I think you're confusing two different things... Microsoft was accused of bundling software (IE) with its *OS*, which can be illegal under certain circumstances because Windows has a monopoly. If they say "you can't have Windows unless you also take IE," then Netscape can't compete, because Windows has a monopoly so people *need* it. This article on the other hand is talking about hardware makers bundling sofware (e.g. Office, Quicken) with their hardware, which does not have a monopoly, so it's not anti-competitive. If Dell makes a deal with Intuit to put Quicken on every computer they sell, I can still go to HP to buy a computer with a different package (or with no software at all, that might be $10 cheaper).
That story that you linked too has nothing to do with Adobe not producing more software. They are just pulling out of some markets.
They're also going to stop localizing their products for those markets, thereby producing less software, so those consumers lose out. If there were as much piracy going on in the rest of the world as in Asia, then presumably they'd stop making ALL their software because they couldn't make any money at it, and ALL their customers would lose out.
if anything, Adobe will save costs
Whah? Now there's some wishful thinking. I guess Adobe should be grateful that they can't make any money there because of all the piracy...
nobody can proove that Adobe would have had a profitable market in those geographics, even if they were able to reduce piracy to 0%.
Of course nobody can prove this. Nobody can disprove it either, what's your point? If there were no piracy, it would be up to Adobe to try to make money in that market, and if they could do it, then those markets would benefit from localized versions of their sofware. If they charged too high a price, then they'd lower the price so that people would buy more. If they couldn't lower the price enough and still make money, then in fact there wouldn't be a market there, and they'd stop trying to sell it. But the rampant piracy makes this system impossible.
I've always dismissed the argument that piracy or theft == potential market.
I certainly agree that 1000 pirated copies doesn't translate into 1000 lost sales - probably a small fraction of that. But it certainly does result in some lost sales. And, I guess I don't disagree that some piracy can popularize a product. But what does that justify? It's up to the company if they want to give let some people (e.g. college students) have their software for free or cheap. I am NOT in the best position to decide whether stealing a copy of this software is good or bad for the company. I'm not exactly a disinterested party...
People have no problem purchasing things at fair prices...
Who decides what the "fair" price is? If we let the consumer decide the price (by threatening to just pirate the software if they don't get the price they want), do you think that would be any "fairer"?
I view your last 2 paragraphs as gobs and gobs of wishful thinking... i.e. Don't these stupid companies realize that they'd just make so much money if they just dropped their prices by 90%... Again, conflict of interest - you're not in an unbiased position to tell these companies what to do. Of course if there were a way to make everyone pay what the sofware is worth to *them*, it would be the ideal situation. But how do you do that?
That's pretty short-sighted don't you think? Piracy is GREAT for consumers in the short term, but BAD for consumers in the long term. The less money that companies make selling software, the less software they'll produce. Remember?
In my very limited reading about AOP, it always sounded like something that was very useful in a very limited set of circumstances, but not nearly as general as OOP. The classic AOP example is logging, which it seems very useful for, but this ubiquitous example made it seem like a one-trick pony.
In this thread, someone else mentioned synchronization, persistance, and security. I'd have to learn more about how AOP is useful in these areas, but they do seem to cut across member boundaries, so I can understand how they'd make good targets. Your needsRepaint() example is another interesting one. (As a side question, would this fall apart if repaints weren't batched? I.e. if I changed an object's x and y and width and height, would that cause 4 screen repaints? Any way around this?)
So it seems like AOP is meant to solve the problem of "whenever we do X, we're going to have to remember to also do Y," where Y could be check security permissions, repaint, write to a log file, etc. Right? Can you suggest some example uses other than the ones already mentioned? I think this would help AOP overcome the one-trick-pony label in my mind.
Hmmm... I see your point, but I actually think it works more the other way. TV and movies have made us familiar with people in other countries like never before. That that slowly introduced us to the concept that other countries actually have living, breathing human beings, that can't be demonized easily. Even in countries that we don't know much about, we do recognize that there are normal civilians there that are probably decent people. In wars before the 60's, I doubt there was any talk of "we have no issue with the people of Germany/Japan/whatever, only with their governments." If you look at the propaganda from WWII, it was all terribly racist. How else could we convince people to go kill those other guys? There were millions of civilian casualties in WWII, but today we hear complaints about the 1000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan or whatever. When we didn't think too much about people anywhere else, do you think anyone would have cared?
