RPM is the standard Linux package file format. If your distro aims to be Linux Standards Base compliant, it must have a mechanism of installing such files.
No. RPM is not the standard Linux package file format. The standard Linux package file format is the tarball, either gzipped (.tar.gz) or bzip2ed (.tar.bz2), or uncompressed (.tar).
RPM is a part of the LSB standard, which is just one of several Linux standards that are NOT universally accepted, nor should it be. RPM was placed in the LSB because of Red Hat politicking and in an IMHO very illegetimate effort to give them an edge over other distributions. Indeed, RPM's inclusion in the LSB is the main reason why the LSB should, IMHO, either be rectified to exclude it, ignored altogether, or (ideally) adhered to in other respects, with the RPM provision sumarilly ignored.
The pointlessness of including RPM in the LSB standard is underscored by the incompatability between Suse RPMs, Red Hat RPMs, and Mandrake RPMs (to name just three), and by the success of many products which have been packaged in proper, distribution-agnostic form (nvidia drivers being one such example, but by no means the only one).
Yes, superior distributions such as Debian and Gentoo can extract the necessary data from the cumbersome RPM format, but forcing them to jump through that particular Red Hat hoop is neither justified, nor desirable.
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
Correction.
There will never be innocents in the US ever again.
With this kind of information at their disposal anyone can be made to appear to be guilty of just about anything. Add secret trials and a general terror-hysteria to the mix and you get an environment that makes Orwell's vision almost pleasant by comparison.
I can finally go back to Gentoo as my primary OS! (Now if they would just release 1.4...)
emerge rsync (update the list of what's available) emerge -up world (preview what's comming) emerge -u world (do it!)
Gentoo isn't like other distros, in which you must wait for a release to stay current. With gentoo, the above three commands bring you up to what is current, which is generally close to the leading edge of the state of the art.
Oh, but you don't like the freeze and want all those new ebuilds waiting in the wings for the release? Fine, just set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" and you can jump past the pending release and play with all the experimental stuff coming down the pike.
I have one set of partitions for exactly that purpose, and one set for the more formal, stable stuff. And you know what? With this approach, I don't have to even care at all when, or even if, they're going to have a "final" release of 1.4. The only other distros I know which come close to this is Debian unstable and Source Mage. The former suffers from the Curse of Binary Distros (lag behind the state of the art by weeks or, in the case of xfree, months), the latter is quite good, comparable to gentoo in many respects (but a different approach, so like salad vs. steak, the choice is entirely up to your own sensibilities and taste).
Correction of Bad Typo (WW I, NOT WW II)
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It was so bad that with the advent of World War II...
Ugh! That was an ugly typo. That should read
"It was so bad that with the advent of World War I..."
World War ONE, not World War TWO. Sorry about any confusion.
It's a great idea, but out in the real world, people use commercial software. If kids aren't educated in how to use it, they won't be able to compete.
What an utter load of crap.
First, I work in the "real world" and make a very acceptable living doing so. We deal with real money (millions of dollars) in a high risk environment (trading various products on various exchanges), and we cream our competition in no small part because of our use in free software.
So: myth number one - commercial software isn't the only thing used in the "real world" (as your statement disingenuously implies), free software is deployed very widely, and very successfully, throughout the "real" world.
Myth number two - education is only valuable if it precisely mimicks a trade school. It isn't particularly important if kids are tought literacy by reading Mark Twain or by reading A Corporate Yesman's Training Primer (except that the latter may preclude them from ever becoming a functioning human being), what is important is that they learn the skill of reading. Likewise, it makes no difference whether a child is taught Macintosh and OS X, Windows and Microsoft Office, or GNU/Linux and OpenOffice, so long as they learn the basics of computer literacy and how to use basic word processing applications. Indeed, the latter will allow the gifted children to excel beyond anything the proprietary offerings could (for they will be able to look under the hood and see how things work), while the average to challenged student will benefit from learning basic concepts they will have little difficulty applying to a different envoronment.
Indeed, kids once moved from Apple IIe to Atari, to MS DOS, to Macintosh (in any order) with little difficulty... I doubt a child moving from KDE to Windows or Mac, or visa versa, will be particularly traumatized.
Myth three: kids should decide what is best. Nonsense. Parents and educators should make that decision... the kids are neither qualified nor equipped with the knowledge necessary to even begin to make such a decision.
Kids should be exposed to computers. The more capabilities they can be exposed to, the better, and the more equipment and software available for them to explore and learn from, the better. It makes little difference whether that is Linux, Windows, or Mac... except in price, and in the opportunity they are afforded, at least theoretically, to look under the hood and see how things really work, and in the variety of different applications (and possibilities) available on a budget. In all these areas a school on a budget gets vastly more return from free software than it ever will from proprietary products, Microsoft spin and corporate politicking, not to mention slashdot astroturfing, aside.
Benjamin Franklin was Right, You and Dyson Wrong
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And perhaps more importantly, here's what James Dyson has to say, which is essentially the same thing: (Dyson is the famous inventor of the phenominally successful and innovative Dyson vacuum cleaners that have vacuumed up the competition virtually everywhere but the US, where they are just now becoming available.)
Ahem. Nice appeal to authority (an authority with a vested interest in the patent system, I might add). Although appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, since you've lent yourself the air of expertise by making such an appeal, I will rebutte with Benjamin Franklin himself, who invented among other things bifocals, the catheter, the franklin stove, lightning rods, and other things too numerous to mention. He opposed patents... so vehemently he refused to patent his own inventions, to the great benefit of America and the world.
A great many other scientists and economists felt similarly, including John von Neuman.
I know many of you who like to benefit from government entitlements such as monopolies, either directly or through parasitical means (e.g. by practicing intellectual property law) are loathe to give up your priveleges, regardless of the cost to society, but the fact remains that when a new idea is tied up for twenty years, most progress on refining, developing, and building upon that idea is stunted, even eliminated.
Indeed, history is a far better reference than the opinons of scientists and inventors past and present, and history does not favor the pro-patent argument at all. Indeed, I cannot think of a single instance where the patent system led to a creation or invention that wouldn't have otherwise been developed, but it is repleate with the stories of inventors denied access to their own inventions because someone else who developed a similiar idea independently won the footrace to the patent office, and is it repleate with examples of stifled technologies resulting directly from patents.
The airplane is one such example: the Wright Brothers did the first wind tunnel experiments, figured out the basics of aerodynamics, and got a well deserved patent on the process (well deserved being defined by patent law, for their idea was new, innovative, and very non-obvious at the time). Yet because of their patent others who were making vast improvements on the design, like Curtis, were stifled in their efforts (Germany and other countries had no such problem, not recognizing the American patent, and their technology pulled ahead of ours dramatically). It was so bad that with the advent of World War II the United States Government, in an unprecendented act, took the patent, opened it up to all competitors, and granted the Wright Brothers a flat 1% royalty, in order to spur competition and the technological improvements it brings. It was a tacit admission that the US patent on airplanes granted to the Wright Brothers, who were certainly deserving, had in fact stifled any further development dramatically.
Indeed, capitalism is predicated upon the premise that competition, not government entitlement, spurs progress. You can believe in capitalism or you can believe in patents, but you cannot believe in both and remain self-consistent... indeed, you will be required to go through logical contortions that will make the Vatican's debate on science and astronomy look positively enlightened in comparison.
The stifling effects of patents are most obvious in the case of software patents, because that is a field we are all inventors in, we all understand intimately, and we all work with. But the effect is just pronounced in other areas of endeavor... it has merely been such an oft-repeated party line that patents are good which has blinded many people's ability to even question the assumption.
Nice try on the ad homonem against the FSF by the way... however, if the FSF does have an official stance on patents, and if that stance opposes patents, they are, with John von Neuman, Benjamin Franklin, and a great many others, in very, very good, and very enlightened, company.
Piracy in all its forms is not a technical problem, but a social problem.
Absolutely right.
Technical solutions to social problems will never succeed. Build a better lock? Someone will build a better lockpick. Unless the social problem is dealt with, the technical solutions will continue to fail.
People have had, to their perceptions at least, the ability to make "perfect" copies of music and video for a very long time... in excess of 20 years.
Yes, the audio and videophile will quickly point out the problems with generational loss on both cassette tape and VHS/Hi8, but to the average person who wants to build up a video library of Seinfeld and Friends episodes, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation videos are perfectly fine (and no, sorry, macrovision is no barrier even for the unititiated. Thank you for playing).
Yet Hollywood makes millions on VHS tapes, and millions more on DVDs that are, I must admit despite my boycott, reasonably priced. Why? Because the hassle factor of burning a copied DVD outweights the pricetag... most people's time is more valuable to them than the money saved infringing on the copyright and burning a copy of the DVD... despite the existence of tools that make doing so easy, even trivial, on just about every platform.
Music, on the other hand, is a different story. The CDs cost as much or more than the DVDs, with vastly less value and content. The hassle factor of copying a good CD is such that a good CD is more likely to be purchased than copied, at least by those who can reasonably afford the purchase, but so much of the mindless dreck being sold by the RIAA is sold on shiny discs with one or two decent tunes, and the remaining tracks utter crap (even by their low standards). The result... most people find the hassle of ripping, copying, and downloading the one or two good songs off an otherwise crappy CD, and the time spent doing so, well offset by the savings and satisfaction of not being suckered into paying full price for a disc full of crap, merely for the privelege of listening to one or two decent songs they'll soon grow tired of anyway.
