Shows you his priorities. The whingeing about GNU/Linux is icing on the cake, and is forgotten when the REAL issues come up. Anything you see RMS arguing that people should use GNU/something as a name, you know that there obviously isn't any real problem happening.
With Bitkeeper, the potential for a real problem (or at least a hell of an inconvenience) is right there, and so you see RMS not even thinking of naming conventions because his concern is about something a lot more important.
There are people who don't see it as a problem- since buying a license/shifting development to something else/jumping through whatever hoops will be technically possible. It's the same as saying there is no such thing as force because (for instance) if a guy has a gun to your head you can take your chances dodging away, or pretend to submit and then escape later, etc etc. It's the same thing as saying the actions of commercial proprietary entities cannot ever be force because people can choose not to buy the product.
Technically this is so, but in the shades-of-gray world of reality such acts can be a KIND of force, simply not an ultimate force. I've seen the suggestion that Slashdotters should get everybody to violate the DMCA and turn themselves in, civil disobedience. It's true that if enough people did this, particularly important people, the law would be destroyed. OK, so where are they? Funny how in reality the DMCA still has force enough to be a danger, even though technically it's not a problem because it can be destroyed through mass civil disobedience.
It is just this sort of thing Stallman is concerned about.
I'm with him, in that I see a conceptual problem with mingling free and proprietary software in this way. I realise in real world uses you don't always get to be ideologically perfect- I myself code Free code using an IDE that's totally nonfree, because I'm not good enough yet to use more difficult programming languages (really it's the APIs for GUI C/C++ coding that throw me, I can't even get started) so I find I'm forced to use a brilliant but proprietary product (REALbasic) for non-C-coder types, or fail to code anything.
I guess the difference between me and Bitkeeper supporters is that I feel I have less option to choose a Free path- and I remain firmly aware that I don't want to stay in proprietary-land a second longer than I have to. With the Bitkeeper thing, I see people saying, we don't really care, the degree of control over our own environments we'd get from Free code is less important than the convenience of using this proprietary tool. I see that as a problem- free software is not an object or an abstraction, it is a PRACTICE that should be pursued where possible. Supporting Bitkeeper is intentionally pursuing the opposite of this practice for personal gain. And personal gain isn't enough of an excuse.
They can only do that with the code as-is or with purely in-house development added to it. They won't be able to say that about any GPL-sphere additions- if you want to nip this in the bud, do such good work on the GPLed version that it becomes the definitive one and completely leaves the in-house version in the dust.
I concede that it looks like they'll want to release GPLed additions under the BL license to proprietary developers- but really, they can't. Any lawyer would eat them alive for such an infraction. Like it or not, they just forked it into BL and GPL versions. If you don't like BL, make the GPL the one to have.
Re:Lost bullshit education, work hard
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 2
I gotta say, I didn't even finish college but on my bookshelves (among a LOT of other books, virtually all used or inherited) are 'classics'. My grandmother had the Chicago Great Books series. When she died, I was interested in them and I got to have 'em.
It includes the Declaration of Independence- the Constitution- and some of the Federalist Papers.
I've read these (also Confucius, Moby Dick, Thoreau and Swift). I admit I haven't read Dante's Divine Comedy, or Virgil, or much Plato. But what I have seen of 'the classics' I consider damned important. If you participate in any way in United States politics, shouldn't you have some idea of how it's supposed to work and why?
Just one tiny snippet from the Federalist Papers-
"The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." -emphasis added
Compare this to what is happening RIGHT NOW with the executive branch seizing all warmaking power by questioning the loyalty of anyone in Congress who acts like they have the power to decide- which, Constitutionally, they do, and for a reason, dammit.
This is not academic stuff. Sometimes 'classics' are classics not because they are old, but because they are incredibly important. I happen to think that the way the USA was set up to operate IS important- and is even more important today, because the original division-of-powers, designed to defend against the instillation of royalty in the US, is breaking down.
Oh, grow up. All privatization means is that instead you'll give your money to Enron and Microsoft and Monsanto. Then Enron will give all the money to its top execs and implode, and Microsoft will arrange that you can't buy a PC capable of running your Linux anymore, and Monsanto will dump PCBs into your water. And you'll end up arguing desperately that you didn't want control over your own computer and that toxic waste is yummy in terrified attempts to prop up the valuation of your retirement account, because you still don't have any control over anything.
"Ideally, someone her age (32) should have at least $100,000 stashed away"
Ye gods! Why? How? Where?
I'm 34 and I don't think I know _anybody_ my age with '$100,000 stashed away'. Hell, I'm not at all sure it's a good thing to have that kind of money 'stashed away'. I make stuff- I have made a bunch of CDs (at ampcast.com, above), I make guitar DI boxes, I even make costume tails. That in spite of the fact that I live on a little more than $5000 a year- it's about budgeting, handling money responsibly, doing without and working hard on things (depression-era values?)
Money doesn't come from the money fairy, people- though I can understand 'Fortune' magazine not understanding this. It's exchange value for goods and services- it's to do things with, not to 'stash away'. From my perspective, as someone who tries to do and build things rather than 'stash away', these mythical people with '$100,000 stashed away' (a HUNDRED thou? not even ten thou, a freaking hundred?) are the PROBLEM.
Where does that money go? Typically not gold, or bank notes in a mattress. No, that money was expected to go straight to Enron- woops, I mean WorldCom- woops, I mean Microsoft. Do we see the problem?
These people are crazy. I can't even feel inferior to their expectations because they seem to have no clue that what they expect is what will RUIN this country. For how many years have people 'stashed away' in this way, and see where it's got us? The answer is not to make it safe to stash away investment in Wall Street and multinational corporations again.
Get out there and do stuff. Build, create, do- within your means, but I'm talking ALL your means, no 'stashing away'. If you get hit by a truck next week you'll have been happier to have been engaged with a real life- you'll be building abilities that are better than any corporate-wall-street-speculation-policy as insurance for your future- and the money you spend in pursuing your plans and interests is money that CIRCULATES, rather than getting 'stashed away'.
Honestly, what IS this shit? I think some people still believe in the money fairy, and it isn't Slashdotters or Gen Xers, it's Fortune Magazine. You'd think one Enron, one dotcom implosion, would've taught them.
I was just reading another 'windows will rule for 1000 years' spiel and as always it mentioned 'unless they really do come up with a better user interface paradigm'.
Seems to me that the real silver bullet- and this article reminds me of it for very obvious reasons- will be a better user RIGHTS paradigm.
Interface is a solved problem. User rights is very much in flux. I suggest that Linux should concentrate on guarding the user (and developer) rights paradigm. Under Free Software there's no distinction anyway- you're allowed.
