Except for the fact that even if the software cost 1/4 less to create, it would not cost less for the consumer. Not many corporations are that nice.
It has nothing to do with corporations being "nice." In fact, it would cost less for the consumer (in a free, competitive market) because corporations aren't nice. In order to gain an edge on their competition, they'll cut prices in order to sell more copies and increase market share. Of course they still want to earn the largest profit possible. It's this drive that forces them to be the best deal possible for the consumer - otherwise they'll buy their competitor's product.
If producing the software now only cost them 1/4 of what it did previously, they'll be able to sell it for less and still be profitable. And they will, if only to drive out competition.
You're making my point for me here, I feel - distributing two thousand copies online will, by this logic, do more for the artist's welfare than distributing one thousand copies via a rapacious record label.
Good point. And I still agree that estimating economic damages form black/gray market activities is next to impossible. It may be possible to estimate the extent of piracy, but not the economic damages.
Software isn't a mathetmatical algorithm. It's an algorithm, period. It's merely a description of how to do something, and people have been doing "somethings" since the dawn of time.
Patents and copyrights are both forms of intellectual property protection. Simply , patents protect the tangible (like new machines), and copyrights protect the intangible (like art and literature). Both can be used to protect code.
What does software have to do with medicine?
"Generics" in medicine is a perfect analogy for open source in software. Both medicine and software (ab)use intellectual property protections, and both generics and open source fight the impositions on individual freedom.
What stops the government from funding medicine research in a non-profit fashion?
Common sense. "Funding medicine research" is the same as with "government control of medicine" because no private corporation would be able to compete with ones that had government funding. It would strengthen the oligopoly of the existing firms. It would also politicize medicine, giving petty congressmen (or foreign equivalent) control of the future.
Currently, firms research medicines because a good medicine will make them rich. The emphasis is on "good" - no one will buy or use bad medicine. If the government subsidized medicine research, bad medicines could still be profitable as politics would decide what would be funded. Instead of the firm with the best medicine winning, the firm with the best lobbyist would. I'm sure none of us want that.
Both patents and copyrights fail miserably in their purpose
No they don't. Companies endure decades of research costs because if the end result is good, they will be able to profit on it for long enough to repay their costs. Without this protection, anyone could produce the same product without the research. Then there would be no research and far less technology.
And the whole term "intellectual property" is just propaganda: an attempt to make people think as property something that is not property.
Actually, it's a legal term:-D. Whether or not you can "own" an idea or not, I'll leave to the philosophers. (Or not, I have a lot of $0.02) Giving ownership of an idea, like I said, is a great incentive to create an idea - and ideas are good.
How did this get modified as "informative"? The Java footprint is huge. Dynamic compilation is horribly slow compared to static, as the JavaBytes have to be continuously converted to the same native code before being run. Granted, the same optimizations are possible, but with static compilation, you compile once and you're done. With dynamic, continuous compiling is an addition to the program's overhead.
Java on Windows doesn't suck because of Windows. In fact, Java on Linux isn't much better. Java sucks because Java sucks. If you want to see how a virtual machine should be done, look at.NET, especially 2.0 and ClickOnce. Linux hacks of the.NET CLR work well, too, although I honestly don't have statistics on well they compare to Java VM on Linux.
Statistics on black/gray markets are little more than propaganda, as there's no way to actually get them. You can estimate, but estimations are inherently biased. So, piracy stats = propaganda. I also think we can all agree that Sony went beyond what even the most hardened Digital Rights Management activists (like myself) have ever recommended. As if violating fair use and your computer wasn't enough, they just had to be incompetent about it, too. Just wanted to concede those points quick.
[Y]et when they make a "Better Piracy buffer" it usually costs them more customers
Yup, exactly what I meant by "a vicious cycle." Eh?:D
[T]hey bought it it's theirs forever or untill they get rid of it meaning they can do with it whatever they want
No, no, no, no, NO! This is especially not true with computer software. Fairly or NOT, when you buy practically any piece of software, you buy a license which gives you the right to use that program for a specific purpose. The developers that made it actually "own" the software - you just bought a right to use it. The rights granted to you by the license are in the End User License Agreement - that boring, wordy thing you skipped every time you installed a piece of software, evidently.
[C]ould you imagine if car companies suddenly came out and said "You bought the car but you aren't allowed to change anything about it, you are not allowed to change the color of the car, the seat covers, anything in the engine [...]
Yup. Nobody would buy cars, and such a thing wouldn't last long, especially given foreign competition and increasing globalization. But, you draw a bad analogy. Microsoft never said you couldn't mess with the seat colors - they said you couldn't reverse-engineer the engine that came as a culmination of decades of work and create an open-source version free (as in beer and speech) for anyone with a compiler and a modem.
