I'm not sure what "most Americans" you're talking about. The mean wage for all jobs in the US with a bit over 127,000,000 employed is 13.05 $/hour or about 35,560 $/year. (Bureau of labor statistics, all jobs figures, currrent set for 2004.)
Beyond the extra step of buring tunes bought on Itunes onto a CDR, what can't you do with the music? I can rip the CDR to any other format I've tried, so what's the big deal? Plays just fine on my winders-EX-PEE@work as well ripps to MP3. The convienence of the download service is worth more than the inconvience of buring and then re-ripping--but that's just my opinion.
I've bought more than a hundred songs on Itunes. The 30 seconds that they pick is indicative of the song. A lot better than Amazon's first thirty seconds of the first few songs. I have not been dissappointed in selecting music by using the apply 30 seconds.
People have brains from which comes Intelligence, and observational powers that exceed our best robots. We are flexible enough to change the mission parameters mid-step should we see something "interesting." We can maneuver on a planetary surface much better than robots. Humans can walk across a few miles of variable terrain carrying a lot of weight. We can't get robot vehicles to anything similar. We are the scientists. Robots are merely long distance tools for humans. We are much better at science when we are up close and personal with the subject of our study. We do not possess robots that can perform experiments. We have many machines that can perform tests, but experiments require intelligence. The closer the scientist is to the experiment the better the observations.
Building a moon base to go to mars has the side effect of building a moon base from which we can do other things. Face it, there are a lot of common folks who would like to be somewhere else and space is a settleable fronteer. We just need to make the transportation and infrastructure available to the general populace.
The common folk want to go into space for all the usual reaons: because its there, because we'll get rich, or away from some annoyingly oppressive government, etc.
Yes I can give you one reason for voting for Kerry and against Bush: Kerry actually served in Vietnam and got wounded, Bush kinda sorta served in the TX national gaurd when he wasn't on leave to campaign, and I suspect that if he had not been a BUSH, he'd have been in trouble for missing so much drill.
All of the other reasons I have are just against BUSH and his war, corruption, and liberal spending habits.
I guess that I'd also add that a guy who married rich is a bit better than one who got there because his daddy's friends owed his daddy favors. But only a tiny bit. I mean, Kerry had to woo the rich girl to get her to marry him so there was some effort involved. Bush just sorta showed up and cashed the checks.
As to clinton's job as Pres. Not bad considering that all he had to do was not screw up the stuff the previous adminstrations had built. Better a BJ in the white house and a semen stained dress than 11,000 "medical evacuations from the theater of action" and blood stained uniorms.
(1) If you can't afford to pay, then don't play. Isn't this what bandwidth caps are for? What about the back up plan for those sites that can't handle the traffic but need to be up? Sounds like poor planning to me.
(2) News sites like CMP are mostlikely ad revenue driven as is evidenced from their pages which are chock full of ads. They are also trying to sell you a subscription to their print edition and get you to sign up for newsletters, etc. Blocking people from coming to this site because they are "not authorized redistributors" is a demonstration of a fatal missunderstanding of how the internet works. Once a person puts up a web page, they have published information for the general public to consume. Trying to limit that based upon "authorization" is wrong. A link is not a redistribution of the content, anymore than someone telling you about a great book that they read. If links are redistributions of content, then the whole of the internet is likely to be in violation of the Copyright Laws under the Berne Convention.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
I'll pay for email like I pay for the regular mail when they can prove that hell not only exists but has frozen over.
It is telling that Ballmer is gloating over the difficulties of a transition to Linux instead of gloating over stomping the Linux community into the ground with better products and services. The fact is that they are having trouble BUT they are still transitioning.
Change is always costly, Linux transitions have all of the troubles that other software transitions have without the high cost of each liscence.
I agree completely with the proposition that we must strive to provide software support for Linux as the primary focus of our community efforts. The code is free, the support is where we have the opportunity to add value and create wealth.
It irritates me no end that we're quite willing to spend 100 billion plus dollars to Kill Other People, never mind the reasons, but wouldn't dare suggest that we spend more than a couple of billion on space exploration.
