This is not a shlashdot interview. You don't need to ask questions. This story is just a link to an interview at http://www.linuxpower.org/display.php?id =168. Unfortunetly, the server is being slashdoted right now:(
This is not a 'slashdot' interview. Just a link to a link on linuxpower.com. At least Thats what I got from reading the blurb. You might be asking a retorical question, but it's not going to get sent to the guy or anything.
If you were to look at Nintendo's IP page, you would find that Emulation is illigal. Yet, this is completly false. Big companies seem to have 'interesting' ideas about what is and is not legal.
Computers and general-purpose computer peripheral devices are not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act. This means they do not pay royalties and they do not incorporate technology to prevent serial copying. As a result, this also means that copying music onto a computer hard drive is not permitted.
There not coverd by the law, but that dosn't mean that they you arn't allowed to record onto them. All it means is that the RIAA dosn't make money for every hard disk. The law dosn't say what you can and can't do with your own equipment, all it says is that for every peice of recording media (analog or digital) that some of the money from the sale goes to the RIAA, beacuse it's posible to use it to pirate music. What the RIAA put on there web page is just a fanticy.
Back up your own pompous and gaseous ramblings with something concrete.
I'm pompous and gaseous now? If you'll recall, your first post was 1,123 words long, in 16 paragraphs. And you didn't state your thesis (if you even had one in that unorganized mess) wasn't until the 14th. Thesis, then support. There's more to writing then grammar and spelling. At least I didn't include a 'suggested reading' section containing books I happen to like at the monument (Cryptonomicon?).
Ok. If Ayn Rand is wrong, show me how. It's that simple
I doubt it. Most so called 'objectivists' I've met are about the same as fundamentalist christens. Any arguments I could throw your way would be rebuffed with thoughts only on how to destroy them, rather then on whether or not they are reasonable.
But I'll try anyway. Ayn Rand is wrong because she tries to use Boolean logic on floating point reality. Or, to put it less geekely, she tries to use pure logic on systems that don't necessarily have pure deterministic behavior. Of course, barring small quantum effects, everything is deterministic, but no applications of Newton's laws can tell you what the "best" thing is, or what the "right" thing is. Rand is forced to use things like Darwinian Evolution to make her points, but even her interpretation of that is bogus. Its not about the survival of the individual you see, it's about the survival of the species
Free market, it's that simple. Period. I create something, I sell it on my own, or, I go to a company to sell it for me. It's my choice. I sign on the dotted line. They have the right to wish to make money, as I do also.
This is where things start to get religious with you people, the irrational belief that the free market is infallible. Of course, you can consider yourself correct, because you have a bizarre definition of failure. Namely, "Something the free market can't do." The reason for this is the need to handle things in a Boolean manner.
Your non-specific example, you said you had a choice. But, in any choice, there are variables that affect the choice. If you were making, say, music, you could choose to take a huge loss (both financially, and possibly artistically) to the RIAA's monopoly, or try to sell Self Burned CD's out of your garage (and make almost nothing). Now, thanks to mp3's and the Internet in general, that isn't the case. A few years ago, however, it would have been largely impossible (unless you had the money to make your own Indy label)
In that case, you would be forced to go with the record companies, or not make the record. Now, The Randite would say that that wasn't really force, because the only real force is cohesive force, when the only choice is A or death. And all other cases are simply cases of 'providing better value'. The reason that you need to do this, is so that you can say ether something is "Force" or it isn't. Force needs to be a Boolean value, or your entire logical construct falls apart. Everything isn't black and white. It's a gradient.
Rand holds that the government is the only entity that can apply cohesive force; I can hold a gun to your head and apply force just as easily. In fact, anyone can when they choose to operate outside of Rand's system. You can bitch and moan and call them "subhuman" all you want, but why should they care?
Altruism is a fairy tale
This is completely bogus. Altruism is an evolved trait. You can't stop Altruism anymore then you can sex. A group of altruistic people is more likely to survive then a non-altruistic one. Evolution is just as much about the group as it is about the individual. Evolution doesn't give a god damn about your contrived flat ideologies.