Traditionally "censorship" means only government supression of information, as you can see from all the definitions quoted on this web site. Only the quote from the touchy-feely "Academic American Encyclopedia from Prodigy on-line" suggests that "censorship" can be applied to non-governmental entities. The web site itself has quite a different idea, however. The idea that "subtle, pervasive, and often invisible psychological methods" of hiding information could be called "censorship" is pretty weak. If you expand the definition of the word to include corporations that supposedly control what you see, you're weakening the meaning of the word in its classical, and most dangerous, sense. Maybe the RIAA is somehow keeping me from hearing all the really good underground bands, but that's nothing compared to government repression of ideas that are "dangerous" (to the current government, of course).
I don't see how signatures or encryption will solve anything.
If you junk all mail that is signed by keys you don't recognize, you could just as easily junk all mail with a From address that you don't recognize. It's unlikely that a spammer will forge their From address so that the message appears to be from your Aunt Edna, so the signing really doesn't buy you anything. The problem is (1) it's a hassle to maintain a list of all your friends that are allowed to send you mail, and (2) sometimes you want to recieve mail from people you don't know, e.g. if you want them to be able to respond to a posting or web site notice or something. It's this unsolicited non-commercial mail that you want to get through that makes this hard.
You're not an environmental skeptic, you're an environmentalist. The phrase is actually "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," in that order. You first started hearing it when recycling became a big issue in the 80's (remember the Long Island garbage barge?) AFAIK it was an environmental slogan to remind people that, yes recycling is good, but it's only a Plan C, for those things that can't reduced or reused. So, the environmentalist movement would very much agree with you.
Unfortunately, in the US there's currently no incentive for people to reduce or reuse other than guilt, and that doesn't often work. I routinely use paper towels instead of a sponge, because it's easier. In Europe isn't there some kind of "waste tax" that manufacturers pay to cover the waste disposal costs of their products? To encourage them to reduce the amount of packaging, and to make disposable things more costly. How is that working, anyone know?
Re:SQL validator
on
SQL Validator
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you shouldn't be allowed to criticize someone for charging money for something, without explaining how they *should* get their money. There are alternative ways to fund a standards organization, but each has their disadvantages too...
The very notion that anything I e-mail to someone is available for downloading/printing by anyone but the receipient is a huge privacy violation.
If you'd read the article, you'd notice that these e-mails were given to the authorities by the *intended recipient* which makes your complaint pretty invalid. I think the judge does in fact know what he's talking about here.
I say publishers because beneficiaries to the latest IP laws are not those who actually create the work but the publishers that releases those works.
This is false! Both publishers and authors benefit. The patent/trademark/copyright goes to the author, who can then assign it or license it to a publisher if they like. Most do, because their work will be more widely available if they do, and they'll make more money. That's the author's choice.
You may have a problem with how our current content-distribution system works, but don't take it out on IP laws. That's a red herring. Copyright isn't forcing *any* author to do *anything*.
I don't think the FTC is staffed by elected officials. I would assume that the top few positions are appointed, and the rest are hired just like at any corporation. That's not to say that your point is irrelevent, just that the more levels of indirection you get from the actual elected official, the less influence the political contributions probably have. More important would be the internal politics that each agency uses to maintain its budget.
This way, they cannot just take your idea, because, as something put in a permanent form, it will be covered by international copyright laws.
Where did you get this? Is there such thing as "international copyright law"? Why do you think that something has to be printed out to be copyrighted? I'm sure that's not true. If that were true, wouldn't all software companies have to regularly print out their source code and just keep it around somewhere?
Also note, in the submission requirements, any entry made to Google becomes their sole property.
No, it says that you grant Google a non-exclusive right to do anything it wants with the code. You still own it and can still do whatever you want with it, including sell it to someone else or start your own company with it, I assume.
The printing press is what created the business of being a writer.
OK, that's a fair point. I'll state my point more clearly: Copyright laws, as eventually embodied, are what allowed professional writers to support themselves, and led to more and better quality writings than if we didn't have them.
Just because the earliest copyright laws were bad doesn't mean that copyright laws are bad in general. We fixed them a long time ago, not recently - at least as far back as the U.S. Constitution, no? We took a tyrannical system that supported the king and made it into one that provided incentive to the author. Sounds good to me.
(I agree that we've broken copyright laws again recently, by extending their length indefinitely, and by extending their reach with the DMCA, etc. I think they should be rolled back to the way they were before we screwed them up. Of course, that doesn't mean that we should abandon them.)
The printing press might well have put most writers out of business, except that we invented copyright laws to prevent this.
