All the parties you mention are likely already subject to taxes (business-related and personal taxes for the merchant, property taxes for the warehouse, vehicle registration fees for the shipper, etc). What a non-resident owes the state is jack and shit.
Cancel your cable if you want to save a little money and what you are interested in is available online. Free shows and movies online won't last forever, though. Free everything is just not sustainable, and right now they are just trying to capture eyeballs and prove the concept. At some point, expect paywalls to appear, at least for 'premium content' or selected episodes of a season or whatever. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Semantics is important. "Unlimited" could just as easily mean "you can use it anytime, not limited to 'offpeak' times". Back in the dialup days, there was often a different per-minute charge depending on what time of day one accessed the internet. Without a qualifier like Unlimited *data*, there's no basis for being indignant. The lesson is to always, always, always read the fine print and never assume that what you think something means (or should mean) is what it actually means.
DRM still sucks. If it catches on, it will make life really, really, bad for the rest of us.
No it won't. Mildly frustrating and inconvenient, maybe. But really, really bad? That's just fear of being deprived of things out of a sense of entitlement. First, we're talking entertainment here, not food, shelter or health care. Second, plenty of (legit) alternatives exist, so I'm sure your library, local bookshop, art gallery etc. will be happy for your patronage and the better for it too. The worst that might happen is you can't buy the likes of Transformers 2 (no great loss, IMHO) on terms you find personally acceptable. There will still be ways for you to see it, whether at a friends, via rental, from the library etc. Or maybe you will realize you dont' want to. And most importantly of all, DRM doesn't take away the most important power you have: the power not to buy. If the prospect of foregoing something you have been conditioned to want but don't really need causes great distress, you are already owned.
Yes, DRM sucks. I refuse it on principle because find the terms unacceptable. But I never bought or played Bioshock due to the DRM, and you know what? The experience wasn't "really, really bad". It barely merits a shrug, to be honest. The real irony of DRM is that it's applied to things we don't really need and are arguably better without (opiate of the masses and all that). Instead of crying about the sky falling, consider that the universe might be giving you a hint about what's actually important.
In the case of the original story, the solution is simple. Don't buy ebooks with DRM if you don't like it. End of story.
You're missing the subtle point that opportunity can be trumped by allowable policy. If the standards are that no emails are examined without just cause and only by explicitly authorized personnel, then some level of 'customary' privacy exists, even if one shouldn't expect that the email could never be viewed. By your reasoning nobody should expect not to be clubbed to death while walking down the street because any passerby has the opportunity to do so, since the potential victim isn't wearing armor. Yet people do expect this, and on the rare occasion that it happens, it's considered a serious crime and the perpetrator is subject to severe punishment for violating the law. I find it perfectly reasonable to consider personal email to be private and that unauthorized people should only be allowed to examine it under narrowly defined circumstances. Private is not the same as "secret".
Keeping traffic completely local would make it much easier to snag a bunch of file sharers in a massive "three strikes and you're out" campaign, don't you think? Since mere use of torrent software seems to be associated with illicit activity in the minds of the ignorant (ie. the authoRIAAties), I'm not sure that "I was just downloading the latest Ubuntu ISO" would be enough to avoid being threatened by the ISP. Lots of local inter-ISP torrent traffic might also cause them to alert local law enforcement to take a closer look. This could increase one's risk significantly, particularly if any 'infringing' content is ever shared (by an occasional, less enlightened, user of the connect, for example). Seems safer to not have to worry about local/non-local bandwidth, to be honest. Might be smarter to prefer connections that are as non-local and non-concentrated as possible. It's not always just about data transfer speed and bandwidth saving - there are other factors to consider.
Agreed. We are, however, in the midst of a technological transition. Such transitions have come (and gone) before, though I'll submit that the nature of the current transition (analog -> digital, finite -> infinite goods) is quite a bit more drastic than humanity has experienced before. But I'm probably biased since I showed up before the current transition rather than being born in the middle of it. Back to the point: I think that the only reason that "other versions of free" manage to pop up is because we're still in the middle of the transition. The post-internet age is just a fraction of a tick when compared to human history. A decade (or two) is nothing, really.
