What Microsoft have done with the W7 to W10 upgrade is equivalent to taking your car into a dealership for a routine service, except that when you get it back, you find that it's been turned into a mobile advertising platform, it has the words "Taxi" painted down the side and, even better, Microsoft get the income from rides you are now required to give to advertisers...
In legal terms that's an "unconscionable contract", meaning a deal that is *so* one-sided that it is unfair to one party and therefore unenforceable under the law. Microsoft are simply better that most of their users are too stupid to realise that they have become the product.
Not being a US citizen I have no idea how this might work in practice, but... The gentleman who has just called for the government to blacklist Apple products was presumably elected to his post to represent a geographic area of the US. Can those same citizens vote him out of office if they decide that he is not representing his constituents properly?
Obviously this is a broader question related to the democratic process, but it occurs to me that a process that allows this bill to be put forward could be used to do something much more sinister, or even outright dangerous. How does the process protect the People from a rogue elected official. What happens if someone is elected claiming to act one way and then does the opposite?
I would love to be able to use a couple of Pi's with PiCams to deliver some CCTV where I live, primarily to identify the person[s] responsible for driving into parked cars and then disappearing... Unfortunately, irrespective of whether we're talking about a closed loop of stills or streaming video, getting this content to storage is going to require some decent network bandwidth.
I've tried this at 100Mb/s and using the basic Pi software just doesn't hack it... The issue is not the performance of the camera or the "grabbing" software, it is the time taken to write data to external storage. For basic practical reasons I don't want to put the storage with the Pi...
So... although no, I'm not trying to run a NAS from my Pi, I *am* trying to send sustained, moderately high bandwidth to a NAS from my PI. Gigabit would, I suspect, make this feasible. 100Mb/s does not.
Let's be fair, though. If we all added our "2 cents" as to what we'd like to see added to the Pi, the resultant computer would cost waaay [sic] more than $35... Here's hoping for the Pi4 though!
I'm really interested in your statement that "code is speech" and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Are you able to cite any supporting materials on that please? The reason being that if, in the eyes of the law, software really is equivalent to speech, then I doubt that it can be patented. Successfully proving your claim could have massive impact, for example, for all those who have signed patent licensing deals with Microsoft...
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of comments already concerning the implications of this web site to the role of a lawyer, but maybe there is an even more important aspect here. The "success rate" statistics would seem to imply that the issuance of parking tickets in the UK is significantly more aggressive than it should be. Now this could be for a number of reasons [under-qualified ticket wardens, poor quality signs, or, perhaps, inappropriate guidance given regarding when to issue.
Non-UK readers may like to know that the UK has a long and very tempestuous relationship with parking supervision; until relatively recently landowners could either clamp parked cars or have an "agent" do it for them; sadly the number of these agencies that were cowboys and scammers caused outrage and fortunately the practice was banned... When I worked in local government ~ 20 years ago, we adjusted the total price of parking tickets and fines to ensure that we recovered the cost of maintaining the car parks, providing security lighting and CCTV, collecting litter, etc, but nothing else. The car parks were basically zero-profit, cost-recovery exercises.
Since then, however, government funding has changed massively, and the issue of parking tickets could well [sorry, not entirely sure either way] be a lucrative source of income for some.
The success of this web site may have less to do with the need for legal skills than the likely dubious grounds under which a ticket was issued in the first place. Now what would be really interesting would be if Joshua Browder [the site developer] could pull some statistics from the site that could show which locations had the most over-turned tickets. If there were patterns in *that* data, then there might be grounds to take a closer look at the issuing agency in an attempt to put things right. Let's hope that he considers doing just that...
When Bill Clinton signed the DMCA into law in 1998, the initiative that resulted in the draft legislation being put before him was one run entirely by large, copyright-holding corporations. 18 years later and with countless real-world examples to go by, we really must not be surprised to learn of instances where the DMCA is being used, by the people that sponsored a law, to act against the potential opponents of those parties.
In theory law is just, consistent and treats all parties equally. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth. What has happened is that large corporations have realised that favourable laws can protect and enforce their business models. Since corporations have vastly more money than private individuals, corporations can lobby to get the laws they want.
