You know, lately I've been seeing a lot of fear-mongering Slashdotters talking about how we all have a moral responsibility to not to business with companies that do business with China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc.
Now, last I checked it was illegal for US corps to do business with North Korea and Iran, so I'm never quite sure why those are brought up. But China is a popular target. I can only imagine this is because we are starting to get nervous about such a massive economic force. Sort of in the same way people in the eighties used to yell "Go Home, Jap!" to anyone who looked Asian on the street. But I digress.
Well-meaning (and I do believe they are well meaning) people have said lots of things about how we ought to "not buy Chinese goods" because the Chinese government doesn't respect basic human rights, and the only way to make them see the light of day is to hit them where it hurts -- financially. We say the same thing about "sweat shops" in Vietnam or wherever operated by firms like Nike or Reebok. Not sure if it's still the rage to go off about these.
Now, as a disclaimer, I actually live in China (I'm American, though). I want to advance a theory about totaletarian regimes: they are non-sustainable if the populace is becoming wealthy.
Now obviously this doesn't apply to a place like North Korea where trading with the country (if it were even legal) really means trading with the government, and not with the people. But China and Vietnam are not like that, despite what you may have heard.
In the 1970s, China was in the throes of the cultural revolution; people truly had no rights, they were expected to spend several hours of their day reciting "Wei Renmin Fuwu" and other works of Chairman and Poet Mao Ze Dong. But those days have been a thing of the past since Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms in the late seventies and early eighties, reforms which continue to this day.
As a direct result of these reforms, money paid into China not only makes the government richer (you can't avoid this, people pay taxes on income) but also, and this is important, it makes the people more wealthy.
Chinese people are not living like beggars (unless you're in Guizhou or something). Especially people in the cities are beginning to do very well for themselves. And if you're in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, well, you're essentially living at first world standards. Really.
The problem is, as people get more wealthy, more prosperous, more educated, more connected to the outside world -- read, not isolated from it as they were during the cultural revolution -- they come into contact with a lot of ideas that had previously been considered non grata by the government. You know, like democracy. The other week I was in Beijing and there was a huge advertisement for a development site with Chinese characters as tall as me saying "Bringing a little more culture, a little more civility, and a little more democracy (!!!) to Beijing."
This is the city that sent tanks against students demonstrating just 15 years ago.
Why is this happening? Because the Chinese government too wants to get rich. Even back in the days when Mao had a swimming pool built for himself in Zhong Nan Hai while everyone else was starving, the best the government cronies could hope for was a lifestyle equivalent to a beverly hills hillbilly. Not shabby, certainly. But nothing (and I mean nothing) like what they enjoy now.
Because they want to encourage more investment, they are continuously relaxing their controls. There are two reasons for this. One: certain technology, like the internet, is necessary for commerce. It can also be used by Chinese citizens to learn uncomfortable truths. Because they are addicted to wealth, they mostly ignore the second issue (the Chinese firewall is a joke -- it's there so they can say they're doing something: most of the stuff that's blocked is irrelevant and a surprising large amount of openly rebellious material in Chi
You can't be serious. Do you live in a world that only includes the US? I live in China, and let me tell you something, there are a goddamn truckload of people here and most of them are not yet on-line -- computers weren't common outside of the government 10 years ago and now, well, there's an explosion happening.
It seems westerners are wont to forget that the whole world is not developed but much (most) of it is developing. Countries like China and India are on their way to being the next century's superpowers -- maybe you think they're going to do that without internet connectivity?
Much of the impetus for IPv6 started in Asia. It is heavily backed by mobile phone companies that want to have internet enabled mobile phones. There are only 4 billion IPv4 addresses -- there are more people in the world than that. When everyone has a cell phone, well, you do the math.
It is absolutely true that the US will not be running out of addresses anytime soon -- but the US is a small place, relatively speaking. IPv6 adoption will begin in Asia and spread from here, as most technology seems to.
It's kind of like high resolution displays -- back in the old days, in the west we all had teletypes and we were happy. But the Japanese weren't. The low-res displays were inadequate for displaying the characters they use to write their language. We said, "ASCII-7 ought to be good enough for anyone." They said, screw that. The result? High resolution displays, printers, and the like, within the reach of the average consumer. And what happened after that? The gaming industry, which had previously made do with text based games like Rogue and Zork, leveraged this new technology and a whole new industry was born that no one saw coming.
If we in the west had been able to push our shortsighted views on the world back then, thinking arrogantly that because we designed the technology we "knew what was best" for everyone else out there, the world would be a very different place. Thankfully, as a direct consequence of the demand created by Asian languages for high resolution displays, consumer technology with graphical capabilities came all that much faster.
IPv6 will be the same story. It can coexist easily with IPv4, and IPv4 is effectively a subset of IPv6. To satisfy their IP needs, will the Chinese government buy IPv4 addresses from the American ISPs that "own" them? Hell no. They'll just build an IPv6 backbone and be done with it. They can still surf all your sites. You just can't surf theirs. How does this hurt them?
Japan and Korea will likely do the same (Japan, after all, has been the most vocal proponent of IPv6 adoption -- in the old days you couldn't get much in the way of non-Japanese documentation for IPv6) and they will link seamlessly with China and India and whoever else.
In these places, Internet enabled phones will quickly become common place because the infrastructure is not holding them back. Cell phones are more common in Asia than in the US anyway.
And then, certainly, some enterprising hackers and businessmen will find some other, unanticipated uses for the billions of addresses each person can call his own without causing anything remotely resembling a shortage. The analog of gaming, if you will. And the US, as has been the case recently, will be left out of the loop.
I don't give a shit, I live in Asia. But maybe you should think twice about being a luddite.
Um, yes. Believe it or not, I knew that. The link to that file on Perry-Castaneda also refers to it as the Mongol dominions.
Genghis Khan was no doubt Mongolian, and the Yuan dynasty was founded by Mongolians -- one of the many ethnic groups that have existed in China since, well, forever. Mongolia (outer, that is) was a part of China essentially up until it became a part of the USSR. It hasn't been an independant state for long.
Their capital was in Beijing. The Mongolian horde was large, but not large enough to administer an empire that size. Like most people that have invaded China, within in a generation, they were sinicized.
The Mongolia/China distinction is essentially a modern one. Not arguing that they're ethnically and culuturally different, though, from other Chinese ethnic groups (hint: China has lots, all different from each other).
Just so that you know (in case you don't) money that goes into "someone's back pocket" does not just stay in that person's back pocket. Regardless of whether that someone happens to be Mr. Gates or your grandmother.
It gets invested, meaning that it's up for "sale" on the loanable funds market. Even if Mr. Gates simply put all his money into a big-ass savings account rather than hire a professional money manager (or team of money managers) to produce a diversified portfolio of assets, the money that is in the bank does not stay there. Indeed, banks are businesses, and they make money from the interest they charge on the loans they give. They aren't required to keep all of your money in the bank at all times. They give it to other people.
