"My projects are no longer small-scale hobbies, they are large frameworks, and I need to make a living."
Well, then do it the way any other else's.
Research your market so you know what's sellable and what is not, to whom and why.
Then target your product to the lowest hanging fruit and focus your advertisement campaign to it (I mean it! You might think at the beginning that your product is targetted to other developers just to find that it is in fact targetted to their managers which are the ones that sign the checks -you need quite different selling points).
Offer solid quality at competitive price and build a strong brand to support it.
Have your ears wide open so you hear what your customers *and* your prospective customers have to say.
And, finally, if you want to make money out of programing, never program[1] for free.
Heck, is there any other way?
[1] I meant exactly what I said: that's nothing to do with the license you happen to attach to what you program, but don't open the editor unless there's somebody willing to pay for the effort.
"Smiths invisible hand has been appropriated by others (abused) and expanded (to your meaning above)."
It is curious that the cite you propose makes exactly my point: the "invisible hand" is well and good and works exactly the way Smith proposed.
As your cite demonstrates -and that's the abuse referred, Smith never gave "magical powers" to the "invisible hand" that made it work but to the benefit of society but that, *given some circumnstances* Smith carefully analize, the "invisible hand" tended to work for a society's benefit more times than not.
Current circumnstances are different than those portraited by Smith, except for the "main engine": that everybody moves in their own interest, looking for their own profits (and it is interesting to note that Smith referes too to the fact that most people are not so good about properly identifying the strategies that maximize their own benefit on the long run and that capital operators tend to know better than average where their profits are *but* their benefits are also not usually aligned to those of society as a whole -sounds familiar?) so it is an exercise to the reader to consider if the "invisible hand" on current circumnstances works for the good of society or not.
All in all, my point states: you'd better get to the sources and read "the wealth of nations" yourself instead of using third party interpretations (which, again, happens to be the point of the wikipedia article you cite).
"I believe that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" originally referred to the tendency of companies based in a particular country to favor doing business in that country thus strengthening their home country."
Yes. And that tendency was a direct effect that they got better profits that way.
"Of course, now companies have no loyalty to any country"
Nor they did back in Adam Smith times (he also studies the import/export and the export/export cases). It's only the world changed and now companies get higher profits where they didn't before. Their loyalty is exactly where it was: maximizing profits.
"There is no more "invisible hand". It's all an open race to the bottom."
I think you'd find much better reading Adam Smith yourself instead of vague third party memories.
"I think you're confusing trusting science with trusting people who do science."
No, I don't think so.
"Science doesn't require trust."
Of course it does: epistemology is not science after all.
In fact, I'd say is just the opposite of what you say: because I trust science, I don't have to trust any given scientist. The repeatability "clause" of the scientific method wouldn't be needed if the people doing science could be inherently trustable.
In other words, I put a high level of trust in what Einstein said because I know he did it in the context of the scientific comunity that I trust because I trust the scientific method science uses.
"We 'trust' the kinds of science that opens itself up to observation, criticism, and testing"
Is there any other kind of science?
"Even if we never personally replicate the results ourselves, we know that the results can and have been replicated."
Which happens to be within the realm of epystemology, or even sociology, not science. That's the Bentham's panopticon principle which has nothing to do with science (other realms of knowledge out of science take advantage of that very same principle, i.e.: Linus Torvalds saying about open source software "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").
Again: have you verified *yourself* but a really minimal part of the key experiments that build our actual comprehension of Universe (and that's taking for granted that you are a scientifc researcher for a living)?
Have you, per chance, verified by yourself, say, the Michelson-Morley experiment that opens the door to Special Relativity?
Heck, it is a cornerstone for modern physics and it was first tried in 1887, you have had more time than enough!
I bet you don't.
"Even if we never personally replicate the results ourselves, we know that the results can and have been replicated."
Which makes exactly my point. You *trust* the scientific method or, in other words, you *believe* that science is capable to produce trustworthy knowledge. It is not blind faith (you trust the scientific method for very reasonable concerns) but it is believeness nevertheless.
"Actually, what we need is pure capitalism, with most large businesses replaced with hundreds of small businesses and coops competing for business."
And how do you expect that to happen, except with the help of government coercion? Current system hasn't evolved out of thin air but already starting from a system with hundreds of small business and coops competing for business.
"More small businesses would mean a larger portion of the workers would be the owners"
Moving your average company from 1000 workers to 100 workers would mean moving the owners-to-workers proportion from 0,1% to 1%. Even moving to a 10 workers average company (and then you should explain how do you expect that to be a world-wide competitive recipy) would mean the profits would be in the hands of a 10%, still far from representative of "profits in the hands of those doing the work".