In a model like this, which exists today, the private individual is *always* going to lose out to corporations. This absolutely doesn't mean that copyright law is wrong, just that it is being abused. For a similar example, look at the way that patent law is being used to stifle software innovation, look at the ways proprietary software companies are using patents to attack FOSS developers. These are both examples of corporations using the law as leverage to give them an (unfair) competitive advantage in what should be an open marketplace.
Notwithstanding the OP observation concerning the rate of development of the internal combustion engine (and at the risk of starting a flame war, which is not the intent) why not move away from *all* the sins of reciprocating engines and go with something like a Wankel rotary?
Yes, I appreciate that the biggest single failing of the rotary is often rotor wear, but the rate of development of materials science has been so incredible over the last 10-15 years that it is pretty much certain that a clean-sheet design started today would be a quantum leap forward from anything we have seen thus far.
I've never personally driven, let alone owned, a rotary engine, but maybe starting with a problem statement of "How do we get rid of mechanically operated valves?" is setting our sights a bit low?
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Didn't Acer have this last year? According to web articles covering the Acer piece, Microsoft filed for a patent at almost the same time that Acer went public with actual product [or, at least, prototypes].
There simply isn't enough innovation in Microsoft's claim to warrant a patent.
The OP rather implies that a supplier offering both convetional HDDs and SSDs of the same capacity would offer their products at prices based upon "cost of manufacture + margin" - i.e. that the retail prices would be a reflection of production costs. Sadly for consumers, this is blatantly not the case. The evidence for this is *everywhere* - for example a BluRay Movie costs no more to make, ship and sell than a DVD [maybe less, the packaging is smaller, lighter and cheaper to ship] and yet BluRay discs cost significantly more. Another classic example is the motor trade, where 2 cars that are identical in every respect except the engine size are priced so that the one with the larger engine costs more.
Going back to the storage industry, there may be at least a couple of legitimate reasons for the price differential : first, the vendor is still recouping research and development costs from SSD technologies, whilst HDDs may be investing much less in R&D and therefore cost less. Second, economies of scale mean that a vendor can spread overheads across greater sale volumes and thus one format costs less.
Unfortunately, what is most likely to be happening is that vendors are "fixing" market prices and using the principle of "cool new thing" to charge a premium for the latest product, well beyond what legitimate development costs would suggest. In theory many countries have national agencies to stop markets conspiring to fix prices like this. There is legislation against this [it's essentially racketeering and/or market manipulation, after all]. Unfortunately, 99% of the time, large suppliers get away with it. It's only when something goes unexpectedly wrong [look at the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal in the UK] that regulators will act [because it puts them in a position where they have no choice but to act].
Unfortunately, for the rest of us, for most of the time, a price is set on the basis of "the maximum we can get away with", as determined by the vendor.
One of the things that interests me about crypto-currencies would be the potential they have for acting as a foreign-exchange vehicle. Say you want to go on vacation overseas. You buy some Bitcoin in your local currency, fly to your destination, then exchange your Bitcoin for the currency of your destination...
It doesn't sound like much, but in theory your actions have just bypassed one of the more lucrative parts of international finance - foreign exchange. When you have credit cards charging ~2% for foreign currency transactions (a joke - multiples of what it costs them) you can see how Bitcoin will very quickly accumulate detractors - ***because the established players have so much to lose from a successful cryptocurrency***.
It is interesting to see the different strategies being taken at the moment - every major bank in the world is exploring the use of blockchain currency, whilst (for example) the European Union is discussing outlawing use (usual four horsemen story). Answering the OP's question is going to depend on the use being contemplated. As an investment? Too late. As a practical, utilitarian mechanism to make life easier and cheaper? Probably too soon.
I am not sure that this is universally applicable. For example, in the UK we just had a case reported in which a Christian-run cake-decorating business was taken to court and successfully prosecuted for declining to decorate a cake for a same-sex couple. In that case the law decided that a refusal to serve constituted discrimination. I cite this example because we have to be very careful that deny-to-supply does not become discrimination (even though I would concede it happens far more frequently in other industries).
