If you look at medicare, about 2% of expenditures are on overhead. If you look at private health care it's about 20-25%. Now granted medicare has less people in it at a higher outlay per person (because it's old people). So that skews the value of that statistic a bit.
But if you think about it, it makes sense that medicare would be more efficient in the long run if it was the only game in town. You'd have one set of paperwork to do for the one insurer that exists. You'd have less bureaucracy overall because, lacking a profit motive, they aren't as fixated on cutting costs and rejecting claims. Being that we'd all be in the same boat, we'd all have motivation to make sure it was being run right by our government.
In the end, all countries that have single payer systems pay less per person for their healthcare and the outcomes are better. So why is it even debatable? We seem to have this fixation in this country that private solutions are always better than government solutions, but there are certain things that are not readily solved by private companies. In a market that is innately competitive, private management is best. But health care is innately uncompetitive.
But you run into the same fundamental problem. Healthy people can afford to get the limited medical care that they need. Sick people cannot afford to get the large amount of medical care that they need. If you look at the cost of health care, what is charged to insurance companies and what is charged to the uninsured, you get a sense of what the real prices are.
Let's say you need a kidney transplant. This is an expensive procedure no matter how competitive a doctor is willing to be. It requires multiple doctors and nurses, hospital facilities, pharmaceuticals, etc. It is something that an average person cannot afford no matter how much the doctors are competing for your dollar. So then wealthy people will be able to get those procedures as they can now, and the poor will get screwed, as they do now.
I'm sorry but a private medical care system will never be effective. Why? Because sick people don't really have choices. Let's say that tomorrow everybody had exactly what you described. You, as a healthy consumer shop around for insurance and get amazing rates because you're healthy. Now, a few years later, you get sick. Your insurance company doesn't want you anymore because you're costing them way more than you're bringing in. So they up your premiums, or drop you all together.
There is no such thing as competition for the insurance dollars of the sick and that's why private health care will never be effective. Universal single payer health care is the best option because:
1) It provides a large pool of people paying into the system, thus making sure sick people get covered but that healthy people don't pay too much
2) It makes everybody overall healthier because poor people can get treatment for communicable diseases quickly rather than avoiding a doctor and spreading it to everybody
3) It's a national security benefit, see also, #2 plus the communicable disease being something suitable horrible like weaponized ebola (doesn't exist so far as I know, but theoretically it'd be bad)
4) It reduces the waste that's a fundamental part of private health care. That is, eliminating profits and the need to pay lots of people to try to weasel out of paying your bill. A publically heald insurance company was recently getting grief for paying out 80% of it's intake because it wasn't profitable enough. 80% efficient and it's getting grief for it.
The intent of the patent process was to provide a quid pro quo for invention. That is, if you created something new, you would be given a temporary monopoly on the invention. In exchange you make concise instructions available that allow other people to replicate your invention after the patent expires. This quid pro quo establishes a financial incentive to invent under the premise that there's a certain amount of expense in invention.
So to get back to the notion of the solid state MP3 player. Let's say several people come up with the idea at the same time. Why should somebody get rewarded for making a patent on it when the idea was not uniquely there's? Just because they bothered to spend some money, they should suddenly have monpoly power over the invention for years to come? They didn't go through any effort to actually invent anything, merely the effort to pay lawyers to patent it.
Now I would be okay with patenting a specific implementation of a solid state MP3 player. If you invest some time researching and developing some particular interface that makes them very power efficient, etc, then I see nothing wrong with getting a patent on that feature. I see nothing wrong with patenting a compression algorithm either because there's a certain amount of research and effort that goes into that development. But I see no reason that the overall concept of a solid state mp3 player should be patentable.
The point of patents is to foster innovation to benefit society as a whole. Does providing a patent on the general concept of a solid state mp3 player benefit innovation? No. It makes money for the guy who patented it sure, but it actually retards development by requiring potential manufacturers to invest in licenses before they can produce a product.