"If you believe trust has anything to do with science, you are sadly ignorant."
Think about it twice.
Are you an expert -and I mean a postdoc-level expert, about, well, everything?
I know I'm not and I know that due to this I have to trust the scientific community to do their job.
One thing is the scientific method which, yes, has nothing to do with trust, and a different thing is science which, really, is all about trust. It is me (and you) trusting that the scientific method is a valid process, both in theory and in practice because the way it works and its included checks and ballances, to gain knowledge about the physical world.
"For a long time, people didn't care about privacy."
You will have to rrrrreally go back in the past to find a time when people didn't care about privacy. Just for the most comically obvious sign, when was the last time that shitting in public was socially acceptable?
People has felt that there are issues that are nobody else's business basically since always.
Not advertising but marketing. Forget about advertising and companies still will want to know what's the average income of your neighborhood, if there's a majority of any ethnic, if they are young or old, how many children on average, if they have degrees or just basic education, if you have a big car or if you prefer your weekly buy on saturday or friday...
Advertising is just the most visible side of the marketing iceberg.
"The problem is not that we have too few laws, it is that most people still think about things as if they were in the mid-20th century. "
I wish that was the case. No, the problem is that as soon as "but on a computer" or "but in the Internet" is thrown into the equation people magically tend to go into dummy mode.
"People have no clue how email works, so they assume it is like a faster version of postal mail."
No, the problem is that people do NOT assume that e-mail is like a faster version of postal mail. Because if they really assumed e-mail being much like postal mail only faster, do you really think they would allow for government to sneek into e-mail without a warrant? If they thougth it worked like postal mail, do you think they'd allow for an employer to gain the right to read correspondence explicity directed to your personal address?
Facebook: do you see people allowing employers to sneek into their family photo albums?
Software: do you see people allowing new cars being sold without legal guarantee?
Computers: do you see people allowing the employer to sneek into the personaly assigned closet without a very strong reason?
So what? It is not live data but one for backup purposes. If the company goes out of business you look for another one, no data is lost in the meantime.
"To protect your backup properly you have to trust someone"
You may need the help of someone but certainly you don't need to trust him.
Cypher your backups if you don't want them accessed by someone else and test them from time to time if you don't want to discover too late someone have been playing with them.
You'll say at first "I'll have worse things to worry about, then!" but, provided you survive, those "worse things" will eventually be taken care of and then, where's your data?
Having no disconnected off-site data set is having no backup, just like RAID: better uptime, no disaster recovery.
In fact, in the end, you are right: I am not in the videogames industry, therefore I don't do X. It's up to those in the videogame industry to seek for their profit as it is up to me to stablish the social contract I feel profits myself and the society I want to live in the best. And certainly I don't think it's a good bargain, one that benefits overall society, the current one with regards of "intellectual property".
Maybe a collective of users can found a videogame production, maybe not. Maybe a good business model is the old and probed arcade shop, where owners pay for game development and then recover by the coins on the machines... I certainly don't give a damn.
"I saw that in response to someone saying ""Medicaid and public universities both work fine", you replied "No, they don't.""
Were the hell did you read something along these lines?
"In my country (Australia)"
It happens that I'm Spanish, so I see your Medicare and double it. Spain, as basically all Europe, have public medical and educations systems that do work so I'm perfectly aware about what I'm talking about.
And how do you think i.e. a public health system works? Is it not a coallition of free citizens pooling to pay exactly for the service they in common decide they need without paying a premium on artificial scarcity for those services?
And doesn't it happen that health costs for European citizens average about a 25% less than their USA counterpart while at the same time European citizens average a 10% better life expectancy than USA?
"So how do you recommend that "an association of end users" fund the development of a video game?"
Not necessarily. But I support the notion that the videogame company shouldn't make its business model to stand on top of artificial scarcity of the product it delivers.
If that means there's no business case for creating videogames, so be it.
It happens that right now I'm listening 1980 Gould's interpretation of Bach's Goldberg variations. There's no way a today's Bach would write a work of art like that, much less have it marketeed by a record company exactly *because* the way the media industry wanted and managed this market and what's their standpoint? So be it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Handling corner cases is accomplished by identifying what they are and specifically implementing code to handle them when necessary."
For the most part, corner cases are bad algorithms.
" why hurt a company that is paying you millions of dollars a year?"
Because they can get even more by hurting them *and* getting their golden parachutes after the havoc?
Randomness as a Service?
I don't know if out will work, but I know it certainly shouldn't.
In two words: MiM attack.
"I've always considered myself very poor at self-deception"
So you think!
"My projects are no longer small-scale hobbies, they are large frameworks, and I need to make a living."
