Prohibiting contributions does not work and simply forces politicians to come up with workarounds, which often end up being outside of the law.
Geez, you don't have much faith in politicians, do you? That's a bit sad. Do you really believe what you're saying? Go live in Sweden, Denmark, or even the UK. I think it will change your mind.
Shouldn't you guys be out on the streets protesting about this? This seems to be the root cause of so many of the issues that are currently coming up on Slashdot. Is there not a political movement in the states to try to change this? It seems pretty fundamental to me.
I think you miss the point, Americans believe that politicians worldwide are highly influenced by the men with the money.
Perhaps that's just a reflection of your culture. If you think it's ok in the US because it's the norm elsewhere then I can honestly say that I think you are wrong. In Europe, at least in the northern European countries, there are a lot of checks in place to prevent this type of corruption. Contributions from companies to political parties are limited, in some countries to very small amounts. Politicians have to decare any business interests publicly. 'Backhanders' are sometimes caught by the press and politicians have to resign.
I'm not saying that Europe is corruption free. It just seems that the people of (mainly Northern) Europe seem to be a lot less willing to put up with this type of corruption than Americans.
What I don't understand is, why do Americans seem to be so complacent about their corrupt legal and political system?
I'm not an American, and haven't spent much time there, so I'm only going by what I see and read on the web and newspapers. But it seems to me that a great number of Americans believe their politicians and law makers are highly influenced by the men with the money. In Europe, that kind of thing is seen as very corrupt and not worthy of a modern, democratic society. Frankly it is viewed as a bit backward and a sign of a democratic system that hasn't matured yet. Italy comes to mind as a country in Europe that has a similar reputation.
How is it that Americans are so convinced of the superiority of their country, say it is 'the land of the free', has a large number of intellectuals, etc, and yet don't seem to be worried about such a corrupt system?
This isn't a troll, and I'm not bashing America (both Europe and the US have their good and bad points), but I would like opinions about why Americans seem to have this blindspot.
Unfortunately I think that a lot of people have got the impression from Hollywood films that we have technology which can do stuff that it can't.
Typical scene - government agent is on the trail of someone - taps their name into a database - image of person and pages of details displayed. Their car is bugged and agent can watch red dot moving across a map. Agent watches image of the person getting out their car from satellite image. Zooms in to look at the face of the person they are talking to. Face is automatically scanned and pages of details come up about them.
All of that stuff is just fantasy - a dangerous fantasy because some people (even politicians) seem to believe in it.
Unfortunately it is very easy to get round all types of technology, it just takes a bit of common sense.
Let's pretend we are going to launch a terrorist attack like the one on 9.11.01. We need to communicate somehow without the authorities finding out.
Let's agree:
Bin Laden = mother.
Taking the dog to the vets = hitting the WTC.
bus = airplane.
$1 = $1000.
Now we can communicate:
We've just had a message from ma to say that it's OK the take the dog to the vet on Tuesday. We are catching the bus at 8.05am, and should be at the vets about an hour later. We need some things for the journey, do you think you could send us $50?
It doesn't matter how sophisticated your technology is, often be very easily defeated with just a little bit of common sense.
What I don't understand about all of this is why are there so few people who can see 'the big picture', including our law makers, businessmen and leaders.
Many people stupidly saw the.com boom and bust as demonstrating that the internet isn't as important as was generally thought, because they assumed that what would happen is just a variation on what went before. They don't understand that the internet is causing fundamental changes to the way the world works.
The world now has a new a new set of rules which over the coming decades are going to completely change the business landscape. Record companies - which currently make money by duplicating, distributing and promoting physical manifestations of music - are going to die, because duplicating, distributing and promoting music can be done at virtually zero cost by anyone now.
Software companies that create and charge high prices for infrastructure and very widely used software are going to die out because their software is so widely used that it will make more sense for their bigger customers (companies and governments) to contribute programming time to open projects than to pay for products from a single company.
General travel agents are going to die out because they are middle men that will serve no useful purpose in the future. Ditto with publishers of scientific journals.
Unfortunately some of our law makers seem to think this natural progression is unjust and are creating laws to restrict or outlaw the technology. There is historic president for this type of response - the Luddites, who smashed machinery during the industrial revolution because it threatened their professions. Hundreds of business types and professions died as a result of the industrial revolution. The same will happen over the coming decades of the Internet revolution.
Unfortunately our leaders and lawmakers, under the influence of the threatened professions, are acting like Luddites in a very literal sense.