Hollywood, for all of its evil and stupidity on the DRM front, at least understands that offering their customers added value gets them to go out and buy DVDs in droves (much as I wish it were otherwise... a boycott alone is a lonely thing indeed).
All of which underscores that, not only will Palladium and DRM wreck the home tech market, much as copy protection killed consumer DAT and cost the home electronics industry a big boom they would have otherwise seen, but, in the end, it won't work anyway.
The problem is a social problem, but that social problem includes not just copyright infringers who are doing something they shouldn't, but also the purveyors of shoddy product that don't want to be forced to give their customers better value or better product, who have already been convicted of price fixing, payola, and other cartel behaviors more than once, producers who are arguably more responsible for the current p2p file trading phenominon than anyone else.
There will always be someone who wants to get the new movie release beforehand, who doesn't mind spending the hours online downloading the latest spiderman cam or LOTR dvd rip, but these people have always existed, will always exist, and don't impact anyone's bottom line appreciably. It is the rest of us, who are used to buying and copying our own stuff (for backup, for ease of use, to listen to in the car, on the boat, in the plane, etc.) who will stop buying this crap if it means ubuiquitous surveillance of our listening habits, and cripping our favorite, expensive toys, that they should worry about. We're the ones who are going to stop buying this stuff if Hollywood and the RIAA get their way, and that's a market downturn they aren't likely to recover from.
Ornothopters flap
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i.e. it has propellers on the wings, just like the pinion feathers on the wings of a bird. It fles like a bird, therefore.
Does that not make it an ornithopter? Do the wings flap?
Ornithopter wings flap. The fan wing does not flap, so it is in no way an ornithopter (nor does it resemble one). It is a fixed wing with a horizontal rotor inside which pulls air across the lifting surface and creates a vortex which lifts the plane. Think of a big combine built into the wing, spinning quickly, and you get a rough idea. The videos are pretty cool... the full flight one shows the plane stopping and hovering a couple of times... one of the nice features of having no stall that my plane, alas, cannot emulate.
It isn't a new "principle" of aviation by any means, but it is a new and very promising design. Unfortunately the patent will probably limit design improvements by anyone other than the original inventor for the next twenty years or so, but there will be some innovative uses and improvements despite that, and in twenty years, once the patent expires, there will doubtless by quite a hayday of new designs.
All you have done is taken the same servers and moved them around the country. Now you'll need to have contracts with 10 times as many service providers and oh by the way we now need a system that can synchronize dynamic content across all of them. Well done - you clearly understood the problem.
Yes, I did very clearly understand the problem.
You, obviously, do not. Nor do you understand what peer-to-peer means, beyond a catchy buzzword you associate with mp3 filetrading, nor do you appear to understand what the word "cache" means.
Ironic, that slashdot would itself point a link to a solid rebuttal to the myth that p2p and freenet can only inherently serve static content, or that even if that were true, the 99.9% of the web that is static should remain hamstrung by the needs of a few dynamic sites, and the plethora of needlessly dynamic sites written by webmasters who should have know better, but couldn't resist using sledge hammers to kill flies no matter how it bloats the traffic on the net.
p2p, be it freenet, you-serve, or some other implimentation, is the future of the web if we want scalability with shared (controlled) costs and the possibility of the internet remaining a free medium where ideas are exchanged, rather than having it devolve into a glorified home shopping network with content pushed down our throats because running a popular server is too costly for the average Joe.
All you have done is taken the same servers and moved them around the country. Now you'll need to have contracts with 10 times as many service providers and oh by the way we now need a system that can synchronize dynamic content across all of them. Well done - you clearly understood the problem.
Yes, I did very clearly understand the problem.
You, obviously, do not. Nor do you understand what peer-to-peer means, beyond a catchy buzzword you associate with mp3 filetrading, nor do you appear to understand what the word "cache" means.
Content is only moved as it is demanded. Synchronization can simply follow the hash keys to wherever the material is cached. Oh, you want to update it? Fine, push out a new node with a new key, cross reference it to the old key and expire the other key. Some people may still get the old data until the new content propogates, but at least they can get it.
And if you want truly dynamic content that changes moment by moment, with no propogation delay, (a la' an idealized (read: not real world) game server), then I humbly suggest the Internet is not the medium you are looking for. Or, alternatively, stick with your client-server architecture (which doesn't deliver on that promise for any significant loads anyway, without serious and costly engineering, and watch your site crawl and your costs skyrocket, while the rest of the more intelligently designed web runs circules around you. Good luck trying to compete with that...
I certainly support freedom. Of course, that freedom includes the freedom of people to add DRM to the computer systems they sell, and the freedom of people to choose whether to buy or not buy it.
Microsoft and the copyright cartels have monopolies that prevent the people from having such a choice. Microsoft's monopoly may be ill-gotten, and perhaps a more lawful Justice Department, free from the stain of presidential bribes, might have brought it into check, but the copyright cartels are granted monopolies by government fiat, and sustained by a regime of copyright law designed expressly for that purpose.
The Founding Fathers didn't give a rat's ass about whether you can get a weekly free beer at a bar. Their freedom of speech was to ensure that political speech wouldn't be silenced.
The constitution does not limit freedom of speech to political speech. It is clearly written and intended to protect all speech. As for the founding father's "giving a rats ass" I suggest you take a remidial course in basic US history.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
--Thomas Jefferson 1812
You demonstrate the achilles heel of the Libertarian philosophy, namely their inability to differentiate between individual freedom, which the constitution was designed and intended to protect, and corporate freedom to run roughshod over those same individuals, which the founding fathers were nearly unanimous in opposing and even fearing. That they could never have forseen the corporate fascism to which our once great democracy has degenerated, and the willful attempt of Microsoft and Hollywood (through Palladium and DRM, as well as other measures) to usurp governance responsibilities (such as policing and enforcing the law) from its rightful authorities, namely a democractically elected government of, by, and for the people, is hardly their fault, but implying that the would have endorsed such a thing is an insult both to them and to the intellegence of anyone reading your post.
Haven't we run this topic completely into the ground? I vote we deal with this when it's actually an issue. -- a nameless exemplar of extinct humanity, shortly before their celebrated demise.
It wasn't their collassal stupidity in creating information monopolies and the concept of thought as property, although certainly humans would have likely ascended beyond their vulnerable planet decades, perhaps centuries, prior to their extinction had they not so crippled their ability to progress and advance, even to think clearly, so completely.
It wasn't even their collassal foolishness in persuing defunct philosophies and clouding their political judgement with outdated and disproven myths regarding nearly every facet of their lives, from the creation of the cosmos to their basic, devolved ethic which was summarized quite succinctly as "greed is good."
Nor was it the removal of their most basic liberties and freedoms (in those portions of the planet that, even for a brief time, had such things), through a misapplication of the libertarian notion of freedom that was extended to explicitly exclude constititional limitations and protections of individuals from search and seizure and self incrimination, to instead encompass the "freedom" of private corporations to impose their will on the masses, to turn the relatively primitive digital computing equipment humans had belatedly invented into ubiquitious law enforcement surveillance, tracking, and monitoring devices through technologies that went by such misnomers as "Palladium," "trusted computing," and "DRM."
No, in the end, mother nature deleted humanity with extreme prejudice because, despite having shown then, demonstrated within a single, short human lifetime the damage meteor impacts could do (using a lifeless, large brown dwarf in their system as a demonstration target), and despite the plethora of other evidence she made available to these remarkably dense, short sighted, arrogant, and bigoted creatures, and despite having been given far more time to develop the technologies and procedures to protect themselves from such events (a time vastly greater than most sapient speicies require to reach the same level of development), they chose, willfully and knowingly, to stop even considering the possibility, to ban all discussion of it, to relegate the concern to the same sort of social tabus they applied to rational discussion of other absurdities, such as religion and politics.
Such a willfully stupid, irresponsible, and foolish species simply couldn't be tolerated, even by one who tolerates so much: mother nature.
So she finally killed humankind with the very object they avoided discussing, considering, talking or speculating about, because she simply could no longer abide such willful, deliberate, and premeditated stupidity. Better to wipe the slate clean and begin again, then allow such mindless dreck even another day of existence beneath the sun.
Most scholars believe the universe is probably better off without such a mentally, socially, and morally retarded species polluting the noosphere. As most are quick to point out, however, humanity's extinction was almost certainly the result of a conscious decision on their part to simply turn their back on the reality which surrounded them, a willful act, and that therefor our gratitude at their demise belongs to rightfully to them.
It is with that acknowledgement that we, the vastly less stupid, foolish, and willfully blind extend a warn thank you to humanity, for the favor they did on behalf of the rest of us in voluntarilly removing themselves from the evolutionary process in a hitherto unprecedented display of conscious, willful, deliberate stupidity. A more shining example of how to turn one's intelligence into a counter-survival trait has never been seen before for since.
