Secondly, Microsoft isn't legally a monopoly in the first place. Lets not change the definition of a monopoly just because we hate Microsoft. A 90% market share alone does not make a monopoly--you have a control entry into the market place, for one. This means that you can block other people from entering the market. Microsoft can't really do that: that can't (and haven't) stopped Linux, Be, etc. from making their own OSes.
Monopolies do not stop people from making competing products. They stop people from being able to successfully market them. Microsoft has done a good job of this until the antitrust trial. Why is Linux gaining popularity? Because large companies like Intel are supporting them. Why is that happening? Because Microsoft, on trial for antitrust, can't afford to attack companies that support Linux. The trial is what makes Linux marketable today; it was basically unmarketable before the trial began. Yes, distros did exist, but not from any true economic perspective.
And the 90% marketshare applies ONLY to desktops--Windows NT is actually a MINORITY in the server market. Remember, 70% of all Internet servers, for example, are Apache (OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE!) and that means they are running either Unix or one of its various clones. Even in LANs, Novell and Unix beat MS hands down.
Desktops are enough! Note that Microsoft is using their desktop monopoly to populate the server market. They work hard to make sure that you need Windows NT servers to run networks of Windows 9? machines. They are also using this monopoly, with Internet Explorer, to gain control of the Internet, by embracing and extending HTTP and HTML until the best way to communicate with Windows browsers is with Windows Web servers.
Finally, if Microsoft IS punished, this could be a nightmare for the industry. One, it means that the industry will have to be VERY careful about innovations, because they will have to be looking over their shoulders to make sure the DOJ isn't there watching their every move. Declaring the browser as part of the operating system isn't that farfetched--including Netscape on the Caldera distribution for instance, with a Caldera logo on it no less, is practically the same thing.
The precaution against bundling is not a problem for the rest of the industry. It is specifically a problem with Microsoft, who signed a legal agreement not to bundle as part of the resolution of a previous antitrust trial.
Look at from a car perspective: if the DOJ says that MS can't bundle IE with Windows, how much of a stretch is it to say DaimlerChrysler or General Motors can't bundle, say, an Infiniti sound system with their cars? If DaimlerChrysler or General Motors controlled the automotive market, there might be good cause to limit their ability to bundle certain stereos with those cars. Since they do not, however, consumer choice is safe.
Monopolistic corporations require more legal restrictions than other corporations, because other corporations are restricted by the marketplace itself. The point of antitrust law is to step in with legal laws where the consequential laws of a capitalist market have failed.
The fans will let it get around the crew compartments without any problems. However, it wouldn't be able to get around the cargo hold--fans don't work well in a vacuum.
If this works, expect a larger unit for vacuum work, as NASA tries to do everything possible to reduce the number of EVAs required. You would need another propulsion system (likely a compressed-air system), some lead shielding (orbital radiation is likely to mess up your average microprocessor), and something to bleed off waste heat (you have to radiate, rather than just dump heat to the surrounding air).
I don't think that "artificial" intelligence exists, I'm not convinced either way for extra-terrestrial intelligence, but I know that non-human intelligence is here on Earth today.
We humans have developed organizational intelligence. Groups of human brains, hooked up with the appropriate networking, can themselves become an alien intelligence, as different from human intelligence as human behavior is from cellular behavior.
For a long time, this has been mostly the province of corporations and governments. Ever wonder why such entities often lack common sense? It's because they are made up of humans, but aren't human. Congress is a group of over 400 humans; it doesn't act as a human, but can be modeled as an intelligent, alien being.
Today, we have the Internet. On a smaller scale, we have Slashdot-style phenomena. These are virtually those "Beowulf clusters of human brains". It is just another alien intelligence.
The big difference between the Internet and government/corporate organizations is in the interhuman connectivity. In governments and corporations, the governing layers are codified into a bureaucracy. This causes specific people to act as chokepoints, and that in turn limits the number of people that can interact effectively. On the Internet, the governing layers are a lot less codified. This requires a lot more data filtering at the various nodes (humans)--spam and similar phenomena travel better across the Internet than through your office--and a lot more bandwidth. But the Internet is all about bandwidth.
Bureaucracies are alien intelligences made of humans. Internet communities are alien intelligences made of humans. They are different species of alien, and they are fighting each other.
Why are bureaucracies afraid of internet communities, and vice versa? The answer is easy to see if you stop thinking in terms of humans. The bureaucracies are seeing a brand new type of intelligence. The "Linux community" is a perfect example. Over the course of eight years, this thing has gotten Microsoft, one of the Lords of Bureaucracy, frightened. A race war of organizational intelligences is brewing, if not already being fought.
Is this the end of humanity and the beginning of organizational intelligence? Hardly. We have been living with bureaucracies since the Pharoahs, possibly before. But just the knowledge that there are inhuman intelligences out there helps you to better understand them, and to better interact with them.
Exactly what do you mean by "authoritarian government"? Are you anarchist, or simply pushing for smaller government? Personally, I am strongly in the second category.
My whole beef is that this country was in fact built on the principle that the government exists for the governed and answers to the governed, rather than the other way around. IMHO, Washington should fear the citizens, as opposed to the other way around.
