I have yet to have anyone convince me that there will be any substantial practical advantage to the HURD over Linux in the long term. And we've been waiting for it to arrive for/at least/ 10 years.
The best Linux using lay person argument for the Hurd is a Windows vs. Linux analogy, i.e. the Hurd just lets the user screw with more stuff. The counter argument is basically "shure eating (abstraction) is importent, but eating too much will make you fat and slow."
Personally, I suspect the Hurd (or some other microkernel) will ultimatly depose Linux by addicting people to the additional power and flexability (i.e. past experence will be the only convincing argument for the people who eventually switch). This dose not necissarily mean that the current incarnation of the Hurd has the right stuff.
Analogy continued: Abstraction is like eating in that you must do it tomarrow too, i.e. what is a reasonable compramize between usability (abstraction) and effeciency today may be starving tomarrow (because the abstraction is necissary to process the increased quantity of information).
Also, the Hurd has some interesting ideas, but I am concerned that it *may* be too much the "bastard child of Unix" to really provide the abstract interface people will need in the future, i.e. translators are a really neet idea, but I am unconvinced that they are the best we could be doing. I have this fealing that the real revolution would somehow involve the scripting langauges in a more fundamental way. Who knows.
It is worth mentioning that abstract and structured dose not always imply slow, but we currently do not depend much on our compilers for opimisation since we are increasing chip speed so fast. Eventually, we will hit a limit in chip speed and need more structured langagues which allow more automatic opimisations by the compiler.
Example: It is possible to do global analysis of functional code that you would never dream of doing to C code.
Example: some of the fastest OSes out there are microkernels which could be writen in a protable high level language, but no portable high level langauge has the balls to preform the optimisations (higher order function, i.e. fucntions which write functions or structured self-modifing code).
"It's easy for commercial sites to relocate, but the average community site can't do that," Mr Yee said. "It is the Web sites of ordinary Australians that will be affected."
We need to develop a good system for individuals to host sites overseas. There are several ideas:
1) free hosting services. Unfortunatly, many of these censor content too, so we should publish information on how to keep your site active via these services.
2) We need to set up a network of people who will volunter to host censored content as an act of civil disobediance. We need to be more organized about miroring censored content and we need people who don't mind hosting things that need CGI and stuff.
4) We need to get the ISPs to offer "offshore inshurance," i.e. the ISP is not allowed to shutdown your site, but they are allowed to move it offshore. Ideally, they should upload the content to the offshore site at the first sign of censorship. The offshore site would activate the page if there was any problem with the main site.. and would not even remove it by the authors request; thus making it resistant to court orders. ISPs in many countries could band together to offer this offshore inshurance; thus keeping costs negligable and protecting from orginisations with a multinational presence (like the MPAA).
If it's Illegal, then could anyone buy a DVD from a different region, try to play it in their own region, and as it won't work, sue the DVD player manufacturer? The MPAA? Anyone? Would it be possible to start a grand scale legal crusade against all DVD manufacturers, just as they are (3 litigations and counting)???
You would have difficulty getting the case to court since the damages are so small, but a class action lawsuit might work. It would be a good idea to file complaints with the various consumer protection orginisations who normally handle the class action lawsuits. It would also be interesting to file hundereds of suits in small claims court, but I don't know how well this would really work,
The best solution is probable to try and get the regionless DVD players that they sell in some countries (the ones who inforce the laws about region locking being illegal) out onto the open market, i.e. set up a mail order shop in one of these countries. We could really hurt the movie industry by getting Europeans access to cheap american DVDs that come out before the movie is released in theaters (assuming people play them in public so that no one will want to wantch the movie) and giving everyone access to cheap indian DVDs.
Is this legal? In the US, this would be classified as illegal exhibition of copyrighted works. Bars/restaurants in the US can't just go rent movies from the local Blockbuster and play them for their customers.
Good point. I would suspect that the laws are not uniform (maybe the EU has something to say about it, but maybe not). We could get arround this by having the bars provide the TV & player and allowng anyone who wants to bring in a DVD play it. The local anti-MPAA people could order themselves DVDs of new releases that are not released in Europe and watch them at a bar. Where other people would see the movie and want to know how they got it before it was released, thus spreading the word. A bar is a personal enough setting that it *might* be hard to attack anyone involved if it was not explicitly a promotional stunt by the bar.
Jeff
BTW> The majority of MPAA movies are not very good so actually seeing bits and pieces of the movie would take the thrill out of going to the theater for many people.
The MPAA is making this out to be a piracy issue because to them it is a piracy issue. It doesn't matter to them that you or any other Slashdot reader doesn't think it's a piracy issue. To them it is a piracy issue, because whether or not the program was intended to do so, the fact remains that it does make piracy easier. There's no getting around that. Now it's up to the courts to decide whether it really is a piracy issue and whether or not the MPAA has a valid complaint. You can argue that all you want.
This is not true! We do not know their real reasons, but ANY good analysis of the situation should take into consideration things like region codes and independent film distribution. The relevent facts are:
1) Region codes are illegal (under international law and many national laws), but very few countries enforce these law. The MPAA wants to protect their illegal use of region codes to provide crappy (delayed) releases in Eurpoe and extort additional money from Europeans. The biggest threat that DeCSS represents to the MPAA is that Europeans will buy DVDs legally before they are released in Europe's theaters.
2) The MPAA wants to control distribution. Currently, they have a strangle hold on independent films because they control printing. The real threat to their dominance from independant film would come if people started distributing independant films directly via selling DVDs.
There has been a lot of talk about fighting the MPAA by boycotting movies. I think this is a wonderful idea, but I think we would be more effective if we make it easyer for the masses to boycott movies. How do we do this?
The answer is: open Linux DVD theaters in European resterants and bars! If Europeans start seeing the new releases in bars before they come out in theaters they will be less likely to see the movie in the theater. This in one of the best ways to hurt the MPAA's pocket book, so if you live in Europe you shouldconsider helping you local bar wire up a regionless DVD player or a Linux box to play new releases from America!
And that's before we get to the fact that your asking Jon to shed light on motives that he has had no part in shaping.
This is correct, but it is likely that Jon knows more then the author of the original post.. and can probable provide additional hypothetical incentives (like the above) which are much more realistic then the MPAA's piracy argument.
Jeff
BTW> It would be nice if someone would post the address of a place to order a regionless DVD player.
Re:I can't believe this
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On to Mars
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· Score: 3
Ok, while we are at it lets not do any science research because we need to feed the poor. NOT this is one of the most moronic arguments I have ever heard. Space Exploration and science in general helps us become more then what we are now. These are the most importent stuff we can do period. Now, I admit it's not good that people starve, but the 20 billion for a mars trip (or even one trilion) will not help.. people starve becuase of politics. How would you spend that 20 billion? a) paying all the dictators to be nice to there people. b) paying american soldiers to go kill the dictators?
