Who said there's no difference? In fact, I pointed out that there is a difference: that it's now more accessible than before.
"Ooh, people have to get an Apple ID!" It's not like there aren't hundreds of millions of people with such accounts--more accounts than Macs. I don't see how this is a problem.
I don't see how this is a problem for you either. You are obviously not a Syrian dissident. If you were, then every place that your and the use of your computer is registered becomes a risk to you and the more you have the less you have time to make . Facebook and Twitter are ways that the underground communicate at the same time as being ways that people are discovered by the government. Your Apple ID might also be used in the same way; to see who generated software for the rest of the underground and so it becomes an additional barrier to your computer use.
There are lots of other people who are in situations different from yours; even just people who like their privacy and who don't want to be registered on principle; choosing solutions which can include everyone is better.
If you don't see the difference between "everybody gets the development kit automatically" and "you can only get the development kit if you register", which an apple account requires, then there is a serious problem. They could very easily include it on the default install and even offer to automatically delete it if it hasn't been used by the time the disk is full if they are worried it will take too much space.
Where you come from, all computers may be connected via fast links to the internet. That is nowhere near true in much of the world.
No longer true for Xcode 4. It is free download in the apps store so it's pretty available but you do have to register which is a perfect example of how Apple sets its self up able to tighten the screws whenever they want.
How ever did it function in the dark years *before* software patents, then?
It would be like in Europe nowadays. They have no software patents so the only computers are owned by the government. In German, for example, there are only three computers currently and those are old "Siemens" ones based on early 20th century telephone exchanges. Each German state has two terminals in their state capital and the rich ones a few more distributed around.
Believe me; it's terrible. Without computers they can't have traffic lights or drive the robots needed to produce things so almost nobody even has a car, and those that do get them imported via Canada from the US to get round their strict, protectionist trade barriers which are they only way they can compete. German people don't even have Facebook!!
Never, ever let the US descend to this level by getting rid of software patents.
with the level of understanding of issues held by the average voter in the US, I shudder to think what would happen if they were directly voting on laws. Most of them can't even do maths.
I would like to say to you that what would happen is that they would be forced to learn. They will vote for stupid things, see the problems they cause, reverse them and begin to demand that everything gets done in a sensible and orderly way like in Switzerland
I would like to say that, but unfortunately I can't. In quite a number of states there are already local "ballot initiatives" and we know that what they mostly do is vote themselves and their richer friends a tax cut increasing their local deficit. Oh well.
The number of patents involved has reduced massively. More than that, most of those that stayed have lost most of their most important features. Frankly, the collapse in this case is pathetic and very very worrying for Oracle. You would assume that they would be able to come up with some solid patents relevant to almost any VM which runs Java and that this would be the fundamental basis of their defence against Motorola's various database related patents. They have failed to do so at the point where the absolutely had to. As it is, they are beginning to look very like the German army during their attack on Stalingrad and just before the counterattack. Dangerously overstreched and extremely exposed with a terrible logistics chain. You have the feeling that the "chocolate factory", as some of the Google critics call them, may just have competed it's conversion for munitions production.
Large Oracle customers might want to make sure the have a long term, ongoing and harmonious relationship with Google. This may be the time to be kicking out Microsoft mail systems and switching company wide to Google Apps.
Looking through the Google histories it seems that first he came out and then, after the fact, people started saying that he must have forged it. That is pretty difficult to check, (remember you can set a date range in Google news search; go from distant past to two days ago and you see just a few articles which seem to be the very first ones) and I'm not at all sure I did it right, but if it is true then it's pretty damning evidence that someone is desperate to tell any lie to make it seem that this is a forgery.
Hipsters already ruined the Mac.....they aren't welcome on Linux either
Your comment has been modded to oblivion; but within there is a kernel of truth that should be answered. I've loved both the Mac and Ubuntu (quite a bit before 10.04). Both really have changed in spirit; the Mac from a platform for creation (remember they used to bundle what at the time was a top end paint program and word processor with the original system) towards a platform for media consumption. Ubuntu from an easy way to get the full GNU/Linux experience which absolutely tested every usability corner case to death into a strange visionaries test ground.
