"people continued to buy it" is a meaningless first-pass approximation of what happened. Actually, counter to popular belief, prohibition curbed the actual consumption of alcohol significantly. however, criminalization led to every manner of sensationalism such as organizes crime, speakeasies, bootlegging, moonshining, and so forth.
people continue to murder despite murder being illegal. your argument about file sharing is as naive as it is unquantified.
Here we see the slashdot line in all its convenient duplicity.
One one hand, there is the party line that any security / encryption measure CAN be broken, so that social measures are really what's necessary to achieve desired aims.
On the other, we see slashdot outrage any time a social convention is established / followed that actually attempts to impose social codes of behavior.
(Side notes to all of this include the typical calling whoever developed the security mechanism a moron because of some obscure backdoor that took the investigator 6 dateless months to find but he acts as if it's so obvious.)
The fact of the matter is that the systems these "young security researchers" are ALL at about the state of the art for this stuff as evidenced by the fact that several companies are more or less doing the same thing. It's also evident that without their information being made public, the security systems do a reasonable job of protecting what they need to protect. It's also clear that there WOULD be a greater social benefit if their information was used to make the security systems even better.
However what's bloody obvious as well is that, given their userbase (students), that there is a greater societal harm in releasing the security flaws publicly at this moment. The DMCA, for all its flaws, was designed for exactly this situation. This is a correct application of the DMCA. The young crackers should negotiate a private deal with the providers for a fair amount for the information, intermediated by an intependent arbiter.
Most turboprops use Jet-A kersone, just like the RJs. Even though they have external propellers, they are still jet engines.
Even if they didn't, the cost of AvGas is about 50% higher than that of kerosene. A jet will burn more than 50% more fuel than a reasonably efficient turboprop over most distances.
The reasons for the transition to RJ's are, in order of importance:
passenger perception. the idea that props are old and jets are new.
time savings / company side. savings in engine wear and crew training time (the jets are generally easier to fly safely than, say, dash-8s or saabs). less crew time needed.
time savings / passenger side. the planes get you to your short-destination noticably quicker on many routes.
The regional jets are faster and perhaps have fewer engine parts to deal with But more fuel efficient they are not.
Planes like the CRJ and the RJ45 are two of the most efficient airplanes flying, but dont come close on fuel efficiency to something like a Dash-8 or Saab 340.
Sigh. What poor analysis. Either that, or you're a troll.
Of course a better supersonic machine can be cranked out. That's not at issue. The issus is whether a profitable one can be. Concorde never came close to profitability, so bascially any new machine would again have to rely heavily on taxpayer monies.
As an economy traveller, you shoud be happy that more comfortable seats at extreme prices exist. They subsidize your flight in effect.
As far as your 'ever lengthening delays' go, this is more myth than anything. Today's airplanes can better skirt and climb above weather than before. ATC delays, while still a problem due to the US's refusal to adopt slot-style scheduling at most airports, is less so due to technology.
I fly from the east coast to london about every month. Delays are few (with the exception of the couple of times that I flew air india, in which case it's practically a rule). I'd hardly call today's mach.85 aircraft "barges," but, then again, you are an idiot.
No, you're wrong, and completely missed the point.
In typical/. style, you again confuse absolute with relative anti-piracy protection. Yes, it's possible to still get cracked office XP due to corporate and other programs, but it's harder to obtain such a copy than it was to obtain a serial from the internet for win98, which itself was harder than typing in all 1s for win95.
The rate of piracy is down substantially more than 3% for XP, though, as a previous posted suggested, I do not evidence this claim here. I am NDA-bound not to.
You're ENTIRELY wrong about "the will of the pirates" being an important factor here. The whole point is that/of course/ anything can and maybe even will be cracked, but the issue is RATE. Piracy is a numbers game.
Software copy protection schemes can be though of like so: they are a tradeoff between convenience and protection. The more you protect, the less convenient it is. Essentially, when you pick a software protections scheme at a given moment in time, assuming you didn't pick an out-of-date one, you are planting your flag on what RATE of piracy you want to allow given the alternative about pissing off your customers.
however (and this is the big however), as time goes on, the FRONTIER grows due to technological improvement. As contributing technologies, such as the internet, encryption, bioscanning, and so forth increase, a software vendor can increasingly gain protection without increasing inconvenience, and so forth. Yes, there's no doubt that a parallel port dongle today would be unpopular.
