True, of course, but the more I think about it, the harder it becomes for me to see the distinction. Where do you draw the line between encoding and encrypting ? Flipping all the bits is just encoding, right ? but CSS is encryption, even after its broken ? where's the line ? Is XORing the contents with "The MPAA Sucks" repeated a million times encoding or encryption ? Surely once I've told you, its just encoding, right ? But if you discover it youself its encryption ?
It makes no sense, unless you start to introduce mathematical concepts of entropy into the law. This convinces me further that the DMCA is not only immoral, its really *stupid*.
Many of the problems with ASPs are just the same problems you get with outsourcing anything at all. For instance, you need to make sure they have the right incentives (so they won't be encouraged to provide choddy service), and you need to make sure they are legally obliged to provide the agreed level of service or compensate you properly. Its possible that non-profits don't have the financial clout to deal with an ASP on this level and get what they need.
There are also technical problems with the model. If you are outsourcing complex apps, there is the question of how they're configured and whether you/your users can customise them. Similarly, there's the question of who holds the data: you or the ASP ? If the latter, can you access it without going through their apps ? In this area, ASPs overlap with hosting services.
There is a real force driving this though, which push lacked, which a desire to offload the extreme hassle of managing and maintaining big, complex apps onto someone else who, presumably, can develop expertise and thus make their costs lower than yours would have been and thus make the whole deal cheaper for everyone. Will it work ? Good question, but don't write it off yet.
Capitalism is a compromise between collectivism and individualism (and some other things). There's no simple stark choice between capitalism and some kind of collectivism. There are both more individualist systems (pure libertarianism and anarchocapitalism, including variants that would not permit limited liability corporations), and others that sit comfortably in the modern view of neither camp (Tucker or Spooner's socialist individualism, or certain Green and "luddite" ideas).
I think you are right, but I also think that as long as there are powerful people who want to have even more power (and there always have been), they will find ways of influencing the political process.
It seems to me that spending limits are the wrong way to go, as is public financing. Interest groups will make their own ads, and find media prepared to show them, even if they're not allowed to make donations. Even if somehow made the system airtight, they'd buy candidates expensive gifts, pay for their children to go to college, etc. Its not even necessarily desirable to stop contributions anyway: after all, we want poor people to run, don't we ?
A better solution might be to force all political organisations to reveal the ultimate source of their funding, and their full accounts, where a political organisation is any body campaigning for issues or candidates, or paying for anyone else to do so. The information could be collated and represented in any easy-to-follow form by an independent public body, as a public service, and violations persued similarly. With such a system in place, all but the most dodgy campaign contributers will find it easier to comply than to try to evade, and those few who do try to evade (extremists, the tobacco lobby, etc) could be persued more easily.
We must also remember that bodies we support (the EFF, the ACLU, the OSF and FSF) are SIGs too. Do we want to stop them campainging ? To truly stop the corporate lobbiests we'd probably have to. The other thing is to try to buoy up these "positive" SIGs: Give them money. Volunteer your time.
No, you aren't. Its called a "contract of adhesion", and it has no legal validity in most jurisdictions. UCITA does give these licenses some force in the US states that have passed it, and they may also be valid in Scotland (although I'm not aware of this being tested), but otherwise common law jurisdictions do not recognise software license agreements as being contracts.
The reason being that the law considers the purchase of software in a store (or over the 'net) to be a sale. You can buy the goods without seeing the license in most cases, and you are usually only confronted with the license when you get the goods home. At this point the law considers the agreement to buy/sell the goods to already be complete, under the normal, common law, terms. Thus agreeing to the EULA is entirely optional, even if you open the box/click the button/whatever.
The problem with hydrogen is where you get it from: as it is not produced by any biological process, you have to make it via the electrolysis of water. That requires power which needs a power source which may be more or less polluting. Thus hydrogen is at best a clean lossless way to transport power.
Methanol on the other hand can be obtained biologically via fermentation, and the plants grown for this purpose will absorb the CO2 produced when the fuel is used in a fuel cell. Thus a methanol economy can be much more ecologically sound than a hydrogen one.
