"you shouldn't have end users plugged into a SAN."
Exactly why shouldn't you have end-users plugged into a SAN? I run a SAN, and I find that diskless workstations PXE booting off gigabit iSCSI storage are a huge improvement to having local disk. For more or less exactly those reasons; performance, redundancy, flexibility, growth and sharing. Not to mention data consolidation and savings in less wasted local storage.
I suspect the idea that SAN's are for servers is mostly spread by overcharging SAN vendors who dont want their profit margins eroded by inexpensive consumer devices. In fact, I'd say consumer storage is rapidly progressing beyond the server side and is these days the main driver behind storage expansion; I certainly know my home storage needs expands faster than the vast majority of the servers I admin (yes, there are the we-want-to-simulate-the-atoms-in-the-ocean exceptions, but most business application servers use less storage than you can get in an mp3 player).
Oh, true, there are many advantages to currency fluctuations. For the US in this case I think it's a bit more painful than usual tho.
The declining dollar will drive a sharp inflationary pressure, which severely limits the Feds ability to moderate the economy. The Fed might want to lower interest rates, but every lowering will result in a rapid inflationary hike, leaving it with the choice of either letting property prices collapse with associated pain of bank runs and failures, or by letting the dollar continue in free fall which means letting everyone holding US assets pay for the irresponsible behaviour of some.
And of course, if the Fed shows it's going to let the dollar tank, that'll just cause everyone to dump even more dollar assets, driving the dollar down further.
Long term there will be a correction, and there will be advantages such as a resolution to the trade imbalances. But the fundamental problem is that large parts of the next decades consumption has already been done, paid for by borrowed money secured with overinflated real-estate prices. Adjusting to paying interest rather than shopping luxuries will suck badly.
On the bright side, perhaps the economists will bang their little heads together hard enough this time to come up with numbers for GDP growth and asset values that are actually based in reality.
None of which are actually necessary, nor would they exist in a free market as competition would drive costs down to the level of p2p networks.
Adding costs to a product is no problem. I could produce CD's in solid gold with sleeves of diamond, hand crafted and hand freighted from the factory to the customer by an olympic runner. They would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still be 'as cheap as I could make them'. But that's not the point of the free market; the point of the free market is to have competition deliver the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of cost. Again, which is not the gold CD, but the all-music-ever-made p2p library where you can access all music ever made by humanity with a touch of a button at no cost.
"Personally, I think a cd is as cheap as a whole industry can make it."
I'm sure it is. Which is exactly why the whole industry has to go.
"Or should each person along the way have no inflation to their salary unlike everyone else expects?"
Like everyone else in the history of economics who's been replaced by automation they should live with their work becoming redundant (and the value being created by machines) and move on to getting another job.
We dont have farm hands manually reaping the harvests anymore, we dont have manual looms weaving textiles and we dont need the music marketing and distribution industry any more.
This is not a loss to society because the value gets created anyway to far less of a cost, and the labour freed up goes to create new wealth, making the whole economy richer as an end result.
"VMWare had problems getting the guest to do the autoconfiguration instead of having the host do it"
Could be a bridging issue with VMWare. As long as the virtualization software acts as an unfiltered bridge, v6 autoconf really should work.
"instead of learning the lessons we all have in the past 10 years about the benefits of small layer-2 islands connected with layer-3."
I agree in part, but it depends on how you look at it. I think the idea is to use it as huge, very sparsely populated layer-2 islands connected with layer-3. And with the default being a/48 per end site, you get 65k subnets per end network (enough for most corporate subnetting purposes). Which does feel like a certain level of overkill; I'm not sure I'll really need 65 thousand internets worth of addresses for my home network in the immediate future.
I think they did design it with such levels of waste in mind tho, so one can see it more as an indication as to the reason for using such a rediculously large address space.
"3) Just try it with VMWare or other virtualization software. Ouch. There's a whole lot of borked there."
Eh, what?
As far as I could tell, as soon as I started radvd on my gateway all my xen guests autoconfigured their global v6 address. Perhaps you have a VMWare specific issue?
"4) Obviously you wouldn't want to use it for a true server, becuase who wants their server IP to change when a NIC burns out?"
Obviously you dont have a server-hardware ip address to use for a true server service. You dedicate an IP address to the actual service so you can move it around freely decoupled from the hardware and any other services on the box. (And to tie back to your earlier point; if you're virtualizing, there's no connection between the hardware and the MAC address anyway).
When you have a bazillion ip addresses it's not like you have to save them for a rainy day.
Why? I dont see any value added by the marketing. It just distorts the market, ensuring that anything that isnt minimum common denominator music will get far less than its fair share of market size, market space and revenue (see payola, channel control, cost of entry, etc).
The unbalanced incentive and revenue multiplication effects of marketing and monopoly rights is largely what has caused the cultural poverty and economic disparity within the music market sector, and removing it entirely would be a huge benefit for the vast mass of less than mass-marketed artists.
If you mean the actual spreading of knowledge about the existence of artists tho, social networks such as last.fm, pandora and the like do a good job of 'marketing'. With the advantage that they dont cost anything and actually reccomend music according to your taste, rather than what a cokesnorting RIAA exec thinks you should pay for to support his habit.