And, "contributing to the theft of auto parts" is particularly misleading because the auto parts are tangible items, whereas the theft of software is a gray area because it is, by definition, intangible. Making a billion copies of Windows XP is easy - you just need a billion CDs and a $20 burner - and despite the fact that you "stole" (technically "infringed on the IP rights of Microsoft") a billion copies of XP, nobody's missing theirs. Think people would notice if you stole a billion carburetors?
[...] [W]hile the other 85% will just read it and move on without replying thus pirating this comment.
Uh... nevermind. I hope you were trying to get moderated "funny.":-D
"gameboy" is capitalized, as it is a proper noun. Besides, you play a Gameboy and not multiple Gameboys. (It's pretty hard playing two at once, y'see.)
You also overused commas and missed verbs. Your pathetic attempt at grammar-nazism should read:
Speak for yourself, pal. When money is tight, morale is low where I come from.
Oh, did you mean morals? Well, that's different. You have lots of company there. I recommend using a grammer checker, or running your text past someone who did something besides play Gameboy or smoke in the bathroom during early school years.
Yeesh. And besides, how can something have "morales" plural attached to it?
Once again, priorities. You have no savings, yet are contemplating a game console. From a corporation whose Office software you won't even use. Think, man. You're broke and you want an Xbox.
I am 16 years old, have a car and a job, good grades, and $300 in a checking account. Sure, it's a 15-year-old Buick, and sure, I work in fast food, but c'mon. It's better than nothing, and you need *some* experience before you can move on.
The best use of these things will be for rescuing people, not killing them. Being able to throw one of these around a potentially dangerous corner or through windows to see if there are injured or unconcious people inside could be invaluable.
Yes, but then you could just use a mirror, because there'd be nobody to see the glint and shoot at you.:D
Remember that the temporary monopoly provided by software (or any kind of) patents is the incentive to create in the first place. Would we have drugs that take decades to create if the instant the formula was out the door, anyone could sell it at cost? Of course not - what would justify the investment of the millions of man-hours of the most highly trained (and expensive) individuals on the planet?
You are correct in saying that tangible, "normal" property represents a share in somethingn you can hold in your hands. The reason for patents/intellectual property is to create the incentive for its creation.
Rememeber that North Vietnam starves while Kim Jong Il flies private chefs around the world to find the fanciest cuisine for his finnicky, dicatator-tastes. Most poverty in this world is artificial - remove the dictators plundering the country, and whadda'ya know, it's a moot point.
Hiring a bunch of Indian programmers for a 1/4 the cost would reduce the final cost of the software. Since it would cost less to legitimately own the software, there would be less piracy.
Isn't globalism great? Artificially high prices anywhere won't be sustainable for long.
firstly i think its funny that you have a grammar sig yet miss cAPITAL lETTERS.:D
[...][D]on't tax revenues come from MONEY EARNED BY THE PEOPLE?
No. Governments can tax anything they want. What you are referring to is an income tax, and is only a small part of what a government can do. The European Union has a "Value Added Tax" which at each stage of production (from raw wood to lumber to furniture) a percentage of the "value added" is taken by the government. I.e., lumber is more valuable than a tree in the forest, and that lumber is even more valuable when its made into a desk. Part of this value is taken from the companies that added it.
You can tax property. Whether you earned anything or not, you can be taxed for the value of the land you own.
Goods themselves can be taxed. I.e., if you make 5 quarts of whiskey, the government may take one. This is called an "excise tax" and was used during the early days of the American government.
Imports can be taxed with tariffs. Exports can be taxed, too. "Sin taxes" can be applied to individual goods have both inflexible demand and are politically incorrect (like cigarettes.)
So, no, the government does not get its revenues solely from money earned by the people. In fact, they would earn more from taxing the income a person raised to buy the $2000 copy of Visual Studio, and even more by applying a tarriff to its import into their country, and even more by applying a sales tax when it was purchased.
Theft/infringement is not taxable, and therefore earns no revenue.
Yet another flawed "OMG look at all those stolen CD's we could earn so much money with this stuff" study.
There's no way get solid figures on black/gray markets. You can estimate, however. And whether these estimations are high or low depends on whether they're considered "fact" or "propaganda."