My point is that "free" (as in beer) won't last, so people should look forward far enough to come up with a long term sustainable plan that takes this into account. What would the FLOSS community do, for example, if Linux had the market share that Windows currently has? Instead of a fraction of a percantage point of the total userbase, what if everyone jumped on the Linux bandwagon? Where would "free" be then? This "give away stuff for nothing" nonsense is only viable if the majority doesn't care. It doesn't scale. So be aware of this and plan for a strategy that does scale.
Actually no. Not hunting for mod points. When I first came across the ShipIt program, I honestly wondered how long they would be able to keep it up. It's a wonderful promotional tool, but it's just that, nothing more. On the related note with respect to Hulu and such, I often see posts (on the web at large, not just on/.) crowing about how someone "ditched my cable because I watch it all for free on Hulu" and chiding all the poor fools for continuing to pay for content when they can have it for free. It baffles me that they cannot see that it will only be free until they have helped destroy the competition, or until enough people switch to sustain a paywall. The chickens haven't come home to roost on that one yet, but they will. The lesson, from those of who have learned to those who haven't, is: Be suspicious of free (of charge) - there are strings attached, or will be. TANSTAAFL.
With respect to ShipIt - it's a nice idea and a great way to promote free software, but it's not a sustainable model. Better to promote the ability to download the ISOs freely and burn them for friends, family and anyone else interested. I'd rather see FLOSS get nice writeups in the local paper so that people understand what it is really all about. They can then go to their local technophile to get a free ISO or "I'll install it for dinner or a beer". Spending the marketing budget on free CD's is an ineffective waste of money, IMHO.
Once they get you hooked, it's free no longer. If you want more, you pay, dearly. Take heed, Hulu fans - it won't be free forever.
Yes, yes. I know panderers of proprietary media such as Hulu are not to be compared to the wholly benevolent producers of FLOSS. The similarity is that promotional tools are simply that, and once sufficient interest has been garnered or they become too expensive, they go away. I always wondered how long they could support ShipIt, or how long services like Hulu would be free (of charge). I have the answer to one question, at least.
Word. Back in those days, people were suspicious of user accounts. The foolish and careless ones signed up first (really low UIDs are a clear sign of herd mentality), so after awhile those of us who had been hanging around longer felt compelled to get accounts just to keep the n00bs from taking over. Sadly, it didn't work.
It is lunatic for anyone with failing vision to waste his time and energy on text to speech conversion when these professional readings are freely available.
You assume much. How about someone who has plenty of time and energy, but little money? Or someone who enjoys the process of text to speech conversion enough to find it a worthwhile pastime? Or someone who already paid for the works and doesn't find the alternate formats worth the extra cost? Your accusation of lunacy is rather insulting and not a little condescending.
The issue is NOT how many people got a copy without paying. The issue is if it was impossible, how many people would have payed?
Reason this is important is because it tells you how much it matters to actually try and fight against it. Fighting copyright infringement takes time and money. Also, the more onerous the DRM you introduce, the more you piss off legit customers and thus the less money you make. So the trick is to find the best balance that gets you the most sales. To do that the most effectively, you need to know how many copies are actual lost sales, and how many would have just done without.
You make a very key point. In fact, the cost of spending resources trying to fight copying might even be higher than people make it out to be. An unspoken assumption that seems to be made by just about everyone discussing this issue is that the price is essentially fixed or at least that everyone who copies would pay that price if copying were impossible. But if copying were impossible, former copiers would just as likely go without as they would pay the asking price, thus putting downward pressure on the latter. The actual market value of the good might actually turn out to be quite a bit lower than content producers delude themselves into thinking. Abandoning efforts to prevent copying and focusing those efforts on giving more people a reason to buy might be more productive in the long run.
I'll weigh in with my mere 6-digit UID and point out that your argument is nonsense if enough interest from the developer community can be marshaled. I will concede that the latter can be very hard, but you still paint a grimmer picture than you need to. The story of git suggests that it is very possible to 'start from scratch' and come up with something very workable rapidly. Why wouldn't the same be possible for the Linux audio stack?
I think this is the most serious threat that the turtleneck sweater brigade have yet seen.
