By my reading of the Guidelines, I understand they are, in fact, attempting to describe the process of patenting the material outcome of the expression of a genetic sequence. Your reference to prior art is by no means facetious and is certainly a basis for a moral, if not legal, challenge to this notion. Unfortunately, the comments requested are vis the "Revised Interim Guidelines" not vis the idea of whether such discovery is a patentable concept. There is a lot of money at stake here and the biotech industry is not going to let some esoteric philosophical ideas stand in the way.
This is one of the better examples of the dangers of market capitalism: not all realms of human endeavour, action and conception are best subjected to the "invisible hand of the market," and it is the market which is driving this bus.
You couldn't buy something from this company if you tried, whether a linux distro, office furniture or a break. There are no deliverables, honey. The only thing for sale at LinuxOne are share certificates.
Christ, it sent shivers up my spine. This presumption of the inherent rectitude of their actions is what makes these little apparatchiks so freaking dangerous. There is no appreciable difference between these bastards and the occupants of the Black Marias.
You're right, this discussion raises some very interesting questions. We are getting into the space between the ancient idea of art as "techne" -- artifice, artfulness, technical skill; and the contemporary notion of art as aesthetic production. As to any insights into human nature, certainly, the act of making software does not provide this, but the function and use of software can. In the same way, the insights high creative art provides come about in the appreciation of the viewer/reader, it is often beneficial for the artist to put such considerations out of her mind when creating the work.
I know the feeling. I found Wrox's (whose stuff I generally dislike) Beginning Linux Programming to be generally excellent. Read it with a good C reference handy and you will go far, grasshopper. There are several docs in the LDP dealing with kernel dev and device drivers, as well.
From the Oxford Universal-- Intelligentsia - 1920. [Russian f. L. intelligentia INTELLIGENCE.] The class consisting of the educated portion of the population and regarded as capable of forming public opinion.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Sterling has a more refined notion in mind, but the term requires neither a clique of like-minded souls, nor book-lernin' per se. In fact, judging from the date, in the coining tongue it probably rapidly came to mean: Those who have read Marx. On face, the author certainly does not exclude the contingent of open-minded slashdoterii. We would do well to take heed.
I found the essay profound, original and highly problematic. As a good manifesto must, it describes an emanant reality, one which, in view of the author, should arise but which is threatened by other developments (ZB, e-commerce). The point I found most compelling was the notion that aesthetics, armed with technical know-how, represents the principal force for its realisation. As a poet, I want to believe this, but I am not convinced that art is not breathing its last. Then again, one-off shock pieces and "identity-art" are merely the death throes of an old order. As a novice hacker, however, I find myself completely caught up in Sterling's vision. Perhaps I can look at it in this light because its not a job for me, but my coding is feeding my writing like nothing has in a long time. There is little else as readily, repeatedly and swiftly new than software, brother.
Looking at art, philosophy or any other discipline of the mind as more than a tool for self-realisation would be equally foolish, conventional wisdom nothwithstanding.
Would I had a few hours to formulate a coherent response but my dog just ralphed on the carpet.
I am a Linux newbie, loud and proud. Vitals: 36 yrs, liberal arts background, married, new kid; Specs: vintage 1981 programming skills (BASIC, FORTRAN 77); more recently, typesetting on a VMS for five years. Motivation: computers aren't boring anymore.
In June of this year, after farting around with the Cygnus tools and NTemacs on my wife's Winblows machine for a year or so and finding myself with a small pile of discretionary cash I purchase a very butch custom machine from Apache Digital <PLUG>outstanding service</PLUG> with Linux pre-installed. Everything I've read indicates install is easy and this is borne out by subsequent experience. The first thing I want to accomplish with my new machine is to change the name from the silly one assigned by the tech at ADC, so I poke around in linuxconf and redefine the loopback address to the obviously unresolvable name Darlene.
