Java and avoiding software piracy?
ada...@gmail.com
Im *hoping* to release an application that I developed in Java, and I
want to release a free version as well as a pay version.
Clearly I want to be able to avoid people cracking it, or creating key
generators... Although i know that it is unlikely to actually stop
them entirely.. I want to do as much as I can to ensure that IF they
want to crack/keygen it, that it will be as difficult as possible.
Please let me know what your thoughts are as to how to achieve this.
Strategies? Resources?
Please send them my way!
Thanks!
Ashoka!
Depends on how may people are going to be using the paid version you
can make a small application that collects several system properties
like size of hard disk etc and use these as a seeds for a random
number generator. The random number will be sent to your server to get
a corresponding key. You will then mark that key as used and not allow
future registration on it. On the down side every time the users
change system configuration they will require a new key. You can
manage this by asking them to enter private info like credit card
number (you already have this because you charged them the first
time).
Its not foolproof and needs some work on the concept but you get the
picture.
regards
Usman Ismail
Andrew Thompson
..
>Im *hoping* to release an application that I developed in Java, and I
>want to release a free version as well as a pay version.
>Please let me know what your thoughts are as to how to achieve this.
Charge for support, and drop that other nonsense
of keys.
--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.athompson.info/andrew/
Message posted via JavaKB.com
http://www.javakb.com/Uwe/Forums.aspx/java-general/200707/1
~kurt
>
> Depends on how may people are going to be using the paid version you
> can make a small application that collects several system properties
> like size of hard disk etc and use these as a seeds for a random
> number generator. The random number will be sent to your server to get
> a corresponding key. You will then mark that key as used and not allow
> future registration on it. On the down side every time the users
Lots of computers are not connected to the Internet - just internal
networks. One needs to take this into consideration.
- Kurt
Roedy Green
indirectly quoted someone who said :
>
>Im *hoping* to release an application that I developed in Java, and I
>want to release a free version as well as a pay version.
see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/obfuscator.html
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com
Hunter Gratzner
> Clearly I want to be able to avoid people cracking it,
You can't. End of discussion.
> Please let me know what your thoughts are as to how to achieve this.
> Strategies?
You are wasting your time.
Roedy Green
<a24...@googlemail.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :
>> Clearly I want to be able to avoid people cracking it,
>
>You can't. End of discussion.
>
>> Please let me know what your thoughts are as to how to achieve this.
>> Strategies?
>
>You are wasting your time.
You don't have to make it impossible. You merely have to make it more
expensive and frustrating than writing the code from scratch. If you
can insist on an Internet connection, then new possibilities open up
to drive pirates insane. There is also the option of native
compilation of highly optimised (and hence naturally obfuscated) code.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/obfuscator.html
Bent C Dalager
<ada...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Im *hoping* to release an application that I developed in Java, and I
>want to release a free version as well as a pay version.
>
>Clearly I want to be able to avoid people cracking it, or creating key
>generators... Although i know that it is unlikely to actually stop
>them entirely.. I want to do as much as I can to ensure that IF they
>want to crack/keygen it, that it will be as difficult as possible.
Now, this depends a lot on the nature of your application and your
target market, but in the general case chances are that in doing this
you will be destroying whatever market you otherwise might have
had. If you're Microsoft, and therefore ubiqutous, or AutoCAD(*), and
therefore indispensable, you can get away with the unavoidable
inconvenience a copyright protection system causes your users.
In pretty much all other cases, however, your main problem is probably
in creating a user base that desires your product and the best way to
do this is to make it as easy as possible to use your software -
whether it's paid for or not. Adding registration keys, activation
schemes, etc., isn't doing this for you.
* - Or whatever it is they are using these days.
Cheers
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - b...@pvv.org - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
powered by emacs
Laie Techie
There are several free decompilers so it is next to impossible to do what
you're asking.
Jet Brains (the makers of IDEA) store a bunch of information:
* Client Name (hashed)
* Client Number
* Expiration Date
* Expiration Version
* Key
All that stuff is combined together in some undisclosed binary format.
None of their methods returns a simple boolean or Date object. The goal
is to use nondescript method names in nondescript classes. Use of
reflection also makes it harder to crack.
-- Laie Techie
Lew
> Use of reflection also makes it harder to crack.
and maintain.
Don't use such a thing heavily throughout your code because you think it will
protect you from hackers. Who would then protect you from yourself?
For a small authorization module reflection techniques can be useful. Just
don't go replacing viable algorithms with it wholesale in a vain attempt to
secure your app.
--
Lew
ada...@gmail.com
connection isnt bad, seeing how the user has to download the
application to their computer to begin wih. But still, easily
hackable with decompiled code. But the reality is that some people
will pay for it and others will find a way to hack it.
I think I just want to put a relatively thin layer of security behind
it, but I do admit that if it is too easy to hack that it will welcome
all types of hackers, and casual users... So I want to make it at
least somewhat challenging for them. In addition, my other concern is
that my server will go down (the one I pay some godaddy for), and then
the user will try to open their application and have it fail to reach
the server for license verification, making my paid users angry.
On the same thread, if I dont have them hit the server, or rather on
server verification I allow them entry to the application, then a
firewall that blocks the connection will simply give them access to
the full app.
As for a key only, perhaps it is a good way to go. But there are just
infinite key generators out there, so clearly anybody who wants to
will be able to find a hack, unless I release fake hacks.
Thanks for the feedback. While I think it is a bit of a lost cause, I
will do something based on the feedback here and post my final
decisions on the matter for any future reader of this thread.
Thanks
ada...@gmail.com
I think that charging for support will earn me very little $$$... as
it is a little application. But thanks for the interesting thought
~kurt
> Ive read all the posts, and have to admit requiring an internet
> connection isnt bad, seeing how the user has to download the
> application to their computer to begin wih. But still, easily
What typically happens is the application is downloaded, burnt to a
CD or DVD (maybe even copied to a floppy if it is small enough),
virus scanned according to the company policy, and then installed
on the internal network. If you go this route, then you must have
some way for the user to call in to get their authorization code.
We ran into this with JBuilder - they only had email support listed,
and it took them over a week to get back to us. I'll never buy one
of their products again.
- Kurt
RedGrittyBrick
>
> my ... concern is
> that my server will go down (the one I pay some godaddy for), and then
> the user will try to open their application and have it fail to reach
> the server for license verification, making my paid users angry.
I may be wrong but I thought that what was being suggested was accessing
an Internet server for initial *registration* after installation, not
for ongoing *verification* on each invocation of the program.
At registration you would retrieve and store a token that the
application would then check at startup - to see if the stored token
matches the gathered hardware fingerprint.
E.g. the token could be the fingerprint and expiry date signed using
your private RSA key. The app would hold your RSA public key and use it
to verify the signature of the fingerprint. Of course a miscreant could
probably hack the bytecode to skip the verification check.
An alternative is to make your application a web-hosted application like
"Google Docs & spreadsheets".
Twisted
will always be either easily copied or unusable, one or the other.
Instead, make money off your ancillary expertise in the software, its
internals, and the problem domain. Your talents in that area are
scarce and rivalrous, so they make sense as private or metered goods.
Charge for customization of someone's install of the software, or for
support beyond basic bug-fixes and how-tos. Open a consultancy, with
the software as testament to your competence in the field. Whatever.
Joshua Cranmer
> Hi,
>
> Im *hoping* to release an application that I developed in Java, and I
> want to release a free version as well as a pay version.
Put only what pertains to the free version in the free version. Don't
even try to have the free version be the pay version with the features
locked out. The pay-only features MUST NOT BE PRESENT IN THE BYTECODE /AT
ALL./ Then only distribute the pay version after people order it.
> Clearly I want to be able to avoid people cracking it, or creating key
> generators... Although i know that it is unlikely to actually stop them
> entirely.. I want to do as much as I can to ensure that IF they want to
> crack/keygen it, that it will be as difficult as possible.
You're trying to do what just about every major software company is
trying (and failing) to do. Simple online license key verification would
be sufficient; if you're really willing to go far, some code sanity tests
for verification (involving java bytecode assembly and knowledge of
obscure parts of the Java VM specification) would probably trip up 90% of
decompilers. Then again, nesting a few synchronized, finally, conditional
break/continue, and loop statements is practically guaranteed to trip up
a decompiler.
l...@mail.com
I'd suggest you take a two step approach:
1. Compile your application down to native code using GCJ or Excelsior
JET:
http://gcc.gnu.org/java/
http://www.excelsior-usa.com/jet.html
It will become about as hard to decompile as if you wrote it in C++.
You may also use a name obfuscator for extra protection:
http://www.excelsior-usa.com/kb/000023.html
2. Protect the resulting native application using a tool of your
choice. Note that Excelsior's tool requires you follow a special
procedure, discussed in their forum:
http://www.excelsior-usa.com/forum/index.php?topic=744.0
Hope this helps,
LDV
Philipp Leitner
> internals, and the problem domain. Your talents in that area are
> scarce and rivalrous, so they make sense as private or metered goods.
> Charge for customization of someone's install of the software, or for
> support beyond basic bug-fixes and how-tos. Open a consultancy, with
> the software as testament to your competence in the field. Whatever.
This is only a valid business model under certain circumstances:
- the tool under discussion has to be something "enterprisey", since
only at least medium-sized companies pay for customized software,
support or consultants. If you wrote e.g. a RSS reader or anything
else that definitely targets the single end user you're out of luck.
- the tool has to be obscure / complex / buggy / ... enough so that
consultancy is even necessary. Again: if you have a well-written
little RSS reader it is unlikely that enough questions arise that a
paid support is even necessary.
- you as the author have to be able and willing to dedicate a lot of
the time following into consulting and/or maintaining the software. If
you already have a day job you're unlikely to have enough spare time
that you can spend to follow this business model. Customization takes
time. So does maintaining and supporting an application.
Conclusion: I am definitely a friend of OSS, but the idea that seems
to go around that an OSS business model is the one and only way to
earn some money with software is just bogus.
And for the OP: I wouldn't care too much about crackers and key
generators. Unless your software /really/ catches on the problems
arising from these guys are marginal.
/philipp
Oliver Wong
<ada...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184113650....@m37g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
If you have no idea how to do start, forget about doing it on your
own. All the crackers out there have way more experience than you (because
you have zero experience!) and so you don't stand a chance.
If you really need copyprotection for your software, license a scheme
from a third party. Just be careful not to get a scheme that people
really, really hate (e.g. StarForce).
- Oliver
Twisted
> - the tool under discussion has to be something "enterprisey", since
> only at least medium-sized companies pay for customized software,
> support or consultants. If you wrote e.g. a RSS reader or anything
> else that definitely targets the single end user you're out of luck.
> - the tool has to be obscure / complex / buggy / ... enough so that
> consultancy is even necessary. Again: if you have a well-written
> little RSS reader it is unlikely that enough questions arise that a
> paid support is even necessary.
If it's something like a little RSS reader, there's no money to be
made off it anyway, certainly not in a competitive market if you play
fair. If there's no market for the ancillary expertise due to anyone
and his brother being able to do it, there's no market for the
software itself for the same reason. Someone will make something
compatible and sell it cheaper. Someone else will do it and make it
FOSS. You won't be able to compete on price OR quality in this case.
The reason to write such software is when it directly benefits your
own productivity through your own in-house use, and then there's no
reason to be stingy and not open-source it since you derive the
benefits of its direct use anyway, and releasing it encourages quid
pro quo (you may get nice free tools and not have to write them; you
might get bug fixes or suggestions from other users of such stuff
savvy enough to modify the code).
> - you as the author have to be able and willing to dedicate a lot of
> the time following into consulting and/or maintaining the software. If
> you already have a day job you're unlikely to have enough spare time
> that you can spend to follow this business model. Customization takes
> time. So does maintaining and supporting an application.
If you already have a day job you already have a steady paycheque and
no need to charge for the software.
> Conclusion: I am definitely a friend of OSS, but the idea that seems
> to go around that an OSS business model is the one and only way to
> earn some money with software is just bogus.
The only ways to earn money with software that depend on charging for
access to the software itself are by their nature coercive and
extortionate. They are also doomed in the long term because your
competitors can always undercut you on price without any loss in
quality. Microsoft is learning this lesson right now. They're reaching
for any legal bludgeon they can invent (software patents for example,
or a "trusted computing" mandate) to kill open source competitors by
criminalizing them, all because they cannot compete in a fair and open
market. Only aggressive marketing and questionable business practises
enabled them to become rich in the first place, that and a lack of
access to alternatives for most consumers for a long time before
widespread access to broadband developed in the industrialized parts
of the world.
> And for the OP: I wouldn't care too much about crackers and key
> generators. Unless your software /really/ catches on the problems
> arising from these guys are marginal.
Anybody using such wasn't ever going to pay for the software anyway.
Actually, scratch that -- some of those using such methods would never
pay no matter what. Making it harder might force them to use a
competitor's software but it won't get your hand into their pockets
successfully. On the other hand, some of those who crack it might
later pay, if they derive benefit from the software and decide it's
worth subsidizing its further development and maintenance. More than
those who just play with your crippled free version, who will just be
annoyed by random and arbitrary restrictions and have a generally
terrible user experience that will put them off ever sending you a
dime.
Why not make the full version free, but offer a registration
certificate or something for a certain amount of money? It may turn on
frivolous features of the software or just a personalized greeting or
something, or let you get early access to bugfix-test beta versions or
something. Plenty will just use the software and never send you a
dime, but they'd likely never have sent you a dime no matter what you
did. Others may gladly pay if they know it will finance further
development of the software, including some that never would have if
subjected to any sort of coercion or made to feel obligated to pay.
You could probably get away with giving the fully-functional version
for free and selling a snazzy "pro skin" even. This works for the
Limewire folks. (They also sell T-shirts. The "pro" version isn't
actually any faster than the free one, despite what they claim; it
just tends to make more redundant connections to hubs to make it
slightly more stable in connectivity perhaps.)
Oh there are lots of creative ways to make money without ticking off
your prospective customers, denying the use of your software to the
poor, or using threats, extortion, gratuitous cripplage, or any copy
protection crap that just adds bugs and subtracts features. Nobody
wants to pay for added bugs and fewer features! Outmoded "copyright"
business models just use the increasingly unenforceable copyright laws
as a crutch to lean on in a futile attempt to avoid the obligation to
innovate. It's red queen syndrome though -- you have to run faster
just to stay in the same place. If by some means (becoming a complete
fascist police state?) the US began to really successfully enforce
copyrights, it would just cause the US to rapidly fall behind other
countries, particularly China, which looks set to topple it and take
on the role of world superpower in the next few years *anyway*. If
they don't, copyright-reliant businesses within the US are quickly
outcompeted by innovative firms with other business models. It's the
whole protectionism-vs.-free-trade thing again, only with information
flow and services instead of physical trade goods. History repeating
itself in the usual manner when someone failed to learn from it. Free
trade won the last few rounds. Anyone want to bet against the proven
champ this game?
Twisted
> If you really need copyprotection for your software, license a scheme
> from a third party. Just be careful not to get a scheme that people
> really, really hate (e.g. StarForce).
Or XCP ... :P
Oliver Wong
"Twisted" <twist...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184290322.2...@q75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
> The reason to write such software is when it directly benefits your
> own productivity through your own in-house use, and then there's no
> reason to be stingy and not open-source it since you derive the
> benefits of its direct use anyway, and releasing it encourages quid
> pro quo (you may get nice free tools and not have to write them; you
> might get bug fixes or suggestions from other users of such stuff
> savvy enough to modify the code).
Feel free to accept them if they arrive, but don't *expect* bug fixes
or suggestions. Only the top 1% or so of open source project ever receive
outside help.
>
>> - you as the author have to be able and willing to dedicate a lot of
>> the time following into consulting and/or maintaining the software. If
>> you already have a day job you're unlikely to have enough spare time
>> that you can spend to follow this business model. Customization takes
>> time. So does maintaining and supporting an application.
>
> If you already have a day job you already have a steady paycheque and
> no need to charge for the software.
That's not necessarily true. Your day job might not be paying enough,
and yet it's the best you can get, and so you need to supplement it with a
second or third job. If programming software is a part of your skillset,
then there's no reason not to consider writing software for profit as one
of those second or third jobs.
>
>> Conclusion: I am definitely a friend of OSS, but the idea that seems
>> to go around that an OSS business model is the one and only way to
>> earn some money with software is just bogus.
>
> The only ways to earn money with software that depend on charging for
> access to the software itself are by their nature coercive and
> extortionate. They are also doomed in the long term because your
> competitors can always undercut you on price without any loss in
> quality.
Depends on your definition of "coercive and extortionate", I suppose. Take
the computer game industry, for example. Most games are one-shot deals.
You won't have enterprises buying support contracts. You won't have users
paying for support. You won't even have users expecting continuous updates
over the next few years of the product. There are some exceptions to this
(Blizzard, for example, semi-regularly releases updates to their game
Diablo), but most games are play-once-and-then-forget-about-forever.
Different games take different approaches to restricting access to the
software. Some uses virtual device drivers that take over your CD drive to
try to differentiate between original CDs and copied ones; others have you
enter a serial number which is then verified online; yet others just
release the game without any software copyprotection at all, relying on
the "honesty" of the Internet (or more cynically, on the guilt that might
be generated in pirates).
The latter of these, I would certainly not consider to be coercive nor
extortionate.
> Microsoft is learning this lesson right now. They're reaching
> for any legal bludgeon they can invent (software patents for example,
> or a "trusted computing" mandate) to kill open source competitors by
> criminalizing them, all because they cannot compete in a fair and open
> market.
It was recently fashionable to demonize Microsoft, such that a lot of
accusations thrown their way was unfair. I think that trend has died a
little bit, but I still see the occasional blogs with one entry saying
"Vista sucks" and followed by another entry saying "I've never tried Vista
and I never will".
First of all, anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
experiencing.
I think a much more accurate model is to think of corporations as a
perfectly rational utilitarian whose sole metric is profit. There's no
good vs evil, moral vs immoral issues to enter into the consideration of a
coporation's "mind". It's solely about what action can maximize profits.
Keeping that in mind makes it much easier to understand Microsoft's (or
any corporation's) actions. They break the law when the profit they gain
from doing so outweighs the penalties they'd pay. They embrace Open Source
when it's profitable to do so (Windows XP has some BSD licensed code in
it, for example), and they try to stiffle competitors of all form (open
source or otherwise) *when it is profitable to do so*. Honestly, I don't
think Microsoft is very concerned about losing the desktop market to
Linux, so they aren't spending much resource in fighting it there (the
reason being the expenses paid in "fighting" Linux will be greater than
profits from the marketshare regained). They might be more concerned with
Apache vs IIS, and so you do see a lot of marketing in that area (I see a
lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).
To address the patents issue in particular, because of the way patent law
is set up, if you're a big company, you are essentially forced to horde up
on so called "defensive patents". It's a like a cold war, where none of
the big corporations sue each other, for fear of getting sued in return.
That's the way the rules were set up, and Microsoft (and other
corporations, like IBM, Sun, etc.) are just playing the smart strategy
according to those rules. Again, it's fallacious to think in terms of
"evil corporations hate our freedom, that's why they patent everything"
versus "acquiring patents is the action with the highest utility at this
point".
> Only aggressive marketing and questionable business practises
> enabled them to become rich in the first place, that and a lack of
> access to alternatives for most consumers for a long time before
> widespread access to broadband developed in the industrialized parts
> of the world.
Drop the keyword "only" and I'll be in agreement with you.
>
>> And for the OP: I wouldn't care too much about crackers and key
>> generators. Unless your software /really/ catches on the problems
>> arising from these guys are marginal.
>
> Anybody using such wasn't ever going to pay for the software anyway.
> Actually, scratch that -- some of those using such methods would never
> pay no matter what. Making it harder might force them to use a
> competitor's software but it won't get your hand into their pockets
> successfully. On the other hand, some of those who crack it might
> later pay, if they derive benefit from the software and decide it's
> worth subsidizing its further development and maintenance. More than
> those who just play with your crippled free version, who will just be
> annoyed by random and arbitrary restrictions and have a generally
> terrible user experience that will put them off ever sending you a
> dime.
On the other hand, I know some people who had pirated Windows XP, but
are going to pay for Windows Vista simply because Vista is too much of a
pain to pirate. It's like Roedy said (and it echos a dogma in the security
industry as a whole): Perfect security is impossible. The goal isn't to
attain perfect security. The goal is to make it such that the least
painful solution is to just go ahead and pay for the software so that this
will be what all rational people (who always choose the least painful/most
pleasurable of all options) end up doing.
[snip some creative ideas for making money; I've no comments or arguments
against that]
- Oliver
Twisted
> That's not necessarily true. Your day job might not be paying enough,
> and yet it's the best you can get, and so you need to supplement it with a
> second or third job. If programming software is a part of your skillset,
> then there's no reason not to consider writing software for profit as one
> of those second or third jobs.
Hire out your programming expertise then. There is always work for
people with a talent for coding.
> Depends on your definition of "coercive and extortionate", I suppose.
My definition isn't unreasonable. It includes things like one party
interfering with a consensual transaction between a second party and a
third party, especially if there's a financial motive such as
preventing competition. (In this instance, the second party is letting
the third party examine an object the second party (legitimately)
possesses, and construct a duplicate of that object with their own raw
materials and time and on their own dime.)
> Take
> the computer game industry, for example. Most games are one-shot deals.
> You won't have enterprises buying support contracts. You won't have users
> paying for support. You won't even have users expecting continuous updates
> over the next few years of the product. There are some exceptions to this
> (Blizzard, for example, semi-regularly releases updates to their game
> Diablo), but most games are play-once-and-then-forget-about-forever.
Well I can see a few options here that don't involve coercive
activities and can still make you money.
* Make it a multiplayer game. Give the game away. Open a pay service
for online play; playing through your service requires access to your
servers and that in turn costs you bandwidth and electricity and the
like; you can certainly meter this access and make money this way. Of
course, if third parties can't create compatible servers then you are
doing something anticompetitive and sneaky!
* Make a game for your own enjoyment. Your own future enjoyment of the
game is the "payment".
* Say you have a great game idea but need financing to create the
game. If enough money is pledged you'll make the game and give it
away. If not enough is pledged by a certain date you'll return the
money already received and won't make the game. This amounts to being
paid up front to write the code, so you don't lose money if it's
easily copied once it's released.
* Make arcade machines that are coin-operated, and to which only you
have the key to the coin-box. If the game's not otherwise available
it's admittedly a bit morally dodgy, but even if it is you'll make
money from machines in places where people have to sit around and wait
for a particular time or a number to come up, like airports and movie
theatre lobbies and suchlike. People often forget to bring their
Nintendo DS or a book or something ... and then you've got some of
their pocket change.
* Demo it to rich people until you sell one copy for a bazillion
bucks. Retire. Don't care if the rich guy then spreads copies around.
Some people have piles of money and nothing better to do with it than
be the first ever to do/have something.
* Give the game away. If it's any good, and especially if the source
code is publicly visible, you might get job offers. Even if game
companies no longer made any money selling copies of games this
wouldn't change, since someone might want a game made with particular
features and not have the skills themselves but have the money to hire
someone to make it for them; and since your proven skills with Java or
whatever are likely of broader use than just game making.
* Use the game as a loss leader to sell something else. A special case
of this is to sell access to one online service for multiplayer gaming
with this game; the game creates the whole market for such online
services, and you start one of them. As the game's maker you may be
able to make a better one more cheaply than a competitor could without
a lot of study of your game's code. More generally, the game might
become popular and you could sell related T-shirts, stuffed game-
character animals or game-character action figures, and other such
physical goods. The game could also contain paid product placements --
e.g. you could make a GTA clone and get Coke and Pepsi to bid for
which one's logo gets on a big billboard and all the vending machines
in the game world or something.
* There's the outright adware/spyware route too, but that's evil, not
to mention stupid since people will just strip that crap out and
spread the "cleaned" version around, and it will outcompete your
original.
* Make copies and sell them! If you don't do anything coercive,
obviously sooner or later other people will make copies and sell them,
and more will give copies away. Some will still prefer to buy from the
trusted original source, or to subsidize the possibility of addons or
new games from a proven good game-maker. Red Hat sells copies of Linux
on CD for $60 a pop, and makes money at it, even though anyone else
can do the same, one company started selling copies of Red Hat's
distro for $30 a pop, and lots of places have free downloads of Fedora
Core. Admittedly not a game, but it still proves you can make money
without restricting others from making copies and giving them away or
selling them.
> Different games take different approaches to restricting access to the
> software.
I hate all gratuitous restrictions on access. If I can pay the
marginal cost of reproduction of something I see no reason I should
not be permitted to have one if I want it, and a grave moral wrong in
withholding access to something for someone who can pay its marginal
cost. Worse, this type of thing involves by its very nature intrusions
and breaches of privacy, because party 1 is trying to impede certain
consensial transactions between parties 2 and 3, not merely to set the
terms of transactions between party 1 (themselves) and other parties.
The only way to do this effectively is to spy on parties 2 and 3 and
then intrude on them when they try to conduct a transaction you don't
like. If done in person, that's called eavesdropping, break-and-enter,
and assault where I come from.
If you really want to control access, you should not furnish copies at
all. Put your game on a server and charge for access to it. Secure the
server against being hacked. Without hacking, all someone can do is
play the game through the interface. Give away a thin client (most
likely a browser applet) which isn't of any use without what's on the
server. Just don't expect many users unless the game is very, very
good or membership is cheap and one fixed-sized payment buys you a
lifetime of access.
> Some uses virtual device drivers that take over your CD drive to
> try to differentiate between original CDs and copied ones; others have you
> enter a serial number which is then verified online
Evil and rude. VXDs being installed without the system administrator's
explicit knowledge and consent ought to be downright illegal, because
they can easily corrupt and crash the OS. Sony recently got into a
world of legal hurt over exactly this sort of BS, namely the infamous
XCP rootkit CDs. Gratuitously requiring a net connection is nearly as
bad, and makes the software stink of spyware. More generally, all such
schemes add a bug-prone component whose very INTENT is to make the
software gratuitously fail sometimes, and any bug in which is sure to
do so. Worse everyone reporting such bugs gets treated with scorn and
suspicion. Treating your customers like criminals and their hardware
and OS configuration like your personal property is a sure way to lose
friends and influence people!
> It was recently fashionable to demonize Microsoft, such that a lot of
> accusations thrown their way was unfair. I think that trend has died a
> little bit, but I still see the occasional blogs with one entry saying
> "Vista sucks" and followed by another entry saying "I've never tried Vista
> and I never will".
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Vista sucks, and I've
never tried Vista and I never will.
Seriously. It does suck.
> First of all, anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
> then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
> jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
> their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
> experiencing.
No, it makes more sense to regard them as emotionless, cold-blooded
sociopaths, since that is what all large corporations are. With IQs in
the mid-to-upper forties, seeing as they're almost invariably less
than the sum of their parts.
Note that I didn't anthropomorphize Microsoft in the original post
anyway. I said they couldn't compete and decided to try to use their
money to buy laws to effectively outlaw competing with Microsoft. This
much is provable fact (they can't compete -> observe Linux server-side
market share eating Windows alive; ditto Apache vs. IIS and JSP vs.
ASP; law-buying, well, just look, the campaign donations are a matter
of public record. No I don't know the URL offhand.)
> I think a much more accurate model is to think of corporations as a
> perfectly rational utilitarian whose sole metric is profit.
This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things. Your
"perfectly rational utilitarian" has an IQ inversely proportional to
the CEO's annual salary. I doubt they actually are perfectly rational.
A rational RIAA would embrace music sharing and monetize music some
new way. In practise, companies often show some degree of dominance by
the will of one or a few people exhibiting all the usual human
foibles. Cartels more so than individual companies; they can be
downright schizophrenic and for obvious reasons. Ultimately however
they often lust for power and control, and obviously so, regardless of
whether this is rational.
They also lack a key element of sanity -- satiability. Corporations
are, by and large, insatiable. The more they have the more they want.
It's not enough to have 47% of the market, 400 full-time paid
employees with full benefits, and enough money coming in to pay the
salaries and expenses; they want 57% of the market and to expand to
500 employees and rake in money faster than they spend it, so they can
panel the CEO's office in oak and he can cut down from three days
working a week to two and spend another day a week playing golf at
expensive Augusta.
> There's no good vs evil, moral vs immoral issues to enter into the consideration of a
> coporation's "mind". It's solely about what action can maximize profits.
Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
droves? In fact, the guys that do this stuff are not doing it for the
benefit of the company's long term profits. They do it to get short
term profits or show decreased expenses in their own department, so
they get promoted and more stock options, so they can buy when the
next product is shipping and the stock jumps, sell right after, and
retire, leaving someone else holding the bag when the customer neglect
comes back to bite the company in the butt.
Companies show some tendency to maximize short-term revenues, about
three or four months out (roughly one fiscal quarter, which cannot be
coincidence), and damn the long term consequences of their behavior.
They act like spoiled children that have not learned empathy, more
than anything else -- little sociopaths with no more than a vague
sense of any time scale beyond a few months, and impulsively grasping
for shiny baubles and smacking at anything they don't like.
> (I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).
I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that plugin.
> To address the patents issue in particular, because of the way patent law
> is set up, if you're a big company, you are essentially forced to horde up
> on so called "defensive patents". It's a like a cold war, where none of
> the big corporations sue each other, for fear of getting sued in return.
And they like it just fine that way, since they can all nuke any small
upstart that threatens to horn in on their turf, especially one that
looks like it won't play by the unspoken rules of the existing cartel.
You know the sort of unspoken rules they have. Like that they will
spend no money fixing bugs except security holes. Or they will all
outsource their support simultaneously and anyone who reneges by
keeping support local to grow its market share by not pissing off its
customers as much as its rivals will get punished in some way. There's
all kinds of collusion like this, though nothing easy to prove.
> That's the way the rules were set up, and Microsoft (and other
> corporations, like IBM, Sun, etc.) are just playing the smart strategy
> according to those rules. Again, it's fallacious to think in terms of
> "evil corporations hate our freedom, that's why they patent everything"
> versus "acquiring patents is the action with the highest utility at this
> point".
Either way, such patents do more harm than good. I think all so-called
IP law does more harm than good, save perhaps trademark law.
> On the other hand, I know some people who had pirated Windows XP, but
> are going to pay for Windows Vista simply because Vista is too much of a
> pain to pirate.
Fools -- they already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay
for a downgrade?
> [snip some creative ideas for making money; I've no comments or arguments
> against that]
They prove copyright law unnecessary to "promoting the progress of
science and the useful arts", which in my opinion leaves it at the
mercy of the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech and of the
press.
Philipp Leitner
coded some app and want to see a few bucks in return for people using
it ... how can that be coercive? If I plant potatoes and want people
to pay for them before eating them, do I "restrict people's access to
my potatoes"?
> Well I can see a few options here that don't involve coercive
> activities and can still make you money.
> * Make it a multiplayer game. Give the game away. Open a pay service
> for online play; playing through your service requires access to your
> servers and that in turn costs you bandwidth and electricity and the
> like; you can certainly meter this access and make money this way. Of
> course, if third parties can't create compatible servers then you are
> doing something anticompetitive and sneaky!
[snipped a lot more ideas]
All of those ideas are possibilities, but all of them will only work
out only in certain circumstances (do you see a big company like IA
produce games 'for the benefit of their own pleasure'?). I cannot see
why you are so strictly against the simple business model of 'we
produce something, you pay to use it'. And no, I really do not think
that everybody has the legal conception that such a business model is
evil and coercive (as you seem to imply). I think this is just the
most natural business model that can come around.
/philipp
Twisted
> Honestly, you have some strange ideas of what is 'coercive'. If I
> coded some app and want to see a few bucks in return for people using
> it ... how can that be coercive? If I plant potatoes and want people
> to pay for them before eating them, do I "restrict people's access to
> my potatoes"?
I don't see anything coercive about those. Not giving people copies of
your app if they don't pay, or your potatoes if they don't pay. It's
your right not to give them to someone if you don't want to, or to
want something in return.
Where it gets coercive is if you insist that the guy with the potatoes
must eat them and cannot plant the "eyes" off one to grow his own,
simply because then he might not buy more from you, and you want to
force him to only ever do business with you. (An agribusiness called
Monsanto has raised a lot of farmers' hackles by doing almost exactly
this.) Likewise if you don't let the guy with a copy of your app
"grow" more copies.