The fastest computer in the world will always be limited to how quickly data may be fed to it. One way or another, a human will have to direct this operation
The world is full of semi-autonomous computing systems. Your example from "math class" is a total non-sequitur.
Absolutely right.
Not only that, he misses the point that humans are limited by the speed with which data can be fed into them as well... and that speed is far slower than the speed with which information can be fed into computers (as is well documented by everything from math tests to aviation accidents). So instead of a sense of smell it has a sense of "1 Gbit ethernet" through which a torrent of data is poured. So what... the information is there, and can be interpreted, i.e. in theory thought can occur... probably at speeds, and possibly at levels of cogitation, unreachable by human beings.
The real question that is likely to be answered is
"Do Americans care more about the freedoms for which hundreds of thousands of their forfather's died, or the Bread and Circuses Hollywood offers?"
In truth, the question will likely become more generic when this dreck is exported to the rest of the world:
"Will people care more about the bread and Circuses America's Hollywood offers them, or the freedoms they, their parents, and their grandparents have died trying to secure for them?"
Depressingly, the former will likely fall into the "Take away any liberties you like, but don't take away my Seinfeld!" here in the states. However, with hardware made in Taiwan and GNU/Linux displacing Windows in governments (and to some degree on the street) in most of the non-American world, the answer the rest of the world gives to the question will be very intersting, and I suspect a very rude surprise to the copyright cartels of New York and Hollywood, and those software and hardware purveyors that kowtow to them.
Reading the story you find out this is not a national ID system.
Not yet. But we already know, indeed have it on public record, that they want a national ID system, that that is their ultimate goal, and while they may not admit to this being a first step, it certainly appears very much like a first step in that direction.
"Those of you with our voluntary ID will have convinience, while those of you without our voluntary ID will be stand in line, be thoroughly scanned, perhaps even patted down or more invasively searched. Welcome to the New World Order, citizen!" How many will choose the latter, because the former is even more distressing than being tracked everywhere, particularly if you travel frequently?
This system is not for you, the everyday individual. This is for making sure people like stewards on airlines don't have to go through security checks everyday to see if they're carrying a bomb. Using new authentication technology that's been discussed on/. already (ie: retinal scanning) they can pass these people by so they can do their jobs quickly, rather than waiting in a security line everyday just to go to work.
Great idea... NOT. I have a friend who flies 737s for United, and while he occasionally gets annoyed (and has some absurd anectdotes from) going through security, he is quick to point out that allowing one group to bypass the security checks creates a catastrophic point of failure, where all a terrorist has to do is get a job doing grunt work for an airline, and they can walze right past security.
Even now it is a problem, with everyone going through security, but at least the existing system, while imperfect, makes the logistic of smuggling weapons and expolisves on board very non-trivial.
This approach isn't going to improve security, indeeed it will do the opposite, by creating an exploitable exception to security.
What it will facilitate is the government tracking (some) of its citizens. Frankly, I'd rather suffer a 9/11 event once each year and take my chances (my car would still be 17 times more likely to kill me), than to turn over that kind of power to my government.
Indeed, terrorism doesn't particularly frighten me (and I work across the street from the Sears Tower, a big target if there ever was one). It is like lightning... if it hits me, I die, but the odds are very good it won't hit me, and I'm not going to waste time and energy being afraid of it.
Now, our government on the other hand, is ubiquitious. The odds of its behavior impacting me are 100%... and I fear it much, much more than I fear some illiterate fanatics from camel-fucking country (apologies in advance to the moderate majorities of those places for my tongue in cheeck jab at American prejudices).
Yahoo is right to do this. They provide a service at some expense and have to recoup their costs.
This is true of anyone offering a service. Now, perhaps the costs (e.g. for my own web page, http://expressivefreedom.org) is low enough that the cost is simply donated, but in that sense that cost is recouped from my day job.
The current client server architecture of the web (which BTW stands in start contrast to the underlying peer-to-peer architecture of the internet itself) places almost all of the cost burden on the publisher. The more popular a web site (or email service, or IRC server, or IM servcie, or what have you) the more bandwidth they need to buy, the more servers they need to cluster together, etc. They have no choice but to recoup their costs or stop offering the service, and if advertising is no longer sufficient (costs have outstripped that line of revinue), then customers will start to have to pony up.
But what is often ignored is that there are architectures where the costs are shared and distributed.
USENET was an early implimentation of this (still costly, because ALL the data is copied to ALL of the distributed servers), where everyone doesn't go to ONE server, they go to ONE of THOUSANDS. USENET still carries more data than any single website (even groups.google.com, which is merely an archive, not a stream of information).
FreeNet is a better implimentation, where data which is in demand is replicated to caches closer (in terms of routing metrics) to those wishing to see the data. The originating site bears only the cost of making the inforamtion available (and providing a small portion of their local drive and bandwidth to cache other unrelated data)... the more popular the data becomes, the more widedly it is distributed, the more available it becomes, all the while adding no additional cost to the providor. The cost instead is shared in tiny increments by everyone, in a barter system of essentially perfect effeciency.
Restructure the web on a P2P basis, as FreeNet is doing, and you don't just get the Anonymouty and Uncensorability it was originally designed for, you get the scalability and low cost (regardless of popularity) of participation which the web in its current, client server form, will never enjoy.
FreeNet does dump old information no longer in demand (least popular, oldest first), a la USENET, but that is easily corrected by the one intersted in providing said information... for there is nothing preventing a static copy being preserved on your own system, to be reloaded into the net when the old copy expires.
Were Yahoo running on such an architecture, it is likely that their add revinues alone would be more than enough to cover all their costs, and there would be no need to begin charging for their other free services. They might choose to anyway... greed seems to know no reasonable bounds these days, now that we've elevated it to diety status... but the bar would be very low for hobbiests and enthusiasts to step in and offer a free alternative. Adopting such an architecture would go a long way in keeping the net free, in both senses of the word.
Unfortunately, there are powerful media interests who do not want to see a world of peers exchanging information, they want to see a new channel by which they can dump their dreck into our minds, while keeping us placidly on the couch where we belong. So, if such a change is going to occur (and with the release of FreeNet 0.5 the software is certainly available and usable), it will have to be because people like us, at the grass roots level, prefer an even playing field to the centralized, "read what we tell you" architecture cable companies, media cartels, Microsoft, and large content providors are tryig to foist upon us instead.
..First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Software may be extremely cheap but supporting it could consume quite a lot of IT man-hours.
Stop parrotting the Microsoft line about cost of use. As one who has worked in IT a very long time, and has administered large Windows networks, UNIX networks, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD networks, I can unequivocably say that the line you are spewing is both deceptive and wrong.
The cost of maintaining and supporting UNIX systems in general, and GNU/Linux systems in particular, is a tiny fraction of the cost to maintain and support the equivelent number of Windows systems. A tiny fraction. Maintaining 20 Windows NT/2k systems requires one full-time employee (one who is competent... if you're hiring new MSCEs off the street, double the number... at least... and hope for the best, because it is going to be a rocky ride). OTOH a single, competent person can easilly administer two hundred or more GNU/Linux systems in the same number of man-hours.
The only real cost is the changeover itself... retraining people on the new system, which costs time and money [a real cost, but one that is in generaly much lower than the propoganda from Redmond would have you believe. Again, they have an agenda, and it isn't your best interests they are concerned with]. Once the changeover is complete, the cost savings in every respect: time (user and administrator man-hours), cost (costs due to downtime are much lower, cost of software is negligable, cost of support is lower, etc.), and deployment logistics (no chasing proprietary, moving targets, no forced upgrades according to the vendor's schedule, not yours, etc.) are immense.
When Microsoft, or those who parrot them, start talking about how much it is going to cost to support open systems vs. their ever-changing, buggy, insecure, and downright shoddy wares, grab ahold of your wallet and back away, carefully, for they are lying to you outright, almost certainly as a prelude to taking more of your time and money. In any other business it would be called fraud.
Again, please let me know what you intend on replacing businesses and the free market with. Again, if it is government then you are a very wishful thinker. If it is some communal thingy, then please point to some large scale example that worked [heck, point to a small scale example even].
We need to get corporations out of government. They have no more business there than the government does running corporations.
Indeed, I never said we had to replace corporations with anything.
What we need to do is disempower corporations' (and other moneyed intersets') ability to influence, finance, even purchase elected officials, so that a democratically elected government once again represents the people who vote, rather than the corporations who select the menu of virtually identical choices from which the people are required to choose.
One man, one vote means the CEO of IBM should have exactly as much influence on the public agenda as myself or my grandmother. Until we change the system of legal, institutionalized bribery we have in place now, that will not be the case, and indeed the corporate fascism we live under today will continue to make a mockery of what our democracy once was.
I see no indication that the downward spiral we are in will slow anytime soon, and certainly it won't without the kind of reforms I just described. In the meantime, we can look forward to greater corporate influence in government, a continued erosion of our constitutional rights to support their agendas, the very real possibility that we will fight wars at their behest (giving a whole new meaning to the term "hostile takeover"), and last, but certainly not least, we can expect a growing level of contempt and disgust among the governed, until eventually it becomes untenable (placing governance devices into every home and every car, indeed into every walkman or portable radio, is a big step in that direction I might add, and something that would have been unthinkable prior to the corporate takeover of our government) and they revolt.
