Can you possibly mean that lower priced journals are an unsolved technical problem?
Mostly, yes.
But whether they are run as nonprofits or not, academic journals have a near monopolistic ability to extract rents that far exceed their costs.
You're not asking why, are you? Look, this is not worth discussing without some background. Please go and read these articles. Some authors are clearly misguided, yet you need to understand where they are coming from.
It is not to say that I didn't support the confrontational attitude of the original PLoS letter, confrontation was effective, it has caught everybody's attention, and a very different approach is needed.
This is so much of a gross oversimplification it is scary. The journals play an extremely role in science. Generally, they're not in it for the money, most of them are non-profits, and published by the scientists' own societies. There are high costs associated with the service they do to the scientific community, and they need to get that paid. If you undermine the peer review process, it is going to be a disaster for science, and it is not unlikely that you can manage to do that but undercutting their cash flow. Publishers have valid concerns, and it can only be solved together. If undermining the peer-review process is business, then business must be Considered Harmful.
That being said, I'm a supporter of open access, I licensed my thesis under the PLoS Open Access licence (even though it was very unclear in legal terms), and it is a topic would like to work on.
I think we can greatly enhance the peer review process, ensure open access to the scientific literature and cut the costs, if we just develop the technology to do it.
We can distribute papers by Bittorrent-like institutional proxies, distributing the costs of distribution and publishing to be shared among participants.
Peer review can be stated in a distributed way using RDF statements, and hashing the paper for integrity checks.
There are many other problems cited my societies, but I think they all have quite straightforward solutions.
The only real cost to remain will be finding and anonymizing reviewers. It is still a significant cost, but it will be much easier to live with. For example by selling dead trees...:-)
I do not doubt that they've got some good stuff there. Probably, they can also spend a lot of resources engineering ideas that researchers in civil society have on their scratch-pad, and so have "products" that are far beyond the civilian market.
But do remember that the quoted page is a recruitment page. It's an ad. Marketing. What do "we" think about marketdroids?:-)
The question is if they are capable of producing really first-class fundamental research. Would there be Nobel prizes awarded if we knew what was going on?
Can hey factor prime number so that my 2048 bit PGP is obsolete?
Right now, you have to do some really good research if you were to do that. It won't take very many years before it happens, though, so we need QPQ (Quantum Privacy, err).
The stuff about Nobel prizes is actually an important point, because most scientists would want recognition. They also want to bounce their ideas off of other scientists. To motivate a top scientist to make things secret, you'd either have to offer him something unique (which is a chicken-and-egg problem), or find something that finds a great interest in National Security issues, whatever that is. I think it is noit very many who would find that very motivating.
What makes you think the government doesn't have some technology you can't even fathom?
How science works. It consists of open, institutional critisism by qualified peers. The larger the community, the more people can and will contribute critisism.
In a world where this does not exist, it will invariably lead to many bad ideas, ideas that are not abandoned. Even though you may recruit the best brains on the planet, they are still just humans, and they can't perform without this critical component of how science works.
That's why I'm pretty sure that no major breakthroughs will happen in secrecy.
Smaller breakthroughs, OTOH, can happen in secrecy. It is conceivable that Shor's algorithm will be implemented on a secret quantum computer, but only after the civil society has done most of the work. They will certainly try.
Just take a look at the most hefty project we know was done in secrecy: Manhattan Project. They had the best brains. Still it was not very fundamental science, and many of the participants got bored out of their minds. It was definately not technology I can't fathom.
I (and the avalanche expert who taught us (red cross I guess, don't remember the name)) obviously stand corrected.
Hm, it is sort of weird... There was a lot of incompentence on avalanches in the military up to the Vassdalen disaster in 1986 IIRC. An avalanche killed 16 soldiers. They had ignored every warning, and after the disaster they used dowsing to try to locate the victims. Obviously they found none that way.
But I really thought they had rinsed out those since then, and I got that impression from Krister Kristensen too.
Guess my contingent was lucky, our officers (especially the company
chief Captain) were skilled, good teachers and genuinely nice people.
