Monitoring publicly available quasars is a much simpler problem than monitoring other sources of randomness like noise on a microphone, keypress timings, heat readings, fanspeed sensors, etc, that are readily available entropy sources on a pc.
If you were a goon, which problem would you prefer? Try to decrypt a message by matching it against a large, but limited, number of known large datastreams, or by matching it against an unknown number of unknown sources that may or may not contain some form of more or less predictable randomness?
"If I didn't have to give out my email address for every damn thing..."
You dont. If you're running your own mailserver, just create junk aliases and simply keep them around for as long as necessary. Heck, create separate personal email aliases for everyone of your friends when you're at it, and it becomes their responsibility not to spread their access address to you around, or you'll simply junk it and make a note not to give them a new one.
In todays overly communicative world, the desireable resource is not you having a mailbox where you can be reached, it's someone else having a mailbox where you can be reached. So change the paradigm around, and let them be the guardian of their very own access line to you. If they fail to guard it or you no longer want them to be able to reach you that way, you just junk that adress, and nobody else is affected.
Re:Yeah, but this is a good thing.
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Ah, but you're just thinking in end-consumer terms.
You see, if there is no geographic segmentation, the brick and mortar store itself will import from a brick and mortar store in Albania, or even a dealer in Albania, undercutting their competition and still profiting more, thus eventually killing the sales the multinational and their official dealers would do in Australia.
The problem is simply built into the IP system, it's fundamentally incompatible with a free market and free trade.
Re:Yeah, but this is a good thing.
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"There's no good reason why games shouldn't work in every region."
There are, however, some very compelling bad reasons. The main being that intellectual monopoly products are not priced in free market competition, but priced depending on disposable income of the consumer group.
Without regions, the price for revenue maximization will be set for a global consumption group, which will create a less evenly distributed market cover.
This is an inevitable artefact of intellectual monopoly legislation (and any monopoly legislation), and until, and unless we get such legislation removed, we will continue seeing attempts to impose such artificial barriers in the pursuit of maximum revenue.
"You cannot set standards and control things without it."
Marketshare gains you little in the way of control unless you have the legal means to exclude competition. That's where intellectual monopoly legislation comes in and joins with marketshare to destroy any semblance of a free market.
"Fat stockholders will think this wonderful until someone else - the Chinese maybe - suddenly turns the tables and then we'll all be sorry."
No shit. Intellectual 'property' is our version of the soviet state factories, killing innovation and competition, leaving us hopelessly inefficient in the heavily monopolized sectors.
I suggest you contact the authors of Star Wreck: In the pirkinning.
A Star Trek/Star Wars crossover in Finnish should at least be quite a bit more entertaining than anything either of the franchises have managed lately.
Yes, but copying and distributing isnt. It's the copying part that is enforcing and binding.
"That only one of us can read the book at any given time is irrelevant."
Unfortunately, no, it isnt irrelevant.
To truly comprehend copyright and its aspects, you need to separate and clear up certain fundamentals that are confusing at best and actively propagandized against by the ip lobby.
A physical incarnation of a copyrighted work is a specific piece of property. If you have purchased or otherwise legally obtained that piece of property, you are the owner of the property, _even the content_, but _only_ that copy.
Copyright is the right to control and restrict the copying of such pieces of property. Until and unless you enter into the territory of copying your property (or something else codified in copyright law), copyright generally does not apply. Shrinkwrap licenses are based on contract law, where you sign away additional rights that you have to your property, therefore they are much less certain to be enforcable.
One of the most illustrative aspects of these issues is when a copyrighted work lapses into public domain. Say you own a copy of a book that does that transition. One day you own the property but you're not allowed to copy it. The next day it's public domain, and you can do absolutely anything and everything you want with that book, including copying and distributing it. You can even keep it private and charge for showing it to people, _even_ tho the copyright is gone and it's in the public domain. It's _your_ property, content and all, and if no library stocked it for public replication, well, then, congrats, you are now the owner of a unique object and you can charge quite a lot for it, despite the contents public domain status.
However, had you signed a shrinkwrap license for the book, the shrinkwrap could still be valid after the copyright lapsed. The shrinkwrap is a contract, completely unrelated to the copyright. You could have a shrinkwrap specifying the ways you were allowed to sit in a chair, it would be just as valid as a software usage shrinkwrap (more or less; certain legal entities work on and try to encourage a theory that you cant run software without copying it from disk into memory, rendering any software use a binding copyright action).
There are a lot of interests trying to confuse the issue and claim that they actually own what's on your DVD and in your book, but the fact is, this far they dont. You own it, they just own the right to prevent you from copying the bits until that right expires.
"But if it were under the GPL, such would not be the case."
