No, when I say "You simply cannot reduce all of life to free market economics and expect it to work. You only get insane, pathological results- Gates is only the most egregious, as well as being an object lesson in motivation- do you believe for one second that the guy would mellow out if his 'wage' was capped at, oh, one billion? Only people with neither money nor the tenacity to make money believe that- they want to believe in Santa Claus. "Maybe the money fairy will give ME 30 billion dollars some day, how would I feel then?""... when I say that, the point I am making is that Bill is not worth half the money printed in the US per year all by himself. He's not! That's crazy.
If you are seeing that happen (and you are) that is no endorsement of any economic or political system. It is a BIG RED FLAG that something is horribly wrong- like 'valuations' of dot-com companies, and you know what happened to those? When the 'real world' is giving you results that are stark raving insane, that means something's gonna blow, that something is BROKEN somewhere. In this case, what is broken is the notion that any one person has a legitimate claim to be worth more than 2/3 the money in the Federal Reserve.
Your randroid-baiting with regard to 'wah, taxes are too big' is not relevant or useful either. Maybe your taxes are bigger than they need to be because guys like Gates are not supporting society to the extent of their ability to do so.
Seeing as I have been a humble Mac user since WAY before it was hip and fashionable, I suggest that voting with your money doesn't accomplish as much as you think it does. MS didn't need my money to armtwist PC OEMS and ISPs. They did it anyway without any help from me.
Otter, I wasn't getting choked by smog 15 years ago living in New England. Now I have to consume an expensive medicine called Serevent just to be able to function- and I live in a small town on top of a MOUNTAIN, currently. I'm not sure if they were pumping PCBs into streams 15 years ago- depends on if they'd invented those chemicals yet...
I realise it is appealing to go with the 'Long Boom' approach and hypnotize yourself with an 'everything is getting better, cleaner, freer, and full of wealth' mantra, but the cost is too damned high. I can't forgive such wilful ignorance when there are very real consequences- especially when you are persuading yourself that the world is getting "richer" and "freer" in THIS day and age. That's horribly wrong.
I don't know how old you are- I'm 34 and won't be impressed by suggestions to wait and see... "it'll be great, don't be negative". I suggest to anyone under 21 who's concerned about these things- don't wait, STUDY! Study history, learn to place these things in a historical context. With a nick like 'Otter' it may be that Otter is more up to date on specifically sea pollution, oil spills etc. He says bird life has returned to the New England coast. GOOD! Meanwhile, too damned many other things, environmental, social, economic, political, are ready to blow, so enjoy the birds and get busy on the next catastrophe to defuse.
As for point two: I don't think the US military should EVER have seriously planned to kill US citizens and blame it on Cuba. Thank McNamara for vetoing the idea every single time it was put forth... but it's very wrong that this was even considered, and the thinking isn't dead.
You are welcome to have it, but other ways of doing things HAVE been tried. They're called 'governments', and sometimes talk about 'rights' and things;)
I could find someone in a psychiatric ward who believed with all his heart that Bill Gates was worth 31 billion dollars. That person could honestly assert that they believed Bill Gates was worth more than half the amount of paper money the US Treasury prints in a year, and also more than 2/3 of all the gold in Fort Knox, all by himself.
That person would still be fucking crazy!
Like the guy in The Young Ones said, "I don't mean to be negative, but no." Your view of things is not realistic. You simply cannot reduce all of life to free market economics and expect it to work. You only get insane, pathological results- Gates is only the most egregious, as well as being an object lesson in motivation- do you believe for one second that the guy would mellow out if his 'wage' was capped at, oh, one billion? Only people with neither money nor the tenacity to make money believe that- they want to believe in Santa Claus. "Maybe the money fairy will give ME 30 billion dollars some day, how would I feel then?"
Meanwhile, in the real world, Capitalism shakes itself to death for lack of a rev limiter- and in the end days, lots of the big winners end up dead, and the revolutionaries who killed them aren't even better off, because what they should have been killing was not the results of the system, but the inadequacies of the system.
I'm sorry, but after listening to you I am all the more persuaded that a maximum wage is very important. If a million upsets you, how about a billion? Or would that cut into YOUR income too uncomfortably?;)
Well, you're preaching to the choir when talking to me. I actually voted my principles when it came down to it- voted for Nader (well known enemy of corporate welfare and advocate of campaign financing reform) and voted Progressive otherwise- I had some literature from the Progressives suggesting things like a MAXIMUM wage. Call me crazy, but I think there's no reason to have one person's assets more than, oh, ten million times as much as J. random welfare mother? One Ferrari and one million dollar mansion IS enough;)
If you can come up with a way to sell people on the value of society instead of the value of money, please do so- you're right that it'd help.
The tough thing about activism in the 21st century, is, how the HELL do you choose? There's too much- impossibly too much that needs to be addressed.
Do you fight against the DMCA and people's right to exchange information with each other?
Do you fight for clean air? I live in VERMONT and today we have worse smog than fucking LA, which I learned courtesy of online EPA ground level ozone reporting information. I would not have believed that possible. Today southern Vermont is at smog danger levels for children, elderly or those with asthma. I have asthma...
Do you fight against water privatization? The global fresh-water situation is getting desperate at a horrifying rate. Part of the problem is overuse, and part of the problem is- get this- corporations forcing entire countries into privatization because the World Bank demands it as a condition of doing business with the country. Once privatized, in the spirit of 'free trade' the corporation (such as Vivendi out of France) can export the country's water elsewhere- like America, if it wants- and refuse water to those in the original country who can't pay for it.
