//It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.//
There's a simple problem with the idea that a person should be rewarded for how much work they do.
By this measure of value, someone who works with his bare hands will be paid more than someone who uses a machine.
Furthermore, I don't see it being long before machines are able to completely outwork (and out-learn, in an economic sense) human beings. Unless we change our tendency to idolize labor in the way you describe, the result will be concluding that humans are worthless because none of them can outwork machines.
Instead it has more to do with perceived 'return on investment' of effort. So work places are having to learn to adjust the work environment to reduce or prevent burnout.
So in other words, these geniuses have JUST DISCOVERED that workers tend to react badly to being overworked and undercompensated? Welcome to the party, Boss! It's good to see you finally made it to reality!
What disturbs me, of course, is the framing of this as the//perception// of the reality being the problem, rather than the reality itself. In other words, this is being sold to management as a way to create mere perceptions of work ROI, rather than actually creating work ROI. In short, they're coddling the industrial tendency to insist upon exploiting workers with deception.
Trust me, Boss. The perception is not the problem; it's the reality.
If you could print your credit card information in X-ray ink, bold face, on the back of your jacket, such that only people with special x-ray spec could read them, would you? We don't do that now, why would we suddenly want to change?
Of course "we use encryption". So the info on your jacket is encrypted. But we didn't use encryption before, even though we should have been (depending on how good it was).
By using RFID, companies are trying to trade off the very intuitive insecurities of radio broadcasting with the not-so-intuitive insecurities of unencrypted mag stripes.
The real reason this change is being made would seem to be that much easier to strand customers in ignorance and pull the wool over their eyes when it comes time to actually investigate and point the finger at whose fault particular fraud cases are. Neither customers nor merchants can tell whose in their parking lot snarfing and cracking transmissions - but they can sure as hell tell you who's had access to their card.
while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, 'some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters'
I find it disturbing that this operates on the same principle as the old saw about boiling a frog in a pot. Shoot the frog with bullets, and the frog (or its surviving kin) will sue you. Shoot it with "non-lethal" rayguns, and it will... er... just jump out of the pot.
Ok, I suppose that's the opposite of the physical effect! But it mstches the political effect, which is that the public will (notionally) accept these radiation guns where they would absolutely not tolerate flying lead. So our plutarchy gets to metaphorically turn up the heat on the burner just a little bit, as opposed to being forced to throw the frog whole hog into a boiling pot.
Still and all, IF we could trust governments to use this lawfully, it would be alright. Unfortunately, that's not the case, now is it? That's the primary case to resist it.
I can see some of your points. They could use some more polish and a little less fanaticism, but they make sense in the end.
The TCPA and TCG are both explicitly designed not to be robust against hardware attacks - only software. The advantage of having a separate key per device is that they prevent class breaks: just because your college hacker can get at his own key doesn't mean he can distribute a software hack that allows anyone else to do so so easily.
Of course, a system where you can get at the TPM's secret keys in your device is valuable to you - but that's only because no one else can (or does). That assumption is what make remote attestations trustworthy, and thus, valuable. The idea that handing the key over to consumers as they buy the machines defeats the entire purpose of having it, because that would be equivalent to having a PC without a TPM in it at all (which is exactly what PCs are today).
The value of a TC system is directly dependent, not on the ability of the system to resist attacks, but on the//prevalence// of successful attacks among users. Furthermore, the value of breaking one's own TPM is proportional to the trust others place in the system. The more people compromise their own secret TPM keys, the more likely it is others will also have done so, meaning the system becomes less and less trustworthy overall. On the other hand, the less trustworthy the system becomes as a result of breakages, the less valuable it becomes to actually break your own TPM. Somehwere, an equilibrium point could be reached.
TPMs certainly provide other features, but those features are not unique to TC TPMs. It's certainly possible to do bootstrap hashing with keys provided and controlled by the user, for example, but there's no reason at all you need a TC TPM to do any of that.
