What catches my attention most is this: what a great illustration that you don't _have_ to be a frothing axewielding sociopath to do harm.
It's plain that Microsoft has done harm. However, you look at the coders and geeks within Microsoft and they are not, for the most part, bad people. Does this invalidate the harm Microsoft has done? No, of course not- welcome to the real world. They have helped it happen, certainly did not set out each day saying "Heyyyy! Let's all stifle innovation in this industry (except from us!) and help to lock computing into some technological Dark Ages!". It's just that the work that they do is effectively harnessed to the power of a corporation which has a long history of doing just such stifling. They are not the ones in toplevel meetings telling Apple "Yes, we're asking you to 'knife the baby'. Kill Quicktime for us or you won't like the consequences". But their work enables the upper management to do just that.
Also, I would be very surprised if there wasn't a (military?) sort of elitism pervading the place. In effect, the Microsoft workers may not be frothing at the mouth to eradicate all competition in the industry- but they do, I feel, see themselves as superior to anybody else, which makes it very easy for them to be very unconcerned about their bosses acting to crush and stifle other companies. Somewhere in the back of the Microsoft worker mind is, "That's okay- if they wanted to _really_ innovate and do good things, they'd quit that company and join US!". This is not capitalism, of course- in most industries, competition is seen as a normal and healthy thing. I feel that within the Microsoft culture, competition from other companies is seen as as best a distraction from _real_ innovation, and at worst a positive roadblock- such that one could easily picture Microsoft people lobbying the government to shut down a competitor that stood in the way of Microsoft expansion. "You're hurting the economic growth of the whole country by allowing them to keep operating like that! They're blocking innovation!"
And still, none of this requires that the people involved are evil people: you just have to look at their worldview. It's all very well having elitism. Elitism plus _clout_ equals trouble.
If your submissions are any good, lots of other people will also be submitting them, and eventually in about 2 weeks one of them will luck out and get a story in:)
I used to madly love Pizza Rolls. Not just any sort, but Three Cheese Pizza Rolls. They _ruled_. They were _perfect_ and yummy and actually somewhat filling and had serious pretensions of being Real Food, and I bought 'em constantly.
Then, some years ago, the company improved them by taking out most of the cheese product, changing the name to 'Cheese' from 'Three Cheese', increasing the amount of tomato stuff by making it more watery and thin, and adding specks of black stuff to it. It was _horrible_ and clearly cheaper to make. The shareholders must have been well pleased. I quit buying the things- even now, years later, I will occasionally pick up a bag of 'em as a sort of salute to what they used to be, but the yumminess is really pretty completely gone.
If anyone has a cache of Three Cheese Pizza Rolls somewhere, put 'em up on eBay and point me at 'em? Nostalgia is worth any price. Same goes for original sugar-based (see: Canadian) Coca-Cola. I think if I remember correctly Totino's Party Pizza also was changed horribly from its original junkfood yumminess, but in a less sweeping manner.
Ya know, if these companies didn't have shareholders, they might be a little less pressured to change things which sell (to try and knock off a few cents) while clinging to their tortured userbase at the same time...
I find that when I make tasty good food that's a whole real meal- it turns into a combination of work and art and recreation and takes up huge amounts of time and energy and attention.:)
For instance, I treat the humble taco like this- I'll fuss around for an hour dicing tomatoes and shredding cheese and ripping lettuce into neat little pieces and cooking a beef filling based on the way they used to make the Old El Paso mix (which was _ruined_ in recent years- gah!) from scratch or semi-scratch. Or I'll make a stirfry curry chicken dish that involves breading chicken slices and some peanuts with straight curry powder and making rice and presoaking raisins to mix with the rice, all to be mixed with mango chutney. There aren't a huge number of recipes, but the common factor is: they taste good, and take maybe an hour or more to prepare. Which is _normal_ for really posh food when you have to dice fresh tomatoes or cut fresh gourmet Bell and Evans organic chicken breast into stirfry slices and bread them each individually in a big bowl of curry powder.
Therefore, this explains why I will also be found eating Ramen (after my Dad took me out to a noodle restaraunt- before that, I wouldn't touch Ramen, but that's when I discovered oriental noodles had an interesting style all their own), or freezer burritos (my attempts at making my own gourmet freezer burritos have not really measured up to _cheap_ freezer burritos- some things are meant to be cheap, not posh), or mac and cheese (which I will put sour cream and nice butter into, tho) or even eating raw spaghettios out of the can (the _serious_ don't-distract-me-with-meatspace dinner).
I like the idea that I epitomize _both_ extremes;)
Seriously. I swear by this for macaroni and cheese products:)
Whether it's classic kraft orange, or something nifty like Annie's Alfredo (a personal favorite), I use the prescribed amount of butter and substitute sour cream for milk. It's richer and more hearty, and also sour cream has less lactose than skim milk (sounds nuts, but think about it, lactose is a sugar). So mac and cheese made with sour cream is less likely to act like a pipe bomb in your digestion if you are lactose intolerant!:)
I like burritos, but only _cheap_ burritos >:) I used to be able to get this brand of freezer burritos in big long sacks- man, I miss those. Currently I'm occasionally buying another brand of cheap freezer burrito, but though the Cheap Burrito Flavor (tm) is still right, the new kind (Tina's Beef And Bean Green Chili) tends to have bits of bone in it, which is extremely nasty. I don't want it _that_ cheap thank you;P:) The other kind (Los Campanas?) had cheaper packaging, but never contained unwanted bits:)
I have no sympathy or patience towards your opposition to the GPL. You will clearly spend hours trying to get it stamped out, write reams of argument trying to scare people away from using it, and all to support commercial companies. Now, I am not intrinsically opposed to commercial companies- as I said (which you ignored) I make heavy use of some commercial software like Photoshop, like the programming environment REALbasic. However, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more rope I give commercial software, the more likely they are to hang _me_ with it, and you too.
You seem blithely unaware of UCITA, of a whole steady movement toward legislating and sanctifying the worst abuses of commercial software. These go beyond a company buying up brainpower and starving entire fields of endeavor from the ideas they need to progress- all the way toward having and using the right to sabotage my own computer in any way they like if they form the idea that I've violated their licensing in some way, and being fully supported by the law in this.
Naturally, the amoral capitalism you espouse will reward those who seize this opportunity quickest, and we can confidently expect the proliferation of this sort of abuse. In some ways your viewpoint is like this: for the users, the world is a battleground, an urban wasteland. But if you're a company, the world is supposedly like the small Vermont town I lived in 6 years or so ago, in which nobody really bothered to lock their cars and everybody knew everybody- stultifying but safe. The unspoken idea is that one _must_ support business and commercial software at all costs, because they are the seat of decency in the world, with a commercial morality that (unlike regular morality) can be reduced to dollars and cents: and that this results in Good Being Done and the accumulation of Profit.
I look out at the constant background of aggressive maneuvers done by closed-source software companies- not simply against each other, against _us_ the consumers- and can't understand why anyone would have more faith in them than in a pack of rabid rats- or why this state of affairs deserves protecting. Just because it results in salaries being paid is not a good enough reason to support it. Look at what happens as a result. You get Photoshop- but you also get Windows Me. You get Id- but you also get Blizzard. You get start-ups- but you also get UCITA. You get Microsoft, and you'll never get rid of them as long as you live. Is this worth protecting? What about the vocation of software coding is so special that guaranteeing its artificially high income is worth setting up this kind of mess?
RMS may well be a loony, but I'd say he was a loony for being twenty years too early. Look at his fanatical opposition to closed-source in the light of UCITA (which did not exist at the time he was forming his ideas). Perhaps it was only chance, or perhaps the reason his fanaticism becomes relevant now is that he really saw and acted on the _result_ of what he saw happening. It's dangerous to 'project' outcomes like that, you can end up totally wrong. RMS could have read the whole situation wrong, back then, and if he had, GNU would have languished basically unused and commercial software would have turned out to be a greatly liberating force with no drawbacks to it, requiring no alternative because all freedom and choice and security was available within it.
Welcome to the real world. It seems that there _was_ a need for GNU- look at all the GNU, the Linux, the GPL out there. It's never been _easy_ to use this stuff, it's geek-only so far, yet people are still forced to turn to it: look at the litany of security bugs, acts of sabotage and intentional incompatibility, the lossage of the commercial software industry. Look at the legislation being passed successfully to reduce their liability even more, scorning all concepts of consumer protection- look at the ideas, the total disregard for private property that leads a commercial software company to think they have a right to seize MY COMPUTER without due process if they think I might have done something wrong, that they have a right to grovel all over it assuming I am guilty of piracy or something until _they_ satisfy themselves that I am innocent- but if _I_ grovel all over their work with a decompiler, I can go to _jail_! Not cyber-jail, real concrete and steel jail for up to five years!
Brett, I did not ask them to behave in this manner. I would have been _quite_ happy to support software companies as you would insist I do, respecting their rights to earn a living. Their rights end, however, when they start arranging to have me thrown in jail, and begin crawling up my computer like IRS auditors looking for violations. I never agreed to their coming on my 'private property' (my computer and data _is_ my property. It's _my_ data) and behaving in such a manner.
It's possible that I'm letting a few bad apples spoil the barrel. However, that's what _happens_: the others end up mimicking the ones making the most money, and crime has always paid. In this case, the precedent is set, the legislation is already being passed, the die is cast.
If they're going to redefine the industry in this manner, I will wholeheartedly embrace the ideas that were (opinionatedly) put forth by RMS so many years ago, in a simpler time that probably didn't rate that sort of hysteria. Times have changed, and it appears that OSS people did not have to declare a war at all- war has been declared on us, by just these commercial software people, up to and including the intention to change the very open standards of the Net itself out from under us to destroy even our communications with each other.
If taking sides makes me malicious, I can only say that I feel justified in such malice, and that I didn't set out to be- my trust was broken. I side against you. I oppose you utterly- not because you are being intentionally malicious, but because you're a damned fool supporting something worse than you imagine. I side with the OSS people, RMS, and the GPL.
How do I take sides with the GPL? It's not by passing laws to outlaw commercial software, by breaking the kneecaps of commercial developers or burning down their office buildings, it's not by planning to develop special GPL-only net standards or writing software that scans your hard drive to see if you're using GPL code in some commercial project- in other words, it's not by malicious means or even the means of commercial software.
I USE IT! So far, I am still free to do so.
_Shame_ on you, Brett. You are a liar and a propagandist supporting a corrupt and abusive system. How do you sleep? I realise this gives you the ability to pull another debator move and cry 'ad hominem' yet again, but I am honestly wondering how you can justify your position to yourself. Is it that, to you, none of the on-record hostile acts of commercial software companies count? Is it that computers are not private property but actually belong to the vendors that make the hardware and software, and that we rent them/borrow them? Is it that you feel capitalism is so religiously important that it must be supported over consumer or even human rights? Is it that you cannot see human existence except in terms of how much a person earns, with no other values? What is it? State your faith if you insist on keeping on arguing like this. You are trying to harm something important, and I want to know why.
