If I could work one 40 hour shift a week, and have the rest of the week off, I'd be thrilled. Even more so if science finds a way to reduce my weekly sleep time without negative health consequences.
Casions make money by selling the illusion of easy money. Casinos are not institutions created to give money to people who are good at math and memorization. Those people are not "legitamite gamblers", because they aren't gambling: they know they will win. They're not even customers, because the house is losing money to them.
The Casino owners don't gamble either. They do whatever it takes to make sure they win on average. Making sure there's no way the customers can guarentee themselves a win is part of that process.
The only reason the Casino can get away with its own form of cheating is that they're the ones providing the service: the illusion. They build a fancy world, staff it with beautiful people, and customers gladly hand over their money. Some of the customers gain enjoyment from this arrangement by dilluding themselves into thinking they've "figured it out" or whatever. But any customers who actually do find a way to reliably win _are cheating_.
The only way to reliably win without cheating is to setup your own casino.
If you're really curious and you want a deep, but approachable explination of all things physics, go to your library and look for the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
So, what does the formula mean?
The E=mc^2 formula accurately predicts how much energy it will be absorbed or released in a nuclear reaction. This is because the mass of an atom is not just the sum of its protons, neutrons and electrons. It takes energy to hold that atom together, and that energy manifests as mass. If a physicist looks up the mass of Deuterium (Hydrogen with an extra neutron) and Helium (two protons and two neutrons), and then compares 2*Mass(D) to Mass(He), she will find that the He atom is slightly less massive. If you mutiply that spare mass by 300000km/s^2, you get a number (in Joules, I think) which corresponds to the energy released by the fusion of two Deuterium atoms into one Helium atom. That's an H bomb.
Another thing this formula predicts is that a particle with a non-zero mass cannot exceed the speed of light. As the particle is accelerated its mass (from the point of view of the rest of the universe) will increase. As its mass increases, the energy it takes to accelerate the particle increases. A physicist can keep adding energy 'till the cows come home, and that particle will just keep getting heavier. Remember that Force is Mass times Acceleration. That is F=ma. As the 'm' increases (because E increased), the force required for the same acceleration also increases. In fact, the reason for the c^2 is because of this particular effect. The speed of light is defined by this formula. All zero-mass particles (such as the photon which carries light) must travel at exactly 'c', or they would break the rules. In a way, 'c' is as close as we have to our old concept of instantaneous or infinite speed. From the light's point of view, it travels everywhere immediately. It's only because of relativity and remote observation that light can be said to have a non-infinite speed. But again I over-simplify.
With all this discussion, you may wonder where Relativity breaks down? So far it's had a hard time with very small scales, so we have Quantum Mechanics for that. There is a distance/time (same thing, really) around the order of the 'plank length', where things start acting more like a finite computer simulation. There are various String Theories which attempt to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. It's an exciting time in Physics.
As always, WikiPedia is a good place to familiarize oneself and find more resources.
Perl6 and Parrot will stabilize in a few years (5?), and it's very likely that the bulk of CPAN will be ported to Perl6 in a way which is compatible with Parrot-hosted languages which behave themselves.
Suddenly (not) the perl syntax will be on even footing with any other language implemented over Parrot. "The right tool for the job" will take on a whole new meaning.
Nah, what the grandparent post is saying is more like "I'm good, but everyone else is bad. Mommy, if you see my brother in the creek you should spank him."
The theory is that these laws protect people from each other. By giving people guidelines for safe interaction, the "good" people will be within safe tolerances, and the "bad" people will reveal themselves as a threat and can be dealt with.
The fallacies are the ideas that speeding is ALWAYS reckless or dangerous, and that the local speed limit authority would never use a unnecessarily low speed limit as a source of revenue. The first is an assumption that "_those_ people who speed have no respect for the rules of society," and the second is an assumption that "the police are only interested in our well-being."
They would be a comforting things to believe, if one could convince oneself that they were true. What a wonderful world it would be if things were so simple.
