There are two sorts of software patents. First there are those that represent some new, significant innovation that took some sort of inventor's skill to create (like LZW compression). These things shouldn't be patented because of the peculiarities of software.
Then there are the dumbass patents, like this one... things that, if they were meatspace instead of software, wouldn't deserve a patent either. You know the kind. One-click shopping. Automatic updates.
See, we have a whole pile of things we can do with software, so many that there are combinations that are obviously useful but haven't been tried yet. These don't deserve patents. Back when this patent happened, widespread use of the internet was relatively new, and people were just starting to apply it to stuff. Radio over IP! Voice over IP! Weather! Live porn with webcams! Webforums! Shopping (with cookies, to do the one-click thing)! Auction houses! Automatic updates!
None of this stuff is patentable, or would be patentable even in a land with software patents. It would be kinda neat to have a wi-fi stove, f'r instance, that would IM me when my food's done. But this is in no way patentable, since it's just sticking two things (that really were innovations) together.
You didn't mention the one that needs to be slashed the most: the military.
$500 billion. Roll that one around in your head for a bit.
This particular case (veterans' benefits) is different, since that's a real benefit to people. But I have gotten *no utility whatsoever* out of most of our military spending. Neither has the rest of the world, and--to the extent that they have--it'd be possible to provide more benefit for cheaper using some other method.
I'm not saying that the US should eliminate its military--shit happens, and it's good to have a fighter jet or three in the neighborhood when shit starts to happen. But our current military capability grossly exceeds our need for defense--we'd be secure from invasion with half the budget we have now.
What to do with that $1*10^11+ wad? Pay down the debt. Give it back to taxpayers. Go to Mars. Fund Aids research. Regain the lead from CERN in particle physics. Build public-access wlan hotspots. Fix roads. I don't care.
But spend it on something that benefits someone.
(Oh, and the argument "cutting the military budget would put all those defense R&D contractors out of work": there are plenty of jobs for EE/CPE/MAE types that need doing that aren't military.)
There's nothing sadder than engineers who've been chomping at the bit for years wanting to do some *real* space work hearing about Bush's Mars plan, maybe even getting to work on preliminaries, and knowing that it's all a political game and nothing will ever actually get off the ground.
I may be a bit slanted toward the private rather than the corporate mindset, but the only impact the SCO thing has had on my ability to use Linux is that I have to keep reading about it on slashdot. They've generated a lot of press, and bought a new Lexus for some lawyers, but they haven't gotten anywhere *near* the thing that actually matters: the people writing the code.
It'll take a much bigger legal brouhaha than SCO, or even Microsoft, has the power to create to do that.
Plus, in any high-stakes legal battle it'll take just one slipup by the aggressor for the whole thing to turn into a public-relations bonanza for OSS: "Megacorp uses obscure patent and legal strongarming to quash altruistic software development, film at 11." Then you run cuddly footage describing how these people have built their own OS from scratch, just 'cause it's nifty and to create something everyone can benefit from.
That's the last thing Microsoft wants--Linux looking sympathetic in the news, MS looking like a bully. It's like mugging nuns.
Other major OS's do indeed install other stuff. Mandrake 10 installs multiple CD's worth of stuff, in fact, and I'm very, very grateful that it does, 'cause I don't want to sit there urpmi'ing stuff over dialup until the cows come home.
The difference is that they don't pretend to be part of the OS. There's a different between an operating environment and an OS: the former includes kde, konqueror, X, openoffice, kmail, and on and on. The point is that these are all interchangeable--if I don't like konqueror, I can go get something else.
It's like cars. I can go buy a car, and it will almost certainly contain a stereo of varying quality. Is that stereo part of the car? No. Am I glad it came with the car, preinstalled and already working without me having to fuss about with cables? Yep.
The car manufacturer, and Mandrake, give me the opportunity to fuss around with cables if I want.
