Rolling on wheels is much more efficient than running. I imagine that the exoskeleton should have wheels so that when you are on manageable terrain, use wheels for movement, and to negotiate tougher terrain, revert back to using legs.
As for the whole exoskeleton vs. segway thing, why not just segway into the exoskeleton as part of the wheels? Imagine if you had one wheel on each foot, then you can just roll down the road - and if the exoskeleton has more power available to it, it makes the speed and range even better!
It seems that with all the DRM - advertising and content sponsorship will be at odds with the content providers - or is it that instead of getting advertisers to pay for our consumption of content, we are now going to pay for it ourselves?
Doesn't it seem like content rights holders are going to go head to head with the content distributors?
Advertisers want their advertisements to be seen by as many people as possible. Content distributors (TV networks) rely on advertising to pay for the content. DRM generally (though not always, I suppose) want the consumers to pay for the content. Why should we, as consumers, start paying for so much content when advertisers used to always pay for them for us?
The Diamond Age has a bunch of very interesting technology - especially in the realm of nanotechnology and virtual presence/reality.
Then there is Snow Crash, with its metaverse, of course, and all of the associated online virtual reality as well.
Only one other thing I could think of as relating to real world but not by Neal Stephenson is Orson Scott Card's Ender's game series' ansible technology, which seems to be similar to some kind of quantum entanglement based (the closest thing I think it resembles) instantaneous communication over long distances (measured in light years).
Coincidentally, I just got a copy of the Manmachine Interface (Japanese edition) manga and it is awesome. It's a very dense piece of work - the full-color pages are amazing - packed with so much detail that it took an hour just to get through the first couple of chapters. The machinery, the technologies, and of course the women are painstakingly rendered with much love by Shirow. Ghost in the Shell pales in comparison.
The 3D rendering with the superimposed hand-drawn characters worked out well, and I think only he could have pulled it off to make them look good together.
I haven't even gotten half way through the book yet (I've just finished the full color pages in the first part), so I'm just touching on the appearance of artwork. It seems that Shirow has also expanded and fleshed out details of his vision of virtual navigations (the brain dives).
Needless to say, I highly recommend everyone to go get a copy! (Although, I'd recommend all of Shirow's work)
On the surface, it's an oxymoron (if you just took the meaning of the words literally), but in depth, yes, of course what you are saying would be ideal - except it's almost anti-capitalistic (vis-a-vis Microsoft, sort of like the Microsoft anti-open source sentiment). Which is to say, if nobody is making money off of it to move your hard earned money into their pockets, then someone will cry foul. Now, if you want another oxymoron, consider that Microsoft has something called Open License...
One use that I wonder about is in the realm of graphics rendering, but this really depends on whether the hardware and kit will support this.
I recently read something in IEEE's Computer Graphics magazine about how they are using a bunch of machines with advanced 3D accelerated graphics cards to do graphics rendering and then reading the graphics buffer to retrieve the image and save it into a centralized location. Obviously, with a bunch of cheaper machines and relatively sophisticated graphics cards, you can get very good results because the rendering is done by hardware.
That being said, you should know where I'm going with this - if you could use PS2's advanced graphics processing and rendering capabilities with a Linux system on it, then what you have is probably a good and possibly cost effective distributed rendering machine - just one of its uses. I don't know about the price/performance ratio, but I think it might be pretty good.
Aside from the above purpose, I will use the oft-quoted Slashdot saying (but with all seriousness): Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of PS2's?
From the very beginning, PCs were the general-purpose computing devices that were designed to be hackable and experimental, at the same time providing us with the ability to get some work done.
Ultimately, of course, whatever we wanted on the PCs make its way to relatively non-hackable end-use, single-purpose "appliances", such as Tivo (yes, I know they are hackable), MP3 players, etc. I believe that more and more of these kinds of things will arrive, but without the PCs leading the way and providing functional experimentation, marketing experimentation, etc., it would take a lot longer to bring such appliances to market. Could you imagine how long it would have taken to create things like Tivo and portable MP3 players that we have now if we didn't have the PC platform to first show that there was a market, second show what the user-interface might look like, and all of that? The PCs are the ultimate mass test-marketing and experimentation tool, somewhat akin to breadboards in electronics. The PCs will always be hackable and will always be useful because of its value as I have described above.
