It sounds like you know more about chess than I do, so I'll take your word for it that more than 10% of the game is represented. But speaking as both a mathematician and a musician, I was being generous in describing melody alone as 20% of musical content. Listen to a piano arrangement of Pachelbel's canon, then a song called Heeding The Call by power-metal band Hammerfall and tell me I'm wrong. The non-deterministic additions Stokes is making to the deterministic chess output match, or arguably slightly exceed, the differences between Pachelbel's and Hammerfall's interpretations of the same melody.
What's being done is starting with a chess game, throwing out most of the information (the positions of non-moving pieces, which piece is moving, and one of the two dimensions of movement), converting (deterministically) what little is left into a sequence of notes, deciding (creatively/non-deterministically) what rhythm to put them in, and deciding (creatively/non-deterministically) how to harmonize them. It's only a mapping between maybe 10% of the game and maybe 20% of the music.
It's a mildly interesting way to "seed" the creative process, but it's neither an impressive intellectual accomplishment (from a musical or mathematical perspective) nor a testament to hidden order in the universe. Most people seem to be misinterpreting it as one (or paradoxically both) of those.
In what way is a large, powerful institution that can control the flow of information NOT a government? In what way is showing preference for certain packets over others NOT regulation?
Anarchism is feudalism. There is no such thing as total deregulation--the choice is about who gets to regulate and how much say you and I get in it.
Not just open-source. Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet out there, period. As of recent versions, its numerical accuracy and featureset leave all other spreadsheets in the dust, along with some well-known statistical analysis suites.
I enjoy both Star Trek and Star Wars as adventure drama, but there is not one iota of real science in either one. Might as well post an article about how the pot trumped the kettle for whiteness.
Kudos to the/. editors for cutting way down on the number of dupes and summary-contradicts-article stories over the past couple of years, but they're certainly not eradicated. Maybe dupe-checking should be part of slashcode--an automatic search for links and link titles that the editor (or submitter?) has to at least scroll past to post.
Some studio-manufactured AutoTune pop stars can actually sing, and some can't, and it's often surprising which is which. If you watched the Oscar telecast a few years ago, you know that Beyonce is a real musician. Christina Aguilera has talent (though chooses not to use it). Several of the High School Musical kids turned out to be decent singers or actors or both once they got out from under Disney's thumb. And on the other hand, despite the strong genetic component to musical talent, pre-AutoTune professional musician Billy Ray Cyrus's daughter can't sing at all without the help of her robotic overlord. As a film projectionist, I had to watch Last Song the other day. In one scene, Miley sings along with the radio AN ENTIRE FUCKING HALF-STEP SHARP! For non-musicians reading this, that's the interval between two adjacent piano keys. If you play two notes together that are separated by a half-step, it sounds awful. And anyone who's not completely tone-deaf can tell it sounds awful. It takes a modicum of musical training to identify the specific problem, but anyone can tell it's wrong. So remember, AutoTune is saving your ears from that crap every day. If it had never existed, there would be fewer no-talent hacks on the radio, but now that they're there, turning it off is a scary, scary idea.
What if the action affects the operation of the school?
Since neither the teacher nor the administration even found out about the page until it had already been taken down, I think it's safe to say it didn't affect the operation of the school.
Just because it's a teacher doesn't stop it being bullying...
Incorrect. The defining characteristic of bullying--what makes it "bullying" rather than "being a jerk"--is that it exploits or creates a power imbalance. In a school, the teachers and administrators have the power. They are the ruling class. When the target is a member of the ruling class, nothing short of the threat of physical violence or large-scale coordinated group action can possibly count as bullying.
...even if you dress it up as only criticising her as a professional...
Doubly incorrect. First, it is not, in this case, "dressing it up," it was in fact nothing more than professional criticism. Second, anything that can even vaguely be dressed up as professional criticism coming from one individual falls short of what it takes to reverse an existing power imbalance.
there are plenty of avenues available to people to voice concerns over a teacher
Like what? You can report actual misconduct to administrators or go directly to the police, depending on the nature and severity of misconduct. But if the concern is just lousy teaching, there's no way to make an official, formal complaint and no reason to believe it would be taken seriously if there was. Most (all?) colleges and universities have evaluation forms that every student fills out on the last day of class, but I don't know of any analogue in high schools. Certainly there wasn't anything like that in the late 90's when I was in high school.
