I refuse to stop using my real address wherever I want to because of spam.
Congrats, man! I am of the same opinion. And like you, I have a vigilant network admin who blocks spam senders and abused open relays. That makes the remaining amount of spam manageable. So maybe I am lucky, but as a matter of principle I refuse to give up rights, freedoms and territory to the bad guys because it is thought to be prudent to do so. It is not.
Maybe the globalization of the free market has its good side after all? Make works PD in some (important) part of the world and then sell from there to the entire planet. Forget local unrealistic, monopolistic, consumer-unfriendly copywright extension laws. The free market will steamroller them all.
Absolutely! Safety IS in numbers! Look at the big picture, find consensus opinions and interesting REAL datapoints, such as specific likes or dislikes, personal experiences, etc. Read at least 5 reviews if there are this many.
Me, I count the occasional very negative review as positive because it shows that someone with an axe to grind took the time to let off steam, or whatever. Conversely, the gushing, but vague five star review is worthless because it does not contain any information worth knowing. I do get alarmed if most reviews are lukewarm.
It is far more likely that, rather than trying to make you "buy the White Album again" they are simply taking less risk on their new venture. Ever notice how old well-selling CDs don't cost as much as newer CDs? It's because they've already made a lot of money on those albums and can lower the price to possibly get more customers.
The lower price is probably rather so that the record company can screw the artist and keep more profit. Most recording and/or publishing contracts are written such that royalties are tiered, e.g. full royalty rate for albums sold at full price, half royalties for albums sold at a discount (i.e. costing $14.99 instead of $17.99), NO royalties if sold through bargain bins. Few artists except for major acts are savvy enough and have good enough lawyers to notice and fight this.
Now add to this the customary practice to reduce royalty rates for 'new media'. You guessed it, digital downloads are new media. The record companies justify such nonsense with things like "it's a risk for us to put out works on new, untested media". Through most of the 80s CDs were regarded as new media.Yeah, right!
One more kicker: Most publishing contracts contain language to assign all rights to songs to the company for use not spelled out specifically in the contract. Your song ends up on a movie soundtrack or on a compilation album? Sorry, you get nada.
This is why all that posturing of the RIAA and the individual record companies in the name of the artists is BS. They couldn't care less.
I respect Bill Wyman, the former Rolling Stone a lot (hey I am a bass player, too...) but I do hope that the journalist Bill Wyman wins this one. He had the name first, didn't change it ever and registered the domain name first. And, being a journalist, he does not infringe on any trademark Bill Wyman, the former Stone may own, because there is precious little overlap between their respective trades, however much they may depend on each other.
Bass player Bill Wyman can always register billwyman.com if he hasn't done so already.
this was the Register's translation of the letter from EMI, not the actual German text
Germany has a slightly different culture
I read the German original and part of the Register's translation. The translation did not strike me as way off (note: German is my mother tongue and English my day-to-day language for the past 15 years). It is interesting, however, that the translation comes across blunter than the German original.
Germany does have a different culture, yes, and moreover, German discourse and writings sometimes sound stiff, blunt, crude or outright rude to foreign ears. This example, though, wasn't bad at all, but it's arrogance and only slightly veiled abuse of the customer was unusual.
What I find especially galling is the bit about EMI collecting problem cases and providing feedback to the copy protection provider.
Well, nice, but they forget that the CD I bought is write-once and the copy protection on it will never improve. I doubt that improved copy protection schemes will find its way onto later pressings of the same CD, unless the CD is entirely reissued. There is absolutely no way to fix the copy protection on existing CDs.
What I am left with, then, if I happen to be the owner of a 'problem' player is the choice of being stuck with a severely crippled CD (as documented by the original sender of the email to EMI, whose DVD player only saw tracks 1 through 8), or return the CD for a refund. No way I can legally access all of the CD unless I buy additional hardware or unless EMI chooses to issue an 'improved' CD and I am content to wait for that.
