I think the thing that has broken in our current market system in the US is the notion of ENLIGHTENED self-interest. The problem is that if one thinks in the short term, seeking the greatest profit right now, then all sorts of things get messed up. Why worry about the environment, that's for somebody to deal with 20 years from now? Why worry about education, that's the government's job and by the time the students now are grown up and looking for jobs it's not going to be your problem finding skilled laborers then.
Our current system rewards those who are taking stupid risks for short term and fleeting finanicial gains. It needs to be changed so that CEO's have more vested interest in the long term health of a company and the related social factors that go into it. They need to be put in a position that understands that having long-term loyalty by employees is beneficial to the company rather than treating them like mercenaries to be brought on only when needed and thrown away at a whim.
Self-interest is fine, if one is taking the bigger picture into account.
Despite all the rhetoric coming out of our government about how horrible this is and how we need a return of ethic to corporations, I'll be very surprised if anything really changes in the long run. The only real change I expect to see is stock holders will change the rules for their CEO's because it isn't in their long term best interest for a CEO to over-inflate his options and bail out.
But as far as ethics in business go, there is only one ethic: make money. The system is set up to encourage a company to find the shortest path to greatest profitability, and that's the way it will likely always be. Is this bad? Depends on what you want companies to accomplish. If you want them to achieve economic growth, increasing efficiency, etc, then they are ideally groomed to do this (as our economy has demonstrated over the past decades). But don't expect any higher moral sense to come out of a company unless there is a profit motive behind it. It can happen, but the system isn't designed to encourage it.
To illustrate the monopoly issue here, what would actually happen is this. Firestone would tell Ford that they have to outfit everything with firestone tires. Then Ford would put out a bid to the other manufacturers to provide a replacement for Firestone's tire. One of them would undercut Firestone, if for no other reason, than to keep them from taking over Ford's tires, and that'd be that. This is what happens in a competitive market, unlike what we see in the O/S market.
The graphics market boils down to two major markets:
1) OEM's 2) Gamers
Gamers will likely pay the premimum to get that extra 20% of performance. Also, the NVIDIA name carries a certain assurance that it's all going to work well.
As for OEM's, harder to say. One the one hand you've got some systems where the goal is being cheap and you go for an integrated chipset. Then on others the goal is best performance and thus the premium for 20% becomes worthwhile. There's a middle there, but I don't know how wide that middle is.
The thing with rabbit is that the inconvenience of having to use them in specific areas substantially outweighed the cost benefit of using them. With 802.11, hot spots would only be a questionable model if you could get comparable bandwidth through any other means.
Currently the best wireless services that offer long range coverage provide sporadic service and far lower bandwidth. 802.11 doesn't provide the wide coverage, but it at least gives substantial bandwidth at the shorter ranges. In the long run you can expect that the standard mechanism for doing wireless will be to roam from hot spot to hot spot, using 2.5G and 3G systems to provide some bandwidth when not near a hot sport. Even as 3G systems get built out, the bandwidth capabilities of hot spots will increase to continue to provide value enough to make it worthwhile to people.
The solution to this is trivial. If you don't pay for software, you aren't required to be given any warranty. Fair enough? Then free software released to the public and not paid for is under no obligation to provide a warranty.
In the case of RedHat or other vendors of Linux software, they would, of course be responsible for providing a warranty on the software they include in their package. Any liability related to that software being solely born by RedHat, who's making the money, not the original developers/maintainers of the software.
Since the earth is spinning, the water tends to be forced to the equator by centrifugal force (although I think more correctly it's centripedal force, but whatever). So no matter where the water comes from, it will tend to flow to the equator.
Actually one likely side-effect of long term global warming is, ironically, an ice age. The water moves to the equator, and this causes the earth to spin slightly slower. The side-effect being that this cools the earth. I forget exactly why this is because I learned it in high school physics which was just over a decade ago.