What is undisputable, however, is that windowsXP's online activation mechanism has done oodles to reduce the rate of piracy of that product. (note: _reduce_the_rate_, not _eliminate_. people who still insist on thinking that the anti-piracy game is one of absolutes are mostly delusional sysadmins trying to pretend that they know something about larger technology issues).
The chestnut that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is basically an oversimplification suitable only for History Channel caliber minds.
Where is the insight? This is clearly an apocraphal linux adoption wet dream and not much else. From the microsoft-dissatisfaction setup to the tried multiple distributions lines to the unbelievale 'everything went perfectly' line, this post is so full of itself it boggles the mind. Even if this post is 100% true (like all those "i converted our whole 450pc LAN to linux" stories that never seem to be substantiable), it's not typical, and even if it were typical, there is NO INSIGHT INVOLVED.
What a load of psudo-intellectual crappetty-crap-crap crap.
You are taking a basic, generic thesis--the capitalist west encroaches on some native populace, seduces it, which causes it to lose its soul. Sure, this is a common story that can be applied to many places throughout the world.
But not here.
Perhaps more than any other country that I know Japan has done a credible job of managing a harmonious coexistance of traditional culture with an international one. Notions that the west introduced capitalism to japan is bullshit. While arguably democracy (or something close enough to it) didn't come to japan until after the war, Japan developed a parallel capitalist culture along the lines of that of western europe regardless of the dutch, perry, or whoever else you want to point to.
The japanese have famously "embraced and extended" outside technologies, but have not done it at the expense of their cultural soul as, say, Shanghai or Jakarta is in the process of doing. Japanese culture is alive and well, and we have no particular need to sympathize with the Japanese for the reasons you suggest. The movie might be interpreted as a reminder to japanese to be mindful of the importance of traditional values, but your suggestion that it is an apt allegory for the japanese condition as pitiful victim of the west is absolute and total nonsense.
(disclaimer: 10 years lived in japan, saw movie in both languages, etc.)
I agree. The risks of potentially hurting the gutenberg press were much higher than freeing millions under naziism. We should have stayed in bed, or just rolled over like the french.
Look, this comment has nothing to do with Israel's politics or religion. However, I'd venture to say that 2/3ds of nonsense slashdot science articles begin with "an israeli company..."
Either it's encryption that can be run recursively to one bit or something else completely off the charts ("100000 times faster than current..."), frankly, ive come to thinking htat israel is the land of bad science and reported hype.
Yes, the tube is less than ideal. The traffic situation is even worse than less than ideal. The congestion charge, however, is not levied on BUSES.
Read the article next time.
Yes, the congestion charge will have some bad externalities--for example, the rich who live inside the affected circle's land values will go up further while they pay only 10% of the fees that others pay. Nevertheless, it's a step towards public transport in a big city--it's a good thing.
As much as everybody here likes to make fun of Visual Basic, I encourage all to have a look at VB's debugger. While there are a few improvements here and there that could be made, in general it far, far surpasses anything else that I have seen out there. (I have yet to play with VB.net--I am referring here to VB6).
How to join the GNOME project for non-hackers FAQ [gnome.org]
This document basically tells people of OTHER TECHNICAL THINGS (like making icons for programmers and writing documentation for programmers and reporting bugs to programmers) that they can do. This is irrelevant to the issue of design and usability.
GNOME Usability Project [gnome.org]
Provides a series of slides that explains things like "what usability is." A nice start, but that hardly means that the end product will be designed with usability in mind. Let us not forget that the usability thing is being spearheaded by Sun, who sure as hell isnt doing it for altruistic reasons. I question the sanity of people who are volunteering their time to Sun--or, more accurately, I question that there really are significant numbers of people doing so.
software with modern and usable GUIs - because the developers have more experience now!
Oh stop it, you're making me laugh. Mozilla fails even the most rudimentary usability tests because of its speed (or lack thereof). If you knew a damn thing about usability rather than playing the old linux game of equating "fancy gui" with usability, you'd recognize this. Usability is a user-centric-ness that needs to be considered in many ways, and Mozilla fails by a mile.