The truth is science is the best investment a government can make. Ultimatly, it is more importent then the poor, the military, and the various corperate / individual subsidies which eat 70% of our budget. Why? It changes who we are.
Technology is also the solution to the thirdworlds problems because it forces the governments to support skilled labor (computers, etc.) which creates a middle class who are sympathetic to the poor. It also forces the countries well-to-do to send their children to the US for education where they become sympathetic to the poor.
I tried smartplay, but since it creates a matrix of all your MP3's it takes about 10 minutes to load/save its database of my 2000 MP3's. Cool idea, though.
Hehe.. I keep it to under 600 mp3s, but it still takes a long time. I guess implementing an O(n^2) algorithm in perl was not a good idea.:)
Well that's why I only claim it to be ``proof of concept.'' It would be nice if one of the real players picks up the idea and dose some real research into the AI side of it too.. and writing stuff in C instead of Perl. Unfortunatly, I have almost no time for this sort of thing.. graduate school eats all my time.
There are also neet things that can be done with AI players on the net which talk among themselves and share songs, i.e. your player makes recomendations to your friends players. It would be a kind of radio that everyone contributed "taste" to, but no one had to put in the time to DJ. It could send out the recommendation once you lissened to the song. You friends system would track how much they liked recommendations from you just like they track mp3s. Unfortunatly, I do not know enough AI or psychology to pull this off, but [addressing everyone] if you are an AI, computer interfaces, or psychology type person then this could make a cool project.
The goal of our user interfaces should be to keep us from waisting our lives screwing arround with the time consuming parts.
I must say I have been really disapointed with the tendency of OSS mp3 player to just copy winamp's skinability. The truth is skins are a really lame form of user configuration because they make it more difficult to change the interface in meaningful ways (as opposed to E themes or something where you actually do reconfigure the interface).
Now, you ask "who would want to change the interface to their mp3 player?" Well there are a lot of reasons, but they mostly boil down to (1) playlists are a waist of time and (2) you will waist you life away skipping songs you are not in the mood to hear if you use random play. I wrote an mpg123 front end called smartplay using perl/gtk which tries to fix these problems. Warning: this is ``proof of concept'' which means it will probable crash sometimes. Features: it uses random play but it displays the list of the next 20 songs it will play and allows you to remove them from the queue at any time, i.e. instead of "hitting skip on a crappy song, going back to work, getting another crappy song and needing to quit work (mentally) to skip it" you can just skip all the shit at once. Also, it tracks you lissening patterns to try and opimize it's random file selector to your mood as determined to the kinds of songs you have been lissening to compleatly.
First, it is worth mentioning that this would be a good idea for enviromentalists or humanitarians who are affraid of things like terminators genes.
Second, the solution is to compramize your principals when you need money, i.e. the worse the application of the patent (the more polution in the enviromentalists case or the more non-OPLed patents it is being used with in our case), the more you charge the person to use it. This means the orginisations which actually hold the patents need to pubilically acountable for their actions.
Third, Universities and Research institutes are satarting to consider using patents as a source of funding. Making the open patent lisence or enviromental patent lissence work could be as simple as pushing these research institutes to put very pro-enviroment and anti-intelectual proterty people in charge. Scientists are frequently few pro-enviroment and anti-intelectual property (the idea that anyone can use it so long as they publish too, i.e. GPL, should be very appealing to these people) so this could be done by pushing these ideas on the scientists that work at these places. We could get people to sign something saing that they will *make a reasonable effort* to not allow their patents to be used for evil and they will only enter into contracts which allow them to back out IF the person is doiong something bad with the patent. If all the researchers are on our side then we will win.
Per that article, the Chinese government has two overriding needs: to keep their tight control over China and to embrace the Internet for economic gain. IMHO, these goals are mutually exclusive.
We have no real evidence that a use of the internet for economic purposes *inherently* implies it's use for political purposes. It is up to us (non-Chinese) to make/keep those purposes mutually exclusive. This means we must help people in China who have somethingh nasty to say about their government to get their message out. This means anonymous remailers, anonymous web hosting, etc. It also means putting economic preasure on China to reform.
Also, adding StegFS in the default Linux kernel distribution would help a lot too, as it gives people plausable deniability for having it installed (the system it's self gives you plausible deniability for not giving up the key). Making crypto a standard part of the kernel would really help a lot of people in these situations.
First, he was suggesting that they would all be downloaded back, so it would not be like those 50 people died.. they just got merged. I would be willing to do something like this, but I do not think it is really a good idea for the general population, i.e. most people are pretty worthless (but I'm pretty cool).
I must admit that I have never really considered the idea of redownloading. It seems a hell of a lot more difficult them making copies in the first place.. and making copies seems a hell of a lot more difficult then making something new.. which gets closer to my real point.
I think the real break through will actually be in physchology of all places, i.e. creating a person/AI to solve the problem you want solved. Now, many people complain about killing it when it is done or forcing it to do something, but I don't not see this as having pretty simple answer: Murder is illegal period, Slavery is illegal period, it is not slavery to create something that ``wants'' to do something, i.e. there is nothing wrong with me influencing a childs world to make them want to solve a specific math problem, but there is soemthing wrong with me forcing them to do something.
Now, the effects this has on intelectual property are wierd. If I make Joe to write a great novel then I would be slavery for my to own his novel, so I am forced into the "open source" philosophy, i.e. I want it so I will make someone who will give it to everyone (including me).
I don't see how free, illegal distribution of music gets the artists money without the record companies taking a cut. Artists realize the power of internet distribution, and are trying to capitalize on it. Napster is most definitely not a way for them to do so. Napster is a way for their hard work to proliferate to a million ears without a single penny of income.
This is the most ignorant thing I have heard all day. The truth is that promotion is the bigest obstical to a bands success and band who have any clue ARE making money from mp3 promotion. It is really fucking easy to realease an mp3 to all the pirate sites and include a message asking them to visit your website in the comment (or maybe even in the audio). No,w once they visit your website you can sell them all sorts of shit like: shirts, stickers, CDs, mp3s of other mixes of your songs.
Now, you say "well people would just pirate the other mixes that the band sells." Well, this is no problem for the band because they can just keep producing newer diffrent things and rolling the old ones into promotional material. The people who want it will pay because some of it will never show up.
The truth is that the whole ideea of buying a CDs full of static music is STUPID. Music should be a service and not a product.. just like software. If you really liked music you would be willing to pay for the new shit. Hell, the fact that lissening tothe same thing over and over again is why we have a DJ club culture.
Piracy is no threat to ANY artist because the artists has the distribution advantage. Piracy is just free promotion of what you have done in the past.. just look at what thei nternet comics have done. Now, you could say that we should not pirate RIAA music because we souln't want to give those artists free promotion.
Plus, If we added the way to bundle a webpage with a song then it would give an artist a way to add all kinds of profit making material: visual art, links to the artists web page, advertisments.
Hell, If I was a recording studio equipment maker I would give studio equipment to good artists for free with the requirment that they mention that they used my equipment at the end of the songs they distribute on mp3. Just think of all the minor leage DJs who will hear it everytime they play the song!