If you are average or even above average consumer and are given the following choice:
1) Go out and buy a $450 ReplayTV that provides 40 hours of record time, network sharing, and was builting from the ground up to be an integrated part of your home theater system.
2) Go out and buy a PC for 300-400 then buy the video capture card, a video card with a TV out, an IR receiver, and software. Then hook it up to your home theater system and always have this odd looking box sitting next to the rest of your equipment.
Gee, I wonder why the PC PVR thing hasn't caught on. We are only now getting to the point where the left over machines we have from new purchases have the performance necessary to handle being a PVR. I've tried to do this a bit myself, and the basic problem I ran into was that my processor just wasn't fast enough to handle the demand. If you have an old PC that's fast enough, it might be worth hacking but otherwise, it's WAY easier and similar priced to just buy a Tivo or ReplayTV.
The industry has ridden the affordability horse about as far as it can go. That's why you see more effort to go for aesthetics. Common trend in commoditzed markets is that there's tight price competition until the market reaches a point where it's hard to get much lower. Then they try to differentiate themselves by marketing, aesthetics, etc.
All you need to do is get a power converter like what you put in your car to convert 12 volt DC to 110 volt AC. Then the only question is about power drain.
As far as I know, most people are totally content with the downstream bandwidth they get from all of these providers. anything upwards of 768Kbps is probably sufficient for most people's needs and even most power users. I personally have 1.5 down and I could drop to 768 without really caring and I'm definitely a power user.
The problem is the upstream. If I want to be hosting a P2P server, or running a website off my computer, 384 is barely sufficient (I know because I run on 384 right now). Would I pay a premimum every month to get double my downstream bandwidth? Heck no, I'd never use it. But I'd pay a premium to double my upstream bandwidth in a heart beat.
The other thing I have to wonder about with this is what the terms of service are. If I get 3Mbps down and I actually use it routinely am I going to get unplesant messages from AT&T telling me to stop using my service?
While certainly those who set up home networks are more likely to be tech savvy and more likely to use more bandwidth, this is also about marketing. You call up AT&T and have a conversation like this:
You: Hi, I wants me some Internet ATT: Alright, fine, would you like to use our basic plan or our ultralink plan? You: Ummmm, what's ultralink? ATT: Ultralink is a service we provide that provides the bandwidth that home networks demand.
Average customer, at this point, will probably think that if they are planning to set up a home network, they'll need whatever this service provides and pay the extra money.
There have been a number of articles complaining about the poor interfaces that exist on modern computers and I keep wondering what exactly these critics expect. What feature is it that they want to see in KDE4 that would somehow create this innovative GUI that would just blow everybody away? 3D? Interactive agents? What? Stop complaining and start solving. Sit down, write code, or tell harass somebody who writes code and solve the problem. Isn't this what open source is supposed to be all about. Contributing ideas to the collective and IMPLEMENTING them.
Furthermore, many articles like this seem to suggest that the next big revolution is right around the corner. The theory seems to be that since the desktop paradigm is 20 years old, it must be replaced with something better. I'm not convinced that this is true. Over the past 20 years, we've been honing the desktop paradigm and frankly I find that it is a really great way to interact with the computer. Of course I'm so old fashioned that I still find the command line to be a great way to interfact with the computer. It seems to me that the next step in computer interaction has to bring the computer to a level that allows for it to seem more human. That level of interaction is, to say the least, non-trivial and I'm not convinced that this is going to be happening anytime soon.
As a side note, talking about the graphical environments on Linux as being Linux is, once again, misleading. Predominantly people run XWindows with Gnome or KDE. But this is, by no means, the only options out there. Now, I'm unaware of any desktop efforts that are really creating something totally new and innovative, but at least Linux allows for the flexibility to do this.
