Well I don't understand -- free market idealists (such as the OP) suppose that markets will act like ideal markets, but know that ideal markets don't exist? How can you base a belief on a known fallacy?
Barriers to entry? Check.
Non-commodity good? Check.
Lack of perfectly informed decisions by the purchasers? Check.
Note that even if the federal government were to stop regulating telecom, there is still the whole issue of infrastructure for landline-based delivery, in terms of barriers to entry.
As to higher barriers to entry under regulation -- that's acceptable, as ANY barrier to entry on the scale we're talking about will prevent competition... adding a few bucketfuls of sand to a dune won't make a difference. The point is that what we'd see WITHOUT regulation would be almost zero innovation by the sole provider in each area -- unless there was a way to make more money off it. Your idea that innovation was stifled by regulation is off the mark -- innovation was stifled by monopoly suppliers, who would have existed with or without regulation.
You can refute it, but your refutations don't hold water. That's why I posted "chicken and egg and chicken and egg" because the common refutation is "Well, we have to regulate it because we spent tax dollars on building the infrastructure." Well, why did you do that? "Because we had to since no one would have sold land to provide the service in the first place." How do you know that? "Well, because."
Don't ascribe others' reasons to me. We don't need to regulate because we spent money on infrastructure... we need to regulate for the same reasons we spent money on infrastructure. That is, to provide good service to as many people as possible (ideally, all of them who want it) while preventing a monopoly from gouging people. There is a natural monopoly for anything with as big of an infrastructure as the telecomm industry, and companies will take advantage of that, to the detriment of consumers, unless regulated.
As to JJ Hill -- why do you think other business were unable to compete? Because of imperfect market conditions (as any real market has) that prevented newcomers from challenging him. Sure he could deliver cheaper goods... he had the infrastructure in hand already. But someone will equal access to the infrastructure could have easily driven prices even lower, and provided more services.
Also, -5 for credibility there. Your little opinion piece about JJ Hill (a self-authored citation? blech.) doesn't refute the fact that he was in fact a monopolist. Sure,some of the things he did help ameliorate the harm his monopolies caused, but it is disingenuous to say that his monopolies caused no harm. A lot of those things could have been done just as easily under a non-monopolist industry. Finally, note that a lot of his innovation was not due to competition from other firms -- it was to react to worldwide financial crisis.
So, what is the status of the situation which allows companies to patent naturally occurring phenomena, such as DNA and now a scent which comes from a chemical naturally produced by the human body?
It's not a patent on the naturally-occurring compound, per se. Rather, patents on methods of producing said compound, or patents for using said compound for a specific use.
After all, tons of pharmaceuticals occur naturally in nature (or at least their parent class of compounds do). And we wouldn't want unscrupulous companies to be able to treat and/or cure diseases indiscriminately, would we?
I totally agree with you -- but it's important to note that in an ideal market, this does not hold true. In an ideal market no regulation will result in the best situation. The problem is that no market is ideal -- we've got barriers to entry, non-commodity goods (these two are core issues with telco deregulation), etc.
GP seems to think that all markets behave like ideal markets. They don't -- which is why government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies from abusing their market status.
But, in the end, it doesn't make much difference -- nothing is going to help him change his mind, we'll continue to posts like this one of his on Slashdot for years to come. The free-market idealists have a pretty unshakeable belief in their dogma, and we'll continue to refute their arguments til kingdom come.
The consumers want one thing -- competition. Competition happens when government stays away from the market. The more we let government "regulate" net neutrality or attempt to create a level playing field, the more we'll see our prices go up, our service levels go down, and competition get wiped out of the market.
(Emphasis mine)
Sure, government regulation of the telcos has in the past couple decades been weighted in favor of said telcos (IMO) -- but the knife cuts both ways.
You're recommending coffee to an already high-strung person?
Caffeine withdrawal is a bitch, my friend, and only feeding the beast some of what it wants will make it go away. (I was just guessing the nature of his beast, but caffeine seemed likely to me).
First, that's not the headline. The headline is "School Software Licenses Under Review."
Second, just as in the 1920s (or even today, in newsprint) there are formatting concerns with your copy. That hook line (which is what you are referring to) ideally should be in one line and be in a slightly larger font than the article text. In addition, it needs to fit in the width of the rest of the article, for ease of reading, and to allow ads next to the article.
