I can definetly tell you that designing & building bridges is harder than designing and building software
What is the current price per line of code for NASA? And there are still bugs. and what about high concurrancy issues, dealing with failover etc etc etc. Bridge building is much more standardised than software, though still not perfect (the Tacoma Bridge and the Thames Millenium Bridge both come to mind). Plus do you need to change the bridge when the boltmaker changes the size of bolts at some time in the future? No, but with software you need to be able to deal with things like changing libraries, recompiling on newer systems etc etc. Oh and if you think you have some super-duper way of proving the mathematical correctness of a software system I've got some software neural networks that you might like to try it on...
Having a well-established and well-respected (how is IEEE or ACM not well respected), *legally binding* set of standards will ensure that people who write sloppy and badly written software will be liable for their (in)action.
I can imagine what would happen, M$ changes some DLL in one of their "updates" and breaks my code (like they did with Wordperfect), so I get sued into oblivion. My only choice then is to go and work for a company that makes enough political contributions (AKA protection money) so that I don't have to worry about it. Looks like M$ will be one of the few companies that will be able to "innovate" under such a regime.
So that communion plate that gets passed around is just for show then? I mean it's not like the Catholic church has its own city or that they need to spend lots of money on hiding some of their preists misdeeds. I'm not attacking just the Catholic church here, I havent seen one religion that isnt based on controling the population and raising a "spiritual" tax of one sort or another so that a minority of the "saved" can lord it over the rest of us. To misquote Morpheus "As long as religion exists the human race will never be free".
Scientology isn't a religion, it's a way for a (very) few people to steal as much as they can from people with poor psychological health. Scientology should be treated as a public health problem and I think this is exactly what the German government is trying to do.
And how exactly is that different from every other organised religion?
To kill a case brought by a company (corporation) you'd have to destroy the company, taking out one person would not change that, also due to the media interest it would be far too dangerous to try such a thing, the closest you'd get is character assasination, which when you're up against someone who has a) been security vetted to work on various military projects b) aided in the capture and prosecution of a coldblooded murderer c) has a large number of high profile people (including members of the Judiciary) who will stand with them your chances of effectively denting their reputation tend to zero.
Well obviously I'd make sure the case made it into the mainstream media, if the CPS tried anything like that they would be hammered, and the Home Secetary would been in for a rough ride, and I'm sure some documents from inside the Home Office would "leak". IANAL, but surely that would come under "Perverting the course of Justice", possibly violation of the Human Rights Act under the right to a fair trial (assuming it can be applied equally to a prosecution as well as a defence) though I don't think it quite qualifies as Treason. Lets not forget that any politician that makes statements about their conduct in ordering the CPS to take over the case is only immune from being hauled into court themselves if they restrict their comments to the House of Commons, Tony and his Cronies need to be on TV, so they open themselves up to being brought before a court if they start trying to twist the truth. So there are ways of attacking the problem both in the media and in the court. The politicians could possibly try to invoke a UK media blackout on the grounds of National Security, however this is the Internet age and the story will get out through the Net, and so hopefully other forms of direct action will not need to be taken to ensure a free and fair trial.
Writing their trojan into your operating system itself seems like a damn good way to do this. Windows and Mac users and even Linux users expect certain processes to access the network, so why not exploit that to camouflage an "ultimate trojan"?
Except of course it can be hacked itself, can you imagine what will happen when skript kiddies start patching an FBI trojan? You'll have something like Back Orifice whose use will not be prosecuted because it was created by the government and therefore is an embarrasment, can you imagine a court case where George Bush is called to explain how he came to sanction the FBI to develop the tool that is at the centre of the prosecutions case? I dont think so. The FBIs use of this tool will only make global network security worse, personally being in the UK if any network that I was running had any node infected by thisI would be bringing a private criminal prosecution against the US government under the UKs Computer Misuse Act, and I'd win too.
The theoretical bandwith limit on large die silicon semiconductors is in the range of 10GHz.
As you said, large die silicon, if we move to other technologies such as the single molecule transistors that are currently being pioneered we won't be faced by the same limitations as silicon.
10GHz is "about" 3 times faster than the current maximum clock rate, 2GHz or so.