Then you aren't just setting the terms of one transaction with you as
a participant; you now seek to govern the buyer's use of what they
purchased and limit in various ways after the fact. THAT is coercive.
In fact, it abrogates some of the buyer's property rights in what they
bought.
In the case of copy-protection schemes, they all tend to be
ineffective against a determined adversary, and they all tend to
compromise users' property rights in the computing hardware they own
as well as the copies of software they bought. They may not be able to
back up the software, for example, or effectively restricted from
upgrading their hardware (MS Vista refuses to work without buying a
new copy if you replace the mobo, from some reports I've read).
> All of those ideas are possibilities, but all of them will only work
> out only in certain circumstances (do you see a big company like IA
> produce games 'for the benefit of their own pleasure'?).
I'm not claiming they are universally applicable. In any given
situation a few of them will be options and most of them won't be, I
expect.
> I cannot see why you are so strictly against the simple business model of 'we
> produce something, you pay to use it'.
I'm not. Keep it on a server you have to pay to access and I won't
complain of coercion. I won't use it, but I don't see other peoples'
property rights being trampled on in this case, nor their freedom of
speech.
I also see no problem with selling disks with copies. It's trying to
control someone's use of what they purchased down the line that
bothers me. I wouldn't want to buy a hammer and get told by the
manufacturer that they would spy on me and confiscate the hammer if I
ever used it to hit nails of a brand they didn't like, or told I
couldn't lend it or sell it, or told I was required to check in with
them for permission every time I wanted to hit something with it.
Software with copy protection and especially with any kind of "product
activation" is exactly like this hypothetical hammer and its ham-
handed manufacturer. And if I bought a hammer and it came with a
shrink-wrapped notice claiming that by using the hammer I "agreed" to
never use it on nails bigger than 3" long, or whatever or whatever,
I'd ignore the notice as not any kind of binding agreement at all. I
don't recall entering into any kind of negotiations with the
manufacturer after all, only the retailer at point-of-sale, and I
certainly don't recall signing anything. If it also said the
manufacturer expressly disclaimed all warranties even fitness-for-
purpose I'd take it back to the store and insist on a refund.
Unfortunately there's not as much choice with software as with hammers
-- just about everybody disclaims fitness-for-purpose, amazingly.
> And no, I really do not think
> that everybody has the legal conception that such a business model is
> evil and coercive (as you seem to imply). I think this is just the
> most natural business model that can come around.
If you mean a business model of "hand me that twenty and I'll hand you
this valuable object" I agree. If you mean any business model that
depends on forcibly restricting the customer's use of their purchase
after the sale has been completed, then I disagree; that is about as
unnatural as things can get. In fact, it undermines the twin pillars
of free-market democracy, one being freedom of speech and transaction
and the other being strong guarantees of property rights. Undermining
these is damn dangerous. And treating information (other than
particular copies, separately) as if it were "property" and
considering any use you don't like (whether or not it takes a copy
away from you) as "theft" is a perversion of every natural law.
Oliver Wong
> On Jul 13, 12:16 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@castortech.com> wrote:
>> That's not necessarily true. Your day job might not be paying
>> enough,
>> and yet it's the best you can get, and so you need to supplement it
>> with a
>> second or third job. If programming software is a part of your
>> skillset,
>> then there's no reason not to consider writing software for profit as
>> one
>> of those second or third jobs.
>
> Hire out your programming expertise then. There is always work for
> people with a talent for coding.
Yes, that's exactly what I was suggesting, and seems to run counter to
your "let's give all software away for free" philosophy.
>> Depends on your definition of "coercive and extortionate", I suppose.
>
> My definition isn't unreasonable. It includes things like one party
> interfering with a consensual transaction between a second party and a
> third party, especially if there's a financial motive such as
> preventing competition. (In this instance, the second party is letting
> the third party examine an object the second party (legitimately)
> possesses, and construct a duplicate of that object with their own raw
> materials and time and on their own dime.)
It's the *other* stuff that your definition includes which worries me.
Stuff like charging money for the right to use a specific software
program, for example.
>
>> Take
>> the computer game industry, for example. Most games are one-shot deals.
>> You won't have enterprises buying support contracts. You won't have
>> users
>> paying for support. You won't even have users expecting continuous
>> updates
>> over the next few years of the product. There are some exceptions to
>> this
>> (Blizzard, for example, semi-regularly releases updates to their game
>> Diablo), but most games are play-once-and-then-forget-about-forever.
>
> Well I can see a few options here that don't involve coercive
> activities and can still make you money.
> * Make it a multiplayer game. Give the game away. Open a pay service
> for online play; playing through your service requires access to your
> servers and that in turn costs you bandwidth and electricity and the
> like; you can certainly meter this access and make money this way. Of
> course, if third parties can't create compatible servers then you are
> doing something anticompetitive and sneaky!
The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.
> * Make a game for your own enjoyment. Your own future enjoyment of the
> game is the "payment".
The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.
> * Say you have a great game idea but need financing to create the
> game. If enough money is pledged you'll make the game and give it
> away. If not enough is pledged by a certain date you'll return the
> money already received and won't make the game. This amounts to being
> paid up front to write the code, so you don't lose money if it's
> easily copied once it's released.
The success rate for this business models seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.
And so on... hopefully, you see the pattern here. Recall once again
that businesses are about making money, and given two business models, one
which is more successful than the other, it seems to make sense that most
businesses would pick the more successful one.
I mean, it's great that you're able to come up with alternative
business models. But the business people aren't really *looking* for
alternative business models. They're plenty happy with the model they
currently have (the one of selling games with copy protection). *You're*
the one who's unhappy with that model, and I'm not sure you have enough
clout to sway the entire game industry.
You could try voting with your wallet and boycotting games with
copyprotection. But for what it's worth, there exists games out there for
which I consider the copyprotection scheme sufficiently unobtrusive that
they have a minimal impact on my purchasing decision. Therefore, I am
likely in the foreseeable future to continue buying games that have copy
protection on them. And I suspect there is a significant market who will
continue to do so as well.
I wanted to highlight one particular business model you mentioned:
> * Demo it to rich people until you sell one copy for a bazillion
> bucks. Retire. Don't care if the rich guy then spreads copies around.
> Some people have piles of money and nothing better to do with it than
> be the first ever to do/have something.
This business model is laughably ridiculous. It's comparable to having
"Win the lottery" as your retirement plan. By including this within your
list, you've weakened the credibility of the rest of the list. IMHO,
anyway. Go for quality of ideas, not quantity.
>> Different games take different approaches to restricting access to the
>> software.
>
> I hate all gratuitous restrictions on access. If I can pay the
> marginal cost of reproduction of something I see no reason I should
> not be permitted to have one if I want it, and a grave moral wrong in
> withholding access to something for someone who can pay its marginal
> cost.
Everybody has a different code of ethics and moral compass. To me, if
someone tells me "I'll only let you have A if you promise not to do B",
and you say "Fine", and then take the A, and then later go ahead and do B,
you have committed a "grave moral wrong" in my eyes:
"I'll only tell you this secret piece of information (which happens to
take the form of a series of zeros and ones) if you promise not to tell
anyone else."
"Ok, I promise."
"Here it is (binaries for a video game)."
"(torrents it and shares it with the world)."
"Hey, what give? You promised you wouldn't tell anyone else my
secret."
"Information wants to be free! You're oppressing me!"
[...]
>
>> It was recently fashionable to demonize Microsoft, such that a lot of
>> accusations thrown their way was unfair. I think that trend has died a
>> little bit, but I still see the occasional blogs with one entry saying
>> "Vista sucks" and followed by another entry saying "I've never tried
>> Vista
>> and I never will".
>
> This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Vista sucks, and I've
> never tried Vista and I never will.
>
> Seriously. It does suck.
Maybe it was too subtle, but the implied question was "How could you
possibly make an informed decision about whether a piece of software sucks
or not without having actually ever tried it?"
>
>> First of all, anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
>> then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
>> jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
>> their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
>> experiencing.
>
> No, it makes more sense to regard them as emotionless, cold-blooded
> sociopaths, since that is what all large corporations are.
You use the keyword "No", but you seem to be agreeing with me. What do
you *really* mean?
[...]
> I said they couldn't compete and decided to try to use their
> money to buy laws to effectively outlaw competing with Microsoft. This
> much is provable fact (they can't compete -> observe Linux server-side
> market share eating Windows alive; ditto Apache vs. IIS and JSP vs.
> ASP;
Your evidence doesn't support your assertion: "Compete" doesn't mean
"Win". Maybe they are simply competing and losing.
>
>> I think a much more accurate model is to think of corporations as a
>> perfectly rational utilitarian whose sole metric is profit.
>
> This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
> brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things.
It wasn't intended to explain those things. But if you want an easy to
grasp explanation: the corporations don't have perfect information. You
can be perfectly rational, but make the in-hindsight-wrong-decision if you
don't have perfect information.
> Your
> "perfectly rational utilitarian" has an IQ inversely proportional to
> the CEO's annual salary. I doubt they actually are perfectly rational.
Note that I didn't say they were perfectly rational. I said that
thinking of corporations as "a perfectly rational utilitarian" is a "much
more accurate model" than an emotional anthromorphic entity who bases its
decision mostly on rage, envy, fear, etc.
> A rational RIAA would embrace music sharing and monetize music some
> new way.
I suspect it's actually vastly more complicated than that, but I'm too
lazy to explain all the details right now, so I won't be surprised if you
continue to believe this.
> In practise, companies often show some degree of dominance by
> the will of one or a few people exhibiting all the usual human
> foibles. Cartels more so than individual companies; they can be
> downright schizophrenic and for obvious reasons. Ultimately however
> they often lust for power and control, and obviously so, regardless of
> whether this is rational.
I think you have a different definition of rational than I do. If they
lust for power and control (or to phrase it more formally, if their metric
is power and control), then doing whatever you can to maximize power and
control is the most rational thing a utilitarian can do.
The problem, I think, is that you're applying your metrics to the
actions of another entity with a different set of metrics, and they aren't
maximize their score in your game, and so you suspect they must be
irrational, when actually they may be maximizing their score in their own
game.
[...]
>
>> There's no good vs evil, moral vs immoral issues to enter into the
>> consideration of a
>> coporation's "mind". It's solely about what action can maximize
>> profits.
>
> Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
> Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
> droves?
(1) Profits exceed costs.
(2) Imperfect information.
> In fact, the guys that do this stuff are not doing it for the
> benefit of the company's long term profits. They do it to get short
> term profits or show decreased expenses in their own department, so
> they get promoted and more stock options, so they can buy when the
> next product is shipping and the stock jumps, sell right after, and
> retire, leaving someone else holding the bag when the customer neglect
> comes back to bite the company in the butt.
Are you implying that this is irrational behaviour, given the metrics
that the companies are applying to themselves?
>
> Companies show some tendency to maximize short-term revenues, about
> three or four months out (roughly one fiscal quarter, which cannot be
> coincidence), and damn the long term consequences of their behavior.
Again, are you implying that this is irrational behaviour, given the
metrics that the companies are applying to themselves?
> They act like spoiled children that have not learned empathy, more
> than anything else -- little sociopaths with no more than a vague
> sense of any time scale beyond a few months, and impulsively grasping
> for shiny baubles and smacking at anything they don't like.
Recall my warning:
<quote>
anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
experiencing.
</quote>
>
>> (I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).
>
> I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that plugin.
You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see such
advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be more
informed about the real world than you. ;)
[...]
>> On the other hand, I know some people who had pirated Windows XP,
>> but
>> are going to pay for Windows Vista simply because Vista is too much of
>> a
>> pain to pirate.
>
> Fools -- they already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay
> for a downgrade?
Your question is based on false premise, and thus is nonsensical.
Here's the information I'm guessing you want:
My friends already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay to
replace it with Vista.
- Oliver
Roedy Green
<ow...@castortech.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :
> I mean, it's great that you're able to come up with alternative
>business models.
My thinking is that software should be rented. You don't give all
your money up front. The vendor then spends time doing things that
make existing users happy rather than silly flash to sell naive new
users. It evens the flow of revenue for both parties.
See http://mindprod.com/project/prebrandedsoftwarerental.html
Jeff Higgins
Roedy Green wrote
> My thinking is that software should be rented. You don't give all
> your money up front. The vendor then spends time doing things that
> make existing users happy rather than silly flash to sell naive new
> users. It evens the flow of revenue for both parties.
>
Yes[] No[X] Sounds like a good idea, but consider software subscriptions,
support contracts, service contracts, etc. Ends up the same old thing,
silly flash each period, bugs not fixed, and enough rent paid on my part
to lease a houseboat on the riviera for some sales exec.
Twisted
> > Hire out your programming expertise then. There is always work for
> > people with a talent for coding.
>
> Yes, that's exactly what I was suggesting, and seems to run counter to
> your "let's give all software away for free" philosophy.
Nope. I don't have a problem with saying "I'll code this for you if
you pay me thus-and-such". It's trying to control the downstream use
of the code once published that bothers me.
> It's the *other* stuff that your definition includes which worries me.
> Stuff like charging money for the right to use a specific software
> program, for example.
Let's see. If I use a specific software program where a copy is
installed on my machine, what are the actual burdens I place on others
in so doing?
* The copy must be furnished. Its marginal cost is close to zero
unless it's trillions of bytes in size, however.
* Running it consumes electricity, which must be provided. OK; let the
hydro company bill me for my usage.
* If it involves network activity, bandwidth is needed. OK; let my ISP
bill me too.
I don't see any way in which the software's author is incrementally
burdened by my usage, given that he isn't the direct source of my
copy.
If the software is on his server and I access this server to use it,
then I use his bandwidth and he has every right to charge me for the
privilege; I've never objected to that. In that case I'm burdening his
network connectivity with my usage.
So let's see. I don't object to him charging me for a copy if I want
to get one directly from him. I don't object to him charging me to use
servers or other hardware he owns or bandwidth he paid for. I do
object to being told what I can or cannot do with a copy once I've
gotten it.
It's true, if anyone can make more copies and spread them around, sell
them or give them away, the market will tend to force the price for
copies down to zero. This kind of thing happens all the time; it's
called "competition". Makers of all sorts of other products have to
put up with competitors producing identical or fully-substitutable
products and undercutting their price.
Red Hat sells software without restricting others from making and
selling or giving away copies, and it manages to prosper just fine.
And insisting on downstream control of use ultimately leads to Big
Brotherish evils. Dongles and similar coercive devices; spyware-like
behavior (MS WGA anyone?); and of course simple denial of access to
the poor, who may be able to furnish the marginal cost of a copy for
their own use but cannot pay the grossly inflated price the software
company asks, which is generally hundreds to thousands of times the
marginal cost.
In no other area besides software and entertainment, except maybe big
pharma and gene-engineered crops, do we see manufacturers collecting
margins of 99.9% on product sales. Even patent-infested areas like the
auto industry get by with thin margins of a percent or so at every
step of the supply chain, from retail/dealership up to manufacturer.
Computer hardware included.
All of those industries have to pay R&D costs somehow, and only those
few I've mentioned do it by creating monopoly lock-in somehow and then
charging thousands of times marginal cost for each physical item.
The worst effects are on the poor, of course. People in poor countries
have rampant HIV-infection rates and are unable to afford the hugely
inflated prices for medication that could save their lives and manage
infections chronically. So they die and die. Farmers get screwed by
big agribusinesses that use pricing and seed-propagating policies and
so-called "terminator genes" to force them into virtual indentureship
where they could buy one load of seed and then be largely self-
sufficient. This can't help but make food less available to the poor
worldwide, beyond harming the generally not-very-wealthy farmers
themselves. In the developed, urban parts of the world, the effects
are certainly still there -- students find software, textbooks, and
other things priced way above marginal cost. So do the instructors,
who pass the pinch on to the students in the form of hefty tuition
fees, and end up not making much money themselves. Student debt is
skyrocketing, and young-adult debt, and a lot of that debt is
basically the Microsofts and McGraw-Hills of the world demanding their
huge margins. They have a hell of a racket going. You can't possibly
not have noticed Microsoft and Bill Gates laughing all the way to the
bank for the past ten plus years.
Closed, paywall-blocked access to the outputs of academic research
have a giant, hidden cost we don't even see or notice. How much faster
would our progress be; how many more problems in e.g. the third world,
or climate management, would have been solved or better-mitigated by
now if the wheels of research in academia had been greased with wide-
open access to more general participation? How many would-be Einsteins
out there are shut out of contributing substantially to the system
because the barrier to entry is too high?
All of these show areas that have "cartelized", where the incumbents
(existing academics, publishers, software makers, etc.) inflate prices
well above costs and create barriers to entry (often not just price-
barriers, but regulatory ones where they can lobby such into
existence) to keep out upstarts and maintain an exclusive club of some
sort.
Actually, one of those groups doesn't seem to be laughing all the way
to the bank. Academics just seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle of
paying through the nose to reach a position of being able to
contribute, and then feeling the need to charge exorbitant amounts for
access to their own research just to cover those expenses once they
can. Which makes the next generation have the same problem, and the
next. It's a few large publishing companies that are raking it in in
this case, rather than the academics, who are stuck on a treadmill
jammed on "super-fast" in order that the publishing companies can
protect their massive profits.
All of this impoverishes the world, culturally, scientifically, and
financially, while enriching a few megacorporations and their
executives. Most of those who try to force exorbitant per-copy pricing
on fundamentally non-scarce goods are just trying to recoup the costs
to them that resulted from bigger fish doing the same thing; the money
they get goes up the chain and accumulates in the pockets of the Bill
Gateses of the world.
It's the next big robber-baron crisis after the big railroad baron
problems of a century or so ago. They're sucking the economy dry, and
forcing most smaller vendors and makers to be intermediaries in
funneling them money, all to line their own pockets. This obviously
isn't sustainable; soon nobody will be able to afford their overpriced
crap. We're already seeing it. Jobs offshoring; prices skyrocketing;
costs of living going up while real wages plummet and unemployment
soars domestically. Either they all go bankrupt when everyone else
does and can no longer pay them, or (more likely) there's some kind of
revolt. Aristocracies bleeding the peasants dry have a bad habit,
historically speaking, of getting beheaded one day. These will be no
exception, if it keeps on the way it has been.
Except for one thing: the Internet makes the machinery for funneling
the money, so-called "intellectual property" laws, largely
unenforceable, and one large emerging world power, China, is showing
little interest in strongly enforcing international "intellectual
property" treaties and laws. So instead, either the system just fails
without violent revolution, or China ascends to world superpower while
the US becomes a has-been like the British Empire did about a century
ago, eventually out-prospering everyone else -- the way the early-
twentieth-century US did, at least until the debut of Steamboat
Willie, and Disney's buying of perpetual copyright extensions from
Congress ever since.
> The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower than
> the traditional model.
Risk's a part of the game. There's always less of it if you cheat, or
use coercion to make your market position unassailable, but that
benefits nobody else. Lack of risk encourages lack of innovation, and
folding most of your money into aggressive marketing, aggressive legal
actions to shut down would-be competitors, and aggressive lobbying to
get more ways of competing outlawed, not to mention encouraging lazy
lack of bug-fixing or other improvements. Seen Microsoft Windoze
lately? How long has Explorer has the bug that scrolls all your open
windows to the top spontaneously from time to time? Or the one where
dropped files don't always go where you dropped them but sometimes to
the bottom of the folder instead? They've had 12 years now to fix
that, since Windows 95 debuted Explorer and these bugs, and they've
done nothing.
> And so on... hopefully, you see the pattern here. Recall once again
> that businesses are about making money, and given two business models, one
> which is more successful than the other, it seems to make sense that most
> businesses would pick the more successful one.
Recall once again that businesses are not ENTITLED to a profit; nor
even to recoup their R&D costs and break even. A "can't lose" business
model is a sure sign that someone is cheating, or the game itself is
rigged somehow. Even in a non-zero-sum game, the existence of a "can't
lose" strategy for one party means that everyone else, other
businesses and consumers alike, "must lose" as the "can't lose" guys
take over and grab an ever bigger share of the pie. Why else would
America's GDP be growing but America's poor actually getting poorer
(after quite a while of getting less poor, relative to cost of
living)? Because the system is increasingly being shaped by a few big
players that "can't lose" to funnel all wealth to them and make it
harder and harder for anyone else to accumulate any.
When I was a child, people saved and invested. When I was a young
adult, people lived paycheque to paycheque and "got by" until they
could retire, but sometimes lost their jobs, couldn't find new ones,
and wound up poor, or committed suicide, or killed everyone in their
family and THEN committed suicide. Now, people are deeply in debt by
the time they enter the workforce, if they can find a job at all of
course, and a lot more wind up poor, or commit suicide...
Who's robbing everyone? GDP is growing, but the wealth is not being
spread. The rising tide isn't floating all the boats. Someone's shaped
it into a monster tidal wave that raises theirs and smashes all the
others. A few rich white men, mostly CEOs and the odd shrub or two,
from the looks of it.
> I mean, it's great that you're able to come up with alternative
> business models. But the business people aren't really *looking* for
> alternative business models.
That's because they've been handed a nice government-granted and
enforced monopoly gravy train. Why would they look, when they can just
sit there doing little useful and rake in the cash anyway? This is not
however a system that is good for society!
You really need to check out http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
-- it can explain a lot of this stuff better than I probably can.
> They're plenty happy with the model they
> currently have (the one of selling games with copy protection). *You're*
> the one who's unhappy with that model, and I'm not sure you have enough
> clout to sway the entire game industry.
Everyone except the top executives in the game industry has reason to
be unhappy with that model. It benefits the few at the expense of
everyone else. As such it is doomed in the long term.
> Everybody has a different code of ethics and moral compass. To me, if
> someone tells me "I'll only let you have A if you promise not to do B",
> and you say "Fine", and then take the A, and then later go ahead and do B,
> you have committed a "grave moral wrong" in my eyes
It's called "breach of contract". There's no need for this "copyright"
BS, or any of the rest of it, since we have contract law anyway. Of
course, contract law is somewhat weaker. If I breach the contract and
give someone a copy, that someone is not bound by any contract and
whatever it is is now freed. And mass-market transactions can't
generally require every customer read and sign something; that's OK
for rare, big-ticket purchases like cars and houses but nobody's doing
that for every CD they buy at HMV. This is exactly as it should be;
businesses can not easily bludgeon their way to riches with a business
model based more on inflating their prices massively and suing
everyone in sight and have to actually innovate to succeed that way.
> Maybe it was too subtle, but the implied question was "How could you
> possibly make an informed decision about whether a piece of software sucks
> or not without having actually ever tried it?"
Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
steaming turd-pile. A huge multi-gigabyte steaming turd-pile that
reeks of Microsoft greed and corruption, and even of media company
greed and corruption. Why does the Vista feature list seem to be what
you'd expect if the RIAA and MPAA were the paying customers rather
than the Vista user-base? That is very interesting don't you think? It
smacks of the rich-old-white-men's club members protecting their own,
at everyone else's expense, from such annoying things as "competition"
and "we, the people, now also find it self-evident that information,
costing next to nothing, should be essentially free". The fact is, at
last count 100,000,000 Americans (more than 1/5 the population) have
decided to engage in mass civil disobedience. That isn't a few
scofflaws or "organized crime" or even terrorism. That is the biggest
revolt against government policy since the Vietnam peace protests and
civil rights riots. In this case (and probably the war), corporate-
bought policy.
I don't remember anything in the Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, or Bill of Rights about corporations getting votes and
legislative power. (Yet the DMCA combined with dongles or other
software lockouts effectively gives them the power to make law.) I do
remember at least one of those having something to say about the
peoples' need sometimes to revolt against aristocratically-imposed
serfdom in various forms. That time has come again, and this time
there might not even be any bloodshed, unless there's a serious
attempt by the government to clamp down with violent force. In that
case, obviously, there WILL be trouble.
> > I said they couldn't compete and decided to try to use their
> > money to buy laws to effectively outlaw competing with Microsoft. This
> > much is provable fact (they can't compete -> observe Linux server-side
> > market share eating Windows alive; ditto Apache vs. IIS and JSP vs.
> > ASP;
>
> Your evidence doesn't support your assertion: "Compete" doesn't mean
> "Win". Maybe they are simply competing and losing.
Given the shoddy quality of e.g. IIS, do you really think they are
trying to "compete" in any arena that doesn't involve either lawyers
or lobbyists?
> > This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
> > brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things.
>
> It wasn't intended to explain those things. But if you want an easy to
> grasp explanation: the corporations don't have perfect information. You
> can be perfectly rational, but make the in-hindsight-wrong-decision if you
> don't have perfect information.
These aren't "wrong" decisions, they are "brain-dead" decisions, which
anyone with a couple of neurons to rub together should have known
would backfire in some way. Pretexting scandals, private-info-leaks,
rootkits ... there seems to be another big scandal every fiscal
quarter and dozens of minor ones these days.
Companies used to have to compete in the market. Now they have gotten
a sense of "entitlement" to government largesse and access to
government muscle to forcibly get their way. Corporations pay* police
to gas protestors at peaceful anti-corporatism rallies. Corporations
pay* government for legislation that makes something the competition
is doing that they don't like illegal. Corporations pay* government
for a system of so-called "intellectual property rights" that are
based on the idea that by developing an idea they are somehow entitled
to profit from it. If they can't turn it into a marketable commodity,
they can at least wait until someone else does and then sue them to
extort billions from them (NTP v. RIM comes to mind here). In a
properly functioning system, corporations that can't turn "it" into a
marketable commodity go bankrupt, and another one that can succeeds,
and consumers and competent businesses all win, while businesses that
can't manage to quite do it quietly fold. You succeed by producing a
product that customers love and want and gain by using, and doing it
more efficiently than the competition.
In the system as it currently runs, you succeed by producing a product
that, while shoddy and actively hostile to customers, embodying in its
very essence your distrust of and contempt for your customers, is also
indispensible to these customers in some way, and of course is their
only realistic option because you bully would-be competitors into
failing, or simply have them all arrested or shot or something.
That isn't free-market capitalism. It's fascism of some kind, or maybe
even a weird quasi-communism, with fixed prices, theoretically
"private" providers of goods and services that are all state-supported
monopolies, and everyone has to buy from "the company store".
> Note that I didn't say they were perfectly rational. I said that
> thinking of corporations as "a perfectly rational utilitarian" is a "much
> more accurate model" than an emotional anthromorphic entity who bases its
> decision mostly on rage, envy, fear, etc.
What about insatiable greed, an arrogant (over)confidence that they
won't get caught, and utter contempt for the peons in the streets
crawling like ants at the base of their grotesquely expensive new
highrise headquarters offices?
Look at those towers and those huge penthouse corner offices for the
executives and tell me we're in a free-market capitalist democracy and
not some kind of crypto-plutocratic feudal society with an
identifiable aristocracy and identifiable peasants?
Somewhere along the line it all went pear-shaped, sometime after about
1960 or so. Maybe it was the Cold War. Maybe it was abandoning the
gold standard. I'm not a professional economist or historian; what do
I know? But I know enough to be able to see what goes on and smell the
stink when there is one.
> > A rational RIAA would embrace music sharing and monetize music some
> > new way.
>
> I suspect it's actually vastly more complicated than that, but I'm too
> lazy to explain all the details right now, so I won't be surprised if you
> continue to believe this.
My guess is they'd continue to sell plastic discs, and regard
filesharing analogously to radio airplay -- it has promotional value.
People would still buy the discs, either to subsidize the artists (not
that the artists usually see a thin dime from CD sales, though that
could obviously be changed) or simply to have a physical disc and
jewel case with cover art, or an "authentic" copy, or whatever.
> I think you have a different definition of rational than I do. If they
> lust for power and control (or to phrase it more formally, if their metric
> is power and control), then doing whatever you can to maximize power and
> control is the most rational thing a utilitarian can do.
It's at the meta-level that their rationality is lacking. A human has
only limited ability to change their core drives and motivations
(which tend to primarily involve self-fueling, reproductive
opportunities, and not getting dead). A corporation in theory can have
whatever motivations some board of directors decides it should have,
and the board could decide that it will be a good citizen and become
very rich that way, but by and large, none of them do.
> The problem, I think, is that you're applying your metrics to the
> actions of another entity with a different set of metrics, and they aren't
> maximize their score in your game, and so you suspect they must be
> irrational, when actually they may be maximizing their score in their own
> game.
If they consider all the top executives going to jail (Enron, etc.) to
be "maximizing their score" I rest my case regarding their rationality
at the meta-level.
Regardless, public policy should focus on the interests of society at
large, not narrow special interests. Of all the special interests out
there, compared to e.g. the disabled, or pregnant women, or the
elderly, or the poor, or the HIV-positive, or minorities, the super-
rich are pretty much the least deserving of special consideration by
the government; they provably can take care of themselves, and if you
crash their fortunes to 1/10 what they are now with some policy they
end up "merely" rich. If that happens, it's no skin off my nose. So
they have to settle for a 70' boat instead of an 80' boat, when most
people still have none and lots don't even have clean frigging
drinking water. :P
Of course, going too extreme that way leads to communism, a proven
dismal failure. Smoothly-functioning markets that are not easy to game
into an "I-can't-possibly-lose" position have historically done the
best job. Too bad they've been gutted and replaced with pale
imitations in recent decades.
> > Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
> > Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
> > droves?
>
> (1) Profits exceed costs.
Profits exceed costs means "it ain't broke" so "don't fix it".
> (2) Imperfect information.
Anyone who doesn't know that outsourcing is bad for the job economy,
bad for the customer base, and eventually bad for your own bottom line
isn't suffering from "imperfect information" but from "I've lived in
this cave in the woods for the last 17 years and then despite by
woeful lack of qualifications I somehow managed to bag this high-
responsibility job that happens to make me a seven-figure annual
salary and somehow avoid being quickly fired for incompetence; lucky
me!".
> > In fact, the guys that do this stuff are not doing it for the
> > benefit of the company's long term profits. They do it to get short
> > term profits or show decreased expenses in their own department, so
> > they get promoted and more stock options, so they can buy when the
> > next product is shipping and the stock jumps, sell right after, and
> > retire, leaving someone else holding the bag when the customer neglect
> > comes back to bite the company in the butt.
>
> Are you implying that this is irrational behaviour, given the metrics
> that the companies are applying to themselves?
It's rational behavior by the executive that does it (although it is
not rational for society to set the rules such that this behavior is
rewarded); it's not self-maximizing for the corporation itself, which
feels the pain shortly after. In effect, the executive is a parasite
on the corporation that the corporation inexplicably permits to bleed
it. The corporation is behaving analogously to a person who allows a
mosquito to settle, drink, and possibly infect them with West Nile or
malaria or something rather than slap it off them.
> Recall my warning:
>
> <quote>
> anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
> then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
> jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
> their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
> experiencing.
> </quote>
Why do my predictions about their behavior better fit observed reality
than yours, then?
> >> (I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).
>
> > I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that plugin.
>
> You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see such
> advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be more
> informed about the real world than you. ;)
Ads? Informed? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?! Ads do not
inform; they present biased or just outright-wrong "information" to
try to persuade you to buy something. If I want a web server some day
I will research what web server is better at that time, rather than
impulsively choose because of some slick piece of ad copy where the
company that makes one claims (of course) that the others all suck.
I expect in the foreseeable future that such research would reveal
Apache to be the superior choice, on price and reliability, though I
could be wrong.
Anyway, if I let an ad influence me, a glitzy, flickering, annoying,
obtrusive, noise-making, animated Flash ad (or worse, popup or other
browsing-obstructing BS) for IIS would instantly sell me on Apache!
> > Fools -- they already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay
> > for a downgrade?
>
> Your question is based on false premise, and thus is nonsensical.
What false premise? That Vista is a downgrade?
Let's see. Vista takes the XP experience and makes the following
changes:
* Replaces Explorer, whose bugs we're familiar with, with a 3D
something-or-other that looks slick on TV demos but is worse to use
and
has bugs we'll need a whole nother 12 years to get used to and learn
how to work around.
* Adds more DRM BS than you can shake a stick at, all apparently
bought and paid for by Hollywood.
* Costs a fortune, when it's easy to get XP for free; it won't be as
easy to get Vista for free for quite a while.
* System requirements and resource usage jump by roughly an order of
magnitude.
