Now, instead of two years at summer camp, he will go to many more years of Federal Pound-me-in-the-a$$ Prison.
Contrary to popular Internet Wisdom(R), you are much more likely to get raped in a state prison than a federal one. Most sex-related crimes (rape, sexual assault, molestation, indecent exposure) are state crimes, not federal ones and so the vast majority of these wonderful people go to state prison. Similarly, most violent offenses are state, not federal.
To make it concrete, >50% of the population of state prisons were in for a violent offense versus 12% in the federal population. Roughly 12% of state prisoners are in for rape or other violent sexual assault, compared to basically 0% in the federal system. Statistics on rapes in the various system likewise bolsters the conclusion: don't get sent to state-pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
According to CEO Max Seybold, beginning in the fourth quarter the company will be ready to roll out its real business model. Folks running Ad-Block may want to sit down for this: advertisements will run when the computer is loading an application. Now the company says most applications will load in only a handful of seconds, and Seybold promises never to artificially delay a load for the benefit of ad screen time. But we'd say its a pretty big omission in the literature.
This is especially glaring when the company says its guided by the values: Green, Fair, and Open. Those last two bits mean CherryPal vows to keep things honest and open-source with its customers. Seybold told us that the company will soon be describing in detail how the advertising works.
While I have no objection to this sort of arrangement, I think a bit more information is forthcoming. Then again, they haven't actually released the device yet, so I'm going to assume that they will make it clear what is going on.
(1) Switch to e-billing (2) Change your billing address to anywhere in Portland, OR 97202 (2b) You might need to switch your area-code to 503 -- some carriers will let it slide though (3) Get charged the lowest cell-phone taxes in the country
I saved about $4/month switching from Taxachussets to Oregon. My parents saved $7 because our town (yes, the town) levies a $2/month tax on cell phones on top of the country and state taxes. Plus, as an added bonus, you can reward a low-tax jurisdiction with more revenue while depriving a high-tax one.
A band that is willing to offer their music on terms to which you agree.
I checked bestbuy.com and it appears to have a similar deal. Granted, it's a good start, but buying a phone online is not the same as being able to feel the phone before you buy it.
I was of the impression that some of those phones are available at their B&M locations as well. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but the general idea that you can't get unlocked phones in the US is rubbish.
It's like trying to buy a notebook computer to run Linux. If you buy it in a store, you pay for Windows Vista and run the risk of buying hardware that does not work with common Linux distributions. (The stores I've been in won't let customers bring in and use an Ubuntu Live CD.) But if you buy it online (e.g. from LinuxCertified or Dell), you run the risk of getting poor ergonomics: a hinge that's too tight or too loose, or an inefficient keyboard, or whatever.
I would love to have Linux laptops on display at BestBuy (and its ilk) but the fact remains that a majority of consumers are indifferent to Linux. Why should a store waste shelf-space on a product that will not generate sales?
For one thing, the determination of the homebrew community to crack the oligopolists' consoles shows that such a market exists.
So a company has neglected to change their product for a small and unprofitable market.
Or what mini-PC with SDTV output would anyone recommend?
I don't understand the relevance of the question. I run a stripped down Windoze box with VLC and S-video out as a media player. My buddy runs a Mac Mini. Another friend uses xmbc on an original xbox. All three are competent home theaters
The reason I don't like DRM or SIM-locks is that they restrict my choices
Only if you chose to buy DRMed music or SIM-locked phones. If you didn't chose to buy those things, your choices wouldn't be restricted.
and that most consumers aren't informed enough about it.
Enough for what? For you to be satisfied with the process that they use to make their purchases?
Meanwhile vendors do their hardest to walk the line between lying and describing their product in the best possible light.
So long as they (a) don't lie and (b) disclose all the material limitations of their products, what exactly is the problem?
In the case of SIM-locking, it actively impedes competition. If cellular provider A is advertising phones for 15 dollars with a SIM-lock disclosed in small print, and company B is advertising cellular phones has to find some way to compete or lose customers.
If consumer-Bob chooses to buy a locked phone then he has decided that taking his phone between companies is not important to him -- that's a valid preference. All told, including the locks, he prefers A to B and that's all there is to it.
They can't lure provider A's existing customers away, because they're contracted.
The contracts expire and there's considerable brand-defection in the US carriers, especially after number portability. At any rate, a company does not have the right to impinge on the freedom of two unrelated parties to make a contract, even if that denies them business.
They could try not selling phones just SIM cards and service accounts, but you'd lose a large market who doesn't have a phone or know where to get one.
So you mean they would lose a large market by not providing goods and services that meet the public's needs? Sounds perfect! We don't need any more companies that won't give us what we want and instead insist on giving us what they think we need.
Meanwhile, cell phone manufacturer C can't even compete with cell phone manufacturer D on obvious product features because provider A and friends want to exploit their contracted customer base.
If those product features are so important, consumers will switch providers to get them.
Finally some consumers that are informed simply come to me asking how to hack it out. Rather than make a visible choice that might affect the market, they choose to spend as little as possible and ignore the contract, law and ethics. It's nice that technology can undo some of the damage, but a) it's an arms race, b) it drives otherwise legitimate use underground c) visible progress is impeded.
