but scientists must ask for more money from the NSF in order to pay the higher page charges.
That theory only holds for as long as scientific reputation in a field is something you buy. It's entirely up to the scientists in the field to cite, credit or ignore the pay-for/for-pay journals.
Of course, when reputation in a field is built upon what paper you pay to publish your research rather than the quality of the research itself that says a bit about the field...
But the argument indicates that perhaps one should even require that publicly funded research not even cite papers that are not publicly available.
The wielding of public power is not necessarily without it's costs and one of the things it may cost is some of the expectation of privacy. This is not fundamentally incompatible with a strong stance on personal privacy.
You can achieve live migration with iSCSI and AoE too
Indeed, but you don't want to do live migration over high-latency links with iSCSI. DRBD may be a better way to go if you want live migration between data centers in different countries.
Ah, don't worry, IP is mostly used to screw richer nations, and is one of the reasons that western industry is so incapable of competing these days. From a macroeconomic point of view it's the equivalent of a heavy taxation scheme, and a very inefficient one at that, leading to higher costs in industry and workforce and rendering it uncompetitive. It'd be almost amusing to see complaints about high taxes and inefficient government while getting reamed by IP if it just wasn't so sad.
The less advanced nations aren't likely to get screwed as badly as they're simply not the low hanging fruit for extortion, especially as long as they don't agree to any significant expansions of IP schemes. Still, for the less savoury parts of some economies, branching out from 419 scams to the nearby patent field might not be a bad idea.
More like welcome to the telecom industry of the last century; an industry whose main product was a huge accounting system that also happened to include phone functionality.
To discern the real intentions one does not need to look further than phone calls and SMS. They're metered. They deal with 'heavy users'. Are they cheaper per amount of data you transfer?
Personally I'd rather sponsor some heavy users with a few percent of my bill than pay the thousands of times the actual cost that we somehow seem to end up with when having metered access.
The court also shows a certain naivete: "Whether the widespread, unlimited file sharing that the record suggests he engaged in benefits the public more than our current copyright protections is a balance to be struck by Congress, not this Court,"
As we have come to understand, copyright law is written by lobbyist organizations and entered into as treaties. 'Congress' or 'public benefit' basically does not figure into the equation.
So keeping stuff secret, especially at international level, is certainly helping
It helps when you're trying to pursue positions and implement regulations that your voters don't want. If you're actually doing what your voters want it doesn't make much difference. Which is one of the reasons to think that if it's secret, it's because they're planning on screwing you.
in theory you sent there people you trust
Not really. Barring the fact that it rarely seems as if those involved in international negotiations like this are actually elected, I certainly can't recall that I've heard of any elected official in any country anywhere who has had 'conducting a new IPR treaty' in their platform. Any chain of trust in this case goes so many steps that you'd be more likely to trust-by-proxy any random stranger in the street. This treaty seems to be very nearly entirely lobby driven, and most likely one of the strongest reasons to keep it secret is to keep most elected politicians in the dark so they won't know what they're voting about or what their voters want.
but it clearly means foreign policy in this instance.
And like most classified material it actually means 'in the interest of protecting the people involved from political embarrassment'.
But it's great way to launder policy; take an internal policy for which you have no democratic political support, push it in a secret international forum as 'foreign policy', then take it back home and adopt it, claiming it's an international treaty requirement. Great way to bypass any democratic forms.
Or the most likely reason: people are getting older. Once you beat most of everything else it's basically either cell regeneration failing to keep up or cell regeneration going haywire that's going to nail you. Terminal diseases like brain cancer where we don't know the cause will simply tend to get more prevalent by default.
Many who've studied brain cancer or seen it up close would. It's one of those diseases where the sheer nastiness (of the most common variants) is so bad that no matter how small the risk, it's better to avoid it.
95% of our population isn't walking around with brain cancer.
Mean survival time is about 11 months and chances are it'll eat important enough parts of the brain before that, so they wouldn't be walking around anyway.