I think the thing is that a lot of the obscure hacking that tends to happen in Unix and Linux is derrived from trying to push it's limits. We take the time to deal with these things because we actually have the opportunity to do so. To illustrate my point, let's assume I'm having a problem with the video under windows versus a problem with video under linux. The symptom in both systems is the same, sporadic system crashes. So let's see what happens when I go try to solve my problem.
I search on-line and find out that there's a known problem with the video card. I find out that, for windows, the newest driver is expected to be released in a few weeks that will fix this problem. So, I wait a few weeks, get the new driver, and get on with life.
Now, under Linux I find out the same thing, that there's a bug and it's expected to be fixed in the newest release of the driver. The difference though is that, if I'm willing to put the work in, I can download a patch for this problem and recompile the driver. So rather than being out of luck for a few weeks, I'm only out of luck for how long it takes me to implement the fix.
I think that this environment promotes an attitude that encourages noodling with things to get them to work. Under windows, we are trained to try CTRL+ALT+DEL, then download a fix pack. Nobody is encourage to get into the guts of the thing even if it's possible. In windows, every effort is made to discourage hacking on the system.
Looks just like a BSOD on NT. With some games I find that I'll get a BSOD at least once and sometimes more per night. I havet to assume it's the video driver, but no number of software upgrades have fixed it. So it crashes and i wish I could play the games on linux.
While Linux is prone to falling into dependancy hell, it doesn't suffer from the same performance degradation that you get in windows. In windows, you seem to have to periodically re-install everything just to get your system to load in a reasonable amount of time. You might get into a dependancy nightmare in Linux when trying to install something new, but the system performance doesn't seem to suffer from cruft related degradation.
I've found in my Linux experience that if I try be experimental and cutting edge, I end up, eventually, getting into situations where it becomes a major nightmare to upgrade. On the other hand, if I leave my system relatively stock, tools like red-carpet, up2date, or apt-get, do a pretty damn good job of hiding the dependancy hell from me.
All things considered, I'd rather have it become a pain to install piece of software then to have it be easy and slowly cause my system to become unusable for no apparent reason.
The article said that the two major carriers that use CDMA are Sprint and Verizon. I personally have a sprint cell phone and it is a Nokia. So if Nokia doesn't make a CDMA phone, this would suggest that I've actually be speaking to people faraway via a very clever hallucination.
So ruling out my delusion (which isn't necessarily a safe bet), somebody's wrong here.
If you think the less of Bruce for this, I'm sure he would let you get up on stage and do it yourself. Are you willing to go to jail and spend the next year in court for your convictions?
Nope, that's what, when I break the law, I do so in the comfort of my own home:). But this does give me an idea...
What about taking this to a new level. Do a mass violation of the DMCA. Arrange for a gathering of hundreds or thousands of geeks and have them all, simultaneously, do exactly what Bruce was planning to do. Are they going to try to arrest all of these people? I'd like to see them try...
From the article: Robert Garby, 38, pleaded guilty to two counts of copyright infringement and four counts of selling unauthorized computer equipment
Can somebody familiar with canadian law explain to me what "selling unauthorize computer equipment" involves. Is this like not getting the chips properly licensed with the canadian equivalent of the FCC? Or does canada have some sort of DMCA-like provision that I'm not aware of.
The fact of the matter is that Bruce Perens is not about to get arrested for violating the DMCA. The movie studios have, if nothing else, demonstrated a strong grasp of how to construct an effective legal strategy around the DMCA. They could have gone after any number of folks for violating the DMCA, but instead they decided to take on 2600. Why? Not because they were the most egregious, but because they could drag a "hacker" into court and it would make their case easier.
Bruce Perens is a businessman, he has a strong reputation, and if he was taken to jail there'd be a huge uproar over it. When it got into court, the judge would be seeing a respected professional, not a hacker. That would hurt the case of the movie studios substantially and they know it.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm very glad to see Bruce and others in the industry standing up to this idiocy, but I think the notion that he might somehow go to jail is borderline absured. No, the movie studios would much rather build up a few precedents taking on the small fish.
