"pretty close to free" --- Well, it's mandatory government service. Not conscription for war, but something similar nonetheless (in many persons' opinions). Of course, there are places in the world where part of your duties as a citizen include a few years of mandatory military service.
If you could get a 20% discount on your taxes by doing non-combat government work for one month out of every year, would you? 70% discount?
Personally, I think all taxation should be paid strictly in labour, that it should be mandatory to work in and develop a familiarity with each discrete industry, and that any industry that is essential for human life should be excluded from the private sector with no exceptions. The way things are run now, the vast majority of people are so highly specialized that their right to vote is rendered meaningless because they are functionally ignorant, and they are engaging in arbitrary and unnecessary tasks and hoping that somehow that will translate into the stuff they need to live. This is functionally equivalent to slavery, and those who are responsible for the maintaining this situation should be held accountable.
In theory you are correct, in practice you are not. You see, with a mesh network, the greater the density of nodes, the greater the available bandwidth between those nodes becomes. The thing is, in this situation you're going to also want to access hosts outside of the mesh, meaning data is going to need to be routed over the mesh to a gateway. This is where the bottleneck lies - the actual performance of the internet will depend on the throughput provided by a relatively fixed number gateways. And I would bet, in typical government fashion, the rate at which users join the mesh would out pace the rate of added gateway capacity.
Your point is valid, however, such an arrangement would dramatically reduce the travel across the backbone. Any discrete piece of data only needs to travel across the backbone once, after which it would be in the mesh and there would be no further need to touch the backbone. It's similar in principle to a squid proxy cache.
There is no such thing as free and of course you are right to say that if it is free it will clog and be maintained badly.
The people who built the power installations at Niagara Falls are long dead. The installation is publicly run and has been providing power to millions of people for a century. All it requires is a relatively small crew to maintain it so it doesn't break down. If you educated the people in the society in how to maintain it, and made them each take a shift, they'd most likely only have to work a single day of their lives to meet their domestic electricity needs. Sounds pretty close to free to me.
People will absorb ANY amount of bandwidth if it's free. This thing will ALWAYS be overloaded and unusable. Period.
A properly designed mesh will have more bandwidth the more users it has. Bittorrent is a virtual mesh network, and it works so well that the legacy network can't handle the simulation.
Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal.
Has it not percolated into your tiny brain that we don't recognize the legitimacy of the bodies that make the laws?
Have you ever watched Charlie Brown? You know the bit where the adults are talking, but all anyone hears is "Whaa whaa, whaa whaa whaa whaa." That's you.
Personally, I think the thing to do is to raze the offices of the politicians and corporate executives, with the people inside.
It was semi-serious. The money supply is being devalued by significant margin on a daily basis, and as this economic system is about to fail utterly, so the whole idea of giving someone the money they deserve is rapidly becoming a moot point. It won't be long now before it's just so much worthless paper, and everyone who is properly informed about what's going on in the world knows it. Not really relevant to the discussion though.
As a computer programmer, I earn my living off commissioned work. Any time licensed software is involved, it damages my prospects. If a client has a budget and a goal, every dime that goes to paying taxes to a proprietary software company shrinks the budget that can be dedicated to getting actual work done. I'm very thankful for the LAMP stack. It allows me to help people who wouldn't even be able to afford to pay for, say, Windows Server and SQL Server, let alone actually pay me to do the work for them.
My partner makes her money selling original works on stretched canvas, and does web design, and does mural projects. She's also been making good money these days going out to live events and doing a painting of the event, then auctioning it at the end of the evening.
The digital copies of her work are released creative commons-attribution. If some business in China were to make a billion posters and sell them to a billion university students and not give her a dime, that would be great. 20 years from now, some of those students would covet an original work.
Oh, and all the music we record we release into the public domain. We do it for the joy of doing it.
What if it wasn't just one person? What if it was a studio that brought all the people and resources together to create a work?
Will you shaft them just because they're a studio, or will you demand the ability to generate 10-100-1000 transactions to pay each member of a production individually?
If they didn't ask me before they started shooting if I wanted to donate my efforts and resources to their cultural work, then why should I give them anything after it is finished? What a warped view of the world you have.
If they want money in their bank account, they can print their own. That's the fashionable thing to do these days. If they want food, they should secure that before they sit down to write.
