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

On Jul 30, 1:20 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip a whole lot of BS]

Aww, crap. Did you have to!?

Here we go again...

An alternative, yes. A perfect one, no.

So there we go. Software does not need to be 100% compatible in order
to be an alternative.

This is entirely beside my point. My point is that it serves no useful
public purpose for the government to enforce that I can only do
certain things if I have Windows, and in effect copyrights have that
as one of their many useless against-the-public-interest consequences
by a) letting software vendors refuse to port to any other platform,
b) letting the same vendors refuse to allow someone else to make such
a port, c) letting Microsoft refuse to allow some other vendor to make
a perfect Windows-substitute, and d) making law enforcement actually
enforce b and c.

This doesn't seem like policy in the service of the public interest to
me. It looks like policy in the service of Bill Gates, who is rich
enough that if anything he should be expected to completely fend for
himself and be given no considerations by the people whatsoever beyond
the most basic protections against violence and robbery.

And no, someone copying Windows to their hearts' content is not
robbery since it takes nothing away from him that he already had.

Believe it or not, some commercial games are genuinely good, and win
attention via that merit.

Believe it or not, some free games are genuinely good, but have a much
harder time getting any attention via corporate-controlled media,
partly because free game makers generally don't pay for advertising
but partly because corporate-controlled media exhibit a strong pro-
paying-for-things bias. There are levels of cartelization and one of
the weakest but most-inclusive of these is that for-profit
corporations protect their own against such outsiders as hobbyings,
freebie-distributors of any kinds, and anything else that might
compete with them all. Not to mention against ordinary consumers;
keeping them in the dark and fed ***, and limiting their choices
artificially, helps keep all of their bottom lines healthy. :P

I see the way the system works, you know. It isn't even, by and large,
through intentional conspiracy so much as through a "subconscious"
that has evolved in response to the environment's pressures; the
process by which companies come to act partly with a common agenda of
screw-the-customer and hide-all-the-free-stuff-as-much-as-possible is
just as blind and unthinking as the process that produced and
eventually got rid of dinosaurs.

And to the extent that that system fails to serve its ultimate
purpose, which is to empower and provide maximum utility to the
people, and do the greatest good for the greatest number, I oppose it
and seek to disrupt it or cause it to change, preferably by informing
people so that eventually the collective behavior of consumers
"selectively breeds" the system to behave more in keeping with its
purpose -- which is that government and business were created by the
people to serve the people, and not the other way around. The best way
for government to do that is to not be too bloated, or too indifferent
to the poor, or too opaque and secretive, or insensitive to the polls.
The best way for businesses to do it is to be encouraged to self-
maximize but be forced to do so in open and fair competition on a
level playing field and to be answerable for any harms they perpetrate
in trying to maximize the bottom line; a major function of government
is to maintain that playing field as level in various ways, and to
enforce the criminal code.

Your before-last assertion, "and there'd be plenty of high quality
ones", I disagree with.

Without evidence.

List some of them, so that I may play them.

I don't have a big off-the-top-of-my-head list; GIYF, so JFGI.

There is no evidence that this would happen and plenty of reasons to
believe it wouldn't, and high quality games would continue to be
produced.

There is also plenty of reasons to believe it would.

Stop arguing for the sake of arguing will you? This is ludicrous.
"This should never be done because I think something bad might happen,
even though I have no evidence at all to suggest such a thing" is not
a sensible way to decide matters of policy. It certainly doesn't
outweigh "This should be done because it is provable that X, Y, and Z
will all happen, and those are all good things, and nobody has proven
anything bad will happen, let alone enough to outweigh X, Y, *and* Z
together."

And even if you were RIGHT -- is losing (or maybe just delaying) the
top tier of games -- GAMES -- too high a price for society to pay for
much greater freedom, much reduced costs of living, much richer
culture generally, and much more innovation in productive technology?

False dilema fallacy: You're acting as if we can only have one or the
other.

What the *** are you babbling about now? Either we have those
freedoms through the removal of so-called IP law, or we don't. If we
do, it may be that we lose or delay the creme-de-la-creme of games,
although I personally think it not especially likely. And then the
question is, is that one thing -- slower release of computer games --
a good reason to give up lots of possible freedoms? I'd argue that the
answer is no.

There is no fallacy there unless you're suggesting either that we can
have those freedoms and IP law too (we can't) or that we can have
those freedoms and top-tier games too (in which case you're actually
CONCEDING my point there, and I win!)

Most games don't have much replay value and are only interesting
within 1 year of their release. We agree that 60 years of copyright (or
whatever it currently is in your country) is "bad". I claim that 0 years
of copyright is bad.

I dispute your claim that 0 is bad. Even 1 year loses us all sorts of
freedoms with our things and our technology. Even 1 DAY does that;
justifies intrusive DRM and private attempts at enforcement.
Encourages a kind of digital feudalism with everybody answerable to
corporate lawmakers and corporate mercenaries with no accountability
to we, the people; the sort of thing revolutionary wars have been
fought to eliminate. Remember the medieval age? The big
"corporations", the owners of the "means of production" then were
landowners who owned the bulk of Europe's arable land at the time.
They were rich, they acted as (and were) aristocrats, and had all
kinds of noble titles. And mercenaries: each their own army of thugs
with swords and plate mail to enforce their decrees on the tenants of
their land.

Copyrights and patents make all of us in the 21st century who use
technology into tenants with no protections. DRM amounts to the same
sort of feudal lords again being able to unilaterally decree the law
without any public recourse, and the use of technological methods as
well as coopting of normal law enforcement (e.g. via the DMCA) to
enforce these corporate-made "laws" amounts to again enforcing it
through mercenaries. Mercenaries because in effect they are enforcing
privately-made law and acting on behalf of private agents, rather than
on behalf of we, the people.

How undemocratic.

It may not be as bad -- no rape and pillage, at least as of yet -- but
it's still not good and shortening the term won't make it go away
either.

And people have done all of those things to top notch quality too. *I*
have done top notch level design AND art asset design PERSONALLY.

Link to them, please.

I'm not sure they're currently hosted anywhere; good, stable hosting
is so hard to find these days. There are references though; google
"twq3tourney2" and "twq3tourney3" and there are references and
screenshots in one or two places.