Or you could fight against corporations polluting, like in Anniston, Alabama. When Monsanto dumps so much poison into the creek that fish fucking explode and fall apart within minutes after being put in the water, you HAVE to buy water that Vivendi exported from some African nation where people die of thirst unable to afford water, because if you dig a well for water and drink it, you die!
Or you could google for 'Operation Northwoods', learn that in the 60s, McNamara repeatedly vetoed proposals from our own military to attack US citizens in order to basically create martyrs, blame it on Cuba and stir up enthusiasm for a war they felt desperately necessary... and ask whether any of that seems familiar, try to see if you can do better than 40 years of silence on what's going on today.
These are either great or horrible times to be an activist. The situation is so bad it forces any sane person to question. But there's too much to be done!
You have to pick a thing and work on that, or you just get ulcers and die early... mind you who can tell with the amount of poison and pollution in our air, our water, our food...
Wil, you da man. Few people ever grow up to be as sound a person as you've had to become. Cheers- and what you will accomplish after 30 will far outshine what you accomplished before 30:)
Is Click-N-Run still $99 for access to public Debian mirrors, or did they actually come up with their own hosting by now?
Lindows and Wal-Mart deserve each other. Wal-Mart is one of the companies that's been caught taking out 'dead peasant insurance' and we already know about Lindows- mp3.com veterans have known about Michael Robertson for a long time.
Just be sure and get the word out to any of the people who might be considering this computer- make it so the most cursory web search will give them the resources they need to not pay Mike a cent of that $99. Put Lindows out of business- that kind of friend you don't need.
The interesting question is implementation- in other words, is it implemented with all files encrypted anyhow, and the 'disable' checkbox simply sets a flag saying "Ignore protection authorization on early versions of media players".
In that case, all the WMAs you create are in fact still locked up, there's just a class of player that can be told to always unlock them. It would be very easy to update all players (by law?) so that all your 'unprotected' WMAs magically become protected, in this case, and you have already accepted license terms (if I'm not mistaken) allowing Microsoft to put out such an update, without telling you. It's all down to where in the process the authorization occurs- is it the encoder being told to do plain vs. locked versions of a file? Or is it the playback being told to lock the file vs. pretend there's no lock on it?
Fortunately it's easy to tell: read the source code for Windows Media Player.
You do realise that what you're describing is technically true? The only grounds you have for calling your suggestion 'paranoid' is, "Microsoft would never ever do such a mean thing".
Granted, it's a lot more likely for them to just remove the checkbox, but think about it. That would be a damned valuable list, that 'people who understand the technology and actively choose to disable DRM' list. That'd be a real warning light, and a very good starter database to hunt for people who are violating copyright more flagrantly. It would be a very valuable list.
The problem with Microsoft doing this sort of thing is as follows:
Compulsory Microsoft courses requiring acceptance of viral Microsoft 'shared source' licensing to basically 'salt the earth' and prevent OSS from ever growing any more.
It is a fact that acceptance of Microsoft's 'Shared Source' involves legal admissions of being privy to Microsoft IP, and also legal admissions that you have no rights to any of it. For that matter, there was something else in there blocking you from bringing suit against Microsoft over patents.
Any compulsory Microsoft programming language course could easily be made to require reference to 'Shared Source' to pass the course- what do you think the course materials would be? This is a missing step- but so easy to implement, given the existence of the viral Shared Source licensing, and the existence of schools in which you MUST take a Microsoft programming language course (presumably for certain majors).
It just falls into place- beautiful, beautiful strategy if you look at it strictly as warfare. If you look at it in terms of creating a society that's functional, then no- you are creating a society filled with booby-trapped coders, who can be taken out of action at any time by Microsoft.
Any college taking such a path would turn out EXCLUSIVELY coders who were legally vulnerable to any Microsoft action. They would be on record as having agreed that they had seen and worked with Microsoft IP, and that this IP was not theirs to keep. This is a setup for directed lawsuits to shut down any OSS project deemed threatening, because the burden of proof would be on the OSS project to prove that it was not infringing proprietary Microsoft IP, even though it was using coders that had made formal legal admissions that they had seen and worked with such IP, and knew it wasn't theirs to keep.
I really fail to see how this isn't a problem. It's not about 'mindshare' at all, it's about leveraging Microsoft's capability to get in a position where ALL CODERS (from a given school) are tainted with the Microsoft version of viral licensing, which equates to a permanent legal timebomb.
That is too high a price to pay just to have the pleasure of playing 'free market capital' with education, and being given money. People seem to have forgotten that there are IP concerns that could arise from this sort of thing. It is a very deadly threat, perhaps the only thing that could genuinely cripple OSS itself (a widespread condition of guilty-unless-expensively-proven-innocent w.r.t. software) and I don't feel I am underestimating Microsoft when I say that this threat is being wielded with full awareness and attention.
One point worth making: for some of these guys (DIGI), they ARE the underlying audio architecture. They build the hardware, supply the software, in some cases (DIGI!) lock out third party converter manufacturers (and Digidesign's new converters SUCK compared to what's available)... it's not about interoperability at all. In other cases (SADiE) the computer involved is strictly a turnkey system put together only to host the audio stuff. There's a LOT of turnkey type stuff out there.
