How many months ago did they announce this happening? Now they are already set to release a real product. If this was a collaboration of a bunch of proprietary software companies, they'd still be hashing out legal agreeements. United Linux itself doesn't interest me that much, but the fact that such things are possible does.
A lot of people listen to tripe, nerds, or otherwise. I can confirm this by the fact, that I can only tolerate one station on the radio (NPR). You might think that it's rather arrogant to pronounce all of radio tripe just because I don't like it. The thing is that the world revolves around me, so it turns out I'm right:)
I'm probably not part of a large demographic here, but I personally don't watch anime on TV and I only full length anime movies. It makes sense to go out and buy the DVD for a single movie, but for a series it can be quite costly to go and buy all the discs.
For any anime that's a series, I'll just drop it into my netflix queue. I end up getting about one disc a week, I watch the episodes, mail it back and get the next disc. So far, I've seen all of Trigun this way (an excellent series), and I'm now working my way through cowboy bebop.
The beauty of this is I don't have commercials, I work through the series at whatever pace suits me, and I can watch it anytime I want (I don't have a Tivo so that's not possible with TV).
Capitalism isn't any more inherently evil than Marxism or any other ism out there. It does have benefits and drawbacks and I'll agree that the way it is practiced in the United States right now has A LOT of drawbacks. Generally speaking any ism, by itself without some other isms thrown in to the mix to provide balance goes badly.
The fact of the matter is that the United States has a very long history of doing terrible things like this. There would be no United States as we know if it weren't for a little genocide and slavery.
We also have a long history of supporting others in doing terrible things for our short term benefit. Invariably all these things come back to bite us in the end, but when you've got politicians only concerned with getting through the next four years of their career, what do you expect.
That goes for the real world too. I guarantee you that the hundreds of people who have done suicide bombings are firmly convinced they are doing a good thing for all the right reasons. There are few things more amazing than the human ability to justify any action in one's own mind no matter how reprehensible.
The logic behind most people's objections to games like GTA are that by playing out these actions in the game we are somehow re-tuning our own personal ethics to suggest that these things are okay to do for real. We kill a thousand virtual hookers and then at some point killing a real hooker doesn't seem that out of line. There are people who can make this kind of logical leap, and they are hopefully diagnosed for their psychosis and treated before it becomes an issue.
People like Lieberman are afraid that if we flirt with our internal dark side, we're going to end up turning into devil worshipping crack head rapists. In reality, the exact opposite is likely to be more true. That by flirting with our dark sides, we can let off a little steam and not have our dark sides come boiling out to do harm to others. Their afraid that if we admit to ourselves that we have a darkside, we are going to be seduced into unleashing it, when really, recognizing its existence is the best way to insure that it won't come out.
Personally I love violent video games and GTA: Vice City is on my short list of games to get in the near future. In addition to playing games like that, I love going to play paintball, and play violent paper role playing games. Now, am I violent? No. I wouldn't want to touch a real gun, let alone fire one, or use one to harm or kill another person.
So there's nothing wrong with it. The point that should be made in the intro to this story isn't that you can win the game peacefully, but rather that there's no reason you should feel compelled to do so, unless you just like the challenge of it. I've played violent games where I intentionally tried to be ethical in the game to make it more interesting.
Actually, I'd love to see somebody do a terrorist video game, honestly. I know there's things like counterstrike, but I mean something where you'd do things like plot out bomb attacks, etc. That could be a lot of fun, but I somehow don't think any major game publisher is going to be backing that sort of game anytime soon:)
In an era where government seems to be doing everything in it's power to render itself meaningless, a project like this will never happen. Our government has has lost any reason to pretend to have an interest in further the future of humanity now that we have no cold war competition. So, NASA will slowly shrivel away into insignificance. Until private companies develop an interest in space, there will be no going forward for us.
The sad thing is that with this development, the short term financial return will be what all space exploration is measured by. A private corporation isn't going to put the risk into a decade or longer effort to develop a space station or any sort of space travel because the risk involved in such a venture isn't worth it.
Think about it. 20K is a very small percentage of the entirety of the US. If you looked hard you could probably frind 20K people somewhere in the US who would agree with 100% of the issues listed on the website. You could also likely get all of these people to vote as a consistent block (just look at how much power Unions have).
