The link in both the/. article and in the original Genome Technology article leads you to a patent that has absolutely nothing to do with music. It is a gene patent, awarded to DuPont 6 years ago, namely US patent # 7,250,557 and is about generating GM plants with modulated sugar/starch content. Half of the actual patent is a long sequence description. However, the word 'music' does not occur anywhere in it.
> So you think it's reasonable in a free and just society for armed > men to go into a private company's offices, rip publically available > posters of 40+ year old technology off the walls and destroy them in > the name of national security?
No, it's not, but I think it should be clear from the article that it happened in the US, not in "a free and just society" so your question is entirely irrelevant...
They get everything so cheap because they get paid so little. That's globalisation for you, work and products and everything is obtained from where it's the cheapest and attempted to be sold for the maximum extractable from any given location.
It has a equalising effect, the cheap labour slowly gets more and more expensive (and by increasing its purchase power drives prices up) while the more expensive labour must become cheaper (and by getting poorer, drives prices down). It's just tough luck that you happen to be the one who is on the losing end.
Of course the real winner is whoever exploits the disparity, in general we can assume that that's the Big Bad Corporation, simply because they have the resources to do it while you don't, even if in theory you could do the same.
In the Seeds of Deception (a book about the GM industry) there's an interesting quote from a Monsanto exec, which essentially states that the idea of spreading GM to underdeveloped countries is that then any food made anywhere would result in a payment to Monsanto.
In addition, the European public is not very keen on the GM stuff, because they do still remember to all the failures caused by not-tested-enough products being pushed to the market. GM has not been rigorously tested by *independent* bodies and the very few independent tests were not encouraging at all.
Until the EU manages to create the USoE where the political decisions will be far removed from the reach of the people, the European politicians do have to listen to their constituents a lot more than the American ones (not always, see e.g. Berlusconi) and if people in Europe are suspicious of GM, it won't be pushed down their throat. If that also benefits the farmers, the better. When Bruxelles consolidates enough power over the individual states so that their decisions become mandatory, then after some heavy-duty lobbying the GM industry will take over Europe as well.
Re:Call all /. lawers (or not)
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GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
> I -do- however have a portion of code that I keep locked up for a commercial application, if I start using a GPL v3 GCC will I be putting myself into peril?
No, you won't. You want to *use* gcc, not distribute it. The GPL explicitely states that it deals with the redistribution of the program and it puts no restriction on its use. If you want to distribute GCC itsels, then the GPL restricts you. If you distribute code compiled with GCC, the GPL has nothing to do with you.
> Incidently, I'm not in the US, but well... sort of, I'm in Australia, which is almost as good as another US state *sigh*.
It seems to me that in the civil rights/privacy/witch-hunt departments we're getting a lead on the mothership:-(
Don't get me wrong, I do not want to defend Stalin at all. But, the WWII deaths are (although he was responsible for a lot of those by trusting Hitler) were not his own doing. The Soviet Union was invaded and they were protecting their land. They beated nazi Germany (yes, it was them and not Normandy that actually did it - Normandy probably saved an other 5-10 million Russian lives, but did not change the outcome), paid the price of some 20 million people and grabbed the Eastern part of Europe as a buffer in case of a further attack. That whole business was not the act of a lunatic dictator, or at least, it wasn't Stalin.
Second, I've recently seen a British biography on Stalin (detailing all the horrors that he did). At the very end one of the historians had an interesting comment: Stalin murdered millions and built a country of fear. However, in about 30 years he advanced the Soviet Union about as much as what the West needed some two centuries to cover. He managed to transform a practically medieval, mostly agricultural country into a powerfull (and indeed feared, even by the mighty US) industrial nation and "superpower" that could no longer be looked at as one of those interesting but otherwise backwards places of the world.
Third, just because Stalin was a bloody tyrant and killed X million people does not mean that someone else can't be a bloody tyrant because he only killed a few hundred thousand.
Not really. Apple sells you the iPod. Apple offers you a service on iTunes. If you have an iPod, you can load music onto it any way you like it. My wife has an iPod and she has no idea that there's the iTunes store, for she just rips her CDs and puts them onto the iPod as to any other MP3 player. There are numerous other MP3 players out there and people buy them but more of them buy the iPod than any other kind because they like it better. Indeed, the iTunes service is only for iPods (I think, don't know but I assume so) but you can use any other service (and there are many) to get MP3-s which will happily play on any player, including the iPod.
Now Windows is a different thing. MS used its market share to force OEMs to include Windows on every piece of HW they sold. MS writes applications that use features of the OS that only MS is aware and MS does everything in its power to keep the format of every file or packet closed and obscured so that no other player on the market could come up with an application that could access MS application related data.
The iPod was not the first MP3 player and became a market leader because people like it better than the others. If you can come up with a player which is actually more user friendly than the iPod, Apple can't stop you to gain market share. As long as people can convert their iTunes downloads to a vanilla MP3 (as far as I know, you can), you can also use the iTunes service for any player you can come up with. It seems that as of now, people like the iPod more than any of the other ~50-100 models on the market. So iPod is a natural monopoly.
