Well it's not exactly about proprietary formats, is it? They could be using OGG and you'd still have to use their application, and there's no Linux version. They could be using OGG and the movie studios would still require them to wrap the files in DRM.
There's nothing all that proprietary about Apple's MPEG4 files. It's the DRM.
So you're saying the economic price may possibly correlate to the environmental costs, but that's not necessarily the case. That's something which in itself would have to be demonstrated. The additional costs, for example, could be more related to research and development or skilled human labor. We don't have enough information here to even begin to analyze the situation.
Now, if you want to go do a study that demonstrates that recycling is worse for the environment than dumping waste in landfills, by all means do that study. That sounds interesting.
But that's nonsense, because if the pricing weren't affordable relative to value customers would 'leave it' and the monopoly would shrink in size
How do you think this works? What do you think you mean by "affordable relative to value"? Do you believe somehow that prices generally are set by the seller based on what's a good "value" for the price?
Prices are set based on what people are willing to spend. People are willing to spend more when they don't have any other options. Let's take an extreme hypothetical and say that someone had a monopoly on food. Now without food you die, so if you had no other option but to buy food from a single vendor, he could charge you literally whatever he wanted and you *would* pay it. Does that make it permissible to allow a food monopoly to take hold, since "all your money" is an affordable price, relative to value?
The breakup of ATT... did that help consumers?
Did you know that you used to have to lease your telephone from AT&T? Not like now where you can buy any telephone you want and plug it into the phone jack. AT&T had some pretty absurdly abusive business practices before the antitrust case. Yes, the Baby Bells have been pretty abusive too, but then again, they still have monopolies. They just don't have country-wide monopolies.
If Microsoft, which most people here will say is a monopoly, charged $700 for Windows Vista Home Basic... take it or leave it, they can do that and be profitable according to your line of reason...
If Microsoft had been allowed to run everyone out of business and then charged $700 per copy of Vista, then yes, everyone would pay it. They could do much worse and get away with it. You'd think everyone could just switch to Linux, but Linux wouldn't exist in the way it does if Microsoft had been unrestrained. Even with the government sniffing around for antitrust violations, they've still been trying to sabotage Linux and trying to push hardware vendors to break Linux compatibility, not offer drivers, etc. You would just have no choice. Sure, eventually their reign of terror would come to an end, because all things eventually end, but that doesn't make it ok.
Look at the telephone company that had infrastructure to your house. They now face competition from cable providers not because of government fiat, but because technology for communications is reducing the technical (and cost) barriers for making it happen.
Yes, we have a cable/phone duopoly control over the Internet instead of a phone monopoly. So they're competing... a little. Fat lot of good it's doing us. Our connections are terribly slow and unreliable, even in many major cities, and customer service is terrible. And prices aren't coming down. What's your point?
Name one price set in the economy, outside the price that government charges for it's "services", that isn't ultimately 'take it or leave it'?
The problem with monopolies isn't whether a price, once set, is "take it or leave it." It's that they have much more power at the point when they're setting the price, which leaves the customers with the choice to "take it" or simply live without it. Customers don't have other options because there isn't meaningful competition.
People wanting to make laws that restrain the power of a monopoly does not constitute "theft".
This made to whole thing silly, but it looked good if you didn't ask the questions.
Or, from a different point of view, the study showed that the system of putting fees on dumping and subsidizing recycling was working. What's wrong with government trying to arrange things such that generally beneficial behavior is also economically sound?
Right. Some of the same geeks who complain about use of Comic sans are the same who complain about the addition of web font support in newer browsers. "Why not just use the web-safe fonts?" they argue, "It's not as though your web page will be less useful because you can't use your pretty font."
I think some people are just adamant that we stick to Times New Roman. I don't get it.
What TPB did and Google does not, is format the search results in a way that makes it easy to get exactly what you want.
Wait, so you're saying that the difference between Google and TPB is that TPB is better? So the only thing keeping Google from being guilty is relative incompetence at providing results? What if their searches improve to provide better results and information about those results?