No patents were violated in the creation of Linux et al., to my (limited) knowledge. If any legitimate patents were violated, then code needs to be rewritten. OSS has already done this: see ogg vs. mp3, png vs. gif.
Illegitimate patent claims can be beaten in court. Plus, with the widespread and revenue-free (thus, legally ephemeral) development and distribution model of OSS, it'd take a severe legal hit to have all that much impact.
There's nothing wrong with the GPL, and the threat of frivolous lawsuits shouldn't make people contemplate changing it.
The problem is that Microsoft has redefined what "operating system" means. To me, an operating system involves things like schedulers, file systems, memory managers, network stacks, user accounts, and device drivers.
It doesn't involve drawing particular pictures on the screen, although it may provide a method to do so.
It sure as hell doesn't involve a web browser.
Microsoft has created this homogenous "operating environment" (Windows Kernel/Windows GUI/MSIE/Office/Outlook) and tried to claim that the whole thing is an operating system. It's not, although Microsoft has tried its darndest to make it such by assuring that you have to use the IE-based tools to talk to the kernel.
"I already have my federal, state, county and city governments. I'm all stocked up here and don't need anymore, thank you very much."
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but:
I've got a city government (which is doing pretty well), a county government (which I never see), and a state government. Trouble is, that state is Alabama... which is a steaming pile of poo. So, I'm glad I've got the federal government to keep the state folks in line; would you believe that a vote to permit interracial marriage failed here four years ago?
I'm not sure if I want a world government to keep my federal government in line. Until four years ago I'd have said that they did a pretty good job. GWB has screwed things up pretty badly recently, but hopefully the process can work like it should: we vote him out, repeal the Patriot Act, reverse the rest of the damage he did, and things get back to normal.
But, say, Zimbabwe? The people there could really use someone with both 1) a bigger stick than Mugabe, and 2) the jurisdiction to use it.
If I'm anything I'm a libertarian--I think government shouldn't meddle just for the sake of meddling. (I had to sign a form giving my *dentist* permission to use my records for counterterrorism. What?) And, thus, the idea of yet another layer of government isn't exactly a walk in the park. But, without the Feds to keep the rednecks in line, this state (AL) would be in much worse shape than it is now.
I think the current economic situation is creating the dilemma you allude to (and it is a problem).
The way I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) is that there are two fundamental forces that affect the price of goods in a capitalistic economy, one in each direction. The first is the profit motive: everyone selling things wants to make money, so they tend to favor high prices. The second is competition: if someone else finds a way to produce something for less (or accept less profit), they'll be able to sell more of it than the other guy who's charging more, and come out ahead.
The reason the free market is a good economic system (usually) is that competition will drive the price of anything down to something close to the cost of production. Put another way, "whatever they can get away with charging" and "how much it cost to make" are pretty close much of the time. This system works pretty well for a lot of things: for instance, computers. I'm quite frankly surprised that people manage to make laptops for $1k.
The problem is, what's the cost of production of music? It's not that high, any way you slice it: there's a guy in town that makes professional-sounding recordings with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment and under a day's work editing. It certainly costs much less than $15-$20 to make a CD, in the volumes that they're sold in. Where does the extra money go?
Mainly: marketing. See, in many businesses it's possible to compete on price and quality without major investments in marketing. However, there's something about the mass-market music business that makes a well-marketed $15 CD sell better than an equal-quality $5 one. Maybe it's that their main market (12-20-year-olds) is highly vulnerable to advertising? Maybe it's that the quality of music is a subjective thing: people can be convinced that one band is better than another through an advertising campaign, but nothing is going to convince me that a 40GB disk is bigger than an 80GB one. (However, see "megahertz myth" for an attempt.)
It's also interesting that I can buy a recording of the New York Philharmonic--a group comprised of around a hundred musicians each with years of training--for the same price as one of a lone pop singer accompanied by a synthesizer. Discuss.
