Yes, the rise in living standards must be attributed to the fact that you have a corrupt authoritarian in power. It is totally unrelated to the oil price explosion. Also, I have this rock that keeps tigers away. Would you like to buy it?
Your credulous short-sightedness is so sad. Please print out your own words so that one day you can look back about them and see what a fool you were.
Wow. You are so very very very very very wrong in everything you say. And yet, you are mouthing the exact stereortype Russian line that I was just talking about. Thank you for proving my point.
Let's see:
MYTH: "Situations are very different." FACT: Of course every situation is different in some ways, but in all thoase cases (any many more from the phillipines to indonesia back in the 70s and 80s) it comes down to this: you had a corrupt and/or dictatorial government squashing opposition and democracy. People power, not insignificantly from expats, was a major engine in bringing an end to the dictatorship (Cuba today is another good example). Too many Russian expats, not content to simply ignore the problems of their country, ACTIVELY SUPPORT THE AUTHORITARIAN REGIME. It's almost unprecedented as it is indefensible, and one hopes that it's just oil money drunkedness at play.
MYTH: "Ukraine is a cleft country." FACT: Survey after survey shows that this is an old, outdated view that certainly does not have any currency now (if it ever did.) From Lugansk to Lviv, Ukrainians see themselves first and foremost as Ukrainians. The most important division that people see is city vs country folk. east vs west is less and less important with every year. Yes, voting patterns showed regional differences, but in this sense Ukraine is no diffeerent than the USA.. but the USA is hardly "ethnically divided" as you suggest Ukraine is. I also note the extreme hypocricy at how some will with one breath claim that Ukraine is "ethnically divided" and then with the second claim that ukrainians don't actually constitute and ethnicity.
MYTH: "most of whom live on portions of Ukrainian land that they believe was unfairly assigned to Ukraine by USSR in 50s." FACT: **** The ONLY territory "assigned" to Ukraine by the USSR in the 1950s was CRIMEA ****. While a nice place to visit, to claim that "most of whom..." is to sugget that most people live in Crimea, which is simply ridiculous. To others reading this thread - Crimea to Ukraine is like Florida to the USA. Sure, it's important in it's own way, but given that he's talking about numbers such as '50% of the population' you see he is clearly speaking out of his ass.
MYTH: "The rest are ferverent Ukrainian nationalists who hate russia and russians." FACT: Visit the city of L'viv, unarguably the heart of Ukrainian nationalism, and you will see Russian spoken freely. There is no 'hatred' of Russia by anybody but a truly tiny minority numbering in the hundreds in all of Ukraine. YES, there is a resentment of the UNDISPUTABLE fact that Russia continues to meddle politically in the affairs of Ukraine, an independent state, and there is also a resentment of the fact that there is no collective sense of guilt felt by Russians about the massive crimes pepetrated over the last, say, 300 years, but that's far FAR different than hating "Russians." Your characterization of Ukrainians as xenophobes and nationalists is completely ironic, given the current realities of Russia. It's a remnant of soviet propaganda that tried to cast any non-Russian nationalism (as it was the biggest threat to the soviet system) in a negative light. To wit, I am not Ukrainian, but I own a company that operates substantially in Ukraine. I own a house in L'viv and have offices there, in Kiev, and in Zaporizhe (and also in MinVody in Russia). I have more than enough experience in the country (and speak Ukrainian and Russian) to know what the hell I'm talking about.
MEANINGLESS STATEMENT: "You will hear different opinions on Ukraine depending on who you talk to and on who happens to be in the office there today." Yes, and the sky is blue and grass is green. What is your point?
You are parroting old, tired cliches. I am guessing that you are a Russian expatriate, since while such views were common in Russia as late as the late 1990s, even now those views are seen as rididculous. Am I not wrong? You are an expatriate whose views ha
I am quite familiar with the Russian expatriate communities in the USA and in the UK. While of course there are individual exceptions amongst intellectuals, students, and the like, the bulk of these expats truly disgust me, politically speaking. Yes, most of these expats are, after all the layers of bullshit are removed, economic migrants who came to better life for themselves and their families. There's nothing wrong with that - if I was in a place of want, I'd consider furthering my self interest by moving to a place of plenty. What is so disgusting about so many of them is how even they continue to support Putin so feverently.
