Vim also does tab completion this way. It annoys me to no end, because if you tab too early you have to either delete or go through all the choices to find what you want; also, bash's method lets you see the list of all the matching files, which sometimes is overwhealmingly long. Well, mostly the reason it annoys me is that I'm used to bash; for most directories it's all a matter of preference. To make vim act like bash, btw, you can put "set wildmode=longest,list" in your vimrc. I don't know of a way to make cmd.exe work like bash.
Upcoming? Nah, they happened a long time ago. But since it was in a galaxy far, far away the light just took until the '70s to reach George Lucas' telescope. And somehow some of the light took a longer path than other parts, so the story came to him out of order. And some parts of it twice.
Amen. Until I started playing with Plan 9 I never realized how silly some aspects of modern Unix systems really are. If you want to see a manpage you use "man", but because it has to run in a terminal emulator it needs a full-featured pager, and IIRC on some systems it even re-generates the pages from *roff source. The hideous complexity of autoconf. X11.
I just started using Plan 9 about a week ago on an occasional basis. Though I can adjust to the system, and admire the elegance that allows, for example, rio to be run within rio, ideas like process-specific file heirarchies and the lack of cruft, you have to realize that the developers of Plan 9 have it easy: they get to make a system for people that will learn to use it.
I wouldn't mind seeing how well Plan 9 would deal with having the system adjust to the user a bit. My first idea is to adapt vi to Plan 9; my goal would be not a straight port, but something that incorporates the familiar commands and modal nature of vi with the text-editing support that Plan 9 gives for free to graphical programs. Sam and Acme are fine editors, but I want to find out if a totally different editor can be written in a reasonable way on the system. Actually, I think a Plan 9 implementation should be cleaner than a Unix one, simply because terminal emulators are so damn wierd to interface with. But that may fall apart when I actually learn how to code on the system.
Another similar issue is in window management: you can use nested rio instances to elegantly get similar functionality to Unix-style multiple desktops (and you can do so much more, too), but it's just not as quick to switch between them using the desktop menus in rio as it is with a simple keystroke in fvwm. The basic question is, could you combine the adaptability of Unix (and particularly Linux) with the elegance of Plan 9? That would be a great environment to study *and* use.
This is a bit off-topic, but I actually just did install Plan 9 on my FreeBSD box a few days ago. It's pretty neat. I am going to try to write a version of vi to Plan 9 just to prove a point.
What you mean is that ends can be a consideration in judging means after the situation has already ended, right? You can only see the end after the dust has cleared.
What's really important isn't judging the actions of the past, but making decisions in the future. To that end, of course, you'll judge actions of the past, but in a different way: you'll look at the similar situations that have occurred, what results have arisen from different actions taken at those junctures, and make judgements on the desirability of those results. When making decisions you can't look at the ends, you can only try to get a clear picture of the potential ends. A decision that leads to success isn't always a good one, and a decision that leads to failure isn't always a bad one.
I don't think anyone is saying that "any dissent from authority" should be punished. Just that spreading around an icon with an animation of shooting one of his teachers is not protected speech. If the kid published criticisms (even in the form of irrational, profane rants) of the school or the teacher, that should certainly be allowed. But instead he made a threat.
If you were a teacher and someone was spreading around animations of you being shot, would you want to teach the kid? Maybe think about school not just as a right for the student, but as a job for the teacher. If you were in any other business working with someone that was passing around stuff like that you'd be well justified to never to do business with that person again. The school, providing a necessary government service can't have full freedom of association, but I think it's justified to try to provide an environment where teachers and students can feel safe.