BitKeeper should be spanked- and it should be a wake-up call. Their need for a business model can go pound sand- it does not contribute to the better USER RIGHTS paradigm that Linux needs to be able to offer.
I think what this person needs to do, if he's serious about wanting to have an impact on the computer animation world, is: start doing some kind of groundbreaking computer animation and cobble together the software to do it.
That, or just learn about all those APIs and train to be the code monkey that can put a software package together. I wish I could do that! I need a code monkey and I don't have one.
It seems as though modern coding is tricky enough that it doesn't leave room for someone to really push the limits in another domain. It's like state of the art software will HAVE to be the product of teamwork and cooperation- which gives me hope for the Free Software model, that allows different people to bring their strengths to the table.
Let me take a minute to just talk from my analogous perspective. I'm an audio geek who codes a bit. I've got arguably the highest performance dither/noiseshaper routines on the planet- very few people use them, because the software I built around them is pretty cheesy in some ways. It's not realtime, it understands virtually no APIs, can't even talk to sound hardware by itself. I don't understand that stuff. At the rate that it progresses, I may NEVER understand it in time to be doing current work on it. As long as my project relies solely on my own work, it will forever be incomplete- it does what I need, it absolutely wastes certain competing software like Pro Tools, but only by ignoring 90% of what Pro Tools actually does.
I have choices. I can keep doing what I do, or I can stop and begin working purely on coding and APIs, teaching myself how to talk to sound hardware etc. ASIO? TDM Digidesign code? The new Apple APIs? I do know what's involved, it's just over my head. The people doing this stuff have it under control, at least the bits they do, but they have no idea what IIR noise shaping is. Some of the people focussing on the audio side have that as well mastered as I do, but they don't necessarily have algorithms as CPU-optimized as I've been forced to make mine, because I'm writing in a pig-slow compiled Basic language (REALbasic- worth investigating for people authoring userfriendly IDEs).
So I'm turning more toward hardware now- got a nifty mic design using two different electret condenser mic elements inductively coupled and powered through a simple transformer. I've been experimenting with multiband compressed processing of the music I do. There are things I'd love to try with that, which I can't, because I haven't the coding skills. I have been able to half-speed master this multiband processing, using simple coding hacks- interpolate the samples to double the length, process (makes things bright, too), then average each pair of samples- sounds fantastic.
Coders often seem to feel like the masters of whatever domain they deign to touch- certainly the story poster seems to feel that way. That's a problem, because it leads to coders writing 'wonderful software' that misses the point- hence the advice I replied to. BE DOING THE WORK. You can't design something in your head for other people and expect it to be worth much- start working with this tool and trying to do great things, and you'll soon find out what needs to be improved.
Meanwhile- I continue to do my work out here in Vermont, without much connection to DAW software projects. I remember once, someone from one of the DAW software projects (Audacity?) wrote me asking what dither was. I tried to tell them (rather emphatically!) and offered any or all of my GPLed dither/noiseshaping code to use. I don't think they did, but they may have added dither to their 2-buss: hope so, as most professional sound engineers working with digital are familiar with the use of dithering in wordlength reduction, and to compete with the commercial software, the free software needs to perform as well.
Or better- because some of the commercial apps show the SAME PROBLEM. Pro Tools didn't have a dithered 2-buss for ages. It still has peculiar internal bussing that causes sound degradation in subtle ways by use of features that shouldn't be causing a problem. Simple MONITORING in Pro Tools is inferior to playing a WAV or AIFF on the host system. It's the same problem- the commercial sphere isn't necessarily being coded by the people using the actual tools, and this can be crippling. Just because they're getting paid doesn't mean they're listening...
If any DAW-coding linux geeks want to talk to me about making their software sound way richer and deeper than certain commercial competitors, I'm always willing to spend time tutoring people on this stuff. It's a specialized problem domain, is what it is. I can't do the coding for myself- that's another specialized domain. Who here has mastered ASIO drivers? Or even knows what they are? Right now I can't think of even ONE SIMPLE FREE AUDIO CAPTURE PROGRAM using ASIO recording at 24 bits and/or high sample rate. Without that, my code is blind and deaf to the outside world.
So- decide. Do you want to be a software developer, or an animation guy? Even though it is frustrating, I'd suggest being the animation guy. Start trying to do things that push the state of the art, and don't be too easily sidetracked into the realms of 'writing a Maya-like interface' or extensible modular software subsystem. It sounds like you want to be the hero software developer. What good is that if there's nothing there behind all those APIs and extensible user-enhanced scripting engine paradigms?
Target something other people AREN'T doing. And be very, very patient, because you WILL NOT be asked to participate- most coders won't see your expertise as relevant. But if you can code enough to tread water you can release- and if you do that you can get some other people who USE the software to be delighted. There's a wordlength reducer out there, POW-R, which is THE most highly rated proprietary dither- it's treated like the Coca-Cola formula and people worship it, it's a buzzword all to itself. I've beat its performance objectively in measurements- but I've also had people write me email just to say that they liked my 'Ten Nines' dither even better than POW-R 3. None of the DAW coders unaware of my existence even know what POW-R is (afaik), but what I did reached some people who were as familiar with the details of my little problem domain as I was, and no higher compliment could be paid- that was basically saying 'thank you for the software, thought you should know it beats the state of the art at any price'.
Do THAT. It will be much more useful than writing yet another general purpose animation system to be a bigshot.
And hint hint- if you write it as Free software, eventually someone WILL be able to put all the pieces together- and we'll all have software that on EVERY level absolutely wastes the expensive proprietary stuff. But the only way to do that is to become the obscure expert on some problem domain that people don't pay attention to.
It's not just a matter of deciding how you want to expose. When you can use it, this technique produces OUTRAGEOUS richness and color saturation. You can also do stuff like vary lighting- average some pics with sharp pinpoint lighting to hit highlights, and some with a big light diffuser to give warmth. Average them all together and you have lighting that can't quite exist in nature:)
That picture was taken with a WEBCAM- in about 12 distinct images that were averaged. Got the idea from Helmut Dersch, who wrote the software I used to do it. It's part of 'Panorama Tools':)
That kind of thinking is still available. It's out there for any human who chooses not to be a sociopathic monster.
It is also out there for any corporation, IF the rules are set up to build that value into the corporate brain. There is nothing inherent in collective entities that would preclude compassion or an understanding of the corporation's place in the world. Many co-ops and other small collective organizations have bylaws with the effect of a conscience, because their members may be crunchygranola types who expect it.
