A little more work? Installing a TIVO is absolutely brain dead. Think of this in terms of a non-computer person you know... Maybe your parents.
Tivo has: - No install of Linux, software, libraries. - no install of cards - Customer support if you cant figure out how to plug it into your TV (the truely braindead) - Comes with all the cables
Some of us are Unix admins at work and can write their own Myth TV if they wanted, but DON'T WANT TO. TV is supposed to be a relaxing veg-your-brain "activity". Most people don't want to have to think about it.
Have you seen the FAQ on Myth TV? Compare these questions and nswers to the "plug it in" install of Tivo:
I get an error when compiling about 'mkspecs'? You need to set QTDIR. On Debian, it should be/usr/share/qt. On Mandrake, it should be/usr/lib/qt3
I can't change the channel when watching TV? Something's wrong with your program database. Did filldata run with no major errors?
When is the last time Tech Support over at Tivo asked a user "Did you make sure that/usr/local/lib is in/etc/ld.so.conf and then re-run ldconfig?"
It might be because the commercial advance on replay tv is automatic. (I think) If I understand it correctly, the Replay TV would skip commercials without your intervention. On the TIVO, not only is the 30 second advance a hidden option, you need to push a button.
Well, if the new owners ReplayTV were honest and forthright, they would not yank the features out from under the current users of Replay, but deny use of these features for all new purchases of Replay.
Trusting Gator
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't really trust Gator at all, but if you a have an effective popup blocker, the software is actually really nice. Not only does it remember your passwords and forms, but it can fill in a form, even if you have never visited the page before. It has enough intelligence to know to put your address into a form that has a slot that says "Address" or "Address #1", and your last name in a form slot that says "Last Name" or "Sirname" or "Full Name".
If it were available for a fee without the adware/spyware, I would buy it.
IMHO: The dems would certainly NOT be cutting taxes... at least not as eggregiously as Bush. I imagine that they would spend heavily on public works projects... It would wind up pushing more jobs into the public sector, but that is how things happen when your country is trying to fight a recession/depression.
We are almost guaranteed to slide into a deflationary recession in the next few years and it is a shame that someone as unfreindly to the common man as Bush is in control. I and most other people do not mind allowing the rich to get richer, as long as it isn't done at our expense. However, as the hard times start creeping in, people are going to want change. Unfortunately, the economy is only moving downward slowly, which allows us to become accustomed to the problems... We don't feel it acutely. We are frogs sitting in a pan of water, with the heat slowly rising.
Actually, the primary thing holding up Project Gutenberg is the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. The copyright law was recently extended so that nothing created earlier than the 1920s is going into the public domain.
There is a large body of great 20th century works that will not enter the public domain for many years. Stuff by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Virginia Woolf, et al.
Its a shame. I actually enjoy reading literature, and I am forced to go to the library for anything newer than 1923.
I love this idea... and I have been waiting for something like it for some time...
Think about it... I would love to search the blogosphere to see how widespread certain news items have become, or how widespread a certain opinion is...
You could use something like this to measure the spread of ideas (at least within a vocal and technologically suave minority).
Your management has run into the main drawback of open-source software. There have been several times (not a lot, but a few) that I have run into roadblocks with open source software that took longer to correct than it would have had I had Sun or HP support on the phone.. For 95% of your problems, you are going to find the information you need online easily. But when you start running into hard core integration and compatibility problems, it is going to be very hard to find the fix, and you have no one to call.
Unless you can find a vendor to provide support for each of your open source software packages, I would not argue the case for open-source. If I were the boss, the first time something breaks and 1000 users are off-line for a day or so, your head would roll. Remember, this is NOT your home computer you are talking about... you are talking about MANY users being down for several hours/days. 1000 people making an average of $30/hour is a lot of money.
If things broke, replacing you would easily pay for itself.
EULAs don't apply to hardware, only to software. EULAs require copyright protection. The only thing you could EULA would be the firmware and even then, the most you could do would be to disallow reverse engineering, and we all know how that turned out in court... IBM lost.
Yes, I think you can EULA hardware, or at least make it proprietary. IBM's problem of disallowing reverse engineering was due to the fact that they created the IBM PC out of standard off-the-shelf parts, and the only thing that was unique was the BIOS itself.
