There's a huge difference between enacting a law to preserve public saftey and enacting one to prevent morons from annoying you.
This is a case where "the market" can regulate itself; theatres which strictly enforce bans on audible phones and beepers will do better than ones which don't.
It's also a case where social pressures (such as being yelled at by actors) is probably sufficient without adding even more trivial cases to an overloaded judiciary system.
Settling out of court does not set a legal precedent. IIRC it can't even be brought into evidence when eventually the pesterees decide that enough is enough, sue and be damned.
Besides, as the grandparent said, the backbone providers keep a stable of lawyers on retainer anyway; it's less of a burden for them to go to court than it would be for a smaller target.
Very, very salient point. Hopefully this might spin out into the defendants objecting to any idea of being forced into having DRM technology in their routing servers. Well, I can dream can't I?
This could be terrific. It's about time that ISPs were clearly defined as common carriers, like telephone companies are. It's absurd to expect an ISP to monitor and vet all traffic through it, and there's no good halfway solution; any requirement for ISPs to act as a censoring agent is fraught with so many issues as to be unworkable.
The RIAA would be well within their rights to sue Listen4ever in an international court, but suing the ISPs because it's too difficult to track down the copyright infringers is like suing the phone company because someone is hassling you from a series of public telephones and it's too hard to catch the caller.
The only point I can think of for the RIAA is that maybe there should be a process for shutting down a domain that is clearly violating international law. That raises all kinds of other issues, but pushing for amendments to international treaties might be an acceptable way for them to deal with their problem.
(Admittedly it would also be awfully hard to implement effectively given how easy it is to register a new domain name. In the end the only real solution is to catch the perpetrators; if that's too difficult, then you just have to live with the issue until you can improve your methods of finding and prosecting them.)
Making the ISP responsible for the messages it conveys basically shuts it down as a medium of free communication, and that's a price that is way too high for protecting copyright holders.
First of all it's a silly idea to carry all your information on one card, because it's a security risk and not needed just to identify you, but it got me thinking;
Would it be possible to include a biometric in smart credit card so that it won't swipe correctly unless my thumbprint has been put on it recently? That would stop a pickpocket from buying $200 worth of gasoline before I notice it's missing.
You could also have a home bio-scanning device that would be needed (maybe in addition to a password) to contact your bank for skinning off disposable numbers from your credit account to shop online with. It would be worth it to people who do a lot of online purchasing, and partcularly for small home businesses.
Bio-metric based identification systems aren't going to solve national security problems any time soon, but some of them are close enough that they could have useful applications for individuals andprivate organizations. Or are they?
Unfortunately the home user won't read the article. He will read advertisement ads that promise him a computer that will make "Windows XP even more secure".
The home user bought Office 2000 because of the helpful little paperclip. He will buy this.
Being defeatist about it doesn't do squat. I bring these kinds of articles to work. I leave them in the lunch room. I don't have to proselytise any more than that; everyone knows it's me leaving them, and they ask me. I tell them what's going on and what they can do about it, including the downsides ("You will have to learn more about your computer. You will have to do some research before you buy new hardware. You won't have as many commercial applications available, and that includes games.").
I keep a supply of Live-CD distros in my desk and I give them away. Microsoft has lost several Joe Sixpack level customers from this activity. I will help people do the switch, while making it clear to them that I'm not an expert or a professional, just a guy willing to help; I will always make a full backup if they have a burner (except for XP), and I will always recommend a dual-boot at least to start with, and I will always promise to do my best to restore their system (no guarantees) if they decide to go back to all-Windows. So far no one has taken me up on that last one.
As an example, the "singles" section of the music market is dead... sales are down as much as 80%. Why? Piracy.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that singles sales have dropped due to 'piracy'? It's not even a sensible theory. It's as easy to copy an album as it is to copy a single, and even the RIAA don't claim that album sales are down any 80%.
People don't like singles because it's a pain in the ass to keep changing out the media after every song. They cost almost as much to produce and distribute as an album and don't sell nearly as well. It's harder to make money on them, that's all, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with people copying them.
Copy-protected CDs prove this point extremely well, as do proposed bills like the SSSCA (Sen. Holling's office has still not received one positive phone call from citizens over that bill).
I believe it's probably true, but how do you know this? Are you just assuming it because they haven't trumpeted out "We got an attaboy" or are the responses publicly available somewhere? If so, could you explain how to access them?
The only problem is that the developer who put that into the spec didn't realize that the MAC address of the computer was part of the generated GUID.
