I think you've entirely misunderstood the comment I was making, and have gotten confused with "Liberal" and "liberal", two very different terms. It also doesn't appear that you're that clued up on what a capital L liberal is either, which is in many ways appropriate given that the definition you appear to be basing your posting on is that spread by the media at present.
Competition has lead to a situation where instead of the media being liberal in its approach - that means listening to all sides, trying to be fair minded, etc - it's gone for a "squarking heads", unbalanced and generally "promote what people want to hear" view. I think that's in large part because of what you yourself believe - that media will, somehow, be more reasonable if there's more of it. But that doesn't really work, because as people assume the method improves all by itself, they tend to let go of their own responsibility in that area. It's ok to promote a viewpoint and ignore the facts because someone else out there will provide the correction. And that's doubly untrue and unlikely to happen when, while there's a lot of media, it's generally owned by the same types of group.
What the solution is... well, there isn't one. I said that. You can write to your rep or senator but there's nothing they're going to do about it. You can let them know that you're concerned about the issue, you can even say that you appreciate the positive effects competition has brought but that if all these extra voices continue to have the same agendas, you'll be forced to go to less reliable and intelligent news outlets instead, but I doubt they'll really care much. You can let them know that SMP support in OpenBSD will make or break your ability to deploy that OS on your workstations and servers, but I doubt that they'll care. You can tell them that you care about freedom and such, and they'll probably agree with you, but it's not like they have anyway of helping. You can let them know you vote, and your vote will be dependent on their policies on the promotion of critical thought, but I seriously doubt they'll do anything but throw their hands up in frustraition and say "But what can I do about it?"
Ultimately, you can't make a difference. Attempts to keep informed will ultimately fail, attempts to encourage your democratic representatives will fail because there's nothing they can do about it. You may as well give up.
If you remember, a few days ago I was talking about Dish Network's weak grasp on the market.
And I thought it was very insightful too. I wrote a good critique here. A critical problem though that DN needs to get past if it's to progress in terms of market share, was something you didn't raise: namely the crippling effect of the DMCA. Dish Network has problems getting out of a rutt where, by all reasonable standards, cable companies have the upper hand. Cable companies do not have the same kinds of limitations when it comes to decoding multiple channels, they have two-way infrastructure, and they have the capabilities of adding non-television services such as telephony and broadband Internet services to their arsenals.
Dish Network can only get beyond this point by making use of its relatively niche position to create specialised services such as PVR integration systems built into its decoders, and such. This, however, requires changes - it is content providers that restrict the use of equipment to view and record content, and, with the DMCA, the content producers have the final say. If they want to enforce a "no record" bit, Dish Network's equipment must enforce it, regardless of how useless such a tool would be.
This quagmire of Dish Network offering nothing but a wider choice of channels and cheaper programming to compete against entrenched cable monopolies
will not disappear by itself. Unless
people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on
Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing GPL'd content parsing code which uses the DMCA in nasty ways in order to discredit it. Write code that makes it impossible to use it to produce encrypted, DMCA protected, content, but at the same time enforces little limitations upon its use. Appreciate the work being done by groups like Ogg Tarkin but that if these systems are shipped with DRM systems, such as Real intends to do with Helix, use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Get SMP working in OpenBSD so that you can efficiently deploy
that operating systems on your workstations and servers. Think
about freedom, openness, and choice, and work to
create software that protects all three. This is an issue that effects YOU
directly, YOU code, and that your code is dependent on opened systems.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat coding as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep your skills up to date, keep writing great code that makes the world a better
place. And, most importantly of all, code.
Discussions of who to believe usually end up being centered around personalities together with ideological constraints. This seems to affect most areas of thought, be it political, social, economic, or scientific. The importance of religion in people's lives has lead, for example, to the rise of "creation science" and other similar theories of life's existance built to attempt to link religious beliefs to something more concrete. Similarly, hard evidence about global warming is being challenged from those who are concerned about the economics of dealing with the problem, on every level from those who challenge the solutions, through those who challenge the reasons, to those who even challenge the suggestion that global warming exists. Equally, those who see the progress of development as itself damaging see evidence of global warming as a way of reasoning for a movement against development.
Ultimately, these theories gain respectability in large part due to the people backing them, and a desire to look at the world through a desire to achieve particular goals. This is no surprise but it does limit critical thought. Critical thought is in many ways impossible without trustworthy evidence, and a desire by a majority to look at evidence critically, but this leads to a conundrum - where do you start believing? If contrary evidence exists, who do you trust? Is there time in the universe to actually examine every claim critically, or examine every piece of evidence? Is it surprising people lock themselves into belief systems and attempt to examine only that that is related to that system?
Skewing this problem further is the not insignificant fact that people's perspectives are shaped by the evidence provided to them and their educations. This begins at school age, where any number of factors may skew how a person develops their own belief systems. State education is dying in the US, and many would argue that such schooling is unduly influenced by governmental factors. Private education however, creates equal and opposite horrors, with parents likely to choose schools that promote their own belief systems and hang-ups, and such schools looking more attractive than those that at least make an attempt to promote critical thought. And a parent's choice is only part of the problem, a school that is inherently designed to promote a specific belief system will attempt to promote itself to a wide range of groups; this leads to a situation where a relatively small number of groups can encourage particular ideologies and ways of looking at the world.
It doesn't stop at schooling. An explosion of information sources, and a lack of accountability where TV networks, publications, and other heavily promoted sources of information have become little more than pulpits for what the proprieters believe is a reasonable balance between the views they wish to express and what the public will stand, has lead to a situation where a huge amount of information presented is unfair, inaccurate, and promotional of particular belief systems. As competition has increased, quality has decreased. A "liberal", ie largely accurate, fair and balanced, media has become used to promoting views of the world that fit a less liberal agenda, lead by Fox, and groups playing catch-up to Fox's brand of popular illiberalism.
Belief systems feed off belief systems. Critical thought takes a back seat as assumptions become treated as facts, and the sheer volume of dubious and inaccurate information wieghts so heavily that more accurate pictures of the world look less and less likely. People believe because someone who says things that repeat other things they believe are saying these things.
I wrote a fairly long essay on the potential consequences of Palladium here. I think it's important to consider that whether people intend for these technologies to only be used by a small subset of computer users with specific security interests, it is almost certain that the current paranoia exhibited by the entertainment industry will make its use compulsory.