Well first, I am allowed to reverse engineer and decrypt software, but thats because I'm an EU, not USA, citizen. So nyah. On the other hand seeing people do stupid things upsets me. I should however point out that under *your* constitution congress passing a law is not the last word in the matter. If it conflicts with existing law, or with the constitution it doesn't count. To take that a little further: I don't consider the law to regulate what I'm allowed to do, merely the consequences if I do it and get caught. Thus if I think the law is stupid I'll break it if I can get away with it, and try to get it changed.
In my view the issue is not that the DMCA is bad because it dictated this decision. The DMCA is bad because its nonsensical. To give "access control" legal status is either a) unnecessary because if access control works there is not need to back it up with laws or b) an attempt to allow copyright holders to dictate the conditions of sale by the back door, and hence circumvent fair use. Given that I believe unbreakable access control to be impossible, the DMCA seems likely to be unconstitutional as fair use is protected (but not defined) in the US constitution.
CSS not being "good" is relevant because how the DMCA is enforced is as yet undecided. It may be that it only applies ot "good" access control under some criterea not as yet decided.
Its hard to accept the verdict because, as some people are having fun illustrating with reductio ad absurdum arguments, giving legal force to copyright holders attempts to control access to their works is unclear in its meaning and of dubious practicality.
CSS is not a very good access control system. You can copy DVDs wholesale, given some expensive equipment, without decoding them. Similarly, if you decode the movies you need more storage space and bandwidth than any domestic pirate might reasonably be expected to have. Thus it neither stops big pirates, nor small ones (who the nature of the medium has already stopped). Its only real effect is to prevent reading and copying the disks in unlicenses equipment, hence this whole thing is a blatant use of copyright in restraint of trade.
Taking this into account, the whole question of what an access control mechanism is comes into account. If we're going to enforce the anti-circumvention provision even against ineffective access control, why the hell *have* access control ? Why not just let the copyright holder set the license conditions and enforce those ?
Of course the answer is rather clear: copyright holders have no interest in fair use, and given their choice they'd prevent it. You can of course see from this that the DMCA shifts the balance of power in favor of the copyright monopolist, and on those grounds it may very well be unconstitutional.
Windows doesn't make Microsoft much money. Office does. Windows is the platform that best runs Microsoft apps. The apps lead people to the platform and then the platform locks them in to the apps (and an upgrade cycle for both).
Having Office (or IE, or whatever) on Linux is just the same story as having them for the Mac. It gets Microsoft mindshare, and it encourages users of other platforms to use Windows instead.
I suspect its just bad web design on Tesco's part. They're using a whole bunch of standard shopping cart and "security" tech, which is not only intensive on cookies, but also on things like the referer field.
Iain and Ian are totally different names, with different roots (though I've forgotten what these are). Ian is Anglo-Saxon, Iain is Gaelic.
I believe Iain Banks uses Iain M Banks for the SF novels for two reasons: his publisher wanted him to use a different name for the SF so as not to spoil his reputation as a serious author, and his family was offended by the fact he missed the M out when he was first published.
The parent post raises several interesting points.
I don't think the ability to do more data processing on electronic information is a very important reason to conceal more of our on-line activities than our off-line ones. After all, any large organisation (apart from those - like credit agencies - trying to avoid the DPA) enters all its information into its computer systems pretty much in real time, regardless of whether the transactions were on or off line.
Its also interesting to note that arguments about privacy are an element of the age old argument about whether societal or individual interests should take precedence in general, and of course that the best answer is "it depends". This does explain why concern about privacy is most intense amongst libertarians and other individualists, even thought the argument is so new it doesn't appear in any of the classic individualist philosophy.
I tend to agree that the most important concerns center around misuse of information (such as drawing tenous conclusions from purchasing data and then using these to make life-affecting decisions about individuals), but it is arguable whether these problems are best avoided by concealing or revealing information. For instance, is it better to avoid writing hand-written letter to avoid the use of graphology, or to publish more data that disproves graphologists claims ?
I think they probably can (and do) correlate info about credit cards with that from loyalty cards. British law only requires that you provide people with access to information you store about them, and correct any errors, under the data protection act. I don't believe there's any limit on what you're allowed to store, or the sources you can use.
Bear in mind that online purchases are inherently less private than off-line ones: you have to tell them your address for delivery, you have to pay by credit card, and both of these bits of info are already bundled up with your purchases in a single transaction. Its almost as bad as a loyalty card in itself. And they charge you a fiver for the privelege.