What would impress me is if some major Linux distiribution would release a DVD player that was based on DeCSS code as part of their software. Now THAT would really be something.
If the person who wrote this virus has caused 911 to be tied up, and this has possibly caused somebody to die, would they be prosecutable under the new anti-hacker law that Congress put together?
That "tar pit" you speak of is also known as the democratic process and it exists for VERY good reasons. It exists so that people who might possibly disagree have a chance to express their disagreement. Legislation by executive fiat is a very dangerous road to travel.
Historically democracies are destroyed, not by external forces, but rather buy a growing internal dislike of the corrpution and tar pit characteristics of the process. People feel like democracy doesn't ever get anything done, and while it is true to some extent, it is also democracy's methodical checks and balances that protects us from fascism. Fascism gets things done, it just sucks to be you when the boot heel comes down on you and those you love.
This sort of move seems indicative of what I fear may be dangerous times for our democracy. All sides of the political spectrum are convinced that the system is fundamentally broken. Government, unable to trust it's own ability to get things done has been setting up these little extra-democractic bureaucracies to run the show without public input, in the hopes of getting something accomplished. ICANN is a perfect example of this dangerous trend, a bureaucracy outside of democratic controls, created by a government convinced of its own ineptness to manage things correctly.
Maybe the distance between manipulating the FCC to get copy controls into broadcasts and electing Hitler is wide, but it seems that the same motivations drive either. We're fed up with the system, and we want somebody to fix it and increasingly we seem willing to give up our democracy just to get something done. It's that kind of desperation that destroys democracy.
Now THAT would be interesting...
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Microsoft using Apache instead of IIS. Now that's an interesting thought. Microsoft would have no issues with using Apache because it's license would allow them to lock up their changes without a problem. They write a module to let it use.net and *whamo* they look like open source advocates. As long as it's the right kind of open source.
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I think the thing that has broken in our current market system in the US is the notion of ENLIGHTENED self-interest. The problem is that if one thinks in the short term, seeking the greatest profit right now, then all sorts of things get messed up. Why worry about the environment, that's for somebody to deal with 20 years from now? Why worry about education, that's the government's job and by the time the students now are grown up and looking for jobs it's not going to be your problem finding skilled laborers then.
Our current system rewards those who are taking stupid risks for short term and fleeting finanicial gains. It needs to be changed so that CEO's have more vested interest in the long term health of a company and the related social factors that go into it. They need to be put in a position that understands that having long-term loyalty by employees is beneficial to the company rather than treating them like mercenaries to be brought on only when needed and thrown away at a whim.
Self-interest is fine, if one is taking the bigger picture into account.
Despite all the rhetoric coming out of our government about how horrible this is and how we need a return of ethic to corporations, I'll be very surprised if anything really changes in the long run. The only real change I expect to see is stock holders will change the rules for their CEO's because it isn't in their long term best interest for a CEO to over-inflate his options and bail out.
But as far as ethics in business go, there is only one ethic: make money. The system is set up to encourage a company to find the shortest path to greatest profitability, and that's the way it will likely always be. Is this bad? Depends on what you want companies to accomplish. If you want them to achieve economic growth, increasing efficiency, etc, then they are ideally groomed to do this (as our economy has demonstrated over the past decades). But don't expect any higher moral sense to come out of a company unless there is a profit motive behind it. It can happen, but the system isn't designed to encourage it.
To illustrate the monopoly issue here, what would actually happen is this. Firestone would tell Ford that they have to outfit everything with firestone tires. Then Ford would put out a bid to the other manufacturers to provide a replacement for Firestone's tire. One of them would undercut Firestone, if for no other reason, than to keep them from taking over Ford's tires, and that'd be that. This is what happens in a competitive market, unlike what we see in the O/S market.
watch your helicopter distintegrate from the recoil :)
The graphics market boils down to two major markets:
1) OEM's
2) Gamers
Gamers will likely pay the premimum to get that extra 20% of performance. Also, the NVIDIA name carries a certain assurance that it's all going to work well.
