If the money funneled into legal departments to hunt pirates were instead funneled into marketing and development of competitive alternatives we'd have next to no piracy. Instead, the money that the lawyers don't pocket goes to implemention of fascist-grade DRM and to greed inspired practices such as pay-for DLC which is a massive turn off. If i want to have a game continously bleed me for cash i'd play an MMORPG(which i do; eve online, but they atleast have the sense of providing expansions for free(and quite often) so the bleeding is smooth)
Who do you think decides where the money goes?
Whose interests will the allocation of money be most aligned with?
Who designs the system which dictates who gets to do the allocation and what benefits them?
I think the people who are positioned to apply the lesson of history are already applying it, and the suckers (that's us, the consumers) by and large pay.
In short, you have an incorrect and dangerous view about what evolution is. It is the exact same view that some of the worst monsters in history have used to excuse some of the worst atrocities ever committed.
That has to be the subtlest and most sensible Godwin I've ever seen.
It would be like trading in your 10 year old car for a new one that looks cool and is comfortable, but is completely autopiloted, and only lets you out at certain stops.
Personally I advocate throwing the party leaders out on their collective asses.
And once the parties elect new leaders, then what?
I don't think policies are bad because politicians are bad, because all politicians are bad. I think policies are bad because the system that makes the policies is a bad system.
Democracy worked well when everybody met at the marketplace in Athens. When you have to take a day off from work and travel for several hours to meet your national politicians (if you live in a small place), only the well-off will be able to show up personally and pressure their politicians.
See also the fall of the roman empire: when the provinces got too far away from Rome and didn't have any real political influence, they didn't really stick. Similarly when the US detached itself from English rule: the citizens were too far away from and had too little influence on those who were making policy.
But now we can all talk over long distances without moving our bodies (by tube, truck or pipe). I think maybe---just maybe---participatory democracy might give the people more sane policy. It's said (somewhat derogatorily) among economists that in a democracy, you get the policies the average voter can understand. I think this is true for a participatory democracy, but this is much better than the pork what's-the-word policies you get when the politicians are hidden away from the public view.
I think this would be a better system, not one composed of better people (who are few and far between).
And as for the notion of the hard work that goes into fonts; I don't dispute that. But if that's a good enough reason for copyrights, then what about the bricklayer who builds a wall, or the carpenter who makes a door?
Here's the economic argument for copyrights, abbreviated, as I understand it, TINLA, etc.:
Some things cost X dollars (or X amount of natural resources, including human attention) per unit to produce. Some things cost X dollars per unit, plus a fixed amount Y dollars, say to build a widget factory first. For most values of X and Y, the free market is happy to produce what people want.
For some goods, we have X = 0 (or X is tiny) and Y is big. In other words, they're the opposite of drugs: the first one is expensive, the rest are free.
Especially if any user/consumer can produce an extra unit from his or her own unit (i.e. they're bit strings stored on a computer), the market acts rather strangely around these kinds of goods, mostly by not making enough.
But the goods are valuable to society; therefore, we want to make laws that encourage their production---by handing out monopolies which allow (approximately) the people who bear the Y-cost to recuperate that cost and make some profit. Such laws can never be perfect, but they can (if done right and enforced right) be better than the "no laws" alternative.
Walls and doors seem much closer to the X-per-unit or X-per-unit-plus-some-Y (where Y doesn't dwarf X), so we as a society have decided not to make laws that fiddle with the market*.
(* At least not in the way copyrights do; there are, depending on your country, labor laws, price control laws, taxation, import and export controls, but none are, I think, based on the same argument as copyrights)
Making a fancy letter "A" is not an activity that should need any greater reward than a single paycheck.
The sum of money earned before your work goes into the public domain constitutes that single paycheck, you just get advances as you go.
Basically, each application for a domain would be carefully vetted under some set of criteria and only unobjectionable content would be allowed.
But wait, a domain is a link from a name, say "www.family-friendly.org", to an IP address, say 1.2.3.45; you don't know that if you contact that IP address, you will get only "nice" responses.
I guess the way to work around that is for the owner of that link to sign a contract with the censorship board (and have routine checks and penalties and courts and stuff). But the censorship board in which nation? Or is it international? Or...?
