"Those who favor the opposite may be willing to pay a premium - perhaps even a 100% premium - for locally grown/locally produced goods."
And then (all other things being equal) what you are doing is promoting an unefficient productivity for your local economy instead of preferring the cheap products so making your local economy can focus on what it can do fine an on the bucket too.
The "all other things being equal" is of importance here. Of course you can be cheaper if you use slaverish work instead of proper wages but that's not the point. Think global instead of local, but think that the human being in the other side of the globe diserves dignity as much as your neighborough.
In the end, you didn't define "freedom". Surely that way you can "probe" your point: if the outcome is not the one you want, it's not "real freedom".
Maybe you start by giving a detailed an unambigous definition of "freedom" and then we see what the outcome is -it might happen it is not what you think it should be.
"i do want to dispute one fact : that making the planet better for humans at the expense of all other life is not somehow better for humans."
The extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence here is that the human degradation of the planet is not bad for humans. There's a concept in Ecology called "microsuccession" or "serule" which studies how populations come one after another because of nutrients depletion and environment poisoning. Humans working like that is not a new concept.
*All* these kind of serules have one thing in common: each dominant (heterotrophic) being acts in two ways over the substrate; on one side they deplete their main nutrients (it can't be any other way), on the other they poison the substrate with their own depositions (it can't be any other way). In the end either they leave no useful nutrient or a too poisoned environment and in any case they extinguish till the next organism in the succession, which happens to take for nutrient what the previous felt as poison, takes the ground.
Looks familiar?
The only other possible outcome, on big ecosystems, is that they evolution to a steady state known as climax (matured forests are the typical example). But in the end, in abscense of geographical changes, every ecosystem finds a climax equilibrium, it's only you may not like it (i.e. Saharian desert).
Now, your choices are: 1) We'll deplete our sources and poison our environment thus facing quite hard times in the future. 2) We are in a steady state with our environment so will find an equilibrium (or a cycle). 3) Magic thinking will avoid 1.
Which one do you think seems more possible? On which hypothesis do you think is more sensible to work from, based on chances and evaluation of possible outcome?
"Thanks for posting something I actually had to look up. lucrum cessans"
Sorry for that. I'm Spanish native so my vocabulary tends to lack on technical terms. 'Lucrum cessans' sounds basically the same in Spanish (lucro cesante) and, yes, it's exactly what you explained.
"Earlier I built a text-messaging system for J2ME phones. At that time (pre-iphone), people sometimes had very shitty data cost plans. Everybody was scared to hell to run up big telecom bills just to transmit something like 100k per month. Nobody used my app (to reiterate, much before the iphone !) Developing something innovative is actually the easy part. The hard part is selling."
You see, marketing is not sales, and you failed in marketing, which goes previous to advertisement or sales.
It's of course easy to tell the story once you know the end but it's clear why you failed and how marketing should have avoided your failure (if only in the naivest way of not losing your time on these projects).
On the first one, the marketing guy would have tell you "let it go by, you target customers are not interested in your product". In the second one, he might tell you "let it go by, your target market is not mature for your product".
Of course, a really great market guy might have told you "your customers are not interested in your product, but we can get their interest this and this way" or "the market is not matured but we can make this modifications instead, or help the market mature faster this way" or "you don't have what it takes to market this product, so instead of selling the product we'll sell the ability to sell the product which means we'll target ATT instead of the final customer, this and this way" (of course, the real value of the marketing way being his ability to fill the "this and this way" part).
"If a product or service needs marketing, it's usually because there's little to no demand for that product or service."
You use marketing to FIND if there's demand for a given product or service and/or how such demand can be created or developed. As such, it has nothing to do with such demand being short or large at the start.
Of course you can let it work out of mere luck and that's what most startups do and that's why most startups fail (but about the rare one that success out of brute statistics you'll never hear from its founder "it was mere luck" because all entrepeneurs think they are right from the begining or else wouldn't have devoted the sheer resources it takes to lift a company -even if it's to let it fail).
"I somehow don't think that a technical failure is a smart way to start out your relationship with your customers if you are a tech company, especially not if you are a company that makes software as part or all of your business."
Then don't do it.