So, while EMI's statement sounds good superficially, it actually documents their absolute lack of regard for their customers, because they'll never be able to fix intentionally broken goods.
Re:There are ways to burn whatever you hear. . .
on
Burn A Song For 99 Cents
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Correct, but I'd much rather have a service that works right out of the box and allows what we need/wish/want/do anyway. It's called customer service and customer satisfaction.
Yes, interest rates on rental properties are higher in general. However, many small time investors first live in the house and thus lock in a low residential rate. Then we move and rent out the property, still enjoying the low interest mortgage. In most cases the bank cannot do anything about it.
Now concerning the rent we charge: It would be nice if it worked the way you describe (well, nice from a purely investment perspective; however I also have a conscience, but that's another matter). There's this thing called market. I can charge what the market will bear, no more, but possibly less. If my own costs are higher than what the market will bear, tough shit. I'll just live with the loss.
In practice I lost ~$400 per month on my rental for the first year. In the second year (now), thanks to a combination of lower interest rates, higher rent, vastly increased property value and refinancing I am breaking even on the fixed costs. I am still loosing money when I factor in maintenance. In the near future I expect that rent increases will cover all my costs.
And before anyone labels me a heartless pig: The rent increases I charge are LESS than the average general rent increase in the local market. As I said above, I do have a conscience, too, and I try to strike a balance between pure investing/business and being socially concious. I have actually been called a party pooper by a fellow landlord because I am alledgedly responsible for keeping rents lower in my neighborhood than they could be. Regardless, it works for me and I wouldn't put my money elsewhere or change my attitude.
Myth: PCs have caught up, even surpassed the top-end SGI workstations.
However, we are talking about IRIX here, i.e. software. IRIX supports this internal bandwidth exceptionally well. An SGI box running IRIX can sustain such bandwidth with real world applications. And it has done so for years.
Five (5!) years ago I talked to an SGI engineer who configured an SGI server to suck down satellite data at 7 GB/s sustained over days and weeks. It was not hard to put the server together, and the OS didn't need any tweaking. Show me any single-system Intel box that can do that now, or even any Intel cluster, for that matter.
So, while your recent PC may have great peak bandwidth, I bet any OS - even the beloved Linux - will not easily let it sustain this data rate.
Now, whether most of us really need those sustained data rates is another matter altogether. But on the other hand, do all of us really need 2.8 GHz CPUs?
That's pretty much how fast they go. My sons' Bit Char-G cars might be a bit faster,actually. Anyway, given the size of the cars, it still looks fast enough when you see them whizz across the floor.
You got to keep in mind that the 'motor' is actually a modified pager vibrator, at least in the Bit Car-G models. Not much power there! But a neat adaptation of technology that was intended for a very different purpose.
Actually, Bit Char-G cars can be bought from US suppliers, too. My sons have had theirs for three months now. I don't remember the URL of the supplier, but it was in NY. Just search Google, that's where my oldest found them.
Out here in CA my sons have been well ahead of the curve for a couple of months at least. But that's all you need when you're a teenager... Now with RadioShack carrying such cars everyone will jump on the bandwagon.
I strongly agree with your observation. I think, however, that the bigger problem is at the middle school level. I have had three talented kids in middle school over the past few years, and let me tell you, the entire administrataive staff, from the principal to the counselors to the admins seem to be deadly afraid of math. Actually, I even think the entire educational establishment is afraid of math.
In middle school (at least here in CA) they make the kids go through a prealgebra class. What this is in practice is a bunch of half-assed algebra and geometry where lots of concepts are quickly shown, never fully explained and definitely never exercised. So kids get to see simple equations, sort of try to solve them, but never discuss in depth how one approaches solving equations. In my opinion (and I am sure most mathematicians, scientists and engineers would agree) math at this level is simply a collection of concepts and rules, and these things need to be explained, learned and exercised. No amount of tinkering and tip-toeing can take away that fact. The educators of course claim that their approach gently exposes kids to advanced math issues and lets them mature until they are ready to grasp real algebra. I believe that these educators are simply projecting their own fear and loathing of math onto the kids.