There's also people using completely unsupported stuff (Ensoniq PARIS) because it sounds better than the current 'standard' (DIGI!). The audio world is really ripe for stuff that will genuinely sound better. Unfortunately, it's hard to find.
GUI is icing- the Linux community has almost nobody with a clue about coding good-sounding DSP. The state of the art in DSP right now is involved with debates over how to properly process DSD/SACD, whether 40-bit fixed point sounds better than 32-bit floating point, finicky details on the internal audio bussing of mainstream platforms like Pro Tools- you simply cannot jump into this with book learning and plans for this or that Roland rhythmbox simulator or DAW, without being... imagine a guy proposing to build an order fulfillment 'backend' using Visual Basic and you'll get some idea how it looks.
A lot of the hottest algorithms in this industry are hopelessly proprietary. A lot of the products in this industry are so brutally proprietary that they use copy-protection systems so draconian that big chunks of the market are in open rebellion against it. The market is ready for open source- open source is just not ready for it.
If you can identify the names 'Waves' and 'T-Racks' and know why one is serious and the other is consumer then you have a head start. If you're familiar with names like Crane Song, all the better. But this is a market that will not be captured by people treating the audio path like a commodity. The '96db should be good enough for anybody' crowd are the competition- open source needs to be pushing the boundaries in terms of sound performance.
I really hope open source can make inroads on the pro levels. Going after the Guitar Center market is pretty much a complete waste of time and will get OSS solutions lumped with a lot of lousy-sounding crud. It doesn't have to be that way.
At the very least, maintain internal signal busses at 32 bit float at the least, preferably 64 bit float or >32 bit fixed point, and only drop back to (for instance) 16 bit when necessary, and dither it. In fact, even dropping to 24 bit fixed (for instance, for the internal busses of Pro Tools) dither it... you pay enough attention to details like that and your sound quality will start being more suggestive of the Mercedes and less of the Yugo...
Some of the pro-linux-on-XBox posters here are astroturf, paid by Microsoft to get XBoxes into the hands of the influential 'tweak' market.
That translates roughly to 'the sort of geek whom people turn to, to ask how to do stuff'...
Microsoft is less concerned with selling games to tweaks than with having people see tweaks USING XBoxes for various purposes, establishing the desirability of the hardware- a sort of 'gee, if Tweak here runs a web server off his XBox, I bet it would be great and reliable for playing my games!' angle they're trying to work.
That is why they have people actively working Slashdot, both posting and moderating. They also have supporters they're not directly paying (more like cheerleaders), but some of the 'stick it to them' posts are in fact Microsoft people, on the clock and working that angle to scare up sales.
Oh, they could still be paranoid. It's just that you don't get to automatically discount anything they say on the grounds of them being paranoid, because there are things that happen that would drive them into wild flights of paranoid ranting but are still true.
In other words, if you have 'paranoid friends', maybe their interpretation of things is a bit off, but there can still be facts they know of that aren't just made up. For instance, somebody might argue that McNamara vetoed the proposed plans to attack American citizens because (fill in Le Carre double twist explanation here). I think it was more a case of McNamara quietly screaming inside his head, "ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKING CRAZY????" and vetoing the plans, hoping that the continuous rejection would settle the crazy people down. I picture him as being perfectly happy to wage war on Southeast Asia, perfectly happy to be resolutely anti-Communist, but still appalled at the idea of waging war on his own country to trick them into battle.
Like McNamara, you don't get the luxury of deciding, 'this is all good, this is all nuts, this is all bad'. You may be in a situation where some of the things you thought you could depend on are betraying you- much like McNamara, sworn to defend the United States and discovering subordinates busily preparing to wage war on their own country to manipulate it. Hopefully you can respond at least as well as he did- he did manage to turn off all of those plans, at the time, but had he been able to do more, we might be better off now.
Wild speculation on black helicopter type stuff only distracts from real things that warrant concern of their own.
Google for "operation northwoods" and you will discover that the military, in the 1960s, as a matter of public record, were laying plans to attack American citizens in order to stir up support for a war on Cuba.
That's not speculation, that is public record, learned through researching and the Freedom Of Information Act. They didn't actually carry out any of these plans, or blow up John Glenn's orbital space flight, because saner heads, including McNamara, refused to even consider allowing the military to make attacks on the country's own citizens for PR reasons.
The plans were still being seriously put forth.
How are you going to explain to people that this was reality, public record, proven, and that the anthrax/researcher killings you're talking about are not proven to that level of confidence? You will only make people less willing to believe the proven and important facts about the military making plans to target US civilians.
And I think that is too high a price to pay. This is the time where people need to learn to listen, not be confused by wild stories.
Choose your stories carefully, and talk about them carefully. It's like traditional investigative journalism- you don't charge madly ahead or you get discredited and lose everything you worked for.
I have the most high performance digital audio noise shaping algorithm in the world GPLed. (I refer to 'Ten Nines', which hits -160db noise floor from a simple 44/16 encoding)
I wrote it- all of it. I 'pay for the research' the first time, it's my IP, it's my right to do that with it.
I also have the right to dual-license it.
If anyone proprietary, like Microsoft (I'd rather see Apple with it, though) wants to have this tech and have the GPL NOT apply to them- they can damned well pay me for it. Nobody else is doing IIR noise shaping, period. The distribution of the spectrogram is unmistakable and can't be faked.
Nothing is stopping these proprietary people from going directly to me for this stuff- and nothing stops me from also putting my stuff out GPL. I just cannot put out the additional code that such a proprietary company might write. That would be implicit in an agreement to dual-license a proprietary version.
