For the longest time I have dreamed of having something like a very powerful broadband transmitter that would pump a very high level modulated subsonic signal into those cars. It would be a matter of figuring out a low frequency that is, say the resonant frequency of the car's chassis.
Point the beaming device's antenna at the offending car, press the button, and it transmits a powerful burst at.24 Hz (or whatever the proper aprox. resonant frequency is). Enough of the signal leaks into the sound system on the car so that their subwoofer shakes the car's frame apart, the motor falls off and pimp-boy wonders what happened.
Really, I think it's a common thing for people to want to bust out windows on those fscker's cars. Here's a tip: get one of those spring-loaded center punches. They make nice dents in the body parts of a car, and can bust out a window without you needing to do a lot of obvious attention-getting swinging motion.
Similarly, metal locks and doors and hinges are simply 'Trust us' since there isn't a government auditor standing beside the workmen at the factory making certain that certain faults and flaws in the mechanism aren't being introduced.
It's just madness to claim that 'Open Source' is inherently more secure because of it's Open Source nature. The only people who make that claim correctly do it through the reasoning that the development process is more robust and hence it's more secure. Any minion at any government agency can slip in tricks and backdoors to render an Open Source tool less secure. Likely these exploits and backdoors would be installed after the miraculous 'audit' process that Open Source advocates are continually claiming that government agencies need to engage in (obviously at zero cost, or.... saaaayyy, you could hire some of us GEEKs to do it- we won't charge you excessively....)
Whoops. Now we've had to set up a 'Ministry of Source Code Auditing' and their blue stamp needs to seal the installation media for every software package installed on any government computer. Thank goodness that whole deparment operates for free.
And, obviously, whenever your computer breaks down, just make a call to Central Services and a friendly crew of technicians will drop on by to fix your machine. After the proper forms have been filled out, of course.
'Jack' the renegade repairman uses an old MS-DOS computer (actually a customized HP 95lx palmtop) to really fix your system, but he's with the underground.
Until there are a half dozen other Office Suites that read and write files saved the OOo binary format, it's as proprietary as anything from Microsoft. What would be so wrong with OpenOffice by default (or maybe even offering the choice to set it as a default for that matter) saving to a non-binary format (i.e. RTF) by default? As it stands OpenOffice is just another proprietary file format to store your information in.
You can go to MSDN and read the specs on MS Office formats, just like you can go to OpenOffice.org and study up on the formats they've derived from the older proprietary StarOffice formats.
The people who will contribute doubless already do.
Instead, what will happen is that less cluefull people will get involved. The quality of bug reports will plummet until there's about 1% as much usable information in a bug report as there is now with a narrow elite involved in OSS usage.
The mid-sized companies and 'protection racket outfits' will march in with pricey support contracts for all the OSS, and government agencies will find themselves paying more for slightly less functionality than they had before. Plus, instead of it being 'Yankees' extorting their money, (far easier to circumvent with piracy) it will be the local thugs (who'll DDOS them and Root their servers if they don't pay up for exactly every desktop.)
I'm just trying to shed a little realism to what's being proposed here. It's quite possible it will be better. But it certainly will NOT be pie-in-the-sky nirvana.
That's 20% non-OSS. It doesn't preclude the use of ANY linux software. If Linux implodes and is consumed by the SCO controversey (unlikely, but let's suppose) Brazil could have a fine setup using FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, or the HURD or all sorts of other options.
My other reading of this proposal is that they could load up the machines with all kinds of junk stuff nobody uses off of, say, a bunch of Freshmeat links in order to bloat up the percentage of software that is Open Source. Then the standard could be a Windows 2000 system with Office XP, (two packages) but have the obligatory 60 or 70 'graphical' MP3 player frontends installed to tip the balance over so less than 20% is non-OS. Plus some weblog parsing graphical frontends and any of the other silly croft that fills the 'free software' project websites.
Or, 5 year old unsupported software for that matter.
I have some excellent 5 year old unsupported software. For instance, I use Micrografx Picture Publisher with my scanner to do image editing of all my digital photography. I'm not a 'professional' and it doubtless doen't offer all the features available to someone who has a supported-current edition of Photoshop, but it certainly does a fine job. The Micrografx software came in a 'Suite' with Micrografx Designer, which is a fine vector-based drawing program. Very adequate for drawing up plans for woodworking projects and also supports scaleable fonts for light-duty desktop publishing projects and layouts. I'm using this software for my home-based business and it's doing a fine job. And it's about five years old and never really was supported (Micrografx software used to be well-supported, but by the time I got this particular graphics 'Suite' box set it was an inexpensive $40 box set at CompUSA.) Unsupported software can do a lot of productive work. It's ridiculous that some exagerate the notion that 'because it's proprietary software, it falls off a cliff shortly after the company quits supporting it.' This software runs fine on W2K and since I don't forsee ever buying another Windows OS it'll do well. If hell breaks out and I'm mandated to go to Windows 2013 because of some horribly compelling new feature, this stuff will set on a seperate machine here on the LAN.