But.. Let's hold on a sec. There's a fundamental difference which stems from their cultural basis, one in BSD an the other in GNU. With OS X the consumer vision is becoming more and more entrenched and there is no escape. Where you used to just download and install developer tools or get Hypercard for free, now you: sign up for an apple account/sign up for Xcode/agree to a developer agreement/download macports/install the apps/find it's not compatible/have to search for an x server... etc. etc. etc.
With Ubuntu you are still one command and a re-login away from a civilised XFCE desktop. If you download Kubuntu you don't even need to use that one command. Linux Mint is fully available and fully Ubuntu software compatible. You won't get that on Android, let alone your 'WiNokia". Ubuntu have had some bad luck with anti-FOSS and FOSS corrupting people like Matt Assay, but they are still in the fold of people who are pushing forward software where you can do what you want with the end result. As long
If the hipsters are paying for that, there isn't much to complain about. Concentrate instead on companies like Apple and to a large extent Google which produce "Open Core" software where everything is open except the very bit that matters. These guys take your effort and turn it into their user's lock in. Ubuntu is still driving forward free and open code and free and open user experiences. That counts for plenty. The thing is to make sure that Ubuntu is encouraged to stay with Copyleft as much as possible and push back against their use of contributor agreements and unprotected code.
That's largely true, though I would be really interested to see how they would survive falling off a high road bridge and landing on a spiky granite boulder..
But; going back to what would likely happen in a crash. Physically well protected things have a tendency to involve large masses of steel or concrete or both. Sometimes aluminium and titanium, but those tend to be more expensive. I would guess that this could be quite an exciting crash even if it didn't involve any nuclear spillage at all. I can see a need for research grant coming on..
Getting rid of the PUC or PSC without revoking the phone company's cable service monopoly makes no sense whatsoever.
Absolutely; but it's no use simply getting rid of the legal monopoly. You have to actually force them to give back the cables. If someone already has the cables in the ground then there is no way for a competitor to practically come in because the costs of new build are always much higher than the costs of merely extending and improving the old network wherever needed to stop the competitor.
Your posting has been pretty much destroyed by the response from the TheVelvetFlamebait and I won't attempt to better that. However, there's another fundamental reason to use the "yelling fire" argument. It's a standard example which shows that, where there is sufficient damage caused by speech there may be a reason to limit it. Just as stampedes have killed people, so the databases kept by the various churches allowed the identification and killing of Jews and others who disagreed with the Nazis. That history is exactly why in Germany people care very much about the right to privacy and that caring extends to a lesser extent across the whole of Europe. The "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example is something you have to overcome to have a chance of pushing forward absolute freedom of speech.
This is where we get towards the practicality of the matter. Freedom of speech is no use if you can't use it. If you have absolute freedom of speech but your employer is allowed to fire you then you will be afraid to use it. In the USA, freedom of speech is interpreted to include corporations; this means in practice that there is less free transfer of information from person to person because it is drowned out by commercial messages.
In US elections the electorate has almost no chance to communicate with anyone except a "Super PAC" because their right to "free speech" outweighs the electorates right to free and effective communication. Even "free speech" can conflict with freedom of speech. If you want to maximise freedom you have to face up to the compromises it entails.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
From the fourth Amendment to the US constitution
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Generally, without privacy, people have difficulty finding space to form independent views; to think for themselves. To do different things. That as a serous and bad effect.
Can you just clear up what you meant by it? The way I understand it then "I will do it anymore" it should be the closed interval beginning from now and continuing forever into the future (Wikipedia says "from now on"). Right? So what I don't get is did you mean that this is now true but wasn't true before or that this was always true?
What you wrote wasn't clear to me, but guessing that you mean "people are able to shout fire":
Yes, you can shout fire, but if you do it when you know there isn't a fire that will be a crime. In just the same way as you can shoot someone with a gun, but if it turns out you were trying to kill them then it's murder. Unfortunately for victims and fortunately for freedom courts in most countries are almost always only able to act after the fact.
Sometimes the right to life threatens the right to free speech (when people want to shout "fire") sometimes the right to free speech threatens the right to free movement (when people set up web sites to track others and become stalkers). What we do is compromise and weigh up one right with another. It's not so complex. Hell it's even built into the European court systems already.
