This is the public good arguement of patents, I agree with it. The only way these guys become patent millionaires is if the company can pay them millions for the idea, and still end up with a profit themselves.
It is a terrible idea to lock up human knowledge for any period of time, or to try and promote a so-called free market economy by granting government entitlements to monopolies right and left. Free markets DEPEND upon competition to function. Monopolies are antithetical to competition. Artificial monopolies on knowledge that restricts whole genres of human endeavor eradicate free markets in entire industries, to everyone's detriment (including, quite often, the monopolists' themselves).
Not only is the idea itself locked up for at least 20 years (longer in many cases, as folks like the pharmaceutical companies have become clever in patenting one portion of a process, then patenting another portion of the same process, extending their patent for several iterations), but every idea which would rest upon the first is locked up and delayed as well.
The initial 20 year stifling of knowledge is bad enough, but the domino effect is sufficiently horrible that we drive around in cars not a great deal different from those built 20 years ago, fly in airplanes not a great deal different from those built 50 years ago, and have doctors and laboratories working on cancer and AIDS treatments ordered to cease and desist their most promising researches by thuggish lawyers more concerned with lining their own pockets than with the tens of thousands of lives such an indefensible policy costs.
There are many other ways to finance R&D than giving away monopoly entitlements, be it for 1 year, 20 years, or (to stray from the topic of monopolies on human knowledge for a minute, to those granted on human expression and information), life+75 years or 95 years. Even the least effecient of the alternatives, using government grants to finance R&D, would cost the economy orders of magnitude less than the system of monopoly entitlements and micro-managed[1] planned economies being touted as "free."
Innovation has already become difficult. Not because there is any shortage of new ideas, or even a shortage of new ideas that are viable and would enrich both the implimentor, and society as a whole as the customer able to obtain new goods and services that enrich everyones lives. Innovation is difficult because all innovation relies on the work of those who went before, and these days, virtually everything relevant to the current leading edge of technology is locked up, and will remain so for a decade or more.
It may serve politician's interests and the interest of large, lethargic corporations to slow progress to a crawl and have enough lead time to stifle any disruptive technologies that emerge (as they are now trying to stifle the Internet, the one disruptive technology that actually managed to surprise the ruling oligarchs), but it certainly does not serve the interests of society at large, and most certainly not of humankind in the more general sense. Quite the contrary.
[1]Don't believe me? Take a look at the byzantine copyright and patent laws on the books today, designed to manage the information and knowledge economies in minute detail. Soviet planned economies were positively laissaz-faire by comparison.
Yes, there is. The settlement between AT&T and Berkeley. The question has already been settled.
No, it hasn't, and your insistence to the contrary shows you to be profoundly ignorant both of the AT&T v. BSD case and the accusations being levied against IBM by SCO.
Hint: they are not the same. They are not even related.
SCO is accusing IBM of having leaked trade secrets to the Linux community WRT multi-processor support (highly unlikely as Linux is vastly more advanced than any of SCOs products on that front, but that is the accusation). This code was not, let me repeat that for those still to dense to get it, was not a part of AT&T Unix system V, and is thus inapplicable to the BSD settlement. The code was written in later years, and would be as illegal in FreeBSD as it would be if it were in Linux.
The accusation would therefor be equally potent against FreeBSD, particularly if someone will ill intent, or innocently and then had their company purchased by those of ill intent, had contributed the code years earlier (as Caldera may well have done with Linux).
FreeBSD, and every other project, has exactly the same vulnerability to the kind of FUD, innuendo, and misinformation Microsoft's proxy (SCO) is committing against Linux.
Live in denial of that if you wish. Assume a case with absolutely nothing to do with SCO's current accusations or tactics somehow magically protects you if you so desire. But in the end, that won't protect you from this sort of behavior, and you can rest assured if such an approach is successful against Linux, FreeBSD stands a very good chance of being next. (After all, Microsoft can get at Apple that way, and remove the last of the free alternatives from their radar screen.)
The RIAA cannot make tools like codec's illegal. It would be like outlawing screwdrivers because they might get used to hotwire a car. While technically true, there are far too many legitimate uses for the tool.
While quite true, the discount with which cartels like the RIAA and MPAA can purchase our ostensibly "elected" officials is appalling. The bottom line, the could outlaw just about anything they like, as they have already done so with security reporting and many forms of reverse engineering through the DMCA, which the aforementioned cartels are now trying to encode into international law, thereby making any legislative reform impossible.
As for legitimate uses, the most interesting one for me, personally, is the ability to create and distribute my own videos in a free and unencumbered format, using free software, to anyone anywhere. Blender animations, shorts, even home made feature length films are an exciting possibility, not to mention of course the ubiquitous home videos of mom, pop, and the kids.
The MPAA fears the loss of the cartel by independent artists. In a few short years we'll be able to generate LOTR quality movies on our home computers, and likely there will be free software available (e.g. blender plugins like 'Make Human' and other enhancements, povray, etc.) that will be available as well. Any talented write with a good script will be able to get together with a few friends and make a movie to shame anything from Hollywood and potentially market it direct via the internet.
Goodbye media cartel.
Which of course is the real reason the MPAA (and the RIAA, within their context vis-a-vis mp3) are so hysterical. It isn't about the illegal copying, which has been going on since the days of the cassette tape, it is about controlling artists' access to their marketplace, and our political "leadership" (I use the term very, very loosely) is complicit and likely quite knowledgable in this. Why else would the FCC be so eager to allow further consolidation of an already oligopolistic media? Because it is easier to apply pressure and suppress dissent with only a few players than it is with a few thousand (as was the case 20 years ago) or a few million (as will be the case if the Internet and independent media are ever permitted to realize their potential).
you might be laughing now but if SCO wins we might all be using BSD!
How this could be modded up as insightful is indicative of how uninformed some people with moderator priveleges are with respect to SCO, Linux, FreeBSD, free software in general, and the US legal system.
1) SCO isn't going to win. They are dying, and doing so loudly, flailing about and spreading as much FUD as they can in the meantime, and the very people who ran the company into the ground are being paid off handsomely by Microsoft for the fit they are throwing but, in the end, they are a dead company. There lawsuit has no legal merit whatsoever, as demonstrated repeatedly by their reticence in backing up any of their wild and absurd claims with a single shred of evidence.
2) If SCO's tactics of unsubstantiated accusations and/or stealing code from one project and then accusing their victims of their own crimes and/or poisoning the well by releasing their own code, then disavowing the action and claiming copyright violation, and/or any number of other unpleasant extrapolations based upon their ever morphing and ever more shrill accusations, then there is nothing to prevent them from doing the same the FreeBSD, or any other project (free or proprietary). This isn't about Ye Olde AT&T code, which the BSD lawsuit cleared up years ago and which the FreeBSD license makes transferable to Linux[1], this is about unsubstantiated claims and FUD which IBM has the money to defend against, but which many other software projects, both free and small-time proprietary, do not.
If this were to ever be successful (something I find to be laughable even with the current, extreme dysfunction of the American legal system) it would represent a clear and present threat not just to Linux, but to FreeBSD, to free software in general, indeed, to proprietary software, to all software developed under any paradigm which isn't defended by a multimillion dollar company (and even those that are, for if absurdity were to ever be successful against the likes of IBM, it would pretty much spell the end of software development in the United States by anyone other than Microsoft or the US Government, and I'm not even sure how well the US Government would fare).
Dismiss the SCO issues as absurd if you wish (they certainly are), but do not dismiss the tactic being used. Were it to stand in any way, shape, or form it would be profoundly dangerous to all software development in the United States of every kind, with the possible exception of that done by monopolists with deep pockets such as Microsoft and entities with lots of guns, such as the US government. Do not be so foolish as to assume FreeBSD would fare any better against such baseless accusations as Linux or anyone else.
[1]The FreeBSD license is compatible for inclusion into GPLed software, so any AT&T code in FreeBSD can be legally used in the Linux kernel as is, SCO's ranting notwithstanding. The inappropriate use of trade secrets by a code contributer, or the use of copyrighted code in violation of copyright law that postdates the BSD v. AT&T trial, could as easily be done by FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, or Joe Blog's NewOS as it could be by Linux, as could any number of "poison well" scenerios.
So, in short, the allegations are absurd, the method of attack disingenuous and despicable in the finest FUD tradition, and the immunity of FreeBSD against similiar forms of attack exactly the same as that of Linux.
The openness of free software provides an interesting opportunity for pre-emtive defense against this sort of nonsense, and we should be brainstorming effective means for doing so in the future. Some (by no means exhaustive) ideas include:
Signed affidavits by all contributors as to the legality of their codes
A less draconian alternative: a simple notice and affirmation in a comment associated with the code.
Incorporating such a feature into CVS, subversion, bitkeeper, and other revision contr
PNG is good for large pictures, but GIF has animated format (GIF89). PNG doesn't have this feature.
That is not entirely true. PNG does support animation, but rather than encapsulating the support into a monolithic file format designed for still images, it was decided instead to use a different suffix and allow the animation support to be developed independently. The format is known as MNG, and works very, very well.
This is actually quite serious
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Darl & SCO Overview
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You *can* steal something that is free. First you copy it into your codebase, then you claim that it is your, and then you sue the person you copied it from. If you are successful in getting them to remove it, you stole it.
Why on earth this was modded as "funny" is beyond me. Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, I should point out that this is actually quite a serious possibility for a number of reasons:
1) SCO may well have violated the copyright on Linux code and placed it in their OS, violating the GPL, and now leveraging code they have copied in violation to accuse the free software community of their own crime.
2) An entity which dislikes free software, like an obscure Redmond company none of us have heard of, might seek to poison the well by having one of their agents deliberately release copyrighted code into a free codebase, then return a couple of years later with accusations of copyright violation.
3) It is quite possible that either of the above scenerios could be combined with an outcome by a relatively uninformed court that finds in favor of the litigant, leaving the original creator of the code in a situation where they are now forbidden from using their own code, while those who violated their copyright are granted ownership of it.
The fact that the very ill-considered Berne convention requires copyrights to be granted "automatically" with no registration means these sort of 'he said, she said' allegations can be manufactured at will, by anyone willing to violate copyright to achieve their ends.
And lest one think no large company would ever violate copyrights in order to achieve such neferious ends, I would remind everyone that one large company, Microsoft, was sued and found to have violated the copyright on, among other things, Stacker. It is not at all a stretch to think they could extend such a strategy further... though I suspect these days if they were to adopt such a strategy, they would do so by proxy *cough* SCO *cough*.
But, as SCO has shown, it doesn't require anything remotely so neferious as planting bad code, violating copyright and then accusing the victim of one's crime of the same, or any of that. All it requires is that one lay claim to having written code "in secret" first (where "in secret" can include simply proprietary, unpublished code as in this case). Since copyrights aren't required to be registered, there is little defense against such accusations and the FUD and financial uncertainty and harm they can create (and their unwillingness to discose the alleged violations to allow any such issues to be resolved and fixed, ie. any such violating code to be removed and rewritten, belies their clear intent to cause harm to businesses and the community. Clearly they have no desire to reach a resolution, and equally clearly it is profoundly unlikely that they have anything even remotely resembling a legitimate claim).