A whole lot of factors, most of them boiling down to demand.
Central bank interest rates have some effect; they're one factor that can be used to encourage a demand for a currency.
As such, inflation is tied to, but neither exactly the cause or the effect of currency fluctuations. A drop in a currency will result in (possibly) measured inflation as the price on imports goes up, and get countered by a central bank (unless countered by deflation elsewhere), thus (possibly) stabilizing currency again.
Of course, if you run the printers and simply print huge amounts of currency faster than the economy grows you'll get both inflation and a drop in the exchange rate, but again, the exchange rate drop isnt driven by the inflation, but both are driven by an oversupply of currency.
Then you have various other factors such as trade imbalances, investment imbalances and currency speculation which can drive an exchange rate both up and down (indirectly through demand for the currency).
What I have is gigabit, and it's just barely good enough. Once you move to gigabit, it's perfectly workable to set up diskless clients booting over the network off iSCSI disks. No more disk noise in the workstations or the media PC, much easier backups, no more hundreds of gigabytes wasted distributed around where you need maybe 4 for the OS. Etc.
And if 1 gigabit made moving disks out of the local machines useful, going to 10 gigabit will make moving even more things out of the local computer possible. It could make network based graphics accelerators possible, where any computer on your LAN could use the 3d accelerator. Etc.
Yes, wireless is good enough. For what we did fifteen years ago; it's perfectly capable of replacing 10mbit coax networks.
But it's nowhere near, nor is it likely to ever get near, replacing anything that actually uses modern networking technology.
"I would be surprised to find that this is an acceptable policy in most governments."
I wouldnt. Using Tor would be a very good way to protect various government activities where they dont want anyone to trace sources and destinations. Think infiltrations of web communities, avoiding host-country snooping on various activities, avoiding geographic tracing for field personell, etc.
As TFA noted, it _is_ policy for various governments specific personell. And it probably works very well against the specific threat it was intended to protect against. The problem in this case was that the lack of encryption opened the communications up to another threat instead.
"However, the owner of the machine has every right to block users who do not allow for advertisements."
Of course they do. They still dont get the revenue tho, eh?
As a general rule, non-descript advertising isnt something I block (like google ads, etc). If and when it is annoying it will get junked, and most likely, as sites with a high annoyance factor tend to try to work around the blocking, the site will get completely shitlisted and I'll go somewhere else instead.
Competition, in the information market, is a killer. Painful, but the publishing business needs to adjust to the fact that the industry is overpopulated by several orders of magnitude.
Frankly tho, some sites make me want to send the EPA on them; I wonder approximately how much energy that advertizing driven automated updates, flash video ads, animated ads, etc, consumes across the world. If you cant view a site without your CPU fan spinning up, then that's a fairly noticable unecessary and undesireable waste of energy.
"I think you will see BSD used in more Embedded systems now."
I really doubt it; things seem to be moving the other way around, with more and more modifiable linux-based devices appearing all the time.
For many embedded devels these days, keeping things proprietary is pointless, the systems are built on cheapo COTS reference implementations anyway, and it'd take the competition longer to copy/clone the software than the product cycle.
The gain from having a common reference source where everyone plays fair and pays their dues, and then competing in per-product-cycle added value is simply larger than the pain of keeping your own inhouse tree and/or constantly merging against an outside moving target. The GPL enforces the level playing field, so the various players dont have to engage in a constant game of prisoners dilemma.
"The GPLv3 is an attempt by RMS to expand the scope of control and legislate hardware interaction with the software."
No. The hardware can do whatever it want, the question is wether Tivo should be allowed to use GPL software that cannot be changed _on_ that hardware.
Tivo is as free as ever to do what they want with their hardware, but that doesnt mean GPL authors have to let anyone use their code to gain control over others. If Tivo wants to use GPL software then they're free to do so, as long as they do not try to restrict anyone elses freedom.
To comply they dont have to change any hardware, they just have to provide the means for anyone else to generate the same valid kernel they can build.
"So where does it stop?"
It stops when people stop trying to use GPL software to take power over others and restrict their freedom.
"Your refrigerator will be turned off because you use a brand of orange juice that RMS is against?"
A more appropriate scenario would be that the refrigerator maker made a refrigerator that would turn itself off if you put unapproved orange juice in it, in which case you'd find the GPL protecting your right to modify your refrigerator software to accept any orange juice.
'One of the main issues with "modern" rechargeable batteries is that they require some fairly substantial integration effort'
Well, shaping them into whatever form is left after the circuit board can require an integration effort. Remember, there _are_ actually standard-form (A, AA, etc) li-ion batteries, commonly used for high-draw usage such as cameras. So the integration is obviously not necessary, but still they do it for some reason... with, as you note, substantial problems as a result.
I mean, if cameras can do it, why not mp3 players, cellphones and laptops?
"I have never known anyone personally that has had to replace a battery on any mobile device within two years"
That's usually because most people just live with the fact that they have to charge the device every day now, rather than every week. Which rather counteracts the whole point of putting a higher capacity battery in the device in the first place. By the time the battery is as good as dead the industry would rather have people buy a new phone.