Once that point is reached, all bets on peaceful reform are out, and I sure as hope I do not live to see it.
That's up for negotiations to decide, isn't it? One side POTENTIALLY benefits from "free promotion", the other from having some filler between advertisements (or some other benefit).
Well, that is the theory. But that assumes both sides come to the table more or less as equals.
In reality, the media cartels have a vertical monopoly on content from the artist's gitarre strings to the listener's earphone, whether that path passes through the radio or television spectrum as a traditional broadcast, or through the retail chain as a shiny 6" disc.
The relationship is more complex than this (the cartels are currently crying foul over radio payola... not because of the payola, which gives them almost complete control over what we hear on the radio, but because of the prices they are currently having to pay. They are asking the government to step in and slap the otherside down, so they can maintain their control, but at bargain basement prices instead), but overall they enjoy a vertical monopoly they are loathe to give up.
mp3.com represented a threat to this, before the cartels coopted them into the regime. Web broadcasters represent a threat to this, as do p2p filesharing networks. Their concern isn't that their content is being played (indeed, they pay for exactly that privelege on traditional radio), their concern is that their content isn't the only thing being played and, worse, they have no way to control that.
Except, of course, to tell a webcaster to "play our play list or pay (exhorbitant) retail to broadcast our music", using their current market dominance to relegate those who say no to a tertiary status, and likely costing them the early listenership they need to stay in business.
Its not that they don't want webcasting, or that they expect to make a lot of money licensing webcasters. Its that they only want THEIR webcasters online, and no one with such a cartel/monopoly mindset will ever negotiate with a party such as the webcasters in good faith.
So, until copyright is reformed to no longer grant government entitlement monopolies, there will be no free market in which such negotiations can take place, indeed, no free market whatsoever, so one cannot reasonably expect acceptable results to arise from applying free market assumptions to what is essentially a planned and very precissely regulated market.
All cries of corporate fascism are a nifty combination of class warfare and attacking a straw man. Class warfare is obviously implied. The straw man is that corporations are made up of people, but are not easilly seen as people.
1) Class Warfar is not inherently implied. There are rich people who are not running corporations (royalty, hedonistic heirs, etc.), and their are quite poor people grunting away in the back rooms of many large corps, eagerly persuing corporate interests over human one's in their quest to rise up the promotional latter. The issue is orthogonal to economic and social class.
2) There is no strawman. Corporations are indeed made up of people, but so too was the apparatus of Stalinist Russia, the Khmere Rouge, the Tea and Opium monopolies of the British Empire, and more recently the Taliban and Al Q'aeda. The point that an organization, sinister or otherwise, is comprised of human beings is completely orthogonal to the question of whether or not that organization (or class of organizations) is detrimental or not, much less to the question I raised as to whether living under corporate fascism, as we apparently do today, is a good thing, or a terrible thing that we must, sooner or later, address (preferably sooner and peacefully, but one way or another, sooner or later, it will be addressed, and the longer we wait, the more likely the correction is to be violent one, something no one in their right mind would wish for. Alas, I am not terribly optimistic.)
3) Corporations have a very dehumanizing effect on people. In the context of business people routinely engage in character assassination, routinely make decisions destructive to human life (Montanto's poisoning of well water in southern US towns during the 1990s) and then exachange memos on how to deal with the legal and political fallout if and when they are caught, routinely make decisions that destroy lives for a marginal improvement in their bottom lines, etc. etc. Activities that people as individuals would never consider in any other context are routine, accepted, even encouraged in the corporate context, generally with the "it's business" justification attached.
If people in a corporate setting cease to behave as people, and instead behave as something less than human toward the fellow man, is it really inappropriate to criticize that, to point it out, and to point the finger at the apparent cause? And, when those same organizations wield undue influence over our government, completely subverting and negating our already fragile democracy in the process, is it really appropriate to dismiss that simply because the organization "is made up of people?"
Let me know what you propose that will replace corporations and provide the same or better services at the same or lower cost.
This is a false dichotomy. We are not faced with merely two choices: live under the current corporate fascist system that has supplanted our democracy, or do without corporations, and industrial products, altogether. Indeed, it can be shown that industrial products can exist without corporations, and that corporations can exist without supplanting the democractic governments beneath which they operate. The fact that this is no longer the case in the United States and western Europe does not mean it never was the case, nor does it mean it is an ideal impossible to achieve.
As much bashing as the U.S. congress has gotten here, I think they now deserve a conditional kudos for having a clue. I say conditional because they do hav a tendency to sneak in little easter eggs that come back to bite us in the butt.
As one who routinely, and scathingly, bashes congress here and elsewhere, I have to agree. This appears to have been a rare instance of insightful, intelligent, reasoned, and balanced governance, something we have seen far too little of lately.
I think this actually has a good chance of being quite successful, and school firewalls can easilly be designed to only access.kids.us, leaving the school surfing of the 'net relatively reasonably without having to employ censorship software whose motives are often suspect (they filter political as well as objectionable content, usually but not always with a pro-right-wing bias, etc.).
As long as the criteria, process, and oversight of the selection of material that is allowed in the.kids.us domain is transparent and public, this will work reasonably well. Yes, there will be politics and debate, but it will be open and, if not always fair, at least reasonably democratic (quite possibly reminiscent of local school board politics). If not, it will just become another dysfunctional censorship project run amok.
However, I am actually fairly optomistic that some lessons may have been learned, and it will be the former, not the latter, which happens. In any event, this is a good, well balanced start to solving a problem without, for once, trampling on either the constitution or the most promising new technology to emerge in a hundred years, namely the Internet itself.
The Federal Government provides nothing. It has no money of its own. Every cent comes from the taxpayer. There is no reason that a taxpayer should have to pay twice for any government service.
Exactly right.
Alternatively, taxes should be cut and all services should be offered on a pay-for-what-you-use system. Governments and NGOs need to learn that they can't have it both ways - that's nothing more than common theft.
It is corporate welfare, a natural consiquence of Corporate Fascism, and something that has been around for a very long time. It is the dirty little secret of the oligarchs... the same people decrying FDR and his New Deal, or any social welfare system whatsoever, and blaming that for all our economic and political woes, will with the next breath claim a need for a new stadium to be built, go to congress or the president for a new war to be fought to promote their business interests, insist on reselling government data to those very same taxpayers again (NOAA charts, anyone?), etc. etc. etc. These same oligarchs benefit from the largist corporate welfare state in the world, taking in orders of magnitude more money than all of the social welfare programs put together (however misguided many of the latter may be, they cost a pittance compared to the cost of corporate welfare).
Now, their rapacious appetites never to be sated, they have decided to rape our public commons, with us the people, as always, footing the bill.
Let the publishers buy the material from the taxpayers at cost, or a little above cost. I mean the real cost... the cost of the research, the cost of bureacratic overhead to underwrite the research, the cost of collecting, collating, and archiving the information, and so on.
See how long they can stay in business if they, instead of the taxpayer, start having to foot the bill for the product they are repackaging.
I think everyone will agree, very quickly, that tax funded scientific websites will become very preferable to these private robber barrons in promoting ubiquitous education and science, just as publicly funded libraries have proven themselves to be.
Sigh... Wake up America! We now live in a socialist society!
Actually no, we live under what could be politely termed "Corporate Faschism," in which the state is effectively owned, or controlled, by corporate interests, and the government serves and enforces those interests.
This is just another shining example of that ideal, brought to you by the 1978 Supreme Court and a 1996-2002 congress unwilling to give up legalized bribery in exchange for campaign finance reform. Get used to it, because anything short of an armed revolution isn't likely to change anything, and none of us have the stomach for revolt.
I'm really suprised that spam-busting hasn't become a bigger political issue. There realyl isn't a large pro-spam lobby, and any senator/rep who campaigned against spam ("I'm going to ban spam! Vote for me") would pick up not only a lot of techie votes, but votes from the general population as well - there isn't really a pro-spam segment of the population, either.
While I frequently take issue with the libertarian knee-jerk reaction against government involvement in just about any area, no matter how constructive it might be, in this particular case, much as I hate and loathe SPAM, I come down firmly on the libertarian side.
With Spam Assassin and other filtering packages we have the technology to take care of SPAM ourselves. We do not need the government passing new laws regulating how people communicate (even sleazeballs like Spammers), we can and should dump those people in the bit bucket ourselves, with our own software.
The anti-fraud laws are generally sufficient... the only additional legislation I would favor would be the ability for user's to sue for some amount of money (say, $500.00) for misuse of their system resources, but even that is a can of worms likely to be best left unopened (consider if someone sent SPAM out in your name, purporting to represent your company, and 10,000,000 people sued you for $500.00 for something you didn't do).
We have the means, and the tools, to deal with these lowlifes ourselves. Let the FTC chase down those committing fraud, and let us filter out the rest ourselves.
And the more important question, would the RIAA/MPAA ever let it happen? Imagine people selling discs of thousands of hours of music, or a whole year's popular films for $5 on the street.