Except for the inconvenient fact that I can't find a piece of hardware (aka phone) with an open enough software stack on a carrier that provides good coverage where I live. I can find the former, but only by getting a phone from a carrier that doesn't have coverage at places like, oh, I don't know, MY HOUSE. The turtleneck sweater brigade have a little bit of breathing room due to the way the market works in the phone industry. Give me hardware/software uncoupled from carriers, and your statement holds more weight. Sadly, that's a fantasy world at present.
One could argue, of course, that "software companies" never did have much of a foundation on which to build a product to begin with. Unless they were able to distort reality by invoking "intellectual property rights" and similar techniques to bring artificial scarcity to a realm that by it's very nature facilitates abundance at very low cost. Until we invent the universal replicator, on the other hand, 'hardware' companies can rely on natural scarcity to support their business model. The smart companies, it seems to me, implement a hardware-based mode somewhere in their business model and are thus much more stable in the long term than exclusively software based companies. Just sayin'.
Yeah, I got that. But the only reason Mono is seen differently is because of the "it's from Microsoft and must be bad" paranoia that in turn resulted in the patent argument to use as justification. Otherwise it's one answer to the "only native apps are good enough" demands that I used to hear quite a lot with regards to Wine. Yet now even writing native apps from scratch is wrong if the environment doesn't meet the proper standards of purity. Now, instead of just being "free" in the right sense, a tool has to be of the proper lineage to be acceptable.
Younger readers might not remember when writing native non-windows apps was actually considered something to be encouraged and Wine was reviled as a great evil. Now I've seen it all.
I don't want to seem rude either, but why is RMS claiming C# poses a gratuitous risk when the truth is that any non-trivial application written in any language is likely to violate one or more patents. Patents held by anyone, not just Microsoft. By this logic he should be advocating that no new software be written because doing so poses a gratuitous risk. We'd better just use the old stuff.
Those who are able can do this mentally. The hard core geeks and Perl hackers can save a copy of this page and do a global replacement, or run it through sed or something.
The exercise: Replace every instance of "Microsoft" with "The Devil". Read everything again.
If you're having trouble deciding where you stand in the debate or why people seem so worked up over mere software, this might help clear things up. The imaginative amongst you can pretend you're a scholar studying a recently unearthed transcript of an ancient religious debate and marvel at the quaintness of it all.
Interesting. Granted, the original use of these terms were based on a slightly different premise, but you've managed to word things in a way that flips the meanings.
The bazaar sounds very much like the conventional business environment full of advertisers, hucksters, fly-by-night companies out to get a buck and all the negative things people tend to associate with modern business.
The cathedral resembles the metaphorical edifice the "free software movement" has constructed.
Interesting indeed.
Good point that has been mentioned before in regard to Mono but is often overlooked. The free software movement itself is based on the act of providing free alternatives to closed systems. That is quite possibly the single most wonderful thing about free (as in freedom) software, in my opinion, beside which every other advantage pales in comparison. The ability to go completely free when necessary rather than being relegated to a switch to a competitor cut from the same cloth is one of the most powerful options FLOSS provides. Viewed in this light, I can't really understand the animosity directed toward Mono, because it offers the very thing that's most valuable to someone trying to exercise their freedom: somewhere to go. The fact that Microsoft is associated somehow seems to blind people to this.
Thank you for a thoughtful and rational post concerning a subject that seems to attract neither. I'd heard rumors of the mythical 'rational person', but never hoped to see one in the wild.:-)
You make a point that should not be overlooked. As a former employee (and spouse of a current employee) of a company in another industry that's commonly hated - pharmaceuticals - I can attest to Miguel's point about people inside Microsoft wanting to do the right thing. A good many people in pharma, particularly in research (which I'm most familiar with) are motivated to be there because they want to develop great medicines. They can be just as frustrated with the actions of company leadership (shareholders and management) as the general public. What keeps a lot of people there despite the frustration is the realization that change can only come from the inside - you have little real influence from outside. In addition, at larger companies, it's much easier to create local pockets of "goodness" that can help balance out the negative, whether it's by taking advantage of the large employee base to achieve massive contributions to charitable organizations or spearheading programs to donate medicines to disadvantage nations/seniors and such. The inside of a company is just a reflection of the world around us - you do what you can where you can to make things better. A superior approach to just doing nothing, IMHO. So what Miguel says about good people inside Microsoft who want to do the right thing rings very true.
