The situations aren't really any different. Nothing in his life has changed yet, but this is just the first "rich" person moving into the neighborhood. Just as one example, in many business cultures it isn't acceptable for a manager to make less than the people under their direction; it is also often true that all promotion paths lead into management. In these cases lower relative pay means you're not getting promoted. Even though you might be happy with the job you have now, that doesn't mean "get promoted" isn't on the list somewhere.
In an ideal world, that would be great. But what others have can be used to take away what you have. A bunch of rich people move into your neighborhood, shops for your income level disappear, but maybe you squeak by. Your rent goes up to reflect the new neighborhood rates, maybe your building even remodels or is sold to developers for a more upscale market. Maybe you have a house, maybe it has been in your family for 100 years. You've got no intention of buying or selling, but your property taxes are based on an estimate of the house's value and the housing bubble is cosing estimated prices to skyrocket. Your taxes go through the roof, and you can't keep the house. But life isn't fair, and nobody said it would be; instead concentrate on what you have... wait.
Limiting connections from a host or network can have its uses - or be an incredibly bad idea - but it doesn't have anything to do with sockstress or slowloris style approaches in particular. these approaches minimize the cost per connection for the attacker, limiting the number of connections in no way lowers that proportional benefit.
Limiting the number of connections per host or network can just make an attack more successful.. For example the dorm I lived in when I started grad school was NATed behind a tiny handful of IP's, with source connection limiting now one or a few attackers can deny service to the entire building.
Why would we both raise prices? Sounds risky to me. If we both raise prices an equal amount the market may shrink, and we'd both be getting the same portion of a smaller pie (lose). If I raise prices and my competitor doesn't, I'll lose market share (lose).
Conversely if I don't raise prices and my competitor doesn't, I face only a known loss. (lose) but if they do raise prices, I'll steal market share from them (win).
In this scenario not raising prices would be the safest bet; it is the only one with a "win" case.
If corporations could just raise prices to cover increased tax, wouldn't they already be charging the higher price to make more profit? There's got to be some reason the corporation isn't charging higher prices already, and if that is true, then the idea that higher expenses (taxes) plainly result in higher prices doesn't work.
I'm really curious what it is you're having trouble doing. I have not found there to be significantly more need to "trust the compiler" in C++ than in C.
I'm not saying there isn't an answer to this, but I don't know what it is. When I'm using Windows Remote Desktop and I lose my connection to the remote machine, or just log off, I can log in again, even from somewhere else, and pick up right where I left off. XTunneling doesn't give me this option, as far as I know. I have dabbled with VNC a little bit, but it seems not to be well integrated with linux in general (separate passwords? individually creating VNC displays?) and even then resuming sessions seems to be 'theoretically' possible, but elusive in reality.
For me, this is an important feature, X will always be less appealing until it works. Right now I RDP into a windows machine inside the firwall, then Xtunnel from there to get at least some of this functionality.
Overcoming challenges might be valuable, working hard is not. Valuing hard work is just another gateway to he same kind of "everyone is wonderful" syndrome we've already got. Anyone can say the "worked hard" on something no matter how poorly they did, and they might not even be lying, do they deserve recognition for that?
If you have to work twice as hard as someone else to overcome some obstacle that doesn't make your accomplishment twice as significant, if anything, it's only half as significant. Knowing that, how can hard work build a sense of self-worth?
Many colleges have materials advertising staring salaries, you might want to look at what your college is promising, my undergraduate institution advertised 45K - 55K starting salaries for software engineering graduates, but some places promise much higher.
That is much too cleanly written to be kernel code. can you throw in a bunch of macros? How about some opaque data objects?
Your code contains far too many complete words. "C is a spartan language and so should your code be." Sell a few vowels and donate the proceeds to Linus.
You're all giving academics too much credit. My adviser is trying to get funding under this grant and most of the people involved don't seem to be aware of or concerned about social implications, or if they are, they get sidetracked into internet style flamewars about NATs in IPV6.
The internet today has several severe flaws usually stemming from the assumption that everyone is mutually trusted. This gives us everything from SPAM to ARP poisoning. Hell, many networking researchers have been convinced that UDP will be the death of the internet for years.
If you don't think that researching networking technologies that can survive the greater internet idiot theorem is worthwhile, then you must be new here.
You just say, "I want the Royal Bank website" (or whatever bank it is) and your browser already comes built-in with the ability to go to the right place to get the right key. Under the current system your browser doesn't contact the certification authority to get a site's public key, the site provides it to your browser at the time of the transaction. The certificate provided by the site is signed by a CA. If the CA's cert is in the browser's trusted roots list, and the provided cert is being used in a way that matches the constraint it describes, the provided cert is accepted.
Certification authorities aren't (generally) key repositories, the user's only contact with a CA is to download and install the CA's root cert. The problem you describe is real, but the current infrastructure doesn't address it at all.
You know, I've never seen any details on how 'deregulated airwaves' would actually work. Can you explain? For that matter, how would state and local regulation work? Considering the ease with which transmissions cross jurisdictional boundaries, any attempt at local regulation would be pointless.
The first thing that comes to mind is that in many cases first sale doctrine does not protect your right to buy software and then resell or even give it away. Software vendors argue that they're not really selling you the software, but a limited liscence that (often) doesn't include the right to resell. The courts don't always support this position, but neither do they always come down against it, nor is it clear that they should because eliminating limited liscences may eliminate open source along with that.