What happens in such prealgebra classes is that many kids will pay just enough attention to coast along. They can actually get As without really understanding the subject matter. At the end of the year, they take an algebra readiness test which is supposed to tell whether they should be promoted to proper algebra or do the prealgebra again. This test along with a teacher recommendation determines a kid's fate for the next few years.
Now, if a kid is forced to do prealgebra once again, what does any normal 12 year old do? Completely turn away from math and claim it sucks! Can't blame them. I believe countless reasonably talented kids are lost in this stupid system and end up hating math and achieving a lot less than they could math-wise. And if you turn away from a subject at the middle school level, that is pretty much it in this highly demanding and competitive system.
As to my own children, I stomped into the counselors office every year and demanded placement in algebra after the first year in prealgebra. (Predictably, they had not aced the algebra readiness test and/or not impressed their teacher enough, and hadn't been promoted to algebra). Needless to say that they had no trouble to catch on with real algebra and bring home good grades, mostly As. So much for 'readiness'. Can't claim they love math, but they tackle it with the same level of dedication they have for most other subjects, which is fine by me.
Correct, but now imagine cheap (well, affordable) UWB based radars available a few years down the road. Even if they'll be banned from the US market based on rulings like the one you cite, they'll be available from other sources. I live just 30 minutes from the Mexican border where I can get all sorts of illegal high-tech gadgets.
It still makes me uneasy. If the police can't use them, other government agencies may still use them. Can you say Patriot Act? Not to mention private individuals with various strange motivations.
I disagree. While you are correct about IE components being used for a variety of apps, this still locks you into a proprietary world. I don't know whether IE-based apps are even crossplatform Win/Mac. With Mozilla we have complete platform independance and working implementations on all Windows flavors, MacOS 9 and X, Linux and various Unix offerings.
But that's beside the point really. What I was getting at was that the open source nature of Mozilla opens the flood gates, because the license terms place little, if any, restrictions on what I can do with my app. That encourages a large variety of new projects from all sorts of developers, not just Intuit.
I'll take IE components more seriously when you can show me an application by non-commercial developers which enjoys a modicum of success.
Don't underestimate the free flow of information/code/ideas. It'll always win.
The fact that bits and pieces of Mozilla are being used for other projects, or as the article implies, that Mozilla is used as a platform for application develpment is an expected outcome of a well guided and well executed Open Source project.
I'd say the fact that the Mozilla team took all that time to get its building blocks right is a major contributing factor, despite the widespread misgivings about Mozilla being so late.
If you have great code - clean, well documented and full featured -, make it freely accessible to everyone who asks, AND have the high profile that Mozilla has, who can beat that? Definitely not a commercial platform, whatever its merits.
Congrats to the Mozilla dvelopers, inside Netscape and elsewhere!
My biggest problem with DRM, or more specifically, the assuption of the Palladium designers that any creator of content or information should be able to control exactly how this content/information gets used.
Excuse me, this is NOT how our society functions! If you create content and put it out, say by telling me something or by sending me email, you place trust in me that I won't use that information inappropriately, and you assume the risk that I actually may violate this trust.
OK, sometimes that trust relationship is codified in law (copyright, IP, etc.) and I CAN be punished for violating it, but still, it is up to me not to violate the trust. I have a choice.
With DRM, and specifically with Palladium, this all changes. I am seen as untrustworthy and the creator of the information decides singlehandedly that I cannot view/use the information e.g. for more than a given length of time and not more than N times. Imagine receiving an email that becomes unreadable after 3 days. It is not gone from your hard drive, mind you, just not readable, cluttering your system with mindless, stupid bits. I have no choice in the matter other than refusing to accept the information in the first place or deleting the expired information afterwards. Me cleaning up other people's junk from my own hard drive after they annoyed me by assuming rights that should properly be mine? You must be kidding.