That's true, but since so many legitimate applications DEMAND full access for installation (you know it's true), most people log in with admin perms. If an app (Cisco VPN client anyone?) insistes on installing a part of itself as a driver, the Unix user will throw a tantrum and the Windows user will just click YES ACCEPT OK FINISH DO IT NOW and complain that the software doesn't just do everything automatically.
So, for the purposes of this discussion ("Dear Slashdot, Please run my anonymous goofy driving sim software on your computer."), Windows - the windows world, magazines, experience, culture, mindset, expectations, etc - does not have an inherent sense of privileges. The architechture of the NT kernel is no less privilege-oriented than a modern Unix kernel, but the people who use the tools are completely different.
The difference between proprietary Polish and free (libre) Polish is that the former is paid for and the latter is created by the people who care enough about it to put the work in.
Free polish will come along when it's ready. It's already starting to show itself. There's plenty of projects working on eye candy, and themes.org is a good example of efforts to create coherent look-and-feels that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.
So, the answer to your first question is that FOSS _is_ capable of 'shipping' fully polished 'products'. (Why do people keep thinking FOSS is competing or selling something?) The answer to your second question (what does FOSS need to make something polished) is "people willing to put in the work." The answer to your third question (how does Firefox 'beat the curse') is "people care enough to put in the work on that project".
Free software doesn't owe anyone anything. If someone wants the stone soup to have a particular herb in it, they can go gather that herb and throw it in the pot. There's no point in complaining that the free soup tastes like wet rock.
Lastly, the most important part of Free Software is the Freedom.
Other sources also have errors in them. Books, periodicals, broadcasts, even court testimony.
Information is trixie and false. There are no guarentees, even when witnessing something first-hand.
Students should not trust any source they find, and should try to find corroborating evidence from may sources. Students should also find out the biases of the sources they use (there are always biases) and take those into account when trying to form a complete picture of whatever they're researching.
All media are created by humans and therefore suspect. Wikipedia is no different from any other source in this sense. Wikipedia's adaptability makes it an excellent colaboration tool, but I wouldn't expect it to be either more or less accurate than any other source. The things which make it more accurate are the same things which make it less so. It balances out.
Data itself is useless. It's what one does with it which makes it valuable. The 40-bit key used with DeCSS is useless without the decoding program. Movies are not at all entertaining if one has no context within which to appreciate them. There are no facts without questions they answer and people asking those questions and reasons for asking and answering those questions. Everything is relative, everything is subjective. Objective truth is an ideal we approach asymtotically, like perfect efficiency in machines. These ideals are impossible, but worth persuing.
The problem I see is that you fail to make clear what the real problem is. It's only scary when the implants are _required_. As long as indiviuals have real choice in the matter, I don't see a problem with it. I would support thought-control chips for those who elected to get them. I would never get one of my own. As long as it's truely voluntary it's not slavery.
The issue does get more complicated then people are presented the choice of "get an implant or pay 'you might be dangerous' fines." A choice between two unwanted options is not freedom.
This is the same objection I have to any state mandates. Public education is great. Mandatory public education is less great. National ID cards don't bother me. Mandatory identification bothers me. Helping the homeless is nice. Prohibiting homelessness bothers me. Helping people pick them selves up from financial disaster is probably good for society. Requiring people to have jobs until they're 55 and then requiring them to retire is a bad idea.
Yes, there is a difference between helpful and harmful discourse, but there's no objective way to tell one from the other. One person's helpful discourse is another person's extreme alarmist rantings.
The meaning of Free Speech is that people are free to say things that people in power don't want them to day, like "Hitler is a murderous megalomaniac," and "Jews are not the problem with Germany today." Those were extreme statements in Nazi Germany, or so I've read.
Furthermore, "Bush is am imbecile" is no less valuable a statement than something more constructive like, "Bush lacks the wisdom and intellect I look for in a leader." The latter is more construtive, but the former must be allowed too, because there's no objective way to tell them apart.