Treating the Internet as a separate country actually makes a lot of sense. It could greatly simplify legal issues.
In an ideal world an international body would be set up so that any taxes gathered in this new country would go to humanitarian causes, helping third world countries develop, preventing diseases, promoting global stability and democracy, etc. Unfortunately the countries of the world are willing to unite and work together to fight and make war, but not to make the world a better place.
Umm, the Internet was invented by the DOD, and more or less just given to the (at first) US public, and then the world. At considerable expense, don't forget.
And the web was invented by an Englishman at the CERN institute in Switzerland. I think your point is a bit weak.
I think it is clear that my post was about the future, not the present. So I agree with your statements about the present, but I don't think they apply to the future.
Why didn't Courtney Love start by distributing her music for love instead of signing with a label?
I don't think you understand my point. Nowhere have I talked about musicians giving away music for the love of it. I said kids of future will use a different means to get rich and famous.
Besides that, I'm not talking about today, I'm talking about the future. In historical terms 5 or 10 years is nothing. (Although I think the web really started to take off in about 1995, so we're really only talking about six years). We tend to be generally very short-sighted today and assume that everything happens really quickly, but actually, major trends and changes take decades, and often only occur with a change of mindset of a new generation. It will take time, but it's happening.
However, the fans should not be able to distribute the music as the musicians will see no profits from this.
OK. Back to the original and fundamental point of my email: "The rules have changed". This is going to affect people in all kinds of professions, and it is going to seem unfair and unjust to many of them.
What rules have changed?
1) There is now virtually zero cost associated with duplicating certain products.
2) There is now virtually zero cost associated with distributing certain products.
3) There is now virtually zero cost associated with promoting certain products.
Of course, we can create technical enclosures where the above rules don't work. But unless we turn around progress, like the Luddites wanted to do, we cannot get rid of the above new rules. They are here to stay.
So what will this mean in practice? The record companies will have their technologies where the new rules don't work, and for a while that will slow their death. But the young kids of 2020 who want to be a famous pop group will know that if they make a great tune, record it, put it on the right web sites, email it to their friends, they'll know that if they are really good their fame will spread like wildfire and they'll get rich and famous, not from selling individual songs but from ad revenue on their web site, from mechandising, from product tie-ins, from playing live and giving live web concerts, etc...
Look at history. There are hundreds of examples of the rules changing which dramatically affect the way people make their income. It is only relatively recently that musicians have been able to sell a physical manifestation of their music - before they had to make their money by other means. The rules are changing again, and the artist and musician of the future will make their money in a different way than those of today. It might be technically possible for the musician of the future to use an uncopiable format, but they won't do it because it just won't be relevant any more and will be a restriction rather than a benefit.
I disagree. The record companies are really just middle men. The 'theft' that is taking place is that they are being made irrelevant by technology, just as earlier professions have been 'robbed' when their roles have been overtaken by technologies.
As you say yourself, record companies pour millions into producing, promoting, and distributing CDs. That's becoming irrelevant.
The band or artist of the future is likely to submit songs for free to listing sites, and their fame will spread by word of mouth, kids will send each other their favourite tunes via their mobiles, little-known bands will suddenly leap to fame in a matter of days. The bands will become famous and will get rich through live concerts, merchandising, pay-per-view live on-line concerts, etc. Of course, there will be companies to fulfil these roles, but they are likely to be very different from todays record companies.
The rules are changing. The record companies are saying they are being robbed of course, and using all means to prevent the changes that are happening, just as John Ludd and his 'Luddites' tried to burn down the cotton mills that they thought had robbed them of their 'rightful' income in England hundreds of years ago. Seems ridiculous now, but it didn't back then.
Every so often, something happens that changes the rules by which the world, and in particular the business world, operates.
A few personal examples. My grandfather was a professional signwriter. Not so long ago if you needed a sign above a shop, for instance, you used to have to go to a signwriter, who would labouriously paint it by hand. There are of course very few of them about nowadays because there are so many other ways to create signs. A perverse way of looking at this would be to think that the signwriter profession has been 'robbed' of its rightful earnings because bad technology has made them irrelevant.
My grandmother was a double entry book-keeper, a kind of accountant's clerk. She would labourously enter figures by hand into big books, do sums and checks to make sure everything was correct. My grandmothers profession has also been 'robbed' of its earnings because it has been made irrelevant by those bad computers.
