The long term solution is reprocessing. People talk about the proliferation concern, but the proliferation concern is the stuff you would be destroying by reprocessing it! If you guard the reprocessing with the same level of security as you would use to guard a storage facility (or a plant for that matter), you get the same amount of proliferation protection. So there just isn't any reason not to do it, and then the waste problem goes from "billions of years" to "dozens of years" because all of the long half life materials get reprocessed.
It seems to me the problem is that we can't shut anything down until there is something to replace it. Whether that something is newer nuclear plants or something else doesn't really matter -- you have to build something to replace what is already there.
It seems to me that what we need is a bill that offers the operators of existing plants a significant financial incentive to build new non-fossil fuel generating capacity and then shut down the existing plants. Basically you write a bill that says the government will loan you money to build new non-fossil fuel generating capacity (the loan amount based on the GW of generating capacity you bring online), and the loan is forgiven if you shut down a plant with at least half as much generating capacity which was built before 1990 or so.
If I modified a Toyota in some way that it ran the way I wanted it to, but somehow generated an EMI pulse that shutdown other cars, including yours anytime I was within 2 miles, would be pissed at Toyota?
If you modified a Toyota in some way that it ran the way you wanted it to, and Toyota decided to stop you by generating an EMI pulse that shutdown other cars etc., yes, I would be pissed at Toyota.
I've never met anyone who thought SS was a funded retirement plan.
I don't understand how calling it insurance vs. a retirement plan has anything to do with the futility of the government issuing itself bonds. The problem remains: A government bond held by the government has zero value because it represents both an asset and a liability of equal value. The accounting method has no practical effect -- at the end of the day, every dollar paid in social security checks that wasn't paid that year in social security tax comes out of the federal treasury one way or another. And if that draw on the treasury becomes too large, we have to take steps to reduce it.
More to the point, setting up the accounting in the way it is causes people to be greatly misled, because it encourages people to focus on the assets and ignore the liabilities.
There is a simple choice, do we, as a society, agree to let old people die of neglect and starvation?
Are you positive that there are utterly no means by which total social security payments can be nontrivially reduced without causing widespread "neglect and starvation"? Because otherwise you're just asking a loaded question.
you don't seem to understand what "no standing army" means. It means the US government sells off everything to the states, as it was before.
That's a completely different story then. You're just saying that we should have a (smaller) military operated at the state level. Which is actually a pretty good idea.
I understand what you are saying. However, I think an insurance program where the more you pay in the less you get would be, well, silly. That would be a hard sell. Those with the most money have the most influence and, though they'd not lose too much, would likely oppose it.
The purpose of social security is that we don't want "old people to die of neglect and starvation." But if that's the case then we only have to provide money to those who would otherwise "die of neglect and starvation." The idea that rich people would be mildly opposed to that and therefore it would be hard to pass does not seem to me any kind of justification for not doing it.
No, I couldn't. Why not? Because at this point, SS, Medicare, and Medicaid are fully funded (depending on who's accounting you pay attention to, or essentially within a rounding error if you take the worst case numbers). There are separate taxes for SS and medical. They are designed to fund those programs, and come pretty close to doing so, if they aren't successfully doing so now. The point is that if you eliminated SS (all the payouts, but also the SS taxes collected) you'd be no closer to balancing the budget. I guess if you wanted to argue that you could eliminate the SS payouts while keeping or increasing the SS taxes, you could. But I don't think that would go over very well politically. Apply the same for Medicare/Medicaid.
Obviously you wouldn't leave social security tax as it is. What you could do is reduce outlays by social security, then reduce social security tax and (at the same time and by the same amount) raise the federal income tax. But what would be far superior would be to eliminate social security tax entirely and raise the income tax to compensate. That way you would have to raise the income tax by a smaller percentage, because the general income tax is graduated in a far more equitable way than the existing social security tax.
That would also have the benefit of doing away with the legal fiction of the social security trust fund that so many people seem to misunderstand. (People just can't seem to wrap their heads around the idea that all current-year social security checks come out of current-year federal receipts, regardless of whether the money the treasury provides for the social security administration comes in exchange for a bond out of the trust or not. If the government issues a bond to A, we can say that A has an asset and the government has a liability. If the government issues a bond to the government, all we can say is that the government has a piece of paper -- the asset and the liability cancel each other.)
Yes, it is. We got by just fine, winning lots of wars and such, without a standing army.
The world is different than it was. Now there are nuclear weapons, private armies, stealth bombers, etc. It is no longer possible to raise in army in a period of time less than what it would take for an enemy to completely destroy you. I mean forget about China and MAD, what happens when some crackpot third world dictator gets hold of some refurbished soviet fighter jets and you haven't got anything to counter? You can't exactly spend six months manufacturing a fighter jet and training pilots in the 30 minutes between when you detect them and when they enter US airspace.
