For what it's worth, I am planning on developing a tool written in PHP to help Open Source projects manage feature requests AND provide some monetary incentive. This could be known as something like "feature bounties" or some other name if anyone has an idea of anything more creative.
Basically, users of the software can promise cash rewards for whoever adds the feature(s) they need. If it is a large feature, users can pool their 'bounties' until the reward is great enough that somebody decides to develop it. At this point, the feature becomes "adopted" by that developer.
This idea is not really new, but I don't think it has been fully explored. It could be implemented initially as an honor system, but some sort of escrow system could also be possible.
The Washington Post is reporting that the latest toy craze, miniature radio-controlled cars, is actually fueled by spam
That's funny... I always thought those miniature RC cars were fueled by watch batteries or triple-A's. I guess it's like they say.. there are endless uses for the ham in a can! (:
As long as our art shows us what it means to do x, in a context that does not sicken us, there will be x.
The only folks who actually believe this are logically-impared liberals who think correlation implies causation.
There are certain things in society that people don't think to do, because they are, and by rights should be, disgusting and wrong actions. Violence and carnage should be one of these.
Violence in itself is not wrong. It is not wrong to harm or even kill in self defense if there be no alternative. It is not wrong to destroy evil men if there be no alternative to subdue them and the havoc they wreck. It's called justice.. and it's something that cannot be avoided given human nature. If you suggest otherwise, I'm afraid you are sorely out of touch with reality.
Do you think it is possible that we can redefine our ethos such that certain thoughts are sickening to people, and that among these thoughts there could be all actions violent?
Before starting off on a gun debate, why not first ask "what is a gun?" Sounds silly, right? But seriously, there are a near infinite means of fashioning weapons easily capable of killing humans. So which of these counts as a "gun"? Is my paintball equipment a gun? It could certainly kill someone if I used marbles instead of soft paint pellets. How about a potato cannon loaded with a golf ball? Or a water baloon sling with a frozen baloon? Or the sling and rock David used to kill Goliath?
IIRC, a gun is legally defined as anything that rapidly accelerates a projectile along a guide using the rapid expansion of gases produced in a combustion reaction. That's a pretty limited definition considering all the many ways to harness kinetic energy as a weapon.
And outlawing / severely regulating such devices will do what good?? NONE
And then you get back to the Columbine nonsense, which the political left has milked for all it's worth in their typical knee-jerk ways. (not to say that the right doesn't employ equally stupid logic on other issues). Suppose the homemade bombs the killers had fashioned had gone off in the cafeterias? Hundreds of students would likely have died. So should we ban propane tanks to 'protect the children'?
..then antenna and C-band satellite are your friends. Free television programming.. Imagine that! -- not having to pay for TV that was already paid for by advertisements! And if you want specialty channels, you can pay about $0.25-0.50/ea. per month and pick and choose the handful that you'd actually watch. Not that there's anything that great anyways.. and all the popular shows are on the free networks anyways.
It's absolutely amazing that so many people have suckered into paying exorbitant prices for cable and directTV.
Folks, go stick a Yagi up on your roof and stop paying these profiteering hollywood assholes who take away our rights at every opportunity.
It's unbelievable the magnitude of stupidity shown by those entrusted with providing our security. Regardless of the subject, you don't fix large security problems by starting with the inconsequential nit-pick details! It'd be like worrying that a burglar could enter your home because they might kick down the door when in fact every window of your house has no lock. The 9/11 tradedy itself solved our air travel security problem. No hijacker will ever again obtain control of an airliner simply for the fact that the passengers and crew will not allow it. Gone is the assumption that a hijacker just wants a large ransom or political favor. Problem solved. We didn't need strip searches and confiscation of nail files.
Trying to regulate, monitor and secure communications channels is absolutely the most useless way to "fight terrorism" -- not to mention it's not even remotely possible in an open and free society. What we really need is an "open source" style audit of our national infrastructure by ordinary Americans who work daily in their areas of expertise. We need simple ingenuity to fix any holes that may exist.
You have no idea what you're talking about. dselect is an excellent package management tool if you've actually read the quick-help instead of just ignoring it and mashing keys until the dependancy resolving dialogs are gone.
It takes a whopping 5 minutes to read the help docs. Amazing how lazy people are these days! And then they complain that Debian is un-friendly!
