How about just being selfish and pretty amoral? I bet a lot of folks could do that. It's not plotting-to-take-over-the-world villainry, but it's not good either.
That would be most people. So you're one superman, there's 7 billion people who have emergencies. Maybe I'd fly down to the Mexican Gulf to plug that oil leak but I wouldn't kill myself trying to save everybody. Not that I'd have to do crime of any type, I figure BP would pay me enough for that one job to make me set for life. I'd just be no worse than the other billionaires out there.
Well that's because there is no competition around the Mom & Pop users, it's more "do you want broadband or don't you?" and so the price is far higher than the service delivered.
I just checked and in my town there's at least 22 broadband providers. The four largest (2 dsl, 2 cable) are all within 20% of each other, roughly the same speed (1-2Mbit down, 0.5-1 Mbit up) and is probably a fair price given the cost of delivering service at all like modem including delivery/returns, line including maintenance, rack space, support, billing and so on. Bulk bandwidth costs as such are almost none, you might notice the complete lack of bullshit "up to X Mbit" claims, the specs aren't impressive but they're delivered.
Everybody on a higher plan pay their way for bandwidth, would they be offering my 25 Mbit line if they weren't making money on it? I doubt that. Sure, they might not make money on everyone in this class as you can reach pretty hefty downloads, but running off all their high speed users would be losing money. If you're trying to tell me we are some sort of loss leader subsidized by the Mom & Pops, I certainly don't believe you. It might be different in the US but there the fraudulent marketing puts mom & pops and high end users on the same "unlimited" line.
No, but it's possible that no side is vulnerable to cyberattacks and they have to fight it out the hard way. So you make a choice, do you build the best system you can or do you build a poorer system because the other one might possibly help the enemy? Chances are, most of your enemies are using a completely different system, or they're using it in a different way, or they've hardened it in ways that make it irrelevant. Why did the NSA release SELinux? Make standards like DES and AES? Because it's more important to have secure systems yourself than anything people might possibly learn or take from it. This is "battle-hardened" code, hardened in the fight with hackers every day.
Also, it's not like you need to need to review all 13 million lines of Linux code. Strip all drivers, all archs, all modules you don't need and it'll be a quite manageable size. It'll certainly be far les work and far less buggy than trying to write anything from scratch. At least if you're going for anything like a "normal" OS...
Umm do you think they're doing it just for the phone minutes? They're dialing special numbers that you get billed extra for, so they get $$$. And the ones who take the money just act all innocent "Hacked? Don't know what you're talking about. You call, you pay."
There used to be a Mig-25 flight for $4000 that provided a similar experience.
That would probably be a variation on the Vomit Comet. Some not so minor differences:
1. You get 30 seconds or less of abrupt weightlessness. 2. If you look out the window you're not actually in space. 3. As a consequence of #2, you're not an astronaut.
Flights like that have more in common with an extreme roller coaster ride, that can also give you the feeling of being floating for brief moments of time. I think the SS2 experience is going to be a lot more real than that. Worth the money? Now that's a different question...
This is exactly how train and air travel began, too. The rich will get to play with it at first, then businessmen will get to use it, and finally it'll be available to the rank-and-file citizenry of the world. Within two decades, we'll likely all be able to fly on space trips.
Except trains and planes took people from where they were to where they wanted to go, for traveling between two earth-based locations space is mostly a big detour. We need some targets out there (space stations, moon base, mars base, something) before traveling in space makes any financial sense. In the big picture these people just lift off, circle the landing strip and come back down. They don't go anywhere.
Yup... I used to be on around 2 Mbps ADSL, it was just painful. Now I'm at 25 Mbps cable, and I've realized I don't really need more. With uTorrent+RSS most things I want are downloaded before I even know it. With 5 Mbps upload I have no trouble uploading anything to friends or keeping my ratio. Now can I pretty please soon pay for a service that is half as good as the pirates give me?