So there's a lot of economic value in 5 year old unsupported software. It's highly likely there will still be economic value in it when it's 95 years old.
Except, of course, the Buck Rodgers space cadets amongst us will probably now claim we'll be breathing air underwater and wearing our underwear on our heads due to some 'miracle' bullshit from nanotech-ding-dong buzzwordland stuff.
Actually, the GPL tends to be very condusive to monopolistic practices. It encourages 'standardization' on one source tree, and it strives to 'monopolize' the software world with only GPL'd software.
It's a 'monopoly for the people' to be certain, but it does resonate in some ways with the old 'dictatorship of the proletariat' mindset, i.e. people claim 'it's a good monopoly/dictatorship, kay?' and such.
But if I still have access to the binaries for a close source software I can use it to access my data. This, of course, isn't true when it comes to software with 'key' or 'validation' mechanisms, but with anything else, there's no reason whatsoever that I can't install the old OS that the software was targeted to and access the data.
Much the same as with the QIC data tapes. Back in about 1994 I switched all my 'data and software archive' content from tons and tons of floppy diskettes to QIC-120 data cartridges. I used the Linux ftape driver and TAR to store to those tapes. I have all that data converted to CDR now, but there's no reason why 10 or 20 years from now, that I couldn't put a Slackware system with kernal 1.2.13 up and use it to retrieve the data from those tapes. Much the same as putting Windows 3.1 on a system to retrieve the data if I'd written to the tapes with Central Point Backup (one of the other programs I used to use with those tapes, before I switched to Linux).
IBM lost their 'leadership role' in the MS-DOS market years before the PS/2. They lost it shortly after the first 'Turbo' XT systems came on the market. IBM continued to plod along, selling 4.77 MHz XT systems at significantly higher prices than the cloners' 10 MHz boxes basically for the entire life of the XT line. Similarly the IBM AT boxes came with a 6 MHz processor for the entire produce life. IBM's response when people discovered that the 12 MHz crystal (double processor clock speed) was socketed and they could simply plug in an 8 MHz crystal from Radio Shack (some of the first overclockers!) was to eliminate the socket and start soldering in the crystal.
Probably by the time of the XT/AT market, IBM recognized that the PC was hurting their terminal/mainframe market. They reined in and stifled the 'skunkworks' operation in Boca Raton that produced the PC and the PS/2 was their attempt to drag the market proprietary. But the PS/2 was their last desperate attempt. I remember how good we all felt when they gave it up and started producing those AT-bus 'Value Point' machines (even though the Microchannel was actually significantly faster).
The 'house' that my computer lives in (it's case) has only gone 'obsolete' once in the time since I've been using IBM compatible systems. That was when the industry standard went from baby-AT to ATX.
That does bring up a vision of the Apple Macintosh and other (Compaq, Dell, H-P) Proprietary Box versions of this house: they'll be limited pre-fab cookie-cutter versions of a house. The Apple Macintosh house will be a somewhat more expensive double-wide. Toshiba will offer a lightweight model that even a small front-wheel-drive vehicle can tow....
For years consumers weren't 'irritated' by 'restrictive' media like music on vinyl LPs. (before cassette tape there wasn't even an easy way to make DEGRADED COPIES yet albums went gold and platinum in the market). Hell, there was a decade and more before CDR when people weren't 'irritated' by CD audio. I can remember the early days of 'ripping' when lots of CDROM drives still had firmware restrictions and you could only 'rip' CD Audio digitally from a select list of drive make/models.
What makes you think these machines will be connected to the public Internet?
Microsoft is already, and generally always has, supported the development of their own private network. I was on MSN (during the 'free' period for beta testers before Win 95 launch) back before it was highly integrated to the Internet. Think of a big CompuServe or AOL type of network.
The Balkanization of the Internet has commercial appeal to companies. People shouldn't assume there's going to be a TCP/IP network to connect to forever....