But let's say for the sake of argument that there are proper channels to go through. Even with that, this is still an open-and-shut First Amendment case. The motivation for putting freedom of speech in the Constitution--the only kind of speech the framers ever thought might need protection--is to allow criticism of the government. Public and charter schools, like the one in question, are funded with tax money. Teachers and administrators are public employees--appointed government officials. That means that anything short of the threat of violence, even if it meets my other criterion for power-shifting bullying, even if it's not even thinly disguised as professional criticism, even if it's accompanied by a flat-out refusal to go through proper channels, is protected speech. Is what the First Amendment is specifically intended to protect. And remember, not a single one of those even-ifs applies to this particular case.
This IS NOT a patent on the use of abbreviations.
This IS NOT a patent on the use of a lookup table to interpret abbreviations.
This IS a patent on a specific algorithm for automatically creating multiple lookup tables for abbreviations.
This IS a patent on a specific algorithm for deciding which lookup table to use based on who's talking to whom about what.
It's far enough outside my area of expertise that I don't know if it's original enough and nonobvious enough to be patentable, but it is absolutely not an Amazon one-click situation.
Editors, please actually read the articles and pay specific attention to whether or not they even vaguely match the submitter's summary. As I mentioned before, this is not my area of expertise, and I had no trouble figuring out what was actually being patented.
Why? Because lobbyists are the ONLY people they listen to.
Sure, lobbyists are a fantastic way of bringing issues to the attention of the people in power. But it is NEVER EVER EVER acceptable for decision-makers to form their opinions by listening only to information that is by definition, and design, one-sided. You'll note that the wording (which was carefully chosen) of my original post puts be blame directly on the politicians. It's not the lobbyists' fault that Joe the Congressman won't seek out opposing viewpoints. That's Joe's job--in fact I was arguing that that's the entirety of Joe's job. What scares and angers me is that he won't do it.
"This happens all the time" != "There was nothing nefarious about it."
The entire point of republican democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, is that making representation a full-time job allows our representatives to put the time and effort into being informed about the issues. It scares and angers me that they try to accomplish that by listening to lobbyists.
You're exactly right. There are parts of the experience which are scarce, therefore sellable, even though the information itself isn't. Right now it's 3D, big screens, better sound, etc. Most those things will make their way to the middle-class home eventually, but top-of-the-line will always be too large and/or expensive for the average individual. We are facing the imminent end of CDs and DVDs (though Blu-Ray will survive a bit longer due to limited bandwidth), and that will drastically reduce the amount of money that goes into the music and movie industries.
But there will always be concerts, cinemas, live theatre, custom software, author signings, etc. The Renaissance patronage system may come back in some form. The amount of money going into the information-creation industries will be smaller, but not zero. As I pointed out in my grandparent post, a lot of people working in those industries would still do it for a lot less money. The sale of information is doomed, but the creation of information will survive, and will still (sometimes or often or usually) be a paying job.
Did the people who made Paranormal Activity on a $15,000 budget actually think it was realistic that they'd make $84,780,000 (and counting) back from it? Or even the fifteen grand they spent? Or did they make the film because they really wanted to, and it was worth that much to them to do it? An enormous chunk of the tens of millions of dollars it usually costs to make a movie is simply people charging far more than the minimum they'd accept because they can. More power to them--as long as movies are actually generating millions of dollars of profit, I'm all for everyone involved getting their fair share. But there's a hell of a lot less price elasticity of supply than you seem to think there is--removing a lot of money from film-making and music-making and the other information industries will only remove a little of the production.
We are way, way, way past the point of diminishing returns, and we got this far ONLY because for a few decades, it was exponentially more expensive to copy information in small batches than large. When large-batch copying was prohibitively expensive, the industry wasn't very profitable. When large-batch copying got cheap (on a per-unit basis, anyway), profits got big. Now that small-batch copying is cheap too, profits will shrink again. You can debate the ethics of it, the exact positive and negative consequences, but the fact remains: this is just as much the inevitable cultural consequence of technological progress as the idea of selling information was to begin with. You can sell things that are scarce. You can't sell things that aren't scarce. Period.
