And companies try to hard to sound like they have no real issues, sometimes making important updates not sound as important as they really are.
Very nicely put.
This is a terrible problem in the computer industry. Because most commercial software is sold as a "closed box" and software is complex and difficult for end users to analyze, software companies can get away with a phenomenal amount of misrepresentation and truth-bending.
This is a major thing that I like about open-source software. The folks in it tend to be reasonably honest. If everyone in the world can see the patch that was just checked in, there's no way you can get away with "Improves functioning of Web pages" for "eliminates remote exploit seizing control of your computer". Furthermore, because there are no marketers involved to work on misrepresenting the software to the user (and thus selling more copies), it's okay to be publically critical about your own software. Bugs aren't "issues", they're *bugs* (God, I hate software companies that insist on calling their bugs "issues"). It's not an "issue", it's a bug. You screwed up; be honest and be trusted in the future. In the open source world, sometimes feature requests are considered "bugs" -- hey, it doesn't do desireable behavior, so the authors overlooked something.
If Microsoft had made Bugzilla, it would be dubbed "Microsoft Advanced Issue Tracker".
I'll second the "autoupdating as used by most applications" bit. It really needs to be a single OS-wide *good* updater with logging, decent error recovery, and the like. apt with deb or rpm is a good example. Having a load of applications, all with their own half-assed updaters that break under particular situations is a *bad* thing.
I've never been able to figure out why nobody provides an automatic application update service for Windows. Once you get used to having an automatic (or manual "tell me what's out of date on my entire system, including applications, and if I choose to do so, download and install updates") update, it's very hard to use anything else.
There are a number of ways to create Windows-bootable CDs -- I know that one guy ("Paul", or something similar) maintains a kit to build them, and c't had an article on creating Windows-bootable CDs at one point (IIRC, there were some severe limitations on NT-series Windows systems, though).
It's somewhat easier to get ahold of Linux systems to do this, though. Microsoft has attempted to sell a "we're locally secure" image, and thus has provided a poor set of troubleshooting tools. I think you can tell my own opinions on the matter from the "rightly or not" bit in my post, but it's still a point where administrators can be mislead -- where the *IX and Windows security approaches differ.
MS has made some really, really bad moves that gave away security for a shorter learning curve or easier application development, and have recently found that people really *do* value security to some degree -- maybe not as much as they should, but it's not something that they can ignore. MS clearly made some decision back in the day that "security has little value", and it's costing them now. SP2 includes some good improvements, but there is a "security at the level of core design" issue with Windows that just does not work out -- Windows was not designed with security in mind (especially security against local user accounts) to the extent that *IX and *IX software is.
They also have some really asinine decisions. MSIE should never have been designed the way it is; from a security standpoint, it is a huge vector for attacks, as it is given special privileges (and the ability to go through most personal firewall software), cannot be removed, and is not updated as frequently as it should be.
All that being said, Linux is not a panacea for spyware. Eventually, as others have pointed out, spyware *will* exist for Linux, unless something stops Linux from becoming a major desktop OS. Yes, the popular mail and web browsing software for Linux places a greater emphasis on security over ease-of-use than Microsoft's own Outlook/OE and MSIE do. Yes, Linux can be CD-booted, and thus software of a Tripwire nature can be easily used, and yes, software is generally open source, and thus it's more difficult for a commercial company to include "phone home" code, and easier for the OS and third party software to be audited and fixed by the community (even if the original developer is no longer around). The open nature of Linux lets distributors compete more heavily, including on security. Chroot is a useful and easy-to-use tool for sandboxing that Windows lacks. The binary-level compatibility fragmentation of the Linux world makes buffer overflow attacks much less likely to work. Packaged software for almost all modern Linux distributions is distributed in a signed package, meaning that most users have the ability to use entirely signed (and theoretically tested) software. However, there is *still* the element of "the user may download, mark as executable, and execute a piece of software, assuming the Linux installation is configured to allow write access and the ability to invoke new software at login. It may be harder to attack, but it is not impossible, at least for a common desktop environment. Linux has already seen its first "spyware" in the Linux implementation of RealPlayer (which, like all RealPlayer implementations, phones home), even if Linux users had the option of bypassing this behavior by just using the RealPlayer codecs through mplayer or similar software.
Keep in mind -- Linux is an improvement over Windows when it comes to security. Just because it's better does not mean that it is a final answer to all computer security problems -- switching to Linux does not mean "I never have to worry about computer security again." I'm worrying that some folks are expecting this kind of behavior, and are going to be sorely disappointed in a couple years when the attacks on Linux from commercial software vendors ramp up a bit. I see a lot of "I don't have to worry about viruses/worms/trojans, because *I* use *Linux*, which just plain isn't a practical stand to take."