Well, then do it the way any other else's.
Research your market so you know what's sellable and what is not, to whom and why.
Then target your product to the lowest hanging fruit and focus your advertisement campaign to it (I mean it! You might think at the beginning that your product is targetted to other developers just to find that it is in fact targetted to their managers which are the ones that sign the checks -you need quite different selling points).
Offer solid quality at competitive price and build a strong brand to support it.
Have your ears wide open so you hear what your customers *and* your prospective customers have to say.
And, finally, if you want to make money out of programing, never program[1] for free.
Heck, is there any other way?
[1] I meant exactly what I said: that's nothing to do with the license you happen to attach to what you program, but don't open the editor unless there's somebody willing to pay for the effort.
"Smiths invisible hand has been appropriated by others (abused) and expanded (to your meaning above)."
It is curious that the cite you propose makes exactly my point: the "invisible hand" is well and good and works exactly the way Smith proposed.
As your cite demonstrates -and that's the abuse referred, Smith never gave "magical powers" to the "invisible hand" that made it work but to the benefit of society but that, *given some circumnstances* Smith carefully analize, the "invisible hand" tended to work for a society's benefit more times than not.
Current circumnstances are different than those portraited by Smith, except for the "main engine": that everybody moves in their own interest, looking for their own profits (and it is interesting to note that Smith referes too to the fact that most people are not so good about properly identifying the strategies that maximize their own benefit on the long run and that capital operators tend to know better than average where their profits are *but* their benefits are also not usually aligned to those of society as a whole -sounds familiar?) so it is an exercise to the reader to consider if the "invisible hand" on current circumnstances works for the good of society or not.
All in all, my point states: you'd better get to the sources and read "the wealth of nations" yourself instead of using third party interpretations (which, again, happens to be the point of the wikipedia article you cite).
"I believe that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" originally referred to the tendency of companies based in a particular country to favor doing business in that country thus strengthening their home country."
Yes. And that tendency was a direct effect that they got better profits that way.
"Of course, now companies have no loyalty to any country"
Nor they did back in Adam Smith times (he also studies the import/export and the export/export cases). It's only the world changed and now companies get higher profits where they didn't before. Their loyalty is exactly where it was: maximizing profits.
"There is no more "invisible hand". It's all an open race to the bottom."
I think you'd find much better reading Adam Smith yourself instead of vague third party memories.
"I think you're confusing trusting science with trusting people who do science."
No, I don't think so.
"Science doesn't require trust."
Of course it does: epistemology is not science after all.
In fact, I'd say is just the opposite of what you say: because I trust science, I don't have to trust any given scientist. The repeatability "clause" of the scientific method wouldn't be needed if the people doing science could be inherently trustable.
In other words, I put a high level of trust in what Einstein said because I know he did it in the context of the scientific comunity that I trust because I trust the scientific method science uses.
F.
There.
Oh! I forgot to add this:
"We 'trust' the kinds of science that opens itself up to observation, criticism, and testing"
Is there any other kind of science?
"Even if we never personally replicate the results ourselves, we know that the results can and have been replicated."
Which happens to be within the realm of epystemology, or even sociology, not science. That's the Bentham's panopticon principle which has nothing to do with science (other realms of knowledge out of science take advantage of that very same principle, i.e.: Linus Torvalds saying about open source software "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").
"Trust. But verify."
Again: have you verified *yourself* but a really minimal part of the key experiments that build our actual comprehension of Universe (and that's taking for granted that you are a scientifc researcher for a living)?
Have you, per chance, verified by yourself, say, the Michelson-Morley experiment that opens the door to Special Relativity?
Heck, it is a cornerstone for modern physics and it was first tried in 1887, you have had more time than enough!
I bet you don't.
"Even if we never personally replicate the results ourselves, we know that the results can and have been replicated."
Which makes exactly my point. You *trust* the scientific method or, in other words, you *believe* that science is capable to produce trustworthy knowledge. It is not blind faith (you trust the scientific method for very reasonable concerns) but it is believeness nevertheless.
"Actually, what we need is pure capitalism, with most large businesses replaced with hundreds of small businesses and coops competing for business."
And how do you expect that to happen, except with the help of government coercion? Current system hasn't evolved out of thin air but already starting from a system with hundreds of small business and coops competing for business.
"More small businesses would mean a larger portion of the workers would be the owners"
Moving your average company from 1000 workers to 100 workers would mean moving the owners-to-workers proportion from 0,1% to 1%. Even moving to a 10 workers average company (and then you should explain how do you expect that to be a world-wide competitive recipy) would mean the profits would be in the hands of a 10%, still far from representative of "profits in the hands of those doing the work".