While some open source developers work for free, those who wish to be paid charge for their time. As a 'content producer' that's all I or anyone can really sell and it is best to get the money up front.
I've focused my arguments in this discussion not so much on 'direct financial harm' as 'reduced utility to the producer of content.' because I take issue with the statement that piracy hurts those people. These people should be paid for their time if they wish to be, and they are. Indeed it's hard to see how you would convince them to take up microphones, instruments, keyboards, or other tools of their trade without paying them for thier time. Given that many content producers are current paid only once, the only remaining potential harm that I can see is that piracy will cause a reduced demand for their time. That's kind of what you're implying with many of your arguments above, as far as I can tell, but I haven't seen any evidence showing that piracy has or will decrease demand for new content. People continue to want new and different movies, music, and software, and pay for them to be created, as well as to attend live plays and concerts. If content producers will be paid for their time, and their time will continue to be in demand, I don't really see how piracy can hurt them. Can you show that piracy decreases demand (or even payment) for the time of content producers? If 'millions' of 'lost sales' can amount to significant harm through the power of calculus, then where is that harm?
I can't think of any meaningful intangible harm that can come to someone as a result of piracy that isn't otherwise protected against, explicitly allowed, or couldn't come to them for selling the rights to their work as is currently customary anyway. Published works are subject to all manner of fair use clauses that would legally allow any embarassing content to be spread far and wide in summary, critique, and parody, and for the creation of derivative works such as those that might be hurtful to the creator. The creator has little power to stop this even within the law, just ask Butch Hartman. By the same token the original author is not generaly repsonsible for the content of derivative works or the way in which their work is used.
That is what we're talking about here, published works, nobdy is talking about raiding people's diaries or personal programs. For piracy to be a concern, the creator had to be willing to sell it to someone in the first place, which means he or she has given up many rights.
The ethics are not so clear cut as you may think. It can be argued that creators should have rights over thier creations, but it can also be argued just as well that creating artificial scarcity is unethical; that the mechanisms both legal and technical used to enforce the rights of copyright holders are themselves unethical; that market models founded on bad faith where the prevailing strategy for dominance has nothing to do with best fulfilling the needs and desires of customers should not be permitted to exist; that copyright and royalties decrease overall utility by allowing the best producers to rest on their laurels and stop producing earliest, creating a reverse-darwinian situation; or any number of other equally reasonable things. I'm not going to argue any of those things, I'm just going to ask what I asked before. Where is the harm to me or other content producers? I sell only my services, I care only for how many people want them and how much they're willing to pay.
Yeah, maybe Steam doesn't require a CD, but it does require an internet connection, which for mobile gaming makes it just as worthless as needing the CD if not moreso. While playing offline is technically possible, the first versions of Steam were pretty paranoid in thinking that you were trying to steal the game any time you didn't have an internet connection. Maybe the latest version of Steam is less intrusive. After all the FPS gamers I know got burned by the first release, how would I ever find out? You only get one first impression. That's in addition to any other problems Steam may have or permit.
OS X server does have some protections built in, if an update reveals your server liscence key is invalid, the fancy XServer tools stop working. Vista will also have similar functionality that will deny you Vista: Pretty Mode if you have a pirated copy and may do more. They don't disable update functionality entirely since un-updated machines represent a threat to the larger user base, but shutting down machines with invalid liscences opens up all kinds of problems they don't want to deal with, not the least of which being that legitimate codes are marked invalid fairly frequently.
IANAL, but I am familiar with software liscences. Borrowing software is almost universally a liscence violation no matter how hard you try to be fair about it. Software vendors consider themselves and their products immune to traditional purchaser's rights over copyrighted works such as books, including the ability to resell or loan them, because you don't actually own the software, just a liscence which specifies very limited rights that preclude most (if not all) forms of transfer of ownership.
As someone who has performed graduate studies in software security I have this to say about stopping piracy. "Don't hold your breath." Even the effective use of trusted computing modules as hardware DRM requires the correct implementation of vast supporting software infrastrucutre including, basically, a paralell, schitzoid OS. It was supposed to be out in Vista, but support was drastically reduced, it will be years before we see an attempt at providing the required functionality from Microsoft, and years after that before they even begin to iron out the software flaws, and probably years after that before the client software does.
No matter what arcane rationalization you dream up, there's no justification for refusing to buy something offered for sale and taking the benifit from it anyway. The only legally supportable position is to refuse to pay money and do without.
The logic above is pretty faulty, but it's also entirely off topic, so in an effort to avoid dragging us further away from my point, I won't address it. As I said before, I might agree with your premise that piracy has negative consequences, it is your arguments in support of that idea that I have a problem with and that's all I'm talking about right now.
Lets put it another way. As a software developer or other content producer in what way am I harmed when people pirate something I've worked on? Be sure the address the fact that open source developers give their products away for free, and can still be paid.
All that is doubtful, and irrelivant to the question at hand. Eliminating potential future work is not the same as depriving someone of just compensation for work that has already been performed. From the perspective of the performer there's no garuntee that money generated from the sale of their CDs will be reinvested into that performer, so you aren't even eliminating probable future work for them. More importantly, just refusing to buy something isn't theft. If nobody bought their music, the RIAA would be in a spot weather anybody downloaded it illegally or not, and that's not criminal in any way.
Just as people will continue to want new and different software regardless of how much they pirate, movies and television shows will still need actors and musicians, professional orchestras and choirs will continue to exist, as will theaters, and the world will still need music teachers, wedding singers, church musicians. For piracy to have an effect on that, recorded music would have had to destroyed the market for live performances and I just don't think it has.
