My god, there is somebody that really _GETS_ it. Perhaps even better than the average Slashdotter. And this person is COURTNEY LOVE! Man, I told you to stop bitching and give Lars et al. a chance to speak. She hit the nail on the head, very hard.
We are so obsessed with our revolutionary "gift" culture, we forget that music has been working on the same premise: write cool stuff, hope people like and use it, and you will be karmically rewarded. We need to step the fsck off and give artists a chance. They are NOT trying to shut down free music distribution for greedy ulterior motives. They are trying to get these channels to work WITH them instead of with the record companies that are fscking them over. I would be pissed off too if people profited from my work by making deals with those who were exploiting me. It's like the artists don't even exist to these companies. Artists WANT to embrace the internet and the freedom it brings. They don't want to be chained to the record companies. They are trying to make all us IPO-crazed geeks realize that we can do GOOD by artists as well. We have tons of audiophiles among our ranks.
She even quotes Stephenson! My god...if I only knew that I really *was* on "their" side when I was 15...
1. Superglue 2. Strip of cloth or large bandage 3. Tape, twist tie, or rubber band
First, apply superglue to both sides of crack, and press pieces together. If superglue comes into contact with hands, follow instructions on back of package to remove. Do not attempt to lick off superglue.
Wait. Until you're tired of waiting.
Take strip of cloth or bandage and tie it around box, perpendicular to the axis of the crack. Secure cloth tightly by either tying it in a knot, or by using tape, a twist tie, or a rubber band.
Refrain from dropping or throwing your box out a window to avoid the risk of future cracks.
Ok, so whose going to print this on some tshirts and sell them?
BTW, I also disagree with your interpretation. A song is a lot more than an idea. Perhaps an IDEA for a song can't be protected, but I think a song can. When you make music you put physical and unique individual effort into it, and also bear an economic burden. I think this serves to make a recording a bit more "concrete" than just an abstract idea. After all, people don't go about just thinking up ideas for songs and selling those ideas. They sell the music that they took effort to play.
Oh come on...X is a server, you have truetype servers and clipboard servers, there are myriad little servers running all over the place in a typical *nix configuration...
Replace "KDE" with "BSD". Nobody is obliged to use your patches. I for one, wouldn't mind having routine and stable releases, instead of a new micro revision every day.
it was probably created under some non-democratic government. Democracy is a rather recent thing. Oops...duh, got my governmental and economic systems mixed up. But as I think of it, the same probably holds true. In non-capitalist societies, art is appreciated for its own sake (or by mandate of the government), not for it's market value.
Oh yeah? Name even one. "The East is Red", maybe? 8-P
Hell...um, how about all of the good Russion novelists and composers. Um, perhaps the entire body of classic English literature and art. Anything that came out of the monarchies of europe. The wonderful litarature and art under asian monarchies and despots. And on and on. Chances are, if you go on vacation and tour any place in the world of cultural significance, it was probably created under some non-democratic government. Democracy is a rather recent thing.
Every artist I have ever known has created their art with no regard to its market value or what society thinks about it. And they were each individuals. They would rather *stop* doing art altogether than submit to some kind of "social-valuing* system.
Ever wonder why N'Sync, Backstreet Boyz, (insert generic auto-generated band here) are so popular?
BTW -- *excellent* quote from Lindsay.
Yes...I had't actually read much of him, but that poem really grabbed me.
I never thought of them as "brands" really. Those places just press images on Hanes hefty tees...
But yes, whatever class this is, socioeconomic status is very vague. Some of the richest silicon valley inhabitants choose to wear cheesy and cheap tshirts.
And, incidentally, although it may be partly true that I purchase clothes of those "non-brands" to identify with a culture...I also like that the markup I'm being charged on a block of cotton is at least going to a good cause;)
"More realistic, he says, is connecting electronic devices such as mobile phones directly into our brains."
Hello, McFly, anybody in there? Why the hell do we need to connect cell phones directly to our brains. Is the cancer NOT enough? Man. Oh well, I guess whenever they do it I'll be the first to make some picoJava WAP application...
Science, I feel, is becoming too advanced for it's own good.
