(I don't have Vista yet... I'm waiting for that first killer game that makes it a necessity. May it be long in coming.) Halo 2 comes out at the end of this month. I so don't want to install Vista, but if someone hasn't hacked the game to run on XP by June, I might do something I'll regret for many years.
How do people read this in a manner that would be critical of the patent system? It was working just fine before, and there was no good reason to put all those customers in jeopardy of losing their phone service (or having to pay more to license something as obvious as sending audio over a network). And it's just as likely that the workaround isn't a "new solution", but a cheap hack to accomplish the same thing in a way that's just barely different enough to avoid the patent - perhaps even a less efficient way that no one would consider using if not for that patent.
Is that doctrine actually good for anything besides stifling innovation? I mean, shouldn't we be encouraging people to come up with new methods that produce the same result in a way that isn't already patented?
It amazes me that people expect something for next to nothing if they wreck the one they have. "Sorry, I scratched my new car, can I have a new one at cost?" If the cost of producing a replacement car were around 1/10 of a new car's retail price, and I'd been explicitly prevented from taking reasonable measures to protect my investment, then I'd expect the manufacturer to sell me a replacement at cost. When they interfere with my own ability to protect my DVD investment by making a backup, it's their responsibility to give me an alternative.
Well then, you might just as well ask why you can't make a delegate out of a field or a variable (without "cheating"). From a language design standpoint, properties are not methods and thus not subject to being made directly into delegates. They're more like smart fields that can calculate their values on demand, react to changes, and constrain new values, and the fact that they become methods + metadata at the CLR level is an implementation detail.
Actually, this sounds like a problem with your local area. I had Comcast for a couple years and regularly got low latency with download speeds up to 7-8 Mbps. When I first moved in, I had to have some techs come out and fix the outdoor wiring, and then every few months the service would go down for about 10 minutes in the middle of the night for maintenance (but every time I called to complain about it, they'd give me a credit).
You cannot copyright an idea (it's PATENT law that allows you to lay claim to an idea). For that matter, in the entire three hundred year history of copyright law, you have never been able to copyright an idea. The distinction between "idea" and "expression" is a fiction used to dance around the free-speech implications of copyright.
The number 5 is an idea. The 09F9 number we're all so familiar with is an idea. All numbers are ideas, and that means all information is ideas. If you want to prevent me from sharing Hit Me Baby One More Time, you have to prevent me from sharing the idea that if you run this particular sequence of bytes through an MP3 decoder, you'll hear a familiar song.
Furthermore, as another poster pointed out, copyright extends to characters. You can write a novel about a wizard school, but you can't have Harry Potter in it, even if you use your own words to describe him. Copyright is preventing you from using the idea of Harry Potter. Drawing a line between "an idea" and "the implementation of an idea" just doesn't work here - a character is an idea.
The people who claim that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are natural rights seem to be missing the fact that at least half of the world's population lives in places without those rights. [...] So, abolitionists may not LIKE copyright, but according to history, it is at least as "natural" as their right to complain about it. You're confusing "natural" with "not violated".
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are "natural" rights in the sense that to violate them, you have to come over and interfere with someone. To take away my right to life, you have to murder me. To take away my right to free speech, you have to muzzle me. To take away my right to own property, you have to yank that property out of my hands.
Copyright, however, is not one of those rights. Copyright doesn't say that no one can mess with your copies - no one wants to do that anyway. What it does is give you the right to mess with everyone else. You get to muzzle them if they're speaking your copyrighted words. You get to prevent them from selling a CD if it contains your copyrighted data. You get to interfere with someone who's just sitting at home, using his own computer and his own internet connection, who hasn't come near you or asked you for anything, and who you wouldn't even know existed if you weren't searching the P2P networks for people to mess with.
