If all hell were to break loose and start Patents World War I, perhaps it would provoke some serious questioning over the rationale of patents. Or at least the current system. I myself would favor an abolition of all private property, other than the 3sq ft you are standing on and objects you carry on your person.
I agree. I also liked what Shutteworth said once, Linux needs to gain on it's own terms. Open source needs to have it's own strategic advantages, work on it's own tech and obstacles, rather than trying to constantly figure out whatever Microsoft proprietary stuff does.
Is there such a thing as a group that coordinates actions to push for open-source growth strategies? Several groups might want such a thing, like governments. There was a time when I thought Microsoft was to blame for everything. These days I believe plain ole hard work, funding, partners, coordination, objectives, strategies, etc play a quite big part too.
Rat brain cells are not going to strike the right chord with people. I would use brain cells from an animal people are familiar with, and trust, like horses, cats, dogs, monkeys, or cattle.
It wont pass the ARSENIC (Association of Robot-Society Engineered Non-Intentional Characteristics) approval test.
It appears it cannot be controlled or predicted, and is at risk of harming humans and live beings in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Some body in the press "OMG THE PENTAGON IS BURNING BOOKS!"
Captain Picard *headpalm*
Someone else in Pentagon "Office of Information Management for US Citizens" --
"Who was the ignorant jackass that ordering public books burnings when they could simply be 'placed in storage until the relevant information is de-classified'."
So in practice the censorship is going to get more and more intense, although surely in a very covert manner, all the time banging into our heads "You have freedom. There is no censorship and no propaganda. You can trust us, we care for you first."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 was a nice book-burning-society story.
Well this seems to be a primary target for p2p legitimate uses... Is there no torrent for this?
The people doesn't need an 'excuse' to make a deal with the government. We don't need to make deals with the government. In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, when we want something done, we tell the government to do it.
Now all we need to do is convince the vast majority of the country to oppose warrantless wiretapping, etc.
To start organizing people, finding 10 people who agree on anything besides drinking beer and partying would be a phenomenal start.
This could be a great "excuse" for us, too. We should make him a deal. Partition off the governmental and "critical industry".
There should be a safe partition for kids. And one for universities. And another for US critical businesses, subpartitioned by sector. Another group of subpartitions for arts, media, games and entertainment. Another for the Middle East, Arabs, Muslims and terrorists in general. Another for China. Wait, they already did that. So if you want to connect to three sites, you can only connect to one at a time, and will need three vpn connections. That would be secure.
If you keep on making everyone more secure, eventually you'll have a totalitarian state. The alternative is to have some security-privacy and secrecy compromise full of abuses and lies, our present situation, or to start and promote actual progress in world human society, not just technology. There is war, peace, and pax romana, nothing else. Accepting current reality is wise, but pointing out towards another reality is even more.
Several times I've heard "This PC came with Linux installed, format it and install Windows." I feel sad, but I really have a hard time making an argument for it. They want stuff that doesn't run on Linux, a familiar interface, the way they know how to do stuff, and that's it. Switching to another OS or application is hard, people only do it if there a strong reason. There have to be strong reasons to switch. Strong apps, that only run on the open source OS would attract people to it - but those get ported to all OS's.
QUERY: - Why are there a hundred articles about Firefox, but nada about Mozilla/seaMonkey?.
Maybe because someone allowed the proper standards, HTML, to take the backseat, and allowed the standards to get hijacked by the browsers, which should all render exactly the same. In fact the browser should not even be identifiable by the server.
The proper calculation has to include the long-term benefits of the government owning their own source code. For example, there will be no forced upgrades. There will be less risk of orphaned products suddenly creating a situation where government data is inaccessible and useless. A national infrastructure of trained programmers to maintain this stuff is now possible, as there is source. There will be higher costs in programmers, that also has to be added.
