One effect of the anonymity of the accused is that we've lost the corrective power of shame. In our efforts to "avoid further damaging" a criminal, we sacrifice a major corrective tool
You admit that "outing" the accused has a punitive effect, but fail to observe that the accused is not always a "criminal". Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty" ? Out them for all I care -- but not until they are proven guilty. How would you like it if you were "outed" as a rapist without a trial ?
Mr. Socialism himself. Spread the wealth, everyone is the same, no one can be better than the rest. The rich must give their money to the poor. He should love communist china.
I'm not clear what "communist China" ( rally more like "state capitalist" ) has to do with "spread the wealth", "everyone is the same" and "no one can be better than the rest". China has entrepreneurs, and inequitable distribution of wealth ( more so than the US ).
You've just demonstrated that you know jack-shit minus epsilon about "communist" China.
Depends on your defn of secure. You can make Linux "secure" and OpenBSD "SECURE". You're right -- for many things Linux's ease of use outweighs OpenBSD's security. But if security is your first priority, and you only want to run a few daemons ( rather than a multi-purpose server with 101 daemons going ) then OpenBSD is a great choice.
Of course it can -- it's OpenSource. Go audit the kernel and get back to us when you're done. There is more to OpenBSD's security than turning off inetd and turning on sshd.
Well speaking for myself, I am aware that Open BSDs better security is part of a trade off -- namely, they don't add features to their OS nearly as quickly as they could if they didn't spend so much time proof-reading their code. Their is a definite tradeoff -- features versus security. Linux supports much more hardware than OpenBSD, and is much more user-friendly. But OpenBSD is much more solid from a security standpoint.
Sure, the "next exploit is waiting to be discovered", and nothing is 100% secure, but it just so happens that it's going to get discovered much faster on Linux or NT than it is on OpenBSD. And the less often exploits are discovered, the less chance that someone will break in.
Yet another smug little Debian weenie with the "if they only had used Debian GNU-Linux, they wouldn't have been cracked". Yeah, but OpenBSDs superior security has more to it than just disabling daemons. Sure, Debian doesn't run every daemon under the sun by default, but it's still Linux, and does not have the same quality control process as BSD. There is a definite tradeoff here -- in Linux, you get more features, and less well-checked code, because the developers are adding more code all the time as opposed to fixing the code they've already got.
Sure, there are exceptions, which is why I said "usually" instead of "always". If I say "usually, birds don't fly", you don't prove me wrong by saying "emu". I put it to you that these anecdotes are the exception rather than the rule.
Cassettes cost the same amount to distribute, and a little more to produce. Yet, they are sold for a fraction of the price of a CD
The record companies don't break even on the cassette sales alone. They obviously recover manufacturing costs, but they rely on CD sales as their main revenue source. In isolation, cassetes are a losing proposition, but a lot of the costs are shared by the CD thing ( staffing, distribution, administration/accounting, marketing ).
Like I said, if you have a business plan that gives more back to the artists and gives the consumer better prices, by all means, go for it. However, all I've been seeing here is a lot of hot air and no business plans.
You're quoting the retail price which is irrelevant to this debate. What you have not quoted is the (wholesale) price that record companies offer to retailers. The record companies don't set retail prices -- those are determined by the distribution network as well as the record companies.
I'm not clear that prices really have increased. I can still get most of my CDs for $11-14 or so. It's only if the retail outlet overprice that I need to pay much more. When I was in the US 10 years ago, I paid $8-11 for a cassete. Allowing for compounded price increases over 10 years, I don't think the increase is enormous.
Moreover, you offer no evidence that the record companies are charging double, and I'd argue that it's the middlemen who are screwing you as much as anything else.
That's an interesting anecdote, but this is rare. Usually, the small labels don't do much better in terms of prices, because they can't come up with a substantially better business plan. Also keep in mind that import duties often drive prices up outside of the US, adding yet another percentage markup to compound everything. Also, importing adds another layer ( at least ) to the middleman chain.