So for publication to remain sustainable, there has to be a profit model of some sort. Get rid of the legal protection that allows you to make the attempt to make a profit (which is exactly what the abolitionists are talking about destroying), and you deal the distribution channels a massive blow - and that takes the content out of the hands of readers. No one is stopping you from selling your services as an author. A barber doesn't need to "own" the hair he cuts in order to make a profit. An accountant doesn't need to "own" the tax forms he fills out. Why should an author need to "own" the sequence of words he writes? Writing is a service like any other, and if people want something written, they can pay a writer to do it.
My girlfriend works in a pawn shop, and every day she buys stuff from tweakers that's probably stolen, but she can't do anything about it without proof. Not everything has a serial number, and not everyone writes down their serial numbers anyway.
Last year, my car was robbed. The only thing with a serial number was my Sirius radio, and I had to call Sirius to get it because I hadn't written it down. Most of what they stole was CDs. Who's going to buy a wallet full of Cake and TMBG albums on the street?
I think if you write a story, or a song or even a software application you're entitled to control ownership rights of it. Why shouldn't you be? I'm generally curious why authors shouldn't be allowed to have ownership of their works. If I go to the park and rake some leaves, should I be allowed to have ownership of that part of the park? After all, I put effort into it, and I should be allowed to own the fruits of my labor, right?
But of course, that's not how it works. The park is a public resource, shared by everyone in town. No person can own any part of it, and I can't change that just by doing some unsolicited work on it. Similarly, ideas are a public resource. No person can own an idea, a concept, a number, or a piece of information.
There are a few arguments for why ideas shouldn't be owned, but my favorite is simply that there's no scarcity there, and ownership exists solely as an answer to the problem of scarcity. If a car can only be in one place at a time, it makes sense to assign ownership to someone so he can decide where it should be at any given moment, because someone has to. But an idea can be used by everyone simultaneously, and one person's use can't interfere with anyone else's. Assigning ownership of an idea is unnecessary and only serves to harm everyone who isn't the owner.
I'm no lawyer, but as far as I know there's no legal framework that can support GPL style software freedom absent copyright law. It's not just about being "free as in beer" and decompiling a program is certainly not the same thing. Why not? You only need to decompile it once, and then everyone is free to clean up the source and contribute their own changes, until your decompiled source eventually becomes as good as the original source code. I agree that it's inconvenient to have to do that, but abolishing copyright would still provide most of the usefulness of the GPL.
My MacBook's touchpad side-scrolls out of the box. You might want to try another troll. Congratulations. My PowerBook G4's touchpad doesn't. You might want to get your facts straight before accusing someone of trolling.
Why buy a giant TV with only SD in the first place:) it looks so much worse than on a "normal" size (say, at or below 32") TV where the image isn't overly blown up. Who said anything about a giant TV? I have a 27" SDTV that cost about $250. Because much of what I watch is 4:3 (Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, etc.), the equivalent HDTV would have to be 32", which costs nearly three times as much.
Though as far as Wii vs 360 vs PS3 goes, I don't think people are really buying Wiis because they feel their TV isn't good enough for the 360 but just fine for the Wii... It's certainly a factor. I look at the 360 and PS3, and I see no reason at all to care whether my console has HDMI outputs or Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but those features make up a lot of the extra cost. They're no use to me, and in fact the experience may even be worse if the games are designed to be played in a higher resolution than my TV can handle. I bought a Wii for three main reasons: it's the cheapest, word of mouth says it's a lot of fun, and the features it's missing (vs. other consoles) are mainly ones I can't use anyway.
Maybe in a few years, HDTVs will be affordable. By that time, the 360 and PS3 will be cheaper anyway, so I may as well wait until I can take advantage of their most-hyped features.
I mean, I'm thinking a large number of households with "standard" TVs aren't in the market for a video game console in the first place (let alone a Wii in particular) I think you've got that backwards. The Wii is all about appealing to customers who don't fit the traditional "hardcore gamer" profile, the ones who are least likely to own a new high-end TV.
