And when Microsoft alienates the education market, they don't just piss off some administrators: if and when those administrators migrate some or all of their services and equipment to OSS, the effect inevitably trickles down to the students being educated in that district. The last thing Microsoft wants is for high school students in the process of making college choices to see the superiority of OSS to their own crufty product, and make decisions based in part on that information. But that is just what is happening. So the events going on right now will have ramifications well into the future. Count on it.
I disagree, and cite Apple as an example of how being the dominant computer in schools doesn't have any real effect on the buying habits of students when they finally get out into the real world. I suspect that some of that has to do with the fact that Apple equipment has historically (meaning, until relatively recently) been far too expensive and closed for people to consider using it in businesses.
Businesses seem to be interested in two things: getting the job done, and being compatible. It's sometimes difficult to say which is considered more important. Where doing the job is more important, Linux has a good shot at replacing Microsoft. But where compatibility is more important, Linux will have a much smaller chance of displacing Microsoft. It's only in the former case that a person's experience in with computers during his education might matter.
But computer technology changes so quickly that the proprietary knowledge (knowledge of Microsoft products, for instance) you pick up in elmentary and even high school will be so out of date by the time you make it into the business world that it'll be irrelevant. Hence, your purchasing decisions once you get out of college are very unlikely to be guided in any significant way by the specific hardware and operating systems you were exposed to as a kid.
Only stable applications such as word processors may be the exception to that, but their very stability makes it possible to implement them on top of free operating systems such as Linux, thus reducing the impact that learning them in K12 would have on a person's buying habits.
The measure of what it "looks" like should be how much light is reflected off an object at a given distance, not how bright the bulb itself looks. The latter is very misleading since the surface area of a typical LED is many times smaller than the surface area of a typical light bulb, so a LED can "look" much brighter compared with a 40W bulb even if the total light output is much less.
The goal of a corporation is to do what its charter sets out for it to do.
No. The goal of a corporation is whatever its owners want it to be, and it's something that can (and will) change over time.
Once a corporation is publicly traded, that goal quickly becomes "make as much money as possible". There may be a few exceptions, but they're just that: exceptions.
So I can agree with you as far as private companies are concerned, but completely disagree when talking about publicly traded corps.
It's the publicly traded corps that have most of the money and power, by the way, so they're the only ones that really matter in this discussion.
Ya know, most succesful revolutions have been ones in which it's the military that revolted. Such things happen.
This is true. Of course, most (all?) such revolutions that have occurred in recent times (within the past, say, 50 years) resulted in a military dictatorship. So this doesn't make me feel any better.
But then, bloodless revolutions (I'd consider the passage of an "amendment" that completely rewrites the Constitution onesuch) are entirely conceivable.
Conceivable, but extremely unlikely, given that the people in power have all the firepower and no incentive to make such changes.
Then again, if some person or corporation were to find a small (poor!) government willing to cede sovereignty over a substantial tract of land (in return for a reasonable price) and set up (say) a Libertarian government there, I'd call that a revolutionary event also.
Dude, don't make me laugh. A corporation establishing a libertarian government?? Not on your life! Remember that the first, last, and only goal of a corporation is to make as much money as it can any way it can (legal or not doesn't matter any more, all that matters is whether or not they get caught and by whom they get caught. Microsoft is proof of this).
Revolutions don't have to mean the civilian militias overpowering the military. What they mean (quoting from Webster's) is fundamental change in political organization; especially : the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed; this implies nothing about the presence or lack of bloodshed.
Since the type of change we're talking about won't happen as a result of the actions of those with power, it must happen as a result of the actions of those without. During the 1700s this was a possibility because of the relative parity between civilians and military. Not anymore.
As for my position -- next revolution we have, I'm opting for a more strictly constitutional republic, one without anything with the potential for misinterpretation of the elastic or commerce clauses. That such an opportunity may not come within my lifetime... well, a revolution will come when a revolution is needed. No reason to write less code or be excessively bothered because of it.
Hmm...revolution. Yeah, right.
Lessee...the civilians have rifles, pistols, and occasionally some light
industrial explosives (with days to weeks of planning they might be able
to put together something capable of destroying a medium sized building,
a la Timothy McVeigh). The feds have tanks, lots of automatic, large
caliber guns with military grade ammunition (your police-issue kevlar
vest is no match for a slug fired from an
M-16 using military-grade propellant), artillery, missiles, high-speed
fighters, bombers, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons.
This ain't the 1700's, you know, when the only difference between
a civilian militia and a state-sponsored military was a few cannons
and perhaps some training. In the 21st century, the government has a
millions-to-one advantage in firepower over the civilian population,
just from the nukes alone.
The only hope an armed rebellion has is in getting the U.S. military to
join in the fight, in which case there won't be much of a fight because
there'll be nobody to fight against. Anything else is just a question
of which side has the largest amount of military support. Ultimately,
the civilians don't make any difference except for a way to deplete the
other side's ammunition. In other words, cannon fodder.
So please excuse me if I seem a bit skeptical about any revolution coming. It might happen, but if it does, it will fail. I have little reason to believe that the military will side with the civilians because military men are rigorously trained to take orders and to execute them no matter how unpleasant they might be.
Bad form to respond to my own message, I know, but I had to correct this:
The only other thing I can say is that you and others (which probably includes myself) who value the happiness and prosperity of others...
