There are anarchist who seek ways to make the society work without being more or less a tyranny of a more or less permeable oligarchy. Then there are useful idiots who went some frustration and give the authorities a tool to discredit their opponents.
About Religious Fundamentalists as Open Source Adopters in many cases you'll see that the same blindness that makes them fundamentalist means that they prefer to use pirated copies of proprietary software. Free Software activist even when somewhat blind are far to vocal about irking things like freedom of expression, tolerance, etc... and not only are proprietary software vendor completely uninterested in any ethical issue, but pirating their software enables the fundies to feel righteous since they are "hitting the enemy for the cause...." (till they happen to be forced to pay...)
"We may change those interfaces (or at least their GUID) after M7 to intentionally break those apps (please let me know if you are using those mechanisms internally)."
And no IBM didn't "gift" them the monopoly it was an accident...
Nope, in most case I have to buy microsoft stuff wether I want it or not because: - the PC I need for my work is not offered without Microsoft OS (and not because I'm picky, but just because the few existing options are not really avaiable where I am, and in most case do pay the microsoft tax but hide it under the table) - Some government agency or similar insist on stuf that are depending on some other stuff that does not use an open format and forces me to have at least a Microsoft partition.
About Apple the issue is not the mac and OSX, indeed I can and do avoid these products... iTunes is much more suspect, but concidering the global mess the audio/video industry is anyway... and the growth of DRM free content for sales or "loan" (streaming would qualify as loan since you are not supposed to keep it after use).... it is not quite as bad.
You could also criticize Intel for domineering, but at least you have at least one option (AMD), and if the netbook "craze" stopped it was in large part due to the fact that Intel refused to sell ATOM based machinesif you did not "fit" in their precise niche (and even more so ATOM + Nvidia ION) .
So do not ask me to give you a break, you should ask them... they are robing you, but in nice "lumpen proletariat" mode you prefer your "predators" to people who point out issues to you...
well you probably would if you would know what kind of agreements thay have, how concentrated the distribution of basic food stuf became in the past 30 years. If you'd recognize how much you pay and how lower than acceptable the quality of many supermarket products are.
Back to gates, he got lucky with IBM hot taking the PC market as seriously as their clients, and corporation at that time did believe that IBM was the best since they did use the same kind of monopolistics methods for their mainframe just one generation earlier. Nobody can really deny him this first step, he was lucky but most commercial success starts that way. What he did then was: force the OEMs to use Microsoft "everywhere" or "not at all" on their computers, this is abuse of dominant position. He then used the control he had on his OS to push successful software vendors out of his market by providing a strong integrations for his competing products and giving uncertain APIs to its major "strategic partners" successfully poinsonning their offering.
You can make an interesting correlation lines between visits of the BMG fundation to emerging countries, and the influence on copyright laws, patents protections, and the type of software these government select (after the visit). The fundation is only charitable if you believe that charity starts on ones door (preferably on the inside side where you personally live).
He should first pay his taxes, then since probably giving back the money is to hard to manage at least start to work ethically. And he is not doing anything humanitarian, he is pretending to do humanitarian things in order to make nice photo ops, and whitewash his political donations in emerging contries and leverage these donation into political clout that helps his investors. He is running a corporation that is dealing in influence, not a charity. The only lives he improves are his own and the ones of the employees of the fundation, and flettingly the people who are to be shown on photo near him (or her) are prepped up before, so if they're lucky at least that day they'll get some extra food.
Well how would you caracterize what he did ? He took peoples money (in very large quantities) using illegal means (for wich in some case he even got a small "slap on the hand", like the EU fine microsoft will eventually have to pay sometimes (even if it looks large it is minimal in comparision to the dammage). So I'm all in favor of growing up, but unless you believe that conning people should not be classified as stealing, you're wrong.
nope you have to spend 5% or risk taxes, but of course if you are gates and are able to strong arm and bribe governments to help your investors, getting 5% on top of a good yearly interest is not too hard.
