I am not so sure this is a universally bad idea. Ubuntu does something similar which, while of course being irrelevant for the software itself, sets a certain goal or mindset for the project. When writing a software for a non-profit we filed "x does not like it" (with x being the least, ahem, mentally flexible and most problematic user in the organisation) as first bug and marked it as release blocker. So in order to get the software out to the users we were forced to interact with the "worst" of them and really reflect on this person's feedback, which resulted in an application that everyone actually wanted to use.
For a big commercial product such a nontechnical bug may be unproductive, but for the right team it may actually add a motivation or direct focus at something that usually would be an afterthought at best.
By now I am completely happy with it. Running nightlies and playing with Labs projects for the past few years I got burned quite a few times when the developers changed vital parts of the sync protocol or the way encryption is handled, but since the last big change a while ago when they stabilised the feature for the last betas I did not experience any issues. Syncing between four installations on two dual-boot machines (each Windows and Ubuntu) works like a charm.
I know I will be grilled for writing this, but has it never occurred to you that it may not be such a good idea to send all that food to those starving people in the first place? The hunger in Africa and other places is, in my humble opinion, not caused by a shortage of food but by an overabundance of people (relative to the resources available there). Many African countries have annual population growth rates between 3 and 4%. Hell, even with the US population almost stagnating at less than 1% and European population in decline and China still enforcing its one-child policy the world population is still growing by about 1% p. a. No matter how much we restrict the use of food for energy production this is unsustainable.
I agree that agricultural land should not be used for energy, but that is not because of all the starving people far away but because we need that land to produce enough food for ourselves to reduce or eliminate our dependence on imports (which indeed often take away local resources from where they are needed most, though that consideration is rather secondary to me).
Oh, by the way, in case you missed the last 20 years of public debate: your crude oil will cease to be an option within my projected lifetime. You may want to come up with something else.
How does a soldier who swore to protect their country from all enemies, foreign and domestic, honour that oath when their own government is guilty of treason? There is no higher instance they could turn to within the chain of authority but the people themselves.
Typically paranoid and deluded world-view of a sheltered basement dweller.
Are you gunning for -20 discoursive faculties do not extend beyond ad hominems? Quite a few conspiracy theories have turned out to be not so theoretical at all. The fact that human nature makes a world-wide collusion to secretly install a New World Order rather unlikely does not mean that individual countries or regions may not be dominated by closed circles of oligarchs that subvert and manipulate the public.
Somebody's first day on the job could result in a machine like the one shown here.
QA should factor in new employees and anyone's work on their "first day on the job" should be monitored much more closely than that of experienced workers. Of course QA cannot disassemble every unit just to make sure everything is 100% OK. But the suggestion that a lack of experience on the worker's part somehow absolves a company from blame when they ship a faulty product is absurd.
When a machine passes QA despite showing 3 unrelated problems each of which should have raised a red flag on its own then at least two people screwed up: The one who assembled it and the one who signed off on its QA pass. Whether it really is a systemic issue or not only time will tell once sufficient numbers have been shipped. But it does show that there is a problem in the process. Such a machine should not have left the facility.
That would be like if you received a monitor with 15 dead pixels, it would have 15 faults.
No. Read Bradley's post again. 3 independent problems. 15 dead pixels equal one shoddy panel. In your monitor example you would have those 15 dead pixels, a loose DVI connector and a missing led. And the sum of that would very likely point to a lack of QA.
I disagree. Open Source is not just about the Ubuntu image you can download today, it is about how we create and use software 20 years from today. It took a long time to get hardware vendors to hand out specs or show genuine interest in delivering Free drivers. And here we are, with at least two big players (AMD and Intel) pledging their support and another (NVIDIA) at least playing along somewhat.
Why? Part of "Linux" is the ability to do with it whatever you want. We already have KDE (in different versions, mind you), GNOME (with the upcoming version 3 being discussed rather heatedly), Xfce and its offspring, Enlightenment, FluxBox and the other *Box environments, and all the really obscure ones (xmonad etc.). Why not throw another one into the mix? It will either live or die depending on how the user base reacts to it. If it lives we get another option. If it dies we get a better understanding of how not to design a desktop environment for a certain target audience. It may not be for everyone, but then again no Linux distro is for everyone, and still that pluralism is generally seen as a good thing.