Supposedly Utopian theory extorts that everyone would be better off if we were all equal, shared everything,
What the hell is "Utopian theory"? Is it a straw man Ayn Rand cooked up in order to tare down? I've studied Western Civ, and I don't remember any "Utopian theory". But again, this is an example of Boolean thinking. Just because someone else is wrong doesn't mean you are right.
People are NOT equal. Some are smarter, faster, and stronger than you. It's that simple. Rules of nature and all that, survival of the fittest. If you are not strong, fast, or smart, you do not evolve.
People don't evolve. (Isolated) Groups do.
I shouldn't assume, but I will, that you meant reproduce. But you are incorrect. You don't need any of those traits (at least, you don't need to have those traits at a higher level then everyone else) In order to reproduce. All you have to do is survive and mate. If you can do that, you're evolutionarily successful. I honestly hope you're not a social Darwinist. (Though, it sounds like you are). That's about the most bogus meme in the history of human thought.
I WANT money, I WANT a new computer
And I care because....
. I don't agree with their business practices, they are bad ones. And if you perform bad business practices, and are unwilling to change with the times, you die off. Natural bloody evolution.
But, you see. The only thing that stopped the dinosaurs was an external intervention namely, an asteroid hitting the planet. Anyway, applying laws and rules from one branch of science to others is usually a recipe for bogosity, especially application to social science, such as sociology. But I'll humor you. The history of natural evolution has been greater and greater vicious ness. The species that survives is the one that can most effectively kill another. I hope you don't want the same kind of blind evolution in human social constructs. IE where the most vicious organizations "win". I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world warring between fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, and scientologists.
yes. Next time you decide to call a person Pompous, and intellectually immature, maybe you should try and read, even comprehend what one is saying.
I did try, and I think I did get your main thesis. It would have been a lot better if you would have written more clearly.
NO. This bloody government did. THEY SIGNED IT INTO LAW
Right, and the media industry paid them to do it. If they were acting as employees of the media giants, then the industry is to blame. Oh, but wait, they bought the government on the "free market", so no wrong was done!
or media giants out to make a buck at the cost of other media giants? Let them fight it out for themselves
Look likes they want to do it at our expense instead. We can't put as much of a fight you know, its more profitable to screw us then the other companies. Of course there just "Providing better value" right? Sure...
evolution teaches us only the worthy survive.
And the 2nd law of thermodynamics teaches us that evolution can't happen, right? Oh, wait that's just A gross, and pointless generalization of something specific, relating to another field, and erroneous as well. I see.
Aside from evolution not directly having anything to do with societal constructs, your interpretation is wrong. Evolution doesn't say anything about "worthiness" or even "Survival". All it says if your capable of reproducing then you can pass on your genotypes. Everything dies, and lots of things are evolutionally successful. As for "worthiness" that's a human standard, not a natural one. [the DMCA] infringes on my right to create, and move freely,
If you're an American, why are you using the word "bloody"
Ayn Rand is wrong. Fundamentally. If you can't appreciate that, then that's to bad.
Music corporations don't produce music; they merely buy it and sell it. And rape people on both sides of the equations. You pay $15 for a CD, and the artiest gets a quarter. It is severely fucked up, and, if you weren't in your "Ubercapitalist" mode of religious thinking. You would see that too.
Of course, the movie companies are in a different situation; as they produce there own art (witch costs huge amounts of money to produce). The situation isn't so clear-cut, but no one should ever be able to take away are constitutional rights just to be able to make more money.
Additionally, your post embodies the major (though not always true) criticisms of Jon Katz's articles: Verbosely pointless. What was your thesis? "This is bad, but not really that bad. It's complicated". I Think you stated it in the second to last paragraph, but I'm not really sure... Of course, this is the kind pompous, and intellectually immature stuff I would expect from a follower of the church of Ayn Rand.