Quit being so paranoid. This isn't about 9/11. It's more about Columbine. When I think back to what I and some of the other kids in my junior high talked about and wrote about, even published on the Internet in pre-Columbine days, and how innocent that really was, I think that this kid probably doesn't deserve a semester-long suspension. When I wrote violent haikus in English class back then (one was about a nuke going off in a peaceful meadow or something, I was young, dumb and read too much Tom Clancy, whom I probably plagairized in that instance) I got a stern talking-to and learned something about how to behave acceptably. That's probably what was right for this kid, too, or maybe some mild punishment. Ultimately it is disappointing that this could have been an opportunity for the kid to learn about the consequences of his words and actions, but it will probably be lost in the legal battle.
Primarily iPods and iTMS songs are purchased seperately. Cars are usually bought whole.
Yeah, there are exceptions, but trying to define what constitutes one product and what constitutes multiple is not easy. Product boundaries will be seen differently by different groups of people and differently over time. A great example is the IE/Windows thing. Is IE its own product? An OS component? A component of the computer? A browser may once have been considered part of an ISP's software bundle, and aren't you glad those days are (mostly) over? Is the status of the browser in relation to these various other products based on the claims of Microsoft? Of Netscape? Of AOL? Is it based on the technical necessity of interrelation? Is it based on how users use the products, and how they want to use the products?
The last few criteria are what make the most sense to me. There's no technical reason that the iPod and iTMS have to exclusively share their DRM format. I also believe that people think of the songs they purchase as seperate from the iPod and iTunes, as works of a more general nature. I think they would find it natural to be able to play these songs on a variety of equivalent devices. But that only means that I believe that they're two unrelated products. Whether that means they have to be legally separated in the market is another issue.
It's not completely analogous to cars, and what's tricky is that it has so much to do with the traditions of the industries. There aren't standards for interfaces between engines and transmissions like there are for computer connections: computers tend to have standards for device interconnects like USB, for file representations, for network protocols and hardware, and non-standard parts eventually tend to be marginalized. People expect that a file on one computer is a file on another, and the representation of digital music as comptuer files ties it up in this tradition that makes people expect compatibility. I don't think people expect the same of cars.
Split the processes into two groups. So you have 180, 90, 45, 22nm processes. You have 130, 65, 32, 16nm processes. Each generation goes for half the size of the one two before it. I don't remember why, but that's what the researchers aim for.
Any processor that's an x86 clone has the 4 privilege levels. AMD's x86 processors should for that reason. I think AMD64 does, too, but I haven't actually read any documents on it.
It certainly is possible to make an OS use more than 2 privilege levels on x86 (a dude I knew in college modified Linux thusly; lots of very frequently-used kernel code and drivers needed modification and IIRC all the userland programs were unmodified because it all runs in ring 3 anyway). As far as portability goes... Linux was originally intended to be an implementation of a Unix kernel for 386. There's no absolute requirement that kernels are as portable as Linux has grown to be.
Damn it, stupid BSA and their "Intellectual Property" trolling.
I know this is a silly semantic point, and maybe a bit off topic, but copyright-able material != "intellectual property". Intellectual property is an ideology that implies that ideas should be treated like physical goods in that they can have one owner that controls it. In the "natural order of things" there is a differece: ideas can be easily reproduced or shared among people and physical goods cannot. Most people that take someone's physical property deprive them of it, which is why for millenia stealing of physical goods has been illegal in many societies. The concept of copyright is totally different from property: the copyright holder wishes to share his or her ideas, but only in specific ways. So in the last few centuries many governments have granted creators of works abilities to control copying of their ideas, but with a limited time span and scope.
Using the term "intellectual property" conditions people to think of ideas like property. They forget the limitations of copyright law and they forget that naturally ideas can be shared. That copyright came to be not out of a desire to protect the rights of creators but to promote the advancement of arts and sciences. The IP crowd wants their rights protected, and we have to ask ourselves, "What are their true rights? Do they have a right to perpetually and without limit ban the sharing of their ideas?" Despite the tone of my post, and my opinion that they shouldn't have that right, I don't think that there's a single right answer to this question. It is a choice of governments to accept the doctrine of intellectual property or not, just as it is their choice to accept the rights of physical property holders or not. I definitely think, however, that calling ideas "property", because of the differences between ideas and physical objects, is misleading.
