Cringely points out, "There aren't one thousand civilian cybersecurity experts in the entire friggin' world!!!!,"
No matter. These guys will be the "cybersecurity" equivalent of the TSA goons at the airport, probably with a management culture even worse than those poor slobs have to live with.
http://www.resellerratings.com/ - post your honest review there.
They have a policy of removing bad reviews - if, get this, there are too many of them. They say its to avoid a vendor being 'targetted.' Seems to me that if a vendor does something bad enough to get a mob riled up to complain en masse, they probably deserve what they get.
They are also vulnerable to astro-turfing. I've witnessed it myself. Tiger Direct, known for being one of the absolute worst places to deal with if anything goes wrong with your order, had a well deserved rating down around 1 or so. It was pretty consistent for a couple of years and then practically over night (well, more like a span of 3-6 months) their rating soared. The reason it changed? A massive influx of positive reviews at a volume at least an order of magnitude higher than for the previous years.
Since resellerratings keeps a sort of history of reviews, you can still see this gaming of the ratings by sorting tiger-direct's reviews by date and looking at the oldest. Unfortunately, the database of reviews doesn't go back all the way to the start, so you'll see about 6 months of sparse true reviews and then the onslaught of astroturfing kicks in.
It's funny that when I ask that question very few people actually answer it. Some do say that I should write horrible programs that require support but that just isn't me.
Yeah, its funny that you haven't even bothered to look for answers - you ask, but you don't search. You would be a terrible businessman with such a prounounced lack of interest in understanding the markets. Besides who says that you deserve to have a business model supported by the government that 'fits' you?
I spend X hours/days developing a program for sell. How do I make money for it your ideal world?
Are you serious? First off, what part of, "And now you are going to demand that I explain stuff that's been discussed to death thousands of times before on this site alone - use google and learn a thing or two on your own." did you miss the first time?
Second, have you read any of the other subthreads on this story? Have you even read much of slashdot? Did you steal that uid?
I write a computer program - if I can't charge for it how should I get paid?
Did you really get "can't charge for it" out of "your brain is broken, its stuck on believing that charging for distribution is the only way to compensate content creators for their efforts" - or where you just trying to illustrate my point about people's brains being stuck on charging for DISTRIBUTION and not for the work itself?
If you think an entire car can be reverse engineered and churned out on a production line in under two years, you just have no sense of proportion. The actual patentable engineering that goes into such a product is miniscule compared to the level of industrial engineering. I think you have over-estimated by a couple of orders of magnitude just how much patentable work goes into creating most products.
If I had any interests in a company that wastes long-term resources for short-term profitability... I would shed them off my portfolio in a heartbeat, I would imagine other smart investors would do too, that company is not going to last long.
What an amazing opinion to hold considering that is precisely the kind of pressure wall street brings to bear on all publicly traded companies. Not to mention, it is a huge distortion of what I have described anyway.
Well, similar situations can happen with journalists and companies.
They can happen but it is 100% the fault of the company. Number one rule of PR - don't tell REPORTERS something that you do not want reported. Especially a reporter that has been hypercritical of your company for years now. There is absolutely no way The Inq fired Demarjian for something like that. That you would claim it so is just you projecting your own issues on whatever actually happened. As far as you actually know, he quit for greener pastures - with Magee gone, the place probably isn't the same work environment it once was.
They could really do us a solid if they were to make a big todo about the reciprocity. Most americans have no clue how bad it is because they don't have to suffer through it. If the brazilians would take the time to explain exactly why each american gets a symbolic anal cavity search, it would go a long way towards getting the problem fixed back here.
chinas procedure is not worse... you are most likely a US guy who doesn't go through border pain when entering... so you have no comparison.
I agree. A close friend of mine travels a lot for business - asia, europe and within the USA. She was bitching about how terrible passport control was in europe - some sort of long line she had to go through the last time she was in Spain. But she had absolutely no idea what non-citizens go through on entry to the US because, as a citizen, she's never had to suffer it herself. She flat out refused to believe me when I told her how fuckt it is, had to dig up articles on fox and cnn before she would accept it.