Very simple: Hit the reset button. No, not that stubby plastic thing on the front of your case. I mean reset copyright law back to what it was when the US founding fathers wrote it right the first time. Let works enter the public domain after 14 years. That would mean every movie released since 1988 would be free to distribute. That'd be a lot of good movies legally on Kazaa or what have you. And then Hollywood would have to "compete" against the public domain and actually write *gasp* original screenplays. This would drive down ticket and video prices to the point where people would no longer bootleg to beat the system--also knowing that they were helping to increase the public domain!
Of course this will never happen, because Hollywood is sickeningly corrupt and gluteonously wealthy enough to pay for laws that make them richer. So there's only one option left: boycott.
City planners want to put a Monorail in Pittsburgh too, but I am totally against it. Why? Because frankly, it's a waste of tax dollars. It doesn't solve much problem in proportion to its enormous cost. We're talking many billions of dollars. How much research on alternative energy and fuel cell vehicles could be accomplished with that much money?! This would quite certainly do more to reduce polution and improve the city. Heck, if the money was truly managed wisely with minimal bureaucracy--say by a non-profit group with a couple overseers--we could probably become the Detroit of environmentally-friendly alternative vehicles and put ourselves on the map as a technology leader. But that would actually make sense, and the Democrats who run this town have an extreme aversion to logic and intelligence, so it'd never fly.
OK, I was not aware that Gentoo was fully a community effort. After checking it out further, however, I would have to classify it as a decent distro. On the other hand, I don't agree with some things about it.
Source-only are fairly impractical in many real-world cases. I can't afford to wait a whole day for all software to compile when setting up a new customer. Granted, I could just compile with everything enabled, use compatible defaults, and then clone the partition, but then that would kinda defeat the purpose of a meta-distro, wouldn't it? And then what happens when I need to upgrade the software? More downtime for re-compiling! Point being, I don't have the time to customize each client machine, so what's the advantage of Gentoo vs. well built Debian binary packages. With Debian, I can install from binary packages for the vast majority of software and install from source packages for the handful that I need to truly customize. Sure, there's room for improvement in making this task more user-friendly, but I don't see the need for a whole new distro when Debian's source package management tools are not THAT far behind what Gentoo is doing. The main difference is that Debian doesn't force you to use source packages. I believe there is even a tool that will automate downloading and build of dependancies when installing from Debian source packages. All this and Debian supports more architectures than any other distro: 10, with a couple others in the works. Gentoo only supports 4. Packages available? Debian: ~10,000 vs. Gentoo: ~3,000. And Debian is moving to become non-Linux-specific as well so that you can use BSD or Hurd kernels. Who's leaving who in the dust? Btw, Distrowatch is misleading if you're going to compare package version numbers: No, Debian 3.0r0 is not as up to date as Gentoo, but few people use *only* the stable releases of Debian. I'm not saying Gentoo is bad, but it IS redundant.
It's okay that stable moves at a snails pace, but unstable doesn't even have software that has become standard on other distributions.
Like what? OK, yeah, KDE3.. but that is only because the Debian project is undergoing the enormous transition to using gcc 3.2.1, which has some c++ incompatibilities with 2.9x. Once this is complete, unstable will move much faster with the latest and greatest KDE stuff.
So now Hollywood thinks it can "win people over" to their side by evoking pity for them?! Pathetic.. truly pathetic. People will not stop boycotting / making unauthorized copies until Hollywood and the music industry learn some ethics themselves. Until then, Joe Public perceives that he is just stealing from a thief. Or phrased another way: Hollywood has no moral ground to stand on when they make these statements against so-called "piracy" by ordinary consumers.
Some reasons to boycott Hollywood and Big Music:
1.) They are solely responsible for the hideously unconstitutional DMCA, which tramples on some pretty basic rights--free speech and expression anyone?
2.) They'd like to ruin all useful consumer electronics and computer technology with crap like SSSCA / CBDTPA, this time taking away basic rights of property ownership ("well, you can own it.. BUT we can legally say how you're allowed to use it")
3.) They repeatedly screw over the true artists if there's a way to increase their profits. (Go look up your own examples.. there are plently out there.)