Unfortunately, there are few readily apparent causes, which makes any risk hard to avoid. And I really doubt cell phone microwaves as a possible risk factor, even if some extremely roundabout causality chain could be imagined. But if there were a proven risk, I'd most likely be handing out my carrier pigeon address (or, more likely, use some other spectrum communications method).
There are always problems with patents per se, as they sub-optimize the free market. Some industry areas are just exposed to more damage; the shorter the development cycle and the more highly multi-functional/combinatory the segment is, the more problems you'll get as inventions that happen to incorporate something patented, or would combine some patented things become basically impossible to make, potentially slowing down development in some areas by decades.
But economic damage is inherent in the patent system no matter what field. Protection from competition will always mean loss of efficiency and things become oh-so-expensive (which itself causes cries for more protection).
Meaningful reform cannot be accomplished as long as the monopoly right is kept. If you want to combine patents with a free market economy, the only way to do that would be to change the function so they only mean you automatically get a payment when someone uses the invention in question, but the use remains free. As the money either way gets extracted from the economy, it's no different from any other tax, so financing would be mostly up to whatever wouldn't be excessively counter-productive. With the difference that an actual tax and budget would actually be possible to account for and control, and a budget would make all the parties in the patent system interested in having the 'right' patents because 'more' patents would mean they'd pay out less.
As it is an infringement of ones right to do what one wishes with ones own property, I certainly have a problem with it. Further, the economic damage caused by copyright is significant, which means that anyone objecting to what is fundamentally an extremely inefficient tax scheme would have a problem with it if it were honestly described and accounted for.
So, why don't you see if you can do better?
Considering the atrocious efficiency it's not exactly hard. In many cases creators get jack or even end up paying for the right to perform their own works, so for some, even completely abolishing copyright would be 'better'.
the sceptics like me will be interested
The simplest one I've seen suggested would basically build upon something similar to radio; mandatory licensing regardless of what medium is involved. Simply have a levy on any end-user sales revenue derived from copying works, handled by the appropriate tax agency and paid to the appropriate creators (modulo socioeconomic goals such as maximizing production, etc). That way it simply becomes a simple political issue of tweaking measurable numbers back and forth.
Of course, a non-adversarial system like that would be very bad for IP lawyers. And a general mandatory licensing scheme would undermine the value of marketing, as if something is excessively marketed anyone can cut the sales price. Which may not make marketing corps happy. In fact, as pretty much any other system would put more of the money spent in the hands of the creators, most of the current IP industry would object.
I used to think that, but I don't any more. Any monopolies handed out by the government and whose cost is borne by the public and the distributed economy will be treated as of interest for the receiving stakeholders only, and thus will permanently expand as the paying parties will not be represented in discussions around the issue. See the claims about IP jobs 'lost' to piracy, yet where are the discussions about jobs among plumbers, pizzamakers or other branches of the economy when copyright shifts money and resources from one part of the economy to the other? Are those branches represented when it's arbitrarily decided that they should be deprived of resources in favour of media industries? Copyright creates no resources, it merely redistributes them.
So no, there is no place for copyright. Any honest industry or creators support scheme requires that it be managed within the normal budget of governments and, like any other redistribution scheme, have its benefits weighed against its costs, and accounted for to the public. No other government scheme has anywhere close to as bad efficiency of copyright; if any other program had less than 5% of funding going to the actual intended beneficiaries there'd be an uproar.
That's not to say there can't be reasonable schemes for encouraging creativity; the easiest would simply be mandatory licensing which dispenses of any contracts no matter what outlet or reproduction, and simply requires a percentage (50-75%, for example) of any revenue derived from the copying to be paid to the creators (via a public agency, such as the IRS, not through private entities like in radio, and modulated by policy). Then it would also be easy to manage reasonable cost/benefit levels (should there be a ceiling on payouts and the rest spread along the long tail to encourage more production, for example, how many years of payout is the optimum to keep creative material flowing, etc).