Because if it's national, why not just put US porn under.xxx.us? Or is this the US (which owns ICANN) imposing its rules of sex-is-naughty-censorship on the rest of us? Is the US going to tell Danish porn makers to buy a non-.dk domain for their porn? Why do they have jurisdiction over us?
Of course, if He doesn't exist, then truth and lies and hurting or not hurting people doesn't matter.
It makes me really sad hearing this.
I want to live in a world where people want to be nice to their fellow human beings (i.e. telling the truth and not hurting them, preferably both where possible) because they are human beings, not conditioned on whether God exists or not.
I'm sad to think that there are a large number of people who would stop loving their fellow human beings if they learned that God doesn't exist. I hope they will change the basis of their morality---but I don't want such a change forced upon them. If nothing else, I hope they will keep believing, so their society won't degenerate into chaos and disorder.
There's a scientific meta-claim that submitting theories to trial by experiment (and discarding the theories which disagree with the world) is likely to produce good theories about how the world works.
How would you verify this? Experimentally? Why would you believe that experimenting is a good way to learn the truth?
Yes, in the end I'm asking "you believe that what you see (perceive) is a reasonably accurate reflecting of what the world really is like; why?" But my answer is still the same: there is an element of faith in science.
That said, I want that kept small, carefully watched and well understood.
Peer review and scientific principles don't mesh well with peer review though [...] Ridding peer review and science of copyright
I assume the first "peer review" was meant to be "copyright"?
Also, I think you can do peer review with restrictive copyrights just fine. It's the whole sharing-of-results that goes away if there's a for-profit journal owning all the results.
Also, the article really isn't about sharing the results themselves, but sharing the data that informs and/or is the foundation for the results. Copyrights really doesn't enter into this question (IANAL TINLA) unless the data is contained within the article. By way of analogy: I can collect data on my computer's fan speed, you can come ask me for that data, and I can say "no way, go 'way"; I don't need copyrights on my data collection to not give it to anyone.
Doesn't "self regulation" usually result in services and pricing that always benefit the industry at the expense of the consumer?
Only if free markets don't work. I think if you're a libertarian or a liberal* economist, you believe that free markets work by assumption rather than because of the evidence (maybe even in spite of the evidence).
(* liberal as in freedom, not left**-wing) (** by US standards)
When it comes to the ballot box, though, people are very unified in strongly supporting the idea that government should initiate force to limit what people can do with things that they own.
And you know that, because all the democrats prefer voting for the Democratic Party, rather than the Democratic Party Prime, which is exactly like its sister party except they have a different stance on copyrights (and vice versa for republicans).
Wait, no... in fact, I don't think you know that; the historical outcome is consistent with a population ignorant of copyright laws and caring very strongly about their relative preferences for tax-paid public television stations and (freedom of) gun ownership. Or some other political issue.
And that's what's wrong with a two-party system: you can buy only whole packages, not individual bits and pieces, and none of the two parties can split into two camps based on an issue if the election system is clone-deterring...
The weak link in the chain is always people, not software.
They way I heard it, a person clicked on a link in Messenger; doing so opened a browser, IE presumably; viewing the page linked to in IE triggered a security baddie in IE, letting the site pwn the local machine in question.
So people are the weak link, because they click on links? Or because they don't download all their web pages in wget and analyze them for IE exploits first?
If so, loads of spare time spent tinkering and six years at a university studying CS doesn't make me quite as computer savvy as I thought:-(
Re:I don't even know where to begin.
on
Life Recorder
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· Score: 1
Your employer will use it to prove you've been slacking off or sneaking off to your car for a company policy prohibited smoke.
Stand up to your boss. Work for a company where you get the sense that you don't even need to ask if you can go outside and smoke whenever you feel like it. No amount of money is compensation enough for being treated with less dignity and respect than that.
If UI designer tells them to do such and such, and they do not like it, they tell him to GTFO. Knowing this, UI designers often don't even bother.
If the ui guys came to the code monkeys with data about user acceptance and comparative task success rates, instead of "complies with usability principles" and "will make it easier for granny" when their suggested changes indeed do remove features from the code monkeys (who tend to be expert users), they code monkeys might object less.
When you need to take someone's cake away from them, at least have the decency to admit "yes, I'm taking your cake". If you can say "here's the purpose it serves, and here's why it works", you might be greeted with less contempt.