Except for a couple of UB's of course. Always count on the UB's and
sergeants to be most fascist.
Oh, they do exist. I know many nice people who are officers, from leutenants and upwards. But I have my doubts if they are suited. BTW, the UBs I had was just as anxious to get the hell out of there as the rest of us....
(1) I was not punished, 'cause the platoon leader was asleep and you can't really hear the difference between weapons since all the grunts use Heckler&Koch AG3's.
Hehe. Well, for all the drills we had, I never learnt anything. The problem is that nothing ever goes wrong for the mistakes you make. Typical example: I was at an exercise at Kongsberg (then home of the swift reaction batalion), and I was in good camo. We were attacked, and they are coming down the hill-side in plain view. From my little nest, I could have picked out the whole platoon. And of course, I fired with blanks. Problem is, there was no way in hell they could have seen me, because of my camo (I didn't see any wargames judges around, but if they were there, they probably couldn't see me either) so they just walked on, directly towards me. They first discovered me at two meters, and then they started firing at me with blanks, allthough that was well within the safety range.
We had the same kinds of drills every few weeks. Nobody ever learnt anything. I got so tired of the mind-numbing stupidity that I wrote a proposal for the platoon. But the moronic officers simply couldn't carry it through. It was fun for me, but still not a learning experience. I managed to sneak up on a moose, I thought it were enemy soldiers, I only stopped a meter short... Whooah.
Nevertheless, I met so much fascism and so many fascists in the Norwegian military, and when I realized that they actually was right in how to build efficient military forces, I became a pacifist.
People mostly die from drowning in an avalanche since they breathe the fine snow on top of the avalanche before getting buried
Who told you this? It is not the fine snow that kills, that is, they kill very few. What kills is that you don't have the muscles to keep the chest up, so you stop breathing due to the pressure.
Hm, I took a course by Krister Kristensen, Norway's foremost research, and he is also the guy giving the courses in the military, so chances are we have got the same course.
Navigation with map and compass, navigation without compass,
Well, my experience was that most officers couldn't find their way out of a paper bag, and that was reflected in how they taught... I did some teaching, but many wore a thick layer of clue repellent...
I don't think there's any answer to that. The only way to maintain a pro-software-patent position is to pretend the question/issue does not exist.
I do not have an answer for that, and I find your posts +5 Insightful, as you may have noticed by the little blue dot.
Nevertheless, there is this issue, how do we encourage people to think up useful, boring stuff.
For example: I think it would be mighty useful to have a checksum algorithm that could make a very short (say one or two integer) digest of a number, that would take into account most common mistakes that humans make when they type numbers, so that you could actually check more reliably if the number had been typed correctly. Modulus 10 is often used for this, but it is not very well suited.
Doing this is going to be exceedingly boring. You would need to first find out typical mistakes, then how to guard against them.
I feel that if someone takes on this task, they should be rewarded for it. And I feel that just doing it should be enough to be rewarded, they shouldn't have to go through the possibly even more boring task of bringing it to the market.
So, how do we reward that kind of work, that's the question?
I also feel strongly that the level of control patent holders is allowed to excert now is not the way to go. Instead of a monopoly, perhaps, just that you do get a cut of whatever cash it brings. Something like that, or....
Well, since you mention Jesus Christ several times in your post: Let the first slashdotter who couldn't have done this as a kid throw the first stone.
Anyone? Thought so.
There are two very pressing problems to be addressed: One is that the guy who talked about woodpeckers destroying civiliazation was right. The other is the massive waste of creativity that happens because kids (and many great hackers from that matter) have a hard time finding constructive outlets for their creativity, and find appreciation for what they do.
I'm not a christian, I haven't ever written malware, and I'm as annoyed by this kids' stuff as the next/.er, but there will be no advances if one isn't capable to get above all that, and see the fundamental problems.