The typical line that I hear from them is "you don't know Russia - it's different - Russia needs a strong man leading it." What utter nonsense. These are the people that should form a disapproving core of expatriat opposition. Too self-absorbed to go out and do anything concrete, but giving tacit approval to the general notion that the situation in Russia is bad. Scratch almost any Iranian ex-pat, for example, and you'll get a tirade about the antidemocratic and repressive regime there. The Ukrainian ex-pat community coalesced with funding and support to help the democractic revolution there recently.
But Russians? Quite selfishly and arrogantly, they cling to the notion that while they were too important to let themselves be bogged down in Russia's corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-egalitarian reality, really Putin and his ilk are what's best for their countrymen left behind.
Don't believe me? Think I'm just prejudiced against Russians? Go into your neighborhood's Russian supermarket and ask the sales clerk what she thinks of Putin.
Of course, then again, there's still the issue that the majority of Russians also paternalistically feel that they (for whatever the faults of the USSR) did the non-Russian republics a big favor by including them into their union, under the theory that a few tens of millions of dead is a small price to pay for having been lifted from the hunting and gathering existence those nations were in before, but that's for another day.
I'm confused - somebody modded the previous tripe as 'insightful'?
If the prices are 'auctioned up into the stratosphere', then where does the money go? It goes right to the taxpayers. If smaller providers have something of value that is perceived as valuable by the market, then there is nothing from stopping them from banding together to form a collective. If the communication and coordination costs are not excessive, then they can certainly win big for themselves.
They don't do that you say? Well, it must be that like a Pizza Shop that only makes one pizza a week, the small companies that you mention do not have the right scale to succeed in the marketplace. We can all bitch and moan about large companies, but in this case, it's fairly clear that they are operating at the right scale PLUS as an added bonus they are actually filling out taxpayer coffers by overpaying in bandwidth auctions!
I don't cry for the subsidy-needing small and medium sized businesses that you suggest. (this is not to say that I don't like small businesses - hell, I own two and have a payroll of 40 people in total, but certainly ones that are propped up by subsidy suck - and that's what eliminating an auction would be - corporate welfare for small businesses).
The cable company has exclusive rights to lay underground cable along certain routes.
More likely than not, this exclusive right was granted to the cable company at a time when the public wanted ubiquitous cable TV and wanted it NOW NOW NOW even though the market wasnt going to support this, and the city dangled this exclusivity as a carrot for the cable company to make the necessary long term investment.
The phone company generally has exclusive rights to their phone poles, which are provided by an arrangement with the city/county. You can't just go put up a bunch of phone poles and offer DSL.
This is because the phone company has to do things by law such as serving unprofitable neighborhoods. But, here's the irony of it all - mobile phones are making much fixed line service obsolete, right? So we see how technology can improve to defeat even an entrenched 'monopoly' provider.
On top of that, the FCC isn't exactly making it easy for people who want to provide wireless internet access to get spectrum. Granted, there's a fixed amount available, but the idea behind the FCC is that they are supposed to portion out the spectrum in the public interest. That means that if someone is ready and willing to provide the public a service that they want, they should get the spectrum. Instead the FuCC plays games with auctions and bullshit and helps media conglomerates extend their control.
Putting aside your juvenile ranting for a moment, you *do* realize that spectrum auctions are just about the best way to serve the public good? The reason is that because they are basically 'winners curse' type auctions - if you win, you probably overpaid. I'd sure as hell rather have some given piece of spectrum controlled by some company who is propping up my standard of living because it overpaid than for some amateurs to muck around and, at best, make a bit of profit for themselves. The market mechanism forces the companies in this case to be efficient and innovative to get back on their investment. To wit, all those companies that spent those big bucks on 3G spectrum licenses appear to be taking it up the arse at the moment.
"even though all the significant marginal costs (like laying cable + fibre, back-end infrastructure"
Econ 101:
You are referring to fixed costs, not marginal costs
The whole point of fixed costs is that you risk a lot at the beginning to hopefully get a stream of rewards later.
