How about coming up with an anti-OSS strategy by doing a better job in your profession than what the OSS folks do?
Linus Torvalds stayed away from the ideology bullshit of GPL, he said "let me see the code, gimme something that works." Without such an attitude we'd still be waiting for GNU Hurd, and still debate the ideological merits of open source, while the rest of the world moves on. In the end it is not the rhetoric that wins a debate.
That is not to say that the GPL didn't play the crucial role of keeping the competition from squatting it. MS loves using BSD code, and Apple wouldn't have gotten anywhere if they had to start their OS X kernel from scratch, so they are all like a priests that preach water yet drink wine. It'd be very easy to outdo linux if you could freely squat it, and just add a little bit of benefit to it, and claim that you've got something better, cuz whatever linux has you automatically have it, and then some. You know you love open source too, and even your own developers, when they try to do something new, they don't start from scratch, but they look at some standard way, how others have done it, and improve from there. Human knowledge is like that, none of us starts from scratch with anything, every one of us learns what previous generations came up with, and nobody gets to own that, at least not til now. As Newton put it, it's easy to see farther when you stand on shoulders of giants. Soon none of the 20/20 vision people will be able to afford to climb up on those shoulders, because it will be owned by the blind. You know you love open source too, open knowledge, you just don't like the fact of not being able to make easy money off of it, but having to compete with it. When you are forced to compete, now the sweating starts and you throw all kinds of rhetoric at something that you are unable to surpass as far as customer preference goes. If you could come up with something that pleases the customer, and advance technology instead regressing it by only coming up with schemes whose benefit is extending your reach and control, without giving the customer something valuable in return, yet demanding payment from them nevertheless.
The OSS way is not perfect, because the creators find it hard to feed themselves, but just like a revolution is not perfect, because the participants find it hard to cultivate and harvest their fields while they are off with their scythes and guns trying to fix some injustice. Go argue to them about the value of being able to feed yourself, they know it very well, yet still they are upset, because unlike you, at least they care about justice, fairness, what's right and what's wrong. I don't think OSS would flourish as much if there was true competition and openness in the software field, with "may the best win" instead of "may the one with the nastiest schemes screw everybody else over."
Another study says businesses lose 3 trillion dollars of productivity over people wasting time by talking to each other at work, about their kids, family, baseball, and other such things unrelated to their job. They often do this while they hang around the water fountain or the coffee machine. Solution? We should ban all coffee machines and water fountains to boost the economy.
Licenses are contracts. If they feel like it, they can offer to charge you based on the number of heartbeats you have during a computer game - mandatory pulse monitor wearing required, or the game won't run. If they feel like it, they may may offer to charge you based on which way the wind blows, or the position of stars. It's your job as a customer to say, you know what, screw you, stick your heart rate monitor up your precious ass, because I'd rather not play under these circumstances. They can offer, nothing wrong with that, but you have to learn how to say no, even when you're addicted. It becomes a problem when there is a monopoly, and you don't have another supplier to turn to, that will respect you as the customer, instead of dictating you the terms. You can cry foul under such circumstances, and say look, I can't find anybody else. So what they can do is setup a puppet competitor, that charges more, still, subsidiary of the monopoly, you just can't prove that, and then say, well, here, you have a choice. So what do you do? Now you can't even cry foul. So you just bend over and touch your toes, and don't keep it tight, cuz the more you fight it, the more it's gonna hurt. Nice and easy. You're getting fucked either way.
Don't forget that before the UN, there was the idea of the League of Nations, and it all could have been done right after WW1, instead of WW2, which may not have even happened. When all the little guys have a forum to come together and collectively denounce some strongass aggressor, they feel a lot more comfortable to stick their heads out and say "No" outloud, because they can back each other. Hitler might have never got anywhere, because the world could have united against him a lot earlier. Nobody is stopping the US now from invading Iraq, partly because of the terrorist show that's put on, which looks very believable, but still, there is a lot of international buzz, which would not be there without the UN, a forum to come to some kind of consensus. Let's face it, the US has been the 2nd biggest oil producer in the World, after Saudi Arabia, all the way up to around 2003, and we just freshly ran out of oil to pump, both in Alaska, in the Gulf, and all over the mainland. You can't keep being the 2nd producer under these conditions, the economy is in a dump, and letting foreigners control your oilprices when you have none to rely on domestically, well, that doesn't sound too tasty either. And you could argue that as soon as they smelled that you're hooked and you crave it like a drug, they'd jack your prices through the roof and suck you dry, just like drugdealers do druggies. Still, it doesn't make it right. You could argue Hitler invaded Poland under similar pretenses, cuz he simply wanted what they had, their land, instead of their oil. It's not right. The correct way to deal with a drug problem is rehabilitation. It's tough, but sooner or later you have to get off the oil addiction, cuz right now you're just postponing it, for another decade, til the oil runs out in Iraq too. What happens then? What happens when there is nobody left to invade, and no oil left on the planet? Whatever happens then, do it now instead, and save some of your reputation.
That reminds me, when are we going to get rid of the blatant age-discrimination that goes on in the porn industry? Just cuz somebody gets to be over 50 with at least 15 more years of productivity ahead of her, it doesn't mean she should lose her job to some ditsy just-18 fresh-snatch! What happened to equal opportunity employment laws?
I personally am too lazy to change my wrist watches and alarm clocks around, so during the winter I just mentally subtract an hour. What are you actually saving here? Daylight hours, so rush hour traffic doesn't drive in the dark at 7am? It doesn't bother me that the clock says 5pm when it's still 4pm.
I usually just procrastinate until January or February, then I don't have to procrastinate anymore, because the reasoning, that, - if I waited this long, I might as well wait that other month rather than bother - starts sounding good. It just doesn't bother me enough that the clock says 8am, when it's really only 7am still, it's so easy to mentally deduct 1 hour each time I look, rather that work up the effort to walk to the clock and dick with the buttons. Maybe when the clock gets a remote control.
One good reason for this move by Bush, could be the adoption of Windows Longhorn, because now your past OS's won't automatically know and adjust to the correct dailight savings time, and instead bug you in middle of september! You gotta give the guy credit for trying to boost the economy by any means necessary, but how about adopting the metric system once and for all, for Pete's sake.
Bashing heads against walls is what Gandhi and his followers did, what Rosa Parks did, what Nelson Mandela did, and what you should do too when tempted to say "I welcome our new insect overlords." It does not mean giving up hope, but it means willing to sacrifice yourself. Sometimes it doesn't work out, like for the jews at Masada, or for the chinese students at Tien An Men square, but it's still the right way to be, because what's life worth without freedom? Only a person that fights for his principles is truly alive, said somebody once. To counter that and lighten up a bit, somebody else said "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."
I still prefer using classic mozilla (writing this inside mozilla 1.8 beta) to firefox, because last time I checked firefox (been a while), it was so low on features. It's like Gnome's Nautilus compared to KDE's Konqueror when it comes to file managers, I don't care how much marketing buzz I hear. I don't want to add a zillion plugins for Firefox from who knows what script kiddie just to get a standard functionality working that the seamonkey mozilla already has. To me the richness if menus and features that standard mozilla has is not overwhelming, please don't simplify it for me. I also like email and composer and addressbook being bundled, and have used Netscap/Mozilla's email ever since I know my mind, ever since Win31/Eudora/Trumpet Winsock. I guess they'd rather have everyone keep their email on Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail servers, with occasional purges, because your emails are your legal documents. Whatever happened to Carnivor that logs all emails? Isn't that good enough anymore? I guess it's a lot easier if they get to purge your old emails for you themselves, because carnivor's storage requirements are getting too expensive.