10/2 = 5
As far as actual tests, I assure you no one has a large transistor count CPU working, the discussions are theoretical.
Have you ever seen the 1st ever transistor, it was damn big, it took a while for them to get the technology right so they could get to where we are today, just because async chips are yet to be anything like as complex as sync logic chips doesnt mean it will never happen, give it time, I was discussing this stuff back in 1987, now finally people are beginning to act on the possibilities, give it another decade or so.
Actually the RSA patent should never have been issued as some geeks at GCHQ ( the British equivalent of the NSA) had though up the idea years before RSA, they didnt patent it as it was ultra-top-secret, but it was prior art non the less see here
I am guessing that you are a UK citizen. Unfortunately certain sectors of the UK press takes a delight in printing "Brussels demands straight bananas" type stories, and don't report all the other things the EU is doing.
Indeed, it is a tradition of the UK press to be vigourous investigators of what those that pass laws are really up to. Just recently the head of the Scottish parliment had to step down for taking money for renting out office space that was being paid for by the government and pocketing the money. Unfortunately the EU has had a lot of problems, nepotism, cronism, fraud, embesslement etc etc and the only really positive thing is the single market, which seems to be more the product of individual governments than the EU apparatus. As for the single currency AKA the Euro, that has lost >20% of its value against the US Dollar since its launch, which means your money is worth less. Having chatted with bankers before the launch of the Euro, they said it would gain value, whenI explained why the Euro was sure to be weak they laughed at me, so thats International Bankers 0 (except the guys at UBS-Warburg, they were as thick as pig shit, they get -666 Troll), analytical geek 1, then look at how the decisions of the European Central Bank are made, in secret, with representives of different countries saying different things to the press/market, you only have to look at how one member was saying earlier this week that there would be no base rate cut and then there was one, do you think anyone is going to have confidence in this sort of doubletalk? No, obviously not. Then look at some of the EUs other policies, like the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) which has kept ineffecient farmers afloat by giving them subsidies and kept out cheaper imports from places like Poland, thus helping to keep the former Eatern Bloc dependent on basic commodity trading and organised crime to make money, then there is the Common Fisheries Policy that has helped drive down the fishing stocks in the North Sea to unsustanable levels while not punishing those that catch undersized (i.e. immature and therefore non-breeding) fish thus helping to kill the fishing stocks even further. Then there is the "democratic deficit", i.e. the fact that only the European Parliment is elected and not the Commission hence alot of the corruption and other misdeeds. I personally can't see the point in it at all, just another layer of petty beurocrats, if you can point to one important thing the EU has acheived I'd love to hear about it, and by important I mean life changing in a positive way.
Each country has its own legal system, its own style of government, and in many cases its own language.
You hit the nail on the head there. To have a unified system, you need to start at the bottom, with language, unfortunately that is politically unacceptable (do you remember when English words were banned by the French?), so they build on quicksand instead. At some point people will start to use the differences in language to drive trucks through some of the laws, and I will laugh my arse off.
I do business between various EU countries so I aware of the issues.
Yeah the most fun one I have come across is regarding having paid VAT (Value Added Tax) on a boat that I sailed across to Holland, if you do not produce a VAT receipt they impound your boat, if the company you bought it from is no longer in business and you don't have the receipt pay up or get impounded, repeat until made bankcrupt.
The EU is doing a good and necessary job easing trade and legislation between all the countries of Europe.
Yeah, I mean it's not like the WTO is there as a global organisation to do that.
- aren't you forgetting, for instance, the introduction of the Euro as the principal currency of most of the EU countries in just under two months time? That a) makes sense b) will have a profound effect on trade in the EU c) will greatly improve ease of trade and competitiveness and d) will greatly lower administration overheads and costs for nearly inter-EU trade.