"That said, the sample that is "people I know" are generally conscious of good technical practices."
It doesnt really matter what you do with them, li-ion batteries are a bit different than other batteries that way; they deteriorate at rate directly related to their age and the operating temperature, losing 20-40 percent capacity per year in normal conditions (you have to store them in a freezer to get down to a negligable 2% drop per year). That'd be fine if you could change them and they cost the same as an AA form li-ion, but not acceptable for what is a limited-lifetime vendor specific part.
"but for any true free market capitalist, all legislation is regulation and therefore an illegitimate interference in the market."
If you look to Adam Smith, the grandfather of free market capitalism, and read The Wealth of Nations, he was not at all against regulation of markets. He was opposed to regulation _in favour of particular organizations or companies_, as this distorted the competition of the free market.
The role the state has in a free market is to ensure that competition is prevalent so we get the most efficient production of wealth possible.
"The whole concept of the free market is for the MARKET to be self regulating, not government."
And it's only a free market that can regulate itself when anyone is able to compete against entrenched interests. It's the _market_ that is intrinsically self-regulating, not the market players. The market players will do anything they can to prevent the freedom of the market, as competition is inherently bad for profits.
Of course, there are a whole lot of far-right capitalists who love to abuse the concept and pretend it means 'anything goes corporatism' for obvious reasons, and they get away with pretending that such predatory market control is 'free' far too often.
To go even further, a free market is not even incompatible with wealth redistribution systems or mutual insurance system (taxes, socialized health insurances, etc), as long as competition is maintained in the providing side (anyone qualified can offer health care and collect payment from the social system, etc).
It's too bad that much of political economy is still stuck in the cold-war era, and while it's not too hard to understand the personal self interests keeping it there, it prevents a more balanced and efficient approach to economic issues, rather than the planned-state-economy vs. monopolistic-corporate-economy we get now, where neither actually offers an optimum approach for maximizing the wealth in the economy.
Not to mention the button formats, small enough to fit the smallest iPod or keyring appliance.
'Legislation should just say "this is what the [product] must do,"'
And that would be "allow the consumer to change it for other interchangeable formats".
"it would actually prevent innovation if the battery pack became a limiting design factor."
There's nothing preventing a battery pack composed of individual smaller batteries, combining to almost any shape you want. As long as you could change the individual cells that'd be fine.
Shape isn't really a problem as standard battery shapes already are vastly varied, and could easily be extended with several more formats (actually allowing varying shapes is part of what causes the explosion problem; random design choices affect the technical issues and you get a constant input of untested designs into the market). And I mean, _really_. Designing around the battery sizes we have isnt really that hard, nor is it a particularly new problem. If the designer isnt competent enough to do that, fire him. (Or set him on fire with his product).
So when the producers come with that excuse I'd suggest it has more to do with their desire for high profit margins on battery replacements. Cheap razors, expensive blades, as it were.
"So while I'm not against capitalism or anything, it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe the drive to cut costs can be taken to dangerous extremes? Just a thought."
"Do I have a solution?"
Actually, there's a very simple capitalistic free market solution to the very problem LiIon batteries pose.
Legislate that LiIon batteries must use standardized battery format and be consumer changeable.
Instead of the current product tying market you'd get one where consumers themselves could chose wether to use exploding batteries with a lifespan of 18-36 months, or less powerful battery types (well, less powerful until the LiIon loses its max charge after a few months anyway).
Heck, you could even legislate a label with 'may explode if looked at wrong'.
I'd betcha the Li-Ions would be used in exactly the places where they need to be used, for the long road trips, or the vacations in the woods (and be stored in the freezer in the time between where they break by 2% instead of 40% per year).
The rest of the time, I'd bet most people would go for the non-exploding batteries that still carry charge enough to survive between docking stations.
Aw, dont sell yourselves short. The US has a lot of nice nature, and it's one of the better countries in which to get a good steak. I used to enjoy my visits to the US (and the business trips).
These days I dont go there either on business or for pleasure. I dont particularly care for the 'welcoming' one gets these days, nor do I trust the current administration with the biometric data they want, nor do I want my tourism dollars to support certain less than ethical actions and institutions of the country.
Perhaps it'll change in the future. But for now, there are other places to visit which dont leave such a bad aftertaste.
"The idea is that the law itself is so flawed that by enforcing it strictly and literally it becomes evident that the law should be changed."
Indeed. The value and accuracy of a DNA database decreases with size as the number of false hits and prevalence of simply mislabeled and misidentified samples increases. With a whole-population database you'd start dragging provably innocent people into court in the range of thousands or tens of thousands per year. This already happens; in the UK, a man with advanced Parkinsons, unable to drive or even dress himself was thrown into jail over several months for a robbery 200 miles from his home, despite even having an alibi. He was later released as a more complete DNA test proved the first one wrong. But while a few cases of innocents getting sacrificed on the altar of biometrics can be ignored, I doubt large scale wrongful prosecutions could.