It's also true that you must be free to complain about other people's free speech, and I commend you for speaking up. I'm just clarifying that no speech can ever be exempt, or the freedom is inhibited everywhere.
The article seems to indicate that this woman had no knowledge of how her computer was used. HOWEVER, I support the idea of posthumously trading files as a statement.
First, what's the statement?
* file traders don't profit from their trading
* the agencies pursuing traders do so with no concern for their customers
* that even 'respectable' old people object to the current IP system
Perhaps there are other statements, but those were the first that came to mind.
Yes, I could see devoting my last few days on earth to that cause. I like it a lot better than giving my money to starving people who are just going to die anyway, for example.
With that out of the way, I think what you propose sounds great. It'll take programmers another decade to adjust to the new model, but I think it would reveal advantages we haven't even thought of yet.
You can't easily synchronize a Mead notepad with your central database over a wireless connection in a coffee shop.
You can't do an automatic search-and-replace on a notepad.
You can't write in various computer languages and then have the notepad render or compile the language to its target format(s). Think web design, for example.
You can't passphrase-protect your notepad.
The notepad has zero levels of undo.
The question is not whether a PDA is useful, but whether the uses it has are ones you want when you're away from a regular computer. If not, that doesn't make you a ludite any more than not driving in a metropolitan city does.
IBM brings in a lot of revenue from support. Supporting, promoting and strengthining free software helps them in several ways. It stabilizes a product they're charging to support (the free software). It adds legitimacy to the product in the eyes of their customers. It undermines the value of the proprietary products the free software is competing with. It encourages non-IBM folks to contribute work to these free projects which IBM is charging to support.
In other words, what's in it for IBM is the same thing that's in it for all of us: cooperation helps us all.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that IBM has a secret internal roadmap with a milestone called "dependance on proprietary software ends". It might not happen until 2050, but whenever it happens, it makes business sense.
The details are easy to disagree over. The grandparent is trying to make a case for changing the way we think about the problem. It's parallel to treating the cause instead of the symptom. Don't just give a person pain killers when what they need is physical therapy. Don't give a person glasses when they could reverse their eye problems with daily exercises. Don't give the homeless food when what they need is jobs and education.
No discussion of specifics will be fruitful if we can't agree on the possibility that our enemies are justified.
"no one is making that [claim]" (that the environment is only significantly affected by humans)
Of course noone is stating their claims in those terms because that would sound as stupid as it is. It is, however, the dominant implication in these debates. For going on fourty years now environmentalism has been a thin veil over class warfare. "Those greedy people are killing us all."
There are legitimate environmentalists, but they are rare and too polite to be heard.
It is no more possible to stop file sharing activities than it is to end drug trade, prostitution, or running moonshine.
Alochol was legalized in the US because enforcing the laws made the mob and crooked officials rich, and because the laws effects on people were not to cause them to stop drinking, but to change when, where, and how they drank.
Keeping these other things illegal is wasteful. Enforcing these laws doesn't help the 'victims' or the 'criminals', and in some cases makes things worse.
More specifically:
Artists do not get more money from RIAA/MPAA prosecution of traders (the lawers might). Crack babies aren't helped or prevented by The Drug War. Neighborhoods do not clean up from the police putting a bunch of hookers and johns in jail.
But to answer your question, there is nothing that 'legitimate' file traders need to do. It can't be stopped. It's just a matter of time before the current social system crumbles before the mighty wheels of the next version.
"Maybe if they actually *tried* linux they could see..."
I doubt it.
With a few exceptions, the people who genuinely like Windows, Linux, or MacOS like them based on some fundamental principle. Linux users like that nothing is held back from them. Windows users like that they aren't subjected to any of the gritty details. Mac users like the pretty colors and "it just works". (Appologees for the gross over-generalizations.)
Your assertion is a little like saying, "if Republicans would just spend some time at a homeless shelter dishing out soup they'd understand welfare.", or "if Democrats spent some time with crack babies they'd understand drug prohibition."