The "which probably includes myself" was written with a different statement in mind, and I forgot to edit that part as well. Sigh. So it should read "which definitely includes myself".
If the thing you wish to complain about is that many people who are (by your standards) succesful have different ethics than you, of course you've every right to say so -- but to claim that following ones' ethics brings neither happiness or success is clearly in the wrong.
I'll certainly not dispute that ethics are something that varies with the individual. If you wish to label people who treat most other people as mere sheep to be fleeced as simply having "different" ethics, then I cannot dispute that either. All I can say is that it is precisely such people who, in general, seem to have the greatest amount of money and wield the greatest amount of power. The person who started this thread was dismayed by this situation, and so am I.
The only other thing I can say is that you and others (which probably includes myself) who value the happiness and prosperity of others as well as themselves will remain happy only at the whim of those who have most of the power and money. As long as you're useful to those people, they'll leave you alone. But don't count on that remaining the case forever.
I, for one, would probably not be terribly happy living in a police state. But that's exactly where we're headed, driven by those very people who, as you say, have "different" ethical beliefs.
We're headed in that direction because it is in that direction that greater wealth and power lay in wait for those "differently" ethical people.
No, I'm not. The word "crime" in the line you cited was a poor choice on my part, but the point of my whole comment wasn't focused on crime (I assume we can agree that crime is not ethical, even though unethical acts aren't necessarily criminal).
Actually, we can't even agree on that. Doing drugs is a crime, for instance, but I see nothing unethical about it. Some crimes are unethical, and some aren't, and it just depends.
It's not up to me to explain one of your assertions. You take Bill Gates and use him as an example to prove "many" of the richest people are unethical. First you'd have to explain to me how you know this (hint: You don't.).
You think perjuring yourself on the witness stand is an ethical thing to do? How about the mafia style techniques his company uses? And it is his company, right?
So tell me, what rights did you lose today? Yesterday? Last Tuesday? To say we are losing our rights on a daily basis is such a grossly hysterical overstatement of our problems I don't think it proves anything at all.
Fair enough. Would it be better for me to say that we lose more of our rights every time Congress passes a batch of laws?
How about evidence instead of assertions? I don't buy the notion that the unethical are unopposed. Otherwise, unethical behavior would never have repercussions.
There is some opposition to the unethical, but that opposition appears to be waning. Furthermore, ethical behavior also has consequences (hell, just look at the front page of Slashdot and you'll find at least one example today).
If being ethical is such a burden for you, throw your ethics away. If there isn't value in your ethics, why feel any need to adhere to them? As it is, you're just whining.
The Dark Side is tempting, but my ethics prevent me from going there. They're too strong a part of me to allow it. But at least I'm aware of the disadvantages.
Don't think the unethical are winning? Then explain our apparently continuous slide towards police statehood.
Well, I had to draw the line somewhere, and 30 years seemed like a nice round number. Since I don't have any experience or memory of Presidents prior to that, I had to limit myself to 30 years. The number could actually be quite a bit larger but I had to stop someplace.:-)
The reason that power can be considered some measure of success is that without it, you cannot defend yourself against unethical people who have it.
And that's the problem: those people who are unethical but who also have power will of course misuse their power. Unless ethical people also have power, the people without ethics will win. They will win because it is that type of person who likes to make the lives of others more difficult, just like the school bully does.
Unethical people are able to acquire money and power much more easily than ethical people because our society rewards the unethical and punishes the ethical. Want proof? Look at who gets elected to office.
None of this is meant as a criticism of how you run your life. The main point I was trying to make is that people who acquire their money and power through unethical means are not unhappy (rather the opposite, methinks), and to claim otherwise is naive and ridiculous.
It may be that you will remain happy while remaining ethical. I certainly hope so (in response to your comment about my ethics versus yours, I expect that they're very similar). But because ethical people tend not to acquire power, don't expect to remain happy just because you're ethical. Unethical people with power tend to use that power to enrichen themselves by making our lives more difficult and, therefore, by making us less happy than we would be otherwise. So don't expect to remain happy or successful simply because you're ethical.
Regardless of how much money you have, chances are 99.99999% that someone else will have more than you do. And if money matters to you (like it would appear), then that fact alone will make you miserable.
Ah, yes, the "money doesn't matter because someone else will always have more than you" argument.
Well, I've got news for you, but money matters to you, too. Don't believe me? Try getting rid of all of it and see how happy you are living on the street.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Money does matter. It matters because it is a tool we use to get by in life. It is the alternative to the direct barter system. If you didn't have money, you'd have to fall back to the barter system in order to survive. All money does is provide a means of exchange.
Do you think you will be just as happy being completely self-sufficient (you grow, gather, or hunt your own food, build your own shelter, etc., and do it using only tools that you have made from scratch. And don't depend on anyone for medical assistance when you need it, either) as you are now? You might think so, but I'll bet reality will be very different. There's a reason people prefer to live within society than away from it: humans are far more capable in groups than alone. But to function as a member of a group, you have to be able to exchange your labor for someone else's. And thus we eventually end up back where we started, looking at money.
Money itself isn't what makes me happy. What makes me happy are the things I can do with it. Some people get confused between the two, of course, but many don't. Hell, some even enjoy the pursuit of money.
Almost everyone out there would like more money. It's not because they want the money directly, it's because of the things they'd like to do with it. For such people, the pursuit of money is not in and of itself enjoyable (though the jobs they get paid for might be), and that's why they don't pursue it as vigorously as some.