It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way:) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty!;)
Actually, there are ways for even Jon Katz to give back, and though it's a bit early to tell he seems like he might be figuring them out. Jon's talent is in writing sound bites and propaganda for people who aren't really listening or paying attention. He gets roasted incessantly on Slashdot for it as many Slashdotters feel trivialised by this, but Jon's medium is perfect for certain messages: for instance, the important task of convincing consumers in general not to be conned into supporting consumer technology that hurts them- new-format CDs, zone-limited DVDs, etc ad nauseam. You can't change public opinion dramatically overnight, but you don't need to change much to hurt the industries that are trying to take over- all you have to do is foster the existing distrust. DIVX didn't just die because geeks ranted against it- it died because it was genuinely a rotten idea, with all its benefits on the side of the industry. Consumers are not idiots and can sense this- a bit of sound-biteage to that effect can spur a large backlash, when the reality is that the 'new product' sucks. And many new products do suck, unprecedentedly so.
This is Jon's calling: his background, style, and motivation perfectly suit him for helping to kick off _non_ geek rejections of things like that. All he needs is a forum, and though Slashdot isn't an ideal forum for him, I am sure he can reach the proper forums as needed.
Such an onslaught of revisionism! I love how people say the GPL 'infects any code that comes near it', for values of 'come near it' that equal 'take GPLed code, read it, copy big chunks of it and use it as the basis of your own thing'. Clearly the only ethical choice is to allow people to take everything you do and _not_ ask anything of them in return! furrfu.
"In fact, the stated intent of the GPL was to destroy jobs that paid better than the slave wages earned by grad students in the MIT AI Lab."
How quaint! And to think that I believed the GPL was for taking coding ideas and forcibly preventing them from being filched and made proprietary by people like you. Shocked, I am, to learn that 'Saint Ignatius's only real interest is in destroying jobs! Could you have misheard him? Maybe he wants to destroy Wozniak instead;)
"Levy relates that Stallman refused to provide EMACS software -- which he was being paid by MIT to write! -- to users on the Computer Science department's systems. Why? Because they used passwords to keep their machines from being broken into from across the ARPANet."
It may have escaped your attention, but at the time, the AI lab did not USE passwords. At the time, people were evolving ways of functioning in 'electronic society' without locks and passwords and barriers, and it actually worked, because people felt the obligation to behave civilly, given the freedom to do harm. The use of passwords you cite was not business as usual, but the imposition of a new set of regulations which assumed anyone with the freedom to do harm would obviously do it, and arranged matters so nobody had that freedom. I realise that you think this is the only way the world can work. We'll never know now, will we? Because RMS failed in his attempt to force the issue, and did not convince the world that establishing social expectations was the way to handle 'security'. (Also, it's interesting to note how you fulminate against anyone interfering with a business-employed coder's right to withhold their code from others if they wish, but won't accept RMS's academia-funded right to withhold EMACS from others as he wished. So if you are a business, you get to do whatever you want, but if you are academic or an OSS type you are obliged to be exploited and trod upon?)
"What the GPL does do, however, is sabotage young companies and programmers with promising ideas."
The _order_ you put that in is interesting, but the claim makes no sense whatsoever. Surely a young company with programmers and promising ideas is free to do whatever it wants, within reason? Do you think a good idea cannot compete against a GPLed implementation of 'cheap imitation' quality? Do you have that little faith in the marketplace that the mere existence of free things terrifies you so? Do you think little elves will sneak into the fine young company under cover of darkness and, cackling malignantly, GPL everything while nobody is looking? You've got some very strange ideas about what the GPL _means_ to a company that wants no part of it. Such as:
"It prohibits commercial developers from making use of open source without giving away the farm."
Why in God's name do you think commercial developers _should_ get to make use of open source? Being a commercial developer usually means proprietary code. Use that. If you must compete and not interact cooperatively with others, come up with your own damn ideas. For _years_ there wasn't a major, public open source movement, and no commercial developers complained about this at all. Nobody objected in the slightest to having to reinvent the wheel behind closed doors, it was a way of life to come up with your own code. Now all of a sudden, OSS is trendy, and suddenly access to other people's code is a _right_?
"Bull. It (the GPL) ensures that programmers cannot make a living by licensing their work."
Nice spin! *clap clap* But of course the key words here are 'BY LICENSING THEIR WORK', and it's most amusing to note how you avoid mentioning this effect only happens to programmers who license under the GPL themselves! You have a real talent for bullshit propaganda, do you work for Mindcraft? The implication of your statement is clearly 'that all programmers are deprived of making a living by the GPL'. The reality, of course, is that programmers can and do make a living by the service they provide (not by any concept of their resulting work as private property)- and that it is ALWAYS up to you the programmer to choose to GPL something or not, and if you don't, all the options of intellectual property licensing remain open to you. In fact they'd be open to you if you GPL, they are just toothless because anyone has the right to have the source of anything you've GPLed. For the programmers who don't GPL, it's even sillier to claim the GPL scorches their earth and ruins their lives and stock options. It has no effect on them at all. Or are all commercial programmers so pathetic that OSS programmers working for free can out-code, out-compete, out-market and out-distribute them? If so, what is your justification for coddling the commercial programmers? Let 'em die! But I am the owner of numerous commercial programs- for instance, I use Photoshop over the GIMP, because Photoshop is _way_ better in my opinion. I think you are being unduly alarmist, behaving like the GPL will kill programmers like the ones who did Photoshop. To compete you have to _compete_, not just own an idea and sit on your ass 'protecting' it...
"It is a weapon because it undermines commercial developers' work. Anyone can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him or her -- except commercial developers."
Cry me a river. Commercial developers are paid to develop. They have resources which part-time people couldn't begin to dream of. They have extra clout with other commercial developers- when Microsoft talks, Apple listens. When Id talks, Microsoft listens. Interestingly, when the GPL talks, Id listens;) it would appear that John Carmack can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him: releasing disused engines so people can play with them and develop things from them, but in such a way that the engine itself cannot be taken and turned into a competing commercial engine to go up against Q3Arena. Bungie has also done this with the Marathon 2 source, recently, also using the GPL. The GPL is _ideal_ for protecting the interests of commercial developers who want to give away their old engines for people to enjoy, but don't want to be bothered supporting them and DON'T want to be seeding another commercial competitor. It's shocking you don't see this considering how common the situation is now.
"This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away.""
This is different from proprietary code exactly how?
"Just as a treasure is lost whenever another a line of code falls under the vicious, viral, unethical GPL."
My. Words fail me. Aside from the fact that this is nonsense, why do you feel that you have any business saying this on Slashdot? I'll give you credit for not preaching to the choir here, but on the other hand you've got to be fscking crazy if you think this argument carries weight here. You're ranting and ignoring the logic of the situation and trying to scare people away from using the GPL, and again I say, why? What on earth about it could be so threatening to you? Are you really that incompetent that you can't compete on grounds of quality, marketing, distribution or trendiness with mere open source software? OSS is like a flood on the rise. It will work its way into all valleys, it will wash away lowlands. If you suck, OSS will bury you: if you make terrific code, it won't be able to touch you unless you want to use it for _your_ purposes like Carmack does. There is no "Can't I just suck in peace without having to compete? I own intellectual property!" option.
OSS is a flood. If you don't want to be part of it, then rise above it. If you won't bother to rise above it, then shut up and drown!
The requirement of "ADV:" beginning the subject field.
I see no reason why all ISPs with acceptable use policies that forbid spamming can't just configure their software to silently discard any email with "ADV:" beginning the subject field. It's not a very common word, after all. This would work to stop spam at the point of injection, and it could also be used in mail relays to blithely throw away whole bunches of spam on sight. ISPs are not public property, after all.
Forget the _bad_ 'opt out' clause (which is just stupid as no matter what law is passed, most opt out addresses are address harvesters anyway), the requirement of a machine-parsable identifier on spams is truly a Good Thing. This is not so that you can recognise spam when you get it- it's so that any ISP between you and the spammer has the option of parsing the spam, finding that it is explicitly something the ISP has no intentions of relaying or sending, and throwing it away before it even gets to you.
I realize spammers may possibly be upset at the idea of ISPs everywhere silently throwing away their spams before they even reach their targets.
Boo fscking hoo. They're lucky it's not a capital offense.
I use SpamCop, but I deeply, _deeply_ distrust their 'Spam Recycling Center' feature, and wonder what the hell that is supposed to be about? You recycle a thing to get _more_ of it. As near as I can tell, it is an accumulated list of something, and regarding spam I don't think it's safe or sensible to keep accumulated lists of _anything_. So I pointedly avoid ever using that 'feature' and am rather piqued with SpamCop for having it default to on. But then, I use spamcop as a LART (got 36 accounts killed so far, not great but better than nothing), and contribute to their spam-blocking records without using them as I am not a spamcop member. So I'm not really entitled to gripe too much about SpamCop. This fool SRC business, however, has seriously reduced the chances of my ever signing up and paying SpamCop as a member. If they are involved in nonsense I won't give them a cent, even though they provide a service that helps me LART spammers without paying huge amounts of attention to the mechanics of it.
With the implication that "ADV:" is legal spam, some spammers can be conned into using it.
Since ISP acceptable use policies have absolutely squat to do with free speech, ISPs then can quietly begin discarding all emails with the "ADV:" as specified in the law. The law says that this is legal spam, it doesn't say that anyone has to actually _carry_ it. That's another issue.
Even if a point-of-injection ISP doesn't quietly discard "ADV:" emails, it should be possible for many email servers to be set to quietly discard such mails, saving disk space and transfer costs. Rather than getting to the destination, the message could be thrown away at any point if it has such a machine-parsable warning flag.
regarding 'good spam' vs. 'bad spam', you are _quite_ insane.:)
The MIT AI Lab was _DARPA_ funded. The existence of the academic sandbox Stallman loved was due to government funding.
As soon as for-profit companies stepped in, the thriving community of hackers that existed in the MIT AI Lab was fragmented and eventually destroyed by the IP requirements of the for-profit companies, notably Symbolics which hired away most of the hackers and silenced them with NDAs.
Only after the MIT AI Lab was already destroyed did Stallman try to revenge himself on Symbolics. He did this through a burst of reverse engineering and singlehandedly kept pace with an entire team of the world's best hackers (at Symbolics), impressing the hell out of them. He succeeded in keeping up while reengineering everything Symbolics did, he didn't just 'try'. The products involved were LISP machines, which grew from concepts originally developed within the AI Lab, so it's not like Stallman had no experience with this- Symbolics had basically scorched the earth of _his_ turf, but everything they did was well within his experience and background. (EMACS is strongly LISP based)
The GPL prevents any such situation from recurring- it bars nobody from participating (despite many attempts to add 'except Microsoft can't use my code!' clauses) and the single condition it imposes is that the code licensed under the GPL remains forever open for discussion and exchange. It does nothing else, and can only be considered a weapon if you expect commercial developers to be allowed to take OTHER PEOPLE'S work away from them, which seems an unusual position.