There are also a few areas where Linux is *behind* Windows when it comes to security.
First, I do not know of any free systems for Linux that allow for mass remote management of systems on a degree that Windows (possibly plus additional software) does. The ability to monitor and administer systems in a "domain" (as Microsoft puts it) easily is an important element in the "read your logs" bit of computer security. The easier it is to check up on the computer you administer, the better security is.
Last I checked/. was not about software piracy, please take your warezing rear elsewhere or by a legit copy with a legit key.
Not correct. Slashdot is mostly general tech discussion, and folks interested in pirating software can provide discussion just as interesting as folks interested in designing copy prevention stuff.
Personally, I find it a little offensive whenever someone tells either of them to shove off ("Don't talk about piracy here" or "DRM sucks, shove off"). I'd rather not try to suppress discussion.
if Comics really were an influence in American culture, then why is the industry itself in the shits? If it wasn't for comicmovies, Marvel probably would've filed for bankruptcy AGAIN. I'm looking here and seeing bankruptcies in 1996 and 2002. That's not healthy under ANY measure.
Because most (not all) American comic books are about superheroes wearing spandex, and people don't age and keep reading those -- and the industry couldn't manage to bring in new readers when competing with things like the Internet.
I do have a couple friends that read some comic books -- Cerebus, Transmetropolitan (I'm not a huge fan of it, but whatever makes one happy, I suppose), and so forth.
Remember than manga does much better -- it just appeals to a broader audience, including adults.
Why do people like Transmetropolitan so much? I've read a couple issues (a friend of mine is a Manhattanite), and I just can't understand why people rave about it's social value so much. It's not bad, I guess, but neither is it something that I'd run around talking about.
After "The Holocaust," I decided to insert "History's greatest crime" - just to see if some asshole (you) would pull an Israeli/Palestinian juxtapositon. Thanks for being so predictable.
You know, the "history's greatest crime" thing came off to me as a bit propagandist as well.
Basically, any phrase with "history's greatest" or the even more pretentious "of all time" tends to be a bit out of whack, IMHO.
SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU currently contains open-source software, such as the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed with commercial software. Zions confirmed that Microsoft is working to replace all open-source code in SFU with commercially licensed alternatives. Last year it licensed Unix software from SCO.
Well, I'm bewildered by this approach. Does MS's legal team completely have their heads up their ass in terms of legal reality, or are they just willing to pay to commercially license software just for the potential value as a FUD tool? Can't distribute the GNU C compiler with commercial software? Apple must be dead in the water!
if Bill wants to make money by selling software that is extremely useful, very functional, is broadly open to working with thousands of software packages, and is secure enough if you aren't a dumbass
Individuals should not develop/invest in OSS because they don't get paid, and it will reduce their own job market as commercial programmers.
You know, free markets are snazzy and all -- robust, efficient, but they were designed to help produce commodity goods like rice or timber efficiently. Even assuming that open source cannot exist in a free market environment (dubious), given the efficiency gains, if there is a stable mechanism to allow open source development that does not impose a higher efficiency cost than is granted, it seems worthwhile to use that mechanism.
this is like saying "volunteer work is causing unemployment for people who wish to do the same work for pay"
If Open Office, Apache, and Mozilla manage to completely drive every Microsoft Office, IIS, and MSIE develoepr out of business and don't provide a single job...let's say that they eliminate a couple hundred people on each project, maybe a thousand total. That pales in comparison to how many jobs have been eliminated because of more efficient software development tools and procedures. By Gates' logic, we should all be coding our software bit by bit in machine language, fliping switches, because even though it's less efficient, it employs more people and "generates more tax revenue".
Until computers can do everything that I possibly want them to do, until they understand what i'm saying, drive my car, avoid crashing, present data in every format that I might prefer, compose beautiful music on-demand, self-diagose problems, and so forth, there will always be jobs for programmers. It'll take a bit for the market to adjust -- people and funding have to move around a bit -- but the fact that there are good open source instances of an office suite, web browser, and kernel is not going to induce starvation in the masses of programmers out there.
Right. However, the airwaves are also a public good -- it's not very feasible to isolate radio waves within a particular region on any kind of a large scale.
Generally, the way we deal with public good problems (clean air, littering in a park, etc) is by establishing rules and regulations that enforce universal cooperation (and thus makes all members of the system win out), which is pretty much what the FCC is for.