I deeply object to being reduced to a subservient, powerless drone when I receive information. I can think for myself, thank you, and I can choose on my own to do the right thing. I insist on having the right to choose to do the right thing.
You obviously haven't read RMS' biography Free as in Freedom, nor the recent article by Eben Moglen, FSF's lawyer, on the GPL. (Sorry, I am too lazy to dig up the links)
The GPL does not force anything on you. In fact, it gives you more freedom than you would have with non-GPL'd code under existing copyright law.
And, as someone else pointed out, you can always choose to not accept the GPL and not use GPL'd software. Nothing wrong with that.
The issue, really, is that we don't live in a vacuum. There are other laws in place, along with what's left of morals and accepted ways of social behavior. All of these regulate how you can behave towards others, in particular what you can and cannot do with THEIR works and ideas.
You seem to have spent years in a niche that wasn't touched by Richard Stallman and the FSF. Fine.
However, everyone who worked with Unix and had usenet access between 1985 and 1992 could NOT avoid running into Richard's ideas, the Free Software Foundation and many of its tools.
To my knowledge RMS never claimed that he 'invented' free software. But he codified the notion and made sure that we can protect our work from being exploited, if we so choose. I highly doubt that free software would be anything like it is today if it weren't for the stubborn work of RMS, BSD- and artistic-style licenses and your free software communities notwithstanding.
Besides, I think your 'free software' was mostly public-domain, which is quite different, actually.
You are probably wrong. Water vapor is present in the atmosphere in vast quantities already. It is part of a cycle which is (almost) completely independant of living organisms, a cycle which has a vast flux, and thus is capable of regulating/adjusting itself fairly effectively. Weather patterns make the water vapor content of the area you live in fluctuate far more than you ever can with human-generated vapor.
Contrast that to CO2 and other combustion byproducts , such as NOx and particulate stuff. None of these are part of an existing cycle with TREMENDOUS flux. CO2 comes closest, but there are living organisms in the equation and thus a bottleneck.
The impact of fossil fuel combustion can always be felt and measured, as we've found out over the past 100 years. I am far less sure about the impact of H2 combustion when overlaid on the existing water cycle..
In the Unix world we dealt with this a decade ago, although, of course, back then there were virtually no commercial interests driving stealthy software installation practices, so the issue was much less charged.
Anyway, back then sysadmins were making a big ruckus about software packages placing bits and pieces into/usr/bin and other such locations, rather than/usr/local or/opt or similar locations, and on top of that not allowing you to change the default locations.
The result today is that an unwritten code of conduct exists: Most Unix packages I deal with (biomedical science, both open source and commercial SW) state clearly what is going into your system, where it is going to go and offer choices to alter all of this. If system-level stuff is changed, say inetd.conf needs to be amended, then this is also clearly stated, and the operator is usually given a choice as to whether modifications should proceed automatically or be deferred pending manual intervention.
In the Windows world, and to some extent in the Mac world all this seems to be sadly lacking. I have a suspicion that software suppliers generally assume that users are dumb and anything can be done to them or with them.
The difference between Unix and the desktop OSes is that many Unix installations (I am being cautious here:-) ) have knowledgeable sysadmins who will detect abuse and object, whereas most Windows and Mac boxes are upgraded by unsuspecting users, administrator accounts under modern Windows versions and OSX notwithstanding. And monetary interests and pressures have multiplied a millionfold...
Even so, the current practice cannot be justified and should not be tolerated.
Slashdot Mirror
why don't you just write a script that tells amazon it is browser X, then pull down the price?
Because there are also cookies which you'd have to forge.
I refuse to stop using my real address wherever I want to because of spam.
Congrats, man! I am of the same opinion. And like you, I have a vigilant network admin who blocks spam senders and abused open relays. That makes the remaining amount of spam manageable. So maybe I am lucky, but as a matter of principle I refuse to give up rights, freedoms and territory to the bad guys because it is thought to be prudent to do so. It is not.