Irrelevant. Whether the lock is effective has no bearing on whether or not a consumer has the right to chose what product best suits his need, even if that choice runs counter to your preferences. If anything, it means the companies are suckers for subsidizing phones that are easily unlocked and used elsewhere -- quite literally paying money into their competitor's hands.
It's not exactly forbidding, but one way involves not giving users technical support unless they turn off closed-source kernel modules. When I installed Ubuntu Hardy on my aunt's PC, I seem to remember an alert box that explained that kernel debugging becomes much more difficult once the program counter enters a module that has no source code.
Indeed it does. Somehow I imagine that your aunt doesn't do much kernel debugging though. Therefore, for her, it would appear that the pros of the closed driver probably outweigh the cons. For others, it might be different.
The presence of closed-source programs on your computer makes it more difficult to support the free software on the same computer. One workaround is to have one pure machine for use with free software and shared-source software and one impure machine for restrictions-managed software.
And if a user still chooses to run closed programs despite knowing that it makes debugging more difficult then he will have decided that some other factor is more important. You place a high priority on debugging and a lower priority on some other things -- that's fine and dandy for you but you are aware (I hope) that other people might have different priorities.
What is the Free alternative to a song by Genesis or Yes?
What makes you think you have the right to buy a song from Yes under whatever terms you see fit? If Yes doesn't want to sell you their song except as an 8-track, that's their right -- you are free to take it or leave it.
North Americans buy phones with a subsidy lock because they can't walk into a phone store and buy phones without a subsidy lock.
Disclosure isn't enough in an oligopolized market. Case in point: Which set-top video game console sold in North America is designed to run free software?
What makes you think there is a market for a console that is designed to run free software? I venture that there is no such market because ability to run F/OSS on their game consoles is not a priority for most console-buying consumers.
Free software is about the end-user's right to do with software as he pleases.
Yes, and he must accept that right whether he want it or not! Compulsory freedom!
It is not about having a choice, it is especially not about having a choice between multiple proprietary options.
Of course not, why would we allow a user to chose the software that best meets his needs from the widest possible selection?
The difference may be subtle to some, but the day it bites you in the ass and you realize that you aren't free to use your software the way you want to, you'll probably figure it out real quick.
I am well aware of the nature of my software, TYVM. I have accepted some of the closed-source software because it was the best product to serve that particular need and I know that I am unable to modify it. I understand that it's shocking to you that others might have different criteria than you but eventually you'll learn to cope.
I sure did, after spending $600 on nvidia video cards that would not work with my monitors under linux because of a &%$&^ bug in their linux drivers it was became real obvious to me.
Unless nVidia promised you that the Linux drivers would support $X then you have only yourself to blame. You know that the drivers were closed and you knew that you were at their mercy as to features/bugs/etc. ..
The reason people have a problem with others simply making an informed choice is that you can't negotiate with a corporation.
Vote with your dollars -- if you don't like FairPlay, don't buy music from iTunes. Why your dislike for FairPlay should affect anyone but you is entirely beyond me. We are all free people capable of making our own decisions -- even decisions that you don't approve of.
Just as most people can't fix a bug in Free software, even more so most people can't make a corporation fix a bug or support a feature in proprietary software. That other person's choice to accept arbitrary restrictions works against me by encouraging the market to remain proprietary.
And if a majority of those people continue to freely chose proprietary, that's a dead-sure sign that the market ought to remain proprietary because that is what serves their needs. Markets are designed to give people what they want, not to embody some higher ideal -- if the market moves towards F/OSS, it is because F/OSS products meet people's needs more satisfactorily than competing products.
Sure my suffering is an externality to the other person. But don't expect me to be happy about it.
Not having the market move in the way you would prefer is not suffering and it's definitely not an externality. Nowhere before have I ever heard a claim that a vendor choosing to offer products not to your liking (presumably because there's no percentage in it whereas the rest of the world is keen to buy a different sort of product) constitutes an injury of any sort.
First, I apologize for misconstruing your meaning.
Part of the reason why I got an unintended meaning is that you apply the word 'should' to universal nouns ('the kernel') -- 'should' normally expressed a preference but it was unclear as to the bearer of that preference. Code for the kernel 'should' have source only insofar as the relevant people prefer that over a closed-source solution.
That, I suppose, is the heart of my issue with RMS et. al. over this sort of thing -- they have a tendency to elevate their personal preference to universal 'shoulds' instead of acknowledging them as being inherently subjective values that might vary considerably from person to person.
Anything that sits in the kernel and has the possibility of crashing your system should have source code. Anything in userland is fair game for closed source software.
On what grounds, exactly, do you purport to forbid users from choosing what software runs in their kernel? Last I checked, the concept of free choice was generally agnostic about the source of the software, only the user's desire to run it.
Posts like these (and moderator ratification), undermine the message of free choice and free tinkering because they imply that the community views some of those choices as illegitimate (as opposed to merely unwise).
Exactly, this is the point of Linux. You get a system where YOU get to make the choices. So if I want to install X software I can. Now the line gets crossed when people start prohibiting Linux users from doing X or Y.
Which is why I am consistently amazed at those that rail against DRM, hardware locks, vendor-proprietary formats and other unwise, but legitimate, choices.