Of course an astounding array of services are no longer accessible at this point. After several hours of frenzied research in xterm, ls and lessing like hell, I figure out that I might try and recreate the config file as it once was. Like a bolt, I realize cat is the answer. I fix the machine and restore my failing KDE session without even rebooting. I take several things away from this 3am jaunt through my ext2 filesystem: a) MS would never have allowed me to do something so foolish; b) I would have been unable to fix such a blunder in MS without a reinstall, let alone rebooting; c) more knowledge about loopback and what it does than I could have gained from 40 lbs of doco; d) a total love affair with Linux.
I have since built a PC from scratch with cast-off parts, after generously volunteering to upgrade my wife's machine <GRIN/>, installed Debian without X and am in the midst of configuring it as a gateway/firewall/mailserver.
The doco for Linux is generally outstanding. The volume of docs for Linux is a problem, but also a direct reflection of just how much you can do with the system. The writing is generally excellent, much better than most other technical docs I've encountered. The bias toward technical detail again reflects the nature of the beast.
Just the opinion of a perfectly satisfied, completely insane Linux newbie/junkie.
...the rise of very big business: an era of absolutely unbridled, unprincipled and rapacious bigness, immorality, inhumanity and greed.
...corporate greed and immorality...
Their [mega-corporations] rise has raised a host of social and moral issues...
...out-of-control business with no morality...
...that's what makes these mega-entities so venal, even dangerous.
Katz -- The Message From Seattle, Dec. 3, 1999
It's not that such companies are evil - corporations can't be evil any more than they can be moral.
Katz -- The Post-Microsoft Era, Nov. 8, 1999
Which is it, Mr. Katz? At what critical mass of market-cap is a corporate entity absolved of moral responsibility? And at what degree of market-domination and media-control does this responsibility again become relevant?
To your credit, you do mention the...host of social and moral issues, but you clearly partake of the ambivalence toward these issues betrayed by the political body in America today. We have not asked for these giants to be held accountable because we are desperately relying upon their paychecks. We take pride in their size and power even as we bemoan the impersonalizing scope of their control.
Most synthetic development can be profitably analysed from a point of view informed by biology. Technology always benefits from submitting itself to biological laws. Open source software, Z.B., has benefited immensely from its rigorous and challenging environment, the sheer number of people enabled to hack on it. Nietzsche's famous quote regarding adversity was clearly coined after an encounter with The Origin of Species.
Contrary to many of the posts on this thread, it is possible to get help without being subjected to reprogramming. You have to control the context and make your own choices about it, however, and that is precisely the issue. Kids don't have the right or the voice to control their fate once they are tagged in this way. This involuntary intervention is what leads to the mind-death/personality destruction (religious addiction, twelve-step addiction, etc.) described in some of these posts and its true that this is often considered a successful outcome. The other possibility is the violent rejection of these misguided attempts at help and the vigorous, sometimes equally destructive defense of self which ensues. I took the latter course. I made it. More than a few I knew are dead, or the moral equivalent.
The first step was to recognize that drinking was killing me. No treatment, I just woke up one morning with the tangible realization that I would be dead in months if I didn't stop. The second step, more elusive, was to recognize that the pot was keeping me numb to what was really going on. It helped at first because I could take the halting initial steps toward recovery without really feeling the slings and arrows.
Recovery involves sucking it up, eating pride, letting the anger die, ignoring blame, ignoring everything that does not lead up and out; the single-minded pursuit of self-respect. It consists in the simplest achievements and taking what pride you can in them: I fed myself today without stealing, I'm making rent. Hit the first tier of Maslow's hierarchy and work your way up. There is a gutful of bile and humiliation to eat along the way. But by then, it was no longer a National Merit Scholor washing dishes in a Lebanese restaurant at 27, it was just another case study trying to get his life out of the gutter.
Hold a job, key skill there. Next, find a way to make a relationship work, but not until you can look yourself in the mirror without loathing. You can learn to love yourself through another, but not if you haven't gotten past the self-loathing.
