I love Linux, and use it at home on my only desktop machine, but I would never want to force someone to use it.
I love democracy, and use it at home, but I would never want to force someone to use it, unless they are my government.
This is about transparency in government, and the assurance that public documents (birth certificates, deeds, tax rolls, etc.) are as accessible in 50 years as they are today, and not held hostage by anyone, be it Microsoft or RMS.
It isn't enough to have open data storage formats, because transparency also requires that we know what is being done with the data in question. This becomes a particularly potent issue if software is ever used for voting, choosing who is drafted should the draft ever be reinstated, choosing who is audited by the IRS, or, as another mentioned, defining how our personal information is protected from others.
Transparency can not be achieved in any of these areas unless the source code is available and open to public scruitiny.
Microsoft lackeys and their moderation points aside, Michael and his sometimes over the top rhetoric aside, Tim O'Reilly is simply wrong on this issue, as are all those who advocate "choice" for those who have power over the rest of us.
Our government doesn't get to choose if and when it would like to exchange democracy for autocracy. It should not get to choose if and when it would like to exchange openness and accessibility to information for proprietary software and data formats. Stick with the latter, and you end up with fiascos like the NOAA[1].
I am simply amazed that so many people think this is trying to force OSS or Free Software on 'everybody.' Nothing could be farther from the truth... it is merely an attempt to force opennenss on government, to protect citizen's access to information irrespective of what operating system or user software they use, be it Free Software, Apple, or, God forbid, Microsoft.
[1]where you have to pay $100 or more for a $3 CDROM of all the marine charts that were made with your tax dollars, because some politician/beuarocrat signed a sweetheart deal giving a private company exclusive rights to resell our public data.
Even though I couldn't stand Wesley Crusher on STNG, I think Wil Wheaton is a great dude.
I agree. After having read some of his comments and articles here on slashdot, I've come to really like the dude. He seems to be a genuinely nice, interesting person, who doesn't need an image consultant to make him that way, and that is, I suspect, a rarity in Hollywood.
I'm bummed for him but glad he's not in the movie all at the same time. Somebody needs to write him into a better role somewhere because I really do hope he finds more success.
I disagree. The later Wes (the one who got set back a year at the Star Fleet Academy and ultimately dropped out to go hang out with the Indians on whatever-that-soon-to-be-Cardassian planet was, and then became the Traveller's apprentice) was becoming a very interesting character. That could have been explored in a variety of ways... I suspect an older, wiser Wesley Crusher who has the larger view, and the ability to unify space, time, and thought with almost Q-like prowess wouldn't be anybody's lackey, not even Star Fleets. Forget the double-secret Star Fleet agent nonesense. Wes would be more likely to be that external, powerful force, kindly disposed toward Star Fleet but far beyond their petty concerns, and unwilling to interfere in Star Fleet's natural evolution.
Indeed, his character provides an interesting opportunity to look at the Prime Directive from the other point of view... as he refuses to use his powers to fend off a Borg attack which the Fed loses, for example. "These years of darkness are critical to the evolution of the Federation and humanity" or something like that, while the fleet burns near the outer edges of Sol's Oort cloud...
Tut tut. If you sink to their level, you're no better than they are.
If the carrot of being allowed to incorporate, with all of the legal and financial benefits that brings, is not sufficient for the aforementioned sub-human filth to behave ethically, and they are able to purchase or pervert legislation to permit said behavior, then the only thing that remains is the stick, be it social stigmatization of the human beings which comprise the sub-human filth that is the corporate entity in question, or the use of more direct methods by the rest of humanity to protect its own interests against the aforementioned sub-human filth.
In any event, defending your intersts against an aggressor is never "sinking to their level," christian turn-your-cheeck, grunt-and-bear-it rhetoric notwithstanding.
They have an opportunity to earn money thanks to stupid patent laws and they try to take advantage of it.
Yes, I can and do blame them.
Human beings are expected to have ethics, and to treat one another with a semblance thereof even when the law doesn't manage to anticipate every possible permutation of human interaction, or indeed, even when the law is clearly flawed.
Sub-human filth that lack such ethics and/or use the law to cause deliberate harm to others for their own banal benefit deserve to be treated exactly as what they are: sub-human filth.
Mutation must be how porn stars can take down a 12 inch Kielbasa on Howard Stern. Do you think those researches doing the mice gene implant can take a porn star throat gene and place it in my wifes throat?:)
Just make sure your wife doen't get the other porn star genes along with it... you know, the genes that make them suddenly become obese astrologers when they get too old, or too ugly, to keep their day jobs.
The Law Goes Further Than That: It is Yours
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Shrinkwrapped Books
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'd just trash it and forget it. It's illegal to send unsolicited items and then try to collect for it - just because they slap a boilerplate on something that arrives unsolicited in your mail you can still just treat it like any bulk business mail, crapcan it.
The law in the USA goes even further (unless the last fifteen years of anti-consumer legislation has repealed it, I admit I don't keep current on all the latest consumer news): if someone sends you an item in the mail unsolicited it belongs to you.[1] Not only can they not tack on restrictions a la this EULA nonsense, they can't even demand you return it.
It is yours, to keep, to shitcan, to donate to a public library (if it is a book), in short, to do with whatever you want.
[1]There are obvious exceptions, such as when it is addressed to someone else and mailed to your address by accident. But, in cases where it is addressed to "Current Occupant", your name, or no name at all, and your address, the item in question is a non-refundable gift to you, with no legal obligation attached whatsoever.
Unfortunately, MP3.com hasn't produced any great victories over the RIAA. Like it or not people are generaly too cheap to pay for anything that they can get for free. If you don't believe me look back on all of the "hell no I won't pay..." posts that were posted right here on/. when Mandrake requested help.
And yet, I own several CDs of artists I discovered, and purchased, through mp3.com.
Even more interesting, the Free Blender Campaign just passed the 80,000 mark, or 80% of the amount needed to purchase and GPL the source code from the Blender holding company.
Clearly people are willing to pay, when they see a benefit, indeed, even when they can get things for free. With Mandrake, many didn't see a benefit (though even there, many others did).
The sad fact is that most people are too self centered and short sited to pay money unless forced to do so.
There are other solutions. The fundamental design of the internet, for example, shares the cost of propogating information between the sender and the receiver. In other words, the basic design of TCP/IP is P2P in nature. Unfortunately, the HTTP protocol was designed in a client-server manner, placing the bulk of the cost on the providor and making the cost not scale gracefully as demand rises. Ditto for ftp.
Contrast that with SMTP and even NNTP, as well as FreeNet. The "Free Speech" aspect of the internet depends in no small part on the "Free Beer" aspect of the internet, or, more correctly, on the balance of cost shared between sender and receiver (i.e. if "free speech" is expensive, only the wealthy will have freedom of speech, and the value of that freedom will become negligable to the common person).
Once FreeNet, or another P2P application level infrastructure is in place, with solid search capabilities and HTML-like facilities, we may be able to return to a state of affairs where costs are shared naturally, and popular sites like slashdot are no longer incredibly expensive to run because bandwidth costs are shared and distributed across the entire network, among all those who read the content equally.