To be honest, blindly hating a company and everything about it is just as stupid as hating every citizen of a particular nation. Given the world-wide, multicultural nature of the free software community, I think most people realize that judging people based on the country they reside in is unreasonable. I submit that it's just as unreasonable to dismiss the efforts of good people because they are associated with a "hated" company. If there are people inside Microsoft who are trying to facilitate change, they deserve just as much help and consideration as the citizens of a nation with an oppressive regime who wish to do the same. It's certainly a more civilized way to make things better than rushing in will guns blazing and killing everyone who opposes you.
A healthy degree of suspicion regarding Microsoft and yes, Mono and Miguel are fine and reasonable. Extremely reasonable, considering past actions (but keep the words of a certain Gordon Sumner in mind - history will teach us nothing). The blind, knee-jerk guilt-by-association I'm seeing from the FLOSS community strikes me as highly irrational, however. Has Microsoft got everyone so cowed that winning the upper hand in every confrontation is just a foregone conclusion, so it's better to run away and avoid them? I guess that's one strategy to follow. Another is to have some confidence in the ability of one's own community to hold its own in the face of adversity and go toe-to-toe and win what you can. Taking back lost ground and ultimately making a former rival a willing member of one's own community seems a much better long term strategy than turning inward in the hope that ignoring them entirely will eventually make them go away.
You're laughably stupid. Set PasswordAuthentication to no and your statistics become meaningless because they don't apply at all. Not even a lucky guess can result in a breach, because you have removed that avenue of attack entirely. If you want to play the statistics game, PubkeyAuthentication with strong encryption plus regular key changes plus some sort of port knocking scheme gives numbers that are much better than yours. I'll take "when hell freezes over" in place of "once in a blue moon" any day of the week. Give me scheme with even better odds and I'll take it. The highway of history is littered with fools who thought "they'll never figure this out. Wait. What? Oh shi....".
SuperBanana indeed. You'll end up on the wrong end of someone's super banana before you know what hit you.
Slashdot Mirror
All the parties you mention are likely already subject to taxes (business-related and personal taxes for the merchant, property taxes for the warehouse, vehicle registration fees for the shipper, etc). What a non-resident owes the state is jack and shit.
Cancel your cable if you want to save a little money and what you are interested in is available online. Free shows and movies online won't last forever, though. Free everything is just not sustainable, and right now they are just trying to capture eyeballs and prove the concept. At some point, expect paywalls to appear, at least for 'premium content' or selected episodes of a season or whatever. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Semantics is important. "Unlimited" could just as easily mean "you can use it anytime, not limited to 'offpeak' times". Back in the dialup days, there was often a different per-minute charge depending on what time of day one accessed the internet. Without a qualifier like Unlimited *data*, there's no basis for being indignant. The lesson is to always, always, always read the fine print and never assume that what you think something means (or should mean) is what it actually means.
DRM still sucks. If it catches on, it will make life really, really, bad for the rest of us.
No it won't. Mildly frustrating and inconvenient, maybe. But really, really bad? That's just fear of being deprived of things out of a sense of entitlement. First, we're talking entertainment here, not food, shelter or health care. Second, plenty of (legit) alternatives exist, so I'm sure your library, local bookshop, art gallery etc. will be happy for your patronage and the better for it too. The worst that might happen is you can't buy the likes of Transformers 2 (no great loss, IMHO) on terms you find personally acceptable. There will still be ways for you to see it, whether at a friends, via rental, from the library etc. Or maybe you will realize you dont' want to. And most importantly of all, DRM doesn't take away the most important power you have: the power not to buy. If the prospect of foregoing something you have been conditioned to want but don't really need causes great distress, you are already owned. Yes, DRM sucks. I refuse it on principle because find the terms unacceptable. But I never bought or played Bioshock due to the DRM, and you know what? The experience wasn't "really, really bad". It barely merits a shrug, to be honest. The real irony of DRM is that it's applied to things we don't really need and are arguably better without (opiate of the masses and all that). Instead of crying about the sky falling, consider that the universe might be giving you a hint about what's actually important. In the case of the original story, the solution is simple. Don't buy ebooks with DRM if you don't like it. End of story.
