Who cares if Linux uses SCSI for USB Keys? Your distro, assuming it was released in the last two years or so, should come with support for USB Keys pre-compiled. You plug the key in and the auto-mounter makes it appear on the desktop. At least in Mandrake...
If you can't read the docs and figure out what you need (assuming it's not obvious because USB keys tend to be/dev/sdX) why are you recompiling your kernel? Windows users don't complain that the system won't work if you delete the registry, so why do they complain that Linux won't work if you open a command-line, CD into an obscure directory, and issue a series of instructions to cause your kernel to be recompiled?
What is this? It's like saying your car sucks because when you add a nitrous kit it's easy to screw up the mods.
Actually, Xerox invented(?) a much better way to store data. You print a page of slashes and backslashes. Small enough that to the eye they appear as a nondescript gray background, especially because compressed data is fairly random and you don't get huge areas of all one direction. Then you scan this light-gray paper in later and treat slashes as 1s and back-slashes as 0s.
For more security, enlarge the slashes and use darker printing, print it on acid-free onion-skin paper.
They actually developed the technique to be used with a Reed-Solomon error-checking codes. If you have 200 bytes of data (say a filename on the master server) it'd generate a code, such that ANY 300 bytes (let's say) from the whole page would be enough to generate all of the data properly. So if all you had from the document was a thin diagonal strip, or a corner, or just a bit of it visible behind dense printing, that you could reconstruct the data and find the URL of the document in its original form.
So you could print out tons of information per page, with a good printer and optics system for the reader. The printer could even use a laser to burn the marks into the media, not just deposit toner. These would then last as well as the best paper has, which is suprisingly long.
Nowhere near as dense as a harddrive, but good because you could describe how to read the data on a page or two of paper and assuming the person doing the reading has a decent scanner, a simple program could OCR the patterns of slashes. All that would be needed would be 1960s tech and a scanner. No proprietary drives, no special interfaces... This is what you'd want to do if you wanted your data to survive a nuclear war and be usable to the Mad Max level survivors.
I didn't say that I couldn't do anything with any limit of money. If I had billions I'd spend it on funding rocketry and all of the cool things I don't think have a direct profit motive. But it's not like I consider getting rich and say, "Oh damn, I could never be a billionarie, why bother?" In fact, I don't think I could really be more motivated by a billion than ten million, because I'd pretty much do everything in my power to get the ten million. (Not that I wouldn't work almost as hard for $250k...)
What I'm proposing is that another dollar earned never costs you anything, even if it's your hundred billionth. There's always something to be earned. You'd never make 4% more and have the government take 5% more. If there is a cost of living increase, it'll hit everyone. Actually, cost of living increases hit the poor more, because a higher percentage of your income goes to food and rent.
The problem is that you can go broke long before this gets to court, and gets tossed out in your favor.
I think we need two things.
1) Pooled legal funds between parties. Just the legal staff, the ammount of paperwork generated by both sides should be about equal.
2) Damages for SLAPP suits based on percentage of assets. If McDonalds sues me for $1m dollars, it's chump change for them even if they lose and have to pay it and my defense, but it's a life-ruining ammount for me and if I can't take the risk I might have to settle unfairly. But if McDonalds sued me for a million and risked being fined $6 billion, they'd probably pick a more reasonable ammount and be willing to limit the costs, in #1 as well.
The dots are pretty easy to connect. They planned time stock sales, and release fraudulent press releases before this. Pump and Dump schemes involve raising a stock price (fraudulently) and then selling the stock. The people who are selling are the people who are releasing the lies that raise the stock price. It's pretty obvious.
The code they pointed to as violating their copyright suggests that they didn't do any research on the history of that code, they simply saw something similar and jumped. However, they claim to have researched it, which is a lie. Lying for financial gain is fraud, and lying to increase your stock price is securities fraud. There's more to it than that, but it's pretty straight forward.
You have a popular page, and it links to something people want. What they don't realize is that your link to that page changes the page, so they really are at ebay.com, but using content from your site so when they go to login, you get their password instead.
Or, make a link to a really good deal at amazon.com, and grab their credit cards.
Of course, ebay and Amazon are probably not that stupid, but many smaller sites are. (Banks maybe?)
I'm saying she could have been. Or rather, perhaps she saw something in Neo and gave him an answer that would encourage him to work for what he could be, not rest on the laurels of being "The One".