The men and women of the record companies have made money in the past by promoting music, making copies of it and distributing it. Their profession has been made irrelevant because the Internet means that anyone can promote, copy and distribute music at virtually zero cost. They are desperately trying to stop this happening, but being a record company is becoming just as irrelevant as being a signwriter or double entry book-keeper.
In the short-term the record companies will use their financial power to get bad laws passed which will slow this natural development down. But in the longer term, sorry folks, but you're history.
It seems to me that one of the big problems with suites competing with MS Office is the problem of importing MS file formats, particually MS Word, in that they are very complex and need to be reverse engineered.
Would it not be more easier and more effective to create a tool for those companies doing the transition from MS Office which exploits MS Office itself? I envisage something like this:
A server-based tool which scans through a company network over night, looking for.doc files. When it finds one, it makes a copy and then automatically opens MS Word and uses an Office VisualBasic macro to parse the document and convert it to the OpenOffice XML format. This copy is then returned to the users hard-disk and the.doc version removed. Users can retrieve the backup version of the original.doc file if they wish.
Of course, there will be instances when this process doesn't completely work, but it should cover 90% of cases. If all old documents in a company are converted like this then it will help everyone to forget about MS products and make the transition go more smoothly.
That's fine for casual conversation, but professionals and those writing formal papers need to steer clear of this sort of propaganda.
I completely disagree.
'Cancer', 'Intellectual property destroyer', 'viral like' these (amongst others) are all terms that Microsoft has associated with the GLP and hence linux when communicating with their customers. And look how effective they've been - they have got loads of press coverage about it. And the terms are misleading, and in the case of 'cancer' just downright offensive.
To describe the Nimda virus or the Code Red virus as Microsoft worms is not misleading at all - it is difficult to argue that they are not Microsoft worms, after all.
I think this is a great idea. May I also suggest 'Outlook viruses' as a term we should use to cover Outlook specific email attachment viruses.
In the aftermath of the WTC disaster, there has been a lot of talk both here in europe and in the US of 'banning cryptography', or putting in backdoors so intelligence agencies can read encrypted stuff.
Isn't the very idea of banning cryptography just plain dumb? The people who might use cryptography for criminal activities are hardly going to respect the ban - they'll just carry on using it anyway.
Furthermore I believe that there are people in this world with a 'good' and non-criminal reason to need cryptography that cannot be decrypted by the security forces. It is widely believed to be true, not by nutty paranoids but by governments and industry leaders, that security forces of some countries (notably the USA, UK and France) use industrial espionage to aid their own companies when pitching for very large contracts. If the US (and/or UK) tries to get a global ban on cryptography or put back doors in, I think the rest of the world has good reason to tell them to get stuffed.
One thing has always puzzelled me about Americans. Perhaps someone would care to enlighten me...
I think it's fairly true to say that American's are fairly obsessed with the concept of 'freedom' and convinced that America is 'Land of the free'. But what essential liberties does an American have that people in most other 'first world' countries don't have? How is an American more free than someone from Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, New Zealand, France, Spain, etc??
The only additional freedom which Americans have which other countries don't is the right to carry firearms, but that's a freedom that nearly 100% of the populations of these countries don't want.
Having lived and travelled in many countries I felt no more free in the US than many other places. In fact, in many ways the US feels much more restricted, for instance, to most Europeans and Australians it is increadible that in many states under 21's can't drink in bars. And the maximum speed limits for cars are really sloooowww... and the police their are very strict when people go over the limit. These are basic, day to day things in which America's seem to be far less free than many of their friends overseas.
So, back to my original question. What essential liberties does an American have than an European Australian, Canadian or New Zealander doesn't have? If there aren't any, can you please all shut up about America being 'land of the free'.
To make such a sweeping statement such is just dumb. I suggest that your knowledge of the business world is limited.
Business uses of Open Source include a wide range of embedded systems, web hosting and service companies, file, email and print servers, 3D graphic rendering in the movie industry, public kiosks, the list is huge and many significant... stuff it. I don't know why I'm wasting my time replying to this rubbish.
Slashdot Mirror
Prohibiting contributions does not work and simply forces politicians to come up with workarounds, which often end up being outside of the law.
Geez, you don't have much faith in politicians, do you? That's a bit sad. Do you really believe what you're saying? Go live in Sweden, Denmark, or even the UK. I think it will change your mind.
That's a great summary.
Shouldn't you guys be out on the streets protesting about this? This seems to be the root cause of so many of the issues that are currently coming up on Slashdot. Is there not a political movement in the states to try to change this? It seems pretty fundamental to me.