Well it could also be because a Rio olympics would be really awesome. I don't think Chicago could compete on atmosphere with Rio.
Plus the gander would get a little taste of the goose sauce too - Brazil is one of the few nations to 'retaliate' and start fingerprinting Americans (and only Americans) who enter the country:
What would motivate them to create new innovative products if they spend years of research and perfecting a product only to get it copied by their competition who does not invest money in said research? (therefore have lower costs). I honestly can't see why they would unless they are doing it as a hobby. Care to enlighten me?
The difference between being first to market and second to market with a half-assed copy.
As someone who has participated in the tear-down and inspection of competitors products (yes all of the big companies do it) if it took years of research to perfect, no one is going to be able to reverse-engineer and then bring up an assembly-line in a day, a week or even a month. And when they do, there is also the question of whether they screw it up and start shipping defective products.
That is the profit window.
Maybe it means that some kinds of R&D won't be profitable - but then again, there are plenty that aren't profitable under the current system too. Or maybe it means that those kinds of R&D get funded in a sort of coopetition between a group of different manufacturers who will all use the results in custom ways - similar to how patent licensing creates the same effect but only after the fact instead of up-front.
Freedom of speech is intended to protect your right to safely express your opinions and beliefs without being persecuted.
While that is certainly true, it is far from the only reason freedom of speech is held in such high regard. Your interpretation that political expression is the only reason we have the right to freedom of speech is entirely bogus. For one thing, if that were the case then you can damn well bet it would have been spelled out that way in the bill of rights. Instead, they put no qualifiers - none whatsoever, not even a teeny tiny restriction - in the 1st amendment.
Second freedom of speech - including the right to make a billion copies of harry potter is the natural state. If it were not for government interference we would all have that right.
As good as this sounds, when this was actually the case, there was far less creative work available for regular people.
There also was no easy way to organise any sort of mass patronage, thus the rich guy paying for an artist's livelihood out of his own pocket is no longer an useful analogy or excuse for copyright.
This is quite a reasonable philosophy to hold, and in no way illogical or immoral.
Except that's not what the EdIII claimed. He didn't claim compensation was logical or moral. He claimed copyright as the means to such was logical and moral. Like him, you have done very ltitle to show that it is either.
Without intellectual property there's nothing to stop him from doing so.
Contract law does not rest on IP law. If that factory manager decides to break his non-compete and non-disclosure contracts with you, you don't need copyrights or patents to be made whole.
Like I said, you really haven't thought very deeply about this, even though all the points you are bringing up have been argued to death here a thousand times before.
It doesn't. But it doesn't 'hurt' the author either which is what you've been implying with your use of the term 'steal' - which is totally inappropriate for situation as described anyway.
Yes. Or they can sell a chapter at a time for a month's worth of income.
Which a publisher can just copy and resell without paying the author.
Yeaaah, this whole sell it up front while you still have control over it idea just isn't really sinking in with you is it? You seem to be unable to formulate a consistent set of objections to that singular idea and thus have taken to quoting out of context and taking pot-shots at those quotes. I'm afraid your inconsistency makes it pointless to debate the subject with you, I should have realized that would be the case when your first question was answered in my original post. So sorry to have wasted your time.
Nice deflection, but no reason. A true TBP fan boi if one ever existed.
TBP? What is that?
And "no reason" - did you miss the entire second paragraph? Or is it because I pre-deflected the typical accusatory demand to be spoon-fed ideas that anyone with a true interest in the economic implications of zero-marginal-cost distribution would already be familiar with, thus leaving a lazy person with no options besides base insults?
That's not an answer at all. You expect authors to sell books at five year's worth of income so they can still make a living when a publisher steals it?
Yes. Or they can sell a chapter at a time for a month's worth of income. Or they can do the lecture circuit. Or they can use the credentials of being a published expert in the field to get a consulting gig in their field of expertise. TODAY 99% of published authors are unable to make a living purely from royalties either, so it isn't like the result here is going to be a significant change.
The other thing about a "publisher stealing" that you don't get is that not only can ONE publisher 'steal' it - ALL of them can. It then becomes a race to the bottom where the only publishers that will make money are the ones who have the cheapest and most efficient distribution system and are able to live off the thinnest of margins. At that point they aren't 'stealing' anything, they are providing a service to the end-user - distribution - and that's all they are getting paid for because the margins will be so thin in such hyper-competitive market.