I have tried to get a recent DVD player for my box, that didn't have any of the crap, but I failed. I know it is easy to upgrade the firmware on my devices to remove the crap, and I have also seen some stand-alone players without it. But the point is that they're not getting my money unless they are willing to sell me an uncrippled device. And nobody seems to care enough for my business to do that...
Well, first of all, note the smiley! Basically, there was a big flamewar about RSS around the release of RSS 2.0. Dave Winer wanted something that was really simple, whereas a whole lot of other people wanted RSS to be the first real Semantic Web application.
RSS as in RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication, while when the R in RSS stands for RDF, we're talking Semantic Web.
So, if you had mentioned the two in the wrong fora at the wrong points in time, it would invariably have set off a huge flamewar...
What resulted from the flamewar was a fork, and Atom was created. Now, it doesn't seem to me Atom is a Semantic Web application either, and I probably lost many points here....
Anyway, the funny thing I meant to point out was that one could inadvertly spark a flamewar by just saying the wrong things yet meaning nothing bad about it...
Actually, I'm a/. reader, but I couldn't care less. Have a search and see that a news story is often propagated across many sites unedited. They are not only about the same thing, they are written by the same journalist, and are identical, word-for-word. When that happens, newsbot is going to link to the MSNBC version. That's all. Move along, please.
Problem is to find out. It may just be very, very difficult.
I think the problem is the cutthroat business environment we have. If everything was done in the open, the problem would have been much less, and it would be much easier to form in informed opinion.
I used to dislike Perl, but found myself returning to it every time I needed to get something done.
Perl is quite mature, there are tons of allready good stuff out there, and Perl hackers are generally very nice people. Still, I didn't really like the language.
But really, if you just think carefully about design, modularize things, do ok OO design, then it is not bad at all. I really can't see the limits.
The UK government passed a law against using a mobile phone while driving - totally unnecessary,there was already the offence of "driving without due care and attention".
IANAL, but I can't agree.
When it comes to criminal offences, it is a long standing and well founded tradition that laws should be as specific as possible.
This is to avoid situations where the accuser uses some badly formulated law to harass individuals: "Uhm, like, yeah, er, we think this is rather, er, bad, and we'd like to lock this guy up".
The Jon Johansen DeCSS case is an excellent example: He was accused of breaking a law that specifically stated it is illegal to open other people's letters. The law wasn't specific enough in it's exact wording, and should never have gotten to court.
Another part of why this tradition is important is that people should know exactly what they can be drawn and quartered for.
In point 5, Neil Gunton cogently observes in the last sentence "A commercial company, on the other hand, can afford to scratch the personal itches of its end-users, because the end-users are the ones paying the bills.". This very true, and I think it provides a useful illustration of a means by which an Open Source company can make money by directly selling software.
I too think that it is very important that we create a cash-flow ASAP, and that it should run through as few hands as possible between the end user and developers.
I think it is vital for the sustainability of Free Software that as many as possible can make a living from writing software directly.
One way to do it, is to convince PHBs that the way of the future is not buying products: "Products are bad, they may or may not do what you want", instead "you can take a free system, which almost do what you need, and pay someone to include the features you need, then, out of enlightened self interest, these changes are submitted back to the project".
German government did this with e.g. Project Ägypten, by paying a small number of small contractors. It works absolutely great, I use it myself often, and it worked great for the developers too. That way, you wouldn't get paid as a charity (which I agree is not a very nice prospect), but you're working with a proper contract. I think if this was common thinking, it would employ a lot of programmers and assure that Free Software would remain prosperous for foreseeable future.
The second thing is that end-users could team up and pay developers to add features they really like to have. For high-profile projects such as Mozilla, KDE and GNOME, I think this could provide very significant income for many developers, who could make a living simply by responding to user wishes.
Third, we need voluntary micropayments. Toss a.1 to developers now and then. It could accumulate to become significant, and while it may not provide a full-time income, it could get a newbie started.
Finally, I have this possibly socialist idea that governments should employ hackers rather than lawyers to find technological rather than legal fixes to obvious problems.... For example, the European Commission is trying to extend the right to reply to online media. While present proposal is not as totally hopeless as the first one, it is still unhealthy. Instead, what they should do is to hire a bunch of hackers to replace the very limited "right to reply" with an RDF based almost unlimited opportunity to reply.