Yes it would. You can lend your particular copy of the GPL software to your friend, temporarily transferring that copy and all that entails to him. Copyright forbids him, and you, from copying it, but not from lending it, or selling it to him.
You become bound by the license if you _copy_ and distribute the copy. Before that the GPL and other copyright permissions do not apply (except insofar as certain disclaimers may or may not apply in appropriate jurisdictions).
No, there is no more 'big' thing, but this is not due to lack of innovation, but due to an abundance of communications.
Previously a thing could seem 'big' because either the inventor had kept it to himself until it had sufficient height to seem 'big', or because the distribution of knowledge was so small as to make natural synthesis of ideas revolutionary.
Now, the 'lone' innovator can innovate all he wants in his attic, but the fact is that the billion connected other people will likely out-innovate him by a matter of many, many orders of magnitude, rendering his 'big' step taking decades a series of smaller steps taking days or weeks, each step of which will appear insignificant.
'Big steps' these days are just a matter of you not being in the loop for a few weeks.... and as an interesting tidbit, did you know that the patent frequency in a country correlates better with divorce rates than it does with innovation rate? And that innovation correlates far better with communications infrastructure and education than it does with patent frequency?
"I like that in order to get patents, companies have trade the knowledge in exchange for protection"
There are some advantages to the function of patents, and this is the one that stands out as the greatest advantage.
But the dilemma is a false one, we're not faced with a choice between monopoly or secrecey. There are many other ways we could accomplish the same thing; for example, we could scrap the monopoly part of patents and instead let the patent office hand out the money directly. That way the conflict of managing the actual cost of overgranting patents becomes an internal problem in the patent office, the budget for extra innovation incentive becomes an ordinary political fiscal issue, and the incentive to get the problem corrected falls squarely among patent holders, as they'd be the ones getting less money per valid patents if there were too many.
It's not an either/or proposition, we can have the good of the patent system without the bad, and we can have it in a way that doesnt damage a free market economy. Such non-monopoly systems of intellectual property incentives would also be extrordinarily friendly towards free software and small inventors, as such publishers/holders could be awarded a financial incentive _without_ having to take an antagonistic stand against their users.
"But I can't use that same repository, as a general rule, to install packages on a Debian system, for example."
As a general rule, that's probably because the repository maintainers have a day job too:).
Really tho, I cant see any technical reasons why it would be impossible to manage. Currently, and traditionally, the packaging usually exists in the forms of a package maintainer who maintains packages for multiple platforms and repository maintainer maintains repositories of many packages for one platform, but you could merge the two and create a single standardized repository across multiple packages and platforms.
I understand that what you're getting at would be using the exact same repository index for every distribution, not merely a merged repository with per-distribution metatdata, but that would be difficult due to logistical problems. The package metadata is there to maintain system integrity, and system integrity state will vary, not for to 'compatibility' reasons, but simply because that's the price of the flexibility of staggered component version changes. That 'problem' exists between various versions of the same distribution, not merely between different distributions.
As a general rule, 'compatibility' will likely be higher between, say, various distributions from 2005, than between one distribution from 2000 compared to a 2005 version of the same distribution.
"What makes DLL hell such hell is not the incompatabilities"
Actually, the hell was caused by the fact and the way by which you could run applications on almost any version of the OS. The reason, you see, that you could do that was that every vendor tended to ship _their own versions_ of DLL's, which would then _overwrite_ the previous versions.
You could do that on linux too; simply write over/lib and/usr/lib with your own versions, but make a wild guess exactly what that does to system stability and every other program on your system.
"Like I said, for most intents and purposes"
Mmm, for a very, _very_, wide definition of 'different' OS. If you would consider a strict dll version controlled version of Win 95 different OS from a strict dll version controlled version of Win 95 with Office installed, well, yes, then linux distributions could be considered different OS's. Usually, I place the 'different OS' somewhere around the general API compatibility level, but even that is sometimes a blurry line (compare Windows drivers usable under Linux, Windows programs usable under Linux, Linux programs under BSD, etc.).
"I think it is getting to the point (maybe it's always been this way) where Linux distributions are effectively different OS's."
Mmm, actually I find it's getting to the point that it's the other way around.
I find more and more tools crossmigrating between the platforms; these days on Fedora you can use yum, up2date and apt more or less seamlessly; heck, most repositories publish their packages for all of the managers, and most other distributions work the same way.
"Slightly different library versions that makes sharing dynamically linked binaries problematic."
Slightly different library versions makes sharing dynamically linked binaries difficult even on different patchlevels on the same OS. DLL hell ring a bell?
