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A Letter from 2020
Auckerman writes: "Mark Summerfield, of Perl Press , has written an excellent article over at OsOpinion. It's written as a letter from his future self on what life will be like in 20 years. Kinda scary and certainly worst case scenerio, but his point gets across."
The shrine of Linus Torvalds will be attended daily by his disciples, who spread around printed sheets of their project source code daily, a ritual begun by Kevin Mitnick in 2003.
Bill Gates, after his recent voluntary demotion to janitor, works yet another day in the halls of Microsoft. "Hey, I got sick of coding, and I had a change of conscience. This was the only way for me to escape," says Bill of his career decision.
Rob "Commander Taco" Malda spends yet another day in Cabo San Lucas, on the coastline, wearing only his 18-karat gold-enameled Speedo, coding away on his Sony VAIO laptop with Debian 20.2.13. The locals beg him to put on a shirt.
The Apple world mourns the loss of Steve Jobs, who died in a hyperbaric chamber accident. Apparently, he drank too much soda while in the chamber, causing his lungs to explode.
Today marks the 15th anniversary of Sony CEO Norio Ohaga and chief design technician Akio Morita trying yet again to take over the world with a proprietary programming language. The result was a humiliating failure similar to that of the original DIVX DVD format. Sony was forced to halt all product production except in the fields of personal sound systems, video production tools, and animé.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Politicians corrupt themselves, and businesses just coronate the most corrupt.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
Just my few cents...
~KONala
Hard drive technology is always present and therefore you can store things. Microsoft has already been bitchslapped by the government and will eventually be totally broken up. Also you can't redefine the US consitution without a great deal of effort and that would be almost impossible to allow. Programmers and Historians are not subversives and never will be. Microsoft is not big brother and dosn't have the clout, etc. In other words not in 100,000,000 years.
Respond to s
and people will recreate representations of the turn-of-the-century internet on their computers. Of course our current internet will fit on one home system then.
Stan: Hey Bob, I'm having an Internet Retro party this weekend, you coming?
Bob: Hell yeah! I wouldn't miss that pron & e-commerce! Let's see if I still remember how to type.
Stan: Don't forget that, aw, what did they call it...oh yeah, Latency!
Both: hahahaha
His stommace would explode instaed, that's where soda goes when you drink it.
If your stommace exploded, you wouldn't have to worry about the blood loss and internal injuries, the shock would likely kill you first.
Still, he'd have to drink a lot so soda, and something would have to be seriously wrong with the hyperbaric chamber for that to happen.
Now, if corporations where some sort of socialist communes, then perhaps we could get away with thinking that corporations are "us" therefore we have only to blame "ourselves".
My dear Green Socialist:
Consider that the majority of American households now hold stock and mutual funds invested in these "evil" corporations. In other words, they already are "us"! Which by implication means, what's good for them is good for us, too! The old saw about "What's good for General Motors is good for America" has more truth to it than you might think. Call it a Capitalist Commune, maybe!? The notion of a class divide between the prolitariat vs. the capitalist is ridiculously outdated. Today the prolitariat is the capitalist!
$$$$$$
Microsoft.net is already somewhat a reality. MS owns a pretty good chunk :/
of shares in UU.NET. Not extremely unbelievable in that light
All I have to say can be summed up in one sentence: what is wrong with you people??
Currently I'm working with some others to produce a free development kit for the Dreamcast. It doesn't sound like much, but the big issue here is that we're scared to release anything for fear of Sega coming down on us, whether we did anything wrong or not. Barring that, every Dreamcast disc is forced to display "Licensed by Sega Enterprises", which even if you disclaim it, is an open invitation to "get rid" of anyone they don't like.
You might be sitting there smug going "heh heh, stupid game consoles, who gives a shit" but the fact is that a lot of companies are heading this way. What happens when all widely available PCs come with a thing like that that makes it next to impossible to install a free OS? Or even worse, like RMS's scenerio, where the computer will not allow a new OS to be installed without some kind of encryption keys? They are already actively developing monitors with encryption in the cable so that you can't copy movies. Forget the logisitcal problems -- there is a possibility that we'll have things like video cards and other hardware that need special encryption keys to unlock usage of them.
The Suck guys were right, the people here at Slashdot have a bad tendancy to just assume that things will always be the same and never get worse. I'm not saying that they'll keep getting worse and worse and there won't be a backlash.. but some laws and precedents are being laid down right now that provide the foundation for things like he describes.
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
I wonder if he conotes the Indians with hackers...
Atill amusing to read and the line with the "European open mindness being crushed by the dollar" is absolutely transferable to today, or not?
da St0p
-- da Stop
In fact, poorer nations are mired in poverty BECAUSE of Amercian-style cpitalits.
"Funding a project is not "taking the initiative in creating the Internet." The Internet was created by scientists"
Well, this isn't completely correct. The Internet was "created" by whichever group of people decided initially to build the arpanet (the DoD in this case). Those scientists would not have done what they did by themselves, they were funded by someone higher up whose idea the whole thing was, and in essence, were just implementors of that idea. Sure they came up with original ideas for the lower level components that the project was built with (e.g. TCP/IP) but not for the Internet itself. I don't see that all the parties involved would have had the initiative to come work together and build what they built, without some higher level entity driving the project. (see "Computer Networks, 3rd Edition, Tanenbaum, page 47 for a few more details on the beginning of the arpanet .. it pretty much happened like that)
It's kind of like, if I decide "I'm going to create my own house", then I go draw up a few rough plans of where I want the kitchen, how big the windows must be, where the bedrooms must be etc etc. Of course, I don't have all the skills required to bring the project to completion, so I hire an architect to draw up the plans, and I hire a builder to physically put it together. But the house is still "my creation", even though I hired some help for implementation. The guy who laid down a bunch of bricks and cement is not, in general, considered the "creator" of my house.
I'm not trying to comment on Al Gore here, I have no idea what he did or didn't do regarding the internet. I'm just making a more general comment on who gets considered a "creator" of something, and 9 times out of 10 it's the person(s) who thought something up, conceptualized and designed the whole thing and then organized its implementation. The house is just one example, but that applies to most other things, especially businesses, software etc. Bjarne Stroustrup created C++, not the hundreds of people who write C++ compilers. Sun is considered the "creator" of Java, not the bunch of scientists who really created it. Etc etc etc.
Don't you guys realize this guy is being totally felicitous? Not only his he making comments on where things could end up if people like Bill Gates has his way with his .NET strategy, but also the horrific brainwashing capabilities that come when laws like the DMCA and UCITA make it illegal to re-create history. After all history is stored on some medium, and any storage could be outlawed through the leasing paradigm being pushed by Corprations like Microsoft. Worse, already the recording and motion picture industries are trying to overturn the 1982 Home Recording Act . And now the FCC is requiring copyright protection chips be placed in all digital televisions. These technologies give them the power to re-write history to suit their agenda. Play this out over the next 20 years, and people will start believing that what they have now is the best, as the history of anything else will be erased.
www.enthea.org
I feel like such a clod. I've been rooting for Al Gore all this time because I think George W. Bush is way worse.
I tell people around me to vote for anybody except for the big two parties just to send the message that there is unrest about the way things are.
Now I have a good recommendation. Thanks.
BTW: (obligitory on topic message so I dont get modded to blackest hell) The huge Mega-Corps like Microsoft an oligarchys like RIAA and MPAA would not be able to survive a libertarian government because their kingdoms are won and protected by an overbearing government. Going libertarian will bring the Constitution back to power.
Let us reclaim this great country and strike down government support of the god-less comunist Mega-Corps!
meept!
meept!