"If you believe trust has anything to do with science, you are sadly ignorant."
Think about it twice.
Are you an expert -and I mean a postdoc-level expert, about, well, everything?
I know I'm not and I know that due to this I have to trust the scientific community to do their job.
One thing is the scientific method which, yes, has nothing to do with trust, and a different thing is science which, really, is all about trust. It is me (and you) trusting that the scientific method is a valid process, both in theory and in practice because the way it works and its included checks and ballances, to gain knowledge about the physical world.
"At this rate it won't be long before they're able to do the same with live cats"
Impossible. For that to happen they should first settle on the cat being in fact alive!
"For a long time, people didn't care about privacy."
You will have to rrrrreally go back in the past to find a time when people didn't care about privacy. Just for the most comically obvious sign, when was the last time that shitting in public was socially acceptable?
People has felt that there are issues that are nobody else's business basically since always.
"Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system."
Facebook is basically a giant marketing data collecting tool. Without the ability to collect your data how exactly could Facebook work?
"This is pervasive only due to advertising."
Not advertising but marketing. Forget about advertising and companies still will want to know what's the average income of your neighborhood, if there's a majority of any ethnic, if they are young or old, how many children on average, if they have degrees or just basic education, if you have a big car or if you prefer your weekly buy on saturday or friday...
Advertising is just the most visible side of the marketing iceberg.
"The problem is not that we have too few laws, it is that most people still think about things as if they were in the mid-20th century. "
I wish that was the case. No, the problem is that as soon as "but on a computer" or "but in the Internet" is thrown into the equation people magically tend to go into dummy mode.
"People have no clue how email works, so they assume it is like a faster version of postal mail."
No, the problem is that people do NOT assume that e-mail is like a faster version of postal mail. Because if they really assumed e-mail being much like postal mail only faster, do you really think they would allow for government to sneek into e-mail without a warrant? If they thougth it worked like postal mail, do you think they'd allow for an employer to gain the right to read correspondence explicity directed to your personal address?
Facebook: do you see people allowing employers to sneek into their family photo albums?
Software: do you see people allowing new cars being sold without legal guarantee?
Computers: do you see people allowing the employer to sneek into the personaly assigned closet without a very strong reason?
"Until that company goes out of business"
So what? It is not live data but one for backup purposes. If the company goes out of business you look for another one, no data is lost in the meantime.
"To protect your backup properly you have to trust someone"
You may need the help of someone but certainly you don't need to trust him.
Cypher your backups if you don't want them accessed by someone else and test them from time to time if you don't want to discover too late someone have been playing with them.
Never understimate the bandwith of a station wagon full off... pigeons?
"I run a RAID5 array on a spare box for backups"
What will happen when you home burns in fire?
You'll say at first "I'll have worse things to worry about, then!" but, provided you survive, those "worse things" will eventually be taken care of and then, where's your data?
Having no disconnected off-site data set is having no backup, just like RAID: better uptime, no disaster recovery.
"I took it as "-- How do you x? -- You don't.""
Take it whatever way you want.
In fact, in the end, you are right: I am not in the videogames industry, therefore I don't do X. It's up to those in the videogame industry to seek for their profit as it is up to me to stablish the social contract I feel profits myself and the society I want to live in the best. And certainly I don't think it's a good bargain, one that benefits overall society, the current one with regards of "intellectual property".
Maybe a collective of users can found a videogame production, maybe not. Maybe a good business model is the old and probed arcade shop, where owners pay for game development and then recover by the coins on the machines... I certainly don't give a damn.
"I saw that in response to someone saying ""Medicaid and public universities both work fine", you replied "No, they don't.""
Were the hell did you read something along these lines?
"In my country (Australia)"
It happens that I'm Spanish, so I see your Medicare and double it. Spain, as basically all Europe, have public medical and educations systems that do work so I'm perfectly aware about what I'm talking about.
And how do you think i.e. a public health system works? Is it not a coallition of free citizens pooling to pay exactly for the service they in common decide they need without paying a premium on artificial scarcity for those services?
And doesn't it happen that health costs for European citizens average about a 25% less than their USA counterpart while at the same time European citizens average a 10% better life expectancy than USA?
QED.
"So how do you recommend that "an association of end users" fund the development of a video game?"
Not necessarily. But I support the notion that the videogame company shouldn't make its business model to stand on top of artificial scarcity of the product it delivers.
If that means there's no business case for creating videogames, so be it.
It happens that right now I'm listening 1980 Gould's interpretation of Bach's Goldberg variations. There's no way a today's Bach would write a work of art like that, much less have it marketeed by a record company exactly *because* the way the media industry wanted and managed this market and what's their standpoint? So be it.