If I have to pay protection money anyway, I might as well get value for my dollars and take my business to some VPN company run out of a country that doesn't concern itself with US law, or copyright in general.
it's expected that a connection's owner will have learned how to secure their network
Why is that expected? Why is that reasonable? If I want to leave my network open, that's my right, and my ISP shouldn't have a say in that. If I want to saturate my line 24/7/365 that's my right, too. Whether it's me doing it or people I choose to share my connection with is none of their business. If they can't handle delivering that bandwidth then they are oversubscribed and need to reduce their offered speeds, expand capacity, charge more, or some combination of those.
It makes perfect sense when you factor in cronyism and economic-nationalism. There's a sense that, if money is going to be spent, it should be spent on products made by a US for-profit firm. The military is almost always the most conservative and nationalistic institution a country has, maybe only second to a State Church which doesn't exist in the US.
Also, don't underestimate ideology. The principles of FLOSS sounds a lot like communism/socialism to people for whom those words still have huge negative, evil, connotations. A good old fashioned money-making American firm is more trustworthy than some Finn who gave his kernel away to the world, at least to the people making these decisions. There'd also be a lot less money changing hands going the FLOSS route, and that's just unacceptable in many circles.
I like to pay taxes, with them I buy civilization.
That a lot of deluded "rugged individualists" falsely think they are entirely self-made and have no obligation to pay back into society amuses me. Seeing them frustrated and resentful at paying taxes makes me smile.
Then you're head and shoulders above most Libertarians who think that the laws of markets overrule the laws of physics. It may be possible to come up with a technological solution to the limited amount of spectrum, but we don't have access to that technology yet.
I'm tired of people claiming that the free market would fix the ISP problem. If we just made the RF spectrum a free for all you'd have the wealthiest companies erecting radio towers everywhere and blasting out as many megawatts of power as they could to drown out their competitors. Everyone would suffer. Everyone would have lower quality of service. Same with physical infrastructure. I really don't want 10 different copper/fiber lines strung from the telephone pole to my house or my street being dug up every year to install new lines for a new company. We need ONE common infrastructure owned by the people collectively which is leased out to businesses who compete with each other. That's the only sane model.
All of that is true, more or less. Somehow it works for us, except when it doesn't.
I do envy the progress of Europe, but they face a different set of challenges. Imagine if all the nations of Europe were just states in a Federal Republic. Now imagine that Federal Government extracted billions of dollars each year to fund a military to kick around the world having adventures and spreading a specific political ideology. Imagine trying to sustain a European welfare system with that anchor tied around your neck. And after so many generations spent serving the Federal Government and its military people start really believing that's a better use of money than schools or trains or hospitals.
You're assuming that any person can climb the "ladder" of jobs as long as those jobs exist. In reality, people are forced to stop when they reach a rung beyond their ability. Most people can't be trained to be software engineers. Most people can't be trained to be scientists. Most people can't be trained to be artists of any quality. But while the height a person can climb is limited, there is no fundamental limit to automation. Eventually automation puts the starting rung out of reach of the average person and you are left with a mass of people unable to find employment anywhere in the economy, and limited in their intellectual capacity to be trained to ever get one of the scarce jobs that do exist.
For those people there are three options:
1. Grinding attrition to reduce their numbers through geographic isolation (prisons, slums, ghettos), violent crime (police abandon these areas and leave them to be ruled by gangs), and various poverty related causes of death (famine, malnutrition, lack of healthcare). 2. Revolt and forcefully take enough to survive from those who have surplus resources 3. Get folded into some sort of peaceful wealth redistribution system that provides for their needs and allows them to reach their personal potential, become educated up to their ability, raise a family, and live with dignity.
It's interesting to note that option one is the inevitable result of free-market economics. It's the only end game that can play out once automation really kicks off in a society that completely shuns anything that seems like socialism. It's also, in my opinion, probably the most likely starting point. I think we're going to see all three of those stages in the next 100-200 years. We are already in stage one in many respects.
