However, I need to comment, that code by govt. oversite....I'd not put that up for a model of efficiency.
It is more efficient because it doesn't rely on depriving people who don't pay from benefiting as part of the funding mechanism. It is better to empower six billion people with that fixed investment than it is to benefit ten thousand people and have the rest operating with inferior tools.
The Internet was created in this way, and succeeded because it was created in this way. If it hadn't been designed using public money and then released to the public to be freely used, it never would have gotten off the ground.
And your argument about rates of pay... wow. We are feeding, and clothing, and sheltering, and caring for all these software developers right now, using the mechanism of money as a way to implement the decentralized logistics. Why are we suddenly not going to have enough resources to continue to do that? Does copyright law create food and shelter that wasn't there, and I'm just now aware of it?
"Because existing systems are corrupt and mismanaged" isn't an answer. It's a hint that there are more areas in the system that need improvement.
See, you can acknowledge that the system is inefficient, that it's wasteful.
You have someone say to you flatly that they are interested in making a system that is more efficient, that is less wasteful, that will give you more and cost you less and empower your neighbour so he can also come up with new ideas you've never thought of and still pay all the software makers of the world just like we're doing now.
And the first reaction you have is "I don't care about benefit, I care about control".
You're not even interested in exploring the idea and making suggestions, you just want to stick your head in the sand.
You're fucking stupid. There just isn't any other way to put it. You can't think out of the box you're in even when you're forced to acknowledge that the box is deeply flawed, and you would rather have less than risk helping your neighbour.
People with your attitude should be kept so far away from authority that they need a telescope to see it, because you can't think beyond your own small little world.
Create a pool of government funded money that goes towards software, and give everyone a vote for which projects they think are important.
Tally the votes, split the pool of money between the projects, running from the most votes to the least.
Don't give one share of the resources per vote though... determine an amount that guarantees a decent standard of living for those participants who are receiving support, and each person who gets anything gets that amount until the pool is empty.
Provide access to common technological infrastructure in a way that supports those whose work is deemed important by their peers first, then let the public at large use up any left over access for their pet projects.
Keep all their work in a common pool that is accessible to all.
Then remove all copyright protections from software.
If you can somehow manage to make a thriving living selling precompiled code in this environment, you're welcome to try, but the system doesn't back up your efforts in the slightest.
If people need custom software made because nothing in existence does what they need, they can of course hire someone to do it.
If there are times of plenty, chuck extra resources towards funding more peoples creativity. If there are times of scarcity, fund less people.
I'm working hard at building infrastructures for several creative industries at this very moment that will operate in a way similar to this. I'd post a link, but I can't handle a slashdotting at the moment.
People who talk about how the money for creative works just won't be there unless you can somehow compel people to surrender it need to realize... the public flat out will not be denied these things, and they will always construct a mechanism to support creation. That has been true throughout our history.
It seems rather foolish to suppose that at this point in our history, when we have more disposable wealth than at any documented time in the past, we will leave our artists, musicians and inventors out to dry just because we could if we wanted to. Nobody on either side of the fence wants to do that.
Now, that's just one idea. There are myriad ways that we can organize ourselves, and that is what we all ought to be talking about, instead of having these blind ideological clashes that don't result in anything except more wasted time and effort.
If you spend obscene amounts of a societies resources making a piece of software, then prevent that software from being put to the maximum possible utility by everyone far and wide who might have a use for it, you just drove up the cost of the software to our society, because it's been paid for and is not being used.
The point is not that coders shouldn't be supported as they do their thing. The point is that there should be a better mechanism put into place to pay for the creation of this valuable software that doesn't inherently destroy so much of its value once it is complete.
The purpose of business is to keep people busy, because if they are not busy, nothing gets done, and we have a depression, and starvation, and deprivation, and death.
The purpose of money is to keep people busy.
If everyone is happy to just keep doing useful things with their life and take what they need instead of trying to show off how many toys they have at the next guys expense, money is a liability, wasted bureaucratic effort that distract people from what was really important.
The success of open source software can be attributed to one simple fact.