Now if you come up with a new OS + office package + browser + whatnot you can not make it read MS documents for the document formats are MS secrets, you can't just plug it onto an MS network for some packet formats are MS secrets and if you reverse engineer everything and you can do it all, then MS will blow the crap out of you with IP lawsuits and threaten the OEMs to not getting the MS licence any more if they sell your stuff. That is where the monopoly becomes unnatural and where the DoJ finds the defendent guilty of illegal business paractices, coersion etc. and when some higher powers kick the backside of the DoJ for harassing such a fine American businesses...
Microsoft has been taking active (and often illegal) steps to enforce its dominant position, Apple simply made a product that people like.
> The Constitution doesn't say the gov't can do it, so they can't.
I'm not familiar with the details of the US Constitution, but it makes one awe the forsight of the Founding Fathers that the Constitution must have an item about landing men on the Moon, for the government did it (from taxpayer's money, too).
It is sad that they forgot about that bit with regards to providing universal, affordable and quality health care and education for the population, but such oversight is probably excusable if one takes into account the mental effort needed to predict the above mentioned moon landing back then.
> Foreign scientists are having a harder and harder time coming to the US to study, collaborate, or even go to a conference. Scientists are being denied visas or putting on long waiting lists (so that they miss the conference!).
Or they simply decide that they do not wish to be treated like a common criminal by some fistbrained thug and just do not go there.
> As a licence fee payer, I'd like the best value for money possible, thankyou very much, and I don't care two hoots about ITV's or Sky's commercial interests!
Ahh, but as a licence fee payer, can you offer as much under the table stuff to the decision-making politicians as ITV or Sky? No? You see, that's why they don't care two hoots about what you'd like...
> it's implausible that they haven't heard of Linux,
Especially considering that according to NetCraft, their webservers for which the IP block belongs to BBC are all running Linux (the other netblocks mapped to BBC but owned by somebody else run all sorts of systems, although very few uses Windows - most of them are Linux, Solaris or BSD).
Just follow the money. Let's see: You pay your taxes. Government employs X number of companies to run the security CCTV system, buys all the computers and the software to sift through the e-sewage from yet other Z companies, sets up N state security agencies employing N*K people. It is all payed from your taxes. Obviously, it is the interest of all the companies and departments involved to remain involved and if possible, get even more involved. Therefore they will lobby, bribe and in general do everything in their power to restrict personal freedom, simply because that is what makes them the money. In addition, these vehicles, once in place, can be used to gather all sorts of other information from who downloaded Britney Spear's latest clip to shopping habits to service usage patterns to tag people by their probable 'troublemaker' status and so on and so forth. That information is very valuable and can be sold. Furthermore, the more control you have over the general population the easier to steer the boat the way *you* want it as opposed to what would be the interest of the public.
The best bit is that it is all payed from taxes. People work for all sorts of small and medium and large companies. People pay taxes and apart from the election have no say in what goes on in their country. Small and medium business are almost the same, they have all sorts of business councils to represent them, but those are still too small and represent very divergent interests to have significant effect or to get out of the tax system.
If you, on the other hand, are a big multinational company, you can afford to pay absolutely minimum taxes as well as to actually put pressure on governments to represent your interest. Basically, you can channel part of the taxes to either directly or indirectly benefit you. You can pressure governments to grant you, for example, absolute freedom in doing global business but deny the citizens the same rights. Or pressure governments to set up procurement procedures that benefit you no matter how much it costs the taxpayer. And the government will do that because it is *not their money*. It is taxes, i.e. the people's money. No politician will be poorer if the government will only buy some products from XYZ Inc, even if it is a tad more expensive and a tad more crappy than the product from QRS, Co.
Where is the profit for the state? Well, 'state' is a fictious creation. It is supposedly the representation of the collective interest of the people living at a certain place. That interest is supposedly served by the state administration. In reality the 'state' is just a collection of people who receive their salaries from your taxes (from politicians to the janitor of the smallest local government office). It is their interest to secure their jobs and money. In addition, we know that professional lobbying involves offering all sorts of personal benefits to decision makers. So there's the state's profit. Do not forget, a country's administration is paid by you. The more control they have over you, the more secure they are.
Where is the profit for the people of the state? Well, there is no profit for them, but why do you think it matters?
The companies are more souvereign than the people. They can do a lot of things that you can't - for example a company, a single legal entity, can directly influence governments while you, an other single entity can not. Not even your own government, let alone several of them simultaneously. I hope you are aware that there are companies around with yearly turnover higher than the GDP of smaller countries... The 3 highest turnover companies (WalMart, Exxon, Shell) each had sales over $3E11 last year. Denmark's GDP in 2006 was $2.6E11. Estonia's GDP is $1.4E10. The most profitable company, Exxon, made $4E10 *profit*. In fact, according to Forbes there are 14 companies that made more *profit* than what Estonia produced all together. As per sales, Estonia would be somewhere around the 450-est place on the Forbes' First 500 Corporation list.
So who do you think have more influence, you or the companies? Or, say, Estonia's representatives in the Europe Council or the lobbysts representing for example the oil companies' interests?
> that supported it "to save the children" and to "catch the terrorists"
Don't forget the most common one: "to make money". The whole push for the Great European Constitution (and the just as strong push for not asking the citizens if the actually want it or not) is all about money. They managed to fill the ??? in the Underpant Gnomes business plan:
1) Unprecedented corporate freedom 2) Limited and closely monitored personal freedom 3) Profit!!!