A Trusted Computing Trusted Platform Modules in your PC is like a public notary implemented in Hardware. You control what documents and signatures the TPM notarizes, and where and to whom you send those documents; but it's very difficult to get it to notarize something that isn't true.
Surely I'm rambling by now, but there's not much here anymore that I'm really disagreeing with you about.
"The entire situation is turning into a 'if you're not with us, you're against us' yelling match. "
Haha, nice try. The problem with divisive rhetoric is that the actual person attempting to make such a division, in this case, is the person making the accusation.
The question posed by An Inconvenient Truth is not whether science should be political, but whether politics should be scientific. Even so, trying to drag politics into a matter of environmental science is a distraction - Al Gore is a politician, but the SCIENCE is the star of the show. Any attempt to shame the film for "politicizing" the issues is either missing the point, or trying to distract you from it.
The question posed by David here is also not whether science education should be political, but whether it should be a BUSINESS.
"Saying Trusted Computing is neutral is like saying that apples with cyanide pills inside are neutral (and they refuse to permit you to but a normal poison-free apple)."
Except that TC offers a lot more useful functionality (and more ethical, even if only relatively) than cyanide.
"All of the benefits and none of the abuses, with identical hardware. "
Well, except for remote attestation. That kind of becomes as silly as trusting a self-signed SSL certificate on an ecommerce website. Although, I suppose if you consider all possible uses of remote attestation "abuses", you're still right. Others have been more imaginative as to consensual uses of it.
I'll have to review the specs again, But I think the only hidden key is only used to sign an attestation that the hardware actually conforms to the TCPA/TCG spec. This is important in order to establish trust for the features the TPM provides, but, again, it isn't used to directly implement any features useful to anyone but the "owner".
The TPM's conformance to the specification requires an attestation by the manufacturer; but how those features are used and communicated depends entirely on how software calls its API. As far as I can tell, there is no potential application of that API, "evil" or not, that isn't as exploitable by a consumer "owner" of the device as by the vendor.
In other words, the only key a consumer can't change is not the one used for any "evil" application of TC that consumers are loudly resisting and complaining about. It enables them, for certain - but it also enables useful and otherwise unavailable pro-user features as well. Like most technology, it's neutral - the details of a feature being good or bad are determined by how those features are used, and by whom.
Ultimately, my point is that one shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The TCPA and TCG technical specifications define what it means to be an "owner" of a device, to "take ownership" of a device. The ability to revoke features on device like this if you, the consumer who purchased the device (the "owner" in the legal sense) is not really problematic. It's a useful feature, in case, eg, your device is stolen.
The problem , of course, comes when you buy or rent a Trusted Computing device from a vendor who has previously "taken ownership" of the device before your purchase, in the technical sense put forth in the spec. If you're renting it, then it's legally the property of the vendor, and they have every right to control of their property. But if you purchase a device outright, there's no excuse for a vendor to retain ownership in the technical sense if they have ceded it to you in the legal one. This is the Crux of all the "evil" potential that Trusted Computing has. If the consumer is the owner, there's not much vendors can do to be evil with it.
The features of Trusted Computing devices work, and they are genuinely useful - but they only serve the "owner" of the device. It is our responsibility to demand full ownership of our devices (and not to settle for "rented" equipment, in the technical sense or the legal one).
"...the GNOME project for many years just added lots and lots of feature creep and otherwise unnamed bloat. "
Is this the same GNOME project Linus lambasted recently, saying "This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease"? Or are you talking about something else? Or is that attitude an over-reacting backlash from the aforementioned era of feature creep? I could see that.
No project suffers from lack of vision; if there's no vision, there's no project.
"Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time"...as opposed to dead and buried. This is not a weakness; it's a strength.
"Not only did Dawes lack vision, he got in the way of everyone who did have vision."