As for exorbitant prices, they're not exorbitant to the people who the program is actually made for. No teenage no-skills programmer would pay $2000 (even if he had it) for Visual Studio when his open-sourcey gcc will do him just fine for his "hello world" programs. However, large corporations definitely benefit, even at such a price. For example, I saw a secure web server that let you buy concert tickets online and the partner program that let the seller enter what tickets were available completed in under five hours. (Although graphics and some of the website layout had been completed already.) It's this complexity and this speed that justify a corporation's expenditure of $2000. They don't need more people to buy their products, because someone who is unwilling to spend $2k for Visual Studio is someone who does not use the $2k worth of features in Visual Studio.
There's (has to be) a reason why Windows is so popular, other than monopolistic collusion and anti-competitive practices. Remember that Microsoft fought an Apple monopoly for over a decade. Now that Windows has caught on, suddenly Windows has a monopoly, despite the existence of Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc., etc.
"Working on morales" is no different than working on economics. Economics is the study of how people attempt to satisfy their unlimited wants with limited or scare resources. It does not mean you would steal everything you could. It does mean that supporting your principles is worth the opportunity cost of earning the required money to do so.
Everything is economics, because it's a study of human behavior. Last time I checked, all humans had behaviors to study. Even those who aren't uber-capitalist plutocrats.
Would these misers have been willing to splash out for the product anyway?
Does it matter? As an (apparently) wise person posted before me, if they won't pay for it, they shouldn't have it. It's only "too expensive" if too few people buy it.
How much of this actually goes to the artist?
Doesn't matter. Giant, big-name publishers don't provde revenue for the artist per se, but they provde advertising for the band's conserts, their primary form of revenue. Would you shell out big bucks to see a (insert band name here) consert if you hadn't heard any of their music? They also help in getting the artist's music on the radio - modern radio would be impossible if individual stations had to license individual songs from individual bands, and this is one place where an oligopoly actually makes sense.
Nothing "costs too much" if enough people buy it to make its production profitable. If $15 is too much for a CD, don't buy it. Don't steal it. Don't infringe its copyright. Leave the people who will pay that much in peace, and watch as billions are saved in legal costs by your attempting to save yourself a few hundred.
Your dilemma boils down to one of two mutually-exclusive choice:
DO take the job and DO use Microsoft software
DON'T take the job and DON'T use Microsoft software
Using one of their programs is not "giving into their monopoly." Open Office exists, and therefore Microsoft Office has no monopoly. Your aversion doesn't really seem to be based on anything tangible - i.e., Bill Gates raped me when I was little - but some kind of moral principle.
Principles are cool. Everyone needs 'em. But, can you articulate what yours are? I noticed how you short-circuited your principles for convenience by supporting/using the Xbox. If the sacrifice of whatever principles you hold is worth a game system, is it worth a job? You are willing to sacrifice the chance to start a career in the business of a wealthy relative that will (hopefully) forever bring prosperity to you, but you are not willing to sacrifice a game console.
Sort out your priorities. (I wouldn't choose the console over the job.) Articulate your beliefs. (Microsoft is evil? Whether it actually is or not, can you empirically prove why, at least within the bounds of your morals?) Define how much of your moral fiber you will sacrifice to convenience. (Once again, the Xbox over the job.)
Also remember that this isn't just a job to "earn money" - this could be the start of a career. Your family friend sounds influential - and who you know matters just as much as what you know. Do well, and it'll be a shiny gold star on your resume and will make the rest of your life much easier. Don't do it at all, and try getting the requisite job experience for a job you want without a job to get said job experience from.
This isn't a Nuremburg decision. No one will fault you for following orders, meshing with the system, and making everyone's lives more productive. Someone will fault you for blowing off a giant opportunity because of a radical stand on intellectual property.
People "would never buy" a piece of software because of its cost. Developers build in an extra "piracy buffer" to the cost of software to make up for lost sales. Bit of a vicious cycle, eh?
All software is essentially mathematical algorithims
The definition of algorithm is A step-by-step problem-solving procedure. All software is created in response to some "problem" - i.e., running the ol' Gutenburg press is tedious - and all computers follow a series of instructions.
Therefore, software is nothing but an algorithm. Or, more accurately, the the application of an algorithm.
XML is pretty and human readable, but there's a lot of space wasted to make it so - especially for just representing a small structure. A binary markup language would probably be better. For example, two bytes of ASCII would get you the < and one character of an XML tag (even less in Unicode) whereas with a special binary format, you could represent the tag as 1 "start of tag" byte followed by 1 "type of tag" byte. Not pretty and not human readable, but you're proposing having another machine parse it anyway, right? It could save one metric heckuvalotta RAM.
Plus, networking drivers, even minimal ones (be they TCP/IP, NetBIOS, NetBEUI, whatever) plus the drivers to interface with the NIC hardware can be fairly large. If the RAM is limited, and therefore what you're transmitting is small, it would probably be easier just to tether it to the "beefy machine" with a serial cable.
