Re: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Copyright and Patent Law?

<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1185422968.736766.45970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jul 25, 1:44 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Exactly my point. IN PRACTISE the only alternative a user has is to
"buy from the company store".

Factually false.

Factually true. Can you get a perfectly Windows-compatible OS from any
source other than Microsoft legally? Not here or in most countries.
The closest you can come that isn't from the "company store" is Linux
+ X + Wine, which is a fairly poor substitute with all kinds of
compatibility issues.

Here's an alternative: Don't use Windows, nor a "perfect
Windows-compatible OS". Use a different OS. Like Linux, or MacOSX.

Consider Firefox vs Internet Explorer, for example. I prefer
Firefox.

And you no doubt sometimes run into IE-only sites. Again no perfect
substitute.

Once, 2 years ago. And it was for a site I wasn't really all that
interested in visiting anyway (something like 7up.com)

For some things (including access to Windoze Update) again
you must go to the Microsoft "company store". On the other hand, IE is
not a substitute for Firefox either, especially if you value your
computer's security from spyware and other intrusions!

You are actually furnishing examples that SUPPORT my point -- that
right now there is no alternative, if you don't want to break
compatibility, to buying from the "company store" lots of the time.

I guess you don't consider Firefox to be an alternative to IE, then.

My point is that the ratio of crappy games to good games is much
worse
for free games than for commercial games.

No, because the bias is still there. You play a) free games, and b)
commercial games that went through extra filtering steps in 1) the
company deciding whether to release or abandon (companies will more
quickly abandon something that looks likely to be a money-loser than
freebie-making hobbyists a project that looks likely to simply be a
loser) and

EXACTLY! This is why there is value to having commercial games. There
is a minimum quality barrier that most game companies adhere to when
making games which actually cost money. This is why I believe the vast
majority of the time, commercial games will be better than free games, and
why forcing all games to be free is a bad thing.

[...]

If there's anything you're paying for with commercial games that
boosts quality, it's simply extra filtering that could as easily come
by way of organic community review processes that, on a crowdsourced
model (ala user book ratings on amazon.com) with no central reviewers
(and especially if fully p2p-architected to avoid central servers
too), could easily have a price tag of zero.

Well, noticed that the "crowdsource" tends to go crazy over commercial
games (look how many fan sites are drooling over Halo 3, Assassin's Creed,
the next Final Fantasy, the next Metal Gear Solid, etc.)

What was the last free game that the crowdsource went crazy for?
Counterstrike, in 1999? And what was the one before that? Nothing?

"Filtering" is not the only thing which makes commercial games better
than free games. If it were, there should be a free game around with the
same quality as the greatest commercial games. Where are they?

Perhaps 90% of all games are
crap, but that would be because 99% of free games are crap and 70% of
commercial games are crap, and it averages out to 90% (since there are
more free games than commercial games).

Even if this were true it wouldn't mean much. It means getting rid of
copyright and patent increases the number of crap games out there. So
what?

If there were no more games of the same quality as commercial games,
and all games were of the quality of free games, then the world would suck
very much, my friend.

You can still avoid the crap games, and at worst a crap game
will cost you a bit of time and bandwidth finding out it's crap, but
never serious money. Sounds like an improvement to me.

You forgot about the part of Quake 3 never getting made (I chose Quake
3, since you seem to be a fan of that game). Counterstrike would never
have gotten made, because HalfLife would not have gotten made.

Also if a few
people actually like one of the "crap" games that would have landed on
the commercial side of the fence before, and then been filtered out at
some point before they ever got to see them, they get games they like
that would otherwise have never been available to anyone!

Such a low probability that it's not worth considering.

In other words, there's something about commercial games that make
them less likely to be crappy. I suspect it's the fact that money is
involved and that you can hire talented people using money.

I think it's just filtering.

Well, I think you're wrong, otherwise we should see, in addition to
all the crappy free games, some free games which rival the quality of
commercial games. But we don't.

There are free levels for Quake 3: Arena
that rival in quality the ones that came with the game. Nay, some are
actually superior in visuals and other respects, because experienced
players made them, and they were made with higher polygon budgets due
to Moore's Law having increased gamers' processing beef since the
initial game release, and they were made with wholly new techniques
(e.g. fancy terrain blending) enabled by community development of
upgraded game-editing tools and new assets (textures etc.).
This wouldn't have happened if "making something for free means
there's zero talent" as you so forcefully keep asserting.

Level design is not sufficient to make a good game. You need art
asset, music, voice acting, script writing, story design, 3D modelling,
engine programming, and so on.

As you've shown with your examples, "free" can get you some additional
levels for an existing commercial game... But you need the commercial game
in the first place.

There are high quality free games of all kinds -- entire games, not
just addon levels for commercial games -- so you can't claim that
somehow magically the money-costing talent of the commercial game
"leaked into" the community-made levels and get away with that
"explanation".

Can you name some of them? And I want you to use the same metric for
"high quality" as you do for commercial games. So when you mention
"Nethack" or "Sokoban" or "Frozen Penguin" or "Bejeweled", etc., while
they may be "high quality" compared to other free games, they suck
compared to commercial games.