While many corporations *do* lease equipment in this manner (General Motors is a big one -- it has such an arrangement with EDS), I don't think that the average consumer would buy/lease the equipment in this manner. Credit is plentiful and cheap (esp. now with the low interest rates) and most people would rather own a machine outright than lease it in this manner or pay some sort of 'maintenance' agreement.
Tivo has proven this false... Though the TIVO is still yours if you do not buy the service, it is significantly less useful. Microsoft sees this and certainly knows that this is the future. Remember their claims that software rental will be the future? Well, this likely would allow them to make software rental happen.
Even if a port of Linux is available, I forsee that it will never become a legitimate competitor.
Several reasons: (think in terms of business and third party vendors writing software for a Linux port...)
- EULA on the hardware disallowing any other operating systems - Voiding the warranty of the hardware. - A monthly fee for a hardware "lease" or "rental" or "maintenance", with a hardware-required dial-in. (think tivo) - Hardware lockouts ostensibly for DRM.
Who is going to write software for this? No one but free software coders... Who is going to support and sell Linux versions of this? No one. You will need to do it yourself. This just doesnt float in the business world.
Now, I haven't research the previous poster's claims of Sony allowing open (with a price) access to their interface... But it certainly is more restrictive than say IDE... where, I believe, there is no third party entity to whom you must pay royalties and access fees.
I am saying that open-source zealots should re-think their position. Not just Linux, but all Free (speech) programming.
Politics aside, let's say that Linux became better and more usable than Windows, and somehow it became the operating system of choice for the world. Then, the majority of the 130000 people working for Microsoft would be out of a job. (with some imagination, you can envision this happening to most of the software industry) No, not all of them work on Windows, but the profit from Windows is what allows the other Microsoft sectors to operate at a loss.
"Fine," you say. "They were just taking money from other people in the world. Those people are now saving money."
Lets take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. Those 130000 people and Microsoft itself cannot afford to purchase the products of the company that you work for. On top of that, they are now competing for the jobs of 130000 other people in the world, lowering the pay of everyone.
Those Microsofters and other software industry workers buy houses, cars, phones, clothes, etc when they are employed. Now you have a large number of other industries with lower revenues as the loss of cash flow trickles through the rest of the economy.
You can imagine it this way... Lets say there were only two companies in the world. Microsoft and Walmart. Everyone works for one of the two companies. Microsoft provides the software to walmart and everyone, and walmart provides the food, clothes, etc to Microsoft and everyone. If microsoft were to go out of business, walmart would lose all of the Microsoft corporate business, and 50% of the people in this imaginary world would not have any income to shop at walmart. Walmart would save on software, but because the demand drop, it would have to lay off and downsize. Profits would remain the same, but now, maybe 75% of the people would not have jobs (but they would have free software! woopee!.. sounds a bit like Slashdot.. no job, but all the free software you can handle!:-) )
This is what is happening to the economy now, and exactly the effect that free software will have on the economy.
What would be awesome is to have a USB TV tuner that I can plug into my TIVO!! One tuner is just not enough!
I wish sony would just quit this business with the memory stick. Proprietary interfaces just stink. They are almost guaranteed to become obsolete in 5 years.
Does 802.11(b or g) enough bandwidth to handle that many people? Not that everyone has a WiFi connection, but when you provide ubiquitious access, the applications will be created that utilize it.
I don't think that 802.11 can handle more than a handful of users before it is swamped. I imagine that the city will be subdivided somehow so that broadcast traffic from one machine isn't repeated to every node in the city.
Of the 16,000 homocides committed, greater than 11,000 were committed using a gun. Sometimes the weapon of opportunity is a gun. Also, though your chances of being murdered (by a gun or otherwise) are fairly low, they are significantly higher than in most other countries.
I agree with most of your other points, though. Moore's ideas would do more harm than good if they were made into policy.
Though I do not doubt that the United States has funded and helped many repressive countries in the middle east, I do doubt that it is the primary or even a major factor in the groundswell of public rancor there.
Unless you are speaking of countries like Israel, which oppresses the Palestinian people. (whether justifiably or not.. that is a different issue)
I doubt that the USA's past or current support for Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia is a major reason for the anger. We may not like the oppressive and fundamentalist turn of some of these countries, but it more likely the fundamentalism of these countries that turns many of their peoples against us.