It's a problem as old as the idea of dynamic linking, and different versions of libraries do not a new OS make. The solution for proprietary vendors who dont want the pain of related support is to ship statically linked binaries, and the solution for the rest of us is to stay away from proprietary vendors as their products end up horrendously bloated.
So, frankly, I think it's going in the right direction.
"Maybe if the Linux community started listening to what users are SAYING they want"
The Linux community is listening to what users are saying. Maybe you missed that, but the entire issue here is that Dell is _not_ a user.
Personally I'm perfectly happy using it as it is. I frankly dont give a crap about Dell, if the boxes they ship arent tested with Linux, then the boxes arent on my approved hardware list. It's not like there arent alternatives.
Yes, there are many distributions, basically it's one big incestous hive of cross-contaminated monstrosities, like evolution on speed. They all listen to their users and all adopt and cross-adopt, re-evolve and split, more rapidly than any single-cell OS can. Perhaps Dell finds that scary and wants to keep dealing with the predictable amoeba (which is evident in other aspects of Dell's business), but that just means that Dell is caught in and with an evolutionary dead end and will find his world dwindling while the rest of us go on our way. He can adapt, or he can crawl into a corner and shrivel up, but telling the rest of the world to stop evolving and changing simply isnt on the menu.
"If a company can produce a network that has the coverage of verizon without all the crap"
This is one of the fundamental reasons why you are sometimes better off with public infrastructure. Instead of five networks covering the dense areas and barely one covering less dense areas you just pay once for building the entire network and then let the service providers battle it out on services.
Having the service providers own the infrastructure is like having oil companies provide the roads and cars. Imagine having five roads to your house in the 'burbs, where you're only allowed to use one, depending on your brand of gas, then try to drive to your cabin in the woods, only to have no road at all there.
And to think how close we were to not getting the internet, but rather ending up with a few large everything-in-one providers...
"If you have everything in your life where you want it and you enjoy a game and want to "splurge" and buy gold so you don't have to spend a massive amount of time doing "less fun" tasks then why not?"
Because if you have to spend a massive amount of time doing something that is less fun in the game, then the game is _broken_. I dont splurge on something fun, only to have to splurge even more to get what I paid for from the beginning.
The whole game is virtual. It doesnt actually _take_ weeks of hard work to create that epic steed, it takes a billionth of a second worth of database updates, and the one single reason you cant it at once is because the game is designed that way. Paying to work around it doesnt solve the actual problem, it just excaberates it.
You realize the person that you pay for the gold, assuming they dont exploit a bug or have admin access, actually has to spend time doing that 'boring' part, taking them away from pursuits that could theoretically create actual wealth for society as a whole, rather than catering to a design defect in a game?
At least, when you buy those 'latest design shoes', you're paying for something that actually cannot be created in a millisecond, thus at least partly creating something resembling actual wealth.
The shoes cannot be created at the press of a key. The gold can. By paying for the gold instead of the shoes, the shoes go uncreated, while someone spends weeks doing something utterly unnecessary. Can you see the difference?
In a simulated economy without controlled scarcity, it sure doesnt.
"If buying some money in a virtual world lets me enjoy my time there"
Um, you're paying to not spend your time there.
If the game is so grossly defective that you have to pay extra to fix deficiencies that prevent you from enjoying it I'd say you need to file a complaint with customer support. I mean, if they told you, yes you can play, but if you want the not-randomly-disconnected token, you have to pay extra, would you? Hmm, maybe get the Steed of Less Lag too, on sale this week?
"Sure... but if you don't enjoy your life what good does having more money do you?"
It can be used to pay for anti-depressants and therapy once the initial deprogramming is done with.
Frankly, even while I've enjoyed several MMORPG's myself, sometimes the line between social game and addiction/cult becomes a bit thin...
Hmmm... that reminds me, long time since I played Evercrack... wonder if my chars are still there, and what the value of a plat is these days... must... get... uber... gear...
Actually it takes no more than a few milliseconds to get 500 gold in WoW;
UPDATE Character SET Gold = 500 WHERE Charname = "Oper"
Tada.
Any object in an MMORPG is essentially worthless in an economic sense; the scarcity is completely artifical and controlled by the operators and anyone who can hack the system. Merging such an economy with a real world economy is exceptionally irrational, as what you actually get for your money is an incentive for people to spend their time subverting and destroying the game economy, if not outright cracking into it or willfully abusing administrative privilidges or even systematically padding the bottom line of the actual company.
Would you buy counterfeit currency on Ebay if you saw it advertized? Have you considered the economic implications of buying counterfeit currency? This isnt that different.
Do something more constructive with your money. I mean, if you truly enjoy paying to get screwed, it's not like there arent options.
"I always think of how it can cost 99 cents to download a full song from iTunes... but then a ringtone... costs 3 dollars"
That's because p2p networks still keeps prices on downloads down.
