I'm the author of that "mission-critical Eidola" treatise; thanks for reading it, which is more than most other posters here seem to have done.
Eidola is, as Paul has noted in his response post, in the very early vaporware stage. My intent in writing the treatise was not to argue that we should all go start using Eidola Right Now for mission-critical work-- that would be silly. Rather, I intended to demonstrate that the Eidola concept, if and when realized, has the *potential* to make mission-critical development better, easier and cheaper. This, then, is an important reason why realizing the Eidola concept sooner rather than later would be a Good Idea.
If you have any more substantive feedback on the treatise, I'd be happy to hear it; you can email me (nweininger (at) pobox (dot) com) or Paul. I'd be grateful for critiques of my view of the problems with software verification, or the discussion of how an Eidola-like language might alleviate those problems.
...and it's called the DO-178B certification process, which is a set of FAA standards for producing avionics software. This is software that *cannot* be allowed to suck, because if it does, a plane will crash and people will die.
DO-178B has a bunch of different verification "levels" depending on the criticality of the software to be written. I spent a couple of years developing for a Level A certification, which is the highest level, used for the most life-critical software. The process is based on common-sense practices-- independent code review, testing, formal requirements specification and design analysis-- taken to an extreme level of anality. It works well: the resultant software is not bug-free but remarkably close, and any bugs that escape the various rounds of review and testing are very likely to be inconsequential.
However, this process is *extremely* expensive to implement and the software takes a *long* time to develop. It requires developers unusually skilled at formal analysis, and lots and lots and lots of developer time spent on review and testing. Thus it is not suitable for the mainstream market.
But we *could* improve software quality in the mainstream if we could make independent code review and formal design analysis easier and more effective: for these practices are the really crucial parts of DO-178B. (Unit testing is actually, in my experience, much less useful, because it tends to miss the sort of feature interactions common in complex systems: the Foobar feature works in mode A but not in mode B, or under light load but not under heavy load, etc).
>For instance, if you want to own a gun, it's hard to beat the US.
the right to murder, yes, very important to me.
Or rather, the right to defend yourself from a murderer or a tyrant-- which defense is a much more common, and more important, use of private arms. Read John Lott, or Gary Kleck, or David Kopel for the truth about American firearms use.
Poster said:
if you wish to practice Islam, Hinduism, Wicca, Atheism, or any other non-Christian religion, better stay away from the whole middle and southern US.
This is an unfortunate and increasingly ridiculous prejudice. Most people in the middle and southern US are *not* religiously intolerant. I lived for a number of years in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, which contains significant Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Orthodox Jewish, etc. communities which are completely tolerated, indeed welcomed. The Twin Cities is also very gay-friendly.
Now, granted, the Twin Cities is a metro area; things are a little different out in the sticks. But when people speak of Canadian or European cultural tolerance they are usually referring to the metropolitan areas there, too. How tolerant is rural Manitoba, or rural Bavaria?
Poster said:
of course you can't hear or see anything that might piss off the puritans on TV or radio in the US, even at 3 o'clock in the morning. and just try buying any music or video that's remotely controversial.. hope you live in a major
metropolis which has more than the major chains, otherwise you're out of luck
Wow. Here we have a Slashdot poster who has apparently not only never heard of the Internet, but also has never heard of cable television.:-)
Now, there are other countries which are, to their credit, more culturally open about sex and other "naughty" things; I really wish we would adopt the Dutch model with regard to sex and drugs. But to suggest that any major type of porn is really unavailable to anyone in the US just flies in the face of reality.
Poster said:
>If you will obviously stick out as a foreigner, there are other countries you may want to stay away from.
yes but you are welcome to come here and pump our gas or clean our toilets.
Or write our software-- like the Indian and Asian coworkers I knew at my last programming job. Once again, the US is far from perfect in the area of openness toward immigrants, but it is far better than many of its critics, and we have the rare advantage that most people here are descendants of immigrants only a few generations back. There is no political anti-immigrant movement in the US with anywhere near the strength of, say, the National Front in France or the Freedom Party in Austria.