Was even Soviet-ear Russia as bad as this? Is Iran even as bad as this? Was Saddam-controlled Iraq as bad as this? I'm not sure which angers me more: the act itself, or the utter stupidity that underlies it!
Compared to Soviet gulags any many other historical acts current day China isn't even near the top hundred. The best estimates indicate less than a thousand died at Tiananmen Square compared to at least 700.000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937-1938. Don't get me wrong, you don't have liberty in China but what they've achieved where so many other totalitarian regimes have failed is to create prosperity. People are employed, wages are up and they get what the Romans called "bread and circus". China just is not suppressing the same kind of "I got no job, no food, no future, what do I have to lose?" rebellion as so many others did.
In a way I think many Americans don't "believe" in China. A non-democratic state that is the world's second largest economy, world's largest car market, huge on all sorts of high tech and production industry and really in every way a much more formidable "opponent" than the Soviet Union ever was. Not to mention one that the US depends on for many goods and now have a sizable debt to. It must go against so many ideologists that think the US model is supreme in every way possible. But just like you organize the military as a strict chain of command from the joint chiefs down to each soldier, China does in the political life - one party and a chain of command. Sadly it has benefits, apparently good enough for most Chinese to shut up and pretend to like it.
Debian stable is ok I guess, if you're looking for something similar to Ubuntu LTS. If you look at what they consider release critical and many other things though, it's obvious it's primarily a server distro. That you may happen to run KDE or Gnome on top and call is a desktop is fine, but they're not remotely as concerned if your desktop crashes as long as LAMP and the rest of the server stack is 100% stable.
Testing is nice if you want a rolling distro, but for anything but your own personal desktop I wouldn't want it. If I set it up for an office or family or friends then I don't want random new versions arriving with every apt-get. Imagine everything is working fine with OpenOffice 2.x and the next update it's 3.0, that sort of thing happens in testing even if it's not a regression as such. Preferably without the worst "it's a work in progress, but it's time to push it to testing to try it on a wider audience" upgrades too.
I'd like to have a little testing and rollout cycle of my own after each release, not just drop everything on them like lightning from a clear blue sky. In fact, I like some predictability myself too. I do run some very experimental packages (latest RC kernel and xorg-edgers packages) but I do it "knowingly", but I prefer that only a few applications are in that kind of change. In short, I want releases. I do wish there was easier ways to say that I want applications $foo and $bar to track upstream much more closely though. But dependencies tend to make that messy, some applications launch a whole barrage of updates.
It's always more productive to have people doing something than it is to have them doing nothing. The reason you see large unemployment (beyond what's needed to give fluidity in the market which is 2-3%) is because you are not competitive. Others produce more for less and keeping costs high or raising costs to get more people in work will add artificial jobs but more of the "natural" jobs disappear. Every country that has tried that strategy has eventually ended up regretting it because you start propping up the cost of doing business in general until everybody needs protection to stay employed. If you reward your own industry with protectionist measures, then other countries will respond in kind and hurt other jobs. It's not like the choice is to keep or not keep the jobs while all else stays equal.
More like 40 years. Plenty cheated by saying 50-99 = 1950-1999, 00-49 = 2000-2049. Of course, before that we'll have the *nix problem of 2038 too. Fortunately it's not going to be accompanies by the y2k hysterics. Just some computer thing that needs fixing.
They'll get plenty experience reacting to bad drivers during road testing. To teach it what the bad parts of bad driving is, you probably have to do a lot of manual work identifying it.
I think the biggest problem will more be when the computer just doesn't "get" the situation, like a detour that actually runs differently from the markings in the road or there's no markings or cars are crossing into what looks like opposing lanes. Or can it correctly identify a police officer standing in the intersection directing traffic contrary to the lights? Or figure out that if a ball is crossing the road, there's a good chance there'll be a kid running after it? If three or more computers cars "deadlock" in a crossing, will they figure it out on their own?