Not pretty, but if space and processing power is truly at such a premium...
Can't tell if you're joking or not, but (modern) computers since the beginning of time read and wrote text. The mainframe at MIT worked with text (and much more) back when the first megabyte stick of memory cost over a million dollars, without adjusting that sum for inflation. Of course, you need enough memory to hold the text you're working with, but to work with it, you need, at most, kilobytes.
Consider events from the viewpoint of the corporation you just maligned. Fairly or not, BellSouth offered a damaged building and in return, the government launched a taxpayer-funded program directly competing with BellSouth. In simpler terms, BellSouth was stabbed in the back. Given the action of the government, BellSouth's reaction is, although not exactly nice, is at least understandable on some level.
Withdrawing the property was indeed petty. And as for "coldest, worst thing" a company has ever done, surely that's hyperbole. Japanese corporations used American POWs as slave labor during World War II. Whether they were justified in any way, shape, or form or not is irrelevant - slave labor is worse than calling "backsies." on a ruined piece of real estate that could be taken with eminent domain anyways.
As for "M$ is the spawn of evil" - do you truly believe that when you have a hotmail address? Besides, whether Microsoft is "evil" or not is irrelevant - they had nothing to do with BellSouth recinding their offer. Come to think of it, neither did Sony, nor their rootkit. Unless you are implying that all corporations are evil - which is something else entirely.
The two of you seem to be arguing slightly different points. In the short term dividends harm the stock, as cash is transferred from the corporation to the private investors. In the long term high dividends, despite their cost to the company, increase demand for the stock.
In other words, paying dividends is kind-of-sort-of-almost-like marketing - in the short term, the company has thrown money out the window. In the long term, (effective) advertising causes more to be bought. Think of dividends as an investment in investment, with an initial cost and a later benefit.
Also consider that dividends are a logical extension of stocks. Shareholders, by definition, are part owners. Paying dividends is merely a way of distributing a corporation's profits to its owners.
Also recall that in a free and competitive market, people pay exactly what things are worth to them.
The key words are free and competitive. A market with high barriers to entry, like the airline industry in which you must own a gajillion-dollar plane to compete, will obviously be less free than farming, in which any person with dirt and seed can try their hand. Competition of a market is directly related to its freedom; no-one will be around to compete with the established monopoly or oligopoly if that no-one is not allowed the chance to try.
Here's the key - is software - bugs, flaws, and all - worth its cost? It all depends on whether you accept the software market as free and competitive. If it is, prices of the software as is truly represent what people are willing to pay for them, and therfore, how much they are worth. If not, and the software industry is single-handedly dominated by Microsoft or some other generic oligopoly (cue Darth Vader breathing) then the software prices are inherently flawed and all of your assertions are correct.
Obviously, you no longer believe that the price of software accurately and truthfully reflects its value. That implies that the software market is neither free nor competitive. Yet, consider the following:
There are zero barriers to entry, other than the ownership of a cheap PC and a cheap compiler. (I have written software on an IBM Personal System 2 obtained free from someone's garbage and a free Borland compiler). Internet access is free in many places, especially public libraries. Both means of production and distribution are free or nearly free, and zero entry barriers is about as free as you get.
Free software does exist, both free as in beer and free as in speech. People are likewise free to choose it over competing, closed software for which they must actually pay. Since (a great) many people choose this software over the free, this implies that Microsoft (or any corporation selling software) provides extra value in some way to consumers in a way that justifies the cost of its software. In fact, Microsoft is massively profitable because of this fact. Is this solely because of brainwashing, FUD, propaganda, and penguin slaying, or does this empirically prove that Microsoft software is a better value?
Nothing in life is perfect; neither is code. Modern software development models accept code as inherently buggy and no model concludes development with the software unfinished. Therefore, development never truly "ends" as long as bugs remain, and bugs will always remain. This honesty and drive to accomplish the impossible is something other than an improvement?
If the market for software is quite possibly the freest on the planet, and yet people still pay prices that are considered "inflated," are they truly inflated? My inflation-adjusted $0.02 - my e-mail is and AIM addresses are free to anyone who takes the effort to flame me.
...[S]ome of us could care less if the root servers serving the.xxx TLD go down under stress.
It's not so much the stress the demand for.xxx domains would create on server bandwidth, but on the practicality of forcing its use. Practically no-one argues that it wouldn't be possible - they created.biz,.info, for example. The problem comes in with enforcing the intent behind this - creating a Red Light district within the Internet, and confining all the smut to easily censored confines.
