"There is no true transational political expression today, perhaps with the exception of the "Greens"."
Well, actually, I think there is, as expressed in the parliamentary groups in the EU parliament. The parties cooperate more than we get told.
However, the media mostly utterly and completely fails to report EU politics (they only report national EU politics), and the local governments have a tendency to blame 'the EU' for things they themselves voted through council or lobbied the commission for.
It must be damn practical for a lot of national politicians to have a scapegoat like the EU.
I wonder how long it will take before the parliament drives a revolution, kicking out dangerously corruptible, interest-conflicted and unaccountable council and commission.
Indeed. Lets have the professional administrators doing the science and the professional scientists doing administration. That sure ought to improve efficiency.
Face it, a good administrator knows how to listen to the people he's in charge of, and let them make the decisions about things he's not an expert at. His job is to facilitate their ability to do their job and manage relations between his bosses and his employees in the way causing the least friction, keeping both eggheads and moneymen happy, if he's good at what he does.
While there are good science trained administrators and good administrator trained scientists, they probably werent very dedicated to those fields if they chose another path advancing in the hierachy, making the training irrelevant compared to the other skills required.
Frankly, I think most movie and tv downloading is simply the result of failures in distribution. Most people I know download stuff do it because there is no possible legal way for them to obtain the material at a reasonable price, due to region issues, cable or satellite channels not being available, etc. Like you say, the collectors will buy the DVD's _either way_, and the one-time watchers will rent the video. As long as it's actually available for rental.
Perhaps compulsory licensing would be a good idea to add to copyright law. If there's no reasonable way (as in, similar to the terms under what the material is distributed to other customers) for a consumer to purchase or otherwise obtain the material, there would be no possible lost sale and thus no case for copyright infringement.
The longterm goal, of course, is to take the soldier out of the loop. A soldier can refuse to flip that release switch when ordered to open fire upon his own countrymen. This is not optimal for our dear leaders.
It's just laziness, as it's technically trivial to solve. On a read-only media there's no reason to refuse ejecting. If there are open files, just _read_ them and cache them in memory if you want to be really nice about it.
"Nope, they are being broadcast at the cost of you watching the commercials"
Not really. If you take a look at exactly what shows are mostly downloaded you'll notice that the vast majority is stuff that is available until later, or isnt available _at all_ in many countries.
The network execs could, if they had a braincell or two between them, take the damn hint and syncronize distribution and make these shows available where people wanted them, and they wouldnt have this problem.
This isnt money lost. This is opportunity squandered, because there are a whole lot of people who'd pay for cable channels showing these shows or watch commercials, but they have no way at all to get the shows they want to see for any reasonable amount of money.
"they are being hurt in the hardware arena by Linux"
They're not being hurt in the hardware arena by Linux. They're being hurt in the hardware arena by x86 primarily, and everyone else after that. Mainly because their performance has been dismal for several years.
If it wasnt Linux eating their lunch, it would be Microsoft. The sales they're losing to linux would be lost _anyway_, except were they lost to Microsoft they would be forever beyond Sun, as the applications would be ported to Microsoft software platforms.
As long software moves within the Unix compatible sphere, Sun can get their act together and compete in the future, but once it moves off that will be far more difficult.
Sun would do well to realize that before they get stabbed in the back by Microsoft.
"the cost of hardware and software license is nothing compared to that"
Until the day you have customers complaining that their laptops gets stuff done faster than the new 8 way Sparc in your computer room.
At which point defending Sun starts becoming fairly taxing.
Suns problem isnt the cost of their hardware and software. Suns problem is that the hardware and software just aint that hot any more. They've spent too much time and effort mouthing off rather than keeping up their engineering, and they havent been able to form a coherent strategy lasting more than a few months for the last five years.
"How would you prevent a broadcaster in New York City from sending their signal into New Jersey and Connecticut?"
The same way one usually prevents signals from crossing national borders?
That is, not at all.