There is no symbiosis between academia and the commercial world. The best that can be expected is armed truce- masters of this art, such as Nicholas Negroponte and his Media Lab, make it look easy, but practice a level of diplomacy as dangerous and tricky as full-on political diplomacy. Negroponte once explained his technique like this: when a company funded research it was made available to all. No companies like this, so Negroponte would say, "Okay, we'll do it your way. And when you come to see your research, we'll blindfold you and lead you right to it. There's 20 billion dollars of other research going on here that you could be seeing, but you won't see any of it. And then when you're done we'll blindfold you again and take you right back out. It's your choice."
That is 'symbiosis'? To me it sounds like power politics and the cunning balancing of totally incompatible interests. Calling it symbiosis is woefully understating the brilliance of the negotiating skills and determination of people like Negroponte, who truly understand the game they are playing- which is more than I can say for you.
Congratulations, Brett. I've never read a post so breathtakingly wrong!:)
I expected something like this- when they attempt to make copy protected _CDs_ can copy protected monitors be far behind? Yes, it's all about control, yes, it's a slamdunk for the stockholders and the companies are almost compelled to pursue this by any means until they get it: however, I can only summon up limited panic over it, and this is why...
Consumer products are not truly based on a model of coercion.
It's really that simple. All this yammer about encryption confuses and frightens the consumer (which is its intended purpose), but there is a level at which _anybody_ would do a doubletake and go, "How would _that_ protect me?". The idea is to have the consumer feel vaguely safer with 'protected' stuff, but funky CDs that don't play in existing players? 'Protecting' the path from video card to monitor? Schemes that, rather than giving the happy consumer 'perfect' sound/video/whatever, turn around and put in watermarks that can survive VCR dubbing, saying 'the picture degradation is not serious, you won't mind!'. You won't mind paying X amount of dollars for the all new monitor to connect to the all new DVD player all to play content with watermarks hazing the image, plus you have to sit through 5 minutes of commercials each time you play the movie, because if you defeat that feature you go to JAIL for up to five years.
How many people here truly think that the average human being won't be smart enough to avoid being exploited that badly? We are not talking about access to food and water and oxygen here. We are talking 'American Pie' and 'Blair Witch Project' and 'The Matrix'. Forgive me for stating what should be already obvious (if it wasn't for the unstated assumptions of the industry!) but this consumption is discretionary income. People not only have the option to not consume, but in fact the burden of persuasion is on the industry, not on the consumer.
"The consumer is not an idiot. She is your wife." -David Ogilvy
People continually behave as if the consumer is a subhuman creature- you see words like zombie used, otherwise clued hackers will go to a mall, observe very distracted people spend discretionary income and conclude that humanity is made of brainless zombies who only do as they are told. This is an exaggeration, because there's always a limit. Do you think DIVX failed entirely due to hackers rushing about like Paul Revere? (For that matter, was the American Revolution due to Paul Revere rushing about, or a deepseated public (consumer!) resentment of taxation and Colonial-era abuses?)
When things get bad enough, those consumers don't need telling. They are people like you, they just probably don't bother caring most of the time about issues like these. Sell one a TV, crying 'New! Improved! Better Picture!' and nod, thinking the consumer is a robot. Now try selling one a TV by crying 'New! Improved! Won't work with your VCR! You won't mind the watermarking a bit! Pay per view!' Surprise surprise! Seems the consumer doesn't understand why the TV not working with his VCR is a feature. How foolish of him!
Well, these new 'features' DO NOT help or benefit the consumer in any way. It's as simple as that. Arguments over furthering the industry's lock on content and war on piracy are, to a typical consumer, vague and distant arguments- it seems like a mighty vague benefit, and inability to dub a movie or plug in any old TV are very blunt and direct disadvantages. The typical consumer won't spend lots of time dubbing off copies of movies, but he wants the option even if he won't use it. He won't march in the streets for it, but if it's denied him, he'll be sulky and resentful, and guess what? We're still talking about discretionary income here- such resentment can put a major hurt on media hardware sales, they sell through _enthusiasm_.
So by all means, go forth and educate! But it's less important to get all of society educated on the fiddly details of technoid encryption schemes- instead, we need the Jon Katz approach, and the message is this:
New tech is booby-trapped, don't be a sucker. That's in general- don't trust it. You can buy software that turns itself off or deletes itself, you can buy CPUs that track your movements, you can buy DVDs that are no good if you move to another area, you can buy CDs that don't play in CD players, soon you can buy monitors and video cards that won't work with regular video cards and monitors, and all of this is against YOU the consumer. It's not helping anyone but the manufacturers! So be sulky, give the new hardware a suspicious resentful look and DON'T FSCKING BUY IT. It's expensive anyway, and your old VCR still works! We'll see if they still want to stonewall after a few crappy holiday seasons.
The people doing all this stuff are all titans of industries based on DISCRETIONARY income, however little they want to admit it. They are vulnerable to a general consumer chilling effect towards their new exploitations, like DIVX and pay-per-view media. It's not necessary for the consumer to be up in arms and march on the manufacturer- all that's needed is for the consumer to be sulky enough to not buy. That money could go for a lot of nice evenings out, or a new car, or mortgage payments or nice clothes or steaks or whatever. The money that's confidently expected to go to DVD players and encrypted monitors is discretionary, it's being competed for by everyday things. Help the everyday things win. Tell someone to not bother upgrading their computer, monitor, VCR. It's not that difficult.
I don't count as some sort of average person, because I am a geek-type person with Asperger's Syndrome (a sort of autism), but I've found that before I had Net access, I became increasingly more isolated, unable to cope with the typical demands of social interaction. Upon discovering the net, I found that text-based interaction was a lot easier, and I went through advocacy newsgroups, MUCKs, IRC and all, getting more and more comfortable with the idea of interacting with other people.
By now I seem to have reached a sort of equilibrium state. It includes interacting with people IRL (which was not the case before I was online!) but more often interacting online. It is not that the Net has taught me to deal with people face to face like it was a stepping stone: rather, the net is a more suitable mode of interaction for me- and _having_ that, I end up being more confident and comfortable in general, and am able to _also_ interact with people to some extent away from the computer. That is still less interaction than your average person, but I'm not your average person.
I don't know how well that answer fits into the original study context. It seems that if 'more REGULAR HUMAN INTERACTION, whee' is always better, then I will always fail to be 'better'. My level of healthy interaction is a particular level, not just 'more is better'. I also have a level of interaction on a more detached, impersonal, 'literary' level, and typing words into the Net fills that need far more than face-to-face communication does. They do not exclude each other if things are going well- one will make up for a shortage of the other, but I can't thrive on just one or the other.
You can't file a patent as open source. The concepts are so orthoganal that they can't coexist. Unlike copyright, which concerns itself with laying claim to the origination of a work (I, not you, wrote this), patent specifically concerns itself with controlling access to a work (I, not you, can use this) and has no other purpose at this time. As such, it is the essence of what 'proprietary' means, and is intrinsically opposed to anything 'open source'. OSS is about sanctioning the free flow of information in whatever manner and legislating how that may be used. Patents are about blocking the free flow of information unless you pay or make other arrangements. It's a black-and-white difference in mode of information exchange.
What you would want if you really want 'open source' inventions is glaringly public domain- ability to publish an invention of whatever nature and have it immediately be recognized, at that point, as prior art. This requires some work- j. random website won't cut it, there must be a central location for hosting the database, it should be searchable so the patent office can _use_ it to look for up-to-the-minute prior art, and it must be widely accessible and publically acknowledged, not secret.
However, this would only prevent Amazon from making a patent based on a public domain idea- it would not prevent Amazon from using that idea, or making millions of dollars off the idea. If you want to punish Amazon, or punish Microsoft, or withhold things from anyone, you don't even want to be using open source much less PD inventions- the whole essence of open source is that anybody can use it, without passing tests or being voted in as OK, given only that they use the OSS according to the rules it comes with. In the case of public domain, it is oddly like the GPL vs. copyright in that the _only_ rule is 'This disqualifies the idea from being fit for patenting'. There are no other rules! Nobody is impeded from marketing the idea at all- the _only_ behavior that _is_ stopped is the ability to take an idea, railroad through a patent and then sue other people to stop them using it.
For some of us, this last situation is dangerous enough that access to a truly _public_ PD system is desperately needed. I know that I desperately need such a system- my website ain't enough, I do not trust that it would stand up in court as prior art against a corporate enemy because it _is_ my website, it's my own backyard.
And yes (hell, yes!) I have stuff to make public- I'm a peculiar geek kind of like the character 'Leonard of Quirm' in pterry books, and people who know me personally and have worked with me or visited my home tend to get all worked up and insist that I should be patenting things left and right. Runs in the family, my Dad is a scientist with a series of infrared instrumentation patents, and he too has pointed to particular inventions of mine and said they were clearly patentable. But that is not the way I want to behave! So for now I just _sit_ on reams of stuff (much of which is audio hardware, me being an audio geek), wishing for a _real_ public domain place to go. I look at SourceForge and drool- something like that would be so good, but nobody is making one for the inventor, because apparently the assumption is 'If you invent physical items, you don't _want_ to share, or to benefit the world, or work within a community of thinkers- only software programmers do that!' Well, bollocks to that:P and I can't be the only one 'cos I'm _not_ unique, I know there are others out there who feel as I do.
Ack, major tangent and rant! Well anyway... you want to look for ways to block patents, not ways to create more of them. The only thing they're good for anymore is blocking innovation and preventing good ideas from fully entering society. They are nothing but toll-gates and it is naive to think they are necessary- how much money does Microsoft make from patents versus how much money it makes through control of media and ownership of extensive distribution facilities? It's asinine to think that losing IP control will hurt the big corporations one iota. It's asinine to think that individuals _get_ equal rights and abilities under patent IP law, for that matter- it comes down to money, as these things do, and you can't outspend a corporation. So the only recourse is abolishment of patents- and, while they exist, staking out areas of public domain, that being the one area that is explicitly off limits to patents.
_I_ am wondering if anyone else is doing the slightest thing to further the development of a public domain database, a web resource? I swear it's necessary. I don't know how many other people need to use such a resource, but think about it- how many people could be expected, in 1990 or so, to write Unix-alike software for no pay just so other people could also share it? Think about it. What about software is so special that only software needs to be open? Ideas are even cheaper to transfer. You just talk- and listen.
This is truly a useful place for your attention to be. You do know that there is an increasing backlash against IT workers _for_ getting high salaries and tending to be indispensable? This could be easily spun into anti-hacker, anti-geek attitudes. Already people talk about internet geeks like they are some haughty breed of nobility who crash servers for fun and are smart enough to be dangerous. I see fewer people talking about how they work like slaves...
Also, you don't fully realise how far this problem goes. See Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts?. Evan Brown is property of DSC Communications, for all intents and purposes, and _all_ hours of his life when employed by DSC were 'work'. That sounds implausible, but he signed off on a contract which gave DSC ownership of any thoughts he had, thinking it wasn't a problem as he was only employed to provide technical support for the Motorola Cellular Division software testing group, not to invent things. He did invent something, apparently a method to convert old computer code into new languages, and DSC first tried to buy the idea, and then fired him and sued him for it. The idea has never been written down and exists only in Evan's brain...