The pharmaceutical corporations are set up as modern corporate businesses, under a Chicago School of Economics model that holds exchange value to be the only value, and human existence to be meaningless except in the situation of exchange value. Effectively, this means that if the drug companies could earn more money by KILLING people than by curing them, they would do so unhesitatingly. Chemical companies already do- I'm talking about drug companies intentionally marketing something that kills people and locks in a profit center, some sort of dependency.
That value system isn't good enough for that industry. Someone needs to come up with a way to make pharmaceutical corporations literally take the Hippocratic Oath. There has to be a way to make healing their first priority. In particular, a system that's increasingly locking up research and forbidding further work on serious and important diseases is a system that needs to be thrown out.
You're wasting your time- that guy isn't interested in reality, he only wants what he wants and will deny anything that gets in the way. It's annoying, I wished I could smack him. Copping an attitude like that is no sort of virtue.
I live on a mountain in Vermont, and even then there are days when I have to be careful what I do- because I'm asthmatic, and believe it or not we get dangerous levels of SMOG occasionally. Worse than LA, sometimes. It comes up from New York and New Jersey when the weather conditions are a certain way.
We also get to have meat with feces again, Bush has rolled back some of the FDA regulations thanks to lobbying from meat packing corporations, and people are already getting sick. The tainted meat, when discovered, is not destroyed- it's just cooked and resold.
Sure, there are people out there who are as utterly irresponsible as the original poster. And some of them are completely shameless. There's also a mental illness called 'schizoid' which is similar, as it's about complete disregard for society and for others.
Nobody said this was a virtue, or even socially acceptable- nobody worth listening to, anyhow.
So the next time you see someone spout off with some 'go buy your SUV, dammit, no guilt!', think to yourself: if it wasn't for the social responsibility that YOU scorn, buddy, I would gladly beat the crap out of you, or simply off you to improve the species.
These guys DEPEND completely on OTHER people being socially enlightened enough to not kick their asses...
X-plane is FAA approved for training towards your Commercial Certificate, Instrument Rating, or Airline Transport Pilot Certificate. Go look at that page and see if it doesn't make you spooge from geeky delight;)
MSFS is a lousy sim to train for anything. The flight modeling is lousy compared with serious simulators, and it's not FAA approved for any sort of training at all. By comparison, Virtual Wings and Elite can be used for IFR training and X-Plane can be used for Instrument Rating, Commercial and Airline Transport Certificate. WHEN used with a $150,000 Motus full-motion platform. But the software is available separately- and competes with MSFS. At, I believe, a markedly lower price- and it's available for MacOSX, not just Windows.
So let's have no more of this 'MSFS is so good for IFR training' silliness;)
It'll be the second. That's what they did to Bungie, after all. Bungie had most of Halo done, but they had to come up with levels. Anyone familiar with the Marathon series knows how creative Bungie COULD be in doing that. Microsoft didn't let them, which is why the Halo levels are widely considered repetitive (see Penny Arcade for an, um, colorful take on the subject)
Same thing is likely to happen to Rare. Likely might be putting it weakly- Microsoft does not produce art or quality, and they WILL do the same thing to Rare. Just as Bungie isn't the same Bungie, Rare won't mean the same thing either. It's simply a question of what your boss will let you do.
Bingo. They'll write off a bunch of stuff that shipped gold and was returned platinum (read: NONE of it would sell) at full retail. Best of all, I'd bet a hundred bucks that in doing that they are exempt from ever paying an artist royalty on what they're unloading! It'd fall under the 'free goods' clause, no question.
This is SO meaningless. Fun to watch though:) make 'em squirm, force 'em to slime more visibly. Hey, every little bit helps:)
Let's extend that. Is your expression, 'music is simply property' property? I'm not sure I ever heard anyone say exactly that before. Should you get a title to that saying, should you get to charge anyone else for the rights to say it?
If you write off the public domain like that, it leads to absurdity pretty quickly. I think the counter-view, 'music is nobody's property', would be less damaging in the long term...
(1) CO2 causes global warming. Suppose that's happening, then-
(2) ice cap melting: Huge amounts of fresh water dump into the oceans. That IS happening- it's been observed. So-
(3) fresh water disrupts the ocean's convection currents, as is being reported here. At which point-
(4) Ice age. At least you get your ice cap back- at least in some places maybe! The energy in the system is still elevated, but now you have a dramatically different climate picture- and that is how you get 'warming' and 'cooling' at the same time. At which point-
(5) "Whoa." The global climate goes completely chaotic, with the oceans no longer in a metastable state, and the energy from the warming producing wild variations in local weather patterns. It may stabilize at some point. It may not. Chaos means you can predict the general range of behavior, more or less, but you can't predict it literally.
(6) Invest in emergency rescue technology for weather catastrophes. Mother Nature is about to kick our ASS, and we've nobody to blame but ourselves- and our bad luck to be doing what we do at the time we're doing it. Things would probably be getting nasty even in Greenpeace-eco-treehugger-world, but that's not the world we live in, and the difference means that things will get UGLY.
Whoa. I'm not certain you're right, but do you realize that if you are right, you're spelling out conditions for unthinkably violent weather? Gulf stream shutting off, new ice age PLUS greenhouse effect global warming sounds like, 'welcome to Weather Gone Apeshit'. What areas would be at risk of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, in the event of that kind of additional energy being put into the weather system?
Good motivations, but the great economies of the British Empire and the United States were built on tariffs, price controls and trade controls. If other countries are to bootstrap to the point where they can play 'free trade' with the big boys, they gotta be allowed to control their trade like we did when we were their size. Otherwise they'll just get sucked dry, which in the long run does nobody any good, and damages trade.
This is great! Bring it on. The more the better as far as I am concerned.
I'm one of the people who's supposed to be concerned about this kind of thing. I'm a musician. I produce sounds as art, and I write songs which are copyright to me. You'd think I'd be like 'whoa, slow down' with this stuff, the p2p.
Here's why I'm not.
Music has long been an avenue for social commentary. From 'What's Going On' to 'For What It's Worth' and 'Ohio', not to mention stuff like Tom Lehrer's 'So Long, Mom' and 'Who's Next?', it's been a way to put across a perspective using art. It doesn't have to be really detailed- in fact, art that's really specific that way tends to suck, polemical to the extent that it's haranguing you. Some of the best art with political importance has been, like 'For What It's Worth', relatively vague. It paints a compelling picture in little words, the details can be filled in by real dialogue. It's about using music to open someone's mind to the POSSIBILITY of dialogue.