Yes, but they tend to be worse than their commercial equivalents.

Ignore the ones a commercial entity would never publish and compare
only the rest. You'll find they're on a par, and that there are plenty
of free ones.

Not a one of the talents you just listed is precluded by a game not
being a commercial one with a business model dependent on restricting
copying. NOT A ONE.

I did not claim they were precluded. I'm saying that level design is
not enough. I'm saying a LOT of talent is needed to make a good game.

And top-notch examples ALL of those talents can be found in free game
content and free game engines. Not just level design. I said that
already but obviously you didn't want to hear it, but it bears
repeating even if you are simply going to ignore it again as
unpalatable.

I'm
saying the odds are in the favour of commercial games, because being able
to pay people tends to attract better talent than begging people to work
on your game project for free.

Who ever claimed that it isn't possible to develop a game on a) a
we're-not-basing-our-business-model-on-restricting-copying or even b)
a non-profit model and still hire talent? I certainly didn't. If you
are claiming that, you're obviously insane; nonprofits hire people all
the time, as do for-profit businesses that don't restrict copying
(e.g. restaurants; the fashion industry) but do depend on innovation
(recipes, new designs). (Both can and do use trademark law but that's
entirely beside the point as interoperable knockoffs thrive and so do
both industries.)

No, you only need "a game" in the first place. And certainly "a
commercial game" that just so happens not to be funded by a
restrictive business model would suffice.

You're right. Slip of the toungue there. You need a game (any game) in
the first place, and it helps if that first game is of decent quality.
Making a mod with crappy engine *usually* yields an equally, if not more,
crappy mod-game. Every mod that had quality comparable to a commercial
game was for the engine of a commercial game: Counterstrike came from
HalfLife; ET came from Castle Wolfenstein.

You're forgetting Nehahra, whose engine was based off a very old Quake
engine and probably largely rewritten. That's an engine of far greater
quality than any commercial engine it can claim as an ancestor.

[snip straw-man argument implying the ludicrous claim that the only
type of game that would survive the abolition of copyright would be
that exemplified by Nethack and online Flash games]

Nehahra is not comparable to today's commercial games.

It's comparable to commercial cames made in the same time period.
Comparing an older free game with commercial games made for and
running on hardware six years more advanced is an obvious case of
cheating. :P

[snip nonsense]

I am giving your game every possible advantage I can, and it is still
losing.

IYHO. You may be comparing apples and oranges. Do they look good? Yes
-- both. Do they look the same? Of course not. So what?

When the companies make less money (and face it, putting ads in games
generates a lot less income than selling the boxes)

But it's a damn sight more honest an income than selling the boxes for
3000 times what they cost to make!

In your worst case scenario of no more commercial games, obviously
that talent would have nowhere to go but into free games, and free
games would improve to take up the slack.

Wrong. They could go into movies, or literary writing, or
business-software programming.

That might be true if you did something as stupid as to abolish video-
game copyrights only instead of all the copyrights. :P Of course
they'd go to where they can command inflated salaries because the
companies can command inflated prices. They'd also need more money
because that cost of living decrease wouldn't really be there. In my
proposed world, though, their costs would plummet at the same time as
the salaries they could command would plummet. Also, a lot of
artificial costs (such as for unfree development tools) of the
gamemaker would go away. Also, the freer competition would necessarily
mean they'd be forced to cut the fat in the upper echelons of
management, and pay less to the suit-wearing types. Clearly a much
larger proportion of the gamemaker's revenues (whatever its business
model) would go to paying the talent.

Right now, your video game $10 is split up something like this (it's
probably actually quite a lot worse, especially at high volumes, as
they keep raking it in per-copy and only pay most of these expenses
including the talent salaries once):
$0.10 paying the talent.
$0.01 towards paying off the ludicrous royalties on the game company's
development tools, as artificial-scarcity pinch has been passed on to
them by their suppliers.
$0.04 pays operating expenses and the like
$0.10 pays for annoying advertisements you have to tune out while
trying to surf the web, watch your favorite show, or whatever.
$0.10 pays for distribution costs, disc-stamping, and the like
$0.70 tax
$9.00 is the profit, so lines the pockets of executives.

Suppose the post-copyright business model generates only 1/20 the
revenue; if each $0.50 is split up as follows the talent gets paid
just as much:

$0.03 paying the talent
$0.04 operating expenses
$0.04 tax (generous)
$0.01 distribution costs (seeding one torrent; generous)
$0.37 profit

It's still largely profit! Note that costs are reduced drastically
because they can deep-six marketing, paying royalties themselves, and
distribution costs. Not having a business model based on selling
copies means restricting copies is pointless and suddenly seeding a
torrent is cheap and very efficient distribution that doesn't
undermine the business model. So distribution costs are slashed. We
assume a post-copyright world so they owe no royalties. Since their
business model isn't based on selling individual copies hawking copies
of this game is a useless expense with no ROI anymore and gets dumped.
So much for the annoying ads. Tax shrinks proportionately to total (I
assumed a 7% tax for the first, and rounding up for the second or an
8% tax). Profits are much less but are positive, so this business is
viable.

Of course cutting the fat further allows them to pay the talent more
than the copyright-using business did.

The 74% profit margin is still obscene, but not nearly as ludicrous as
the 90% profit margin before. In practise easy copying would force
price competition and whatever their revenue stream their margins
would be driven down to a sliver, to something like this:

$0.05 paying the talent (more than before) (competition to attract
talent is fiercer)
$0.03 operating expenses (some efficiency improvements forced by
having real competition)
$0.01 tax
$0.01 distribution costs (seeding one torrent; generous)
$0.02 profit

Total $0.12, a bit more than a dime. This business is lean, mean, and
efficient now, and still profitable. Whatever it charges for, it's
fairly cheap. Copies of the software are free. A lot of useless
expenses are gone, including outmoded inefficient distribution and
marketing methods. What marketing they do is for whatever they sell
that the game is a loss-leader for. Marketing may even be their
revenue source rather than an expense. Most likely they rely on a bit
of narrowcast advertising that seeds word-of-mouth spread, and being
findable in Google and on The Pirate Bay or something. Of course this
requires a quality product so the incentive to make a quality product
is still there. The talent makes 66% more money than before. The only
losers are lawyers and executives, who make merely reasonable salaries
now (in "operating expenses" going down a percentage and in no longer
lining their pockets from "profit").

