Or maybe they'll demand DRM free media. Some music companies are now offering drm free songs because people have demanded it.
DRM for music is only the beginning. Once you get DRM for digital images, and can make it work, then artists of all shapes and sizes will gravitate to that platform.
Back on topic - let IBM patent this - its not like the patent will hold up except in the US, so watch how quickly everyone else uses it...
Let IBM patent it, have them get some sort of exclusive right to offshore business processes, and, then, offshoring will gradually grind to a halt for 20 years because only IBM will be allowed to do it and IBM will screw it up.
You also have a choice of.doc formats for Windows, also. Word for Windows 2.0, Word 6, Word 97, Word 2000, Word whatever_the_flavor_of_the_day... but nothing open to sharing with others using other OSes or hardware
The version argument is lame. Everything has a version on it. Look at Java, for example. And, people generally don't care too much about sharing with other OSes. That's more of a political argument that open source people make.
If you consider Windows good, I've got some swamp land in Florida for you. GOOD? GOOD? Wow. Some people never learn, do they.
Hey, I can put Windows on a machine, and watch a movie after it is installed. Can't do that with Linux, now, can you? As a developer, I have a choice of APIs for sound on Windows, and amazingly, they all work. By contrast, Linux sound is pretty rough. You've got a sound api for KDE, a sound api for Gnome, some other legacy sound apis, and none of them are as good as DirectSound and there's nothing as elegant and comprehensive as DirectMusic.
If we look at what the kernel offers, well, sure, Linux has a pretty elegant file model. But I'm aggravated that the Linux kernel lacks something basic like CopyFile, and Linux's asynch model doesn't quite stack up to the power offered by I/O completion ports.
From a user level - Linux's wireless networking is a mess compared to Windows, and even digital camera support is bad. Sure, Canon has finally upgraded to a newer standard, but older and perfectly workable cameras remain a void, but, they run ok on Windows. Linux support for Camera RAW format sucks, making it useless for any real digital photography. Of course, all of this just works on Windows.
You can go and blame manufacturers, and driver writers and whatever consumer conspiracy you want, but at the end of the day, consumers don't care. An operating system is an ecosystem, and either that ecosystem does what you want, or it doesn't, and under Linux, it doesn't, and for a lot of people.
Linux does have some advantages over Windows, I'll give you that. But, Windows has a lot of advantages of its own, as well, so many that, you can't really say that Windows is empirically bad, and in fact, for many applications, Windows is better.
You'll never have consumer support for Linux, because there will always be some multimedia content supporting some form of DRM, and Windows allows for that, and Linux doesn't. When consumers have to go through hoops to download a song or play a movie on an OS, they won't choose it.
See, now we see what IBM is really all about, using free software to make it easier to throw more people out of work in the states. At least with Microsoft, there's developers actually working in the USA....
Re:And then Bush goes and kills thousends of peopl
on
Replacing a Thinkpad?
·
· Score: 1
And somehow that makes the US system better
The US system is better. People wrote that Putin was a murderer for Chechnya. One by one, as all of them were squeezed out of business, assasinated, or other otherwise silenced. You may not agree with the invasion, but, at least you can criticize it and even take action to a point, to undermine the US military effort there. In most other countries, you could be assasinated as a traitor for even coming out against a war that nation is fighting, wheras in America, all you have is people calling you names but with really no other consequence to you. I'd say that's a freer system.
says that a fuel cell car needs about 5kg per fill up of 350 miles, we're looking at roughly 1750 car miles per acre per day, or, about 640,000 miles per acre year, assuming that you can grow algae year round.
Assuming that the USA has 240 million drivers , driving on average, 11,000 miles per year (wikipedia), then, we're talking about a demand for about a little over 4 million acres of algae. So, this could actually work, and work a lot better than ethanol.
Even a 10% hydrogen conversion efficiency would require only 20 million acres of land, and that's considerably less than the several hundred million acres (more than the area of the USA, to grow enough corn to make ethanol with for fuel).
But you stand up in a public Q&A and do the yell the same stuff and act like an obnoxious prick you get tasered.