There is a useful expression for cases like this: "The law may upset reason, but reason may not upset the law...", meaning that no matter how reasonable or justified a course of action can be, if it can be shown to breach an act and be, for example, discriminatory, then that heralds a world of hurt for the service provider... As a non-lawyer this always strikes me as weird, because if a vendor chose not to deal with me for some random reason, I would conclude they are not worth my custom and simply walk away.
In this case, maybe you had to be there...
A couple of obvious gotchas...
1. What if your Tesla suffers a mechanical failure like a puncture whilst en route? Will it simply phone the nearest Tesla-approved repair centre? What about access to move the vehicle to make a wheel swap safely? Will the repair technician be granted access?
2. What about the pranksters? In the days of rail freight we've had the local hoodlums sat on a bridge with a rifle and a box full of ammo... What is to stop the same jokers prancing Tesla owners by shooting out the windows of an unaccompanied car?
3. What about insurance? Say your Tesla does get hit by pranksters such that it does the journey but when it reaches you it has been badly damaged? Will insurance companies have to treat that like a hit-and-run?
Don't get me wrong, this has some potential benefits, but I would be concerned that owners would end up picking up the cost from all these unforeseen events, like it or not...
Unless I have missed something about the way that GNU/Linux package management works, there is a very significant difference in capability between Microsoft monitoring Windows users and whatever might be done by Linux distributions:-
When a Microsoft OS starts to download and deploy updates, it does so from a unique instance of that OS, made unique by the presence of an activation key. Further, in most use case scenarios, connections for software updates are "direct", i.e. internet-connected Windows PC links to the Windows Update service to download patches. The exceptions would be large corporations that have their own, internally-hosted update servers [so that they can manage the roll-out of patches] and those companies that have employed caching proxy connectivity [i.e. such as the functionality provided by the IPFire Linux-based firewall/proxy server] that allow caching of OS updates.
it's the fact that Linux distributions *don't* have unique license keys embedded within them that help eliminate the potential for eavesdropping on specific targets. Having said, these, please don't forget that there are scores of ways that a computer can be identified as unique. Those interested in learning more should check out "Panopticlick" [an EFF-provided free tool that will show you exactly how "anonymous" you are on the web...]. Take a look at http://panopticlick.eff.org/
I'm not sure if this is a factor, a consequence, or unrelated, but...... when I read stories like this, I try and apply a simple question, "Who benefits?" as an attempt to dig out deeper motives. Bitcoin has the potential/has proven to be a significant market disruption of the existing, traditional banking model. In one single step it has leapt past existing banking models and thus threatens portions of the current global banking model.
Specifically, one of the most lucrative forms of revenue for banks today related to "foreign currency transactions". When you are a tourist or traveller and getting stung to the tune of anywhere between 1-3% of the value of each foreign-currency transaction, or whether you are a company engaged in international trade that therefore has to convert some receipts back to your native currency in order to bank profits, there are huge, huge fees available to those who facilitate ForEx transactions. Bitcoin and equivalent cryptocurrencies have the potential to disrupt this market: convert your local currency to Bitcoin and then, overseas, simply convert your Bitcoin to *that* local currency...
Obviously banks are only too well aware of this and all of them will be working to implement an alternative solution of their own. This alternative will be "approved" and of course will come with fees and charges. But we should all hope that the presence of Bitcoin or equivalent in the ForEx market can actually help to drive down prices. The simple truth is that multinational banks either maintain foreign currency accounts for themselves, or have deals with in-country partner banks, such that the cost to them for a currency swap is going to run to thousandths of one percent.
This takes us back to the reason to follow this story - because *anything* that disrupts or dilutes the strength of emerging crypto-currencies - i.e. in a "divide and conquer" or similar methodology, is only going to benefit those who make an awful lot of money in this space at the moment...
I'm not saying that the quoted motive relating to governance is in any way invalid or bogus. I'm just pointing out that certain groups will benefit more from this change than others, and one group that seems unlikely to benefit significantly are the users of Bitcoin. That, if nothing else, makes me just a tad suspicious...
