* Why should people illegaly using software get the services as well?
* If people pirate software they should at least have to bear the consequences of running a pirated and after a while insecure software.
This "No" has some interesting side effects:
* Some people will eventually start buying MS software. I dislike MS but they should nevertheless get their money.
* Those who don't buy a valid license will suffer negative personal consequences. At first, there will be millions of infected machines worsening the effect of worms and other malware. But eventually ISPs will react and simply shut network access of those machines down until they are fixed. This is already starting to happen anyways. Eventually this will be a good thing for all alternatives to MS Windows since they become much more attractive which in turn will eventually decrease the impact of the MS monoculture on clients.
I think MS should do everything possible to make it as hard as it can be to use unlicensed windows. The'll shoot themselves in their knees but it'll be better for everyone in the long run.
You are wrong. Individual Homepages being shut down might not have made a difference but European politicians already started to complain about the amount of letters and mails they got. Also the voices of quite a few small and medium sized businesses joined the choir. I really don't think all of this went by unheard.
There it is again? What exactly is anti-American? For you it seems, not agreeing with everything American and even expressing it is enough to be anti-American. Why do you even expect people to be pro-American if all the options you give out are agree to everything and do whatever we say you do and be pro-American or don't and be anti-American.
If having a different opinion is enough to be anti-American, well so be it. I'll gladly be called anti-American because being pro-American really is no option for any slightly educated person.
What about your private life? Do all people agree with you on all accounts and follow your orders? If not, are they your enemies as soon as they don't? A view like that in normal life won't have you keep a lot of friends if any. How do you think this would work out in politics?
You really have an interesting point of view. Do you really think, the US could even slightly be what it is now without international trade and relations? Besides. Do you really want to live in a world that's poisoned by the aftereffects of a couple of "The bombs" being droped in various places? While the bombs might have devestated large parts of their targets and the long term consequences would cause a lot more people dying of cancer and such, eventually and very slowly radiation would also reach the US. Nuclear war cannot be regional. After such a war, everyone wuld loose. That's why people more intelligent than you used it as a threat. One or two bombs droped in far places of the world (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) might be ok. But either you do it right, bombing quite a few countries into oblivion on a major scale or even the US will face quite a bit of trouble. This means either the US will suffer consequences or they will suffer consequences. Funny sentence, ey? But do you get it? Probably not.
Yeah right. Damn, now European Countries dare to not follow the weird and short term Outbursts of America's seemingly crazy president. How dare they. How dare they not accept and follow every single order that's given to them by the US? How dare they to oppose to a war against Iraq that was obviously based on false information and a lot of paranoid propaganda? How dare they not to joyously jump in and repair all the damage the US has done in the first place. Damn, those backward Europeans. First they accept one half of the benefit of 50 years of good relations with the US and now they oppose being under complete control. They even dare to have their own Ideas about how the world's supposed to tick.
No, I really don't get it. This is simply outragious.
[erased the paranoid propaganda in the last part of the post]
Since you are the second one complaining about that, it must have come across slightly different than intended.
I don't mind Opensource or even FreeSoftware on windows at all. What I dislike though is cloneing the next sword to battle the market of a company that has near monopoly status already without even the slightest bit of assurance that this company will not at some stage kill or cripple the Mono project and essentially consume all the developed apps with that move.
What's the point of creating open source software, especially open source software for linux if all your work might at some stage stop working on linux because MS decided to fight Mono?
That's the reason for me drawing comparisons to the QT situation. Mono might be open source but it will never be open.
> What does QTs license change years ago have to do > with making a mono and dotgnu creating webservice > platforms and C# portability?
Nothing at first. My intention was to highlight that in the past, far less dangerous license problems led to the Gnome project and ironically now, one of the major supporters of Gnome, Ximian, is heavily backing Mono and even somewhat pushing Mono towards Gnome.
> one can say the same thing about php and perl > helping the MS server platform, gcc supporting > MS development, and frozen bubble making > windows a better gaming platform.