I guess the mozilla foundation is finally like Redhat, being taken over, and soon they'll release a statement, like Redhat's CEO did during the Fedora Core 1 release, saying "don't use our product, if you're a desktop user you're better off using Windows." Any leader of any company should get capital punishment for saying something like that. It's one thing to acknowledge the competition having released a superior product, but you still should say, customers, we would like you to use your product anyway, and we're doing everything we can to make it better and catch up to the competition.
Mozilla composer smells already dead, nobody really cares, I haven't used it myself, but expect Thunderbird to fall to the side, which everyone would care about, a lot. Good thing about email is that it's easy to toss together a pop3 client, and you have a million choices.
Has been humming along just fine is no guarantee that it will be running along just fine. If anything, corporations with money cannot be trusted. If you just let them run rampant, one monopoly would end up controlling the internet, because they'd buy out everyone else, then blackmail you to the limit if you want to use it. Government needs to interfere in free trade, all the time, and regulate things like natural monopolies, or unnatural ones. Are you gonna trust the US government to do that?
No kidding man - I just got a job, but I'm not signing this contract because I have a problem with this noncompete clause. You might as well just walk out the door right then and there, you just achieved getting fired on your first day on a job. Congratulations.
On the other hand a company has the right to ask you to keep his trade secrets secret, and part of that is noncompete agreements. (By the way bitching to your wife about politics that happened at work does not constitute a trade secret violation.) Even one year doesn't sound like a lot in this sense, but you still need some kind of balance. You can't hold someone hostage for 20 years because he can't get a job in his field of expertise, because it's automatically competition to you. While patents expire in 20 years and become public domain, when it comes to people you don't have 20 years to "age" their knowledge of your secrets to the point where it should become somewhat equivalent to public domain.
Also, there is such a thing as a skillset, some common foundation of knowledge that you absorbed into your being that you apply to solve problems. Though there is such a thing as a company investing into a person, and educating them even in basic knowledge, in hopes that they will retain that investment, the company doesn't own that, the company doesn't own a person's problem solving abilities, companies don't own people.
A person similarly invests in a company, in hopes that he will retain his investment, but if a company is free to fire a person at a moment's notice, for any reason, the so is a person free to leave, at a moments notice, for any reason. If you want them to stay, have them sign a contract, to stay, but that too is a double-edged sword.
You make very good points. Freedom is an absolute good relative only to itself. Still, there is a need for government, a need for limiting freedoms, which is what 'to govern' means. If nothing else, for simple sustainability reasons because we live in the real world. Not being allowed to have more than 1 child? What kind of freedom is that?
Still, as you point out, everyone has their right for inner, personal freedom, to be the way they want to be, especially when it doesn't affect others too much. As an example, think of the pygmies and the bushmans from the kalahari desert getting deported into urban gettoes, cuz we know what's better for them. We 'modernize' them. I too say if they wanna live in the desert, let them live in the desert. That's where their heart belongs. There is nothing more heart wrenching, then an old bushman, sitting behind chicken wire in the ghetto, looking out toward the desert and longing to be there, singing his old songs and crying. Are you gonna argue to the bushmans, that look, you'll have central heating and air conditioning, and all the water you can dream of, come move into the city, it's better for you? And him saying no, I want to teach my grandchildren how to find and dig up a hibernating frog from the sand, and be able to drink, nasty water, but drink in the tradition my great grandfathers did.
There is a fine subtle tone in the semantics of the chinese prime minister that you can pick up - "he believes a chinese person would like an education first." He didn't say "needs one," or "should have one," but, "would like one." Also he didn't say "he knows," but "he believes," meaning it's a given he could be dead wrong. Just like the bushman "would like to" stay the way he is and teach his grandkids, so you let him, but in case he asks to learn calculus and classical music, doesn't he have the right to? Culture is a very important thing, but even above a persons own culture, comes his own inner freedom, first, his own right to be the way he wants to be, as long as it doesn't affect others too much. Even the Amish recognize this part.
It's always a balance, ying-yang, personal freedom vs. affecting others with your freedom. For instance, I heard dads saying "I don't want teachers in school teaching my kids how to be gay, I'd prefer having my own grandkids instead." Now all people who happen to be gay, we let them, because it doesn't affect us that much, compared to what an important, core issue to their inner freedom being gay is, but to say that it doesn't affect us at all, that would be a bit of overstatement.
Yes, politicians love to present us with false choices, but in principle, in everything, in every action, there is still a choice. Ying-yang is never false, because there are always at least two sides to every story. Every story. Knowing and fully absorbing both sides is the only way to retain balance. Whenever you hear a bit of another side to a truth that you've held practically to a dogma status, you should be very happy to be able to listen, and soak it up, but that doesn't mean you abandoned your previous stance. It doesn't mean "either one or the other," but more like a little bit of both, even when you "make choices."
You make good choices by being fully aware of the other side, and being careful, that while you live with your polarized, "agrressive" choice that you just took, you keep the other side in mind and never forget about it, and be ready to pull back, and swing back to the other side, at a moment's notice, when you've overswung too much to this side. Oscillate near the balance point. You can't live life by doing nothing ever, and whenever you do something, you're automatically swinging to one side of some story.
Sometimes life requires that you swing quite a bit to "the other side," trying to balance a tide that's way over your means, and you're reduced to a status of "bashing your head against some wall." That's what the current resigning supreme court judge did, threw in the towel, protest. Bashed her head against a
"why would deregulating the communication industry help broadband"
- Actually, the recent Supreme Court decision to not force local carriers to share their digital lines such as cable or dsl lines, and unlike analog phone lines that are truly deregulated, will help these companies invest into laying lots of fiber, thinking it's gonna be theirs forever. Then a new decision from the Supreme Court, and the government shows up with eminent domain ideas and seizes their lines, and makes them a public good. It's like with patents and other monopolistic things - you get an initial period where you get your return, then it's all deregulated in your face, for the benefit of everyone.
- Another way to help this broadband agenda and lay lots of fiber, all the way to the home, is to start up a company that lives on borrowed cash, do a stock offer on this company, take the investor's money, lay it down into fiber, then run the company into the ground into bankruptcy, and cancel the stock of the investors, then show up with a "real" company and purchase up the remaining assets at a bargain price. This has been done quite a few times, and this is the preferable way the FCC/Corporate America would like to go, if only those investors weren't so scared to invest after the dotcom bust! Maybe Bush with his Social Security reform could nudge them into investing? How about a tax reform where you won't pay as much direct taxes, but we'll make it mandatory to invest. At least this way you won't know for sure your money is gone as soon as you bought stock on it, and you get "hope" in exchange, just like with the lottery, and unlike with regular taxes. Dazzling with bullshit, giving lots of "hope" could do great things to moral and consumer confidence. Cuz songs like 'if I was a wealthy girl, I'd have all the money in the world, my cash flow would never ever end" just ain't helping the stock market, man, the money just ain't pouring in as it used to. Ah, those good old days!
