Also, I think you're aiming at the wrong target when you blame DRM for lack of incremental development, I don't give it 100% of the blame - obviously under the current system a hundred years or so must pass (in the USA) before the legal preventions expire and only the technical preventions are left. But if effective DRM were forced on everything then it certainly would be a major part of the problem.
Finally, I wouldn't put too much weight on the "default state of the universe". By default there's no force of nature that locks me up if I kill someone, but I'm rather glad we as a society made those kinds of rules. By "default" there is nothing stopping someone else from killing you in response to you committing murder. That we have laws which formalize the process doesn't really change anything. Furthermore, it is a heck of a lot easier to punish someone for committing a physical crime because (a) it takes a lot of effort to kill someone whereas copying information is easy (b) most people are not inclined to kill another whereas most people are inclined to share information (c) killing someone typically leaves evidence (at least a missing person) whereas copying information leaves no evidence behind. All these things, and more, make laws about physical crimes feasible and reasonable but should indicate that arbitrary laws about information sharing in and of itself are not.
There is a law that allows you to collect royalties for every hammer SOLD if you design one. Which is completely unrelated to my point, so much so that I think you probably missed the point. It's like I was talking about growing oranges and you came back with a comment about eating durians because at least it's a fruit too.
All of those are good but, well, they're not working. I disagree with that. So far no DRM system protecting anything of note has gone without circumvention. In particular ALL of the 'music rental' DRM systems have fallen, along with all the games, movies and every other form of content that distributors regularly try to lock down. In fact the free market is responding at some levels, witness iTunes move to include non-DRM songs and the utter defeat of DRM at any of the other music resellers like Amazon, Wal-mart, etc. And then there is the rise of Free software which is purely driven by a compensation for work done, not compensation per copy made model.
Does anyone REALLY expect privacy when they talk on a phone or use the internet or the likes? Yes I do. And that's because I don't expect wholesale monitoring. Just like when I travel about in public I don't expect that every movement of every person in the entire town is recorded, filed away and cross-referenced for future use either. I consider wholesale monitoring to be an unreasonable search because the people doing the monitoring have no reason to suspect the people being monitored of committing a crime.
I'd respectfully disagree with that and point that it is your view that is supporting only one way, that without DRM, and mine leaves open the potential for both types of content. The problem with that argument is that it could be applied to ANY arbitrary restriction. The CueCat folks could have made a lot of money if there had been a law that prevented people from using cuecats for anything else. Automakers could make a profitable business selling ultra-luxury (and ultra-expensive) cars for cheap if there was a law that required car owners to temporarily lease their cars, payment going to automakers, to other people when otherwise not in use. Cities could save tax revenue if they were able to charge a royalty for every photograph of their landmarks. All kinds of cocakmamie schemes would become profitable if only they passed a law...
The reason DRM is evil - yes evil - not neutral, but evil - is that it destroys culture. It destroys our history. Imagine if all hieroglyphics had been written on self-destructing or encrypted tablets. We would know only a miserable fraction of what we do about the culture of ancient civilizations. Our society today would suffer for it. The public domain is a right, it is in fact the default state of the universe. Similarly DRM prevents the incremental development of new culture. Locked up culture may as well not even exist for all it contributes to the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
We've never really had freedoms. Sez you. You are making up a non-existent distinction - freedom whether you call it liberty or anything else has always come with consequences aka living with the results of your actions. To say that we have the 'freedom' to break the law but not the 'liberty' to do so is just hand-waving and extremely counter-productive.
Every law is a restriction a liberty or freedom and an enabler of rights. That is what laws do. Again with the generic argument for restrictions. It does not follow that just because some restrictions are useful that DRM or copyrights in general are a net benefit to society.