You're missing the subtle point that opportunity can be trumped by allowable policy. If the standards are that no emails are examined without just cause and only by explicitly authorized personnel, then some level of 'customary' privacy exists, even if one shouldn't expect that the email could never be viewed. By your reasoning nobody should expect not to be clubbed to death while walking down the street because any passerby has the opportunity to do so, since the potential victim isn't wearing armor. Yet people do expect this, and on the rare occasion that it happens, it's considered a serious crime and the perpetrator is subject to severe punishment for violating the law. I find it perfectly reasonable to consider personal email to be private and that unauthorized people should only be allowed to examine it under narrowly defined circumstances. Private is not the same as "secret".
Keeping traffic completely local would make it much easier to snag a bunch of file sharers in a massive "three strikes and you're out" campaign, don't you think? Since mere use of torrent software seems to be associated with illicit activity in the minds of the ignorant (ie. the authoRIAAties), I'm not sure that "I was just downloading the latest Ubuntu ISO" would be enough to avoid being threatened by the ISP. Lots of local inter-ISP torrent traffic might also cause them to alert local law enforcement to take a closer look. This could increase one's risk significantly, particularly if any 'infringing' content is ever shared (by an occasional, less enlightened, user of the connect, for example). Seems safer to not have to worry about local/non-local bandwidth, to be honest. Might be smarter to prefer connections that are as non-local and non-concentrated as possible. It's not always just about data transfer speed and bandwidth saving - there are other factors to consider.
My point is that "free" (as in beer) won't last, so people should look forward far enough to come up with a long term sustainable plan that takes this into account. What would the FLOSS community do, for example, if Linux had the market share that Windows currently has? Instead of a fraction of a percantage point of the total userbase, what if everyone jumped on the Linux bandwagon? Where would "free" be then? This "give away stuff for nothing" nonsense is only viable if the majority doesn't care. It doesn't scale. So be aware of this and plan for a strategy that does scale.
Actually no. Not hunting for mod points. When I first came across the ShipIt program, I honestly wondered how long they would be able to keep it up. It's a wonderful promotional tool, but it's just that, nothing more. On the related note with respect to Hulu and such, I often see posts (on the web at large, not just on /.) crowing about how someone "ditched my cable because I watch it all for free on Hulu" and chiding all the poor fools for continuing to pay for content when they can have it for free. It baffles me that they cannot see that it will only be free until they have helped destroy the competition, or until enough people switch to sustain a paywall. The chickens haven't come home to roost on that one yet, but they will. The lesson, from those of who have learned to those who haven't, is: Be suspicious of free (of charge) - there are strings attached, or will be. TANSTAAFL.
With respect to ShipIt - it's a nice idea and a great way to promote free software, but it's not a sustainable model. Better to promote the ability to download the ISOs freely and burn them for friends, family and anyone else interested. I'd rather see FLOSS get nice writeups in the local paper so that people understand what it is really all about. They can then go to their local technophile to get a free ISO or "I'll install it for dinner or a beer". Spending the marketing budget on free CD's is an ineffective waste of money, IMHO.
Yes, yes. I know panderers of proprietary media such as Hulu are not to be compared to the wholly benevolent producers of FLOSS. The similarity is that promotional tools are simply that, and once sufficient interest has been garnered or they become too expensive, they go away. I always wondered how long they could support ShipIt, or how long services like Hulu would be free (of charge). I have the answer to one question, at least.
Word. Back in those days, people were suspicious of user accounts. The foolish and careless ones signed up first (really low UIDs are a clear sign of herd mentality), so after awhile those of us who had been hanging around longer felt compelled to get accounts just to keep the n00bs from taking over. Sadly, it didn't work.
Not for another 3 years, sonny. :-)
Hey look - it's a low UID reunion!