Those people invest it, build businesses, charities, whatever. Some of the ventures succeed, and others don't; some loans default, some are paid off. In the end though, the banks make money, and wealth is created, because Mr. Gates still has his 40 bn or however much it is, but x number of companies that didn't exist before now do because the loan they got from the bank was made possible by the cash reserves in his "back pocket".
The very rich don't actually spend much of their money, percentage-wise. That doesn't mean that it gets converted into gold and buried on a beach somewhere. It gets funneled back into the economy.
Maybe, but I don't think that was his point. His point was that DARPANet, which undeniably grew into one of the most impressive of man's modern achievements, started as a government funded project. This was in response to the GP's assertion that the government fails to do anything right.
The truth is, private enterprise has so far been pretty bad about architecting anything with interoperability in mind. As economists say, incentives matter, and they're right: there's no incentive for a private company to make life easier for its competitors. That's why Microsoft won't release the doc format, that's why Sony loves MD so much, I mean, you'd have to be purposely daft to not be able to list literally hundreds of examples of private companies attempting to lock out the competetion and lock in their customers. I'm not even going to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, in all cases.
But -- and there is a but -- the internet was, and remains, a network of networks. If any project depends on interoperability, it's the internet. So while I don't doubt that efficient private enterprise could have come up with something similar or maybe even better, how long would it have taken? How long would we have been stuck using Prodigy? Bill Gates didn't even see the internet boom coming!
What always cracks me up about communists and libertarians is how inflexible some of them seem to be. Communists believe that the market is evil, and do all they can to suppress it , and libertarians worship the invisible hand to the point that they can't see that there are places where the market is simply not as efficient as, dare I say it, socialist programs. The horror!
The funny thing is that economists recognize that there are some things the free market does poorly, even though in most cases it is by far and away the most efficient allocator of scarce resources. Why can't you? It's not like it has to be one or the other.
Actually, I think it sort of is. But you have to look long-term. And it's important that we make the distinction between Free software and open source software to really grasp why.
So let's talk about proprietary software in a reasonably non-judgemental way. Essentially, a company gets together and decides to write a bunch of software and then attempts to sell the binaries, hoping to recover the cost of investment. The software they write may be very good: in fact, it may be better than any of its competitors, Free or not. I'm saying this just so that you understand that there's nothing inherently better about Free software, quality-wise, in the short run.
Immediately though, the decision to develop proprietary software has some unwanted side-effects. There's a huge body of Free software whose only purpose is to help other people develop Free software: libraries, implementations of well-known but nonetheless complex algorithms, and so on. These are typically the best implementations available, because they have been widely tested, refined, debugged. They are generic and they are not innovative, in general. Many of them have been known for twenty years or more. They are, essentially, the building blocks of modern programs. A good program will add something to these blocks -- some innovation of its own -- but will still be made up mostly of things that have been done before. This is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" principle. It applies to most things, not just software.
A Free software developer is free to use these building blocks to rapidly develop high quality software, just by sticking these premade pieces together. There's no guarantee he'll do this well, or that he'll add any innvotation to the mix -- in fact, on average, he probably won't. But because he is working with good materials, he can 1) work fast and 2) be relatively sure of the robustness of the algorithms he is using.
A proprietary developer cannot do this. He must (barring a BSD-like solution) constantly reinvent the wheel to get to where the Free software developer is on day 1. So even if a company has better programmers, better management, better vision, and better innovation, it is still forced to waste much of its time developing in-house solutions to known problems, or licensing other proprietary solutions from other companies. Both of these options drive the price of development upwards. Further, reimplementations of even well understood processes introduce bugs, just as copying a book by hand introduces typos, even if you understand all the grammar and all the words on the page. This also holds the venture back. And hikes the cost further.
As time goes on, the body of Free software solutions to common problems continues to grow, bugs in these implementations get ironed out, and so on. So it's important to understand something about a Free software project: even if the project goes nowhere (and most of them don't), the work done by the programmers on the project remains forever in the hands of the people, waiting to be reused. This is an important point. If someone writes yet another MP3 player, and doesn't even finish it, but there's something of worth or interest in the code, it can be appropriated by someone else. It may not be. But it can be. It's easy to see that given enough time, there will be a tremendous amount of Free software.
Now, let's go back to our proprietary developers. They are exceptionally talented, exceptionally diligent, exceptionally well-funded and exceptionally lucky, and because of these factors they overcome the initial frustration of having to reinvent the wheel on so much stuff and actually produce an innovative product, and lo and behold, the market responds and it sells. People everywhere are using the product; the company IPOs and the stock price soars. Sound familiar? It should, it happens all the time. For a while (perhaps a year, perhaps ten, perhaps 100, perhaps more) the company operates as a going concern, gene
Two things: one, flies (like all insects) have a tracheal circulatory system. This means that they have no blood, but instead have a lot of small tubes (trachea) instead of veins and arteries that carry oxygen directly to the cells. As a result, your statement that a fly doesn't have many cavities is, well, wrong. Of course you could make the argument that these tubes are not closed, and so should be immune to a pressure change, but I very much doubt that the air circulating inside the fly's body would react to the pressure change as quickly as the pressure outside being acted on by the nuclear weapon would.
Two, "unless the fly was right at the epicenter and was incinerated" should be "unless the fly were right at the epicenter and were incinerated". I know, I know, grammar nazis annoy everyone, and my grammar is far from perfect, but I just want to point out that the subjunctive mood in english is... ahem... not yet dead!
(Incidentally, the reason you say were and not was is because your statement is a hypothesis, and is not in fact the case.)
I second your comment about math, at least. I was a math major in college. I think a lot of the geeks here think that women aren't all that into math because they remember taking math and in those classes women were a minority. This is because most of our readers were not actually math majors, and undergraduate math classes -- especially calculus and the like -- have a lot of non-math majors (specifically, CS and physics majors, where women have classically been underrepresented). Once you hit upper division, though, and those slackers cut out, the number of women jumps to around 60% in my case.
Roughly half the faculty (pretty evenly split) was female, and a number of them were specialists in their fields -- my graduate abstract algebra course was taught by a very, very competent german woman, for example. In my topology class senior year, 20 students showed up on day one and on the day of the final there were only 6 -- and 4 of them were girls. These are not "easy" subjects selected by people who are unable to cope with abstraction.
I've always been completely confused by people here that prattle on about how women don't like math and science as if its somehow accepted fact.
Of course, and I'm sure someone will be upset about this, but one of the reasons I couldn't cope with CS majors is because of the sort of socially inept dweebs the discipline seems to attract. It's always seemed to me that this is the deterent for most people, including women.
Society is certainly much less forgiving of women who cannot perform adequately socially. Perhaps this has something to do with it. But I'm not a sociologist, so I won't pretend to know.
Just wanted to support you on the math assertion with some anecdotal evidence (for what it's worth).
It's true that no GPL violation has ever gone to court. But it's not because no one has ever pushed the issue, quite the contrary: it's because the general assumption is that it will hold up in court, and no company really wants to risk it.