Now currently in the USA, we literally have the authorities shutting down communications on the grounds of 'supporting terrorist activities'. These are the same people who spent government money to drape a statue tit- they are not oblivious to art, they are just determined to make it behave. We're now looking at a situation where it is a real concern- it wouldn't be much of a jump to see these guys categorize dissident art and music as 'aid to terrorists', and to see them methodically expunge it from the Internet wherever they find it.
That's where it starts to get on my turf. I'm an American- 34, grew up middle class, normally you would think I would get to produce whatever art or music I wanted. Maybe. But the spectacle of a manufactured war with Iraq so appalls me (hell, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff are against it too, I don't think I'm alone there) that I can't sit around experimenting with instrumental music anymore.
Like I said in an earlier post, I've cut a recent song, "Blood on the Sand", directly about the Iraq situation. I wrote it hardcore and kept it as simple as I could, I played it hardcore until I had blisters on my fingers, I mixed it and put it out, and now by Bush's own rules I'm aiding the terrorists- because if it's gotta be 'us vs. them' and 'us' means what he's doing, NO WAY am I getting behind that, and that makes me 'them' and yeah, I'm trying to support the point of view against this Iraq overthrow.
How does that relate to streaming p2p? I would think it was obvious but the point can't be made too often. We are in a situation RAPIDLY approaching suppression of political dissidents. Already the government is shutting down web sites on political grounds- you cannot so openly express your support for those the government considers active enemies. How far away is the next step, suppressing stuff that doesn't actively support the government? That's where the rising tide begins to drown me- I don't specifically support anyone the government considers terrorists, but I can't condemn them as blindly as I'm asked to. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, considered the birthplace of American Revolution, and now I have to wonder whether the desperation shown by those New England patriots is now echoed somewhere in the Middle East- and even to think such thoughts is less and less permitted.
I am unfamiliar with firing a gun, and I am unfamiliar with hand to hand combat. In a war, in a revolution, I'm not that much use to some things. But I'm an artist- and when I can no longer hide and entertain myself with purposeless artistic stuff, my art becomes my weapon, and the harder I work the better a weapon it becomes. It's my only recourse.
So, I view all forms of p2p as samizdat- on the one hand, organizations like the RIAA consider they have ownership of a lot of art and their grounds for suppressing its communication is on the grounds that it's their property. It's important to remember that the government can consider art's content as grounds for suppressing it- we're 90% there already. At that point, p2p (including streaming) can be the only method for suppressed ideas to get a hearing. Doesn't mean the ideas will all be good or worthy- but to somebody expressing ideas in danger of being suppressed, p2p is hugely important.
Like me. And I could go farther- and may have to if my conscience so demands, and it comes around with a song that needs to be heard.
I feel sorry for anybody who is only capable of sitting in a La-Z-Boy. Our society has produced such people- quite a few such people. They would have to work and learn to be capable of anything else. Even to march they would have to go outside, and be able to walk for an extended period of time. In our wonderful best-of-all-worlds society not everybody is even capable of that. I know people so essentially unhealthy that they'd be endangering their lives just being around tear gas, which is typical crowd control tech.
You can't speak for me, however, because the very war you're talking about is what forced me back into the studio- I'm a musician and maybe I'm not good for much but it's the only weapon I got, and I cut the hardest rock tune I could around the hook, 'How much for a barrel... of blood on the sand?'. Got it right here. Ampcast, which I'm using, would allow me to try and charge a buck for a full download- maybe some of you, maybe YOU, would understand why that's the last thing I'd want to do. Currently I have absolutely no way for people to 'reward' me for this work- yes, I did have 'blisters on me fingers', especially after the bass part- I just want the ideas out there. It's painting a picture of where the Bush cronies are coming from, as if briefing some diplomat who's being sent to the Middle East only to pillage it and declare war on it.
I also cut a 'radio edit', both to bring it under three minutes and to experiment with 'modern major label style' loudness maximizing- that one is also free download and likewise there's not a thing you can do to pay for it- later I'll get a CD out, full resolution, couldn't wait that long to get this track out there. It says what I needed to say about the whole "Let's have a war so the 'axis of evil' can all die" mindset that really makes me sick at heart. Question the ethics? Let's talk 'get horribly stressed and feel helpless and powerless to freaking stop it'.
That said-
You should note that this my only weapon against this insanity, is taking place through the distribution of mp3s- and if I should happen to write something SO compelling that it seriously made me a problem (I wish- will keep working tho) and the government came and took me away and ordered my ISP and Ampcast to not distribute material that aided terrorists (WHICH! IS! HAPPENING! And it could happen to me as well), then p2p services, notably Gnutella, could continue to circulate my ideas if they were worthy.
This is nothing more than samizdat as practiced in other repressive regimes that marked off whole positions or areas of discourse as forbidden.
Now that the United States is openly one of them and will repress words that are challenging enough to the government's aims, all this 'sheltered' fuss over the DMCA is not as irrelevant as you think. It's the copyright industry wanting to stamp out uncontrolled copying. However, uncontrolled copying can be the last refuge of the patriotic dissident.
It all ties together- we all have to shovel the shit on OUR doorstep. For some people, DMCA weighs more heavily on them than a thousand dead Arabs, all of whom have names and mothers, none of whom you know. Rather than condemning someone like that, how about letting them fight their own battles? I can tell you right now that from my point of view as a musician and songwriter, it matters that people fight DMCA- theoretically defending my copyright values is a piss-poor bargain for losing the ability to have a global communications network that can take suppressed music and art and still get it to where people can think about it. The RIAA/MPAA dreamworld is also a tool for political control rivalling the Cold War USSR, and that matters, especially now.
You're right about there being more important issues out there- but hey, you just hit on a great idea.
Have everybody specifically set out to play a DVD THEY OWN on Linux and then say 'arrest me!'. Have them give away copies of DeCSS too. Leave p2p out of it for now- not necessary.
How heavy are these? With the little two-motor, no-steering ones, you could make little tiny blimps or something. Build propellers instead of the wheels. Granted, you can buy radio controlled blimps, but maybe not quite that teeny:)
Hey! Boats!:D And best of all, the range of the transmitter is unfortunately not much bigger than your tub anyway, so..;)
I'd say it's also a major problem that there's less incentive to produce a cure than there is to produce 'treatments' that postpone death without curing. Healthy people don't buy more drugs. As long as the pharmaceutical industry is committed to profit above all else, and does not value human life in its own right, it will ACTIVELY avoid even looking for solutions that are 'too effective', should any exist.
The R&D doesn't even WANT to find a cure- a cure would mean people would use it and then stop buying medicine. That is every bit as large of a problem. It would be as if your family doctor carefully avoided healing you, preferring to keep you in a state of precarious health and expensively visiting him all the time. The difference is, doctors can be sued for malpractice. Pharmaceutical corporations cannot be sued for malpractice- under the current rules of capitalization they are required to maximize profit, even though they pursue a medical function.