That's not the problem. The problem is that due to the DRM, Product Activation, and Palladium technologies built-in to the watch, you can't tell the time to anyone else when you're wearing it...
Why thank you. However, if you feel that you can write a more informative, interesting, and insightful review of the situation concerning open technologies, I'm all ears. Feel free to knock down anything I've said, or even repeat it if you agree with anything I've written.
Here's a question - support OpenBSD were to support SMP. Suppose that this had been done years ago, and that there was simply no issue with it. And suppose that because of that, my penultimate paragraph were one sentence shorter. Suppose also I reworded it to say exactly the same thing:
You know, I hadn't noticed before, but yeah, I do tend to finish a lot of my posts similarly. I guess it's my concerns about freedom and democracy.
That said, there's nothing else any of those messages have in common, and, if I may say so, all three are informative, interesting, and insightful analysises in their relevent fields - that of the difficulty of attracting great programmers to games development despite it being the cutting edge of invention in the computer world, that of the actual reasons why OS/2 failed and how free software can be used to ensure a future where a choice in operating systems is a real possibility and workable option; and on the dichotomies in the telecommunications industry that mean that we're facing unprecedented attempts to restrict bandwidth at a time when we have a glut, and ways of getting out of that dillema.
If you can point to three other postings on the same subject that are as insightful, I'd be delighted to read them.
Good lord! I didn't leave that in did I? Oh well. That entirely invalidates my entire argument and I accept that, because I suggest that OpenBSD needs SMP, that my explanation of the dangers of totalitarian copyright laws, of the results of paranoia by the content industry, and of the legal backing the DMCA gives to access prevention systems inbuilt into Digital Restrictions Management mechanism, together with my suggestions of who to write to and what sorts of issues should be raised with them, is in fact complete nonsense.
I shall, of course, be writing to my senator encouraging more and more draconian laws, or at least saying that I don't really give a stuff either way. Doesn't affect me, does it?
That's great. Now, answer me this: What the hell do you think the solution is to keeping these technologies open while a clearly hostile law like the DMCA is on the books?
Or do you feel technologies shouldn't be open? That the problems with keeping copyrighted material protected are such that it's legitimate to cripple all future technologies to save them? If so, why do you feel this way?
I made some important points which I believe to be entirely valid and very critical at this point. I also suggested the only obvious solution. Are you so blinded by the style as to ignore the content?
This project is a demonstration of the value of open technologies, hardware, and standards. Ogg, MP3 (patents aside), Ethernet and TCP/IP, are all open and well documented technologies. There's nothing in the CPU the creator proposes that's been crippled to prevent "unauthorized" use. Even MP3 which is encumbered by patents is documented and anyone may use it for any (legal) purpose they wish, although in a limited number of commercial cases, they may have to pay a small royalty. It's no big deal.
At the same time, this is a useful project - clearly, Ethernet is a common communications infrastructure component, and is probably one of the most flexible. This type of technology means that someone can plug a (commodity?) component into an unquestionably commodity network infrastructure, something not really available right now. There's no need to rewrite the home because the best place for the CD deck is in one room, and one place where the output might want to be listened to is another.
These two issues are important - a problem has been solved with open components, and it would be impossible to solve that problem without that open infrastructure. Yet various groups, lead by the MPAA (and to an extent cheered on by the RIAA, the representative of the recording industry which has concerns about unauthorized copying) have promoted laws that remove that ability to problem solve. In the end, the output of copyrighted material producers is being compromised by these actions, but this doesn't stop them as there's an assumption that open technologies are bad, and that technologies need to be centrally controlled and contain technologies to prevent not merely uses of copyright material that are clearly unfair to the content producers, but also of uses of that material that the producers have not heard of.
One company, Microsoft, has already proposed and demonstrated technologies that would make projects such as the above impossible. Content would not be copyable onto unprotected commodity components in Palladium, a digital restrictions mechanism that uses encryption and authorization at the hardware level to divide a world into "trusted" and "untrusted" realms. While Microsoft argues their technology is voluntarily, a content producer can restrict use of their content to only those who sign up for the technological restrictions.
This is a block on innovation. It's a block on personal freedom. In the end, it will cause damage not merely to consumers but also to those who produce content. We face a future of stagnant information growth, resembling more the state of Brewery development in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, than the technology industry during the same period.
Palladium is backed by entertainment industry promoted laws such as the DMCA, that make it illegal to bypass access control mechanisms, such as Palladium's Digital Restrictions Mechanisms.
This quagmire of a paranoid entertainment industry crippling the future both of content production and technology
will not disappear by itself. Unless
people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on
Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Write also to the Jack Valenti, the CEO and chair of the MPAA, whose address
and telephone number can be found at the About the MPAA page. Write too to Bill Gates, Chief of Technologies and thus in overall charge of Palladium, at Microsoft. Tell them
you understand the concerns content producers have about unauthorized copying, but that without an open technological infrastructure, the value of content will be lowered, and as the bar to entry into content production is raised more and more innovation will be sucked out of the industry. Tell them that technologies such as Palladium, DVD CSS, and other technological locks, will damage both the content and technology industries in ways that go well beyond anything reasonable. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create new ways of viewing and hearing content but that if
those technologies are closed, you will be forced to
use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let
them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy
OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have
about freedom, openness, and choice, and how digital restrictions
harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU
directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed
dependent, on their policies towards legally enforcing clearly damaging restrictions management systems.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Let's face it: a great many CEOs are responsible for driving the nation's economy. While it would be foolish to pretend that all CEOs are positive - whether it's a crook like Kenneth Lay, or an individual who starts a company with the aim of ripping off customers or shareholders like the managers of many telephony start ups,.coms, and telemarketing or spam groups, or those evil individuals who start companies that manufacture "antenna boosters" and "engine degreasers", or whether it's a person put in charge of a perfectly viable company in order to take it apart, sending jobs overseas and destroying the company's main sources of income - the fact remains that many CEOs, perhaps even quite a large number of them, are responsible for the creation and maintenance of the world's infrastructure and production capabilities. It is they that put in the work, working long hours (at least initially, of course most can sit back after a few years and work one day a week, especially the unpleasant ones mentioned earlier, but certainly initially it's 20 hour days living on nothing but pizza and coffee) to produce things that otherwise wouldn't exist.