Social Security payments to millionaires don't cost much. SS to any one person is so tiny it's a rounding error. The number of millionaires is small enough that it won't affect everyone else.
I suspect there are more than you think. In any event, you know what I'm saying -- you invert the existing payment scheme. Right now people who made more money during their careers are collecting larger social security checks. So you keep payments to the people who made less than the median wage right where they are, and you reduce the payments to anyone who made more than that amount to the same level. I don't know if that would cut the outlays in half, but I bet it would cut a huge chunk out of it without causing anyone to starve to death.
I agree with almost all of this, but two things: First, you keep talking about "military and debt interest" but you could say exactly the same thing (and more, because it's bigger) about "social security, medicare and medicaid."
Second, this:
The only way to stay within our means at this point is something radical like abolishing a standing army.
This really isn't true. The problem isn't that we have a military, the problem is that we spend the better half of a trillion dollars a year on it. I mean yes, if you want to balance the budget by making cuts only to the military, you would have to get rid of the whole thing. But why is that the case? It would be like saying we had to get rid of all social welfare programs.
What we have to do is to cut everything in half. If we spent half as much on the military and half as much as we do now on social programs, we would basically be there. And if that scares you, remember that the way you cut a budget in half is not by sawing every Humvee in half and selling one half on eBay.
What you do is stop funding military pork barrel projects and stop sending social security checks to millionaires. Now obviously that isn't as easy as it sounds -- you have to be able to distinguish "good military research" (see: internet) from "wasteful military research" (see: Star Wars / SDI). You have to decide who qualifies as too rich for social security, or which procedures for medicare to stop covering because they aren't cost-effective. And we won't get that 100% right, but that is no excuse for not trying.
So, yeah - build and do business in the ghettos, so that some of the ghetto dwellers can at least make a living. Responsibility - what a concept!
The trouble is that it ignores why poor people live in ghettos. If you revitalize an area that used to be a ghetto, it makes property values go up. Poor people almost by definition don't own property, so they don't benefit from increased property values, but the increased property values lead to higher rent. Which prices them out of the local housing market and requires them to move to a different ghetto.
Oh, do you mean the tendency to find everything PSM and many things non-obvious? That would be fair.
This, but also other things. Like compare Image Technical Services. v. Kodak (9th Cir. 1997) with In re Independent Service Organizations Antitrust Litigation v. Xerox (Fed. Cir. 2000) with regard to using a patent in one market to control a second.
In the US they have a special court for patent appeals (the Federal Circuit) but the trials happen in regular federal district court.
A lot of people actually think it's a problem because the people who get put on the court are generally former patent lawyers, which has caused them to have a reputation of being pretty biased in favor of patents.
Netflix movies are rentals and they have to have at least some token something or there would be instant copy software released an then bye bye Netflix.
Then explain broadcast TV. Shouldn't they be shutting down their transmitters, because instant copy software (e.g. MythTV) already exists?
There is no good reason to copy a Netflix stream. If you subscribe to Netflix, you can just stream it again from Netflix for free if you want to watch it again. If you watch a lot of movies the service just doesn't cost enough to be worth trying to download a bunch of movies so you cancel, because then you would never get anything new. And nobody wants to use it to put things on The Pirate Bay because DVDs and BDs are higher quality. At best I could see if you wanted to download a movie so you could watch it on a plane or something, but it's Netflix -- just order the DVD by mail.
Moreover, the content industries still release movies on DVD and BD even though they're both broken. If working DRM was actually a requirement then that wouldn't happen, so it obviously isn't.
You also have NO choice on broadcast, and it comes with commercials, a whole shitload of them, and it is also cut. You don't get those things with Netflix.
Of course they have a choice -- they could stop transmitting. Nothing stops them from replacing all broadcast TV with Netflix set top boxes that stream TV from the internet, and if DRM was half as important as you say then they would have.
And they frequently broadcast uncut movies on TV, and anyone can strip the commercials with a DVR. So that isn't it either.
BTW, the reason Netflix don't (and never will) work on Linux? it requires a proprietary kernel driver and no way Linus will allow that.
It requires no such thing. If the DRM has no hardware support then there is no possible reason it can't be implemented in userspace -- the only thing the kernel can do that userspace code can't is run privileged hardware instructions. Conversely, if it requires hardware support then there is no requirement for the kernel code to be proprietary, because secret sauce is in the hardware rather than the kernel. Moreover, it works on Roku devices, which are Linux based, so clearly it isn't impossible.
It works in OSX, iOS, and Windows because they have support for Janus DRM (the same one that has been around for years with no major hacks) which hooks into the kernel thus making it damned near impossible to hack without turning the data to garbage.
The reason it hasn't been cracked is that nothing uses it, not because it's in the kernel. There is nothing special about kernel code -- you can run the whole OS in a VM and fool it into thinking it's running on bare metal like this. As above, nobody has a major incentive to copy Netflix streams when there are higher quality sources available. About the only good reason anybody has to break the DRM is to make Netflix work on Linux, and people are holding off on that because there is allegedly some negotiation going on between the Mono people and Microsoft to actually implement the DRM in Moonlight, which would save everyone the cat and mouse game.