Yet if I join a GNOME mailing list, and I ask things carefully and politely, providing all the necessery details, I almost always get a good and clear answer (unless of course, nobody knows an answer). I never, I repeat, never get flamed down or told RTFM.
There's a world of difference between getting an answer to a technical question by supplication and driving the development of a new product. OSS is developer, not market driven. Where it is more market driven, it's basically being used by for-profit companies to serve some auxillary goal (like Sun's support of Gnome). Even if eleet comment was a little over the top, you can't deny that.
Wrong.
If you say they don't design when they first started the project, then yes, I agree with you partially.
There is a difference between technical design and usability / user-centric design. Your next several paragraphs confuse the two (talking about a complete re-write due to TECHNICAL issues),and thus are completely irrelevant. nice smokescreen, tho!
GNOME Usability Project [gnome.org] anyone? A lot of usability studies are contributed by Sun and Ximian. Sun also contributed a lot of user documentation.
Right. When companies sense profit is to be had, they foster usability. When there is none, usability doesn't occur, and even when it does, it's, well, in practice more smoke than fire. It's not hard to put up a document telling somebody how to conduct usability tests. It's a different thing to actually do them.
Usability design requires collaboration. This is best done in person. OSS suffers because of this, in general, as well.
Commercial [redhat.com] open source [ximian.com] software [suse.com]. 'nuff said.
Fair enough. You are right. Commercial open source software, that sideline game through which companies position themselves in a to take advantage of the work of free labor while bundling this with their own proprietary extensions as a 'value add' does care about usability. RedHat does everything in its power to keep the usable bits proprietary, but throws the occasional bone back to the actual OSS world.
Big picture: at the end of the day, you STILL can't reliably cut and paste complex objects between apps that dont explicitly know about each others file types in linux systems. You STILL dont have so much as a simple, fast, usable web browser that comes close to IE. You STILL suffer from chronic underdocumentation and applications that, because of poor design, demand it. Sure, it gets better, but it's always a pale imitation of what some company has profited on years ago.
In every retail software company that I know of, there are these folks called designers. No, they're not programmers, so often time they take ridicule from the geektelligencia, but ultimately what they do (the good ones, anyway) is at least as important to the quality of the final product as what the coders do.
They sit there, with their lightweight psychology, graphics design, philosophy, women's studies, physical education, etc degrees, and contemplate and measure cost/benefits of how the software should work. When appropriate, they poll users. They perform usability tests on actual users. They monitor how actual users use existing versions of the software in order to both spot common errors and figure out exactly what features are actually being used. They document what they do. They read books and articles on nominally the flimsiest of things, like "the psychological implications of color choice in menu design." Their feature requests sometimes border on the really difficult to implement, and sometimes quite simple.
Theirs is a full-time job. Even, if in your arrogance, you don't believe that it takes particular skill, at least grant them that it takes time to go and set up actual usability testing sessions and so forth.
The implication is that PROGRAMMERS DON'T DO DESIGN (at least, interface / features design). Or, at least, anything a programmer might do is reviewed and analyzed.
Needless to say, this is totally different than in oss/linux, where programers are really the only actors in the whole software development cycle. "design" is accomplished largely by copying other products, whcih inevitably leads to a lack of appreciation for the subtleties that make up for good interface and usability design.
Gimp and Xfig - my two favorite whipping boys, are examples number one and two of programs that nominally have the features, but in practice are painful to use compared to their closed-source equivalents (Photoshop and Visio).
The problem is as well is that there is no plausible way to get designers and similar 'soft skill' people into the OSS cycle today:
culturally, the OSS 3l337 reject anybody without super-skills. don't even pretend that this isnt true.
Technically, there are no mechanisms in place for this. CVS is about code. The development model is essentially about continuous 'patching' of the software rather than grand rearchitecting, which design considerations often require.
economically, there's little hope of getting quality designers involved. Programmers barely get recognition in OSS (blowing to hell ESR's naive theories, btw). Who would care who designed what? How do you get street cred as a designer? I mean, it could happen, but it would take a pretty big mental shift.
Design = customer focus. OSS too often has this not. Profit drive causes customer focus. Alas.
