However, you can note that in one country, 60% of the work is being done for pleasure, 20% for scratching an itch, and 20% for other reasons, while in another country, those same distributions are 30%, 50%, and 20%. And then you can make observations about the amount of development done in those countries and the different factors behind them. Oh, that's what the writer did, isn't it?
A more important observation he is making is that you are more likely to proprietize the code if you can make money doing so; otherwise, you're more likely to leave it open. So the US, which far outstrips Europe in per-capita IT spending, lags behind Europe in per-capita open source development.
Or perhaps you have trouble dealing with topics outside your expertise.
This paper was not written in po-mo babble, it's straightforward and reasonable. It's just dealing in a complex way with things that we usually deal with by taking for granted. Instead of parroting the platitudes that the topic usually get (I can't believe that would-be computer scientists are so comfortable bandying about anecdotes instead of data) he looked at the numbers and made causation/correlation observations that usually get glossed over.
Not entirely true. Most anyone will become addicted to cigarettes after some exposure. I know of no one who is addicted to brussel sprouts. Humans are structured in such a way that they have exploitable weaknesses, and games are designed in such a way as to be as obsessing as possible. Some games are structurally more addictive than others - I know a lot more people who play Civilization obsessively than who play Freecell obsessively.
Looking at the actual Everquest Widows board, I noticed two things: first, that most of the people their blamed their partners for their addictive behaviors, not the game itself (and thus were not calling for anything resembling regulation, just to preempt that thread), and that second and more interestingly, some gamers themselves noted that the game was particularly addicting because it took so long and so much time and effort to actually accomplish anything in Everquest.
That's what is interesting about this question. Most games have some sort of "payoff" device that is implicit when you play it. When you get that payoff, whether it is the final goal or some sort of intermediary plateau, you take a breather and appreciate your accomplishment. If a game defers that payoff and continues to promise it, it will become more and more of a time-sink. THis fairly much appeals to the natural structure of human motivation - it's *designed* to generate obsessive behavior.
Specifically, I'm thinking of the nasty Jerusalem B virus that would infect LOGIN.EXE and BTRIEVE.EXE files, and thus reinfect each machine on the network at login.
I suspect that if Ricochet devices were phone-sized and included nearly global voice access, they'd have been more successful. The mistake was betting on the much smaller laptop market, and sticking to (or being stuck with) the metro-region model.
Don't be misled. Maybe you are too young to remember, or weren't in the industry, but the VB-based viruses are far tamer than some of the older Bulgarian viruses that used to attack DOS and Novell systems - those viruses would actually destroy the *hardware*. Unix has plenty of exploitable aspects - there was a vulnerability in pine that allowed for the execution of arbitrary code, there have been sendmail holes, worms, and other vulnerabilities. The unix model has been criticized by none other than RMS (when defending the HURD model) for its promiscuous reliance on SUID.
I'm going to dissent from the naysayers and say that this is a good thing. The ability to move large amounts of data on small, easy to carry devices is going to have a lot more consumer penetration than some of the other geek-fantasies will. Moving video around will have somewhat limited usefulness (although the newswires have done amazing things with the bulky satellite video phones; this will make reporting from remote areas even easier). But the complaints about the video display miss the point entirely: once the video data is flowing, you can output to a number of interfaces; imagine piping that video stream to a sunglass-display, for example. (Remember, not everyone drives to work, which is why this sort of thing is more popular in mass-transit oriented countries like Japan and Europe.) Think of the ability to set up remote monitoring of facilities, video conferencing and the like.
It's a little bit of a leap for some geeks to move from the productivity-centered focus of desktop computing and its derivations to the idea of communications-oriented socializing technologies, but for most people the latter is usually more exciting.
