When a company decides to claim a monopoly on a service (and when you purchase a franchise from a community or state government you generally wind up having a monopoly in that area)
Bzzzzt. The telephone companies would not be having to ask any local government for permission to do anything if they were not offering TV. It's illegal already for a local government to interfere with a purely telecom-related upgrade. And there is a minimum of two providers (the two satellite companies) available to every American, before considering cable or the telecoms. Hence, no monopoly.
Why have we had two mainboard posts pimping a vaporware browser extension that, if completed, will duplicate the functionality of existing programs, inside a browser?
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Which is exactly why it's perfectly plain that I have a right to chop you into pieces with a chainsaw if you annoy me. I mean, it's right there in the Constitution. Look!
The Ninth Amendment does not mean what you think it means. It was created to address the antifederalist argument that having a Bill of Rights at all would give the government the right to take away anything that wasn't in it. It means that if you have rights written down somewhere besides the Constitution - like your state Constitution - they are valid too. It also means that if neither the state nor the federal government has passed a law against it, you may do it. But if there is a law against it, like me hacking you up with a chainsaw, then, guess what - you can't do it. Ssssshocking!
Call me back when these countries grow repressive enough that they mandate that their ISPs use their root DNS servers. Until then, they can posture all they like while America ignores them and everyone continues to use the American root DNS system.
American DNS = freedom, mom, and apple pie. Is anyone surprised?
Ie isn't integrated into the OS. What it is, which is important, is "integrated" with Group Policy. I work for a large company that aggressively deploys Open Source. But my Desktop Engineering department is not (yet) ready to deploy Linux because we have far too many customized Windows apps. And they won't deploy Firefox on Windows because it can't be hotfixed by group policy in ways that are transparent to the user - it has to be either completely re-pushed with each new version, or the users have to be given the ability to update their own with untested patches and risk breaking something else by doing so. Not to mention that the fact that some things our users need access to are IE - only means doubling the workload for keeping up with security vulnerabilities and such.
In the real world, huge barriers to adoption are created by problems like these. And if they don't see it at work, many non-techie people won't think of deploying it at home.
My question to you is what mechanism would you suggest to ensure that altruism never fails?
You can't insure that altruism never fails. Resources are scarce, and sometimes any system you come up with to distribute them will fail, whether it's the Objectivist free market with no kindness toward other people, the more reasonable libertarian free market with private charity, or socialism.
I think the second of those options provides for the most efficient and robust means of distribution possible, though.
That'd be you, homey. Ayn Rand didn't like non-Randist libertarians, condemned the Libertarian Party of the U.S., and generally had no use whatsoever for the whole idea. Her followers are called Objectivists, and they are more likely to be gently made fun of by reasonable libertarians than anyone else, even though they are sometimes useful political allies.
George Orwell was a socialist who made fun of Communists. This works much the same way. Altruism isn't immoral. It just doesn't always work.
Even at a price of $10k, we don't expect to sell more than maybe 20-50 licenses. Costs associated with producing this software thus far are approaching $2mil, so we doubt our costs would be recouped. It is thus relatively easy to make the case that we _shouldn't_ sell the software.
No, it isn't, not on that basis. All the money you have spent on the project thus far is sunk cost, meaning that money is gone whether you open source, sell binaries, or do nothing.
The only figure that matters now is revenue, and the only shot you have of convincing your bosses to open the source is to show that that will develop more revenue than keeping it closed. That, I would guess, is a dicey proposition.
In my experience, few pointy-haired bosses understand non-monetary benefits of open sourcing like getting free development work from the community (which may not be a consideration on a niche app like this anyway), and fewer yet give a damn about positive publicity unless they're in marketing or PR. It's all about the Benjamins, baby.
You're touting Canada as freer than the U.S.? Seriously?
Are you freer to move around in Canada or the US? (hint: you will not be checked for your papers when travelling inside Canada. hint: you can still carry a small knife on a Canadian domestic flight.)