Think of all of the jobs that an 87 billion dollar space program could generate. Think of all the body bags and misery that 87 billion spent on a war bought.
Here's a good question for you then: what about the few people who either do not have their ID with them or simply do not have a Drivers Liscense or State ID?
What about using part of the corn for making corn oil, and then transforming that into biodiesel? Then you could run the trackor on a standard engine, and then take the rest and use it to make hydrogen from ethanol.
I'm not sure about the following, but would it be possible to press the oil out of the corn, for use in making diesel, and then use the rest for fermentation? That way you would get most of the energy out of the corn. The residual cellulose could be composed into fertilizer for the corn field. The benefits would be that you get the maximum amount of diesel, and then extract sugars for ethanol and fuel cell use, and waste nothing as the rest is fertilizer.
What software doesn't have an equivalent on the MAC? I've heard this for years and see no problems with software. Either windows or Linux or mac all have the stuff most people need. How many word processors, spreadsheets, calinders, music programs do you need? All the WWW browers work on Mac/Linux/Windows (well except for IE but who really cares?) Quicken and work a likes are out for MAC/Linux/Windows. What software is only for windows that will matter to most folks?
Windows XP ain't THAT bad. For me, I'm a MAC/Linux Guy, but work...well they buy Microsoft stuff. OLD Microsoft Stuff. Like Windows 98. Get a new DELL and the IT guy puts WIN 98 on it. Let me remind you all that WIN98 isn't really an OS, its a countdown timer to a data losing crash. Win XP doesn't crash so often, which for me is a LOT Better. I wouldn't call XP "crippled" but rather, vunerable. A lot of stuff in XP works, well a lot better than other versions of windows.
Of course, I snuck Linux onto an old box down in the lab where the IT guy can't find it, and there it just runs and runs and runs.
I wonder, though, if it is not too much trouble to remove features from(Cripple) XP, why was it impossible to remove IE back during the antitrust trial? Isn't IE just another feature like the BSOD. (Which for the uninitiated does really still exist in Windows XP. I got one the other day.)
Actually, I think that Groklaw is much more reliable than many of the people that are paid to be "objective." I've been following the whole case for a while now and Groklaw, while having a decidely biased flavor, is very objective in its reasoning. Much better than the regular media and even/.
Groklaw has been very interested in finding the truth of the allegations that SCO has made. the truth is very biased in that the preponderance of evidence shows that SCO is (at best) deluded or (at worst) fraudulent.
A friend of mine caught a person stealling his VCR out of a college dorm. The VCR was taken and held for evidence for nearly two years. It was totally trashed when he got it back. This was in the early days of the VCR when a good machine when for many hundreds of dollars.
It's not just if you get your machine back; it also could be broken beyond all recovery. Oh yeah, the cops claimed that the damage all occurred during the crime, even though we are pretty sure that was not the case.
The odds are much more likely that you will die by car accident than by radiation. Even if we were to replace every single electric power generator in North America with an "inherently safe" nuclear reactor design, you would be more likely to die driving to the gas station or grocery store than by a reactor radiation release. There are several studies on human's ability to assess risk and it has been shown to be rather flawed.
Physics. The materials that are used in nuclear reactors are not the same as those used in atom bombs. A nuclear reactor that goes critical is a melt down not an explosion. The chernobyl accident was a steam explosion from a core melt down in an inherently unsafe reactor design - one that the KGB stole from the US as I recall. The chernobyl accident was NOT a nuclear explosion. The radiation that got spread over the land has caused damage, and thus the need for "inherently safe" designs. An inherently safe design for a nuclear reactor is one inwhich the default state of the reactor is off. If all of the systems that control the reaction fail, then the natural forces of nature, such as gravity will be used to shut the reactor down and cool it. This can be done in several ways: mechanical such as the control rods that drop into the off position in the advent of a failure; disperal of the fuel in a matrix that limits the amount of nuclear reaction that can occur so that a melt down is impossible. There are many other ways to prevent a nuclear reaction from happening. (This I got from a documentary on nuclear power and the chernobyl accident.)