Boycotting is not enough, the corrosive effect of corruption on politics is too strong, and politically it's only used to claim that anyone boycotting is pirating anyway. But it's certainly a right thing to do; paying for anything from the RIAA/MPAA corps means supporting the type of corruption going on as ACTA and other back-room deals, which I find utterly unacceptable by now.
That could lead to a criminal record. If you're a politician you won't get a criminal record even if you violate human rights (case in point), torture people or commit war crimes unless you happen to be on the losing side in a war. DNA evidence would make no difference, with what passes for 'rule of law' in 'democratic countries', you could have their signature on a confession, video, multiple witnesses and live broadcasts of them torturing someone to death and a spokesperson would just go 'Mr. Politician does not condone torture' and they'd get away with it.
As a significant number of suicides occur with no prior indication it should be fairly obvious that most people can hide and adapt their outward facade as appropriate for the situation and to avoid making other people uncomfortable. Neither looking happy at a beach or looking sombre at a funeral are relevant criteria for judging depression.
That's not to say you cant investigate false claims for depression; various other indicators like normalized sleeping patterns, a constant and reasonably rich social life, making significant progress in other areas of life might indicate that at least part time return to work might be appropriate. But to make such a determination you'd probably need a full time investigator with clinical experience over several weeks. In which case it might be more productive to spend that money on a full time psychotherapist, which might actually do some good rather than possibly trigger paranoia as well.
Ultimately, I suspect the least costly option is to simply use the judgement of medical professionals. Not that that's perfect, but it's less imperfect than most options.
Sometimes you need to file a patent as soon as you can, because somebody else is working on the same idea.
That's just the thing tho, if somebody else is working on the same idea it's obviously not unique enough to warrant monopoly rights at all and we'd be better off with the competitors fighting it out on the market.
it's the failing of the patent office, not the person filing the patent.
In the current system, neither the patent office nor the person filing the patent have much incentive to prevent screwups in the filers favour. Neither of them gets to pay for it; everyone else does.
But again, that's a problem of patents as an exclusive system; to take the Bell/Gray as an example in a non-exclusive system, they could both get granted the patent and share the associated incentive revenue. In such a system the costs are borne by the players; let too many patents get granted and revenue per patent would shrink, so all parties would have an incentive for the 'right' patents to be granted (one might assume that if the costs of the patent system was actually accounted for it would get a fixed budget rather than the unaccounted for general levy on the economy it is today).
Then again, if you can't be absolutely one hundred percent certain that you're the first, then maybe you shouldn't apply for or be able to get a monopoly?
But basically it's one of those issues that is practically irresolvable with an all-or-nothing monopoly system, while it would be easy to resolve in a system constructed as most other wealth redistribution systems. If the patent office simply paid out a certain amount when a patent got used by someone it would be trivial to reduce the amount paid. But how do you repair damage caused to other companies by the use of the falsely obtained monopoly right?
no material of any sort can be kept sufficiently reflective under combat conditions that the laser wouldn't destroy it.
Indeed. A more fruitful approach would probably be more similar to reactive armour; a material that produces large amounts of refractive or absorbing smoke particles to dissipate the beam and rapidly transport the energy away; a cursory reading about directed energy weapons indicate that even the ordinary vaporization of the target can cause shading problems.
Various kinds of vapour countermeasures might also have the advantage of providing beam tracing possibilities for a retaliatory strike.
That was my first instinct as well, but if you look a bit more at the issue it's not much of an expansion. The possible extra surface would be suid binaries, as the ability to install and run programs is rarely secured anyway, only the ability to do it 'the right way' (ie, via package manager into the base system) is secured.
Personally I tend to be more concerned with server systems where this would not be an appropriate default policy (altho package-kit seems to offer some nice granularity in its config), but for end-user desktop systems it might even be appropriate as long as there is a reasonable selection of repositories specified. Even in an enterprise setting it could be appropriate if you think 'customized enterprise repositories' instead of 'random internet repo'.