I think that's quite reasonable. I do use notionally "free" technologies - but I also donate to those projects as and where I can - i.e. I tend to use and enjoy wikipdia quite a bit, so last week I donated £50. I try and cover all the major FLOSS projects and communities that I use. Here's an interesting thing though - if I add up what I've spent on proprietary software [ I have 7 licensed copies of Win 7/64 Ultimate on various machines, 2 copies of MS Office 2013 Pro Plus, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Elements, plus a raft of odd little commercial packages such as PavTube] and then compare the total cost of that spend [averaged out over the years of ownership] with what I spend on FLOSS contributions, I still struggle to keep my FLOSS spend up to what I spend on proprietary software. Not because I am in any way reluctant to make the contributions - on the contrary, I happen to think it's my duty to put my money where my mouth is - but because it's remarkable just how much I've ended up spending on commercial software.
Now, I appreciate that I'm not an average user, but I wonder if a concerted move back to "non-free" might actually be too much of a culture shock?
Not strictly related [sorry], I was thinking about Microsoft's switch to the "free" model for Windows 10. There's sort-of speculation that if you're a PC manufacturer like Dell or Lenovo or such, you pay under $15 a set for a Windows License. So let's say, for the sake of debate, that W10 retail value would be $20 per seat on average. For Microsoft to give that away for free, they seem to be saying that they reckon they can get equivalent value out of the average user over the lifetime ownership of the OS - basically through their spyware and monitoring of user activities... That's something I find quite disturbing - not that MS are doing this [well, OK, yes, that too] but the amount of revenue it generates. If people are willing to pay that much for *activity data*, precisely what are they getting in return?
Just to finish with a thought on your paid-for model. How about "freemium"? [OK, isn't that what Canonical tried?] How about products where you get a core set of functional services but pay a little bit more for higher performance or extra functionality? Do you think that would be economically viable? Also, if we did move away from this "free to use" model in which our activities were recorded, harvested and sold... If we started to pay companies for software again, do you think they would be honest enough to remove the spyware and keep it permanently out? Or is this a drug that's too addictive for them?
... when Mark Shuttleworth formed Canonical, one of the strongest claims they made was that ubuntu would always be free.
I *do* appreciate that Canonical's activation of the spyware feature was publicised and only relevent to users of the Dash in the Unity desktop, and also aware that it's a bit of a leap of faith to suggest that 12.10 and onwards were anything other than free, but the fact remained that Canonical started to take kickbacks from Amazon - payment - for data generated by ubuntu users. In other words, ubuntu users were doing stuff that resulted in Canonical getting paid. This doesn't - quite - meet up to "free"...
Like the parent post to which you responded, my reaction to the announcement was to continue to run on 12.04 LTS for a bit longer than expected, then make the switch to Mint, initially [and currently] on the ubuntu-derived Mint edition, but with testing currently underway to complete a migration to LMDE 2.0.
But from my perspective the key point was that my decision was to literally and completely walk away from ubuntu/Canonical. I didn't agree with the ethics of their decision and the *only* mechanism I had to voice my opinion was to drop their product like a hot potato, which I did. I had been a user of ubuntu since 5.04, Hoary Hedgehog. I got to ubuntu via Mandrake/Mandriva, which in turn I got to after getting annoyed with Red Hat.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Perhaps the unique perspective here is that users of Linux are, by definition, very much aware of the impacts of acts like this from Canonical. I dare say that there are many GNU/Linux users out there today [well, I'm one] who once used Windows but got so disenfranchised at the machinations and underhand practices of Microsoft that they decided to walk. In any scenario where it becomes clear that a party is acting in an underhand or dishonourable way, the single, simplest response we have in our power is to stop using any product by such an un-trusted source.
~10 years ago I gave up on Microsoft because they were blatantly not trustworthy.
4 years ago I gave up on Canonical/ubuntu for the same reason.
I can't say for certain whether Mint will continue to be honourable, but if they slip, I'll move on.
Eventually [I hope] enough of us will do that such that companies realise that they "can't get away with it" and will treat their users with respect.
