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The Silencing of Maya

niederfamily.blogspot.be

281–290 of 332 posts

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you argue that? Genuinely curious.

Can you tell me the case where separating hardware from software created superior product? Anyway, I am too tired to argue with FOSS extremists touting their imaginary world with imaginary benefits and solutions for imaginary threats for imaginary users. "Users" ir the key word there. Majority of the people using software are just users, not programmers. We are not all butchers, bakers, and car mechanics. We don't ha…

>imaginary world with imaginary benefits and solutions for imaginary threats

Do be careful. RMS's "imaginations" have come true more than once. It's often that you don't know what you have until it's gone...

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#282
post #66

If anyone feels like making a copycat app over the weekend. http://www.speakforyourself.org/About_The_App.html

I contacted the parents via the email on their blog and offered to do just this.

Let me know if you need any help. I don't have time to clone the entire app, but could certainly contribute a screen, control, planning, etc

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#283
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does hardware end where does software start? Is the code in your BIOS still hardware? How about the driver for your graphics card? Is it still hardware if the processor only executes code signed by its manufacturer? Forbidding hardware companies like Apple to sell software is not sufficient to prevent them from only running things they approve. And besides, a law like that would likely cripple a large part of t…

I am sure there have been many objections against separation of executive, legislative and judiciary powers, also in the name of efficiency. > a law like that I don't see it as a law. I think it should be to the constitutional level. Laws, if necessary, would get into details on how to enforce the constitution, and these details may vary with place and time. > would likely cripple a large part of the industry and sti…

Apple wouldn't exist if a Montesquieu like separation of powers had been applied to the industry. Apple has always had seamless control of their product, it's what differentiates and makes them successful as a company.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apple has been a leader in this industry shift. Actually, Apple has been a follower. Ubuntu and the Linux world in general has had app-stores long before Apple came to the party. The Apple app-store is nothing more than a Sony'fied software repository. Where Apple have succeeded while "The Linux scene" has floundered is, Apple have put the app-store, physically, in peoples pockets. Sony/Sharp could have done it soon…

> Ubuntu and the Linux world in general has had app-stores long before Apple came to the party You're kidding, right? The difference is that software in Linux distro repositories (which is what I assume you're referencing) is both free as in beer and open source . Which kind of makes it the opposite of what most people think of when they say "app store." (Pre-emptive nitpick: it's true that Canonical has recently sta…

I'm talking about the appstores/repo's as technical features of an installed operating system base. We in Linux have had the ability to easily access app-store catalogs for years; Apple have built theirs relatively recently in comparison.

And the fact that there has been free as in beer, and open source 'walled gardens' is exactly the point I'm making: Sharp could've had an app store in the 90's, they already had the repository and just needed to add a customer element; this is the only new thing Apple has added to the game. Repo's were old hat until it morphed into Appstores.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. By your rationale every person in charge of a business is a philanthropist because they make other people's lives better. Like, let's say, British Petroleum, Bank of America, Electronic Arts, Blackwater, Heckler & Koch, people baking bread, and so on. They are still a business, and they still make money. When they return some of the money they earned back to society without expecting them back, THEN you can ca…

No, not all of them. Just those that try to make a buck and try hard to make the world a better place by creating useful things (what have they given away? not their money; their time, which is the most important thing they have. they could go on vacation 200 days a year, but instead they try to create things to enrich the world and themselves).

Flawed logic again. They have not given away their time, they get paid for their time, like every other business out there. The more it sells, the better they get paid. They are not performing community service, they SELL stuff. SELLING stuff is not philanthropy, no matter how useful the product is.

Sure, they could go on vacation 200 days a year but the fact that some don't doesn't mean that they are philanthropic, it just means that they like their work or they get off on running a big company, or some other reason.

Sorry, you still have not managed to prove Jobs was a philanthropist, and you will not be able to to so by using sophisms. Try again.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is and can be no ethical principle [..] I wasn't addressing the ethical part of your claim at all, but since you insist: there can be a moral argument in favor of patents. It goes like this: * Corporations are legal entities that are allowed because they were expected to, and have been shown to, advance our average wellbeing * Corporations more effectively increase our average wellbeing if they are encouraged t…

This is horribly embarrassing argument. It's a blatant post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy. What's worse is that it ignores the central point: the cost of your system is that individuals who think of an idea that happens to match one that is patented by one of these corporations gets the tar beaten out of him if he tries to use/trade it. You can't justify this violence, you can only try to sweep it under the rug, as you…

Speaking of embarrassing, you're embarrassing people who advocate against patents, with your incoherent vehemence. The comments you've been responding to have been civil and contributory to the conversation, and your responses, I think, have been less than civil and perhaps not very well-crafted towards contribution.

If the rest of this comment appears to be a personal attack, I apologize; I would ask that it be read as an analysis of the above thread, with an eye to improving future discourse.