For instance, I cannot fathom how anyone could have a problem with a knowledgeable user buying a DRMed song from iTunes. Sure, I wouldn't do so, but so long as that consumer understands the limitations on what he is buying, I don't see the problem. Same thing for a phone with a SIM-lock or a vendor-specific database that is entirely unusable without their software. In all those cases, a full and honest disclosure is more than sufficient to vitiate any potential harm.
Folks, the Attorney General's behavior is blatantly unethical. He's using false legal claims to bring down legitimate forums, and the ISPs are bending to his will.
The ISPs "bent to his will" in the sense that they decided that this particular service was not very important to their customers -- so unimportant that they won't even bother to defend a case that is an obvious slam dunk (according to you, anyway).
Have you ever heard anyone chose and ISP because of USENET? Most random people have never heard of it and most geeks just chose the fastest connection in their price range -- USENET doesn't figure into it. Just as well, since most ISP-newshosting services are notoriously crappy anyway. Google Groups supports reading and posting to text-based groups, alt.binaries* users will subscribe to giganews and such.
The Democratic Party primary can quite reasonably considered to be the end of the line for candidates seeking Federal election from MA. Unless you have a genius plan to disrupt the internal workings of the party, I find it hard to believe you are going to accomplish all that much.
Well, I was responding to a different parent but I acknowledge that the scenario is not covered in my proposed system. Proposed system 1.1 requires only a client-side fix, however.
After downloading the updated package meta-data, but before requesting any packages (and therefore before it has revealed anything to the mirror), any services that are to be upgraded are disabled. This will require all packages that interact with internet-facing services to include a field detailing how to bring the service down. For instance, the OpenSSH package might list 'kill 9 $SSHD_PID' in this field. After the service has been successfully taken down, the request for the package is sent, things are updated, and everyone is happy.
Dismissed at the pleading stage for failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted. There is no legal theory on this planet that would make a third party (even a disreputable one like the RIAA) responsible for the Dell's choice to include or exclude some features from a driver. Perhaps you could proceed in a fraud case against Dell IF somewhere they claimed stereo-mix as a feature or, and this is a huge stretch, general merchantability.
More broadly, I suggest you stop thinking of the legal system is a cure-all for every practice you don't like. The law is not meant to be an all-encompassing tool for redressing every wrong but rather a minimal standard of civilized decency. While I'm no fan of the RIAA, and many of their tactics are indeed illegal (I'll let NYCL flesh those out), this particular odious act is still well within the law.
Even that won't help. The authors got so caught up in the complex exploiting they didn't notice the BIG implication of their work. The problem can't be fixed with tech, crypto or anything but https connects to known to be trusted mirror operators.
There's an easy technological fix -- signing expiration. Instead of signing a package forever, the distro should sign it for, say, 2 weeks. When each signature expires, the distro team should re-sign it only if there is no newer stable version. The client can then easily know if the update mirror is out of date (maliciously or otherwise).
The whole process could be implemented and automated in a week or two (no, I'm not volunteering).
This isn't new or interesting -- it's a classic pump and dump, most likely on the price of oil.
(1) Buy oil futures (2) Pump spam/disinformation about a US military strike in Iran. (2a) Do this when US/Israeli officials are making strong statements (2b) because Iran has just tested some missiles (3) Watch the price of oil go up 4-5% in a day http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/ (4) (Sell your oil futures at a) Profit!
While I strongly object to the telecom immunity provisions, I support the substantive amendments to FISA regarding the wiretapping provisions. Of course, I would certainly vote against the bill as-is.
The rationale for amending the substantive provisions of FISA is pretty straightforward: the original statute had a bug where purely international communications passing through the US could not be bugged on US soil without a warrant, but if you tapped the very same cable in int'l waters, it was legal. This distinction makes no sense whatsoever -- the location of the wiretapping equipment should not be relevant.
Secondly, neither the original FISA nor any other provision of law ever prohibited interception of a foreign to foreign phone call, even if the physical interception happens on US soil. That same foreign-to-foreign communication would require a warrant, however, if it was written in a email that was retrieved from storage inside the US. Again, a distinction that makes no sense -- the mode of communication ought not to be relevant.
Thirdly, the new bill still provides that a court order is necessary if a target is inside the country OR a US citizen. In fact, the old FISA did not require a warrant to target an American citizen outside the country, whereas the new bill does -- an expansion of protection for our citizens traveling abroad.
If anyone wants to show me any provision of this bill that provides for the warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens, I'd be glad to see it. Until then, that characterization is unfounded. See the analysis at Balkinization (who opposes the reforms, btw, so you can't accuse me of getting information from a friendly source!): http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/06/guide-to-new-fisa-bill-part-iii.html
Of course, it's utterly contemptible that Pres. Bush didn't go to Congress in 2001 and get the law fixed instead of just ignoring it. That fact, however, is strictly independent of the merits of the reforms. Simply pursuing a goal illegally (immorally and in unbelievable disregard for the rule of law) does not actually materially change the merits of the goal itself.
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal.
Quick addendum, I don't think you understood my meaning. The prestige comes from the quality of the articles that you've written, not acceptance into an elite journal. The point is that the elite journal provides a very useful proxy for assessing the quality of the work. A researcher's publication history provides a very good measure of the quality and focus of his work which would otherwise be difficult to gauge (it would require become expert in the field(s), reading all the articles and then judging their merit -- way too much work).