Then you make a YouTube video of the whole thing, become a hero for the left wing, maybe get a book deal, and suddenly, make a ton of money being a victim of persecution, and that's even before you file your first lawsuit for excessive force against the cops, the city, the feds, and even the taser makers.
America is a great country, because even the people who protest wealth, get rich by doing so.
In America, you can have a website and a donate money to form an organization saying "Bush sucks". In China, if you did that, you would wind up in jail.
I asked for a specific admission. You have not cited one. If you want to say there are overtones, leanings, implications, that's fine. "Admitedly," as used, is a pejorative, and as such, is open to challenge.
I gave you a specific admission. It's all there when you read RMS's writings. You choose to ignore. In any case, your entire argument is a red herring anyway. You are likely a GPL zealot trying to avoid it being called socialist, because, you are afraid that this will somehow hurt the GPL.
In other words, the central thrust of my arguments are correct, Stallman is a leftist, and frankly, so are many supporters of Linux. What's the big crime in coming out? Why do you have to be so afraid of your ideas that you want to lie about them by throwing up insignificant details designed to distort reality?
See aforementioned mention of red herrings. This one goes by the name of "guilt by association." Perhaps there are others who would be interested in pursuing you down this rabbit hole.
Nope. This would be more called proof of motive. You know, OJ didn't like Nicole's new boyfriend, so it is reasonable to think that he stabbed him and her to death.
Given your follow-up, I perceive that you have neglected to reflect on the way market forces have responded positively to GPL'd software. You do allow that software could be an isolated exception, but this contradicts your citing the Soviet Union, etc. In other words, you're muddling state socialism with RMS's philosophy, which I would describe as libertarian socialism, or market socialism. In still other words, the standard vision of socialism as a governmental project should not, and cannot, be conflated free software, which has made inroads into the market without, or even in spite of, the government
Well now, that's just filled with factual distortions. The government is very responsible for free software, in case you haven't noticed. You couldn't have the GPL without copyright law, clearly, otherwise, everything would just be public domain. But more directly, have you noticed just how much the German government supports KDE, and, all of those students that work on Linux in some way, jeez, do you think they get their tuition by baking cookies? In one way or another, they are getting either student loans or scholarships or some form of state subsidy. Indeed, Stallman's MIT gets a giant amount of its money as basically the -uber- think tank for the Department of Defense.
Hey, we need to invade outer space. All it takes is one terrorist asteroid, and entire city is cooked. Oh the humanity! Screw the space station, what we need is for the USA to build....
Let's see, Apple is building an entire business around user friendly appliances and have a pretty good reputation for user interface design. Why not see what they can do with it?
Yes, especially since the original bill was passed under Bill Clinton's presidency. Oh, good old Bill such a republican, wasn't he?
Sigh. Yes I am being sarcastic.
Fiscally, the only thing that Bush has done that could be considered Republican was to lower the capital gains tax. However, Clinton himself lowered the capital gains tax, but also kept spending in check, balanced the budget, promoted a sound dollar. If Hillary would actually be as good fiscally as her husband was, I'd say the budget would be in pretty good shape.
On the other hand, Bush is afflicted with LBJ syndrome. He's spends more than a drunk in a whorehouse.
On/. I fall politically on the "right-wing nutjob" side of the isle,
That's where I'm at, and I feel the same way about the GPL as you do. I like GPL stuff, and, heck, I like open software and the open software culture. Saying that the GPL has some pinko commie aspect of it isn't condemning it, its just calling it what it is, and, the thing is, and, unlike pinko commmie stuff in the real world, it actually does seem to work on a real level.
One wonders though, if the GPL Sputnik will ultimately be answered by some closed source Apollo, somewhere down the road, but, that they got X-Windows working with 3d graphics card and pretty well seems to say, hmmm, maybe not.
It isn't that- people keep coming up with that because you don't precisely have to pay anything for it
No, my argument was more rhetorical. In America, the Supreme Court can do whatever it wants. Scalia rails on about Roe V Wade not being "constitutional" and then goes and does legal somersaults when it suits him. Justices don't have to make anything "logical". All they have to do is invent a set of tests for which their ruling applies, and then, say, in that case, here is the law. It can be as schizophrenic as they want.