The Netflix thing is a bummer, but it's a case of drm not being compatible with open source, as I see it.
It seems to me the problem is that DRM is incompatible with people owning their personal property. There is nothing stopping you from writing an open source program that encrypts movies while they're in transit over a network etc. And then people will break the DRM in two hours just like they do with the proprietary ones.
The real incompatibility is in allowing the user to own their computer. Even if you have proprietary software, if the user can attach a debugger to it or can emulate the whole thing in software then the DRM is toast. The only way that DRM can "work" is by eliminating actual property ownership. It literally requires for us all to become renters and trespassers on what was once our own property, so that corporations can own our culture. I mean literally -- it's not an exaggeration.
DRM sucks, but as far as I can tell, Netflix can't exist without it.
Over-the-air broadcast TV exists without it. In higher quality than Netflix. So I'm not seeing the inherent reason why Netflix can't exist without it.
I don't know if you can really call it "organized." It's more like a mob. Somebody points in a direction and some people follow, but nobody has to and some people don't.
Who cares what Microsoft does? Working enterprise-class directory services is something that Linux doesn't have and should. Once it has that, what is Microsoft going to do? Invent a bunch of new an interesting features that everybody has to have to keep them on Windows? Are we talking about the same Microsoft here?
I don't see the problem. The VM is open source, right? So the apps will run on non-Android Linux if you want. And on other things, like Blackberries. How is that bad?
Bing (on Google): bing is not google bing is cheating bing is google bing is annoying bing is powered by google
Google (on Bing): google is watching you google is skynet google is evil google is the devil google is better than bing
Microsoft (on Google): microsoft is dying microsoft is dead microsoft is doomed microsoft is a monopoly microsoft is a registered trademark microsoft is failing
Microsoft (on Bing): microsoft is evil microsoft is paying you not fake microsoft is dead microsoft is not a monopoly microsoft is locked microsoft is obsolete microsoft is not genuine
Sony (on Google): sony is evil sony is stupid sony is suing sony is gay sony is mad sony is racist sony is a japanese company sony is crap
Sony (on Bing): sony is bricking ps3 sony is awesome sony is too confident in 3d sony is going bankrupt sony is too high on themselves
Obviously there are sometimes quirks with the different filesystems, but you get that in any heterogeneous environment. You should see the resource fork mess if you have different versions of MacOS accessing the same share on a Windows server, especially if some of them access it through Windows shares and others through Services for Macintosh.
And Windows has different kinds of problems. I've seen Windows file servers with totally inexplicable performance issues. One minute you're getting link speed file copies and the next it's taking users 15 minutes to log in because their 10MB user profile is on the file server, even though the CPU is at 2% and there is only trivial network or disk activity on the server. Shares just disappear all on their own with nothing about it in the logs. Someone with an SSD and a gigabit card in their desktop decides to do a large file copy and everything on the file server chokes because the OS will evict everything previously in the disk cache from memory in favor of the new data while simultaneously putting full load on the array.
Or what the horrible filesystem tricks that viruses that try to hide in a user's profile do when the profile is on a file server -- folders you can't delete without rebooting the server to chkdsk the filesystem, entries that show up in a directory listing but any attempt to access it says the file doesn't exist, files you can access by name that don't show up in a directory listing, etc. Especially once the server AV finally downloads a virus definition for the thing and then half the time makes it worse by unsuccessfully trying to quarantine it.
Whereas with samba, if I have a problem with it, it's basically always because I've set something wrong in a configuration file and once I fix it the problem is gone.
Saying that the GPLv2 is "worthless" is just silly. Yes, you can't run your modifications on a locked down device and that's totally lame. But they still have to publish the source to their changes if they're distributing it. And you can still take that code and run it on your MythTV box or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see how going from a situation where the major carriers only offer locked down phones running Android, iOS, WP7 or BlackberryOS to one where they only offer iOS, WP7 or BlackberryOS is in any way good for open source. The problem isn't the license, the problem is that these jackasses refuse to allow any phones without lockdown. If you can fix that then the license isn't a problem and if you can't then you're screwed no matter what.
That's like saying Debian could do this and still be Debian. So what? Android is using Linux. That means they're making Linux drivers for their devices, they're writing code that runs on Linux, they're making devices you can easily port Linux applications to, etc.
I find that samba3 works better for basic Windows file sharing than Windows servers do. What it's missing is AD, which is the point of samba4. If and when samba4 is of the same quality and maturity as samba3, I agree with the GP. There really isn't going to be a lot of reason to have Windows on the enterprise server anymore.
Then the FCC tried to do it anyway and the courts shot them down on the grounds they lacked authority without a law from Congress. So Omaba's thugs just ignored all that and did it yet again.