In the first movie there was no mention of the oracle being one of the bad guys, which meant that the interpretations there was more along the lines that she saw that Neo could be the one, but that it would take sacrifice to make him go beyond the stage of just very good to actually seeing under the matrix and realizing that not only could he jump very far, but that there wasn't gravity, and there wasn't distance, so not only could he float slowly across, but he could just be across without travelling, because here and there aren't really different.
In fact, my biggest issue with the second movie is that Neo is just very fast, and can fly. Except for saving Trinity at the end, he doesn't really use him new understanding of the matrix. When he fights the Smiths he simply gets faster, he doesn't actually freeze time, or teleport, or just make them go away. Admittedly he was playing at first, but later on... And when his friends were running away with the keymaker, being chased by the guys in white who could ghost, he had a kung-fu fight with the Morovingian's guards rather than just dealing with them and going to help.
It's like they made him too powerful in the first movie and he had to forget about everything Morpheus and everyone told him "you think that's air?", "there is no spoon", etc.
When I said we don't need really rich people, I meant over a few million dollars. Bill Gates isn't as helpful to the economy, imho, as one hundred people with his money spread between them.
I think the goal of having fifty million dollars is about as motivating as the goal of having fifty billion dollars, for most people. If you start at an average level and work your way up to fifty million, you can already buy things that were undreamed of before. Yachts, mansions, fast cars, fast women, etc. You could buy the private school and put your kids through it.
Do people who have billions actually work harder, or did they just get lucky? Would the lack of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison's level of success really stop people from trying? Would you wake up and say, "Damn, I could only ever make $50M or so, so I'm not going to try - Back to McDonalds for minimum wage?"
And I do agree that there needs to be something to strive for, but I don't think it needs to be being a billionaire. Fame, sports achievements, politics, education, respected position, etc. You could even, for bonus points, do them all... An educated millionarie, winner of the Superbowl, famous Shakespearean actor, and chairman of the local rotary club.:)
I'll agree about the targetted tax, and to take it a bit further. I think we should see a credit for all public resources rented or sold, and then see this balance a higher tax bill. This way people would be more upset about sweetheart deals for the radio spectrum allocations, for example. And we'd see how much money the government really wanted.
If a progressive tax provides a dis-incentive, which I don't agree with, your flat tax after a certain point provides a disincentive for people making minimum wage to earn enough to get taxed.
However, I think that as long as a progressive tax doesn't hit 100%, it still provides incentive to earn more. Not as much perhaps, but that doesn't strike me as a bad thing.
Really rich people aren't needed though, despite arguments about capital and investing. Companies can fill the same niche. Mutual funds are a way of getting many not-rich people to provide capital to fund businesses. If there wasn't incentive for people to be billionaries, life would still go on, much as it is now.
But that was easy. She told him he wasn't the one. Had he not done that, he wouldn't have been. When he does go back in and become the one, she simply says that she told him what he needed to hear.
It's why people believe in psychics in the real world, they're hard to nail down on specifics and there's always a way to see it that doesn't involve them being outright wrong.
Making more money still leaves more in your pocket, just less than it might have otherwise. Sure, you don't get all of that extra $100k, but it's better than not having any of it.
As long as the prophecy would come true in (or based on actions in) the matrix, and the Oracle has a lot of power in the matrix, it wouldn't be hard to make those prophecies come true.
Besides, they all related to Neo's becoming "The One", something that may or may not have actually been his doing. If it's merely a matter of being shown the back-end of the system, the machines could have made one of many qualified (strength of will, intelligence, gullibility, whatever...) people into the one.
All of the mystic elements in the first movie could have been explained in the context of the matrix. Neo's "One-ness" was only in the matrix, and the prophecy was that a "One" would be found, not that Neo was the one. (After all, there were other candidates for the position.) The neat thing about the movie is that their world could be ours, no mysticism was really required.
That was the neat thing for me, it was a neat way to ask old questions about existence and reality. "Brain in the Jar", and "The Cave", and all these other thought experiments, but in a catchy story with kick-ass effects.
What was the real story of the creation of the matrix? Why were humans being used as power, or were they really? Was Zion a real free city, or was it just another level of the matrix to catch the troublemakers?
If it doesn't answer the majority of these things, it's a weak ending.