All well and good. Making.xxx domains would not cause servers to go down, segments of the Internet to black out, nor cause peoples to switch their mouse orientation back to their dominant hand. It would, however, to force between 60% and 70% of the Internet to move the new domain and the new domain only.
A few problems with this, many already brought up in previous posts:
Who decides what's pornographic, and therefore must have a.xxx domain only?
How would sites not under United States jurisdiction be compelled to move to the new domain?
What about conflicting domain names? I.e., if two different people own genericpornsite.com and genericpornsite.net, and both are forced to move to a.xxx domain, who gets genericpornsite.xxx?
Since the.xxx domain is designed to be censored, what if content other than pornography is forced to be located there, i.e., controversial political speech? Something that makes censorship this easy is inherently dangerous.
So, no, no-one will be zipping their pants up anytime soon. Especially since effectively using a.xxx domain, i.e., forcing all smut peddlers to exist only on a.xxx domain, is impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the fact that even if the software cost 1/4 less to create, it would not cost less for the consumer. Not many corporations are that nice.
It has nothing to do with corporations being "nice." In fact, it would cost less for the consumer (in a free, competitive market) because corporations aren't nice. In order to gain an edge on their competition, they'll cut prices in order to sell more copies and increase market share. Of course they still want to earn the largest profit possible. It's this drive that forces them to be the best deal possible for the consumer - otherwise they'll buy their competitor's product.
If producing the software now only cost them 1/4 of what it did previously, they'll be able to sell it for less and still be profitable. And they will, if only to drive out competition.
You're making my point for me here, I feel - distributing two thousand copies online will, by this logic, do more for the artist's welfare than distributing one thousand copies via a rapacious record label.
Good point. And I still agree that estimating economic damages form black/gray market activities is next to impossible. It may be possible to estimate the extent of piracy, but not the economic damages.
Software isn't a mathetmatical algorithm. It's an algorithm, period. It's merely a description of how to do something, and people have been doing "somethings" since the dawn of time.
What do patents have to do with copyrights?
Patents and copyrights are both forms of intellectual property protection. Simply , patents protect the tangible (like new machines), and copyrights protect the intangible (like art and literature). Both can be used to protect code.
What does software have to do with medicine?
"Generics" in medicine is a perfect analogy for open source in software. Both medicine and software (ab)use intellectual property protections, and both generics and open source fight the impositions on individual freedom.
What stops the government from funding medicine research in a non-profit fashion?
Common sense. "Funding medicine research" is the same as with "government control of medicine" because no private corporation would be able to compete with ones that had government funding. It would strengthen the oligopoly of the existing firms. It would also politicize medicine, giving petty congressmen (or foreign equivalent) control of the future.
Currently, firms research medicines because a good medicine will make them rich. The emphasis is on "good" - no one will buy or use bad medicine. If the government subsidized medicine research, bad medicines could still be profitable as politics would decide what would be funded. Instead of the firm with the best medicine winning, the firm with the best lobbyist would. I'm sure none of us want that.
Both patents and copyrights fail miserably in their purpose
No they don't. Companies endure decades of research costs because if the end result is good, they will be able to profit on it for long enough to repay their costs. Without this protection, anyone could produce the same product without the research. Then there would be no research and far less technology.
And the whole term "intellectual property" is just propaganda: an attempt to make people think as property something that is not property.
Actually, it's a legal term :-D. Whether or not you can "own" an idea or not, I'll leave to the philosophers. (Or not, I have a lot of $0.02) Giving ownership of an idea, like I said, is a great incentive to create an idea - and ideas are good.
How did this get modified as "informative"? The Java footprint is huge. Dynamic compilation is horribly slow compared to static, as the JavaBytes have to be continuously converted to the same native code before being run. Granted, the same optimizations are possible, but with static compilation, you compile once and you're done. With dynamic, continuous compiling is an addition to the program's overhead.
Java on Windows doesn't suck because of Windows. In fact, Java on Linux isn't much better. Java sucks because Java sucks. If you want to see how a virtual machine should be done, look at .NET, especially 2.0 and ClickOnce. Linux hacks of the .NET CLR work well, too, although I honestly don't have statistics on well they compare to Java VM on Linux.
Statistics on black/gray markets are little more than propaganda, as there's no way to actually get them. You can estimate, but estimations are inherently biased. So, piracy stats = propaganda. I also think we can all agree that Sony went beyond what even the most hardened Digital Rights Management activists (like myself) have ever recommended. As if violating fair use and your computer wasn't enough, they just had to be incompetent about it, too. Just wanted to concede those points quick.