I could maybe see on-demand video being highly successful, because the cable companies can throw that much data down the line to you (at least I think they can... they seem to have it working so far, but I've only seen it at other people's houses). The Internet is just silly, you'd have long downloads for low quality video. Also, the interfaces are already there and reasonably intuitive for on-demand cable as they are, whereas those for connecting to the Internet to stream content aren't ready for the living room, from what I've seen.
Hell, I'm a gigantic geek, but if I wanted to watch a movie I'd look in the phone book for a local rental store. It (marginally) reduces how pathetic it feels to stay in by making you go out;-).
What, in Soviet Russia, meta-humor mods up you? Come on...
Re:This is Slashdot, right?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 2, Informative
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you had a dual processor machine with a 486 and a 487. You had two processors, but the rest of the hardware (not to mention all of the software you'd likely run on the thing) wasn't capable of dealing with multiple processors. In fact, I doubt that the processors themselves were capable of doubled-up (requires some considerations in terms of cache coherancy and resource sharing).
Still, I can hardly call it slimy or nasty. Just about every hardware company does it. I recently found out that a UDMA card I have in one of my old computers can be turned into a RAID card by strategically sodering a resistor on the back. Supposedly Intel builds two of certain components onto Pentium 4s solely for the purpose of QA, and one gets disabled. That's a market economy: prices aren't dictated by what things cost to make, they're dictated by what people will pay. So if the market for the expensive product is limited, throw in an artificial cripple and sell loads to lower-margin markets.
I don't know if I'd necessarily call this an "ugly" way of doing things; this has been available on SMB shares for a while (possibly only with server versions of Windows, I don't really know), so why not implement it on a local machine through SMB to localhost? I mean, it's not like the traffic is actually going out to the network. CUPS config is done through an http server on localhost, and I know X does some kind of crazy shit along a similar vein. I actually think it's a pretty clever way of leveraging existing code to get a useful new feature with minimal effort. You could probably configure existing versions of Windows to do the exact same thing.
It gives you a mixture. I'm in Santa Clara right now and I just Googled "Rancho San Antonio" (without quotation marks), which is the name of an open-space preserve in nearby Los Altos (I did this before reading this article, because I wanted to find a map of the trails there). At the top of the page are results for "rancho" in or near San Antonio, TX. But the actual search results give websites about the preserve, and I found what I was looking for.
From the looks of the search results, one looking for a rancho in San Antonio may not have been as lucky as I, but there was probably a link near the top to give the localized results that they wanted.
In C, and in most other languages, "while" is not a function, it's a looping construct. It doesn't return anything. Hate to be a pedant, but this is very important to understanding its operation.
An identical copy of the Big Mac, that is, a bit-for-bit copy of something you download from iTMS, is completely useless to anyone but you unless you've discovered the key stored on your computer that allows iTunes to decrypt the file to perform its limited set of allowed operations. If you discover the key you can distribute that to your friends and they can use it to play back the files. If you discover the encryption algorithm as well you can decrypt the file so that anyone can access the information stored in the file.
With its DRM-applied media, which is what the DMCA really applies to, Apple could sue you for copyright violation if you spread the files on your favorite P2P. But they'd probably just laugh at everyone that downloaded them instead. Copyright laws, for a group like the RIAA, are too lax, too un-uniform (across different companies) and too hard to enforce. DRM lets them make whatever rules they want, apply them everywhere, and enforce them perpetually without any effort. The DMCA basically protects their ability to set those rules.
In that sense, it's ironic that the the law is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, because its effect is to make actual copyright laws, set by governments, irrelevant.
User interface design, like most things, isn't just a sliding scale from good to bad. I'd bet the UI is designed at least reasonably well for what most people use it for, as it's been sharpened for these purposes over the years. It's just that the UI isn't terribly good for redacting, because it wasn't designed with redacting in mind.