As of January 20, 2000, Evan Brown is bankrupt and has sold everything he has but the farm on which he lives. On his 48th birthday, Judge Curt B. Henderson of the 219th Judicial District Court of the State of Texas has ordered him to work at DSC's PB-6 building in Plano without compensation for time, travel or expenses until he has documented his idea. Evan lives 3 hours from Plano. (I don't know from reading this if he has sold his car to pay legal expenses). He has also been ordered by the judge to write out his idea relating to DSC's product hardware (Zilog Z8000) as the machine executable binary code, rather than the Intel 8080 which Evan prefers.
How many hours a week did _Evan Brown_ work? Rather, ask if, legally, there was a single minute of any day when he was _not_ at work.
I know there are many Slashdot posters who respond to talk of collective bargaining and exploitation with cries of 'Wuss! Whiner! You go be a loser because we are tough and smart and better than most people and will take over the world by working 90 hours a week without compensation.' I would ask those people- have you read your contracts? Are you property, like Evan Brown's brain legally was? Can you set a price on that?
Evan Brown was employed as technical support for the Motorola Cellular Division software testing group. That is exactly the sort of job we're all talking about here, and now there is legal precedent in Texas law that if your employer slipped in details about owning your ideas during the time of employment- they can legally fire you, bankrupt you, sue you for the ideas and get the courts to go along with it and _compel_ you to reveal anything you claimed to have, whether or not they can prove that you invented it 'on their time'. Effectively, you can sign off on a contract that makes your brain property of the company, and the US Government will back it. If you do, the company could come after you ten years later claiming that your current invention was made during the time you worked for them- and with the Evan Brown case as case law, they could win, so even quitting a job with such conditions does not necessarily get you off the hook. The company could legally come after you years later demanding the contents of your mind or seizing ownership of your inventions, based on their prior ownership of your mind and thoughts- and win.
I bought LinuxPPC 1999 knowing that it was...interesting to get running, because I'd already downloaded it and installed it from my HD.:)
I haven't got around to reinstalling it (which I intend to do for fun, having a definite geek gene), but it is much nicer not having to download for 48 hours or so and take up whole HD partitions:) plus I've already worked out the kernel I need to run, which apparently is "vmlinux.2.2.1-VERY-STABLE". So I have a head start at wrestling '99 into useful shape and playing with it.
The packaging for LinuxPPC 1999 is small but _very_ attractive! And ya gotta love that tripped-out-penguin 'Linux Power' graphic. Yow. It looks stunned to be running on a PPC, but nevertheless getting into it;)
Forgive me for being contrary, but this _is_ exactly the same as the claim, "Free software eventually means no software" or "Free writing eventually means no writing" or indeed "Free speech eventually means no speech". In each case, a type of creative behavior that can be worth money is being competed with by the same behavior done freely. This only hurts the commercial offering to the extent that the commercial offering is artificially maintained above its freemarket value. There was a time when engraving was very expensive, and scribes were well paid for their access to pens and paper and ink and their ability to write things down, an ability the regular person did not have. I'm sure they argued that free engraving eventually meant no books would ever be written, and that the written word would die out completely because peasants couldn't write. Of course, Gutenberg yanked _their_ chains even worse- another example of technology destroying culture. Look at the Yellow Pages- do you see a _single_ _scribe_ listed? So, logically, the written word is dead...
Regarding software, people (perhaps even you yourself, 'Life Blood') made this very argument, that free software would so hurt the profit margins of commercial software that all software would die and there would be no software left. Well, the reality turned out to be this- if you want a free software author to write something in particular, hire 'em. The free market miraculously survives, cutting away the deadwood, shaking loose the dependence on artificially high profit margins and making the capitalists _compete_ as they claim to want to do. It seems that most capitalists would really rather be either the State, and be communists, or the Biggest Stick, and be fascists. I frankly see very little real capitalism in the arguments of capitalists- you'd think they would accept the challenges of further capitalism, but they always want to win and then be protected from ever having to lose again. Only natural I suppose, but the world doesn't work that way.
With regard to movies, what free movies will mean, what independently-authored movies will mean, is that the studios will have to actually compete for a change. They will have to make special effects so grand that you _want_ to go to a theater to experience them. They will have to hire better writers than the amateurs can (seemingly not a problem, or so you would think). They will have to hire better continuity people, grips and gaffers and the whole crew of people for making serious movies, and actually produce not 'product' but genuine works of art- and then they will have to have the merchandising ready and be able to sell you things based on the chances of their movie being copied from here to Taiwan with _everybody_ watching it and talking about it and being excited about it.
Isn't that what they _want_?
Imagine 'Men In Black' being viewed _everywhere_ on release. Now, consider the profitability of a 'flashything!' toy, perhaps with a little strobe. I'm not aware of them ever making one, but this would be an absolute slamdunk of an idea- and potentially as profitable as the movie itself, as you don't _have_ to sell a toy at $8. A sufficiently good Flashything(tm) could go for $30 and still sell like Furbies.
The clincher is this: MIB developed that mindshare not by marketing pressure, but by being a damned good movie as movies go. In order to be able to do the merchandising and take advantage of people copying your movie, take advantage of 'flash mindshare' and having the world suddenly mad for Flashythings and Will Smith, you not only have to allow the copying, you have to MAKE A GOOD MOVIE. People won't copy it if it sucks! The only way you'll really get that kind of saturation is if you really do a good movie! Only then does it become possible to use the other methods and sell toys and run a Men In Black 'Everquest' clone for money etc. ad creativitum.
And if you do an equally good movie that's up against the MIB, and you're successfully stopping anyone from copying and MIB is _not_ limiting copying- you lose! You blew it- you saw slippery data as a threat, they saw it as an advantage, _they_ are the ones on top of the big fad movie of the moment and _you_ are out to lunch, your carefully guarded theatre profits in the toilet because everybody spent the money on FlashyThings(tm).
This is inevitable. It's merely a question of who can figure it out quickest- and what media ends up making it possible. If DVDs do not, then DVDs will go the way of Beta and VHS tapes and vinyl records- eventually the technology will go to the point where it _is_ possible to DL entire movies in a few scant minutes, or send them about in an envelope by third class mail, and this whole scenario of slippery-data as a weapon will play itself out- and the world will never be the same.
_Text_ used to be only for the rich- until Gutenberg.
He's confused: it's the sun in his eyes that's harming his vision. He's got it backwards.
Maybe his old eyes can adjust to emerging from his cave and maybe not, but I for one refuse to stay in the cave with him. It's time to come out and look at the real world and not just the shadows on the walls. (thank you, Plato)
I don't know what the media business will be like, either, in a world where data is so slippery that it's basically everywhere and you can't easily control or channel it. I don't know exactly how people will earn income in such a world, though clearly the middlemen will suffer the worst. I do know that it's happening one way or another, cleanly or messily, and I would like to see for myself what it's like, and fend for myself in it. I'm sorry that Jack Valenti has so firmly identified himself with the middlemen- a class that's destined to lose its present position of authority and control, and take on more of a mediator position. However, that doesn't exempt him from the consequences.
Note how he talked a great deal (with some degree of plausibility) about what had to happen in order for his products to thrive and do business as usual- but nobody saw fit to ask about the other products _competing_ with the industry products?
The reason this concept draws a blank is because there basically _aren't_ any in the public eye, because both the music media and film media industries are heavily controlled. However, this is really the best counterargument against the RIAA and MPAA- given enough access to the market, at some point people may be copying indie music and film _more_ than the copyright protected works of the industries.
There seems to be this assumption that the nature of technological empowerment is strictly to turn good consumers into bad consumers- there's this Berlin Wall between the consumer and the artist, and if you don't live in Hollywood or LA you couldn't possibly be an artist, therefore you must be a pirate. The idea is that there will never be content created except by the industry- so if content piracy gets too out of hand, and the ability to make and duplicate media gets too accessible, the industry will wither and die leaving nothing in its place. And all the industry artists will starve and get regular jobs (pointedly assuming they're making anything with the industry! Which is rather statistically unlikely), and then all the consumers will sit on their butts, with no music and no TV and no films at all, because there will be nobody left to produce them.
This _is_ fscking absurd, of course.
The trouble is, there need to be more artists driven to support new media in the same way that some programmers feel obligated to support free software- an ethical decision that furthers a particular agenda, even at the expense of profits or popularity. It turned out that once a certain number of people were using free software things snowballed and we got Linux. There need to be a certain number of people ready to produce MP3 music, to produce some sort of film that can be distributed on mainstream media, to get a similar power base against the media industries- only then can media start to be seriously decentralised, much as communication is now seriously decentralised what with email and the Web and all.
The trouble is, we're at a point where (intentionally or not) the industries are taking steps to block access to independents. It wouldn't take much to make consumer DVD players refuse to play indie DVDs- they already refuse to play out-of-zone DVDs, which is already an abuse of their power over the new global economy! You can hunt for budget DVDs on eBay, but the players are set to refuse to play such DVDs. BMG has been attempting to introduce a new CD format that is no longer Red Book CD Audio- if things go badly we could not only lose the ability to author our own films on DVD, but even the ability to author our own music CDs on CD-R. This goes beyond having CD-R taxed so that if you author your own music you are forced to pay a tax to the very industry which is fighting you and trying to crush you (which is what already happens)- it goes all the way to attempts to legally forbid you to author media for the public at all, based on the fact that you're using the same recording media as 'media pirates'.
It is really a shame that the Salon interviewer didn't think to ask Jack Valenti about these issues. Of course, he has been so successful in hurting and blocking other movie producing markets (such as Canada, see Nebular's post) that it doesn't even occur to most people that anything other than the MPAA can make a film- or that anything but the RIAA can make a CD.
It's not about responding quicker (that might be the worst thing you could do!). It's certainly not about the people being either better _or_ worse than the pols. It _is_ about having or making the time to deal with the issues. What does UCITA mean to you? Well then, what about Monsanto? That's yet another area, agribusiness, and I only mention it because I have heard enough about it to know there are serious issues with that. Many people who know more than I do about dangerous agribusiness developments haven't got a clue what UCITA is or why they should care. And then I am quite certain that there are still other issues I haven't even heard about, thousands of them.
"You shut up! Try running a state for a while instead of a small business and see how you like it!" (Robert Heinlein character in 'Magic, Inc.')
I mean it. There just ISN'T time. No sane person should expect that they can make sensible decisions on all the doings of government, individually. You have to delegate. It's stark raving madness to think you can micromanage U.S. government, and the whole concept of ever-more-direct-Democracy is essentially wanting to turn the country over to micromanagement on the assumption that this would work. Even _if_ the idea of simple majority was a smart one (and there are reasons why it can be an absolute curse), there is just no way 'the people of the U.S.' are able to educate themselves on what they would need to know. Nobody could, even the pols only get part of the way there, and they are (at least in theory) fulltime employed at it. If you want government to improve, figure out how to get the pols to work harder and take more responsibility for their actions, don't just talk about giving the People a governmental 'remote'. "Click 'yes' to fight cyberterrorist acts"...