Which means no software publisher is safe, now that pandora's box has been opened, from similiar disingenuous attacks.
It would behoove everyone if every copyright were required to be registerd no later than 1 year after the code/prose was written or the movie/music recorded (i.e. 1 year 'grace'). Unfortunately, the media and copyright cartels have tied all of our copyright law up in international agreements such as the Berne convention and treaties which have empowered the WTO and WIPO to such a degree that any kind of sensible reform is impossible without a nation withdrawing from a number of uncumbering and binding international accords.
So look for more of this sort of nonsense, directed not only against free software, but against all kinds of published works. Once pandora's box has been opened and the weapon used, one can only expect it to be used again. And again, empowering lawyers and decimating the productive capability of the software industry, be it free software or proprietary.
This may actually be the beginning of the final collapse of our
Wonder what would have happened if Guthenberg was allowed to take a patent (don't think that particularly concept existed at that time) off his invention of the printing press.
What would have happened? The patent would have expired 14 years later, that's what (28 years if he bothered to renew it). Net effect on society: probably about zero, because technology didn't spread very quickly.
If you are going to defend the current system of government monopoly entitlements, you should at least learn to differentiate between copyright law and patent law. While the two do bear similiarities in their stifling of human creativity and economic endeavor, they are not the same, and their consiquences, while often similiar, are not the same. Certainly the duration of their respective monopolies are not at all similiar. Patent law grants monopoly entitlements for 20 years on human knowledge. Copyrights grant monopoly entitlements for 95 years, or life plus 75 years, on human expression and information.
In your comment above, you are confusing copyright law (as it was implimented in the United States after the revolutionary war, with its 14 year expiration + optionally an additional 14 years) with patent law (which had a 17 year expiration and now has a 20 year expiration, in the US, but was in other jurisdiction granted for much longer...sometimes in perpetuity).
Copyright in England was perpetual in its initial incarnation, and offered publishers only exclusive rights... authors had no rights at all, until the Statue of Anne was passed almost a century later, and practically still had no rights until the Statue of Anne was enforced by a court case several decades after that.
What would have happened is that the printing press would have spread much more slowly during its initial 'craze', giving governments and the Church more lead time in devising effective methods of censorship. Things like the reformation might never have happened in such an environment, where 20 years could have been the difference from a disruptive technology allowing exposure of a new idea ("let's all read and interpret the Bible for ourselves, rather than being spoonfed our opinions from Rome") and an emerging technology so controlled as to be reduced to a tool of the entrenched power ologopolies (sound familiar? It should: that is how everything from the telephone and radio to television and aerospace work today. The Internet was a surprising phenomenon... one that was immediately addressed with software patents and, when that failed to quell the innovation quickly enough, draconian copyright laws such as the world hasn't seen since before copyright's relative liberalisation under the Statue of Anne).
It is difficult to know with certainty what chilling effect a 20 year patent (or a patent in perpetuity, as was the norm at the time patents were first being offered as Royal rewards for innovation, often to those who had brought the innovation to the crown and not to those who actually did the innovating and inventing... a sad state of affairs that exists to this day, if you substitute USPTO for the crown). However, based upon the chilling effects being observed today, and our knowledge of the importance the printing press played in political and cultural changes in Europe that led to the enlightenment and modern scientific collaboration, among other things, it is safe to day that a 20 (or perpetual) delay might well have tipped the scales sufficiently in favor of the entrenched powers so as to make any such reforms very difficult, at least, and perhaps impossible.
Which really should give one pause. How many similiar, much needed changes and reforms have been quelled by slowing down and ultimately suppressing emerging technologies. What is it that threatens free software and the internet more than anything else? You guessed it, copyright law on the one side as wielded by the media cartels, and patent l
In short, if you're a geek, don't mind a few days downtime for installation and can deal with hand configuring your box, you might give Gentoo a try.
Just a minor point. No downtime is required whatsoever if you have a second set of partitions handy (and with the size of today's hard drives, there really isn't any excuse for not creating a second set of / and/boot partitions to allow multiple, independent installs and provide easy failback if an upgrade goes awry).
Simply install your filesystem(s) of choice on your spare / and/boot partiton, mount them under/mnt/gentoo (or whever), untar the stage 1 tarball into/mnt/gentoo (or wherever), mount -o bind/proc/mnt/gentoo/pric (or wherever/proc) per the install docs, and install in a chrooted environment.
No need to shutdown and boot off of CD (Live or otherwise), no need to do without the services of your existing GNU/Linux installation. The entire process of installing, be it a day (on a fast dual Athlon) or a week (on a slower P2) won't prevent you from using your computer one iota, modulo the CPU and network usage itself (which a ctrl-z will fix if you need the cycles for another task).
It isn't for everyone, but for those capable of going through the install, it is delightful, and as you correctly point out, of all the GNU/Linux distributions far and wide it is hands down the easiest to maintain, administer, and keep up to date.
Of course, it is fashionable to characterize enthusiasts of every ilk 'zealots' these days, and the guise of humor is often used for disseminating such ad homonem labels. However, one can easilly differentiate between a zealot who lives in denial of the shortcomings of his source of zealotry while insisting it is the only true way (Microsoft astroturfers and marketers are a prime example of this, though by no means the only example), while enthusiasts will generally recognize and try to better the shortcomings of their source of enthusiasm, and will generally acknowledge that other solutions work and, while not the enthusiast's favorite, are nevertheless viable.
Most GNU/Linux, Free Software, and open source enthusiasts are not zealots. Many Microsoft enthusiasts (astroturfers excepted) are not zealots. It is past time people stopped misusing the word.
LiveCDs are cool. I'm use Knoppix all the time (Linux bliss in the computer lab, finally). But what is the logic behind using a source-based distribution for a LiveCD?
I don't have anything against Gentoo, but fail to see *why* Gentoo... Is PPC support better with Gentoo? Or are the Gentoo guys just the first ones to do this for PPCs?
First, Gentoo is much more than a source based distro.
1) portage is arguably the best package manager known to man. It exceeds IMHO apt-get, which is perhaps the second (or maybe third, depending on one's POV) finest package manager. Having easy access to portage from a live CD is fantastic for those who want to go the next step and actually install Gentoo, or rescue an existing Gentoo system.
2) Being a source based distro means one can optimize one's build to their own hardware. Taken a step further, one could optimize a Gentoo LiveCD for their hardware (PPC, Athlon v. Intel, etc.)
3) Source based v. Binary based is, for purposes of RUNNING the LiveCD, completely orthogonal, as the LiveCD itself contains all binaries. So, the best answer to your question as to why is "why not?"
While the tools available to Gentooers allow for more optimization out of the box than, say, Debian by default (yes, you can build debian from source with apt-get, but as one who as done so I can say it is quite painful), to those running the LiveCD the only affect will be a faster, snappier LiveCD, assuming they have downloaded an ISO optimized for their architecture.
For those of us running Gentoo it is a godsend... we get all the benefits of being able to give away live CDs to our less computer-literate friends with our favorite distro, but most importantly, we can use the disks ourselves to install Gentoo, upgrade, or rescue it, and all the utilities present are familiar and located in familiar places (something not always true with a liveCd from another distro). Of course, this works both ways if one prefers Debian, Mandrake, or what have you.
I have no trouble whatsoever running Gentoo on my Fujitsu Stylistic 600 or my Fujitsu Stylistic 3400, compete with functioning touch screen, audio, etc.
I just starting making a similiar installation on a Fujitsu Stylistic 4110 active pen system. The OS is installing just fine, after which I will have to experiment with the touch screen device and see if I can get it working.
So, in short, running GNU/Linux on a tablet doesn't appear to be at all difficult, and in at least several cases touch screen support under xfree is working as well. YMMV of course, and you'd be well advised to research the particular hardware you are interested in before shelling out any cash, but as one MS free person to another I can tell you the option does exist, if you have applications that would benefit from a touch-screen tablet (as my employer does).
Knoppix is impressive
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ClusterKnoppix
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Knoppix is very impressive. As a former Debian (now Gentoo) user and administrator, I can appreciate the quality of the "back-end" engineering in distributions like Debian, which is IMHO hands down the best binary distribution out there (Gentoo is a source based distro, as is Linux from Scratch and Source Mage. It is my preference for source based distros, and portage in particular with Gentoo, that led me to switch, not any argument with the quality of Debian or apt-get, which is excellent). To see such a slick, astonishingly easy live-cd environment put on top of such a quality distribution is delightful, and while I yearn for a Gentoo knoppix (and will likely get my wish with their ever-improving but as yet no-where-near-as-good-as knoppix live-CDs), I have on more than one occasion used a knoppix CD to rescue a non-debian (Gentoo, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, you-name-it) distribution.
Having such easy clustering, with such an idiot-proof interface ("put the CD in the drive, boot, and you're ready to go"), built upon such a solid foundation where shortcuts that afflict other distributions haven't been taken, is truly an achievement worthy of praise and respect.
In short, knoppix already rocked, and now they have surpassed themselves again! Very, very cool!
To be honest, I wish that Linus had a reason to be afraid. His reaction to this whole thing started off as complete apathy and is still hovering around it.
I have in the past been very critical of Linus' apathy and apparent blindness to some of the deeper underlying issues that will likely affect our freedom to code at all, much less code on the operating system our cooperative effort has created over the last 12 years or so, in part under his non-political guidance. Richard Stallman, as undiplomatic as he can be, truly does Get It(tm), and has done much to steer the community away from trouble (remember the KDE/qt/GPL conflicts. Imagine the situation we'd be in vis-a-vis SCO and M$ FUD if Gnome hadn't appeared, the flame fests hadn't been fought, and ultimately a workable, compatible solution hadn't been found, thanks to Trolltech's admiral flexibility and willingness to acknowledge mistakes and fix them, and thanks to RMSes stubborn insistance that the GPL be adhered to, no matter how cool the project.
All that having been said, the last thing on earth I would want to see is Linus sued for his 12 years of unselfish generosity. Do I agree with Linus' political (or rather, apolitical stance)? No, on that front I come down on RMSes side, despite my fervent desire that he learn a little diplomacy (which, to be fair, he appears to have done in no small amount, as listening to any of the speaches he's made in the last few years amply demonstrates), and despite the extreme irritation I felt at his 'lignux' proposal years ago.
I may not agree with Linus on some points, and I may wish he'd speak up a little more often to defend the Community he helped catalyze into being, but the man is entitled to his own world view, his own opinions, and no one in their right mind should wish something so awful as a lawsuit (however unfounded) onto someone who has done so much to enrich us all. As one who is personally bearing the brunt of an appalling act of barrotry myself, and having to defend against a frivilous, but non-the-less expensive, lawsuit (condo related, for the curious), I take particular exception to the notion that Linus deserves any kind of kick in the pants, much less a kick to the head through SCO's (or anyone elses) letigious thuggary and barratry.