Content belongs to the creator. If my first steps were recorded in analog video, the government should not impose a law which would make such content impossible to view. When I create a DVD of my baby's first steps, I should have the right to control and sign that content. I should have the right to make it available to others and transcode that content to whatever the format of the day is in 2021.
How does this relate to Powell's policies at all?
If you're proposing change, this relates to copyright law, not to regulation of communication.
Government belongs to the people. All content created at taxpayer expense should be in an open format, not subject to proprietary licensing.
Interesting idea, and I agree. However, again, this is not the domain of the FCC, which doesn't have the required jurisdiction. You'll need legislation going through the House and Senate that constrains purchasing in the Executive Branch.
Government should not play favorites. If Howard Stern profits from our airwaves with junior high mentaility, then everyone capable of expressing a junior high mentality should also have this right. If World Harvest Radio uses our airwaves to convince the world that Americans are all right-wing extremists and cultists, than other kooks should have that right.
You need to propose feasibile approaches for this. Yes, as an ideal we try to roughly approximate a meritocracy with a free flow of ideas. However, in practical terms, there are lots of people that object to some information being available to their kids (and advocate censorship), and things like funding for idealized systems can be a problem.
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
Again, you need to propose an actual mechanism here.
Consumers should be able to select from the thousands of public programs available at the Library of Congress and produced by other governments (BBC, RTE, NHK...) wi# # Consumers should be able to select from the thousands of public programs available at the Library of Congress and produced by other governments (BBC, RTE, NHK...) without running into a region code "iron curtain".thout running into a region code "iron curtain".
That's also an interesting idea. I'd be dubious as to whether this would be FCC jurisdiction, again. It'd just involve an international treaty giving playing rights to stuff produced with taxpayer dollars in various nations.
The BBC in particular does some nice stuff.
A broadcast flag is a stupid simpleminded idea. It won't work and it will violate many of the above principles.
It doesn't have to be elaborate. Macrovision can be defeated, but it keeps the average Joe from copying.
That being said, I think you're right, and that the broadcast flag is pretty much dead in terms of helping companies recieve payment for their goods.
I've been playing around with some ideas on distributed evaluation and rating, and if anyone can direct me to folks who discuss and work on this, I'd be appreciative.
I'm a bit too far out there for immediate inclusion into Firefox, though...
Only idiots like you would compare the US to these terrorist peices of slime.
Why not shoot down my reasoning, if it's so flawed, instead of just calling me names?
As for "terrorist pieces of slime", the United States has been fighting proxy wars in a number of countries around the world for some time, "terrorist" has been little more than the buzzword for "the guys being backed by the other side", and "freedom fighters" as the buzzword for "the guys backed by us", even if the tactics are identical.
Terrorism is defined by the use of force against civilians to produce political influence. This is a tactic that, while obviously not invented by the United States, is heartily endorsed by it. The last three largest booms in terrorism were all enacted by the United States:
* The "Total War" in the South under General Sherman's command in the Civil War, where all civilian infrastructure was targetted en masse. At least in recent history, this is the first major surfacing of targetting of civilians in war.
* The use of civilian-targetted bombing in World War II, it could be argued, was initiated by an accidental German bombing from a single plane lost during the Battle of Britain. However, ultimately Britain was responsible for the first large deliberate bombing targetting civilians (as a response). The United States and Britain proceeded to engage in massive anti-civilian bombing. The United States also engaged in this behavior in the Pacific theater, with firebombing of Japanese civilians.
* The use of atomic weaponry against human beings has only ever been engaged in by the United States, and was used against cities rather than isolated military targets.
The problem is that you've likely had a tremendous amount of US-based nationalistic propaganda shoved down your throat. If by "terrorist scum" you mean bin Laden and friends, then you're talking about a group that was backed by the United States for years to do exactly what they're doing now...but against the Soviet Union (especially entertaining, with Bush using "backing terrorism" as a reason for a country to be considered evil and fair game for invasion). You're talking about a group that is primarily engaged in fighting for religious reasons -- exactly the same reason the United States was founded, if you'll remember.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like bin Laden blowing up US civilians. But neither am I going to pretend that he's some kind of evil monster and that the people in the US that have been doing the same thing for years are noble, good, and idolizable -- I consider to be ethically on the level of the guy that gave the go-ahead for the dropping of the atomic bomb (though technically the atomic bomb guy killed over an order of magnitude more people and did so at a juncture when peace probably could have been obtained within a month without use of the atomic bomb, but we'll let that slide). Bin Laden is a fairly ballsy person fighting at fairly nasty odds and keeping ahead of the opposition. The position he holds is, for many people, much like what George Washington holds for USians (remember all that "dishonorable" business of hiding behind trees and rocks instead of shooting from the open, in the manner that military action was "supposed" to happen and the way the British army fought at the time?)