The bad behaviour of many CEOs creating crooked startups, picking apart viable companies, swindling employees and stockholders, and producing goods that aren't worth the money spent on the packaging, has lead to a damaging image so that all CEOs, regardless of whether they fall into that category, or are the kinds of nice ones that appear on the cover of Fortune magazine as people who have turned companies around, attend every employee party and are considered "down to earth", "one of the team", "a close friend to every employee", and who introduce back massages as a part of keeping their employees happy, are regarded as evil dishonest individuals, who do not deserve the multimillion salaries they're paid. This in turn puts people off wanting to become CEOs - after all, who wants to earn $57,000,000 a year plus stock options if it means not only having give two thirds of that to the tax man, leaving you with a measily $20,000,000 or so, but also means being assumed to be a common white collar criminal, always on the take, except when you're on the front cover of Fortune?
This quagmire of people not wanting to be CEOs because the taxes leave them with only a few million dollars as salary, and because CEOs aren't always the most popular people around, will not disappear by itself. Unless
people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on
Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them
CEOs are important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to cut taxes for the top 5% earners in the country to make being a CEO a more attractive proposition
but that if the reputation of CEOs keeps being sullied by exposes and court cases for the really crooked ones, you will be forced to
use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternative jobs. Let
them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy
OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have
about freedom, openness, and choice, and how CEOs being treated badly
harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU
directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed
dependent, on their policy on the treatment of CEOs.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Why should your Senator or Congressman (or woman) choose any of those solutions? Low wages and poor working conditions make recruitment for good programmers difficult and this in turn ensures invention in the computing and algorithmic fields is stifled. Clearly this is a bad thing.
What's the alternative to letting your legislators know what concerns you? Letter bomb attack? Going postal? Clearly, ensuring your democratically elected representatives are aware of your concerns is the more reasonable and peaceful of the available solutions. We support a democracy for a reason, because it is right that peaceful solutions be found for all solvable problems, and that people obey the rigid rules of society for the sake of one another. Peaceful co-existance can only be achieved through reason, through peaceful liberation and open debate.
At the end of the day, what your senator or representative chooses to do to resolve this particular issue will be based on the facts, based on hearing all points of view and based on the essential values of fairness and decency. It may be that legislation is required, it may be that existing regulations can solve the issue. It may be that deals can be struck, or that the industry can be made more attractive so that more companies want to join in. It may even be that the best solution is for an elected representative of the people to meet and sit down with the managers of the computer game industry, and, in the civilized atmosphere of the tea room or coffee shop, reason with them.
Surely that's better than resorting to terrorist solutions?
It remains a key feature of IT that the skills involved allow entry to such a wide range of differing industries that there's practically no reason for someone to feel they're at a dead end. The video game industry, is in many ways, a case in point: although not wonderful - the salaries are generally so bad it makes analyst programming look positively well paid - it's a great entry point for any programmer with imagination who wants to use programming skills that are normally cut off at other levels. Database management is well known, dynamic web page building is understood and there are limits to what you can do: but video game development is different - algorithms are always being bettered, and the very good can end up pushing video game development into another sphere, creating types of application previously unenvisagable.
It's ironic that this happens and yet it's considered a poor-man's profession. Programmers in this field are generally poorly treated, with poor contracts, little chance of advancement, and little cross-skillification that would allow a programmer to move into a more respected arena. This is, in part, because it's an entertainment area, and in part because for every superskilled programmer who is able to push the arena into a new paradigm, there must be a hundred who can barely put together a bunch of assembler instructions to copy memory from one place to another without it taking five times as long as it ought to, and containing bugs.
This quagmire of the more innovative area of programming being hampered by a low perception of the people involved and the skills they bring to the table
will not disappear by itself. Unless
people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on
Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them
you value programmers who have the imagination and skills to create entirely new technologies for the manipulation of complex graphics, and who have the cut needed to understand the essentials of good game play. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create wonderful new games
but that if good programmers are put off by poor working conditions and salaries, you will be forced to
use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let
them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy
OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have
about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor working conditions detering the best of the best
harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU
directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed
dependent, on their policies on elite computer game programmers.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
One of the issues that the whole derivative work sphere has is that it in many ways contradicts the normal notions of collabaration, where usually people work together in a controlled environment to create a work. In open source and free software, in general it's assumed that people will if they can, but the systems are set up to allow different forks to go ahead. This leads to interesting results: people working together usually have the same aims, for someone to split off a project and develop independently suggests a difference in goals, and this in itself suggests that the people concerned may have differences of opinion that are more than just technical.
The GPL was created for a specific aim - to ensure that there would be a base of software that is, for want of a better term, free to the end user. That means that the end user need not care about how the software is created and the aims of the person creating it, but is able to use the software for their own personal use to the best of its capabilities. If the software needs to support something new, they can change it. But in itself, this promotes a non-collaborative paradigm. And this creates - as you can see from some of the heated discussions of GPL vs BSD/X11, etc, discussions on Slashdot - an ironic dichotomy where the aims of those who use GPL'd software may be at odds with those of the original developers, almost my definition.
This quagmire of free software frustrating a small minority of those who are uninvolved in its development who in many ways wish to remove the very freedoms the GPL provides to users of their own derived software will not go away by itself. Unless
people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on
Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them you believe that collaboration and the use of derivation is something you want to encourage. Tell them that you
appreciate the work being done by the free software and open source communities, but if the freedoms they introduce end up being compromised by incompatable derived software that removes those freedoms you will be forced to use less and less secure and
intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or
break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations
and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and
choice, and how we need to work together to create a world where collaboration and derivation is a norm that can be relied upon to exist. Let them know that this is an issue that
effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be
influenced, indeed dependent, on your legislator's policy towards free and open software.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Finally! Someone with a clue! THANK YOU for saying this.
