Not only does the GPL prevent competitors from swallowing your code into proprietary products, but you can also sell GPLed code at the same time.
Basically, you offer the code under an alternative proprietary license, for a nice juicy fee, as Trolltech does with QT. People who want to live in Unfreedonia are welcome to pay for the privilege. That way you also get some income to help support free software development.
Of course, when random hackers send you GPLed patches, you can't just merge them into your private codebase; that was why Trolltech feared that the GPL would fork QT.
The correct response, however, is to pay those hackers a little bit for the copyright to their patches...
Python is a really snazzy language, but one limitation to its flexibility is the absence of static typing.
It seems that (optional) static types would enable the creation of practical python compilers, and could also provide much more in the way of pre-execution error detection.
I've heard rumours that static typing might be in the pipeline for Python. Is there any truth to these rumours, and if so, how might they be implemented?
It is true that we haven't learned everything we'll learn, or got close to being able to do everything we'll be able do. We are in a unique position now though, in the sense that for the first time, we can provide convincing sketch answers to most of the interesting questions about the universe. I recommend David Deutsch's book The Fabric of Reality on the subject...
Theoretical computer science does tell us some things which appear to be absolute. One of those is that "information is information is information".
The big difference between a standardised digital archive and microfiche is that the former is pure information. It will be automatically convertible to more sophisticated forms of storage in the future. Digitising microfiche archives is possible, but still requires lots of physical work which is only partly automatable.
Having said that, it is also possible to identify a big limitation in the proposed "LTSS" - the same thing which is missing from the web today - rich metadata (this isn't just about XML, btw). Do a search on the "semantic web" if you're curious....
We all have a lot of non-geeky loved ones who use Hotmail because they heard about it and their friends use it. I've explained to a few of them why they shouldn't use it, but it's a real hastle.
What we need right now is a cannonical "why you shouldn't use Hotmail" website. We could then set an auto-reply on every message from hotmail (or at least the first message from each account) pointing out the URL.
Does anyone feel like setting this up?
(Hotmail is probably a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation)
There's no shortage of historical information on the net, but if you want in depth analysis of some historical issue or other, you basically have to go and look in a library.
In fact, I often find that Xrefer does a better job of answering historical or philosophical questions than a generic web search. Since Xrefer is just [free beer] access to a collection of reference books, that isn't really very encouraging.
Basically, the net is great for breadth, but for non-geek disciplines, the depth is often lacking. We need to shrink copyright terms down to at most 5 or 10 years. That might help:)
This is quite an interesting example of why "rights" are not a suitable basis for social policy.
Rights at the most fundamental level are contradictory. In this example, one person's right to free speech is contradictory to another's right not to be threatened or murdered. In general though, people's rights will always be entangled when we live in the same spaces and interact.
The only ethically consistent approach is to identify a set of values, and make decisions based on those values. Of course, we disagree on what those values should be, and so (for example) the left will call for censorship in one case and the right in another.
We may choose to support a set of rights because we believe, on balance, that those rights will have a net positive ethical impact. But it seems wise to regard those rights as a guide, rather than an absolute framework.
Without being a lawyer, or a US citizen;), this decision looks very political. Previous judgements have ruled that although burning draft cards or copying DeCSS are actually speech, such speech should not be protected because of its side effects. Those precedents don't seem to have had much of an impact here...
I've lately been thinking that most geo-political games (Risk, Diplomacy, etc) are not very realistic,
because the goal of world conquest is not only within reach, but it is nearly a guarantee that one-world
government will be the final outcome.
You are correct in saying that these games are not realistic. The fundamental problem is that in real life, there is no such thing as a "single minded" nation. Countries are made up of lots of independent minds pulling in different directions; it's very hard to combine this with the idea that every player controls a country.
Having said that, after I read the history of European politics and diplomacy in the lead up to the first World War, I found the similarities to a game of Diplomacy quite disturbing.
Millions of people died because some countries managed to stitch up better alliances than others...