Not to mention that crime scene contamination with DNA evidence is even easier than ruining fingerprint evidence. Go to the nearest cleaning waste bin and get a vaccuum bag used for cleaning buses or something. Put it in a vacuum cleaner (or other more practical dispersal device) and hit reverse. Smirk as hundreds of thousands of DNA samples cover the scene.
Perhaps latex catsuits or biohazard gear will become mainstream fashion; with prevalent DNA usage, you had better be careful where you deposit any cells or hair. Shed them in a public place, and anyone can use them to 'reliably' place you at a crime scene.
Re:Application to "OOXML is an open standard" myth
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"we'll really have an uphill battle in convincing decision-makers"
On the other hand, it also means Microsoft will have a hard time convincing anyone that they're not a manipulative untrustworthy monopoly engaged in everything from corruption and bribery to intimidation and market distortion.
The reluctance of more serious members to be associated with such unethical behaviour may very well outweigh whatever perks Microsoft wants to offer their bought voters.
To quote the grandfather of free-market capitalism:
"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 10
Free market capitalism does not require blind acceptance of any working conditions, in fact, abuse that potentially damages workers or reduces their motivation, capacity and desire for work damages the very engine of wealth creation in society, ruining the greatest asset the economy has.
Adam Smith most certainly recognized the disparity in power between employers and employees, and while there are a whole lot of people who like to twist the idea of free market capitalism into an anything-goes feast for the new aristocracy and corporate owners, the fact is that the state has many legitimate roles in a free market. As long as it stays away from protecting the owners and investors from competition.
Well, that, or the other way around; monopolies will charge what the market will bear. When you have a legal monopoly you maximizie revenue by setting the price at a point where a lot of consumers will not be able to afford the product (ie, 45 dollars).
As piracy is the only actual competition, it is the only thing holding prices back. Without it, you could expect the same White Album to be $60. Or $100. With working mandatory DRM and/or per play charges, you could expect an even higher price... the only limit would be when so many consumers would rather eat that an increase in price would result in a decline of total revenue (which, for various reasons ranging from possible rate of consumption (limited by time/day) through marketing efforts is at a very high price).
So, no, you havent been doing your part. When prices fall towards free market competetive equilibrium, which for music would be a couple of cents for an album of that level of mass production, then perhaps everyone's done their part.
That will probably not happen before the whole concept of 'intellectual property' is revised to fit a free market tho.
"Why don't they just pick up a gratis operating system with a more permissive license, like one of the BSD's, and stop worrying about tivoizing GPL'ed code?"
Probably because the BSD multimedia/PVR development community is comparatively smaller. Tivo might have to do their own work (not to mention that they'd probably implode trying to decide wether to completely proprietarize any improvements they made or gain community help).
"AFAIK, rsync is only one-way, meaning that it overwrites and eventually deletes files."
rsync has a whole bunch of options that will let you decide behaviour. --update will make it skip files that have newer modify times or you could use --backup to make it make a copy of files instead of overwriting them, etc. Mix and match and run two-way syncs after eachother and you could get close in behaviour to a real two-way sync.
"I thought about Coda but it seems to be far too complicated and unreliable and I don't know better alternatives."
I've played around with Coda, and from what I recall there are two things that make it impractial for 'ordinary' use. The lack of file locking (which causes problems with annoying apps that use it) and the handling of large files (it had to copy the entire file to local cache before unblocking the io calls, ie, dont look at any video files on coda). And so, my original idea of having home directories supporting disconnected operations were shot. It would have worked very well for specific subsets of datastorage, but in the end it was simpler to just sort the data into various structures and deal with syncing on a case by case basis (rsync for some things, plain nfs/autofs for other things, cvs for code or text, etc).
In the end, I think this is one of those problems where it's better to just sit on your arse and wait because the problem of permanent connectivity will be solved before someone figures out how to make a wholly transparent redundant filesystem that seamlessly supports disconnected operation. The whole problem is simply to a certain extent incompatible with the way filesystems usually work.
"they'll be filmed separately and stitched together"
Probably something like that, yes. From the article: 'they have a room of 200 or 300 guys that are doing all the background, it's insane.'
Somehow I dont think Hollywood is losing money due to 'piracy'. It might be more related to having 300 people doing something one camera would do well enough.
And somehow I think the cultural heritage of the human race might be better off if the contorted economic system around the creative arts financed three or four(ty) movies with different stories, rather than one with everything in focus.
"The trouble is that it's very hard to do that with telephone service."
No it isnt. It's no different than roads, sewage or other pieces of infrastructure.
You simply have the state own them, let contractors bid for the construction, then make the infrastructure available (for a fee, a tax, or neither) to those who need the infrastructure. In the case of phones you simply let various phone companies sell their services over the infrastructure (and you can charge them over time for the expense of building it. Or not, depending on your socioeconomic goals with the expanded infrastructure).
The tricky part appears to be resisting ideas to expand the states involvement beyond simply owning the actual infrastructure. While the economic activity of 'owning infrastructure' doesnt lend itself to competition, building it, servicing it and selling services utilizing the infrastructure certainly do.
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"you shouldn't have end users plugged into a SAN."