Little sensitive there, biodork. I wasn't trying to make any point other than PhDs not being bound by the hippocratic oath. That in no way implies that PhDs don't hold themselves to just as high a standard without the oath. Nor does it imply that doctors that take the oath take it seriously.
It only implies exactly what I said: that PhDs don't take the oath. It's really pretty simple.
No secret vendetta or hidden agenda here. You can take off your tin foil hat.
For what it's worth, Arabic music is already quite popular in France. It started out getting a lot of airtime because of the large North African population there, but with exposure it crept (much as Arab food has) into the culture in general. There's a lot of french/arab music these days (where for example a french artist uses arab tunes, or vice versa). I personally quite like a lot of the middle eastern music I hear. I think it really depends on exposure. Americans don't get much exposure to non-english music and I think they have a hard time getting over the whole "the language sounds different" thing, but that's much less true in Europe.
I expect middle eastern culture will enter the west through Europe, so if you're thinking of starting a profitable company, Europe might be a better place than America to set up shop.
And unfortunately, because "karma means nothing" to him, it's sitting at -1. What a shame. I don't have any modpoints but hopefully a +2 reply will help some mods with points boost it to somewhere bozos that don't read at -1 can enjoy it.
That's all well and good, except that Norway isn't part of the EU, and thus is not under any obligations whatsoever to comply with any "EU directives".
Just so you know. Not all of Europe is in the EU. Here's a link: European Member States.
You're essentially right, but I think you're overlooking something important: secondary effects. Your prediction that market capitalism as practiced in the United States will eventually produce a broadband network that is both fast and efficient economically is probably not incorrect. But what you're missing, I think, is this concept of the "public good" that the grandparent was talking about.
You see, the internet, like highways and running water, is increasingly becoming necessary infrastructure for businesses. While it is true that many of us on Slashdot use the internet primarily for porn, the truth is that the internet has also become a business enabler. Many firms, rightly or wrongly, perceive internet access as being something that they need to function in this day and age -- and so they preferentially set up shop in places where this service is fast, plentiful, and cheap.
Let's take roads as an example. Private roads are not impossible, and some Libertarians actually suggest that a privatized road system would be in the public interest, on the grounds that the lack of competition and the government's love of pork-barrel legislation and contracts that plague the current system would be absent in a private system, leading to greater allocative efficiency -- essentially, we the tax payers would get a high quality road system which would be cheaper to build. They may even be right about this, in the long run. But imagine you were a business, and you were considering setting up shop in a country whose roads were private. You would likely find that only places with high population densities and large amounts of thoroughfare have adequately developed road systems. Of course, this would hardly be surprising: no private entity would consider building a road to nowhere. It doesn't make good fiscal sense.
In the public system, we take the hit financially by allowing the government to handle the road system -- you'll get no argument from me that they are less efficient than the private sector in pretty much every possible way. However, because of their willingness to build roads without real concern about whether or not the investment will be profitable, places with low populations and low thoroughfares still have a good chance of not being rejected as a place to set up shop by businesses requiring good roads to function.
That's the key, really. When a government, say in France, Canada, or South Korea, undertakes a project to supply broadband overnight to even places that really don't currently have a pressing need for it, we the tax-payers most certainly do pay more. However, the investment pays off (or at least this is the idea) because we are ensuring, as we do with the road system, that businesses, no matter where they set up shop, have access to a resource they are increasingly deeming critical to their day to day operations.
An example of this is South Korea, which after the 96-97 Asian Financial Crisis was in very dire economic straits. The goverment at that time pledged a tremendous amount of capital to develop their current broadband system, with an eye to attracting foreign investment. It worked very, very well -- the South Korean economy has bounced back admirably, considering how badly it was doing.
Basically, the reason people are concerned about the lack of broadband in the US, at least in the business community, is not because we can't download porn fast enough, although I'll admit that would be welcome. Rather, it is because they are concerned (and rightly so) that companies will take broadband (or lack thereof) as the deciding factor in setting up operations. We don't need more companies setting up shop in NYC or SF, really. We need more companies in rural America, which is still largely dependant on agriculture (which is stupid, because the only way America stays competitive internationally in agriculture is with farm subsidies -- but that's another rant for another time).
I unfortunately reversed Say's Law in my original post. Say's Law states that supply creates demand, not that demand creates supply. The entry on wikipedia for Say's Law describes the idea and its ramifications for the curious. I botched it entirely with the reversal.
However, despite being embarassingly wrong on a public forum, I think that the underlying logic remains relatively intact. Consider: the existance of strong consumer demand for a product at a particular price in no way guarantees that suppliers will be able to meet that demand. Indeed, the law of demand states that lowering price will nearly always increase demand.
For example, I can guarantee that if spaceflight were completely safe and only cost say, 3 dollars per trip, there would be huge consumer demand. But this does not guarantee that suppliers will jump in and fill the need, because obviously, there's no way they can do this and make a profit, and turning a profit is what suppliers are about.
So the crux of my point, really, was that the existance of large demand does not guarantee supply. If technology is creating a price ceiling for distribution -- which seems likely, if digital distribution continues to drive the cost of distribution to zero and thus the profit to be made from distribution to zero -- then the companies currently depending on that business model will go out of business. Not a loss, really, as far as I'm concerned. Buggy whips and all that.
Again, appologies for my error. My memory is failing me.
Quite right, if you take "production" to mean "copying". Unfortunately, this isn't production, it is simply distribution. The actual production of content still requires labour, which is (and will remain) a scarce resource.
I know my post was quite long, and started out with a criticism of the original poster's logic, but in actuality, I agree with the original poster in most respects, I simply don't agree with the logic he used to arrive at the points he arrived at. I think if you read the rest of my post (I'm assuming you didn't, if you did, my appologies) you'll realize that I'm not trying to shoot him down.
I think what we're in now is a sort of transitional period. Consider that as recently as ten years ago, most music (for example) was not available for free, on-line. Consumers had to pay for copies, whereas now, they don't. The result is that their demand for content has increased greatly -- much of the stuff I download, for example, is not stuff that I would have considered buying (at least not at the price the RIAA was charging). I think I am typical in this regard: when a good costs more, we are more wary about our consumption of it. This is the law of demand in action.
The question that one has to ask, I think, is whether or not firms like the RIAA now have any incentive to distribute copies for money, especially as a core business model. Enough people are still buying music that they haven't really been harmed financially, despite their complaints -- many people claim to buy more music because they like to own CDs and now can listen to music before they buy. But I don't think CDs are here to stay. I think they are slowly being replaced by a completely digital distribution system.
This removes the need for an RIAA-style distribution system, certainly. But it does not remove the need for content creation. I believe content creation will persist, and I expect it will do so much more efficiently than it does now (I outlined this in my previous post). But to say that content is not "scarce" isn't much of an argument, frankly, because it requires scarce resources to create. Zero cost distribution is only beneficial once the content has been created, after all -- so the creation of content remains a process governed in some respects by the laws of supply and demand.