Jeff
BTW> It will not be long before there are companies specialising in internet promotion of music, i.e. pay us to upload all you shit tot he pirate sites.
I say we go after the people who are harassing Jon Johansen in Norway. These include the state attorney (Ms Inger Marie Sunde; relevent post) and the law firm which pulled the strings (relevent post). These people need to be "informed" of the error of their way.. or crusified if they will not reform. It would be especially helpful if people would track down the law firm's customers, so we can complain to them.
[switching back to topic of this article] I'll be curious to see the real analysis of the etoy thing. I'd love to think that we really hurt their stock price.
Also, I should say that I really liked the style of the etoy press release. These guys are pretty good.
He argues faster machines should not be required, yet he years for more and more abstraction.
Actually, abstraction eventually traslates into faster code. Who would want to work out all the optimisations gcc dose in ams? It would take you a lot of work just to figure out what gcc dose in 1 second.
Simillarly, functional langauges will eventually allow the compiler to generate code which takes advantage of opimizations which a human could not reasonably do. Example: some experements with structured self-modifing code (i.e. functions which write optimized functions) have achived massive improvments in preformance (factor of 10 for Henery Masslin's Sethisis microkernel; this can be done by object oriented lanagues too).
Currently, it is easier to speed up the hardware, but when we start hitting the theoretical limits we will need to switch to compiler optimisations for speed improvment.. and imperitive langauges are considered to be something of a dead end for optimisation.
First, here is teh correct link to the old LiViD article.
Norwegian law firm Simonsen & Musaeus said it had reported Johansen and his father to the police on behalf of the Motion Picture Association (MBA)
We should make this Law firm pay for using these tactics! We must contact there customers and complain about Simonsen & Musaeus's actions (you can mail them at simonsen.musaeus@simu.no to tell them you are contacting there customers; they have a list of partners with email addresses here). I will be tring to identify their customers and posting links so ypou can all email them, but please look yourself if you know more about how to find their customers.
Ok, I guess I should start with some information. Here is a list of the firms partners if you want to send them mail discussing there abuse of the legal system: asmund@simu.no, g.heiberg.simonsen@simu.no, l.musaeus@simu.no, jsh@simu.no, knut.boye@simu.no, sindre.walderhaug@simu.no, pk@simu.no, p.hartz.hanssen@simu.no, etondel@simu.no, spoppegaard@simu.no, msovik@simu.no, einar.amundsen@simu.no, c.r.flinder@simu.no, mos@simu.no, a.steen@simu.no, p.seime@simu.no, a.os@simu.no, k.woldseth@simu.no, jsegseth@simu.no, c.eriksen@simu.no, s.benestad@simu.no, h.ovrebo@simu.no, c.glommen@simu.no, o.rieck@simu.no, e.hoiby@simu.no, ik@simu.no, e.huitfeldt@simu.no, k.f.jensen@simu.no
I suppose one thing we could do is send convincing letters to these people regarding the dispicable legal tactics of their company.
Jeff
BTW> There are other people involved in this who we should take action against too (discussed here).
Re:A Fireside Renaissance as a Socioeconomic Respo
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DeCSS Author Arrested
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· Score: 2
You have some very interesting ideas. We need to do things to push these sorts of ideas on the general public. I guess you could write a manifesto and get it posted all over the internet.
I encourage others to brainstorm and post other novel, positive ways we can take back control of our own lives from these jerks and hit them in the pocketbook at the same time. We are smarter than these people. Rather than reacting emotionally and throwing stones, let's react intelligently and put them out of business.
First, it would be nice if someone would post ways to contribute to the guy's legal defence (this post asked before me).
Second, we need the support of the general population, so we may need emotional campaigns. Specifically, we should politically attack the government officials who do this kind of shit. It could be really useful to the community to kill the carear of an anti-Linux / anti-fair use politician or two (I discuss this further in my other post)
It is worth mentioning that non-US countries should not want to be dependent on a US company (Microsoft) so "anti-Linux == treason" is a useful meme which the general population can understand. I think the community should take what happens in the rest of the world very seriously.. to the point of remembering anti-Linux politicians (like Ms Inger Marie Sunde (state attorney in Norway) and donating money to see them removed from office. We could run a web site which lists the anti-Linux politicians who are currently running for office and allows people to contribute to campaigns opposing them. People could contribute small amounts of money, but it would be scary to politicians since it draws money from all over the world.
I believe that this is a decission by the state attorney (Ms Inger Marie Sunde) that a crime might have been committed.
If Inger Sunde isthe person who made the decision to attack us like this, then we need to crucify her. Many attorney's in the US are elected (or at appointed directly by elected officials) so they are sensitive to public opinion. If you live in Norway you should probable be calling Ms. Sunde office to complain and explain the truth.
Also, it is worth pointing out that it is in Norway's interest that people can use systems like Linux since Norway should not want to be too dependant on US software (i.e. Microsoft). Hell, if I was a citizen I would be calling her a traitor unless she drops the case. I wonder how useful this "anti-Linux == treason" meme would be in the non-US world.. it might win us some support from some segments of the populatin which really don't know anyhting about computers.
We should make a point to remember public officials like this who make anti-Linux/OSS policies. If she sticks to this decision I would be willing to chip in some money to run commercials explaining why she is a traitor to her country on Norway's TV at election time.
I would love to see somoene who knows about the politics of this sort of thing in Norway explain the bezt course of action for communicating our message.. forcefully.
Jeff
BTW> Generally, we should be tring harder to apply our zelotness and looking for people like this to crusify. It might help the movement quite a bit to kill the career of an anti-Linux, anti-OSS, or anti-reverse engenering government official or two.. as other government officials will sit up and take notice.
Such a beast would reduce the complexity of a brute force search for a symmetric key by a "mere" square root.
This is incorrect. Shor's quatum factoring algorithm achives a polynomial time bound for factoring large numbers. I believe the square root improvment is grovers algorithm for general inverse problems. It is still possible that there is a large factor sitting in the engenering problem of constructing a quantum computer which would mess up Shor's algorithm, but there are currently no credible (information theoretic) arguments for such a problem.
I have a question regarding the really dumb post you replied to. Did the article even discuss quantum mechanics? I did not look vcery closely, but I did not see it discussed. Meaning the donut message you repled to had about 0 clueons. I noticed the same person later on in the discussion making some wild claims about this article saing quantum entangelemnts would create FTL communications. I'm thinking maybe we may have a new type of troll?:)
I suppose someone could submit a story called "What/. dose not understand about physics" and correct a few of the common missconceptions.
I seriously doubt that 'playing DVDs under the operating system of your choice' is one of those "unalienable rights". As for the 'greater good', since when has that *ever* concerned the world of coporate greed?
Actually, you do have rights to do shit with the stuff you buy.. it's called fair use. This is why all those EULA say you are allowed to make a backup copy. If the EFF dose a good job we should be able to establish all sorts of nice things like the right to copy the DVD as a backup, etc. Really, there should be more consumer rights orgs. involved in this case.