Are you sure you mean 'will be'? If it was being fought, where would you hear about it- CNN?
Perhaps it is being fought and lost. After all, what would it look like? The corporations are as amorphous as Al Quaeda. Even when you get an Anniston or Bhopal, it's tough to identify a specific person responsible for the deaths. How do you fight a legal fiction and a set of codified behaviors about as enlightened as a shark?
Check your premises, Ayn. Game theory is full of abundant evidence that direct pursuit of self-interest can be catastrophic. Essentially, selfishness is dangerous because it leads to many undesirable effects, most notably the weakening of the societal infrastructure that people tend to rely on. It benefits you to get rid of the workers' health plan to save money until they all DIE and you're hosed. It benefits corporations to patent everything in the world until scientific progress is completely hobbled and the only groundbreaking work is happening in places like China which don't necessarily respect those rules. Currently, what's being set up is the hobbling of Western Civilisation- it could become impossible to do any new work, either scientific or artistic, because of the stridency of intellectual property challenging any new works that might bear some resemblance to something patented or copyrighted.
In that case, none of the IP holders (they think like you- at least the corporations do, because they are legal fictions sociopathic by design) will budge, and the next Reinassance will have to take place in what we now laughably call the 'third world'. Possibly this will lead to war, and the stultified 'first world' will actively try to kill citizens of the 'third world' since they're unable to prevent 'em from thinking and creating. At the very least, severe trade sanctions would be expected.
All because 'intellectual property' isn't intrinsically limited- if someone can get a patent on 'having an idea', for instance, and ENFORCE it, selfishness would imply that they would take no thought of the impact on society, but just enforce it and bring other people's progress to a standstill. In order to value 'overall societal progress' one has to take into account the development of one's fellows, even to encourage it. A rising tide floats all boats. Note the avoidance of the word 'competitors'. Not everything is a freakin' market, Ayn.
Slashdot Mirror
With Bitkeeper, the potential for a real problem (or at least a hell of an inconvenience) is right there, and so you see RMS not even thinking of naming conventions because his concern is about something a lot more important.
There are people who don't see it as a problem- since buying a license/shifting development to something else/jumping through whatever hoops will be technically possible. It's the same as saying there is no such thing as force because (for instance) if a guy has a gun to your head you can take your chances dodging away, or pretend to submit and then escape later, etc etc. It's the same thing as saying the actions of commercial proprietary entities cannot ever be force because people can choose not to buy the product.
Technically this is so, but in the shades-of-gray world of reality such acts can be a KIND of force, simply not an ultimate force. I've seen the suggestion that Slashdotters should get everybody to violate the DMCA and turn themselves in, civil disobedience. It's true that if enough people did this, particularly important people, the law would be destroyed. OK, so where are they? Funny how in reality the DMCA still has force enough to be a danger, even though technically it's not a problem because it can be destroyed through mass civil disobedience.
It is just this sort of thing Stallman is concerned about.
I'm with him, in that I see a conceptual problem with mingling free and proprietary software in this way. I realise in real world uses you don't always get to be ideologically perfect- I myself code Free code using an IDE that's totally nonfree, because I'm not good enough yet to use more difficult programming languages (really it's the APIs for GUI C/C++ coding that throw me, I can't even get started) so I find I'm forced to use a brilliant but proprietary product (REALbasic) for non-C-coder types, or fail to code anything.
I guess the difference between me and Bitkeeper supporters is that I feel I have less option to choose a Free path- and I remain firmly aware that I don't want to stay in proprietary-land a second longer than I have to. With the Bitkeeper thing, I see people saying, we don't really care, the degree of control over our own environments we'd get from Free code is less important than the convenience of using this proprietary tool. I see that as a problem- free software is not an object or an abstraction, it is a PRACTICE that should be pursued where possible. Supporting Bitkeeper is intentionally pursuing the opposite of this practice for personal gain. And personal gain isn't enough of an excuse.
I concede that it looks like they'll want to release GPLed additions under the BL license to proprietary developers- but really, they can't. Any lawyer would eat them alive for such an infraction. Like it or not, they just forked it into BL and GPL versions. If you don't like BL, make the GPL the one to have.
It includes the Declaration of Independence- the Constitution- and some of the Federalist Papers.
I've read these (also Confucius, Moby Dick, Thoreau and Swift). I admit I haven't read Dante's Divine Comedy, or Virgil, or much Plato. But what I have seen of 'the classics' I consider damned important. If you participate in any way in United States politics, shouldn't you have some idea of how it's supposed to work and why?
Just one tiny snippet from the Federalist Papers-
Compare this to what is happening RIGHT NOW with the executive branch seizing all warmaking power by questioning the loyalty of anyone in Congress who acts like they have the power to decide- which, Constitutionally, they do, and for a reason, dammit.This is not academic stuff. Sometimes 'classics' are classics not because they are old, but because they are incredibly important. I happen to think that the way the USA was set up to operate IS important- and is even more important today, because the original division-of-powers, designed to defend against the instillation of royalty in the US, is breaking down.
And there is no tooth fairy.
Ye gods! Why? How? Where?
I'm 34 and I don't think I know _anybody_ my age with '$100,000 stashed away'. Hell, I'm not at all sure it's a good thing to have that kind of money 'stashed away'. I make stuff- I have made a bunch of CDs (at ampcast.com, above), I make guitar DI boxes, I even make costume tails. That in spite of the fact that I live on a little more than $5000 a year- it's about budgeting, handling money responsibly, doing without and working hard on things (depression-era values?)
Money doesn't come from the money fairy, people- though I can understand 'Fortune' magazine not understanding this. It's exchange value for goods and services- it's to do things with, not to 'stash away'. From my perspective, as someone who tries to do and build things rather than 'stash away', these mythical people with '$100,000 stashed away' (a HUNDRED thou? not even ten thou, a freaking hundred?) are the PROBLEM.
Where does that money go? Typically not gold, or bank notes in a mattress. No, that money was expected to go straight to Enron- woops, I mean WorldCom- woops, I mean Microsoft. Do we see the problem?
These people are crazy. I can't even feel inferior to their expectations because they seem to have no clue that what they expect is what will RUIN this country. For how many years have people 'stashed away' in this way, and see where it's got us? The answer is not to make it safe to stash away investment in Wall Street and multinational corporations again.