ACME company is the one collecting the data, but it's going to be OCP the one that will really start the business if the previous data shows it viable.
"By analysing the founding stories of many companies it appears to me that success is tied to some sort of Generalist Capability. The founders need to understand both technology and selling."
And what do you think marketing is? Marketing is about findings and, of course, you can always find something out of sheer luck. Those startups, out of conscient study, out of gut feeling or out of sheer luck understood a market (even if because they invented it), found a gap in it (well, if they invented the market niche, the gap is obvious: all of it) and they found the way to get revenue out of it. That's pure marketing in action.
"What marketing does is let people know it exists"
That's advertising.
"in the end it's laying out the case that your product does a good job of doing X, so that people that do X decide to try what you have."
Marketing is basically the opposite: is finding what people will decide to buy and why so a way can be found for you to have what the people is about to buy in the proper place, at the proper moment and with the proper price tag, not the other way around.
"I assume you work for a corporation and you don't understand that "booting" a company is typically done by two persons or less. You cannot start a company with "managers" and "executives"."
This is as wrong as what you are telling about the other guy.
*Any* company needs managers and executives. In fact, that's what they need the most since anything else can be eventually subcontracted. It's only that in a startup the owners double as the visionary CIO, and the chief engineer and the humble programmer (and every other role), all at the same time and, due to this, they have to be very clever in the way they manage their resources, even if they are only managing themselves.
"This can be a good step, but you'll want to sort out your vision of the market before you approach potential investors or marketing partners."
Exactly. By the redaction, he is missunderstanding marketing for advertisement.
Marketing is what studies the market, find what and how can be sellable and at what price tag. Then there it goes advertisement campaigns to make the world know you are there.
I don't think Slashdot tribe has any problem with marketing -when done properly, only with stupid marketroids/sellers.
You say you have a product you can sell, well, make yourself clear why people is wanting to buy it on top of other competing products and services (within or out your market segment), then hire a marketing guy or company to review your ideas, find how credible they are, plan to cover the your flaws, if any, and only then, start advertising it.
And don't let enter a partner unless is a strategic value for your stated (to yourself and with honesty) mission and vision (yes, that's MBA jargon, but valuable nevertheless).
"The tougher question which most avoid is why are copyright holders assumed to be evil? I'm not talking corporations, we can all agree they are inherently evil."
End of the question then, since corporations are the real copyright owners.
"Say I spend a year writing a novel"
Then ask for any compensation to the one that promised it before you started writing.
What? Nobody promised you anything before start writing? Tough luck, then.
"Say you spend a few days or a week reading it"
That certainly takes effort too. Do you really think I'm entitled to ask you for compensation, then?
"If it takes me six months to a year to write it why am I expected to work for free"
Again, who told you anyone was expecting *anything* from you to start with? Please, ask him compensation, not me, for I certainly didn't expect nothing from you.
"We just want a fighting chance to make a living."
Me too. Do you know what I did? I agreed *first* for the work to be done and the compensation I wanted; only *then* I started working on it. Up to date, I respect my side of the deal and so does the one that pays my bills.
"Well at least in the US you have civil and criminal copyright infringement, so it can be infringing without being criminal. As I understood it in Spain downloading is considered an act of private copying which is legal, but it sounds like unauthorized uploading still is illegal, just not criminally prosecuted unless it's for commercial profit."
That's not the case. It says that uploading without commercial profit is not criminally prosecutable and says absolutly *nothing* about civil cases. Not because it is (implicitly) illegal but because General Attorney talks just about criminal matters.
On a side note, SGAE (Spanish RIAA) has tried the civil route too, without luck. That's why they pushed for the "Sinde law" which basically sidesteps judges' work by trying to be able to close web sites they don't like without trial or judge hearing (in its short life they went to close sites that had previously already been judged, penal and civil, and found unguilty).
More on this, the Comission tried to maintain its members in secrecy up to the point to menace of punitive actions to a famous Spanish lawyer if he revealed them. Luckily, the members' list has been filtered to press just about two weeks ago.
"you could set up huge, legal, non-profit seeds in Spain."