Do these people understand money, time and resources are not cheap and infinite?
If (or rather: once) the energy situation gets bad enough money will stop being a consideration and resources will indeed be "infinite" in the sense that they will simply be utilised no matter what, and by force if necessary. So they err not in their assumptions per se but in their timing. It will be a long way to go before the powers that be stop evaluating their options in units of currency. But it will happen. It has to, really.
Not taking sides in this debate, but you do realise that "intellectual property" was invented only a few hundred years ago, right? Those societies that at least we in the Western world consider to be our intellectual ancestors thrived through the ability to build upon others' works and create something new from them. So a society without any form of protection of immaterial goods is very much possible. The FOSS ecosystem is not a society, but it does show that a collective can indeed benefit from free sharing and reuse of ideas.
In the "good old days" artists needed a patron not because there was no IP law but because most artists' audience was incredibly small by today's standards. The Church and the aristocracy were about the only ones to commission artworks or have their buildings elaborately decorated. Not because everyone else got their art fix from ThePirateHorsecourier but because everyone else was too busy working their arse off to feed themselves or bashing in skulls. Given the circumstances I would still consider that era a prosperous time for the arts. I agree with GP's point that the ability to freely use whatever you got your hands on and create something new from it was a very good thing, and I would like to extend this to say it contributed considerably to the wealth of cultural legacy that has serves artists up until this very day as a solid foundation to build upon and a rich repertoire to draw inspiration from.
From what I have read about the issue it is my understanding that most patents in the media codec area are somehow extensions or refinements of other patented methods. Which would mean that instead of 1,000 individual patents one would be looking at a card house of legal technicalities that would fold if the fundamental patents everyone else built upon were invalidated. Could someone in the field comment on whether that really is the case?
I am sorry as well, for I believe you missed the "beyond a very poor choice of location" part. Children have to learn how to behave appropriately. And the two most common ways to learn is from examples and from mistakes. Those kids made a mistake. They should have confined their sexual activity to areas where it is appropriate. They should have received a stern lecture on the subject of decency and be done with. PP's comment, though, sounds to me like those kids were doing something despicably horrible by having sex. Cancelling school dances? Oh dear! That is going to make them stop having sex. Right. And it is so very pedagogically sound to simply ban the dances instead of addressing the inappropriate behaviour. Wonderful. And the kids' intimate contacts should all be dutifully reported to the parents. Because that helps to, ahm, well, it certainly must be for the child's best. Oh, and they do not have any right to privacy, anyways. Teachers are absolutely free to report anything about their students to the parents. (In case you are wondering, that is not the case under every jurisdiction. In many places children's privacy enjoys quite strong protection even against their parents' right - and duty - to keep tabs on their offspring.)
C_amiga_fan's comment nicely sums up what in my humble opinion is wrong with today's parents and, by that, today's kids: Constant monitoring and ever stricter regulations have replaced a proper upbringing that empowers kids to make sensible and informed choices about what they do, thereby stripping them of any sense of responsibility for their actions. Parents should not need to know whether their kids engage in sexual intercourse; They should be able to trust them to be smart about it.
[...] "They acted like they had not done anything wrong!" [...]
Christ Almighty! Kids, having sex, and without giving due notice prior to the event to all parties concerned! What has this world come to?
Seriously, what the hell? Unless one of them was coerced or emotionally incapable of making an informed choice on the matter, or unless they were not using a condom I fail to see any wrongdoing beyond a very poor choice of location.
There is so much wrong with today's kids. Self esteem issues, aggression, substance abuse, lack of basic social skills and manners - them having sex is the least of those issues. Or rather it would be, if they were taught how to do it responsibly instead of the moral panicking they are being subjected to. Well, that and the abstinence bullshit.