Yes, morality and fittest are orthogonal in their purist sense. But in a pragmatic sense, it's not that simple. As far as humans are concerned, a human being gets nowhere without culture, without society, without the 'all for one, one for all.' And the glue that holds all this together is called morality. Morality is always an issue between the self, the one, and the interest of the "all." The difficulty always happens when the "one", or at least a subgroup, is not willing to invest in the "all", gaining temporary advantage over the rest. As a consequence, when the moral system fully breaks down and everyone-for-themselves-dog-eat-dog becomes the rule, they all become collectively "unfit." There are no "fit" people today on the planet that have survived without morality in their past - anywhere you look, there is human cooperation, human culture, and in every culture there are rules, taboos, morals - it's simply impossible incomprehensible and unworkable any other way. Unlike ants or bees, that have their morals hard wired and cannot overcome them, with humans, at any point in time there are many dissidents that break the rules. The reasoning is that if only I break the rules, but the rest won't, it's still gonna be workable - which is true. The problem happens when everyone breaks it, based on this reasoning. This is an unstable system, and in every moral system there is a feedback mechanism, where a little breaking here and there is fine, but when it gets out of hand, the feedback mechanism equilibrates it back. One powerful feedback mechanism sustaining morality is "reputation," and how others treat you based on how you act. You have to be careful in distinguishing "reputation" from "prejudice." Reputation is workable in small villages, where everyone knows you, or in societies such as Japan that are very stiff, but there is no such thing as reputation in the US, because the only thing that matters is how much money you're sitting on, and often the best way to obtain that is through immoral ways. Credit rating or criminal record/prison doesn't even come close to the effectiveness reputation used to have, let alone you get to have good credit if you're a bloodsucker, and lawmakers/governments court you because you have money, can bring jobs, can invest, etc. Let's not even start with the legal system, and the "morality" of lawyers these days - their morality is only a matter of cash. Money is a great universal unit to measure value, but it doesn't work well when it comes to moral values, reputation and "correct peer pressure" used to be much more effective. Unfortunately even peer pressure is perverted into pushing one to have the fanciest cars, hippest gadgets, and not to keep you moral. I blame the media and somewhat the school system for that - it's their job to spread the seeds of culture. There is a fine difference/balance between keeping morals and forcing to conform to a norm thus taking away their freedom - in a properly educated world people could be free and tolerant, yet uphold some kind of principles of morality, and peer pressure each other into sticking to them. Lawyers aren't doing a good job of it. Unfortunately, the only peer pressure existing these days is to "make money", and the sleazier and nastier you can get around to exploiting others in this process, the more highly you are regarded. Money is a very pragmatic solution to everyday problems of people handling their own business, living their lives according to rules, but still, when it comes to measuring and regulating overall morality, it doesn't function well. The biggest problem with money is that it's not a stable system, it aids the concentration of power, and therefore automatically exploitation and abuse of it, where peer pressure and reputation no longer function, and instead the "I welcome our new... overlords" is the only way to survive, for a while.
The original topic here was sustainability, and the Chinese gov't being out to dumb their own people down to be able to tell at all what the concept means. I answered those things - the Chinese, unlike the US newstainment media-culture, are not out to dumb themselves down. And as far as sustainability goes, they have a pretty good record, even if they are dealing with the biggest sustainability problem on the planet - too many people. They are dealing with it.
Yes, I agree freedom is extremely important, but there is that other side to it too, that you heard. To every dogma, to every principle, whenever you hear the other side with some truth to it, it's worth considering and soaking up the thoughts. You could say what's an education worth if you're not allowed to be free even after you've got your education - and you'd be right. To every story there are two sides, ying-yang. For one, how can you be free, when the government tells you you can't have more than one kid? What kind of freedom is that? Yet, what would be the sustainability cost of such freedom, in China with 1.3 billion mouths to feed?
"Freedom is that people be secure in their person and property and not be forced by the government to do anything to their bodies or give up their possessions. Freedom is not about what a government can do for people, but what the government can't do to people."
Yeah, right, give me a break - as opposed to China, the US doesn't have eminent domain, - the US government respects your property. Yeah, eminent domain is not the reason why the only sane supreme court judge threw in the towel, and now all you have left is spineless sheep that never stick up a pole and not budge from their position, and evaluate things for themselves, but instead get herded whichever way the wind blows from the White House. The original intent of the Founding Fathers was of a gov't with division of power, between the President, Court System, and Congress, neither of the 3 having full authority over the other, and having to stare each other down and come to deadlocks if that's what it takes. Where is that balance these days? Also the secret service can't just pull up to your house without a warrant, like it can in China, and take you away, on suspicion that you could be a terrorist, or whatever buzzword they use in China. What's really different anymore in the US from a dictatorship, such as China has. At least, if you must have dictators, have ones that say "a person would rather have an education" than ones that say "don't double-tax dividends."
Nobody, even the article, isn't saying where the bulk of this energy is consumed? Is it the tractor, combine, or insecticide spraying airplane that eats so much gas? Transporting the corn/potato/whatever you wanna digest to the nearby plant? I bet you a lot that isn't it.
I'm guessing the massive portion of the energy (over 90%) is used by the distillation process. It takes tremendous amount of heat to vaporize water and alcohols, for what, to simply precipitate them back down. As a sidenote, in the chemical industry 50% of all energy use is for separation processes, most important being the super energy-hungry distillation. Most fermentation ways to produce alcohol stop at something like 10% concentration, because the bacteria die in too much alcohol - in a sense they pollute themselves to death. Membrane separations, like your body's cells use, could be more energy efficient, if they had membrane technology selective for concentrating up alcohol. The pure water that you buy in stores as artesian mountain-spring water, it's about 1% mountain water blended with locally produced "distilled water." (The 1% is there so they can still claim it's mountain spring water.) The locally produced "distilled water" isn't produced by distillation, that would be humongously expensive, but instead it's produced by reverse osmosis membrane separation, giving you about the same purity at the fraction of the cost. Trouble with alcohol is, that, while it's very easy to find efficient membranes that separate out pure water, it's quite hard to come up with something that keeps the water + rotten/fermented corn gunk on one side, and exudes only pure alcohol on the other, by osmotic pressure.
Like Apple would be a different beast than MS. Frankly, Apple's hip offerings don't entice me - as far as looks and ease of usability goes, I'll take Win98SE any day over a recent Mac.
Back in old Europe, when wars were fought between royalty, you could keep "customs of war" that were not violated, because frankly, it was just a job for the soldiers. After acknowledging defeat by the revolutionaries and the French, the officers of the King of England held a big feast with the French officers - to them it was an ordinary matter. As far as the civilians were concerned, losing a war was like getting ruled by a French royalty in England, compared to an English royalty - as far as their lives were concerned, it was the same kind of hell.
But after WWI, when royalty went out of vogue, civilians started caring, and now you had underground partisans in France, who were pretty much civilians, and you have partisans in Iraq, who are pretty much civilians, no matter how much the media tries to portray them as foreign military infiltrators. It's hard to keep "customs of war" respecting the civilians when the civilians themselves participate in shooting you. In any case, war is fucking war, asking for any behavior from the other side is stupid.