Like what if they allowed you to sort results on torrents by how many seeders there were? That would be a legitimate search option for legitimate torrent use. Would that make Google guilty of the same things as TPB?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that you should listen to me because I post on Slashdot. People are suggesting, however, that we should listen to a selection of quotes from "artists" because they're artists.
Yes, those creating copyrighted material probably have an interest in the development and enforcement of copyright law. However, that doesn't make every one of them qualified to write and interpret copyright law, nor does it necessarily make them fit to decide what kind of copyright laws are going to benefit society most.
So when someone throws up a bunch of anonymous quotes from "artists" saying that the TPB verdict is a good thing, I don't see any particular reason why I should give those quotes any more weight than anonymous posts on 4chan.
I'm not sure whether we're quite on the same page (we might be). It's not that "intellectual property" isn't a useful idea, but that it was never intended to control what happened to your ideas when they went out into the world. Owning the copyright on a book wasn't intended to control who read your book, or whether that book could be lent or shared among friends. It was intended to allow you to prevent other commercial publishers from profiting from your work without paying you.
It's also noteworthy that in the US, the government is only granted the power to give copyrights for the sake of promoting the "useful arts", and traditionally there has been the concept that copyrights were only applicable for a limited time before the work become public property. In fact, the concept was that the intellectual property would become public by default, and that copyrights were an additional reward that the public was willing to grant for the sake of encouraging and promoting the work.
I think we have to start from that foundation. From there we can ask, "Given this new age of ubiquitous information, what kinds of temporary rights is the public willing to part with for the sake of encouraging artistic work?" It should not start from believing that people have an inalienable human right to control the destiny of every thought that happens to pass through their heads.
This seems reasonable. So it wasn't a devious attempt to block a competitor, just a very rigid safety feature that is unmotivated to integrate competitive products.
You say tomato...
Being unmotivated to integrate with the market-leader's products only really happens when you have a competing product that you're just as happy to promote. The whole anti-trust thing came about because Microsoft was feeling unmotivated to ensure that non-Microsoft software worked with Microsoft's operating system.
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
So Congress has the power to provide for the general Welfare of the United States...
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
and regulate commerce when it's among several states...
To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;
... and it even explicitly mentions roads.
So it doesn't seem to me that building national infrastructure is outside the scope of the Federal Government's enumerated powers. On the contrary, I think if there are any 2 things that are properly the Federal government's business, it's keeping an army and developing national (interstate) infrastructure.
Admittedly, no, you don't get explicit mention of railways, power grids, or the Internet in the Constitution-- but then such omissions aren't very curious of a document written in the 18th century.
il is king is japan and europe because these places are so much more dense population wise than the usa.
On the other hand, it's easier to support higher population densities when you build proper infrastructure. Building enough public transportation so that people didn't need cars would ease traffic congestion. Also you can fit more people into an area when you don't need to provide parking spaces and garages.
So it might be a bit of a chicken vs. egg problem. Public transportation makes more sense in areas with high population density, but the annoyances of living in poorly planned cities with deficient infrastructure and services is at least part of what makes people want to spread out in the first place.
Well the distance issue would be helped if our train system were modern and actually fast. And what kind of an argument is it to say, "We shouldn't expand our rail system because our current system doesn't go where I need to go, and therefore isn't useful"? If it's not going where people need to go, then it seems like that's a case for expansion.
Ah, yes, anything that involves government spending is a "pork-barrel project". Except when we build highways, subsidize oil companies, and prop up auto manufacturers. Then it's "capitalism".
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how meaningful searches can be done without decryption-- but then I don't pretend to be any kind of a genius about these things. It seems much more likely to me that there could be some kind of a system where unencrypted search indexes are kept locally while the files are encrypted and sent to an online storage service. Then you could search locally for the file you're looking for, fetch the encrypted information from the online storage, and then decrypt it locally.
That sort of thing seems entirely possible to me, but I'm not aware of any service that specifically offers that. I bet someone here could whip something up in 10 minutes to do it.
What are you talking about? The guy bought books for his Kindle. He *bought* them. Say what you will about, "No, this is licensing," but check Amazon's website and there's a button that says, "Buy now with 1-click". *Buy*.