4.) They are the single largest driving force in brainwashing youth with "alternative morals." And no, this has nothing to do with the mere existence of sex and violence in film. It's about the attitudes behind the way that sex and violence are portrayed. It's about the underlying message delivered. (Example: American Pie - "you're a loser if you're still a virgin at the end of high school")
5.) They are an enormous tool of consumer whore-ism and shame-based marketing that promotes conformity. "You're no good unless you look this way / act this way / have these things / etc."
6.) They have destroyed the original institution of limited copyright for the purpose of making gargantuan amounts of money with minimal efforts.
7.) They seem to believe that they are "owed" enormous wealth because they are so special, as compared to most businesses which are subject to the Free Market and actually have to work hard to operate efficiently and turn a profit. Even bad movies tend to yield a profit margin unheard of in any other industry.
8.) Unchecked positioning in the market and monopolistic tactics that rival Microsoft's have led to disgusting price gouging of theater tickets, pay TV, music albums, and movies. All at the expense of consumers.
9.) They repeatedly have taken all available measures to maintain gatekeepers of all media, making it very difficult for independent artists and producers to succeed...And then they turn around and put out propaganda like this, saying "don't attack the gatekeepers! you'll hurt the poor working-class folks in the entertainment industry!!"
I don't know about the rest of you folk, but this kinda stuff is plenty to make me avoid the theaters and wait for the $0.99 DVD rental (on the handful of movies even *worth* seeing) Vote with your dollars, people!!
"We are a poor country. We cannot develop operating systems and platforms on our own," Kulkarni said.
It sounds to me like RMS spent too much time explaining the virtues of the Open Source development model and not enough time explaining that virtually all of the Free Software that India will ever need is already written! Next time, RMS, brag about all the cool stuff they can have free right now and then explain how it came into existance!
But then again, if they want to remain a 3rd world toilet by stuffing their monies into US corporate coffers, that's up to them.. can't say we didn't try to help.
The sooner we get rid of all these stupid special-purpose and commercial distributions, the sooner people will realize that ALL the legitimate money in Open Source software is found in consulting and services. We only need ONE popular Linux distribution: Debian. And before anyone goes flaming me for being a "debian elitist" or starts criticizing how Debian's installer sucks and is unsuitable for home users, consider this: Debian is the only distribution that is fully community-driven. It is the only distribution with a formalized policy and social contract. It is one of the oldest distributions and has a solid track record in security and timeliness. The size and popularity of the project is growing rapidly--Debian now packages far more software than ANY other distribution.
And yes, now that Debian has begun to move far beyond its "techie-core" roots, there is a large interest in developing newbie-friendly installers and system maintenance utilities. Interested? Get coding! (:
widely seen as a way to prevent Microsoft, which has been embroiled in a legal battle with InterTrust, from grabbing control of the potentially lucrative business
Q.) Why exactly would hardware companies spend almost half a BILLION dollars on a company developing technology that makes products less useful to consumers? Why would they go out of their way to conform to Hollywood's interests? A.) To become the new gatekeepers of media of course! Of course it's a "lucrative business.." not a very ethical one... but hell, it's all about the money these days, right?
Hopefully people will boycott this garbage and it'll go the way of the Divxsaurs. At very least we now have the beginnings of a new format war. Maybe competitors will crack each others DRM systems to prove them insecure and "leak" code through 14-year-old kids in northern europe. (:
Strange times we live in. Vote with your dollars folks!!
I'm not against all patents, just software patents. I beXGZ¦iãÿdï.ïoftware patents are overly broad by default. Not everyone can manufacture imitation products, but everyone can write software. So who do you protect: the individual or the software company? You hit the nail right on the head with "The problem with software, is that it's all "intellectual" and "conceptual" My free speech right to express ideas through code is infinitely more important than any business' bottom line. Furthermore, software patents always hurt innovation. Software, like mathematics and literature, builds upon innumerable previous ideas, non of which are truly original and many of which are ordinal discoveries rather than inventions.
Perhaps the biggest danger with software patents is stifling the adoption of open standards, and therefore competition. Nothing that Microsoft is doing with.Net/C#/etc. is truly innovative--there are dozens of ways to do the same thing. But yet they are patenting the concepts of how *their own* system works to prevent competing implementations. Sure, you can avoid the patents by doing things your own way, but it won't be compatible. Software companies are granted more than enough monopoly through copyright of their implementations. Patents only block competition.