Sure one could say that and it seems reasonable at first. But for me there is a difference. PHP, Perl and GCC are open. As mentioned in other comments, MS can slightly change APIs in future versions not opening up the changes. The main reason for MONO's existance will be gone. Perl, PHP and GCC can and do change as well but they are open and can be ported whereas Mono can become a "Cul de Sac" for anyone hoping to do cross platform development simply if MS finds it appropriate to do so.
> You seem to no nothing about DotGNU. The > project's goal is to create a free software web > platform in much the same way the GNU project > set out to create a free unix-like platform.
You are right. I simply assumed it was a project similar to Mono. Apperantly I was wrong here, sorry.
>One could argue that GNU/Linux has helped SCO, >ATT, or HP to improve their commercial unix, but >somehow I think they would all disagree.
This depends on how you look at it. If you look at a plain solaris, I at least feel that all the GNU tools make it an a lot friendlier environment. I think you misunderstood me. I don't say Open Source on Winodws is bad and I don't mind ported applications at all. What I dislike though is a seemingly open technology being heavily positioned against and modeled after a much more open platform (JAVA) and the efforts to bring this to Linux. In this case, Porting efforts are undertaken by the community and MS can shut them down or seriously cripple them once they decide Mono is eating away too much of their profits. This is impossible or much less possible in your examples. Of course the developed applications will stay but only on Windows.
> And to revisit your issues with mono, claiming > that C# and MSIL support for linux is helping > microsoft more than it is helping anyone else > is similar to saying that java support on linux > is only good for Sun. I just don't see the > evidence or reasoning.
Well, JAVA is heavily protected with Licenseing as well but it's in Sun's interest that JAVA supports as many platforms as possible. The development process is not as open as with most Opensource apps but the JAVA community process is imho ok. Of course Sun could theoretically stop support for all but their operating system at one point but Users of JAVA would have a much better position fighting an action like that in courts as they would have against Microsoft enforcing their patents on Mono since Mono was at no time officially supported by Microsoft.
> Your tie in with QT makes no sense. I think > you are missing something important. QT and > GTK+ are completely unrelated to the webservice > and binary portability arenas where mono and > dotgnu are. Incidentally, there are libraries > to use QT and GTK+ from C#.
I know what they are and of course webservices are something else. I'm aware that.NET is a lot more similar to JAVA than it was to QT or GTK. But both technologies are used to create multiplatform applications. JAVA and.NET allow that by running bytecode within an environment that abstracts Plattform from the binaries and GTK and QT go the "traditional" way of enabling to write highly similar code that can be compiled for many platforms. As I mentioned, I'm not that much informed about DotGn
> Is it faster? No Compared to what? Plain C, compiled by a highly optimizing compiler for a certain platform? No, of course not. JAVA? Maybe. Interpreted languages without bytecode support? Maybe.
> Is Development Faster ? No Yes, on Winodws with visual studio. At least compared to plain C with a texteditor. This also requires use of all the non open stuff of course.
> Is it cross platform ? No In theory yes, which makes it seem interesting at first. But:
> Is it Encumbered By Patents? Yes Yes. That's imho the most important reason to not use it for open source development.
> Does it do things that other languages cannot? No No but that would be an argument against any other language. But having different languages is a good thing. Besides, in theory.NET is language independant, which makes it interesting. Of course all language.NET implementations have to be used slightly different than their native counterparts to fit within the boundaries of the framework and it's programming paradigms.
I don't like the development of Mono and DotGnu anyways. Think about it. Gnome started in part because some people didn't like the QT license. A "problem" that is now resolved with QT being GPL licensed and a contract that will put it under a BSD-style license once Trolltech decides to stop working on it or is going out of business.
Mono on the other hand reproduces MS technology that MS apperantly doesn't want to be open despite it's (marketing) efforts to standardize a subset of the Framework. I think developing with/for mono is counterproductive since it allows possibly great Opensource software to be used with Windows, taking away another reason for people to switch or even consider a switch. Because only a subset of.NET is halfopen, a great bit of.NET software won't run on linux anyways, which reduces the weight of one of the arguments for Mono significantly.
While.NET might even be an interesting technology, community based (partial) support will only benefit Microsoft. It will add additional Software for Windows but probably only few Applications will arrive for Linux, since producing applications with a small subset of the API will be more work. Considering that a commercial QT license is not that expensive for businesses developing software compared to the labour cost, and the very few applications using this powerfull toolkit for easy multiplatform development, I really can't see many companies limiting themselves to the subset of.NET to create applications that also run on Linux.