I'm not sure what you're referring to in regards to the 'papers'. The only 'papers' I've ever had demanded were my driver's license and insurance, during a traffic stop for speeding, and I had the same thing happen in Canada. You've got me on the knife, but on the other hand, I can carry around a handgun in my trunk in the U.S. if I'm driving, so we're even.
Are your rights of privacy and protection guaranteed by the state? (hint: in the Canada it is not a crime to let someone know that the government is violating their constitutional rights.)
No, on the other hand, if we're talking about free speech, it is a crime to actually try using those constitutional rights. Win for the USA.
Are you free to do what you will with your property (hint: DMCA, fair use)
Um, yeah. My definition of free to use my own property includes not having it seized by the government in taxes. Win for the USA.
The list goes on.
It sure does, and the US keeps winning on most counts. Too bad you can't talk about it in your own press.
People would think that stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't.
That's because stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't. An album is a physical good; if I steal it from you you can no longer use it. An mp3 is what economists call a non-rival good; if I 'steal' it from you you may never notice and have not been harmed in any way, unless of course you believe in Marx's labor theory of value.
That last gives rise to my personal IP motto - 'intellectual property is Communism.'
How about America, the land of not as bad as Britain? How about America, the land of doesn't run a gulag as bad as Japan's? How about America, not as fascist as Denmark?
Our human rights problems get noticed because we're bigger and have further to fall. That's fair. But all this hysteria makes me laugh. We're still, without question, the freest country on Earth. Period.
What you are describing is evil.... what's more, it is illegal.
Uh, no. Age discrimination is illegal (but only against those over 40). Discrimination based on service time isn't. If you have a 45 year old employee who has been around 20 years, and a 42 year old employee who has been around 1 year, it's perfectly legal to fire the first guy based on service time. As for evil - they already paid you.
What's more, if you have a 39 year old guy and a 22 year old guy, it's perfectly legal to fire the first guy based on nothing but his age. Now there, I'll agree, it's kind of evil.
Yes, people shop at Wal-Mart because of low prices but the reason they have to shop low prices is that their wages have gone down (in real terms) over the past 30 years.
This is an example of misuse of economic statistics. Yes, real income has fallen, but since 1980 real disposable income is up 50% because real prices have fallen a lot faster than real wages, your examples notwithstanding.
People don't shop at Wal-Mart because they have to; we're a lot richer than we were just 25 years ago. People shop at Wal-Mart because they're cheap and convenient and we'd rather spend some of that vastly increased disposable income on other stuff... booze and hookers, in my case.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. For example, Thomas Jefferson, the originator of the phrase 'separation of church and state' did the following after he came up with that phrase:
In an 1803 federal Indian treaty, Jefferson willingly agreed to provide $300 to "assist the said Kaskaskia tribe in the erection of a church" and to "provide annually for seven years $100 towards the support of a Catholic priest". He also signed three separate acts setting aside government lands for the sole use of religious groups and setting aside government lands so that Moravian missionaries might be assisted in "promoting Christianity."
When Washington D. C. became the national capital in 1800, Congress voted that the Capitol building would also serve as a church building. President Jefferson chose to attend church each Sunday at the Capitol and even provided the service with paid government musicians to assist in its worship. Jefferson also began similar Christian services in his own Executive Branch, both at the Treasury Building and at the War Office.
Jefferson praised the use of a local courthouse as a meeting place for Christian services;
Jefferson assured a Christian religious school that it would receive "the patronage of the government";
Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict a story from the Bible and include the word "God" in its motto;
While President, Jefferson closed his presidential documents with the phrase, "In the year of our Lord Christ; by the President; Thomas Jefferson."
You can find quotes or actions by every one of the supposedly Deist founding fatehrs that indicate that they approved of Christianity in public life. Fact is, it isn't a Christian nation now, but it was, and may be again. I personally am not in favor of such things, but the only legal bar to them is the one that comes from twentieth-century court rulings that can be reversed at any time. The seperation of church and state as we understand it today is not as sacred, or as safe, as you think it is.
And when you shoot the policeman conducting this unannounced search as a home invader, what happens then?
