Oh, you mean like the System/38's had since, oh, the late 70's?
I never said orthogonal persistency was new, but fast implementations of it are newer than System/38 (KeyKOS had the first, and EROS's implementation is faster).
Anyhow, it is irrelevant how old Orthogonal Persistency is, it is the way to go and the current use of file systems fragments the computing world and makes features that much more expensive.
Are you over 30, and desperate to show you can still be a worthwhile disruptive thinker?? What you're saying sounds similar to the proposals for the next ReiserFS.
Nope, I am less than 25... But I do believe people over 30 can make worthwhile contributions.
I am a big fan of this guy's work on Subtext, which happens to address a lot of the issues that plague languages today, including language fragmentation.
I believe that a lot of the issues you raise, regarding multiple ways to express the same things, is mainly a result of the fact languages are still based on simple text. Because they are limited to text as the only medium to communicate with the programmer, they cannot be optimized for all kinds of tasks at the same time. A very very smart text editor aware of the language could ofcourse optimize the work for any given purpose, but even then, the text representation might be unoptimized for this or that purpose. Subtext addresses this by separating the internal representation of the program from the way you edit and view it. This allows creating views/edit-controls of the program which are optimized for certain purposes. The same environment will finally get rid of the silly "right tool for the job" crowd and make that one tool right for almost all jobs, via optimized frontends of the "language" for different tasks.
This will mean that there is just one semantic, and syntax is replaced with a GUI. GUI's can be self-explanatory, and semantics need only be learned once.
The problem is, the computing world is so hopelessly fragmented that every feature, every useful idea ever created, needs to be reimplemented in the context of every platform and often in the case of every program.
Sometimes it is just stupid, but often it is required because of the nature of the crappy computing world we live in.
For example, since the registry is just like the file system, but is just a little bit different and uses different interfaces, we need to duplicate all of the tools and features that we have to work with filesystems on the registry.
Since every application has a persistent large space it accesses via open/close/unlink/read/write interfaces, and a non-persistent small space it accesses via malloc/free/memory-access, every application must reimplement the dumping/loading between these two memories for all of its data. Every processing function must be implemented on memory for in-application use, and a special GUI or command line interface must be written just for it, to wrap its functionality for the user, accessing files. Worse, a specific wrapper that attaches the library to input/output from some network connection.
Since every application has to manage its own GUI window (amazing that this stupid model survives still..), every feature written which due to the above concerns gets reimplemented in the context of every application needs to get some GUI code to be implemented for it in the context of each and every application.
We live in a super-fragmented computing world, where the exact same features are reimplemented over and over and over, each time in the scope of a new "environment" which is just like the other one, but with a slight difference.
The unfortunate inevitable consequence is that 99.9% of our effort in the computing world is concentrated at duplicating existing ideas to new environments. This is, as you say, very uninteresting and even frustrating!
What the computing world desperately needs is some unification and generalization that would get rid of almost all of the duplicated effort now seen:
Unification of all spaces: No more silly separation of persistent file space and non-persistent memory space! Just have one orthogonally persistent space that is fast. This is very possible to implement, even on ordinary x86 hardware. This also results in another simplification: A program is either installed and "running" or it is not there. A lot of wasted effort writing "installers" that worry about the persistent representation of the program would become unnecessary!
As an extension of the previous bullet: Databases, the Windows "Registry" and File Systems all serve the same purpose, and all do it poorly. There is no reason why they cannot be unified to a single object lookup engine (Database?) which is a superset of the functionalities of each
Generalization of the GUI. Who ever thought that an "application" should manage a window? This is a bad idea, that results in tons and tons of useless uninteresting code that connects GUI widgets to library logic. Instead, software should be written as simple functions or "components" (much like Unix commands in a command line pipe) which are easily and even automatically attached to the correct GUI widgets by the GUI. The GUI then becomes completely disconnected from the software logic, which makes it more customizable by the user, and lets the user build his own interesting "windows" that interface him to multiple components. "winamp" and other music players would become mere configurations of widgets that any user can build up. I would guess 90% of the code in the world being written is all about this and would become unnecessary.