Of course, one could argue convincingly that musicians and artists will create content regardless of economic incentives, because they are motivated by something non-monetary to create -- and those that are only motivated by money don't usually produce much of worth anyway, so their loss is hardly a big deal. But on the flip side of the coin, it should be clear to anyone that an artist able to make his living doing what he loves is going to be far more prolific than one who must have another, "real" career.
I outlined a number of ways I think artists will do just that, without the RIAA, in my original post.
Friend, you're mistaken. Copyright applies only to published works, not unpublished ones. When copyright on a derivative, published work expires, the entity holding the copyright is under no obligation whatsoever to publish the unpublished work from which it was derived. In this case, the "derivative" work is the binary distributed by Microsoft; the unpublished work from which it was derived is the source code.
In some cases, the source code (or parts of it) may have been published, under something like a shared source initiative -- and if that distribution happened long enough ago that copyright has expired, that published work would indeed become public domain. Only in this situtation would distribution of MS's source code be legal, and then only the source code that MS licensed (which is not necessarily the same code used to produce the binaries, and is not necessarily complete).
I'm entirely in agreement with the basic premise of your post (ie, that this-thing-we-call-IP is at best a legal fiction and at worst an abomination), but your logic doesn't make very much sense.
There's a lot of stuff that is debated in Economics, but the laws of supply and demand aren't in that category. When price for a good decreases, the quantity of goods demanded by consumers, all things being equal, will increase. Conversely, as the price of a good decreases, the willingness of a producer to supply that good decreases. It is these two laws, acting in concert, that act to bring the prices and quantity produced into equilibrium. It is true of all goods.
When the effective price of a good, such as music, for example, drops to zero, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that consumers start consuming it like crazy. It should also come as no surprise whatsoever that the suppliers of this good become less keen on supplying said product (or try their best to prevent the activities or competitors that are causing the price shift from entering the market -- which is what they are doing at present).
The idea in your post is not a new one: you've just stated Say's Law, a law in classical economics which suggests that supply is irrelevant because demand creates its own supply. Unfortunately, this idea doesn't appear to hold in most cases.
Here on Slashdot, we've come up with a number of reasons why the content creation industry (music and books, at least) will continue, regardless of whether the RIAA and the publishers perish or restructure. This is because, in actuality, these massive companies create little or no content at all themselves (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, little worthwhile content, but that's subjective). Instead, they have occupied a niche whereby they publish the works of others, and make a profit doing so. This was possible in the past because the machinery and technology required to mass produce was in almost all cases far out of the reach of individual artists and authors.
Despite what wide-eyed and bushy-tailed slashbots claim, that is still mostly true today, but it is clear that there is enabling technology on the horizon that will make most or all of their current services obsolete. The machinery and software required to record music and produce albums for artists is already something that a hobbyist can do in his or her garage, although at this point the quality isn't really competitive in most cases -- but it will be, and that's clear to anyone, as prices of equipment drop and free software replacements for expensive music editing and recording software finally get to a point where a critical mass of home-producers can use them. In the book-publishing industry, the rise of e-books, which despite setbacks will probably become quite a popular way of reading books in the future, makes the ability to print paper copies less valuable to authors.
The only real problem left that individuals have is distribution. Certainly, the internet allows anyone to make their music or books available, but there's no guarantee at all that interested readers/listeners will be able to access them (ie, find them). It therefore seems reasonable to assume that "after the revolution", the RIAA and many publishing houses will find themselves morphing into advertising and promotion houses that do what they currently do best -- PR. I expect they will be forced to do so through competition with smaller firms offering these services, at better rates and with contracts that needn't be signed in blood.
But none of this is going to happen overnight, and I anticipate that probably for a generation or so we're going to see a lot of fighting and foot dragging. In the end though, consumers will be left with a far more efficient (in terms of economic allocative efficiency) system that provides them with much the same goods they consume today, only cheaper (much cheaper). It may be that musicians in particu
I've been using Linux exclusively since 1996. Everyone I know who uses a DE uses GNOME; I know no one who uses KDE. In fact, when my old roommate's computer broke and I lent him my Alpha, I initially installed KDE because I'd heard it was more like Windows -- he hated it and loved GNOME.
What does this tell you?
Absolutely fucking nothing. It's a fact that lots of Linux users love KDE. It is also a fact that lots of them love GNOME. If KDE really were so prevalent, there wouldn't be so many flamewars about which is better -- what, do you think there are 3 GNOME users that psychotically prowl message boards and flame anyone pro-KDE to a crisp?
I mean honestly, repeat this again and again until you get it through your skull: anecdotes are not data. Repeat, anecdotes are not data.
Me, I use neither. PWM all the way, baby, and I hack the source myself. If I were so conceited as to think that my linux usage habits were normal, I might write a long winded post about how much nicer it is to use this environment. But I don't, because I'm not a retard.
While the OP's comment about China's culture being intact is certainly wrong, your explanation is just misinformation. Hopefully it's not deliberate.
First off, the KMT were hardly sent off to to Taiwan, they were driven there. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is what you meant and were simply not being precise. But as for culture going with them, I think the only way you can make an argument for that is if you are refering to the vast numbers of cultural treasures and relics looted by the KMT army as the retreated. Most of China's existing cultural treasure exists on Taiwan, and it's not because the KMT goverment protected what it had while the Mainland government didn't. Consider how much of what was in the Forbidden City is now in museums on Taiwan.
The I Ching is still around and was hardly "replaced" by Mao's little red book -- during Mao's cult of personality years, the little red book was studied by everyone, whereas the I Ching is mostly completely meaningless drivel well beyond the reaches of all but the most educated masses. It's classically been used by fortune tellers as a way to read omens and that usage remains. Any deeper interpretation is just new age crap. If you read Chinese (and my impression is that you probably don't) then you'd realize that expecting the common people to be able to decifer the I Ching a bit like you reading Homer in ancient greek, only harder.
Confucianism remains the driving force in how Chinese culture determines roles and the flow of respect on both sides of the strait. Collectivism was, I think, never popular, except in those years right after the revolution when the locals actually believed that cooperative iron smelts could transform China's rural economy into an industrialized one overnight.
And if you think T'ai Chi has been replaced by ping pong, then you're just nuts. Tell that to all the old men and women I see doing T'ai Chi here every morning, or the huge numbers of westerners so serious about its various styles that they move here for the sole purpose of learning it.
Amusingly, the event which destroyed much of mainland China's cultural heritage, the aptly named "Cultural Revolution", which began in 1966 and ended either in 1969 or as late as 1976, depending on whom you ask, went unmentioned in your post. But I guess facts aren't all that important when you're trying to associate loss of cultural heritage to a communist revolution, instead of to the acts of a megalomaniac leveraging a carefully crafted cult of personality to achieve ends that are widely derided by everyone on both sides of the strait.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, lately I've been seeing a lot of fear-mongering Slashdotters talking about how we all have a moral responsibility to not to business with companies that do business with China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc.
Now, last I checked it was illegal for US corps to do business with North Korea and Iran, so I'm never quite sure why those are brought up. But China is a popular target. I can only imagine this is because we are starting to get nervous about such a massive economic force. Sort of in the same way people in the eighties used to yell "Go Home, Jap!" to anyone who looked Asian on the street. But I digress.