When I was in a position something like yours - giving a week-long course on Linux to a group of scientists, I managed to cobble together a few
semi-acceptable bits and pieces, mostly by adapting other people's lecture notes and tutorials.
It's all here, and it's all under open licenses of one sort or another.
But I've got to say, I was somewhat perturbed by the fraction of Linux training material which was proprietary...
Here's an excellent GNU/Linux charity....
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 3
Hi...
(disclaimer - I am Computerbank's publicity officer:)
Computerbank is an Australian charity which recycles second hand computers, installs Debian on them, and gives them to people who would otherwise be unable to afford one.
We also provide a lot of training, covering both introductory system usage and more in-depth material for people hoping to get a shot at an IT career.
Computerbank has been existence for a couple of years, and is beginning to get some serious organisational momentum.
All this proves is that Bob's internet uplink is in France.
Nope. The satellite can be sure of Bob's location if he signs a reply to its message and sends it "instantly". Then only somebody with his key could be in France.
BUT... he could leave a copy of his key in France. And at this point you're right, and that is the killer for my original suggestion. Protocols which relly on secret information are broken if one of the parties doesn't want to keep it secret! We can't trust Bob not to duplicate his identity, unless his "location key" is embedded in a closed box, which is designed to self destruct if anyone breaks the seal:)
Now of course, the perfect self destructing locked box is non-existent. However, you can do pretty well with pre-written EEPROMs inside a microcontroller. Beaking one of those open and reading it would be a pain and a half; add a few anti-tamper measures, and it gets really evil. If you were completely paranoid, you could add an "expiry date" so that you needed a new chip each month.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying any of this, because I can think of many more evil applications of this technology than good ones.
GPS isn't really enough. You need to have something which you couldn't have had if you were anywhere else.
Satellites could give you this, but only if they beamed different, cryptographically secure, messages in different directions.
The simplest example would be an "authentication satellite", where Jane asks the satellite,
"is Bob really in France?"
...Satellite sends encrypted message for Bob in the direction of France...
If Bob knows the contents of the message, he's in France.
Of course, Bob could just have a tranceiver in France.... so.... quantum encrypt it in a single photon:). Single photon quantum encyption is nearly good enough for Earth-satellite links, IIRC.
None of this fixes the "problem" (is it really a bad thing?) mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, that physical devices and people are separable...
In the Republican primary in that exact same area, thanks to support from a relative, Buchanan got up to 8,000 votes in 1996. In a primary, where a
very small number of republicans actually turn out compared to election days. Of course, that was way before he left the party, but it is more than
reasonable that he still has between 1/3rd of the supporters that he did back then. Saying "this is wrong because every other country voted
differently." is complete bull. And, as most of us who's visited know, you never visit Palm Beach without seeing something odd. Anyway....
I'm not a US citizen, so I could be wrong on this, but didn't Buchanan have something like 30% support across the Republican party nationally? What did that get him in this election?
If you want people to believe your claim that Palm Beach might be genuinely different, what were Buchanan's primary votes like in neighbouring areas in 1996? In order for your position to be defensible, they must be significantly lower.
I would like to remind everyone that the electoral college works. Just because New York and California really really want Gore to win doesn't mean
that the rest of the country wants what Gore represents. Imagine if the EU existed during Hitler's rise to power, and Nazi Germany dominated the
popular vote for the elections to president of the EU. This is all hypothetical, but I'm simply afraid that a lot of people don't understand the power
balancing that the electoral college brings.
I suggest you read a little more about Hitler's rise to power before you make claims like this. Hitler never won a popular vote in the Weimar Republic. The closest he got was about 44%, and that was in an election where he had massive media backing and substantial support from Germany's industrialists.
Rhetoric aside, your argument is that some people's votes should inherently be worth more than others, because of where they live. That is bad enough, but it also seems that your claims are motivated solely by your desired outcome, rather than on any coherent set of electoral principles.
Actually, what is good about the Tasmanian electoral system is that it is proportional;
that is, if you get 10% of the vote, you get 10% of the seats. Of course, the ALP and the Liberals colluded to raise the "quotas" so that you now need 17% to get any seats at all, but that's another story.