Laws are not made to be broken, they're made to make living a little easier. If you have problems with the laws on the books, and believe they're not helping, you need to raise your voice. Make your government aware of your misgivings. It's
YOUR government damn it. You may have decided to let it run itself
these last few years, but ultimately the founding fathers made sure
that the government would be, in some way, answerable to you - be that,
arguably as originally intended, on a State by State level, or, as it
is now, on a more pluralist democratic level (yes, as long as the
legislature is answerable to the populace, it's a democracy. You don't
need more than that, all this BS about rule by plebicite is just that:
BS)
Speeding may or may not be something you believe should be outlawed. Clearly, if you believe it should be, you must call for more appropriate and stict enforcement of this law - if everyone is forced, through widespread non-compliance such that compliance is itself dangerous, to disobey that law, then the only way it can be made to work is to create mechanisms that enforce it properly. Similarly, you may be of the opinion that selective or patchy enforcement means that the law is itself wrong, that the ends do not justify having the law in the first place, and that the law should itself be taken off the books. But without you declaring it a problem, and demanding your government deal with this, the government will assume you consent to the laws we have as they're written.
This quagmire of government inaction over inappropriately implemented laws
regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless
people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on
Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator
[senate.gov]. Tell them either to enforce the law or take it off the books, depending on what you believe. Tell them that you
appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, or that you're fed up of taxpayers money being spent on enforcing unenforcable laws, but if money
keeps being thrown at half-assed half-implemented solutions that you either agree or disagree with, you will be forced to use less and less secure and
intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or
break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations
and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and
choice, and how half implemented laws harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that
effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be
influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they either implement the law fully, or abolish it, depending on your point of view.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Re:This is really great news
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 2
The problem here, is that only the rich can afford an easy to use web publishing package like FrontPage running on Windoes XP/2000. Everyone else is forced to use a free but hard to use knock-off like Linux to make their voices heard.
If only everyone sincerely expressed their views as eloquently as you have above. You are, of course, quite right: access to information publishing is restricted to a small elite, and unless web publishing technologies are opened up to everyone, we risk becoming a country where only a small, vocal, right wing minority (Rupert Murdoch, Steve Case, etc) have a voice.
Opening up the ability to publish could, as you suggest, be done by providing everyone in the country with a free copy of FrontPage. However, the ability to publish is limited if that that you publish can only be seen on, say, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and it would not be beyond Microsoft to modify FrontPage to do just that, restricting content only to that small elite who can afford Windows 2000 and Windows XP with Internet Explorer. A better solution would be to develop the tools: make those provided by Linux the equal to, or greater than, anything the competition can provide. The "cheap knock-offs", as you put it, would then be open to everyone.
This quagmire of content controlled by an elite will not disappeaar by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that the only way to open up the information revolution and provide the ability to openly criticise government to all is to provide open, capable, web publishing software to all for free. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done in the Free Software and Open Source domains, but if more resources are not devoted to improving the output of these groups you will be forced to use less and less
secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or
break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations
and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and
choice, and how providing free, high quality, web publishing sofware can help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that
effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be
influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on open web publishing software.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
If you're concerned about the potential consequences to privacy and freedom this type of technology might entail, there's really only one thing you can do: Make your government aware of your misgivings. It's YOUR government damn it. You may have decided to let it run itself these last few years, but ultimately the founding fathers made sure that the government would be, in some way, answerable to you - be that, arguably as originally intended, on a State by State level, or, as it is now, on a more pluralist democratic level (yes, as long as the legislature is answerable to the populace, it's a democracy. You don't need more than that, all this BS about rule by plebicite is just that: BS)
Your government throws money at all types of security "solutions" right now because it believes that is what you want it to do. It believes that, given the events of the last 14 months, you are frightened enough to break Franklin's famous principle about trading freedoms for security. It will do anything to make you feel safer, not only by making you safer, but by throwing tax payer dollars at pointless and socially dangerous projects such as "odor identification systems", as well as more infamous projects such as the face scanning technologies used in Tampa that were found to misidentify a large percentage of the population.
This quagmire of government spending to make you feel safer regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them not to do anything. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, but if money keeps being thrown at more and more invasive and ultimately pointless security measures you will be forced to use less and less
secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or
break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations
and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and
choice, and how them doing stuff all the time just for the sake of being popular harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that
effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be
influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they can summon up the political courage to spend an entire term getting nothing done.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Yahoo!'s actions are yet another example of the fascist imperialist corporate state forcing ordinary people to lose their privacy or become second class citizens. Not content with subscriptions and adverts, they want to own your computer too. This is just another example of the type of corporate control we should expect with the current regime, ie the Bush administration, in power, which exists to funnel money from hard working ordinary people into the coffers of the already obscenely rich while trying to divert attention from what it's doing by setting up fake wars - ie Iraq, Afghanistan, France, etc.
The agenda of Yahoo is the same as it is for all the giant corporations, ie Microsoft, WalMart, AT&T, Sam Adams, AOL Time Warner, etc; it's to turn you into a wage earning slave exploiting your production on one hand, while controlling what you spend with the pitiful money they give you.
This quagmire of big business and big gubmint working together to exploit you must end. But it will not happen by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator, or to the Bush Family Evil Empire at the White House. Tell them that personal freedom and privacy combined with decent working conditions, a fair wage for a fair day's work, and decent, affordable, universal health care, are important to you - that you should have the rightt to control that that you store on your own disks. Tell them that you are appalled at Yahoo!'s and the pResident's efforts in this area, but that in the absense of full disclosure, you will have to find a less secure and intelligently run country to live in. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a corporate state run for greed's sake that exploits the workers destroys all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on the rights of ordinary, hard working, people.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
There's always going to be a strong case for sectioning off some parts of the radio spectrum simply to make sure that some services can operate uninterrupted - whether those are emergency services, cell phones, even to some extent radio and television. But the fact that some sectioning is necessary (or, in the case of radio and TV, desirable) has lead to a somewhat absurd situation where a substantial majority of the usable electromagnetic spectrum has been designated off limits. That's absurd, it's a block on innovation and on telecommunications, and arguably we would have seen a great deal more in that field over the last few decades especially had more than a few megahertz been open.
Most countries have taken this approach. In America, the FCC has taken on a role not merely of allocating frequencies but of controlling, insofar as they constitutionally can, what travels over them. The absurd limits on the 2.4GHz band, created in part not to help foster private telecommunications but to make microwave ovens legal, mean that communications over these bands have to be ultra-local in scale and have lead to conflicts between household and office equipment that should not exist. When my microwave oven is on, despite the heavy shielding, my Seimens Gigaset phone's reception is audibly impaired. I gather a common complaint is that 2.4GHz phones tend to interfere with 802.11* wireless networks too. And all because of artificial scarcity.