Gone are the days of duels, where someone administers the rules and two people shoot each other down according to principles. These days all you get in night-vision-undercover-ninja-clothed commandoes that go in, shoot you in the back with a silencer and get out, mission accomplished. The only principle is that, mission accomplished, the most efficient way. Don't shoot a person in the back, like they teach in westerns, always face him, look him in the eye, have principles? Yeah, right.
How about not having wars for a change, and coming up with an international forum where things can debated instead? Oh wait.. we already have that, but it doesn't properly serve our interest, so we choose to ignore it. Who's gonna stop us?
Missed the second part, mea culpa, I forgot he was a japanese person, instead of chinese. I don't think that's such a core issue, because the two cultures are very close to each other. You ask any japanese or chinese, and they won't care that much who he was, as opposed to what he was preaching. Does it matter if a black belt is an ethiopian, or a classical music flute player is a japanese?
Even that budget 80's teen movie portrays a chinese elder, in his wisdom, teaching a teen how to be a man. That is the most important step in any kind of sustainability, teaching the next generation, and caring about them, instead of caring only about yourself and what party you will go to this weekend when it's finally Friday-Friday-Friday, and how you'll spend your check-into-cash-payday-advance money you just got. Stick your head in the sand, like just-another-manic-mondays never come.
I don't think you can tinker with music the same way you can tinker with code. You can take and reuse someone else's music - Eminem using Dido's "my tea's gone cold I wonder why I got out of bed alone' - to create something more, but just like with scientific articles, you can quote others, but not really change the original much, just include it as a reference, or critique it, or absorb it in your own derivative work. The original still stands free and clear, and should be a separate entity. Have you heard of release 3.95.23 of Eminem's new song, it's beta status now until enough people test it and find the lyrics or the tune can no longer be tweaked, wow, version 4 just came out? Music is not like code, it gets boring once you heard it enough. Still, small groups of artists can come together, tweak a piece of music, but to the majority of the population, it has to come as a shock, as something sudden and new, just like the punchline of a joke. On the other hand, remember good old folk music? Many people worked on a creation, and maintained it, or even tweaked it and spiced it up here and there.
This is one point that I utterly disagree on. When the chinese prime minister was here, during the Clinton years, and was asked about human rights violations in China, you know what his answer was? He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education. That sentence struck me very much, at the core of my belief system, which was freedom above all. But he's right - after all, what is freedom good for without wisdom, what is freedom good for if you don't know what to do with it? I personally witnessed the fall of communism in the eastern block countries, and the fingerpointing, blaming and lynching of each other that starts whenever people free suddenly "free" and run rampant without self control, because there is no longer a secret service that's watching and comes takes you away. Remember the french revolution and guillotines? A temporary fix could be freedom+religion, fear of God, God is watching instead of the secret service, but the Chinese don't have Gods. Yet their culture is the most outspoken preacher of self control - wax on, wax off - remember? Wouldn't inner self control be a much more dignified way to be a human being, than an external self control, such as secret service or God?
Don't write off the Chinese so easily - they somehow put a stop to the explosive population growth, in a culture that values huge families. As far as sustainability goes, they hold the record - they have maintained a continuous existence for almost longer than any other culture - though heavily violent at first, the philosophies of Confucius and Lao Tzu from millenia ago, that still dominate today, sound very nonviolent and sustainable, even if not perfect - e.g. father as an absolute "tyrant." The Chinese were also not perfect in the sense that they too had an emperor until very recently, corruption, etc., but still, it's worth paying attention to what they are saying. They are not convinced the Taiwanese system that we pump so full of cash and resources to showcase it to them as bait, will lead to good. After all, they know what kind of opium-plague the free market can lead to, that scar in their memory is still very recent. When I see internet censoring stories about them, I'm not fully convinced that it's done simply out of a need to maintain corrupt power, or to keep China from succumbing to the inflow of miseducation and sex-opium-n-rocknroll that you get from the liberated, freemarket, human-rights promoting Clearchannel-RIAA western media.
If you're developping for a single company, solving a single issue at hand, the GPL is no problem, because you can ask money for it, you can only not decide what happens to the code after you get paid, it's out of your hands. But neither do you lose the code, because you can go on doing what you want with it, so it's not like a sale and transfer. So as far as most programmers are concerned, working at a company IT dept, it shouldn't matter that much.
The only issue is when you wish to solve broad problems, where you have many customers at once, and you don't want one customer taking your work and becoming your competitor, selling to your work other customers, when the inital agreement/hope during the code generation phase was that you'd get a full return from all of them, and they won't outcompete you by selling/giving each other your work. Would you have done the same work if you only got the return from one of your customers?
However, if the problems is broad enough, you can start justifying standardization even among competitors, with standards such as ASTM, ISO, IEEE, for the sake of efficiency and interoperability. In such schemes everybody gives up something, but the customer base benefits trememdously. Imagine if all memory manufacturers produced their own proprietary formats? How about harddrives? How about screws? There are opposite examples too, how about motherboard sockets or car parts? When is a 1-click shopping 'invention' generic enough to be called a screw?
Software standards such as Apache or Linux, emerge similarly, where if you come across a problem, you are allowed to look under the hood, and go search for a standard fix, but if one doesn't exist, you are allowed to go ahead and fix your own problem. Being allowed is a BIG deal, because not everyone has months/forever-never to wait on someone else, and if they can't do it themselves, they'd rather hire another programmer if the original who "owns" the product is unwilling, or is acting similar to a blackmailer. Once you do this, fix the problem for yourself, the cost of releasing the fix is nil. You can only talk about opportunity cost, the sales that you lost that you could have had - which is a very vague term. But if the product wasn't "yours" in the first place, you're committing a crime by simply fixing the problem, and instead you're forced to contact your supplier and cross your fingers and hope he will do it for you. This is the key difference between information "goods" and conventional material goods - if you produce a traditional good, if you hand it over, you no longer get to keep it, it's a cost to you. Once information exists, it costs nothing to freely duplicate, the real cost is only the initial generation part, where money can be quite an incentive, or instead of money, trying to fix your own problem.
Imagine if you could duplicate a car-part that broke down on your car by simply beaming over a copy from your neighbour's? By nature, you can do this with information, and this is what DRM-ultracopyright-digital technologies are meant to fix, so you will no longer be able to, because the intellectual property owners want to get paid. Welcome transactional digital age, where every information transfer network packet is handled as a database or bank transaction - it will either transfer and erase original, or not transfer at all. I wonder how they will apply this to your brain, when you try to teach - i.e. transfer information - your kids math, language, literature, culture.
I think information consumption, education in existing knowledge, is at least as important as the creation or generation of new information, because without a good education you only generate crap. Therefore consumption of information such as education, going to a public library, or even listening to music, could be compensated financially, instead of put a break on by lack of funds. Plain english - you should get paid to get an education or for reading a good novel instead of you having to pay for it - it's a worthwhile human a
Slashdot Mirror
How about coming up with an anti-OSS strategy by doing a better job in your profession than what the OSS folks do?