Then, and maybe only then, you might be ready for some constructive therapy, on your terms, with a professional who knows the limits of his craft and respects your sense of self. I had a son February last and I didn't want to inflict my shit on him. I can tell you that its been eight years since I took the first baby steps out of the ditch I was sleeping in. I've got a wife, a kid, two cars and a mortgage. I just busted into the IT group at my employer after five years of setting type. I am back in school part-time, teaching myself computing on weekends (Thank you, Linus). I can tell you that I feel like I am only just starting to deal with what was really going on all those years ago.
I'll wager a significant proportion of slashdotterii fit this profile. I know I do and committed my share of violent, primarily self-destructive acts. But the key here is that the profile is being used to identify potential violent offenders, the better to react swiftly with the full force of the law as necessary. It would be naieve to imagine that the FBI, BCA, or ATF are profiling individuals for some "love."
I was a principal suspect in a pretty serious local crime based on the heresay of a "concerned" law enforcement official. The BCA interviewed my parents and girlfriend while I was in school. The up-shot: come home from school to find myself homeless, my girlfriend no longer permitted contact with me. They apprehended the responsible party a few weeks later, but I didn't get the girl back and an already tenuous relationship with my parents deteriorated further. I won't bore you with the details of the black decade which followed, suffice to say there is a big hole where my twenties should have been thanks to the intervention of "concerned" adults.
An object four times the size of Jupiter orbiting a Sol-sized star with a period of 3.3 days? That thing is really booking and must be quite close to the star. Mercury's orbital period is 88 days. Aren't we looking at some sort of hybrid binary system? Is it any wonder the thing is hot.
Depends upon your definition of a book. Do inscribed deer femurs bound with hide constitute a book? If so, the divination records of the Shang and possibly Xia dynasties of China constitute the oldest of books, dating to the 2nd millenia BCE. The designation of this book as earliest probably presumes a printed work.
There are certainly discourses which date to prior to the publication of this version of the Diamond Sutra, including the Bible, the Hindi scriptures, the I Ching, the Quran, but the texts we have of these works are later productions, rescriptions of previous, now lost, works.
Some of my fellow slashdotter's have expressed contempt for the government intervention in the marketplace that this trial represents, that the eventual, inevitable triumph of Linux over M$ will be a hollow victory if it is achieved over a crippled adversary. Microsoft partisans have likewise voiced concern over needless government intrusion, that Microsoft is being punished for being an effective and competitive company, or even that Justice is merely out to take Bill down a notch. Both of these critiques partake of distrust of government's role in policing the "free" market. The political body has clearly grown increasingly chary about government's role in the marketplace in the last two decades.
It would seem that much of this concern can be attributed to the clumsiness of several high profile anti-trust actions in recent history. I am thinking in particular of the IBM case which seems to have simply outlived the conditions it was attempting to redress. The perception is that government intervention, particularly in the high-tech industries, is inherently futile, that the judiciary and bureaucrats are out of touch with the issues industry faces and consequently the cure is often worse than the disease.
Does it remain true that capital, left to its own devices, will seek a monopoly as its natural development? Does the US government, as the only capable body, have a duty to check this natural development? Does the Sherman Act remain a valid vehicle for effecting this control?
Stallman's on the nail with his characterization of ESR's work. He is speaking not of Raymond's political views (decidedly libertarian if I am any judge) but of the tone and tenor of his analysis of Open Source, the movement. ESR consistently uses economic terms and arguments to characterize the value of open source development, probably because the thrust of his writing is directed at legitimating this model for the suits. This emphasis on the economic over the social, that social structures are essentially economically determined is, ironically, a hallmark of "Socialist" thought.