I support a lot of XP machines and in general the owners still love the OS because they are familiar with it. It's going to be around for a long, long time. I predict marketshare will continue dropping as it has until it reaches about 10% where it'll stabilize for a couple years despite being completely unsupported, losing perhaps 1-2% per year after that until completely dropping off the radar.
MS is in a unique position with their OS because in general all new PCs ship with the newest version of Windows. So they can force Windows 8 into the market just by refusing to license it to OEMs for default installs and then waiting long enough for consumers to upgrade their hardware. That takes years, but as we saw with Windows 7 it's a predictable and regular process.
The only question is, will MS stick to their guns and force this paradigm shift, or will they relent like they did with Vista and make Windows 8 a short-lived intermediate OS for whatever comes next? Maybe the next version of Windows will see a return to a more classic desktop paradigm similar to Windows 7, with metro being entirely optional. Maybe the next version will split into two, metro being aimed at consumer and tablet hardware and a Windows 7 style OS to keep corporate users happy. Sadly, I think the most likely outcome will be the first one. MS isn't going to relent. This is what they want their OS to be and that's the last word. "Corporate world, you better get used to it. You know you can't ditch Windows, Office, and Exchange." They're betting on the pain of switching to Linux or OS X (which strangely could now provide a more familiar experience to Windows users than MS's newest offering) being worse than the pain of learning this new family of software. And I think they'll get away with it just by shear momentum. To hurry adoption along even more I expect them to be more aggressive with Windows 7's EOL schedule than they were with XP, which was generous to start and then extended.
Several times I've had my, extremely minor, edits reversed nearly instantaneously (which makes me suspect some sort of bot written by the "owner" camping that article) and then a few minutes later I get a pithy comment on my user page that almost always begins, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" That I've been registered years longer than them doesn't seem to matter. It then continues to list their extensive expertise in the related fields relevant to the article and how that makes them far more qualified than a mere mortal like me to edit the holy text.
You may be an expert in *this* field, sir, but you're in need of some remedial English courses.
And it's usually not even changing anything factual, just cleaning up cumbersome prose. Many of the engineering and science articles suffer from this. They still take offense and revert it. I don't have the patience to start an edit war over every single grammatically tedious sentence I want to fix.
Really? Was there ever any doubt this would happen? You have to take your privacy into your own hands, you can't trust the fox to guard the hen house. I'm going to continue running ABP, blocking third party cookies, running noscript, and blackholing known ad servers in my hosts file.
The sad part is that if they would just play nice, follow the rules, and respect me, I wouldn't go through all this trouble and I'd actually end up seeing a lot of ads.
Over the years cars have become much more efficient, through various refinements and improvements in the design of the internal combustion engine. We are able to produce more horsepower with less fuel. So, did cars stay the same size and increase in fuel economy over the years? Some have, but especially in the USA, designers instead chose to increase the size and power while keeping fuel efficiency relatively constant. So the engine has become more efficient, yet those gains weren't used to produce a more fuel efficient engine, they were used to make bigger, more powerful, cars that had the same fuel economy.
With the iPhone, the battery definitely has become better of the years. So did Apple choose to increase battery life? Nope. As with the cars, they increased the CPU power, screen resolution, GPU power, memory, radios, etc. They packed more powerful components, more efficient components, into the same size with ever increasing battery technology. So battery tech has to keep improving all the time, just to keep up with the increase in power usage from the rest of the system, and it doesn't even always keep up. It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.
I've not developed this very far and I know there are counter-examples, many came to mind while writing this, yet the analogy is apt especially when we confine our comparison to specific segments of the US car market. I'm pleased that, in recent years, this trend seems to finally be reversing, and the US is becoming more--if only slightly--like Europe with their focus on smaller, more efficient cars.
It's too bad that Apple has stopped supporting 10.6, and that Safari on it will not be getting further updates. That version of Safari is outdated and contains over a hundred security holes. It is not a safe browser to be using. You can get infected simply by opening a malicious site.