How does that help GPL?
How doesn't it? Most people working on GPL software are doing it for compensation already, as long as they get paid for the work they put in then so what? Sure anyone who buys locked-up GPL software is getting screwed but the solution to that is quite pragmatic and simple - don't buy software that doesn't come with the source in the first place.
Thing is Mega corp can buy one copy from you then produce more copies at a lesser price than you
"So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth"
I find it so funny that Slashdot is so against copyright especially since the IT industry is so dependent on copyrights and patents in order to function, its like most of the people in Slashdot is wishing their jobs away.
Shows what little you know. Most software development is custom work, off the shelf has been a growing but still minority piece of the pie. For the most part patents and copyrights have caused stagnation and massive amounts of overhead in the industry - just look at the huge number of "defensive patents" that any large tech corp holds today - they never intend to use the patents to generate revenue or even necessarily any actual products, only to protect themselves from the occasional patent troll, and to keep the little guys - the real innovators - out of the market.
As a dentist I'm so glad that the copyright issue does not affect me directly.
Which is probably why you haven't thought very deeply about it either.
And what exactly is to stop a publisher just stealing an author's book and printing it without him seeing a penny? Or a software company ripping off a GPL project without giving anything back?
"So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth"
Morality -- Are you really bringing copyrights into the realm of Good, Bad, Evil, and Virtuous?
Freedom of speech is good and virtuous. Copyrights are restriction on freedom of speech, ergo they are the opposite of good and virtuous. You connect the dots.
2) Financial -- Point of sale or performance only.
Bingo was his nameo!
What would stop a megacorp from just copying your works and using their existing infrastructure and wealth to distribute your creations?
Absolutely nothing. So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth. Then it doesn't matter if megacorp spends their own money to distribute a million copies, the creator's been paid and all those copies megacorp has distributed are just free advertising for the creator's next work.
3) Logical. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The thinking behind copyright is valid and reasonable.
Maybe that was true before the internet made copyright enforcement impossible, now -- under current conditions -- is quite logical to say that copyright is entirely unreasonable.
Owning ideas is as valid a philosophy as not being able to own ideas.
Yes indeed, just as sensible as legislating pi to be exactly 3.14. With out billions of dollars spent on lawyers guns and, er, money, copyright could never even pretend to exist. But the free distribution of ideas, well that takes exactly zero dollars to make happen, its the natural state and has been since the dawn of man sitting around campfires reciting oral traditions.
Copyright isn't even the ownership of an idea anyway, its the ownership of the right to distribute that idea.
Of course, you could not be more wrong if you tried. Those "dinosaurs" as you call them are being very quickly replaced by young 20 somethings that are creating new and interesting content. They need capitol to do this,
Heeelarious freudian slip dude.
Besides that your brain is broken, its stuck on believing that charging for distribution is the only way to compensate content creators for their efforts. Just because that's the way it has most obviously been done for the past century or two doesn't mean that's the only way it can or even should be done. And now you are going to demand that I explain stuff that's been discussed to death thousands of times before on this site alone - use google and learn a thing or two on your own.
3. Violent crime should be punished by an automatic sentence to one of the US owned Pacific Islands such as the Johnston Atoll.
So, you want to reward criminals by sending them to a tropical island with nothing but sand, sun and surf? Those islands aren't quite Hawaii, but a lot of people wouldn't mind a year's vacation in the archipelago.
The Aleutian Islands, on the other hand, would be a lot less desirable of a destination.
Slashdot Mirror
Cringely points out, "There aren't one thousand civilian cybersecurity experts in the entire friggin' world!!!!,"
No matter. These guys will be the "cybersecurity" equivalent of the TSA goons at the airport, probably with a management culture even worse than those poor slobs have to live with.
http://www.resellerratings.com/ - post your honest review there.
They have a policy of removing bad reviews - if, get this, there are too many of them.
They say its to avoid a vendor being 'targetted.' Seems to me that if a vendor does something bad enough to get a mob riled up to complain en masse, they probably deserve what they get.