Maybe the globalization of the free market has its good side after all? Make works PD in some (important) part of the world and then sell from there to the entire planet. Forget local unrealistic, monopolistic, consumer-unfriendly copywright extension laws. The free market will steamroller them all.
I never thought it'd come to this...
Absolutely! Safety IS in numbers! Look at the big picture, find consensus opinions and interesting REAL datapoints, such as specific likes or dislikes, personal experiences, etc. Read at least 5 reviews if there are this many.
Me, I count the occasional very negative review as positive because it shows that someone with an axe to grind took the time to let off steam, or whatever. Conversely, the gushing, but vague five star review is worthless because it does not contain any information worth knowing. I do get alarmed if most reviews are lukewarm.
It is far more likely that, rather than trying to make you "buy the White Album again" they are simply taking less risk on their new venture. Ever notice how old well-selling CDs don't cost as much as newer CDs? It's because they've already made a lot of money on those albums and can lower the price to possibly get more customers.
The lower price is probably rather so that the record company can screw the artist and keep more profit. Most recording and/or publishing contracts are written such that royalties are tiered, e.g. full royalty rate for albums sold at full price, half royalties for albums sold at a discount (i.e. costing $14.99 instead of $17.99), NO royalties if sold through bargain bins. Few artists except for major acts are savvy enough and have good enough lawyers to notice and fight this.
Now add to this the customary practice to reduce royalty rates for 'new media'. You guessed it, digital downloads are new media. The record companies justify such nonsense with things like "it's a risk for us to put out works on new, untested media". Through most of the 80s CDs were regarded as new media.Yeah, right!
One more kicker: Most publishing contracts contain language to assign all rights to songs to the company for use not spelled out specifically in the contract. Your song ends up on a movie soundtrack or on a compilation album? Sorry, you get nada.
This is why all that posturing of the RIAA and the individual record companies in the name of the artists is BS. They couldn't care less.
em>Ah well, too bad I don't read Rolling Stone, I can't cancel my subscription in protest. ;-)
It's the band 'The Rolling Stones', not the magazine. You can cancel your subscription all you want, Bill Wyman, the musician wouldn't care.
I respect Bill Wyman, the former Rolling Stone a lot (hey I am a bass player, too...) but I do hope that the journalist Bill Wyman wins this one. He had the name first, didn't change it ever and registered the domain name first. And, being a journalist, he does not infringe on any trademark Bill Wyman, the former Stone may own, because there is precious little overlap between their respective trades, however much they may depend on each other.
Bass player Bill Wyman can always register billwyman.com if he hasn't done so already.
this was the Register's translation of the letter from EMI, not the actual German text
Germany has a slightly different culture
I read the German original and part of the Register's translation. The translation did not strike me as way off (note: German is my mother tongue and English my day-to-day language for the past 15 years). It is interesting, however, that the translation comes across blunter than the German original.
Germany does have a different culture, yes, and moreover, German discourse and writings sometimes sound stiff, blunt, crude or outright rude to foreign ears. This example, though, wasn't bad at all, but it's arrogance and only slightly veiled abuse of the customer was unusual.
What I find especially galling is the bit about EMI collecting problem cases and providing feedback to the copy protection provider.
Well, nice, but they forget that the CD I bought is write-once and the copy protection on it will never improve. I doubt that improved copy protection schemes will find its way onto later pressings of the same CD, unless the CD is entirely reissued. There is absolutely no way to fix the copy protection on existing CDs.
What I am left with, then, if I happen to be the owner of a 'problem' player is the choice of being stuck with a severely crippled CD (as documented by the original sender of the email to EMI, whose DVD player only saw tracks 1 through 8), or return the CD for a refund. No way I can legally access all of the CD unless I buy additional hardware or unless EMI chooses to issue an 'improved' CD and I am content to wait for that.