Peer review is great, but you don't have to charge the readers of your journal to be able to review papers before they are published.
Editors don't work for free.
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal. If Nature was made freely available tomorrow, do you think many scientists would stop submitting articles to it because of that?
Charging enables Nature to hire experts that can better assess the quality of submitted articles. If they didn't charge, the quality would slide and, yes, eventually, scientists would stop submitting articles.
Yes, editing is very useful, but just because people don't have to pay to read a paper, that doesn't mean it can't be edited.
Editors still don't work for free.
Ah, here's your real argument. You don't care that almost everyone can't read many journals for free, because you can.
Almost right. I accept that almost everyone can't read them because I don't think it's possible to have an freely accessible journal that provides the same benefits. If it were just a matter of flipping a switch and not changing the quality of the product, I would certainly do that. It's not.
No, the purpose of the journal is to have experts that filter, scrutinize, assess-importance-of, and edit the papers so I don't have to do the drudge work. Just because you either didn't read those purposes or assert that they don't justify the cost does not mean you get to disregard what I wrote and assign some other nefarious purpose under the guise of "what are you saying here".
I wish it weren't so (and I submit all my papers to http://www.arxiv.org/ as well to the journals), but the fact is, closed journals provide significant value both to the reader and to the submitting author. I'm not really trying to defend the system here, by the way, I'm just trying to explain what purpose it serves (and what an open alternative would have to match).
Referees and Peer-Review Referees are invaluable because someone has to objectively assess articles for basic scientific merit and rigor. The better journals can recruit referees for each submission that truly grok the subject matter and can often work very productively with an author. Quite a number of important advances are made and pitfalls avoided because a referee insisted that a researcher cover her bases before submission. Of course, nobody claims that PR journals are bullshit-free, but they are certainly far better than un-reviewed sources like arxiv.
This function is especially important for readers in multidisciplinary fields (myself included) that often read papers on subjects in which we are not expert enough to know what constitutes sound science. When I read about some group that has extracted and crystallized some protein, I'd like to know that someone competent at the relevant techniques has scrutinized their methods because I haven't the faintest clue (I'm a physicist by training, a biophysicist by necessity).
Prestige and Selection Another important function of the journals is to select articles by importance. If a paper makes Nature or Science, that's usually a good indicator that they've made an important advance. The benefits of this selection are twofold: first, readers can keep tabs on work at the forefront without wading through lots of papers. It sounds lazy, but most of us cannot read every paper that is published and are quite glad to outsource some filtering to the journals.
Secondly, it allows authors to demonstrate to people outside their immediate field what caliber work they've done. Even among people in the same department, it's not immediately clear what qualifies as a breakthrough work (as opposed to incremental work, which I don't trash in the least bit, but it's not really the same hat) -- prestigious journal cites are a good substitute, especially when the alternative is to either become an expert in the field or find one and ask.
Review Articles Most journals have an in-house staff to write articles reviewing the state of a particular field/technique/whatever. This is also an invaluable services because sometimes one needs a broad, textbook-level summary instead of a large number of discrete, deep papers on a topic. Given that science is done in small, insular little bits, it's natural that there is room for someone to aggregate and summarize those bits and put them into a larger perspective.
Editing Another thankless job (the snarky comments about the/. eds belie the fact that editing is hard work). Dupes are weeded out and researchers with poor language skills (especially when writing in an adopted language) are given help communicating their ideas. Confusing or unclear language is massaged back into form, figures are well-presented and well-labeled, text is formatted to be easy on the eyes, references are given in a standard form. These things count more than most/.ers realize (Knuth was on to something guys . . )
Access Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
I've actually had FIOS (20/5/$50) for about a year now at these usage rates, but my router died and I had to get a new one in June. I've had absolutely zero complaints, which is not shocking since the glass they strung up is far from capacity. If I'm costing them more than my user fees, I would be glad to pay extra to cover my usage (seriously).
For those of you that complain that you just can't use that much bandwidth, I suggest you try a little harder. Be creative: host your own flash videos, use sshfs to mount your music directory from wherever, set up SVN repositories for everyone you know, . . .
No, they are actually as disjoint as possible. The Court right now is 4 "liberals" (RBG,SB,PS,DS), 4 "conservatives" (CT, AS, SA, JR) and one wildcard (AMK) -- scare quotes because I don't want to oversimplify.
On the Liberal side: Boumedienne (the Habeas case) was 5-4 with the libs + AMK. Lawrence v. Texas (overturning TX sodomy law) was 5-4, libs + AMK.
On the Conservative side Heller was 5-4 with the conservatives + AMK. Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC (overturning a prohibition on political advertising with 60 days of an election) was 5-4, conservatives + AMK.
Makes me kind of depressed that I have to chose which freedoms are the most important to me. I support all 4 of these decisions wholeheartedly and I am not eager to pick a candidate based on which liberties he is most likely to curtail.
The real deal is that more often than not, non-competes are applied with a breadth that cannot be described as anything but abusive. Then perhaps employees can insist on contract language that narrows the effect of the non-competes. That would be far superior, IMO, to the European approach of treating me like a nitwit that cannot even negotiate a contract without the government's help. Seriously, it's insulting to think that I cannot read and understand (or, failing that, hire a lawyer to help me understand) a contract -- I am a fully functioning human being, not a bloody invalid!