Some interesting consequences of the above unifications:
Excel and other spreadsheets, and build systems become one! Excel applies functions to input data nodes when those are modified and connects their output to various GUI elements (specifi
In my KDE/Kubuntu install here, I click an icon, click "update", "upgrade" and "go" flashy gui buttons, and my system is up-to-date. This includes everything from my kernel and drivers, to my installed games, servers and any other package of the thousands available.
In Windows, you have to use their update tool which has a slightly more complicated interface, and only upgrades about.. 15(?) software packages from Microsoft. What about your games? What about your various installed programs? In Windows, everything is 3rd party, and so nothing can be auto-upgraded.
That's what Windows is lacking. Do you realize this?
I enjoy the freedom I have to release a piece of software closed-source, for any price that I wish (if it's too expensive, the market will let me know, and I will lower the price).
Please note that that is not a "freedom" but a "power". The difference is that by releasing it closed-source and enforcing it by copyright you are restricting the freedoms of others, not gaining any freedom yourself.
What you are proposing is basically making software a government run monopoly. If this were to happen, most U.S. software companies would immediately go to a country where they could sell it without having to release their source.
Why are you assuming that this is a bad thing? The US would have the economic advantage of being able to freely and legally copy all of the world's software, while also funding the Free Software development via a tax.
This tax's distribution to the opensource developers could be done via votes or other methods that take away the power from the government and put it in the hands of the people. This reduces the problem of bribes and other such manipulations.
You are also forgetting that money drives technology. Without big business interest, we would still be in the computer stone age.
Note that Multics, UNIX, Lisp, Fortran, C compilers, etc. were all developed before software copyrights were enforced and copyright-driven money was put into the business.
There aren't enough people in this world that would even benefit from having all software open source.
People would be able to use all software they could benefit from, rather than just the software they can afford. Currently, this is not true because there are huge copyright-driven companies who have a very strong incentive to make opensource software not viable. They successfully make it too expensive in order to be viable by creating and standardizing secret formats (Office), attaching their OS and software to OEM's so that everyone not in the know gets to start with their OS, etc. Without a monetary incentive to harm opensource efforts, it would become far more viable and the entire population would be exposed to vast amounts of software.
Also consider the amount of adware, spyware, DRM and other malicious behaviours users are experiencing when using their computer, and this problem is only getting worse. This problem is completely solved with opensource.
Most people could give a flying fuck. They just want software application X to work. Even big open source projects only have a handful of developers that are actually making contributions.
That may be true, but this is because people are ignorant. If you ask them if they want the above advantages (software accessibility, getting rid of malware), they would surely answer yes.
If they wanted to make money on it, they should have released it a commercial application.
They want to make money on it (who doesn't want to make money?) but its more important to them that user freedom is not harmed in the process. Releasing the software as closed-source would create profit and harm everybody's freedom and decrease the economy's efficiency (code reusability becoming nil).
A software tax lets everyone keep their rights to copy anything and creates a decent incentive to create software for those pieces of software that would theoretically not be created for free. If you buy any piece of software at all today, you are already paying more than a software tax would be. Note that a software tax is not proposed in addition to closed-source software payments but instead of those. i.e: All software would become free (as in freedom) and paid by the tax.
Remember that copyright itself is coercion. So coercing people not to coerce is a special form of coercion.
A free software tax is somewhat similar to a road tax. Not everybody uses roads, but most people do, and everyone does indirectly. There is a concensus that roads should be built by the government via a tax, and this is not considered evil coercion. Why is a similar software development model considered coercion?
Too much politics and agenda and not enough open source development.
That's the whole point Stallman is trying to make, and everybody seems to be missing.
Its not about the software - it is about the freedom. Not the freedom to restrict users with copyrights or patents (actually that's a power, and not a freedom), but the freedom of a software user to freely run, learn from, distribute and modify the software he uses (or ofcourse to delegate this right to someone with the necessary technical skills to do so).