So he bought these books, and now because Amazon doesn't like his behavior, they're denying him access to books that he bought. Of course this is an example of why DRM is bad. Imagine you went out to Barnes and Noble and bought physical books. Then, later, because you returned too many purchases to Barnes and Noble and they didn't like that, they went into your house and took back the books you previously purchased without giving you a refund. After complaining, they said, "Ok, we'll return these books, but just this once!"
It's like paying 300 for a pair of Gucci sunglasses: they're damned good for your eyes but 250 dollars of it is a tax on design.
That's not that great a metaphor, considering the prices for Apple products really aren't usually that far out of whack. It'd be more like if the cheapest Apple-brand sunglasses were $50, and they were pretty similar to a Dell-brand pair that was $45 and also similar to a Dell-brand pair that was $60, except that the Apple-brand pair offered slightly better UV-A protection and slightly worse UV-B protection, and were considered more stylish.
But you could also buy a pair of Dell-brand sunglasses for $10 that were made of cheap plastic, and though the UV protection was ok, they were a little too dark and sometimes made it hard to see. Apple just didn't offer a $10 pair of glasses.
I think that is a metaphor that's a little more apropriate.
I know we geeks have a tendency to assume that anything that's "cool" must also suck, because we aren't cool, but... you know... we're all awesome. But if you keep an open mind, you'll realize that, every now and then, when people are all jumping on the bandwagon, it's because that wagon is headed in the right direction.
Yeah, let me be clear about this: I would LOVE to be able to use Thunderbird and Sunbird and never have to deal with Outlook and Exchange again.
But!
I need to replace all the functionality on the server side and client side, including mobile devices. When one of my users (which includes my bosses) ask me, "How do I do [whatever] in this new system?" I can't say, "You can't, but that's ok because it's FOSS!" I have to be able to say, at worst, "You can't do that exactly, but you can do this other thing which really is just as good." At worst.
Right. In fact, it's hard not to see the connection between the return of Steve Jobs and the comeback of Apple. They spent a couple decades sitting on old designs and old technology, settling for an ever-shrinking design market, a market that was in the process of moving to Windows because Photoshop really runs on either platform. It's no wonder that the press and consumers weren't interested in Apple.
Then Jobs comes back, and you get a bunch of colorful computer designs that catches the media's attention. It kind of ushered out the era of the beige box. After years of jumping from one "next generation" operating system to another, never actually finishing anything, they push a new OS out the door based on an OS from Jobs's old company. Then they release the iPod, which was supposedly something Jobs pushed for himself.
Each of these things took a couple years of development before they were really refined, but each represented a turning point for Apple. They overhauled their designs, began using technically superior products (superior at least to their older products), and entered new markets. It's not without reason that their image in the media turned around.
not catering to a demographic that wants lower prices, and is probably willing to accept lower quality, means you allow competitors to gain a foothold.
In that sense, it still doesn't seem bad for Apple. You're saying, "Although they're doing well in the market that they really want, they aren't doing well in a market that they've chosen not to participate in." Well, oh well.
I'm still waiting for the IPod bubble to burst. Been waiting quite a while now...
What do you mean burst? It's not like real estate or the tech bubble. The iPod may saturate the market, which will lead to decreased sales. Then again, there's only so bad you can feel for a company who has decreased sales because everyone who might be in the market for one of their products already owns their products.
I just switched over to mac this past December, and I will say that for the first time in a long time, I found myself buying smaller twenty dollar applications that have I needed in my work flow. So in some way, my cost of ownership has risen.
I guess that depends on whether each of those $20 applications save you more than $20 over the lifetime of their use. Even if only in time saved-- ask yourself how much time each of those will save you over the whole time you own them, and then ask yourself what the dollar rate is at which you value your own time.
Anyway, yes, it's true that Apple has a pretty good developer community right now. I remember a long time ago, there used to be tons and tons of little $20 shareware apps for Windows, but it seems like a lot of that has either died off or turned to FOSS. For whatever reason, that market is still going strong on OSX.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't know why their movie catalog isn't bigger.
Well it's not exactly about proprietary formats, is it? They could be using OGG and you'd still have to use their application, and there's no Linux version. They could be using OGG and the movie studios would still require them to wrap the files in DRM.