"This is yet another example of evil corporate blah blah blah blah blah.."
"Won't corporations ever learn blah blah blah..."
In soviet russia, TurboTax activates you!
Let's start a boycott / return campaign....
"this is an example of how free markets work. They clamp down too hard on their customers this time, they'll pay next time." (oh, wait, no, that's too enlightened).
Turbotax sucks anyway, I always use {alternate product}.
(generic Turbotax efiling horror story)
general carping about various turbotax ("home", "small business") editions.
Some handwaving / slippery slope argumentation that attempts to imply that since some DRM technology is faulty, it must all be doomed to fail / evil.
Some immature claims that any DRM technology is hackable.
Requests for turbotax crackZ. But, of course, they're not called that here, as this is gentile slashdot.
A reasonable response or two that DRM technology need not be 100% foolproof to be effective. This is modded down to -2, troll.
"fair use" is not an fucking ironclad structure. It's a general principle that tries to balance the need to reward and incentivize authors (and publishers, as proxy) and the need of people to have reasonable access to intellectual property.
so, that's why all the slippery slope napster-type arguments that attempt to define the issue as "because transaction Y has the same shape as transaction X (even though the scale is different), and transaction X is ok per fair use, transaction Y is ok per fair use" are (generally, as a practical matter) FULL OF SHIT. When fair use is concerned, scale matters and SOCIETAL IMPACT matters.
It's not something that you can reason with through general principles--it's a measured idea. Now, yes, occasionally media companies try to clamp down too hard. But when some moron on slashdot posts something that is a "loophole in DMCA" for you to exploit then you know it's going to be a de facto fair use violation because these sort of loopholes in the digital world, reminiscent of a recent piece of spam email that I got recently advising me that young women would stick their arms up the orifices of other young women "up to the elbow" encourage abuse and increases the scale of the activity which then pushes it over the edge.
Yes, if you record "when buildings collapse 12" on VHS and give it to your friend as is, it's probably ok per fair use. But when you start doing it digitally, 400 times per day, with the commercials removed, then all of a sudden even though fundamentally it's the same action going on, fair use is violated, DMCA or no DMCA.
Syria is a key strategic country that the US cannot afford to piss off over trifles. Furthermore, Syria is a net importer of intellectual property and has no significant software industry whatsoever to speak of.
Ergo, the low-cost-best-results alternative for Syria is to turn a blind eye towards software piracy, knowing full well that rightsholders' recourses are few. This will result in equally low cost, but better productvitiy and compatibility with the more developed world, because, zealot wet dreams notwithstanding, as of this moment Windows beats Linux for everyday user tasks, even moreso when we take network effects into account.
You should stop promoting free software and start promoting piracy.
Slashdot Mirror
people continue to murder despite murder being illegal. your argument about file sharing is as naive as it is unquantified.
One one hand, there is the party line that any security / encryption measure CAN be broken, so that social measures are really what's necessary to achieve desired aims.
On the other, we see slashdot outrage any time a social convention is established / followed that actually attempts to impose social codes of behavior.
(Side notes to all of this include the typical calling whoever developed the security mechanism a moron because of some obscure backdoor that took the investigator 6 dateless months to find but he acts as if it's so obvious.)
The fact of the matter is that the systems these "young security researchers" are ALL at about the state of the art for this stuff as evidenced by the fact that several companies are more or less doing the same thing. It's also evident that without their information being made public, the security systems do a reasonable job of protecting what they need to protect. It's also clear that there WOULD be a greater social benefit if their information was used to make the security systems even better.
However what's bloody obvious as well is that, given their userbase (students), that there is a greater societal harm in releasing the security flaws publicly at this moment. The DMCA, for all its flaws, was designed for exactly this situation. This is a correct application of the DMCA. The young crackers should negotiate a private deal with the providers for a fair amount for the information, intermediated by an intependent arbiter.
Even if they didn't, the cost of AvGas is about 50% higher than that of kerosene. A jet will burn more than 50% more fuel than a reasonably efficient turboprop over most distances.
The reasons for the transition to RJ's are, in order of importance:
What have you been smoking?
The regional jets are faster and perhaps have fewer engine parts to deal with But more fuel efficient they are not.