The Euro is transfering risk of exchange rate fluctuations from companies doing business inside Europe to the EU as a block, before if one country was doing badly its exchange rate would be affected, now it affects everyone else, as there is no real accountability this can go on and on taking the life out of the Eurozone economies by hitting confidence that anything will be sorted out. If you wanted to do the project right, you start from a common language, then common laws created by forming a "superstate" and doing away with national democracies, having common tax, defence, and foregn relations policies, common defence and common currency, if you did that, it would work. Right now we have already seen the strains that Ireland and Italy have had on the project and it's not looking good. As there is no strategy or unwinding the Euro as a currency and going back to national currencies it means there is no way out, if the markets get fed up of the BS coming out of the EU and the Central Bank the currency could take a nose dive, imagine if the Euro was worth the same as a Rupee, how would that hit you? The EU was borne of protectionism (it was originally about protecting coal and steel industries) and the Euro was borne out of political fudging (the Euro was originally drafted as a "common currency", Maggie Thatcher got some things changed in the negotiations for the Treaty and for that some other leaders changed "common" to "single" for the currency, so instead of just having a common currency that could be used as alternative to national currencies it became a single one that all had to bow down to).
Davies did invent packet switching, and Britain would have been well ahead of the US if the R&D had been funded, unfortuantely, Tony Benn MP, at the time the Science Minister refused to fund it, thus allowing thw US to come in and use what had been created in Britain which then went on to be Arpanet and then the Internet. So born in Britain and raised by the Americans. There is an Open University programme (TV that is) that has an interview with Davies as I recall backfrom the 70s I think where he explains packet switching and the series of events that lead to the knucklehead UK politicians cutting the funding.
I phoned VPL the day it collapsed and was one of the few that got to hear Jarons answerphone message, him almost in tears telling us that Thompson had pulled the plug, you could really hear he was broken by the expereince, he has bounced back a bit and still even turns up on TV now and again, though I havent seen him in a year or so, does anyone know if he still has those long dreads?
Well I still play Doom and Quake with my VFX headset, I'm still waiting for some really good headsets to come along with a price tag that is not meant for the US military, I had hoped for the Sony one to be useful, unfortunately it still seems to be mono rather than stereoscopic, maybe with OLEDs the pricing will drop like a stone and we'll all be geeking out playing Quake on the way into work soon, now if we can just integrate some wireless networking gear into the system we can frag each other instead of burying our heads in the newspaper on the train.
not true. FastTrack will emerge unscathed in the end because they are not participating in any copyright violations anymore than microsoft is for including a TCP stack in windows. They don't facilitate the network with central servers.
also see how having a central server has broken gIFT which may indeed make them liable.
One biggish issue for p2p companies to realize is that though having a single connected network of peers has benefits, they may need to explicitly segregate customers who engage in illicit activities if they want enterprise customers to sign on.
I don't think I need to remind anyone that the Internet is not segregated, even though some are trying
Actually as I recall it was really Compaq that was responsible for pushing the IBM cloned BIOS / machines and thus opening the market for all the other clone manufacturers. I still have some computer mags from that time, and they are choc full of Compaq ads pushing their clones as much as they could. So if I were dishing out credit for the PC market of today, I'd say 1) IBM for creating the XT 2) Compaq for pushing the clone market 3) Intel for selling 8088s/8086s to all and sundry 4) all those that helped create the killer apps of the day (shoutouts to the Visicalc guys) 5) the fab production people for making Moore's law possible... and MS somewhere near the end as Bill did insist on that fscking stupid 640K limit.
Gates said there's a role for free software alongside commercial software,
After all the M$ FUD, the Halloween documents, the Mindcraft study etc etc now they accept open source as legit.. I think I am going to open a bottle of very expensive champagne... as Ghandi once famously said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"
Why? I have a collection of lots of WWII memorabilia from both sides (collected when I was a kid), everything from medals and documentation to ordinance and gasmasks, why should people not collect history? It has given me a very personal view of what was a terrible time in world history, and reminds me to fight to prevent anything like that from happening again, and it also reminds me that it is up to us, you and me, not the politicians, because they lothe to stretch their minds and see the bigger picture. Look at what is happening now, and imagine for an instant that after the Soveits had been kicked out of Afghanistan that the politicains in the rest of the world had not abandoned them, that there had been a Marshal Plan for Afghanistan, do you think Bin Laden would have had the ability to set up training / indoctrination camps? No, obviously not, unfortunately people in the rest of the world ignored the contribution of the Afghan people in helping to ultimately defeat a totalitarian regime that was at times as bad as the Nazis. So now there is a breeding ground for people like Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda, just like there was a breeding ground for Hitler and the Nazis after WWI, those who do not learn from history yadda yadda..