How? You just got through telling us Xorg's fork solved the problem. Was there a some strange delay between the time it became apparent Dawes was stonewalling and the time Packard forked Xorg? If so, how do you propose to explain such a delay//in terms of Bazaar vs Cathedral methodologies//? Had Xfree86 been a cathedral'ed project, Packard would have been//helpless// to solve the problem, not better empowered.
There's actually a fairly simple way to get FOSS devs to obey your "vision": pay them. It's the same thing Cathedrals do; they just license their software differently. There's nothing in the licenses that says you can't pay for software development, to say nothing of copies. Ask Linus about it; I understand he's making a fine salary maintaining a fairly useful software project.
Really, this 'FOSS developers code at home in their underwear in their free time' mentality of some is a disease. It's really what puts the lie to the whole idea that the only way to make money with software is by withholding IP rights.
So I guess I'm not clear, then, on what you mean by "Cathedral". Based on your article, you might be talking about paying programmers. You could also be talking about withholding freedoms. But neither of these makes sense.
At first blush, FOSS may seem to promote choice. Choice is definitely good when it comes to vendor accountability, in a marketplace created when only a few vendors can create software. But choice and//freedom// are different ideas. Choice is a series of selections on a menu; freedom is a pen and paper. FOSS doesn't always operate within a market context, despite what proprietary vendors would like you to believe.
A mishmash of different communications protocols is not good; it works out better if we get together and negotiate just a few standard protocols. This narrows freedom into choices for those who cannot or choose not to participate in the negotiations, but the freedom to depart from the standard is what keeps it accountable to users.
Too much choice can well frustrate users (more than confuse them), but it's the UI design aspects of the choice that are most critical here. Having many ways to skin the cat isn't the problem; it's having to//ask// the user which way they want to do it every time. If there's a mouseclick, and a keyboard shorcut to perform an operation, that's not a bad choice; I just use the mouseclick as the most obvious route, and I can discover the keyboard shortcut if I decide I want to investigate it. Reasonable defaults is the name of the game.
"Without content, the market for technology designed to deliver it will dry up quickly."
How can you say that when you've been claiming enormous losses from widespread online piracy for a decade? Obviously you do not hear the CEA's clients crying uncle (an observation you make in this very article!), so obviously all that piracy isn't hurting them in the least.
Of course, you may have a point insofar as you, considering yourself the exclusive font of all content, are still supplying the lion's share of the content that's being infringed. Again, I assure, should your doomsday scenario come to fruition, the world will continue to "make do" with what's left of our creativity in sufficient quantities to fill up every iPod and Tivo the CEA's clients can sell.
Don't fool yourself. And most importantly, don't fool us.
"Musicians, artists, filmmakers and others won't produce rich, diverse content if they don't believe their creations will be adequately protected from IP theft and other unfair, illegal uses."
BULLSHIT.
PLENTY of artists continue to create and release works under Creative Commons and other open license on a daily basis. Only artists and commercial publishers like the RIAA's clientele won't produce content without restrictive "protections". If they went away, the commons would only grow.
"Threatening" us with the bankruptcy of proprietary artists does NOT serve you well as a useful argument. It makes me want to call your bluff. No more Britney or NSYNC?...Promise?
Of course, we both know you're not going away. So quit bullshitting.
This is where we suffer once again from the a ability to conflate gratis with libre. When a journalist says "free software", it's an ambiguous term, so Ballmer gets to pick which frame which is to his best advantage. Of course, he immediately starts talking about the software//business//, which is the context that Microsoft exists entirely within.
Libre software only partially exists in the business world, however. Industry can benefit from user freedom the same as everyone else.
It bugs me that "free software" is the term de jour when the gratis/libre confusion is mainly caused by the selection of a thing - software - for the object of the adjective. Things have no use for freedom; as such, it's reasonable to assume that free software means gratis. Software has no use for freedom;//users// do. We would be better off referring more to user freedom (eg "the free user foudation") that to free software.
I see I'm not the only one doing this (not that I thought I was).