Community-made levels that use little of the commercial
game save its engine are bad enough for your argument. Community-made
entire games, engine included, blow it out of the water. So do source
ports like Tenebrae that pretty much reimplement a commercial game
from scratch. Tenebrae + custom Quake 1 level (e.g. any one of Iikka's
blue themed levels) with all-custom assets = barely anything
originated by the commercial source remains save the QuakeC telling
the game monsters how to move and determining what damage their
weapons do.

Oh, great. A fan made clone of Quake 1 which was *BASED ON THE QUAKE 1
SOURCE CODE*. Hooray for free games. I'm sure Quake 1 would be a great
commercial success by today's standards, right? I mean, if they released
Quake 1 today, it could seriously compete for gamer's attention, pulling
them away from their XBox360 and PS3 games, right?

Oh wait... No, it can't. Because our expectations as gamers have moved
on since 1996, when Quake 1 was first released, over ten years ago.

And there's a wholly-original community-made popular RTS
game with Linux ports.

Really? Popular, you say? Is it as popular as Warcraft 3? Does it have
the visuals of Supreme Commander? Or is this another free game which is
decidedly less impressive than its commercial counterparts?

There's the fact that Tenebrae pulls off most
of the same new visual features Doom 3 does, and was developed wholly
independently of Doom 3, based on an older Quake engine (1 vs. 3), and
does as well, and is free.

Tenebrae looks as good as Doom 3, you say?

http://images.google.ca/images?q=tenebrae
http://www.tenebrae2.com/tb2_screenshots.html

http://images.google.ca/images?q=doom%203
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/reviews/pc/doom-3/
http://happypenguin.org/show?Doom%203
http://forums.biorust.com/3d-modelling/3374-doom-3-skin-shading.html

Hmm...

I think you need to get your eyesight checked.

Argue all you want. There is plenty of talented work product available
for the low, low price of $0.00, and there always has been and always
will be. Them's the bald facts.

I don't disagree with that. I'm saying that people are drawn to money,
and that companies prefer to higher people who are more talented as
opposed to people who are less talented.

Therefore as a natural process, commercial games get more talent
poured into them than free games.

I'm not saying there's zero talent in free games. I'm saying if you're
really talented, you'll probably be able to get a job using those talents.
And given that most people prefer to do something and get paid for it,
rather than do the same exact thing for free, those talented people will
tend to get jobs. From companies. Who make games. Which cost money.

[...]

Strawman argument. Windows is emphatically indispensible for certain
things or under certain circumstances.

I think you don't know what "Strawman argument" means. A Stawman
argument would be an argument in which I had misrepresented your
arguments. It seems clear to me that you actually did claim that
Windows
is indispensible (and in fact, that you are claiming it again now), so
when I portray your arguments as if you were claiming that Windows is
indispensible, this is a very accurate portrayal.
The strawman misrepresentation is that I never claimed people can't
"get through life" without Windows -- lots of people do it all the
time.

I guess you have a different definition of "indispensible" than I do,
then.

I claimed that there is no 100% compatible substitute for
Windows.

I don't dispute that there is no 100% compatible substitue for
Windows. I DO dispute that Windows is indispensible.

I said Windows is not optional if you want to do certain things, that
logically should be possible without paying Microsoft because those
things are not themselves run by Microsoft. Your response was to
mischaracterize my argument as being that "But you can't live without
Windows!", which is classic strawman fallacy.

Like I said, I think you have a different definition of
"indispensible" than I do.

Try doing high-end CAD stuff with Linux or FreeBSD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_computer-aided_design_software

Or just about
anything requiring color management and matching when printed out. Or
playing certain (non-Microsoft) games.

Why should Microsoft have to be paid for me to do these things? I see
no public-benefit rationale in society enforcing such a thing by law.

I'm not aware of a law that forces you to pay Microsoft to play
certain non-Microsoft games. On the other hand, you may need to pay
Microsoft in order to acquire a valid license for Windows. If the game
*requires* Windows, that was a decision that the game makers made, and is
not really Microsoft's fault. If you can figure out a way to play the game
without using Windows (perhaps, e.g., because it was a game written in
Java, or perhaps via emulation software), then you won't need to pay
Microsoft at all. This shows that there is no such law.

Hell, I should be able to do whatever I like without depending on any
specific vendor.

I think there exist certain things you should not be allowed to do.

I should be able to have local and long distance
service by a choice of providers, separately. I should be able to use
any of several operating systems, including various unixes (got them,
Linux, FreeBSD...) and windowses (so far there's only Microsoft
there). I should be able to use any application level software I like
on any of these. And I should be able to get any given application
software from a choice of vendors providing perfectly interchangeable
versions.
[...]

This is where I would normally say "So what?" because I'm not really
interested in how you think the world should be. This would normally be a
starting point where we start talking past each other, with me talking
about how the world is. But now that I'm more aware about this kind of
miscommunication, I'm avoiding it, and notifying you of the potential
pitfall here too.

Again, Windows is not indispensible. Go to comp.os.linux.advocacy
if
you don't believe me.

Tell me how to do exactly what I can do with Corel Draw + Windows,
including color management, without using any Microsoft or Corel
software, and I might change my mind. Until then ...

Well, first of all, you're not using the same definition of
"indispensible" as I am. Second of all, if you want to find out how, I
already told you what to do: Go to comp.os.linux.advocacy. If you don't
want to find out how (perhaps because finding out how would threaten your
current belief system), then it doesn't matter what I tell you.