I think it is important to get a historical perspective on this. The French laws come out of Frances state of denial regarding collaboration with the Nazis and in particular the Vichy regime. When I have spent time in France and brought up the Vichy, no one of that era wanted to talk about it, and the young seemed rather oblivious to the amount of collaboration that really went on in France prefering to think that all of France was really full of Resistance fighters. Unfortunately the US doesnt come out whiter than white either, infact Roosevelt was on very good terms with Admiral Jean François Darlan one of the high ranking Vichy, fortunately while America was trying to do deals with those helping the Nazis with the Final Solution (the Holocaust) the Brits in the shape of the SOE got on and trained Ferdinand Bonnier de la Chapelle who went on to assasinate Darlan on 24th December 1942 with an SOE issued pistol no less, which lead to the rise of General Charles De Gaulle. So now more than half a century later we have dumb French laws that are there to help suppress the truth of what happened under Vichy and we have the Americans saying they shouldnt while blissfully forgetting that they were quite happy to deal with the same Vichy regime. Those who do not learn from history yadda yadda...
Added to this is the simple fact that....touring is DAMN expensive.
You are correct, I remember when the Stones hired a 747 to fly them around on one tour, that must be damn expensive, not to mention the cost of all those trashed hotel rooms and Rolls in the pool. I know rockstars are not supposed to be like us mere mortals that now have to fly budget carriers for our business trips, rather than Business class, but maybe, just maybe you could think about cutting down a little, who knows you might end up making a decent living.
I'm afraid it's the fault of us Brits really after all we helped create the CIA by setting up Camp X and the Americans seem to have taken our ideas to heart, this is just another Exploding Rat, I hope I speak for the majority of us Brits when I say... Sorry!
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I think eveyone needs to go and read The Halting Problem and Worse is better
I can definetly tell you that designing & building bridges is harder than designing and building software
What is the current price per line of code for NASA? And there are still bugs. and what about high concurrancy issues, dealing with failover etc etc etc. Bridge building is much more standardised than software, though still not perfect (the Tacoma Bridge and the Thames Millenium Bridge both come to mind). Plus do you need to change the bridge when the boltmaker changes the size of bolts at some time in the future? No, but with software you need to be able to deal with things like changing libraries, recompiling on newer systems etc etc. Oh and if you think you have some super-duper way of proving the mathematical correctness of a software system I've got some software neural networks that you might like to try it on...
Having a well-established and well-respected (how is IEEE or ACM not well respected), *legally binding* set of standards will ensure that people who write sloppy and badly written software will be liable for their (in)action.
I can imagine what would happen, M$ changes some DLL in one of their "updates" and breaks my code (like they did with Wordperfect), so I get sued into oblivion. My only choice then is to go and work for a company that makes enough political contributions (AKA protection money) so that I don't have to worry about it. Looks like M$ will be one of the few companies that will be able to "innovate" under such a regime.
So that communion plate that gets passed around is just for show then? I mean it's not like the Catholic church has its own city or that they need to spend lots of money on hiding some of their preists misdeeds. I'm not attacking just the Catholic church here, I havent seen one religion that isnt based on controling the population and raising a "spiritual" tax of one sort or another so that a minority of the "saved" can lord it over the rest of us. To misquote Morpheus "As long as religion exists the human race will never be free".
Here you go, enjoy -
Rubberhose
Scientology isn't a religion, it's a way for a (very) few people to steal as much as they can from people with poor psychological health. Scientology should be treated as a public health problem and I think this is exactly what the German government is trying to do.
And how exactly is that different from every other organised religion?
To kill a case brought by a company (corporation) you'd have to destroy the company, taking out one person would not change that, also due to the media interest it would be far too dangerous to try such a thing, the closest you'd get is character assasination, which when you're up against someone who has a) been security vetted to work on various military projects b) aided in the capture and prosecution of a coldblooded murderer c) has a large number of high profile people (including members of the Judiciary) who will stand with them your chances of effectively denting their reputation tend to zero.