It is lunatic for anyone with failing vision to waste his time and energy on text to speech conversion when these professional readings are freely available.
The Braille edition of the Deadly Hollows costs $15. The full set in Braille: $60. Promoting Braille Literacy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
You assume much. How about someone who has plenty of time and energy, but little money? Or someone who enjoys the process of text to speech conversion enough to find it a worthwhile pastime? Or someone who already paid for the works and doesn't find the alternate formats worth the extra cost? Your accusation of lunacy is rather insulting and not a little condescending.
The issue is NOT how many people got a copy without paying. The issue is if it was impossible, how many people would have payed?
Reason this is important is because it tells you how much it matters to actually try and fight against it. Fighting copyright infringement takes time and money. Also, the more onerous the DRM you introduce, the more you piss off legit customers and thus the less money you make. So the trick is to find the best balance that gets you the most sales. To do that the most effectively, you need to know how many copies are actual lost sales, and how many would have just done without.
You make a very key point. In fact, the cost of spending resources trying to fight copying might even be higher than people make it out to be. An unspoken assumption that seems to be made by just about everyone discussing this issue is that the price is essentially fixed or at least that everyone who copies would pay that price if copying were impossible. But if copying were impossible, former copiers would just as likely go without as they would pay the asking price, thus putting downward pressure on the latter. The actual market value of the good might actually turn out to be quite a bit lower than content producers delude themselves into thinking. Abandoning efforts to prevent copying and focusing those efforts on giving more people a reason to buy might be more productive in the long run.
I'll weigh in with my mere 6-digit UID and point out that your argument is nonsense if enough interest from the developer community can be marshaled. I will concede that the latter can be very hard, but you still paint a grimmer picture than you need to. The story of git suggests that it is very possible to 'start from scratch' and come up with something very workable rapidly. Why wouldn't the same be possible for the Linux audio stack?
I think this is the most serious threat that the turtleneck sweater brigade have yet seen.
Except for the inconvenient fact that I can't find a piece of hardware (aka phone) with an open enough software stack on a carrier that provides good coverage where I live. I can find the former, but only by getting a phone from a carrier that doesn't have coverage at places like, oh, I don't know, MY HOUSE. The turtleneck sweater brigade have a little bit of breathing room due to the way the market works in the phone industry. Give me hardware/software uncoupled from carriers, and your statement holds more weight. Sadly, that's a fantasy world at present.
One could argue, of course, that "software companies" never did have much of a foundation on which to build a product to begin with. Unless they were able to distort reality by invoking "intellectual property rights" and similar techniques to bring artificial scarcity to a realm that by it's very nature facilitates abundance at very low cost. Until we invent the universal replicator, on the other hand, 'hardware' companies can rely on natural scarcity to support their business model. The smart companies, it seems to me, implement a hardware-based mode somewhere in their business model and are thus much more stable in the long term than exclusively software based companies. Just sayin'.
Yeah, I got that. But the only reason Mono is seen differently is because of the "it's from Microsoft and must be bad" paranoia that in turn resulted in the patent argument to use as justification. Otherwise it's one answer to the "only native apps are good enough" demands that I used to hear quite a lot with regards to Wine. Yet now even writing native apps from scratch is wrong if the environment doesn't meet the proper standards of purity. Now, instead of just being "free" in the right sense, a tool has to be of the proper lineage to be acceptable.
Younger readers might not remember when writing native non-windows apps was actually considered something to be encouraged and Wine was reviled as a great evil. Now I've seen it all.
I don't want to seem rude either, but why is RMS claiming C# poses a gratuitous risk when the truth is that any non-trivial application written in any language is likely to violate one or more patents. Patents held by anyone, not just Microsoft. By this logic he should be advocating that no new software be written because doing so poses a gratuitous risk. We'd better just use the old stuff.
Those who are able can do this mentally. The hard core geeks and Perl hackers can save a copy of this page and do a global replacement, or run it through sed or something.
The exercise: Replace every instance of "Microsoft" with "The Devil". Read everything again.
If you're having trouble deciding where you stand in the debate or why people seem so worked up over mere software, this might help clear things up. The imaginative amongst you can pretend you're a scholar studying a recently unearthed transcript of an ancient religious debate and marvel at the quaintness of it all.