* Oh, and you can now play DirectX 10 games -- all one of them, so if
you're a Halo 3 fan it's a must-buy despite the above.
Given your existing hardware, "upgrading" to Vista will mean out-of-
pocket expenses of a few hundred dollars and result in being able to
do less, more slowly, with more bugs and crashes than you currently
can, except that you can now play the latest Halo game. And now it has
much more "Big Brother Inside" to boot.
Contrast with XP, which was a significant reliability, stability, and
performance improvement over Win9X and especially the execrable WinME,
despite including the WinME features such as thumbnail views in
Explorer and System Restore, and the only onerous DRM BS it added was
product activation -- and THAT was highly controversial at the time,
but proved to be largely a non-hassle (for normal users and for
pirates). XP of course was the best Windows ever from Microsoft's
perspective too -- it sold tremendously well, raking in record
profits, and was still buggy enough to keep their pay-support a profit
center into the bargain.
The only thing I can think when I read or see anything about Vista is:
"What was Microsoft *thinking*?!"
Please check out http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
before making any more lengthy followups to this thread. Other readers
of this thread are encouraged to read (or at least skim) the material
there also. It won't bite, despite the pdf format of much of the
material there.
Twisted
Seconded. Software "rental" or "as a service" is a euphemism for
software "serfdom": taking our functionality away from us and renting
it back to us. The existing gratuitous upgrade treadmills or (in
business settings) mandatory "maintenance" plans are bad enough. All
are clearly extortionate behavior by a company powerful enough to game
the system in whatever ways maximize its own revenues at everyone
else's expense. Robber barons.
Roedy Green
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>Seconded. Software "rental" or "as a service" is a euphemism for
>software "serfdom"
I think you have it backwards. Once a vendor has all your money he can
laugh at you. He can sell you crap that does not work at all. With
rental, after 2 months you can leave having given him only a fraction
of the dough he would get had he delivered.
The other advantage is the vendor keeps all his customers up to date.
He does not need to worry about supporting old code. he can update as
often as he pleases to fix bugs quickly.
Roedy Green
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>Nope. I don't have a problem with saying "I'll code this for you if
>you pay me thus-and-such". It's trying to control the downstream use
>of the code once published that bothers me.
I certainly try with my "non-military use only". I don't want blood
on my hands.
Twisted
> Corporations pay* police
> to gas protestors at peaceful anti-corporatism rallies. Corporations
> pay* government for legislation that makes something the competition
> is doing that they don't like illegal. Corporations pay* government
> for a system of so-called "intellectual property rights" that are
> based on the idea that by developing an idea they are somehow entitled
> to profit from it.
The footnote here being:
* Well, they actually pay campaign contributions to mayoral
candidates, congressional candidates, senatorial candidates, and
presidential candidates, supposedly not for consideration but as
gifts, but we all know how the game is really played here, don't we?
(What the HELL is going on with GG? The post I'm replying to appeared
at the text-only read-only NNTP host I use for reading and checking
propagation almost as soon as I'd posted it but did not appear on GG
itself for a full hour! How can it be injected at GG but make it to
some obscure server in Eastern Europe an hour sooner than to Google's
own server? It's not logically possible. They must have some bug that
is causing the GG post-viewing interface to show a heavily out-of-date
version of what's actually on their news spool. It's probably an HTTP
cache in their load-balancing infrastructure that's not managing
timestamps properly. Given the nearly exact 1 hour difference, I'm
guessing they had to reload a machine somewhere and its clock wound up
on standard instead of daylight time, perhaps because they restored a
config file from a backup made during the winter. Too bad there's no
obvious way to give them a heads-up about it. It's probably a five-
minute fix once they realize what's gone wrong.)
Twisted
wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 06:35:11 -0000, Twisted <twisted...@gmail.com>
> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>
> >Seconded. Software "rental" or "as a service" is a euphemism for
> >software "serfdom"
>
> I think you have it backwards. Once a vendor has all your money he can
> laugh at you. He can sell you crap that does not work at all. With
> rental, after 2 months you can leave having given him only a fraction
> of the dough he would get had he delivered.
Wrong. With the subscription, he can laugh all the way to the bank.
Maybe he's locked you into an N-year contract. Maybe he simply has a
monopoly on the software and nobody else's is remotely compatible.
Most likely your data is on his servers instead of your computer, and
he can dictate terms by holding this data hostage.
Not to mention, right now if you want to word process, you pay $X up
front and then can word process to your hearts' content for the rest
of your life for only the costs of electricity and keeping the
hardware maintained. With your vaunted subscription model, you have to
pay $X over and over and over again or the software stops working.
After some point in time you've paid far more money than in the non-
subscription scenario but you're no better off. Continuing to use the
software doesn't cost the software vendor anything, unlike continuing
to use electricity which costs the hydro company, yet you're being
billed as if it's a utility whose "consumption" somehow actually is
consuming something other than electricity. This simply doesn't make
any sense! It's extortion, pure and simple.
"Rent-to-own" where after you've paid the original full purchase price
you "own" it and don't need to pay any more except to get a whole new
version is better, and arguably better than the current system where
you pay up-front.
Better yet is just to disallow software merchants disclaiming "fitness
for purpose".
Best of all is to set information free and charge for things that are
genuinely scarce.
> The other advantage is the vendor keeps all his customers up to date.
Yes, a very big advantage for the vendor. Not for the customers, of
course. Customers of course get this experience:
* New bugs appear as if by magic and they can't just sit at a version
they can use and whose bugs they're used to working around.
* Features disappear or tell you one day you now have to pay extra to
use them.
* DRM components are updated, which invariably makes things worse
rather than better for consumers.
* And so forth.
Forced updates and "subscription models" have some prototypes we can
examine:
* Google Groups. The interface and bugs keep changing. Bugs and issues
don't get fixed often and it's not possible to get ahold of the
developers to report stuff or get help.
* Intuit's upgrade treadmill basically makes its tax-preparation and
accounting software into "subscription" software. There are numerous
reports of former functionality disappearing or becoming "premium"
stuff that they demand extra money for you to use.
* Subscription TV services such as satellite companies drop channels
you can only get back by paying more each month than you used to.
(While their costs are no doubt actually going *down* over time.) They
frequently rearrange channels or otherwise gratuitously scramble your
favorite lists into unusability every couple of months.
* Prices keep jacking up and up on both of the above items that aren't
free.
* Apple's iTunes DRM keeps changing. Upgrading is apparently mandatory
for some things to keep working, from all accounts, making it
essentially a subscription, so there's no escape from the random and
arbitrary limits on song-burning, playlist-building, and other things
gradually contracting, from 7 of something down to 5 and then 4, and
things of that nature.
* There are numerous well-documented examples of automatic updates to
anti-virus subscriptions generating new bugs, false positives, or
otherwise corrupting things, and often expiring something so that you
have to pay for a more expensive version, instead of just paying the
existing subscription.
* Microsoft has pushed a nefarious Windows update, "Windows Genuine
Advantage Notification", by deceptively putting it into the so-called
"critical" updates, which are supposed to only be security patches.
Windows Genuine Advantage was made outright mandatory but didn't do
much harm to most users of Windows XP. However, those who downloaded
the "Notification" update and installed it, which would supposedly
just tell them whether or not their XP was genuine (what the existing
WGA already was determining and reporting to Microsoft when you used
Windows Update), found that in fact it would classify a percentage of
installations as "pirated" basically at random, including known
legitimate ones. In fact, the "Notification" was nothing of the sort;
it was a booby-trap that would cause WGA to fail and XP to demand
reactivation on a random percentage of the infected machines. Of
course, reactivation of XP has suddenly become curiously difficult
right around the time of the big Vista roll-out ... it's notable that
Microsoft continues to push the WGAN "security patch" at those users
like myself that have refused to install it, and that if you "hide"
the update in the Windows Update Web site interface, this particular
one periodically unhides itself. If you're not wary, the automatic
update tray thingie will download it and try to install it soon after
that happens if you don't go and rehide it. (Needless to say, I've
long since turned off automatic installation of updates. I review the
list when it says there are new updates and it's bogus fairly often.
Besides the bogus WGAN "security patch" one update, cryptically named
"917953", repeatedly shows up as new after it's been installed. In
fact, I install it again every time there's other patches than just
that one showing up new, and after a couple of reboots it again shows
up as if it were brand new! It does so periodically every few days
until the next batch of updates. This has been the case for more than
a year now. So I manage the update process manually, or my computer
would be rebooting itself every day or two due to "917953" if it
worked at all after being infected with WGA "notification".)
Actually, I guess WGA "notification" *is* a security patch of a sort.
It just doesn't provide any security for the user's computer (rather
the opposite, as it's more vulnerable to requiring reactivation, which
is bad). Rather, it is a "critical security patch" for Microsoft's
cash flow, and particularly the less-than-stellar sales of Vista...
So, does any of the above sound like anything you'd want becoming more
widespread than it already is? Oh, I forgot, you're apparently
planning to be a vendor of such "services", which means you'd be
laughing all the way to the bank. So I guess your answer would be
"yes".
I know what mine is.
Lew
> * The copy must be furnished. Its marginal cost is close to zero
> unless it's trillions of bytes in size, however.
You keep harping on the "marginal cost" of reproduction, as if that were the
only cost. What about the amortized cost of invention, just to name one, the
overhead of keeping inventor staff working (utilities, health insurance, ...)
during development?
What about the added value one's invention brings to the customer? Cost is
not the only side of the price equation; there is also value to the customer.
If I provide a million dollars worth of value to you, and charge half a
million, you're ahead even if it only "cost" me fitty ce't to do it. (We are,
of course, in this case not ascribing a cost to the acquisition of knowledge
that made it possible for me to succeed at your task, but we should.) What
about the fact that my quality of work will be superior to that of a
competitor who would "spend" the same amount on the marginal cost side, but
didn't invest as much labor or cleverness in gaining skill as I?
Your economic argument is naive at best, disingenuous most likely, and
fraudulent at worst. Even the most rabid Marxist would include the labor of
developing a developer's skill set as part of the value, and the labor of
creation, and the labor of marketing, and the labor of creating and
maintaining a business structure to support the product, and a zillion other
factors beyond the putative "marginal cost" of the byte stream.
"Marginal cost" is not the only variable in the price equation, but it does
make a pretty, expert-sounding buzzword to make your argument less obviously
flawed.
Econ 101 is a good idea in order to get a grasp on some of these concepts.
--
Lew
Bent C Dalager
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>Twisted wrote:
>> * The copy must be furnished. Its marginal cost is close to zero
>> unless it's trillions of bytes in size, however.
>
>You keep harping on the "marginal cost" of reproduction, as if that were the
>only cost. What about the amortized cost of invention, just to name one, the
>overhead of keeping inventor staff working (utilities, health insurance, ...)
>during development?
The development cost certainly has to be covered somehow. It does seem
incredibly suboptimal, however, to charge per copy, or per seat, or
per minute, etc. In order to maximize benefit to society, a different
model should be found to cover the development cost of useful
software.
>What about the added value one's invention brings to the customer? Cost is
>not the only side of the price equation; there is also value to the customer.
>
>If I provide a million dollars worth of value to you, and charge half a
>million, you're ahead even if it only "cost" me fitty ce't to do it.
If you find 1,000 customers for which this is true, you will have
"created" a surplus value of 500 million dollars that society can
benefit from. If, on the other hand, you were to give it away
(i.e. anyone can copy it for free) and the average value of the
software seen across the entire population is only $1 per person, then
you will have "created" a benefit for society of 5 billion dollars.
This is at the basis of the argument for free copying: its benefit to
society will often be enormous.
>What
>about the fact that my quality of work will be superior to that of a
>competitor who would "spend" the same amount on the marginal cost side, but
>didn't invest as much labor or cleverness in gaining skill as I?
This is presumably calculated into the conjectured half million dollar
upside to purchasing your product.
>Your economic argument is naive at best, disingenuous most likely, and
>fraudulent at worst. Even the most rabid Marxist would include the labor of
>developing a developer's skill set as part of the value, and the labor of
>creation, and the labor of marketing, and the labor of creating and
>maintaining a business structure to support the product, and a zillion other
>factors beyond the putative "marginal cost" of the byte stream.
The point is rather that once the product exists, producing more
copies is practically free and each copy that goes into use is a
benefit to society. It is therefore foolish of us to perpetuate a
system that will outlaw such a benefit. Clearly, more copies will go
into use if the product is free of charge than if it has an
appreciable cost and so the copies should be free in order to maximize
benefit to society.
The problem remains as to how to ensure funding for the development of
the software. The answer will presumably vary from one field to the
next. As an example, in the professional graphics design field, a
great number of professional companies will presumably be prepared to
pay for running maintenance and support contracts in order to ensure
that they are constantly at peak performance (the cost/benefit
analysis of such a scenario is likely to trivially favour paying a
reasonable support fee). Amateurs and less serious professionals can
happily surf in the wake of this bleeding edge crowd.
>"Marginal cost" is not the only variable in the price equation, but it does
>make a pretty, expert-sounding buzzword to make your argument less obviously
>flawed.
The marginal cost argument presupposes that development is funded from
some other source than charging for copies. Its main use in the
current economic regime is to point out how silly we are being for
artifically assigning a cost to what is essentially a free benefit and
that we should be getting our asses in gear in order not to keep
shooting ourselves in the foot.
Cheers
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - b...@pvv.org - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
powered by emacs
Lew
> The development cost certainly has to be covered somehow. It does seem
> incredibly suboptimal, however, to charge per copy, or per seat, or
> per minute, etc. In order to maximize benefit to society, a different
> model should be found to cover the development cost of useful
> software.
If it's sub-optimal, the system will tend to balance it. You are free in an
open market to create alternate business models and try to make them sustainable.
Lew wrote:
>> What about the added value one's invention brings to the customer? Cost is
>> not the only side of the price equation; there is also value to the customer.
>>
>> If I provide a million dollars worth of value to you, and charge half a
>> million, you're ahead even if it only "cost" me fitty ce't to do it.
Bent C Dalager wrote:
> If you find 1,000 customers for which this is true, you will have
> "created" a surplus value of 500 million dollars that society can
> benefit from. If, on the other hand, you were to give it away
> (i.e. anyone can copy it for free) and the average value of the
> software seen across the entire population is only $1 per person, then
> you will have "created" a benefit for society of 5 billion dollars.
The Prisoner's Dilemma. What about the benefit to the seller?
If the seller goes out of business, who will support that "free" software? If
inventors can't make money off their inventions, who will invent? You have to
account for the long-term benefit of keeping inventors working at invention.
The beauty of capitalism is that its "Invisible Hand" balances all these forces.
--
Lew
Bent C Dalager
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>Bent C Dalager wrote:
>> The development cost certainly has to be covered somehow. It does seem
>> incredibly suboptimal, however, to charge per copy, or per seat, or
>> per minute, etc. In order to maximize benefit to society, a different
>> model should be found to cover the development cost of useful
>> software.
>
>If it's sub-optimal, the system will tend to balance it.
Ah, except the system is designed so as not to. If copyright were
eliminated, then your statement might be correct.
>You are free in an
>open market to create alternate business models and try to make them sustainable.
A business also tends to be sub-optimal: it only optimizes on its own
revenue. This is not what I am talking about. I am talking about
optimizing for benefit to society as a whole.
>
>The Prisoner's Dilemma. What about the benefit to the seller?
I addressed this in the text you did not quote.
>If the seller goes out of business, who will support that "free" software?
Anyone who cares to.
>If inventors can't make money off their inventions, who will invent?
If you cannot make money off your invention, it most likely was a
crappy one. Either invent something worthwhile or get a day job.
> You have to
>account for the long-term benefit of keeping inventors working at invention.
Indeed. The current system, however, does not. It encourages inventors
to invent one single thing and then spend the rest of their lives in
court trying to squeeze money out of various businesses that may or
may not be using their invention.
Inventors tend to be more useful out of court than in it and so that
is what we should be trying to achieve.
>The beauty of capitalism is that its "Invisible Hand" balances all these forces.
Unfortunately, "beautiful" capitalism has no room for state-sanctioned
monopolies like copyright or patents. So long as they are in effect,
"beautiful" capitalism is not.
Which isn't to say capitalism shouldn't be regulated, but it should be
regulated in a manner that actually benefits society rather than the
other way around.
Cheers,
Lew
> If you cannot make money off your invention, it most likely was a
> crappy one. Either invent something worthwhile or get a day job.
But I thought you said the inventor should give away their invention in order
to benefit society? How will they make money that way?
--
Lew
Bent C Dalager
Lew
> In article <d4OdnR7Gy9prIAHb...@comcast.com>,
> Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>> Bent C Dalager wrote:
>>> If you cannot make money off your invention, it most likely was a
>>> crappy one. Either invent something worthwhile or get a day job.
>> But I thought you said the inventor should give away their invention in order
>> to benefit society? How will they make money that way?
>
> I addressed this in the text you did not quote.
You addressed it, but did not resolve it.
The argument is flawed in that it deems reproduction cost as the only cost
worthy of consideration. Basic accounting practices factor in the amortized
cost of development and overhead costs, like maintaining a physical plant,
that you conveniently ignored. There is also the desire side of the equation
- value is not merely a function of cost, but of desire on the consumer side.
You seem to feel that people should not pay for what benefits they receive,
and that not paying will benefit society. That latter is not addressed but
merely asserted in your post.
If people don't pay for the software, or other goods that have low
reproduction costs (but possibly high other costs), then how will those
corporations who are magically going to take care of the inventors going to
pay those inventors? This was not addressed in the "text [I] did not quote",
but hand-waved as to where that revenue will arise for them to pay the inventors.
The rhetorical device of saying, "it will benefit society", is assertion of a
conclusion to support the argument, a.k.a. "circular reasoning". I disagree
that your plan to give away software will benefit society; I conclude that it
will harm society by reducing the feedback from sales of one's labors as a
psychological incentive to perform those labors. As the former Soviet Union
and the People's Republic of China's experiences indicate, arbitrary policies
of "this should benefit society, therefore it does, and we aren't going to pay
the worker" don't work. Capitalism does, even in its imperfect forms as
practiced today.
As support, I indicate that the most capitalistic economies produce the
largest amount of innovation and material well being. The profit motive
actually is a motive. The only examples I can find of your ideas lie in
political and economic ruin.
--
Lew
Bent C Dalager
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>
>You addressed it, but did not resolve it.
If I could resolve the socio-economic problems surrounding
remuneration for intellectual labour, I would be writing a thesis not
a Usenet post.
>The argument is flawed in that it deems reproduction cost as the only cost
>worthy of consideration.
It does not. I explicitly addressed the development cost.
> Basic accounting practices factor in the amortized
>cost of development and overhead costs, like maintaining a physical plant,
>that you conveniently ignored.
This is all just part of the development cost, which I addressed.
> There is also the desire side of the equation
>- value is not merely a function of cost, but of desire on the consumer side.
> You seem to feel that people should not pay for what benefits they receive,
>and that not paying will benefit society. That latter is not addressed but
>merely asserted in your post.
Indeed. Some products will not benefit society much if freely
available. Others will have some small or large benefit, and yet
others will have negative benefit. I am assuming that software that
could otherwise have generated revenue are more likely than not to
actually be useful and therefore have a good potential for benefiting
society if made freely available. One example would be IDE software,
another would be word processing software. Both make people (hobbyists
and professionals alike) more efficient at what they do and so they
will be able to do more of it.
>If people don't pay for the software, or other goods that have low
>reproduction costs (but possibly high other costs), then how will those
>corporations who are magically going to take care of the inventors going to
>pay those inventors? This was not addressed in the "text [I] did not quote",
>but hand-waved as to where that revenue will arise for them to pay the inventors.
It was addressed in the form of an example. For your benefit, here is
another one: game producers may move towards subscription-based models
a la WoW, wherein what they are selling is not the game software as
such but running development of the game world (and, incidentally,
appropriate patches/new versions of the game software).
>The rhetorical device of saying, "it will benefit society", is assertion of a
>conclusion to support the argument, a.k.a. "circular reasoning". I disagree
>that your plan to give away software will benefit society; I conclude that it
>will harm society by reducing the feedback from sales of one's labors as a
>psychological incentive to perform those labors.
If the WoW designers and programmers can reliably create new
worthwhile content, the subscription dollars will keep ticking in. If
they fail to do this, they deserve to go out of business and they will
do so because people will stop paying for the non-service. Please
point out where you perceive the lack of feedback.
>As the former Soviet Union
>and the People's Republic of China's experiences indicate, arbitrary policies
>of "this should benefit society, therefore it does, and we aren't going to pay
>the worker" don't work. Capitalism does, even in its imperfect forms as
>practiced today.
Trying to equate anything with which you disagree with communism is a
particularly desperate form of rhetoric. You would do yourself a
favour if you stopped doing so.
>As support, I indicate that the most capitalistic economies produce the
>largest amount of innovation and material well being. The profit motive
>actually is a motive. The only examples I can find of your ideas lie in
>political and economic ruin.
To my knowledge, there are no examples of information age societies
that did away with copyright.
Unless you are referring to fiction?
Cheers,
znôrt
> If it's sub-optimal, the system will tend to balance it.
> You are free in an open market to create alternate business
> models and try to make them sustainable.
Not at all. This aparent freedom is just fake. In the end it's just a matter of
dominance. Rules are very well set and here to stay, and they are designed
to perpetuate existing predominance and always will be adjusted to serve
dominant sectors. This is the game and the rules, although sounding good
and being written in nice golden capitals, are foul from the very start. Twisted
already told you about lobbies and about how the legislative corpus is
systematically coerced to benefit certain groups, at the expense of general
social progress. This is just the tip of the iceberg. His argument may be a
little overstretched, but he sure has a point. The point, I would say. This
shouldn't surprise you, it has always been that way. Globalization only
makes it more dramatic.
Lew
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>> You addressed it, but did not resolve it.
>
> If I could resolve the socio-economic problems surrounding
> remuneration for intellectual labour, I would be writing a thesis not
> a Usenet post.
And likely winning a Nobel prize.
I agree with some of what you say, but I think restricting the market to "free
distribution" as you say is a mistake, as forbidding free distribution would be.
>> The argument is flawed in that it deems reproduction cost as the only cost
>> worthy of consideration.
>
> It does not. I explicitly addressed the development cost.
In one area, yes, but the larger part of the argument seemed to rest on the
notion that the only cost involved in distributing software is media cost and
shipping or downloading. I see now that you meant your alternative
remuneration model to allow recoupment of the investment.
> It was addressed in the form of an example. For your benefit, here is
> another one: game producers may move towards subscription-based models
> a la WoW, wherein what they are selling is not the game software as
> such but running development of the game world (and, incidentally,
> appropriate patches/new versions of the game software).
For certain types of business it does seem to be a good model.
>> As the former Soviet Union
>> and the People's Republic of China's experiences indicate, arbitrary policies
>> of "this should benefit society, therefore it does, and we aren't going to pay
>> the worker" don't work. Capitalism does, even in its imperfect forms as
>> practiced today.
>
> Trying to equate anything with which you disagree with communism is a
> particularly desperate form of rhetoric. You would do yourself a
> favour if you stopped doing so.
I wasn't equating anything you said with communism, not even as rhetoric,
desperate or otherwise. And what makes you think I "disagree" with communism?
I cited those examples as evidence that capitalism is more socially stable
than pure socialistic economic models. One failed to embrace that fact and is
gone, the other is introducing capitalism at a controlled pace and is
benefiting hugely. I wouldn't characterize the PRC as having abandoned its
communist ideals at all; they may well be a shining example of success at
implementing a communist political system.
Characterizing an objective point designed to illustrate an applied principle
as mere rhetoric would seem the more desperate tactic.
>> As support, I indicate that the most capitalistic economies produce the
>> largest amount of innovation and material well being. The profit motive
>> actually is a motive. The only examples I can find of your ideas lie in
>> political and economic ruin.
>
> To my knowledge, there are no examples of information age societies
> that did away with copyright.
The United States, in certain segments of the market. Illustrating that the
free software model, for which you actually argue rather cogently, can coexist
with the models you call restrictive, due to the advantages of an open market.
Of course it didn't "do away with copyright" but it allows individual
competitors to (effectively) do so, and they have.
Other examples abound - Where does Linus Torvalds live?
> Unless you are referring to fiction?
You make good points, except for the "fiction" remark and the off-base
accusation of "desperate rhetoric".
--
Lew
Oliver Wong
> On Jul 16, 2:37 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@castortech.com> wrote:
>
>> It's the *other* stuff that your definition includes which worries
>> me.
>> Stuff like charging money for the right to use a specific software
>> program, for example.
>
> Let's see. If I use a specific software program where a copy is
> installed on my machine, what are the actual burdens I place on others
> in so doing?
[List of burdens in answer to one's own rhetorical question]
So what? Just because the activity you wish to do "only minimally"
burdens other people does not necessarily mean that those other people
*must* grant you permission to perform those activities.
[...]
>
> I do
> object to being told what I can or cannot do with a copy once I've
> gotten it.
Yes, I understand that. All I can say is "too bad for you", since
you're closing off a lot of opportunities to yourself.
>
> It's true, if anyone can make more copies and spread them around, sell
> them or give them away, the market will tend to force the price for
> copies down to zero. This kind of thing happens all the time; it's
> called "competition".
I guess it depends on your definition of "competition". In the context
of markets, economics, products, etc., "competition" to me means making a
similar, but different product, and trying to gain the marketshare of the
original product.
If you make a car, and then I make another car, and I claim my car is
better/faster/cheaper/whatever, then I am competing with you.
If you make a car, and then I put it in my magical "cloning" machine,
and generate millions of clones of your car, and give them all away for
free, then I'm not creating a "competing product".
> Makers of all sorts of other products have to
> put up with competitors producing identical or fully-substitutable
> products and undercutting their price.
Notice that reasoning which applies to products which are mostly bits
of information might not apply to products which are mostly physical
matter. Actually, you ARE aware of this (you state the "marginal cost of
reproduction" argument over and over again), but you seem to ignore this
fact when it's convenient (such as in the above paragraph).
> Red Hat sells software without restricting others from making and
> selling or giving away copies, and it manages to prosper just fine.
Red Hat makes most of its money from support subscription from
enterprise companies. This business model is not applicable to all forms
of software. E.g. games.
>
> And insisting on downstream control of use ultimately leads to Big
> Brotherish evils.
So don't use their products. But don't stop other people from using
their products if those other people *like* their products.
>
> In no other area besides software and entertainment, except maybe big
> pharma and gene-engineered crops, do we see manufacturers collecting
> margins of 99.9% on product sales.
Haha.
You make it sound like I should be filthy rich from my sales of
software. Yet, this doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe there's some flaw
in your theory...
[snip long text about cars, medicine, and other off topic stuff]
>
>> The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower
>> than
>> the traditional model.
>
> Risk's a part of the game. There's always less of it if you cheat, or
> use coercion to make your market position unassailable, but that
> benefits nobody else.
I guess you're working under the assumption that corporations are
trying to benefit other people? I think they're trying to benefit
themselves.
[...]
> Seen Microsoft Windoze
> lately?
Do you mean "Microsoft Windows"? You may be interested in
http://www.datasync.com/~rogerspl/Advocacy-HOWTO-6.html
<quote>
Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained
by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative
spelling".
</quote>
I'm using Windows right now, actually.
> How long has Explorer has the bug that scrolls all your open
> windows to the top spontaneously from time to time?
I wouldn't know. I've never seen this bug.
> Or the one where
> dropped files don't always go where you dropped them but sometimes to
> the bottom of the folder instead?
I think you are assuming that the order in which the files appear in a
folder is persistent. It's not. Telling the folder to "sort by name", for
example, does not re-order the bits on the harddrive.
> They've had 12 years now to fix
> that, since Windows 95 debuted Explorer and these bugs, and they've
> done nothing.
Did you submit a bug report? Personally, I'm pretty happy with the
progress Window has made, so I will probably continue to use their
products. I'm not happy with *everything* in the Windows series of OSes.
They have their flaws, just like every other OS I've tried, but so far, I
like them better than the alternatives (MacOSX, various flavours of Linux,
a couple flavours of BSD, QNX, etc.).
>
>> And so on... hopefully, you see the pattern here. Recall once again
>> that businesses are about making money, and given two business models,
>> one
>> which is more successful than the other, it seems to make sense that
>> most
>> businesses would pick the more successful one.
>
> Recall once again that businesses are not ENTITLED to a profit; nor
> even to recoup their R&D costs and break even.
I've never forgotten that (and you say "once again" as if you've
brought up this point before; have you?) I think you should recall,
though, that you are not ENTITLED to free software either.
Here's what it sounds like you're saying to me: "Information should be
free. Any body who imposes restriction on my sharing files over the
internet is evil and oppressive. All software should be free."
Here's what I'm saying: "When people make you an offer, you can either
accept it or reject it. So for example, if someone offers to license you
software for a specific purpose, you can accept that deal, or you can
reject that deal. You can't force other people to do what you want. In
particular, you cannot force people to release their software for free, if
they don't want to do that. Otherwise, *YOU* are the one being
oppressive."
> A "can't lose" business
> model is a sure sign that someone is cheating, or the game itself is
> rigged somehow.
Strawman. Nobody said anything about "can't lose" until you brought it
up.
[...]
>
> When I was a child, people saved and invested. When I was a young
> adult, people lived paycheque to paycheque and "got by" until they
> could retire, but sometimes lost their jobs, couldn't find new ones,
> and wound up poor, or committed suicide, or killed everyone in their
> family and THEN committed suicide. Now, people are deeply in debt by
> the time they enter the workforce, if they can find a job at all of
> course, and a lot more wind up poor, or commit suicide...
That's a sad story. Is it relevant to... you know... whether or not
people should be allowed to not give their software away for free?
[...]
>
>> They're plenty happy with the model they
>> currently have (the one of selling games with copy protection).
>> *You're*
>> the one who's unhappy with that model, and I'm not sure you have enough
>> clout to sway the entire game industry.
>
> Everyone except the top executives in the game industry has reason to
> be unhappy with that model. It benefits the few at the expense of
> everyone else. As such it is doomed in the long term.
If that's true, then I guess you can just sit back and relax, as
you'll eventually get what you want.
>> Everybody has a different code of ethics and moral compass. To me,
>> if
>> someone tells me "I'll only let you have A if you promise not to do B",
>> and you say "Fine", and then take the A, and then later go ahead and do
>> B,
>> you have committed a "grave moral wrong" in my eyes
>
> It's called "breach of contract". There's no need for this "copyright"
> BS, or any of the rest of it, since we have contract law anyway.
Yes, but you refute this argument in your next couple of sentences...
> Of
> course, contract law is somewhat weaker. If I breach the contract and
> give someone a copy, that someone is not bound by any contract and
> whatever it is is now freed. And mass-market transactions can't
> generally require every customer read and sign something; that's OK
> for rare, big-ticket purchases like cars and houses but nobody's doing
> that for every CD they buy at HMV.
Right, so now we see the demand for copyright laws, and perhaps have a
bit of insight into why it was created in the first place.
> This is exactly as it should be;
> businesses can not easily bludgeon their way to riches with a business
> model based more on inflating their prices massively and suing
> everyone in sight and have to actually innovate to succeed that way.
With the exception of the RIAA, businesses typically won't sue you for
pirating if you don't actually pirate. I hope your argument isn't merely
"RIAA is evil, therefore everyone should give their software away for
free".
>> Maybe it was too subtle, but the implied question was "How could
>> you
>> possibly make an informed decision about whether a piece of software
>> sucks
>> or not without having actually ever tried it?"
>
> Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
> steaming turd-pile.
That's factually false... unless, of course, *you* get to choose whom
the "expert" label applies and doesn't apply to: This guy doesn't like
Vista? Well, he must be an expert them. This guy does? Must be an idiot.
> Why does the Vista feature list seem to be what
> you'd expect if the RIAA and MPAA were the paying customers rather
> than the Vista user-base?
Question is based on false premise, and is therefore nonsensical.
You're assuming that Vista's feature list is appears to *everyone* to be
what one would expect if RIAA and MPAA were the paying customers.
> That is very interesting don't you think?
I don't find your question particularly interesting, no.
[...]
>
> Given the shoddy quality of e.g. IIS, do you really think they are
> trying to "compete" in any arena that doesn't involve either lawyers
> or lobbyists?