It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves.
This is absolutly true. I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. The two things making the online comics successful are (1) direct connection between artist and consumer (i.e. people visit you page) and (2) the inherent visualness and interactivness of the media (a web page), but there is nothing keeping us from doing this with music too: Ideas:
a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blurb in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff (shirts, CDs, special mp3s), and advertising (people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners).
Hell, the equipment companies should be willing to give good internet artists equipment in exchange for advertising now!
b) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot (like live versions and good jaming). Face it lissening to the same thing over and over gets boring!
Also, we need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists (another aspect of the service philosophy). I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."
The bottom line: there are MASSIVE marketing oppertunities for music on the net. All it requires is someone who can make music, write code to take credit card orders, and run a buisness all at once.
All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists.
I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. There are a few things holding online music back a bit:
a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blub in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff, and advertising---people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners.
b) We need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists. I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."
c) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot like live versions and good jaming.. and some artists will find this more fun then the normal production thing (I think TMBG had a song of the day phone thing for a while).
A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle).
You do not neded to do away with capital gains tax.. just income tax. The money needs to go someplace. I guess investment firms could be forced to deduct the tax automatically when you sell stuff, so individual people would not need to fill out taxes unless they actually took possetion of the stock. I suppose you would also need to keep things like inheretance tax.
(1) It's much harder to evade. (2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people. (3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes.
These are all good fine reasons, but you missed a very importent reason: people see how much they are paing every day (well companies may include it in the cost of the product, but prices go up when they rase it, so it is still better then the gov. hiding it via paycheck deductions and stuff).
Related to tax reform: It is also worth mentioning that we need to privatise social security, but not give some agency the power to effect the market by having lots of dollars to invest. I supposet he best way to do this would be to allow people to open up social security accounts with financial institutions. People would be allowed to transfer money they have paid to socail security in the past into these accounts. The social security administration would restrict how much money people could have in privatized accounts (you don't want everyone to take the money out now or we would have big problems), but there would be soo much preasure on them to let people have more of their money that they wuold need to keep raising the precentage every year. Eventually, we would have a nice mandatory private investment system which did not need to invest in gov. bonds. Medicare could be a mandatory inshurace attached to these private accounts.
Personally, I think that online voting should require various amounts of platform information to be made available. Furthermore, I would want to require a random 3-4 question quiz on each canidate. This way, we are ensuring that more educated are voted. This would be a wonderful way of raising the bar for voting.
This is probable not such a hot idea: The south used to require people to be able to read becuase they did not want blacks to vote. These were called Jim Crow Laws and were a very bad thing. It is really a tough choice: on one extream we have Oz where every moron is required to vote, but on the other extream we have places which descriminate. I feal comfortable with the gov. adding a technelogical option to voting which make voting easier for serton segments of the population, but not with telling serton segments they can not vote,
I think a good compramize that might fix many problems in america today would be: if your org. runs some kind of score card or votes guide and you can get enough signatures then you can be linked to from some the voting site. This would make doing candidate research easy.
If you think about it, requirements 1 and 3 seem almost mutually exclusive. I know that there are algorithms that purport to be able to handle this in theory
I think theree are really good algorithms anonymous authentication (we have anonymous curency system could do this job), but I doubt they will work through HTTP as it currently stands, so people would need to download a plugin.. which is not too difficult. There are also neet ideas like leting lots of independent groups countthe votes, i.e. your computer sends out the anonymous but authenticatable vote t hundreds of machines.
The only real problem for online voting is the poor control of the enviroment, i.e. your parents / spouce looking over your sholder to make shure you voted "correctly." This is a VERY big problem, but there are way to solve it.. including criminal penalties for menipulating someone else's vote like this and restrictng the voting to things like cell-phones, i.e. truely *personal* computers (note: those are crappy solutions). I guess you could say it is easy to be anonymous from big brother but not from your real big brother..:)
There is also some concern about viruses which hang out until voting time and then vote for specific parties/people. Still there are many advantages to online voting like: higher precentages of more educated people vote (remember, you can find out all sorts of things about the candidates online that you never hear from main stream news and you can get the opinion of importent groups like the ACLU) and people can vote more oftin since it is less hassel.
Jeff
Re:The GPL has much bigger problems than this.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 2
First, I personally support doing things the Linus way: use the GPL, but do not inforce bits that would hurt your friends (people who contribute commersial drivers).
It can be argued that GPLed code has done some good despite the GPL, not because of it. (Red Hat and Be, Inc., to name two companies, both exploit loopholes in the GPL.)
I have seen no _real_ evidence regarding the effect the GPL has had on the development of free software companies, but I would suspect that the history of Unix would point towards making people publish the changes they make as being the only way to keep us from stepping backwards. How many closed sorce companies have sprung up off of BSD.. and then died taking their improvments with them? (Note: the community may be diffrent today and people may be less likely to take code proprietary, but the point remains)
GPL causes is that it promotes fragmentation and incompatibility by preventing commercial developers from using the same code base as those who are publishing open source.
I don't really know, but from the examples I can think of GPLed software has been less likely to fragment then code under other licenses.. and I see plenty of arguemnts that the non-fragmentation of some projects is due to the GPL's not allow the code to be made proprietary, i.e. fragmented.
But others -- in particular small developers -- will be badly hurt because they cannot do this.
This arguement always seemed like bullshit to me. You are always free to contact the copright holder obtain permission to make a commersial copy without the GPL restrictions. I do not really see any reason why a free software programmer should be expected to give ``our colleagues'' who do NOT believe in free software a leg up without some compensation.. they arn't going to give me their source without some compensation are they?
This is the really wonderful thing about the GPL. It allows the programmer to make a choice about such things when they come up.. an option the programmer looses if they distribute the software without the GPL. Personally, I would always advicate using the GPL, unless you havea good reason not to use it (example: Perl's dose not use the GPL specifically because Larry felt that it would be better if the development fragmented).
Jeff
BTW> Sorry about the rant, but I've jsut seen a lot of people bitch about the GPL, but not provide any real evidence as to it's harm. Now, RMS has been an ass on occasion and ESR may be correct that RMS's style (calling it free software) set the movement back (and when I worked at VA we enjoyed many good RMS jokes), but I do not feal these complaints are realevent to the GPL.
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I have yet to have anyone convince me that there will be any substantial practical advantage to the HURD over Linux in the long term. And we've been waiting for it to arrive for /at least/ 10 years.
The best Linux using lay person argument for the Hurd is a Windows vs. Linux analogy, i.e. the Hurd just lets the user screw with more stuff. The counter argument is basically "shure eating (abstraction) is importent, but eating too much will make you fat and slow."
Personally, I suspect the Hurd (or some other microkernel) will ultimatly depose Linux by addicting people to the additional power and flexability (i.e. past experence will be the only convincing argument for the people who eventually switch). This dose not necissarily mean that the current incarnation of the Hurd has the right stuff.