Music isn't an "idea." It is the result of creative effort on the part of artists who provide a service - the creation and performance of music - as well as that of a host of technical people and business people (sound engineers, marketeers, etc. etc.). They provide consumers with a service and have every right to compensation for that service, just as if they were performing their music live.
The sort version: By the time you have the chance to buy or steal a CD, the artist and all the technical people you mention above have already been paid for the performance recorded on that CD, and most probably won't be paid for it again no matter how well it sells.
The long version: As a software engineer the way my work is treated isn't that different legally or culturally from the way that music or movies are treated and I doubt the argument you use above is any more valid for music than it is for software. When I write software I only get paid once for my time and all those 'technical people' you mentioned probably also only get paid once as well. Since I have already been paid by the time anything I work on can be bought or stolen (and those 'technical people' have probably also already been paid by the time the CD is finished) it is dishonest to say that illegally copying my product deprives me of compensation and I find it equally unlikely that copying a recorded song dprives anyone directly involved in the recording of that song of compensation.
Also, the statement "Just as if they were performing live" rings hollow. Concert tickets and a CD don't cost the same amount. A shrink wrapped product doesn't cost the same amount as hiring a team of software developers to make the same product for you from scratch. They aren't the same, considering that the majority of the people directly involved in the performance recorded on the CD have probably already been paid for that performance the one and only time, they are barely even related.
Lastly, just because something takes effort to develop doesn't mean it isn't an idea. Lots of work has gone into the idea of object oriented programming, or the idea of relativity, and they are even more clearly ideas than a recorded song in that they lack any specific physical or sensory form. (I'll actually grant you that a recorded song might not qualify as an idea.)
You can call me greedy if you want, but remember I stand to lose exactly as much from software piracy as most analogous people in the music industry stand to lose from music piracy, which from my perspective is: Nothing. Piracy, even F/OSS and the creative commons may have other effects on software, music, and the market in general both good and bad, and I'd be happy to talk about that if you want, but as a 'content producer' I have a real problem with people complaining piracy deprives 'content producers' of payment, in my experience that's almost never true.
I tried emusic. Some of the MP3's I got from emusic were of unbearably poor quality, with skips, occasionally gaps, and worst of all painful audio artificats that made me think my speakers were broken at first. What's up with that?
Can you please describe how the model of the DARPA grand challenge would be applied to the Big Dig? How would the process work and in what ways would it be superior to the current system?
Some questions that come to mind right off the bat: What about the cost of verifying each of the design entires against the requiremets? How would you apply this compettitive model to both the design and implementation phases as the current discussion shows both can be a source of waste and a point of failure? How would you even have more than one 'compettitor' during the implementation phase? How would this approach be significantly different in terms of both cost and incentive for the winner to do a good job than the lowest bidder system? How do you determine what a reasonable prize pot for each phase of the project is, and how much would it cost to make those determinations? How would you ensure that the people judging entries are less corrupt than the people assigning contracts are now?
Some thoughts regarding those questions:
Implementation is at least as important as design in a project like the Big Dig, and I can't figure out how to apply a "DARPA Grand Challenge" approach to the implementaiton of infrastructure projects like The Big Dig, as many teams as wish to can make robots, but you can't really have more than one team building separate "big dig" implementations can you?
Even during design you have problems, many of the instiutions participating in the DARPA grand challenge are presteige-seeking institutions for whom profit is not the sole, or even dominant motivating factor. With a fixed prize pot in a profit driven environment you're in basically the same boat as before. In either case if you don't win the prize the money you invested in design is entirely wasted and you have to do the cheapest design you think you can get away with to maximize profits. Both approaches fail to eliminate the incentive to cut corners.
I'm not saying those things don't happen. I'm saying that they are highly illegal and not common place. Signing off on a design for an engineer is like preparing legal documents without being a lawyer or giving medical advice without being a doctor.
While that's almost surely true in this case, because the dig is a state civil engineering project, it is not as generally true as one might think, or wish. Generally only projects subject to state building codes, or in some other way involved with a state require the involvement of a P.E. from that state. There are many types of projects, even life critical ones, where the signature of a P.E. is not required and modifying an engineer's design, while unethical and quite possibly illegal, is not legall in the same way as impersonating a doctor or lawyer.
Liscences are handled at the state level and many types of engineering implicitly don't require them under the interstate commerce clause, or are explicitly exempted. This includes automotive and aerospace engineering and many forms of electrical, computer, and basically all software engineering (though I hard TX had a version of the PE for SE's) wikipedia also mentions chemical engineering in this category http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_engineer.
When I was doing my undergrad it was required that the AE's pass the FE to graduate, expected but not required of the ME's, encouraged of the EEs, and many computer engineers didn't even know about the test.
Laws like that one are pretty common. The logic behind it is that the belief that you can resist a police officer and be held blameless for it so long as the officer's actions eventually get ruled illegal presents an increased danger to officers weather thier actions were illegal or not.
I'm not sure I agree with that logic, and I'm not sure that I disagree with it either, but I do know that it would only work as a deterrant if most people were aware of such laws, which they do not seem to be. Since they are not, it is not so much a deterrant to resisting the police as it is a way for them to charge people with something and have it stick even when the officer's actions were illegal.
IANAL but I do know that copyright and patent protections, and the liscence terms associated with much commercial software, have next to nothing to do with each other so please don't conflate them.