I'm not at all worried about the jobs of the people that make the old technology (scribes, horse-and-buggy, analog VCRs, CD players, etc). If those things get replaced by better things, I'm all for that. I'm worried about the jobs of the people that create the art/entertainment that is delivered by those vehicles, and by the ones that replace them. Without enforceable copyright, I don't know how those people make money.
I don't know - in movies and TV, there are a lot of actors that I think are really good and deserve to earn a living. Not to mention writers, cinematographers, set designers, costume designers, and I guess key grips, etc., whatever they are. It's just a simple fact that you'll get more and better entertainment if people can make a living at it, than if it can only be done as a hobby.
Of course, if someone can download shows to his hard drive, edit out the commercials, and post them to the net, then this business model breaks down - just like all other business models do, in the face of free digital copying. How do you make money selling content (or giving it away with commercials in it), when anyone can get it for free (or with the commercials edited out)?
No, it's called Capitalism when people pay for stuff that they want. This encourages companies to produce what people want and will pay for. When people can copy stuff for free, capitalism breaks down. If I (a media exec) build a better mousetrap, and people can get it without paying for it, then I'm out of a job.
This idea always comes up - distribute your product widely, to generate interest in your product. That's great, as long as you can eventually SELL your product to SOMEONE. You're saying that the stupid TV execs should let people freely distribute their shows - does that include shows with the commericals deleted? Does that include the Sopranos or other pay-TV shows? Even basic cable channels get some of their revenue from cable fees, right?
Digital copying threatens not just current media business models, but many POSSIBLE NEW business models too. I can think of some business models that might succeed, depending on the medium (TV vs. movies vs. books vs. music), but they're all extremely unproven, and might very well fail miserably. That's when "people gotta eat" falls apart, and we start getting less entertainment, because nobody's paying for it.
It's not exactly the same scenario. Things like sewers, clean water, garbage pickup, etc. are public health issues - they help prevent comunicable diseases. If they weren't provided to everyone for free (or cheap), then disease would spread much more rapidly, even to those people that decided to pay for their sewers etc. rather than dump their s**t onto the streets. Even a libertarian might see the benefit in this kind of service being provided by the govt.
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I think you're confusing two different things... Microsoft was accused of bundling software (IE) with its *OS*, which can be illegal under certain circumstances because Windows has a monopoly. If they say "you can't have Windows unless you also take IE," then Netscape can't compete, because Windows has a monopoly so people *need* it. This article on the other hand is talking about hardware makers bundling sofware (e.g. Office, Quicken) with their hardware, which does not have a monopoly, so it's not anti-competitive. If Dell makes a deal with Intuit to put Quicken on every computer they sell, I can still go to HP to buy a computer with a different package (or with no software at all, that might be $10 cheaper).
That story that you linked too has nothing to do with Adobe not producing more software. They are just pulling out of some markets.
They're also going to stop localizing their products for those markets, thereby producing less software, so those consumers lose out. If there were as much piracy going on in the rest of the world as in Asia, then presumably they'd stop making ALL their software because they couldn't make any money at it, and ALL their customers would lose out.
if anything, Adobe will save costs
Whah? Now there's some wishful thinking. I guess Adobe should be grateful that they can't make any money there because of all the piracy...
nobody can proove that Adobe would have had a profitable market in those geographics, even if they were able to reduce piracy to 0%.
Of course nobody can prove this. Nobody can disprove it either, what's your point? If there were no piracy, it would be up to Adobe to try to make money in that market, and if they could do it, then those markets would benefit from localized versions of their sofware. If they charged too high a price, then they'd lower the price so that people would buy more. If they couldn't lower the price enough and still make money, then in fact there wouldn't be a market there, and they'd stop trying to sell it. But the rampant piracy makes this system impossible.
I've always dismissed the argument that piracy or theft == potential market.
I certainly agree that 1000 pirated copies doesn't translate into 1000 lost sales - probably a small fraction of that. But it certainly does result in some lost sales. And, I guess I don't disagree that some piracy can popularize a product. But what does that justify? It's up to the company if they want to give let some people (e.g. college students) have their software for free or cheap. I am NOT in the best position to decide whether stealing a copy of this software is good or bad for the company. I'm not exactly a disinterested party...
People have no problem purchasing things at fair prices...
Who decides what the "fair" price is? If we let the consumer decide the price (by threatening to just pirate the software if they don't get the price they want), do you think that would be any "fairer"?