They are also vulnerable to astro-turfing. I've witnessed it myself. Tiger Direct, known for being one of the absolute worst places to deal with if anything goes wrong with your order, had a well deserved rating down around 1 or so. It was pretty consistent for a couple of years and then practically over night (well, more like a span of 3-6 months) their rating soared. The reason it changed? A massive influx of positive reviews at a volume at least an order of magnitude higher than for the previous years.
Since resellerratings keeps a sort of history of reviews, you can still see this gaming of the ratings by sorting tiger-direct's reviews by date and looking at the oldest. Unfortunately, the database of reviews doesn't go back all the way to the start, so you'll see about 6 months of sparse true reviews and then the onslaught of astroturfing kicks in.
It's funny that when I ask that question very few people actually answer it. Some do say that I should write horrible programs that require support but that just isn't me.
Yeah, its funny that you haven't even bothered to look for answers - you ask, but you don't search.
You would be a terrible businessman with such a prounounced lack of interest in understanding the markets.
Besides who says that you deserve to have a business model supported by the government that 'fits' you?
I spend X hours/days developing a program for sell. How do I make money for it your ideal world?
Are you serious? First off, what part of, "And now you are going to demand that I explain stuff that's been discussed to death thousands of times before on this site alone - use google and learn a thing or two on your own." did you miss the first time?
Second, have you read any of the other subthreads on this story? Have you even read much of slashdot? Did you steal that uid?
I write a computer program - if I can't charge for it how should I get paid?
Did you really get "can't charge for it" out of "your brain is broken, its stuck on believing that charging for distribution is the only way to compensate content creators for their efforts" - or where you just trying to illustrate my point about people's brains being stuck on charging for DISTRIBUTION and not for the work itself?
If you think an entire car can be reverse engineered and churned out on a production line in under two years, you just have no sense of proportion. The actual patentable engineering that goes into such a product is miniscule compared to the level of industrial engineering. I think you have over-estimated by a couple of orders of magnitude just how much patentable work goes into creating most products.
If I had any interests in a company that wastes long-term resources for short-term profitability... I would shed them off my portfolio in a heartbeat, I would imagine other smart investors would do too, that company is not going to last long.
What an amazing opinion to hold considering that is precisely the kind of pressure wall street brings to bear on all publicly traded companies. Not to mention, it is a huge distortion of what I have described anyway.
Well, similar situations can happen with journalists and companies.
They can happen but it is 100% the fault of the company. Number one rule of PR - don't tell REPORTERS something that you do not want reported. Especially a reporter that has been hypercritical of your company for years now. There is absolutely no way The Inq fired Demarjian for something like that. That you would claim it so is just you projecting your own issues on whatever actually happened. As far as you actually know, he quit for greener pastures - with Magee gone, the place probably isn't the same work environment it once was.
Charlie Demerjian, who was fired from The Inquirer for a number of reasons, including making shit up.
Like what? That's a hell of a big accusation just to take on faith.
I think they cut him out of the information loop because he leaked some info he wasn't supposed to.
Unlikely. Because the Inq never signs NDAs. That's their official policy and has been since Mike Magee founded it.
They could really do us a solid if they were to make a big todo about the reciprocity. Most americans have no clue how bad it is because they don't have to suffer through it. If the brazilians would take the time to explain exactly why each american gets a symbolic anal cavity search, it would go a long way towards getting the problem fixed back here.
chinas procedure is not worse ... you are most likely a US guy who doesn't go through border pain when entering ... so you have no comparison.
I agree. A close friend of mine travels a lot for business - asia, europe and within the USA. She was bitching about how terrible passport control was in europe - some sort of long line she had to go through the last time she was in Spain. But she had absolutely no idea what non-citizens go through on entry to the US because, as a citizen, she's never had to suffer it herself. She flat out refused to believe me when I told her how fuckt it is, had to dig up articles on fox and cnn before she would accept it.
Well it could also be because a Rio olympics would be really awesome. I don't think Chicago could compete on atmosphere with Rio.