And please make sure your answer to "how do you know what users want?" isn't "because I can tell you what to do!"
I agree with you (the parent) more than your parent (my grandparent).
That is, I agree with your conclusion but disagree with your arguments.
Not everything that has the same outcome is the same thing. [...] Theft requires a physical deprivation. That's the critical point.
Okay, so let's edit what your parent said:
Theft:
User has the game
The previous owner doesn't
Ubisoft doesn't get any money
Piracy:
User has the game
The previous owner also has the game
Ubisoft doesn't get any money
I don't think you have disproven "things are equal if they have equal outcomes". Your parent just didn't describe the outcome in sufficient detail.
And second hand sales doesn't prove your parents way of defining things wrong either: add the extra requirement that the previous owner of the game (the seller) has a freely accepted compensation---this distinguishes them from cases of theft.
As a very philosophical point, the only description of outcomes that is sure to be sufficiently detailed is a complete description of the state of the world, suitable for your Laplacian Demon. Sometimes less will do, but you might need to keep adding more.
Hmm... interesting. Thanks for making me think a little about this:-)
Clearly the game was a runaway success, but the DRM was just not strong enough.
It never is.
Or, in case I'm wrong, it almost never is.
So rather than making good games, is the game industry really in the business of inventing and attaching to games the DRM schemes which win the arms race against crackers?
It seems that if you limit your talent pool to paid staff whom you subject to performance reviews, and the cracker army enlist the free time of passionate volunteers, the cracker army may be smaller in terms of wall clock hours, but it has better morale. If Sun Tzu is as correct as he is well known, we should expect the crackers to win, right?
(In terms of human motivation and organization, the crackers work similar to the open source movement, I think)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm a spelling nazi today....
I think the distinction between spelling and meaning/usage has alluded you ;-)
If the money funneled into legal departments to hunt pirates were instead funneled into marketing and development of competitive alternatives we'd have next to no piracy.
Instead, the money that the lawyers don't pocket goes to implemention of fascist-grade DRM and to greed inspired practices such as pay-for DLC which is a massive turn off. If i want to have a game continously bleed me for cash i'd play an MMORPG(which i do; eve online, but they atleast have the sense of providing expansions for free(and quite often) so the bleeding is smooth)
Who do you think decides where the money goes?
Whose interests will the allocation of money be most aligned with?
Who designs the system which dictates who gets to do the allocation and what benefits them?
I think the people who are positioned to apply the lesson of history are already applying it, and the suckers (that's us, the consumers) by and large pay.
In short, you have an incorrect and dangerous view about what evolution is. It is the exact same view that some of the worst monsters in history have used to excuse some of the worst atrocities ever committed.
That has to be the subtlest and most sensible Godwin I've ever seen.
Congratulations, sir---you win an internets!
It would be like trading in your 10 year old car for a new one that looks cool and is comfortable, but is completely autopiloted, and only lets you out at certain stops.
Apple = Slicked-up public transportation ;-)
<a href="not video">University of Washington speech</a>
Could you please post a download link (for viewing in my favorite video player)?
Personally I advocate throwing the party leaders out on their collective asses.
And once the parties elect new leaders, then what?
I don't think policies are bad because politicians are bad, because all politicians are bad. I think policies are bad because the system that makes the policies is a bad system.
Democracy worked well when everybody met at the marketplace in Athens. When you have to take a day off from work and travel for several hours to meet your national politicians (if you live in a small place), only the well-off will be able to show up personally and pressure their politicians.
See also the fall of the roman empire: when the provinces got too far away from Rome and didn't have any real political influence, they didn't really stick. Similarly when the US detached itself from English rule: the citizens were too far away from and had too little influence on those who were making policy.
But now we can all talk over long distances without moving our bodies (by tube, truck or pipe). I think maybe---just maybe---participatory democracy might give the people more sane policy. It's said (somewhat derogatorily) among economists that in a democracy, you get the policies the average voter can understand. I think this is true for a participatory democracy, but this is much better than the pork what's-the-word policies you get when the politicians are hidden away from the public view.
I think this would be a better system, not one composed of better people (who are few and far between).
And as for the notion of the hard work that goes into fonts; I don't dispute that. But if that's a good enough reason for copyrights, then what about the bricklayer who builds a wall, or the carpenter who makes a door?