Interesting. Granted, the original use of these terms were based on a slightly different premise, but you've managed to word things in a way that flips the meanings. The bazaar sounds very much like the conventional business environment full of advertisers, hucksters, fly-by-night companies out to get a buck and all the negative things people tend to associate with modern business. The cathedral resembles the metaphorical edifice the "free software movement" has constructed. Interesting indeed.
Good point that has been mentioned before in regard to Mono but is often overlooked. The free software movement itself is based on the act of providing free alternatives to closed systems. That is quite possibly the single most wonderful thing about free (as in freedom) software, in my opinion, beside which every other advantage pales in comparison. The ability to go completely free when necessary rather than being relegated to a switch to a competitor cut from the same cloth is one of the most powerful options FLOSS provides. Viewed in this light, I can't really understand the animosity directed toward Mono, because it offers the very thing that's most valuable to someone trying to exercise their freedom: somewhere to go. The fact that Microsoft is associated somehow seems to blind people to this.
Thank you for a thoughtful and rational post concerning a subject that seems to attract neither. I'd heard rumors of the mythical 'rational person', but never hoped to see one in the wild. :-)
You make a point that should not be overlooked. As a former employee (and spouse of a current employee) of a company in another industry that's commonly hated - pharmaceuticals - I can attest to Miguel's point about people inside Microsoft wanting to do the right thing. A good many people in pharma, particularly in research (which I'm most familiar with) are motivated to be there because they want to develop great medicines. They can be just as frustrated with the actions of company leadership (shareholders and management) as the general public. What keeps a lot of people there despite the frustration is the realization that change can only come from the inside - you have little real influence from outside. In addition, at larger companies, it's much easier to create local pockets of "goodness" that can help balance out the negative, whether it's by taking advantage of the large employee base to achieve massive contributions to charitable organizations or spearheading programs to donate medicines to disadvantage nations/seniors and such. The inside of a company is just a reflection of the world around us - you do what you can where you can to make things better. A superior approach to just doing nothing, IMHO. So what Miguel says about good people inside Microsoft who want to do the right thing rings very true.
To be honest, blindly hating a company and everything about it is just as stupid as hating every citizen of a particular nation. Given the world-wide, multicultural nature of the free software community, I think most people realize that judging people based on the country they reside in is unreasonable. I submit that it's just as unreasonable to dismiss the efforts of good people because they are associated with a "hated" company. If there are people inside Microsoft who are trying to facilitate change, they deserve just as much help and consideration as the citizens of a nation with an oppressive regime who wish to do the same. It's certainly a more civilized way to make things better than rushing in will guns blazing and killing everyone who opposes you.
A healthy degree of suspicion regarding Microsoft and yes, Mono and Miguel are fine and reasonable. Extremely reasonable, considering past actions (but keep the words of a certain Gordon Sumner in mind - history will teach us nothing). The blind, knee-jerk guilt-by-association I'm seeing from the FLOSS community strikes me as highly irrational, however. Has Microsoft got everyone so cowed that winning the upper hand in every confrontation is just a foregone conclusion, so it's better to run away and avoid them? I guess that's one strategy to follow. Another is to have some confidence in the ability of one's own community to hold its own in the face of adversity and go toe-to-toe and win what you can. Taking back lost ground and ultimately making a former rival a willing member of one's own community seems a much better long term strategy than turning inward in the hope that ignoring them entirely will eventually make them go away.
You're laughably stupid. Set PasswordAuthentication to no and your statistics become meaningless because they don't apply at all. Not even a lucky guess can result in a breach, because you have removed that avenue of attack entirely. If you want to play the statistics game, PubkeyAuthentication with strong encryption plus regular key changes plus some sort of port knocking scheme gives numbers that are much better than yours. I'll take "when hell freezes over" in place of "once in a blue moon" any day of the week. Give me scheme with even better odds and I'll take it. The highway of history is littered with fools who thought "they'll never figure this out. Wait. What? Oh shi....". SuperBanana indeed. You'll end up on the wrong end of someone's super banana before you know what hit you.