This is why P2P is so important, and must be preserved from the depradations of the Copyright Cartels. Not for inane, juvinile file trading, but to fix the bottlenecks of the internet and to keep the medium free and accessible for all to use, regardless of wealth.
I happen to have found one of the rare awesome girls that thinks spending thousands on a ring instead of a down payment on a house is stupid.
That's not as rare as you think, or rather, as rare as DeBeers has paid Hollywood to make you think.
Most women I know are pretty together and feel likewise... while they'd like to have the ring, there are a lot more material things they'd like to have a lot more, and a house is usually at the top of the list.
Here's the thing. Trademark requires that the holder of the trademark actively defend their mark.
Yeah, well, they are far too late.
'Godzilla' is a song by Blue Oeyster Cult that is a good twenty-plus year old.
'Mozilla' is the name of a browser that has been in widespread use since at least the mid-nineteen nineties.
'zilla as a suffix has been used in colloqual English for at least as long.
If they were going to complain about the likes of Davezilla or Mozilla, they should have done so eight years ago, before the terms came into common usage, not after.
Anyway, he said that when he was getting started, he thought that Libertarianism would most appeal to business people and the wealthy. He found out that they simply weren't interested--because often their wealth stemmed from government regulations, or at least government regulations today protected their wealth/livelyhoods from competition.
I think this is spot on, and an ugly truth behind much of government's paternal regulation. BUT, having said that, there is a very, very large blindspot in the Libertarian philosophy in my opinion, and that is:
the ability of companies, of corporations, of organizations, to wield power, influence, and authority as great or even greater than that of any government, and such organizations are not constrained by constitutional law.
This is a problem, and right now the only solution is the imperfect, and often abused, use of government regulation of industry. At least the government is democratically elected, Florida election shinnannigans notwithstanding. Corporations are not democratic in the least, and if a citizen is to be under the heel of one or the other, far better to be under the heel of a government you can remove from office in a few years.
That having been said, the best solution is to have constitutional guarantees that protect individual rights from centers of authority apply equally, irrespective of whether those centers of authority stem from civil government, corporate governance, religious or political affiliation.
In other words, it shouldn't just be Congress that is prohibited from making a law restricting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., it should be any organization whatsoever. Ditto with every other protected right and liberty.
Individual rights, freedoms, and liberties must take precidence over everything else, including the society's choice of economic systems and even system of governance itself.
Until that fundamental problem is addressed, Libertarianism, by taking what controls there are off of corporate America, is proposing a cure many times worse than the problem.
Address that issue effectively, and Libertariansim may well be on to something. But as long as libertarianism elevates the capitalist economic system to the same level of importance as the consitutional republic ("democratic" in today's parlacce) political systems and the human rights and liberties it is designed to protect, the entire philosophy will effectively have a poison pill included with it.
Individual freedom, liberty, and constitutional democracy is orthogonal to economic systems, and mixing the two together undermines the far more important stance the Libertarian's could be taking: that of defending and protecting individual liberty and constitutional law from both the politicians and the large, multinational corporations, both of whome seek to subvert it.
Until and unless that ever changes, I will respectfully continue to decline becoming a Libertarian.
Re:Time to move to Savannah
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Linuxworld Fun
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have two projects on SourceForge. Please tell me when exactly should I expect problems. I hadn't single SourceForge problem yet.
Not exactly into being proactive, are we.
The concerns are (a) difficulty to extract meta-data from SF (already mentioned), (b) the uncertainty of whether or not the free (beer) SF service will be around for the forseeable future, even for non-commercial, free projects, and (c) the uncertainly as to whether or not VA will be around to offer the service, in any form, for the forseeable future.
Contrast this with the FSF, which is a charity that has been around since the eighties (at least), isn't going to 'go under' like the rest of the dot bomb anytime soon, if ever, and will never pull the kinds of stunts SF does to make obtaining and extracting one's information more difficult over time, or to change the conditions of use.
It isn't about predicting trouble with certainty, it is about recognizing a vulnerability and doing something about it before the problem can arise.
But it is your project, so if you prefer to wait until trouble actually arises, that is your perogative, and in the end, your fault.
Bruse was not arguing that the computer technology isn't there, he was stating the talent inherent in projects such as the one you mention is not hampered by the technology. The guy working on Rustboy is very talented and it shows by him not having to use the latest and greatest computer technology to tell his story.
The error in Bruce's assumption is the notion that everyone who has talent, or even those most talented, are already working for the studios. In other words, that our society is already benefiting from all of the talent out there through the existing media cartels, and that this tool therefor isn't going to add anything of significance to our culture, at least in the area of film making.
This simply ins't true. For every artist who claws their way into the cartel through talent, dumb luck, or, most often, connections with those already on the inside, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of equally talented people who never make it and are never heard or seen.
Making these tools generally available won't mean everyone is suddenly a Gilliam or a Spielberg, but it will mean that many of those thousands of talented people whose work we never see, indeed most often is never created, will be seen, will be available, and will be able to compete against the offerings of the studios themselves, a significant portion of which I might point out suck as badly as any amateur material I've seen.
Who cares if this means a million people produce crap I'd never want to see. If it means 10 people (or, more likely, a couple of thousand) produce good, interesting, innovative material, then our society and our culture have experienced a windfall in artistic work.
There is also commercial opportunity there (even if all the artists were to release their stuff under Free Licenses of one sort or another, something which I suspect some would do but many would not), for someone to review such works and help those interested find the wheat among the chaff.
This assumes, of course, that the common person is allowed to have an unfettered, general purpose computer or a bidirectional internet connection, something which those very same cartels are actively trying to prevent.
damn it, I hit submit when I meant to hit preview.
Even if only 1 in 100,000 has the story telling talent to put together a good film, that would amount to 2,800 potent competitors to the media cartels.
should have read:
Even if only 1 in 100,000 has the story telling talent to put together a good film, that would amount to 2,800 potent competitors to the media cartels in the U.S. alone.
... isn't the "rampant piracy" Red Herring they've been feeding the press and their tame politicians in Washington, D.C., it is the possibility that anyone who does have a story to tell will be able to make a quality movie with nothing more than their home PC and a little time.
Suddenly we don't need studios, we don't need actors, and we don't need tens or hundreds of millions to produce a blockbuster movie. And with the internet to distribute the material on, we don't need their distribution network of cinemas either.
The most important talent they rely on is not skill in computer imagery, but skill in telling a compelling story using all of the tools of the visual idiom. This is what most people don't have, and it is an essential element to producing good film.
Like musicians using home-studios to record music, without talent this will go largely unusued, or, more likely, there will be a lot of less-than-good material out there... a state of affairs the mimicks the current, cartel-controlled situation rather well, actually. Even if only 1 in 100,000 has the story telling talent to put together a good film, that would amount to 2,800 potent competitors to the media cartels.
Musicians really don't need million dollar studios anymore to produce an album, and while this means a lot of junk is pressed onto CD, it also means a lot of musicians are able to produce and market their music outside of the RIAA's cartel, through mp3.com and elsewhere. Hollywood doesn't fear the napstersization of their medium nearly as much as they fear the mp3.com-ization of it, and competition with a few thousand talented people not on their payroll.
This, I think, is why we are experiencing such an onslought of attempts through legislation and back door regulation via the FCC and a little known "standards" body called the BPDG to take both the internet, and general computers, out of the hands of private citizens.