ESR's emphasis on the economics of open source development deflects attention from the really radical inflection point the open source community represents: the model of a directed, yet non-hierarchical social structure. It is the first truly radical social form to have emerged from the new communications matrices. ESR's characterization of the Open Source community as a post-scarcity gift culture, which he presents as a reification of that anthropological notion, misses the crucial point that gift cultures have relatively little to do with wealth, in fact exist within economies of crushing dearth. The fact that wealth changes hands is a result of the assignment wealth==power common to all cultures; precisely the assignment that the open source community so radically redirects.
The principal rationale of a gift culture is not some function of wealth distribution, but rather the affirmation of social status, q.v. George Bataille The Accursed Share. He is greatest who gives the most and in this crowd, unique, it seems, the source is the coin of the realm.
This will be a big boost to the alternatives. This is very steep for the consumer market. Perhaps they imagine that folks just buy a new PC when the OS is running a little behind the curve.
Anyone I know who is still running Windows on a home PC are using pirated copies. This is just one more good reason not to upgrade but to switch.
Hell, I might even be able to persuade my wife to run Linux. She do not like to spend money, that one.
I found the documentation for Red Hat to be decidedly unhelpful. The tone veered between insultingly patronizing and obtuse. It also focused primarily on their front-end tools. Frankly, I didn't get Linux as a replacement for Windows on my desktop, I've never run Winblows on a computer. I got Linux to get into the machine, not hide from it.
I'm getting a lot more satisfaction running Debian on a little homebuilt mailserver; without X and with the LDP/HOWTOs.
Slashdot Mirror
By my reading of the Guidelines, I understand they are, in fact, attempting to describe the process of patenting the material outcome of the expression of a genetic sequence. Your reference to prior art is by no means facetious and is certainly a basis for a moral, if not legal, challenge to this notion. Unfortunately, the comments requested are vis the "Revised Interim Guidelines" not vis the idea of whether such discovery is a patentable concept. There is a lot of money at stake here and the biotech industry is not going to let some esoteric philosophical ideas stand in the way.
This is one of the better examples of the dangers of market capitalism: not all realms of human endeavour, action and conception are best subjected to the "invisible hand of the market," and it is the market which is driving this bus.
You couldn't buy something from this company if you tried, whether a linux distro, office furniture or a break. There are no deliverables, honey. The only thing for sale at LinuxOne are share certificates.
You can trust us.
Christ, it sent shivers up my spine. This presumption of the inherent rectitude of their actions is what makes these little apparatchiks so freaking dangerous. There is no appreciable difference between these bastards and the occupants of the Black Marias.
You're right, this discussion raises some very interesting questions. We are getting into the space between the ancient idea of art as "techne" -- artifice, artfulness, technical skill; and the contemporary notion of art as aesthetic production. As to any insights into human nature, certainly, the act of making software does not provide this, but the function and use of software can. In the same way, the insights high creative art provides come about in the appreciation of the viewer/reader, it is often beneficial for the artist to put such considerations out of her mind when creating the work.
Thanks, gwalla.
Boumphrey's book is the only other Wrox title I haven't returned disatisfied.
XML for Applications was one of the lightest 600 page tech book I've ever run afoul of. Its true you could do worse: SAMS.
I know the feeling. I found Wrox's (whose stuff I generally dislike) Beginning Linux Programming to be generally excellent. Read it with a good C reference handy and you will go far, grasshopper. There are several docs in the LDP dealing with kernel dev and device drivers, as well.
I second that emotion!
From the Oxford Universal--
Intelligentsia - 1920. [Russian f. L. intelligentia INTELLIGENCE.] The class consisting of the educated portion of the population and regarded as capable of forming public opinion.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Sterling has a more refined notion in mind, but the term requires neither a clique of like-minded souls, nor book-lernin' per se. In fact, judging from the date, in the coining tongue it probably rapidly came to mean: Those who have read Marx. On face, the author certainly does not exclude the contingent of open-minded slashdoterii. We would do well to take heed.