Well, an obvious solution is to legally limit the politican donation system. That's what happens in most European countries.
I think you miss the point, Americans believe that politicians worldwide are highly influenced by the men with the money.
Perhaps that's just a reflection of your culture. If you think it's ok in the US because it's the norm elsewhere then I can honestly say that I think you are wrong. In Europe, at least in the northern European countries, there are a lot of checks in place to prevent this type of corruption. Contributions from companies to political parties are limited, in some countries to very small amounts. Politicians have to decare any business interests publicly. 'Backhanders' are sometimes caught by the press and politicians have to resign.
I'm not saying that Europe is corruption free. It just seems that the people of (mainly Northern) Europe seem to be a lot less willing to put up with this type of corruption than Americans.
I was thinking that EU is corrupt because they're the one asking for money from MS. How low can they go?
Erm... I'm not sure how to respond to that. I think you're kind of missing the point.
What I don't understand is, why do Americans seem to be so complacent about their corrupt legal and political system?
I'm not an American, and haven't spent much time there, so I'm only going by what I see and read on the web and newspapers. But it seems to me that a great number of Americans believe their politicians and law makers are highly influenced by the men with the money. In Europe, that kind of thing is seen as very corrupt and not worthy of a modern, democratic society. Frankly it is viewed as a bit backward and a sign of a democratic system that hasn't matured yet. Italy comes to mind as a country in Europe that has a similar reputation.
How is it that Americans are so convinced of the superiority of their country, say it is 'the land of the free', has a large number of intellectuals, etc, and yet don't seem to be worried about such a corrupt system?
This isn't a troll, and I'm not bashing America (both Europe and the US have their good and bad points), but I would like opinions about why Americans seem to have this blindspot.
Unfortunately I think that a lot of people have got the impression from Hollywood films that we have technology which can do stuff that it can't.
Typical scene - government agent is on the trail of someone - taps their name into a database - image of person and pages of details displayed. Their car is bugged and agent can watch red dot moving across a map. Agent watches image of the person getting out their car from satellite image. Zooms in to look at the face of the person they are talking to. Face is automatically scanned and pages of details come up about them.
All of that stuff is just fantasy - a dangerous fantasy because some people (even politicians) seem to believe in it.
Unfortunately it is very easy to get round all types of technology, it just takes a bit of common sense.
Let's pretend we are going to launch a terrorist attack like the one on 9.11.01. We need to communicate somehow without the authorities finding out.
Let's agree:
Bin Laden = mother.
Taking the dog to the vets = hitting the WTC.
bus = airplane.
$1 = $1000.
Now we can communicate:
We've just had a message from ma to say that it's OK the take the dog to the vet on Tuesday. We are catching the bus at 8.05am, and should be at the vets about an hour later. We need some things for the journey, do you think you could send us $50?
It doesn't matter how sophisticated your technology is, often be very easily defeated with just a little bit of common sense.
What I don't understand about all of this is why are there so few people who can see 'the big picture', including our law makers, businessmen and leaders.
.com boom and bust as demonstrating that the internet isn't as important as was generally thought, because they assumed that what would happen is just a variation on what went before. They don't understand that the internet is causing fundamental changes to the way the world works.
Many people stupidly saw the
The world now has a new a new set of rules which over the coming decades are going to completely change the business landscape. Record companies - which currently make money by duplicating, distributing and promoting physical manifestations of music - are going to die, because duplicating, distributing and promoting music can be done at virtually zero cost by anyone now.
Software companies that create and charge high prices for infrastructure and very widely used software are going to die out because their software is so widely used that it will make more sense for their bigger customers (companies and governments) to contribute programming time to open projects than to pay for products from a single company.
General travel agents are going to die out because they are middle men that will serve no useful purpose in the future. Ditto with publishers of scientific journals.
Unfortunately some of our law makers seem to think this natural progression is unjust and are creating laws to restrict or outlaw the technology. There is historic president for this type of response - the Luddites, who smashed machinery during the industrial revolution because it threatened their professions. Hundreds of business types and professions died as a result of the industrial revolution. The same will happen over the coming decades of the Internet revolution.
Unfortunately our leaders and lawmakers, under the influence of the threatened professions, are acting like Luddites in a very literal sense.
Actually, he seems to be from France (notice the .fr in his URL).
;-)
Damn. And I thought I'd found a good way to tease the Americans. Oh well, I'll just have to provoke the French instead.