I don't know if that's really accurate. I mean think about: Why does the FCC exist, if not to regulate telecommunications companies? Moreover, if the FCC isn't the right agency to regulate them then which is? Or should we just have telecommunications companies sprawling corrupt empires across the land with monopoly profits, like the robber barons of old?
The real problem is that the FCC is too deferential to the telcos. They're allowed to regulate them both as telecommunications providers and as information service providers, but they have a lot less authority over information service providers. Which is why Bush reclassified them as information service providers -- because they paid him good money to do it. But there is nothing stopping Obama from regulating them as telecommunications providers instead.
I kind of get the impression that the Democrats want to keep them as information service providers because it's a much broader category (it includes Microsoft, Facebook, etc. as well as the ISPs) and if they can get some history of being able to regulate "information service providers" then they can sink their hooks into those companies too. Which is totally stupid. They need to just reclassify the ISPs as telecommunications providers and get back to doing what they were created to do -- regulating AT&T.
I completely agree that they could have handled it better. I just feel like it was more of a stupid oversight mistake than some kind of intentional malice.
From an "Open" standpoint, what Google did was just wrong. If they really want their OS to be open, then they need to let it be open even if it's not the exact result they intended. If they want to close things down, then fine. But they need to make a decision and hold to it, instead of trying to straddle the line.
Trying to straddle the line is kind of the whole point. Android is open in the sense that you can do whatever you want; the Google services aren't. If you want the former, it's Apache licensed and you can do whatever you please with it. If you want the latter, it comes on different terms.
I'm sure Barnes & Noble picked Android for their Nook e-readers due to the promise of "open", and their engineers are now stuck maintaining the Nook Color on an OS that Google says is only for phones. The more appropriate tablet OS is closed off to them for now, possibly halting progress on a Nook Color 2.
The OS they used is the same OS it was when they decided to use it. The fact that Google is going to make something better adapted to tablets hasn't changed it. And they can still get earlier access to the "tablet OS" if they want to join the OHA.
Realistically the only reason they're holding it back is because they don't want to have a million Chinese junk tablets on the market running a development version of the OS and ruining their reputation. What I wish they would do is publish the development code but under a license that says you can't ship it on a device, and then once the final version is ready release it under the Apache license without that restriction. But I don't always get what I want.
I feel like DRM is a special-case inconvenience which is worse than others because the buyer understands that it has no purpose. They know that they are not a pirate because there is a hole in their wallet where the money they paid used to be, but then they get treated like a criminal and are prevented from doing things they have every right to do. Whereas with ads, people understand that there is a reason for it -- it's how they got to watch legitimately without paying.
Of course, what smart people do is find a way to make sure the creator gets an ad impression and is paid by advertisers but without the user actually having to watch the ad. Then everybody wins. (Except the marketing trolls, but ever since they invented astroturf they're officially not people so nobody cares about them -- I'm actually pretty sure that "tivo" is what primitive cultures used to say when they impaled a marketing troll with a spear.)
Sure, everyone knows a geek, but knowing a geek and seeing what he does with his geeky toys doesn't usually make non-geeks rush out to buy said geeky toys. That's why they remain geeky toys, and not mainstream devices.
Sure, if you've got a personal webserver at home and you can do some cool stuff with it, it doesn't mean all your non-geek friends are going to go out and get one. But when it comes time to buy a tablet, the fact that you see the geek friend doing all kinds of amazing things with the Brand X tablet will often be a determining factor in the purchase decision.
Your point has a certain amount of logic behind it; however, if it actually held up under real-world conditions, do you really think you'd be seeing quite so many people buying the things they buy, and then doing with them the things they do?
Obviously the effect is relative. All things equal, the device which is friendly to geeks will do better. But if you can "somehow" make sure that the competitors in your industry are mostly all screwing their customers in the same ways like the phone companies do then you can do as you like, because there is no safe harbor into which customers can flee.
I think the point is this: It isn't that what geeks want doesn't matter, it's that it isn't always outcome determinative. But sometimes it is, and companies can (and do) ignore that at their peril.
It was intentionally replacing the Google location API, a component that was considered on the open side of the OS.
There was no reason for them to have to remove the Google API instead of installing along side it, except that Skyhook wanted to harm their competitor by depriving them of location data. No one is even stopping them from doing that on a non-Google-branded phone, but they wanted to do it on a Google-branded phone. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Only over time did Google get pissy about it, likely because they wanted to own the location API for ad revenue reasons.
Google's entire business model is to supply ad supported services. All they're doing is saying that you can't have the services without the ads. I mean what are they supposed to do, continue to provide the services while competitors swap out the components that supply the revenue to pay for them?
Just as Microsoft got pissy with OEMs for making deals to bundle Netscape Navigator, since it meant people might not use Internet Explorer.
Microsoft didn't want them to include Netscape at all. Nobody was removing Internet Explorer from Windows, which would have been a far less Machiavellian thing to complain about.
