There are several real issues with Open Source in Emerging Economies 1) Limited broadband capabilities, even in a country like Saudi Arabia the typical University/Research Center/ISP will have a limited international connectivity, and downloading a Linux Distrib is not easy, having a large number of people doing this is even harder. On the bonus side the same applies to Windows upgrade with the result that most installations are hopelessly unsafe, and the typical Windows box a flea ridden disaster.
2) Limited value given to Freedom, although the "G8" countries are trying to limit the citizens freedoms to fight T. D.D. and P. you can promote "Freedom" without sounding "too" suspicious, in a dictatorship where Free Speech is defined as a foreign conspiracy against national values only "Free as in Free beer/(or in some country apple juice)" stays as an argument. And of course if you have a lot of conterfeiting happenning you are in a situation where Ubuntu cost 4$ and Windows Vista also 4$ (two DVD you see).
3) Limited access to large projects
Large projects are "paid for" by foreign government through various "AID" schemes, wich actually means that "G8" tax payers carry the risk of large loans, that are eventually repaid by the emerging countries tax payers to various insurance funds.
And since it is an "AID" it actually means that the lender country decides what will be used, and in the case of the US it means
That the great philantropist Bill Gates will be contacted to provide his marvellous products.
4) Limited access to "reseller bonus",
Basically the way corruption works in emerging countries is that since the "G8" countries decided to "fight corruption" what they
really did is "outsource it" to local reseller, since "service bills" will be paid on delivery, and since the people who are
expecting a kick back are in a hurry the best place to pad fees are in the licences fees.
So basically you sell a lot of licences for 10 time the real price and the local distributor is giving the cash "as needed"
And you have plausible deniebility.
Of course if you use Open Source solutions 10 time 0 is 0, not very attractive.
5) Little respect for creative work, the most admired people are "warriors" of some kind and "big merchant", and those people are
the one that get the best revenue, actual "work" is paid a minimum. And since Open Source is all about squezzing out the
"merchant" and trying to give the power back to the "creator" it does not fit.
Why will it ultimatelly succeed
a) Telcos are greedy, so they will ultimatelly improve the infrastructure to attract more customers. b) Public discourse and private discourse are very different, so ultimatelly the grass roots effect of Open Source should do the trick c) The governments are starting to be scared of the cost of "aid", so some critical infrastructure are self funded (so have to be affordable) d) Corruption has a tendency toward reduction, and anyway where it cannot be reduced the "corrupt elite" will see in their interest to find ways to squezze cash out of "sustainable solutions". e) People in the emerging country will eventually start to find their own creative role models, you might keep in mind that one of the things the precipitated the first world war (less that 100 years ago) was the desire of the German Imperial government to stop local opponents by calling on a common enemy. And one of the gripes of the local opponents was the "c
Apparently M. Marchich is http://www.dutkoworldwide.com/media_center/latest_ news/1056/ In his resume they focus on his Latin American experience, maybe the ODF is confusing Europe and Latin America ? (on the up side Mr Marchich employer is using apache on FreeBsd so they cannot be all bad:-))
Anyway it is a little bit worrying when the people that are supposed to support the "good side" are using the same processes as the "bad guy".
I would not mind if the ODF alliance would hire M. Marchick as a consultant, or "Chief PHB interactor", but asking somebody that does not seem to have any interest in Open Standards (or god forbid open source) before his nomination seems strange.
Well I guess it makes some interesting email exchange between members.
Dear drone that do like microsoft because it allows you not to care, I have "super weapons" that will win the war, you can tell that to all disbeliever. I didn't pull them out right now because I'm didn't have the time yet to bother, but I will if needed.
So you are on the winner side anyway, you can keep free will, brain, and capacity to critisize under wrap not required, do not think it could hurt.
And this will work, at least for one more quarter, and who cares for next year anyway ?
Indeed but then it would be almost Hoch Deutsch instead of South Bavarian, and South Bavarian is obviously a Superior Langage, as explained in Rosendorfer's Königlich bayerisches Sportbrevier (Of wich the Olympic commity ordered 40 000 exemplars for the Munich Olympiad until they actually read the book, at wich time they cancelled the order demonstrating a total lack of humor).