Those who are doing things because they think it's good and important stuff to be doing are more successful than those who are doing things because they are compelled by money.
Even though everything is stacked against them, even though they have no financial support, these projects are thriving, because money is a poor way to run a society, and people who live by the dollar can't compete with those who live with passion.
As time progresses, we will assemble new mechanisms to support these people in their efforts, mechanisms that don't rely on money.
And we will do this because it is simply a better way to run a society, and those societies that don't get with the program will disappear as so many failed societies have done before.
Or to put it another way, you're talking about towing the horse with the cart because you don't really understand the way the game works or what its purpose is.
In addition to everything else that they are, women ARE baby factories. Not only that, they are the only baby factories. Yet we scorn them for making babies that we need and give them kudos for abandoning that responsibility and living a white collar lifestyle.
All the while, the signs that the society is in desperate need of a next generation that was never produced are rapidly moving from the realm of the abstract to the physical realm, and becoming more pressing because the capacity to poach the youth of other nations to make up for the shortfall has been impeded.
This is short sighted to the point of retardation.
The religious fundamentalists are not coming to this conclusion because of rational acknowledgment of the necessity, but because they're retards following a book.
If we can't find a rationally driven way to have a society that respects the next generation of people and holds accountable those who for whatever reason cause harm to that next generation, then we will just keep puttering along with the best tools we do have... religion.
I don't know about you, but I am more interested in putting my efforts into devising that better way and supporting it than I am in the other two options. Neither mindless religion nor nihilistic self-indulgence hold much appeal to me.
The trick is in identifying the societal needs these distasteful patterns are meeting, so you can come up with a less ornerous pattern that still meets those needs.
That can't happen without an politically unpopular but honest view of whats happening in the world.
And what's happening is a nihilistic descent into societal collapse as a direct result of popular values.
If you want to argue that it's ok that we're dying off, because other peoples aren't, and nothing means anything anyways, pass me another pill thanks... well, as far as I'm concerned, you can just fucking die right now and get out of the way.
Yeah... isn't it fucked up that they are still pretty much the main driver for population growth? They're close minded and retarded followers of someone who died 2000 years ago, and they're the fathers and mothers of the next generation of people who were born here, not us. Crazy. Makes you think maybe we're all doing something wrong...
Economist is a reasonably reputable source for information, are they not?
Be enlightened.
I really like the politically correct junk he throws in at the end...
"States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies. If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than nappies, that's up to them."
The question is not "should states be in the business of pushing people to have babies", but rather "should there be professional services to assist in preventing or killing babies", and to a lesser extend, "should states be preventing men from pushing women to have babies".
And if you think he's right about America being insulated from this by younger demographics, remember that this was written in 2000, before the borders were locked so tightly.
Take a look at what closed immigration is doing to the farmers fields now that they are having trouble getting illegal labour. Take a look at the tech sector, where the companies are actually leaving for foreign shores because they can't hire the foreign born from the US anymore.
For fucks sakes, open your damned eyes.
Either we collectively come up with a better vision of the world that acknowledges that this one is leading to the extermination of those who believe in it, and try to come up with something better that isn't couched in religious fundamentalism, but still allows us to continue to flourish and grow, or we don't, and religious fundamentalism and a new dark age of superstition begins when what we all came to know sputters out like a candle.
You mean, the people who are entrusted with safeguarding the continuing society beyond the individual were concerned when the same poisons that fucked up other countries are being peddled in their country? Shock and awe!
The point of privacy is that having an imbalance of knowledge leaves you vulnerable, not that ignorance is good.
The public, through the Internet, now has access to raw data on world events that was formerly only available to world leaders and members of the journalistic profession. This is generally conceded to be a good thing.
Why do you think it's a good thing that only the government and high-level business executives have access to data on what and where everyone in your neighbourhood is saying and doing, but not you and the rest of the public?
We are on the edge of a population bust that will halve the population of the Western world in the next decade or two. Do some research.
