Yes, all the game shops back in the 80/90s only coded for XT/AT/x86 because that platform was the market leader. There was no market for Apple ][, C64/128, Amiga or Atari Games.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, the Apple II, C64/C128, Amiga, and Atari, at various points in that period, had a lot more of the market of personal computers used by prime gaming demographics than Linux has now.
Your Linux environment point is moot. Game distributors can include the libraries the software needs right on the CD (a GPL/LGPL license ability).
Assuming that the libraries the game needs are Free libraries, they can; of course, while DLL hell isn't a Linux problem, software conflicts can exist, and being able to supply needed libraries doesn't solve the problem of conflicts. Another reason to want a homogenous environment is to manage consumer expectations: a homogenous environment means that on a system on which the game runs at all, it will run with a predictable quality. That's an advantage that consoles have over Windows PCs, and one that Windows PCs have over Linux systems.
I'm guessing that ID did pretty well. They are still releasing Linux native games, I bought two so far. All the Loki games I've purchased (4) back in 2001 still work fine under my latest and greatest release from Ubuntu.
The first of those (that one company finds it profitable) doesn't say much (a niche that supports a small number of companies may not support more); the second isn't, from a game publishers perspective, much of a strength: what it means is that people have less incentive to buy the "latest and greatest" on Linux.
What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?
Well, first, they want a homogenous platform. They tolerate the world of Windows PCs, because its a huge market, but they aren't too happy with the unpredictable nature of that environment compared to consoles. Linux environments are less predictable in terms of hardware and software than Windows environments.
Second, they want a market that is large enough to justify the development expense.
I am not versed in acceptable survey sampling standards, but given the 100's of 1000's (if not millions) of gamer-kids all across the country, this seems small to me. Just an uneducated observation....
Correct, you are not versed in "acceptable survey sampling standards" or even the basic theory underlying sampling. The size of the population being sampled is not a factor in the size of the sample needed to draw conclusions to any degree of confidence. see Required sample sizes for hypothesis tests.
It's not false, but it's not precise either. However, it is as precise as could be written down at the time
Its not even internally consistent. The "accurate, but not precise" defense of Genesis as compatible with scientific evidence requires a little less intellectual gymnastics than the idea that young-earth creationism is scientifically viable, but its still isn't particularly compelling.
The only assumptions science is based upon are: 1) There exists a universe external to the individual observer, 2) That behavior of that universe is to some extent explainable by rules which are on some level constant.
(IME, most religious belief systems share these assumptions, but add a whole lot of additional assumptions on top of them.)
Everything else in science flows from those assumptions.
In that sense it is no better than religion.
Whether or not science is "better" than religion is hardly at issue. Certainly, it has fewer fundamental assumptions that are unchallengable within its framework than any religion I am aware of.
In order to assert that the universe is 13 some odd billion years old, the time needs to be measured.
Science does not assert that the universe is 13+ billion years old. And, no, the time does not need to be measured for science to conclude that. You don't seem to understand how scientific conclusions are drawn.
The law of the atom governs radioactivity
WTF is "the law of the atom"?
The big assumption is that the gravitational and atomic clocks always tick at the same rate throughout all time, especially in the past.
To the extent that anything like this is a factor, it is not an assumption, but a scientific conclusion based on its role in hypotheses that have testable results which have withstood systematic attempts at falsification. This does not mean (nor does science hold it to mean) that it may not turn out to be false, because science's conclusions are ultimately always tentative, and may be replaced by explanations which are more parsimonious, or which have superior explanatory and predictive power.
I read that too, but it hardly seems fair if it's his property and they're trespassing. I mean, if he had a sprinkler system (assuming the current GA drought wasn't going on) and it soaked them, that wouldn't be assault, would it? What if he triggered the sprinkler remotely? Would that be assault? If not, then what makes using this "auto-sprinkling robot" on his own property "assault?"
An "aluminum water cannon" sounds a lot more like a firehose than a "sprinkler". There are generally very specific legal conditions in which one may use force even against trespassers, how broad these are vary enormously (even with the US) by jurisdiction.
web 2.0 is fine and all but I suspect that in the long term you're still going to need an OS to do the work required to access web 2.0 in the first place.