It really depends on what schools are using the computers for, but for the most part, using free software for education should be the best thing.
Especially with the latest round of Microsoft software debacles of licensing and bundling.
We need to prevent Microsoft from having its cake and eating it too; charging schools licensing fees and having our school system raising generations of kids (read: future consumers) on Microsoft software, just like Disney and McDonalds are doing.
Free software needs to have the advocacy in education. There needs to be people (something perhaps, like FSF for Education) whose focus is to provide free software and awareness and training for schools and it needs to be at such a scale as to convince educational systems around the country (U.S.) that it is worth investigating into and investing in. They need to know that this "free software thing" isn't going to go away soon and that teaching kids about it will not mean that they cannot function in the workforces of tomorrow.
I think perhaps some of the large Linux houses should (if they didn't already) invest more into programs for educators.
Not knowing enough about the topic, I can only explain that my understanding is, web bugs use cookies, but not all cookies are for web bugs. Web bugs are things like little one pixel GIF files or banner ads. It's especially useful when you are talking about different website that contains web bugs from the same place, because the site that is serving up the web bugs can track you across web sites using cookies they've placed on your machine.
As far as downloading, people can still send you things if they don't have YOUR IP address - some kind of proxy system would do.
I'm not going to harp on the Internet "oldster" thing like the rest of the readers, though you deserve it - I don't think of myself as such because I've been on since 1994 - later than many others. You deserve whatever pounding you might receive from that little comment.
Do you sound elitist? Of course. Do you care? no. Some people still want the free stuff because they either can't afford it (because they are young and their family don't want to pay for it) or they want to spend their money on better things than to subscribe to get hooked up to the Internet, which for all the benefits that it has, also has many drawbacks. Most of us here at Slashdot probably spend more time than we really should online. Come on! Go out and enjoy the summer (I really shouldn't talk, spending more than 15+ hours a day in front of the screen).
If you really try to spend $100 a month on commercial software (and they are not games) then you are just plainly more foolish. You have bought into the franchise - you are going to subscribe to the software taxes (read: licensing fees) for the rest of your life so people like Bill Gates can get rich (I'm not going to knock Bill, I think he deserves to be rich). But for the most part, the "free" (as in beer) software that's out there is keeping us from getting completely assimilated into the software consumer farm-raising that large corporate software houses are trying to do - just like McDonald's and Disney are raising generation after generation of consumers who will be loyal subscribers from childhood, so have you succumbed to the same mentality for software. But that's just my opinion.
And what exactly is wrong with giving Internet access to people? If there are companies willing to give that away, then go right ahead. Just because you paid for your connection it doesn't make you more legitimate or more "wholesome" (gag me, please). You consider it stolen bandwidth, well, suppose I paid more for my connection than you. Well, I can still consider that you have stolen bandwidth from me, because after all, I paid more for my connection, why should you have equal opportunity to get license? Why, ISPs should just give more priority to higher paying customers, and relegate whatever bandwidth that is left over to those who paid less. I'm sure you can see how quickly this will mean that the Internet will only be available to the richest people in the world while being, for all practical purposes, inaccessible to most people in the world (which is currently true, of course).
never did I say I was brilliant. I'm merely saying that just like their test went wrong, so, too, could the expected destruction of the test plan via the mach 7 dive. What the hell do I care what the mathematical equations of a mach 7 dive is? nor did I think the person was wrong. I was just posing a "what if?" question. People are so easily offended around here.
hey, depends on trajectory, the speed at which they were going to have the plane enter the ocean, and all that. Sure, even Mach 1 is enough to probably obliterate it, but I'd think that just in case that their little "planned destruction" of the plane didn't work, they'd still need to have the explosives anyhow.
What if, for example, instead of the rocket veering off course, the plane veers off its death dive after it has been successful tested, and somehow it ended up skipping with a low angle of incident with respect to the ocean surface, and instead skipped like a stone on the ocean surface?
not likely, but there is a slight possiblity, right?