Well, isn't the concept of "Higgs Bosons" similar to having some sort of "ether"?
Ummm no ; umm yes; umm what do you mean "similar".
Also, there is nothing that says ether must interact with all particles in the same way, or at all. That might sound far-fetched, but it really isn't more far fetched than proposing dark matter and dark energy with similar properties.
Nothing says it must interact with particles equally, but the whole point of an aether is that it is a medium in which electromagnetic waves can happen. This means it must interact with photons (or at least "light waves"). Since it measurably doesn't interact with them (see the Michelson Morley experiment and various followups to it) it doesn't exist.
Sadly, the project is rather late and I get 99% of what I've wanted out of my N900 for less than it would have cost to buy the Freerunner then this on top.
That's the whole point though. Up till now, if you bought a Nokia N900 or N9, you were worrying what happens when you lose the device in two years time and there isn't anything equivalent on the market. The OpenMoko phone looked like a failure since the company gave up. Now they begin to look visionary and just a little bit too early. We now know for sure that people are going to keep coming out with these hobbyist devices and that they are going to keep getting better and better. That means you can start to take the idea seriously and invest time effort and even money. This is the equivalent moment to the moment when the ISA bus was added to the IBM-PC. Suddenly you realise that you have an open Linux based mobile device architecture which has escaped from the control of the big companies that were initially involved in setting it up.
Some of what you say is true and country folks can't expect the same services as in the city. That's why people moved to the cities in the first place. However:
Nobody is stopping you from doing that.
Oh yes they are. The first fundamental blockage is that the teleco companies own the most interesting parts of the radio spectrum and buy it up everywhere. Secondly, whenever a town starts to build a network of their own they come in and try to get legislation blocking it.
This blocking of competition also generalises to private initiatives in many places; when someone starts to build a competing network they will come in exactly there, and nowhere else, and make sure they kill off the competition.
Finally, the telecos got ownership of a whole bunch of infrastructure that was state built almost everywhere. The value of that is obvious, but most important is the blocking power; there's no way to rebuild the whole thing all at once and the person who has it already is always able to block competition wherever they choose.
This just is an area where the companies ensure that pure free market fails and so there needs to be intervention.
You aren't getting this entirely. Have a look at GoDaddy; they have a long involvement in DNS, which is one of the areas where corruption and politics meets technology. They aren't particularly big and powerful, but they knew enough to find out about the legislation and to know who to talk to to get their own name in there early. They were explicitly listed by name in the legislation so that only they could benefit from exclusions.
The list of people who support ACTA is invitation only. From their own point of view MS is in there because they benefit. From the general point of view they benefit because the *AA thought that without them the legislation might get blocked and that with them it would be more powerful. The next time this type of legislation comes around you may find something like a new copyright on search engine results being offered to Google in order to drag them in and get their support.
And if you identify everyone who attends these meetings and concentrate on getting rid of them you will have struck a very big blow for clearing up politics generally. There are very few issues which as clearly come out as big corporation vs. people. Even better is that in this case it isn't because there are no big corporations on our side, just because they are new corporations which haven't yet worked out how to do corruption (that's why Microsoft is on the other side). This is a really really worthwhile cause and making a list of everyone who ever collaborated with the RIAA, MPAA and big media over this and following up on it to the end could set back the corporate control of government by decades.
Except that things like git may be good for distributed teams that rarely talk to each other (your typical open source project) but people I know who've dealt with this in real world in-the-same-cubicle-row teams tend to spit and cuss when talking about git and mercurial.
The point fundamentally is that a proper distributed version control system is an entirely new tool and a major advance in much the same way as any version control is an advance over just using files. This does mean added complexity. Just as when people switched from doing everything in assembly to using compilers, there will be people who have problems; and / or will resist this change for a long time.
The key benefit isn't really in the fact you can work distributedly. It's rather in the ability to check in fast and often on a local repository without making a mess of the central one. this allows making of checkins for every logically separate change.
