If everything wasn't already so screwed up in the first place, Opera's opportunity wouldn't exist.
Perhaps Opera has seen into the crystal ball and noted that by 2011 or thereabouts, either the Internet is on IPv6 or else things are about to start seriously breaking down. In the case that IPv6 actually turns out to be the future, Opera is now positioning themselves to be the/one/ provider that has empowered its users to make full use of a newly re-opened peer-to-peer internet. While everyone else is stuck with hopelessly centralized systems, Opera users will experience the full power of an open internet from day one. Done correctly they could be huge ca 2012 and onwards while everyone else is playing catch-up.
Until you see what time Warner wants to do with caps. The modification to their terms of service allowed their VOIP service unlimited bandwidth while charging the customer for some else's VOIP. ISP's want a deal where BING.com users don't get charged bandwidth but if you use google.com you have to pay extra.
So, you're saying... we will end up with Google Over Voip?
But seriously, is the whale killing business profitable.
In 2003, 647 whales killed generated NOK 26.3M, about $4M, in profits.
Perhaps you can burn the blubber to generate energy.
The blubber is not being used at all at present I think. We used to both use it domestically and also export the best bits (of a bacon-like quality) to Japan. This last is considered a delicacy and used to sell for $10-50 per kg at retail. The temporary whaling ban of 1987-1993 stopped this and blubber production hasn't restarted since. Nowadays, it's mostly the meat that is used. (Which is quite excellent, we had some from this year's catch yesterday and I can heartily recommend it.)
Part of the problem with whale blubber these days is that it's full of dioxins, PCB and such so one will have to find some way of cleaning it up if it's to be used for food.
The whale oil factories also never got restarted, it's probably something of a marginal product.
I saw a thing on a some cable channel show, where a saw blade would instantly stop [sawstop.com] when you put your finger into it.
I would very much want to know, and I would test it -- not with a human finger, but with something I wouldn't mind seeing chopped in half. If it fails the test, it goes back to the store. If it's a scam, they get what they deserve -- if it's merely defective, I get one that actually works.
If this is the one they showed on Time Warp then triggering the automatic stop also breaks the machine (all that energy has to go/somewhere/) so it will be going back to the store whether it works or not.
The one you get back will either be a different one or a repaired one, and you would of course have to test to see if the automatic stop still works . . .
I'd say the "new business model" that keeps getting touted is exactly where we were 400 years ago.
Except that the patron of the 21st century is the public at large or, as an economist might put it, the marketplace. The artist can now have a direct, unfiltered feed directly to his customers rather than go through cumbersome expensive middle men. The only reason an artist may not want this unprecendented power is that someone has been feeding him misinformation about it. No prizes for guessing who that someone might be.
There aren't an infinite number of people to kill. As a proportion of the theoretically available 'space', 6.7 billion people is very much closer to 'all' the people than it is to 'none' of the people. Seventy-five years is very much closer to 'none' of the time than it is to 'all' of the time.
Actually, there are only about 80 years of time (give or take). 75 years is therefore much closer to all time than it is to zero time.
TFA says if the download has no purchase price, then it is taxed based on the purchase price of similar items. So if you download a track from an indie artist or public domain for free you still owe a tax as if you had purchased it for the average going rate of an mp3 on iTunes...
Is $0 a price of zero dollars or is it "no purchase price"? magnatune.com offers "similar items" at zero dollars for non-commercial use so the tax would presumably be 7.5% (or whatever) of zero dollars. Unless this is "no purchase price", in which case magnatune.com would be doing us all a favour by also offering the same items at $0.01 for non-commercial use?
Unless they really meant "God created complex mechanisms which eventually gave rise to life and then millions of years later resulted purely by chance something that resembled God." I don't buy it.