"(not unlike all the os dicussions going on, what is coolest/best? linux or windows? we all know windows is "better", it may just not be so fucking cool, all depending on each individual's interests;" [...] "some people may have problems accepting that others simply just are more creative/better humans."
You are now considered a better human if you use windows... And that story doesnt seem so far out anymore.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
Agreed. "Look, I can make references to a work of brilliance and Microsoft's most recent business initiative, spout a bit about corporate monoculture, and get linked to by /."
Stupid waste of time.
This is, as you say, a no case scenario.
And what point, exactly, was gotten across? Corporations are scary? Get over it.
Remember, if it were up to Kahuna Burger, the Sega Dreamcast itself would be illegal, since all video games do is stir people up and make them into zombie killbots in his warped world view. He certainly wouldn't want a free development kit for Dreamcast, no one would be able to censor it. Kahuna Burger is a fascist, he'd easily adjust to the future portrayed in the letter, probably landing a job as copyright enforcer and shooting violaters.
My suggestion to you is to keep working on it, and when you've finished it, release it. If Bleem is legal, and SOA allows Bleem on Dreamcast, your development kit should be ok.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
If, in addition, historians will have problems with IP regulation, it is a significan risk. And, if nothing is static, it's even worse, if historians has to rent, then, yes, our history is erased.
Around here, for dead tree magazines, there is a law requiring everybody to send a copy to a public archive for a nominal compensation. I know there has been discussions about things like that for digital media as well (at least I know they have been recording USENET for years), but they have to get publishers consent on the web. For historians, that's probably a Bad Thing. BTW, I have been dumping all my stuff to a tape once a year lately, with the intention of keeping it there for the future. In 20 years I can look back on it.... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Okay. Letting corporations run things is a Bad Idea. We figured that out. How about we all get together and tell the other people? You know, those other people around you?
*sigh* Why do I feel like a choir member when reading stuff like this?
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
If you are from 20 years in the future and somehow reading this, please answer my questions:
:(
1 - Have there been any advances in prewarmed ground corn since 2000? Or is hot grits just passe and lukewarm oatmeal is where it's at?
2 - What is the status of Beowulf clustering? More importantly, could I even imagine a circa 2020 Beowulf cluster?
3 - What is the current status of the Miss Portman? If she is unmarried then my plan has failed
4 - Tom Christiansen - Once and for, is this guy dead!?!
5 - #5 is more of a request. Can you please browse the 20 year old Slashdot archives and tell me what this post god mod'ed too? If it's not +5, Insightfull...frrr
Thank you.
With love,
,
faeryman
> Take a worldwide survey, and I think you'll find that most *individuals*
aren't willing to admit to themselves that they're really greedy
bastards, and that it makes them feel better about themselves if they
claim to be good people on a survey; then they don't have to actually go
act like they really care, they can just talk about it.
Even in the heyday or government/business buddy, buddying in the 1880-1900 you really didn't see that much coorporation. People always have critism and you couldn't execute anyone or send them to internment camps. It just dosn't work that way. There is due process and the force of law, etc.
Respond to s
Yawn
Guys: It's just software. It is not the end of the world. there are more important things in life than this. Really.
It gets pretty tiresome after a year or two guys. Can't this band play any other numbers?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Well, the reason I consider mega-corps communist is because of their sheer size and the way they do business. A capitalist busines, in my mind, is a small and fast moving company that competes with many other small and fast moving companies to sell the best product possable at the lowest cost possable in order to still make a profit. On the other hand, I see mega-corps as a rigidly structured self contained government. Products are often controlled through litigation to create or maintain a monopoly or an oligarchy. Employees are cared for in every manner by the company (insurance, child care, predictable salary not based on skill). Also mega-corps are given state financial assistance in the form of very low cost loans, grants, corporate welvare, government surplus purchasing programs, etc. These corporations far closer resemble the state run "businesses" of communist China than they do the capitalist ideal stated above.
meept!
meept!
Yikes, and I've just finished rolling up a character for a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. The similarities are quite evident. Gotta love those corporate governments...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
As much as I feel that we are heading to a society that resembles Mark's prediction. I've always felt that there will be a breaking point where people just won't stand for it anymore. The general apathy towards UCITA, DMCA, and the fiasco with Napster (at least outside of geek circles) can only continue for so long. Eventually disgust with the system will hit a threshhold and a large enough group of people will fight back. I'm not sure that working in the system is the way things like this will change. My prediction is that rampant civil disobediance will be the force for change. I'm sure there are others out there, like me, that will choose to ignore laws that take away our rights. The powers that be cannot win, when the numbers that are resisting are too huge to punish. Of course this all hinges on normal people feeling that their rights are being severely violated and realizing that there is something that they can do about it.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Certainly I would need a steel rod implanted in my head to believe a libertarian government would bust up the monopolies.
Your points about economic libertarians are well taken and I believe what you say coinsides with my fellings. I believe the government needs strong social programs so that every American has a place to live, food, and good health care, and free education even if they lose every cent they have.
The reason I like libertarians however is my belief that the government has no place in regulating my business dealings. If I want to buy a CD and rip into MP3s for all my friends I should be able to. If the RIAA does not want me to do this they should have had me sign a zillion page contract saying exactly how, when, and who is allowed to listen to the music on that CD. They could even put some teeth into the contract threatening to never sell me another CD if I violate their contract.
meept!
meept!
Nope. I'm with you on this one. It has the feel as if he just read 1984 and was trying to copy the feel (substitute proles for subversives and you start to see what I'm saying). Maybe I'm a optimist but what he writes seems really unlikely. And what's this about the last digital copy of Sgt. Pepper being erased? I still have the original album (and the record player to play it one) and it's over twenty years old. What makes him think all this is just going to evaporate?
Dear Elvis,
Greetings from the year 2000! I'm writing you from my auto-piloted aircar on my way to work. Normally my wife, Claudia Schiffer, takes the aircar, but my jet pack is in the shop this week.
I just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for making the decision to major in Near Eastern Studies rather than Computer Science. Excellent idea. I now work for a multi-billion dollar Near Eastern Studies company while my Unix hacking friends beg for quarters in the street.
By the way, you should probably sell all that Cisco stock you've got. Networking is going nowhere. Invest in cold fusion.
Sincerely,
You
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
If Amazon keeps their "One Click" patent, then it expires in 2024 and, it can never be patented again.
Specifically, I was refering to the possibility of other patents similar to that taking hold in the market. Granted, their patent would run out in 2004, and granted they'll go through hell keeping it even if they do persue it. However, all it would take is a few patents from Microsoft along the same lines and we'd be in trouble.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
As many times as we have to remind you limeys that the expression is "sheesh". And BTW, how can you be sure you don't have a problem with gas and the rest of us are just too polite to mention it?
And not even well reasoned FUD at that.
Bingo -- stop right there. That is exactly what I'm getting at. Is this a problem? Yes. Should we be concerned? Absolutely. Should we do something about it? Of course we should.
Should we keep preaching to the already converted?
NO.
The big fallacy here is in thinking that Slashdot is anything but our little geek soapbox to rant upon, but that's all it is. I'd like to see some changes too, but this isn't the place to bring them about. A start, sure, but you're sufficently riled up & organized that it's now time to move on to bigger strategies -- write (with atoms & paper, not bits & keys!) to your congressmen and let them know how important this is. Don't bitch about it to me -- I'm already on your side. Bitch about it to people that can do something about the problem. If you invest all your energy here then the world is going to pass you by, and the issue you're so worked up about will never be helped by your contribution.