Poster said:
virginia still has laws prohibiting oral sex, sex before marriage, and any kind of sex other than standard missionary position. hope you're not a homosexual, too, cuz for some dumb reason we like to herrangue them about their sexual promiscuity then prevent them from legally binding themselves to a single permanent partner. i just don't get why 85% of americans are against gay marriage.
As previous posters noted, the silly laws about sex are mostly unenforced. As for homosexuality, once again, ths US is certainly far from perfect, but we are way ahead of many critics. In how many countries can a gay couple even *think* about trying to get domestic partner benefits from their employers? In how many countries has there even been proposed legislation to grant "civil unions" to gays?
This whole topic illustrates what really pisses me off about foreign critics of the US. They slam Americans for being ignorant about other countries (which many in fact are, certainly), but then they criticize the US in ways that make it clear that they are not only ignorant about real American life, but are ignorant about (or willfully distorting) their own countries' realities.
...they document the processor state REALLY POORLY, and as a result it's really hard to pin down either (a) what you need to do to get everything "set up right" at boot, or (b) how long it's going to take to execute any given instruction under any given circumstance.
This is very frustrating for those of us who need to write deterministic-performance (i.e. real-time) code, since it makes it hard to formally derive any reasonable guaranteed upper bounds on the execution time of anything.
The microcode update thing discussed in the Byte article is a particularly glaring instance of this lack of documentation. Not too long ago, I was working on a special-purpose real-time OS, and had to look through the whole PII family documentation to make sure the OS was "doing the right thing" wrt all the registers on the PII. There is ONE mention of the "microcode update signature register" in the entire 3-volume processor manual, and the mention gives no clue as to what the register's function is, when it can be set (not in user mode, one hopes!), or how it interacts with anything else.
I emailed Intel's tech support about this, and the guy responding to the email had no idea what I was talking about. When I pointed him to the page number in the docs, he went and checked with the developers, and returned with a vague answer that gave me essentially the same information printed in the Byte article. In the end we figured out that as long as the OS left it alone, we didn't need to worry; but that was a lot of time wasted because of Intel's opacity.
In fairness to Intel, other processor docs aren't much better in the determinism/precision department. However, Intel's architecture is peculiarly byzantine, since it consists of layers and layers of backward compatibility kludges grafted clumsily on top of one another, so Intel ought to feel a special responsibility to document their rat's nest of a processor properly. On the other hand, maybe they're too embarrassed to do so.
Nick Weininger
NASA crowds out real private spacecraft again...
on
X-33 Shuttle Problems
·
· Score: 1
I thought the most interesting aspect of the linked-to AP article was the mention that private launch vehicle developers hated the X-33 and the Space Launch Initiative, because none of them could get venture funding for their own rockets when the spectre of a NASA vehicle hangs over them.
Once again, we see NASA doing something it is, as a government agency, absolutely terrible at doing (reducing costs), while preventing private entrepreneurs from having the opportunity to do it better. There are lots of them out there with lots of interesting ideas-- Kistler, Roton, Pioneer Rocketplane among them-- but none of them will ever get a real chance to succeed as long as NASA steps on their toes. If it hadn't been for the Shuttle program, who knows, maybe these guys would have gotten that chance 20 years ago, and today we'd be discussing which is the best hotel in Luna City.
Yet another reason why the best thing we can do for the human future in space is to restrict the government space program. If NASA has any real reason for doing any space stuff at all, it should be the way-out-there, purely scientific probes (like the Pluto probe it recently cancelled), not launch technology that it is obviously terrible at doing.
A number of posters defending the anti-IP stance have made the argument that "Well, even before copyrights/patents existed people have invented, painted, sung, etc."
True, but consider this: the vast majority of the useful inventions and interesting artistic creations we benefit from today were created in the last 200 years. The last 200 years is (roughly) the age of modern copyrights and patents.
This may be a coincidence, but it is likely not. Surely the development of the modern rule of law has been a crucial enabling condition for the progress and prosperity of the last 200 years; just recently, in the Asian financial crisis, we saw countries suffer because they lacked the proper rule-of-law infrastructure to promote a stable environment for investment. Given the large majority of the past 200 years' useful inventions that have been patented, it's hard to believe that they all would have been created just as quickly if their inventors had been working only for the intellectual pleasure of invention.