Given that you're going to give Tesco your credit card number anyway, from which they can find out just about anything about you, and if you have a loyalty card they can also correlate this information with your purchases, I really don't see what you gain by using junkbuster etc. If someone already knows what groceries you buy, where you live, your income band and your credit rating, and probably a great deal about your lifestyle, letting them know what web browser your use and what web site you came from seems pretty irrelevant.
Frankly I find this obsession with privacy somewhat bizarre and worrying. For some reason people see it as reasonable to expect to be able to conceal all the details of their online activities to a much greater extent than is possible in real life. Why ?
Mainsoft have had a "wine-like" framework for porting Windows apps to Unix for years. In spite of its existence, almost all applications need some work on top of the basic use of that package, and it is this that takes all the development time, as the semantics of certain Win32 calls are very hard to reproduce on Unix. This presumably is what they are doing with Office just now.
From what I here, a great deal of code in the Office apps is specific to office, and not available to other apps, simply because its not OS functionality, but office specific functionality.
Incidentally: Mainsoft is an NT source licensee. Given that MS may not be reluctant to show them office source as well.
Well firstly, "the open source community" is not a very well defined or coherent thing, but it has one thing in common: almost everyone in it has used some variant of Unix at some point. Thus, almost all open source software is either for Unix, or is very Unix-like. NT-Emacs and Cygwin are wonderful things, but their main function is to make NT more like Unix. Similarly the open source projects proposed for MacOS X and BeOS are mainly ports of X-servers or X widget sets.
Historically, this has come about because the tradition of opening source really began with Unix-like or pre-Unix systems on minicomputers. That whole community coverged on Unix, and the poeple who carried open source through the Dark Age of the 1980s were people from Unix backgrounds. Thus Sun used a variant of BSD, Gnu software is all *like* Unix software, and the only open source software for the early 16-bit home computers made them more like Unix machines.
Its not that we all think Unix is wonderful. It has many problems, the biggest one being X, but people are unlikely to abandon it for an alternative just for the hell of it. The Unix Way of doing various things has developed over quite a period of time, and has proved better than, or at least equal to, most other paradigms in OS design (most importantly the VMS and NT Way). A great deal of useful software, especially in the internet server arena, which is becoming of more concern even for small business and home users, is very much Unix-centric, as is seen in the difficulty of porting it to different OS models (Apache or Sendmail on NT don't work very well).
Now I'm going to start telling you what you really think, so please feel free to tell me I'm wrong....
Most people who are looking for alternative to Unix, including the various Free Software projects that have been set up to persue this goal, are people who do not know a hell of a lot about OS kernel design, but who see the surface features of Unix - a slow, ugly, insufficiently standardised GUI, and a hard to understand CLI - and want a more coherent and simpler user experience.
My point is that there is no fundamental difficulty in creating these things on top of an otherwise Unix-like system. It needs some considerable thought, and it also probably needs a bunch of existing stuff, such as conventional CLIs, and X (at least in its current incarnation), and possibly even the model of IPC to be binned, or hidden from the user.
In a nutshell: not only is there no chance of getting the Open Source community to adopt a different OS, but there's no really good reason to ask it to. Much better to build on what we have. The much more important problem, in my view, is getting open source people to take on the concerns of "ordinary users".
If multi-user isn't useful "on the desktop" why does even Windows 95 (ORS 2.5, at least) have user profiles ? and NT have file permissions ? You seem to be confusing "desktop use" with "home use", but even for home use, multi-user capabilities are useful: my brother and parents have their 98 machine set up with different profiles for different users.
I'd suggest that instead of removing command line and multi-user functionality from the system, what you really want to do is to hide it. NextStep did at least part of this fairly well, by hiding the "normal" Unix directory hierarchy, because no user ever really needed to see it.
Similarly, I'd suggest hiding the existence of different user permissions, by running as little stuff as possible as root, and never allowing root logins, but making all manipulations of the (hidden) system files dependent on a concealed "sudo". This prevents users from accidentally fubaring the system (I assume you don't always login as root, for exactly this reason), while meaning they don't have to know anything about users or permissions beyond entering their name when they start the system.
