Do product-tying laws apply to free (as in $) products? That doesn't make sense to me.
(What you're referring to is "product-tying" and certainly wasn't invented by MS. If you have a monopoly, you can use product-tying to effectively 'force' people to buy other products too. So say you're the only guy in town who can sell pens (say, by making special deals and cutbacks for local stationary retailers). People need pens, and now they need to buy them from you. So now you introduce a "special offer" where every time someone buys a pen, they get a pencil bundled with it too. Only catch is, they have to buy it with the pencil, they can no longer buy the pen by itself. So effectively if they want a pen, they have to buy the pencil too. Then you go argue that this is "good for customers" because your research shows that "94.3% of people who use pens also use pencils".)
It's all fine and well though if competition is possible in the market, because then another competitor will come in and sell just pens, for cheaper. But Microsoft strong-armed OEMs, forcing them to sell only Windows, and to sell it with every PC they sold. It's all in the findings.
Indeed. In some places there are "three strikes" systems for people who continually commit certain crimes with no intention of reform. Wealthier people also often do the same with dangerous/reckless driving behaviour (in places without point systems), i.e. they keep speeding, and just pay the fines without worrying about it. For traffic offences more and more countries are switching to point systems, which is a good thing - continue to commit certain offences with no intention of reform, and you lose your license.
Likewise, a company that continues to break the same laws repeatedly, with no intention of reform, should have some sort of "three strikes and you're out" system, or a points-based system. A company that then habitually refuses to operate within the law should have it's license to do business revoked. Simple as that; if your business model is such that you can't succeed without continually breaking the law, you have a flawed business model and don't deserve to be doing business anyway.
Sheez, an AC on/. "knows for a fact". I'm totally convinced now. And it must be true, or you'd surely never have used such emphatic language as "know for a fact". References please!
This is a typical sort of 'engineer' type comment, naively thinking that people make rational decisions based on which products are technologically superior than others. The vast majority of people do not. Mostly they just use whatever everyone else they know seems to be using, and/or what they happen to already know how to use. If you made Linux far better than both Macs and PCs as desktop systems tomorrow, and they seamlessly ran all Windows and Mac apps, you still wouldn't get more than an additional tiny one or two (maybe three) percent new users. Because that is simply just not how people make purchasing decisions, especially not individuals. (You would however get some "corporate converts", and only once a reasonable percentage of corporations converted would you start seeing individuals following suit, because "this is what we use at work"). It would only really take off once it hits critical mass, which actually (depressingly) really just boils down to people deciding based on the fact that 'everyone else seems to be using THIS' --- 90+% of those people still would never have even the faintest clue that they'd "inadvertently" be using the best product from a technological perspective, nor would they even understand why it's the best if you tried to explain it to them.
Until programmers start trying to understand the "psychology" of "the man on the street", Linux on the desktop is dead in the water.
The primary reason OpenSource is rare 'on the desktop' has virtually nothing to do with whether it "can do this" or "can't do that" or has "too many ways of doing X". The primary reason that people "choose" Windows on the desktop is because "pretty much everyone else uses it".
I promise you, less than 2% of computer users even know (or care) enough to even be able to tell you that they "don't like Linux because of package management fragmentation". Puh-lease!! 98% of users are like "uh, everyone I know uses dis 'Windows' thing, wods dis 'Linux' thing anyway, never heard of it". These people are not "choosing Windows" in any sense, and especially not based on rational technical analyses of which OS does package management better. My sister uses Windows because that's "the standard", she has never even tried Linux, she certainly isn't going to be telling my anytime soon that she "didn't like Linux because she couldn't find rpm on the Debian system she tried". Get real.
Linux doesn't "need" anything other than critical mass. Good luck. The only way this will start happening is if e.g. large corps and governments start standardizing internally on Linux-based desktops.