But don't make the mistake, as you seem to be, of believing that because money in and of itself isn't what people are after, that it isn't important. It's important just like food is important -- a requirement of survival in today's world.
And as should be obvious from so many of the articles on Slashdot, money is an expression of power. Relating back to the original thread, those who lack ethics seem to be much more capable of acquiring and using money than those who are ethical. Hence, I stand by my original assertion that being ethical puts one at a significant disadvantage in the real world.
There will always be notable examples of those who profit by crime, but if you look, you'll also see many who do very well (financially and/or personally) by behaving ethically. There is value in not being part of the problem.
The problem here is that you're equating ethical behavior with lawful behavior. The two aren't the same thing at all.
And being ethical does put you at a serious disadvantage. Don't believe me? The explain to the rest of us why so many of the richest people in the U.S. are unethical (hint: Bill Gates didn't become the richest guy in the U.S. by behaving ethically). Explain to us why we haven't seen an ethical President for the past 30 years.
If being ethical didn't put one at a serious disadvantage, then we wouldn't be losing our rights on a daily basis like we have been for the past 2-3 decades, because the unethical people would be opposed by at least as many ethical people. But that just doesn't happen, does it? Instead, the unethical are almost completely unopposed, because the ethical DON'T HAVE POWER. What more proof could you possibly want???
Re:Where Does Honesty Get You?
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Me, I'd rather be an honest and ethical person, rather than a rich one. At least I enjoy whatever little money I have!
Are you really so naive as to believe that unethical people who have a lot of money don't enjoy it? That sounds to me like something that people without money tell themselves to console themselves, sort of like telling your kid that the school bully is actually miserable, when in fact he's probably having a great time picking on other people.
Well, enjoy it while you can, because the peoplewithmoneyandpower are looking to make sure you have even less money to enjoy than you have now, so that they will have even more money and power to enjoy.
Feel free to bury your head in the sand and tell yourself that it's okay, while legislation like the DMCA and SSSCA gets passed and enforced. Yes, it'll all be okay, even if you no longer have any money and are living in a corporate run police state. Because at least you'll still have your ethics!
(And yes, I despise those people without ethics and am sickened at how they seem to be able to do so much better than people with ethics, but I'm not naive enough to believe that the fact that I have any ethics makes one damned bit of difference in the real world. In fact, I know it puts me at a significant disadvantage, and sometimes wish I didn't have these ethical beliefs that prevent me from doing something about that).
That's true, but they save money in the long run by spending more money up front. Many people don't do this because they think short term, not long term.
So this technology is a possible solution to the energy problem, but only if it gets sold at roughly the same price point as current lightbulbs.
But you can expect that they'll be sold at a premium even if the manufacturing costs are the same, simply because they're better, and so the problem of high energy consumption will remain.
Brin's idea of the transparent society has one huge flawed assumption behind it: that the people in power aren't going to exploit their power to give themselves some opacity.
But of course they will, just as they have and will exploit their power to give themselves other advantages over those who lack that power.
And once they do that, all of the advantages of the transparent society disappear, and we're left with "big brother".
This is why it's so important to oppose any incursion into our privacy. The transparent society simply cannot happen as long as humans behave like humans, so the only reasonable alternative is a reasonable amount of privacy.
Things are bad enough as it is. They don't need to get any worse. But I believe that they will, that the United States will transform itself into a police state the likes of which the world has never seen, and that it will take the rest of the world with it through its military power. And it will all happen because the large corporations (more precisely, those who own and run them) want cheap labor and a captive market simultaneously, and by their nature have no ethics (and yet are given almost all of the same rights as individuals are yet none of the responsibilities). And popular revolution won't happen either, not when the military has a millions to one advantage in firepower.
Enjoy your privacy and freedom now, while you still can. It probably won't be long before they're gone.
They don't need to ship dual boot systems. All they need to do is configure the hard disk so that it has a spare, unused partition that is large enough to put a decent installation of Linux onto.
In fact, they can even go so far as to install Linux onto it but without touching the default boot sector (so Windows boots up as usual the first time the system boots from the hard disk).
Then they ship a bootable CD whose sole purpose is to allow the user to configure the system any way he/she wants prior to starting the system. On of those options is to define how the partition mentioned above gets used: it can be used as another Windows partition, or the Linux installation on it can be "activated" (doing so will, of course, cause the bootloader to be replaced with the bootsectors for a dual boot system so that Linux or Windows can be booted). It should also be possible to configure various things about the Windows installation, such as which browser is the default, etc.
The vendor can then set up the system (they control the BIOS, right?) so that it requires the configuration CD the first time the system is booted (and thereafter until the configuration CD runs -- the config CD can change the BIOS settings so that the system will boot as normal once the user decides how he wants his system configured).
Point being that in this case it is the user who takes the actions, not the vendor. The vendor is merely giving the user the tools to accomplish the things mentioned above.
I'd love to see Microsoft try to argue against this in court in front of the judge, since doing this simply gives the user options and doesn't change the user experience except through the user's own actions. If Microsoft's position is that the user isn't fit to decide for himself what he wants, then it will be exposed by their objection to this scheme.
I don't know about you, but I think the way antitrust is handled is ridiculous.