Speak for yourself. Here in my area few care all that much about the "big" elections - we only get to choose between fascists, sell-outs and loonies - but local issues up to state level get people on the streets and into the polling stations.
Besides, most forms of e-democracy offer not just direct voting but also delegation of votes, where you assign your vote to someone - a person, an ad-hoc group or a "proper" party - to cast it for you. The great thing is: You can delegate your vote wholesale to one entity, just as in a representative democracy, or split it between different ones for different topics (eg. Pirate Party for technology, Greens for ecology, Liberals for the rest), or delegate it per default but place a vote yourself on individual issues you feel strongly about. And you are not bound to your choice for x years but you can change delegations at any point. It is the best of all worlds, really. In a representative democracy I have to vote for the one party I disagree the least with, and even then I risk being left completely without representation if either the party of my choice is not popular enough to gather significant numbers of votes or if that party lied to me before the election and, once in office, breaks its promises. In a system like Liquid Democracy I can make sure my vote on each and every issue actually goes to the option I want to have no matter what general representative I choose, and I can punish liars by revoking delegations.
You missed step number 1, in which those companies went on a shopping spree within the government and bought themselves a legal system that allows for this nonsense in the first place.
People who are afraid of something will see it everywhere because fear, like any strong emotion, displaces reason. In a literature class the lecturer casually, just in passing, referred to the death eaters in "Harry Potter" as a form of terrorism. What the hell?! Sure, when one looks at them closely some of the superficial criteria fit - they strike suddenly out of hiding, kill and quickly vanish again - but not in a million years would it have occurred to me to call them terrorists.
This incredibly overblown fear of those evil terrorists has for the last years been taking forms and levels that leave me dumbstruck.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not so sure this is a universally bad idea. Ubuntu does something similar which, while of course being irrelevant for the software itself, sets a certain goal or mindset for the project. When writing a software for a non-profit we filed "x does not like it" (with x being the least, ahem, mentally flexible and most problematic user in the organisation) as first bug and marked it as release blocker. So in order to get the software out to the users we were forced to interact with the "worst" of them and really reflect on this person's feedback, which resulted in an application that everyone actually wanted to use.
For a big commercial product such a nontechnical bug may be unproductive, but for the right team it may actually add a motivation or direct focus at something that usually would be an afterthought at best.
By now I am completely happy with it. Running nightlies and playing with Labs projects for the past few years I got burned quite a few times when the developers changed vital parts of the sync protocol or the way encryption is handled, but since the last big change a while ago when they stabilised the feature for the last betas I did not experience any issues. Syncing between four installations on two dual-boot machines (each Windows and Ubuntu) works like a charm.
I know I will be grilled for writing this, but has it never occurred to you that it may not be such a good idea to send all that food to those starving people in the first place? The hunger in Africa and other places is, in my humble opinion, not caused by a shortage of food but by an overabundance of people (relative to the resources available there). Many African countries have annual population growth rates between 3 and 4%. Hell, even with the US population almost stagnating at less than 1% and European population in decline and China still enforcing its one-child policy the world population is still growing by about 1% p. a. No matter how much we restrict the use of food for energy production this is unsustainable.
I agree that agricultural land should not be used for energy, but that is not because of all the starving people far away but because we need that land to produce enough food for ourselves to reduce or eliminate our dependence on imports (which indeed often take away local resources from where they are needed most, though that consideration is rather secondary to me).
Oh, by the way, in case you missed the last 20 years of public debate: your crude oil will cease to be an option within my projected lifetime. You may want to come up with something else.
How does a soldier who swore to protect their country from all enemies, foreign and domestic, honour that oath when their own government is guilty of treason? There is no higher instance they could turn to within the chain of authority but the people themselves.
Typically paranoid and deluded world-view of a sheltered basement dweller.
Are you gunning for -20 discoursive faculties do not extend beyond ad hominems? Quite a few conspiracy theories have turned out to be not so theoretical at all. The fact that human nature makes a world-wide collusion to secretly install a New World Order rather unlikely does not mean that individual countries or regions may not be dominated by closed circles of oligarchs that subvert and manipulate the public.
