Fuck entertainment, and fuck those who would take away our freedom to learn and work. Open Source or not, fuck DRM.
Because in order to care about software and (through a somewhat vague leap) education you have to say "Fuck entertainment?"
Because entertainment and education never remotely intersect? Because somehow allowing DRM in entertainment fields will prevent it becoming used in software/education?
Seriously. What the hell? DRM is bad everywhere.
Also, it's less of a do-or-die issue in software because there is no sweeping "Let's make all software DRM'd" movement. It's up to individual companies/groups whether to DRM individual software products.
The music/entertainment industries, however, MUST, in order to make DRM work for them at all, push all or almost all entertainment purchasing through DRM'd channels. Thus, the ongoing RIAA and MPAA campaigns.
Again, not that your concerns aren't potentially valid in a post-webpocalyptic dystopia. But right now, the strongest efforts at pushing DRM are in the movie and recording industries, and those revenues are solidly entertainment focused.
Gee whiz! Yes, these technologies can be used in involved hypothetical scenarios to aid in censorship and in stopping whistleblowing!
Hey, how come my PlaysForSure doesn't anymore?
DRM is bad. No questions. But right now, the primary issue is ownership of licensed media, not government/corporate censorship. Because, realistically, it's being used for media ownership control, and not for censorship.
Again... I'm not saying that none of these technologies don't have potential, down-the-road censorship applications.
I'm saying that, right now, this is about protecting music and movie revenue (or enhancing it) by driving consumers into specific channels for purchasing music. RIGHT NOW (and for the forseeable future) this is an ownership issue and a fair use issue, not a censorship issue.
Also, you're shoving huge world-wide changesets into single steps here. First, we get EVERY CONSUMER DEVICE IN THE WORLD moved to a trusted computing platform. Note that TC has utterly no foothold in commodity PCs or laptops currently.
Second, we utterly remove all analog (and, I'm presuming, non-DRM digital) recording devices from the planet. Also preventing people from building and distributing new ones.
Also... seriously, get a tinfoil hat, dude. I'm no fan of Vista, but the driver issues have not actually been due to DRM or preparing the way for TC. They've been the result of sensible privilege management being applied to a system that ran everything as admin, and other technical issues.
We'd be missing the point if DRM was primarily (or even AT ALL) used as a censorship tool currently. But it's not. Partly because a rebellious reporter would presumably have enough sense to release the report in a format not immediately susceptible to DRM takedown. And in your second example... un-DRMing the document is the FIRST NECESSARY STEP in leaking the DRM'd document. Otherwise, it won't be readable by unauthorized computers. Like, say, everyone you want to read it.
Hospitals with licensed programs are an issue... but not in this way. Not a single program vital to the functioning of a hospital just hard shuts down when the license expires. The issue is that the hospital stops getting updates, stops being able to get support for maintenance issues, etc.
People give a fuck about music and movies because, like it or not, entertainment is an important part of human life. Reading, watching movies and television, etc. are part of our engagement with our own and other cultures. And documentaries exist. Humor with political or philosophical elements exists.
Also... frankly, this IS about piracy. It isn't actually about censorship or corporate whistleblowing or shutting down hospitals; it's about corporations trying to cripple potential uses of media in order to try and force pirates through their media channels. It's about entertainment revenue, deal with it.
I guess if they were traitors, as opposed to just being out-in-the-open "The Enemy." It's more like this:
Sheeps: Hello! We are sheeps! We enjoy frolicing, not being eaten, and grass!
New Sheep (that looks suspiciously like a wolf with a sheepskin draped over it): Hello, other sheeps! I have brought you hollandaise sauce! It is good for bathing your delicious rumps!
It's up to us to say "Hey! You plan to eat us! Kicking begins now!"
Any coalition that involves Sony is bound to be doing something idiotic to try and keep control of something they just sold you.
Then again, sometimes the database contains all songs that were present in the playlist at some point.