Corporations, which the Supreme Court has essentially declared to be legal entities with rights and everything, act like spoiled children because they have one and only one purpose: make money to the exclusion of all else.
What's the best way to make money to the exclusion of all else? Become a monopoly and abuse it once you have it!
If antitrust remedies don't include really stiff penalties, then every corporation out there is going to be very predictable and attempt to become a monopoly -- and once they do, they'll be even more predictable and abuse that monopoly. And why not? Abusing a monopoly doesn't cost them anything. The worst thing that happens is that they lose their monopoly status, right? But until that time, they bring in the cash hand over fist because of their abuse of their monopoly position.
Abuse of a monopoly should be so horrendously expensive that corporations don't even think of doing it, because the consequences would be too devastating. Much better to play nice and profit reasonably from it than to play dirty and get smacked down hard for it, right? But with the rules as they are right now, corporations have every incentive to abuse their monopoly for as long as they're able, because doing so doesn't cost them anything.
And that's gotta change.
I mean, if individuals are punished under the law for breaking the law, then why aren't corporations? Why are corporations so special, anyway, that we have elevated them to the status of godhood?
You do have a good point, so I thought of another alternative.
How about this: instead of doing what I suggested previously, they set their cache up so that instead of the cached entry coming up initially, it comes up with a statement that the owners/operators of the site are attempting to stifle free speech through abuse of the DMCA (or whatever), and on that page is the link to the cached entry (along with a link to the text of the lawsuit in question) so that the viewer can get to it if he really wants.
That way people who hit Google's cache will know that the Bad Guys really are Bad and why, but will still be able to get to the information they're after if they really want it.
And it still does damage to the Bad Guys.
You guys don't seem to quite follow my point here.
I'm not advocating that Google use this tactic as a means of offense, only as a means of defense against DMCA lawsuits and other lawsuits that would stifle free speech or would otherwise compromise Google's integrity as a search engine (guess I should have made this point clearer).
See, the deal as I see it is this: if some company or organization is going to insist that Google compromise their integrity as a search engine and force the point through force of law, then shouldn't Google comply in such a way as to maximize the damage to the entity that is making such demands? I mean, the DMCA requires them to remove their cached entries. What Google is currently doing is good, but in my opinion not good enough. They can do that and do what I suggest at the same time, see?
By doing so, they would make it as expensive as possible for the Bad Guys to use the DMCA as a bludgeon.
And they do have power -- a lot more than they're using right now.
They're the premiere web search engine right now, with multiple companies (like Yahoo) using them as their own search engine.
What kind of power does Google have? It can make a web presence disappear.
Think of it like this: how do most people find sites on the internet these days? Search engines, right? Sometimes they'll find them indirectly but that's only by chance. When they're actually looking for something, they'll use a search engine. Which usually means they'll use Google.
So by removing all references to a particular site, Google can essentially make that site disappear.
And so Google should do exactly that to any web site that belongs to any entity that threatens Google with a lawsuit.
It should prove especially effective against companies, which rely more and more on their web presence.
Yep. And Standard Oil had a monopoly on gasoline. But hey, you didn't have to use oil-derived gasoline, you could have used alcohol or some other fuel to fuel your car. Oh, sure, you might have had to make serious modifications to your engine to get it to work properly, but you did have a choice, so the U.S. Government had no business busting Standard Oil for their so-called "monopoly".
So they monitor email. And instant messaging. And web browsing. And they "downsize" you if they find that you're using them for personal use.
Do they do the same thing with the telephone?
No?
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a double standard. Also known as hypocrisy.
Oh, they do monitor your phone conversations? Fine: do they "downsize" you if you use the phone for personal use? No? Then lather, rinse, and repeat.
Oh, they "downsize" you if you use the phone for personal use? Who do they think they are, the NSA? What do they think you are, a slave?
If they're going to treat you as a slave at work, then they can fuck off when you're not physically at work: you should refuse to give them the benefit of any thoughts, ideas, or efforts that don't originate at work. And if they press it, then you should be able to bring them up on criminal charges (slavery is against the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, and it doesn't matter whether or not you're being paid: slaves were "paid" in the form of food, too).
It seems unlikely that there's room for a middleman like Best Buy in online distribution of music. If you were able to purchase and download music direcly from an artist's or label's website, why would you want to pay Best Buy extra money on top of that?
So how can Best Buy be the middleman here? Simple: by providing the servers and network endpoints for the storage of that music (and the credit card verification). It's not like the label's website is going to have the upstream capacity it'll need to deal with millions of users each downloading relatively large (multi-megabyte) files, right?
Best Buy's biggest problem here is that all of their experience is in the brick and mortar retail business, not the online transaction business.
The "problem" of artists bypassing the labels entirely and putting their music up on their own websites is entirely different, and is nothing that CD copy protection addresses in any way.
Best Buy probably feels they have a lot more to lose than the record companies do.
Don't you mean "loose"? This is Slashdot, after all.:-)
Why should data ever be sent to these repositories in the clear? If you're concerned about the security of a piece of data that you decide to store offsite, shouldn't you encrypt it first before storing it?
The only reason this "centralized control" is even an issue is that the data being stored there is given to the controlling entity as cleartext instead of an encrypted hunk of data.
Give the data over in encrypted form and the only people who can access it are the people you give explicit authorization to do so. And so the only issue is one of data availability, which would be the only parameter left under the control of the owner of the repository.