That would almost be worse than anything else, wouldn't it?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Uhm. I asume you mean corporate web sites have more content, cleaner designs, ect. It might be true, to some extent, but did you stop and ask yourself why?
Maybe they have the resources (read money) to hire people to build those.
While the "free" and uncolonised may have good ideas, they have to work to "earn their lives" (anyone else than me sees something wrong with the way that sounds?) and do that in their free time.
My point is that we're all stuck in a capitalistic system and some are advantaged and others held back by it. But you can't judge people's capabilities based on their production in such unequal system.
Anarchy is the answer.
Must read
An Anarchy FAQ
This text has been illegally obtained from vault files. Do not leave this terminal or attempt to enter any commands. You will be arrested momentarily. Resistance is futile.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
Better yet, don't use Windows at all! If you feel the need for Windows, of any version:
Better yet, never by Intel based hardware (which is the one of the main RDRAM boosters). Try an Alpha-based system, Power Macintosh, or even a Sun workstation. If you absolutely must use an x86 compatible system, get an AMD solution. When the AMD x86-64 stuff comes out definitely get an AMD solution ;-)
Start going to local music events by small, unsigned bands. You might be suprised by how much good music is out there that never makes it to national distribution. Many of those small bands are even able to afford to have their own CDs pressed and sell them at performances.
Watch them in the theaters only after they move to the second string, $1/$1.50/$2.00 theaters or wait for the movis on non-pay-per-view cable or open broadcast TV. As for DVD's just don't buy them at all! If you really care about this issue, you can forego a little bit of entertainment.
I can't agree more with this one. If you live in a democratic country and you don't like what's going on, get out there and do something about it. If you don't live in a democracy, maybe you should look into doing something about that as well ;-)
The author of this short story (not article) should have focused on the monopolistic tendacies of AOL instead of Microsoft.
I'm not saying the issue isn't important. It is, but this is no longer the best forum to raise your concerns. Just about everyone here is already on your side; the goal now should be to move forward and convince people that actually matter -- members of congress, judges, and our presidents & governors. Arguably, the private sector is at least as important, but you're never going to get them on your side on this one so it's a dead end to go after them.
There are more important issues. Copyright is a strange & muddied thing, and very interesting in these GNU / Linux / mp3 / Napster / etc days. But it's not the end of the world. Sorry, but that's all there is to it. It ties in to some very dangerous issues (the AOL-TimeWarner merger terrifies me, for example) but there are more important things to worry about. Health care. Education. Defense. Ecology. Et cetera -- pick any one you choose. Just because copyright plays a role in our livlihoods does not, by that very connection, make it the most important issue on the docket -- and implying such implies quite a bit about the self-importance of the readers here. Is software a big deal? Sure, I guess. But give me a break, get a grip on reality. The jonny one note thing gets really, really old after a while...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Of course, I was born, raised, and have always lived in Richmond, VA (Capitol of the Confederacy). Go figure... guess that doesn't really make much sense.
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
Hopefully this story is grossly hysteric. Anyway it should be a wake-up call -- fight the UCITA!
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I like the Live Goat Porn number. Oh wait... damn... I guess I'm a one trick pony, too...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Does this mean that we get M$ stock options at birth?
This article is silly. Al Gore would never let this happen - oh, wait, he DID put the Internet for sale on eBay, so I guess anything is possible.
I think an interesting part about this "letter" from 2020 is that all technology mentioned sounds to be on the same level as what we have today. To me, this is the most poignant part of the Winopoly/RIAA/MPAA trend toward litigation. A new technology emerges and it gets its ass sued off.
Given the tendency of big business to sue, I'm amazed we've gotten this far.
I actually know people who sound like this...."Windows sucks and crashes, but hey everyone knows how to use it and I can listen to my music..."
Burn Hollywood Burn
Silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I am just wondering where the heck John Galt is to invite me to his little valley where all the other geeks are hiding out until the government ruins the world and everybody wants us back.
1984 is about government getting into our private lives. If governments weren't corrupt, corporations wouldn't have the power to be corrupt.
Splitting up the 500 richest corporations and giving the money to the public isn't going to solve any problems. We should have more freedom to skirt around these ridiculous laws, not make laws to strip away more freedom (elect Harry Browne)
That would be against the DMCA. According to the DMCA, all border crossings to Canada are considered devices allowing people to get around copyright protections and thus, are illegal.
- IF---
- Amazon is allowed to keep their patent on the "One Click" ordering system.
- Microsoft
.NET (God forbid... PLEASE) actually takes off and gains market share
- User-owned storage media begins to vanish
- RIAA shuts down Napster/Gnutella, etc (**** NO I'M NOT ADVOCATING COPYRIGHT INFRINGMENT - ONLY THE PRINCIPLE UNDER WHICH NAPSTER OPPERATES - A FREE MEDIUM FOR EXCHANGE OF FILES AND IDEAS)
- UCITA passes in all 50 states
- Licenses to hardware can be enforced without any signed agreement between parties (READ:
:Cue:Cat)
Then this story could become reality in 20 years. God help us all.quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
Now, airplanes are still around, but we all don't have one in our garage. True there have been many advantages like cleaner fuel, and more efficient jets, but they're still the same planes from the 60's and 70's.
With Moore's law its hard to imaging if computers will go the way of the jet, and hind-sight is always 20/20, but I feel comfortable being in the IS/IT market. I think we need to focus on the fact that computers have been a boom *long* in the making, and planes are more of a boom that fizzled moreso than computers are today. We are the generation that forms this technology into a service that will benefit everyone, and not just a skilled pilot and a few travelors packed like sardines...
Why are you all proud to be in IS/IT, and what do you think about technology trends becoming more informational than physical (er... that is as far as the common man is concerned) ?
----
One thing I know. Predictions of what life will be like n years in the future are always wrong and get more wrong the larger the values of n.
They're all bollocks!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Hey it's you from 2020,
Guess what... There still ain't any flying cars, robot butlers, or food generators. C-ya in another 20. Oh buy the way don't use any Win128 programs... It will send a signal to the Microsoft Terminators to find you...
Talk to you later...
you 20 years from now
P.S. Save your frozen burritos, Coffee Beans and Mountain Dews they're the only currency these days...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
You seem to be saying that the example of airplanes shows that we should not really expect Moore's Law to continue, since we have had only minor advances in this field, keeping the same basic shape and principles as planes from the 60's and 70's.
But the important technology that appeared after the 60's and 70's was not an airplane in every home...it was in things that we didn't even see coming!. Personal computers, the internet, have revolutionised our lives in a way that could not have been preditcted even in 1980. True, its the year 2000 and we don't all have the flying cars that the sci-fi of 30 years ago promised, but we can assured that life in 20 years time will be very different than it is now. Better or worse, remains to be seen.
--
Why is the universe here? -Well, where else would it be?
Nowadays you always hear stories in the media about the Japanese suffering in internment camps during WWII and about the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there are never stories about say, the Nanking Massacre, Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march to put the Japanese people's suffering in those camps in perspective. It almosts makes the Japanese seem victims of WWII like the jews were, whilst in fact they were the agressors.
Bush has over $90 million in campaign contributions, mostly from BB, while Gore has just over $50 million)
What's needed is a simple rule, if it can't vote, it can't make a campaign contribution. Clearly, campaign contributions have an influence on the outcome of an election to some degree (nobody will hear of Bob Smith who has $5.00 in his campaign fund), thus, contributions should be restricted to those who have a right to influence an election's outcome (voters). Add to that a cap on the amount an individual may contribute (since no particular voter is to have more influence than another) and perhaps representatives might start representing the people they're supposed to again.