I view your last 2 paragraphs as gobs and gobs of wishful thinking... i.e. Don't these stupid companies realize that they'd just make so much money if they just dropped their prices by 90%... Again, conflict of interest - you're not in an unbiased position to tell these companies what to do. Of course if there were a way to make everyone pay what the sofware is worth to *them*, it would be the ideal situation. But how do you do that?
That's pretty short-sighted don't you think? Piracy is GREAT for consumers in the short term, but BAD for consumers in the long term. The less money that companies make selling software, the less software they'll produce. Remember?
In my very limited reading about AOP, it always sounded like something that was very useful in a very limited set of circumstances, but not nearly as general as OOP. The classic AOP example is logging, which it seems very useful for, but this ubiquitous example made it seem like a one-trick pony.
In this thread, someone else mentioned synchronization, persistance, and security. I'd have to learn more about how AOP is useful in these areas, but they do seem to cut across member boundaries, so I can understand how they'd make good targets. Your needsRepaint() example is another interesting one. (As a side question, would this fall apart if repaints weren't batched? I.e. if I changed an object's x and y and width and height, would that cause 4 screen repaints? Any way around this?)
So it seems like AOP is meant to solve the problem of "whenever we do X, we're going to have to remember to also do Y," where Y could be check security permissions, repaint, write to a log file, etc. Right? Can you suggest some example uses other than the ones already mentioned? I think this would help AOP overcome the one-trick-pony label in my mind.
Hmmm... I see your point, but I actually think it works more the other way. TV and movies have made us familiar with people in other countries like never before. That that slowly introduced us to the concept that other countries actually have living, breathing human beings, that can't be demonized easily. Even in countries that we don't know much about, we do recognize that there are normal civilians there that are probably decent people. In wars before the 60's, I doubt there was any talk of "we have no issue with the people of Germany/Japan/whatever, only with their governments." If you look at the propaganda from WWII, it was all terribly racist. How else could we convince people to go kill those other guys? There were millions of civilian casualties in WWII, but today we hear complaints about the 1000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan or whatever. When we didn't think too much about people anywhere else, do you think anyone would have cared?
Traditionally "censorship" means only government supression of information, as you can see from all the definitions quoted on this web site. Only the quote from the touchy-feely "Academic American Encyclopedia from Prodigy on-line" suggests that "censorship" can be applied to non-governmental entities. The web site itself has quite a different idea, however. The idea that "subtle, pervasive, and often invisible psychological methods" of hiding information could be called "censorship" is pretty weak. If you expand the definition of the word to include corporations that supposedly control what you see, you're weakening the meaning of the word in its classical, and most dangerous, sense. Maybe the RIAA is somehow keeping me from hearing all the really good underground bands, but that's nothing compared to government repression of ideas that are "dangerous" (to the current government, of course).
I don't see how signatures or encryption will solve anything.
If you junk all mail that is signed by keys you don't recognize, you could just as easily junk all mail with a From address that you don't recognize. It's unlikely that a spammer will forge their From address so that the message appears to be from your Aunt Edna, so the signing really doesn't buy you anything. The problem is (1) it's a hassle to maintain a list of all your friends that are allowed to send you mail, and (2) sometimes you want to recieve mail from people you don't know, e.g. if you want them to be able to respond to a posting or web site notice or something. It's this unsolicited non-commercial mail that you want to get through that makes this hard.
You're not an environmental skeptic, you're an environmentalist. The phrase is actually "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," in that order. You first started hearing it when recycling became a big issue in the 80's (remember the Long Island garbage barge?) AFAIK it was an environmental slogan to remind people that, yes recycling is good, but it's only a Plan C, for those things that can't reduced or reused. So, the environmentalist movement would very much agree with you.
Unfortunately, in the US there's currently no incentive for people to reduce or reuse other than guilt, and that doesn't often work. I routinely use paper towels instead of a sponge, because it's easier. In Europe isn't there some kind of "waste tax" that manufacturers pay to cover the waste disposal costs of their products? To encourage them to reduce the amount of packaging, and to make disposable things more costly. How is that working, anyone know?
I think you shouldn't be allowed to criticize someone for charging money for something, without explaining how they *should* get their money. There are alternative ways to fund a standards organization, but each has their disadvantages too...
The very notion that anything I e-mail to someone is available for downloading/printing by anyone but the receipient is a huge privacy violation.
If you'd read the article, you'd notice that these e-mails were given to the authorities by the *intended recipient* which makes your complaint pretty invalid. I think the judge does in fact know what he's talking about here.
I say publishers because beneficiaries to the latest IP laws are not those who actually create the work but the publishers that releases those works.