I guess when I get right down to it I'm saying this: the ONLY key difference between the pols and the People is that the pols get full-time to learn about the issues. The People don't _have_ the time to learn about the issues. They probably are experts on their own backyards, but nobody is giving them time to learn about Qatar and labor issues in Cleveland and UCITA and genetically engineered wheat and the implications of telecommuting on OSHA regulations and SSI Red Book incentives and the price of tea in Des Moines?
If the pols are so useless at this when it's all they do, what on earth gives you the idea that you can turn the decisions over to people who haven't even heard about half of these things? How would you make them listen, how are you going to force them to abandon every free hour they have and stay up extra late at night to be briefed on Somalia?
Yes, I'm getting 'debatey', but so are you. Really, isn't this a major concern?
It is _not_ that congressmen are cleverer, more educated, or wiser than your average person (god forbid!). It's just that your average person doesn't have TIME to handle this kind of thing directly. That's what congressmen are _for_, they are basically employees of the citizenry hired to learn about this stuff and make good decisions. Certainly they have faults but they are not that much worse than the citizenry, not worse at all.
My thinking on the matter is colored by a lot of reading on Watergate: representatives were placed in pretty intolerable positions at that time. Some represented deeply conservative constituencies which doggedly supported Nixon- yet gradually the representatives began to realise that Nixon had lied to them, lied to the people, committed crimes, and as impeachment grew closer and closer, they all ended up turning against Nixon, because they owed their constituencies not just their obedience, but their judgement. It was a tough call, causing many of them great anguish- they like you took representation seriously. But the bottom line was this: they knew that their own constituents had been lied to and misled, and they couldn't wait around for 'em to figure that out. They had to act based on the truth.
If it was a pure democracy, it is possible that Watergate could have ended in an expertly 'spun' poll or vote (The Nixon people spent millions in astroturf campaigns through fake organizations, even buying a fullpage Times advertisement under a false name) resulting in a criminal President who engaged in wiretapping, surveillance, and conspiracy to burglary and obstruction of justice... staying in office and continuing to do it. That's not OK.
By the same token, though it's hard to argue that politicians should be trusted, _somebody_ has to get the job of learning up on this stuff and deciding things. When you read history it might surprise you, sometimes, how our pols can sometimes rise above all the corruption and politicking and do what we'd want them to do- even eloquently, movingly.
Campaign reform, yes. Tie the hands of corporate pork barrel special interests, yes. Replace the pols with one big vote- no thank you. For all their faults the pols do that job better than one big vote ever could.
Slashdot Mirror
It's plain that Microsoft has done harm. However, you look at the coders and geeks within Microsoft and they are not, for the most part, bad people. Does this invalidate the harm Microsoft has done? No, of course not- welcome to the real world. They have helped it happen, certainly did not set out each day saying "Heyyyy! Let's all stifle innovation in this industry (except from us!) and help to lock computing into some technological Dark Ages!". It's just that the work that they do is effectively harnessed to the power of a corporation which has a long history of doing just such stifling. They are not the ones in toplevel meetings telling Apple "Yes, we're asking you to 'knife the baby'. Kill Quicktime for us or you won't like the consequences". But their work enables the upper management to do just that.
Also, I would be very surprised if there wasn't a (military?) sort of elitism pervading the place. In effect, the Microsoft workers may not be frothing at the mouth to eradicate all competition in the industry- but they do, I feel, see themselves as superior to anybody else, which makes it very easy for them to be very unconcerned about their bosses acting to crush and stifle other companies. Somewhere in the back of the Microsoft worker mind is, "That's okay- if they wanted to _really_ innovate and do good things, they'd quit that company and join US!". This is not capitalism, of course- in most industries, competition is seen as a normal and healthy thing. I feel that within the Microsoft culture, competition from other companies is seen as as best a distraction from _real_ innovation, and at worst a positive roadblock- such that one could easily picture Microsoft people lobbying the government to shut down a competitor that stood in the way of Microsoft expansion. "You're hurting the economic growth of the whole country by allowing them to keep operating like that! They're blocking innovation!"
And still, none of this requires that the people involved are evil people: you just have to look at their worldview. It's all very well having elitism. Elitism plus _clout_ equals trouble.
If your submissions are any good, lots of other people will also be submitting them, and eventually in about 2 weeks one of them will luck out and get a story in :)
I used to madly love Pizza Rolls. Not just any sort, but Three Cheese Pizza Rolls. They _ruled_. They were _perfect_ and yummy and actually somewhat filling and had serious pretensions of being Real Food, and I bought 'em constantly.
Then, some years ago, the company improved them by taking out most of the cheese product, changing the name to 'Cheese' from 'Three Cheese', increasing the amount of tomato stuff by making it more watery and thin, and adding specks of black stuff to it. It was _horrible_ and clearly cheaper to make. The shareholders must have been well pleased. I quit buying the things- even now, years later, I will occasionally pick up a bag of 'em as a sort of salute to what they used to be, but the yumminess is really pretty completely gone.
If anyone has a cache of Three Cheese Pizza Rolls somewhere, put 'em up on eBay and point me at 'em? Nostalgia is worth any price. Same goes for original sugar-based (see: Canadian) Coca-Cola. I think if I remember correctly Totino's Party Pizza also was changed horribly from its original junkfood yumminess, but in a less sweeping manner.
Ya know, if these companies didn't have shareholders, they might be a little less pressured to change things which sell (to try and knock off a few cents) while clinging to their tortured userbase at the same time...
For instance, I treat the humble taco like this- I'll fuss around for an hour dicing tomatoes and shredding cheese and ripping lettuce into neat little pieces and cooking a beef filling based on the way they used to make the Old El Paso mix (which was _ruined_ in recent years- gah!) from scratch or semi-scratch. Or I'll make a stirfry curry chicken dish that involves breading chicken slices and some peanuts with straight curry powder and making rice and presoaking raisins to mix with the rice, all to be mixed with mango chutney. There aren't a huge number of recipes, but the common factor is: they taste good, and take maybe an hour or more to prepare. Which is _normal_ for really posh food when you have to dice fresh tomatoes or cut fresh gourmet Bell and Evans organic chicken breast into stirfry slices and bread them each individually in a big bowl of curry powder.
Therefore, this explains why I will also be found eating Ramen (after my Dad took me out to a noodle restaraunt- before that, I wouldn't touch Ramen, but that's when I discovered oriental noodles had an interesting style all their own), or freezer burritos (my attempts at making my own gourmet freezer burritos have not really measured up to _cheap_ freezer burritos- some things are meant to be cheap, not posh), or mac and cheese (which I will put sour cream and nice butter into, tho) or even eating raw spaghettios out of the can (the _serious_ don't-distract-me-with-meatspace dinner).
I like the idea that I epitomize _both_ extremes ;)
Whether it's classic kraft orange, or something nifty like Annie's Alfredo (a personal favorite), I use the prescribed amount of butter and substitute sour cream for milk. It's richer and more hearty, and also sour cream has less lactose than skim milk (sounds nuts, but think about it, lactose is a sugar). So mac and cheese made with sour cream is less likely to act like a pipe bomb in your digestion if you are lactose intolerant! :)
I like burritos, but only _cheap_ burritos >:) I used to be able to get this brand of freezer burritos in big long sacks- man, I miss those. Currently I'm occasionally buying another brand of cheap freezer burrito, but though the Cheap Burrito Flavor (tm) is still right, the new kind (Tina's Beef And Bean Green Chili) tends to have bits of bone in it, which is extremely nasty. I don't want it _that_ cheap thank you ;P :) The other kind (Los Campanas?) had cheaper packaging, but never contained unwanted bits :)
I have no sympathy or patience towards your opposition to the GPL. You will clearly spend hours trying to get it stamped out, write reams of argument trying to scare people away from using it, and all to support commercial companies. Now, I am not intrinsically opposed to commercial companies- as I said (which you ignored) I make heavy use of some commercial software like Photoshop, like the programming environment REALbasic. However, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the more rope I give commercial software, the more likely they are to hang _me_ with it, and you too.
You seem blithely unaware of UCITA, of a whole steady movement toward legislating and sanctifying the worst abuses of commercial software. These go beyond a company buying up brainpower and starving entire fields of endeavor from the ideas they need to progress- all the way toward having and using the right to sabotage my own computer in any way they like if they form the idea that I've violated their licensing in some way, and being fully supported by the law in this.
Naturally, the amoral capitalism you espouse will reward those who seize this opportunity quickest, and we can confidently expect the proliferation of this sort of abuse. In some ways your viewpoint is like this: for the users, the world is a battleground, an urban wasteland. But if you're a company, the world is supposedly like the small Vermont town I lived in 6 years or so ago, in which nobody really bothered to lock their cars and everybody knew everybody- stultifying but safe. The unspoken idea is that one _must_ support business and commercial software at all costs, because they are the seat of decency in the world, with a commercial morality that (unlike regular morality) can be reduced to dollars and cents: and that this results in Good Being Done and the accumulation of Profit.
I look out at the constant background of aggressive maneuvers done by closed-source software companies- not simply against each other, against _us_ the consumers- and can't understand why anyone would have more faith in them than in a pack of rabid rats- or why this state of affairs deserves protecting. Just because it results in salaries being paid is not a good enough reason to support it. Look at what happens as a result. You get Photoshop- but you also get Windows Me. You get Id- but you also get Blizzard. You get start-ups- but you also get UCITA. You get Microsoft, and you'll never get rid of them as long as you live. Is this worth protecting? What about the vocation of software coding is so special that guaranteeing its artificially high income is worth setting up this kind of mess?
RMS may well be a loony, but I'd say he was a loony for being twenty years too early. Look at his fanatical opposition to closed-source in the light of UCITA (which did not exist at the time he was forming his ideas). Perhaps it was only chance, or perhaps the reason his fanaticism becomes relevant now is that he really saw and acted on the _result_ of what he saw happening. It's dangerous to 'project' outcomes like that, you can end up totally wrong. RMS could have read the whole situation wrong, back then, and if he had, GNU would have languished basically unused and commercial software would have turned out to be a greatly liberating force with no drawbacks to it, requiring no alternative because all freedom and choice and security was available within it.
Welcome to the real world. It seems that there _was_ a need for GNU- look at all the GNU, the Linux, the GPL out there. It's never been _easy_ to use this stuff, it's geek-only so far, yet people are still forced to turn to it: look at the litany of security bugs, acts of sabotage and intentional incompatibility, the lossage of the commercial software industry. Look at the legislation being passed successfully to reduce their liability even more, scorning all concepts of consumer protection- look at the ideas, the total disregard for private property that leads a commercial software company to think they have a right to seize MY COMPUTER without due process if they think I might have done something wrong, that they have a right to grovel all over it assuming I am guilty of piracy or something until _they_ satisfy themselves that I am innocent- but if _I_ grovel all over their work with a decompiler, I can go to _jail_! Not cyber-jail, real concrete and steel jail for up to five years!