If the GNU zealots have their way, that will be the situation. Lets say linux and its host of supporting applications become so good that a majority of persons decide to use it, and it just plain works... Who is going to pay you to write new software if you have a nearly perfect open-format word processor and office suite? And business apps? and operating system?
Maybe games and entertainment will continue to need programmers, but in general, without moving formats like Word and Excel, there is no need to purchase more applications.
So that is how they found the code... there is a bug... "i" is probably a single byte variable...and it just overran its bounds by one! (the range should only be from 0 to 255, not 256)
Good for O'Reilly.... however, it doesn't make a difference. Most of their products are worthless after only a few years.
This is much like Coke and other large companys starting to expense their options. The only ones that do it now are those that it doesn't make a difference to their bottom line. The others who it would affect don't even consider it.
O'Reilly's action is a great sentiment, but it won't make a difference until the government alters the copyright laws.
Find someone who will spend a billion dollars trying to find a cure for some disease without the possiblity to get any of that billion back. If the US government funded healthcare entirely, there would be a point.
Exactly my point.
With a free market system, the main drugs being researched are those that rich white men want. How many male potency, hair growth, depression, non-drowsy antihistamine drugs do we need?
I'm not trying to imply that any of those drugs are bad, but that the free-market causes those to come first. The free market ALSO causes pharmaceutical companies to spend 60% of their budgets on marketing, while never requiring them to prove that their drugs are any better than the existing public-domain ones. All the FDA requires is proof that the drug works to some degree and that it is safe. If asprin is more effective than your drug, it does not matter.
Most egregious is that the free market causes drug companies to stress treatment of diseases rather than cures. Why cure a disease entirely when you can get repeat sales for your treatment for the remainder of the patient's life?
Someone has come along and created a product with equal demand for less money: DVD movies. Oddly enough that hasn't been even considered as to why $18 albums aren't selling well.
DVD movies are NOT less expensive than the alternative: VHS movies. At least, they aren't where I live.
You've brought up an excellent example. DVD movies are significantly cheaper to produce than VHS movies, as are CDs than cassettes. However, both items are actually slightly MORE expensive to the consumer than their analog counterparts.
The reason is likely because of the natural monopoly of the defacto standard of DVD movies and CDs. There is no "beta-max" version of DVDs or CDs. Even if there were, one or the other would soon die out (because no one wants to buy and maintain two players, and the formats would be incompatible, so you would need to have the same format as your friends to share media).
Therefore... higher prices for DVDs than VHS tapes.
What you are describing is different from what is (likely) occuring. The firm is not doing research, but allowing others to unknowingly provide them with computational power to brute-force a solution.
The persons volunteering for this program are doing so in the belief that their efforts will help in saving the lives of those infected or those that might be infected with the disease. HOWEVER, what they will wind up doing is helping only those who can afford the medications that are created (under a patent-enforced monopoly), or those who live under a government that can afford the medications for them.
Many of those in capitalistic societies without socialized medicine or insurance, like 30 million in the United states will not be able to afford this medication.
However, if the findings from the program were immediately given to the public domain, I would be more in agreement with the ethics.
Though, I do not agree that being rewarded financially from free-market sales of medicines is a good thing. The poor are not less human or less deserving of good health than the rich. They deserve to live healthily. Though you may not agree, I believe it is the duty of a society to provide for the healthcare of all those in that society.
Why should the cost savings be passed onto the consumer? The only mechanism in place to pass savings onto the consumer is competition. What incentive does the RIAA have to reduce the cost of their product? Unless someone else comes along and creates a product with equal demand for less money, they will not lower their prices.
In an environment of true competition, it would be very difficult to become obscenely rich. Artificial restraints like patents, copyrights, and monopolies are the only way to become rich. (other than the lottery, if you consider that being "rich")
It is a shame that though a large number of the Internet community will altruistically join the fight against SARS, voluteering thier computer's processing power and the electricity used to keep it running, while the likely (pecuniary) beneficiary will be a giant biotechnology firm, which will quickly patent any findings that are uncovered by the distributed computing program.
Since you volunteer your computer, I would bet that this fact does not need to be stated in any EULA.
Slashdot Mirror
A little more work? Installing a TIVO is absolutely brain dead. Think of this in terms of a non-computer person you know... Maybe your parents.