Here's the economic argument for copyrights, abbreviated, as I understand it, TINLA, etc.:
Some things cost X dollars (or X amount of natural resources, including human attention) per unit to produce. Some things cost X dollars per unit, plus a fixed amount Y dollars, say to build a widget factory first. For most values of X and Y, the free market is happy to produce what people want.
For some goods, we have X = 0 (or X is tiny) and Y is big. In other words, they're the opposite of drugs: the first one is expensive, the rest are free.
Especially if any user/consumer can produce an extra unit from his or her own unit (i.e. they're bit strings stored on a computer), the market acts rather strangely around these kinds of goods, mostly by not making enough.
But the goods are valuable to society; therefore, we want to make laws that encourage their production---by handing out monopolies which allow (approximately) the people who bear the Y-cost to recuperate that cost and make some profit. Such laws can never be perfect, but they can (if done right and enforced right) be better than the "no laws" alternative.
Walls and doors seem much closer to the X-per-unit or X-per-unit-plus-some-Y (where Y doesn't dwarf X), so we as a society have decided not to make laws that fiddle with the market*.
(* At least not in the way copyrights do; there are, depending on your country, labor laws, price control laws, taxation, import and export controls, but none are, I think, based on the same argument as copyrights)
Making a fancy letter "A" is not an activity that should need any greater reward than a single paycheck.
The sum of money earned before your work goes into the public domain constitutes that single paycheck, you just get advances as you go.
Basically, each application for a domain would be carefully vetted under some set of criteria and only unobjectionable content would be allowed.
But wait, a domain is a link from a name, say "www.family-friendly.org", to an IP address, say 1.2.3.45; you don't know that if you contact that IP address, you will get only "nice" responses.
I guess the way to work around that is for the owner of that link to sign a contract with the censorship board (and have routine checks and penalties and courts and stuff). But the censorship board in which nation? Or is it international? Or ...?
Because if it's national, why not just put US porn under .xxx.us? Or is this the US (which owns ICANN) imposing its rules of sex-is-naughty-censorship on the rest of us? Is the US going to tell Danish porn makers to buy a non-.dk domain for their porn? Why do they have jurisdiction over us?
Of course, if He doesn't exist, then truth and lies and hurting or not hurting people doesn't matter.
It makes me really sad hearing this.
I want to live in a world where people want to be nice to their fellow human beings (i.e. telling the truth and not hurting them, preferably both where possible) because they are human beings, not conditioned on whether God exists or not.
I'm sad to think that there are a large number of people who would stop loving their fellow human beings if they learned that God doesn't exist. I hope they will change the basis of their morality---but I don't want such a change forced upon them. If nothing else, I hope they will keep believing, so their society won't degenerate into chaos and disorder.
IMHO Faith and Science are exact opposites.
There's a scientific meta-claim that submitting theories to trial by experiment (and discarding the theories which disagree with the world) is likely to produce good theories about how the world works.
How would you verify this? Experimentally? Why would you believe that experimenting is a good way to learn the truth?
Yes, in the end I'm asking "you believe that what you see (perceive) is a reasonably accurate reflecting of what the world really is like; why?" But my answer is still the same: there is an element of faith in science.
That said, I want that kept small, carefully watched and well understood.
Please talk to me! I love you!
Linksys needs a girlfriend ;-)
Peer review and scientific principles don't mesh well with peer review though [...] Ridding peer review and science of copyright
I assume the first "peer review" was meant to be "copyright"?
Also, I think you can do peer review with restrictive copyrights just fine. It's the whole sharing-of-results that goes away if there's a for-profit journal owning all the results.
Also, the article really isn't about sharing the results themselves, but sharing the data that informs and/or is the foundation for the results. Copyrights really doesn't enter into this question (IANAL TINLA) unless the data is contained within the article. By way of analogy: I can collect data on my computer's fan speed, you can come ask me for that data, and I can say "no way, go 'way"; I don't need copyrights on my data collection to not give it to anyone.
Scientist who do good pier reviewed studies
If a scientist gets a bad pier review, will the university (or other employer) have his pay docked?
I'm here all week. Try the instant veal burger ;-)
How pithy; I like it :-)
Doesn't "self regulation" usually result in services and pricing that always benefit the industry at the expense of the consumer?