Pricing on copyrighted material isnt set relative to costs, it's set relative to available capital for purchases. If the consumers get more money, then the prices will rise, regardless of actual costs. The only 'competition' there is is illicit copying.
The DOJ suing the labels for 'collusion to keep prices up' is rather ironic and just shows how far from reality the concept of IP has gone.
To the attorney general: Yes, of course there is price fixing and collusion to keep the price up. It's in the damn code of law. Look under the heading 'digital millenium copyright act' in your own bookshelf and you'll find all the evidence you need. 'Keeping the prices up' was the whole point of it.
Considering pretty much any 4 minute piece on any topic you know anything about usually can be described as bovine feces, I dont think that's an unreasonable precaution.
On the other hand, the piece sort of alludes to a valid concern; the rampant criminalization of common activities like filesharing creates a strong evolutionary pressure for concealing common activities. It's like the overuse of antibiotics leading to bacterial resistance and creating superbacteria.
Fighting such evolution is inevitably futile; the only way to slow the process down is to lower the evolutionary pressure and hope the undesired strains get outcompeted by the not quite so undesired strains; if you dont classify filesharing as illegal, most filesharing programs wont adopt encryption and anonymity; it would be a waste of resources that could get spent on better search or UI. Conversely, make filesharing illegal and development and demand will be directed towards making it encrypted and untraceable.
Copyrights arent property rights. They are state protected monopoly rights and are in their essense incompatible with a liberal market view. Calling it 'intellectual property' is simply a misnomer intented to cause exactly the kind of confusion you've fallen victim to.
Intellectual monopoly rights restrict what the owner of a piece of property is allowed to do with that property. The GPL essentially restores those rights to the owner of any copy, and prevents further re-restriction. That fundamentally supports the essense of the free market and competition, and cannot be described as either socialist or communitarian except in their broadest egalitarian aspect.
Frankly, I think a general tax would be far superior to copyright in economic performance. But change it to a percentage of salesprice, like VAT, and apply it across all distribution, blank media or not, say five percent. A few cents off a blank CD, a lot more off a commercial finished product.
Big bad corporations want to make money off music? Well, go ahead, take whatever you want, but part of your profits will be taxed and distributed to the original _creators_. Sell music over the internet? Sure, that's free too, but again part of your profits go to the creators.
Such a system would be far more compatible with a free market and competition than the current monopoly rights based one, and it would generate far better dividends for the creators of material.
All of which goes to prove that a conflict based exclusive rights patent system is inherently flawed and serve no useful purpose.
An attribution system where incentive is granted as a government payout instead wouldnt be subject to the same problem; NTP wouldnt be able to block RIM's use; RIM wouldnt have a reason not to claim use of NTP's invention. RIM would simply report use of the invention, and the incentive would be paid.
The whole system conflict is moved to the internals of the patent office instead; the more patents they grant the smaller each incentive payout becomes; either they have to grant better and fewer patents or they have to obtain higher funding for the incentive system (which would be subject to the ordinary political control.
"Will it reduce the cost as no one will be able to pirate anymore - No, This will be hacked within a few months of it coming out the same way CSS was"
Monopolistic pricing is adjusted upwards with increased demand; the amortization of production cost over units is utterly irrelevant to pricing. IE; piracy is one of the factors keeping the price down.
"Of course it can be done - humans somehow do it, and we do it tremendously well."
Depending on what you mean by 'well'. How many times have you passed right by someone you know, and how many times have you seen someone you think you recognize in a crowd, but it turned out to be someone just looking like them?
Even if the human brain is tremendously good at facial recognition, the problem simply grows too fast when both population and match-set grows. Personally I suspect there simply is such a large overlap in variations within the appearance of a single individual and between individuals that you'll never get rid of the false positive/negative problem, and thus end up with either a system that changes your apparent identity depending on your facial expression and amount of stubble, or one that identifies five thousand copies of the same individual across the country.
"Free, RELIABLE wi-fi is not available in nearly as many areas in the U.S. as even T-Mobile cell phone coverage."
And cheap, reliable cell coverage is not available in nearly as many areas in the US as Iridium satellite phone.
That doesnt keep the cellphones cheap good-enough coverage from wiping the floor with the satellite solution.
The fact is, the vast majority of revenue is from people who roam between one or two places; home and work, mostly covered by wi-fi. The writing's been on the wall for this one a long time; the coming drop in revenue that the operators will face as good-enough free coverage kills their cash cow and they're reduced to the revenue from low-coverage areas will wreck havoc with their business model.