Left to their own devices in this warped, materialistic, money chasing society, given the power to do so, women will sit behind desks pushing papers around, suckle off the hard physical labour of men, giving men nothing that they value in return, and kill off their unborn children. How do we know? They've been doing it for decades right in front of your face. It's really a shame that it's true, but it is true, and if you can't look at it and talk about it, you're a coward.
Wealth is people. Money is just a ticket that you redeem for someone elses time. The poorer parts of the world that haven't been infected with our malignant philosophies are rising, and the west is going bankrupt... it's a place genetic material goes to die.
You can call me a misogynist all you like. If you think a world that expects young women to kill their unborn children and spend the most vital years of their lives stuck in universities being professed at by their elders, so they can get meaningless jobs and finally wake to what they've been missing when their plumbing is just about worn out, when they need a surgeon just to get pregnant, when they are too old and tired to play with their kids if they do actually have one, if you think that is friendly to women, or men, or children, or anyone at all, you're the one that needs to have their head examined.
You talk to people about it, and they're so busy defending their own suffering, drawing self-worth from it like someone who just got out of basic training. So brainwashed that they can't seem to grasp that they are damned well entitled to something better.
We have all been collectively RIPPED OFF, men and women both. Fed a bunch of lies. And then we wake up one morning, older, bitter, too late, and realize that it's all just a bunch of meaningless shit. That we were cowed into listening and obediently working when we should have been building our own dreams and legacies.
The misogynists are those vicious diesel dykes who don't wish to take responsibility for anything beyond their own pleasure and self-aggrandizement, and the business leaders who would rather have men and women both surrendering their own lives to their jobs.
I love women. Love my girlfriend, love my daughter. I think they ought to be respected and treasured for what they are, encouraged to make children when they are young, fertile and horny, raise families, be continuously educated throughout their lives, wisely administer and preserve the families wealth, and not be obligated to try to be shallow copies of men and endlessly fail.
The way it is now, the women fantasize about virile, politically incorrect black goons like 50c, who actually behave as though they had a set of balls, and the white men fantasize about Asian women, who actually behave as though they didn't have a set of balls.
Nobody actually likes it this way. They just don't know how to stop.
That's bullshit rhetoric used by those who want to confound the issue. We want them all to breed.
It's a daily affair... you read an article about how there's a crisis, not enough workers, can't let the old retire, need immigrants, but can't let them in cause they'd replace our culture with their own.
Then the same news organization crows triumphantly about the success they've had in combating teenage pregnancy, and what a great thing this is for the world. Because we really need more women with expensive, useless educations to work in insignificant, white collar, middle management jobs.
What a fucking joke.
Incidentally, this was all right there in the actuary tables that the life insurance industry collects all along... governments have been quietly planning for this clusterfuck for at least a decade.
I made the mistake of trying to talk about it at a dinner party 10 years ago, and wow... you wanna talk about a sense of pissed off entitlement... boomers thinking that because they worked all their life and saved for retirement, magic elves were going to sprout up to fetch them food and mow their lawn for them.
Whatever. I'll be at -1 in a moment anyway, and no one will read this.
You moron. We're about to face a crisis of underpopulation that will cause widespread societal collapse in all first world nations.
China should be encouraging them all to have 3, then when the population of North America is cut in half in ten years, they do the same thing the Europeans did.
Birth control and feminism are to thank for that. If only we could turn rats and cockroaches on to these ideas... they'd exterminate themselves in a few generations. Just like we've been doing.
Parents could find the nerdy kid instantly... authorities would know inconclusively about the bully and what he's been doing, child molesters and stalkers wouldn't be able to stalk anyone undetected, ever, and old dishonourable scumbags wouldn't be able to cheat on their wives and steal the younger generations women.
Sounds awesome. Unless you're a scumbag, which you've most likely become if you managed to survive several decades in this corrupt world we live in...
The problem with NYC and London is that they inflate the privacy fears among the population, while simultaneously inflating the mad bomber fears among the population, and end up leaving the population with the worst of both worlds...
Spy cameras everywhere, lots of evidence for selective enforcement should that be convenient to anyone in power, but instead of having everyone looking out for each other with this newfound access to timely information, it's just collected and stored to be used as a weapon against individuals later.