I relish the demise of SCO, and the dozens of countersuits and investor lawsuits that will undoubtably follow. With luck, the fools will have left an I undotted or a T uncrossed, and be doing some hard time in a 6'x9' cell to boot, compliments of the SEC.
They say that if you wanted someplace to look, then the filesystem support would be the place to start. They don't at all suggest that it actually happened. Suggesting that the lkml post you link makes it look like they might have stolen code from Linux is just like SCO saying that IBM has stolen code from them and then refusing to put up or shut up.
No, it isn't. The source code for the Linux kernel is available for public perusal. The source code to Unixware (or whatever SCO is calling it these days) is not. Telling someone to "show the offending code" of a proprietary product isn't reasonable, although asking them to point to the object code which was likely compiled from the stolen code (and decompiling that) isn't all that unreasonable, and would likely provide enough evidence for a subpeano compelling an examination of the code in question.
The statement may have been inaccurate, but it is certainly nowhere remotely tantamount to what SCO has been doing, by any rational measure.
That having been said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if SCO did in fact steal code from Linux, and that this entire debacle was either premeditated (with theft of Linux code a first step in this entire premeditated crime), and then fell apart when the executives at SCO who had intended to do this discovered to their horror that their predicessors had merely bought sublicensing rights and not the actual copyrights and patents, or a preemtive action to try and cover their own exceedingly dirty tracks.
Indeed, the latter is really the best possible face that can be put on SCO's actions, and is itself nevertheless quite appalling, as it entails deliberate copyright violations and fraudulant allegations being made by SCO in an effort to defraud the community and Linux vendors. No matter how one slices this, SCO and its leadership are in a whole heap of legal trouble, and if Novell's allegations prove to be true, could well be facing very serious criminal charges of fraud and SEC violations, charges that could bring with them solid prison sentences.
The BSDs already had their court battle, against ATT at the time.
ATT lost the case so thoroughly they settled out of court and asked (and managed) to have the terms of the agreement kept secret.
The BSDs have been deemed IP-violations free wrt to Unix (all releases up to sys V, i think), and since no big name like IBM & all is proeminently featured in the BSD's dev', they have it quite easy on the "trade secrets" front.
The allegations from SCO change more often than water vapor formations in a hurricane, but some of those ever-mutating accusations included IBM having donated copyrighted code to the GNU/Linux kernel (which SCO has now admitted is not their 'official' complaint). Had that in fact been the case, there is absolutely nothing preventing the same accusation being levelled against FreeBSD, or anyone else (including other proprietary software).
The threat was there, if unspoken, and it would be niave to think that if FreeBSD, rather than GNU/Linux, were on the corporate radar for people of SCO and Microsoft's ilk ("fraudulant liars, and in the case of Microsoft convicted monopolists"), would be immune to receiving such accusations merely because of one historical victory.
FreeBSD is absolutely clean wrt AT&T/Novel IP up to sys V. So is GNU/Linux. But are they clean with respect to what has come after? Almost certainly, but that obviously didn't stop baseless accusations from being made against GNU/Linux, and it certainly would do nothing to prevent similiar accusations from being made against FreeBSD, should the occasion ever call for it (in the minds of those filthy enough to engage in such practices).
Linux isn't the only thing that has been vindicated here. The entire Open Source and Free Software Community has been vindicated, and that includes those operating systems and programs that weren't the target (but could have been)... at least, not the target of fraudulant allegations this time.
If what Novell claims is true then SCO has more than a few problems to handle. It will have to start with a global apology.
If this is true (and it almost certainly is... Novel, unlike SCO, may not be thriving, but they aren't facing immenent bankrupcy either), then the fact that SCO lied to their shareholders is an SEC violation. It is fraud (among other things) and the perpetrators could be looking at a prison term (hopefully in a cockroach ridden, butt-slamming Pen, rather than Club Fed).
And, as others have pointed out, the civil damages and liability resulting from this fraudulant deception against SCO and those personally involved in the deception could well be quite staggaring. These people could well end up broke and in prison.
This, of course, assumes the government actually chooses to enforce the law this time. As we saw with the Microsoft Anti-Trust case, that is certainly not a given.
Regardless, however, it does vindicate GNU/Linux and free software in the extreme, and it does demonstrate the depths of depravity that Microsoft (who was quite transparently pushing this and financing it via a license they clearly weren't required to get) and its shills, such as SCO, will sink to.
The best revenge is living well, indeed, living better than those who have wronged you. Even if SCO were to get off scott free (unlikely), clearly, anyone running FreeBSD (which could theoretically have been targeted with a similiar FUD campaign) and GNU/Linux are living quite well (in the technical arena at least), certainly much better than the poor sops running Unixware and SCO, and arguably quite a bit better than those running the product of SCO's master in Redmond. We should take joy in that fact (but not let it slow down the counter suits and prosecutions from those who were more directly wronged by SCO's illegal and unconscionable behavior).
iTunes is user hostile, and attempts to make it difficult to convert the music into a transparent format that can be copied and accessed by any application.
If you call "select playlist, insert CDR or CDRW, click on big, easy to see, "Burn" button, click on OK" "difficult to convert the music into a transparent format that can be copied and accessed by any application", then, er, yeah, that's right.
Disclaimer: I am not an iTunes user.
If I have understood the discussion correctly, what he means is that you have to add another shiny, plastic disc to the landfill everytime you want to convert a file to.ogg or.mp3. That is user-hostile (not to mention eco-hostile), but understandable and, IMHO, a sufficient hurdle to stop massive copyright violations while still allowing reasonable fair use (backups, and the ability to move the material to an unencumbered format usable on other (e.g. GNU/Linux and FreeBSD) systems.
What is more troubling is exactly what the original poster mentioned: just because Apple's use of DRM is reasonable today, doesn't mean it will be reasonable in six months or a year. And, having bought into and accepted a Digital Rights Mangling technology, one has abdicated a large portion of the autonmy and control they otherwise would enjoy over the hardware and software they have purchased. Getting that freedom and autonomy back will be very difficult and, if one is in the Windows world and makes a similiar compromise (with Palladium, which people are quite right in pointing out is vastly more draconian and intrusive than the DRM Apple has implimented), probably impossible.
So, all consumerist euphoria with a new, shiny device aside, voices of caution with respect to the adoption of technologies designed to take the owner's control of their hardware away, and turn such authority over to the vendors of content which happens to reside or pass through said hardware, are extremely well placed, and ignored at your own peril.
Going back to our Latin roots, [...] this flower is "scientifically" defined as an unusually huge and shapeless representation of the male penis. This is why men shouldn't name flowers.
Well, it does look like a big honkin' dick, so perhaps it was aptly named after all.
I find it remarkable (and very cool) that there exists a flower that has naturally evolved to be so large and, well, colorful. Methinks a little genetic intermingling with redwoods could lead to a very, very cool, mondo Dogwood-esque blooming tree.
Or perhaps we could try some even more baroque variants, creating new forests of diverse and strangely delightful plants. However, I would avoid anything carnivorous... the last thing we need is a sequioa sized venus fly trap (though that would keep the tree huggers and loggers alike at bay, but then, too, the spotted owl would likely not fair to well in its branches either).
Well if it's years off, the patent will have expired by then - and the Patent Office will have no choice but see the prior art when somebody gets around to trying to patent it again.
That is only true if the practical applications are at least 20 years after the date of filing, something that you cannot be certain of (though the well documented chilling effects of patents on innovation would lead one to expect that this might indeed become the case, as a direct result of the issuence of this patent).
It is appalling that someone can think of a speculative idea and patent it, then wait for someone to actually do the hard work of inventing a useful product before gouging them for royalties. Not only is there no incentive for anyone other than the arm-chair patent holder to develop this idea (and even were he qualified to do so, he is but one person), there is actually disincentive to do so, as the end result of the toil necessary to create such a remarkable device will be a lawsuit from a science fiction author in the peanut gallar.
The previous poster said this "wasn't a call to arms." Well, it damn well should be. Unfortunately we have cultivated apathy to a high art, and appear unable to move ourselves out of that helpless state of mind even when things like this (not to mention software patents, which threaten innovation and free software for all of us) repeatedly kick us all directly in the face.
Our masters, in conditioning us to be compliant and uninvolved, untroublesome, quiet consumers have done their work well...to the profound detriment of us all.
With Timothy's typically unenlightened, American Apologist addendum to the original post, and I quote:
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
one would expect Canada, which is even larger than the US, less densly populated even in its populated areas, and much so in its rural areas, to have even less broadband availability than the United States. However, surprising as it is to many of my countrymen, broadband is both more widely availabe and less expensive in Canada, indeed, in rural Canada, than it is in downtown Chicago.
This wasn't always the case... prior to Baby Powell's mismanagement of the FCC (and the local telco monopolies), and prior to that agency's willful unwillingness to enforce federal laws mandating fair and equitable access of competitors to local monopoly last-mile wire, Spring offered an 8 Mbit download/1 MBit upload ADSL service which, for the two months I had it before SBC drove them out of the marketplace with Baby Powell's blessing, Downtown Chicago actually surpassed rural canada in available bandwidth.
No longer.
Although I live in the heart of the city, a mere 10 minute walk from the dense, commercial portion of the city commonly referred to as the "loop," I am unable to get affordable DSL at anything greater than 1 Mbit. This, in contrast to the very inexepensive, 2 Mbit and better offerings available to rural residents of Alberta.
The dichotomy between the United States and Korea (South) isn't one of geography, it is one far more closely related to the dichotomy between Korea (South) and Korea (North), i.e. the difference between a nation with a well managed telecommunications industry and one with a poorly managed telecommunications industry, and while America (The US) bears little resemblence to the deprivations of North Korea, we probably owe that more to a history of decent management which has only, since about the 1980s, become an ongoing condition of zero and even negative-sum gameplaying by our leaders, in contrast to North Korea's fifty odd year of starkly negative-sum policies.[1]
However, if those of us living here do not get off our butts and insist on good governance, for the good of the many and not just the few, we may find ourselves, in not so many generations at all, bearing a striking resemblence to the third world we so like to disparage. Indeed, arguably, in terms of health care and telecommunications, we already do. Let's hope the greed of the ruling class and their political pawns doesn't extend that to our home or, worse, our food supply.
[1]Negative-sum games are scenerios in which a player's strategy is to win in such a way that the overall wealth is decreased, but their sum total increases. Imagine starting out with three pies, throwing one in the face of your opponent, and then running off with the other two. Only two pies remain, but 2 pies are better for you than merely 1 1/2. Or imagine an intellectual property regime that impoverishes the culture of billions, but makes a few thousand people filthy rich, and a few million able to make ends-meet, if just barely.
Zero sum is where you compete for portions of a pool of wealth which neither grows nor shrinks. Assuming a fair outcome, you both end up with 1.5 pies. Assuming an unfair, but nevertheless non-destructive, zero-sum scenerio, the three pies remain in existence and are divvied up in some fashion favoring one party or the other.