Driving a car with no "exception handling" is relatively easy. But if you're going to require a capable and alert driver at all times, the win is next to nothing. Even if you're in the driver's seat and could grab the wheel at a second's notice, just figuring out what the situation is and why the computer felt a compelling need to panic will usually mean your decision will come too late. It just won't do much good until you can put yourself in the passenger seat and let the computer be fully responsible for the driving.
Personally I don't think it'll come to the US any time soon. If a kid comes running out from behind a bush or corner or parked car or doorway without warning there almost certainly will be an accident, the law says you must have no higher speed than that you can stop but as long as buildings stand a few meters from the road that's not going to happen. After the driving software is sued to all hell and back they'll let drivers keep that liability.
That is just because the US has such a weird system where you get paid to work some hours yet everybody expects you to work some unspecified number of extra hours for free. Of course employees try grabbing as much as possible then. Here it's 150% or 200% of regular pay which quite quickly cuts down on how much your employer wants you to work overtime. Exceptionally few are exempt, and most people report any overtime. I don't think the US system helps anyone, it's just dishonest about what the real hourly wage is.
So on a wild guess there's a function "int recordId()" that'll return -1 on problems (network failure, database connection failure, whatever). Sounds like a completely reasonable design except it's time to move to int64, 2^63 records ought to be enough for everyone. Though with the US prison population, who knows...
Well it does show you have a low threshold for what you're sharing. You might have had a shitty day at work, but companies prefer that you don't broadcast it on facebook. Particularly if it's not just whining but actual flaws in products or services or insults or well... there's not really many ways to win. I don't know how your office is, but mine is not past saying "Man, I got so wasted on saturday this hangover is killing me" when we meet Monday morning but only talking, it's not recorded anywhere for posterity. Anything written is just filtered to "Not feeling very good today:/" or something. Personally at least I feel that is natural, but I've noticed many people have no filter about what they post up for their 200 facebook friends to see. I wouldn't exactly call it a positive qualification at least...
See - that's the problem in 2010. People think the government has power. The truth is that people have power which they permit the government to use:
All the power that a blind man has picking color. People are fed all sorts of bullshit from the media run by big business, fake grass root movements, government smokescreens and extreme hostility that makes you think the choice is between Stalin and Genghis Khan or staying at home.
Try making some noise about the power they have, that you will be their anti-corporatist alternative and it'll be drowned out by a huge roar as they accuse you of being an anti-capitalist, anti-freedom commie-loving terrorist - if they're kind. There will be a circle jerk of bullshit, one piece will back up another but people won't realize it goes in circles and this is all solid good reporting. It's not very subtle but it works, people get their vote but you undermine its function instead.
Just like "fair use" was technically not touched by the DMCA. (1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems (c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected. (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.) You just make it pretty much impossible to not violate the DMCA in order to exercise that fair use. Your vote is much the same.
I'm not in France but I did check my broadband subscription. Yep, they offer a free email but you have to register to create it. They just assume that most people, like me, use a free email provider that's static even if my ISP change so we don't need it. Granted, that was probably registered with them somewhere but 10000 very similar emails a day? Which many people will mark as spam just to annoy them? Pretty soon all the major providers (gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc.) will place them in the spam filter. Email is not remotely reliable enough for this if you don't get any kind of confirmation it's been recieved.
Most of the time. I'd say you are right but there are exceptions. One example is Privoxy. It'a been nearly the same since the 3.0 release in 2002, but there's been constantly tiny little fixes so it's not abandoned and has had an average 175000 downloads/year not including Linux distros etc. so obviously many people find it useful.
So they're not taking over the world. But is there any point to try to be another jack-of-all-trades software? It does one thing and it does it well, or if you'd want to do it differently you probably need to do it in the browser. Either way there's really no reason to make it part of the same application, this one is "done".
Statistically, about half US companies do the calendar year and half something else, so if you're trying to guess something from the percentages it might matter. Then again over here in Europe my last company used the calendar year like almost all here but salaries were adjusted in April.