Big xkcd fan, but that particular one is totally without merit--the Pythons were obsessive rewriters. Every sketch went through multiple drafts, they chose their topics and precise wording very carefully. They put a lot of effort into finding the absolute most effective way of surprising the audience, and they usually succeeded. The brilliance of Python is that they took the kind of humor that doesn't rely on surprise (a la Laurel and Hardy), and made it so surprising that everyone mistakes it for surprise-humor. Most comedy incorporates surprise, but nothing stays surprising forever--the comedy that stands the test of time is the comedy that doesn't depend on it. Take surprise out of Python and you still have some of the best-written jokes the world has ever produced. The most common format for their sketches was essentially to repeat the same joke over and over again with different wording--Dead Parrot, Crunchy Frog, Spam, Spanish Inquisition, Self-Defense, etc. After the first twenty seconds, there's nothing left to surprise you even the first time you see it. The humor is in the flawless execution--and that's why it's so obsessively quoted and rewatched.
When you install Ubuntu into a dual-boot situation, it asks if you want it to import your entire My Documents folder.
Most open source solutions are terribly documented...you need to...hit the forums or wikis.
To an extent, I agree with you, but you're overstating your case a bit. I'm certainly not happy with the sorry state of F/OSS documentation, but your implication that proprietary software is any better is nonsense. The software written by the companies Joe Sixpack knows the names of--that is, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe--tends to have built-in help systems. Because those companies can afford to hire someone to write it. The software written by everyone else, proprietary or open source, has half-assed or nonexistant built-in help. Even those three big companies aren't great at it. Their help systems don't answer the questions users actually have, they answer the questions they think users are going to have. The amount of overlap varies wildly from app to app--I find Excel's help system to be extremely useful, and Word's to be a waste of RAM, personally. The wiki approach to documentation is, by definition, a closer match to what users actually need, and part of the point of open source is that the original authors are not the only ones competent to write documentation. The fact that most people's first instinct is to look for a drop-down help menu is simply because that's what they're used to. It doesn't mean it's a better way to do it.
What's so great about free software? It's free? Is Open Office better then MS Office? No? Is GIMP better than Photoshop or PSP or anything? No?
For most end-user applications, the absolute best in the industry is usually proprietary. That's true. The competing free software tends to do about 80% of what the proprietary solution does. But only the 1% of users who use that particular application at a professional level ever need, or, sometimes, are even capable of understanding, the other 20%. The differences between OO.o Word Processor and MS Word are the things that you don't need unless you're a professional writer/editor/publisher. The differences between OO.o Spreadsheet and MS Excel are the things you don't need unless you're an MBA. The differences between GIMP and Photoshop are the things you don't need unless you're an artist. A lot of people will need the proprietary application in one or two domains, but would never notice the difference anywhere else. But they're paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the proprietary solution anyway.
And you're conveniently ignoring all the FOSS that's simply better: Firefox, PostgreSQL, Apache, R, Pidgin, any of a dozen free PDF viewers, etc.
Is Linux easier to use than Windows or Mac...for email and typing documents and browsing the web?
Absolutely. You're confusing familiarity with simplicity. If you're already familiar with Windows, using it will be quite a bit easier than learning a new tool. For true beginners, I'd say that Mac is the easiest, Ubuntu is fairly close, and Windows is a total nightmare. There's some subjectivity there, but I'd bet that no-one who disagrees has ever been the friend/relative everyone uses for free tech support.
anyone idealistic enough to run free software is already doing so
I disagree with this more strongly than anything else you said. The political things we say about open software and open file formats are strongly compatible with a wide range of leftist and libertarian movements, especially anticorporatism. I have on several occasions talked people with anti-Walmart bumper stickers into switching to Linux.
Domain squatters are similar. They help allocate the good domains to those who are willing to pay for them. Just this weekend I heard of ancestry.com. I instantly knew what it was. That great name saved the business from having to build a brand. If it had been "avalea.com" instead, I would have said "what's that?" This domain should be allocated to someone who is willing to put the capital into building a good business with it.