More to the point, that would have been a whole different story if Microsoft's business model was to give away Windows for free and put ads in Internet Explorer to pay for it, and somebody was then taking the free Windows and distributing it having removed IE and replaced it with their own ad-supported browser.
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The long term solution is reprocessing. People talk about the proliferation concern, but the proliferation concern is the stuff you would be destroying by reprocessing it! If you guard the reprocessing with the same level of security as you would use to guard a storage facility (or a plant for that matter), you get the same amount of proliferation protection. So there just isn't any reason not to do it, and then the waste problem goes from "billions of years" to "dozens of years" because all of the long half life materials get reprocessed.
It seems to me the problem is that we can't shut anything down until there is something to replace it. Whether that something is newer nuclear plants or something else doesn't really matter -- you have to build something to replace what is already there.
It seems to me that what we need is a bill that offers the operators of existing plants a significant financial incentive to build new non-fossil fuel generating capacity and then shut down the existing plants. Basically you write a bill that says the government will loan you money to build new non-fossil fuel generating capacity (the loan amount based on the GW of generating capacity you bring online), and the loan is forgiven if you shut down a plant with at least half as much generating capacity which was built before 1990 or so.
If I modified a Toyota in some way that it ran the way I wanted it to, but somehow generated an EMI pulse that shutdown other cars, including yours anytime I was within 2 miles, would be pissed at Toyota?
If you modified a Toyota in some way that it ran the way you wanted it to, and Toyota decided to stop you by generating an EMI pulse that shutdown other cars etc., yes, I would be pissed at Toyota.
I've never met anyone who thought SS was a funded retirement plan.
I don't understand how calling it insurance vs. a retirement plan has anything to do with the futility of the government issuing itself bonds. The problem remains: A government bond held by the government has zero value because it represents both an asset and a liability of equal value. The accounting method has no practical effect -- at the end of the day, every dollar paid in social security checks that wasn't paid that year in social security tax comes out of the federal treasury one way or another. And if that draw on the treasury becomes too large, we have to take steps to reduce it.
More to the point, setting up the accounting in the way it is causes people to be greatly misled, because it encourages people to focus on the assets and ignore the liabilities.
There is a simple choice, do we, as a society, agree to let old people die of neglect and starvation?
Are you positive that there are utterly no means by which total social security payments can be nontrivially reduced without causing widespread "neglect and starvation"? Because otherwise you're just asking a loaded question.
you don't seem to understand what "no standing army" means. It means the US government sells off everything to the states, as it was before.
That's a completely different story then. You're just saying that we should have a (smaller) military operated at the state level. Which is actually a pretty good idea.
I understand what you are saying. However, I think an insurance program where the more you pay in the less you get would be, well, silly. That would be a hard sell. Those with the most money have the most influence and, though they'd not lose too much, would likely oppose it.
The purpose of social security is that we don't want "old people to die of neglect and starvation." But if that's the case then we only have to provide money to those who would otherwise "die of neglect and starvation." The idea that rich people would be mildly opposed to that and therefore it would be hard to pass does not seem to me any kind of justification for not doing it.
No, I couldn't. Why not? Because at this point, SS, Medicare, and Medicaid are fully funded (depending on who's accounting you pay attention to, or essentially within a rounding error if you take the worst case numbers). There are separate taxes for SS and medical. They are designed to fund those programs, and come pretty close to doing so, if they aren't successfully doing so now. The point is that if you eliminated SS (all the payouts, but also the SS taxes collected) you'd be no closer to balancing the budget. I guess if you wanted to argue that you could eliminate the SS payouts while keeping or increasing the SS taxes, you could. But I don't think that would go over very well politically. Apply the same for Medicare/Medicaid.
Obviously you wouldn't leave social security tax as it is. What you could do is reduce outlays by social security, then reduce social security tax and (at the same time and by the same amount) raise the federal income tax. But what would be far superior would be to eliminate social security tax entirely and raise the income tax to compensate. That way you would have to raise the income tax by a smaller percentage, because the general income tax is graduated in a far more equitable way than the existing social security tax.
That would also have the benefit of doing away with the legal fiction of the social security trust fund that so many people seem to misunderstand. (People just can't seem to wrap their heads around the idea that all current-year social security checks come out of current-year federal receipts, regardless of whether the money the treasury provides for the social security administration comes in exchange for a bond out of the trust or not. If the government issues a bond to A, we can say that A has an asset and the government has a liability. If the government issues a bond to the government, all we can say is that the government has a piece of paper -- the asset and the liability cancel each other.)
Yes, it is. We got by just fine, winning lots of wars and such, without a standing army.
The world is different than it was. Now there are nuclear weapons, private armies, stealth bombers, etc. It is no longer possible to raise in army in a period of time less than what it would take for an enemy to completely destroy you. I mean forget about China and MAD, what happens when some crackpot third world dictator gets hold of some refurbished soviet fighter jets and you haven't got anything to counter? You can't exactly spend six months manufacturing a fighter jet and training pilots in the 30 minutes between when you detect them and when they enter US airspace.