I should mention that I don't believe all of my arguments (-; However, I just get annoyed when some stupid American comes along and claims that America's success is due to the fact that Americans ( supposedly, "like him" ) are somehow superior intellectually or otherwise. My experience has been that this isn't really the case.
IMO, the main reason America is as succesful as it is has a lot to do with the fact that it has a very solid political foundation, and there are enough smart Americans to make sure that the foundation (usually) doesn't rot. There are other countries which are also good politically and economically, but because they are smaller, they are also less visible/influential.
My comments about the education system here still stand -- I'm not saying that there aren't any smart American kids -- but a lot of the bright kids don't know anything because they don't teach them anything. My experience in grad school has been that though some American guys are very bright, they have much less background knowledge than their European or Australian counterparts.
Immigrants have children in school too, does this make them stupid as well?
Check the statistics. American kids are dumb ( ie they score poorly on international tests ).
They are being taught basically to survive in today's and tomorrow's economy which was built by American business and economical principles.
What ? The Americans also invented capitalism ? Yeah, whatever.
Foreigners will do the same work for less money. An average American computer science or engineering grad expects 40k a year and up right out of college. An engineer from India will work for half that salary.
Bzzzt -- you can't legally pay a H1B that low. There are minimums that you have to pay H1B workers, and I know a lot of those workers -- the minimums in question aren't that bad. So no, it's not about cheap labor. BTW, you don't even address my point about academic research, which also takes in a lot of foreigners.
You kind of make my point here -- the record companies do provide a useful service, and it's not that easy to provide the same service cheaper. Each layer of middlemen costs something. You haven't offered any figures on how much the record companies sell each CD for ( in volume to resellers I mean ). You just whine about prices without providing any evidence besides your "opinion" that $15 is "too expensive".
Why should I pay a $15 buck markup for some plastic disk?
Because that's how much it costs to distribute it ultimately ?
A "vast distributed system" used to "challenge the record companies" is all well and good as long as you don't put nonfree material on it. Stealing from the record companies is hardly a legitimate way of "challenging" them.
what the hell do they do, just ship the cd's and sell them at a ridiculously inflated price.
The problem is that when you go through a few chain of middlemen, you get exponential price increases. It's not that each middleman is inefficient, it's that routing through a few layers of middlemen is. That's why businesses that sell things online (like Amazon) can always get better prices to the buyer -- they cut out middlemen.
In any cases, if the artists learn to either promote for free or sell online ( I know that slashdotters hate the idea of paying for something though ), it would be a good thing.
The CD costs $2- or so to make, but how much does it cost to distribute ? All the middlemen need to take their cut, and each cut is a percentage. The price grows exponentially with the no of middlemen. You may as well ask why you're paying $20 or more for a pair of pants that cost $2- for a Thai sweatshop worker to sew together.
In conclusion, this "CDs are too expensive" rhetoric is totally bogus. If someone was capable of giving the artist more money and getting the music to consumers for less, we'd see the record companies go out of business. But they're not. The problem is that the retail style distribution model is inefficient.
Electronic distribution might or might not prove cheaper. However, what the slashdot community seem to like most about the internet distribution model is that they can freeload and circumvent copyrights.
BTW, see further up and hear what he has to say about Microsoft. I bet if those comments were posted, we'd see all the anger of slashdot directed his way.
IIRC, the Sultan of Brunei is richer. BTW, this says very little except that your resources are distributed inequitably.
and has the most intelligent and inventive people in the world.
Yeah -- the immigrants ! Seriously, your kids are stupid. Read any stats on education, or try teaching in America then teach abroad and compare.
BTW, did you mention -- it has the highest per-capita prison population in the world ? Did you mention that your kids are among the dumbest among the industrialised nations ?
its language is also the primary language of the world. and most cultures mimic us.