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 disagree that I'm defending the state of affairs as it is now.

So you're just attacking my suggested reform then? Why?

The term "attacking" has too strong of a negative connotation. I am
pointing out whaT I perceive to be logical inconsistencies in your
reasoning so that you may better explain them to me. I've said this in my
previous post already.

Because it
won't leave you any loopholes to wriggle a hand through to stick it in
someone's pocket without them being able to tell you to cheerfully
bugger off and get the exact same thing elsewhere for a lower price?

Nope.

No loopholes by which you can charge a fat percentage above marginal
cost for a good and not have to worry about being undercut by a
competitor?

Nope.

Even if you make less money consider what the consequences
would be. You'd spend far far less than you do now on all sorts of
things.

Yes, I know, and these are arguments I've cited to other people as
well towards the benefit of your reform. This is why I'm am generally
supportive of your reform. It's just the details that I disagree with.

The only people who will lose more money than they save from such a
change will be the very fatcat executives, lawyers, lobbyists, and
legislators that will fight this change with their dying breaths.

This is a big claim, and one I would not repeat without more evidence
backing it up.

Show them a world without boundaries -- a world without copyright.

Stylistic criticism here: you're sounding like a hippy, and I think
that makes your argument less persuasive to the mainstream. I'm telling
you this so that you can make your arguments more persuasive, and not as
an attempt to counter your arguments.

When they see it coming to pass anyway they won't be able to claim
"but it's unworkable" anymore because the counterexample will be
staring them in the face. They can dismiss a seemingly niche thing
like current free software and free culture movements. They won't be
able to dismiss it when the majority of stuff is free-as-in-speech
rather than a minority. They won't be able to say "Oh, well a FEW
companies can find a niche with such a WACKO business model, but it
proves nothing" anymore once free culture and free software are
mainstream.

Nice. So what have you released into the public domain so far?

[...]

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.

The software can be configured in multiple ways. For example,
whether
or not you had eye-candy enabled might affect the bug. As a software
developer, you should be aware of this.

If eye-candy setting variations can cause dropped files to go randomly
to different places, then that is in itself a bug. An eye-candy option
should only affect how data looks, not how it behaves semantically.

I argue that the pixel-position of filenames on the screen is "how the
data looks" and not "how it behaves semantically".

Anyway are you claiming that there is an eye candy option that makes
dropped files always appear near where the mouse pointer was, and
under which if you drop near the top of a tall list of items in say
Tiles mode, it never, ever, ever, ever puts it all the way at the
bottom (actually scrolling down to display where it went -- somewhere
you therefore can't possibly have clicked anywhere near)?

I avoid making "never, ever, ever" claims. I claim that 100% of the
time (which is like 5 or 6 times) in which I did it, the bug did not
manifest itself.

If so, which option is it?

Under the performance settings, I've got everything unchecked except
for "Show translucent selection rectangle", "Show Window content while
dragging", "Smooth edges of screen font" and "Use common tasks in
folders".

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 --

I think you don't know what "almost none" means. Windows XP SP2
was
released in 2004. In 1994, people were running Windows 3.1.

Ten years ago as of this writing is 1997, by which time Windows 95 had
existed for a while and had a time to receive at least one service
pack and develop some maturity. At that time Explorer was equally old
(around 2 years old) and this particular bug existed. It remains
unfixed now, a decade later. It's probably something stupid like a
race condition that would take a couple of hours to find and five
minutes to fix. Ten years is a span over forty thousand times that
long. There is absolutely no excuse.

So you agree that several bugs have been fixed in the time span of 10
years?

[...]
There's the double-counter that "curing diseases is not harmful;
curtailing peoples' freedom to do harmless things is".

And then there's the triple-counter of "Forcing all information to
be
free is not necessarily harmless". So there. =P

It is does far more good than harm as long as it doesn't extend to
permit (or require!) privacy invasions.

Yeah, that's the claim. Some people (myself included) are skeptical.

You have a different definition of "deal" than I have, for
example.
When I interact with a vending machine, I am not directly interacting
with
any human, and yet the terms of the deal are clear: I have to put $1
into
the slot, and I get a drink or candy or whatever it is that the
vending
machine is offering. The fact that you require a living sentient being
present is unecessarily restrictive.

Are there any restrictions on what you can do with the can, or is it
just a straight-up sale governed by default sale-regulating law?

Well, it depends on the vending machine, I suppose. It's conceivable
that there may exist a vending machine out there which will display an
EULA that you must agree to before accepting your beverage. If no such
EULA is present, then I assume that I can do whatever I want with the can,
taking into consideration any other laws that may apply (for example,
using the can to smash someone's window is probably illegal). If there
*IS* an EULA, then I will decide whether or not I agree with its term
before buying the drink. If I do, then I'll buy it. If I don't, then I'll
buy a drink somewhere else.

[more "should vs is" stuff that I have no comment on]

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.

What about signing a document without a witness?

That should be the bare minimum cost to a company of having a
restrictive agreement with a customer that goes beyond what the law
provides via copyright and other applicable laws, either by further
restricting the customer or by removing their affirmative rights under
the law (e.g. to sue in small-claims court rather than go to binding
arbitration, in an all-too-common example).