As an example, imagine you add a new feature but for it to work you have to do some optimization. Probably you write the feature first then do the optimization afterwards. However, if you make them in separate sets of check ins, you then push the optimization up stream first (no functional change, so much easier to get in). This means that as you struggle for several months to get your new feature accepted, your optimizations and other changes to the broad code base are already in. Your need to keep rebasing almost completely disappears.
You could in principle do that with a normal revision control system using multiple branches, but in real life you don't. That's because you discover what changes you are going to have to make as you go along and start fixing the code around your change. By the time you do this it's too late to go back in time and split up your early commits into two separate branches. With a distributed system you can get into the habit of committing early and often so this is much much easier.
I haven't used them myself though.
And changing tools is a major shakeup. You never do this on a whim, it takes time and testing and keeping things in parallel for awhile. Real world projects should never do this just because some blogger liked a tool and wrote about it.
Both GIT and Mercurial are a bit beyond that and have seen both a fair bit of large scale commercial and very large scale open source usage.
Successful cut overs that I have seen involved at first mirroring from SVN/CVS or whatever into the distributed version control and then moving the tools over so that they read from the new system. However, once that was done there was a day when there was a very hard cut over and all commits suddenly switched from going into the old repository to the new. A softer cut over risks chaos and insanity IMHO. The cut over should be done very close to the start of a development cycle. There definitely has to be an experienced user of the new system to support anybody who is having problems.
I had a boss once who checked in code constantly. He was indeed one of the most productive members of the team, but the number of checkins far outweighed the actual productivity since he was also committing a lot of code to fix up his earlier commits. Ie, he checked code in before testing, then tested it immediately, then updated the code, plus he used the checkin as a means of backing up files sometimes. Whereas I'd wait until the code was working or at least in a workable form before checking in.
And this is why you should switch to a proper modern distributed version control like Mercurial or GIT. Your boss would checkin locally and wouldn't disturb the development. You would learn to checkin more often and learn to record the reason for changes rather than the result. All would be happiness and light.
So in other words Cisco is the company that valued it's reputation least and is the most worth boycotting. The other ones cared more. If that had been HP we would have boycotted them. What's your point?
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Who said there's no difference? In fact, I pointed out that there is a difference: that it's now more accessible than before.
"Ooh, people have to get an Apple ID!" It's not like there aren't hundreds of millions of people with such accounts--more accounts than Macs. I don't see how this is a problem.
I don't see how this is a problem for you either. You are obviously not a Syrian dissident. If you were, then every place that your and the use of your computer is registered becomes a risk to you and the more you have the less you have time to make . Facebook and Twitter are ways that the underground communicate at the same time as being ways that people are discovered by the government. Your Apple ID might also be used in the same way; to see who generated software for the rest of the underground and so it becomes an additional barrier to your computer use.
There are lots of other people who are in situations different from yours; even just people who like their privacy and who don't want to be registered on principle; choosing solutions which can include everyone is better.
If you don't see the difference between "everybody gets the development kit automatically" and "you can only get the development kit if you register", which an apple account requires, then there is a serious problem. They could very easily include it on the default install and even offer to automatically delete it if it hasn't been used by the time the disk is full if they are worried it will take too much space.
Where you come from, all computers may be connected via fast links to the internet. That is nowhere near true in much of the world.
No longer true for Xcode 4. It is free download in the apps store so it's pretty available but you do have to register which is a perfect example of how Apple sets its self up able to tighten the screws whenever they want.
How ever did it function in the dark years *before* software patents, then?
It would be like in Europe nowadays. They have no software patents so the only computers are owned by the government. In German, for example, there are only three computers currently and those are old "Siemens" ones based on early 20th century telephone exchanges. Each German state has two terminals in their state capital and the rich ones a few more distributed around.
Believe me; it's terrible. Without computers they can't have traffic lights or drive the robots needed to produce things so almost nobody even has a car, and those that do get them imported via Canada from the US to get round their strict, protectionist trade barriers which are they only way they can compete. German people don't even have Facebook!!
Never, ever let the US descend to this level by getting rid of software patents.
with the level of understanding of issues held by the average voter in the US, I shudder to think what would happen if they were directly voting on laws. Most of them can't even do maths.