Well, I think technology might be moving a bit fast. We are generating solutions for problems we don't even HAVE. I mean, REALLY, *who* needs to be a cyborg? Huh? Besides the *gee-whiz* factor, who really needs to be a cyborg? Sure, I can see perhaps giving sight to the blind, or creating better prosthetics, but is there any real reason we NEED to be wiring hardware to ourselves? So technology is moving fast, and the market is convincing us we need all this crap we really don't. How the hell many people REALLY need a pager, a cell phone, and a palm pilot? What the hell are you doing with all your time, except for *organizing* it! I mean, come on...
I think the people creating this stuff (us) have to be careful that there is a reason to. You know, I like the computer industry. You know why? Because it is entirely self-sufficient! We create our own problems (bugs, imaginary needs) and then solve them for the pure joy of it! It's wonderful.
Well, I have to go now because I have to debug an Apache and JServ build on AIX - so that we can write servlets - so that the HR department can write custom jsp pages - so that people can look up their employee information online (instead of, say, picking up a phone and calling a human. woohoo!).
One of the primary motivations and goals of science is the pressure it places on society to grow, adapt, and change to accomodate eternally new situations and events.
That is an interesting statement. It seems to me that pressure on society is a *consequence*, not a *motivation* of science. Scientists don't sit around thinking "How can I put pressure on society?". Science is basically problem solving. Some people solve problems for specific applications (applied science). Some people solve problems out of curiosity (pure science). But I don't think anybody solves problems just *because* the solution will exert pressure on society. Pressure is a side-effect and consequence.
Given the opportunity, I'd more than happily upload my personality and move into an immortal world of silver and silicon, leaving behind my useless arms, my insufficient sight, and the slowness of meat-memory. Give me a single opportunity and I'll happily exchange my left eye for an implant, my right arm for cybernetics, and my blood for nanotech-enhanced immunity to disease and wounds.
Transhumanist? I was once allured by that philosophy, but after a while found it arrogant and sterile. I am a human, not a borg. Thank you, but I think I'll remain human...for whatever meat-based flaws that means I'll have to endure (oh the humanity).
In the end, it comes down to a simple axiom: Those who do not partake of the new fruits of the vine will suffer, wither, and die, while those who do, who move, who evolve, transmutate, transcend, will not. In the end, its that simple.
...and they also used to sell cocaine tinctures as magic panacea elixers. Technology != progress. The two might be correlated but they are not the same. The same technology that keeps us warm and cozy, keeps us in a tense state of nuclear stalemate. The same technology that cures diseases, can wipe out just as many people.
I choose life, but my definition of "life" is not just "living".
Um, besides the wonderful benefit of building electronics this discovery provides...couldn't we build little nano-bots that bind to viruses in the body and render them inactive? I mean, I think that would be a much more useful and obvious use. It's funny how whenever anything is discovered we immediately try to apply it to computing.
The scary thing is really not that there are big evil corporations. The really scary thing is that those same big evil nameless faceless corporations can and might and do quietly shape the consciousness and worldview of people. Perhaps to the point that we don't FNORD see them anymore.
That, as a whole, we are being lulled into an unconscious slumber, that powerful unaccountable forces are subtley, but greatly, shaping our perception is very scary.
I mute commercials, and generally try to avoid advertising at all costs. But it is simply *impossible* to not get those goddamn jingles stuck in your head...the thought pollution is *immense*. Sometimes I think communists may have gotten it partly right (well, besides the tyranny stuff) in wiping this capitalist crud out. Some of the best cultural, literatary, and artistic work, and cultural progress in general, has been accomplished under non-capitalist systems. The problem is that capitalism measures everything by market value, by how much an *individual* values something, not by what a *society* values. But that is another rant.
The Leaden Eyed
Let not young minds be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull Its poor are ox-like, limp, and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but that they starve so dreamlessly. Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap. Not that they serve, but that they have no gods to serve. Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
Vachel Lindsay
"and if I die before I learn to speak/
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake/ but half asleep?"
Primitive Radio Gods, "Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand"
But you cannot deny that dynamic optimization, like that done in the Crusoe chip has a significant advantage over static compilation in some areas. I mean, it's obvious: at compile-time you CANNOT know how the program will run and what you can optimize. But you CAN at run time! The important thing is not just the VM, which the original poster is correct in enumerating the benefits of hardware and system abstraction, but also the very fact of dynamic optimization, which I believe, as systems increase in complexity, will be the only way to go. We have always made a trade-off between overhead/performance expense and complexity. High level and fourth generation languages are plain evidence of this. As we move to MUCH more complex, distributed applications, in a heterogenous, pervasively networked world, I believe dynamic optimization and system independence will pay off big time. I mean, what's better: a fast C program 2 years late, or a *well-designed*, clean, OO, distributed cross-platform program now? Premature optimization and all...why not push it back to the runtime and not have to munge up our code trying to second guess the machine?