Unfortunately, too many people in this country have decided that easy is better than free. It's not that we let the government take over; we're just about asking them to. Let the Fed handle various details of our lives so we don't have to! We have a population willing to lay down their freedom and power for convenience, and a government willing to give convenience for power. Both sides share the blame.
And, so help me, I am one of those who has opted for the "easy" side. Time to change that; time to break out a pen and a printer and express my outrage to the right people.
Please don't cry when you have to code Hyper-meta-moderation because some day you probably will!
That would be double-Bucky-moderation. After this expands and explodes, it will eventually reach quadruple-Bucky-moderation. We will never reach quintuple-Bucky-moderation because we don't have enough fingers to do so;^>
IMHO, Red Hat is both legally and morally justified in restricting others from redistributing Red Hat as Red Hat.
Legally, this is not copyright law; this is trademark law. The GPL doesn't cover this. Red Hat owns the Red Hat name, and it is worth millions of dollars to them. This restriction doesn't effect the software, unless they require that you remove all Red Hat notifications before you ship it (in which case, they are breaking the GPL).
Morally, it makes a lot of sense. If I start my own Red Hat derivative distro (say, mirror their FTP site or pretty much copy the CDs), I have every right to copy and redistribute the software (due to GPL), but no right to any of Red Hat's marketing power. If I say that I have El Cheapo Red Hat disks, I am skimming off of Red Hat's marketing investments, while eating some of their business. That just ain't fittin'.
Worse, what if I derive my own distro from Red Hat? Again, I have every right to do so and to distribute it, but no right to call it Red Hat. After all, I could have easily broken the kernel or whatever with my "improvements". The last thing Red Hat needs are my bugs being attached to their name and destroying their credibility.
That being said, it would make sense to say that a distro was derived from Red Hat n.m. But if Red Hat isn't shipping it, it's not Red Hat. It's Linux.
BTW, isn't this the same board that complains that people equate the names "Red Hat" and "Linux"? Reigning in the Red Hat name makes it harder to forget that there are other distros out there. Accuse Red Hat of one evil or the other, but not both: even a pendulum can't swing both ways at the same time.
This yutz makes it through because he defaults to +2.
Methinks we are in violent agreement. The section I quote (article I, section 8) gives Congress the right to pass an internet tax. I was using it to oppose amendment 10 (loose translation: anything we don't cover in the constitution and amendments is not a power given to the Federal Government). I simply showed what piece of the constitution did give that power to the Fed, so amendment 10 is irrelevant here. As another has noted, Congress may or may not have the right to fund education, but that's another story.
Again, I agree that singling the Internet out for taxation, though legal, seems fairly stupid in my book. Too many loopholes.
Thought 1, concerning using such revenue for education:
Yeah, right. I'm sure they will have a separate tax pool for education. They don't have a separate tax pool for Social Security.
Money for such a task would go into the general pool, and thus be used anywhere and everywhere. Saying otherwise is counting on bleeding heart gullability. While I am very interested in funding education, doing it with a special Federal tax is not going to happen, no matter what they say.
Besides, states and municipalities do it pretty well, thank you. IMArrogantO, the Fed should keep its fingers out of things that the states are competent at.
Thought 2, about a specific Internet tax
IIRC, the bill taxes Internet and catalog sales. Why you tax something based on the way it is sold is beyond me, unless it is to get the word "Internet" in there. Remember, the word "Internet" means more money--maybe the bill is trying to go IPO? Or maybe Congress is? That would legalize buying Senators, at least...
If they just taxed interstate sales, this would make a lot more sense to me. This would be applied to most Internet commerce, catalog sales, etc. It also gets around the definition of "Internet commerce". Interstate commerce is pretty well defined. And regarding non-US sales, standard tariff law and/or NAFTA already regulates this. I live in a zero-sales-tax state (NH), and this makes sense to me.
Thought 3: regarding constitutionality
Article 1, section 8, US constitution: the Fed has the right to tax us, and to regulate interstate commerce. I don't see congress overstepping constitutional bounds here.
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Open source software can survive in the marketplace by the most basic evidence: it does. Scientists have proven that bees are aerodynamically incapable of flight. But bees fly, defying everything we know about aerodynamics. Perl, Linux, and Apache survive in the marketplace, defying everything some of us know about economics.
ESR's papers explain the business model. In short, it is very hard/impossible to make money selling open source software. So don't even try.
Open source software does not exist in the marketplace as a product; it exists mostly as a marketing "ploy". Remember, if you are making open source software, you are the resident expert. In today's market, such expertise is the product. Take Perl, written by Larry Wall, paid by O'Reilly books. Perl itself is free. O'Reilly's books aren't. And O'Reilly's books Perl books sell for two big reasons:
1) Since Perl is so effective, everybody wants to use it, thus to learn it.
2) Since Wall writes books for O'Reilly, they make much better Perl books than anybody else.
Currently, you can still make money "selling" open source Linux. That is, you sell the CDs, so that people don't have to spend hours downloading it via FTP (and blowing up the net connection halfway through...). Red Hat realizes that this will not last forever; they expect the download speed to increase faster than the code base, and thus the value of the CD is plummeting.
Red Hat's new business model is consulting and support. They box Linux, thus they have some serious expertise, and can land some big name consulting accounts.
Re:"Hi, I'm Rob, and I wanna be a borg"
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 2
It sounds neat, and I'd consider it, but people keep forgetting one little detail.