Social Security payments to millionaires don't cost much. SS to any one person is so tiny it's a rounding error. The number of millionaires is small enough that it won't affect everyone else.
I suspect there are more than you think. In any event, you know what I'm saying -- you invert the existing payment scheme. Right now people who made more money during their careers are collecting larger social security checks. So you keep payments to the people who made less than the median wage right where they are, and you reduce the payments to anyone who made more than that amount to the same level. I don't know if that would cut the outlays in half, but I bet it would cut a huge chunk out of it without causing anyone to starve to death.
I agree with almost all of this, but two things: First, you keep talking about "military and debt interest" but you could say exactly the same thing (and more, because it's bigger) about "social security, medicare and medicaid."
Second, this:
The only way to stay within our means at this point is something radical like abolishing a standing army.
This really isn't true. The problem isn't that we have a military, the problem is that we spend the better half of a trillion dollars a year on it. I mean yes, if you want to balance the budget by making cuts only to the military, you would have to get rid of the whole thing. But why is that the case? It would be like saying we had to get rid of all social welfare programs.
What we have to do is to cut everything in half. If we spent half as much on the military and half as much as we do now on social programs, we would basically be there. And if that scares you, remember that the way you cut a budget in half is not by sawing every Humvee in half and selling one half on eBay.
What you do is stop funding military pork barrel projects and stop sending social security checks to millionaires. Now obviously that isn't as easy as it sounds -- you have to be able to distinguish "good military research" (see: internet) from "wasteful military research" (see: Star Wars / SDI). You have to decide who qualifies as too rich for social security, or which procedures for medicare to stop covering because they aren't cost-effective. And we won't get that 100% right, but that is no excuse for not trying.
So, yeah - build and do business in the ghettos, so that some of the ghetto dwellers can at least make a living. Responsibility - what a concept!
The trouble is that it ignores why poor people live in ghettos. If you revitalize an area that used to be a ghetto, it makes property values go up. Poor people almost by definition don't own property, so they don't benefit from increased property values, but the increased property values lead to higher rent. Which prices them out of the local housing market and requires them to move to a different ghetto.
Oh, do you mean the tendency to find everything PSM and many things non-obvious? That would be fair.
This, but also other things. Like compare Image Technical Services. v. Kodak (9th Cir. 1997) with In re Independent Service Organizations Antitrust Litigation v. Xerox (Fed. Cir. 2000) with regard to using a patent in one market to control a second.
In the US they have a special court for patent appeals (the Federal Circuit) but the trials happen in regular federal district court.
A lot of people actually think it's a problem because the people who get put on the court are generally former patent lawyers, which has caused them to have a reputation of being pretty biased in favor of patents.
Netflix movies are rentals and they have to have at least some token something or there would be instant copy software released an then bye bye Netflix.
Then explain broadcast TV. Shouldn't they be shutting down their transmitters, because instant copy software (e.g. MythTV) already exists?
There is no good reason to copy a Netflix stream. If you subscribe to Netflix, you can just stream it again from Netflix for free if you want to watch it again. If you watch a lot of movies the service just doesn't cost enough to be worth trying to download a bunch of movies so you cancel, because then you would never get anything new. And nobody wants to use it to put things on The Pirate Bay because DVDs and BDs are higher quality. At best I could see if you wanted to download a movie so you could watch it on a plane or something, but it's Netflix -- just order the DVD by mail.
Moreover, the content industries still release movies on DVD and BD even though they're both broken. If working DRM was actually a requirement then that wouldn't happen, so it obviously isn't.
You also have NO choice on broadcast, and it comes with commercials, a whole shitload of them, and it is also cut. You don't get those things with Netflix.
Of course they have a choice -- they could stop transmitting. Nothing stops them from replacing all broadcast TV with Netflix set top boxes that stream TV from the internet, and if DRM was half as important as you say then they would have.
And they frequently broadcast uncut movies on TV, and anyone can strip the commercials with a DVR. So that isn't it either.
BTW, the reason Netflix don't (and never will) work on Linux? it requires a proprietary kernel driver and no way Linus will allow that.
It requires no such thing. If the DRM has no hardware support then there is no possible reason it can't be implemented in userspace -- the only thing the kernel can do that userspace code can't is run privileged hardware instructions. Conversely, if it requires hardware support then there is no requirement for the kernel code to be proprietary, because secret sauce is in the hardware rather than the kernel. Moreover, it works on Roku devices, which are Linux based, so clearly it isn't impossible.
It works in OSX, iOS, and Windows because they have support for Janus DRM (the same one that has been around for years with no major hacks) which hooks into the kernel thus making it damned near impossible to hack without turning the data to garbage.