De Icaza didn't say that the OS would become unnecessary, only irrelevant, by which he clearly meant that it would become a commodity without the power to lock people in. If the OS you are running makes no different to your apps (which is ideally the case with "Web 2.0" apps, but not really all that much the case given that many "Web 2.0" apps require not only a standards-compliant browser but also require support infrastructure whose availability, quality, and behavior is not consistent across different OS's.)
Then there's the fact that everything based on web 2.0 will not function without a connection and that is a critical flaw.
How critical that flaw is depends on how ubiquitous connectivity is; anyhow, "web 2.0" apps that can operate in an "offline" mode are a big focus and something de Icaza was no doubt considering in making the statement.
Is it reasonable to assume that every student will carry out their homework assignment in isolation?
It is certainly reasonable to expect that students will do so if the assignment (either specifically or through generalized instructions like the course syllabus) specifies that it is to be completed independently, and more importantly it is reasonably to impose consequences, in that case, if they do not.
Now, if nothing in the school policies, the syllabus, or the assignment specifies that, then, no, its not reasonable to expect that students won't collaborate on homework.
It's not really commendable that someone took it upon themselves to go for a more organised approach to 'cheating' but I'd say that if the university wants assignments to be carried out by individuals alone they have a duty to provide invigilated exam halls rather than setting a practically unenforceable condition and kicking anyone out who they happen to find breaking it.
And if the government wants people not to commit murder, it needs to put cameras everywhere (including in private residences) to make sure peopel can't, rather than just imprisoning and/or executing anyone they happen to find doing it, right?
Thousands of other students will have broken this rule in the past sitting around a library table or a kitchen counter - why did the university let them get away with it?
Assuming, arguendo, that this is true, it is probably because they had the common sense not to do it in a way in which it is easy to be caught. Thousands of people have gotten away with murder without being punished, too, but that doesn't mean that someone that commits murder on camera in front of a police station is going to be able to argue that they shouldn't be punished for it. Breaking rules can have consequences, and breaking rules stupidly is more likely to have consequences.
You get used to seeing them and maybe don't question it, but why do so many structures in 'outer space' -- low gravity, three-dimensional space -- take on essentially two-dimensional forms? Consider rings around planets, planetary systems around stars, and galaxies, at least. They are all flat discs.
property in the layman terms of "it has an owner" as in the "copyright owner" but not "property" in the correct technical sense of the word.
The technical sense of the word "property" is, roughly, "a collection of exclusive legal rights relating to some particular subject, or the subject to which some collection of those rights attach." And, IP is precisely property in that technical sense.
If you mean "not 'property' in some poorly thought-out, fuzzy sense in which only real property and tangible personal property can be 'property' which is utterly divorced from the historical use, understanding, and justifications of property rights", then, well, you might be correct, but that's not the "proper technical sense of the word".
As far as I know, nothing can be both copyrighted and patented at the same time.
Since copyrights and patents don't apply to the same kind of things this is probably true in a sense, though it is certainly the case that, e.g., the non-functional elements of the design of a product could be protected by copyright (and possibly trademark) and the functional ones by patent at the same time, and that the common-language description of that situation would be that the product was copyright, patented, and possibly trademarked; this would, perhaps, be imprecise, but not particularly inaccurate.
But, FTA, there's no way you can protect it without involving the law/other physical enforcement. It's not like physical property - you can't just hire a security team to make sure no-one trespasses, because once they have the idea they can't give it back.
Intellectual Property is not trespassed upon by someone having an idea, as that is not within the scope of the exclusive rights conveyed by any form of IP. The actual things that constitute violations are things that are, conceptually at least and often in practice, just as subject to vigilante enforcement as are the exclusive rights in real or personal property; indeed, we've seen plenty of articles on slashdots about IP owners and their agents attempting vigilante enforcement. And, anyhow, one of the main reasons for having legal rights in real and tangible personal property is to allow the creation of stores of wealth greater than could possibly be practically defended by vigilante enforcement (on the theory, at least in utilitarian justifications, that this doesn't just lead to the concentration of wealth and the deprivation of the losers, but that this results in creating greater net wealth, and that even those least well off are better off with this system than without it; whether this is true in any particular application is debatable though it at least seems plausible that combined with the right other policies it could be true.)
There no meaningful way I can see that IP differs from real and tangible personal property (or other intangible personal property) in this regard (including, of course, the fact that actual implementations often may not serve the net good even though the concept could do so.) I think we'd do a lot better to examine the actual problems with how our systems of property are implemented rather than making spurious and largely semantic arguments against certain classes of property really being "property".