Sure, there are people who are ignorant, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that People Are Different. Even if the people on the various sides of the various fences COULD agree on The Facts and The Rules Of The Universe, they STILL wouldn't agree on What We Should Do.
There is a school of thought which says that privacy is only necessary to keep people equal. With ubiquitous monitoring, privacy would not even be something people would want. The usual privacy concern is that our secrets will be used against us. If someone knew I had a gold-plated toilet they would steal it or mock me.
With ubiquitous monitoring the theft of the toilet would be recorded and the information on the event would be available to everyone. Since I would also know the embarressing things about people who mocked me, I probably wouldn't mind getting teased about my fancy toilet.
The problem with lack of privacy isn't that our secrets aren't secret, but that it's one directional. Who watches the watchers? Privacy is like money. If some people have more than others it creates an imbalance which is open to exploitation (stolen gold toilets). If noone has privacy then exploitation is not possible because the playing field is level again.
I don't favor invasive monitoring, but I do support fully public two-way monitoring. I want anyone to be able to see me walk from home to the bus, and from the bus to work, and I want to have the ability to find out who watched me, and to call up video of them watching me. The technology is not here yet, but when it is, we will have to deal with it.
Funny story: I worked at a startup four years ago, and EMC tried to get me fired for not buying their $3.6m 1.5TB system. Then the salesman went into his "I'm going to lose my job if you don't buy it" routine. They also claimed we weren't testing it correctly. We were testing through a server attached to a load farm housing copies of real work data.
Never buy anything from EMC. They fired their engineers years ago. EMC is a sales and marketing company. They even run their Clarion equipment on embeded Windows.
Our company acquired $68m in venture capital in about 2 (years?).
Part of the difference between the US and European auto markets is that the entirety of Europe would fit in the land area occupied by one or two of our largest states (depending on what one includes as part of Europe). I'll drive two hours to visit my sister, six to visit my parents, and I'm planning a week-long roadtrip for next spring.
When one has the mindset that one is going to spend a lot of time inside something, one wants a lot of room and comfort. A motorhome is impractical because it's hard to find parking and they're no fun to drive. Over-sized regular vehicals are a compromise.
We've lived like this for many generations, and it's going to take a lot of work to grow out of it. It has already started in the major cities. Public transit in large cities has improved a great deal (I spend 40 minutes a day on the bus commuting), and small efficient vehicals are showing up more frequently.
So as one of the people trapped in the US, I ask that the rest of the world please be patient with us while we come to our senses.
Actually, it is funny. It's not appropriate for a press release, but it is funny.
Since none of the antagonists have any legitimate knowledge of the authors' races or sexual preferences, either accusation reflects more on the attacker than the victim. The humor is more obvious if I blow it out of proportion:
"to everyone who came out to show their support for us and who defended us when everyone was calling us tri-sexual, purple and green spotted, turds, grass clippings, pasta brains and worse."
Or, shortened: "to everyone who supported us while idiots called us names."
If the attackers were making legitimate complaints, and the defenders re-phrased them as "calling us gay", that would be insensitive to homosexuals.
In this case, "calling us gay" is shorthand for all the stupid crap people post on message boards, most of which ammounts to little more than name calling, often involving the word 'gay' or 'fag'.
Anyone taking the comment badly is failing to take all the context into consideration.
"Yes, they do make a lot of money, but I can say that they also earn that money.
If you think otherwise, consider it this way--for every test that they publish there are literally thousands of hours of research, testing, and retesting that have been done."
No matter how much time, research, testing, and retesting I put into my latest creation on the toilet, I don't think anyone will be interested in buying it.
Slashdot Mirror
If I could work one 40 hour shift a week, and have the rest of the week off, I'd be thrilled. Even more so if science finds a way to reduce my weekly sleep time without negative health consequences.