If the ships have a wireless link to the crew that will allow them to be somewhat in the matrix, why do they stick these huge plugs into people?
Besides, Neo's powers in the matrix don't allow him to command the working of it, or he'd just say what he wants to happen. He merely changes himself to move faster, better, etc. It's directly opposite of what they *say* ("there is no spoon") but it's exactly what they show us. Neo never simply makes an agent go away, he always outfights, or flies away, etc. Based on this, he shouldn't be able to tell the Sentinels to shut off, even if they were in the matrix, not real-world machines as they're supposed to be.
How did Neo become able to stop the Sentinels *outside* of the Matrix? I don't want fucking "It's very Eastern". I want a real, or Western, answer. Like, perhaps, he wasn't out of the matrix or something. Even if he was one with the sentinels and understands their inputs logically, he still can't broadcast radio waves with his mind, if they are indeed in the real world. A question that I am told wasn't adressed in the third movie.
Actually, OCR is as near to 100% accurate as needed, assuming it has a limited set of inputs and controlled scanning conditions. Having it read large easy-to-read English text where you knew the names involved would be trivial (ie, might cost a bit, but could be very very accurate.)
Seriously, storing the data twice is just asking for trouble. Even if there's no fraud involved, it's an extra step that could go wrong and needs to be verified. It'd be bad enough if the two copies were both human readable for on-the-spot checks, but for one copy to not be... Why make it harder?
If Adobe, for instance, sees that a lot (10k or so) people are using Photoshop in Linux, they'll consider porting when there's competition. They'll realize that people in Linux are using their product, but that it may stop because a native program (with better performance and interface) is coming out. If nobody used Photoshop in Linux though, they'd never know it was a graphics platform, or that there was a market share to lose.
There are actually a ton of art shops using Linux, mostly (in my experience) to do with movies and animation. I don't doubt that they'd switch their graphics artists from Windows at some point, like they've switched their animators. And all the software in this area is weird and requires some education, the bit of extra education involved in Linux vs Windows wouldn't matter at all. If Adobe isn't listening to the growing number of Linux users, some other company will.
They have suggested compulsory licensing as a possible solution to P2P woes. This could (my words) be in the form of paying extra for bandwidth, the everyone is a thief theory, or it could be in the form of legalized music trading on non-free P2P networks, and a government-backed crackdown on P2P networks that facilitate trading music without the fees.
Compulsory licensing is currently used (in Canada at any rate - I think in the USA too) on CDs, Tapes, and DATs, every one you buy costs a bit more and the extra is given to the industry association to distribute to the artists who are supposedly being copied. (Based on sales figures, etc.) Of course, none of this actually makes it to the artist and even if it did, it'd make it to the artists with high sales stats (Britney, etc) not the artists who are probably being taped more (Phish, the Dead, etc). This is very bad because you're paying for music you supposedly pirate for every disk you use, for backups, for your own music, for pirated games, etc. There's no way to make sure the money gets to the right artists, or to avoid paying by proving that you're not using the disk for music (let alone the idea that they should have to prove that you are using it for music...)
The EFF's said "Another solution might be compulsory licensing -- Congress could step in and force the record labels to accept file sharing in exchange for reasonable compensation from file sharers. This is what happened with webcasting. It is also how cable companies and satellite companies pay for TV programming. These historical solutions have only affected specific industries; there is no reason that we cannot limit the P2P solution as well. [...] For example, there is a specific compulsory license for making a cover song. If you want to record your own version of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," you don't have to get Bob's permission. A specific section of the copyright law allows you to simply go ahead and record and sell your version -- as long as, in return, you pay Bob eight cents for every copy you sell."
This seems to suggest that you wouldn't pay a tarrif for simply being online, or using a P2P network, but that you'd be able to download music (special P2P networks, from the music companies, etc) and that you'd pay for the downloads, but that you wouldn't have to ask permission - congress would just rule that published music costs $.xx per song and that you're allowed to copy it, if you pay that.
This actually seems reasonable. It'd force the music companies to license their music in a useful way, but it wouldn't preclude better deals (if you wanted to cover Dylan's music and he wants you to, he might waive the fee) and wouldn't require people to pay for things they don't like or use.
In other words, I think the EFF is in the right here.
You'd be a lot more likely to find exploitable bugs though, if people could see the source. Sure, it would be auditable, but what if twenty potentially exploitable bugs were found, you couldn't prove that they weren't exploited, but they could have been...