How exactly does this add value? Your claim is that the people willing to pay are likely to create more value than the people unwilling to pay. In many industries, this makes sense: the more money you have, the more you can spend on making a good product. But web companies work differently. Time, effort, and skill are the things that matter, the only use for money is to purchase the time, effort, and skill of more people. We've seen time and time again that students and the underemployed--the people with the most time and/or effort and/or skill to put into it, and the least money--are more successful at making good websites than existing big companies with lots of money. And among big companies with lots of money, every dollar spent for the domain is a dollar that can't be spent on hiring another programmer--the companies willing to spend more on domains are the ones willing to spend less on the product.
Cybersquatting allocates the best domain names to the people least likely to put them to good use. Squatters are subtracting value.
Furthermore, nobody has ever suggested a good system that would eliminate squatters. You want registrars deciding who has a "legitimate" business and who is just squatting?
The fact that nobody's come up with a good solution does not mean there isn't one to be found. And finding out that a problem is unsolvable does not mean it ceases to be a problem.
Or do you want to just jack up the price of domains so squatting is economical--but then, registering domains becomes uneconomical for many individuals or small businesses?
I'm not convinced that won't work. Squatters generally work in bulk--buying huge quantities of domains in the hopes that a few of them will turn out to be worth something. I don't have enough information to say anything for sure, but it's at least possible that an increase small enough not to affect individuals and startups could raise expenses for squatters to more than their revenue. But like I said, that's beside the point.
Besides, if you don't want to buy from a squatter, go get a made up word that nobody has registered. They are easy to find. But then you have to work harder to build a brand.
You're making my point for me. Either way of doing things, buying from a squatter or putting more money/time/effort into other kinds of marketing, diverts resources from product creation. It's probably a net loss, at best a break-even redistribution of wealth. Again, subtracting value.
Buying thousands of shares of a troubled company for less than $1 each and then hoping later, when the company recovers, to sell them at a huge profit is also scumbaggy then? It seems to be the same thing.
It's not, in the slightest way, the same thing. Investing in a company going through tough times provides them capital that they can use to solve their problems. Investment means you are helping create value, and the profit you make when the stock goes up is your share of that value. Your actions are a net gain for society, and your profit is the reward.
Cybersquatting is very different. Domain names have no inherent value until they point to a site people want to go to. Buying domains with no intent to use them, but rather to sell them for a share of the value the buyer will try to create, is just piggybacking on someone else's hard work. Your actions make no contribution to creating any value. Worse, every dollar the buyer gives you is a dollar they can't spend on creating value themselves. Your actions are a net loss for society.
Investment and cybersquatting are activities that are different in fundamental nature and in global results. The similar local results--your personal profit--are little more than coincidence.
You're comparing apples to oranges. In the situation where a computer is assembled and configured by professionals, then sold to end-users, any OS will Just Work out of the box. In the situation where components are sold to end-users who assemble and configure themselves, Linux is a hell of a lot easier than Windows to get running, and slightly easier to get running well.
I think the argument you're trying to make is that an OS that doesn't come preinstalled by major-brand manufacturers is unsuitable for the typical end user. Which I agree with--I'm a Linux user, borderline zealot, but there's no way Joe Sixpack can be expected to know how to install a new OS.
Sites that work better in IE than Firefox are certainly a minority, and sites that don't work at all in Firefox are rare, but they do exist. I can think of two examples that I've experienced in the last week:
My girlfriend is a college student who takes most of her classes online. She was taking a quiz a few days ago and trying to answer the first question crashed Firefox, every time she tried. Only IE works. The school is Columbus State Community College, FYI.
My employer contracts with a company called Workbrain for "workforce management"--employee scheduling, timeclock, payroll, etc. It's all web-based, so we can check our schedules, see pay stubs, request time off, etc. online. Almost all of the website works fine in any browser. But the part of the site that allows us to view the full schedule for all employees or the staff phone list, among other things, simply does not display in Firefox.
Neither of those problems is solvable by falsifying user agent. They are genuine incompatibilities. No, there's no reason, not even ease of development, that the sites should have been designed that way. It would have been easier, not just more functional, to implement both sites in plain-vanilla HTML--neither does anything fancy. But how they should have been done is irrelevant. They were both actually done in a way that only works in IE, and they're both completely modern sites that are completely unavoidable parts of our day-to-day lives.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you know more about chess than I do, so I'll take your word for it that more than 10% of the game is represented. But speaking as both a mathematician and a musician, I was being generous in describing melody alone as 20% of musical content. Listen to a piano arrangement of Pachelbel's canon, then a song called Heeding The Call by power-metal band Hammerfall and tell me I'm wrong. The non-deterministic additions Stokes is making to the deterministic chess output match, or arguably slightly exceed, the differences between Pachelbel's and Hammerfall's interpretations of the same melody.