That basically means the only viable solution left is no more digital music - live performances only.
No more digital music *sales*. If you think the artists are going to survive by trying to keep their music a secret you can only listen to at a live performance, you are wrong. It'll be advertising. Plus you can ask people who can't come to your performance for donations, sell them merchandise or whatever. It's not like there won't be music to listen to, society would do fine without copyright.
If a majority of the population decided bank robbery was okay, does that mean we should re-evaluate if robbing banks is really a bad thing? Of course not!
If the majority in a democratic country voted for communism, then we probably would have to re-evalute how we think of property. But since you're so good at making loaded questions, should we continue the war on drugs because the drug lords like the money they're making?
Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights
Your argument is circular, I have no right to copy because of copyright. Any losses you think exist only exist because of copyright. Your whole argument hinges on that people agree with copyright as a concept.
Generally you have no right to stop me from mimicking you or imitating you. That I can't make a file on my hard disk - my property - be exactly like the file on your property is a tiny little niche that was cut out to create incentive for creators. The more "don't take my money" logic I hear from creators that talk only about their own paycheck and nothing about *why* society should keep copyright, the more I want to snuff it out entirely.
It's the year of Linux on your laptop and my laptop but from the experience, I think the general revolution can be called off. I'm guessing it will catch up as computers reach some sort of stagnation point - most people are happy wtih XP, OS X hasn't had anything revolutionary since 2007 (a $30 Snow Leopard doesn't count) - but it won't be this year or next year. In fact with Firefox being chased down by Chrome, OpenOffice trying to regroup as LibreOffice I think 2011 could be a really bad year for open source overall.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no you can't, 50 move rule. But yes, there are far more possible games than there are possible positions.
How about just being selfish and pretty amoral? I bet a lot of folks could do that. It's not plotting-to-take-over-the-world villainry, but it's not good either.
That would be most people. So you're one superman, there's 7 billion people who have emergencies. Maybe I'd fly down to the Mexican Gulf to plug that oil leak but I wouldn't kill myself trying to save everybody. Not that I'd have to do crime of any type, I figure BP would pay me enough for that one job to make me set for life. I'd just be no worse than the other billionaires out there.
Well that's because there is no competition around the Mom & Pop users, it's more "do you want broadband or don't you?" and so the price is far higher than the service delivered.
I just checked and in my town there's at least 22 broadband providers. The four largest (2 dsl, 2 cable) are all within 20% of each other, roughly the same speed (1-2Mbit down, 0.5-1 Mbit up) and is probably a fair price given the cost of delivering service at all like modem including delivery/returns, line including maintenance, rack space, support, billing and so on. Bulk bandwidth costs as such are almost none, you might notice the complete lack of bullshit "up to X Mbit" claims, the specs aren't impressive but they're delivered.
Everybody on a higher plan pay their way for bandwidth, would they be offering my 25 Mbit line if they weren't making money on it? I doubt that. Sure, they might not make money on everyone in this class as you can reach pretty hefty downloads, but running off all their high speed users would be losing money. If you're trying to tell me we are some sort of loss leader subsidized by the Mom & Pops, I certainly don't believe you. It might be different in the US but there the fraudulent marketing puts mom & pops and high end users on the same "unlimited" line.
"Iran Acknowledges Espionage At Nuclear Facilities"
From the headline, I thought Iran had admitted to espionage at foreign nuclear facilities which would have been more newsworthy.
No, but it's possible that no side is vulnerable to cyberattacks and they have to fight it out the hard way. So you make a choice, do you build the best system you can or do you build a poorer system because the other one might possibly help the enemy? Chances are, most of your enemies are using a completely different system, or they're using it in a different way, or they've hardened it in ways that make it irrelevant. Why did the NSA release SELinux? Make standards like DES and AES? Because it's more important to have secure systems yourself than anything people might possibly learn or take from it. This is "battle-hardened" code, hardened in the fight with hackers every day.