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Now, instead of two years at summer camp, he will go to many more years of Federal Pound-me-in-the-a$$ Prison.
Contrary to popular Internet Wisdom(R), you are much more likely to get raped in a state prison than a federal one. Most sex-related crimes (rape, sexual assault, molestation, indecent exposure) are state crimes, not federal ones and so the vast majority of these wonderful people go to state prison. Similarly, most violent offenses are state, not federal.
To make it concrete, >50% of the population of state prisons were in for a violent offense versus 12% in the federal population. Roughly 12% of state prisoners are in for rape or other violent sexual assault, compared to basically 0% in the federal system. Statistics on rapes in the various system likewise bolsters the conclusion: don't get sent to state-pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
References:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p05.pdf (!PDF!)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/21/cherrypal_launches_cherrypal_with_cherrypalcloud_and_cherrypal_etc/
While I have no objection to this sort of arrangement, I think a bit more information is forthcoming. Then again, they haven't actually released the device yet, so I'm going to assume that they will make it clear what is going on.
(1) Switch to e-billing
(2) Change your billing address to anywhere in Portland, OR 97202
(2b) You might need to switch your area-code to 503 -- some carriers will let it slide though
(3) Get charged the lowest cell-phone taxes in the country
I saved about $4/month switching from Taxachussets to Oregon. My parents saved $7 because our town (yes, the town) levies a $2/month tax on cell phones on top of the country and state taxes. Plus, as an added bonus, you can reward a low-tax jurisdiction with more revenue while depriving a high-tax one.
http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/06/cz_sw_0606cellphone.html
I want to leave it; what should I take instead?
A band that is willing to offer their music on terms to which you agree.
I checked bestbuy.com and it appears to have a similar deal. Granted, it's a good start, but buying a phone online is not the same as being able to feel the phone before you buy it.
I was of the impression that some of those phones are available at their B&M locations as well. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but the general idea that you can't get unlocked phones in the US is rubbish.
It's like trying to buy a notebook computer to run Linux. If you buy it in a store, you pay for Windows Vista and run the risk of buying hardware that does not work with common Linux distributions. (The stores I've been in won't let customers bring in and use an Ubuntu Live CD.) But if you buy it online (e.g. from LinuxCertified or Dell), you run the risk of getting poor ergonomics: a hinge that's too tight or too loose, or an inefficient keyboard, or whatever.
I would love to have Linux laptops on display at BestBuy (and its ilk) but the fact remains that a majority of consumers are indifferent to Linux. Why should a store waste shelf-space on a product that will not generate sales?
For one thing, the determination of the homebrew community to crack the oligopolists' consoles shows that such a market exists.
So a company has neglected to change their product for a small and unprofitable market.
Or what mini-PC with SDTV output would anyone recommend?
I don't understand the relevance of the question. I run a stripped down Windoze box with VLC and S-video out as a media player. My buddy runs a Mac Mini. Another friend uses xmbc on an original xbox. All three are competent home theaters
The reason I don't like DRM or SIM-locks is that they restrict my choices
Only if you chose to buy DRMed music or SIM-locked phones. If you didn't chose to buy those things, your choices wouldn't be restricted.
and that most consumers aren't informed enough about it.
Enough for what? For you to be satisfied with the process that they use to make their purchases?
Meanwhile vendors do their hardest to walk the line between lying and describing their product in the best possible light.
So long as they (a) don't lie and (b) disclose all the material limitations of their products, what exactly is the problem?
In the case of SIM-locking, it actively impedes competition. If cellular provider A is advertising phones for 15 dollars with a SIM-lock disclosed in small print, and company B is advertising cellular phones has to find some way to compete or lose customers.
If consumer-Bob chooses to buy a locked phone then he has decided that taking his phone between companies is not important to him -- that's a valid preference. All told, including the locks, he prefers A to B and that's all there is to it.
They can't lure provider A's existing customers away, because they're contracted.
The contracts expire and there's considerable brand-defection in the US carriers, especially after number portability. At any rate, a company does not have the right to impinge on the freedom of two unrelated parties to make a contract, even if that denies them business.
They could try not selling phones just SIM cards and service accounts, but you'd lose a large market who doesn't have a phone or know where to get one.
So you mean they would lose a large market by not providing goods and services that meet the public's needs? Sounds perfect! We don't need any more companies that won't give us what we want and instead insist on giving us what they think we need.
Meanwhile, cell phone manufacturer C can't even compete with cell phone manufacturer D on obvious product features because provider A and friends want to exploit their contracted customer base.
If those product features are so important, consumers will switch providers to get them.
Finally some consumers that are informed simply come to me asking how to hack it out. Rather than make a visible choice that might affect the market, they choose to spend as little as possible and ignore the contract, law and ethics. It's nice that technology can undo some of the damage, but a) it's an arms race, b) it drives otherwise legitimate use underground c) visible progress is impeded.
Irrelevant. Whether the lock is effective has no bearing on whether or not a consumer has the right to chose what product best suits his need, even if that choice runs counter to your preferences. If anything, it means the companies are suckers for subsidizing phones that are easily unlocked and used elsewhere -- quite literally paying money into their competitor's hands.