And in Amarok's case, it most definitely does. It's got a big focus on collection management (which, honestly, makes it a pretty bad fit for a netbook, where I'd be much more inclined to go for something like Beep or even moc (Music On Command-line)). You're probably not going to want to waste the RAM or the cycles to run MySQL just for an MP3 player on your eee, but it's worth it in desktop land. With MySQL as the backup, on a 1.4 gigahertz system with 1 gig of RAM, Amarok is not only snappy, but not adding significantly to processor/RAM load. And that's even when I do something moronic to lag IT the hell down (Like put 4300 songs into the playlist at once).
But if it's default install, then it's definitely using SQLite, which produced bad, bad results for me that looked exactly like the UI being monstrously slow. Because the blocking happens any time you're doing anything with the collection of songs, which is like 90% of the time.
I'm well aware of the code overhead involved here, but the Amarok guys should have just embedded a database into the software. Granted, my collection is large... but it's not off the edge of reason, and Amarok slowed down around the 1000-2000 songs imported point.
But, to get it actually accepted into the code base... one would assume you'd submit as a patch. Which would be read by whoever does the merging for the project. And which, thus, would be caught as malicious, or else would be kicked back as obfuscated. They'd have to make the code look exactly like functional code that does a good thing, while really being evil. Maybe not impossible, but damn hard.
I'm addressing a side-point here, but what's your database backend on Amarok?
I was having slowdowns, crashes, and basically experiencing torment of the slowdown kind every single goddamn time I ran Amarok. Then I realized (via the readsing, not the logicsing, full disclosure here) that this was all due to the data on those hundreds, nay, thousandillions of tracks being managed in a freaking SQLite file-based database. Since I was already running MySQL on my box for other reasons, it took three minutes to fix the problem. Now, it purrs like a dream (as long as I don't do something retarded like add 4800 tracks to one giant playlist by drag and drop. Like I just did. D'oh).
It may just be that Amarok is too heavy on its own, after all. But then, your platform is designed as a lightweight one; I'm not sure it's fair to expect full-featured music-manager type software to run smoothly on a tiny netbook.
To throw my oar in, though... I do with certain things (namely, adding files to a damn playlist) weren't entirely UI blocking. It's fine with a sane number of tracks, but it seems to me you could fork off a process or something to deal with large changes in state, and just lock the parts of the UI involved.
Again. The question of whether they fulfill that purpose is certainly open for debate. I mean, I've been stopped and harassed to no purpose by the police myself.
On the other hand, there are serial killers in jail or executed now that operated in Sarasota while I lived there, also on account of the police.
"The Police" is too large a concept to be simply across-the-board condemned or sainted.
Addition: The violent crime comment is relevant because we're talking about guns/police here... Because even Soldier of Fortune isn't going to claim that private gun ownership is the solution to white collar crime (although it's fun to imagine it;-)
The purpose of the police is to protect people. Whether they fall short of that goal or not, that's the point.
And when we're talking about violent crime, I'm correct. True, embezzlement and other white-collar crime is motivated by greed, but by and large, you don't rob a liquor store if you're wealthy. You don't burglarize houses if you're making a comfortable living, or even just a reasonable one.
Mod parent hilarious.
Also, p. is the symbol for ruples in Belarus. There's also a p looking thing for Cuban pesos.
Not really any A's, though.
$Qå...fÂ¥ is probably stretching it too far, though. (It's Sony, if it's not obvious).
I put to you that both liberal thinker and leftist here are essentially undefined terms carrying political charge.
Also, wow, this comes out of left field. It's entirely possible to be religious and liberal (in classic, modern, and Crystal Pepsi flavors), or to be Atheist and not liberal.
There is a significant contingent in the Libertarian party that aligns itself strongly for "If you're on my property, I can shoots you."
Usually, of course, Libertarians allow that the police and courts are legitimate functions of government (also generally roads, for some reason). There are Libertarians the believe in the police being replaced by either a privatized poice force or with armed citizenry.
I guess this all boils down to "Some people who still acknowledge that government has some minimal functions, don't believe police are in those minimal functions."
In the long term, with the alleviation of the crippling poverty and horrible societal conditions that drive 90% of crime.
Or, depending on the liberal, with a gun that's not an assault rifle, that he waited 10 to 12 days for, and that he has a permit for. Shotguns being better for home defense than assault rifles for said purpose anyway.