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The fact is, people DO make arguments of a moral nature in favour of patents. And last I checked, there's no gold standard in validity of moral arguments. Your opening salvo ("no moral justification for patents, period") is interpretable as either a claim about the behaviour of humans, or a claim about universal ethics; that would make it obviously false or obviously laughable, respectively.

You ALSO, in your opening salvo, misrepresented patents ("you are not allowed to think of... and then trade..."), and Confusion fairly-politely tried to help you out. You replied with "No, you misunderstand ethics", which aside from being a rude escalation of conflict is also a non sequitur (since the use of "No" implies you're replying to his/her content, which you weren't).

THEN, Confusion was again polite and outlined a moral argument which has been taken by many participants in the broader societal discussion about patents, including the ones who make the laws in several countries over a few hundred years. She/he was even clear that the consequences alleged by this argument, with respect to the public good, appear to be at least partially divergent from the consequences observed in reality, AND explicitly pointed out that the argument isn't unassailable ("That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.").

I think any reasonable observer would agree that there IS a moral argument in favour of patents. It has some premises that not everyone agrees with (e.g. a sort of utilitarian framework). It also contains some contentious claims about the interaction between incentive structures and behaviour (e.g. inventors wouldn't invent, AND/OR drug companies wouldn't do FDA testing, without patent "protection"), which are clearly hard to test the truth of, and many reasonable people disagree about to what extent they are true. (I myself find the "drug company" argument very persuasive (I agree with kevinalexbrown above), and the "inventor" argument highly suspect (I mostly agree with you, below, in your comment about Tesla and Torvalds), but the point is that intelligent thoughtful people (or even HN commenters) can disagree about these things.

Hopefully I don't have to go into detail about how opening a post with "This is horribly embarrassing argument." is nothing more than verbal abuse.

And your shot about post hoc ergo propter hoc is a little missing the point: while some crazy person COULD say "look we got an internet because of the patent system, therefore we were right about patents", and I take your point about that hypothetical argument being an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I don't think anybody actually does make that argument. We all know we haven't sampled the universe in two states, and we all know that we're arguing about untested hypotheticals (about what WOULD happen with less patents or more patents, and about what WOULD HAVE happened in the past say 50 years).

And one last complaint about your rhetoric: while I acknowledge that ultimately any law (at least in all extent societies) is ultimately backed up by threat of violence, and thus in some sense law is violence, it's ludicrous to conflate the enforcement of near-consensus with violence. Unless you literally meant violence, and literally meant "gets the tar beaten out of him", in which case of course we all know that's not what happens to those who lose in patent fights. What happens is that profits that they have taken, which are judged by the courts to have been earned in violation of the framework of law, are taken away, and/or they are required to make good profits that they have been judged to have unfairly denied to others. Much as other proscribed commercial activity (e.g. fraudulent product misrepresentation, e.g. cartels) would be penalized. So, either way, your phrasing about violence is at best a distraction, at worst a falsehood.

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The thing is, it's weird having to write this little attack on your little attacks, because I agree that the first-world patent system has raged dysfunctionally out of control, and is stifling innovation rather than promoting it. (That's ALL it's doing wrong, mind you, because if you stick to 30-year-old products and technologies, you'll never notice this stuff. But I want to live in the FUTURE, never mind the present!) But I think the argument is narrower than you make it seem (again, consider drug companies), and I think we could afford to keep it more civil than I read you to have done, at least among basically-reasonable people.

Hopefully I have myself managed to avoid destructive incivility.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#287
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's life changing, pay the party that invented the thing, not the ones that copied it in a app. Now, if it's not remotely equally useful, sue them for something for screwing your life with false claims.

Who should pay for that? The company which believes they aren't infringing and are already in negotations over the licensing? Or the family who presumable don't have infinite wallets?

doesn't the company that claims to have invented it first have a product in the market?

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that it's laywers being paranoid. If Apple didn't stop the app from being distributed when they were notified of a problem and a court later upheld the complaint, they might be sued for contributory infringement, or whatever the relevant patent term is.

We have a solution for this: preliminary injection. IANAL, so perhaps this is still opening up for lots of liability, but I'd much prefer Apple say "You want it taken down? Ask the judge for a preliminary injunction. Until then, go away." Preliminary injunctions are the due process mechanism for causing the action to cease while it's litigated rather than continue. They, not Apple's whim/decision/liability-aversion,…

Precisely.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#289
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who should pay for that? The company which believes they aren't infringing and are already in negotations over the licensing? Or the family who presumable don't have infinite wallets?

doesn't the company that claims to have invented it first have a product in the market?

Not one that's good enough, apparently.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#290
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would all be pertinent if the software patents in question were actually novel inventions worthy of protection. One of the patents is for a "method for dynamically redefining the keys on a keyboard". I mean, come on .

The key is, was that novel when the patent was first filed?

Given that xmodmap has been around since the 80s, probably not.
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