IBM strived desperately to close the Open Architecture with the PS/2 line and Microchannel. They tried to bring along Microsoft as a cabin boy in the OS/2 partnership but Microsoft by that point had a good business going with the cloners.
It's really shocking how reality has been flipped on it's head. Microsoft was no hero in the year 1988, but Apple and IBM were considered a far worse threat to computing freedom.
Linux as it exists today wouldn't exist if there wasn't a strong common base of x86 hardware in existence. The side effect of Microsoft bloatism that obsoleted all kinds of fine hardware to experiment with Linux on plus the commonality of said hardware base are very important. If Linux had been an experiment based on, say SparcStations or other hardware of similar expense and commonness it would still be a cool experiment existing only in computer science labs on campuses.
Any technology that all-encompassing and powerful flattens the idealists who dance around in front of it like it's going to be a panacea. You're acting just the same as the propagandists of Nuclear Power in the 1950's with their pie-in-the-sky 'electricity will be too cheap to meter' blather.
Think bigger than society and laws, think way bigger. We aren't born here to adhere to any given set of rules, we consider what is best for our interests, consider possible threats, consequences, etc. and make decisions and act accordingly.
You seem to be making a 'might equals right' argument, arguing that with your mighty intellect and your preened moral sense you're better than the rest of society and can decide what's right or wrong.
Lots of lunatic megalomaniacs start out that way. I bet Jeff Dahlmer felt strongly that way.
As an aside: If you think 'the recording industry is useless and doesn't provide us with anything we couldn't live with' then why the hell do you insist on your right to appropriate and duplicate their recordings?? Shouldn't you just cut your speaker wires and pound on your bongo drums or whatever?
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For the longest time I have dreamed of having something like a very powerful broadband transmitter that would pump a very high level modulated subsonic signal into those cars. It would be a matter of figuring out a low frequency that is, say the resonant frequency of the car's chassis.
.24 Hz (or whatever the proper aprox. resonant frequency is). Enough of the signal leaks into the sound system on the car so that their subwoofer shakes the car's frame apart, the motor falls off and pimp-boy wonders what happened.
Point the beaming device's antenna at the offending car, press the button, and it transmits a powerful burst at
Really, I think it's a common thing for people to want to bust out windows on those fscker's cars. Here's a tip: get one of those spring-loaded center punches. They make nice dents in the body parts of a car, and can bust out a window without you needing to do a lot of obvious attention-getting swinging motion.
you cannot deny the fact that UFOs do exist, we do not know whos controlling them we just know they are there.
That's a tautology. Obviously any object that is flying but hasn't been identified is an Unidentified Flying Object. ergo: UFOs exist.
Similarly, metal locks and doors and hinges are simply 'Trust us' since there isn't a government auditor standing beside the workmen at the factory making certain that certain faults and flaws in the mechanism aren't being introduced.
It's just madness to claim that 'Open Source' is inherently more secure because of it's Open Source nature. The only people who make that claim correctly do it through the reasoning that the development process is more robust and hence it's more secure. Any minion at any government agency can slip in tricks and backdoors to render an Open Source tool less secure. Likely these exploits and backdoors would be installed after the miraculous 'audit' process that Open Source advocates are continually claiming that government agencies need to engage in (obviously at zero cost, or.... saaaayyy, you could hire some of us GEEKs to do it- we won't charge you excessively....)
Whoops. Now we've had to set up a 'Ministry of Source Code Auditing' and their blue stamp needs to seal the installation media for every software package installed on any government computer. Thank goodness that whole deparment operates for free.
And, obviously, whenever your computer breaks down, just make a call to Central Services and a friendly crew of technicians will drop on by to fix your machine. After the proper forms have been filled out, of course.
'Jack' the renegade repairman uses an old MS-DOS computer (actually a customized HP 95lx palmtop) to really fix your system, but he's with the underground.
Until there are a half dozen other Office Suites that read and write files saved the OOo binary format, it's as proprietary as anything from Microsoft. What would be so wrong with OpenOffice by default (or maybe even offering the choice to set it as a default for that matter) saving to a non-binary format (i.e. RTF) by default? As it stands OpenOffice is just another proprietary file format to store your information in.
You can go to MSDN and read the specs on MS Office formats, just like you can go to OpenOffice.org and study up on the formats they've derived from the older proprietary StarOffice formats.
as people start contributing.
The people who will contribute doubless already do.
Instead, what will happen is that less cluefull people will get involved. The quality of bug reports will plummet until there's about 1% as much usable information in a bug report as there is now with a narrow elite involved in OSS usage.