I trust said developer was immediately terminated for gross incompetence then. Come on, the person writing the spec, responsible for implementing this valuable new feature of unique document IDs, didn't even bother to examine the method by which the ID was generated?
If there was a better way of generating unique IDs on a computer, you can bet that it would have been used instead.
It's hard to believe that the spec writer looked very hard for alternatives when s/he didn't even examine the provenance of the original.
But hey, why look at it in a reasonable fashion when you can go off the deep end with conspiracy stories?
In this particular case, the conspiracy story is a lot more reasonable than the explanation you've offered. However, it's certainly possible that there's no malice here; maybe the development team simply didn't care about their customer's privacy. That's the explanation I favored at the time; however, the pattern of behaviour we've all seen since doesn't cast a kindly backward light.
More and more it looks like that was when they started moving step by step away from the shallow end.
No, you just own the CD it came on. Anyway, why would you want that software? All it's good for is connecting you to a lousy service that you will then have to pay to use.
You pays your money and you takes your chance. I haven't entered into any contract agreeing to accept the ad in return for the content, and I didn't force them to put their content out in a publicly accessible manner. If they want to ensure that they get their revenue, they can explicitly ask me if I'm willing to view some ads before I visit their site.
If instead they want to make unwarranted assumptions about the kind of browser I'm using and/or my Web browsing habits, that's their lookout. I feel no ethical dilemma at all; I am not stealing anything, because at no point did I make any agreement to accept popups. Had I done so and then reneged on my agreement, that would be a different story.
I get a scad of unsolicited advertising in my Sunday newspaper, too. I usually throw it away without looking at it. No doubt the newspaper would be more expensive if it wasn't there, but that doesn't mean I feel ethically obliged to wade through it so that their business model is justified. A presumption on their part does not constitute an obligation on mine.
On the other hand, I wouldn't even attept to disable the banner advertising on my Opera browser, because there I did agree to it - it was my choice to accept the ad-sponsored version, and I consider it a fair exchange.
Vote with your dollars and the tools at your disposal
I do. Mozilla's popup blocking is a tool at my disposal. I don't whine about those ads because I don't see them. The site is entitled to try and use them as a revenue stream, just as TV stations are entitled to air ads, but that doesn't mean I am obligated to do what they're hoping I will. If it were that simple then the Underpants Gnome could come up with a profitable plan.
1) Desire revenue.
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
Whining that your business plan doesn't work because people aren't acting like good little corporate sheep isn't any better than what you're complaining about. If people are willing to go to considerable lengths to avoid an entire class of advertising then it's time to wake up and look for alternatives. Harangueing people to suffer through advertising they actively despise because "it's the right thing to do" isn't likely to result in additional sales for the advertisers anyway.
There's a study I read about in a psychology class which had participants walk around with inverting lenses over their eyes. After a few days they reported that the world suddenly turned right way up; when the lenses were removed everything seemed inverted again, and they had to wait for the flip again!
Always wanted to try that myself, just for the hell of it, but never had a spare couple of weeks or someone willing to lead me around.
On the other hand, I wonder if the phosphenes would be interpretable at all to a visual cortex that has never learned how to see.
The short answer unfortunately is no, a person blind from birth will not be able to benefit from this. I've done a lot of research in this area because I'm amblyopic, which means that I have two physically functional eyes but only one is actually fully useful. They don't point at quite the same angle (though you'd have to look pretty closely to tell), so my brain gave up on combining them into a stereoscopic image and basically let the left one go hang.
It wasn't spotted until I was five, which means I missed the window to fully develop that side of my visual cortex; it's useful for peripheral vision, but I can't distinguish shapes and lines well enough to read with it. Had it been spotted early enough, just putting a patch over the good eye while the laggard developed could have let me see all these 3D images everyone's always on about... grrr!
Still, I'm lucky to have sight and I know it. I can't provide a reference, but IIRC there's a study in which cataracts were removed from the eyes of children who had been born blind. They were still not able to see. You have only a narrow window of time in which to develop parts of your brain. If you lost your sight after about five or six years old then you could probably benefit from this, but if you were born blind you're going to have to substitute other senses. For example, it would still be possible to translate a camera signal into a grid of pressors distributed over some area of skin.
Parents, get your toddler's eyes and ears checked!!!
A person blind from birth would give a lot of his resources to be able to see, even if experimental, even if only temporary.
I doubt this would work for someone blind from birth. The optical pathways have to potentiate pretty early, by age 5 at the latest, or they won't ever be useful. Same thing happens with deafness, IIRC; if you've been totally deaf since birth then an implant won't help.