Seriously though, it's getting tiresome. Sometimes I could almost believe that the people most vocally bashing Windows are the ones who haven't actually used it in years, and are basing their vitriol on out of date experiences.
Could be true to some extent. I haven't used Windows regularly since 94-95-ish. So I tend not to talk too much about it. I'm in it for the freedom anyway.
However, the last time I actually needed Windows to do something for me, it didn't work....
I wanted some new firmware in my mobile phone, so I downloaded some stuff from Siemens, and ran their installer.
Windows XP BSODed on me, and seems to have been flaky since. It was my mother's laptop, but she has gotten so used to KDE now, she doesn't care.
So, it was the only time in ten years I actually needed it, and it BSODs... Makes it hard to believe when you're being told that it has improved over the years....:-)
Well, they tried to fix that in recent years, I can tell you that much.:-P
My old 3210 survived two hours in the washing machine. My girlfriend's recent model died after a full day in her pocket in rain.
It goes the same way with pretty much any company:
1) Make a good product
2) See it take off
3) Profit!
4) Dump the quality
5) Wonder why the market thinks you suck.
But the really bad thing is that the other manufacturers now know that they need to live up to the old standards of the successful company: They only need to be marginally better than the successful company was after they dumped the quality.
Which means, we loose.
Re:Knighted for Building on the Backs of Giants
on
That's Sir Tim to You
·
· Score: 1
Yes, he says that very proudly, mind you. Sir Tim has always emphasized that the only way to build things is to build it on the Backs of Giants. In fact, I would more say it needs to be built on the back of huge piles of many small ideas. That's what's so wrong about software patents, it kills that process.
Sir Tim is probably one of the people that say software patents are bad with most authority, in we should appreciate that.
Re:Sorry. No way.
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, I for one doesn't fit in either of the categories you made for the parent poster.
The whole idea with copyright is the balance of the human rights that say that people have a right to take part in the cultural and scientific advancements of society, and on the other hand, the creators right to be rewarded.
What you think that you need to take away, is the first groups right. You'll create a society where only one group has rights. That's not a society I want to live in, thank you very much.
Distributing some of my software with DRM enabled allows me to *afford* my other contributions to the community. It pays my bills, provides food for myself and my 5 children, and lets me live comfortably.
With all due respect, this is a strawman.
Society needs to adapt to changing conditions, by finding new ways to reward creators. It means that you need to be creative. Those are the breaks.
DRM technology is available, and I should have the right to use it. You certainly have the right to not buy it.
It is my opinion that this statement is in direct conflict with human rights.
I have a very hard time believing that. Our genome is simply too homogenous for anything like that to be feasible. Biologically, just using the term "races" is meaningless, we're much more similar than that.
In fact, it has been claimed that Isrealis have been able to kill Palestinians by using the same method.
That was the subject of a study, that concluded it was simply not possible to do either way. This study, which I can't find a reference to right now, created a lot of controversy, not because of it's scientific content, which was not disputed, but because that the author referred to the palestinian refugee camps he had visited as "concentration camps". The paper was withdrawn by the publisher for that reason.
This is in fact part of my anti-DRM rant. Even though the paper was withdrawn, it still exists, and the conclusions still stands. With DRM, it can be removed entirely. Nobody should have that much power.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly, yes.
You're not asking why, are you? Look, this is not worth discussing without some background. Please go and read these articles. Some authors are clearly misguided, yet you need to understand where they are coming from.
It is not to say that I didn't support the confrontational attitude of the original PLoS letter, confrontation was effective, it has caught everybody's attention, and a very different approach is needed.
This is so much of a gross oversimplification it is scary. The journals play an extremely role in science. Generally, they're not in it for the money, most of them are non-profits, and published by the scientists' own societies. There are high costs associated with the service they do to the scientific community, and they need to get that paid. If you undermine the peer review process, it is going to be a disaster for science, and it is not unlikely that you can manage to do that but undercutting their cash flow. Publishers have valid concerns, and it can only be solved together. If undermining the peer-review process is business, then business must be Considered Harmful.