I must be stupid, because I don't understand your answer. Can you
explain it in more simple terms? As I mentioned, I often sign documents
with no witnesses present, citing my income tax return as one example. Do
you think these zero-witness documents have no meaning at all? Or do you
think that it may be possible to be bounded by the conditions of a
document you signed and agreed to, even if there were not witnesses seeing
you sign it?

[...]

I'm not from the UK.

You keep behaving as if you are. You certainly behave as though you're
not in North America, but are where English is the dominant language.
That seems to mean if it's not the UK it's Australia, where the law is
similar again.

I'm not from Australia either.

[...]
No, I think maybe you're in a certain frame of mind (we might call
it
"argumentative"), and your frame of mind forces tones onto the text
you
read which are not present.

It's *text*. If you're associating any kind of "tone" with it at all
you're frankly hallucinating and should see a neurologist who will be
far better qualified to help you than I am.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3A+tone
<quote>
The writer's attitude toward his readers and his subject; his mood or
moral view. A writer can be formal, informal, playful, ironic, and
especially, optimistic or pessimistic.
</quote>


You frequently think I'm disputing a lot of
things which I'm not actually disputing, and you think people are
insulting you, when they're not, and you think people are hacking you,
when they are not, etc.

This doesn't make sense. If I post something and you don't agree with
it, you're disputing even if you claim you're not.

Just because I reply to something doesn't mean I disagree with it.

If you call me a
name or impugn my honor, intelligence, competence at <foo>,
capabilities, mental health, or any other attribute or ability in
public, then you are insulting me even if you claim you're not.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3A+insult
<quote>
abuse: a rude expression intended to offend or hurt;
[...]
a deliberately offensive act or something producing the effect of
deliberate disrespect
</quote>

To insult someone is a deliberate action. I am not deliberately
offending or hurting you. I am stating what I believe to be objective
facts, or if they are merely my opinions, I explictily state so.

You may be insulted by such statements, but that does not necessarily
mean that I am insulting you.

And if
postings of mine selectively disappear/don't propagate in a content-
sensitive manner and spam filtering is highly implausible as an
explanation, then I am (almost certainly) being hacked even if you
claim I'm not.

I disagree, but am too lazy to explain to you my reasons for believing
otherwise.

Of course, you've made it fairly obvious that you have a vested
interest here.

What do you think my interest is?

Extortion, obviously. Why else oppose copyright abolition than if you
have something you sell at a 4000% mark-up over marginal cost and fear
being undercut by competition?

Perhaps because I believe without copyright, computer games would be a
lot crappier on average? At any rate, it's not a black and white issue.
Just because I oppose copyright abolition doesn't mean that I think we
should have lots and lots of copyright. Maybe I think we should have less
copyright than we have now, but we should have more than zero copyright.

[...]
[snip one interpretation; the one which favors Twisted's arguments, of
course]

So if it happens to favor my arguments, it's ipso facto bogus?

I never claimed that. This is one of the things I'm talking about when
I say you infer tones or insults or whatever which are not there.

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?

Perhaps if the configuration or technology used the laptop itself
is
that which is valuable.

Not even then, since Alice still has this valuable technology and has
not in any way been deprived of the use of it or of the physical
possession of her laptop.

The value of the technology is not in having it, but in being the only
person to have it.

Or perhaps, the
laptop harddrive contains senstive information, such as govermental
records, and in the process of cloning the laptop, you've also cloned
the
contents of the harddrive.

I never objected to laws making truly sensitive information government-
secret. I don't want the enemy to have timely knowledge of my side's
battle plans for instance.

Okay, so we agree that not ALL information should be free. Good.

I don't want government-collected private
information leaking and enabling identity theft either. So I would
support having laws a) making certain information classified for a
short time, with automatic expiry, during wartime, expiring after a
time limit or if the war is officially ended; this should keep battle
plans secure; b) making the details on how to make WMDs secret, but
construction, preservation of an arsenal of, and use of the WMDs
subject to legislature approval; and c) making private information
(peoples' financial and health records, street address, names where
they choose to be pseudonymous online, email addresses where they
choose not to reveal them, credit card numbers, and the like) subject
to nontransferable "copyright-like" control, each piece of such
information about a particular person by that particular person. So a
company wanting, say, my street address would require my explicit opt-
in permission to tell each specific third party that address before
they are permitted by law to do so, or to publish it (e.g. in the
phone book).

Okay, so you agree that something which is "copyright-like" may be
desirable in some situations. Good. We're in agreement then.

You're falsely assuming that it takes a competitor the same amount
of
effort to make the same product as the original company.

If it takes them less and they sell for less so much the better.
That's called "efficiency". If someone can make something just as high
quality for half the cost they deserve to be rewarded in the
marketplace! That's the whole point of capitalism!

I'm talking about the situation in which it takes them more. Read the
next paragraph:

For example, Microsoft makes Windows a certain way. They make some
internal design decisions which ends up with Windows having a certain
set
of features, a certain specific behaviour, and so on. For a competitor
to
make an competing product of Windows which behaves identically is
extremely difficult, unless they had access to the original internal
design decisions. To make a fully-substitutable product, you'd have to
not
only duplicate all the features of Windows, but also duplicate all the
bugs, including the ones that Microsoft themselves don't even know
about.

