... for war orphans with the orphans still inside, put up a building profaning all that is holy, build a 10,000 watt sound stage blasting abba 24/7 and show movies involving bert and earnie masticating big bird on a projector screen that can be seen from space, I still want my freaking 100Mbps symmetrical fiber connection to my home.
when its for cost reasons, there is nothing an employee can do. can I live on the same pay rate that east europe can live on? surely, I can't (I live in the US).
Life isn't fair, you can't have the moon on a stick, no you cannot have a pony and if you eat lots of chocolate cake every day you may get fat (unless you happen to have a great metabolism, which also isn't fair).
No one forces you to buy anything. Likewise a company shouldn't be forced to buy your labor if they don't think it's worth the money.
I really would like to see somebody make the leap and extend that argument to defend downloading movies.
People will download movies because it is cheaper than buying them and you usually get the same thing as the dvd minus the annoying trailers and fbi warnings (which can't be skipped on some dvd players).
This being said, I think that people should use whatever service or technology gives them the most value for their dollar. Netflix comes to mind, as does the pirate bay for different reasons. Trying to force people to violate their self interest is futile and is usually counterproductive.
If the only thing that can keep your business around is a government granted monopoly (in this case, the monopoly to distribute content you originally created) you don't deserve to be called a capitalist, nor do you deserve to be in business.
When *I* was a child, a real American would take that $20 bill and use it as a down payment on a 5000 sq ft house in the suburbs. Why? because this is America dammit, we need a big lawn to wash our H3's on.
Are you one of those sissy europhiles they tell us about on Fox News?
Imagine a world where anyone could make a copy of a building, with all of it's non-biological contents, for free, just by looking at it and imagining it somewhere else. This would greatly enrich everyone, and people that would normally be tasked with building said copied building could get onto doing other things (making new buildings that haven't been made before, for example).
Now imagine that that building is a software program.
Piracy forces people to a: build things that people want and are willing to pay for, and b: reduces the need for people to build (pay for) the same thing over and over again. This is why piracy is a good thing.
In the material world, matter can't be created or destroyed. So in order to sell a widget, you have to make a widget first, and when you DO sell a widget, you only get to keep a fraction of the money you make, since the majority of the price has to go into MAKING ANOTHER WIDGET.
Am I the only one who read this an instantly thought about the first law of equivalent exchange in FMA?
... because once you have created it, the supply of it is essentially unlimited.
In short, it makes no sense to pay someone for work they've already done when you can pay them for something you want them to do.
For example it would be silly to try to sell 2 + 2 = 4 because there is no real constraint in getting this from something else (your head, google, a calculator, etc.). It would not be silly to sell someone a device (such as a computer) that can compute this, as the supply of computers is not unlimited.
If the result of 2 + 2 were not known, it would sense to pay someone to find out what it equals as time (for humans) is a very limited resource. Once they've done that they can start to work on other mathematical topics and you (or anyone else) can profit from their gain.
Why would you do this instead of waiting for it to "Just Happen"? Well, say you're building something real, like a bridge, and you need to know what 2 + 2 equals in order to construct a part used to make it. Given that you've been contracted to build it, the customer has time constraints, and you have a deadline. In this case paying a mathematician (or a kid with a calculator) is required to sell your actual product (a bridge). People don't pay for the parts that make up a bridge, they pay for something you can walk (or drive) across. Just because you made it easier for future generations (or other bridge contractors) doesn't mean that you can't charge the first customer what it took to figure out how to do it.
Similarly, if you run a hospital and have lots of patients with lung cancer, it makes sense to work with other hospitals to contract researchers to find new medicines and techniques to treat it. You don't need IP to create supply (a limited amount of success in surviving cancer) and demand (people with cancer). People aren't buying pills in this case, they're buying survival. Once you've cured lung cancer you can move on and work towards curing things like bad breath or belief in invisible things like IP.
Last time I checked, professional truck drivers still had to drive stick shift (If I'm wrong I apologize). Sometimes you need a TV that just turns on, other times you need a machine that does exactly what you want it to (and be very specific when doing so). The latter will always have a bigger learning curve than the former, but it doesn't make it bad design.
Reading slashdot (firefox)
Talking with people on IM (pidgin)
chatting with folks online (irssi)
reading e-mail (gmail in firefox, or mutt when I'm feeling like being productive)
Some of what I've done this week:
made some wallpapers (gimp)
performed some maintenance on several servers (ssh, apt-get, vim)
setup some file servers and routers in a test environment (nfs, samba, iproute2, vmware workstation)
written some scripts (python, vim)
Ubuntu Linux (or your distro of choice) makes setting up, maintaining and performing all of the above tasks far easier (at least for me). I'm not certain how easier things can get than running apt-get install foo, or double clicking on a deb or rpm file a vendor gives you. Or, if you don't know what you want you can go into Applications | Add/Remove to browse for whatever apps your heart may desire.