Orbit. A falling nuclear reactor that burns up in the atmosphere will distribute a tiny amount of radioactive material across the planet. At best it will be difficult to detect against the normal soup of radioactive isotopes that are already on the surface and have been for billions of years. (Ever heard of Radon Gas? A naturally occuring radioactive element that you breath every day.) Perhaps you should be afraid of the radiation that is present in many of your common household items: the smoke detector for example. The amount of energy required to lift things into orbit means that any nuclear reactor sent into orbit will be tiny. TINY. Not nearly like the size of something used to power a nuclear submarine, and nearly insignificant when compared to a major nuclear electric plant.
What is more dangerous? A ten pound reactor falling from 30,000 feet or a drive in an automobile in Toronto. Even if we had as many nuclear powered rockets as we have aircraft flying every day, your death odds would still be larger with the auto. A nuclear powered rocket would be about as dangerous to people on earth as the current mix of highly toxic and explosive chemicals used to lift the US space shuttle. The mere fact that they are CHEMICAL propellants as opposed to NUCLEAR propellents seems to lead people to the erroneous conclusion that the chemcial rockets are safer. Now, we have demonstrated with 1960's technology that we can design and built a device that will survive reentry and impact onto either water or land and not kill the humans inside. A reactor is not a bag of water held together by cellular membranes; it is a much stronger device; sothe though that it is impossible to build a reactor that won't disentegrate on impact from orbit is wrong.
A little publicized fact: We will either go nuclear in the next twenty years or we will return to the energy technology of 1780. The fossil fuel mine is both finite and dwindling. Education is the Key to reducing the public's fear of nuclear energy. We are fearless on the highways and millions die in traffic accidents every year. We are petrified about anything labled "nuclear." Incidentally, this is why you go for an MRI (magnetic resonance imagine) instead of an NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance image, which is what that technology was originally called. The nuclear was dropped because people are AFRAID of anything nuclear.
There are several companies in the specialty chemicals business that have a monopoly on the chemicals that they produce. They do not abuse their monopoly because it would be very bad for business.
Apparently the person asking slashdot should be asking Groklaw.
Really, for a very good analysis of why the SCO lawsuit is very very unlikely to succeed, and a lot of pretty good analysis on how the stock price got to be so high, check out groklaw.
Obviously, you don't depend upon you copyrightable creations to provide monetary sustenance for you self and your dependants.
Let's ask this question: would you care if they took you public domain textbook, altered it, copyrighted it and prevented you from using your own works without a lengthy legal battle? It can happen, because the current system of copyright assumes that the person who registers it with the office is the owner. Easier with a text book to show infrigement than with computer code.
"And spam is not a result of freedom. It's a result of greed. That's like saying highways cause high speed chases..."
Facilitate. Highways facilitate car chases. Without highways car chases wouldn't be very effective. Other forms of chases would dominate. Like horse chases or foot chases. The internet has facilitated spam which is just a really cheap form of junk mail.
I think you've missed the boat on the freedom thing. The GPL is not about freedom it is about fairness. The GPL is a response to the overwhelming duration of the copyright. Most copyrighted works are unavailable to the public. Think of all of the songs, movies, books, and music that are "out of print" because it is too costly to keep them in the traditional store shelves. The GPL is about ensuring, through the use of the obnoxious copyright law, that the public domain is protected and encouraged. The GPL is not a one size fits all liscence. But, then the EULAs of software companies are far worse. Then there is the fact that so many publishing houses retain the copyright to a work and will never, ever make it available to the public because they don't see a profitable market for it. GPL'd works will not leave the public sight by this means.
GPL is a trade. Much like you make with an employer or publisher wherein you trade your rights to the work you created for a certain number of monetary units. The GPL is a trade in that you trade you right in the work you created for the rights that the improvers of your code have. Who loses?
I am not very confident in the public domain. It has been raped repeatedly by corporations and unscupulous people.
But then you must also narrowly define investments. I make money primarily by employment. But my skills were obtained through an investment of time and money into my own advanced education. So, unless one is uneducated, unskilled labor, one is a capitalist.
Now if we define investments as only money put into stock and bonds, we've narrowed the field the a few million people globally. Oddly enough that would include most of Europe's surviving nobility, and exclude a large number of corporate captains.