Excerpts from the UMI® Dissertation Abstracts database are being used by Contentville, which, in turn, collects orders for full-text dissertations. Dissertation orders are fulfilled by UMI® Dissertations Publishing, whose mission is to expand scholarly communication and improve access to academic research. All Dissertation Publishing Agreements with authors remain in effect. Dissertation authors retain all rights to their dissertations. All sales will be tracked for royalty payments. All contracted royalties will be paid, per the agreement. The UMI program continues to expand access to research and maintain a permanent archive of scholarly works. Wider distribution of dissertation research is intended to support the international scholarly community.
From this I conclude:
1. Contentville are actually selling stuff that was already for sale off-line.
2. If your thesis is there, and you did not license it, presumably you gave a license to your University, which did. This is not unusual. Its generally in the agreement you sign in a hungover stupour during freshers' week.
I set my parents machine up multi-user. It lets my little brother install all his games and wacky-dektop settings, while my parents keep the standard Windows settings with the Word icon out where they can get at it in the middle of the desktop.
My brother's only computer literate at a user level, and my parents are barely that.
Of course, they don't have passwords or anything, but its definitely multi-user.
Its also a traffic issue. Cable modem lines are shared between houses on the same street, using a CSMA/CD system like ethernet. I you're running slashdot on your cable modem box, you're reducing the quality of service for your neighbours.
I'm not sure whether similar constraints apply to ADSL.
While I don't entirely agree with you (I use Gnome, but honestly don't like either solution much), it should be pointed out that these are the giants of commercial Unix here. The people who bought you POSIX, OSF/1, X-Windows, Motif, and CDE. They've never agreed with one another to do anything that made the slightest bit of sense. Indeed they seem to regard standardisation as an opportunity to bog their rivals down in dross while they go and reinvent a new, different, incompatible kind of square wheel just for themselves.
No, copyright in the written word was invented by publishers - it was felt that writers would create regardless, but publishers needed an incentive. However, copyright in music is a much more recent developement, and I believe artists (or more specifically composers and songwriters) were very active in first applying copyright to sheet music, and then to public performances. Not sure where copyright on recordings first appeared, but presumably its derivative of the idea that a license is necessary in order to perform.
Slashdot Mirror
True, of course, but the more I think about it, the harder it becomes for me to see the distinction. Where do you draw the line between encoding and encrypting ? Flipping all the bits is just encoding, right ? but CSS is encryption, even after its broken ? where's the line ? Is XORing the contents with "The MPAA Sucks" repeated a million times encoding or encryption ? Surely once I've told you, its just encoding, right ? But if you discover it youself its encryption ?
It makes no sense, unless you start to introduce mathematical concepts of entropy into the law. This convinces me further that the DMCA is not only immoral, its really *stupid*.
Many of the problems with ASPs are just the same problems you get with outsourcing anything at all. For instance, you need to make sure they have the right incentives (so they won't be encouraged to provide choddy service), and you need to make sure they are legally obliged to provide the agreed level of service or compensate you properly. Its possible that non-profits don't have the financial clout to deal with an ASP on this level and get what they need.
There are also technical problems with the model. If you are outsourcing complex apps, there is the question of how they're configured and whether you/your users can customise them. Similarly, there's the question of who holds the data: you or the ASP ? If the latter, can you access it without going through their apps ? In this area, ASPs overlap with hosting services.
There is a real force driving this though, which push lacked, which a desire to offload the extreme hassle of managing and maintaining big, complex apps onto someone else who, presumably, can develop expertise and thus make their costs lower than yours would have been and thus make the whole deal cheaper for everyone. Will it work ? Good question, but don't write it off yet.
Capitalism is a compromise between collectivism and individualism (and some other things). There's no simple stark choice between capitalism and some kind of collectivism. There are both more individualist systems (pure libertarianism and anarchocapitalism, including variants that would not permit limited liability corporations), and others that sit comfortably in the modern view of neither camp (Tucker or Spooner's socialist individualism, or certain Green and "luddite" ideas).
I think you are right, but I also think that as long as there are powerful people who want to have even more power (and there always have been), they will find ways of influencing the political process.
It seems to me that spending limits are the wrong way to go, as is public financing. Interest groups will make their own ads, and find media prepared to show them, even if they're not allowed to make donations. Even if somehow made the system airtight, they'd buy candidates expensive gifts, pay for their children to go to college, etc. Its not even necessarily desirable to stop contributions anyway: after all, we want poor people to run, don't we ?