Positive sum scenerios are of course the best, and in terms of physical goods (and limited supply), capitalism generally excels here (except in situations of monopolies, be they 'natural', such as roads and telephone wire, or through economic or political force, such as the East India Tea company in days of yore, or Microsoft today). In this scenerio a strategem is employed that results in the creation of additional pies, which may or may not be shared freel
Free software may be fine and dandy, but some of us don't actually mind *paying* for software if said software does the job well. [...] What I'm buying is *convenience*.
What you are buying is a hostage situation for your data. What do you do if MoneyDance goes out of business? (No need to belabor all of the underhanded tactics software vendors can and do use to coerce upgrades by holding one's data hostage: MoneyDance isn't Sun Microsystems or Microsoft, but the end user's vulnerability is the same, and non-malicious causes abound in sufficient quantity to make the point.) All that convinience, all that time "saved" gets to now be paid back, with interest, as you laboriously move your data to another format (or even, perhaps, have to reenter it by hand).
I too have been more than willing to pay for good software in the past (I used Quicken at one time, and have paid for Blender, back when it was commercial, as well as various video editing software [much of which, under windows, never worked. Transcode, cinelerra, et. al. may have a learning curve, but they work, and my data will be accessible and usable in perpetuity, until the very bits themselves decay. Under Windows I have data that, three years later, is unavailable because of a changing OS, and discontinued software).
GNUcash is excellent. It is elegantly designed, it works, it does the job, and it's being free insures my financial data will be usable, and accessible, ten, twenty, fifty, even a hundred years from now. Quicken, MoneyDance, et. al. not only cannot guarantee that, but past experience shows that, with them and indeed, with any proprietary software, the data so stored will lose usability in less than half a decade.
If free software really doesn't float your boat, and convinience of the moment outweighs any medium or long term concerns about the accessibility and usability of your data, then go right ahead and cut corners as you so advocate. But at least be honest with yourself as to the real tradeoff you are making, and don't go looking for symphathy when it turns around and bites you.
I don't know how things are in the US these days, but if using your right to free speech makes you a terrorist or incapable of recieving state benefits... You are all prisoners allready.
Things have become very ugly in the states in the last few months, and threaten to become dramatically moreso in the not-so-distant future.
In principal we aren't prisoners yet, as we can theoretically still emigrate if we so choose. As a practical manner, however, emigration is quite difficult for even the well qualified (I have lived as an expat, and could have emigrated and stayed in Germany at the time, but chose instead to follow the money back to the US. At the time it was still a relatively free country, with Orwellian concerns being an issue of what was coming if we continued down the path, not what had already come into being, as is now the case). Now that I feel an increasing desire to leave once again I am finding the barriars to emigration, or rather immigration at the far end (Europe at least; Canada appears to be more friendly in this regard and is a real possibility), are extraordinarilly high. I feel empathy for anyone who has gone through this nonsense trying to come to the US in the past, and it does feel like a bit of karma in action. Until one realizes that it is governments that exclude, and that in collusion with one another they very effectively trap their people, all the while making the other nation out to be the bad guy ("Those self-centered [Americans|Germans|French|...] won't let us hard working folks immigrate!"). As a PR move it sure beats the Berlin wall.
In other words, without the ability to actually move somewhere else (and be allowed by that somewhere else to do so), one really is a prisoner in one's land as a practical matter, even if in theory one would be allowed to leave.
The gist of what you say is correct, however. The United States has become dramatically less free, and stands perilously close to the threshhold where non-democratic architectures of control reach critical mass and peaceful reform becomes all but impossible. From there the decline and fall will all but be assured, with the only question remaining that of timing: will the violence come in a year, a decade, or a century?
This "doomsday" (though the fall of a government hardly constitutes armageddon) scenerio is still avoidable, but I fear if people do not begin insisting on their rights and liberties vocally, loudly, and with resolve, it won't be for long. Then the best we'll be able to hope for as Americans is a long slow, gradual decline, rather than a precipitous fall. Given the trends of the last several years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations (though to my eyes at least much more accelerated under Aschcroft & Co.), however, it appears that even that hope may be a vain one.
Except for these changes: Anti-Religion, Italian (close enough), Male, 29 years old, 180K/year (and rising), Democrat-Liberal.
Guess I'll have to buy a few politicians.
Sorry, as a mere human whose last name is not Gates you cannot afford to buy any politicians. Certainly not with a puny $180k per year income.
Vote for the person my ass, more like vote for the better commercial.
There are very real differences between many of the candidates on many of the issues. There are republicans that are quite liberal and democrats so conservative that they make Baby Bush look like a liberal. If you cannot be bothered to do the research and find out which is which, and instead vote along party planks and platforms, you are quite probably voting against your own views in more than one instance. This isn't Europe we're talking about, where strong party discipline and parliamentary divisions based upon party percentage rule the day, this is America, with all of its 2-party follies firmly in place... one of which is that the party does not provide much of an indicator as to the candidates position on much of anything.
The problem we are really confronting is one which runs much deeper than liberal v. conservative, republicrat v. democan, and one which Libertarians (for all I disagree with their "capitalism ueber alles" mentality) are very correct in pointing out: there exists among both liberals and conservatives the notion that it is appropriate and good to use governmental power to coerce the other side into abiding by one's own personal views on what is right or wrong.
Liberals (including my girlfriend but excluding myself) generally want to abridge the second amendment. Seemed to work well enough for Europe... except it didn't, in places like Bosnia-Herzogovina, Kosovo, et. al.
Conservatives want to take away a woman's right to choose.
Liberals want to take away our right to privacy, in order to insure recording industry and Hollywood profiteering using an outdated business model.
Conservatives want to take away our right to privacy in order to insure recording industry and Hollywood profiteering using an outdated business model.
Liberals want to take away our right to privacy in order to insure our compliance with various (mostly positive IMHO, but then, I'm generally quite liberal) social engineering objectives (reduction of racism, tolerance, etc. All good, but the methods often used, including dogma ("political correctness") and affirmative action (allowing lower scoring persons of one group into college and rejecting higher scoring persons of another, instead of having a fair system that descriminates against no one based on [insert cultural or physical characteristic here], etc.). These objectives are commonly referred to as "the law" as enacted by (most often) Democrats.
Conservatives want to take away our privacy in order to insure our compliance with various political and social objectives. USAPATRIOT, PATRIOT2, and so on underscore this. Said objectives are commonly referred to as "the law" as passed by (most often) Republicans.
Until conservatives and liberals, republicans and democrats, both take a step back and begin to respect the constitution and the freedoms it is intended to insure more than their own personal economic, political, and social agendas, we will continue to have our most basic freedoms eroded, regardless of which party is in power. Indeed, if this doesn't stop, and quickly, we will find ourselves living in a police state to rival that of any stalinist regime, and it is a crap shoot as to whether that will be a police state run by corrupt democrats beholden to Disney and Time-Warner, or one run by corrupt republicans beholden to Esso, Exxon, and McDonald-Douglas, and while the outcome of this crap shoot may be of great interest to Disney, Time-Warner, Esso, Exxon, McDonald-Douglas, et. al., it will ultimately make little difference to the rest of us, condemned by our own impotence to living beneath such tyranny.
Based on 20+ years of software development, I've not seen any new algorithm. Every program is cribbed from some other program. [...] a small inventor can't benefit from Software patents because large corporations can always show prior art to virtually any software algorithm. You, as "Joe Inventor" don't have the resources to do this type of research so as a practical matter, software patents aren't useful to the mythical lone inventor.
substitute "patent" for "software patent" and you are dead on.
The inherent problem with granting government entitlements to twenty year monopolies (or, really, monopolies of any length of time) are most obvious with software, because software develops at such a rapid pace, and because software blurrs the line between the written word (expression) and engineering: indeed it is a hybrid of both, with characteristics of both.
However, if you look at the pharamceutical industry (AIDS and brast cancer research stifled with cease and desist letters alleging patent violations by the researchers), the aviation industry (the US government seized the original airplane patent), or any other industry founded upon previous and ongoing invention, you will find the same problems, and the same truths.
Patents do NOT foster innovation, they stifle it dramatically (recall the US government, desperate to modernize its aviation technology with the advent of WW I, seized the Wright Brothers' patent on the airplane and opened the technology up to competition).
Patents favor LARGE corporations and entities (e.g. universities) over the small inventor in almost every instance. Prior art, unequal financial resources to seek redress or defend against allegations, and so on.
No invention is ever created in a vacuum: all science and engineering involves standing on the shoulders of ones peers and predicessors.
Patents enrich lawyers first, large corporations second, and small inventors last (if at all, and more often than not it does not). It impoverishes the rest of society immensly.
Invention, and enrichment based upon invention, does not require a monopoly. Invention takes place in the absence of patents, indeed is generally much more active in such an absence. This has been seen in Hollywood (the founders of which fled new york and the restrictive patents businesses there had on the new medium they wished to exploit: moving pictures) and in Silicon Valley (the aforementioned plethora and explosion of invention that has since been dramatically stifled by the US patent system).
If we really believe in the free market and competition, what the hell are we doing granting 20-year government entitlements to monopolies on human knowledge, and 95 year (or life+70) government entitlements for monopolies on expression? Monopoly markets are the most fragile, ineffecient markets that exist (worse than communism, even!), and are really unjustifiable in this day and age. Yet we are moving away from free markets, toward an environment where everything, every expression, every invention, every concept will be thoroughly locked down by patents (if it is knowledge) or copyright (if it is expression). A dramatic and decisive end to free markets in every signatory to the international WIPO accords.
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a, else it would be major news and be covered by mainstream media, and there'd be a downloadable patch or something.
Or (much more likely) many of those same "news" organizations use the very product they cannot use today.
Though I say that somewhat tongue in cheeck, it is quite possible Microsoft is excersizing its economic and legal muscle (threat of lawsuits etc.) to keep a number of customers and news sites quiet.
Another factor is quite possibly that most people (rightfully) mistrust Microsoft and only upgrade when they are compelled to (e.g. purchasing new hardware, renewing a support contract with the Evil Empire, and so on). That being the case, most people who have stayed away from XP (the majority of Windows users), and those who are running old-enough versions to be unaffected, will not have been so crippled. This time.
Whatever the reason, this is akin to the lack of DMCA criticism seen in the mainstream media (which is a part of the very cartels benefiting from the DMCA), the lack of skepticism in the reporting of "trusted computing", "DRM", "Palladium", et. al. Clearly it has been reported in a couple of places, and very obviously it is affecting a fair number of people.
Silence doesn't mean nothing is going on. The fact that a few journalists have enough integrity to point out a story others either can't, or won't, report doesn't mean there is nothing going on. Did you really expect MSNBC to say something bad about Microsoft's core strategy ("trusted" computing)? They may hold their punches on bug reports and security alerts, but with something this important to their long-term monopolistic strategies you can bet they'll pull all the stops out to keep things as quiet as they can. We have seen such strong-arm tactics in the past WRT PC Magazine and others, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Microsoft was building its first monopoly. Expect to see such successful tactics used in a similair fashion as Microsoft seeks to encode its monopoly into every PC at the hardware level, and into every program at the software level through trusted key exchange and encryption protocols (Palladium, TCPA, DRM, etc.).