[Y]et when they make a "Better Piracy buffer" it usually costs them more customers
Yup, exactly what I meant by "a vicious cycle." Eh? :D
[T]hey bought it it's theirs forever or untill they get rid of it meaning they can do with it whatever they want
No, no, no, no, NO! This is especially not true with computer software. Fairly or NOT, when you buy practically any piece of software, you buy a license which gives you the right to use that program for a specific purpose. The developers that made it actually "own" the software - you just bought a right to use it. The rights granted to you by the license are in the End User License Agreement - that boring, wordy thing you skipped every time you installed a piece of software, evidently.
[C]ould you imagine if car companies suddenly came out and said "You bought the car but you aren't allowed to change anything about it, you are not allowed to change the color of the car, the seat covers, anything in the engine [...]
Yup. Nobody would buy cars, and such a thing wouldn't last long, especially given foreign competition and increasing globalization. But, you draw a bad analogy. Microsoft never said you couldn't mess with the seat colors - they said you couldn't reverse-engineer the engine that came as a culmination of decades of work and create an open-source version free (as in beer and speech) for anyone with a compiler and a modem.
And, "contributing to the theft of auto parts" is particularly misleading because the auto parts are tangible items, whereas the theft of software is a gray area because it is, by definition, intangible. Making a billion copies of Windows XP is easy - you just need a billion CDs and a $20 burner - and despite the fact that you "stole" (technically "infringed on the IP rights of Microsoft") a billion copies of XP, nobody's missing theirs. Think people would notice if you stole a billion carburetors?
[...] [W]hile the other 85% will just read it and move on without replying thus pirating this comment.
Uh... nevermind. I hope you were trying to get moderated "funny." :-D
"gameboy" is capitalized, as it is a proper noun. Besides, you play a Gameboy and not multiple Gameboys. (It's pretty hard playing two at once, y'see.)
You also overused commas and missed verbs. Your pathetic attempt at grammar-nazism should read:
Yeesh. And besides, how can something have "morales" plural attached to it?
Once again, priorities. You have no savings, yet are contemplating a game console. From a corporation whose Office software you won't even use. Think, man. You're broke and you want an Xbox.
I am 16 years old, have a car and a job, good grades, and $300 in a checking account. Sure, it's a 15-year-old Buick, and sure, I work in fast food, but c'mon. It's better than nothing, and you need *some* experience before you can move on.
The best use of these things will be for rescuing people, not killing them. Being able to throw one of these around a potentially dangerous corner or through windows to see if there are injured or unconcious people inside could be invaluable.
Yes, but then you could just use a mirror, because there'd be nobody to see the glint and shoot at you. :D
Remember that the temporary monopoly provided by software (or any kind of) patents is the incentive to create in the first place. Would we have drugs that take decades to create if the instant the formula was out the door, anyone could sell it at cost? Of course not - what would justify the investment of the millions of man-hours of the most highly trained (and expensive) individuals on the planet?
You are correct in saying that tangible, "normal" property represents a share in somethingn you can hold in your hands. The reason for patents/intellectual property is to create the incentive for its creation.
Rememeber that North Vietnam starves while Kim Jong Il flies private chefs around the world to find the fanciest cuisine for his finnicky, dicatator-tastes. Most poverty in this world is artificial - remove the dictators plundering the country, and whadda'ya know, it's a moot point.
Companies can't protect the bits, they can only charge for the physical portion and service.
If they can only charge for the physical medium, who will make the bits on that medium?
Hiring a bunch of Indian programmers for a 1/4 the cost would reduce the final cost of the software. Since it would cost less to legitimately own the software, there would be less piracy.
Isn't globalism great? Artificially high prices anywhere won't be sustainable for long.
firstly i think its funny that you have a grammar sig yet miss cAPITAL lETTERS. :D
[...][D]on't tax revenues come from MONEY EARNED BY THE PEOPLE?
No. Governments can tax anything they want. What you are referring to is an income tax, and is only a small part of what a government can do. The European Union has a "Value Added Tax" which at each stage of production (from raw wood to lumber to furniture) a percentage of the "value added" is taken by the government. I.e., lumber is more valuable than a tree in the forest, and that lumber is even more valuable when its made into a desk. Part of this value is taken from the companies that added it.
You can tax property. Whether you earned anything or not, you can be taxed for the value of the land you own.
Goods themselves can be taxed. I.e., if you make 5 quarts of whiskey, the government may take one. This is called an "excise tax" and was used during the early days of the American government.
Imports can be taxed with tariffs. Exports can be taxed, too. "Sin taxes" can be applied to individual goods have both inflexible demand and are politically incorrect (like cigarettes.)
