This is exactly what Apple wants to have happen: every developer now publishes a native iOS version of their app. The lack of Flash support on iOS is merely the tip of the iceberg. If Apple's strategy comes to fruition, iOS becomes the dominant app platform so developers are basically forced to support it - just as Windows was for the past 20 years. And Apple both gets to control what is available for iOS (read: keep out competition), and gets a cut of everything that sells. Read this (this is not my blog, it's mostly about finance and banking and that whole mess, but there are a handful of posts on other topics):
It's a pretty scary future indeed, but sadly with iOS's dominance I can't see how to stop the freight train. With PCs, maybe there was enough market pressure for an "open" system where we can run whatever we want. But with smartphones, it's enough of an "appliance" that I don't think anyone will care. And we'll be stuck with Apple's draconian policies for the next 20 years.
Arguing over the legal definitions is missing the point.
I agree. I've made countless posts here arguing things other than legal definitions; I'm not sure how much of my post history you can see, but there have been plenty. Basically, my arguments boil down to:
Any item (either with non-zero duplication cost like a car, or with zero duplication cost like an MP3 file) still takes non-zero cost to create in the first place.
Creators of physical items are accustomed to amortizing creation cost in with duplication cost in the sale of every item. For example, car designers/testers need to get paid, and that happens by including their salaries into the price of a new car.
Creators of zero-cost-of-reproduction items still have to get paid somehow, and free reproduction of items doesn't do it. Arguments about creating things 'for the love of music/movies/writing/software' are basically arguing for a charity-supported creation society, something that I don't believe is good enough.
Ad-supported, auxiliary-supported (concerts), charity-supported (donations), tax-supported (public libraries/museums/government projects) are all solutions to this problem, but I still haven't seen anything that strikes me as an obvious way to support such creators and their creations.
This is the second time I have made the above post on Slashdot, and the second time that I've gotten responses that in no way related to the point I was making. Let me quote the OP:
When you steal something you deprive the previous owner of their copy.
The OP is arguing that the defining characteristic of "theft" is deprivation, and specifically deprivation of a physical item. I pointed out that theft of time is also considered a crime, and does not involve depriving anyone of physical items. Basically, theft of labor comes one notch closer to the spirit of copyright infringement, yet still involves the word "theft".
Slashdot is notorious for spreading this incorrect information, and it needs to stop. Theft of time/labor is also a crime, at least in twostate, and a Google search for "theft of labor" reveals many more citations for you to peruse.
I have never understood this desire for a continuous 1 cent spread. I think HFT use that argument to justify their existence. The market does not require it.
Market makers set bid and ask prices, and when we trade stock, the market maker makes the spread. If HFT weren't there, market makers would probably make more money due to a wider spread, but I'd be okay with that since they are the ones REALLY providing liquidity.
Second, no one can "siphon off" money without taking a risk.
Bzzt. The whole point of HFT is to exploit microsecond-long arbitrage opportunities, which are by definition zero-risk.
In any case, is it really a surprise that the body will boost its immunity when it detects a possible disease threat?
No, that's not a surprise, but you missed the point of the study. The interesting part is that "when it detects a possible threat" can be triggered by images, rather than by physical exposure of your immune system to pathogens. That suggests that immune response has a pathway through your brain.
What exactly does the other thread do while the mm thread is running, and if it blocks like I think, how does that speed anything up?
They keys are speculative allocation, and batch freeing. They decouple the actual allocation/deallocation that the system's memory management library performs (which may involve slow system calls into the kernel, even), from the malloc and free calls that the program makes. By decoupling the rest of the program thread from the memory allocation thread, the application then doesn't always have to wait for all the accounting and data structure manipulation that malloc and free do. Of course there are times when it does have to wait, but with intelligent speculative mallocs, and batched frees, they try to minimize those.
It's actually very similar to threaded I/O in that it decouples two aspects of the program, and allows for forward progress on things that aren't dependent on the thing that gets shoved off to another thread.
Solution: per-class MPG numbers, and actually enforce the classes properly. Specifically: if you're selling compact SUVs to soccer moms, don't classify them as light-duty trucks, classify them as sedans or minivans and make them adhere to the stricter MPG ratings.