The mid-sized companies and 'protection racket outfits' will march in with pricey support contracts for all the OSS, and government agencies will find themselves paying more for slightly less functionality than they had before. Plus, instead of it being 'Yankees' extorting their money, (far easier to circumvent with piracy) it will be the local thugs (who'll DDOS them and Root their servers if they don't pay up for exactly every desktop.)
I'm just trying to shed a little realism to what's being proposed here. It's quite possible it will be better. But it certainly will NOT be pie-in-the-sky nirvana.
Let me translate: So if you sold me an office suite, for instance OpenOffice.org, which saves to a binary format (it does), my information is yours?
That's 20% non-OSS. It doesn't preclude the use of ANY linux software. If Linux implodes and is consumed by the SCO controversey (unlikely, but let's suppose) Brazil could have a fine setup using FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, or the HURD or all sorts of other options.
My other reading of this proposal is that they could load up the machines with all kinds of junk stuff nobody uses off of, say, a bunch of Freshmeat links in order to bloat up the percentage of software that is Open Source. Then the standard could be a Windows 2000 system with Office XP, (two packages) but have the obligatory 60 or 70 'graphical' MP3 player frontends installed to tip the balance over so less than 20% is non-OS. Plus some weblog parsing graphical frontends and any of the other silly croft that fills the 'free software' project websites.
Or, 5 year old unsupported software for that matter.
I have some excellent 5 year old unsupported software. For instance, I use Micrografx Picture Publisher with my scanner to do image editing of all my digital photography. I'm not a 'professional' and it doubtless doen't offer all the features available to someone who has a supported-current edition of Photoshop, but it certainly does a fine job. The Micrografx software came in a 'Suite' with Micrografx Designer, which is a fine vector-based drawing program. Very adequate for drawing up plans for woodworking projects and also supports scaleable fonts for light-duty desktop publishing projects and layouts. I'm using this software for my home-based business and it's doing a fine job. And it's about five years old and never really was supported (Micrografx software used to be well-supported, but by the time I got this particular graphics 'Suite' box set it was an inexpensive $40 box set at CompUSA.) Unsupported software can do a lot of productive work. It's ridiculous that some exagerate the notion that 'because it's proprietary software, it falls off a cliff shortly after the company quits supporting it.' This software runs fine on W2K and since I don't forsee ever buying another Windows OS it'll do well. If hell breaks out and I'm mandated to go to Windows 2013 because of some horribly compelling new feature, this stuff will set on a seperate machine here on the LAN.
So there's a lot of economic value in 5 year old unsupported software. It's highly likely there will still be economic value in it when it's 95 years old.
Except, of course, the Buck Rodgers space cadets amongst us will probably now claim we'll be breathing air underwater and wearing our underwear on our heads due to some 'miracle' bullshit from nanotech-ding-dong buzzwordland stuff.
Actually, the GPL tends to be very condusive to monopolistic practices. It encourages 'standardization' on one source tree, and it strives to 'monopolize' the software world with only GPL'd software.
It's a 'monopoly for the people' to be certain, but it does resonate in some ways with the old 'dictatorship of the proletariat' mindset, i.e. people claim 'it's a good monopoly/dictatorship, kay?' and such.
But if I still have access to the binaries for a close source software I can use it to access my data. This, of course, isn't true when it comes to software with 'key' or 'validation' mechanisms, but with anything else, there's no reason whatsoever that I can't install the old OS that the software was targeted to and access the data.
Much the same as with the QIC data tapes. Back in about 1994 I switched all my 'data and software archive' content from tons and tons of floppy diskettes to QIC-120 data cartridges. I used the Linux ftape driver and TAR to store to those tapes. I have all that data converted to CDR now, but there's no reason why 10 or 20 years from now, that I couldn't put a Slackware system with kernal 1.2.13 up and use it to retrieve the data from those tapes. Much the same as putting Windows 3.1 on a system to retrieve the data if I'd written to the tapes with Central Point Backup (one of the other programs I used to use with those tapes, before I switched to Linux).
What ever happened to 'choice' being made by the end users, or barring that, someone close to the end users like the departmental manager?
In companies that mandate a Windows desktop and Office, people like you scream and kick up a fury about the users not being offered a choice.
And to think, poor Saddam only had a Boeing 707 fuselage at his Terrorist Training Camp. I guess in the third world, you have to get by with less...
And yet 'support centers' exist to make sure that people 'who are gay but just don't know it' can be encouraged to 'come out.'