Culture is not static. It is dynamic. It changes with the times and the people. That should be obvious. However, it is my belief that apart from culture changing, in itself, we are becoming generally more acultural. As we graduate to a global community, large cultures will be broken along more specialized lines. E.g., some of us may associate with Geek culture more than we do with the culture of our nation. We might feel more at home in a foreign culture, if surrounded by geeks. Culture is changing from the bland one-size-fits-all, into individual and peculiar flavors, in small niches. E.g., people who like anime have a culture to themselves, which breaks nationality borders. We should take care that the free market of ideas leads to cultural diversity, not aculture stagnation.
Your government has done a good job of ensuring your ingorance. The Iroquois (Iroquois Confederacy, 6 Nations: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas), one time allies, was one of the largest, if not THE largest, native american nation. They had an agriculture-based economy that dwarfed any other in scale, efficiency, and technology. Unfortunately, due to ignorace, duplicity, lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and genocide that lasted up to modern times (forced sterilization ~1980s), the Iroquois were largely exterminated, and actively deprived of their culture (laws against practicing their culture). Today, the Iroquois are still here, mostly in New York state, trying to pick up the pieces and just live decent lives, although US citizens are STILL trying to shove them off their land. They are still owed a gigantic amount of land and monetary compensation from treaties (which our founding fathers declared was THE law of the land) and IMO reparations, which unfortunately they will probably never get as long as US citizens are still under the delusion that Indians just disappeared off the face of this continent after we came (which is party true...due to us).
Enlighten yourself, and read a few books: http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/#HML
This is capitalism. Capitalism is a greedy-optimizing system. So people are spending less time with family, more time eating fast food, living in rented domiciles, frequently moving, and frequently spending to recoup lost time. As you can see, following to it's logical path, capitalism is gravitating us into more productive "human resources" in the machine of the market. Being a greedy-optimizing system, it frequently generates bad long term affects. Just witness the state of the environment, the fact we have a third world sweatshop indentured to rich western capital economies, and the erosion of culture, or what some would call "family values". The Iroquois had a saying: all decisions should be made with the possible of effects seven generations down the line taken into consideration.
We are being made commodities. Communism was a revolt against the industrial revolution commoditizing our physical bodies. Well, now we've replaced ourselves with machines, we have become mental commodities. That is my theory anyway. We ever speeding onward to more optimal guys-behind-the-desk. Everybody is somebody else's guy-behind the desk. That's my little theory anyway...and it scares me.
In the beginning of Asimov's Robot series, a robot is sent to the future to see what it is like. When the robot comes back it says everything is wonderful. There is no disease and everybody is happy. What has really happened is that the human race has died out, leaving only robot progeny. Let's make sure we do not optimize ourselves out of the equation.
The internet will not further the "democracy" that we currently have. It may open great possibilities for true democracy, but the electoral sham that we have to deal with cannot be reformed. It can only be destroyed and replaced.
That is true. What people want to believe is that the system is reformable. They want to believe that if they just cared enough and tried enough and participated enough their voice can be heard and the system can be changed. Unfortunately, whether intentionally or not, this country's system is VERY resistent to change. It is very good at allowing people to THINK they are affecting change. But some systems just CANNOT be reformed. It needs a bottom up reanalysis and reconstruction. There is too much harmful cruft built up in this government.
I will not be voting in the next election, nor in any election after that. I refuse to give my name to a system which can so easily be diverted and corrupted. Does this imply that I am apolitical? Far from it. But in a system which insists that individuals cannot make a difference, I will use everything in my power to do so. If this means breaking their laws, so be it. There are ills that need to be cured, and apathy is the only criminal element in dealing with those ills.
Unfortunately, not participating is exactly what needs to be done to ensure the system never changes. It might be true that change in the system cannot come from within itself, but perhaps by participating in the current system, one can elect those who can make radical changes. Change needs to be "bootstrapped" internally first.
Flame me, but I agree. When people decry Microsoft's lack of innovation, they forget, although not really major accomplishments, Microsoft's innovations here and there. Take the browser for instance: Customizable toolbars...auto-completion...images with alt tags that appear in popups. These aren't really great things to begin with, but yet were quietly copied in almost every current browser.