I personally don't have any problem with the "socially liberal" part of Libertarianism, when not taken to extremes. But I do feel that they're primarily a tool; they've evolved as the libertarian leadership, who are primarily concerned with economic deregulation as a means to higher profit, tries to reach out to fringe groups that have little or no common cause economically, but whose agenda doesn't conflict with the core Libertarian principles. Because that's what gives them the numbers to do anything.
It doesn't hurt that it's easy to convince stoners and the crazy end of gun nuts*** that an oversimplified model of the economic system is valid.
***(and I say this as someone who supports private gun ownership and goes to the range on occasion - there's a level of a-rational discourse at a very broad level in the field)
I'd actually declare a moratorium on the use of liberal (or conservative), at least without some sort of qualifier on the front (socially, for instance. I'm also not sure that "economically liberal" has any real defined meaning in today's society).
And Libertarianism is the merger of laissez-faire economics with extreme minimalist social legislation. Which is one step on each side from anarchy, which is lack of any government.
Ayn Rand is crap, I mean, objectivism, which is a philosophy that has as much to do with liberal and enlightenment ideas as an elephant has to do with a mouse. That is, completely unrelated, but thrown in the same story a lot. She preaches against one of the few core values shared by almost all enlightenment thinkers, that being altruism.
As with many terms in the current political environment, liberal has ceased to function. It's used as hate speech by self-defined conservatives (basically as a brand for anyone they're against, without any meaning or defined characteristics) and generally avoided by serious speakers/thinkers on the middle to left of the political debate because of its status as loaded word. Them McCoys done did poison the well, ayup.
They do only compete in these niche areas, it's true. But they're still competing in those niches on a level field, upgrade-wise.
I'm not sure on the graphics cards (I believe the Mac Pro just has an PCIE 2.0 slot). Apple does sell cards for higher than average list price, true, and I'm not sure what has driver support in OSX, but I'm not sure how much of that is Apple's fault.
I do think that it's not acknowledged enough that a lot of Apple's vaunted "It just works" comes from the fact that they support a very limited range of hardware, and thus can (and do) do 90+% of their driver development.
Yeah... except that people do care. Maybe people aren't switching en masse out of hand, but Mac's percentage of the market has been rising, and (anecdotal evidence, yada yada) I know several people who've made the switch already, and several others who are just waiting for the end of their current computer's useful lifetime. Not that Mac is going to suddenly overwhelm the PC market, but it's not infeasible to compete with and/or overthrow monopolies, just hard. Plus, the likelihood of Dell/HP killing themselves isn't really small enough to discount.
Also, people don't actually buy computers for Windows. In fact, if Vista showed anything, it's that people buy computers FOR THE COMPUTER. If the OS makes it look more likely that the computer will be buggy, well, that will inhibit growth.
A lot of Mac's decisions do irk me, but I also feel that I have to point out that they're close to being as upgradeable as the PC in each product subcategory. Their laptop isn't particularly locked down by laptop standards, although it does lack a fscking manual eject on the CD-ROM*. The iMac is at least as upgradable as Gateway's or Sony's "Computer + monitor," and isn't a piece of crap, to boot. The Mini... well, the Mini is locked down, but it's also half the size of the Shuttle mini cases. The Mac Pro... I've not looked at it, but it seems upgradeable enough.
* Off topic, but holy crap I hate that there's no way to physically force the Mac laptops to give back your CD if it can't recognize that it has it.
Hmmm... but is "Lisp without the macro facility" really Lispish?
Yes, Perl shares anonymous first class functions. But so do JavaScript and an number of other languages. What everyone talks about as the defining feature of Lisp is programmatic redefinition of the program at runtime. While you can theoretically do this in Perl, it's so far from being easy that I don't think it can really be called a language feature. Add to that Perl's incredible verbosity and plurality of specific features...
I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can program Perl like it's a crippled version of Lisp, but only by ignoring a great deal of the language's basic structure.
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Because in order to care about software and (through a somewhat vague leap) education you have to say "Fuck entertainment?"