Jeez, what a contradiction.
My colorful language was a bit over-the-top. I accept your correction. They are, as you termed it, nothing more than common criminals.
Does that count?
Hearsay doesn't count as a citation.
On what planet or reality should an artist have that much control over their songs?
On any planet where a non-zero effort is involved in writing/composing said songs.
IBM lost their 'leadership role' in the MS-DOS market years before the PS/2. They lost it shortly after the first 'Turbo' XT systems came on the market. IBM continued to plod along, selling 4.77 MHz XT systems at significantly higher prices than the cloners' 10 MHz boxes basically for the entire life of the XT line. Similarly the IBM AT boxes came with a 6 MHz processor for the entire produce life. IBM's response when people discovered that the 12 MHz crystal (double processor clock speed) was socketed and they could simply plug in an 8 MHz crystal from Radio Shack (some of the first overclockers!) was to eliminate the socket and start soldering in the crystal.
Probably by the time of the XT/AT market, IBM recognized that the PC was hurting their terminal/mainframe market. They reined in and stifled the 'skunkworks' operation in Boca Raton that produced the PC and the PS/2 was their attempt to drag the market proprietary. But the PS/2 was their last desperate attempt. I remember how good we all felt when they gave it up and started producing those AT-bus 'Value Point' machines (even though the Microchannel was actually significantly faster).
The 'house' that my computer lives in (it's case) has only gone 'obsolete' once in the time since I've been using IBM compatible systems. That was when the industry standard went from baby-AT to ATX.
That does bring up a vision of the Apple Macintosh and other (Compaq, Dell, H-P) Proprietary Box versions of this house: they'll be limited pre-fab cookie-cutter versions of a house. The Apple Macintosh house will be a somewhat more expensive double-wide. Toshiba will offer a lightweight model that even a small front-wheel-drive vehicle can tow....
For years consumers weren't 'irritated' by 'restrictive' media like music on vinyl LPs. (before cassette tape there wasn't even an easy way to make DEGRADED COPIES yet albums went gold and platinum in the market). Hell, there was a decade and more before CDR when people weren't 'irritated' by CD audio. I can remember the early days of 'ripping' when lots of CDROM drives still had firmware restrictions and you could only 'rip' CD Audio digitally from a select list of drive make/models.
What makes you think these machines will be connected to the public Internet?
Microsoft is already, and generally always has, supported the development of their own private network. I was on MSN (during the 'free' period for beta testers before Win 95 launch) back before it was highly integrated to the Internet. Think of a big CompuServe or AOL type of network.
The Balkanization of the Internet has commercial appeal to companies. People shouldn't assume there's going to be a TCP/IP network to connect to forever....
When you say 'the market' that's shorthand for 'the marketing guys up on third floor' right??
IBM strived desperately to close the Open Architecture with the PS/2 line and Microchannel. They tried to bring along Microsoft as a cabin boy in the OS/2 partnership but Microsoft by that point had a good business going with the cloners.
It's really shocking how reality has been flipped on it's head. Microsoft was no hero in the year 1988, but Apple and IBM were considered a far worse threat to computing freedom.
Linux as it exists today wouldn't exist if there wasn't a strong common base of x86 hardware in existence. The side effect of Microsoft bloatism that obsoleted all kinds of fine hardware to experiment with Linux on plus the commonality of said hardware base are very important. If Linux had been an experiment based on, say SparcStations or other hardware of similar expense and commonness it would still be a cool experiment existing only in computer science labs on campuses.
Or, if you're involved in a revolution, you're spinning in place.
Any technology that all-encompassing and powerful flattens the idealists who dance around in front of it like it's going to be a panacea. You're acting just the same as the propagandists of Nuclear Power in the 1950's with their pie-in-the-sky 'electricity will be too cheap to meter' blather.
Think bigger than society and laws, think way bigger. We aren't born here to adhere to any given set of rules, we consider what is best for our interests, consider possible threats, consequences, etc. and make decisions and act accordingly.
You seem to be making a 'might equals right' argument, arguing that with your mighty intellect and your preened moral sense you're better than the rest of society and can decide what's right or wrong.
Lots of lunatic megalomaniacs start out that way. I bet Jeff Dahlmer felt strongly that way.
As an aside: If you think 'the recording industry is useless and doesn't provide us with anything we couldn't live with' then why the hell do you insist on your right to appropriate and duplicate their recordings?? Shouldn't you just cut your speaker wires and pound on your bongo drums or whatever?