The question of whether inventors "deserve" all of the rewards from a patent is beside the point here. Clearly a reward system in which Alexander Graham Bell (to take an example from a previous post) gets all the profits from inventing the telephone, when others get nothing because they invented it slightly later, is imperfect. However, even a very imperfect reward system is better than none at all, from a social-efficiency perspective. The question should be not: is the IP system fair? but: is there empirical reason to believe it works better than the alternative(s)? I think there is.
Linux has been oft-cited as an example of a terrific advance developed without IP protection. Since I'm writing this from a Linux machine, I can hardly dispute that it's terrific. However, remember that Linux would not exist in its present form without cheap Intel-compatible hardware to run on, and that hardware would not exist without (a) competition in chip design driven by the prospect of rewards from IP (chips are very expensive to develop, IP rewards allow the devel. costs to be recouped) and (b) Microsoft, which created a standard OS so ubiquitous that HW developers had to make their HW compatible enough to run that OS. So Linux is indirectly dependent for its existence not only on IP, but on a company often held up as one of the worst abusers of IP.
Nevertheless, the author of the "Against IP" article gives a useful and thought-provoking catalogue of the costly abuses of IP in today's world. I agree with most of his specific criticisms of abuses. Many posters have responded by saying "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
In fact, it is possible that the IP system today is inherently subject to such abuses that reform is not worthwhile and abolition is the way to go. Establishing this would require establishing that (a) the costs of IP abuses exceed the known benefits of IP's existence and (b) the nature of the IP system, and particularly of the governments that enforce it, is such that reforms will not cause the cost of abuses to fall below the benefits. These are both debatable questions, and it would be really interesting to see them studied from the point of view of Public Choice economics. Does anyone know if such a study has been made?
Most of the nonsense Katz spews in this article has been adequately responded to by other posters-- notably MrLizard. It's a shame there is so much nonsense, because he's made some good points on this issue; I thought his expose of Pinkerton was terrific, and terrifying.
However, there are a couple of things he says that are just wrong and need to be responded to. First, he states that "Though H.L. Mencken brilliantly and savagely spoofed organized religion and politics a half-century ago, it would be nearly impossible to do so now in any public forum outside the Net."
What kind of a rock has Mr. Katz been living under? Has he ever read Florence King's column in _National Review_, or *anybody*'s columns in _Liberty_ or _Reason_? (Or, if your political persuasions run the other way, _Z_ or _In These Times_ or _Mother Jones_ or _The Nation_). There is at least as much diversity of opinion expressed in print in America as there was in Mencken's time. True, Mencken wouldn't get on television today, but in his time there was no television-- and he wrote for little magazines, _The Smart Set_ and _The American Mercury_, hardly the mainstream media of his day. Television is increasingly irrelevant anyway-- which is why the example of Time Warner pulling ABC rings so hollow; nobody, but nobody, got denied any important information or any viewpoint because of that.
Secondly, he says that "the very idea of regulation of corporate growth has vanished as a civic idea" and "government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business." This, after the Microsoft lawsuit, and the lawsuits against the tobacco companies, and the lawsuits against the gun companies? This, when the number of regulations in the Federal Register increases every year? When has government ever done *more* to regulate and restrict the operations of large businesses?
Here I think Katz is a victim of socialist government-school history. We are taught that the Progressives and New Dealers were heroic crusaders against the power of big business. In fact, all they were crusading for was their own political power. Regulations have always been co-opted by large businesses to protect their market domination against upstart competitors by creating barriers to entry into markets.
And that's the big point Katz is missing here. The problem is not corporate power; it's political power. Political power that corporations use as a club to beat their competitors and preserve their monopolies; political power fueled by the immense amount of government expenditures, from schools to prisons to construction projects to sugar subsidies to bombers. If such power is strong here, and getting stronger, it is stronger still already in the Leviathan States of Europe (as other posters have noted). What we must do to take away that power is *not* to fight the corporations-- it is to fight the government.