Only to the extent that third-party software actually depends on a
buggy behavior of Windows to work properly, and to that extent, the
buggy behavior is known and documented (at least by the third-party
software's developer).

Not by Microsoft, not by anyone else, and sometimes not even by the
third party developer. Sometimes you play around with a poorly documented
API until it just works, and then you swear never to touch this piece of
code again. It happens in the real world of programming.

Anyway, you didn't address my point at all. Like I said, you're
assuming it takes a competitor equal or less effort to make 100%
substitutable product. In the case of Windows, it would likely take a much
greater amount of effort.

Yes, I do. When they fab the processors, they don't all come out
equal. For example, one processor from a batch might run fine at 3Ghz,
while another processor from the same batch might only be able to
manage
2Ghz. So althought they all come from the same manufacturing process,
some
processors will be (correctly) marked as an inferior product, and sold
at
a lower price.

That's not a shenanigan, that's normal market forces. They're not
deliberately degrading some of them; instead they simply have
imperfect QA. There's an enormous difference there. The price
differential reflects a difference in marginal cost: suppose one in
two chips can run at the higher speed. Then the cost of the better
chip is substantially higher than the cost of the mediocre one since
to make one "better" chip requires making a two chips on average.
Making a single "better" chip thus has twice the cost of making a
single "can be mediocre" chip. On
the other hand it also produces an average of one "free" mediocre chip
as well as the "better" chip, so it can be
discounted by the mediocre chip's price. The result is that instead of
both chips being priced by the market at the marginal cost of one "can
be mediocre" chip, the mediocre one is priced a bit lower and the
better one is priced a bit higher.

Anyway, a competitive market will make the pricing rational, in
theory. It will certainly not price the chip with the higher marginal
cost lower! (Making a 486SX meant making a 486DX and then doing
additional work on it, so its marginal cost was higher than the
486DX.)

Making a 486SX means making a 486DX without the additional step of
ensuring that the FPU works. As in your example, making a 486DX might
require four attempts on average (requiring the main CPU to work and the
FPU to work), whereas making a 486SX might require only two attempts on
average (requiring the main CPU to work, and not caring whether or not the
FPU works).

In the specific case of the 486SX, they may have found that in
some of
their batches, their FPU components were naturally failing as part of
the
manufacturing process, and they figured they could sell that processor
at
a lower price.

That would not be a shenanigan, if true. However I'm fairly sure I
read somewhere that they intentionally crippled 486 chips destined to
be 486SX chips to make them 486SX chips and left others alone to be
486DX chips.

Well, if Intel were as smart as me (and I suspect that they at least
as smart as I am), they would test the FPU, and if it had a faulty FPU,
they would market it as a 486SX. If it was a fully functioning FPU, they
could either sell it as a 486DX or a 486SX, depending on market demands.
This leads to greater profits than simply immediately breaking all FPUs
for the SX series, and then hoping for the best for the DX series, and
merely throwing away the DXes that don't work.

Then, as demand picked up for the cheaper processors, they
had to actually disable the FPU component to meet that demand.

If they could sell deliberately damaged 486DXs at the SX price point
to meet the demand and turn a profit, then they could have sold fully-
functional 486DXs at the SX price point to meet the demand and still
turned a profit. A competitive market would have forced them to,
because if they didn't a competitor would.

Assuming a competitor could produce a 486 chip, yes. We're more or
less in agreement.

The same thing happens with clockspeeds in processors. Sometimes,
there's a lot of demand for a lower clockspeed (and cheaper) CPU, but
it
just so happens that the manufacturers were "lucky" this time around,
and
all of their batches produced very high-rated processors. So to meet
the
demand, they have to actually downclock some of their processors and
cell
those.

And that is illegitimate. If we could have the higher speed for the
same price why should it be held back from us?

You can. It's called overclocking.

It's exactly the same thing which happens when you buy "Extra
extra
virgin olive oil" instead of "extra virgin olive oil". By paying a
premium, you increase the likelyhood that you're getting the best from
the
batch. If you pay a lower price, you may still get the best from the
batch
(e.g. if all items in the batch were equally good), but you run the
risk
of getting something slightly worse.

The processor equivalent is to sell chips tested up to some speed for
a low price, and others tested up to a higher speed for a higher
price, but not deliberately cripple any chips.

You are crippling the "extra extra virgin olive oil" by mixing it with
merely "extra virgin oil". Basically, when you buy "extra virgin oil", you
may have some "extra extra virgin oil" in there, or you may not.

Similarly, when you buy a lower-rated CPU (e.g. 2GHZ), it *may* be
capable of being clocked up to 3GHz, or it may not.

By paying a premium for the 3GHz, you're paying for the fact that
Intel asserts that yes, these CPUs are tested to function at 3GHz. If you
merely buy the 2GHz CPU, you may actually have a chip which will run fine
at 3GHz, but Intel themselves are not making any promises about it.

People buying at the
low price point may get errors running at clock rates people buying at
the higher price have no problems at; or they may not. They aren't
forced to use the lower speed though; it's merely a crapshoot whether
they get a higher speed or not.

That is EXACTLY the situation as it is now.

Anyway if they can sell the best chips at the lowest price point and
still make a profit they have no right to charge more for them; doing
so is a privilege. A competitive market should tend not to grant that
privilege.