Get out there and do stuff. Build, create, do- within your means, but I'm talking ALL your means, no 'stashing away'. If you get hit by a truck next week you'll have been happier to have been engaged with a real life- you'll be building abilities that are better than any corporate-wall-street-speculation-policy as insurance for your future- and the money you spend in pursuing your plans and interests is money that CIRCULATES, rather than getting 'stashed away'.
Honestly, what IS this shit? I think some people still believe in the money fairy, and it isn't Slashdotters or Gen Xers, it's Fortune Magazine. You'd think one Enron, one dotcom implosion, would've taught them.
Seems to me that the real silver bullet- and this article reminds me of it for very obvious reasons- will be a better user RIGHTS paradigm.
Interface is a solved problem. User rights is very much in flux. I suggest that Linux should concentrate on guarding the user (and developer) rights paradigm. Under Free Software there's no distinction anyway- you're allowed.
BitKeeper should be spanked- and it should be a wake-up call. Their need for a business model can go pound sand- it does not contribute to the better USER RIGHTS paradigm that Linux needs to be able to offer.
I think what this person needs to do, if he's serious about wanting to have an impact on the computer animation world, is: start doing some kind of groundbreaking computer animation and cobble together the software to do it.
That, or just learn about all those APIs and train to be the code monkey that can put a software package together. I wish I could do that! I need a code monkey and I don't have one.
It seems as though modern coding is tricky enough that it doesn't leave room for someone to really push the limits in another domain. It's like state of the art software will HAVE to be the product of teamwork and cooperation- which gives me hope for the Free Software model, that allows different people to bring their strengths to the table.
Let me take a minute to just talk from my analogous perspective. I'm an audio geek who codes a bit. I've got arguably the highest performance dither/noiseshaper routines on the planet- very few people use them, because the software I built around them is pretty cheesy in some ways. It's not realtime, it understands virtually no APIs, can't even talk to sound hardware by itself. I don't understand that stuff. At the rate that it progresses, I may NEVER understand it in time to be doing current work on it. As long as my project relies solely on my own work, it will forever be incomplete- it does what I need, it absolutely wastes certain competing software like Pro Tools, but only by ignoring 90% of what Pro Tools actually does.
I have choices. I can keep doing what I do, or I can stop and begin working purely on coding and APIs, teaching myself how to talk to sound hardware etc. ASIO? TDM Digidesign code? The new Apple APIs? I do know what's involved, it's just over my head. The people doing this stuff have it under control, at least the bits they do, but they have no idea what IIR noise shaping is. Some of the people focussing on the audio side have that as well mastered as I do, but they don't necessarily have algorithms as CPU-optimized as I've been forced to make mine, because I'm writing in a pig-slow compiled Basic language (REALbasic- worth investigating for people authoring userfriendly IDEs).
So I'm turning more toward hardware now- got a nifty mic design using two different electret condenser mic elements inductively coupled and powered through a simple transformer. I've been experimenting with multiband compressed processing of the music I do. There are things I'd love to try with that, which I can't, because I haven't the coding skills. I have been able to half-speed master this multiband processing, using simple coding hacks- interpolate the samples to double the length, process (makes things bright, too), then average each pair of samples- sounds fantastic.
Coders often seem to feel like the masters of whatever domain they deign to touch- certainly the story poster seems to feel that way. That's a problem, because it leads to coders writing 'wonderful software' that misses the point- hence the advice I replied to. BE DOING THE WORK. You can't design something in your head for other people and expect it to be worth much- start working with this tool and trying to do great things, and you'll soon find out what needs to be improved.
Meanwhile- I continue to do my work out here in Vermont, without much connection to DAW software projects. I remember once, someone from one of the DAW software projects (Audacity?) wrote me asking what dither was. I tried to tell them (rather emphatically!) and offered any or all of my GPLed dither/noiseshaping code to use. I don't think they did, but they may have added dither to their 2-buss: hope so, as most professional sound engineers working with digital are familiar with the use of dithering in wordlength reduction, and to compete with the commercial software, the free software needs to perform as well.
Or better- because some of the commercial apps show the SAME PROBLEM. Pro Tools didn't have a dithered 2-buss for ages. It still has peculiar internal bussing that causes sound degradation in subtle ways by use of features that shouldn't be causing a problem. Simple MONITORING in Pro Tools is inferior to playing a WAV or AIFF on the host system. It's the same problem- the commercial sphere isn't necessarily being coded by the people using the actual tools, and this can be crippling. Just because they're getting paid doesn't mean they're listening...
If any DAW-coding linux geeks want to talk to me about making their software sound way richer and deeper than certain commercial competitors, I'm always willing to spend time tutoring people on this stuff. It's a specialized problem domain, is what it is. I can't do the coding for myself- that's another specialized domain. Who here has mastered ASIO drivers? Or even knows what they are? Right now I can't think of even ONE SIMPLE FREE AUDIO CAPTURE PROGRAM using ASIO recording at 24 bits and/or high sample rate. Without that, my code is blind and deaf to the outside world.
So- decide. Do you want to be a software developer, or an animation guy? Even though it is frustrating, I'd suggest being the animation guy. Start trying to do things that push the state of the art, and don't be too easily sidetracked into the realms of 'writing a Maya-like interface' or extensible modular software subsystem. It sounds like you want to be the hero software developer. What good is that if there's nothing there behind all those APIs and extensible user-enhanced scripting engine paradigms?
Target something other people AREN'T doing. And be very, very patient, because you WILL NOT be asked to participate- most coders won't see your expertise as relevant. But if you can code enough to tread water you can release- and if you do that you can get some other people who USE the software to be delighted. There's a wordlength reducer out there, POW-R, which is THE most highly rated proprietary dither- it's treated like the Coca-Cola formula and people worship it, it's a buzzword all to itself. I've beat its performance objectively in measurements- but I've also had people write me email just to say that they liked my 'Ten Nines' dither even better than POW-R 3. None of the DAW coders unaware of my existence even know what POW-R is (afaik), but what I did reached some people who were as familiar with the details of my little problem domain as I was, and no higher compliment could be paid- that was basically saying 'thank you for the software, thought you should know it beats the state of the art at any price'.
Do THAT. It will be much more useful than writing yet another general purpose animation system to be a bigshot.
And hint hint- if you write it as Free software, eventually someone WILL be able to put all the pieces together- and we'll all have software that on EVERY level absolutely wastes the expensive proprietary stuff. But the only way to do that is to become the obscure expert on some problem domain that people don't pay attention to.
Just a suggestion....