Anyone who claims that they don't want to live forever (in health) is lying to themselves as a crude defense mechanism against the trauma caused by confronting the fact that they won't be able to.
If there was a switch to flip for immortality (again, in health) I suspect that even the staunchest defender of death as a necessary part of the "human condition" would jump at the chance to throw it.
I can still go to Newegg.com and order a bunch of commodity parts and assemble a general purpose computer, install a completely FLOSS operating system and all the software I want on it. I can load it up with quad GPUs for password cracking, terabytes of storage for all my pirated media and warez, run TOR and Truecrypt, and all sorts of other "evil" features. If there's a war on general purpose computing it's clear which side is winning.
As it stands now, an individual has never had more access to computing power, bandwidth, and data than they do now. Yes, there are locked down boxes you can buy if you're not interested in all that, but individual components are still being sold. There's a thriving market for computer hardware that isn't going to disappear any time soon, and neither will the free software made to run on such hardware. As little as $35 (or whatever the Raspberry Pi costs) gets you a "general purpose computer", albeit a very simple and underpowered one.
Walled gardens can peacefully co-exist without threatening general purpose computing.
And as we've seen from every iOS device, even walled gardens don't keep people locked in if they are determined to leave. If you make compelling hardware people will always find ways to use it how they wish. I can easily take root control over my iPhone if I wanted to. Same is true for Android devices.
I'm not too cunning of a linguist but I think what happened there (in American English at least) is that "have" when spoken has morphed to sound more like "huv" which is then erroneously rendered in text as "of" by the semi-literate.
A Linux distro is at least as complicated as Windows, and yet they are distributed for free. I'm not just suggesting that it'll happen, I can point to it happening every day in the real world.
You've probably not dealt with unlicensed copies of Windows recently. There is no inconvenience. They install just like the real thing and run perfectly without issues. All the updates work, everything runs normally. Depending on what you got you might need to run a program one time to insert a license key but after that it's indistinguishable from the licensed copy.
I'll believe that when I see it. Or when I don't see it, I guess.
If you're betting on hackers not figuring out how to run the most popular OS on the hardware they own you're quite the risk taker. Either that, or you have an incredibly, and dare I say unjustified, faith in MS's ability to create secure software.
You can get paid for your labor if you can find someone willing to pay for it, that is, you can get paid for the act of creating the software. But you have no right or claim to compensation for every copy that gets made after the fact. And you're committing a logical fallacy there about legality. You're appealing to authority, which says nothing about the correctness of the process or outcome. Our legal system reflects our morality, more or less, but often times it is at odds with it.
If it's not free (beer) then it's not going to make much of a difference converting unlicensed copies into licensed ones. Home built PCs often use unlicensed copies of Windows, among people who are building PCs to run Windows and games at least. You're not going to convert those people to legitimate users unless you can meet the current price they are paying now--which is zero.
For personal use I don't know why anyone would pay for a copy of Windows, especially when it means taking money away from spending it on hardware. When faced with the choice of a "legitimate" copy of Windows or the next highest graphics card or CPU, people will always choose the hardware that provides tangible improvement. A licensed copy of windows is bit-for-bit identical to the unlicensed one and offers no improvement other than some vague (false) sense of moral correctness. And that's entirely based on the user's subjective opinions on software licensing and the morality of imaginary property.
So whom is this licensing option really going to be for? I don't see it going anywhere, unless the price is so low as to be negligible, but then they'd be undercutting their other more profitable licensing options.
Just get rid of software patents. Get rid of them entirely. Invalidate all the current ones and stop issuing new software patents. They are essentially patents on math and certain long numbers, which is absurd.
Use Transmission on the Mac, or Deluge on Windows. Both are open source. A torrent client, more than other types of programs, needs to be open source for security reasons. I won't risk an entertainment industry backdoor.