The reason it hasn't been cracked is that nothing uses it, not because it's in the kernel. There is nothing special about kernel code -- you can run the whole OS in a VM and fool it into thinking it's running on bare metal like this. As above, nobody has a major incentive to copy Netflix streams when there are higher quality sources available. About the only good reason anybody has to break the DRM is to make Netflix work on Linux, and people are holding off on that because there is allegedly some negotiation going on between the Mono people and Microsoft to actually implement the DRM in Moonlight, which would save everyone the cat and mouse game.
The Netflix thing is a bummer, but it's a case of drm not being compatible with open source, as I see it.
It seems to me the problem is that DRM is incompatible with people owning their personal property. There is nothing stopping you from writing an open source program that encrypts movies while they're in transit over a network etc. And then people will break the DRM in two hours just like they do with the proprietary ones.
The real incompatibility is in allowing the user to own their computer. Even if you have proprietary software, if the user can attach a debugger to it or can emulate the whole thing in software then the DRM is toast. The only way that DRM can "work" is by eliminating actual property ownership. It literally requires for us all to become renters and trespassers on what was once our own property, so that corporations can own our culture. I mean literally -- it's not an exaggeration.
DRM sucks, but as far as I can tell, Netflix can't exist without it.
Over-the-air broadcast TV exists without it. In higher quality than Netflix. So I'm not seeing the inherent reason why Netflix can't exist without it.
I don't know if you can really call it "organized." It's more like a mob. Somebody points in a direction and some people follow, but nobody has to and some people don't.
Who cares what Microsoft does? Working enterprise-class directory services is something that Linux doesn't have and should. Once it has that, what is Microsoft going to do? Invent a bunch of new an interesting features that everybody has to have to keep them on Windows? Are we talking about the same Microsoft here?
Android apps run in a VM and are Java-based.
I don't see the problem. The VM is open source, right? So the apps will run on non-Android Linux if you want. And on other things, like Blackberries. How is that bad?
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Obviously there are sometimes quirks with the different filesystems, but you get that in any heterogeneous environment. You should see the resource fork mess if you have different versions of MacOS accessing the same share on a Windows server, especially if some of them access it through Windows shares and others through Services for Macintosh.
And Windows has different kinds of problems. I've seen Windows file servers with totally inexplicable performance issues. One minute you're getting link speed file copies and the next it's taking users 15 minutes to log in because their 10MB user profile is on the file server, even though the CPU is at 2% and there is only trivial network or disk activity on the server. Shares just disappear all on their own with nothing about it in the logs. Someone with an SSD and a gigabit card in their desktop decides to do a large file copy and everything on the file server chokes because the OS will evict everything previously in the disk cache from memory in favor of the new data while simultaneously putting full load on the array.
Or what the horrible filesystem tricks that viruses that try to hide in a user's profile do when the profile is on a file server -- folders you can't delete without rebooting the server to chkdsk the filesystem, entries that show up in a directory listing but any attempt to access it says the file doesn't exist, files you can access by name that don't show up in a directory listing, etc. Especially once the server AV finally downloads a virus definition for the thing and then half the time makes it worse by unsuccessfully trying to quarantine it.
Whereas with samba, if I have a problem with it, it's basically always because I've set something wrong in a configuration file and once I fix it the problem is gone.
Saying that the GPLv2 is "worthless" is just silly. Yes, you can't run your modifications on a locked down device and that's totally lame. But they still have to publish the source to their changes if they're distributing it. And you can still take that code and run it on your MythTV box or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see how going from a situation where the major carriers only offer locked down phones running Android, iOS, WP7 or BlackberryOS to one where they only offer iOS, WP7 or BlackberryOS is in any way good for open source. The problem isn't the license, the problem is that these jackasses refuse to allow any phones without lockdown. If you can fix that then the license isn't a problem and if you can't then you're screwed no matter what.
That's like saying Debian could do this and still be Debian. So what? Android is using Linux. That means they're making Linux drivers for their devices, they're writing code that runs on Linux, they're making devices you can easily port Linux applications to, etc.
I find that samba3 works better for basic Windows file sharing than Windows servers do. What it's missing is AD, which is the point of samba4. If and when samba4 is of the same quality and maturity as samba3, I agree with the GP. There really isn't going to be a lot of reason to have Windows on the enterprise server anymore.
I'm glad you have no issues with your recent versions of Ubuntu, a quick perusal of the Ubuntu support forums tells a different story though.
You say that as though Windows support forums are barren of users with issues.
Then the FCC tried to do it anyway and the courts shot them down on the grounds they lacked authority without a law from Congress. So Omaba's thugs just ignored all that and did it yet again.
I don't know if that's really accurate. I mean think about: Why does the FCC exist, if not to regulate telecommunications companies? Moreover, if the FCC isn't the right agency to regulate them then which is? Or should we just have telecommunications companies sprawling corrupt empires across the land with monopoly profits, like the robber barons of old?