Americans invented the English language ? ROFL ! The reason that English is dominant has as much to do with the size of the former British empire as anything else. This is also why almost all East Asian writing is Chinese ( essentially ). Most cultures mimic America ??? Yeah, whatever.
jealous of America. i want to live there but can't because they don't want any more stupid foreigners like me."
Last I heard, the high tech industry were begging for H1Bs because there aren't enough intelligent Americans around. PhD programs are also recruiting foreigners by the ton. It's kind of funny that the "stupid foreigners" are being recruited near the top of the intellectual ladder -- research and high tech.
Go to the printing HOWTO homepage ( the version on the LDP is often out of date ). This HOWTO maintainer ( Grant ) really rocks. The page refers to other projects like LPRNG and PDQ.
I didn't say "The artist doesn't have a right to my money", I said "The Music Companies dont have a right to my money". The music companies didn't create the music. They didn't improve it or make it any better.
By distributing the music they made it available in the first place. They performed a service, namely distribution, and have a legitimate claim to compensation.
If I download an mp3 from somewhere, the person I downloaded it from still has it so that was hardly stealing, was it?
You've just cheated the artist out of his paycheck.
Also I know that the cost of producing the thing is way less (and I mean *obscenely* less) than the cost they want to charge me for it.
THe same is true for clothing. It costs $2- or so to make a pair of jeans in a Thailand sweatshop. But that hardly justifies stealing jeans. The middlemen perform a useful service, namely getting the product from (a) to (b).
Is it immoral?
At best, it's rude and disrespectful to the artist.
It's fairly standard practice for bigger record companies to own at least part of any number of the distributors, retailers, shippers etc that all grab a piece of the cash action.
If they own all the "middlemen" , they still incur the costs of those middlemen. The point is that distribution is expensive because it involves several layers of middlemen, and each middleman biz needs to add a markup to stay alive.
If you really do have a business plan that can better compensate the artists, while providing better consumer prices, then you can laugh all the way to the bank at the expense of the record companies. Otherwise, you are just blowing smoke, and your claim of "high prices" is baseless. No one is forcing the artists to sign anything, they are free to build their own record labels, and in fact they often do, but this rarely results in substantially more money for the artists or better prices for consumers.
IMO, this "big evil record companies" argument is just a poor excuse pushed by the freeloaders who are after a means to circumvent compensating the artists.
I ran into a lot of issues porting from G++ to MSVC++, but upon closer inspection, I think many of them actually seem to be the result of G++ being too permisive, rather than MSVC++ being non-standard.
You're partly right. G++ is permissive, but you can force it to be strict. I just tried this example:
int foo ( int j = 0 ); int main ( int argc, char** argv ) { exit (0); } int foo ( int j = 0 ){ return 0; } Now try compiling this with g++ test.C OK, that went through without a hitch. Now try this: g++ -Wall -pedantic-errors test.C -- it catches this one. So no, g++ most probably isn't "outvoted" -- it agrees with the other guys on what the ansi standard is, but you need to tell it to enforce the standard.
Given the GUI nature of Windows I'd assume that C++ is out of the question - after all under Linux you've only got gcc - which works well enough for simple Linux apps but would fail miserably under the burden of a full-sized Windows app,
??? The entire KDE package compiles with g++. I'd hardly call it a "simple Linux app". What features is g++ missing ? It seems to include the basics, including things like STL. The main problem is probably going to be coding something that will compile on MS's brain damaged compilers, which don't always accept ansi-standard code. As for MFC, well yeah, you can't use it, you use some other API instead ( such as QT ). It's not like MFC is the world's only API for Windows.
I agree that Java is slow. I don't agree with your comments about python and perl though. Both can be quite useful, and it is possible to write comprehensible code in perl, even if you can't.
Why switch to Linux to develop a Windows app ? Maybe he wants it to run on more than one platform.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is not "if" but "when". All the info should be available in due course.
