Just to clarify - the legal premise that supports copyright in the US is the promotion of science etc., the legal premise that supports copyright in the EU is the recognition of natural rights.
This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what is right - just what is legal.
Depends where you come from. In the US it is to promote the useful sciences etc. In the EU it is more about legal recognition of natural rights. Pick your poison...
The QWERTY keyboard has the fabulous design feature of putting those commonly used cut, copy and paste commands right next to the cmd key. I mean, that was just inspired design - who would have thought?
With this new keyboard you are gong to have to reach all over the keyboard to do a simple cut, copy and paste.
Which raises the biggest problem, a huge majority of programs have been designed to be used with the QWERTY keyboard. At the simplest think of games with keyboard motion controls - anyone remember I,J,K,L movement triangles? That is writ large over practically any program (except maybe anything designed by Microsoft who don't seem to consider usability and interface design high on their list of product atributes;))
You don't seem to get it. I'm not advocating communism - I'm saying that sometimes governments do good things. They do all those useful things like:
Providing law and order, making sure that anarchy doesn't reign (look at much of Africa if you wan't to see what happens when you don't have decent governments).
Building roads so you can drive a 1967 Cadilac El Dorado at 115mph getting 1mpg while sucking down McDonald's quarter pound cheesburgers.
All those things they call public services, like electricity, water, education.
Providing weather observations.
You may not realise it, but most of your life is about free handouts. Or were you so fabulously wealthy that your parents sent you to primary school in the Swiss alps with the best teachers that money could buy?
Let's just go straight to
2: ??????
with that one.
At least in a free market, you can vote with your wallet.
That presumes you have a wallet to vote with. And remember that the one with the biggest wallet wins - who gives a jot about the peons, I only care about what JP Morgan says. In a truly free market you get to hand your wallet to JP Morgan or any of the other robber barons that used to dominate America. Don't like working 80 hours a week for $1 a day - tough shit that's the free market (shoot all those commie-loving unionists right now). Like being able to return a crappy product for a refund - that's the government (waranty shmaranty - caveat emptor!).
I just love feeding the trolls. Can I sir? Can I? Please? Please? Pick me! Pick me!
Nobody is stopping you from going out and collecting your own weather observations and selling that data to whoever will buy it. However, the government does some things because it is more efficient to do so. Could you imagine if the government didn't do weather and private companies were the only source of information. No hurricane alerts for Florida unless you pay for the information. No crop alerts for the mid-West unless you pay for them. Don't even think about going surfing in California without paying for a report on where the weather is best. Yup, that is what capitalism is about - ripping off everyone you possibly can and screw common decency.
Of course, free-market capitalism is really all about competition. So if you didn't want to be ripped off for weather information you could have 10 companies all collecting the same information (er, Fred, what's the temperature in Dubuque?) - yeah, that's smart - more like a waste of money.
In sum, it makes sense for the government to do some things and provide the information for as near to free as possible.
Look at the Internet browser market. Five years ago Internet Explorer was considered on top of its game. Look what has happened since. Microsoft has rested on its laurels and IE is now considered a steaming pile of dung. So much for innovation.
What about output? I would be very surprised if Microsoft had anything to do with that. The computing market is one that would have experienced huge growth with or without Microsoft. So sure, output has gone up in practically any computer related market, but that is just like any other new market.
Consider, for example, the market for cars or aeroplanes. Both were effectively monopolised early in their US history due to patents. However, because the products were so revolutionary the market grew dramatically. It would be facile to argue that Ford and Wright stimulated output growth. No, the market grew in spite of them. Same deal with Microsoft.
I just find it interesting that the spacing between the "interesting" events keeps going down as you follow this list. There are 1417 years between the first two events but only one between the last two.
It must be that we are living in much more interesting times these days. I mean, which is more interesting, Charles II disbanding parliament or congressional hearings into Enron.
After all, look at the productive legislative change we got from congress because of Enron compared to the mere trifle of disbanding parliament.
Don't be facile. He wasn't citing "daddy truck" as data to support his hypothesis he was providing a personal example to illuminate the possibility.
Do you truly expect every conversation you have to be identical to a published journal article? Have you sat through presentations where the person reads out from their journal article -- boring as hell. On the other hand, if you try to make your talk interesting by providing personal examples and illustrating ideas with examples you get shot down because you are missleading with anecdotal data. Oh really?
Economics is a (mostly) non-experimental but rigorously statistical science. Economists are better at dealing with creapy data than most.
None of this namby-pamby ooh, lets run an experiment which the woosy chemists and physicists do. No, you want to study the effects of a huge tax cut you have to hope for a president with Alzheimers - and even then you only get to do the test once.
Indeed it can. In fact economics is much better at rigorouslly assesing findings because economists regularly deal with crappy data. The difference between most economics and most science is that economics is not an experimental science. This means that you have to take the data you are given and consider all the possible ways it could be misleading and crappy.