Casions make money by selling the illusion of easy money. Casinos are not institutions created to give money to people who are good at math and memorization. Those people are not "legitamite gamblers", because they aren't gambling: they know they will win. They're not even customers, because the house is losing money to them.
The Casino owners don't gamble either. They do whatever it takes to make sure they win on average. Making sure there's no way the customers can guarentee themselves a win is part of that process.
The only reason the Casino can get away with its own form of cheating is that they're the ones providing the service: the illusion. They build a fancy world, staff it with beautiful people, and customers gladly hand over their money. Some of the customers gain enjoyment from this arrangement by dilluding themselves into thinking they've "figured it out" or whatever. But any customers who actually do find a way to reliably win _are cheating_.
The only way to reliably win without cheating is to setup your own casino.
If you're really curious and you want a deep, but approachable explination of all things physics, go to your library and look for the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
So, what does the formula mean?
The E=mc^2 formula accurately predicts how much energy it will be absorbed or released in a nuclear reaction. This is because the mass of an atom is not just the sum of its protons, neutrons and electrons. It takes energy to hold that atom together, and that energy manifests as mass. If a physicist looks up the mass of Deuterium (Hydrogen with an extra neutron) and Helium (two protons and two neutrons), and then compares 2*Mass(D) to Mass(He), she will find that the He atom is slightly less massive. If you mutiply that spare mass by 300000km/s^2, you get a number (in Joules, I think) which corresponds to the energy released by the fusion of two Deuterium atoms into one Helium atom. That's an H bomb.
Another thing this formula predicts is that a particle with a non-zero mass cannot exceed the speed of light. As the particle is accelerated its mass (from the point of view of the rest of the universe) will increase. As its mass increases, the energy it takes to accelerate the particle increases. A physicist can keep adding energy 'till the cows come home, and that particle will just keep getting heavier. Remember that Force is Mass times Acceleration. That is F=ma. As the 'm' increases (because E increased), the force required for the same acceleration also increases. In fact, the reason for the c^2 is because of this particular effect. The speed of light is defined by this formula. All zero-mass particles (such as the photon which carries light) must travel at exactly 'c', or they would break the rules. In a way, 'c' is as close as we have to our old concept of instantaneous or infinite speed. From the light's point of view, it travels everywhere immediately. It's only because of relativity and remote observation that light can be said to have a non-infinite speed. But again I over-simplify.
With all this discussion, you may wonder where Relativity breaks down? So far it's had a hard time with very small scales, so we have Quantum Mechanics for that. There is a distance/time (same thing, really) around the order of the 'plank length', where things start acting more like a finite computer simulation. There are various String Theories which attempt to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. It's an exciting time in Physics.
As always, WikiPedia is a good place to familiarize oneself and find more resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity
Perl6 and Parrot will stabilize in a few years (5?), and it's very likely that the bulk of CPAN will be ported to Perl6 in a way which is compatible with Parrot-hosted languages which behave themselves.
Suddenly (not) the perl syntax will be on even footing with any other language implemented over Parrot. "The right tool for the job" will take on a whole new meaning.
Nah, what the grandparent post is saying is more like "I'm good, but everyone else is bad. Mommy, if you see my brother in the creek you should spank him."
The theory is that these laws protect people from each other. By giving people guidelines for safe interaction, the "good" people will be within safe tolerances, and the "bad" people will reveal themselves as a threat and can be dealt with.
The fallacies are the ideas that speeding is ALWAYS reckless or dangerous, and that the local speed limit authority would never use a unnecessarily low speed limit as a source of revenue. The first is an assumption that "_those_ people who speed have no respect for the rules of society," and the second is an assumption that "the police are only interested in our well-being."
They would be a comforting things to believe, if one could convince oneself that they were true. What a wonderful world it would be if things were so simple.
That's true, but since so many legitimate applications DEMAND full access for installation (you know it's true), most people log in with admin perms. If an app (Cisco VPN client anyone?) insistes on installing a part of itself as a driver, the Unix user will throw a tantrum and the Windows user will just click YES ACCEPT OK FINISH DO IT NOW and complain that the software doesn't just do everything automatically.