So, while EMI's statement sounds good superficially, it actually documents their absolute lack of regard for their customers, because they'll never be able to fix intentionally broken goods.
Correct, but I'd much rather have a service that works right out of the box and allows what we need/wish/want/do anyway. It's called customer service and customer satisfaction.
I have two problems with this new service:
Their client, Rhapsody, is Windows only, and you can only burn
10 songs per month. Nice try, but lame.
You are a bit off on several counts.
Yes, interest rates on rental properties are higher in general. However, many small time investors first live in the house and thus lock in a low residential rate. Then we move and rent out the property, still enjoying the low interest mortgage. In most cases the bank cannot do anything about it.
Now concerning the rent we charge: It would be nice if it worked the way you describe (well, nice from a purely investment perspective; however I also have a conscience, but that's another matter). There's this thing called market. I can charge what the market will bear, no more, but possibly less. If my own costs are higher than what the market will bear, tough shit. I'll just live with the loss.
In practice I lost ~$400 per month on my rental for the first year. In the second year (now), thanks to a combination of lower interest rates, higher rent, vastly increased property value and refinancing I am breaking even on the fixed costs. I am still loosing money when I factor in maintenance. In the near future I expect that rent increases will cover all my costs.
And before anyone labels me a heartless pig: The rent increases I charge are LESS than the average general rent increase in the local market. As I said above, I do have a conscience, too, and I try to strike a balance between pure investing/business and being socially concious. I have actually been called a party pooper by a fellow landlord because I am alledgedly responsible for keeping rents lower in my neighborhood than they could be. Regardless, it works for me and I wouldn't put my money elsewhere or change my attitude.
"SGIs have huge internal bandwidth"
Myth: PCs have caught up, even surpassed the top-end SGI workstations.
However, we are talking about IRIX here, i.e. software. IRIX supports this internal bandwidth exceptionally well. An SGI box running IRIX can sustain such bandwidth with real world applications. And it has done so for years.
Five (5!) years ago I talked to an SGI engineer who configured an SGI server to suck down satellite data at 7 GB/s sustained over days and weeks. It was not hard to put the server together, and the OS didn't need any tweaking. Show me any single-system Intel box that can do that now, or even any Intel cluster, for that matter.
So, while your recent PC may have great peak bandwidth, I bet any OS - even the beloved Linux - will not easily let it sustain this data rate.
Now, whether most of us really need those sustained data rates is another matter altogether. But on the other hand, do all of us really need 2.8 GHz CPUs?
That's pretty much how fast they go. My sons' Bit Char-G cars might be a bit faster,actually.
Anyway, given the size of the cars, it still looks fast enough when you see them whizz across the floor.
You got to keep in mind that the 'motor' is actually a modified pager vibrator, at least in the Bit Car-G models. Not much power there! But a neat adaptation of technology that was intended for a very different purpose.
Actually, Bit Char-G cars can be bought from US suppliers, too. My sons have had theirs for three months now. I don't remember the URL of the supplier, but it was in NY. Just search Google, that's where my oldest found them.
Out here in CA my sons have been well ahead of the curve for a couple of months at least. But that's all you need when you're a teenager...
Now with RadioShack carrying such cars everyone will jump on the bandwagon.
I strongly agree with your observation. I think, however, that the bigger problem is at the middle school level. I have had three talented kids in middle school over the past few years, and let me tell you, the entire administrataive staff, from the principal to the counselors to the admins seem to be deadly afraid of math. Actually, I even think the entire educational establishment is afraid of math.
In middle school (at least here in CA) they make the kids go through a prealgebra class. What this is in practice is a bunch of half-assed algebra and geometry where lots of concepts are quickly shown, never fully explained and definitely never exercised. So kids get to see simple equations, sort of try to solve them, but never discuss in depth how one approaches solving equations. In my opinion (and I am sure most mathematicians, scientists and engineers would agree) math at this level is simply a collection of concepts and rules, and these things need to be explained, learned and exercised. No amount of tinkering and tip-toeing can take away that fact. The educators of course claim that their approach gently exposes kids to advanced math issues and lets them mature until they are ready to grasp real algebra. I believe that these educators are simply projecting their own fear and loathing of math onto the kids.