Possibly because it's the Rails part of RoR that doesn't scale?
Not really. Its because Ruby is a really nice language for lots of people, and once those people are exposed to it, through Rails or otherwise, they tend to use it for things (whether they start with Rails or not) that aren't web applications, and thus for which Rails is pretty much irrelevant.
Rails OTOH, like a lot of web frameworks, falls into the framework trap.
I've yet to see any evidence that Rails "makes scaling more difficult". I've seen a few complaints that particular applications didn't scale well on Rails that even the source of the complaints later backed off from claiming was a problem with Rails rather than their own approach to scaling, and a lot of complaints that the way to scale a Rails app to handle larger loads isn't the way you scale up an application on some particular other framework. What I don't see a lot of is any indication that scaling Rails is actually generally more difficult.
Continuing my ongoing series of posts on "intellectual property," I wanted to discuss the phrase itself. It's become common language to call it intellectual property, but that leads to various problems -- most notably the idea that it's just like regular property.
Well, no, apparently Masnick doesn't understand the way language works. Modifiers (here, "intellectual") indicate that things are different from other things in the modified class (here, "property"), not that they are "just like" the other things in the modified class. This is true of "real property", "personal property" (and more specifically "tangible personal property" and "intangible personal property", where the additional modifier ["tangible" or "intangible"] indicates that not only is the item different from other types of "property" but also from other types of "personal property".)
As I've written before, the very purpose of "property" and "property rights" was to better manage allocation of scarce resources.
Masnick may have written before, but its not accurate as a matter of fact (the reason for "property" and "property rights" factually is that people who had stuff wanted to justify continuing to have it and excluding other people from taking it), nor is it the only retrospective justification offered for it (management of scarce resources is often argued as a justification of property, a more general argument for promoting the general welfare by increasing the incentive to create and preserve value -- which includes, but goes beyond, management of scarce resources -- is often offered, and a number of a priori reasons are often offered as well.) So there is no sense in which the claim that that there is a single purpose of property and property rights is true other than a as a subject statement of personally preferred justification.
If there's no scarce resource at all, then the whole concept of property no longer makes sense.
If you start from Masnick's premise that property is solely about managing scarce resources, this is true. If one takes the view that property rights exist to create incentives to create and/or preserve value, a framework within which management of scarce resources to prevent waste is subsumed, the absence of scarcity doesn't obviate the utility of property. It might recommend different treatment of property rights where scarcity isn't a major concern, but then rights in intellectual property are already very distinct from those in tangible personal property which are very distinct from those in real property.
As for the suggested alternative terms:
Intellectual Monopoly
This one is fairly accurate, in that all property rights are legally-enforced monopolies of one kind or another. Of course, its just as accurate to call real property "land monopoly" and tangible personal property "movable objects monopoly".
Intellectual Privilege
Also accurate, in that all monopolies are privileges granted by law and, as discussed previously, all property is monopoly. But, again, the "privilege" label would be no less accurate applied to any other existing form of property.
Imaginary Property
Not very good. It is property, of course, but the only way the imaginary works is if imaginary is taken as equivalent to "intangible". But IP is but one small subclass of intangible personal property, so this would be a particularly bad label.
Others
All the examples given under this heading are labels that could apply to all property as written, without modification. All legal property rights constitute "use monopolies", all legal property rights are "imposed monopoly privileges", and all legal property rights are "Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies".
Without knowing, we can't even speculate on whether you can't find someone because demand is so high that they've all been snapped up, or because the product is dead.
Does it really matter why its impossible to find someone to maintain what they have? The end result is the same.
As far as I know, the only physical objects with copyright hinderances on them are buildings (not sure about china patterns, and silverware).
The designs of many physical products are subject to copyright, and since copyright is automatic on creation, they are copyrighted whether or not the creators thought about it at the time; if home fabbing becomes practical and popular and starts threatening retail sales, a lot more industry associations are going to be joining the RIAA and MPAA going after filesharers (since P2P is the most likely method for sharing designs) as copyright infringers.
Right now, there are patents.
Well, yeah, those are issues too.
If I download a fabbing pattern from a foreign source, am I breaking patent law, or breaking import law?
Its not like those (and throw copyright in, too) are exclusive. For some products you could be breaking all three.