I would like to say to you that what would happen is that they would be forced to learn. They will vote for stupid things, see the problems they cause, reverse them and begin to demand that everything gets done in a sensible and orderly way like in Switzerland
I would like to say that, but unfortunately I can't. In quite a number of states there are already local "ballot initiatives" and we know that what they mostly do is vote themselves and their richer friends a tax cut increasing their local deficit. Oh well.
Clicky please.
If google can't work around them ...
The number of patents involved has reduced massively. More than that, most of those that stayed have lost most of their most important features. Frankly, the collapse in this case is pathetic and very very worrying for Oracle. You would assume that they would be able to come up with some solid patents relevant to almost any VM which runs Java and that this would be the fundamental basis of their defence against Motorola's various database related patents. They have failed to do so at the point where the absolutely had to. As it is, they are beginning to look very like the German army during their attack on Stalingrad and just before the counterattack. Dangerously overstreched and extremely exposed with a terrible logistics chain. You have the feeling that the "chocolate factory", as some of the Google critics call them, may just have competed it's conversion for munitions production.
Large Oracle customers might want to make sure the have a long term, ongoing and harmonious relationship with Google. This may be the time to be kicking out Microsoft mail systems and switching company wide to Google Apps.
(tongue only partly in cheek;)
Looking through the Google histories it seems that first he came out and then, after the fact, people started saying that he must have forged it. That is pretty difficult to check, (remember you can set a date range in Google news search; go from distant past to two days ago and you see just a few articles which seem to be the very first ones) and I'm not at all sure I did it right, but if it is true then it's pretty damning evidence that someone is desperate to tell any lie to make it seem that this is a forgery.
Hipsters already ruined the Mac .....they aren't welcome on Linux either
Your comment has been modded to oblivion; but within there is a kernel of truth that should be answered. I've loved both the Mac and Ubuntu (quite a bit before 10.04). Both really have changed in spirit; the Mac from a platform for creation (remember they used to bundle what at the time was a top end paint program and word processor with the original system) towards a platform for media consumption. Ubuntu from an easy way to get the full GNU/Linux experience which absolutely tested every usability corner case to death into a strange visionaries test ground.
But.. Let's hold on a sec. There's a fundamental difference which stems from their cultural basis, one in BSD an the other in GNU. With OS X the consumer vision is becoming more and more entrenched and there is no escape. Where you used to just download and install developer tools or get Hypercard for free, now you: sign up for an apple account/sign up for Xcode/agree to a developer agreement/download macports/install the apps/find it's not compatible/have to search for an x server... etc. etc. etc.
With Ubuntu you are still one command and a re-login away from a civilised XFCE desktop. If you download Kubuntu you don't even need to use that one command. Linux Mint is fully available and fully Ubuntu software compatible. You won't get that on Android, let alone your 'WiNokia". Ubuntu have had some bad luck with anti-FOSS and FOSS corrupting people like Matt Assay, but they are still in the fold of people who are pushing forward software where you can do what you want with the end result. As long
If the hipsters are paying for that, there isn't much to complain about. Concentrate instead on companies like Apple and to a large extent Google which produce "Open Core" software where everything is open except the very bit that matters. These guys take your effort and turn it into their user's lock in. Ubuntu is still driving forward free and open code and free and open user experiences. That counts for plenty. The thing is to make sure that Ubuntu is encouraged to stay with Copyleft as much as possible and push back against their use of contributor agreements and unprotected code.
That's largely true, though I would be really interested to see how they would survive falling off a high road bridge and landing on a spiky granite boulder..
But; going back to what would likely happen in a crash. Physically well protected things have a tendency to involve large masses of steel or concrete or both. Sometimes aluminium and titanium, but those tend to be more expensive. I would guess that this could be quite an exciting crash even if it didn't involve any nuclear spillage at all. I can see a need for research grant coming on..
Getting rid of the PUC or PSC without revoking the phone company's cable service monopoly makes no sense whatsoever.
Absolutely; but it's no use simply getting rid of the legal monopoly. You have to actually force them to give back the cables. If someone already has the cables in the ground then there is no way for a competitor to practically come in because the costs of new build are always much higher than the costs of merely extending and improving the old network wherever needed to stop the competitor.