Third, brevity is important to online journalism no less than print journalism -- people are scanning thousands or even tens of thousands of lines of text a day. Being succinct is crucial to be easy to read, which is something more online news sites should focus on.
Have a cup of coffee. Relax a bit. You're obviously a bit too high-strung at the moment -- very quick to call them 'idiots' when you apparently don't know the first thing about the "journalistic standards" you mention.
I nkow, nitpicking a bit, but it's not the next step, it's a concurrent step...
From a totally cynical point of view: Keem them fat & happy while you restrict rights that don't yet affect them daily; then tear 'em down to subsistance living so you can take away the rights that DO affect them on a daily basis.
The advantage libertarianism has over the current US system is that along with the monied control of government, you'd get a little personal freedom to make you feel better at being bent over all the time.
f the manufacturer forces him to use product A only with product B, the customer cannot make this decision. If he is forced to use product A if he wants to use product B, this violates the laws of free trade.
Not unless the manufacturer has a monopoly on product B. There is no restriction on buyers purchasing equivalent goods from someone else otherwise, so there is no violation of fair business practices.
I agree with you. The reason it frustrates me so much though is that it's been rehashed a million times on every patent article. The single-subject posters (like a lot of the libertarians on slashdot) have the knee-jerk response of espousing libertarianism as a panacea for legal & social issues no matter how tangentially it relates to the article.
I'm all for discussion of potential solutions, but real discussion about possible, near-future solutions is far more important, to me, than pie-in-the-sky "what if government just butted out" discussions. The libertarian vision will never come to pass in the US, and discussion of it is pretty much a waste of time (and mod points:))
Of note, I share a lot of opinions with libertarians in re: personal liberties.
The next step as freedoms diminish is to start reducing the size of the middle class: those who have money and time for lesuire, but do not have any power in the system.
The next step? Poverty rates through 2004. This reflects people moving from the lower middle class, as well as higher population growth in the lowest income ranges.
Higher gas prices? Reduce the discretionary income of the middle and lower classes disproportionately. How about food, also excluded from inflation statistics? Higher gas prices also causing food price inflation. The middle class, if defined as a percentage of households (the 3rd quintile) will never get smaller. But if defined by buying power and lifestlye (as fits your post) it's already shrinking.
Well, first off, that's a small-l libertarian, not a capital-L-Libertarian. Big difference, and doesn't queste to Republican/Democrat. Second, I'd rather if there was a libertarian post on the topic, that they even bothered to discuss the downsides of libertarianism in the case, or even acknowledge that there are some. It's been discussed enough that any even casual reader of Slashdot has seen the same discussion dozens of times.
There is no deliberate obtuseness. You are still failing to address the same damn point -- any 'obtuseness' you see is the result of your own failing to explain your incorrect conclusion. And as to the red herring and straw man, why are they not? How is the red herring germane to the discussion, and what does the straw man have to do with the original disucssion?
You didn't read the summary or article carefully. This is a species of ant that does not rely on scent for navigation, as their normal habitat breaks down the pheremones/scents too quickly.
According to the terms of the EULA, MS owns the OS software. Fine.
However, MS does not own works made using that software, nor do they own other software I've purchased (or licensed) that operates with the OS. By denying me the use of that software (by using up resources, etc, or by disabling Windows), they are definitely causing me harm. Furthermore, documents I've created using MSOffice, due to the closed format, are technically unrecoverable.
Look a little higher up in the thread (though the post may have been done after yours). A very clear case is made that WGA is spyware. Calling a spade a spade is not bias.
This works the same in traditional news media... some people think "unbiased" means "equal time for opposing points of view." When one point of view is correct, unbiased means reporting that view as correct.
As an example, take global warming. Are all the people claiming it is happening at least partly due to human action biased?
Not to stray too offtopic in my explanation of why calling it spyware isn't biased, but using a one-word term to refer to something that would take many lines of text to explain otherwise is a good thing. And if you still don't think WGA is spyware, then maybe a little more research is in order... it's not the submitter's nor the editor's job to provide you with all relevant information.
Hey you know what? His opinion is valid. If he feels personally wronged by Microsoft, he is perfectly justified in wanting Microsoft to get slapped. If he feels there is overwhelming evidence that Microsoft has wronged others, he is perfectly justified in wanting Microsoft to get slapped.
His stated opinion was not about frustration with MS -- it was about frustration with this particular action by MS.