One tip: do NOT put up a script that randomly rotates addresses on a website. Every time a harvester gets a new address, it thinks its got a new address. Then, every time you would normally get one spam, you get a LOT of them.
The natives built a school there knowing full well students would be voting there. It does not matter how temporary your stay is - if it's long enough to register to vote, it's long enough to be considered a legitimate resident.
If the alternative is having thousands of students not vote because they can't get home, I'd prefer you vote where you are.
I don't think "Open Sourcing" yourself means publishing every last detail of your life. Even copyleft licenses like the GPL don't require you to publish anything you use or modify.
Open sourcing yourself would tend to imply that I give anyone the freedom to use, modify, redistribute and redistribute modifications of ME. That's too much for anyone, obviously - but I could just publish everything ABOUT my life under a CC/GNU license. But that still wouldn't be open sourcing "myself".
Conversely, I could publish almost everything about my life under highly restrictive licenses in DRM encrusted formats. That wouldn't be open sourcing - well, anything, even though I'd have no privacy.
This is the prime example of what is wrong with market fundamentalism.
"Let people do whatever they want - unless it involves forming an organization which distributes voting equity per voter, rather than per dollar. That should be illegal."
Although it's despicable, it's understandable to see telcos and cable cos lobbying to protect markets they monopolize; This, however, is the first situation I've seen where they're trying to protect markets//they're not even in//. This shows that they're not satisfied with just choking out communities with no braodband access - they're looking for governments to give//them// the money they wold have spent providing their own solutions.
about a year ago, I did a couple of gigs through RaC. It took a while to dig through absurdly underpriced proposals to find something worth doing, but I bid and won a couple projects that were well suited to my skillset. They didn't pay well, but the competition was stiff, and I mostly won on the merits of my experience in the project's areas.
* It didn't pay well; I did it at the time because I was a bit desperate. * It didn't pay fast; RaC pays by Paypal twice a month; you could wait a month after your client signs off to actually get paid.
Overall, the experience wasn't great. I would say, however, that it is a decent place to find new clients - once you have proven yourself useful with a few, they will break off from RaC and deal with you direct (even telecommuting), for better pay. The bids are low on RaC because there's no established relationship, and no buyers want to risk much on someone they've not worked with before. Asking for more after you get established is quite reasonable, though.
Shortly after I finished a couple of projects with one buyer, other work picked up, and I had no time for him. I had to beat him off with a stick, including his offers of more money.
There's also a lot to be said for buyers leary of foreign outsourcing. When you're strictly telecommuting (and if you're a small business, you are), you don't want to deal with a language or culture barrier. Being an articulate, clear speaker of English and living in North America did prove to be an edge.
In summary, it's a rough market, but it can be a decent place to find clients that will pay off over long term relationships.
So just buy the copyrights for quicktime or itunes from Apple....except I think you'll likely need more than a hundred mil for that. Companies that consider lock-in a business model are pretty clingy.
Ed Felten recently pointed out something that's stuck in my mind.
Everybody knows DRM does not stop piracy. Every time you see a headline about something "cracking down on piracy", substitute "customers" for "piracy", because that's really the effect it has - pirates crack it and supply the underground all the same, and customers are inconvenienced and soured.
As Felten points out, however, DRM is not actually useless - it's just useless for stopping piracy. What it's really useful for is controlling markets. And "speed bumps" that inconvenience legitimate customers are actually great for that, because while pirates can operate perfectly well if they give away data, taking money leaves a paper trail a mile wide. This is the trail wide enough to legally obliterate any significant commercial piracy operation within the proper jurisdictions.
Of course, there are plenty of "speed bumps" out there that are easier to use. This is just useless.
Slashdot Mirror
//It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.//
There's a simple problem with the idea that a person should be rewarded for how much work they do.
By this measure of value, someone who works with his bare hands will be paid more than someone who uses a machine.