The problem we have right now is that there's a lot of patents out there on very obvious concepts. The one-click patent is an obvious indication of a broken system. This is so ridiculously obvious that it wouldn't occurr to most people that it would even be patentable. What did Amazon have to do to figure out one-click short of paying a lawyer to register the patent? Nothing. So why should they get some sort of monopoly on the concept?
So if 2 people come up with something non-obvious and one chooses to go public with it and put it in the database I see no reason that the other person should get a patent on it. I see this system as a way to protect somebody who's developing a product without the expense of patents. If I, as an individual think of some new way to do something but have no interest in a patent, it would be good for me to have a way to protect myself from people that might otherwise come up with the idea and try to patent it themselves.
Yeah okay so then they understand why DRM is annoying. But does it change their habbits in any way? Do they stop buying DVD's? Do they stop buying videos through ITunes? In the end, the media companies will continue to push DRM so long as it's incorporation doesn't adversely affect sales. Unless people connect the dots from DRM to actually doing something that harms the sales of the media companies, it doesn't matter if you convince them DRM sucks.
The only competition for DVD was DivX and all DivX players would play standard DVD's. In this case you have two incompatible formats. Really it's a matter of how the PS3 fits into this. If the PS3 gets people into Blu-ray, blu-ray wins. Otherwise HD-DVD, at a lower price point and with better name recognition, wins.
Yeah the sheer volume of meaningless patents is already huge. What I would suggest is perhaps somewhat along the lines of the original concept but deals well with the volume issues:
1) Provide an open database for public disclosure. This database would be a repository for prior art claims. So what you would do is, if you had a good idea, you'd drop it into the database and it would be kept there. Then when a patent came up, it would be readily searchable and if your idea was relevant and prior to their invention, it'd prevent them from getting the patent.
2) Seriously improve the patent review process. That means upping fees, hiring more patent clerks, and increasing the difficulty of getting a patent in the first place. It's time we stop pretending that patents are the realm of the lone inventor and recognize that they are weapons in corporate IP arsenals. As such make them very expensive to get and maintain and make the vetting process quite vigorous.
Check out Wild Divine for an example of what you can do with a game that uses biofeedback. It's like $150 and comes with a biofeedback device that plugs into a USB port.
The concept of the game is to have you use meditative techniques to manipulate things in the game. So you have to make a baloon rise, or something like that to progress in the game. It's an interesting concept but the game itself gets repetitive pretty fast since the tasks you perform are all pretty similar. The artwork is different for different things, but the overall interaction doesn't change a whole lot.
What's totally hilarious about this is what ultimately the google logo thing brings more attention to the artist's work. You go to google one day, the logo looks funky, and you wonder why. So you click the logo and are now finding out all about Miro, etc.
Not only is this not any obvious violation of copyright law, but IT HELPS THEM. It's free freaking advertising for the artist and presumably could lead to better returns on sales of the art, etc. Whiners.
Yes, I know that. However mandarin or cantonese would both be useful. I personally prefer mandarin just because I love the sound of it, but both are useful.
The fact of the matter is that any of the white collar professions typically rely on knowledge work and it is, by far, the most readily transferred over seas. You don't need to build factories or even ship anything, you just need to hook somebody up to the Internet and you're good to go.
That means, in the long run, if you're in these fields you are going to be at risk for being outsourced. As long as your phyiscal presence isn't requisite for your job, there's a chance this can happen to you. Having said that, much of the work does require a physical presence when you really think about it.
Programming, in the sense of, reading a spec and implementing it can be done anywhere on earth at any time of the day. But developing requirements and designing a system does require some presence practically speaking. There are just some things that are easier to do sitting around a conference table with a white board than on a phone call.
Many companies do outsourcing, but the smart ones are using it to offload the more repetitive mechanized parts of the work to save their smart local workers for the higher level tasks. It lowers your costs and it frees up your developers from the tedious stuff that they probably never wanted to do in the first place.