I remember reading that this is suppose to revolutionize travel, meaning this is not just a military technology they are working on, but something geared towards civilian travel.
I hope they are not going to continue to require rocket boosting to get fast enough for the scramjet engine to be operable. But then, how could they get up to that speed?
add something like a remote detachment and parachute attachment so that they can at least save the plane if something like this goes wrong?
I know they didn't even wanted to retrieve the test planes, but if they added something like a parachute attachment, they may even actually be able to retrieve them as well. These things are pretty expensive, after all.
But hey, IANANAE (I Am Not A NASA Aerospace Engineer), so what do I know, right?
Obviously, AOL is not like Sun and Oracle, bitter enemies of Microsoft to the end.
Microsoft is a software company. Though they do hardware and internet access, they still have their power and revenues mostly from software. Microsoft has MSN, has Hotmail, MSN messenger, all of that stuff, so that even if they don't eventually dominate in those areas, they have chips to bargain with.
AOL was an ISP, together with Time Warner, a media company. Yes, they bought Netscape, a software company. But their revenue certainly don't derive from selling software. They give their software away. Why did they buy Netscape? so they have something to bargain with, this includes AOL Instant Messenger.
I suspect that they both would continue investing in all those things, but it makes so much more sense for them to combine forces - Microsoft provides the software and platform, AOL provides the service. Neither one of them really need the non-core business that they got into. If they wanted, they could sell of their own portions of the non-core business to the other and still maintain some of the advantages, if they join forces. Is this likely to happen? Probably not. But if Microsoft has their way, joining forces with AOL will benefit both of them tremendously. Mozilla? Netscape? It doesn't matter. Who are the potential losers? us.
We will have less choices in things. Without AOL's support in Netscape and to a significant degree, Mozilla, the very likely scenario is that most future PCs will come bundled with Windows XP, AOL, IE, etc. That will become the "norm". If these two companies join forces with one of the baby bells, or if they figure out some other way to get to the broadband access user base as well, then they will be unbeatable.
Which should make you really glad that there has been so much work done on Linux and the Open Source front, as well as the technological advancements that is slowly but surely making the PC disappear.
I don't know how/why anybody can take this seriously. Yes, I see the patent that was granted. I still think the whole site is just a scam. I just can't believe it's really serious.
Hey I understand the benefits of magnetism and asian medicine - but you are not going to tell me looking at that site, that you don't suspect it's just a gag of some sort - involving Roblimo and all.
For heaven's sake, looking through the site, reading some of the stuff it just amazes me the amount of crap that's there. The badly drawn images, the overly large text with bad colors and bad graphics, it's all just too much to be true.
Not only that, when I've finally had enough of the crap on the site and tried to leave, new browser windows popped up for underage (lolita) porn! What the fuck?
If this ain't a joke, then Roblimo needs to have his head examined. What a fucking waste!
Some of the people do have some point, and as it is with everything, it's always a double-edged sword. What is often the best thing about something is also probably the worst. Expecting the homogeneity that McDonald's offers worldwide to bring familiarity and feeling of "home" for Americans is great for Americans who want that - and to some degree, I do find comfort in that. However, it is also scary how far and deep McDonald's reach is. Nothing against the McDonald's people - I'm sure they all mean well - but in the quest to increase the bottom-line for shareholder value, McDonald's must do everything it can to maintain it's popularity and stranglehold on the fast food consumerism - and they do it at the same level that Disney does - they start with the kids. It's at the same time comforting and insidious. They do everything they could to make their image kid-friendly. But they have also raised generation after generation of loyal McDonald's and Disney adherents, who expect to see their corporate iconic parent's influence everywhere. The corporations become the "security blanket" of generation after generation of kids. If not for the wake-up calls of people who challenge the popular view, we'd be, as one of the +5 posters say, in the age of the puppet kings.