Because entertainment and education never remotely intersect? Because somehow allowing DRM in entertainment fields will prevent it becoming used in software/education?
Seriously. What the hell? DRM is bad everywhere.
Also, it's less of a do-or-die issue in software because there is no sweeping "Let's make all software DRM'd" movement. It's up to individual companies/groups whether to DRM individual software products.
The music/entertainment industries, however, MUST, in order to make DRM work for them at all, push all or almost all entertainment purchasing through DRM'd channels. Thus, the ongoing RIAA and MPAA campaigns.
Again, not that your concerns aren't potentially valid in a post-webpocalyptic dystopia. But right now, the strongest efforts at pushing DRM are in the movie and recording industries, and those revenues are solidly entertainment focused.
Gee whiz! Yes, these technologies can be used in involved hypothetical scenarios to aid in censorship and in stopping whistleblowing!
Hey, how come my PlaysForSure doesn't anymore?
DRM is bad. No questions. But right now, the primary issue is ownership of licensed media, not government/corporate censorship. Because, realistically, it's being used for media ownership control, and not for censorship.
Again... I'm not saying that none of these technologies don't have potential, down-the-road censorship applications.
I'm saying that, right now, this is about protecting music and movie revenue (or enhancing it) by driving consumers into specific channels for purchasing music. RIGHT NOW (and for the forseeable future) this is an ownership issue and a fair use issue, not a censorship issue.
Also, you're shoving huge world-wide changesets into single steps here. First, we get EVERY CONSUMER DEVICE IN THE WORLD moved to a trusted computing platform. Note that TC has utterly no foothold in commodity PCs or laptops currently.
Second, we utterly remove all analog (and, I'm presuming, non-DRM digital) recording devices from the planet. Also preventing people from building and distributing new ones.
Also... seriously, get a tinfoil hat, dude. I'm no fan of Vista, but the driver issues have not actually been due to DRM or preparing the way for TC. They've been the result of sensible privilege management being applied to a system that ran everything as admin, and other technical issues.
We'd be missing the point if DRM was primarily (or even AT ALL) used as a censorship tool currently. But it's not. Partly because a rebellious reporter would presumably have enough sense to release the report in a format not immediately susceptible to DRM takedown. And in your second example... un-DRMing the document is the FIRST NECESSARY STEP in leaking the DRM'd document. Otherwise, it won't be readable by unauthorized computers. Like, say, everyone you want to read it.
Hospitals with licensed programs are an issue... but not in this way. Not a single program vital to the functioning of a hospital just hard shuts down when the license expires. The issue is that the hospital stops getting updates, stops being able to get support for maintenance issues, etc.
People give a fuck about music and movies because, like it or not, entertainment is an important part of human life. Reading, watching movies and television, etc. are part of our engagement with our own and other cultures. And documentaries exist. Humor with political or philosophical elements exists.
Also... frankly, this IS about piracy. It isn't actually about censorship or corporate whistleblowing or shutting down hospitals; it's about corporations trying to cripple potential uses of media in order to try and force pirates through their media channels. It's about entertainment revenue, deal with it.
I guess if they were traitors, as opposed to just being out-in-the-open "The Enemy." It's more like this:
It's up to us to say "Hey! You plan to eat us! Kicking begins now!"
Any coalition that involves Sony is bound to be doing something idiotic to try and keep control of something they just sold you.
And in Amarok's case, it most definitely does. It's got a big focus on collection management (which, honestly, makes it a pretty bad fit for a netbook, where I'd be much more inclined to go for something like Beep or even moc (Music On Command-line)). You're probably not going to want to waste the RAM or the cycles to run MySQL just for an MP3 player on your eee, but it's worth it in desktop land. With MySQL as the backup, on a 1.4 gigahertz system with 1 gig of RAM, Amarok is not only snappy, but not adding significantly to processor/RAM load. And that's even when I do something moronic to lag IT the hell down (Like put 4300 songs into the playlist at once).
But if it's default install, then it's definitely using SQLite, which produced bad, bad results for me that looked exactly like the UI being monstrously slow. Because the blocking happens any time you're doing anything with the collection of songs, which is like 90% of the time.