I think the place to start is in releasing the data of the most powerful people, those that should be accountable to everyone. Airing out out the secrets in these databases, and causing some social stirs. Most people don't even know such data on them exists, and they would ignorantly blame the leaks do everything to shut it down, some would be smarter and attack the original sources. Say someone published all credit databases, experian etc, credit cards data, banking data, transfers, all police records, all phone call records. Everyone published everything they know about everyone else. Everyone would know about who is amassing millions and billions, who they work with, and where it came from. The end of secrets. Of course a black market of off-record transactions would start, but it may not thrive. And there would be anger, controversy, physical aggression, police and fbi action, etc.
Hmm indeed. Although you ultimately have little privacy protection from the three-letter-agencies and many corporations, you do have it from the policeman, the religious nuts, and your neighbors, all of which you meet on a daily basis. The only real problem is, "Who is guarding the guards."
In order to get a terminal which does something as simple as read all websites, it has to support a ton of bloated technologies, which more or less forces you to run some expensive bloaty OS, with a bunch of other protections. Gigabytes of support libraries to display a page. Websites are supposed to be universally readable. Thankfully now mobile devices are popular and low-powered, perhaps now the universal-readable concept and argument will gain more strength over the most-visual-selling argument.
Sometimes achieving a balanced view is possible and best. Sometimes profound change is best, socially accecptable and easy, but politically nearly impossible. In those cases, political pressure and political organizing is the way to go. I think copyrights/patents/trademarks are changing most rapidly through abuse and legal confusion, mostly because it's very similar to civil disobedience, creating a politically untenable situation.
There is no property rights to trademarks. The purpose of Trademarks is to prevent consumers from being mislead or confused.
That was the original intent. But saying "M*D*nalds food is bad for you." Or "S*cient*l*gy=lies." or registering foxlies.com have become unauthorized trademark violations. Or defamation slander etc. In other words, imposition of copyright law onto freedom of expression.
I agree. But. Be careful of what you wish for - you may get it. All files, documents, data, and databases may be freely disseminated. Personal databases too. Passwords too. Phone numbers, purchase histories, places visited, dates. The CIA's, Mossad's, Boeing's, yours, mine, Tiger Woods, the pope and the POTUS. I agree, yes. I vote for extreme transparency, extreme data openness, any day, over extreme secrecy, which we have now.
The problem is copyright laws don't serve their original purpose anymore, and continuing to interpret them the same way just leads to all sorts of ridiculous situations, and injustice. Intellectual property trolls are the best example, they are applying copyright law exactly, but they never author anything, not even representing authors, just try to take IP user's money.
Immoral, but I think not illegal. It's a kind of legal baiting. Perhaps the best thing to do is to starts hundreds of thousands of these cases, until some courts press legislators to change the law and stop the nonsense. Perhaps we could raise some money to pay salaries for a couple hundred open source programmers.
Does this mean that all newspaper stories are freely usable by anyone?...
No. You may only use them for reading and when the regular toilet paper ends. For any other purpose such as lining bird cages and cleaning windows, etc, you must get special permits.
How concisely you sum up years of interrogations about this whole "intellectual property" thing !
Well, I'd propose modifying the property law. Private property is limited to what you can carry on your person, or keep within one 12ft x 12ft space. Everything else is public property, and you may join various associations to use and manage and care for it. As to private intellectual property, you may author it and keep it locked in there if you wish.
I like that argument technique - make up a fact, for example, divorce rates are going through the roof, and blame it on a group that you don't like.
Seriously, I like that technique.
OK, let's try it. (1) Make up a fact.
Buddhists are torturers, forcing people sign contracts to donate their homes.
(2) Blame it on a group you don't like.
Oil companies in Texas are behind it all, they want the oil under the properties, and are collecting profit.
Hmm I don't think that works. There seems to be a requirement for some minimal logical association and credibility on the part of the reader. You can't just blame anyone for anything and have it stick. You can manipulate the facts, twist the terms, words, and phrase construction, and make them more believable, but people's education and information level and social context imposes some limitation on how much you can get them to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
If all hell were to break loose and start Patents World War I, perhaps it would provoke some serious questioning over the rationale of patents. Or at least the current system. I myself would favor an abolition of all private property, other than the 3sq ft you are standing on and objects you carry on your person.