Ach Zackel Tzement, Sacreubleu, Himihergottzefix, Non Dikats I have been found out, I confess I'm an Eurotrash trying to undermine the US by poisoning the American version of the English Langage.
But anyway resistance is useless, because we have worse than misspelling and gramatical errors in slashdot:
The Européans inventented GSM and SMS (short for Silly Misspelled Sentences) and all your children will bow to the superior power of messy Texting.
I'm pattenting the following plug-in, take a photo, cut it in little pieces, change the skin tones to vivid green, make some simple random transformations, add a button: "remove fig-leaf".
If you see this, the user has just to hit the remove fig-leaf button, each element of the photo is unscrambled locally (with java or maybe javascript), and the various vignettes are shown ordered and side-by side for the enjoyment of people at work and other people that could potentially be minors in their juridiction, but clicked on the link that say that they swear (a lot, hum no i mean) that they are "of age".
I'm also patenting the process that enables an operator to distribute unlock codes for this "humanity progress generating" technology through an informal high school network, in exchange of msn tags and e-mail addresses that the operator can use later for absolutelly legal uses (at least legal in transdniestrian, the sovreign republic of turcish Cyprus and some interesting parts of laos.
Unfortunatelly I'm against business methods and software patents, so I guess I'll have to find another way to become rich beyond all dreams of avarice.
(excluding savings of course, that wouldn't be in the fun category:-))
[ps]
-------------- This sig is a temporary place holder in case I ever decide that I need one.
Actually the maths are weak but not "really false". Typically a VC does not win all or nothing. It is more like in 20 deals:
1 is a big success: *10 and most real (effectivelly freed money) was
done here.
5 deals are huge flop, one of them hurts (it looked good and then failed, so more than seed money was spent).
10 deals fail and the VC is only recouping 1/3rd of their investment
4 deals work quite well but not stellar, so the VC gets *2
At the end the VC gets 30% more per year than what they invested.
VB is double plus good for beginners, it links them to a single vendor that despise them, and if ever they develop anything really good it will take it away from them. And since VB skills are exactly the kind of moron level skills that pointy headed bosses love to outsource it removes beginners from the qualified job pool fast.
This is obvioulsy very good (at least for people like me that are not recent beginner).
So please be a nice miscrosoft slave dog and learn VB + C# + IIE + all the rest of the nice billable microsoft tools.
of course if you would like to have a reasonable nice easy to learn langage for beginners that would like to be able to do some simple tasks and not be linked to a single platform you could get a plate of gambas (no I will not give the URL I feel nasty today).
Provide a Linux/FreeBsd/... Open Source computer. Your children will be very irritated (what no msn wink !!!!), no pirated version of photoshop ?? NO itune... But they will have to learn to be selfreliant, and find out that they can:
Fix stuff (really fix them)
Be part of a community of doer instead of brainless consumers.
1) You can't avoid it because the hardware you'd like to buy happens to be pre-loaded with it, and the company will not dare to displease big Bill. 2) Because the content providers are so caught up in their own paranoid customer hating trip that they prefer to give full control to Mr Bill rather than authorize an open source compatible player for their content. 3) Because Vista is fully compatible with buying Outsourced products at WallMart, eating Genemodified food, wearing overpriced Nike shoes while watching spectator sports that have strictly no relationship with you but give you a fake feeling of "bellonging". a lot) Because counting up to 10 is actually hard work.
One should not be surprised by the dimwitness of XboxLive Users. Anybody using anything by Microsoft for entertainment is either immoral or dimwited or both.
Entertainment is not compulsory, so it is volontarily that somebody decides to get "amused" by the most dangerous corporation around, and the most lickely to use any possible method to take all their: money, freedoms and privacy away.
Concidering the number of programmers in India (some of them might even enjoy programming), I think this just demonstrate that Elections in India, particularly in remote areas (where the EVM is used primarely) are a sham. It is not even clear that a user cannot just vote as often as s/he want:
Did you hear a beep ?
Not yet, not yet...
I think I heard a beep !
No, No, dear brother in law
Ok
Now you hear a beep.
A yes now I hear.
And in any case units can be duplicated, there is no paper trail, no possibility to do a recount. Now wonder the BJP was elected.
Well part of the solution would be to remove all Windows machines, particularly on the desktop. It would probably drive quite a few of the real dimwits away. (of course the romantic that installed seti would still need to have an explanation about proper use of "unused" corporate ressources.