The question is whether people that need redacting are a big enough market that software designers should cater to them, or whether government agencies must develop a standard redacting procedure for each of the software titles they use and teach their employees the procedure.
So the government either has to "start some business" or issue bonds. How is it going to pay those bonds when they mature? It's going to have to either tax people or make an even bigger monopoly business that it can make huge profits on. To get the kind of profits necessary to fund on-the-surface unprofitable initiatives like maintenance of roads and other infrastructure, providing education, etc (and at the Federal level, defense). it would have to make some pretty big profits. Which probably means they'd charge way over the top for their product and illegalize competition.
Actually, they've already done that kind of thing, with the US Postal Service. Their rates aren't that bad, but they have made it illegal for anyone else to deliver letters in the US (which is why FedEx has to have all that padding in their letter envelopes so they count as packages). I don't really have a sense for whether the USPS is overcharging for letter delivery, but we have no way to find out since they can't have any direct competition by law.
I'd rather pay a tax that distributes the cost of services over a population than have to deal with all kinds of zany government-appointed monopolies.
It hasn't restricted your rights *yet*. But it does restrict the choice in devices you can buy to play the music, and the choice in software you can use to play it. It restricts your ability to build a device you play the music or write a piece of software to play the music. It restricts your ability to amuse yourself by remixing the song. It restricts your ability to copy the music freely when the copyright term ends.
Of course, with copyright terms getting longer, and timeless musical works becoming rarer, it's quite possible you'll never have the desire to enjoy this last right anyway.
Haha, Linux may not have a manpage for "linux", but FreeBSD does! If you man linux in BSD you get the page for Linux ABI support. And if you man unix you get something about the UNIX-domain protocol family (for IPC).
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Vim also does tab completion this way. It annoys me to no end, because if you tab too early you have to either delete or go through all the choices to find what you want; also, bash's method lets you see the list of all the matching files, which sometimes is overwhealmingly long. Well, mostly the reason it annoys me is that I'm used to bash; for most directories it's all a matter of preference. To make vim act like bash, btw, you can put "set wildmode=longest,list" in your vimrc. I don't know of a way to make cmd.exe work like bash.
Upcoming? Nah, they happened a long time ago. But since it was in a galaxy far, far away the light just took until the '70s to reach George Lucas' telescope. And somehow some of the light took a longer path than other parts, so the story came to him out of order. And some parts of it twice.
Light is wierd.
Amen. Until I started playing with Plan 9 I never realized how silly some aspects of modern Unix systems really are. If you want to see a manpage you use "man", but because it has to run in a terminal emulator it needs a full-featured pager, and IIRC on some systems it even re-generates the pages from *roff source. The hideous complexity of autoconf. X11.
I just started using Plan 9 about a week ago on an occasional basis. Though I can adjust to the system, and admire the elegance that allows, for example, rio to be run within rio, ideas like process-specific file heirarchies and the lack of cruft, you have to realize that the developers of Plan 9 have it easy: they get to make a system for people that will learn to use it.
I wouldn't mind seeing how well Plan 9 would deal with having the system adjust to the user a bit. My first idea is to adapt vi to Plan 9; my goal would be not a straight port, but something that incorporates the familiar commands and modal nature of vi with the text-editing support that Plan 9 gives for free to graphical programs. Sam and Acme are fine editors, but I want to find out if a totally different editor can be written in a reasonable way on the system. Actually, I think a Plan 9 implementation should be cleaner than a Unix one, simply because terminal emulators are so damn wierd to interface with. But that may fall apart when I actually learn how to code on the system.
Another similar issue is in window management: you can use nested rio instances to elegantly get similar functionality to Unix-style multiple desktops (and you can do so much more, too), but it's just not as quick to switch between them using the desktop menus in rio as it is with a simple keystroke in fvwm. The basic question is, could you combine the adaptability of Unix (and particularly Linux) with the elegance of Plan 9? That would be a great environment to study *and* use.