Funny how your touting of market forces doesn't seem to include them paying YOU anything. If you want to make something open to many people, and you want to be able to let Microsoft close it off, why on earth wouldn't you want to charge them for the privilege? Isn't that perfectly in spirit with what they'll be wanting to do? Sauce for the goose, man.
And if we're talking about large group projects, I see no reason why a Microsoft should ever be allowed to take those proprietary- and still, if the whole group agrees to, they can dual-license it.
Fair enough- one thing I'd point out is that losers can be appeased fairly easily. If you worry about keeping the winners happy, you have a problem, because the kind of person who can make a million dollars in the first place is not the kind of person who can stop there. This is a very basic truth.
It's not even 'takes money to make money', it gets to the basics of what makes a person go- our captains of industry are, in many cases, very intense, driven people and they do NOT NEED additional tax breaks in order to keep them interested. These are not the kind of people to let obstacles or adversity stand in their way. Some of them are dogged Randish individualists, others are more socially aware while personally still being incredibly hard workers. These aren't yacht people, they are 100-hour-a-week people who haven't seen the yacht in years- too busy. How often does Bill Gates take vacations?
Don't worry about keeping the winners happy- tax 'em and put the load on them, they'll carry it better than any number of losers. They're fighters, almost by definition- of course they're gonna squawk, it's their nature. But it's like the adage, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person- if you want to finance a society, hit up the rich people, good and hard. They'll cope! And on the whole they didn't get to be that way by getting coddled and supported. If you have a situation where your rich classes need to be coddled and supported by government, you're in big trouble. If you're pulling a cart, do you use an ox, or a shitload of chickens?
I suspect there IS no one set of simple rules that would work for everything- in the case of Microsoft and controlling it while also not injuring the ability of people to form similar companies unhobbled by legislation, it might be necessary to make rules specially for Microsoft. This is the epitome of unfairness, as it would be saying "OK, you specifically have to do this this and this. Nobody else does!". But anything else could also be unfair- what if there was a computing company using something such as Linux, that was utterly principled and honorable and benevolent, and as such became just as big as Microsoft? Would you make laws based on bigness and hobble that company when it was not acting maliciously? It's hard to formulate general rules based on a specific situation that is itself changing constantly.
It's almost like the correct way to go is to emulate the intents of early American government- everything becomes balanced against everything else, and the thing is to maintain the balance. If something succeeds hugely, you hook it up to gears and wheels, tax it heavily, whatever, not so much to punish it as to use its success to float everybody's boat and to maintain the balance. If something is struggling, not like 'cheating and being crap' but just, like Linux, being a very small player, you tilt things in its favor, not so much to reward it for being a loser as to maintain the balance, set it up to remain a player rather than be run over by larger players as a matter of course.
So maybe you don't have absolute freedom to live in Hollywood- if that's such a ritzy place maybe it should cost the earth to live there- but at the same time, maybe you should have absolute freedom to live in Noplace, Kansas even if you don't have money or anything. You don't get a posh standard of living, but you're allowed a few bucks that you get to put back into the economy by buying things like food, and maybe you'll end up producing something worthwhile during your life. If not, well, on a government scale your whole life was cheaper than most defense contracts for the military, so it's not like you were expensive to feed: you're a gamble that society will benefit in some way from letting you live in spite of your seeming uselessness. You're NOT offered a mansion in Hollywood, mind you- that would be silly.
On the other hand, Madison would have agreed, largely because he understood the problem of tyranny of the majority and the necessity of maintaining government to preserve smaller factions in public life. Madison knew from studying history that when you have the Majority steamrollering anything else, that is what sows the seeds for bloody revolution, and government is the price to pay for appeasing those factions and keeping their pain level low enough that they don't blow stuff up or lead an armed uprising.
Europe has also learned this, and well it should- it formed the history of harsh lessons that the framers of the Constitution LEARNED from, so we depend a great deal on the failed experiments of Europe. It should not be surprising that Europe has itself learned from its own experience.
Throwing away government has been tried, but it is impossible to throw away authority. You only end up with rabble-rouser demagogues and more tyrannies and more revolutions by whoever is being stomped on THIS time. The beauty of the original model for American government is that it makes, or made, a concerted attempt to balance EVERYONE'S interest, with absolutely no notion of 'thou art fitter, therefore go forth and kick ass'. It specifically looks after the UNFIT factions, for the very pragmatic reason that those are the people who will get stomped on enough to revolt. You don't have to protect or reward the fat and happy, you have to keep a close eye on the losers to see that they're not so desperate as to upset the applecart. That doesn't mean stomping on them more, it means subsiziding them to keep 'em happy.
Again, this is no mystery to Europeans- it's only Americans and especially Libertarians who don't 'get it'.
Like hell I wouldn't- I've done business with people in Europe. I'll follow their rules. They have a right to set their own rules. We're not their boss.
The trouble with some of you libertarians is that you reduce things to overly simple terms that don't work: absolute freeness and no rules from government, and then you are surprised or disbelieving when some powerful party begins throwing its weight around. You're fixated on governments and can't see that any other entity can have authority/force, when in fact authority is built into a huge percentage of relationships of any kind, and doing without authority involves conscious effort and continuous negotiation.
As such, you have indeed had a lot of influence on the Net, but only succeeded in freeing it from the direct control of governments, turning it right over to the direct control of commercial interests.