So in the end it should be clear, don't support Mono by developing applications for/with it.
Another possibility is already being used. You could use the excess energy produced during the day, to pump water into reservoirs on a hill. At night, when there is no solar energy being created use this stored water to fuel a water power plant. Things like that are used in Europe to counter peaks in energy usage since they can react rather quickly compared to conventional powerplants.
Eric's tool allows to compare larger and smaller chunks. Simple lines will easily match very often. Simple lines are not a problem. The problem is always lying in a sequence of lines. That's why you need overlapping sequences.
Well, if I make a living on fixing other people's computers, I sure wouldn't greet them with hey, you are too clueless, you deserved that thing.
But If my mailbox get's flooded with sobigs or virusfilter removal messages, I get angry.
There is another aspect with the blaster victims that asked me for help. They all complained about Microsoft and buggy software. Of course not one of them ever was regularily running windows update even though a lot of them were told by me personally before. So we have people refusing to do the easiest computer housekeeping chores and at the same time complain about the consequences. It's really hard not to become bitter about that kind of ignorance and to not start thinking those people deserve no better.
If I decide to smoke, or not exercise, it won't affect you at all. If I decide to not care at all about my PC, it could well affect you directly.
But if I get cancer or a heart attack or whatever other consequence of all the things i did or did not do to keep me healthy, I have to take a piece of the blame for the consequences. Even before that, there are penalties. If I smoked, I'd get higher health insurance rates etc.
So there actually is a reason to blame people for neglecting to care, especially if their actions affect others directly. If I can't do research for a paper because some idiots neglected to do a minimal amount of housekeeping on their computers, I think I have a right to blame them for it.
People usually need to suffer to learn.
Why not install some kind of automated vulnerability/penetration testing tool that scans machines on a regular basis. If a machine is found vlunerable or disrupting the network because of an infection or misconfiguration, issue a warning along with some documentation, disconnect it and have the person report it fixed to be connected again. On the second incident like that, do the same but issue a serious warning and a one week penalty. On the third incident, disconnect the machine for the complete term.
One could even consider billing the people for example 5$ for the first warning, 15$ for the second, 30$ for the shutdown.
This way people will learn the hard way that keeping their computers secure and up to date is a requirement and also good netizenship. If people are not willing to accept rules for driving a car and cause accidents that disrupt traffic and endanger others, they eventually lose their license or have to pay penaltys. Why not have similar penalties for disrupting university networks. People with vulnerable or misconfigured machines don't risk lifes but they could cripple network operation for others. Think of this happening to you in the final stages of writing some papers. Veeery annoying.
Which version of winodws are you using?
If it's XP you can turn off all dumb and annoying alerts including deinstalling the *+#*%$ messanger by running http://www.xp-antispy.org/. Just remember to close it before deinstallation.
Where's the problem to shut people down but allow them to reach a server where all the relevant patches for the malware causing a shutdown is available? Might even be a proxy to official MS sites.
You make a few valid points but you are also missing some things that should be factored in and which might change the equation a bit.
Energy:
The internet today consumes a huge amount of energy. If there will be much video on demand, we need more infrastructure which means higher energyconsumption in most cases. But a switch of habits listening to music or watching movies will also have an effect on the enduser's energy consumption. While today we have DVD players or VCRs which consume reasonably little energy, video on demand will probably come in much more compressed form needing more processing power to view the movie. Additionally there will probably be harddisks and other fancy things in the devices which will add to the bill. The highest energy jump will probably occur because of people using their PCs more and more for media consumption. While it's probably default already for most of the slashdot crowd, more and more people will get media servers in their basements, multimedia pcs in the livingrooms etc. A lot of people will leave their PCs on *much* longer because they don't write a letter, surf the net a little and switch off their machines. No they'll keep it on listening to music while reading a book for example. This is of course only true for normal people since most of the slashdotters probably have forgotton that there is that little switch to turn of the pc:-)
Once you only get things in digital form you either need ways to be able to get it again without paying or you store things somewhere. This will result in higher use of DVD-Rs CD-Rs and whatever else there will be. You will trade originals which people seldom throw out with media that is much likely to be thrown out and recreated.