Unjustified assumptions about publishing
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
I agree with RMS that "pay-per-play" licenses for books, etc. are a Bad Thing. However, RMS and most of the responders to him here implicitly assume that (If This Goes On) we will have no way of getting access to desirable content other than by going through a few mega-media companies who hold all their copyrights under "pay-per-play" terms. This is also, BTW, the view expressed by Jordan Pollack in another recent Slashdot thread.
This seems to me a clearly fallacious assumption. The same sorts of new technologies that enable things like eBooks also enable content creators to do an end run around the mega-media companies if they want to. The availability of Internet publishing and the ability to print and bind a book on the spot in the bookstore, to name two, make it easier to "be your own publisher" and distribute your creations on whatever terms you choose. If you're publishing a book on your Website, for example, it shouldn't be any harder to set up "paper book-like license" terms than "pay-per-play" terms.
For an example of nontraditional publishing taking advantage of new technologies right now, look at Pulpless.com. This is an "online-or-print" venture run by J. Neil Schulman that sells books in digital and paper editions. If enough content creators choose such means of distribution, the big publishers have no recourse: they cannot make money without the creators.
So, if you're a content creator, and you don't want your works distributed under restrictive "pay-per-play" licenses, use (or start!) a publishing company that doesn't use such licenses. If you're a content creator and you agree with RMS, set up your works so that people can click to pay you a buck if they like 'em. (That's one good point RMS makes: micropayment technologies are a Good Thing that should be encouraged, because they expand the distribution options available to content creators).
If you're a content consumer, and you don't like restrictive licenses, don't buy from publishing companies that use them. If you're a content creator and you *do* like restrictive licenses, it is your right to use them-- you, not the consumers, rightfully own the product of your mind. But don't be surprised if your sales languish because of negative consumer reaction to your licensing terms. That's how the free market works: people get what they want, as long as they're willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Besides which, there's plenty of good stuff that is in the public domain and in libraries already. Nobody's going to be doomed to grow up an ignorant schlep if they don't want to, or have the means to, pay publishing companies every time they read a book.
In sum, then, it seems to me that the fears raised on this topic constitute mostly FUD about new technologies combined with the usual groundless fears of "dominance by a few large corporations." We get enough of that nonsense from ignorant mainstream media people already; it's a shame to see it coming from geeks, who ought to know better.
Slashdot Mirror
Eidola is, as Paul has noted in his response post, in the very early vaporware stage. My intent in writing the treatise was not to argue that we should all go start using Eidola Right Now for mission-critical work-- that would be silly. Rather, I intended to demonstrate that the Eidola concept, if and when realized, has the *potential* to make mission-critical development better, easier and cheaper. This, then, is an important reason why realizing the Eidola concept sooner rather than later would be a Good Idea.
If you have any more substantive feedback on the treatise, I'd be happy to hear it; you can email me (nweininger (at) pobox (dot) com) or Paul. I'd be grateful for critiques of my view of the problems with software verification, or the discussion of how an Eidola-like language might alleviate those problems.
Nick Weininger
DO-178B has a bunch of different verification "levels" depending on the criticality of the software to be written. I spent a couple of years developing for a Level A certification, which is the highest level, used for the most life-critical software. The process is based on common-sense practices-- independent code review, testing, formal requirements specification and design analysis-- taken to an extreme level of anality. It works well: the resultant software is not bug-free but remarkably close, and any bugs that escape the various rounds of review and testing are very likely to be inconsequential.
However, this process is *extremely* expensive to implement and the software takes a *long* time to develop. It requires developers unusually skilled at formal analysis, and lots and lots and lots of developer time spent on review and testing. Thus it is not suitable for the mainstream market.
But we *could* improve software quality in the mainstream if we could make independent code review and formal design analysis easier and more effective: for these practices are the really crucial parts of DO-178B. (Unit testing is actually, in my experience, much less useful, because it tends to miss the sort of feature interactions common in complex systems: the Foobar feature works in mode A but not in mode B, or under light load but not under heavy load, etc).