Communism's philosophical base, as I recall, was that human beings are inherently good and unselfish. This is false and therefore communism as a form of government was doomed to collapse into dictatorship.
The open source software movement is not communist because it does not have the same philosophical base. The people who work on the code do so for their own selfish reasons; e.g. they enjoy doing it; they are paid to do it; they are writing a tool to help solve one of their own problems and need the help of other people, etc.
The current capitalistic system is much more related to fuedalistic system where the lord master owns the property and the products of the labor. The serfs were not slaves in that they were not property, but they could be imagined to be contract labor with lousy benefits and low pay.
The fear that OSS causes among the corporations that raise FUD against it is similar to the fear that the ancient nobles felt to the rise of both the democracy in the American republic, and also of the communists of Marx and Engles. They are not afraid that they can't make money off of the movement, but that they are not in control of it.
There is an assumption in the Forbes article that is rather naieve: that money is the only motivator in the economy. While it has been proven that people will go with a best value product over others in a level field market, Microsoft has never been interested in such a field of competition and has indeavored to CONTROL the market. The fear of losing market control, of losing the monopoly, is what motivates Microsoft. They know in Redmond, that the long years of tyrany have made them reviled and when they fall it will be ugly. If the OSS is merely the response to the tyrany of Microsoft, then the OSS model will fade once Microsoft has collapsed. If, as I suspect, the OSS movement is an improved software development plateform developed to make everyone's life better including those who contribute, the model will thrive.
Win 2K crashed on me several times without having a hardware problem.
Mostly it crashed while trying to either Print or utilize the local area network. But not always. Excell for office 2K was really quite good at crashing win2K.
I've switched to XP and have only seen the BSOD once...a crash on waking up and not seeing the server.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what "most Americans" you're talking about. The mean wage for all jobs in the US with a bit over 127,000,000 employed is 13.05 $/hour or about 35,560 $/year. (Bureau of labor statistics, all jobs figures, currrent set for 2004.)
I think you're facts are off a bit.
Beyond the extra step of buring tunes bought on Itunes onto a CDR, what can't you do with the music? I can rip the CDR to any other format I've tried, so what's the big deal? Plays just fine on my winders-EX-PEE@work as well ripps to MP3. The convienence of the download service is worth more than the inconvience of buring and then re-ripping--but that's just my opinion.
I've bought more than a hundred songs on Itunes. The 30 seconds that they pick is indicative of the song. A lot better than Amazon's first thirty seconds of the first few songs. I have not been dissappointed in selecting music by using the apply 30 seconds.
"So what do we need the humans for?"
People have brains from which comes Intelligence, and observational powers that exceed our best robots. We are flexible enough to change the mission parameters mid-step should we see something "interesting." We can maneuver on a planetary surface much better than robots. Humans can walk across a few miles of variable terrain carrying a lot of weight. We can't get robot vehicles to anything similar. We are the scientists. Robots are merely long distance tools for humans. We are much better at science when we are up close and personal with the subject of our study. We do not possess robots that can perform experiments. We have many machines that can perform tests, but experiments require intelligence. The closer the scientist is to the experiment the better the observations.
Building a moon base to go to mars has the side effect of building a moon base from which we can do other things. Face it, there are a lot of common folks who would like to be somewhere else and space is a settleable fronteer. We just need to make the transportation and infrastructure available to the general populace.
The common folk want to go into space for all the usual reaons: because its there, because we'll get rich, or away from some annoyingly oppressive government, etc.
Yes I can give you one reason for voting for Kerry and against Bush: Kerry actually served in Vietnam and got wounded, Bush kinda sorta served in the TX national gaurd when he wasn't on leave to campaign, and I suspect that if he had not been a BUSH, he'd have been in trouble for missing so much drill.
All of the other reasons I have are just against BUSH and his war, corruption, and liberal spending habits.
I guess that I'd also add that a guy who married rich is a bit better than one who got there because his daddy's friends owed his daddy favors. But only a tiny bit. I mean, Kerry had to woo the rich girl to get her to marry him so there was some effort involved. Bush just sorta showed up and cashed the checks.