I'm a computer programmer. My girlfriend is a painter and artist. We are both musicians. We are the people these copyright rules are intended to promote. And we don't want them, and we don't need them, and we think we'd be better off without them. So, if the guy can't put food on his table without copyright, perhaps it's because he's fucking doing it wrong.
That is immoral. Our culture is made up of things do when they are not taking care of their basic needs, and is for everybody. This is the natural order of things. It is not right for a person to neglect the care of their basic needs, then frantically try to control what other people do with this particular piece of our culture because they have put themselves in a desperate situation.
If a person creates something of particular merit, it is a service to society to help that person spend less effort on their basic needs and allow them to enrich our culture further. Unless it is a commissioned work or performance, there is no debt that is owed to the creator.
Irregardless, it is not right for anyone to attempt to systematically reduce peoples access to works of knowledge and culture. It is an intellectual assault on all of humanity to do this. Aside from the dilemma of the man who for no good reason cannot read his book, it personally hurts every one of us to have stupider neighbors than we have to.
If you're giving money to the person who is a creator, then you're doing a public service by empowering them to continue to create, but are not actually morally obligated to do so.
If, however, you're giving money to a corporation that doesn't create things, but actively utilizes the economic power you gave them to ensure that things others create remain artificially scarce so that it's profit margins remain strong, then you are responsible for every individual who was needlessly deprived of access.
It's not just "ok" to infringe copyright in such cases. It's an immoral act to fund such groups by making a purchase, it's your moral responsibility not to fund such groups, and it's an act of public service to subvert their capacity to continue to act in such a fashion.
In summary, if can't put the money directly into the hand of the person who created the work, it's better not to pay for it at all, and it's better to help others to also not pay for it at all.
"So you gave Redhat permission to distribute this data?" "Yes." "And were you aware it was being distributed under the GPL?" "Uhh..." "And that the GPL allows further modification and redistribution so long as it remains under that license?" "..." "Case dismissed!"
If granting distribution rights to someone also meant giving them the right to relicense what they were distributing, the GPL would be defunct.
The answer is simple. The way to address the problem is to do to proprietary hardware what free software did to proprietary software. Design non-proprietary hardware and make it accessible to the masses.
When my daughter was two, she loved computers. Being able to move the mouse and bang the keys and watch the screen change in reaction to her kept her fascinated for an hour at a time. You could lock the desktop and it wouldn't make a lick of difference, as long as she could move the mouse pointer and watch letters appear in the login box when she hammered on the keyboard.
Knowing that, you want something highly configurable that will allow you to control what he can find in his explorations, like leaving breadcrumbs for Hansel and Gretel. Personally, I'd go with a Linux based system that has a clean, minimalist interface and really lock it down.
What about Bear Grylls? He served three years with the Special Air Service, a special forces unit of the British army. During his service, he broke his back in three places in a parachuting accident over Southern Africa and still hiked ten miles on his fingertips all the way to Paris, France. He has drank his own pee and eaten about 100 species in situations of life or death survival. I don't think he'd look kindly at you saying he's a chicken.
The whole market driven economic system is collapsing, all around the world. It's finally becoming apparent that it was never an efficient or effective system, and that any perceptions of efficiency and effectiveness came from a surplus of working adults with no dependent children to distract them from being industrious.
Each week, hundreds of billions of dollars are printed and distributed to a select few individuals. Which means each week, any particular dollar is worth far less than it was the week before. Ownership of stock has proven to be worthless, because all the large businesses that participate in the stock exchanges are bankrupt and worthless, unless they get a bailout, in which case your share of them is devalued to the point of insignificance.
This system doesn't work.
So, why would anyone in their right mind think that moving responsibility for communications infrastructure to individuals and market forces is going to do anything beyond cause the collapse of modern communications?
You privatize common infrastructure, its utility is underutilized, then it is destroyed. Pretty cut and dried.
Evolve simply means 'to change over time'. It doesn't mean 'to grow', or 'to become better', or anything. It doesn't mean 'adapting to the environment', or 'survival of the fittest' or the like (although these are mechanisms involved in life's evolution). Stars evolve. Rocks evolve. Technology evolves. Life evolves. Everything evolves. The mechanisms of change differ, but the fact of change does not.