I would hardly call the request for something to be subject to more reseach a stupid overgeneralisations - or haven't you RTFA?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes indeed, OS X has some nifty features if you are using non-standard layouts.
This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what is right - just what is legal.
That sound's painful and I'm sure it would be against the reverse engineering clauses in your license agreement.
Tish, boom - I'll be here all week.
Depends where you come from. In the US it is to promote the useful sciences etc. In the EU it is more about legal recognition of natural rights. Pick your poison...
The QWERTY keyboard has the fabulous design feature of putting those commonly used cut, copy and paste commands right next to the cmd key. I mean, that was just inspired design - who would have thought?
With this new keyboard you are gong to have to reach all over the keyboard to do a simple cut, copy and paste.
Which raises the biggest problem, a huge majority of programs have been designed to be used with the QWERTY keyboard. At the simplest think of games with keyboard motion controls - anyone remember I,J,K,L movement triangles? That is writ large over practically any program (except maybe anything designed by Microsoft who don't seem to consider usability and interface design high on their list of product atributes ;))
Love the quote.
Providing law and order, making sure that anarchy doesn't reign (look at much of Africa if you wan't to see what happens when you don't have decent governments).
Building roads so you can drive a 1967 Cadilac El Dorado at 115mph getting 1mpg while sucking down McDonald's quarter pound cheesburgers.
All those things they call public services, like electricity, water, education.
Providing weather observations.
You may not realise it, but most of your life is about free handouts. Or were you so fabulously wealthy that your parents sent you to primary school in the Swiss alps with the best teachers that money could buy?
2: ??????
with that one.
That presumes you have a wallet to vote with. And remember that the one with the biggest wallet wins - who gives a jot about the peons, I only care about what JP Morgan says. In a truly free market you get to hand your wallet to JP Morgan or any of the other robber barons that used to dominate America. Don't like working 80 hours a week for $1 a day - tough shit that's the free market (shoot all those commie-loving unionists right now). Like being able to return a crappy product for a refund - that's the government (waranty shmaranty - caveat emptor!).
Nobody is stopping you from going out and collecting your own weather observations and selling that data to whoever will buy it. However, the government does some things because it is more efficient to do so. Could you imagine if the government didn't do weather and private companies were the only source of information. No hurricane alerts for Florida unless you pay for the information. No crop alerts for the mid-West unless you pay for them. Don't even think about going surfing in California without paying for a report on where the weather is best. Yup, that is what capitalism is about - ripping off everyone you possibly can and screw common decency.
Of course, free-market capitalism is really all about competition. So if you didn't want to be ripped off for weather information you could have 10 companies all collecting the same information (er, Fred, what's the temperature in Dubuque?) - yeah, that's smart - more like a waste of money.
In sum, it makes sense for the government to do some things and provide the information for as near to free as possible.
Look at the Internet browser market. Five years ago Internet Explorer was considered on top of its game. Look what has happened since. Microsoft has rested on its laurels and IE is now considered a steaming pile of dung. So much for innovation.
What about output? I would be very surprised if Microsoft had anything to do with that. The computing market is one that would have experienced huge growth with or without Microsoft. So sure, output has gone up in practically any computer related market, but that is just like any other new market.
Consider, for example, the market for cars or aeroplanes. Both were effectively monopolised early in their US history due to patents. However, because the products were so revolutionary the market grew dramatically. It would be facile to argue that Ford and Wright stimulated output growth. No, the market grew in spite of them. Same deal with Microsoft.
"If you tell one more cluster joke, I'm ripping your arm off!"
It must be that we are living in much more interesting times these days. I mean, which is more interesting, Charles II disbanding parliament or congressional hearings into Enron.
After all, look at the productive legislative change we got from congress because of Enron compared to the mere trifle of disbanding parliament.
???
3. Someone will profit
Do you truly expect every conversation you have to be identical to a published journal article? Have you sat through presentations where the person reads out from their journal article -- boring as hell. On the other hand, if you try to make your talk interesting by providing personal examples and illustrating ideas with examples you get shot down because you are missleading with anecdotal data. Oh really?
Economics is a (mostly) non-experimental but rigorously statistical science. Economists are better at dealing with creapy data than most. None of this namby-pamby ooh, lets run an experiment which the woosy chemists and physicists do. No, you want to study the effects of a huge tax cut you have to hope for a president with Alzheimers - and even then you only get to do the test once.
Indeed it can. In fact economics is much better at rigorouslly assesing findings because economists regularly deal with crappy data. The difference between most economics and most science is that economics is not an experimental science. This means that you have to take the data you are given and consider all the possible ways it could be misleading and crappy. I would hardly call the request for something to be subject to more reseach a stupid overgeneralisations - or haven't you RTFA?