Brett, I did not ask them to behave in this manner. I would have been _quite_ happy to support software companies as you would insist I do, respecting their rights to earn a living. Their rights end, however, when they start arranging to have me thrown in jail, and begin crawling up my computer like IRS auditors looking for violations. I never agreed to their coming on my 'private property' (my computer and data _is_ my property. It's _my_ data) and behaving in such a manner.
It's possible that I'm letting a few bad apples spoil the barrel. However, that's what _happens_: the others end up mimicking the ones making the most money, and crime has always paid. In this case, the precedent is set, the legislation is already being passed, the die is cast.
If they're going to redefine the industry in this manner, I will wholeheartedly embrace the ideas that were (opinionatedly) put forth by RMS so many years ago, in a simpler time that probably didn't rate that sort of hysteria. Times have changed, and it appears that OSS people did not have to declare a war at all- war has been declared on us, by just these commercial software people, up to and including the intention to change the very open standards of the Net itself out from under us to destroy even our communications with each other.
If taking sides makes me malicious, I can only say that I feel justified in such malice, and that I didn't set out to be- my trust was broken. I side against you. I oppose you utterly- not because you are being intentionally malicious, but because you're a damned fool supporting something worse than you imagine. I side with the OSS people, RMS, and the GPL.
How do I take sides with the GPL? It's not by passing laws to outlaw commercial software, by breaking the kneecaps of commercial developers or burning down their office buildings, it's not by planning to develop special GPL-only net standards or writing software that scans your hard drive to see if you're using GPL code in some commercial project- in other words, it's not by malicious means or even the means of commercial software.
I USE IT! So far, I am still free to do so.
_Shame_ on you, Brett. You are a liar and a propagandist supporting a corrupt and abusive system. How do you sleep? I realise this gives you the ability to pull another debator move and cry 'ad hominem' yet again, but I am honestly wondering how you can justify your position to yourself. Is it that, to you, none of the on-record hostile acts of commercial software companies count? Is it that computers are not private property but actually belong to the vendors that make the hardware and software, and that we rent them/borrow them? Is it that you feel capitalism is so religiously important that it must be supported over consumer or even human rights? Is it that you cannot see human existence except in terms of how much a person earns, with no other values? What is it? State your faith if you insist on keeping on arguing like this. You are trying to harm something important, and I want to know why.
Airwindows Desktops
Airwindows Backgrounds
Airwindows Tiles
Airwindows Titlebars
Airwindows Web Backgrounds
It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way :) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty! ;)
This is Jon's calling: his background, style, and motivation perfectly suit him for helping to kick off _non_ geek rejections of things like that. All he needs is a forum, and though Slashdot isn't an ideal forum for him, I am sure he can reach the proper forums as needed.
"In fact, the stated intent of the GPL was to destroy jobs that paid better than the slave wages earned by grad students in the MIT AI Lab."
How quaint! And to think that I believed the GPL was for taking coding ideas and forcibly preventing them from being filched and made proprietary by people like you. Shocked, I am, to learn that 'Saint Ignatius's only real interest is in destroying jobs! Could you have misheard him? Maybe he wants to destroy Wozniak instead ;)
"Levy relates that Stallman refused to provide EMACS software -- which he was being paid by MIT to write! -- to users on the Computer Science department's systems. Why? Because they used passwords to keep their machines from being broken into from across the ARPANet."
It may have escaped your attention, but at the time, the AI lab did not USE passwords. At the time, people were evolving ways of functioning in 'electronic society' without locks and passwords and barriers, and it actually worked, because people felt the obligation to behave civilly, given the freedom to do harm. The use of passwords you cite was not business as usual, but the imposition of a new set of regulations which assumed anyone with the freedom to do harm would obviously do it, and arranged matters so nobody had that freedom. I realise that you think this is the only way the world can work. We'll never know now, will we? Because RMS failed in his attempt to force the issue, and did not convince the world that establishing social expectations was the way to handle 'security'. (Also, it's interesting to note how you fulminate against anyone interfering with a business-employed coder's right to withhold their code from others if they wish, but won't accept RMS's academia-funded right to withhold EMACS from others as he wished. So if you are a business, you get to do whatever you want, but if you are academic or an OSS type you are obliged to be exploited and trod upon?)
"What the GPL does do, however, is sabotage young companies and programmers with promising ideas."
The _order_ you put that in is interesting, but the claim makes no sense whatsoever. Surely a young company with programmers and promising ideas is free to do whatever it wants, within reason? Do you think a good idea cannot compete against a GPLed implementation of 'cheap imitation' quality? Do you have that little faith in the marketplace that the mere existence of free things terrifies you so? Do you think little elves will sneak into the fine young company under cover of darkness and, cackling malignantly, GPL everything while nobody is looking? You've got some very strange ideas about what the GPL _means_ to a company that wants no part of it. Such as:
"It prohibits commercial developers from making use of open source without giving away the farm."
Why in God's name do you think commercial developers _should_ get to make use of open source? Being a commercial developer usually means proprietary code. Use that. If you must compete and not interact cooperatively with others, come up with your own damn ideas. For _years_ there wasn't a major, public open source movement, and no commercial developers complained about this at all. Nobody objected in the slightest to having to reinvent the wheel behind closed doors, it was a way of life to come up with your own code. Now all of a sudden, OSS is trendy, and suddenly access to other people's code is a _right_?
"Bull. It (the GPL) ensures that programmers cannot make a living by licensing their work."
Nice spin! *clap clap* But of course the key words here are 'BY LICENSING THEIR WORK', and it's most amusing to note how you avoid mentioning this effect only happens to programmers who license under the GPL themselves! You have a real talent for bullshit propaganda, do you work for Mindcraft? The implication of your statement is clearly 'that all programmers are deprived of making a living by the GPL'. The reality, of course, is that programmers can and do make a living by the service they provide (not by any concept of their resulting work as private property)- and that it is ALWAYS up to you the programmer to choose to GPL something or not, and if you don't, all the options of intellectual property licensing remain open to you. In fact they'd be open to you if you GPL, they are just toothless because anyone has the right to have the source of anything you've GPLed. For the programmers who don't GPL, it's even sillier to claim the GPL scorches their earth and ruins their lives and stock options. It has no effect on them at all. Or are all commercial programmers so pathetic that OSS programmers working for free can out-code, out-compete, out-market and out-distribute them? If so, what is your justification for coddling the commercial programmers? Let 'em die! But I am the owner of numerous commercial programs- for instance, I use Photoshop over the GIMP, because Photoshop is _way_ better in my opinion. I think you are being unduly alarmist, behaving like the GPL will kill programmers like the ones who did Photoshop. To compete you have to _compete_, not just own an idea and sit on your ass 'protecting' it...
"It is a weapon because it undermines commercial developers' work. Anyone can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him or her -- except commercial developers."
Cry me a river. Commercial developers are paid to develop. They have resources which part-time people couldn't begin to dream of. They have extra clout with other commercial developers- when Microsoft talks, Apple listens. When Id talks, Microsoft listens. Interestingly, when the GPL talks, Id listens ;) it would appear that John Carmack can use GPLed code in the way which most benefits him: releasing disused engines so people can play with them and develop things from them, but in such a way that the engine itself cannot be taken and turned into a competing commercial engine to go up against Q3Arena. Bungie has also done this with the Marathon 2 source, recently, also using the GPL. The GPL is _ideal_ for protecting the interests of commercial developers who want to give away their old engines for people to enjoy, but don't want to be bothered supporting them and DON'T want to be seeding another commercial competitor. It's shocking you don't see this considering how common the situation is now.
"This isn't ethical; it's a game of "keep-away.""
This is different from proprietary code exactly how?
"Just as a treasure is lost whenever another a line of code falls under the vicious, viral, unethical GPL."
My. Words fail me. Aside from the fact that this is nonsense, why do you feel that you have any business saying this on Slashdot? I'll give you credit for not preaching to the choir here, but on the other hand you've got to be fscking crazy if you think this argument carries weight here. You're ranting and ignoring the logic of the situation and trying to scare people away from using the GPL, and again I say, why? What on earth about it could be so threatening to you? Are you really that incompetent that you can't compete on grounds of quality, marketing, distribution or trendiness with mere open source software? OSS is like a flood on the rise. It will work its way into all valleys, it will wash away lowlands. If you suck, OSS will bury you: if you make terrific code, it won't be able to touch you unless you want to use it for _your_ purposes like Carmack does. There is no "Can't I just suck in peace without having to compete? I own intellectual property!" option.
OSS is a flood. If you don't want to be part of it, then rise above it. If you won't bother to rise above it, then shut up and drown!
I see no reason why all ISPs with acceptable use policies that forbid spamming can't just configure their software to silently discard any email with "ADV:" beginning the subject field. It's not a very common word, after all. This would work to stop spam at the point of injection, and it could also be used in mail relays to blithely throw away whole bunches of spam on sight. ISPs are not public property, after all.
Forget the _bad_ 'opt out' clause (which is just stupid as no matter what law is passed, most opt out addresses are address harvesters anyway), the requirement of a machine-parsable identifier on spams is truly a Good Thing. This is not so that you can recognise spam when you get it- it's so that any ISP between you and the spammer has the option of parsing the spam, finding that it is explicitly something the ISP has no intentions of relaying or sending, and throwing it away before it even gets to you.
I realize spammers may possibly be upset at the idea of ISPs everywhere silently throwing away their spams before they even reach their targets.
Boo fscking hoo. They're lucky it's not a capital offense.
I use SpamCop, but I deeply, _deeply_ distrust their 'Spam Recycling Center' feature, and wonder what the hell that is supposed to be about? You recycle a thing to get _more_ of it. As near as I can tell, it is an accumulated list of something, and regarding spam I don't think it's safe or sensible to keep accumulated lists of _anything_. So I pointedly avoid ever using that 'feature' and am rather piqued with SpamCop for having it default to on. But then, I use spamcop as a LART (got 36 accounts killed so far, not great but better than nothing), and contribute to their spam-blocking records without using them as I am not a spamcop member. So I'm not really entitled to gripe too much about SpamCop. This fool SRC business, however, has seriously reduced the chances of my ever signing up and paying SpamCop as a member. If they are involved in nonsense I won't give them a cent, even though they provide a service that helps me LART spammers without paying huge amounts of attention to the mechanics of it.
As soon as for-profit companies stepped in, the thriving community of hackers that existed in the MIT AI Lab was fragmented and eventually destroyed by the IP requirements of the for-profit companies, notably Symbolics which hired away most of the hackers and silenced them with NDAs.