Really, the US bashing on slashdot has gotten out of control. You don't like anything the US does.
No, I like a lot of things that the US does. The problem is that generally, in politics, one doesn't crow about the minor political improvements as much as one does about the horrible political fuckups, and the Bush administration has had more than its share of fuckups.
You think that everything that is bad in the world is the US's fault. Fine you are entitled to your beleif.
Of course not. Some things are -- as it happens, US oil policy and actions supporting oil policy are pretty nasty things, and oil policy happens to currently be in the
While the idea of running a blog is interesting -- I'm facinated by the idea of alternate and potentially more efficient communication to policymakers -- I'm not sure that the blog format selected is appropriate. You're producing all comments dropped into a page, with no hierarchy, moderation or anything. It's like trying to suck down the contents of a firehose. The advantage of electronic forums is not only one-way communication with the forum owner, but also allowing other people interested in relevant issues to interact with each other and to share ideas and information.
There are a couple of format changes that I'd suggest.
First, threading is just plain going to be necessary for any forum of this size. It's not reasonable to expect people to track interleaved discussion -- and it's efficient to allow the public to correct errors in posts and to associate related information, instead of forcing readers to skim through many, many comments that comprise a series of interleaved discussions.
Second of all, moderation, or some similar system could be helpful. Slashcode is a popular codebase to allow moderation, but the structure only partly deals with moderation abusers -- those that attempt to moderate up viewpoints that they agree with, rather than those that they believe to be correct. Slashcode has a good deal of popularity mostly on forums with communities that generally agree with each other on overall issues. I don't believe that there are any forum moderation systems that try to identify "clusters" of posters that moderate each other up (perhaps this is a research project waiting to happen, if no companies are already working on such a thing). Instead of all posts being assigned a global scalar value representing "goodness", there'd be N identified clusters, and "goodness" from the point of view *of each of those clusters*. Doing so would be interesting, as it might be easier to find the "best arguments" for a particular side, and could deal better with more lobbying-oriented environments like this.
I'm not sure whether the "let's slap some viewpoints on a blog" idea is directly from Mike Powell or whether it originated with a staffer -- I find it exciting, and a good sign when it's coming from the FCC. Thanks again to whoever originated the idea, and to Mike Powell for trying it out.
I realize that, but if Google can hand out 1 GB for free, and Microsoft can operate Hotmail as a free email service, one would think that CMU could handle a couple megs per alumnus. This is not a big cost, and plenty of other universities do it.
I mean, whenever someone *uses* the durn thing, they get free press. Wouldn't you want it to be widely known that [insert famous scientist] went to your university? It's the cheapest form of advertisment that a university can possibly get (and bandwidth and storage costs *keep* dropping, so it keeps getting cheaper over time). It encourages people to use their CMU box and thus gives Alumni Relations a reliable route to contact people to hit them up for money.
Honestly, a lot of people I know at CMU dearly love their schools, but few people like the university administration.
Yeah, I'm still cranky over the fact that Carnegie Mellon is yanking the email boxes from their alumni (and apparently wasn't going to warn them until a couple of students got active and forced Alumni Relations to say something). It'd be nice if CMU had a bit more regard for their alumni when it comes to things that cost them less than the lousy stuff they hand out during their graduation.
*grumble* lousy CMU.
CMU has some great schools and good folks and administrators in those schools, but when it comes to the university itself, CMU really cheeses me off.
Just because you can build something doesn't mean you should.
On the other hand, just because you don't like the fact that it's easy to build something doesn't mean that you should stick your head in the sand and try kicking whoever it is that bluntly pointed out that such things can be built. The New Zealand government doesn't sound like it's handled this in a particularly good way either.
On the whole, though, this guy did something ostentatious to prove a point without the intent to hurt anyone, and with the hope of perhaps proving his skills. I think that there are a lot of people here that can relate -- sure, this guy happens to do aeronautical propulsion and control, but he's not doing anything that different from a lot of colorful techies that I know.
Heck, Melissa caused a lot more damage than a single cruise missile could.
Slashdot Mirror
And companies try to hard to sound like they have no real issues, sometimes making important updates not sound as important as they really are.
Very nicely put.
This is a terrible problem in the computer industry. Because most commercial software is sold as a "closed box" and software is complex and difficult for end users to analyze, software companies can get away with a phenomenal amount of misrepresentation and truth-bending.