I dunno. What would have happened if you had done that in the 1980s, when the courts first interpreted existing stautes to allow sneak-and-peek searches? Searches the Patriot Act merely codified and did not expand
Time to go read up on the subject, and not from a box of cheerios.
Allows the FBI to engage in wiretaps, searches, and other intrusive information gathering activitives against individuals without a warrant, without probable cause, and without any indication that those individuals are agents of a foreign power. Those individuals are bared from discussion of these events and are not required to be notified, even after the fact
That provision has A) been struck down and B) was simply a slight modification of existing authority from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which no one complained about at the time. See here.
Your other complaints are similarly misinformed. I'm sorry, but I have to suggest that you read the actual law.
Well, I love to turn this argument against them by asking how terrorism has personally affected them, because for the vast majority of the public, terrorism has not affected their lives in any way.
The recession of 2002 was largely (not entirely) caused by 9/11. There were tens of thousands of layoffs as a result of that recession, in my city alone.
Even if your assertion were true, however, when a response that doesn't affect you is directed at a problem that doesn't affect you, it's known as a proportional response.
The government's response to terrorism, OTOH, has made life much more difficult though for law-abiding citizens.
Yes, but I'm guessing that nothing that's made anyone's life more difficult is actually a result of the PATRIOT Act, which is the point of the question "how has it made your life more difficult."
Forget the PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act is virtually harmless; even the ACLU admits that they approve of almost all of it.
There are a handful of questionable provisions, dealing mostly with library records and informing you of a warrant AFTER your house has been searched (law enforcement still has to get the warrant BEFORE the house is searched, they just don't have to inform you). The former I don't like; the latter, frankly, I don't see a problem with.
There is nothing in the Patriot Act about Guantanamo Bay. There is nothing about torture, or deporting people to countries where it is practiced. Nothing about depriving anyone of the right to counsel. Nothing about secret trials. Nothing about the way people who aren't subject to the Geneva Conventions are treated.
Do these things happen, and should we be concerned about them? Absolutely. Do they have anything to do with the PATRIOT Act? Nothing whatsoever. Do people who complain about the PATRIOT Act being responsible for these things spread FUD and cloud the real issues? Yes. Is that a real problem? I think so.
If you can detain someone outside of the country, do so under a warrant that is classified, and deny them access to legal representation, outside contact, and the US court system.... how will anyone ever know?
No one would. On the other hand, not one of those things has anything to do with the PATRIOT Act. Insofar as they happen, they authority to do them comes from elsewhere. The PATRIOT Act contains such gross abuses of your civil rights (yes, that was sarcasm) as roving wiretaps and accessing your library records (the Justice Department says it has never used the latter, I believe, though I have not read TFA).
You have to keep the things you want to be paranoid about straight.
Slashdot Mirror
When a company decides to claim a monopoly on a service (and when you purchase a franchise from a community or state government you generally wind up having a monopoly in that area)
Bzzzzt. The telephone companies would not be having to ask any local government for permission to do anything if they were not offering TV. It's illegal already for a local government to interfere with a purely telecom-related upgrade. And there is a minimum of two providers (the two satellite companies) available to every American, before considering cable or the telecoms. Hence, no monopoly.
Why have we had two mainboard posts pimping a vaporware browser extension that, if completed, will duplicate the functionality of existing programs, inside a browser?
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Which is exactly why it's perfectly plain that I have a right to chop you into pieces with a chainsaw if you annoy me. I mean, it's right there in the Constitution. Look!
The Ninth Amendment does not mean what you think it means. It was created to address the antifederalist argument that having a Bill of Rights at all would give the government the right to take away anything that wasn't in it. It means that if you have rights written down somewhere besides the Constitution - like your state Constitution - they are valid too. It also means that if neither the state nor the federal government has passed a law against it, you may do it. But if there is a law against it, like me hacking you up with a chainsaw, then, guess what - you can't do it. Ssssshocking!
Sweet. I can't wait to insta-boot to my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
American DNS = freedom, mom, and apple pie. Is anyone surprised?