If a company sells some gas-guzzlers that everyone buys, and sells one or two token hybrids/EVs/compacts that no one buys for whatever reason (too expensive, too few features, ugly, piece of shit, bad reliability, whatever), this law isn't going to help.
Slashdot has been doing stupid April 1 shit for more than 10 years, and hasn't heeded any negative comments about 1) the fact that they do it at all, 2) the style/type/content of the jokes, or 3) the amount/length of time that it goes on. Everyone should be well aware of this by now. If you can't stand it, leave. Or start your own tech/politics site that doesn't do stupid April 1 shit. The editors here obviously don't care about any opinions about April 1 shenanigans, and will continue to do as they please.
Additionally, posting a "Please stop" comment on April 1 is karma whoring. It's a +5 Insightful for what amounts to a first post.
Read GP's post again. He specifically singled out depriving someone of property as the thing that defines theft. Labor and time are NOT property, which is what my post was addressing.
Furthermore, I would argue that labor and time are not physical anyway. I don't know how "time" is a physical thing, and while energy may be physical, no one is coming to take the food which provides the energy off the service provider's table when depriving him of labor.
In GP's post, he said theft involves depriving someone of property. Now you have amended the Slashdot-acceptable definition of theft to include theft of time as well as property. That was the objective of my post.
Time is a bit more ethereal than property, wouldn't you say?
Well, actually, stealing usually involves depriving somebody of property.
This Slashdot-promoted definition is wrong, and out of control. The counterexample is theft of labor, or in other words the service industry. If someone charges money to provide a service, say, mowing your lawn, and then you don't pay them for that service, that is theft, as defined by law. Here is your citation. When committing the crime of theft of labor, you have not deprived anyone of physical property, yet you have committed theft.
Why do you (or any other Slashdot poster who supports weak copyright when it comes to paying for things, but strong copyright in this case) draw the distinction between copyright for artistic integrity and copyright so you can get paid? An artist insisting on getting paid is morally reprehensible, but an artist insisting on keeping artistic integrity is morally okay?
Not flamebait! Calling someone a hypocrite using false facts and little to no coherent arguments == flamebait. Calling someone a hypocrite with correct facts and sound arguments != flamebait.
You're right about this analogy with flour, but this analogy fails when it comes to ticket scalping, and it amounts to a lack of competition. Another company cannot come in and offer another Metallica concert in the same town on the same day (or even the next day) as the first Metallica concert in order to compete. There is only one Metallica, and usually Metallica does all of its booking through a single production company.
It amounts to a localized monopoly, where the production company has a monopoly on the market. The company has decided that tickets to that show should be sold for a certain amount - usually whatever it takes to cover costs plus a reasonable profit for the company. The scalpers then come in and buy all the tickets, giving *themselves* the monopoly, and they offer the tickets for sale at vastly higher amounts, much more than their own costs of running the botnet or whatever. They are certainly taking a risk that not enough of the tickets will sell to cover their capital investment, but the risk is greatly reduced because of the inflated price at which they offer the tickets, which they hold because they are now a monopoly. They may only need to sell half the tickets to cover the original capital investment.
It would be absolutely outstanding if scalpers created a new market where new companies were able to come in and bid down the price of these concerts, but the actual act/performers themselves are the scarce thing that prevents this from happening.
I like the solution that someone else pointed out, which effectively wipes out the artificial monopoly that scalpers create for themselves. If a show sells X% of its tickets, automagically schedule another show in the same venue for the next day.
I'm trying to find the actual patent decision briefs (the original documents), but I'm having trouble doing so. I want to read for example why the court dismissed the patents in the suit against Nvidia in Nov 2009 (without assuming that prior art was the real reason or whatnot). Rambus had one suit dismissed because they shredded some documents and the decision hinged on that as a show of bad faith (which I acknowledged Rambus did back in my very first post), not on the actual patents themselves. All the online articles are very thin on details.
Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
Your post:
They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
So yes, I do understand, since we both said the exact same thing. DDR SDRAM is not RDRAM and it plenty different, but Rambus says that it still uses their tech. What is the problem?