I agree. I also liked what Shutteworth said once, Linux needs to gain on it's own terms. Open source needs to have it's own strategic advantages, work on it's own tech and obstacles, rather than trying to constantly figure out whatever Microsoft proprietary stuff does.
Is there such a thing as a group that coordinates actions to push for open-source growth strategies? Several groups might want such a thing, like governments. There was a time when I thought Microsoft was to blame for everything. These days I believe plain ole hard work, funding, partners, coordination, objectives, strategies, etc play a quite big part too.
Rat brain cells are not going to strike the right chord with people. I would use brain cells from an animal people are familiar with, and trust, like horses, cats, dogs, monkeys, or cattle.
It wont pass the ARSENIC (Association of Robot-Society Engineered Non-Intentional Characteristics) approval test. It appears it cannot be controlled or predicted, and is at risk of harming humans and live beings in general. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Some body in the press "OMG THE PENTAGON IS BURNING BOOKS!" Captain Picard *headpalm*
Someone else in Pentagon "Office of Information Management for US Citizens" -- "Who was the ignorant jackass that ordering public books burnings when they could simply be 'placed in storage until the relevant information is de-classified'."
So in practice the censorship is going to get more and more intense, although surely in a very covert manner, all the time banging into our heads "You have freedom. There is no censorship and no propaganda. You can trust us, we care for you first."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 was a nice book-burning-society story.
Well this seems to be a primary target for p2p legitimate uses... Is there no torrent for this?
The people doesn't need an 'excuse' to make a deal with the government. We don't need to make deals with the government. In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, when we want something done, we tell the government to do it. Now all we need to do is convince the vast majority of the country to oppose warrantless wiretapping, etc.
To start organizing people, finding 10 people who agree on anything besides drinking beer and partying would be a phenomenal start.
This could be a great "excuse" for us, too. We should make him a deal. Partition off the governmental and "critical industry".
There should be a safe partition for kids. And one for universities. And another for US critical businesses, subpartitioned by sector. Another group of subpartitions for arts, media, games and entertainment. Another for the Middle East, Arabs, Muslims and terrorists in general. Another for China. Wait, they already did that. So if you want to connect to three sites, you can only connect to one at a time, and will need three vpn connections. That would be secure.
If you keep on making everyone more secure, eventually you'll have a totalitarian state. The alternative is to have some security-privacy and secrecy compromise full of abuses and lies, our present situation, or to start and promote actual progress in world human society, not just technology. There is war, peace, and pax romana, nothing else. Accepting current reality is wise, but pointing out towards another reality is even more.
The benefit for NSA is that they can keep on wiretapping the majority of internet communications with impunity.
Your evidence, reason for suspicion, or hunch is...
Several times I've heard "This PC came with Linux installed, format it and install Windows." I feel sad, but I really have a hard time making an argument for it. They want stuff that doesn't run on Linux, a familiar interface, the way they know how to do stuff, and that's it. Switching to another OS or application is hard, people only do it if there a strong reason. There have to be strong reasons to switch. Strong apps, that only run on the open source OS would attract people to it - but those get ported to all OS's.
QUERY: - Why are there a hundred articles about Firefox, but nada about Mozilla/seaMonkey?.
Maybe because someone allowed the proper standards, HTML, to take the backseat, and allowed the standards to get hijacked by the browsers, which should all render exactly the same. In fact the browser should not even be identifiable by the server.
The proper calculation has to include the long-term benefits of the government owning their own source code. For example, there will be no forced upgrades. There will be less risk of orphaned products suddenly creating a situation where government data is inaccessible and useless. A national infrastructure of trained programmers to maintain this stuff is now possible, as there is source. There will be higher costs in programmers, that also has to be added.