Today companies are so big that no amount of end-user action, short of "walk", will bring about a change. Even a non-profit has to be relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
What Microsoft have done with the W7 to W10 upgrade is equivalent to taking your car into a dealership for a routine service, except that when you get it back, you find that it's been turned into a mobile advertising platform, it has the words "Taxi" painted down the side and, even better, Microsoft get the income from rides you are now required to give to advertisers... In legal terms that's an "unconscionable contract", meaning a deal that is *so* one-sided that it is unfair to one party and therefore unenforceable under the law. Microsoft are simply better that most of their users are too stupid to realise that they have become the product.
Not being a US citizen I have no idea how this might work in practice, but... The gentleman who has just called for the government to blacklist Apple products was presumably elected to his post to represent a geographic area of the US. Can those same citizens vote him out of office if they decide that he is not representing his constituents properly? Obviously this is a broader question related to the democratic process, but it occurs to me that a process that allows this bill to be put forward could be used to do something much more sinister, or even outright dangerous. How does the process protect the People from a rogue elected official. What happens if someone is elected claiming to act one way and then does the opposite?
I would love to be able to use a couple of Pi's with PiCams to deliver some CCTV where I live, primarily to identify the person[s] responsible for driving into parked cars and then disappearing... Unfortunately, irrespective of whether we're talking about a closed loop of stills or streaming video, getting this content to storage is going to require some decent network bandwidth. I've tried this at 100Mb/s and using the basic Pi software just doesn't hack it... The issue is not the performance of the camera or the "grabbing" software, it is the time taken to write data to external storage. For basic practical reasons I don't want to put the storage with the Pi... So... although no, I'm not trying to run a NAS from my Pi, I *am* trying to send sustained, moderately high bandwidth to a NAS from my PI. Gigabit would, I suspect, make this feasible. 100Mb/s does not. Let's be fair, though. If we all added our "2 cents" as to what we'd like to see added to the Pi, the resultant computer would cost waaay [sic] more than $35... Here's hoping for the Pi4 though!
I'm really interested in your statement that "code is speech" and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Are you able to cite any supporting materials on that please? The reason being that if, in the eyes of the law, software really is equivalent to speech, then I doubt that it can be patented. Successfully proving your claim could have massive impact, for example, for all those who have signed patent licensing deals with Microsoft...
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of comments already concerning the implications of this web site to the role of a lawyer, but maybe there is an even more important aspect here. The "success rate" statistics would seem to imply that the issuance of parking tickets in the UK is significantly more aggressive than it should be. Now this could be for a number of reasons [under-qualified ticket wardens, poor quality signs, or, perhaps, inappropriate guidance given regarding when to issue. Non-UK readers may like to know that the UK has a long and very tempestuous relationship with parking supervision; until relatively recently landowners could either clamp parked cars or have an "agent" do it for them; sadly the number of these agencies that were cowboys and scammers caused outrage and fortunately the practice was banned... When I worked in local government ~ 20 years ago, we adjusted the total price of parking tickets and fines to ensure that we recovered the cost of maintaining the car parks, providing security lighting and CCTV, collecting litter, etc, but nothing else. The car parks were basically zero-profit, cost-recovery exercises. Since then, however, government funding has changed massively, and the issue of parking tickets could well [sorry, not entirely sure either way] be a lucrative source of income for some. The success of this web site may have less to do with the need for legal skills than the likely dubious grounds under which a ticket was issued in the first place. Now what would be really interesting would be if Joshua Browder [the site developer] could pull some statistics from the site that could show which locations had the most over-turned tickets. If there were patterns in *that* data, then there might be grounds to take a closer look at the issuing agency in an attempt to put things right. Let's hope that he considers doing just that...
When Bill Clinton signed the DMCA into law in 1998, the initiative that resulted in the draft legislation being put before him was one run entirely by large, copyright-holding corporations. 18 years later and with countless real-world examples to go by, we really must not be surprised to learn of instances where the DMCA is being used, by the people that sponsored a law, to act against the potential opponents of those parties. In theory law is just, consistent and treats all parties equally. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth. What has happened is that large corporations have realised that favourable laws can protect and enforce their business models. Since corporations have vastly more money than private individuals, corporations can lobby to get the laws they want. In a model like this, which exists today, the private individual is *always* going to lose out to corporations. This absolutely doesn't mean that copyright law is wrong, just that it is being abused. For a similar example, look at the way that patent law is being used to stifle software innovation, look at the ways proprietary software companies are using patents to attack FOSS developers. These are both examples of corporations using the law as leverage to give them an (unfair) competitive advantage in what should be an open marketplace.