Linus Torvalds stayed away from the ideology bullshit of GPL, he said "let me see the code, gimme something that works." Without such an attitude we'd still be waiting for GNU Hurd, and still debate the ideological merits of open source, while the rest of the world moves on. In the end it is not the rhetoric that wins a debate.
That is not to say that the GPL didn't play the crucial role of keeping the competition from squatting it. MS loves using BSD code, and Apple wouldn't have gotten anywhere if they had to start their OS X kernel from scratch, so they are all like a priests that preach water yet drink wine. It'd be very easy to outdo linux if you could freely squat it, and just add a little bit of benefit to it, and claim that you've got something better, cuz whatever linux has you automatically have it, and then some. You know you love open source too, and even your own developers, when they try to do something new, they don't start from scratch, but they look at some standard way, how others have done it, and improve from there. Human knowledge is like that, none of us starts from scratch with anything, every one of us learns what previous generations came up with, and nobody gets to own that, at least not til now. As Newton put it, it's easy to see farther when you stand on shoulders of giants. Soon none of the 20/20 vision people will be able to afford to climb up on those shoulders, because it will be owned by the blind. You know you love open source too, open knowledge, you just don't like the fact of not being able to make easy money off of it, but having to compete with it. When you are forced to compete, now the sweating starts and you throw all kinds of rhetoric at something that you are unable to surpass as far as customer preference goes. If you could come up with something that pleases the customer, and advance technology instead regressing it by only coming up with schemes whose benefit is extending your reach and control, without giving the customer something valuable in return, yet demanding payment from them nevertheless.
The OSS way is not perfect, because the creators find it hard to feed themselves, but just like a revolution is not perfect, because the participants find it hard to cultivate and harvest their fields while they are off with their scythes and guns trying to fix some injustice. Go argue to them about the value of being able to feed yourself, they know it very well, yet still they are upset, because unlike you, at least they care about justice, fairness, what's right and what's wrong. I don't think OSS would flourish as much if there was true competition and openness in the software field, with "may the best win" instead of "may the one with the nastiest schemes screw everybody else over."
Another study says businesses lose 3 trillion dollars of productivity over people wasting time by talking to each other at work, about their kids, family, baseball, and other such things unrelated to their job. They often do this while they hang around the water fountain or the coffee machine. Solution? We should ban all coffee machines and water fountains to boost the economy.
Licenses are contracts. If they feel like it, they can offer to charge you based on the number of heartbeats you have during a computer game - mandatory pulse monitor wearing required, or the game won't run. If they feel like it, they may may offer to charge you based on which way the wind blows, or the position of stars.
It's your job as a customer to say, you know what, screw you, stick your heart rate monitor up your precious ass, because I'd rather not play under these circumstances. They can offer, nothing wrong with that, but you have to learn how to say no, even when you're addicted.
It becomes a problem when there is a monopoly, and you don't have another supplier to turn to, that will respect you as the customer, instead of dictating you the terms. You can cry foul under such circumstances, and say look, I can't find anybody else.
So what they can do is setup a puppet competitor, that charges more, still, subsidiary of the monopoly, you just can't prove that, and then say, well, here, you have a choice. So what do you do? Now you can't even cry foul.
So you just bend over and touch your toes, and don't keep it tight, cuz the more you fight it, the more it's gonna hurt. Nice and easy. You're getting fucked either way.
Don't forget that before the UN, there was the idea of the League of Nations, and it all could have been done right after WW1, instead of WW2, which may not have even happened. When all the little guys have a forum to come together and collectively denounce some strongass aggressor, they feel a lot more comfortable to stick their heads out and say "No" outloud, because they can back each other. Hitler might have never got anywhere, because the world could have united against him a lot earlier.
Nobody is stopping the US now from invading Iraq, partly because of the terrorist show that's put on, which looks very believable, but still, there is a lot of international buzz, which would not be there without the UN, a forum to come to some kind of consensus.
Let's face it, the US has been the 2nd biggest oil producer in the World, after Saudi Arabia, all the way up to around 2003, and we just freshly ran out of oil to pump, both in Alaska, in the Gulf, and all over the mainland. You can't keep being the 2nd producer under these conditions, the economy is in a dump, and letting foreigners control your oilprices when you have none to rely on domestically, well, that doesn't sound too tasty either. And you could argue that as soon as they smelled that you're hooked and you crave it like a drug, they'd jack your prices through the roof and suck you dry, just like drugdealers do druggies. Still, it doesn't make it right. You could argue Hitler invaded Poland under similar pretenses, cuz he simply wanted what they had, their land, instead of their oil. It's not right.
The correct way to deal with a drug problem is rehabilitation. It's tough, but sooner or later you have to get off the oil addiction, cuz right now you're just postponing it, for another decade, til the oil runs out in Iraq too. What happens then? What happens when there is nobody left to invade, and no oil left on the planet? Whatever happens then, do it now instead, and save some of your reputation.
.. to see 489 of 637 comments on this topic. They say nerds have no people skills. They may not, but they sure do care about people.
I like this post.
That reminds me, when are we going to get rid of the blatant age-discrimination that goes on in the porn industry? Just cuz somebody gets to be over 50 with at least 15 more years of productivity ahead of her, it doesn't mean she should lose her job to some ditsy just-18 fresh-snatch! What happened to equal opportunity employment laws?
Red or blue doesn't matter? Haven't you heard the slogan: "better dead than red"?
I personally am too lazy to change my wrist watches and alarm clocks around, so during the winter I just mentally subtract an hour. What are you actually saving here? Daylight hours, so rush hour traffic doesn't drive in the dark at 7am? It doesn't bother me that the clock says 5pm when it's still 4pm.
I usually just procrastinate until January or February, then I don't have to procrastinate anymore, because the reasoning, that, - if I waited this long, I might as well wait that other month rather than bother - starts sounding good. It just doesn't bother me enough that the clock says 8am, when it's really only 7am still, it's so easy to mentally deduct 1 hour each time I look, rather that work up the effort to walk to the clock and dick with the buttons. Maybe when the clock gets a remote control.
One good reason for this move by Bush, could be the adoption of Windows Longhorn, because now your past OS's won't automatically know and adjust to the correct dailight savings time, and instead bug you in middle of september! You gotta give the guy credit for trying to boost the economy by any means necessary, but how about adopting the metric system once and for all, for Pete's sake.
Bashing heads against walls is what Gandhi and his followers did, what Rosa Parks did, what Nelson Mandela did, and what you should do too when tempted to say "I welcome our new insect overlords." It does not mean giving up hope, but it means willing to sacrifice yourself. Sometimes it doesn't work out, like for the jews at Masada, or for the chinese students at Tien An Men square, but it's still the right way to be, because what's life worth without freedom? Only a person that fights for his principles is truly alive, said somebody once. To counter that and lighten up a bit, somebody else said "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."
I still prefer using classic mozilla (writing this inside mozilla 1.8 beta) to firefox, because last time I checked firefox (been a while), it was so low on features. It's like Gnome's Nautilus compared to KDE's Konqueror when it comes to file managers, I don't care how much marketing buzz I hear.