In the long run, there would, of course, be issues that not all 20K agreed on, and certainly as time went on this population of die hards would become dilluted. But I think it's well within reason for this group of people to come together and do it if they believe it can be done.
This plan has huge mounds of idealism piled onto it, but I think a fair portion of the idealism isn't completely ludicrous. On the other hand there are some parts that are more questionable. There will need to be taxes, and in all likelihood, they'd have to be rather high relative to most other locales because they may lose federal funding. It may be possible to structure these taxes differently though to provide a better return on investment, etc. There's a lot that can be done to improve how government functions if you can start with a clean slate.
I don't think the problems Microsoft faces are so much a matter of them not doing their job. Instead, I think it boils down to the fact that a lot of people realize the long term threat to their business of becoming dependent on one vendor for anything. If Microsoft continues to build market share and eliminate viable competition, they will have less and less motivation to respond to customer needs.
And this is what I love about posting discussions online like this. Very good point and you're right, I am confusing the two. So I'll go away quietly:)
If the his claims that the open source model doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development of BitKeeper, then I say proove him wrong. Somebody write an equivalent product that is open source.
I think it's legit that some products can't survive on an open source business model. Maybe bitkeeper is an example of this.
Well seeing as RMS wants GNU/Linux because it hilights the contribution of GNU to the overall linux environment, I wonder if Bitkeeper will be asking similar soon:). Before long it'll be:
I preface this by saying that I'm a big fan and proponent of open source but anyhow...
If free software really is better then why do people like RMS need to come out ranting about giving into the evils of proprietary software. Either it's a better model of development or it isn't, and if you have to brow beat people into using it, maybe it's not a better way of doing things. It always seems to me that the people most afraid that their beliefs are wrong are the ones screaming the loudest that they are right.
As long as we have the freedom to write free software and use free software, then I don't really see the point of such ranting. Let the software itself speak quietly of the benefits of being free rather than screaming about the evils of proprietary software.
I'm sure that Linus would be happy to use a more free product if he felt it was suited to the task. Linus, unlike RMS, has never, to my knowledge, been much of a politician. He wrote open source software because it made sense to do so. He's made his choices for the same reason anybody should, because they made good sound technical sense. (if I'm wrong here, please don't hesitate to point it out:)
Either it will survive and thrive because it has benefits or it will shrivel up and die. Evolution marches merrily on. I mean the process, not the mail client. Though I LOVE the mail client:).
Let me ask you this: are you more likely to vote a politician into office because of his position on DRM or his position on military action in Iraq?
The problem is that, in a time when there are really serious concerns, something relatively obscure like DRM is going to get pushed to the bottom of the priority list. The state of the economy is a whole lot more important than the state of DRM. Both issues concern me, but one has to weigh them very differently. Hard to seriously vote against somebody who's in the RIAA's pocket but is willing to make a stand against military action in Iraq (if you tend to lean that political direction).
So, anybody want to chime up accusing this guy of being a thief? He's stealing right? Isn't that fundamentally wrong?
I'm going to get modded down for this but it bugs me to no end when people say something that is as ephemoral as this is "just wrong". I doubt we'll be hearing much in that regard because this guy is doing academic research. Though seeing as fair use is slowly getting demolished by media industry paranoia, we can expect that not even academics like this will be safe in the future.
In grade school physics class we made methanol and ethanol from wood. Taking what amounted to skinny popsicle sticks and heating them in a test tube we were able to get both methanol and ethanol out of it. Granted, this may not be the most economicaly efficient way to obtain methanol, but it's not strictly a fossil fuel derrivative.
The solution here is for the publishing companies to relax and stop worrying about protecting everything and instead worry about trying to get things to the public in the most convient and appealing way possible. Rather than sell individual e-books create an on-line library with a monthly subscription cost. Let users print out the books if they wish or order the actually printed copies at a membership discount. Rather than sell individual songs, create a vast music library where I can get unfettered access to all I want for a reasonable monthly fee.
I'm on the five disc plan and find that I've really been getting good use out of netflix. The best thing is that I can slowly work my way through the various anime series that I've always wanted to see but didn't want to buy. So I've now seen all of Trigun and am working my way through Cowboy Bebop now.