I believe in the rights of the users and those of the creators Well, then you and I will always disagree. The only right of the creator is to get paid whatever they can convince someone to pay them for the work of creation, just like everyone else on the planet. Just like your only right as an employee is to get paid for the work you do for your employer. I would love to have a law written for me that guarantees that I get paid a royalty every time someone uses a tool that I created - every new nail pounded in with *my* hammer will be 10 cents, thank you very much. But that's not the natural order of the universe - as soon as I let that hammer out of my control, I don't get paid any more for its use - the possessor is free to do with it as he wishes and it is infeasible for me to stop him- trying to contractually enforce such payments would bear a cost higher than the value received. If anything that law of nature applies 10x more to information distribution than it does to physical objects, yet the law of man is intent on contradicting that law of nature. The end result is a whole lot of effort wasted on enforcing the unenforceable, effort that would have been much more productively spent on creation in the first place.
Without the DRM the content would not have been available at all. Or maybe the 'owners' would have realized that content sitting on the shelf doing nothing earns nothing and thus even just 1% of the pie is better than 0%.
Or maybe someone who would have been motivated by the complete absence of content would have given away *their* version of the content, but the presence of locked down content was enough to discourage them from the effort.
Or maybe someone who would have done an incredible job of incrementally updating the content with massive amounts of newer and more current information just gave up because the DRM prevented him from editing and building on the original content.
Or maybe enough people would have pooled their money to hire someone else to produce similar content and make it available for free, but the price difference per person wasn't worth the effort.
We know the, "without DRM, the content would not have been made available at all" argument all too well, that's why NormalVisual pre-emptively mentioned it, no need to elaborate. For each time it gets used, there are at least 4x more reasons to discount it. If anything, it is the sheeple argument because it assumes that there is only one way to skin a cat, is stuck in the box, etc.
There are benefits to restrictions as odd as that sounds. Restrictions in of themselves are generally useless and often counter-productive. They need to be backed up with solid empirical evidence based on current conditions justifying those restrictions. Not someone's opinion, even if it is an opinion shared by millions of others. The conditions under which copyright was conceived, and DRM proponents still labor, are centuries old and were highly questionable even then. The world has moved on, its time the market did too.
Fuck RMS, he is irrelevant to this discussion. No YOU are irrelevant. I figured this was your opinion to start with, glad I finally dragged it out of you.
Anyone who claims the license's primary author is irrelevant to understanding "the core goal of the" license is just a blathering idiot.
In the meantime, quite misstating "the core goal of the GPL," OK?
Goals aren't relevant here, YOU ARE THE ONE WHO STARTED WITH THE GOAL TALK.
I'm also not making shit up WHAT PART OF, under GPL3 and under the intent of earlier GPLv2, Tivo can't do what they did. They found a loophole and exploited it, and that's why GPLv3 closed the loophole." DO YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND?
never said TiVo or anyone else should be allowed to violate the terms of the GPLv2, YOU MADE A CLAIM AS TO WHAT THE CORE GOAL OF THE GPL WAS. I REFUTED IT YOU REFUSE TO BELIEVE RMS'S OWN WORDS.
I also question the claim that no one foresaw this problem when v2 was written. "NO ONE?" WHO SAID "NO ONE?" YOU SAID IT. QUIT MAKING SHIT UP.
That "no one" at the FSF was aware of what the atari 7800 may or may not have done is unsurprising, the 7800 was a teeny-tiny blip in the market and the only people would have even NOTICED the problem would have been the subset of game developers who needed to get their cartridge signed of the subset of game developers working on the least popular system in the market, which is a far cry from the people at the AI lab at MIT.
If that's the best you can do to refute RMS'S OWN WORDS you should just give it up. You either realize just how ridiculous your justification is or you are delusional.
and in any case i suspect these lines in v3 will be thrown out in court because they extend far beyond the realm of software. Laugh. So you think that a license that grants developers MORE freedom to distribute the code that what copyright does is going to get knocked down and the result will be what? Default copyright restrictions is what, which means tivoization wannabe users won't be able to use GPLv3 licensed software at ALL.