"the social forces that produce the hump under some circumstances can lead to a poverty trap long before full industrialization is reached. Depending on the stage of development capital accumulation may have negative or positive externalities via criminal behavior. At a low stage of development capital accumulation by one producer generates increasing crime that reduces the profitability of all producers. At a higher stage of development, when labor has become more scarce, capital accumulation (and increased employment) of one producer reduces crime, enhancing the profitability of all producers. It is the changing sign of the externality at different stages of development that can generate
a poverty trap."
On a broader scale that's not true, study a little economics. Say this was a business district, reduced crime helps make the businesses more profitable and productive. This generates 'excess wealth' which is taxed. This in turn is used to fight crime not just in that area but everywhere within the economic/governmental sector. Criminals choose the easiest targets, i.e. with the lowest risk and greatest reward. These areas normally (re-actively) are 'next' to have investments made in them by the locals in those areas to lower crime (i.e. increase the risk). This chases criminals to the next *lower reward* area with similar risk. Thus crime fighting resource investments tend to be made first where they have the most impact, and criminals are eventually statistically driven into lower and lower reward areas to perform crime (i.e. poorer and poorer areas). Since the reward to the criminals is lower, it starts becoming less profitable to be a criminal, and an increasing number of criminals (statistically) tend to start looking for "honest work" where the rewards may be similar but the risk is lower. As long as productive economic sub-sectors of the economy remain profitable enough to effectively fight crime in their areas, crime slowly tends toward a statistical minimum, where eventually only the people who really are destined to be criminals will be criminals.
The converse applies too. If there are not enough excess resources in a productive business area to effectively fight crime in that area, the criminals remain. This drives up the costs of doing business in an area, and also chases potential clients out of such areas that they perceive as "bad". A downward spiral occurs. Businesses start moving out of an area, customers hear an area is "going bad", more and more businesses pack up, and the criminals 'take over'. With no more businesses in an area, there are no excess resources that can be used to fight the crime. Thus an area often remains "trapped" in a bad state indefinitely (or until someone decides to fund a clean-up).
Now, sure, the businesses that move out of one area move into another area which will be profitable. However, this "business area" is really a microcosm of an entire economy (which may be a country, a state, or municipal area), which has an average amount of "excess resources" that it can devote to fighting crime; this "average amount" is a function of the economic output (productivity) of the region. If an entire region is too poor to effectively fight crime (on average), then criminals are attracted to the entire region in general (because risk/reward looks better). And with (a) more criminals to fight and (b) less money to fight those criminals, the same downward spiral occurs, with the same extreme difficulty to ever break out of it. With criminals moving in, businesses move out (to other states/countries etc).
The above is called a "poverty trap". Basically the problem is that e.g. a country that is *already* poor may never be able to break up out of it due to the 'poverty trap'. This is not speculative conjecture, these are studied and modelled economic principles.
There is effectively "line" above which, if your economic output is higher than the line, an upward spiral occurs - enough excess resources are generated to fight crime, crime moves away to easier targets, and business becomes even more profitable. If your economic output is below the line, the downward spiral occurs. South Africa is an interesting case study of a potential poverty trap, where the economy is more or less "straddling the line" at the moment and could go either way, in my opinion.
And criminals do move about between countries, A LOT. Again, see South Africa as a case study, where organized crime syndicates from all over (e.g. Nigeria, Russia, Zimbabwe, USA, China etc) are all moving in. A large number of 'petty criminals' are also poor illegal immigrants from places like Zimbabwe.
Not everyone is either born a criminal or not. It's more a
Of course if you're modifying Linux for a specific embedded application, you're going to strip it down to probably about 1% of it's former self, basically containing only support for the hardware etc. that you need. You're definitely not going to keep running, e.g. X with KDE (and GIMP and Tux Racer etc), and even at the kernel level, there are hundreds of devices, filesystems and protocols that you simply won't need - many of which are modules and can be removed very easily. In fact, once you strip it down to your requirements, chances are you will have about the same number of lines of code (in fact I would wager, less) than the RTOS this guy is selling.
Main problem is not the number of lines of code, but the fact that you'd have to verify the Linux one yourself (or use this guy's RTOS and just take his word for it, and take his word that his government hasn't hidden backdoors etc for, say, spying on other governments).