This is a major thing that I like about open-source software. The folks in it tend to be reasonably honest. If everyone in the world can see the patch that was just checked in, there's no way you can get away with "Improves functioning of Web pages" for "eliminates remote exploit seizing control of your computer". Furthermore, because there are no marketers involved to work on misrepresenting the software to the user (and thus selling more copies), it's okay to be publically critical about your own software. Bugs aren't "issues", they're *bugs* (God, I hate software companies that insist on calling their bugs "issues"). It's not an "issue", it's a bug. You screwed up; be honest and be trusted in the future. In the open source world, sometimes feature requests are considered "bugs" -- hey, it doesn't do desireable behavior, so the authors overlooked something.
If Microsoft had made Bugzilla, it would be dubbed "Microsoft Advanced Issue Tracker".
I'll second the "autoupdating as used by most applications" bit. It really needs to be a single OS-wide *good* updater with logging, decent error recovery, and the like. apt with deb or rpm is a good example. Having a load of applications, all with their own half-assed updaters that break under particular situations is a *bad* thing.
I've never been able to figure out why nobody provides an automatic application update service for Windows. Once you get used to having an automatic (or manual "tell me what's out of date on my entire system, including applications, and if I choose to do so, download and install updates") update, it's very hard to use anything else.
There are a number of ways to create Windows-bootable CDs -- I know that one guy ("Paul", or something similar) maintains a kit to build them, and c't had an article on creating Windows-bootable CDs at one point (IIRC, there were some severe limitations on NT-series Windows systems, though).
It's somewhat easier to get ahold of Linux systems to do this, though. Microsoft has attempted to sell a "we're locally secure" image, and thus has provided a poor set of troubleshooting tools. I think you can tell my own opinions on the matter from the "rightly or not" bit in my post, but it's still a point where administrators can be mislead -- where the *IX and Windows security approaches differ.
You know...
WRT to real-world security and Linux:
MS has made some really, really bad moves that gave away security for a shorter learning curve or easier application development, and have recently found that people really *do* value security to some degree -- maybe not as much as they should, but it's not something that they can ignore. MS clearly made some decision back in the day that "security has little value", and it's costing them now. SP2 includes some good improvements, but there is a "security at the level of core design" issue with Windows that just does not work out -- Windows was not designed with security in mind (especially security against local user accounts) to the extent that *IX and *IX software is.
They also have some really asinine decisions. MSIE should never have been designed the way it is; from a security standpoint, it is a huge vector for attacks, as it is given special privileges (and the ability to go through most personal firewall software), cannot be removed, and is not updated as frequently as it should be.
All that being said, Linux is not a panacea for spyware. Eventually, as others have pointed out, spyware *will* exist for Linux, unless something stops Linux from becoming a major desktop OS. Yes, the popular mail and web browsing software for Linux places a greater emphasis on security over ease-of-use than Microsoft's own Outlook/OE and MSIE do. Yes, Linux can be CD-booted, and thus software of a Tripwire nature can be easily used, and yes, software is generally open source, and thus it's more difficult for a commercial company to include "phone home" code, and easier for the OS and third party software to be audited and fixed by the community (even if the original developer is no longer around). The open nature of Linux lets distributors compete more heavily, including on security. Chroot is a useful and easy-to-use tool for sandboxing that Windows lacks. The binary-level compatibility fragmentation of the Linux world makes buffer overflow attacks much less likely to work. Packaged software for almost all modern Linux distributions is distributed in a signed package, meaning that most users have the ability to use entirely signed (and theoretically tested) software. However, there is *still* the element of "the user may download, mark as executable, and execute a piece of software, assuming the Linux installation is configured to allow write access and the ability to invoke new software at login. It may be harder to attack, but it is not impossible, at least for a common desktop environment. Linux has already seen its first "spyware" in the Linux implementation of RealPlayer (which, like all RealPlayer implementations, phones home), even if Linux users had the option of bypassing this behavior by just using the RealPlayer codecs through mplayer or similar software.
Keep in mind -- Linux is an improvement over Windows when it comes to security. Just because it's better does not mean that it is a final answer to all computer security problems -- switching to Linux does not mean "I never have to worry about computer security again." I'm worrying that some folks are expecting this kind of behavior, and are going to be sorely disappointed in a couple years when the attacks on Linux from commercial software vendors ramp up a bit. I see a lot of "I don't have to worry about viruses/worms/trojans, because *I* use *Linux*, which just plain isn't a practical stand to take."
There are also a few areas where Linux is *behind* Windows when it comes to security.