I think some of the unix/open source world is sometimes stuck in the rut of "We're right/better so we don't HAVE to innovate". Take traditional file systems and security mechanisms. These are really feeling the strain when scaled up to a global network with thousands of users and terabytes of data.
To fend off some flames - open source DOES lead to great innovation in many areas. Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, and a slew of other projects obviously are doing new and very cool things. We have to be careful not to think that "just" because open source is better, that means we don't have to aggressively innovate. Unfortunately for most users, ungraced by Stallman's philosophical ideals, a proprietary product that fulfills or exceeds their requirements is better than a "pure" and free one which does not.
Slashdot Mirror
My god, there is somebody that really _GETS_ it. Perhaps even better than the average Slashdotter. And this person is COURTNEY LOVE! Man, I told you to stop bitching and give Lars et al. a chance to speak. She hit the nail on the head, very hard.
We are so obsessed with our revolutionary "gift" culture, we forget that music has been working on the same premise: write cool stuff, hope people like and use it, and you will be karmically rewarded. We need to step the fsck off and give artists a chance. They are NOT trying to shut down free music distribution for greedy ulterior motives. They are trying to get these channels to work WITH them instead of with the record companies that are fscking them over. I would be pissed off too if people profited from my work by making deals with those who were exploiting me. It's like the artists don't even exist to these companies. Artists WANT to embrace the internet and the freedom it brings. They don't want to be chained to the record companies. They are trying to make all us IPO-crazed geeks realize that we can do GOOD by artists as well. We have tons of audiophiles among our ranks.
She even quotes Stephenson! My god...if I only knew that I really *was* on "their" side when I was 15...
smart, germane haikus
is software up to the job?
oops, buffer overflow
Items you will need for this procedure:
1. Superglue
2. Strip of cloth or large bandage
3. Tape, twist tie, or rubber band
First, apply superglue to both sides of crack, and press pieces together. If superglue comes into contact with hands, follow instructions on back of package to remove. Do not attempt to lick off superglue.
Wait. Until you're tired of waiting.
Take strip of cloth or bandage and tie it around box, perpendicular to the axis of the crack. Secure cloth tightly by either tying it in a knot, or by using tape, a twist tie, or a rubber band.
Refrain from dropping or throwing your box out a window to avoid the risk of future cracks.
(sorry, something makes me do this)
Ok, so whose going to print this on some tshirts and sell them?
BTW, I also disagree with your interpretation. A song is a lot more than an idea. Perhaps an IDEA for a song can't be protected, but I think a song can. When you make music you put physical and unique individual effort into it, and also bear an economic burden. I think this serves to make a recording a bit more "concrete" than just an abstract idea. After all, people don't go about just thinking up ideas for songs and selling those ideas. They sell the music that they took effort to play.
Oh come on...X is a server, you have truetype servers and clipboard servers, there are myriad little servers running all over the place in a typical *nix configuration...
Replace "KDE" with "BSD". Nobody is obliged to use your patches. I for one, wouldn't mind having routine and stable releases, instead of a new micro revision every day.
it was probably created under some non-democratic government. Democracy is a rather recent thing.
Oops...duh, got my governmental and economic systems mixed up. But as I think of it, the same probably holds true. In non-capitalist societies, art is appreciated for its own sake (or by mandate of the government), not for it's market value.
Hell...um, how about all of the good Russion novelists and composers. Um, perhaps the entire body of classic English literature and art. Anything that came out of the monarchies of europe. The wonderful litarature and art under asian monarchies and despots. And on and on. Chances are, if you go on vacation and tour any place in the world of cultural significance, it was probably created under some non-democratic government. Democracy is a rather recent thing.
Ever wonder why N'Sync, Backstreet Boyz, (insert generic auto-generated band here) are so popular?
Yes...I had't actually read much of him, but that poem really grabbed me.
I never thought of them as "brands" really. Those places just press images on Hanes hefty tees...
;)
But yes, whatever class this is, socioeconomic status is very vague. Some of the richest silicon valley inhabitants choose to wear cheesy and cheap tshirts.
And, incidentally, although it may be partly true that I purchase clothes of those "non-brands" to identify with a culture...I also like that the markup I'm being charged on a block of cotton is at least going to a good cause
You have a point...robots might just be our future
"More realistic, he says, is connecting electronic devices such as mobile phones directly into our brains."
