All this shows that the Intelligent Design scam has been very successful. People assume that ID just means there is some kind of intelligence behind the Universe, which makes it appeal to non-creationists who believe in God. (This is a very large group, perhaps even a majority of the world's population.)
The problem is made worse by polls that list ID and Creationism as separate options. As there is so much (deliberate) confusion about what ID means, they should have left it out.
There are different types of creationism (Young Earth, God of the Gaps, etc.), and different ways of relating evolution to religion (eg. Richard Dawkins thinks evolution provides powerful evidence against the existece of God, Paul Davies thinks it doesn't). But ID doesn't represent any of them.
This is a great idea (a way to turn a DRM system against its owners), but the RIAA / MPAA lawyers would argue that posting even an encrypted, DRM-crippled version of a song / movie on a P2P network is copyright infringement. The fact that it's useless without the key doesn't stop it being a copy.
They'd also put in additional restrictions: You're only licensed to play a movie on one particular physcial device, or you need to pay every time it's watched. (This is the real point of DRM.)
The Affero license has been "testing" the Web Services clause for a while.
The problem for Free Software purists is that it's a EULA: It restricts use, not just copying. That seems to contradict the "not a contract" part of the GPL, and probably can't be enforced in many jurisidctions (although it is a way of fighting back against UCITA or similar laws / court decisions that make EULAs binding).
Technically, it's free as in beer too. They restrict it to the UK, not just to license-fee payers. So if you live in the UK and don't have a TV, you get it for nothing.
The underlying problem is that Motorola's customer is the cellular network operator, not the end-user. We'd have much more choice if we simply bought phones in the same way as a PC or any other electronic device.
Unfortunately, people like to get those "free" phones from the operators, even if they always come with a 2-year service contract that actually means paying for the phone many times over.
I agree, as a former UK license-payer now living elsewhere. (I already paid for some of this content, yet I can't access it.) But most of the stuff on the BBC's Web site is accessible worldwide, with UK residents (and in some cases, paying subscribers) only getting higher bit-rates, better resolution, etc.
Most of this stuff doesn't look so great, anwyay. It all seems to be 2- or 3- minute clips, not full programmes from the archives. And I'm sure that any sites that redistribute/remix the content will be accessible from outside the UK, whether or not that's technically legal. (The license terms definitely don't say anything about restricting access in the same way that the BBC does, so it looks like they're mostly concerned about bandwidth as far as the public is concerned.)
Most Internet users don't know or care exactly what protcol they're using. (And there's no particular reason why they should, although a basic understanding of IE's security flaws would be useful.) I'd expect to see similar figures for DNS, UDP, and IEEE 802.3.
Web2.0 is overhyped, but not just because of users' ignorance. People can use GMail and Google Maps perfectly well without understanding what XMLHttpRequest is or how JavaScript differs from Java.
I'm not ure about DVD players, but drivers for video cards need to pass some Microsoft tests that include support for DRM. If they're signed by MS, they're not allowed to run in Windows.
Even worse, Vista will allow MS to revoke signatures if a particular make and model of video card is hacked. So your video card could suddenly stop working, just because you happen to be using the same kind as DVD Jon.
Windowsupdate.com is probably the only useful site that actually needs IE, so an update that turned IE back on would be redundant.
Microsoft could alter WindowsUpdate so that it didn't depend on ActiveX, or someone could develop an extension that made ActiveX work with Firefox. But MS doesn't have any incentive for the former, and the latter would be a huge security risk.
Dell isn't my favorite vendor, but one of the biggest obstacles to desktop (and even moreso, laptop) Linux is the difficulty of getting everything working. If it came pre-installed, perhaps customized for a specific hardware platform, a lot more people would use it.
This obviously doesn't apply to big IT departments that use a standard image for all PCs. But it would help home and small business users, most of whom don't install their own OS.