And that makes me laugh.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The article is way over the top. Seems like everyone these days thinks it's fashionable to have an opinion about all the legal battles and how corporate america is crushing the freedom of the net. As a result, every half-wit journalist out there is trying to write something intelligent about it but often times their incompetence and shallow understanding of the real issues is the only thing that comes accross. If things continue to get worse a new medium will rise to fill the gap. People will just stop using the internet the way tehy use it now. The internet will become a convenient shopping center. One big catalog. There will be a new means for people to communicate free thoughts and ideas. Some people think "oh, well it's to expensive to build a private internet" or "big business will always control the computer technology market" but those people aren't thinking. Who says computers will be the preferred means of sharing information in the future? Like the invention of the microchip who's to say that a completely new technnology that we can't even conceive isn't just beyond the horizon? If it isn't maybe you should be the one to use your brain and figure it out, someone has to. If we lose this battle for protection, free speech, and privacy on the net a new group of geniuses will find a way to create a second revolution. That's human nature.
...this is no longer the best forum to raise your concerns.
/. However, there are few other issues with such wide-reaching influence; software issues affect both education and health care, for instance. That's why I got a bit defensive. Sorry about that.
Heh. You, sir, are completely correct. I did *not* mean that software issues are the only (or even the most) important issues around. Corporatism and corporate manifest destiny are certainly the larger, scarier parent issue; and social issues such as education and health care are certainly more fundamentally important.
/. is certainly more focused on the computer-tech end of the social issues because that is the nature of
In any case, I think you are right-- fighting strictly for software rights is fighting the symptoms, not the disease.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It's pretty clear what Al Gore meant, he was trying to take credit for someone else's successful idea. It's not a big deal, politicians do it all the time. Al Gore just got called out on it, that's all.
Nice reference.
(Bladerunner: [close captioned for the lame])
Absimiliard
Hi, I'm your friendly neighbourhood Fascist Moderator at osOpinion. What happened, in few words: the site used to be affiliated with Maximum PC; then Kelly McNeill, our editor-in-chief, got a better offer from the NewsFactor Network. A few weeks ago, we switched, and the NewsFactor people came up with this new portal-like look. I personally would like a pure-text alternative look (like /.'s "Light" option), but you can't have everything...
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
The Indians of America didn't believe in ownership of land.
Look what happened to them!
I don't forget how it was to be a kid on the Bboards.
All the stuff you couldn't download... it was a bunch of porn and warez and dumb online games.
Still, the old apache systems were quite cute, and though I don't miss the connection speeds, it was quite convenient to have everything a little boy shouldn't have in one place. Anarchist's handbook and warez comander keen games in one place. As it went on, it got more focused as a message board tool and less as a pure file-leech place. And that's how the internet started, too. What will the next generation of networking tools be?
This was pre-linux popularity, pre-slashdot. What will replace the internet? A corporate network like Microsoft.net? I'm guessing (just guessing) digital tv and transferrence of free movies and songs. And why shouldn't music videos be given free from companies, or sold for cheap.
Is our personal freedom worth more than the good of society? Yes. So let's fight for the next technology to be as free as possible.
-Ben
Things are that bad my sig is just meant as a reminder there are some bullies and then there is the antichrist.
Respond to s
The net is in a danger of becoming a desolate, sterilized wasteland Take a look around the world. As you look, please note which parts of the world have been "colonised" by corporations grabbing land and "putting up 'no trespassing' signs without ever stopping to think whether it would be better to keep their property somewhere else". In other words, which parts of the world have been developed under the normal, capitalist, Western mode of production.
Then note which parts of the world remain "free" and uncolonised, without the plague of that cursed private property.
Then see which of the two categories contains most of the world's "desolate, sterilized wastelands".
You may be surprised.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I guess the big difference is, Wired publishes all his Henny Penny tripe.
OMFG! Another George Orwell in the making! Notify the Media!
Now if we can just pull another "Animal Farm" out of the poor boob before we suck out his brains with a bicycle pump...
"Sure, living in today's modern workaday world IS a little like having Bees live in your head.
But, there they are..."
-- Firesign Theatre, 1972
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
World Unification Copyright Infringement Trade Act?
Well, U Can't Innovate Trade Act?
Okay, that was dumb, I'm sorry.
And exactly who corrupts the government? That's right... Big Business. If it weren't for lobbyists giving millions to Dubyuh or Gore, there might still be a shread of dignity in political elections (and I'm not exagerating; Bush has over $90 million in campaign contributions, mostly from BB, while Gore has just over $50 million)
And I'm not advocating splitting up the Fortune 500; I'm advocating restricting their influence over the government and the laws that are passed at the federal level.
------
If there is one thing that the UK fuel crisis made clear is that people don't care what you do to them. This scenario benefits big corporations - ie. the people who get to say what laws should be made. Don't mistake lots of people bitching on /. for people actually doing anything. Everyday we see government and lawyers all over the world eroding our online rights. What do we do about that - talk a lot - Oh I'm scared...
This wasn't all stuff back in the days of Arpanet, but check out, for example, the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. And I actually remember an article about a national "network of networks" *written* by Gore in Byte magazine in the early 90s.
It's a real shame that this soundbyte has been so widely spread out of context. Check the facts.
(That said, I personally support Nader, for reasons given quite clearly in the article).
--
J
I'm not so willing to bet joe blue-collar-worker has exactly the same political ideas as niles upper-management. And guess who has the money? Upper management of course. And they give that money to political groups that represent *their* interests, not necessarily the interests of their employees. Corporations are not politically homogenous entities. In fact I'd say that the hierarchy in corporations reflect the general political differences of the population at large. Those at top have substantially different views than those at bottom. Now, if corporations where some sort of socialist communes, then perhaps we could get away with thinking that corporations are "us" therefore we have only to blame "ourselves". Just look at YOUR corporation and who is in charge. Do you coders in the trenches really have that much power over your ivory tower business school PHBs and marketing suits? Do you *really* think they share your political views identically?
Yes human nature is at fault. But the bad part of it is at fault more.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"Now more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature.... If the next centennial does not find us a great nation ... it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."
- James Garfield, 1877
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
And when the vinyl is cracked or scratched or otherwise unplayable, and no new copy is available in anything but digital format? When record players aren't made at all because they're not profitable, and old ones can't be fixed for lack of parts or people capable of working on them? Forget analog tape decks - degeneration of media, no new equipment, adoption of heavily-protected and proprietary digital formats for the media and subsequent storage, etc.
The symbolic dystopia everyone keeps throwing around is "1984", although Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" would be more apt for this particular reference. Books that weren't memorized were lost to the ages. Wait for the analog devices and self-storage options to disappear because of age/obsolescence/disrepair/replacement, and see what happens.
(That said, the article still seemed like a weak attempt, despite some of the good points made.)
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Seriously, look at the pro-internet bills he created and got passed.
--
Tangentially, what's all the hoopla about accountability, anyway? So what if you can point and say "Bob screwed up!", if there are no sanctions for Bob's actions? This is a big problem with governments: they have ridiculous procedural overhead for accountability, but no culpability.
--
Change is inevitable.
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
I think 1984 and articles like these, while illustrative are subtley missing target. You want to know what the future will be like? You want to know how things will look? Too bad. You won't be able to know. And worse, you won't KNOW you that there is anything to know. The scariest thing is a future in which the transparent propagandizing and commercializing effect has made us clueless, and careless to reality. Who of us out there this morning watching Good Morning America and eating cereal pimped by that wholesome Rosie O'Donnel, was as aware or angry as I was about our government's involvement in Columbia, or the School of Americas? There are many issues that people are just simply unaware of. Ommission of information is sometimes worse than denial of it. Those who own information own reality. And the only way to defend yourself is make yourself aware of what is going on under your nose. Otherwise, when our horrible future comes...we will not even know it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
No joke.