There's more to it, but I didn't want my initial response getting too long...
While churches may sometimes support a government, administer a government, or be sanctioned by a government, it doesn't hold that all religions are governments and vice versa.
I think what underlies your OP (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that religions and governments often share methodologies, and that often there is as much dogma with a civil government as there is with a religion.
The parallels and relationships between the two are often incredible, but the two are not always> the same, so they can't be equated.
So some space virus wipes out the crew, and Houston decides to remotely land the shuttle and bring the virus back to Earth. Good going, NASA, I was hoping to avoid the whole Captain Trips situation this century...
you are misinformed - the function of the government is to protect individuals rights from ALL TRANSGRESSORS
Your interpretation of the purpose of government is one that suits your argument, but there are many thoughts on the purpose of government, we happen to disagree.
social factors can also promote the violation of individuals rights - such as the inertia behind the male genital mutilation practice of the united states. Which was initially started up int he late 1800s by radical fundamentalist christians as a "cure" to masturbation - since masturbation was the root of all evil
Red herring. Whether or not social factors promote violation of individual rights does not affect whether or not they should protect individual rights. It is quite possible to have a failure in the system, an example of one means nothing. Useless.
Censorship is a violation of peoples rights - yet it's done "for their protection". If you are incapable of making the differentiation between protecting a right, and "protecting" someone from something irrelevant like swear words, twinkies, boobies or dissent then you are being intentionally obtuse.
Straw man. Useless again, where'd you learn to argue/debate/discuss, Bill O'Reilly? (sorry, given the tone of your response, had to use the ad hominem there). Appropriate example: My right to defend my property vs. your right to life. There's a tradeoff there, and people will disagree as to which is more valued. Do I have a license to shoot you because you trespass? Do you have a license to be free of threat of harm that violates my right to be secure in my property? Ditto for your next point -- often the rights of people are at loggerheads. There is not always a clear case of "my right overrules your right."
you seem to have a faulty understanding of what rights are as I covered before - any exercise of "a right" that violates the rights of others is NOT protected - it is License instead of Right.
Please attempt to understand the concepts of which you speak!
I would say the same of you! This goes back to my previous points. Yes, any exercise of a right that affects another is a license -- but all exercises of rights affect others, and therefore any application of a right is a license. You're splitting hairs with the semantics, here, while failing to discuss the issue. One cannot discuss rights in the abstract while speaking of government action (which is not abstract).
of course not, and your attempt to godwin with argument through intentionally being obtuse demonstrates the underlying knowledge that your position is weak and willfully ignorant of the difference between rights and license
Nope. How is my pointing out a blatant fallacy in your logic anything other than that? This doesn't invalidate my point, it invalidates yours -- there is no difference in practice between any applied right and any license. There is no intentional obtuseness -- there is just the obvious fact that your position on rights doesn't account for when rights (or licenses, for that matter) conflict. Your answer to my valid point? "your position is weak and willfully ignorant of the difference between rights and license." Not so. You're choosing not to see that the distinction between rights and licenses do not matter, because we're not talking about abstraction, we're discussing actions. Again, your use of a useless debating tool (the ad hominem, in this case) does nothing to bolster your argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I don't understand -- free market idealists (such as the OP) suppose that markets will act like ideal markets, but know that ideal markets don't exist? How can you base a belief on a known fallacy?
Barriers to entry? Check.
Non-commodity good? Check.
Lack of perfectly informed decisions by the purchasers? Check.
Note that even if the federal government were to stop regulating telecom, there is still the whole issue of infrastructure for landline-based delivery, in terms of barriers to entry.
As to higher barriers to entry under regulation -- that's acceptable, as ANY barrier to entry on the scale we're talking about will prevent competition... adding a few bucketfuls of sand to a dune won't make a difference. The point is that what we'd see WITHOUT regulation would be almost zero innovation by the sole provider in each area -- unless there was a way to make more money off it. Your idea that innovation was stifled by regulation is off the mark -- innovation was stifled by monopoly suppliers, who would have existed with or without regulation.
Don't ascribe others' reasons to me. We don't need to regulate because we spent money on infrastructure... we need to regulate for the same reasons we spent money on infrastructure. That is, to provide good service to as many people as possible (ideally, all of them who want it) while preventing a monopoly from gouging people. There is a natural monopoly for anything with as big of an infrastructure as the telecomm industry, and companies will take advantage of that, to the detriment of consumers, unless regulated.