Slashdot Mirror
If I have to pay protection money anyway, I might as well get value for my dollars and take my business to some VPN company run out of a country that doesn't concern itself with US law, or copyright in general.
it's expected that a connection's owner will have learned how to secure their network
Why is that expected? Why is that reasonable? If I want to leave my network open, that's my right, and my ISP shouldn't have a say in that. If I want to saturate my line 24/7/365 that's my right, too. Whether it's me doing it or people I choose to share my connection with is none of their business. If they can't handle delivering that bandwidth then they are oversubscribed and need to reduce their offered speeds, expand capacity, charge more, or some combination of those.
It makes perfect sense when you factor in cronyism and economic-nationalism. There's a sense that, if money is going to be spent, it should be spent on products made by a US for-profit firm. The military is almost always the most conservative and nationalistic institution a country has, maybe only second to a State Church which doesn't exist in the US.
Also, don't underestimate ideology. The principles of FLOSS sounds a lot like communism/socialism to people for whom those words still have huge negative, evil, connotations. A good old fashioned money-making American firm is more trustworthy than some Finn who gave his kernel away to the world, at least to the people making these decisions. There'd also be a lot less money changing hands going the FLOSS route, and that's just unacceptable in many circles.
I like to pay taxes, with them I buy civilization.
That a lot of deluded "rugged individualists" falsely think they are entirely self-made and have no obligation to pay back into society amuses me. Seeing them frustrated and resentful at paying taxes makes me smile.
Then you're head and shoulders above most Libertarians who think that the laws of markets overrule the laws of physics. It may be possible to come up with a technological solution to the limited amount of spectrum, but we don't have access to that technology yet.
I'm tired of people claiming that the free market would fix the ISP problem. If we just made the RF spectrum a free for all you'd have the wealthiest companies erecting radio towers everywhere and blasting out as many megawatts of power as they could to drown out their competitors. Everyone would suffer. Everyone would have lower quality of service. Same with physical infrastructure. I really don't want 10 different copper/fiber lines strung from the telephone pole to my house or my street being dug up every year to install new lines for a new company. We need ONE common infrastructure owned by the people collectively which is leased out to businesses who compete with each other. That's the only sane model.
All of that is true, more or less. Somehow it works for us, except when it doesn't.
I do envy the progress of Europe, but they face a different set of challenges. Imagine if all the nations of Europe were just states in a Federal Republic. Now imagine that Federal Government extracted billions of dollars each year to fund a military to kick around the world having adventures and spreading a specific political ideology. Imagine trying to sustain a European welfare system with that anchor tied around your neck. And after so many generations spent serving the Federal Government and its military people start really believing that's a better use of money than schools or trains or hospitals.
That's America.
You're assuming that any person can climb the "ladder" of jobs as long as those jobs exist. In reality, people are forced to stop when they reach a rung beyond their ability. Most people can't be trained to be software engineers. Most people can't be trained to be scientists. Most people can't be trained to be artists of any quality. But while the height a person can climb is limited, there is no fundamental limit to automation. Eventually automation puts the starting rung out of reach of the average person and you are left with a mass of people unable to find employment anywhere in the economy, and limited in their intellectual capacity to be trained to ever get one of the scarce jobs that do exist.
For those people there are three options:
1. Grinding attrition to reduce their numbers through geographic isolation (prisons, slums, ghettos), violent crime (police abandon these areas and leave them to be ruled by gangs), and various poverty related causes of death (famine, malnutrition, lack of healthcare).
2. Revolt and forcefully take enough to survive from those who have surplus resources
3. Get folded into some sort of peaceful wealth redistribution system that provides for their needs and allows them to reach their personal potential, become educated up to their ability, raise a family, and live with dignity.
It's interesting to note that option one is the inevitable result of free-market economics. It's the only end game that can play out once automation really kicks off in a society that completely shuns anything that seems like socialism. It's also, in my opinion, probably the most likely starting point. I think we're going to see all three of those stages in the next 100-200 years. We are already in stage one in many respects.