So here are the requirements for a workable centralized data repository as I see it:
Freeform storage of data indexed by a unique ID that's assigned to the data's owner and a name (consider the ID to be the directory in which the data is stored, and the name to be the filename of the data).
Multi-key encryption of the data made easy by the client. So if you want to give some entity access to the data, you create a key for them and add it to the keyring associated with the data. If you want to remove someone's access, you remove their keyring entry, reencrypt the data (so that a different, randomly generated, session key is generated for the data and stored in the keyring), and retransmit it to the repository.
No offsite storage solution is a substitute for having your own copy of your data. You're a moron if you rely on someone else for the integrity of your data. Bottom line: keep a copy for yourself. You'll have to anyway in order to use the scheme outlined above, in order to revoke keys.
The most worrisome situation will be the one where you authorize someone to access a piece of data and that someone turns out to be a Bad Guy associated with the repository's owner. This is a bad deal because they can collaborate on making the data unavailable (and thus impossible to rewrite) after you decide to remove the Bad Guy from your keyring. But the genie is out of the bottle by that time anyway: you gave the Bad Guy a key, so he had the opportunity to get the cleartext data. Once that happens, it's all over anyway (but see below).
No storage scheme, including self storage, can change the nature of information: easily copied and impossible to control once it gets out. If you don't want anyone getting at a piece of your data, don't give anyone a key to that piece. Simple as that.
One other thing: if a piece of information gets out of your control, the easiest way by far to put the genie back in the bottle is to make that piece of information irrelevant. That's why cancelling your credit cards and getting new ones issued works for dealing with credit card fraud (but not for preventing it).
The mistake you are making is that you think I care about the probably myriad extra classes and objects KDE base library makes available on top of the QT ones upon which it is based. I don't. They serve very little purpose as seen by the fact that I can run the few QT applications I have without any problems while KDE is a dependancy nightmare which is a waste of time given that the end result is to ape Windows which I haven't had any use for for 4 years now.
Well, the usefulness of the extras that the KDE classes provide is certainly questionable, so I won't disagree with you about this point (primarily because my knowledge of what the KDE classes provide is very limited).
All I'm saying is that it's rather misleading to say that Windowmaker is a "framework for running applications". That's like saying that the shell is a framework for running applications. Most people regard "application framework" as referring to the underpinnings that make the application itself possible, and that's clearly not the relationship between Windowmaker and applications.
It's much more accurate to say that Windowmaker is an application launcher.
One other thing: Neither Windowmaker nor Qt provide the means for enabling the user to manage his files. That requires a file manager. But a file manager is something that almost every user out there will regard as being part of the desktop environment. Hence, it's also misleading to call Windowmaker a desktop environment.
In any case, my original point is that you can't get away with installing Windowmaker and then say "see, I've solved the desktop bloat problem!" or "I've solved the usability problem!", because neither statement is true.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree, and cite Apple as an example of how being the dominant computer in schools doesn't have any real effect on the buying habits of students when they finally get out into the real world. I suspect that some of that has to do with the fact that Apple equipment has historically (meaning, until relatively recently) been far too expensive and closed for people to consider using it in businesses.
Businesses seem to be interested in two things: getting the job done, and being compatible. It's sometimes difficult to say which is considered more important. Where doing the job is more important, Linux has a good shot at replacing Microsoft. But where compatibility is more important, Linux will have a much smaller chance of displacing Microsoft. It's only in the former case that a person's experience in with computers during his education might matter.
But computer technology changes so quickly that the proprietary knowledge (knowledge of Microsoft products, for instance) you pick up in elmentary and even high school will be so out of date by the time you make it into the business world that it'll be irrelevant. Hence, your purchasing decisions once you get out of college are very unlikely to be guided in any significant way by the specific hardware and operating systems you were exposed to as a kid.
Only stable applications such as word processors may be the exception to that, but their very stability makes it possible to implement them on top of free operating systems such as Linux, thus reducing the impact that learning them in K12 would have on a person's buying habits.
The measure of what it "looks" like should be how much light is reflected off an object at a given distance, not how bright the bulb itself looks. The latter is very misleading since the surface area of a typical LED is many times smaller than the surface area of a typical light bulb, so a LED can "look" much brighter compared with a 40W bulb even if the total light output is much less.
No. The goal of a corporation is whatever its owners want it to be, and it's something that can (and will) change over time.
Once a corporation is publicly traded, that goal quickly becomes "make as much money as possible". There may be a few exceptions, but they're just that: exceptions.
So I can agree with you as far as private companies are concerned, but completely disagree when talking about publicly traded corps.
It's the publicly traded corps that have most of the money and power, by the way, so they're the only ones that really matter in this discussion.
This is true. Of course, most (all?) such revolutions that have occurred in recent times (within the past, say, 50 years) resulted in a military dictatorship. So this doesn't make me feel any better.
Conceivable, but extremely unlikely, given that the people in power have all the firepower and no incentive to make such changes.
Dude, don't make me laugh. A corporation establishing a libertarian government?? Not on your life! Remember that the first, last, and only goal of a corporation is to make as much money as it can any way it can (legal or not doesn't matter any more, all that matters is whether or not they get caught and by whom they get caught. Microsoft is proof of this).
Since the type of change we're talking about won't happen as a result of the actions of those with power, it must happen as a result of the actions of those without. During the 1700s this was a possibility because of the relative parity between civilians and military. Not anymore.