Question is based on false premise, and is therefore nonsensical.
You're assuming that IIS is perceived to be shoddy by everyone.
>
>> > This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
>> > brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things.
>>
>> It wasn't intended to explain those things. But if you want an easy
>> to
>> grasp explanation: the corporations don't have perfect information. You
>> can be perfectly rational, but make the in-hindsight-wrong-decision if
>> you
>> don't have perfect information.
>
> These aren't "wrong" decisions, they are "brain-dead" decisions, which
> anyone with a couple of neurons to rub together should have known
> would backfire in some way. Pretexting scandals, private-info-leaks,
> rootkits ... there seems to be another big scandal every fiscal
> quarter and dozens of minor ones these days.
I think you're assuming that the corporations had, as part of their
"imperfect information", the knowledge that they'd get caught.
[...]
>
>> Note that I didn't say they were perfectly rational. I said that
>> thinking of corporations as "a perfectly rational utilitarian" is a
>> "much
>> more accurate model" than an emotional anthromorphic entity who bases
>> its
>> decision mostly on rage, envy, fear, etc.
>
> What about insatiable greed, an arrogant (over)confidence that they
> won't get caught, and utter contempt for the peons in the streets
> crawling like ants at the base of their grotesquely expensive new
> highrise headquarters offices?
What about them?
Are you arguing that these traits (whether or not we agree that the
corporations actually have them) make it such that the "emotional
anthropomoprh" model is more accurate than the "rational utilitarian"
model?
>
> Look at those towers and those huge penthouse corner offices for the
> executives and tell me we're in a free-market capitalist democracy and
> not some kind of crypto-plutocratic feudal society with an
> identifiable aristocracy and identifiable peasants?
Is this a question, or an imperative statement?
>> I think you have a different definition of rational than I do. If
>> they
>> lust for power and control (or to phrase it more formally, if their
>> metric
>> is power and control), then doing whatever you can to maximize power
>> and
>> control is the most rational thing a utilitarian can do.
>
> It's at the meta-level that their rationality is lacking. A human has
> only limited ability to change their core drives and motivations
> (which tend to primarily involve self-fueling, reproductive
> opportunities, and not getting dead). A corporation in theory can have
> whatever motivations some board of directors decides it should have,
> and the board could decide that it will be a good citizen and become
> very rich that way, but by and large, none of them do.
Actually, I believe there exists a law which forces a corporation to
have exactly one motivation: maximize profits. Read "The Corporation" by
Joel Bakan (ISBN 978-0743247467)
Here are some quotes from the reviews (which are really mainly summaries
of the book) from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0743247469/sr=8-2/qid=1184687364/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary/105-2760513-0097202?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&qid=1184687364&sr=8-2#customerReviews
<quote>
legislation REQUIRES companies to put shareholder financial interest, or
profit, above all other interests.
</quote>
<quote>
all that counts when managers make decisions is the cost vs the benefit of
those decisions. For instance, if a company makes more money by letting
people die, breaking laws, or spoiling the environment, managers have no
choice but to make those decisions in order to fulfill their legal
requirements towards shareholders.
</quote>
<quote>
It is against the law, not to mention the longstanding traditions of
western capitalism, for corporations to do anything but maximize profits
and shareholder value, with no regard whatsoever for the social,
political, or environmental consequences.
</quote>
etc.
>> > Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
>> > Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
>> > droves?
>>
>> (1) Profits exceed costs.
>
> Profits exceed costs means "it ain't broke" so "don't fix it".
That's not what "profits exceed costs" to me, and I suspect there was
a miscommunication here, so let me rephrase point (1).
(1) The profits from outsourcing support (in the form of reduced
support costs) exceeds the cost of outsourcing support (in the form of
lower customer satisfaction).
>> (2) Imperfect information.
>
> Anyone who doesn't know that outsourcing is bad for the job economy,
> bad for the customer base, and eventually bad for your own bottom line
> isn't suffering from "imperfect information" but from "I've lived in
> this cave in the woods for the last 17 years and then despite by
> woeful lack of qualifications I somehow managed to bag this high-
> responsibility job that happens to make me a seven-figure annual
> salary and somehow avoid being quickly fired for incompetence; lucky
> me!".
I disagree.
[...]
>> Recall my warning:
>>
>> <quote>
>> anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
>> then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
>> jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
>> their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
>> experiencing.
>> </quote>
>
> Why do my predictions about their behavior better fit observed reality
> than yours, then?
Please tell me what your predictions are, and what you think my
predictions are.
>> >> (I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for
>> >> example).
>>
>> > I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that
>> > plugin.
>>
>> You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see such
>> advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be
>> more
>> informed about the real world than you. ;)
>
> Ads? Informed? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?! Ads do not
> inform; they present biased or just outright-wrong "information" to
> try to persuade you to buy something
This next part is said toungue-in-cheek, because this really is a
minor, silly sub-argument (to me, at least), but there seems to be some
misunderstanding, so I felt I should clarify:
I am arguing that Microsoft is trying to promote IIS over Apache. By
arguing against me, I guess you are implying that you believe Microsoft is
NOT trying to promote IIS over Apache (or maybe that you just like
arguing). I cite the existence of advertisement as evidence for my
argument that yes, Microsoft is trying to promote IIS over Apache. You
counter with the fact that you've never seen such an add, adding that you
have an adblocker installed.
Therefore, I conclude that I am right and you are wrong, and I am
crediting my being right to the fact that I was able to see the ads.
>> > Fools -- they already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay
>> > for a downgrade?
>>
>> Your question is based on false premise, and thus is nonsensical.
>
> What false premise? That Vista is a downgrade?
More or less. I would phrase it as "That Vista is perceive universally
(by everyone) to be a downgrade".
[...]
>
> Please check out
> http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
> before making any more lengthy followups to this thread.
Sorry, I haven't read it yet, though I did glance through it. It's on
my TODO list.
In the meantime, here's something for you to ponder: What exactly is
your goal with this thread? Are you trying to convince all the programmers
here to release their software for free? Are you trying to convince people
that copyright is bad? Are you trying to convince people that corporations
are evil? Are you trying to convince people that corporations are
emotional? Are you trying to convince people that the pharmaceutical
industry is harming the poor? Are you trying to convince people that Vista
is bad?
There are all separate goals, and you're sort of going all over the
place. I think because of this, you might be falsely assuming that when I
disagree with you on one point (e.g. that all software should be given
away for free), then I also disagree with you on all your other points
(e.g. that corporations are "evil").
A lot of what you write seems to me like non-sequitur. I might write,
for example, that corporations can be modeled as "rational utilitarians"
and then see you reply of "Look at how evil they are!" to which I'm
wondering "So what?" The tone of your message makes it sound like some
sort of rebuttal, but the content seems to indicate that you're just
bringing in completely unrelated topics.
- Oliver
Roedy Green
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>Wrong. With the subscription, he can laugh all the way to the bank.
>Maybe he's locked you into an N-year contract.
Purchasing is 100 year contract with a guarantee the product will
fail.
The whole point of rental is to avoid locking in. In any system I
have seen the worst you are on the hook for is one year.
Oliver Wong
news:f7il2d$cn9$1...@orkan.itea.ntnu.no...
>
> game producers may move towards subscription-based models
> a la WoW, wherein what they are selling is not the game software as
> such but running development of the game world (and, incidentally,
> appropriate patches/new versions of the game software).
I find it interesting that:
(1) I am arguing in this thread against the viability of making
profits from games via a subscription model.
(2) I have "sworn off" MMORPGs (or, as a matter of fact, any type of
game) which cost a monthly fee to play.
I wonder whether this is coincidental, or if (2) caused (1), or if
there is some other causal chain.
<digressions inReferencedToPoint="1">
One of the main complaints of copyright law and intellectual property,
from what I can see from Twisted's link to
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm is that it takes
power away from society and places it in the hands of a few already-rich
individuals.
MMORPGs that are financially successful are apparently extremely expensive
to make (I've seen development cost figures in the hundreds of millions of
US dollar thrown about for WoW, EverQuest II, etc.), so it seems to me
that pushing all games towards MMO would worsen things in this aspect.
non-MMOs with regular updates are very rarely successful. Diablo is the
one example that comes to mind. Total Annihilation is an example of a
company which tried to do regular updates, but abandoned this goal about 1
month after the game release, because it was just too expensive to do.
</digressions>
<digressions inReferencedToPoint="2">
A new, retail, pay-once game usually costs around $60. MMO subscriptions
are typically on the order of $20 per month. I'm a relatively busy person,
so I don't have too much time to play games. I might be able do a
"serious" gaming session (i.e. longer than 5 minutes) maybe 2 days out of
a given month.
That's about 6 days of play in an MMO versus an potentially infinite
amount of play for a typical retail game. Now given, most retail games get
boring after a while, but the good ones tend to be more fun than merely 6
day's worth.
I'm not saying MMOs objectively suck and we should ban them. I'm saying
for my specific situation, paying-once makes much more sense that
subscription model. I also claim that there are many other people in my
situation (many of my friends, for example), and that this is pretty
representative of my demographic in general (young adults who played lots
of videogames back in school, having recently become full-time employed,
still want to play, but have much less free time to do so).
</digressions>
- Oliver
Roedy Green
>Wrong. With the subscription, he can laugh all the way to the bank.
>Maybe he's locked you into an N-year contract.
One problem with buying is you don't know how long your software will
run. The vendor is under no obligation to keep it working after he
gets your money. I have an expensive copy of TopStyle gathering dust
that won't work under vista.
When rental, it is very clear just how long your program will continue
to work.
What really burns me is vendors who try to SELL me an upgrade to fix
BUGS. He should be paying ME to apologise!
Bent C Dalager
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>Bent C Dalager wrote:
>
>>
>
>In one area, yes, but the larger part of the argument seemed to rest on the
>notion that the only cost involved in distributing software is media cost and
>shipping or downloading. I see now that you meant your alternative
>remuneration model to allow recoupment of the investment.
The salient point is that there isn't one single remuneration model
for all, there are several - not all models are suitable for all
markets or software types. I cannot possibly hope to cover all such
models here, in part because we have only discovered a few of them so
far and in part because it takes brighter/more desperate brains than
mine to discover more.
>> Trying to equate anything with which you disagree with communism is a
>> particularly desperate form of rhetoric. You would do yourself a
>> favour if you stopped doing so.
>
>I wasn't equating anything you said with communism, not even as rhetoric,
>desperate or otherwise.
Very well. In that case, I must point out that it is the copyright and
patent regimes that are the closest to a planned economy and that free
copying is the closest to a free market system.
> And what makes you think I "disagree" with communism?
> (...)
>Characterizing an objective point designed to illustrate an applied principle
>as mere rhetoric would seem the more desperate tactic.
If you did indeed cite communistic states as serious counterpoints
rather than for emotional appeal, I withdraw my objection.
>> To my knowledge, there are no examples of information age societies
>> that did away with copyright.
>
>The United States, in certain segments of the market. Illustrating that the
>free software model, for which you actually argue rather cogently, can coexist
>with the models you call restrictive, due to the advantages of an open market.
>
>Of course it didn't "do away with copyright" but it allows individual
>competitors to (effectively) do so, and they have.
Free/open source software and open standards have done us a world of
good over the last 20+ years. My suggestion is that if all software
was this free, it would do us an order of magnitude more good.
I concede that this poses a problem of finding models to cover
development costs, but I do not think that this is an insurmountable
problem.
>> Unless you are referring to fiction?
>
>You make good points, except for the "fiction" remark and the off-base
>accusation of "desperate rhetoric".
The fiction remark wasn't entirely flippant. Since we have little or
no experience with copyright-less regimes, fiction might provide the
more interesting illustrations of how such a regime might actually
work in practice.
Cheers
Bent C Dalager
Oliver Wong <ow...@castortech.com> wrote:
>"Bent C Dalager" <b...@pvv.ntnu.no> wrote in message
>news:f7il2d$cn9$1...@orkan.itea.ntnu.no...
>>
>> game producers may move towards subscription-based models
>> a la WoW, wherein what they are selling is not the game software as
>> such but running development of the game world (and, incidentally,
>> appropriate patches/new versions of the game software).
>
> I find it interesting that:
>
> (1) I am arguing in this thread against the viability of making
>profits from games via a subscription model.
> (2) I have "sworn off" MMORPGs (or, as a matter of fact, any type of
>game) which cost a monthly fee to play.
>
> I wonder whether this is coincidental, or if (2) caused (1), or if
>there is some other causal chain.
I haven't followed your arguments (or if I have I can't remember
them), but I would like to point out one consequence of my model that
may not be immediately obvious:
Without the copyright regime, anyone will be able to establish WoW
servers running their own WoW-compatible worlds. Certainly, they will
first have to reverse-engineer the protocols (and this needs to not be
illegal) and this poses something of a problem but is unlikely to be
excessively difficult. Once this has happened, competition would arise
for WoW-players' subscription money. Most likely, the original vendor
will have a considerable advantage for a number of reasons but if they
turn out to be incompetent, or if you find some niche server somewhere
that interests you for some obscure reason, you can quite happily
switch content supplier. Or run with both for that matter.
>MMORPGs that are financially successful are apparently extremely expensive
>to make (I've seen development cost figures in the hundreds of millions of
>US dollar thrown about for WoW, EverQuest II, etc.), so it seems to me
>that pushing all games towards MMO would worsen things in this aspect.
While I don't actually know much of anything about this, I am guessing
that a large part of this cost is in artwork, motion capture, voice
acting, musical scores, etc. These are all things that are largely
unnecessary for a great many fun game concepts and I can easily
imagine MMO games that offer considerably simpler - stylized perhaps -
graphics etc. and still find a decent market.
In choosing to go for the 100mill+ model, a game developer is saying
that he is pushing the envelope and that he wants his game to be right
there on the bleeding edge. This approach is, I believe, incredibly
expensive for what you get in return and it is not a necessary
approach to make a popular game.
>non-MMOs with regular updates are very rarely successful. Diablo is the
>one example that comes to mind. Total Annihilation is an example of a
>company which tried to do regular updates, but abandoned this goal about 1
>month after the game release, because it was just too expensive to do.
There is definitely work still to be done in exploring these business
models. But note that a business model that didn't work two years ago
may very well be a huge hit two years down the line when technology,
infrastructure and social development have caught up with it.
>A new, retail, pay-once game usually costs around $60. MMO subscriptions
>are typically on the order of $20 per month. I'm a relatively busy person,
>so I don't have too much time to play games. I might be able do a
>"serious" gaming session (i.e. longer than 5 minutes) maybe 2 days out of
>a given month.
>
>That's about 6 days of play in an MMO versus an potentially infinite
>amount of play for a typical retail game. Now given, most retail games get
>boring after a while, but the good ones tend to be more fun than merely 6
>day's worth.
I am not convinced that this is much of a problem. For a large number
of people, $60 just isn't a whole lot of money. Neither is $20. And
neither is $20 a month. The latter is somewhere around the amount that
people really don't bother much with at all. (Obviously, it varies
with wealth levels, but I think this is common enough.)
(The one thing that really surprises me is that MMOGs seem to be
charging for the "first dose", i.e. the game box. I can only conclude
that this is to cover the cost for putting boxes on shelves and so
it's basically a marketing cost. In a mature online MMOG market, I
would expect the game software to be downloadable for free, with some
free initial playing time thrown in, just to get people hooked.)
>I'm not saying MMOs objectively suck and we should ban them. I'm saying
>for my specific situation, paying-once makes much more sense that
>subscription model. I also claim that there are many other people in my
>situation (many of my friends, for example), and that this is pretty
>representative of my demographic in general (young adults who played lots
>of videogames back in school, having recently become full-time employed,
>still want to play, but have much less free time to do so).
I don't think that MMOG-style subscription is the one and only model
for selling games under a copyright-free system. What the others would
be is a little difficult to say though since the lack of necessity has
led to them not being developed.
Cheers
Bent C Dalager
Oliver Wong <ow...@castortech.com> wrote:
>
> So what? Just because the activity you wish to do "only minimally"
>burdens other people does not necessarily mean that those other people
>*must* grant you permission to perform those activities.
The question is rather why a bunch of people that aren't affected by
my actions should have the right to veto what I'm doing.
>> It's true, if anyone can make more copies and spread them around, sell
>> them or give them away, the market will tend to force the price for
>> copies down to zero. This kind of thing happens all the time; it's
>> called "competition".
>
> I guess it depends on your definition of "competition". In the context
>of markets, economics, products, etc., "competition" to me means making a
>similar, but different product, and trying to gain the marketshare of the
>original product.
The competition in this case is for the most desirable method of
distribution/delivery. The problem of distributing a product is
separate from the problem of developing it (or manufacturing it, but
that is something of a non-issue in this case).
> If you make a car, and then I make another car, and I claim my car is
>better/faster/cheaper/whatever, then I am competing with you.
>
> If you make a car, and then I put it in my magical "cloning" machine,
>and generate millions of clones of your car, and give them all away for
>free, then I'm not creating a "competing product".
But of course you are. How would this not compete with the original,
presumably expensive-to-make, cars?
>> Red Hat sells software without restricting others from making and
>> selling or giving away copies, and it manages to prosper just fine.
>
> Red Hat makes most of its money from support subscription from
>enterprise companies. This business model is not applicable to all forms
>of software. E.g. games.
So they must find a different one.
>> And insisting on downstream control of use ultimately leads to Big
>> Brotherish evils.
>
> So don't use their products. But don't stop other people from using
>their products if those other people *like* their products.
The suggestion isn't to stop people from using the products, it's to
ensure that /more people/ get to use the products (if they like).
> Here's what I'm saying: "When people make you an offer, you can either
>accept it or reject it. So for example, if someone offers to license you
>software for a specific purpose, you can accept that deal, or you can
>reject that deal. You can't force other people to do what you want. In
>particular, you cannot force people to release their software for free, if
>they don't want to do that. Otherwise, *YOU* are the one being
>oppressive."
Of course you can force people to release their software for free
(well, you can't force them to release it but you can force them to do
it for free if they do choose to release it). This is as simple(*) as
removing the government-granted copyright monopoly.
* - to the extent that this is simple, which it isn't because it's
firmly entrenched in a considerable number of international treaties
and trade agreements.
Twisted
> (What the HELL is going on with GG? The post I'm replying to appeared
> at the text-only read-only NNTP host I use for reading and checking
> propagation almost as soon as I'd posted it but did not appear on GG
> itself for a full hour! How can it be injected at GG but make it to
> some obscure server in Eastern Europe an hour sooner than to Google's
> own server? It's not logically possible. They must have some bug that
> is causing the GG post-viewing interface to show a heavily out-of-date
> version of what's actually on their news spool. It's probably an HTTP
> cache in their load-balancing infrastructure that's not managing
> timestamps properly. Given the nearly exact 1 hour difference, I'm
> guessing they had to reload a machine somewhere and its clock wound up
> on standard instead of daylight time, perhaps because they restored a
> config file from a backup made during the winter. Too bad there's no
> obvious way to give them a heads-up about it. It's probably a five-
> minute fix once they realize what's gone wrong.)
It's even more horribly broken today. Postings dated 9 AM my time on
the NNTP server are missing on GG nearly 12 hours later. GG shows
nothing at all new for the last day in the "usb dongle" thread, which
I know to be a lie.
Effectively, I've got one hand tied behind my back. There are postings
I know are out there but I'm being denied the right to respond to
them, and for no apparent reason.
I want whoever is responsible identified and I want their head on a
pike!
Give me a google feedback address with all of the following
properties:
* If I send email there it will not bounce.
* And it will be read by an actual human being.
* Within one business day.
* And they will fix whatever the FUCK they broke immediately; it
should be as simple as rolling back some ill-advised change to some
server's configuration.
* After this, the aforementioned head-ka-bob will be shipped priority
next-day by USPS or Fed Ex to the P.O. box of my choice.
Or else give me all of the information (e.g. a server address or web
address) needed to use an NNTP server:
* To post news.
* For free.
* Without having to expose an email address if I don't want to.
* Without any pernicious "posting limits", awful propagation, gobs of
spam, terrible retention, or other such problems.
* And which will not change in any of these respects for quite a long
time.
I want one of these or the other in a followup to this posting
immediately. I've had it with fucking Google Groups.
Twisted
> The beauty of capitalism is that its "Invisible Hand" balances all these forces.
The beauty of capitalism is that the "invisible hand" balances things
out -- as long as there's no serious forcible restraint of trade going
on, or undermining of peoples' rights in their physical possessions
(such as discs and computing hardware).
Copyright (and patent) create exactly the kinds of restraint of trade
that hamstrings the "invisible hand" and distorts the market. The
result is to favor incumbent big businesses at everyone else's
expense, of course.
Twisted
> Indeed. The current system, however, does not. It encourages inventors
> to invent one single thing and then spend the rest of their lives in
> court trying to squeeze money out of various businesses that may or
> may not be using their invention.
Well put.
At best, they have an incentive to invent until they get one solid hit
and then retire and live on the royalty cheques that start rolling in.
Stephen King's novels give a good counterargument to copyrights.
Without copyrights, so the theory goes, he would never have written
his numerous novels.
Yeah, right. First, what happened once Stephen King got a solid hit
and was starting to rake in money? *He kept writing*. So much for his
writing being financially motivated. Creativity is quite often its own
reward. The good writers don't do it for the money but for less
tangible rewards, and don't need financial motivation. Writers that do
it purely for the money are, by and large, BAD writers. Not
subsidizing them might be a blessing. (Most are ad copy writers,
though, and will still get paid without copyrights. :P)
Second, I hear all the left-wing* pro-state-sanctioned-monopoly* nuts
screaming that Stephen King would not have written all that he has if
he'd had to keep a day job; while the royalty money rolling in didn't
motivate his subsequent writing, it did free him to write full-time.
I don't buy that one either. With proven writing talent he could still
market the skill and make money at writing. Signed/special editions
could be sold at a premium, copyright or no copyright. Free electronic
pdfs of his books everywhere and cheap knockoff paperbacks by various
unaffiliated publishers wouldn't diminish the market for such
collectibles one iota. Fans of his "dark tower" stories endlessly
awaiting the next one would have been motivated to donate money if it
would get it written any faster. Writing often maintains its own
timetable anyway, depending on inspiration and assorted such factors.
A day job may actually help a writer subconsciously grind on the
current problems in their writing while keeping their conscious mind
distracted, and they find they're full of ideas after the end of the
shift. Certainly with fame comes the ability to charge for appearances
and speeches. There's also the sugar-mommy option -- fame attracts
women as much as money does, and some women are wealthy.
It's also worth noting that prolific writers existed pre-copyright.
Shakespeare comes to mind. Many of them did not have any kind of
patronage either, or necessarily truly copious spare time.
Inventions, software, and usable tools are an even stronger case
against copyright and patents than entertainment. For example,
something may be developed because the developer himself has a use for
it and it will increase his productivity at something else down the
road. This is worth some up-front investment in development.
Finally, it's worth noting that free copies of stuff for people who
couldn't afford to pay anyway enriches them without impoverishing
anyone else. The vendor makes the same amount of money off those
people that they would have anyway -- zip, zero, zilch.
Consider drugs in third-world countries. They should have them
available at marginal cost. Why don't they? Big Pharma has a patent.
Why doesn't Big Pharma generously license it really cheaply to the
poor? Because they'd make twice what they use and sell the rest to the
West and undercut Big Pharma's domestic pricing. Sometimes deals are
actually cut that allow a country to make cheap generics but not
export them.
In short, Big Pharma want price discrimination so as to charge the
rich more than the poor.
If that's at all valid, it means patents and copyrights should be
replaced with appropriate inventor/pharma/whatever R&D subsidies and
an income tax hike in the upper brackets, which has the same effect
without attacking property rights and free speech or denying cheap
generics to the poor. (And the poor *in the West* would get cheap
generics too, not just in the third world.)
* Those pushing for stronger "IP" rights are definitely pushing for
state-enforced monopoly powers, and for government marketing meddling
on the pretext of fixing perceived market failures. Government
meddling in the market and especially state-supported monopolies are a
characteristically socialist type of policy. Those pushing for
information freedom are right-wing; they push for less government
meddling and more free-market individualism. That's small-c
conservative leaning towards right-libertarian. Of course, I'm
something of an odd duck, since unlike the typical libertarian I
support progressive taxes like income tax, though not regressive
taxes. I consider sales taxes other than on luxury and bad-for-your-
health items, along with copyright and patent royalties, to be
regressive taxes in effect. Taxes on items that have negative
externalities on the health-care system, environment, or what not I
have no problem with. So by all means, tax alcohol, tobacco,
incandescent light bulbs, and SUVs, but let us have cheap basic
necessities -- food, fluorescent bulbs, software, shelter,
utilities...also unlike the typical libertarian I think there's a
place for state monopolies in certain classes of infrastructure, from
roads to health care, and state-provided basic services in education.
Education good enough to get entry level jobs in most careers really
should be available for free; a society that spends tax money on that
is making a long-term investment that will pay off tremendously.
Cutting the educational fat by better focusing later years of
curriculum and starting to focus on an eventual vocational skill-set
earlier also makes sense. Grade school should teach basic life skills
-- some, but not as much repetition of, basic math and grammar type
stuff; enough to balance a checkbook and read and write decently,
certainly; and a lot more of other stuff either ignored or rarely
considered. High school should remain the social cauldron it is now,
but with more participatory student government of some sort to hands-
on teach civics, and with college-like focus towards specific possible
career paths. Dropping frivolous arts requirements and other stuff to
optional status cuts costs. Getting rid of extortionate copyright-
inflated pricing of books and tuition and software obviously goes a
long way too. As for health care, one-tier universal please. Anything
else abrogates the right to equal opportunity from birth. Money can be
had from taxing everything from cigarettes and alcohol to food with
trans fats to other recreational drugs (if you legalize some) and
making cosmetic type stuff (other than to reverse disfigurement) non-
free and tax that too. Yeah - let the Hollywood actresses' nose jobs
and tummy tucks pay for curing AIDS and giving everyone access to
basic health maintenance.
I don't know what to call the above. Politically it isn't any kind of
"ism" I ever heard of, other than maybe "common-senseism"?
Lew
> It's even more horribly broken today. Postings dated 9 AM my time on
> the NNTP server are missing on GG nearly 12 hours later. GG shows
> nothing at all new for the last day in the "usb dongle" thread, which
> I know to be a lie.
This is the wrong newsgroup for that issue. This one is about Java
programming issues.
--
Lew
Joshua Cranmer
> It's also worth noting that prolific writers existed pre-copyright.
> Shakespeare comes to mind. Many of them did not have any kind of
> patronage either, or necessarily truly copious spare time.
What was the literacy rate in Shakespeare's time? Shakespeare was writing
plays to be performed by a specific performin group, from which he
derived money. IIRC, playwrights in those days tended to try to keep
their playscripts to themselves.
> Inventions, software, and usable tools are an even stronger case against
> copyright and patents than entertainment. For example, something may be
> developed because the developer himself has a use for it and it will
> increase his productivity at something else down the road. This is worth
> some up-front investment in development.
>
> Finally, it's worth noting that free copies of stuff for people who
> couldn't afford to pay anyway enriches them without impoverishing anyone
> else. The vendor makes the same amount of money off those people that
> they would have anyway -- zip, zero, zilch.
>
> Consider drugs in third-world countries. They should have them available
> at marginal cost. Why don't they? Big Pharma has a patent. Why doesn't
> Big Pharma generously license it really cheaply to the poor? Because
> they'd make twice what they use and sell the rest to the West and
> undercut Big Pharma's domestic pricing. Sometimes deals are actually cut
> that allow a country to make cheap generics but not export them.
Big Pharma is rather the exception than the rule. The research needed to
create drugs is quite expensive (machinery for research alone propels the
costs into the millions, costs of chemicals for tests is well into the
tens or hundreds of thousands, and then there are several dozen tests
that need to be done before the drug can make it to market); to recoup on
this huge upfront cost, Big Pharma relies on a few blockbuster drugs. In
any case, the Big Pharma model is totally unsustainable. For more
information, see The Economist*, several issues in the past two or so
years deal with the woes of Big Pharma.
> In short, Big Pharma want price discrimination so as to charge the rich
> more than the poor.
There are more factors: distribution is slightly harder in poor
countries. I don't have the exact article, but this point is refuted in
another recent issue of The Economist*.
> If that's at all valid, it means patents and copyrights should be
> replaced with appropriate inventor/pharma/whatever R&D subsidies and an
> income tax hike in the upper brackets, which has the same effect without
> attacking property rights and free speech or denying cheap generics to
> the poor. (And the poor *in the West* would get cheap generics too, not
> just in the third world.)
>
> * Those pushing for stronger "IP" rights are definitely pushing for
> state-enforced monopoly powers, and for government marketing meddling on
> the pretext of fixing perceived market failures. Government meddling in
> the market and especially state-supported monopolies are a
> characteristically socialist type of policy.
But without goverment meddling, trains would have double-digit crash
rates, automobiles would get about ten miles to the gallon, and Arizona
would be devoid of water.
> Also unlike the typical libertarian I think there's a place
> for state monopolies in certain classes of infrastructure, from roads to
> health care, and state-provided basic services in education.
So you are admittedly socialist, which seems to be a status that you
abhor (given your rather harsh tone).
> Money can be had from taxing everything from cigarettes and alcohol to
> food with trans fats to other recreational drugs (if you legalize some
> and making cosmetic type stuff (other than to reverse disfigurement)
> non- free and tax that too. Yeah - let the Hollywood actresses' nose
> jobs and tummy tucks pay for curing AIDS and giving everyone access to
> basic health maintenance.
I don't think that sin taxes are a good idea -- they start imposing one
person's morality onto another.
> I don't know what to call the above. Politically it isn't any kind of
> "ism" I ever heard of, other than maybe "common-senseism"?
Seems to me to be a mixture of socialism with a fair mix of compassionate
conservatism. How about calling it "every-position-but-the-center-ism"?
Finally: as long as there exists some cost to making something, that
something is going to start having a cost to you (cf. Economic Principle
#1: There is no such thing as a free lunch). Since everything has
opportunity costs, you will always have to pay. Get over it.
* Economist articles past a certain time can only be accessed on their
website's archive with a subscription, but given that you seem to be sure
on your position on economic theory, I thought it prudent to assume that
you are an avid of this publication, so that it wouldn't be a problem.
~kurt
>>
> The development cost certainly has to be covered somehow. It does seem
> incredibly suboptimal, however, to charge per copy, or per seat, or
> per minute, etc. In order to maximize benefit to society, a different
> model should be found to cover the development cost of useful
> software.
Most commercial software is not developed to maximize the benefit to
society. It is written to maximize profit to the entity that owns it.
There is nothing wrong with that.
- Kurt
Bent C Dalager
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. It is not my position that
businesses should not be working towards maximizing their own profits
- my position is that they should do so under a copyright-less regime.
Lew
> It is not my position that
> businesses should not be working towards maximizing their own profits
> - my position is that they should do so under a copyright-less regime.
I can only desperately say that that is a hopelessly socialist position.
--
Lew
Bent C Dalager
You have yet to explain how the /removal/ of government granted
monopolies is in any way a socialist development.
Lew
> In article <P_6dnQ7LMc35gAPb...@comcast.com>,
> Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>> Bent C Dalager wrote:
>>> It is not my position that
>>> businesses should not be working towards maximizing their own profits
>>> - my position is that they should do so under a copyright-less regime.
>> I can only desperately say that that is a hopelessly socialist position.
>
> You have yet to explain how the /removal/ of government granted
> monopolies is in any way a socialist development.
You have yet to explain how mandating what is now a free choice is in any way
not a socialist development.
--
Lew
Bent C Dalager
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>
>You have yet to explain how mandating what is now a free choice is in any way
>not a socialist development.
How is mandating anything in itself socialist? All societies make laws
and mandate whatever they feel like. This includes modern democracies
as well as authoritarian dictatorships.
But whatever the case, there is no free choice. Under the current
regime, you are required by law not to copy copyrighted material. You
have no choice in the matter whatsoever, unless you want to break the
law. My proposal would restore free choice in the matter.
Lew
> In article <PfednZLXyoYVvQPb...@comcast.com>,
> Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>> You have yet to explain how mandating what is now a free choice is in any way
>> not a socialist development.