I don't want to add a zillion plugins for Firefox from who knows what script kiddie just to get a standard functionality working that the seamonkey mozilla already has. To me the richness if menus and features that standard mozilla has is not overwhelming, please don't simplify it for me. I also like email and composer and addressbook being bundled, and have used Netscap/Mozilla's email ever since I know my mind, ever since Win31/Eudora/Trumpet Winsock. I guess they'd rather have everyone keep their email on Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail servers, with occasional purges, because your emails are your legal documents. Whatever happened to Carnivor that logs all emails? Isn't that good enough anymore? I guess it's a lot easier if they get to purge your old emails for you themselves, because carnivor's storage requirements are getting too expensive.
I guess the mozilla foundation is finally like Redhat, being taken over, and soon they'll release a statement, like Redhat's CEO did during the Fedora Core 1 release, saying "don't use our product, if you're a desktop user you're better off using Windows." Any leader of any company should get capital punishment for saying something like that. It's one thing to acknowledge the competition having released a superior product, but you still should say, customers, we would like you to use your product anyway, and we're doing everything we can to make it better and catch up to the competition.
Mozilla composer smells already dead, nobody really cares, I haven't used it myself, but expect Thunderbird to fall to the side, which everyone would care about, a lot. Good thing about email is that it's easy to toss together a pop3 client, and you have a million choices.
Has been humming along just fine is no guarantee that it will be running along just fine. If anything, corporations with money cannot be trusted. If you just let them run rampant, one monopoly would end up controlling the internet, because they'd buy out everyone else, then blackmail you to the limit if you want to use it. Government needs to interfere in free trade, all the time, and regulate things like natural monopolies, or unnatural ones. Are you gonna trust the US government to do that?
No kidding man - I just got a job, but I'm not signing this contract because I have a problem with this noncompete clause. You might as well just walk out the door right then and there, you just achieved getting fired on your first day on a job. Congratulations.
On the other hand a company has the right to ask you to keep his trade secrets secret, and part of that is noncompete agreements. (By the way bitching to your wife about politics that happened at work does not constitute a trade secret violation.) Even one year doesn't sound like a lot in this sense, but you still need some kind of balance. You can't hold someone hostage for 20 years because he can't get a job in his field of expertise, because it's automatically competition to you. While patents expire in 20 years and become public domain, when it comes to people you don't have 20 years to "age" their knowledge of your secrets to the point where it should become somewhat equivalent to public domain.
Also, there is such a thing as a skillset, some common foundation of knowledge that you absorbed into your being that you apply to solve problems. Though there is such a thing as a company investing into a person, and educating them even in basic knowledge, in hopes that they will retain that investment, the company doesn't own that, the company doesn't own a person's problem solving abilities, companies don't own people.
A person similarly invests in a company, in hopes that he will retain his investment, but if a company is free to fire a person at a moment's notice, for any reason, the so is a person free to leave, at a moments notice, for any reason. If you want them to stay, have them sign a contract, to stay, but that too is a double-edged sword.
You make very good points. Freedom is an absolute good relative only to itself. Still, there is a need for government, a need for limiting freedoms, which is what 'to govern' means. If nothing else, for simple sustainability reasons because we live in the real world. Not being allowed to have more than 1 child? What kind of freedom is that?
Still, as you point out, everyone has their right for inner, personal freedom, to be the way they want to be, especially when it doesn't affect others too much. As an example, think of the pygmies and the bushmans from the kalahari desert getting deported into urban gettoes, cuz we know what's better for them. We 'modernize' them. I too say if they wanna live in the desert, let them live in the desert. That's where their heart belongs. There is nothing more heart wrenching, then an old bushman, sitting behind chicken wire in the ghetto, looking out toward the desert and longing to be there, singing his old songs and crying. Are you gonna argue to the bushmans, that look, you'll have central heating and air conditioning, and all the water you can dream of, come move into the city, it's better for you? And him saying no, I want to teach my grandchildren how to find and dig up a hibernating frog from the sand, and be able to drink, nasty water, but drink in the tradition my great grandfathers did.
There is a fine subtle tone in the semantics of the chinese prime minister that you can pick up - "he believes a chinese person would like an education first." He didn't say "needs one," or "should have one," but, "would like one." Also he didn't say "he knows," but "he believes," meaning it's a given he could be dead wrong. Just like the bushman "would like to" stay the way he is and teach his grandkids, so you let him, but in case he asks to learn calculus and classical music, doesn't he have the right to? Culture is a very important thing, but even above a persons own culture, comes his own inner freedom, first, his own right to be the way he wants to be, as long as it doesn't affect others too much. Even the Amish recognize this part.
It's always a balance, ying-yang, personal freedom vs. affecting others with your freedom. For instance, I heard dads saying "I don't want teachers in school teaching my kids how to be gay, I'd prefer having my own grandkids instead." Now all people who happen to be gay, we let them, because it doesn't affect us that much, compared to what an important, core issue to their inner freedom being gay is, but to say that it doesn't affect us at all, that would be a bit of overstatement.
Yes, politicians love to present us with false choices, but in principle, in everything, in every action, there is still a choice. Ying-yang is never false, because there are always at least two sides to every story. Every story. Knowing and fully absorbing both sides is the only way to retain balance. Whenever you hear a bit of another side to a truth that you've held practically to a dogma status, you should be very happy to be able to listen, and soak it up, but that doesn't mean you abandoned your previous stance. It doesn't mean "either one or the other," but more like a little bit of both, even when you "make choices."
You make good choices by being fully aware of the other side, and being careful, that while you live with your polarized, "agrressive" choice that you just took, you keep the other side in mind and never forget about it, and be ready to pull back, and swing back to the other side, at a moment's notice, when you've overswung too much to this side. Oscillate near the balance point. You can't live life by doing nothing ever, and whenever you do something, you're automatically swinging to one side of some story.
Sometimes life requires that you swing quite a bit to "the other side," trying to balance a tide that's way over your means, and you're reduced to a status of "bashing your head against some wall." That's what the current resigning supreme court judge did, threw in the towel, protest. Bashed her head against a
"why would deregulating the communication industry help broadband"
- Actually, the recent Supreme Court decision to not force local carriers to share their digital lines such as cable or dsl lines, and unlike analog phone lines that are truly deregulated, will help these companies invest into laying lots of fiber, thinking it's gonna be theirs forever. Then a new decision from the Supreme Court, and the government shows up with eminent domain ideas and seizes their lines, and makes them a public good. It's like with patents and other monopolistic things - you get an initial period where you get your return, then it's all deregulated in your face, for the benefit of everyone.
- Another way to help this broadband agenda and lay lots of fiber, all the way to the home, is to start up a company that lives on borrowed cash, do a stock offer on this company, take the investor's money, lay it down into fiber, then run the company into the ground into bankruptcy, and cancel the stock of the investors, then show up with a "real" company and purchase up the remaining assets at a bargain price. This has been done quite a few times, and this is the preferable way the FCC/Corporate America would like to go, if only those investors weren't so scared to invest after the dotcom bust! Maybe Bush with his Social Security reform could nudge them into investing? How about a tax reform where you won't pay as much direct taxes, but we'll make it mandatory to invest. At least this way you won't know for sure your money is gone as soon as you bought stock on it, and you get "hope" in exchange, just like with the lottery, and unlike with regular taxes. Dazzling with bullshit, giving lots of "hope" could do great things to moral and consumer confidence. Cuz songs like 'if I was a wealthy girl, I'd have all the money in the world, my cash flow would never ever end" just ain't helping the stock market, man, the money just ain't pouring in as it used to. Ah, those good old days!