As for OEM's, harder to say. One the one hand you've got some systems where the goal is being cheap and you go for an integrated chipset. Then on others the goal is best performance and thus the premium for 20% becomes worthwhile. There's a middle there, but I don't know how wide that middle is.
The thing with rabbit is that the inconvenience of having to use them in specific areas substantially outweighed the cost benefit of using them. With 802.11, hot spots would only be a questionable model if you could get comparable bandwidth through any other means.
Currently the best wireless services that offer long range coverage provide sporadic service and far lower bandwidth. 802.11 doesn't provide the wide coverage, but it at least gives substantial bandwidth at the shorter ranges. In the long run you can expect that the standard mechanism for doing wireless will be to roam from hot spot to hot spot, using 2.5G and 3G systems to provide some bandwidth when not near a hot sport. Even as 3G systems get built out, the bandwidth capabilities of hot spots will increase to continue to provide value enough to make it worthwhile to people.
The solution to this is trivial. If you don't pay for software, you aren't required to be given any warranty. Fair enough? Then free software released to the public and not paid for is under no obligation to provide a warranty.
In the case of RedHat or other vendors of Linux software, they would, of course be responsible for providing a warranty on the software they include in their package. Any liability related to that software being solely born by RedHat, who's making the money, not the original developers/maintainers of the software.
Is this really that hard or unintuitive?
Since the earth is spinning, the water tends to be forced to the equator by centrifugal force (although I think more correctly it's centripedal force, but whatever). So no matter where the water comes from, it will tend to flow to the equator.
Actually one likely side-effect of long term global warming is, ironically, an ice age. The water moves to the equator, and this causes the earth to spin slightly slower. The side-effect being that this cools the earth. I forget exactly why this is because I learned it in high school physics which was just over a decade ago.
If you are average or even above average consumer and are given the following choice:
1) Go out and buy a $450 ReplayTV that provides 40 hours of record time, network sharing, and was builting from the ground up to be an integrated part of your home theater system.
2) Go out and buy a PC for 300-400 then buy the video capture card, a video card with a TV out, an IR receiver, and software. Then hook it up to your home theater system and always have this odd looking box sitting next to the rest of your equipment.
Gee, I wonder why the PC PVR thing hasn't caught on. We are only now getting to the point where the left over machines we have from new purchases have the performance necessary to handle being a PVR. I've tried to do this a bit myself, and the basic problem I ran into was that my processor just wasn't fast enough to handle the demand. If you have an old PC that's fast enough, it might be worth hacking but otherwise, it's WAY easier and similar priced to just buy a Tivo or ReplayTV.
The industry has ridden the affordability horse about as far as it can go. That's why you see more effort to go for aesthetics. Common trend in commoditzed markets is that there's tight price competition until the market reaches a point where it's hard to get much lower. Then they try to differentiate themselves by marketing, aesthetics, etc.
All you need to do is get a power converter like what you put in your car to convert 12 volt DC to 110 volt AC. Then the only question is about power drain.
As far as I know, most people are totally content with the downstream bandwidth they get from all of these providers. anything upwards of 768Kbps is probably sufficient for most people's needs and even most power users. I personally have 1.5 down and I could drop to 768 without really caring and I'm definitely a power user.
The problem is the upstream. If I want to be hosting a P2P server, or running a website off my computer, 384 is barely sufficient (I know because I run on 384 right now). Would I pay a premimum every month to get double my downstream bandwidth? Heck no, I'd never use it. But I'd pay a premium to double my upstream bandwidth in a heart beat.
The other thing I have to wonder about with this is what the terms of service are. If I get 3Mbps down and I actually use it routinely am I going to get unplesant messages from AT&T telling me to stop using my service?