And in an even greater shocker, these stunning new titles will be able to play smoothly on an ATi Rage 128.
This is a bit off-topic, but I actually just did install Plan 9 on my FreeBSD box a few days ago. It's pretty neat. I am going to try to write a version of vi to Plan 9 just to prove a point.
What you mean is that ends can be a consideration in judging means after the situation has already ended, right? You can only see the end after the dust has cleared.
What's really important isn't judging the actions of the past, but making decisions in the future. To that end, of course, you'll judge actions of the past, but in a different way: you'll look at the similar situations that have occurred, what results have arisen from different actions taken at those junctures, and make judgements on the desirability of those results. When making decisions you can't look at the ends, you can only try to get a clear picture of the potential ends. A decision that leads to success isn't always a good one, and a decision that leads to failure isn't always a bad one.
I don't think anyone is saying that "any dissent from authority" should be punished. Just that spreading around an icon with an animation of shooting one of his teachers is not protected speech. If the kid published criticisms (even in the form of irrational, profane rants) of the school or the teacher, that should certainly be allowed. But instead he made a threat.
If you were a teacher and someone was spreading around animations of you being shot, would you want to teach the kid? Maybe think about school not just as a right for the student, but as a job for the teacher. If you were in any other business working with someone that was passing around stuff like that you'd be well justified to never to do business with that person again. The school, providing a necessary government service can't have full freedom of association, but I think it's justified to try to provide an environment where teachers and students can feel safe.
Quit being so paranoid. This isn't about 9/11. It's more about Columbine. When I think back to what I and some of the other kids in my junior high talked about and wrote about, even published on the Internet in pre-Columbine days, and how innocent that really was, I think that this kid probably doesn't deserve a semester-long suspension. When I wrote violent haikus in English class back then (one was about a nuke going off in a peaceful meadow or something, I was young, dumb and read too much Tom Clancy, whom I probably plagairized in that instance) I got a stern talking-to and learned something about how to behave acceptably. That's probably what was right for this kid, too, or maybe some mild punishment. Ultimately it is disappointing that this could have been an opportunity for the kid to learn about the consequences of his words and actions, but it will probably be lost in the legal battle.
Primarily iPods and iTMS songs are purchased seperately. Cars are usually bought whole.
Yeah, there are exceptions, but trying to define what constitutes one product and what constitutes multiple is not easy. Product boundaries will be seen differently by different groups of people and differently over time. A great example is the IE/Windows thing. Is IE its own product? An OS component? A component of the computer? A browser may once have been considered part of an ISP's software bundle, and aren't you glad those days are (mostly) over? Is the status of the browser in relation to these various other products based on the claims of Microsoft? Of Netscape? Of AOL? Is it based on the technical necessity of interrelation? Is it based on how users use the products, and how they want to use the products?
The last few criteria are what make the most sense to me. There's no technical reason that the iPod and iTMS have to exclusively share their DRM format. I also believe that people think of the songs they purchase as seperate from the iPod and iTunes, as works of a more general nature. I think they would find it natural to be able to play these songs on a variety of equivalent devices. But that only means that I believe that they're two unrelated products. Whether that means they have to be legally separated in the market is another issue.
It's not completely analogous to cars, and what's tricky is that it has so much to do with the traditions of the industries. There aren't standards for interfaces between engines and transmissions like there are for computer connections: computers tend to have standards for device interconnects like USB, for file representations, for network protocols and hardware, and non-standard parts eventually tend to be marginalized. People expect that a file on one computer is a file on another, and the representation of digital music as comptuer files ties it up in this tradition that makes people expect compatibility. I don't think people expect the same of cars.
Split the processes into two groups. So you have 180, 90, 45, 22nm processes. You have 130, 65, 32, 16nm processes. Each generation goes for half the size of the one two before it. I don't remember why, but that's what the researchers aim for.