Patent and copyright protections are fairly specific, have many exceptions, and can apply even in the absence of other liscence terms, but they're limited by something called the first-sale doctrine. I can't make and sell copies of a copyrighted book I buy at barnes and nobel, but I may do with that particular copy of the book whatever I please, including mark it up,, loan it, sell it, or give it away without the consent or involvement of the copyright holder. I love used bookstores and they're very much legal. This also applies to patents, so if you sell me a PS2, Xbox, computer, or a program for such, neither patents nor copyright will prevent me from cracking it open and studying it or modifying it.
Format shifting has also been successfully argued to be a protected fair use (though not universally), so ripping a DVD or CD is not, in itself, a violation of copyright and CSS and DRM technologies in that sense interfere with consumer rights. To the best of my knowledge it is the legal wrangling of liscencing, along with the DMCA, that permits these kinds of restrictions.
To get around these and other exceptions to patent and copyright, liscences are used. Companies who use this tactic claim many rights for themselves in addition to those granted by copyright, and claim that because the product is liscenced and not sold exceptions to and obligations of copyright don't apply to them. This is actually dubious, and the courts have yet to come to a universal and overwhelming consensus.
So the case isn't as clear cut as you make it. When I buy a book it is mine, and I have rights over it, it's not clear why my rights when buying a song, movie, or computer program should be less.
Also, I don't mean to be rude but the statement It is not your's. You never created it. seems kind of odd. I didn't create most of the material goods in my apartment, and even where I did I didn't produce their component parts, but they're still mine. On the other hand, I have created many things that were never mine even as I made them, such as anything for school or work.
I think this proposal is taking a very narrow view of the problems with non-neutral, tiered networks with this description:
The whole point of the net neutrality debate is that telecom companies should not be allowed to charge for "Yahoo" the way cable providers now charge for "ESPN."
In seeking to alleviate that one problem, it actualy codifies many of the other problems of non-neutral, tiered networks: Complex, possibly non-uniform pricing structures possibly involving an arbitrarily long string of middlemen all allowed to charge independantly, false distinction between 'providers' and 'consumers', bandwith priced based on packet type and destination, and intrusive record keeping in the name of billing. It also manages to add very specific requirements to network applications, basically creating a 'billing' network layer that may be tied directly to legislation. The proposal is also poorly worded and confusing. Take the example below:
Telecom service vendors can't charge two parties for delivering the same byte.
and then this:
there would be a small pop-up window showing "the meter running." This should give the opportunity to change the QOS so that the cost is zero (base-level QOS won't be metered).
These two statements conflict. If the consumer has the option to increase the QOS level on any site that has been subsidized by paying more for an even higher qos, then the the provider has paid for that byte of information by subsidizing it, and the consumer has paid for it by further increasing the QOS.
This statement is also confusing because there may be many networks with many owners between two parties on the internet, if a content provider decides to subsidize a higher QOS with a consumer ISP, but the consumer ISP's upstream connection passes through an independant network, the provider would then have to contract with the upstream network for an equal QOS subsidy for the first subsidy to have practical meaning, and the consumer may have to slect an independant QOS (and associated cost) at each step as well. This can be extended to an arbitrary number of upstream networks, and easily manipulated to include more networks than neccecary (it would in fact reward this inefficient routing behavior). Inconsisency in QOS tiers between networks further complicates matters, and it only takes one network in the chain that doesn't implement QOS levels at all to mess up the whole system. This is one of the fundamental problems with a tiered internet. If each network involved were allowed to charge consumers and providers independantly, how would the consumer go about paying each of the networks that might be involved in a transaction? Would they receive dozens of bills each month, would this new 'billing' network layer include some form of payment information, or would the consumer's direst ISP act as a collection and disbursment service?
Here is another contradiction:
The ISP would implement a few levels of QOS, and an assignment scheme that would by default assign each kind of traffic to a certain QOS level.
Pricing of internet services to consumers will be based wholly on technical characteristics such as volume and quality of service, and not on the identity of the information provider, the content of the information, [emphasis added] or the equipment (hardware or software) used by the consumer to consume it.
If ISPs are charing different amounts for different QOS levels, and by default assign different types of traffic to different levels, they are charging based on packet content, not meaningful technical characteristics. Also, why would an ISP not by default assign all types of traffic to the most expensive QOS level?
The proposal also draws meaningless and confusing distinctions between "information providers" and "consumers." Amazon, google, ebay, are all also consumers of internet services. The quote below seems to imply that those determined to be "information providers" don't p
Generally, I'd agree with you that a graduate education in software engineering shouldn't be required for most jobs. On the other hand, accredited software engineering undergraduate programs distinct from computer science or electrical engineering are fairly new. I graduated with a B.S. SE in 2004, and that was the first year that ABET accredited programs in Software Engineering, and there were only 4 such programs. Yes, I graduated from one of them. Yes, I've gone on to grad school.
Having met and worked with many people with conventional computer engineering or computer science degrees, I can say with some certainty that many such programs are still graduating people who have never been asked to study at least some (though rarely all) of the following: software process, project management, requirements engineering, software validation, or software architecture at a level above basic design patterns, such as quality attributes. About the only software engineering specific topics I can count on nearly all recent graduates to know are OO design, design patterns and maybe a little verification.