As to clinton's job as Pres. Not bad considering that all he had to do was not screw up the stuff the previous adminstrations had built. Better a BJ in the white house and a semen stained dress than 11,000 "medical evacuations from the theater of action" and blood stained uniorms.
(1) If you can't afford to pay, then don't play. Isn't this what bandwidth caps are for? What about the back up plan for those sites that can't handle the traffic but need to be up? Sounds like poor planning to me.
(2) News sites like CMP are mostlikely ad revenue driven as is evidenced from their pages which are chock full of ads. They are also trying to sell you a subscription to their print edition and get you to sign up for newsletters, etc. Blocking people from coming to this site because they are "not authorized redistributors" is a demonstration of a fatal missunderstanding of how the internet works. Once a person puts up a web page, they have published information for the general public to consume. Trying to limit that based upon "authorization" is wrong. A link is not a redistribution of the content, anymore than someone telling you about a great book that they read. If links are redistributions of content, then the whole of the internet is likely to be in violation of the Copyright Laws under the Berne Convention.
I'll pay for email like I pay for the regular mail when they can prove that hell not only exists but has frozen over.
It is telling that Ballmer is gloating over the difficulties of a transition to Linux instead of gloating over stomping the Linux community into the ground with better products and services. The fact is that they are having trouble BUT they are still transitioning.
Change is always costly, Linux transitions have all of the troubles that other software transitions have without the high cost of each liscence.
I agree completely with the proposition that we must strive to provide software support for Linux as the primary focus of our community efforts. The code is free, the support is where we have the opportunity to add value and create wealth.
It irritates me no end that we're quite willing to spend 100 billion plus dollars to Kill Other People, never mind the reasons, but wouldn't dare suggest that we spend more than a couple of billion on space exploration.
Think of all of the jobs that an 87 billion dollar space program could generate. Think of all the body bags and misery that 87 billion spent on a war bought.
Here's a good question for you then: what about the few people who either do not have their ID with them or simply do not have a Drivers Liscense or State ID?
And search and seizure is still a big issue for us geeks. Check this bit out:
http://www.cithosting.com/
I'm not giving you all a clickable link, because I'm ignorant of how to do that, and too busy to learn. (It's on my to do list.)
What about using part of the corn for making corn oil, and then transforming that into biodiesel? Then you could run the trackor on a standard engine, and then take the rest and use it to make hydrogen from ethanol.
I'm not sure about the following, but would it be possible to press the oil out of the corn, for use in making diesel, and then use the rest for fermentation? That way you would get most of the energy out of the corn. The residual cellulose could be composed into fertilizer for the corn field. The benefits would be that you get the maximum amount of diesel, and then extract sugars for ethanol and fuel cell use, and waste nothing as the rest is fertilizer.
What software doesn't have an equivalent on the MAC? I've heard this for years and see no problems with software. Either windows or Linux or mac all have the stuff most people need. How many word processors, spreadsheets, calinders, music programs do you need? All the WWW browers work on Mac/Linux/Windows (well except for IE but who really cares?) Quicken and work a likes are out for MAC/Linux/Windows. What software is only for windows that will matter to most folks?
Oh wait you must be talking about GAMES.
That's what I have an XBOX/Playstation/etc for.
I hate to say it...
Windows XP ain't THAT bad. For me, I'm a MAC/Linux Guy, but work...well they buy Microsoft stuff. OLD Microsoft Stuff. Like Windows 98. Get a new DELL and the IT guy puts WIN 98 on it. Let me remind you all that WIN98 isn't really an OS, its a countdown timer to a data losing crash. Win XP doesn't crash so often, which for me is a LOT Better. I wouldn't call XP "crippled" but rather, vunerable. A lot of stuff in XP works, well a lot better than other versions of windows.
Of course, I snuck Linux onto an old box down in the lab where the IT guy can't find it, and there it just runs and runs and runs.
I wonder, though, if it is not too much trouble to remove features from(Cripple) XP, why was it impossible to remove IE back during the antitrust trial? Isn't IE just another feature like the BSOD. (Which for the uninitiated does really still exist in Windows XP. I got one the other day.)
