Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?
"Twisted" <twisted0n3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184651360.821682.40950@22g2000hsm.googlegroups.com...
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