Hmm...revolution. Yeah, right. Lessee...the civilians have rifles, pistols, and occasionally some light industrial explosives (with days to weeks of planning they might be able to put together something capable of destroying a medium sized building, a la Timothy McVeigh). The feds have tanks, lots of automatic, large caliber guns with military grade ammunition (your police-issue kevlar vest is no match for a slug fired from an M-16 using military-grade propellant), artillery, missiles, high-speed fighters, bombers, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons.
This ain't the 1700's, you know, when the only difference between a civilian militia and a state-sponsored military was a few cannons and perhaps some training. In the 21st century, the government has a millions-to-one advantage in firepower over the civilian population, just from the nukes alone.
The only hope an armed rebellion has is in getting the U.S. military to join in the fight, in which case there won't be much of a fight because there'll be nobody to fight against. Anything else is just a question of which side has the largest amount of military support. Ultimately, the civilians don't make any difference except for a way to deplete the other side's ammunition. In other words, cannon fodder.
So please excuse me if I seem a bit skeptical about any revolution coming. It might happen, but if it does, it will fail. I have little reason to believe that the military will side with the civilians because military men are rigorously trained to take orders and to execute them no matter how unpleasant they might be.
The "which probably includes myself" was written with a different statement in mind, and I forgot to edit that part as well. Sigh. So it should read "which definitely includes myself".
I'll certainly not dispute that ethics are something that varies with the individual. If you wish to label people who treat most other people as mere sheep to be fleeced as simply having "different" ethics, then I cannot dispute that either. All I can say is that it is precisely such people who, in general, seem to have the greatest amount of money and wield the greatest amount of power. The person who started this thread was dismayed by this situation, and so am I.
The only other thing I can say is that you and others (which probably includes myself) who value the happiness and prosperity of others as well as themselves will remain happy only at the whim of those who have most of the power and money. As long as you're useful to those people, they'll leave you alone. But don't count on that remaining the case forever.
I, for one, would probably not be terribly happy living in a police state. But that's exactly where we're headed, driven by those very people who, as you say, have "different" ethical beliefs. We're headed in that direction because it is in that direction that greater wealth and power lay in wait for those "differently" ethical people.
Actually, we can't even agree on that. Doing drugs is a crime, for instance, but I see nothing unethical about it. Some crimes are unethical, and some aren't, and it just depends.
You think perjuring yourself on the witness stand is an ethical thing to do? How about the mafia style techniques his company uses? And it is his company, right?
Fair enough. Would it be better for me to say that we lose more of our rights every time Congress passes a batch of laws?
There is some opposition to the unethical, but that opposition appears to be waning. Furthermore, ethical behavior also has consequences (hell, just look at the front page of Slashdot and you'll find at least one example today).
The Dark Side is tempting, but my ethics prevent me from going there. They're too strong a part of me to allow it. But at least I'm aware of the disadvantages.
Don't think the unethical are winning? Then explain our apparently continuous slide towards police statehood.
Well, I had to draw the line somewhere, and 30 years seemed like a nice round number. Since I don't have any experience or memory of Presidents prior to that, I had to limit myself to 30 years. The number could actually be quite a bit larger but I had to stop someplace. :-)
And that's the problem: those people who are unethical but who also have power will of course misuse their power. Unless ethical people also have power, the people without ethics will win. They will win because it is that type of person who likes to make the lives of others more difficult, just like the school bully does.
Unethical people are able to acquire money and power much more easily than ethical people because our society rewards the unethical and punishes the ethical. Want proof? Look at who gets elected to office.
None of this is meant as a criticism of how you run your life. The main point I was trying to make is that people who acquire their money and power through unethical means are not unhappy (rather the opposite, methinks), and to claim otherwise is naive and ridiculous.
It may be that you will remain happy while remaining ethical. I certainly hope so (in response to your comment about my ethics versus yours, I expect that they're very similar). But because ethical people tend not to acquire power, don't expect to remain happy just because you're ethical. Unethical people with power tend to use that power to enrichen themselves by making our lives more difficult and, therefore, by making us less happy than we would be otherwise. So don't expect to remain happy or successful simply because you're ethical.
Ah, yes, the "money doesn't matter because someone else will always have more than you" argument.
Well, I've got news for you, but money matters to you, too. Don't believe me? Try getting rid of all of it and see how happy you are living on the street.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Money does matter. It matters because it is a tool we use to get by in life. It is the alternative to the direct barter system. If you didn't have money, you'd have to fall back to the barter system in order to survive. All money does is provide a means of exchange.
Do you think you will be just as happy being completely self-sufficient (you grow, gather, or hunt your own food, build your own shelter, etc., and do it using only tools that you have made from scratch. And don't depend on anyone for medical assistance when you need it, either) as you are now? You might think so, but I'll bet reality will be very different. There's a reason people prefer to live within society than away from it: humans are far more capable in groups than alone. But to function as a member of a group, you have to be able to exchange your labor for someone else's. And thus we eventually end up back where we started, looking at money.
Money itself isn't what makes me happy. What makes me happy are the things I can do with it. Some people get confused between the two, of course, but many don't. Hell, some even enjoy the pursuit of money.
Almost everyone out there would like more money. It's not because they want the money directly, it's because of the things they'd like to do with it. For such people, the pursuit of money is not in and of itself enjoyable (though the jobs they get paid for might be), and that's why they don't pursue it as vigorously as some.