Exactly why shouldn't you have end-users plugged into a SAN? I run a SAN, and I find that diskless workstations PXE booting off gigabit iSCSI storage are a huge improvement to having local disk. For more or less exactly those reasons; performance, redundancy, flexibility, growth and sharing. Not to mention data consolidation and savings in less wasted local storage.
I suspect the idea that SAN's are for servers is mostly spread by overcharging SAN vendors who dont want their profit margins eroded by inexpensive consumer devices. In fact, I'd say consumer storage is rapidly progressing beyond the server side and is these days the main driver behind storage expansion; I certainly know my home storage needs expands faster than the vast majority of the servers I admin (yes, there are the we-want-to-simulate-the-atoms-in-the-ocean exceptions, but most business application servers use less storage than you can get in an mp3 player).
Oh, true, there are many advantages to currency fluctuations. For the US in this case I think it's a bit more painful than usual tho.
The declining dollar will drive a sharp inflationary pressure, which severely limits the Feds ability to moderate the economy. The Fed might want to lower interest rates, but every lowering will result in a rapid inflationary hike, leaving it with the choice of either letting property prices collapse with associated pain of bank runs and failures, or by letting the dollar continue in free fall which means letting everyone holding US assets pay for the irresponsible behaviour of some.
And of course, if the Fed shows it's going to let the dollar tank, that'll just cause everyone to dump even more dollar assets, driving the dollar down further.
Long term there will be a correction, and there will be advantages such as a resolution to the trade imbalances. But the fundamental problem is that large parts of the next decades consumption has already been done, paid for by borrowed money secured with overinflated real-estate prices. Adjusting to paying interest rather than shopping luxuries will suck badly.
On the bright side, perhaps the economists will bang their little heads together hard enough this time to come up with numbers for GDP growth and asset values that are actually based in reality.
"There are the costs..."
None of which are actually necessary, nor would they exist in a free market as competition would drive costs down to the level of p2p networks.
Adding costs to a product is no problem. I could produce CD's in solid gold with sleeves of diamond, hand crafted and hand freighted from the factory to the customer by an olympic runner. They would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still be 'as cheap as I could make them'. But that's not the point of the free market; the point of the free market is to have competition deliver the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of cost. Again, which is not the gold CD, but the all-music-ever-made p2p library where you can access all music ever made by humanity with a touch of a button at no cost.
"Personally, I think a cd is as cheap as a whole industry can make it."
I'm sure it is. Which is exactly why the whole industry has to go.
"Or should each person along the way have no inflation to their salary unlike everyone else expects?"
Like everyone else in the history of economics who's been replaced by automation they should live with their work becoming redundant (and the value being created by machines) and move on to getting another job.
We dont have farm hands manually reaping the harvests anymore, we dont have manual looms weaving textiles and we dont need the music marketing and distribution industry any more.
This is not a loss to society because the value gets created anyway to far less of a cost, and the labour freed up goes to create new wealth, making the whole economy richer as an end result.
"VMWare had problems getting the guest to do the autoconfiguration instead of having the host do it"
/48 per end site, you get 65k subnets per end network (enough for most corporate subnetting purposes). Which does feel like a certain level of overkill; I'm not sure I'll really need 65 thousand internets worth of addresses for my home network in the immediate future.
Could be a bridging issue with VMWare. As long as the virtualization software acts as an unfiltered bridge, v6 autoconf really should work.
"instead of learning the lessons we all have in the past 10 years about the benefits of small layer-2 islands connected with layer-3."
I agree in part, but it depends on how you look at it. I think the idea is to use it as huge, very sparsely populated layer-2 islands connected with layer-3. And with the default being a
I think they did design it with such levels of waste in mind tho, so one can see it more as an indication as to the reason for using such a rediculously large address space.
"3) Just try it with VMWare or other virtualization software. Ouch. There's a whole lot of borked there."
Eh, what?
As far as I could tell, as soon as I started radvd on my gateway all my xen guests autoconfigured their global v6 address. Perhaps you have a VMWare specific issue?
"4) Obviously you wouldn't want to use it for a true server, becuase who wants their server IP to change when a NIC burns out?"
Obviously you dont have a server-hardware ip address to use for a true server service. You dedicate an IP address to the actual service so you can move it around freely decoupled from the hardware and any other services on the box. (And to tie back to your earlier point; if you're virtualizing, there's no connection between the hardware and the MAC address anyway).
When you have a bazillion ip addresses it's not like you have to save them for a rainy day.
"There needs to be a viable alternative to this."
Why? I dont see any value added by the marketing. It just distorts the market, ensuring that anything that isnt minimum common denominator music will get far less than its fair share of market size, market space and revenue (see payola, channel control, cost of entry, etc).
The unbalanced incentive and revenue multiplication effects of marketing and monopoly rights is largely what has caused the cultural poverty and economic disparity within the music market sector, and removing it entirely would be a huge benefit for the vast mass of less than mass-marketed artists.
If you mean the actual spreading of knowledge about the existence of artists tho, social networks such as last.fm, pandora and the like do a good job of 'marketing'. With the advantage that they dont cost anything and actually reccomend music according to your taste, rather than what a cokesnorting RIAA exec thinks you should pay for to support his habit.