While certainly those who set up home networks are more likely to be tech savvy and more likely to use more bandwidth, this is also about marketing. You call up AT&T and have a conversation like this:
You: Hi, I wants me some Internet
ATT: Alright, fine, would you like to use our basic plan or our ultralink plan?
You: Ummmm, what's ultralink?
ATT: Ultralink is a service we provide that provides the bandwidth that home networks demand.
Average customer, at this point, will probably think that if they are planning to set up a home network, they'll need whatever this service provides and pay the extra money.
There have been a number of articles complaining about the poor interfaces that exist on modern computers and I keep wondering what exactly these critics expect. What feature is it that they want to see in KDE4 that would somehow create this innovative GUI that would just blow everybody away? 3D? Interactive agents? What? Stop complaining and start solving. Sit down, write code, or tell harass somebody who writes code and solve the problem. Isn't this what open source is supposed to be all about. Contributing ideas to the collective and IMPLEMENTING them.
Furthermore, many articles like this seem to suggest that the next big revolution is right around the corner. The theory seems to be that since the desktop paradigm is 20 years old, it must be replaced with something better. I'm not convinced that this is true. Over the past 20 years, we've been honing the desktop paradigm and frankly I find that it is a really great way to interact with the computer. Of course I'm so old fashioned that I still find the command line to be a great way to interfact with the computer. It seems to me that the next step in computer interaction has to bring the computer to a level that allows for it to seem more human. That level of interaction is, to say the least, non-trivial and I'm not convinced that this is going to be happening anytime soon.
As a side note, talking about the graphical environments on Linux as being Linux is, once again, misleading. Predominantly people run XWindows with Gnome or KDE. But this is, by no means, the only options out there. Now, I'm unaware of any desktop efforts that are really creating something totally new and innovative, but at least Linux allows for the flexibility to do this.
I think the thing is that a lot of the obscure hacking that tends to happen in Unix and Linux is derrived from trying to push it's limits. We take the time to deal with these things because we actually have the opportunity to do so.
To illustrate my point, let's assume I'm having a problem with the video under windows versus a problem with video under linux. The symptom in both systems is the same, sporadic system crashes. So let's see what happens when I go try to solve my problem.
I search on-line and find out that there's a known problem with the video card. I find out that, for windows, the newest driver is expected to be released in a few weeks that will fix this problem. So, I wait a few weeks, get the new driver, and get on with life.
Now, under Linux I find out the same thing, that there's a bug and it's expected to be fixed in the newest release of the driver. The difference though is that, if I'm willing to put the work in, I can download a patch for this problem and recompile the driver. So rather than being out of luck for a few weeks, I'm only out of luck for how long it takes me to implement the fix.
I think that this environment promotes an attitude that encourages noodling with things to get them to work. Under windows, we are trained to try CTRL+ALT+DEL, then download a fix pack. Nobody is encourage to get into the guts of the thing even if it's possible. In windows, every effort is made to discourage hacking on the system.
Looks just like a BSOD on NT. With some games I find that I'll get a BSOD at least once and sometimes more per night. I havet to assume it's the video driver, but no number of software upgrades have fixed it. So it crashes and i wish I could play the games on linux.
While Linux is prone to falling into dependancy hell, it doesn't suffer from the same performance degradation that you get in windows. In windows, you seem to have to periodically re-install everything just to get your system to load in a reasonable amount of time. You might get into a dependancy nightmare in Linux when trying to install something new, but the system performance doesn't seem to suffer from cruft related degradation.
I've found in my Linux experience that if I try be experimental and cutting edge, I end up, eventually, getting into situations where it becomes a major nightmare to upgrade. On the other hand, if I leave my system relatively stock, tools like red-carpet, up2date, or apt-get, do a pretty damn good job of hiding the dependancy hell from me.
All things considered, I'd rather have it become a pain to install piece of software then to have it be easy and slowly cause my system to become unusable for no apparent reason.