After all there are some consequences that would have to be evaluated if you think about the environment.
Well, I guess they assume that the content industry is one that follws changes in markets. Obviously though it isn't like that. Music and movie companies are much happier sueing peoples behinds off or lobbying new laws to operate the same way as ever than emerging into new markets. If they actually will offer digital music in the far future, I guess it will be extremely consumer limiting upto complete uselessness, extremely expensive and of course windows only.
No, I really don't have much hope those idiots will get a usable service with reasonable prices and a decent catalogue going any time soon but I'd love to be proven wrong. I think it's more probable that someone external like Apple for Mac users steps in with a working service.
Are the organized protests of the people and many small and medium sized organizations strong enough to win against lobbyorganizations like the BSA.
We have individuals mailing members of the european parliament, we have small and medium businesses like Magix (Musicmaker, and other tools) voicing ther opinion. We have sites being hidden. We have political parties in the EU government like the Greens that oppose the change of the patent laws.
It is known that there are forces in the EU government that promote the use of open source software for governments which means members of parliament who want to inform themselves about opensource might even stumble over protesting websites.
Hopefully the rescheduling will give those that are in doubt enough time to see that pushing through a BSA authored change to european patent laws is not backed up by large parts of the people and hopefully all those personal letters and mails will have a stronger impact than whatever it is, the lobby people offer the parliament members.
Yawn. All those comments questioning wether the protests are seen/heard. It is clear they were heard. The vote was already rescheduled because of the protests. So there is no question.
Well protests were heard as I wrote earlier and the vote is rescheduled. That's at least a start. Shutting down/hiding the sites is just one of the measures taken.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand. Why do you need XP pro for gaming?
Besides you are not forced to buy windows together with hardware. There are vendors that offer hardware without os.
No for various reasons:
* Why should people illegaly using software get the services as well?
* If people pirate software they should at least have to bear the consequences of running a pirated and after a while insecure software.
This "No" has some interesting side effects:
* Some people will eventually start buying MS software. I dislike MS but they should nevertheless get their money.
* Those who don't buy a valid license will suffer negative personal consequences. At first, there will be millions of infected machines worsening the effect of worms and other malware. But eventually ISPs will react and simply shut network access of those machines down until they are fixed. This is already starting to happen anyways. Eventually this will be a good thing for all alternatives to MS Windows since they become much more attractive which in turn will eventually decrease the impact of the MS monoculture on clients.
I think MS should do everything possible to make it as hard as it can be to use unlicensed windows. The'll shoot themselves in their knees but it'll be better for everyone in the long run.
You are wrong. Individual Homepages being shut down might not have made a difference but European politicians already started to complain about the amount of letters and mails they got. Also the voices of quite a few small and medium sized businesses joined the choir. I really don't think all of this went by unheard.
> It was pretty anti-American before Iraq
There it is again? What exactly is anti-American? For you it seems, not agreeing with everything American and even expressing it is enough to be anti-American. Why do you even expect people to be pro-American if all the options you give out are agree to everything and do whatever we say you do and be pro-American or don't and be anti-American.
If having a different opinion is enough to be anti-American, well so be it. I'll gladly be called anti-American because being pro-American really is no option for any slightly educated person.
What about your private life? Do all people agree with you on all accounts and follow your orders? If not, are they your enemies as soon as they don't? A view like that in normal life won't have you keep a lot of friends if any. How do you think this would work out in politics?
You really have an interesting point of view. Do you really think, the US could even slightly be what it is now without international trade and relations? Besides. Do you really want to live in a world that's poisoned by the aftereffects of a couple of "The bombs" being droped in various places? While the bombs might have devestated large parts of their targets and the long term consequences would cause a lot more people dying of cancer and such, eventually and very slowly radiation would also reach the US. Nuclear war cannot be regional. After such a war, everyone wuld loose. That's why people more intelligent than you used it as a threat. One or two bombs droped in far places of the world (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) might be ok. But either you do it right, bombing quite a few countries into oblivion on a major scale or even the US will face quite a bit of trouble. This means either the US will suffer consequences or they will suffer consequences. Funny sentence, ey? But do you get it? Probably not.