So, for the purposes of this discussion ("Dear Slashdot, Please run my anonymous goofy driving sim software on your computer."), Windows - the windows world, magazines, experience, culture, mindset, expectations, etc - does not have an inherent sense of privileges. The architechture of the NT kernel is no less privilege-oriented than a modern Unix kernel, but the people who use the tools are completely different.
The difference is that GreaseMonkey cannot install itself without the user's consent.
Wouldn't it be better to compile to native code then?
I guess I don't understand the point of JIT. If performance matters, compile to native. If not, use a VM. Why bother with the middle ground?
The difference between proprietary Polish and free (libre) Polish is that the former is paid for and the latter is created by the people who care enough about it to put the work in.
Free polish will come along when it's ready. It's already starting to show itself. There's plenty of projects working on eye candy, and themes.org is a good example of efforts to create coherent look-and-feels that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.
So, the answer to your first question is that FOSS _is_ capable of 'shipping' fully polished 'products'. (Why do people keep thinking FOSS is competing or selling something?) The answer to your second question (what does FOSS need to make something polished) is "people willing to put in the work." The answer to your third question (how does Firefox 'beat the curse') is "people care enough to put in the work on that project".
Free software doesn't owe anyone anything. If someone wants the stone soup to have a particular herb in it, they can go gather that herb and throw it in the pot. There's no point in complaining that the free soup tastes like wet rock.
Lastly, the most important part of Free Software is the Freedom.
Other sources also have errors in them. Books, periodicals, broadcasts, even court testimony.
Information is trixie and false. There are no guarentees, even when witnessing something first-hand.
Students should not trust any source they find, and should try to find corroborating evidence from may sources. Students should also find out the biases of the sources they use (there are always biases) and take those into account when trying to form a complete picture of whatever they're researching.
All media are created by humans and therefore suspect. Wikipedia is no different from any other source in this sense. Wikipedia's adaptability makes it an excellent colaboration tool, but I wouldn't expect it to be either more or less accurate than any other source. The things which make it more accurate are the same things which make it less so. It balances out.
Data itself is useless. It's what one does with it which makes it valuable. The 40-bit key used with DeCSS is useless without the decoding program. Movies are not at all entertaining if one has no context within which to appreciate them. There are no facts without questions they answer and people asking those questions and reasons for asking and answering those questions. Everything is relative, everything is subjective. Objective truth is an ideal we approach asymtotically, like perfect efficiency in machines. These ideals are impossible, but worth persuing.
The problem I see is that you fail to make clear what the real problem is. It's only scary when the implants are _required_. As long as indiviuals have real choice in the matter, I don't see a problem with it. I would support thought-control chips for those who elected to get them. I would never get one of my own. As long as it's truely voluntary it's not slavery.
The issue does get more complicated then people are presented the choice of "get an implant or pay 'you might be dangerous' fines." A choice between two unwanted options is not freedom.
This is the same objection I have to any state mandates. Public education is great. Mandatory public education is less great. National ID cards don't bother me. Mandatory identification bothers me. Helping the homeless is nice. Prohibiting homelessness bothers me. Helping people pick them selves up from financial disaster is probably good for society. Requiring people to have jobs until they're 55 and then requiring them to retire is a bad idea.
Etc.
Yes, there is a difference between helpful and harmful discourse, but there's no objective way to tell one from the other. One person's helpful discourse is another person's extreme alarmist rantings.
The meaning of Free Speech is that people are free to say things that people in power don't want them to day, like "Hitler is a murderous megalomaniac," and "Jews are not the problem with Germany today." Those were extreme statements in Nazi Germany, or so I've read.
Furthermore, "Bush is am imbecile" is no less valuable a statement than something more constructive like, "Bush lacks the wisdom and intellect I look for in a leader." The latter is more construtive, but the former must be allowed too, because there's no objective way to tell them apart.