Really, broadcast signals and administrative borders arent a new thing. Wether or not it's a good idea is another thing, but it's not that much of an issue.
"guaranteed that no *human* entity would get to look at your data"
Without a signed contract and Google declaring itself a sovereign nation it's not like such a guarantee can be guaranteed beyond the next board meeting or court order.
Well, frankly, I think the actual announcement from Microsoft is just random PR in response to a recent Gartner report on the issue of IPods in the workplace, rather than any specific concern. The topic appears to be slightly hyped for the moment.
The actual long-term plan for Microsoft i think is palladium integration, which would likely mean some form of partial or whole sandboxing of untrusted content like that, but that would be more or less entirely unrelated to USB itself. And that's probably several years away.
The idea is to prevent people from stealing corporate data via USB devices, as sources have noted that there has apparently been a huge upsurge in data smuggling by use of rectally insertable USB devices.
Now, some may say that there are other more practical ways of stealing data, like mailing it, ftp'ing it, dumping it over a http connection, reading it from a wlan or something, but as these things require a bit more thought than merely shoving the data up your arse, they are widely regarded as being unlikely security holes, so to speak. Others say that people have had access to cd's, floppy disks and printouts for a long time without data smuggling being a problem needing an industry-wide solution, but they apparently have not tried rectal insertion of these media.
So to nip this problem in the bud, we need a new USB standard. The only alternative would be supergluing every corporate employees arse shut to prevent this flow of intellectual property out from offices around the world.
"So a product without a competitor is no different from an open source product."
Actually, it's far, far worse, as there's an immediate commercial disincentive to security development.
It costs money.
Someone may do code reviews for free or for fame on opensource, but nobody is going to review commercial proprietary closed source without a fat paycheck.
As long as there is no serious competition any money spent on security is wasted money. And once security becomes a selling point it's most likely much more cost effective to market the perception that the product is secure, rather than actually securing the product. Claim 'blah blah methods, blah blah secure, blah blah focus, blah'. Say it's all the evil hackers abusing your product because it's popular, etc.
A few marketdroids are far cheaper than having your programmers spending half their time doing code reviews.
"which release of Fedora...which version of Redhat?"
Which release of Windows? 98SE? ME? 2000? XP? Pro? Which servicepacks? With what patches?
You're inventing a problem that frankly isnt real. Most commercial non-opensource Linux programs run as well today as they did five years ago.
The trick, if you're desperate to avoid system update conflicts, is called static linking and it works just fine.
It's not like shared library version issues is a new or linux-only problem.
And if you're talking actual enterprise-level 'we'll help you fix this' support, that's never a problem. You support what's profitable to support and ignore any segments too small to sell profitable support to.
"They're claiming that it's a piracy concern, but what's the ratio of pirates vs. normal users?"
As long as the 'normal user' option has a twelve inch mandatory rectal penetrator included, the media corps are ensuring there will be a lot of pirates.
... are pretty much about to get killed by fibre and PVR/internet based desired-content-only distributon.
Satellite economics stink when all you have are the three customers living in the boondocks nowhere paying to support your entire infrastructure, as everyone else goes groundbased.
And 1500 channels are pointless as people with PVR's are discovering. What consumers want isnt something good somewhere maybe, on one channel, pretty _please_, but what _I_ want to see, _now_.
It's really not that complicated. You read the forums. You see if anyone has gotten the game you want to play working. If nobody has, chances are it probably wont work. If somebody has gotten it working, and they specify how, then you can be reasonably sure to manage it too, with some work.
If you actually bother to check the state of the games you want to play you'll find performance _is_ rather consistent.
"I shouldn't have to spend hours at a time trying to get acceptable performance out of games I *already* paid for once"
Sortof like installing windows and spending hours at a time reinstalling it, and the correct versions of video drivers and direct X to get acceptable performance out of games you already paid for once, isnt it?
That's the point. Good for you that you get that. Because we successfully do prevent just that kind of exploitation without resorting to blanket toll barriers against countries. Which means we can successfully prevent selective conditions that democratic western nations would never accept at home.