Slashdot Mirror
Monitoring publicly available quasars is a much simpler problem than monitoring other sources of randomness like noise on a microphone, keypress timings, heat readings, fanspeed sensors, etc, that are readily available entropy sources on a pc.
If you were a goon, which problem would you prefer? Try to decrypt a message by matching it against a large, but limited, number of known large datastreams, or by matching it against an unknown number of unknown sources that may or may not contain some form of more or less predictable randomness?
"If I didn't have to give out my email address for every damn thing..."
You dont. If you're running your own mailserver, just create junk aliases and simply keep them around for as long as necessary. Heck, create separate personal email aliases for everyone of your friends when you're at it, and it becomes their responsibility not to spread their access address to you around, or you'll simply junk it and make a note not to give them a new one.
In todays overly communicative world, the desireable resource is not you having a mailbox where you can be reached, it's someone else having a mailbox where you can be reached. So change the paradigm around, and let them be the guardian of their very own access line to you. If they fail to guard it or you no longer want them to be able to reach you that way, you just junk that adress, and nobody else is affected.
Ah, but you're just thinking in end-consumer terms.
You see, if there is no geographic segmentation, the brick and mortar store itself will import from a brick and mortar store in Albania, or even a dealer in Albania, undercutting their competition and still profiting more, thus eventually killing the sales the multinational and their official dealers would do in Australia.
The problem is simply built into the IP system, it's fundamentally incompatible with a free market and free trade.
"There's no good reason why games shouldn't work in every region."
There are, however, some very compelling bad reasons. The main being that intellectual monopoly products are not priced in free market competition, but priced depending on disposable income of the consumer group.
Without regions, the price for revenue maximization will be set for a global consumption group, which will create a less evenly distributed market cover.
This is an inevitable artefact of intellectual monopoly legislation (and any monopoly legislation), and until, and unless we get such legislation removed, we will continue seeing attempts to impose such artificial barriers in the pursuit of maximum revenue.
"You cannot set standards and control things without it."
Marketshare gains you little in the way of control unless you have the legal means to exclude competition. That's where intellectual monopoly legislation comes in and joins with marketshare to destroy any semblance of a free market.
"Fat stockholders will think this wonderful until someone else - the Chinese maybe - suddenly turns the tables and then we'll all be sorry."
No shit. Intellectual 'property' is our version of the soviet state factories, killing innovation and competition, leaving us hopelessly inefficient in the heavily monopolized sectors.
I suggest you contact the authors of Star Wreck: In the pirkinning.
A Star Trek/Star Wars crossover in Finnish should at least be quite a bit more entertaining than anything either of the franchises have managed lately.
"Distribution is a pre-requisite to sharing."
Yes, but copying and distributing isnt. It's the copying part that is enforcing and binding.
"That only one of us can read the book at any given time is irrelevant."
Unfortunately, no, it isnt irrelevant.
To truly comprehend copyright and its aspects, you need to separate and clear up certain fundamentals that are confusing at best and actively propagandized against by the ip lobby.
A physical incarnation of a copyrighted work is a specific piece of property. If you have purchased or otherwise legally obtained that piece of property, you are the owner of the property, _even the content_, but _only_ that copy.
Copyright is the right to control and restrict the copying of such pieces of property. Until and unless you enter into the territory of copying your property (or something else codified in copyright law), copyright generally does not apply. Shrinkwrap licenses are based on contract law, where you sign away additional rights that you have to your property, therefore they are much less certain to be enforcable.
One of the most illustrative aspects of these issues is when a copyrighted work lapses into public domain. Say you own a copy of a book that does that transition. One day you own the property but you're not allowed to copy it. The next day it's public domain, and you can do absolutely anything and everything you want with that book, including copying and distributing it. You can even keep it private and charge for showing it to people, _even_ tho the copyright is gone and it's in the public domain. It's _your_ property, content and all, and if no library stocked it for public replication, well, then, congrats, you are now the owner of a unique object and you can charge quite a lot for it, despite the contents public domain status.
However, had you signed a shrinkwrap license for the book, the shrinkwrap could still be valid after the copyright lapsed. The shrinkwrap is a contract, completely unrelated to the copyright. You could have a shrinkwrap specifying the ways you were allowed to sit in a chair, it would be just as valid as a software usage shrinkwrap (more or less; certain legal entities work on and try to encourage a theory that you cant run software without copying it from disk into memory, rendering any software use a binding copyright action).
There are a lot of interests trying to confuse the issue and claim that they actually own what's on your DVD and in your book, but the fact is, this far they dont. You own it, they just own the right to prevent you from copying the bits until that right expires.
"But if it were under the GPL, such would not be the case."
Yes it would. You can lend your particular copy of the GPL software to your friend, temporarily transferring that copy and all that entails to him. Copyright forbids him, and you, from copying it, but not from lending it, or selling it to him.