Ah, yes, I missed that. The point remains that this is not (and is not even intended to be) algorithmic composition by any stretch of the imagination.
What's being done is starting with a chess game, throwing out most of the information (the positions of non-moving pieces, which piece is moving, and one of the two dimensions of movement), converting (deterministically) what little is left into a sequence of notes, deciding (creatively/non-deterministically) what rhythm to put them in, and deciding (creatively/non-deterministically) how to harmonize them. It's only a mapping between maybe 10% of the game and maybe 20% of the music.
It's a mildly interesting way to "seed" the creative process, but it's neither an impressive intellectual accomplishment (from a musical or mathematical perspective) nor a testament to hidden order in the universe. Most people seem to be misinterpreting it as one (or paradoxically both) of those.
In what way is a large, powerful institution that can control the flow of information NOT a government? In what way is showing preference for certain packets over others NOT regulation?
Anarchism is feudalism. There is no such thing as total deregulation--the choice is about who gets to regulate and how much say you and I get in it.
Not just open-source. Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet out there, period. As of recent versions, its numerical accuracy and featureset leave all other spreadsheets in the dust, along with some well-known statistical analysis suites.
Anybody who uses "elude" when they mean "allude" is accidentally correct.
Slow and steady wins the race.
I enjoy both Star Trek and Star Wars as adventure drama, but there is not one iota of real science in either one. Might as well post an article about how the pot trumped the kettle for whiteness.
Less than a month ago. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/16/1931214/Users-Rejecting-Security-Advice-Considered-Rational
Kudos to the /. editors for cutting way down on the number of dupes and summary-contradicts-article stories over the past couple of years, but they're certainly not eradicated. Maybe dupe-checking should be part of slashcode--an automatic search for links and link titles that the editor (or submitter?) has to at least scroll past to post.
Some studio-manufactured AutoTune pop stars can actually sing, and some can't, and it's often surprising which is which. If you watched the Oscar telecast a few years ago, you know that Beyonce is a real musician. Christina Aguilera has talent (though chooses not to use it). Several of the High School Musical kids turned out to be decent singers or actors or both once they got out from under Disney's thumb. And on the other hand, despite the strong genetic component to musical talent, pre-AutoTune professional musician Billy Ray Cyrus's daughter can't sing at all without the help of her robotic overlord. As a film projectionist, I had to watch Last Song the other day. In one scene, Miley sings along with the radio AN ENTIRE FUCKING HALF-STEP SHARP! For non-musicians reading this, that's the interval between two adjacent piano keys. If you play two notes together that are separated by a half-step, it sounds awful. And anyone who's not completely tone-deaf can tell it sounds awful. It takes a modicum of musical training to identify the specific problem, but anyone can tell it's wrong. So remember, AutoTune is saving your ears from that crap every day. If it had never existed, there would be fewer no-talent hacks on the radio, but now that they're there, turning it off is a scary, scary idea.
What if the action affects the operation of the school?
Since neither the teacher nor the administration even found out about the page until it had already been taken down, I think it's safe to say it didn't affect the operation of the school.
Just because it's a teacher doesn't stop it being bullying...
Incorrect. The defining characteristic of bullying--what makes it "bullying" rather than "being a jerk"--is that it exploits or creates a power imbalance. In a school, the teachers and administrators have the power. They are the ruling class. When the target is a member of the ruling class, nothing short of the threat of physical violence or large-scale coordinated group action can possibly count as bullying.
Doubly incorrect. First, it is not, in this case, "dressing it up," it was in fact nothing more than professional criticism. Second, anything that can even vaguely be dressed up as professional criticism coming from one individual falls short of what it takes to reverse an existing power imbalance.
there are plenty of avenues available to people to voice concerns over a teacher
Like what? You can report actual misconduct to administrators or go directly to the police, depending on the nature and severity of misconduct. But if the concern is just lousy teaching, there's no way to make an official, formal complaint and no reason to believe it would be taken seriously if there was. Most (all?) colleges and universities have evaluation forms that every student fills out on the last day of class, but I don't know of any analogue in high schools. Certainly there wasn't anything like that in the late 90's when I was in high school.