Has anyone EVER seen someone looking up porn in a library? I certainly haven't. My local library's 8Eö>2_Jals are in plain view of the entire upstairs floor. Someone would have to be awful gutsy to display their moral decadence so blatantly in public.
Secondly, they need to at least get the language right. Children do not look up porn; immature teenage boys do. You don't just randomly stumble into porn sites.
On the other hand, I have no problem with libraries filtering their content as long as they use open source software like DansGuardian and ONLY use it to block porn sites. I've set this up for clients and it works nearly flawlessly.
I know it sounds harsh, but the vast majority of music out there is downright pathetic, whether indie or label. And unfortunately, indie music is reliably the worst. (yes, I've tried emusic, mp3.com, iuma, etc. they all suck terribly.)
It's as simple as this, people: produce quality music and you WILL succeed. And when I say quality music, I mean single songs that take you a whole week or even month to compose--not something you scribble down in one or two practice sessions with your favorite garage band buddies. Good music, like literature, must be refined over and over and over again. The best writing is rewriting. And once you have perfected your work, do whatever you need to get a professional quality recording done. Find someone who has a fullblown home studio or find an audio engineer who can help you.
And for the record, the following music genres need not apply because they are fundamentally flawed to begin with: Punk, Ska, Grunge, most variations of Rap. Sorry, but counter-culture is worthless if it's inferior.
One representative from Microsoft personally reassured me several times over the past few year that her company does not intend to charge high royalties for licenses to patents. Perhaps that also means that her company won't attempt to stifle competition by charging higher royalties than the open source community can afford.
"Reasonable royalties" are not acceptable and are, in fact, incompatible with Free Software to begin with. Software patents need eliminated altogether. They are 100% anti-innovation and anti-free-market. I will not pay one dime to M$ for their supposed software patents and neither should ANY other members of the Open Source community, even if it comes to outright civil disobedience. It's a shame the US patent office was stupid enough to start accepting them in the first place. Time for some reform I think.
Seriously, on a sheer magnitude scale, which has greater potential to change global climate patterns? Human CO2 production or a significant change in solar radiation? (Not to mention changes in seismic activity resulting from the same fluctuations in the earth's molten core..) The earth is not exactly a stable system.
Oooh.. here's a novel idea!
on
Ultimate Sleds?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I just posted, but here's another idea that might actually be original. How about some sort of bungie apparatus? This could work in all sorts of ways. Either the cord could release and spring back away after slowing you down or else you could ride out the oscillations... perhaps getting a free ride halfway back up the hill. (: Heck, if you get this figured out, charge admission. (and take out a huge insurance policy! hehe)
Do what ski resorts do for their tubing hills: before the trees at the bottom, build up a mound of dirt / strawbale / etc. that'll get covered in snow. Don't make the grade sharp enough to act as a jump though (unless intended!) The mound should slow you down enough to roll off safely.. assuming there's at least some flat area at the bottom of the sled hill to work with. Or you could always try a net. (:
Without the promise of a monopoly-- temporary though it will be-- there would be no incentive to innovate.
They say that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. In this case, that'd be your Economics 101 class. Try reading something more recent than the Wealth of Nations. Yeah, it's a good book, but Adam Smith, like any economist, grotesquely oversimplified. There are many non-monetary reasons to innovate, not the least of which being necessity, desire for knowledge, community building, even entertainment..
The average Slashdot poster hasn't the foggiest idea how the world actually works, and has no respect whatsoever for the power of the profit motive.
Now that's some good flamebait.
And unconstitutional? Please refer to Article I, section 8: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." All patents are fundamentally constitutional, as long as they are granted for a limited time.
They key phrase here is "to promote the progress of.." Software patents do not promote progress. This has been cited by software companies themselves, such as Oracle. Furthermore, software patents trample on first amendment rights. Would you support patents on literature? mathematics? There are certain areas where patents are detrimental to society because they constrict the free flow of ideas (which is ultimately more important to progress than ANY profit motive).
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, I am planning on developing a tool written in PHP to help Open Source projects manage feature requests AND provide some monetary incentive. This could be known as something like "feature bounties" or some other name if anyone has an idea of anything more creative.