No problem. He makes the call, they track him down to within a few feet of his location using the E-911 system and shoot him.
The article said that the two major carriers that use CDMA are Sprint and Verizon. I personally have a sprint cell phone and it is a Nokia. So if Nokia doesn't make a CDMA phone, this would suggest that I've actually be speaking to people faraway via a very clever hallucination.
So ruling out my delusion (which isn't necessarily a safe bet), somebody's wrong here.
If you think the less of Bruce for this, I'm sure he would let you get up on stage and do it yourself. Are you willing to go to jail and spend the next year in court for your convictions?
:). But this does give me an idea...
Nope, that's what, when I break the law, I do so in the comfort of my own home
What about taking this to a new level. Do a mass violation of the DMCA. Arrange for a gathering of hundreds or thousands of geeks and have them all, simultaneously, do exactly what Bruce was planning to do. Are they going to try to arrest all of these people? I'd like to see them try...
From the article:
Robert Garby, 38, pleaded guilty to two counts of copyright infringement and four counts of selling unauthorized computer equipment
Can somebody familiar with canadian law explain to me what "selling unauthorize computer equipment" involves. Is this like not getting the chips properly licensed with the canadian equivalent of the FCC? Or does canada have some sort of DMCA-like provision that I'm not aware of.
The fact of the matter is that Bruce Perens is not about to get arrested for violating the DMCA. The movie studios have, if nothing else, demonstrated a strong grasp of how to construct an effective legal strategy around the DMCA. They could have gone after any number of folks for violating the DMCA, but instead they decided to take on 2600. Why? Not because they were the most egregious, but because they could drag a "hacker" into court and it would make their case easier.
Bruce Perens is a businessman, he has a strong reputation, and if he was taken to jail there'd be a huge uproar over it. When it got into court, the judge would be seeing a respected professional, not a hacker. That would hurt the case of the movie studios substantially and they know it.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm very glad to see Bruce and others in the industry standing up to this idiocy, but I think the notion that he might somehow go to jail is borderline absured. No, the movie studios would much rather build up a few precedents taking on the small fish.
What would impress me is if some major Linux distiribution would release a DVD player that was based on DeCSS code as part of their software. Now THAT would really be something.
If the person who wrote this virus has caused 911 to be tied up, and this has possibly caused somebody to die, would they be prosecutable under the new anti-hacker law that Congress put together?
That "tar pit" you speak of is also known as the democratic process and it exists for VERY good reasons. It exists so that people who might possibly disagree have a chance to express their disagreement. Legislation by executive fiat is a very dangerous road to travel.
Historically democracies are destroyed, not by external forces, but rather buy a growing internal dislike of the corrpution and tar pit characteristics of the process. People feel like democracy doesn't ever get anything done, and while it is true to some extent, it is also democracy's methodical checks and balances that protects us from fascism. Fascism gets things done, it just sucks to be you when the boot heel comes down on you and those you love.
This sort of move seems indicative of what I fear may be dangerous times for our democracy. All sides of the political spectrum are convinced that the system is fundamentally broken. Government, unable to trust it's own ability to get things done has been setting up these little extra-democractic bureaucracies to run the show without public input, in the hopes of getting something accomplished. ICANN is a perfect example of this dangerous trend, a bureaucracy outside of democratic controls, created by a government convinced of its own ineptness to manage things correctly.
Maybe the distance between manipulating the FCC to get copy controls into broadcasts and electing Hitler is wide, but it seems that the same motivations drive either. We're fed up with the system, and we want somebody to fix it and increasingly we seem willing to give up our democracy just to get something done. It's that kind of desperation that destroys democracy.
Microsoft using Apache instead of IIS. Now that's an interesting thought. Microsoft would have no issues with using Apache because it's license would allow them to lock up their changes without a problem. They write a module to let it use .net and *whamo* they look like open source advocates. As long as it's the right kind of open source.