I found the essay profound, original and highly problematic. As a good manifesto must, it describes an emanant reality, one which, in view of the author, should arise but which is threatened by other developments (ZB, e-commerce). The point I found most compelling was the notion that aesthetics, armed with technical know-how, represents the principal force for its realisation. As a poet, I want to believe this, but I am not convinced that art is not breathing its last. Then again, one-off shock pieces and "identity-art" are merely the death throes of an old order. As a novice hacker, however, I find myself completely caught up in Sterling's vision. Perhaps I can look at it in this light because its not a job for me, but my coding is feeding my writing like nothing has in a long time. There is little else as readily, repeatedly and swiftly new than software, brother.
Looking at art, philosophy or any other discipline of the mind as more than a tool for self-realisation would be equally foolish, conventional wisdom nothwithstanding.
Would I had a few hours to formulate a coherent response but my dog just ralphed on the carpet.
Man Rides Bus to Work
Woman Will Work Out at Gym
Dog Bites Man
I am a Linux newbie, loud and proud. Vitals: 36 yrs, liberal arts background, married, new kid; Specs: vintage 1981 programming skills (BASIC, FORTRAN 77); more recently, typesetting on a VMS for five years. Motivation: computers aren't boring anymore.
In June of this year, after farting around with the Cygnus tools and NTemacs on my wife's Winblows machine for a year or so and finding myself with a small pile of discretionary cash I purchase a very butch custom machine from Apache Digital <PLUG>outstanding service</PLUG> with Linux pre-installed. Everything I've read indicates install is easy and this is borne out by subsequent experience. The first thing I want to accomplish with my new machine is to change the name from the silly one assigned by the tech at ADC, so I poke around in linuxconf and redefine the loopback address to the obviously unresolvable name Darlene.
Of course an astounding array of services are no longer accessible at this point. After several hours of frenzied research in xterm, ls and lessing like hell, I figure out that I might try and recreate the config file as it once was. Like a bolt, I realize cat is the answer. I fix the machine and restore my failing KDE session without even rebooting. I take several things away from this 3am jaunt through my ext2 filesystem: a) MS would never have allowed me to do something so foolish; b) I would have been unable to fix such a blunder in MS without a reinstall, let alone rebooting; c) more knowledge about loopback and what it does than I could have gained from 40 lbs of doco; d) a total love affair with Linux.
I have since built a PC from scratch with cast-off parts, after generously volunteering to upgrade my wife's machine <GRIN/>, installed Debian without X and am in the midst of configuring it as a gateway/firewall/mailserver.
The doco for Linux is generally outstanding. The volume of docs for Linux is a problem, but also a direct reflection of just how much you can do with the system. The writing is generally excellent, much better than most other technical docs I've encountered. The bias toward technical detail again reflects the nature of the beast.
Just the opinion of a perfectly satisfied, completely insane Linux newbie/junkie.
...the rise of very big business: an era of absolutely unbridled, unprincipled and rapacious bigness, immorality, inhumanity and greed.
...corporate greed and immorality...
...out-of-control business with no morality...
...that's what makes these mega-entities so venal, even dangerous.
...host of social and moral issues, but you clearly partake of the ambivalence toward these issues betrayed by the political body in America today. We have not asked for these giants to be held accountable because we are desperately relying upon their paychecks. We take pride in their size and power even as we bemoan the impersonalizing scope of their control.
Their [mega-corporations] rise has raised a host of social and moral issues...
Katz -- The Message From Seattle, Dec. 3, 1999
It's not that such companies are evil - corporations can't be evil any more than they can be moral.
Katz -- The Post-Microsoft Era, Nov. 8, 1999
Which is it, Mr. Katz? At what critical mass of market-cap is a corporate entity absolved of moral responsibility? And at what degree of market-domination and media-control does this responsibility again become relevant?