But almost every place in the US has _some_ sort of local music scene. Even this godforsaken rathole known as Denver has hope. It's the first DIY indie Country scene I've ever seen in my life!
I've heard tell that there's also a very active rap/hiphop indie scene, but since I think most rap sounds like egotistical shit I've not paid much attention there.
The most important thing is that consumers have to accept any new thing. If people don't buy it, it's useless. Just being for sale isn't enough. DIVX is a great example. So will the e-book formats that encrypt books so only one person can read them. Having been overseas for a few years in the US Army I know firsthand the reason for region coding. Movies come out in the US first then overseas. And code free players are available for extra cost. Geeks can never seem to understand that regular consumers don't buy everything available. Nobody has the money. And consumers are notoriously conservative.
Be an Outlaw, use a free Operating System. Something is going terribly wrong, we used to be born free on a free earth and suddenly we imposed on ourselves a lot of restrictions. My question is, are humans getting worst as the years go by? Has our life really improved?
Unfortunately I don't know and I'm too lazy to care anyway.
The rise of the multi-national corporation is playing a big part in the changes in society, don't you think? When a single corporation can challenge laws in two or three countries simultaneously, that has some rather disturbing implications for freedom.
...can pry my unix/unix-like operating systems from my cold dead fingers.
Future scenario prediction under communism is impossible because communism has no future.
If history (remember that kiddies) has taught us anything it's that the big companies that once roared tend to get the smack-down after fscking the public over many years.
But other companies just take their place. Remember when IBM was punished by not being allowed to enforce certain patents for 10 years. MS stepped in and took over (think OLE).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the 1970's the same cute "scenario" could've been written about IBM except that the last copy of Sgt Peppers would've been on an 8-track.
All that kept going through my mind was the 1984 commercial.
-Jennifer
If Ralph is so great, why won't he join the Green Party as a member?
If you're sick of corporations running everything, disempower the Corporation that charters them: Vote Libertarian!
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
DMCA and UCITA are crap. Fine. Work to repeal them, or work around them.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups.
Ah, hell, forgot who said that.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I want my damn atomic car...100 miles per gram and free lead underwear. Cmon think about it...could lead to a new species while your foolin around on top of the reactor
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
> anything France has done in this century
Would you please be kind enough to elaborate on that? Thanks in advance.
The article is Yak fodder. It comes across like some of the lame over-dramatized personal editorials you hear on NPR (don't get me wrong, I like NPR and a lot of the personal editorials. Just not the over-dramatized ones). If you're going to be apocalyptic, try not to sound like a 13 year old girl writing in her 'Hello Kitty' diary.
Dear Diary:
Today I met someone in the secret underground who called himself an 'historian'. I looked up historian in the dictionary and nothing was listed. He has a strange mystical aura about him and he smells like moth-balls...
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
i have an idea on how to get ppl to vote, put lottory nbrs on the stubs you get at the voting booth.
give a G or two away, at the booths and you will see more ppl bothering to go and vote.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
The problem with this is soft money. Suppose I support Bush, donate the maximum amount to his campaign, but feel that it is not enough. I may go out and have a printer make some placards supporting him, or place ads on TV and the paper supporting him, or maybe buy some overpriced knickacks from him. It is difficult to count or suppress these kinds of contributions without suppressing freedom of speech. And even if you could, I could always take out ads bashing Gore with no reference to Bush.
I find it less important that campaign contributions are limited so much as that the contributions are on the public record. At least that way we know who has bought our politicians.
Why when one thinks of things to come 5 years from now, he always thinks first, second and third place of Microsoft?
This is a company with an innovation pace well under others like Cisco / IBM / or the other you're thinking, not to mention the OPEN community.
What if in a few days, one of them make a huge discovery like... let me think a moment... radical new chip technology, quantum computing in a box, real human brain emulators or something like that.
I'm sure that is not coming from MS for sure, and the one to get there first has the possibility to became a huge monster.
so again why is always MS ?
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
... in his corporate cube, re-writing history
One day this business may get ugly. Be ready.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Grin, the closest I had was the senior year letter that went out 2 years later (was supposed to be one, our English teacher forgot... the only teacher lazier than the seniors)...
It was really freaky, and that was two years... I couldn't imagine 10...
Alex
Try "It can't happen here", Sinclair Lewis, 1935. Great book which blows 1984 out of the water imho- describing the growth and establishment of fascism in the good ol' US of A. Instead of showing the instigators as malicious, evil masterminds, Lewis portrays the leaders as incompetent bumbling idiots (the similarities between the head Corporatist(1) and Duh-bya are remarkable). Almost painfully realistic, with real headlines from the 30's thrown in for effect, this book gave me nightmares for weeks.
ICHH comes complete with machine gun toting boy scouts beating innocent bystanders, Americans fleeing to Canada, and pointless, bloody wars fought to keep political scandal out of newspapers. The single most important idea to be taken from it is just how fast these things can happen; once an idea becomes fashionable, and the guys with guns get the power to use them, the game is over.
Rev Neh
(1) Corporatist by the classical definition, not that of slashbot/katzian fame
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I would expect the socialists at SlashDot to embrace this sort of drivel. Windows NT (pick your version) does not crash any more than *NIX. Moderate me down, socialist motherfucker.
"Saddam Hussein cavorts with terrorists."
The biggest problem with the flood of new developers publishing under the GPL, for GNU, and floods of submissions to Freshmeat.net, is thats a lot of them SUCK. I don't care if fr3d wrote a Perl script to sort his mp3's. Oooh, it's released under the GPL, how trendy.
Has anyone heard a pro developer complain saying, "It's so GNU, it's practically worthless!" ? There is a undercurrent I've discovered of people tired of being told the virtues of software freedom, and trying it only to see that it, quite frankly, sucks sometimes. All these worthless, or neat but poorly written programs, give Free software (by any definition) bad reps. For instance. Look at GNU Emacs. Despite people who dislike emacs in favor of VI, one thing you need to admit is that barring lisp hacking, Emacs dosen't crash. Heck, I've written some pretty wierd stuff in elisp, and I've never once seen it crash, or lost more than a few characters of data, with emacs (with stable versions of course).
Linux is another example. It works, it works well, and fixes it's problems quickly. But unfortunatly in the growing crowd of GPL'ed, BSD'ed,and public domain software, they are exceptions. No one will respect the ideals of GNU, the ideals of the BSD liscense, or the idea that software should be in the hands of and in the control of the USERS, not the developers. Developers only exist to fill the users needs.
I don't care if someone says "Well I'm not getting paid, so don't expect so much." This is a bad attitude, and people like this should STOP MAKING PROGRAMS. Don't release something unless it's usefull. And feel free to release COMPONENT code!!! Libraries are plentiful and easy to modify. Fully working, poorly written programs are less usefull to me than a well written reusable librarly (the GMA library comes to mind).
Also, programmers of Free, Open Sourced, or Public Domain software should APPLY FOR PATENTS and then hold them. Then retire the patent. This way we legally hold work in the public's grasp.
I do not know a service established to help us, lone developers or small project groups, to accomplish this. If there is one, point more people to it!
This is just my personal rant.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
from the article:
I found a paper book the other day that described the rise and fall of something called the "Internet".
Man, I sure hope that when I'm forty I have a much better memory than this guy.