I'd say that it should be open years before it's actually used in a federal election, and make sure it gets used to elect local dog-catchers long before final use. Then, pay a bounty to people who identify weaknesses. Up to $10k or some other large ammount if it's potentially exploitable. The few hundred thousand you'd end up paying are nothing compared to the value of all the professionals who'd look hard at this, both for the possibility of a huge bonus check, and for resume material. How'd it look, when going for a coding job, to be able to claim that the government gave you $10k for a security audit on the official voting software?
You have reading trouble, don't you? The GPL never "demands" anything, but offers. Even then it doesn't require all of your work, merely all of what you combine with mine. Half the code in your project, without the rest or the build files, is useless. You get to pick and choose through my code, why should I get less from you?
Further, your use of the word extortion is incorrect. Extortion requires "coercion or intimidation, illegal use of officials powers or position" according to the dictionary. Making you an offer, however bad you may feel it would be for you, can never be extortion if you're honestly free to take it or leave it. Considering that I don't even seek to make you the offer, that the GPL is merely there if you want to look, it's even farther from extortion.
It's not greed, it's a flat price. Play along and be generous to those around you, or play alone. Be a good neighbor, or don't expect any help from anyone.
You have a very funny version of extortion, where writing code and leaving it on the net for people to use, or not, counts?
You are never trapped into having to use GPLed code, so it can't be seen as extortion. You never have to work harder than simply writing the code yourself. Pretty simple.
Greed also implies a lust for personal gain, and hoarding. It's hard to be greedy about something that is being given equally to everyone. I really want there to be more GPLed software, but it's hard to see that as greed. Is it greed when people wish for world peace? I'm in a rich country, I could easily buy all the software I needed if there wasn't free software, much like peace activists usually aren't in personal danger. But we both want to better the world, for ourselves and for everyone else in more urgent need than us.
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Who cares if Linux uses SCSI for USB Keys? Your distro, assuming it was released in the last two years or so, should come with support for USB Keys pre-compiled. You plug the key in and the auto-mounter makes it appear on the desktop. At least in Mandrake...
/dev/sdX) why are you recompiling your kernel? Windows users don't complain that the system won't work if you delete the registry, so why do they complain that Linux won't work if you open a command-line, CD into an obscure directory, and issue a series of instructions to cause your kernel to be recompiled?
If you can't read the docs and figure out what you need (assuming it's not obvious because USB keys tend to be
What is this? It's like saying your car sucks because when you add a nitrous kit it's easy to screw up the mods.
Thanks. I was wondering what they called that.
Actually, Xerox invented(?) a much better way to store data. You print a page of slashes and backslashes. Small enough that to the eye they appear as a nondescript gray background, especially because compressed data is fairly random and you don't get huge areas of all one direction. Then you scan this light-gray paper in later and treat slashes as 1s and back-slashes as 0s.
For more security, enlarge the slashes and use darker printing, print it on acid-free onion-skin paper.
They actually developed the technique to be used with a Reed-Solomon error-checking codes. If you have 200 bytes of data (say a filename on the master server) it'd generate a code, such that ANY 300 bytes (let's say) from the whole page would be enough to generate all of the data properly. So if all you had from the document was a thin diagonal strip, or a corner, or just a bit of it visible behind dense printing, that you could reconstruct the data and find the URL of the document in its original form.
So you could print out tons of information per page, with a good printer and optics system for the reader. The printer could even use a laser to burn the marks into the media, not just deposit toner. These would then last as well as the best paper has, which is suprisingly long.
Nowhere near as dense as a harddrive, but good because you could describe how to read the data on a page or two of paper and assuming the person doing the reading has a decent scanner, a simple program could OCR the patterns of slashes. All that would be needed would be 1960s tech and a scanner. No proprietary drives, no special interfaces... This is what you'd want to do if you wanted your data to survive a nuclear war and be usable to the Mad Max level survivors.
I didn't say that I couldn't do anything with any limit of money. If I had billions I'd spend it on funding rocketry and all of the cool things I don't think have a direct profit motive. But it's not like I consider getting rich and say, "Oh damn, I could never be a billionarie, why bother?" In fact, I don't think I could really be more motivated by a billion than ten million, because I'd pretty much do everything in my power to get the ten million. (Not that I wouldn't work almost as hard for $250k...)