First the article is focusing mostly on the way he is using the cash he put in security far from the taxman... Partnering with all the wrong organisations to f*up the world under guise of philantropy is not "good" no matter where the money comes from.
And of course the money comes from abuse of monopoly powers.
You are right in the fact that a charity worth running is worth running right, but for instance trying toe get a monopoly on a market segment is something most companies try to do, there is no value in a charity to do the same.
It is not the world's most popular OS it is the one you "have" to use because of monopoly building tactics. The Office suit might be the most popular, but even this is tainted by abusing the power on the OS market to illegally favor the application. And that money would be better of being totally destroyed rather than in the hand of a guy who pretend to believe that monsanto is a friend of hungry people in emerging countries. (just in case you are under the delusion that GMO are a misunderstood champion of the poor, learn from the fate of the 1000s of Indian farmers who commit suicide due to their working with monsanto, and think about how usefull "industrial agriculture" can be when it is imposed on a population where at least 40% of the population cannot do something more sophisticated than small traditional agriculture, it took the "emerged world" 60 years to move from around 50% to 2 or 3% of the population in the "fields", if you want to do the same i one generation you can just as "humanely" shoot the poor b***ds directly.)
And gates is not a roge philantropist but a 100% corporate america white collar criminal pushing a conservative agenda with some "democrat" colloring.
(well democrats are just somewhat less obviously right wing radicals than republicans...)
Nope it is the right thing to do, he stole the money, he should not have a say in how to give it back. And it is a sinister organisation, it does pro microsoft marketing
Gates is using his fundation to: => Remove cash from his taxable income => provide a cushy long term job & tax free playground for his descendent => invest in feel good actions to boost his cash cow's marketing drive.
Moreover if I steal your money, or con you out by putting you in a situation where I have a monopoly on something you need it's a crime. The fact that I might or might not give it to somebody else does not make it less of a crime, particularly if I cannot claim to be some "robin hood" equalizer if I prefer to steal from the weak and uneducated.
What is surprising is not that his philanthropic record is criticized, but that there are people who are not raving maniacs or subnormal idiots who didn't realize this earlier.
In practice churches and philantropic activities should be subjected to a flat rate tax at the highest corporate taxation level.
well the typical consumer has clicked: yes, yes, yes, yes... a couple of month ago... And does not understand how any of this works...
So a tools that tells him or her... "I see a spy siting about ==> here" sniffing your youtube/facebook/etc... transaction would be more helpful than being satisfied that you can : If you use firefox do Edit/Preferences/Advanced/View certificate and see if any seems suspicious, btw it could probably even be called something like "Best Verisign for Trust in Your Region" or "ZTCK s.r.l Switerland"...
And unless you are quite IT competent it is close to useless...
after all their clients are either incompetent or evil....
What would be really interesting would be a simple consumer level tool to detect DPI with crypto interception... So at least you know how much your ISP loves you....
In practice it is the relative efficiency of the business model that slowed down the move to internet. I remember very well when I was offering internet on-line service development to french customers, many told me that they would wait until "The Internet" would come to its sense and offer a revenue share similar to the minitel... (At least with them you could speak, the ones who believed that anyway Microsoft would offer a "better" solution never buyed anything:-))...
I believe you where not around in 82, or didn't go to france in the 80s. What France Telecom invented (probably by accident) is that under some circumstances you can "let go".
So they acctually accepted that other companies would make money on their network, they provided the terminal, the infrastructure and the billing but allmost all the rest where in the hand of a lot of various private company.
When the first "book shop on the internet" came out in the early 90s there where about 40 000 Minitel services and at least 5 active book shops.
No it lost out because the operator insisted on keeping a large part of the revenue stream, and did not go on investing the the technology. It was a great cheap alphanumeric terminal, but never made the transition to "bitmaped graphical interaction"...