What happens in such prealgebra classes is that many kids will pay just enough attention to coast along. They can actually get As without really understanding the subject matter. At the end of the year, they take an algebra readiness test which is supposed to tell whether they should be promoted to proper algebra or do the prealgebra again. This test along with a teacher recommendation determines a kid's fate for the next few years.
Now, if a kid is forced to do prealgebra once again, what does any normal 12 year old do? Completely turn away from math and claim it sucks! Can't blame them. I believe countless reasonably talented kids are lost in this stupid system and end up hating math and achieving a lot less than they could math-wise. And if you turn away from a subject at the middle school level, that is pretty much it in this highly demanding and competitive system.
As to my own children, I stomped into the counselors office every year and demanded placement in algebra after the first year in prealgebra. (Predictably, they had not aced the algebra readiness test and/or not impressed their teacher enough, and hadn't been promoted to algebra). Needless to say that they had no trouble to catch on with real algebra and bring home good grades, mostly As. So much for 'readiness'. Can't claim they love math, but they tackle it with the same level of dedication they have for most other subjects, which is fine by me.
Correct, but now imagine cheap (well, affordable) UWB based radars available a few years down the road. Even if they'll be banned from the US market based on rulings like the one you cite, they'll be available from other sources. I live just 30 minutes from the Mexican border where I can get all sorts of illegal high-tech gadgets.
It still makes me uneasy. If the police can't use them, other government agencies may still use them. Can you say Patriot Act? Not to mention private individuals with various strange motivations.
The scary bit for me are not the admittedly awesome communications aspects of UWB, but the radar applications (see FAQ page linked to above).
Low cost devices that can image through walls? Through the walls of MY house? No thanks!
I disagree. While you are correct about IE components being used for a variety of apps, this still locks you into a proprietary world. I don't know whether IE-based apps are even crossplatform Win/Mac. With Mozilla we have complete platform independance and working implementations on all Windows flavors, MacOS 9 and X, Linux and various Unix offerings.
But that's beside the point really. What I was getting at was that the open source nature of Mozilla opens the flood gates, because the license terms place little, if any, restrictions on what I can do with my app. That encourages a large variety of new projects from all sorts of developers, not just Intuit.
I'll take IE components more seriously when you can show me an application by non-commercial developers which enjoys a modicum of success.
Don't underestimate the free flow of information/code/ideas. It'll always win.
The fact that bits and pieces of Mozilla are being used for other projects, or as the article implies, that Mozilla is used as a platform for application develpment is an expected outcome of a well guided and well executed Open Source project.
I'd say the fact that the Mozilla team took all that time to get its building blocks right is a major contributing factor, despite the widespread misgivings about Mozilla being so late.
If you have great code - clean, well documented and full featured -, make it freely accessible to everyone who asks, AND have the high profile that Mozilla has, who can beat that? Definitely not a commercial platform, whatever its merits.
Congrats to the Mozilla dvelopers, inside Netscape and elsewhere!
My biggest problem with DRM, or more specifically, the assuption of the Palladium designers that any creator of content or information should be able to control exactly how this content/information gets used.
Excuse me, this is NOT how our society functions! If you create content and put it out, say by telling me something or by sending me email, you place trust in me that I won't use that information inappropriately, and you assume the risk that I actually may violate this trust.
OK, sometimes that trust relationship is codified in law (copyright, IP, etc.) and I CAN be punished for violating it, but still, it is up to me not to violate the trust. I have a choice.