Once the technology comes out, and you pay a doctor to drill a 10baseT port in your skull, Microsoft will release Brain 2.0.
And then you have to go to the doctor for the upgrade, or all the new stuff will give you an incompatibility headache when you plug it in.
Their mistake was to sign a contract with M$. M$ has screwed everybody else they signed a contract with too.
1: That's not saying much. If you take shrink-wrap licenses as signatures, the majority of America has signed a contract with M$.
2: You don't have to sign a contract with M$ to be screwed by them. They're an equal-opportunity fiend.
Sun's mistake was to attempt to defy Microsoft with something as small as a multiplatform language. You don't bring that weak stuff around Microsoft. We may, repeat may be having an effect on them with the combined weight of the government (personified by the DoJ) and a software development model most companies can't even grok, much less fight (that is, OSS).
Any attempt to remove Microsoft's hammerlock on the software licensing industry has failed, plain and simple. The only reason that Linux is actually winning these days is that it is avoiding that industry entirely.
While MS has its hammerlock on the software license industry, Linux and other projects are creating a new industry of software service. Microsoft can have their licensing monopoly. The open source movement is attemptint to do nothing less than marginalize the software licensing industry. Since Microsoft owns that industry, they are simply suffering collateral damage.
They can use every last trick in the book to keep a monopoly on sailing vessels. We're selling steamships. We aren't trying to render Microsoft obsolete; we are trying to render software licensing obsolete.
My roommate was skimming an issue of _Cosmo_ a few months back, and I glanced over her shoulder at an article listing 30 practical things women really should be able to do (change flats, set VCR clocks, etc.) I nearly hit the roof when it listed "trying to add memory to your computer" under a sidebar of 5 things *not* to try!
I didn't read the article, but I have to say something. IMHO, "Trying to add memory to your computer" is a good thing not to try, regardless of gender, unless you are at least fairly deep into computers. Do you know the size, speed, parity, EDOness, feature-du-jour of your [SD]IMMs? I don't, and I built one of my machines from scratch!
To go with the gender analogy, I could see a similar note not to do your own RAM in Car and Driver or Popular Woodworking.
I'm not so sure that it is a punitive measure as a deterrant one. By making illegally obtained evidence inadmissable in court, you remove the motive for collecting evidence illegally. This has proved very useful for keeping police officers on their toes when it comes to search warrants and the like.
If this regulation was not in place, there would often be police officers, driven by the need to get the felon in prison, willing to "take a fall" and get a fine slapped on them for illegal evidence-gathering for the sake of getting a conviction. Making illegal evidence gathering put the conviction itself in jeopardy gives cops good reason to follow the letter of the law themselves.
If you're clean, Uncle Sam generally leaves you alone. There are exceptions, but they're not my greatest concern.
Opening my doors to law enforcement, however, means leaving my doors open to every law enforcement officer with certain permissions.
If the setup gives one thousand police officers the technological ability (not the legal power) to access my machine, I can be potentially screwed if the corruption rate among police officers is one tenth of one percent.
In general, I trust any police officer I meet; the one I run into is not likely to be one of the corrupt few. But a back door for police makes you an easy target specifically for the corrupt officer. That back door will not be invaded by the nine hundred ninety-nine clean cops, unless they can procure a warrant. I only worry about the minority corrupt cop, and that's enough.
Can you think of any group of one thousand people where you can trust each and every one of them? I can't.
I have no problem with that. Given a warrant from a judge, the police have every right to search my house, my car, and my hard drive.
This does not require me to use a lock on my door or my car that the police can easily pick. If they want to search my house, they either have to get me to open it or break it down (and they have every right to break it down if I don't open it).
The problem with back doors is that they are prone to abuse. The search warrant is a legal technique that allows police to use powers they wouldn't otherwise have (without the warrant, searching my home is breaking and entering). If they required a technological technique, such as a lock that can be opened by anyone with a police key, the abuse could be rampant. A bad cop could just unlock my door with such a key and get whatever he wants, regardless of warrant. Without that, they have to break in, make a ruckus, make it obvious as to what he is doing, and basically give me a reasonable chance to get him arrested if he doesn't have a warrant.
Worse yet, a technological entry point like a back door can be used by non-cops. If cops can get into a back door, crackers can, too.
Note that not all cops are bad. Very few of them are. But if there are a million policemen in this country, and one half of one percent of them are "bad", that would be five thousand criminal policemen with keys to my data. Note that the above numbers are out of my hat; I don't have statistics on me.
Giving police a back door into your house, car, or computer means that you must implicitly trust, not police officers in general, but every single police officer individually. Do you? I don't.
If you have a warrant, you have my hard drive. But you are going to have to physically walk up to my house and seize the computer, or you are going to have to electronically monitor or enter it just like any cracker would. The ability of the police to obtain a warrant and search my data is a far cry from an obligation for me to make it easy for them to do so.
Also, I have an implicit right to encrypt anything. I am not required to testify against myself, again per the Constitution/Bill of Rights. Requiring me to make information available to police is potentially requiring me to testify against myself.
Don't confuse the Constitution with reality. This won't be a free country until the Powers That Be have the Constitution rammed down their collective throats and they submit to it.