Our missile defense systems should not be running the same software as my home PC whether it is a commercial or open-source product.
Are you a software developer, or don't you understand software development? As a software developer I cannot agree with you. Sounds a little like those who don't understand the math behind encryption and think the government can crack it by being smart/sophisticated. The more open and broadly tested software components are, the closer to impossible it becomes to crack them, NOT more possible.
Possible, but this could happen to closed source too - the main difference is that with OpenSource, you have a chance in hell of actually finding it. With OpenSource, you're looking for a needle in a haystack. With closed source, you're looking for a 1/1000th scale needle amongst a million haystacks.
OpenSource will always be harder to poison than closed source. Period.
Uh, how is it a troll? It's true, and it's on-topic, and you can't refute the arguments either - so you just call it a troll because you don't like what you hear?
Sad, the most common type of comment on this thread is basically "Ha ha, this isn't a problem because (some dumb hugely-ignorant-of-extremely-complex-ecosystems joke)". As if making a few jokes (that reveal one's incredible ignorance) is somehow going to save us from the problems we're creating.
It seems like most people who claim to oppose genetic modification of foods, plants, etc. are basing their views mostly on fears rather than any solid evidence
That doesn't meant that there aren't valid reasons to be extremely cautious with these powerful new largely untested techniques.
The fact that many stupid people are paranoid and use terms like "Frankenfoods" doesn't mean there aren't dangers. Can't you separate the 'stupid people' from the facts? "Oh but look, these guys are against and they're stupid nutters, therefore there is no reason to be against it". Come on.
And if you want to talk about twisted and nutty, how about the ridiculous German outlawing of the public display of their iconic political symbols of the WWII era?
Oh wait, is that more or less nutty than, say, the banning of teaching of evolution in schools? Or, perhaps, the banning of certain comic strips or movies (even in recent times).
Anyway, this is all a moot point, since what you are trying to do is defend your nutty twisted ethics by pointing fingers at other countries and saying, "but look, they have some nutty twisted ethics too!". The fact that other countries also have certain nutty twisted ethics does not make your nutty twisted ethics OK or defendable.
I find it interesting that you do not think killing is as natural as sex
Don't put words in my mouth. I agree both are perfectly natural aspects of human behaviour. However being natural has nothing to do with being morally objectionable. In a civilised society we regard certain things as being counter-productive and harmful to the community/society at large (e.g. murder). Therefore in civilised societies we don't "embrace violence", unlike the US. This is clear and logical based on the simple notion that none of us wants to be a victim of murder.
But that's exactly what he/she said! ????? The way I read it, you misunderstood him/her completely 180 degrees opposite, you're both saying the same thing..
As much as you're trying to paint out the US viewpoint as merely being culturally different to the European viewpoint, and rather weakly trying to imply that the Europeans are simply being closed-minded for not "understanding" the US cultural view, there are fundamental, absolute differences that sorta kinda make it pretty obvious that the US viewpoint here is 'twisted and nutty'. You cannot claim this is just "a different viewpoint", there are some pretty obvious moral and ethical discrepancies between showing, say, a nipple (which is probably the ultimate, natural display of love, affection, bonding and nurturing), and showing graphic displays of humans blowing one another up.
Or do you really think that blowing people up is natural, normal and positive for humanity? Perhaps that would explain US foreign policies.
Indeed! Hehe. The problem with the idea of shooting trash into space is probably mainly the cost of getting things up there. A lot of force/energy is required. It's expensive even for small payloads like a few people and a bit of equipment. Now try do it for the millions of tonnes of waste (toxic or otherwise) that humans produce each year, it's not feasible.
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Do product-tying laws apply to free (as in $) products? That doesn't make sense to me.