I'll grump with the best of 'em, but some of the seemingly heinous violations of unixy traditions we've seen in the last few years aren't necessarily completely without thought. But they do require some annoying relearning before one can thoroughly criticize them on a better basis than pure instinct and after doing a cursory examination of package-kit I figure I probably need to rtfm some more before I decide what to do with it.
A more 'correct' way to disable would probably be something like what's described here.
Editing the package-kit rules also seems to make it possible to obtain some finer granularity that doesn't seem as unpalatable as sometimes inappropriate general install rights.
Imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to watch is available from the internet instantly
If there was no copyright, that would be a possibility, yes.
In the current reality it's unlikely we'll get such a solution in the long term, for many reasons. It does not serve media companies to have to compete with older content. Ubiquitous content is inherently incompatible with exclusive deals, driving down ultimate pricing (compare the whole 'news is dying' thing). Monopoly pricing maximizes revenue when a significant number of potential customers cannot afford the product. Etc.
The only way you're going to get an Alexandrian library of media is if you build it yourself, for yourself, and frankly disk space to do just that is cheap.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, when you have monopolistic pricing you set prices for revenue maximization as a function of consumer disposable income. As it's not a competitive function they'll likely end up with roughly the same pricing with or without collusion.
Frankly, Ellisons refusal to spin it off is the strongest indication that the purpose of acquiring MySQL as part of the deal is anti-competitive. As you say, it's not as if Oracle really needs it, so it shouldn't be this much of an issue.
the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt
If Sun goes into reorganization or liquidation assets like MySQL would probably be sold off and Oracle would likely be blocked as a buyer of MySQL, so the EC's main objection would be resolved in an acceptable fashion either way. The purpose of government in a competitive free market should be exactly that; prevent anticompetitive behaviour and structures, not support failing companies.
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but scientists must ask for more money from the NSF in order to pay the higher page charges.
That theory only holds for as long as scientific reputation in a field is something you buy. It's entirely up to the scientists in the field to cite, credit or ignore the pay-for/for-pay journals.
Of course, when reputation in a field is built upon what paper you pay to publish your research rather than the quality of the research itself that says a bit about the field...
But the argument indicates that perhaps one should even require that publicly funded research not even cite papers that are not publicly available.
The wielding of public power is not necessarily without it's costs and one of the things it may cost is some of the expectation of privacy. This is not fundamentally incompatible with a strong stance on personal privacy.
You can achieve live migration with iSCSI and AoE too
Indeed, but you don't want to do live migration over high-latency links with iSCSI. DRBD may be a better way to go if you want live migration between data centers in different countries.
Ah, don't worry, IP is mostly used to screw richer nations, and is one of the reasons that western industry is so incapable of competing these days. From a macroeconomic point of view it's the equivalent of a heavy taxation scheme, and a very inefficient one at that, leading to higher costs in industry and workforce and rendering it uncompetitive. It'd be almost amusing to see complaints about high taxes and inefficient government while getting reamed by IP if it just wasn't so sad.
The less advanced nations aren't likely to get screwed as badly as they're simply not the low hanging fruit for extortion, especially as long as they don't agree to any significant expansions of IP schemes. Still, for the less savoury parts of some economies, branching out from 419 scams to the nearby patent field might not be a bad idea.
More like welcome to the telecom industry of the last century; an industry whose main product was a huge accounting system that also happened to include phone functionality.
To discern the real intentions one does not need to look further than phone calls and SMS. They're metered. They deal with 'heavy users'. Are they cheaper per amount of data you transfer?
Personally I'd rather sponsor some heavy users with a few percent of my bill than pay the thousands of times the actual cost that we somehow seem to end up with when having metered access.
The court also shows a certain naivete: "Whether the widespread, unlimited file sharing that the record suggests he engaged in benefits the public more than our current copyright protections is a balance to be struck by Congress, not this Court,"
As we have come to understand, copyright law is written by lobbyist organizations and entered into as treaties. 'Congress' or 'public benefit' basically does not figure into the equation.