"Igon, Tell him about the Twinkie."
on
Quack!
·
· Score: 3
There are a lot of media twinkies in this country, if not the world. You know what I mean; entertainment with little or no redeeming value. Mental junk food. Good examples seem to be a lot of action flicks, a good number of fiction TV, and just about any software Id makes.
We have made a lot of hubbub in this country about the problems caused by these media twinkies. Whenever a teenager goes off the deep end (often with a hail of bullets), somebody can point the cause back to these media twinkies. The witch hunts then recycle.
This is not the problem.
There is a place for junk food. There is a place for mental junk food. Used properly, they are mostly (if not entirely) harmless. Used improperly, they sicken minds and bodies.
That place is simple. Junk food is an amusing diversion away from a sane, steady diet. Try to use it as a steady diet, and the results are predictable.
Imagine if somebody found a teenager who lived on nothing but 20-30 Twinkies a day, became obese, and developed diabetes. Imagine the news stories. Where would the blame be thrown? Possibly at the teenager, probably at the parents, maybe at the school. Where would blame likely not be thrown? At the guys who make Twinkies. It is obvious that Twinkies are not to be used to replace three squares a day. If somebody tried to blame the Twinkie people, the response would be a coast to coast "Duh!".
But we do the exact same thing with media twinkies. Time after time, we see kids who are growing up on action flicks, television, and Id games. So people blame the movies, the shows, and the games.
Clue phone: these are the media twinkies. In moderation, they make a steady diet of healthy idea exchange more interesting. In bulk, they do nothing but make your mind sick.
Shall we blame the media? Hollywood, TV, and Id? Only when they try to fool us and pass their stuff off as healthy media. If they sell their wares as distractions, they are being as responsible as an ice cream stand.
Unfortunately, while parents have the clue regarding food (three squares a day), they often don't get or don't want a clue on media. They let their kids grow up on this stuff. And then they wonder why the kids are insane.
Let me reiterate. Playing Quake does not turn you into a homicidal maniac. Playing Quake for five hours a day may well do so.
A huge part of parenting, perhaps the biggest part, is keeping one's children well-fed in the head. Children learn like adults wish they could. It's a survival trait, one of the few we humans have. Let them learn guns, and they learn guns. Teach them right from wrong, and they learn right from wrong. Let them learn guns then, and still reinforce right and wrong, and the kids can handle it properly.
There is a big push among some people to solve the problems of juvinile delinquency and school shootings (IMHO, two seperate problems) by keeping kids away from these media twinkies. That should be done--by the parents. But that's only half the problem.
Eliminate the media twinkies, and a lot of kids have nothing left. That is the evil. It is better to eat the junk food, for body or mind, than to simply not eat--but not by much. The only sane alternative is healthy food--three squares a day.
This is called parenting. And this is why nothing the government does will solve this problem. Until we make it unacceptable to feed our kids steady diets of media twinkies, we will continue raising generations of media twinkies--with predictable results.
There is no reason to tax it other than "We want more money."
I wish I could be that naive.
The other reason may be "We want to track all this email". This would be a great way to keep tabs on things. It would also be a way to shut down operations that wish to hide their doings from the government (not necessarily criminals...I can think of many legitimate reasons to hide certain details from the government). If you avoided notifying the Fed of your emailing, the IRS can get you, a la Al Capone.
BTW, is this not a direct assault on the first amendment? Free speech requires "free beer". If the government has the power to tax email, it has the power to tax it heavily--that is, to suppress it.
You can tax commerce, so you can tax commercial communications ventures (telcos, ISPs, cable providers) for their commercial activities. You can tax and regulate the electromagnetic spectrum as a "previously undiscovered resource", and the only way to keep the spectrum from becoming pure noise. Finally, you can tax postal service (with stamps) because the government is actually providing a service.
Taxing email (or other TCP-style traffic) is entirely out of line. It will also be very hard to do; if a protocol is taxed, another protocol will pop up. Programmers can release software faster than Congress can regulate it. Most ISPs are already taxed on a per-dollar, rather than per-megabyte, basis by virtue of being commercial entities.
I can understand why the government wants to tax the Internet. It's for the same reason bank robbers rob banks: it's where the money is. The Internet is full of the more wealthy people and businesses in the US; if you are going to levy a tax in this country, you may as well tax the wealthier people. I for one have no problem with taxing the Net in principle, but I do have a problem with the email idea. Perhaps a saner, more fair, and less invasive tax would be an e-commerce sales tax.
Before people flame me for saying the above to get "other people" taxed, understand that I am a software engineer (to give you an idea of my tax bracket) in the e-commerce business. If my ideas get implemented, I will pay more tax than I do now. I don't overly mind paying taxes, and I know that being taxed in some form or other is a necessity. I do mind when the tax codes invade my freedom and violate my rights, especially when the same tax revenues could be gained in a less invasive way.
No, it won't slow down sales a bit. It might improve them. I wasn't even going to think of Win2K before. but if it is released before the first snow, I'll buy half a dozen, grind up the CDs, and scatter them over my lawn. Should come up nice and green next spring;^>
Nobody is stopping Microsoft from setting up a 4.0 server. This isn't an organized contest--just put your machine online and say "Crack me!".
I'm sure if they ask Bill real nice he could shell out some dough for a server and an NT4 license...