Well-meaning (and I do believe they are well meaning) people have said lots of things about how we ought to "not buy Chinese goods" because the Chinese government doesn't respect basic human rights, and the only way to make them see the light of day is to hit them where it hurts -- financially. We say the same thing about "sweat shops" in Vietnam or wherever operated by firms like Nike or Reebok. Not sure if it's still the rage to go off about these.
Now, as a disclaimer, I actually live in China (I'm American, though). I want to advance a theory about totaletarian regimes: they are non-sustainable if the populace is becoming wealthy.
Now obviously this doesn't apply to a place like North Korea where trading with the country (if it were even legal) really means trading with the government, and not with the people. But China and Vietnam are not like that, despite what you may have heard.
In the 1970s, China was in the throes of the cultural revolution; people truly had no rights, they were expected to spend several hours of their day reciting "Wei Renmin Fuwu" and other works of Chairman and Poet Mao Ze Dong. But those days have been a thing of the past since Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms in the late seventies and early eighties, reforms which continue to this day.
As a direct result of these reforms, money paid into China not only makes the government richer (you can't avoid this, people pay taxes on income) but also, and this is important, it makes the people more wealthy.
Chinese people are not living like beggars (unless you're in Guizhou or something). Especially people in the cities are beginning to do very well for themselves. And if you're in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, well, you're essentially living at first world standards. Really.
The problem is, as people get more wealthy, more prosperous, more educated, more connected to the outside world -- read, not isolated from it as they were during the cultural revolution -- they come into contact with a lot of ideas that had previously been considered non grata by the government. You know, like democracy. The other week I was in Beijing and there was a huge advertisement for a development site with Chinese characters as tall as me saying "Bringing a little more culture, a little more civility, and a little more democracy (!!!) to Beijing."
This is the city that sent tanks against students demonstrating just 15 years ago.
Why is this happening? Because the Chinese government too wants to get rich. Even back in the days when Mao had a swimming pool built for himself in Zhong Nan Hai while everyone else was starving, the best the government cronies could hope for was a lifestyle equivalent to a beverly hills hillbilly. Not shabby, certainly. But nothing (and I mean nothing) like what they enjoy now.
Because they want to encourage more investment, they are continuously relaxing their controls. There are two reasons for this. One: certain technology, like the internet, is necessary for commerce. It can also be used by Chinese citizens to learn uncomfortable truths. Because they are addicted to wealth, they mostly ignore the second issue (the Chinese firewall is a joke -- it's there so they can say they're doing something: most of the stuff that's blocked is irrelevant and a surprising large amount of openly rebellious material in Chi
You can't be serious. Do you live in a world that only includes the US? I live in China, and let me tell you something, there are a goddamn truckload of people here and most of them are not yet on-line -- computers weren't common outside of the government 10 years ago and now, well, there's an explosion happening.
It seems westerners are wont to forget that the whole world is not developed but much (most) of it is developing. Countries like China and India are on their way to being the next century's superpowers -- maybe you think they're going to do that without internet connectivity?
Much of the impetus for IPv6 started in Asia. It is heavily backed by mobile phone companies that want to have internet enabled mobile phones. There are only 4 billion IPv4 addresses -- there are more people in the world than that. When everyone has a cell phone, well, you do the math.
It is absolutely true that the US will not be running out of addresses anytime soon -- but the US is a small place, relatively speaking. IPv6 adoption will begin in Asia and spread from here, as most technology seems to.
It's kind of like high resolution displays -- back in the old days, in the west we all had teletypes and we were happy. But the Japanese weren't. The low-res displays were inadequate for displaying the characters they use to write their language. We said, "ASCII-7 ought to be good enough for anyone." They said, screw that. The result? High resolution displays, printers, and the like, within the reach of the average consumer. And what happened after that? The gaming industry, which had previously made do with text based games like Rogue and Zork, leveraged this new technology and a whole new industry was born that no one saw coming.
If we in the west had been able to push our shortsighted views on the world back then, thinking arrogantly that because we designed the technology we "knew what was best" for everyone else out there, the world would be a very different place. Thankfully, as a direct consequence of the demand created by Asian languages for high resolution displays, consumer technology with graphical capabilities came all that much faster.
IPv6 will be the same story. It can coexist easily with IPv4, and IPv4 is effectively a subset of IPv6. To satisfy their IP needs, will the Chinese government buy IPv4 addresses from the American ISPs that "own" them? Hell no. They'll just build an IPv6 backbone and be done with it. They can still surf all your sites. You just can't surf theirs. How does this hurt them?
Japan and Korea will likely do the same (Japan, after all, has been the most vocal proponent of IPv6 adoption -- in the old days you couldn't get much in the way of non-Japanese documentation for IPv6) and they will link seamlessly with China and India and whoever else.
In these places, Internet enabled phones will quickly become common place because the infrastructure is not holding them back. Cell phones are more common in Asia than in the US anyway.
And then, certainly, some enterprising hackers and businessmen will find some other, unanticipated uses for the billions of addresses each person can call his own without causing anything remotely resembling a shortage. The analog of gaming, if you will. And the US, as has been the case recently, will be left out of the loop.
I don't give a shit, I live in Asia. But maybe you should think twice about being a luddite.
Um, yes. Believe it or not, I knew that. The link to that file on Perry-Castaneda also refers to it as the Mongol dominions.
Genghis Khan was no doubt Mongolian, and the Yuan dynasty was founded by Mongolians -- one of the many ethnic groups that have existed in China since, well, forever. Mongolia (outer, that is) was a part of China essentially up until it became a part of the USSR. It hasn't been an independant state for long.
Their capital was in Beijing. The Mongolian horde was large, but not large enough to administer an empire that size. Like most people that have invaded China, within in a generation, they were sinicized.
The Mongolia/China distinction is essentially a modern one. Not arguing that they're ethnically and culuturally different, though, from other Chinese ethnic groups (hint: China has lots, all different from each other).
Just so that you know (in case you don't) money that goes into "someone's back pocket" does not just stay in that person's back pocket. Regardless of whether that someone happens to be Mr. Gates or your grandmother.
It gets invested, meaning that it's up for "sale" on the loanable funds market. Even if Mr. Gates simply put all his money into a big-ass savings account rather than hire a professional money manager (or team of money managers) to produce a diversified portfolio of assets, the money that is in the bank does not stay there. Indeed, banks are businesses, and they make money from the interest they charge on the loans they give. They aren't required to keep all of your money in the bank at all times. They give it to other people.
Those people invest it, build businesses, charities, whatever. Some of the ventures succeed, and others don't; some loans default, some are paid off. In the end though, the banks make money, and wealth is created, because Mr. Gates still has his 40 bn or however much it is, but x number of companies that didn't exist before now do because the loan they got from the bank was made possible by the cash reserves in his "back pocket".
The very rich don't actually spend much of their money, percentage-wise. That doesn't mean that it gets converted into gold and buried on a beach somewhere. It gets funneled back into the economy.