Not yet: SGAE attornies had tried the lucrum cessans route too (whitout any luck... yet) and its lobby is pressing to change the laws -once again, till they get what they want. It is useful to remember how the Wikileaks papers showed members of the SGAE lobby to be the Spanish shills of USA on this (and now they are very near to current government, so go figure). Oh! and don't forget that basically the whole damn board of directors of SGAE is now waiting trial for fraud, unlawful misappropiation and financial crime (well, the previous one, at least they had the honorability of changing the board when the previous one got arrested).
"If Spain decides that pirating is OK, i guess that Americans can restrict/boycott Spanish IP commercialization."
Problem being that Spain never decided that pirating is OK. Heck, Spain even sent war ships to Somalian waters to fight piracy.
And no, Spain is not in favor of IP violations either, but that doesn't mean it has to be Disney's shill which is what this IIPA 301 list is all about.
"So this putz uses a stolen password (...) He claims that this is ethical hacking?"
Of course yes. "Ethical" in "ethical hacking" is, well, an ethical statement, so all about intention. Are you claiming against his declaration that he did it in bad faith? It doesn't seem so.
"He's not exposing some inherent weakness in the system,"
Yes, he is. It's only too common to think that "the system" ends where the computer ends. That's as wrong as it can be: "the system" certainly includes the human factor and the way people use the computer part of the system so, yes, he exposed a flaw in the system and he did it in the least lessive way he could so, again yes, the "ethical hacking" definition can be sustained here.
All that being said, I think both the representative and the judge did properly their duty: the former showed a flaw in the system, the latter penalized a punible act in a proportioned way. Civil disobedience is not meant to go without consequences, even if it is the ethical thing to be done.
Well, here I *do* follow you. Add a "me too" here, for two reasons: it is not only stupid from a logical point of view (for the reasons you stated), but seems obvious to me that the "on the internet" laws are made out of malice, not ignorance, out of the fact that I still have to see a case where an "on the Internet" law doesn't go in the direction of supporting big corporations against citizenship and/or eroding civil rights.
"However, porn isn't all made domestically"
Here is where I lose track. Neither assessinations nor wars, nor frauds (nor anything) are done (only) domestically.
"Where porn involves or depicts genuine pain or abuse"
Where porn involves or depicts genuine pain or abuse, is porn no more but torture. Again, we already have laws for that.
"Worldwide the level of protection under the law [...] isn't at domestic standards."
That's valid for *any* laws and that's covered also: it is called "international law" -you can decide what law violations can be prosecuted worldwide (i.e. crimes against humanity), what law violations of or by one of your citizens can be prosecuted worldwide (i.e. child abuse on many countries), and well, about tortures depictions, it depends on context (i.e.: you gave the Pulitzer to the guy that photographed "the napalm child" from Vietnam, but you prosecute on terrorism charges the one that photographed the execution of a kipnapped person in Afghanistan) -and finally, you don't prosecute anybody just by having a copy of neither of them. No need to call "porn" to make any difference.
"There are instances of women doing these things because they cannot find anything else legal, that can give them the money they need to survive. Those women make up a grey area."
Do you really think all those people flipping burgers at McDonald's do it out of their unstoppable vocation?
Possession *is* ownership... for the proper definition of possession, which is "whenever you can hold your claim against those challenging it". Yes, that's it, be it with fits or nukes.
Slashdot Mirror
"The patent covers te exact calculation used to combine those three factors."
So, in the end, the core of the patent is an algorithm... which are non-patentables to start with.
"A lot of the cheaper is because the workers only get paid enough to live in a shanty."
Of course yes, and I'm completly against that, I thought it was clear in my previous message.
"I don't find it particularly helpful to a take a self-sufficient local culture..."
Please, define "local". Your home? your town? your county? your state? your country?
I for one want to tell "local" my planet.
"Those who favor the opposite may be willing to pay a premium - perhaps even a 100% premium - for locally grown/locally produced goods."
And then (all other things being equal) what you are doing is promoting an unefficient productivity for your local economy instead of preferring the cheap products so making your local economy can focus on what it can do fine an on the bucket too.
The "all other things being equal" is of importance here. Of course you can be cheaper if you use slaverish work instead of proper wages but that's not the point. Think global instead of local, but think that the human being in the other side of the globe diserves dignity as much as your neighborough.