But let's say for the sake of argument that there are proper channels to go through. Even with that, this is still an open-and-shut First Amendment case. The motivation for putting freedom of speech in the Constitution--the only kind of speech the framers ever thought might need protection--is to allow criticism of the government. Public and charter schools, like the one in question, are funded with tax money. Teachers and administrators are public employees--appointed government officials. That means that anything short of the threat of violence, even if it meets my other criterion for power-shifting bullying, even if it's not even thinly disguised as professional criticism, even if it's accompanied by a flat-out refusal to go through proper channels, is protected speech. Is what the First Amendment is specifically intended to protect. And remember, not a single one of those even-ifs applies to this particular case.
+i Evil?
Or +1 (mod 5) Evil, to model the "what if everyone did it" approach to ethics.
This IS NOT a patent on the use of abbreviations.
This IS NOT a patent on the use of a lookup table to interpret abbreviations.
This IS a patent on a specific algorithm for automatically creating multiple lookup tables for abbreviations.
This IS a patent on a specific algorithm for deciding which lookup table to use based on who's talking to whom about what.
It's far enough outside my area of expertise that I don't know if it's original enough and nonobvious enough to be patentable, but it is absolutely not an Amazon one-click situation.
Editors, please actually read the articles and pay specific attention to whether or not they even vaguely match the submitter's summary. As I mentioned before, this is not my area of expertise, and I had no trouble figuring out what was actually being patented.
Why? Because lobbyists are the ONLY people they listen to.
Sure, lobbyists are a fantastic way of bringing issues to the attention of the people in power. But it is NEVER EVER EVER acceptable for decision-makers to form their opinions by listening only to information that is by definition, and design, one-sided. You'll note that the wording (which was carefully chosen) of my original post puts be blame directly on the politicians. It's not the lobbyists' fault that Joe the Congressman won't seek out opposing viewpoints. That's Joe's job--in fact I was arguing that that's the entirety of Joe's job. What scares and angers me is that he won't do it.
From Wikipedia:
"In this sense it refers to the notion representative democracy, as one meaning of republic is a system of restricted democracy."
To be a successful details-nazi, first check that you in fact have the details correct.
"This happens all the time" != "There was nothing nefarious about it."
The entire point of republican democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, is that making representation a full-time job allows our representatives to put the time and effort into being informed about the issues. It scares and angers me that they try to accomplish that by listening to lobbyists.
You're exactly right. There are parts of the experience which are scarce, therefore sellable, even though the information itself isn't. Right now it's 3D, big screens, better sound, etc. Most those things will make their way to the middle-class home eventually, but top-of-the-line will always be too large and/or expensive for the average individual. We are facing the imminent end of CDs and DVDs (though Blu-Ray will survive a bit longer due to limited bandwidth), and that will drastically reduce the amount of money that goes into the music and movie industries.
But there will always be concerts, cinemas, live theatre, custom software, author signings, etc. The Renaissance patronage system may come back in some form. The amount of money going into the information-creation industries will be smaller, but not zero. As I pointed out in my grandparent post, a lot of people working in those industries would still do it for a lot less money. The sale of information is doomed, but the creation of information will survive, and will still (sometimes or often or usually) be a paying job.
Did the people who made Paranormal Activity on a $15,000 budget actually think it was realistic that they'd make $84,780,000 (and counting) back from it? Or even the fifteen grand they spent? Or did they make the film because they really wanted to, and it was worth that much to them to do it? An enormous chunk of the tens of millions of dollars it usually costs to make a movie is simply people charging far more than the minimum they'd accept because they can. More power to them--as long as movies are actually generating millions of dollars of profit, I'm all for everyone involved getting their fair share. But there's a hell of a lot less price elasticity of supply than you seem to think there is--removing a lot of money from film-making and music-making and the other information industries will only remove a little of the production.