It would also significantly change the "mood" in your enterprise.
But of course many managers will pretend that their assistant would never be able to switch (wich is not true, I trained my first secretary to use Emacs and Troff (without getting sued for moral harassment:-)), but training a manager is of course much harder).
But anyway you are right the amount of foolishness employees can have in large company is stagerring.
It's not the Telefax, but the Minitel, the minitel network did cost millions to implement, it also brought billions in for France Telecom, and about 20 000 service providers for quite à long time. Although it's dying out, it's not dead yet and quite a lot of the existing "Internet" companies in France where "Minitel shops" 15 years ago.
Finally a cool looking, slick and fancy box that runs a Linux version that is compatible with my lesse brethen (the ones that have less money to burn, or god forbid better things to do with their money;-).
After all if you are happy with a fixed computer you can buy all kind of funky gear to make your shuttle look like something out of the future as it was in the 50s, but there is not so much mods you can do on a laptop.
So Apple is certainly addressing a burning need. "cool computers", and if anybody would really care for the price N* shooes would cost 15.
Microsoft just has to "crack the whip" at Suse/Novell, RedHat, Mandriva and Circular (*ubuntu) and stop them from shipping FAT drivers.
So no interoperability with: USB keys, Digital Cameras, MP3/Video Players, etc... Or in another word no Desktop Linux except for a couple of died in the whool hackers that are willing to download the driver in Brasil/Lithuania/Transdniestrian Moldovia/...
M$ does not need to stop ALL linux users, 60/80% are enough.
Just look at the difficulties we have with deCSS on Linux. Where actually it becomes LESS illegal to download a blockbuster on a P2P network than to play the DVD you PAID for (of course depending of where you leave, but in Europe it is pretty much the case).
So it is a very bad news, somebody should fully investigate all the persons in the USPTO involved, and send them to jail.
First of all there are two similar proposals 1) Tax everybody 2) Tax only thouse who use a P2P protocol. Second The "principe" is that all the money collected is shared by all the registered authors, each authors receiving a percentage of the global fund depending of the percentage of the audience that downloaded his/her content. The difficulty is that right now this mechanism exists with the CD and USB key tax and is based on CD/DVD sales.
Unfortunatelly there is no reason to believe that the listening patterns are the same on the internet and in the CD/DVD market. And the CD/DVD market could very well disapear within a couple of years.
So what is needed is a way to "count" downloads, not an easy task. Especially if you do not want to snoop on the citizens.
Of course the people that are really running scared are not the artists but all the middle people from the major's marketing creatures to the big chain sales clerc.
Why are people who bought an XBox from Microsoft unhappy about the defects, crashes and other problems ? After all it is a "Branded Product", and a "Brand is a 'promise'" it is supposed to work a certain way, for instance an apple product is supposed to be "cool" a little bit different in usage, and a little bit more expensive, a volvo is supposed to be real safe, etc... And of course a microsoft product is supposed to be full of bug, the real price of "ownership" is hard to find and to understand, and most of the average user cannot even figure out that there might be an alternative.
So for all this the Xbox delivers, it crashes, the price does not reflect the real price but do not worry microsoft will pull the cash out of the game writers (and no there will be no Free and Open Source Games running on it), and most of the buyer are far to alienated to understand that under no circumstance should you buy one.
Well an individual shop owner should certainly not have to carry a whole society's guilt.
But why is such a thing needed anyway ? if not because there is nothing else interesting to do for teenagers.
Or even worse they probably do not have the mental tools necessary to imagine something else to do.
-- waza doing, nothun chilling it out, nyou, nothun -- 20 years later encephalogram still pretty much flat --
Our society has spent so much time transforming us into consumer that if we do not have the money to consume we feel the need to be "near the consomation opportunity", we have made consomation a "spectator sport" for thouse that cannot (just like sport is a spectator sport for the 'sportively challenged'".
So the solution is PAY MORE TAXES, and use them to provide better public education, particularly for the kids that would not get "good parenting". And create places that are "fun to hang out" for teens, with things to do (and places to be while doing nothing except maybe shmoosing).
Thanks for the explanation, from somebody that has an acceptable level of hearing, this is quite interesting.