You admit that "outing" the accused has a punitive effect, but fail to observe that the accused is not always a "criminal". Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty" ? Out them for all I care -- but not until they are proven guilty. How would you like it if you were "outed" as a rapist without a trial ?
Your psots are a riot.
Cheers,
HAND,
I'm not clear what "communist China" ( rally more like "state capitalist" ) has to do with "spread the wealth", "everyone is the same" and "no one can be better than the rest". China has entrepreneurs, and inequitable distribution of wealth ( more so than the US ).
You've just demonstrated that you know jack-shit minus epsilon about "communist" China.
HAND
Of course it can -- it's OpenSource. Go audit the kernel and get back to us when you're done. There is more to OpenBSD's security than turning off inetd and turning on sshd.
Sure, the "next exploit is waiting to be discovered", and nothing is 100% secure, but it just so happens that it's going to get discovered much faster on Linux or NT than it is on OpenBSD. And the less often exploits are discovered, the less chance that someone will break in.
The record companies don't break even on the cassette sales alone. They obviously recover manufacturing costs, but they rely on CD sales as their main revenue source. In isolation, cassetes are a losing proposition, but a lot of the costs are shared by the CD thing ( staffing, distribution, administration/accounting, marketing ).
Like I said, if you have a business plan that gives more back to the artists and gives the consumer better prices, by all means, go for it. However, all I've been seeing here is a lot of hot air and no business plans.
I'm not clear that prices really have increased. I can still get most of my CDs for $11-14 or so. It's only if the retail outlet overprice that I need to pay much more. When I was in the US 10 years ago, I paid $8-11 for a cassete. Allowing for compounded price increases over 10 years, I don't think the increase is enormous.
Moreover, you offer no evidence that the record companies are charging double, and I'd argue that it's the middlemen who are screwing you as much as anything else.
IMO, the main reason America is as succesful as it is has a lot to do with the fact that it has a very solid political foundation, and there are enough smart Americans to make sure that the foundation (usually) doesn't rot. There are other countries which are also good politically and economically, but because they are smaller, they are also less visible/influential.
My comments about the education system here still stand -- I'm not saying that there aren't any smart American kids -- but a lot of the bright kids don't know anything because they don't teach them anything. My experience in grad school has been that though some American guys are very bright, they have much less background knowledge than their European or Australian counterparts.
Check the statistics. American kids are dumb ( ie they score poorly on international tests ).
They are being taught basically to survive in today's and tomorrow's economy which was built by American business and economical principles.
What ? The Americans also invented capitalism ? Yeah, whatever.
Foreigners will do the same work for less money. An average American computer science or engineering grad expects 40k a year and up right out of college. An engineer from India will work for half that salary.
Bzzzt -- you can't legally pay a H1B that low. There are minimums that you have to pay H1B workers, and I know a lot of those workers -- the minimums in question aren't that bad. So no, it's not about cheap labor. BTW, you don't even address my point about academic research, which also takes in a lot of foreigners.
You kind of make my point here -- the record companies do provide a useful service, and it's not that easy to provide the same service cheaper. Each layer of middlemen costs something. You haven't offered any figures on how much the record companies sell each CD for ( in volume to resellers I mean ). You just whine about prices without providing any evidence besides your "opinion" that $15 is "too expensive".
Why should I pay a $15 buck markup for some plastic disk?
Because that's how much it costs to distribute it ultimately ?
A "vast distributed system" used to "challenge the record companies" is all well and good as long as you don't put nonfree material on it. Stealing from the record companies is hardly a legitimate way of "challenging" them.
The problem is that when you go through a few chain of middlemen, you get exponential price increases. It's not that each middleman is inefficient, it's that routing through a few layers of middlemen is. That's why businesses that sell things online (like Amazon) can always get better prices to the buyer -- they cut out middlemen.
In any cases, if the artists learn to either promote for free or sell online ( I know that slashdotters hate the idea of paying for something though ), it would be a good thing.