This is not to say that McDonald's people or Disney's people are evil - the corporate entity is the one in question - and the corporate entity's consciouness is driven by an economic ego (or was that superego? Damn! I could never remember) to fulfill its economic desires that is expressed by the shareholder collective.
I think that the book merely brings up a good manifestation of corporatism and the reactions of many of the Slashdot reader shows that to a large degree, they have succeeded in their mass brain-washing of generations of kids.
That said, I still like going to McDonalds, even if I know that their foods are completely flavored by chemical factories in New Jersey and their french fries contain beef tallow extracts - sometimes, you just can't help it - their fries ARE good.
People are stupid and selfish. How do we fix that?
You don't -- you let evolution take care of that. Stupid and selfish people on the whole are less likely to survive, though they may have other dominant traits that help them. For example, if you are smart and selfish, you may still get by quite well. We may not like selfishness, but it is one of those things that helps individuals survive. Selfishness doesn't help the species as a whole survive, and most of us tend to dislike selfish people, while realizing that selfishness is universal, only that some people exhibit it more so than others (or it could be argued that smart people who are selfish don't appear selfish - that's why they are smart)
What's the solution? Awareness and activism, I'd say. If you are more aware of things like those mentioned in the book (an excellent book, by the way, and there's a short article that was based on the book at the Atlantic Monthly which can give you a good idea about the book).
Which is to say, at the very least, we are doing the right thing by having discussions here, and Jon Katz, for all the overreaching arguments he make, is actually providing public service by bringing up topics such as these for debate.
I see your point, but I truly hope that we wouldn't be as meek as to let that happen, when we become our own slaves in a world of mandated work and consume cycle, not having a choice to opt out of such a system...
No, not wireless network appliances, not quantum computers and fiber optic connection to the internet, precisely because those are your dreams NOW. No, in the future, the computers should disappear into the fabric of our lives (cotton?). Computers will be so ubiquitous that you don't even think of them as computers - they'll be so taken for granted that they will cease to be something people focus much attention on. The internet will just be something that's always been there.
This is an unbelievable thread of flames about licenses and Dan Bernstein's license. To me, it's pretty simple. I have no problems getting qmail, installing it and make it work (ok, I have technical difficulties of my own, but nothing in his license prevents me from using his software). I have downloaded a couple of patches that works on the source level to his software to support some DNS foolishness that are not attributable to his software. I am personally a fan of his software.
In the sense that I can obtain, compile, install and use his program from source code I download from his site, I consider that "free" in every sense I need. So I'm not allowed, under his license, to redistribute a binary form of his software with different install locations or binary patches to other people. Fine, I'm willing to accept that. It doesn't prevent anybody else from getting and using the software.
In FreeBSD, I found that qmail is in their ports collection. Ports works at the source level, able to get the source from the original author's site, extract and compile the program, and install it in whatever place appropriate. Perhaps RedHat can adapt a different method of using RPMs to distribute the software using the source, compile and install after extracting the software.
I can also appreciate that, in some ways, disallowing binary patches will ensure that the program will not be patched in such ways that Dan cannot possibly be responsible for.
Slashdot Mirror
Rolling on wheels is much more efficient than running. I imagine that the exoskeleton should have wheels so that when you are on manageable terrain, use wheels for movement, and to negotiate tougher terrain, revert back to using legs.
As for the whole exoskeleton vs. segway thing, why not just segway into the exoskeleton as part of the wheels? Imagine if you had one wheel on each foot, then you can just roll down the road - and if the exoskeleton has more power available to it, it makes the speed and range even better!
It seems that with all the DRM - advertising and content sponsorship will be at odds with the content providers - or is it that instead of getting advertisers to pay for our consumption of content, we are now going to pay for it ourselves?
Doesn't it seem like content rights holders are going to go head to head with the content distributors?
Advertisers want their advertisements to be seen by as many people as possible. Content distributors (TV networks) rely on advertising to pay for the content. DRM generally (though not always, I suppose) want the consumers to pay for the content. Why should we, as consumers, start paying for so much content when advertisers used to always pay for them for us?
It happened in the world of the Slashdot Propaganda Machine.