This kind of research is going to help a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have a hope. though. Gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling about science, don't it?:-)
Your point did not pass unnoticed; I actually thought very seriously about your post throughout the entire day today.I finally came to the conclusion that I simply cannot take the lead on this. I can support, I can and will contribute to the cause, but I am simply not able to make it a full time cause.
Your post really made me think the proper question: what if no one takes the lead on this? Isn't it up to me? I can't, though, not if I'm going to meet the obligations I already have. I am genuinely doing what I can; if someone takes the point to create an organized effort, I can redirect some of my resources, but I cannot lead the charge.
By your reasoning, you can't make a choice without restricting choice.
That's quite some degrees off from my central point, but it's absolutely correct. The act of deciding eliminates all the things you decided against. The moving finger, having written, ne'er can be lured back to unwrite. A suicide's second thoughts on the way down are irrelevant to anyone.
But my main point was that some choices open up a wider range of options, while others restrict your freedom of movement further on. I made a point of explaining why I thought open source software led to more options and therefore a greater freedom of choice for a purchasing government. So what's your point?
So I guess everybody had better stop making choices. We have to preserve freedom of choice, you know!
A refusal to decide is itself a decision. That which may never be used need never be preserved.
For crying out loud, jcast, if you want to play sophomoric word games at least read some sophomore-level textbooks on philosophy, or semantics, or symbolic logic, or at least some decent poetry.
Would the Act for Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism have passed if it had been called the Act for Open Policies Providing Real Emergency Security Structures? There's a big PR difference between PATRIOT and OPPRESS. Even in the shock phase I think the American people would have resisted OPPRESS, or at least taken pause over it, but they lapped up PATRIOT without thinking.
In short, the names of legislation are always chosen in order to push emotional buttons; they rarely have more than a tangential reference to the actual issues dealt with by the bill, so let's just ignore the names and look at the actual issues. (There too we're going to have to deal with semantics, since there are pleasant-sounding and nasty-sounding ways to describe each point of view, but there's at least one less level of obfuscation to go through.) Now, of the roughly two sides, which is restricting choice less?
The closed-source crowd are saying it's wrong to start the process of choosing government software by limiting the pool according to license structure. Their official position is that they want closed-source software to be considered on an equal footing with open-source software.
The open-source/free-software crowd want all software used by the government to be open source. Some of them want a BSD-style license, some a GPL license to be the standard, but they all want to prevent closed source in government. Let's start there.
Is that a restriction of choice? Of course it is! Out of all the possible software out there, it is restricting your choice to that group of software which allows you to see the source code. You'd have to be blind, deaf, dumb and stupid not to see that that restricts your initial options.
However, after the purchase/lease of the software there are other choices you can make. For instance, should you desire changes in the software you can choose to hire any competent software engineering firm, or create your own corps of coders, provided you didn't choose a closed-source base. You can decide when and how you need to upgrade, provided that you aren't locked into 'the only game in town.' You can acquire additional hardware without renegotiating your software, only your support.
If you buy closed-source, proprietary sofware then you reduce your choices; you force yourself to deal with that software's vendor, because only they have the tools needed to maintain and repair your tools. If you are a private party, then that is your prerogative; you have an absolute right to make a profligate fool of yourself. A government is, or at least should be, held to a higher standard. Unless there is literally no practical open-source alternative, a government body should not restrict its choices by choosing closed-source software. Where closed-source software is the only practical solution, government should assiduously work toward increasing its options.
The remaining question is whether society is better served by a BSD or similar license, allowing for incorporation into closed-source commercial software, or a GPL type license which restricts the software to only open source thereafter. My initial reaction was to support the GPL style license, since it is less susceptible to abuse by commercial enterprises; however, the more I think about it, the more I lean toward BSD type licensing for government works. The BSD has proven itself capable of adding richly to the public domain, and as long as all government software and data formats, including document formats are fully available to the public I do not see the potential for abuse being prohibitively high.
The main threat to open formats is the notorious "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactics which Microsoft has honed to a fine edge; however, these tactics can only work in a near-monopoly situation. If the government and its immediate subcontractors requires strict adherence to the vanilla open standards in the data it receives, then there is automatically a substantial and enduring market for tools which by default do not use non-standard extensions. No company which has substantial dealings with the government (and "everyone deals with the government") is going to prefer tools which make that essential transaction difficult. When document and data formats are fully open and free, and thereby not susceptible to EEE abuse by monopoly muscle, "losing" source code inside proprietary products will not be as harmful as it is now; Microsoft, or Sun, or Apple can take that code but they will have to do genuinely innovative and extraordinary things with it in order to compete with the already available free software.