So, if you put the GPL in front of the SCOTUS, you could get some arse of a Judge looking at it, decide that it wasn't inline with their philosophy, and then just invent some sort of ruling just to scupper the whole thing. The interesting thing is that RMS has actually thought of the ultimate experiment in the GPL: If one is against socialism, one is in favor of private ownership, but does a private owner have the right to compel his users to share to grant a license? Either way, RMS wins, as, some limit is placed on private ownership. I'm suprised more people on slashdot, so obsessed with the "cause", haven't really gleaned yet just how big this really is.
The GPL is THE socialogical question of our time. Even if I disagree with a lot of his ideas, the importance of what he has done cannot be underestimated. He's up there with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Jefferson, etc, in terms of doing something new.
You say "Does an admittedly left leaning GPL..." I want to know who "admit[ted]" that the GPL is "left leaning," and when. Don't cite me RMS's opinions on other matters, or the lifestyle of FLOSS users, or any other ad hominem red herrings. Tell me, specifically, whose admission you are referring to.
You know, that is some heap of non-logic you are throwing out there buddy. You would seriously believe that a person's body of thought is somehow isolated from a major portion of his work. That's absurd.
RMS's political philosophy is socialist, in that, he argues that the needs of the consumers so completely outweigh the rights of the producers that the producers of goods have no rights at all. The central thrust of his philosophy is that ownership is bad. That's socialism, and that, by definition, is leftist.
Being a software man, and, by all accounts, a rather intelligent and well thought one, he seeks to stamp his political philosophy into the technology world, before it is too late. To that end, RMS invents the GPL. The GPL is a license based on copyright. But note that he does not believe, per se, in copyright law. He argues, ultimtely, that http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/, that, software should not be "owned" at all, but recognizes that under most western law, that copyright is the means with which to best achieve his end, effectively.
Stallman notes the stock socialist criticism of the soviet union - the communists were bad, and they just wanted it all for themselves. The thing is, a more detailed look at the history of soviet communism would show that many of the communist leaders were really actually rather smart, and genuinely tried to do the right thing, but power corrupts, over time. To some degree, stalin's paranoid period aside, many of the communist constraints on freedom were really, like the GPL gone mad - to protect the workers, we have to have rule, after rule, after rule, to keep it just so. It just doesn't work, and a worse tyranny results. The downfall of any socialist system is that to get the social arrangement you want in even one aspect of it, sooner or later, you have to try to control all of it. It's just the nature of things.
Otherwise, I will file you (and any further arguments you may wish to make) next to people who misuse the word "literally," cannot distinguish between "to" and "too," and believe that quotation marks are used to add emphasis.
Your threat is silly. It's silly that you are offended that I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software. Note that, I didn't make any moral judgements about it. In all other fields, the "real fields", I think socialism is evil, not because the idea is bad, because, on paper, if it could work, it would have been alright. It's just, its failed everywhere it has been applied. But in software, who knows, maybe it might work. That software can be copied without cost changes things, and its worth it to let things play out, as the experiment of GPL, and following its consequences with non-free software, is really the social experiment of our time, and it should be viewed as a non-catastrophic and above all, peaceful way to study the interactions of radically different ideologies as they compete and coexist. Who knows, maybe from all of this, some new thoughts about a radically new economic system might arise from this interaction, that gives us the benefits of capitalism but that addresses the social concerns that socialism wants to, but can't.
If you claim to have an open mind, the first thing to do is call things what they are, not call them what you want people to believe them to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they'll demand DRM free media. Some music companies are now offering drm free songs because people have demanded it.
DRM for music is only the beginning. Once you get DRM for digital images, and can make it work, then artists of all shapes and sizes will gravitate to that platform.
Back on topic - let IBM patent this - its not like the patent will hold up except in the US, so watch how quickly everyone else uses it ...
Let IBM patent it, have them get some sort of exclusive right to offshore business processes, and, then, offshoring will gradually grind to a halt for 20 years because only IBM will be allowed to do it and IBM will screw it up.