(What you're referring to is "product-tying" and certainly wasn't invented by MS. If you have a monopoly, you can use product-tying to effectively 'force' people to buy other products too. So say you're the only guy in town who can sell pens (say, by making special deals and cutbacks for local stationary retailers). People need pens, and now they need to buy them from you. So now you introduce a "special offer" where every time someone buys a pen, they get a pencil bundled with it too. Only catch is, they have to buy it with the pencil, they can no longer buy the pen by itself. So effectively if they want a pen, they have to buy the pencil too. Then you go argue that this is "good for customers" because your research shows that "94.3% of people who use pens also use pencils".)
It's all fine and well though if competition is possible in the market, because then another competitor will come in and sell just pens, for cheaper. But Microsoft strong-armed OEMs, forcing them to sell only Windows, and to sell it with every PC they sold. It's all in the findings.
Indeed. In some places there are "three strikes" systems for people who continually commit certain crimes with no intention of reform. Wealthier people also often do the same with dangerous/reckless driving behaviour (in places without point systems), i.e. they keep speeding, and just pay the fines without worrying about it. For traffic offences more and more countries are switching to point systems, which is a good thing - continue to commit certain offences with no intention of reform, and you lose your license.
Likewise, a company that continues to break the same laws repeatedly, with no intention of reform, should have some sort of "three strikes and you're out" system, or a points-based system. A company that then habitually refuses to operate within the law should have it's license to do business revoked. Simple as that; if your business model is such that you can't succeed without continually breaking the law, you have a flawed business model and don't deserve to be doing business anyway.
Sheez, an AC on /. "knows for a fact". I'm totally convinced now. And it must be true, or you'd surely never have used such emphatic language as "know for a fact". References please!
Uhm, I think it was a joke ..
This is a typical sort of 'engineer' type comment, naively thinking that people make rational decisions based on which products are technologically superior than others. The vast majority of people do not. Mostly they just use whatever everyone else they know seems to be using, and/or what they happen to already know how to use. If you made Linux far better than both Macs and PCs as desktop systems tomorrow, and they seamlessly ran all Windows and Mac apps, you still wouldn't get more than an additional tiny one or two (maybe three) percent new users. Because that is simply just not how people make purchasing decisions, especially not individuals. (You would however get some "corporate converts", and only once a reasonable percentage of corporations converted would you start seeing individuals following suit, because "this is what we use at work"). It would only really take off once it hits critical mass, which actually (depressingly) really just boils down to people deciding based on the fact that 'everyone else seems to be using THIS' --- 90+% of those people still would never have even the faintest clue that they'd "inadvertently" be using the best product from a technological perspective, nor would they even understand why it's the best if you tried to explain it to them.
Until programmers start trying to understand the "psychology" of "the man on the street", Linux on the desktop is dead in the water.
The primary reason OpenSource is rare 'on the desktop' has virtually nothing to do with whether it "can do this" or "can't do that" or has "too many ways of doing X". The primary reason that people "choose" Windows on the desktop is because "pretty much everyone else uses it".
I promise you, less than 2% of computer users even know (or care) enough to even be able to tell you that they "don't like Linux because of package management fragmentation". Puh-lease!! 98% of users are like "uh, everyone I know uses dis 'Windows' thing, wods dis 'Linux' thing anyway, never heard of it". These people are not "choosing Windows" in any sense, and especially not based on rational technical analyses of which OS does package management better. My sister uses Windows because that's "the standard", she has never even tried Linux, she certainly isn't going to be telling my anytime soon that she "didn't like Linux because she couldn't find rpm on the Debian system she tried". Get real.
Linux doesn't "need" anything other than critical mass. Good luck. The only way this will start happening is if e.g. large corps and governments start standardizing internally on Linux-based desktops.
That's 'cause most of us are secretly using Windows ;)
A bit more on crime induced poverty traps here: http://www.sv.ntnu.no/iso/Ragnar.Torvik/crime.pdf.
A quote from the conclusion:
"the social forces that produce the hump under some circumstances can lead to a poverty trap long before full industrialization is reached. Depending on the stage of development capital accumulation may have negative or positive externalities via criminal behavior. At a low stage of development capital accumulation by one producer generates increasing crime that reduces the profitability of all producers. At a higher stage of development, when labor has become more scarce, capital accumulation (and increased employment) of one producer reduces crime, enhancing the profitability of all producers. It is the changing sign of the externality at different stages of development that can generate a poverty trap."