So keeping stuff secret, especially at international level, is certainly helping
It helps when you're trying to pursue positions and implement regulations that your voters don't want. If you're actually doing what your voters want it doesn't make much difference. Which is one of the reasons to think that if it's secret, it's because they're planning on screwing you.
in theory you sent there people you trust
Not really. Barring the fact that it rarely seems as if those involved in international negotiations like this are actually elected, I certainly can't recall that I've heard of any elected official in any country anywhere who has had 'conducting a new IPR treaty' in their platform. Any chain of trust in this case goes so many steps that you'd be more likely to trust-by-proxy any random stranger in the street. This treaty seems to be very nearly entirely lobby driven, and most likely one of the strongest reasons to keep it secret is to keep most elected politicians in the dark so they won't know what they're voting about or what their voters want.
but it clearly means foreign policy in this instance.
And like most classified material it actually means 'in the interest of protecting the people involved from political embarrassment'.
But it's great way to launder policy; take an internal policy for which you have no democratic political support, push it in a secret international forum as 'foreign policy', then take it back home and adopt it, claiming it's an international treaty requirement. Great way to bypass any democratic forms.
Or the most likely reason: people are getting older. Once you beat most of everything else it's basically either cell regeneration failing to keep up or cell regeneration going haywire that's going to nail you. Terminal diseases like brain cancer where we don't know the cause will simply tend to get more prevalent by default.
Would anyone really stop using cell phones?
Many who've studied brain cancer or seen it up close would. It's one of those diseases where the sheer nastiness (of the most common variants) is so bad that no matter how small the risk, it's better to avoid it.
95% of our population isn't walking around with brain cancer.
Mean survival time is about 11 months and chances are it'll eat important enough parts of the brain before that, so they wouldn't be walking around anyway.
Unfortunately, there are few readily apparent causes, which makes any risk hard to avoid. And I really doubt cell phone microwaves as a possible risk factor, even if some extremely roundabout causality chain could be imagined. But if there were a proven risk, I'd most likely be handing out my carrier pigeon address (or, more likely, use some other spectrum communications method).
There is no problem with software patents per se.
There are always problems with patents per se, as they sub-optimize the free market. Some industry areas are just exposed to more damage; the shorter the development cycle and the more highly multi-functional/combinatory the segment is, the more problems you'll get as inventions that happen to incorporate something patented, or would combine some patented things become basically impossible to make, potentially slowing down development in some areas by decades.
But economic damage is inherent in the patent system no matter what field. Protection from competition will always mean loss of efficiency and things become oh-so-expensive (which itself causes cries for more protection).
Meaningful reform cannot be accomplished as long as the monopoly right is kept. If you want to combine patents with a free market economy, the only way to do that would be to change the function so they only mean you automatically get a payment when someone uses the invention in question, but the use remains free. As the money either way gets extracted from the economy, it's no different from any other tax, so financing would be mostly up to whatever wouldn't be excessively counter-productive. With the difference that an actual tax and budget would actually be possible to account for and control, and a budget would make all the parties in the patent system interested in having the 'right' patents because 'more' patents would mean they'd pay out less.
problem with the basic principle of copyright
As it is an infringement of ones right to do what one wishes with ones own property, I certainly have a problem with it. Further, the economic damage caused by copyright is significant, which means that anyone objecting to what is fundamentally an extremely inefficient tax scheme would have a problem with it if it were honestly described and accounted for.
So, why don't you see if you can do better?
Considering the atrocious efficiency it's not exactly hard. In many cases creators get jack or even end up paying for the right to perform their own works, so for some, even completely abolishing copyright would be 'better'.
the sceptics like me will be interested
The simplest one I've seen suggested would basically build upon something similar to radio; mandatory licensing regardless of what medium is involved. Simply have a levy on any end-user sales revenue derived from copying works, handled by the appropriate tax agency and paid to the appropriate creators (modulo socioeconomic goals such as maximizing production, etc). That way it simply becomes a simple political issue of tweaking measurable numbers back and forth.