The "there is no real competiton" excuse is whining amongst those who weren't clever enough to make the big investments earlier or can't make them now because of market forces. yes, this is tough for consumers, but that's the market - it goes to those who get in early. You only have a case to whine if your provider has a monopoly by law.
thanks for the response. I stand by my original assessment. The zenarchy link is absolute looniess. Since you seem to be rather engrossed by it, I suspect that any attempt to convince you otherwise would be futile, but, well, what can I say. Yes, I have read the whole thing. It's basically the socio-political equivalent of any number of new age quack "healing" treatments. It uses words that sound like science and fact, and makes allusions to all sorts of famous people and their ideas, but at the end of the day it's a snowball of nonsense.
In the Age of Perfect Peace the True People of Old lived in harmony equal to the rhythm of the seasons and the ebb and flow of tidal cycles. With no concept of law and order, they lacked occasion for crime and turmoil.
Wow. Just wow. Tom, thanks for reminding me of the cranks and loons that one meets on the Internet. You never quite sure who is behind that keyboard. Remember to bathe once in a while.
"Artificial Rights?" And the right to free speech is a "natural" right, why, exactly? Oh, let's not get into that one. Instead, let's look at the more obvious problem in your post:
You can't possibly be so stupid as to not recognize that your last two statements are mutually contradictory. In the first, you state (rightly) that congress has the authority to create structures (such as copyright and patents) to secure rights for authors and inventors. In the second, you seem categorigally discount the appropriateness that one of those structures might include the concept of transmission/assignment/sale of said rights to others, which anybody who has given the matter more than one second of honest thought will immediately conclude is a key component to truly promoting the useful arts, as without this, say, drug companies, who, for all their warts, have brought good to the word to the tune of, oh, say, 20 billion QOLYs (Quality of Life Years) to the world in general, would basically not exist or be a pale shadow of themselves.
Your business model is not a government entitlement program. The rest of us are not bound to rewrite our laws to support it.
Wow. What a load of crap. Here is the full extent of what the Constitution, which you cite, says about copyright:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Within this broad framework, it is the mandate of legislators to enact legislation and the judiciary to make ruilings that seek to best "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by balancing the needs for rightsholders to be motivated and the public's right to information. Some things, like national defense, are impractical or impossible to contract on a 1-v-1 basis. Likewise, it is impractical if not impossible to have a complete contract written every time any transfer or license of IP occurs. Therefore, much of what we think about IP is determined by judicious consideration of the balance. Now, you personally may not like where the balance was struck most recently. However, your statement of "grossest imaginable violation of the constitution's language" is hyperbole in the extreme, and, more to the point, absolute bollocks. Oh, I'm sorry, was I not actually supposed to cite the constitution and what it actually says? Was I supposed to take your bald assertion on faith?
Especially with crap that I buy and should be used in a manner I see fit short of mass distributing it to other anonymous people.
Why exactly should this arbitrary limit be the limit? If the only limit is that you can not mass distribute it, then you limit the ability of companies to offer products with more flexible and personalized limits. While all analogies are fraught with complications, here's one that I think is apt: you are basically saying that ALL restaurants MUST be "all-you-can-eat" (no a-la-carte) with the limitation that customers are not allowed to stuff food into their purses and pockets and take it home. Why exactly can't, for example, you and I come to some agreement that, for example, you write some song and I am allowed to listen to it exactly once since this we came to a mutually agreed upon price for which I agreed to listen to it only once?
Here we are again. Another organization makes some claim relating to the damages caused by piracy. As always, the elephant in the room (that piracy is substantial and deserves attention, if only because society has collectively devleoped a bargain where creators of intellectual property are entitled to reasonable protection of their works but that protection is being circumvented in massive quantities) is ignored. Instead, smoke and mirrors are thrown up - the large number cited is 'unverifiable' as if a definitive number to sixty decimal places could be derived - or are we going to get into a stupid discussion about terms such as 'piracy' and 'theft' again? Even if the SBA estimate is high due to the use of SBA-favourable assumptions, the elephant is still there.
Let's discuss the real issues, shall we?
When A pirates software X and B pays for it, the producer still loses even if A never intended to pay for it, as the perceived value of the software is less. Consider the situation where you were the only person in the world who bought the latest music CD and everybody else got the same music by pirating it. Proof of ownership? Hell no - you feel like a sucker, because, in fact, the situation has made you one.