Your posting has been pretty much destroyed by the response from the TheVelvetFlamebait and I won't attempt to better that. However, there's another fundamental reason to use the "yelling fire" argument. It's a standard example which shows that, where there is sufficient damage caused by speech there may be a reason to limit it. Just as stampedes have killed people, so the databases kept by the various churches allowed the identification and killing of Jews and others who disagreed with the Nazis. That history is exactly why in Germany people care very much about the right to privacy and that caring extends to a lesser extent across the whole of Europe. The "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example is something you have to overcome to have a chance of pushing forward absolute freedom of speech.
This is where we get towards the practicality of the matter. Freedom of speech is no use if you can't use it. If you have absolute freedom of speech but your employer is allowed to fire you then you will be afraid to use it. In the USA, freedom of speech is interpreted to include corporations; this means in practice that there is less free transfer of information from person to person because it is drowned out by commercial messages.
In US elections the electorate has almost no chance to communicate with anyone except a "Super PAC" because their right to "free speech" outweighs the electorates right to free and effective communication. Even "free speech" can conflict with freedom of speech. If you want to maximise freedom you have to face up to the compromises it entails.
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
From the fourth Amendment to the US constitution
Generally, without privacy, people have difficulty finding space to form independent views; to think for themselves. To do different things. That as a serous and bad effect.
Can you just clear up what you meant by it? The way I understand it then "I will do it anymore" it should be the closed interval beginning from now and continuing forever into the future (Wikipedia says "from now on"). Right? So what I don't get is did you mean that this is now true but wasn't true before or that this was always true?
What you wrote wasn't clear to me, but guessing that you mean "people are able to shout fire":
Yes, you can shout fire, but if you do it when you know there isn't a fire that will be a crime. In just the same way as you can shoot someone with a gun, but if it turns out you were trying to kill them then it's murder. Unfortunately for victims and fortunately for freedom courts in most countries are almost always only able to act after the fact.
Sometimes the right to life threatens the right to free speech (when people want to shout "fire") sometimes the right to free speech threatens the right to free movement (when people set up web sites to track others and become stalkers). What we do is compromise and weigh up one right with another. It's not so complex. Hell it's even built into the European court systems already.
If only there was a "...what?" mod option.
Presumably as a +1. As opposed to the "what the..." moderation.
Well, isn't the concept of "Higgs Bosons" similar to having some sort of "ether"?
Ummm no ; umm yes; umm what do you mean "similar".
Also, there is nothing that says ether must interact with all particles in the same way, or at all. That might sound far-fetched, but it really isn't more far fetched than proposing dark matter and dark energy with similar properties.
Nothing says it must interact with particles equally, but the whole point of an aether is that it is a medium in which electromagnetic waves can happen. This means it must interact with photons (or at least "light waves"). Since it measurably doesn't interact with them (see the Michelson Morley experiment and various followups to it) it doesn't exist.
Sadly, the project is rather late and I get 99% of what I've wanted out of my N900 for less than it would have cost to buy the Freerunner then this on top.
That's the whole point though. Up till now, if you bought a Nokia N900 or N9, you were worrying what happens when you lose the device in two years time and there isn't anything equivalent on the market. The OpenMoko phone looked like a failure since the company gave up. Now they begin to look visionary and just a little bit too early. We now know for sure that people are going to keep coming out with these hobbyist devices and that they are going to keep getting better and better. That means you can start to take the idea seriously and invest time effort and even money. This is the equivalent moment to the moment when the ISA bus was added to the IBM-PC. Suddenly you realise that you have an open Linux based mobile device architecture which has escaped from the control of the big companies that were initially involved in setting it up.
Some of what you say is true and country folks can't expect the same services as in the city. That's why people moved to the cities in the first place. However:
Nobody is stopping you from doing that.
Oh yes they are. The first fundamental blockage is that the teleco companies own the most interesting parts of the radio spectrum and buy it up everywhere. Secondly, whenever a town starts to build a network of their own they come in and try to get legislation blocking it.
This blocking of competition also generalises to private initiatives in many places; when someone starts to build a competing network they will come in exactly there, and nowhere else, and make sure they kill off the competition.