MS had a $3 XP license in the 3rd world for awhile. If they did that worldwide and cooperated with these low-end PC vendors it would short-circuit the Linux retail-price advantage.
Microsoft can only afford the $3 XP license in the third world because the entire cost of XP development is paid by the people paying the high price of licenses in the first world. If they start making similarly low-cost Windows license available in the first world, where not only will they compete with Linux (good for MS), they will also provide a low cost alternative to Microsoft's more expensive OS earnings (bad for MS), then they risk destroying the market that is paying the premium that covers their fixed costs so that they can have a low-cost third-world version that makes a slim profit only because the entire fixed cost of development has already been paid for by the market in the developed world.
The only way Microsoft can survive if it does that is if (1) it can transform its business model to rely more on making money on service and support for business rather than software licenses, or (2) it can manage to raise the cost early adopters of its top-line OS's pay even more, without somehow losing all its early adopters.
Ars Technica is exploring the relationship between property rights and copyright, arguing that copyright holders are making a mistake by stressing similarities between property rights and copyright.
Timothy Lee (the author of TFA) makes qutie a few errors. First, they claim "Critics of the practice [filesharing] analogize copyrights to property rights" -- this is flatly factually wrong. Critics of the filesharing note, correctly, that copyrights are a subset of property rights (not something merely analogous to property rights), and draw an analogy between violations of copyrights and violations of rights in tangible personal property. Mr. Lee has misidentified where the analogy is drawn.
Second, Lee counts the one argument for property rights as two different arguments, by falsely splitting it into the "scarcity argument" (which he claims doesn't apply to copyright) and the "reward" argument (which he claim does.) In fact, the scarcity argument (that property rights are beneficial because they promote a more efficient use of scarce resources) is simply an application of the reward argument (that people will be more motivated to create and preserve value when they are able to exclusively control all or some part of the value created and/or preserved by their action) to the case of management of existing resources. By falsely counting the general argument and its specific application as two independent arguments, Lee paints a picture of copyright being an area with a "weaker" argument for property rights, when in fact it has the exact same argument (at least, in terms of the basis of argument, which is what is at issue in this part of Lee's pience) for property rights.
Third, Lee miscategorizes the argument for property rights (and, therefore, for copyrights) as being about "necessity", when its not about "necessity" (which is conceptually binary -- something either is "needed" or not) but about utility (that, on balance, people are better off with property rights, even though some are denied access to that which they would otherwise have, than without property rights.) This mistake leads to him dismissing the need for copyright "for certain classes of creative work", because those forms would not completely disappear without copyright. This misses the point of the reward argument for property rights entirely, which isn't about necessity but net gain. (Note, I'm not arguing that, viewed through that lens, copyright, and particularly not especially the increasingly rigid system of copyright we have now, is justified, merely that you need to focus on the real basis of property rights argument to challenge it meaningfully.)
That being said, eventually Lee (after all the errors and unnecessary diversions) does get around to the rather simple observation that applies to all laws: that no law is effective (he narrowly applies this property rights, but it is far more generally applicable) unless the people subject to it generally accept it (either by accepting it as legitimate or at least by deciding its not worth the cost of violation), and attempting to more strictly enforce a rule that most people don't believe is right rarely produces that respect, even in the more minimal form. (It can, if the government is able to drive the combination of the cost and certainty of being caught out of compliance high enough, but that usually takes insane levels of enforcement that threaten the general perception of the legitimacy of the government, rather than just the particular law, if the prohibited act is widely accepted as something people should not be punished, or punished as harshly as is necessary to secure general compliance, for doing.)
The Rails variant Merb is designed for concurrency and scales much better.
Merb, AFAIK, isn't a "Rails variant", just one of the (many) other Ruby web frameworks, designed from pretty much the opposite philosophy of Rails: where Rails is opinionated software that bundles lots of components and is premised around the expectation that you'll use the bundled components, though you can beat on Rails to replace those with alternatives (some more easily than others), Merb advertises itself as "ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic".
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 80s and early 90s, the Apple II, C64/C128, Amiga, and Atari, at various points in that period, had a lot more of the market of personal computers used by prime gaming demographics than Linux has now.