That being said, I'm a supporter of open access, I licensed my thesis under the PLoS Open Access licence (even though it was very unclear in legal terms), and it is a topic would like to work on.
I think we can greatly enhance the peer review process, ensure open access to the scientific literature and cut the costs, if we just develop the technology to do it.
We can distribute papers by Bittorrent-like institutional proxies, distributing the costs of distribution and publishing to be shared among participants.
Peer review can be stated in a distributed way using RDF statements, and hashing the paper for integrity checks.
There are many other problems cited my societies, but I think they all have quite straightforward solutions.
The only real cost to remain will be finding and anonymizing reviewers. It is still a significant cost, but it will be much easier to live with. For example by selling dead trees... :-)
If only someone would hire me to do it.... :-)
But do remember that the quoted page is a recruitment page. It's an ad. Marketing. What do "we" think about marketdroids? :-)
The question is if they are capable of producing really first-class fundamental research. Would there be Nobel prizes awarded if we knew what was going on?
Can hey factor prime number so that my 2048 bit PGP is obsolete? Right now, you have to do some really good research if you were to do that. It won't take very many years before it happens, though, so we need QPQ (Quantum Privacy, err).
The stuff about Nobel prizes is actually an important point, because most scientists would want recognition. They also want to bounce their ideas off of other scientists. To motivate a top scientist to make things secret, you'd either have to offer him something unique (which is a chicken-and-egg problem), or find something that finds a great interest in National Security issues, whatever that is. I think it is noit very many who would find that very motivating.
How science works. It consists of open, institutional critisism by qualified peers. The larger the community, the more people can and will contribute critisism.
In a world where this does not exist, it will invariably lead to many bad ideas, ideas that are not abandoned. Even though you may recruit the best brains on the planet, they are still just humans, and they can't perform without this critical component of how science works.
That's why I'm pretty sure that no major breakthroughs will happen in secrecy.
Smaller breakthroughs, OTOH, can happen in secrecy. It is conceivable that Shor's algorithm will be implemented on a secret quantum computer, but only after the civil society has done most of the work. They will certainly try.
Just take a look at the most hefty project we know was done in secrecy: Manhattan Project. They had the best brains. Still it was not very fundamental science, and many of the participants got bored out of their minds. It was definately not technology I can't fathom.
But I really thought they had rinsed out those since then, and I got that impression from Krister Kristensen too.
Oh, they do exist. I know many nice people who are officers, from leutenants and upwards. But I have my doubts if they are suited. BTW, the UBs I had was just as anxious to get the hell out of there as the rest of us....
Hehe. Well, for all the drills we had, I never learnt anything. The problem is that nothing ever goes wrong for the mistakes you make. Typical example: I was at an exercise at Kongsberg (then home of the swift reaction batalion), and I was in good camo. We were attacked, and they are coming down the hill-side in plain view. From my little nest, I could have picked out the whole platoon. And of course, I fired with blanks. Problem is, there was no way in hell they could have seen me, because of my camo (I didn't see any wargames judges around, but if they were there, they probably couldn't see me either) so they just walked on, directly towards me. They first discovered me at two meters, and then they started firing at me with blanks, allthough that was well within the safety range.
We had the same kinds of drills every few weeks. Nobody ever learnt anything. I got so tired of the mind-numbing stupidity that I wrote a proposal for the platoon. But the moronic officers simply couldn't carry it through. It was fun for me, but still not a learning experience. I managed to sneak up on a moose, I thought it were enemy soldiers, I only stopped a meter short... Whooah.
Nevertheless, I met so much fascism and so many fascists in the Norwegian military, and when I realized that they actually was right in how to build efficient military forces, I became a pacifist.
Who told you this? It is not the fine snow that kills, that is, they kill very few. What kills is that you don't have the muscles to keep the chest up, so you stop breathing due to the pressure.