It's not exactly forbidding, but one way involves not giving users technical support unless they turn off closed-source kernel modules. When I installed Ubuntu Hardy on my aunt's PC, I seem to remember an alert box that explained that kernel debugging becomes much more difficult once the program counter enters a module that has no source code.
Indeed it does. Somehow I imagine that your aunt doesn't do much kernel debugging though. Therefore, for her, it would appear that the pros of the closed driver probably outweigh the cons. For others, it might be different.
The presence of closed-source programs on your computer makes it more difficult to support the free software on the same computer. One workaround is to have one pure machine for use with free software and shared-source software and one impure machine for restrictions-managed software.
And if a user still chooses to run closed programs despite knowing that it makes debugging more difficult then he will have decided that some other factor is more important. You place a high priority on debugging and a lower priority on some other things -- that's fine and dandy for you but you are aware (I hope) that other people might have different priorities.
What is the Free alternative to a song by Genesis or Yes?
What makes you think you have the right to buy a song from Yes under whatever terms you see fit? If Yes doesn't want to sell you their song except as an 8-track, that's their right -- you are free to take it or leave it.
North Americans buy phones with a subsidy lock because they can't walk into a phone store and buy phones without a subsidy lock.
http://www.compusa.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?cat=1809&keywords=unlocked&mnf=
Disclosure isn't enough in an oligopolized market. Case in point: Which set-top video game console sold in North America is designed to run free software?
What makes you think there is a market for a console that is designed to run free software? I venture that there is no such market because ability to run F/OSS on their game consoles is not a priority for most console-buying consumers.
Free software is about the end-user's right to do with software as he pleases.
Yes, and he must accept that right whether he want it or not! Compulsory freedom!
It is not about having a choice, it is especially not about having a choice between multiple proprietary options.
Of course not, why would we allow a user to chose the software that best meets his needs from the widest possible selection?
The difference may be subtle to some, but the day it bites you in the ass and you realize that you aren't free to use your software the way you want to, you'll probably figure it out real quick.
I am well aware of the nature of my software, TYVM. I have accepted some of the closed-source software because it was the best product to serve that particular need and I know that I am unable to modify it. I understand that it's shocking to you that others might have different criteria than you but eventually you'll learn to cope.
I sure did, after spending $600 on nvidia video cards that would not work with my monitors under linux because of a &%$&^ bug in their linux drivers it was became real obvious to me.
Unless nVidia promised you that the Linux drivers would support $X then you have only yourself to blame. You know that the drivers were closed and you knew that you were at their mercy as to features/bugs/etc. . .
The reason people have a problem with others simply making an informed choice is that you can't negotiate with a corporation.
Vote with your dollars -- if you don't like FairPlay, don't buy music from iTunes. Why your dislike for FairPlay should affect anyone but you is entirely beyond me. We are all free people capable of making our own decisions -- even decisions that you don't approve of.
Just as most people can't fix a bug in Free software, even more so most people can't make a corporation fix a bug or support a feature in proprietary software. That other person's choice to accept arbitrary restrictions works against me by encouraging the market to remain proprietary.
And if a majority of those people continue to freely chose proprietary, that's a dead-sure sign that the market ought to remain proprietary because that is what serves their needs. Markets are designed to give people what they want, not to embody some higher ideal -- if the market moves towards F/OSS, it is because F/OSS products meet people's needs more satisfactorily than competing products.
Sure my suffering is an externality to the other person. But don't expect me to be happy about it.
Not having the market move in the way you would prefer is not suffering and it's definitely not an externality. Nowhere before have I ever heard a claim that a vendor choosing to offer products not to your liking (presumably because there's no percentage in it whereas the rest of the world is keen to buy a different sort of product) constitutes an injury of any sort.
First, I apologize for misconstruing your meaning.
Part of the reason why I got an unintended meaning is that you apply the word 'should' to universal nouns ('the kernel') -- 'should' normally expressed a preference but it was unclear as to the bearer of that preference. Code for the kernel 'should' have source only insofar as the relevant people prefer that over a closed-source solution.
That, I suppose, is the heart of my issue with RMS et. al. over this sort of thing -- they have a tendency to elevate their personal preference to universal 'shoulds' instead of acknowledging them as being inherently subjective values that might vary considerably from person to person.
The guy chosing Skype is telling RMS to shove it - and there are a million other guys out there just like him.
This guy is not a geek.
He will never share your values - he will never learn to speak your language - but the closed source vendor can and will speak his.
And I support his right to make choices with which I disagree. More power to "the guy" for deciding for himself what he wants!
Anything that sits in the kernel and has the possibility of crashing your system should have source code. Anything in userland is fair game for closed source software.
On what grounds, exactly, do you purport to forbid users from choosing what software runs in their kernel? Last I checked, the concept of free choice was generally agnostic about the source of the software, only the user's desire to run it.
Posts like these (and moderator ratification), undermine the message of free choice and free tinkering because they imply that the community views some of those choices as illegitimate (as opposed to merely unwise).
Exactly, this is the point of Linux. You get a system where YOU get to make the choices. So if I want to install X software I can. Now the line gets crossed when people start prohibiting Linux users from doing X or Y.