>
> How is mandating anything in itself socialist? All societies make laws
> and mandate whatever they feel like. This includes modern democracies
> as well as authoritarian dictatorships.
>
> But whatever the case, there is no free choice. Under the current
> regime, you are required by law not to copy copyrighted material. You
> have no choice in the matter whatsoever, unless you want to break the
> law. My proposal would restore free choice in the matter.
You are not required to copyright your work, or if you do, you are not
required to not copyleft it. Your proposal would remove free choice in the
matter.
You acknowledge that society needs laws to mandate the common good, then in
the next breath propose your socialist notion to abolish copyrights.
Copyrights exist to promote commerce and protect the author. If you don't
feel you need the protection, don't copyright. If you don't like copyrighted
works, only use ones that aren't. That's free choice. If the non-copyright
model is better for business, it will prevail. Your idea would remove that
free competition. Hence, socialist.
--
Lew
~kurt
> Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>>Bent C Dalager wrote:
>>> It is not my position that
>>> businesses should not be working towards maximizing their own profits
>>> - my position is that they should do so under a copyright-less regime.
>>
>>I can only desperately say that that is a hopelessly socialist position.
>
> You have yet to explain how the /removal/ of government granted
> monopolies is in any way a socialist development.
Actually, it is more of a communist one. Right out of the Communist
Manifesto: "...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property."
The idea being, only the rich will benefit from actually being able to own
anything. So, eliminate private property because the rich are, of course,
evil, since they obviously have made all of their money off the hard work
of others and don't deserve their money....
In this case, we are talking about eliminating intellectual property
through eliminating copyright.
I personally like copyright - I believe the entity who develops the
software should be able to choose any form of copyright. The user
can choose to if it is acceptable or not. GPL protects intellectual
property - I'm using it for some of my own personal stuff. But, I wouldn't
want to force it on anyone.
Now, software patents - they should be done away with. Software patents
are a joke.
- Kurt
Bent C Dalager
Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:
>
>You are not required to copyright your work, or if you do, you are not
>required to not copyleft it.
Anything anyone ever does that can be covered by copyright is
automatically copyrighted. There are no well established methods of
explicitly putting a work into the public domain and even if there
were, you are burdened with having to ensure that such a waiver always
accompanies your work everywhere because if it ever gets separated
from it, people have to assume that the work is under copyright.
This is a tremendous restriction on intellectual freedom because
pretty much everything you come across that you could have used for
your own work is copyrighted by default and so you cannot use it.
>Your proposal would remove free choice in the
>matter.
It would remove the freedom to pointlessly coerce other people. I tend
to consider this a good thing.
>You acknowledge that society needs laws to mandate the common good, then in
>the next breath propose your socialist notion to abolish copyrights.
Again with the socialism ranting. Get a dictionary, learn new swear
words, live a happier life.
>Copyrights exist to promote commerce and protect the author.
No, they do not. They exist to promote the arts and ensure we get more
and better works of art. As of very recently, the best way to do that
is to abolish copyright.
>If you don't
>feel you need the protection, don't copyright.
This is not possible since everything I ever write will automatically
be copyrighted.
>If you don't like copyrighted
>works, only use ones that aren't. That's free choice.
It is a perverted notion of free choice a la "you can choose any
colour you like so long as it's black". Copyright removes my freedom
to choose works to use because its effect is to ensure that a great
number of them are out of bounds. It has no opposite effect - that is,
there are no works that I could not use without copyright but that I
can use with it. It therefore causes a net loss in freedom.
> If the non-copyright
>model is better for business, it will prevail.
Something that does not exist can hardly "prevail". It would have to
come into existence first.
>Your idea would remove that
>free competition. Hence, socialist.
Copyright removes free competition because at its very basis, it
grants monopolies. I don't know which text books you are using, but I
advise you to look up "free competition" and "monopoly" and try to
figure out how, exactly, they relate to one another.
Bent C Dalager
~kurt <actino...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>Bent C Dalager <b...@pvv.ntnu.no> wrote:
>>
>> You have yet to explain how the /removal/ of government granted
>> monopolies is in any way a socialist development.
>
>Actually, it is more of a communist one. Right out of the Communist
>Manifesto: "...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the
>single sentence: Abolition of private property."
This refers to physical property. What we are discussing is copyright,
which is not property at all.
>In this case, we are talking about eliminating intellectual property
>through eliminating copyright.
There exists a wide-spread misunderstanding that copyright establishes
ownership to an artistic work. It does not, and an artistic work is
never anyone's "property" because abstract ideas cannot be owned. What
it does establish is a set of limited and exclusive rights to the
artistic work, mostly to do with duplication and performance.
Joshua Cranmer
> This refers to physical property. What we are discussing is copyright,
> which is not property at all.
Taking your suggestion elsewhere to look up in the dictionary, here is
the pertinent definitions of property in the OED:
property (n.)
3b. A (usually material) thing belonging to a person, group of persons,
etc.; a possession; (as a mass noun) that which one owns; possessions
collectively; a person's goods, wealth, etc.
3d. orig. and chiefly N. Amer. A literary work considered with regard to
its commercial production (esp. film) rights.
a copyright belongs to a person, ergo, a copyright is property.
Bent C Dalager
Joshua Cranmer <bl...@somewhere.invalid> wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:57:13 +0000, Bent C Dalager wrote:
>> This refers to physical property. What we are discussing is copyright,
>> which is not property at all.
>
>Taking your suggestion elsewhere to look up in the dictionary, here is
>the pertinent definitions of property in the OED:
Two immediate points of interest would be:
1) The OED does not define the meaning of the legal constructs of
copyright and property. It describes the everyday meanings. It is
generally not constructive to mix the two in a debate about legal
concepts.
2) Even if I were to accept the OED's definition in the context of a
copyright debate, the quote from the OED specifically states that its
entry is only relevant for a relatively small part of the world. It
would seem silly to base the debate on an interpretation that is
obviously under construction and not particularly well accepted in the
world at large.
Further, the OED entry is little more than a symptom of the
wide-spread misunderstanding that I brought up earlier. The nature of
language is such that misunderstandings become normative once they
become sufficiently wide spread.
Twisted
> So what? Just because the activity you wish to do "only minimally"
> burdens other people does not necessarily mean that those other people
> *must* grant you permission to perform those activities.
I don't see that people who are not burdened at all have any right to
intrude into the privacy of my home or wherever. I don't believe I
should need permission to do anything from anyone it doesn't take away
from. (And I don't consider not-yet-earned profits something I can be
taking away from someone who doesn't have them yet; there is no
entitlement to profits. If I take money from their pocket that they
already had that's stealing. If I don't buy something they're selling,
they end up making less profit than if I do, but that can hardly be
stealing, or it is "stealing" to not buy everything we see for sale
until we go bankrupt, which would be downright silly. So there cannot
be an entitlement to profit, only to try. And if there's no
entitlement to profit, there's no justification for restraint of trade
on the grounds that I might undercut someone's price or something --
oh woe is them! They only have a market capitalization of three
billion dollars instead of four because of dastardly competition! All
they're left with is more riches than most of us will ever see in our
lifetimes plus the first-mover advantage in the marketplace, and the
shirt on their backs! Who perpetrated this horriffic crime upon them
and left them impoverished so! Who?? :P
> If you make a car, and then I put it in my magical "cloning" machine,
> and generate millions of clones of your car, and give them all away for
> free, then I'm not creating a "competing product".
Sure you are. You've got a more efficient manufacturing process and
you can therefore compete on price. Good for you.
> > Makers of all sorts of other products have to
> > put up with competitors producing identical or fully-substitutable
> > products and undercutting their price.
>
> Notice that reasoning which applies to products which are mostly bits
> of information might not apply to products which are mostly physical
> matter. Actually, you ARE aware of this (you state the "marginal cost of
> reproduction" argument over and over again), but you seem to ignore this
> fact when it's convenient (such as in the above paragraph).
You're the one suggesting that information products be treated
specially by disallowing making fully-substitutable products. Why?
Just because the market will drive the price actually to zero given a
chance? Let it. Free software enriches us all, and can be a loss-
leader for a business. Commercial software sales can still exist;
there are ways to compete with free. Just ask Dasani.
> Red Hat makes most of its money from support subscription from
> enterprise companies. This business model is not applicable to all forms
> of software. E.g. games.
Some model would be. Games could be funded with a market price that
rapidly drops to zero if the cost drops to near-zero, e.g. by
community-sourcing content. (Look at the proliferation of third-party
Quake 3 maps and other add-ons if you don't think that's possible.)
There are other funding models than pay-per-copy and I see no sensible
economics-derived reason to create what amounts to price-protections
for this class of products.
Productivity tools can derive money from support. They're the things
it's most important that society manage to fund. Entertainment is
frivolous and not so important to ensure gets funded somehow. At the
same time entertainment is the popular subset of culture, and culture
needs to be participatory for the health of society. Culture that is
locked up behind paywalls (keeping out the poor) and that restricts
contribution (via copyright) is not participatory to any kind of
healthy degree. Culture that is participatory is largely self-
sustaining, because it will be produced by the people encouraged to
participate not by the prospect of cash reward but by the simple
natural human desire to participate in making and experiencing culture
-- a desire archaeologically documented by its end products to go back
at to least thirty thousand years before anyone invented any ideas
remotely resembling copyright, I might add.
> > And insisting on downstream control of use ultimately leads to Big
> > Brotherish evils.
>
> So don't use their products. But don't stop other people from using
> their products if those other people *like* their products.
A free market would let everyone choose whether to use something with
Big Brother features or not. We don't have a free market. Some stuff
requires recent versions of Windows that cannot legally be had without
the Big Brother features, so Windows can be indispensible and not
substitutable with a non-Big-Brotherish alternative. This is a market
failure -- the lack of a Big Brother free otherwise 100% compatible
Windoze substitute. There are bugs I'd like fixed that haven't been,
too. This is also a market failure. Like most market failures these
are the result of government distortion of the market via artificial
restraints of trade.
> You make it sound like I should be filthy rich from my sales of
> software. Yet, this doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe there's some flaw
> in your theory...
No; if you'd bothered to read the whole thing you'd notice that the
system is a pyramid. The parasites at the very top siphon off the
money and get rich; the people in the middle are forced to engage in
equally nasty behavior sometimes just to make ends meet; the ones at
the bottom, Joe Consumer, just plain get screwed. With sharp
implements. And no lube.
You're one of the people in the middle, one of those "just following
orders" types but not a highly-placed member of the party that will
all hang for their crimes some day. You're like the soldier in the
totalitarian regime that will have to testify against those really
evil ones and will end up with a lighter sentence.
> >> The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower
> >> than
> >> the traditional model.
>
> > Risk's a part of the game. There's always less of it if you cheat, or
> > use coercion to make your market position unassailable, but that
> > benefits nobody else.
>
> I guess you're working under the assumption that corporations are
> trying to benefit other people? I think they're trying to benefit
> themselves.
You miss the point of my argument. Corporations are trying to benefit
themselves. Public policy is supposed to benefit the public, not
corporations other than to the extent that it is in the public
interest to aid or subsidize them. Making and enforcing public
policies that favor big business at the expense of Joe Consumer is
therefore immoral and should be illegal to legislate (unconstitutional
even). Repealing such policies in favor of pro-consumer ones should be
a high priority. But the government has been bought at auction...and
the Second Civil War now looms in our near future, its onset less than
ten years away now.
(Remember, you heard that here first.)
> > Or the one where
> > dropped files don't always go where you dropped them but sometimes to
> > the bottom of the folder instead?
>
> I think you are assuming that the order in which the files appear in a
> folder is persistent. It's not. Telling the folder to "sort by name", for
> example, does not re-order the bits on the harddrive.
I'm not a moron; I know this. What I mean is, you get an Explorer
window and sort the files by name, say. Now they appear sorted by
name. Drag and drop a new file to move it and the I beam shows where
it should appear when dropped. Drop it and 90% of the time it goes
where the I beam indicates. 10% of the time it goes at the end of the
list of files instead. (Switch to List view from Tiles and that jumps
to 100%, by the way.)
It's easy to reproduce. Make two dummy directories with a load of
dummy files in each and drag files back and forth for a while. Within
20 or so you should get an instance of one jumping to the bottom of
the list instead of going where you dropped it and where the I beam
indicated it would go.
I know the files will be arranged by name or something again when the
directory is navigated away from and then back to, but sometimes I
want to arrange related files close together temporarily to do some
work, before later re-sorting them, and this is really annoying when
it happens.
> Did you submit a bug report?
Last time I checked, Microsoft had started to charge money for the
privilege of complaining to them. Nevermind that they ignore all bug
reports anyway, except maybe security hole reports.
> I've never forgotten that (and you say "once again" as if you've
> brought up this point before; have you?) I think you should recall,
> though, that you are not ENTITLED to free software either.
I'm ENTITLED by constitutional law to a free market, which by its
nature should tend to result in prices near marginal cost shortly
after something is no longer brand-spanking-new. I see prices that are
clearly hugely inflated over marginal cost, I see it as prima facie
evidence that it is not a free market, and therefore my constitutional
rights are being violated.
I see that despite broken laws, the invisible hand is still tirelessly
seeking to correct the bogus pricing on many information objects;
check out your favorite torrent tracker site for things that are
available at closer to marginal cost thanks to the amazing robustness
of the invisible hand to perform its works even in the face of serious
attempts to actually handcuff it by law. The market itself has made
its opinion clear; it's time for the law to catch up and to better fit
the constitutional intent in this, which the founding fathers clearly
planned to be a free-market democracy.
(It's not just software; seen the price tags on iPods lately? Not
coming down, unlike on most electronics. Apple gleefully claims to get
a 40% margin on each iPod sold; bank robbers don't dare gleefully
announce that they just cracked a safe to the tune of $50 million
because society in its wisdom made bank robbery illegal. Highway
robbery such as Apple perpetrates, for some mysterious reason, remains
perfectly legal however.)
> Here's what it sounds like you're saying to me: "Information should be
> free. Any body who imposes restriction on my sharing files over the
> internet is evil and oppressive. All software should be free."
Actually, what I'm saying is that information, once published,
actually IS free, and that it is violating the very laws of nature to
try to chain it or to charge money merely for access to it. It also
tramples on my property rights in my hardware, in my copies of
information, and the like, and in my free speech rights, and in my
right to be in a free market democracy as enshrined in the
constitution.
> Here's what I'm saying: "When people make you an offer, you can either
> accept it or reject it. So for example, if someone offers to license you
> software for a specific purpose, you can accept that deal, or you can
> reject that deal.
I don't remember any such deal ever being made. I do recall seeing
retailers sell software in the usual manner -- give me this money and
we'll give you this box with this disc of information in it, subject
to whatever return policies and such. I do also recall seeing notices
put inside that box claiming to be a binding contract between me and
the manufacturer, but which obviously can't be, since there's been no
meeting of the minds, no negotiation, and no signatures or witnessing
of same. Similarly notices on download sites or appearing when
software is installed or run, again with no negotiation, no
signatures, no witnesses. I certainly have not seen a deal made with
the manufacturer by a user, or anything other than an attempt by a
manufacturer to claim that a deal is already in place that isn't, or
that clicking a button on a GUI somewhere somehow constitutes making a
deal, even though I know darn well that it's a piece of dumb software
and it's not possible to make a deal with it any more than it's
possible to make a deal with a rock, and the manufacturer is nowhere
in sight, nor online or on the phone in some manner, so I'm certainly
not making a deal with the manufacturer.
Of course, maybe I have a weird idea of what actually constitutes a
"deal", or a binding contract. Maybe it's quaint to imagine it
actually involving negotiation, compromise by both sides, a meeting of
the minds, consideration for both sides, and signed and witnessed
agreements on both sides. Yet I suspect that does go on in the support-
contract space.
I don't believe though that a typical shrink-wrapped software purchase
is governed by any kind of contract except with the retailer. You
receive the goods (a disc with some software on it) after having
negotiated with the retailer, and before hearing any so-called
"license agreement" pap from the manufacturer. The manufacturer
including such a notice is in essence trying to unilaterally change
the existing contract you have with them (namely none beyond the law's
requirements of a manufacturer and a consumer, generally that the
manufacturer warrants their product for merchantability and fitness-
for-purpose and is liable for direct damages only, so the price tag of
the software only). Remember at this point you already have the disc.
If the manufacturer required you to sign an agreement in exchange for
receiving the disc you might have a point. However, you have already
received the disc and are entitled to all the usual rights under
copyright law. This includes the right to install the software and
make transient copies and whatever copies are generally incidentally
produced as part of normal use of the software, in case you were
unfamiliar with the law*. This means that not only your purchase of
the software, but your installation and normal use of the software is
lawful without requiring any further negotiation with its
manufacturer. Consequently, any "license agreement" that does not
provide you additional rights beyond those you have under copyright
law is one-sided in the legal sense of the term, which normally would
make it void even if you actually had negotiated and signed it. You
didn't even do that. The only "license agreements" I've seen that look
at all legitimate therefore are the GPL and its ilk, which grant you
additional rights (such as distribution rights) subject to certain
conditions. These agreements provide consideration for both sides
supposedly agreeing to something, and even THOSE don't involve
negotiation and signing, at least that I've noticed. Commercial
software agreements are, to the very last one of them, one-sided and
if they were binding would provide consideration for the manufacturer
but none for the user, the other party to the transaction, who would
without the agreement have all the rights under copyright law
including to install and use the software, and to remedies for defects
up to the price of the software, and with it generally loses most of
those rights, including the fair-use right to reverse engineer and
disassemble and the right to any remedy at all for defects. Nobody
sane would sign such a thing, so no judge that isn't bought should
uphold any of these so-called "contracts".
* To quote chapter and verse, in the US, 17 U.S.C. Section 117(a)(1)
provides a defense against copyright infringement for anyone who (i)
owns a physical copy of a computer program, (ii) makes an adaptation
"as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in
conjunction with a machine," and (iii) uses it "in no other manner."
This covers installation and the transient copies made during normal
use of software.
> You can't force other people to do what you want. In
> particular, you cannot force people to release their software for free, if
> they don't want to do that. Otherwise, *YOU* are the one being
> oppressive."
I don't want to force anyone to do anything. I don't think I should be
able to force Joe to release his software for free. If he wants to
sell it to Kevin for $50,000, take-it-or-leave-it, he has the right
to. If he wants Kevin to have to sign a contract perhaps forbidding
Kevin from redistributing it, he has the right to. He can sue Kevin
for breach of contract if he did have Kevin sign such a contract and
then Kevin sold or gave me a copy anyway. On the other hand he should
have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the copy I got
from Kevin, as I never signed any contract with him and I never
received anything from him (I received something from Kevin).
In fact, I'm not sure society should even allow NDA-like contracts
muzzling speech to be enforceable. Society doesn't allow contracts
selling oneself into slavery to be enforceable, and I think this
should extend to all contract terms that would limit one's
constitutional rights, including one's First Amendment rights.
> > A "can't lose" business
> > model is a sure sign that someone is cheating, or the game itself is
> > rigged somehow.
>
> Strawman. Nobody said anything about "can't lose" until you brought it
> up.
It is not a straw man and it is relevant. That is what is happening
now: businesses trying to create a "no-lose situation" by lobbying and
lawyers so they don't have to be able to compete in the market and can
just lazily sit there releasing shoddy products with sappy names like
Vista and rake in cash all day long.
> That's a sad story. Is it relevant to... you know... whether or not
> people should be allowed to not give their software away for free?
If you'd bothered to read my previous posting you'd know it was
relevant. It is the logical outcome of shackling information and
privatizing everything, even ideas, until every single action and
every bit of knowledge has a fee attached, payable to someone who
isn't cost anything incrementally be each use. It's the result of a
society that lets trolls set up camp under bridges and terrorize
travelers to extort fees from them, despite not doing anything to
actually keep the bridges maintained properly, and indeed often
deliberately misdesigning the bridges not to maximize its utility to
travelers but to maximize the ability of trolls to terrorize travelers
that use that bridge instead. Not to mention dynamiting the hill road
that is the alternate route, blocking it with an "accidental"
rockfall, to force people to use their bridge instead of taking the
(free) long way around.
> > Everyone except the top executives in the game industry has reason to
> > be unhappy with that model. It benefits the few at the expense of
> > everyone else. As such it is doomed in the long term.
>
> If that's true, then I guess you can just sit back and relax, as
> you'll eventually get what you want.
Meanwhile it galls me to see someone new pop up here every week asking
how they can make the Java software they're developing less useful,
buggier, and more expensive than it needs to be. It's continuing
visual evidence that efficient free markets have failed in this part
of the world, and that a nasty struggle and possible strife lies in
the near future.
> > It's called "breach of contract". There's no need for this "copyright"
> > BS, or any of the rest of it, since we have contract law anyway.
>
> Yes, but you refute this argument in your next couple of sentences...
>
> > Of
> > course, contract law is somewhat weaker. If I breach the contract and
> > give someone a copy, that someone is not bound by any contract and
> > whatever it is is now freed. And mass-market transactions can't
> > generally require every customer read and sign something; that's OK
> > for rare, big-ticket purchases like cars and houses but nobody's doing
> > that for every CD they buy at HMV.
>
> Right, so now we see the demand for copyright laws, and perhaps have a
> bit of insight into why it was created in the first place.
We see the demand in the sense of why it would benefit corporations to
have stronger clubs in their trollish mitts to use when terrorizing
bridge crossing travelers.
We don't see demand in the sense of why it would benefit the public. I
content that it does not in fact benefit the public, certainly not now
in the information age; it probably never has.
Recall that laws are (supposed to be) written to benefit the public,
not corporations or any other special interests except to the extent
that doing so benefits the public at large. There are many strong and
cogent arguments, some from economics (Against Monopoly), some from
empirical observation (the success of open source software; the
existence of invention and innovation and culture before copyright and
patent), and some from cultural needs (participatory culture and
copyright are inherently incompatible; read anything associated with
"free culture" in Google that is from the pro-free-culture side of the
debate to find detailed arguments and evidence), that so-called
"intellectual property" laws are harmful to the public rather than
beneficial to the public, and therefore are or should be
unconstitutional. In particular, the free software and free culture
movements' successful products have proven beyond a reasonable doubt
that the minimum level of copyright and patent protection needed to
satisfy the needs of the Progress Clause is in fact zero, and that
means that the First Amendment trumps it and in my considered opinion
these two pieces of the constitution, as written, make copyright and
patent laws beyond the minimum necessary unconstitutional; the
evidence then makes them all unconstitutional and furthermore meets
the standard of evidence required to convict them in criminal court.
That should be sufficient to get them struck down. It isn't, of
course, because lots of judges are in the hip pockets of various $3000
suits (suits whose very existence proves there are gross market
inefficiencies and therefore failures) right next to senators,
congressmen, and in at least one case (the Halliburton CEO? An oil
company executive?), the President.
> > This is exactly as it should be;
> > businesses can not easily bludgeon their way to riches with a business
> > model based more on inflating their prices massively and suing
> > everyone in sight and have to actually innovate to succeed that way.
>
> With the exception of the RIAA, businesses typically won't sue you for
> pirating if you don't actually pirate. I hope your argument isn't merely
> "RIAA is evil, therefore everyone should give their software away for
> free".
Strawman. Read my paragraph again and consider e.g. RIM v. NTP and
other recent high-stakes patent infringement cases. And read
everything Bent has been posting to this thread. And Against Monopoly,
if you still haven't gotten around to it.
> > Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
> > steaming turd-pile.
>
> That's factually false...
No, it's factually true. The only experts that claim Vista is anything
anyone should buy are Microsoft marketing department experts and
various people whose opinions are bought and paid for. Independent,
consumer-minded software evaluators choose XP over Vista. Every last
one of them.
[snip some mild, unprovoked insultage]
> Question is based on false premise, and is therefore nonsensical.
Stop being insulting and rude.
> You're assuming that IIS is perceived to be shoddy by everyone.
Everyone that matters (professional, independent-minded web site
administrators whose primary concern is the site working properly and
who aren't required to toe some MS-only line by management. Just about
all non-corporate site admins in particular. And every security expert
outside Steve Ballmer's hip pockets. IIS security is a dismal failure
-- it's the logical server-side counterpart of Internet Exploder;
every week a new exploit discovered and every month a new batch of
patches. And you can't make the usual "there's more exploits for the
Microsoft stuff because it's what the majority are using" argument in
this case because Apache's market share is the LARGER one and Apache
is still more secure DESPITE having the "being a bigger target"
disadvantage.)
> I think you're assuming that the corporations had, as part of their
> "imperfect information", the knowledge that they'd get caught.
A two year old expects to raid the cookie jar and not get caught, even
when they're the only child in the house and they take half the
cookies that were in the jar.
A grown man should not expect to be able to embezzle fifty billion
dollars and have it go unnoticed, or be able to pocket it without the
bulge being noticed eventually. (Metaphorically, anyway.)
If the guys running the show at Enron thought they'd get caught, they
acted in an irrational, non-self-maximizing manner.
If they thought they wouldn't, they have single-digit IQs and should
have been drooling and in diapers still, in a padded room somewhere
where they get regular doses of feel-good chemicals like Thorazine.
That people with this level of incompetence in basic arithmetic and
other life skills were hired and ended up actually in charge of a
major energy company is proof of incompetence or irrationality in the
hiring department and on the part of the shareholders, in that case.
Sooner or later, if you follow the chain back, you run into someone
who knew what they were doing and who had to be simply irrational, and
who nonetheless had a position of responsibility.
Regardless, the corporation itself should have had the information
that this couldn't go undetected and the perpetrators uncaught, and
acted to self-maximize, per your theory. It didn't. Too bad for your
theory then; one counterexample is all it takes to torpedo a universal
claim such as the one you made.
Actually, I'm guessing they thought the Bush administration would
shield them and they turned out instead to be fall guys. Still
irrational or stupid; they played with fire and expected not to get
burned just because one of the flames made promises to that effect.
> Are you arguing that these traits (whether or not we agree that the
> corporations actually have them) make it such that the "emotional
> anthropomoprh" model is more accurate than the "rational utilitarian"
> model?
See below.
> Here are some quotes from the reviews (which are really mainly summaries
> of the book) from Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0743247469/sr=8-2/q...
> <quote>
> legislation REQUIRES companies to put shareholder financial interest, or
> profit, above all other interests.
> </quote>
>
> <quote>
> all that counts when managers make decisions is the cost vs the benefit of
> those decisions. For instance, if a company makes more money by letting
> people die, breaking laws, or spoiling the environment, managers have no
> choice but to make those decisions in order to fulfill their legal
> requirements towards shareholders.
> </quote>
This is a scathing indictment of the current law then. It actually
forces corporations to choose between breaking some laws and breaking
other laws and fails to even offer them a straight and narrow path
they can walk. That in turn guarantees moral turpitude. Once they are
forced to break the law they have less respect for the law itself for
being obviously broken, and they are also now on the slippery slope of
all criminal behavior, where there's a reinforcing pattern of more law
breaking to try to eliminate evidence of the initial lawbreaking, more
lawbreaking forced by the initial lawbreaking rendering them
susceptible to blackmail, and so forth. For insensible laws, taxes
were evaded. For evasion of taxes, documents were forged. For forging
of documents, blackmail occurred. For blackmail's occurrence, money
was embezzled. For embezzlement of money, auditors were bribed. For
bribing of auditors, more money was needed. For want of more money, a
bank was robbed. For robbing a bank, security guards started shooting.
For the getaway, security guards got shot. For the shot security
guards, a murder was covered up. For covering up a murder, the mob got
involved. For mob involvement, drugs had to be warehoused ...
You get the picture.
> (1) The profits from outsourcing support (in the form of reduced
> support costs) exceeds the cost of outsourcing support (in the form of
> lower customer satisfaction).
I know of no case where this is actually true except where customer
loyalty is a complete non-issue. One-off products might qualify.
Anything with consumables or upgrades to generate a future revenue
stream is clearly a nonstarter here.
> > Why do my predictions about their behavior better fit observed reality
> > than yours, then?
>
> Please tell me what your predictions are, and what you think my
> predictions are.
Well, your theory predicts that Enron-type events should be rare. Mine
predicts that they should be common. Interestingly, they used to be
rare, but now are common. Your theory describes the behavior of
corporations before the late 1990s, and mine describes their current
behavior. An interesting research question is: what caused this change
in behavior? A hint on a possible research direction: it's notable
that this change coincides roughly with Clinton leaving office and the
next iteration of the Shrub Dynasty beginning.
>
> >> >> (I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for
> >> >> example).
>
> >> > I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that
> >> > plugin.
>
> >> You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see such
> >> advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be
> >> more
> >> informed about the real world than you. ;)
>
> > Ads? Informed? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?! Ads do not
> > inform; they present biased or just outright-wrong "information" to
> > try to persuade you to buy something
>
> This next part is said toungue-in-cheek, because this really is a
> minor, silly sub-argument (to me, at least), but there seems to be some
> misunderstanding, so I felt I should clarify:
>
> I am arguing that Microsoft is trying to promote IIS over Apache. By
> arguing against me, I guess you are implying that you believe Microsoft is
> NOT trying to promote IIS over Apache (or maybe that you just like
> arguing).
You *have* gone off the deep end, then.
You said you saw a lot of banners promoting IIS. I don't doubt it; I
don't doubt MS is promoting IIS heavily.
I said I didn't see the banners and you should really get Adblock, on
the grounds that I figured you found constantly being bombarded by
distracting flashing animated things while you're trying to find and
read information online was annoying.
Apparently you are crazy enough that:
a) You don't find it annoying.
b) You actually believe what the flashy thingies whisper in your ear
while someone tries to stick their hand in your pocket
c) You actually therefore believe that IIS is superior to Apache. It
isn't. The only thing the flashy things and their favoring of IIS
prove is that the IIS marketing budget is superior to the Apache
marketing budget, a good hint that the IIS fixing-things-and-making-a-
quality-product budget might be the worse for it. All the quiet, non-
revenue-generating "powered by Apache" buttons (which I don't block,
by the way), on the other hand, and the lack of comparable "powered by
IIS" ones, indicate which of the two web site operators themselves
actually find preferable and generally praiseworthy. The fact that the
only people widely promoting IIS on the web are the ones being paid by
Microsoft to do so is a damning indictment of IIS. And the fact that
IIS is worse than Apache but Apache is free (as in beer and as in
speech) is a damning indictment of "intellectual property" law.
> More or less. I would phrase it as "That Vista is perceive universally
> (by everyone) to be a downgrade".
I never claimed that. I certainly expect that Microsoft doesn't treat
it as such. Microsoft's marketing department certainly doesn't.
I claimed that Vista WAS a downgrade, not that it was PERCEIVED by any
particular group to be a downgrade. I then cited feature differences
to prove that in fact Vista IS a downgrade, since some things don't
work properly under Vista that do under XP, but Vista doesn't let you
do anything XP doesn't let you do, or do anything more efficiently, or
even AS efficiently. Except play that one DirectX 10 game. Unless you
weight that game working very heavily versus e.g. your CD burning and
media player working, other stuff working, and your hardware not
acting like it turned into a pumpkin (with "486SX 25" stamped on the
case) at midnight, and Big Brother not being inside. Most people's
weightings should lead to the rational, utilitarian choice to stick
with XP, which indicates that yes, Vista is indeed a downgrade.
Vista's poor sales (by Microsoft's own expectations) are another piece
of evidence, and also support the thesis that a substantial fraction
of savvy computer users do perceive it (accurately) as a downgrade.
> Sorry, I haven't read it yet, though I did glance through it. It's on
> my TODO list.
Really?
> In the meantime, here's something for you to ponder: What exactly is
> your goal with this thread?
To rebut bogus and inaccurate information, and to advise people who
appear to be erring in judgment or in their declaratory knowledge
base. There's a particularly strong bogohazard in this thread for some
reason, which has therefore required significant attention from my
higher functions of late. Unfortunately, at around this same time
Google's dropped the ball on providing proper usenet access and
support. Discovering a workaround is now also occupying substantial
higher functional attention. Data on alternative free news sources,
preferably proper NNTP servers, is lacking. Google may not be a
disinterested party so the next logical move is a search using a non-
Google search engine. That is pending but other concerns are more
pressing, such as defragging, consolidation, and tuning some higher
functions whilst running them through the simulator loop a few times.