Yeah right. Damn, now European Countries dare to not follow the weird and short term Outbursts of America's seemingly crazy president. How dare they. How dare they not accept and follow every single order that's given to them by the US? How dare they to oppose to a war against Iraq that was obviously based on false information and a lot of paranoid propaganda? How dare they not to joyously jump in and repair all the damage the US has done in the first place. Damn, those backward Europeans. First they accept one half of the benefit of 50 years of good relations with the US and now they oppose being under complete control. They even dare to have their own Ideas about how the world's supposed to tick.
No, I really don't get it. This is simply outragious.
[erased the paranoid propaganda in the last part of the post]
> But you still have not given me a reason to use it....
I did not intend to. Slighly down I even explained why I wouldn't use it. I just disagreed with some of your claims.
Since you are the second one complaining about that, it must have come across slightly different than intended.
I don't mind Opensource or even FreeSoftware on windows at all. What I dislike though is cloneing the next sword to battle the market of a company that has near monopoly status already without even the slightest bit of assurance that this company will not at some stage kill or cripple the Mono project and essentially consume all the developed apps with that move.
What's the point of creating open source software, especially open source software for linux if all your work might at some stage stop working on linux because MS decided to fight Mono?
That's the reason for me drawing comparisons to the QT situation. Mono might be open source but it will never be open.
> What does QTs license change years ago have to do
.NET is a lot more similar to JAVA than it was to QT or GTK. But both technologies are used to create multiplatform applications. JAVA and .NET allow that by running bytecode within an environment that abstracts Plattform from the binaries and GTK and QT go the "traditional" way of enabling to write highly similar code that can be compiled for many platforms. As I mentioned, I'm not that much informed about DotGn
> with making a mono and dotgnu creating webservice
> platforms and C# portability?
Nothing at first. My intention was to highlight that in the past, far less dangerous license problems led to the Gnome project and ironically now, one of the major supporters of Gnome, Ximian, is heavily backing Mono and even somewhat pushing Mono towards Gnome.
> one can say the same thing about php and perl
> helping the MS server platform, gcc supporting
> MS development, and frozen bubble making
> windows a better gaming platform.
Sure one could say that and it seems reasonable at first. But for me there is a difference. PHP, Perl and GCC are open. As mentioned in other comments, MS can slightly change APIs in future versions not opening up the changes. The main reason for MONO's existance will be gone. Perl, PHP and GCC can and do change as well but they are open and can be ported whereas Mono can become a "Cul de Sac" for anyone hoping to do cross platform development simply if MS finds it appropriate to do so.
> You seem to no nothing about DotGNU. The
> project's goal is to create a free software web
> platform in much the same way the GNU project
> set out to create a free unix-like platform.
You are right. I simply assumed it was a project similar to Mono. Apperantly I was wrong here, sorry.
>One could argue that GNU/Linux has helped SCO,
>ATT, or HP to improve their commercial unix, but
>somehow I think they would all disagree.
This depends on how you look at it. If you look at a plain solaris, I at least feel that all the GNU tools make it an a lot friendlier environment. I think you misunderstood me. I don't say Open Source on Winodws is bad and I don't mind ported applications at all. What I dislike though is a seemingly open technology being heavily positioned against and modeled after a much more open platform (JAVA) and the efforts to bring this to Linux. In this case, Porting efforts are undertaken by the community and MS can shut them down or seriously cripple them once they decide Mono is eating away too much of their profits. This is impossible or much less possible in your examples. Of course the developed applications will stay but only on Windows.
> And to revisit your issues with mono, claiming
> that C# and MSIL support for linux is helping
> microsoft more than it is helping anyone else
> is similar to saying that java support on linux
> is only good for Sun. I just don't see the
> evidence or reasoning.
Well, JAVA is heavily protected with Licenseing as well but it's in Sun's interest that JAVA supports as many platforms as possible. The development process is not as open as with most Opensource apps but the JAVA community process is imho ok. Of course Sun could theoretically stop support for all but their operating system at one point but Users of JAVA would have a much better position fighting an action like that in courts as they would have against Microsoft enforcing their patents on Mono since Mono was at no time officially supported by Microsoft.