Furthermore, I don't see it being long before machines are able to completely outwork (and out-learn, in an economic sense) human beings. Unless we change our tendency to idolize labor in the way you describe, the result will be concluding that humans are worthless because none of them can outwork machines.
Losing competition on the Internet doesn't concern me that much.
//cooperation// on the Internet, then we'll be in trouble.
When we start lose
I mean, that is what the Internet was invented to do, now, wasn't it?
Instead it has more to do with perceived 'return on investment' of effort. So work places are having to learn to adjust the work environment to reduce or prevent burnout.
//perception// of the reality being the problem, rather than the reality itself. In other words, this is being sold to management as a way to create mere perceptions of work ROI, rather than actually creating work ROI. In short, they're coddling the industrial tendency to insist upon exploiting workers with deception.
So in other words, these geniuses have JUST DISCOVERED that workers tend to react badly to being overworked and undercompensated? Welcome to the party, Boss! It's good to see you finally made it to reality!
What disturbs me, of course, is the framing of this as the
Trust me, Boss. The perception is not the problem; it's the reality.
If you could print your credit card information in X-ray ink, bold face, on the back of your jacket, such that only people with special x-ray spec could read them, would you? We don't do that now, why would we suddenly want to change?
Of course "we use encryption". So the info on your jacket is encrypted. But we didn't use encryption before, even though we should have been (depending on how good it was).
By using RFID, companies are trying to trade off the very intuitive insecurities of radio broadcasting with the not-so-intuitive insecurities of unencrypted mag stripes.
The real reason this change is being made would seem to be that much easier to strand customers in ignorance and pull the wool over their eyes when it comes time to actually investigate and point the finger at whose fault particular fraud cases are. Neither customers nor merchants can tell whose in their parking lot snarfing and cracking transmissions - but they can sure as hell tell you who's had access to their card.
while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, 'some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters'
I find it disturbing that this operates on the same principle as the old saw about boiling a frog in a pot. Shoot the frog with bullets, and the frog (or its surviving kin) will sue you. Shoot it with "non-lethal" rayguns, and it will... er... just jump out of the pot.
Ok, I suppose that's the opposite of the physical effect! But it mstches the political effect, which is that the public will (notionally) accept these radiation guns where they would absolutely not tolerate flying lead. So our plutarchy gets to metaphorically turn up the heat on the burner just a little bit, as opposed to being forced to throw the frog whole hog into a boiling pot.
Still and all, IF we could trust governments to use this lawfully, it would be alright. Unfortunately, that's not the case, now is it? That's the primary case to resist it.
I can see some of your points. They could use some more polish and a little less fanaticism, but they make sense in the end.
//prevalence// of successful attacks among users. Furthermore, the value of breaking one's own TPM is proportional to the trust others place in the system. The more people compromise their own secret TPM keys, the more likely it is others will also have done so, meaning the system becomes less and less trustworthy overall. On the other hand, the less trustworthy the system becomes as a result of breakages, the less valuable it becomes to actually break your own TPM. Somehwere, an equilibrium point could be reached.
The TCPA and TCG are both explicitly designed not to be robust against hardware attacks - only software. The advantage of having a separate key per device is that they prevent class breaks: just because your college hacker can get at his own key doesn't mean he can distribute a software hack that allows anyone else to do so so easily.
Of course, a system where you can get at the TPM's secret keys in your device is valuable to you - but that's only because no one else can (or does). That assumption is what make remote attestations trustworthy, and thus, valuable. The idea that handing the key over to consumers as they buy the machines defeats the entire purpose of having it, because that would be equivalent to having a PC without a TPM in it at all (which is exactly what PCs are today).
The value of a TC system is directly dependent, not on the ability of the system to resist attacks, but on the
TPMs certainly provide other features, but those features are not unique to TC TPMs. It's certainly possible to do bootstrap hashing with keys provided and controlled by the user, for example, but there's no reason at all you need a TC TPM to do any of that.