Also, it's not like you need to need to review all 13 million lines of Linux code. Strip all drivers, all archs, all modules you don't need and it'll be a quite manageable size. It'll certainly be far les work and far less buggy than trying to write anything from scratch. At least if you're going for anything like a "normal" OS...
Umm do you think they're doing it just for the phone minutes? They're dialing special numbers that you get billed extra for, so they get $$$. And the ones who take the money just act all innocent "Hacked? Don't know what you're talking about. You call, you pay."
I didnt know RyanAir went to space already...
There used to be a Mig-25 flight for $4000 that provided a similar experience.
That would probably be a variation on the Vomit Comet. Some not so minor differences:
1. You get 30 seconds or less of abrupt weightlessness.
2. If you look out the window you're not actually in space.
3. As a consequence of #2, you're not an astronaut.
Flights like that have more in common with an extreme roller coaster ride, that can also give you the feeling of being floating for brief moments of time. I think the SS2 experience is going to be a lot more real than that. Worth the money? Now that's a different question...
This is exactly how train and air travel began, too. The rich will get to play with it at first, then businessmen will get to use it, and finally it'll be available to the rank-and-file citizenry of the world. Within two decades, we'll likely all be able to fly on space trips.
Except trains and planes took people from where they were to where they wanted to go, for traveling between two earth-based locations space is mostly a big detour. We need some targets out there (space stations, moon base, mars base, something) before traveling in space makes any financial sense. In the big picture these people just lift off, circle the landing strip and come back down. They don't go anywhere.
Yup... I used to be on around 2 Mbps ADSL, it was just painful. Now I'm at 25 Mbps cable, and I've realized I don't really need more. With uTorrent+RSS most things I want are downloaded before I even know it. With 5 Mbps upload I have no trouble uploading anything to friends or keeping my ratio. Now can I pretty please soon pay for a service that is half as good as the pirates give me?
Was even Soviet-ear Russia as bad as this? Is Iran even as bad as this? Was Saddam-controlled Iraq as bad as this? I'm not sure which angers me more: the act itself, or the utter stupidity that underlies it!
Compared to Soviet gulags any many other historical acts current day China isn't even near the top hundred. The best estimates indicate less than a thousand died at Tiananmen Square compared to at least 700.000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937-1938. Don't get me wrong, you don't have liberty in China but what they've achieved where so many other totalitarian regimes have failed is to create prosperity. People are employed, wages are up and they get what the Romans called "bread and circus". China just is not suppressing the same kind of "I got no job, no food, no future, what do I have to lose?" rebellion as so many others did.
In a way I think many Americans don't "believe" in China. A non-democratic state that is the world's second largest economy, world's largest car market, huge on all sorts of high tech and production industry and really in every way a much more formidable "opponent" than the Soviet Union ever was. Not to mention one that the US depends on for many goods and now have a sizable debt to. It must go against so many ideologists that think the US model is supreme in every way possible. But just like you organize the military as a strict chain of command from the joint chiefs down to each soldier, China does in the political life - one party and a chain of command. Sadly it has benefits, apparently good enough for most Chinese to shut up and pretend to like it.
Debian stable is ok I guess, if you're looking for something similar to Ubuntu LTS. If you look at what they consider release critical and many other things though, it's obvious it's primarily a server distro. That you may happen to run KDE or Gnome on top and call is a desktop is fine, but they're not remotely as concerned if your desktop crashes as long as LAMP and the rest of the server stack is 100% stable.
Testing is nice if you want a rolling distro, but for anything but your own personal desktop I wouldn't want it. If I set it up for an office or family or friends then I don't want random new versions arriving with every apt-get. Imagine everything is working fine with OpenOffice 2.x and the next update it's 3.0, that sort of thing happens in testing even if it's not a regression as such. Preferably without the worst "it's a work in progress, but it's time to push it to testing to try it on a wider audience" upgrades too.