The Diamond Age has a bunch of very interesting technology - especially in the realm of nanotechnology and virtual presence/reality.
Then there is Snow Crash, with its metaverse, of course, and all of the associated online virtual reality as well.
Only one other thing I could think of as relating to real world but not by Neal Stephenson is Orson Scott Card's Ender's game series' ansible technology, which seems to be similar to some kind of quantum entanglement based (the closest thing I think it resembles) instantaneous communication over long distances (measured in light years).
The 3D rendering with the superimposed hand-drawn characters worked out well, and I think only he could have pulled it off to make them look good together.
I haven't even gotten half way through the book yet (I've just finished the full color pages in the first part), so I'm just touching on the appearance of artwork. It seems that Shirow has also expanded and fleshed out details of his vision of virtual navigations (the brain dives).
Needless to say, I highly recommend everyone to go get a copy! (Although, I'd recommend all of Shirow's work)
On the surface, it's an oxymoron (if you just took the meaning of the words literally), but in depth, yes, of course what you are saying would be ideal - except it's almost anti-capitalistic (vis-a-vis Microsoft, sort of like the Microsoft anti-open source sentiment). Which is to say, if nobody is making money off of it to move your hard earned money into their pockets, then someone will cry foul. Now, if you want another oxymoron, consider that Microsoft has something called Open License...
Quite an oxymoron
I recently read something in IEEE's Computer Graphics magazine about how they are using a bunch of machines with advanced 3D accelerated graphics cards to do graphics rendering and then reading the graphics buffer to retrieve the image and save it into a centralized location. Obviously, with a bunch of cheaper machines and relatively sophisticated graphics cards, you can get very good results because the rendering is done by hardware.
That being said, you should know where I'm going with this - if you could use PS2's advanced graphics processing and rendering capabilities with a Linux system on it, then what you have is probably a good and possibly cost effective distributed rendering machine - just one of its uses. I don't know about the price/performance ratio, but I think it might be pretty good.
Aside from the above purpose, I will use the oft-quoted Slashdot saying (but with all seriousness): Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of PS2's?
Ultimately, of course, whatever we wanted on the PCs make its way to relatively non-hackable end-use, single-purpose "appliances", such as Tivo (yes, I know they are hackable), MP3 players, etc. I believe that more and more of these kinds of things will arrive, but without the PCs leading the way and providing functional experimentation, marketing experimentation, etc., it would take a lot longer to bring such appliances to market. Could you imagine how long it would have taken to create things like Tivo and portable MP3 players that we have now if we didn't have the PC platform to first show that there was a market, second show what the user-interface might look like, and all of that? The PCs are the ultimate mass test-marketing and experimentation tool, somewhat akin to breadboards in electronics. The PCs will always be hackable and will always be useful because of its value as I have described above.
Especially with the latest round of Microsoft software debacles of licensing and bundling.
We need to prevent Microsoft from having its cake and eating it too; charging schools licensing fees and having our school system raising generations of kids (read: future consumers) on Microsoft software, just like Disney and McDonalds are doing.
Free software needs to have the advocacy in education. There needs to be people (something perhaps, like FSF for Education) whose focus is to provide free software and awareness and training for schools and it needs to be at such a scale as to convince educational systems around the country (U.S.) that it is worth investigating into and investing in. They need to know that this "free software thing" isn't going to go away soon and that teaching kids about it will not mean that they cannot function in the workforces of tomorrow.
I think perhaps some of the large Linux houses should (if they didn't already) invest more into programs for educators.
As far as downloading, people can still send you things if they don't have YOUR IP address - some kind of proxy system would do.
Do you sound elitist? Of course. Do you care? no. Some people still want the free stuff because they either can't afford it (because they are young and their family don't want to pay for it) or they want to spend their money on better things than to subscribe to get hooked up to the Internet, which for all the benefits that it has, also has many drawbacks. Most of us here at Slashdot probably spend more time than we really should online. Come on! Go out and enjoy the summer (I really shouldn't talk, spending more than 15+ hours a day in front of the screen).