HDTV uses ATM and so does my DSL ISP. Huh? HDTV? Doubt it. Broadcast (ATSC) certainly isn't ATM and the QAM256 which is used on most cable providers (comcast, rtn, verizon fios, etc) for digital television, including HD, isn't ATM either.
The DSL part typically uses ATM but that's little more than point-to-point. You certainly don't set up a PVC from your modem to a website which was a major part of the plans for ATM. On the backhaul ATM's losing to ethernet. It hasn't lost the fight yet, like it did for the desktop, but it isn't gaining marketshare.
The Internet's congestion avoidance mechanism, an afterthought that was tacked-on in the late 80's, reduces and increases the rate of TCP streams to match available network resources, but it doesn't molest UDP at all. One very important point here is that this 'afterthought' in TCP works at the end-points. The network remains dumb, it is the end-points that decide how to do congestion management.
Wasn't that what Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was supposed to address? Good point. ATM died because the benefits weren't worth the costs (much more complex hardware all around, never mind the protocol stacks).
A related point that seems to run through the article is that more bandwidth is not the solution. But he doesn't explain why - for example
This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's or the Internet meltdown problem disappeared spontaneously in the 80's. What we need to do is engineer a better interface between P2P and the Internet, such that each can share information with the other to find the best way to copy desired content. In the first case I think he's completely wrong, more bandwidth is exactly what solved the problem. Both in the network and the applications use of that bandwidth (netscape was the first to do simultaneous requests over multiple connections - which did not require any protocol changes). In the second case, he's talking about Bob Metcalf (the nominal inventor of ethernet and nowadays a half-baked pundit) predicting a "gigalapse" of the internet specifically due to a lack of bandwidth...
It's interesting to note that ATT themselves have declared more bandwidth to be the solution. They didn't phrase it quite that way, but ultimately that's the conclusion an educated reader can draw from their research results. 1x the bandwidth of a 'managed network' requires 2x the bandwidth in a 'neutral network' to achieve the same throughputs, etc. Sounds like a lot, but then you realize that bandwidth costs are not linear, nor are management costs. In fact, they tend to operate in reverse economies of scale - bandwidth gets cheaper the more you buy (think of it as complexity O(x+n) due to fixed costs and the simple 1 to 1 nature of links), but management gets more expensive the more you do it because the 1-to-1 nature of links gets subsumed by having to manage the effects of all connections on each other n-to-n style for O(x+n^2). Ars Technica analysis of ATT report
I have yet to see any valid claim that TiVo violated the license on the code they use, show me otherwise. That's because I never made that claim. I thought I was clear when I wrote, "under GPL3 and under the intent of earlier GPLv2, Tivo can't do what they did. They found a loophole and exploited it, and that's why GPLv3 closed the loophole." What part of THAT do you fail to understand?
This is why TiVo hasn't been sued, they haven't violated the license IN ANY WAY. What part of loophole and intent to do you fail to understand?
Now, Linus just said exactly what i said before, and he has a VERY firm understanding of the issues involved. No, Linus does not. He has a firm grasp of what HIS goals are. Not what the FSF's goals are.
I mean jesus christ, if RMS's own words aren't enough to convince you of what the FSF's goals are, then I don't know what will. But the least you can do is stop going around mis-stating what the "core goal of the GPL is."
You seem to think because they use GPL code in full compliance with the license, they are somehow obligated to meet any number of other random demands that have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LICENSE. Quit making shit up. Seriously. I have clearly stated otherwise. Only someone with an agenda would turn a blind eye to what I wrote and then say that I "seem to think" the exact opposite.
What a coincidence that they make an enormous overreaction which frees up countless gigabits of bandwidth! It's not going to work out like that.
Years ago they stopped carrying the heaviest bandwidth alt.* groups (I think it was the DVD images groups) and the ones with obvious kiddie-porn names. Other than that, verizon had very wide coverage and good completion with about a week or so of history.