Planes like the CRJ and the RJ45 are two of the most efficient airplanes flying, but dont come close on fuel efficiency to something like a Dash-8 or Saab 340.
Of course a better supersonic machine can be cranked out. That's not at issue. The issus is whether a profitable one can be. Concorde never came close to profitability, so bascially any new machine would again have to rely heavily on taxpayer monies.
As an economy traveller, you shoud be happy that more comfortable seats at extreme prices exist. They subsidize your flight in effect.
As far as your 'ever lengthening delays' go, this is more myth than anything. Today's airplanes can better skirt and climb above weather than before. ATC delays, while still a problem due to the US's refusal to adopt slot-style scheduling at most airports, is less so due to technology.
I fly from the east coast to london about every month. Delays are few (with the exception of the couple of times that I flew air india, in which case it's practically a rule). I'd hardly call today's mach .85 aircraft "barges," but, then again, you are an idiot.
In typical /. style, you again confuse absolute with relative anti-piracy protection. Yes, it's possible to still get cracked office XP due to corporate and other programs, but it's harder to obtain such a copy than it was to obtain a serial from the internet for win98, which itself was harder than typing in all 1s for win95.
The rate of piracy is down substantially more than 3% for XP, though, as a previous posted suggested, I do not evidence this claim here. I am NDA-bound not to.
You're ENTIRELY wrong about "the will of the pirates" being an important factor here. The whole point is that /of course/ anything can and maybe even will be cracked, but the issue is RATE. Piracy is a numbers game.
Software copy protection schemes can be though of like so: they are a tradeoff between convenience and protection. The more you protect, the less convenient it is. Essentially, when you pick a software protections scheme at a given moment in time, assuming you didn't pick an out-of-date one, you are planting your flag on what RATE of piracy you want to allow given the alternative about pissing off your customers.
however (and this is the big however), as time goes on, the FRONTIER grows due to technological improvement. As contributing technologies, such as the internet, encryption, bioscanning, and so forth increase, a software vendor can increasingly gain protection without increasing inconvenience, and so forth. Yes, there's no doubt that a parallel port dongle today would be unpopular.
What is undisputable, however, is that windowsXP's online activation mechanism has done oodles to reduce the rate of piracy of that product. (note: _reduce_the_rate_, not _eliminate_. people who still insist on thinking that the anti-piracy game is one of absolutes are mostly delusional sysadmins trying to pretend that they know something about larger technology issues).
The chestnut that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is basically an oversimplification suitable only for History Channel caliber minds.
Where is the insight? This is clearly an apocraphal linux adoption wet dream and not much else. From the microsoft-dissatisfaction setup to the tried multiple distributions lines to the unbelievale 'everything went perfectly' line, this post is so full of itself it boggles the mind. Even if this post is 100% true (like all those "i converted our whole 450pc LAN to linux" stories that never seem to be substantiable), it's not typical, and even if it were typical, there is NO INSIGHT INVOLVED.
You are taking a basic, generic thesis--the capitalist west encroaches on some native populace, seduces it, which causes it to lose its soul. Sure, this is a common story that can be applied to many places throughout the world.
But not here.
Perhaps more than any other country that I know Japan has done a credible job of managing a harmonious coexistance of traditional culture with an international one. Notions that the west introduced capitalism to japan is bullshit. While arguably democracy (or something close enough to it) didn't come to japan until after the war, Japan developed a parallel capitalist culture along the lines of that of western europe regardless of the dutch, perry, or whoever else you want to point to.
The japanese have famously "embraced and extended" outside technologies, but have not done it at the expense of their cultural soul as, say, Shanghai or Jakarta is in the process of doing. Japanese culture is alive and well, and we have no particular need to sympathize with the Japanese for the reasons you suggest. The movie might be interpreted as a reminder to japanese to be mindful of the importance of traditional values, but your suggestion that it is an apt allegory for the japanese condition as pitiful victim of the west is absolute and total nonsense.
(disclaimer: 10 years lived in japan, saw movie in both languages, etc.)
I agree. The risks of potentially hurting the gutenberg press were much higher than freeing millions under naziism. We should have stayed in bed, or just rolled over like the french.
Look, this comment has nothing to do with Israel's politics or religion. However, I'd venture to say that 2/3ds of nonsense slashdot science articles begin with "an israeli company..."