"And the exchange rate is driven by...?"
A whole lot of factors, most of them boiling down to demand.
Central bank interest rates have some effect; they're one factor that can be used to encourage a demand for a currency.
As such, inflation is tied to, but neither exactly the cause or the effect of currency fluctuations. A drop in a currency will result in (possibly) measured inflation as the price on imports goes up, and get countered by a central bank (unless countered by deflation elsewhere), thus (possibly) stabilizing currency again.
Of course, if you run the printers and simply print huge amounts of currency faster than the economy grows you'll get both inflation and a drop in the exchange rate, but again, the exchange rate drop isnt driven by the inflation, but both are driven by an oversupply of currency.
Then you have various other factors such as trade imbalances, investment imbalances and currency speculation which can drive an exchange rate both up and down (indirectly through demand for the currency).
"when what they have is good enough."
What I have is gigabit, and it's just barely good enough. Once you move to gigabit, it's perfectly workable to set up diskless clients booting over the network off iSCSI disks. No more disk noise in the workstations or the media PC, much easier backups, no more hundreds of gigabytes wasted distributed around where you need maybe 4 for the OS. Etc.
And if 1 gigabit made moving disks out of the local machines useful, going to 10 gigabit will make moving even more things out of the local computer possible. It could make network based graphics accelerators possible, where any computer on your LAN could use the 3d accelerator. Etc.
Yes, wireless is good enough. For what we did fifteen years ago; it's perfectly capable of replacing 10mbit coax networks.
But it's nowhere near, nor is it likely to ever get near, replacing anything that actually uses modern networking technology.
"I would be surprised to find that this is an acceptable policy in most governments."
I wouldnt. Using Tor would be a very good way to protect various government activities where they dont want anyone to trace sources and destinations. Think infiltrations of web communities, avoiding host-country snooping on various activities, avoiding geographic tracing for field personell, etc.
As TFA noted, it _is_ policy for various governments specific personell. And it probably works very well against the specific threat it was intended to protect against. The problem in this case was that the lack of encryption opened the communications up to another threat instead.
"However, the owner of the machine has every right to block users who do not allow for advertisements."
Of course they do. They still dont get the revenue tho, eh?
As a general rule, non-descript advertising isnt something I block (like google ads, etc). If and when it is annoying it will get junked, and most likely, as sites with a high annoyance factor tend to try to work around the blocking, the site will get completely shitlisted and I'll go somewhere else instead.
Competition, in the information market, is a killer. Painful, but the publishing business needs to adjust to the fact that the industry is overpopulated by several orders of magnitude.
Frankly tho, some sites make me want to send the EPA on them; I wonder approximately how much energy that advertizing driven automated updates, flash video ads, animated ads, etc, consumes across the world. If you cant view a site without your CPU fan spinning up, then that's a fairly noticable unecessary and undesireable waste of energy.
"I think you will see BSD used in more Embedded systems now."
I really doubt it; things seem to be moving the other way around, with more and more modifiable linux-based devices appearing all the time.
For many embedded devels these days, keeping things proprietary is pointless, the systems are built on cheapo COTS reference implementations anyway, and it'd take the competition longer to copy/clone the software than the product cycle.
The gain from having a common reference source where everyone plays fair and pays their dues, and then competing in per-product-cycle added value is simply larger than the pain of keeping your own inhouse tree and/or constantly merging against an outside moving target. The GPL enforces the level playing field, so the various players dont have to engage in a constant game of prisoners dilemma.
"The GPLv3 is an attempt by RMS to expand the scope of control and legislate hardware interaction with the software."
No. The hardware can do whatever it want, the question is wether Tivo should be allowed to use GPL software that cannot be changed _on_ that hardware.
Tivo is as free as ever to do what they want with their hardware, but that doesnt mean GPL authors have to let anyone use their code to gain control over others. If Tivo wants to use GPL software then they're free to do so, as long as they do not try to restrict anyone elses freedom.
To comply they dont have to change any hardware, they just have to provide the means for anyone else to generate the same valid kernel they can build.
"So where does it stop?"
It stops when people stop trying to use GPL software to take power over others and restrict their freedom.
"Your refrigerator will be turned off because you use a brand of orange juice that RMS is against?"
A more appropriate scenario would be that the refrigerator maker made a refrigerator that would turn itself off if you put unapproved orange juice in it, in which case you'd find the GPL protecting your right to modify your refrigerator software to accept any orange juice.
'One of the main issues with "modern" rechargeable batteries is that they require some fairly substantial integration effort'
Well, shaping them into whatever form is left after the circuit board can require an integration effort. Remember, there _are_ actually standard-form (A, AA, etc) li-ion batteries, commonly used for high-draw usage such as cameras. So the integration is obviously not necessary, but still they do it for some reason... with, as you note, substantial problems as a result.
I mean, if cameras can do it, why not mp3 players, cellphones and laptops?
"I have never known anyone personally that has had to replace a battery on any mobile device within two years"
That's usually because most people just live with the fact that they have to charge the device every day now, rather than every week. Which rather counteracts the whole point of putting a higher capacity battery in the device in the first place. By the time the battery is as good as dead the industry would rather have people buy a new phone.