Hm, I took a course by Krister Kristensen, Norway's foremost research, and he is also the guy giving the courses in the military, so chances are we have got the same course.
Well, my experience was that most officers couldn't find their way out of a paper bag, and that was reflected in how they taught... I did some teaching, but many wore a thick layer of clue repellent...
I do not have an answer for that, and I find your posts +5 Insightful, as you may have noticed by the little blue dot.
Nevertheless, there is this issue, how do we encourage people to think up useful, boring stuff.
For example: I think it would be mighty useful to have a checksum algorithm that could make a very short (say one or two integer) digest of a number, that would take into account most common mistakes that humans make when they type numbers, so that you could actually check more reliably if the number had been typed correctly. Modulus 10 is often used for this, but it is not very well suited.
Doing this is going to be exceedingly boring. You would need to first find out typical mistakes, then how to guard against them.
I feel that if someone takes on this task, they should be rewarded for it. And I feel that just doing it should be enough to be rewarded, they shouldn't have to go through the possibly even more boring task of bringing it to the market.
So, how do we reward that kind of work, that's the question?
I also feel strongly that the level of control patent holders is allowed to excert now is not the way to go. Instead of a monopoly, perhaps, just that you do get a cut of whatever cash it brings. Something like that, or....
Anyone? Thought so.
There are two very pressing problems to be addressed: One is that the guy who talked about woodpeckers destroying civiliazation was right. The other is the massive waste of creativity that happens because kids (and many great hackers from that matter) have a hard time finding constructive outlets for their creativity, and find appreciation for what they do.
I'm not a christian, I haven't ever written malware, and I'm as annoyed by this kids' stuff as the next /.er, but there will be no advances if one isn't capable to get above all that, and see the fundamental problems.
Hm, your sig indicates that you might be the first to collect the bounty, or does it mean something entirely different?
So I can't see it failing, really...
RSS as in RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication, while when the R in RSS stands for RDF, we're talking Semantic Web.
So, if you had mentioned the two in the wrong fora at the wrong points in time, it would invariably have set off a huge flamewar...
What resulted from the flamewar was a fork, and Atom was created. Now, it doesn't seem to me Atom is a Semantic Web application either, and I probably lost many points here....
There seems to be some peace possibilities though.
Anyway, the funny thing I meant to point out was that one could inadvertly spark a flamewar by just saying the wrong things yet meaning nothing bad about it...
Actually, I'm a /. reader, but I couldn't care less. Have a search and see that a news story is often propagated across many sites unedited. They are not only about the same thing, they are written by the same journalist, and are identical, word-for-word. When that happens, newsbot is going to link to the MSNBC version. That's all. Move along, please.
Uhm, actually, this should probably be moderated flamebait, allthough the poster might not be intentionally trolling.... :-)
I think the problem is the cutthroat business environment we have. If everything was done in the open, the problem would have been much less, and it would be much easier to form in informed opinion.
Actually, I've heard that OSF1 BSODed once. But it is just rumours...
- Everyone in Norway speaks Norwegian
- No-one else speaks Norwegian, so that's only 4.5 million people
- the other 99.9% of the earth's population are pretty interesting too
Ergo, we need huge pipes to the rest of the world...I used to dislike Perl, but found myself returning to it every time I needed to get something done. Perl is quite mature, there are tons of allready good stuff out there, and Perl hackers are generally very nice people. Still, I didn't really like the language.
But really, if you just think carefully about design, modularize things, do ok OO design, then it is not bad at all. I really can't see the limits.
IANAL, but I can't agree.
When it comes to criminal offences, it is a long standing and well founded tradition that laws should be as specific as possible.
This is to avoid situations where the accuser uses some badly formulated law to harass individuals: "Uhm, like, yeah, er, we think this is rather, er, bad, and we'd like to lock this guy up".
The Jon Johansen DeCSS case is an excellent example: He was accused of breaking a law that specifically stated it is illegal to open other people's letters. The law wasn't specific enough in it's exact wording, and should never have gotten to court.