In some situations a person using the Internet may literally have their words and ideas cosigned over to the ownership of a commercial interest that lays claim to rights over the IP- there have been various scares over Microsoft, or Yahoo doing this- in others, control of protocols like HTTP are in practice wholly in the control of a company like Microsoft who leverage other properties to gain that control. That is authority, some of you guys just don't see that because they're not a government. You see it as a matter of choice, but in a practical sense it is not.
Currently, we're seeing Microsoft make determined moves towards seizing authority over the entire internet by way of.NET, DRM, Passport, the various technologies that would let them create a situation in which the 'choice' is to be subject to them, or not use the Net at all.
I know many of you Libertarians would object strongly if Microsoft used government to lock down this situation- for instance, banning non-DRM computer systems from accessing the Net.
Are you going to figure out that in this case Microsoft is as much an authority as any government, even in the absence of such legislation, and their 'barrel of a gun' is their ability to set the terms of participation? By that I mean- given that there is no government mandate for Microsoft, given that Microsoft controls 50% of all computers under their rules, and the remaining 50% of the Internet is hobbyists running old school TCP/IP and prevented by Microsoft's rules from interacting with the Microsoft net- do you view such a situation as a free market, or as a form of effective authority equivalent to government? What if it's 90% and 10%? 99% and 1%? 99.99% and.01%? At what point do you concede that although Microsoft are not legally allowed to directly point guns at people (they need BSA and federal marshals for that), they nevertheless wield force?
Actually, this guy talks wildly but the underlying points make a lot of sense. If you look past the rabble rousing you see a lot of the same concerns held by a majority of Slashdotters.
Whatever the outcome, I can think of no better reason for them to WANT their own internet than the attitude you show.
Personally, I do care, and I hope they get something they can live with. My only concern is that it cannot be my responsibility to proactively obey the laws of every little country in the world. People can obey the laws of their own countries without a squawk from me, I just won't be held to every government's rules at once. I can only live one place at once. Actually, that puts me on the 'EU' side of things rather than on the 'cyberspace' side of things, if you get right down to it.
There IS one significant point they need to address- if they want trusted secure computing and DRM, who are they going to get it from?...Microsoft?
Slashdot Mirror
If you are seeing that happen (and you are) that is no endorsement of any economic or political system. It is a BIG RED FLAG that something is horribly wrong- like 'valuations' of dot-com companies, and you know what happened to those? When the 'real world' is giving you results that are stark raving insane, that means something's gonna blow, that something is BROKEN somewhere. In this case, what is broken is the notion that any one person has a legitimate claim to be worth more than 2/3 the money in the Federal Reserve.
Your randroid-baiting with regard to 'wah, taxes are too big' is not relevant or useful either. Maybe your taxes are bigger than they need to be because guys like Gates are not supporting society to the extent of their ability to do so.
Seeing as I have been a humble Mac user since WAY before it was hip and fashionable, I suggest that voting with your money doesn't accomplish as much as you think it does. MS didn't need my money to armtwist PC OEMS and ISPs. They did it anyway without any help from me.
I realise it is appealing to go with the 'Long Boom' approach and hypnotize yourself with an 'everything is getting better, cleaner, freer, and full of wealth' mantra, but the cost is too damned high. I can't forgive such wilful ignorance when there are very real consequences- especially when you are persuading yourself that the world is getting "richer" and "freer" in THIS day and age. That's horribly wrong.
I don't know how old you are- I'm 34 and won't be impressed by suggestions to wait and see... "it'll be great, don't be negative". I suggest to anyone under 21 who's concerned about these things- don't wait, STUDY! Study history, learn to place these things in a historical context. With a nick like 'Otter' it may be that Otter is more up to date on specifically sea pollution, oil spills etc. He says bird life has returned to the New England coast. GOOD! Meanwhile, too damned many other things, environmental, social, economic, political, are ready to blow, so enjoy the birds and get busy on the next catastrophe to defuse.
As for point two: I don't think the US military should EVER have seriously planned to kill US citizens and blame it on Cuba. Thank McNamara for vetoing the idea every single time it was put forth... but it's very wrong that this was even considered, and the thinking isn't dead.
You are welcome to have it, but other ways of doing things HAVE been tried. They're called 'governments', and sometimes talk about 'rights' and things ;)
I could find someone in a psychiatric ward who believed with all his heart that Bill Gates was worth 31 billion dollars. That person could honestly assert that they believed Bill Gates was worth more than half the amount of paper money the US Treasury prints in a year, and also more than 2/3 of all the gold in Fort Knox, all by himself.
That person would still be fucking crazy!
Like the guy in The Young Ones said, "I don't mean to be negative, but no." Your view of things is not realistic. You simply cannot reduce all of life to free market economics and expect it to work. You only get insane, pathological results- Gates is only the most egregious, as well as being an object lesson in motivation- do you believe for one second that the guy would mellow out if his 'wage' was capped at, oh, one billion? Only people with neither money nor the tenacity to make money believe that- they want to believe in Santa Claus. "Maybe the money fairy will give ME 30 billion dollars some day, how would I feel then?"
Meanwhile, in the real world, Capitalism shakes itself to death for lack of a rev limiter- and in the end days, lots of the big winners end up dead, and the revolutionaries who killed them aren't even better off, because what they should have been killing was not the results of the system, but the inadequacies of the system.