Basically, users of the software can promise cash rewards for whoever adds the feature(s) they need. If it is a large feature, users can pool their 'bounties' until the reward is great enough that somebody decides to develop it. At this point, the feature becomes "adopted" by that developer.
This idea is not really new, but I don't think it has been fully explored. It could be implemented initially as an honor system, but some sort of escrow system could also be possible.
Please comment if you have any ideas!
The Washington Post is reporting that the latest toy craze, miniature radio-controlled cars, is actually fueled by spam
That's funny... I always thought those miniature RC cars were fueled by watch batteries or triple-A's. I guess it's like they say.. there are endless uses for the ham in a can! (:
As long as our art shows us what it means to do x, in a context that does not sicken us, there will be x.
The only folks who actually believe this are logically-impared liberals who think correlation implies causation.
There are certain things in society that people don't think to do, because they are, and by rights should be, disgusting and wrong actions. Violence and carnage should be one of these.
Violence in itself is not wrong. It is not wrong to harm or even kill in self defense if there be no alternative. It is not wrong to destroy evil men if there be no alternative to subdue them and the havoc they wreck. It's called justice.. and it's something that cannot be avoided given human nature. If you suggest otherwise, I'm afraid you are sorely out of touch with reality.
Do you think it is possible that we can redefine our ethos such that certain thoughts are sickening to people, and that among these thoughts there could be all actions violent?
Suggest you read/watch A Clockwork Orange.
(But if Microsoft wanted to, they could become the world's biggest producer of Linux software.)
Only if they didn't try to sell it -- and that will never happen because it's their whole backwards and antiquated business model.
Nope.. we don't need MS at all. Not for Office, not for anything. Half the point of using Linux is to get away from their proprietary crapware.
Before starting off on a gun debate, why not first ask "what is a gun?" Sounds silly, right? But seriously, there are a near infinite means of fashioning weapons easily capable of killing humans. So which of these counts as a "gun"? Is my paintball equipment a gun? It could certainly kill someone if I used marbles instead of soft paint pellets. How about a potato cannon loaded with a golf ball? Or a water baloon sling with a frozen baloon? Or the sling and rock David used to kill Goliath?
IIRC, a gun is legally defined as anything that rapidly accelerates a projectile along a guide using the rapid expansion of gases produced in a combustion reaction. That's a pretty limited definition considering all the many ways to harness kinetic energy as a weapon.
And outlawing / severely regulating such devices will do what good?? NONE
And then you get back to the Columbine nonsense, which the political left has milked for all it's worth in their typical knee-jerk ways. (not to say that the right doesn't employ equally stupid logic on other issues). Suppose the homemade bombs the killers had fashioned had gone off in the cafeterias? Hundreds of students would likely have died. So should we ban propane tanks to 'protect the children'?
..then antenna and C-band satellite are your friends. Free television programming.. Imagine that! -- not having to pay for TV that was already paid for by advertisements! And if you want specialty channels, you can pay about $0.25-0.50/ea. per month and pick and choose the handful that you'd actually watch. Not that there's anything that great anyways.. and all the popular shows are on the free networks anyways.
It's absolutely amazing that so many people have suckered into paying exorbitant prices for cable and directTV.
Folks, go stick a Yagi up on your roof and stop paying these profiteering hollywood assholes who take away our rights at every opportunity.
It's unbelievable the magnitude of stupidity shown by those entrusted with providing our security. Regardless of the subject, you don't fix large security problems by starting with the inconsequential nit-pick details! It'd be like worrying that a burglar could enter your home because they might kick down the door when in fact every window of your house has no lock. The 9/11 tradedy itself solved our air travel security problem. No hijacker will ever again obtain control of an airliner simply for the fact that the passengers and crew will not allow it. Gone is the assumption that a hijacker just wants a large ransom or political favor. Problem solved. We didn't need strip searches and confiscation of nail files.
Trying to regulate, monitor and secure communications channels is absolutely the most useless way to "fight terrorism" -- not to mention it's not even remotely possible in an open and free society. What we really need is an "open source" style audit of our national infrastructure by ordinary Americans who work daily in their areas of expertise. We need simple ingenuity to fix any holes that may exist.
I can give that crusty dselect the finger...
You have no idea what you're talking about. dselect is an excellent package management tool if you've actually read the quick-help instead of just ignoring it and mashing keys until the dependancy resolving dialogs are gone.