Frenchies - go to Sweden - land of the free!
But how many time will this network stays up before local authorities stop it?
;-)
My god, where are you from? Sounds like your authorities are very oppressive!
Come to Europe - land of the free!
If it's "another place", how can they rule?
It would be a country ruled by an international body.
Treating the Internet as a separate country actually makes a lot of sense. It could greatly simplify legal issues.
In an ideal world an international body would be set up so that any taxes gathered in this new country would go to humanitarian causes, helping third world countries develop, preventing diseases, promoting global stability and democracy, etc. Unfortunately the countries of the world are willing to unite and work together to fight and make war, but not to make the world a better place.
Umm, the Internet was invented by the DOD, and more or less just given to the (at first) US public, and then the world. At considerable expense, don't forget.
And the web was invented by an Englishman at the CERN institute in Switzerland. I think your point is a bit weak.
I think it is clear that my post was about the future, not the present. So I agree with your statements about the present, but I don't think they apply to the future.
Why didn't Courtney Love start by distributing her music for love instead of signing with a label?
I don't think you understand my point. Nowhere have I talked about musicians giving away music for the love of it. I said kids of future will use a different means to get rich and famous.
Besides that, I'm not talking about today, I'm talking about the future. In historical terms 5 or 10 years is nothing. (Although I think the web really started to take off in about 1995, so we're really only talking about six years). We tend to be generally very short-sighted today and assume that everything happens really quickly, but actually, major trends and changes take decades, and often only occur with a change of mindset of a new generation. It will take time, but it's happening.
However, the fans should not be able to distribute the music as the musicians will see no profits from this.
OK. Back to the original and fundamental point of my email: "The rules have changed". This is going to affect people in all kinds of professions, and it is going to seem unfair and unjust to many of them.
What rules have changed?
1) There is now virtually zero cost associated with duplicating certain products.
2) There is now virtually zero cost associated with distributing certain products.
3) There is now virtually zero cost associated with promoting certain products.
Of course, we can create technical enclosures where the above rules don't work. But unless we turn around progress, like the Luddites wanted to do, we cannot get rid of the above new rules. They are here to stay.
So what will this mean in practice? The record companies will have their technologies where the new rules don't work, and for a while that will slow their death. But the young kids of 2020 who want to be a famous pop group will know that if they make a great tune, record it, put it on the right web sites, email it to their friends, they'll know that if they are really good their fame will spread like wildfire and they'll get rich and famous, not from selling individual songs but from ad revenue on their web site, from mechandising, from product tie-ins, from playing live and giving live web concerts, etc...
Look at history. There are hundreds of examples of the rules changing which dramatically affect the way people make their income. It is only relatively recently that musicians have been able to sell a physical manifestation of their music - before they had to make their money by other means. The rules are changing again, and the artist and musician of the future will make their money in a different way than those of today. It might be technically possible for the musician of the future to use an uncopiable format, but they won't do it because it just won't be relevant any more and will be a restriction rather than a benefit.
I disagree. The record companies are really just middle men. The 'theft' that is taking place is that they are being made irrelevant by technology, just as earlier professions have been 'robbed' when their roles have been overtaken by technologies.
As you say yourself, record companies pour millions into producing, promoting, and distributing CDs. That's becoming irrelevant.
The band or artist of the future is likely to submit songs for free to listing sites, and their fame will spread by word of mouth, kids will send each other their favourite tunes via their mobiles, little-known bands will suddenly leap to fame in a matter of days. The bands will become famous and will get rich through live concerts, merchandising, pay-per-view live on-line concerts, etc. Of course, there will be companies to fulfil these roles, but they are likely to be very different from todays record companies.
The rules are changing. The record companies are saying they are being robbed of course, and using all means to prevent the changes that are happening, just as John Ludd and his 'Luddites' tried to burn down the cotton mills that they thought had robbed them of their 'rightful' income in England hundreds of years ago. Seems ridiculous now, but it didn't back then.
Every so often, something happens that changes the rules by which the world, and in particular the business world, operates.
A few personal examples. My grandfather was a professional signwriter. Not so long ago if you needed a sign above a shop, for instance, you used to have to go to a signwriter, who would labouriously paint it by hand. There are of course very few of them about nowadays because there are so many other ways to create signs. A perverse way of looking at this would be to think that the signwriter profession has been 'robbed' of its rightful earnings because bad technology has made them irrelevant.