I had been a netflix subscribe previously and then canceled for a while. The problem was I was on a plan where I got less discs. So I'd end up at home with all of my discs and not interested in watching any of them at that moment. I went for months without returning any discs because I just wasn't in the right mood for the movies I had. Seemed like a big waster of money.
Now with the plan I'm on I haven't really noticed shipping delays and I keep the discs circulating pretty rapidly. I've almost always got one or two discs on hand and we get to see about one anime disc/week which is just about the right pace to keep it fresh in your mind but not get oversaturated by it.
The funny thing is that the reason the RIAA ends up pissing people off is the same reason an electronic attack would be pointless. They shun computers and they do everything they can to insure that the experience of downloading electronic music is as unplesant as possible.
Hacking them would probably help them overall if you think about it. "Oh our system are down, you see how bad this Internet thing is, go buy CD's, they don't go down like this Internet thing." Not to mention the fact that the hacking would make them look like the victims of the evil computer geeks rather than the other way around.
Don't do anything stupid, for your sake and for all of our sakes.
It seems to me that the "monoculture" of geekdom that this article refers to is nothing more than a reaction to the forces working against the common geek principles. Though we may have our differences, we see common threats to our ways of life and so we let a lot of our points of contention slide away because there are bigger things at stake. Where the outside world doesn't pry at us we have plenty of contention such as:
-emacs vs. vi
-liux distro A vs. linux distro B
-bsd vs. linux
We have no end of things to argue about amongst ourselves. The monoculture this article speaks about has mostly to do with how technology has become more a part of mainstream culture and thus drawn the interest of powers that have not normally cared about what us geeks were doing. Most of us stand against the MPAA and the RIAA, etc, because we see them trying to limit what we as geeks have always been able to do. We all want to have the freedom to do what we want with our toys and we don't take kindly to people messing with that freedom.
Thanks to all of those P2P pirates out there, starz couldn't make enough money on their programming to be able to produce the movie. The bitter bitter irony of it all...
Slashdot Mirror
How many months ago did they announce this happening? Now they are already set to release a real product. If this was a collaboration of a bunch of proprietary software companies, they'd still be hashing out legal agreeements. United Linux itself doesn't interest me that much, but the fact that such things are possible does.
A lot of people listen to tripe, nerds, or otherwise. I can confirm this by the fact, that I can only tolerate one station on the radio (NPR). You might think that it's rather arrogant to pronounce all of radio tripe just because I don't like it. The thing is that the world revolves around me, so it turns out I'm right :)
I'm probably not part of a large demographic here, but I personally don't watch anime on TV and I only full length anime movies. It makes sense to go out and buy the DVD for a single movie, but for a series it can be quite costly to go and buy all the discs.
For any anime that's a series, I'll just drop it into my netflix queue. I end up getting about one disc a week, I watch the episodes, mail it back and get the next disc. So far, I've seen all of Trigun this way (an excellent series), and I'm now working my way through cowboy bebop.
The beauty of this is I don't have commercials, I work through the series at whatever pace suits me, and I can watch it anytime I want (I don't have a Tivo so that's not possible with TV).
Capitalism isn't any more inherently evil than Marxism or any other ism out there. It does have benefits and drawbacks and I'll agree that the way it is practiced in the United States right now has A LOT of drawbacks. Generally speaking any ism, by itself without some other isms thrown in to the mix to provide balance goes badly.
Dresden.... Tokyo...
The fact of the matter is that the United States has a very long history of doing terrible things like this. There would be no United States as we know if it weren't for a little genocide and slavery.
We also have a long history of supporting others in doing terrible things for our short term benefit. Invariably all these things come back to bite us in the end, but when you've got politicians only concerned with getting through the next four years of their career, what do you expect.
That goes for the real world too. I guarantee you that the hundreds of people who have done suicide bombings are firmly convinced they are doing a good thing for all the right reasons. There are few things more amazing than the human ability to justify any action in one's own mind no matter how reprehensible.
The logic behind most people's objections to games like GTA are that by playing out these actions in the game we are somehow re-tuning our own personal ethics to suggest that these things are okay to do for real. We kill a thousand virtual hookers and then at some point killing a real hooker doesn't seem that out of line. There are people who can make this kind of logical leap, and they are hopefully diagnosed for their psychosis and treated before it becomes an issue.