Fuel acquisition and certain financial transactions also come ahead in
the priority queue, pending daylight hours and various retail stores
and business offices opening. Meanwhile inclement weather requires
that I disconnect my external network connections and go to internal
power for several hours or risk a destructive surge. The time can
fortunately be used for the aforementioned internal optimization
tasks, and for other internal data processing.
Twisted
wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:51:14 -0000, Twisted <twisted...@gmail.com>
> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>
> >Wrong. With the subscription, he can laugh all the way to the bank.
> >Maybe he's locked you into an N-year contract.
>
> One problem with buying is you don't know how long your software will
> run. The vendor is under no obligation to keep it working after he
> gets your money. I have an expensive copy of TopStyle gathering dust
> that won't work under vista.
>
> When rental, it is very clear just how long your program will continue
> to work.
This is ludicrous.
You buy, and it works forever, assuming you don't change or upgrade
the hardware or OS too much. It's not like a car; it shouldn't "wear
out" unless deliberately timebombed by the author, in which case it
should be avoided in favor of the competition anyway.
You rent, and it only works until you stop paying.
In effect, you buy and you pay once, or maybe infrequently when a new
version is released and you can't avoid upgrading perhaps because only
the new version works on MS Windows Pista or some such reason.
You rent and you pay every goddamn month all over again.
Also, you buy and when the vendor inevitably stops supporting the
product, you can still continue to use it although you can't expect
there to be any further updates for compatibility, so eventually as
you move on with your hardware and OS it will die, but it will last
years first.
You rent and when the vendor inevitably stops supporting the product
it instantly stops working, or lasts at most one more month.
And of course, you use FOSS you can pay as little as zilch, and there
is no single vendor who if they stop supporting the product they cause
the product to no longer be supported at all. Vendors that want money
will have support contracts you can sign up for IF YOU WANT TO or need
it because your use is mission-critical. FOSS vendors with pay support
contracts on offer are far nicer and more honest than anyone selling
"software as a service". For one thing, you can use the software as
much and as long as you want to without paying, though without vendor
support. If you want vendor support you can pay for it. If the vendor
goes under or quits supporting it you can likely find ANOTHER company
offering support, instead of being up the creek. You don't have to
change to a different program to continue to have support, and pay for
the new program, and deal with migrating data, retraining users, and
all of those additional hassles, which are also an expense in a
business context. If the worst comes to the worst, and it's mission
critical for you, has no known alternatives that are good substitutes
for your usage, and no longer has any vendors providing support at
all, you can hire a few geeks to provide your own in-house support
because you have (or should have) the full unobfuscated source code
and low-level documentation! FOSS is therefore especially important if
you're a business user, because a huge amount of risk and uncertainty
with regular commercial software, which gets worse with "rental"
software like you advocate, simply disappears with FOSS.
I know which gives the most value for the money, and which the least.
If you don't, or you're simply wrong, well, I guess that's just your
tough luck. :P
Twisted
> Twisted wrote:
> > It's even more horribly broken today. Postings dated 9 AM my time on
> > the NNTP server are missing on GG nearly 12 hours later. GG shows
> > nothing at all new for the last day in the "usb dongle" thread, which
> > I know to be a lie.
>
> This is the wrong newsgroup for that issue.
Feel free to suggest a better newsgroup for that issue then.
Roedy Green
<Pidg...@verizon.net> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :
>What was the literacy rate in Shakespeare's time?
2. there was no way to record a performance and later write a
transcript.
3. there was no way to pirate a performance identical to the original.
Twisted
> In
> any case, the Big Pharma model is totally unsustainable. For more
> information, see The Economist*, several issues in the past two or so
> years deal with the woes of Big Pharma.
This is evidence in support of my more general thesis that copyright/
patent systems like we have now are unsustainable. Unenforceable,
inefficient*, and they make the "path of least resistance" for
businesses require them to both be exceedingly customer-hostile and be
"hit-driven" and ultimately unsustainable themselves.
* E.g. companies spend effort to make a product, then extra effort
sabotaging it, and charge extra for it, instead of just make the
product, leave it in good shape, and charge less for it -- nevermind
crippleware that comes on a disc, remember the 486 SX chip, back when
Intel still had a monopoly on the x86 architecture? Their key patent
expiring saved everyone a lot of money and grief. Well, everyone
except Intel anyway.
> > * Those pushing for stronger "IP" rights are definitely pushing for
> > state-enforced monopoly powers, and for government marketing meddling on
> > the pretext of fixing perceived market failures. Government meddling in
> > the market and especially state-supported monopolies are a
> > characteristically socialist type of policy.
>
> But without goverment meddling, trains would have double-digit crash
> rates, automobiles would get about ten miles to the gallon, and Arizona
> would be devoid of water.
I'm not arguing against basic safety regulations. Government should do
at least these four things:
* Defend the realm from outside attack, and violent internal
minorities and criminals. But not defend the leadership from changes
in the will of the people by force, other than defending them from
violent force.
* Maintain the basic infrastructure that gives the market players a
level playing field. This includes providing and maintaining roads,
networks, health maintenance, education, and sundry stuff like that,
so everyone has a decent opportunity from the start and access to
basic services and to information and education.
* Tweak the market to account for diffuse negative externalities, e.g.
with carbon cap-and-trade schemes, safety regulations, smoking bans/
taxes, and similarly, and support legal action or actually pursue
criminal charges in cases of concentrated negative externalities. This
way polluters pay the costs their polluting has for the public as a
whole, for example.
* Raise funds to support the above, but without burdening the poor. A
progressive income tax seems to work OK; poll taxes, sales taxes, and
similarly do not work as well because they hit the poor hard.
And it should do very little else, aside from represent the people and
debate issues and the like in order to guide the above behaviors.
Note that I suggest its market intervention be limited to:
* Providing some services itself, which will obviously compete with
any private industries doing likewise. In practise it is likely to
contract out to these same private industries much of the time. I'd
like to see broadband fiber nationalized but the maintenance and
building-out of the infrastructure contracted back out to the same
companies that currently own the fiber, but have little incentive to
build it out further, and lots to squeeze existing customers by nickel-
and-diming them to death. Private companies would also provide actual
services over the line, and compete rather than have monopolies. The
government fiber would be "naked", i.e. respecting the end-to-end
principle and not caring what runs over it. Capacity would be rented
to service providers, generating revenue. This would pay the
contractors that maintain the fiber and build out more fiber.
* Regulating negative externalities. Tobacco or pot smoking in public
is a negative externality. Crack vials in the streets also. Smoking in
private is not, or is up to the landowner to regulate. Pollution and
toxic spills are negative externalities. So is abrupt climate change
and its various associated violent weather events. Same with products
that are dangerously unsafe, or fraudulently promoted. So is the theft
of physical property, freeloading off services where it
proportionately increases someone's costs (electricity, fiber
bandwidth), and violent crime. Someone privately copying a music CD
and giving someone else or selling them the copy is not. Some of the
negative externalities can be taxed; others can be outlawed, with
varying penalties; others may be subjected to insurance premium
increases, cap-and-trade systems, or other forms of regulation.
Antitrust should get more teeth, too. Corporate mergers and
acquisitions better scrutinized; often blocked. The breakdown of a
free market for a product or service is also a negative externality
for those consumers affected by the loss of competition in the
affected space.
> So you are admittedly socialist, which seems to be a status that you
> abhor (given your rather harsh tone).
Not really. Not unless anyone who wants public roads to be publicly
maintained out of the public purse is a socialist.
The US has a lot of the road network maintained publicly, but it is
currently one of the most right-wing countries you can find on earth.
Mind you it has privatized health care and bandwidth, and antitrust-
regulated those to ensure competitiveness and efficiency far too
little.
This is why some types of infrastructure need to be government-owned,
even though they're about the only things that should be. Competition
benefits consumers, but privately owned networks result in lack of
competition or lack of efficiency. If there's multiple parallel
networks it's hugely inefficient; if there's a single network, and its
owner naturally refuses to let its own competitors use it, then
there's no competition. Right now we actually have both -- parallel
cable and DSL networks almost everywhere, and not enough competition
to boot, with only two choices of broadband provider per residence or
business.
Government should own the actual infrastructural hardware but contract
its maintenance and growth out to private industry. Telcos that
currently have no incentive to build out in rural areas will have --
the government is offering them money to do so. They won't however be
able to deny the right of competitors to coexist on the one network of
lines, and so they'll have to, well, compete. They'll have to bid for
those government contracts, as well as for customers. The government
obviously has to be completely neutral regarding the network traffic
-- no censorship, no terms of service save that the service providers
that directly rent the bandwidth from them must pay their rent on
time, and no snooping without a warrant and whatever other applicable
due process of law.
Actually, I'd technically hold the weaker position that key
infrastructure like roads and fiber (and health care and education!)
needs to be owned by (if not really operated by) non-profit
organizations, but in practise for anything critical to the whole
populace it should be government, held accountable by the usual
mechanisms involving polling booths, legislative assemblies, and all
that stuff. Private organizations are often accountable to basically
no-one, and even when nonprofit are not obligated to bow to the will
of the people. (Wikimedia foundation comes to mind.)
> > Money can be had from taxing everything from cigarettes and alcohol to
> > food with trans fats to other recreational drugs (if you legalize some
> > and making cosmetic type stuff (other than to reverse disfigurement)
> > non- free and tax that too. Yeah - let the Hollywood actresses' nose
> > jobs and tummy tucks pay for curing AIDS and giving everyone access to
> > basic health maintenance.
>
> I don't think that sin taxes are a good idea -- they start imposing one
> person's morality onto another.
You completely misread me. I don't think "sin taxes" per se, or
imposing morality of the sort people largely don't agree on, is a good
idea either. I was suggesting, rather, that things that end up
imposing on the health system or environment get taxed. Things with
proven negative externalities. I'd be the last one to suggest taxes
for sleeping with someone else's wife or things like that; that's for
private people to decide and cope with privately -- up until someone
decides to actually get violent, which happens all too often, mind.
> Seems to me to be a mixture of socialism with a fair mix of compassionate
> conservatism. How about calling it "every-position-but-the-center-ism"?
Actually I probably am more centrist than anything else. Left on
infrastructure not being privately owned; right on not too much market
meddling except key infrastructure and regulating the areas where the
market doesn't naturally correct negative externalities by making the
manufacturer bear the costs in some indirect way (e.g. pollution;
global warming; unsafe products that place other people besides the
user at risk, e.g. badly-designed automobiles); civil libertarian,
etc.
> Finally: as long as there exists some cost to making something, that
> something is going to start having a cost to you (cf. Economic Principle
> #1: There is no such thing as a free lunch). Since everything has
> opportunity costs, you will always have to pay. Get over it.
So, for data, I should therefore expect to pay for bandwidth? Well
guess what -- I do, in fact, pay for the bandwidth that I use. Ditto
the storage space/media where the data gets put.
Twisted
> Bent C Dalager <b...@pvv.ntnu.no> wrote:
> > The development cost certainly has to be covered somehow. It does seem
> > incredibly suboptimal, however, to charge per copy, or per seat, or
> > per minute, etc. In order to maximize benefit to society, a different
> > model should be found to cover the development cost of useful
> > software.
>
> Most commercial software is not developed to maximize the benefit to
> society.
No, but the law is (or rather, was supposed to be) developed to
maximize the benefit to society.
Corporations can try to screw the customer and create artificial
scarcity. The government should, up to a point (outright fraud and
actual violence/theft), let them. The government should not actually
assist them, or obstruct or even criminalize customers getting around
these corporations' attempts. The government should be neutral in this
case. Instead it sides with big business in this case.
Twisted
> their playscripts to themselves.
I'm not against companies having trade secrets and TRYING to keep them
secret. I am against government assisting/enforcing any such secrecy,
or criminalizing consumers' and competitors' prying into the secrets.
Those trying to create artificial scarcity should be on their own in
their fight against the "evil" consumer; without government
assistance. In fact the government should be neutral, neither helping
the consumer nor the vendor in these cases, although it should step in
with antitrust legislation if mergers or other market activities would
leave one vendor lacking competition.
Gordon Beaton
Lew
>>>> It's even more horribly broken today. Postings dated 9 AM my time on
>>>> the NNTP server are missing on GG nearly 12 hours later. GG shows
>>>> nothing at all new for the last day in the "usb dongle" thread, which
>>>> I know to be a lie.
Lew wrote:
>>> This is the wrong newsgroup for that issue.
Twisted wrote:
>> Feel free to suggest a better newsgroup for that issue then.
It's not our responsibility here to do your off-topic research. That is
incredibly arrogant of you. How about you show some respect?
Gordon Beaton wrote:
> http://groups.google.com/group/Is-Something-Broken/topics
Fortunately for you, Gordon is a very nice person.
--
Lew
Oliver Wong
"Bent C Dalager" <b...@pvv.ntnu.no> wrote in message
news:f7jl3n$ukm$1...@orkan.itea.ntnu.no...
>
> Without the copyright regime, anyone will be able to establish WoW
> servers running their own WoW-compatible worlds. Certainly, they will
> first have to reverse-engineer the protocols (and this needs to not be
> illegal) and this poses something of a problem but is unlikely to be
> excessively difficult. Once this has happened, competition would arise
> for WoW-players' subscription money. Most likely, the original vendor
> will have a considerable advantage for a number of reasons but if they
> turn out to be incompetent, or if you find some niche server somewhere
> that interests you for some obscure reason, you can quite happily
> switch content supplier. Or run with both for that matter.
This is already happening, actually. Google for "Private WoW Server"
and the 3rd hit is entitled "World of Warcraft top 100 - Private servers",
implying that there is a sufficiently greater than 100 private servers
available such that a top 100 list is meaningful.
[snip stuff I don't disagree with and have no further comments]
>>A new, retail, pay-once game usually costs around $60. MMO subscriptions
>>are typically on the order of $20 per month. I'm a relatively busy
>>person,
>>so I don't have too much time to play games. I might be able do a
>>"serious" gaming session (i.e. longer than 5 minutes) maybe 2 days out
>>of
>>a given month.
>>
>>That's about 6 days of play in an MMO versus an potentially infinite
>>amount of play for a typical retail game. Now given, most retail games
>>get
>>boring after a while, but the good ones tend to be more fun than merely
>>6
>>day's worth.
>
> I am not convinced that this is much of a problem. For a large number
> of people, $60 just isn't a whole lot of money. Neither is $20. And
> neither is $20 a month. The latter is somewhere around the amount that
> people really don't bother much with at all. (Obviously, it varies
> with wealth levels, but I think this is common enough.)
I guess you're wealthier than I am. $20 a month is enough to make me
stop and think "Is this really worth it?"
>
> (The one thing that really surprises me is that MMOGs seem to be
> charging for the "first dose", i.e. the game box. I can only conclude
> that this is to cover the cost for putting boxes on shelves and so
> it's basically a marketing cost. In a mature online MMOG market, I
> would expect the game software to be downloadable for free, with some
> free initial playing time thrown in, just to get people hooked.)
There are a couple of pseudo-free MMOs: You download the software and
play for free as much as you want. However, you need to pay (real life)
money for certain things. This may be merely cosmetic things like
clothing, or it may be arguably-critical things like a weapon powerful
enough to make overcoming your next challenge of "reasonable difficulty",
or it may be objectively-critical things like an item which is simply
required by the game rules to continue advancing your character.
I play around with some of them, but I find I tire of them relatively
quickly.
- Oliver
Mark Rafn
>>Maybe he's locked you into an N-year contract.
Roedy Green <see_w...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote:
>One problem with buying is you don't know how long your software will
>run. The vendor is under no obligation to keep it working after he
>gets your money.
The vendor is under very little obligation at all. With the vast majority of
software, though, it will run forever, but your needs will change sooner or
later.
>I have an expensive copy of TopStyle gathering dust
>that won't work under vista.
Sure. It didn't stop working under vista; it NEVER worked under vista.
It'll run forever under whatever OS you bought it for.
>When rental, it is very clear just how long your program will continue
>to work.
Not at all. The rental model makes no more guarantees about long-term
upgrades, the company staying in business or continuing to work on the
product, etc. than the sale model does.
--
Mark Rafn da...@dagon.net <http://www.dagon.net/>
~kurt
>
> No, but the law is (or rather, was supposed to be) developed to
> maximize the benefit to society.
I believe your premise here is wrong though. Laws also exist to protect
the rights of the individual, which quite often conflict with the benefit
of society in general. In the US, there is a struggle between the more
trational American way of thinking that involves protecting individual rights,
vs. the more "progressive" thinking that benefits society (the masses).
More and more often, the potential of the individual is being limited in
the name of the greater good.
A case in point that is almost on topic - look at modern software development.
It embraces process, and this CMMI thing. It can benefit overall development,
but at the cost of neutralizing you hero programmers, who are often critical
to the success of a project.
> Corporations can try to screw the customer and create artificial
> scarcity. The government should, up to a point (outright fraud and
> actual violence/theft), let them. The government should not actually
> assist them, or obstruct or even criminalize customers getting around
> these corporations' attempts. The government should be neutral in this
> case. Instead it sides with big business in this case.
Well, I can agree with much of what you have said. Things such as the DMCA
are absurd. The fact that it is illegal for me to create software that can
circumvent software protection methods is BS. I have no problem with it
being illegal to steal (make copies) of software and music where the
copyright holder does not permit such actions, but making the tools that
allows one to do this should not be illegal.
- Kurt
Oliver Wong
news:1184816957.9...@i38g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> On Jul 17, 12:29 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@castortech.com> wrote:
>> So what? Just because the activity you wish to do "only minimally"
>> burdens other people does not necessarily mean that those other people
>> *must* grant you permission to perform those activities.
>
> I don't see that people who are not burdened at all have any right to
> intrude into the privacy of my home or wherever. I don't believe I
> should need permission to do anything from anyone it doesn't take away
> from. (And I don't consider not-yet-earned profits something I can be
> taking away from someone who doesn't have them yet; there is no
> entitlement to profits.
The way you phrase this paragraph makes it sound like you're
egocentric pirate: "I should be allowed to download all movie, software,
games, etc. I want, because I wasn't gonna pay for those things ANYWAY, so
it's not like they're losing any profits, etc."
I disagree with this philosophy.
Later on, you write:
> I don't want to force anyone to do anything. I don't think I should be
> able to force Joe to release his software for free. If he wants to
> sell it to Kevin for $50,000, take-it-or-leave-it, he has the right
> to. If he wants Kevin to have to sign a contract perhaps forbidding
> Kevin from redistributing it, he has the right to. He can sue Kevin
> for breach of contract if he did have Kevin sign such a contract and
> then Kevin sold or gave me a copy anyway. On the other hand he should
> have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the copy I got
> from Kevin, as I never signed any contract with him and I never
> received anything from him (I received something from Kevin).
Which is an entirely different matter. IANAL, but I believe this is
essentially how copyright laws work in my country and I'm satisfied with
it. (Incidentally, I thought I'd mention that you seem to take an overly
America-centric view of things).
[...]
>> If you make a car, and then I put it in my magical "cloning"
>> machine,
>> and generate millions of clones of your car, and give them all away for
>> free, then I'm not creating a "competing product".
>
> Sure you are. You've got a more efficient manufacturing process and
> you can therefore compete on price. Good for you.
I guess this is mainly a matter of definitions.
>
>> > Makers of all sorts of other products have to
>> > put up with competitors producing identical or fully-substitutable
>> > products and undercutting their price.
>>
>> Notice that reasoning which applies to products which are mostly
>> bits
>> of information might not apply to products which are mostly physical
>> matter. Actually, you ARE aware of this (you state the "marginal cost
>> of
>> reproduction" argument over and over again), but you seem to ignore
>> this
>> fact when it's convenient (such as in the above paragraph).
>
> You're the one suggesting that information products be treated
> specially by disallowing making fully-substitutable products.
Factually false. I'm guessing what you're referring to is my argument
that software developers should be allowed to charge money for their
software. I have nothing against other software developers making
competing products, even when those competing products are
"fully-substitutable" (though in practice, virtually no software is
fully-sbustituable with another software unless the two are identical).
> Why? Just because the market will drive the price actually to zero given
> a
> chance?
Questions are based on false premise.
>> Red Hat makes most of its money from support subscription from
>> enterprise companies. This business model is not applicable to all
>> forms
>> of software. E.g. games.
>
> Some model would be. Games could be funded with a market price that
> rapidly drops to zero if the cost drops to near-zero, e.g. by
> community-sourcing content. (Look at the proliferation of third-party
> Quake 3 maps and other add-ons if you don't think that's possible.)
This is a common mistake: to assume that games are interchangeable or
fully substitutable. A lot of community content sucks. The vast majority
of games (and I'm counting a player submitted mod as a "game") I've played
were free, and yet the vast majority of games I've actually enjoyed cost
money.
> There are other funding models than pay-per-copy and I see no sensible
> economics-derived reason to create what amounts to price-protections
> for this class of products.
What "price-protection" do you perceive for games? The request from
the developers to not make copies of their software and distribute it over
the internet?
>
> Productivity tools can derive money from support. They're the things
> it's most important that society manage to fund. Entertainment is
> frivolous and not so important to ensure gets funded somehow. At the
> same time entertainment is the popular subset of culture, and culture
> needs to be participatory for the health of society.
Can you support this assertion?
[...]
>
>> > And insisting on downstream control of use ultimately leads to Big
>> > Brotherish evils.
>>
>> So don't use their products. But don't stop other people from using
>> their products if those other people *like* their products.
>
> A free market would let everyone choose whether to use something with
> Big Brother features or not. We don't have a free market. Some stuff
> requires recent versions of Windows that cannot legally be had without
> the Big Brother features, so Windows can be indispensible and not
> substitutable with a non-Big-Brotherish alternative.
Windows is not indispensible. Many people make it through life just
fine without ever owning a personal computer (I'm not counting things like
computers which may be in their wristwatches or microwave ovens),
nevermind a copy of Windows. And there's that very vocal community of
Linux advocates who proudly state how they've been Windows-free for years.
[snip appeal-to-fear fallacy]
>
>> >> The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower
>> >> than
>> >> the traditional model.
>>
>> > Risk's a part of the game. There's always less of it if you cheat, or
>> > use coercion to make your market position unassailable, but that
>> > benefits nobody else.
>>
>> I guess you're working under the assumption that corporations are
>> trying to benefit other people? I think they're trying to benefit
>> themselves.
>
> You miss the point of my argument. Corporations are trying to benefit
> themselves. Public policy is supposed to benefit the public, not
> corporations other than to the extent that it is in the public
> interest to aid or subsidize them.
I think we're talking past each other, then. I'm trying to tell you
what the world is like right now, and you're trying to tell me what you
think the world should be.
> Making and enforcing public
> policies that favor big business at the expense of Joe Consumer is
> therefore immoral and should be illegal to legislate (unconstitutional
> even). Repealing such policies in favor of pro-consumer ones should be
> a high priority. But the government has been bought at auction...and
> the Second Civil War now looms in our near future, its onset less than
> ten years away now.
>
> (Remember, you heard that here first.)
I advise you not to assume you were the first one to come up with the
idea that a civil war in America may soon occur.
>
>> > Or the one where
>> > dropped files don't always go where you dropped them but sometimes to
>> > the bottom of the folder instead?
>>
>> I think you are assuming that the order in which the files appear
>> in a
>> folder is persistent. It's not. Telling the folder to "sort by name",
>> for
>> example, does not re-order the bits on the harddrive.
>
> I'm not a moron; I know this. What I mean is, you get an Explorer
> window and sort the files by name, say. Now they appear sorted by
> name. Drag and drop a new file to move it and the I beam shows where
> it should appear when dropped. Drop it and 90% of the time it goes
> where the I beam indicates. 10% of the time it goes at the end of the
> list of files instead. (Switch to List view from Tiles and that jumps
> to 100%, by the way.)
>
> It's easy to reproduce. Make two dummy directories with a load of
> dummy files in each and drag files back and forth for a while. Within
> 20 or so you should get an instance of one jumping to the bottom of
> the list instead of going where you dropped it and where the I beam
> indicated it would go.
Can you produce a screencast demonstrating the problem? I can't
reproduce your bug on my WinXP SP2 machine.
>> Did you submit a bug report?
>
> Last time I checked, Microsoft had started to charge money for the
> privilege of complaining to them. Nevermind that they ignore all bug
> reports anyway, except maybe security hole reports.
So in other words, "no". And you wonder why your bug (which I'm unable
to reproduce) hasn't gotten fixed for over 10 years?
[snip America-specific stuff]
>> Here's what it sounds like you're saying to me: "Information should
>> be
>> free. Any body who imposes restriction on my sharing files over the
>> internet is evil and oppressive. All software should be free."
>
> Actually, what I'm saying is that information, once published,
> actually IS free, and that it is violating the very laws of nature to
> try to chain it or to charge money merely for access to it.
You can't actually violate a "law of nature", else it wouldn't be a
"law of nature" by definition. Therefore, charging money for access to
information is not against a law of nature.
If you relax your statement a bit, to something like "It's unnatural
for information to not be free", then there's the usual counter of "lots
of things humans do is unnatural, such as developing cure for diseases,
etc."
[snip more America-specific stuff]
>
>> Here's what I'm saying: "When people make you an offer, you can
>> either
>> accept it or reject it. So for example, if someone offers to license
>> you
>> software for a specific purpose, you can accept that deal, or you can
>> reject that deal.
>
> I don't remember any such deal ever being made.
I think you do, actually. Read this next part you wrote:
> I do recall seeing
> retailers sell software in the usual manner -- give me this money and
> we'll give you this box with this disc of information in it, subject
> to whatever return policies and such.
Okay, so that's one deal: You give the store money, and they give you
whatever's in the box.
[...]
> Similarly notices on download sites or appearing when
> software is installed or run, again with no negotiation, no
> signatures, no witnesses. I certainly have not seen a deal made with
> the manufacturer by a user, or anything other than an attempt by a
> manufacturer to claim that a deal is already in place that isn't, or
> that clicking a button on a GUI somewhere somehow constitutes making a
> deal, even though I know darn well that it's a piece of dumb software
> and it's not possible to make a deal with it any more than it's
> possible to make a deal with a rock, and the manufacturer is nowhere
> in sight, nor online or on the phone in some manner, so I'm certainly
> not making a deal with the manufacturer.
You really should read the labels on buttons before you click on them.
I suspect the button you had clicked on had a label like "I AGREE" or
something similar. This is the deal that I'm talking about.
The argument "it's a piece of dumb software and it's not possible to
make a deal with it any more than it's possible to make a deal with a
rock" is invalid. The analog would be "This so called 'contract' is a dumb
piece of paper. It's not possible to make a deal with a piece of paper
anymore than it's possible to make a deal with a rock."
The piece of paper and the piece of software is presenting you with
text explaining to you the nature of the deal, and with whom you are
making the deal (or it should, or else it's poorly written).
>
> Of course, maybe I have a weird idea of what actually constitutes a
> "deal", or a binding contract. Maybe it's quaint to imagine it
> actually involving negotiation, compromise by both sides, a meeting of
> the minds, consideration for both sides, and signed and witnessed
> agreements on both sides. Yet I suspect that does go on in the support-
> contract space.
Yes, I think you do have a "weird" idea of what actually constitutes a
deal, in this context at least. First of all, a deal is not necessarily a
"binding contract", as you seem to imply. If you make a promise to your
friend to meet up in at your "secret spot" 20 years later, that's a deal.
There's no signature, and no witnesses (other than the two parties
involved).
>
> I don't believe though that a typical shrink-wrapped software purchase
> is governed by any kind of contract except with the retailer. You
> receive the goods (a disc with some software on it) after having
> negotiated with the retailer, and before hearing any so-called
> "license agreement" pap from the manufacturer. The manufacturer
> including such a notice is in essence trying to unilaterally change
> the existing contract you have with them (namely none beyond the law's
> requirements of a manufacturer and a consumer, generally that the
> manufacturer warrants their product for merchantability and fitness-
> for-purpose and is liable for direct damages only, so the price tag of
> the software only). Remember at this point you already have the disc.
> If the manufacturer required you to sign an agreement in exchange for
> receiving the disc you might have a point. However, you have already
> received the disc and are entitled to all the usual rights under
> copyright law. This includes the right to install the software and
> make transient copies and whatever copies are generally incidentally
[etc...]
Why are you bringing all this up? I can only guess that you're trying
to argue that what you're doing is legal or something along those lines.
I never claimed what you were doing was illegal. You're just
unnecessarily bringing in irrelevant points into the discussion, things
which are not even under dispute.
>
>> You can't force other people to do what you want. In
>> particular, you cannot force people to release their software for free,
>> if
>> they don't want to do that. Otherwise, *YOU* are the one being
>> oppressive."
>
> I don't want to force anyone to do anything. I don't think I should be
> able to force Joe to release his software for free. If he wants to
> sell it to Kevin for $50,000, take-it-or-leave-it, he has the right
> to. If he wants Kevin to have to sign a contract perhaps forbidding
> Kevin from redistributing it, he has the right to. He can sue Kevin
> for breach of contract if he did have Kevin sign such a contract and
> then Kevin sold or gave me a copy anyway.
Excellent. Then we are in agreement (so far).
> On the other hand he should
> have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the copy I got
> from Kevin, as I never signed any contract with him and I never
> received anything from him (I received something from Kevin).
Well, here I think the water gets muddier... Earlier, you mentioned
that matter-based products and information-based products should receive
the same treatment, right? Well, if someone acquires a laptop illegally
(e.g. it fell off the back of a truck), and then sold it to me, and the
police eventually track down the laptop to me, they are allowed to
confiscate it from me to return it to its original owner even if *I*
personally did not break any laws (that's the law in my country, anyway).
The question is what is the closest analog to this when applied to
information-based goods?
>
> It is not a straw man and it is relevant. That is what is happening
> now: businesses trying to create a "no-lose situation" by lobbying and
> lawyers so they don't have to be able to compete in the market and can
> just lazily sit there releasing shoddy products with sappy names like
> Vista and rake in cash all day long.
I personally don't see the relevance. Let's say I agree with you and
that yes, businesses are trying to create a "no-lose" situation. So what?
This doesn't conflict with anything said earlier.
>
>> That's a sad story. Is it relevant to... you know... whether or not
>> people should be allowed to not give their software away for free?
>
> If you'd bothered to read my previous posting you'd know it was
> relevant.
More like if I had predicted what your future (now past) postings
would have been... Previously, it sounded like you wanted all software
developers to give away their software for free. Only now did you clarify
that you, instead, wanted to abolish copyright. These are two completely
different desires.
[...]
>> > Everyone except the top executives in the game industry has reason to
>> > be unhappy with that model. It benefits the few at the expense of
>> > everyone else. As such it is doomed in the long term.
>>
>> If that's true, then I guess you can just sit back and relax, as
>> you'll eventually get what you want.
>
> Meanwhile it galls me to see someone new pop up here every week asking
> how they can make the Java software they're developing less useful,
> buggier, and more expensive than it needs to be. It's continuing
> visual evidence that efficient free markets have failed in this part
> of the world, and that a nasty struggle and possible strife lies in
> the near future.
I disagree. Crappy products can exist in a free market too, you know.
Therefore, the existence of crappy products does not necessarily indicate
a market failure.
[snip more stuff as a result of me describing the world as it is and
Twisted describing the world as it "should" be.]
[...]
>> > Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
>> > steaming turd-pile.
>>
>> That's factually false...
>
> No, it's factually true.
It's factually false, and you provide a counterexample to your claim
in the very next sentence:
> The only experts that claim Vista is anything
> anyone should buy are Microsoft marketing department experts and
> various people whose opinions are bought and paid for.
I claim that there are other "experts" (but note that you've avoided
answering my question as to what criterias you consider an necessary to
receive the title of "expert") who support Vista.
> Independent,
> consumer-minded software evaluators choose XP over Vista. Every last
> one of them.
Would you consider me an independent, consumer-minded software
evaluator? Why or why not?
>
> [snip some mild, unprovoked insultage]
>
>> Question is based on false premise, and is therefore nonsensical.
>
> Stop being insulting and rude.
Oh, not this again... Are you going to snip every argument you are
unable to address, labelling it "insults"?
If you ask a question which is based on a false premise, how am I
supposed to answer it, except to tell you that it is a false premise? If I
were to ask you "Why is copyright and intellectual property the greatest
thing in the world?" you could not actually answer the question because it
is based on the premise that copyright and intellectual property actually
is the greatest thing in the world, whereas you believe it isn't.