They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
No, I don't understand. Who decided that The JEDEC DDR SDRAM Specification doesn't rip off RDRAM - you? As far as I know, the courts first said it didn't, then they overturned that, and it went back and forth about 10 times until the late 2000s when Rambus started winning court cases.
Wrong. Did you even read the wikipedia page you linked to? "DDR... is a class of memory integrated circuits used in computers." JESD79 is the complete JEDEC DRAM specification that employs the DDR concept to DRAM. RDRAM employed it too, years earlier than JESD79. Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
The thing they revealed under NDA was their RDRAM technology, NOT DDR!
What the fuck? RDRAM IS DDR! RDRAM used both edge of the clock to transfer data, which is the definition of DDR! Your whole post makes no sense because while you seem to know everything about the case, you know nothing about the actual technology!
I followed the case briefly. Rambus allowed JEDEC members to see what they were doing under NDA years before anyone at JEDEC mentioned it. So despite your repeated assertion that everyone else had "already thought" of SDR and DDR, no one knows if that is true or not because the NDAs are, well NDAs. That is where we can just stop the arguing.
I started typing up a huge line-by-line response to this and it's pointless. Unless you can prove you were at the JEDEC meetings in the 90s (I wasn't), neither of us knows what really went on. Rambus surely did sell some crappy memory, but that wasn't the point - the point of their company was to license their tech to real memory manufacturers because it was good and it was at least a year (probably more like 3 in terms of what was needed to actually implement it) ahead of anyone else. If you're saying that there is no value in that because someone else would have thought of it later, then we should just agree to disagree.
The motivation of the patent system is to encourage people to do research and develop products now, today that will benefit the consumer, rather than "at some point later". That the industry was "already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did" is just an anecdote about how technology evolves. Rambus made it evolve faster under the assumption that they could get some money by licensing it, but they got nothing (until now). Without the promise of patents and license agreements, maybe Rambus doesn't even bother to take their ideas to production. No other manufacturer has any incentive to move from EDO DRAM to synchronous DRAM, and maybe DDR takes 10 years longer to reach the consumer. This is obviously all hypothetical, of course, but the point is, Rambus made the industry change sooner, rather than later.
It's called competition, and Rambus was a perfect example of it in action. Then a bunch of greedy corporations ruined it, admitted to doing so, and yet we still have people like you on Slashdot defending them. I don't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly what Apple wants to have happen: every developer now publishes a native iOS version of their app. The lack of Flash support on iOS is merely the tip of the iceberg. If Apple's strategy comes to fruition, iOS becomes the dominant app platform so developers are basically forced to support it - just as Windows was for the past 20 years. And Apple both gets to control what is available for iOS (read: keep out competition), and gets a cut of everything that sells. Read this (this is not my blog, it's mostly about finance and banking and that whole mess, but there are a handful of posts on other topics):
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/30/personal-computing-apple-google-2/
It's a pretty scary future indeed, but sadly with iOS's dominance I can't see how to stop the freight train. With PCs, maybe there was enough market pressure for an "open" system where we can run whatever we want. But with smartphones, it's enough of an "appliance" that I don't think anyone will care. And we'll be stuck with Apple's draconian policies for the next 20 years.
Arguing over the legal definitions is missing the point.
I agree. I've made countless posts here arguing things other than legal definitions; I'm not sure how much of my post history you can see, but there have been plenty. Basically, my arguments boil down to:
Ad-supported, auxiliary-supported (concerts), charity-supported (donations), tax-supported (public libraries/museums/government projects) are all solutions to this problem, but I still haven't seen anything that strikes me as an obvious way to support such creators and their creations.
This is the second time I have made the above post on Slashdot, and the second time that I've gotten responses that in no way related to the point I was making. Let me quote the OP:
When you steal something you deprive the previous owner of their copy.
The OP is arguing that the defining characteristic of "theft" is deprivation, and specifically deprivation of a physical item. I pointed out that theft of time is also considered a crime, and does not involve depriving anyone of physical items. Basically, theft of labor comes one notch closer to the spirit of copyright infringement, yet still involves the word "theft".
Slashdot is notorious for spreading this incorrect information, and it needs to stop. Theft of time/labor is also a crime, at least in two state, and a Google search for "theft of labor" reveals many more citations for you to peruse.