I do hope that at least once you have filtered out the people that do not like to "work" (have a meaningfull conversation) it leaves you with enough interesting people that you can meet at some quite place.
It also points to some interesting suggestion for hearing aid maker, since the level of computing power available is going up, I would guess that two improvements should be possible either now or soon. 1) compare the sounds that are comming in from both side of the head and boost up what is "similar" (i.e either in front or directly behind you) and boost down the rest (what is not in your sphere of direct interest) 2) provide some level of environment profiling that enables you to "say" I'm at a disco, or at home, or..., and choose which sound bands should be filtered, and which should be increased.
First of all Microsoft is the largest private sponsor for the SMSI, the simple fact that they where allowed to do this is allready damning. (of course they will be able to say that it is just the tunisian government that asked them, and they are just being nice, and it is even true that of course the tunisian government is clueless enough to do this, but the UN should have refused, but then probably the US representatives would have claimed that the UN is against free market, and unfair to nice US corporations.)
Second the fact that the redactors accepted to remove the mention can be due to incompetence or corruption, or both, the strengh of M$ in developping countries is tremendous, for no really good reason, except that they have the money needed to pay nice "study trips".
Finally most probably the paper will not be corrected, and in a year or two what will be used as a base for policy setting will be the "simplified for easy reading" paper. And the current protestation will be forgotten.
I do agree totally, but of course I'm sure the reason her name does not appear is because I'm the only one who needs her name and phone number:-). (Now I wonder why I didn't get it yet, must be all that spam clogging down the Internet.)
Slashdot Mirror
There are several real issues with Open Source in Emerging Economies
1) Limited broadband capabilities, even in a country like Saudi Arabia the typical University/Research Center/ISP will have a limited international connectivity, and downloading a Linux Distrib is not easy, having a large number of people doing this is even harder.
On the bonus side the same applies to Windows upgrade with the result that most installations are hopelessly unsafe, and the typical Windows box a flea ridden disaster.
2) Limited value given to Freedom, although the "G8" countries are trying to limit the citizens freedoms to fight T. D.D. and P. you can promote "Freedom" without sounding "too" suspicious, in a dictatorship where Free Speech is defined as a foreign conspiracy against national values only "Free as in Free beer/(or in some country apple juice)" stays as an argument.
And of course if you have a lot of conterfeiting happenning you are in a situation where Ubuntu cost 4$ and Windows Vista also 4$ (two DVD you see).
3) Limited access to large projects
Large projects are "paid for" by foreign government through various "AID" schemes, wich actually means that "G8" tax payers carry the risk of large loans, that are eventually repaid by the emerging countries tax payers to various insurance funds.
And since it is an "AID" it actually means that the lender country decides what will be used, and in the case of the US it means
That the great philantropist Bill Gates will be contacted to provide his marvellous products.
4) Limited access to "reseller bonus",
Basically the way corruption works in emerging countries is that since the "G8" countries decided to "fight corruption" what they
really did is "outsource it" to local reseller, since "service bills" will be paid on delivery, and since the people who are
expecting a kick back are in a hurry the best place to pad fees are in the licences fees.
So basically you sell a lot of licences for 10 time the real price and the local distributor is giving the cash "as needed"
And you have plausible deniebility.
Of course if you use Open Source solutions 10 time 0 is 0, not very attractive.
5) Little respect for creative work, the most admired people are "warriors" of some kind and "big merchant", and those people are
the one that get the best revenue, actual "work" is paid a minimum. And since Open Source is all about squezzing out the
"merchant" and trying to give the power back to the "creator" it does not fit.
Why will it ultimatelly succeed
a) Telcos are greedy, so they will ultimatelly improve the infrastructure to attract more customers.
b) Public discourse and private discourse are very different, so ultimatelly the grass roots effect of Open Source should do the trick
c) The governments are starting to be scared of the cost of "aid", so some critical infrastructure are self funded (so have to be affordable)
d) Corruption has a tendency toward reduction, and anyway where it cannot be reduced the "corrupt elite" will see in their interest to find ways to squezze cash out of "sustainable solutions".
e) People in the emerging country will eventually start to find their own creative role models, you might keep in mind that one of the things the precipitated the first world war (less that 100 years ago) was the desire of the German Imperial government to stop local opponents by calling on a common enemy.
