Very good question - I recently wrote a nice little shell script for adding a site to the squidGuard whitelist that filters my children's browsing.
Then I wanted to make it easy for my wife to run. All I wanted was a little GUI window with a couple of controls to set the script's parameters, and an output box to capture the output of the script. I couldn't find a way to do it as easily as I wanted.
In the end I went with a ruby script using a Glade ui definition. It works excellently, but it was more work than I really wanted to do. I'd love to hear of an easier way.
Obeying Benfords law isn't a pattern - it's the absence of a pattern. If the sequence of leading digits of prime numbers didn't follow Benford's Law, that would be a pattern, and a very interesting and peculiar one - there would have to be some underlying reason for such non-randomness.
The problem with intellectual property from an anarcho-capitalist viewpoint is the allocation of enforcement costs. Ownership of physical property is relatively easy to enforce because the property owner can guard or at least watch his property. Enforcing exclusivity of the right to copy requires watching what people do in private, which cannot be done either cheaply or unintrusively.
The present regime lays very heavy enforcement costs on the general public, through the power of subpoena used to investigate suspected breaches, and most significantly in the restriction of "circumvention devices". There is no way to justify such restrictions in an anarcho-capitalist worldview.
I would see "intellectual property" as a contract right rather than a property right. That would mean that the costs of enforcement would fall entirely on the "intellectual property owner", and in practice would amount pretty much to the abolition of copyright and patent.
You should try to find papers by Stephan Kinsella - an opponent of IP who writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and others, and also Tim Lee, who takes a more pragmatic (but very informed view) and has written for Cato. He blogs at "Technology Liberation Front".
I covered the essay here, mainly in an attempt to clarify the issues.
A key question is how much competition BellSouth and the like face in the end-user ISP market. Judging from the situation here in the UK, no ISP could restrict the service on offer this way and hold on to market share - the market would go elsewhere. But that would not necessarily be the case in the absence of Local Loop Unbundling, which is a regulatory requirement on BT.
There's also a possibility that ISPs could creep this sort of thing in very gradually, but I can't really see it - in order to get any value, it has to be obvious enough to give the ISP leverage on service providers, and if it is that obvious it will put off consumers.
Financiers are disappointed that Google isn't blowing billions on big-name takeovers. The reason is that they want to buy up companies for their technology, and it's cheaper to aquire that early, rather than wait for the target company to make a name for themselves. Paul Graham has summed it up:
Hence the fourth problem: the acquirers have begun to realize they can buy wholesale. Why should they wait for VCs to make the startups they want more expensive? Most of what the VCs add, acquirers don't want anyway. The acquirers already have brand recognition and HR departments. What they really want is the software and the developers, and that's what the startup is in the early phase: concentrated software and developers.
Google, typically, seems to have been the first to figure this out. "Bring us your startups early," said Google's speaker at the Startup School. They're quite explicit about it: they like to acquire startups at just the point where they would do a Series A round. (The Series A round is the first round of real VC funding; it usually happens in the first year.) It is a brilliant strategy, and one that other big technology companies will no doubt try to duplicate. Unless they want to have still more of their lunch eaten by Google.
The result is just as much money for the target company founders (who haven't had their stakes diluted by investors), but none for venture capitalists, and much less for Wall Street. Hence the long faces.
In fact, "the greenhouse effect" is, for practical purposes, entirely an effect of atmospheric water. The total effect of atmospheric CO2 is way down in the noise of the effect of small variations in atmospheric water. There has never been any evidence that variations in atmospheric CO2 can produce any variation in climate.
The fundamental rationale of Daylight saving time is that people are too stupid to notice the seasons changing or the sun rising, but only care what government tells them the time is. The secondary assumption is that people in Maine and Florida need to react to changing seasons in the same way.
I believe people are quite capable of adapting to the seasons of their own accord.
To my mind, the big advantage is that the dependencies are more fuzzy. I can run a stable distribution, with stable, tested, software, but if I need, say, the latest Abiword, or mplayer, I don't need to upgrade my whole system to get it. That is what I always wanted with Debian, but couldn't have.