What I'm proposing is that another dollar earned never costs you anything, even if it's your hundred billionth. There's always something to be earned. You'd never make 4% more and have the government take 5% more. If there is a cost of living increase, it'll hit everyone. Actually, cost of living increases hit the poor more, because a higher percentage of your income goes to food and rent.
The problem is that you can go broke long before this gets to court, and gets tossed out in your favor.
I think we need two things.
1) Pooled legal funds between parties. Just the legal staff, the ammount of paperwork generated by both sides should be about equal.
2) Damages for SLAPP suits based on percentage of assets. If McDonalds sues me for $1m dollars, it's chump change for them even if they lose and have to pay it and my defense, but it's a life-ruining ammount for me and if I can't take the risk I might have to settle unfairly. But if McDonalds sued me for a million and risked being fined $6 billion, they'd probably pick a more reasonable ammount and be willing to limit the costs, in #1 as well.
The dots are pretty easy to connect. They planned time stock sales, and release fraudulent press releases before this. Pump and Dump schemes involve raising a stock price (fraudulently) and then selling the stock. The people who are selling are the people who are releasing the lies that raise the stock price. It's pretty obvious.
The code they pointed to as violating their copyright suggests that they didn't do any research on the history of that code, they simply saw something similar and jumped. However, they claim to have researched it, which is a lie. Lying for financial gain is fraud, and lying to increase your stock price is securities fraud. There's more to it than that, but it's pretty straight forward.
You have a popular page, and it links to something people want. What they don't realize is that your link to that page changes the page, so they really are at ebay.com, but using content from your site so when they go to login, you get their password instead.
Or, make a link to a really good deal at amazon.com, and grab their credit cards.
Of course, ebay and Amazon are probably not that stupid, but many smaller sites are. (Banks maybe?)
I'm saying she could have been. Or rather, perhaps she saw something in Neo and gave him an answer that would encourage him to work for what he could be, not rest on the laurels of being "The One".
In the first movie there was no mention of the oracle being one of the bad guys, which meant that the interpretations there was more along the lines that she saw that Neo could be the one, but that it would take sacrifice to make him go beyond the stage of just very good to actually seeing under the matrix and realizing that not only could he jump very far, but that there wasn't gravity, and there wasn't distance, so not only could he float slowly across, but he could just be across without travelling, because here and there aren't really different.
In fact, my biggest issue with the second movie is that Neo is just very fast, and can fly. Except for saving Trinity at the end, he doesn't really use him new understanding of the matrix. When he fights the Smiths he simply gets faster, he doesn't actually freeze time, or teleport, or just make them go away. Admittedly he was playing at first, but later on... And when his friends were running away with the keymaker, being chased by the guys in white who could ghost, he had a kung-fu fight with the Morovingian's guards rather than just dealing with them and going to help.
It's like they made him too powerful in the first movie and he had to forget about everything Morpheus and everyone told him "you think that's air?", "there is no spoon", etc.
When I said we don't need really rich people, I meant over a few million dollars. Bill Gates isn't as helpful to the economy, imho, as one hundred people with his money spread between them.
:)
I think the goal of having fifty million dollars is about as motivating as the goal of having fifty billion dollars, for most people. If you start at an average level and work your way up to fifty million, you can already buy things that were undreamed of before. Yachts, mansions, fast cars, fast women, etc. You could buy the private school and put your kids through it.
Do people who have billions actually work harder, or did they just get lucky? Would the lack of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison's level of success really stop people from trying? Would you wake up and say, "Damn, I could only ever make $50M or so, so I'm not going to try - Back to McDonalds for minimum wage?"
And I do agree that there needs to be something to strive for, but I don't think it needs to be being a billionaire. Fame, sports achievements, politics, education, respected position, etc. You could even, for bonus points, do them all... An educated millionarie, winner of the Superbowl, famous Shakespearean actor, and chairman of the local rotary club.
I'll agree about the targetted tax, and to take it a bit further. I think we should see a credit for all public resources rented or sold, and then see this balance a higher tax bill. This way people would be more upset about sweetheart deals for the radio spectrum allocations, for example. And we'd see how much money the government really wanted.
If a progressive tax provides a dis-incentive, which I don't agree with, your flat tax after a certain point provides a disincentive for people making minimum wage to earn enough to get taxed.