Analogy continued: Abstraction is like eating in that you must do it tomarrow too, i.e. what is a reasonable compramize between usability (abstraction) and effeciency today may be starving tomarrow (because the abstraction is necissary to process the increased quantity of information).
Also, the Hurd has some interesting ideas, but I am concerned that it *may* be too much the "bastard child of Unix" to really provide the abstract interface people will need in the future, i.e. translators are a really neet idea, but I am unconvinced that they are the best we could be doing. I have this fealing that the real revolution would somehow involve the scripting langauges in a more fundamental way. Who knows.
It is worth mentioning that abstract and structured dose not always imply slow, but we currently do not depend much on our compilers for opimisation since we are increasing chip speed so fast. Eventually, we will hit a limit in chip speed and need more structured langagues which allow more automatic opimisations by the compiler.
Example: It is possible to do global analysis of functional code that you would never dream of doing to C code.
Example: some of the fastest OSes out there are microkernels which could be writen in a protable high level language, but no portable high level langauge has the balls to preform the optimisations (higher order function, i.e. fucntions which write functions or structured self-modifing code).
Jeff
"It's easy for commercial sites to relocate, but the average community site can't do that," Mr Yee said. "It is the Web sites of ordinary Australians that will be affected."
We need to develop a good system for individuals to host sites overseas. There are several ideas:
1) free hosting services. Unfortunatly, many of these censor content too, so we should publish information on how to keep your site active via these services.
2) We need to set up a network of people who will volunter to host censored content as an act of civil disobediance. We need to be more organized about miroring censored content and we need people who don't mind hosting things that need CGI and stuff.
4) We need to get the ISPs to offer "offshore inshurance," i.e. the ISP is not allowed to shutdown your site, but they are allowed to move it offshore. Ideally, they should upload the content to the offshore site at the first sign of censorship. The offshore site would activate the page if there was any problem with the main site.. and would not even remove it by the authors request; thus making it resistant to court orders. ISPs in many countries could band together to offer this offshore inshurance; thus keeping costs negligable and protecting from orginisations with a multinational presence (like the MPAA).
Jeff
If it's Illegal, then could anyone buy a DVD from a different region, try to play it in their own region, and as it won't work, sue the DVD player manufacturer? The MPAA? Anyone? Would it be possible to start a grand scale legal crusade against all DVD manufacturers, just as they are (3 litigations and counting)???
You would have difficulty getting the case to court since the damages are so small, but a class action lawsuit might work. It would be a good idea to file complaints with the various consumer protection orginisations who normally handle the class action lawsuits. It would also be interesting to file hundereds of suits in small claims court, but I don't know how well this would really work,
The best solution is probable to try and get the regionless DVD players that they sell in some countries (the ones who inforce the laws about region locking being illegal) out onto the open market, i.e. set up a mail order shop in one of these countries. We could really hurt the movie industry by getting Europeans access to cheap american DVDs that come out before the movie is released in theaters (assuming people play them in public so that no one will want to wantch the movie) and giving everyone access to cheap indian DVDs.
Jeff
Is this legal? In the US, this would be classified as illegal exhibition of copyrighted works. Bars/restaurants in the US can't just go rent movies from the local Blockbuster and play them for their customers.
Good point. I would suspect that the laws are not uniform (maybe the EU has something to say about it, but maybe not). We could get arround this by having the bars provide the TV & player and allowng anyone who wants to bring in a DVD play it. The local anti-MPAA people could order themselves DVDs of new releases that are not released in Europe and watch them at a bar. Where other people would see the movie and want to know how they got it before it was released, thus spreading the word. A bar is a personal enough setting that it *might* be hard to attack anyone involved if it was not explicitly a promotional stunt by the bar.
Jeff
BTW> The majority of MPAA movies are not very good so actually seeing bits and pieces of the movie would take the thrill out of going to the theater for many people.
The MPAA is making this out to be a piracy issue because to them it is a piracy issue. It doesn't matter to them that you or any other Slashdot reader doesn't think it's a piracy issue. To them it is a piracy issue, because whether or not the program was intended to do so, the fact remains that it does make piracy easier. There's no getting around that. Now it's up to the courts to decide whether it really is a piracy issue and whether or not the MPAA has a valid complaint. You can argue that all you want.
This is not true! We do not know their real reasons, but ANY good analysis of the situation should take into consideration things like region codes and independent film distribution. The relevent facts are:
1) Region codes are illegal (under international law and many national laws), but very few countries enforce these law. The MPAA wants to protect their illegal use of region codes to provide crappy (delayed) releases in Eurpoe and extort additional money from Europeans. The biggest threat that DeCSS represents to the MPAA is that Europeans will buy DVDs legally before they are released in Europe's theaters.
2) The MPAA wants to control distribution. Currently, they have a strangle hold on independent films because they control printing. The real threat to their dominance from independant film would come if people started distributing independant films directly via selling DVDs.
There has been a lot of talk about fighting the MPAA by boycotting movies. I think this is a wonderful idea, but I think we would be more effective if we make it easyer for the masses to boycott movies. How do we do this?
The answer is: open Linux DVD theaters in European resterants and bars! If Europeans start seeing the new releases in bars before they come out in theaters they will be less likely to see the movie in the theater. This in one of the best ways to hurt the MPAA's pocket book, so if you live in Europe you shouldconsider helping you local bar wire up a regionless DVD player or a Linux box to play new releases from America!
And that's before we get to the fact that your asking Jon to shed light on motives that he has had no part in shaping.
This is correct, but it is likely that Jon knows more then the author of the original post.. and can probable provide additional hypothetical incentives (like the above) which are much more realistic then the MPAA's piracy argument.
Jeff
BTW> It would be nice if someone would post the address of a place to order a regionless DVD player.
Ok, while we are at it lets not do any science research because we need to feed the poor. NOT this is one of the most moronic arguments I have ever heard. Space Exploration and science in general helps us become more then what we are now. These are the most importent stuff we can do period. Now, I admit it's not good that people starve, but the 20 billion for a mars trip (or even one trilion) will not help.. people starve becuase of politics. How would you spend that 20 billion? a) paying all the dictators to be nice to there people. b) paying american soldiers to go kill the dictators?
The truth is science is the best investment a government can make. Ultimatly, it is more importent then the poor, the military, and the various corperate / individual subsidies which eat 70% of our budget. Why? It changes who we are.
Technology is also the solution to the thirdworlds problems because it forces the governments to support skilled labor (computers, etc.) which creates a middle class who are sympathetic to the poor. It also forces the countries well-to-do to send their children to the US for education where they become sympathetic to the poor.
Jeff
I tried smartplay, but since it creates a matrix of all your MP3's it takes about 10 minutes to load/save its database of my 2000 MP3's. Cool idea, though.
:)
Hehe.. I keep it to under 600 mp3s, but it still takes a long time. I guess implementing an O(n^2) algorithm in perl was not a good idea.