As to JJ Hill -- why do you think other business were unable to compete? Because of imperfect market conditions (as any real market has) that prevented newcomers from challenging him. Sure he could deliver cheaper goods... he had the infrastructure in hand already. But someone will equal access to the infrastructure could have easily driven prices even lower, and provided more services.
Also, -5 for credibility there. Your little opinion piece about JJ Hill (a self-authored citation? blech.) doesn't refute the fact that he was in fact a monopolist. Sure,some of the things he did help ameliorate the harm his monopolies caused, but it is disingenuous to say that his monopolies caused no harm. A lot of those things could have been done just as easily under a non-monopolist industry. Finally, note that a lot of his innovation was not due to competition from other firms -- it was to react to worldwide financial crisis.
After all, tons of pharmaceuticals occur naturally in nature (or at least their parent class of compounds do). And we wouldn't want unscrupulous companies to be able to treat and/or cure diseases indiscriminately, would we?
Welcome to the puss-y inflamed itching-to-all-hell scabbed-over mosquito-bite reality that many of the rest of us have to endure.
Time to join the normals, I guess... Natural Mosquito Repelling is a pretty lame Super-power, anyway.
I totally agree with you -- but it's important to note that in an ideal market, this does not hold true. In an ideal market no regulation will result in the best situation. The problem is that no market is ideal -- we've got barriers to entry, non-commodity goods (these two are core issues with telco deregulation), etc.
GP seems to think that all markets behave like ideal markets. They don't -- which is why government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies from abusing their market status.
But, in the end, it doesn't make much difference -- nothing is going to help him change his mind, we'll continue to posts like this one of his on Slashdot for years to come. The free-market idealists have a pretty unshakeable belief in their dogma, and we'll continue to refute their arguments til kingdom come.
Sure, government regulation of the telcos has in the past couple decades been weighted in favor of said telcos (IMO) -- but the knife cuts both ways.
First, that's not the headline. The headline is "School Software Licenses Under Review."
Second, just as in the 1920s (or even today, in newsprint) there are formatting concerns with your copy. That hook line (which is what you are referring to) ideally should be in one line and be in a slightly larger font than the article text. In addition, it needs to fit in the width of the rest of the article, for ease of reading, and to allow ads next to the article.
Third, brevity is important to online journalism no less than print journalism -- people are scanning thousands or even tens of thousands of lines of text a day. Being succinct is crucial to be easy to read, which is something more online news sites should focus on.
Have a cup of coffee. Relax a bit. You're obviously a bit too high-strung at the moment -- very quick to call them 'idiots' when you apparently don't know the first thing about the "journalistic standards" you mention.
I nkow, nitpicking a bit, but it's not the next step, it's a concurrent step...
From a totally cynical point of view: Keem them fat & happy while you restrict rights that don't yet affect them daily; then tear 'em down to subsistance living so you can take away the rights that DO affect them on a daily basis.
Left|Right turn signals? Rearview|Side mirrors? But yeah.
If you're going to be basing laws on a study, I'd rather not have Mythbusters do the study.
Well, it's not stopping capitalism...
The advantage libertarianism has over the current US system is that along with the monied control of government, you'd get a little personal freedom to make you feel better at being bent over all the time.
I agree with you. The reason it frustrates me so much though is that it's been rehashed a million times on every patent article. The single-subject posters (like a lot of the libertarians on slashdot) have the knee-jerk response of espousing libertarianism as a panacea for legal & social issues no matter how tangentially it relates to the article.
:))
I'm all for discussion of potential solutions, but real discussion about possible, near-future solutions is far more important, to me, than pie-in-the-sky "what if government just butted out" discussions. The libertarian vision will never come to pass in the US, and discussion of it is pretty much a waste of time (and mod points
Of note, I share a lot of opinions with libertarians in re: personal liberties.
Higher gas prices? Reduce the discretionary income of the middle and lower classes disproportionately. How about food, also excluded from inflation statistics? Higher gas prices also causing food price inflation. The middle class, if defined as a percentage of households (the 3rd quintile) will never get smaller. But if defined by buying power and lifestlye (as fits your post) it's already shrinking.