The only people stopping Microsoft from putting out a non-beta crack test is Microsoft. We can only guess why they aren't. My guess is that they think that W2K is more secure than NT4.
Actually, the GPL mixes very well with guns. The rationale for both are the same.
The idea behind GPL is that software should be free(speech). Copyright law pretty much makes that impossible; if you leave software in the public domain, someone will edit, copyright, and enslave it. You use a copyright on GPL to keep the copyright law at bay.
It is the same thing with guns. Guns are lethal; then can be used to kill, and are designed to kill.
So why do we give police officers, sworn to protect our lives, such deadly weapons? Because that is how you counter guns in evil hands.
Guns in good hands counter guns in evil hands. Copyrights in good hands (copylefts) counter copyrights in evil hands. You twist the tool of evil to keep the evil at bay. It's a dangerous game, but the only alternative is to get trampled by the evildoers.
Actually, he is able to write music. Usually, he will parody a particular song. Sometimes, he will parody a particular artist or style. On this album, it's "Germs"; his best artist-parody is "Dare to be Stupid". Mark Mothersbaugh reportedly wishes that Devo could sound like that (see Al's VH1 story), and there is a good part of the population that thinks that it is a Devo song.
Al also does some of his own composition without a net, besides the polka tunes. Things like "You Don't Love Me Anymore" or the last track on this album (I don't have the title on me--the sauerkraut one). They just don't turn into signals.
Slashdot Mirror
Monopolies do not stop people from making competing products. They stop people from being able to successfully market them. Microsoft has done a good job of this until the antitrust trial. Why is Linux gaining popularity? Because large companies like Intel are supporting them. Why is that happening? Because Microsoft, on trial for antitrust, can't afford to attack companies that support Linux. The trial is what makes Linux marketable today; it was basically unmarketable before the trial began. Yes, distros did exist, but not from any true economic perspective.
And the 90% marketshare applies ONLY to desktops--Windows NT is actually a MINORITY in the server market. Remember, 70% of all Internet servers, for example, are Apache (OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE!) and that means they are running either Unix or one of its various clones. Even in LANs, Novell and Unix beat MS hands down.
Desktops are enough! Note that Microsoft is using their desktop monopoly to populate the server market. They work hard to make sure that you need Windows NT servers to run networks of Windows 9? machines. They are also using this monopoly, with Internet Explorer, to gain control of the Internet, by embracing and extending HTTP and HTML until the best way to communicate with Windows browsers is with Windows Web servers.
Finally, if Microsoft IS punished, this could be a nightmare for the industry. One, it means that the industry will have to be VERY careful about innovations, because they will have to be looking over their shoulders to make sure the DOJ isn't there watching their every move. Declaring the browser as part of the operating system isn't that farfetched--including Netscape on the Caldera distribution for instance, with a Caldera logo on it no less, is practically the same thing.
The precaution against bundling is not a problem for the rest of the industry. It is specifically a problem with Microsoft, who signed a legal agreement not to bundle as part of the resolution of a previous antitrust trial.
Look at from a car perspective: if the DOJ says that MS can't bundle IE with Windows, how much of a stretch is it to say DaimlerChrysler or General Motors can't bundle, say, an Infiniti sound system with their cars? If DaimlerChrysler or General Motors controlled the automotive market, there might be good cause to limit their ability to bundle certain stereos with those cars. Since they do not, however, consumer choice is safe.
Monopolistic corporations require more legal restrictions than other corporations, because other corporations are restricted by the marketplace itself. The point of antitrust law is to step in with legal laws where the consequential laws of a capitalist market have failed.
If this works, expect a larger unit for vacuum work, as NASA tries to do everything possible to reduce the number of EVAs required. You would need another propulsion system (likely a compressed-air system), some lead shielding (orbital radiation is likely to mess up your average microprocessor), and something to bleed off waste heat (you have to radiate, rather than just dump heat to the surrounding air).
We humans have developed organizational intelligence. Groups of human brains, hooked up with the appropriate networking, can themselves become an alien intelligence, as different from human intelligence as human behavior is from cellular behavior.
For a long time, this has been mostly the province of corporations and governments. Ever wonder why such entities often lack common sense? It's because they are made up of humans, but aren't human. Congress is a group of over 400 humans; it doesn't act as a human, but can be modeled as an intelligent, alien being.
Today, we have the Internet. On a smaller scale, we have Slashdot-style phenomena. These are virtually those "Beowulf clusters of human brains". It is just another alien intelligence.
The big difference between the Internet and government/corporate organizations is in the interhuman connectivity. In governments and corporations, the governing layers are codified into a bureaucracy. This causes specific people to act as chokepoints, and that in turn limits the number of people that can interact effectively. On the Internet, the governing layers are a lot less codified. This requires a lot more data filtering at the various nodes (humans)--spam and similar phenomena travel better across the Internet than through your office--and a lot more bandwidth. But the Internet is all about bandwidth.
Bureaucracies are alien intelligences made of humans. Internet communities are alien intelligences made of humans. They are different species of alien, and they are fighting each other.
Why are bureaucracies afraid of internet communities, and vice versa? The answer is easy to see if you stop thinking in terms of humans. The bureaucracies are seeing a brand new type of intelligence. The "Linux community" is a perfect example. Over the course of eight years, this thing has gotten Microsoft, one of the Lords of Bureaucracy, frightened. A race war of organizational intelligences is brewing, if not already being fought.