Well obviously I'd make sure the case made it into the mainstream media, if the CPS tried anything like that they would be hammered, and the Home Secetary would been in for a rough ride, and I'm sure some documents from inside the Home Office would "leak". IANAL, but surely that would come under "Perverting the course of Justice", possibly violation of the Human Rights Act under the right to a fair trial (assuming it can be applied equally to a prosecution as well as a defence) though I don't think it quite qualifies as Treason. Lets not forget that any politician that makes statements about their conduct in ordering the CPS to take over the case is only immune from being hauled into court themselves if they restrict their comments to the House of Commons, Tony and his Cronies need to be on TV, so they open themselves up to being brought before a court if they start trying to twist the truth. So there are ways of attacking the problem both in the media and in the court. The politicians could possibly try to invoke a UK media blackout on the grounds of National Security, however this is the Internet age and the story will get out through the Net, and so hopefully other forms of direct action will not need to be taken to ensure a free and fair trial.
Writing their trojan into your operating system itself seems like a damn good way to do this. Windows and Mac users and even Linux users expect certain processes to access the network, so why not exploit that to camouflage an "ultimate trojan"?
Except of course it can be hacked itself, can you imagine what will happen when skript kiddies start patching an FBI trojan? You'll have something like Back Orifice whose use will not be prosecuted because it was created by the government and therefore is an embarrasment, can you imagine a court case where George Bush is called to explain how he came to sanction the FBI to develop the tool that is at the centre of the prosecutions case? I dont think so. The FBIs use of this tool will only make global network security worse, personally being in the UK if any network that I was running had any node infected by thisI would be bringing a private criminal prosecution against the US government under the UKs Computer Misuse Act, and I'd win too.
The theoretical bandwith limit on large die silicon semiconductors is in the range of 10GHz.
As you said, large die silicon, if we move to other technologies such as the single molecule transistors that are currently being pioneered we won't be faced by the same limitations as silicon.
10GHz is "about" 3 times faster than the current maximum clock rate, 2GHz or so.
10/2 = 5
As far as actual tests, I assure you no one has a large transistor count CPU working, the discussions are theoretical.
Have you ever seen the 1st ever transistor, it was damn big, it took a while for them to get the technology right so they could get to where we are today, just because async chips are yet to be anything like as complex as sync logic chips doesnt mean it will never happen, give it time, I was discussing this stuff back in 1987, now finally people are beginning to act on the possibilities, give it another decade or so.
Ok, I think we need a poll for this new benchmark name -
o Gibson
o Babbage
o Turing
o Stephenson
o CowboyNeal
I just want to see the look on a salemans face when he says this new processor is rated at 10 Giga CowboyNeals...
Actually the RSA patent should never have been issued as some geeks at GCHQ ( the British equivalent of the NSA) had though up the idea years before RSA, they didnt patent it as it was ultra-top-secret, but it was prior art non the less see here
I am guessing that you are a UK citizen. Unfortunately certain sectors of the UK press takes a delight in printing "Brussels demands straight bananas" type stories, and don't report all the other things the EU is doing.
Indeed, it is a tradition of the UK press to be vigourous investigators of what those that pass laws are really up to. Just recently the head of the Scottish parliment had to step down for taking money for renting out office space that was being paid for by the government and pocketing the money. Unfortunately the EU has had a lot of problems, nepotism, cronism, fraud, embesslement etc etc and the only really positive thing is the single market, which seems to be more the product of individual governments than the EU apparatus. As for the single currency AKA the Euro, that has lost >20% of its value against the US Dollar since its launch, which means your money is worth less. Having chatted with bankers before the launch of the Euro, they said it would gain value, whenI explained why the Euro was sure to be weak they laughed at me, so thats International Bankers 0 (except the guys at UBS-Warburg, they were as thick as pig shit, they get -666 Troll), analytical geek 1, then look at how the decisions of the European Central Bank are made, in secret, with representives of different countries saying different things to the press/market, you only have to look at how one member was saying earlier this week that there would be no base rate cut and then there was one, do you think anyone is going to have confidence in this sort of doubletalk? No, obviously not. Then look at some of the EUs other policies, like the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) which has kept ineffecient farmers afloat by giving them subsidies and kept out cheaper imports from places like Poland, thus helping to keep the former Eatern Bloc dependent on basic commodity trading and organised crime to make money, then there is the Common Fisheries Policy that has helped drive down the fishing stocks in the North Sea to unsustanable levels while not punishing those that catch undersized (i.e. immature and therefore non-breeding) fish thus helping to kill the fishing stocks even further. Then there is the "democratic deficit", i.e. the fact that only the European Parliment is elected and not the Commission hence alot of the corruption and other misdeeds. I personally can't see the point in it at all, just another layer of petty beurocrats, if you can point to one important thing the EU has acheived I'd love to hear about it, and by important I mean life changing in a positive way. Each country has its own legal system, its own style of government, and in many cases its own language.