What makes you think that the french government keeped subsidizing it, it was a cash cow for the government when france telecom was still a mostly "public" company, the high revenue of 3615 (mostly "hot stuff") was bringing billions to the government.
I'm sure that Bercy (the french Finance Ministery) are still having wet dreams about milking as much from the internet..
They are closing it because only the "cheapest" service are still around. The way it worked is that you could (as a service provider) choose : Service Operators pays all (only rare very specialized services worked that way) (nbr 3613) Service Operators pays nothing, the user pay little (most "public services", and most of what survives till the end of this week) (nbr 3614) Service Operators get a little, the user pays more (nbr 3615) Service Operators get a lot, the user pays a lot (nbr 3617) Most services where 3615, but now most services ar 3613, and with the number of terminals going from 20 Millions*Lots of hours to 400 K * few hours it probably only now starts to cost more maintaining the service than it generates revenues.
Arpanet predates the minitel in some ways, but the minitel started commercial services in 80/81, and in 84 there where thousend of services and millions of users. the "Internet" had almost no services except email and ftp before the 90s.
In practice it represents an "alternative reality" to the Internet and cannot really be seen as a fore or post runner, but a similar tool that created a large industry. And most french "Internet Successes" where started by Minitel entrepreuneurs, only now after about 15 years of "Internet" do we start to have people who create Internet businesses without having first dabbled in the Minitel. It didn't replace the silicon valley, but it definitivelly gave a "leg up" to france in comparision to other "competitors"
Slashdot Mirror
There are anarchist who seek ways to make the society work without being more or less a tyranny of a more or less permeable oligarchy.
Then there are useful idiots who went some frustration and give the authorities a tool to discredit their opponents.
About Religious Fundamentalists as Open Source Adopters in many cases you'll see that the same blindness that makes them fundamentalist means that they prefer to use pirated copies of proprietary software. Free Software activist even when somewhat blind are far to vocal about irking things like freedom of expression, tolerance, etc... and not only are proprietary software vendor completely uninterested in any ethical issue, but pirating their software enables the fundies to feel righteous since they are "hitting the enemy for the cause...." (till they happen to be forced to pay...)
Really,
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111018190335196
"We may change those interfaces (or at least their GUID) after M7 to intentionally break those apps (please let me know if you are using those mechanisms internally)."
And no IBM didn't "gift" them the monopoly it was an accident...
Nope, in most case I have to buy microsoft stuff wether I want it or not because:
- the PC I need for my work is not offered without Microsoft OS (and not because I'm picky, but just because the few existing options are not really avaiable where I am, and in most case do pay the microsoft tax but hide it under the table)
- Some government agency or similar insist on stuf that are depending on some other stuff that does not use an open format and forces me to have at least a Microsoft partition.
About Apple the issue is not the mac and OSX, indeed I can and do avoid these products...
iTunes is much more suspect, but concidering the global mess the audio/video industry is anyway... and the growth of DRM free content for sales or "loan" (streaming would qualify as loan since you are not supposed to keep it after use).... it is not quite as bad.
You could also criticize Intel for domineering, but at least you have at least one option (AMD), and if the netbook "craze" stopped it was in large part due to the fact that Intel refused to sell ATOM based machinesif you did not "fit" in their precise niche (and even more so ATOM + Nvidia ION) .
So do not ask me to give you a break, you should ask them... they are robing you, but in nice "lumpen proletariat" mode you prefer your "predators" to people who point out issues to you...
well you probably would if you would know what kind of agreements thay have, how concentrated the distribution of basic food stuf became in the past 30 years.
If you'd recognize how much you pay and how lower than acceptable the quality of many supermarket products are.
Back to gates, he got lucky with IBM hot taking the PC market as seriously as their clients, and corporation at that time did believe that IBM was the best since they did use the same kind of monopolistics methods for their mainframe just one generation earlier.