The challenge in IT is that you need to be nimble with your skills independent of your employer. The tendancy, especially amongst larger companies, it to get you into doing one thing and doing that one thing well. This means that when that one thing becomes unneeded, they have little incentive to keep you.
In the good old days, they'd retraint you. These days they'll put that project into maintenance mode, hire contractors in India to do it, and send you packing. A good friend of mine worked for one of the airlines that went through bankruptcy. He's very specialized in what he knows so it's hard for him to find work elsewhere. so he's been through pay cut after pay cut and he can't do much about it.
So if you want to get along well in IT, keep your skills fresh and broad, and try to develop the soft skills more. Being able to work well with people and understand business requirements will do a lot more for you in the long run than knowing one more computer language.
Of the three, hindi would be the least useful. English is very commonly taught in India which is why a lot of the outsourcing goes there. Chinese and Japanese will be far more useful.
The thing here is that the Windows API is already broken. There are any number of bugs and hidden features that come out with each new release of Windows. Developers write to take advantage of and work around these bugs. So invariably if Apple writes it they will have different bugs and not implement the current bugs correctly. So even if they had the resources to completely implement it, they could never be quite identical.
Furthermore there are lots of assumptions built into windows about where things should be installed, libraries that need to be there, etc. This is the biggest reason that Wine has never quite worked ideally. It can be made to work with a particular piece of software but it requires going through and validating them one by one essentially.
You get fun things like a piece of software that works perfectly on Windows but is dependent on IE 6, and Windows Media Player. The original developer could safely assume both were there on windows, but they aren't on Wine or what have you and thus it breaks.
You know, I thought the whole oversight thing was why we had that other branch of government. You know that one with all the talking people that pass laws that the President ignores? Yeah those guys, they should probably look into this.
Actually if you read what they said, they were doing pretty well in spite of some set backs, they just ran into one big problem with a legal issue. I was one of those people buying those books and I was always a big fan of the series. I'll admit that the character creation and such were always a tad too complex and time consuming, and the game mechanics had issues. In spite of that though it was a pretty rich universe that they put together.
I haven't been able to play the game in a very long time, but that's because of how time consuming RPG's are in general. I can't play for 4-8 hours in a sitting these days as I have too much other stuff to do. But I really hope they can stay afloat and get some licensing deals for a movie or MMO. This stuff would be awesome on the big screen.
It's insane rambling and on top of that it doesn't make the slightest bit of business sense for Apple (yeah sometimes insane and business sense do go together). Apple makes money on hardware. If people can get the Apple experience on cheaper hardware like they did in the clone days, then Apple has a serious problem.
For Apple, running Windows on Apple is perfectly okay because it means people are still buying Apple hardware. However, it is not in their interest to be, primarily, a windows computer manufacturer because then they suddenly have to compete with Dell, etc. They derrive value from having a unique experience with the slick hardware and the nicely integrated OS.
It is furthermore not in the immediate interest of Apple to offer OSX on non-apple hardware. The risk they face there is, once again, people defecting to cheaper hardware. This could change in time though. The position they are in now is that people can get an Apple laptop and become familiar with the Apple experience without abandoning Windows completely. It makes it possible for business users to have chic Apple hardware but still run their company's Windows based software.
So open sourcing will not happen. It's too important to Apple to keep a tight control over the experience of using Apple products. Once they set the code free they can't control what happens. Imagine the mistake of clone licensing repeated with no ability to undo the mistake and you see where this goes.
I don't necessarily disagree with his thinking, but it's worth having some perspective on how "progressive" his voice really is. I saw mention of this editorial on DailyKOS in this article yesterday. Notable quote:
"Moore may indeed have been an early Greenpeace member, in the distant mists, but more recently can be better described as the founder of Greenspirit Enterprises, a consulting organization focused on improving the environmental PR of his mining, logging, biotech and energy industry clients."