Is this the end of humanity and the beginning of organizational intelligence? Hardly. We have been living with bureaucracies since the Pharoahs, possibly before. But just the knowledge that there are inhuman intelligences out there helps you to better understand them, and to better interact with them.
My whole beef is that this country was in fact built on the principle that the government exists for the governed and answers to the governed, rather than the other way around. IMHO, Washington should fear the citizens, as opposed to the other way around.
Unfortunately, too many people in this country have decided that easy is better than free. It's not that we let the government take over; we're just about asking them to. Let the Fed handle various details of our lives so we don't have to! We have a population willing to lay down their freedom and power for convenience, and a government willing to give convenience for power. Both sides share the blame.
And, so help me, I am one of those who has opted for the "easy" side. Time to change that; time to break out a pen and a printer and express my outrage to the right people.
That would be double-Bucky-moderation. After this expands and explodes, it will eventually reach quadruple-Bucky-moderation. We will never reach quintuple-Bucky-moderation because we don't have enough fingers to do so ;^>
Legally, this is not copyright law; this is trademark law. The GPL doesn't cover this. Red Hat owns the Red Hat name, and it is worth millions of dollars to them. This restriction doesn't effect the software, unless they require that you remove all Red Hat notifications before you ship it (in which case, they are breaking the GPL).
Morally, it makes a lot of sense. If I start my own Red Hat derivative distro (say, mirror their FTP site or pretty much copy the CDs), I have every right to copy and redistribute the software (due to GPL), but no right to any of Red Hat's marketing power. If I say that I have El Cheapo Red Hat disks, I am skimming off of Red Hat's marketing investments, while eating some of their business. That just ain't fittin'.
Worse, what if I derive my own distro from Red Hat? Again, I have every right to do so and to distribute it, but no right to call it Red Hat. After all, I could have easily broken the kernel or whatever with my "improvements". The last thing Red Hat needs are my bugs being attached to their name and destroying their credibility.
That being said, it would make sense to say that a distro was derived from Red Hat n.m. But if Red Hat isn't shipping it, it's not Red Hat. It's Linux.
BTW, isn't this the same board that complains that people equate the names "Red Hat" and "Linux"? Reigning in the Red Hat name makes it harder to forget that there are other distros out there. Accuse Red Hat of one evil or the other, but not both: even a pendulum can't swing both ways at the same time.
Methinks we are in violent agreement. The section I quote (article I, section 8) gives Congress the right to pass an internet tax. I was using it to oppose amendment 10 (loose translation: anything we don't cover in the constitution and amendments is not a power given to the Federal Government). I simply showed what piece of the constitution did give that power to the Fed, so amendment 10 is irrelevant here. As another has noted, Congress may or may not have the right to fund education, but that's another story.
Again, I agree that singling the Internet out for taxation, though legal, seems fairly stupid in my book. Too many loopholes.
Yeah, right. I'm sure they will have a separate tax pool for education. They don't have a separate tax pool for Social Security.
Money for such a task would go into the general pool, and thus be used anywhere and everywhere. Saying otherwise is counting on bleeding heart gullability. While I am very interested in funding education, doing it with a special Federal tax is not going to happen, no matter what they say.
Besides, states and municipalities do it pretty well, thank you. IMArrogantO, the Fed should keep its fingers out of things that the states are competent at.
Thought 2, about a specific Internet tax
IIRC, the bill taxes Internet and catalog sales. Why you tax something based on the way it is sold is beyond me, unless it is to get the word "Internet" in there. Remember, the word "Internet" means more money--maybe the bill is trying to go IPO? Or maybe Congress is? That would legalize buying Senators, at least...
If they just taxed interstate sales, this would make a lot more sense to me. This would be applied to most Internet commerce, catalog sales, etc. It also gets around the definition of "Internet commerce". Interstate commerce is pretty well defined. And regarding non-US sales, standard tariff law and/or NAFTA already regulates this. I live in a zero-sales-tax state (NH), and this makes sense to me.
Thought 3: regarding constitutionality
Article 1, section 8, US constitution: the Fed has the right to tax us, and to regulate interstate commerce. I don't see congress overstepping constitutional bounds here.
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
ESR's papers explain the business model. In short, it is very hard/impossible to make money selling open source software. So don't even try.
Open source software does not exist in the marketplace as a product; it exists mostly as a marketing "ploy". Remember, if you are making open source software, you are the resident expert. In today's market, such expertise is the product. Take Perl, written by Larry Wall, paid by O'Reilly books. Perl itself is free. O'Reilly's books aren't. And O'Reilly's books Perl books sell for two big reasons:
1) Since Perl is so effective, everybody wants to use it, thus to learn it.
2) Since Wall writes books for O'Reilly, they make much better Perl books than anybody else.
Currently, you can still make money "selling" open source Linux. That is, you sell the CDs, so that people don't have to spend hours downloading it via FTP (and blowing up the net connection halfway through...). Red Hat realizes that this will not last forever; they expect the download speed to increase faster than the code base, and thus the value of the CD is plummeting.