Blah, blah, blah... true scostsman fallacy... blah, blah, blah...
In the end, you didn't define "freedom". Surely that way you can "probe" your point: if the outcome is not the one you want, it's not "real freedom".
Maybe you start by giving a detailed an unambigous definition of "freedom" and then we see what the outcome is -it might happen it is not what you think it should be.
"i do want to dispute one fact : that making the planet better for humans at the expense of all other life is not somehow better for humans."
The extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence here is that the human degradation of the planet is not bad for humans. There's a concept in Ecology called "microsuccession" or "serule" which studies how populations come one after another because of nutrients depletion and environment poisoning. Humans working like that is not a new concept.
*All* these kind of serules have one thing in common: each dominant (heterotrophic) being acts in two ways over the substrate; on one side they deplete their main nutrients (it can't be any other way), on the other they poison the substrate with their own depositions (it can't be any other way). In the end either they leave no useful nutrient or a too poisoned environment and in any case they extinguish till the next organism in the succession, which happens to take for nutrient what the previous felt as poison, takes the ground.
Looks familiar?
The only other possible outcome, on big ecosystems, is that they evolution to a steady state known as climax (matured forests are the typical example). But in the end, in abscense of geographical changes, every ecosystem finds a climax equilibrium, it's only you may not like it (i.e. Saharian desert).
Now, your choices are:
1) We'll deplete our sources and poison our environment thus facing quite hard times in the future.
2) We are in a steady state with our environment so will find an equilibrium (or a cycle).
3) Magic thinking will avoid 1.
Which one do you think seems more possible? On which hypothesis do you think is more sensible to work from, based on chances and evaluation of possible outcome?
"is it unnecessary ? go back to living in a cave"
Data from World Bank on per capita KWh consumption (2010):
USA: 13,394
Germany: 7,215
Denmark: 6,327
United Kingdom: 5,736
It seems that there's a middleground place between your SUV and a cave.
"Thanks for posting something I actually had to look up.
lucrum cessans"
Sorry for that. I'm Spanish native so my vocabulary tends to lack on technical terms. 'Lucrum cessans' sounds basically the same in Spanish (lucro cesante) and, yes, it's exactly what you explained.
"Earlier I built a text-messaging system for J2ME phones. At that time (pre-iphone), people sometimes had very shitty data cost plans. Everybody was scared to hell to run up big telecom bills just to transmit something like 100k per month. Nobody used my app (to reiterate, much before the iphone !)
Developing something innovative is actually the easy part. The hard part is selling."
You see, marketing is not sales, and you failed in marketing, which goes previous to advertisement or sales.
It's of course easy to tell the story once you know the end but it's clear why you failed and how marketing should have avoided your failure (if only in the naivest way of not losing your time on these projects).
On the first one, the marketing guy would have tell you "let it go by, you target customers are not interested in your product". In the second one, he might tell you "let it go by, your target market is not mature for your product".
Of course, a really great market guy might have told you "your customers are not interested in your product, but we can get their interest this and this way" or "the market is not matured but we can make this modifications instead, or help the market mature faster this way" or "you don't have what it takes to market this product, so instead of selling the product we'll sell the ability to sell the product which means we'll target ATT instead of the final customer, this and this way" (of course, the real value of the marketing way being his ability to fill the "this and this way" part).
"If a product or service needs marketing, it's usually because there's little to no demand for that product or service."
You use marketing to FIND if there's demand for a given product or service and/or how such demand can be created or developed. As such, it has nothing to do with such demand being short or large at the start.
Of course you can let it work out of mere luck and that's what most startups do and that's why most startups fail (but about the rare one that success out of brute statistics you'll never hear from its founder "it was mere luck" because all entrepeneurs think they are right from the begining or else wouldn't have devoted the sheer resources it takes to lift a company -even if it's to let it fail).
"I somehow don't think that a technical failure is a smart way to start out your relationship with your customers if you are a tech company, especially not if you are a company that makes software as part or all of your business."
Then don't do it.
ACME company is the one collecting the data, but it's going to be OCP the one that will really start the business if the previous data shows it viable.
Done.