Hello, McFly, anybody in there? Why the hell do we need to connect cell phones directly to our brains. Is the cancer NOT enough? Man. Oh well, I guess whenever they do it I'll be the first to make some picoJava WAP application...
Well, I think technology might be moving a bit fast. We are generating solutions for problems we don't even HAVE. I mean, REALLY, *who* needs to be a cyborg? Huh? Besides the *gee-whiz* factor, who really needs to be a cyborg? Sure, I can see perhaps giving sight to the blind, or creating better prosthetics, but is there any real reason we NEED to be wiring hardware to ourselves? So technology is moving fast, and the market is convincing us we need all this crap we really don't. How the hell many people REALLY need a pager, a cell phone, and a palm pilot? What the hell are you doing with all your time, except for *organizing* it! I mean, come on...
I think the people creating this stuff (us) have to be careful that there is a reason to. You know, I like the computer industry. You know why? Because it is entirely self-sufficient! We create our own problems (bugs, imaginary needs) and then solve them for the pure joy of it! It's wonderful.
Well, I have to go now because I have to debug an Apache and JServ build on AIX - so that we can write servlets - so that the HR department can write custom jsp pages - so that people can look up their employee information online (instead of, say, picking up a phone and calling a human. woohoo!).
That is an interesting statement. It seems to me that pressure on society is a *consequence*, not a *motivation* of science. Scientists don't sit around thinking "How can I put pressure on society?". Science is basically problem solving. Some people solve problems for specific applications (applied science). Some people solve problems out of curiosity (pure science). But I don't think anybody solves problems just *because* the solution will exert pressure on society. Pressure is a side-effect and consequence.
Transhumanist? I was once allured by that philosophy, but after a while found it arrogant and sterile. I am a human, not a borg. Thank you, but I think I'll remain human...for whatever meat-based flaws that means I'll have to endure (oh the humanity).
...and they also used to sell cocaine tinctures as magic panacea elixers. Technology != progress. The two might be correlated but they are not the same. The same technology that keeps us warm and cozy, keeps us in a tense state of nuclear stalemate. The same technology that cures diseases, can wipe out just as many people.
I choose life, but my definition of "life" is not just "living".
Um, besides the wonderful benefit of building electronics this discovery provides...couldn't we build little nano-bots that bind to viruses in the body and render them inactive? I mean, I think that would be a much more useful and obvious use. It's funny how whenever anything is discovered we immediately try to apply it to computing.
And then there is the class, in which I belong, which wears only jeans and witty and/or cheezy t-shirts which are bought exclusively online.
(writting while wearing my "geek." shirt...)
My wardrobe is too small...I still have a list of shirts from shinymonkey, copyleft and thinkgeek to purchase yet.
That, as a whole, we are being lulled into an unconscious slumber, that powerful unaccountable forces are subtley, but greatly, shaping our perception is very scary.
I mute commercials, and generally try to avoid advertising at all costs. But it is simply *impossible* to not get those goddamn jingles stuck in your head...the thought pollution is *immense*. Sometimes I think communists may have gotten it partly right (well, besides the tyranny stuff) in wiping this capitalist crud out. Some of the best cultural, literatary, and artistic work, and cultural progress in general, has been accomplished under non-capitalist systems. The problem is that capitalism measures everything by market value, by how much an *individual* values something, not by what a *society* values. But that is another rant.
"Change the minds and the evil can no longer exist."
Yes, but how do you change minds? With money. And who has the money? *Ahhh*....
But you cannot deny that dynamic optimization, like that done in the Crusoe chip has a significant advantage over static compilation in some areas. I mean, it's obvious: at compile-time you CANNOT know how the program will run and what you can optimize. But you CAN at run time! The important thing is not just the VM, which the original poster is correct in enumerating the benefits of hardware and system abstraction, but also the very fact of dynamic optimization, which I believe, as systems increase in complexity, will be the only way to go. We have always made a trade-off between overhead/performance expense and complexity. High level and fourth generation languages are plain evidence of this. As we move to MUCH more complex, distributed applications, in a heterogenous, pervasively networked world, I believe dynamic optimization and system independence will pay off big time. I mean, what's better: a fast C program 2 years late, or a *well-designed*, clean, OO, distributed cross-platform program now? Premature optimization and all...why not push it back to the runtime and not have to munge up our code trying to second guess the machine?