I support a lot of XP machines and in general the owners still love the OS because they are familiar with it. It's going to be around for a long, long time. I predict marketshare will continue dropping as it has until it reaches about 10% where it'll stabilize for a couple years despite being completely unsupported, losing perhaps 1-2% per year after that until completely dropping off the radar.
MS is in a unique position with their OS because in general all new PCs ship with the newest version of Windows. So they can force Windows 8 into the market just by refusing to license it to OEMs for default installs and then waiting long enough for consumers to upgrade their hardware. That takes years, but as we saw with Windows 7 it's a predictable and regular process.
The only question is, will MS stick to their guns and force this paradigm shift, or will they relent like they did with Vista and make Windows 8 a short-lived intermediate OS for whatever comes next? Maybe the next version of Windows will see a return to a more classic desktop paradigm similar to Windows 7, with metro being entirely optional. Maybe the next version will split into two, metro being aimed at consumer and tablet hardware and a Windows 7 style OS to keep corporate users happy. Sadly, I think the most likely outcome will be the first one. MS isn't going to relent. This is what they want their OS to be and that's the last word. "Corporate world, you better get used to it. You know you can't ditch Windows, Office, and Exchange." They're betting on the pain of switching to Linux or OS X (which strangely could now provide a more familiar experience to Windows users than MS's newest offering) being worse than the pain of learning this new family of software. And I think they'll get away with it just by shear momentum. To hurry adoption along even more I expect them to be more aggressive with Windows 7's EOL schedule than they were with XP, which was generous to start and then extended.
And I don't think he was wrong anyway. He wasn't wrong about them sucking, he was wrong about people being willing to put up with them.
Several times I've had my, extremely minor, edits reversed nearly instantaneously (which makes me suspect some sort of bot written by the "owner" camping that article) and then a few minutes later I get a pithy comment on my user page that almost always begins, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" That I've been registered years longer than them doesn't seem to matter. It then continues to list their extensive expertise in the related fields relevant to the article and how that makes them far more qualified than a mere mortal like me to edit the holy text.
You may be an expert in *this* field, sir, but you're in need of some remedial English courses.
And it's usually not even changing anything factual, just cleaning up cumbersome prose. Many of the engineering and science articles suffer from this. They still take offense and revert it. I don't have the patience to start an edit war over every single grammatically tedious sentence I want to fix.
Sure thing, MS. Pay for our new hardware and our office will gladly upgrade.
They are referring to the Tanooki suit.
Really? Was there ever any doubt this would happen? You have to take your privacy into your own hands, you can't trust the fox to guard the hen house. I'm going to continue running ABP, blocking third party cookies, running noscript, and blackholing known ad servers in my hosts file.
The sad part is that if they would just play nice, follow the rules, and respect me, I wouldn't go through all this trouble and I'd actually end up seeing a lot of ads.
There is a very good car analogy here.
Over the years cars have become much more efficient, through various refinements and improvements in the design of the internal combustion engine. We are able to produce more horsepower with less fuel. So, did cars stay the same size and increase in fuel economy over the years? Some have, but especially in the USA, designers instead chose to increase the size and power while keeping fuel efficiency relatively constant. So the engine has become more efficient, yet those gains weren't used to produce a more fuel efficient engine, they were used to make bigger, more powerful, cars that had the same fuel economy.
With the iPhone, the battery definitely has become better of the years. So did Apple choose to increase battery life? Nope. As with the cars, they increased the CPU power, screen resolution, GPU power, memory, radios, etc. They packed more powerful components, more efficient components, into the same size with ever increasing battery technology. So battery tech has to keep improving all the time, just to keep up with the increase in power usage from the rest of the system, and it doesn't even always keep up. It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.
I've not developed this very far and I know there are counter-examples, many came to mind while writing this, yet the analogy is apt especially when we confine our comparison to specific segments of the US car market. I'm pleased that, in recent years, this trend seems to finally be reversing, and the US is becoming more--if only slightly--like Europe with their focus on smaller, more efficient cars.
