
*sigh*
College isn't a trade school, you're supposed to get a well-rounded education.
I agree with you that it shouldn't be a trade school, but it's often treated like a trade school. Even liberal arts degrees are (often enough) treated like you're in a trade school to become a liberal arts professor.
What's more, most people don't *want* real well-rounded educations. Most people I talk to don't even seem to understand the concept of a well-rounded education. They think a well-rounded education is where you learn to sit down, shut up, and recite the exact dates that random historical events happened, or recite word-for-word quotes from old books.
In my experience, from when I went to college and from talking to younger people today, most kids are going to college for two reasons: (a) they want to get a decent job someday; and (b) they want to get drunk and have sex for 4 years. It's not that I have a real problem with either of those goals, but there are cheaper ways to achieve them.
Why can't we admit that not everyone gets to be a fashion model, a football star, or a CEO?
Well you have a bunch of rich workaholic CEOs running things, and they go around telling everyone that rich workaholic CEOs are the only valuable people in the world and everyone else is a useless piece of crap. Surprise!
One of the problems a culture who believes that "capitalism" is an ethical/moral system rather than simply an economic system. For example:
I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it.
If "wages represent the value that a worker provides to others", then implicitly no one can ever be underpaid or under-appreciated. Rich people are rich because they're good people who deserve all that life has to offer. If a garbage man or janitor is poor and suffering, it must be that he is a bad and worthless person who isn't contributing anything to society.... right?
Yeah, so that really sucks, but that belief system persists, largely because the rich and powerful are egocentric enough to actually believe that they deserve everything they've gotten, as well as being powerful enough push that belief system into our culture as an absolute truth.
People don't get college degrees in order to go cut down trees, they get them in hopes of making a career in their chosen field.
I think you might be missing the point. People often don't go to college in the hopes of making a career in their chosen field. They go to college because everyone tells them they're supposed to go to college, and everyone warns them they'll end up working behind the counters at McDonald's if they don't have a college degree.
So just to give a hypothetical scenario: You get a degree in art history or something and then end up working in a random company's HR department. The company produces widgets of some kind, and you don't even really care what they produce because your job is pushing paperwork around. Nothing about your job has anything do art or history or art history. Your training in writing academic papers has very little relevance to your job. Maybe you picked up some work habits an people skills in college that help you in your job, but mostly you got drunk and partied and learned trivia that you thought was kind of interesting at the time.
Now that scenario doesn't cover everyone's college experience, but it's far from unusual. I wouldn't go as far as to say that college is a waste of time and money for those people, but it's hardly an efficient way of "making a career in your chosen field".