Lots of other first world countries use proportional representation - look at this
cool map. In fact, South Australia's upper house is proprotionally elected - which is how the Democrats got a strong presence there in the first place.
Why is this being posted to Slashdot? Its not even vaguely related to the rest of the posts. I'm getting the impression that Hemos was incredibly
bored today and wanted to start up a good old fashioned flame-war for his own amusement.
While the stories posted to Slashdot are at the discretion of CmdrTaco, Hemos, et al, I would hope they'd use more discretion in the future. I
don't go to the Republican or Democrats for Linux news, and so I don't wanna come to Slashdot for a politcal opinion...especially one not even
closely related to Linux or Opensource.
There's a saying that goes something like this:
"If you don't do politics, politics will do you"
Fortunately, judging by the response to this article, most of the slashdot community seems to understand this:)
The Asia/Pacific election is a real mess
on
ICANN Voting Begins
·
· Score: 4
I'm an Asia/Pacific at-large member, and the situation over here looks pretty bad. None of the progressive looking candidates even got onto the ballot paper.
The candidates that are on the paper have all refused to say anything about organisational politics, trademarks and intellectual property, or corporate influence.
Just to top it of, looking at this page of statistics, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the vote was being stacked.
>You are restricting trapped users of non-free platforms in rather unpleasant ways
you are focusing (I think, you don't say) on the desire of these users to see source code. The license is trying to solve a different problem, how to make money. Yes, there are many users who are trapped, but many users have a choice about their platform, and the choosers are much more
apt to be programmers with a need for source than are the trapped. The trapped can purchase the same product, the choosers can choose the source if they want.
Actually, I think you misunderstood me a little there. I am (sometimes) a trapped user. If I sit down in a lab full of Windows boxes, or in an internet cafe, or I use a proprietary UNIX server somewhere, I would like to be able install and use free appliations. The Free World License is a double edged sword....
you may feel that the use of this license may risk an incompatible world, but it explicitly doesn't encourage it. The license encourages selling stuff to people who've chosen a proprietary platform, and sharing stuff with people who've chosen to share. Same stuff, total compatibility.
Obviously, there is some truth to this, and incompatibility is not always going to result from doing this sort of thing. There are however, times when it may; this is most likely to occur when a new area opens up, and different protocols are viying to become the "standard" for some kind of service. During this process, having Free code available on non-free platforms gives us more chance of setting an open standard. When we don't achieve this, we suffer as a result. For example, a hypothetical cross-platform free office suite available in the early 90s might have saved us from having to stress about M$ Office compatibility....
If it's free only for free OS's, then it's non-free if you go by the Debian Free Software Guidelines (as I do).
Before I start this, I should just state for the record that I am a very enthusiastic Debian user, and a wholehearted DFSG & FSF supporter.
I thought for a long time about writng a Free World style license, simply because I resented the fact that Windows users could take almost any Free code I wrote and use it, while I couldn't use closed source Windows programs with anything like the same degree of ease.
Ross Williams (author of the Free World license) states on his Free World pages that he sees the only difference between his approach to licensing and that of the GPL as "strategic". One approach to freeing the world's software is to exclude non-free platforms from using the free code base that we have created; the other is to entice users away from the proprietary software by showing them what wonderful free programs were available.
Eventually, I came round to agreeing with RMS on this. I guess the key points that convinced me were:
You are restricting trapped users of non-free platforms in rather unpleasant ways
More importantly, you are encouraging an incompatible world. This is not only an unpleasant situation, but it may be strategically very unwise for the free software movement...
I guess that having said those things, there could be some arguments for using this sort of license for "convenience" code, rather than "essential" code. If your application has no potential to be a source of incompatibility, then it could be acceptable to make it only avaialable to users of Free platforms.
If the Pentium is a "complete architectural overhaul", then what the blazes does one call the Vax->Axp change, or the 68K->PPC change, or
the C80->C6000 change?