And one of the gripes of the local opponents was the "c
Apparently M. Marchich is http://www.dutkoworldwide.com/media_center/latest_ news/1056/ :-))
In his resume they focus on his Latin American experience, maybe the ODF is confusing Europe and Latin America ?
(on the up side Mr Marchich employer is using apache on FreeBsd so they cannot be all bad
Anyway it is a little bit worrying when the people that are supposed to support the "good side" are using the same processes as the "bad guy".
I would not mind if the ODF alliance would hire M. Marchick as a consultant, or "Chief PHB interactor", but asking somebody that does not seem to have any interest in Open Standards (or god forbid open source) before his nomination seems strange.
Well I guess it makes some interesting email exchange between members.
Dear drone that do like microsoft because it allows you not to care,
I have "super weapons" that will win the war, you can tell that to all disbeliever.
I didn't pull them out right now because I'm didn't have the time yet to bother, but I will if needed.
So you are on the winner side anyway, you can keep free will, brain, and capacity to critisize under wrap
not required, do not think it could hurt.
And this will work, at least for one more quarter, and who cares for next year anyway ?
Since it seems to be a 1st of april hoax, all the lively discusions are for nought :-) ;-)
:-)
Oups
(although I'm sure that the PR CP has some PC games for the PC (in latin languages its even more "alliterative" CP becoming PC)
Sorry to end my mail here I have to mend some socks before my batery closes down due to electricity shortage
Indeed but then it would be almost Hoch Deutsch instead of South Bavarian, and South Bavarian is obviously a Superior Langage, as explained in Rosendorfer's Königlich bayerisches Sportbrevier (Of wich the Olympic commity ordered 40 000 exemplars for the Munich Olympiad until they actually read the book, at wich time they cancelled the order demonstrating a total lack of humor).
Cheers
Ach Zackel Tzement, Sacreubleu, Himihergottzefix, Non Dikats
I have been found out, I confess I'm an Eurotrash trying to undermine the US by poisoning the American version of the English Langage.
But anyway resistance is useless, because we have worse than misspelling and gramatical errors in slashdot:
The Européans inventented GSM and SMS (short for Silly Misspelled Sentences) and all your children will bow to the superior power of messy Texting.
--------------
Ha ha
I'm pattenting the following plug-in, take a photo, cut it in little pieces, change the skin tones to vivid green, make some simple random transformations, add a button: "remove fig-leaf".
:-))
If you see this, the user has just to hit the remove fig-leaf button, each element of the photo is unscrambled locally (with java or maybe javascript), and the various vignettes are shown ordered and side-by side for the enjoyment of people at work and other people that could potentially be minors in their juridiction, but clicked on the link that say that they swear (a lot, hum no i mean) that they are "of age".
I'm also patenting the process that enables an operator to distribute unlock codes for this "humanity progress generating" technology through an informal high school network, in exchange of msn tags and e-mail addresses that the operator can use later for absolutelly legal uses (at least legal in transdniestrian, the sovreign republic of turcish Cyprus and some interesting parts of laos.
Unfortunatelly I'm against business methods and software patents, so I guess I'll have to find another way to become rich beyond all dreams of avarice.
(excluding savings of course, that wouldn't be in the fun category
[ps]
--------------
This sig is a temporary place holder in case I ever decide that I need one.
Actually the maths are weak but not "really false".
Typically a VC does not win all or nothing.
It is more like in 20 deals:
1 is a big success: *10 and most real (effectivelly freed money) was
done here.
5 deals are huge flop, one of them hurts (it looked good and then failed, so more than seed money was spent).
10 deals fail and the VC is only recouping 1/3rd of their investment
4 deals work quite well but not stellar, so the VC gets *2
At the end the VC gets 30% more per year than what they invested.
VB is double plus good for beginners, it links them to a single vendor that despise them, and if ever they develop anything really good it will take it away from them.
And since VB skills are exactly the kind of moron level skills that pointy headed bosses love to outsource it removes beginners from the qualified job pool fast.
This is obvioulsy very good (at least for people like me that are not recent beginner).
So please be a nice miscrosoft slave dog and learn VB + C# + IIE + all the rest of the nice billable microsoft tools.
of course if you would like to have a reasonable nice easy to learn langage for beginners that would like to be able to do some simple tasks and not be linked to a single platform you could get a plate of gambas (no I will not give the URL I feel nasty today).