>For instance, if you want to own a gun, it's hard to beat the US.
the right to murder, yes, very important to me.
Or rather, the right to defend yourself from a murderer or a tyrant-- which defense is a much more common, and more important, use of private arms. Read John Lott, or Gary Kleck, or David Kopel for the truth about American firearms use.
Poster said:
if you wish to practice Islam, Hinduism, Wicca, Atheism, or any other non-Christian religion, better stay away from the whole middle and southern US.
This is an unfortunate and increasingly ridiculous prejudice. Most people in the middle and southern US are *not* religiously intolerant. I lived for a number of years in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, which contains significant Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Orthodox Jewish, etc. communities which are completely tolerated, indeed welcomed. The Twin Cities is also very gay-friendly.
Now, granted, the Twin Cities is a metro area; things are a little different out in the sticks. But when people speak of Canadian or European cultural tolerance they are usually referring to the metropolitan areas there, too. How tolerant is rural Manitoba, or rural Bavaria?
Poster said:
of course you can't hear or see anything that might piss off the puritans on TV or radio in the US, even at 3 o'clock in the morning. and just try buying any music or video that's remotely controversial .. hope you live in a major
metropolis which has more than the major chains, otherwise you're out of luck
Wow. Here we have a Slashdot poster who has apparently not only never heard of the Internet, but also has never heard of cable television. :-)
Now, there are other countries which are, to their credit, more culturally open about sex and other "naughty" things; I really wish we would adopt the Dutch model with regard to sex and drugs. But to suggest that any major type of porn is really unavailable to anyone in the US just flies in the face of reality.
Poster said:
>If you will obviously stick out as a foreigner, there are other countries you may want to stay away from.
yes but you are welcome to come here and pump our gas or clean our toilets.
Or write our software-- like the Indian and Asian coworkers I knew at my last programming job. Once again, the US is far from perfect in the area of openness toward immigrants, but it is far better than many of its critics, and we have the rare advantage that most people here are descendants of immigrants only a few generations back. There is no political anti-immigrant movement in the US with anywhere near the strength of, say, the National Front in France or the Freedom Party in Austria.
Poster said:
virginia still has laws prohibiting oral sex, sex before marriage, and any kind of sex other than standard missionary position. hope you're not a homosexual, too, cuz for some dumb reason we like to herrangue them about their sexual promiscuity then prevent them from legally binding themselves to a single permanent partner. i just don't get why 85% of americans are against gay marriage.
As previous posters noted, the silly laws about sex are mostly unenforced. As for homosexuality, once again, ths US is certainly far from perfect, but we are way ahead of many critics. In how many countries can a gay couple even *think* about trying to get domestic partner benefits from their employers? In how many countries has there even been proposed legislation to grant "civil unions" to gays?
This whole topic illustrates what really pisses me off about foreign critics of the US. They slam Americans for being ignorant about other countries (which many in fact are, certainly), but then they criticize the US in ways that make it clear that they are not only ignorant about real American life, but are ignorant about (or willfully distorting) their own countries' realities.
Nick Weininger
This is very frustrating for those of us who need to write deterministic-performance (i.e. real-time) code, since it makes it hard to formally derive any reasonable guaranteed upper bounds on the execution time of anything.
The microcode update thing discussed in the Byte article is a particularly glaring instance of this lack of documentation. Not too long ago, I was working on a special-purpose real-time OS, and had to look through the whole PII family documentation to make sure the OS was "doing the right thing" wrt all the registers on the PII. There is ONE mention of the "microcode update signature register" in the entire 3-volume processor manual, and the mention gives no clue as to what the register's function is, when it can be set (not in user mode, one hopes!), or how it interacts with anything else.
I emailed Intel's tech support about this, and the guy responding to the email had no idea what I was talking about. When I pointed him to the page number in the docs, he went and checked with the developers, and returned with a vague answer that gave me essentially the same information printed in the Byte article. In the end we figured out that as long as the OS left it alone, we didn't need to worry; but that was a lot of time wasted because of Intel's opacity.