It should be said that it is easier for Japan to take this step because they don't have the residual burdens that Christianity has left in Western society: the fixed distinction between human and animal, the doctrine of mind/body dualism and the essential (rather than emergent) soul, and the tendency to see humanity as a matter of form rather than one of process. Until recently, many historians attributed Western scientific and technological supremecy to advantages that were fairly bestowed to it by Christian doctrine, such as the idea of nature as "the book of God's works," the partition between the observer and the observed, and the belief in static immutable laws that could be gleaned by faith, reason, and observation. Perhaps the west has now exhausted the advantages that the Judeo-Christian mindset bestowed on it, and that further progress is actually easier in another intellectual tradition.
Except that it works, usually. I can't count the times I've heard people buckle-under to a C&D letter, saying "I just don't have the time and resources to fight this." And after the 10 minutes of indignant "I'll never buy anything from Company X again," it's amnesia time and back to business as usual.
People, the law has to be fought. Directly. Preserving the right to say what you want and do what you want with stuff you own is something that needs to be done in a political arena, not in the market.
When you realize how, you will understand why the private sector can be as oppressive and hostile to freedom as the public sector, and less accountable for it as long as the Benjamins keep rolling in.
No, that's the point. The new system encourages it. The previous metric used by Google was weighted links-to to determine the value of the look-up. I think the rating system is far more vulnerable to abuse.
Recipes themselves are not copyrightable. As it stands, presentation and pictures and so forth are. The different protections for different types of content are arbitrary, and largely the product of the histories of the political sway of the main interests behind those types of content.
Some services do have lasting effects that influence the value of those services, but again the persistence of value is something that can be predicted in the negotiation of the recruitment of the service. Architecture and construction engineering provide value *long* after the commissioned work is built, but people don't pay royalties or other ongoing renumeration to architects.
That can also be said of developing recipes and telling good jokes. Neither of those are subject to intellectual property law.
If those works have value, then the people who derive value from those works will support it, with or without copyright law. Much software is already written by commission or by bid, some of which is even released into the GPL later. Absent the artificial constraints created by trying to package software as if it were a shipped good, the service of writing software will be funded the way other services are: if there's a need, someone will pay for the service in advance. If no one does, then there's no need. If an industry needs something, industry consortiums can (and already do) come together to fund the development of a package. Academia can be (and already is) a viable source for supporting people to write software.
The main problem is that everyone is applying political-economic theories that are based around economies of real goods, not around intellectual property. As soon as you invoke the idea that the code can "belong" to someone, you've already presumed a huge superstructure of legal and governmental prerogatives and interests. Contract law won't help you, either, since code "in the wild" can be used by individuals who haven't explicitly entered into a contract.
Attempt to paint the FSF as communist fail to address that they are talking about intellectual property, not real goods; additionally, they fail to realize that the FSF focuses its efforts on motivating developers to release code under the GPL, rather than coercing them to do so. To describe them as communist would be akin to describing the United Way as Stalinist.
Berkeley has a big leg (ahem) to stand on: that they aren't getting enough public funding, due to tax cuts in California. They definitely subsidize their students' education far more than Stanford does, but they simply can't afford to *not* go to the private sector if they want to provide a first-tier education. If people care about public education, they will fund it to the degree that private schools get, and then complaining that the products of research aren't public will be a valid plaint. Until then, providing a penny of support doesn't merit a pound of privilege.
First off, there's no place without some racist people; the question is whether they have enough sense to keep the racism out of their policy. Much of Latin America *is* racist in the sense of stereotypes and jokes, but there's a lot more intermingling and socializing between different racial groups, and Brazil has had so much intermarrying between races that it's more like a continuum of features than a society of races.
It's still easier to get rich in the US than anywhere else. That is not the be-all and end-all of freedom as far as I am concerned. Right now, it's easier to get rich in China than in Mexico, but Mexico is definitely freer. In places like Mexico and the less bureaucratically overwhelming parts of Latin America, you are pretty much completely free to try to get rich. But wealth occurs in the context of markets and infrastructure, and even in some cultural variables none of which have anything to do with law or governments.
Brazil does have a very cosmopolitan culture; great city life and night life. If you are will to simply make a good living and have a nice place, rather than get stinking rich, you might prefer it.