/usr/share/qt. On Mandrake, it should be /usr/lib/qt3
/usr/local/lib is in /etc/ld.so.conf and then re-run ldconfig?"
Tivo has:
- No install of Linux, software, libraries.
- no install of cards
- Customer support if you cant figure out how to plug it into your TV (the truely braindead)
- Comes with all the cables
Some of us are Unix admins at work and can write their own Myth TV if they wanted, but DON'T WANT TO. TV is supposed to be a relaxing veg-your-brain "activity". Most people don't want to have to think about it.
Have you seen the FAQ on Myth TV?
Compare these questions and nswers to the "plug it in" install of Tivo:
I get an error when compiling about 'mkspecs'?
You need to set QTDIR. On Debian, it should be
I can't change the channel when watching TV?
Something's wrong with your program database. Did filldata run with no major errors?
When is the last time Tech Support over at Tivo asked a user "Did you make sure that
It might be because the commercial advance on replay tv is automatic. (I think) If I understand it correctly, the Replay TV would skip commercials without your intervention. On the TIVO, not only is the 30 second advance a hidden option, you need to push a button.
Well, if the new owners ReplayTV were honest and forthright, they would not yank the features out from under the current users of Replay, but deny use of these features for all new purchases of Replay.
I don't really trust Gator at all, but if you a have an effective popup blocker, the software is actually really nice. Not only does it remember your passwords and forms, but it can fill in a form, even if you have never visited the page before. It has enough intelligence to know to put your address into a form that has a slot that says "Address" or "Address #1", and your last name in a form slot that says "Last Name" or "Sirname" or "Full Name".
If it were available for a fee without the adware/spyware, I would buy it.
IMHO: The dems would certainly NOT be cutting taxes... at least not as eggregiously as Bush. I imagine that they would spend heavily on public works projects... It would wind up pushing more jobs into the public sector, but that is how things happen when your country is trying to fight a recession/depression.
We are almost guaranteed to slide into a deflationary recession in the next few years and it is a shame that someone as unfreindly to the common man as Bush is in control. I and most other people do not mind allowing the rich to get richer, as long as it isn't done at our expense. However, as the hard times start creeping in, people are going to want change. Unfortunately, the economy is only moving downward slowly, which allows us to become accustomed to the problems... We don't feel it acutely. We are frogs sitting in a pan of water, with the heat slowly rising.
Actually, the primary thing holding up Project Gutenberg is the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. The copyright law was recently extended so that nothing created earlier than the 1920s is going into the public domain.
There is a large body of great 20th century works that will not enter the public domain for many years. Stuff by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Virginia Woolf, et al.
Its a shame. I actually enjoy reading literature, and I am forced to go to the library for anything newer than 1923.
I love this idea... and I have been waiting for something like it for some time...
Think about it... I would love to search the blogosphere to see how widespread certain news items have become, or how widespread a certain opinion is...
You could use something like this to measure the spread of ideas (at least within a vocal and technologically suave minority).
Your management has run into the main drawback of open-source software. There have been several times (not a lot, but a few) that I have run into roadblocks with open source software that took longer to correct than it would have had I had Sun or HP support on the phone.. For 95% of your problems, you are going to find the information you need online easily. But when you start running into hard core integration and compatibility problems, it is going to be very hard to find the fix, and you have no one to call.
Unless you can find a vendor to provide support for each of your open source software packages, I would not argue the case for open-source. If I were the boss, the first time something breaks and 1000 users are off-line for a day or so, your head would roll. Remember, this is NOT your home computer you are talking about... you are talking about MANY users being down for several hours/days. 1000 people making an average of $30/hour is a lot of money.
If things broke, replacing you would easily pay for itself.
EULAs don't apply to hardware, only to software. EULAs require copyright protection. The only thing you could EULA would be the firmware and even then, the most you could do would be to disallow reverse engineering, and we all know how that turned out in court ... IBM lost.
Yes, I think you can EULA hardware, or at least make it proprietary. IBM's problem of disallowing reverse engineering was due to the fact that they created the IBM PC out of standard off-the-shelf parts, and the only thing that was unique was the BIOS itself.
While many corporations *do* lease equipment in this manner (General Motors is a big one -- it has such an arrangement with EDS), I don't think that the average consumer would buy/lease the equipment in this manner. Credit is plentiful and cheap (esp. now with the low interest rates) and most people would rather own a machine outright than lease it in this manner or pay some sort of 'maintenance' agreement.