We are way, way, way past the point of diminishing returns, and we got this far ONLY because for a few decades, it was exponentially more expensive to copy information in small batches than large. When large-batch copying was prohibitively expensive, the industry wasn't very profitable. When large-batch copying got cheap (on a per-unit basis, anyway), profits got big. Now that small-batch copying is cheap too, profits will shrink again. You can debate the ethics of it, the exact positive and negative consequences, but the fact remains: this is just as much the inevitable cultural consequence of technological progress as the idea of selling information was to begin with. You can sell things that are scarce. You can't sell things that aren't scarce. Period.
"Seems random" != "is random"
Big xkcd fan, but that particular one is totally without merit--the Pythons were obsessive rewriters. Every sketch went through multiple drafts, they chose their topics and precise wording very carefully. They put a lot of effort into finding the absolute most effective way of surprising the audience, and they usually succeeded. The brilliance of Python is that they took the kind of humor that doesn't rely on surprise (a la Laurel and Hardy), and made it so surprising that everyone mistakes it for surprise-humor. Most comedy incorporates surprise, but nothing stays surprising forever--the comedy that stands the test of time is the comedy that doesn't depend on it. Take surprise out of Python and you still have some of the best-written jokes the world has ever produced. The most common format for their sketches was essentially to repeat the same joke over and over again with different wording--Dead Parrot, Crunchy Frog, Spam, Spanish Inquisition, Self-Defense, etc. After the first twenty seconds, there's nothing left to surprise you even the first time you see it. The humor is in the flawless execution--and that's why it's so obsessively quoted and rewatched.
destroying people's data
When you install Ubuntu into a dual-boot situation, it asks if you want it to import your entire My Documents folder.
Most open source solutions are terribly documented...you need to...hit the forums or wikis.
To an extent, I agree with you, but you're overstating your case a bit. I'm certainly not happy with the sorry state of F/OSS documentation, but your implication that proprietary software is any better is nonsense. The software written by the companies Joe Sixpack knows the names of--that is, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe--tends to have built-in help systems. Because those companies can afford to hire someone to write it. The software written by everyone else, proprietary or open source, has half-assed or nonexistant built-in help. Even those three big companies aren't great at it. Their help systems don't answer the questions users actually have, they answer the questions they think users are going to have. The amount of overlap varies wildly from app to app--I find Excel's help system to be extremely useful, and Word's to be a waste of RAM, personally. The wiki approach to documentation is, by definition, a closer match to what users actually need, and part of the point of open source is that the original authors are not the only ones competent to write documentation. The fact that most people's first instinct is to look for a drop-down help menu is simply because that's what they're used to. It doesn't mean it's a better way to do it.
What's so great about free software? It's free? Is Open Office better then MS Office? No? Is GIMP better than Photoshop or PSP or anything? No?
For most end-user applications, the absolute best in the industry is usually proprietary. That's true. The competing free software tends to do about 80% of what the proprietary solution does. But only the 1% of users who use that particular application at a professional level ever need, or, sometimes, are even capable of understanding, the other 20%. The differences between OO.o Word Processor and MS Word are the things that you don't need unless you're a professional writer/editor/publisher. The differences between OO.o Spreadsheet and MS Excel are the things you don't need unless you're an MBA. The differences between GIMP and Photoshop are the things you don't need unless you're an artist. A lot of people will need the proprietary application in one or two domains, but would never notice the difference anywhere else. But they're paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the proprietary solution anyway.
And you're conveniently ignoring all the FOSS that's simply better: Firefox, PostgreSQL, Apache, R, Pidgin, any of a dozen free PDF viewers, etc.
Is Linux easier to use than Windows or Mac...for email and typing documents and browsing the web?
Absolutely. You're confusing familiarity with simplicity. If you're already familiar with Windows, using it will be quite a bit easier than learning a new tool. For true beginners, I'd say that Mac is the easiest, Ubuntu is fairly close, and Windows is a total nightmare. There's some subjectivity there, but I'd bet that no-one who disagrees has ever been the friend/relative everyone uses for free tech support.
anyone idealistic enough to run free software is already doing so
I disagree with this more strongly than anything else you said. The political things we say about open software and open file formats are strongly compatible with a wide range of leftist and libertarian movements, especially anticorporatism. I have on several occasions talked people with anti-Walmart bumper stickers into switching to Linux.