I'm sorry, but after listening to you I am all the more persuaded that a maximum wage is very important. If a million upsets you, how about a billion? Or would that cut into YOUR income too uncomfortably? ;)
If you can come up with a way to sell people on the value of society instead of the value of money, please do so- you're right that it'd help.
Do you fight against the DMCA and people's right to exchange information with each other?
Do you fight for clean air? I live in VERMONT and today we have worse smog than fucking LA, which I learned courtesy of online EPA ground level ozone reporting information. I would not have believed that possible. Today southern Vermont is at smog danger levels for children, elderly or those with asthma. I have asthma...
Do you fight against water privatization? The global fresh-water situation is getting desperate at a horrifying rate. Part of the problem is overuse, and part of the problem is- get this- corporations forcing entire countries into privatization because the World Bank demands it as a condition of doing business with the country. Once privatized, in the spirit of 'free trade' the corporation (such as Vivendi out of France) can export the country's water elsewhere- like America, if it wants- and refuse water to those in the original country who can't pay for it.
Or you could fight against corporations polluting, like in Anniston, Alabama. When Monsanto dumps so much poison into the creek that fish fucking explode and fall apart within minutes after being put in the water, you HAVE to buy water that Vivendi exported from some African nation where people die of thirst unable to afford water, because if you dig a well for water and drink it, you die!
Or you could google for 'Operation Northwoods', learn that in the 60s, McNamara repeatedly vetoed proposals from our own military to attack US citizens in order to basically create martyrs, blame it on Cuba and stir up enthusiasm for a war they felt desperately necessary... and ask whether any of that seems familiar, try to see if you can do better than 40 years of silence on what's going on today.
These are either great or horrible times to be an activist. The situation is so bad it forces any sane person to question. But there's too much to be done!
You have to pick a thing and work on that, or you just get ulcers and die early... mind you who can tell with the amount of poison and pollution in our air, our water, our food...
Wil, you da man. Few people ever grow up to be as sound a person as you've had to become. Cheers- and what you will accomplish after 30 will far outshine what you accomplished before 30 :)
Lindows and Wal-Mart deserve each other. Wal-Mart is one of the companies that's been caught taking out 'dead peasant insurance' and we already know about Lindows- mp3.com veterans have known about Michael Robertson for a long time.
Just be sure and get the word out to any of the people who might be considering this computer- make it so the most cursory web search will give them the resources they need to not pay Mike a cent of that $99. Put Lindows out of business- that kind of friend you don't need.
In that case, all the WMAs you create are in fact still locked up, there's just a class of player that can be told to always unlock them. It would be very easy to update all players (by law?) so that all your 'unprotected' WMAs magically become protected, in this case, and you have already accepted license terms (if I'm not mistaken) allowing Microsoft to put out such an update, without telling you. It's all down to where in the process the authorization occurs- is it the encoder being told to do plain vs. locked versions of a file? Or is it the playback being told to lock the file vs. pretend there's no lock on it?
Fortunately it's easy to tell: read the source code for Windows Media Player.
Doh.
Granted, it's a lot more likely for them to just remove the checkbox, but think about it. That would be a damned valuable list, that 'people who understand the technology and actively choose to disable DRM' list. That'd be a real warning light, and a very good starter database to hunt for people who are violating copyright more flagrantly. It would be a very valuable list.
Compulsory Microsoft courses requiring acceptance of viral Microsoft 'shared source' licensing to basically 'salt the earth' and prevent OSS from ever growing any more.
It is a fact that acceptance of Microsoft's 'Shared Source' involves legal admissions of being privy to Microsoft IP, and also legal admissions that you have no rights to any of it. For that matter, there was something else in there blocking you from bringing suit against Microsoft over patents.
Any compulsory Microsoft programming language course could easily be made to require reference to 'Shared Source' to pass the course- what do you think the course materials would be? This is a missing step- but so easy to implement, given the existence of the viral Shared Source licensing, and the existence of schools in which you MUST take a Microsoft programming language course (presumably for certain majors).
It just falls into place- beautiful, beautiful strategy if you look at it strictly as warfare. If you look at it in terms of creating a society that's functional, then no- you are creating a society filled with booby-trapped coders, who can be taken out of action at any time by Microsoft.
Any college taking such a path would turn out EXCLUSIVELY coders who were legally vulnerable to any Microsoft action. They would be on record as having agreed that they had seen and worked with Microsoft IP, and that this IP was not theirs to keep. This is a setup for directed lawsuits to shut down any OSS project deemed threatening, because the burden of proof would be on the OSS project to prove that it was not infringing proprietary Microsoft IP, even though it was using coders that had made formal legal admissions that they had seen and worked with such IP, and knew it wasn't theirs to keep.
I really fail to see how this isn't a problem. It's not about 'mindshare' at all, it's about leveraging Microsoft's capability to get in a position where ALL CODERS (from a given school) are tainted with the Microsoft version of viral licensing, which equates to a permanent legal timebomb.
That is too high a price to pay just to have the pleasure of playing 'free market capital' with education, and being given money. People seem to have forgotten that there are IP concerns that could arise from this sort of thing. It is a very deadly threat, perhaps the only thing that could genuinely cripple OSS itself (a widespread condition of guilty-unless-expensively-proven-innocent w.r.t. software) and I don't feel I am underestimating Microsoft when I say that this threat is being wielded with full awareness and attention.
This public service announcement was brought to you by... ;)
Of these, probably four hundred thousand paid more taxes than Microsoft did in 1999.