Any processor that's an x86 clone has the 4 privilege levels. AMD's x86 processors should for that reason. I think AMD64 does, too, but I haven't actually read any documents on it.
It certainly is possible to make an OS use more than 2 privilege levels on x86 (a dude I knew in college modified Linux thusly; lots of very frequently-used kernel code and drivers needed modification and IIRC all the userland programs were unmodified because it all runs in ring 3 anyway). As far as portability goes... Linux was originally intended to be an implementation of a Unix kernel for 386. There's no absolute requirement that kernels are as portable as Linux has grown to be.
Damn it, stupid BSA and their "Intellectual Property" trolling.
I know this is a silly semantic point, and maybe a bit off topic, but copyright-able material != "intellectual property". Intellectual property is an ideology that implies that ideas should be treated like physical goods in that they can have one owner that controls it. In the "natural order of things" there is a differece: ideas can be easily reproduced or shared among people and physical goods cannot. Most people that take someone's physical property deprive them of it, which is why for millenia stealing of physical goods has been illegal in many societies. The concept of copyright is totally different from property: the copyright holder wishes to share his or her ideas, but only in specific ways. So in the last few centuries many governments have granted creators of works abilities to control copying of their ideas, but with a limited time span and scope.
Using the term "intellectual property" conditions people to think of ideas like property. They forget the limitations of copyright law and they forget that naturally ideas can be shared. That copyright came to be not out of a desire to protect the rights of creators but to promote the advancement of arts and sciences. The IP crowd wants their rights protected, and we have to ask ourselves, "What are their true rights? Do they have a right to perpetually and without limit ban the sharing of their ideas?" Despite the tone of my post, and my opinion that they shouldn't have that right, I don't think that there's a single right answer to this question. It is a choice of governments to accept the doctrine of intellectual property or not, just as it is their choice to accept the rights of physical property holders or not. I definitely think, however, that calling ideas "property", because of the differences between ideas and physical objects, is misleading.
I could maybe see on-demand video being highly successful, because the cable companies can throw that much data down the line to you (at least I think they can... they seem to have it working so far, but I've only seen it at other people's houses). The Internet is just silly, you'd have long downloads for low quality video. Also, the interfaces are already there and reasonably intuitive for on-demand cable as they are, whereas those for connecting to the Internet to stream content aren't ready for the living room, from what I've seen.
;-).
Hell, I'm a gigantic geek, but if I wanted to watch a movie I'd look in the phone book for a local rental store. It (marginally) reduces how pathetic it feels to stay in by making you go out
What, in Soviet Russia, meta-humor mods up you? Come on...
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you had a dual processor machine with a 486 and a 487. You had two processors, but the rest of the hardware (not to mention all of the software you'd likely run on the thing) wasn't capable of dealing with multiple processors. In fact, I doubt that the processors themselves were capable of doubled-up (requires some considerations in terms of cache coherancy and resource sharing).
Still, I can hardly call it slimy or nasty. Just about every hardware company does it. I recently found out that a UDMA card I have in one of my old computers can be turned into a RAID card by strategically sodering a resistor on the back. Supposedly Intel builds two of certain components onto Pentium 4s solely for the purpose of QA, and one gets disabled. That's a market economy: prices aren't dictated by what things cost to make, they're dictated by what people will pay. So if the market for the expensive product is limited, throw in an artificial cripple and sell loads to lower-margin markets.
I don't know if I'd necessarily call this an "ugly" way of doing things; this has been available on SMB shares for a while (possibly only with server versions of Windows, I don't really know), so why not implement it on a local machine through SMB to localhost? I mean, it's not like the traffic is actually going out to the network. CUPS config is done through an http server on localhost, and I know X does some kind of crazy shit along a similar vein. I actually think it's a pretty clever way of leveraging existing code to get a useful new feature with minimal effort. You could probably configure existing versions of Windows to do the exact same thing.