It takes a whopping 5 minutes to read the help docs. Amazing how lazy people are these days! And then they complain that Debian is un-friendly!
Very simple: Hit the reset button. No, not that stubby plastic thing on the front of your case. I mean reset copyright law back to what it was when the US founding fathers wrote it right the first time. Let works enter the public domain after 14 years. That would mean every movie released since 1988 would be free to distribute. That'd be a lot of good movies legally on Kazaa or what have you. And then Hollywood would have to "compete" against the public domain and actually write *gasp* original screenplays. This would drive down ticket and video prices to the point where people would no longer bootleg to beat the system--also knowing that they were helping to increase the public domain!
Of course this will never happen, because Hollywood is sickeningly corrupt and gluteonously wealthy enough to pay for laws that make them richer. So there's only one option left: boycott.
Vote with your dollars.
Yeah.. right.. I wanna kiss the lips from some dead person.. Totally sexy.
What kind of sick individual would use this procedure if it was available? And who would touch them with even a 10 foot pole if they did?
And then, it all becomes clear: Michael Jackson
City planners want to put a Monorail in Pittsburgh too, but I am totally against it. Why? Because frankly, it's a waste of tax dollars. It doesn't solve much problem in proportion to its enormous cost. We're talking many billions of dollars. How much research on alternative energy and fuel cell vehicles could be accomplished with that much money?! This would quite certainly do more to reduce polution and improve the city. Heck, if the money was truly managed wisely with minimal bureaucracy--say by a non-profit group with a couple overseers--we could probably become the Detroit of environmentally-friendly alternative vehicles and put ourselves on the map as a technology leader. But that would actually make sense, and the Democrats who run this town have an extreme aversion to logic and intelligence, so it'd never fly.
OK, I was not aware that Gentoo was fully a community effort. After checking it out further, however, I would have to classify it as a decent distro. On the other hand, I don't agree with some things about it.
Source-only are fairly impractical in many real-world cases. I can't afford to wait a whole day for all software to compile when setting up a new customer. Granted, I could just compile with everything enabled, use compatible defaults, and then clone the partition, but then that would kinda defeat the purpose of a meta-distro, wouldn't it? And then what happens when I need to upgrade the software? More downtime for re-compiling! Point being, I don't have the time to customize each client machine, so what's the advantage of Gentoo vs. well built Debian binary packages. With Debian, I can install from binary packages for the vast majority of software and install from source packages for the handful that I need to truly customize. Sure, there's room for improvement in making this task more user-friendly, but I don't see the need for a whole new distro when Debian's source package management tools are not THAT far behind what Gentoo is doing. The main difference is that Debian doesn't force you to use source packages. I believe there is even a tool that will automate downloading and build of dependancies when installing from Debian source packages. All this and Debian supports more architectures than any other distro: 10, with a couple others in the works. Gentoo only supports 4. Packages available? Debian: ~10,000 vs. Gentoo: ~3,000. And Debian is moving to become non-Linux-specific as well so that you can use BSD or Hurd kernels. Who's leaving who in the dust? Btw, Distrowatch is misleading if you're going to compare package version numbers: No, Debian 3.0r0 is not as up to date as Gentoo, but few people use *only* the stable releases of Debian. I'm not saying Gentoo is bad, but it IS redundant.
It's okay that stable moves at a snails pace, but unstable doesn't even have software that has become standard on other distributions.
Like what? OK, yeah, KDE3.. but that is only because the Debian project is undergoing the enormous transition to using gcc 3.2.1, which has some c++ incompatibilities with 2.9x. Once this is complete, unstable will move much faster with the latest and greatest KDE stuff.
So now Hollywood thinks it can "win people over" to their side by evoking pity for them?! Pathetic.. truly pathetic. People will not stop boycotting / making unauthorized copies until Hollywood and the music industry learn some ethics themselves. Until then, Joe Public perceives that he is just stealing from a thief. Or phrased another way: Hollywood has no moral ground to stand on when they make these statements against so-called "piracy" by ordinary consumers.
..And then they turn around and put out propaganda like this, saying "don't attack the gatekeepers! you'll hurt the poor working-class folks in the entertainment industry!!"
Some reasons to boycott Hollywood and Big Music:
1.) They are solely responsible for the hideously unconstitutional DMCA, which tramples on some pretty basic rights--free speech and expression anyone?