I'm not saying he's full of it, but before we say that even environmental progressives are re-thinking nuclear, it might be useful to actually get the thoughts of people still in the progressive environmental movement.
I do love that they argue that you can't proove evolution but, in this book, some guy wrote long ago that's been translated and interpreted countless times, it says God made the world in 7 days and thus it is true. There is a certain amount of faith necessary to go from theory to fact but it's a very minimal leap compared to believing in the literalness of biblical text.
You illuminate a good point. For the creationist folks, they'll continue to dispute this because their blind faith requires it. It's like the entropy argument. They'll say that spontaneous organization can't happen because of entropy and ignore the fact that entropy only applies to closed systems.
It's cool that they discovered this but it won't change the debate.
We need to make an important distinction here between open source, closed source, and RMS' view of software as embodied in the GPL. I think there's little argument against the value of providing source code to people for products they buy. However, having the kind of free redistribution that's associated with the GPL isn't a panacea.
In your analogy, you compare an alphabet to heiroglyphics but the clear assumption is that open source is necessarily superior to closed source. That closed source is only a benefit to the software developers who use it. So let me ask you, how would video games of the quality we see today get made under the GPL? They thrive because people have to pay $50-60 per copy which provides the money to fund development. There are GPL games, but the quality of those games are not on par with the leading edge of closed source development.
Both of your presented points of view tend to suggest development related to business and large organization use of software. As a developer I like having open source software available to build upon. I couldn't do the work I've done without it. Within a large business, open source is very valuable as a way to reduce the licensing hassles associated with closed source. But in the case of consumer products, there's a lot to be said for the closed source approach. These are people that, by and large, aren't going to modify and tweak the product, and being closed source provides a direct revenue stream that can't be made up for in support contacts, etc.
I find that he has a lot in common with Marx. I don't mean specifically in terms of this notion of community propery that's bound into the GPL, but more in just the notion that his ideas are... ideals, but not particularly practical in all cases. I will be the first person to tell you that the GPL is valuable and has a place in software. But I think there's a lot out there that can't derrive benefit from the GPL.
The GPL is a very useful approach when the software isn't the way you intend to make money. That is, the software is a gateway to other business. So you have GPL software that you build a consulting and customization service on top of. Or you use GPL software in a piece of hardware you sell. It's very hard to make a profitable business selling software that other people can redistribute for free.
The ideals that the GPL embodies are noble, but in the end, they aren't practical in all cases. Much like marx denied certain realities about human nature, RMS denies certain realities about software development. I like his vision, and in the real world there is a place for that vision, but not as big a place as I think he'd like.
Yeah it's not like any of this is new. What really irritates me is that while saying that addiction is about filling some internal emptiness they infer that easy access to pornography is a problem. No, the internal emptiness is the problem, and people will fill it with video games, porn, crack, sex or whatever else. People who are prone to addictive behavior are prone to addictive behavior regardless the source. There are things that are genuinely physically addictive like hard drugs, etc, but the only reason porn is even thrown in here is because it's seen as "naughty". If somebody was addicted to excercise for example, nobody would think twice about it because it's sociall acceptable. It's only because it's nekkid people that there's an article about it.
Yeah it's not going to make much of a difference. IE will just get upgraded and people will just use it like they do IE 6. IE gained as much ground as it did because it came by default, but there's other factors to consider:
1) Netscape's browser was not keeping up with IE 2) Not many people had the bandwidth to download a new browser (for all I love firefox I'd never encourage my friends with modems to try downloading it)
Frankly I think this second part is not fully appreciated in the browser war history. If it takes me a minute or two to download and install a new browser, it's more likely I'll bother to do it. Firefox has come on-line as the availability of broadband has expanded significantly making it easy for people to try it out if they hear about it.