You call it politics and attempt to avoid talking about it. Stallman is knowingly calling it discussion of freedom and urges everyone to talk about it.
Back in the day, its IDE was pretty good compared to all the rest. But as C++ builder, Delphi, Qt and others came along, even the IDE didn't stand out of the crowd.
The VB language itself, as well as BASIC, are not good beginner languages. They make easy things harder, and hard things impossible. They have a lot of special-case rules that only make it harder for beginners, and they have no room for growth.
To top it all, VB creates non-portable programs on a non-free platform.
You are downloading the exact same binary as many others (and in the case of gentoo, the same source). If a backdoor is inserted to a source, its wide in the open - and so with opensource, even if YOU are not going to read the source, you are protected.
With binaries, you are partially right, but the thing is, Redhat, Debian and every other distribution compile their own binary, and so everyone must be in on it for a trojan to succeed.
This is the most insightful comment I've seen in this article, and the one that in my experience is the most difficult for people to get.
At work, I often have to struggle against cutting corners, and against knowingly doing things wrong to save a bit of time. To me it is completely clear that these "little problems" add up and cost much more in the long run, but it is quite unintuitive that putting extra days or even weeks into code review or strategic planning now, when a close deadline is due, can and is likely to save that amount or more later. The thought of moving these arbitrary and many times virtual deadlines is inconceivable, and fuels countless bad project decisions.
I think that when antibiotics are given, multiple types must ALWAYS be given. I am not sure if this is the situation today, but assuming multiple anti-biotics require multiple mutations for the bacteria to survive, then multiple antibiotic types should be used to make the antibiotics last longer.
If an antibiotics A requires a mutation with chance P(A) and an antibiotics B requires a mutation with chance P(B), then the combination requires a mutation with chance P(A)*P(B). Giving the antibiotic types separately results in a: MIN(P(A), P(B)) chance of the mutations occuring.
In other words, if we give people "the next" antibiotic type every time, we are "burning" the antibiotics much faster than if we give as many antibiotic types at the same time.
All this assuming different mutations are required to survive multiple antibiotic types.
Since I thought about this in a few minutes of my spare time, I assume that doctors/biology experts know this. My question is: Is this applied? Or is there something I am missing?
There is a huge difference between wathing a movie in a theatre and watching one in a home. Size of screen, number and quality of speakers and a few other things.
Does this mean that we don't need copyright [in its current form] at all for movie makers to make money?
Wouldn't it be enough that a limited form of copyright that only applied to theaters, and not private homes, was applied?
there will be no more new music, new software, new movies, new tv shows, ever again.
What are you basing this nonsense on? There was music before copyright, and there will be music after it. There was software before copyright protection applied to it, and there will be after it. Most TV shows don't really gain any financial incentive from copyright, and for them the issue is completely moot. As for movies, we will have to test and find out. In any case, a copyright limited to movies for periods of time just long enough to guarantee an incentive sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. A copyright on software and music, which evidently don't need a copyright incentive is preposterous.
great plan buddy. I spose you assume that creative people dont need to eat? get real, the ease of copying creative works means that copyright is MORE important now than before. I guess you dont work in a job where you create anything digital or easily copied, because your plan makes you a homeless tramp...
You are making various wrong assumptions:
The importance of a law has nothing to do with its effects on the general populace Copyright originally applied when people could not reasonably copy at all and did not limit them. Today, copyright limits each and every person in society. It became a huge burden, and that is a case against copyright, not for it.
Creative people can only make money being creative based on copyright. Bzzt. Wrong. Many creative people today make their living by writing BSD, Public Domain and GPL software. Lawyers and others are writing creative works all the time, and yet they get no copyright? How is that possible? Oh, your theory is collapsing!
It is however true, that with government policing its citizens in their homes against making full efficient use of the copies in their disposal makes them more dependant on the creative people, and thus helping the creative people's financial and power status. However, you and many others have trouble understanding that not everything that makes money for people is a good thing. Government subsidy of potato selling could help potato sellers, but it doesn't make it a good thing!