The details of/why/ CD's are being sold for far more than their cost of production aren't important. The important bit is that 1) the incremental cost of production is low, and 2) some people have found a way (the Internet) to make it virtually zero. In a truly competitive legal-economic system, this would--by force of competition--become part of the mainstream distribution channel. Economics favors a sort of "lowest-energy state" much as chemistry does; in this case it is extremely high volumes and low prices, since the incremental cost can be brought to zero.
But it hasn't. There's iTunes et al., but they still sell music for more than the cost of production. Unauthorized copying (it is NOT "piracy", no more than masturbation is murder--think of all the little sperm that never got a chance!. Piracy involves robbery and murder.) is as prevalent as it is simply because the current distribution method isn't the economic ideal. Why isn't it? That's debatable. But it is, and everyone knows it. In the minds of lots and lots of people, economic pressures, in this case, trump legal ones.
No legislative remedy to the problem you mention will succeed until the cost of music approaches the cost of production and distribution. Unfortunately, no economic solution can succeed without either fixing the *social* problem of vulnerability to marketing or changing the legal framework in a way that renders the current business model impossible.
Eh, code seems like it'd be something useful to learn anyway... all sorts of uses in a pinch.
On that note, how well does all this Amateur Packet Radio stuff work? *That* seems like something cool. (Is there enough bandwidth available to run, for instance, ssh/telnet?)
This is why we need more amateur radio operators around. (I must admit I've been delinquent and not gotten a license, but I intend to in the near future... as soon as I have the cash.)
Decentralized communications are more reliable and flexible, albeit sometimes harder to make efficient.
What, honestly, does it do right that other browsers consistently get wrong? This isn't a rhetorical question--I'm curious.
The rendering engine is slow (compared to Opera, so I'm a bit spoiled), the user interface is missing things that competitors have had for a while (mouse gestures? popup blocking? selective image/cookie blocking? tabbed browsing?), and it's got the aforementioned security issues.
IE stores each individual cookie and each individual cache object in its own file. I have seen computers (P2/350 on win98 with ~10K cache objects) get slowed to a crawl by this. Might be a good idea on reiserfs, but fat32 (and probably ntfs) choke and die on this.
Sure, there are websites that only work in IE. That's partly because people design them to be bug-compatible with it, and partly because any website that doesn't work in IE won't get published.
"I doubt that Kerry will pull all the soldiers out of the middle east if he gets elected because a lot of people will be pissed if the gas price suddenly doubled."
Right, but the taxpayers still come out ahead, since (ideally) the money being spent on military campaigns in the Middle East would wind up back in their pockets... or wind up being used to construct public transit, etc. so we don't need to buy as much gas.
I am pro-military, in the sense that I respect the sacrifices soldiers have made and that I don't want American soldiers (or anyone else, for that matter) to die by violence. I think Kerry would agree with me on this. He's also more likely than Bush to agree with me on the following two stances, so I support him (over Bush; he's certainly not my ideal leader) for president.
I am anti-military-funding. I question whether the American taxpayer, or the world at large, is getting the best return-on-investment for the $~500 billion spent annually by the USA on its military. (Ironically, that military investment has in many people's estimation less secure: had we not meddled militarily in the Middle East by setting up bases and such, some argue, it's unlikely that we would be a target by those who interpret that meddling as an act of war. I'm not sure if I agree with this viewpoint, but I do know that there are things we could do with that $500G-per-year that would provide more security than the US military.)
I am anti-military-use, for two reasons. First the escapade in Iraq has cost the American taxpayer on the order of $200G. Have either Americans or the world received their money's worth for that? If you want to help Americans with that money, either return it to the taxpayers or spend it on infrastructure/health care/whatever. If you want to be altruistic and help the world with it, fund Third World education, or buy out American pharmaceutical/agricultural patents. Second, there's the human cost of war. Military action usually results in far more bloodshed and instability than military planners foresee when they embark upon it. (The Vietnam War resulted in a lot of Vietnamese and Americans getting blown up for no real reason.) The maintenance of a sufficient military to defend one's borders is prudent, but it's also prudent to refuse to use that force--especially offensively--except as a last resort.