A better solution might be to force all political organisations to reveal the ultimate source of their funding, and their full accounts, where a political organisation is any body campaigning for issues or candidates, or paying for anyone else to do so. The information could be collated and represented in any easy-to-follow form by an independent public body, as a public service, and violations persued similarly. With such a system in place, all but the most dodgy campaign contributers will find it easier to comply than to try to evade, and those few who do try to evade (extremists, the tobacco lobby, etc) could be persued more easily.
We must also remember that bodies we support (the EFF, the ACLU, the OSF and FSF) are SIGs too. Do we want to stop them campainging ? To truly stop the corporate lobbiests we'd probably have to. The other thing is to try to buoy up these "positive" SIGs: Give them money. Volunteer your time.
No, you aren't. Its called a "contract of adhesion", and it has no legal validity in most jurisdictions. UCITA does give these licenses some force in the US states that have passed it, and they may also be valid in Scotland (although I'm not aware of this being tested), but otherwise common law jurisdictions do not recognise software license agreements as being contracts.
The reason being that the law considers the purchase of software in a store (or over the 'net) to be a sale. You can buy the goods without seeing the license in most cases, and you are usually only confronted with the license when you get the goods home. At this point the law considers the agreement to buy/sell the goods to already be complete, under the normal, common law, terms. Thus agreeing to the EULA is entirely optional, even if you open the box/click the button/whatever.
It doesn't need to be illegal, since trying to following the instructions is almost invariably fatal, or at least serious injurous.
But you didn't. And even if you did, how could they tell ?
The problem with hydrogen is where you get it from: as it is not produced by any biological process, you have to make it via the electrolysis of water. That requires power which needs a power source which may be more or less polluting. Thus hydrogen is at best a clean lossless way to transport power.
Methanol on the other hand can be obtained biologically via fermentation, and the plants grown for this purpose will absorb the CO2 produced when the fuel is used in a fuel cell. Thus a methanol economy can be much more ecologically sound than a hydrogen one.
Well first, I am allowed to reverse engineer and decrypt software, but thats because I'm an EU, not USA, citizen. So nyah. On the other hand seeing people do stupid things upsets me. I should however point out that under *your* constitution congress passing a law is not the last word in the matter. If it conflicts with existing law, or with the constitution it doesn't count. To take that a little further: I don't consider the law to regulate what I'm allowed to do, merely the consequences if I do it and get caught. Thus if I think the law is stupid I'll break it if I can get away with it, and try to get it changed.
In my view the issue is not that the DMCA is bad because it dictated this decision. The DMCA is bad because its nonsensical. To give "access control" legal status is either a) unnecessary because if access control works there is not need to back it up with laws or b) an attempt to allow copyright holders to dictate the conditions of sale by the back door, and hence circumvent fair use. Given that I believe unbreakable access control to be impossible, the DMCA seems likely to be unconstitutional as fair use is protected (but not defined) in the US constitution.
CSS not being "good" is relevant because how the DMCA is enforced is as yet undecided. It may be that it only applies ot "good" access control under some criterea not as yet decided.
Its hard to accept the verdict because, as some people are having fun illustrating with reductio ad absurdum arguments, giving legal force to copyright holders attempts to control access to their works is unclear in its meaning and of dubious practicality.
CSS is not a very good access control system. You can copy DVDs wholesale, given some expensive equipment, without decoding them. Similarly, if you decode the movies you need more storage space and bandwidth than any domestic pirate might reasonably be expected to have. Thus it neither stops big pirates, nor small ones (who the nature of the medium has already stopped). Its only real effect is to prevent reading and copying the disks in unlicenses equipment, hence this whole thing is a blatant use of copyright in restraint of trade.
Taking this into account, the whole question of what an access control mechanism is comes into account. If we're going to enforce the anti-circumvention provision even against ineffective access control, why the hell *have* access control ? Why not just let the copyright holder set the license conditions and enforce those ?
Of course the answer is rather clear: copyright holders have no interest in fair use, and given their choice they'd prevent it. You can of course see from this that the DMCA shifts the balance of power in favor of the copyright monopolist, and on those grounds it may very well be unconstitutional.
Windows doesn't make Microsoft much money. Office does. Windows is the platform that best runs Microsoft apps. The apps lead people to the platform and then the platform locks them in to the apps (and an upgrade cycle for both).