It isn't about 'piracy,' it is about competition, and they don't fear competition from 'everybody' so much as they fear general access to the tools, which means those talented persons not a part of the cartels would be able to compete for viewership and marketshare on a level playing field with the big studios.
We aren't ridding society of these jobs, just morphing them into different areas.
This has always been true, with every technological innovation. I'm sure horse dealers felt threatened by the invention of the wheel, when a cart carrying eight people could be pulled by two horses (instead of the 8 that would have been necessary for each person to ride). Most (but not all! There are still horses and buggies for hobby/tourist purposes around) Buggy whip manufacturers had to find new work with the invention of the automobile, radio felt threatened by the advent of TV, and all the old media and copyright cartels feel threatened by the Internet.
Yet, in each of these cases, the jobs lost in one area were created in another, and anyone willing to learn a new skill could migrate to a new profession.
Unfortunately this flexibility has been lost on the recording industry, Hollywood, and indeed on the media and copyright cartels in general, and this inflexibility to some degree seems to permeate much of the corporate culture that surrounds the profession.
Take your thought, and the thought of the article itself, to its logical (and, IMHO very desireable, conclusion): CGI will allow anyone with a good story to tell the ability to animate and create a movie, perhaps a blockbuster movie, in the comfornt and convinience of their home, on their home PC. Not today, but given moores law, almost certainly within 5-10 years.
Think of what that means. The cartels suddenly have competition from every direction, indeed, from everyone with a creative bent and a personal PC powerful enough to render animations in a reasonable time (today, a few big clusters, in five years, nearly every home PC). Assuming the software improves over time in the same fashion it has to date, these animations may well be indistinguishable from real actors on real sets.
Soon anyone will be able to make a movie on their own PC, and distribute it to a world-wide audience via the internet. That is, assuming there remains an internet such as we know it, and individuals are still allowed to possess general purpose computers, both of which are assumptions we can no longer take for granted.
Is it any wonder Hollywood is using the Red Herring of "piracy" to push on so many fronts (legislative via several bills including Hollings', back door regulatory via the FCC ( http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/ FCC-02-231A1.pdf )and the lessor known, but perhaps more dangerous, BPDG, and so forth, for the banning of individual, non-corporate possession of general purpose computers and the crippling of the internet.
This isn't about the "horror" of people being able to download and store television shows and movies... anyone with a TV antenna and a VCR can already do that, and has been able to for twenty years... this is about preemting the possibility of any competition from private citizens now and forever.
The fact that, in the process, they will be able to take away our ability to record television programs for the first time in twenty years, supreme court rulings notwithstanding, is merely icing on the cake.
Times are changing, not dissapearing!
Yes, but if we are complacent, they will be changing in very, very negative ways for anyone working with or interested in digital technology or artistic freedom. There is a steam roller bearing down on us in Washington D.C. and in the conference rooms where UN and international treaties are negotiated, and we are for the most part behaving as though we are oblivious to this unpleasant fact.
Although my ATI 8500 should be able to drive my HDTV-ready monitor at 1920x1200 resolution, I've yet to be able to coax the X driver into delivering that resolution through the DVI interface.
However, using the Nvidia binary-only X 4.2 drivers I have no trouble driving the monitor in 1920x1280 24-bit color resolution with a GeForce4 Ti4600.
Such a setup should work fine for a relatively low-resolution plasma like the one you are considering, at 1366x768... indeed, I suspect you could easilly coax that out of an ATI 8500 or ATI 7500 under XFree 4.2, and almost certainly if you use ATI's drivers.
If you're going to spend that kind of money on a plasma, though, I'd wait a couple of years, until they support true 1080i at least. 768 lines of resolution is analogous to 1024x768 resolution on a computer (yes, I know you get more horizontal pixels in a 16:9 format, my monitor is 16:10 so I'm intimately familiar with that), so keep in mind that you are buying an expensive product whose resolution will likely be disappointing to you in a couple or three years.
Welcome to the world of intergenerational warfare. I'll bet no science fiction novel you ever read prepared you for this.
Under Nixon an older, reactionary generation declared a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on). Indeed, the prohibition of drugs and the actions that have been taken to try and stamp out its use has caused far greater harm, in both a humanitarian and economic sense, than the abuse of the substances themselves ever did or could have.
A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors.
Now, with the new War on Copyright Infringement, we are about to target today's youth, who trade their music, their movies, their videotapes online, instead of via cassette tape the way us older folk did when we were in high school and college.
Another front on an intergenerational war, between the dinasaurs of the Jack Valenti Generation of Greed and the emerging, technically savvy information generation they seek to repress and quite possibly destroy.
This escalation will likely claim even more victims, fill our prisons even more with people even less inclined to violence than the many drug offendors who account for half our inmate population today.
Worse, we'll have to listen to even more self-righteous tripe along the lines "but these fans are stealing bread and milk from the mouths of Lars and Britney," and "we'll win the war on copyright infringement! These pirates will never see the light of day again! God Bless America!"
What's next, a broken egg on a frying pan with the words "This represents your Life on MP3?"
Make no mistake, this is intergenerational warfare, waged by the parents and grandparents upon the children who have chosen to live differently than their elders, indeed, differently than their elders can comprehend. As we draw closer to the technological singuarity I think we can expect ever more extreme examples of the same.
Hell, I haven't even finished writing a novel set in 2057 that depicts exactly these sorts of events. How close is one to the Singualarity I wonder, when real world events overtake science fiction faster than it can be written?
What, you're going to blame this fiasco on one age group being myopic
Absolutely not. The wrongdoers and politicians span several generations.
My point was how commonplace the rhetoric of "free market says, so everyone should just cave and do" has become. This is a relatively new development, one that flies in the face of economic theory, free markets, free societies, and a functional society, and one that would have been laughed into submission a few short years ago.
These days one rarely hears a rebuttal, so I begin to wonder why that is and speculate that there is perhaps a group of people who do not grasp capitalism, perhaps because the only form of it they've been exposed to is the corporate perversion of it we've had throughout the late 80s, 90's, and early naughties.
Nothing more was implied or intended than that.
Oh, and if any one generation were to take a big chunck of the blame for the philosophical myopia and malaise that has engulfed so much of the American psyche over the last twenty years, I would most certainly rank my generation at the top of that list, though, as you rightly point out, the blame is a little more widely spread than that.
congrats to all involved, and kudos to the CEO for realizing he was in over his head. nothing worse than a CEO that doesn't know how to be a CEO.
Sure there is. One who knows how to be a CEO according to today's business standards... who will pilfer the once profitable company and exit the steaming ruins of the once profitable company pocketing millions.
There are a lot of things worse than a well meaning CEO in over their head (they at least can learn), one who knows exactly what their doing and is looking out for themselves more than they are the company.
And in today's marketplace, what percentage of the resumes/CVs crossing their desk do you think will be from competent, well meaning CEOs? 1%? 10%? I doubt much higher than that, and I'm an optimist.
Because they were such a bunch of raving Puritans nobody in Europe would tolerate them?
heh!