Red Hat's new business model is consulting and support. They box Linux, thus they have some serious expertise, and can land some big name consulting accounts.
Once the technology comes out, and you pay a doctor to drill a 10baseT port in your skull, Microsoft will release Brain 2.0.
And then you have to go to the doctor for the upgrade, or all the new stuff will give you an incompatibility headache when you plug it in.
Remember: cyber upgrades hurt.
1: That's not saying much. If you take shrink-wrap licenses as signatures, the majority of America has signed a contract with M$.
2: You don't have to sign a contract with M$ to be screwed by them. They're an equal-opportunity fiend.
Sun's mistake was to attempt to defy Microsoft with something as small as a multiplatform language. You don't bring that weak stuff around Microsoft. We may, repeat may be having an effect on them with the combined weight of the government (personified by the DoJ) and a software development model most companies can't even grok, much less fight (that is, OSS).
Any attempt to remove Microsoft's hammerlock on the software licensing industry has failed, plain and simple. The only reason that Linux is actually winning these days is that it is avoiding that industry entirely.
While MS has its hammerlock on the software license industry, Linux and other projects are creating a new industry of software service. Microsoft can have their licensing monopoly. The open source movement is attemptint to do nothing less than marginalize the software licensing industry. Since Microsoft owns that industry, they are simply suffering collateral damage.
They can use every last trick in the book to keep a monopoly on sailing vessels. We're selling steamships. We aren't trying to render Microsoft obsolete; we are trying to render software licensing obsolete.
I didn't read the article, but I have to say something. IMHO, "Trying to add memory to your computer" is a good thing not to try, regardless of gender, unless you are at least fairly deep into computers. Do you know the size, speed, parity, EDOness, feature-du-jour of your [SD]IMMs? I don't, and I built one of my machines from scratch!
To go with the gender analogy, I could see a similar note not to do your own RAM in Car and Driver or Popular Woodworking.
If this regulation was not in place, there would often be police officers, driven by the need to get the felon in prison, willing to "take a fall" and get a fine slapped on them for illegal evidence-gathering for the sake of getting a conviction. Making illegal evidence gathering put the conviction itself in jeopardy gives cops good reason to follow the letter of the law themselves.
Opening my doors to law enforcement, however, means leaving my doors open to every law enforcement officer with certain permissions.
If the setup gives one thousand police officers the technological ability (not the legal power) to access my machine, I can be potentially screwed if the corruption rate among police officers is one tenth of one percent.
In general, I trust any police officer I meet; the one I run into is not likely to be one of the corrupt few. But a back door for police makes you an easy target specifically for the corrupt officer. That back door will not be invaded by the nine hundred ninety-nine clean cops, unless they can procure a warrant. I only worry about the minority corrupt cop, and that's enough.
Can you think of any group of one thousand people where you can trust each and every one of them? I can't.
This does not require me to use a lock on my door or my car that the police can easily pick. If they want to search my house, they either have to get me to open it or break it down (and they have every right to break it down if I don't open it).
The problem with back doors is that they are prone to abuse. The search warrant is a legal technique that allows police to use powers they wouldn't otherwise have (without the warrant, searching my home is breaking and entering). If they required a technological technique, such as a lock that can be opened by anyone with a police key, the abuse could be rampant. A bad cop could just unlock my door with such a key and get whatever he wants, regardless of warrant. Without that, they have to break in, make a ruckus, make it obvious as to what he is doing, and basically give me a reasonable chance to get him arrested if he doesn't have a warrant.
Worse yet, a technological entry point like a back door can be used by non-cops. If cops can get into a back door, crackers can, too.
Note that not all cops are bad. Very few of them are. But if there are a million policemen in this country, and one half of one percent of them are "bad", that would be five thousand criminal policemen with keys to my data. Note that the above numbers are out of my hat; I don't have statistics on me.
Giving police a back door into your house, car, or computer means that you must implicitly trust, not police officers in general, but every single police officer individually. Do you? I don't.
If you have a warrant, you have my hard drive. But you are going to have to physically walk up to my house and seize the computer, or you are going to have to electronically monitor or enter it just like any cracker would. The ability of the police to obtain a warrant and search my data is a far cry from an obligation for me to make it easy for them to do so.
Also, I have an implicit right to encrypt anything. I am not required to testify against myself, again per the Constitution/Bill of Rights. Requiring me to make information available to police is potentially requiring me to testify against myself.
Gee, can I live in your America?
Don't confuse the Constitution with reality. This won't be a free country until the Powers That Be have the Constitution rammed down their collective throats and they submit to it.
We have made a lot of hubbub in this country about the problems caused by these media twinkies. Whenever a teenager goes off the deep end (often with a hail of bullets), somebody can point the cause back to these media twinkies. The witch hunts then recycle.
This is not the problem.
There is a place for junk food. There is a place for mental junk food. Used properly, they are mostly (if not entirely) harmless. Used improperly, they sicken minds and bodies.
That place is simple. Junk food is an amusing diversion away from a sane, steady diet. Try to use it as a steady diet, and the results are predictable.
Imagine if somebody found a teenager who lived on nothing but 20-30 Twinkies a day, became obese, and developed diabetes. Imagine the news stories. Where would the blame be thrown? Possibly at the teenager, probably at the parents, maybe at the school. Where would blame likely not be thrown? At the guys who make Twinkies. It is obvious that Twinkies are not to be used to replace three squares a day. If somebody tried to blame the Twinkie people, the response would be a coast to coast "Duh!".