As is always brought up here in slashdot in other contexts - there's no need to pirate any given piece of software, as there are free alternatives out there. so, even if you see nothing wrong with, say, creating unlicenced drugs to save lives, the fact is that in this case there simply is no analogue. even if there were no OSS, you'd be hard pressed to suggest that anybody NEEDS software.
Software patents may well be evil. There may well be problems in the IP regime. You may be against the idea that copyright is continuously extended. However, none of this has anything to do with the present discussion of piracy of software, most of which is typically under five years old.
Until the slashdot crowd, collectively (and I'm not saying that all slashdotters think alike, but you'd be just throwing more smoke and mirrors if you were to not believe that there weren't some rather commonly held views here along the lines I am suggesting and that those views have widely seen to be synonymous with a general 'slashdot look on life'), is willing to face up to the real issues instead of throwing up more kneejerk smoke and mirrors, it will continue to be an intellectually dishonest sideshow.
Ah, the "only true christians" fallacy. Look it up if you don't know what I mean.
no matter what my bona fides, and the fact that i've written a magnitude of code more than you or what-have-you (and in many OSS projects, to boot), if i dont support your god given right to pirate movies, music, and software, then I'm not a "true geek"? yes, the DMCA and CDA have severe problems. let me repeat that: SEVERE problems. however, they're not as bad as the alternative that many "true geeks" here are supporting, which is basically complete abandonment of all IP regulations.
from what i understood from this article, this survey appears to be monumentally biased. it seems to believe that all "tech people" have the same politics, which is horribly, horribly false. For example, the article scored politicians based on their views of H1b visas and export restrictions. How, exaclty, voting one way or another makes a lawmaker "tech friendly" is unclear to me. Those issues are about immigration, trade, and security policy (or some mixture thereof), NOT technology. There's not a single issue that I can think of that would justify this survey. Heck, I'm as pure a technologist as you can find (own a few 3-letter dot coms, multiple CS/EE degrees, I have written code that now sits in the linux kernel, and now run a small software company) and i am basically for stronger enforcement of copyright laws.. does this make me 'anti-tech' or 'pro-tech' in this survey view?
"Also, by spreading static content across four different hostnames, site operators can achieve dramatic improvements in perceived performance."
How ironic that a google engineer would say this, since doing this will also pretty well kill your google pagerank rankings. Google is great, yes, but among is many, many problems are the ridiculous ways that it forces people to do web design if they want a decent pagerank. another is how it "helpfully" directs you to "geographically relevant" searches - meaning that, for example, if you want a hotel room in egypt and browse from the UK, you get all the links from (much more expensive) UK based hotel and travel shops rather than, say, ones in egypt or elsewhere that, while also in english, are much cheaper.
the other side of the coin is that technological people only rarely have any grasp whatsoever of public policy and/or law issues. case in point #1 is slashdot, where we see people with doubtlessly technological skill coming out of their ears but largely (though not universally, of course - ther are a few truly bright people here on all sides of the various questions) unable or unwilling to see beyond short-term self interest in giving rather poorly thought out views on virtually every matter from intellectual property to labor policy to corporate governance to crime and punishment. And, the cases go on and on, to the technically savvy but economically clueless CS professor at your local university to RMS. Are technological people good at providing us with new insights and ways of looking at things? yes - just like a good sci-fi story does. But I have yet to see any good evidence that technological people - that is to say, people who are trained and experienced in working with technical systems, can translate that ability into the sort of wider ken necessary for working and developing political or legal systems. I'm not saying there aren't people who made the leap. I'm also not saying that those people didn't do it brilliantly. I'm just saying that in my experience, that those people had a technical background didnt give them any particular specialized insight or brilliance per se.
In summary, what I guess I'm trying to say is something like this. You wouldn't dare claim to write a line of code without knowing what a variable or a loop was. However, people seem perfectly content to pass themselves off as commentators on political matters (or competent policy officials, for that matter!) without knowing, say, what an externality is or what the gross national or domestic product of their country is (within an order of magnitude).
In other words, yes, "ha ha, look how dumb politicians are", but also, "pot, meet kettle."
Seriously. Was something like 60 euro per hour at the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang via satellite connection. I doubt it was censored or even monitored, though I'd be a fool to not at least concede the possibility.
so, what you're saying is that they should sue more people? i agree. there's nothing wrong with p2p per se - but if somebody breaks the law and it can be shown within reasonable doubt that they have, then they should be punished. if you personally disagree with copyright law / private property / speed limits / income taxes / whatever, and if you want to "protest" by breaking the law, then be prepared to accept the consequences.