With DRM, and specifically with Palladium, this all changes. I am seen as untrustworthy and the creator of the information decides singlehandedly that I cannot view/use the information e.g. for more than a given length of time and not more than N times. Imagine receiving an email that becomes unreadable after 3 days. It is not gone from your hard drive, mind you, just not readable, cluttering your system with mindless, stupid bits. I have no choice in the matter other than refusing to accept the information in the first place or deleting the expired information afterwards. Me cleaning up other people's junk from my own hard drive after they annoyed me by assuming rights that should properly be mine? You must be kidding.
I deeply object to being reduced to a subservient, powerless drone when I receive information. I can think for myself, thank you, and I can choose on my own to do the right thing. I insist on having the right to choose to do the right thing.
You obviously haven't read RMS' biography Free as in Freedom, nor the recent article by Eben Moglen, FSF's lawyer, on the GPL. (Sorry, I am too lazy to dig up the links)
The GPL does not force anything on you. In fact, it gives you more freedom than you would have with non-GPL'd code under existing copyright law.
And, as someone else pointed out, you can always choose to not accept the GPL and not use GPL'd software. Nothing wrong with that.
The issue, really, is that we don't live in a vacuum. There are other laws in place, along with what's left of morals and accepted ways of social behavior. All of these regulate how you can behave towards others, in particular what you can and cannot do with THEIR works and ideas.
I completely disagree!
You seem to have spent years in a niche that wasn't touched by Richard Stallman and the FSF. Fine.
However, everyone who worked with Unix and had usenet access between 1985 and 1992 could NOT avoid running into Richard's ideas, the Free Software Foundation and many of its tools.
To my knowledge RMS never claimed that he 'invented' free software. But he codified the notion and made sure that we can protect our work from being exploited, if we so choose. I highly doubt that free software would be anything like it is today if it weren't for the stubborn work of RMS, BSD- and artistic-style licenses and your free software communities notwithstanding.
Besides, I think your 'free software' was mostly public-domain, which is quite different, actually.
You are probably wrong.
Water vapor is present in the atmosphere in vast quantities already. It is part of a cycle which is (almost) completely independant of living organisms, a cycle which has a vast flux, and thus is capable of regulating/adjusting itself fairly effectively. Weather patterns make the water vapor content of the area you live in fluctuate far more than you ever can with human-generated vapor.
Contrast that to CO2 and other combustion byproducts , such as NOx and particulate stuff. None of these are part of an existing cycle with TREMENDOUS flux. CO2 comes closest, but there are living organisms in the equation and thus a bottleneck.
The impact of fossil fuel combustion can always be felt and measured, as we've found out over the past 100 years. I am far less sure about the impact of H2 combustion when overlaid on the existing water cycle..
Christoph
In the Unix world we dealt with this a decade ago, although, of course, back then there were virtually no commercial interests driving stealthy software installation practices, so the issue was much less charged.
/usr/bin and other such locations, rather than /usr/local or /opt or similar locations, and on top of that not allowing you to change the default locations.
:-) ) have knowledgeable sysadmins who will detect abuse and object, whereas most Windows and Mac boxes are upgraded by unsuspecting users, administrator accounts under modern Windows versions and OSX notwithstanding. And monetary interests and pressures have multiplied a millionfold...
Anyway, back then sysadmins were making a big ruckus about software packages placing bits and pieces into
The result today is that an unwritten code of conduct exists: Most Unix packages I deal with (biomedical science, both open source and commercial SW) state clearly what is going into your system, where it is going to go and offer choices to alter all of this. If system-level stuff is changed, say inetd.conf needs to be amended, then this is also clearly stated, and the operator is usually given a choice as to whether modifications should proceed automatically or be deferred pending manual intervention.
In the Windows world, and to some extent in the Mac world all this seems to be sadly lacking. I have a suspicion that software suppliers generally assume that users are dumb and anything can be done to them or with them.
The difference between Unix and the desktop OSes is that many Unix installations (I am being cautious here
Even so, the current practice cannot be justified and should not be tolerated.