In the UK, until the mid-eighties, it was virtually impossible to use any kind of wireless device without a licence. An opening up made portable telephones and similar devices possible, but innovation was hampered for the longest time because of this.
A genuine opening up - with some restrictions for some bands to reduce the chances of a destructive tragedy of the commons, but otherwise an unrestricted unrestrained environement - of large amounts of the spectrum, possibly insofar as practically possible going for the long term goal of opening up 90% of the airwaves, would create opportunities both for localised and long distance communications to a degree currently unthought of. Private, community owned, relay networks could create sane and affordable telephone provision, last mile provision for Internet type networks would become easier and could work on a broadcast rather than point-to-point model. Devices designed to operate within homes could work without a maze of unintelligable cabling - your TV and receiver could receive digital signals directly from a DVD player anywhere in the house, as long as the signals followed agreed upon standards. It'd be ironic to see "plug and play" type functionality built into every household media device to free itself from the use of plugs and sockets.
At the moment, the government and FCC has no incentive whatsoever to do any of this. Governments have recently (last 20 years or so) seen rationing the electromagnetic spectum as an opportunity to raise stealth taxes. In an era where everyone looks at their income tax bills and blames the government, but looks at their cellphone bills and blames the cellphone companies, it makes sense for them to lighten the load on income taxes by moving to indirect taxation such as that generated by auctioning spectrum. This is a disasterous policy as not merely does it undermine the innovation that could be fostered in an environment of free spectrum, but it constitutes a form of regressive taxation as certain types of communication becomes more and more important and necessary because of network effects. I've known employers that refuse to employ people for certain types of job who will not supply a working cellphone number.
The spectrum will not open itself. The government needs to act, and act in the public interest, not what it can get away with to raise funds on-the-sly. Unless people are
prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing
will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to the FCC, your congressman or senator. Tell them that innovation and freedom is important to you,
and that it's important that the airwaves be opened up to foster a genuinely innovative and progressive culture where communications are unhampered by artificial scarcities, monopolies, and restraints. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done into creating a large ISM band, but if these efforts fail, you will be forced to use less and less
secure and intelligently designed wireless technologies, to get around the bottlenecks the current ISM bands impose. Let them know that SMP may make or
break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations
and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and
choice, and how opening up the airwaves can help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that
effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be
influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on opening up the airwaves.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right,
treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives
informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Mourning OS/2 and promoting a base of portable, free, application software is trolling now is it?
And I've posted precisely ONE OS/2 article in recent memory. I think I posted a few comments on the user interface last year but that was a while ago, and had nothing in common with the above save for both having something to do with OS/2.
A body lies on the found. A large bullet wound leaks blood from the chest. Bill Gates is standing over the body cackling like a mad man.
Slashdot users crowd around.
"I never did like the bastard", says one, "He died of loneliness".
"I gather he was suffering from food poisoning" says another. "He clearly died of that."
"Nonsense", says another, "He got laid off just now. It must have been suicide."
"I thought he had cancer?" says another.
The fact that OS/2 was open to many criticisms doesn't mean that OS/2 wasn't killed by a specific act by Microsoft. If OS/2 had been marketed for another six months despite Microsoft's demands, and IBM had done pretty well without Microsoft's Windows 95 threats doing it any damage, then it might be possible to protest that the FoF are wrong - that MS had no involvement (except in some "made a better product" way which clearly isn't the case) in OS/2's death. But there is no such alibi here. IBM did as Microsoft required they do. That is the act that killed OS/2. OS/2 may have died anyway, but we'll never know that.
I recall an interview with a Compaq exec in early 1996.
There's your problem. The Microsoft threats came in 1995, and it was late 1995 that IBM pulled all marketing from OS/2 and stopped bundling it with their own systems.
Again, read the Findings of Fact. It's explained there. And ESCOM, which in 1995 was arguably the strongest PC distributer in Europe, had no problems shipping PCs with OS/2 until IBM pulled the plug. Escom made the choice available to end users, and both "types of PC" sold like hot cakes.
(Unfortunately a cashflow crisis killed Escom in early 96, doubly a shame because that pretty much destroyed the Amiga, C= being owned by Escom at that point and still making plans to recover.)
Slashdot Mirror
Competition has lead to a situation where instead of the media being liberal in its approach - that means listening to all sides, trying to be fair minded, etc - it's gone for a "squarking heads", unbalanced and generally "promote what people want to hear" view. I think that's in large part because of what you yourself believe - that media will, somehow, be more reasonable if there's more of it. But that doesn't really work, because as people assume the method improves all by itself, they tend to let go of their own responsibility in that area. It's ok to promote a viewpoint and ignore the facts because someone else out there will provide the correction. And that's doubly untrue and unlikely to happen when, while there's a lot of media, it's generally owned by the same types of group.
What the solution is... well, there isn't one. I said that. You can write to your rep or senator but there's nothing they're going to do about it. You can let them know that you're concerned about the issue, you can even say that you appreciate the positive effects competition has brought but that if all these extra voices continue to have the same agendas, you'll be forced to go to less reliable and intelligent news outlets instead, but I doubt they'll really care much. You can let them know that SMP support in OpenBSD will make or break your ability to deploy that OS on your workstations and servers, but I doubt that they'll care. You can tell them that you care about freedom and such, and they'll probably agree with you, but it's not like they have anyway of helping. You can let them know you vote, and your vote will be dependent on their policies on the promotion of critical thought, but I seriously doubt they'll do anything but throw their hands up in frustraition and say "But what can I do about it?"
Ultimately, you can't make a difference. Attempts to keep informed will ultimately fail, attempts to encourage your democratic representatives will fail because there's nothing they can do about it. You may as well give up.
Dish Network can only get beyond this point by making use of its relatively niche position to create specialised services such as PVR integration systems built into its decoders, and such. This, however, requires changes - it is content providers that restrict the use of equipment to view and record content, and, with the DMCA, the content producers have the final say. If they want to enforce a "no record" bit, Dish Network's equipment must enforce it, regardless of how useless such a tool would be.