We note that the "profit" category above included a lot of executive
salary fat as well as what actually went on the books as profit.
Anything that just lined pockets and didn't pay for additional useful
work in other words. A "good enough" salary for each non-talent
employee is included in "operating costs" and any additional amount of
salary for any of these that the market wouldn't bear in the presence
of genuine competition is included in "profit". The profit penny left
goes to shareholders or into expansion, rather than wood-paneling the
CEO's new 50' yacht.

I'm saying "Windows IS NOT indispensible".

Then you are claiming that if every copy of Windows out there
mysteriously transmogrified into a Red Hat install overnight, it
wouldn't cause more than a bit of bafflement and retraining, rather
than just about everything grinding to a halt.

I find that frankly unbelievable.

Not on the books, but there seems to be one in practise -- either pay
the Microsoft tax or pay in subtler ways by missing out on certain
things.

Yes, either pay for something, or "pay in the form of not having that
something".

But it's illegitimate! That something being required is gratuitous
rather than an unshakable fact of nature, and that something being
priced 3000-times cost is equally gratuitous! It's as if to protect
the buggy whip industry a law were passed requiring that all drivers
purchase a buggy whip to be allowed to drive certain common classes of
vehicle including the workhorse 18-wheeler trucks on which all
commerce depends (gratuitous since a truck driver gets much more use
out of the pedals than a buggy whip) and furthermore the buggy whips
themselves were made immune to price competition somehow (resulting in
gratuitously inflated per-whip prices). And subjected to planned
obsolescence...

Uh... I think all of economy is based on the concept of paying for
something, or else you don't have that something.

The economy depends on paying the costs of something. It does not
depend on, nor should it make a stable state of affairs, paying
thousands of times the costs for only one rather than thousands of the
item in question. Only lack of effective competition in an area
enables that kind of pricing abuse to persist. And it is worst in
areas where laws explicitly provide for anticompetitive business
practises. Copyright is even responsible for the inflated price of the
iPod, since the main place to get legal online tunes is iTunes, which
naturally works with iPods and which makes getting the music in any
form other than 128-bit AAC with Apple DRM artificially difficult (you
have to waste a blank CD to turn them into mp3s, but it's possible)
and non-iPod hardware won't play AAC with Apple DRM. The result of
anticompetitive behavior on the part of a) music labels (music
copyrights) and b) Apple itself (AAC licensing, or rather refusal to
do same) results in Apple having a defacto monopoly on interoperable
hardware and getting to jack the price up to be made up mainly of
fatty margins with relatively little meat paying the ordinary daily-
grind employees of Apple or any other company.

So even hardware is infected with artificially raised prices, even
before we start considering patent law's effects as well.

I'm guessing you're referring to Bill Gates. Your use of swear words
and all caps leads me to believe this is an emotional subject for you.

The "emotional subject" is your sheer density. Why haven't you
imploded and fallen within your own event horizon and, consequently,
shut up (aside maybe from Hawking radiation that'd be
indistinguishable from noise) yet? That you continue to profess the
ludicrous belief that Bill Gates somehow is owed a single red cent
more by any user of Windows or of any other software, no matter how
many future copies might (at no cost to Bill Gates I might add!) be
made, simply beggars belief, yet here you are.

When I buy a Microsoft product, I don't say to myself "Wait a minute.
I'm just handing my money over to the richest guy in the world, and he
doesn't need any more money, so really, I shouldn't buy this product at
all!"

When the government continues to enforce a copyright on a Microsoft
product, it is basically saying (and enforcing) that making more
copies still entitles Bill to more money despite the sheer lack of any
compelling public interest in further enriching the man.

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

I do too -- but only where they cost someone without that someone's
consent.

Okay, I'm glad we're in agreement.

So much for copyright law then, since it prohibits me from doing some
things purely with my own materials, time, and money, behind closed
doors, without any involvement of the copyright holder and without my
touching any of the copyright holder's things or money.

Stuff like "I shouldn't have to pay Microsoft in order to use
applications which require Microsoft Windows". A lot of minor stuff like
that, that is hardly worth even remembering.

No, the point I was trying to make, but which is too sensible to ever
avoid flying right over your head, is that there should not BE any
applications that REQUIRE Windows. That very thing by itself is
objectionable, and is an artificial constraint on the market place
enforced by law that is not in the public interests and only
marginally even in Bill Gates' interests now, since the marginal
increase in his expected earnings from perpetuating this sorry state
of affairs is a minuscule fraction of what he's already hoarded.

There are
proven business models for you-can-play-for-free commercial games
(baseball, admittedly not a computer game, but I don't see that
distinction as being relevant).

I think the distinction is relevant.

No it isn't. The same business model can profitably exploit a video
game with sports-like elements.

For example s/stadium/server and stadium seats/server bandwidth for a
scarce resource you can sell tickets to without evilly creating
artificial scarcity. Making money off live spectating is this
possible. (Live spectating might give advantages over television
spectating e.g. interactive control of your own personal virtual
camera.)

Advertising and sponsorship would be almost EXACTLY unchanged, aside
from the potentially enormous amount of ad space in the virtual arena,
compared to the limits on physical space. (Admittedly, seeing my
favorite game maps defaced with billboards plastered everywhere might
not be so nice, but if it pays their bills, and is only on the
official event games and not home games...)

There are also proven downsides,
abuses, rampant problems, and issues with the existing system most of
which cannot be fixed except either by superficial bandaids or by
tossing that whole system into the recycle bin as inherently flawed
and proven not fit for purpose.

Again, I'm not disputing this. So again, we see that I am in agreement
with your "core ideas".

I don't see term length shortening being either necessary (to "promote
the progress...") or sufficient (to avoid these downsides).
Superficial bandaids other than short term lengths are subject to
loopholes. Term length reductions might even be subject to loopholes,
for example game's copyright running out so release a mandatory update
-- don't let the auth servers auth anyone to play who doesn't have it
-- and copyright the update => another year of raking in free money!