Of course, a non-adversarial system like that would be very bad for IP lawyers. And a general mandatory licensing scheme would undermine the value of marketing, as if something is excessively marketed anyone can cut the sales price. Which may not make marketing corps happy. In fact, as pretty much any other system would put more of the money spent in the hands of the creators, most of the current IP industry would object.
There is a place for copyright
I used to think that, but I don't any more. Any monopolies handed out by the government and whose cost is borne by the public and the distributed economy will be treated as of interest for the receiving stakeholders only, and thus will permanently expand as the paying parties will not be represented in discussions around the issue. See the claims about IP jobs 'lost' to piracy, yet where are the discussions about jobs among plumbers, pizzamakers or other branches of the economy when copyright shifts money and resources from one part of the economy to the other? Are those branches represented when it's arbitrarily decided that they should be deprived of resources in favour of media industries? Copyright creates no resources, it merely redistributes them.
So no, there is no place for copyright. Any honest industry or creators support scheme requires that it be managed within the normal budget of governments and, like any other redistribution scheme, have its benefits weighed against its costs, and accounted for to the public. No other government scheme has anywhere close to as bad efficiency of copyright; if any other program had less than 5% of funding going to the actual intended beneficiaries there'd be an uproar.
That's not to say there can't be reasonable schemes for encouraging creativity; the easiest would simply be mandatory licensing which dispenses of any contracts no matter what outlet or reproduction, and simply requires a percentage (50-75%, for example) of any revenue derived from the copying to be paid to the creators (via a public agency, such as the IRS, not through private entities like in radio, and modulated by policy). Then it would also be easy to manage reasonable cost/benefit levels (should there be a ceiling on payouts and the rest spread along the long tail to encourage more production, for example, how many years of payout is the optimum to keep creative material flowing, etc).
Boycotting is not enough, the corrosive effect of corruption on politics is too strong, and politically it's only used to claim that anyone boycotting is pirating anyway. But it's certainly a right thing to do; paying for anything from the RIAA/MPAA corps means supporting the type of corruption going on as ACTA and other back-room deals, which I find utterly unacceptable by now.
So they started with the politicians then?
That could lead to a criminal record. If you're a politician you won't get a criminal record even if you violate human rights (case in point), torture people or commit war crimes unless you happen to be on the losing side in a war. DNA evidence would make no difference, with what passes for 'rule of law' in 'democratic countries', you could have their signature on a confession, video, multiple witnesses and live broadcasts of them torturing someone to death and a spokesperson would just go 'Mr. Politician does not condone torture' and they'd get away with it.
As a significant number of suicides occur with no prior indication it should be fairly obvious that most people can hide and adapt their outward facade as appropriate for the situation and to avoid making other people uncomfortable. Neither looking happy at a beach or looking sombre at a funeral are relevant criteria for judging depression.
That's not to say you cant investigate false claims for depression; various other indicators like normalized sleeping patterns, a constant and reasonably rich social life, making significant progress in other areas of life might indicate that at least part time return to work might be appropriate. But to make such a determination you'd probably need a full time investigator with clinical experience over several weeks. In which case it might be more productive to spend that money on a full time psychotherapist, which might actually do some good rather than possibly trigger paranoia as well.
Ultimately, I suspect the least costly option is to simply use the judgement of medical professionals. Not that that's perfect, but it's less imperfect than most options.
Sometimes you need to file a patent as soon as you can, because somebody else is working on the same idea.
That's just the thing tho, if somebody else is working on the same idea it's obviously not unique enough to warrant monopoly rights at all and we'd be better off with the competitors fighting it out on the market.
it's the failing of the patent office, not the person filing the patent.
In the current system, neither the patent office nor the person filing the patent have much incentive to prevent screwups in the filers favour. Neither of them gets to pay for it; everyone else does.