Why would it be important to specify the process at that point? What happens is that some wannabe prophet walks up to the top of a mountain and calls out for god to speak to him. For whatever reason, god decides this is The Guy and now is the right time to reveal some part of the Grand Scheme and that an important part of this is to get the people to understand that god caused them to be. So god simply states "I created you in my image". It is short, simple and to the point. It gets the message across. What in all of existence could possibly motivate god to want to completely muddy his message by instead going "see, thirteen billion years ago I effected a primal explosion that was carefully engineered so as to cause the existence of gaseous clouds that would eventuelly coalesce and form primary star systems that would create complex elements from simple ones through fusion processes"... and so on and so forth to the tune of several hundred stone tablets before finally coming to the salient point "and thus through carefully manipulating the physical history of the universe I caused you to be"? I have no problem at all seeing why god would go for the Reader's Digest version.
they claim 50% of net traffic in the UK is illegal content but provide no evidence for this figure
Does this imply that the entertainment industry is now assuming responsibility for about half the spam out there? Better sharpen our lawyers while there's still some cash left to be shaken out of them:-)
Not allowing subscription fees to pay for other city projects - this on the other hand is not necessarily fair.
This is insanely stupid from TWC's point of view. If I can't charge a little bit extra for my muni broadband to pay for extra police (or a new SUV for myself, or whatever), then I'll just lower my rates to breakeven.
I'm guessing this is intended as a disincentive for other cities to build their own network infrastructure - after all, if they can't charge a few cents extra to pay for other city expenses then all that is left to motivate them to build a network is their sense of social responsibility.
The only reason such a disincentive would work, of course, is if TWC considers that it gouges its customers to such a degree that ISP-based profits would actually be a considerable motivator for cities. After all, a city-owned ISP can only make noticable profits if their competition is grossly overpriced, and their competition is TWC.
Of course he can. It's just that having done so, he is no longer omnipotent. If he's clever he'll put off doing it until absolutely necessary. Of course, not being able to lift it doesn't mean he won't be able to un-make it upon which he will once again be omnipotent.
In brief: omnipotence necessarily includes the power to make yourself non-omnipotent.
But if the SaaS uses standardized protocols, and you have full access to your data, then if you don't like the desicions of your SaaS provider, you just can take your data and pass it to another SaaS provider, or can just start to do your stuff locally then.
I/think/ what he is trying to say (it's not entirely clear) is that if you get your results from a SaaS then you have no good way of making sure the SaaS didn't produce bogus data or otherwise try to rip you off, or perhaps it is that if the SaaS starts malfunctioning you are at the mercy of others wrt getting it fixed so you can resume normal operations. This particular objection of his really needs to be developed further so that it can be better understood.
First obstacle: Why should Joe Sixpack be required to run his own server just so he can use e-mail?
He shouldn't of course. It's the mail software that should be required to make it/possible/ for Joe to run a local server/if he wants to/. Most Joes won't want to.
That is the kind of logistical problem inherent to RMS's position. Sure, we'd solve all our privacy problems since the only possessor of my data would be me. But we'd then have to deal with all sorts of other problems, and some existing applications would simply be impractical without centralized servers under the control of a single party. Or do you believe Facebook would function correctly if it were decentralized and everyone had their own custom version of the software?
It's not entirely clear what RMS really means with his objection to SaaS as a concept. I can't recall him having objected to HTML or cgi-bin as conceptually wrong in the past so it can't be that anything that happens remotely is bad for you. It appears to be connected with the idea that if you are running a calculation that is very important to you then you really want to be in control of the machinery that is doing that calculation. Most of what people do on Facebook is probably not all that important to them, at least not in detail even if the aggregate may be. I think he's saying something more along the lines of "make sure you own the hardware/and/ the software you are running mission critical calculations on".
If I am correct in this then Facebook is fine as a centralized repository and gateway for information (better, of course, if the Facebook software is Free), but if you are wise then you will have created that information on software and hardware you control before uploading it.
If RMS wants to convince any average non-technical person, he needs to present reasons why the average person would want Facebook (for example) to be open-source.
This doesn't appear to be his strategy though. RMS' strategy is to convince enough programmers of his ideas to get enough quality Free software (mostly useful libraries) made that it will become impossible for all the other non-convinced developers to ignore it. The libraries must be of such quality and usefulness that non-Free developers feel compelled to use them and thus get dragged into the movement kicking and screaming. This, of course, works best with a license like the GPL which enforces the inheritance of its freedoms to derived software.
To a large extent this has been an outstanding success. Free and open source software is taking the world by storm but unfortunately not all of it is GPL. These days I expect RMS to spend a lot of his efforts trying to convince OSS project leads that they need to take their projects over to GPL-like licenses.
End users and CEOs are presumably not in the target audience - they are just left to accept whatever software the techies throw at them and if the techie world is full of Free software then Free software is what the end user will get.