Yes, this is actually a topic that was brought up in my discussion
with my friends. We found that at the very least, Trademark, as you say,
would probably need to stay. Otherwise it would be legal for me to sell
snuff-bestiality-porn in a DVD box that looks identical to "Disney's Snow
White And the Seven Dwarves", since Disney no longer owns the term
"Disney", nor the particular font or style of writing the text "Disney's
Snow White And the Seven Dwarves", nor the pictures of that appear on
those boxes, etc.

Trademark isn't urgently in need of being destroyed but it does need
to be brought down to earth. On the other hand I can see getting rid
of it entirely, perhaps by making misrepresenting stuff in product
labeling be considered full-blown fraud and prosecuted as such, rather
than using existing wimpy truth-in-advertising laws. This somewhat
levels the playing field -- it is in the hands of the criminal justice
system and cases would generally be brought by the AG and their crack
legal team on behalf of aggrieved consumers, rather than a) up-front
fees to register marks and b) civil "let the most expensive legal team
win!" lawsuits that clearly stack the odds in favor of big business
over either small and medium businesses or aggrieved consumers.

Clearly, such things would be "bad" for society. This, incidentally,
was one of the reasons I felt "zero IP" was a bad idea. I'm glad you are
no longer advocating zero IP.

I don't consider trademarks, once rationalized, to be real IP. They
create a right of a company not to have its brand misrepresented. They
have about as much in common with copyrights as academic no-plagiarism
rules do, w.r.t. their effects and purpose. Making them inalienable
(non-transferable) might even make sense, since all too often a bad
company buys up a trademark in good repute and uses it to sell a load
of horse*** to unwitting consumers for a while before they wise up
(Norton brand software just about heads up the list). That still
doesn't stop a change of management at a company from running a
formerly-respected product line directly into the ground, mind you.
Perhaps tying a trademark to a set of warranty terms that must be
honored for any authentic product bearing that mark? Don't honor the
warranty terms, lose protection for the trademark, or even get charged
with infringing it yourself?

What you've presented here is strategy (e.g. let's not make the change
suddenly, but phase it out over 10 years) and speculation (in the end,
everyone will have 3 day workweeks). You've not presented evidence.

You've not presented evidence that the world after such a 2012 will be
shitty and no longer have games as good as counterstrike being made.
So I think we're even there. As it is, though, even if copyright's
unchanged or even worse in 2012 we'll probably have 4-day workweeks.
Much of the trend in unemployment and part-time vs. full-time work is
preexisting anyway; sooner or later the spotty distribution of
salaries (here a full-time one, there a part-time one, and over there
none at all) and working hours (here 40 a week, there as much as 120 a
week and for less pay and more stress, and over there none at all)
will reach some instability threshold and get a "market correction" of
some sort. (The market in question being the labor market I suppose.)
If there's only around 32 hours of work a week to go around, a 4 hour
work week might emerge. Of course all those people with "mandatory
overtime" and similar BS might mean it's still around 40 and just not
as smoothly distributed as before for some reason. Regardless, in the
employment area something has to give and soon. And in the fatcat
profits area too, because people simply can't afford what is asked of
them in the way of cost of living anymore. That WILL self-correct, one
way or another, and I'm betting on "soon" when it comes to
"when?"...perhaps overpriced products with cheaper alternatives (e.g.
Windows) will see growing disuse. Perhaps there'll be a growing
backlash against anticompetitive behavior in general, especially as
people increasingly feel directly the restrictions that enable these,
through frustratingly user-hostile HD-DVD players beholden to
Hollywood via DRM rather than their own owners. People finding that
their stuff increasingly no longer is theirs to control and use as
they see fit but instead increasingly embodies the agendas and goals
of some distant organization with ulterior financial motives will rise
up against oppression. Or something like that.

I'm not even telling you what should be done. I'm telling you what
probably will happen, soon, regardless. The system is wound as tight
as it can get, and fatcats have their hands wedged as deeply into the
pockets of the people as they can reach without coming out empty
because the people have no more money for them to take. It's
unsustainable; they pay domestically less than they reach for
domestically, and the less they get the less they pay and the more
they lay off, and the cycle will just spiral down into a black
economic depression -- except that there'll be lots of room for new
and innovative businesses with novel business models to horn in and
provide genuinely useful, non-artificially-scarce goods and services
at a reasonable price. Once it's clear that clearing the patent
thickets and other anticompetitive deadwood so as to let them is the
only way to stave off the worst depression since the thirties,
government will cave. Or else it will sit stupidly and let the
depression happen, likely followed by world war three. After that
people will rebuild and resolve not to make the same mistakes as last
time. This time they'll use constitutions to shackle businesses AND
government to be beholden to the public interest in some way, perhaps
simply by having a Progress Clause that *prohibits* the legislature
from granting exclusive rights to any idea, invention, software,
writings, or other art or design or plan or blueprint.

It'd
be nice if things turn out the way you said they will, but I feel there is
not enough evidence to believe that they WILL turn out that way.

I think the evidence is that people will manage and muddle through
somehow like they always did with regard to the "difficulties" of
funding R&D type activities, such as the good old-fashioned getting
venture capital to fund product A, plowing product A's profits into
expansion and funding product B instead of lining a few pockets with
it, and so on ... you know, the good old-fashioned way of doing
business.

The benefits are all just about guaranteed. The downsides are vague
speculations with little evidence. Perhaps best is a pilot project.
Maybe some progressive European country will abolish IP inside itself.
But then, a non-self-sufficient nation may not make a good test,
partly because it might be attacked (embargoed, if not physically
attacked) by the US at the behest of Big Business and a false
correlation of no-IP=bad-consequences might arise as a result.

China is an interesting candidate.

But the US would be best. China still is somewhat hamstrung by relics
of communism and antidemocratic attitudes, but if it shakes off the
last of that funk it's world superpower in no time, running
competitive rings around the US once it gets its burgeoning industrial
base matured and starts building off free software and suchlike to
enter the information age for real. The US has a window of opportunity
to keep its world prestige and leadership, but it's rapidly closing.
It needs to streamline its laws, free its content, and throw out the
shrubs and all the other business-bought crooks and start being run by
representatives of the citizenry again in order to make that window.
Because if it gets worse (or no better) and China does get better
(while possessing a much larger labor force, a much larger domestic
market for goods and services, and a general disinterest in American-
style IP laws) ...