No, those were the ones that left the small, insignificant but incredibly charming and progressive country, most of which is below see level and kept dry by dikes, for the shores of America. You know, the ones that got kicked out of the UK, then got kicked out of Holland (which takes talent, given how tolerant the Dutch are).
His, like mine, probably just left that little mound in the Atlantic because they didn't like it much.
Of course, after two hundred years, we've managed to turn this nice continent, or at least our portion of it, into a bigger, but otherwise similiar, dung heap. Alas, now there really isn't anywhere left to emigrate to, so like y'all over there, we too can do little more than wallow in what we're stuck with.
Well, in America, it wouldn't be law. I don't know about Europe, but here in America, a law like that would have a snowballs chance in hell of getting approved.
Ahem. Don't count on it, and above all do not be complacent!
What do you thing the DMCA was a step toward.
Or what the SSSCA, DRM, etc. are an attempt to do now.
The US government has historically taken every new communications medium out of the hands of the common man, whether it was the telephone (a mandated monopoly for AT&T that lasted 70 years and put dozens of competitors out of business, overnight), radio, television (the FCC taking the once-free airwaves and restricting them to use by only those who could afford the payoff... I mean, "fees", yeah, that's right, "fees"), etc.
All in the fine tradition of the British Crown, who invented copyright for the sole purpose of controlling who would, and would not, be permitted to own and operate a printing press, lest something the Crown disapproved of be disseminated to the masses or, even worse, the masses be able to communicate en mass amongst themselves.
Make no mistake about it, the Copyright Cartels and their tame politicians are making every effort to do the same to the Internet right now, under the guise of copyright protection, digital rights management, and laws making the disconnection of a controviersial website the default mode, rather than an exception requiring signficiant judicial review and perhaps even a trial beforehand (as was the case pre-DMCA).
Do nothing, do not speak out, and they will likely succeed, with nary a concern for the economic impact that would have on the next several generations of people. Just ask any of the many entrepreneurs who at one time competed against AT&T, before AT&T managed to buy legislation granting them a monopoly... oh wait, you can't. Almost all of those people were dead long before the government rethought its decision, and broke up the monopoly they themselves had created.
What about France suing eBay to take items off their web site hosted on American soil, or any number of student laws, suits, etc going on with countries suing/charging US firms for wrong doing on the Internet?
Yeah, Mr. Thompson is quite a hypocrit all through the article.
He rightly decries the ability of America to impose censorship on the net, then calls for the ability to enforce local laws restricting access to objectionable information on the net in the next sentence. He decries the DMCA, then wants to build in infrastructure that would facilitate DRM type technologies into the network protocol a paragraph later (IIRC).
He resembles a Romulan when he claims the net was invented in Europe (it was invented in the United States. HTML, and what we call 'the web' was invented as a collaboration between CERN and the University of Illinois, long after the internet, email, gopher, and USENET had been in use by thousands throughout the US and world) and they should somehow 'take it back.'
In short, throughout the article he raises legitimate criticisms of the excesses of American politicians and law, then advocates building a new network to allow European governments to do the same exact kinds of things, indeed, to facilitate it.
I'm as down on the anti-government regulation of big business, capitalism ueber alles myopia of the Libertarians as anyone, but that hardly negates their far more legitimate stance with respect to individual liberty, or the need to respect the basic tenants of the US constitution (which, by the way, would negate much of his criticism of the US if we actually adhered to that document).
In summary, he basically is saying "take the internet out of the hands of the imperialistic americans and those anarchistic people, and put them in the hands of our local regulators and governments where they belong!"
Feh. I hope the network gets built just so their is more redundancy in the infrastructure itself, but good luck talking a wired world into divorcing itself from one another so your local goons can institute more of their censorship and their regulations instead. Short of mandated change, I doubt they'll get too many takers, even in Europe, no matter how much nationalistic anti-American Euro-pride gets trotted out during the marketing campaign.
His logical fallacy is , of course, thinking that the US has a monopoly on this kind of thing. [emphesis added]
Assuming America has a "monopoly" on abusive potical, technical, or jurisprudence wrt to the net isn't a logical fallacy, it is a factual fallacy. The logic is sound, the assumption made upon which the argument is based is what is inaccurate. That isn't the same thing as a logical fallacy, such as ad homonem attacks, circular reasoning, appeals to authority, and the like.
All that having been said, I found nothing in that article that seemed to imply America has a monopoly on this behavior, just that, under the current Copyright Cartels (is there any doubt in anyone's mind who is calling the shots in D.C. these days?), we, or rather America, are by far the worst offendors.
One of the original strengths in the design of the internet is its ability to route around damage. Copyright, censorship, physical outage, political repression... all these things represent damage as far as the internet, a system designed to propogate and share information, is concerned.
If the Europeans want to build some redundancy into the routing and infrastructure of the net by building a network that can sustain itself independently, should America drop off the net completely, more power to them. The more redundancy, and the more capacity there is for the Internet to route around the kind of damage government censors, politicians, and copyright holders create, the better.
In any case, nothing illegal has happened, so it's probably nothing more than a lot of mud-slinging, using the current climate in the investment community as leverage to get handfuls of "the really *good* mud".
Midslinging or not, the dirt is real, and the practice is corrupt (and undermines the viability of the company in question) whether or not it is VCs trying to do an end run around the intent of the law to pull some of their investment out of the company after the fact, or (as seems just as likely) its a little petty pilfering by the board of directors of the company kitty.
Voting to give oneself unsecured loans, voting to "forgive" oneself one's loan, or what have you is deceptive and amounts to legalized, institutional theft from the company and its stock holders (if any). Arguing that its just a clever dodge to avoid taxes otherwise owed for compensation, that the rest of us not privy to the board, and such insider perks, would end up paying certainly doesn't elevate the act any, no matter how much distate one might have for taxes.
In short, it is sleazy in any context. The fact that it is as common as you imply, and for as many varied "legitimate" reasons as you imply, makes me doubly glad to be invested in real estate and not in the stock market.
Free Markets Require Competition to Exist
on
PowerPC Goes 64 bit
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Sorry, but market forces are now as powerful as performance metrics. Apple no longer benefits from not being x86...cost being the biggest issue, and most of the time now they can't even claim a performance gain.
Intel won the CPU war on desktop PCs. Look to servers, handhelds, game consoles, etc. for the the next CPU battle worth fighting.
Until we have a monoculture in all our products, and have eliminated every trace of competition or choice, everywhere?
You waive your hands at the "invisible hand" of the free market as an argument for competitors to not even try competing for a portion of the marketplace, in effect advocating the replacement of a market with competitors with an intel monopoly.
I suspect you do not even see the contradiction in your argument, so let me spell it out for you. Monopolies are antithetical to a functional Free Market. Without competition the entire basis for capitalism functioning in any worthwhile capacity at all is removed and no free market exists. In short, without competition capitalism dies, and the free market "authority" you are alluding to becomes meaningless.
It astonishes me how people can argue "the market says" with one breath and "everyone should cave and give company X a monopoly" with the next. Indeed, one is forced to wonder if much of the current economic chaos isn't a result of an entire graduating class, perhaps an entire generation, not understanding even a little of economics in any context other than the inflated (and as it turns out largely fradulant) boom of the 1990s.