Hope this helps...
Open source is sort of proof that it would be available...
But having said that, I agree with your post.
Maybe, but I don't think that was his point. His point was that DARPANet, which undeniably grew into one of the most impressive of man's modern achievements, started as a government funded project. This was in response to the GP's assertion that the government fails to do anything right.
The truth is, private enterprise has so far been pretty bad about architecting anything with interoperability in mind. As economists say, incentives matter, and they're right: there's no incentive for a private company to make life easier for its competitors. That's why Microsoft won't release the doc format, that's why Sony loves MD so much, I mean, you'd have to be purposely daft to not be able to list literally hundreds of examples of private companies attempting to lock out the competetion and lock in their customers. I'm not even going to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, in all cases.
But -- and there is a but -- the internet was, and remains, a network of networks. If any project depends on interoperability, it's the internet. So while I don't doubt that efficient private enterprise could have come up with something similar or maybe even better, how long would it have taken? How long would we have been stuck using Prodigy? Bill Gates didn't even see the internet boom coming!
What always cracks me up about communists and libertarians is how inflexible some of them seem to be. Communists believe that the market is evil, and do all they can to suppress it , and libertarians worship the invisible hand to the point that they can't see that there are places where the market is simply not as efficient as, dare I say it, socialist programs. The horror!
The funny thing is that economists recognize that there are some things the free market does poorly, even though in most cases it is by far and away the most efficient allocator of scarce resources. Why can't you? It's not like it has to be one or the other.
Dude... the Yuan dynasty? The largest empire the world has ever seen? Stretched all the way to Poland? Made the USSR look small in comparison?
Not a world superpower... Yeah, right.
Here's a map of China from 1300-1405. Yeah.
Actually, I think it sort of is. But you have to look long-term. And it's important that we make the distinction between Free software and open source software to really grasp why.
So let's talk about proprietary software in a reasonably non-judgemental way. Essentially, a company gets together and decides to write a bunch of software and then attempts to sell the binaries, hoping to recover the cost of investment. The software they write may be very good: in fact, it may be better than any of its competitors, Free or not. I'm saying this just so that you understand that there's nothing inherently better about Free software, quality-wise, in the short run.
Immediately though, the decision to develop proprietary software has some unwanted side-effects. There's a huge body of Free software whose only purpose is to help other people develop Free software: libraries, implementations of well-known but nonetheless complex algorithms, and so on. These are typically the best implementations available, because they have been widely tested, refined, debugged. They are generic and they are not innovative, in general. Many of them have been known for twenty years or more. They are, essentially, the building blocks of modern programs. A good program will add something to these blocks -- some innovation of its own -- but will still be made up mostly of things that have been done before. This is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" principle. It applies to most things, not just software.
A Free software developer is free to use these building blocks to rapidly develop high quality software, just by sticking these premade pieces together. There's no guarantee he'll do this well, or that he'll add any innvotation to the mix -- in fact, on average, he probably won't. But because he is working with good materials, he can 1) work fast and 2) be relatively sure of the robustness of the algorithms he is using.
A proprietary developer cannot do this. He must (barring a BSD-like solution) constantly reinvent the wheel to get to where the Free software developer is on day 1. So even if a company has better programmers, better management, better vision, and better innovation, it is still forced to waste much of its time developing in-house solutions to known problems, or licensing other proprietary solutions from other companies. Both of these options drive the price of development upwards. Further, reimplementations of even well understood processes introduce bugs, just as copying a book by hand introduces typos, even if you understand all the grammar and all the words on the page. This also holds the venture back. And hikes the cost further.
As time goes on, the body of Free software solutions to common problems continues to grow, bugs in these implementations get ironed out, and so on. So it's important to understand something about a Free software project: even if the project goes nowhere (and most of them don't), the work done by the programmers on the project remains forever in the hands of the people, waiting to be reused. This is an important point. If someone writes yet another MP3 player, and doesn't even finish it, but there's something of worth or interest in the code, it can be appropriated by someone else. It may not be. But it can be. It's easy to see that given enough time, there will be a tremendous amount of Free software.
Now, let's go back to our proprietary developers. They are exceptionally talented, exceptionally diligent, exceptionally well-funded and exceptionally lucky, and because of these factors they overcome the initial frustration of having to reinvent the wheel on so much stuff and actually produce an innovative product, and lo and behold, the market responds and it sells. People everywhere are using the product; the company IPOs and the stock price soars. Sound familiar? It should, it happens all the time. For a while (perhaps a year, perhaps ten, perhaps 100, perhaps more) the company operates as a going concern, gene
Two things: one, flies (like all insects) have a tracheal circulatory system. This means that they have no blood, but instead have a lot of small tubes (trachea) instead of veins and arteries that carry oxygen directly to the cells. As a result, your statement that a fly doesn't have many cavities is, well, wrong. Of course you could make the argument that these tubes are not closed, and so should be immune to a pressure change, but I very much doubt that the air circulating inside the fly's body would react to the pressure change as quickly as the pressure outside being acted on by the nuclear weapon would.
... ahem... not yet dead!
Two, "unless the fly was right at the epicenter and was incinerated" should be "unless the fly were right at the epicenter and were incinerated". I know, I know, grammar nazis annoy everyone, and my grammar is far from perfect, but I just want to point out that the subjunctive mood in english is
(Incidentally, the reason you say were and not was is because your statement is a hypothesis, and is not in fact the case.)
I second your comment about math, at least. I was a math major in college. I think a lot of the geeks here think that women aren't all that into math because they remember taking math and in those classes women were a minority. This is because most of our readers were not actually math majors, and undergraduate math classes -- especially calculus and the like -- have a lot of non-math majors (specifically, CS and physics majors, where women have classically been underrepresented). Once you hit upper division, though, and those slackers cut out, the number of women jumps to around 60% in my case.
Roughly half the faculty (pretty evenly split) was female, and a number of them were specialists in their fields -- my graduate abstract algebra course was taught by a very, very competent german woman, for example. In my topology class senior year, 20 students showed up on day one and on the day of the final there were only 6 -- and 4 of them were girls. These are not "easy" subjects selected by people who are unable to cope with abstraction.
I've always been completely confused by people here that prattle on about how women don't like math and science as if its somehow accepted fact.
Of course, and I'm sure someone will be upset about this, but one of the reasons I couldn't cope with CS majors is because of the sort of socially inept dweebs the discipline seems to attract. It's always seemed to me that this is the deterent for most people, including women.
Society is certainly much less forgiving of women who cannot perform adequately socially. Perhaps this has something to do with it. But I'm not a sociologist, so I won't pretend to know.
Just wanted to support you on the math assertion with some anecdotal evidence (for what it's worth).
It's true that no GPL violation has ever gone to court. But it's not because no one has ever pushed the issue, quite the contrary: it's because the general assumption is that it will hold up in court, and no company really wants to risk it.
Check this out for a start: FSF Compliance Lab.
Cheers.