The first sentence of the question says it all: Microsoft dominates the desktop. It has a monopoly of the PC OS and the Office suite. Those are very significant, costing users hundreds of dollars per machine and accounting for more than 100% of MS's profits. (More, because MS takes what it hopes will be a temporary loss on just about everything else.)
MS has moved into other areas like gaming, but that doesn't end its existing monopolies. And (not a coincidence), MS's products in those new areas are actually quite good, because it has to compete.
The one area of progres is the Web browser. Firefox (and Safari, and now Opera) really has eaten into IE's dominance, and that's good for everyone (including IE users, as it's forcing MS to start work on the browser again).
Google could get around this problem simply by making Google News truly opt-in. Publishers would have to actively submit their sites, agreeing not to sue Google for including them. Even better, sites could specify exactly what content Google is allowed to reproduce (eg. headlines, deks, thumbnail images), or disallow certain content (eg. syndicated material from AFP).
Sites get so much traffic from Google that the majority probably would choose to be indexed. Even if a few (or a lot) resisted, there'd still be so much content that the service would still be useful to readers (and profitable to Google's advertisers).
Economies grow by a few percent a year on average, so it isn't a zero sum game in the long term. But the shorter your time frame, the closer to a zero sum game it gets. In this particular case, Google is growing much faster than the econonomy as a whole, so someone else has to lose out.
Of course, it's more complicated than that: Google is actually helping certain segments of the economy to grow at the expense of others, not simply taking market share from competitors. For example, online retailers and small publishers do well, print advertising does badly.
If the agencies really believed this, they could issue Google and the news sites' hosts with DMCA takedown notices, just like the RIAA, BSA, etc. do for music and software.
They could even try the RIAA's "sue your customers" business model, as the customers would appear to be in the wrong. (And the case ought to be much clearer, because unlike an average computer user who might accidentally place a Microsoft-copyrighted file in a shared directory, these are professional Web sites staffed by people who ought to know what they're doing.) But I guess they won't, as the customers in this case are large corporations who can finght back, not kids. Also, there are comparatively few customers, and the agencies don't want to lose them
AFP and other agencies could just change the terms of their licensing so that their customers can't post to a server that's indexed by Google News. If they already have, then the online publishers are breaking their contracts (and probably copyright law as well).
Canada's health care system is generally better than the US's, but 9/11 stretched a lot of some towns' resources. Dozens of jumbo jets had to land at little-used airstrips that were nowhere near a major city, so thousands of people had to spend several days in small villages that would normally have a population of a few hundred (sleeping on the floor in school gyms, airport hangers, etc.)
By most accounts, the locals did a lot to make the stranded travelers feel welcome. But some of them were very remote, so a three-day wait to see a doctor isn't implausible, particularly with all aircraft grounded.
The main "selling" points of Firefox 1.5 are the same as for 1.0: It's more user-friendly and secure than IE. So the marketing push is aimed at people who:
1. Don't pay much attention to browsers, and so ignored the marketing the first time round. (People are bombarded with ads all the time. It can take a while for something even to be noticed.)
2. Do know a bit about browsers, but thought that Firefox was too new (1.0 products tend to be unstable) or decided to wait for Microsoft to release IE 7 (which still isn't available, except to a selected group of beta testers).
The automated systems are intended to dissuade people from calling. People who are left on hold for an hour will eventually give up, and people who know they're going to be put on hold endlessly won't bother to call at all.
The end result is a lot of disattisfied customers, but many companies don't care about that. Customers who need lots of technical support tend not to be very profitable, so the provider doesn't really mind if they go elsewhere. And in the case of of the DSL and cable monopolies, there's nowhere else to go anyway.
That sort of thing could already happen. Large-scale DNA testing makes it much more likely that people will be caught up in a police dragnet. For example:
1. Sweeing a barber or hairdresser's store provides hair from lots of different people. A criminal can simply plant some of this at the scene of a crime.