I can't believe the big deal made about such a lossy compression like mp3. It really sounds like crap
Scientific testing has proved otherwise
you can get "modest" playability out of an mp3 if you decompress it and play it back as a wav file
This proves you don't know what you're talking about. Decompressing to a.wav file and decompressing to the soundcards waveform buffer produce the exact same waveform, unless you have some kind of fucked up sound card (or slow-ass computer. Are you using DirectSound with winamp on a slow computer?)
When I first got my computer hooked up to this nice stereo I bought for my dorm, I could really, really tell the difference between MP3 and CD sound. But it turned out that the audio coming off the CD player was a lot higher in volume then the mp3s. I adjusted the levels, and it turned out the two sounded almost exactly the same. Also, a 196kbit/sec MP3 is, for most cases, indistinguishable from a real sample.
What you have to relize here, is that this isn't a US law. Its a state law. And states have no power to do any kind of diplomacy with other nations. The US government should have no interest in protecting this law overseas, so it shouldn't matter.
Palm's use motorola dragonball 68k's, (are they 68k's?) not z80's. The z80 was the 8bit chip used in early nintendo and atari units. Palms are a lot more powerfull then that.
Slashdot bitches about ads on cell phones. Slashdot posts ads on website. interesting.
Advertising is becoming ubiquitous, and really, it kind of sucks. I guess that's what happens when everything becomes a 'service'. No one would ever have thought of hardwiring advertisements into a PC, (well, people have, but they were never wide spread). But the monument something ceases to be a 'thing' and becomes a 'service' it gets plastered with advertisements.
Of course, dicking around with a cell phone is a good way to end up in jail, so good luck trying to disable this (unless they provide an option). I can see it now, DMCA style restrictions on "circumventing and advertising scheme". I wouldn't be to surprised, the way things are going now, and the way hardware companies are perfectly willing to stomp all over your rights if it means more money.
Did anyone else follow the teapot Link on the page? It was pretty interesting reading, and anyone who's done any 3d modeling will probably get a kick out of it... Unfortunately, almost all of the external links (from the teapot page) were dead:(
This sounds like something that was done just to prove it could be done, so people could say "You know, they ported OpenGL to the palm pilot".
But, surely as the palm grows in hardware and display, it could become useful. I'd bet a high-end palm probably has more CPU power then the 486 you played doom on, or at least more then the 386 you played wolf-3d on. I'd really like to see someone port (or develop) some games now. Perhaps the GPL'd quake engine? (How fast is the software rendering there using?)
Heh, imagine being able to say, "You know, they ported GL quake to the palm pilot"...
Certanly, you don't think this was an issue of trademark infringment, Unless you think BN has a right to decided who gets to call themsleves a bookstore and who dosn't. They might have had a case if amazon tried to call themslevs "The Barns and Noble of the web" or somthing like that. But that's not what they did.
Wow, I figured Anything from apple would be bad, but the review sounds like somthing straght out of AFA propaganda/FUD "Parents should be aware that children who go exploring there are only a couple of clicks away from some serious porn. " wow...
What about the time Barnes & Noble sued to try to stop Amazon from calling itself "the world's largest bookstore" because they didn't have a brick-and-mortar presence (like, ahem, Barnes & Noble) and hence shouldn't be able to call themselves a "bookstore"? And I'm pretty sure there have been other little squabbles that slip my mind at present.
Huh? I don't think you can sue someone just beacuse you dissagree with there use of a word. That dosn't make any sense. If you say "I'm cool" does that mean I can sue you if I think you're an idiot? hrm... maybe that would a good thing:P
The entire patent system really needs an overhaul for the 21st. century.
Of course, I doubt we'll get it.
Oh, we'll get it. Just like we 'got' copyright reform in the form of the 'Digital Millennium Copyright Act'. Of course, it wont be what's "right" or what's "best". But it will certainly be in the best interests of those organizations that have lots of money...