...and Windows XP, and almost every version of Windows before that.
It will be buggy, counterintuitive, mac people will complain that it lacks design, linux nerds will complain that it isn't stable (or free), and people will slowly migrate to it to make sure that the 10 year old windows app they have running their entire company works about as well as it used it (which is to say not well at all, but management got really pretty pens from the vendor they get support from).
If Windows Vista didn't convince people to change OS vendors, what can Windows 7 do that will?
Why can't rich people just keep all the economic gains over the next couple decades, give out a little to the middle class (basically what they have today), and keep the poor as poor as they've been for quite some time (i.e. not poor on a world scale)?
There is no cycle, just the golden rule (those with gold make the rules).
Right now I can always get another more free piece of equipment, but what about in 10-15 years when you can't run the software on anything but authorized hardware, and trying to bypass that is a federal offense.
Don't hang up. We don't have to talk about the Matrix. We can talk about... stuff. Bands you like, girls we've dated, the Matrix...
This being said, they can take away my open source OS from my cold, dead fingers.
How is making a copy of something theft? You didn't lose anything material. This is like saying that you're stealing by reading a word such as "word" and using it in another sentence.
How about we call piracy what is really is: A survival trait common among young and nerdy people around the world.
Come now, a sense of right and wrong is so September 12. We can't have our corporations bound by such petty concerns when there is money^h^h^h^h^h freedom to protect.
Having the government impose a fine is not the answer. The *only* way companies will ever learn to properly secure consumer data is if consumers drive them out of business when they fuck it up.
Just like how consumers don't buy gas from Exxon-Mobile anymore after they spilled lots of oil in Alaska.
... read the headline and think: all you need to do to clean off those nasty viruses is to install Linux, then had a double take on someone getting a macbook pro dirty?
What is better than the Internet? It's like saying that you have better things to do than partake of the sum total of human culture distilled into a picture of a cat saying: "oh, hai guys! I can haz speelchek?"
Slashdot Mirror
... for war orphans with the orphans still inside, put up a building profaning all that is holy, build a 10,000 watt sound stage blasting abba 24/7 and show movies involving bert and earnie masticating big bird on a projector screen that can be seen from space, I still want my freaking 100Mbps symmetrical fiber connection to my home.
when its for cost reasons, there is nothing an employee can do. can I live on the same pay rate that east europe can live on? surely, I can't (I live in the US).
Life isn't fair, you can't have the moon on a stick, no you cannot have a pony and if you eat lots of chocolate cake every day you may get fat (unless you happen to have a great metabolism, which also isn't fair).
No one forces you to buy anything. Likewise a company shouldn't be forced to buy your labor if they don't think it's worth the money.
I really would like to see somebody make the leap and extend that argument to defend downloading movies.
People will download movies because it is cheaper than buying them and you usually get the same thing as the dvd minus the annoying trailers and fbi warnings (which can't be skipped on some dvd players).
This being said, I think that people should use whatever service or technology gives them the most value for their dollar. Netflix comes to mind, as does the pirate bay for different reasons. Trying to force people to violate their self interest is futile and is usually counterproductive.
If the only thing that can keep your business around is a government granted monopoly (in this case, the monopoly to distribute content you originally created) you don't deserve to be called a capitalist, nor do you deserve to be in business.
When *I* was a child, a real American would take that $20 bill and use it as a down payment on a 5000 sq ft house in the suburbs. Why? because this is America dammit, we need a big lawn to wash our H3's on.
Are you one of those sissy europhiles they tell us about on Fox News?
Was I the only one that read that and though: "Abortions for some, tiny American flags for others!"
Imagine a world where anyone could make a copy of a building, with all of it's non-biological contents, for free, just by looking at it and imagining it somewhere else. This would greatly enrich everyone, and people that would normally be tasked with building said copied building could get onto doing other things (making new buildings that haven't been made before, for example).
Now imagine that that building is a software program.
Piracy forces people to a: build things that people want and are willing to pay for, and b: reduces the need for people to build (pay for) the same thing over and over again. This is why piracy is a good thing.
In the material world, matter can't be created or destroyed. So in order to sell a widget, you have to make a widget first, and when you DO sell a widget, you only get to keep a fraction of the money you make, since the majority of the price has to go into MAKING ANOTHER WIDGET.
Am I the only one who read this an instantly thought about the first law of equivalent exchange in FMA?
... because once you have created it, the supply of it is essentially unlimited.
In short, it makes no sense to pay someone for work they've already done when you can pay them for something you want them to do.
For example it would be silly to try to sell 2 + 2 = 4 because there is no real constraint in getting this from something else (your head, google, a calculator, etc.). It would not be silly to sell someone a device (such as a computer) that can compute this, as the supply of computers is not unlimited.