TV (over the airwaves) is financed through ads and sponsors. What about Cable TV, which I pay for? Why do I have to watch ads on those channels? Because the shows on those channels are financed through ads and sponsors too. You probably pay around $1 per channel per month, maybe less. Do you think that really pays for the production of every show on cable?
Doesn't UPnP's NAT traversal solve this, at least when implemented correctly (I don't know how DC++ managed to completely screw it up)? If you need an incoming port, just ask the firewall for one.
BTW, I think SFTP is the "new protocol" you're looking for.
Windows users have very little useful software that is free. Most software is commercial or shareware. Windows users seek to fill the gaping functionality holes with commercial software and get nickeled and dimed (more like $20 and $50) to death. And if you think it's bad on Windows, just look at OS X.
Say you've got one of the old PowerBooks without a multi-touchpad and you want to set up side scrolling, like every other laptop in the world has? There's a utility for that... if you don't mind clicking away a nag box every time your computer boots up or wakes from standby, or paying for a feature that's included for free on every other laptop (after you paid extra for a feature-rich Apple machine in the first place).
At least on Windows, the good shareware and commercial stuff eventually gets cloned as freeware, if not OSS, because there is a large community of Windows developers who aren't in it for the money (and may not have even paid for the OS or development tools). On the Mac, you're more likely to find a community trying to nag and guilt-trip you into paying for some shareware with a cute name.
Besides, HDTV is more widespread than you think, I'd say. Statistics say otherwise: only something like 10-15% of households have HDTV. Most people are waiting for HDTV prices to approach normal TV prices, because they don't want to spend twice as much for a screen half as big as the one they already have, especially when plenty of popular content is still only SD.
Using a lambda expression is also cheating, I don't even know why we are debating that. I still don't know why you're calling it "cheating". No one is going to mark you down for using anonymous delegates in the real world.
It's not cheating. Methods are not "first class" in C# at all; delegates are, and an anonymous delegate that calls the property accessor is equivalent to a delegate made directly from the property accessor. If the few nanosecond difference bothers you, you shouldn't be using managed code in the first place.
BTW, is this a problem you've actually encountered, or just another theoretical complaint with no bearing on the real world of C# development?
Here's a theory: hard drives don't get cheaper at the low end, they just get bigger. If that 8 GB drive costs $25, in a couple years you might be able to get a 40 GB drive for $25 instead, but you still won't be able to get the 8 GB drive for $5.
Meanwhile, the console is expected to get cheaper, not just better. If you're still spending $25 on the hard drive, even as all the other components have gotten cheaper, that makes it harder to drop the console's price. You could use the larger hard drive as a selling point, but for something that's mainly used for saved games and caching (which is invisible to the buyer), the extra space isn't all that attractive.
The Cube supported 480p only... speaking of which, that's the best the Wii does as well but I guess Nintendo's just weird like that. "Weird" like a fox. They're designing for the TVs people have today, not the TVs people might have in five years, and the result is a console that turns a profit even at half the price of its loss-leading competitors. By the time HDTV is affordable enough to find its way into more than 1 in 10 households, it'll be time for a new console anyway.
Indeed, for all the noise people like to make about waiting lists, we don't have it any better in the US. It's a basic problem of supply and demand: there's a finite amount of "health care" available at any given time, and demand is greater than that. You have to ration it somehow.
In the US, we generally ration it based on how much money you have. If you can afford the procedure, you get it; otherwise you don't. In Canada, they ration it based on how much you need the procedure, a decision made by actual doctors; if you have a minor ailment, you'll wait, but if you need treatment immediately, you'll get it. Does it really make any more sense to let poor people suffer than it does to let people with minor ailments wait?
What is this 'public' you speak of? Studios aren't interested in controlling anyone's behavior, other than that which directly involves their private property... Nonsense. If I buy an HD-DVD, it's my property. The disc is mine. The studios are interested in controlling my behavior as it relates to my disc.