Not to mention that the (then government owned) Telstra infrastructure was built from our pockets and now (the privately owned) Telstra is screaming that it is its private property now and letting others to use its copper/fiber would be a communist plot to enslave the free world as we know it. So every telco that wants to provide a broadband service *has* to build their own network (based on the assumption that we will pay for it in access fees) anyway. Thus, the Libs sell you the status quo as a big achievment and put some half-assed measure (well, a promise of it anyway) for the bush (which would never be served by the private sector for the profit margin there is way too low) to gain a few votes in marginal seats. The usual election year BS.
> Results don't matter, it's the intentions of the legislation that matter.
Like Lord Vetinary's very human deathrow, where the guards quietly allow the condemned to scrape the old mortar with the spoon and get through the cell wall (and then find a brand new, much harder and thicker wall behind it):
"You see, sir, what matters is not freedom as such but the prospect of freedom."
Um, coal + air => fire + CO2. oil + air => fire + CO2 + H2O. If China uses coal to run the power station and the US runs it on oil that doesn't mean that China is big bad polluter and the US is running lush green. Oil is cleanER that coal but not clean.
The US is emitting 5.8E9 tons of CO2 per year, China is spewing off 3.3E9. The ratio is about 1.75. If you look at the per-capita emission, you get a ratio of about 7, the US being the larger polluter. If you look at the per-GDP emissions, THEN you find China more polluting that the US, about 3 times as much.
> Democracy: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the > people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. > > Republic: a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is > exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them. > > The difference is what, precisely?
By the definitions above, a level of indirection.
In democracy the people execute their power either directly or indirectly (by directly chosen reps).
In the republic they execute their power either indirectly (by directly chosen reps) or double-indirectly (by indirectly chosen reps).
In addition, republic originates from the Latin expression 'thing of the people' where "thing" is not further specified, while democracy is from the Greek 'rule of the people', which is more direct definition.
Yes, I am aware of the four freedoms. However, I have a feeling that retaining copyright and GPL our code does not help to achieve our goal any more than abolish copyright completely. If I open up the source code but patent any significant operation in it, you can run the program, you can study the program, but you can't share it or its modified versions with your neighbour even if there's no copyright protection, because then you'd need to license the patent from me. The GPL avoids this issue by simply stating that in such cases the GPL is not applicable. The GPL limits itself to copyright and to cases where the barrier to get your 4 freedoms is the copyright and the copyright alone.
Freedom 0 is taken from you using the copyright. You can be limited to use the program to do only X because the manufacturer can limit your right to legally have the copy of the program only if you agree with that restriction. If there was no copyright, you would not be in a license agreement with the manufacturer and thus they caouldn't deny any kind of usage of the program.
Freedom 2 is obviously a copyright only issue.
Freedom 1 is indeed a GPL specific thing. However, given enough resources you can disassemble (and to a degree dis-C:-) a program, so you can re-create a source from the binary. Since Freedom 0 applies, they can't stop you doing that. It might be harder than having access to the source, but it would be doable and legal.
Freedom 3 is a consequential freedom from 0,1 and 2 so it would also be given.
So, currently the GPL can't protect you against trade secrets and patents, it can protect you against copyright. If you abolish copyright, the GPL in its current form would not be needed. It does not mean that you would have the 4 freedoms, but copyright + GPL can't garantee it either.
If I am a Big Bad Microcorp today you can't force me to release Free Software. I can take away you freedoms, every one of them, simply by using copyright - I can force you to sign (click) any license I want, otherwise I do not give you the copy. I can stop you from releasing Free Software in my field by patenting every silly (or bright) idea I can think of. If there was no copyright at all, I could not take away Freedom 0 and Freedom 2 from you. Indirectly, you could (with enough determination) gain Freedom 1 and thus Freedom 3 whether I like it or not. The only way I could stop you would be to apply trade secret or patent against you, which I can do today too, but why would I bother when I have this handy copyright law.
Using the copyright law to proliferate free software is a brilliant idea. However, I believe that we would be closer to the all code should be free idea without copyright - basically every program would be in the public domain (as much as patents and trade secrets allow it). The we could focus on abolishing patents and trade secrets...
Regardless whether you agree with copyright or not, the argument that copyright is good because without it there wouldn't be a GPL is simply wrong. The GPL was born to fight closed source. Closed source was protected by copyright. RMS et al had the great idea of using the copyright law to fight its effect, they used the law-guaranteed restrictive power of copyright to guarantee that the right of copying a GPL-ed work can not be limited.
If there was no copyright there would not be a need for the GPL because there would not be a restriction on copying, modifying and redistributing the source. The GPL is a counter-measure and as such its existence is dependent on that of the measure it counters. If you agree with a counter-measure it is a logical fallacy to say that the original measure is good because without it we couldn't fight against it...
The article goes into scenarios where Big Bad Megacorp steals your code and distributes DRM protected binaries because there's no copyright. Well, first of all the 'R' in DRM would not be there if there was no copyright. They had no legal basis of using any measure to stop you to copy the program. They can use technical measures, but if you defeat them, they're out of luck.