Well that's why I only claim it to be ``proof of concept.'' It would be nice if one of the real players picks up the idea and dose some real research into the AI side of it too.. and writing stuff in C instead of Perl. Unfortunatly, I have almost no time for this sort of thing.. graduate school eats all my time.
There are also neet things that can be done with AI players on the net which talk among themselves and share songs, i.e. your player makes recomendations to your friends players. It would be a kind of radio that everyone contributed "taste" to, but no one had to put in the time to DJ. It could send out the recommendation once you lissened to the song. You friends system would track how much they liked recommendations from you just like they track mp3s. Unfortunatly, I do not know enough AI or psychology to pull this off, but [addressing everyone] if you are an AI, computer interfaces, or psychology type person then this could make a cool project.
The goal of our user interfaces should be to keep us from waisting our lives screwing arround with the time consuming parts.
Jeff
I must say I have been really disapointed with the tendency of OSS mp3 player to just copy winamp's skinability. The truth is skins are a really lame form of user configuration because they make it more difficult to change the interface in meaningful ways (as opposed to E themes or something where you actually do reconfigure the interface).
Now, you ask "who would want to change the interface to their mp3 player?" Well there are a lot of reasons, but they mostly boil down to (1) playlists are a waist of time and (2) you will waist you life away skipping songs you are not in the mood to hear if you use random play. I wrote an mpg123 front end called smartplay using perl/gtk which tries to fix these problems. Warning: this is ``proof of concept'' which means it will probable crash sometimes. Features: it uses random play but it displays the list of the next 20 songs it will play and allows you to remove them from the queue at any time, i.e. instead of "hitting skip on a crappy song, going back to work, getting another crappy song and needing to quit work (mentally) to skip it" you can just skip all the shit at once. Also, it tracks you lissening patterns to try and opimize it's random file selector to your mood as determined to the kinds of songs you have been lissening to compleatly.
Jeff
First, it is worth mentioning that this would be a good idea for enviromentalists or humanitarians who are affraid of things like terminators genes.
Second, the solution is to compramize your principals when you need money, i.e. the worse the application of the patent (the more polution in the enviromentalists case or the more non-OPLed patents it is being used with in our case), the more you charge the person to use it. This means the orginisations which actually hold the patents need to pubilically acountable for their actions.
Third, Universities and Research institutes are satarting to consider using patents as a source of funding. Making the open patent lisence or enviromental patent lissence work could be as simple as pushing these research institutes to put very pro-enviroment and anti-intelectual proterty people in charge. Scientists are frequently few pro-enviroment and anti-intelectual property (the idea that anyone can use it so long as they publish too, i.e. GPL, should be very appealing to these people) so this could be done by pushing these ideas on the scientists that work at these places. We could get people to sign something saing that they will *make a reasonable effort* to not allow their patents to be used for evil and they will only enter into contracts which allow them to back out IF the person is doiong something bad with the patent. If all the researchers are on our side then we will win.
Jeff
Per that article, the Chinese government has two overriding needs: to keep their tight control over China and to embrace the Internet for economic gain. IMHO, these goals are mutually exclusive.
We have no real evidence that a use of the internet for economic purposes *inherently* implies it's use for political purposes. It is up to us (non-Chinese) to make/keep those purposes mutually exclusive. This means we must help people in China who have somethingh nasty to say about their government to get their message out. This means anonymous remailers, anonymous web hosting, etc. It also means putting economic preasure on China to reform.
Also, adding StegFS in the default Linux kernel distribution would help a lot too, as it gives people plausable deniability for having it installed (the system it's self gives you plausible deniability for not giving up the key). Making crypto a standard part of the kernel would really help a lot of people in these situations.
Jeff
First, he was suggesting that they would all be downloaded back, so it would not be like those 50 people died.. they just got merged. I would be willing to do something like this, but I do not think it is really a good idea for the general population, i.e. most people are pretty worthless (but I'm pretty cool).
I must admit that I have never really considered the idea of redownloading. It seems a hell of a lot more difficult them making copies in the first place.. and making copies seems a hell of a lot more difficult then making something new.. which gets closer to my real point.
I think the real break through will actually be in physchology of all places, i.e. creating a person/AI to solve the problem you want solved. Now, many people complain about killing it when it is done or forcing it to do something, but I don't not see this as having pretty simple answer: Murder is illegal period, Slavery is illegal period, it is not slavery to create something that ``wants'' to do something, i.e. there is nothing wrong with me influencing a childs world to make them want to solve a specific math problem, but there is soemthing wrong with me forcing them to do something.
Now, the effects this has on intelectual property are wierd. If I make Joe to write a great novel then I would be slavery for my to own his novel, so I am forced into the "open source" philosophy, i.e. I want it so I will make someone who will give it to everyone (including me).
Jeff
I don't see how free, illegal distribution of music gets the artists money without the record companies taking a cut. Artists realize the power of internet distribution, and are trying to capitalize on it. Napster is most definitely not a way for them to do so. Napster is a way for their hard work to proliferate to a million ears without a single penny of income.
This is the most ignorant thing I have heard all day. The truth is that promotion is the bigest obstical to a bands success and band who have any clue ARE making money from mp3 promotion. It is really fucking easy to realease an mp3 to all the pirate sites and include a message asking them to visit your website in the comment (or maybe even in the audio). No,w once they visit your website you can sell them all sorts of shit like: shirts, stickers, CDs, mp3s of other mixes of your songs.
Now, you say "well people would just pirate the other mixes that the band sells." Well, this is no problem for the band because they can just keep producing newer diffrent things and rolling the old ones into promotional material. The people who want it will pay because some of it will never show up.
The truth is that the whole ideea of buying a CDs full of static music is STUPID. Music should be a service and not a product.. just like software. If you really liked music you would be willing to pay for the new shit. Hell, the fact that lissening tothe same thing over and over again is why we have a DJ club culture.
Piracy is no threat to ANY artist because the artists has the distribution advantage. Piracy is just free promotion of what you have done in the past.. just look at what thei nternet comics have done. Now, you could say that we should not pirate RIAA music because we souln't want to give those artists free promotion.
Plus, If we added the way to bundle a webpage with a song then it would give an artist a way to add all kinds of profit making material: visual art, links to the artists web page, advertisments.
Hell, If I was a recording studio equipment maker I would give studio equipment to good artists for free with the requirment that they mention that they used my equipment at the end of the songs they distribute on mp3. Just think of all the minor leage DJs who will hear it everytime they play the song!
Jeff
BTW> It will not be long before there are companies specialising in internet promotion of music, i.e. pay us to upload all you shit tot he pirate sites.
I say we go after the people who are harassing Jon Johansen in Norway. These include the state attorney (Ms Inger Marie Sunde; relevent post) and the law firm which pulled the strings
(relevent post). These people need to be "informed" of the error of their way.. or crusified if they will not reform. It would be especially helpful if people would track down the law firm's customers, so we can complain to them.