It seems that way, but in practice, modern x86 CPUs (Pentii, Athlons, Crusoen) are just the x86 instruction set wrapped around something which is not like an 8086....
Nobody has ever been lynched or murdered over DVD copy protection. Families have not been broken up by it. Lives are not in danger.
You're making a big mistake by thinking that because a danger is explicit, it is more important.
I don't think that either you or I could possibly quantify how different a world without IP could be to a world in which technology has provided ubiquitous means for controlling information ownership. One thing that is certain though - information has the power to completely change education, politics, science, medicine, and just about any other field you care to mention.
In a world without restrictions on information, lives would certainly be saved, and (I suspect) the fight against racism would be aided.
I'm not trying to say that the DVD case specifically is that important. Instead, I argue that it is part of a larger and completely world-altering battle.
I guess I was also arguing in my original post that an "in between" future where half the world's information is controlled would be relatively unstable... in the long run, we will either have mostly free information, or mostly owned information...
The court case is not about being able to play DVDs on Linux.
Ultimately, this is part of the war over Intellectual Property.
There are two futures. In one, almost every piece of information (music, books, film, software) is owned by somebody. Powerful organisations use standards to make sure that "free" information is not a threat (eg "extend and embrace", or encrypting standard AV content so that only those with cryptographic keys can create it).
In the other, almost every piece of information is unrestricted, and the people who created it are rewarded in other ways.
This is every bit as big as the fight against racism (although obviously quite different too).
I'm not motivated to help Computerbank because of an operating system. Computerbank excites me because I hope that people in unfortunate circumstances and the GNU/Linux community may be able to help each other.
We can help them get an education or a job. Perhaps, just perhaps, some of them will end up being active participants in the GNU/Linux world.
I have spent a lot of time trying to help people in other ways (such as being involved in politics - shudder), and I can assure you that drawing on the support of a community like ours makes things a lot easier.
P.S. apologies to anyone who regards this as offtopic. I would have replied by email, were it not an AC who made this comment. Whoever you are, if you want to continue discussing this, please feel free to mail me.
Electricity, sanitation, water, food, and medical care are all necessities that we in the United States and the rest of the first world take for granted every single day that other not so fortunate nations do not have ready access to. I have yet to hear one subsistence farmer complain about his inability to gain wondrous knowledge from Internet sites such as Slashdot. I do hear about a lack of sanitary water to drink, much less to bathe, or food shortages due to corruption and infrastructural inefficiences causing famine. My parents grew up in 1940s Malaysia, and just thinking about the differences in our experiences makes me thank God that I was fortunate enough to be spared that.
You are correct in claiming that there are things that a lot of people on this planet have got to worry about for survival before they can think about net access. You are unwise to flame Roblimo for asking the question. Arguing that we must provide universal basic infrastructure before thinking about brining the net to impoverished countries is quite naive.
What you have not considered is the reason why Sudan or Chechnya (your examples) are impoverished. In most cases, poverty has little to do with a lack of resources and much more to do with politics. Also, your examples are places where conditions are extremely harsh; there are numerous "third world" countries in less drastic situations.
Providing net cafes may help communities far more than, for example, providing electricity to every home. It is only when people have some access to education and information that they can hope to actually improve their situations.
In theory, this is possible, and you could get much better performance out of your disks. You could also make it transparent; the user would never need to see that the disk was RAIDed.
If you use RAID-0 (striping), you don't even loose space (although modern drives already contain their own error correction codes, so this is kinda meaningless).
The problem is that in order to pull this off, the heads have to be able to read or write every disk platter simultaneously. I believe it is possible to get disks that do this, but I they're very expensive. Essentially, the mechanical problem of aligning the head is very tricky, and doing it in n places requires n times as much infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, you offer the code under an alternative proprietary license, for a nice juicy fee, as Trolltech does with QT. People who want to live in Unfreedonia are welcome to pay for the privilege. That way you also get some income to help support free software development.
Of course, when random hackers send you GPLed patches, you can't just merge them into your private codebase; that was why Trolltech feared that the GPL would fork QT.