In fairness to Intel, other processor docs aren't much better in the determinism/precision department. However, Intel's architecture is peculiarly byzantine, since it consists of layers and layers of backward compatibility kludges grafted clumsily on top of one another, so Intel ought to feel a special responsibility to document their rat's nest of a processor properly. On the other hand, maybe they're too embarrassed to do so.
Nick Weininger
I thought the most interesting aspect of the linked-to AP article was the mention that private launch vehicle developers hated the X-33 and the Space Launch Initiative, because none of them could get venture funding for their own rockets when the spectre of a NASA vehicle hangs over them.
Once again, we see NASA doing something it is, as a government agency, absolutely terrible at doing (reducing costs), while preventing private entrepreneurs from having the opportunity to do it better. There are lots of them out there with lots of interesting ideas-- Kistler, Roton, Pioneer Rocketplane among them-- but none of them will ever get a real chance to succeed as long as NASA steps on their toes. If it hadn't been for the Shuttle program, who knows, maybe these guys would have gotten that chance 20 years ago, and today we'd be discussing which is the best hotel in Luna City.
Yet another reason why the best thing we can do for the human future in space is to restrict the government space program. If NASA has any real reason for doing any space stuff at all, it should be the way-out-there, purely scientific probes (like the Pluto probe it recently cancelled), not launch technology that it is obviously terrible at doing.
Nick Weininger
True, but consider this: the vast majority of the useful inventions and interesting artistic creations we benefit from today were created in the last 200 years. The last 200 years is (roughly) the age of modern copyrights and patents.
This may be a coincidence, but it is likely not. Surely the development of the modern rule of law has been a crucial enabling condition for the progress and prosperity of the last 200 years; just recently, in the Asian financial crisis, we saw countries suffer because they lacked the proper rule-of-law infrastructure to promote a stable environment for investment. Given the large majority of the past 200 years' useful inventions that have been patented, it's hard to believe that they all would have been created just as quickly if their inventors had been working only for the intellectual pleasure of invention.
The question of whether inventors "deserve" all of the rewards from a patent is beside the point here. Clearly a reward system in which Alexander Graham Bell (to take an example from a previous post) gets all the profits from inventing the telephone, when others get nothing because they invented it slightly later, is imperfect. However, even a very imperfect reward system is better than none at all, from a social-efficiency perspective. The question should be not: is the IP system fair? but: is there empirical reason to believe it works better than the alternative(s)? I think there is.
Linux has been oft-cited as an example of a terrific advance developed without IP protection. Since I'm writing this from a Linux machine, I can hardly dispute that it's terrific. However, remember that Linux would not exist in its present form without cheap Intel-compatible hardware to run on, and that hardware would not exist without (a) competition in chip design driven by the prospect of rewards from IP (chips are very expensive to develop, IP rewards allow the devel. costs to be recouped) and (b) Microsoft, which created a standard OS so ubiquitous that HW developers had to make their HW compatible enough to run that OS. So Linux is indirectly dependent for its existence not only on IP, but on a company often held up as one of the worst abusers of IP.
Nevertheless, the author of the "Against IP" article gives a useful and thought-provoking catalogue of the costly abuses of IP in today's world. I agree with most of his specific criticisms of abuses. Many posters have responded by saying "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
In fact, it is possible that the IP system today is inherently subject to such abuses that reform is not worthwhile and abolition is the way to go. Establishing this would require establishing that (a) the costs of IP abuses exceed the known benefits of IP's existence and (b) the nature of the IP system, and particularly of the governments that enforce it, is such that reforms will not cause the cost of abuses to fall below the benefits. These are both debatable questions, and it would be really interesting to see them studied from the point of view of Public Choice economics. Does anyone know if such a study has been made?
Most of the nonsense Katz spews in this article has been adequately responded to by other posters-- notably MrLizard. It's a shame there is so much nonsense, because he's made some good points on this issue; I thought his expose of Pinkerton was terrific, and terrifying.
However, there are a couple of things he says that are just wrong and need to be responded to. First, he states that "Though H.L. Mencken brilliantly and savagely spoofed organized religion and politics a half-century ago, it would be nearly impossible to do so now in any public forum outside the Net."