Assuming that the libraries the game needs are Free libraries, they can; of course, while DLL hell isn't a Linux problem, software conflicts can exist, and being able to supply needed libraries doesn't solve the problem of conflicts. Another reason to want a homogenous environment is to manage consumer expectations: a homogenous environment means that on a system on which the game runs at all, it will run with a predictable quality. That's an advantage that consoles have over Windows PCs, and one that Windows PCs have over Linux systems.
The first of those (that one company finds it profitable) doesn't say much (a niche that supports a small number of companies may not support more); the second isn't, from a game publishers perspective, much of a strength: what it means is that people have less incentive to buy the "latest and greatest" on Linux.
Well, first, they want a homogenous platform. They tolerate the world of Windows PCs, because its a huge market, but they aren't too happy with the unpredictable nature of that environment compared to consoles. Linux environments are less predictable in terms of hardware and software than Windows environments.
Second, they want a market that is large enough to justify the development expense.
Neither of those work in Linux's favor.
I think this says more about the menu organization in vista than about the general utility of voice interfaces.
Fortunately, Berkeley is still its own world, so that one's still safe...
Correct, you are not versed in "acceptable survey sampling standards" or even the basic theory underlying sampling. The size of the population being sampled is not a factor in the size of the sample needed to draw conclusions to any degree of confidence. see Required sample sizes for hypothesis tests.
Its not even internally consistent. The "accurate, but not precise" defense of Genesis as compatible with scientific evidence requires a little less intellectual gymnastics than the idea that young-earth creationism is scientifically viable, but its still isn't particularly compelling.
The only assumptions science is based upon are:
1) There exists a universe external to the individual observer,
2) That behavior of that universe is to some extent explainable by rules which are on some level constant.
(IME, most religious belief systems share these assumptions, but add a whole lot of additional assumptions on top of them.)
Everything else in science flows from those assumptions.
Whether or not science is "better" than religion is hardly at issue. Certainly, it has fewer fundamental assumptions that are unchallengable within its framework than any religion I am aware of.
Science does not assert that the universe is 13+ billion years old. And, no, the time does not need to be measured for science to conclude that. You don't seem to understand how scientific conclusions are drawn.
WTF is "the law of the atom"?
To the extent that anything like this is a factor, it is not an assumption, but a scientific conclusion based on its role in hypotheses that have testable results which have withstood systematic attempts at falsification. This does not mean (nor does science hold it to mean) that it may not turn out to be false, because science's conclusions are ultimately always tentative, and may be replaced by explanations which are more parsimonious, or which have superior explanatory and predictive power.
An "aluminum water cannon" sounds a lot more like a firehose than a "sprinkler". There are generally very specific legal conditions in which one may use force even against trespassers, how broad these are vary enormously (even with the US) by jurisdiction.
De Icaza didn't say that the OS would become unnecessary, only irrelevant, by which he clearly meant that it would become a commodity without the power to lock people in. If the OS you are running makes no different to your apps (which is ideally the case with "Web 2.0" apps, but not really all that much the case given that many "Web 2.0" apps require not only a standards-compliant browser but also require support infrastructure whose availability, quality, and behavior is not consistent across different OS's.)
How critical that flaw is depends on how ubiquitous connectivity is; anyhow, "web 2.0" apps that can operate in an "offline" mode are a big focus and something de Icaza was no doubt considering in making the statement.
No, anti-aliasing is fairly commonly used with raytracing to remove artifacts that would otherwise crop up.
It is certainly reasonable to expect that students will do so if the assignment (either specifically or through generalized instructions like the course syllabus) specifies that it is to be completed independently, and more importantly it is reasonably to impose consequences, in that case, if they do not.
Now, if nothing in the school policies, the syllabus, or the assignment specifies that, then, no, its not reasonable to expect that students won't collaborate on homework.
And if the government wants people not to commit murder, it needs to put cameras everywhere (including in private residences) to make sure peopel can't, rather than just imprisoning and/or executing anyone they happen to find doing it, right?
Assuming, arguendo, that this is true, it is probably because they had the common sense not to do it in a way in which it is easy to be caught. Thousands of people have gotten away with murder without being punished, too, but that doesn't mean that someone that commits murder on camera in front of a police station is going to be able to argue that they shouldn't be punished for it. Breaking rules can have consequences, and breaking rules stupidly is more likely to have consequences.
I think it boils down to spin and gravity.
The technical sense of the word "property" is, roughly, "a collection of exclusive legal rights relating to some particular subject, or the subject to which some collection of those rights attach." And, IP is precisely property in that technical sense.