Only after the MIT AI Lab was already destroyed did Stallman try to revenge himself on Symbolics. He did this through a burst of reverse engineering and singlehandedly kept pace with an entire team of the world's best hackers (at Symbolics), impressing the hell out of them. He succeeded in keeping up while reengineering everything Symbolics did, he didn't just 'try'. The products involved were LISP machines, which grew from concepts originally developed within the AI Lab, so it's not like Stallman had no experience with this- Symbolics had basically scorched the earth of _his_ turf, but everything they did was well within his experience and background. (EMACS is strongly LISP based)
The GPL prevents any such situation from recurring- it bars nobody from participating (despite many attempts to add 'except Microsoft can't use my code!' clauses) and the single condition it imposes is that the code licensed under the GPL remains forever open for discussion and exchange. It does nothing else, and can only be considered a weapon if you expect commercial developers to be allowed to take OTHER PEOPLE'S work away from them, which seems an unusual position.
There is no symbiosis between academia and the commercial world. The best that can be expected is armed truce- masters of this art, such as Nicholas Negroponte and his Media Lab, make it look easy, but practice a level of diplomacy as dangerous and tricky as full-on political diplomacy. Negroponte once explained his technique like this: when a company funded research it was made available to all. No companies like this, so Negroponte would say, "Okay, we'll do it your way. And when you come to see your research, we'll blindfold you and lead you right to it. There's 20 billion dollars of other research going on here that you could be seeing, but you won't see any of it. And then when you're done we'll blindfold you again and take you right back out. It's your choice."
That is 'symbiosis'? To me it sounds like power politics and the cunning balancing of totally incompatible interests. Calling it symbiosis is woefully understating the brilliance of the negotiating skills and determination of people like Negroponte, who truly understand the game they are playing- which is more than I can say for you.
Congratulations, Brett. I've never read a post so breathtakingly wrong! :)
Consumer products are not truly based on a model of coercion.
It's really that simple. All this yammer about encryption confuses and frightens the consumer (which is its intended purpose), but there is a level at which _anybody_ would do a doubletake and go, "How would _that_ protect me?". The idea is to have the consumer feel vaguely safer with 'protected' stuff, but funky CDs that don't play in existing players? 'Protecting' the path from video card to monitor? Schemes that, rather than giving the happy consumer 'perfect' sound/video/whatever, turn around and put in watermarks that can survive VCR dubbing, saying 'the picture degradation is not serious, you won't mind!'. You won't mind paying X amount of dollars for the all new monitor to connect to the all new DVD player all to play content with watermarks hazing the image, plus you have to sit through 5 minutes of commercials each time you play the movie, because if you defeat that feature you go to JAIL for up to five years.
How many people here truly think that the average human being won't be smart enough to avoid being exploited that badly? We are not talking about access to food and water and oxygen here. We are talking 'American Pie' and 'Blair Witch Project' and 'The Matrix'. Forgive me for stating what should be already obvious (if it wasn't for the unstated assumptions of the industry!) but this consumption is discretionary income. People not only have the option to not consume, but in fact the burden of persuasion is on the industry, not on the consumer.
"The consumer is not an idiot. She is your wife." -David Ogilvy
People continually behave as if the consumer is a subhuman creature- you see words like zombie used, otherwise clued hackers will go to a mall, observe very distracted people spend discretionary income and conclude that humanity is made of brainless zombies who only do as they are told. This is an exaggeration, because there's always a limit. Do you think DIVX failed entirely due to hackers rushing about like Paul Revere? (For that matter, was the American Revolution due to Paul Revere rushing about, or a deepseated public (consumer!) resentment of taxation and Colonial-era abuses?)
When things get bad enough, those consumers don't need telling. They are people like you, they just probably don't bother caring most of the time about issues like these. Sell one a TV, crying 'New! Improved! Better Picture!' and nod, thinking the consumer is a robot. Now try selling one a TV by crying 'New! Improved! Won't work with your VCR! You won't mind the watermarking a bit! Pay per view!' Surprise surprise! Seems the consumer doesn't understand why the TV not working with his VCR is a feature. How foolish of him!
Well, these new 'features' DO NOT help or benefit the consumer in any way. It's as simple as that. Arguments over furthering the industry's lock on content and war on piracy are, to a typical consumer, vague and distant arguments- it seems like a mighty vague benefit, and inability to dub a movie or plug in any old TV are very blunt and direct disadvantages. The typical consumer won't spend lots of time dubbing off copies of movies, but he wants the option even if he won't use it. He won't march in the streets for it, but if it's denied him, he'll be sulky and resentful, and guess what? We're still talking about discretionary income here- such resentment can put a major hurt on media hardware sales, they sell through _enthusiasm_.
So by all means, go forth and educate! But it's less important to get all of society educated on the fiddly details of technoid encryption schemes- instead, we need the Jon Katz approach, and the message is this:
The people doing all this stuff are all titans of industries based on DISCRETIONARY income, however little they want to admit it. They are vulnerable to a general consumer chilling effect towards their new exploitations, like DIVX and pay-per-view media. It's not necessary for the consumer to be up in arms and march on the manufacturer- all that's needed is for the consumer to be sulky enough to not buy. That money could go for a lot of nice evenings out, or a new car, or mortgage payments or nice clothes or steaks or whatever. The money that's confidently expected to go to DVD players and encrypted monitors is discretionary, it's being competed for by everyday things. Help the everyday things win. Tell someone to not bother upgrading their computer, monitor, VCR. It's not that difficult.By now I seem to have reached a sort of equilibrium state. It includes interacting with people IRL (which was not the case before I was online!) but more often interacting online. It is not that the Net has taught me to deal with people face to face like it was a stepping stone: rather, the net is a more suitable mode of interaction for me- and _having_ that, I end up being more confident and comfortable in general, and am able to _also_ interact with people to some extent away from the computer. That is still less interaction than your average person, but I'm not your average person.
I don't know how well that answer fits into the original study context. It seems that if 'more REGULAR HUMAN INTERACTION, whee' is always better, then I will always fail to be 'better'. My level of healthy interaction is a particular level, not just 'more is better'. I also have a level of interaction on a more detached, impersonal, 'literary' level, and typing words into the Net fills that need far more than face-to-face communication does. They do not exclude each other if things are going well- one will make up for a shortage of the other, but I can't thrive on just one or the other.
One million two hundred thousand percent difference is equal?
What you would want if you really want 'open source' inventions is glaringly public domain- ability to publish an invention of whatever nature and have it immediately be recognized, at that point, as prior art. This requires some work- j. random website won't cut it, there must be a central location for hosting the database, it should be searchable so the patent office can _use_ it to look for up-to-the-minute prior art, and it must be widely accessible and publically acknowledged, not secret.
However, this would only prevent Amazon from making a patent based on a public domain idea- it would not prevent Amazon from using that idea, or making millions of dollars off the idea. If you want to punish Amazon, or punish Microsoft, or withhold things from anyone, you don't even want to be using open source much less PD inventions- the whole essence of open source is that anybody can use it, without passing tests or being voted in as OK, given only that they use the OSS according to the rules it comes with. In the case of public domain, it is oddly like the GPL vs. copyright in that the _only_ rule is 'This disqualifies the idea from being fit for patenting'. There are no other rules! Nobody is impeded from marketing the idea at all- the _only_ behavior that _is_ stopped is the ability to take an idea, railroad through a patent and then sue other people to stop them using it.
For some of us, this last situation is dangerous enough that access to a truly _public_ PD system is desperately needed. I know that I desperately need such a system- my website ain't enough, I do not trust that it would stand up in court as prior art against a corporate enemy because it _is_ my website, it's my own backyard.
And yes (hell, yes!) I have stuff to make public- I'm a peculiar geek kind of like the character 'Leonard of Quirm' in pterry books, and people who know me personally and have worked with me or visited my home tend to get all worked up and insist that I should be patenting things left and right. Runs in the family, my Dad is a scientist with a series of infrared instrumentation patents, and he too has pointed to particular inventions of mine and said they were clearly patentable. But that is not the way I want to behave! So for now I just _sit_ on reams of stuff (much of which is audio hardware, me being an audio geek), wishing for a _real_ public domain place to go. I look at SourceForge and drool- something like that would be so good, but nobody is making one for the inventor, because apparently the assumption is 'If you invent physical items, you don't _want_ to share, or to benefit the world, or work within a community of thinkers- only software programmers do that!' Well, bollocks to that :P and I can't be the only one 'cos I'm _not_ unique, I know there are others out there who feel as I do.
Ack, major tangent and rant! Well anyway... you want to look for ways to block patents, not ways to create more of them. The only thing they're good for anymore is blocking innovation and preventing good ideas from fully entering society. They are nothing but toll-gates and it is naive to think they are necessary- how much money does Microsoft make from patents versus how much money it makes through control of media and ownership of extensive distribution facilities? It's asinine to think that losing IP control will hurt the big corporations one iota. It's asinine to think that individuals _get_ equal rights and abilities under patent IP law, for that matter- it comes down to money, as these things do, and you can't outspend a corporation. So the only recourse is abolishment of patents- and, while they exist, staking out areas of public domain, that being the one area that is explicitly off limits to patents.
_I_ am wondering if anyone else is doing the slightest thing to further the development of a public domain database, a web resource? I swear it's necessary. I don't know how many other people need to use such a resource, but think about it- how many people could be expected, in 1990 or so, to write Unix-alike software for no pay just so other people could also share it? Think about it. What about software is so special that only software needs to be open? Ideas are even cheaper to transfer. You just talk- and listen.
Also, you don't fully realise how far this problem goes. See Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts?. Evan Brown is property of DSC Communications, for all intents and purposes, and _all_ hours of his life when employed by DSC were 'work'. That sounds implausible, but he signed off on a contract which gave DSC ownership of any thoughts he had, thinking it wasn't a problem as he was only employed to provide technical support for the Motorola Cellular Division software testing group, not to invent things. He did invent something, apparently a method to convert old computer code into new languages, and DSC first tried to buy the idea, and then fired him and sued him for it. The idea has never been written down and exists only in Evan's brain...
As of January 20, 2000, Evan Brown is bankrupt and has sold everything he has but the farm on which he lives. On his 48th birthday, Judge Curt B. Henderson of the 219th Judicial District Court of the State of Texas has ordered him to work at DSC's PB-6 building in Plano without compensation for time, travel or expenses until he has documented his idea. Evan lives 3 hours from Plano. (I don't know from reading this if he has sold his car to pay legal expenses). He has also been ordered by the judge to write out his idea relating to DSC's product hardware (Zilog Z8000) as the machine executable binary code, rather than the Intel 8080 which Evan prefers.
How many hours a week did _Evan Brown_ work? Rather, ask if, legally, there was a single minute of any day when he was _not_ at work.
I know there are many Slashdot posters who respond to talk of collective bargaining and exploitation with cries of 'Wuss! Whiner! You go be a loser because we are tough and smart and better than most people and will take over the world by working 90 hours a week without compensation.' I would ask those people- have you read your contracts? Are you property, like Evan Brown's brain legally was? Can you set a price on that?