The real problem is that the FCC is too deferential to the telcos. They're allowed to regulate them both as telecommunications providers and as information service providers, but they have a lot less authority over information service providers. Which is why Bush reclassified them as information service providers -- because they paid him good money to do it. But there is nothing stopping Obama from regulating them as telecommunications providers instead.
I kind of get the impression that the Democrats want to keep them as information service providers because it's a much broader category (it includes Microsoft, Facebook, etc. as well as the ISPs) and if they can get some history of being able to regulate "information service providers" then they can sink their hooks into those companies too. Which is totally stupid. They need to just reclassify the ISPs as telecommunications providers and get back to doing what they were created to do -- regulating AT&T.
I completely agree that they could have handled it better. I just feel like it was more of a stupid oversight mistake than some kind of intentional malice.
From an "Open" standpoint, what Google did was just wrong. If they really want their OS to be open, then they need to let it be open even if it's not the exact result they intended. If they want to close things down, then fine. But they need to make a decision and hold to it, instead of trying to straddle the line.
Trying to straddle the line is kind of the whole point. Android is open in the sense that you can do whatever you want; the Google services aren't. If you want the former, it's Apache licensed and you can do whatever you please with it. If you want the latter, it comes on different terms.
I'm sure Barnes & Noble picked Android for their Nook e-readers due to the promise of "open", and their engineers are now stuck maintaining the Nook Color on an OS that Google says is only for phones. The more appropriate tablet OS is closed off to them for now, possibly halting progress on a Nook Color 2.
The OS they used is the same OS it was when they decided to use it. The fact that Google is going to make something better adapted to tablets hasn't changed it. And they can still get earlier access to the "tablet OS" if they want to join the OHA.
Realistically the only reason they're holding it back is because they don't want to have a million Chinese junk tablets on the market running a development version of the OS and ruining their reputation. What I wish they would do is publish the development code but under a license that says you can't ship it on a device, and then once the final version is ready release it under the Apache license without that restriction. But I don't always get what I want.
I feel like DRM is a special-case inconvenience which is worse than others because the buyer understands that it has no purpose. They know that they are not a pirate because there is a hole in their wallet where the money they paid used to be, but then they get treated like a criminal and are prevented from doing things they have every right to do. Whereas with ads, people understand that there is a reason for it -- it's how they got to watch legitimately without paying.
Of course, what smart people do is find a way to make sure the creator gets an ad impression and is paid by advertisers but without the user actually having to watch the ad. Then everybody wins. (Except the marketing trolls, but ever since they invented astroturf they're officially not people so nobody cares about them -- I'm actually pretty sure that "tivo" is what primitive cultures used to say when they impaled a marketing troll with a spear.)
Sure, everyone knows a geek, but knowing a geek and seeing what he does with his geeky toys doesn't usually make non-geeks rush out to buy said geeky toys. That's why they remain geeky toys, and not mainstream devices.
Sure, if you've got a personal webserver at home and you can do some cool stuff with it, it doesn't mean all your non-geek friends are going to go out and get one. But when it comes time to buy a tablet, the fact that you see the geek friend doing all kinds of amazing things with the Brand X tablet will often be a determining factor in the purchase decision.
Your point has a certain amount of logic behind it; however, if it actually held up under real-world conditions, do you really think you'd be seeing quite so many people buying the things they buy, and then doing with them the things they do?
Obviously the effect is relative. All things equal, the device which is friendly to geeks will do better. But if you can "somehow" make sure that the competitors in your industry are mostly all screwing their customers in the same ways like the phone companies do then you can do as you like, because there is no safe harbor into which customers can flee.
I think the point is this: It isn't that what geeks want doesn't matter, it's that it isn't always outcome determinative. But sometimes it is, and companies can (and do) ignore that at their peril.
It was intentionally replacing the Google location API, a component that was considered on the open side of the OS.
There was no reason for them to have to remove the Google API instead of installing along side it, except that Skyhook wanted to harm their competitor by depriving them of location data. No one is even stopping them from doing that on a non-Google-branded phone, but they wanted to do it on a Google-branded phone. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Only over time did Google get pissy about it, likely because they wanted to own the location API for ad revenue reasons.
Google's entire business model is to supply ad supported services. All they're doing is saying that you can't have the services without the ads. I mean what are they supposed to do, continue to provide the services while competitors swap out the components that supply the revenue to pay for them?
Just as Microsoft got pissy with OEMs for making deals to bundle Netscape Navigator, since it meant people might not use Internet Explorer.
Microsoft didn't want them to include Netscape at all. Nobody was removing Internet Explorer from Windows, which would have been a far less Machiavellian thing to complain about.
More to the point, that would have been a whole different story if Microsoft's business model was to give away Windows for free and put ads in Internet Explorer to pay for it, and somebody was then taking the free Windows and distributing it having removed IE and replaced it with their own ad-supported browser.