First, I do not know of any free systems for Linux that allow for mass remote management of systems on a degree that Windows (possibly plus additional software) does. The ability to monitor and administer systems in a "domain" (as Microsoft puts it) easily is an important element in the "read your logs" bit of computer security. The easier it is to check up on the computer you administer, the better security is.
Second of all, Windows has *easy to use
Last I checked /. was not about software piracy, please take your warezing rear elsewhere or by a legit copy with a legit key.
Not correct. Slashdot is mostly general tech discussion, and folks interested in pirating software can provide discussion just as interesting as folks interested in designing copy prevention stuff.
Personally, I find it a little offensive whenever someone tells either of them to shove off ("Don't talk about piracy here" or "DRM sucks, shove off"). I'd rather not try to suppress discussion.
if Comics really were an influence in American culture, then why is the industry itself in the shits? If it wasn't for comicmovies, Marvel probably would've filed for bankruptcy AGAIN. I'm looking here and seeing bankruptcies in 1996 and 2002. That's not healthy under ANY measure.
Because most (not all) American comic books are about superheroes wearing spandex, and people don't age and keep reading those -- and the industry couldn't manage to bring in new readers when competing with things like the Internet.
I do have a couple friends that read some comic books -- Cerebus, Transmetropolitan (I'm not a huge fan of it, but whatever makes one happy, I suppose), and so forth.
Remember than manga does much better -- it just appeals to a broader audience, including adults.
... Transmetropolitan ...
Why do people like Transmetropolitan so much? I've read a couple issues (a friend of mine is a Manhattanite), and I just can't understand why people rave about it's social value so much. It's not bad, I guess, but neither is it something that I'd run around talking about.
After "The Holocaust," I decided to insert "History's greatest crime" - just to see if some asshole (you) would pull an Israeli/Palestinian juxtapositon. Thanks for being so predictable.
You know, the "history's greatest crime" thing came off to me as a bit propagandist as well.
Basically, any phrase with "history's greatest" or the even more pretentious "of all time" tends to be a bit out of whack, IMHO.
SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU currently contains open-source software, such as the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed with commercial software. Zions confirmed that Microsoft is working to replace all open-source code in SFU with commercially licensed alternatives. Last year it licensed Unix software from SCO.
Well, I'm bewildered by this approach. Does MS's legal team completely have their heads up their ass in terms of legal reality, or are they just willing to pay to commercially license software just for the potential value as a FUD tool? Can't distribute the GNU C compiler with commercial software? Apple must be dead in the water!
That's not what the article said. It quoted Gates as complaining about open source.
if Bill wants to make money by selling software that is extremely useful, very functional, is broadly open to working with thousands of software packages, and is secure enough if you aren't a dumbass
Let me know when he starts doing so.
Individuals should not develop/invest in OSS because they don't get paid, and it will reduce their own job market as commercial programmers.
You know, free markets are snazzy and all -- robust, efficient, but they were designed to help produce commodity goods like rice or timber efficiently. Even assuming that open source cannot exist in a free market environment (dubious), given the efficiency gains, if there is a stable mechanism to allow open source development that does not impose a higher efficiency cost than is granted, it seems worthwhile to use that mechanism.
this is like saying "volunteer work is causing unemployment for people who wish to do the same work for pay"
If Open Office, Apache, and Mozilla manage to completely drive every Microsoft Office, IIS, and MSIE develoepr out of business and don't provide a single job...let's say that they eliminate a couple hundred people on each project, maybe a thousand total. That pales in comparison to how many jobs have been eliminated because of more efficient software development tools and procedures. By Gates' logic, we should all be coding our software bit by bit in machine language, fliping switches, because even though it's less efficient, it employs more people and "generates more tax revenue".
Until computers can do everything that I possibly want them to do, until they understand what i'm saying, drive my car, avoid crashing, present data in every format that I might prefer, compose beautiful music on-demand, self-diagose problems, and so forth, there will always be jobs for programmers. It'll take a bit for the market to adjust -- people and funding have to move around a bit -- but the fact that there are good open source instances of an office suite, web browser, and kernel is not going to induce starvation in the masses of programmers out there.
The airwaves belong to the people.
Right. However, the airwaves are also a public good -- it's not very feasible to isolate radio waves within a particular region on any kind of a large scale.
Generally, the way we deal with public good problems (clean air, littering in a park, etc) is by establishing rules and regulations that enforce universal cooperation (and thus makes all members of the system win out), which is pretty much what the FCC is for.