Evan Brown was employed as technical support for the Motorola Cellular Division software testing group. That is exactly the sort of job we're all talking about here, and now there is legal precedent in Texas law that if your employer slipped in details about owning your ideas during the time of employment- they can legally fire you, bankrupt you, sue you for the ideas and get the courts to go along with it and _compel_ you to reveal anything you claimed to have, whether or not they can prove that you invented it 'on their time'. Effectively, you can sign off on a contract that makes your brain property of the company, and the US Government will back it. If you do, the company could come after you ten years later claiming that your current invention was made during the time you worked for them- and with the Evan Brown case as case law, they could win, so even quitting a job with such conditions does not necessarily get you off the hook. The company could legally come after you years later demanding the contents of your mind or seizing ownership of your inventions, based on their prior ownership of your mind and thoughts- and win.
How's _that_ for an 80 hour week? :P
I haven't got around to reinstalling it (which I intend to do for fun, having a definite geek gene), but it is much nicer not having to download for 48 hours or so and take up whole HD partitions :) plus I've already worked out the kernel I need to run, which apparently is "vmlinux.2.2.1-VERY-STABLE". So I have a head start at wrestling '99 into useful shape and playing with it.
The packaging for LinuxPPC 1999 is small but _very_ attractive! And ya gotta love that tripped-out-penguin 'Linux Power' graphic. Yow. It looks stunned to be running on a PPC, but nevertheless getting into it ;)
Forgive me for being contrary, but this _is_ exactly the same as the claim, "Free software eventually means no software" or "Free writing eventually means no writing" or indeed "Free speech eventually means no speech". In each case, a type of creative behavior that can be worth money is being competed with by the same behavior done freely. This only hurts the commercial offering to the extent that the commercial offering is artificially maintained above its freemarket value. There was a time when engraving was very expensive, and scribes were well paid for their access to pens and paper and ink and their ability to write things down, an ability the regular person did not have. I'm sure they argued that free engraving eventually meant no books would ever be written, and that the written word would die out completely because peasants couldn't write. Of course, Gutenberg yanked _their_ chains even worse- another example of technology destroying culture. Look at the Yellow Pages- do you see a _single_ _scribe_ listed? So, logically, the written word is dead...
Regarding software, people (perhaps even you yourself, 'Life Blood') made this very argument, that free software would so hurt the profit margins of commercial software that all software would die and there would be no software left. Well, the reality turned out to be this- if you want a free software author to write something in particular, hire 'em. The free market miraculously survives, cutting away the deadwood, shaking loose the dependence on artificially high profit margins and making the capitalists _compete_ as they claim to want to do. It seems that most capitalists would really rather be either the State, and be communists, or the Biggest Stick, and be fascists. I frankly see very little real capitalism in the arguments of capitalists- you'd think they would accept the challenges of further capitalism, but they always want to win and then be protected from ever having to lose again. Only natural I suppose, but the world doesn't work that way.
With regard to movies, what free movies will mean, what independently-authored movies will mean, is that the studios will have to actually compete for a change. They will have to make special effects so grand that you _want_ to go to a theater to experience them. They will have to hire better writers than the amateurs can (seemingly not a problem, or so you would think). They will have to hire better continuity people, grips and gaffers and the whole crew of people for making serious movies, and actually produce not 'product' but genuine works of art- and then they will have to have the merchandising ready and be able to sell you things based on the chances of their movie being copied from here to Taiwan with _everybody_ watching it and talking about it and being excited about it.
Isn't that what they _want_?
Imagine 'Men In Black' being viewed _everywhere_ on release. Now, consider the profitability of a 'flashything!' toy, perhaps with a little strobe. I'm not aware of them ever making one, but this would be an absolute slamdunk of an idea- and potentially as profitable as the movie itself, as you don't _have_ to sell a toy at $8. A sufficiently good Flashything(tm) could go for $30 and still sell like Furbies.
The clincher is this: MIB developed that mindshare not by marketing pressure, but by being a damned good movie as movies go. In order to be able to do the merchandising and take advantage of people copying your movie, take advantage of 'flash mindshare' and having the world suddenly mad for Flashythings and Will Smith, you not only have to allow the copying, you have to MAKE A GOOD MOVIE. People won't copy it if it sucks! The only way you'll really get that kind of saturation is if you really do a good movie! Only then does it become possible to use the other methods and sell toys and run a Men In Black 'Everquest' clone for money etc. ad creativitum.
And if you do an equally good movie that's up against the MIB, and you're successfully stopping anyone from copying and MIB is _not_ limiting copying- you lose! You blew it- you saw slippery data as a threat, they saw it as an advantage, _they_ are the ones on top of the big fad movie of the moment and _you_ are out to lunch, your carefully guarded theatre profits in the toilet because everybody spent the money on FlashyThings(tm).
This is inevitable. It's merely a question of who can figure it out quickest- and what media ends up making it possible. If DVDs do not, then DVDs will go the way of Beta and VHS tapes and vinyl records- eventually the technology will go to the point where it _is_ possible to DL entire movies in a few scant minutes, or send them about in an envelope by third class mail, and this whole scenario of slippery-data as a weapon will play itself out- and the world will never be the same.
_Text_ used to be only for the rich- until Gutenberg.
Maybe his old eyes can adjust to emerging from his cave and maybe not, but I for one refuse to stay in the cave with him. It's time to come out and look at the real world and not just the shadows on the walls. (thank you, Plato)
I don't know what the media business will be like, either, in a world where data is so slippery that it's basically everywhere and you can't easily control or channel it. I don't know exactly how people will earn income in such a world, though clearly the middlemen will suffer the worst. I do know that it's happening one way or another, cleanly or messily, and I would like to see for myself what it's like, and fend for myself in it. I'm sorry that Jack Valenti has so firmly identified himself with the middlemen- a class that's destined to lose its present position of authority and control, and take on more of a mediator position. However, that doesn't exempt him from the consequences.
The reason this concept draws a blank is because there basically _aren't_ any in the public eye, because both the music media and film media industries are heavily controlled. However, this is really the best counterargument against the RIAA and MPAA- given enough access to the market, at some point people may be copying indie music and film _more_ than the copyright protected works of the industries.
There seems to be this assumption that the nature of technological empowerment is strictly to turn good consumers into bad consumers- there's this Berlin Wall between the consumer and the artist, and if you don't live in Hollywood or LA you couldn't possibly be an artist, therefore you must be a pirate. The idea is that there will never be content created except by the industry- so if content piracy gets too out of hand, and the ability to make and duplicate media gets too accessible, the industry will wither and die leaving nothing in its place. And all the industry artists will starve and get regular jobs (pointedly assuming they're making anything with the industry! Which is rather statistically unlikely), and then all the consumers will sit on their butts, with no music and no TV and no films at all, because there will be nobody left to produce them.
This _is_ fscking absurd, of course.
The trouble is, there need to be more artists driven to support new media in the same way that some programmers feel obligated to support free software- an ethical decision that furthers a particular agenda, even at the expense of profits or popularity. It turned out that once a certain number of people were using free software things snowballed and we got Linux. There need to be a certain number of people ready to produce MP3 music, to produce some sort of film that can be distributed on mainstream media, to get a similar power base against the media industries- only then can media start to be seriously decentralised, much as communication is now seriously decentralised what with email and the Web and all.
The trouble is, we're at a point where (intentionally or not) the industries are taking steps to block access to independents. It wouldn't take much to make consumer DVD players refuse to play indie DVDs- they already refuse to play out-of-zone DVDs, which is already an abuse of their power over the new global economy! You can hunt for budget DVDs on eBay, but the players are set to refuse to play such DVDs. BMG has been attempting to introduce a new CD format that is no longer Red Book CD Audio- if things go badly we could not only lose the ability to author our own films on DVD, but even the ability to author our own music CDs on CD-R. This goes beyond having CD-R taxed so that if you author your own music you are forced to pay a tax to the very industry which is fighting you and trying to crush you (which is what already happens)- it goes all the way to attempts to legally forbid you to author media for the public at all, based on the fact that you're using the same recording media as 'media pirates'.
It is really a shame that the Salon interviewer didn't think to ask Jack Valenti about these issues. Of course, he has been so successful in hurting and blocking other movie producing markets (such as Canada, see Nebular's post) that it doesn't even occur to most people that anything other than the MPAA can make a film- or that anything but the RIAA can make a CD.
_That_ has to change.
"You shut up! Try running a state for a while instead of a small business and see how you like it!" (Robert Heinlein character in 'Magic, Inc.')
I mean it. There just ISN'T time. No sane person should expect that they can make sensible decisions on all the doings of government, individually. You have to delegate. It's stark raving madness to think you can micromanage U.S. government, and the whole concept of ever-more-direct-Democracy is essentially wanting to turn the country over to micromanagement on the assumption that this would work. Even _if_ the idea of simple majority was a smart one (and there are reasons why it can be an absolute curse), there is just no way 'the people of the U.S.' are able to educate themselves on what they would need to know. Nobody could, even the pols only get part of the way there, and they are (at least in theory) fulltime employed at it. If you want government to improve, figure out how to get the pols to work harder and take more responsibility for their actions, don't just talk about giving the People a governmental 'remote'. "Click 'yes' to fight cyberterrorist acts"...
I guess when I get right down to it I'm saying this: the ONLY key difference between the pols and the People is that the pols get full-time to learn about the issues. The People don't _have_ the time to learn about the issues. They probably are experts on their own backyards, but nobody is giving them time to learn about Qatar and labor issues in Cleveland and UCITA and genetically engineered wheat and the implications of telecommuting on OSHA regulations and SSI Red Book incentives and the price of tea in Des Moines?
If the pols are so useless at this when it's all they do, what on earth gives you the idea that you can turn the decisions over to people who haven't even heard about half of these things? How would you make them listen, how are you going to force them to abandon every free hour they have and stay up extra late at night to be briefed on Somalia?
Yes, I'm getting 'debatey', but so are you. Really, isn't this a major concern?
My thinking on the matter is colored by a lot of reading on Watergate: representatives were placed in pretty intolerable positions at that time. Some represented deeply conservative constituencies which doggedly supported Nixon- yet gradually the representatives began to realise that Nixon had lied to them, lied to the people, committed crimes, and as impeachment grew closer and closer, they all ended up turning against Nixon, because they owed their constituencies not just their obedience, but their judgement. It was a tough call, causing many of them great anguish- they like you took representation seriously. But the bottom line was this: they knew that their own constituents had been lied to and misled, and they couldn't wait around for 'em to figure that out. They had to act based on the truth.
If it was a pure democracy, it is possible that Watergate could have ended in an expertly 'spun' poll or vote (The Nixon people spent millions in astroturf campaigns through fake organizations, even buying a fullpage Times advertisement under a false name) resulting in a criminal President who engaged in wiretapping, surveillance, and conspiracy to burglary and obstruction of justice... staying in office and continuing to do it. That's not OK.
By the same token, though it's hard to argue that politicians should be trusted, _somebody_ has to get the job of learning up on this stuff and deciding things. When you read history it might surprise you, sometimes, how our pols can sometimes rise above all the corruption and politicking and do what we'd want them to do- even eloquently, movingly.
Campaign reform, yes. Tie the hands of corporate pork barrel special interests, yes. Replace the pols with one big vote- no thank you. For all their faults the pols do that job better than one big vote ever could.