This quagmire of Dish Network offering nothing but a wider choice of channels and cheaper programming to compete against entrenched cable monopolies will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing GPL'd content parsing code which uses the DMCA in nasty ways in order to discredit it. Write code that makes it impossible to use it to produce encrypted, DMCA protected, content, but at the same time enforces little limitations upon its use. Appreciate the work being done by groups like Ogg Tarkin but that if these systems are shipped with DRM systems, such as Real intends to do with Helix, use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Get SMP working in OpenBSD so that you can efficiently deploy that operating systems on your workstations and servers. Think about freedom, openness, and choice, and work to create software that protects all three. This is an issue that effects YOU directly, YOU code, and that your code is dependent on opened systems.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat coding as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep your skills up to date, keep writing great code that makes the world a better place. And, most importantly of all, code.
Ultimately, these theories gain respectability in large part due to the people backing them, and a desire to look at the world through a desire to achieve particular goals. This is no surprise but it does limit critical thought. Critical thought is in many ways impossible without trustworthy evidence, and a desire by a majority to look at evidence critically, but this leads to a conundrum - where do you start believing? If contrary evidence exists, who do you trust? Is there time in the universe to actually examine every claim critically, or examine every piece of evidence? Is it surprising people lock themselves into belief systems and attempt to examine only that that is related to that system?
Skewing this problem further is the not insignificant fact that people's perspectives are shaped by the evidence provided to them and their educations. This begins at school age, where any number of factors may skew how a person develops their own belief systems. State education is dying in the US, and many would argue that such schooling is unduly influenced by governmental factors. Private education however, creates equal and opposite horrors, with parents likely to choose schools that promote their own belief systems and hang-ups, and such schools looking more attractive than those that at least make an attempt to promote critical thought. And a parent's choice is only part of the problem, a school that is inherently designed to promote a specific belief system will attempt to promote itself to a wide range of groups; this leads to a situation where a relatively small number of groups can encourage particular ideologies and ways of looking at the world.
It doesn't stop at schooling. An explosion of information sources, and a lack of accountability where TV networks, publications, and other heavily promoted sources of information have become little more than pulpits for what the proprieters believe is a reasonable balance between the views they wish to express and what the public will stand, has lead to a situation where a huge amount of information presented is unfair, inaccurate, and promotional of particular belief systems. As competition has increased, quality has decreased. A "liberal", ie largely accurate, fair and balanced, media has become used to promoting views of the world that fit a less liberal agenda, lead by Fox, and groups playing catch-up to Fox's brand of popular illiberalism.
Belief systems feed off belief systems. Critical thought takes a back seat as assumptions become treated as facts, and the sheer volume of dubious and inaccurate information wieghts so heavily that more accurate pictures of the world look less and less likely. People believe because someone who says things that repeat other things they believe are saying these things.
And, frankly, there's bugger all anyone can do about it.
Destruction of value combined with increased competition.
People need to get motivated.
That's not the problem. The problem is that due to the DRM, Product Activation, and Palladium technologies built-in to the watch, you can't tell the time to anyone else when you're wearing it...
Here's a question - support OpenBSD were to support SMP. Suppose that this had been done years ago, and that there was simply no issue with it. And suppose that because of that, my penultimate paragraph were one sentence shorter. Suppose also I reworded it to say exactly the same thing:
Would we even be having this discussion?
I don't think so.
That said, there's nothing else any of those messages have in common, and, if I may say so, all three are informative, interesting, and insightful analysises in their relevent fields - that of the difficulty of attracting great programmers to games development despite it being the cutting edge of invention in the computer world, that of the actual reasons why OS/2 failed and how free software can be used to ensure a future where a choice in operating systems is a real possibility and workable option; and on the dichotomies in the telecommunications industry that mean that we're facing unprecedented attempts to restrict bandwidth at a time when we have a glut, and ways of getting out of that dillema.
If you can point to three other postings on the same subject that are as insightful, I'd be delighted to read them.
I shall, of course, be writing to my senator encouraging more and more draconian laws, or at least saying that I don't really give a stuff either way. Doesn't affect me, does it?
Or do you feel technologies shouldn't be open? That the problems with keeping copyrighted material protected are such that it's legitimate to cripple all future technologies to save them? If so, why do you feel this way?
I made some important points which I believe to be entirely valid and very critical at this point. I also suggested the only obvious solution. Are you so blinded by the style as to ignore the content?
At the same time, this is a useful project - clearly, Ethernet is a common communications infrastructure component, and is probably one of the most flexible. This type of technology means that someone can plug a (commodity?) component into an unquestionably commodity network infrastructure, something not really available right now. There's no need to rewrite the home because the best place for the CD deck is in one room, and one place where the output might want to be listened to is another.
These two issues are important - a problem has been solved with open components, and it would be impossible to solve that problem without that open infrastructure. Yet various groups, lead by the MPAA (and to an extent cheered on by the RIAA, the representative of the recording industry which has concerns about unauthorized copying) have promoted laws that remove that ability to problem solve. In the end, the output of copyrighted material producers is being compromised by these actions, but this doesn't stop them as there's an assumption that open technologies are bad, and that technologies need to be centrally controlled and contain technologies to prevent not merely uses of copyright material that are clearly unfair to the content producers, but also of uses of that material that the producers have not heard of.
One company, Microsoft, has already proposed and demonstrated technologies that would make projects such as the above impossible. Content would not be copyable onto unprotected commodity components in Palladium, a digital restrictions mechanism that uses encryption and authorization at the hardware level to divide a world into "trusted" and "untrusted" realms. While Microsoft argues their technology is voluntarily, a content producer can restrict use of their content to only those who sign up for the technological restrictions.
This is a block on innovation. It's a block on personal freedom. In the end, it will cause damage not merely to consumers but also to those who produce content. We face a future of stagnant information growth, resembling more the state of Brewery development in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, than the technology industry during the same period.
Palladium is backed by entertainment industry promoted laws such as the DMCA, that make it illegal to bypass access control mechanisms, such as Palladium's Digital Restrictions Mechanisms.