If you really try to spend $100 a month on commercial software (and they are not games) then you are just plainly more foolish. You have bought into the franchise - you are going to subscribe to the software taxes (read: licensing fees) for the rest of your life so people like Bill Gates can get rich (I'm not going to knock Bill, I think he deserves to be rich). But for the most part, the "free" (as in beer) software that's out there is keeping us from getting completely assimilated into the software consumer farm-raising that large corporate software houses are trying to do - just like McDonald's and Disney are raising generation after generation of consumers who will be loyal subscribers from childhood, so have you succumbed to the same mentality for software. But that's just my opinion.
And what exactly is wrong with giving Internet access to people? If there are companies willing to give that away, then go right ahead. Just because you paid for your connection it doesn't make you more legitimate or more "wholesome" (gag me, please). You consider it stolen bandwidth, well, suppose I paid more for my connection than you. Well, I can still consider that you have stolen bandwidth from me, because after all, I paid more for my connection, why should you have equal opportunity to get license? Why, ISPs should just give more priority to higher paying customers, and relegate whatever bandwidth that is left over to those who paid less. I'm sure you can see how quickly this will mean that the Internet will only be available to the richest people in the world while being, for all practical purposes, inaccessible to most people in the world (which is currently true, of course).
never did I say I was brilliant. I'm merely saying that just like their test went wrong, so, too, could the expected destruction of the test plan via the mach 7 dive. What the hell do I care what the mathematical equations of a mach 7 dive is? nor did I think the person was wrong. I was just posing a "what if?" question. People are so easily offended around here.
What if, for example, instead of the rocket veering off course, the plane veers off its death dive after it has been successful tested, and somehow it ended up skipping with a low angle of incident with respect to the ocean surface, and instead skipped like a stone on the ocean surface?
not likely, but there is a slight possiblity, right?
I agree, I have a hard time trying to get Java to run on my abacus as well.
Were they planning to destroy it (using the same onboard explosives that they used this time) in the ocean after it dives in as well?
I remember reading that this is suppose to revolutionize travel, meaning this is not just a military technology they are working on, but something geared towards civilian travel.
I hope they are not going to continue to require rocket boosting to get fast enough for the scramjet engine to be operable. But then, how could they get up to that speed?
I know they didn't even wanted to retrieve the test planes, but if they added something like a parachute attachment, they may even actually be able to retrieve them as well. These things are pretty expensive, after all.
But hey, IANANAE (I Am Not A NASA Aerospace Engineer), so what do I know, right?
Microsoft is a software company. Though they do hardware and internet access, they still have their power and revenues mostly from software. Microsoft has MSN, has Hotmail, MSN messenger, all of that stuff, so that even if they don't eventually dominate in those areas, they have chips to bargain with.
AOL was an ISP, together with Time Warner, a media company. Yes, they bought Netscape, a software company. But their revenue certainly don't derive from selling software. They give their software away. Why did they buy Netscape? so they have something to bargain with, this includes AOL Instant Messenger.
I suspect that they both would continue investing in all those things, but it makes so much more sense for them to combine forces - Microsoft provides the software and platform, AOL provides the service. Neither one of them really need the non-core business that they got into. If they wanted, they could sell of their own portions of the non-core business to the other and still maintain some of the advantages, if they join forces. Is this likely to happen? Probably not. But if Microsoft has their way, joining forces with AOL will benefit both of them tremendously. Mozilla? Netscape? It doesn't matter. Who are the potential losers? us.
We will have less choices in things. Without AOL's support in Netscape and to a significant degree, Mozilla, the very likely scenario is that most future PCs will come bundled with Windows XP, AOL, IE, etc. That will become the "norm". If these two companies join forces with one of the baby bells, or if they figure out some other way to get to the broadband access user base as well, then they will be unbeatable.
Which should make you really glad that there has been so much work done on Linux and the Open Source front, as well as the technological advancements that is slowly but surely making the PC disappear.
Hey I understand the benefits of magnetism and asian medicine - but you are not going to tell me looking at that site, that you don't suspect it's just a gag of some sort - involving Roblimo and all.