[switching back to topic of this article] I'll be curious to see the real analysis of the etoy thing. I'd love to think that we really hurt their stock price.
Also, I should say that I really liked the style of the etoy press release. These guys are pretty good.
Jeff
He argues faster machines should not be required, yet he years for more and more abstraction.
Actually, abstraction eventually traslates into faster code. Who would want to work out all the optimisations gcc dose in ams? It would take you a lot of work just to figure out what gcc dose in 1 second.
Simillarly, functional langauges will eventually allow the compiler to generate code which takes advantage of opimizations which a human could not reasonably do. Example: some experements with structured self-modifing code (i.e. functions which write optimized functions) have achived massive improvments in preformance (factor of 10 for Henery Masslin's Sethisis microkernel; this can be done by object oriented lanagues too).
Currently, it is easier to speed up the hardware, but when we start hitting the theoretical limits we will need to switch to compiler optimisations for speed improvment.. and imperitive langauges are considered to be something of a dead end for optimisation.
Jeff
First, here is teh correct link to the old LiViD article.
Norwegian law firm Simonsen & Musaeus said it had reported Johansen and his father to the police on behalf of the Motion Picture Association (MBA)
We should make this Law firm pay for using these tactics! We must contact there customers and complain about Simonsen & Musaeus's actions (you can mail them at simonsen.musaeus@simu.no to tell them you are contacting there customers; they have a list of partners with email addresses here). I will be tring to identify their customers and posting links so ypou can all email them, but please look yourself if you know more about how to find their customers.
Ok, I guess I should start with some information. Here is a list of the firms partners if you want to send them mail discussing there abuse of the legal system: asmund@simu.no, g.heiberg.simonsen@simu.no, l.musaeus@simu.no, jsh@simu.no, knut.boye@simu.no, sindre.walderhaug@simu.no, pk@simu.no, p.hartz.hanssen@simu.no, etondel@simu.no, spoppegaard@simu.no, msovik@simu.no, einar.amundsen@simu.no, c.r.flinder@simu.no, mos@simu.no, a.steen@simu.no, p.seime@simu.no, a.os@simu.no, k.woldseth@simu.no, jsegseth@simu.no, c.eriksen@simu.no, s.benestad@simu.no, h.ovrebo@simu.no, c.glommen@simu.no, o.rieck@simu.no, e.hoiby@simu.no, ik@simu.no, e.huitfeldt@simu.no, k.f.jensen@simu.no
I suppose one thing we could do is send convincing letters to these people regarding the dispicable legal tactics of their company.
Jeff
BTW> There are other people involved in this who we should take action against too (discussed here).
You have some very interesting ideas. We need to do things to push these sorts of ideas on the general public. I guess you could write a manifesto and get it posted all over the internet.
I encourage others to brainstorm and post other novel, positive ways we can take back control of our own lives from these jerks and hit them in the pocketbook at the same time. We are smarter than these people. Rather than reacting emotionally and throwing stones, let's react intelligently and put them out of business.
First, it would be nice if someone would post ways to contribute to the guy's legal defence (this post asked before me).
Second, we need the support of the general population, so we may need emotional campaigns. Specifically, we should politically attack the government officials who do this kind of shit. It could be really useful to the community to kill the carear of an anti-Linux / anti-fair use politician or two (I discuss this further in my other post)
It is worth mentioning that non-US countries should not want to be dependent on a US company (Microsoft) so "anti-Linux == treason" is a useful meme which the general population can understand. I think the community should take what happens in the rest of the world very seriously.. to the point of remembering anti-Linux politicians (like Ms Inger Marie Sunde (state attorney in Norway) and donating money to see them removed from office. We could run a web site which lists the anti-Linux politicians who are currently running for office and allows people to contribute to campaigns opposing them. People could contribute small amounts of money, but it would be scary to politicians since it draws money from all over the world.
Jeff
I believe that this is a decission by the state attorney (Ms Inger Marie Sunde) that a crime might have been committed.
If Inger Sunde isthe person who made the decision to attack us like this, then we need to crucify her. Many attorney's in the US are elected (or at appointed directly by elected officials) so they are sensitive to public opinion. If you live in Norway you should probable be calling Ms. Sunde office to complain and explain the truth.
Also, it is worth pointing out that it is in Norway's interest that people can use systems like Linux since Norway should not want to be too dependant on US software (i.e. Microsoft). Hell, if I was a citizen I would be calling her a traitor unless she drops the case. I wonder how useful this "anti-Linux == treason" meme would be in the non-US world.. it might win us some support from some segments of the populatin which really don't know anyhting about computers.
We should make a point to remember public officials like this who make anti-Linux/OSS policies. If she sticks to this decision I would be willing to chip in some money to run commercials explaining why she is a traitor to her country on Norway's TV at election time.
I would love to see somoene who knows about the politics of this sort of thing in Norway explain the bezt course of action for communicating our message.. forcefully.
Jeff
BTW> Generally, we should be tring harder to apply our zelotness and looking for people like this to crusify. It might help the movement quite a bit to kill the career of an anti-Linux, anti-OSS, or anti-reverse engenering government official or two.. as other government officials will sit up and take notice.
Such a beast would reduce the complexity of a brute force search for a symmetric key by a "mere" square root.
:)
/. dose not understand about physics" and correct a few of the common missconceptions.
This is incorrect. Shor's quatum factoring algorithm achives a polynomial time bound for factoring large numbers. I believe the square root improvment is grovers algorithm for general inverse problems. It is still possible that there is a large factor sitting in the engenering problem of constructing a quantum computer which would mess up Shor's algorithm, but there are currently no credible (information theoretic) arguments for such a problem.
I have a question regarding the really dumb post you replied to. Did the article even discuss quantum mechanics? I did not look vcery closely, but I did not see it discussed. Meaning the donut message you repled to had about 0 clueons. I noticed the same person later on in the discussion making some wild claims about this article saing quantum entangelemnts would create FTL communications. I'm thinking maybe we may have a new type of troll?
I suppose someone could submit a story called "What
Jeff
I seriously doubt that 'playing DVDs under the operating system of your choice' is one of those "unalienable rights". As for the 'greater good', since when has that *ever* concerned the world of coporate greed?
Actually, you do have rights to do shit with the stuff you buy.. it's called fair use. This is why all those EULA say you are allowed to make a backup copy. If the EFF dose a good job we should be able to establish all sorts of nice things like the right to copy the DVD as a backup, etc. Really, there should be more consumer rights orgs. involved in this case.
Jeff
It is a key part of a strategy for the artist to take control of their own destiny and start running things themselves.
This is absolutly true. I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. The two things making the online comics successful are (1) direct connection between artist and consumer (i.e. people visit you page) and (2) the inherent visualness and interactivness of the media (a web page), but there is nothing keeping us from doing this with music too: Ideas:
a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blurb in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff (shirts, CDs, special mp3s), and advertising (people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners).