Has actual PC security actually interested you in the past, say, decade? I was of the impression that you just paid some second rate programmer in bangalore a load of bananas to churn out any old crap that had the following requirements:
1. we must be able to sell it in regular, deluxe, gold, platinum, internet, special edition, international, lite, and fat free versions. after all, this allows the user to pay for the exact level of security they need. consumer choice, right! some people only want to pay a little and thus be protected only against some vague subset of last year's threats, while others want to pay more and thus be protected a bit more against some vague subset of last year's threats.
2. as in #1, the software must be sold in yearly versions. this allows users to respond to the cutting edge threats of 2003 by buying the 2005 version, still on sale in CompUSA (probably).
3. we must really focus our efforts on getting this shiat pre-loaded on as many chain store PCs as posslbe. WARNING YOUR COMPUTER IS AT RISK! DO YOU WANT TO PAY $99.99 PER YEAR NOW TO UPGRADE? Your choices are [ Yes ] and [ Ask me again in 5 minutes with a big ass system modal dialog box ]
4. The software must be impossible to uninstall, for Sound Business Reasons (tm). Well, we should include an uninstall routine, but ensure that it does not work if the software is modified in any way.
I agree with all the other comments. We should continue to fawn endlessly over the blue sky projections of every linx/oss startup with a gleam in their eye, but should heap scorn, ridicule, and skepticism at the management of a company that's managed to lead the market, for better or for worse, for over two decades. Or, let's laugh at ballmer because he once jumped around like the big sweaty man he is.
And you wonder why slashdot stopped being taken seriously a long time ago.
Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees, or do not pay for their health insurance
Like Wal-Mart?
I have a strong suspicion that your "friend's story", with it's heartbreaking tale of the "good employee blacklisted for making safety-minded comments" should be a poster child for internet "you're only hearing one side of the story" arguments, with extra bonus for exaggeration.
Yes, there are irrational and stupid people throughout the world, but I am guessing that your friend's crime was not simply "making comments about weak airline security to his coworkers and boss", but doing something, saying something, and/or having personality traits that rang alarm bells with a bunch of people.
what exactly did he contribute to the discussion? at best, the laughable idea that that boogeyman of the "mainstream press" (which presumably includes places like time, newsweek, the new york times, the economist, and so forth, all of which have featured linux/foss on their front covers and/or prominently in their publications regularly) "ignores" FOSS. How exactly is the parent poster "insightful" other than providing context-free, but conspiracy-innuendo-full rah-rah cheerleading? come on people.
Slashdot Mirror
Your credulous short-sightedness is so sad. Please print out your own words so that one day you can look back about them and see what a fool you were.
Let's see:
You are parroting old, tired cliches. I am guessing that you are a Russian expatriate, since while such views were common in Russia as late as the late 1990s, even now those views are seen as rididculous. Am I not wrong? You are an expatriate whose views ha
The typical line that I hear from them is "you don't know Russia - it's different - Russia needs a strong man leading it." What utter nonsense. These are the people that should form a disapproving core of expatriat opposition. Too self-absorbed to go out and do anything concrete, but giving tacit approval to the general notion that the situation in Russia is bad. Scratch almost any Iranian ex-pat, for example, and you'll get a tirade about the antidemocratic and repressive regime there. The Ukrainian ex-pat community coalesced with funding and support to help the democractic revolution there recently.
But Russians? Quite selfishly and arrogantly, they cling to the notion that while they were too important to let themselves be bogged down in Russia's corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-egalitarian reality, really Putin and his ilk are what's best for their countrymen left behind.
Don't believe me? Think I'm just prejudiced against Russians? Go into your neighborhood's Russian supermarket and ask the sales clerk what she thinks of Putin.
Of course, then again, there's still the issue that the majority of Russians also paternalistically feel that they (for whatever the faults of the USSR) did the non-Russian republics a big favor by including them into their union, under the theory that a few tens of millions of dead is a small price to pay for having been lifted from the hunting and gathering existence those nations were in before, but that's for another day.