2. Spitting in the street is a crime in many jurisdictions. The police could conceivably take a saliva sample and learn who did it.
3. Worst of all, the probability of false convictions increases dramatically. There may only be a 1 in a million chance of false positive, but if everyone's DNA is on file and a DNA test is run for every crime that happens, there's a good chance that many one of us will eventually be falsely accused of something.
The only software that implements OpenDocument right now happens to be FOSS, but it doesn't have to be: Microsoft, Apppe or anyone else can implement the format without having to publish their source code under the GPL or give it away freely.
This is all about interoperability. Software vendors can still sell licenses, but they will have to give people a good reason to buy them (and not just Microsoft locking people in to its proprietary file formats). OpenDocument will probably be good for software companies that aren't Microsoft, provided they're working on a niche type of document that isn't already covered by the standard (free or MS) office suite.
This could be why most of the right-wing bloggers (eg. Sully, Instacracker) don't even allow comments. I always thought that they were just scared of left-wingers pointing out the holes in their arguments, but it could be they're also worried about their own supporters making them seem like fascists.
Half the commenters here seem to be saying that OLPC should just have accepted Apple's offer. I doubt that they'd say the same if it had been Microsoft rather than Apple.
Fortunately, the people behind OLPC have a longer-term vision (or just Red Hat's influence...)
I don't think we need to choose between supporting and opposing Google. We can support any efforts it makes to free information without becoming mindless cheerleaders of everything it does.
Google isn't yet a monopoly: It faces real competition from Yahoo, which actually beats it in some areas (eg. mapping). There are also other, smaller companies like Zimbra focused on specific Web-based applications. In most cases, Google's direct competitors will be lobbying for the same things as Google. (The exception is Microsoft, but it's really trying to defend its monopoly of OS and Office software, not compete with Google and Yahoo directly.)
Problem #5: Program forces users t0 click through a 100,000-word EULA that its authors claim constitutes "reasonable notification". I imagine this would be Sony's defence.
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All this shows that the Intelligent Design scam has been very successful. People assume that ID just means there is some kind of intelligence behind the Universe, which makes it appeal to non-creationists who believe in God. (This is a very large group, perhaps even a majority of the world's population.)
The problem is made worse by polls that list ID and Creationism as separate options. As there is so much (deliberate) confusion about what ID means, they should have left it out.
There are different types of creationism (Young Earth, God of the Gaps, etc.), and different ways of relating evolution to religion (eg. Richard Dawkins thinks evolution provides powerful evidence against the existece of God, Paul Davies thinks it doesn't). But ID doesn't represent any of them.
This is a great idea (a way to turn a DRM system against its owners), but the RIAA / MPAA lawyers would argue that posting even an encrypted, DRM-crippled version of a song / movie on a P2P network is copyright infringement. The fact that it's useless without the key doesn't stop it being a copy.
They'd also put in additional restrictions: You're only licensed to play a movie on one particular physcial device, or you need to pay every time it's watched. (This is the real point of DRM.)
The Affero license has been "testing" the Web Services clause for a while.
The problem for Free Software purists is that it's a EULA: It restricts use, not just copying. That seems to contradict the "not a contract" part of the GPL, and probably can't be enforced in many jurisidctions (although it is a way of fighting back against UCITA or similar laws / court decisions that make EULAs binding).
Technically, it's free as in beer too. They restrict it to the UK, not just to license-fee payers. So if you live in the UK and don't have a TV, you get it for nothing.
The underlying problem is that Motorola's customer is the cellular network operator, not the end-user. We'd have much more choice if we simply bought phones in the same way as a PC or any other electronic device.
Unfortunately, people like to get those "free" phones from the operators, even if they always come with a 2-year service contract that actually means paying for the phone many times over.
I agree, as a former UK license-payer now living elsewhere. (I already paid for some of this content, yet I can't access it.) But most of the stuff on the BBC's Web site is accessible worldwide, with UK residents (and in some cases, paying subscribers) only getting higher bit-rates, better resolution, etc.