Of course, we feel it's all great to battle "child pornography" while we defend race-hatred, while non-Americans (who often have very different ages of consent) consider that an infringement of their free speech. So are we implicitly trading the right to different types of censorship?
You are only partially correct - I am making the distinction you note, except that haute-cuisine also has political and aristocratic transference features that you don't recognize. The creation of a national cuisine isn't simply the valoriziation of folk cuisines, but comes from specific institutional qualifications and elaborations. Modern high French cuisine developed directly from the arrival of Elanor of Aquitane from Italy and the introduction of Italian court sauces and preparation techniques into aristocratic kitchens - it wasn't just taking rustic food and dressing it up a bit, there was a discourse among the upper classes in those societies that long preceded that sort of folk-to-high adaption of culture. The same is definitely the case in China as well. In fact, many cooking techniques migrate the other direction: from the upper classes down.
Incidentally, it is not entirely correct to dismiss out-of-hand California cuisines as lacking popular basis. California had an Asian cuisine presence that made itself felt even as early as the late 19th century in non-Asian cooking styles.
Slashdot Mirror
However, you can note that in one country, 60% of the work is being done for pleasure, 20% for scratching an itch, and 20% for other reasons, while in another country, those same distributions are 30%, 50%, and 20%. And then you can make observations about the amount of development done in those countries and the different factors behind them. Oh, that's what the writer did, isn't it?
A more important observation he is making is that you are more likely to proprietize the code if you can make money doing so; otherwise, you're more likely to leave it open. So the US, which far outstrips Europe in per-capita IT spending, lags behind Europe in per-capita open source development.
This paper was not written in po-mo babble, it's straightforward and reasonable. It's just dealing in a complex way with things that we usually deal with by taking for granted. Instead of parroting the platitudes that the topic usually get (I can't believe that would-be computer scientists are so comfortable bandying about anecdotes instead of data) he looked at the numbers and made causation/correlation observations that usually get glossed over.
Not entirely true. Most anyone will become addicted to cigarettes after some exposure. I know of no one who is addicted to brussel sprouts. Humans are structured in such a way that they have exploitable weaknesses, and games are designed in such a way as to be as obsessing as possible. Some games are structurally more addictive than others - I know a lot more people who play Civilization obsessively than who play Freecell obsessively.
That's what is interesting about this question. Most games have some sort of "payoff" device that is implicit when you play it. When you get that payoff, whether it is the final goal or some sort of intermediary plateau, you take a breather and appreciate your accomplishment. If a game defers that payoff and continues to promise it, it will become more and more of a time-sink. THis fairly much appeals to the natural structure of human motivation - it's *designed* to generate obsessive behavior.
Specifically, I'm thinking of the nasty Jerusalem B virus that would infect LOGIN.EXE and BTRIEVE.EXE files, and thus reinfect each machine on the network at login.
I suspect that if Ricochet devices were phone-sized and included nearly global voice access, they'd have been more successful. The mistake was betting on the much smaller laptop market, and sticking to (or being stuck with) the metro-region model.
Don't be misled. Maybe you are too young to remember, or weren't in the industry, but the VB-based viruses are far tamer than some of the older Bulgarian viruses that used to attack DOS and Novell systems - those viruses would actually destroy the *hardware*. Unix has plenty of exploitable aspects - there was a vulnerability in pine that allowed for the execution of arbitrary code, there have been sendmail holes, worms, and other vulnerabilities. The unix model has been criticized by none other than RMS (when defending the HURD model) for its promiscuous reliance on SUID.
I'd call SSX pretty inspired and even innovative, despite its debt to Tony Hawk.
It's a little bit of a leap for some geeks to move from the productivity-centered focus of desktop computing and its derivations to the idea of communications-oriented socializing technologies, but for most people the latter is usually more exciting.