And yet I seem to have released more into the public domain than you
have. Does this mean I'm a stronger advocate for the reduction of
copyright than you are? Do you see now that I am not a "Microsoft
employee", or a "middle man, following orders", or whatever other
accusations you've thrown at me so far?

I don't know what the hell you are. I think you act like or pretend to
be whatever suits you. You're a debating chameleon -- you assume any
position you like and appear to be anything that has a vested interest
in that position winning; then you change, even in the middle of the
same debate; and change again...

Which as far as I am aware makes you one thing and one thing only --
an argumentative prick. :)

I argue that "how the data looks" can make a big difference to user
convinience. Consider a listing of a billion numbers compared to a
bar-chart. The data is behaving semantically in the exact same way, and
yet one "look" is more useful than the other "look".

The UI clearly has different semantics, regardless of the data-level
semantics being identical.

Earlier, you said 1 in 10, and then you said every single time. Now
it's 1 in 50 or 60?

I never said 1 in 10, and I said it does it every single time in list
(and I believe details) view. It's quite random and sporadic in icons
and tiles view; just TRY IT AND SEE. It should happen eventually. Now
I've mentioned it you should sooner or later notice it during normal
use of your Windoze machines anyway.

It depends on a lot of things, actually, and I think we may be
beginning to stretch the analogy too far. If a EULA really did pop up when
I tried to open the can, we'd probably be in some sort of super high tech
society where it's plausible that the can itself is monitoring me, perhaps
sending a live video feed of my actions to some corporations. I'd behave
differently in that society than I would in the one where I currently
live.

How you'd behave is immaterial. It's whether such behavior by the soft
drink manufacturer strikes you as at all legitimate, whether it's at
all true that current law could reasonably consider this hypothetical
EULA to be binding on the drink-purchaser, and whether it is in the
public interest for law enforcement to provide remedies for the soft
drink manufacturer if you violate the questionable "agreement" or
dodge it by puncturing the can or whatever.

If the corporate behemoth that tried to screw you gets to watch
helplessly while you get what you wanted and they get only what is
their reasonable due but no more, despite their nasty attempt at
overreaching and control, well so much the better.

Hmmm... I must be really dense, because I still don't see the answer
to my question. If you sign a document, and there is no one to witness you
signing the document, do you consider the document to be worthless?

I answered that already. This is a paper document you sign, and the
company gets to keep a copy. Later they can produce it in court as
evidence that you entered into a binding agreement with them, if they
want to sue you for breach of contract.

So yes.

If however it's a computer dialog produced by software running on your
local machine, there's no evidence that the company can later produce
in court to prove that you entered into any binding agreements with
them.

In the worst case that they rig it to phone home and only work if it
succeeded, they have an IP address, which they can't even turn into a
particular internet service account holder's name without probable
cause and a subpoena, if then. Given even such a name, they may be
able to claim in court sensibly that something is binding on that
person, but not some other person -- e.g. a family member that used
the same computer.

I think there's no way that it can ever make sense to give anywhere
near the same amount of legal weight to a EULA button-click as to a
signature on a real written contract with a copy (with the signature
evident) retained by each interested party. Even a EULA button-click
associated with an IP address.

So it sounds like you feel there's a difference between signing a
piece of paper, and clicking on a button labelled "agree", but you concede
that in the case of signing a piece of paper, whether or not a witness is
present to see you sign the paper is irrelevant. Am I correctly presenting
your position here?

Not quite. Witnesses are sometimes required, presumably where more
weight is needed than an unwitnessed signature would provide.

Nice try with the weasel words, but no cigar. You can believe with all
your heart that I'm an idiot or consider it "merely your opinion" that
I'm nuts, and if you call me an idiot or crazy in public it's still
insulting.

I've neither called you an idiot, nor crazy.

Maybe not, but you've sometimes implied it.

Either provide a plausible alternative theory for what happened or
agree.

<shrugs> No. I don't have to do what you tell me to do.

Cop-out.

You should certainly be interested in it now, because the
censor has broadened his horizons somewhat. This posting of yours that
I'm replying to? It got attacked in precisely the same way as my last
TWO postings to this branch of the thread (yes, it's now TWO, THREE if
you count the repost attempt of the first one separately, and so a
total of FOUR separate messages, three by me and one by you).

I don't really care, because for the most part, my reply is direct at
you, and given that you've replied to it, you've read it. It doesn't
bother me whether or not anyone else in the world can see my messages. I'm
not posting here to try to persuade people towards my position.

Why ARE you posting here, then? Not to persuade other people, you
claim. Obviously not to persuade me, which you must have realized by
now is futile since it takes actual evidence to persuade me and you
clearly have none.

BTW, my previous posting was again subjected to restricted
propagation, as was your most recent posting. That makes two of yours
now. How soon will you become incensed that someone is restricting the
distribution of your own postings without cause? It's damned rude of
them to decide on your behalf how far you want your message
distributed, is it not? And when it's posted to an unmoderated group,
to boot!

Remember: When it comes to usenet, only a) spam and b) postings to
moderated groups are at all legitimate to use technical means to block
or cancel. Others may be grounds for flaming or even complaining to a
poster's ISP, but generally none are legitimate to unilaterally
cancel.

That's such bad programming it deserves to blow up in your face. The
cure for such problems is, as everyone in this froup should be well
aware, Java. The only downside: it takes away your excuses for
platform discrimination, and it's unsuited to small apps.

This happens in Java too. There are bugs in Sun's Java compiler, for
example (I've posted a few to this newsgroup). Sun's Javac simply does not
actually follow the language specifications. That means you are now
effective writing for a programming language which is similar to, but not
quite identical to, Java, and you don't have the specifications for that
language you're programming for.

Do Java programmers generally write code that will break if the bugs
are fixed though? Or only code that adheres to the subset of the JLS
that actually works in current javac, and therefore adheres to the
JLS?

Note that part of the reason is the expectation that bugs will
actually get fixed, making it unsafe to rely on them. Obviously this
factor is yet another one that doesn't apply when coding to Microsoft
tools and APIs. Another reason why "the cure is Java".