The people who live in NYC and London should be demanding that all footage from those cameras be publicly accessible, instantly and indefinitely. They should be willing to kill for it if necessary, because they will be utterly ruled by it if they don't.
This would be awesome if it was open to the public. As long as it's not just a way for the few to know everything about the many and engage in selective enforcement, it's towards the good.
Go China!
There are a lot of dumb business people. Most businesses fail, actually.
Smart business people don't set themselves up to be dependent on third parties who can take advantage of that dependency, because they lose everything if they're stupid enough to make that mistake.
Software costs become marginal if you're free, they eventually become an unsustainable liability if you're not.
Google would have been stillborn in the garage if they had been dependent on Microsoft for their OS.
Now they're one of the worlds greatest entrepreneurial success stories.
The cost, stability, utility and ease of migration are direct results of the freedom. As in, those qualities would not exist if it wasn't free.
Open source vendors have to recognize that Windows is here to stay and that together with Microsoft it will form a duopoly in the market for operating systems. This also requires that the Linux community respects Microsoft rather than ridicule it.
Slashdot Mirror
If a malfunction results in a failure of the local TV signal rather than resulting in a failure of the device, the FCCs decision is the right one.
Devices are expected to fail. Given a long enough timeframe, ALL of them fail.
Clearly, all that hard work to polish the recorded sound isn't really very important to people.
Doesn't bode well for the planned obsolescence system and it's efforts to shift us to new hi-def hardware.
However, I need to comment, that code by govt. oversite....I'd not put that up for a model of efficiency.
It is more efficient because it doesn't rely on depriving people who don't pay from benefiting as part of the funding mechanism. It is better to empower six billion people with that fixed investment than it is to benefit ten thousand people and have the rest operating with inferior tools.
The Internet was created in this way, and succeeded because it was created in this way. If it hadn't been designed using public money and then released to the public to be freely used, it never would have gotten off the ground.
And your argument about rates of pay... wow. We are feeding, and clothing, and sheltering, and caring for all these software developers right now, using the mechanism of money as a way to implement the decentralized logistics. Why are we suddenly not going to have enough resources to continue to do that? Does copyright law create food and shelter that wasn't there, and I'm just now aware of it?
"Because existing systems are corrupt and mismanaged" isn't an answer. It's a hint that there are more areas in the system that need improvement.
See, you can acknowledge that the system is inefficient, that it's wasteful.
You have someone say to you flatly that they are interested in making a system that is more efficient, that is less wasteful, that will give you more and cost you less and empower your neighbour so he can also come up with new ideas you've never thought of and still pay all the software makers of the world just like we're doing now.
And the first reaction you have is "I don't care about benefit, I care about control".
You're not even interested in exploring the idea and making suggestions, you just want to stick your head in the sand.
You're fucking stupid. There just isn't any other way to put it. You can't think out of the box you're in even when you're forced to acknowledge that the box is deeply flawed, and you would rather have less than risk helping your neighbour.
People with your attitude should be kept so far away from authority that they need a telescope to see it, because you can't think beyond your own small little world.
Well, off the cuff...
One idea:
Create a pool of government funded money that goes towards software, and give everyone a vote for which projects they think are important.
Tally the votes, split the pool of money between the projects, running from the most votes to the least.
Don't give one share of the resources per vote though... determine an amount that guarantees a decent standard of living for those participants who are receiving support, and each person who gets anything gets that amount until the pool is empty.
Provide access to common technological infrastructure in a way that supports those whose work is deemed important by their peers first, then let the public at large use up any left over access for their pet projects.
Keep all their work in a common pool that is accessible to all.
Then remove all copyright protections from software.
If you can somehow manage to make a thriving living selling precompiled code in this environment, you're welcome to try, but the system doesn't back up your efforts in the slightest.
If people need custom software made because nothing in existence does what they need, they can of course hire someone to do it.
If there are times of plenty, chuck extra resources towards funding more peoples creativity. If there are times of scarcity, fund less people.
I'm working hard at building infrastructures for several creative industries at this very moment that will operate in a way similar to this. I'd post a link, but I can't handle a slashdotting at the moment.