I'd like to have a little testing and rollout cycle of my own after each release, not just drop everything on them like lightning from a clear blue sky. In fact, I like some predictability myself too. I do run some very experimental packages (latest RC kernel and xorg-edgers packages) but I do it "knowingly", but I prefer that only a few applications are in that kind of change. In short, I want releases. I do wish there was easier ways to say that I want applications $foo and $bar to track upstream much more closely though. But dependencies tend to make that messy, some applications launch a whole barrage of updates.
It's always more productive to have people doing something than it is to have them doing nothing. The reason you see large unemployment (beyond what's needed to give fluidity in the market which is 2-3%) is because you are not competitive. Others produce more for less and keeping costs high or raising costs to get more people in work will add artificial jobs but more of the "natural" jobs disappear. Every country that has tried that strategy has eventually ended up regretting it because you start propping up the cost of doing business in general until everybody needs protection to stay employed. If you reward your own industry with protectionist measures, then other countries will respond in kind and hurt other jobs. It's not like the choice is to keep or not keep the jobs while all else stays equal.
More like 40 years. Plenty cheated by saying 50-99 = 1950-1999, 00-49 = 2000-2049. Of course, before that we'll have the *nix problem of 2038 too. Fortunately it's not going to be accompanies by the y2k hysterics. Just some computer thing that needs fixing.
They'll get plenty experience reacting to bad drivers during road testing. To teach it what the bad parts of bad driving is, you probably have to do a lot of manual work identifying it.
I think the biggest problem will more be when the computer just doesn't "get" the situation, like a detour that actually runs differently from the markings in the road or there's no markings or cars are crossing into what looks like opposing lanes. Or can it correctly identify a police officer standing in the intersection directing traffic contrary to the lights? Or figure out that if a ball is crossing the road, there's a good chance there'll be a kid running after it? If three or more computers cars "deadlock" in a crossing, will they figure it out on their own?
Driving a car with no "exception handling" is relatively easy. But if you're going to require a capable and alert driver at all times, the win is next to nothing. Even if you're in the driver's seat and could grab the wheel at a second's notice, just figuring out what the situation is and why the computer felt a compelling need to panic will usually mean your decision will come too late. It just won't do much good until you can put yourself in the passenger seat and let the computer be fully responsible for the driving.
Personally I don't think it'll come to the US any time soon. If a kid comes running out from behind a bush or corner or parked car or doorway without warning there almost certainly will be an accident, the law says you must have no higher speed than that you can stop but as long as buildings stand a few meters from the road that's not going to happen. After the driving software is sued to all hell and back they'll let drivers keep that liability.
That is just because the US has such a weird system where you get paid to work some hours yet everybody expects you to work some unspecified number of extra hours for free. Of course employees try grabbing as much as possible then. Here it's 150% or 200% of regular pay which quite quickly cuts down on how much your employer wants you to work overtime. Exceptionally few are exempt, and most people report any overtime. I don't think the US system helps anyone, it's just dishonest about what the real hourly wage is.
So on a wild guess there's a function "int recordId()" that'll return -1 on problems (network failure, database connection failure, whatever). Sounds like a completely reasonable design except it's time to move to int64, 2^63 records ought to be enough for everyone. Though with the US prison population, who knows...
1. Pretend it's not there and go on a tour of the most patriotic American landmarks to demonstrate your loyalty to the United States.
AKA scouting out possible symbolic terrorist targets. But I'm quite impressed with how well you hid the really bad choice among the other nine.
Well it does show you have a low threshold for what you're sharing. You might have had a shitty day at work, but companies prefer that you don't broadcast it on facebook. Particularly if it's not just whining but actual flaws in products or services or insults or well... there's not really many ways to win. I don't know how your office is, but mine is not past saying "Man, I got so wasted on saturday this hangover is killing me" when we meet Monday morning but only talking, it's not recorded anywhere for posterity. Anything written is just filtered to "Not feeling very good today :/" or something. Personally at least I feel that is natural, but I've noticed many people have no filter about what they post up for their 200 facebook friends to see. I wouldn't exactly call it a positive qualification at least...