I'm well aware of the code overhead involved here, but the Amarok guys should have just embedded a database into the software. Granted, my collection is large... but it's not off the edge of reason, and Amarok slowed down around the 1000-2000 songs imported point.
But, to get it actually accepted into the code base... one would assume you'd submit as a patch. Which would be read by whoever does the merging for the project. And which, thus, would be caught as malicious, or else would be kicked back as obfuscated. They'd have to make the code look exactly like functional code that does a good thing, while really being evil. Maybe not impossible, but damn hard.
Last paragraph, s/with/wish/.
Sigh.
I'm addressing a side-point here, but what's your database backend on Amarok?
I was having slowdowns, crashes, and basically experiencing torment of the slowdown kind every single goddamn time I ran Amarok. Then I realized (via the readsing, not the logicsing, full disclosure here) that this was all due to the data on those hundreds, nay, thousandillions of tracks being managed in a freaking SQLite file-based database. Since I was already running MySQL on my box for other reasons, it took three minutes to fix the problem. Now, it purrs like a dream (as long as I don't do something retarded like add 4800 tracks to one giant playlist by drag and drop. Like I just did. D'oh).
It may just be that Amarok is too heavy on its own, after all. But then, your platform is designed as a lightweight one; I'm not sure it's fair to expect full-featured music-manager type software to run smoothly on a tiny netbook.
To throw my oar in, though... I do with certain things (namely, adding files to a damn playlist) weren't entirely UI blocking. It's fine with a sane number of tracks, but it seems to me you could fork off a process or something to deal with large changes in state, and just lock the parts of the UI involved.
Again. The question of whether they fulfill that purpose is certainly open for debate. I mean, I've been stopped and harassed to no purpose by the police myself.
On the other hand, there are serial killers in jail or executed now that operated in Sarasota while I lived there, also on account of the police.
"The Police" is too large a concept to be simply across-the-board condemned or sainted.
Addition: The violent crime comment is relevant because we're talking about guns/police here... Because even Soldier of Fortune isn't going to claim that private gun ownership is the solution to white collar crime (although it's fun to imagine it ;-)
Not me, personally. Everyone, personally.
The purpose of the police is to protect people. Whether they fall short of that goal or not, that's the point.
And when we're talking about violent crime, I'm correct. True, embezzlement and other white-collar crime is motivated by greed, but by and large, you don't rob a liquor store if you're wealthy. You don't burglarize houses if you're making a comfortable living, or even just a reasonable one.
Mod parent hilarious. Also, p. is the symbol for ruples in Belarus. There's also a p looking thing for Cuban pesos. Not really any A's, though. $Qå...fÂ¥ is probably stretching it too far, though. (It's Sony, if it's not obvious).
Ahem. "There are Libertarians that believe..."
I put to you that both liberal thinker and leftist here are essentially undefined terms carrying political charge.
Also, wow, this comes out of left field. It's entirely possible to be religious and liberal (in classic, modern, and Crystal Pepsi flavors), or to be Atheist and not liberal.
I giggled at the last sentence here.
There is a significant contingent in the Libertarian party that aligns itself strongly for "If you're on my property, I can shoots you."
Usually, of course, Libertarians allow that the police and courts are legitimate functions of government (also generally roads, for some reason). There are Libertarians the believe in the police being replaced by either a privatized poice force or with armed citizenry.
I guess this all boils down to "Some people who still acknowledge that government has some minimal functions, don't believe police are in those minimal functions."
In the short term, with the Police.
In the long term, with the alleviation of the crippling poverty and horrible societal conditions that drive 90% of crime.
Or, depending on the liberal, with a gun that's not an assault rifle, that he waited 10 to 12 days for, and that he has a permit for. Shotguns being better for home defense than assault rifles for said purpose anyway.
You see, that's where we disagree.
Putting my flame-retardant suit on here.
I personally don't have any problem with the "socially liberal" part of Libertarianism, when not taken to extremes. But I do feel that they're primarily a tool; they've evolved as the libertarian leadership, who are primarily concerned with economic deregulation as a means to higher profit, tries to reach out to fringe groups that have little or no common cause economically, but whose agenda doesn't conflict with the core Libertarian principles. Because that's what gives them the numbers to do anything.