Now, by killing all of alt.* they will force their customers to move to 3rd party usenet providers which could easily cause 10x more peered bandwidth usage than before since each customer has to get their own copy versus sharing from the local 'cache' that was verizon's usenet servers.
I don't care about RMS printer. I do understand why he started the GNU project, yes, but this is 2008 and there are other considerations. No, there are no other considerations. If you don't the terms of the GPL, DON"T USE GNU CODE. Simple as that. Why you do think Tivo or anyone else is entitled to violate the terms of the GPL? Because the source code is there? You think that means its in the public domain?
At least now you know your interpretation of the GPL is completely false and you have no reason to repeat that error again.
You can't possibly argue that you should be allowed to easily circumvent service theft protections simply because you like to tinker or because they used GPL software. And you really can't say they should HELP you do so, that's insane. What part of develop your own code do you fail to understand?
What you call "twist" is exactly the chain of events that caused RMS to start the GNU project in the first place.
RMS had a printer, the driver for the printer was broken, he wanted to fix THAT PRINTER. Not use the driver with some other printer, he wanted the only printer he had to work.
You can't possibly argue that you should be allowed to screw with anything GPL software comes into contact with. Yeah, I don't need the GPL for that. I am flat out arguing that I have the right to screw with anything I own. FULL STOP. The GPL just makes it easier for me. Don't want to make it easier for me? Don't build your empire on top of GPL'd software, go spend your own development money.
So taken as a whole, TiVo can't allow people to screw with parts of the system that may interfere with things you have no right to screw with, including the parts of the system that protect satellite broadcasts. You realize that is a circular argument, right? The GPL must mean its OK to prevent in place changes because of some contract that Tivo signed with somebody else? The answer is that, under GPL3 and under the intent of earlier GPLv2, Tivo can't do what they did. They found a loophole and exploited it, and that's why GPLv3 closed the loophole.
in reality the core goal of the GPL is to make sure anyone who IMPROVES GPL software releases that code for use by others, especially for other uses. Bzzzzt.
the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, and
In fact, you are free to improve the software all you want for your own personal use and there are no requirements to distribute the changes you've made.
there are a few valid uses for it, like digital rentals. There are a ton of nifty business models that would work if only (a) the laws of physics were different or (b) the government enforced people obeying alternate laws of physics as if they were the real thing.
Of course the cost to society of (a) or (b) is usually much higher than the value returned to society.
If IBM are shipping mainframes with Linux, their customers are presumably using Linux for something mission critical. Not necessarily. As others have pointed out, linux is just one hosted OS, the hypervisor remains OS/390 and/or variants. IBM's big push with linux on the mainframe has been server consolidation - take 100 'lesser' servers put them on one mainframe where they also benefit from the redundant hardware availability (aka 5-nines availability) are as secondary benefit and not only do you decrease hardware costs but also administration costs.
SPOILERS FOLLOW In the movie, the voice-over at the end explains that Will Smith "is legend" because of the sacrifice he made in order to get the zombie cure to surviving humans. Not because he started the zombie plague.
On second though, I guess it might not be quite so bad because the movie does suggest that the zombies might actually be 'people' (have emotions, etc) too and not just be 100% evil killing machines. SPOILERS OVER
"We are Legion" is probably more appropros.
Or, at least more sympathetic to the people who got us here:
"Those who fight monsters should take care that they never become one. For when you stand and look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." ~ Frederich Nietsche
Except that they do use "citizens" when they mean "citizens", why then use "people" if it also means "citizens". Mod up! Everyone should be aware of that point.
Furthermore, the constitution spells out the powers of the government - everything not listed is prohibited to the federal government - while everything not listed is assumed to be the rights of the people (or states).
And one last point, more for rah-rah than anything else - the declaration of independence does not say that only "all citizens are created equal."