Someone must be an uncreative slob to support such views.
I actually make a decent living doing very creative work, without any reliance on copyright, thank you.
I take it you are dead happy to see basically zero progress in software from now on. What a twat.
Are you even listening?
The claim is not that creation is not necessary, but that the incentive to create is not necessary.
In other words, creation will continue to exist long after copyright. Can you get that through your head or will you continue to argue against a strawman?
As copying becomes easier, copyright becomes a heavier burden on society.
As copying becomes easier and digital processing becomes more of a commodity, creation of new materials becomes easier, thus requiring less of an incentive.
So as the years pass by, you would expect copyright terms to shorten and perhaps even disappear (Who knows? Maybe we have already reached a state where an artifical incentive to create is no longer necessary). But for some odd reason, copyright terms get longer and longer. The camel's back is already breaking, and in many countries, copyright lost society's respect entirely.
Currently, the difficulty in enforcing copyright is a huge release on the stress copyright is forming on the society, but if the new DRM technologies are successful, this release will also be blocked - and I anticipate an explosion. Perhaps a positive one, because it will almost surely result in the abolishment of copyright.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to encode genetic weaknesses into creatures you are going to spread in such an environment, so that you can get rid of them in case they cause too much trouble?
I am not sure about the exact implementation of this, but perhaps reducing resistability to some otherwise harmless disease, or increasing sensitivity to a type of poison...
Unfortunately for you, the majority of the people do believe in its morality, so you're into a tough fight.
As for copyrights.. The vast majority of people in my country share my belief that it is immoral, so we can all disrespect it in (relative) peace. Ofcourse at any time, this can be used for selective persecution, but in general it is not a persecuted offence.
Some of us don't believe in the morality of copyright in its current form, and thus cannot respect it.
I avoid closed-source software because it is usually of lesser quality, but I have no bad feelings about infringing on copyrights that ought not to be given in the first place, for an incentive to create software that just is not needed.
On what grounds do you say that they are not effective against terrorism?
In Israel, bag/metal searches prevent terrorism and almost all terrorism acts had occurred where these searches were not enacted. The very few places where the search failed to prevent the terrorist act, are those were the search site itself was crowded.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you mean like the System/38's had since, oh, the late 70's?
I never said orthogonal persistency was new, but fast implementations of it are newer than System/38 (KeyKOS had the first, and EROS's implementation is faster).
Anyhow, it is irrelevant how old Orthogonal Persistency is, it is the way to go and the current use of file systems fragments the computing world and makes features that much more expensive.
Are you over 30, and desperate to show you can still be a worthwhile disruptive thinker?? What you're saying sounds similar to the proposals for the next ReiserFS.
Nope, I am less than 25...
But I do believe people over 30 can make worthwhile contributions.
I am a big fan of this guy's work on Subtext, which happens to address a lot of the issues that plague languages today, including language fragmentation.
I believe that a lot of the issues you raise, regarding multiple ways to express the same things, is mainly a result of the fact languages are still based on simple text. Because they are limited to text as the only medium to communicate with the programmer, they cannot be optimized for all kinds of tasks at the same time. A very very smart text editor aware of the language could ofcourse optimize the work for any given purpose, but even then, the text representation might be unoptimized for this or that purpose. Subtext addresses this by separating the internal representation of the program from the way you edit and view it. This allows creating views/edit-controls of the program which are optimized for certain purposes. The same environment will finally get rid of the silly "right tool for the job" crowd and make that one tool right for almost all jobs, via optimized frontends of the "language" for different tasks.
This will mean that there is just one semantic, and syntax is replaced with a GUI. GUI's can be self-explanatory, and semantics need only be learned once.
Sometimes it is just stupid, but often it is required because of the nature of the crappy computing world we live in.
For example, since the registry is just like the file system, but is just a little bit different and uses different interfaces, we need to duplicate all of the tools and features that we have to work with filesystems on the registry.