Plus the gander would get a little taste of the goose sauce too - Brazil is one of the few nations to 'retaliate' and start fingerprinting Americans (and only Americans) who enter the country:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/06/1073268024215.html
What would motivate them to create new innovative products if they spend years of research and perfecting a product only to get it copied by their competition who does not invest money in said research? (therefore have lower costs). I honestly can't see why they would unless they are doing it as a hobby. Care to enlighten me?
The difference between being first to market and second to market with a half-assed copy.
As someone who has participated in the tear-down and inspection of competitors products (yes all of the big companies do it) if it took years of research to perfect, no one is going to be able to reverse-engineer and then bring up an assembly-line in a day, a week or even a month. And when they do, there is also the question of whether they screw it up and start shipping defective products.
That is the profit window.
Maybe it means that some kinds of R&D won't be profitable - but then again, there are plenty that aren't profitable under the current system too. Or maybe it means that those kinds of R&D get funded in a sort of coopetition between a group of different manufacturers who will all use the results in custom ways - similar to how patent licensing creates the same effect but only after the fact instead of up-front.
Freedom of speech is intended to protect your right to safely express your opinions and beliefs without being persecuted.
While that is certainly true, it is far from the only reason freedom of speech is held in such high regard. Your interpretation that political expression is the only reason we have the right to freedom of speech is entirely bogus. For one thing, if that were the case then you can damn well bet it would have been spelled out that way in the bill of rights. Instead, they put no qualifiers - none whatsoever, not even a teeny tiny restriction - in the 1st amendment.
Second freedom of speech - including the right to make a billion copies of harry potter is the natural state. If it were not for government interference we would all have that right.
As good as this sounds, when this was actually the case, there was far less creative work available for regular people.
There also was no easy way to organise any sort of mass patronage, thus the rich guy paying for an artist's livelihood out of his own pocket is no longer an useful analogy or excuse for copyright.
This is quite a reasonable philosophy to hold, and in no way illogical or immoral.
Except that's not what the EdIII claimed. He didn't claim compensation was logical or moral. He claimed copyright as the means to such was logical and moral. Like him, you have done very ltitle to show that it is either.
You're why no one seriously agrees with abolishing copyright. Have a nice day.
Wow! Me personally? What a heavy burden I carry.
I guess that makes you a "no one" then, huh?
Without intellectual property there's nothing to stop him from doing so.
Contract law does not rest on IP law. If that factory manager decides to break his non-compete and non-disclosure contracts with you, you don't need copyrights or patents to be made whole.
Like I said, you really haven't thought very deeply about this, even though all the points you are bringing up have been argued to death here a thousand times before.
PS - what shish said.
How does that help the author?
It doesn't. But it doesn't 'hurt' the author either which is what you've been implying with your use of the term 'steal' - which is totally inappropriate for situation as described anyway.
Yes. Or they can sell a chapter at a time for a month's worth of income.
Which a publisher can just copy and resell without paying the author.
Yeaaah, this whole sell it up front while you still have control over it idea just isn't really sinking in with you is it? You seem to be unable to formulate a consistent set of objections to that singular idea and thus have taken to quoting out of context and taking pot-shots at those quotes. I'm afraid your inconsistency makes it pointless to debate the subject with you, I should have realized that would be the case when your first question was answered in my original post. So sorry to have wasted your time.
Nice deflection, but no reason. A true TBP fan boi if one ever existed.
TBP? What is that?
And "no reason" - did you miss the entire second paragraph? Or is it because I pre-deflected the typical accusatory demand to be spoon-fed ideas that anyone with a true interest in the economic implications of zero-marginal-cost distribution would already be familiar with, thus leaving a lazy person with no options besides base insults?
That's not an answer at all. You expect authors to sell books at five year's worth of income so they can still make a living when a publisher steals it?
Yes. Or they can sell a chapter at a time for a month's worth of income.
Or they can do the lecture circuit.
Or they can use the credentials of being a published expert in the field to get a consulting gig in their field of expertise.
TODAY 99% of published authors are unable to make a living purely from royalties either, so it isn't like the result here is going to be a significant change.