But at what point does it cost more money for you to pay some guy to come re-write your Free spreadsheet program that it costs just to freakin' buy MS Office, or pay Google to use their "cloud based" spreadsheet.
Neither of those is going to do you any good if they don't provide the functionality you are looking for. Part of the point of using a Free spreadsheet is that however fringe your needs are you can provide for them without having to write the entire software from scratch.
For software that everyone wants and needs, with a huge user base making making contributions and suggestions, Free software seems to work pretty well. I'm not at all convinced that it will work as well for special purpose apps in mission critical environments.
In this scenario it can help guard you against price gouging from, or bankruptcy of, the one and only niche vendor in the market.
Public domain is literally in the public domain. It doesn't need a license of any kind.
In most countries in the world, copyright is automatic and as far as I can tell mandatory. Whatever you create that is copyrightable is/automatically/ copyrighted by yourself. You do not need to do anything to make this happen and it is not clear that there is anything you can do to/keep it from/ happening. If you know otherwise, I would welcome a pointer to national laws or international treaties that allow authors to opt out of automatic copyright.
You attach a "This code is hereby placed in the public domain." line in the code or accompanying documentation.
What reason do you have to believe that this actually works? Of course, your country may be different from mine but having perused our copyright laws, not only did I not find any clause that would permit an author to place a work in the public domain rather than have it covered by automatic copyright but there are rights granted to me that I/cannot/ renounce even if I wanted to. This indicates to me that just writing "this is in the public domain" is at least in part a legally flawed license.
this nebulous (to most people) idea of "freedom" (which, you must admit, the average non-programmer will not be able to exploit)
I cannot agree with this. Your average computer illiterate can pay the kid next-doors twenty bucks to customize his software, and your average non-IT company can hire consultants to customize their software. So long as both are using Free software they are entirely free in who they hire to do these jobs and they can get it done to their exact specifications. Moreover, if the software is Free then whatever problem the average computer illiterate has is probably shared by others and chances are someone will have already done a patch for it.
However, unilaterally calling SaaS "evil" is not going to convince anyone that his arguments have merit. He needs to present more concrete arguments that the average businessman will understand - and, in most cases, that means talking about money.
I believe this is entirely orthogonal to RMS' endeavours and perhaps not possible anyway. Being evil can presumably be profitable at times so it doesn't seem feasible in the general case to construct a profit-based argument in favour of ethical behaviour. Moreover, even if you did so in a few practical cases in which it happened to apply it would quickly backfire on you since you didn't bring across your/actual/ point which is that ethical behaviour is a goal in itself.
Personally I consider the adoption of proprietary software to be unwise more than it is evil but RMS probably feels a need to be crystal clear in his statements so as to leave no room for doubt about his position.
Blu-ray Disc also uses "disc", as does the DVD Forum's semi-official expansion of DVD as "digital versatile disc". The pattern here is that optical storage uses "disc", while magnetic storage uses "disk".
And, of course, the 1990s-era magneto-optical "disck" completes the taxonomy.
It's all well and good to say "This is evil!" but if he really wants people to stop using SaaS, he needs to provide concrete reasons that a business should take the more expensive route.
RMS doesn't address monetary cost, but freedom. Sometimes giving up freedom is going to earn or save you money. RMS will tend to advocate hanging on to your freedom instead and paying whatever monetary cost is associated with that choice.
The opportunity cost lost to having to use a piece of software the way the vendor intended it rather than being free to customize it to your own specific needs is difficult to estimate and I am not aware of RMS having tried to do this.
I think public domain is the only truly free software philosophy, and have long used the presence of the GPL to motivate me to run the other way, far and fast before even looking at the code. Because I'm not interested in lawyers, and I'm not interested in telling anyone they can't use my code. Because it is my intent that it actually be free.
How do you use the public domain though, except by attaching some GPL-ish software license to your work?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what the copyright abolitionist would say when copyright is abolished and the GPL stops to be enforceable...
I'm guessing "w00t!", but suspect that "yay!" may be a strong contender.
If everything wasn't already so screwed up in the first place, Opera's opportunity wouldn't exist.