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If you look at medicare, about 2% of expenditures are on overhead. If you look at private health care it's about 20-25%. Now granted medicare has less people in it at a higher outlay per person (because it's old people). So that skews the value of that statistic a bit.
But if you think about it, it makes sense that medicare would be more efficient in the long run if it was the only game in town. You'd have one set of paperwork to do for the one insurer that exists. You'd have less bureaucracy overall because, lacking a profit motive, they aren't as fixated on cutting costs and rejecting claims. Being that we'd all be in the same boat, we'd all have motivation to make sure it was being run right by our government.
In the end, all countries that have single payer systems pay less per person for their healthcare and the outcomes are better. So why is it even debatable? We seem to have this fixation in this country that private solutions are always better than government solutions, but there are certain things that are not readily solved by private companies. In a market that is innately competitive, private management is best. But health care is innately uncompetitive.
But you run into the same fundamental problem. Healthy people can afford to get the limited medical care that they need. Sick people cannot afford to get the large amount of medical care that they need. If you look at the cost of health care, what is charged to insurance companies and what is charged to the uninsured, you get a sense of what the real prices are.
Let's say you need a kidney transplant. This is an expensive procedure no matter how competitive a doctor is willing to be. It requires multiple doctors and nurses, hospital facilities, pharmaceuticals, etc. It is something that an average person cannot afford no matter how much the doctors are competing for your dollar. So then wealthy people will be able to get those procedures as they can now, and the poor will get screwed, as they do now.
I'm sorry but a private medical care system will never be effective. Why? Because sick people don't really have choices. Let's say that tomorrow everybody had exactly what you described. You, as a healthy consumer shop around for insurance and get amazing rates because you're healthy. Now, a few years later, you get sick. Your insurance company doesn't want you anymore because you're costing them way more than you're bringing in. So they up your premiums, or drop you all together.
There is no such thing as competition for the insurance dollars of the sick and that's why private health care will never be effective. Universal single payer health care is the best option because:
1) It provides a large pool of people paying into the system, thus making sure sick people get covered but that healthy people don't pay too much
2) It makes everybody overall healthier because poor people can get treatment for communicable diseases quickly rather than avoiding a doctor and spreading it to everybody
3) It's a national security benefit, see also, #2 plus the communicable disease being something suitable horrible like weaponized ebola (doesn't exist so far as I know, but theoretically it'd be bad)
4) It reduces the waste that's a fundamental part of private health care. That is, eliminating profits and the need to pay lots of people to try to weasel out of paying your bill. A publically heald insurance company was recently getting grief for paying out 80% of it's intake because it wasn't profitable enough. 80% efficient and it's getting grief for it.
The intent of the patent process was to provide a quid pro quo for invention. That is, if you created something new, you would be given a temporary monopoly on the invention. In exchange you make concise instructions available that allow other people to replicate your invention after the patent expires. This quid pro quo establishes a financial incentive to invent under the premise that there's a certain amount of expense in invention.
So to get back to the notion of the solid state MP3 player. Let's say several people come up with the idea at the same time. Why should somebody get rewarded for making a patent on it when the idea was not uniquely there's? Just because they bothered to spend some money, they should suddenly have monpoly power over the invention for years to come? They didn't go through any effort to actually invent anything, merely the effort to pay lawyers to patent it.
Now I would be okay with patenting a specific implementation of a solid state MP3 player. If you invest some time researching and developing some particular interface that makes them very power efficient, etc, then I see nothing wrong with getting a patent on that feature. I see nothing wrong with patenting a compression algorithm either because there's a certain amount of research and effort that goes into that development. But I see no reason that the overall concept of a solid state mp3 player should be patentable.
The point of patents is to foster innovation to benefit society as a whole. Does providing a patent on the general concept of a solid state mp3 player benefit innovation? No. It makes money for the guy who patented it sure, but it actually retards development by requiring potential manufacturers to invest in licenses before they can produce a product.