To your credit, you do mention the
Most synthetic development can be profitably analysed from a point of view informed by biology. Technology always benefits from submitting itself to biological laws. Open source software, Z.B., has benefited immensely from its rigorous and challenging environment, the sheer number of people enabled to hack on it. Nietzsche's famous quote regarding adversity was clearly coined after an encounter with The Origin of Species.
Contrary to many of the posts on this thread, it is possible to get help without being subjected to reprogramming. You have to control the context and make your own choices about it, however, and that is precisely the issue. Kids don't have the right or the voice to control their fate once they are tagged in this way. This involuntary intervention is what leads to the mind-death/personality destruction (religious addiction, twelve-step addiction, etc.) described in some of these posts and its true that this is often considered a successful outcome. The other possibility is the violent rejection of these misguided attempts at help and the vigorous, sometimes equally destructive defense of self which ensues. I took the latter course. I made it. More than a few I knew are dead, or the moral equivalent.
The first step was to recognize that drinking was killing me. No treatment, I just woke up one morning with the tangible realization that I would be dead in months if I didn't stop. The second step, more elusive, was to recognize that the pot was keeping me numb to what was really going on. It helped at first because I could take the halting initial steps toward recovery without really feeling the slings and arrows.
Recovery involves sucking it up, eating pride, letting the anger die, ignoring blame, ignoring everything that does not lead up and out; the single-minded pursuit of self-respect. It consists in the simplest achievements and taking what pride you can in them: I fed myself today without stealing, I'm making rent. Hit the first tier of Maslow's hierarchy and work your way up. There is a gutful of bile and humiliation to eat along the way. But by then, it was no longer a National Merit Scholor washing dishes in a Lebanese restaurant at 27, it was just another case study trying to get his life out of the gutter.
Hold a job, key skill there. Next, find a way to make a relationship work, but not until you can look yourself in the mirror without loathing. You can learn to love yourself through another, but not if you haven't gotten past the self-loathing.
Then, and maybe only then, you might be ready for some constructive therapy, on your terms, with a professional who knows the limits of his craft and respects your sense of self. I had a son February last and I didn't want to inflict my shit on him. I can tell you that its been eight years since I took the first baby steps out of the ditch I was sleeping in. I've got a wife, a kid, two cars and a mortgage. I just busted into the IT group at my employer after five years of setting type. I am back in school part-time, teaching myself computing on weekends (Thank you, Linus). I can tell you that I feel like I am only just starting to deal with what was really going on all those years ago.
I'll wager a significant proportion of slashdotterii fit this profile. I know I do and committed my share of violent, primarily self-destructive acts. But the key here is that the profile is being used to identify potential violent offenders, the better to react swiftly with the full force of the law as necessary. It would be naieve to imagine that the FBI, BCA, or ATF are profiling individuals for some "love."
I was a principal suspect in a pretty serious local crime based on the heresay of a "concerned" law enforcement official. The BCA interviewed my parents and girlfriend while I was in school. The up-shot: come home from school to find myself homeless, my girlfriend no longer permitted contact with me. They apprehended the responsible party a few weeks later, but I didn't get the girl back and an already tenuous relationship with my parents deteriorated further. I won't bore you with the details of the black decade which followed, suffice to say there is a big hole where my twenties should have been thanks to the intervention of "concerned" adults.
Someone tell Judy Chicago, Norman Mailer and Krzysztlof Kieslowski, I'll get the lights.</SARCASM
Post-modernism is a critical stance, subject to the whim of fashion and the dead-hand of time; art is in no way so constrained.
An object four times the size of Jupiter orbiting a Sol-sized star with a period of 3.3 days? That thing is really booking and must be quite close to the star. Mercury's orbital period is 88 days. Aren't we looking at some sort of hybrid binary system? Is it any wonder the thing is hot.
Ouch. And only too apt.
Flacid thinking, dressed in engagé relativism, with just a hint of indifference.