"By analysing the founding stories of many companies it appears to me that success is tied to some sort of Generalist Capability. The founders need to understand both technology and selling."
And what do you think marketing is? Marketing is about findings and, of course, you can always find something out of sheer luck. Those startups, out of conscient study, out of gut feeling or out of sheer luck understood a market (even if because they invented it), found a gap in it (well, if they invented the market niche, the gap is obvious: all of it) and they found the way to get revenue out of it. That's pure marketing in action.
"What marketing does is let people know it exists"
That's advertising.
"in the end it's laying out the case that your product does a good job of doing X, so that people that do X decide to try what you have."
Marketing is basically the opposite: is finding what people will decide to buy and why so a way can be found for you to have what the people is about to buy in the proper place, at the proper moment and with the proper price tag, not the other way around.
"I assume you work for a corporation and you don't understand that "booting" a company is typically done by two persons or less. You cannot start a company with "managers" and "executives"."
This is as wrong as what you are telling about the other guy.
*Any* company needs managers and executives. In fact, that's what they need the most since anything else can be eventually subcontracted. It's only that in a startup the owners double as the visionary CIO, and the chief engineer and the humble programmer (and every other role), all at the same time and, due to this, they have to be very clever in the way they manage their resources, even if they are only managing themselves.
"I have seen amazing products crash and burn due to bad marketing"
I think you are confusing marketing and sales.
Bad marketing? Trying to sell ice to skimos.
Bad sales? Failing at selling, well, anything, to a compulsive buyer.
"I've seen development derailed and wasted because of bad pricing, complete ignorance of the market and terrible planning."
See? That *is* marketing.
"This can be a good step, but you'll want to sort out your vision of the market before you approach potential investors or marketing partners."
Exactly. By the redaction, he is missunderstanding marketing for advertisement.
Marketing is what studies the market, find what and how can be sellable and at what price tag. Then there it goes advertisement campaigns to make the world know you are there.
I don't think Slashdot tribe has any problem with marketing -when done properly, only with stupid marketroids/sellers.
You say you have a product you can sell, well, make yourself clear why people is wanting to buy it on top of other competing products and services (within or out your market segment), then hire a marketing guy or company to review your ideas, find how credible they are, plan to cover the your flaws, if any, and only then, start advertising it.
And don't let enter a partner unless is a strategic value for your stated (to yourself and with honesty) mission and vision (yes, that's MBA jargon, but valuable nevertheless).
"The tougher question which most avoid is why are copyright holders assumed to be evil? I'm not talking corporations, we can all agree they are inherently evil."
End of the question then, since corporations are the real copyright owners.
"Say I spend a year writing a novel"
Then ask for any compensation to the one that promised it before you started writing.
What? Nobody promised you anything before start writing? Tough luck, then.
"Say you spend a few days or a week reading it"
That certainly takes effort too. Do you really think I'm entitled to ask you for compensation, then?
"If it takes me six months to a year to write it why am I expected to work for free"
Again, who told you anyone was expecting *anything* from you to start with? Please, ask him compensation, not me, for I certainly didn't expect nothing from you.
"We just want a fighting chance to make a living."
Me too. Do you know what I did? I agreed *first* for the work to be done and the compensation I wanted; only *then* I started working on it. Up to date, I respect my side of the deal and so does the one that pays my bills.
"Well at least in the US you have civil and criminal copyright infringement, so it can be infringing without being criminal. As I understood it in Spain downloading is considered an act of private copying which is legal, but it sounds like unauthorized uploading still is illegal, just not criminally prosecuted unless it's for commercial profit."
That's not the case. It says that uploading without commercial profit is not criminally prosecutable and says absolutly *nothing* about civil cases. Not because it is (implicitly) illegal but because General Attorney talks just about criminal matters.
On a side note, SGAE (Spanish RIAA) has tried the civil route too, without luck. That's why they pushed for the "Sinde law" which basically sidesteps judges' work by trying to be able to close web sites they don't like without trial or judge hearing (in its short life they went to close sites that had previously already been judged, penal and civil, and found unguilty).
More on this, the Comission tried to maintain its members in secrecy up to the point to menace of punitive actions to a famous Spanish lawyer if he revealed them. Luckily, the members' list has been filtered to press just about two weeks ago.