"You're saying the rich nations should band together and keep the poor nations poor -- "for their own good", of course, whether they like it or not."
No. I'm saying the citizens of the democratic rich nations need to band together to prevent the interest groups interested in keeping the poor nations poor from doing that.
Globalization is good, necessary and unavoidable, but it needs to happen with all the parts of the market, not merely capital and goods.
"We got those things in the US after we industrialized, because that's when we could afford them."
Bullshit. If 'afford' was any major consideration for labour rights and worker protection we still wouldnt have it. And, as it is, the workers in question are about to lose those things as the jobs are exported to places without them. Because the corporate leadership feels it cant 'afford' those things.
All this is about legal enforcement of minimum standards.
"You're all fools anyway for talking like there's any solution to this."
Ah, that's why so many large corporations successfully exploit whipped child workers in slave factories, right? There just isnt any way to prevent them when they're hell-bent on reducing costs?
Face it, there are any number of solutions to these problems. There are just strong interest groups who do not wish these problems solved as it would make screwing the vast majority of the world, employees and stockholders of the corporations in question included, much more difficult.
"There is nothing you can do."
Yes we can. We can globalize the social structures protecting the vast majority of the population of the democratic western states from the worst forms of exploitation. There's nothing saying we have to import goods made from sweatshop labour just because we want to import goods from another country. There's nothing saying we have to allow movement of capital, production and goods without allowing movement of labour at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no true transational political expression today, perhaps with the exception of the "Greens"."
Well, actually, I think there is, as expressed in the parliamentary groups in the EU parliament. The parties cooperate more than we get told.
However, the media mostly utterly and completely fails to report EU politics (they only report national EU politics), and the local governments have a tendency to blame 'the EU' for things they themselves voted through council or lobbied the commission for.
It must be damn practical for a lot of national politicians to have a scapegoat like the EU.
I wonder how long it will take before the parliament drives a revolution, kicking out dangerously corruptible, interest-conflicted and unaccountable council and commission.
Indeed. Lets have the professional administrators doing the science and the professional scientists doing administration. That sure ought to improve efficiency.
Face it, a good administrator knows how to listen to the people he's in charge of, and let them make the decisions about things he's not an expert at. His job is to facilitate their ability to do their job and manage relations between his bosses and his employees in the way causing the least friction, keeping both eggheads and moneymen happy, if he's good at what he does.
While there are good science trained administrators and good administrator trained scientists, they probably werent very dedicated to those fields if they chose another path advancing in the hierachy, making the training irrelevant compared to the other skills required.
Frankly, I think most movie and tv downloading is simply the result of failures in distribution. Most people I know download stuff do it because there is no possible legal way for them to obtain the material at a reasonable price, due to region issues, cable or satellite channels not being available, etc. Like you say, the collectors will buy the DVD's _either way_, and the one-time watchers will rent the video. As long as it's actually available for rental.
Perhaps compulsory licensing would be a good idea to add to copyright law. If there's no reasonable way (as in, similar to the terms under what the material is distributed to other customers) for a consumer to purchase or otherwise obtain the material, there would be no possible lost sale and thus no case for copyright infringement.
The longterm goal, of course, is to take the soldier out of the loop. A soldier can refuse to flip that release switch when ordered to open fire upon his own countrymen. This is not optimal for our dear leaders.
It's just laziness, as it's technically trivial to solve. On a read-only media there's no reason to refuse ejecting. If there are open files, just _read_ them and cache them in memory if you want to be really nice about it.
"Nope, they are being broadcast at the cost of you watching the commercials"
Not really. If you take a look at exactly what shows are mostly downloaded you'll notice that the vast majority is stuff that is available until later, or isnt available _at all_ in many countries.
The network execs could, if they had a braincell or two between them, take the damn hint and syncronize distribution and make these shows available where people wanted them, and they wouldnt have this problem.