So, no, the government does not get its revenues solely from money earned by the people. In fact, they would earn more from taxing the income a person raised to buy the $2000 copy of Visual Studio, and even more by applying a tarriff to its import into their country, and even more by applying a sales tax when it was purchased.
Theft/infringement is not taxable, and therefore earns no revenue.
Yet another flawed "OMG look at all those stolen CD's we could earn so much money with this stuff" study.
There's no way get solid figures on black/gray markets. You can estimate, however. And whether these estimations are high or low depends on whether they're considered "fact" or "propaganda."
As for exorbitant prices, they're not exorbitant to the people who the program is actually made for. No teenage no-skills programmer would pay $2000 (even if he had it) for Visual Studio when his open-sourcey gcc will do him just fine for his "hello world" programs. However, large corporations definitely benefit, even at such a price. For example, I saw a secure web server that let you buy concert tickets online and the partner program that let the seller enter what tickets were available completed in under five hours. (Although graphics and some of the website layout had been completed already.) It's this complexity and this speed that justify a corporation's expenditure of $2000. They don't need more people to buy their products, because someone who is unwilling to spend $2k for Visual Studio is someone who does not use the $2k worth of features in Visual Studio.
There's (has to be) a reason why Windows is so popular, other than monopolistic collusion and anti-competitive practices. Remember that Microsoft fought an Apple monopoly for over a decade. Now that Windows has caught on, suddenly Windows has a monopoly, despite the existence of Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc., etc.
"Working on morales" is no different than working on economics. Economics is the study of how people attempt to satisfy their unlimited wants with limited or scare resources. It does not mean you would steal everything you could. It does mean that supporting your principles is worth the opportunity cost of earning the required money to do so.
Everything is economics, because it's a study of human behavior. Last time I checked, all humans had behaviors to study. Even those who aren't uber-capitalist plutocrats.
Would these misers have been willing to splash out for the product anyway?
Does it matter? As an (apparently) wise person posted before me, if they won't pay for it, they shouldn't have it. It's only "too expensive" if too few people buy it.
How much of this actually goes to the artist?
Doesn't matter. Giant, big-name publishers don't provde revenue for the artist per se, but they provde advertising for the band's conserts, their primary form of revenue. Would you shell out big bucks to see a (insert band name here) consert if you hadn't heard any of their music? They also help in getting the artist's music on the radio - modern radio would be impossible if individual stations had to license individual songs from individual bands, and this is one place where an oligopoly actually makes sense.
Nothing "costs too much" if enough people buy it to make its production profitable. If $15 is too much for a CD, don't buy it. Don't steal it. Don't infringe its copyright. Leave the people who will pay that much in peace, and watch as billions are saved in legal costs by your attempting to save yourself a few hundred.
Your dilemma boils down to one of two mutually-exclusive choice:
Using one of their programs is not "giving into their monopoly." Open Office exists, and therefore Microsoft Office has no monopoly. Your aversion doesn't really seem to be based on anything tangible - i.e., Bill Gates raped me when I was little - but some kind of moral principle.
Principles are cool. Everyone needs 'em. But, can you articulate what yours are? I noticed how you short-circuited your principles for convenience by supporting/using the Xbox. If the sacrifice of whatever principles you hold is worth a game system, is it worth a job? You are willing to sacrifice the chance to start a career in the business of a wealthy relative that will (hopefully) forever bring prosperity to you, but you are not willing to sacrifice a game console.
Sort out your priorities. (I wouldn't choose the console over the job.) Articulate your beliefs. (Microsoft is evil? Whether it actually is or not, can you empirically prove why, at least within the bounds of your morals?) Define how much of your moral fiber you will sacrifice to convenience. (Once again, the Xbox over the job.)
Also remember that this isn't just a job to "earn money" - this could be the start of a career. Your family friend sounds influential - and who you know matters just as much as what you know. Do well, and it'll be a shiny gold star on your resume and will make the rest of your life much easier. Don't do it at all, and try getting the requisite job experience for a job you want without a job to get said job experience from.
This isn't a Nuremburg decision. No one will fault you for following orders, meshing with the system, and making everyone's lives more productive. Someone will fault you for blowing off a giant opportunity because of a radical stand on intellectual property.
People "would never buy" a piece of software because of its cost. Developers build in an extra "piracy buffer" to the cost of software to make up for lost sales. Bit of a vicious cycle, eh?
All software is essentially mathematical algorithims
The definition of algorithm is A step-by-step problem-solving procedure. All software is created in response to some "problem" - i.e., running the ol' Gutenburg press is tedious - and all computers follow a series of instructions.
Therefore, software is nothing but an algorithm. Or, more accurately, the the application of an algorithm.