However, I think that as long as a progressive tax doesn't hit 100%, it still provides incentive to earn more. Not as much perhaps, but that doesn't strike me as a bad thing.
Really rich people aren't needed though, despite arguments about capital and investing. Companies can fill the same niche. Mutual funds are a way of getting many not-rich people to provide capital to fund businesses. If there wasn't incentive for people to be billionaries, life would still go on, much as it is now.
But that was easy. She told him he wasn't the one. Had he not done that, he wouldn't have been. When he does go back in and become the one, she simply says that she told him what he needed to hear.
It's why people believe in psychics in the real world, they're hard to nail down on specifics and there's always a way to see it that doesn't involve them being outright wrong.
Yes. As long as every dollar you make brings an actual gain and there's no place where you make a dollar and lose more than that to tax.
Why should tax be constant, on your first and last dollar? If you accept income tax at all, I don't see why progressive taxation is a problem.
Making more money still leaves more in your pocket, just less than it might have otherwise. Sure, you don't get all of that extra $100k, but it's better than not having any of it.
As long as the prophecy would come true in (or based on actions in) the matrix, and the Oracle has a lot of power in the matrix, it wouldn't be hard to make those prophecies come true.
Besides, they all related to Neo's becoming "The One", something that may or may not have actually been his doing. If it's merely a matter of being shown the back-end of the system, the machines could have made one of many qualified (strength of will, intelligence, gullibility, whatever...) people into the one.
All of the mystic elements in the first movie could have been explained in the context of the matrix. Neo's "One-ness" was only in the matrix, and the prophecy was that a "One" would be found, not that Neo was the one. (After all, there were other candidates for the position.) The neat thing about the movie is that their world could be ours, no mysticism was really required.
That was the neat thing for me, it was a neat way to ask old questions about existence and reality. "Brain in the Jar", and "The Cave", and all these other thought experiments, but in a catchy story with kick-ass effects.
What was the real story of the creation of the matrix? Why were humans being used as power, or were they really? Was Zion a real free city, or was it just another level of the matrix to catch the troublemakers?
If it doesn't answer the majority of these things, it's a weak ending.
If the ships have a wireless link to the crew that will allow them to be somewhat in the matrix, why do they stick these huge plugs into people?
Besides, Neo's powers in the matrix don't allow him to command the working of it, or he'd just say what he wants to happen. He merely changes himself to move faster, better, etc. It's directly opposite of what they *say* ("there is no spoon") but it's exactly what they show us. Neo never simply makes an agent go away, he always outfights, or flies away, etc. Based on this, he shouldn't be able to tell the Sentinels to shut off, even if they were in the matrix, not real-world machines as they're supposed to be.
But if the writers/directors are idiots and couldn't come up with a decent explanation, we should adopt the matrix-within-a-matrix idea.
Sheesh, it's not just Lucas. Now let me guess, they really planned on making nine movies...
How did Neo become able to stop the Sentinels *outside* of the Matrix? I don't want fucking "It's very Eastern". I want a real, or Western, answer. Like, perhaps, he wasn't out of the matrix or something. Even if he was one with the sentinels and understands their inputs logically, he still can't broadcast radio waves with his mind, if they are indeed in the real world. A question that I am told wasn't adressed in the third movie.
Actually, OCR is as near to 100% accurate as needed, assuming it has a limited set of inputs and controlled scanning conditions. Having it read large easy-to-read English text where you knew the names involved would be trivial (ie, might cost a bit, but could be very very accurate.)
Seriously, storing the data twice is just asking for trouble. Even if there's no fraud involved, it's an extra step that could go wrong and needs to be verified. It'd be bad enough if the two copies were both human readable for on-the-spot checks, but for one copy to not be... Why make it harder?
If Adobe, for instance, sees that a lot (10k or so) people are using Photoshop in Linux, they'll consider porting when there's competition. They'll realize that people in Linux are using their product, but that it may stop because a native program (with better performance and interface) is coming out. If nobody used Photoshop in Linux though, they'd never know it was a graphics platform, or that there was a market share to lose.
There are actually a ton of art shops using Linux, mostly (in my experience) to do with movies and animation. I don't doubt that they'd switch their graphics artists from Windows at some point, like they've switched their animators. And all the software in this area is weird and requires some education, the bit of extra education involved in Linux vs Windows wouldn't matter at all. If Adobe isn't listening to the growing number of Linux users, some other company will.