What kind of a rock has Mr. Katz been living under? Has he ever read Florence King's column in _National Review_, or *anybody*'s columns in _Liberty_ or _Reason_? (Or, if your political persuasions run the other way, _Z_ or _In These Times_ or _Mother Jones_ or _The Nation_). There is at least as much diversity of opinion expressed in print in America as there was in Mencken's time. True, Mencken wouldn't get on television today, but in his time there was no television-- and he wrote for little magazines, _The Smart Set_ and _The American Mercury_, hardly the mainstream media of his day. Television is increasingly irrelevant anyway-- which is why the example of Time Warner pulling ABC rings so hollow; nobody, but nobody, got denied any important information or any viewpoint because of that.
Secondly, he says that "the very idea of regulation of corporate growth has vanished as a civic idea" and "government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business." This, after the Microsoft lawsuit, and the lawsuits against the tobacco companies, and the lawsuits against the gun companies? This, when the number of regulations in the Federal Register increases every year? When has government ever done *more* to regulate and restrict the operations of large businesses?
Here I think Katz is a victim of socialist government-school history. We are taught that the Progressives and New Dealers were heroic crusaders against the power of big business. In fact, all they were crusading for was their own political power. Regulations have always been co-opted by large businesses to protect their market domination against upstart competitors by creating barriers to entry into markets.
And that's the big point Katz is missing here. The problem is not corporate power; it's political power. Political power that corporations use as a club to beat their competitors and preserve their monopolies; political power fueled by the immense amount of government expenditures, from schools to prisons to construction projects to sugar subsidies to bombers. If such power is strong here, and getting stronger, it is stronger still already in the Leviathan States of Europe (as other posters have noted). What we must do to take away that power is *not* to fight the corporations-- it is to fight the government.
I agree with RMS that "pay-per-play" licenses for books, etc. are a Bad Thing. However, RMS and most of the responders to him here implicitly assume that (If This Goes On) we will have no way of getting access to desirable content other than by going through a few mega-media companies who hold all their copyrights under "pay-per-play" terms. This is also, BTW, the view expressed by Jordan Pollack in another recent Slashdot thread.
This seems to me a clearly fallacious assumption. The same sorts of new technologies that enable things like eBooks also enable content creators to do an end run around the mega-media companies if they want to. The availability of Internet publishing and the ability to print and bind a book on the spot in the bookstore, to name two, make it easier to "be your own publisher" and distribute your creations on whatever terms you choose. If you're publishing a book on your Website, for example, it shouldn't be any harder to set up "paper book-like license" terms than "pay-per-play" terms.
For an example of nontraditional publishing taking advantage of new technologies right now, look at Pulpless.com. This is an "online-or-print" venture run by J. Neil Schulman that sells books in digital and paper editions. If enough content creators choose such means of distribution, the big publishers have no recourse: they cannot make money without the creators.
So, if you're a content creator, and you don't want your works distributed under restrictive "pay-per-play" licenses, use (or start!) a publishing company that doesn't use such licenses. If you're a content creator and you agree with RMS, set up your works so that people can click to pay you a buck if they like 'em. (That's one good point RMS makes: micropayment technologies are a Good Thing that should be encouraged, because they expand the distribution options available to content creators).
If you're a content consumer, and you don't like restrictive licenses, don't buy from publishing companies that use them. If you're a content creator and you *do* like restrictive licenses, it is your right to use them-- you, not the consumers, rightfully own the product of your mind. But don't be surprised if your sales languish because of negative consumer reaction to your licensing terms. That's how the free market works: people get what they want, as long as they're willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Besides which, there's plenty of good stuff that is in the public domain and in libraries already. Nobody's going to be doomed to grow up an ignorant schlep if they don't want to, or have the means to, pay publishing companies every time they read a book.
In sum, then, it seems to me that the fears raised on this topic constitute mostly FUD about new technologies combined with the usual groundless fears of "dominance by a few large corporations." We get enough of that nonsense from ignorant mainstream media people already; it's a shame to see it coming from geeks, who ought to know better.