It's too bad that Apple has stopped supporting 10.6, and that Safari on it will not be getting further updates. That version of Safari is outdated and contains over a hundred security holes. It is not a safe browser to be using. You can get infected simply by opening a malicious site.
Anyone who claims that they don't want to live forever (in health) is lying to themselves as a crude defense mechanism against the trauma caused by confronting the fact that they won't be able to.
If there was a switch to flip for immortality (again, in health) I suspect that even the staunchest defender of death as a necessary part of the "human condition" would jump at the chance to throw it.
I can still go to Newegg.com and order a bunch of commodity parts and assemble a general purpose computer, install a completely FLOSS operating system and all the software I want on it. I can load it up with quad GPUs for password cracking, terabytes of storage for all my pirated media and warez, run TOR and Truecrypt, and all sorts of other "evil" features. If there's a war on general purpose computing it's clear which side is winning.
As it stands now, an individual has never had more access to computing power, bandwidth, and data than they do now. Yes, there are locked down boxes you can buy if you're not interested in all that, but individual components are still being sold. There's a thriving market for computer hardware that isn't going to disappear any time soon, and neither will the free software made to run on such hardware. As little as $35 (or whatever the Raspberry Pi costs) gets you a "general purpose computer", albeit a very simple and underpowered one.
Walled gardens can peacefully co-exist without threatening general purpose computing.
And as we've seen from every iOS device, even walled gardens don't keep people locked in if they are determined to leave. If you make compelling hardware people will always find ways to use it how they wish. I can easily take root control over my iPhone if I wanted to. Same is true for Android devices.
I'm not too cunning of a linguist but I think what happened there (in American English at least) is that "have" when spoken has morphed to sound more like "huv" which is then erroneously rendered in text as "of" by the semi-literate.
A Linux distro is at least as complicated as Windows, and yet they are distributed for free. I'm not just suggesting that it'll happen, I can point to it happening every day in the real world.
You've probably not dealt with unlicensed copies of Windows recently. There is no inconvenience. They install just like the real thing and run perfectly without issues. All the updates work, everything runs normally. Depending on what you got you might need to run a program one time to insert a license key but after that it's indistinguishable from the licensed copy.
I'll believe that when I see it. Or when I don't see it, I guess.
If you're betting on hackers not figuring out how to run the most popular OS on the hardware they own you're quite the risk taker. Either that, or you have an incredibly, and dare I say unjustified, faith in MS's ability to create secure software.
You can get paid for your labor if you can find someone willing to pay for it, that is, you can get paid for the act of creating the software. But you have no right or claim to compensation for every copy that gets made after the fact. And you're committing a logical fallacy there about legality. You're appealing to authority, which says nothing about the correctness of the process or outcome. Our legal system reflects our morality, more or less, but often times it is at odds with it.
If it's not free (beer) then it's not going to make much of a difference converting unlicensed copies into licensed ones. Home built PCs often use unlicensed copies of Windows, among people who are building PCs to run Windows and games at least. You're not going to convert those people to legitimate users unless you can meet the current price they are paying now--which is zero.
For personal use I don't know why anyone would pay for a copy of Windows, especially when it means taking money away from spending it on hardware. When faced with the choice of a "legitimate" copy of Windows or the next highest graphics card or CPU, people will always choose the hardware that provides tangible improvement. A licensed copy of windows is bit-for-bit identical to the unlicensed one and offers no improvement other than some vague (false) sense of moral correctness. And that's entirely based on the user's subjective opinions on software licensing and the morality of imaginary property.
So whom is this licensing option really going to be for? I don't see it going anywhere, unless the price is so low as to be negligible, but then they'd be undercutting their other more profitable licensing options.
Just get rid of software patents. Get rid of them entirely. Invalidate all the current ones and stop issuing new software patents. They are essentially patents on math and certain long numbers, which is absurd.
Use Transmission on the Mac, or Deluge on Windows. Both are open source. A torrent client, more than other types of programs, needs to be open source for security reasons. I won't risk an entertainment industry backdoor.