You hit the nail on the head there. To have a unified system, you need to start at the bottom, with language, unfortunately that is politically unacceptable (do you remember when English words were banned by the French?), so they build on quicksand instead. At some point people will start to use the differences in language to drive trucks through some of the laws, and I will laugh my arse off.
I do business between various EU countries so I aware of the issues.
Yeah the most fun one I have come across is regarding having paid VAT (Value Added Tax) on a boat that I sailed across to Holland, if you do not produce a VAT receipt they impound your boat, if the company you bought it from is no longer in business and you don't have the receipt pay up or get impounded, repeat until made bankcrupt.
The EU is doing a good and necessary job easing trade and legislation between all the countries of Europe.
Yeah, I mean it's not like the WTO is there as a global organisation to do that.
- aren't you forgetting, for instance, the introduction of the Euro as the principal currency of most of the EU countries in just under two months time? That a) makes sense b) will have a profound effect on trade in the EU c) will greatly improve ease of trade and competitiveness and d) will greatly lower administration overheads and costs for nearly inter-EU trade.
The Euro is transfering risk of exchange rate fluctuations from companies doing business inside Europe to the EU as a block, before if one country was doing badly its exchange rate would be affected, now it affects everyone else, as there is no real accountability this can go on and on taking the life out of the Eurozone economies by hitting confidence that anything will be sorted out. If you wanted to do the project right, you start from a common language, then common laws created by forming a "superstate" and doing away with national democracies, having common tax, defence, and foregn relations policies, common defence and common currency, if you did that, it would work. Right now we have already seen the strains that Ireland and Italy have had on the project and it's not looking good. As there is no strategy or unwinding the Euro as a currency and going back to national currencies it means there is no way out, if the markets get fed up of the BS coming out of the EU and the Central Bank the currency could take a nose dive, imagine if the Euro was worth the same as a Rupee, how would that hit you? The EU was borne of protectionism (it was originally about protecting coal and steel industries) and the Euro was borne out of political fudging (the Euro was originally drafted as a "common currency", Maggie Thatcher got some things changed in the negotiations for the Treaty and for that some other leaders changed "common" to "single" for the currency, so instead of just having a common currency that could be used as alternative to national currencies it became a single one that all had to bow down to).
Davies did invent packet switching, and Britain would have been well ahead of the US if the R&D had been funded, unfortuantely, Tony Benn MP, at the time the Science Minister refused to fund it, thus allowing thw US to come in and use what had been created in Britain which then went on to be Arpanet and then the Internet. So born in Britain and raised by the Americans. There is an Open University programme (TV that is) that has an interview with Davies as I recall backfrom the 70s I think where he explains packet switching and the series of events that lead to the knucklehead UK politicians cutting the funding.
I phoned VPL the day it collapsed and was one of the few that got to hear Jarons answerphone message, him almost in tears telling us that Thompson had pulled the plug, you could really hear he was broken by the expereince, he has bounced back a bit and still even turns up on TV now and again, though I havent seen him in a year or so, does anyone know if he still has those long dreads?
Well I still play Doom and Quake with my VFX headset, I'm still waiting for some really good headsets to come along with a price tag that is not meant for the US military, I had hoped for the Sony one to be useful, unfortunately it still seems to be mono rather than stereoscopic, maybe with OLEDs the pricing will drop like a stone and we'll all be geeking out playing Quake on the way into work soon, now if we can just integrate some wireless networking gear into the system we can frag each other instead of burying our heads in the newspaper on the train.
If you saw the program you'd know that it was cracked by someone at a lab Microsoft set up with Cambridge University, this is the same Microsoft that calls on security experts to "end information anarchy" and stop releasing sample code that exploits security holes in Windows and other operating systems. AKA MS Hypocracy 3.51
not true. FastTrack will emerge unscathed in the end because they are not participating in any copyright violations anymore than microsoft is for including a TCP stack in windows. They don't facilitate the network with central servers.