The Big Bad Megacorp would need a different business model to rip you off. I bet they'd find a way. It wouldn't be based on their exclusive right to copy a work, that's all. The current content provider industry business model uses copyright as the basis of their revenue. They would sink and some other industry would pop up that uses some other aspect to make money. Of course the copyright lobby is scared about *their* income going down and it's no consolation for them that some other businesses would became filthy rich if copyright was abolished, so they fight to protect and extend copyright as much as possible.
The GPL fights back at least in the software segment of the copyright business. But the GPL is only good because it undoes the restrictions that the copyright places on you (by ingeniously using the very law that protects the copyright industry's content) to provide you the freedom the industry wants to deny. Without copyright there wouldn't be GPL because there would not be a need for it.
NSW. My experience if of parental nature, including public, private and catholic schools with multiple test subjects of my descendancy. The pubic primary was the one I talked about. The catholic primary was catholic only, compulsory religious education, conveniently located adjacent to the church itself. They managed to turn the kid from believer to atheist. The private had the express policy that religion belongs to the home and the curch, not the school. As you said, YMMV. By chance I happen to live in the Bible-belt section of Sydney and the church is a very big business here (Hillsong Church Ltd...), so all that pastoral care stuff is taken more seriously.
Yes, that religious flexibility is good. However, that's actually not the freedom of the children but the parents. If you tell the school that your 7-year old child is a devout Roman Catholic, (s)he will be ushered to the relevant religious classroom, no matter what (s)he thinks. Mind you, you can also tell them that you don't care. My kid went to some catholic thing for a while, found it way too rigid, went to the unitarians for some as he found the teacher more interesting and responsive and at the end decided to go to the library and read nature books instead. I told the school that it was my kid who had to decide what to believe in, not me and they did not object, which is indeed cool.
Nevertheless, I can't understand why the Australian education establishment is so ferociously fighting any attempt to rank schools and teachers. Not all schools are equal and not all teachers are equally good (or bad). Why pretend equality when there isn't any? The education here is not at all that crash-hot, so at least give a chance to parents to send their kids to some of the better schools, public or otherwise. The general social respect towards teachers is very low (which I personally I find very frightening). Maybe if the 'good' and 'bad' adjectives would be deemed politically correct in front of the 'school' and 'teacher' nouns, at least the good ones might reclaim some that lost respect.
Also, why can't a student or his/her parents see the student's High School Certificate tests? All in all, it is her/his work, how come that (s)he can't see how it was marked? A kid's essay on a Coleridge poem or a feeble attempt of proving a^2+b^2=c^2 is treated as if it was some superbig state secret that would jeopardise Australia's security if anyone saw how it was marked.
As per the website, well, informal ranking of the teachers is nothing new: kids, at least within the same school, do it between each other, as do parents - there's a lot of word of mouth stuff going on. The website just concentrates it, that's all.
I haven't held it, personally, but of course I saw it up close, although those were very fresh ones. Not more disgusting than a large chunk of liver, or a brain or any internal organ, which, as a matter of fact, you can buy in any supermarket (animal ones, not human, of course). Why would it be gross? A program about the human body showing parts of the human body is quite acceptable, that's the whole point, isn't it? You expect to see bodyparts and tsunamies of blood and preferably dismemberment, gruesome death and all that in any action movie, you expect to see sexually explicite acts in a porn movie and images of parts of the human body in a science show about the human body. If you find violence gross, you don't watch Terminator-N+1 or the evening news, if you find sex offending, you don't watch Deepthroat and if you find the sight of an organ nauseating, you do not watch films about biology, surgery or slaughterhouses.
Hiding things might make the illusion that they don't exist but that's just self-delusion. There's a placenta at every birth and babies are born covered with a grayish cream and blood and flattened noses and there's the umbillical cord that you have to cut and there's a lot of blood all around the whole thing. So? Should we believe in storks or cabbage patches because some people find reality disgusting? I don't think so.
If you find the placenta gross, you do not have to watch the show. Why should all the people who want to see it watch a pixelised blob just because there might be viewers who do not want to see it?
- Religious government: The parliament starts every sitting with a prayer. Ruddock (who is behind all that censorship BS) is openly religious and a big advocate of "Christian values". The federal government shot down the ACT's gay and lesbian civil union laws based on the sanctity of marriage, which by its religious definition "must be between man and woman". Also, the government's senate majority depends on Fielding, who belongs to a religious party.
- Fat Cat: I stand corrected. Fat Cat was indeed pulled down by not having educational value and it was Humphrey B. Bear who was criticised for not wearing pants. I found both of these things ridiculous at the time (not that Fat Cat was actually educational, but neither were half a dozen other shows, not to mention the cartoons) and mixed them up. It's no excuse for not checking my facts, though, so my sincere (and I mean sincere) apologies.
- I saw that BBC documentary, it was a multi-part show about the human body (you can find the DVD in ABC shops). The part about reproduction *did* have the placenta pixellated. Also, I don't know who censors the cable networks, but if you have a chance, watch "Blowup" (the Antonioni film) on TCM and on World Movies. The World Movies version is slightly longer, for the TCM version simply cuts the bits which contain nudity. It might not be due to the local censorship, but coming already butchered from the States - I don't know, but it's still ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
The link in both the /. article and in the original Genome Technology article leads you to a patent that has absolutely nothing to do with music. It is a gene patent, awarded to DuPont 6 years ago, namely US patent # 7,250,557 and is about generating GM plants with modulated sugar/starch content. Half of the actual patent is a long sequence description. However, the word 'music' does not occur anywhere in it.