There's nothing all that proprietary about Apple's MPEG4 files. It's the DRM.
So you're saying the economic price may possibly correlate to the environmental costs, but that's not necessarily the case. That's something which in itself would have to be demonstrated. The additional costs, for example, could be more related to research and development or skilled human labor. We don't have enough information here to even begin to analyze the situation.
Now, if you want to go do a study that demonstrates that recycling is worse for the environment than dumping waste in landfills, by all means do that study. That sounds interesting.
But that's nonsense, because if the pricing weren't affordable relative to value customers would 'leave it' and the monopoly would shrink in size
How do you think this works? What do you think you mean by "affordable relative to value"? Do you believe somehow that prices generally are set by the seller based on what's a good "value" for the price?
Prices are set based on what people are willing to spend. People are willing to spend more when they don't have any other options. Let's take an extreme hypothetical and say that someone had a monopoly on food. Now without food you die, so if you had no other option but to buy food from a single vendor, he could charge you literally whatever he wanted and you *would* pay it. Does that make it permissible to allow a food monopoly to take hold, since "all your money" is an affordable price, relative to value?
The breakup of ATT... did that help consumers?
Did you know that you used to have to lease your telephone from AT&T? Not like now where you can buy any telephone you want and plug it into the phone jack. AT&T had some pretty absurdly abusive business practices before the antitrust case. Yes, the Baby Bells have been pretty abusive too, but then again, they still have monopolies. They just don't have country-wide monopolies.
If Microsoft, which most people here will say is a monopoly, charged $700 for Windows Vista Home Basic... take it or leave it, they can do that and be profitable according to your line of reason...
If Microsoft had been allowed to run everyone out of business and then charged $700 per copy of Vista, then yes, everyone would pay it. They could do much worse and get away with it. You'd think everyone could just switch to Linux, but Linux wouldn't exist in the way it does if Microsoft had been unrestrained. Even with the government sniffing around for antitrust violations, they've still been trying to sabotage Linux and trying to push hardware vendors to break Linux compatibility, not offer drivers, etc. You would just have no choice. Sure, eventually their reign of terror would come to an end, because all things eventually end, but that doesn't make it ok.
Look at the telephone company that had infrastructure to your house. They now face competition from cable providers not because of government fiat, but because technology for communications is reducing the technical (and cost) barriers for making it happen.
Yes, we have a cable/phone duopoly control over the Internet instead of a phone monopoly. So they're competing... a little. Fat lot of good it's doing us. Our connections are terribly slow and unreliable, even in many major cities, and customer service is terrible. And prices aren't coming down. What's your point?
Name one price set in the economy, outside the price that government charges for it's "services", that isn't ultimately 'take it or leave it'?
The problem with monopolies isn't whether a price, once set, is "take it or leave it." It's that they have much more power at the point when they're setting the price, which leaves the customers with the choice to "take it" or simply live without it. Customers don't have other options because there isn't meaningful competition.
People wanting to make laws that restrain the power of a monopoly does not constitute "theft".
This made to whole thing silly, but it looked good if you didn't ask the questions.
Or, from a different point of view, the study showed that the system of putting fees on dumping and subsidizing recycling was working. What's wrong with government trying to arrange things such that generally beneficial behavior is also economically sound?
It's not as dead as you think. CSS3 has support for web fonts. Safari already supports it, and I think Chrome and Firefox are working on support too.
Right. Some of the same geeks who complain about use of Comic sans are the same who complain about the addition of web font support in newer browsers. "Why not just use the web-safe fonts?" they argue, "It's not as though your web page will be less useful because you can't use your pretty font."
I think some people are just adamant that we stick to Times New Roman. I don't get it.
What TPB did and Google does not, is format the search results in a way that makes it easy to get exactly what you want.
Wait, so you're saying that the difference between Google and TPB is that TPB is better? So the only thing keeping Google from being guilty is relative incompetence at providing results? What if their searches improve to provide better results and information about those results?
Like what if they allowed you to sort results on torrents by how many seeders there were? That would be a legitimate search option for legitimate torrent use. Would that make Google guilty of the same things as TPB?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that you should listen to me because I post on Slashdot. People are suggesting, however, that we should listen to a selection of quotes from "artists" because they're artists.