Only if free markets don't work. I think if you're a libertarian or a liberal* economist, you believe that free markets work by assumption rather than because of the evidence (maybe even in spite of the evidence).
(* liberal as in freedom, not left**-wing)
(** by US standards)
We all buy coffee pots and wristwatches without any expectation that we'll be allowed to load arbitrary software into their CPUs.
lol :D
Isn't any repository a whitelist?
Yes. That brings up the question: why trust one repository over another?
Why should I trust Debian's repository over RandomDude's (or vice versa)? Why should I trust Apple's over RandomDude's (or vice versa)?
Well, I guess Apple are trustworthy because they say so, and RandomDude didn't say he was trustworthy...
When it comes to the ballot box, though, people are very unified in strongly supporting the idea that government should initiate force to limit what people can do with things that they own.
And you know that, because all the democrats prefer voting for the Democratic Party, rather than the Democratic Party Prime, which is exactly like its sister party except they have a different stance on copyrights (and vice versa for republicans).
Wait, no... in fact, I don't think you know that; the historical outcome is consistent with a population ignorant of copyright laws and caring very strongly about their relative preferences for tax-paid public television stations and (freedom of) gun ownership. Or some other political issue.
And that's what's wrong with a two-party system: you can buy only whole packages, not individual bits and pieces, and none of the two parties can split into two camps based on an issue if the election system is clone-deterring...
The weak link in the chain is always people, not software.
They way I heard it, a person clicked on a link in Messenger; doing so opened a browser, IE presumably; viewing the page linked to in IE triggered a security baddie in IE, letting the site pwn the local machine in question.
So people are the weak link, because they click on links? Or because they don't download all their web pages in wget and analyze them for IE exploits first?
If so, loads of spare time spent tinkering and six years at a university studying CS doesn't make me quite as computer savvy as I thought :-(
Your employer will use it to prove you've been slacking off or sneaking off to your car for a company policy prohibited smoke.
Stand up to your boss. Work for a company where you get the sense that you don't even need to ask if you can go outside and smoke whenever you feel like it. No amount of money is compensation enough for being treated with less dignity and respect than that.
If UI designer tells them to do such and such, and they do not like it, they tell him to GTFO. Knowing this, UI designers often don't even bother.
If the ui guys came to the code monkeys with data about user acceptance and comparative task success rates, instead of "complies with usability principles" and "will make it easier for granny" when their suggested changes indeed do remove features from the code monkeys (who tend to be expert users), they code monkeys might object less.
When you need to take someone's cake away from them, at least have the decency to admit "yes, I'm taking your cake". If you can say "here's the purpose it serves, and here's why it works", you might be greeted with less contempt.
And please make sure your answer to "how do you know what users want?" isn't "because I can tell you what to do!"
I agree with you (the parent) more than your parent (my grandparent).
That is, I agree with your conclusion but disagree with your arguments.
Not everything that has the same outcome is the same thing. [...] Theft requires a physical deprivation. That's the critical point.
Okay, so let's edit what your parent said:
I don't think you have disproven "things are equal if they have equal outcomes". Your parent just didn't describe the outcome in sufficient detail.
And second hand sales doesn't prove your parents way of defining things wrong either: add the extra requirement that the previous owner of the game (the seller) has a freely accepted compensation---this distinguishes them from cases of theft.
As a very philosophical point, the only description of outcomes that is sure to be sufficiently detailed is a complete description of the state of the world, suitable for your Laplacian Demon. Sometimes less will do, but you might need to keep adding more.
Hmm... interesting. Thanks for making me think a little about this :-)
Clearly the game was a runaway success, but the DRM was just not strong enough.
It never is.
Or, in case I'm wrong, it almost never is.
So rather than making good games, is the game industry really in the business of inventing and attaching to games the DRM schemes which win the arms race against crackers?
It seems that if you limit your talent pool to paid staff whom you subject to performance reviews, and the cracker army enlist the free time of passionate volunteers, the cracker army may be smaller in terms of wall clock hours, but it has better morale. If Sun Tzu is as correct as he is well known, we should expect the crackers to win, right?
(In terms of human motivation and organization, the crackers work similar to the open source movement, I think)
http://www.xkcd.com/686/
By the way, its articles like this that shed light on these networks, which we certainly don't need.
The first rule of usenet...?