If the prices are 'auctioned up into the stratosphere', then where does the money go? It goes right to the taxpayers. If smaller providers have something of value that is perceived as valuable by the market, then there is nothing from stopping them from banding together to form a collective. If the communication and coordination costs are not excessive, then they can certainly win big for themselves.
They don't do that you say? Well, it must be that like a Pizza Shop that only makes one pizza a week, the small companies that you mention do not have the right scale to succeed in the marketplace. We can all bitch and moan about large companies, but in this case, it's fairly clear that they are operating at the right scale PLUS as an added bonus they are actually filling out taxpayer coffers by overpaying in bandwidth auctions!
I don't cry for the subsidy-needing small and medium sized businesses that you suggest. (this is not to say that I don't like small businesses - hell, I own two and have a payroll of 40 people in total, but certainly ones that are propped up by subsidy suck - and that's what eliminating an auction would be - corporate welfare for small businesses).
More likely than not, this exclusive right was granted to the cable company at a time when the public wanted ubiquitous cable TV and wanted it NOW NOW NOW even though the market wasnt going to support this, and the city dangled this exclusivity as a carrot for the cable company to make the necessary long term investment.
The phone company generally has exclusive rights to their phone poles, which are provided by an arrangement with the city/county. You can't just go put up a bunch of phone poles and offer DSL.
This is because the phone company has to do things by law such as serving unprofitable neighborhoods. But, here's the irony of it all - mobile phones are making much fixed line service obsolete, right? So we see how technology can improve to defeat even an entrenched 'monopoly' provider.
On top of that, the FCC isn't exactly making it easy for people who want to provide wireless internet access to get spectrum. Granted, there's a fixed amount available, but the idea behind the FCC is that they are supposed to portion out the spectrum in the public interest. That means that if someone is ready and willing to provide the public a service that they want, they should get the spectrum. Instead the FuCC plays games with auctions and bullshit and helps media conglomerates extend their control.
Putting aside your juvenile ranting for a moment, you *do* realize that spectrum auctions are just about the best way to serve the public good? The reason is that because they are basically 'winners curse' type auctions - if you win, you probably overpaid. I'd sure as hell rather have some given piece of spectrum controlled by some company who is propping up my standard of living because it overpaid than for some amateurs to muck around and, at best, make a bit of profit for themselves. The market mechanism forces the companies in this case to be efficient and innovative to get back on their investment. To wit, all those companies that spent those big bucks on 3G spectrum licenses appear to be taking it up the arse at the moment.
Econ 101:
- You are referring to fixed costs, not marginal costs
- The whole point of fixed costs is that you risk a lot at the beginning to hopefully get a stream of rewards later.
The "there is no real competiton" excuse is whining amongst those who weren't clever enough to make the big investments earlier or can't make them now because of market forces. yes, this is tough for consumers, but that's the market - it goes to those who get in early. You only have a case to whine if your provider has a monopoly by law.thanks for the response. I stand by my original assessment. The zenarchy link is absolute looniess. Since you seem to be rather engrossed by it, I suspect that any attempt to convince you otherwise would be futile, but, well, what can I say. Yes, I have read the whole thing. It's basically the socio-political equivalent of any number of new age quack "healing" treatments. It uses words that sound like science and fact, and makes allusions to all sorts of famous people and their ideas, but at the end of the day it's a snowball of nonsense.
In the Age of Perfect Peace the True People of Old lived in harmony equal to the rhythm of the seasons and the ebb and flow of tidal cycles. With no concept of law and order, they lacked occasion for crime and turmoil.
Wow. Just wow. Tom, thanks for reminding me of the cranks and loons that one meets on the Internet. You never quite sure who is behind that keyboard. Remember to bathe once in a while.
You can't possibly be so stupid as to not recognize that your last two statements are mutually contradictory. In the first, you state (rightly) that congress has the authority to create structures (such as copyright and patents) to secure rights for authors and inventors. In the second, you seem categorigally discount the appropriateness that one of those structures might include the concept of transmission/assignment/sale of said rights to others, which anybody who has given the matter more than one second of honest thought will immediately conclude is a key component to truly promoting the useful arts, as without this, say, drug companies, who, for all their warts, have brought good to the word to the tune of, oh, say, 20 billion QOLYs (Quality of Life Years) to the world in general, would basically not exist or be a pale shadow of themselves.