So you just fiddle around with the source code, adding random brackets
here, an unnecessary cast there, all just to get try and get the code to
works. And when it works, you add a comment saying /*DO NOT TOUCH THIS
CODE UNTIL JAVA 1.7 IS RELEASED!!! (see bug #882833)*/.

Yep, and keep it valid within the JLS at the same time so it won't
outright break when Java 7 is released either.

But that requires special equipment and expertise, and is difficult
and dangerous.

Really? All I have to do is hit DEL when my computer boots up, and I'm
dumped into the motherboard setup screen. It'll say something like the
frontbuss is currently set to 233Mhz (for example), and allow me to bump
it up to 300Mhz in increments in 1Mhz.

That's the bus speed, not the CPU speed, you n00b. Two different
things. (A clue: typical CPU speeds these days are measured in GHz.)

Can you overclock THE CPU by fiddling in your BIOS? And can you do any
of this in such a way that you can easily back out a change that has a
deleterious effect, without lasting damage to your hardware or to your
data?

That is essentially what happens now, with the exception of when
there's a demand for slower chips, and Intel has an excess of faster chip,
Intel may downclock the chip and sell it as if it were a slower chip. (If
there is no such excess of faster chips, then Intel may just say "Sorry,
there's a shortage right now. Try again later.")

Why not just NOT downclock the chip and sell it at the slower-chip
price? A faster chip is a perfectly good substitute for a slower chip.
Artificially degrading something in the manner described is repugnant,
not to mention inefficient and a sign of market failure or simple
nastiness and a will to withhold things for no good reason than that
you are greedy.

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

And he is an expert because?

He's an "expert" in the same sense that most computer enthusiasts are
experts: They typically know more about computers, and thus OSes, than the
general public.

Let me guess -- he's a big Windows enthusiast but has no real concept
of anything else. IOW, a biased source. Or maybe easily swayed by eye
candy. Anyway, VISTA IS WORSE:

http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista

Stick THAT in your fucking pipe and smoke it wisearse!

Vista is worse than Windows XP. It can not do as much as well, on
average. It is full of nastiness meant to enrich MS. It constitutes
spyware, indeed appears to be the largest piece of spyware software in
history, and one of the first shrink-wrapped pieces of spyware, where
the main danger used to be exclusively free online downloads of
dubious software from dubious sites and online browser exploits. And
there's the DRM ... the poorer performance ... the likelihood of lots
of incompatibilities with your existing hardware and software ...

No rational utilitarian migrates from XP SP2 to Vista or from anything
else to Vista for that matter. Not on a production machine.

When a specific task on a computer is running slow, they'd
know whether it was because of low RAM, slow CPU, slow harddrive, slow
Internet connection, malware, etc., whereas the general public would not.

Well if they haven't discovered that Vista's slow performance is due
to malware (namely, Vista) then they have clearly got blinkered vision
or simply aren't the expert you claim they are.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars

It sucks, but it's pretty -- therefore it still sucks.

In the light of these difficulties, many people wrote Vista off.

Aha! There were "difficulties".

Even after the false starts and scaled-back plans

Aha! There were MAJOR difficulties.

Vista is still a huge evolution in the history of the
NT platform, and that's not something to be sniffed at. The fundamental
changes to the platform are of a scale not seen since the release of NT.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a huge evolution in the
history of the staph aureus "platform" and is definitely not something
to be sniffed at, not unless you want to start sneezing and then drop
dead despite being given massive doses of antibiotics. :P

That something has had "fundamental changes" does not make it
automatically good, or even anything you want to touch with a ten-foot
pole.

In the following pages, I'll be talking about these big new features-the
graphics stack and the new APIs-and why they're so important for the
Windows platform.

Because no matter its deep-seated faults and unfixable performance
issues, a little eye candy is all it takes to magically make it a
machine offering superior productivity for all of your practical needs
once more. :P

In addition to these revolutionary features, Vista
includes a host of evolutionary improvements that together make it a
hugely compelling release

This is either Microsoft, or someone copying wholesale from MS ad
copy. No self respecting independent reviewer uses marketroid language
like the above paragraph! It's revolting! It's sugary filling and no
substance; self-serving (well Microsoft-serving) praise with no
evidence to support it; it's about as far from proper investigative
journalism as it's possible to get without going to the extremes
epitomized famously by sentence "You take the pictures; I'll furnish
the war". :P

No; only Vista objectively sucking is evidence that Vista objectively
sucks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_argument

That's like arguing that my claim that the ketchup is red because,
well, it's red is circular. Maybe it is, but that's simply because
it's a pretty much fundamentally true thing you can't divide much
deeper. It's self-evident except of course to the red-green
colorblind. You obviously have a kind of sucks-rocks colorblindness if
you can't likewise see that Vista is a small lump of cat feces that
somehow escaped removal from the litter tray and ended up sold on
store shelves.

Er, I take that back. Vista is not at all small, it's a fucking
elephant of fatty bloat and it's the size of a small moon. But the
rest of it is true.

Yes, that would qualify if it were true that Vista can't do anything
XP can't do faster, cheaper and better. Luckily, it isn't.

Games again. You a hardcore gamer? You say copyright law is good
because abolishing it would make everything else better but make all
the games suck. You say Vista is better than XP because although XP
does everything else better it won't run a handful of Vista-only
games.

I don't think that it is sound public policy for our government to
base its laws and enforcement activities around what's good for
hardcore gamers, any more than if you substituted any other small
minority for "hardcore gamers" there.

Thing is, if Vista rocks and XP sucks because of gamers, and copyright
law rocks because of gamers, then lynchings rock because of Klansmen,
and so does abolishing civil rights, and blowing up tall buildings
rocks because of the minority of Al Qaeda sympathizers among us, and
so forth. Your argument leads to a very dangerous place!

BTW, there's more than one game which is Vista only. DirectX 10 itself
is Vista only, and there's a good handful of games coming out which are
DX10 only, with more coming along the way.

How many now? Of course this is all moot; a DX10 emulation for XP will
arise sooner or later whether Microsoft wants one to or not. So even
these games don't pull Vista up out of the toilet, even if you really
esteem games over all other considerations, even if you esteem them
even over much more practical considerations.