Since every application has a persistent large space it accesses via open/close/unlink/read/write interfaces, and a non-persistent small space it accesses via malloc/free/memory-access, every application must reimplement the dumping/loading between these two memories for all of its data. Every processing function must be implemented on memory for in-application use, and a special GUI or command line interface must be written just for it, to wrap its functionality for the user, accessing files. Worse, a specific wrapper that attaches the library to input/output from some network connection.
Since every application has to manage its own GUI window (amazing that this stupid model survives still..), every feature written which due to the above concerns gets reimplemented in the context of every application needs to get some GUI code to be implemented for it in the context of each and every application.
We live in a super-fragmented computing world, where the exact same features are reimplemented over and over and over, each time in the scope of a new "environment" which is just like the other one, but with a slight difference.
The unfortunate inevitable consequence is that 99.9% of our effort in the computing world is concentrated at duplicating existing ideas to new environments. This is, as you say, very uninteresting and even frustrating!
What the computing world desperately needs is some unification and generalization that would get rid of almost all of the duplicated effort now seen:
This also results in another simplification: A program is either installed and "running" or it is not there. A lot of wasted effort writing "installers" that worry about the persistent representation of the program would become unnecessary!
Instead, software should be written as simple functions or "components" (much like Unix commands in a command line pipe) which are easily and even automatically attached to the correct GUI widgets by the GUI. The GUI then becomes completely disconnected from the software logic, which makes it more customizable by the user, and lets the user build his own interesting "windows" that interface him to multiple components. "winamp" and other music players would become mere configurations of widgets that any user can build up. I would guess 90% of the code in the world being written is all about this and would become unnecessary.
Some interesting consequences of the above unifications:
In my KDE/Kubuntu install here, I click an icon, click "update", "upgrade" and "go" flashy gui buttons, and my system is up-to-date. This includes everything from my kernel and drivers, to my installed games, servers and any other package of the thousands available.
In Windows, you have to use their update tool which has a slightly more complicated interface, and only upgrades about.. 15(?) software packages from Microsoft. What about your games? What about your various installed programs? In Windows, everything is 3rd party, and so nothing can be auto-upgraded.
That's what Windows is lacking. Do you realize this?
This is how it works here. And I haven't touched my KDE defaults.
I enjoy the freedom I have to release a piece of software closed-source, for any price that I wish (if it's too expensive, the market will let me know, and I will lower the price).
Please note that that is not a "freedom" but a "power". The difference is that by releasing it closed-source and enforcing it by copyright you are restricting the freedoms of others, not gaining any freedom yourself.
What you are proposing is basically making software a government run monopoly. If this were to happen, most U.S. software companies would immediately go to a country where they could sell it without having to release their source.
Why are you assuming that this is a bad thing?
The US would have the economic advantage of being able to freely and legally copy all of the world's software, while also funding the Free Software development via a tax.
This tax's distribution to the opensource developers could be done via votes or other methods that take away the power from the government and put it in the hands of the people. This reduces the problem of bribes and other such manipulations.
You are also forgetting that money drives technology. Without big business interest, we would still be in the computer stone age.
Note that Multics, UNIX, Lisp, Fortran, C compilers, etc. were all developed before software copyrights were enforced and copyright-driven money was put into the business.
There aren't enough people in this world that would even benefit from having all software open source.
People would be able to use all software they could benefit from, rather than just the software they can afford. Currently, this is not true because there are huge copyright-driven companies who have a very strong incentive to make opensource software not viable. They successfully make it too expensive in order to be viable by creating and standardizing secret formats (Office), attaching their OS and software to OEM's so that everyone not in the know gets to start with their OS, etc. Without a monetary incentive to harm opensource efforts, it would become far more viable and the entire population would be exposed to vast amounts of software.
Also consider the amount of adware, spyware, DRM and other malicious behaviours users are experiencing when using their computer, and this problem is only getting worse. This problem is completely solved with opensource.