But we do the exact same thing with media twinkies. Time after time, we see kids who are growing up on action flicks, television, and Id games. So people blame the movies, the shows, and the games.
Clue phone: these are the media twinkies. In moderation, they make a steady diet of healthy idea exchange more interesting. In bulk, they do nothing but make your mind sick.
Shall we blame the media? Hollywood, TV, and Id? Only when they try to fool us and pass their stuff off as healthy media. If they sell their wares as distractions, they are being as responsible as an ice cream stand.
Unfortunately, while parents have the clue regarding food (three squares a day), they often don't get or don't want a clue on media. They let their kids grow up on this stuff. And then they wonder why the kids are insane.
Let me reiterate. Playing Quake does not turn you into a homicidal maniac. Playing Quake for five hours a day may well do so.
A huge part of parenting, perhaps the biggest part, is keeping one's children well-fed in the head. Children learn like adults wish they could. It's a survival trait, one of the few we humans have. Let them learn guns, and they learn guns. Teach them right from wrong, and they learn right from wrong. Let them learn guns then, and still reinforce right and wrong, and the kids can handle it properly.
There is a big push among some people to solve the problems of juvinile delinquency and school shootings (IMHO, two seperate problems) by keeping kids away from these media twinkies. That should be done--by the parents. But that's only half the problem.
Eliminate the media twinkies, and a lot of kids have nothing left. That is the evil. It is better to eat the junk food, for body or mind, than to simply not eat--but not by much. The only sane alternative is healthy food--three squares a day.
This is called parenting. And this is why nothing the government does will solve this problem. Until we make it unacceptable to feed our kids steady diets of media twinkies, we will continue raising generations of media twinkies--with predictable results.
I wish I could be that naive.
The other reason may be "We want to track all this email". This would be a great way to keep tabs on things. It would also be a way to shut down operations that wish to hide their doings from the government (not necessarily criminals...I can think of many legitimate reasons to hide certain details from the government). If you avoided notifying the Fed of your emailing, the IRS can get you, a la Al Capone.
BTW, is this not a direct assault on the first amendment? Free speech requires "free beer". If the government has the power to tax email, it has the power to tax it heavily--that is, to suppress it.
You can tax commerce, so you can tax commercial communications ventures (telcos, ISPs, cable providers) for their commercial activities. You can tax and regulate the electromagnetic spectrum as a "previously undiscovered resource", and the only way to keep the spectrum from becoming pure noise. Finally, you can tax postal service (with stamps) because the government is actually providing a service.
Taxing email (or other TCP-style traffic) is entirely out of line. It will also be very hard to do; if a protocol is taxed, another protocol will pop up. Programmers can release software faster than Congress can regulate it. Most ISPs are already taxed on a per-dollar, rather than per-megabyte, basis by virtue of being commercial entities.
I can understand why the government wants to tax the Internet. It's for the same reason bank robbers rob banks: it's where the money is. The Internet is full of the more wealthy people and businesses in the US; if you are going to levy a tax in this country, you may as well tax the wealthier people. I for one have no problem with taxing the Net in principle, but I do have a problem with the email idea. Perhaps a saner, more fair, and less invasive tax would be an e-commerce sales tax.
Before people flame me for saying the above to get "other people" taxed, understand that I am a software engineer (to give you an idea of my tax bracket) in the e-commerce business. If my ideas get implemented, I will pay more tax than I do now. I don't overly mind paying taxes, and I know that being taxed in some form or other is a necessity. I do mind when the tax codes invade my freedom and violate my rights, especially when the same tax revenues could be gained in a less invasive way.
I've used both Red Hat and a couple of SCO flavors. I have yet to find a SCO feature Red Hat would want.
No, it won't slow down sales a bit. It might improve them. I wasn't even going to think of Win2K before. but if it is released before the first snow, I'll buy half a dozen, grind up the CDs, and scatter them over my lawn. Should come up nice and green next spring;^>
I'm sure if they ask Bill real nice he could shell out some dough for a server and an NT4 license...
The only people stopping Microsoft from putting out a non-beta crack test is Microsoft. We can only guess why they aren't. My guess is that they think that W2K is more secure than NT4.
To those at MS who set up this test: Linux is currently (in fact, always) accepting converts. It is never too late.
The idea behind GPL is that software should be free(speech). Copyright law pretty much makes that impossible; if you leave software in the public domain, someone will edit, copyright, and enslave it. You use a copyright on GPL to keep the copyright law at bay.
It is the same thing with guns. Guns are lethal; then can be used to kill, and are designed to kill.
So why do we give police officers, sworn to protect our lives, such deadly weapons? Because that is how you counter guns in evil hands.
Guns in good hands counter guns in evil hands. Copyrights in good hands (copylefts) counter copyrights in evil hands. You twist the tool of evil to keep the evil at bay. It's a dangerous game, but the only alternative is to get trampled by the evildoers.
So what is the difference?
Al also does some of his own composition without a net, besides the polka tunes. Things like "You Don't Love Me Anymore" or the last track on this album (I don't have the title on me--the sauerkraut one). They just don't turn into signals.