You become bound by the license if you _copy_ and distribute the copy. Before that the GPL and other copyright permissions do not apply (except insofar as certain disclaimers may or may not apply in appropriate jurisdictions).
No, there is no more 'big' thing, but this is not due to lack of innovation, but due to an abundance of communications.
... and as an interesting tidbit, did you know that the patent frequency in a country correlates better with divorce rates than it does with innovation rate? And that innovation correlates far better with communications infrastructure and education than it does with patent frequency?
Previously a thing could seem 'big' because either the inventor had kept it to himself until it had sufficient height to seem 'big', or because the distribution of knowledge was so small as to make natural synthesis of ideas revolutionary.
Now, the 'lone' innovator can innovate all he wants in his attic, but the fact is that the billion connected other people will likely out-innovate him by a matter of many, many orders of magnitude, rendering his 'big' step taking decades a series of smaller steps taking days or weeks, each step of which will appear insignificant.
'Big steps' these days are just a matter of you not being in the loop for a few weeks.
"I like that in order to get patents, companies have trade the knowledge in exchange for protection"
There are some advantages to the function of patents, and this is the one that stands out as the greatest advantage.
But the dilemma is a false one, we're not faced with a choice between monopoly or secrecey. There are many other ways we could accomplish the same thing; for example, we could scrap the monopoly part of patents and instead let the patent office hand out the money directly. That way the conflict of managing the actual cost of overgranting patents becomes an internal problem in the patent office, the budget for extra innovation incentive becomes an ordinary political fiscal issue, and the incentive to get the problem corrected falls squarely among patent holders, as they'd be the ones getting less money per valid patents if there were too many.
It's not an either/or proposition, we can have the good of the patent system without the bad, and we can have it in a way that doesnt damage a free market economy. Such non-monopoly systems of intellectual property incentives would also be extrordinarily friendly towards free software and small inventors, as such publishers/holders could be awarded a financial incentive _without_ having to take an antagonistic stand against their users.
"But I can't use that same repository, as a general rule, to install packages on a Debian system, for example."
:).
/lib and /usr/lib with your own versions, but make a wild guess exactly what that does to system stability and every other program on your system.
As a general rule, that's probably because the repository maintainers have a day job too
Really tho, I cant see any technical reasons why it would be impossible to manage. Currently, and traditionally, the packaging usually exists in the forms of a package maintainer who maintains packages for multiple platforms and repository maintainer maintains repositories of many packages for one platform, but you could merge the two and create a single standardized repository across multiple packages and platforms.
I understand that what you're getting at would be using the exact same repository index for every distribution, not merely a merged repository with per-distribution metatdata, but that would be difficult due to logistical problems. The package metadata is there to maintain system integrity, and system integrity state will vary, not for to 'compatibility' reasons, but simply because that's the price of the flexibility of staggered component version changes. That 'problem' exists between various versions of the same distribution, not merely between different distributions.
As a general rule, 'compatibility' will likely be higher between, say, various distributions from 2005, than between one distribution from 2000 compared to a 2005 version of the same distribution.
"What makes DLL hell such hell is not the incompatabilities"
Actually, the hell was caused by the fact and the way by which you could run applications on almost any version of the OS. The reason, you see, that you could do that was that every vendor tended to ship _their own versions_ of DLL's, which would then _overwrite_ the previous versions.
You could do that on linux too; simply write over
"Like I said, for most intents and purposes"
Mmm, for a very, _very_, wide definition of 'different' OS. If you would consider a strict dll version controlled version of Win 95 different OS from a strict dll version controlled version of Win 95 with Office installed, well, yes, then linux distributions could be considered different OS's. Usually, I place the 'different OS' somewhere around the general API compatibility level, but even that is sometimes a blurry line (compare Windows drivers usable under Linux, Windows programs usable under Linux, Linux programs under BSD, etc.).
"I think it is getting to the point (maybe it's always been this way) where Linux distributions are effectively different OS's."
Mmm, actually I find it's getting to the point that it's the other way around.
I find more and more tools crossmigrating between the platforms; these days on Fedora you can use yum, up2date and apt more or less seamlessly; heck, most repositories publish their packages for all of the managers, and most other distributions work the same way.
"Slightly different library versions that makes sharing dynamically linked binaries problematic."
Slightly different library versions makes sharing dynamically linked binaries difficult even on different patchlevels on the same OS. DLL hell ring a bell?
It's a problem as old as the idea of dynamic linking, and different versions of libraries do not a new OS make. The solution for proprietary vendors who dont want the pain of related support is to ship statically linked binaries, and the solution for the rest of us is to stay away from proprietary vendors as their products end up horrendously bloated.