Notwithstanding the OP observation concerning the rate of development of the internal combustion engine (and at the risk of starting a flame war, which is not the intent) why not move away from *all* the sins of reciprocating engines and go with something like a Wankel rotary? Yes, I appreciate that the biggest single failing of the rotary is often rotor wear, but the rate of development of materials science has been so incredible over the last 10-15 years that it is pretty much certain that a clean-sheet design started today would be a quantum leap forward from anything we have seen thus far. I've never personally driven, let alone owned, a rotary engine, but maybe starting with a problem statement of "How do we get rid of mechanically operated valves?" is setting our sights a bit low?
http://www.pcworld.com/article... Didn't Acer have this last year? According to web articles covering the Acer piece, Microsoft filed for a patent at almost the same time that Acer went public with actual product [or, at least, prototypes]. There simply isn't enough innovation in Microsoft's claim to warrant a patent.
The OP rather implies that a supplier offering both convetional HDDs and SSDs of the same capacity would offer their products at prices based upon "cost of manufacture + margin" - i.e. that the retail prices would be a reflection of production costs. Sadly for consumers, this is blatantly not the case. The evidence for this is *everywhere* - for example a BluRay Movie costs no more to make, ship and sell than a DVD [maybe less, the packaging is smaller, lighter and cheaper to ship] and yet BluRay discs cost significantly more. Another classic example is the motor trade, where 2 cars that are identical in every respect except the engine size are priced so that the one with the larger engine costs more. Going back to the storage industry, there may be at least a couple of legitimate reasons for the price differential : first, the vendor is still recouping research and development costs from SSD technologies, whilst HDDs may be investing much less in R&D and therefore cost less. Second, economies of scale mean that a vendor can spread overheads across greater sale volumes and thus one format costs less. Unfortunately, what is most likely to be happening is that vendors are "fixing" market prices and using the principle of "cool new thing" to charge a premium for the latest product, well beyond what legitimate development costs would suggest. In theory many countries have national agencies to stop markets conspiring to fix prices like this. There is legislation against this [it's essentially racketeering and/or market manipulation, after all]. Unfortunately, 99% of the time, large suppliers get away with it. It's only when something goes unexpectedly wrong [look at the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal in the UK] that regulators will act [because it puts them in a position where they have no choice but to act]. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, for most of the time, a price is set on the basis of "the maximum we can get away with", as determined by the vendor.
One of the things that interests me about crypto-currencies would be the potential they have for acting as a foreign-exchange vehicle. Say you want to go on vacation overseas. You buy some Bitcoin in your local currency, fly to your destination, then exchange your Bitcoin for the currency of your destination... It doesn't sound like much, but in theory your actions have just bypassed one of the more lucrative parts of international finance - foreign exchange. When you have credit cards charging ~2% for foreign currency transactions (a joke - multiples of what it costs them) you can see how Bitcoin will very quickly accumulate detractors - ***because the established players have so much to lose from a successful cryptocurrency***. It is interesting to see the different strategies being taken at the moment - every major bank in the world is exploring the use of blockchain currency, whilst (for example) the European Union is discussing outlawing use (usual four horsemen story). Answering the OP's question is going to depend on the use being contemplated. As an investment? Too late. As a practical, utilitarian mechanism to make life easier and cheaper? Probably too soon.