Tivo has proven this false... Though the TIVO is still yours if you do not buy the service, it is significantly less useful. Microsoft sees this and certainly knows that this is the future. Remember their claims that software rental will be the future? Well, this likely would allow them to make software rental happen.
Even if a port of Linux is available, I forsee that it will never become a legitimate competitor.
Several reasons: (think in terms of business and third party vendors writing software for a Linux port...)
- EULA on the hardware disallowing any other operating systems
- Voiding the warranty of the hardware.
- A monthly fee for a hardware "lease" or "rental" or "maintenance", with a hardware-required dial-in. (think tivo)
- Hardware lockouts ostensibly for DRM.
Who is going to write software for this? No one but free software coders... Who is going to support and sell Linux versions of this? No one. You will need to do it yourself. This just doesnt float in the business world.
In interfaces? For instance:
- IDE
- SCSI
- USB
- Serial
- Parallel
- PCI
Now, I haven't research the previous poster's claims of Sony allowing open (with a price) access to their interface... But it certainly is more restrictive than say IDE... where, I believe, there is no third party entity to whom you must pay royalties and access fees.
I am saying that open-source zealots should re-think their position. Not just Linux, but all Free (speech) programming.
:-) )
Politics aside, let's say that Linux became better and more usable than Windows, and somehow it became the operating system of choice for the world. Then, the majority of the 130000 people working for Microsoft would be out of a job. (with some imagination, you can envision this happening to most of the software industry) No, not all of them work on Windows, but the profit from Windows is what allows the other Microsoft sectors to operate at a loss.
"Fine," you say. "They were just taking money from other people in the world. Those people are now saving money."
Lets take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. Those 130000 people and Microsoft itself cannot afford to purchase the products of the company that you work for. On top of that, they are now competing for the jobs of 130000 other people in the world, lowering the pay of everyone.
Those Microsofters and other software industry workers buy houses, cars, phones, clothes, etc when they are employed. Now you have a large number of other industries with lower revenues as the loss of cash flow trickles through the rest of the economy.
You can imagine it this way... Lets say there were only two companies in the world. Microsoft and Walmart. Everyone works for one of the two companies. Microsoft provides the software to walmart and everyone, and walmart provides the food, clothes, etc to Microsoft and everyone. If microsoft were to go out of business, walmart would lose all of the Microsoft corporate business, and 50% of the people in this imaginary world would not have any income to shop at walmart. Walmart would save on software, but because the demand drop, it would have to lay off and downsize. Profits would remain the same, but now, maybe 75% of the people would not have jobs (but they would have free software! woopee!.. sounds a bit like Slashdot.. no job, but all the free software you can handle!
This is what is happening to the economy now, and exactly the effect that free software will have on the economy.
What would be awesome is to have a USB TV tuner that I can plug into my TIVO!! One tuner is just not enough!
I wish sony would just quit this business with the memory stick. Proprietary interfaces just stink. They are almost guaranteed to become obsolete in 5 years.
Does 802.11(b or g) enough bandwidth to handle that many people? Not that everyone has a WiFi connection, but when you provide ubiquitious access, the applications will be created that utilize it.
I don't think that 802.11 can handle more than a handful of users before it is swamped. I imagine that the city will be subdivided somehow so that broadcast traffic from one machine isn't repeated to every node in the city.
Just a side note:
Of the 16,000 homocides committed, greater than 11,000 were committed using a gun. Sometimes the weapon of opportunity is a gun. Also, though your chances of being murdered (by a gun or otherwise) are fairly low, they are significantly higher than in most other countries.
I agree with most of your other points, though. Moore's ideas would do more harm than good if they were made into policy.
Though I do not doubt that the United States has funded and helped many repressive countries in the middle east, I do doubt that it is the primary or even a major factor in the groundswell of public rancor there.
Unless you are speaking of countries like Israel, which oppresses the Palestinian people. (whether justifiably or not.. that is a different issue)
I doubt that the USA's past or current support for Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia is a major reason for the anger. We may not like the oppressive and fundamentalist turn of some of these countries, but it more likely the fundamentalism of these countries that turns many of their peoples against us.
I can imagine not needing NEW software.