Imagine a coin. Good is one one side and bad is on other. Then there are lawyers, which are opposite to both sides. They are greater than both good and evil, able to walk on edges between good and bad. And there is NYCL, he is in oppsoition to lawyers, and he is one of them. The most mythical man of all dimensions. He is the one which trims the edges, uncovering thruth before our eyes. He is the son of justice. Unfortunately... There Can Be Only One!
I agree, but you should have left off the "at least in the USA" part. The system in place right now is comparative freedom if you look at some of the European multi-party states with parliamentary systems. That's where I disagree. In multi-party systems it is much less likely for the same party to hold the equivalent of both executive and significant legislative control. They usually end up making coalitions, which almost by definition, cause them to vote against their party interests. In essence each party becomes the rough equivalent of a single representative. A government run by 2 'people' is a lot worse off than a government run by 10 or 20 'people.'
My point is that a penchant for fairness is, by definition, enlightened self-interest. Not that people always act in their short-term self-interest (there are plenty of experiments showing that is not the case, your example which I've never heard of and you didn't cite, is just one) but that fairness is a mental shortcut for long term self-interest because a fair system has a higher chance of benefiting them in the long run.
IN other words your hypothetical experiment is just fucking with the brain's huerstics - you took the short term benefit out of the picture and showed that people were still 'designed' to act as if there was a long-term benefit.
I just don't want to see us adopt the Republican method of Governing -- blackmailing our own members to vote the party line against their own constituents, But that is the very essence of being in a political party, at least in the USA. Political parties here exist to subvert the separation of powers in the us constitution, reducing the tension between the executive and the legislative branches and causing the legislative branch to vote against its own best interests. Instead they are expected to vote for what is best for the party (and ultimately the people who control the party, generally not the voters). Sometimes that party unity/coercion is stronger than others, but weak coercion is contrary to the design of the party system.
In short, the basis of free market capitalist economic theory is false. People are not primarily 'selfish actors.' They are social creatures, genetically programmed to be fair, to seek out fairness, and to punish unfairness. It really isn't too difficult to see your claims about fairness as just an example of enlightened self-interest, but still self-interest nonetheless. Ultimately its only the difference between being a short-term selfish actor and a long-term selfish actor.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason DRM is evil - yes evil - not neutral, but evil - is that it destroys culture. It destroys our history. Imagine if all hieroglyphics had been written on self-destructing or encrypted tablets. We would know only a miserable fraction of what we do about the culture of ancient civilizations. Our society today would suffer for it. The public domain is a right, it is in fact the default state of the universe. Similarly DRM prevents the incremental development of new culture. Locked up culture may as well not even exist for all it contributes to the progress of the useful arts and sciences. We've never really had freedoms. Sez you. You are making up a non-existent distinction - freedom whether you call it liberty or anything else has always come with consequences aka living with the results of your actions. To say that we have the 'freedom' to break the law but not the 'liberty' to do so is just hand-waving and extremely counter-productive. Every law is a restriction a liberty or freedom and an enabler of rights. That is what laws do. Again with the generic argument for restrictions. It does not follow that just because some restrictions are useful that DRM or copyrights in general are a net benefit to society. I believe in the rights of the users and those of the creators Well, then you and I will always disagree. The only right of the creator is to get paid whatever they can convince someone to pay them for the work of creation, just like everyone else on the planet. Just like your only right as an employee is to get paid for the work you do for your employer. I would love to have a law written for me that guarantees that I get paid a royalty every time someone uses a tool that I created - every new nail pounded in with *my* hammer will be 10 cents, thank you very much. But that's not the natural order of the universe - as soon as I let that hammer out of my control, I don't get paid any more for its use - the possessor is free to do with it as he wishes and it is infeasible for me to stop him- trying to contractually enforce such payments would bear a cost higher than the value received. If anything that law of nature applies 10x more to information distribution than it does to physical objects, yet the law of man is intent on contradicting that law of nature. The end result is a whole lot of effort wasted on enforcing the unenforceable, effort that would have been much more productively spent on creation in the first place.