Little sensitive there, biodork. I wasn't trying to make any point other than PhDs not being bound by the hippocratic oath. That in no way implies that PhDs don't hold themselves to just as high a standard without the oath. Nor does it imply that doctors that take the oath take it seriously.
It only implies exactly what I said: that PhDs don't take the oath. It's really pretty simple.
No secret vendetta or hidden agenda here. You can take off your tin foil hat.
I may be wrong, but I think the Hippocratic Oath is required for MDs, not PhDs.
For what it's worth, Arabic music is already quite popular in France. It started out getting a lot of airtime because of the large North African population there, but with exposure it crept (much as Arab food has) into the culture in general. There's a lot of french/arab music these days (where for example a french artist uses arab tunes, or vice versa). I personally quite like a lot of the middle eastern music I hear. I think it really depends on exposure. Americans don't get much exposure to non-english music and I think they have a hard time getting over the whole "the language sounds different" thing, but that's much less true in Europe.
I expect middle eastern culture will enter the west through Europe, so if you're thinking of starting a profitable company, Europe might be a better place than America to set up shop.
And unfortunately, because "karma means nothing" to him, it's sitting at -1. What a shame.
I don't have any modpoints but hopefully a +2 reply will help some mods with points boost it to somewhere bozos that don't read at -1 can enjoy it.
That's all well and good, except that Norway isn't part of the EU, and thus is not under any obligations whatsoever to comply with any "EU directives".
Just so you know. Not all of Europe is in the EU. Here's a link: European Member States.
You're essentially right, but I think you're overlooking something important: secondary effects. Your prediction that market capitalism as practiced in the United States will eventually produce a broadband network that is both fast and efficient economically is probably not incorrect. But what you're missing, I think, is this concept of the "public good" that the grandparent was talking about.
You see, the internet, like highways and running water, is increasingly becoming necessary infrastructure for businesses. While it is true that many of us on Slashdot use the internet primarily for porn, the truth is that the internet has also become a business enabler. Many firms, rightly or wrongly, perceive internet access as being something that they need to function in this day and age -- and so they preferentially set up shop in places where this service is fast, plentiful, and cheap.
Let's take roads as an example. Private roads are not impossible, and some Libertarians actually suggest that a privatized road system would be in the public interest, on the grounds that the lack of competition and the government's love of pork-barrel legislation and contracts that plague the current system would be absent in a private system, leading to greater allocative efficiency -- essentially, we the tax payers would get a high quality road system which would be cheaper to build. They may even be right about this, in the long run. But imagine you were a business, and you were considering setting up shop in a country whose roads were private. You would likely find that only places with high population densities and large amounts of thoroughfare have adequately developed road systems. Of course, this would hardly be surprising: no private entity would consider building a road to nowhere. It doesn't make good fiscal sense.
In the public system, we take the hit financially by allowing the government to handle the road system -- you'll get no argument from me that they are less efficient than the private sector in pretty much every possible way. However, because of their willingness to build roads without real concern about whether or not the investment will be profitable, places with low populations and low thoroughfares still have a good chance of not being rejected as a place to set up shop by businesses requiring good roads to function.
That's the key, really. When a government, say in France, Canada, or South Korea, undertakes a project to supply broadband overnight to even places that really don't currently have a pressing need for it, we the tax-payers most certainly do pay more. However, the investment pays off (or at least this is the idea) because we are ensuring, as we do with the road system, that businesses, no matter where they set up shop, have access to a resource they are increasingly deeming critical to their day to day operations.
An example of this is South Korea, which after the 96-97 Asian Financial Crisis was in very dire economic straits. The goverment at that time pledged a tremendous amount of capital to develop their current broadband system, with an eye to attracting foreign investment. It worked very, very well -- the South Korean economy has bounced back admirably, considering how badly it was doing.
Basically, the reason people are concerned about the lack of broadband in the US, at least in the business community, is not because we can't download porn fast enough, although I'll admit that would be welcome. Rather, it is because they are concerned (and rightly so) that companies will take broadband (or lack thereof) as the deciding factor in setting up operations. We don't need more companies setting up shop in NYC or SF, really. We need more companies in rural America, which is still largely dependant on agriculture (which is stupid, because the only way America stays competitive internationally in agriculture is with farm subsidies -- but that's another rant for another time).
Cheers.
We are in complete agreement.
I unfortunately reversed Say's Law in my original post. Say's Law states that supply creates demand, not that demand creates supply. The entry on wikipedia for Say's Law describes the idea and its ramifications for the curious. I botched it entirely with the reversal.
However, despite being embarassingly wrong on a public forum, I think that the underlying logic remains relatively intact. Consider: the existance of strong consumer demand for a product at a particular price in no way guarantees that suppliers will be able to meet that demand. Indeed, the law of demand states that lowering price will nearly always increase demand.
For example, I can guarantee that if spaceflight were completely safe and only cost say, 3 dollars per trip, there would be huge consumer demand. But this does not guarantee that suppliers will jump in and fill the need, because obviously, there's no way they can do this and make a profit, and turning a profit is what suppliers are about.
So the crux of my point, really, was that the existance of large demand does not guarantee supply. If technology is creating a price ceiling for distribution -- which seems likely, if digital distribution continues to drive the cost of distribution to zero and thus the profit to be made from distribution to zero -- then the companies currently depending on that business model will go out of business. Not a loss, really, as far as I'm concerned. Buggy whips and all that.
Again, appologies for my error. My memory is failing me.
Quite right, if you take "production" to mean "copying". Unfortunately, this isn't production, it is simply distribution. The actual production of content still requires labour, which is (and will remain) a scarce resource.
I know my post was quite long, and started out with a criticism of the original poster's logic, but in actuality, I agree with the original poster in most respects, I simply don't agree with the logic he used to arrive at the points he arrived at. I think if you read the rest of my post (I'm assuming you didn't, if you did, my appologies) you'll realize that I'm not trying to shoot him down.
I think what we're in now is a sort of transitional period. Consider that as recently as ten years ago, most music (for example) was not available for free, on-line. Consumers had to pay for copies, whereas now, they don't. The result is that their demand for content has increased greatly -- much of the stuff I download, for example, is not stuff that I would have considered buying (at least not at the price the RIAA was charging). I think I am typical in this regard: when a good costs more, we are more wary about our consumption of it. This is the law of demand in action.
The question that one has to ask, I think, is whether or not firms like the RIAA now have any incentive to distribute copies for money, especially as a core business model. Enough people are still buying music that they haven't really been harmed financially, despite their complaints -- many people claim to buy more music because they like to own CDs and now can listen to music before they buy. But I don't think CDs are here to stay. I think they are slowly being replaced by a completely digital distribution system.
This removes the need for an RIAA-style distribution system, certainly. But it does not remove the need for content creation. I believe content creation will persist, and I expect it will do so much more efficiently than it does now (I outlined this in my previous post). But to say that content is not "scarce" isn't much of an argument, frankly, because it requires scarce resources to create. Zero cost distribution is only beneficial once the content has been created, after all -- so the creation of content remains a process governed in some respects by the laws of supply and demand.