Yes, morality and fittest are orthogonal in their purist sense. But in a pragmatic sense, it's not that simple. As far as humans are concerned, a human being gets nowhere without culture, without society, without the 'all for one, one for all.' And the glue that holds all this together is called morality. Morality is always an issue between the self, the one, and the interest of the "all." ... overlords" is the only way to survive, for a while.
The difficulty always happens when the "one", or at least a subgroup, is not willing to invest in the "all", gaining temporary advantage over the rest. As a consequence, when the moral system fully breaks down and everyone-for-themselves-dog-eat-dog becomes the rule, they all become collectively "unfit."
There are no "fit" people today on the planet that have survived without morality in their past - anywhere you look, there is human cooperation, human culture, and in every culture there are rules, taboos, morals - it's simply impossible incomprehensible and unworkable any other way. Unlike ants or bees, that have their morals hard wired and cannot overcome them, with humans, at any point in time there are many dissidents that break the rules. The reasoning is that if only I break the rules, but the rest won't, it's still gonna be workable - which is true. The problem happens when everyone breaks it, based on this reasoning. This is an unstable system, and in every moral system there is a feedback mechanism, where a little breaking here and there is fine, but when it gets out of hand, the feedback mechanism equilibrates it back.
One powerful feedback mechanism sustaining morality is "reputation," and how others treat you based on how you act. You have to be careful in distinguishing "reputation" from "prejudice." Reputation is workable in small villages, where everyone knows you, or in societies such as Japan that are very stiff, but there is no such thing as reputation in the US, because the only thing that matters is how much money you're sitting on, and often the best way to obtain that is through immoral ways. Credit rating or criminal record/prison doesn't even come close to the effectiveness reputation used to have, let alone you get to have good credit if you're a bloodsucker, and lawmakers/governments court you because you have money, can bring jobs, can invest, etc. Let's not even start with the legal system, and the "morality" of lawyers these days - their morality is only a matter of cash. Money is a great universal unit to measure value, but it doesn't work well when it comes to moral values, reputation and "correct peer pressure" used to be much more effective. Unfortunately even peer pressure is perverted into pushing one to have the fanciest cars, hippest gadgets, and not to keep you moral. I blame the media and somewhat the school system for that - it's their job to spread the seeds of culture. There is a fine difference/balance between keeping morals and forcing to conform to a norm thus taking away their freedom - in a properly educated world people could be free and tolerant, yet uphold some kind of principles of morality, and peer pressure each other into sticking to them. Lawyers aren't doing a good job of it. Unfortunately, the only peer pressure existing these days is to "make money", and the sleazier and nastier you can get around to exploiting others in this process, the more highly you are regarded. Money is a very pragmatic solution to everyday problems of people handling their own business, living their lives according to rules, but still, when it comes to measuring and regulating overall morality, it doesn't function well. The biggest problem with money is that it's not a stable system, it aids the concentration of power, and therefore automatically exploitation and abuse of it, where peer pressure and reputation no longer function, and instead the "I welcome our new
The original topic here was sustainability, and the Chinese gov't being out to dumb their own people down to be able to tell at all what the concept means. I answered those things - the Chinese, unlike the US newstainment media-culture, are not out to dumb themselves down. And as far as sustainability goes, they have a pretty good record, even if they are dealing with the biggest sustainability problem on the planet - too many people. They are dealing with it.
Yes, I agree freedom is extremely important, but there is that other side to it too, that you heard. To every dogma, to every principle, whenever you hear the other side with some truth to it, it's worth considering and soaking up the thoughts. You could say what's an education worth if you're not allowed to be free even after you've got your education - and you'd be right. To every story there are two sides, ying-yang.
For one, how can you be free, when the government tells you you can't have more than one kid? What kind of freedom is that? Yet, what would be the sustainability cost of such freedom, in China with 1.3 billion mouths to feed?
"Freedom is that people be secure in their person and property and not be forced by the government to do anything to their bodies or give up their possessions. Freedom is not about what a government can do for people, but what the government can't do to people."
Yeah, right, give me a break - as opposed to China, the US doesn't have eminent domain, - the US government respects your property. Yeah, eminent domain is not the reason why the only sane supreme court judge threw in the towel, and now all you have left is spineless sheep that never stick up a pole and not budge from their position, and evaluate things for themselves, but instead get herded whichever way the wind blows from the White House. The original intent of the Founding Fathers was of a gov't with division of power, between the President, Court System, and Congress, neither of the 3 having full authority over the other, and having to stare each other down and come to deadlocks if that's what it takes. Where is that balance these days?
Also the secret service can't just pull up to your house without a warrant, like it can in China, and take you away, on suspicion that you could be a terrorist, or whatever buzzword they use in China.
What's really different anymore in the US from a dictatorship, such as China has. At least, if you must have dictators, have ones that say "a person would rather have an education" than ones that say "don't double-tax dividends."
Nobody, even the article, isn't saying where the bulk of this energy is consumed? Is it the tractor, combine, or insecticide spraying airplane that eats so much gas? Transporting the corn/potato/whatever you wanna digest to the nearby plant? I bet you a lot that isn't it.
I'm guessing the massive portion of the energy (over 90%) is used by the distillation process. It takes tremendous amount of heat to vaporize water and alcohols, for what, to simply precipitate them back down. As a sidenote, in the chemical industry 50% of all energy use is for separation processes, most important being the super energy-hungry distillation. Most fermentation ways to produce alcohol stop at something like 10% concentration, because the bacteria die in too much alcohol - in a sense they pollute themselves to death. Membrane separations, like your body's cells use, could be more energy efficient, if they had membrane technology selective for concentrating up alcohol. The pure water that you buy in stores as artesian mountain-spring water, it's about 1% mountain water blended with locally produced "distilled water." (The 1% is there so they can still claim it's mountain spring water.) The locally produced "distilled water" isn't produced by distillation, that would be humongously expensive, but instead it's produced by reverse osmosis membrane separation, giving you about the same purity at the fraction of the cost. Trouble with alcohol is, that, while it's very easy to find efficient membranes that separate out pure water, it's quite hard to come up with something that keeps the water + rotten/fermented corn gunk on one side, and exudes only pure alcohol on the other, by osmotic pressure.
Like Apple would be a different beast than MS. Frankly, Apple's hip offerings don't entice me - as far as looks and ease of usability goes, I'll take Win98SE any day over a recent Mac.
Back in old Europe, when wars were fought between royalty, you could keep "customs of war" that were not violated, because frankly, it was just a job for the soldiers. After acknowledging defeat by the revolutionaries and the French, the officers of the King of England held a big feast with the French officers - to them it was an ordinary matter. As far as the civilians were concerned, losing a war was like getting ruled by a French royalty in England, compared to an English royalty - as far as their lives were concerned, it was the same kind of hell.