It doesn't hurt that it's easy to convince stoners and the crazy end of gun nuts*** that an oversimplified model of the economic system is valid.
***(and I say this as someone who supports private gun ownership and goes to the range on occasion - there's a level of a-rational discourse at a very broad level in the field)
Mod parent +1 funny, assuming that the use of liberal in an accurate other context was meant to be so.
I'd actually declare a moratorium on the use of liberal (or conservative), at least without some sort of qualifier on the front (socially, for instance. I'm also not sure that "economically liberal" has any real defined meaning in today's society).
And Libertarianism is the merger of laissez-faire economics with extreme minimalist social legislation. Which is one step on each side from anarchy, which is lack of any government.
Ayn Rand is crap, I mean, objectivism, which is a philosophy that has as much to do with liberal and enlightenment ideas as an elephant has to do with a mouse. That is, completely unrelated, but thrown in the same story a lot. She preaches against one of the few core values shared by almost all enlightenment thinkers, that being altruism.
As with many terms in the current political environment, liberal has ceased to function. It's used as hate speech by self-defined conservatives (basically as a brand for anyone they're against, without any meaning or defined characteristics) and generally avoided by serious speakers/thinkers on the middle to left of the political debate because of its status as loaded word. Them McCoys done did poison the well, ayup.
Ayn Rand is one for the liberals how?
Libertarian, sure. But liberal... not so much.
They do only compete in these niche areas, it's true. But they're still competing in those niches on a level field, upgrade-wise.
I'm not sure on the graphics cards (I believe the Mac Pro just has an PCIE 2.0 slot). Apple does sell cards for higher than average list price, true, and I'm not sure what has driver support in OSX, but I'm not sure how much of that is Apple's fault.
I do think that it's not acknowledged enough that a lot of Apple's vaunted "It just works" comes from the fact that they support a very limited range of hardware, and thus can (and do) do 90+% of their driver development.
Pompous attitude of its user base... ethical concerns over its atmosphere of secrecy and dodgey take on copyright and patent issues... I could go on.
I'm not a Mac hater, but neither are they the shining gods of saving us all.
P.S. It's M$. You know, because the dollar sign looks like an 'S'.
Yeah... except that people do care. Maybe people aren't switching en masse out of hand, but Mac's percentage of the market has been rising, and (anecdotal evidence, yada yada) I know several people who've made the switch already, and several others who are just waiting for the end of their current computer's useful lifetime. Not that Mac is going to suddenly overwhelm the PC market, but it's not infeasible to compete with and/or overthrow monopolies, just hard. Plus, the likelihood of Dell/HP killing themselves isn't really small enough to discount.
Also, people don't actually buy computers for Windows. In fact, if Vista showed anything, it's that people buy computers FOR THE COMPUTER. If the OS makes it look more likely that the computer will be buggy, well, that will inhibit growth.
A lot of Mac's decisions do irk me, but I also feel that I have to point out that they're close to being as upgradeable as the PC in each product subcategory. Their laptop isn't particularly locked down by laptop standards, although it does lack a fscking manual eject on the CD-ROM*. The iMac is at least as upgradable as Gateway's or Sony's "Computer + monitor," and isn't a piece of crap, to boot. The Mini... well, the Mini is locked down, but it's also half the size of the Shuttle mini cases. The Mac Pro... I've not looked at it, but it seems upgradeable enough.
* Off topic, but holy crap I hate that there's no way to physically force the Mac laptops to give back your CD if it can't recognize that it has it.
Hmmm... but is "Lisp without the macro facility" really Lispish?
Yes, Perl shares anonymous first class functions. But so do JavaScript and an number of other languages. What everyone talks about as the defining feature of Lisp is programmatic redefinition of the program at runtime. While you can theoretically do this in Perl, it's so far from being easy that I don't think it can really be called a language feature. Add to that Perl's incredible verbosity and plurality of specific features...
I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can program Perl like it's a crippled version of Lisp, but only by ignoring a great deal of the language's basic structure.