A Trusted Computing Trusted Platform Modules in your PC is like a public notary implemented in Hardware. You control what documents and signatures the TPM notarizes, and where and to whom you send those documents; but it's very difficult to get it to notarize something that isn't true.
Surely I'm rambling by now, but there's not much here anymore that I'm really disagreeing with you about.
"The entire situation is turning into a 'if you're not with us, you're against us' yelling match. "
Haha, nice try. The problem with divisive rhetoric is that the actual person attempting to make such a division, in this case, is the person making the accusation.
The question posed by An Inconvenient Truth is not whether science should be political, but whether politics should be scientific. Even so, trying to drag politics into a matter of environmental science is a distraction - Al Gore is a politician, but the SCIENCE is the star of the show. Any attempt to shame the film for "politicizing" the issues is either missing the point, or trying to distract you from it.
The question posed by David here is also not whether science education should be political, but whether it should be a BUSINESS.
"Saying Trusted Computing is neutral is like saying that apples with cyanide pills inside are neutral (and they refuse to permit you to but a normal poison-free apple)."
Except that TC offers a lot more useful functionality (and more ethical, even if only relatively) than cyanide.
"All of the benefits and none of the abuses, with identical hardware. "
Well, except for remote attestation. That kind of becomes as silly as trusting a self-signed SSL certificate on an ecommerce website. Although, I suppose if you consider all possible uses of remote attestation "abuses", you're still right. Others have been more imaginative as to consensual uses of it.
I'll have to review the specs again, But I think the only hidden key is only used to sign an attestation that the hardware actually conforms to the TCPA/TCG spec. This is important in order to establish trust for the features the TPM provides, but, again, it isn't used to directly implement any features useful to anyone but the "owner".
The TPM's conformance to the specification requires an attestation by the manufacturer; but how those features are used and communicated depends entirely on how software calls its API. As far as I can tell, there is no potential application of that API, "evil" or not, that isn't as exploitable by a consumer "owner" of the device as by the vendor.
In other words, the only key a consumer can't change is not the one used for any "evil" application of TC that consumers are loudly resisting and complaining about. It enables them, for certain - but it also enables useful and otherwise unavailable pro-user features as well. Like most technology, it's neutral - the details of a feature being good or bad are determined by how those features are used, and by whom.
Ultimately, my point is that one shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The TCPA and TCG technical specifications define what it means to be an "owner" of a device, to "take ownership" of a device. The ability to revoke features on device like this if you, the consumer who purchased the device (the "owner" in the legal sense) is not really problematic. It's a useful feature, in case, eg, your device is stolen.
The problem , of course, comes when you buy or rent a Trusted Computing device from a vendor who has previously "taken ownership" of the device before your purchase, in the technical sense put forth in the spec. If you're renting it, then it's legally the property of the vendor, and they have every right to control of their property. But if you purchase a device outright, there's no excuse for a vendor to retain ownership in the technical sense if they have ceded it to you in the legal one. This is the Crux of all the "evil" potential that Trusted Computing has. If the consumer is the owner, there's not much vendors can do to be evil with it.
The features of Trusted Computing devices work, and they are genuinely useful - but they only serve the "owner" of the device. It is our responsibility to demand full ownership of our devices (and not to settle for "rented" equipment, in the technical sense or the legal one).
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1890
"...the GNOME project for many years just added lots and lots of feature creep and otherwise unnamed bloat. "
Is this the same GNOME project Linus lambasted recently, saying "This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease"? Or are you talking about something else? Or is that attitude an over-reacting backlash from the aforementioned era of feature creep? I could see that.
No project suffers from lack of vision; if there's no vision, there's no project.
"Bazaar-style development allows projects to be in a zombie state for long periods of time"
"Not only did Dawes lack vision, he got in the way of everyone who did have vision."