Content belongs to the creator. If my first steps were recorded in analog video, the government should not impose a law which would make such content impossible to view. When I create a DVD of my baby's first steps, I should have the right to control and sign that content. I should have the right to make it available to others and transcode that content to whatever the format of the day is in 2021.
How does this relate to Powell's policies at all?
If you're proposing change, this relates to copyright law, not to regulation of communication.
Government belongs to the people. All content created at taxpayer expense should be in an open format, not subject to proprietary licensing.
Interesting idea, and I agree. However, again, this is not the domain of the FCC, which doesn't have the required jurisdiction. You'll need legislation going through the House and Senate that constrains purchasing in the Executive Branch.
Government should not play favorites. If Howard Stern profits from our airwaves with junior high mentaility, then everyone capable of expressing a junior high mentality should also have this right. If World Harvest Radio uses our airwaves to convince the world that Americans are all right-wing extremists and cultists, than other kooks should have that right.
You need to propose feasibile approaches for this. Yes, as an ideal we try to roughly approximate a meritocracy with a free flow of ideas. However, in practical terms, there are lots of people that object to some information being available to their kids (and advocate censorship), and things like funding for idealized systems can be a problem.
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
Again, you need to propose an actual mechanism here.
Consumers should be able to select from the thousands of public programs available at the Library of Congress and produced by other governments (BBC, RTE, NHK...) wi#
# Consumers should be able to select from the thousands of public programs available at the Library of Congress and produced by other governments (BBC, RTE, NHK...) without running into a region code "iron curtain".thout running into a region code "iron curtain".
That's also an interesting idea. I'd be dubious as to whether this would be FCC jurisdiction, again. It'd just involve an international treaty giving playing rights to stuff produced with taxpayer dollars in various nations.
The BBC in particular does some nice stuff.
A broadcast flag is a stupid simpleminded idea. It won't work and it will violate many of the above principles.
It doesn't have to be elaborate. Macrovision can be defeated, but it keeps the average Joe from copying.
That being said, I think you're right, and that the broadcast flag is pretty much dead in terms of helping companies recieve payment for their goods.
I've been playing around with some ideas on distributed evaluation and rating, and if anyone can direct me to folks who discuss and work on this, I'd be appreciative.
I'm a bit too far out there for immediate inclusion into Firefox, though...
Or permanent alien abduction.
Only idiots like you would compare the US to these terrorist peices of slime.
Why not shoot down my reasoning, if it's so flawed, instead of just calling me names?
As for "terrorist pieces of slime", the United States has been fighting proxy wars in a number of countries around the world for some time, "terrorist" has been little more than the buzzword for "the guys being backed by the other side", and "freedom fighters" as the buzzword for "the guys backed by us", even if the tactics are identical.
Terrorism is defined by the use of force against civilians to produce political influence. This is a tactic that, while obviously not invented by the United States, is heartily endorsed by it. The last three largest booms in terrorism were all enacted by the United States:
* The "Total War" in the South under General Sherman's command in the Civil War, where all civilian infrastructure was targetted en masse. At least in recent history, this is the first major surfacing of targetting of civilians in war.
* The use of civilian-targetted bombing in World War II, it could be argued, was initiated by an accidental German bombing from a single plane lost during the Battle of Britain. However, ultimately Britain was responsible for the first large deliberate bombing targetting civilians (as a response). The United States and Britain proceeded to engage in massive anti-civilian bombing. The United States also engaged in this behavior in the Pacific theater, with firebombing of Japanese civilians.
* The use of atomic weaponry against human beings has only ever been engaged in by the United States, and was used against cities rather than isolated military targets.
The problem is that you've likely had a tremendous amount of US-based nationalistic propaganda shoved down your throat. If by "terrorist scum" you mean bin Laden and friends, then you're talking about a group that was backed by the United States for years to do exactly what they're doing now...but against the Soviet Union (especially entertaining, with Bush using "backing terrorism" as a reason for a country to be considered evil and fair game for invasion). You're talking about a group that is primarily engaged in fighting for religious reasons -- exactly the same reason the United States was founded, if you'll remember.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like bin Laden blowing up US civilians. But neither am I going to pretend that he's some kind of evil monster and that the people in the US that have been doing the same thing for years are noble, good, and idolizable -- I consider to be ethically on the level of the guy that gave the go-ahead for the dropping of the atomic bomb (though technically the atomic bomb guy killed over an order of magnitude more people and did so at a juncture when peace probably could have been obtained within a month without use of the atomic bomb, but we'll let that slide). Bin Laden is a fairly ballsy person fighting at fairly nasty odds and keeping ahead of the opposition. The position he holds is, for many people, much like what George Washington holds for USians (remember all that "dishonorable" business of hiding behind trees and rocks instead of shooting from the open, in the manner that military action was "supposed" to happen and the way the British army fought at the time?)