So, in short: I am pro-military, but I think we spend too much on it (maintain too great a force), and are too eager to use that force abroad.
If you are living in a dangerous part of town, you might be wise to buy a pistol for protection. But you don't need a Kalashnikov, especially when the criminals are twelve-year-olds with knives, and you don't shoot anyone unless you absolutely need to to protect yourself.
After my second discman in a year broke (I only have a tape deck, so I have to use external cd players with an adapter in the car), I started using my laptop as a car music player. Lots of storage, no need to burn CD's.
And, while I've got it in the car, I may as well run netstumbler...
Or they could implement a quiz period before a vote: any congresscritter who can't answer reasonable questions about the bill (with a paper copy in front of him/her, but no electronics or aides) must either vote nay or abstain.
'Course, something like this could never come to pass--it'd be used for filibuster tactics, how do you define "reasonable", who determines what's an acceptable answer, etc. But it's a scary thought-experiment to realize that something like this would drastically change the face of Congress.
Your radio bill *is* rising, although not directly.
They're playing more ads and worse music, thus the amount of time you have to expend and the number of inane ads you have to listen to in order to get the same entertainment value value has gone up.
It's all a matter of marginal costs. And, you're right--eventually when those costs (crappy radio) outweigh the value gained from radio, people will start listening to their own recordings in their cars. (Many already have, obviously.)
The "Americanism" that you refer to (that the GPL supposedly violates) is the belief in individual liberty coupled with civic responsibility--the idea that, if it doesn't infringe on anyone else's personal rights, you have the freedom to do what the hell you want and the duty to use that freedom to benefit society as a whole.
OSS is thus right in line with the original American values. As long as it doesn't mess up anyone else, the KDE developers can do whatever the hell they want with their computers: they choose to write code on them and give me a copy, so I can post this here.
Now there is a trend toward the reliance on the law, on legally-binding agreements and codification, rather than on a shared duty to be benevolent, to make people play nice. Whether this is a good thing or not is a discussion for another time, but it is certain that large organizations--chiefly, corporations and IP-holders--can make greater use of this new reliance on contracts than individuals can.
The GPL is simply a creative rechanneling of this current trend to protect individuals--who would like to protect the altruistic and hackable nature of their products--rather than those who wish to profit from them.
I wish the GPL didn't need to exist--that developers could release software with a statement to the effect of "I'd like this code to remain open and distributed free of charge. Please do me the respect of acknowledging me as the original offer, and of honoring my wishes for this work." But since, in today's climate, people (read: corporations) are bound not by honor and ethics but only by law, the OSS community needs the GPL to *protect* the original American values inherent in open source software.
I know some folks who work on water filtration and recycling systems for missions like this. It's quite a challenge, as things that we don't even consider as contaminants will build up in the water supply over enough cycles.
Remote probes aren't efficient anyway, since you've got to pay the energy cost to boost that stuff halfway to Mars anyway. May as well just make a bigger main spacecraft. On the bright side, those supplies can be boosted into Earth orbit in advance of the manned mission taking off.
Back-of-the-envelope math: A person in space goes through, iirc, about 1800 Kcalories a day. Dried food provides somewhere around 4 Kcal/gram, so you're looking at 450 grams (=1 pound) per person per day. For a four-person mission over three years, you're looking at two tons of food.
Considering that any Mars ship is going to be huge anyway, this isn't that bad. It's the water that's nasty.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two sorts of software patents. First there are those that represent some new, significant innovation that took some sort of inventor's skill to create (like LZW compression). These things shouldn't be patented because of the peculiarities of software.
Then there are the dumbass patents, like this one... things that, if they were meatspace instead of software, wouldn't deserve a patent either. You know the kind. One-click shopping. Automatic updates.