I am not sure that this is universally applicable. For example, in the UK we just had a case reported in which a Christian-run cake-decorating business was taken to court and successfully prosecuted for declining to decorate a cake for a same-sex couple. In that case the law decided that a refusal to serve constituted discrimination. I cite this example because we have to be very careful that deny-to-supply does not become discrimination (even though I would concede it happens far more frequently in other industries). There is a useful expression for cases like this: "The law may upset reason, but reason may not upset the law...", meaning that no matter how reasonable or justified a course of action can be, if it can be shown to breach an act and be, for example, discriminatory, then that heralds a world of hurt for the service provider... As a non-lawyer this always strikes me as weird, because if a vendor chose not to deal with me for some random reason, I would conclude they are not worth my custom and simply walk away. In this case, maybe you had to be there...
A couple of obvious gotchas... 1. What if your Tesla suffers a mechanical failure like a puncture whilst en route? Will it simply phone the nearest Tesla-approved repair centre? What about access to move the vehicle to make a wheel swap safely? Will the repair technician be granted access? 2. What about the pranksters? In the days of rail freight we've had the local hoodlums sat on a bridge with a rifle and a box full of ammo... What is to stop the same jokers prancing Tesla owners by shooting out the windows of an unaccompanied car? 3. What about insurance? Say your Tesla does get hit by pranksters such that it does the journey but when it reaches you it has been badly damaged? Will insurance companies have to treat that like a hit-and-run? Don't get me wrong, this has some potential benefits, but I would be concerned that owners would end up picking up the cost from all these unforeseen events, like it or not...
Unless I have missed something about the way that GNU/Linux package management works, there is a very significant difference in capability between Microsoft monitoring Windows users and whatever might be done by Linux distributions:- When a Microsoft OS starts to download and deploy updates, it does so from a unique instance of that OS, made unique by the presence of an activation key. Further, in most use case scenarios, connections for software updates are "direct", i.e. internet-connected Windows PC links to the Windows Update service to download patches. The exceptions would be large corporations that have their own, internally-hosted update servers [so that they can manage the roll-out of patches] and those companies that have employed caching proxy connectivity [i.e. such as the functionality provided by the IPFire Linux-based firewall/proxy server] that allow caching of OS updates. it's the fact that Linux distributions *don't* have unique license keys embedded within them that help eliminate the potential for eavesdropping on specific targets. Having said, these, please don't forget that there are scores of ways that a computer can be identified as unique. Those interested in learning more should check out "Panopticlick" [an EFF-provided free tool that will show you exactly how "anonymous" you are on the web...]. Take a look at http://panopticlick.eff.org/
I'm not sure if this is a factor, a consequence, or unrelated, but... ... when I read stories like this, I try and apply a simple question, "Who benefits?" as an attempt to dig out deeper motives. Bitcoin has the potential/has proven to be a significant market disruption of the existing, traditional banking model. In one single step it has leapt past existing banking models and thus threatens portions of the current global banking model.
Specifically, one of the most lucrative forms of revenue for banks today related to "foreign currency transactions". When you are a tourist or traveller and getting stung to the tune of anywhere between 1-3% of the value of each foreign-currency transaction, or whether you are a company engaged in international trade that therefore has to convert some receipts back to your native currency in order to bank profits, there are huge, huge fees available to those who facilitate ForEx transactions. Bitcoin and equivalent cryptocurrencies have the potential to disrupt this market: convert your local currency to Bitcoin and then, overseas, simply convert your Bitcoin to *that* local currency...
Obviously banks are only too well aware of this and all of them will be working to implement an alternative solution of their own. This alternative will be "approved" and of course will come with fees and charges. But we should all hope that the presence of Bitcoin or equivalent in the ForEx market can actually help to drive down prices. The simple truth is that multinational banks either maintain foreign currency accounts for themselves, or have deals with in-country partner banks, such that the cost to them for a currency swap is going to run to thousandths of one percent.
This takes us back to the reason to follow this story - because *anything* that disrupts or dilutes the strength of emerging crypto-currencies - i.e. in a "divide and conquer" or similar methodology, is only going to benefit those who make an awful lot of money in this space at the moment...
I'm not saying that the quoted motive relating to governance is in any way invalid or bogus. I'm just pointing out that certain groups will benefit more from this change than others, and one group that seems unlikely to benefit significantly are the users of Bitcoin. That, if nothing else, makes me just a tad suspicious...