The correct response, however, is to pay those hackers a little bit for the copyright to their patches...
It seems that (optional) static types would enable the creation of practical python compilers, and could also provide much more in the way of pre-execution error detection.
I've heard rumours that static typing might be in the pipeline for Python. Is there any truth to these rumours, and if so, how might they be implemented?
Theoretical computer science does tell us some things which appear to be absolute. One of those is that "information is information is information".
The big difference between a standardised digital archive and microfiche is that the former is pure information. It will be automatically convertible to more sophisticated forms of storage in the future. Digitising microfiche archives is possible, but still requires lots of physical work which is only partly automatable.
Having said that, it is also possible to identify a big limitation in the proposed "LTSS" - the same thing which is missing from the web today - rich metadata (this isn't just about XML, btw). Do a search on the "semantic web" if you're curious....
We all have a lot of non-geeky loved ones who use Hotmail because they heard about it and their friends use it. I've explained to a few of them why they shouldn't use it, but it's a real hastle.
What we need right now is a cannonical "why you shouldn't use Hotmail" website. We could then set an auto-reply on every message from hotmail (or at least the first message from each account) pointing out the URL.
Does anyone feel like setting this up?
(Hotmail is probably a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation)
There's no shortage of historical information on the net, but if you want in depth analysis of some historical issue or other, you basically have to go and look in a library.
In fact, I often find that Xrefer does a better job of answering historical or philosophical questions than a generic web search. Since Xrefer is just [free beer] access to a collection of reference books, that isn't really very encouraging.
Basically, the net is great for breadth, but for non-geek disciplines, the depth is often lacking. We need to shrink copyright terms down to at most 5 or 10 years. That might help :)
Rights at the most fundamental level are contradictory. In this example, one person's right to free speech is contradictory to another's right not to be threatened or murdered. In general though, people's rights will always be entangled when we live in the same spaces and interact.
The only ethically consistent approach is to identify a set of values, and make decisions based on those values. Of course, we disagree on what those values should be, and so (for example) the left will call for censorship in one case and the right in another.
We may choose to support a set of rights because we believe, on balance, that those rights will have a net positive ethical impact. But it seems wise to regard those rights as a guide, rather than an absolute framework.
Without being a lawyer, or a US citizen ;), this decision looks very political. Previous judgements have ruled that although burning draft cards or copying DeCSS are actually speech, such speech should not be protected because of its side effects. Those precedents don't seem to have had much of an impact here...
You are correct in saying that these games are not realistic. The fundamental problem is that in real life, there is no such thing as a "single minded" nation. Countries are made up of lots of independent minds pulling in different directions; it's very hard to combine this with the idea that every player controls a country.
Having said that, after I read the history of European politics and diplomacy in the lead up to the first World War, I found the similarities to a game of Diplomacy quite disturbing. Millions of people died because some countries managed to stitch up better alliances than others...
It's all here, and it's all under open licenses of one sort or another.
But I've got to say, I was somewhat perturbed by the fraction of Linux training material which was proprietary...
(disclaimer - I am Computerbank's publicity officer :)
Computerbank is an Australian charity which recycles second hand computers, installs Debian on them, and gives them to people who would otherwise be unable to afford one.
We also provide a lot of training, covering both introductory system usage and more in-depth material for people hoping to get a shot at an IT career.
Computerbank has been existence for a couple of years, and is beginning to get some serious organisational momentum.
(see .sig for more info :)
Nope. The satellite can be sure of Bob's location if he signs a reply to its message and sends it "instantly". Then only somebody with his key could be in France.
BUT... he could leave a copy of his key in France. And at this point you're right, and that is the killer for my original suggestion. Protocols which relly on secret information are broken if one of the parties doesn't want to keep it secret! We can't trust Bob not to duplicate his identity, unless his "location key" is embedded in a closed box, which is designed to self destruct if anyone breaks the seal :)
Now of course, the perfect self destructing locked box is non-existent. However, you can do pretty well with pre-written EEPROMs inside a microcontroller. Beaking one of those open and reading it would be a pain and a half; add a few anti-tamper measures, and it gets really evil. If you were completely paranoid, you could add an "expiry date" so that you needed a new chip each month.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying any of this, because I can think of many more evil applications of this technology than good ones.