How? You just got through telling us Xorg's fork solved the problem. Was there a some strange delay between the time it became apparent Dawes was stonewalling and the time Packard forked Xorg? If so, how do you propose to explain such a delay
There's actually a fairly simple way to get FOSS devs to obey your "vision": pay them. It's the same thing Cathedrals do; they just license their software differently. There's nothing in the licenses that says you can't pay for software development, to say nothing of copies. Ask Linus about it; I understand he's making a fine salary maintaining a fairly useful software project.
Really, this 'FOSS developers code at home in their underwear in their free time' mentality of some is a disease. It's really what puts the lie to the whole idea that the only way to make money with software is by withholding IP rights.
So I guess I'm not clear, then, on what you mean by "Cathedral". Based on your article, you might be talking about paying programmers. You could also be talking about withholding freedoms. But neither of these makes sense.
At first blush, FOSS may seem to promote choice. Choice is definitely good when it comes to vendor accountability, in a marketplace created when only a few vendors can create software. But choice and //freedom// are different ideas. Choice is a series of selections on a menu; freedom is a pen and paper. FOSS doesn't always operate within a market context, despite what proprietary vendors would like you to believe.
//ask// the user which way they want to do it every time. If there's a mouseclick, and a keyboard shorcut to perform an operation, that's not a bad choice; I just use the mouseclick as the most obvious route, and I can discover the keyboard shortcut if I decide I want to investigate it. Reasonable defaults is the name of the game.
A mishmash of different communications protocols is not good; it works out better if we get together and negotiate just a few standard protocols. This narrows freedom into choices for those who cannot or choose not to participate in the negotiations, but the freedom to depart from the standard is what keeps it accountable to users.
Too much choice can well frustrate users (more than confuse them), but it's the UI design aspects of the choice that are most critical here. Having many ways to skin the cat isn't the problem; it's having to
Just curious - are these interface problems something that enterprising Python hackers might be able to fix by writing their own?
And then he gives us this gem:
"Without content, the market for technology designed to deliver it will dry up quickly."
How can you say that when you've been claiming enormous losses from widespread online piracy for a decade? Obviously you do not hear the CEA's clients crying uncle (an observation you make in this very article!), so obviously all that piracy isn't hurting them in the least.
Of course, you may have a point insofar as you, considering yourself the exclusive font of all content, are still supplying the lion's share of the content that's being infringed. Again, I assure, should your doomsday scenario come to fruition, the world will continue to "make do" with what's left of our creativity in sufficient quantities to fill up every iPod and Tivo the CEA's clients can sell.
Don't fool yourself. And most importantly, don't fool us.
"Musicians, artists, filmmakers and others won't produce rich, diverse content if they don't believe their creations will be adequately protected from IP theft and other unfair, illegal uses."
...Promise?
BULLSHIT.
PLENTY of artists continue to create and release works under Creative Commons and other open license on a daily basis. Only artists and commercial publishers like the RIAA's clientele won't produce content without restrictive "protections". If they went away, the commons would only grow.
"Threatening" us with the bankruptcy of proprietary artists does NOT serve you well as a useful argument. It makes me want to call your bluff. No more Britney or NSYNC?
Of course, we both know you're not going away. So quit bullshitting.
This is where we suffer once again from the a ability to conflate gratis with libre. When a journalist says "free software", it's an ambiguous term, so Ballmer gets to pick which frame which is to his best advantage. Of course, he immediately starts talking about the software //business//, which is the context that Microsoft exists entirely within.
//users// do. We would be better off referring more to user freedom (eg "the free user foudation") that to free software.
Libre software only partially exists in the business world, however. Industry can benefit from user freedom the same as everyone else.
It bugs me that "free software" is the term de jour when the gratis/libre confusion is mainly caused by the selection of a thing - software - for the object of the adjective. Things have no use for freedom; as such, it's reasonable to assume that free software means gratis. Software has no use for freedom;
I see I'm not the only one doing this (not that I thought I was).
