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43 Million Americans Use P2P Software
robl writes "If the NYTimes article is correct then somewhere around 1 in 6 Americans apparently are unindicted felons. In the eyes of the public file swapping is as morally wrong as speeding on the NJ Turnpike. The rest of the article talks about the RIAA's carrot/stick/education approach and how they may find themselves entering into negotiations for some forms of file sharing. Also the EFF will be running ads in Rolling Stone next month asking if enthusiasts are tired of being treated like criminals."
The Open Source movement such as Linux Mandrake has been a topic of
considerable debate on the Internet's most controversial site. The
majority of this debate has centered around the technical merits of
the software, with the esteemed editors argueing against adopting
Linux by employing the full depth of their considerable intellects,
and the other side hurling death threats and similar invective. This
has allowed many who would not otherwise receive quality information
about Open Source software to be made aware of many of its
ramifications, but one issue has been left alone: The overt racism
that is deeply embedded in the movement.
Allow me to explain.
Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel
DeIcaza.
What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans
on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a
self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no
Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one
here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white
faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are
ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred
'kernel' by any person of color.
Lets look at the list of the companies using Linux. Are there any
black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these
companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software,
any of them owned by an African-American? No again.
More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open
Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats'
scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their
fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They
destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing
data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset
of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere
there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness.
Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad'
hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo
book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French
are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is
widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of
its more popular sites.
It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist
commands with not so hidden symbolism.
It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice
of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are
poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan)
, 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical
purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute
sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored
supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist
symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every
incidence.
Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some
hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades
Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of
running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I
don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is
banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that
appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!
One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is
available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see
that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously
this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel.
If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I wo
yaa
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on
Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do
some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was
very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our
exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process
went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were
considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that
we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It
was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something
called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license
states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money
we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would
now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult
position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with
another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no
option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive
with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually
guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my
experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my
associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure
it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.
Everyone at this point has heard and seen about VA Linux Systems succesful IPO. Lesser known is the fact that ESR[?] is on the Board of VA. Yesterday seems to have been a time of personal reflection on the his new situation. Click below to read ERSR's musings on sudden wealth.
A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich.
I was at my machine, hacking, when I got email congratulating me on the success of the VA Linux Systems IPO. I was working on my latest small project -- a compiler for a special-purpose language I've designed called Scriptable Network Graphics, or SNG. SNG is an editable representation of the chunk data in a PNG. What I'm writing is a compiler/decompiler pair, so you can dump PNGs in SNG, edit the SNG, then recompile to a PNG image.
"Congratulations? That's interesting," said I to myself. "I didn't think we were going out till tomorrow." And I oughtta know; I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself to be VA's official corporate conscience, and it's a matter of public record that I hold a substantial share in the company. I tooled on over to Linux Today, chased a link -- and discovered that Larry Augustin had taken the fast option we discussed during the last Board conference call. VA had indeed gone out on NASDAQ -- and I had become worth approximately forty-one million dollars while I wasn't looking.
Well, that didn't last long. In the next two hours, VA dropped from $274 a share to close at $239, leaving me with a stake of only thirty-six million dollars. Which is still a preposterously large amount of money.
You may wonder why I am talking about this in public. The first piece of advice your friends and family will give you, if it looks like you're about to become really wealthy, is: keep it quiet. It's nobody else's business -- you don't want to look like you're gloating, and you don't want to be deluged with an endless succession of charity appeals, business propositions, long-lost best friends, and plain bald-faced mooching.
Trouble with the "keep it quiet" theory is that I've made my bucks in a very public way. When you're already a media figure, and your name is on the S-1 of a hot IPO, and email from friends and journalists starts coming in like crazy as the stock breaks first-day-gainplaying it coy swiftly ceases to look like a viable option.
Besides, it wouldn't be fair to dissemble. I serve a community. I'm wealthy today because my efforts to spread the idea of open source on behalf of that community helped galvanize the business world, and earned the respect and the trust of a lot of hackers. Larry thought that respect was an asset worth shelling out 150,000 shares of VA for. Fairness to the hackers who made me bankable demands that I publicly acknowledge this result -- and publicly face the question of how it's going to affect my life and what I'll do with the money.
This is a question that a lot of us will be facing as open source sweeps the technology landscape. Money follows where value leads, and the mainstream business and finance world is seeing increasing value in our tribe of scruffy hackers. Red Hat and VA have created a precedent now, with their directed-shares programs designed to reward as many individual contributors as they can identify; future players aiming for community backing and a seat at the high table will have to follow suit. In this and other ways (including, for example, task markets) the wealth is going to be shared.
So while there aren't likely to be a lot more multimillion-dollar bonanzas like mine, lots of hackers are going to have to evolve answers to this question for smaller amounts that will nevertheless make a big difference to individuals; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to change your life -- or wreck it.
(Gee. Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?")
The first part of my answer is "I'll do nothing, until next June". Because I'm a VA board member, under SEC regulations
And all 6 out of 6 cowards ike you will always remain anonymous! Thankfully
Pot calling the kettle black?
According to NORML's website, 80 million Americans have smoked pot, that horrible life-ruining plant.
Those monsters! Don't they realise that mareh-ju-wanna is responsible for six out of every ten outbreaks of "the munchies"?
And excessive munchies can lead to snacking, which can lead to obesity, which can lead to health problems, which can lead to DEATH.
This awful, horrible, naughty, naughty plant MUST be banned!
It's for the children.
1 out of 20 Americans visit Slashdot.org
... I dont know
The other
(note: that number is completely made up from an un-educated guess)