See, we have a whole pile of things we can do with software, so many that there are combinations that are obviously useful but haven't been tried yet. These don't deserve patents. Back when this patent happened, widespread use of the internet was relatively new, and people were just starting to apply it to stuff. Radio over IP! Voice over IP! Weather! Live porn with webcams! Webforums! Shopping (with cookies, to do the one-click thing)! Auction houses! Automatic updates!
None of this stuff is patentable, or would be patentable even in a land with software patents. It would be kinda neat to have a wi-fi stove, f'r instance, that would IM me when my food's done. But this is in no way patentable, since it's just sticking two things (that really were innovations) together.
You didn't mention the one that needs to be slashed the most: the military.
$500 billion. Roll that one around in your head for a bit.
This particular case (veterans' benefits) is different, since that's a real benefit to people. But I have gotten *no utility whatsoever* out of most of our military spending. Neither has the rest of the world, and--to the extent that they have--it'd be possible to provide more benefit for cheaper using some other method.
I'm not saying that the US should eliminate its military--shit happens, and it's good to have a fighter jet or three in the neighborhood when shit starts to happen. But our current military capability grossly exceeds our need for defense--we'd be secure from invasion with half the budget we have now.
What to do with that $1*10^11+ wad? Pay down the debt. Give it back to taxpayers. Go to Mars. Fund Aids research. Regain the lead from CERN in particle physics. Build public-access wlan hotspots. Fix roads. I don't care.
But spend it on something that benefits someone.
(Oh, and the argument "cutting the military budget would put all those defense R&D contractors out of work": there are plenty of jobs for EE/CPE/MAE types that need doing that aren't military.)
I live in Huntsville, AL--Rocket City USA.
There's nothing sadder than engineers who've been chomping at the bit for years wanting to do some *real* space work hearing about Bush's Mars plan, maybe even getting to work on preliminaries, and knowing that it's all a political game and nothing will ever actually get off the ground.
What problems?
I may be a bit slanted toward the private rather than the corporate mindset, but the only impact the SCO thing has had on my ability to use Linux is that I have to keep reading about it on slashdot. They've generated a lot of press, and bought a new Lexus for some lawyers, but they haven't gotten anywhere *near* the thing that actually matters: the people writing the code.
It'll take a much bigger legal brouhaha than SCO, or even Microsoft, has the power to create to do that.
Plus, in any high-stakes legal battle it'll take just one slipup by the aggressor for the whole thing to turn into a public-relations bonanza for OSS: "Megacorp uses obscure patent and legal strongarming to quash altruistic software development, film at 11." Then you run cuddly footage describing how these people have built their own OS from scratch, just 'cause it's nifty and to create something everyone can benefit from.
That's the last thing Microsoft wants--Linux looking sympathetic in the news, MS looking like a bully. It's like mugging nuns.
Other major OS's do indeed install other stuff. Mandrake 10 installs multiple CD's worth of stuff, in fact, and I'm very, very grateful that it does, 'cause I don't want to sit there urpmi'ing stuff over dialup until the cows come home.
The difference is that they don't pretend to be part of the OS. There's a different between an operating environment and an OS: the former includes kde, konqueror, X, openoffice, kmail, and on and on. The point is that these are all interchangeable--if I don't like konqueror, I can go get something else.
It's like cars. I can go buy a car, and it will almost certainly contain a stereo of varying quality. Is that stereo part of the car? No. Am I glad it came with the car, preinstalled and already working without me having to fuss about with cables? Yep.
The car manufacturer, and Mandrake, give me the opportunity to fuss around with cables if I want.
Microsoft doesn't.
Why should the OSS people hide?
No patents were violated in the creation of Linux et al., to my (limited) knowledge. If any legitimate patents were violated, then code needs to be rewritten. OSS has already done this: see ogg vs. mp3, png vs. gif.
Illegitimate patent claims can be beaten in court. Plus, with the widespread and revenue-free (thus, legally ephemeral) development and distribution model of OSS, it'd take a severe legal hit to have all that much impact.