If the GNU zealots have their way, that will be the situation. Lets say linux and its host of supporting applications become so good that a majority of persons decide to use it, and it just plain works... Who is going to pay you to write new software if you have a nearly perfect open-format word processor and office suite? And business apps? and operating system?
Maybe games and entertainment will continue to need programmers, but in general, without moving formats like Word and Excel, there is no need to purchase more applications.
That sector of the industry would be hobbled.
I bet this is the stolen code:
for (i=0; i 256; i++) {
Dirty, stinking thieves!
So that is how they found the code... there is a bug... "i" is probably a single byte variable...and it just overran its bounds by one! (the range should only be from 0 to 255, not 256)
Good for O'Reilly.... however, it doesn't make a difference. Most of their products are worthless after only a few years.
This is much like Coke and other large companys starting to expense their options. The only ones that do it now are those that it doesn't make a difference to their bottom line. The others who it would affect don't even consider it.
O'Reilly's action is a great sentiment, but it won't make a difference until the government alters the copyright laws.
Find someone who will spend a billion dollars trying to find a cure for some disease without the possiblity to get any of that billion back. If the US government funded healthcare entirely, there would be a point.
Exactly my point.
With a free market system, the main drugs being researched are those that rich white men want. How many male potency, hair growth, depression, non-drowsy antihistamine drugs do we need?
I'm not trying to imply that any of those drugs are bad, but that the free-market causes those to come first. The free market ALSO causes pharmaceutical companies to spend 60% of their budgets on marketing, while never requiring them to prove that their drugs are any better than the existing public-domain ones. All the FDA requires is proof that the drug works to some degree and that it is safe. If asprin is more effective than your drug, it does not matter.
Most egregious is that the free market causes drug companies to stress treatment of diseases rather than cures. Why cure a disease entirely when you can get repeat sales for your treatment for the remainder of the patient's life?
Someone has come along and created a product with equal demand for less money: DVD movies. Oddly enough that hasn't been even considered as to why $18 albums aren't selling well.
DVD movies are NOT less expensive than the alternative: VHS movies. At least, they aren't where I live.
You've brought up an excellent example. DVD movies are significantly cheaper to produce than VHS movies, as are CDs than cassettes. However, both items are actually slightly MORE expensive to the consumer than their analog counterparts.
The reason is likely because of the natural monopoly of the defacto standard of DVD movies and CDs. There is no "beta-max" version of DVDs or CDs. Even if there were, one or the other would soon die out (because no one wants to buy and maintain two players, and the formats would be incompatible, so you would need to have the same format as your friends to share media).
Therefore... higher prices for DVDs than VHS tapes.
What you are describing is different from what is (likely) occuring. The firm is not doing research, but allowing others to unknowingly provide them with computational power to brute-force a solution.
The persons volunteering for this program are doing so in the belief that their efforts will help in saving the lives of those infected or those that might be infected with the disease. HOWEVER, what they will wind up doing is helping only those who can afford the medications that are created (under a patent-enforced monopoly), or those who live under a government that can afford the medications for them.
Many of those in capitalistic societies without socialized medicine or insurance, like 30 million in the United states will not be able to afford this medication.
However, if the findings from the program were immediately given to the public domain, I would be more in agreement with the ethics.
Though, I do not agree that being rewarded financially from free-market sales of medicines is a good thing. The poor are not less human or less deserving of good health than the rich. They deserve to live healthily. Though you may not agree, I believe it is the duty of a society to provide for the healthcare of all those in that society.
Why should the cost savings be passed onto the consumer? The only mechanism in place to pass savings onto the consumer is competition. What incentive does the RIAA have to reduce the cost of their product? Unless someone else comes along and creates a product with equal demand for less money, they will not lower their prices.
In an environment of true competition, it would be very difficult to become obscenely rich. Artificial restraints like patents, copyrights, and monopolies are the only way to become rich. (other than the lottery, if you consider that being "rich")
Could article this be what you were talking about?h tml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom.
It is a shame that though a large number of the Internet community will altruistically join the fight against SARS, voluteering thier computer's processing power and the electricity used to keep it running, while the likely (pecuniary) beneficiary will be a giant biotechnology firm, which will quickly patent any findings that are uncovered by the distributed computing program.
Since you volunteer your computer, I would bet that this fact does not need to be stated in any EULA.