Hell, the equipment companies should be willing to give good internet artists equipment in exchange for advertising now!
b) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot (like live versions and good jaming). Face it lissening to the same thing over and over gets boring!
Also, we need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists (another aspect of the service philosophy). I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."
The bottom line: there are MASSIVE marketing oppertunities for music on the net. All it requires is someone who can make music, write code to take credit card orders, and run a buisness all at once.
Jeff
All in all, mp3's are pretty cool for those of us who are artists.
I'm not an artist, but I do know that other forms of art (like comics) have done pretty well in the transition to the internet. There are a few things holding online music back a bit:
a) We need a way to get back to the artist from the music. Currently you could put a little blub in the end of all the songs you put on mp3 sites asking people to come get a longer version of the song without the blurb from your site, but this kinda sucks. I think the only real solution is going to be to change the mp3 players to support attaching web shit to be attached to the song (a button to launch netscape would show up if there was such content). This would allow the artists to include visual art, lyrics, links to buy stuff, and advertising---people would not delete the attached content because they would want to keep the useful part of the attached information. Eventually, a good chunk of that money people spend on radio adds could be going directly into the artist's pockets via banners.
b) We need a better system of promotion like mp3 radio and ways of finding artists. I have not been to impressed with mp3.com and I think the artists could do MUCH better by promoting themselves if we develop the "infrastructure."
c) We need to promote the idea that music is a service and not a produce (sounds like maybe sunscream is doing this). Real fans would happily visit the site (or pay) for services like "mix of the day/week" and good artists can turn out a lot of music with is good just because you don't lissen to it a lot like live versions and good jaming.. and some artists will find this more fun then the normal production thing (I think TMBG had a song of the day phone thing for a while).
Jeff
A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle).
You do not neded to do away with capital gains tax.. just income tax. The money needs to go someplace. I guess investment firms could be forced to deduct the tax automatically when you sell stuff, so individual people would not need to fill out taxes unless they actually took possetion of the stock. I suppose you would also need to keep things like inheretance tax.
(1) It's much harder to evade.
(2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people. (3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes.
These are all good fine reasons, but you missed a very importent reason: people see how much they are paing every day (well companies may include it in the cost of the product, but prices go up when they rase it, so it is still better then the gov. hiding it via paycheck deductions and stuff).
Related to tax reform: It is also worth mentioning that we need to privatise social security, but not give some agency the power to effect the market by having lots of dollars to invest. I supposet he best way to do this would be to allow people to open up social security accounts with financial institutions. People would be allowed to transfer money they have paid to socail security in the past into these accounts. The social security administration would restrict how much money people could have in privatized accounts (you don't want everyone to take the money out now or we would have big problems), but there would be soo much preasure on them to let people have more of their money that they wuold need to keep raising the precentage every year. Eventually, we would have a nice mandatory private investment system which did not need to invest in gov. bonds. Medicare could be a mandatory inshurace attached to these private accounts.
Jeff
Personally, I think that online voting should require various amounts of platform information to be made available. Furthermore, I would want to require a random 3-4 question quiz on each canidate. This way, we are ensuring that more educated are voted. This would be a wonderful way of raising the bar for voting.
This is probable not such a hot idea: The south used to require people to be able to read becuase they did not want blacks to vote. These were called Jim Crow Laws and were a very bad thing. It is really a tough choice: on one extream we have Oz where every moron is required to vote, but on the other extream we have places which descriminate. I feal comfortable with the gov. adding a technelogical option to voting which make voting easier for serton segments of the population, but not with telling serton segments they can not vote,
I think a good compramize that might fix many problems in america today would be: if your org. runs some kind of score card or votes guide and you can get enough signatures then you can be linked to from some the voting site. This would make doing candidate research easy.
Jeff
If you think about it, requirements 1 and 3 seem almost mutually exclusive. I know that there are algorithms that purport to be able to handle this in theory
:)
I think theree are really good algorithms anonymous authentication (we have anonymous curency system could do this job), but I doubt they will work through HTTP as it currently stands, so people would need to download a plugin.. which is not too difficult. There are also neet ideas like leting lots of independent groups countthe votes, i.e. your computer sends out the anonymous but authenticatable vote t hundreds of machines.
The only real problem for online voting is the poor control of the enviroment, i.e. your parents / spouce looking over your sholder to make shure you voted "correctly." This is a VERY big problem, but there are way to solve it.. including criminal penalties for menipulating someone else's vote like this and restrictng the voting to things like cell-phones, i.e. truely *personal* computers (note: those are crappy solutions). I guess you could say it is easy to be anonymous from big brother but not from your real big brother..
There is also some concern about viruses which hang out until voting time and then vote for specific parties/people. Still there are many advantages to online voting like: higher precentages of more educated people vote (remember, you can find out all sorts of things about the candidates online that you never hear from main stream news and you can get the opinion of importent groups like the ACLU) and people can vote more oftin since it is less hassel.
Jeff
First, I personally support doing things the Linus way: use the GPL, but do not inforce bits that would hurt your friends (people who contribute commersial drivers).
It can be argued that GPLed code has done some good despite the GPL, not because of it. (Red Hat and Be, Inc., to name two companies, both exploit loopholes in the GPL.)
I have seen no _real_ evidence regarding the effect the GPL has had on the development of free software companies, but I would suspect that the history of Unix would point towards making people publish the changes they make as being the only way to keep us from stepping backwards. How many closed sorce companies have sprung up off of BSD.. and then died taking their improvments with them? (Note: the community may be diffrent today and people may be less likely to take code proprietary, but the point remains)
GPL causes is that it promotes fragmentation and incompatibility by preventing commercial developers from using the same code base as those who are publishing open source.
I don't really know, but from the examples I can think of GPLed software has been less likely to fragment then code under other licenses.. and I see plenty of arguemnts that the non-fragmentation of some projects is due to the GPL's not allow the code to be made proprietary, i.e. fragmented.
But others -- in particular small developers -- will be badly hurt because they cannot do this.
This arguement always seemed like bullshit to me. You are always free to contact the copright holder obtain permission to make a commersial copy without the GPL restrictions. I do not really see any reason why a free software programmer should be expected to give ``our colleagues'' who do NOT believe in free software a leg up without some compensation.. they arn't going to give me their source without some compensation are they?
This is the really wonderful thing about the GPL. It allows the programmer to make a choice about such things when they come up.. an option the programmer looses if they distribute the software without the GPL. Personally, I would always advicate using the GPL, unless you havea good reason not to use it (example: Perl's dose not use the GPL specifically because Larry felt that it would be better if the development fragmented).
Jeff
BTW> Sorry about the rant, but I've jsut seen a lot of people bitch about the GPL, but not provide any real evidence as to it's harm. Now, RMS has been an ass on occasion and ESR may be correct that RMS's style (calling it free software) set the movement back (and when I worked at VA we enjoyed many good RMS jokes), but I do not feal these complaints are realevent to the GPL.