Yes, those creating copyrighted material probably have an interest in the development and enforcement of copyright law. However, that doesn't make every one of them qualified to write and interpret copyright law, nor does it necessarily make them fit to decide what kind of copyright laws are going to benefit society most.
So when someone throws up a bunch of anonymous quotes from "artists" saying that the TPB verdict is a good thing, I don't see any particular reason why I should give those quotes any more weight than anonymous posts on 4chan.
Frankly, I don't give a fuck what the artists think.
But I thought being able to play a couple chords on a guitar qualified you to write federal policy, right?!
I'm not sure whether we're quite on the same page (we might be). It's not that "intellectual property" isn't a useful idea, but that it was never intended to control what happened to your ideas when they went out into the world. Owning the copyright on a book wasn't intended to control who read your book, or whether that book could be lent or shared among friends. It was intended to allow you to prevent other commercial publishers from profiting from your work without paying you.
It's also noteworthy that in the US, the government is only granted the power to give copyrights for the sake of promoting the "useful arts", and traditionally there has been the concept that copyrights were only applicable for a limited time before the work become public property. In fact, the concept was that the intellectual property would become public by default, and that copyrights were an additional reward that the public was willing to grant for the sake of encouraging and promoting the work.
I think we have to start from that foundation. From there we can ask, "Given this new age of ubiquitous information, what kinds of temporary rights is the public willing to part with for the sake of encouraging artistic work?" It should not start from believing that people have an inalienable human right to control the destiny of every thought that happens to pass through their heads.
This seems reasonable. So it wasn't a devious attempt to block a competitor, just a very rigid safety feature that is unmotivated to integrate competitive products.
You say tomato...
Being unmotivated to integrate with the market-leader's products only really happens when you have a competing product that you're just as happy to promote. The whole anti-trust thing came about because Microsoft was feeling unmotivated to ensure that non-Microsoft software worked with Microsoft's operating system.
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
So Congress has the power to provide for the general Welfare of the United States...
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
and regulate commerce when it's among several states...
To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;
... and it even explicitly mentions roads.
So it doesn't seem to me that building national infrastructure is outside the scope of the Federal Government's enumerated powers. On the contrary, I think if there are any 2 things that are properly the Federal government's business, it's keeping an army and developing national (interstate) infrastructure.
Admittedly, no, you don't get explicit mention of railways, power grids, or the Internet in the Constitution-- but then such omissions aren't very curious of a document written in the 18th century.
il is king is japan and europe because these places are so much more dense population wise than the usa.
On the other hand, it's easier to support higher population densities when you build proper infrastructure. Building enough public transportation so that people didn't need cars would ease traffic congestion. Also you can fit more people into an area when you don't need to provide parking spaces and garages.
So it might be a bit of a chicken vs. egg problem. Public transportation makes more sense in areas with high population density, but the annoyances of living in poorly planned cities with deficient infrastructure and services is at least part of what makes people want to spread out in the first place.
Well the distance issue would be helped if our train system were modern and actually fast. And what kind of an argument is it to say, "We shouldn't expand our rail system because our current system doesn't go where I need to go, and therefore isn't useful"? If it's not going where people need to go, then it seems like that's a case for expansion.
Ah, yes, anything that involves government spending is a "pork-barrel project". Except when we build highways, subsidize oil companies, and prop up auto manufacturers. Then it's "capitalism".
Infrastructure is such as waste of money.
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand how meaningful searches can be done without decryption-- but then I don't pretend to be any kind of a genius about these things. It seems much more likely to me that there could be some kind of a system where unencrypted search indexes are kept locally while the files are encrypted and sent to an online storage service. Then you could search locally for the file you're looking for, fetch the encrypted information from the online storage, and then decrypt it locally.
That sort of thing seems entirely possible to me, but I'm not aware of any service that specifically offers that. I bet someone here could whip something up in 10 minutes to do it.
Sorry, if that's true, then I must have misunderstood. I didn't intentionally misstate the situation.