2.) They'd like to ruin all useful consumer electronics and computer technology with crap like SSSCA / CBDTPA, this time taking away basic rights of property ownership ("well, you can own it.. BUT we can legally say how you're allowed to use it")
3.) They repeatedly screw over the true artists if there's a way to increase their profits. (Go look up your own examples.. there are plently out there.)
4.) They are the single largest driving force in brainwashing youth with "alternative morals." And no, this has nothing to do with the mere existence of sex and violence in film. It's about the attitudes behind the way that sex and violence are portrayed. It's about the underlying message delivered. (Example: American Pie - "you're a loser if you're still a virgin at the end of high school")
5.) They are an enormous tool of consumer whore-ism and shame-based marketing that promotes conformity. "You're no good unless you look this way / act this way / have these things / etc."
6.) They have destroyed the original institution of limited copyright for the purpose of making gargantuan amounts of money with minimal efforts.
7.) They seem to believe that they are "owed" enormous wealth because they are so special, as compared to most businesses which are subject to the Free Market and actually have to work hard to operate efficiently and turn a profit. Even bad movies tend to yield a profit margin unheard of in any other industry.
8.) Unchecked positioning in the market and monopolistic tactics that rival Microsoft's have led to disgusting price gouging of theater tickets, pay TV, music albums, and movies. All at the expense of consumers.
9.) They repeatedly have taken all available measures to maintain gatekeepers of all media, making it very difficult for independent artists and producers to succeed.
I don't know about the rest of you folk, but this kinda stuff is plenty to make me avoid the theaters and wait for the $0.99 DVD rental (on the handful of movies even *worth* seeing) Vote with your dollars, people!!
"We are a poor country. We cannot develop operating systems and platforms on our own," Kulkarni said.
It sounds to me like RMS spent too much time explaining the virtues of the Open Source development model and not enough time explaining that virtually all of the Free Software that India will ever need is already written! Next time, RMS, brag about all the cool stuff they can have free right now and then explain how it came into existance!
But then again, if they want to remain a 3rd world toilet by stuffing their monies into US corporate coffers, that's up to them.. can't say we didn't try to help.
The sooner we get rid of all these stupid special-purpose and commercial distributions, the sooner people will realize that ALL the legitimate money in Open Source software is found in consulting and services. We only need ONE popular Linux distribution: Debian. And before anyone goes flaming me for being a "debian elitist" or starts criticizing how Debian's installer sucks and is unsuitable for home users, consider this: Debian is the only distribution that is fully community-driven. It is the only distribution with a formalized policy and social contract. It is one of the oldest distributions and has a solid track record in security and timeliness. The size and popularity of the project is growing rapidly--Debian now packages far more software than ANY other distribution.
And yes, now that Debian has begun to move far beyond its "techie-core" roots, there is a large interest in developing newbie-friendly installers and system maintenance utilities. Interested? Get coding! (:
widely seen as a way to prevent Microsoft, which has been embroiled in a legal battle with InterTrust, from grabbing control of the potentially lucrative business
Q.) Why exactly would hardware companies spend almost half a BILLION dollars on a company developing technology that makes products less useful to consumers? Why would they go out of their way to conform to Hollywood's interests? A.) To become the new gatekeepers of media of course! Of course it's a "lucrative business.." not a very ethical one... but hell, it's all about the money these days, right?
Hopefully people will boycott this garbage and it'll go the way of the Divxsaurs. At very least we now have the beginnings of a new format war. Maybe competitors will crack each others DRM systems to prove them insecure and "leak" code through 14-year-old kids in northern europe. (:
Strange times we live in. Vote with your dollars folks!!
I'm not against all patents, just software patents. I beXGZ¦iãÿdï.ïoftware patents are overly broad by default. Not everyone can manufacture imitation products, but everyone can write software. So who do you protect: the individual or the software company? You hit the nail right on the head with "The problem with software, is that it's all "intellectual" and "conceptual" My free speech right to express ideas through code is infinitely more important than any business' bottom line. Furthermore, software patents always hurt innovation. Software, like mathematics and literature, builds upon innumerable previous ideas, non of which are truly original and many of which are ordinal discoveries rather than inventions.