Most people could give a flying fuck. They just want software application X to work. Even big open source projects only have a handful of developers that are actually making contributions.
That may be true, but this is because people are ignorant.
If you ask them if they want the above advantages (software accessibility, getting rid of malware), they would surely answer yes.
If they wanted to make money on it, they should have released it a commercial application.
They want to make money on it (who doesn't want to make money?) but its more important to them that user freedom is not harmed in the process. Releasing the software as closed-source would create profit and harm everybody's freedom and decrease the economy's efficiency (code reusability becoming nil).
A software tax lets everyone keep their rights to copy anything and creates a decent incentive to create software for those pieces of software that would theoretically not be created for free. If you buy any piece of software at all today, you are already paying more than a software tax would be. Note that a software tax is not proposed in addition to closed-source software payments but instead of those. i.e: All software would become free (as in freedom) and paid by the tax.
Remember that copyright itself is coercion.
So coercing people not to coerce is a special form of coercion.
A free software tax is somewhat similar to a road tax. Not everybody uses roads, but most people do, and everyone does indirectly.
There is a concensus that roads should be built by the government via a tax, and this is not considered evil coercion. Why is a similar software development model considered coercion?
Too much politics and agenda and not enough open source development.
That's the whole point Stallman is trying to make, and everybody seems to be missing.
Its not about the software - it is about the freedom. Not the freedom to restrict users with copyrights or patents (actually that's a power, and not a freedom), but the freedom of a software user to freely run, learn from, distribute and modify the software he uses (or ofcourse to delegate this right to someone with the necessary technical skills to do so).
You call it politics and attempt to avoid talking about it. Stallman is knowingly calling it discussion of freedom and urges everyone to talk about it.
Are you saying software "piracy" is a bad thing?
Back in the day, its IDE was pretty good compared to all the rest. But as C++ builder, Delphi, Qt and others came along, even the IDE didn't stand out of the crowd.
The VB language itself, as well as BASIC, are not good beginner languages. They make easy things harder, and hard things impossible. They have a lot of special-case rules that only make it harder for beginners, and they have no room for growth.
To top it all, VB creates non-portable programs on a non-free platform.
You are downloading the exact same binary as many others (and in the case of gentoo, the same source). If a backdoor is inserted to a source, its wide in the open - and so with opensource, even if YOU are not going to read the source, you are protected.
With binaries, you are partially right, but the thing is, Redhat, Debian and every other distribution compile their own binary, and so everyone must be in on it for a trojan to succeed.
One of many developers.
Without a conflict of interests.
This is the most insightful comment I've seen in this article, and the one that in my experience is the most difficult for people to get.
At work, I often have to struggle against cutting corners, and against knowingly doing things wrong to save a bit of time. To me it is completely clear that these "little problems" add up and cost much more in the long run, but it is quite unintuitive that putting extra days or even weeks into code review or strategic planning now, when a close deadline is due, can and is likely to save that amount or more later. The thought of moving these arbitrary and many times virtual deadlines is inconceivable, and fuels countless bad project decisions.
I think that when antibiotics are given, multiple types must ALWAYS be given.
I am not sure if this is the situation today, but assuming multiple anti-biotics require multiple mutations for the bacteria to survive, then multiple antibiotic types should be used to make the antibiotics last longer.
If an antibiotics A requires a mutation with chance P(A) and an antibiotics B requires a mutation with chance P(B), then the combination requires a mutation with chance P(A)*P(B). Giving the antibiotic types separately results in a: MIN(P(A), P(B)) chance of the mutations occuring.
In other words, if we give people "the next" antibiotic type every time, we are "burning" the antibiotics much faster than if we give as many antibiotic types at the same time.
All this assuming different mutations are required to survive multiple antibiotic types.
Since I thought about this in a few minutes of my spare time, I assume that doctors/biology experts know this. My question is: Is this applied? Or is there something I am missing?
There is a huge difference between wathing a movie in a theatre and watching one in a home. Size of screen, number and quality of speakers and a few other things.