Perhaps Opera has seen into the crystal ball and noted that by 2011 or thereabouts, either the Internet is on IPv6 or else things are about to start seriously breaking down. In the case that IPv6 actually turns out to be the future, Opera is now positioning themselves to be the /one/ provider that has empowered its users to make full use of a newly re-opened peer-to-peer internet. While everyone else is stuck with hopelessly centralized systems, Opera users will experience the full power of an open internet from day one. Done correctly they could be huge ca 2012 and onwards while everyone else is playing catch-up.
Until you see what time Warner wants to do with caps. The modification to their terms of service allowed their VOIP service unlimited bandwidth while charging the customer for some else's VOIP. ISP's want a deal where BING.com users don't get charged bandwidth but if you use google.com you have to pay extra.
So, you're saying ... we will end up with Google Over Voip ?
Works for me.
But seriously, is the whale killing business profitable.
In 2003, 647 whales killed generated NOK 26.3M, about $4M, in profits.
Perhaps you can burn the blubber to generate energy.
The blubber is not being used at all at present I think. We used to both use it domestically and also export the best bits (of a bacon-like quality) to Japan. This last is considered a delicacy and used to sell for $10-50 per kg at retail. The temporary whaling ban of 1987-1993 stopped this and blubber production hasn't restarted since. Nowadays, it's mostly the meat that is used. (Which is quite excellent, we had some from this year's catch yesterday and I can heartily recommend it.)
Part of the problem with whale blubber these days is that it's full of dioxins, PCB and such so one will have to find some way of cleaning it up if it's to be used for food.
The whale oil factories also never got restarted, it's probably something of a marginal product.
One whale will die, whole project will be shot.
This is Norway. We kill whales for a living.
I saw a thing on a some cable channel show, where a saw blade would instantly stop [sawstop.com] when you put your finger into it.
I would very much want to know, and I would test it -- not with a human finger, but with something I wouldn't mind seeing chopped in half. If it fails the test, it goes back to the store. If it's a scam, they get what they deserve -- if it's merely defective, I get one that actually works.
If this is the one they showed on Time Warp then triggering the automatic stop also breaks the machine (all that energy has to go /somewhere/) so it will be going back to the store whether it works or not.
The one you get back will either be a different one or a repaired one, and you would of course have to test to see if the automatic stop still works . . .
I'd say the "new business model" that keeps getting touted is exactly where we were 400 years ago.
Except that the patron of the 21st century is the public at large or, as an economist might put it, the marketplace. The artist can now have a direct, unfiltered feed directly to his customers rather than go through cumbersome expensive middle men. The only reason an artist may not want this unprecendented power is that someone has been feeding him misinformation about it. No prizes for guessing who that someone might be.
There aren't an infinite number of people to kill. As a proportion of the theoretically available 'space', 6.7 billion people is very much closer to 'all' the people than it is to 'none' of the people. Seventy-five years is very much closer to 'none' of the time than it is to 'all' of the time.
Actually, there are only about 80 years of time (give or take). 75 years is therefore much closer to all time than it is to zero time.
TFA says if the download has no purchase price, then it is taxed based on the purchase price of similar items. So if you download a track from an indie artist or public domain for free you still owe a tax as if you had purchased it for the average going rate of an mp3 on iTunes...
Is $0 a price of zero dollars or is it "no purchase price"?
magnatune.com offers "similar items" at zero dollars for non-commercial use so the tax would presumably be 7.5% (or whatever) of zero dollars. Unless this is "no purchase price", in which case magnatune.com would be doing us all a favour by also offering the same items at $0.01 for non-commercial use?
God created man in his image.
Unless they really meant "God created complex mechanisms which eventually gave rise to life and then millions of years later resulted purely by chance something that resembled God." I don't buy it.
Why would it be important to specify the process at that point? What happens is that some wannabe prophet walks up to the top of a mountain and calls out for god to speak to him. For whatever reason, god decides this is The Guy and now is the right time to reveal some part of the Grand Scheme and that an important part of this is to get the people to understand that god caused them to be. So god simply states "I created you in my image". It is short, simple and to the point. It gets the message across. What in all of existence could possibly motivate god to want to completely muddy his message by instead going "see, thirteen billion years ago I effected a primal explosion that was carefully engineered so as to cause the existence of gaseous clouds that would eventuelly coalesce and form primary star systems that would create complex elements from simple ones through fusion processes" ... and so on and so forth to the tune of several hundred stone tablets before finally coming to the salient point "and thus through carefully manipulating the physical history of the universe I caused you to be"? I have no problem at all seeing why god would go for the Reader's Digest version.