But again, that's a problem of patents as an exclusive system; to take the Bell/Gray as an example in a non-exclusive system, they could both get granted the patent and share the associated incentive revenue. In such a system the costs are borne by the players; let too many patents get granted and revenue per patent would shrink, so all parties would have an incentive for the 'right' patents to be granted (one might assume that if the costs of the patent system was actually accounted for it would get a fixed budget rather than the unaccounted for general levy on the economy it is today).
Then again, if you can't be absolutely one hundred percent certain that you're the first, then maybe you shouldn't apply for or be able to get a monopoly?
But basically it's one of those issues that is practically irresolvable with an all-or-nothing monopoly system, while it would be easy to resolve in a system constructed as most other wealth redistribution systems. If the patent office simply paid out a certain amount when a patent got used by someone it would be trivial to reduce the amount paid. But how do you repair damage caused to other companies by the use of the falsely obtained monopoly right?
no material of any sort can be kept sufficiently reflective under combat conditions that the laser wouldn't destroy it.
Indeed. A more fruitful approach would probably be more similar to reactive armour; a material that produces large amounts of refractive or absorbing smoke particles to dissipate the beam and rapidly transport the energy away; a cursory reading about directed energy weapons indicate that even the ordinary vaporization of the target can cause shading problems.
Various kinds of vapour countermeasures might also have the advantage of providing beam tracing possibilities for a retaliatory strike.
The attack surface has been expanded
That was my first instinct as well, but if you look a bit more at the issue it's not much of an expansion. The possible extra surface would be suid binaries, as the ability to install and run programs is rarely secured anyway, only the ability to do it 'the right way' (ie, via package manager into the base system) is secured.
Personally I tend to be more concerned with server systems where this would not be an appropriate default policy (altho package-kit seems to offer some nice granularity in its config), but for end-user desktop systems it might even be appropriate as long as there is a reasonable selection of repositories specified. Even in an enterprise setting it could be appropriate if you think 'customized enterprise repositories' instead of 'random internet repo'.
I'll grump with the best of 'em, but some of the seemingly heinous violations of unixy traditions we've seen in the last few years aren't necessarily completely without thought. But they do require some annoying relearning before one can thoroughly criticize them on a better basis than pure instinct and after doing a cursory examination of package-kit I figure I probably need to rtfm some more before I decide what to do with it.
A more 'correct' way to disable would probably be something like what's described here.
Editing the package-kit rules also seems to make it possible to obtain some finer granularity that doesn't seem as unpalatable as sometimes inappropriate general install rights.
Imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to watch is available from the internet instantly
If there was no copyright, that would be a possibility, yes.
In the current reality it's unlikely we'll get such a solution in the long term, for many reasons. It does not serve media companies to have to compete with older content. Ubiquitous content is inherently incompatible with exclusive deals, driving down ultimate pricing (compare the whole 'news is dying' thing). Monopoly pricing maximizes revenue when a significant number of potential customers cannot afford the product. Etc.
The only way you're going to get an Alexandrian library of media is if you build it yourself, for yourself, and frankly disk space to do just that is cheap.
They all price match each other
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, when you have monopolistic pricing you set prices for revenue maximization as a function of consumer disposable income. As it's not a competitive function they'll likely end up with roughly the same pricing with or without collusion.
I seriously don't see why Oracle needs MySQL.
Frankly, Ellisons refusal to spin it off is the strongest indication that the purpose of acquiring MySQL as part of the deal is anti-competitive. As you say, it's not as if Oracle really needs it, so it shouldn't be this much of an issue.
the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt
If Sun goes into reorganization or liquidation assets like MySQL would probably be sold off and Oracle would likely be blocked as a buyer of MySQL, so the EC's main objection would be resolved in an acceptable fashion either way. The purpose of government in a competitive free market should be exactly that; prevent anticompetitive behaviour and structures, not support failing companies.
Of course, I'm not interested in having what amounts to ads in my search results, so if Rupert Murdoch wants that I'd suggest he pay for it.