Not all together- EACH slashdotter paid more than Microsoft did- because it paid no taxes in 1999 due to stock options trickery.
Don't jump to reassuring but unwarranted conclusions. The truth is worse than you think...
There's also people using completely unsupported stuff (Ensoniq PARIS) because it sounds better than the current 'standard' (DIGI!). The audio world is really ripe for stuff that will genuinely sound better. Unfortunately, it's hard to find.
A lot of the hottest algorithms in this industry are hopelessly proprietary. A lot of the products in this industry are so brutally proprietary that they use copy-protection systems so draconian that big chunks of the market are in open rebellion against it. The market is ready for open source- open source is just not ready for it.
If you can identify the names 'Waves' and 'T-Racks' and know why one is serious and the other is consumer then you have a head start. If you're familiar with names like Crane Song, all the better. But this is a market that will not be captured by people treating the audio path like a commodity. The '96db should be good enough for anybody' crowd are the competition- open source needs to be pushing the boundaries in terms of sound performance.
I really hope open source can make inroads on the pro levels. Going after the Guitar Center market is pretty much a complete waste of time and will get OSS solutions lumped with a lot of lousy-sounding crud. It doesn't have to be that way.
At the very least, maintain internal signal busses at 32 bit float at the least, preferably 64 bit float or >32 bit fixed point, and only drop back to (for instance) 16 bit when necessary, and dither it. In fact, even dropping to 24 bit fixed (for instance, for the internal busses of Pro Tools) dither it... you pay enough attention to details like that and your sound quality will start being more suggestive of the Mercedes and less of the Yugo...
That translates roughly to 'the sort of geek whom people turn to, to ask how to do stuff'...
Microsoft is less concerned with selling games to tweaks than with having people see tweaks USING XBoxes for various purposes, establishing the desirability of the hardware- a sort of 'gee, if Tweak here runs a web server off his XBox, I bet it would be great and reliable for playing my games!' angle they're trying to work.
That is why they have people actively working Slashdot, both posting and moderating. They also have supporters they're not directly paying (more like cheerleaders), but some of the 'stick it to them' posts are in fact Microsoft people, on the clock and working that angle to scare up sales.
Now, mod me 'flamebait'. ;)
In other words, if you have 'paranoid friends', maybe their interpretation of things is a bit off, but there can still be facts they know of that aren't just made up. For instance, somebody might argue that McNamara vetoed the proposed plans to attack American citizens because (fill in Le Carre double twist explanation here). I think it was more a case of McNamara quietly screaming inside his head, "ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKING CRAZY????" and vetoing the plans, hoping that the continuous rejection would settle the crazy people down. I picture him as being perfectly happy to wage war on Southeast Asia, perfectly happy to be resolutely anti-Communist, but still appalled at the idea of waging war on his own country to trick them into battle.
Like McNamara, you don't get the luxury of deciding, 'this is all good, this is all nuts, this is all bad'. You may be in a situation where some of the things you thought you could depend on are betraying you- much like McNamara, sworn to defend the United States and discovering subordinates busily preparing to wage war on their own country to manipulate it. Hopefully you can respond at least as well as he did- he did manage to turn off all of those plans, at the time, but had he been able to do more, we might be better off now.
Google for "operation northwoods" and you will discover that the military, in the 1960s, as a matter of public record, were laying plans to attack American citizens in order to stir up support for a war on Cuba.
That's not speculation, that is public record, learned through researching and the Freedom Of Information Act. They didn't actually carry out any of these plans, or blow up John Glenn's orbital space flight, because saner heads, including McNamara, refused to even consider allowing the military to make attacks on the country's own citizens for PR reasons.
The plans were still being seriously put forth.
How are you going to explain to people that this was reality, public record, proven, and that the anthrax/researcher killings you're talking about are not proven to that level of confidence? You will only make people less willing to believe the proven and important facts about the military making plans to target US civilians.
And I think that is too high a price to pay. This is the time where people need to learn to listen, not be confused by wild stories.
Choose your stories carefully, and talk about them carefully. It's like traditional investigative journalism- you don't charge madly ahead or you get discredited and lose everything you worked for.
Let's drop your 'collaborate' example for a bit and go with a real-world one.
Main Dithers (spectrograms at 16 bit)
I have the most high performance digital audio noise shaping algorithm in the world GPLed. (I refer to 'Ten Nines', which hits -160db noise floor from a simple 44/16 encoding)
I wrote it- all of it. I 'pay for the research' the first time, it's my IP, it's my right to do that with it.
I also have the right to dual-license it.
If anyone proprietary, like Microsoft (I'd rather see Apple with it, though) wants to have this tech and have the GPL NOT apply to them- they can damned well pay me for it. Nobody else is doing IIR noise shaping, period. The distribution of the spectrogram is unmistakable and can't be faked.
Nothing is stopping these proprietary people from going directly to me for this stuff- and nothing stops me from also putting my stuff out GPL. I just cannot put out the additional code that such a proprietary company might write. That would be implicit in an agreement to dual-license a proprietary version.
Funny how your touting of market forces doesn't seem to include them paying YOU anything. If you want to make something open to many people, and you want to be able to let Microsoft close it off, why on earth wouldn't you want to charge them for the privilege? Isn't that perfectly in spirit with what they'll be wanting to do? Sauce for the goose, man.
And if we're talking about large group projects, I see no reason why a Microsoft should ever be allowed to take those proprietary- and still, if the whole group agrees to, they can dual-license it.