If you mean "not 'property' in some poorly thought-out, fuzzy sense in which only real property and tangible personal property can be 'property' which is utterly divorced from the historical use, understanding, and justifications of property rights", then, well, you might be correct, but that's not the "proper technical sense of the word".
Since copyrights and patents don't apply to the same kind of things this is probably true in a sense, though it is certainly the case that, e.g., the non-functional elements of the design of a product could be protected by copyright (and possibly trademark) and the functional ones by patent at the same time, and that the common-language description of that situation would be that the product was copyright, patented, and possibly trademarked; this would, perhaps, be imprecise, but not particularly inaccurate.
Intellectual Property is not trespassed upon by someone having an idea, as that is not within the scope of the exclusive rights conveyed by any form of IP. The actual things that constitute violations are things that are, conceptually at least and often in practice, just as subject to vigilante enforcement as are the exclusive rights in real or personal property; indeed, we've seen plenty of articles on slashdots about IP owners and their agents attempting vigilante enforcement. And, anyhow, one of the main reasons for having legal rights in real and tangible personal property is to allow the creation of stores of wealth greater than could possibly be practically defended by vigilante enforcement (on the theory, at least in utilitarian justifications, that this doesn't just lead to the concentration of wealth and the deprivation of the losers, but that this results in creating greater net wealth, and that even those least well off are better off with this system than without it; whether this is true in any particular application is debatable though it at least seems plausible that combined with the right other policies it could be true.)
There no meaningful way I can see that IP differs from real and tangible personal property (or other intangible personal property) in this regard (including, of course, the fact that actual implementations often may not serve the net good even though the concept could do so.) I think we'd do a lot better to examine the actual problems with how our systems of property are implemented rather than making spurious and largely semantic arguments against certain classes of property really being "property".
Not really. Its because Ruby is a really nice language for lots of people, and once those people are exposed to it, through Rails or otherwise, they tend to use it for things (whether they start with Rails or not) that aren't web applications, and thus for which Rails is pretty much irrelevant.
Well, no, apparently Masnick doesn't understand the way language works. Modifiers (here, "intellectual") indicate that things are different from other things in the modified class (here, "property"), not that they are "just like" the other things in the modified class. This is true of "real property", "personal property" (and more specifically "tangible personal property" and "intangible personal property", where the additional modifier ["tangible" or "intangible"] indicates that not only is the item different from other types of "property" but also from other types of "personal property".)
Masnick may have written before, but its not accurate as a matter of fact (the reason for "property" and "property rights" factually is that people who had stuff wanted to justify continuing to have it and excluding other people from taking it), nor is it the only retrospective justification offered for it (management of scarce resources is often argued as a justification of property, a more general argument for promoting the general welfare by increasing the incentive to create and preserve value -- which includes, but goes beyond, management of scarce resources -- is often offered, and a number of a priori reasons are often offered as well.) So there is no sense in which the claim that that there is a single purpose of property and property rights is true other than a as a subject statement of personally preferred justification.
If you start from Masnick's premise that property is solely about managing scarce resources, this is true. If one takes the view that property rights exist to create incentives to create and/or preserve value, a framework within which management of scarce resources to prevent waste is subsumed, the absence of scarcity doesn't obviate the utility of property. It might recommend different treatment of property rights where scarcity isn't a major concern, but then rights in intellectual property are already very distinct from those in tangible personal property which are very distinct from those in real property.
As for the suggested alternative terms:
This one is fairly accurate, in that all property rights are legally-enforced monopolies of one kind or another. Of course, its just as accurate to call real property "land monopoly" and tangible personal property "movable objects monopoly".
Also accurate, in that all monopolies are privileges granted by law and, as discussed previously, all property is monopoly. But, again, the "privilege" label would be no less accurate applied to any other existing form of property.
Imaginary Property
Not very good. It is property, of course, but the only way the imaginary works is if imaginary is taken as equivalent to "intangible". But IP is but one small subclass of intangible personal property, so this would be a particularly bad label.
All the examples given under this heading are labels that could apply to all property as written, without modification. All legal property rights constitute "use monopolies", all legal property rights are "imposed monopoly privileges", and all legal property rights are "Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies".
The argument for this po
Does it really matter why its impossible to find someone to maintain what they have? The end result is the same.