If people came up with relevant, on-topic palindromes like this one I'd, for one, welcome our new mirror-same overlords.
The only difference between these new formats and DVD with respect to DRM is that DVD's DRM has already been broken.
It gives you a mixture. I'm in Santa Clara right now and I just Googled "Rancho San Antonio" (without quotation marks), which is the name of an open-space preserve in nearby Los Altos (I did this before reading this article, because I wanted to find a map of the trails there). At the top of the page are results for "rancho" in or near San Antonio, TX. But the actual search results give websites about the preserve, and I found what I was looking for.
From the looks of the search results, one looking for a rancho in San Antonio may not have been as lucky as I, but there was probably a link near the top to give the localized results that they wanted.
In C, and in most other languages, "while" is not a function, it's a looping construct. It doesn't return anything. Hate to be a pedant, but this is very important to understanding its operation.
An identical copy of the Big Mac, that is, a bit-for-bit copy of something you download from iTMS, is completely useless to anyone but you unless you've discovered the key stored on your computer that allows iTunes to decrypt the file to perform its limited set of allowed operations. If you discover the key you can distribute that to your friends and they can use it to play back the files. If you discover the encryption algorithm as well you can decrypt the file so that anyone can access the information stored in the file.
With its DRM-applied media, which is what the DMCA really applies to, Apple could sue you for copyright violation if you spread the files on your favorite P2P. But they'd probably just laugh at everyone that downloaded them instead. Copyright laws, for a group like the RIAA, are too lax, too un-uniform (across different companies) and too hard to enforce. DRM lets them make whatever rules they want, apply them everywhere, and enforce them perpetually without any effort. The DMCA basically protects their ability to set those rules.
In that sense, it's ironic that the the law is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, because its effect is to make actual copyright laws, set by governments, irrelevant.
At least that's my understanding.
User interface design, like most things, isn't just a sliding scale from good to bad. I'd bet the UI is designed at least reasonably well for what most people use it for, as it's been sharpened for these purposes over the years. It's just that the UI isn't terribly good for redacting, because it wasn't designed with redacting in mind.
The question is whether people that need redacting are a big enough market that software designers should cater to them, or whether government agencies must develop a standard redacting procedure for each of the software titles they use and teach their employees the procedure.
So the government either has to "start some business" or issue bonds. How is it going to pay those bonds when they mature? It's going to have to either tax people or make an even bigger monopoly business that it can make huge profits on. To get the kind of profits necessary to fund on-the-surface unprofitable initiatives like maintenance of roads and other infrastructure, providing education, etc (and at the Federal level, defense). it would have to make some pretty big profits. Which probably means they'd charge way over the top for their product and illegalize competition.
Actually, they've already done that kind of thing, with the US Postal Service. Their rates aren't that bad, but they have made it illegal for anyone else to deliver letters in the US (which is why FedEx has to have all that padding in their letter envelopes so they count as packages). I don't really have a sense for whether the USPS is overcharging for letter delivery, but we have no way to find out since they can't have any direct competition by law.
I'd rather pay a tax that distributes the cost of services over a population than have to deal with all kinds of zany government-appointed monopolies.
Everyone knows that Real Women use FVWM with ridiculous custom configurations that only they understand.
It hasn't restricted your rights *yet*. But it does restrict the choice in devices you can buy to play the music, and the choice in software you can use to play it. It restricts your ability to build a device you play the music or write a piece of software to play the music. It restricts your ability to amuse yourself by remixing the song. It restricts your ability to copy the music freely when the copyright term ends.
Of course, with copyright terms getting longer, and timeless musical works becoming rarer, it's quite possible you'll never have the desire to enjoy this last right anyway.
Haha, Linux may not have a manpage for "linux", but FreeBSD does! If you man linux in BSD you get the page for Linux ABI support. And if you man unix you get something about the UNIX-domain protocol family (for IPC).
It's a good thing nobody tells noobs to RTFM...