I won't even get into the fact that free markets are but one force, one tool, necessary for a functioning society or culture, another point often ignored in our western myopia, but that is a discussion for another thread.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Linux, and use it at home on my only desktop machine, but I would never want to force someone to use it.
... it is merely an attempt to force opennenss on government, to protect citizen's access to information irrespective of what operating system or user software they use, be it Free Software, Apple, or, God forbid, Microsoft.
I love democracy, and use it at home, but I would never want to force someone to use it, unless they are my government.
This is about transparency in government, and the assurance that public documents (birth certificates, deeds, tax rolls, etc.) are as accessible in 50 years as they are today, and not held hostage by anyone, be it Microsoft or RMS.
It isn't enough to have open data storage formats, because transparency also requires that we know what is being done with the data in question. This becomes a particularly potent issue if software is ever used for voting, choosing who is drafted should the draft ever be reinstated, choosing who is audited by the IRS, or, as another mentioned, defining how our personal information is protected from others.
Transparency can not be achieved in any of these areas unless the source code is available and open to public scruitiny.
Microsoft lackeys and their moderation points aside, Michael and his sometimes over the top rhetoric aside, Tim O'Reilly is simply wrong on this issue, as are all those who advocate "choice" for those who have power over the rest of us.
Our government doesn't get to choose if and when it would like to exchange democracy for autocracy. It should not get to choose if and when it would like to exchange openness and accessibility to information for proprietary software and data formats. Stick with the latter, and you end up with fiascos like the NOAA[1].
I am simply amazed that so many people think this is trying to force OSS or Free Software on 'everybody.' Nothing could be farther from the truth
[1]where you have to pay $100 or more for a $3 CDROM of all the marine charts that were made with your tax dollars, because some politician/beuarocrat signed a sweetheart deal giving a private company exclusive rights to resell our public data.
Even though I couldn't stand Wesley Crusher on STNG, I think Wil Wheaton is a great dude.
... I suspect an older, wiser Wesley Crusher who has the larger view, and the ability to unify space, time, and thought with almost Q-like prowess wouldn't be anybody's lackey, not even Star Fleets. Forget the double-secret Star Fleet agent nonesense. Wes would be more likely to be that external, powerful force, kindly disposed toward Star Fleet but far beyond their petty concerns, and unwilling to interfere in Star Fleet's natural evolution.
... as he refuses to use his powers to fend off a Borg attack which the Fed loses, for example. "These years of darkness are critical to the evolution of the Federation and humanity" or something like that, while the fleet burns near the outer edges of Sol's Oort cloud...
I agree. After having read some of his comments and articles here on slashdot, I've come to really like the dude. He seems to be a genuinely nice, interesting person, who doesn't need an image consultant to make him that way, and that is, I suspect, a rarity in Hollywood.
I'm bummed for him but glad he's not in the movie all at the same time. Somebody needs to write him into a better role somewhere because I really do hope he finds more success.
I disagree. The later Wes (the one who got set back a year at the Star Fleet Academy and ultimately dropped out to go hang out with the Indians on whatever-that-soon-to-be-Cardassian planet was, and then became the Traveller's apprentice) was becoming a very interesting character. That could have been explored in a variety of ways
Indeed, his character provides an interesting opportunity to look at the Prime Directive from the other point of view
Tut tut. If you sink to their level, you're no better than they are.
If the carrot of being allowed to incorporate, with all of the legal and financial benefits that brings, is not sufficient for the aforementioned sub-human filth to behave ethically, and they are able to purchase or pervert legislation to permit said behavior, then the only thing that remains is the stick, be it social stigmatization of the human beings which comprise the sub-human filth that is the corporate entity in question, or the use of more direct methods by the rest of humanity to protect its own interests against the aforementioned sub-human filth.
In any event, defending your intersts against an aggressor is never "sinking to their level," christian turn-your-cheeck, grunt-and-bear-it rhetoric notwithstanding.
They have an opportunity to earn money thanks to stupid patent laws and they try to take advantage of it.
Yes, I can and do blame them.
Human beings are expected to have ethics, and to treat one another with a semblance thereof even when the law doesn't manage to anticipate every possible permutation of human interaction, or indeed, even when the law is clearly flawed.
Sub-human filth that lack such ethics and/or use the law to cause deliberate harm to others for their own banal benefit deserve to be treated exactly as what they are: sub-human filth.
Mutation must be how porn stars can take down a 12 inch Kielbasa on Howard Stern. Do you think those researches doing the mice gene implant can take a porn star throat gene and place it in my wifes throat? :)
... you know, the genes that make them suddenly become obese astrologers when they get too old, or too ugly, to keep their day jobs.
Just make sure your wife doen't get the other porn star genes along with it
I'd just trash it and forget it. It's illegal to send unsolicited items and then try to collect for it - just because they slap a boilerplate on something that arrives unsolicited in your mail you can still just treat it like any bulk business mail, crapcan it.
The law in the USA goes even further (unless the last fifteen years of anti-consumer legislation has repealed it, I admit I don't keep current on all the latest consumer news): if someone sends you an item in the mail unsolicited it belongs to you.[1] Not only can they not tack on restrictions a la this EULA nonsense, they can't even demand you return it.
It is yours, to keep, to shitcan, to donate to a public library (if it is a book), in short, to do with whatever you want.
[1]There are obvious exceptions, such as when it is addressed to someone else and mailed to your address by accident. But, in cases where it is addressed to "Current Occupant", your name, or no name at all, and your address, the item in question is a non-refundable gift to you, with no legal obligation attached whatsoever.
Unfortunately, MP3.com hasn't produced any great victories over the RIAA. Like it or not people are generaly too cheap to pay for anything that they can get for free. If you don't believe me look back on all of the "hell no I won't pay..." posts that were posted right here on /. when Mandrake requested help.
And yet, I own several CDs of artists I discovered, and purchased, through mp3.com.
Even more interesting, the Free Blender Campaign just passed the 80,000 mark, or 80% of the amount needed to purchase and GPL the source code from the Blender holding company.
Clearly people are willing to pay, when they see a benefit, indeed, even when they can get things for free. With Mandrake, many didn't see a benefit (though even there, many others did).
The sad fact is that most people are too self centered and short sited to pay money unless forced to do so.
There are other solutions. The fundamental design of the internet, for example, shares the cost of propogating information between the sender and the receiver. In other words, the basic design of TCP/IP is P2P in nature. Unfortunately, the HTTP protocol was designed in a client-server manner, placing the bulk of the cost on the providor and making the cost not scale gracefully as demand rises. Ditto for ftp.
Contrast that with SMTP and even NNTP, as well as FreeNet. The "Free Speech" aspect of the internet depends in no small part on the "Free Beer" aspect of the internet, or, more correctly, on the balance of cost shared between sender and receiver (i.e. if "free speech" is expensive, only the wealthy will have freedom of speech, and the value of that freedom will become negligable to the common person).
Once FreeNet, or another P2P application level infrastructure is in place, with solid search capabilities and HTML-like facilities, we may be able to return to a state of affairs where costs are shared naturally, and popular sites like slashdot are no longer incredibly expensive to run because bandwidth costs are shared and distributed across the entire network, among all those who read the content equally.