Tom's Hardware - Copying a DVD Video to CD-ROM
Has Microsoft ever stuck to a platform for five years, let alone 20, without changing their game plan?
Yeah, but who wants to go to Canada, I mean geez ;)
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
My paradigm is intact.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
The article was indeed drivel as another poster pointed out. But all the scary legal compromising going on IS something to be concerned about. Fortunately, there are things we can do with existing technology to preserve our rights...
Software. Use open source. If you need Win32, don't upgrade beyond Win 98.
Hardware. Never buy RDRAM-based motherboards.
Music. Buycott the MPAA but start looking into new indie groups too. Try MOD music. Rip your CD's at home into OGG, not MP3. Share your OGGs via Gnutella. Never buy an Audio CDR - always use data CDrs.
Movies. Watch 'em in the theater and buy DVD's as you see fit. The MPAA has a lock on this one, we don't have much legal opportunity to fight back (ideas anyone?)
Privacy. Use PGP.
Vote! email and write your congressman - get informed about what the DMCA and the UCITA and the other threats are. Slashdot's YRO section is easily one of the best references. Support the EFF. get informed - and help inform.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
-= Griffis =-
Well, duh.
And exactly who corrupts the government? That's right... Big Business.
Don't forget that the US voters are also partially to blame. We can be such sheep sometime. We vote for candidates the way we root for football teams where we should be looking at candidates as interviewees for a job. I too support the idea of getting special interest perks out of politics (or perhaps politics out of government), but I think that ultimately the responsibility lies with the voters.
Remember, if you're able to vote and don't, you're not allowed to complain.
-Jennifer
To myself:
Hey! Where'd you put the remote?
- Me.
If we can have the FEC administer taxpayer-funded welfare for political campaigns, its only fair to the have a welfare system for voters.
Hallelujah, I'm not alone. But "makes 1984 look realistic"? More like it makes The Matrix look realistic. Or even Zardoz.
I still can't believe someone out there thinks this is an "excellent" article.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.. how exactly was that "insightful"?
"As I was talking to the historian she said something crazy about how the world we live in might have been totally different. There was this guy who got hit by a bus...."
It's just software. It is not the end of the world. there are more important things in life than this. Really.
How much of US society today is unworkable without software? Yes, I realize this is a US-centric view, but the world shows every indication of following suit.
It's not just software-- it's our future. Society develops in what is called "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary circles-- long periods of stasis in which things evolve slowly, interrupted by short, frantic periods in which things change drastically and quickly. During those periods of rapid change, little things can make a big difference in the final outcome (chaos theory). Those who control the change control the outcome.
We are building our future society right now, in more ways than you can imagine. Corporations are struggling to control the genie-out-of-the-bottle that is the Internet; the only way to control the Internet is to control the software with which people access the Internet. Note the recent DeCSS and Napster rulings. We'll see more and more patent wars between corporations, with our rights being collateral damage; eventually, it will become almost impossible to even write programs because every little thing will be a patent infringement.
Personally, I would like to see a patent system that allows anyone to use any patent under a GPL-compatible license. That way, corporations can keep other corporations from making a buck off their patent, but it allows fair use of the patent for citizens who will not profit from use of the patent.
In any case, corporations will not be satisfied until they can force us to hand over our money. They will use any means necessary, including infringing on our rights. Ten years from now, this will have settled down into equilibrium-- the time for them to act is now. The time for us to stop them is now.
Our future depends on it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
To me this "letter" sounds very similar to the book "Anthem" by Ayn Rand. (without all the "we" and "they").
I think it might be the style of writing and the blissfully oppressed atmosphere.
Am I the only one left with a bad taste in the mouth after reading that article?
or maybe it's this coffee.
_______________
you may quote me
--
Actually, in 2020, most patents in place today will have expired, and those that haven't will have their days numbered.
As a consequence, things like e-mail, TCP/IP, etc. that we do today should be protected. Of course, copyright is another insanity we would still have to deal with.
sigs are a waste of space
The corporate influence is slowly but surely eating away the open nature of the net and replacing it with barbed wire fencing to protect their property. They are claiming "land", dumping property on it and putting up "no trespassing" signs without ever stopping to think whether it would be better to keep their property somewhere else.
The net is in a danger of becoming a desolate, sterilized wasteland decorated by islands of corporate information protected behind the walls of greed.
No matter what Netscape does, the X server isn't supposed to crash. If it does, sure Netscape might be the immediate cause but the X server is the root of the problem
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
20 years is not all that far off into the future and while technology has changed drastically I see no reason for that to give somone the impression we're going to be in a Big Brother situation with MS controlling the monitors. If history (remember that kiddies) has taught us anything it's that the big companies that once roared tend to get the smack-down after fscking the public over many years.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the 1970's the same cute "scenario" could've been written about IBM except that the last copy of Sgt Peppers would've been on an 8-track.
Bah...
The whole system is intertwined. The type of future described here is not that far off, but I stress that the REAL enemy underneath all of this is socialism. There would not be such a world of influence if the Constitution had been bulletproof enough to continue protecting our individual human rights. The more laws that are made to benefit people, groups, corporations, or any collectively-minded organizations, the more we are trampled to the point of being slaves. The people who are paying themselves off right now don't care about what happens when they die. They take a short-circuit to human progress and achievement and cash in all the money they have effectively TAKEN from us, and trade it for a check with insufficient funds.
Case in point - China. Here our extremely advanced technological revolution, not to mention our entire economy, is being handed away to a communist government. Our taxes continue increasing, our money continues disappearing.
"Is there a similiarity here? Oooooohhhh, I think there is."
I know this is turning into a rant, but I put up with what I see as the beginnings of shit like this, and I get really tired of it.
Anyone who wants to know anything about anything like this should read the works of Ayn Rand.
And I agree with Mad-cat, Harry Browne is by far the best candidate for president that we have right now.
That is all.
I object to a number of points.
First what does unchristian have to do with anything? Is the author blaming Christians for creating copyrights? I'm a Christian and what I was taught was that we should share not hord. I don't see any link between Christianity and pattents. Could someone elaborate who has a different point of view?
Say what you want about IP and pattents, but without them we would not be where we are today economically. Business would have little ensentive to innovate, medical breakthroughs would rarely happen (why would you put up millions of $$ in R&D if you can't recoup any of the cost) While I think the DMCA was to extreme and a bunch of politians who have no technical experience had no idea what they were writting, that happens with just about all the bills that are passed by congress. Health care, gun control, social security, etc.
Lets see, how many congresspeople have been doctors? Served on a police force? Most make too much money in retirement that they don't even get a social security check! Yet they pass regulations on it. They are not our best and brightest. You can't expect perfection. The best and brightest normally go elsewhere and do other things.
Back to the article. It's easy to print gloom and doom. Americans love it. Just look at all the Y2K books! I picked up one and it claimed that there are over 15,000 embeded computer chips in every oil rig in the world, and they will all shut down on Jan 1, 2000. What bull. Lets spend our time and energy fighting and educating people about the shortcomings of these laws (which most of us are doing) instead of trying to gain publicity for personal gain.
We were promised flying cars.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
no, it doesn't.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
I think Dilbert will rule the world. Or, if he doesn't then he will influence it enough so that we will retain some control.
Here is the Proof: Dilbert has managed to infliltrate every company that I have ever worked for. How do I know? His strips always reflect exactly what is happening where I am when I am there.
Today was a great day. I finally reformatted my house's hard drive and installed Linux on it, so the toaster, blender, television and vibrating easy chair are finally working again. I'm still having some trouble getting X Windows installed in the bathroom, but I think it's because all the BSODs from the old operating system still have the toilet clogged up.