Disclaimer: I do not believe in god.
they claim 50% of net traffic in the UK is illegal content but provide no evidence for this figure
Does this imply that the entertainment industry is now assuming responsibility for about half the spam out there? Better sharpen our lawyers while there's still some cash left to be shaken out of them :-)
and can also make plants grow up to 30 percent larger.'"
Maybe someone needs to use this idea to make a super penis pill!
Evolution is way ahead of you: the human penis is already grown in a bed of human hair.
A long brief? That's almost as funny as when I ordered what turned out to be a Medium XXL at my local Burger King.
Not allowing subscription fees to pay for other city projects - this on the other hand is not necessarily fair.
This is insanely stupid from TWC's point of view. If I can't charge a little bit extra for my muni broadband to pay for extra police (or a new SUV for myself, or whatever), then I'll just lower my rates to breakeven.
I'm guessing this is intended as a disincentive for other cities to build their own network infrastructure - after all, if they can't charge a few cents extra to pay for other city expenses then all that is left to motivate them to build a network is their sense of social responsibility.
The only reason such a disincentive would work, of course, is if TWC considers that it gouges its customers to such a degree that ISP-based profits would actually be a considerable motivator for cities. After all, a city-owned ISP can only make noticable profits if their competition is grossly overpriced, and their competition is TWC.
He can't make a rock he can't lift?
Of course he can. It's just that having done so, he is no longer omnipotent. If he's clever he'll put off doing it until absolutely necessary. Of course, not being able to lift it doesn't mean he won't be able to un-make it upon which he will once again be omnipotent.
In brief: omnipotence necessarily includes the power to make yourself non-omnipotent.
But if the SaaS uses standardized protocols, and you have full access to your data, then if you don't like the desicions of your SaaS provider, you just can take your data and pass it to another SaaS provider, or can just start to do your stuff locally then.
I /think/ what he is trying to say (it's not entirely clear) is that if you get your results from a SaaS then you have no good way of making sure the SaaS didn't produce bogus data or otherwise try to rip you off, or perhaps it is that if the SaaS starts malfunctioning you are at the mercy of others wrt getting it fixed so you can resume normal operations. This particular objection of his really needs to be developed further so that it can be better understood.
First obstacle: Why should Joe Sixpack be required to run his own server just so he can use e-mail?
He shouldn't of course. It's the mail software that should be required to make it /possible/ for Joe to run a local server /if he wants to/. Most Joes won't want to.
That is the kind of logistical problem inherent to RMS's position. Sure, we'd solve all our privacy problems since the only possessor of my data would be me. But we'd then have to deal with all sorts of other problems, and some existing applications would simply be impractical without centralized servers under the control of a single party. Or do you believe Facebook would function correctly if it were decentralized and everyone had their own custom version of the software?
It's not entirely clear what RMS really means with his objection to SaaS as a concept. I can't recall him having objected to HTML or cgi-bin as conceptually wrong in the past so it can't be that anything that happens remotely is bad for you. It appears to be connected with the idea that if you are running a calculation that is very important to you then you really want to be in control of the machinery that is doing that calculation. Most of what people do on Facebook is probably not all that important to them, at least not in detail even if the aggregate may be. I think he's saying something more along the lines of "make sure you own the hardware /and/ the software you are running mission critical calculations on".
If I am correct in this then Facebook is fine as a centralized repository and gateway for information (better, of course, if the Facebook software is Free), but if you are wise then you will have created that information on software and hardware you control before uploading it.
If RMS wants to convince any average non-technical person, he needs to present reasons why the average person would want Facebook (for example) to be open-source.
This doesn't appear to be his strategy though. RMS' strategy is to convince enough programmers of his ideas to get enough quality Free software (mostly useful libraries) made that it will become impossible for all the other non-convinced developers to ignore it. The libraries must be of such quality and usefulness that non-Free developers feel compelled to use them and thus get dragged into the movement kicking and screaming. This, of course, works best with a license like the GPL which enforces the inheritance of its freedoms to derived software.