This is why P2P is so important, and must be preserved from the depradations of the Copyright Cartels. Not for inane, juvinile file trading, but to fix the bottlenecks of the internet and to keep the medium free and accessible for all to use, regardless of wealth.
I happen to have found one of the rare awesome girls that thinks spending thousands on a ring instead of a down payment on a house is stupid.
... while they'd like to have the ring, there are a lot more material things they'd like to have a lot more, and a house is usually at the top of the list.
That's not as rare as you think, or rather, as rare as DeBeers has paid Hollywood to make you think.
Most women I know are pretty together and feel likewise
Here's the thing. Trademark requires that the holder of the trademark actively defend their mark.
Yeah, well, they are far too late.
'Godzilla' is a song by Blue Oeyster Cult that is a good twenty-plus year old.
'Mozilla' is the name of a browser that has been in widespread use since at least the mid-nineteen nineties.
'zilla as a suffix has been used in colloqual English for at least as long.
If they were going to complain about the likes of Davezilla or Mozilla, they should have done so eight years ago, before the terms came into common usage, not after.
Anyway, he said that when he was getting started, he thought that Libertarianism would most appeal to business people and the wealthy. He found out that they simply weren't interested--because often their wealth stemmed from government regulations, or at least government regulations today protected their wealth/livelyhoods from competition.
I think this is spot on, and an ugly truth behind much of government's paternal regulation. BUT, having said that, there is a very, very large blindspot in the Libertarian philosophy in my opinion, and that is:
the ability of companies, of corporations, of organizations, to wield power, influence, and authority as great or even greater than that of any government, and such organizations are not constrained by constitutional law.
This is a problem, and right now the only solution is the imperfect, and often abused, use of government regulation of industry. At least the government is democratically elected, Florida election shinnannigans notwithstanding. Corporations are not democratic in the least, and if a citizen is to be under the heel of one or the other, far better to be under the heel of a government you can remove from office in a few years.
That having been said, the best solution is to have constitutional guarantees that protect individual rights from centers of authority apply equally, irrespective of whether those centers of authority stem from civil government, corporate governance, religious or political affiliation.
In other words, it shouldn't just be Congress that is prohibited from making a law restricting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., it should be any organization whatsoever. Ditto with every other protected right and liberty.
Individual rights, freedoms, and liberties must take precidence over everything else, including the society's choice of economic systems and even system of governance itself.
Until that fundamental problem is addressed, Libertarianism, by taking what controls there are off of corporate America, is proposing a cure many times worse than the problem.
Address that issue effectively, and Libertariansim may well be on to something. But as long as libertarianism elevates the capitalist economic system to the same level of importance as the consitutional republic ("democratic" in today's parlacce) political systems and the human rights and liberties it is designed to protect, the entire philosophy will effectively have a poison pill included with it.
Individual freedom, liberty, and constitutional democracy is orthogonal to economic systems, and mixing the two together undermines the far more important stance the Libertarian's could be taking: that of defending and protecting individual liberty and constitutional law from both the politicians and the large, multinational corporations, both of whome seek to subvert it.
Until and unless that ever changes, I will respectfully continue to decline becoming a Libertarian.
I have two projects on SourceForge. Please tell me when exactly should I expect problems. I hadn't single SourceForge problem yet.
Not exactly into being proactive, are we.
The concerns are (a) difficulty to extract meta-data from SF (already mentioned), (b) the uncertainty of whether or not the free (beer) SF service will be around for the forseeable future, even for non-commercial, free projects, and (c) the uncertainly as to whether or not VA will be around to offer the service, in any form, for the forseeable future.
Contrast this with the FSF, which is a charity that has been around since the eighties (at least), isn't going to 'go under' like the rest of the dot bomb anytime soon, if ever, and will never pull the kinds of stunts SF does to make obtaining and extracting one's information more difficult over time, or to change the conditions of use.
It isn't about predicting trouble with certainty, it is about recognizing a vulnerability and doing something about it before the problem can arise.
But it is your project, so if you prefer to wait until trouble actually arises, that is your perogative, and in the end, your fault.
Bruse was not arguing that the computer technology isn't there, he was stating the talent inherent in projects such as the one you mention is not hampered by the technology. The guy working on Rustboy is very talented and it shows by him not having to use the latest and greatest computer technology to tell his story.
The error in Bruce's assumption is the notion that everyone who has talent, or even those most talented, are already working for the studios. In other words, that our society is already benefiting from all of the talent out there through the existing media cartels, and that this tool therefor isn't going to add anything of significance to our culture, at least in the area of film making.
This simply ins't true. For every artist who claws their way into the cartel through talent, dumb luck, or, most often, connections with those already on the inside, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of equally talented people who never make it and are never heard or seen.
Making these tools generally available won't mean everyone is suddenly a Gilliam or a Spielberg, but it will mean that many of those thousands of talented people whose work we never see, indeed most often is never created, will be seen, will be available, and will be able to compete against the offerings of the studios themselves, a significant portion of which I might point out suck as badly as any amateur material I've seen.
Who cares if this means a million people produce crap I'd never want to see. If it means 10 people (or, more likely, a couple of thousand) produce good, interesting, innovative material, then our society and our culture have experienced a windfall in artistic work.
There is also commercial opportunity there (even if all the artists were to release their stuff under Free Licenses of one sort or another, something which I suspect some would do but many would not), for someone to review such works and help those interested find the wheat among the chaff.
This assumes, of course, that the common person is allowed to have an unfettered, general purpose computer or a bidirectional internet connection, something which those very same cartels are actively trying to prevent.
damn it, I hit submit when I meant to hit preview.
Even if only 1 in 100,000 has the story telling talent to put together a good film, that would amount to 2,800 potent competitors to the media cartels.
should have read:
Even if only 1 in 100,000 has the story telling talent to put together a good film, that would amount to 2,800 potent competitors to the media cartels in the U.S. alone.
... isn't the "rampant piracy" Red Herring they've been feeding the press and their tame politicians in Washington, D.C., it is the possibility that anyone who does have a story to tell will be able to make a quality movie with nothing more than their home PC and a little time.
... a state of affairs the mimicks the current, cartel-controlled situation rather well, actually. Even if only 1 in 100,000 has the story telling talent to put together a good film, that would amount to 2,800 potent competitors to the media cartels.
Suddenly we don't need studios, we don't need actors, and we don't need tens or hundreds of millions to produce a blockbuster movie. And with the internet to distribute the material on, we don't need their distribution network of cinemas either.
The most important talent they rely on is not skill in computer imagery, but skill in telling a compelling story using all of the tools of the visual idiom. This is what most people don't have, and it is an essential element to producing good film.
Like musicians using home-studios to record music, without talent this will go largely unusued, or, more likely, there will be a lot of less-than-good material out there
Musicians really don't need million dollar studios anymore to produce an album, and while this means a lot of junk is pressed onto CD, it also means a lot of musicians are able to produce and market their music outside of the RIAA's cartel, through mp3.com and elsewhere. Hollywood doesn't fear the napstersization of their medium nearly as much as they fear the mp3.com-ization of it, and competition with a few thousand talented people not on their payroll.
This, I think, is why we are experiencing such an onslought of attempts through legislation and back door regulation via the FCC and a little known "standards" body called the BPDG to take both the internet, and general computers, out of the hands of private citizens.