The end result is just slightly less stable than debian "stable", but considerably more than "testing" or "unstable". It is only possible because my packages are built against the libraries I've got, not the ones the package maintainer has got. Waiting for compiles is a pain, but it's what makes it all work.
Cost of a text message: 6.7p - 10p (any time period)
orange.co.uk
Cost of a 30-second peak voice call: 6.5p orange.co.uk
Cost of a 5-minute peak fixed-line call: Free on a call plan comparable to a typical mobile package, or 15p on a basic tariff (10p eve, 5p wkend). ntl.com
I've worked in fixed-line telecoms in the UK, for a US company, so I've seen a lot of both.
Basically, the US telecoms industry never recovered from AT&T being broken up. It's catching up with UK & Scandinavia fast, but it started a long, long way behind.
The incompatibilities across the country are just one aspect of that. There are two different GSM frequency bands used within the UK by different networks, and not long ago your phone would only work on one or the other. Nowadays all phones work on both bands.
A point missed in the article is that the largest part of a typical domestic phone bill is calls from fixed-line to mobile. Fixed-line to fixed-line calls have dropped to about nothing. Even international calls to popular destinations are much cheaper than fixed-mobile.
Text messaging is not cheaper than voice calling. If you pay a hefty monthly fee (and most people do) you get a number of free / cheap texts thrown in, but a text message will generally cost about the same as a five-minute call from a landline, or a short mobile-mobile voice call. Whatever it is attacts people to SMS, it's not value for money.
The reason that one or two countries leaving could topple the whole thing is that, in many countries, popular acceptance for the EU is gained by threatening that leaving would be an economic catastrophe. If this bluff were called, there would be a huge shift in attitude across Europe.
As for Britain, the Conservatives will not win the election, and anyway do not have a policy of leaving the EU (which is why I won't be voting for them). Britain if it did ever leave would be a huge blow, because it is the only country other than Germany which makes significant net contribution to the budget.
But it's not just obvious suspects like Denmark and Britain that might leave. Approval for the treaties, when they are voted for, runs around 50% even in France and the Netherlands.
Bear in mind that software patents are as big a problem for large businesses as for small businesses (outside of the software industry itself). Large businesses probably spend more, proportional to their earnings, on software than small companies do, because software is how you manage the administration problems of a large organisation.
Software patents will make software more expensive and lower quality, and will hit these companies (banks, telcos, insurance companies, retail chains) hardest of all.
In my opinion, it's a mistake to argue this issue in terms of big business vs small business, as it gives the impression you're a closet anti-capitalist -- at least to conservatives. The issue really is a handful of major technology companies against the world.
Unless of course the vote is scheduled for a Thursday afternoon, in which case it will be impossible to get the absolute majority of MEPs (i.e. not just a majority of MEPs present) needed to amend at second reading.
You may be correct. The parliament vote against software patentablility was in September 2003. I was remembering something from 2002, where I thought the initial proposals were adopted.
The nearest I can find (ffii's archives don't go back that far) is a reference to Parliament's Legal Affairs committee considering the question in July 2002.
In fact, the Parliament first passed the directive as it stands. It was lied to for this to happen, before opposition could be organised, and when it found out the truth, it then passed a motion asking for changes, which the Commission considered, then decided in its wisdom to ignore.
This new decision is from the Council, consisting of members nominally, but as we have seen not actually, responsible to their national parliaments.
Preventing the directive going ahead now is probably impossible. It would make more sense to get out of it by leaving the EU. If two countries were to leave, the whole edifice would probably collapse.
I worked for a company where we had to try to get a piece of billing software to work that had been developed by another part of the company. It was not a pleasant experience, and when the project was finally abandoned we took the database schema diagram off the office wall, went out into the car park and cremated it. I still have the ashes in a tin on my mantelpiece.
I might post photographs of the ceremony later, I've got them at home.
But of course, that was the specific point I made that Troll called "bullshit." I only brought the metaphor up in order to say that it wasn't a statement about morality, but some people don't read too well.