I really liked O'reilly's metaphor of the net as an ecosystem, one, that like the nascent PC industry stagnated under corporate control. He really makes an interesting point, one that I think is pretty much true. We all remember how cool the Internet used to be, and how much it sucks now... An advertising network awash in pop-up windows, Spam, and "push media". Where "portal players" compete for "eyeballs". The term, of course is from the television industry, where it actually makes some sense. But the fact that they borrow metaphors from the that industry really tells us what they think of there customer base, and where they want to take the Internet (Just look at iwon.com shudder)
Well, I'm never one to pass up a chance to bash the current state of the Internet, but O'reilly's statement really got me thinking. Could the 'ecosystem' idea be applied to the Open Source movement? The Free Software Movement has been around for a long time, helping people get good, quality software programmed mostly for fun. But, Ironically, there's money to be made in it. ESR came around and renamed the movement, and made himself quite a bit of money. And now the corporations are all over it. Some, such as IBM (witch has really always been about hardware and support) see it for what it is, a way to get good software. But others, most notably VA and RedHat depend on it for their livelihood.
We are already seeing the results of the corpiritzation of open source, and I wonder what will happen when it is completely commercialized... (or even if that will really happen)
it's 2AM, there's some marginal spell checking, but other then that...
History isn't over, neither is economics. In 1900, many intellectuals forsaw a future of peace and leisure, where everyone would be rich. It didn't happen for them, and it won't happen for us.
But don't you see, it has happend for us. At least in the US, someone would be considered 'poor' by our standards would be considered rich or at least middle class by their standards.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF are you talking about? since when does the Linux kernel have anything to do with X-windows drivers?
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I'm sure matrox won't be far behind.
Matrox dosn't make its own drivers, they just put out the specs.
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Is it simply standard to score anonymous coward as zero
Yes.
AC posts start at zero, registerd users posts start at 1, with the option to post at 2 if they have > 30 karma
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This is not a shlashdot interview. You don't need to ask questions. This story is just a link to an interview at http://www.linuxpower.org/display.php?id =168. Unfortunetly, the server is being slashdoted right now :(
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This is not a 'slashdot' interview. Just a link to a link on linuxpower.com. At least Thats what I got from reading the blurb. You might be asking a retorical question, but it's not going to get sent to the guy or anything.
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That the RIAA makes money everytime you buy a blank audio tape, or Music only CD. But they don't make money of hard drives.
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If you were to look at Nintendo's IP page, you would find that Emulation is illigal. Yet, this is completly false. Big companies seem to have 'interesting' ideas about what is and is not legal.
Computers and general-purpose computer peripheral devices are not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act. This means they do not pay royalties and they do not incorporate technology to prevent serial copying. As a result, this also means that copying music onto a computer hard drive is not permitted.
There not coverd by the law, but that dosn't mean that they you arn't allowed to record onto them. All it means is that the RIAA dosn't make money for every hard disk. The law dosn't say what you can and can't do with your own equipment, all it says is that for every peice of recording media (analog or digital) that some of the money from the sale goes to the RIAA, beacuse it's posible to use it to pirate music. What the RIAA put on there web page is just a fanticy.
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I don't remember what they used for a ringer.
Hrm.. flashing lights?
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Uh? how can there be a controversy if this is the first publisized information about it? Maybe if there's a huge comment thread, but...
This is just like the traditional media, hyping non-events in order to get people interested.
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Back up your own pompous and gaseous ramblings with something concrete.
I'm pompous and gaseous now? If you'll recall, your first post was 1,123 words long, in 16 paragraphs. And you didn't state your thesis (if you even had one in that unorganized mess) wasn't until the 14th. Thesis, then support. There's more to writing then grammar and spelling. At least I didn't include a 'suggested reading' section containing books I happen to like at the monument (Cryptonomicon?).
Ok. If Ayn Rand is wrong, show me how. It's that simple
I doubt it. Most so called 'objectivists' I've met are about the same as fundamentalist christens. Any arguments I could throw your way would be rebuffed with thoughts only on how to destroy them, rather then on whether or not they are reasonable.