People who talk about how the money for creative works just won't be there unless you can somehow compel people to surrender it need to realize... the public flat out will not be denied these things, and they will always construct a mechanism to support creation. That has been true throughout our history.
It seems rather foolish to suppose that at this point in our history, when we have more disposable wealth than at any documented time in the past, we will leave our artists, musicians and inventors out to dry just because we could if we wanted to. Nobody on either side of the fence wants to do that.
Now, that's just one idea. There are myriad ways that we can organize ourselves, and that is what we all ought to be talking about, instead of having these blind ideological clashes that don't result in anything except more wasted time and effort.
If you spend obscene amounts of a societies resources making a piece of software, then prevent that software from being put to the maximum possible utility by everyone far and wide who might have a use for it, you just drove up the cost of the software to our society, because it's been paid for and is not being used.
The point is not that coders shouldn't be supported as they do their thing. The point is that there should be a better mechanism put into place to pay for the creation of this valuable software that doesn't inherently destroy so much of its value once it is complete.
Is this really so hard to understand?
The purpose of business is not to make a profit.
The purpose of business is to keep people busy, because if they are not busy, nothing gets done, and we have a depression, and starvation, and deprivation, and death.
The purpose of money is to keep people busy.
If everyone is happy to just keep doing useful things with their life and take what they need instead of trying to show off how many toys they have at the next guys expense, money is a liability, wasted bureaucratic effort that distract people from what was really important.
The success of open source software can be attributed to one simple fact.
Those who are doing things because they think it's good and important stuff to be doing are more successful than those who are doing things because they are compelled by money.
Even though everything is stacked against them, even though they have no financial support, these projects are thriving, because money is a poor way to run a society, and people who live by the dollar can't compete with those who live with passion.
As time progresses, we will assemble new mechanisms to support these people in their efforts, mechanisms that don't rely on money.
And we will do this because it is simply a better way to run a society, and those societies that don't get with the program will disappear as so many failed societies have done before.
Or to put it another way, you're talking about towing the horse with the cart because you don't really understand the way the game works or what its purpose is.
Most people don't.
In addition to everything else that they are, women ARE baby factories. Not only that, they are the only baby factories. Yet we scorn them for making babies that we need and give them kudos for abandoning that responsibility and living a white collar lifestyle.
All the while, the signs that the society is in desperate need of a next generation that was never produced are rapidly moving from the realm of the abstract to the physical realm, and becoming more pressing because the capacity to poach the youth of other nations to make up for the shortfall has been impeded.
This is short sighted to the point of retardation.
The religious fundamentalists are not coming to this conclusion because of rational acknowledgment of the necessity, but because they're retards following a book.
If we can't find a rationally driven way to have a society that respects the next generation of people and holds accountable those who for whatever reason cause harm to that next generation, then we will just keep puttering along with the best tools we do have... religion.
I don't know about you, but I am more interested in putting my efforts into devising that better way and supporting it than I am in the other two options. Neither mindless religion nor nihilistic self-indulgence hold much appeal to me.
The trick is in identifying the societal needs these distasteful patterns are meeting, so you can come up with a less ornerous pattern that still meets those needs.
That can't happen without an politically unpopular but honest view of whats happening in the world.
And what's happening is a nihilistic descent into societal collapse as a direct result of popular values.
If you want to argue that it's ok that we're dying off, because other peoples aren't, and nothing means anything anyways, pass me another pill thanks... well, as far as I'm concerned, you can just fucking die right now and get out of the way.
I just wanted to add to that last post...
Organizations have a lot of inerta. It takes a concerted effort to restructure.
When a closed source organization starts becoming more open, it took a lot of hard work and restructuring to make it possible.
When an open source organization starts closing things up, it takes a lot of hard work and restructuring to make that possible too.
Which means the people at the helm are working hard to start hoarding things they were given in trust for the public good.
It reveals that the organization has a poor moral character.
They didn't write it.
It's not the product of their mind, not the product of their efforts.
It's the product of many peoples minds and efforts.