See - that's the problem in 2010. People think the government has power. The truth is that people have power which they permit the government to use:
All the power that a blind man has picking color. People are fed all sorts of bullshit from the media run by big business, fake grass root movements, government smokescreens and extreme hostility that makes you think the choice is between Stalin and Genghis Khan or staying at home.
Try making some noise about the power they have, that you will be their anti-corporatist alternative and it'll be drowned out by a huge roar as they accuse you of being an anti-capitalist, anti-freedom commie-loving terrorist - if they're kind. There will be a circle jerk of bullshit, one piece will back up another but people won't realize it goes in circles and this is all solid good reporting. It's not very subtle but it works, people get their vote but you undermine its function instead.
Just like "fair use" was technically not touched by the DMCA. (1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems (c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected. (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.) You just make it pretty much impossible to not violate the DMCA in order to exercise that fair use. Your vote is much the same.
I'm not in France but I did check my broadband subscription. Yep, they offer a free email but you have to register to create it. They just assume that most people, like me, use a free email provider that's static even if my ISP change so we don't need it. Granted, that was probably registered with them somewhere but 10000 very similar emails a day? Which many people will mark as spam just to annoy them? Pretty soon all the major providers (gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc.) will place them in the spam filter. Email is not remotely reliable enough for this if you don't get any kind of confirmation it's been recieved.
Most of the time. I'd say you are right but there are exceptions. One example is Privoxy. It'a been nearly the same since the 3.0 release in 2002, but there's been constantly tiny little fixes so it's not abandoned and has had an average 175000 downloads/year not including Linux distros etc. so obviously many people find it useful.
So they're not taking over the world. But is there any point to try to be another jack-of-all-trades software? It does one thing and it does it well, or if you'd want to do it differently you probably need to do it in the browser. Either way there's really no reason to make it part of the same application, this one is "done".
Statistically, about half US companies do the calendar year and half something else, so if you're trying to guess something from the percentages it might matter. Then again over here in Europe my last company used the calendar year like almost all here but salaries were adjusted in April.
That basically means the only viable solution left is no more digital music - live performances only.
No more digital music *sales*. If you think the artists are going to survive by trying to keep their music a secret you can only listen to at a live performance, you are wrong. It'll be advertising. Plus you can ask people who can't come to your performance for donations, sell them merchandise or whatever. It's not like there won't be music to listen to, society would do fine without copyright.
If a majority of the population decided bank robbery was okay, does that mean we should re-evaluate if robbing banks is really a bad thing? Of course not!
If the majority in a democratic country voted for communism, then we probably would have to re-evalute how we think of property. But since you're so good at making loaded questions, should we continue the war on drugs because the drug lords like the money they're making?
Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights
Your argument is circular, I have no right to copy because of copyright. Any losses you think exist only exist because of copyright. Your whole argument hinges on that people agree with copyright as a concept.
Generally you have no right to stop me from mimicking you or imitating you. That I can't make a file on my hard disk - my property - be exactly like the file on your property is a tiny little niche that was cut out to create incentive for creators. The more "don't take my money" logic I hear from creators that talk only about their own paycheck and nothing about *why* society should keep copyright, the more I want to snuff it out entirely.
It's the year of Linux on your laptop and my laptop but from the experience, I think the general revolution can be called off. I'm guessing it will catch up as computers reach some sort of stagnation point - most people are happy wtih XP, OS X hasn't had anything revolutionary since 2007 (a $30 Snow Leopard doesn't count) - but it won't be this year or next year. In fact with Firefox being chased down by Chrome, OpenOffice trying to regroup as LibreOffice I think 2011 could be a really bad year for open source overall.