The problem we have right now is that there's a lot of patents out there on very obvious concepts. The one-click patent is an obvious indication of a broken system. This is so ridiculously obvious that it wouldn't occurr to most people that it would even be patentable. What did Amazon have to do to figure out one-click short of paying a lawyer to register the patent? Nothing. So why should they get some sort of monopoly on the concept?
So if 2 people come up with something non-obvious and one chooses to go public with it and put it in the database I see no reason that the other person should get a patent on it. I see this system as a way to protect somebody who's developing a product without the expense of patents. If I, as an individual think of some new way to do something but have no interest in a patent, it would be good for me to have a way to protect myself from people that might otherwise come up with the idea and try to patent it themselves.
Yeah okay so then they understand why DRM is annoying. But does it change their habbits in any way? Do they stop buying DVD's? Do they stop buying videos through ITunes? In the end, the media companies will continue to push DRM so long as it's incorporation doesn't adversely affect sales. Unless people connect the dots from DRM to actually doing something that harms the sales of the media companies, it doesn't matter if you convince them DRM sucks.
The only competition for DVD was DivX and all DivX players would play standard DVD's. In this case you have two incompatible formats. Really it's a matter of how the PS3 fits into this. If the PS3 gets people into Blu-ray, blu-ray wins. Otherwise HD-DVD, at a lower price point and with better name recognition, wins.
Yeah the sheer volume of meaningless patents is already huge. What I would suggest is perhaps somewhat along the lines of the original concept but deals well with the volume issues:
1) Provide an open database for public disclosure. This database would be a repository for prior art claims. So what you would do is, if you had a good idea, you'd drop it into the database and it would be kept there. Then when a patent came up, it would be readily searchable and if your idea was relevant and prior to their invention, it'd prevent them from getting the patent.
2) Seriously improve the patent review process. That means upping fees, hiring more patent clerks, and increasing the difficulty of getting a patent in the first place. It's time we stop pretending that patents are the realm of the lone inventor and recognize that they are weapons in corporate IP arsenals. As such make them very expensive to get and maintain and make the vetting process quite vigorous.
Check out Wild Divine for an example of what you can do with a game that uses biofeedback. It's like $150 and comes with a biofeedback device that plugs into a USB port.
The concept of the game is to have you use meditative techniques to manipulate things in the game. So you have to make a baloon rise, or something like that to progress in the game. It's an interesting concept but the game itself gets repetitive pretty fast since the tasks you perform are all pretty similar. The artwork is different for different things, but the overall interaction doesn't change a whole lot.
What's totally hilarious about this is what ultimately the google logo thing brings more attention to the artist's work. You go to google one day, the logo looks funky, and you wonder why. So you click the logo and are now finding out all about Miro, etc.
Not only is this not any obvious violation of copyright law, but IT HELPS THEM. It's free freaking advertising for the artist and presumably could lead to better returns on sales of the art, etc. Whiners.
Yes, I know that. However mandarin or cantonese would both be useful. I personally prefer mandarin just because I love the sound of it, but both are useful.
The fact of the matter is that any of the white collar professions typically rely on knowledge work and it is, by far, the most readily transferred over seas. You don't need to build factories or even ship anything, you just need to hook somebody up to the Internet and you're good to go.
That means, in the long run, if you're in these fields you are going to be at risk for being outsourced. As long as your phyiscal presence isn't requisite for your job, there's a chance this can happen to you. Having said that, much of the work does require a physical presence when you really think about it.
Programming, in the sense of, reading a spec and implementing it can be done anywhere on earth at any time of the day. But developing requirements and designing a system does require some presence practically speaking. There are just some things that are easier to do sitting around a conference table with a white board than on a phone call.
Many companies do outsourcing, but the smart ones are using it to offload the more repetitive mechanized parts of the work to save their smart local workers for the higher level tasks. It lowers your costs and it frees up your developers from the tedious stuff that they probably never wanted to do in the first place.