But I'll try anyway. Ayn Rand is wrong because she tries to use Boolean logic on floating point reality. Or, to put it less geekely, she tries to use pure logic on systems that don't necessarily have pure deterministic behavior. Of course, barring small quantum effects, everything is deterministic, but no applications of Newton's laws can tell you what the "best" thing is, or what the "right" thing is. Rand is forced to use things like Darwinian Evolution to make her points, but even her interpretation of that is bogus. Its not about the survival of the individual you see, it's about the survival of the species
Free market, it's that simple. Period. I create something, I sell it on my own, or, I go to a company to sell it for me. It's my choice. I sign on the dotted line. They have the right to wish to make money, as I do also.
This is where things start to get religious with you people, the irrational belief that the free market is infallible. Of course, you can consider yourself correct, because you have a bizarre definition of failure. Namely, "Something the free market can't do." The reason for this is the need to handle things in a Boolean manner.
Your non-specific example, you said you had a choice. But, in any choice, there are variables that affect the choice. If you were making, say, music, you could choose to take a huge loss (both financially, and possibly artistically) to the RIAA's monopoly, or try to sell Self Burned CD's out of your garage (and make almost nothing). Now, thanks to mp3's and the Internet in general, that isn't the case. A few years ago, however, it would have been largely impossible (unless you had the money to make your own Indy label)
In that case, you would be forced to go with the record companies, or not make the record. Now, The Randite would say that that wasn't really force, because the only real force is cohesive force, when the only choice is A or death. And all other cases are simply cases of 'providing better value'. The reason that you need to do this, is so that you can say ether something is "Force" or it isn't. Force needs to be a Boolean value, or your entire logical construct falls apart. Everything isn't black and white. It's a gradient.
Rand holds that the government is the only entity that can apply cohesive force; I can hold a gun to your head and apply force just as easily. In fact, anyone can when they choose to operate outside of Rand's system. You can bitch and moan and call them "subhuman" all you want, but why should they care?
Altruism is a fairy tale
This is completely bogus. Altruism is an evolved trait. You can't stop Altruism anymore then you can sex. A group of altruistic people is more likely to survive then a non-altruistic one. Evolution is just as much about the group as it is about the individual. Evolution doesn't give a god damn about your contrived flat ideologies.
Supposedly Utopian theory extorts that everyone would be better off if we were all equal, shared everything,
What the hell is "Utopian theory"? Is it a straw man Ayn Rand cooked up in order to tare down? I've studied Western Civ, and I don't remember any "Utopian theory". But again, this is an example of Boolean thinking. Just because someone else is wrong doesn't mean you are right.
People are NOT equal. Some are smarter, faster, and stronger than you. It's that simple. Rules of nature and all that, survival of the fittest. If you are not strong, fast, or smart, you do not evolve.
People don't evolve. (Isolated) Groups do.
I shouldn't assume, but I will, that you meant reproduce. But you are incorrect. You don't need any of those traits (at least, you don't need to have those traits at a higher level then everyone else) In order to reproduce. All you have to do is survive and mate. If you can do that, you're evolutionarily successful. I honestly hope you're not a social Darwinist. (Though, it sounds like you are). That's about the most bogus meme in the history of human thought.
I WANT money, I WANT a new computer
And I care because....
. I don't agree with their business practices, they are bad ones. And if you perform bad business practices, and are unwilling to change with the times, you die off. Natural bloody evolution.
But, you see. The only thing that stopped the dinosaurs was an external intervention namely, an asteroid hitting the planet. Anyway, applying laws and rules from one branch of science to others is usually a recipe for bogosity, especially application to social science, such as sociology. But I'll humor you. The history of natural evolution has been greater and greater vicious ness. The species that survives is the one that can most effectively kill another. I hope you don't want the same kind of blind evolution in human social constructs. IE where the most vicious organizations "win". I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world warring between fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, and scientologists.
yes. Next time you decide to call a person Pompous, and intellectually immature, maybe you should try and read, even comprehend what one is saying.