Ie isn't integrated into the OS. What it is, which is important, is "integrated" with Group Policy. I work for a large company that aggressively deploys Open Source. But my Desktop Engineering department is not (yet) ready to deploy Linux because we have far too many customized Windows apps. And they won't deploy Firefox on Windows because it can't be hotfixed by group policy in ways that are transparent to the user - it has to be either completely re-pushed with each new version, or the users have to be given the ability to update their own with untested patches and risk breaking something else by doing so. Not to mention that the fact that some things our users need access to are IE - only means doubling the workload for keeping up with security vulnerabilities and such.
In the real world, huge barriers to adoption are created by problems like these. And if they don't see it at work, many non-techie people won't think of deploying it at home.
Work on the operating system that most people have to use at work.
You can't insure that altruism never fails. Resources are scarce, and sometimes any system you come up with to distribute them will fail, whether it's the Objectivist free market with no kindness toward other people, the more reasonable libertarian free market with private charity, or socialism.
I think the second of those options provides for the most efficient and robust means of distribution possible, though.
That'd be you, homey. Ayn Rand didn't like non-Randist libertarians, condemned the Libertarian Party of the U.S., and generally had no use whatsoever for the whole idea. Her followers are called Objectivists, and they are more likely to be gently made fun of by reasonable libertarians than anyone else, even though they are sometimes useful political allies.
George Orwell was a socialist who made fun of Communists. This works much the same way. Altruism isn't immoral. It just doesn't always work.
Don't Be Evil. Be Hypocritical, Unpleasant, Petulant and Juvenile. But Not Evil.
I'm guessing he might be, as he is a SixApart employee since they bought Danga (LiveJournal).
No, it isn't, not on that basis. All the money you have spent on the project thus far is sunk cost, meaning that money is gone whether you open source, sell binaries, or do nothing.
The only figure that matters now is revenue, and the only shot you have of convincing your bosses to open the source is to show that that will develop more revenue than keeping it closed. That, I would guess, is a dicey proposition.
In my experience, few pointy-haired bosses understand non-monetary benefits of open sourcing like getting free development work from the community (which may not be a consideration on a niche app like this anyway), and fewer yet give a damn about positive publicity unless they're in marketing or PR. It's all about the Benjamins, baby.
Are you freer to move around in Canada or the US? (hint: you will not be checked for your papers when travelling inside Canada. hint: you can still carry a small knife on a Canadian domestic flight.)
I'm not sure what you're referring to in regards to the 'papers'. The only 'papers' I've ever had demanded were my driver's license and insurance, during a traffic stop for speeding, and I had the same thing happen in Canada. You've got me on the knife, but on the other hand, I can carry around a handgun in my trunk in the U.S. if I'm driving, so we're even.
Are your rights of privacy and protection guaranteed by the state? (hint: in the Canada it is not a crime to let someone know that the government is violating their constitutional rights.)
No, on the other hand, if we're talking about free speech, it is a crime to actually try using those constitutional rights. Win for the USA.
Are you free to do what you will with your property (hint: DMCA, fair use) Um, yeah. My definition of free to use my own property includes not having it seized by the government in taxes. Win for the USA.
The list goes on.
It sure does, and the US keeps winning on most counts. Too bad you can't talk about it in your own press.
That's because stealing an album in a shop is immoral, but stealing an mp3 isn't. An album is a physical good; if I steal it from you you can no longer use it. An mp3 is what economists call a non-rival good; if I 'steal' it from you you may never notice and have not been harmed in any way, unless of course you believe in Marx's labor theory of value.
That last gives rise to my personal IP motto - 'intellectual property is Communism.'
Our human rights problems get noticed because we're bigger and have further to fall. That's fair. But all this hysteria makes me laugh. We're still, without question, the freest country on Earth. Period.
I will promise never to use Windows again (except for games).
Uh, no. Age discrimination is illegal (but only against those over 40). Discrimination based on service time isn't. If you have a 45 year old employee who has been around 20 years, and a 42 year old employee who has been around 1 year, it's perfectly legal to fire the first guy based on service time. As for evil - they already paid you.