But don't make the mistake, as you seem to be, of believing that because money in and of itself isn't what people are after, that it isn't important. It's important just like food is important -- a requirement of survival in today's world.
And as should be obvious from so many of the articles on Slashdot, money is an expression of power. Relating back to the original thread, those who lack ethics seem to be much more capable of acquiring and using money than those who are ethical. Hence, I stand by my original assertion that being ethical puts one at a significant disadvantage in the real world.
The problem here is that you're equating ethical behavior with lawful behavior. The two aren't the same thing at all.
And being ethical does put you at a serious disadvantage. Don't believe me? The explain to the rest of us why so many of the richest people in the U.S. are unethical (hint: Bill Gates didn't become the richest guy in the U.S. by behaving ethically). Explain to us why we haven't seen an ethical President for the past 30 years.
If being ethical didn't put one at a serious disadvantage, then we wouldn't be losing our rights on a daily basis like we have been for the past 2-3 decades, because the unethical people would be opposed by at least as many ethical people. But that just doesn't happen, does it? Instead, the unethical are almost completely unopposed, because the ethical DON'T HAVE POWER. What more proof could you possibly want???
Are you really so naive as to believe that unethical people who have a lot of money don't enjoy it? That sounds to me like something that people without money tell themselves to console themselves, sort of like telling your kid that the school bully is actually miserable, when in fact he's probably having a great time picking on other people.
Well, enjoy it while you can, because the people with money and power are looking to make sure you have even less money to enjoy than you have now, so that they will have even more money and power to enjoy.
Feel free to bury your head in the sand and tell yourself that it's okay, while legislation like the DMCA and SSSCA gets passed and enforced. Yes, it'll all be okay, even if you no longer have any money and are living in a corporate run police state. Because at least you'll still have your ethics!
(And yes, I despise those people without ethics and am sickened at how they seem to be able to do so much better than people with ethics, but I'm not naive enough to believe that the fact that I have any ethics makes one damned bit of difference in the real world. In fact, I know it puts me at a significant disadvantage, and sometimes wish I didn't have these ethical beliefs that prevent me from doing something about that).
So this technology is a possible solution to the energy problem, but only if it gets sold at roughly the same price point as current lightbulbs. But you can expect that they'll be sold at a premium even if the manufacturing costs are the same, simply because they're better, and so the problem of high energy consumption will remain.
But of course they will, just as they have and will exploit their power to give themselves other advantages over those who lack that power.
And once they do that, all of the advantages of the transparent society disappear, and we're left with "big brother".
This is why it's so important to oppose any incursion into our privacy. The transparent society simply cannot happen as long as humans behave like humans, so the only reasonable alternative is a reasonable amount of privacy.
Things are bad enough as it is. They don't need to get any worse. But I believe that they will, that the United States will transform itself into a police state the likes of which the world has never seen, and that it will take the rest of the world with it through its military power. And it will all happen because the large corporations (more precisely, those who own and run them) want cheap labor and a captive market simultaneously, and by their nature have no ethics (and yet are given almost all of the same rights as individuals are yet none of the responsibilities). And popular revolution won't happen either, not when the military has a millions to one advantage in firepower.
Enjoy your privacy and freedom now, while you still can. It probably won't be long before they're gone.
In fact, they can even go so far as to install Linux onto it but without touching the default boot sector (so Windows boots up as usual the first time the system boots from the hard disk).
Then they ship a bootable CD whose sole purpose is to allow the user to configure the system any way he/she wants prior to starting the system. On of those options is to define how the partition mentioned above gets used: it can be used as another Windows partition, or the Linux installation on it can be "activated" (doing so will, of course, cause the bootloader to be replaced with the bootsectors for a dual boot system so that Linux or Windows can be booted). It should also be possible to configure various things about the Windows installation, such as which browser is the default, etc.
The vendor can then set up the system (they control the BIOS, right?) so that it requires the configuration CD the first time the system is booted (and thereafter until the configuration CD runs -- the config CD can change the BIOS settings so that the system will boot as normal once the user decides how he wants his system configured).
Point being that in this case it is the user who takes the actions, not the vendor. The vendor is merely giving the user the tools to accomplish the things mentioned above.
I'd love to see Microsoft try to argue against this in court in front of the judge, since doing this simply gives the user options and doesn't change the user experience except through the user's own actions. If Microsoft's position is that the user isn't fit to decide for himself what he wants, then it will be exposed by their objection to this scheme.
Corporations, which the Supreme Court has essentially declared to be legal entities with rights and everything, act like spoiled children because they have one and only one purpose: make money to the exclusion of all else.
What's the best way to make money to the exclusion of all else? Become a monopoly and abuse it once you have it!
If antitrust remedies don't include really stiff penalties, then every corporation out there is going to be very predictable and attempt to become a monopoly -- and once they do, they'll be even more predictable and abuse that monopoly. And why not? Abusing a monopoly doesn't cost them anything. The worst thing that happens is that they lose their monopoly status, right? But until that time, they bring in the cash hand over fist because of their abuse of their monopoly position.
Abuse of a monopoly should be so horrendously expensive that corporations don't even think of doing it, because the consequences would be too devastating. Much better to play nice and profit reasonably from it than to play dirty and get smacked down hard for it, right? But with the rules as they are right now, corporations have every incentive to abuse their monopoly for as long as they're able, because doing so doesn't cost them anything.