Furthermore, the information encoded on the disc is not anyone's property. Information is very different from property.
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Is that doctrine actually good for anything besides stifling innovation? I mean, shouldn't we be encouraging people to come up with new methods that produce the same result in a way that isn't already patented?
Well then, you might just as well ask why you can't make a delegate out of a field or a variable (without "cheating"). From a language design standpoint, properties are not methods and thus not subject to being made directly into delegates. They're more like smart fields that can calculate their values on demand, react to changes, and constrain new values, and the fact that they become methods + metadata at the CLR level is an implementation detail.
Point is, the format isn't supported. MPEG-4 in a .MP4 container != MPEG-4 in an .AVI/.DivX container.
Actually, this sounds like a problem with your local area. I had Comcast for a couple years and regularly got low latency with download speeds up to 7-8 Mbps. When I first moved in, I had to have some techs come out and fix the outdoor wiring, and then every few months the service would go down for about 10 minutes in the middle of the night for maintenance (but every time I called to complain about it, they'd give me a credit).
I've never heard of any of those video sites. Is this an actual problem affecting well-known sites, or just these no-names?
Aha. Well, how about just deprecating "active mode" FTP and switching everyone over to passive mode?
The number 5 is an idea. The 09F9 number we're all so familiar with is an idea. All numbers are ideas, and that means all information is ideas. If you want to prevent me from sharing Hit Me Baby One More Time, you have to prevent me from sharing the idea that if you run this particular sequence of bytes through an MP3 decoder, you'll hear a familiar song.
Furthermore, as another poster pointed out, copyright extends to characters. You can write a novel about a wizard school, but you can't have Harry Potter in it, even if you use your own words to describe him. Copyright is preventing you from using the idea of Harry Potter. Drawing a line between "an idea" and "the implementation of an idea" just doesn't work here - a character is an idea. The people who claim that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are natural rights seem to be missing the fact that at least half of the world's population lives in places without those rights. [...] So, abolitionists may not LIKE copyright, but according to history, it is at least as "natural" as their right to complain about it. You're confusing "natural" with "not violated".
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are "natural" rights in the sense that to violate them, you have to come over and interfere with someone. To take away my right to life, you have to murder me. To take away my right to free speech, you have to muzzle me. To take away my right to own property, you have to yank that property out of my hands.
Copyright, however, is not one of those rights. Copyright doesn't say that no one can mess with your copies - no one wants to do that anyway. What it does is give you the right to mess with everyone else. You get to muzzle them if they're speaking your copyrighted words. You get to prevent them from selling a CD if it contains your copyrighted data. You get to interfere with someone who's just sitting at home, using his own computer and his own internet connection, who hasn't come near you or asked you for anything, and who you wouldn't even know existed if you weren't searching the P2P networks for people to mess with. So for publication to remain sustainable, there has to be a profit model of some sort. Get rid of the legal protection that allows you to make the attempt to make a profit (which is exactly what the abolitionists are talking about destroying), and you deal the distribution channels a massive blow - and that takes the content out of the hands of readers. No one is stopping you from selling your services as an author. A barber doesn't need to "own" the hair he cuts in order to make a profit. An accountant doesn't need to "own" the tax forms he fills out. Why should an author need to "own" the sequence of words he writes? Writing is a service like any other, and if people want something written, they can pay a writer to do it.
My girlfriend works in a pawn shop, and every day she buys stuff from tweakers that's probably stolen, but she can't do anything about it without proof. Not everything has a serial number, and not everyone writes down their serial numbers anyway.
Last year, my car was robbed. The only thing with a serial number was my Sirius radio, and I had to call Sirius to get it because I hadn't written it down. Most of what they stole was CDs. Who's going to buy a wallet full of Cake and TMBG albums on the street?
But of course, that's not how it works. The park is a public resource, shared by everyone in town. No person can own any part of it, and I can't change that just by doing some unsolicited work on it. Similarly, ideas are a public resource. No person can own an idea, a concept, a number, or a piece of information.