> So you think it's reasonable in a free and just society for armed
> men to go into a private company's offices, rip publically available
> posters of 40+ year old technology off the walls and destroy them in
> the name of national security?
No, it's not, but I think it should be clear from the article that it happened in the US, not in "a free and just society" so your question is entirely irrelevant...
They get everything so cheap because they get paid so little. That's globalisation for you, work and products and everything is obtained from where it's the cheapest and attempted to be sold for the maximum extractable from any given location.
It has a equalising effect, the cheap labour slowly gets more and more expensive (and by increasing its purchase power drives prices up) while the more expensive labour must become cheaper (and by getting poorer, drives prices down). It's just tough luck that you happen to be the one who is on the losing end.
Of course the real winner is whoever exploits the disparity, in general we can assume that that's the Big Bad Corporation, simply because they have the resources to do it while you don't, even if in theory you could do the same.
In the Seeds of Deception (a book about the GM industry) there's an interesting quote from a Monsanto exec, which essentially states that the idea of spreading GM to underdeveloped countries is that then any food made anywhere would result in a payment to Monsanto.
In addition, the European public is not very keen on the GM stuff, because they do still remember to all the failures caused by not-tested-enough products being pushed to the market. GM has not been rigorously tested by *independent* bodies and the very few independent tests were not encouraging at all.
Until the EU manages to create the USoE where the political decisions will be far removed from the reach of the people, the European politicians do have to listen to their constituents a lot more than the American ones (not always, see e.g. Berlusconi) and if people in Europe are suspicious of GM, it won't be pushed down their throat. If that also benefits the farmers, the better. When Bruxelles consolidates enough power over the individual states so that their decisions become mandatory, then after some heavy-duty lobbying the GM industry will take over Europe as well.
> I -do- however have a portion of code that I keep locked up for a commercial application, if I start using a GPL v3 GCC will I be putting myself into peril?
:-(
No, you won't. You want to *use* gcc, not distribute it. The GPL explicitely states that it deals with the redistribution of the program and it puts no restriction on its use. If you want to distribute GCC itsels, then the GPL restricts you. If you distribute code compiled with GCC, the GPL has nothing to do with you.
> Incidently, I'm not in the US, but well... sort of, I'm in Australia, which is almost as good as another US state *sigh*.
It seems to me that in the civil rights/privacy/witch-hunt departments we're getting a lead on the mothership
Don't get me wrong, I do not want to defend Stalin at all. But, the WWII deaths are (although he was responsible for a lot of those by trusting Hitler) were not his own doing. The Soviet Union was invaded and they were protecting their land. They beated nazi Germany (yes, it was them and not Normandy that actually did it - Normandy probably saved an other 5-10 million Russian lives, but did not change the outcome), paid the price of some 20 million people and grabbed the Eastern part of Europe as a buffer in case of a further attack. That whole business was not the act of a lunatic dictator, or at least, it wasn't Stalin.
Second, I've recently seen a British biography on Stalin (detailing all the horrors that he did). At the very end one of the historians had an interesting comment: Stalin murdered millions and built a country of fear. However, in about 30 years he advanced the Soviet Union about as much as what the West needed some two centuries to cover. He managed to transform a practically medieval, mostly agricultural country into a powerfull (and indeed feared, even by the mighty US) industrial nation and "superpower" that could no longer be looked at as one of those interesting but otherwise backwards places of the world.
Third, just because Stalin was a bloody tyrant and killed X million people does not mean that someone else can't be a bloody tyrant because he only killed a few hundred thousand.
Not really. Apple sells you the iPod. Apple offers you a service on iTunes. If you have an iPod, you can load music onto it any way you like it. My wife has an iPod and she has no idea that there's the iTunes store, for she just rips her CDs and puts them onto the iPod as to any other MP3 player. There are numerous other MP3 players out there and people buy them but more of them buy the iPod than any other kind because they like it better. Indeed, the iTunes service is only for iPods (I think, don't know but I assume so) but you can use any other service (and there are many) to get MP3-s which will happily play on any player, including
the iPod.
Now Windows is a different thing. MS used its market share to force OEMs to include Windows on every piece of HW they sold. MS writes applications that use features of the OS that only MS is aware and MS does everything in its power to keep the format of every file or packet closed and obscured so that no other player on the market could come up with an application that could access MS application related data.
The iPod was not the first MP3 player and became a market leader because people like it better than the others. If you can come up with a player which is actually more user friendly than the iPod, Apple can't stop you to gain market share. As long as people can convert their iTunes downloads to a vanilla MP3 (as far as I know, you can), you can also use the iTunes service for any player you can come up with. It seems that as of now, people like the iPod more than any of the other ~50-100 models on the market. So iPod is a natural monopoly.
Now if you come up with a new OS + office package + browser + whatnot you can not make it read MS documents for the document formats are MS secrets, you can't just plug it onto an MS network for some packet formats are MS secrets and if you reverse engineer everything and you can do it all, then MS will blow the crap out of you with IP lawsuits and threaten the OEMs to not getting the MS licence any more if they sell your stuff. That is where the monopoly becomes unnatural and where the DoJ finds the defendent guilty of illegal business paractices, coersion etc. and when some higher powers kick the backside of the DoJ for harassing such a fine American businesses...