This is false! Both publishers and authors benefit. The patent/trademark/copyright goes to the author, who can then assign it or license it to a publisher if they like. Most do, because their work will be more widely available if they do, and they'll make more money. That's the author's choice.
You may have a problem with how our current content-distribution system works, but don't take it out on IP laws. That's a red herring. Copyright isn't forcing *any* author to do *anything*.
I don't think the FTC is staffed by elected officials. I would assume that the top few positions are appointed, and the rest are hired just like at any corporation. That's not to say that your point is irrelevent, just that the more levels of indirection you get from the actual elected official, the less influence the political contributions probably have. More important would be the internal politics that each agency uses to maintain its budget.
That's right. Do you see this as just the network's problem because they're greedy corporations, or do you see the downside for the consumers too?
This way, they cannot just take your idea, because, as something put in a permanent form, it will be covered by international copyright laws.
Where did you get this? Is there such thing as "international copyright law"? Why do you think that something has to be printed out to be copyrighted? I'm sure that's not true. If that were true, wouldn't all software companies have to regularly print out their source code and just keep it around somewhere?
Also note, in the submission requirements, any entry made to Google becomes their sole property.
No, it says that you grant Google a non-exclusive right to do anything it wants with the code. You still own it and can still do whatever you want with it, including sell it to someone else or start your own company with it, I assume.
The printing press is what created the business of being a writer.
OK, that's a fair point. I'll state my point more clearly: Copyright laws, as eventually embodied, are what allowed professional writers to support themselves, and led to more and better quality writings than if we didn't have them.
Just because the earliest copyright laws were bad doesn't mean that copyright laws are bad in general. We fixed them a long time ago, not recently - at least as far back as the U.S. Constitution, no? We took a tyrannical system that supported the king and made it into one that provided incentive to the author. Sounds good to me.
(I agree that we've broken copyright laws again recently, by extending their length indefinitely, and by extending their reach with the DMCA, etc. I think they should be rolled back to the way they were before we screwed them up. Of course, that doesn't mean that we should abandon them.)
The printing press might well have put most writers out of business, except that we invented copyright laws to prevent this.
I'm not at all worried about the jobs of the people that make the old technology (scribes, horse-and-buggy, analog VCRs, CD players, etc). If those things get replaced by better things, I'm all for that. I'm worried about the jobs of the people that create the art/entertainment that is delivered by those vehicles, and by the ones that replace them. Without enforceable copyright, I don't know how those people make money.
I don't know - in movies and TV, there are a lot of actors that I think are really good and deserve to earn a living. Not to mention writers, cinematographers, set designers, costume designers, and I guess key grips, etc., whatever they are. It's just a simple fact that you'll get more and better entertainment if people can make a living at it, than if it can only be done as a hobby.
Of course, if someone can download shows to his hard drive, edit out the commercials, and post them to the net, then this business model breaks down - just like all other business models do, in the face of free digital copying. How do you make money selling content (or giving it away with commercials in it), when anyone can get it for free (or with the commercials edited out)?
No, it's called Capitalism when people pay for stuff that they want. This encourages companies to produce what people want and will pay for. When people can copy stuff for free, capitalism breaks down. If I (a media exec) build a better mousetrap, and people can get it without paying for it, then I'm out of a job.
This idea always comes up - distribute your product widely, to generate interest in your product. That's great, as long as you can eventually SELL your product to SOMEONE. You're saying that the stupid TV execs should let people freely distribute their shows - does that include shows with the commericals deleted? Does that include the Sopranos or other pay-TV shows? Even basic cable channels get some of their revenue from cable fees, right?
Digital copying threatens not just current media business models, but many POSSIBLE NEW business models too. I can think of some business models that might succeed, depending on the medium (TV vs. movies vs. books vs. music), but they're all extremely unproven, and might very well fail miserably. That's when "people gotta eat" falls apart, and we start getting less entertainment, because nobody's paying for it.
It's not exactly the same scenario. Things like sewers, clean water, garbage pickup, etc. are public health issues - they help prevent comunicable diseases. If they weren't provided to everyone for free (or cheap), then disease would spread much more rapidly, even to those people that decided to pay for their sewers etc. rather than dump their s**t onto the streets. Even a libertarian might see the benefit in this kind of service being provided by the govt.
And, how much easier is customer support for Amazon than for Gateway? How many problems can I have with my book?
"In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine."
--Benjamin Graham
What you're saying is true in the short term, but not in the long term.
Maybe you're thinking of this urban legend?