Nobody can really deny him this first step, he was lucky but most commercial success starts that way.
What he did then was:
force the OEMs to use Microsoft "everywhere" or "not at all" on their computers, this is abuse of dominant position.
He then used the control he had on his OS to push successful software vendors out of his market by providing a strong integrations for his competing products and giving uncertain APIs to its major "strategic partners" successfully poinsonning their offering.
You are right to be scared, but I'm not sure that you do recognize your enemies...
It seems many Ayn Rand fans literally had their mind blown away, ... :-)
And they are still searching for it
You can make an interesting correlation lines between visits of the BMG fundation to emerging countries, and the influence on copyright laws, patents protections, and the type of software these government select (after the visit).
The fundation is only charitable if you believe that charity starts on ones door (preferably on the inside side where you personally live).
He should first pay his taxes, then since probably giving back the money is to hard to manage at least start to work ethically.
And he is not doing anything humanitarian, he is pretending to do humanitarian things in order to make nice photo ops, and whitewash his political donations in emerging contries and leverage these donation into political clout that helps his investors.
He is running a corporation that is dealing in influence, not a charity.
The only lives he improves are his own and the ones of the employees of the fundation, and flettingly the people who are to be shown on photo near him (or her) are prepped up before, so if they're lucky at least that day they'll get some extra food.
You are naive...
Well how would you caracterize what he did ? He took peoples money (in very large quantities) using illegal means (for wich in some case he even got a small "slap on the hand", like the EU fine microsoft will eventually have to pay sometimes (even if it looks large it is minimal in comparision to the dammage).
So I'm all in favor of growing up, but unless you believe that conning people should not be classified as stealing, you're wrong.
nope you have to spend 5% or risk taxes, but of course if you are gates and are able to strong arm and bribe governments to help your investors, getting 5% on top of a good yearly interest is not too hard.
First the article is focusing mostly on the way he is using the cash he put in security far from the taxman...
Partnering with all the wrong organisations to f*up the world under guise of philantropy is not "good" no matter where the money comes from.
And of course the money comes from abuse of monopoly powers.
You are right in the fact that a charity worth running is worth running right, but for instance trying toe get a monopoly on a market segment is something most companies try to do, there is no value in a charity to do the same.
It is not the world's most popular OS it is the one you "have" to use because of monopoly building tactics.
The Office suit might be the most popular, but even this is tainted by abusing the power on the OS market to illegally favor the application.
And that money would be better of being totally destroyed rather than in the hand of a guy who pretend to believe that monsanto is a friend of hungry people in emerging countries.
(just in case you are under the delusion that GMO are a misunderstood champion of the poor, learn from the fate of the 1000s of Indian farmers who commit suicide due to their working with monsanto, and think about how usefull "industrial agriculture" can be when it is imposed on a population where at least 40% of the population cannot do something more sophisticated than small traditional agriculture, it took the "emerged world" 60 years to move from around 50% to 2 or 3% of the population in the "fields", if you want to do the same i one generation you can just as "humanely" shoot the poor b***ds directly.)
And gates is not a roge philantropist but a 100% corporate america white collar criminal pushing a conservative agenda with some "democrat" colloring.
(well democrats are just somewhat less obviously right wing radicals than republicans...)
s/young people/young (and old) idiots/ : here I fixed your typo
Nope it is the right thing to do, he stole the money, he should not have a say in how to give it back.
And it is a sinister organisation, it does pro microsoft marketing
http://www.deathhousebarber.com/images/jr-647-copy-2.jpg (another fine example of philantropy, al capone's soup kitchen)
Gates is using his fundation to:
=> Remove cash from his taxable income
=> provide a cushy long term job & tax free playground for his descendent
=> invest in feel good actions to boost his cash cow's marketing drive.
Moreover if I steal your money, or con you out by putting you in a situation where I have a monopoly on something you need it's a crime.