In conclusion, this "CDs are too expensive" rhetoric is totally bogus. If someone was capable of giving the artist more money and getting the music to consumers for less, we'd see the record companies go out of business. But they're not. The problem is that the retail style distribution model is inefficient.
Electronic distribution might or might not prove cheaper. However, what the slashdot community seem to like most about the internet distribution model is that they can freeload and circumvent copyrights.
BTW, see further up and hear what he has to say about Microsoft. I bet if those comments were posted, we'd see all the anger of slashdot directed his way.
IIRC, the Sultan of Brunei is richer. BTW, this says very little except that your resources are distributed inequitably.
and has the most intelligent and inventive people in the world.
Yeah -- the immigrants ! Seriously, your kids are stupid. Read any stats on education, or try teaching in America then teach abroad and compare.
BTW, did you mention -- it has the highest per-capita prison population in the world ? Did you mention that your kids are among the dumbest among the industrialised nations ?
its language is also the primary language of the world. and most cultures mimic us.
Americans invented the English language ? ROFL ! The reason that English is dominant has as much to do with the size of the former British empire as anything else. This is also why almost all East Asian writing is Chinese ( essentially ). Most cultures mimic America ??? Yeah, whatever.
jealous of America. i want to live there but can't because they don't want any more stupid foreigners like me."
Last I heard, the high tech industry were begging for H1Bs because there aren't enough intelligent Americans around. PhD programs are also recruiting foreigners by the ton. It's kind of funny that the "stupid foreigners" are being recruited near the top of the intellectual ladder -- research and high tech.
By distributing the music they made it available in the first place. They performed a service, namely distribution, and have a legitimate claim to compensation.
If I download an mp3 from somewhere, the person I downloaded it from still has it so that was hardly stealing, was it?
You've just cheated the artist out of his paycheck.
Also I know that the cost of producing the thing is way less (and I mean *obscenely* less) than the cost they want to charge me for it.
THe same is true for clothing. It costs $2- or so to make a pair of jeans in a Thailand sweatshop. But that hardly justifies stealing jeans. The middlemen perform a useful service, namely getting the product from (a) to (b).
Is it immoral?
At best, it's rude and disrespectful to the artist.
If they own all the "middlemen" , they still incur the costs of those middlemen. The point is that distribution is expensive because it involves several layers of middlemen, and each middleman biz needs to add a markup to stay alive.
If you really do have a business plan that can better compensate the artists, while providing better consumer prices, then you can laugh all the way to the bank at the expense of the record companies. Otherwise, you are just blowing smoke, and your claim of "high prices" is baseless. No one is forcing the artists to sign anything, they are free to build their own record labels, and in fact they often do, but this rarely results in substantially more money for the artists or better prices for consumers.
IMO, this "big evil record companies" argument is just a poor excuse pushed by the freeloaders who are after a means to circumvent compensating the artists.
You're partly right. G++ is permissive, but you can force it to be strict. I just tried this example:
int foo ( int j = 0 );
int main ( int argc, char** argv ) { exit (0); }
int foo ( int j = 0 ){ return 0; }
Now try compiling this with
g++ test.C
OK, that went through without a hitch. Now try this:
g++ -Wall -pedantic-errors test.C
-- it catches this one. So no, g++ most probably isn't "outvoted" -- it agrees with the other guys on what the ansi standard is, but you need to tell it to enforce the standard.
??? The entire KDE package compiles with g++. I'd hardly call it a "simple Linux app". What features is g++ missing ? It seems to include the basics, including things like STL. The main problem is probably going to be coding something that will compile on MS's brain damaged compilers, which don't always accept ansi-standard code. As for MFC, well yeah, you can't use it, you use some other API instead ( such as QT ). It's not like MFC is the world's only API for Windows.
I agree that Java is slow. I don't agree with your comments about python and perl though. Both can be quite useful, and it is possible to write comprehensible code in perl, even if you can't.
Why switch to Linux to develop a Windows app ? Maybe he wants it to run on more than one platform.