At one level, you're right. Copyright has, historically, served a useful purpose. If we lose practically-enforced copyright, we lose something of value.
where potentially monetizable assets are a priori non-exclusive, the erection of artificial barriers to their easy dissemination is not only desirable but a religio-commercio-moral obligation;
That sounds like overstating the case. The "artificial barriers" might be desirable, but their erection has to be traded off against the new harms the barriers can cause. The fact seems to be that effective barriers are incompatible with open availability of general-purpose information-processing equipment. If TiVo persist with this, but people can bypass the restrictions by using open PC hardware and Linux, then open hardware, or Linux, or both will have to be banned, or else teams of "copyright police" will have to be empowered to pry into people's houses to see what they've plugged into their cable receiver, or else the "artificial barriers" will fail. That is the endgame.
That is the point of "information wants to be free". It doesn't mean "information morally ought to be free", it means that effectively preventing information from being free is difficult and will come at a heavy cost.
That's defensible; but this story isn't about whether you should be allowed to make recordings, it's about whether Tivo's hardware is capable of making recordings. Now in theory TiVo are making this decision on commercial grounds, but the suspicion is that some kind of legal pressure has either been applied or could be applied which has induced them to cripple their own product in this way.
"We've been selling media for years and nobody has had the equipment to make perfect copies (because it was too expensive or completely unavailable), so that now the technology has made the equipment widely available, it should be banned".
It works on very low-spec hardware (because it doesn't depend on fancy graphical installation or maintenance tools).
I have it running on servers down to P5/100 spec, and running well as a desktop OS on P5/133 machines.
(Plus tremendous stability and availability on a very large number of hardware architectures, but those have been mentioned by others. Oh, and the fact you never have to install it on a machine more than once; just seamlessly upgrade.)
Aside from the fact that they're probably lying, a good proportion of the problems in Florida 2000 were "user error". That doesn't mean they were ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good question - I recently wrote a nice little shell script for adding a site to the squidGuard whitelist that filters my children's browsing. Then I wanted to make it easy for my wife to run. All I wanted was a little GUI window with a couple of controls to set the script's parameters, and an output box to capture the output of the script. I couldn't find a way to do it as easily as I wanted. In the end I went with a ruby script using a Glade ui definition. It works excellently, but it was more work than I really wanted to do. I'd love to hear of an easier way.
Obeying Benfords law isn't a pattern - it's the absence of a pattern. If the sequence of leading digits of prime numbers didn't follow Benford's Law, that would be a pattern, and a very interesting and peculiar one - there would have to be some underlying reason for such non-randomness.
The present regime lays very heavy enforcement costs on the general public, through the power of subpoena used to investigate suspected breaches, and most significantly in the restriction of "circumvention devices". There is no way to justify such restrictions in an anarcho-capitalist worldview.
I would see "intellectual property" as a contract right rather than a property right. That would mean that the costs of enforcement would fall entirely on the "intellectual property owner", and in practice would amount pretty much to the abolition of copyright and patent.
You should try to find papers by Stephan Kinsella - an opponent of IP who writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and others, and also Tim Lee, who takes a more pragmatic (but very informed view) and has written for Cato. He blogs at "Technology Liberation Front".
I covered the essay here, mainly in an attempt to clarify the issues.
A key question is how much competition BellSouth and the like face in the end-user ISP market. Judging from the situation here in the UK, no ISP could restrict the service on offer this way and hold on to market share - the market would go elsewhere. But that would not necessarily be the case in the absence of Local Loop Unbundling, which is a regulatory requirement on BT.
There's also a possibility that ISPs could creep this sort of thing in very gradually, but I can't really see it - in order to get any value, it has to be obvious enough to give the ISP leverage on service providers, and if it is that obvious it will put off consumers.
Screwed up the link: The Venture Capital Squeeze
In fact, "the greenhouse effect" is, for practical purposes, entirely an effect of atmospheric water. The total effect of atmospheric CO2 is way down in the noise of the effect of small variations in atmospheric water. There has never been any evidence that variations in atmospheric CO2 can produce any variation in climate.