The other thing about a "publisher stealing" that you don't get is that not only can ONE publisher 'steal' it - ALL of them can. It then becomes a race to the bottom where the only publishers that will make money are the ones who have the cheapest and most efficient distribution system and are able to live off the thinnest of margins. At that point they aren't 'stealing' anything, they are providing a service to the end-user - distribution - and that's all they are getting paid for because the margins will be so thin in such hyper-competitive market.
How does that help GPL?
How doesn't it? Most people working on GPL software are doing it for compensation already, as long as they get paid for the work they put in then so what?
Sure anyone who buys locked-up GPL software is getting screwed but the solution to that is quite pragmatic and simple - don't buy software that doesn't come with the source in the first place.
Thing is Mega corp can buy one copy from you then produce more copies at a lesser price than you
"So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth"
I find it so funny that Slashdot is so against copyright especially since the IT industry is so dependent on copyrights and patents in order to function, its like most of the people in Slashdot is wishing their jobs away.
Shows what little you know. Most software development is custom work, off the shelf has been a growing but still minority piece of the pie.
For the most part patents and copyrights have caused stagnation and massive amounts of overhead in the industry - just look at the huge number of "defensive patents" that any large tech corp holds today - they never intend to use the patents to generate revenue or even necessarily any actual products, only to protect themselves from the occasional patent troll, and to keep the little guys - the real innovators - out of the market.
As a dentist I'm so glad that the copyright issue does not affect me directly.
Which is probably why you haven't thought very deeply about it either.
And what exactly is to stop a publisher just stealing an author's book and printing it without him seeing a penny?
Or a software company ripping off a GPL project without giving anything back?
"So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth"
Last I checked, one of the "A"'s in MPAA and RIAA stood for "America". Also, last I checked, neither Sweden no the Ukraine were in America.
Yeah, but the OTHER 'A' stands for Ass. and there are Asses in ALL countries!
Morality -- Are you really bringing copyrights into the realm of Good, Bad, Evil, and Virtuous?
Freedom of speech is good and virtuous.
Copyrights are restriction on freedom of speech, ergo they are the opposite of good and virtuous.
You connect the dots.
2) Financial -- Point of sale or performance only.
Bingo was his nameo!
What would stop a megacorp from just copying your works and using their existing infrastructure and wealth to distribute your creations?
Absolutely nothing. So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth. Then it doesn't matter if megacorp spends their own money to distribute a million copies, the creator's been paid and all those copies megacorp has distributed are just free advertising for the creator's next work.
3) Logical. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The thinking behind copyright is valid and reasonable.
Maybe that was true before the internet made copyright enforcement impossible, now -- under current conditions -- is quite logical to say that copyright is entirely unreasonable.
Owning ideas is as valid a philosophy as not being able to own ideas.
Yes indeed, just as sensible as legislating pi to be exactly 3.14. With out billions of dollars spent on lawyers guns and, er, money, copyright could never even pretend to exist. But the free distribution of ideas, well that takes exactly zero dollars to make happen, its the natural state and has been since the dawn of man sitting around campfires reciting oral traditions.
Copyright isn't even the ownership of an idea anyway, its the ownership of the right to distribute that idea.
Of course, you could not be more wrong if you tried. Those "dinosaurs" as you call them are being very quickly replaced by young 20 somethings that are creating new and interesting content. They need capitol to do this,
Heeelarious freudian slip dude.
Besides that your brain is broken, its stuck on believing that charging for distribution is the only way to compensate content creators for their efforts. Just because that's the way it has most obviously been done for the past century or two doesn't mean that's the only way it can or even should be done. And now you are going to demand that I explain stuff that's been discussed to death thousands of times before on this site alone - use google and learn a thing or two on your own.
He didn't mention anything about putting up a 5 star resort, or even sending food..
Ah, so he was making a joke!
I guess that means he was joking about the first two points too.
3. Violent crime should be punished by an automatic sentence to one of the US owned Pacific Islands such as the Johnston Atoll.
So, you want to reward criminals by sending them to a tropical island with nothing but sand, sun and surf? Those islands aren't quite Hawaii, but a lot of people wouldn't mind a year's vacation in the archipelago.
The Aleutian Islands, on the other hand, would be a lot less desirable of a destination.