My grandmother was a double entry book-keeper, a kind of accountant's clerk. She would labourously enter figures by hand into big books, do sums and checks to make sure everything was correct. My grandmothers profession has also been 'robbed' of its earnings because it has been made irrelevant by those bad computers.
The men and women of the record companies have made money in the past by promoting music, making copies of it and distributing it. Their profession has been made irrelevant because the Internet means that anyone can promote, copy and distribute music at virtually zero cost. They are desperately trying to stop this happening, but being a record company is becoming just as irrelevant as being a signwriter or double entry book-keeper.
In the short-term the record companies will use their financial power to get bad laws passed which will slow this natural development down. But in the longer term, sorry folks, but you're history.
It seems to me that one of the big problems with suites competing with MS Office is the problem of importing MS file formats, particually MS Word, in that they are very complex and need to be reverse engineered.
.doc files. When it finds one, it makes a copy and then automatically opens MS Word and uses an Office VisualBasic macro to parse the document and convert it to the OpenOffice XML format. This copy is then returned to the users hard-disk and the .doc version removed. Users can retrieve the backup version of the original .doc file if they wish.
Would it not be more easier and more effective to create a tool for those companies doing the transition from MS Office which exploits MS Office itself? I envisage something like this:
A server-based tool which scans through a company network over night, looking for
Of course, there will be instances when this process doesn't completely work, but it should cover 90% of cases. If all old documents in a company are converted like this then it will help everyone to forget about MS products and make the transition go more smoothly.
That's fine for casual conversation, but professionals and those writing formal papers need to steer clear of this sort of propaganda.
I completely disagree.
'Cancer', 'Intellectual property destroyer', 'viral like' these (amongst others) are all terms that Microsoft has associated with the GLP and hence linux when communicating with their customers. And look how effective they've been - they have got loads of press coverage about it. And the terms are misleading, and in the case of 'cancer' just downright offensive.
To describe the Nimda virus or the Code Red virus as Microsoft worms is not misleading at all - it is difficult to argue that they are not Microsoft worms, after all.
I think this is a great idea. May I also suggest 'Outlook viruses' as a term we should use to cover Outlook specific email attachment viruses.
SUSE is very good for a first linux installation.
In the aftermath of the WTC disaster, there has been a lot of talk both here in europe and in the US of 'banning cryptography', or putting in backdoors so intelligence agencies can read encrypted stuff.
Isn't the very idea of banning cryptography just plain dumb? The people who might use cryptography for criminal activities are hardly going to respect the ban - they'll just carry on using it anyway.
Furthermore I believe that there are people in this world with a 'good' and non-criminal reason to need cryptography that cannot be decrypted by the security forces. It is widely believed to be true, not by nutty paranoids but by governments and industry leaders, that security forces of some countries (notably the USA, UK and France) use industrial espionage to aid their own companies when pitching for very large contracts. If the US (and/or UK) tries to get a global ban on cryptography or put back doors in, I think the rest of the world has good reason to tell them to get stuffed.
It's worth taking a look at the visitor's area of the TIF web site:
http://www.tif.co.uk/
It certainly has an impressive list of members, including certain UK government departments such as the Inland Revenue.
One thing has always puzzelled me about Americans. Perhaps someone would care to enlighten me...
I think it's fairly true to say that American's are fairly obsessed with the concept of 'freedom' and convinced that America is 'Land of the free'. But what essential liberties does an American have that people in most other 'first world' countries don't have? How is an American more free than someone from Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, New Zealand, France, Spain, etc??
The only additional freedom which Americans have which other countries don't is the right to carry firearms, but that's a freedom that nearly 100% of the populations of these countries don't want.
Having lived and travelled in many countries I felt no more free in the US than many other places. In fact, in many ways the US feels much more restricted, for instance, to most Europeans and Australians it is increadible that in many states under 21's can't drink in bars. And the maximum speed limits for cars are really sloooowww... and the police their are very strict when people go over the limit. These are basic, day to day things in which America's seem to be far less free than many of their friends overseas.
So, back to my original question. What essential liberties does an American have than an European Australian, Canadian or New Zealander doesn't have? If there aren't any, can you please all shut up about America being 'land of the free'.
To make such a sweeping statement such is just dumb. I suggest that your knowledge of the business world is limited.
Business uses of Open Source include a wide range of embedded systems, web hosting and service companies, file, email and print servers, 3D graphic rendering in the movie industry, public kiosks, the list is huge and many significant... stuff it. I don't know why I'm wasting my time replying to this rubbish.