I took my car in to the mechanic today. He said that the problem with my windshield wipers was that I had Perl in /usr/bin/perl18 instead of /usr/bin/perl. Well, duh! I swear, I was never cut out to be a mechanic.
Anyway, I have to go get ready for work. My shoes take a while to boot up, so I must be going now.
ZPengo
Got Rhinos?
Yes, it is a worst-case scenario. And, personally, I think that things will never get that bad. But I see things leaning that way; corporations becoming more and more powerful, the freedom of the Internet starting to be reigned in... It's scary, but what can we do (besides elect Ralph Nader).
The article leaves out a big part, though. The United States may be heading towards a terrible future, but what about other countries? Copyrights and patents could get so insane here in the USA that somebody can patent the alphabet (I wouldn't put it past them...) but those patents don't hold water in other countries. If things get too hairy here in the USA, let's all just defect North to Canada and leave behind idiotic copyright laws. Sounds like a sound plan to me.
------
But what are the chances that joe blue-collar-worker when put in niles upper-management's place wouldn't do the same despicable things? What truly makes joe the more admirable of the two in this scenario? joe's values and politcal ideas are likely just as self-serving as niles' are, we just tend to side with joe because the niles already had his lucky break. His parents were millionaires, or his friend was in upper-management too.
I think Ted's point was more along the lines of "People, almost ALL people, are selfish and greedy, and aim only to make their own lives easier and more comfortable, while not giving a damn about anyone else."
For example, as I was driving home from class today, I noticed while I was stopped at a light that the median was COVERED with black gum spots. Who sincerely thought to themselves that throwing their chewed gum out the window was a viable alternative to wrapping it up in a piece of paper and throwing it in a garbage can later? A whole lot of people must have, because there was a whole lot of gum on that median. They somehow justified to themselves that throwing their crap out the window for someone else to deal with was OK. How? It made their life easier.
Do you honestly think that it was niles upper-management who was throwing his gum out the window? Nope, chances are it was joe.
While I know this is a very trivial example, I think it illustrates the spirit of Ted's comment quite well.
First off I find it hard to believe Microsoft will be ruling the world in such a manner. The idea alone is absolutely absurd. Microsoft is just a Corporation that was in the right place at the right time. I think they contributed a lot to the advancement of technology into the home, but now they're just holding society back.
I gave up on the Internet a long time ago... aside from slashdot and a few other interesting sites there's nothing worth looking at that hasn't already disappeared. (anyone remember gopher?)
As far as the DMCA and UTCIA go I feel that if we as geeks can put on a suit and fight this one off our home ground we stand a fair chance of winning. The only thing the government has done to the Internet is move the battleground over intellectual property rights to a different location. I guess they figured we wouldn't fight this one. I think the worst thing we can do is to let things continue.
Personally I think our society hit it's peak just after World War I.. when the communist revolution was happening in Asia our government decided that personal rights and freedom were to take a back seat to National Security. (I give you the Red Scare and McCarthyism)
With the growth of the Internet I think society made an attempt to stand back on it's feet again, and if we don't stop the law makers now we're just going to get knocked back down. Consider this similar to the fall of the Roman Empire. We've got a chance albeit a small one, to get society back to where it belongs.
Getting back to the loosing history aspect. Someone rm -rf'ed the directory containing the constitution and bill of rights, but it's not happening twenty years in the future.... it's happening right now. WE NEED TO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS IF WE REALLY WANT THEM BACK!!
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Yep, *NIX took over last decade and Microsoft was forced into the the open source business. Suprisingly, they are doing very well, and regained their trust in the UNIX world. Windows turned obsolete and Microsoft invested in Linux to make it more user-friendly. So, I'm now using OpenMicrosoft Linux 2020.
Right, but I feel you fail to really see the realtionship between business, common people and goverment.
Business relies on common people to fund them, the goverment also relies on common people to fund them too. With a relationship of two thing so powerful with the same goals in mind, it easy to screw over people.
Think about this, say we vote someone into office. He (or she) seams like a good honest person. A business man comes up to him and offer him and 400 other people outragest gifts and reward for voting one way. The bill they vote on is, let's say the DMCA. The media, which is the one *REALLY* in control of the people, protries it as a great bill to help the artist, and say something along the line of "it's for the childern, save the childern. protect the work of your childern" and everyone in the public think, oh yeah! These guys are doing great things for us. Little do they know the law that they pass is the root of all evil to be. And if it fails, someone rewrites it until it something the people will fall for.
Ok you're going to blam the people, "humanity as a whole". That's fine. But where do people get the real information about the subjects? They aren't born with it. They have to be tought. Where do they get tought? Schools! Who are the schools? The Goverment!
Most people send thier kids into goverment school, teaching socialism and how to be a productive, mindless slave for "the good of society". Then kids leave goverment schools and where do they end up? Most of them go to "Public Colleges". Who run these schools? Business people!! People who only goal is to make money. Sure there are a few school theach ideas, but most soul goal is to make money, and produce people who make money for businesses.
Great! We have a group of people that are mindless slaves to corparations with the ideas of socialism implaneted there by the goverment and businesses.
And we are the problem? No, we are not the people, the problem is the ideas that been implanted by businesses and politicians over 200 years. Heck the idea1 might been around for 1000's of years.
Or it's becuase all the mindless slaves people living in this world don't vote, and leave people in office. Most people don't want the goverment in thier lives, and which to live free without worries. Today politicians are selling votes, like businesses sell products. Heck, you could tell people "we are going to have a income tax, but don't worry, we will only tax the "rich"". Opps, that worked.
What are people really voting for anyways? A idea? A idea of what? A way to live thier lives? Where do they get these ideas? Do they want what they know to be good? What do they know? They know that they are slaves and can everything surpiled to them.
Isn't that what the goverment is today?
I think it is.
The US is screwed. It's too late to change it. Just like all goverments in the past, time is up for the US goverment.
Rome is buring...
MarNuke
Personally, I immediately thought of Bradbury's Farenheit 451 where in some future books become illegal, and you have firemen whose only job is to make sure every book is burned.
My picture is that though more things might start becomming illegal soon, the pirate community will hook us up anyway.
Yaay pirates! Go post an .iso today! Once the savvy users get used to never paying and never caring, there is no way anyone could clamp down the copyrights without pissing everyone off. Sure, the piracy movement conflicts with the OSS movement because it lands proprietary software on more hard drives, but maybe a healthy and growing pirate community will make it impossible to seriously start gouging people.
People corrupt politicians. Business are just made up of hundreds and thousands of people who want to get ahead in life, and the upper management uses the weight of the organization to force some changes. Labor parties do the same thing. So do religious groups. Sure, individuals used to have a voice in politics, but the voice of a large collective silences many individuals. So lets not target "Businesses". People as a whole are willing to backstab each other to get a step up in life, and we are part of that society. Business isn't the problem. Humanity is, and by extension, _we_ are the problem.
Of course, that's not an excuse for agnostic apathy. Sure, the agnostic apathetics are technically correct-- they don't know anything and they don't care about anything. You don't worry about your foundation breaking when you haven't built anything. Rather, we must understand and expect that this is how the world works, and we need to manipulate the system for the greater good of everyone, not just for our own "greater good".
Only when we finally admit that We are the problem can we benefit humanity as a whole. Until then, everyone is still wrapped in their own selfishness and pride.
-Ted
(Score -1: Karma Whore)
Network 23 lives, folks. It looks just like that. Is it gonna be that bad in 2020? Maybe not, but I'll bet it gets worse before it gets better. We don't have enough of a good start (lawyers/bottom of the sea) yet.