Intel cannot sell ALL their chips at the lowest price point. They need
to sell some chips at a high price point, and others at a low price point.
Here's some fictional numbers to help illustate the point.

Let's say you can make 100 CPUs in a given batch, and it costs $20'000
to make a batch. In theory, if they all came out equally, you could sell
the CPUs for $200 each to just break even. So you make such a batch, and
it turns out that 50 of those CPUs can only run at 2Ghz, and 50 of them
can run at 3Ghz. You sell the 3Ghz ones at $300 each, making $15;000. So
far, you've loss $5000. So you sell the 2Ghz CPUs at $100 each, making
another $5'000. When you add these two together, you get $20'000, thus
just breaking even.

A naive person might see this and say "Hey, if you can afford to sell
your 2GHz chips at $100 each, and the 2GHz chips are just 3GHz chips that
have been downclocked, why don't you sell ALL your chips at $100?"

If they did that, they would no longer be making a profit, and instead
be taking on a loss.

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.)

First list what criterias you consider necessary to receive the
title
of "expert".

Just name someone! Someone YOU consider an expert.

Okay. A friend of mine named Patrick Wong (no relation).

I subscribe to the C# newsgroup

AHA! He admits it!

Oops. You caught me. I guess I *double*-lose this arugment.

He IS a Microsoft partisan! That explains every
single bogus argument and seemingly-insane choice he's made, from
favoring copyright law and lack of market competition to favoring
Vista.

So ... how much is Microsoft paying you to endorse their party line in
cljp instead of having independent, honestly formed opinions of your
own? Or do you actually have independent, honestly formed opinions
that just happen to be 100% wrong, wrong, wrong out of some inability
to recognize when you've been logically refuted or when something
(e.g. Windows Pista) is utter ***?

The latter. ;)

[...]
I've started to do that, but often times, I suspect your
"premises"
are facetious. Things like "Vista objectively sucks", which I suspect
no
rational or honest person would actually believe.

You are insane. Vista does objectively suck. By the objective criteria
of "can I do anything with Vista that I can't do with XP?" whose
answer is "no". Oh, right, Halo 3. Big whup.

Right, so you've given a counter example to refute your own argument.

If you STILL claim that it is not objectively confirmed that XP is
superior to Vista, then you need help that I am not qualified to
provide; but I'll give you a referral to whichever specialist you
choose if you look up "psychiatrists" in the Yellow Pages.

I don't understand what it is you are offering me. You're saying if I
choose a psychiatrist, you'll give me a referral to that particular
psychiatrist which I myself chose?

The problem here is that you assume I disagree with everything in
your
post. I don't. I agree with a lot of it. I only disagree with a narrow
subset of paragraphs, and those are the ones which I sometimes respond
to.

You respond to nearly every paragraph I write here so the "narrow
subset" is apparently about 99% of them. Curious definition of
"narrow".

No, I snip liberally. Maybe you don't realize how long your posts are.

So in other words, if I say I disagree with something, then I
disagree
with it. If I don't say whether or not I disagree with something, then
you
have no information as to whether or not I disagree with it.

If you argue instead of accepting the point then I assume (rightly)
that you disagree with it.

You say "the point", as if there was only one. If you mention 4 points
in a sentence, I may disagree with one of them, without disagreeing with
the other 3.

Note that I'm working under the assumption that you're not open to
alternatives to your beliefs

Muster some evidence and I might accept some alternative.

You say this as if you believe I want you to accept alternatives. I
don't. I really don't care what you choose to believe in.

so I'm not trying to "convince" you that I
am right or anything like that. I am very interested in your beliefs,
however (in fact, I was speaking about the plausibility of a world
without
intellectual property with some friends of mine last night over
dinner,
and I repeated a couple of your arguments to defend the plausibility),
and
I'd like to hear more about it.

In other words you just argue for the sake of arguing, taking a
position contrary to some position someone else espoused, and even
when sometimes this means arguing in favor of IP, sometimes arguing
against IP, etc.???

The problem is you seem to assume IP is all or nothing. I believe that
some IP is good, but the world as it is now has too much IP. So when you
say "Let's abolish IP", I disagree that this is a good idea, because that
would be too little IP. When people say "We need more IP", I'll disagree
with them, because I think we already have too much IP.

This is why when you say something which really doesn't make sense
to
me, I reply to it, explaining the problems I see. I tend to assume
that
most people are logical or rational in most aspects, and so if they
say
something irrational or illogical, I can only assume I must have
misunderstood something. I'll state what I see to be a logical
inconsistency, to give the other person (you, in this case) a chance
to
clarify what was meant.

Why does it often look like a wilful misunderstanding in these cases,
then?

For example continuing to act as if I haven't sufficiently proven the
case for using XP rather than Vista, when I'm fairly certain I have,
short of citing chapter and verse. Lew's post (search for posts by Lew
on the date on this post's timestamp and it will be one of only two or
three), various entries at the Gripe Log (http://www.gripe2ed.com),
and a lot of stuff easily found by googling "Windows Vista" will
support my hypothesis over yours.

Having lots of people say "Vista sucks" is not evidence that Vista
objectively sucks; only evidence that it subjectively sucks. The fact that
I like Vista is proof enough for me that Vista does not objectively suck.
I realize that it may not be proof enough for you, but again, I'm not
concerned with proving this to you.