Microsoft has been taking active (and often illegal) steps to enforce its dominant position, Apple simply made a product that people like.
> The Constitution doesn't say the gov't can do it, so they can't.
I'm not familiar with the details of the US Constitution, but it makes one awe the forsight of the Founding Fathers that the Constitution must have an item about landing men on the Moon, for the government did it (from taxpayer's money, too).
It is sad that they forgot about that bit with regards to providing universal, affordable and quality health care and education for the population, but such oversight is probably excusable if one takes into account the mental effort needed to predict the above mentioned moon landing back then.
> Foreign scientists are having a harder and harder time coming to the US to study, collaborate, or even go to a conference. Scientists are being denied visas or putting on long waiting lists (so that they miss the conference!).
Or they simply decide that they do not wish to be treated like a common criminal by some fistbrained thug and just do not go there.
> As a licence fee payer, I'd like the best value for money possible, thankyou very much, and I don't care two hoots about ITV's or Sky's commercial interests!
Ahh, but as a licence fee payer, can you offer as much under the table stuff to the decision-making politicians as ITV or Sky? No? You see, that's why they don't care two hoots about what you'd like...
> it's implausible that they haven't heard of Linux,
Especially considering that according to NetCraft, their webservers for which the IP block belongs to BBC are all running Linux (the other netblocks mapped to BBC but owned by somebody else run all sorts of systems, although very few uses Windows - most of them are Linux, Solaris or BSD).
Just follow the money. Let's see: You pay your taxes. Government employs X number of companies to run the security CCTV system, buys all the computers and the software to sift through the e-sewage from yet other Z companies, sets up N state security agencies employing N*K people. It is all payed from your taxes. Obviously, it is the interest of all the companies and departments involved to remain involved and if possible, get even more involved. Therefore they will lobby, bribe and in general do everything in their power to restrict personal freedom, simply because that is what makes them the money. In addition, these vehicles, once in place, can be used to gather all sorts of other information from who downloaded Britney Spear's latest clip to shopping habits to service usage patterns to tag people by their probable 'troublemaker' status and so on and so forth. That information is very valuable and can be sold. Furthermore, the more control you have over the general population the easier to steer the boat the way *you* want it as opposed to what would be the interest of the public.
The best bit is that it is all payed from taxes. People work for all sorts of small and medium and large companies. People pay taxes and apart from the election have no say in what goes on in their country. Small and medium business are almost the same, they have all sorts of business councils to represent them, but those are still too small and represent very divergent interests to have significant effect or to get out of the tax system.
If you, on the other hand, are a big multinational company, you can afford to pay absolutely minimum taxes as well as to actually put pressure on governments to represent your interest. Basically, you can channel part of the taxes to either directly or indirectly benefit you. You can pressure governments to grant you, for example, absolute freedom in doing global business but deny the citizens the same rights. Or pressure governments to set up procurement procedures that benefit you no matter how much it costs the taxpayer. And the government will do that because it is *not their money*. It is taxes, i.e. the people's money. No politician will be poorer if the government will only buy some products from XYZ Inc, even if it is a tad more expensive and a tad more crappy than the product from QRS, Co.
Where is the profit for the state? Well, 'state' is a fictious creation. It is supposedly the representation of the collective interest of the people living at a certain place. That interest is supposedly served by the state administration. In reality the 'state' is just a collection of people who receive their salaries from your taxes (from politicians to the janitor of the smallest local government office). It is their interest to secure their jobs and money. In addition, we know that professional lobbying involves offering all sorts of personal benefits to decision makers. So there's the state's profit. Do not forget, a country's administration is paid by you. The more control they have over you, the more secure they are.
Where is the profit for the people of the state? Well, there is no profit for them, but why do you think it matters?
The companies are more souvereign than the people. They can do a lot of things that you can't - for example a company, a single legal entity, can directly influence governments while you, an other single entity can not. Not even your own government, let alone several of them simultaneously. I hope you are aware that there are companies around with yearly turnover higher than the GDP of smaller countries... The 3 highest turnover companies (WalMart, Exxon, Shell) each had sales over $3E11 last year. Denmark's GDP in 2006 was $2.6E11. Estonia's GDP is $1.4E10. The most profitable company, Exxon, made $4E10 *profit*. In fact, according to Forbes there are 14 companies that made more *profit* than what Estonia produced all together. As per sales, Estonia would be somewhere around the 450-est place on the Forbes' First 500 Corporation list.
So who do you think have more influence, you or the companies? Or, say, Estonia's representatives in the Europe Council or the lobbysts representing for example the oil companies' interests?
> that supported it "to save the children" and to "catch the terrorists"
Don't forget the most common one: "to make money". The whole push for the Great European Constitution (and the just as strong push for not asking the citizens if the actually want it or not) is all about money. They managed to fill the ??? in the Underpant Gnomes business plan:
1) Unprecedented corporate freedom
2) Limited and closely monitored personal freedom
3) Profit!!!