I mean, come on, folks, it's not like everything that's now off patent will suddenly become patentable anytime in our lifetimes!
Why not? They've already retroactively extended the lifespan of copyrights. What's to stop them from doing that with patents? What's to stop them from doing that and taking it one step further and reinstating patents and copyrights that have expired? Hell, they got the copyright extensions through with relatively little fuss. I bet the patents wouldn't be too big a problem either.
DMCA and UCITA are crap. Fine. Work to repeal them, or work around them.
Working around them won't work. If we find ways around them, they'll pass new laws. Working to get them repealed is a better idea, but that requires educating the public on the issues and what they really mean. The problem is that the public has already been indoctrinated by the media to believe that copyrighted works are owned by the copyright holder and nobody has any right to do anything with them without permission from the copyright holder. Now that they've gotten the lifespan extended to longer than the average human lifespan, people seem to consider copyrights to be perpetual. Most of us will never see anything created in our lifetime pass into the public domain. Kinda sad. But all of this makes it quite difficult to have a rational debate about the issues. As soon as someone starts putting forward the idea that copyrights need to be rethought and perhaps reimplemented in a different fashion (i.e. for shorter periods, with greater fair-use protection) they are branded with the label of extremist or pirate by the media and big business. They will be demonized for depriving the poor artists of the ability to make a living (despite the fact that most of the media industry is constantly coming up with new ways to screw the creators and increase profits).
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
-- Al Gore, March 9, 1999; CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer
I liked the article-- though I think it's safe to say he's preaching to the choir.
One thing I noticed is his opinion that this would start in the US and be opposed by Europe. The Euros are anti-MS, but that's only because it's an American company. Look at what's been going on lately: British Telecom, anything France has done in this century, and some of the EU's bizarre laws seem to me to point to Europe being an early adopter! If nothing else, the world as he describes it seems to be more like minitel and less like those hearings in the US a few weeks ago.
BTW, is Slashdot going to pay BT the patent royalty for their many links? After all, Al Gore invented the Internet, but British Telecom invented hypertext...
Users should not try to tell moderators what to do.
Like the 'one-click' shopping that Amazon thinks they own. This is completely and utterly wrong. Anyone should be allowed to implement a one-click buy from a web page. Although our government is too stupid to see it, these are common things dne with a computer with lots of prior art. Al Gore is largely responsible for these patent awards. It would not have been given under prior administrations... Certainly Bush will eliminate some of these moronic patents
Police have issued a statement saying they found Amphentamine, Cocaine & Angel Dust at the flat of Paula Yates. There was no sign of her other daughter.
..
.
What the hell, no flying cars in 2020? I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Microsoft's attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Apples' Cube. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Censorship is bad. Dumb patents are bad. Awful fiction is ALSO bad. I'm not sure which is worse.
Stop smoking that west coast herb you hippie. You remind me of all the people who screamed that electing George Bush (Sr) was going to be the end of the world. It's all hype for hits; don't follow the link.
Shit. Is everybody on this website 12 years old? 13, actually. Except for the wisest of us, who remember installing SCO on Compaq 386's from a stack of floppies 4 inches high.
--
What point would that be? "I can write silly future fiction that makes 1984 look realisitic"?
Its not a worst case scenerio, its a no case scenerio. At best it could pass as a satire of geek fears.
In a word, ugh.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
After reading the article, I definately think its a bit sensationalistic. The stupidity of the general populace is rather great, but even Joe Blow on the street would start thinking of revolution under those circumstances. Anyway, I guess it was more to give the reader a good shock about the copyright stuff anyway than any legitimate vision of the future. Kinda reminds me of "A Modest Proposal" in a way.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
--
The present is unimaginably bad by standards of just five years ago. How can it be that I'm stuck with crapy peer to peer networking with propriatary MS formats only when HTML is so much easier? Who would have imagined that vastly improved hardware could be made less reliable and slower than a 386? Who would belive that decoding media or linking could be illegal?
Your freedoms are being erroded. Check out this attack on a system called Publius, Speach without Accountibility from an old killer of trees, Scientific American. Anonymous publishing will not be tollerated in the new media, and "piracy" will be used as the hammer that squashes free publishing in general. Anonymous publishing is the foundation of a free press and the meat space equivalent will never die.
Cool, I finished this letter before BSoD. Sorry if it is less than pollished.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Re: choice, lack of Please read Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle both by Guy DeBord. -km
You think that was some kind of literary achievement? The article reads like a 14 year old's english assignment! It went right past scary and slipped into silly.
"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness." -Robert A. Heinlen
"Fair use" under copyright law is almost an extinct concept already, and reverse engineering is currently being prosecuted as a felony. Today I don't own much of what I've purchased, and have no right to use my purchases except in the specific manner and location proscribed by the seller. Will it get worse? Of course, because most Americans are stupid and lazy. The rest are greedy.
The meek don't inherit shit.
The problem is, a lot of us work for Corporations...
Now let's go bitch about software licensing!
Back in 7th grade I had an English teacher (Robert Smiley) who gave us a creative writing project where we were to write ourselves a letter that was to be opened 10 years down the road. The subject matter was to be what we envisioned our lives being like at that time frame in our future. Well, about 17 years later my mother ran across this small envelope addressed to me stating 'if the fates allow open me now' and a wax seal of a penny and the year 1992 impressed into the wax where the date on the penny was. I opened it, completely having forgotten what I wrote and was really surprised. You see, the 'predictions' were all wrong but the mindset wasn't. No, I didn't go to college like I had foreseen, but I made references to free speech (was really into Jefferson at the time and writing a report for another class) and online communications (at 11 I was addicted to Compuserve and my new 300 baud screemer..I digress) being the 'in thing' for people to speak freely where the couldn't in the real world. Opening the letter to myself had a profound impact on me and I spent many months contemplating my thoughts as an 11 year old and rejuvinating ideas/goals that had become dormant. So far, the end result being my return to college and certain passions rekindled. I recently wrote myself a new letter and placed it in my mothers safe deposit box for some date in the future. This article is great in the sense that it has the right feel and vision. It is probably not far off (eerie) from where things are headed. It would be interesting to see this letter in 2020 and see how close to a bullseye it is.I wonder if any of Mr. Smiley's students are out there who found thier letters. If you had a similar project please reply as it would be great to hear the results/thoughts/outcome.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
I guess what I'm trying to say is...
There is no difference in motivation between joe blue collar and joe white collar. It's just that the white collar folks have more means than everyone else.
It's a catagorical denial of Marxism, actually. Marx claims that eventually the working class will overthrow the ruling class and live in Utopia. "THIS revolution will be different! This revolution will be the LAST!"
What Marx fails to see is that the problem is not with the means (money and power) but the motive (greed and pride). Not all humans have money and power, but almost all humans are greedy and proud. It is pure hubris to claim that we the workers as a whole would act any different if we were in power.
There are two courses of action. You can become agnostic apathetic-- another term for a cynic, meaning you don't do anything. Or you can shed the evil motives and then work the means in favor of humanity (and against the system itself).
Clearly this is a difficult task, but only because personal humility is learned one mind at a time. It's easy to coordinate selfish people, but it's hard to even find self-sacrificing people, much less become one.
-Ted
Since very few individuals have access to email in 2020, did he send this via the USPS?
Man, and we thought the internet would rid us of snail mail. Guess sponsoring Lance Armstrong turned out to be a ploy to cover up the space-time experiments down at your local Post Office
"retro-fitting for the unwitting"