And that's gotta change.
I mean, if individuals are punished under the law for breaking the law, then why aren't corporations? Why are corporations so special, anyway, that we have elevated them to the status of godhood?
How about this: instead of doing what I suggested previously, they set their cache up so that instead of the cached entry coming up initially, it comes up with a statement that the owners/operators of the site are attempting to stifle free speech through abuse of the DMCA (or whatever), and on that page is the link to the cached entry (along with a link to the text of the lawsuit in question) so that the viewer can get to it if he really wants.
That way people who hit Google's cache will know that the Bad Guys really are Bad and why, but will still be able to get to the information they're after if they really want it. And it still does damage to the Bad Guys.
I'm not advocating that Google use this tactic as a means of offense, only as a means of defense against DMCA lawsuits and other lawsuits that would stifle free speech or would otherwise compromise Google's integrity as a search engine (guess I should have made this point clearer).
See, the deal as I see it is this: if some company or organization is going to insist that Google compromise their integrity as a search engine and force the point through force of law, then shouldn't Google comply in such a way as to maximize the damage to the entity that is making such demands? I mean, the DMCA requires them to remove their cached entries. What Google is currently doing is good, but in my opinion not good enough. They can do that and do what I suggest at the same time, see? By doing so, they would make it as expensive as possible for the Bad Guys to use the DMCA as a bludgeon.
They're the premiere web search engine right now, with multiple companies (like Yahoo) using them as their own search engine.
What kind of power does Google have? It can make a web presence disappear.
Think of it like this: how do most people find sites on the internet these days? Search engines, right? Sometimes they'll find them indirectly but that's only by chance. When they're actually looking for something, they'll use a search engine. Which usually means they'll use Google.
So by removing all references to a particular site, Google can essentially make that site disappear.
And so Google should do exactly that to any web site that belongs to any entity that threatens Google with a lawsuit.
It should prove especially effective against companies, which rely more and more on their web presence.
Right?
Do they do the same thing with the telephone?
No?
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a double standard. Also known as hypocrisy.
Oh, they do monitor your phone conversations? Fine: do they "downsize" you if you use the phone for personal use? No? Then lather, rinse, and repeat.
Oh, they "downsize" you if you use the phone for personal use? Who do they think they are, the NSA? What do they think you are, a slave?
If they're going to treat you as a slave at work, then they can fuck off when you're not physically at work: you should refuse to give them the benefit of any thoughts, ideas, or efforts that don't originate at work. And if they press it, then you should be able to bring them up on criminal charges (slavery is against the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, and it doesn't matter whether or not you're being paid: slaves were "paid" in the form of food, too).
So how can Best Buy be the middleman here? Simple: by providing the servers and network endpoints for the storage of that music (and the credit card verification). It's not like the label's website is going to have the upstream capacity it'll need to deal with millions of users each downloading relatively large (multi-megabyte) files, right?
Best Buy's biggest problem here is that all of their experience is in the brick and mortar retail business, not the online transaction business.
The "problem" of artists bypassing the labels entirely and putting their music up on their own websites is entirely different, and is nothing that CD copy protection addresses in any way.
Don't you mean "loose"? This is Slashdot, after all. :-)
The only reason this "centralized control" is even an issue is that the data being stored there is given to the controlling entity as cleartext instead of an encrypted hunk of data.
Give the data over in encrypted form and the only people who can access it are the people you give explicit authorization to do so. And so the only issue is one of data availability, which would be the only parameter left under the control of the owner of the repository.
So here are the requirements for a workable centralized data repository as I see it:
The most worrisome situation will be the one where you authorize someone to access a piece of data and that someone turns out to be a Bad Guy associated with the repository's owner. This is a bad deal because they can collaborate on making the data unavailable (and thus impossible to rewrite) after you decide to remove the Bad Guy from your keyring. But the genie is out of the bottle by that time anyway: you gave the Bad Guy a key, so he had the opportunity to get the cleartext data. Once that happens, it's all over anyway (but see below).
No storage scheme, including self storage, can change the nature of information: easily copied and impossible to control once it gets out. If you don't want anyone getting at a piece of your data, don't give anyone a key to that piece. Simple as that.
One other thing: if a piece of information gets out of your control, the easiest way by far to put the genie back in the bottle is to make that piece of information irrelevant. That's why cancelling your credit cards and getting new ones issued works for dealing with credit card fraud (but not for preventing it).
Well, the usefulness of the extras that the KDE classes provide is certainly questionable, so I won't disagree with you about this point (primarily because my knowledge of what the KDE classes provide is very limited).
All I'm saying is that it's rather misleading to say that Windowmaker is a "framework for running applications". That's like saying that the shell is a framework for running applications. Most people regard "application framework" as referring to the underpinnings that make the application itself possible, and that's clearly not the relationship between Windowmaker and applications.
It's much more accurate to say that Windowmaker is an application launcher.
One other thing: Neither Windowmaker nor Qt provide the means for enabling the user to manage his files. That requires a file manager. But a file manager is something that almost every user out there will regard as being part of the desktop environment. Hence, it's also misleading to call Windowmaker a desktop environment.
In any case, my original point is that you can't get away with installing Windowmaker and then say "see, I've solved the desktop bloat problem!" or "I've solved the usability problem!", because neither statement is true.