On a broader scale that's not true, study a little economics. Say this was a business district, reduced crime helps make the businesses more profitable and productive. This generates 'excess wealth' which is taxed. This in turn is used to fight crime not just in that area but everywhere within the economic/governmental sector. Criminals choose the easiest targets, i.e. with the lowest risk and greatest reward. These areas normally (re-actively) are 'next' to have investments made in them by the locals in those areas to lower crime (i.e. increase the risk). This chases criminals to the next *lower reward* area with similar risk. Thus crime fighting resource investments tend to be made first where they have the most impact, and criminals are eventually statistically driven into lower and lower reward areas to perform crime (i.e. poorer and poorer areas). Since the reward to the criminals is lower, it starts becoming less profitable to be a criminal, and an increasing number of criminals (statistically) tend to start looking for "honest work" where the rewards may be similar but the risk is lower. As long as productive economic sub-sectors of the economy remain profitable enough to effectively fight crime in their areas, crime slowly tends toward a statistical minimum, where eventually only the people who really are destined to be criminals will be criminals.
The converse applies too. If there are not enough excess resources in a productive business area to effectively fight crime in that area, the criminals remain. This drives up the costs of doing business in an area, and also chases potential clients out of such areas that they perceive as "bad". A downward spiral occurs. Businesses start moving out of an area, customers hear an area is "going bad", more and more businesses pack up, and the criminals 'take over'. With no more businesses in an area, there are no excess resources that can be used to fight the crime. Thus an area often remains "trapped" in a bad state indefinitely (or until someone decides to fund a clean-up).
Now, sure, the businesses that move out of one area move into another area which will be profitable. However, this "business area" is really a microcosm of an entire economy (which may be a country, a state, or municipal area), which has an average amount of "excess resources" that it can devote to fighting crime; this "average amount" is a function of the economic output (productivity) of the region. If an entire region is too poor to effectively fight crime (on average), then criminals are attracted to the entire region in general (because risk/reward looks better). And with (a) more criminals to fight and (b) less money to fight those criminals, the same downward spiral occurs, with the same extreme difficulty to ever break out of it. With criminals moving in, businesses move out (to other states/countries etc).
The above is called a "poverty trap". Basically the problem is that e.g. a country that is *already* poor may never be able to break up out of it due to the 'poverty trap'. This is not speculative conjecture, these are studied and modelled economic principles.
There is effectively "line" above which, if your economic output is higher than the line, an upward spiral occurs - enough excess resources are generated to fight crime, crime moves away to easier targets, and business becomes even more profitable. If your economic output is below the line, the downward spiral occurs. South Africa is an interesting case study of a potential poverty trap, where the economy is more or less "straddling the line" at the moment and could go either way, in my opinion.
And criminals do move about between countries, A LOT. Again, see South Africa as a case study, where organized crime syndicates from all over (e.g. Nigeria, Russia, Zimbabwe, USA, China etc) are all moving in. A large number of 'petty criminals' are also poor illegal immigrants from places like Zimbabwe.
Not everyone is either born a criminal or not. It's more a
Of course if you're modifying Linux for a specific embedded application, you're going to strip it down to probably about 1% of it's former self, basically containing only support for the hardware etc. that you need. You're definitely not going to keep running, e.g. X with KDE (and GIMP and Tux Racer etc), and even at the kernel level, there are hundreds of devices, filesystems and protocols that you simply won't need - many of which are modules and can be removed very easily. In fact, once you strip it down to your requirements, chances are you will have about the same number of lines of code (in fact I would wager, less) than the RTOS this guy is selling.
Main problem is not the number of lines of code, but the fact that you'd have to verify the Linux one yourself (or use this guy's RTOS and just take his word for it, and take his word that his government hasn't hidden backdoors etc for, say, spying on other governments).