The fact that I might or might not give it to somebody else does not make it less of a crime, particularly if I cannot claim to be some "robin hood" equalizer if I prefer to steal from the weak and uneducated.
What is surprising is not that his philanthropic record is criticized, but that there are people who are not raving maniacs or subnormal idiots who didn't realize this earlier.
In practice churches and philantropic activities should be subjected to a flat rate tax at the highest corporate taxation level.
This ensure that the company only keeps burnt our overachiever and political sharks.
With a little bit of luck it'll drive them into the ground.
And anyway anybody working for microsoft deserves "advanced corporate management techniques" being applied to him or her.
well the typical consumer has clicked: yes, yes, yes, yes ... a couple of month ago...
And does not understand how any of this works...
So a tools that tells him or her ... "I see a spy siting about ==> here" sniffing your youtube/facebook/etc... transaction would be ...
more helpful than being satisfied that you can :
If you use firefox do Edit/Preferences/Advanced/View certificate and see if any seems suspicious, btw it could probably even be called something like "Best Verisign for Trust in Your Region" or "ZTCK s.r.l Switerland"
And unless you are quite IT competent it is close to useless...
I do apologize, I should have written something real useful like "first post", but it is the first time it happens to me, so I forgot :)
after all their clients are either incompetent or evil....
What would be really interesting would be a simple consumer level tool to detect DPI with crypto interception...
So at least you know how much your ISP loves you....
In practice it is the relative efficiency of the business model that slowed down the move to internet. :-))...
I remember very well when I was offering internet on-line service development to french customers, many told me that they would wait until "The Internet" would come to its sense and offer a revenue share similar to the minitel...
(At least with them you could speak, the ones who believed that anyway Microsoft would offer a "better" solution never buyed anything
But is was a fun time :-)
I believe you where not around in 82, or didn't go to france in the 80s.
What France Telecom invented (probably by accident) is that under some circumstances you can "let go".
So they acctually accepted that other companies would make money on their network, they provided the terminal, the infrastructure and the billing but allmost all the rest where in the hand of a lot of various private company.
When the first "book shop on the internet" came out in the early 90s there where about 40 000 Minitel services and at least 5 active book shops.
Sometimes ./ lack the "like" button :-)
No it lost out because the operator insisted on keeping a large part of the revenue stream, and did not go on investing the the technology.
It was a great cheap alphanumeric terminal, but never made the transition to "bitmaped graphical interaction"...
What makes you think that the french government keeped subsidizing it, it was a cash cow for the government when france telecom was still a mostly "public" company, the high revenue of 3615 (mostly "hot stuff") was bringing billions to the government.
I'm sure that Bercy (the french Finance Ministery) are still having wet dreams about milking as much from the internet..
They are closing it because only the "cheapest" service are still around.
The way it worked is that you could (as a service provider) choose :
Service Operators pays all (only rare very specialized services worked that way) (nbr 3613)
Service Operators pays nothing, the user pay little (most "public services", and most of what survives till the end of this week) (nbr 3614)
Service Operators get a little, the user pays more (nbr 3615)
Service Operators get a lot, the user pays a lot (nbr 3617)
Most services where 3615, but now most services ar 3613, and with the number of terminals going from 20 Millions*Lots of hours to 400 K * few hours it probably only now starts to cost more maintaining the service than it generates revenues.
Arpanet predates the minitel in some ways, but the minitel started commercial services in 80/81, and in 84 there where thousend of services and millions of users.
the "Internet" had almost no services except email and ftp before the 90s.
In practice it represents an "alternative reality" to the Internet and cannot really be seen as a fore or post runner, but a similar tool that created a large industry.
And most french "Internet Successes" where started by Minitel entrepreuneurs, only now after about 15 years of "Internet" do we start to have people who create Internet businesses without having first dabbled in the Minitel.
It didn't replace the silicon valley, but it definitivelly gave a "leg up" to france in comparision to other "competitors"