The challenge in IT is that you need to be nimble with your skills independent of your employer. The tendancy, especially amongst larger companies, it to get you into doing one thing and doing that one thing well. This means that when that one thing becomes unneeded, they have little incentive to keep you.
In the good old days, they'd retraint you. These days they'll put that project into maintenance mode, hire contractors in India to do it, and send you packing. A good friend of mine worked for one of the airlines that went through bankruptcy. He's very specialized in what he knows so it's hard for him to find work elsewhere. so he's been through pay cut after pay cut and he can't do much about it.
So if you want to get along well in IT, keep your skills fresh and broad, and try to develop the soft skills more. Being able to work well with people and understand business requirements will do a lot more for you in the long run than knowing one more computer language.
Of the three, hindi would be the least useful. English is very commonly taught in India which is why a lot of the outsourcing goes there. Chinese and Japanese will be far more useful.
You buy a newer game that's designed for the uber hardware and then it turns out that it won't play on your slower version. Good plan Microsoft.
The thing here is that the Windows API is already broken. There are any number of bugs and hidden features that come out with each new release of Windows. Developers write to take advantage of and work around these bugs. So invariably if Apple writes it they will have different bugs and not implement the current bugs correctly. So even if they had the resources to completely implement it, they could never be quite identical.
Furthermore there are lots of assumptions built into windows about where things should be installed, libraries that need to be there, etc. This is the biggest reason that Wine has never quite worked ideally. It can be made to work with a particular piece of software but it requires going through and validating them one by one essentially.
You get fun things like a piece of software that works perfectly on Windows but is dependent on IE 6, and Windows Media Player. The original developer could safely assume both were there on windows, but they aren't on Wine or what have you and thus it breaks.
Cringley is full of it.
You know, I thought the whole oversight thing was why we had that other branch of government. You know that one with all the talking people that pass laws that the President ignores? Yeah those guys, they should probably look into this.
Actually if you read what they said, they were doing pretty well in spite of some set backs, they just ran into one big problem with a legal issue. I was one of those people buying those books and I was always a big fan of the series. I'll admit that the character creation and such were always a tad too complex and time consuming, and the game mechanics had issues. In spite of that though it was a pretty rich universe that they put together.
I haven't been able to play the game in a very long time, but that's because of how time consuming RPG's are in general. I can't play for 4-8 hours in a sitting these days as I have too much other stuff to do. But I really hope they can stay afloat and get some licensing deals for a movie or MMO. This stuff would be awesome on the big screen.
It's insane rambling and on top of that it doesn't make the slightest bit of business sense for Apple (yeah sometimes insane and business sense do go together). Apple makes money on hardware. If people can get the Apple experience on cheaper hardware like they did in the clone days, then Apple has a serious problem.
For Apple, running Windows on Apple is perfectly okay because it means people are still buying Apple hardware. However, it is not in their interest to be, primarily, a windows computer manufacturer because then they suddenly have to compete with Dell, etc. They derrive value from having a unique experience with the slick hardware and the nicely integrated OS.
It is furthermore not in the immediate interest of Apple to offer OSX on non-apple hardware. The risk they face there is, once again, people defecting to cheaper hardware. This could change in time though. The position they are in now is that people can get an Apple laptop and become familiar with the Apple experience without abandoning Windows completely. It makes it possible for business users to have chic Apple hardware but still run their company's Windows based software.
So open sourcing will not happen. It's too important to Apple to keep a tight control over the experience of using Apple products. Once they set the code free they can't control what happens. Imagine the mistake of clone licensing repeated with no ability to undo the mistake and you see where this goes.
I don't necessarily disagree with his thinking, but it's worth having some perspective on how "progressive" his voice really is. I saw mention of this editorial on DailyKOS in this article yesterday. Notable quote:
"Moore may indeed have been an early Greenpeace member, in the distant mists, but more recently can be better described as the founder of Greenspirit Enterprises, a consulting organization focused on improving the environmental PR of his mining, logging, biotech and energy industry clients."