Cheers
Provide a Linux/FreeBsd/... Open Source computer. ...
Your children will be very irritated (what no msn wink !!!!), no pirated version of photoshop ?? NO itune
But they will have to learn to be selfreliant, and find out that they can:
Fix stuff (really fix them)
Be part of a community of doer instead of brainless consumers.
Cheers
[ps]
1) You can't avoid it because the hardware you'd like to buy happens to be pre-loaded with it, and the company will not dare to displease big Bill.
2) Because the content providers are so caught up in their own paranoid customer hating trip that they prefer to give full control to Mr Bill rather than authorize an open source compatible player for their content.
3) Because Vista is fully compatible with buying Outsourced products at WallMart, eating Genemodified food, wearing overpriced Nike shoes while watching spectator sports that have strictly no relationship with you but give you a fake feeling of "bellonging".
a lot) Because counting up to 10 is actually hard work.
One should not be surprised by the dimwitness of XboxLive Users.
Anybody using anything by Microsoft for entertainment is either immoral or dimwited or both.
Entertainment is not compulsory, so it is volontarily that somebody decides to get "amused" by the most dangerous corporation around, and the most lickely to use any possible method to take all their: money, freedoms and privacy away.
Concidering the number of programmers in India (some of them might even enjoy programming), I think this just demonstrate that Elections in India, particularly in remote areas (where the EVM is used primarely) are a sham. ...
It is not even clear that a user cannot just vote as often as s/he want:
Did you hear a beep ?
Not yet, not yet
I think I heard a beep !
No, No, dear brother in law
Ok
Now you hear a beep.
A yes now I hear.
And in any case units can be duplicated, there is no paper trail, no possibility to do a recount.
Now wonder the BJP was elected.
Electronic Voting is a Con Game.
Actually I've installed them Linux, and trying to keep them feeded
:-)
fast enought with games so that they do not feel "disadvantaged".
You illustrate exactly my point, people do not even "think" that you
can have music and videos on an FOSS platform.
But it does represent a significant part of the market (not that smaller than MaxOS, and certainly growing faster).
Moreover if it isn't Linux compatible, it usually means that somebody wants to pull some wool over your eyes.
Cheers anyway
So one of the Majors got in bed with one of the Technological Gateway Keeper.
Why can't I feel so good about this ?
I do not want my children to pester me to get a "computer that really works" because they "need" to see the same DVD as their friends.
I guess there goes the last hope that this branch of "consumer electronics" goes the right way.
Please: Burn your iPod (but I know you will not).
Well part of the solution would be to remove all Windows machines, particularly on the desktop.
:-)), but training a manager is of course much harder).
It would probably drive quite a few of the real dimwits away.
(of course the romantic that installed seti would still need to have an explanation about proper use of "unused" corporate ressources.
It would also significantly change the "mood" in your enterprise.
But of course many managers will pretend that their assistant would never be able to switch (wich is not true, I trained my first secretary to use Emacs and Troff (without getting sued for moral harassment
But anyway you are right the amount of foolishness employees can have in large company is stagerring.
It's not the Telefax, but the Minitel, the minitel network did cost millions to implement, it also brought billions in for France Telecom, and about 20 000 service providers for quite à long time.
Although it's dying out, it's not dead yet and quite a lot of the existing "Internet" companies in France where "Minitel shops" 15 years ago.
Finally a cool looking, slick and fancy box that runs a Linux version that is compatible with my lesse brethen (the ones that have less money to burn, or god forbid better things to do with their money ;-).
After all if you are happy with a fixed computer you can buy all kind of funky gear to make your shuttle look like something out of the future as it was in the 50s, but there is not so much mods you can do on a laptop.
So Apple is certainly addressing a burning need. "cool computers", and if anybody would really care for the price N* shooes would cost 15.
Microsoft just has to "crack the whip" at Suse/Novell, RedHat, Mandriva and Circular (*ubuntu) and stop them from shipping FAT drivers.
...
So no interoperability with: USB keys, Digital Cameras, MP3/Video Players, etc
Or in another word no Desktop Linux except for a couple of died in the whool hackers that are willing to download the driver in Brasil/Lithuania/Transdniestrian Moldovia/...