But after WWI, when royalty went out of vogue, civilians started caring, and now you had underground partisans in France, who were pretty much civilians, and you have partisans in Iraq, who are pretty much civilians, no matter how much the media tries to portray them as foreign military infiltrators. It's hard to keep "customs of war" respecting the civilians when the civilians themselves participate in shooting you. In any case, war is fucking war, asking for any behavior from the other side is stupid.
Gone are the days of duels, where someone administers the rules and two people shoot each other down according to principles. These days all you get in night-vision-undercover-ninja-clothed commandoes that go in, shoot you in the back with a silencer and get out, mission accomplished. The only principle is that, mission accomplished, the most efficient way. Don't shoot a person in the back, like they teach in westerns, always face him, look him in the eye, have principles? Yeah, right.
How about not having wars for a change, and coming up with an international forum where things can debated instead? Oh wait.. we already have that, but it doesn't properly serve our interest, so we choose to ignore it. Who's gonna stop us?
Missed the second part, mea culpa, I forgot he was a japanese person, instead of chinese. I don't think that's such a core issue, because the two cultures are very close to each other. You ask any japanese or chinese, and they won't care that much who he was, as opposed to what he was preaching. Does it matter if a black belt is an ethiopian, or a classical music flute player is a japanese?
Even that budget 80's teen movie portrays a chinese elder, in his wisdom, teaching a teen how to be a man. That is the most important step in any kind of sustainability, teaching the next generation, and caring about them, instead of caring only about yourself and what party you will go to this weekend when it's finally Friday-Friday-Friday, and how you'll spend your check-into-cash-payday-advance money you just got. Stick your head in the sand, like just-another-manic-mondays never come.
I don't think you can tinker with music the same way you can tinker with code. You can take and reuse someone else's music - Eminem using Dido's "my tea's gone cold I wonder why I got out of bed alone' - to create something more, but just like with scientific articles, you can quote others, but not really change the original much, just include it as a reference, or critique it, or absorb it in your own derivative work. The original still stands free and clear, and should be a separate entity. Have you heard of release 3.95.23 of Eminem's new song, it's beta status now until enough people test it and find the lyrics or the tune can no longer be tweaked, wow, version 4 just came out? Music is not like code, it gets boring once you heard it enough. Still, small groups of artists can come together, tweak a piece of music, but to the majority of the population, it has to come as a shock, as something sudden and new, just like the punchline of a joke. On the other hand, remember good old folk music? Many people worked on a creation, and maintained it, or even tweaked it and spiced it up here and there.
This is one point that I utterly disagree on. When the chinese prime minister was here, during the Clinton years, and was asked about human rights violations in China, you know what his answer was? He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education. That sentence struck me very much, at the core of my belief system, which was freedom above all. But he's right - after all, what is freedom good for without wisdom, what is freedom good for if you don't know what to do with it? I personally witnessed the fall of communism in the eastern block countries, and the fingerpointing, blaming and lynching of each other that starts whenever people free suddenly "free" and run rampant without self control, because there is no longer a secret service that's watching and comes takes you away. Remember the french revolution and guillotines? A temporary fix could be freedom+religion, fear of God, God is watching instead of the secret service, but the Chinese don't have Gods. Yet their culture is the most outspoken preacher of self control - wax on, wax off - remember? Wouldn't inner self control be a much more dignified way to be a human being, than an external self control, such as secret service or God?
Don't write off the Chinese so easily - they somehow put a stop to the explosive population growth, in a culture that values huge families. As far as sustainability goes, they hold the record - they have maintained a continuous existence for almost longer than any other culture - though heavily violent at first, the philosophies of Confucius and Lao Tzu from millenia ago, that still dominate today, sound very nonviolent and sustainable, even if not perfect - e.g. father as an absolute "tyrant." The Chinese were also not perfect in the sense that they too had an emperor until very recently, corruption, etc., but still, it's worth paying attention to what they are saying. They are not convinced the Taiwanese system that we pump so full of cash and resources to showcase it to them as bait, will lead to good. After all, they know what kind of opium-plague the free market can lead to, that scar in their memory is still very recent. When I see internet censoring stories about them, I'm not fully convinced that it's done simply out of a need to maintain corrupt power, or to keep China from succumbing to the inflow of miseducation and sex-opium-n-rocknroll that you get from the liberated, freemarket, human-rights promoting Clearchannel-RIAA western media.
If you're developping for a single company, solving a single issue at hand, the GPL is no problem, because you can ask money for it, you can only not decide what happens to the code after you get paid, it's out of your hands. But neither do you lose the code, because you can go on doing what you want with it, so it's not like a sale and transfer. So as far as most programmers are concerned, working at a company IT dept, it shouldn't matter that much.
The only issue is when you wish to solve broad problems, where you have many customers at once, and you don't want one customer taking your work and becoming your competitor, selling to your work other customers, when the inital agreement/hope during the code generation phase was that you'd get a full return from all of them, and they won't outcompete you by selling/giving each other your work. Would you have done the same work if you only got the return from one of your customers?
However, if the problems is broad enough, you can start justifying standardization even among competitors, with standards such as ASTM, ISO, IEEE, for the sake of efficiency and interoperability. In such schemes everybody gives up something, but the customer base benefits trememdously. Imagine if all memory manufacturers produced their own proprietary formats? How about harddrives? How about screws? There are opposite examples too, how about motherboard sockets or car parts? When is a 1-click shopping 'invention' generic enough to be called a screw?
Software standards such as Apache or Linux, emerge similarly, where if you come across a problem, you are allowed to look under the hood, and go search for a standard fix, but if one doesn't exist, you are allowed to go ahead and fix your own problem. Being allowed is a BIG deal, because not everyone has months/forever-never to wait on someone else, and if they can't do it themselves, they'd rather hire another programmer if the original who "owns" the product is unwilling, or is acting similar to a blackmailer. Once you do this, fix the problem for yourself, the cost of releasing the fix is nil. You can only talk about opportunity cost, the sales that you lost that you could have had - which is a very vague term. But if the product wasn't "yours" in the first place, you're committing a crime by simply fixing the problem, and instead you're forced to contact your supplier and cross your fingers and hope he will do it for you. This is the key difference between information "goods" and conventional material goods - if you produce a traditional good, if you hand it over, you no longer get to keep it, it's a cost to you. Once information exists, it costs nothing to freely duplicate, the real cost is only the initial generation part, where money can be quite an incentive, or instead of money, trying to fix your own problem.
Imagine if you could duplicate a car-part that broke down on your car by simply beaming over a copy from your neighbour's? By nature, you can do this with information, and this is what DRM-ultracopyright-digital technologies are meant to fix, so you will no longer be able to, because the intellectual property owners want to get paid. Welcome transactional digital age, where every information transfer network packet is handled as a database or bank transaction - it will either transfer and erase original, or not transfer at all. I wonder how they will apply this to your brain, when you try to teach - i.e. transfer information - your kids math, language, literature, culture.
I think information consumption, education in existing knowledge, is at least as important as the creation or generation of new information, because without a good education you only generate crap. Therefore consumption of information such as education, going to a public library, or even listening to music, could be compensated financially, instead of put a break on by lack of funds. Plain english - you should get paid to get an education or for reading a good novel instead of you having to pay for it - it's a worthwhile human a