Not to mention that the (then government owned) Telstra infrastructure was built from our pockets and now (the privately owned) Telstra is screaming that it is its private property now and letting others to use its copper/fiber would be a communist plot to enslave the free world as we know it. So every telco that wants to provide a broadband service *has* to build their own network (based on the assumption that we will pay for it in access fees) anyway.
Thus, the Libs sell you the status quo as a big achievment and put some half-assed measure (well, a promise of it anyway) for the bush (which would never be served by the private sector for the profit margin there is way too low) to gain a few votes in marginal seats. The usual election year BS.
> Results don't matter, it's the intentions of the legislation that matter.
Like Lord Vetinary's very human deathrow, where the guards quietly allow the condemned to scrape the old mortar with the spoon and get through the cell wall (and then find a brand new, much harder and thicker wall behind it):
"You see, sir, what matters is not freedom as such but the prospect of freedom."
Um, coal + air => fire + CO2. oil + air => fire + CO2 + H2O.
If China uses coal to run the power station and the US runs it on oil that doesn't mean that China is big bad polluter and the US is running lush green. Oil is cleanER that coal but not clean.
The US is emitting 5.8E9 tons of CO2 per year, China is spewing off 3.3E9. The ratio is about 1.75.
If you look at the per-capita emission, you get a ratio of about 7, the US being the larger polluter.
If you look at the per-GDP emissions, THEN you find China more polluting that the US, about 3 times as much.
> Democracy: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the
> people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
>
> Republic: a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is
> exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
>
> The difference is what, precisely?
By the definitions above, a level of indirection.
In democracy the people execute their power either directly or indirectly (by directly chosen reps).
In the republic they execute their power either indirectly (by directly chosen reps) or double-indirectly (by indirectly chosen reps).
In addition, republic originates from the Latin expression 'thing of the people' where "thing" is not further specified, while democracy is from the Greek 'rule of the people', which is more direct definition.
Yes, I am aware of the four freedoms. However, I have a feeling that retaining copyright and GPL our code does not help to achieve our goal any more than abolish copyright completely. If I open up the source code but patent any significant operation in it, you can run the program, you can study the program, but you can't share it or its modified versions with your neighbour even if there's no copyright protection, because then you'd need to license the patent from me. The GPL avoids this issue by simply stating that in such cases the GPL is not applicable. The GPL limits itself to copyright and to cases where the barrier to get your 4 freedoms is the copyright and the copyright alone.
:-) a program, so you can re-create a source from the binary. Since Freedom 0 applies, they can't stop you doing that. It might be harder than having access to the source, but it would be doable and legal.
Freedom 0 is taken from you using the copyright. You can be limited to use the program to do only X because the manufacturer can limit your right to legally have the copy of the program only if you agree with that restriction. If there was no copyright, you would not be in a license agreement with the manufacturer and thus they caouldn't deny any kind of usage of the program.
Freedom 2 is obviously a copyright only issue.
Freedom 1 is indeed a GPL specific thing. However, given enough resources you can disassemble (and to a degree dis-C
Freedom 3 is a consequential freedom from 0,1 and 2 so it would also be given.
So, currently the GPL can't protect you against trade secrets and patents, it can protect you against copyright. If you abolish copyright, the GPL in its current form would not be needed. It does not mean that you would have the 4 freedoms, but copyright + GPL can't garantee it either.
If I am a Big Bad Microcorp today you can't force me to release Free Software. I can take away you freedoms, every one of them, simply by using copyright - I can force you to sign (click) any license I want, otherwise I do not give you the copy. I can stop you from releasing Free Software in my field by patenting every silly (or bright) idea I can think of. If there was no copyright at all, I could not take away Freedom 0 and Freedom 2 from you. Indirectly, you could (with enough determination) gain Freedom 1 and thus Freedom 3 whether I like it or not. The only way I could stop you would be to apply trade secret or patent against you, which I can do today too, but why would I bother when I have this handy copyright law.
Using the copyright law to proliferate free software is a brilliant idea. However, I believe that we would be closer to the all code should be free idea without copyright - basically every program would be in the public domain (as much as patents and trade secrets allow it). The we could focus on abolishing patents and trade secrets...
Regardless whether you agree with copyright or not, the argument that copyright is good because without it there wouldn't be a GPL is simply wrong. The GPL was born to fight closed source. Closed source was protected by copyright. RMS et al had the great idea of using the copyright law to fight its effect, they used the law-guaranteed restrictive power of copyright to guarantee that the right of copying a GPL-ed work can not be limited.
If there was no copyright there would not be a need for the GPL because there would not be a restriction on copying, modifying and redistributing the source. The GPL is a counter-measure and as such its existence is dependent on that of the measure it counters. If you agree with a counter-measure it is a logical fallacy to say that the original measure is good because without it we couldn't fight against it...
The article goes into scenarios where Big Bad Megacorp steals your code and distributes DRM protected binaries because there's no copyright. Well, first of all the 'R' in DRM would not be there if there was no copyright. They had no legal basis of using any measure to stop you to copy the program. They can use technical measures, but if you defeat them, they're out of luck.
The Big Bad Megacorp would need a different business model to rip you off. I bet they'd find a way. It wouldn't be based on their exclusive right to copy a work, that's all. The current content provider industry business model uses copyright as the basis of their revenue. They would sink and some other industry would pop up that uses some other aspect to make money. Of course the copyright lobby is scared about *their* income going down and it's no consolation for them that some other businesses would became filthy rich if copyright was abolished, so they fight to protect and extend copyright as much as possible.