>
>> You're assuming that IIS is perceived to be shoddy by everyone.
>
> Everyone that matters (professional, independent-minded web site
> administrators whose primary concern is the site working properly and
> who aren't required to toe some MS-only line by management)
If that's your criteria for "everyone that matters", then I've met
some counter-examples to your claim.
BTW, my criteria for "everyone that matters" is "the people who are
making the buying decisions", since the context that generated this
subdiscussion is you're wondering whether Microsoft is seriously trying to
compete against Apache using IIS.
I'm genuinely surprised that you think Microsoft is not trying to
compete against Apache. You think Microsft just enjoys throwing their
money away on IIS developers and marketing?
>> I think you're assuming that the corporations had, as part of their
>> "imperfect information", the knowledge that they'd get caught.
>
> A two year old expects to raid the cookie jar and not get caught, even
> when they're the only child in the house and they take half the
> cookies that were in the jar.
>
> A grown man should not expect to be able to embezzle fifty billion
> dollars and have it go unnoticed, or be able to pocket it without the
> bulge being noticed eventually. (Metaphorically, anyway.)
Why not? The Enron Scandal had started in the 1990s and was only
discovered around 2001. Sounds like pretty sneaky behaviour to me.
And if they really did embezzle 50 billion as you claim (I can't find
citation for this figure), then even if they did get caught, they came out
ahead: Their fines were merely on the order of 10s of millions. Even if we
round that up to 100 milion, that's still 49'900 million dollars of
profit.
>
> If the guys running the show at Enron thought they'd get caught, they
> acted in an irrational, non-self-maximizing manner.
The numbers don't seem to indicate that.
>
> If they thought they wouldn't, they have single-digit IQs and should
> have been drooling and in diapers still, in a padded room somewhere
> where they get regular doses of feel-good chemicals like Thorazine.
> That people with this level of incompetence in basic arithmetic and
> other life skills were hired and ended up actually in charge of a
> major energy company is proof of incompetence or irrationality in the
> hiring department and on the part of the shareholders, in that case.
> Sooner or later, if you follow the chain back, you run into someone
> who knew what they were doing and who had to be simply irrational, and
> who nonetheless had a position of responsibility.
Also, not true, and I recommend you read the Corporation, a book I had
recommended to you earlier this thread.
>
> Regardless, the corporation itself should have had the information
> that this couldn't go undetected and the perpetrators uncaught, and
> acted to self-maximize, per your theory. It didn't.
I disagree.
> Too bad for your
> theory then; one counterexample is all it takes to torpedo a universal
> claim such as the one you made.
I think you failed to understand what my "theory" is (but actually, I
never gave a theory, I gave a model). I'll repeat what I said for your
benefit:
<quote>
anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
experiencing.
</quote>
Later on, I said (but cannot find the exact quote, so this is a
paraphrasing): "A Rational utilitarian is a better model for corporations
than an emotional anthropomorph".
>
> Actually, I'm guessing they thought the Bush administration would
> shield them and they turned out instead to be fall guys. Still
> irrational or stupid; they played with fire and expected not to get
> burned just because one of the flames made promises to that effect.
Actually, if that's what they thought, it'd still be rational. I think
you and I might not have the same definition of rational. Here's my
guideline for what a rational utilitarian would do:
Calculate the expected utility of all possible actions, and choose
the one which gives the highest expected utility.
If they thought the Bush Administration would protect them with
probability 60%, and that the utility they'd gain is 100 "profit points",
that's an expected utility of 60pp. If the alternative was a more
conservative approach which gave a 90% probability of gaining 65 "profit
points", this alternative action gives only 58.5 utility. Better to take
the first action.
>
>> Are you arguing that these traits (whether or not we agree that the
>> corporations actually have them) make it such that the "emotional
>> anthropomoprh" model is more accurate than the "rational utilitarian"
>> model?
>
> See below.
After scanning below, I don't see an answer. Typing either "Yes" or
"No" would have taken less effort than typing "See below." So which is it?
Is it "Yes"? Or is it "No"?
>
>> Here are some quotes from the reviews (which are really mainly
>> summaries
>> of the book) from
>> Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0743247469/sr=8-2/q...
>> <quote>
>> legislation REQUIRES companies to put shareholder financial interest,
>> or
>> profit, above all other interests.
>> </quote>
>>
>> <quote>
>> all that counts when managers make decisions is the cost vs the benefit
>> of
>> those decisions. For instance, if a company makes more money by letting
>> people die, breaking laws, or spoiling the environment, managers have
>> no
>> choice but to make those decisions in order to fulfill their legal
>> requirements towards shareholders.
>> </quote>
>
> This is a scathing indictment of the current law then.
Yes. Read the rest of the book to gain more insight on the behaviour
of corporations.
>> (1) The profits from outsourcing support (in the form of reduced
>> support costs) exceeds the cost of outsourcing support (in the form of
>> lower customer satisfaction).
>
> I know of no case where this is actually true except where customer
> loyalty is a complete non-issue. One-off products might qualify.
> Anything with consumables or upgrades to generate a future revenue
> stream is clearly a nonstarter here.
This is your guess. You don't have actual figures.
>> > Why do my predictions about their behavior better fit observed
>> > reality
>> > than yours, then?
>>
>> Please tell me what your predictions are, and what you think my
>> predictions are.
>
> Well, your theory predicts that Enron-type events should be rare.
Actually, no, quite the opposite. My *model* predicts that companies
will try to do whatever they think will make their them the most profit.
Enron followed my model (they made nearly 50 billion of pure profit
according to your figures).
> Mine
> predicts that they should be common.
You say "Mine" implying that you have a model and/or a theory? If so,
can you actually state what it is? Is your model that corporations are
emotional anthropomorphs?
[...]
>
>>
>> >> >> (I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for
>> >> >> example).
>>
>> >> > I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that
>> >> > plugin.
>>
>> >> You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see
>> >> such
>> >> advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be
>> >> more
>> >> informed about the real world than you. ;)
>>
>> > Ads? Informed? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?! Ads do not
>> > inform; they present biased or just outright-wrong "information" to
>> > try to persuade you to buy something
>>
>> This next part is said toungue-in-cheek, because this really is a
>> minor, silly sub-argument (to me, at least), but there seems to be some
>> misunderstanding, so I felt I should clarify:
>>
>> I am arguing that Microsoft is trying to promote IIS over Apache.
>> By
>> arguing against me, I guess you are implying that you believe Microsoft
>> is
>> NOT trying to promote IIS over Apache (or maybe that you just like
>> arguing).
>
> You *have* gone off the deep end, then.
>
> You said you saw a lot of banners promoting IIS. I don't doubt it; I
> don't doubt MS is promoting IIS heavily.
Okay, good. Earlier, it sounded like you *were* doubting that.
>
> I said I didn't see the banners and you should really get Adblock, on
> the grounds that I figured you found constantly being bombarded by
> distracting flashing animated things while you're trying to find and
> read information online was annoying.
>
> Apparently you are crazy enough that:
> a) You don't find it annoying.
I'm amused that you find natural immunity to ads to be a form of
craziness. I'm reminded of the story in which a man stumbles into a
community born without eyes, and when he tries to explain them the concept
of "sight", they consider him crazy, and they trace this insanity to these
strange growth in his head. Surgically removing them restored his sanity.
> b) You actually believe what the flashy thingies whisper in your ear
> while someone tries to stick their hand in your pocket
I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for that in
my post.
> c) You actually therefore believe that IIS is superior to Apache.
I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for that in
my post. All I can guess is that when I said "There exist some people who
believe that IIS is superior to Apache" that you erroneously assumed that
I was one of those people!
[...]
>> More or less. I would phrase it as "That Vista is perceive
>> universally
>> (by everyone) to be a downgrade".
>
> I never claimed that. I certainly expect that Microsoft doesn't treat
> it as such. Microsoft's marketing department certainly doesn't.
Good, we're making progress.
> I claimed that Vista WAS a downgrade, not that it was PERCEIVED by any
> particular group to be a downgrade.
Hmm... Well, I disagree with your claim, then.
> I then cited feature differences
> to prove that in fact Vista IS a downgrade, since some things don't
> work properly under Vista that do under XP, but Vista doesn't let you
> do anything XP doesn't let you do, or do anything more efficiently, or
> even AS efficiently. Except play that one DirectX 10 game.
At the Turing-Equivalent level, it may be true that Vista doesn't let
you do anything which XP doesn't let you do. From a more practical
perspective, your statement is false. I'll give you one example: The Vista
start button now has a search feature which I find much more convenient
than the XP start button.
> Most people's
> weightings should lead to the rational, utilitarian choice to stick
> with XP, which indicates that yes, Vista is indeed a downgrade.
A wise "rational utilitiarian" person would not assume that everybody
has the same utility function that they do, and thus would not try to make
subjective statements into objective ones.
>
> Vista's poor sales (by Microsoft's own expectations) are another piece
> of evidence, and also support the thesis that a substantial fraction
> of savvy computer users do perceive it (accurately) as a downgrade.
I guess you wouldn't consider me to be a savvy computer user, then.
>> Sorry, I haven't read it yet, though I did glance through it. It's
>> on
>> my TODO list.
>
> Really?
Well, not anymore. I got kind of fed up with their rhetoric tactics by
the beginning of the third chapter. I think the line that really got my
eyes rolling was:
<quote>
Competition is a good thing. That is why the NBA and the
Tour de France are so popular, and why we give our all at the
annual interdepartmental basketball game.
</quote>
While I agree that *economic* competition is a "good" thing, I was
annoyed with their false analogies, appeal to vivid imagery, and other
fallacies sprinkled throughout their treatise. "Hey, I love Basketball! I
guess I should support the abolishment of intellectual property too!"
>> In the meantime, here's something for you to ponder: What exactly
>> is
>> your goal with this thread?
>
> To rebut bogus and inaccurate information, and to advise people who
> appear to be erring in judgment or in their declaratory knowledge
> base.
And what information have you perceived to be "bogus and inaccurate"
so far in this thread, other than perhaps my claim that "Vista sucks" is
subjective?
- Oliver
Twisted
wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:26:33 GMT, Joshua Cranmer
> said :>What was the literacy rate in Shakespeare's time?
>
> 1. the cost of copying was very high.
And the fact that it isn't now is considered broken? What would have
happened to the computer revolution had Intel insisted back in the
early 90s that regardless of the continuing decrease in the cost of a
MHz, the price of one should be fixed to ensure Intel's continued
profitability, and the morons (or worse, traitors) running the show in
Congress had actually granted their wish?
We'd all still be putt-putting around on 33 MHz CPUs, that's what --
those of us that aren't rich, at least, i.e. the vast majority of us.
So much for Java then, which would never have been a viable platform
on hardware that slow.
> 2. there was no way to record a performance and later write a
> transcript.
And the fact that we now can is a bug, not a feature?
> 3. there was no way to pirate a performance identical to the original.
And the fact that we can now is a bug, not a feature?
You would roll back the clock to the dark ages? You abhor increased
productivity and efficiency in the market this much? I suppose you
would centrally plan the economy, too, and demand we all dress as
Amish, and such, you communist. :P
Twisted
I said feel free to suggest a newsgroup.
That is not a newsgroup.
That is a web forum of some sort, which blatantly says at the top that
I am not a member and only members may post.
I'm not signing up for some web forum (and the accompanying buttload
of spam, or whatever it is they want to do to me or my email address
that prompts them to insist that I sign up) just to get what I'm
already owed* anyway, which is the ability to discuss this issue.
* I'm a user affected by the issue. Also there's that whole first
amendment thing.
I will now repeat my original question (emphasis added):
Feel free to suggest a better *newsgroup* for this issue.
Gordon Beaton
> I said feel free to suggest a newsgroup.
>
> That is not a newsgroup.
You're quite the princess. It may not be a Usenet newsgroup, but
unlike *this* newsgroup, it *is* an appropriate place for your
complaints,
If you're unhappy with the service provided by Google, then complain
to Google (or ask them for a refund).
> I will now repeat my original question (emphasis added):
>
> Feel free to suggest a better *newsgroup* for this issue.
Try alt.whine.
/gordon
--
Twisted
> Twisted wrote:
> >>>> It's even more horribly broken today. Postings dated 9 AM my time on
> >>>> the NNTP server are missing on GG nearly 12 hours later. GG shows
> >>>> nothing at all new for the last day in the "usb dongle" thread, which
> >>>> I know to be a lie.
> Lew wrote:
> >>> This is the wrong newsgroup for that issue.
> Twisted wrote:
> >> Feel free to suggest a better newsgroup for that issue then.
>
> It's not our responsibility here to do your off-topic research.
You two complained about something I was doing but failed to be
constructive by suggesting a viable alternative; I called you on that.
As far as I am able to determine, you have still failed to suggest a
viable alternative, 18 hours later. In each future case where you feel
the urge to post this kind of thing, please either make a
*constructive* suggestion or refrain from posting any criticism at all
(whether or not I happen to be the target). That applies to both of
you, indeed to everyone who reads this who is prone to making such
postings.
Lew
> You two complained about something I was doing but failed to be
> constructive by suggesting a viable alternative; I called you on that.
> As far as I am able to determine, you have still failed to suggest a
> viable alternative, 18 hours later. In each future case where you feel
> the urge to post this kind of thing, please either make a
> *constructive* suggestion or refrain from posting any criticism at all
> (whether or not I happen to be the target). That applies to both of
> you, indeed to everyone who reads this who is prone to making such
> postings.
I complained about you bringing your childish off-topic whining into this
newsgroup and you try to act like it's my fault that you aren't responsible
enough to take it to an appropriate forum. This is not the place either to
handle your stupid problem nor to suggest how when you're too lazy and
irresponsible to do it yourself. I feel no guilt about calling you on that
arrogant and egotistical behavior. I am not your little slave-boy on whom you
to play your prima donna games; no one here is. Take responsibility for your
own behavior and stop being a crybaby when we don't sympathize.
--
Lew
Joshua Cranmer
> I'm ENTITLED by constitutional law to a free market, which by its nature
> should tend to result in prices near marginal cost shortly after
> something is no longer brand-spanking-new.
Would you be so kind as to point out *where* in the U.S. Constitution it
so states that every person has a right to a free market? The closest I
can find is Article IV, Section. 4.:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a
Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against
Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive
(when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.
That merely says that no state can be an autocracy, there is nothing in
there about any free market.
Also, re another thread in which you advocated poll taxes, poll taxes
were made illegal by Ammendment XXIV. IIRC, that was stipulated because
they were used to keep poor blacks from voted and were quite unfavorable
to the poor. But, I may be wrong.
Joe Attardi
> I said feel free to suggest a newsgroup.
> That is not a newsgroup.
>
> That is a web forum of some sort, which blatantly says at the top that
> I am not a member and only members may post.
a Google Group, which you are already a member of (Google Groups, that
is).
> I'm not signing up for some web forum (and the accompanying buttload
> of spam, or whatever it is they want to do to me or my email address
> that prompts them to insist that I sign up)
It's Google. They already have your email address. How much spam are
they currently sending you?
I swear you just look for the opportunity to whine.
> Feel free to suggest a better *newsgroup* for this issue.
It's not our responsibility to do this. In our last encounter,
Twisted, you were constantly complaining about how the conversation
was offtopic. So here you are taking a 180 degree turnaround. You're
offtopic, nobody wants to hear you complain about Google Groups, so we
don't need to suggest a newsgroup. Participate in the conversation at
hand and stop complaining about Google Groups, which is provided for
free.
Andreas Leitgeb
>> It's easy to reproduce. Make two dummy directories with a load of
>> dummy files in each and drag files back and forth for a while. Within
>> 20 or so you should get an instance of one jumping to the bottom of
>> the list instead of going where you dropped it and where the I beam
>> indicated it would go.
>
> Can you produce a screencast demonstrating the problem? I can't
> reproduce your bug on my WinXP SP2 machine.
I think to remember that Windows tends to show just-recently-modified
files at the end of the list. So if you copy (or move between
different logical disks) largish files, it might happen that while
copying is still in progress, the file's name might be moved to the
end of the list in explorer.
I'm a dedicated windows-hater, but frequently notice that I still
know it better than most self-entitled windows-lovers/experts.
Andreas Leitgeb
> You two complained about something I was doing but failed to be
> constructive by suggesting a viable alternative;
Oh, and next time the police catch a bankrobber, the robber
will ask them for alternatives to get rich quickly, and unable
to provide one, the police have to let him finish the act...
Twisted
> Not at all. The rental model makes no more guarantees about long-term
> upgrades, the company staying in business or continuing to work on the
> product, etc. than the sale model does.
And to top it off, the rental model more thoroughly puts you at the
vendor's mercy. What if your data is stored on their servers instead
of locally? What if the software requires (gratuitously -- its main
functionality doesn't, but its license validation BS does) their net
servers to be available and they happen to go down? The vendor can
force-feed you a downgrade, i.e. disable a feature, and then charge
extra for a "deluxe" rental option that brings the feature back. We've
seen these tactics used with the "standard" upgrade treadmill model by
the likes of Intuit before; and satellite TV providers dropping
channels from packages you had resulting in your having to pay extra
to continue receiving them; there's no reason to have any faith
whatsoever that software renters won't do equally nasty things
whenever they feel the need to show revenue growth at a quarterly
meeting with shareholders or some such. Once you're dependent on them
for productivity (and especially if they have any of your documents
hostage!) they can just squeeze and squeeze. A regular software vendor
can only do that to the extent that they can make an update essential
(MS gratuitously breaks backward compatibility so as soon as one
person in one workplace uses a new version of MS Word, their co-
workers that sometimes use documents from them have to follow suit,
and the new version then spreads virus-like and Microsoft laughs all
the way to the bank, so this IS possible, but at least they have to
work for it)...
Twisted
> You aren't responsible enough to take it to an appropriate forum.
Incorrect. More accurate would have been
"You don't have access to an appropriate forum".
Which is of course not "your" (my) fault at all, or even at all under
my control.
If you disagree, and post a followup to that effect, please furnish
evidence to support your position in the form of the name of a Usenet
newsgroup that would constitute such an "appropriate forum". I will
direct similar future material to said newsgroup if it meets the
obvious criteria.
Twisted
wrote:
A posting with an offtopic aside inside of it is hardly comparable to
a bank robbery. Grow up.
Twisted
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:37:09 -0000, Twisted wrote:
> > I said feel free to suggest a newsgroup.
>
> > That is not a newsgroup.
>
> You're quite the princess. It may not be a Usenet newsgroup, but
> unlike *this* newsgroup, it *is* an appropriate place for your
> complaints,
Except that I cannot post there, as was noted in a part of my post
that you conveniently snipped! :P
> If you're unhappy with the service provided by Google, then complain
> to Google (or ask them for a refund).
I actually did. I found a contact-us form somewhere in the Byzantine
help area of their web site, which appears to take all the text
entered into it and forward it to /dev/null based on the observed
results of using it (i.e., nothing happened -- no response, though I
supplied an easily human-demunged valid reply address, and the problem
complained about did not promptly go away).
Well actually it's not quite true that nothing happened. The link to
the devil-loving form disappeared shortly, since I went looking for it
again to send a ruder message after a day or so and could not for the
life of me find it despite looking in all the same places as when I
did find it originally. I'm guessing they annoyed around 500,000
users, woke up one morning to find some inbox with 500,000 new
messages, deleted the entire inbox in question, and deleted the form
from their Web site as too much of an annoyance to deal with.
Sorry, if you find your users too much of an annoyance to deal with
you should not have gone into your line of work. Please retire now and
arrange for the hiring of replacements who do not find users too much
of an annoyance to deal with. Or at least refrain from making untested
changes to a production system that sees that high a volume of usage.
If whatever they tried to do that went wrong had been tested on a
scratch monkey mockup system first this would never have happened. For
that matter if they'd had proper change management it would have been
a five-minute job to roll back the change the instant a symptom of it-
wasn't-an-unequivocal-improvement-to-the-system appeared. Since the
change apparently took them around 80 hours to roll back rather than
five minutes I conclude that their change management strategy is much
like those of all other IT enterprises I've ever encountered: utter
shite.
> > I will now repeat my original question (emphasis added):
>
> > Feel free to suggest a better *newsgroup* for this issue.
>
> Try alt.whine.
I very much doubt any Google employees, let alone actual management,
pay attention to what goes on there, or even that there's a
concentration of other GG users there that might know of workarounds
and suchlike.
Twisted
dead to haunt me:
> On Jul 19, 2:37 pm, Twisted <twisted...@gmail.com> wrote:> I said feel free to suggest a newsgroup.
> > That is not a newsgroup.
>
> > That is a web forum of some sort, which blatantly says at the top that
> > I am not a member and only members may post.
>
> Must you always exaggerate? It's not a "web forum of some sort"
It is a Web forum. It's not a Usenet newsgroup and it appears to be a
discussion forum accessible only via one Web site. Ergo it's a Web
forum.
> it's a Google Group, which you are already a member of (Google Groups, that
> is).
I clicked a "reply" link in there and it said "Sorry only members are
permitted to post" so apparently not. I'm not signing up for an
additional, separate Web forum just to report their stupid bugs.
Besides, it was obviously useless. There were a thousand reports there
from users of zillions of problems, and a single lone employee voice
periodically dropping in to say "Yes, we noticed there's a problem
too" and then disappear again without saying anything actually useful,
such as
* Why they did this to everyone
* When they would get around to undoing it
* Who would be made into an example and sent into the desert with a
pink slip for this outrage
* Anything else of actual interest to anyone
It was obvious that a) nobody with the power to actually do something
constructive, such as actually fix a problem rather than just note
that hmm, it looks like maybe there's a problem, reads that forum; b)
in fact aside from a single employee charged with posting meaningless
reassuring content-free noise that provided no additional useful
information to try to calm the membership (while the same organization
continues to use its left hand to further P.O. the same membership by
the way, by turning up a "Usenet caching delay" from 1 hour to 6, then
12 ...) the postings there were in fact totally ignored by Google; c)
nobody there even had anything useful to suggest as a workaround; and
d) nobody there wanted to recommend any alternative news source that
wasn't either non-NNTP or pay-only.
No point signing up in other words.
> > I'm not signing up for some web forum (and the accompanying buttload
> > of spam, or whatever it is they want to do to me or my email address
> > that prompts them to insist that I sign up)
>
> It's Google. They already have your email address. How much spam are
> they currently sending you?
Google is doing two things with GG:
1. Providing a Usenet archive and Usenet access.
2. Hosting a bunch of third-party Web forums, which like typical Web
forums require signup.
Additionally, having a gmail/GG account for Usenet posting does NOT
count as having signed up to any of the forums in 2 above, as I
verified (see above).
Signing up for any Web forum exposes to the forum's operators (in
addition to the hosting provider) at minimum a working email address,
and frequently requires additional hoop-jumping besides.
Additionally, Web forums are invariably moderated (generally retro-
moderated rather than forward-moderated) and tend towards extreme
administrative tyranny (e.g. banning users for personal reasons);
another reason I avoid them like the plague these days. I vastly
prefer unmoderated usenet groups, such as this one. That Web forum you
suggested is guaranteeably vastly inferior to such in pretty much
every respect. It doesn't even not get spam! I saw at least four there
over the last few days. The only nice thing I could do there but not
with a normal unmoderated usenet group is this -- I could click the
little "rate this post" thingie beneath each spam and give the bastard
spammers a one-star rating of "god-fucking-awful". Fat lot of good
that's likely to do, of course.
> I swear you just look for the opportunity to whine.
No, people insist on shoving a solid reason to into my lap however.
For example, whichever Google technician could have decided "Should I
try to make this minor optimization to our main, no-redundant-backups,
500,000 people use it daily news server despite not knowing what the
foobar I'm doing with things this complicated, simply because they
trusted me with an admin password anyway? Nah, that would be
irresponsible." instead of deciding "Yes" and then proceeding to gum
things up so thoroughly that it took them nearly FOUR FULL DAYS to
undo his handiwork.
> It's not our responsibility to do this.
Initially no. But when you complained about my posting here it became
your responsibility, because to make a constructive suggestion out of
that complaint you have to suggest a concrete alternative.
> Participate in the conversation at
> hand and stop complaining about Google Groups, which is provided for
> free.
No, I will not, Your Royal Highness. Consider this a coup and revolt.
Keep up with ordering us peasants around and we'll have to behead you
and melt down your crown to use the gold as spending cash, King
Nobody, especially if you continue to suggest "Let them have cake!"
the next time someone who can't afford better complains that their
Google Groups bread is stale.
Twisted
> Twisted <twisted...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > No, but the law is (or rather, was supposed to be) developed to
> > maximize the benefit to society.
>
> I believe your premise here is wrong though. Laws also exist to protect
> the rights of the individual, which quite often conflict with the benefit
> of society in general.
And how, precisely, does writing laws to create and protect the
monopoly privileges of the corporation by limiting the rights of the
individual in their computing hardware and in their copies of books,
software, and various other things support EITHER the rights of the
individual OR the benefit of society, pray tell?
> A case in point that is almost on topic - look at modern software development.
> It embraces process, and this CMMI thing. It can benefit overall development,
> but at the cost of neutralizing you hero programmers, who are often critical
> to the success of a project.
"CMMI thing"?
> Well, I can agree with much of what you have said. Things such as the DMCA
> are absurd. The fact that it is illegal for me to create software that can
> circumvent software protection methods is BS. I have no problem with it
> being illegal to steal (make copies) of software and music where the
> copyright holder does not permit such actions, but making the tools that
> allows one to do this should not be illegal.
Making copies is not stealing. If I steal your CD, you no longer have
the CD. If I copy your CD, you still have your CD. If I copy your CD,
I have CERTAINLY done nothing to a musician halfway around the planet
who can't even know that I did so unless he was spying on me. That
musician can only be harmed, or indeed affected at all, if they go to
the effort to break the law and invade my privacy. Having done so
maybe they deserve what they get ... whatever that is. In any event,
they can easily avoid this mysterious magical form of harm by not
spying on anyone anymore. :P
Roedy Green
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>secret. I am against government assisting/enforcing any such secrecy,
disclose technology. I guess back then 17 years was considered a very
short time.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com
Twisted
> The way you phrase this paragraph makes it sound like you're
> egocentric pirate: "I should be allowed to download all movie, software,
> games, etc. I want, because I wasn't gonna pay for those things ANYWAY, so
> it's not like they're losing any profits, etc."
Your putting words in my mouth does not a cogent argument make.
> I disagree with this philosophy.
Feel free to. I don't have a problem with that -- it's called free
speech. I just have a problem with people whose philosophy is
totalitarian control and communistic monopolizing and price-fixing
being able to actually impose their wishes unilaterally on everyone
else, which is unfortunately currently the case.
[NDA-like contracts, which like all contracts are not automatically
transitive to bind on every third party that happens upon a copy
somehow]
> Which is an entirely different matter. IANAL, but I believe this is
> essentially how copyright laws work in my country and I'm satisfied with
> it. (Incidentally, I thought I'd mention that you seem to take an overly
> America-centric view of things).
I'm fairly sure UK copyright law is binding on third parties, and also
has the niggling issue of being automatic on everything, the default
option not requiring an explicit notice, with all the bad consequences
that that has (outlined elsewhere in this thread, primarily by Bent).
> > You're the one suggesting that information products be treated
> > specially by disallowing making fully-substitutable products.
>
> Factually false. I'm guessing what you're referring to is my argument
> that software developers should be allowed to charge money for their
> software. I have nothing against other software developers making
> competing products, even when those competing products are
> "fully-substitutable" (though in practice, virtually no software is
> fully-sbustituable with another software unless the two are identical).
Exactly my point. IN PRACTISE the only alternative a user has is to
"buy from the company store". That's called "a goddamn monopoly", and
therefore violates one of the fundamental principles of a free market
economy, aka capitalism -- namely that there actually be this thing
called "a free market". Having to buy from the company store or do
without is emphatically not a free market and smells like communism.
Any case of state-granted subsidies, monopolies, and other perks being
sprinkled around like there's no tomorrow smacks of socialism.
Guess what? The enforcement side, snooping on and interfering forcibly
with downstream uses and third-party transactions involving copies,
violates the OTHER fundamental principle of a free market economy,
strong property rights! (And in that light, calling copyrights or
patents "property rights" themselves is a complete travesty. They're
"monopoly privileges" and they actually *erode* property rights.)
> > Why? Just because the market will drive the price actually to zero given
> > a
> > chance?
>
> Questions are based on false premise.
Stop dodging my questions with this repetitive, vaguely insulting, and
annoying non-answer. It doesn't help your case any.
> This is a common mistake: to assume that games are interchangeable or
> fully substitutable.
It's also a mistake I never make.
> A lot of community content sucks.
A lot of community content rocks.
Do you have a point here?
> The vast majority
> of games (and I'm counting a player submitted mod as a "game") I've played
> were free, and yet the vast majority of games I've actually enjoyed cost
> money.
90% of everything is crap. You've proven nothing, save that you make
more careful decisions about spending serious money than you do about
using small amounts of bandwidth and time, which is perfectly normal.
You just avoided the vast majority of commercial games that were crap
and a smaller fraction of the free ones that were crap, because trying
free ones cost so much less.
This is a common mistake for amateurs to make when trying to use
statistics as evidence of something, BTW.
> What "price-protection" do you perceive for games? The request from
> the developers to not make copies of their software and distribute it over
> the internet?
The request from the developers (and its being enforced by the fucking
government!) to have an effective noncompete agreement with everyone
who happens upon a copy, and therefore a monopoly, yes.
The sole effect of allowing arbitrary use and redistribution by users
would be that market forces would drive the price of a copy down to
zero. Therefore trying to strongarm this into not happening is an
attempt at price protection, nothing more and nothing less.
> > Productivity tools can derive money from support. They're the things
> > it's most important that society manage to fund. Entertainment is
> > frivolous and not so important to ensure gets funded somehow. At the
> > same time entertainment is the popular subset of culture, and culture
> > needs to be participatory for the health of society.
>
> Can you support this assertion?
Eh, have you looked out a window lately?
Productivity tools: Red Hat Inc.
Culture needs to be participatory: notice the mass civil disobedience
in creating unauthorized mashups, sequels, and the like to assorted
things. Also notice that the "corporate sanctioned" subset of modern
culture is all pap, Britney and suchlike, but that it wasn't always
this way, e.g. thousands of years ago. Culture is turning into
monoculture, and when media concentration reaches the point of there
being only one media company left standing unabsorbed by another, it
will have become one. Or rather, it won't have because the mass civil
disobedience will turn into frank revolt before that happens.
> > A free market would let everyone choose whether to use something with
> > Big Brother features or not. We don't have a free market. Some stuff
> > requires recent versions of Windows that cannot legally be had without
> > the Big Brother features, so Windows can be indispensible and not
> > substitutable with a non-Big-Brotherish alternative.
>
> Windows is not indispensible. Many people make it through life just
> fine without ever owning a personal computer (I'm not counting things like
> computers which may be in their wristwatches or microwave ovens),
> nevermind a copy of Windows.
Strawman argument. Windows is emphatically indispensible for certain
things or under certain circumstances.
> > You miss the point of my argument. Corporations are trying to benefit
> > themselves. Public policy is supposed to benefit the public, not
> > corporations other than to the extent that it is in the public
> > interest to aid or subsidize them.
>
> I think we're talking past each other, then. I'm trying to tell you
> what the world is like right now, and you're trying to tell me what you
> think the world should be.
Nice try. No, you're not merely telling me what it's like right now,
you're defending that state of affairs as somehow being right or just.
I'm pointing out that it isn't, and why it isn't by the principles of
the capitalist democracies we live in.
> Can you produce a screencast demonstrating the problem? I can't
> reproduce your bug on my WinXP SP2 machine.
That's impossible, since you're using the same software I am, and
there's no logical reason for this behavior to depend on the hardware
or things like the MAC address or the user's name or anything.
> So in other words, "no". And you wonder why your bug (which I'm unable
> to reproduce) hasn't gotten fixed for over 10 years?
Same reason almost none of the others have -- Microsoft doesn't
provide an easy way to freely give them bug feedback, and furthermore
ignores nearly all of what feedback it does nonetheless receive.