This isnt money lost. This is opportunity squandered, because there are a whole lot of people who'd pay for cable channels showing these shows or watch commercials, but they have no way at all to get the shows they want to see for any reasonable amount of money.
"they are being hurt in the hardware arena by Linux"
They're not being hurt in the hardware arena by Linux. They're being hurt in the hardware arena by x86 primarily, and everyone else after that. Mainly because their performance has been dismal for several years.
If it wasnt Linux eating their lunch, it would be Microsoft. The sales they're losing to linux would be lost _anyway_, except were they lost to Microsoft they would be forever beyond Sun, as the applications would be ported to Microsoft software platforms.
As long software moves within the Unix compatible sphere, Sun can get their act together and compete in the future, but once it moves off that will be far more difficult.
Sun would do well to realize that before they get stabbed in the back by Microsoft.
"the cost of hardware and software license is nothing compared to that"
Until the day you have customers complaining that their laptops gets stuff done faster than the new 8 way Sparc in your computer room.
At which point defending Sun starts becoming fairly taxing.
Suns problem isnt the cost of their hardware and software. Suns problem is that the hardware and software just aint that hot any more. They've spent too much time and effort mouthing off rather than keeping up their engineering, and they havent been able to form a coherent strategy lasting more than a few months for the last five years.
"How would you prevent a broadcaster in New York City from sending their signal into New Jersey and Connecticut?"
The same way one usually prevents signals from crossing national borders?
That is, not at all.
Really, broadcast signals and administrative borders arent a new thing. Wether or not it's a good idea is another thing, but it's not that much of an issue.
"guaranteed that no *human* entity would get to look at your data"
Without a signed contract and Google declaring itself a sovereign nation it's not like such a guarantee can be guaranteed beyond the next board meeting or court order.
Because solar cells are horribly expensive, and the roof of a car isnt exactly the safest place to put expensive breakable and/or stealable stuff.
Currently it's just not worth it.
... and consolidate your network infrastructure on VMware or something similar.
Well, frankly, I think the actual announcement from Microsoft is just random PR in response to a recent Gartner report on the issue of IPods in the workplace, rather than any specific concern. The topic appears to be slightly hyped for the moment.
The actual long-term plan for Microsoft i think is palladium integration, which would likely mean some form of partial or whole sandboxing of untrusted content like that, but that would be more or less entirely unrelated to USB itself. And that's probably several years away.
The idea is to prevent people from stealing corporate data via USB devices, as sources have noted that there has apparently been a huge upsurge in data smuggling by use of rectally insertable USB devices.
Now, some may say that there are other more practical ways of stealing data, like mailing it, ftp'ing it, dumping it over a http connection, reading it from a wlan or something, but as these things require a bit more thought than merely shoving the data up your arse, they are widely regarded as being unlikely security holes, so to speak. Others say that people have had access to cd's, floppy disks and printouts for a long time without data smuggling being a problem needing an industry-wide solution, but they apparently have not tried rectal insertion of these media.
So to nip this problem in the bud, we need a new USB standard. The only alternative would be supergluing every corporate employees arse shut to prevent this flow of intellectual property out from offices around the world.
"So a product without a competitor is no different from an open source product."
Actually, it's far, far worse, as there's an immediate commercial disincentive to security development.
It costs money.
Someone may do code reviews for free or for fame on opensource, but nobody is going to review commercial proprietary closed source without a fat paycheck.
As long as there is no serious competition any money spent on security is wasted money. And once security becomes a selling point it's most likely much more cost effective to market the perception that the product is secure, rather than actually securing the product. Claim 'blah blah methods, blah blah secure, blah blah focus, blah'. Say it's all the evil hackers abusing your product because it's popular, etc.
A few marketdroids are far cheaper than having your programmers spending half their time doing code reviews.
"which release of Fedora...which version of Redhat?"
Which release of Windows? 98SE? ME? 2000? XP? Pro? Which servicepacks? With what patches?
You're inventing a problem that frankly isnt real. Most commercial non-opensource Linux programs run as well today as they did five years ago.