Really, the US bashing on slashdot has gotten out of control. You don't like anything the US does.
No, I like a lot of things that the US does. The problem is that generally, in politics, one doesn't crow about the minor political improvements as much as one does about the horrible political fuckups, and the Bush administration has had more than its share of fuckups.
You think that everything that is bad in the world is the US's fault. Fine you are entitled to your beleif.
Of course not. Some things are -- as it happens, US oil policy and actions supporting oil policy are pretty nasty things, and oil policy happens to currently be in the
While the idea of running a blog is interesting -- I'm facinated by the idea of alternate and potentially more efficient communication to policymakers -- I'm not sure that the blog format selected is appropriate. You're producing all comments dropped into a page, with no hierarchy, moderation or anything. It's like trying to suck down the contents of a firehose. The advantage of electronic forums is not only one-way communication with the forum owner, but also allowing other people interested in relevant issues to interact with each other and to share ideas and information.
There are a couple of format changes that I'd suggest.
First, threading is just plain going to be necessary for any forum of this size. It's not reasonable to expect people to track interleaved discussion -- and it's efficient to allow the public to correct errors in posts and to associate related information, instead of forcing readers to skim through many, many comments that comprise a series of interleaved discussions.
Second of all, moderation, or some similar system could be helpful. Slashcode is a popular codebase to allow moderation, but the structure only partly deals with moderation abusers -- those that attempt to moderate up viewpoints that they agree with, rather than those that they believe to be correct. Slashcode has a good deal of popularity mostly on forums with communities that generally agree with each other on overall issues. I don't believe that there are any forum moderation systems that try to identify "clusters" of posters that moderate each other up (perhaps this is a research project waiting to happen, if no companies are already working on such a thing). Instead of all posts being assigned a global scalar value representing "goodness", there'd be N identified clusters, and "goodness" from the point of view *of each of those clusters*. Doing so would be interesting, as it might be easier to find the "best arguments" for a particular side, and could deal better with more lobbying-oriented environments like this.
I'm not sure whether the "let's slap some viewpoints on a blog" idea is directly from Mike Powell or whether it originated with a staffer -- I find it exciting, and a good sign when it's coming from the FCC. Thanks again to whoever originated the idea, and to Mike Powell for trying it out.
I realize that, but if Google can hand out 1 GB for free, and Microsoft can operate Hotmail as a free email service, one would think that CMU could handle a couple megs per alumnus. This is not a big cost, and plenty of other universities do it.
I mean, whenever someone *uses* the durn thing, they get free press. Wouldn't you want it to be widely known that [insert famous scientist] went to your university? It's the cheapest form of advertisment that a university can possibly get (and bandwidth and storage costs *keep* dropping, so it keeps getting cheaper over time). It encourages people to use their CMU box and thus gives Alumni Relations a reliable route to contact people to hit them up for money.
Honestly, a lot of people I know at CMU dearly love their schools, but few people like the university administration.
Yeah, I'm still cranky over the fact that Carnegie Mellon is yanking the email boxes from their alumni (and apparently wasn't going to warn them until a couple of students got active and forced Alumni Relations to say something). It'd be nice if CMU had a bit more regard for their alumni when it comes to things that cost them less than the lousy stuff they hand out during their graduation.
*grumble* lousy CMU.
CMU has some great schools and good folks and administrators in those schools, but when it comes to the university itself, CMU really cheeses me off.
I'm not familiar with Veritas' software, but could you give a few examples of missing functionality? I'm curious...
Good point.
The United States has drafted people and forced them to fight in its wars.
In some ways, al Quaeda is a much more ideal organization -- they ask for volunteers.
We all know how credible that source is.
Who, Bush? He doesn't always lie. Sometimes he's just stupid.
Just because you can build something doesn't mean you should.
On the other hand, just because you don't like the fact that it's easy to build something doesn't mean that you should stick your head in the sand and try kicking whoever it is that bluntly pointed out that such things can be built. The New Zealand government doesn't sound like it's handled this in a particularly good way either.
On the whole, though, this guy did something ostentatious to prove a point without the intent to hurt anyone, and with the hope of perhaps proving his skills. I think that there are a lot of people here that can relate -- sure, this guy happens to do aeronautical propulsion and control, but he's not doing anything that different from a lot of colorful techies that I know.
Heck, Melissa caused a lot more damage than a single cruise missile could.