One tip: do NOT put up a script that randomly rotates addresses on a website. Every time a harvester gets a new address, it thinks its got a new address. Then, every time you would normally get one spam, you get a LOT of them.
this doesn't help for websites, though.
The natives built a school there knowing full well students would be voting there. It does not matter how temporary your stay is - if it's long enough to register to vote, it's long enough to be considered a legitimate resident.
If the alternative is having thousands of students not vote because they can't get home, I'd prefer you vote where you are.
I don't think "Open Sourcing" yourself means publishing every last detail of your life. Even copyleft licenses like the GPL don't require you to publish anything you use or modify.
Open sourcing yourself would tend to imply that I give anyone the freedom to use, modify, redistribute and redistribute modifications of ME. That's too much for anyone, obviously - but I could just publish everything ABOUT my life under a CC/GNU license. But that still wouldn't be open sourcing "myself".
Conversely, I could publish almost everything about my life under highly restrictive licenses in DRM encrusted formats. That wouldn't be open sourcing - well, anything, even though I'd have no privacy.
This is a really bad analogy.
As accustomed to skipping TFA as Slashdotters are, I'm sure they'd have no problems not clicking on this one, too.
This is the prime example of what is wrong with market fundamentalism.
//they're not even in//. This shows that they're not satisfied with just choking out communities with no braodband access - they're looking for governments to give //them// the money they wold have spent providing their own solutions.
"Let people do whatever they want - unless it involves forming an organization which distributes voting equity per voter, rather than per dollar. That should be illegal."
Although it's despicable, it's understandable to see telcos and cable cos lobbying to protect markets they monopolize; This, however, is the first situation I've seen where they're trying to protect markets
Most of the time, we just call that bundling or tying. It's even illegal, in some places.
Bundle or tie things together that used to be separate, and you get booed. But if it was your business model all along, you're worshipped.
about a year ago, I did a couple of gigs through RaC. It took a while to dig through absurdly underpriced proposals to find something worth doing, but I bid and won a couple projects that were well suited to my skillset. They didn't pay well, but the competition was stiff, and I mostly won on the merits of my experience in the project's areas.
* It didn't pay well; I did it at the time because I was a bit desperate.
* It didn't pay fast; RaC pays by Paypal twice a month; you could wait a month after your client signs off to actually get paid.
Overall, the experience wasn't great. I would say, however, that it is a decent place to find new clients - once you have proven yourself useful with a few, they will break off from RaC and deal with you direct (even telecommuting), for better pay. The bids are low on RaC because there's no established relationship, and no buyers want to risk much on someone they've not worked with before. Asking for more after you get established is quite reasonable, though.
Shortly after I finished a couple of projects with one buyer, other work picked up, and I had no time for him. I had to beat him off with a stick, including his offers of more money.
There's also a lot to be said for buyers leary of foreign outsourcing. When you're strictly telecommuting (and if you're a small business, you are), you don't want to deal with a language or culture barrier. Being an articulate, clear speaker of English and living in North America did prove to be an edge.
In summary, it's a rough market, but it can be a decent place to find clients that will pay off over long term relationships.
So just buy the copyrights for quicktime or itunes from Apple. ...except I think you'll likely need more than a hundred mil for that. Companies that consider lock-in a business model are pretty clingy.
Ed Felten recently pointed out something that's stuck in my mind.
Everybody knows DRM does not stop piracy. Every time you see a headline about something "cracking down on piracy", substitute "customers" for "piracy", because that's really the effect it has - pirates crack it and supply the underground all the same, and customers are inconvenienced and soured.
As Felten points out, however, DRM is not actually useless - it's just useless for stopping piracy. What it's really useful for is controlling markets. And "speed bumps" that inconvenience legitimate customers are actually great for that, because while pirates can operate perfectly well if they give away data, taking money leaves a paper trail a mile wide. This is the trail wide enough to legally obliterate any significant commercial piracy operation within the proper jurisdictions.
Of course, there are plenty of "speed bumps" out there that are easier to use. This is just useless.