The designs of many physical products are subject to copyright, and since copyright is automatic on creation, they are copyrighted whether or not the creators thought about it at the time; if home fabbing becomes practical and popular and starts threatening retail sales, a lot more industry associations are going to be joining the RIAA and MPAA going after filesharers (since P2P is the most likely method for sharing designs) as copyright infringers.
Well, yeah, those are issues too.
Its not like those (and throw copyright in, too) are exclusive. For some products you could be breaking all three.
Microsoft can only afford the $3 XP license in the third world because the entire cost of XP development is paid by the people paying the high price of licenses in the first world. If they start making similarly low-cost Windows license available in the first world, where not only will they compete with Linux (good for MS), they will also provide a low cost alternative to Microsoft's more expensive OS earnings (bad for MS), then they risk destroying the market that is paying the premium that covers their fixed costs so that they can have a low-cost third-world version that makes a slim profit only because the entire fixed cost of development has already been paid for by the market in the developed world.
The only way Microsoft can survive if it does that is if (1) it can transform its business model to rely more on making money on service and support for business rather than software licenses, or (2) it can manage to raise the cost early adopters of its top-line OS's pay even more, without somehow losing all its early adopters.
Yeah, because workers usually have more clout than businesses when it comes to shaping legislation.
If FreeBSD is the only FreeBSD distro, then what are (among others) PC-BSD and Desktop BSD?
Timothy Lee (the author of TFA) makes qutie a few errors. First, they claim "Critics of the practice [filesharing] analogize copyrights to property rights" -- this is flatly factually wrong. Critics of the filesharing note, correctly, that copyrights are a subset of property rights (not something merely analogous to property rights), and draw an analogy between violations of copyrights and violations of rights in tangible personal property. Mr. Lee has misidentified where the analogy is drawn.
Second, Lee counts the one argument for property rights as two different arguments, by falsely splitting it into the "scarcity argument" (which he claims doesn't apply to copyright) and the "reward" argument (which he claim does.) In fact, the scarcity argument (that property rights are beneficial because they promote a more efficient use of scarce resources) is simply an application of the reward argument (that people will be more motivated to create and preserve value when they are able to exclusively control all or some part of the value created and/or preserved by their action) to the case of management of existing resources. By falsely counting the general argument and its specific application as two independent arguments, Lee paints a picture of copyright being an area with a "weaker" argument for property rights, when in fact it has the exact same argument (at least, in terms of the basis of argument, which is what is at issue in this part of Lee's pience) for property rights.
Third, Lee miscategorizes the argument for property rights (and, therefore, for copyrights) as being about "necessity", when its not about "necessity" (which is conceptually binary -- something either is "needed" or not) but about utility (that, on balance, people are better off with property rights, even though some are denied access to that which they would otherwise have, than without property rights.) This mistake leads to him dismissing the need for copyright "for certain classes of creative work", because those forms would not completely disappear without copyright. This misses the point of the reward argument for property rights entirely, which isn't about necessity but net gain. (Note, I'm not arguing that, viewed through that lens, copyright, and particularly not especially the increasingly rigid system of copyright we have now, is justified, merely that you need to focus on the real basis of property rights argument to challenge it meaningfully.)
That being said, eventually Lee (after all the errors and unnecessary diversions) does get around to the rather simple observation that applies to all laws: that no law is effective (he narrowly applies this property rights, but it is far more generally applicable) unless the people subject to it generally accept it (either by accepting it as legitimate or at least by deciding its not worth the cost of violation), and attempting to more strictly enforce a rule that most people don't believe is right rarely produces that respect, even in the more minimal form. (It can, if the government is able to drive the combination of the cost and certainty of being caught out of compliance high enough, but that usually takes insane levels of enforcement that threaten the general perception of the legitimacy of the government, rather than just the particular law, if the prohibited act is widely accepted as something people should not be punished, or punished as harshly as is necessary to secure general compliance, for doing.)
# and the ruby equivalent
for i in 0..9 # or: for i in 0...10
puts i # or STDOUT.puts i
end
Merb, AFAIK, isn't a "Rails variant", just one of the (many) other Ruby web frameworks, designed from pretty much the opposite philosophy of Rails: where Rails is opinionated software that bundles lots of components and is premised around the expectation that you'll use the bundled components, though you can beat on Rails to replace those with alternatives (some more easily than others), Merb advertises itself as "ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic".