One of the most important aspects of democracy is that it is based upon majority rule. Everyone (of legal age, of course) has equal rights to vote, regardless of personal income or property, e.g. One person==one vote.
This is really what makes democracy democracy.
When selling your vote you are basically saying that voting rights should be based upon your income or property, that is: one dollar==one vote.
This is certainly NOT called democracy because it's not the majority of people who rules society but rather the majority of capital who rules it, similar to how corporations are run.
So if you fancy to change your country into a corporate state, then by God's means sell your vote to the highest bidder.
..whats the point of building and launching these colonies from the moon when it is simpler and more energy efficient to build them on the moon in the first place ?....
Because of gravity. You would only weigh 1/6 on the Moon as on Earth. If you lived there for a long time you could forget ever returning to Earth.
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see...
on
The High Frontier
·
· Score: 1
Moving to the Moon is not such a viable option. The Moon has only 1/6 of the gravity of the Earth. This means that any person that lived there for an extended period would have big trouble moving back to Earth. If I lived on the Moon I would at least want to return to Earth as a tourist. Space stations, where we could have the same gravity as on Earth are a much better option.
Gandhi was, of course, a cool guy, mostly for never using violence. But he did certainly not have more impact than, say Newton or Gutenberg. Gandhi couldn't free India, (he tried hard, though). It took a world war and 17 year to do so. His country didn't even share his vision of self sufficiency through small scale domestic production, right after independence India was building giant steelworks. And Gandhi wasn't even that popular in Inda, the middle class liked him but the poors didn't care much about him, as did the Muslims (if they knew about him in the first place).
I think people today see Gandhi more of an icon like perhaps JFK, Martin Luther King and maybe Mandela. They don't care or know much about the person but see him instead as a symbol of freedom and liberty.
I think most ISPs just buy newsgroup "feeds" from other companies so the ISPs don't really have much power over which groups they carry. And if an ISP starts deleting one or two "obviously" illegal groups... well then it would become responsible for each post in every newsgroup it carries because it would have an editorial powers like newspapers and it could be sued for the content it carries. At least I think this is how it works.
And one other thing. If the government would start requiring ISP's to remove illegal newsgroups off their servers, the ISP's would probably also delete most of the "near-illegal" groups like alt.sex.teen and even the entire alt.warez* group list. Better safe than sorry, as they say.
It is always the question of where to draw the fine line. For example, if the ISP stops carrying the alt.binaries.pedophilia group should it also stop carrying other questionable groups? Few groups do "obviously" carry illegal material but many groups, for example alt.binaries.pictures.girls, alt.sex.teens, alt.anarchism and alt.binaries.warez.commadore64 "may" carry illegal material (at least in some countries) but perhaps the majority of the postings on the group are legal. If the ISP starts monitoring the newsgroups list for illegal material where should it stop? Should it stop carrying alt.binaries.warez.commadore64?
Who here do think that Microsoft will rule the world forever? Anyone thinks it will rule for the next 20 years? 10 years? 5 years? I don't think so. Microsoft's happy days are soon to be over.
The world is changing but Microsoft isn't changing fast enough. The question whether Microsoft has a monopoly over PC operating systems (which it does, at the moment) will be irrelevant in few years. There are so many exciting things happening that will undermine Microsoft's powers. Internet enabled mobile phones, set top boxes, Internet everywhere, and all that stuff. But the primary reasons Microsoft will someday fail are two: It's greed and it's employee greed.
First, how much does it cost for PC companies like Compaq or Dell to purchase Windows for each PC they sell? I think each copy costs at least $50, probably $70, and NT/2K even more. Now, how are companies going to be able to sell PC's for $700 or $500 or $300 with an OS that costs 50 bucks? Today already, Windows costs more than the main processor in many of those cheap computers, and I bet Microsoft makes more money on all those $500 PC's than the manufacturers themselves. Second, as we have seen in the past, Microsoft has the bad habit of taking over their "partners" business or betraying them in other ways as Microsoft has often done (keyword: Citrix). Other companies have noticed this behaviour and WILL continue to do so, so they try to avoid Microsoft whenever possible (the smart one at least). Remember for example how reluctant TCI John Malone was to accept Windows CE on his company set top boxes. Microsoft even had to bribe AT&T, TCI new owner, 5 billion dollars to insure it would use Windows. How many times will Microsoft be able to do that? It may have a lot of money but their chest isn't endless. I also think it's certain that somewhere within the PC industry, thousands of people are trying to find a way to avoid the MS Tax by using other, cheaper OS's, be it Linux or BeOS or maybe even something totally new.