I would have thought that rather than shipping with a nonstarter like FreeDOS that Dell would ship with a live-CD demo distro of some OS they actually wanted to sell. Obviously Windows is out for this scenario, but Linux isn't. They state that they are willing to sell preconfigured Linux boxen provided the volume is there.
So why not make the token OS a live-CD version of that Linux distro - the one Dell wants to sell? The live-CD version wouldn't deter enterprise-class customers from buying, since it wouldn't meet their requirements, but it would provide enough real utility to effectively demonstrate the look and feel, and a mere taste of the performance, of an actual installed version.
Shipping with a token non-HD-installed OS is clever. Shipping with a token non-HD-installed OS which also effectively advertises another product you can actually sell would be cleverer.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a case where "the market" can regulate itself; theatres which strictly enforce bans on audible phones and beepers will do better than ones which don't.
It's also a case where social pressures (such as being yelled at by actors) is probably sufficient without adding even more trivial cases to an overloaded judiciary system.
Snicker!! Kudos, I could just picture that... maybe Jack and Hilary need to go shopping!!! ;-)
Besides, as the grandparent said, the backbone providers keep a stable of lawyers on retainer anyway; it's less of a burden for them to go to court than it would be for a smaller target.
Very, very salient point. Hopefully this might spin out into the defendants objecting to any idea of being forced into having DRM technology in their routing servers. Well, I can dream can't I?
The RIAA would be well within their rights to sue Listen4ever in an international court, but suing the ISPs because it's too difficult to track down the copyright infringers is like suing the phone company because someone is hassling you from a series of public telephones and it's too hard to catch the caller.
The only point I can think of for the RIAA is that maybe there should be a process for shutting down a domain that is clearly violating international law. That raises all kinds of other issues, but pushing for amendments to international treaties might be an acceptable way for them to deal with their problem.
(Admittedly it would also be awfully hard to implement effectively given how easy it is to register a new domain name. In the end the only real solution is to catch the perpetrators; if that's too difficult, then you just have to live with the issue until you can improve your methods of finding and prosecting them.)
Making the ISP responsible for the messages it conveys basically shuts it down as a medium of free communication, and that's a price that is way too high for protecting copyright holders.
Would it be possible to include a biometric in smart credit card so that it won't swipe correctly unless my thumbprint has been put on it recently? That would stop a pickpocket from buying $200 worth of gasoline before I notice it's missing.
You could also have a home bio-scanning device that would be needed (maybe in addition to a password) to contact your bank for skinning off disposable numbers from your credit account to shop online with. It would be worth it to people who do a lot of online purchasing, and partcularly for small home businesses.
Bio-metric based identification systems aren't going to solve national security problems any time soon, but some of them are close enough that they could have useful applications for individuals andprivate organizations. Or are they?
2) If you don't read the spam, they have no revenue.
3) You're gaining the valuable benefits of spam without paying for them.
4) Therefore, not reading spam is STEALING!!!
Oh, and
5) ???
6) Profit!!!
The home user bought Office 2000 because of the helpful little paperclip. He will buy this.
Being defeatist about it doesn't do squat. I bring these kinds of articles to work. I leave them in the lunch room. I don't have to proselytise any more than that; everyone knows it's me leaving them, and they ask me. I tell them what's going on and what they can do about it, including the downsides ("You will have to learn more about your computer. You will have to do some research before you buy new hardware. You won't have as many commercial applications available, and that includes games.").
I keep a supply of Live-CD distros in my desk and I give them away. Microsoft has lost several Joe Sixpack level customers from this activity. I will help people do the switch, while making it clear to them that I'm not an expert or a professional, just a guy willing to help; I will always make a full backup if they have a burner (except for XP), and I will always recommend a dual-boot at least to start with, and I will always promise to do my best to restore their system (no guarantees) if they decide to go back to all-Windows. So far no one has taken me up on that last one.
Because you control the software. The object of
the exercise is to protect the copyright holder
of the file you put on your computer from
you.
Why not chimps? Maybe they could get funding from some movie company wanting to make another "Planet of the Apes" remake.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that singles sales have dropped due to 'piracy'? It's not even a sensible theory. It's as easy to copy an album as it is to copy a single, and even the RIAA don't claim that album sales are down any 80%.