It isn't about 'piracy,' it is about competition, and they don't fear competition from 'everybody' so much as they fear general access to the tools, which means those talented persons not a part of the cartels would be able to compete for viewership and marketshare on a level playing field with the big studios.
And that is something they simply cannot abide.
We aren't ridding society of these jobs, just morphing them into different areas.
/ FCC-02-231A1.pdf )and the lessor known, but perhaps more dangerous, BPDG, and so forth, for the banning of individual, non-corporate possession of general purpose computers and the crippling of the internet.
... anyone with a TV antenna and a VCR can already do that, and has been able to for twenty years ... this is about preemting the possibility of any competition from private citizens now and forever.
This has always been true, with every technological innovation. I'm sure horse dealers felt threatened by the invention of the wheel, when a cart carrying eight people could be pulled by two horses (instead of the 8 that would have been necessary for each person to ride). Most (but not all! There are still horses and buggies for hobby/tourist purposes around) Buggy whip manufacturers had to find new work with the invention of the automobile, radio felt threatened by the advent of TV, and all the old media and copyright cartels feel threatened by the Internet.
Yet, in each of these cases, the jobs lost in one area were created in another, and anyone willing to learn a new skill could migrate to a new profession.
Unfortunately this flexibility has been lost on the recording industry, Hollywood, and indeed on the media and copyright cartels in general, and this inflexibility to some degree seems to permeate much of the corporate culture that surrounds the profession.
Take your thought, and the thought of the article itself, to its logical (and, IMHO very desireable, conclusion): CGI will allow anyone with a good story to tell the ability to animate and create a movie, perhaps a blockbuster movie, in the comfornt and convinience of their home, on their home PC. Not today, but given moores law, almost certainly within 5-10 years.
Think of what that means. The cartels suddenly have competition from every direction, indeed, from everyone with a creative bent and a personal PC powerful enough to render animations in a reasonable time (today, a few big clusters, in five years, nearly every home PC). Assuming the software improves over time in the same fashion it has to date, these animations may well be indistinguishable from real actors on real sets.
Soon anyone will be able to make a movie on their own PC, and distribute it to a world-wide audience via the internet. That is, assuming there remains an internet such as we know it, and individuals are still allowed to possess general purpose computers, both of which are assumptions we can no longer take for granted.
Is it any wonder Hollywood is using the Red Herring of "piracy" to push on so many fronts (legislative via several bills including Hollings', back door regulatory via the FCC ( http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch
This isn't about the "horror" of people being able to download and store television shows and movies
The fact that, in the process, they will be able to take away our ability to record television programs for the first time in twenty years, supreme court rulings notwithstanding, is merely icing on the cake.
Times are changing, not dissapearing!
Yes, but if we are complacent, they will be changing in very, very negative ways for anyone working with or interested in digital technology or artistic freedom. There is a steam roller bearing down on us in Washington D.C. and in the conference rooms where UN and international treaties are negotiated, and we are for the most part behaving as though we are oblivious to this unpleasant fact.
Although my ATI 8500 should be able to drive my HDTV-ready monitor at 1920x1200 resolution, I've yet to be able to coax the X driver into delivering that resolution through the DVI interface.
... indeed, I suspect you could easilly coax that out of an ATI 8500 or ATI 7500 under XFree 4.2, and almost certainly if you use ATI's drivers.
However, using the Nvidia binary-only X 4.2 drivers I have no trouble driving the monitor in 1920x1280 24-bit color resolution with a GeForce4 Ti4600.
Such a setup should work fine for a relatively low-resolution plasma like the one you are considering, at 1366x768
If you're going to spend that kind of money on a plasma, though, I'd wait a couple of years, until they support true 1080i at least. 768 lines of resolution is analogous to 1024x768 resolution on a computer (yes, I know you get more horizontal pixels in a 16:9 format, my monitor is 16:10 so I'm intimately familiar with that), so keep in mind that you are buying an expensive product whose resolution will likely be disappointing to you in a couple or three years.
Welcome to the world of intergenerational warfare. I'll bet no science fiction novel you ever read prepared you for this.
Under Nixon an older, reactionary generation declared a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on). Indeed, the prohibition of drugs and the actions that have been taken to try and stamp out its use has caused far greater harm, in both a humanitarian and economic sense, than the abuse of the substances themselves ever did or could have.
A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors.
Now, with the new War on Copyright Infringement, we are about to target today's youth, who trade their music, their movies, their videotapes online, instead of via cassette tape the way us older folk did when we were in high school and college.
Another front on an intergenerational war, between the dinasaurs of the Jack Valenti Generation of Greed and the emerging, technically savvy information generation they seek to repress and quite possibly destroy.
This escalation will likely claim even more victims, fill our prisons even more with people even less inclined to violence than the many drug offendors who account for half our inmate population today.
Worse, we'll have to listen to even more self-righteous tripe along the lines "but these fans are stealing bread and milk from the mouths of Lars and Britney," and "we'll win the war on copyright infringement! These pirates will never see the light of day again! God Bless America!"
What's next, a broken egg on a frying pan with the words "This represents your Life on MP3?"
Make no mistake, this is intergenerational warfare, waged by the parents and grandparents upon the children who have chosen to live differently than their elders, indeed, differently than their elders can comprehend. As we draw closer to the technological singuarity I think we can expect ever more extreme examples of the same.
Hell, I haven't even finished writing a novel set in 2057 that depicts exactly these sorts of events. How close is one to the Singualarity I wonder, when real world events overtake science fiction faster than it can be written?
What, you're going to blame this fiasco on one age group being myopic
Absolutely not. The wrongdoers and politicians span several generations.
My point was how commonplace the rhetoric of "free market says, so everyone should just cave and do" has become. This is a relatively new development, one that flies in the face of economic theory, free markets, free societies, and a functional society, and one that would have been laughed into submission a few short years ago.
These days one rarely hears a rebuttal, so I begin to wonder why that is and speculate that there is perhaps a group of people who do not grasp capitalism, perhaps because the only form of it they've been exposed to is the corporate perversion of it we've had throughout the late 80s, 90's, and early naughties.
Nothing more was implied or intended than that.
Oh, and if any one generation were to take a big chunck of the blame for the philosophical myopia and malaise that has engulfed so much of the American psyche over the last twenty years, I would most certainly rank my generation at the top of that list, though, as you rightly point out, the blame is a little more widely spread than that.
congrats to all involved, and kudos to the CEO for realizing he was in over his head. nothing worse than a CEO that doesn't know how to be a CEO.
... who will pilfer the once profitable company and exit the steaming ruins of the once profitable company pocketing millions.
Sure there is. One who knows how to be a CEO according to today's business standards
There are a lot of things worse than a well meaning CEO in over their head (they at least can learn), one who knows exactly what their doing and is looking out for themselves more than they are the company.
And in today's marketplace, what percentage of the resumes/CVs crossing their desk do you think will be from competent, well meaning CEOs? 1%? 10%? I doubt much higher than that, and I'm an optimist.
Because they were such a bunch of raving Puritans nobody in Europe would tolerate them?
heh!
No, those were the ones that left the small, insignificant but incredibly charming and progressive country, most of which is below see level and kept dry by dikes, for the shores of America. You know, the ones that got kicked out of the UK, then got kicked out of Holland (which takes talent, given how tolerant the Dutch are).