There's nothing wrong with the GPL, and the threat of frivolous lawsuits shouldn't make people contemplate changing it.
The problem is that Microsoft has redefined what "operating system" means. To me, an operating system involves things like schedulers, file systems, memory managers, network stacks, user accounts, and device drivers.
It doesn't involve drawing particular pictures on the screen, although it may provide a method to do so.
It sure as hell doesn't involve a web browser.
Microsoft has created this homogenous "operating environment" (Windows Kernel/Windows GUI/MSIE/Office/Outlook) and tried to claim that the whole thing is an operating system. It's not, although Microsoft has tried its darndest to make it such by assuring that you have to use the IE-based tools to talk to the kernel.
Link (+1, Funny)
apple.com?
"I already have my federal, state, county and city governments. I'm all stocked up here and don't need anymore, thank you very much."
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but:
I've got a city government (which is doing pretty well), a county government (which I never see), and a state government. Trouble is, that state is Alabama... which is a steaming pile of poo. So, I'm glad I've got the federal government to keep the state folks in line; would you believe that a vote to permit interracial marriage failed here four years ago?
I'm not sure if I want a world government to keep my federal government in line. Until four years ago I'd have said that they did a pretty good job. GWB has screwed things up pretty badly recently, but hopefully the process can work like it should: we vote him out, repeal the Patriot Act, reverse the rest of the damage he did, and things get back to normal.
But, say, Zimbabwe? The people there could really use someone with both 1) a bigger stick than Mugabe, and 2) the jurisdiction to use it.
If I'm anything I'm a libertarian--I think government shouldn't meddle just for the sake of meddling. (I had to sign a form giving my *dentist* permission to use my records for counterterrorism. What?) And, thus, the idea of yet another layer of government isn't exactly a walk in the park. But, without the Feds to keep the rednecks in line, this state (AL) would be in much worse shape than it is now.
I think the current economic situation is creating the dilemma you allude to (and it is a problem).
/why/ CD's are being sold for far more than their cost of production aren't important. The important bit is that 1) the incremental cost of production is low, and 2) some people have found a way (the Internet) to make it virtually zero. In a truly competitive legal-economic system, this would--by force of competition--become part of the mainstream distribution channel. Economics favors a sort of "lowest-energy state" much as chemistry does; in this case it is extremely high volumes and low prices, since the incremental cost can be brought to zero.
The way I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) is that there are two fundamental forces that affect the price of goods in a capitalistic economy, one in each direction. The first is the profit motive: everyone selling things wants to make money, so they tend to favor high prices. The second is competition: if someone else finds a way to produce something for less (or accept less profit), they'll be able to sell more of it than the other guy who's charging more, and come out ahead.
The reason the free market is a good economic system (usually) is that competition will drive the price of anything down to something close to the cost of production. Put another way, "whatever they can get away with charging" and "how much it cost to make" are pretty close much of the time. This system works pretty well for a lot of things: for instance, computers. I'm quite frankly surprised that people manage to make laptops for $1k.
The problem is, what's the cost of production of music? It's not that high, any way you slice it: there's a guy in town that makes professional-sounding recordings with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment and under a day's work editing. It certainly costs much less than $15-$20 to make a CD, in the volumes that they're sold in. Where does the extra money go?
Mainly: marketing. See, in many businesses it's possible to compete on price and quality without major investments in marketing. However, there's something about the mass-market music business that makes a well-marketed $15 CD sell better than an equal-quality $5 one. Maybe it's that their main market (12-20-year-olds) is highly vulnerable to advertising? Maybe it's that the quality of music is a subjective thing: people can be convinced that one band is better than another through an advertising campaign, but nothing is going to convince me that a 40GB disk is bigger than an 80GB one. (However, see "megahertz myth" for an attempt.)
It's also interesting that I can buy a recording of the New York Philharmonic--a group comprised of around a hundred musicians each with years of training--for the same price as one of a lone pop singer accompanied by a synthesizer. Discuss.