People don't like singles because it's a pain in the ass to keep changing out the media after every song. They cost almost as much to produce and distribute as an album and don't sell nearly as well. It's harder to make money on them, that's all, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with people copying them.
I believe it's probably true, but how do you know this? Are you just assuming it because they haven't trumpeted out "We got an attaboy" or are the responses publicly available somewhere? If so, could you explain how to access them?
I trust said developer was immediately terminated for gross incompetence then. Come on, the person writing the spec, responsible for implementing this valuable new feature of unique document IDs, didn't even bother to examine the method by which the ID was generated?
If there was a better way of generating unique IDs on a computer, you can bet that it would have been used instead.
It's hard to believe that the spec writer looked very hard for alternatives when s/he didn't even examine the provenance of the original.
But hey, why look at it in a reasonable fashion when you can go off the deep end with conspiracy stories?
In this particular case, the conspiracy story is a lot more reasonable than the explanation you've offered. However, it's certainly possible that there's no malice here; maybe the development team simply didn't care about their customer's privacy. That's the explanation I favored at the time; however, the pattern of behaviour we've all seen since doesn't cast a kindly backward light.
More and more it looks like that was when they started moving step by step away from the shallow end.
We all make mistakes, but this one gave me a real belly laugh! Thanks!
Or were you using a pirated key on a copy you purchased legally?
No, you just own the CD it came on. Anyway, why would you want that software? All it's good for is connecting you to a lousy service that you will then have to pay to use.
If instead they want to make unwarranted assumptions about the kind of browser I'm using and/or my Web browsing habits, that's their lookout. I feel no ethical dilemma at all; I am not stealing anything, because at no point did I make any agreement to accept popups. Had I done so and then reneged on my agreement, that would be a different story.
I get a scad of unsolicited advertising in my Sunday newspaper, too. I usually throw it away without looking at it. No doubt the newspaper would be more expensive if it wasn't there, but that doesn't mean I feel ethically obliged to wade through it so that their business model is justified. A presumption on their part does not constitute an obligation on mine.
On the other hand, I wouldn't even attept to disable the banner advertising on my Opera browser, because there I did agree to it - it was my choice to accept the ad-sponsored version, and I consider it a fair exchange.
I do. Mozilla's popup blocking is a tool at my disposal. I don't whine about those ads because I don't see them. The site is entitled to try and use them as a revenue stream, just as TV stations are entitled to air ads, but that doesn't mean I am obligated to do what they're hoping I will. If it were that simple then the Underpants Gnome could come up with a profitable plan.
1) Desire revenue.
2) ???
3) Profit!!!
Whining that your business plan doesn't work because people aren't acting like good little corporate sheep isn't any better than what you're complaining about. If people are willing to go to considerable lengths to avoid an entire class of advertising then it's time to wake up and look for alternatives. Harangueing people to suffer through advertising they actively despise because "it's the right thing to do" isn't likely to result in additional sales for the advertisers anyway.
Always wanted to try that myself, just for the hell of it, but never had a spare couple of weeks or someone willing to lead me around.
The short answer unfortunately is no, a person blind from birth will not be able to benefit from this. I've done a lot of research in this area because I'm amblyopic, which means that I have two physically functional eyes but only one is actually fully useful. They don't point at quite the same angle (though you'd have to look pretty closely to tell), so my brain gave up on combining them into a stereoscopic image and basically let the left one go hang.
It wasn't spotted until I was five, which means I missed the window to fully develop that side of my visual cortex; it's useful for peripheral vision, but I can't distinguish shapes and lines well enough to read with it. Had it been spotted early enough, just putting a patch over the good eye while the laggard developed could have let me see all these 3D images everyone's always on about... grrr!
Still, I'm lucky to have sight and I know it. I can't provide a reference, but IIRC there's a study in which cataracts were removed from the eyes of children who had been born blind. They were still not able to see. You have only a narrow window of time in which to develop parts of your brain. If you lost your sight after about five or six years old then you could probably benefit from this, but if you were born blind you're going to have to substitute other senses. For example, it would still be possible to translate a camera signal into a grid of pressors distributed over some area of skin.
Parents, get your toddler's eyes and ears checked!!!
I doubt this would work for someone blind from birth. The optical pathways have to potentiate pretty early, by age 5 at the latest, or they won't ever be useful. Same thing happens with deafness, IIRC; if you've been totally deaf since birth then an implant won't help.