There are a few arguments for why ideas shouldn't be owned, but my favorite is simply that there's no scarcity there, and ownership exists solely as an answer to the problem of scarcity. If a car can only be in one place at a time, it makes sense to assign ownership to someone so he can decide where it should be at any given moment, because someone has to. But an idea can be used by everyone simultaneously, and one person's use can't interfere with anyone else's. Assigning ownership of an idea is unnecessary and only serves to harm everyone who isn't the owner. I'm no lawyer, but as far as I know there's no legal framework that can support GPL style software freedom absent copyright law. It's not just about being "free as in beer" and decompiling a program is certainly not the same thing. Why not? You only need to decompile it once, and then everyone is free to clean up the source and contribute their own changes, until your decompiled source eventually becomes as good as the original source code. I agree that it's inconvenient to have to do that, but abolishing copyright would still provide most of the usefulness of the GPL.
Maybe in a few years, HDTVs will be affordable. By that time, the 360 and PS3 will be cheaper anyway, so I may as well wait until I can take advantage of their most-hyped features. I mean, I'm thinking a large number of households with "standard" TVs aren't in the market for a video game console in the first place (let alone a Wii in particular) I think you've got that backwards. The Wii is all about appealing to customers who don't fit the traditional "hardcore gamer" profile, the ones who are least likely to own a new high-end TV.
Doesn't UPnP's NAT traversal solve this, at least when implemented correctly (I don't know how DC++ managed to completely screw it up)? If you need an incoming port, just ask the firewall for one.
BTW, I think SFTP is the "new protocol" you're looking for.
Say you've got one of the old PowerBooks without a multi-touchpad and you want to set up side scrolling, like every other laptop in the world has? There's a utility for that... if you don't mind clicking away a nag box every time your computer boots up or wakes from standby, or paying for a feature that's included for free on every other laptop (after you paid extra for a feature-rich Apple machine in the first place).
At least on Windows, the good shareware and commercial stuff eventually gets cloned as freeware, if not OSS, because there is a large community of Windows developers who aren't in it for the money (and may not have even paid for the OS or development tools). On the Mac, you're more likely to find a community trying to nag and guilt-trip you into paying for some shareware with a cute name.
It's not cheating. Methods are not "first class" in C# at all; delegates are, and an anonymous delegate that calls the property accessor is equivalent to a delegate made directly from the property accessor. If the few nanosecond difference bothers you, you shouldn't be using managed code in the first place.
BTW, is this a problem you've actually encountered, or just another theoretical complaint with no bearing on the real world of C# development?
Here's a theory: hard drives don't get cheaper at the low end, they just get bigger. If that 8 GB drive costs $25, in a couple years you might be able to get a 40 GB drive for $25 instead, but you still won't be able to get the 8 GB drive for $5.
Meanwhile, the console is expected to get cheaper, not just better. If you're still spending $25 on the hard drive, even as all the other components have gotten cheaper, that makes it harder to drop the console's price. You could use the larger hard drive as a selling point, but for something that's mainly used for saved games and caching (which is invisible to the buyer), the extra space isn't all that attractive.
Indeed, for all the noise people like to make about waiting lists, we don't have it any better in the US. It's a basic problem of supply and demand: there's a finite amount of "health care" available at any given time, and demand is greater than that. You have to ration it somehow.
In the US, we generally ration it based on how much money you have. If you can afford the procedure, you get it; otherwise you don't. In Canada, they ration it based on how much you need the procedure, a decision made by actual doctors; if you have a minor ailment, you'll wait, but if you need treatment immediately, you'll get it. Does it really make any more sense to let poor people suffer than it does to let people with minor ailments wait?
Furthermore, the information encoded on the disc is not anyone's property. Information is very different from property.
BrainMaker (respected neural network software): basic version, $195. Professional, $795. No free trial.