Which is why I am consistently amazed at those that rail against DRM, hardware locks, vendor-proprietary formats and other unwise, but legitimate, choices.
For instance, I cannot fathom how anyone could have a problem with a knowledgeable user buying a DRMed song from iTunes. Sure, I wouldn't do so, but so long as that consumer understands the limitations on what he is buying, I don't see the problem. Same thing for a phone with a SIM-lock or a vendor-specific database that is entirely unusable without their software. In all those cases, a full and honest disclosure is more than sufficient to vitiate any potential harm.
It's about choice right?
Folks, the Attorney General's behavior is blatantly unethical. He's using false legal claims to bring down legitimate forums, and the ISPs are bending to his will.
The ISPs "bent to his will" in the sense that they decided that this particular service was not very important to their customers -- so unimportant that they won't even bother to defend a case that is an obvious slam dunk (according to you, anyway).
Have you ever heard anyone chose and ISP because of USENET? Most random people have never heard of it and most geeks just chose the fastest connection in their price range -- USENET doesn't figure into it. Just as well, since most ISP-newshosting services are notoriously crappy anyway. Google Groups supports reading and posting to text-based groups, alt.binaries* users will subscribe to giganews and such.
All in all, a lot of noise about a small dog.
The Democratic Party primary can quite reasonably considered to be the end of the line for candidates seeking Federal election from MA. Unless you have a genius plan to disrupt the internal workings of the party, I find it hard to believe you are going to accomplish all that much.
MA was bought and paid for a long time ago.
Well, I was responding to a different parent but I acknowledge that the scenario is not covered in my proposed system. Proposed system 1.1 requires only a client-side fix, however.
After downloading the updated package meta-data, but before requesting any packages (and therefore before it has revealed anything to the mirror), any services that are to be upgraded are disabled. This will require all packages that interact with internet-facing services to include a field detailing how to bring the service down. For instance, the OpenSSH package might list 'kill 9 $SSHD_PID' in this field. After the service has been successfully taken down, the request for the package is sent, things are updated, and everyone is happy.
Dismissed at the pleading stage for failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted. There is no legal theory on this planet that would make a third party (even a disreputable one like the RIAA) responsible for the Dell's choice to include or exclude some features from a driver. Perhaps you could proceed in a fraud case against Dell IF somewhere they claimed stereo-mix as a feature or, and this is a huge stretch, general merchantability.
More broadly, I suggest you stop thinking of the legal system is a cure-all for every practice you don't like. The law is not meant to be an all-encompassing tool for redressing every wrong but rather a minimal standard of civilized decency. While I'm no fan of the RIAA, and many of their tactics are indeed illegal (I'll let NYCL flesh those out), this particular odious act is still well within the law.
Even that won't help. The authors got so caught up in the complex exploiting they didn't notice the BIG implication of their work. The problem can't be fixed with tech, crypto or anything but https connects to known to be trusted mirror operators.
There's an easy technological fix -- signing expiration. Instead of signing a package forever, the distro should sign it for, say, 2 weeks. When each signature expires, the distro team should re-sign it only if there is no newer stable version. The client can then easily know if the update mirror is out of date (maliciously or otherwise).
The whole process could be implemented and automated in a week or two (no, I'm not volunteering).
This isn't new or interesting -- it's a classic pump and dump, most likely on the price of oil.
(1) Buy oil futures
(2) Pump spam/disinformation about a US military strike in Iran.
(2a) Do this when US/Israeli officials are making strong statements
(2b) because Iran has just tested some missiles
(3) Watch the price of oil go up 4-5% in a day http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/
(4) (Sell your oil futures at a) Profit!
Yawn . . .
While I strongly object to the telecom immunity provisions, I support the substantive amendments to FISA regarding the wiretapping provisions. Of course, I would certainly vote against the bill as-is.
The rationale for amending the substantive provisions of FISA is pretty straightforward: the original statute had a bug where purely international communications passing through the US could not be bugged on US soil without a warrant, but if you tapped the very same cable in int'l waters, it was legal. This distinction makes no sense whatsoever -- the location of the wiretapping equipment should not be relevant.
Secondly, neither the original FISA nor any other provision of law ever prohibited interception of a foreign to foreign phone call, even if the physical interception happens on US soil. That same foreign-to-foreign communication would require a warrant, however, if it was written in a email that was retrieved from storage inside the US. Again, a distinction that makes no sense -- the mode of communication ought not to be relevant.
Thirdly, the new bill still provides that a court order is necessary if a target is inside the country OR a US citizen. In fact, the old FISA did not require a warrant to target an American citizen outside the country, whereas the new bill does -- an expansion of protection for our citizens traveling abroad.
If anyone wants to show me any provision of this bill that provides for the warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens, I'd be glad to see it. Until then, that characterization is unfounded. See the analysis at Balkinization (who opposes the reforms, btw, so you can't accuse me of getting information from a friendly source!): http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/06/guide-to-new-fisa-bill-part-iii.html
Of course, it's utterly contemptible that Pres. Bush didn't go to Congress in 2001 and get the law fixed instead of just ignoring it. That fact, however, is strictly independent of the merits of the reforms. Simply pursuing a goal illegally (immorally and in unbelievable disregard for the rule of law) does not actually materially change the merits of the goal itself.
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal.