This quagmire of a paranoid entertainment industry crippling the future both of content production and technology will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Write also to the Jack Valenti, the CEO and chair of the MPAA, whose address and telephone number can be found at the About the MPAA page. Write too to Bill Gates, Chief of Technologies and thus in overall charge of Palladium, at Microsoft. Tell them you understand the concerns content producers have about unauthorized copying, but that without an open technological infrastructure, the value of content will be lowered, and as the bar to entry into content production is raised more and more innovation will be sucked out of the industry. Tell them that technologies such as Palladium, DVD CSS, and other technological locks, will damage both the content and technology industries in ways that go well beyond anything reasonable. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create new ways of viewing and hearing content but that if those technologies are closed, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how digital restrictions harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies towards legally enforcing clearly damaging restrictions management systems.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
The bad behaviour of many CEOs creating crooked startups, picking apart viable companies, swindling employees and stockholders, and producing goods that aren't worth the money spent on the packaging, has lead to a damaging image so that all CEOs, regardless of whether they fall into that category, or are the kinds of nice ones that appear on the cover of Fortune magazine as people who have turned companies around, attend every employee party and are considered "down to earth", "one of the team", "a close friend to every employee", and who introduce back massages as a part of keeping their employees happy, are regarded as evil dishonest individuals, who do not deserve the multimillion salaries they're paid. This in turn puts people off wanting to become CEOs - after all, who wants to earn $57,000,000 a year plus stock options if it means not only having give two thirds of that to the tax man, leaving you with a measily $20,000,000 or so, but also means being assumed to be a common white collar criminal, always on the take, except when you're on the front cover of Fortune?
This quagmire of people not wanting to be CEOs because the taxes leave them with only a few million dollars as salary, and because CEOs aren't always the most popular people around, will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them CEOs are important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to cut taxes for the top 5% earners in the country to make being a CEO a more attractive proposition but that if the reputation of CEOs keeps being sullied by exposes and court cases for the really crooked ones, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternative jobs. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how CEOs being treated badly harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policy on the treatment of CEOs.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
What's the alternative to letting your legislators know what concerns you? Letter bomb attack? Going postal? Clearly, ensuring your democratically elected representatives are aware of your concerns is the more reasonable and peaceful of the available solutions. We support a democracy for a reason, because it is right that peaceful solutions be found for all solvable problems, and that people obey the rigid rules of society for the sake of one another. Peaceful co-existance can only be achieved through reason, through peaceful liberation and open debate.
At the end of the day, what your senator or representative chooses to do to resolve this particular issue will be based on the facts, based on hearing all points of view and based on the essential values of fairness and decency. It may be that legislation is required, it may be that existing regulations can solve the issue. It may be that deals can be struck, or that the industry can be made more attractive so that more companies want to join in. It may even be that the best solution is for an elected representative of the people to meet and sit down with the managers of the computer game industry, and, in the civilized atmosphere of the tea room or coffee shop, reason with them.
Surely that's better than resorting to terrorist solutions?
It's ironic that this happens and yet it's considered a poor-man's profession. Programmers in this field are generally poorly treated, with poor contracts, little chance of advancement, and little cross-skillification that would allow a programmer to move into a more respected arena. This is, in part, because it's an entertainment area, and in part because for every superskilled programmer who is able to push the arena into a new paradigm, there must be a hundred who can barely put together a bunch of assembler instructions to copy memory from one place to another without it taking five times as long as it ought to, and containing bugs.
This quagmire of the more innovative area of programming being hampered by a low perception of the people involved and the skills they bring to the table will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them you value programmers who have the imagination and skills to create entirely new technologies for the manipulation of complex graphics, and who have the cut needed to understand the essentials of good game play. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to create wonderful new games but that if good programmers are put off by poor working conditions and salaries, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor working conditions detering the best of the best harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on elite computer game programmers.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
The GPL was created for a specific aim - to ensure that there would be a base of software that is, for want of a better term, free to the end user. That means that the end user need not care about how the software is created and the aims of the person creating it, but is able to use the software for their own personal use to the best of its capabilities. If the software needs to support something new, they can change it. But in itself, this promotes a non-collaborative paradigm. And this creates - as you can see from some of the heated discussions of GPL vs BSD/X11, etc, discussions on Slashdot - an ironic dichotomy where the aims of those who use GPL'd software may be at odds with those of the original developers, almost my definition.
This quagmire of free software frustrating a small minority of those who are uninvolved in its development who in many ways wish to remove the very freedoms the GPL provides to users of their own derived software will not go away by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them you believe that collaboration and the use of derivation is something you want to encourage. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the free software and open source communities, but if the freedoms they introduce end up being compromised by incompatable derived software that removes those freedoms you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how we need to work together to create a world where collaboration and derivation is a norm that can be relied upon to exist. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on your legislator's policy towards free and open software.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Laws are not made to be broken, they're made to make living a little easier. If you have problems with the laws on the books, and believe they're not helping, you need to raise your voice. Make your government aware of your misgivings. It's YOUR government damn it. You may have decided to let it run itself these last few years, but ultimately the founding fathers made sure that the government would be, in some way, answerable to you - be that, arguably as originally intended, on a State by State level, or, as it is now, on a more pluralist democratic level (yes, as long as the legislature is answerable to the populace, it's a democracy. You don't need more than that, all this BS about rule by plebicite is just that: BS)
Speeding may or may not be something you believe should be outlawed. Clearly, if you believe it should be, you must call for more appropriate and stict enforcement of this law - if everyone is forced, through widespread non-compliance such that compliance is itself dangerous, to disobey that law, then the only way it can be made to work is to create mechanisms that enforce it properly. Similarly, you may be of the opinion that selective or patchy enforcement means that the law is itself wrong, that the ends do not justify having the law in the first place, and that the law should itself be taken off the books. But without you declaring it a problem, and demanding your government deal with this, the government will assume you consent to the laws we have as they're written.
This quagmire of government inaction over inappropriately implemented laws regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them either to enforce the law or take it off the books, depending on what you believe. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, or that you're fed up of taxpayers money being spent on enforcing unenforcable laws, but if money keeps being thrown at half-assed half-implemented solutions that you either agree or disagree with, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how half implemented laws harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they either implement the law fully, or abolish it, depending on your point of view.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Opening up the ability to publish could, as you suggest, be done by providing everyone in the country with a free copy of FrontPage. However, the ability to publish is limited if that that you publish can only be seen on, say, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and it would not be beyond Microsoft to modify FrontPage to do just that, restricting content only to that small elite who can afford Windows 2000 and Windows XP with Internet Explorer. A better solution would be to develop the tools: make those provided by Linux the equal to, or greater than, anything the competition can provide. The "cheap knock-offs", as you put it, would then be open to everyone.