Having Office (or IE, or whatever) on Linux is just the same story as having them for the Mac. It gets Microsoft mindshare, and it encourages users of other platforms to use Windows instead.
I suspect its just bad web design on Tesco's part. They're using a whole bunch of standard shopping cart and "security" tech, which is not only intensive on cookies, but also on things like the referer field.
Iain and Ian are totally different names, with different roots (though I've forgotten what these are). Ian is Anglo-Saxon, Iain is Gaelic.
I believe Iain Banks uses Iain M Banks for the SF novels for two reasons: his publisher wanted him to use a different name for the SF so as not to spoil his reputation as a serious author, and his family was offended by the fact he missed the M out when he was first published.
The parent post raises several interesting points.
I don't think the ability to do more data processing on electronic information is a very important reason to conceal more of our on-line activities than our off-line ones. After all, any large organisation (apart from those - like credit agencies - trying to avoid the DPA) enters all its information into its computer systems pretty much in real time, regardless of whether the transactions were on or off line.
Its also interesting to note that arguments about privacy are an element of the age old argument about whether societal or individual interests should take precedence in general, and of course that the best answer is "it depends". This does explain why concern about privacy is most intense amongst libertarians and other individualists, even thought the argument is so new it doesn't appear in any of the classic individualist philosophy.
I tend to agree that the most important concerns center around misuse of information (such as drawing tenous conclusions from purchasing data and then using these to make life-affecting decisions about individuals), but it is arguable whether these problems are best avoided by concealing or revealing information. For instance, is it better to avoid writing hand-written letter to avoid the use of graphology, or to publish more data that disproves graphologists claims ?
I think they probably can (and do) correlate info about credit cards with that from loyalty cards. British law only requires that you provide people with access to information you store about them, and correct any errors, under the data protection act. I don't believe there's any limit on what you're allowed to store, or the sources you can use.
Bear in mind that online purchases are inherently less private than off-line ones: you have to tell them your address for delivery, you have to pay by credit card, and both of these bits of info are already bundled up with your purchases in a single transaction. Its almost as bad as a loyalty card in itself. And they charge you a fiver for the privelege.
Given that you're going to give Tesco your credit card number anyway, from which they can find out just about anything about you, and if you have a loyalty card they can also correlate this information with your purchases, I really don't see what you gain by using junkbuster etc. If someone already knows what groceries you buy, where you live, your income band and your credit rating, and probably a great deal about your lifestyle, letting them know what web browser your use and what web site you came from seems pretty irrelevant.
Frankly I find this obsession with privacy somewhat bizarre and worrying. For some reason people see it as reasonable to expect to be able to conceal all the details of their online activities to a much greater extent than is possible in real life. Why ?
Mainsoft have had a "wine-like" framework for porting Windows apps to Unix for years. In spite of its existence, almost all applications need some work on top of the basic use of that package, and it is this that takes all the development time, as the semantics of certain Win32 calls are very hard to reproduce on Unix. This presumably is what they are doing with Office just now.
From what I here, a great deal of code in the Office apps is specific to office, and not available to other apps, simply because its not OS functionality, but office specific functionality.
Incidentally: Mainsoft is an NT source licensee. Given that MS may not be reluctant to show them office source as well.
Well firstly, "the open source community" is not a very well defined or coherent thing, but it has one thing in common: almost everyone in it has used some variant of Unix at some point. Thus, almost all open source software is either for Unix, or is very Unix-like. NT-Emacs and Cygwin are wonderful things, but their main function is to make NT more like Unix. Similarly the open source projects proposed for MacOS X and BeOS are mainly ports of X-servers or X widget sets.
....
Historically, this has come about because the tradition of opening source really began with Unix-like or pre-Unix systems on minicomputers. That whole community coverged on Unix, and the poeple who carried open source through the Dark Age of the 1980s were people from Unix backgrounds. Thus Sun used a variant of BSD, Gnu software is all *like* Unix software, and the only open source software for the early 16-bit home computers made them more like Unix machines.
Its not that we all think Unix is wonderful. It has many problems, the biggest one being X, but people are unlikely to abandon it for an alternative just for the hell of it. The Unix Way of doing various things has developed over quite a period of time, and has proved better than, or at least equal to, most other paradigms in OS design (most importantly the VMS and NT Way). A great deal of useful software, especially in the internet server arena, which is becoming of more concern even for small business and home users, is very much Unix-centric, as is seen in the difficulty of porting it to different OS models (Apache or Sendmail on NT don't work very well).