RIAA Looks To Stop KaZaA, Morpheus & Grokster
also see how having a central server has broken gIFT which may indeed make them liable.
One biggish issue for p2p companies to realize is that though having a single connected network of peers has benefits, they may need to explicitly segregate customers who engage in illicit activities if they want enterprise customers to sign on.
I don't think I need to remind anyone that the Internet is not segregated, even though some are trying
Actually as I recall it was really Compaq that was responsible for pushing the IBM cloned BIOS / machines and thus opening the market for all the other clone manufacturers. I still have some computer mags from that time, and they are choc full of Compaq ads pushing their clones as much as they could. So if I were dishing out credit for the PC market of today, I'd say 1) IBM for creating the XT 2) Compaq for pushing the clone market 3) Intel for selling 8088s/8086s to all and sundry 4) all those that helped create the killer apps of the day (shoutouts to the Visicalc guys) 5) the fab production people for making Moore's law possible... and MS somewhere near the end as Bill did insist on that fscking stupid 640K limit.
You forgot the most incredible bit-
Gates said there's a role for free software alongside commercial software,
After all the M$ FUD, the Halloween documents, the Mindcraft study etc etc now they accept open source as legit.. I think I am going to open a bottle of very expensive champagne... as Ghandi once famously said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"
Why? I have a collection of lots of WWII memorabilia from both sides (collected when I was a kid), everything from medals and documentation to ordinance and gasmasks, why should people not collect history? It has given me a very personal view of what was a terrible time in world history, and reminds me to fight to prevent anything like that from happening again, and it also reminds me that it is up to us, you and me, not the politicians, because they lothe to stretch their minds and see the bigger picture. Look at what is happening now, and imagine for an instant that after the Soveits had been kicked out of Afghanistan that the politicains in the rest of the world had not abandoned them, that there had been a Marshal Plan for Afghanistan, do you think Bin Laden would have had the ability to set up training / indoctrination camps? No, obviously not, unfortunately people in the rest of the world ignored the contribution of the Afghan people in helping to ultimately defeat a totalitarian regime that was at times as bad as the Nazis. So now there is a breeding ground for people like Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda, just like there was a breeding ground for Hitler and the Nazis after WWI, those who do not learn from history yadda yadda..
I think it is important to get a historical perspective on this. The French laws come out of Frances state of denial regarding collaboration with the Nazis and in particular the Vichy regime. When I have spent time in France and brought up the Vichy, no one of that era wanted to talk about it, and the young seemed rather oblivious to the amount of collaboration that really went on in France prefering to think that all of France was really full of Resistance fighters. Unfortunately the US doesnt come out whiter than white either, infact Roosevelt was on very good terms with Admiral Jean François Darlan one of the high ranking Vichy, fortunately while America was trying to do deals with those helping the Nazis with the Final Solution (the Holocaust) the Brits in the shape of the SOE got on and trained Ferdinand Bonnier de la Chapelle who went on to assasinate Darlan on 24th December 1942 with an SOE issued pistol no less, which lead to the rise of General Charles De Gaulle. So now more than half a century later we have dumb French laws that are there to help suppress the truth of what happened under Vichy and we have the Americans saying they shouldnt while blissfully forgetting that they were quite happy to deal with the same Vichy regime. Those who do not learn from history yadda yadda...
Added to this is the simple fact that....touring is DAMN expensive.
You are correct, I remember when the Stones hired a 747 to fly them around on one tour, that must be damn expensive, not to mention the cost of all those trashed hotel rooms and Rolls in the pool. I know rockstars are not supposed to be like us mere mortals that now have to fly budget carriers for our business trips, rather than Business class, but maybe, just maybe you could think about cutting down a little, who knows you might end up making a decent living.
A great example of artists getting royally fucked.
Shurely you mean royalty fucked?
I'm afraid it's the fault of us Brits really after all we helped create the CIA by setting up Camp X and the Americans seem to have taken our ideas to heart, this is just another Exploding Rat, I hope I speak for the majority of us Brits when I say... Sorry!