When the Tech Industry creates its own, well funded PAC a la the NRA and starts outbribing the Hollywood Cartels in Washington. The tech industry is orders of magnitude larger than the consumer electronics industry, which in turn is an order of magnitude larger than Hollywood and the Recording industry put together.
Slashdot Mirror
RPM is the standard Linux package file format. If your distro aims to be Linux Standards Base compliant, it must have a mechanism of installing such files.
No. RPM is not the standard Linux package file format. The standard Linux package file format is the tarball, either gzipped (.tar.gz) or bzip2ed (.tar.bz2), or uncompressed (.tar).
RPM is a part of the LSB standard, which is just one of several Linux standards that are NOT universally accepted, nor should it be. RPM was placed in the LSB because of Red Hat politicking and in an IMHO very illegetimate effort to give them an edge over other distributions. Indeed, RPM's inclusion in the LSB is the main reason why the LSB should, IMHO, either be rectified to exclude it, ignored altogether, or (ideally) adhered to in other respects, with the RPM provision sumarilly ignored.
The pointlessness of including RPM in the LSB standard is underscored by the incompatability between Suse RPMs, Red Hat RPMs, and Mandrake RPMs (to name just three), and by the success of many products which have been packaged in proper, distribution-agnostic form (nvidia drivers being one such example, but by no means the only one).
Yes, superior distributions such as Debian and Gentoo can extract the necessary data from the cumbersome RPM format, but forcing them to jump through that particular Red Hat hoop is neither justified, nor desirable.
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
Correction.
There will never be innocents in the US ever again.
With this kind of information at their disposal anyone can be made to appear to be guilty of just about anything. Add secret trials and a general terror-hysteria to the mix and you get an environment that makes Orwell's vision almost pleasant by comparison.
I can finally go back to Gentoo as my primary OS! (Now if they would just release 1.4...)
emerge rsync (update the list of what's available)
emerge -up world (preview what's comming)
emerge -u world (do it!)
Gentoo isn't like other distros, in which you must wait for a release to stay current. With gentoo, the above three commands bring you up to what is current, which is generally close to the leading edge of the state of the art.
Oh, but you don't like the freeze and want all those new ebuilds waiting in the wings for the release? Fine, just set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" and you can jump past the pending release and play with all the experimental stuff coming down the pike.
I have one set of partitions for exactly that purpose, and one set for the more formal, stable stuff. And you know what? With this approach, I don't have to even care at all when, or even if, they're going to have a "final" release of 1.4. The only other distros I know which come close to this is Debian unstable and Source Mage. The former suffers from the Curse of Binary Distros (lag behind the state of the art by weeks or, in the case of xfree, months), the latter is quite good, comparable to gentoo in many respects (but a different approach, so like salad vs. steak, the choice is entirely up to your own sensibilities and taste).
It was so bad that with the advent of World War II...
Ugh! That was an ugly typo. That should read
"It was so bad that with the advent of World War I..."
World War ONE, not World War TWO. Sorry about any confusion.
It's a great idea, but out in the real world, people use commercial software. If kids aren't educated in how to use it, they won't be able to compete.
... I doubt a child moving from KDE to Windows or Mac, or visa versa, will be particularly traumatized.
... the kids are neither qualified nor equipped with the knowledge necessary to even begin to make such a decision.
... except in price, and in the opportunity they are afforded, at least theoretically, to look under the hood and see how things really work, and in the variety of different applications (and possibilities) available on a budget. In all these areas a school on a budget gets vastly more return from free software than it ever will from proprietary products, Microsoft spin and corporate politicking, not to mention slashdot astroturfing, aside.
What an utter load of crap.
First, I work in the "real world" and make a very acceptable living doing so. We deal with real money (millions of dollars) in a high risk environment (trading various products on various exchanges), and we cream our competition in no small part because of our use in free software.
So: myth number one - commercial software isn't the only thing used in the "real world" (as your statement disingenuously implies), free software is deployed very widely, and very successfully, throughout the "real" world.
Myth number two - education is only valuable if it precisely mimicks a trade school. It isn't particularly important if kids are tought literacy by reading Mark Twain or by reading A Corporate Yesman's Training Primer (except that the latter may preclude them from ever becoming a functioning human being), what is important is that they learn the skill of reading. Likewise, it makes no difference whether a child is taught Macintosh and OS X, Windows and Microsoft Office, or GNU/Linux and OpenOffice, so long as they learn the basics of computer literacy and how to use basic word processing applications. Indeed, the latter will allow the gifted children to excel beyond anything the proprietary offerings could (for they will be able to look under the hood and see how things work), while the average to challenged student will benefit from learning basic concepts they will have little difficulty applying to a different envoronment.
Indeed, kids once moved from Apple IIe to Atari, to MS DOS, to Macintosh (in any order) with little difficulty
Myth three: kids should decide what is best. Nonsense. Parents and educators should make that decision
Kids should be exposed to computers. The more capabilities they can be exposed to, the better, and the more equipment and software available for them to explore and learn from, the better. It makes little difference whether that is Linux, Windows, or Mac
And perhaps more importantly, here's what James Dyson has to say, which is essentially the same thing: (Dyson is the famous inventor of the phenominally successful and innovative Dyson vacuum cleaners that have vacuumed up the competition virtually everywhere but the US, where they are just now becoming available.)
... so vehemently he refused to patent his own inventions, to the great benefit of America and the world.
... indeed, you will be required to go through logical contortions that will make the Vatican's debate on science and astronomy look positively enlightened in comparison.
... it has merely been such an oft-repeated party line that patents are good which has blinded many people's ability to even question the assumption.
... however, if the FSF does have an official stance on patents, and if that stance opposes patents, they are, with John von Neuman, Benjamin Franklin, and a great many others, in very, very good, and very enlightened, company.
Ahem. Nice appeal to authority (an authority with a vested interest in the patent system, I might add). Although appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, since you've lent yourself the air of expertise by making such an appeal, I will rebutte with Benjamin Franklin himself, who invented among other things bifocals, the catheter, the franklin stove, lightning rods, and other things too numerous to mention. He opposed patents
A great many other scientists and economists felt similarly, including John von Neuman.
I know many of you who like to benefit from government entitlements such as monopolies, either directly or through parasitical means (e.g. by practicing intellectual property law) are loathe to give up your priveleges, regardless of the cost to society, but the fact remains that when a new idea is tied up for twenty years, most progress on refining, developing, and building upon that idea is stunted, even eliminated.
Indeed, history is a far better reference than the opinons of scientists and inventors past and present, and history does not favor the pro-patent argument at all. Indeed, I cannot think of a single instance where the patent system led to a creation or invention that wouldn't have otherwise been developed, but it is repleate with the stories of inventors denied access to their own inventions because someone else who developed a similiar idea independently won the footrace to the patent office, and is it repleate with examples of stifled technologies resulting directly from patents.
The airplane is one such example: the Wright Brothers did the first wind tunnel experiments, figured out the basics of aerodynamics, and got a well deserved patent on the process (well deserved being defined by patent law, for their idea was new, innovative, and very non-obvious at the time). Yet because of their patent others who were making vast improvements on the design, like Curtis, were stifled in their efforts (Germany and other countries had no such problem, not recognizing the American patent, and their technology pulled ahead of ours dramatically). It was so bad that with the advent of World War II the United States Government, in an unprecendented act, took the patent, opened it up to all competitors, and granted the Wright Brothers a flat 1% royalty, in order to spur competition and the technological improvements it brings. It was a tacit admission that the US patent on airplanes granted to the Wright Brothers, who were certainly deserving, had in fact stifled any further development dramatically.
Indeed, capitalism is predicated upon the premise that competition, not government entitlement, spurs progress. You can believe in capitalism or you can believe in patents, but you cannot believe in both and remain self-consistent
The stifling effects of patents are most obvious in the case of software patents, because that is a field we are all inventors in, we all understand intimately, and we all work with. But the effect is just pronounced in other areas of endeavor
Nice try on the ad homonem against the FSF by the way
Piracy in all its forms is not a technical problem, but a social problem.
... in excess of 20 years.
... most people's time is more valuable to them than the money saved infringing on the copyright and burning a copy of the DVD ... despite the existence of tools that make doing so easy, even trivial, on just about every platform.
... most people find the hassle of ripping, copying, and downloading the one or two good songs off an otherwise crappy CD, and the time spent doing so, well offset by the savings and satisfaction of not being suckered into paying full price for a disc full of crap, merely for the privelege of listening to one or two decent songs they'll soon grow tired of anyway.
... a boycott alone is a lonely thing indeed).
Absolutely right.
Technical solutions to social problems will never succeed. Build a better lock? Someone will build a better lockpick. Unless the social problem is dealt with, the technical solutions will continue to fail.
People have had, to their perceptions at least, the ability to make "perfect" copies of music and video for a very long time
Yes, the audio and videophile will quickly point out the problems with generational loss on both cassette tape and VHS/Hi8, but to the average person who wants to build up a video library of Seinfeld and Friends episodes, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation videos are perfectly fine (and no, sorry, macrovision is no barrier even for the unititiated. Thank you for playing).