Now I'm going to start telling you what you really think, so please feel free to tell me I'm wrong
Most people who are looking for alternative to Unix, including the various Free Software projects that have been set up to persue this goal, are people who do not know a hell of a lot about OS kernel design, but who see the surface features of Unix - a slow, ugly, insufficiently standardised GUI, and a hard to understand CLI - and want a more coherent and simpler user experience.
My point is that there is no fundamental difficulty in creating these things on top of an otherwise Unix-like system. It needs some considerable thought, and it also probably needs a bunch of existing stuff, such as conventional CLIs, and X (at least in its current incarnation), and possibly even the model of IPC to be binned, or hidden from the user.
In a nutshell: not only is there no chance of getting the Open Source community to adopt a different OS, but there's no really good reason to ask it to. Much better to build on what we have. The much more important problem, in my view, is getting open source people to take on the concerns of "ordinary users".
If multi-user isn't useful "on the desktop" why does even Windows 95 (ORS 2.5, at least) have user profiles ? and NT have file permissions ? You seem to be confusing "desktop use" with "home use", but even for home use, multi-user capabilities are useful: my brother and parents have their 98 machine set up with different profiles for different users.
I'd suggest that instead of removing command line and multi-user functionality from the system, what you really want to do is to hide it. NextStep did at least part of this fairly well, by hiding the "normal" Unix directory hierarchy, because no user ever really needed to see it.
Similarly, I'd suggest hiding the existence of different user permissions, by running as little stuff as possible as root, and never allowing root logins, but making all manipulations of the (hidden) system files dependent on a concealed "sudo". This prevents users from accidentally fubaring the system (I assume you don't always login as root, for exactly this reason), while meaning they don't have to know anything about users or permissions beyond entering their name when they start the system.
I looked at the website. It says:
Excerpts from the UMI® Dissertation Abstracts database are being used by Contentville, which, in turn, collects orders for full-text dissertations. Dissertation orders are fulfilled by UMI® Dissertations Publishing, whose mission is to expand scholarly communication and improve access to academic research. All Dissertation Publishing Agreements with authors remain in effect. Dissertation authors retain all rights to their dissertations. All sales will be tracked for royalty payments. All contracted royalties will be paid, per the agreement. The UMI program continues to expand access to research and maintain a permanent archive of scholarly works. Wider distribution of dissertation research is intended to support the international scholarly community.
From this I conclude:
1. Contentville are actually selling stuff that was already for sale off-line.
2. If your thesis is there, and you did not license it, presumably you gave a license to your University, which did. This is not unusual. Its generally in the agreement you sign in a hungover stupour during freshers' week.
I set my parents machine up multi-user. It lets my little brother install all his games and wacky-dektop settings, while my parents keep the standard Windows settings with the Word icon out where they can get at it in the middle of the desktop.
My brother's only computer literate at a user level, and my parents are barely that.
Of course, they don't have passwords or anything, but its definitely multi-user.
Its also a traffic issue. Cable modem lines are shared between houses on the same street, using a CSMA/CD system like ethernet. I you're running slashdot on your cable modem box, you're reducing the quality of service for your neighbours.
I'm not sure whether similar constraints apply to ADSL.
While I don't entirely agree with you (I use Gnome, but honestly don't like either solution much), it should be pointed out that these are the giants of commercial Unix here. The people who bought you POSIX, OSF/1, X-Windows, Motif, and CDE. They've never agreed with one another to do anything that made the slightest bit of sense. Indeed they seem to regard standardisation as an opportunity to bog their rivals down in dross while they go and reinvent a new, different, incompatible kind of square wheel just for themselves.
Actually DCE-RPC is used in ... Windows. Its the basis for DCOM, and Windows-NT's bizarre internal LPC doohickey. They use DCE IDL as well.
Simon
No, copyright in the written word was invented by publishers - it was felt that writers would create regardless, but publishers needed an incentive. However, copyright in music is a much more recent developement, and I believe artists (or more specifically composers and songwriters) were very active in first applying copyright to sheet music, and then to public performances. Not sure where copyright on recordings first appeared, but presumably its derivative of the idea that a license is necessary in order to perform.