"That said, the sample that is "people I know" are generally conscious of good technical practices."
It doesnt really matter what you do with them, li-ion batteries are a bit different than other batteries that way; they deteriorate at rate directly related to their age and the operating temperature, losing 20-40 percent capacity per year in normal conditions (you have to store them in a freezer to get down to a negligable 2% drop per year). That'd be fine if you could change them and they cost the same as an AA form li-ion, but not acceptable for what is a limited-lifetime vendor specific part.
"but for any true free market capitalist, all legislation is regulation and therefore an illegitimate interference in the market."
If you look to Adam Smith, the grandfather of free market capitalism, and read The Wealth of Nations, he was not at all against regulation of markets. He was opposed to regulation _in favour of particular organizations or companies_, as this distorted the competition of the free market.
The role the state has in a free market is to ensure that competition is prevalent so we get the most efficient production of wealth possible.
"The whole concept of the free market is for the MARKET to be self regulating, not government."
And it's only a free market that can regulate itself when anyone is able to compete against entrenched interests. It's the _market_ that is intrinsically self-regulating, not the market players. The market players will do anything they can to prevent the freedom of the market, as competition is inherently bad for profits.
Of course, there are a whole lot of far-right capitalists who love to abuse the concept and pretend it means 'anything goes corporatism' for obvious reasons, and they get away with pretending that such predatory market control is 'free' far too often.
To go even further, a free market is not even incompatible with wealth redistribution systems or mutual insurance system (taxes, socialized health insurances, etc), as long as competition is maintained in the providing side (anyone qualified can offer health care and collect payment from the social system, etc).
It's too bad that much of political economy is still stuck in the cold-war era, and while it's not too hard to understand the personal self interests keeping it there, it prevents a more balanced and efficient approach to economic issues, rather than the planned-state-economy vs. monopolistic-corporate-economy we get now, where neither actually offers an optimum approach for maximizing the wealth in the economy.
"the ubiquity of things like AA, AAA, C, D, etc."
Not to mention the button formats, small enough to fit the smallest iPod or keyring appliance.
'Legislation should just say "this is what the [product] must do,"'
And that would be "allow the consumer to change it for other interchangeable formats".
"it would actually prevent innovation if the battery pack became a limiting design factor."
There's nothing preventing a battery pack composed of individual smaller batteries, combining to almost any shape you want. As long as you could change the individual cells that'd be fine.
Shape isn't really a problem as standard battery shapes already are vastly varied, and could easily be extended with several more formats (actually allowing varying shapes is part of what causes the explosion problem; random design choices affect the technical issues and you get a constant input of untested designs into the market). And I mean, _really_. Designing around the battery sizes we have isnt really that hard, nor is it a particularly new problem. If the designer isnt competent enough to do that, fire him. (Or set him on fire with his product).
So when the producers come with that excuse I'd suggest it has more to do with their desire for high profit margins on battery replacements. Cheap razors, expensive blades, as it were.
"So while I'm not against capitalism or anything, it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe the drive to cut costs can be taken to dangerous extremes? Just a thought."
"Do I have a solution?"
Actually, there's a very simple capitalistic free market solution to the very problem LiIon batteries pose.
Legislate that LiIon batteries must use standardized battery format and be consumer changeable.
Instead of the current product tying market you'd get one where consumers themselves could chose wether to use exploding batteries with a lifespan of 18-36 months, or less powerful battery types (well, less powerful until the LiIon loses its max charge after a few months anyway).
Heck, you could even legislate a label with 'may explode if looked at wrong'.
I'd betcha the Li-Ions would be used in exactly the places where they need to be used, for the long road trips, or the vacations in the woods (and be stored in the freezer in the time between where they break by 2% instead of 40% per year).
The rest of the time, I'd bet most people would go for the non-exploding batteries that still carry charge enough to survive between docking stations.
Aw, dont sell yourselves short. The US has a lot of nice nature, and it's one of the better countries in which to get a good steak. I used to enjoy my visits to the US (and the business trips).
These days I dont go there either on business or for pleasure. I dont particularly care for the 'welcoming' one gets these days, nor do I trust the current administration with the biometric data they want, nor do I want my tourism dollars to support certain less than ethical actions and institutions of the country.
Perhaps it'll change in the future. But for now, there are other places to visit which dont leave such a bad aftertaste.
"The idea is that the law itself is so flawed that by enforcing it strictly and literally it becomes evident that the law should be changed."
Indeed. The value and accuracy of a DNA database decreases with size as the number of false hits and prevalence of simply mislabeled and misidentified samples increases. With a whole-population database you'd start dragging provably innocent people into court in the range of thousands or tens of thousands per year. This already happens; in the UK, a man with advanced Parkinsons, unable to drive or even dress himself was thrown into jail over several months for a robbery 200 miles from his home, despite even having an alibi. He was later released as a more complete DNA test proved the first one wrong. But while a few cases of innocents getting sacrificed on the altar of biometrics can be ignored, I doubt large scale wrongful prosecutions could.