Depends upon your definition of a book. Do inscribed deer femurs bound with hide constitute a book? If so, the divination records of the Shang and possibly Xia dynasties of China constitute the oldest of books, dating to the 2nd millenia BCE. The designation of this book as earliest probably presumes a printed work.
There are certainly discourses which date to prior to the publication of this version of the Diamond Sutra, including the Bible, the Hindi scriptures, the I Ching, the Quran, but the texts we have of these works are later productions, rescriptions of previous, now lost, works.
Some of my fellow slashdotter's have expressed contempt for the government intervention in the marketplace that this trial represents, that the eventual, inevitable triumph of Linux over M$ will be a hollow victory if it is achieved over a crippled adversary. Microsoft partisans have likewise voiced concern over needless government intrusion, that Microsoft is being punished for being an effective and competitive company, or even that Justice is merely out to take Bill down a notch. Both of these critiques partake of distrust of government's role in policing the "free" market. The political body has clearly grown increasingly chary about government's role in the marketplace in the last two decades.
It would seem that much of this concern can be attributed to the clumsiness of several high profile anti-trust actions in recent history. I am thinking in particular of the IBM case which seems to have simply outlived the conditions it was attempting to redress. The perception is that government intervention, particularly in the high-tech industries, is inherently futile, that the judiciary and bureaucrats are out of touch with the issues industry faces and consequently the cure is often worse than the disease.
Does it remain true that capital, left to its own devices, will seek a monopoly as its natural development? Does the US government, as the only capable body, have a duty to check this natural development? Does the Sherman Act remain a valid vehicle for effecting this control?
Michael Haarman,
...the Queen, Linus Torvalds, official purveyor of Operating Systems to Her Majesty's Household.
Stallman's on the nail with his characterization of ESR's work. He is speaking not of Raymond's political views (decidedly libertarian if I am any judge) but of the tone and tenor of his analysis of Open Source, the movement. ESR consistently uses economic terms and arguments to characterize the value of open source development, probably because the thrust of his writing is directed at legitimating this model for the suits. This emphasis on the economic over the social, that social structures are essentially economically determined is, ironically, a hallmark of "Socialist" thought.
ESR's emphasis on the economics of open source development deflects attention from the really radical inflection point the open source community represents: the model of a directed, yet non-hierarchical social structure. It is the first truly radical social form to have emerged from the new communications matrices. ESR's characterization of the Open Source community as a post-scarcity gift culture, which he presents as a reification of that anthropological notion, misses the crucial point that gift cultures have relatively little to do with wealth, in fact exist within economies of crushing dearth. The fact that wealth changes hands is a result of the assignment wealth==power common to all cultures; precisely the assignment that the open source community so radically redirects.
The principal rationale of a gift culture is not some function of wealth distribution, but rather the affirmation of social status, q.v. George Bataille The Accursed Share. He is greatest who gives the most and in this crowd, unique, it seems, the source is the coin of the realm.
This will be a big boost to the alternatives. This is very steep for the consumer market. Perhaps they imagine that folks just buy a new PC when the OS is running a little behind the curve.
Anyone I know who is still running Windows on a home PC are using pirated copies. This is just one more good reason not to upgrade but to switch.
Hell, I might even be able to persuade my wife to run Linux. She do not like to spend money, that one.
Somebody, somewhere, is already selling hardisks pre-loaded with Linux, I forget who. Check the mall. Don't know if they work. Anybody tried one?
sell it in boxes with gobs of documentation
I found the documentation for Red Hat to be decidedly unhelpful. The tone veered between insultingly patronizing and obtuse. It also focused primarily on their front-end tools. Frankly, I didn't get Linux as a replacement for Windows on my desktop, I've never run Winblows on a computer. I got Linux to get into the machine, not hide from it.
I'm getting a lot more satisfaction running Debian on a little homebuilt mailserver; without X and with the LDP/HOWTOs.
Lordy! :)
Where to take that subject? We are gods, the machines our creations? The machine is god (or will be) and we are subject? God is a machine?