It's not even 'takes money to make money', it gets to the basics of what makes a person go- our captains of industry are, in many cases, very intense, driven people and they do NOT NEED additional tax breaks in order to keep them interested. These are not the kind of people to let obstacles or adversity stand in their way. Some of them are dogged Randish individualists, others are more socially aware while personally still being incredibly hard workers. These aren't yacht people, they are 100-hour-a-week people who haven't seen the yacht in years- too busy. How often does Bill Gates take vacations?
Don't worry about keeping the winners happy- tax 'em and put the load on them, they'll carry it better than any number of losers. They're fighters, almost by definition- of course they're gonna squawk, it's their nature. But it's like the adage, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person- if you want to finance a society, hit up the rich people, good and hard. They'll cope! And on the whole they didn't get to be that way by getting coddled and supported. If you have a situation where your rich classes need to be coddled and supported by government, you're in big trouble. If you're pulling a cart, do you use an ox, or a shitload of chickens?
It's almost like the correct way to go is to emulate the intents of early American government- everything becomes balanced against everything else, and the thing is to maintain the balance. If something succeeds hugely, you hook it up to gears and wheels, tax it heavily, whatever, not so much to punish it as to use its success to float everybody's boat and to maintain the balance. If something is struggling, not like 'cheating and being crap' but just, like Linux, being a very small player, you tilt things in its favor, not so much to reward it for being a loser as to maintain the balance, set it up to remain a player rather than be run over by larger players as a matter of course.
So maybe you don't have absolute freedom to live in Hollywood- if that's such a ritzy place maybe it should cost the earth to live there- but at the same time, maybe you should have absolute freedom to live in Noplace, Kansas even if you don't have money or anything. You don't get a posh standard of living, but you're allowed a few bucks that you get to put back into the economy by buying things like food, and maybe you'll end up producing something worthwhile during your life. If not, well, on a government scale your whole life was cheaper than most defense contracts for the military, so it's not like you were expensive to feed: you're a gamble that society will benefit in some way from letting you live in spite of your seeming uselessness. You're NOT offered a mansion in Hollywood, mind you- that would be silly.
Europe has also learned this, and well it should- it formed the history of harsh lessons that the framers of the Constitution LEARNED from, so we depend a great deal on the failed experiments of Europe. It should not be surprising that Europe has itself learned from its own experience.
Throwing away government has been tried, but it is impossible to throw away authority. You only end up with rabble-rouser demagogues and more tyrannies and more revolutions by whoever is being stomped on THIS time. The beauty of the original model for American government is that it makes, or made, a concerted attempt to balance EVERYONE'S interest, with absolutely no notion of 'thou art fitter, therefore go forth and kick ass'. It specifically looks after the UNFIT factions, for the very pragmatic reason that those are the people who will get stomped on enough to revolt. You don't have to protect or reward the fat and happy, you have to keep a close eye on the losers to see that they're not so desperate as to upset the applecart. That doesn't mean stomping on them more, it means subsiziding them to keep 'em happy.
Again, this is no mystery to Europeans- it's only Americans and especially Libertarians who don't 'get it'.
Like hell I wouldn't- I've done business with people in Europe. I'll follow their rules. They have a right to set their own rules. We're not their boss.
As such, you have indeed had a lot of influence on the Net, but only succeeded in freeing it from the direct control of governments, turning it right over to the direct control of commercial interests.
In some situations a person using the Internet may literally have their words and ideas cosigned over to the ownership of a commercial interest that lays claim to rights over the IP- there have been various scares over Microsoft, or Yahoo doing this- in others, control of protocols like HTTP are in practice wholly in the control of a company like Microsoft who leverage other properties to gain that control. That is authority, some of you guys just don't see that because they're not a government. You see it as a matter of choice, but in a practical sense it is not.
Currently, we're seeing Microsoft make determined moves towards seizing authority over the entire internet by way of .NET, DRM, Passport, the various technologies that would let them create a situation in which the 'choice' is to be subject to them, or not use the Net at all.
I know many of you Libertarians would object strongly if Microsoft used government to lock down this situation- for instance, banning non-DRM computer systems from accessing the Net.
Are you going to figure out that in this case Microsoft is as much an authority as any government, even in the absence of such legislation, and their 'barrel of a gun' is their ability to set the terms of participation? By that I mean- given that there is no government mandate for Microsoft, given that Microsoft controls 50% of all computers under their rules, and the remaining 50% of the Internet is hobbyists running old school TCP/IP and prevented by Microsoft's rules from interacting with the Microsoft net- do you view such a situation as a free market, or as a form of effective authority equivalent to government? What if it's 90% and 10%? 99% and 1%? 99.99% and .01%? At what point do you concede that although Microsoft are not legally allowed to directly point guns at people (they need BSA and federal marshals for that), they nevertheless wield force?
Actually, this guy talks wildly but the underlying points make a lot of sense. If you look past the rabble rousing you see a lot of the same concerns held by a majority of Slashdotters.
Personally, I do care, and I hope they get something they can live with. My only concern is that it cannot be my responsibility to proactively obey the laws of every little country in the world. People can obey the laws of their own countries without a squawk from me, I just won't be held to every government's rules at once. I can only live one place at once. Actually, that puts me on the 'EU' side of things rather than on the 'cyberspace' side of things, if you get right down to it.
There IS one significant point they need to address- if they want trusted secure computing and DRM, who are they going to get it from? ...Microsoft?