Finally, how much is Microsoft worth these days? Last time I checked it was somewhere hovering around 500 billions. How much will it be able to grow? Perhaps it will be worth one trillion or two sometime in the future, but one day the valuation of Microsoft will stop growing 20-30% each year. An when that day will come what do you think all those low paid - stock option rich - Microserfs will do? Either they'll flee the ship or demand a raise. And when all those tens of thousands of MS employee will get their raise, the profits of Microsoft will certainly take a huge plunge. And with it, the stock price and again the Microserfs will demand a raise or leave and the stock price will fall even more etc.
Well, this is what I think, perhaps I'm to optimistic:)
Your logic is kinda strange. You want action now because "Four or five years from now, which is when the case could finally get to the Supreme Court under normal circumstances, there is a good chance that Microsoft will no longer be a true monopoly" . I'd like to mention that the antitrust rules were set because the government thought that nobody could be able to compete with monopolies so monopolies should be restricted or broken up. Well, if the market is able to solve the Microsoft problem itself as you are saying it will, then why the heck do we need antitrust rules at all? Just to have a little revenge for all those Blue screens of death?
Yeah, the company can perhaps legally sell land on the Moon and Mars but is the ownership of some real estate in outer space really worth anything unless you can defend it? If you can't defend your property you don't really own it. How would you stop anyone from just taking your land? You can't. We can just look at history and see for example how the white people kicked the Indians off their own land because the Indian couldn't defend it well enough. And the Indians at least had spears and arrows. If you would buy some real estate on the Moon you wouldn't have anything except that single piece of paper stating that you own that area. But who would ever care about that piece of paper? You could perhaps argue that the government would defend your land in outer space, just like it does here on Earth, but would the US government really spend millions of dollars to stop someone from stealing your property on the Moon? I think not.
Perhaps I'm just taking this just a little bit too seriously:)
The subject was of course supposed to be "Is Open Source worth it for commercial projects?"
Sorry...
For those of you who clicked, a great comment I saw somewhere...
>>... (the thought of a DJ sitting at a computer >>table on a platform in the middle of a dance >>hall clicking a mouse kinda freaks me out)
>Well, for us old farts who remember that to >entertain people musically you actually had to >PLAY an instrument, this type of comment is >kinda fun to see...
What I am very curious about is whether it would be worthwhile for companies to Open Source their already existing software products.
I ask this because most/all of the successful Open Source software (Linux, Sendmail, Apache) have been developed by individuals as a community projects, not by companies with profit as the objective. The companies have jumped on board later (Redhat, Sendmail Inc, etc) when the software has grown popular. Can it really be justified for a company that has spent millions of dollars on a software project to start giving their crown jewel away, especially as "Real Open Source" under the GPL license? Perhaps they could release the source code, just not under GPL, and retain the redistribution right themselves but I just don't see much good in doing that because then the bazaar effect would mostly be lost.
Every company could undercut the original developer of the software in selling support, as the original developer would have to get their investment in product development back.
Obviously the Loss Leader method hasn't worked very well for Netscape (probably because of lousy code and code not being Real Open Source).
Accessorizing, Come on:)
Perhaps the only real way, is Widget Frosting but that would only work for hardware companies and I don't see many hardware companies doing other software than OS'es.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really what makes democracy democracy.
When selling your vote you are basically saying that voting rights should be based upon your income or property, that is: one dollar==one vote. This is certainly NOT called democracy because it's not the majority of people who rules society but rather the majority of capital who rules it, similar to how corporations are run.
So if you fancy to change your country into a corporate state, then by God's means sell your vote to the highest bidder.
Because of gravity. You would only weigh 1/6 on the Moon as on Earth. If you lived there for a long time you could forget ever returning to Earth.
Moving to the Moon is not such a viable option. The Moon has only 1/6 of the gravity of the Earth. This means that any person that lived there for an extended period would have big trouble moving back to Earth. If I lived on the Moon I would at least want to return to Earth as a tourist. Space stations, where we could have the same gravity as on Earth are a much better option.
I think people today see Gandhi more of an icon like perhaps JFK, Martin Luther King and maybe Mandela. They don't care or know much about the person but see him instead as a symbol of freedom and liberty.
And one other thing. If the government would start requiring ISP's to remove illegal newsgroups off their servers, the ISP's would probably also delete most of the "near-illegal" groups like alt.sex.teen and even the entire alt.warez* group list. Better safe than sorry, as they say.