Most of this stuff doesn't look so great, anwyay. It all seems to be 2- or 3- minute clips, not full programmes from the archives. And I'm sure that any sites that redistribute/remix the content will be accessible from outside the UK, whether or not that's technically legal. (The license terms definitely don't say anything about restricting access in the same way that the BBC does, so it looks like they're mostly concerned about bandwidth as far as the public is concerned.)
Most Internet users don't know or care exactly what protcol they're using. (And there's no particular reason why they should, although a basic understanding of IE's security flaws would be useful.) I'd expect to see similar figures for DNS, UDP, and IEEE 802.3.
Web2.0 is overhyped, but not just because of users' ignorance. People can use GMail and Google Maps perfectly well without understanding what XMLHttpRequest is or how JavaScript differs from Java.
I meant: If they're not signed by MS, they're not allowed to run in Windows.
I'm not ure about DVD players, but drivers for video cards need to pass some Microsoft tests that include support for DRM. If they're signed by MS, they're not allowed to run in Windows.
Even worse, Vista will allow MS to revoke signatures if a particular make and model of video card is hacked. So your video card could suddenly stop working, just because you happen to be using the same kind as DVD Jon.
Windowsupdate.com is probably the only useful site that actually needs IE, so an update that turned IE back on would be redundant.
Microsoft could alter WindowsUpdate so that it didn't depend on ActiveX, or someone could develop an extension that made ActiveX work with Firefox. But MS doesn't have any incentive for the former, and the latter would be a huge security risk.
Dell isn't my favorite vendor, but one of the biggest obstacles to desktop (and even moreso, laptop) Linux is the difficulty of getting everything working. If it came pre-installed, perhaps customized for a specific hardware platform, a lot more people would use it.
This obviously doesn't apply to big IT departments that use a standard image for all PCs. But it would help home and small business users, most of whom don't install their own OS.
The first sentence of the question says it all: Microsoft dominates the desktop. It has a monopoly of the PC OS and the Office suite. Those are very significant, costing users hundreds of dollars per machine and accounting for more than 100% of MS's profits. (More, because MS takes what it hopes will be a temporary loss on just about everything else.)
MS has moved into other areas like gaming, but that doesn't end its existing monopolies. And (not a coincidence), MS's products in those new areas are actually quite good, because it has to compete.
The one area of progres is the Web browser. Firefox (and Safari, and now Opera) really has eaten into IE's dominance, and that's good for everyone (including IE users, as it's forcing MS to start work on the browser again).
Google could get around this problem simply by making Google News truly opt-in. Publishers would have to actively submit their sites, agreeing not to sue Google for including them. Even better, sites could specify exactly what content Google is allowed to reproduce (eg. headlines, deks, thumbnail images), or disallow certain content (eg. syndicated material from AFP).
Sites get so much traffic from Google that the majority probably would choose to be indexed. Even if a few (or a lot) resisted, there'd still be so much content that the service would still be useful to readers (and profitable to Google's advertisers).
Economies grow by a few percent a year on average, so it isn't a zero sum game in the long term. But the shorter your time frame, the closer to a zero sum game it gets. In this particular case, Google is growing much faster than the econonomy as a whole, so someone else has to lose out.
Of course, it's more complicated than that: Google is actually helping certain segments of the economy to grow at the expense of others, not simply taking market share from competitors. For example, online retailers and small publishers do well, print advertising does badly.
If the agencies really believed this, they could issue Google and the news sites' hosts with DMCA takedown notices, just like the RIAA, BSA, etc. do for music and software.
They could even try the RIAA's "sue your customers" business model, as the customers would appear to be in the wrong. (And the case ought to be much clearer, because unlike an average computer user who might accidentally place a Microsoft-copyrighted file in a shared directory, these are professional Web sites staffed by people who ought to know what they're doing.) But I guess they won't, as the customers in this case are large corporations who can finght back, not kids. Also, there are comparatively few customers, and the agencies don't want to lose them
AFP and other agencies could just change the terms of their licensing so that their customers can't post to a server that's indexed by Google News. If they already have, then the online publishers are breaking their contracts (and probably copyright law as well).