Whether or not this particular instance is an example of such strong-arm, corporate censorship and intimidation isn't really important (I merely point out that such things have come out of Redmond in the past, and can be expected to again), it is important to remember that, in a Palladium/TCPA/DRM/Microsoft world, the ability of anyone to report any kind of failure of this kind will be reduced to zero as more and more people adopt such crippled technologies. For purely technical, if not both technical and political/litigious, reasons.
The only real protection for people's data, freedom (including that of expression), and their ability to use the hardware and software they have purchased is to use uncrippled software. Right now those choices are limited to Apple and Free Software (on the consumer end), and to various non-Microsoft systems on the higher end (workstation/server). Of all those, only free software is guaranteed to remain uncrippled in perpetuity; all of the others can (and will, if it is deemed to be profitable) cripple their software at any time in the future whenever they so desire.
Which is why anyone taking a long term view toward protecting and preserving the integrity and accessiblity of their data must at least consider using free software, and deploying it wherever possible.
Open formats are good (and important), but open implimentations are really required for true safety. What good is an open format if only one company has adopted it, no free software to read it exists, and that company goes under? Not much, particularly if that format is difficult or cumbersome to impliment. Now you get to pay someone to reimpliment that open format in order to get at your data... far better to have used
Re:What department is this?
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Feral Robot Dogs
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· Score: 4, Informative
eating-steaks-that-grow-on-trees dept?? Comon Micheal, We know its early but this title is ++ungood.
It is a sci-fi reference to a cybernetically enhanced attack dog. Snowcrash (?) I think. One of those cyberpunkesque novels, where the dog lived much of his life in a virtual state, eating steaks that grew on trees. Rather clever, though clearly an insider reference.
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This is the public good arguement of patents, I agree with it. The only way these guys become patent millionaires is if the company can pay them millions for the idea, and still end up with a profit themselves.
It is a terrible idea to lock up human knowledge for any period of time, or to try and promote a so-called free market economy by granting government entitlements to monopolies right and left. Free markets DEPEND upon competition to function. Monopolies are antithetical to competition. Artificial monopolies on knowledge that restricts whole genres of human endeavor eradicate free markets in entire industries, to everyone's detriment (including, quite often, the monopolists' themselves).
Not only is the idea itself locked up for at least 20 years (longer in many cases, as folks like the pharmaceutical companies have become clever in patenting one portion of a process, then patenting another portion of the same process, extending their patent for several iterations), but every idea which would rest upon the first is locked up and delayed as well.
The initial 20 year stifling of knowledge is bad enough, but the domino effect is sufficiently horrible that we drive around in cars not a great deal different from those built 20 years ago, fly in airplanes not a great deal different from those built 50 years ago, and have doctors and laboratories working on cancer and AIDS treatments ordered to cease and desist their most promising researches by thuggish lawyers more concerned with lining their own pockets than with the tens of thousands of lives such an indefensible policy costs.
There are many other ways to finance R&D than giving away monopoly entitlements, be it for 1 year, 20 years, or (to stray from the topic of monopolies on human knowledge for a minute, to those granted on human expression and information), life+75 years or 95 years. Even the least effecient of the alternatives, using government grants to finance R&D, would cost the economy orders of magnitude less than the system of monopoly entitlements and micro-managed[1] planned economies being touted as "free."
Innovation has already become difficult. Not because there is any shortage of new ideas, or even a shortage of new ideas that are viable and would enrich both the implimentor, and society as a whole as the customer able to obtain new goods and services that enrich everyones lives. Innovation is difficult because all innovation relies on the work of those who went before, and these days, virtually everything relevant to the current leading edge of technology is locked up, and will remain so for a decade or more.
It may serve politician's interests and the interest of large, lethargic corporations to slow progress to a crawl and have enough lead time to stifle any disruptive technologies that emerge (as they are now trying to stifle the Internet, the one disruptive technology that actually managed to surprise the ruling oligarchs), but it certainly does not serve the interests of society at large, and most certainly not of humankind in the more general sense. Quite the contrary.
[1]Don't believe me? Take a look at the byzantine copyright and patent laws on the books today, designed to manage the information and knowledge economies in minute detail. Soviet planned economies were positively laissaz-faire by comparison.
Yes, there is. The settlement between AT&T and Berkeley. The question has already been settled.
No, it hasn't, and your insistence to the contrary shows you to be profoundly ignorant both of the AT&T v. BSD case and the accusations being levied against IBM by SCO.
Hint: they are not the same. They are not even related.
SCO is accusing IBM of having leaked trade secrets to the Linux community WRT multi-processor support (highly unlikely as Linux is vastly more advanced than any of SCOs products on that front, but that is the accusation). This code was not, let me repeat that for those still to dense to get it, was not a part of AT&T Unix system V, and is thus inapplicable to the BSD settlement. The code was written in later years, and would be as illegal in FreeBSD as it would be if it were in Linux.
The accusation would therefor be equally potent against FreeBSD, particularly if someone will ill intent, or innocently and then had their company purchased by those of ill intent, had contributed the code years earlier (as Caldera may well have done with Linux).
FreeBSD, and every other project, has exactly the same vulnerability to the kind of FUD, innuendo, and misinformation Microsoft's proxy (SCO) is committing against Linux.
Live in denial of that if you wish. Assume a case with absolutely nothing to do with SCO's current accusations or tactics somehow magically protects you if you so desire. But in the end, that won't protect you from this sort of behavior, and you can rest assured if such an approach is successful against Linux, FreeBSD stands a very good chance of being next. (After all, Microsoft can get at Apple that way, and remove the last of the free alternatives from their radar screen.)
The RIAA cannot make tools like codec's illegal. It would be like outlawing screwdrivers because they might get used to hotwire a car. While technically true, there are far too many legitimate uses for the tool.
While quite true, the discount with which cartels like the RIAA and MPAA can purchase our ostensibly "elected" officials is appalling. The bottom line, the could outlaw just about anything they like, as they have already done so with security reporting and many forms of reverse engineering through the DMCA, which the aforementioned cartels are now trying to encode into international law, thereby making any legislative reform impossible.
As for legitimate uses, the most interesting one for me, personally, is the ability to create and distribute my own videos in a free and unencumbered format, using free software, to anyone anywhere. Blender animations, shorts, even home made feature length films are an exciting possibility, not to mention of course the ubiquitous home videos of mom, pop, and the kids.
The MPAA fears the loss of the cartel by independent artists. In a few short years we'll be able to generate LOTR quality movies on our home computers, and likely there will be free software available (e.g. blender plugins like 'Make Human' and other enhancements, povray, etc.) that will be available as well. Any talented write with a good script will be able to get together with a few friends and make a movie to shame anything from Hollywood and potentially market it direct via the internet.
Goodbye media cartel.
Which of course is the real reason the MPAA (and the RIAA, within their context vis-a-vis mp3) are so hysterical. It isn't about the illegal copying, which has been going on since the days of the cassette tape, it is about controlling artists' access to their marketplace, and our political "leadership" (I use the term very, very loosely) is complicit and likely quite knowledgable in this. Why else would the FCC be so eager to allow further consolidation of an already oligopolistic media? Because it is easier to apply pressure and suppress dissent with only a few players than it is with a few thousand (as was the case 20 years ago) or a few million (as will be the case if the Internet and independent media are ever permitted to realize their potential).
How this could be modded up as insightful is indicative of how uninformed some people with moderator priveleges are with respect to SCO, Linux, FreeBSD, free software in general, and the US legal system.
1) SCO isn't going to win. They are dying, and doing so loudly, flailing about and spreading as much FUD as they can in the meantime, and the very people who ran the company into the ground are being paid off handsomely by Microsoft for the fit they are throwing but, in the end, they are a dead company. There lawsuit has no legal merit whatsoever, as demonstrated repeatedly by their reticence in backing up any of their wild and absurd claims with a single shred of evidence.
2) If SCO's tactics of unsubstantiated accusations and/or stealing code from one project and then accusing their victims of their own crimes and/or poisoning the well by releasing their own code, then disavowing the action and claiming copyright violation, and/or any number of other unpleasant extrapolations based upon their ever morphing and ever more shrill accusations, then there is nothing to prevent them from doing the same the FreeBSD, or any other project (free or proprietary). This isn't about Ye Olde AT&T code, which the BSD lawsuit cleared up years ago and which the FreeBSD license makes transferable to Linux[1], this is about unsubstantiated claims and FUD which IBM has the money to defend against, but which many other software projects, both free and small-time proprietary, do not.
If this were to ever be successful (something I find to be laughable even with the current, extreme dysfunction of the American legal system) it would represent a clear and present threat not just to Linux, but to FreeBSD, to free software in general, indeed, to proprietary software, to all software developed under any paradigm which isn't defended by a multimillion dollar company (and even those that are, for if absurdity were to ever be successful against the likes of IBM, it would pretty much spell the end of software development in the United States by anyone other than Microsoft or the US Government, and I'm not even sure how well the US Government would fare).
Dismiss the SCO issues as absurd if you wish (they certainly are), but do not dismiss the tactic being used. Were it to stand in any way, shape, or form it would be profoundly dangerous to all software development in the United States of every kind, with the possible exception of that done by monopolists with deep pockets such as Microsoft and entities with lots of guns, such as the US government. Do not be so foolish as to assume FreeBSD would fare any better against such baseless accusations as Linux or anyone else.
[1]The FreeBSD license is compatible for inclusion into GPLed software, so any AT&T code in FreeBSD can be legally used in the Linux kernel as is, SCO's ranting notwithstanding. The inappropriate use of trade secrets by a code contributer, or the use of copyrighted code in violation of copyright law that postdates the BSD v. AT&T trial, could as easily be done by FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, or Joe Blog's NewOS as it could be by Linux, as could any number of "poison well" scenerios.
So, in short, the allegations are absurd, the method of attack disingenuous and despicable in the finest FUD tradition, and the immunity of FreeBSD against similiar forms of attack exactly the same as that of Linux.
The openness of free software provides an interesting opportunity for pre-emtive defense against this sort of nonsense, and we should be brainstorming effective means for doing so in the future. Some (by no means exhaustive) ideas include:
PNG is good for large pictures, but GIF has animated format (GIF89). PNG doesn't have this feature.
That is not entirely true. PNG does support animation, but rather than encapsulating the support into a monolithic file format designed for still images, it was decided instead to use a different suffix and allow the animation support to be developed independently. The format is known as MNG, and works very, very well.
You *can* steal something that is free. First you copy it into your codebase, then you claim that it is your, and then you sue the person you copied it from. If you are successful in getting them to remove it, you stole it.
... though I suspect these days if they were to adopt such a strategy, they would do so by proxy *cough* SCO *cough*.