> Your tie in with QT makes no sense. I think
> you are missing something important. QT and
> GTK+ are completely unrelated to the webservice
> and binary portability arenas where mono and
> dotgnu are. Incidentally, there are libraries
> to use QT and GTK+ from C#.
I know what they are and of course webservices are something else. I'm aware that
> Is it faster? No
.NET is language independant, which makes it interesting. Of course all language.NET implementations have to be used slightly different than their native counterparts to fit within the boundaries of the framework and it's programming paradigms.
Compared to what? Plain C, compiled by a highly optimizing compiler for a certain platform? No, of course not. JAVA? Maybe. Interpreted languages without bytecode support? Maybe.
> Is Development Faster ? No
Yes, on Winodws with visual studio. At least compared to plain C with a texteditor. This also requires use of all the non open stuff of course.
> Is it cross platform ? No
In theory yes, which makes it seem interesting at first. But:
> Is it Encumbered By Patents? Yes
Yes. That's imho the most important reason to not use it for open source development.
> Does it do things that other languages cannot? No
No but that would be an argument against any other language. But having different languages is a good thing. Besides, in theory
Don't do it.
.NET is halfopen, a great bit of .NET software won't run on linux anyways, which reduces the weight of one of the arguments for Mono significantly.
.NET might even be an interesting technology, community based (partial) support will only benefit Microsoft. It will add additional Software for Windows but probably only few Applications will arrive for Linux, since producing applications with a small subset of the API will be more work. Considering that a commercial QT license is not that expensive for businesses developing software compared to the labour cost, and the very few applications using this powerfull toolkit for easy multiplatform development, I really can't see many companies limiting themselves to the subset of .NET to create applications that also run on Linux.
I don't like the development of Mono and DotGnu anyways. Think about it. Gnome started in part because some people didn't like the QT license. A "problem" that is now resolved with QT being GPL licensed and a contract that will put it under a BSD-style license once Trolltech decides to stop working on it or is going out of business.
Mono on the other hand reproduces MS technology that MS apperantly doesn't want to be open despite it's (marketing) efforts to standardize a subset of the Framework. I think developing with/for mono is counterproductive since it allows possibly great Opensource software to be used with Windows, taking away another reason for people to switch or even consider a switch. Because only a subset of
While
So in the end it should be clear, don't support Mono by developing applications for/with it.
Another possibility is already being used. You could use the excess energy produced during the day, to pump water into reservoirs on a hill. At night, when there is no solar energy being created use this stored water to fuel a water power plant. Things like that are used in Europe to counter peaks in energy usage since they can react rather quickly compared to conventional powerplants.
Eric's tool allows to compare larger and smaller chunks. Simple lines will easily match very often. Simple lines are not a problem. The problem is always lying in a sequence of lines. That's why you need overlapping sequences.
Well, if I make a living on fixing other people's computers, I sure wouldn't greet them with hey, you are too clueless, you deserved that thing.
But If my mailbox get's flooded with sobigs or virusfilter removal messages, I get angry.
There is another aspect with the blaster victims that asked me for help. They all complained about Microsoft and buggy software. Of course not one of them ever was regularily running windows update even though a lot of them were told by me personally before. So we have people refusing to do the easiest computer housekeeping chores and at the same time complain about the consequences. It's really hard not to become bitter about that kind of ignorance and to not start thinking those people deserve no better.
There is a difference though...
If I decide to smoke, or not exercise, it won't affect you at all. If I decide to not care at all about my PC, it could well affect you directly.
But if I get cancer or a heart attack or whatever other consequence of all the things i did or did not do to keep me healthy, I have to take a piece of the blame for the consequences. Even before that, there are penalties. If I smoked, I'd get higher health insurance rates etc.
So there actually is a reason to blame people for neglecting to care, especially if their actions affect others directly. If I can't do research for a paper because some idiots neglected to do a minimal amount of housekeeping on their computers, I think I have a right to blame them for it.