Canada's health care system is generally better than the US's, but 9/11 stretched a lot of some towns' resources. Dozens of jumbo jets had to land at little-used airstrips that were nowhere near a major city, so thousands of people had to spend several days in small villages that would normally have a population of a few hundred (sleeping on the floor in school gyms, airport hangers, etc.)
By most accounts, the locals did a lot to make the stranded travelers feel welcome. But some of them were very remote, so a three-day wait to see a doctor isn't implausible, particularly with all aircraft grounded.
The main "selling" points of Firefox 1.5 are the same as for 1.0: It's more user-friendly and secure than IE. So the marketing push is aimed at people who:
1. Don't pay much attention to browsers, and so ignored the marketing the first time round. (People are bombarded with ads all the time. It can take a while for something even to be noticed.)
2. Do know a bit about browsers, but thought that Firefox was too new (1.0 products tend to be unstable) or decided to wait for Microsoft to release IE 7 (which still isn't available, except to a selected group of beta testers).
The automated systems are intended to dissuade people from calling. People who are left on hold for an hour will eventually give up, and people who know they're going to be put on hold endlessly won't bother to call at all.
The end result is a lot of disattisfied customers, but many companies don't care about that. Customers who need lots of technical support tend not to be very profitable, so the provider doesn't really mind if they go elsewhere. And in the case of of the DSL and cable monopolies, there's nowhere else to go anyway.
That sort of thing could already happen. Large-scale DNA testing makes it much more likely that people will be caught up in a police dragnet. For example:
1. Sweeing a barber or hairdresser's store provides hair from lots of different people. A criminal can simply plant some of this at the scene of a crime.
2. Spitting in the street is a crime in many jurisdictions. The police could conceivably take a saliva sample and learn who did it.
3. Worst of all, the probability of false convictions increases dramatically. There may only be a 1 in a million chance of false positive, but if everyone's DNA is on file and a DNA test is run for every crime that happens, there's a good chance that many one of us will eventually be falsely accused of something.
The only software that implements OpenDocument right now happens to be FOSS, but it doesn't have to be: Microsoft, Apppe or anyone else can implement the format without having to publish their source code under the GPL or give it away freely.
This is all about interoperability. Software vendors can still sell licenses, but they will have to give people a good reason to buy them (and not just Microsoft locking people in to its proprietary file formats). OpenDocument will probably be good for software companies that aren't Microsoft, provided they're working on a niche type of document that isn't already covered by the standard (free or MS) office suite.
This could be why most of the right-wing bloggers (eg. Sully, Instacracker) don't even allow comments. I always thought that they were just scared of left-wingers pointing out the holes in their arguments, but it could be they're also worried about their own supporters making them seem like fascists.
Half the commenters here seem to be saying that OLPC should just have accepted Apple's offer. I doubt that they'd say the same if it had been Microsoft rather than Apple.
Fortunately, the people behind OLPC have a longer-term vision (or just Red Hat's influence...)
I don't think we need to choose between supporting and opposing Google. We can support any efforts it makes to free information without becoming mindless cheerleaders of everything it does.
Google isn't yet a monopoly: It faces real competition from Yahoo, which actually beats it in some areas (eg. mapping). There are also other, smaller companies like Zimbra focused on specific Web-based applications. In most cases, Google's direct competitors will be lobbying for the same things as Google. (The exception is Microsoft, but it's really trying to defend its monopoly of OS and Office software, not compete with Google and Yahoo directly.)
Problem #5: Program forces users t0 click through a 100,000-word EULA that its authors claim constitutes "reasonable notification". I imagine this would be Sony's defence.