It is always the question of where to draw the fine line. For example, if the ISP stops carrying the alt.binaries.pedophilia group should it also stop carrying other questionable groups? Few groups do "obviously" carry illegal material but many groups, for example alt.binaries.pictures.girls, alt.sex.teens, alt.anarchism and alt.binaries.warez.commadore64 "may" carry illegal material (at least in some countries) but perhaps the majority of the postings on the group are legal. If the ISP starts monitoring the newsgroups list for illegal material where should it stop? Should it stop carrying alt.binaries.warez.commadore64?
Who here do think that Microsoft will rule the world forever? Anyone thinks it will rule for the next 20 years? 10 years? 5 years? I don't think so. Microsoft's happy days are soon to be over.
The world is changing but Microsoft isn't changing fast enough. The question whether Microsoft has a monopoly over PC operating systems (which it does, at the moment) will be irrelevant in few years. There are so many exciting things happening that will undermine Microsoft's powers. Internet enabled mobile phones, set top boxes, Internet everywhere, and all that stuff. But the primary reasons Microsoft will someday fail are two: It's greed and it's employee greed.
First, how much does it cost for PC companies like Compaq or Dell to purchase Windows for each PC they sell? I think each copy costs at least $50, probably $70, and NT/2K even more. Now, how are companies going to be able to sell PC's for $700 or $500 or $300 with an OS that costs 50 bucks? Today already, Windows costs more than the main processor in many of those cheap computers, and I bet Microsoft makes more money on all those $500 PC's than the manufacturers themselves. Second, as we have seen in the past, Microsoft has the bad habit of taking over their "partners" business or betraying them in other ways as Microsoft has often done (keyword: Citrix). Other companies have noticed this behaviour and WILL continue to do so, so they try to avoid Microsoft whenever possible (the smart one at least). Remember for example how reluctant TCI John Malone was to accept Windows CE on his company set top boxes. Microsoft even had to bribe AT&T, TCI new owner, 5 billion dollars to insure it would use Windows. How many times will Microsoft be able to do that? It may have a lot of money but their chest isn't endless. I also think it's certain that somewhere within the PC industry, thousands of people are trying to find a way to avoid the MS Tax by using other, cheaper OS's, be it Linux or BeOS or maybe even something totally new.
Finally, how much is Microsoft worth these days? Last time I checked it was somewhere hovering around 500 billions. How much will it be able to grow? Perhaps it will be worth one trillion or two sometime in the future, but one day the valuation of Microsoft will stop growing 20-30% each year. An when that day will come what do you think all those low paid - stock option rich - Microserfs will do? Either they'll flee the ship or demand a raise. And when all those tens of thousands of MS employee will get their raise, the profits of Microsoft will certainly take a huge plunge. And with it, the stock price and again the Microserfs will demand a raise or leave and the stock price will fall even more etc.
Well, this is what I think, perhaps I'm to optimistic :)
Your logic is kinda strange. You want action now because "Four or five years from now, which is when the case could finally get to the Supreme Court under normal circumstances, there is a good chance that Microsoft will no longer be a true monopoly" . I'd like to mention that the antitrust rules were set because the government thought that nobody could be able to compete with monopolies so monopolies should be restricted or broken up. Well, if the market is able to solve the Microsoft problem itself as you are saying it will, then why the heck do we need antitrust rules at all? Just to have a little revenge for all those Blue screens of death?
Perhaps I'm just taking this just a little bit too seriously :)
Sorry ...
For those of you who clicked, a great comment I saw somewhere ...
>>... (the thought of a DJ sitting at a computer
>>table on a platform in the middle of a dance
>>hall clicking a mouse kinda freaks me out)
>Well, for us old farts who remember that to
>entertain people musically you actually had to
>PLAY an instrument, this type of comment is
>kinda fun to see...
I ask this because most/all of the successful Open Source software (Linux, Sendmail, Apache) have been developed by individuals as a community projects, not by companies with profit as the objective. The companies have jumped on board later (Redhat, Sendmail Inc, etc) when the software has grown popular. Can it really be justified for a company that has spent millions of dollars on a software project to start giving their crown jewel away, especially as "Real Open Source" under the GPL license? Perhaps they could release the source code, just not under GPL, and retain the redistribution right themselves but I just don't see much good in doing that because then the bazaar effect would mostly be lost.
I just don't see any of the four methods, described on opensource.org ( Support Sellers, Loss Leader, Widget Frosting, Accessorizing ) as viable ways to get back the investment for already existing software products.