Yet Hollywood makes millions on VHS tapes, and millions more on DVDs that are, I must admit despite my boycott, reasonably priced. Why? Because the hassle factor of burning a copied DVD outweights the pricetag
Music, on the other hand, is a different story. The CDs cost as much or more than the DVDs, with vastly less value and content. The hassle factor of copying a good CD is such that a good CD is more likely to be purchased than copied, at least by those who can reasonably afford the purchase, but so much of the mindless dreck being sold by the RIAA is sold on shiny discs with one or two decent tunes, and the remaining tracks utter crap (even by their low standards). The result
Hollywood, for all of its evil and stupidity on the DRM front, at least understands that offering their customers added value gets them to go out and buy DVDs in droves (much as I wish it were otherwise
All of which underscores that, not only will Palladium and DRM wreck the home tech market, much as copy protection killed consumer DAT and cost the home electronics industry a big boom they would have otherwise seen, but, in the end, it won't work anyway.
The problem is a social problem, but that social problem includes not just copyright infringers who are doing something they shouldn't, but also the purveyors of shoddy product that don't want to be forced to give their customers better value or better product, who have already been convicted of price fixing, payola, and other cartel behaviors more than once, producers who are arguably more responsible for the current p2p file trading phenominon than anyone else.
There will always be someone who wants to get the new movie release beforehand, who doesn't mind spending the hours online downloading the latest spiderman cam or LOTR dvd rip, but these people have always existed, will always exist, and don't impact anyone's bottom line appreciably. It is the rest of us, who are used to buying and copying our own stuff (for backup, for ease of use, to listen to in the car, on the boat, in the plane, etc.) who will stop buying this crap if it means ubuiquitous surveillance of our listening habits, and cripping our favorite, expensive toys, that they should worry about. We're the ones who are going to stop buying this stuff if Hollywood and the RIAA get their way, and that's a market downturn they aren't likely to recover from.
i.e. it has propellers on the wings, just like the pinion feathers on the wings of a bird. It fles like a bird, therefore.
... the full flight one shows the plane stopping and hovering a couple of times ... one of the nice features of having no stall that my plane, alas, cannot emulate.
Does that not make it an ornithopter? Do the wings flap?
Ornithopter wings flap. The fan wing does not flap, so it is in no way an ornithopter (nor does it resemble one). It is a fixed wing with a horizontal rotor inside which pulls air across the lifting surface and creates a vortex which lifts the plane. Think of a big combine built into the wing, spinning quickly, and you get a rough idea. The videos are pretty cool
It isn't a new "principle" of aviation by any means, but it is a new and very promising design. Unfortunately the patent will probably limit design improvements by anyone other than the original inventor for the next twenty years or so, but there will be some innovative uses and improvements despite that, and in twenty years, once the patent expires, there will doubtless by quite a hayday of new designs.
All you have done is taken the same servers and moved them around the country. Now you'll need to have contracts with 10 times as many service providers and oh by the way we now need a system that can synchronize dynamic content across all of them. Well done - you clearly understood the problem.
Yes, I did very clearly understand the problem.
You, obviously, do not. Nor do you understand what peer-to-peer means, beyond a catchy buzzword you associate with mp3 filetrading, nor do you appear to understand what the word "cache" means.
Ironic, that slashdot would itself point a link to a solid rebuttal to the myth that p2p and freenet can only inherently serve static content, or that even if that were true, the 99.9% of the web that is static should remain hamstrung by the needs of a few dynamic sites, and the plethora of needlessly dynamic sites written by webmasters who should have know better, but couldn't resist using sledge hammers to kill flies no matter how it bloats the traffic on the net.
p2p, be it freenet, you-serve, or some other implimentation, is the future of the web if we want scalability with shared (controlled) costs and the possibility of the internet remaining a free medium where ideas are exchanged, rather than having it devolve into a glorified home shopping network with content pushed down our throats because running a popular server is too costly for the average Joe.
All you have done is taken the same servers and moved them around the country. Now you'll need to have contracts with 10 times as many service providers and oh by the way we now need a system that can synchronize dynamic content across all of them. Well done - you clearly understood the problem.
Yes, I did very clearly understand the problem.
You, obviously, do not. Nor do you understand what peer-to-peer means, beyond a catchy buzzword you associate with mp3 filetrading, nor do you appear to understand what the word "cache" means.
Content is only moved as it is demanded. Synchronization can simply follow the hash keys to wherever the material is cached. Oh, you want to update it? Fine, push out a new node with a new key, cross reference it to the old key and expire the other key. Some people may still get the old data until the new content propogates, but at least they can get it.
And if you want truly dynamic content that changes moment by moment, with no propogation delay, (a la' an idealized (read: not real world) game server), then I humbly suggest the Internet is not the medium you are looking for. Or, alternatively, stick with your client-server architecture (which doesn't deliver on that promise for any significant loads anyway, without serious and costly engineering, and watch your site crawl and your costs skyrocket, while the rest of the more intelligently designed web runs circules around you. Good luck trying to compete with that...
Microsoft and the copyright cartels have monopolies that prevent the people from having such a choice. Microsoft's monopoly may be ill-gotten, and perhaps a more lawful Justice Department, free from the stain of presidential bribes, might have brought it into check, but the copyright cartels are granted monopolies by government fiat, and sustained by a regime of copyright law designed expressly for that purpose.
The Founding Fathers didn't give a rat's ass about whether you can get a weekly free beer at a bar. Their freedom of speech was to ensure that political speech wouldn't be silenced.
The constitution does not limit freedom of speech to political speech. It is clearly written and intended to protect all speech. As for the founding father's "giving a rats ass" I suggest you take a remidial course in basic US history.
You demonstrate the achilles heel of the Libertarian philosophy, namely their inability to differentiate between individual freedom, which the constitution was designed and intended to protect, and corporate freedom to run roughshod over those same individuals, which the founding fathers were nearly unanimous in opposing and even fearing. That they could never have forseen the corporate fascism to which our once great democracy has degenerated, and the willful attempt of Microsoft and Hollywood (through Palladium and DRM, as well as other measures) to usurp governance responsibilities (such as policing and enforcing the law) from its rightful authorities, namely a democractically elected government of, by, and for the people, is hardly their fault, but implying that the would have endorsed such a thing is an insult both to them and to the intellegence of anyone reading your post.
It wasn't their collassal stupidity in creating information monopolies and the concept of thought as property, although certainly humans would have likely ascended beyond their vulnerable planet decades, perhaps centuries, prior to their extinction had they not so crippled their ability to progress and advance, even to think clearly, so completely.
It wasn't even their collassal foolishness in persuing defunct philosophies and clouding their political judgement with outdated and disproven myths regarding nearly every facet of their lives, from the creation of the cosmos to their basic, devolved ethic which was summarized quite succinctly as "greed is good."
Nor was it the removal of their most basic liberties and freedoms (in those portions of the planet that, even for a brief time, had such things), through a misapplication of the libertarian notion of freedom that was extended to explicitly exclude constititional limitations and protections of individuals from search and seizure and self incrimination, to instead encompass the "freedom" of private corporations to impose their will on the masses, to turn the relatively primitive digital computing equipment humans had belatedly invented into ubiquitious law enforcement surveillance, tracking, and monitoring devices through technologies that went by such misnomers as "Palladium," "trusted computing," and "DRM."
No, in the end, mother nature deleted humanity with extreme prejudice because, despite having shown then, demonstrated within a single, short human lifetime the damage meteor impacts could do (using a lifeless, large brown dwarf in their system as a demonstration target), and despite the plethora of other evidence she made available to these remarkably dense, short sighted, arrogant, and bigoted creatures, and despite having been given far more time to develop the technologies and procedures to protect themselves from such events (a time vastly greater than most sapient speicies require to reach the same level of development), they chose, willfully and knowingly, to stop even considering the possibility, to ban all discussion of it, to relegate the concern to the same sort of social tabus they applied to rational discussion of other absurdities, such as religion and politics.
Such a willfully stupid, irresponsible, and foolish species simply couldn't be tolerated, even by one who tolerates so much: mother nature.
So she finally killed humankind with the very object they avoided discussing, considering, talking or speculating about, because she simply could no longer abide such willful, deliberate, and premeditated stupidity. Better to wipe the slate clean and begin again, then allow such mindless dreck even another day of existence beneath the sun.
Most scholars believe the universe is probably better off without such a mentally, socially, and morally retarded species polluting the noosphere. As most are quick to point out, however, humanity's extinction was almost certainly the result of a conscious decision on their part to simply turn their back on the reality which surrounded them, a willful act, and that therefor our gratitude at their demise belongs to rightfully to them.
It is with that acknowledgement that we, the vastly less stupid, foolish, and willfully blind extend a warn thank you to humanity, for the favor they did on behalf of the rest of us in voluntarilly removing themselves from the evolutionary process in a hitherto unprecedented display of conscious, willful, deliberate stupidity. A more shining example of how to turn one's intelligence into a counter-survival trait has never been seen before for since.
Bravo, humankind, bravo.
The fastest computer in the world will always be limited to how quickly data may be fed to it. One way or another, a human will have to direct this operation
... and that speed is far slower than the speed with which information can be fed into computers (as is well documented by everything from math tests to aviation accidents). So instead of a sense of smell it has a sense of "1 Gbit ethernet" through which a torrent of data is poured. So what ... the information is there, and can be interpreted, i.e. in theory thought can occur ... probably at speeds, and possibly at levels of cogitation, unreachable by human beings.