Why on earth this was modded as "funny" is beyond me. Donning my tinfoil hat for a moment, I should point out that this is actually quite a serious possibility for a number of reasons:
1) SCO may well have violated the copyright on Linux code and placed it in their OS, violating the GPL, and now leveraging code they have copied in violation to accuse the free software community of their own crime.
2) An entity which dislikes free software, like an obscure Redmond company none of us have heard of, might seek to poison the well by having one of their agents deliberately release copyrighted code into a free codebase, then return a couple of years later with accusations of copyright violation.
3) It is quite possible that either of the above scenerios could be combined with an outcome by a relatively uninformed court that finds in favor of the litigant, leaving the original creator of the code in a situation where they are now forbidden from using their own code, while those who violated their copyright are granted ownership of it.
The fact that the very ill-considered Berne convention requires copyrights to be granted "automatically" with no registration means these sort of 'he said, she said' allegations can be manufactured at will, by anyone willing to violate copyright to achieve their ends.
And lest one think no large company would ever violate copyrights in order to achieve such neferious ends, I would remind everyone that one large company, Microsoft, was sued and found to have violated the copyright on, among other things, Stacker. It is not at all a stretch to think they could extend such a strategy further
But, as SCO has shown, it doesn't require anything remotely so neferious as planting bad code, violating copyright and then accusing the victim of one's crime of the same, or any of that. All it requires is that one lay claim to having written code "in secret" first (where "in secret" can include simply proprietary, unpublished code as in this case). Since copyrights aren't required to be registered, there is little defense against such accusations and the FUD and financial uncertainty and harm they can create (and their unwillingness to discose the alleged violations to allow any such issues to be resolved and fixed, ie. any such violating code to be removed and rewritten, belies their clear intent to cause harm to businesses and the community. Clearly they have no desire to reach a resolution, and equally clearly it is profoundly unlikely that they have anything even remotely resembling a legitimate claim).
Which means no software publisher is safe, now that pandora's box has been opened, from similiar disingenuous attacks.
It would behoove everyone if every copyright were required to be registerd no later than 1 year after the code/prose was written or the movie/music recorded (i.e. 1 year 'grace'). Unfortunately, the media and copyright cartels have tied all of our copyright law up in international agreements such as the Berne convention and treaties which have empowered the WTO and WIPO to such a degree that any kind of sensible reform is impossible without a nation withdrawing from a number of uncumbering and binding international accords.
So look for more of this sort of nonsense, directed not only against free software, but against all kinds of published works. Once pandora's box has been opened and the weapon used, one can only expect it to be used again. And again, empowering lawyers and decimating the productive capability of the software industry, be it free software or proprietary.
This may actually be the beginning of the final collapse of our
Wonder what would have happened if Guthenberg was allowed to take a patent (don't think that particularly concept existed at that time) off his invention of the printing press.
...sometimes in perpetuity).
... authors had no rights at all, until the Statue of Anne was passed almost a century later, and practically still had no rights until the Statue of Anne was enforced by a court case several decades after that.
... one that was immediately addressed with software patents and, when that failed to quell the innovation quickly enough, draconian copyright laws such as the world hasn't seen since before copyright's relative liberalisation under the Statue of Anne).
... a sad state of affairs that exists to this day, if you substitute USPTO for the crown). However, based upon the chilling effects being observed today, and our knowledge of the importance the printing press played in political and cultural changes in Europe that led to the enlightenment and modern scientific collaboration, among other things, it is safe to day that a 20 (or perpetual) delay might well have tipped the scales sufficiently in favor of the entrenched powers so as to make any such reforms very difficult, at least, and perhaps impossible.
What would have happened? The patent would have expired 14 years later, that's what (28 years if he bothered to renew it). Net effect on society: probably about zero, because technology didn't spread very quickly.
If you are going to defend the current system of government monopoly entitlements, you should at least learn to differentiate between copyright law and patent law. While the two do bear similiarities in their stifling of human creativity and economic endeavor, they are not the same, and their consiquences, while often similiar, are not the same. Certainly the duration of their respective monopolies are not at all similiar. Patent law grants monopoly entitlements for 20 years on human knowledge. Copyrights grant monopoly entitlements for 95 years, or life plus 75 years, on human expression and information.
In your comment above, you are confusing copyright law (as it was implimented in the United States after the revolutionary war, with its 14 year expiration + optionally an additional 14 years) with patent law (which had a 17 year expiration and now has a 20 year expiration, in the US, but was in other jurisdiction granted for much longer
Copyright in England was perpetual in its initial incarnation, and offered publishers only exclusive rights
What would have happened is that the printing press would have spread much more slowly during its initial 'craze', giving governments and the Church more lead time in devising effective methods of censorship. Things like the reformation might never have happened in such an environment, where 20 years could have been the difference from a disruptive technology allowing exposure of a new idea ("let's all read and interpret the Bible for ourselves, rather than being spoonfed our opinions from Rome") and an emerging technology so controlled as to be reduced to a tool of the entrenched power ologopolies (sound familiar? It should: that is how everything from the telephone and radio to television and aerospace work today. The Internet was a surprising phenomenon
It is difficult to know with certainty what chilling effect a 20 year patent (or a patent in perpetuity, as was the norm at the time patents were first being offered as Royal rewards for innovation, often to those who had brought the innovation to the crown and not to those who actually did the innovating and inventing
Which really should give one pause. How many similiar, much needed changes and reforms have been quelled by slowing down and ultimately suppressing emerging technologies. What is it that threatens free software and the internet more than anything else? You guessed it, copyright law on the one side as wielded by the media cartels, and patent l
In short, if you're a geek, don't mind a few days downtime for installation and can deal with hand configuring your box, you might give Gentoo a try.
/boot partitions to allow multiple, independent installs and provide easy failback if an upgrade goes awry).
/boot partiton, mount them under /mnt/gentoo (or whever), untar the stage 1 tarball into /mnt/gentoo (or wherever), mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/pric (or wherever/proc) per the install docs, and install in a chrooted environment.
Just a minor point. No downtime is required whatsoever if you have a second set of partitions handy (and with the size of today's hard drives, there really isn't any excuse for not creating a second set of / and
Simply install your filesystem(s) of choice on your spare / and
No need to shutdown and boot off of CD (Live or otherwise), no need to do without the services of your existing GNU/Linux installation. The entire process of installing, be it a day (on a fast dual Athlon) or a week (on a slower P2) won't prevent you from using your computer one iota, modulo the CPU and network usage itself (which a ctrl-z will fix if you need the cycles for another task).
It isn't for everyone, but for those capable of going through the install, it is delightful, and as you correctly point out, of all the GNU/Linux distributions far and wide it is hands down the easiest to maintain, administer, and keep up to date.
Of course, it is fashionable to characterize enthusiasts of every ilk 'zealots' these days, and the guise of humor is often used for disseminating such ad homonem labels. However, one can easilly differentiate between a zealot who lives in denial of the shortcomings of his source of zealotry while insisting it is the only true way (Microsoft astroturfers and marketers are a prime example of this, though by no means the only example), while enthusiasts will generally recognize and try to better the shortcomings of their source of enthusiasm, and will generally acknowledge that other solutions work and, while not the enthusiast's favorite, are nevertheless viable.
Most GNU/Linux, Free Software, and open source enthusiasts are not zealots. Many Microsoft enthusiasts (astroturfers excepted) are not zealots. It is past time people stopped misusing the word.
LiveCDs are cool. I'm use Knoppix all the time (Linux bliss in the computer lab, finally).
... we get all the benefits of being able to give away live CDs to our less computer-literate friends with our favorite distro, but most importantly, we can use the disks ourselves to install Gentoo, upgrade, or rescue it, and all the utilities present are familiar and located in familiar places (something not always true with a liveCd from another distro). Of course, this works both ways if one prefers Debian, Mandrake, or what have you.
But what is the logic behind using a source-based distribution for a LiveCD?
I don't have anything against Gentoo, but fail to see *why* Gentoo...
Is PPC support better with Gentoo? Or are the Gentoo guys just the first ones to do this for PPCs?
First, Gentoo is much more than a source based distro.
1) portage is arguably the best package manager known to man. It exceeds IMHO apt-get, which is perhaps the second (or maybe third, depending on one's POV) finest package manager. Having easy access to portage from a live CD is fantastic for those who want to go the next step and actually install Gentoo, or rescue an existing Gentoo system.
2) Being a source based distro means one can optimize one's build to their own hardware. Taken a step further, one could optimize a Gentoo LiveCD for their hardware (PPC, Athlon v. Intel, etc.)
3) Source based v. Binary based is, for purposes of RUNNING the LiveCD, completely orthogonal, as the LiveCD itself contains all binaries. So, the best answer to your question as to why is "why not?"
While the tools available to Gentooers allow for more optimization out of the box than, say, Debian by default (yes, you can build debian from source with apt-get, but as one who as done so I can say it is quite painful), to those running the LiveCD the only affect will be a faster, snappier LiveCD, assuming they have downloaded an ISO optimized for their architecture.
For those of us running Gentoo it is a godsend
I have no trouble whatsoever running Gentoo on my Fujitsu Stylistic 600 or my Fujitsu Stylistic 3400, compete with functioning touch screen, audio, etc.
I just starting making a similiar installation on a Fujitsu Stylistic 4110 active pen system. The OS is installing just fine, after which I will have to experiment with the touch screen device and see if I can get it working.
So, in short, running GNU/Linux on a tablet doesn't appear to be at all difficult, and in at least several cases touch screen support under xfree is working as well. YMMV of course, and you'd be well advised to research the particular hardware you are interested in before shelling out any cash, but as one MS free person to another I can tell you the option does exist, if you have applications that would benefit from a touch-screen tablet (as my employer does).
Knoppix is very impressive. As a former Debian (now Gentoo) user and administrator, I can appreciate the quality of the "back-end" engineering in distributions like Debian, which is IMHO hands down the best binary distribution out there (Gentoo is a source based distro, as is Linux from Scratch and Source Mage. It is my preference for source based distros, and portage in particular with Gentoo, that led me to switch, not any argument with the quality of Debian or apt-get, which is excellent). To see such a slick, astonishingly easy live-cd environment put on top of such a quality distribution is delightful, and while I yearn for a Gentoo knoppix (and will likely get my wish with their ever-improving but as yet no-where-near-as-good-as knoppix live-CDs), I have on more than one occasion used a knoppix CD to rescue a non-debian (Gentoo, Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, you-name-it) distribution.
Having such easy clustering, with such an idiot-proof interface ("put the CD in the drive, boot, and you're ready to go"), built upon such a solid foundation where shortcuts that afflict other distributions haven't been taken, is truly an achievement worthy of praise and respect.
In short, knoppix already rocked, and now they have surpassed themselves again! Very, very cool!
To be honest, I wish that Linus had a reason to be afraid. His reaction to this whole thing started off as complete apathy and is still hovering around it.