This quagmire of content controlled by an elite will not disappeaar by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that the only way to open up the information revolution and provide the ability to openly criticise government to all is to provide open, capable, web publishing software to all for free. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done in the Free Software and Open Source domains, but if more resources are not devoted to improving the output of these groups you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how providing free, high quality, web publishing sofware can help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on open web publishing software.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Your government throws money at all types of security "solutions" right now because it believes that is what you want it to do. It believes that, given the events of the last 14 months, you are frightened enough to break Franklin's famous principle about trading freedoms for security. It will do anything to make you feel safer, not only by making you safer, but by throwing tax payer dollars at pointless and socially dangerous projects such as "odor identification systems", as well as more infamous projects such as the face scanning technologies used in Tampa that were found to misidentify a large percentage of the population.
This quagmire of government spending to make you feel safer regardless of the consequences will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them not to do anything. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to protect your safety, but if money keeps being thrown at more and more invasive and ultimately pointless security measures you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how them doing stuff all the time just for the sake of being popular harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on whether or not they can summon up the political courage to spend an entire term getting nothing done.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
I'd remember something like that.
So nuhnuh, suck on that imperialist capitalist lackey!
The agenda of Yahoo is the same as it is for all the giant corporations, ie Microsoft, WalMart, AT&T, Sam Adams, AOL Time Warner, etc; it's to turn you into a wage earning slave exploiting your production on one hand, while controlling what you spend with the pitiful money they give you.
This quagmire of big business and big gubmint working together to exploit you must end. But it will not happen by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator, or to the Bush Family Evil Empire at the White House. Tell them that personal freedom and privacy combined with decent working conditions, a fair wage for a fair day's work, and decent, affordable, universal health care, are important to you - that you should have the rightt to control that that you store on your own disks. Tell them that you are appalled at Yahoo!'s and the pResident's efforts in this area, but that in the absense of full disclosure, you will have to find a less secure and intelligently run country to live in. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a corporate state run for greed's sake that exploits the workers destroys all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on the rights of ordinary, hard working, people.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
Most countries have taken this approach. In America, the FCC has taken on a role not merely of allocating frequencies but of controlling, insofar as they constitutionally can, what travels over them. The absurd limits on the 2.4GHz band, created in part not to help foster private telecommunications but to make microwave ovens legal, mean that communications over these bands have to be ultra-local in scale and have lead to conflicts between household and office equipment that should not exist. When my microwave oven is on, despite the heavy shielding, my Seimens Gigaset phone's reception is audibly impaired. I gather a common complaint is that 2.4GHz phones tend to interfere with 802.11* wireless networks too. And all because of artificial scarcity.
In the UK, until the mid-eighties, it was virtually impossible to use any kind of wireless device without a licence. An opening up made portable telephones and similar devices possible, but innovation was hampered for the longest time because of this.
A genuine opening up - with some restrictions for some bands to reduce the chances of a destructive tragedy of the commons, but otherwise an unrestricted unrestrained environement - of large amounts of the spectrum, possibly insofar as practically possible going for the long term goal of opening up 90% of the airwaves, would create opportunities both for localised and long distance communications to a degree currently unthought of. Private, community owned, relay networks could create sane and affordable telephone provision, last mile provision for Internet type networks would become easier and could work on a broadcast rather than point-to-point model. Devices designed to operate within homes could work without a maze of unintelligable cabling - your TV and receiver could receive digital signals directly from a DVD player anywhere in the house, as long as the signals followed agreed upon standards. It'd be ironic to see "plug and play" type functionality built into every household media device to free itself from the use of plugs and sockets.
At the moment, the government and FCC has no incentive whatsoever to do any of this. Governments have recently (last 20 years or so) seen rationing the electromagnetic spectum as an opportunity to raise stealth taxes. In an era where everyone looks at their income tax bills and blames the government, but looks at their cellphone bills and blames the cellphone companies, it makes sense for them to lighten the load on income taxes by moving to indirect taxation such as that generated by auctioning spectrum. This is a disasterous policy as not merely does it undermine the innovation that could be fostered in an environment of free spectrum, but it constitutes a form of regressive taxation as certain types of communication becomes more and more important and necessary because of network effects. I've known employers that refuse to employ people for certain types of job who will not supply a working cellphone number.
The spectrum will not open itself. The government needs to act, and act in the public interest, not what it can get away with to raise funds on-the-sly. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to the FCC, your congressman or senator. Tell them that innovation and freedom is important to you, and that it's important that the airwaves be opened up to foster a genuinely innovative and progressive culture where communications are unhampered by artificial scarcities, monopolies, and restraints. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done into creating a large ISM band, but if these efforts fail, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed wireless technologies, to get around the bottlenecks the current ISM bands impose. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how opening up the airwaves can help all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on opening up the airwaves.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
And I've posted precisely ONE OS/2 article in recent memory. I think I posted a few comments on the user interface last year but that was a while ago, and had nothing in common with the above save for both having something to do with OS/2.
*sigh*
Slashdot users crowd around.
"I never did like the bastard", says one, "He died of loneliness".
"I gather he was suffering from food poisoning" says another. "He clearly died of that."
"Nonsense", says another, "He got laid off just now. It must have been suicide."
"I thought he had cancer?" says another.
The fact that OS/2 was open to many criticisms doesn't mean that OS/2 wasn't killed by a specific act by Microsoft. If OS/2 had been marketed for another six months despite Microsoft's demands, and IBM had done pretty well without Microsoft's Windows 95 threats doing it any damage, then it might be possible to protest that the FoF are wrong - that MS had no involvement (except in some "made a better product" way which clearly isn't the case) in OS/2's death. But there is no such alibi here. IBM did as Microsoft required they do. That is the act that killed OS/2. OS/2 may have died anyway, but we'll never know that.
Again, read the Findings of Fact. It's explained there. And ESCOM, which in 1995 was arguably the strongest PC distributer in Europe, had no problems shipping PCs with OS/2 until IBM pulled the plug. Escom made the choice available to end users, and both "types of PC" sold like hot cakes.
(Unfortunately a cashflow crisis killed Escom in early 96, doubly a shame because that pretty much destroyed the Amiga, C= being owned by Escom at that point and still making plans to recover.)