Wow. What a load of crap. Here is the full extent of what the Constitution, which you cite, says about copyright:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Within this broad framework, it is the mandate of legislators to enact legislation and the judiciary to make ruilings that seek to best "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by balancing the needs for rightsholders to be motivated and the public's right to information. Some things, like national defense, are impractical or impossible to contract on a 1-v-1 basis. Likewise, it is impractical if not impossible to have a complete contract written every time any transfer or license of IP occurs. Therefore, much of what we think about IP is determined by judicious consideration of the balance. Now, you personally may not like where the balance was struck most recently. However, your statement of "grossest imaginable violation of the constitution's language" is hyperbole in the extreme, and, more to the point, absolute bollocks. Oh, I'm sorry, was I not actually supposed to cite the constitution and what it actually says? Was I supposed to take your bald assertion on faith?
Why exactly should this arbitrary limit be the limit? If the only limit is that you can not mass distribute it, then you limit the ability of companies to offer products with more flexible and personalized limits. While all analogies are fraught with complications, here's one that I think is apt: you are basically saying that ALL restaurants MUST be "all-you-can-eat" (no a-la-carte) with the limitation that customers are not allowed to stuff food into their purses and pockets and take it home. Why exactly can't, for example, you and I come to some agreement that, for example, you write some song and I am allowed to listen to it exactly once since this we came to a mutually agreed upon price for which I agreed to listen to it only once?
Let's discuss the real issues, shall we?
- When A pirates software X and B pays for it, the producer still loses even if A never intended to pay for it, as the perceived value of the software is less. Consider the situation where you were the only person in the world who bought the latest music CD and everybody else got the same music by pirating it. Proof of ownership? Hell no - you feel like a sucker, because, in fact, the situation has made you one.
- As is always brought up here in slashdot in other contexts - there's no need to pirate any given piece of software, as there are free alternatives out there. so, even if you see nothing wrong with, say, creating unlicenced drugs to save lives, the fact is that in this case there simply is no analogue. even if there were no OSS, you'd be hard pressed to suggest that anybody NEEDS software.
- Software patents may well be evil. There may well be problems in the IP regime. You may be against the idea that copyright is continuously extended. However, none of this has anything to do with the present discussion of piracy of software, most of which is typically under five years old.
Until the slashdot crowd, collectively (and I'm not saying that all slashdotters think alike, but you'd be just throwing more smoke and mirrors if you were to not believe that there weren't some rather commonly held views here along the lines I am suggesting and that those views have widely seen to be synonymous with a general 'slashdot look on life'), is willing to face up to the real issues instead of throwing up more kneejerk smoke and mirrors, it will continue to be an intellectually dishonest sideshow.Ah, the "only true christians" fallacy. Look it up if you don't know what I mean. no matter what my bona fides, and the fact that i've written a magnitude of code more than you or what-have-you (and in many OSS projects, to boot), if i dont support your god given right to pirate movies, music, and software, then I'm not a "true geek"? yes, the DMCA and CDA have severe problems. let me repeat that: SEVERE problems. however, they're not as bad as the alternative that many "true geeks" here are supporting, which is basically complete abandonment of all IP regulations.
from what i understood from this article, this survey appears to be monumentally biased. it seems to believe that all "tech people" have the same politics, which is horribly, horribly false. For example, the article scored politicians based on their views of H1b visas and export restrictions. How, exaclty, voting one way or another makes a lawmaker "tech friendly" is unclear to me. Those issues are about immigration, trade, and security policy (or some mixture thereof), NOT technology. There's not a single issue that I can think of that would justify this survey. Heck, I'm as pure a technologist as you can find (own a few 3-letter dot coms, multiple CS/EE degrees, I have written code that now sits in the linux kernel, and now run a small software company) and i am basically for stronger enforcement of copyright laws.. does this make me 'anti-tech' or 'pro-tech' in this survey view?