You also have a choice of .doc formats for Windows, also. Word for Windows 2.0, Word 6, Word 97, Word 2000, Word whatever_the_flavor_of_the_day ... but nothing open to sharing with others using other OSes or hardware
The version argument is lame. Everything has a version on it. Look at Java, for example. And, people generally don't care too much about sharing with other OSes. That's more of a political argument that open source people make.
Isn't that why they don't choose DRM in first place? ("You are not authorized to play this song" messages aren't exactly consumer-friendly).
Usually, someone has to pay for something, in order to call them a consumer.
AMD Roadkill!
AMD Eddies! Fast Eddies : More cores for less!
AMD Apology : Sorry we pissed you off Intel!
rah rah, USA... pathetic.
No, rah rah, USA, pilgrim. USA is awesome!
If you consider Windows good, I've got some swamp land in Florida for you. GOOD? GOOD? Wow. Some people never learn, do they.
Hey, I can put Windows on a machine, and watch a movie after it is installed. Can't do that with Linux, now, can you? As a developer, I have a choice of APIs for sound on Windows, and amazingly, they all work. By contrast, Linux sound is pretty rough. You've got a sound api for KDE, a sound api for Gnome, some other legacy sound apis, and none of them are as good as DirectSound and there's nothing as elegant and comprehensive as DirectMusic.
If we look at what the kernel offers, well, sure, Linux has a pretty elegant file model. But I'm aggravated that the Linux kernel lacks something basic like CopyFile, and Linux's asynch model doesn't quite stack up to the power offered by I/O completion ports.
From a user level - Linux's wireless networking is a mess compared to Windows, and even digital camera support is bad. Sure, Canon has finally upgraded to a newer standard, but older and perfectly workable cameras remain a void, but, they run ok on Windows. Linux support for Camera RAW format sucks, making it useless for any real digital photography. Of course, all of this just works on Windows.
You can go and blame manufacturers, and driver writers and whatever consumer conspiracy you want, but at the end of the day, consumers don't care. An operating system is an ecosystem, and either that ecosystem does what you want, or it doesn't, and under Linux, it doesn't, and for a lot of people.
Linux does have some advantages over Windows, I'll give you that. But, Windows has a lot of advantages of its own, as well, so many that, you can't really say that Windows is empirically bad, and in fact, for many applications, Windows is better.
You'll never have consumer support for Linux, because there will always be some multimedia content supporting some form of DRM, and Windows allows for that, and Linux doesn't. When consumers have to go through hoops to download a song or play a movie on an OS, they won't choose it.
Nice to see you're proud Windows is made in your country. I'm proud it's not made in mine.
That's a good comeback, but we both know your country can't make anything even remotely as good as Windows, and therefor doesn't even try.
Did I say X-Box? I thought I said -Windows-.
See, now we see what IBM is really all about, using free software to make it easier to throw more people out of work in the states. At least with Microsoft, there's developers actually working in the USA....
And somehow that makes the US system better
The US system is better. People wrote that Putin was a murderer for Chechnya. One by one, as all of them were squeezed out of business, assasinated, or other otherwise silenced. You may not agree with the invasion, but, at least you can criticize it and even take action to a point, to undermine the US military effort there. In most other countries, you could be assasinated as a traitor for even coming out against a war that nation is fighting, wheras in America, all you have is people calling you names but with really no other consequence to you. I'd say that's a freer system.
Given 35kg of hydrogen per acre, and that
http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech-R&D/wtr_16523,295,p1.html?a=f
says that a fuel cell car needs about 5kg per fill up of 350 miles, we're looking at roughly 1750 car miles per acre per day, or, about 640,000 miles per acre year, assuming that you can grow algae year round.
Assuming that the USA has 240 million drivers , driving on average, 11,000 miles per year (wikipedia), then, we're talking about a demand for about a little over 4 million acres of algae. So, this could actually work, and work a lot better than ethanol.
Even a 10% hydrogen conversion efficiency would require only 20 million acres of land, and that's considerably less than the several hundred million acres (more than the area of the USA, to grow enough corn to make ethanol with for fuel).
But you stand up in a public Q&A and do the yell the same stuff and act like an obnoxious prick you get tasered.