Because you asked me to. When you say things like "Please show me an
expert who likes Vista", if it isn't too much trouble for me, I'll do it.
I'm nice like that.

You're supposed to come up empty handed, numbskull. Instead you find
some Microsoft mouthpiece with a tiny amount of implausible
deniability that he's a Microsoft mouthpiece? And babble on and on
about games? :P

Vista is NOT better. That would be an objective statement. I'm saying
*I* like Vista better, and that I am not the only one. The fact that I am
willing to say "I like Vista" despite all the mockery that it invites is
pretty strong evidence, I think, to support the claim that yes, I really
do like Vista.

Sucks-rocks colorblindness confirmed then. That or you're a flaming
nut.

Otherwise, what possible evidence can I produce that will demonstrate
to you that I really do like Vista? I cannot display the contents of my
mind, and you cannot read it.

You need to furnish evidence that Vista is the rational choice of a
utilitarian, rather than sticking with XP. So far you've failed
miserably.

Yes, it I *am* choosing not to do something (namely convince you of my
position), and yes I do think that if I tried to convince you of my
position, that I would fail to do so. So what?

You're not even trying to defend your position. In fact as far as I
can tell you have no position, unless "whatever position is oppose
Twisted's" is your position or something. :P

2+2 is 1 in these, true. 4 is also 1 in these, and so 2+2 is still 4.

There is no 4 in the ring of integers modulus 3, nor the trinary
integers.

There is if you define it to be 3+1, as would be the standard
definition of 2, 3, 4 ... in a system (0 is the additive identity, 1
is the multiplicative identity, 2 is 1+1, 3 is 2+1, 4 is 3+1...). It
just happens that 4 = 1 in this ring, and doesn't ordinarily.

There's also the little matter that one ordinarily is referring to the
normal integers and not some modular ring by default, unless
explicitly stated otherwise.

You're also relying on the assumption that if something is enshrined
in "Constitution Law", that it's a good thing.

I'm considering particular things in the constitution that have a
proven track record of doing good far outweighing any harm they do to
be good things. There is no such track record for copyrights or
patents; no evidence that they have made a whit of difference for the
common good though there's all manner of evidence for serious,
frequent harmful consequences.

It's like a drug of no proven efficacy and demonstrable, common and
deleterious side effects. As such, the FDA would yank it in a week if
it ever mistakenly approved it in the first place.

Instead this drug is being forcibly administered to the body politic,
increasingly over its own objections from a growing size and variety
of parts, and at ever increasing doses. Why do they keep increasing
the dose? Because it seems insufficiently effective at the lower dose,
that's why! That's because it is in fact ineffective at any dose --
and indeed, the symptoms it's being adminstered to cure (slow
innovation and suchlike) are actually being caused by the drug itself,
and would go away if they'd only let the patient be and quit drugging
them.

The relevance is that it demonstrates a belief system in which doing
public good is not necessarily a good thing.

Solipsism is prima facie evidence that someone is not a good candidate
for public office, so I daresay it is not relevant. Public policy
clearly must be based on the theory that the public that is to be
served exists. There's a simple utilitarian argument and payoff
matrix.

Top row is public's existence; left column is whether public policy
assumes its existence

N Y
N 0* 0**


Y 0*** 1****

* Nothing happens so no costs or payoff
** Here we assume (generously) no harm if the public is treated as not
existing.
*** Here there is no harm because the tax money that is paid for the
benefit of the nonexistent public is equally nonexistent!
**** Here we assume public policy sufficiently non-braindead that
benefits exceed costs by one unit.

The payoff matrix makes it clear that the outcome is no worse, but
possibly better, if you assume the public exists and behave
accordingly.

(Similar payoff matrices prove that you may as well assume the
nonexistence of any given religious type entity, good or bad. Given
the contradictory religious information out there, the speculative
negative payoff from wrath of god type stuff is risked uniformly and
can be subtracted from every alternative choice; if you pick Catholic
and the Muslims were right you're in for it, but if you pick Islam and
the Buddhists were right, or the Jews ...; The costs of practising
religion become the only remaining factor, and most are nonzero aside
from the choice of ignoring religion entirely, unless you're in an
intolerant society. So the logical choice is Christian during the
inquisition, Islam in Iran, agnostic/atheist in most secular
democracies, and so forth, and to minimize costs by doing the minimum
necessary to "pass" in all cases; and not being outspokenly
irreligious may be beneficial in some of the secular democracies. A
related argument decides the facts of the matter: atheism. Anything
discernible from noise has pattern by definition; a pattern by
definition forms the basis for a mechanistic understanding of and for
the technological control of a phenomenon. So all phenomena can be
decomposed into two components, one indistinguishable from noise and
one that is amenable to rationalist and naturalist approaches. The
noise is where anything supernatural or divine gets relegated, and is
also amenable to rationalist and naturalist approaches because it can
be modeled as noise! To the extent that it can't be, you obviously
didn't decompose the noise and the signal correctly; try again. So we
can use a hardware source of white noise such as television snow or
radio static as an acceptable substitute for God. So much for
religious truth; religion is 100% divorced from any pragmatic concern
and actually is what it always suspiciously resembled: a matter of
fashion and culture and nothing deeper, even if an inspiration for all
sorts of interesting architecture and philosophy at times. Outweighed
by its frequent historical use as en excuse for bloodshed and
oppression...the identity of indiscernibles is one philosophical
position that would actually make strictly equal the radio static and
supposed creator using the reasoning given above. No doubt some
credulous type neurologically prone to feelings of rapture and awe
will now start a whole cult that gets off on tuning between stations
in the middle of nowhere along I-95 to receive wisdom and instructions
from on high...:P)

Also, again, note that I am not disagreeing with your axioms. Just
highlighting them.

Axioms, hell -- they're theorems; see the payoff matrix above.
I argue you are not qualified to judge whether an idiom is "of
widespread nature"

In general, no. When it's English, yes.