I have in the past been very critical of Linus' apathy and apparent blindness to some of the deeper underlying issues that will likely affect our freedom to code at all, much less code on the operating system our cooperative effort has created over the last 12 years or so, in part under his non-political guidance. Richard Stallman, as undiplomatic as he can be, truly does Get It(tm), and has done much to steer the community away from trouble (remember the KDE/qt/GPL conflicts. Imagine the situation we'd be in vis-a-vis SCO and M$ FUD if Gnome hadn't appeared, the flame fests hadn't been fought, and ultimately a workable, compatible solution hadn't been found, thanks to Trolltech's admiral flexibility and willingness to acknowledge mistakes and fix them, and thanks to RMSes stubborn insistance that the GPL be adhered to, no matter how cool the project.
All that having been said, the last thing on earth I would want to see is Linus sued for his 12 years of unselfish generosity. Do I agree with Linus' political (or rather, apolitical stance)? No, on that front I come down on RMSes side, despite my fervent desire that he learn a little diplomacy (which, to be fair, he appears to have done in no small amount, as listening to any of the speaches he's made in the last few years amply demonstrates), and despite the extreme irritation I felt at his 'lignux' proposal years ago.
I may not agree with Linus on some points, and I may wish he'd speak up a little more often to defend the Community he helped catalyze into being, but the man is entitled to his own world view, his own opinions, and no one in their right mind should wish something so awful as a lawsuit (however unfounded) onto someone who has done so much to enrich us all. As one who is personally bearing the brunt of an appalling act of barrotry myself, and having to defend against a frivilous, but non-the-less expensive, lawsuit (condo related, for the curious), I take particular exception to the notion that Linus deserves any kind of kick in the pants, much less a kick to the head through SCO's (or anyone elses) letigious thuggary and barratry.
I relish the demise of SCO, and the dozens of countersuits and investor lawsuits that will undoubtably follow. With luck, the fools will have left an I undotted or a T uncrossed, and be doing some hard time in a 6'x9' cell to boot, compliments of the SEC.
They say that if you wanted someplace to look, then the filesystem support would be the place to start. They don't at all suggest that it actually happened. Suggesting that the lkml post you link makes it look like they might have stolen code from Linux is just like SCO saying that IBM has stolen code from them and then refusing to put up or shut up.
No, it isn't. The source code for the Linux kernel is available for public perusal. The source code to Unixware (or whatever SCO is calling it these days) is not. Telling someone to "show the offending code" of a proprietary product isn't reasonable, although asking them to point to the object code which was likely compiled from the stolen code (and decompiling that) isn't all that unreasonable, and would likely provide enough evidence for a subpeano compelling an examination of the code in question.
The statement may have been inaccurate, but it is certainly nowhere remotely tantamount to what SCO has been doing, by any rational measure.
That having been said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if SCO did in fact steal code from Linux, and that this entire debacle was either premeditated (with theft of Linux code a first step in this entire premeditated crime), and then fell apart when the executives at SCO who had intended to do this discovered to their horror that their predicessors had merely bought sublicensing rights and not the actual copyrights and patents, or a preemtive action to try and cover their own exceedingly dirty tracks.
Indeed, the latter is really the best possible face that can be put on SCO's actions, and is itself nevertheless quite appalling, as it entails deliberate copyright violations and fraudulant allegations being made by SCO in an effort to defraud the community and Linux vendors. No matter how one slices this, SCO and its leadership are in a whole heap of legal trouble, and if Novell's allegations prove to be true, could well be facing very serious criminal charges of fraud and SEC violations, charges that could bring with them solid prison sentences.
The BSDs already had their court battle, against ATT at the time.
... at least, not the target of fraudulant allegations this time.
ATT lost the case so thoroughly they settled out of court and asked (and managed) to have the terms of the agreement kept secret.
The BSDs have been deemed IP-violations free wrt to Unix (all releases up to sys V, i think), and since no big name like IBM & all is proeminently featured in the BSD's dev', they have it quite easy on the "trade secrets" front.
The allegations from SCO change more often than water vapor formations in a hurricane, but some of those ever-mutating accusations included IBM having donated copyrighted code to the GNU/Linux kernel (which SCO has now admitted is not their 'official' complaint). Had that in fact been the case, there is absolutely nothing preventing the same accusation being levelled against FreeBSD, or anyone else (including other proprietary software).
The threat was there, if unspoken, and it would be niave to think that if FreeBSD, rather than GNU/Linux, were on the corporate radar for people of SCO and Microsoft's ilk ("fraudulant liars, and in the case of Microsoft convicted monopolists"), would be immune to receiving such accusations merely because of one historical victory.
FreeBSD is absolutely clean wrt AT&T/Novel IP up to sys V. So is GNU/Linux. But are they clean with respect to what has come after? Almost certainly, but that obviously didn't stop baseless accusations from being made against GNU/Linux, and it certainly would do nothing to prevent similiar accusations from being made against FreeBSD, should the occasion ever call for it (in the minds of those filthy enough to engage in such practices).
Linux isn't the only thing that has been vindicated here. The entire Open Source and Free Software Community has been vindicated, and that includes those operating systems and programs that weren't the target (but could have been)
If what Novell claims is true then SCO has more than a few problems to handle. It will have to start with a global apology.
... Novel, unlike SCO, may not be thriving, but they aren't facing immenent bankrupcy either), then the fact that SCO lied to their shareholders is an SEC violation. It is fraud (among other things) and the perpetrators could be looking at a prison term (hopefully in a cockroach ridden, butt-slamming Pen, rather than Club Fed).
If this is true (and it almost certainly is
And, as others have pointed out, the civil damages and liability resulting from this fraudulant deception against SCO and those personally involved in the deception could well be quite staggaring. These people could well end up broke and in prison.
This, of course, assumes the government actually chooses to enforce the law this time. As we saw with the Microsoft Anti-Trust case, that is certainly not a given.
Regardless, however, it does vindicate GNU/Linux and free software in the extreme, and it does demonstrate the depths of depravity that Microsoft (who was quite transparently pushing this and financing it via a license they clearly weren't required to get) and its shills, such as SCO, will sink to.
The best revenge is living well, indeed, living better than those who have wronged you. Even if SCO were to get off scott free (unlikely), clearly, anyone running FreeBSD (which could theoretically have been targeted with a similiar FUD campaign) and GNU/Linux are living quite well (in the technical arena at least), certainly much better than the poor sops running Unixware and SCO, and arguably quite a bit better than those running the product of SCO's master in Redmond. We should take joy in that fact (but not let it slow down the counter suits and prosecutions from those who were more directly wronged by SCO's illegal and unconscionable behavior).
If you call "select playlist, insert CDR or CDRW, click on big, easy to see, "Burn" button, click on OK" "difficult to convert the music into a transparent format that can be copied and accessed by any application", then, er, yeah, that's right.
Disclaimer: I am not an iTunes user.
If I have understood the discussion correctly, what he means is that you have to add another shiny, plastic disc to the landfill everytime you want to convert a file to
What is more troubling is exactly what the original poster mentioned: just because Apple's use of DRM is reasonable today, doesn't mean it will be reasonable in six months or a year. And, having bought into and accepted a Digital Rights Mangling technology, one has abdicated a large portion of the autonmy and control they otherwise would enjoy over the hardware and software they have purchased. Getting that freedom and autonomy back will be very difficult and, if one is in the Windows world and makes a similiar compromise (with Palladium, which people are quite right in pointing out is vastly more draconian and intrusive than the DRM Apple has implimented), probably impossible.
So, all consumerist euphoria with a new, shiny device aside, voices of caution with respect to the adoption of technologies designed to take the owner's control of their hardware away, and turn such authority over to the vendors of content which happens to reside or pass through said hardware, are extremely well placed, and ignored at your own peril.
Going back to our Latin roots, [...] this flower is "scientifically" defined as an unusually huge and shapeless representation of the male penis. This is why men shouldn't name flowers.
... the last thing we need is a sequioa sized venus fly trap (though that would keep the tree huggers and loggers alike at bay, but then, too, the spotted owl would likely not fair to well in its branches either).
Well, it does look like a big honkin' dick, so perhaps it was aptly named after all.
I find it remarkable (and very cool) that there exists a flower that has naturally evolved to be so large and, well, colorful. Methinks a little genetic intermingling with redwoods could lead to a very, very cool, mondo Dogwood-esque blooming tree.
Or perhaps we could try some even more baroque variants, creating new forests of diverse and strangely delightful plants. However, I would avoid anything carnivorous
Well if it's years off, the patent will have expired by then - and the Patent Office will have no choice but see the prior art when somebody gets around to trying to patent it again.
That is only true if the practical applications are at least 20 years after the date of filing, something that you cannot be certain of (though the well documented chilling effects of patents on innovation would lead one to expect that this might indeed become the case, as a direct result of the issuence of this patent).
It is appalling that someone can think of a speculative idea and patent it, then wait for someone to actually do the hard work of inventing a useful product before gouging them for royalties. Not only is there no incentive for anyone other than the arm-chair patent holder to develop this idea (and even were he qualified to do so, he is but one person), there is actually disincentive to do so, as the end result of the toil necessary to create such a remarkable device will be a lawsuit from a science fiction author in the peanut gallar.
The previous poster said this "wasn't a call to arms." Well, it damn well should be. Unfortunately we have cultivated apathy to a high art, and appear unable to move ourselves out of that helpless state of mind even when things like this (not to mention software patents, which threaten innovation and free software for all of us) repeatedly kick us all directly in the face.
Our masters, in conditioning us to be compliant and uninvolved, untroublesome, quiet consumers have done their work well...to the profound detriment of us all.
Funny you should mention Canada.
... prior to Baby Powell's mismanagement of the FCC (and the local telco monopolies), and prior to that agency's willful unwillingness to enforce federal laws mandating fair and equitable access of competitors to local monopoly last-mile wire, Spring offered an 8 Mbit download/1 MBit upload ADSL service which, for the two months I had it before SBC drove them out of the marketplace with Baby Powell's blessing, Downtown Chicago actually surpassed rural canada in available bandwidth.
With Timothy's typically unenlightened, American Apologist addendum to the original post, and I quote:
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
one would expect Canada, which is even larger than the US, less densly populated even in its populated areas, and much so in its rural areas, to have even less broadband availability than the United States. However, surprising as it is to many of my countrymen, broadband is both more widely availabe and less expensive in Canada, indeed, in rural Canada, than it is in downtown Chicago.
This wasn't always the case
No longer.
Although I live in the heart of the city, a mere 10 minute walk from the dense, commercial portion of the city commonly referred to as the "loop," I am unable to get affordable DSL at anything greater than 1 Mbit. This, in contrast to the very inexepensive, 2 Mbit and better offerings available to rural residents of Alberta.