His, like mine, probably just left that little mound in the Atlantic because they didn't like it much.
Of course, after two hundred years, we've managed to turn this nice continent, or at least our portion of it, into a bigger, but otherwise similiar, dung heap. Alas, now there really isn't anywhere left to emigrate to, so like y'all over there, we too can do little more than wallow in what we're stuck with.
cheers, mate.
Well, in America, it wouldn't be law. I don't know about Europe, but here in America, a law like that would have a snowballs chance in hell of getting approved.
... I mean, "fees", yeah, that's right, "fees"), etc.
... oh wait, you can't. Almost all of those people were dead long before the government rethought its decision, and broke up the monopoly they themselves had created.
Ahem. Don't count on it, and above all do not be complacent!
What do you thing the DMCA was a step toward.
Or what the SSSCA, DRM, etc. are an attempt to do now.
The US government has historically taken every new communications medium out of the hands of the common man, whether it was the telephone (a mandated monopoly for AT&T that lasted 70 years and put dozens of competitors out of business, overnight), radio, television (the FCC taking the once-free airwaves and restricting them to use by only those who could afford the payoff
All in the fine tradition of the British Crown, who invented copyright for the sole purpose of controlling who would, and would not, be permitted to own and operate a printing press, lest something the Crown disapproved of be disseminated to the masses or, even worse, the masses be able to communicate en mass amongst themselves.
Make no mistake about it, the Copyright Cartels and their tame politicians are making every effort to do the same to the Internet right now, under the guise of copyright protection, digital rights management, and laws making the disconnection of a controviersial website the default mode, rather than an exception requiring signficiant judicial review and perhaps even a trial beforehand (as was the case pre-DMCA).
Do nothing, do not speak out, and they will likely succeed, with nary a concern for the economic impact that would have on the next several generations of people. Just ask any of the many entrepreneurs who at one time competed against AT&T, before AT&T managed to buy legislation granting them a monopoly
What about France suing eBay to take items off their web site hosted on American soil, or any number of student laws, suits, etc going on with countries suing/charging US firms for wrong doing on the Internet?
Yeah, Mr. Thompson is quite a hypocrit all through the article.
He rightly decries the ability of America to impose censorship on the net, then calls for the ability to enforce local laws restricting access to objectionable information on the net in the next sentence. He decries the DMCA, then wants to build in infrastructure that would facilitate DRM type technologies into the network protocol a paragraph later (IIRC).
He resembles a Romulan when he claims the net was invented in Europe (it was invented in the United States. HTML, and what we call 'the web' was invented as a collaboration between CERN and the University of Illinois, long after the internet, email, gopher, and USENET had been in use by thousands throughout the US and world) and they should somehow 'take it back.'
In short, throughout the article he raises legitimate criticisms of the excesses of American politicians and law, then advocates building a new network to allow European governments to do the same exact kinds of things, indeed, to facilitate it.
I'm as down on the anti-government regulation of big business, capitalism ueber alles myopia of the Libertarians as anyone, but that hardly negates their far more legitimate stance with respect to individual liberty, or the need to respect the basic tenants of the US constitution (which, by the way, would negate much of his criticism of the US if we actually adhered to that document).
In summary, he basically is saying "take the internet out of the hands of the imperialistic americans and those anarchistic people, and put them in the hands of our local regulators and governments where they belong!"
Feh. I hope the network gets built just so their is more redundancy in the infrastructure itself, but good luck talking a wired world into divorcing itself from one another so your local goons can institute more of their censorship and their regulations instead. Short of mandated change, I doubt they'll get too many takers, even in Europe, no matter how much nationalistic anti-American Euro-pride gets trotted out during the marketing campaign.
His logical fallacy is , of course, thinking that the US has a monopoly on this kind of thing. [emphesis added]
... all these things represent damage as far as the internet, a system designed to propogate and share information, is concerned.
Assuming America has a "monopoly" on abusive potical, technical, or jurisprudence wrt to the net isn't a logical fallacy, it is a factual fallacy. The logic is sound, the assumption made upon which the argument is based is what is inaccurate. That isn't the same thing as a logical fallacy, such as ad homonem attacks, circular reasoning, appeals to authority, and the like.
All that having been said, I found nothing in that article that seemed to imply America has a monopoly on this behavior, just that, under the current Copyright Cartels (is there any doubt in anyone's mind who is calling the shots in D.C. these days?), we, or rather America, are by far the worst offendors.
One of the original strengths in the design of the internet is its ability to route around damage. Copyright, censorship, physical outage, political repression
If the Europeans want to build some redundancy into the routing and infrastructure of the net by building a network that can sustain itself independently, should America drop off the net completely, more power to them. The more redundancy, and the more capacity there is for the Internet to route around the kind of damage government censors, politicians, and copyright holders create, the better.
In any case, nothing illegal has happened, so it's probably nothing more than a lot of mud-slinging, using the current climate in the investment community as leverage to get handfuls of "the really *good* mud".
Midslinging or not, the dirt is real, and the practice is corrupt (and undermines the viability of the company in question) whether or not it is VCs trying to do an end run around the intent of the law to pull some of their investment out of the company after the fact, or (as seems just as likely) its a little petty pilfering by the board of directors of the company kitty.
Voting to give oneself unsecured loans, voting to "forgive" oneself one's loan, or what have you is deceptive and amounts to legalized, institutional theft from the company and its stock holders (if any). Arguing that its just a clever dodge to avoid taxes otherwise owed for compensation, that the rest of us not privy to the board, and such insider perks, would end up paying certainly doesn't elevate the act any, no matter how much distate one might have for taxes.
In short, it is sleazy in any context. The fact that it is as common as you imply, and for as many varied "legitimate" reasons as you imply, makes me doubly glad to be invested in real estate and not in the stock market.
Sorry, but market forces are now as powerful as performance metrics. Apple no longer benefits from not being x86...cost being the biggest issue, and most of the time now they can't even claim a performance gain.
Intel won the CPU war on desktop PCs. Look to servers, handhelds, game consoles, etc. for the the next CPU battle worth fighting.
Until we have a monoculture in all our products, and have eliminated every trace of competition or choice, everywhere?
You waive your hands at the "invisible hand" of the free market as an argument for competitors to not even try competing for a portion of the marketplace, in effect advocating the replacement of a market with competitors with an intel monopoly.
I suspect you do not even see the contradiction in your argument, so let me spell it out for you. Monopolies are antithetical to a functional Free Market. Without competition the entire basis for capitalism functioning in any worthwhile capacity at all is removed and no free market exists. In short, without competition capitalism dies, and the free market "authority" you are alluding to becomes meaningless.
It astonishes me how people can argue "the market says" with one breath and "everyone should cave and give company X a monopoly" with the next. Indeed, one is forced to wonder if much of the current economic chaos isn't a result of an entire graduating class, perhaps an entire generation, not understanding even a little of economics in any context other than the inflated (and as it turns out largely fradulant) boom of the 1990s.
I won't even get into the fact that free markets are but one force, one tool, necessary for a functioning society or culture, another point often ignored in our western myopia, but that is a discussion for another thread.