"you could set up huge, legal, non-profit seeds in Spain."
Not yet: SGAE attornies had tried the lucrum cessans route too (whitout any luck... yet) and its lobby is pressing to change the laws -once again, till they get what they want. It is useful to remember how the Wikileaks papers showed members of the SGAE lobby to be the Spanish shills of USA on this (and now they are very near to current government, so go figure). Oh! and don't forget that basically the whole damn board of directors of SGAE is now waiting trial for fraud, unlawful misappropiation and financial crime (well, the previous one, at least they had the honorability of changing the board when the previous one got arrested).
"If Spain decides that pirating is OK, i guess that Americans can restrict/boycott Spanish IP commercialization."
Problem being that Spain never decided that pirating is OK. Heck, Spain even sent war ships to Somalian waters to fight piracy.
And no, Spain is not in favor of IP violations either, but that doesn't mean it has to be Disney's shill which is what this IIPA 301 list is all about.
"So this putz uses a stolen password (...) He claims that this is ethical hacking?"
Of course yes. "Ethical" in "ethical hacking" is, well, an ethical statement, so all about intention. Are you claiming against his declaration that he did it in bad faith? It doesn't seem so.
"He's not exposing some inherent weakness in the system,"
Yes, he is. It's only too common to think that "the system" ends where the computer ends. That's as wrong as it can be: "the system" certainly includes the human factor and the way people use the computer part of the system so, yes, he exposed a flaw in the system and he did it in the least lessive way he could so, again yes, the "ethical hacking" definition can be sustained here.
All that being said, I think both the representative and the judge did properly their duty: the former showed a flaw in the system, the latter penalized a punible act in a proportioned way. Civil disobedience is not meant to go without consequences, even if it is the ethical thing to be done.
Don't think I'm following you here...
"I hate '... on the internet' laws"
Well, here I *do* follow you. Add a "me too" here, for two reasons: it is not only stupid from a logical point of view (for the reasons you stated), but seems obvious to me that the "on the internet" laws are made out of malice, not ignorance, out of the fact that I still have to see a case where an "on the Internet" law doesn't go in the direction of supporting big corporations against citizenship and/or eroding civil rights.
"However, porn isn't all made domestically"
Here is where I lose track. Neither assessinations nor wars, nor frauds (nor anything) are done (only) domestically.
"Where porn involves or depicts genuine pain or abuse"
Where porn involves or depicts genuine pain or abuse, is porn no more but torture. Again, we already have laws for that.
"Worldwide the level of protection under the law [...] isn't at domestic standards."
That's valid for *any* laws and that's covered also: it is called "international law" -you can decide what law violations can be prosecuted worldwide (i.e. crimes against humanity), what law violations of or by one of your citizens can be prosecuted worldwide (i.e. child abuse on many countries), and well, about tortures depictions, it depends on context (i.e.: you gave the Pulitzer to the guy that photographed "the napalm child" from Vietnam, but you prosecute on terrorism charges the one that photographed the execution of a kipnapped person in Afghanistan) -and finally, you don't prosecute anybody just by having a copy of neither of them. No need to call "porn" to make any difference.
"Only if the participants want to participate."
Then the problem is not in the "porn" side but in the "unwilling to participate" one. And there already are a lot of laws covering that side.
"Sorry, but cleaning toilets doesn't involve having pictures/videos of you doing acts you'd rather keep private"
It's obvious that the porno artist doesn't think the same or he/she would in fact keep those acts private instead of in front of a camera.
"with people you'd rather not do them with"
Again, the porno artist migth dissent.
"There's a huge difference between having sex (or even just appearing naked in front of people) and cleaning a toilet, to a lot of people."
Sure! And obviously there's people that given the choice prefer the former to the latter.
Don't know why the heck somebody modded you "insightul" when you didn't make any point at all.
"There are instances of women doing these things because they cannot find anything else legal, that can give them the money they need to survive. Those women make up a grey area."
Do you really think all those people flipping burgers at McDonald's do it out of their unstoppable vocation?
Possession *is* ownership... for the proper definition of possession, which is "whenever you can hold your claim against those challenging it". Yes, that's it, be it with fits or nukes.