Or maybe someone who would have been motivated by the complete absence of content would have given away *their* version of the content, but the presence of locked down content was enough to discourage them from the effort.
Or maybe someone who would have done an incredible job of incrementally updating the content with massive amounts of newer and more current information just gave up because the DRM prevented him from editing and building on the original content.
Or maybe enough people would have pooled their money to hire someone else to produce similar content and make it available for free, but the price difference per person wasn't worth the effort.
We know the, "without DRM, the content would not have been made available at all" argument all too well, that's why NormalVisual pre-emptively mentioned it, no need to elaborate. For each time it gets used, there are at least 4x more reasons to discount it. If anything, it is the sheeple argument because it assumes that there is only one way to skin a cat, is stuck in the box, etc. There are benefits to restrictions as odd as that sounds. Restrictions in of themselves are generally useless and often counter-productive. They need to be backed up with solid empirical evidence based on current conditions justifying those restrictions. Not someone's opinion, even if it is an opinion shared by millions of others. The conditions under which copyright was conceived, and DRM proponents still labor, are centuries old and were highly questionable even then. The world has moved on, its time the market did too.
Anyone who claims the license's primary author is irrelevant to understanding "the core goal of the" license is just a blathering idiot.
In the meantime, quite misstating "the core goal of the GPL," OK?
That "no one" at the FSF was aware of what the atari 7800 may or may not have done is unsurprising, the 7800 was a teeny-tiny blip in the market and the only people would have even NOTICED the problem would have been the subset of game developers who needed to get their cartridge signed of the subset of game developers working on the least popular system in the market, which is a far cry from the people at the AI lab at MIT.
If that's the best you can do to refute RMS'S OWN WORDS you should just give it up. You either realize just how ridiculous your justification is or you are delusional. and in any case i suspect these lines in v3 will be thrown out in court because they extend far beyond the realm of software. Laugh. So you think that a license that grants developers MORE freedom to distribute the code that what copyright does is going to get knocked down and the result will be what? Default copyright restrictions is what, which means tivoization wannabe users won't be able to use GPLv3 licensed software at ALL.
The DSL part typically uses ATM but that's little more than point-to-point. You certainly don't set up a PVC from your modem to a website which was a major part of the plans for ATM. On the backhaul ATM's losing to ethernet. It hasn't lost the fight yet, like it did for the desktop, but it isn't gaining marketshare.
A related point that seems to run through the article is that more bandwidth is not the solution. But he doesn't explain why - for example This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90's or the Internet meltdown problem disappeared spontaneously in the 80's. What we need to do is engineer a better interface between P2P and the Internet, such that each can share information with the other to find the best way to copy desired content. In the first case I think he's completely wrong, more bandwidth is exactly what solved the problem. Both in the network and the applications use of that bandwidth (netscape was the first to do simultaneous requests over multiple connections - which did not require any protocol changes). In the second case, he's talking about Bob Metcalf (the nominal inventor of ethernet and nowadays a half-baked pundit) predicting a "gigalapse" of the internet specifically due to a lack of bandwidth...
It's interesting to note that ATT themselves have declared more bandwidth to be the solution. They didn't phrase it quite that way, but ultimately that's the conclusion an educated reader can draw from their research results. 1x the bandwidth of a 'managed network' requires 2x the bandwidth in a 'neutral network' to achieve the same throughputs, etc. Sounds like a lot, but then you realize that bandwidth costs are not linear, nor are management costs. In fact, they tend to operate in reverse economies of scale - bandwidth gets cheaper the more you buy (think of it as complexity O(x+n) due to fixed costs and the simple 1 to 1 nature of links), but management gets more expensive the more you do it because the 1-to-1 nature of links gets subsumed by having to manage the effects of all connections on each other n-to-n style for O(x+n^2). Ars Technica analysis of ATT report
I mean jesus christ, if RMS's own words aren't enough to convince you of what the FSF's goals are, then I don't know what will. But the least you can do is stop going around mis-stating what the "core goal of the GPL is." You seem to think because they use GPL code in full compliance with the license, they are somehow obligated to meet any number of other random demands that have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LICENSE. Quit making shit up. Seriously. I have clearly stated otherwise. Only someone with an agenda would turn a blind eye to what I wrote and then say that I "seem to think" the exact opposite.