M$ does not need to stop ALL linux users, 60/80% are enough.
Just look at the difficulties we have with deCSS on Linux.
Where actually it becomes LESS illegal to download a blockbuster on a P2P network than to play the DVD you PAID for (of course depending of where you leave, but in Europe it is pretty much the case).
So it is a very bad news, somebody should fully investigate all the persons in the USPTO involved, and send them to jail.
First of all there are two similar proposals
1) Tax everybody
2) Tax only thouse who use a P2P protocol.
Second
The "principe" is that all the money collected is shared by all the registered authors, each authors receiving a percentage of the global fund depending of the percentage of the audience that downloaded his/her content.
The difficulty is that right now this mechanism exists with the CD and USB key tax and is based on CD/DVD sales.
Unfortunatelly there is no reason to believe that the listening patterns are the same on the internet and in the CD/DVD market.
And the CD/DVD market could very well disapear within a couple of years.
So what is needed is a way to "count" downloads, not an easy task.
Especially if you do not want to snoop on the citizens.
Of course the people that are really running scared are not the artists but all the middle people from the major's marketing creatures to the big chain sales clerc.
Why are people who bought an XBox from Microsoft unhappy about the defects, crashes and other problems ?
After all it is a "Branded Product", and a "Brand is a 'promise'" it is supposed to work a certain way, for instance an apple product is supposed to be "cool" a little bit different in usage, and a little bit more expensive, a volvo is supposed to be real safe, etc...
And of course a microsoft product is supposed to be full of bug, the real price of "ownership" is hard to find and to understand, and most of the average user cannot even figure out that there might be an alternative.
So for all this the Xbox delivers, it crashes, the price does not reflect the real price but do not worry microsoft will pull the cash out of the game writers (and no there will be no Free and Open Source Games running on it), and most of the buyer are far to alienated to understand that under no circumstance should you buy one.
Well an individual shop owner should certainly not have to carry a whole society's guilt.
But why is such a thing needed anyway ? if not because there is nothing else interesting to do for teenagers.
Or even worse they probably do not have the mental tools necessary to imagine something else to do.
-- waza doing, nothun chilling it out, nyou, nothun -- 20 years later encephalogram still pretty much flat --
Our society has spent so much time transforming us into consumer that if we do not have the money to consume we feel the need to be "near the consomation opportunity", we have made consomation a "spectator sport" for thouse that cannot (just like sport is a spectator sport for the 'sportively challenged'".
So the solution is PAY MORE TAXES, and use them to provide better public education, particularly for the kids that would not get "good parenting".
And create places that are "fun to hang out" for teens, with things to do (and places to be while doing nothing except maybe shmoosing).
Thanks for the explanation, from somebody that has an acceptable level of hearing, this is quite interesting.
..., and choose which sound bands should be filtered, and which should be increased.
I do hope that at least once you have filtered out the people that do not like to "work" (have a meaningfull conversation) it leaves you with enough interesting people that you can meet at some quite place.
It also points to some interesting suggestion for hearing aid maker, since the level of computing power available is going up, I would guess that two improvements should be possible either now or soon.
1) compare the sounds that are comming in from both side of the head and boost up what is "similar" (i.e either in front or directly behind you)
and boost down the rest (what is not in your sphere of direct interest)
2) provide some level of environment profiling that enables you to "say" I'm at a disco, or at home, or
First of all Microsoft is the largest private sponsor for the SMSI, the simple fact that they where allowed to do this is allready damning.
(of course they will be able to say that it is just the tunisian government that asked them, and they are just being nice, and it is even true that of course the tunisian government is clueless enough to do this, but the UN should have refused, but then probably the US representatives would have claimed that the UN is against free market, and unfair to nice US corporations.)
Second the fact that the redactors accepted to remove the mention can be due to incompetence or corruption, or both, the strengh of M$ in developping countries is tremendous, for no really good reason, except that they have the money needed to pay nice "study trips".
Finally most probably the paper will not be corrected, and in a year or two what will be used as a base for policy setting will be the "simplified for easy reading" paper.
And the current protestation will be forgotten.
I do agree totally, but of course I'm sure the reason her name does not appear is because I'm the only one who needs her name and phone number :-).
;-)
(Now I wonder why I didn't get it yet, must be all that spam clogging down the Internet.)
Cheers