Our missile defense systems should not be running the same software as my home PC whether it is a commercial or open-source product.
Are you a software developer, or don't you understand software development? As a software developer I cannot agree with you. Sounds a little like those who don't understand the math behind encryption and think the government can crack it by being smart/sophisticated. The more open and broadly tested software components are, the closer to impossible it becomes to crack them, NOT more possible.
Possible, but this could happen to closed source too - the main difference is that with OpenSource, you have a chance in hell of actually finding it. With OpenSource, you're looking for a needle in a haystack. With closed source, you're looking for a 1/1000th scale needle amongst a million haystacks.
OpenSource will always be harder to poison than closed source. Period.
I don't see how that comment is misogynistic ... but then maybe I am just misogynistic :/
Presumably the same planet as those wacky folks at dictionary.com.
Uh, how is it a troll? It's true, and it's on-topic, and you can't refute the arguments either - so you just call it a troll because you don't like what you hear?
Uh, yes, and your strawman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H argument really proves that there are no potential dangers in genetically modifying organisms.
Sad, the most common type of comment on this thread is basically "Ha ha, this isn't a problem because (some dumb hugely-ignorant-of-extremely-complex-ecosystems joke)". As if making a few jokes (that reveal one's incredible ignorance) is somehow going to save us from the problems we're creating.
It seems like most people who claim to oppose genetic modification of foods, plants, etc. are basing their views mostly on fears rather than any solid evidence
That doesn't meant that there aren't valid reasons to be extremely cautious with these powerful new largely untested techniques.
The fact that many stupid people are paranoid and use terms like "Frankenfoods" doesn't mean there aren't dangers. Can't you separate the 'stupid people' from the facts? "Oh but look, these guys are against and they're stupid nutters, therefore there is no reason to be against it". Come on.
And if you want to talk about twisted and nutty, how about the ridiculous German outlawing of the public display of their iconic political symbols of the WWII era?
Oh wait, is that more or less nutty than, say, the banning of teaching of evolution in schools? Or, perhaps, the banning of certain comic strips or movies (even in recent times).
Anyway, this is all a moot point, since what you are trying to do is defend your nutty twisted ethics by pointing fingers at other countries and saying, "but look, they have some nutty twisted ethics too!". The fact that other countries also have certain nutty twisted ethics does not make your nutty twisted ethics OK or defendable.
I find it interesting that you do not think killing is as natural as sex
Don't put words in my mouth. I agree both are perfectly natural aspects of human behaviour. However being natural has nothing to do with being morally objectionable. In a civilised society we regard certain things as being counter-productive and harmful to the community/society at large (e.g. murder). Therefore in civilised societies we don't "embrace violence", unlike the US. This is clear and logical based on the simple notion that none of us wants to be a victim of murder.
But that's exactly what he/she said! ????? The way I read it, you misunderstood him/her completely 180 degrees opposite, you're both saying the same thing ..
As much as you're trying to paint out the US viewpoint as merely being culturally different to the European viewpoint, and rather weakly trying to imply that the Europeans are simply being closed-minded for not "understanding" the US cultural view, there are fundamental, absolute differences that sorta kinda make it pretty obvious that the US viewpoint here is 'twisted and nutty'. You cannot claim this is just "a different viewpoint", there are some pretty obvious moral and ethical discrepancies between showing, say, a nipple (which is probably the ultimate, natural display of love, affection, bonding and nurturing), and showing graphic displays of humans blowing one another up.
Or do you really think that blowing people up is natural, normal and positive for humanity? Perhaps that would explain US foreign policies.
Indeed! Hehe. The problem with the idea of shooting trash into space is probably mainly the cost of getting things up there. A lot of force/energy is required. It's expensive even for small payloads like a few people and a bit of equipment. Now try do it for the millions of tonnes of waste (toxic or otherwise) that humans produce each year, it's not feasible.
But wouldn't the same EU directive apply to motherboards and monitors too?
So this is your last post then, is it? I mean, obviously you won't be hanging around this site anymore if you think it isn't good.