Gizmo wrote:
Somebody's first day on the job could result in a machine like the one shown here.
QA should factor in new employees and anyone's work on their "first day on the job" should be monitored much more closely than that of experienced workers. Of course QA cannot disassemble every unit just to make sure everything is 100% OK. But the suggestion that a lack of experience on the worker's part somehow absolves a company from blame when they ship a faulty product is absurd.
When a machine passes QA despite showing 3 unrelated problems each of which should have raised a red flag on its own then at least two people screwed up: The one who assembled it and the one who signed off on its QA pass. Whether it really is a systemic issue or not only time will tell once sufficient numbers have been shipped. But it does show that there is a problem in the process. Such a machine should not have left the facility.
Just don't know what to do with the railroads, though.
Drug trafficking cartels. The more you control, the higher you can push the prices.
Which means that QA failed. "New employee" is no excuse for shipping a flawed product.
That would be like if you received a monitor with 15 dead pixels, it would have 15 faults.
No. Read Bradley's post again. 3 independent problems. 15 dead pixels equal one shoddy panel. In your monitor example you would have those 15 dead pixels, a loose DVI connector and a missing led. And the sum of that would very likely point to a lack of QA.
I disagree. Open Source is not just about the Ubuntu image you can download today, it is about how we create and use software 20 years from today. It took a long time to get hardware vendors to hand out specs or show genuine interest in delivering Free drivers. And here we are, with at least two big players (AMD and Intel) pledging their support and another (NVIDIA) at least playing along somewhat.
Why? Part of "Linux" is the ability to do with it whatever you want. We already have KDE (in different versions, mind you), GNOME (with the upcoming version 3 being discussed rather heatedly), Xfce and its offspring, Enlightenment, FluxBox and the other *Box environments, and all the really obscure ones (xmonad etc.). Why not throw another one into the mix? It will either live or die depending on how the user base reacts to it. If it lives we get another option. If it dies we get a better understanding of how not to design a desktop environment for a certain target audience. It may not be for everyone, but then again no Linux distro is for everyone, and still that pluralism is generally seen as a good thing.
And where do you think the DMCA came from?
Do these people understand money, time and resources are not cheap and infinite?
If (or rather: once) the energy situation gets bad enough money will stop being a consideration and resources will indeed be "infinite" in the sense that they will simply be utilised no matter what, and by force if necessary. So they err not in their assumptions per se but in their timing. It will be a long way to go before the powers that be stop evaluating their options in units of currency. But it will happen. It has to, really.
[...] that's not a standard to form a society by.
Not taking sides in this debate, but you do realise that "intellectual property" was invented only a few hundred years ago, right? Those societies that at least we in the Western world consider to be our intellectual ancestors thrived through the ability to build upon others' works and create something new from them. So a society without any form of protection of immaterial goods is very much possible. The FOSS ecosystem is not a society, but it does show that a collective can indeed benefit from free sharing and reuse of ideas.
In the "good old days" artists needed a patron not because there was no IP law but because most artists' audience was incredibly small by today's standards. The Church and the aristocracy were about the only ones to commission artworks or have their buildings elaborately decorated. Not because everyone else got their art fix from ThePirateHorsecourier but because everyone else was too busy working their arse off to feed themselves or bashing in skulls. Given the circumstances I would still consider that era a prosperous time for the arts. I agree with GP's point that the ability to freely use whatever you got your hands on and create something new from it was a very good thing, and I would like to extend this to say it contributed considerably to the wealth of cultural legacy that has serves artists up until this very day as a solid foundation to build upon and a rich repertoire to draw inspiration from.
From what I have read about the issue it is my understanding that most patents in the media codec area are somehow extensions or refinements of other patented methods. Which would mean that instead of 1,000 individual patents one would be looking at a card house of legal technicalities that would fold if the fundamental patents everyone else built upon were invalidated. Could someone in the field comment on whether that really is the case?