It's also true that you must be free to complain about other people's free speech, and I commend you for speaking up. I'm just clarifying that no speech can ever be exempt, or the freedom is inhibited everywhere.
The article seems to indicate that this woman had no knowledge of how her computer was used. HOWEVER, I support the idea of posthumously trading files as a statement.
First, what's the statement?
* file traders don't profit from their trading
* the agencies pursuing traders do so with no concern for their customers
* that even 'respectable' old people object to the current IP system
Perhaps there are other statements, but those were the first that came to mind.
Yes, I could see devoting my last few days on earth to that cause. I like it a lot better than giving my money to starving people who are just going to die anyway, for example.
... he wants you to fund his 25 processors on a single chip project.
/ /c olorforth.com/25x.html
Referenced from http://colorforth.com/
but only visible via the way-back machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020806132234/http:
With that out of the way, I think what you propose sounds great. It'll take programmers another decade to adjust to the new model, but I think it would reveal advantages we haven't even thought of yet.
You can't easily synchronize a Mead notepad with your central database over a wireless connection in a coffee shop.
You can't do an automatic search-and-replace on a notepad.
You can't write in various computer languages and then have the notepad render or compile the language to its target format(s). Think web design, for example.
You can't passphrase-protect your notepad.
The notepad has zero levels of undo.
The question is not whether a PDA is useful, but whether the uses it has are ones you want when you're away from a regular computer. If not, that doesn't make you a ludite any more than not driving in a metropolitan city does.
IBM brings in a lot of revenue from support. Supporting, promoting and strengthining free software helps them in several ways. It stabilizes a product they're charging to support (the free software). It adds legitimacy to the product in the eyes of their customers. It undermines the value of the proprietary products the free software is competing with. It encourages non-IBM folks to contribute work to these free projects which IBM is charging to support.
In other words, what's in it for IBM is the same thing that's in it for all of us: cooperation helps us all.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that IBM has a secret internal roadmap with a milestone called "dependance on proprietary software ends". It might not happen until 2050, but whenever it happens, it makes business sense.
The details are easy to disagree over. The grandparent is trying to make a case for changing the way we think about the problem. It's parallel to treating the cause instead of the symptom. Don't just give a person pain killers when what they need is physical therapy. Don't give a person glasses when they could reverse their eye problems with daily exercises. Don't give the homeless food when what they need is jobs and education.
No discussion of specifics will be fruitful if we can't agree on the possibility that our enemies are justified.
"no one is making that [claim]"
(that the environment is only significantly affected by humans)
Of course noone is stating their claims in those terms because that would sound as stupid as it is. It is, however, the dominant implication in these debates. For going on fourty years now environmentalism has been a thin veil over class warfare. "Those greedy people are killing us all."
There are legitimate environmentalists, but they are rare and too polite to be heard.
It is no more possible to stop file sharing activities than it is to end drug trade, prostitution, or running moonshine.
Alochol was legalized in the US because enforcing the laws made the mob and crooked officials rich, and because the laws effects on people were not to cause them to stop drinking, but to change when, where, and how they drank.
Keeping these other things illegal is wasteful. Enforcing these laws doesn't help the 'victims' or the 'criminals', and in some cases makes things worse.
More specifically:
Artists do not get more money from RIAA/MPAA prosecution of traders (the lawers might). Crack babies aren't helped or prevented by The Drug War. Neighborhoods do not clean up from the police putting a bunch of hookers and johns in jail.
But to answer your question, there is nothing that 'legitimate' file traders need to do. It can't be stopped. It's just a matter of time before the current social system crumbles before the mighty wheels of the next version.
"Maybe if they actually *tried* linux they could see..."
I doubt it.
With a few exceptions, the people who genuinely like Windows, Linux, or MacOS like them based on some fundamental principle. Linux users like that nothing is held back from them. Windows users like that they aren't subjected to any of the gritty details. Mac users like the pretty colors and "it just works". (Appologees for the gross over-generalizations.)