The administrators of the projects should be appreciative of that fact.
It is not their property. Laws can say what they want, lawyers and contracts and twisting of justice aside, it simply isn't theirs.
When open source organizations try to close access and extract money from people, they become malignant, corrupt, thieving organizations.
Declaring that it's legal for someone to do this doesn't change the fundamental nature of what's going on.
The misplaced sense of entitlement these organizations display is truly disgusting.
Yeah... isn't it fucked up that they are still pretty much the main driver for population growth? They're close minded and retarded followers of someone who died 2000 years ago, and they're the fathers and mothers of the next generation of people who were born here, not us. Crazy. Makes you think maybe we're all doing something wrong...
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm? story_id=9545933
Economist is a reasonably reputable source for information, are they not?
Be enlightened.
I really like the politically correct junk he throws in at the end...
"States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies. If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than nappies, that's up to them."
The question is not "should states be in the business of pushing people to have babies", but rather "should there be professional services to assist in preventing or killing babies", and to a lesser extend, "should states be preventing men from pushing women to have babies".
http://www.nytimes.com/specials/010100mil-demo-san ger.html
Go argue with the NYT.
And if you think he's right about America being insulated from this by younger demographics, remember that this was written in 2000, before the borders were locked so tightly.
Take a look at what closed immigration is doing to the farmers fields now that they are having trouble getting illegal labour. Take a look at the tech sector, where the companies are actually leaving for foreign shores because they can't hire the foreign born from the US anymore.
For fucks sakes, open your damned eyes.
Either we collectively come up with a better vision of the world that acknowledges that this one is leading to the extermination of those who believe in it, and try to come up with something better that isn't couched in religious fundamentalism, but still allows us to continue to flourish and grow, or we don't, and religious fundamentalism and a new dark age of superstition begins when what we all came to know sputters out like a candle.
You mean, the people who are entrusted with safeguarding the continuing society beyond the individual were concerned when the same poisons that fucked up other countries are being peddled in their country? Shock and awe!
The point of privacy is that having an imbalance of knowledge leaves you vulnerable, not that ignorance is good.
The public, through the Internet, now has access to raw data on world events that was formerly only available to world leaders and members of the journalistic profession. This is generally conceded to be a good thing.
Why do you think it's a good thing that only the government and high-level business executives have access to data on what and where everyone in your neighbourhood is saying and doing, but not you and the rest of the public?
We are on the edge of a population bust that will halve the population of the Western world in the next decade or two. Do some research.
Left to their own devices in this warped, materialistic, money chasing society, given the power to do so, women will sit behind desks pushing papers around, suckle off the hard physical labour of men, giving men nothing that they value in return, and kill off their unborn children. How do we know? They've been doing it for decades right in front of your face. It's really a shame that it's true, but it is true, and if you can't look at it and talk about it, you're a coward.
Wealth is people. Money is just a ticket that you redeem for someone elses time. The poorer parts of the world that haven't been infected with our malignant philosophies are rising, and the west is going bankrupt... it's a place genetic material goes to die.
You can call me a misogynist all you like. If you think a world that expects young women to kill their unborn children and spend the most vital years of their lives stuck in universities being professed at by their elders, so they can get meaningless jobs and finally wake to what they've been missing when their plumbing is just about worn out, when they need a surgeon just to get pregnant, when they are too old and tired to play with their kids if they do actually have one, if you think that is friendly to women, or men, or children, or anyone at all, you're the one that needs to have their head examined.
You talk to people about it, and they're so busy defending their own suffering, drawing self-worth from it like someone who just got out of basic training. So brainwashed that they can't seem to grasp that they are damned well entitled to something better.
We have all been collectively RIPPED OFF, men and women both. Fed a bunch of lies. And then we wake up one morning, older, bitter, too late, and realize that it's all just a bunch of meaningless shit. That we were cowed into listening and obediently working when we should have been building our own dreams and legacies.
The misogynists are those vicious diesel dykes who don't wish to take responsibility for anything beyond their own pleasure and self-aggrandizement, and the business leaders who would rather have men and women both surrendering their own lives to their jobs.