:)
People like Lieberman are afraid that if we flirt with our internal dark side, we're going to end up turning into devil worshipping crack head rapists. In reality, the exact opposite is likely to be more true. That by flirting with our dark sides, we can let off a little steam and not have our dark sides come boiling out to do harm to others. Their afraid that if we admit to ourselves that we have a darkside, we are going to be seduced into unleashing it, when really, recognizing its existence is the best way to insure that it won't come out.
Personally I love violent video games and GTA: Vice City is on my short list of games to get in the near future. In addition to playing games like that, I love going to play paintball, and play violent paper role playing games. Now, am I violent? No. I wouldn't want to touch a real gun, let alone fire one, or use one to harm or kill another person.
So there's nothing wrong with it. The point that should be made in the intro to this story isn't that you can win the game peacefully, but rather that there's no reason you should feel compelled to do so, unless you just like the challenge of it. I've played violent games where I intentionally tried to be ethical in the game to make it more interesting.
Actually, I'd love to see somebody do a terrorist video game, honestly. I know there's things like counterstrike, but I mean something where you'd do things like plot out bomb attacks, etc. That could be a lot of fun, but I somehow don't think any major game publisher is going to be backing that sort of game anytime soon
It'd be nice if we could have this sort of debate and result happen someplace it really matters like Congress :)
In an era where government seems to be doing everything in it's power to render itself meaningless, a project like this will never happen. Our government has has lost any reason to pretend to have an interest in further the future of humanity now that we have no cold war competition. So, NASA will slowly shrivel away into insignificance. Until private companies develop an interest in space, there will be no going forward for us.
The sad thing is that with this development, the short term financial return will be what all space exploration is measured by. A private corporation isn't going to put the risk into a decade or longer effort to develop a space station or any sort of space travel because the risk involved in such a venture isn't worth it.
Think about it. 20K is a very small percentage of the entirety of the US. If you looked hard you could probably frind 20K people somewhere in the US who would agree with 100% of the issues listed on the website. You could also likely get all of these people to vote as a consistent block (just look at how much power Unions have).
In the long run, there would, of course, be issues that not all 20K agreed on, and certainly as time went on this population of die hards would become dilluted. But I think it's well within reason for this group of people to come together and do it if they believe it can be done.
This plan has huge mounds of idealism piled onto it, but I think a fair portion of the idealism isn't completely ludicrous. On the other hand there are some parts that are more questionable. There will need to be taxes, and in all likelihood, they'd have to be rather high relative to most other locales because they may lose federal funding. It may be possible to structure these taxes differently though to provide a better return on investment, etc. There's a lot that can be done to improve how government functions if you can start with a clean slate.
The people will be momentarily confused, asking you if you meant to say, "Canadian". You use this moment of confusion to take their run for it.
I don't think the problems Microsoft faces are so much a matter of them not doing their job. Instead, I think it boils down to the fact that a lot of people realize the long term threat to their business of becoming dependent on one vendor for anything. If Microsoft continues to build market share and eliminate viable competition, they will have less and less motivation to respond to customer needs.
If travelling the world and having problems, just remember this one important phrase:
"Don't shoot, I'm Candian!"
And this is what I love about posting discussions online like this. Very good point and you're right, I am confusing the two. So I'll go away quietly :)
If the his claims that the open source model doesn't have a prayer of supporting the development of BitKeeper, then I say proove him wrong. Somebody write an equivalent product that is open source.
I think it's legit that some products can't survive on an open source business model. Maybe bitkeeper is an example of this.
Well seeing as RMS wants GNU/Linux because it hilights the contribution of GNU to the overall linux environment, I wonder if Bitkeeper will be asking similar soon :). Before long it'll be:
IBM/Sun/SGI/Bitkeeper/GNU/Linux
I preface this by saying that I'm a big fan and proponent of open source but anyhow...
:)
:).
If free software really is better then why do people like RMS need to come out ranting about giving into the evils of proprietary software. Either it's a better model of development or it isn't, and if you have to brow beat people into using it, maybe it's not a better way of doing things. It always seems to me that the people most afraid that their beliefs are wrong are the ones screaming the loudest that they are right.
As long as we have the freedom to write free software and use free software, then I don't really see the point of such ranting. Let the software itself speak quietly of the benefits of being free rather than screaming about the evils of proprietary software.