What are you talking about? The guy bought books for his Kindle. He *bought* them. Say what you will about, "No, this is licensing," but check Amazon's website and there's a button that says, "Buy now with 1-click". *Buy*.
So he bought these books, and now because Amazon doesn't like his behavior, they're denying him access to books that he bought. Of course this is an example of why DRM is bad. Imagine you went out to Barnes and Noble and bought physical books. Then, later, because you returned too many purchases to Barnes and Noble and they didn't like that, they went into your house and took back the books you previously purchased without giving you a refund. After complaining, they said, "Ok, we'll return these books, but just this once!"
It's like paying 300 for a pair of Gucci sunglasses: they're damned good for your eyes but 250 dollars of it is a tax on design.
That's not that great a metaphor, considering the prices for Apple products really aren't usually that far out of whack. It'd be more like if the cheapest Apple-brand sunglasses were $50, and they were pretty similar to a Dell-brand pair that was $45 and also similar to a Dell-brand pair that was $60, except that the Apple-brand pair offered slightly better UV-A protection and slightly worse UV-B protection, and were considered more stylish.
But you could also buy a pair of Dell-brand sunglasses for $10 that were made of cheap plastic, and though the UV protection was ok, they were a little too dark and sometimes made it hard to see. Apple just didn't offer a $10 pair of glasses.
I think that is a metaphor that's a little more apropriate.
I know we geeks have a tendency to assume that anything that's "cool" must also suck, because we aren't cool, but... you know... we're all awesome. But if you keep an open mind, you'll realize that, every now and then, when people are all jumping on the bandwagon, it's because that wagon is headed in the right direction.
Yeah, let me be clear about this: I would LOVE to be able to use Thunderbird and Sunbird and never have to deal with Outlook and Exchange again.
But!
I need to replace all the functionality on the server side and client side, including mobile devices. When one of my users (which includes my bosses) ask me, "How do I do [whatever] in this new system?" I can't say, "You can't, but that's ok because it's FOSS!" I have to be able to say, at worst, "You can't do that exactly, but you can do this other thing which really is just as good." At worst.
Right. In fact, it's hard not to see the connection between the return of Steve Jobs and the comeback of Apple. They spent a couple decades sitting on old designs and old technology, settling for an ever-shrinking design market, a market that was in the process of moving to Windows because Photoshop really runs on either platform. It's no wonder that the press and consumers weren't interested in Apple.
Then Jobs comes back, and you get a bunch of colorful computer designs that catches the media's attention. It kind of ushered out the era of the beige box. After years of jumping from one "next generation" operating system to another, never actually finishing anything, they push a new OS out the door based on an OS from Jobs's old company. Then they release the iPod, which was supposedly something Jobs pushed for himself.
Each of these things took a couple years of development before they were really refined, but each represented a turning point for Apple. They overhauled their designs, began using technically superior products (superior at least to their older products), and entered new markets. It's not without reason that their image in the media turned around.
not catering to a demographic that wants lower prices, and is probably willing to accept lower quality, means you allow competitors to gain a foothold.
In that sense, it still doesn't seem bad for Apple. You're saying, "Although they're doing well in the market that they really want, they aren't doing well in a market that they've chosen not to participate in." Well, oh well.
I'm still waiting for the IPod bubble to burst. Been waiting quite a while now...
What do you mean burst? It's not like real estate or the tech bubble. The iPod may saturate the market, which will lead to decreased sales. Then again, there's only so bad you can feel for a company who has decreased sales because everyone who might be in the market for one of their products already owns their products.
I just switched over to mac this past December, and I will say that for the first time in a long time, I found myself buying smaller twenty dollar applications that have I needed in my work flow. So in some way, my cost of ownership has risen.
I guess that depends on whether each of those $20 applications save you more than $20 over the lifetime of their use. Even if only in time saved-- ask yourself how much time each of those will save you over the whole time you own them, and then ask yourself what the dollar rate is at which you value your own time.
Anyway, yes, it's true that Apple has a pretty good developer community right now. I remember a long time ago, there used to be tons and tons of little $20 shareware apps for Windows, but it seems like a lot of that has either died off or turned to FOSS. For whatever reason, that market is still going strong on OSX.