Then you make a YouTube video of the whole thing, become a hero for the left wing, maybe get a book deal, and suddenly, make a ton of money being a victim of persecution, and that's even before you file your first lawsuit for excessive force against the cops, the city, the feds, and even the taser makers.
America is a great country, because even the people who protest wealth, get rich by doing so.
In America, you can have a website and a donate money to form an organization saying "Bush sucks". In China, if you did that, you would wind up in jail.
I mean, a lot of computers are already bundled with Vista. So its a success. Onto the next release!
I asked for a specific admission. You have not cited one. If you want to say there are overtones, leanings, implications, that's fine. "Admitedly," as used, is a pejorative, and as such, is open to challenge.
I gave you a specific admission. It's all there when you read RMS's writings. You choose to ignore. In any case, your entire argument is a red herring anyway. You are likely a GPL zealot trying to avoid it being called socialist, because, you are afraid that this will somehow hurt the GPL.
In other words, the central thrust of my arguments are correct, Stallman is a leftist, and frankly, so are many supporters of Linux. What's the big crime in coming out? Why do you have to be so afraid of your ideas that you want to lie about them by throwing up insignificant details designed to distort reality?
See aforementioned mention of red herrings. This one goes by the name of "guilt by association." Perhaps there are others who would be interested in pursuing you down this rabbit hole.
Nope. This would be more called proof of motive. You know, OJ didn't like Nicole's new boyfriend, so it is reasonable to think that he stabbed him and her to death.
Given your follow-up, I perceive that you have neglected to reflect on the way market forces have responded positively to GPL'd software. You do allow that software could be an isolated exception, but this contradicts your citing the Soviet Union, etc. In other words, you're muddling state socialism with RMS's philosophy, which I would describe as libertarian socialism, or market socialism. In still other words, the standard vision of socialism as a governmental project should not, and cannot, be conflated free software, which has made inroads into the market without, or even in spite of, the government
Well now, that's just filled with factual distortions. The government is very responsible for free software, in case you haven't noticed. You couldn't have the GPL without copyright law, clearly, otherwise, everything would just be public domain. But more directly, have you noticed just how much the German government supports KDE, and, all of those students that work on Linux in some way, jeez, do you think they get their tuition by baking cookies? In one way or another, they are getting either student loans or scholarships or some form of state subsidy. Indeed, Stallman's MIT gets a giant amount of its money as basically the -uber- think tank for the Department of Defense.
Hey, we need to invade outer space. All it takes is one terrorist asteroid, and entire city is cooked. Oh the humanity! Screw the space station, what we need is for the USA to build ....
http://www.scifi.com/galactica
Battlestars!
Let's see, Apple is building an entire business around user friendly appliances and have a pretty good reputation for user interface design. Why not see what they can do with it?
Heck, if we can stay the course in Iraq, why can't we stay the course in low earth orbit?
Yes, especially since the original bill was passed under Bill Clinton's presidency. Oh, good old Bill such a republican, wasn't he?
Sigh. Yes I am being sarcastic.
Fiscally, the only thing that Bush has done that could be considered Republican was to lower the capital gains tax. However, Clinton himself lowered the capital gains tax, but also kept spending in check, balanced the budget, promoted a sound dollar. If Hillary would actually be as good fiscally as her husband was, I'd say the budget would be in pretty good shape.
On the other hand, Bush is afflicted with LBJ syndrome. He's spends more than a drunk in a whorehouse.
On /. I fall politically on the "right-wing nutjob" side of the isle,
That's where I'm at, and I feel the same way about the GPL as you do. I like GPL stuff, and, heck, I like open software and the open software culture. Saying that the GPL has some pinko commie aspect of it isn't condemning it, its just calling it what it is, and, the thing is, and, unlike pinko commmie stuff in the real world, it actually does seem to work on a real level.
One wonders though, if the GPL Sputnik will ultimately be answered by some closed source Apollo, somewhere down the road, but, that they got X-Windows working with 3d graphics card and pretty well seems to say, hmmm, maybe not.