The details of
But it hasn't. There's iTunes et al., but they still sell music for more than the cost of production. Unauthorized copying (it is NOT "piracy", no more than masturbation is murder--think of all the little sperm that never got a chance!. Piracy involves robbery and murder.) is as prevalent as it is simply because the current distribution method isn't the economic ideal. Why isn't it? That's debatable. But it is, and everyone knows it. In the minds of lots and lots of people, economic pressures, in this case, trump legal ones.
No legislative remedy to the problem you mention will succeed until the cost of music approaches the cost of production and distribution. Unfortunately, no economic solution can succeed without either fixing the *social* problem of vulnerability to marketing or changing the legal framework in a way that renders the current business model impossible.
Eh, code seems like it'd be something useful to learn anyway... all sorts of uses in a pinch.
On that note, how well does all this Amateur Packet Radio stuff work? *That* seems like something cool. (Is there enough bandwidth available to run, for instance, ssh/telnet?)
This is why we need more amateur radio operators around. (I must admit I've been delinquent and not gotten a license, but I intend to in the near future... as soon as I have the cash.)
Decentralized communications are more reliable and flexible, albeit sometimes harder to make efficient.
This seems like yet another problem related to this wacky "registry" thing.
Honestly, what's the point?
What advantage does the Windows Registry have over the "bunch of plain-vanilla ASCII configuration files" method that the Unices use?
What, honestly, does it do right that other browsers consistently get wrong? This isn't a rhetorical question--I'm curious.
The rendering engine is slow (compared to Opera, so I'm a bit spoiled), the user interface is missing things that competitors have had for a while (mouse gestures? popup blocking? selective image/cookie blocking? tabbed browsing?), and it's got the aforementioned security issues.
IE stores each individual cookie and each individual cache object in its own file. I have seen computers (P2/350 on win98 with ~10K cache objects) get slowed to a crawl by this. Might be a good idea on reiserfs, but fat32 (and probably ntfs) choke and die on this.
Sure, there are websites that only work in IE. That's partly because people design them to be bug-compatible with it, and partly because any website that doesn't work in IE won't get published.
I can't vote with my dollars where it counts.
I don't like Microsoft, so I don't give them any of my money. That's voting with my money, and is how the system is supposed to work.
I don't like US militarism, but I have no choice but to fund it--if I try to spend my money elsewhere, I'll get thrown in jail for tax evasion.
Why can't this country do something useful with its vast wealth instead of building unneeded weapons and funding unjustified wars?
"I doubt that Kerry will pull all the soldiers out of the middle east if he gets elected because a lot of people will be pissed if the gas price suddenly doubled."
Right, but the taxpayers still come out ahead, since (ideally) the money being spent on military campaigns in the Middle East would wind up back in their pockets... or wind up being used to construct public transit, etc. so we don't need to buy as much gas.
I am pro-military, in the sense that I respect the sacrifices soldiers have made and that I don't want American soldiers (or anyone else, for that matter) to die by violence. I think Kerry would agree with me on this. He's also more likely than Bush to agree with me on the following two stances, so I support him (over Bush; he's certainly not my ideal leader) for president.
I am anti-military-funding. I question whether the American taxpayer, or the world at large, is getting the best return-on-investment for the $~500 billion spent annually by the USA on its military. (Ironically, that military investment has in many people's estimation less secure: had we not meddled militarily in the Middle East by setting up bases and such, some argue, it's unlikely that we would be a target by those who interpret that meddling as an act of war. I'm not sure if I agree with this viewpoint, but I do know that there are things we could do with that $500G-per-year that would provide more security than the US military.)