.Net/C#/etc. is truly innovative--there are dozens of ways to do the same thing. But yet they are patenting the concepts of how *their own* system works to prevent competing implementations. Sure, you can avoid the patents by doing things your own way, but it won't be compatible. Software companies are granted more than enough monopoly through copyright of their implementations. Patents only block competition.
Perhaps the biggest danger with software patents is stifling the adoption of open standards, and therefore competition. Nothing that Microsoft is doing with
Has anyone EVER seen someone looking up porn in a library? I certainly haven't. My local library's 8Eö>2_Jals are in plain view of the entire upstairs floor. Someone would have to be awful gutsy to display their moral decadence so blatantly in public.
Secondly, they need to at least get the language right. Children do not look up porn; immature teenage boys do. You don't just randomly stumble into porn sites.
On the other hand, I have no problem with libraries filtering their content as long as they use open source software like DansGuardian and ONLY use it to block porn sites. I've set this up for clients and it works nearly flawlessly.
I know it sounds harsh, but the vast majority of music out there is downright pathetic, whether indie or label. And unfortunately, indie music is reliably the worst. (yes, I've tried emusic, mp3.com, iuma, etc. they all suck terribly.)
It's as simple as this, people: produce quality music and you WILL succeed. And when I say quality music, I mean single songs that take you a whole week or even month to compose--not something you scribble down in one or two practice sessions with your favorite garage band buddies. Good music, like literature, must be refined over and over and over again. The best writing is rewriting. And once you have perfected your work, do whatever you need to get a professional quality recording done. Find someone who has a fullblown home studio or find an audio engineer who can help you.
And for the record, the following music genres need not apply because they are fundamentally flawed to begin with: Punk, Ska, Grunge, most variations of Rap. Sorry, but counter-culture is worthless if it's inferior.
One representative from Microsoft personally reassured me several times over the past few year that her company does not intend to charge high royalties for licenses to patents. Perhaps that also means that her company won't attempt to stifle competition by charging higher royalties than the open source community can afford.
"Reasonable royalties" are not acceptable and are, in fact, incompatible with Free Software to begin with. Software patents need eliminated altogether. They are 100% anti-innovation and anti-free-market. I will not pay one dime to M$ for their supposed software patents and neither should ANY other members of the Open Source community, even if it comes to outright civil disobedience. It's a shame the US patent office was stupid enough to start accepting them in the first place. Time for some reform I think.
Seriously, on a sheer magnitude scale, which has greater potential to change global climate patterns? Human CO2 production or a significant change in solar radiation? (Not to mention changes in seismic activity resulting from the same fluctuations in the earth's molten core..) The earth is not exactly a stable system.
I just posted, but here's another idea that might actually be original. How about some sort of bungie apparatus? This could work in all sorts of ways. Either the cord could release and spring back away after slowing you down or else you could ride out the oscillations... perhaps getting a free ride halfway back up the hill. (: Heck, if you get this figured out, charge admission. (and take out a huge insurance policy! hehe)
Do what ski resorts do for their tubing hills: before the trees at the bottom, build up a mound of dirt / strawbale / etc. that'll get covered in snow. Don't make the grade sharp enough to act as a jump though (unless intended!) The mound should slow you down enough to roll off safely.. assuming there's at least some flat area at the bottom of the sled hill to work with. Or you could always try a net. (:
Without the promise of a monopoly-- temporary though it will be-- there would be no incentive to innovate.
They say that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. In this case, that'd be your Economics 101 class. Try reading something more recent than the Wealth of Nations. Yeah, it's a good book, but Adam Smith, like any economist, grotesquely oversimplified. There are many non-monetary reasons to innovate, not the least of which being necessity, desire for knowledge, community building, even entertainment..
The average Slashdot poster hasn't the foggiest idea how the world actually works, and has no respect whatsoever for the power of the profit motive.
Now that's some good flamebait.
And unconstitutional? Please refer to Article I, section 8: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." All patents are fundamentally constitutional, as long as they are granted for a limited time.
They key phrase here is "to promote the progress of.." Software patents do not promote progress. This has been cited by software companies themselves, such as Oracle. Furthermore, software patents trample on first amendment rights. Would you support patents on literature? mathematics? There are certain areas where patents are detrimental to society because they constrict the free flow of ideas (which is ultimately more important to progress than ANY profit motive).