It's not just a matter of deciding how you want to expose. When you can use it, this technique produces OUTRAGEOUS richness and color saturation. You can also do stuff like vary lighting- average some pics with sharp pinpoint lighting to hit highlights, and some with a big light diffuser to give warmth. Average them all together and you have lighting that can't quite exist in nature :)
That picture was taken with a WEBCAM- in about 12 distinct images that were averaged. Got the idea from Helmut Dersch, who wrote the software I used to do it. It's part of 'Panorama Tools' :)
It is also out there for any corporation, IF the rules are set up to build that value into the corporate brain. There is nothing inherent in collective entities that would preclude compassion or an understanding of the corporation's place in the world. Many co-ops and other small collective organizations have bylaws with the effect of a conscience, because their members may be crunchygranola types who expect it.
The pharmaceutical corporations are set up as modern corporate businesses, under a Chicago School of Economics model that holds exchange value to be the only value, and human existence to be meaningless except in the situation of exchange value. Effectively, this means that if the drug companies could earn more money by KILLING people than by curing them, they would do so unhesitatingly. Chemical companies already do- I'm talking about drug companies intentionally marketing something that kills people and locks in a profit center, some sort of dependency.
That value system isn't good enough for that industry. Someone needs to come up with a way to make pharmaceutical corporations literally take the Hippocratic Oath. There has to be a way to make healing their first priority. In particular, a system that's increasingly locking up research and forbidding further work on serious and important diseases is a system that needs to be thrown out.
I live on a mountain in Vermont, and even then there are days when I have to be careful what I do- because I'm asthmatic, and believe it or not we get dangerous levels of SMOG occasionally. Worse than LA, sometimes. It comes up from New York and New Jersey when the weather conditions are a certain way.
We also get to have meat with feces again, Bush has rolled back some of the FDA regulations thanks to lobbying from meat packing corporations, and people are already getting sick. The tainted meat, when discovered, is not destroyed- it's just cooked and resold.
Sure, there are people out there who are as utterly irresponsible as the original poster. And some of them are completely shameless. There's also a mental illness called 'schizoid' which is similar, as it's about complete disregard for society and for others.
Nobody said this was a virtue, or even socially acceptable- nobody worth listening to, anyhow.
So the next time you see someone spout off with some 'go buy your SUV, dammit, no guilt!', think to yourself: if it wasn't for the social responsibility that YOU scorn, buddy, I would gladly beat the crap out of you, or simply off you to improve the species.
These guys DEPEND completely on OTHER people being socially enlightened enough to not kick their asses...
MSFS is a lousy sim to train for anything. The flight modeling is lousy compared with serious simulators, and it's not FAA approved for any sort of training at all. By comparison, Virtual Wings and Elite can be used for IFR training and X-Plane can be used for Instrument Rating, Commercial and Airline Transport Certificate. WHEN used with a $150,000 Motus full-motion platform. But the software is available separately- and competes with MSFS. At, I believe, a markedly lower price- and it's available for MacOSX, not just Windows.
So let's have no more of this 'MSFS is so good for IFR training' silliness ;)
Same thing is likely to happen to Rare. Likely might be putting it weakly- Microsoft does not produce art or quality, and they WILL do the same thing to Rare. Just as Bungie isn't the same Bungie, Rare won't mean the same thing either. It's simply a question of what your boss will let you do.
Because THEY say so?
Smarten up...
This is SO meaningless. Fun to watch though :) make 'em squirm, force 'em to slime more visibly. Hey, every little bit helps :)
Let's extend that. Is your expression, 'music is simply property' property? I'm not sure I ever heard anyone say exactly that before. Should you get a title to that saying, should you get to charge anyone else for the rights to say it?
If you write off the public domain like that, it leads to absurdity pretty quickly. I think the counter-view, 'music is nobody's property', would be less damaging in the long term...
(1) CO2 causes global warming. Suppose that's happening, then-
(2) ice cap melting: Huge amounts of fresh water dump into the oceans. That IS happening- it's been observed. So-
(3) fresh water disrupts the ocean's convection currents, as is being reported here. At which point-
(4) Ice age. At least you get your ice cap back- at least in some places maybe! The energy in the system is still elevated, but now you have a dramatically different climate picture- and that is how you get 'warming' and 'cooling' at the same time. At which point-
(5) "Whoa." The global climate goes completely chaotic, with the oceans no longer in a metastable state, and the energy from the warming producing wild variations in local weather patterns. It may stabilize at some point. It may not. Chaos means you can predict the general range of behavior, more or less, but you can't predict it literally.
(6) Invest in emergency rescue technology for weather catastrophes. Mother Nature is about to kick our ASS, and we've nobody to blame but ourselves- and our bad luck to be doing what we do at the time we're doing it. Things would probably be getting nasty even in Greenpeace-eco-treehugger-world, but that's not the world we live in, and the difference means that things will get UGLY.
Whoa. I'm not certain you're right, but do you realize that if you are right, you're spelling out conditions for unthinkably violent weather? Gulf stream shutting off, new ice age PLUS greenhouse effect global warming sounds like, 'welcome to Weather Gone Apeshit'. What areas would be at risk of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, in the event of that kind of additional energy being put into the weather system?
Good motivations, but the great economies of the British Empire and the United States were built on tariffs, price controls and trade controls. If other countries are to bootstrap to the point where they can play 'free trade' with the big boys, they gotta be allowed to control their trade like we did when we were their size. Otherwise they'll just get sucked dry, which in the long run does nobody any good, and damages trade.
I'm one of the people who's supposed to be concerned about this kind of thing. I'm a musician. I produce sounds as art, and I write songs which are copyright to me. You'd think I'd be like 'whoa, slow down' with this stuff, the p2p.
Here's why I'm not.
Music has long been an avenue for social commentary. From 'What's Going On' to 'For What It's Worth' and 'Ohio', not to mention stuff like Tom Lehrer's 'So Long, Mom' and 'Who's Next?', it's been a way to put across a perspective using art. It doesn't have to be really detailed- in fact, art that's really specific that way tends to suck, polemical to the extent that it's haranguing you. Some of the best art with political importance has been, like 'For What It's Worth', relatively vague. It paints a compelling picture in little words, the details can be filled in by real dialogue. It's about using music to open someone's mind to the POSSIBILITY of dialogue.
Now currently in the USA, we literally have the authorities shutting down communications on the grounds of 'supporting terrorist activities'. These are the same people who spent government money to drape a statue tit- they are not oblivious to art, they are just determined to make it behave. We're now looking at a situation where it is a real concern- it wouldn't be much of a jump to see these guys categorize dissident art and music as 'aid to terrorists', and to see them methodically expunge it from the Internet wherever they find it.