Does this mean that we don't need copyright [in its current form] at all for movie makers to make money?
Wouldn't it be enough that a limited form of copyright that only applied to theaters, and not private homes, was applied?
What are you basing this nonsense on?
There was music before copyright, and there will be music after it. There was software before copyright protection applied to it, and there will be after it.
Most TV shows don't really gain any financial incentive from copyright, and for them the issue is completely moot.
As for movies, we will have to test and find out. In any case, a copyright limited to movies for periods of time just long enough to guarantee an incentive sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. A copyright on software and music, which evidently don't need a copyright incentive is preposterous.
great plan buddy. I spose you assume that creative people dont need to eat?
get real, the ease of copying creative works means that copyright is MORE important now than before.
I guess you dont work in a job where you create anything digital or easily copied, because your plan makes you a homeless tramp...
You are making various wrong assumptions:
Copyright originally applied when people could not reasonably copy at all and did not limit them. Today, copyright limits each and every person in society. It became a huge burden, and that is a case against copyright, not for it.
Bzzt. Wrong.
Many creative people today make their living by writing BSD, Public Domain and GPL software. Lawyers and others are writing creative works all the time, and yet they get no copyright?
How is that possible?
Oh, your theory is collapsing!
It is however true, that with government policing its citizens in their homes against making full efficient use of the copies in their disposal makes them more dependant on the creative people, and thus helping the creative people's financial and power status. However, you and many others have trouble understanding that not everything that makes money for people is a good thing. Government subsidy of potato selling could help potato sellers, but it doesn't make it a good thing!
I actually make a decent living doing very creative work, without any reliance on copyright, thank you.
I take it you are dead happy to see basically zero progress in software from now on.
What a twat.
Are you even listening?
The claim is not that creation is not necessary, but that the incentive to create is not necessary.
In other words, creation will continue to exist long after copyright. Can you get that through your head or will you continue to argue against a strawman?
Ofcourse we all know that without copyright, there would be no software at all.
As copying becomes easier, copyright becomes a heavier burden on society.
As copying becomes easier and digital processing becomes more of a commodity, creation of new materials becomes easier, thus requiring less of an incentive.
So as the years pass by, you would expect copyright terms to shorten and perhaps even disappear (Who knows? Maybe we have already reached a state where an artifical incentive to create is no longer necessary). But for some odd reason, copyright terms get longer and longer. The camel's back is already breaking, and in many countries, copyright lost society's respect entirely.
Currently, the difficulty in enforcing copyright is a huge release on the stress copyright is forming on the society, but if the new DRM technologies are successful, this release will also be blocked - and I anticipate an explosion. Perhaps a positive one, because it will almost surely result in the abolishment of copyright.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to encode genetic weaknesses into creatures you are going to spread in such an environment, so that you can get rid of them in case they cause too much trouble?
I am not sure about the exact implementation of this, but perhaps reducing resistability to some otherwise harmless disease, or increasing sensitivity to a type of poison...
Any biology experts to comment on the idea?
Unfortunately for you, the majority of the people do believe in its morality, so you're into a tough fight.
As for copyrights.. The vast majority of people in my country share my belief that it is immoral, so we can all disrespect it in (relative) peace. Ofcourse at any time, this can be used for selective persecution, but in general it is not a persecuted offence.
Some of us don't believe in the morality of copyright in its current form, and thus cannot respect it.
I avoid closed-source software because it is usually of lesser quality, but I have no bad feelings about infringing on copyrights that ought not to be given in the first place, for an incentive to create software that just is not needed.
In addition to the memory/cpu hogging, Debianized FireFox also crashes very very often... :-(
That's why I prefer Konqueror, and suffer from a somewhat limited web sometimes...
And by the way, I have updates, do you want to upgrade me NOW? LATER?
On what grounds do you say that they are not effective against terrorism?
In Israel, bag/metal searches prevent terrorism and almost all terrorism acts had occurred where these searches were not enacted. The very few places where the search failed to prevent the terrorist act, are those were the search site itself was crowded.