I think these are all important topics to someone who wants to be a software engineer and many of my aquaintances who didn't study them in school have been deep-fried in them by industry, but they were done a disservice by not being asked to study them in school. Once undergraduate programs start teaching them, the need for graduate school in SE will be reduced, but until then there are plenty of otherwise qualified CE and CS people who could benifit from graduate studies in SE.
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The situations aren't really any different. Nothing in his life has changed yet, but this is just the first "rich" person moving into the neighborhood. Just as one example, in many business cultures it isn't acceptable for a manager to make less than the people under their direction; it is also often true that all promotion paths lead into management. In these cases lower relative pay means you're not getting promoted. Even though you might be happy with the job you have now, that doesn't mean "get promoted" isn't on the list somewhere.
In an ideal world, that would be great. But what others have can be used to take away what you have. A bunch of rich people move into your neighborhood, shops for your income level disappear, but maybe you squeak by. Your rent goes up to reflect the new neighborhood rates, maybe your building even remodels or is sold to developers for a more upscale market. Maybe you have a house, maybe it has been in your family for 100 years. You've got no intention of buying or selling, but your property taxes are based on an estimate of the house's value and the housing bubble is cosing estimated prices to skyrocket. Your taxes go through the roof, and you can't keep the house. But life isn't fair, and nobody said it would be; instead concentrate on what you have... wait.
Limiting connections from a host or network can have its uses - or be an incredibly bad idea - but it doesn't have anything to do with sockstress or slowloris style approaches in particular. these approaches minimize the cost per connection for the attacker, limiting the number of connections in no way lowers that proportional benefit.
Limiting the number of connections per host or network can just make an attack more successful.. For example the dorm I lived in when I started grad school was NATed behind a tiny handful of IP's, with source connection limiting now one or a few attackers can deny service to the entire building.
Why would we both raise prices? Sounds risky to me. If we both raise prices an equal amount the market may shrink, and we'd both be getting the same portion of a smaller pie (lose). If I raise prices and my competitor doesn't, I'll lose market share (lose).
Conversely if I don't raise prices and my competitor doesn't, I face only a known loss. (lose) but if they do raise prices, I'll steal market share from them (win).
In this scenario not raising prices would be the safest bet; it is the only one with a "win" case.
If corporations could just raise prices to cover increased tax, wouldn't they already be charging the higher price to make more profit? There's got to be some reason the corporation isn't charging higher prices already, and if that is true, then the idea that higher expenses (taxes) plainly result in higher prices doesn't work.
I'm really curious what it is you're having trouble doing. I have not found there to be significantly more need to "trust the compiler" in C++ than in C.
I'm not saying there isn't an answer to this, but I don't know what it is. When I'm using Windows Remote Desktop and I lose my connection to the remote machine, or just log off, I can log in again, even from somewhere else, and pick up right where I left off. XTunneling doesn't give me this option, as far as I know. I have dabbled with VNC a little bit, but it seems not to be well integrated with linux in general (separate passwords? individually creating VNC displays?) and even then resuming sessions seems to be 'theoretically' possible, but elusive in reality.
For me, this is an important feature, X will always be less appealing until it works. Right now I RDP into a windows machine inside the firwall, then Xtunnel from there to get at least some of this functionality.
Overcoming challenges might be valuable, working hard is not. Valuing hard work is just another gateway to he same kind of "everyone is wonderful" syndrome we've already got. Anyone can say the "worked hard" on something no matter how poorly they did, and they might not even be lying, do they deserve recognition for that?
If you have to work twice as hard as someone else to overcome some obstacle that doesn't make your accomplishment twice as significant, if anything, it's only half as significant. Knowing that, how can hard work build a sense of self-worth?
Many colleges have materials advertising staring salaries, you might want to look at what your college is promising, my undergraduate institution advertised 45K - 55K starting salaries for software engineering graduates, but some places promise much higher.
That is much too cleanly written to be kernel code. can you throw in a bunch of macros? How about some opaque data objects? Your code contains far too many complete words. "C is a spartan language and so should your code be." Sell a few vowels and donate the proceeds to Linus.
You're all giving academics too much credit. My adviser is trying to get funding under this grant and most of the people involved don't seem to be aware of or concerned about social implications, or if they are, they get sidetracked into internet style flamewars about NATs in IPV6. The internet today has several severe flaws usually stemming from the assumption that everyone is mutually trusted. This gives us everything from SPAM to ARP poisoning. Hell, many networking researchers have been convinced that UDP will be the death of the internet for years. If you don't think that researching networking technologies that can survive the greater internet idiot theorem is worthwhile, then you must be new here.
You know, I've never seen any details on how 'deregulated airwaves' would actually work. Can you explain? For that matter, how would state and local regulation work? Considering the ease with which transmissions cross jurisdictional boundaries, any attempt at local regulation would be pointless.
The first thing that comes to mind is that in many cases first sale doctrine does not protect your right to buy software and then resell or even give it away. Software vendors argue that they're not really selling you the software, but a limited liscence that (often) doesn't include the right to resell. The courts don't always support this position, but neither do they always come down against it, nor is it clear that they should because eliminating limited liscences may eliminate open source along with that.
While some open source developers work for free, those who wish to be paid charge for their time. As a 'content producer' that's all I or anyone can really sell and it is best to get the money up front.