[...]
So when I do that handwaving "I don't agree" thing, it means I
believe
that I fully understand this portion of your belief, but I don't
choose to
believe in it.

Well that's just plain silly, if I've given evidence showing that my
belief is the more accurate one.

I am aware of your evidence, and I am aware of my evidence, and I feel
my evidence is stronger.

When I give a rebuttal, it means I suspect I don't
understand your belief, and I wish for you to explain it to me in
greater
detail.

So everything is "a matter of opinion" to you?

Not everything.

Vista can do very
little XP can't do and nothing that XP can do as well as XP can do it,
and "better" remains in the eye of the beholder?

I agree with some portions of that sentence, and disagree with others.

2+2 is 4 as a matter
of nearly universal opinion but not of objective fact?

There exists numbering systems where 2+2 is not 4 (consider trinary
integers or the ring of integers modulus 3, for example). Whether or not
2+2=4 depends on the axioms you take to form the basis of your numbering
system. The most popular numbering system happens to have chosen axioms
such that 2+2=4, but it is not the only possible numbering system.

Copyright law
is bad or good as a matter of opinion and not as a matter of
constitutional law, public policy, and the founding principles of the
nation (including the principle that the law should serve public
benefit ends only, and the principle that competitive markets are good
things)?

Good and bad themselves are a matter of opinion, so yes. You are
assuming, for example, that "public benefit" itself is good. That's one
axiom you might adopt for your belief system (and incidentally, as a
utilitarian, I too believe that public benefit is good), but there exists
systems of belief in which public benefit is not necessarily good.
Solipsism, for example, believes that there is no "public" at all, so it
that public benefit is neither good nor bad.

For that matter, competitive markets being good things
providing more stuff more cheaply and efficiently than all known
alternatives is a matter of opinion and not a proven-by-economists
fact?

That they are "good things" is opinion. That they provide more stuff
than all known alternatives may be fact (I don't know what all the known
alternatives are, so I can't say whether or not it's true or not).

You're making that up out of whole cloth. You claimed that Apache
was
not superior to IIS, which I am rebutting.

I disagree that that was my claim (and I'm leaving it at that,
because
I don't really care whether you believe me or not).

Reviewing, I think I see where you got confused.

I said MS provably can't compete in a competitive market place --
witness Linux and Apache eating Windows and IIS on the server side.
Your response was to suggest that you disbelieved me, but I now
suspect you misunderstood "can't compete" to mean literally "can't
compete -- not even and come in dead last",

Yes, I tend to assume you mean what you wrote.

rather than "can't hack
it, can't win, can't even place or show, simply can't compete". I just
meant they are unable to do at all well versus genuine competition so
they try to outlaw competing with MS rather than try to improve their
ability to play the game as it was meant to be played against real
live opponents. Which I don't think you even disagree with.

Right.

What a mess. And you criticized ME for supposedly "not expressing
myself clearly"?

Yes. If you mean something, please write down what you mean. If you
write something other than what you mean, you may not be expressing
yourself very clearly.

I'm starting to wonder if you're not as fluent in English as your
vocabulary and grammar would seem to imply. Misunderstanding common
idioms, among other things? Each side finding the other "unclear" sure
suggests a mutual language barrier rather than one side actually being
unclear, too.

So much for Australia. Where the hell are you, and what do they use
for talking there, Newspeak or something?

I'm from Canada, and the language here is generally referred to as
"Canadian English", or sometimes simply "English" if context makes it
clear that Canadian English is what is being referred to, or if the
distinction between Canadian English and other Englishes (e.g. British,
American, etc.) is not important.

You've managed to "fake it" (being a native English speaker) fairly
well, but I think you've just been exposed at last ... :P

A lot of people learn to fake it. Recall how I said that offshore
support may be more successful than you think?

I'm not recommending the book to you in order to "win" this
argument.
I'm recommending it to you because I am too lazy to explain why I
disagree
with your claims with respect to corporations. I had suspect that
maybe
you were interested in the behaviour corporations, and so I
recommended
this book because I thought it might interest you.

Recommendations that include a (no-registerwalls) URL to the full text
of whatever you are recommending carry a lot more weight than "go find
it yourself!" or "you can't so much as read it without paying first"
recommendations.

I don't know how you measure the weight of recommendations. This is
not a competition. I'm recommending this to you not because I am trying to
win, but because I thought you would be genuinely interested. If you don't
want to read it, then don't read it. Again, I don't care.

I have lost the argument, and Twisted has won. Twisted
has defeated me in this thread.

Is that someone raising the white flag I see? Yes, indeed it is!
Vindicated at last...

I'm happy that you're happy.

Insane corporations with brain tumors kind of put a crimp in your "all
corporations are rational utilitarians" hypothesis.

That was not my hypothesis. My claim was that "corporations as a
rational utilitarian is a better model than an emotional anthropomorph".
I'm not sure why you have so much difficulty understanding this.

[...]

To recap: I said MS is unable to compete in an open market. You
claimed that ads for IIS prove that they can. I said that they seem to
be unwilling to put any effort into the quality of their product --
only into lawyers and lobbying efforts to try to outlaw competing with
them so they don't have to. (I still contend that they expend effort
on legal matters and marketing vastly more than they do on product QA,
if "QA" is even in their vocabularies.)