I think that's quite reasonable. I do use notionally "free" technologies - but I also donate to those projects as and where I can - i.e. I tend to use and enjoy wikipdia quite a bit, so last week I donated £50. I try and cover all the major FLOSS projects and communities that I use. Here's an interesting thing though - if I add up what I've spent on proprietary software [ I have 7 licensed copies of Win 7/64 Ultimate on various machines, 2 copies of MS Office 2013 Pro Plus, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Elements, plus a raft of odd little commercial packages such as PavTube] and then compare the total cost of that spend [averaged out over the years of ownership] with what I spend on FLOSS contributions, I still struggle to keep my FLOSS spend up to what I spend on proprietary software. Not because I am in any way reluctant to make the contributions - on the contrary, I happen to think it's my duty to put my money where my mouth is - but because it's remarkable just how much I've ended up spending on commercial software. Now, I appreciate that I'm not an average user, but I wonder if a concerted move back to "non-free" might actually be too much of a culture shock? Not strictly related [sorry], I was thinking about Microsoft's switch to the "free" model for Windows 10. There's sort-of speculation that if you're a PC manufacturer like Dell or Lenovo or such, you pay under $15 a set for a Windows License. So let's say, for the sake of debate, that W10 retail value would be $20 per seat on average. For Microsoft to give that away for free, they seem to be saying that they reckon they can get equivalent value out of the average user over the lifetime ownership of the OS - basically through their spyware and monitoring of user activities... That's something I find quite disturbing - not that MS are doing this [well, OK, yes, that too] but the amount of revenue it generates. If people are willing to pay that much for *activity data*, precisely what are they getting in return? Just to finish with a thought on your paid-for model. How about "freemium"? [OK, isn't that what Canonical tried?] How about products where you get a core set of functional services but pay a little bit more for higher performance or extra functionality? Do you think that would be economically viable? Also, if we did move away from this "free to use" model in which our activities were recorded, harvested and sold... If we started to pay companies for software again, do you think they would be honest enough to remove the spyware and keep it permanently out? Or is this a drug that's too addictive for them?
... when Mark Shuttleworth formed Canonical, one of the strongest claims they made was that ubuntu would always be free. I *do* appreciate that Canonical's activation of the spyware feature was publicised and only relevent to users of the Dash in the Unity desktop, and also aware that it's a bit of a leap of faith to suggest that 12.10 and onwards were anything other than free, but the fact remained that Canonical started to take kickbacks from Amazon - payment - for data generated by ubuntu users. In other words, ubuntu users were doing stuff that resulted in Canonical getting paid. This doesn't - quite - meet up to "free"... Like the parent post to which you responded, my reaction to the announcement was to continue to run on 12.04 LTS for a bit longer than expected, then make the switch to Mint, initially [and currently] on the ubuntu-derived Mint edition, but with testing currently underway to complete a migration to LMDE 2.0. But from my perspective the key point was that my decision was to literally and completely walk away from ubuntu/Canonical. I didn't agree with the ethics of their decision and the *only* mechanism I had to voice my opinion was to drop their product like a hot potato, which I did. I had been a user of ubuntu since 5.04, Hoary Hedgehog. I got to ubuntu via Mandrake/Mandriva, which in turn I got to after getting annoyed with Red Hat. Once bitten, twice shy. Perhaps the unique perspective here is that users of Linux are, by definition, very much aware of the impacts of acts like this from Canonical. I dare say that there are many GNU/Linux users out there today [well, I'm one] who once used Windows but got so disenfranchised at the machinations and underhand practices of Microsoft that they decided to walk. In any scenario where it becomes clear that a party is acting in an underhand or dishonourable way, the single, simplest response we have in our power is to stop using any product by such an un-trusted source. ~10 years ago I gave up on Microsoft because they were blatantly not trustworthy. 4 years ago I gave up on Canonical/ubuntu for the same reason. I can't say for certain whether Mint will continue to be honourable, but if they slip, I'll move on. Eventually [I hope] enough of us will do that such that companies realise that they "can't get away with it" and will treat their users with respect. Today companies are so big that no amount of end-user action, short of "walk", will bring about a change. Even a non-profit has to be relevant.