What a load of claptrap. Evolution doesn't mean 'to change over time'. If I turn the plant on my desk 90 degrees every day, it's not evolving. Revolving maybe.
Evolution is when the progeny of individuals in a group undergo mutation, and some of those mutations die out without recreating themselves, reducing diversity, while others do not die out, thereby changing the nature of the group.
You can argue that this is bullshit and doesn't happen if you like. But this is still what the word means. Mutation is about change. Evolution is about extinction.
So no, they don't make machines. Their scrollwheel mice were built by Logitech (albeit maybe to Microsoft's specification). The kernel software that shipped with the xbox classic was... well, sort of. Microsoft codeveloped NT with IBM under the label "OS/2". OS/2 died a horrible death, NT was a victim of its own success.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was the DOS/3.1/95/98 series of operating systems that was co-developed with IBM. From what I understand, the NT code base was basically a re-implementation of VMS. MS was unable to develop what they wanted with the staff they had, so they poached a bunch of developers from a competitor and had them re-write their competitors internals, then stick the Windows legacy and marketing crap on top.
That's all well and good, but it's not going to stop grunts from using them to look at porn in the field. If I was going to do a cyber attack on the DoD, I'd be leaving virus infected DVDs full of porn lying around in occupied areas. You're pretty much guaranteed that it'll get passed from person to person.
I've taught my 8 year old to program with it. You can upload your programs to the MIT website and get kudos from other kids, which gives positive feedback. You can download other peoples programs and see how they made them, then hack them and upload them again, and it will preserve the fact that you created it, and whose work it was based upon, giving some opportunity to see the rewards that come with sharing information.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO is dead.
Ahh, but trolls have regeneration. Everyone knows that.
"pretty close to free" --- Well, it's mandatory government service. Not conscription for war, but something similar nonetheless (in many persons' opinions). Of course, there are places in the world where part of your duties as a citizen include a few years of mandatory military service. If you could get a 20% discount on your taxes by doing non-combat government work for one month out of every year, would you? 70% discount?
Personally, I think all taxation should be paid strictly in labour, that it should be mandatory to work in and develop a familiarity with each discrete industry, and that any industry that is essential for human life should be excluded from the private sector with no exceptions. The way things are run now, the vast majority of people are so highly specialized that their right to vote is rendered meaningless because they are functionally ignorant, and they are engaging in arbitrary and unnecessary tasks and hoping that somehow that will translate into the stuff they need to live. This is functionally equivalent to slavery, and those who are responsible for the maintaining this situation should be held accountable.
If you consider "the best" to be "everyone can appreciate this without effort", you'll get it from such a system.
If you have to develop the capacity to appreciate a thing, you'll never find it from such a system.
So, this methodology is a great way to find banal, tepid elevator music that challenges no one. If that's what you're into.
In theory you are correct, in practice you are not. You see, with a mesh network, the greater the density of nodes, the greater the available bandwidth between those nodes becomes. The thing is, in this situation you're going to also want to access hosts outside of the mesh, meaning data is going to need to be routed over the mesh to a gateway. This is where the bottleneck lies - the actual performance of the internet will depend on the throughput provided by a relatively fixed number gateways. And I would bet, in typical government fashion, the rate at which users join the mesh would out pace the rate of added gateway capacity.
Your point is valid, however, such an arrangement would dramatically reduce the travel across the backbone. Any discrete piece of data only needs to travel across the backbone once, after which it would be in the mesh and there would be no further need to touch the backbone. It's similar in principle to a squid proxy cache.
There is no such thing as free and of course you are right to say that if it is free it will clog and be maintained badly.
The people who built the power installations at Niagara Falls are long dead. The installation is publicly run and has been providing power to millions of people for a century. All it requires is a relatively small crew to maintain it so it doesn't break down. If you educated the people in the society in how to maintain it, and made them each take a shift, they'd most likely only have to work a single day of their lives to meet their domestic electricity needs. Sounds pretty close to free to me.
People will absorb ANY amount of bandwidth if it's free. This thing will ALWAYS be overloaded and unusable. Period.
A properly designed mesh will have more bandwidth the more users it has. Bittorrent is a virtual mesh network, and it works so well that the legacy network can't handle the simulation.
Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal.
Has it not percolated into your tiny brain that we don't recognize the legitimacy of the bodies that make the laws?
Have you ever watched Charlie Brown? You know the bit where the adults are talking, but all anyone hears is "Whaa whaa, whaa whaa whaa whaa." That's you.
Personally, I think the thing to do is to raze the offices of the politicians and corporate executives, with the people inside.
Irregardless Please do not use this non-word, it is painful to the eyes.
It is in multiple dictionaries, and is used in common speech. It's been a word that people use since long before you were born. Give up already.
It was semi-serious. The money supply is being devalued by significant margin on a daily basis, and as this economic system is about to fail utterly, so the whole idea of giving someone the money they deserve is rapidly becoming a moot point. It won't be long now before it's just so much worthless paper, and everyone who is properly informed about what's going on in the world knows it. Not really relevant to the discussion though.
As a computer programmer, I earn my living off commissioned work. Any time licensed software is involved, it damages my prospects. If a client has a budget and a goal, every dime that goes to paying taxes to a proprietary software company shrinks the budget that can be dedicated to getting actual work done. I'm very thankful for the LAMP stack. It allows me to help people who wouldn't even be able to afford to pay for, say, Windows Server and SQL Server, let alone actually pay me to do the work for them.
My partner makes her money selling original works on stretched canvas, and does web design, and does mural projects. She's also been making good money these days going out to live events and doing a painting of the event, then auctioning it at the end of the evening.
The digital copies of her work are released creative commons-attribution. If some business in China were to make a billion posters and sell them to a billion university students and not give her a dime, that would be great. 20 years from now, some of those students would covet an original work.
Oh, and all the music we record we release into the public domain. We do it for the joy of doing it.
What if it wasn't just one person? What if it was a studio that brought all the people and resources together to create a work?
Will you shaft them just because they're a studio, or will you demand the ability to generate 10-100-1000 transactions to pay each member of a production individually?
If they didn't ask me before they started shooting if I wanted to donate my efforts and resources to their cultural work, then why should I give them anything after it is finished? What a warped view of the world you have.
If they want money in their bank account, they can print their own. That's the fashionable thing to do these days. If they want food, they should secure that before they sit down to write.
I'm a computer programmer. My girlfriend is a painter and artist. We are both musicians. We are the people these copyright rules are intended to promote. And we don't want them, and we don't need them, and we think we'd be better off without them. So, if the guy can't put food on his table without copyright, perhaps it's because he's fucking doing it wrong.
That is immoral. Our culture is made up of things do when they are not taking care of their basic needs, and is for everybody. This is the natural order of things. It is not right for a person to neglect the care of their basic needs, then frantically try to control what other people do with this particular piece of our culture because they have put themselves in a desperate situation.
If a person creates something of particular merit, it is a service to society to help that person spend less effort on their basic needs and allow them to enrich our culture further. Unless it is a commissioned work or performance, there is no debt that is owed to the creator.
Irregardless, it is not right for anyone to attempt to systematically reduce peoples access to works of knowledge and culture. It is an intellectual assault on all of humanity to do this. Aside from the dilemma of the man who for no good reason cannot read his book, it personally hurts every one of us to have stupider neighbors than we have to.
Oh yeah... I was born in the 70s, whatever letter that happens to make me...
If you're giving money to the person who is a creator, then you're doing a public service by empowering them to continue to create, but are not actually morally obligated to do so.
If, however, you're giving money to a corporation that doesn't create things, but actively utilizes the economic power you gave them to ensure that things others create remain artificially scarce so that it's profit margins remain strong, then you are responsible for every individual who was needlessly deprived of access.
It's not just "ok" to infringe copyright in such cases. It's an immoral act to fund such groups by making a purchase, it's your moral responsibility not to fund such groups, and it's an act of public service to subvert their capacity to continue to act in such a fashion.
In summary, if can't put the money directly into the hand of the person who created the work, it's better not to pay for it at all, and it's better to help others to also not pay for it at all.
These aren't products. They're components. How many discrete kinds of lego blocks do you need before you've got your bases covered?