XML is pretty and human readable, but there's a lot of space wasted to make it so - especially for just representing a small structure. A binary markup language would probably be better. For example, two bytes of ASCII would get you the < and one character of an XML tag (even less in Unicode) whereas with a special binary format, you could represent the tag as 1 "start of tag" byte followed by 1 "type of tag" byte. Not pretty and not human readable, but you're proposing having another machine parse it anyway, right? It could save one metric heckuvalotta RAM.
Plus, networking drivers, even minimal ones (be they TCP/IP, NetBIOS, NetBEUI, whatever) plus the drivers to interface with the NIC hardware can be fairly large. If the RAM is limited, and therefore what you're transmitting is small, it would probably be easier just to tether it to the "beefy machine" with a serial cable.
Not pretty, but if space and processing power is truly at such a premium...
Can't tell if you're joking or not, but (modern) computers since the beginning of time read and wrote text. The mainframe at MIT worked with text (and much more) back when the first megabyte stick of memory cost over a million dollars, without adjusting that sum for inflation. Of course, you need enough memory to hold the text you're working with, but to work with it, you need, at most, kilobytes.
Consider events from the viewpoint of the corporation you just maligned. Fairly or not, BellSouth offered a damaged building and in return, the government launched a taxpayer-funded program directly competing with BellSouth. In simpler terms, BellSouth was stabbed in the back. Given the action of the government, BellSouth's reaction is, although not exactly nice, is at least understandable on some level.
Withdrawing the property was indeed petty. And as for "coldest, worst thing" a company has ever done, surely that's hyperbole. Japanese corporations used American POWs as slave labor during World War II. Whether they were justified in any way, shape, or form or not is irrelevant - slave labor is worse than calling "backsies." on a ruined piece of real estate that could be taken with eminent domain anyways.
As for "M$ is the spawn of evil" - do you truly believe that when you have a hotmail address? Besides, whether Microsoft is "evil" or not is irrelevant - they had nothing to do with BellSouth recinding their offer. Come to think of it, neither did Sony, nor their rootkit. Unless you are implying that all corporations are evil - which is something else entirely.
The two of you seem to be arguing slightly different points. In the short term dividends harm the stock, as cash is transferred from the corporation to the private investors. In the long term high dividends, despite their cost to the company, increase demand for the stock.
In other words, paying dividends is kind-of-sort-of-almost-like marketing - in the short term, the company has thrown money out the window. In the long term, (effective) advertising causes more to be bought. Think of dividends as an investment in investment, with an initial cost and a later benefit.
Also consider that dividends are a logical extension of stocks. Shareholders, by definition, are part owners. Paying dividends is merely a way of distributing a corporation's profits to its owners.
Also recall that in a free and competitive market, people pay exactly what things are worth to them.
The key words are free and competitive. A market with high barriers to entry, like the airline industry in which you must own a gajillion-dollar plane to compete, will obviously be less free than farming, in which any person with dirt and seed can try their hand. Competition of a market is directly related to its freedom; no-one will be around to compete with the established monopoly or oligopoly if that no-one is not allowed the chance to try.
Here's the key - is software - bugs, flaws, and all - worth its cost? It all depends on whether you accept the software market as free and competitive. If it is, prices of the software as is truly represent what people are willing to pay for them, and therfore, how much they are worth. If not, and the software industry is single-handedly dominated by Microsoft or some other generic oligopoly (cue Darth Vader breathing) then the software prices are inherently flawed and all of your assertions are correct.
Obviously, you no longer believe that the price of software accurately and truthfully reflects its value. That implies that the software market is neither free nor competitive. Yet, consider the following:
If the market for software is quite possibly the freest on the planet, and yet people still pay prices that are considered "inflated," are they truly inflated? My inflation-adjusted $0.02 - my e-mail is and AIM addresses are free to anyone who takes the effort to flame me.
It's not so much the stress the demand for .xxx domains would create on server bandwidth, but on the practicality of forcing its use. Practically no-one argues that it wouldn't be possible - they created .biz, .info, for example. The problem comes in with enforcing the intent behind this - creating a Red Light district within the Internet, and confining all the smut to easily censored confines.
All well and good. Making .xxx domains would not cause servers to go down, segments of the Internet to black out, nor cause peoples to switch their mouse orientation back to their dominant hand. It would, however, to force between 60% and 70% of the Internet to move the new domain and the new domain only.
A few problems with this, many already brought up in previous posts:
So, no, no-one will be zipping their pants up anytime soon. Especially since effectively using a .xxx domain, i.e., forcing all smut peddlers to exist only on a .xxx domain, is impossible.