The simplest example would be an "authentication satellite", where Jane asks the satellite,
"is Bob really in France?"
If Bob knows the contents of the message, he's in France.
Of course, Bob could just have a tranceiver in France.... so.... quantum encrypt it in a single photon :). Single photon quantum encyption is nearly good enough for Earth-satellite links, IIRC.
None of this fixes the "problem" (is it really a bad thing?) mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, that physical devices and people are separable...
I'm not a US citizen, so I could be wrong on this, but didn't Buchanan have something like 30% support across the Republican party nationally? What did that get him in this election?
If you want people to believe your claim that Palm Beach might be genuinely different, what were Buchanan's primary votes like in neighbouring areas in 1996? In order for your position to be defensible, they must be significantly lower.
I would like to remind everyone that the electoral college works. Just because New York and California really really want Gore to win doesn't mean that the rest of the country wants what Gore represents. Imagine if the EU existed during Hitler's rise to power, and Nazi Germany dominated the popular vote for the elections to president of the EU. This is all hypothetical, but I'm simply afraid that a lot of people don't understand the power balancing that the electoral college brings.
I suggest you read a little more about Hitler's rise to power before you make claims like this. Hitler never won a popular vote in the Weimar Republic. The closest he got was about 44%, and that was in an election where he had massive media backing and substantial support from Germany's industrialists.
Rhetoric aside, your argument is that some people's votes should inherently be worth more than others, because of where they live. That is bad enough, but it also seems that your claims are motivated solely by your desired outcome, rather than on any coherent set of electoral principles.
(sorry for sounding harsh :)
Lots of other first world countries use proportional representation - look at this cool map. In fact, South Australia's upper house is proprotionally elected - which is how the Democrats got a strong presence there in the first place.
While the stories posted to Slashdot are at the discretion of CmdrTaco, Hemos, et al, I would hope they'd use more discretion in the future. I don't go to the Republican or Democrats for Linux news, and so I don't wanna come to Slashdot for a politcal opinion...especially one not even closely related to Linux or Opensource.
There's a saying that goes something like this:
"If you don't do politics, politics will do you"
Fortunately, judging by the response to this article, most of the slashdot community seems to understand this :)
The candidates that are on the paper have all refused to say anything about organisational politics, trademarks and intellectual property, or corporate influence.
Just to top it of, looking at this page of statistics, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the vote was being stacked.
you are focusing (I think, you don't say) on the desire of these users to see source code. The license is trying to solve a different problem, how to make money. Yes, there are many users who are trapped, but many users have a choice about their platform, and the choosers are much more apt to be programmers with a need for source than are the trapped. The trapped can purchase the same product, the choosers can choose the source if they want.
Actually, I think you misunderstood me a little there. I am (sometimes) a trapped user. If I sit down in a lab full of Windows boxes, or in an internet cafe, or I use a proprietary UNIX server somewhere, I would like to be able install and use free appliations. The Free World License is a double edged sword....
you may feel that the use of this license may risk an incompatible world, but it explicitly doesn't encourage it. The license encourages selling stuff to people who've chosen a proprietary platform, and sharing stuff with people who've chosen to share. Same stuff, total compatibility.
Obviously, there is some truth to this, and incompatibility is not always going to result from doing this sort of thing. There are however, times when it may; this is most likely to occur when a new area opens up, and different protocols are viying to become the "standard" for some kind of service. During this process, having Free code available on non-free platforms gives us more chance of setting an open standard. When we don't achieve this, we suffer as a result. For example, a hypothetical cross-platform free office suite available in the early 90s might have saved us from having to stress about M$ Office compatibility....
Before I start this, I should just state for the record that I am a very enthusiastic Debian user, and a wholehearted DFSG & FSF supporter.