I have never understood this desire for a continuous 1 cent spread. I think HFT use that argument to justify their existence. The market does not require it.
Market makers set bid and ask prices, and when we trade stock, the market maker makes the spread. If HFT weren't there, market makers would probably make more money due to a wider spread, but I'd be okay with that since they are the ones REALLY providing liquidity.
Second, no one can "siphon off" money without taking a risk.
Bzzt. The whole point of HFT is to exploit microsecond-long arbitrage opportunities, which are by definition zero-risk.
In any case, is it really a surprise that the body will boost its immunity when it detects a possible disease threat?
No, that's not a surprise, but you missed the point of the study. The interesting part is that "when it detects a possible threat" can be triggered by images, rather than by physical exposure of your immune system to pathogens. That suggests that immune response has a pathway through your brain.
What exactly does the other thread do while the mm thread is running, and if it blocks like I think, how does that speed anything up?
They keys are speculative allocation, and batch freeing. They decouple the actual allocation/deallocation that the system's memory management library performs (which may involve slow system calls into the kernel, even), from the malloc and free calls that the program makes. By decoupling the rest of the program thread from the memory allocation thread, the application then doesn't always have to wait for all the accounting and data structure manipulation that malloc and free do. Of course there are times when it does have to wait, but with intelligent speculative mallocs, and batched frees, they try to minimize those.
It's actually very similar to threaded I/O in that it decouples two aspects of the program, and allows for forward progress on things that aren't dependent on the thing that gets shoved off to another thread.
Solution: per-class MPG numbers, and actually enforce the classes properly. Specifically: if you're selling compact SUVs to soccer moms, don't classify them as light-duty trucks, classify them as sedans or minivans and make them adhere to the stricter MPG ratings.
If a company sells some gas-guzzlers that everyone buys, and sells one or two token hybrids/EVs/compacts that no one buys for whatever reason (too expensive, too few features, ugly, piece of shit, bad reliability, whatever), this law isn't going to help.
Slashdot has been doing stupid April 1 shit for more than 10 years, and hasn't heeded any negative comments about 1) the fact that they do it at all, 2) the style/type/content of the jokes, or 3) the amount/length of time that it goes on. Everyone should be well aware of this by now. If you can't stand it, leave. Or start your own tech/politics site that doesn't do stupid April 1 shit. The editors here obviously don't care about any opinions about April 1 shenanigans, and will continue to do as they please.
Additionally, posting a "Please stop" comment on April 1 is karma whoring. It's a +5 Insightful for what amounts to a first post.
Please stop posting "Please stop" comments. If you don't like it, stop reading Slashdot for the day.
Read GP's post again. He specifically singled out depriving someone of property as the thing that defines theft. Labor and time are NOT property, which is what my post was addressing.
Furthermore, I would argue that labor and time are not physical anyway. I don't know how "time" is a physical thing, and while energy may be physical, no one is coming to take the food which provides the energy off the service provider's table when depriving him of labor.
In GP's post, he said theft involves depriving someone of property. Now you have amended the Slashdot-acceptable definition of theft to include theft of time as well as property. That was the objective of my post.
Time is a bit more ethereal than property, wouldn't you say?
Well, actually, stealing usually involves depriving somebody of property.
This Slashdot-promoted definition is wrong, and out of control. The counterexample is theft of labor, or in other words the service industry. If someone charges money to provide a service, say, mowing your lawn, and then you don't pay them for that service, that is theft, as defined by law. Here is your citation. When committing the crime of theft of labor, you have not deprived anyone of physical property, yet you have committed theft.
Why do you (or any other Slashdot poster who supports weak copyright when it comes to paying for things, but strong copyright in this case) draw the distinction between copyright for artistic integrity and copyright so you can get paid? An artist insisting on getting paid is morally reprehensible, but an artist insisting on keeping artistic integrity is morally okay?
Not flamebait! Calling someone a hypocrite using false facts and little to no coherent arguments == flamebait. Calling someone a hypocrite with correct facts and sound arguments != flamebait.