I did try, and I think I did get your main thesis. It would have been a lot better if you would have written more clearly.
NO. This bloody government did. THEY SIGNED IT INTO LAW
Right, and the media industry paid them to do it. If they were acting as employees of the media giants, then the industry is to blame. Oh, but wait, they bought the government on the "free market", so no wrong was done!
or media giants out to make a buck at the cost of other media giants? Let them fight it out for themselves
Look likes they want to do it at our expense instead. We can't put as much of a fight you know, its more profitable to screw us then the other companies. Of course there just "Providing better value" right? Sure...
evolution teaches us only the worthy survive.
And the 2nd law of thermodynamics teaches us that evolution can't happen, right? Oh, wait that's just A gross, and pointless generalization of something specific, relating to another field, and erroneous as well. I see.
Aside from evolution not directly having anything to do with societal constructs, your interpretation is wrong. Evolution doesn't say anything about "worthiness" or even "Survival". All it says if your capable of reproducing then you can pass on your genotypes. Everything dies, and lots of things are evolutionally successful. As for "worthiness" that's a human standard, not a natural one. [the DMCA] infringes on my right to create, and move freely,
If you're an American, why are you using the word "bloody"
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Ayn Rand is wrong. Fundamentally. If you can't appreciate that, then that's to bad.
Music corporations don't produce music; they merely buy it and sell it. And rape people on both sides of the equations. You pay $15 for a CD, and the artiest gets a quarter. It is severely fucked up, and, if you weren't in your "Ubercapitalist" mode of religious thinking. You would see that too.
Of course, the movie companies are in a different situation; as they produce there own art (witch costs huge amounts of money to produce). The situation isn't so clear-cut, but no one should ever be able to take away are constitutional rights just to be able to make more money.
Additionally, your post embodies the major (though not always true) criticisms of Jon Katz's articles: Verbosely pointless. What was your thesis? "This is bad, but not really that bad. It's complicated". I Think you stated it in the second to last paragraph, but I'm not really sure... Of course, this is the kind pompous, and intellectually immature stuff I would expect from a follower of the church of Ayn Rand.
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I can't believe the big deal made about such a lossy compression like mp3. It really sounds like crap
.wav file and decompressing to the soundcards waveform buffer produce the exact same waveform, unless you have some kind of fucked up sound card (or slow-ass computer. Are you using DirectSound with winamp on a slow computer?)
Scientific testing has proved otherwise
you can get "modest" playability out of an mp3 if you decompress it and play it back as a wav file
This proves you don't know what you're talking about. Decompressing to a
When I first got my computer hooked up to this nice stereo I bought for my dorm, I could really, really tell the difference between MP3 and CD sound. But it turned out that the audio coming off the CD player was a lot higher in volume then the mp3s. I adjusted the levels, and it turned out the two sounded almost exactly the same. Also, a 196kbit/sec MP3 is, for most cases, indistinguishable from a real sample.
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So, what your saying, basicaly, is that it's OK for the government to make bad, unconstitutional laws, beacuse you can always just break them?
That is about the most braindead thing I've ever heard.
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What you have to relize here, is that this isn't a US law. Its a state law. And states have no power to do any kind of diplomacy with other nations. The US government should have no interest in protecting this law overseas, so it shouldn't matter.
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Palm's use motorola dragonball 68k's, (are they 68k's?) not z80's. The z80 was the 8bit chip used in early nintendo and atari units. Palms are a lot more powerfull then that.
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Slashdot bitches about ads on cell phones. Slashdot posts ads on website. interesting.
Advertising is becoming ubiquitous, and really, it kind of sucks. I guess that's what happens when everything becomes a 'service'. No one would ever have thought of hardwiring advertisements into a PC, (well, people have, but they were never wide spread). But the monument something ceases to be a 'thing' and becomes a 'service' it gets plastered with advertisements.