Wine, bottles and bottles of wine. Good stuff too, some of it anyway.
Actually, I think that Groklaw is much more reliable than many of the people that are paid to be "objective." I've been following the whole case for a while now and Groklaw, while having a decidely biased flavor, is very objective in its reasoning. Much better than the regular media and even /.
Groklaw has been very interested in finding the truth of the allegations that SCO has made. the truth is very biased in that the preponderance of evidence shows that SCO is (at best) deluded or (at worst) fraudulent.
A friend of mine caught a person stealling his VCR out of a college dorm. The VCR was taken and held for evidence for nearly two years. It was totally trashed when he got it back. This was in the early days of the VCR when a good machine when for many hundreds of dollars.
It's not just if you get your machine back; it also could be broken beyond all recovery. Oh yeah, the cops claimed that the damage all occurred during the crime, even though we are pretty sure that was not the case.
It's about risk assessment.
The odds are much more likely that you will die by car accident than by radiation. Even if we were to replace every single electric power generator in North America with an "inherently safe" nuclear reactor design, you would be more likely to die driving to the gas station or grocery store than by a reactor radiation release. There are several studies on human's ability to assess risk and it has been shown to be rather flawed.
Physics. The materials that are used in nuclear reactors are not the same as those used in atom bombs. A nuclear reactor that goes critical is a melt down not an explosion. The chernobyl accident was a steam explosion from a core melt down in an inherently unsafe reactor design - one that the KGB stole from the US as I recall. The chernobyl accident was NOT a nuclear explosion. The radiation that got spread over the land has caused damage, and thus the need for "inherently safe" designs. An inherently safe design for a nuclear reactor is one inwhich the default state of the reactor is off. If all of the systems that control the reaction fail, then the natural forces of nature, such as gravity will be used to shut the reactor down and cool it. This can be done in several ways: mechanical such as the control rods that drop into the off position in the advent of a failure; disperal of the fuel in a matrix that limits the amount of nuclear reaction that can occur so that a melt down is impossible. There are many other ways to prevent a nuclear reaction from happening. (This I got from a documentary on nuclear power and the chernobyl accident.)
Orbit. A falling nuclear reactor that burns up in the atmosphere will distribute a tiny amount of radioactive material across the planet. At best it will be difficult to detect against the normal soup of radioactive isotopes that are already on the surface and have been for billions of years. (Ever heard of Radon Gas? A naturally occuring radioactive element that you breath every day.) Perhaps you should be afraid of the radiation that is present in many of your common household items: the smoke detector for example. The amount of energy required to lift things into orbit means that any nuclear reactor sent into orbit will be tiny. TINY. Not nearly like the size of something used to power a nuclear submarine, and nearly insignificant when compared to a major nuclear electric plant.
What is more dangerous? A ten pound reactor falling from 30,000 feet or a drive in an automobile in Toronto. Even if we had as many nuclear powered rockets as we have aircraft flying every day, your death odds would still be larger with the auto. A nuclear powered rocket would be about as dangerous to people on earth as the current mix of highly toxic and explosive chemicals used to lift the US space shuttle. The mere fact that they are CHEMICAL propellants as opposed to NUCLEAR propellents seems to lead people to the erroneous conclusion that the chemcial rockets are safer. Now, we have demonstrated with 1960's technology that we can design and built a device that will survive reentry and impact onto either water or land and not kill the humans inside. A reactor is not a bag of water held together by cellular membranes; it is a much stronger device; sothe though that it is impossible to build a reactor that won't disentegrate on impact from orbit is wrong.
A little publicized fact: We will either go nuclear in the next twenty years or we will return to the energy technology of 1780. The fossil fuel mine is both finite and dwindling. Education is the Key to reducing the public's fear of nuclear energy. We are fearless on the highways and millions die in traffic accidents every year. We are petrified about anything labled "nuclear." Incidentally, this is why you go for an MRI (magnetic resonance imagine) instead of an NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance image, which is what that technology was originally called. The nuclear was dropped because people are AFRAID of anything nuclear.