I am sorry as well, for I believe you missed the "beyond a very poor choice of location" part. Children have to learn how to behave appropriately. And the two most common ways to learn is from examples and from mistakes. Those kids made a mistake. They should have confined their sexual activity to areas where it is appropriate. They should have received a stern lecture on the subject of decency and be done with. PP's comment, though, sounds to me like those kids were doing something despicably horrible by having sex. Cancelling school dances? Oh dear! That is going to make them stop having sex. Right. And it is so very pedagogically sound to simply ban the dances instead of addressing the inappropriate behaviour. Wonderful. And the kids' intimate contacts should all be dutifully reported to the parents. Because that helps to, ahm, well, it certainly must be for the child's best. Oh, and they do not have any right to privacy, anyways. Teachers are absolutely free to report anything about their students to the parents. (In case you are wondering, that is not the case under every jurisdiction. In many places children's privacy enjoys quite strong protection even against their parents' right - and duty - to keep tabs on their offspring.)
C_amiga_fan's comment nicely sums up what in my humble opinion is wrong with today's parents and, by that, today's kids: Constant monitoring and ever stricter regulations have replaced a proper upbringing that empowers kids to make sensible and informed choices about what they do, thereby stripping them of any sense of responsibility for their actions. Parents should not need to know whether their kids engage in sexual intercourse; They should be able to trust them to be smart about it.
[...] "They acted like they had not done anything wrong!" [...]
Christ Almighty! Kids, having sex, and without giving due notice prior to the event to all parties concerned! What has this world come to?
Seriously, what the hell? Unless one of them was coerced or emotionally incapable of making an informed choice on the matter, or unless they were not using a condom I fail to see any wrongdoing beyond a very poor choice of location.
There is so much wrong with today's kids. Self esteem issues, aggression, substance abuse, lack of basic social skills and manners - them having sex is the least of those issues. Or rather it would be, if they were taught how to do it responsibly instead of the moral panicking they are being subjected to. Well, that and the abstinence bullshit.
Speak for yourself. Here in my area few care all that much about the "big" elections - we only get to choose between fascists, sell-outs and loonies - but local issues up to state level get people on the streets and into the polling stations.
Besides, most forms of e-democracy offer not just direct voting but also delegation of votes, where you assign your vote to someone - a person, an ad-hoc group or a "proper" party - to cast it for you. The great thing is: You can delegate your vote wholesale to one entity, just as in a representative democracy, or split it between different ones for different topics (eg. Pirate Party for technology, Greens for ecology, Liberals for the rest), or delegate it per default but place a vote yourself on individual issues you feel strongly about. And you are not bound to your choice for x years but you can change delegations at any point. It is the best of all worlds, really. In a representative democracy I have to vote for the one party I disagree the least with, and even then I risk being left completely without representation if either the party of my choice is not popular enough to gather significant numbers of votes or if that party lied to me before the election and, once in office, breaks its promises. In a system like Liquid Democracy I can make sure my vote on each and every issue actually goes to the option I want to have no matter what general representative I choose, and I can punish liars by revoking delegations.
You missed step number 1, in which those companies went on a shopping spree within the government and bought themselves a legal system that allows for this nonsense in the first place.
Ah, I had indeed completely misinterpreted OP's comment. That is what reading too much Islam bashing on one day does to you. Frightening, really.
More on topic, though, such proposals seem to be a dime a dozen at the moment.
If by "it" you are referring to a democracy, well, you could use a new one. Yours looks kinda broken to me.
Good point, I completely forgot.
People who are afraid of something will see it everywhere because fear, like any strong emotion, displaces reason. In a literature class the lecturer casually, just in passing, referred to the death eaters in "Harry Potter" as a form of terrorism. What the hell?! Sure, when one looks at them closely some of the superficial criteria fit - they strike suddenly out of hiding, kill and quickly vanish again - but not in a million years would it have occurred to me to call them terrorists.
This incredibly overblown fear of those evil terrorists has for the last years been taking forms and levels that leave me dumbstruck.
and so on. Again, this has nothing to do with how violent or dangerous or realistic something actually is.