[snip list of countries]

Half of those are not English countries. Of the ones that are, most
are much smaller than the US in population. Certainly the idioms I see
in wide use are widespread in English generally, as adding even a full
50 million people that don't use the idiom isn't going to dilute it
more than 20% or so, and equally the ones that I don't see are
probably used by a population no larger than that of Mexico City and
that the Los Angeles Valley in California alone will see (and likely
raise somewhat).

English obviously not quite as strong as
you make it out to be and weak in areas native speakers have no
problems at all;

Most Canadians do not speak American English as well as Americans do,
just like most Americans do not speak Canadian English as well as
Canadians do.

I'm fairly sure the idiom I used is not America-specific. It's
sufficiently generally English that your unfamiliarity with it points
to English not being your primary language.

I guess Internet service is better in Canada than where ever it is you
live.

I don't think so. I checked, and Internet service in Canada is mostly
the usual pattern of phone/cable duopolies just as it is in the
states.

I suggest that offshort support knows just as much about what they're
talking about as inhouse support. Both are just reading through a script.
In other words, offshore is not necessarily any worse than inhouse, and is
cheaper. Therefore supporting my argument that it is occasionally rational
for a company to use offshort support. Phew. I'm glad we got that settled.

It might be rational for a company to use shoddy offshore support in
place of shoddy onshore support, but it is not rational for them to
use shoddy support in place of decent support IF repeat business is at
all important in their line of work and they have real competition.

I'm typically "genuinely interested" only when I can experiment and
try it at no (financial, spam, or otherwise) risk to myself. And not
necessarily even then; it depends on lots more.

Okay, noted for now, though I may eventually forget and one day
recommend you stuff which... you know... costs money.

It's not about free, it's about risk-free and not paying ludicrous
margins above cost and free speech.

Same as with software. Same as with a lot of what I've been arguing.

You still win the argument, by the way. Again, I don't really care
about "winning" or "losing" arguments. I argue to exchange information;
not to score points. So if winning makes you happy, then I declare you the
winner, since it costs me nothing to do so.

I argue in the interests of bringing the light of truth and reason
into dark corners. Being argued back at is like some jerkoff following
me turning off all the lights I'd just turned on. Being argued back at
by someone who apparently doesn't even have a stake in the outcome is
like the same jerkoff claiming it's for reasons of energy efficiency
even though the light of truth and reason has probably got net
negative carbon emissions. :P

I'm not necessarily agreeing that "MS is unable to compete in an
open market".

There's plenty of evidence: whenever they have real competition their
market share goes directly into the toilet and someone hits "flush".
And they spend far more effort on artificially blocking competition
from happening than they do on product R&D, to judge by such
expensive, crummy, over-budget, and past-due turdpiles as Vista. That
XP is mostly usable must be a fluke; everything else was about as
execrable by the standards of the time, from windows 1.0 right up to
millennium <bletch> edition. Maybe they used up all of XP's evilness
budget allocation on pushing the world's first "product activation" BS
on everyone and a few of the more annoying bugs and crashes, and on
shoddy unfree support, lack of fixes for most bugs without security
implications, and the stupid half-open connection limit in SP2, or at
least not making it sysadmin-configurable, and then rigging every
SINGLE windows update batch since a third-party patch for that was
released to unpatch it.

This, by the way, is why I find it amusing when you insult my reading
comprehension.

There's nothing amusing about it; it's frankly bad. You misunderstand
one out of every three things I say, by my estimate, and I'm writing
in plain English, not Cockney fucking rhyming slang or something!

That snuff-porn example mentioned above, which you seem to agree with,
shows that trademark (which is a form of IP), might be a good idea.
Therefore, zero IP might be a bad idea.

I suggested alternatives even to trademark, and reasons why trademark
is entirely unlike IP.

Maybe this will help you understand: You do not need to even know what
serotonin nor dopamine is, in order to understand the sentence "I disagree
with it, but you win the argument". Hopefully this will help guide you to
understanding the sentence.

Saying in the same sentence that I'm wrong and that I win the argument
is like capitulating a game of field hockey while believing the score
currently favors your team over mine, or maybe while simply accusing
me of cheating. It's somewhat insulting, and it's also just plain
nonsensical. I was wondering what physiological abnormalities in your
brain chemistry would lead you to behave in such a manner.

My markup is a subset of plain-text.

Sentences like this make my head spin and convince me that you are not
normal. I don't think it's some Canadian thing either; I've met
Canadians and the vast majority of them, like the vast majority of
Americans, are not nuts.

Now get thee hence to w3c.org and educate thyself on the many
differences between HTML, XML, and plain text.

If your newsreader display bugs when it encounters the characters "<"
or ">", then perhaps you should use a different newsreader, or report bugs
to its author. This is a suggestion, not an order. I'm giving you this
suggestion to (marginally) improve the quality of your life. Feel free to
ignore the suggestion.

It doesn't wig out; it just doesn't interpret the markup into whatever
kind of fancy nice rich-text display you had in mind. I end up seeing
what looks like web page source -- text interspersed with html type
tags that make it hard to read and generally uglify everything. In
other words the usual behavior when you feed markup to a tool that
expects normal text, especially markup that's nonstandard and not
preceded by an appropriate DTD reference header.

[nit-picky BS snipped]

I never claimed that Vista smells like roses.

You're a literal-minded, obtuse, argumentative arsehole.

And again, I am asking you what was the point of that example, then,
if not to mislead its reader.

To inform, engage, and educate its reader, obviously.

If you reply, I will provide a P.O. box address to
which you may send U.S. money orders.

That was in response to a particular challenge nobody met the criteria
for, in case you'd forgotten. You conveniently quoted only the one
condition involving replying. Oh, and I suppose I should add the
following:

LEGAL NOTICE:
By reading this message with appended legal BS, you hereby agree:
a) Not to censor or in any way modify this message, nor impair its
distribution via normal usenet propagation mechanisms;
b) Not to selectively remove it from or prevent it entering your own
news spool while leaving most other posts to this thread alone, if you
are a news administrator and your spool carries cljp;
c) Not to cancel it retroactively;
d) That this message is distributed AS IS, without warranty including
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE; the sender
accepts no liability for any damages, including incidental and
consequential damages, arising from your use of this message; and
e) That to the extent that applicable state law supersedes some of the
terms and conditions above, the others will remain in full force and
effect.

So there. :P

.