The trick, if you're desperate to avoid system update conflicts, is called static linking and it works just fine.
It's not like shared library version issues is a new or linux-only problem.
And if you're talking actual enterprise-level 'we'll help you fix this' support, that's never a problem. You support what's profitable to support and ignore any segments too small to sell profitable support to.
Well, when it comes to Sun and x86 you only have to miss their strategy-of-the-week briefing to be 'out of touch'.
I'll be taking Solaris on anything but Sparc seriously when Sun manages to go a few years without discontinuing it.
"If they don't want to get maimed or killed, maybe they should have picked a different job."
Does that go for any policemen, firemen, small children, spouses, relatives, housesitters, etc, who might actually have a reason to be there too?
Or have you invented a new form of trap that magically springs only on the guilty?
Cheney?
"They're claiming that it's a piracy concern, but what's the ratio of pirates vs. normal users?"
As long as the 'normal user' option has a twelve inch mandatory rectal penetrator included, the media corps are ensuring there will be a lot of pirates.
Most people enjoy media more without rippage.
... are pretty much about to get killed by fibre and PVR/internet based desired-content-only distributon.
Satellite economics stink when all you have are the three customers living in the boondocks nowhere paying to support your entire infrastructure, as everyone else goes groundbased.
And 1500 channels are pointless as people with PVR's are discovering. What consumers want isnt something good somewhere maybe, on one channel, pretty _please_, but what _I_ want to see, _now_.
It's really not that complicated. You read the forums. You see if anyone has gotten the game you want to play working. If nobody has, chances are it probably wont work. If somebody has gotten it working, and they specify how, then you can be reasonably sure to manage it too, with some work.
If you actually bother to check the state of the games you want to play you'll find performance _is_ rather consistent.
"I shouldn't have to spend hours at a time trying to get acceptable performance out of games I *already* paid for once"
Sortof like installing windows and spending hours at a time reinstalling it, and the correct versions of video drivers and direct X to get acceptable performance out of games you already paid for once, isnt it?
"Name one other commerical program..."
Well, Windows would get close to qualifying...
It's a sad state of computers we have.
"Your little outburst would've been fallacious"
That's the point. Good for you that you get that. Because we successfully do prevent just that kind of exploitation without resorting to blanket toll barriers against countries. Which means we can successfully prevent selective conditions that democratic western nations would never accept at home.
"You're saying the rich nations should band together and keep the poor nations poor -- "for their own good", of course, whether they like it or not."
No. I'm saying the citizens of the democratic rich nations need to band together to prevent the interest groups interested in keeping the poor nations poor from doing that.
Globalization is good, necessary and unavoidable, but it needs to happen with all the parts of the market, not merely capital and goods.
"Achieving equilibrium can take longer than your natural life"
Oh, you can be pretty much guaranteed it will. There is no profit in allowing equilibrium to be reached.
"We got those things in the US after we industrialized, because that's when we could afford them."
Bullshit. If 'afford' was any major consideration for labour rights and worker protection we still wouldnt have it. And, as it is, the workers in question are about to lose those things as the jobs are exported to places without them. Because the corporate leadership feels it cant 'afford' those things.
All this is about legal enforcement of minimum standards.
"You're all fools anyway for talking like there's any solution to this."
Ah, that's why so many large corporations successfully exploit whipped child workers in slave factories, right? There just isnt any way to prevent them when they're hell-bent on reducing costs?
Face it, there are any number of solutions to these problems. There are just strong interest groups who do not wish these problems solved as it would make screwing the vast majority of the world, employees and stockholders of the corporations in question included, much more difficult.
"There is nothing you can do."
Yes we can. We can globalize the social structures protecting the vast majority of the population of the democratic western states from the worst forms of exploitation. There's nothing saying we have to import goods made from sweatshop labour just because we want to import goods from another country. There's nothing saying we have to allow movement of capital, production and goods without allowing movement of labour at the same time.