This kind of research is going to help a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have a hope. though. Gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling about science, don't it? :-)
Your post really made me think the proper question: what if no one takes the lead on this? Isn't it up to me? I can't, though, not if I'm going to meet the obligations I already have. I am genuinely doing what I can; if someone takes the point to create an organized effort, I can redirect some of my resources, but I cannot lead the charge.
That's quite some degrees off from my central point, but it's absolutely correct. The act of deciding eliminates all the things you decided against. The moving finger, having written, ne'er can be lured back to unwrite. A suicide's second thoughts on the way down are irrelevant to anyone.
But my main point was that some choices open up a wider range of options, while others restrict your freedom of movement further on. I made a point of explaining why I thought open source software led to more options and therefore a greater freedom of choice for a purchasing government. So what's your point?
So I guess everybody had better stop making choices. We have to preserve freedom of choice, you know!
A refusal to decide is itself a decision. That which may never be used need never be preserved.
For crying out loud, jcast, if you want to play sophomoric word games at least read some sophomore-level textbooks on philosophy, or semantics, or symbolic logic, or at least some decent poetry.
In short, the names of legislation are always chosen in order to push emotional buttons; they rarely have more than a tangential reference to the actual issues dealt with by the bill, so let's just ignore the names and look at the actual issues. (There too we're going to have to deal with semantics, since there are pleasant-sounding and nasty-sounding ways to describe each point of view, but there's at least one less level of obfuscation to go through.) Now, of the roughly two sides, which is restricting choice less?
The closed-source crowd are saying it's wrong to start the process of choosing government software by limiting the pool according to license structure. Their official position is that they want closed-source software to be considered on an equal footing with open-source software.
The open-source/free-software crowd want all software used by the government to be open source. Some of them want a BSD-style license, some a GPL license to be the standard, but they all want to prevent closed source in government. Let's start there.
Is that a restriction of choice? Of course it is! Out of all the possible software out there, it is restricting your choice to that group of software which allows you to see the source code. You'd have to be blind, deaf, dumb and stupid not to see that that restricts your initial options.
However, after the purchase/lease of the software there are other choices you can make. For instance, should you desire changes in the software you can choose to hire any competent software engineering firm, or create your own corps of coders, provided you didn't choose a closed-source base. You can decide when and how you need to upgrade, provided that you aren't locked into 'the only game in town.' You can acquire additional hardware without renegotiating your software, only your support.
If you buy closed-source, proprietary sofware then you reduce your choices; you force yourself to deal with that software's vendor, because only they have the tools needed to maintain and repair your tools. If you are a private party, then that is your prerogative; you have an absolute right to make a profligate fool of yourself. A government is, or at least should be, held to a higher standard. Unless there is literally no practical open-source alternative, a government body should not restrict its choices by choosing closed-source software. Where closed-source software is the only practical solution, government should assiduously work toward increasing its options.
The remaining question is whether society is better served by a BSD or similar license, allowing for incorporation into closed-source commercial software, or a GPL type license which restricts the software to only open source thereafter. My initial reaction was to support the GPL style license, since it is less susceptible to abuse by commercial enterprises; however, the more I think about it, the more I lean toward BSD type licensing for government works. The BSD has proven itself capable of adding richly to the public domain, and as long as all government software and data formats, including document formats are fully available to the public I do not see the potential for abuse being prohibitively high.
The main threat to open formats is the notorious "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactics which Microsoft has honed to a fine edge; however, these tactics can only work in a near-monopoly situation. If the government and its immediate subcontractors requires strict adherence to the vanilla open standards in the data it receives, then there is automatically a substantial and enduring market for tools which by default do not use non-standard extensions. No company which has substantial dealings with the government (and "everyone deals with the government") is going to prefer tools which make that essential transaction difficult. When document and data formats are fully open and free, and thereby not susceptible to EEE abuse by monopoly muscle, "losing" source code inside proprietary products will not be as harmful as it is now; Microsoft, or Sun, or Apple can take that code but they will have to do genuinely innovative and extraordinary things with it in order to compete with the already available free software.
And wouldn't it be nice to see them compete?
So why not make the token OS a live-CD version of that Linux distro - the one Dell wants to sell? The live-CD version wouldn't deter enterprise-class customers from buying, since it wouldn't meet their requirements, but it would provide enough real utility to effectively demonstrate the look and feel, and a mere taste of the performance, of an actual installed version.
Shipping with a token non-HD-installed OS is clever. Shipping with a token non-HD-installed OS which also effectively advertises another product you can actually sell would be cleverer.