> > Actually, what I'm saying is that information, once published,
> > actually IS free, and that it is violating the very laws of nature to
> > try to chain it or to charge money merely for access to it.
>
> You can't actually violate a "law of nature", else it wouldn't be a
> "law of nature" by definition. Therefore, charging money for access to
> information is not against a law of nature.
You're right -- you can't actually violate a law of nature. That is
why DRM schemes and other attempts to perfectly enforce copyright are
doomed to failure, and why they are observed in actual fact to have a
100% failure rate with copies escaping in every single significant
(reasonably popular) instance -- they are attempting to violate a law
of nature.
More specifically, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, via one of its
information-theory implications.
> If you relax your statement a bit, to something like "It's unnatural
> for information to not be free", then there's the usual counter of "lots
> of things humans do is unnatural, such as developing cure for diseases,
> etc."
There's the double-counter that "curing diseases is not harmful;
curtailing peoples' freedom to do harmless things is".
> > I do recall seeing
> > retailers sell software in the usual manner -- give me this money and
> > we'll give you this box with this disc of information in it, subject
> > to whatever return policies and such.
>
> Okay, so that's one deal: You give the store money, and they give you
> whatever's in the box.
But without any of the onerous conditions the manufacturer later tries
to claim.
> You really should read the labels on buttons before you click on them.
> I suspect the button you had clicked on had a label like "I AGREE" or
> something similar. This is the deal that I'm talking about.
That's not a deal, that's interacting with an insentient piece of
software. A deal requires that I communicate with a living sentient
being my understanding and acceptance of foobar, in return for
quuxmumble.
What you're describing is my solo interaction, unwitnessed, with some
bits and bytes on MY COMPUTER, gyrating somewhere in its memory core,
and not even receiving any quuxmumble in exchange (since the right to
install and use the software is already granted by 17 USC Section
117(a)(1)).
If I made a "deal" with anything at all, it was with my own computer.
I'm fairly sure I am not legally bound by the terms of deals I make
with my computer, and even if I am, so what? My computer won't sue --
it isn't programmed to.
> The argument "it's a piece of dumb software and it's not possible to
> make a deal with it any more than it's possible to make a deal with a
> rock" is invalid. The analog would be "This so called 'contract' is a dumb
> piece of paper. It's not possible to make a deal with a piece of paper
> anymore than it's possible to make a deal with a rock."
Clicking a button, unwitnessed, in a solo interaction with a piece of
software and signing, with a witness, a document after negotiating
with somebody are two very different things.
> The piece of paper and the piece of software is presenting you with
> text explaining to you the nature of the deal, and with whom you are
> making the deal (or it should, or else it's poorly written).
Except that there is nobody there making a deal with me in one case.
The manufacturer is God knows where, and isn't offering me any
consideration in exchange anyway since copyright law already gives me
the right to use the software.
This applies to you in the UK too. Visit http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ipr/IntellectualProperty.htm
and text-search for "Making temporary copies". Though it uses the
specific examples of viewing Web pages and sending faxen, it applies
to any transient copy that's part of normal use of a work -- such as
when installing and running software. You don't need to make any extra
deal with the copyright holder to be able to do so, so unless the so-
called "agreement" governs your doing something copyright law normally
restricts, such as distributing copies or derivative works, it isn't
providing you any consideration in exchange for what it asks of you,
and that makes it null and void under the contract laws of most
countries EVEN IF you accept the theory that something clicking in
some software on your computer autonomously actually constitutes the
signing of a binding contract.
And besides, what if a minor, or my cat, or somebody that can't read
English clicking randomly, or something accidentally falling on the
keyboard triggers the "Accept" button?
Who has "agreed" to anything then?
What for that matter if Bob clicks the button and Alice later
decompiles the code -- Alice didn't agree to anything, and Bob may
have agreed (under your theory) not to decompile the code but didn't
decompile the code. Hmm.
Anyway, this is clearly patently absurd (no pun unintended). You can't
form a binding contract by simply clicking some stuff in your
software. At minimum a network transaction of some kind would seem to
be required, and likely a human witness, under any sensible
interpretation of contract law.
If not, by reading this message and clicking "reply" you agree to wire
me the amount of $1,000,000 (one million) USD, payable in monthly
installments of $20,000 (twenty-thousand), with 25% annual interest
compounded monthly. If you reply, I will provide a P.O. box address to
which you may send U.S. money orders.
:)
> Yes, I think you do have a "weird" idea of what actually constitutes a
> deal, in this context at least. First of all, a deal is not necessarily a
> "binding contract", as you seem to imply.
A deal that isn't a "binding contract" is not legally enforceable. The
most someone can do for my violating such a deal is to not do business
with me anymore. So a Web forum can ban people that violate its AUP.
An ISP might stop serving someone who violates theirs. A software
vendor who ships me a bucket of bits with a "deal" I don't like can
shove their "deal" -- and if they don't like it they're free to refuse
to sell to me ever again (though I probably bought from a retail
outlet rather than the vendor themselves anyway, so it likely won't
matter).
And even a "deal" that is not a "binding contract" is still by
definition "you give me X and I'll give you Y". I don't notice the
software vendor offering me anything as my half of the so-called
bargain. I already have the software. I already even have the right to
install and use it under Title 17 Section 117(a)(1). They aren't
offering anything else, besides things I already have. Where's the
"deal" there? Only the GPL and its ilk offer me something new -- the
right to redistribute subject to certain conditions, which under
copyright law I did not legally have before.
The only case I can think of where a "deal" has been made at all is if
the "agreement" occurs via a Web form that guards access to the
download link. Then the deal is apparently in exchange for receiving
the copy, rather than in exchange for absolutely nothing. Even so, I
don't see what makes it remotely resemble "legally binding" given the
lack of a "meeting of the minds", any ability whatsoever to negotiate,
or any bargaining power on my side of the "deal". Those are generally
enough to void a supposed "contract". Lack of a signed piece of paper
they can cite as evidence of my having agreed to their "deal" might
also pose a wee problem; there's no proof I ever "agreed" to anything
whatsoever. Maybe I knew the download URL and pasted it into the
browser address bar, bypassing the form. Maybe I even found the
installer on a p2p net and never got it from their Web site at all, in
case the site is configured to block access to the download URL until
the same IP submits the "agree" form. The best they might do if I did
click that form is have their server log all such form submissions,
then find it later, print a copy, and show that as evidence that I
"agreed". I can then point out that with no witnesses, they don't know
it wasn't a cat, a glitch in my computer, or someone other than me.
Maybe I saw the "agreement", left the room without clicking anything,
came back, and found this file downloaded. Maybe this means someone
else agreed to it and then left me the file as a gift, no strings
attached.
> If you make a promise to your
> friend to meet up in at your "secret spot" 20 years later, that's a deal.
> There's no signature, and no witnesses (other than the two parties
> involved).
And they can't sue me or have me arrested for not showing up, either,
under the laws here, or under UK law. They can decide not to be my
friend anymore. Perhaps I can live with that.
> Why are you bringing all this up? I can only guess that you're trying
> to argue that what you're doing is legal or something along those lines.
What I'm doing is writing Usenet posts to combat a torrent of bogosity
that might affect impressionable persons. That isn't illegal here --
we have this nifty thing called the First Amendment that, your
accusing tone implies, you rightpondians evidently lack.
> I never claimed what you were doing was illegal. You're just
> unnecessarily bringing in irrelevant points into the discussion, things
> which are not even under dispute.
You certainly appear to be disputing them.
Of course, you've made it fairly obvious that you have a vested
interest here. And now you've accused me of having an agenda beyond
simple argumentation and bogosity-combat.
> > On the other hand he should
> > have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the copy I got
> > from Kevin, as I never signed any contract with him and I never
> > received anything from him (I received something from Kevin).
>
> Well, here I think the water gets muddier... Earlier, you mentioned
> that matter-based products and information-based products should receive
> the same treatment, right? Well, if someone acquires a laptop illegally
> (e.g. it fell off the back of a truck), and then sold it to me, and the
> police eventually track down the laptop to me, they are allowed to
> confiscate it from me to return it to its original owner even if *I*
> personally did not break any laws (that's the law in my country, anyway).
There's a big difference here: in the CD-copying case nothing was
stolen.
In your scenario, the original owner of the laptop is deprived of it
until it is returned. In the case that Kevin copies a CD for me, no
recording industry corporation is missing a CD they deserve to get
back. They are missing a CD Kevin bought, but Kevin paid for it (by
hypothesis). If they want it back they can always buy it back from
Kevin at whatever price Kevin is willing to accept for it. As for
little old me, in this hypothetical scenario I have an mp3 file, or a
burned CD, but I don't have any CD the recording company used to
possess, unless they sell blank CDs, and if so I paid for that too. If
they want it back I might be willing to sell it to them ...
Kevin also still has his CD despite the copy being made. I don't have
anything of Kevin's he might want back, either.
Here we assume that each transactions was consensual with respect to
the two parties involved in it -- Kevin bought the CD, Kevin permitted
me to have the copy, and any blank CD I burned I purchased too.
> The question is what is the closest analog to this when applied to
> information-based goods?
If I take Kevin's CD without asking, and sell it to Katie, the police
can take the CD from Katie and return it to Kevin.
Back to your laptop scenario, if Alice has a laptop, Bob takes it
without asking, and Bob sells the stolen laptop to Charlie, the police
can take the laptop from Charlie and return it to Alice.
What happens if, instead, Alice has a laptop and Bob buys parts and
builds a clone of Alice's laptop with them, then sells this new laptop
to Charlie? Is there any logical reason for the police to take
Charlie's laptop and give it to Alice in this scenario? Is there any
logical reason for a sane and just society to empower them to do so?
> I personally don't see the relevance. Let's say I agree with you and
> that yes, businesses are trying to create a "no-lose" situation. So what?
> This doesn't conflict with anything said earlier.
It means it's not a proper free market, which is bad, mmkay?
> More like if I had predicted what your future (now past) postings
> would have been... Previously, it sounded like you wanted all software
> developers to give away their software for free. Only now did you clarify
> that you, instead, wanted to abolish copyright. These are two completely
> different desires.
Then you have a poor reading comprehension ability. But then, everyone
here surely already knows that. Right at the start I objected to the
OP's desire to cripple the functionality of some software they were
developing in order to annoy users and extort money from them, rather
than just sell freely-redistributable copies ala Red Hat *or even just
sell copyright-encumbered (but DRM-free) copies*. :P
> I disagree. Crappy products can exist in a free market too, you know.
> Therefore, the existence of crappy products does not necessarily indicate
> a market failure.
No, it's the absence of less crappy alternatives in many cases that
points to market failure.
Also, it's a symptom of market failure when a crappy product is crappy
not because they put in X effort to make it cheaply instead of the
much bigger amount Y of effort to make a good product, but because
they actually put in Y effort and then Z *more* effort to make it
*worse* to price discriminate and artificially segment the market.
In a smoothly functioning free market, a company that puts in Y effort
to make a product Foobar, then sells this at price P and puts in Z
*more* effort to make a crummy Foobar Lite to sell at price Q << P, is
going to be eaten alive by a competitor that puts in Y effort to make
a product Bazquux interchangeable with Foobar and sells Bazquux at
price Q. It has more power than Foobar Lite, and the same power as but
a lower price than Foobar, which makes it compete successfully with
both, one on quality and the other on price. Both companies are
putting in at least Y effort but Foobar's maker is putting in more.
Bazquux's maker is putting out a product that by itself is superior to
TWO of Foobar's maker's products with lower operating costs, which is
an obvious case of superior efficiency.
So no company with half a brain pulls shenanigans like Foobar Lite
unless it has a monopoly on all substitutable goods. A monopoly is
prima facie evidence of market failure, so the existence of products
like Foobar Lite is likewise evidence of market failure.
It doesn't have to involve copyright. Before Intel had competitors
like AMD making interchangeable CPUs, they made the 486DX, at a
certain amount of effort Y per chip. Then they put in effort Z on some
chips to damage the FPU component and sold those more cheaply as a
486SX. Unless they were selling the 486SX at a loss, which I doubt,
they could have not crippled them and still been profitable. That
means the difference in price between the SX and DX was pure rent. If
AMD had been around then, they'd have put in Y effort to make a 486DX
clone and sold it at the SX price point to eat Intel alive. Intel only
dared do something this awful to its customers (give them less while
doing more work) because they had a monopoly at that time on x86-
compatible CPUs. You don't see them pulling these kinds of shenanigans
now, do you?
> [snip more stuff as a result of me describing the world as it is and
> Twisted describing the world as it "should" be.]
See above.
>
> [...]
> >> > Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
> >> > steaming turd-pile.
> >>
> >> That's factually false...
> >
> > No, it's factually true.
>
> It's factually false
Fuck you. This is unproductive and it's insulting. You're basically
calling me a liar, and in public too.
> I claim that there are other "experts" (but note that you've avoided
> answering my question as to what criterias you consider an necessary to
> receive the title of "expert") who support Vista.
Name an "expert" (IYHO) who publicly claims Vista is a better choice
for the average consumer than XP SP2. (Any SP2, including regular,
pro, media center edition, 32-bit or 64, etc.)
> Would you consider me an independent, consumer-minded software
> evaluator? Why or why not?
Of course not. You're a pro-Microsoft nut. I don't even know why
you're hanging out here rather than at the C# newsgroup. Or maybe it's
because C# doesn't rate its own newsgroup yet? (Does it, in fact, have
one yet?)
I should also note that some people buy Vista to try it without
necessarily deciding to stick with it, or buy it and try it out of
sheer morbid curiosity. Myself, when I want to derive entertainment by
observing the minutiae of a slow-motion train wreck, I prefer to do it
from elsewhere than standing in the middle of the tracks, but that's
probably just me. :)
Some are probably already being forced to use it at work, the poor
souls, and maybe even at home to stay in synch with their work
computers with respect to Office version and suchlike.
None of these are evidence of Vista's superiority to anything higher
on the evolutionary ladder than the common cockroach.
> >> Question is based on false premise, and is therefore nonsensical.
> >
> > Stop being insulting and rude.
>
> Oh, not this again... Are you going to snip every argument you are
> unable to address, labelling it "insults"?
I quoted your line. I can't "address" it because it is basically
content-free. It made no attempt to actually argue against my
preceding point. In fact it is similar to what you just accused me of,
posting a boilerplate content-free response to arguments you are
unable to address.
If some of the arguments I make are beyond you, I can't offer much
assistance I'm afraid. Technology that provably increases IQ scores,
even temporarily, simply isn't available off the shelf to the average
consumer yet. Nevertheless, with repeated study you might eventually
have an insight into them and be able someday to comprehend and thus
to respond more intelligently.
> If you ask a question which is based on a false premise, how am I
> supposed to answer it, except to tell you that it is a false premise?
You could start by making a cogent argument stating what the premise
is and your reasons for believing it to be false, instead of making a
blanket assertion that some unspecified premise somewhere in what I
wrote is false without evidence. I can't rebut that, because I don't
even know what premise you're referring to. I'd gladly bolster it with
more evidence in its favor if I did. But I'm guessing you'd prefer I
just shut up and let you have the last word instead, bogus though that
last word would therefore likely be.
> If I
> were to ask you "Why is copyright and intellectual property the greatest
> thing in the world?" you could not actually answer the question because it
> is based on the premise that copyright and intellectual property actually
> is the greatest thing in the world, whereas you believe it isn't.
Yes, but I'd explain why I disagreed, rather than simply say some
unspecified premise of yours was false.
I could have responded to your WHOLE POST with "Based on a false
premise and nonsensical." since I disagree with just about everything
in it, but I chose to give a detailed response instead. For that
matter, you could have responded to any of mine in like fashion, since
you seem to disagree with everything in them, yet you choose to do so
only in response to a narrow subset of paragraphs in each of my posts
and give detailed attempts at rebuttals to the rest. I find this
interesting and will now be looking for patterns in which you respond
to with argumentation and which you respond to with a handwave that
essentially just means "I don't agree".
> > Everyone that matters (professional, independent-minded web site
> > administrators whose primary concern is the site working properly and
> > who aren't required to toe some MS-only line by management)
>
> If that's your criteria for "everyone that matters", then I've met
> some counter-examples to your claim.
>
> BTW, my criteria for "everyone that matters" is "the people who are
> making the buying decisions"
Well, it's easy to see where you went wrong, then. The original
question was which was the superior Web server, IIS or Apache?
Obviously the one that works better when employed as a Web server. The
one that crashes less, screws up responding to requests less, admits
fewer intruders that proceed to deface the site or add spam or a 1x1
iframe that loads malicious code when visitors subsequently arrive who
have vulnerable browsers, and so forth. Which happens to be Apache.
IIS admits far more intruders, crashes all the time, screws up (with
e.g. spurious 500-series errors) more often, collapses under heavy
traffic and stops responding at lower traffic volumes given the same
hardware strength than Apache ... Every benchmark, every security
comparison, and the everyday decisions of millions of web masters all
point to Apache being superior. It's also worth noting as I've said
before that it's the only one of the two with the property that a
substantial fraction of web masters feel proud enough of using it to
trumpet the fact publicly on every page of their site.
> since the context that generated this
> subdiscussion is you're wondering whether Microsoft is seriously trying to
> compete against Apache using IIS.
You're making that up out of whole cloth. You claimed that Apache was
not superior to IIS, which I am rebutting. Apparently because I'm not
only right, but cleaning your clock in that particular department,
you've decided to try to redefine it to be about something that I
never argued against.
Microsoft is, of course, seriously trying to compete against Apache
using IIS, albeit miserably failing.
> I'm genuinely surprised that you think Microsoft is not trying to
> compete against Apache.
You're just making that up. At no time did I ever claim anything of
the sort, in this thread or anywhere else, ever.
> > A grown man should not expect to be able to embezzle fifty billion
> > dollars and have it go unnoticed, or be able to pocket it without the
> > bulge being noticed eventually. (Metaphorically, anyway.)
>
> Why not? The Enron Scandal had started in the 1990s and was only
> discovered around 2001. Sounds like pretty sneaky behaviour to me.
A rational crook would have embezzled a fair bit and then floated away
on a golden parachute to a non-extradition-treaty country. This one
stuck around greedily trying to grab more and more until the amount
missing became so large that it could not possibly be concealed
anymore, then promptly got caught.
> > If they thought they wouldn't, they have single-digit IQs and should
> > have been drooling and in diapers still, in a padded room somewhere
> > where they get regular doses of feel-good chemicals like Thorazine.
> > That people with this level of incompetence in basic arithmetic and
> > other life skills were hired and ended up actually in charge of a
> > major energy company is proof of incompetence or irrationality in the
> > hiring department and on the part of the shareholders, in that case.
> > Sooner or later, if you follow the chain back, you run into someone
> > who knew what they were doing and who had to be simply irrational, and
> > who nonetheless had a position of responsibility.
>
> Also, not true, and I recommend you read the Corporation, a book I had
> recommended to you earlier this thread.
If you know of a download URL (cannot be behind a paywall or
registerwall) of the full text of the book I may well do so. Otherwise
you cannot use it as that's not fighting fair. I'm certainly not
paying money (and for all I know, it will end up going to you!) just
to debunk some of the BS you've been posting in cljp lately! Letting
you cost me money would also be letting you win.
In any event, the logic in the paragraph I wrote that you quoted
directly above appears to be impeccable. If you have a reason to
believe it is flawed, provide some reasoning rather than handwaving it
with a reference to a (probably unfree) document that none of the rest
of us has likely ever read and that none of the rest of us likely have
ready access to.
> > Regardless, the corporation itself should have had the information
> > that this couldn't go undetected and the perpetrators uncaught, and
> > acted to self-maximize, per your theory. It didn't.
>
> I disagree.
It's your theory. If you disagree, are you therefore abandoning it and
capitulating this silly fight? If so, I win, and feel free to shut up
now. :)
If you mean you don't think that it torpedoes your theory, think
again. A rational self-maximizing corporation would not embezzle from
itself and then get totally destroyed while hemmorhaging money,
ticking off customers, ruining shareholders, and ending up a smoking
pile of cinders, which is what appears to have happened in this case.
Regarding it as a monolithic entity, it appears to have spontaneously
decided to commit suicide one bright sunny day without any prior
warning or any obvious intolerable externally-imposed circumstances
that might provoke a rational being to make the pain stop in the only
way they could.
A person in good health, with no problems at work or in their love
life, millions of dollars, no skeletons in the closet or legal issues,
and many years of these remaining true to expect statistically, jumps
to their death from a 17th-story balcony. Was that person rational? If
you say they were, please justify this with some reasoning.
> I think you failed to understand what my "theory" is (but actually, I
> never gave a theory, I gave a model). I'll repeat what I said for your
> benefit:
Theory, model, whatever -- it tries to predict and it fails miserably.
Shall we try again now?
> Later on, I said (but cannot find the exact quote, so this is a
> paraphrasing): "A Rational utilitarian is a better model for corporations
> than an emotional anthropomorph".
Don't tell me this is you redefining "better" again. Earlier you
redefined "IIS is better than Apache" as "IIS is marketed more
aggressively than Apache", for all intents and purposes, and switched
to discussing how Microsoft is trying aggressively to compete with
Apache as if that somehow proved your claims. Are you now claiming
that your model is "better" because you are trying aggressively to
compete with my model, or something like that, rather than claiming
that it actually makes better predictions?
> > Actually, I'm guessing they thought the Bush administration would
> > shield them and they turned out instead to be fall guys. Still
> > irrational or stupid; they played with fire and expected not to get
> > burned just because one of the flames made promises to that effect.
>
> Actually, if that's what they thought, it'd still be rational.
No, it isn't. The hypothetical promise of liability-shielding came
from a politician. The promises of politicians are composed of over
99% pure LI3. Therefore it is not rational for anyone who isn't very
young and naïve to believe any such promise without some serious
evidence that it's actually true. This particular (hypothetical)
promise obviously wasn't. And I doubt you believe it at all likely
that the embezzler was young and naïve given that they successfully
rose to a high place in a multi-billion-dollar corporation's inner
executive class and held it for some time.
In fact, the embezzler was irrational in precisely the same manner
exhibited by a chronic gambler who expects to eventually beat the
house and loses his shirt at the craps tables for his efforts. Only
the gambler harms at worst his family and himself, while the embezzler
did much greater damage to a far larger assortment of affected
parties.
> If they thought the Bush Administration would protect them with
> probability 60%, and that the utility they'd gain is 100 "profit points",
> that's an expected utility of 60pp. If the alternative was a more
> conservative approach which gave a 90% probability of gaining 65 "profit
> points", this alternative action gives only 58.5 utility. Better to take
> the first action.
Yeah, and going to jail has a utility of minus how many pp? Also,
believing the protection probability is anything above a sliver of one
percent when the promise came from a politician is obviously not
rational itself, regardless of how rational they might have been in
using the dubious number 60 subsequently.
Also, anyone savvy engaged in this sort of situation should expect
that their benefactor's loyalties will do an abrupt 180 the instant
the benefactor's own self or close minions becomes at risk of scandal
or criminal investigation. At that moment, the rational benefactor
shreds all of the evidence that they were in any way complicit and
leaves the would-be benefactee standing alone to face whatever may
come. And doesn't warn them. Of course, they earlier made sure the
benefactee retained no evidence of the benefactor's aid...supposedly
as part of trying to get rid of "some of the evidence against us", one
assumes...
> >> Are you arguing that these traits (whether or not we agree that the
> >> corporations actually have them) make it such that the "emotional
> >> anthropomoprh" model is more accurate than the "rational utilitarian"
> >> model?
> >
> > See below.
>
> After scanning below, I don't see an answer. Typing either "Yes" or
> "No" would have taken less effort than typing "See below." So which is it?
> Is it "Yes"? Or is it "No"?
What you didn't see below was my mentioning that my model predicts
Enron-like events to occur frequently and yours predicts them to occur
rarely; in fact they appear to now occur frequently, but didn't
apparently used to.
I've never quite agreed that my model is best described by the term
"emotional anthropomorph", but to the extent that it isn't, your
question above is irrelevant and can only serve to attack a straw man
instead of what I have actually said here recently.
> > This is a scathing indictment of the current law then.
>
> Yes. [Attempts to sell me something again -- I think]
If you agree, then why are you continuing to argue against my
suggested reforms and reasons for these to be superior to the current
legal landscape?
>
> >> (1) The profits from outsourcing support (in the form of reduced
> >> support costs) exceeds the cost of outsourcing support (in the form of
> >> lower customer satisfaction).
> >
> > I know of no case where this is actually true except where customer
> > loyalty is a complete non-issue. One-off products might qualify.
> > Anything with consumables or upgrades to generate a future revenue
> > stream is clearly a nonstarter here.
>
> This is your guess. You don't have actual figures.
It is a very strongly educated guess. We have all of the following
evidence:
* They could use tighter QA to cut down on support costs. Satisfied
customers don't complain much. Tighter QA on software is a ridiculous
no-brainer since the added QA costs are fixed instead of proportional
to usage, but the removed support costs are proportional to usage.
Added QA for software always wins in the long term.
* Offshoring support will cost X% of your customer retention rate and
will alienate potential new customers. If you gain customers at a
certain rate, and furthermore each customer buys N items on average,
you end up with eventually having had some number K of customers for
the product and KN sales at whatever margin, for a profit proportional
to KN. Offshoring support reduces N more or less directly and reduces
K at the same time by making customers warn would-be customers that
support is awful and they should shop elsewhere. It doesn't take a
genius to note that the loss is quadratic rather than linear. That's
bad news. The savings might be quadratic too, since one supposes
support costs proportional to KN, but this only comes out to be a win
if the expected support costs per unit exceed the expected margin per
unit. If that's the case your real problem was that you either priced
too low, or you suck. Either way, you save even more money by
eliminating support entirely in this case, and maybe more still by not
even trying to sell this particular line of products at all. :P
It follows that we should mainly expect offshoring support by a
rational company for products that are loss-leaders and whose
dependent is supported onshore -- even offshoring support for the
razor but not for the blades may be bad, since razor sales being hurt
will hurt the blade sales you make money on.
* There's also the empirical evidence: companies that offshored
support often run into financial trouble shortly after due to sagging
sales volumes; some are stupid enough to actually wonder why. Some
onshore their support again and recover. Some die. Some have a
monopoly lock-in, and tell the customers to go fuck themselves, and
the customers have to just grin and go hunting for some lube. These
last, of course, make my original point.
> Actually, no, quite the opposite. My *model* predicts that companies
> will try to do whatever they think will make their them the most profit.
> Enron followed my model (they made nearly 50 billion of pure profit
> according to your figures).
I don't know what the actual figures are, but I think it's safe to say
they were forced to give up at least as much as they embezzled. Also,
Enron didn't make anything, some embezzlers at the top may have gotten
away with some money. More got caught and the company name is
certainly ruined as it's synonymous with "a catastrophically bad
investment" these days.
> You say "Mine" implying that you have a model and/or a theory? If so,
> can you actually state what it is? Is your model that corporations are
> emotional anthropomorphs?
I stated what it was in an earlier posting; if you want to reread it
go ahead and reread it as I'm not stopping you. I would not agree that
your description is the most accurate possible, though, no.
> > You said you saw a lot of banners promoting IIS. I don't doubt it; I
> > don't doubt MS is promoting IIS heavily.
>
> Okay, good. Earlier, it sounded like you *were* doubting that.
That's probably because you have an IQ somewhere between that of a
stone and that of a larger rock with river moss growing on it. It
certainly isn't because it was true, or I'd said anything to imply or
suggest that it was.
> > I said I didn't see the banners and you should really get Adblock, on
> > the grounds that I figured you found constantly being bombarded by
> > distracting flashing animated things while you're trying to find and
> > read information online was annoying.
> >
> > Apparently you are crazy enough that:
> > a) You don't find it annoying.
>
> I'm amused that you find natural immunity to ads to be a form of
> craziness.
What natural immunity? You noticed and remembered the extravagant pro-
IIS claims in a bunch of them, so you're hardly naturally immune to
their somewhat-dubious charms. :P You went on to dispute my claim that
Apache is a better choice of Web server software, which implies that
you're not only not immune to the ads getting some fraction of your
attention (thus distracting it away from focusing on something
relevant to your task at the time), but furthermore you're not even
immune to being persuaded by the fucking things.
Just what ARE you immune to, then? Besides chicken pox, polio, mumps,
and rubella that is? :P
> > b) You actually believe what the flashy thingies whisper in your ear
> > while someone tries to stick their hand in your pocket
>
> I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for that in
> my post.
Your defense of IIS over Apache despite its obvious inferiority is
evidence aplenty.
> > c) You actually therefore believe that IIS is superior to Apache.
>
> I don't know how you concluded this. There was no evidence for that in
> my post.
I said that IIS was worse than Apache and you disagreed. I call that
evidence.
> > I claimed that Vista WAS a downgrade, not that it was PERCEIVED by any
> > particular group to be a downgrade.
>
> Hmm... Well, I disagree with your claim, then.
That's as insane as disagreeing with my claim that IIS is inferior to
Apache. I already TWICE mentioned that you can do less, more slowly,
with Vista and given hardware than you can with XP SP2 and the same
hardware, except for one single game you can play on Vista but not on
XP, and which a third-party thing might soon make XP able to run
anyway. If that's not evidence enough of Vista's inferiority (oh, and
did I mention it costs money versus sticking with your existing copy
of XP, and that it's full of crummy DRM that eats system resources and
can't be turned off despite you, the system administrator, considering
it unwanted, and a whole bunch of other stuff?) I don't know what the
fuck it would take to convince you that it was. Documented evidence of
a computer bursting into flames shortly after Vista was installed
perhaps? Given the oft-reported gratuitous heavy continuous DRM-
related CPU use by Vista and a growing tendency for the cheaper
computer manufacturers to install inadequate CPU cooling to save a
buck and in the hopes that the buyer will never run it at near-100%
utilization for any length of time, it shouldn't be hard to find as
much Vista-linked porno for pyros on Youtube as it will take to
convince you. Search for some ... I dare ya. :)
> At the Turing-Equivalent level, it may be true that Vista doesn't let
> you do anything which XP doesn't let you do. From a more practical
> perspective, your statement is false. I'll give you one example: The Vista
> start button now has a search feature...
I just clicked the Start button. The second to last item on the right
hand side was Search, with a cute magnifying glass logo next to it. On
a WinXP SP2 box I keep around.
> A wise "rational utilitiarian" person would not assume that everybody
> has the same utility function that they do, and thus would not try to make
> subjective statements into objective ones.
Even easier access to the "search", if it were true (and it clearly
isn't) that Vista provided such, would not be worth gobs of DRM. You
can find third-party search tools and add them to XP's Start menu
(including not in a submenu, by adding a shortcut to the top left part
of the main menu) anyway, which makes them just as accessible, and the
search tool can be perfectly good.
Meanwhile XP SP2 has better hardware support, better system
requirements/stability, better (i.e. much less) DRM, ...
Anyone choosing Vista for production use rather than just testing or
kicks despite this stuff is clearly irrational.
> I guess you wouldn't consider me to be a savvy computer user, then.
You show few signs of being a savvy anything. Computer user, flame
warrior, copyright defender ... as far as I can tell you're mediocre
at all of these.
> Well, not anymore. I got kind of fed up with their rhetoric tactics by
> the beginning of the third chapter. I think the line that really got my
> eyes rolling was:
>
> <quote>
> Competition is a good thing. That is why the NBA and the
> Tour de France are so popular, and why we give our all at the
> annual interdepartmental basketball game.
> </quote>
You're going to ignore tons of cogent arguments because you don't like
the authors' *style*? That is irrational to the nth degree.
Oh, well. Your loss.
> fallacies sprinkled throughout their treatise. "Hey, I love Basketball! I
> guess I should support the abolishment of intellectual property too!"
Straw man, caricature, and about ten other things. They never
suggested such a chain of reasoning was valid and you know it.
> And what information have you perceived to be "bogus and inaccurate"
> so far in this thread, other than perhaps my claim that "Vista sucks" is
> subjective?
Oh, such bogosity as suggestions that copyrights aren't bad, claims
that IIS is better than Apache (not just better-marketed), and
accusations that I lied (once) or wrote "nonsense" (numerous
times) ... that kind of thing. The usual twaddle and BS you run into
on usenet despite having killfiled every blatant spammer you saw.