For heaven's sake, looking through the site, reading some of the stuff it just amazes me the amount of crap that's there. The badly drawn images, the overly large text with bad colors and bad graphics, it's all just too much to be true. Not only that, when I've finally had enough of the crap on the site and tried to leave, new browser windows popped up for underage (lolita) porn! What the fuck?
If this ain't a joke, then Roblimo needs to have his head examined. What a fucking waste!
Some of the people do have some point, and as it is with everything, it's always a double-edged sword. What is often the best thing about something is also probably the worst. Expecting the homogeneity that McDonald's offers worldwide to bring familiarity and feeling of "home" for Americans is great for Americans who want that - and to some degree, I do find comfort in that. However, it is also scary how far and deep McDonald's reach is. Nothing against the McDonald's people - I'm sure they all mean well - but in the quest to increase the bottom-line for shareholder value, McDonald's must do everything it can to maintain it's popularity and stranglehold on the fast food consumerism - and they do it at the same level that Disney does - they start with the kids. It's at the same time comforting and insidious. They do everything they could to make their image kid-friendly. But they have also raised generation after generation of loyal McDonald's and Disney adherents, who expect to see their corporate iconic parent's influence everywhere. The corporations become the "security blanket" of generation after generation of kids. If not for the wake-up calls of people who challenge the popular view, we'd be, as one of the +5 posters say, in the age of the puppet kings.
This is not to say that McDonald's people or Disney's people are evil - the corporate entity is the one in question - and the corporate entity's consciouness is driven by an economic ego (or was that superego? Damn! I could never remember) to fulfill its economic desires that is expressed by the shareholder collective.
I think that the book merely brings up a good manifestation of corporatism and the reactions of many of the Slashdot reader shows that to a large degree, they have succeeded in their mass brain-washing of generations of kids.
That said, I still like going to McDonalds, even if I know that their foods are completely flavored by chemical factories in New Jersey and their french fries contain beef tallow extracts - sometimes, you just can't help it - their fries ARE good.
You don't -- you let evolution take care of that. Stupid and selfish people on the whole are less likely to survive, though they may have other dominant traits that help them. For example, if you are smart and selfish, you may still get by quite well. We may not like selfishness, but it is one of those things that helps individuals survive. Selfishness doesn't help the species as a whole survive, and most of us tend to dislike selfish people, while realizing that selfishness is universal, only that some people exhibit it more so than others (or it could be argued that smart people who are selfish don't appear selfish - that's why they are smart)
What's the solution? Awareness and activism, I'd say. If you are more aware of things like those mentioned in the book (an excellent book, by the way, and there's a short article that was based on the book at the Atlantic Monthly which can give you a good idea about the book).
Which is to say, at the very least, we are doing the right thing by having discussions here, and Jon Katz, for all the overreaching arguments he make, is actually providing public service by bringing up topics such as these for debate.
I see your point, but I truly hope that we wouldn't be as meek as to let that happen, when we become our own slaves in a world of mandated work and consume cycle, not having a choice to opt out of such a system...
No, not wireless network appliances, not quantum computers and fiber optic connection to the internet, precisely because those are your dreams NOW. No, in the future, the computers should disappear into the fabric of our lives (cotton?). Computers will be so ubiquitous that you don't even think of them as computers - they'll be so taken for granted that they will cease to be something people focus much attention on. The internet will just be something that's always been there.
In the sense that I can obtain, compile, install and use his program from source code I download from his site, I consider that "free" in every sense I need. So I'm not allowed, under his license, to redistribute a binary form of his software with different install locations or binary patches to other people. Fine, I'm willing to accept that. It doesn't prevent anybody else from getting and using the software.
In FreeBSD, I found that qmail is in their ports collection. Ports works at the source level, able to get the source from the original author's site, extract and compile the program, and install it in whatever place appropriate. Perhaps RedHat can adapt a different method of using RPMs to distribute the software using the source, compile and install after extracting the software.
I can also appreciate that, in some ways, disallowing binary patches will ensure that the program will not be patched in such ways that Dan cannot possibly be responsible for.