"So you gave Redhat permission to distribute this data?" "Yes." "And were you aware it was being distributed under the GPL?" "Uhh..." "And that the GPL allows further modification and redistribution so long as it remains under that license?" "..." "Case dismissed!"
If granting distribution rights to someone also meant giving them the right to relicense what they were distributing, the GPL would be defunct.
The answer is simple. The way to address the problem is to do to proprietary hardware what free software did to proprietary software. Design non-proprietary hardware and make it accessible to the masses.
When my daughter was two, she loved computers. Being able to move the mouse and bang the keys and watch the screen change in reaction to her kept her fascinated for an hour at a time. You could lock the desktop and it wouldn't make a lick of difference, as long as she could move the mouse pointer and watch letters appear in the login box when she hammered on the keyboard.
Knowing that, you want something highly configurable that will allow you to control what he can find in his explorations, like leaving breadcrumbs for Hansel and Gretel. Personally, I'd go with a Linux based system that has a clean, minimalist interface and really lock it down.
What about Bear Grylls? He served three years with the Special Air Service, a special forces unit of the British army. During his service, he broke his back in three places in a parachuting accident over Southern Africa and still hiked ten miles on his fingertips all the way to Paris, France. He has drank his own pee and eaten about 100 species in situations of life or death survival. I don't think he'd look kindly at you saying he's a chicken.
You could say he was clumsy and had bad breath...
The whole market driven economic system is collapsing, all around the world. It's finally becoming apparent that it was never an efficient or effective system, and that any perceptions of efficiency and effectiveness came from a surplus of working adults with no dependent children to distract them from being industrious.
Each week, hundreds of billions of dollars are printed and distributed to a select few individuals. Which means each week, any particular dollar is worth far less than it was the week before. Ownership of stock has proven to be worthless, because all the large businesses that participate in the stock exchanges are bankrupt and worthless, unless they get a bailout, in which case your share of them is devalued to the point of insignificance.
This system doesn't work.
So, why would anyone in their right mind think that moving responsibility for communications infrastructure to individuals and market forces is going to do anything beyond cause the collapse of modern communications?
You privatize common infrastructure, its utility is underutilized, then it is destroyed. Pretty cut and dried.
Evolve simply means 'to change over time'. It doesn't mean 'to grow', or 'to become better', or anything. It doesn't mean 'adapting to the environment', or 'survival of the fittest' or the like (although these are mechanisms involved in life's evolution). Stars evolve. Rocks evolve. Technology evolves. Life evolves. Everything evolves. The mechanisms of change differ, but the fact of change does not.
What a load of claptrap. Evolution doesn't mean 'to change over time'. If I turn the plant on my desk 90 degrees every day, it's not evolving. Revolving maybe.
Evolution is when the progeny of individuals in a group undergo mutation, and some of those mutations die out without recreating themselves, reducing diversity, while others do not die out, thereby changing the nature of the group.
You can argue that this is bullshit and doesn't happen if you like. But this is still what the word means. Mutation is about change. Evolution is about extinction.
So no, they don't make machines. Their scrollwheel mice were built by Logitech (albeit maybe to Microsoft's specification). The kernel software that shipped with the xbox classic was... well, sort of. Microsoft codeveloped NT with IBM under the label "OS/2". OS/2 died a horrible death, NT was a victim of its own success.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was the DOS/3.1/95/98 series of operating systems that was co-developed with IBM. From what I understand, the NT code base was basically a re-implementation of VMS. MS was unable to develop what they wanted with the staff they had, so they poached a bunch of developers from a competitor and had them re-write their competitors internals, then stick the Windows legacy and marketing crap on top.
I know of a few guys who were 'awarded' a loss of a month of pay for similar violations.
Exactly.
That's all well and good, but it's not going to stop grunts from using them to look at porn in the field. If I was going to do a cyber attack on the DoD, I'd be leaving virus infected DVDs full of porn lying around in occupied areas. You're pretty much guaranteed that it'll get passed from person to person.
I would suggest introducing them to Scratch.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
I've taught my 8 year old to program with it. You can upload your programs to the MIT website and get kudos from other kids, which gives positive feedback. You can download other peoples programs and see how they made them, then hack them and upload them again, and it will preserve the fact that you created it, and whose work it was based upon, giving some opportunity to see the rewards that come with sharing information.