That's where it starts to get on my turf. I'm an American- 34, grew up middle class, normally you would think I would get to produce whatever art or music I wanted. Maybe. But the spectacle of a manufactured war with Iraq so appalls me (hell, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff are against it too, I don't think I'm alone there) that I can't sit around experimenting with instrumental music anymore.
Like I said in an earlier post, I've cut a recent song, "Blood on the Sand", directly about the Iraq situation. I wrote it hardcore and kept it as simple as I could, I played it hardcore until I had blisters on my fingers, I mixed it and put it out, and now by Bush's own rules I'm aiding the terrorists- because if it's gotta be 'us vs. them' and 'us' means what he's doing, NO WAY am I getting behind that, and that makes me 'them' and yeah, I'm trying to support the point of view against this Iraq overthrow.
How does that relate to streaming p2p? I would think it was obvious but the point can't be made too often. We are in a situation RAPIDLY approaching suppression of political dissidents. Already the government is shutting down web sites on political grounds- you cannot so openly express your support for those the government considers active enemies. How far away is the next step, suppressing stuff that doesn't actively support the government? That's where the rising tide begins to drown me- I don't specifically support anyone the government considers terrorists, but I can't condemn them as blindly as I'm asked to. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, considered the birthplace of American Revolution, and now I have to wonder whether the desperation shown by those New England patriots is now echoed somewhere in the Middle East- and even to think such thoughts is less and less permitted.
I am unfamiliar with firing a gun, and I am unfamiliar with hand to hand combat. In a war, in a revolution, I'm not that much use to some things. But I'm an artist- and when I can no longer hide and entertain myself with purposeless artistic stuff, my art becomes my weapon, and the harder I work the better a weapon it becomes. It's my only recourse.
So, I view all forms of p2p as samizdat- on the one hand, organizations like the RIAA consider they have ownership of a lot of art and their grounds for suppressing its communication is on the grounds that it's their property. It's important to remember that the government can consider art's content as grounds for suppressing it- we're 90% there already. At that point, p2p (including streaming) can be the only method for suppressed ideas to get a hearing. Doesn't mean the ideas will all be good or worthy- but to somebody expressing ideas in danger of being suppressed, p2p is hugely important.
Like me. And I could go farther- and may have to if my conscience so demands, and it comes around with a song that needs to be heard.
So, more p2p, please! :D
Chris Johnson
You can't speak for me, however, because the very war you're talking about is what forced me back into the studio- I'm a musician and maybe I'm not good for much but it's the only weapon I got, and I cut the hardest rock tune I could around the hook, 'How much for a barrel... of blood on the sand?'. Got it right here. Ampcast, which I'm using, would allow me to try and charge a buck for a full download- maybe some of you, maybe YOU, would understand why that's the last thing I'd want to do. Currently I have absolutely no way for people to 'reward' me for this work- yes, I did have 'blisters on me fingers', especially after the bass part- I just want the ideas out there. It's painting a picture of where the Bush cronies are coming from, as if briefing some diplomat who's being sent to the Middle East only to pillage it and declare war on it.
I also cut a 'radio edit', both to bring it under three minutes and to experiment with 'modern major label style' loudness maximizing- that one is also free download and likewise there's not a thing you can do to pay for it- later I'll get a CD out, full resolution, couldn't wait that long to get this track out there. It says what I needed to say about the whole "Let's have a war so the 'axis of evil' can all die" mindset that really makes me sick at heart. Question the ethics? Let's talk 'get horribly stressed and feel helpless and powerless to freaking stop it'.
That said-
You should note that this my only weapon against this insanity, is taking place through the distribution of mp3s- and if I should happen to write something SO compelling that it seriously made me a problem (I wish- will keep working tho) and the government came and took me away and ordered my ISP and Ampcast to not distribute material that aided terrorists (WHICH! IS! HAPPENING! And it could happen to me as well), then p2p services, notably Gnutella, could continue to circulate my ideas if they were worthy.
This is nothing more than samizdat as practiced in other repressive regimes that marked off whole positions or areas of discourse as forbidden.
Now that the United States is openly one of them and will repress words that are challenging enough to the government's aims, all this 'sheltered' fuss over the DMCA is not as irrelevant as you think. It's the copyright industry wanting to stamp out uncontrolled copying. However, uncontrolled copying can be the last refuge of the patriotic dissident.
It all ties together- we all have to shovel the shit on OUR doorstep. For some people, DMCA weighs more heavily on them than a thousand dead Arabs, all of whom have names and mothers, none of whom you know. Rather than condemning someone like that, how about letting them fight their own battles? I can tell you right now that from my point of view as a musician and songwriter, it matters that people fight DMCA- theoretically defending my copyright values is a piss-poor bargain for losing the ability to have a global communications network that can take suppressed music and art and still get it to where people can think about it. The RIAA/MPAA dreamworld is also a tool for political control rivalling the Cold War USSR, and that matters, especially now.
Dissident Stallmanist musician slashdotter #580, signing off.
Have everybody specifically set out to play a DVD THEY OWN on Linux and then say 'arrest me!'. Have them give away copies of DeCSS too. Leave p2p out of it for now- not necessary.
Hey! Boats! :D And best of all, the range of the transmitter is unfortunately not much bigger than your tub anyway, so.. ;)
The R&D doesn't even WANT to find a cure- a cure would mean people would use it and then stop buying medicine. That is every bit as large of a problem. It would be as if your family doctor carefully avoided healing you, preferring to keep you in a state of precarious health and expensively visiting him all the time. The difference is, doctors can be sued for malpractice. Pharmaceutical corporations cannot be sued for malpractice- under the current rules of capitalization they are required to maximize profit, even though they pursue a medical function.
Perhaps it is being fought and lost. After all, what would it look like? The corporations are as amorphous as Al Quaeda. Even when you get an Anniston or Bhopal, it's tough to identify a specific person responsible for the deaths. How do you fight a legal fiction and a set of codified behaviors about as enlightened as a shark?
In that case, none of the IP holders (they think like you- at least the corporations do, because they are legal fictions sociopathic by design) will budge, and the next Reinassance will have to take place in what we now laughably call the 'third world'. Possibly this will lead to war, and the stultified 'first world' will actively try to kill citizens of the 'third world' since they're unable to prevent 'em from thinking and creating. At the very least, severe trade sanctions would be expected.
All because 'intellectual property' isn't intrinsically limited- if someone can get a patent on 'having an idea', for instance, and ENFORCE it, selfishness would imply that they would take no thought of the impact on society, but just enforce it and bring other people's progress to a standstill. In order to value 'overall societal progress' one has to take into account the development of one's fellows, even to encourage it. A rising tide floats all boats. Note the avoidance of the word 'competitors'. Not everything is a freakin' market, Ayn.