Culture is not static. It is dynamic. It changes with the times and the people. That should be obvious. However, it is my belief that apart from culture changing, in itself, we are becoming generally more acultural. As we graduate to a global community, large cultures will be broken along more specialized lines. E.g., some of us may associate with Geek culture more than we do with the culture of our nation. We might feel more at home in a foreign culture, if surrounded by geeks. Culture is changing from the bland one-size-fits-all, into individual and peculiar flavors, in small niches. E.g., people who like anime have a culture to themselves, which breaks nationality borders. We should take care that the free market of ideas leads to cultural diversity, not aculture stagnation.
Man, this should be a Wired article. This is just too good.
Your government has done a good job of ensuring your ingorance. The Iroquois (Iroquois Confederacy, 6 Nations: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas), one time allies, was one of the largest, if not THE largest, native american nation. They had an agriculture-based economy that dwarfed any other in scale, efficiency, and technology. Unfortunately, due to ignorace, duplicity, lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and genocide that lasted up to modern times (forced sterilization ~1980s), the Iroquois were largely exterminated, and actively deprived of their culture (laws against practicing their culture). Today, the Iroquois are still here, mostly in New York state, trying to pick up the pieces and just live decent lives, although US citizens are STILL trying to shove them off their land. They are still owed a gigantic amount of land and monetary compensation from treaties (which our founding fathers declared was THE law of the land) and IMO reparations, which unfortunately they will probably never get as long as US citizens are still under the delusion that Indians just disappeared off the face of this continent after we came (which is party true...due to us).
Enlighten yourself, and read a few books:
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/#HM
This is capitalism. Capitalism is a greedy-optimizing system. So people are spending less time with family, more time eating fast food, living in rented domiciles, frequently moving, and frequently spending to recoup lost time. As you can see, following to it's logical path, capitalism is gravitating us into more productive "human resources" in the machine of the market. Being a greedy-optimizing system, it frequently generates bad long term affects. Just witness the state of the environment, the fact we have a third world sweatshop indentured to rich western capital economies, and the erosion of culture, or what some would call "family values". The Iroquois had a saying: all decisions should be made with the possible of effects seven generations down the line taken into consideration.
We are being made commodities. Communism was a revolt against the industrial revolution commoditizing our physical bodies. Well, now we've replaced ourselves with machines, we have become mental commodities. That is my theory anyway. We ever speeding onward to more optimal guys-behind-the-desk. Everybody is somebody else's guy-behind the desk. That's my little theory anyway...and it scares me.
In the beginning of Asimov's Robot series, a robot is sent to the future to see what it is like. When the robot comes back it says everything is wonderful. There is no disease and everybody is happy. What has really happened is that the human race has died out, leaving only robot progeny.
Let's make sure we do not optimize ourselves out of the equation.
That is true. What people want to believe is that the system is reformable. They want to believe that if they just cared enough and tried enough and participated enough their voice can be heard and the system can be changed. Unfortunately, whether intentionally or not, this country's system is VERY resistent to change. It is very good at allowing people to THINK they are affecting change. But some systems just CANNOT be reformed. It needs a bottom up reanalysis and reconstruction. There is too much harmful cruft built up in this government.
Unfortunately, not participating is exactly what needs to be done to ensure the system never changes. It might be true that change in the system cannot come from within itself, but perhaps by participating in the current system, one can elect those who can make radical changes. Change needs to be "bootstrapped" internally first.
Flame me, but I agree. When people decry Microsoft's lack of innovation, they forget, although not really major accomplishments, Microsoft's innovations here and there. Take the browser for instance: Customizable toolbars...auto-completion...images with alt tags that appear in popups. These aren't really great things to begin with, but yet were quietly copied in almost every current browser.
I think some of the unix/open source world is sometimes stuck in the rut of "We're right/better so we don't HAVE to innovate". Take traditional file systems and security mechanisms. These are really feeling the strain when scaled up to a global network with thousands of users and terabytes of data.
To fend off some flames - open source DOES lead to great innovation in many areas. Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, and a slew of other projects obviously are doing new and very cool things. We have to be careful not to think that "just" because open source is better, that means we don't have to aggressively innovate. Unfortunately for most users, ungraced by Stallman's philosophical ideals, a proprietary product that fulfills or exceeds their requirements is better than a "pure" and free one which does not.
http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr /jsr_014_gener.html