The world is full of semi-autonomous computing systems. Your example from "math class" is a total non-sequitur.
Absolutely right.
Not only that, he misses the point that humans are limited by the speed with which data can be fed into them as well
The real question that is likely to be answered is
"Do Americans care more about the freedoms for which hundreds of thousands of their forfather's died, or the Bread and Circuses Hollywood offers?"
In truth, the question will likely become more generic when this dreck is exported to the rest of the world:
"Will people care more about the bread and Circuses America's Hollywood offers them, or the freedoms they, their parents, and their grandparents have died trying to secure for them?"
Depressingly, the former will likely fall into the "Take away any liberties you like, but don't take away my Seinfeld!" here in the states. However, with hardware made in Taiwan and GNU/Linux displacing Windows in governments (and to some degree on the street) in most of the non-American world, the answer the rest of the world gives to the question will be very intersting, and I suspect a very rude surprise to the copyright cartels of New York and Hollywood, and those software and hardware purveyors that kowtow to them.
Reading the story you find out this is not a national ID system.
/. already (ie: retinal scanning) they can pass these people by so they can do their jobs quickly, rather than waiting in a security line everyday just to go to work.
... NOT. I have a friend who flies 737s for United, and while he occasionally gets annoyed (and has some absurd anectdotes from) going through security, he is quick to point out that allowing one group to bypass the security checks creates a catastrophic point of failure, where all a terrorist has to do is get a job doing grunt work for an airline, and they can walze right past security.
... if it hits me, I die, but the odds are very good it won't hit me, and I'm not going to waste time and energy being afraid of it.
... and I fear it much, much more than I fear some illiterate fanatics from camel-fucking country (apologies in advance to the moderate majorities of those places for my tongue in cheeck jab at American prejudices).
Not yet. But we already know, indeed have it on public record, that they want a national ID system, that that is their ultimate goal, and while they may not admit to this being a first step, it certainly appears very much like a first step in that direction.
"Those of you with our voluntary ID will have convinience, while those of you without our voluntary ID will be stand in line, be thoroughly scanned, perhaps even patted down or more invasively searched. Welcome to the New World Order, citizen!" How many will choose the latter, because the former is even more distressing than being tracked everywhere, particularly if you travel frequently?
This system is not for you, the everyday individual. This is for making sure people like stewards on airlines don't have to go through security checks everyday to see if they're carrying a bomb. Using new authentication technology that's been discussed on
Great idea
Even now it is a problem, with everyone going through security, but at least the existing system, while imperfect, makes the logistic of smuggling weapons and expolisves on board very non-trivial.
This approach isn't going to improve security, indeeed it will do the opposite, by creating an exploitable exception to security.
What it will facilitate is the government tracking (some) of its citizens. Frankly, I'd rather suffer a 9/11 event once each year and take my chances (my car would still be 17 times more likely to kill me), than to turn over that kind of power to my government.
Indeed, terrorism doesn't particularly frighten me (and I work across the street from the Sears Tower, a big target if there ever was one). It is like lightning
Now, our government on the other hand, is ubiquitious. The odds of its behavior impacting me are 100%
Yahoo is right to do this. They provide a service at some expense and have to recoup their costs.
... the more popular the data becomes, the more widedly it is distributed, the more available it becomes, all the while adding no additional cost to the providor. The cost instead is shared in tiny increments by everyone, in a barter system of essentially perfect effeciency.
... for there is nothing preventing a static copy being preserved on your own system, to be reloaded into the net when the old copy expires.
... greed seems to know no reasonable bounds these days, now that we've elevated it to diety status ... but the bar would be very low for hobbiests and enthusiasts to step in and offer a free alternative. Adopting such an architecture would go a long way in keeping the net free, in both senses of the word.
This is true of anyone offering a service. Now, perhaps the costs (e.g. for my own web page, http://expressivefreedom.org) is low enough that the cost is simply donated, but in that sense that cost is recouped from my day job.
The current client server architecture of the web (which BTW stands in start contrast to the underlying peer-to-peer architecture of the internet itself) places almost all of the cost burden on the publisher. The more popular a web site (or email service, or IRC server, or IM servcie, or what have you) the more bandwidth they need to buy, the more servers they need to cluster together, etc. They have no choice but to recoup their costs or stop offering the service, and if advertising is no longer sufficient (costs have outstripped that line of revinue), then customers will start to have to pony up.
But what is often ignored is that there are architectures where the costs are shared and distributed.
USENET was an early implimentation of this (still costly, because ALL the data is copied to ALL of the distributed servers), where everyone doesn't go to ONE server, they go to ONE of THOUSANDS. USENET still carries more data than any single website (even groups.google.com, which is merely an archive, not a stream of information).
FreeNet is a better implimentation, where data which is in demand is replicated to caches closer (in terms of routing metrics) to those wishing to see the data. The originating site bears only the cost of making the inforamtion available (and providing a small portion of their local drive and bandwidth to cache other unrelated data)
Restructure the web on a P2P basis, as FreeNet is doing, and you don't just get the Anonymouty and Uncensorability it was originally designed for, you get the scalability and low cost (regardless of popularity) of participation which the web in its current, client server form, will never enjoy.
FreeNet does dump old information no longer in demand (least popular, oldest first), a la USENET, but that is easily corrected by the one intersted in providing said information
Were Yahoo running on such an architecture, it is likely that their add revinues alone would be more than enough to cover all their costs, and there would be no need to begin charging for their other free services. They might choose to anyway
Unfortunately, there are powerful media interests who do not want to see a world of peers exchanging information, they want to see a new channel by which they can dump their dreck into our minds, while keeping us placidly on the couch where we belong. So, if such a change is going to occur (and with the release of FreeNet 0.5 the software is certainly available and usable), it will have to be because people like us, at the grass roots level, prefer an even playing field to the centralized, "read what we tell you" architecture cable companies, media cartels, Microsoft, and large content providors are tryig to foist upon us instead.
..First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Software may be extremely cheap but supporting it could consume quite a lot of IT man-hours.
... if you're hiring new MSCEs off the street, double the number ... at least ... and hope for the best, because it is going to be a rocky ride). OTOH a single, competent person can easilly administer two hundred or more GNU/Linux systems in the same number of man-hours.
... retraining people on the new system, which costs time and money [a real cost, but one that is in generaly much lower than the propoganda from Redmond would have you believe. Again, they have an agenda, and it isn't your best interests they are concerned with]. Once the changeover is complete, the cost savings in every respect: time (user and administrator man-hours), cost (costs due to downtime are much lower, cost of software is negligable, cost of support is lower, etc.), and deployment logistics (no chasing proprietary, moving targets, no forced upgrades according to the vendor's schedule, not yours, etc.) are immense.
Stop parrotting the Microsoft line about cost of use. As one who has worked in IT a very long time, and has administered large Windows networks, UNIX networks, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD networks, I can unequivocably say that the line you are spewing is both deceptive and wrong.
The cost of maintaining and supporting UNIX systems in general, and GNU/Linux systems in particular, is a tiny fraction of the cost to maintain and support the equivelent number of Windows systems. A tiny fraction. Maintaining 20 Windows NT/2k systems requires one full-time employee (one who is competent
The only real cost is the changeover itself
When Microsoft, or those who parrot them, start talking about how much it is going to cost to support open systems vs. their ever-changing, buggy, insecure, and downright shoddy wares, grab ahold of your wallet and back away, carefully, for they are lying to you outright, almost certainly as a prelude to taking more of your time and money. In any other business it would be called fraud.
Again, please let me know what you intend on replacing businesses and the free market with. Again, if it is government then you are a very wishful thinker. If it is some communal thingy, then please point to some large scale example that worked [heck, point to a small scale example even].
We need to get corporations out of government. They have no more business there than the government does running corporations.
Indeed, I never said we had to replace corporations with anything.
What we need to do is disempower corporations' (and other moneyed intersets') ability to influence, finance, even purchase elected officials, so that a democratically elected government once again represents the people who vote, rather than the corporations who select the menu of virtually identical choices from which the people are required to choose.
One man, one vote means the CEO of IBM should have exactly as much influence on the public agenda as myself or my grandmother. Until we change the system of legal, institutionalized bribery we have in place now, that will not be the case, and indeed the corporate fascism we live under today will continue to make a mockery of what our democracy once was.
I see no indication that the downward spiral we are in will slow anytime soon, and certainly it won't without the kind of reforms I just described. In the meantime, we can look forward to greater corporate influence in government, a continued erosion of our constitutional rights to support their agendas, the very real possibility that we will fight wars at their behest (giving a whole new meaning to the term "hostile takeover"), and last, but certainly not least, we can expect a growing level of contempt and disgust among the governed, until eventually it becomes untenable (placing governance devices into every home and every car, indeed into every walkman or portable radio, is a big step in that direction I might add, and something that would have been unthinkable prior to the corporate takeover of our government) and they revolt.
Once that point is reached, all bets on peaceful reform are out, and I sure as hope I do not live to see it.