How ironic that a google engineer would say this, since doing this will also pretty well kill your google pagerank rankings. Google is great, yes, but among is many, many problems are the ridiculous ways that it forces people to do web design if they want a decent pagerank. another is how it "helpfully" directs you to "geographically relevant" searches - meaning that, for example, if you want a hotel room in egypt and browse from the UK, you get all the links from (much more expensive) UK based hotel and travel shops rather than, say, ones in egypt or elsewhere that, while also in english, are much cheaper.
the other side of the coin is that technological people only rarely have any grasp whatsoever of public policy and/or law issues. case in point #1 is slashdot, where we see people with doubtlessly technological skill coming out of their ears but largely (though not universally, of course - ther are a few truly bright people here on all sides of the various questions) unable or unwilling to see beyond short-term self interest in giving rather poorly thought out views on virtually every matter from intellectual property to labor policy to corporate governance to crime and punishment. And, the cases go on and on, to the technically savvy but economically clueless CS professor at your local university to RMS. Are technological people good at providing us with new insights and ways of looking at things? yes - just like a good sci-fi story does. But I have yet to see any good evidence that technological people - that is to say, people who are trained and experienced in working with technical systems, can translate that ability into the sort of wider ken necessary for working and developing political or legal systems. I'm not saying there aren't people who made the leap. I'm also not saying that those people didn't do it brilliantly. I'm just saying that in my experience, that those people had a technical background didnt give them any particular specialized insight or brilliance per se. In summary, what I guess I'm trying to say is something like this. You wouldn't dare claim to write a line of code without knowing what a variable or a loop was. However, people seem perfectly content to pass themselves off as commentators on political matters (or competent policy officials, for that matter!) without knowing, say, what an externality is or what the gross national or domestic product of their country is (within an order of magnitude). In other words, yes, "ha ha, look how dumb politicians are", but also, "pot, meet kettle."
Seriously. Was something like 60 euro per hour at the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang via satellite connection. I doubt it was censored or even monitored, though I'd be a fool to not at least concede the possibility.
so, what you're saying is that they should sue more people? i agree. there's nothing wrong with p2p per se - but if somebody breaks the law and it can be shown within reasonable doubt that they have, then they should be punished. if you personally disagree with copyright law / private property / speed limits / income taxes / whatever, and if you want to "protest" by breaking the law, then be prepared to accept the consequences.
You miss the point. For most things you could complain about RHL 6.2E, the answer will be 'we have a patch on our website...'
So, the answer is the same. For XP SP1 users, the answer is 'we have a patch on our website... it's called SP2'
So, McAffee/Symantec..
Has actual PC security actually interested you in the past, say, decade? I was of the impression that you just paid some second rate programmer in bangalore a load of bananas to churn out any old crap that had the following requirements:
1. we must be able to sell it in regular, deluxe, gold, platinum, internet, special edition, international, lite, and fat free versions. after all, this allows the user to pay for the exact level of security they need. consumer choice, right! some people only want to pay a little and thus be protected only against some vague subset of last year's threats, while others want to pay more and thus be protected a bit more against some vague subset of last year's threats.
2. as in #1, the software must be sold in yearly versions. this allows users to respond to the cutting edge threats of 2003 by buying the 2005 version, still on sale in CompUSA (probably).
3. we must really focus our efforts on getting this shiat pre-loaded on as many chain store PCs as posslbe. WARNING YOUR COMPUTER IS AT RISK! DO YOU WANT TO PAY $99.99 PER YEAR NOW TO UPGRADE? Your choices are [ Yes ] and [ Ask me again in 5 minutes with a big ass system modal dialog box ]
4. The software must be impossible to uninstall, for Sound Business Reasons (tm). Well, we should include an uninstall routine, but ensure that it does not work if the software is modified in any way.
If it's a dig at microsoft, no matter how small.... it's news on slashdot.
And you wonder why slashdot stopped being taken seriously a long time ago.
Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees, or do not pay for their health insurance Like Wal-Mart?
Yes, there are irrational and stupid people throughout the world, but I am guessing that your friend's crime was not simply "making comments about weak airline security to his coworkers and boss", but doing something, saying something, and/or having personality traits that rang alarm bells with a bunch of people.
what exactly did he contribute to the discussion? at best, the laughable idea that that boogeyman of the "mainstream press" (which presumably includes places like time, newsweek, the new york times, the economist, and so forth, all of which have featured linux/foss on their front covers and/or prominently in their publications regularly) "ignores" FOSS. How exactly is the parent poster "insightful" other than providing context-free, but conspiracy-innuendo-full rah-rah cheerleading? come on people.