I've focused my arguments in this discussion not so much on 'direct financial harm' as 'reduced utility to the producer of content.' because I take issue with the statement that piracy hurts those people. These people should be paid for their time if they wish to be, and they are. Indeed it's hard to see how you would convince them to take up microphones, instruments, keyboards, or other tools of their trade without paying them for thier time. Given that many content producers are current paid only once, the only remaining potential harm that I can see is that piracy will cause a reduced demand for their time. That's kind of what you're implying with many of your arguments above, as far as I can tell, but I haven't seen any evidence showing that piracy has or will decrease demand for new content. People continue to want new and different movies, music, and software, and pay for them to be created, as well as to attend live plays and concerts. If content producers will be paid for their time, and their time will continue to be in demand, I don't really see how piracy can hurt them. Can you show that piracy decreases demand (or even payment) for the time of content producers? If 'millions' of 'lost sales' can amount to significant harm through the power of calculus, then where is that harm?
I can't think of any meaningful intangible harm that can come to someone as a result of piracy that isn't otherwise protected against, explicitly allowed, or couldn't come to them for selling the rights to their work as is currently customary anyway. Published works are subject to all manner of fair use clauses that would legally allow any embarassing content to be spread far and wide in summary, critique, and parody, and for the creation of derivative works such as those that might be hurtful to the creator. The creator has little power to stop this even within the law, just ask Butch Hartman. By the same token the original author is not generaly repsonsible for the content of derivative works or the way in which their work is used.
That is what we're talking about here, published works, nobdy is talking about raiding people's diaries or personal programs. For piracy to be a concern, the creator had to be willing to sell it to someone in the first place, which means he or she has given up many rights.
The ethics are not so clear cut as you may think. It can be argued that creators should have rights over thier creations, but it can also be argued just as well that creating artificial scarcity is unethical; that the mechanisms both legal and technical used to enforce the rights of copyright holders are themselves unethical; that market models founded on bad faith where the prevailing strategy for dominance has nothing to do with best fulfilling the needs and desires of customers should not be permitted to exist; that copyright and royalties decrease overall utility by allowing the best producers to rest on their laurels and stop producing earliest, creating a reverse-darwinian situation; or any number of other equally reasonable things. I'm not going to argue any of those things, I'm just going to ask what I asked before. Where is the harm to me or other content producers? I sell only my services, I care only for how many people want them and how much they're willing to pay.
Yeah, maybe Steam doesn't require a CD, but it does require an internet connection, which for mobile gaming makes it just as worthless as needing the CD if not moreso. While playing offline is technically possible, the first versions of Steam were pretty paranoid in thinking that you were trying to steal the game any time you didn't have an internet connection. Maybe the latest version of Steam is less intrusive. After all the FPS gamers I know got burned by the first release, how would I ever find out? You only get one first impression. That's in addition to any other problems Steam may have or permit.
OS X server does have some protections built in, if an update reveals your server liscence key is invalid, the fancy XServer tools stop working. Vista will also have similar functionality that will deny you Vista: Pretty Mode if you have a pirated copy and may do more. They don't disable update functionality entirely since un-updated machines represent a threat to the larger user base, but shutting down machines with invalid liscences opens up all kinds of problems they don't want to deal with, not the least of which being that legitimate codes are marked invalid fairly frequently.
IANAL, but I am familiar with software liscences. Borrowing software is almost universally a liscence violation no matter how hard you try to be fair about it. Software vendors consider themselves and their products immune to traditional purchaser's rights over copyrighted works such as books, including the ability to resell or loan them, because you don't actually own the software, just a liscence which specifies very limited rights that preclude most (if not all) forms of transfer of ownership.
As someone who has performed graduate studies in software security I have this to say about stopping piracy. "Don't hold your breath." Even the effective use of trusted computing modules as hardware DRM requires the correct implementation of vast supporting software infrastrucutre including, basically, a paralell, schitzoid OS. It was supposed to be out in Vista, but support was drastically reduced, it will be years before we see an attempt at providing the required functionality from Microsoft, and years after that before they even begin to iron out the software flaws, and probably years after that before the client software does.
No matter what arcane rationalization you dream up, there's no justification for refusing to buy something offered for sale and taking the benifit from it anyway. The only legally supportable position is to refuse to pay money and do without.
The logic above is pretty faulty, but it's also entirely off topic, so in an effort to avoid dragging us further away from my point, I won't address it. As I said before, I might agree with your premise that piracy has negative consequences, it is your arguments in support of that idea that I have a problem with and that's all I'm talking about right now.
Lets put it another way. As a software developer or other content producer in what way am I harmed when people pirate something I've worked on? Be sure the address the fact that open source developers give their products away for free, and can still be paid.
All that is doubtful, and irrelivant to the question at hand. Eliminating potential future work is not the same as depriving someone of just compensation for work that has already been performed. From the perspective of the performer there's no garuntee that money generated from the sale of their CDs will be reinvested into that performer, so you aren't even eliminating probable future work for them. More importantly, just refusing to buy something isn't theft. If nobody bought their music, the RIAA would be in a spot weather anybody downloaded it illegally or not, and that's not criminal in any way. Just as people will continue to want new and different software regardless of how much they pirate, movies and television shows will still need actors and musicians, professional orchestras and choirs will continue to exist, as will theaters, and the world will still need music teachers, wedding singers, church musicians. For piracy to have an effect on that, recorded music would have had to destroyed the market for live performances and I just don't think it has.
Music isn't an "idea." It is the result of creative effort on the part of artists who provide a service - the creation and performance of music - as well as that of a host of technical people and business people (sound engineers, marketeers, etc. etc.). They provide consumers with a service and have every right to compensation for that service, just as if they were performing their music live.