That creature has stolen the space modulator!
Domain squatters are similar. They help allocate the good domains to those who are willing to pay for them. Just this weekend I heard of ancestry.com. I instantly knew what it was. That great name saved the business from having to build a brand. If it had been "avalea.com" instead, I would have said "what's that?" This domain should be allocated to someone who is willing to put the capital into building a good business with it.
How exactly does this add value? Your claim is that the people willing to pay are likely to create more value than the people unwilling to pay. In many industries, this makes sense: the more money you have, the more you can spend on making a good product. But web companies work differently. Time, effort, and skill are the things that matter, the only use for money is to purchase the time, effort, and skill of more people. We've seen time and time again that students and the underemployed--the people with the most time and/or effort and/or skill to put into it, and the least money--are more successful at making good websites than existing big companies with lots of money. And among big companies with lots of money, every dollar spent for the domain is a dollar that can't be spent on hiring another programmer--the companies willing to spend more on domains are the ones willing to spend less on the product.
Cybersquatting allocates the best domain names to the people least likely to put them to good use. Squatters are subtracting value.
Furthermore, nobody has ever suggested a good system that would eliminate squatters. You want registrars deciding who has a "legitimate" business and who is just squatting?
The fact that nobody's come up with a good solution does not mean there isn't one to be found. And finding out that a problem is unsolvable does not mean it ceases to be a problem.
Or do you want to just jack up the price of domains so squatting is economical--but then, registering domains becomes uneconomical for many individuals or small businesses?
I'm not convinced that won't work. Squatters generally work in bulk--buying huge quantities of domains in the hopes that a few of them will turn out to be worth something. I don't have enough information to say anything for sure, but it's at least possible that an increase small enough not to affect individuals and startups could raise expenses for squatters to more than their revenue. But like I said, that's beside the point.
Besides, if you don't want to buy from a squatter, go get a made up word that nobody has registered. They are easy to find. But then you have to work harder to build a brand.
You're making my point for me. Either way of doing things, buying from a squatter or putting more money/time/effort into other kinds of marketing, diverts resources from product creation. It's probably a net loss, at best a break-even redistribution of wealth. Again, subtracting value.
Buying thousands of shares of a troubled company for less than $1 each and then hoping later, when the company recovers, to sell them at a huge profit is also scumbaggy then? It seems to be the same thing.
It's not, in the slightest way, the same thing. Investing in a company going through tough times provides them capital that they can use to solve their problems. Investment means you are helping create value, and the profit you make when the stock goes up is your share of that value. Your actions are a net gain for society, and your profit is the reward.
Cybersquatting is very different. Domain names have no inherent value until they point to a site people want to go to. Buying domains with no intent to use them, but rather to sell them for a share of the value the buyer will try to create, is just piggybacking on someone else's hard work. Your actions make no contribution to creating any value. Worse, every dollar the buyer gives you is a dollar they can't spend on creating value themselves. Your actions are a net loss for society.
Investment and cybersquatting are activities that are different in fundamental nature and in global results. The similar local results--your personal profit--are little more than coincidence.
You're comparing apples to oranges. In the situation where a computer is assembled and configured by professionals, then sold to end-users, any OS will Just Work out of the box. In the situation where components are sold to end-users who assemble and configure themselves, Linux is a hell of a lot easier than Windows to get running, and slightly easier to get running well.
I think the argument you're trying to make is that an OS that doesn't come preinstalled by major-brand manufacturers is unsuitable for the typical end user. Which I agree with--I'm a Linux user, borderline zealot, but there's no way Joe Sixpack can be expected to know how to install a new OS.
-1 Misinformative.
Sites that work better in IE than Firefox are certainly a minority, and sites that don't work at all in Firefox are rare, but they do exist. I can think of two examples that I've experienced in the last week:
Neither of those problems is solvable by falsifying user agent. They are genuine incompatibilities. No, there's no reason, not even ease of development, that the sites should have been designed that way. It would have been easier, not just more functional, to implement both sites in plain-vanilla HTML--neither does anything fancy. But how they should have been done is irrelevant. They were both actually done in a way that only works in IE, and they're both completely modern sites that are completely unavoidable parts of our day-to-day lives.