There are several companies in the specialty chemicals business that have a monopoly on the chemicals that they produce. They do not abuse their monopoly because it would be very bad for business.
I know. I work for one.
Apparently the person asking slashdot should be asking Groklaw.
Really, for a very good analysis of why the SCO lawsuit is very very unlikely to succeed, and a lot of pretty good analysis on how the stock price got to be so high, check out groklaw.
Obviously, you don't depend upon you copyrightable creations to provide monetary sustenance for you self and your dependants.
Let's ask this question: would you care if they took you public domain textbook, altered it, copyrighted it and prevented you from using your own works without a lengthy legal battle? It can happen, because the current system of copyright assumes that the person who registers it with the office is the owner. Easier with a text book to show infrigement than with computer code.
"And spam is not a result of freedom. It's a result of greed. That's like saying highways cause high speed chases..."
Facilitate. Highways facilitate car chases. Without highways car chases wouldn't be very effective. Other forms of chases would dominate. Like horse chases or foot chases. The internet has facilitated spam which is just a really cheap form of junk mail.
I think you've missed the boat on the freedom thing. The GPL is not about freedom it is about fairness. The GPL is a response to the overwhelming duration of the copyright. Most copyrighted works are unavailable to the public. Think of all of the songs, movies, books, and music that are "out of print" because it is too costly to keep them in the traditional store shelves. The GPL is about ensuring, through the use of the obnoxious copyright law, that the public domain is protected and encouraged. The GPL is not a one size fits all liscence. But, then the EULAs of software companies are far worse. Then there is the fact that so many publishing houses retain the copyright to a work and will never, ever make it available to the public because they don't see a profitable market for it. GPL'd works will not leave the public sight by this means.
GPL is a trade. Much like you make with an employer or publisher wherein you trade your rights to the work you created for a certain number of monetary units. The GPL is a trade in that you trade you right in the work you created for the rights that the improvers of your code have. Who loses?
I am not very confident in the public domain. It has been raped repeatedly by corporations and unscupulous people.
But then you must also narrowly define investments. I make money primarily by employment. But my skills were obtained through an investment of time and money into my own advanced education. So, unless one is uneducated, unskilled labor, one is a capitalist.
Now if we define investments as only money put into stock and bonds, we've narrowed the field the a few million people globally. Oddly enough that would include most of Europe's surviving nobility, and exclude a large number of corporate captains.
Communism's philosophical base, as I recall, was that human beings are inherently good and unselfish. This is false and therefore communism as a form of government was doomed to collapse into dictatorship.
The open source software movement is not communist because it does not have the same philosophical base. The people who work on the code do so for their own selfish reasons; e.g. they enjoy doing it; they are paid to do it; they are writing a tool to help solve one of their own problems and need the help of other people, etc.
The current capitalistic system is much more related to fuedalistic system where the lord master owns the property and the products of the labor. The serfs were not slaves in that they were not property, but they could be imagined to be contract labor with lousy benefits and low pay.
The fear that OSS causes among the corporations that raise FUD against it is similar to the fear that the ancient nobles felt to the rise of both the democracy in the American republic, and also of the communists of Marx and Engles. They are not afraid that they can't make money off of the movement, but that they are not in control of it.
There is an assumption in the Forbes article that is rather naieve: that money is the only motivator in the economy. While it has been proven that people will go with a best value product over others in a level field market, Microsoft has never been interested in such a field of competition and has indeavored to CONTROL the market. The fear of losing market control, of losing the monopoly, is what motivates Microsoft. They know in Redmond, that the long years of tyrany have made them reviled and when they fall it will be ugly. If the OSS is merely the response to the tyrany of Microsoft, then the OSS model will fade once Microsoft has collapsed. If, as I suspect, the OSS movement is an improved software development plateform developed to make everyone's life better including those who contribute, the model will thrive.
Win 2K crashed on me several times without having a hardware problem.
Mostly it crashed while trying to either Print or utilize the local area network. But not always. Excell for office 2K was really quite good at crashing win2K.
I've switched to XP and have only seen the BSOD once...a crash on waking up and not seeing the server.
And THAT is exactly why the radio in my automobile hasn't been turned on in YEARS.