That's up for negotiations to decide, isn't it? One side POTENTIALLY benefits from "free promotion", the other from having some filler between advertisements (or some other benefit).
... not because of the payola, which gives them almost complete control over what we hear on the radio, but because of the prices they are currently having to pay. They are asking the government to step in and slap the otherside down, so they can maintain their control, but at bargain basement prices instead), but overall they enjoy a vertical monopoly they are loathe to give up.
Well, that is the theory. But that assumes both sides come to the table more or less as equals.
In reality, the media cartels have a vertical monopoly on content from the artist's gitarre strings to the listener's earphone, whether that path passes through the radio or television spectrum as a traditional broadcast, or through the retail chain as a shiny 6" disc.
The relationship is more complex than this (the cartels are currently crying foul over radio payola
mp3.com represented a threat to this, before the cartels coopted them into the regime. Web broadcasters represent a threat to this, as do p2p filesharing networks. Their concern isn't that their content is being played (indeed, they pay for exactly that privelege on traditional radio), their concern is that their content isn't the only thing being played and, worse, they have no way to control that.
Except, of course, to tell a webcaster to "play our play list or pay (exhorbitant) retail to broadcast our music", using their current market dominance to relegate those who say no to a tertiary status, and likely costing them the early listenership they need to stay in business.
Its not that they don't want webcasting, or that they expect to make a lot of money licensing webcasters. Its that they only want THEIR webcasters online, and no one with such a cartel/monopoly mindset will ever negotiate with a party such as the webcasters in good faith.
So, until copyright is reformed to no longer grant government entitlement monopolies, there will be no free market in which such negotiations can take place, indeed, no free market whatsoever, so one cannot reasonably expect acceptable results to arise from applying free market assumptions to what is essentially a planned and very precissely regulated market.
All cries of corporate fascism are a nifty combination of class warfare and attacking a straw man. Class warfare is obviously implied. The straw man is that corporations are made up of people, but are not easilly seen as people.
1) Class Warfar is not inherently implied. There are rich people who are not running corporations (royalty, hedonistic heirs, etc.), and their are quite poor people grunting away in the back rooms of many large corps, eagerly persuing corporate interests over human one's in their quest to rise up the promotional latter. The issue is orthogonal to economic and social class.
2) There is no strawman. Corporations are indeed made up of people, but so too was the apparatus of Stalinist Russia, the Khmere Rouge, the Tea and Opium monopolies of the British Empire, and more recently the Taliban and Al Q'aeda. The point that an organization, sinister or otherwise, is comprised of human beings is completely orthogonal to the question of whether or not that organization (or class of organizations) is detrimental or not, much less to the question I raised as to whether living under corporate fascism, as we apparently do today, is a good thing, or a terrible thing that we must, sooner or later, address (preferably sooner and peacefully, but one way or another, sooner or later, it will be addressed, and the longer we wait, the more likely the correction is to be violent one, something no one in their right mind would wish for. Alas, I am not terribly optimistic.)
3) Corporations have a very dehumanizing effect on people. In the context of business people routinely engage in character assassination, routinely make decisions destructive to human life (Montanto's poisoning of well water in southern US towns during the 1990s) and then exachange memos on how to deal with the legal and political fallout if and when they are caught, routinely make decisions that destroy lives for a marginal improvement in their bottom lines, etc. etc. Activities that people as individuals would never consider in any other context are routine, accepted, even encouraged in the corporate context, generally with the "it's business" justification attached.
If people in a corporate setting cease to behave as people, and instead behave as something less than human toward the fellow man, is it really inappropriate to criticize that, to point it out, and to point the finger at the apparent cause? And, when those same organizations wield undue influence over our government, completely subverting and negating our already fragile democracy in the process, is it really appropriate to dismiss that simply because the organization "is made up of people?"
Let me know what you propose that will replace corporations and provide the same or better services at the same or lower cost.
This is a false dichotomy. We are not faced with merely two choices: live under the current corporate fascist system that has supplanted our democracy, or do without corporations, and industrial products, altogether. Indeed, it can be shown that industrial products can exist without corporations, and that corporations can exist without supplanting the democractic governments beneath which they operate. The fact that this is no longer the case in the United States and western Europe does not mean it never was the case, nor does it mean it is an ideal impossible to achieve.
As much bashing as the U.S. congress has gotten here, I think they now deserve a conditional kudos for having a clue. I say conditional because they do hav a tendency to sneak in little easter eggs that come back to bite us in the butt.
.kids.us, leaving the school surfing of the 'net relatively reasonably without having to employ censorship software whose motives are often suspect (they filter political as well as objectionable content, usually but not always with a pro-right-wing bias, etc.).
.kids.us domain is transparent and public, this will work reasonably well. Yes, there will be politics and debate, but it will be open and, if not always fair, at least reasonably democratic (quite possibly reminiscent of local school board politics). If not, it will just become another dysfunctional censorship project run amok.
As one who routinely, and scathingly, bashes congress here and elsewhere, I have to agree. This appears to have been a rare instance of insightful, intelligent, reasoned, and balanced governance, something we have seen far too little of lately.
I think this actually has a good chance of being quite successful, and school firewalls can easilly be designed to only access
As long as the criteria, process, and oversight of the selection of material that is allowed in the
However, I am actually fairly optomistic that some lessons may have been learned, and it will be the former, not the latter, which happens. In any event, this is a good, well balanced start to solving a problem without, for once, trampling on either the constitution or the most promising new technology to emerge in a hundred years, namely the Internet itself.
The Federal Government provides nothing. It has no money of its own. Every cent comes from the taxpayer. There is no reason that a taxpayer should have to pay twice for any government service.
... the same people decrying FDR and his New Deal, or any social welfare system whatsoever, and blaming that for all our economic and political woes, will with the next breath claim a need for a new stadium to be built, go to congress or the president for a new war to be fought to promote their business interests, insist on reselling government data to those very same taxpayers again (NOAA charts, anyone?), etc. etc. etc. These same oligarchs benefit from the largist corporate welfare state in the world, taking in orders of magnitude more money than all of the social welfare programs put together (however misguided many of the latter may be, they cost a pittance compared to the cost of corporate welfare).
... the cost of the research, the cost of bureacratic overhead to underwrite the research, the cost of collecting, collating, and archiving the information, and so on.
Exactly right.
Alternatively, taxes should be cut and all services should be offered on a pay-for-what-you-use system. Governments and NGOs need to learn that they can't have it both ways - that's nothing more than common theft.
It is corporate welfare, a natural consiquence of Corporate Fascism, and something that has been around for a very long time. It is the dirty little secret of the oligarchs
Now, their rapacious appetites never to be sated, they have decided to rape our public commons, with us the people, as always, footing the bill.
Let the publishers buy the material from the taxpayers at cost, or a little above cost. I mean the real cost
See how long they can stay in business if they, instead of the taxpayer, start having to foot the bill for the product they are repackaging.
I think everyone will agree, very quickly, that tax funded scientific websites will become very preferable to these private robber barrons in promoting ubiquitous education and science, just as publicly funded libraries have proven themselves to be.
Sigh... Wake up America! We now live in a socialist society!
Actually no, we live under what could be politely termed "Corporate Faschism," in which the state is effectively owned, or controlled, by corporate interests, and the government serves and enforces those interests.
This is just another shining example of that ideal, brought to you by the 1978 Supreme Court and a 1996-2002 congress unwilling to give up legalized bribery in exchange for campaign finance reform. Get used to it, because anything short of an armed revolution isn't likely to change anything, and none of us have the stomach for revolt.
I'm really suprised that spam-busting hasn't become a bigger political issue. There realyl isn't a large pro-spam lobby, and any senator/rep who campaigned against spam ("I'm going to ban spam! Vote for me") would pick up not only a lot of techie votes, but votes from the general population as well - there isn't really a pro-spam segment of the population, either.
... the only additional legislation I would favor would be the ability for user's to sue for some amount of money (say, $500.00) for misuse of their system resources, but even that is a can of worms likely to be best left unopened (consider if someone sent SPAM out in your name, purporting to represent your company, and 10,000,000 people sued you for $500.00 for something you didn't do).
While I frequently take issue with the libertarian knee-jerk reaction against government involvement in just about any area, no matter how constructive it might be, in this particular case, much as I hate and loathe SPAM, I come down firmly on the libertarian side.
With Spam Assassin and other filtering packages we have the technology to take care of SPAM ourselves. We do not need the government passing new laws regulating how people communicate (even sleazeballs like Spammers), we can and should dump those people in the bit bucket ourselves, with our own software.
The anti-fraud laws are generally sufficient
We have the means, and the tools, to deal with these lowlifes ourselves. Let the FTC chase down those committing fraud, and let us filter out the rest ourselves.
And the more important question, would the RIAA/MPAA ever let it happen? Imagine people selling discs of thousands of hours of music, or a whole year's popular films for $5 on the street.
When the Tech Industry creates its own, well funded PAC a la the NRA and starts outbribing the Hollywood Cartels in Washington. The tech industry is orders of magnitude larger than the consumer electronics industry, which in turn is an order of magnitude larger than Hollywood and the Recording industry put together.