I believe people are quite capable of adapting to the seasons of their own accord.
The end result is just slightly less stable than debian "stable", but considerably more than "testing" or "unstable". It is only possible because my packages are built against the libraries I've got, not the ones the package maintainer has got. Waiting for compiles is a pain, but it's what makes it all work.
Cost of a text message: 6.7p - 10p (any time period) orange.co.uk
Cost of a 30-second peak voice call: 6.5p orange.co.uk
Cost of a 5-minute peak fixed-line call: Free on a call plan comparable to a typical mobile package, or 15p on a basic tariff (10p eve, 5p wkend). ntl.com
I've worked in fixed-line telecoms in the UK, for a US company, so I've seen a lot of both.
Basically, the US telecoms industry never recovered from AT&T being broken up. It's catching up with UK & Scandinavia fast, but it started a long, long way behind.
The incompatibilities across the country are just one aspect of that. There are two different GSM frequency bands used within the UK by different networks, and not long ago your phone would only work on one or the other. Nowadays all phones work on both bands.
A point missed in the article is that the largest part of a typical domestic phone bill is calls from fixed-line to mobile. Fixed-line to fixed-line calls have dropped to about nothing. Even international calls to popular destinations are much cheaper than fixed-mobile.
Text messaging is not cheaper than voice calling. If you pay a hefty monthly fee (and most people do) you get a number of free / cheap texts thrown in, but a text message will generally cost about the same as a five-minute call from a landline, or a short mobile-mobile voice call. Whatever it is attacts people to SMS, it's not value for money.
As for Britain, the Conservatives will not win the election, and anyway do not have a policy of leaving the EU (which is why I won't be voting for them). Britain if it did ever leave would be a huge blow, because it is the only country other than Germany which makes significant net contribution to the budget.
But it's not just obvious suspects like Denmark and Britain that might leave. Approval for the treaties, when they are voted for, runs around 50% even in France and the Netherlands.
EU law-making
Software patents will make software more expensive and lower quality, and will hit these companies (banks, telcos, insurance companies, retail chains) hardest of all.
In my opinion, it's a mistake to argue this issue in terms of big business vs small business, as it gives the impression you're a closet anti-capitalist -- at least to conservatives. The issue really is a handful of major technology companies against the world.
The system is rigged.
The nearest I can find (ffii's archives don't go back that far) is a reference to Parliament's Legal Affairs committee considering the question in July 2002.
Agenda
Register story (letter from Alan Cox).
Indeed. here are some reasons.
This new decision is from the Council, consisting of members nominally, but as we have seen not actually, responsible to their national parliaments.
Why the EU is so corrupt
Preventing the directive going ahead now is probably impossible. It would make more sense to get out of it by leaving the EU. If two countries were to leave, the whole edifice would probably collapse.
I might post photographs of the ceremony later, I've got them at home.
But of course, that was the specific point I made that Troll called "bullshit." I only brought the metaphor up in order to say that it wasn't a statement about morality, but some people don't read too well.
That is the point of "information wants to be free". It doesn't mean "information morally ought to be free", it means that effectively preventing information from being free is difficult and will come at a heavy cost.
That's defensible; but this story isn't about whether you should be allowed to make recordings, it's about whether Tivo's hardware is capable of making recordings. Now in theory TiVo are making this decision on commercial grounds, but the suspicion is that some kind of legal pressure has either been applied or could be applied which has induced them to cripple their own product in this way.
"We've been selling media for years and nobody has had the equipment to make perfect copies (because it was too expensive or completely unavailable), so that now the technology has made the equipment widely available, it should be banned".
It works on very low-spec hardware (because it doesn't depend on fancy graphical installation or maintenance tools). I have it running on servers down to P5/100 spec, and running well as a desktop OS on P5/133 machines. (Plus tremendous stability and availability on a very large number of hardware architectures, but those have been mentioned by others. Oh, and the fact you never have to install it on a machine more than once; just seamlessly upgrade.)
Aside from the fact that they're probably lying, a good proportion of the problems in Florida 2000 were "user error". That doesn't mean they were ignored.