The GPL fights back at least in the software segment of the copyright business. But the GPL is only good because it undoes the restrictions that the copyright places on you (by ingeniously using the very law that protects the copyright industry's content) to provide you the freedom the industry wants to deny. Without copyright there wouldn't be GPL because there would not be a need for it.
NSW. My experience if of parental nature, including public, private and catholic schools with multiple test subjects of my descendancy. The pubic primary was the one I talked about. The catholic primary was catholic only, compulsory religious education, conveniently located adjacent to the church itself. They managed to turn the kid from believer to atheist. The private had the express policy that religion belongs to the home and the curch, not the school. As you said, YMMV. By chance I happen to live in the Bible-belt section of Sydney and the church is a very big business here (Hillsong Church Ltd...), so all that pastoral care stuff is taken more seriously.
Yes, that religious flexibility is good. However, that's actually not the freedom of the children but the parents. If you tell the school that your 7-year old child is a devout Roman Catholic, (s)he will be ushered to the relevant religious classroom, no matter what (s)he thinks. Mind you, you can also tell them that you don't care. My kid went to some catholic thing for a while, found it way too rigid, went to the unitarians for some as he found the teacher more interesting and responsive and at the end decided to go to the library and read nature books instead. I told the school that it was my kid who had to decide what to believe in, not me and they did not object, which is indeed cool.
Nevertheless, I can't understand why the Australian education establishment is so ferociously fighting any attempt to rank schools and teachers. Not all schools are equal and not all teachers are equally good (or bad). Why pretend equality when there isn't any? The education here is not at all that crash-hot, so at least give a chance to parents to send their kids to some of the better schools, public or otherwise. The general social respect towards teachers is very low (which I personally I find very frightening). Maybe if the 'good' and 'bad' adjectives would be deemed politically correct in front of the 'school' and 'teacher' nouns, at least the good ones might reclaim some that lost respect.
Also, why can't a student or his/her parents see the student's High School Certificate tests? All in all, it is her/his work, how come that (s)he can't see how it was marked? A kid's essay on a Coleridge poem or a feeble attempt of proving a^2+b^2=c^2 is treated as if it was some superbig state secret that would jeopardise Australia's security if anyone saw how it was marked.
As per the website, well, informal ranking of the teachers is nothing new: kids, at least within the same school, do it between each other, as do parents - there's a lot of word of mouth stuff going on. The website just concentrates it, that's all.
Isn't the RSA still claiming that RC4 is their trade secret (despite the fact that it's in the open for more than a decade) ?
> WMDs? I guess they just can't be found anywhre huh?
Well, all those stockpiles in Iraq that have never been found, they must be *somewhere*!
I haven't held it, personally, but of course I saw it up close, although those were very fresh ones. Not more disgusting than a large chunk of liver, or a brain or any internal organ, which, as a matter of fact, you can buy in any supermarket (animal ones, not human, of course). Why would it be gross? A program about the human body showing parts of the human body is quite acceptable, that's the whole point, isn't it? You expect to see bodyparts and tsunamies of blood and preferably dismemberment, gruesome death and all that in any action movie, you expect to see sexually explicite acts in a porn movie and images of parts of the human body in a science show about the human body. If you find violence gross, you don't watch Terminator-N+1 or the evening news, if you find sex offending, you don't watch Deepthroat and if you find the sight of an organ nauseating, you do not watch films about biology, surgery or slaughterhouses.
Hiding things might make the illusion that they don't exist but that's just self-delusion. There's a placenta at every birth and babies are born covered with a grayish cream and blood and flattened noses and there's the umbillical cord that you have to cut and there's a lot of blood all around the whole thing. So? Should we believe in storks or cabbage patches because some people find reality disgusting? I don't think so.
If you find the placenta gross, you do not have to watch the show. Why should all the people who want to see it watch a pixelised blob just because there might be viewers who do not want to see it?
Australia.
- Religious government: The parliament starts every sitting with a prayer. Ruddock (who is behind all that censorship BS) is openly religious and a big advocate of "Christian values". The federal government shot down the ACT's gay and lesbian civil union laws based on the sanctity of marriage, which by its religious definition "must be between man and woman". Also, the government's senate majority depends on Fielding, who belongs to a religious party.
- Fat Cat: I stand corrected. Fat Cat was indeed pulled down by not having educational value and it was Humphrey B. Bear who was criticised for not wearing pants. I found both of these things ridiculous at the time (not that Fat Cat was actually educational, but neither were half a dozen other shows, not to mention the cartoons) and mixed them up. It's no excuse for not checking my facts, though, so my sincere (and I mean sincere) apologies.
- I saw that BBC documentary, it was a multi-part show about the human body (you can find the DVD in ABC shops). The part about reproduction *did* have the placenta pixellated. Also, I don't know who censors the cable networks, but if you have a chance, watch "Blowup" (the Antonioni film) on TCM and on World Movies. The World Movies version is slightly longer, for the TCM version simply cuts the bits which contain nudity. It might not be due to the local censorship, but coming already butchered from the States - I don't know, but it's still ridiculous.