The sort version: By the time you have the chance to buy or steal a CD, the artist and all the technical people you mention above have already been paid for the performance recorded on that CD, and most probably won't be paid for it again no matter how well it sells.
The long version:
As a software engineer the way my work is treated isn't that different legally or culturally from the way that music or movies are treated and I doubt the argument you use above is any more valid for music than it is for software. When I write software I only get paid once for my time and all those 'technical people' you mentioned probably also only get paid once as well. Since I have already been paid by the time anything I work on can be bought or stolen (and those 'technical people' have probably also already been paid by the time the CD is finished) it is dishonest to say that illegally copying my product deprives me of compensation and I find it equally unlikely that copying a recorded song dprives anyone directly involved in the recording of that song of compensation.
Also, the statement "Just as if they were performing live" rings hollow. Concert tickets and a CD don't cost the same amount. A shrink wrapped product doesn't cost the same amount as hiring a team of software developers to make the same product for you from scratch. They aren't the same, considering that the majority of the people directly involved in the performance recorded on the CD have probably already been paid for that performance the one and only time, they are barely even related.
Lastly, just because something takes effort to develop doesn't mean it isn't an idea. Lots of work has gone into the idea of object oriented programming, or the idea of relativity, and they are even more clearly ideas than a recorded song in that they lack any specific physical or sensory form. (I'll actually grant you that a recorded song might not qualify as an idea.)
You can call me greedy if you want, but remember I stand to lose exactly as much from software piracy as most analogous people in the music industry stand to lose from music piracy, which from my perspective is: Nothing. Piracy, even F/OSS and the creative commons may have other effects on software, music, and the market in general both good and bad, and I'd be happy to talk about that if you want, but as a 'content producer' I have a real problem with people complaining piracy deprives 'content producers' of payment, in my experience that's almost never true.
I tried emusic. Some of the MP3's I got from emusic were of unbearably poor quality, with skips, occasionally gaps, and worst of all painful audio artificats that made me think my speakers were broken at first. What's up with that?
Can you please describe how the model of the DARPA grand challenge would be applied to the Big Dig? How would the process work and in what ways would it be superior to the current system?
Some questions that come to mind right off the bat: What about the cost of verifying each of the design entires against the requiremets? How would you apply this compettitive model to both the design and implementation phases as the current discussion shows both can be a source of waste and a point of failure? How would you even have more than one 'compettitor' during the implementation phase? How would this approach be significantly different in terms of both cost and incentive for the winner to do a good job than the lowest bidder system? How do you determine what a reasonable prize pot for each phase of the project is, and how much would it cost to make those determinations? How would you ensure that the people judging entries are less corrupt than the people assigning contracts are now?
Some thoughts regarding those questions:
Implementation is at least as important as design in a project like the Big Dig, and I can't figure out how to apply a "DARPA Grand Challenge" approach to the implementaiton of infrastructure projects like The Big Dig, as many teams as wish to can make robots, but you can't really have more than one team building separate "big dig" implementations can you?
Even during design you have problems, many of the instiutions participating in the DARPA grand challenge are presteige-seeking institutions for whom profit is not the sole, or even dominant motivating factor. With a fixed prize pot in a profit driven environment you're in basically the same boat as before. In either case if you don't win the prize the money you invested in design is entirely wasted and you have to do the cheapest design you think you can get away with to maximize profits. Both approaches fail to eliminate the incentive to cut corners.
I'm not saying those things don't happen. I'm saying that they are highly illegal and not common place. Signing off on a design for an engineer is like preparing legal documents without being a lawyer or giving medical advice without being a doctor.
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While that's almost surely true in this case, because the dig is a state civil engineering project, it is not as generally true as one might think, or wish. Generally only projects subject to state building codes, or in some other way involved with a state require the involvement of a P.E. from that state. There are many types of projects, even life critical ones, where the signature of a P.E. is not required and modifying an engineer's design, while unethical and quite possibly illegal, is not legall in the same way as impersonating a doctor or lawyer.
Liscences are handled at the state level and many types of engineering implicitly don't require them under the interstate commerce clause, or are explicitly exempted. This includes automotive and aerospace engineering and many forms of electrical, computer, and basically all software engineering (though I hard TX had a version of the PE for SE's) wikipedia also mentions chemical engineering in this category http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_enginee
When I was doing my undergrad it was required that the AE's pass the FE to graduate, expected but not required of the ME's, encouraged of the EEs, and many computer engineers didn't even know about the test.
Laws like that one are pretty common. The logic behind it is that the belief that you can resist a police officer and be held blameless for it so long as the officer's actions eventually get ruled illegal presents an increased danger to officers weather thier actions were illegal or not.
I'm not sure I agree with that logic, and I'm not sure that I disagree with it either, but I do know that it would only work as a deterrant if most people were aware of such laws, which they do not seem to be. Since they are not, it is not so much a deterrant to resisting the police as it is a way for them to charge people with something and have it stick even when the officer's actions were illegal.
IANAL but I do know that copyright and patent protections, and the liscence terms associated with much commercial software, have next to nothing to do with each other so please don't conflate them.
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Patent and copyright protections are fairly specific, have many exceptions, and can apply even in the absence of other liscence terms, but they're limited by something called the first-sale doctrine. I can't make and sell copies of a copyrighted book I buy at barnes and nobel, but I may do with that particular copy of the book whatever I please, including mark it up,, loan it, sell it, or give it away without the consent or involvement of the copyright holder. I love used bookstores and they're very much legal. This also applies to patents, so if you sell me a PS2, Xbox, computer, or a program for such, neither patents nor copyright will prevent me from cracking it open and studying it or modifying it.