To a large extent this has been an outstanding success. Free and open source software is taking the world by storm but unfortunately not all of it is GPL. These days I expect RMS to spend a lot of his efforts trying to convince OSS project leads that they need to take their projects over to GPL-like licenses.
End users and CEOs are presumably not in the target audience - they are just left to accept whatever software the techies throw at them and if the techie world is full of Free software then Free software is what the end user will get.
But at what point does it cost more money for you to pay some guy to come re-write your Free spreadsheet program that it costs just to freakin' buy MS Office, or pay Google to use their "cloud based" spreadsheet.
Neither of those is going to do you any good if they don't provide the functionality you are looking for. Part of the point of using a Free spreadsheet is that however fringe your needs are you can provide for them without having to write the entire software from scratch.
For software that everyone wants and needs, with a huge user base making making contributions and suggestions, Free software seems to work pretty well. I'm not at all convinced that it will work as well for special purpose apps in mission critical environments.
In this scenario it can help guard you against price gouging from, or bankruptcy of, the one and only niche vendor in the market.
Public domain is literally in the public domain. It doesn't need a license of any kind.
In most countries in the world, copyright is automatic and as far as I can tell mandatory. Whatever you create that is copyrightable is /automatically/ copyrighted by yourself. You do not need to do anything to make this happen and it is not clear that there is anything you can do to /keep it from/ happening. If you know otherwise, I would welcome a pointer to national laws or international treaties that allow authors to opt out of automatic copyright.
You attach a "This code is hereby placed in the public domain." line in the code or accompanying documentation.
What reason do you have to believe that this actually works? Of course, your country may be different from mine but having perused our copyright laws, not only did I not find any clause that would permit an author to place a work in the public domain rather than have it covered by automatic copyright but there are rights granted to me that I /cannot/ renounce even if I wanted to. This indicates to me that just writing "this is in the public domain" is at least in part a legally flawed license.
this nebulous (to most people) idea of "freedom" (which, you must admit, the average non-programmer will not be able to exploit)
I cannot agree with this. Your average computer illiterate can pay the kid next-doors twenty bucks to customize his software, and your average non-IT company can hire consultants to customize their software. So long as both are using Free software they are entirely free in who they hire to do these jobs and they can get it done to their exact specifications. Moreover, if the software is Free then whatever problem the average computer illiterate has is probably shared by others and chances are someone will have already done a patch for it.
However, unilaterally calling SaaS "evil" is not going to convince anyone that his arguments have merit. He needs to present more concrete arguments that the average businessman will understand - and, in most cases, that means talking about money.
I believe this is entirely orthogonal to RMS' endeavours and perhaps not possible anyway. Being evil can presumably be profitable at times so it doesn't seem feasible in the general case to construct a profit-based argument in favour of ethical behaviour. Moreover, even if you did so in a few practical cases in which it happened to apply it would quickly backfire on you since you didn't bring across your /actual/ point which is that ethical behaviour is a goal in itself.
Personally I consider the adoption of proprietary software to be unwise more than it is evil but RMS probably feels a need to be crystal clear in his statements so as to leave no room for doubt about his position.
Blu-ray Disc also uses "disc", as does the DVD Forum's semi-official expansion of DVD as "digital versatile disc". The pattern here is that optical storage uses "disc", while magnetic storage uses "disk".
And, of course, the 1990s-era magneto-optical "disck" completes the taxonomy.
It's all well and good to say "This is evil!" but if he really wants people to stop using SaaS, he needs to provide concrete reasons that a business should take the more expensive route.
RMS doesn't address monetary cost, but freedom. Sometimes giving up freedom is going to earn or save you money. RMS will tend to advocate hanging on to your freedom instead and paying whatever monetary cost is associated with that choice.
The opportunity cost lost to having to use a piece of software the way the vendor intended it rather than being free to customize it to your own specific needs is difficult to estimate and I am not aware of RMS having tried to do this.
Basically, Stallman owns everything produced by anyone who has ever distributed any GPL software in any form connected with copyright.
How on Earth do you conclude this?
I think public domain is the only truly free software philosophy, and have long used the presence of the GPL to motivate me to run the other way, far and fast before even looking at the code. Because I'm not interested in lawyers, and I'm not interested in telling anyone they can't use my code. Because it is my intent that it actually be free.
How do you use the public domain though, except by attaching some GPL-ish software license to your work?