So, frankly, I think it's going in the right direction.
"Maybe if the Linux community started listening to what users are SAYING they want"
The Linux community is listening to what users are saying. Maybe you missed that, but the entire issue here is that Dell is _not_ a user.
Personally I'm perfectly happy using it as it is. I frankly dont give a crap about Dell, if the boxes they ship arent tested with Linux, then the boxes arent on my approved hardware list. It's not like there arent alternatives.
Yes, there are many distributions, basically it's one big incestous hive of cross-contaminated monstrosities, like evolution on speed. They all listen to their users and all adopt and cross-adopt, re-evolve and split, more rapidly than any single-cell OS can. Perhaps Dell finds that scary and wants to keep dealing with the predictable amoeba (which is evident in other aspects of Dell's business), but that just means that Dell is caught in and with an evolutionary dead end and will find his world dwindling while the rest of us go on our way. He can adapt, or he can crawl into a corner and shrivel up, but telling the rest of the world to stop evolving and changing simply isnt on the menu.
"If a company can produce a network that has the coverage of verizon without all the crap"
This is one of the fundamental reasons why you are sometimes better off with public infrastructure. Instead of five networks covering the dense areas and barely one covering less dense areas you just pay once for building the entire network and then let the service providers battle it out on services.
Having the service providers own the infrastructure is like having oil companies provide the roads and cars. Imagine having five roads to your house in the 'burbs, where you're only allowed to use one, depending on your brand of gas, then try to drive to your cabin in the woods, only to have no road at all there.
And to think how close we were to not getting the internet, but rather ending up with a few large everything-in-one providers...
"If you have everything in your life where you want it and you enjoy a game and want to "splurge" and buy gold so you don't have to spend a massive amount of time doing "less fun" tasks then why not?"
Because if you have to spend a massive amount of time doing something that is less fun in the game, then the game is _broken_. I dont splurge on something fun, only to have to splurge even more to get what I paid for from the beginning.
The whole game is virtual. It doesnt actually _take_ weeks of hard work to create that epic steed, it takes a billionth of a second worth of database updates, and the one single reason you cant it at once is because the game is designed that way. Paying to work around it doesnt solve the actual problem, it just excaberates it.
You realize the person that you pay for the gold, assuming they dont exploit a bug or have admin access, actually has to spend time doing that 'boring' part, taking them away from pursuits that could theoretically create actual wealth for society as a whole, rather than catering to a design defect in a game?
At least, when you buy those 'latest design shoes', you're paying for something that actually cannot be created in a millisecond, thus at least partly creating something resembling actual wealth.
The shoes cannot be created at the press of a key. The gold can. By paying for the gold instead of the shoes, the shoes go uncreated, while someone spends weeks doing something utterly unnecessary. Can you see the difference?
"Money has no intrinsic value in and of itself,"
In a simulated economy without controlled scarcity, it sure doesnt.
"If buying some money in a virtual world lets me enjoy my time there"
Um, you're paying to not spend your time there.
If the game is so grossly defective that you have to pay extra to fix deficiencies that prevent you from enjoying it I'd say you need to file a complaint with customer support. I mean, if they told you, yes you can play, but if you want the not-randomly-disconnected token, you have to pay extra, would you? Hmm, maybe get the Steed of Less Lag too, on sale this week?
"Sure... but if you don't enjoy your life what good does having more money do you?"
It can be used to pay for anti-depressants and therapy once the initial deprogramming is done with.
Frankly, even while I've enjoyed several MMORPG's myself, sometimes the line between social game and addiction/cult becomes a bit thin...
Hmmm... that reminds me, long time since I played Evercrack... wonder if my chars are still there, and what the value of a plat is these days... must... get... uber... gear...
Actually it takes no more than a few milliseconds to get 500 gold in WoW;
UPDATE Character
SET Gold = 500
WHERE Charname = "Oper"
Tada.
Any object in an MMORPG is essentially worthless in an economic sense; the scarcity is completely artifical and controlled by the operators and anyone who can hack the system. Merging such an economy with a real world economy is exceptionally irrational, as what you actually get for your money is an incentive for people to spend their time subverting and destroying the game economy, if not outright cracking into it or willfully abusing administrative privilidges or even systematically padding the bottom line of the actual company.
Would you buy counterfeit currency on Ebay if you saw it advertized? Have you considered the economic implications of buying counterfeit currency? This isnt that different.
Do something more constructive with your money. I mean, if you truly enjoy paying to get screwed, it's not like there arent options.
"I always think of how it can cost 99 cents to download a full song from iTunes... but then a ringtone... costs 3 dollars"
That's because p2p networks still keeps prices on downloads down.