Your assertion is a little like saying, "if Republicans would just spend some time at a homeless shelter dishing out soup they'd understand welfare.", or "if Democrats spent some time with crack babies they'd understand drug prohibition."
Sure, there are people who are ignorant, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that People Are Different. Even if the people on the various sides of the various fences COULD agree on The Facts and The Rules Of The Universe, they STILL wouldn't agree on What We Should Do.
Because People Are Different.
There is a school of thought which says that privacy is only necessary to keep people equal. With ubiquitous monitoring, privacy would not even be something people would want. The usual privacy concern is that our secrets will be used against us. If someone knew I had a gold-plated toilet they would steal it or mock me.
With ubiquitous monitoring the theft of the toilet would be recorded and the information on the event would be available to everyone. Since I would also know the embarressing things about people who mocked me, I probably wouldn't mind getting teased about my fancy toilet.
The problem with lack of privacy isn't that our secrets aren't secret, but that it's one directional. Who watches the watchers? Privacy is like money. If some people have more than others it creates an imbalance which is open to exploitation (stolen gold toilets). If noone has privacy then exploitation is not possible because the playing field is level again.
I don't favor invasive monitoring, but I do support fully public two-way monitoring. I want anyone to be able to see me walk from home to the bus, and from the bus to work, and I want to have the ability to find out who watched me, and to call up video of them watching me. The technology is not here yet, but when it is, we will have to deal with it.
Funny story: I worked at a startup four years ago, and EMC tried to get me fired for not buying their $3.6m 1.5TB system. Then the salesman went into his "I'm going to lose my job if you don't buy it" routine. They also claimed we weren't testing it correctly. We were testing through a server attached to a load farm housing copies of real work data.
Never buy anything from EMC. They fired their engineers years ago. EMC is a sales and marketing company. They even run their Clarion equipment on embeded Windows.
Our company acquired $68m in venture capital in about 2 (years?).
Part of the difference between the US and European auto markets is that the entirety of Europe would fit in the land area occupied by one or two of our largest states (depending on what one includes as part of Europe). I'll drive two hours to visit my sister, six to visit my parents, and I'm planning a week-long roadtrip for next spring.
When one has the mindset that one is going to spend a lot of time inside something, one wants a lot of room and comfort. A motorhome is impractical because it's hard to find parking and they're no fun to drive. Over-sized regular vehicals are a compromise.
We've lived like this for many generations, and it's going to take a lot of work to grow out of it. It has already started in the major cities. Public transit in large cities has improved a great deal (I spend 40 minutes a day on the bus commuting), and small efficient vehicals are showing up more frequently.
So as one of the people trapped in the US, I ask that the rest of the world please be patient with us while we come to our senses.
Thank you.
Actually, it is funny. It's not appropriate for a press release, but it is funny.
Since none of the antagonists have any legitimate knowledge of the authors' races or sexual preferences, either accusation reflects more on the attacker than the victim. The humor is more obvious if I blow it out of proportion:
"to everyone who came out to show their support for us and who defended us when everyone was calling us tri-sexual, purple and green spotted, turds, grass clippings, pasta brains and worse."
Or, shortened: "to everyone who supported us while idiots called us names."
If the attackers were making legitimate complaints, and the defenders re-phrased them as "calling us gay", that would be insensitive to homosexuals.
In this case, "calling us gay" is shorthand for all the stupid crap people post on message boards, most of which ammounts to little more than name calling, often involving the word 'gay' or 'fag'.
Anyone taking the comment badly is failing to take all the context into consideration.
"Yes, they do make a lot of money, but I can say that they also earn that money.
If you think otherwise, consider it this way--for every test that they publish there are literally thousands of hours of research, testing, and retesting that have been done."
No matter how much time, research, testing, and retesting I put into my latest creation on the toilet, I don't think anyone will be interested in buying it.