I am anti-military-use, for two reasons. First the escapade in Iraq has cost the American taxpayer on the order of $200G. Have either Americans or the world received their money's worth for that? If you want to help Americans with that money, either return it to the taxpayers or spend it on infrastructure/health care/whatever. If you want to be altruistic and help the world with it, fund Third World education, or buy out American pharmaceutical/agricultural patents. Second, there's the human cost of war. Military action usually results in far more bloodshed and instability than military planners foresee when they embark upon it. (The Vietnam War resulted in a lot of Vietnamese and Americans getting blown up for no real reason.) The maintenance of a sufficient military to defend one's borders is prudent, but it's also prudent to refuse to use that force--especially offensively--except as a last resort.
So, in short: I am pro-military, but I think we spend too much on it (maintain too great a force), and are too eager to use that force abroad.
If you are living in a dangerous part of town, you might be wise to buy a pistol for protection. But you don't need a Kalashnikov, especially when the criminals are twelve-year-olds with knives, and you don't shoot anyone unless you absolutely need to to protect yourself.
After my second discman in a year broke (I only have a tape deck, so I have to use external cd players with an adapter in the car), I started using my laptop as a car music player. Lots of storage, no need to burn CD's.
And, while I've got it in the car, I may as well run netstumbler...
Or they could implement a quiz period before a vote: any congresscritter who can't answer reasonable questions about the bill (with a paper copy in front of him/her, but no electronics or aides) must either vote nay or abstain.
'Course, something like this could never come to pass--it'd be used for filibuster tactics, how do you define "reasonable", who determines what's an acceptable answer, etc. But it's a scary thought-experiment to realize that something like this would drastically change the face of Congress.
Your radio bill *is* rising, although not directly.
They're playing more ads and worse music, thus the amount of time you have to expend and the number of inane ads you have to listen to in order to get the same entertainment value value has gone up.
It's all a matter of marginal costs. And, you're right--eventually when those costs (crappy radio) outweigh the value gained from radio, people will start listening to their own recordings in their cars. (Many already have, obviously.)
Why?
If Congress doesn't read it before voting on it, why should we?
*grumble*
No, they're not right.
The "Americanism" that you refer to (that the GPL supposedly violates) is the belief in individual liberty coupled with civic responsibility--the idea that, if it doesn't infringe on anyone else's personal rights, you have the freedom to do what the hell you want and the duty to use that freedom to benefit society as a whole.
OSS is thus right in line with the original American values. As long as it doesn't mess up anyone else, the KDE developers can do whatever the hell they want with their computers: they choose to write code on them and give me a copy, so I can post this here.
Now there is a trend toward the reliance on the law, on legally-binding agreements and codification, rather than on a shared duty to be benevolent, to make people play nice. Whether this is a good thing or not is a discussion for another time, but it is certain that large organizations--chiefly, corporations and IP-holders--can make greater use of this new reliance on contracts than individuals can.
The GPL is simply a creative rechanneling of this current trend to protect individuals--who would like to protect the altruistic and hackable nature of their products--rather than those who wish to profit from them.
I wish the GPL didn't need to exist--that developers could release software with a statement to the effect of "I'd like this code to remain open and distributed free of charge. Please do me the respect of acknowledging me as the original offer, and of honoring my wishes for this work." But since, in today's climate, people (read: corporations) are bound not by honor and ethics but only by law, the OSS community needs the GPL to *protect* the original American values inherent in open source software.
I know some folks who work on water filtration and recycling systems for missions like this. It's quite a challenge, as things that we don't even consider as contaminants will build up in the water supply over enough cycles.
Remote probes aren't efficient anyway, since you've got to pay the energy cost to boost that stuff halfway to Mars anyway. May as well just make a bigger main spacecraft. On the bright side, those supplies can be boosted into Earth orbit in advance of the manned mission taking off.
Back-of-the-envelope math: A person in space goes through, iirc, about 1800 Kcalories a day. Dried food provides somewhere around 4 Kcal/gram, so you're looking at 450 grams (=1 pound) per person per day. For a four-person mission over three years, you're looking at two tons of food.
Considering that any Mars ship is going to be huge anyway, this isn't that bad. It's the water that's nasty.
Iexplore == internet access?