I think the place to start is in releasing the data of the most powerful people, those that should be accountable to everyone. Airing out out the secrets in these databases, and causing some social stirs. Most people don't even know such data on them exists, and they would ignorantly blame the leaks do everything to shut it down, some would be smarter and attack the original sources. Say someone published all credit databases, experian etc, credit cards data, banking data, transfers, all police records, all phone call records. Everyone published everything they know about everyone else. Everyone would know about who is amassing millions and billions, who they work with, and where it came from. The end of secrets. Of course a black market of off-record transactions would start, but it may not thrive. And there would be anger, controversy, physical aggression, police and fbi action, etc.
Well I suppose since streets are wide open with no cars ever, people must be going nuts with anything that has wheels. But I dunno, never been there.
Hmm indeed. Although you ultimately have little privacy protection from the three-letter-agencies and many corporations, you do have it from the policeman, the religious nuts, and your neighbors, all of which you meet on a daily basis. The only real problem is, "Who is guarding the guards."
In order to get a terminal which does something as simple as read all websites, it has to support a ton of bloated technologies, which more or less forces you to run some expensive bloaty OS, with a bunch of other protections. Gigabytes of support libraries to display a page. Websites are supposed to be universally readable. Thankfully now mobile devices are popular and low-powered, perhaps now the universal-readable concept and argument will gain more strength over the most-visual-selling argument.
Sometimes achieving a balanced view is possible and best. Sometimes profound change is best, socially accecptable and easy, but politically nearly impossible. In those cases, political pressure and political organizing is the way to go. I think copyrights/patents/trademarks are changing most rapidly through abuse and legal confusion, mostly because it's very similar to civil disobedience, creating a politically untenable situation.
There is no property rights to trademarks. The purpose of Trademarks is to prevent consumers from being mislead or confused.
That was the original intent. But saying "M*D*nalds food is bad for you." Or "S*cient*l*gy=lies." or registering foxlies.com have become unauthorized trademark violations. Or defamation slander etc. In other words, imposition of copyright law onto freedom of expression.
NO TRADEMARKS
NO PATENTS
NO COPYRIGHT
No restrictions would be great.
I agree. But. Be careful of what you wish for - you may get it.
All files, documents, data, and databases may be freely disseminated. Personal databases too. Passwords too. Phone numbers, purchase histories, places visited, dates. The CIA's, Mossad's, Boeing's, yours, mine, Tiger Woods, the pope and the POTUS. I agree, yes. I vote for extreme transparency, extreme data openness, any day, over extreme secrecy, which we have now.
The problem is copyright laws don't serve their original purpose anymore, and continuing to interpret them the same way just leads to all sorts of ridiculous situations, and injustice. Intellectual property trolls are the best example, they are applying copyright law exactly, but they never author anything, not even representing authors, just try to take IP user's money.
Immoral, but I think not illegal. It's a kind of legal baiting. Perhaps the best thing to do is to starts hundreds of thousands of these cases, until some courts press legislators to change the law and stop the nonsense. Perhaps we could raise some money to pay salaries for a couple hundred open source programmers.
Does this mean that all newspaper stories are freely usable by anyone?...
No. You may only use them for reading and when the regular toilet paper ends. For any other purpose such as lining bird cages and cleaning windows, etc, you must get special permits.
How exactly is this going to work?
How concisely you sum up years of interrogations about this whole "intellectual property" thing !
Well, I'd propose modifying the property law. Private property is limited to what you can carry on your person, or keep within one 12ft x 12ft space. Everything else is public property, and you may join various associations to use and manage and care for it. As to private intellectual property, you may author it and keep it locked in there if you wish.
I like that argument technique - make up a fact, for example, divorce rates are going through the roof, and blame it on a group that you don't like.
Seriously, I like that technique.
OK, let's try it.
(1) Make up a fact.
Buddhists are torturers, forcing people sign contracts to donate their homes.
(2) Blame it on a group you don't like.
Oil companies in Texas are behind it all, they want the oil under the properties, and are collecting profit.
Hmm I don't think that works. There seems to be a requirement for some minimal logical association and credibility on the part of the reader. You can't just blame anyone for anything and have it stick. You can manipulate the facts, twist the terms, words, and phrase construction, and make them more believable, but people's education and information level and social context imposes some limitation on how much you can get them to believe.