I'm not saying he's full of it, but before we say that even environmental progressives are re-thinking nuclear, it might be useful to actually get the thoughts of people still in the progressive environmental movement.
I do love that they argue that you can't proove evolution but, in this book, some guy wrote long ago that's been translated and interpreted countless times, it says God made the world in 7 days and thus it is true. There is a certain amount of faith necessary to go from theory to fact but it's a very minimal leap compared to believing in the literalness of biblical text.
You illuminate a good point. For the creationist folks, they'll continue to dispute this because their blind faith requires it. It's like the entropy argument. They'll say that spontaneous organization can't happen because of entropy and ignore the fact that entropy only applies to closed systems.
It's cool that they discovered this but it won't change the debate.
We need to make an important distinction here between open source, closed source, and RMS' view of software as embodied in the GPL. I think there's little argument against the value of providing source code to people for products they buy. However, having the kind of free redistribution that's associated with the GPL isn't a panacea.
In your analogy, you compare an alphabet to heiroglyphics but the clear assumption is that open source is necessarily superior to closed source. That closed source is only a benefit to the software developers who use it. So let me ask you, how would video games of the quality we see today get made under the GPL? They thrive because people have to pay $50-60 per copy which provides the money to fund development. There are GPL games, but the quality of those games are not on par with the leading edge of closed source development.
Both of your presented points of view tend to suggest development related to business and large organization use of software. As a developer I like having open source software available to build upon. I couldn't do the work I've done without it. Within a large business, open source is very valuable as a way to reduce the licensing hassles associated with closed source. But in the case of consumer products, there's a lot to be said for the closed source approach. These are people that, by and large, aren't going to modify and tweak the product, and being closed source provides a direct revenue stream that can't be made up for in support contacts, etc.
I find that he has a lot in common with Marx. I don't mean specifically in terms of this notion of community propery that's bound into the GPL, but more in just the notion that his ideas are... ideals, but not particularly practical in all cases. I will be the first person to tell you that the GPL is valuable and has a place in software. But I think there's a lot out there that can't derrive benefit from the GPL.
The GPL is a very useful approach when the software isn't the way you intend to make money. That is, the software is a gateway to other business. So you have GPL software that you build a consulting and customization service on top of. Or you use GPL software in a piece of hardware you sell. It's very hard to make a profitable business selling software that other people can redistribute for free.
The ideals that the GPL embodies are noble, but in the end, they aren't practical in all cases. Much like marx denied certain realities about human nature, RMS denies certain realities about software development. I like his vision, and in the real world there is a place for that vision, but not as big a place as I think he'd like.
Yeah it's not like any of this is new. What really irritates me is that while saying that addiction is about filling some internal emptiness they infer that easy access to pornography is a problem. No, the internal emptiness is the problem, and people will fill it with video games, porn, crack, sex or whatever else. People who are prone to addictive behavior are prone to addictive behavior regardless the source. There are things that are genuinely physically addictive like hard drugs, etc, but the only reason porn is even thrown in here is because it's seen as "naughty". If somebody was addicted to excercise for example, nobody would think twice about it because it's sociall acceptable. It's only because it's nekkid people that there's an article about it.
Yeah it's not going to make much of a difference. IE will just get upgraded and people will just use it like they do IE 6. IE gained as much ground as it did because it came by default, but there's other factors to consider:
1) Netscape's browser was not keeping up with IE
2) Not many people had the bandwidth to download a new browser (for all I love firefox I'd never encourage my friends with modems to try downloading it)
Frankly I think this second part is not fully appreciated in the browser war history. If it takes me a minute or two to download and install a new browser, it's more likely I'll bother to do it. Firefox has come on-line as the availability of broadband has expanded significantly making it easy for people to try it out if they hear about it.