I'm sure that Linus would be happy to use a more free product if he felt it was suited to the task. Linus, unlike RMS, has never, to my knowledge, been much of a politician. He wrote open source software because it made sense to do so. He's made his choices for the same reason anybody should, because they made good sound technical sense. (if I'm wrong here, please don't hesitate to point it out
Either it will survive and thrive because it has benefits or it will shrivel up and die. Evolution marches merrily on. I mean the process, not the mail client. Though I LOVE the mail client
Let me ask you this: are you more likely to vote a politician into office because of his position on DRM or his position on military action in Iraq?
The problem is that, in a time when there are really serious concerns, something relatively obscure like DRM is going to get pushed to the bottom of the priority list. The state of the economy is a whole lot more important than the state of DRM. Both issues concern me, but one has to weigh them very differently. Hard to seriously vote against somebody who's in the RIAA's pocket but is willing to make a stand against military action in Iraq (if you tend to lean that political direction).
So, anybody want to chime up accusing this guy of being a thief? He's stealing right? Isn't that fundamentally wrong?
I'm going to get modded down for this but it bugs me to no end when people say something that is as ephemoral as this is "just wrong". I doubt we'll be hearing much in that regard because this guy is doing academic research. Though seeing as fair use is slowly getting demolished by media industry paranoia, we can expect that not even academics like this will be safe in the future.
In grade school physics class we made methanol and ethanol from wood. Taking what amounted to skinny popsicle sticks and heating them in a test tube we were able to get both methanol and ethanol out of it. Granted, this may not be the most economicaly efficient way to obtain methanol, but it's not strictly a fossil fuel derrivative.
The solution here is for the publishing companies to relax and stop worrying about protecting everything and instead worry about trying to get things to the public in the most convient and appealing way possible. Rather than sell individual e-books create an on-line library with a monthly subscription cost. Let users print out the books if they wish or order the actually printed copies at a membership discount. Rather than sell individual songs, create a vast music library where I can get unfettered access to all I want for a reasonable monthly fee.
I'm on the five disc plan and find that I've really been getting good use out of netflix. The best thing is that I can slowly work my way through the various anime series that I've always wanted to see but didn't want to buy. So I've now seen all of Trigun and am working my way through Cowboy Bebop now.
I had been a netflix subscribe previously and then canceled for a while. The problem was I was on a plan where I got less discs. So I'd end up at home with all of my discs and not interested in watching any of them at that moment. I went for months without returning any discs because I just wasn't in the right mood for the movies I had. Seemed like a big waster of money.
Now with the plan I'm on I haven't really noticed shipping delays and I keep the discs circulating pretty rapidly. I've almost always got one or two discs on hand and we get to see about one anime disc/week which is just about the right pace to keep it fresh in your mind but not get oversaturated by it.
The funny thing is that the reason the RIAA ends up pissing people off is the same reason an electronic attack would be pointless. They shun computers and they do everything they can to insure that the experience of downloading electronic music is as unplesant as possible.
Hacking them would probably help them overall if you think about it. "Oh our system are down, you see how bad this Internet thing is, go buy CD's, they don't go down like this Internet thing." Not to mention the fact that the hacking would make them look like the victims of the evil computer geeks rather than the other way around.
Don't do anything stupid, for your sake and for all of our sakes.
It seems to me that the "monoculture" of geekdom that this article refers to is nothing more than a reaction to the forces working against the common geek principles. Though we may have our differences, we see common threats to our ways of life and so we let a lot of our points of contention slide away because there are bigger things at stake. Where the outside world doesn't pry at us we have plenty of contention such as:
-emacs vs. vi
-liux distro A vs. linux distro B
-bsd vs. linux
We have no end of things to argue about amongst ourselves. The monoculture this article speaks about has mostly to do with how technology has become more a part of mainstream culture and thus drawn the interest of powers that have not normally cared about what us geeks were doing. Most of us stand against the MPAA and the RIAA, etc, because we see them trying to limit what we as geeks have always been able to do. We all want to have the freedom to do what we want with our toys and we don't take kindly to people messing with that freedom.
Thanks to all of those P2P pirates out there, starz couldn't make enough money on their programming to be able to produce the movie. The bitter bitter irony of it all...