Quick addendum, I don't think you understood my meaning. The prestige comes from the quality of the articles that you've written, not acceptance into an elite journal. The point is that the elite journal provides a very useful proxy for assessing the quality of the work. A researcher's publication history provides a very good measure of the quality and focus of his work which would otherwise be difficult to gauge (it would require become expert in the field(s), reading all the articles and then judging their merit -- way too much work).
Peer review is great, but you don't have to charge the readers of your journal to be able to review papers before they are published.
Editors don't work for free.
Charging people to read the journal creates only a false sense of prestige. Genuine prestige arises from the quality of the articles in the journal. If Nature was made freely available tomorrow, do you think many scientists would stop submitting articles to it because of that?
Charging enables Nature to hire experts that can better assess the quality of submitted articles. If they didn't charge, the quality would slide and, yes, eventually, scientists would stop submitting articles.
Yes, editing is very useful, but just because people don't have to pay to read a paper, that doesn't mean it can't be edited.
Editors still don't work for free.
Ah, here's your real argument. You don't care that almost everyone can't read many journals for free, because you can.
Almost right. I accept that almost everyone can't read them because I don't think it's possible to have an freely accessible journal that provides the same benefits. If it were just a matter of flipping a switch and not changing the quality of the product, I would certainly do that. It's not.
You say that you're "just trying to explain what purpose it serves". So what are you saying here? The purpose of closed journals is to ensure that only the élite [sicwtf] can read them?
No, the purpose of the journal is to have experts that filter, scrutinize, assess-importance-of, and edit the papers so I don't have to do the drudge work. Just because you either didn't read those purposes or assert that they don't justify the cost does not mean you get to disregard what I wrote and assign some other nefarious purpose under the guise of "what are you saying here".
Referees and Peer-Review Referees are invaluable because someone has to objectively assess articles for basic scientific merit and rigor. The better journals can recruit referees for each submission that truly grok the subject matter and can often work very productively with an author. Quite a number of important advances are made and pitfalls avoided because a referee insisted that a researcher cover her bases before submission. Of course, nobody claims that PR journals are bullshit-free, but they are certainly far better than un-reviewed sources like arxiv.
This function is especially important for readers in multidisciplinary fields (myself included) that often read papers on subjects in which we are not expert enough to know what constitutes sound science. When I read about some group that has extracted and crystallized some protein, I'd like to know that someone competent at the relevant techniques has scrutinized their methods because I haven't the faintest clue (I'm a physicist by training, a biophysicist by necessity).
Prestige and Selection Another important function of the journals is to select articles by importance. If a paper makes Nature or Science, that's usually a good indicator that they've made an important advance. The benefits of this selection are twofold: first, readers can keep tabs on work at the forefront without wading through lots of papers. It sounds lazy, but most of us cannot read every paper that is published and are quite glad to outsource some filtering to the journals.
Secondly, it allows authors to demonstrate to people outside their immediate field what caliber work they've done. Even among people in the same department, it's not immediately clear what qualifies as a breakthrough work (as opposed to incremental work, which I don't trash in the least bit, but it's not really the same hat) -- prestigious journal cites are a good substitute, especially when the alternative is to either become an expert in the field or find one and ask.
Review Articles Most journals have an in-house staff to write articles reviewing the state of a particular field/technique/whatever. This is also an invaluable services because sometimes one needs a broad, textbook-level summary instead of a large number of discrete, deep papers on a topic. Given that science is done in small, insular little bits, it's natural that there is room for someone to aggregate and summarize those bits and put them into a larger perspective.
Editing Another thankless job (the snarky comments about the /. eds belie the fact that editing is hard work). Dupes are weeded out and researchers with poor language skills (especially when writing in an adopted language) are given help communicating their ideas. Confusing or unclear language is massaged back into form, figures are well-presented and well-labeled, text is formatted to be easy on the eyes, references are given in a standard form. These things count more than most /.ers realize (Knuth was on to something guys . . )
Access Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
http://img366.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tempax7.gif
I've actually had FIOS (20/5/$50) for about a year now at these usage rates, but my router died and I had to get a new one in June. I've had absolutely zero complaints, which is not shocking since the glass they strung up is far from capacity. If I'm costing them more than my user fees, I would be glad to pay extra to cover my usage (seriously).
For those of you that complain that you just can't use that much bandwidth, I suggest you try a little harder. Be creative: host your own flash videos, use sshfs to mount your music directory from wherever, set up SVN repositories for everyone you know, . . .
No, they are actually as disjoint as possible. The Court right now is 4 "liberals" (RBG,SB,PS,DS), 4 "conservatives" (CT, AS, SA, JR) and one wildcard (AMK) -- scare quotes because I don't want to oversimplify.
On the Liberal side:
Boumedienne (the Habeas case) was 5-4 with the libs + AMK.
Lawrence v. Texas (overturning TX sodomy law) was 5-4, libs + AMK.
On the Conservative side
Heller was 5-4 with the conservatives + AMK.
Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC (overturning a prohibition on political advertising with 60 days of an election) was 5-4, conservatives + AMK.
Makes me kind of depressed that I have to chose which freedoms are the most important to me. I support all 4 of these decisions wholeheartedly and I am not eager to pick a candidate based on which liberties he is most likely to curtail.