Format shifting has also been successfully argued to be a protected fair use (though not universally), so ripping a DVD or CD is not, in itself, a violation of copyright and CSS and DRM technologies in that sense interfere with consumer rights. To the best of my knowledge it is the legal wrangling of liscencing, along with the DMCA, that permits these kinds of restrictions.
To get around these and other exceptions to patent and copyright, liscences are used. Companies who use this tactic claim many rights for themselves in addition to those granted by copyright, and claim that because the product is liscenced and not sold exceptions to and obligations of copyright don't apply to them. This is actually dubious, and the courts have yet to come to a universal and overwhelming consensus.
Here are some cases that didn't go the way of the EULA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step-Saver_Data_Syst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softman_v._Adobe
So the case isn't as clear cut as you make it. When I buy a book it is mine, and I have rights over it, it's not clear why my rights when buying a song, movie, or computer program should be less.
Also, I don't mean to be rude but the statement It is not your's. You never created it. seems kind of odd. I didn't create most of the material goods in my apartment, and even where I did I didn't produce their component parts, but they're still mine. On the other hand, I have created many things that were never mine even as I made them, such as anything for school or work.
I think this proposal is taking a very narrow view of the problems with non-neutral, tiered networks with this description:
The whole point of the net neutrality debate is that telecom companies should not be allowed to charge for "Yahoo" the way cable providers now charge for "ESPN."
In seeking to alleviate that one problem, it actualy codifies many of the other problems of non-neutral, tiered networks: Complex, possibly non-uniform pricing structures possibly involving an arbitrarily long string of middlemen all allowed to charge independantly, false distinction between 'providers' and 'consumers', bandwith priced based on packet type and destination, and intrusive record keeping in the name of billing. It also manages to add very specific requirements to network applications, basically creating a 'billing' network layer that may be tied directly to legislation. The proposal is also poorly worded and confusing. Take the example below:
Telecom service vendors can't charge two parties for delivering the same byte.
and then this:
there would be a small pop-up window showing "the meter running." This should give the opportunity to change the QOS so that the cost is zero (base-level QOS won't be metered).
These two statements conflict. If the consumer has the option to increase the QOS level on any site that has been subsidized by paying more for an even higher qos, then the the provider has paid for that byte of information by subsidizing it, and the consumer has paid for it by further increasing the QOS.
This statement is also confusing because there may be many networks with many owners between two parties on the internet, if a content provider decides to subsidize a higher QOS with a consumer ISP, but the consumer ISP's upstream connection passes through an independant network, the provider would then have to contract with the upstream network for an equal QOS subsidy for the first subsidy to have practical meaning, and the consumer may have to slect an independant QOS (and associated cost) at each step as well. This can be extended to an arbitrary number of upstream networks, and easily manipulated to include more networks than neccecary (it would in fact reward this inefficient routing behavior). Inconsisency in QOS tiers between networks further complicates matters, and it only takes one network in the chain that doesn't implement QOS levels at all to mess up the whole system. This is one of the fundamental problems with a tiered internet. If each network involved were allowed to charge consumers and providers independantly, how would the consumer go about paying each of the networks that might be involved in a transaction? Would they receive dozens of bills each month, would this new 'billing' network layer include some form of payment information, or would the consumer's direst ISP act as a collection and disbursment service?
Here is another contradiction:
The ISP would implement a few levels of QOS, and an assignment scheme that would by default assign each kind of traffic to a certain QOS level.
Pricing of internet services to consumers will be based wholly on technical characteristics such as volume and quality of service, and not on the identity of the information provider, the content of the information, [emphasis added] or the equipment (hardware or software) used by the consumer to consume it.
If ISPs are charing different amounts for different QOS levels, and by default assign different types of traffic to different levels, they are charging based on packet content, not meaningful technical characteristics. Also, why would an ISP not by default assign all types of traffic to the most expensive QOS level?
The proposal also draws meaningless and confusing distinctions between "information providers" and "consumers." Amazon, google, ebay, are all also consumers of internet services. The quote below seems to imply that those determined to be "information providers" don't p
Generally, I'd agree with you that a graduate education in software engineering shouldn't be required for most jobs. On the other hand, accredited software engineering undergraduate programs distinct from computer science or electrical engineering are fairly new. I graduated with a B.S. SE in 2004, and that was the first year that ABET accredited programs in Software Engineering, and there were only 4 such programs. Yes, I graduated from one of them. Yes, I've gone on to grad school.
Having met and worked with many people with conventional computer engineering or computer science degrees, I can say with some certainty that many such programs are still graduating people who have never been asked to study at least some (though rarely all) of the following: software process, project management, requirements engineering, software validation, or software architecture at a level above basic design patterns, such as quality attributes. About the only software engineering specific topics I can count on nearly all recent graduates to know are OO design, design patterns and maybe a little verification.
I think these are all important topics to someone who wants to be a software engineer and many of my aquaintances who didn't study them in school have been deep-fried in them by industry, but they were done a disservice by not being asked to study them in school. Once undergraduate programs start teaching them, the need for graduate school in SE will be reduced, but until then there are plenty of otherwise qualified CE and CS people who could benifit from graduate studies in SE.