Another part of why this tradition is important is that people should know exactly what they can be drawn and quartered for.
I too think that it is very important that we create a cash-flow ASAP, and that it should run through as few hands as possible between the end user and developers.
I think it is vital for the sustainability of Free Software that as many as possible can make a living from writing software directly.
One way to do it, is to convince PHBs that the way of the future is not buying products: "Products are bad, they may or may not do what you want", instead "you can take a free system, which almost do what you need, and pay someone to include the features you need, then, out of enlightened self interest, these changes are submitted back to the project".
German government did this with e.g. Project Ägypten, by paying a small number of small contractors. It works absolutely great, I use it myself often, and it worked great for the developers too. That way, you wouldn't get paid as a charity (which I agree is not a very nice prospect), but you're working with a proper contract. I think if this was common thinking, it would employ a lot of programmers and assure that Free Software would remain prosperous for foreseeable future.
The second thing is that end-users could team up and pay developers to add features they really like to have. For high-profile projects such as Mozilla, KDE and GNOME, I think this could provide very significant income for many developers, who could make a living simply by responding to user wishes.
Third, we need voluntary micropayments. Toss a .1 to developers now and then. It could accumulate to become significant, and while it may not provide a full-time income, it could get a newbie started.
Finally, I have this possibly socialist idea that governments should employ hackers rather than lawyers to find technological rather than legal fixes to obvious problems.... For example, the European Commission is trying to extend the right to reply to online media. While present proposal is not as totally hopeless as the first one, it is still unhealthy. Instead, what they should do is to hire a bunch of hackers to replace the very limited "right to reply" with an RDF based almost unlimited opportunity to reply.
Could be true to some extent. I haven't used Windows regularly since 94-95-ish. So I tend not to talk too much about it. I'm in it for the freedom anyway.
However, the last time I actually needed Windows to do something for me, it didn't work....
I wanted some new firmware in my mobile phone, so I downloaded some stuff from Siemens, and ran their installer.
Windows XP BSODed on me, and seems to have been flaky since. It was my mother's laptop, but she has gotten so used to KDE now, she doesn't care.
So, it was the only time in ten years I actually needed it, and it BSODs... Makes it hard to believe when you're being told that it has improved over the years.... :-)
My old 3210 survived two hours in the washing machine. My girlfriend's recent model died after a full day in her pocket in rain.
It goes the same way with pretty much any company:
1) Make a good product
2) See it take off
3) Profit!
4) Dump the quality
5) Wonder why the market thinks you suck.
But the really bad thing is that the other manufacturers now know that they need to live up to the old standards of the successful company: They only need to be marginally better than the successful company was after they dumped the quality.
Which means, we loose.
Sir Tim is probably one of the people that say software patents are bad with most authority, in we should appreciate that.
The whole idea with copyright is the balance of the human rights that say that people have a right to take part in the cultural and scientific advancements of society, and on the other hand, the creators right to be rewarded.
What you think that you need to take away, is the first groups right. You'll create a society where only one group has rights. That's not a society I want to live in, thank you very much.
With all due respect, this is a strawman.
Society needs to adapt to changing conditions, by finding new ways to reward creators. It means that you need to be creative. Those are the breaks.
It is my opinion that this statement is in direct conflict with human rights.
Gotta keep up traditions, eh...? I've heard that Sir Tim was thrown off the Oxford network once after hacking it...? Is this true?
In fact, it has been claimed that Isrealis have been able to kill Palestinians by using the same method.
That was the subject of a study, that concluded it was simply not possible to do either way. This study, which I can't find a reference to right now, created a lot of controversy, not because of it's scientific content, which was not disputed, but because that the author referred to the palestinian refugee camps he had visited as "concentration camps". The paper was withdrawn by the publisher for that reason.
This is in fact part of my anti-DRM rant. Even though the paper was withdrawn, it still exists, and the conclusions still stands. With DRM, it can be removed entirely. Nobody should have that much power.