Either it's encryption that can be run recursively to one bit or something else completely off the charts ("100000 times faster than current..."), frankly, ive come to thinking htat israel is the land of bad science and reported hype.
Yes, the tube is less than ideal. The traffic situation is even worse than less than ideal. The congestion charge, however, is not levied on BUSES.
Read the article next time.
Yes, the congestion charge will have some bad externalities--for example, the rich who live inside the affected circle's land values will go up further while they pay only 10% of the fees that others pay. Nevertheless, it's a step towards public transport in a big city--it's a good thing.
As much as everybody here likes to make fun of Visual Basic, I encourage all to have a look at VB's debugger. While there are a few improvements here and there that could be made, in general it far, far surpasses anything else that I have seen out there. (I have yet to play with VB.net--I am referring here to VB6).
Sigh, there we go again, go again.
How to join the GNOME project for non-hackers FAQ [gnome.org]
This document basically tells people of OTHER TECHNICAL THINGS (like making icons for programmers and writing documentation for programmers and reporting bugs to programmers) that they can do. This is irrelevant to the issue of design and usability.
GNOME Usability Project [gnome.org]
Provides a series of slides that explains things like "what usability is." A nice start, but that hardly means that the end product will be designed with usability in mind. Let us not forget that the usability thing is being spearheaded by Sun, who sure as hell isnt doing it for altruistic reasons. I question the sanity of people who are volunteering their time to Sun--or, more accurately, I question that there really are significant numbers of people doing so.
Documentation + Translation != Usability != Design.
software with modern and usable GUIs - because the developers have more experience now!
Oh stop it, you're making me laugh. Mozilla fails even the most rudimentary usability tests because of its speed (or lack thereof). If you knew a damn thing about usability rather than playing the old linux game of equating "fancy gui" with usability, you'd recognize this. Usability is a user-centric-ness that needs to be considered in many ways, and Mozilla fails by a mile.
Yet if I join a GNOME mailing list, and I ask things carefully and politely, providing all the necessery details, I almost always get a good and clear answer (unless of course, nobody knows an answer). I never, I repeat, never get flamed down or told RTFM.
There's a world of difference between getting an answer to a technical question by supplication and driving the development of a new product. OSS is developer, not market driven. Where it is more market driven, it's basically being used by for-profit companies to serve some auxillary goal (like Sun's support of Gnome). Even if eleet comment was a little over the top, you can't deny that.
Wrong. If you say they don't design when they first started the project, then yes, I agree with you partially.
There is a difference between technical design and usability / user-centric design. Your next several paragraphs confuse the two (talking about a complete re-write due to TECHNICAL issues),and thus are completely irrelevant. nice smokescreen, tho!
GNOME Usability Project [gnome.org] anyone? A lot of usability studies are contributed by Sun and Ximian. Sun also contributed a lot of user documentation. Right. When companies sense profit is to be had, they foster usability. When there is none, usability doesn't occur, and even when it does, it's, well, in practice more smoke than fire. It's not hard to put up a document telling somebody how to conduct usability tests. It's a different thing to actually do them.
Usability design requires collaboration. This is best done in person. OSS suffers because of this, in general, as well.
Commercial [redhat.com] open source [ximian.com] software [suse.com]. 'nuff said.
Fair enough. You are right. Commercial open source software, that sideline game through which companies position themselves in a to take advantage of the work of free labor while bundling this with their own proprietary extensions as a 'value add' does care about usability. RedHat does everything in its power to keep the usable bits proprietary, but throws the occasional bone back to the actual OSS world.
Big picture: at the end of the day, you STILL can't reliably cut and paste complex objects between apps that dont explicitly know about each others file types in linux systems. You STILL dont have so much as a simple, fast, usable web browser that comes close to IE. You STILL suffer from chronic underdocumentation and applications that, because of poor design, demand it. Sure, it gets better, but it's always a pale imitation of what some company has profited on years ago.