I thought for a long time about writng a Free World style license, simply because I resented the fact that Windows users could take almost any Free code I wrote and use it, while I couldn't use closed source Windows programs with anything like the same degree of ease.
Ross Williams (author of the Free World license) states on his Free World pages that he sees the only difference between his approach to licensing and that of the GPL as "strategic". One approach to freeing the world's software is to exclude non-free platforms from using the free code base that we have created; the other is to entice users away from the proprietary software by showing them what wonderful free programs were available.
Eventually, I came round to agreeing with RMS on this. I guess the key points that convinced me were:
- You are restricting trapped users of non-free platforms in rather unpleasant ways
- More importantly, you are encouraging an incompatible world. This is not only an unpleasant situation, but it may be strategically very unwise for the free software movement...
I guess that having said those things, there could be some arguments for using this sort of license for "convenience" code, rather than "essential" code. If your application has no potential to be a source of incompatibility, then it could be acceptable to make it only avaialable to users of Free platforms.It seems that way, but in practice, modern x86 CPUs (Pentii, Athlons, Crusoen) are just the x86 instruction set wrapped around something which is not like an 8086....
You're making a big mistake by thinking that because a danger is explicit, it is more important.
I don't think that either you or I could possibly quantify how different a world without IP could be to a world in which technology has provided ubiquitous means for controlling information ownership. One thing that is certain though - information has the power to completely change education, politics, science, medicine, and just about any other field you care to mention.
In a world without restrictions on information, lives would certainly be saved, and (I suspect) the fight against racism would be aided.
I'm not trying to say that the DVD case specifically is that important. Instead, I argue that it is part of a larger and completely world-altering battle.
I guess I was also arguing in my original post that an "in between" future where half the world's information is controlled would be relatively unstable... in the long run, we will either have mostly free information, or mostly owned information...
Ultimately, this is part of the war over Intellectual Property.
There are two futures. In one, almost every piece of information (music, books, film, software) is owned by somebody. Powerful organisations use standards to make sure that "free" information is not a threat (eg "extend and embrace", or encrypting standard AV content so that only those with cryptographic keys can create it).
In the other, almost every piece of information is unrestricted, and the people who created it are rewarded in other ways.
This is every bit as big as the fight against racism (although obviously quite different too).
I'm not motivated to help Computerbank because of an operating system. Computerbank excites me because I hope that people in unfortunate circumstances and the GNU/Linux community may be able to help each other.
We can help them get an education or a job. Perhaps, just perhaps, some of them will end up being active participants in the GNU/Linux world.
I have spent a lot of time trying to help people in other ways (such as being involved in politics - shudder), and I can assure you that drawing on the support of a community like ours makes things a lot easier.
P.S. apologies to anyone who regards this as offtopic. I would have replied by email, were it not an AC who made this comment. Whoever you are, if you want to continue discussing this, please feel free to mail me.
You are correct in claiming that there are things that a lot of people on this planet have got to worry about for survival before they can think about net access. You are unwise to flame Roblimo for asking the question. Arguing that we must provide universal basic infrastructure before thinking about brining the net to impoverished countries is quite naive.
What you have not considered is the reason why Sudan or Chechnya (your examples) are impoverished. In most cases, poverty has little to do with a lack of resources and much more to do with politics. Also, your examples are places where conditions are extremely harsh; there are numerous "third world" countries in less drastic situations.
Providing net cafes may help communities far more than, for example, providing electricity to every home. It is only when people have some access to education and information that they can hope to actually improve their situations.
Maybe, just maybe, this might spark some sensible patent law reform.
It's being replaced by SPEC's "CPU 2000" benchmark, but AMD don't seem to be reporting CPU 2000 results yet.
If you use RAID-0 (striping), you don't even loose space (although modern drives already contain their own error correction codes, so this is kinda meaningless).
The problem is that in order to pull this off, the heads have to be able to read or write every disk platter simultaneously. I believe it is possible to get disks that do this, but I they're very expensive. Essentially, the mechanical problem of aligning the head is very tricky, and doing it in n places requires n times as much infrastructure.