Of course, dicking around with a cell phone is a good way to end up in jail, so good luck trying to disable this (unless they provide an option). I can see it now, DMCA style restrictions on "circumventing and advertising scheme". I wouldn't be to surprised, the way things are going now, and the way hardware companies are perfectly willing to stomp all over your rights if it means more money.
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Did anyone else follow the teapot Link on the page? It was pretty interesting reading, and anyone who's done any 3d modeling will probably get a kick out of it... Unfortunately, almost all of the external links (from the teapot page) were dead :(
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This sounds like something that was done just to prove it could be done, so people could say "You know, they ported OpenGL to the palm pilot".
But, surely as the palm grows in hardware and display, it could become useful. I'd bet a high-end palm probably has more CPU power then the 486 you played doom on, or at least more then the 386 you played wolf-3d on. I'd really like to see someone port (or develop) some games now. Perhaps the GPL'd quake engine? (How fast is the software rendering there using?)
Heh, imagine being able to say, "You know, they ported GL quake to the palm pilot"...
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Certanly, you don't think this was an issue of trademark infringment, Unless you think BN has a right to decided who gets to call themsleves a bookstore and who dosn't. They might have had a case if amazon tried to call themslevs "The Barns and Noble of the web" or somthing like that. But that's not what they did.
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Wow, I figured Anything from apple would be bad, but the review sounds like somthing straght out of AFA propaganda/FUD "Parents should be aware that children who go exploring there are only a couple of clicks away from some serious porn. " wow...
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What about the time Barnes & Noble sued to try to stop Amazon from calling itself "the world's largest bookstore" because they didn't have a brick-and-mortar presence (like, ahem, Barnes & Noble) and hence shouldn't be able to call themselves a "bookstore"? And I'm pretty sure there have been other little squabbles that slip my mind at present.
:P
Huh? I don't think you can sue someone just beacuse you dissagree with there use of a word. That dosn't make any sense. If you say "I'm cool" does that mean I can sue you if I think you're an idiot? hrm... maybe that would a good thing
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The entire patent system really needs an overhaul for the 21st. century.
Of course, I doubt we'll get it.
Oh, we'll get it. Just like we 'got' copyright reform in the form of the 'Digital Millennium Copyright Act'. Of course, it wont be what's "right" or what's "best". But it will certainly be in the best interests of those organizations that have lots of money...
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It's not just commissions, it's commissions on the internet man.
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I really liked O'reilly's metaphor of the net as an ecosystem, one, that like the nascent PC industry stagnated under corporate control. He really makes an interesting point, one that I think is pretty much true. We all remember how cool the Internet used to be, and how much it sucks now... An advertising network awash in pop-up windows, Spam, and "push media". Where "portal players" compete for "eyeballs". The term, of course is from the television industry, where it actually makes some sense. But the fact that they borrow metaphors from the that industry really tells us what they think of there customer base, and where they want to take the Internet (Just look at iwon.com shudder)
Well, I'm never one to pass up a chance to bash the current state of the Internet, but O'reilly's statement really got me thinking. Could the 'ecosystem' idea be applied to the Open Source movement? The Free Software Movement has been around for a long time, helping people get good, quality software programmed mostly for fun. But, Ironically, there's money to be made in it. ESR came around and renamed the movement, and made himself quite a bit of money. And now the corporations are all over it. Some, such as IBM (witch has really always been about hardware and support) see it for what it is, a way to get good software. But others, most notably VA and RedHat depend on it for their livelihood.
We are already seeing the results of the corpiritzation of open source, and I wonder what will happen when it is completely commercialized... (or even if that will really happen)
it's 2AM, there's some marginal spell checking, but other then that...
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History isn't over, neither is economics. In 1900, many intellectuals forsaw a future of peace and leisure, where everyone would be rich. It didn't happen for them, and it won't happen for us.
But don't you see, it has happend for us. At least in the US, someone would be considered 'poor' by our standards would be considered rich or at least middle class by their standards.
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