It isn't that- people keep coming up with that because you don't precisely have to pay anything for it
No, my argument was more rhetorical. In America, the Supreme Court can do whatever it wants. Scalia rails on about Roe V Wade not being "constitutional" and then goes and does legal somersaults when it suits him. Justices don't have to make anything "logical". All they have to do is invent a set of tests for which their ruling applies, and then, say, in that case, here is the law. It can be as schizophrenic as they want.
So, if you put the GPL in front of the SCOTUS, you could get some arse of a Judge looking at it, decide that it wasn't inline with their philosophy, and then just invent some sort of ruling just to scupper the whole thing. The interesting thing is that RMS has actually thought of the ultimate experiment in the GPL: If one is against socialism, one is in favor of private ownership, but does a private owner have the right to compel his users to share to grant a license? Either way, RMS wins, as, some limit is placed on private ownership. I'm suprised more people on slashdot, so obsessed with the "cause", haven't really gleaned yet just how big this really is.
The GPL is THE socialogical question of our time. Even if I disagree with a lot of his ideas, the importance of what he has done cannot be underestimated. He's up there with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Jefferson, etc, in terms of doing something new.
Some critics have characterized the FSF's position that led to the drafting of the GPL as socialist, and socialism is a left ideology
The real question is thus. Is the world wide left wing, seemingly so resurgent, that casting something as socialism is considered a criticism?
Interesting.
You say "Does an admittedly left leaning GPL..." I want to know who "admit[ted]" that the GPL is "left leaning," and when. Don't cite me RMS's opinions on other matters, or the lifestyle of FLOSS users, or any other ad hominem red herrings. Tell me, specifically, whose admission you are referring to.
You know, that is some heap of non-logic you are throwing out there buddy. You would seriously believe that a person's body of thought is somehow isolated from a major portion of his work. That's absurd.
RMS's political philosophy is socialist, in that, he argues that the needs of the consumers so completely outweigh the rights of the producers that the producers of goods have no rights at all. The central thrust of his philosophy is that ownership is bad. That's socialism, and that, by definition, is leftist.
Being a software man, and, by all accounts, a rather intelligent and well thought one, he seeks to stamp his political philosophy into the technology world, before it is too late. To that end, RMS invents the GPL. The GPL is a license based on copyright. But note that he does not believe, per se, in copyright law. He argues, ultimtely, that http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/, that, software should not be "owned" at all, but recognizes that under most western law, that copyright is the means with which to best achieve his end, effectively.
Stallman notes the stock socialist criticism of the soviet union - the communists were bad, and they just wanted it all for themselves. The thing is, a more detailed look at the history of soviet communism would show that many of the communist leaders were really actually rather smart, and genuinely tried to do the right thing, but power corrupts, over time. To some degree, stalin's paranoid period aside, many of the communist constraints on freedom were really, like the GPL gone mad - to protect the workers, we have to have rule, after rule, after rule, to keep it just so. It just doesn't work, and a worse tyranny results. The downfall of any socialist system is that to get the social arrangement you want in even one aspect of it, sooner or later, you have to try to control all of it. It's just the nature of things.
Otherwise, I will file you (and any further arguments you may wish to make) next to people who misuse the word "literally," cannot distinguish between "to" and "too," and believe that quotation marks are used to add emphasis.
Your threat is silly. It's silly that you are offended that I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software. Note that, I didn't make any moral judgements about it. In all other fields, the "real fields", I think socialism is evil, not because the idea is bad, because, on paper, if it could work, it would have been alright. It's just, its failed everywhere it has been applied. But in software, who knows, maybe it might work. That software can be copied without cost changes things, and its worth it to let things play out, as the experiment of GPL, and following its consequences with non-free software, is really the social experiment of our time, and it should be viewed as a non-catastrophic and above all, peaceful way to study the interactions of radically different ideologies as they compete and coexist. Who knows, maybe from all of this, some new thoughts about a radically new economic system might arise from this interaction, that gives us the benefits of capitalism but that addresses the social concerns that socialism wants to, but can't.
If you claim to have an open mind, the first thing to do is call things what they are, not call them what you want people to believe them to be.
In what way could the GPL possibly be considered non-commercial?
The point is, a Supreme Court Judge can make up whatever law they want to, if they want to.