Well, first off, that's a small-l libertarian, not a capital-L-Libertarian. Big difference, and doesn't queste to Republican/Democrat. Second, I'd rather if there was a libertarian post on the topic, that they even bothered to discuss the downsides of libertarianism in the case, or even acknowledge that there are some. It's been discussed enough that any even casual reader of Slashdot has seen the same discussion dozens of times.
Are you kidding?
There is no deliberate obtuseness. You are still failing to address the same damn point -- any 'obtuseness' you see is the result of your own failing to explain your incorrect conclusion. And as to the red herring and straw man, why are they not? How is the red herring germane to the discussion, and what does the straw man have to do with the original disucssion?
Oh, FFS, can we have ONE discussion regarding patent issues without a libertarian troll that fails to look at the downsides of minimalist government?
You didn't read the summary or article carefully. This is a species of ant that does not rely on scent for navigation, as their normal habitat breaks down the pheremones/scents too quickly.
I'll add one thing to your summary:
According to the terms of the EULA, MS owns the OS software. Fine.
However, MS does not own works made using that software, nor do they own other software I've purchased (or licensed) that operates with the OS. By denying me the use of that software (by using up resources, etc, or by disabling Windows), they are definitely causing me harm. Furthermore, documents I've created using MSOffice, due to the closed format, are technically unrecoverable.
Look a little higher up in the thread (though the post may have been done after yours). A very clear case is made that WGA is spyware. Calling a spade a spade is not bias.
This works the same in traditional news media... some people think "unbiased" means "equal time for opposing points of view." When one point of view is correct, unbiased means reporting that view as correct.
As an example, take global warming. Are all the people claiming it is happening at least partly due to human action biased?
Not to stray too offtopic in my explanation of why calling it spyware isn't biased, but using a one-word term to refer to something that would take many lines of text to explain otherwise is a good thing. And if you still don't think WGA is spyware, then maybe a little more research is in order... it's not the submitter's nor the editor's job to provide you with all relevant information.
Hey you know what? His opinion is valid. If he feels personally wronged by Microsoft, he is perfectly justified in wanting Microsoft to get slapped. If he feels there is overwhelming evidence that Microsoft has wronged others, he is perfectly justified in wanting Microsoft to get slapped.
His stated opinion was not about frustration with MS -- it was about frustration with this particular action by MS.
There's more to it, but I didn't want my initial response getting too long...
While churches may sometimes support a government, administer a government, or be sanctioned by a government, it doesn't hold that all religions are governments and vice versa.
I think what underlies your OP (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that religions and governments often share methodologies, and that often there is as much dogma with a civil government as there is with a religion.
The parallels and relationships between the two are often incredible, but the two are not always> the same, so they can't be equated.
So some space virus wipes out the crew, and Houston decides to remotely land the shuttle and bring the virus back to Earth. Good going, NASA, I was hoping to avoid the whole Captain Trips situation this century...
Red herring. Whether or not social factors promote violation of individual rights does not affect whether or not they should protect individual rights. It is quite possible to have a failure in the system, an example of one means nothing. Useless.
Straw man. Useless again, where'd you learn to argue/debate/discuss, Bill O'Reilly? (sorry, given the tone of your response, had to use the ad hominem there). Appropriate example: My right to defend my property vs. your right to life. There's a tradeoff there, and people will disagree as to which is more valued. Do I have a license to shoot you because you trespass? Do you have a license to be free of threat of harm that violates my right to be secure in my property? Ditto for your next point -- often the rights of people are at loggerheads. There is not always a clear case of "my right overrules your right."
I would say the same of you! This goes back to my previous points. Yes, any exercise of a right that affects another is a license -- but all exercises of rights affect others, and therefore any application of a right is a license. You're splitting hairs with the semantics, here, while failing to discuss the issue. One cannot discuss rights in the abstract while speaking of government action (which is not abstract).
Nope. How is my pointing out a blatant fallacy in your logic anything other than that? This doesn't invalidate my point, it invalidates yours -- there is no difference in practice between any applied right and any license. There is no intentional obtuseness -- there is just the obvious fact that your position on rights doesn't account for when rights (or licenses, for that matter) conflict. Your answer to my valid point? "your position is weak and willfully ignorant of the difference between rights and license." Not so. You're choosing not to see that the distinction between rights and licenses do not matter, because we're not talking about abstraction, we're discussing actions. Again, your use of a useless debating tool (the ad hominem, in this case) does nothing to bolster your argument.