People usually need to suffer to learn. Why not install some kind of automated vulnerability/penetration testing tool that scans machines on a regular basis. If a machine is found vlunerable or disrupting the network because of an infection or misconfiguration, issue a warning along with some documentation, disconnect it and have the person report it fixed to be connected again. On the second incident like that, do the same but issue a serious warning and a one week penalty. On the third incident, disconnect the machine for the complete term. One could even consider billing the people for example 5$ for the first warning, 15$ for the second, 30$ for the shutdown. This way people will learn the hard way that keeping their computers secure and up to date is a requirement and also good netizenship. If people are not willing to accept rules for driving a car and cause accidents that disrupt traffic and endanger others, they eventually lose their license or have to pay penaltys. Why not have similar penalties for disrupting university networks. People with vulnerable or misconfigured machines don't risk lifes but they could cripple network operation for others. Think of this happening to you in the final stages of writing some papers. Veeery annoying.
Which version of winodws are you using? If it's XP you can turn off all dumb and annoying alerts including deinstalling the *+#*%$ messanger by running http://www.xp-antispy.org/. Just remember to close it before deinstallation.
Where's the problem to shut people down but allow them to reach a server where all the relevant patches for the malware causing a shutdown is available? Might even be a proxy to official MS sites.
You make a few valid points but you are also missing some things that should be factored in and which might change the equation a bit.
:-)
Energy:
The internet today consumes a huge amount of energy. If there will be much video on demand, we need more infrastructure which means higher energyconsumption in most cases.
But a switch of habits listening to music or watching movies will also have an effect on the enduser's energy consumption. While today we have DVD players or VCRs which consume reasonably little energy, video on demand will probably come in much more compressed form needing more processing power to view the movie. Additionally there will probably be harddisks and other fancy things in the devices which will add to the bill.
The highest energy jump will probably occur because of people using their PCs more and more for media consumption. While it's probably default already for most of the slashdot crowd, more and more people will get media servers in their basements, multimedia pcs in the livingrooms etc. A lot of people will leave their PCs on *much* longer because they don't write a letter, surf the net a little and switch off their machines. No they'll keep it on listening to music while reading a book for example. This is of course only true for normal people since most of the slashdotters probably have forgotton that there is that little switch to turn of the pc
Once you only get things in digital form you either need ways to be able to get it again without paying or you store things somewhere. This will result in higher use of DVD-Rs CD-Rs and whatever else there will be. You will trade originals which people seldom throw out with media that is much likely to be thrown out and recreated.
After all there are some consequences that would have to be evaluated if you think about the environment.
Well, I guess they assume that the content industry is one that follws changes in markets. Obviously though it isn't like that. Music and movie companies are much happier sueing peoples behinds off or lobbying new laws to operate the same way as ever than emerging into new markets. If they actually will offer digital music in the far future, I guess it will be extremely consumer limiting upto complete uselessness, extremely expensive and of course windows only.
No, I really don't have much hope those idiots will get a usable service with reasonable prices and a decent catalogue going any time soon but I'd love to be proven wrong. I think it's more probable that someone external like Apple for Mac users steps in with a working service.
Have you even visited one example? Nearly all sites are not really down, they just show the protest note and offer a link to reach the original site.
Are the organized protests of the people and many small and medium sized organizations strong enough to win against lobbyorganizations like the BSA.
We have individuals mailing members of the european parliament, we have small and medium businesses like Magix (Musicmaker, and other tools) voicing ther opinion. We have sites being hidden. We have political parties in the EU government like the Greens that oppose the change of the patent laws.
It is known that there are forces in the EU government that promote the use of open source software for governments which means members of parliament who want to inform themselves about opensource might even stumble over protesting websites.
Hopefully the rescheduling will give those that are in doubt enough time to see that pushing through a BSA authored change to european patent laws is not backed up by large parts of the people and hopefully all those personal letters and mails will have a stronger impact than whatever it is, the lobby people offer the parliament members.
Yawn. All those comments questioning wether the protests are seen/heard. It is clear they were heard. The vote was already rescheduled because of the protests. So there is no question.
You are aware that Capitol Hill is not the targeted audience?
Well protests were heard as I wrote earlier and the vote is rescheduled. That's at least a start. Shutting down/hiding the sites is just one of the measures taken.