Of course, one could argue convincingly that musicians and artists will create content regardless of economic incentives, because they are motivated by something non-monetary to create -- and those that are only motivated by money don't usually produce much of worth anyway, so their loss is hardly a big deal. But on the flip side of the coin, it should be clear to anyone that an artist able to make his living doing what he loves is going to be far more prolific than one who must have another, "real" career.
I outlined a number of ways I think artists will do just that, without the RIAA, in my original post.
Regards...
Friend, you're mistaken. Copyright applies only to published works, not unpublished ones. When copyright on a derivative, published work expires, the entity holding the copyright is under no obligation whatsoever to publish the unpublished work from which it was derived. In this case, the "derivative" work is the binary distributed by Microsoft; the unpublished work from which it was derived is the source code.
In some cases, the source code (or parts of it) may have been published, under something like a shared source initiative -- and if that distribution happened long enough ago that copyright has expired, that published work would indeed become public domain. Only in this situtation would distribution of MS's source code be legal, and then only the source code that MS licensed (which is not necessarily the same code used to produce the binaries, and is not necessarily complete).
Hopefully that clears things up for you a bit.
I'm entirely in agreement with the basic premise of your post (ie, that this-thing-we-call-IP is at best a legal fiction and at worst an abomination), but your logic doesn't make very much sense.
There's a lot of stuff that is debated in Economics, but the laws of supply and demand aren't in that category. When price for a good decreases, the quantity of goods demanded by consumers, all things being equal, will increase. Conversely, as the price of a good decreases, the willingness of a producer to supply that good decreases. It is these two laws, acting in concert, that act to bring the prices and quantity produced into equilibrium. It is true of all goods.
When the effective price of a good, such as music, for example, drops to zero, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that consumers start consuming it like crazy. It should also come as no surprise whatsoever that the suppliers of this good become less keen on supplying said product (or try their best to prevent the activities or competitors that are causing the price shift from entering the market -- which is what they are doing at present).
The idea in your post is not a new one: you've just stated Say's Law, a law in classical economics which suggests that supply is irrelevant because demand creates its own supply. Unfortunately, this idea doesn't appear to hold in most cases.
Here on Slashdot, we've come up with a number of reasons why the content creation industry (music and books, at least) will continue, regardless of whether the RIAA and the publishers perish or restructure. This is because, in actuality, these massive companies create little or no content at all themselves (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, little worthwhile content, but that's subjective). Instead, they have occupied a niche whereby they publish the works of others, and make a profit doing so. This was possible in the past because the machinery and technology required to mass produce was in almost all cases far out of the reach of individual artists and authors.
Despite what wide-eyed and bushy-tailed slashbots claim, that is still mostly true today, but it is clear that there is enabling technology on the horizon that will make most or all of their current services obsolete. The machinery and software required to record music and produce albums for artists is already something that a hobbyist can do in his or her garage, although at this point the quality isn't really competitive in most cases -- but it will be, and that's clear to anyone, as prices of equipment drop and free software replacements for expensive music editing and recording software finally get to a point where a critical mass of home-producers can use them. In the book-publishing industry, the rise of e-books, which despite setbacks will probably become quite a popular way of reading books in the future, makes the ability to print paper copies less valuable to authors.
The only real problem left that individuals have is distribution. Certainly, the internet allows anyone to make their music or books available, but there's no guarantee at all that interested readers/listeners will be able to access them (ie, find them). It therefore seems reasonable to assume that "after the revolution", the RIAA and many publishing houses will find themselves morphing into advertising and promotion houses that do what they currently do best -- PR. I expect they will be forced to do so through competition with smaller firms offering these services, at better rates and with contracts that needn't be signed in blood.
But none of this is going to happen overnight, and I anticipate that probably for a generation or so we're going to see a lot of fighting and foot dragging. In the end though, consumers will be left with a far more efficient (in terms of economic allocative efficiency) system that provides them with much the same goods they consume today, only cheaper (much cheaper). It may be that musicians in particu
The .cn TLD is China, not .ch. I believe .ch is Switzerland (I remember it vaguely from the days of lyrics.ch, that was a great site.)
I've been using Linux exclusively since 1996. Everyone I know who uses a DE uses GNOME; I know no one who uses KDE. In fact, when my old roommate's computer broke and I lent him my Alpha, I initially installed KDE because I'd heard it was more like Windows -- he hated it and loved GNOME.
What does this tell you?
Absolutely fucking nothing. It's a fact that lots of Linux users love KDE. It is also a fact that lots of them love GNOME. If KDE really were so prevalent, there wouldn't be so many flamewars about which is better -- what, do you think there are 3 GNOME users that psychotically prowl message boards and flame anyone pro-KDE to a crisp?
I mean honestly, repeat this again and again until you get it through your skull: anecdotes are not data. Repeat, anecdotes are not data.
Me, I use neither. PWM all the way, baby, and I hack the source myself. If I were so conceited as to think that my linux usage habits were normal, I might write a long winded post about how much nicer it is to use this environment. But I don't, because I'm not a retard.
Seriously.
With all due respect, you're an idiot.
While the OP's comment about China's culture being intact is certainly wrong, your explanation is just misinformation. Hopefully it's not deliberate.
First off, the KMT were hardly sent off to to Taiwan, they were driven there. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is what you meant and were simply not being precise. But as for culture going with them, I think the only way you can make an argument for that is if you are refering to the vast numbers of cultural treasures and relics looted by the KMT army as the retreated. Most of China's existing cultural treasure exists on Taiwan, and it's not because the KMT goverment protected what it had while the Mainland government didn't. Consider how much of what was in the Forbidden City is now in museums on Taiwan.
The I Ching is still around and was hardly "replaced" by Mao's little red book -- during Mao's cult of personality years, the little red book was studied by everyone, whereas the I Ching is mostly completely meaningless drivel well beyond the reaches of all but the most educated masses. It's classically been used by fortune tellers as a way to read omens and that usage remains. Any deeper interpretation is just new age crap. If you read Chinese (and my impression is that you probably don't) then you'd realize that expecting the common people to be able to decifer the I Ching a bit like you reading Homer in ancient greek, only harder.
Confucianism remains the driving force in how Chinese culture determines roles and the flow of respect on both sides of the strait. Collectivism was, I think, never popular, except in those years right after the revolution when the locals actually believed that cooperative iron smelts could transform China's rural economy into an industrialized one overnight.
And if you think T'ai Chi has been replaced by ping pong, then you're just nuts. Tell that to all the old men and women I see doing T'ai Chi here every morning, or the huge numbers of westerners so serious about its various styles that they move here for the sole purpose of learning it.
Amusingly, the event which destroyed much of mainland China's cultural heritage, the aptly named "Cultural Revolution", which began in 1966 and ended either in 1969 or as late as 1976, depending on whom you ask, went unmentioned in your post. But I guess facts aren't all that important when you're trying to associate loss of cultural heritage to a communist revolution, instead of to the acts of a megalomaniac leveraging a carefully crafted cult of personality to achieve ends that are widely derided by everyone on both sides of the strait.