It should be said that it is easier for Japan to take this step because they don't have the residual burdens that Christianity has left in Western society: the fixed distinction between human and animal, the doctrine of mind/body dualism and the essential (rather than emergent) soul, and the tendency to see humanity as a matter of form rather than one of process. Until recently, many historians attributed Western scientific and technological supremecy to advantages that were fairly bestowed to it by Christian doctrine, such as the idea of nature as "the book of God's works," the partition between the observer and the observed, and the belief in static immutable laws that could be gleaned by faith, reason, and observation. Perhaps the west has now exhausted the advantages that the Judeo-Christian mindset bestowed on it, and that further progress is actually easier in another intellectual tradition.
That's the trouble with fines as punishment. They punish the poor inordinately, and the rich almost not at all.
People, the law has to be fought. Directly. Preserving the right to say what you want and do what you want with stuff you own is something that needs to be done in a political arena, not in the market.
When you realize how, you will understand why the private sector can be as oppressive and hostile to freedom as the public sector, and less accountable for it as long as the Benjamins keep rolling in.
No, that's the point. The new system encourages it. The previous metric used by Google was weighted links-to to determine the value of the look-up. I think the rating system is far more vulnerable to abuse.
Some services do have lasting effects that influence the value of those services, but again the persistence of value is something that can be predicted in the negotiation of the recruitment of the service. Architecture and construction engineering provide value *long* after the commissioned work is built, but people don't pay royalties or other ongoing renumeration to architects.
Let me guess: you're in college, aren't you?
If those works have value, then the people who derive value from those works will support it, with or without copyright law. Much software is already written by commission or by bid, some of which is even released into the GPL later. Absent the artificial constraints created by trying to package software as if it were a shipped good, the service of writing software will be funded the way other services are: if there's a need, someone will pay for the service in advance. If no one does, then there's no need. If an industry needs something, industry consortiums can (and already do) come together to fund the development of a package. Academia can be (and already is) a viable source for supporting people to write software.
Attempt to paint the FSF as communist fail to address that they are talking about intellectual property, not real goods; additionally, they fail to realize that the FSF focuses its efforts on motivating developers to release code under the GPL, rather than coercing them to do so. To describe them as communist would be akin to describing the United Way as Stalinist.
Strip malls.
Berkeley has a big leg (ahem) to stand on: that they aren't getting enough public funding, due to tax cuts in California. They definitely subsidize their students' education far more than Stanford does, but they simply can't afford to *not* go to the private sector if they want to provide a first-tier education. If people care about public education, they will fund it to the degree that private schools get, and then complaining that the products of research aren't public will be a valid plaint. Until then, providing a penny of support doesn't merit a pound of privilege.
It's still easier to get rich in the US than anywhere else. That is not the be-all and end-all of freedom as far as I am concerned. Right now, it's easier to get rich in China than in Mexico, but Mexico is definitely freer. In places like Mexico and the less bureaucratically overwhelming parts of Latin America, you are pretty much completely free to try to get rich. But wealth occurs in the context of markets and infrastructure, and even in some cultural variables none of which have anything to do with law or governments.
Brazil does have a very cosmopolitan culture; great city life and night life. If you are will to simply make a good living and have a nice place, rather than get stinking rich, you might prefer it.
Of course, we feel it's all great to battle "child pornography" while we defend race-hatred, while non-Americans (who often have very different ages of consent) consider that an infringement of their free speech. So are we implicitly trading the right to different types of censorship?
South America is becoming a bastion of freedom.
You are only partially correct - I am making the distinction you note, except that haute-cuisine also has political and aristocratic transference features that you don't recognize. The creation of a national cuisine isn't simply the valoriziation of folk cuisines, but comes from specific institutional qualifications and elaborations. Modern high French cuisine developed directly from the arrival of Elanor of Aquitane from Italy and the introduction of Italian court sauces and preparation techniques into aristocratic kitchens - it wasn't just taking rustic food and dressing it up a bit, there was a discourse among the upper classes in those societies that long preceded that sort of folk-to-high adaption of culture. The same is definitely the case in China as well. In fact, many cooking techniques migrate the other direction: from the upper classes down.
Incidentally, it is not entirely correct to dismiss out-of-hand California cuisines as lacking popular basis. California had an Asian cuisine presence that made itself felt even as early as the late 19th century in non-Asian cooking styles.