The dichotomy between the United States and Korea (South) isn't one of geography, it is one far more closely related to the dichotomy between Korea (South) and Korea (North), i.e. the difference between a nation with a well managed telecommunications industry and one with a poorly managed telecommunications industry, and while America (The US) bears little resemblence to the deprivations of North Korea, we probably owe that more to a history of decent management which has only, since about the 1980s, become an ongoing condition of zero and even negative-sum gameplaying by our leaders, in contrast to North Korea's fifty odd year of starkly negative-sum policies.[1]
However, if those of us living here do not get off our butts and insist on good governance, for the good of the many and not just the few, we may find ourselves, in not so many generations at all, bearing a striking resemblence to the third world we so like to disparage. Indeed, arguably, in terms of health care and telecommunications, we already do. Let's hope the greed of the ruling class and their political pawns doesn't extend that to our home or, worse, our food supply.
[1]Negative-sum games are scenerios in which a player's strategy is to win in such a way that the overall wealth is decreased, but their sum total increases. Imagine starting out with three pies, throwing one in the face of your opponent, and then running off with the other two. Only two pies remain, but 2 pies are better for you than merely 1 1/2. Or imagine an intellectual property regime that impoverishes the culture of billions, but makes a few thousand people filthy rich, and a few million able to make ends-meet, if just barely.
Zero sum is where you compete for portions of a pool of wealth which neither grows nor shrinks. Assuming a fair outcome, you both end up with 1.5 pies. Assuming an unfair, but nevertheless non-destructive, zero-sum scenerio, the three pies remain in existence and are divvied up in some fashion favoring one party or the other.
Positive sum scenerios are of course the best, and in terms of physical goods (and limited supply), capitalism generally excels here (except in situations of monopolies, be they 'natural', such as roads and telephone wire, or through economic or political force, such as the East India Tea company in days of yore, or Microsoft today). In this scenerio a strategem is employed that results in the creation of additional pies, which may or may not be shared freel
Free software may be fine and dandy, but some of us don't actually mind *paying* for software if said software does the job well. [...] What I'm buying is *convenience*.
What you are buying is a hostage situation for your data. What do you do if MoneyDance goes out of business? (No need to belabor all of the underhanded tactics software vendors can and do use to coerce upgrades by holding one's data hostage: MoneyDance isn't Sun Microsystems or Microsoft, but the end user's vulnerability is the same, and non-malicious causes abound in sufficient quantity to make the point.) All that convinience, all that time "saved" gets to now be paid back, with interest, as you laboriously move your data to another format (or even, perhaps, have to reenter it by hand).
I too have been more than willing to pay for good software in the past (I used Quicken at one time, and have paid for Blender, back when it was commercial, as well as various video editing software [much of which, under windows, never worked. Transcode, cinelerra, et. al. may have a learning curve, but they work, and my data will be accessible and usable in perpetuity, until the very bits themselves decay. Under Windows I have data that, three years later, is unavailable because of a changing OS, and discontinued software).
GNUcash is excellent. It is elegantly designed, it works, it does the job, and it's being free insures my financial data will be usable, and accessible, ten, twenty, fifty, even a hundred years from now. Quicken, MoneyDance, et. al. not only cannot guarantee that, but past experience shows that, with them and indeed, with any proprietary software, the data so stored will lose usability in less than half a decade.
If free software really doesn't float your boat, and convinience of the moment outweighs any medium or long term concerns about the accessibility and usability of your data, then go right ahead and cut corners as you so advocate. But at least be honest with yourself as to the real tradeoff you are making, and don't go looking for symphathy when it turns around and bites you.
I don't know how things are in the US these days, but if using your right to free speech makes you a terrorist or incapable of recieving state benefits... You are all prisoners allready.
Things have become very ugly in the states in the last few months, and threaten to become dramatically moreso in the not-so-distant future.
In principal we aren't prisoners yet, as we can theoretically still emigrate if we so choose. As a practical manner, however, emigration is quite difficult for even the well qualified (I have lived as an expat, and could have emigrated and stayed in Germany at the time, but chose instead to follow the money back to the US. At the time it was still a relatively free country, with Orwellian concerns being an issue of what was coming if we continued down the path, not what had already come into being, as is now the case). Now that I feel an increasing desire to leave once again I am finding the barriars to emigration, or rather immigration at the far end (Europe at least; Canada appears to be more friendly in this regard and is a real possibility), are extraordinarilly high. I feel empathy for anyone who has gone through this nonsense trying to come to the US in the past, and it does feel like a bit of karma in action. Until one realizes that it is governments that exclude, and that in collusion with one another they very effectively trap their people, all the while making the other nation out to be the bad guy ("Those self-centered [Americans|Germans|French|...] won't let us hard working folks immigrate!"). As a PR move it sure beats the Berlin wall.
In other words, without the ability to actually move somewhere else (and be allowed by that somewhere else to do so), one really is a prisoner in one's land as a practical matter, even if in theory one would be allowed to leave.
The gist of what you say is correct, however. The United States has become dramatically less free, and stands perilously close to the threshhold where non-democratic architectures of control reach critical mass and peaceful reform becomes all but impossible. From there the decline and fall will all but be assured, with the only question remaining that of timing: will the violence come in a year, a decade, or a century?
This "doomsday" (though the fall of a government hardly constitutes armageddon) scenerio is still avoidable, but I fear if people do not begin insisting on their rights and liberties vocally, loudly, and with resolve, it won't be for long. Then the best we'll be able to hope for as Americans is a long slow, gradual decline, rather than a precipitous fall. Given the trends of the last several years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations (though to my eyes at least much more accelerated under Aschcroft & Co.), however, it appears that even that hope may be a vain one.
Anti-Religion, Italian (close enough), Male, 29 years old, 180K/year (and rising), Democrat-Liberal.
Guess I'll have to buy a few politicians.
Sorry, as a mere human whose last name is not Gates you cannot afford to buy any politicians. Certainly not with a puny $180k per year income.
Vote for the person my ass, more like vote for the better commercial.
There are very real differences between many of the candidates on many of the issues. There are republicans that are quite liberal and democrats so conservative that they make Baby Bush look like a liberal. If you cannot be bothered to do the research and find out which is which, and instead vote along party planks and platforms, you are quite probably voting against your own views in more than one instance. This isn't Europe we're talking about, where strong party discipline and parliamentary divisions based upon party percentage rule the day, this is America, with all of its 2-party follies firmly in place
The problem we are really confronting is one which runs much deeper than liberal v. conservative, republicrat v. democan, and one which Libertarians (for all I disagree with their "capitalism ueber alles" mentality) are very correct in pointing out: there exists among both liberals and conservatives the notion that it is appropriate and good to use governmental power to coerce the other side into abiding by one's own personal views on what is right or wrong.
Until conservatives and liberals, republicans and democrats, both take a step back and begin to respect the constitution and the freedoms it is intended to insure more than their own personal economic, political, and social agendas, we will continue to have our most basic freedoms eroded, regardless of which party is in power. Indeed, if this doesn't stop, and quickly, we will find ourselves living in a police state to rival that of any stalinist regime, and it is a crap shoot as to whether that will be a police state run by corrupt democrats beholden to Disney and Time-Warner, or one run by corrupt republicans beholden to Esso, Exxon, and McDonald-Douglas, and while the outcome of this crap shoot may be of great interest to Disney, Time-Warner, Esso, Exxon, McDonald-Douglas, et. al., it will ultimately make little difference to the rest of us, condemned by our own impotence to living beneath such tyranny.
substitute "patent" for "software patent" and you are dead on.
The inherent problem with granting government entitlements to twenty year monopolies (or, really, monopolies of any length of time) are most obvious with software, because software develops at such a rapid pace, and because software blurrs the line between the written word (expression) and engineering: indeed it is a hybrid of both, with characteristics of both.
However, if you look at the pharamceutical industry (AIDS and brast cancer research stifled with cease and desist letters alleging patent violations by the researchers), the aviation industry (the US government seized the original airplane patent), or any other industry founded upon previous and ongoing invention, you will find the same problems, and the same truths.
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a, else it would be major news and be covered by mainstream media, and there'd be a downloadable patch or something.
... far better to have used
Or (much more likely) many of those same "news" organizations use the very product they cannot use today.
Though I say that somewhat tongue in cheeck, it is quite possible Microsoft is excersizing its economic and legal muscle (threat of lawsuits etc.) to keep a number of customers and news sites quiet.
Another factor is quite possibly that most people (rightfully) mistrust Microsoft and only upgrade when they are compelled to (e.g. purchasing new hardware, renewing a support contract with the Evil Empire, and so on). That being the case, most people who have stayed away from XP (the majority of Windows users), and those who are running old-enough versions to be unaffected, will not have been so crippled. This time.
Whatever the reason, this is akin to the lack of DMCA criticism seen in the mainstream media (which is a part of the very cartels benefiting from the DMCA), the lack of skepticism in the reporting of "trusted computing", "DRM", "Palladium", et. al. Clearly it has been reported in a couple of places, and very obviously it is affecting a fair number of people.
Silence doesn't mean nothing is going on. The fact that a few journalists have enough integrity to point out a story others either can't, or won't, report doesn't mean there is nothing going on. Did you really expect MSNBC to say something bad about Microsoft's core strategy ("trusted" computing)? They may hold their punches on bug reports and security alerts, but with something this important to their long-term monopolistic strategies you can bet they'll pull all the stops out to keep things as quiet as they can. We have seen such strong-arm tactics in the past WRT PC Magazine and others, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Microsoft was building its first monopoly. Expect to see such successful tactics used in a similair fashion as Microsoft seeks to encode its monopoly into every PC at the hardware level, and into every program at the software level through trusted key exchange and encryption protocols (Palladium, TCPA, DRM, etc.).
Whether or not this particular instance is an example of such strong-arm, corporate censorship and intimidation isn't really important (I merely point out that such things have come out of Redmond in the past, and can be expected to again), it is important to remember that, in a Palladium/TCPA/DRM/Microsoft world, the ability of anyone to report any kind of failure of this kind will be reduced to zero as more and more people adopt such crippled technologies. For purely technical, if not both technical and political/litigious, reasons.
The only real protection for people's data, freedom (including that of expression), and their ability to use the hardware and software they have purchased is to use uncrippled software. Right now those choices are limited to Apple and Free Software (on the consumer end), and to various non-Microsoft systems on the higher end (workstation/server). Of all those, only free software is guaranteed to remain uncrippled in perpetuity; all of the others can (and will, if it is deemed to be profitable) cripple their software at any time in the future whenever they so desire.
Which is why anyone taking a long term view toward protecting and preserving the integrity and accessiblity of their data must at least consider using free software, and deploying it wherever possible.
Open formats are good (and important), but open implimentations are really required for true safety. What good is an open format if only one company has adopted it, no free software to read it exists, and that company goes under? Not much, particularly if that format is difficult or cumbersome to impliment. Now you get to pay someone to reimpliment that open format in order to get at your data
eating-steaks-that-grow-on-trees dept?? Comon Micheal, We know its early but this title is ++ungood.
It is a sci-fi reference to a cybernetically enhanced attack dog. Snowcrash (?) I think. One of those cyberpunkesque novels, where the dog lived much of his life in a virtual state, eating steaks that grew on trees. Rather clever, though clearly an insider reference.