I agree.

[...]
So as you can see, I never said IIS was better than Apache.

Given the shoddy quality of e.g. IIS, do you really think they are
You're assuming that IIS is perceived to be shoddy by everyone.

You implied there that you think that IIS is better.

No, I didn't. You may have inferred that, but I didn't imply it. I
personally think Apache is better than IIS, but I am aware of the
existence of people who think IIS is better than Apache. Therefore, IIS is
not perceived to be shoddy by everyone.

Which is it? While it's technically true that you never SAID that IIS
was better than Apache, you sure as hell implied it and you definitely
disputed when I claimed that IIS was "shoddy"! Technically true or
not, I think that remark you just made is rather deceptive. You argued
against my claim that Apache was superior to IIS at least in that one
sentence from an earlier post, and now essentially claim that you
never did.

So which is it?

When you say "A is B", you mean "Objectively, A is B. This is a
fact.". If you say "I think A is B", then you mean "Whether A is B is
subjective, and I happen to believe A is indeed B".

Rather than saying "I think IIS is better than Apache", you said "IIS
is better than Apache". So I am disagreeing with your claim that IIS is
better than Apache, but I am not disputing that you may think that IIS is
better than Apache, or even that most people think IIS is better than
Apache.

Is it clear now?

[...]

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?

I'm not. Go for it. All the more power to you. I support your
cause at
the general abstract level, although I disagree with some details
within
it.

Such as? And why does it seem you're attacking every bit of it if it's
only "some details"?

That zero IP is a good idea.

It is a very strongly educated guess. We have all of the following
evidence:

[snip evidence because I understand your points, I disagree with them,
and
I am not interested in explaining my disagreements. So again, you win
this
argument.]

That's a cop-out and you bloody know it. You either disagree with the
evidence, or you don't disagree with my points. Choose one. Either
rebut the evidence or really honestly concede the point by stopping
disagreeing with it. :P

I disagree with it, but you win the argument. What's so difficult to
understand, here?

[...]
Yes, and I've heard your claims. Notice that the more times you
make
those claims doesn't necessarily make it more and more true each time.

No, they remain just as true as they were before I said them even
once. It's just that with repetition there's a slim chance that even a
xylocephalic postmodern relativist like you might "get it" eventually.

Perhaps I should just give up on that seemingly-forlorn hope though...

Yes, I think that will be less painful for both of us.

Even then, only if there were evidence to believe that the
bursting
into flames was caused by Vista. If, for example, you had a video of
kids
installing Vista onto a computer, and then detonating a firecracker
within
it, this would not cause me to like Vista less.

Now *there's* an idea. Well, a video of kids loading Vista onto a
computer and then giggling as it burst into flames and stuff shot out
of the holes in the side, with the firecracker not being shown being
put in there beforehand. Especially if it's detailed enough to show
some smoke coming out as the install progressed, and then the fire
afterward. This is a great idea for a viral YouTube video, and anti-MS
propaganda! Yes! Thank you!

Your welcome. Feel free to use this idea, BTW, I'm releasing it into
the public domain.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vista%20porno%20for%20pyros

No Videos found for 'vista porno for pyros'

Your Google-fu is not strong.

Please show me the query I should have used.

(And what's with posting semi-HTML? Yuck...this last post of yours was
especially bad.)

It's not HTML; it's pseudo-XML, in order to give the text the
structure that is typically required in technical discussions and
difficult to otherwise convey using plain text.

There's many small improvements like that sprinkled all over Vista
which makes me long for it whenever I'm stuck on an XP machine, and
have
to actually search through the start menu to find the shortcut to the
notepad program, for example.

You consider performing a search to be faster?

I'm not saying searches are always faster than whatever the
alternatives are in all situations. I'm saying in this particular example,
I prefer Vista to XP.

On what, a craptop with
300MB (yes MB) of disk space and all of 1345 files or a PDA or
something? I know if I clicked Start -> Search and typed "not" in "All
or part of the file name" I'd be waiting for ten minutes or so before
I got notepad.exe, buried in probably a metric shitload of irrelevant
clutter (I'd use "notepad.exe" as the search query in actuality). I
find it difficult to believe that Vista is any faster, unless you
cheated and scoped the search to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
\Start Menu on Vista but not on XP or something like that.

I know you find it difficult to believe. You've never actually tried
Vista, and you've been influenced by all the negative things you've read
about it. Maybe one day, someone will develop a Firefox extension that
will allow you to form independent opinions?

Is Vista's search genuinely faster, given a fair comparison (searches
scoped equally, same approximate size of scope in file count and
megabytage; equally powerful hardware)? Surely not?

Try it and see.

What was the point of bringing up basketball, if they were not
suggesting such a chain of reasoning, then?

It was probably part of an example of some kind. Examples often
contain details irrelevant to the larger point being made. It doesn't
make them any less valid.

It wasn't part of an example. It WAS the example. That was the entire
thing.

BTW, congratulations on winning the argument. Can you give me a
P.O.
box to which I may mail you a prize?

This thread ending without any further ado is prize enough; that and
your capitulation on record for posterity here @ Google Groups.

I thought you said if I replied to your thread, you'd give me a P.O.
box to which I can mail you stuff. Was that a lie?

- Oliver


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