I love women. Love my girlfriend, love my daughter. I think they ought to be respected and treasured for what they are, encouraged to make children when they are young, fertile and horny, raise families, be continuously educated throughout their lives, wisely administer and preserve the families wealth, and not be obligated to try to be shallow copies of men and endlessly fail.
The way it is now, the women fantasize about virile, politically incorrect black goons like 50c, who actually behave as though they had a set of balls, and the white men fantasize about Asian women, who actually behave as though they didn't have a set of balls.
Nobody actually likes it this way. They just don't know how to stop.
That's bullshit rhetoric used by those who want to confound the issue. We want them all to breed.
It's a daily affair... you read an article about how there's a crisis, not enough workers, can't let the old retire, need immigrants, but can't let them in cause they'd replace our culture with their own.
Then the same news organization crows triumphantly about the success they've had in combating teenage pregnancy, and what a great thing this is for the world. Because we really need more women with expensive, useless educations to work in insignificant, white collar, middle management jobs.
What a fucking joke.
Incidentally, this was all right there in the actuary tables that the life insurance industry collects all along... governments have been quietly planning for this clusterfuck for at least a decade.
I made the mistake of trying to talk about it at a dinner party 10 years ago, and wow... you wanna talk about a sense of pissed off entitlement... boomers thinking that because they worked all their life and saved for retirement, magic elves were going to sprout up to fetch them food and mow their lawn for them.
Whatever. I'll be at -1 in a moment anyway, and no one will read this.
You moron. We're about to face a crisis of underpopulation that will cause widespread societal collapse in all first world nations.
China should be encouraging them all to have 3, then when the population of North America is cut in half in ten years, they do the same thing the Europeans did.
Birth control and feminism are to thank for that. If only we could turn rats and cockroaches on to these ideas... they'd exterminate themselves in a few generations. Just like we've been doing.
Parents could find the nerdy kid instantly... authorities would know inconclusively about the bully and what he's been doing, child molesters and stalkers wouldn't be able to stalk anyone undetected, ever, and old dishonourable scumbags wouldn't be able to cheat on their wives and steal the younger generations women.
Sounds awesome. Unless you're a scumbag, which you've most likely become if you managed to survive several decades in this corrupt world we live in...
The problem with NYC and London is that they inflate the privacy fears among the population, while simultaneously inflating the mad bomber fears among the population, and end up leaving the population with the worst of both worlds...
Spy cameras everywhere, lots of evidence for selective enforcement should that be convenient to anyone in power, but instead of having everyone looking out for each other with this newfound access to timely information, it's just collected and stored to be used as a weapon against individuals later.
The people who live in NYC and London should be demanding that all footage from those cameras be publicly accessible, instantly and indefinitely. They should be willing to kill for it if necessary, because they will be utterly ruled by it if they don't.
Stalin himself never had it so good.
This would be awesome if it was open to the public. As long as it's not just a way for the few to know everything about the many and engage in selective enforcement, it's towards the good. Go China!
There are a lot of dumb business people. Most businesses fail, actually.
Smart business people don't set themselves up to be dependent on third parties who can take advantage of that dependency, because they lose everything if they're stupid enough to make that mistake.
Software costs become marginal if you're free, they eventually become an unsustainable liability if you're not.
Google would have been stillborn in the garage if they had been dependent on Microsoft for their OS.
Now they're one of the worlds greatest entrepreneurial success stories.
The cost, stability, utility and ease of migration are direct results of the freedom. As in, those qualities would not exist if it wasn't free.
Open source vendors have to recognize that Windows is here to stay and that together with Microsoft it will form a duopoly in the market for operating systems. This also requires that the Linux community respects Microsoft rather than ridicule it.
How can I put this eloquently...
Fuck off, Uncle Tom.
Depends. If they've taken contributions from OTHER programmers from the outside, then they don't own all the code, and can't close it off anymore.
Their contribution process involves assigning all ownership of your contributions to MySQL for this exact reason.
I'm going to be launching such a site shortly, and I'm going with PostgreSQL. And yes, they are rather complex projects to put together.