Not to mention that crime scene contamination with DNA evidence is even easier than ruining fingerprint evidence. Go to the nearest cleaning waste bin and get a vaccuum bag used for cleaning buses or something. Put it in a vacuum cleaner (or other more practical dispersal device) and hit reverse. Smirk as hundreds of thousands of DNA samples cover the scene.
Perhaps latex catsuits or biohazard gear will become mainstream fashion; with prevalent DNA usage, you had better be careful where you deposit any cells or hair. Shed them in a public place, and anyone can use them to 'reliably' place you at a crime scene.
"we'll really have an uphill battle in convincing decision-makers"
On the other hand, it also means Microsoft will have a hard time convincing anyone that they're not a manipulative untrustworthy monopoly engaged in everything from corruption and bribery to intimidation and market distortion.
The reluctance of more serious members to be associated with such unethical behaviour may very well outweigh whatever perks Microsoft wants to offer their bought voters.
To quote the grandfather of free-market capitalism:
"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 10
Free market capitalism does not require blind acceptance of any working conditions, in fact, abuse that potentially damages workers or reduces their motivation, capacity and desire for work damages the very engine of wealth creation in society, ruining the greatest asset the economy has.
Adam Smith most certainly recognized the disparity in power between employers and employees, and while there are a whole lot of people who like to twist the idea of free market capitalism into an anything-goes feast for the new aristocracy and corporate owners, the fact is that the state has many legitimate roles in a free market. As long as it stays away from protecting the owners and investors from competition.
"Piracy causes lower prices then, does it?"
Well, that, or the other way around; monopolies will charge what the market will bear. When you have a legal monopoly you maximizie revenue by setting the price at a point where a lot of consumers will not be able to afford the product (ie, 45 dollars).
As piracy is the only actual competition, it is the only thing holding prices back. Without it, you could expect the same White Album to be $60. Or $100. With working mandatory DRM and/or per play charges, you could expect an even higher price... the only limit would be when so many consumers would rather eat that an increase in price would result in a decline of total revenue (which, for various reasons ranging from possible rate of consumption (limited by time/day) through marketing efforts is at a very high price).
So, no, you havent been doing your part. When prices fall towards free market competetive equilibrium, which for music would be a couple of cents for an album of that level of mass production, then perhaps everyone's done their part.
That will probably not happen before the whole concept of 'intellectual property' is revised to fit a free market tho.
"Why don't they just pick up a gratis operating system with a more permissive license, like one of the BSD's, and stop worrying about tivoizing GPL'ed code?"
Probably because the BSD multimedia/PVR development community is comparatively smaller. Tivo might have to do their own work (not to mention that they'd probably implode trying to decide wether to completely proprietarize any improvements they made or gain community help).
"AFAIK, rsync is only one-way, meaning that it overwrites and eventually deletes files."
rsync has a whole bunch of options that will let you decide behaviour. --update will make it skip files that have newer modify times or you could use --backup to make it make a copy of files instead of overwriting them, etc. Mix and match and run two-way syncs after eachother and you could get close in behaviour to a real two-way sync.
"I thought about Coda but it seems to be far too complicated and unreliable and I don't know better alternatives."
I've played around with Coda, and from what I recall there are two things that make it impractial for 'ordinary' use. The lack of file locking (which causes problems with annoying apps that use it) and the handling of large files (it had to copy the entire file to local cache before unblocking the io calls, ie, dont look at any video files on coda). And so, my original idea of having home directories supporting disconnected operations were shot. It would have worked very well for specific subsets of datastorage, but in the end it was simpler to just sort the data into various structures and deal with syncing on a case by case basis (rsync for some things, plain nfs/autofs for other things, cvs for code or text, etc).
In the end, I think this is one of those problems where it's better to just sit on your arse and wait because the problem of permanent connectivity will be solved before someone figures out how to make a wholly transparent redundant filesystem that seamlessly supports disconnected operation. The whole problem is simply to a certain extent incompatible with the way filesystems usually work.
"they'll be filmed separately and stitched together"
Probably something like that, yes. From the article: 'they have a room of 200 or 300 guys that are doing all the background, it's insane.'
Somehow I dont think Hollywood is losing money due to 'piracy'. It might be more related to having 300 people doing something one camera would do well enough.
And somehow I think the cultural heritage of the human race might be better off if the contorted economic system around the creative arts financed three or four(ty) movies with different stories, rather than one with everything in focus.
"The trouble is that it's very hard to do that with telephone service."
No it isnt. It's no different than roads, sewage or other pieces of infrastructure.
You simply have the state own them, let contractors bid for the construction, then make the infrastructure available (for a fee, a tax, or neither) to those who need the infrastructure. In the case of phones you simply let various phone companies sell their services over the infrastructure (and you can charge them over time for the expense of building it. Or not, depending on your socioeconomic goals with the expanded infrastructure).
The tricky part appears to be resisting ideas to expand the states involvement beyond simply owning the actual infrastructure. While the economic activity of 'owning infrastructure' doesnt lend itself to competition, building it, servicing it and selling services utilizing the infrastructure certainly do.