What's more, if you have a 39 year old guy and a 22 year old guy, it's perfectly legal to fire the first guy based on nothing but his age. Now there, I'll agree, it's kind of evil.
This is an example of misuse of economic statistics. Yes, real income has fallen, but since 1980 real disposable income is up 50% because real prices have fallen a lot faster than real wages, your examples notwithstanding.
People don't shop at Wal-Mart because they have to; we're a lot richer than we were just 25 years ago. People shop at Wal-Mart because they're cheap and convenient and we'd rather spend some of that vastly increased disposable income on other stuff... booze and hookers, in my case.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. For example, Thomas Jefferson, the originator of the phrase 'separation of church and state' did the following after he came up with that phrase:
In an 1803 federal Indian treaty, Jefferson willingly agreed to provide $300 to "assist the said Kaskaskia tribe in the erection of a church" and to "provide annually for seven years $100 towards the support of a Catholic priest". He also signed three separate acts setting aside government lands for the sole use of religious groups and setting aside government lands so that Moravian missionaries might be assisted in "promoting Christianity."
When Washington D. C. became the national capital in 1800, Congress voted that the Capitol building would also serve as a church building. President Jefferson chose to attend church each Sunday at the Capitol and even provided the service with paid government musicians to assist in its worship. Jefferson also began similar Christian services in his own Executive Branch, both at the Treasury Building and at the War Office.
Jefferson praised the use of a local courthouse as a meeting place for Christian services;
Jefferson assured a Christian religious school that it would receive "the patronage of the government";
Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict a story from the Bible and include the word "God" in its motto;
While President, Jefferson closed his presidential documents with the phrase, "In the year of our Lord Christ; by the President; Thomas Jefferson."
You can find quotes or actions by every one of the supposedly Deist founding fatehrs that indicate that they approved of Christianity in public life. Fact is, it isn't a Christian nation now, but it was, and may be again. I personally am not in favor of such things, but the only legal bar to them is the one that comes from twentieth-century court rulings that can be reversed at any time. The seperation of church and state as we understand it today is not as sacred, or as safe, as you think it is.
I also like and use Desktop Sidebar when I have to boot to XP.
I dunno. What would have happened if you had done that in the 1980s, when the courts first interpreted existing stautes to allow sneak-and-peek searches? Searches the Patriot Act merely codified and did not expand
Time to go read up on the subject, and not from a box of cheerios.
That provision has A) been struck down and B) was simply a slight modification of existing authority from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which no one complained about at the time. See here.
Your other complaints are similarly misinformed. I'm sorry, but I have to suggest that you read the actual law.
The recession of 2002 was largely (not entirely) caused by 9/11. There were tens of thousands of layoffs as a result of that recession, in my city alone.
Even if your assertion were true, however, when a response that doesn't affect you is directed at a problem that doesn't affect you, it's known as a proportional response.
The government's response to terrorism, OTOH, has made life much more difficult though for law-abiding citizens.
Yes, but I'm guessing that nothing that's made anyone's life more difficult is actually a result of the PATRIOT Act, which is the point of the question "how has it made your life more difficult."
There is nothing in the Patriot Act about Guantanamo Bay. There is nothing about torture, or deporting people to countries where it is practiced. Nothing about depriving anyone of the right to counsel. Nothing about secret trials. Nothing about the way people who aren't subject to the Geneva Conventions are treated.
Do these things happen, and should we be concerned about them? Absolutely. Do they have anything to do with the PATRIOT Act? Nothing whatsoever. Do people who complain about the PATRIOT Act being responsible for these things spread FUD and cloud the real issues? Yes. Is that a real problem? I think so.
No one would. On the other hand, not one of those things has anything to do with the PATRIOT Act. Insofar as they happen, they authority to do them comes from elsewhere. The PATRIOT Act contains such gross abuses of your civil rights (yes, that was sarcasm) as roving wiretaps and accessing your library records (the Justice Department says it has never used the latter, I believe, though I have not read TFA).
You have to keep the things you want to be paranoid about straight.