They sit there, with their lightweight psychology, graphics design, philosophy, women's studies, physical education, etc degrees, and contemplate and measure cost/benefits of how the software should work. When appropriate, they poll users. They perform usability tests on actual users. They monitor how actual users use existing versions of the software in order to both spot common errors and figure out exactly what features are actually being used. They document what they do. They read books and articles on nominally the flimsiest of things, like "the psychological implications of color choice in menu design." Their feature requests sometimes border on the really difficult to implement, and sometimes quite simple.
Theirs is a full-time job. Even, if in your arrogance, you don't believe that it takes particular skill, at least grant them that it takes time to go and set up actual usability testing sessions and so forth.
The implication is that PROGRAMMERS DON'T DO DESIGN (at least, interface / features design). Or, at least, anything a programmer might do is reviewed and analyzed.
Needless to say, this is totally different than in oss/linux, where programers are really the only actors in the whole software development cycle. "design" is accomplished largely by copying other products, whcih inevitably leads to a lack of appreciation for the subtleties that make up for good interface and usability design.
Gimp and Xfig - my two favorite whipping boys, are examples number one and two of programs that nominally have the features, but in practice are painful to use compared to their closed-source equivalents (Photoshop and Visio).
The problem is as well is that there is no plausible way to get designers and similar 'soft skill' people into the OSS cycle today:
- culturally, the OSS 3l337 reject anybody without super-skills. don't even pretend that this isnt true.
- Technically, there are no mechanisms in place for this. CVS is about code. The development model is essentially about continuous 'patching' of the software rather than grand rearchitecting, which design considerations often require.
- economically, there's little hope of getting quality designers involved. Programmers barely get recognition in OSS (blowing to hell ESR's naive theories, btw). Who would care who designed what? How do you get street cred as a designer? I mean, it could happen, but it would take a pretty big mental shift.
Design = customer focus. OSS too often has this not. Profit drive causes customer focus. Alas.Moderation Totals: Mind-Numbingly Naive, -2
"fair use" is not an fucking ironclad structure. It's a general principle that tries to balance the need to reward and incentivize authors (and publishers, as proxy) and the need of people to have reasonable access to intellectual property.
so, that's why all the slippery slope napster-type arguments that attempt to define the issue as "because transaction Y has the same shape as transaction X (even though the scale is different), and transaction X is ok per fair use, transaction Y is ok per fair use" are (generally, as a practical matter) FULL OF SHIT. When fair use is concerned, scale matters and SOCIETAL IMPACT matters.
It's not something that you can reason with through general principles--it's a measured idea. Now, yes, occasionally media companies try to clamp down too hard. But when some moron on slashdot posts something that is a "loophole in DMCA" for you to exploit then you know it's going to be a de facto fair use violation because these sort of loopholes in the digital world, reminiscent of a recent piece of spam email that I got recently advising me that young women would stick their arms up the orifices of other young women "up to the elbow" encourage abuse and increases the scale of the activity which then pushes it over the edge.
Yes, if you record "when buildings collapse 12" on VHS and give it to your friend as is, it's probably ok per fair use. But when you start doing it digitally, 400 times per day, with the commercials removed, then all of a sudden even though fundamentally it's the same action going on, fair use is violated, DMCA or no DMCA.
I didn't realize that Henry Blodgett was now at the New York Times!
What a pathetic attempt to get mod points that was.
Consider the four major disasters:
- SS Fort Stikine, the ship that blew up in Bombay, was Canadian built.
- USS Maine - Maine borders Canada. Was it a message to the US from our northern "friends?"
- Port Chicago - easy access by Canadian saboteurs with limpets, also sends that same "message"
- Halifax - need I say more?
Those dastardly canadians like to blow up ships. Please stay tuned for my 352 page pdf.READ THIS KEYNOTE ADDRESS for an intelligent, no-bullshit media industry view on disruptive technologies such as napster.
Syria is a key strategic country that the US cannot afford to piss off over trifles. Furthermore, Syria is a net importer of intellectual property and has no significant software industry whatsoever to speak of.
Ergo, the low-cost-best-results alternative for Syria is to turn a blind eye towards software piracy, knowing full well that rightsholders' recourses are few. This will result in equally low cost, but better productvitiy and compatibility with the more developed world, because, zealot wet dreams notwithstanding, as of this moment Windows beats Linux for everyday user tasks, even moreso when we take network effects into account.
You should stop promoting free software and start promoting piracy.