If the result of 2 + 2 were not known, it would sense to pay someone to find out what it equals as time (for humans) is a very limited resource. Once they've done that they can start to work on other mathematical topics and you (or anyone else) can profit from their gain.
Why would you do this instead of waiting for it to "Just Happen"? Well, say you're building something real, like a bridge, and you need to know what 2 + 2 equals in order to construct a part used to make it. Given that you've been contracted to build it, the customer has time constraints, and you have a deadline. In this case paying a mathematician (or a kid with a calculator) is required to sell your actual product (a bridge). People don't pay for the parts that make up a bridge, they pay for something you can walk (or drive) across. Just because you made it easier for future generations (or other bridge contractors) doesn't mean that you can't charge the first customer what it took to figure out how to do it.
Similarly, if you run a hospital and have lots of patients with lung cancer, it makes sense to work with other hospitals to contract researchers to find new medicines and techniques to treat it. You don't need IP to create supply (a limited amount of success in surviving cancer) and demand (people with cancer). People aren't buying pills in this case, they're buying survival. Once you've cured lung cancer you can move on and work towards curing things like bad breath or belief in invisible things like IP.
Easy vs. hard isn't == good vs. bad design.
Last time I checked, professional truck drivers still had to drive stick shift (If I'm wrong I apologize). Sometimes you need a TV that just turns on, other times you need a machine that does exactly what you want it to (and be very specific when doing so). The latter will always have a bigger learning curve than the former, but it doesn't make it bad design.
In short, the more you tighten your grip the more star^h^h^h^hcomputer systems will slip through your grasp.
What I'm doing right now:
Reading slashdot (firefox)
Talking with people on IM (pidgin)
chatting with folks online (irssi)
reading e-mail (gmail in firefox, or mutt when I'm feeling like being productive)
Some of what I've done this week:
made some wallpapers (gimp)
performed some maintenance on several servers (ssh, apt-get, vim)
setup some file servers and routers in a test environment (nfs, samba, iproute2, vmware workstation)
written some scripts (python, vim)
Ubuntu Linux (or your distro of choice) makes setting up, maintaining and performing all of the above tasks far easier (at least for me). I'm not certain how easier things can get than running apt-get install foo, or double clicking on a deb or rpm file a vendor gives you. Or, if you don't know what you want you can go into Applications | Add/Remove to browse for whatever apps your heart may desire.
...and Windows XP, and almost every version of Windows before that.
It will be buggy, counterintuitive, mac people will complain that it lacks design, linux nerds will complain that it isn't stable (or free), and people will slowly migrate to it to make sure that the 10 year old windows app they have running their entire company works about as well as it used it (which is to say not well at all, but management got really pretty pens from the vendor they get support from).
If Windows Vista didn't convince people to change OS vendors, what can Windows 7 do that will?
Why can't rich people just keep all the economic gains over the next couple decades, give out a little to the middle class (basically what they have today), and keep the poor as poor as they've been for quite some time (i.e. not poor on a world scale)?
There is no cycle, just the golden rule (those with gold make the rules).
No LTE. Less space than a blue-ray disk. Lame.
Funny, but I think you mean "No SDHC slot. No hardware keyboard. Lame."
Right now I can always get another more free piece of equipment, but what about in 10-15 years when you can't run the software on anything but authorized hardware, and trying to bypass that is a federal offense.
Don't hang up. We don't have to talk about the Matrix. We can talk about... stuff. Bands you like, girls we've dated, the Matrix...
This being said, they can take away my open source OS from my cold, dead fingers.
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2007 - $8.3 billion +14%
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2008 - $9.6 billion +16% (forecast)
I think about 2 billion of that is WoW... ;)
How is making a copy of something theft? You didn't lose anything material. This is like saying that you're stealing by reading a word such as "word" and using it in another sentence.
How about we call piracy what is really is: A survival trait common among young and nerdy people around the world.
...would never use the Internet for pron.
This day will live in infamy.
They don't call it 'Americas love affair with the automobile' for nothing, you know.
I am an American, and I for one am disgusted that many of us are willing to trade the future for some nice gold bars.
Thanks! That's what I get for typing with one hand on the bus before coffee.
Come now, a sense of right and wrong is so September 12. We can't have our corporations bound by such petty concerns when there is money^h^h^h^h^h freedom to protect.
Having the government impose a fine is not the answer. The *only* way companies will ever learn to properly secure consumer data is if consumers drive them out of business when they fuck it up.
Just like how consumers don't buy gas from Exxon-Mobile anymore after they spilled lots of oil in Alaska.
... read the headline and think: all you need to do to clean off those nasty viruses is to install Linux, then had a double take on someone getting a macbook pro dirty?
What is better than the Internet? It's like saying that you have better things to do than partake of the sum total of human culture distilled into a picture of a cat saying: "oh, hai guys! I can haz speelchek?"