Years ago they stopped carrying the heaviest bandwidth alt.* groups (I think it was the DVD images groups) and the ones with obvious kiddie-porn names. Other than that, verizon had very wide coverage and good completion with about a week or so of history.
Now, by killing all of alt.* they will force their customers to move to 3rd party usenet providers which could easily cause 10x more peered bandwidth usage than before since each customer has to get their own copy versus sharing from the local 'cache' that was verizon's usenet servers.
At least now you know your interpretation of the GPL is completely false and you have no reason to repeat that error again. You can't possibly argue that you should be allowed to easily circumvent service theft protections simply because you like to tinker or because they used GPL software. And you really can't say they should HELP you do so, that's insane. What part of develop your own code do you fail to understand?
What you call "twist" is exactly the chain of events that caused RMS to start the GNU project in the first place.
RMS had a printer, the driver for the printer was broken, he wanted to fix THAT PRINTER. Not use the driver with some other printer, he wanted the only printer he had to work. You can't possibly argue that you should be allowed to screw with anything GPL software comes into contact with. Yeah, I don't need the GPL for that. I am flat out arguing that I have the right to screw with anything I own. FULL STOP.
The GPL just makes it easier for me. Don't want to make it easier for me? Don't build your empire on top of GPL'd software, go spend your own development money. So taken as a whole, TiVo can't allow people to screw with parts of the system that may interfere with things you have no right to screw with, including the parts of the system that protect satellite broadcasts. You realize that is a circular argument, right? The GPL must mean its OK to prevent in place changes because of some contract that Tivo signed with somebody else? The answer is that, under GPL3 and under the intent of earlier GPLv2, Tivo can't do what they did. They found a loophole and exploited it, and that's why GPLv3 closed the loophole.
- the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
- the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors,
- the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, and
- the freedom to share the changes you make.
--The Foundations of the GPLIn fact, you are free to improve the software all you want for your own personal use and there are no requirements to distribute the changes you've made.
Of course the cost to society of (a) or (b) is usually much higher than the value returned to society.
IBM's big push with linux on the mainframe has been server consolidation - take 100 'lesser' servers put them on one mainframe where they also benefit from the redundant hardware availability (aka 5-nines availability) are as secondary benefit and not only do you decrease hardware costs but also administration costs.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
In the movie, the voice-over at the end explains that Will Smith "is legend" because of the sacrifice he made in order to get the zombie cure to surviving humans. Not because he started the zombie plague.
On second though, I guess it might not be quite so bad because the movie does suggest that the zombies might actually be 'people' (have emotions, etc) too and not just be 100% evil killing machines.
SPOILERS OVER
"We are Legion" is probably more appropros.
Or, at least more sympathetic to the people who got us here:
"Those who fight monsters should take care that they never become one.
For when you stand and look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
~ Frederich Nietsche
Furthermore, the constitution spells out the powers of the government - everything not listed is prohibited to the federal government - while everything not listed is assumed to be the rights of the people (or states).
And one last point, more for rah-rah than anything else - the declaration of independence does not say that only "all citizens are created equal."
Unless you mean hitting powerplants with fallen trees that is...
My point is that a penchant for fairness is, by definition, enlightened self-interest. Not that people always act in their short-term self-interest (there are plenty of experiments showing that is not the case, your example which I've never heard of and you didn't cite, is just one) but that fairness is a mental shortcut for long term self-interest because a fair system has a higher chance of benefiting them in the long run.
IN other words your hypothetical experiment is just fucking with the brain's huerstics - you took the short term benefit out of the picture and showed that people were still 'designed' to act as if there was a long-term benefit.