Read my response here. I think you've misunderstood their position.
-- Damn this two-minute delay. wait, wait, wait...
They have suggested compulsory licensing as a possible solution to P2P woes. This could (my words) be in the form of paying extra for bandwidth, the everyone is a thief theory, or it could be in the form of legalized music trading on non-free P2P networks, and a government-backed crackdown on P2P networks that facilitate trading music without the fees.
Compulsory licensing is currently used (in Canada at any rate - I think in the USA too) on CDs, Tapes, and DATs, every one you buy costs a bit more and the extra is given to the industry association to distribute to the artists who are supposedly being copied. (Based on sales figures, etc.) Of course, none of this actually makes it to the artist and even if it did, it'd make it to the artists with high sales stats (Britney, etc) not the artists who are probably being taped more (Phish, the Dead, etc). This is very bad because you're paying for music you supposedly pirate for every disk you use, for backups, for your own music, for pirated games, etc. There's no way to make sure the money gets to the right artists, or to avoid paying by proving that you're not using the disk for music (let alone the idea that they should have to prove that you are using it for music...)
The EFF's said "Another solution might be compulsory licensing -- Congress could step in and force the record labels to accept file sharing in exchange for reasonable compensation from file sharers. This is what happened with webcasting. It is also how cable companies and satellite companies pay for TV programming. These historical solutions have only affected specific industries; there is no reason that we cannot limit the P2P solution as well. [...] For example, there is a specific compulsory license for making a cover song. If you want to record your own version of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," you don't have to get Bob's permission. A specific section of the copyright law allows you to simply go ahead and record and sell your version -- as long as, in return, you pay Bob eight cents for every copy you sell."
This seems to suggest that you wouldn't pay a tarrif for simply being online, or using a P2P network, but that you'd be able to download music (special P2P networks, from the music companies, etc) and that you'd pay for the downloads, but that you wouldn't have to ask permission - congress would just rule that published music costs $.xx per song and that you're allowed to copy it, if you pay that.
This actually seems reasonable. It'd force the music companies to license their music in a useful way, but it wouldn't preclude better deals (if you wanted to cover Dylan's music and he wants you to, he might waive the fee) and wouldn't require people to pay for things they don't like or use.
In other words, I think the EFF is in the right here.
You'd be a lot more likely to find exploitable bugs though, if people could see the source. Sure, it would be auditable, but what if twenty potentially exploitable bugs were found, you couldn't prove that they weren't exploited, but they could have been...
I'd say that it should be open years before it's actually used in a federal election, and make sure it gets used to elect local dog-catchers long before final use. Then, pay a bounty to people who identify weaknesses. Up to $10k or some other large ammount if it's potentially exploitable. The few hundred thousand you'd end up paying are nothing compared to the value of all the professionals who'd look hard at this, both for the possibility of a huge bonus check, and for resume material. How'd it look, when going for a coding job, to be able to claim that the government gave you $10k for a security audit on the official voting software?
You have reading trouble, don't you? The GPL never "demands" anything, but offers. Even then it doesn't require all of your work, merely all of what you combine with mine. Half the code in your project, without the rest or the build files, is useless. You get to pick and choose through my code, why should I get less from you?
Further, your use of the word extortion is incorrect. Extortion requires "coercion or intimidation, illegal use of officials powers or position" according to the dictionary. Making you an offer, however bad you may feel it would be for you, can never be extortion if you're honestly free to take it or leave it. Considering that I don't even seek to make you the offer, that the GPL is merely there if you want to look, it's even farther from extortion.
It's not greed, it's a flat price. Play along and be generous to those around you, or play alone. Be a good neighbor, or don't expect any help from anyone.
You have a very funny version of extortion, where writing code and leaving it on the net for people to use, or not, counts?
You are never trapped into having to use GPLed code, so it can't be seen as extortion. You never have to work harder than simply writing the code yourself. Pretty simple.
Greed also implies a lust for personal gain, and hoarding. It's hard to be greedy about something that is being given equally to everyone. I really want there to be more GPLed software, but it's hard to see that as greed. Is it greed when people wish for world peace? I'm in a rich country, I could easily buy all the software I needed if there wasn't free software, much like peace activists usually aren't in personal danger. But we both want to better the world, for ourselves and for everyone else in more urgent need than us.