Finally, the telecos got ownership of a whole bunch of infrastructure that was state built almost everywhere. The value of that is obvious, but most important is the blocking power; there's no way to rebuild the whole thing all at once and the person who has it already is always able to block competition wherever they choose.
This just is an area where the companies ensure that pure free market fails and so there needs to be intervention.
You aren't getting this entirely. Have a look at GoDaddy; they have a long involvement in DNS, which is one of the areas where corruption and politics meets technology. They aren't particularly big and powerful, but they knew enough to find out about the legislation and to know who to talk to to get their own name in there early. They were explicitly listed by name in the legislation so that only they could benefit from exclusions.
The list of people who support ACTA is invitation only. From their own point of view MS is in there because they benefit. From the general point of view they benefit because the *AA thought that without them the legislation might get blocked and that with them it would be more powerful. The next time this type of legislation comes around you may find something like a new copyright on search engine results being offered to Google in order to drag them in and get their support.
And if you identify everyone who attends these meetings and concentrate on getting rid of them you will have struck a very big blow for clearing up politics generally. There are very few issues which as clearly come out as big corporation vs. people. Even better is that in this case it isn't because there are no big corporations on our side, just because they are new corporations which haven't yet worked out how to do corruption (that's why Microsoft is on the other side). This is a really really worthwhile cause and making a list of everyone who ever collaborated with the RIAA, MPAA and big media over this and following up on it to the end could set back the corporate control of government by decades.
Except that things like git may be good for distributed teams that rarely talk to each other (your typical open source project) but people I know who've dealt with this in real world in-the-same-cubicle-row teams tend to spit and cuss when talking about git and mercurial.
The point fundamentally is that a proper distributed version control system is an entirely new tool and a major advance in much the same way as any version control is an advance over just using files. This does mean added complexity. Just as when people switched from doing everything in assembly to using compilers, there will be people who have problems; and / or will resist this change for a long time.
The key benefit isn't really in the fact you can work distributedly. It's rather in the ability to check in fast and often on a local repository without making a mess of the central one. this allows making of checkins for every logically separate change.
As an example, imagine you add a new feature but for it to work you have to do some optimization. Probably you write the feature first then do the optimization afterwards. However, if you make them in separate sets of check ins, you then push the optimization up stream first (no functional change, so much easier to get in). This means that as you struggle for several months to get your new feature accepted, your optimizations and other changes to the broad code base are already in. Your need to keep rebasing almost completely disappears.
You could in principle do that with a normal revision control system using multiple branches, but in real life you don't. That's because you discover what changes you are going to have to make as you go along and start fixing the code around your change. By the time you do this it's too late to go back in time and split up your early commits into two separate branches. With a distributed system you can get into the habit of committing early and often so this is much much easier.
I haven't used them myself though.
And changing tools is a major shakeup. You never do this on a whim, it takes time and testing and keeping things in parallel for awhile. Real world projects should never do this just because some blogger liked a tool and wrote about it.
Both GIT and Mercurial are a bit beyond that and have seen both a fair bit of large scale commercial and very large scale open source usage.
Successful cut overs that I have seen involved at first mirroring from SVN/CVS or whatever into the distributed version control and then moving the tools over so that they read from the new system. However, once that was done there was a day when there was a very hard cut over and all commits suddenly switched from going into the old repository to the new. A softer cut over risks chaos and insanity IMHO. The cut over should be done very close to the start of a development cycle. There definitely has to be an experienced user of the new system to support anybody who is having problems.
I had a boss once who checked in code constantly. He was indeed one of the most productive members of the team, but the number of checkins far outweighed the actual productivity since he was also committing a lot of code to fix up his earlier commits. Ie, he checked code in before testing, then tested it immediately, then updated the code, plus he used the checkin as a means of backing up files sometimes. Whereas I'd wait until the code was working or at least in a workable form before checking in.
And this is why you should switch to a proper modern distributed version control like Mercurial or GIT. Your boss would checkin locally and wouldn't disturb the development. You would learn to checkin more often and learn to record the reason for changes rather than the result. All would be happiness and light.
So in other words Cisco is the company that valued it's reputation least and is the most worth boycotting. The other ones cared more. If that had been HP we would have boycotted them. What's your point?