Pricing on copyrighted material isnt set relative to costs, it's set relative to available capital for purchases. If the consumers get more money, then the prices will rise, regardless of actual costs. The only 'competition' there is is illicit copying.
The DOJ suing the labels for 'collusion to keep prices up' is rather ironic and just shows how far from reality the concept of IP has gone.
To the attorney general: Yes, of course there is price fixing and collusion to keep the price up. It's in the damn code of law. Look under the heading 'digital millenium copyright act' in your own bookshelf and you'll find all the evidence you need. 'Keeping the prices up' was the whole point of it.
Considering pretty much any 4 minute piece on any topic you know anything about usually can be described as bovine feces, I dont think that's an unreasonable precaution.
On the other hand, the piece sort of alludes to a valid concern; the rampant criminalization of common activities like filesharing creates a strong evolutionary pressure for concealing common activities. It's like the overuse of antibiotics leading to bacterial resistance and creating superbacteria.
Fighting such evolution is inevitably futile; the only way to slow the process down is to lower the evolutionary pressure and hope the undesired strains get outcompeted by the not quite so undesired strains; if you dont classify filesharing as illegal, most filesharing programs wont adopt encryption and anonymity; it would be a waste of resources that could get spent on better search or UI. Conversely, make filesharing illegal and development and demand will be directed towards making it encrypted and untraceable.
Copyrights arent property rights. They are state protected monopoly rights and are in their essense incompatible with a liberal market view. Calling it 'intellectual property' is simply a misnomer intented to cause exactly the kind of confusion you've fallen victim to.
Intellectual monopoly rights restrict what the owner of a piece of property is allowed to do with that property. The GPL essentially restores those rights to the owner of any copy, and prevents further re-restriction. That fundamentally supports the essense of the free market and competition, and cannot be described as either socialist or communitarian except in their broadest egalitarian aspect.
"The government has no right or reason to insure or protect the profit of a privately owned business"
Well, 'intellectual property' is, essentially, taxation rights handed out to private interests. So, it's not like it's a new thing.
Frankly, I think a general tax would be far superior to copyright in economic performance. But change it to a percentage of salesprice, like VAT, and apply it across all distribution, blank media or not, say five percent. A few cents off a blank CD, a lot more off a commercial finished product.
Big bad corporations want to make money off music? Well, go ahead, take whatever you want, but part of your profits will be taxed and distributed to the original _creators_. Sell music over the internet? Sure, that's free too, but again part of your profits go to the creators.
Such a system would be far more compatible with a free market and competition than the current monopoly rights based one, and it would generate far better dividends for the creators of material.
All of which goes to prove that a conflict based exclusive rights patent system is inherently flawed and serve no useful purpose.
An attribution system where incentive is granted as a government payout instead wouldnt be subject to the same problem; NTP wouldnt be able to block RIM's use; RIM wouldnt have a reason not to claim use of NTP's invention. RIM would simply report use of the invention, and the incentive would be paid.
The whole system conflict is moved to the internals of the patent office instead; the more patents they grant the smaller each incentive payout becomes; either they have to grant better and fewer patents or they have to obtain higher funding for the incentive system (which would be subject to the ordinary political control.
"Will it reduce the cost as no one will be able to pirate anymore - No, This will be hacked within a few months of it coming out the same way CSS was"
Monopolistic pricing is adjusted upwards with increased demand; the amortization of production cost over units is utterly irrelevant to pricing. IE; piracy is one of the factors keeping the price down.
"Of course it can be done - humans somehow do it, and we do it tremendously well."
Depending on what you mean by 'well'. How many times have you passed right by someone you know, and how many times have you seen someone you think you recognize in a crowd, but it turned out to be someone just looking like them?
Even if the human brain is tremendously good at facial recognition, the problem simply grows too fast when both population and match-set grows. Personally I suspect there simply is such a large overlap in variations within the appearance of a single individual and between individuals that you'll never get rid of the false positive/negative problem, and thus end up with either a system that changes your apparent identity depending on your facial expression and amount of stubble, or one that identifies five thousand copies of the same individual across the country.
"Free, RELIABLE wi-fi is not available in nearly as many areas in the U.S. as even T-Mobile cell phone coverage."
And cheap, reliable cell coverage is not available in nearly as many areas in the US as Iridium satellite phone.
That doesnt keep the cellphones cheap good-enough coverage from wiping the floor with the satellite solution.
The fact is, the vast majority of revenue is from people who roam between one or two places; home and work, mostly covered by wi-fi. The writing's been on the wall for this one a long time; the coming drop in revenue that the operators will face as good-enough free coverage kills their cash cow and they're reduced to the revenue from low-coverage areas will wreck havoc with their business model.