You're right about this analogy with flour, but this analogy fails when it comes to ticket scalping, and it amounts to a lack of competition. Another company cannot come in and offer another Metallica concert in the same town on the same day (or even the next day) as the first Metallica concert in order to compete. There is only one Metallica, and usually Metallica does all of its booking through a single production company.
It amounts to a localized monopoly, where the production company has a monopoly on the market. The company has decided that tickets to that show should be sold for a certain amount - usually whatever it takes to cover costs plus a reasonable profit for the company. The scalpers then come in and buy all the tickets, giving *themselves* the monopoly, and they offer the tickets for sale at vastly higher amounts, much more than their own costs of running the botnet or whatever. They are certainly taking a risk that not enough of the tickets will sell to cover their capital investment, but the risk is greatly reduced because of the inflated price at which they offer the tickets, which they hold because they are now a monopoly. They may only need to sell half the tickets to cover the original capital investment.
It would be absolutely outstanding if scalpers created a new market where new companies were able to come in and bid down the price of these concerts, but the actual act/performers themselves are the scarce thing that prevents this from happening.
I like the solution that someone else pointed out, which effectively wipes out the artificial monopoly that scalpers create for themselves. If a show sells X% of its tickets, automagically schedule another show in the same venue for the next day.
I'm trying to find the actual patent decision briefs (the original documents), but I'm having trouble doing so. I want to read for example why the court dismissed the patents in the suit against Nvidia in Nov 2009 (without assuming that prior art was the real reason or whatnot). Rambus had one suit dismissed because they shredded some documents and the decision hinged on that as a show of bad faith (which I acknowledged Rambus did back in my very first post), not on the actual patents themselves. All the online articles are very thin on details.
Wait, I think we agreed on something. My post:
Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
Your post:
They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
So yes, I do understand, since we both said the exact same thing. DDR SDRAM is not RDRAM and it plenty different, but Rambus says that it still uses their tech. What is the problem?
They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
No, I don't understand. Who decided that The JEDEC DDR SDRAM Specification doesn't rip off RDRAM - you? As far as I know, the courts first said it didn't, then they overturned that, and it went back and forth about 10 times until the late 2000s when Rambus started winning court cases.
Wrong. Did you even read the wikipedia page you linked to? "DDR ... is a class of memory integrated circuits used in computers." JESD79 is the complete JEDEC DRAM specification that employs the DDR concept to DRAM. RDRAM employed it too, years earlier than JESD79. Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
The thing they revealed under NDA was their RDRAM technology, NOT DDR!
What the fuck? RDRAM IS DDR! RDRAM used both edge of the clock to transfer data, which is the definition of DDR! Your whole post makes no sense because while you seem to know everything about the case, you know nothing about the actual technology!
I followed the case briefly. Rambus allowed JEDEC members to see what they were doing under NDA years before anyone at JEDEC mentioned it. So despite your repeated assertion that everyone else had "already thought" of SDR and DDR, no one knows if that is true or not because the NDAs are, well NDAs. That is where we can just stop the arguing.
I started typing up a huge line-by-line response to this and it's pointless. Unless you can prove you were at the JEDEC meetings in the 90s (I wasn't), neither of us knows what really went on. Rambus surely did sell some crappy memory, but that wasn't the point - the point of their company was to license their tech to real memory manufacturers because it was good and it was at least a year (probably more like 3 in terms of what was needed to actually implement it) ahead of anyone else. If you're saying that there is no value in that because someone else would have thought of it later, then we should just agree to disagree.
The motivation of the patent system is to encourage people to do research and develop products now, today that will benefit the consumer, rather than "at some point later". That the industry was "already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did" is just an anecdote about how technology evolves. Rambus made it evolve faster under the assumption that they could get some money by licensing it, but they got nothing (until now). Without the promise of patents and license agreements, maybe Rambus doesn't even bother to take their ideas to production. No other manufacturer has any incentive to move from EDO DRAM to synchronous DRAM, and maybe DDR takes 10 years longer to reach the consumer. This is obviously all hypothetical, of course, but the point is, Rambus made the industry change sooner, rather than later.
It's called competition, and Rambus was a perfect example of it in action. Then a bunch of greedy corporations ruined it, admitted to doing so, and yet we still have people like you on Slashdot defending them. I don't get it.