I would be willing to become an Eee owner, but the possibility that it may not conform fully to the GPL turns me off. Unless I see the full source code as required by GPL, I'm not going to buy Eee.
I don't see any particular reason why kids should be allowed to put their contact information up on the web.
From when I was only 14 years old I was maintaining my own websites, including e-commerce sites, I was developing my own shareware games and I was promoting them, I was also maintaining forums and mailing lists, and I was also publishing/selling articles and short scifi stories to magazines (and I was also trying to publish my scifi in book form by approaching publishers, but I failed in this, because publishers did not believe in teenage authors). Giving out some contact info, carefully, was required.
the children to whom these laptops are going don't need whizbang computing power
Now a child can get educated simply by accessing HTML pages, which means even an old Pentium 133MHz processor will do fine.
But children in the first world will soon be educated from within Second Life and some sort of next-generation post-AJAX interactive Web which will be much more resource-hungry than HTML.
With this in mind, it would be reasonable to except that children laptops should get more powerful soon, even for third world countries. If not, then when in first world children will learn from within Second Life, in the third world children will be stuck with HTML.
Some people say some weird things about Eee and GPL, see here and here... I don't know whether what they say is true, but I guess it would be of interest to consumers who care about the GPL.
* Use a real name and optionally nicknames that map easily to your real name * get a website, now * make sure all your nicknames are associated with your site where your real name is visible * List your website prominently in your CV * Give examples of your work on your CV with URLs * Enter into various professional societies (eg I'm in IEEE Engineering Management Society, ACM, BCS, ACS, IET, Chartered Management Institute,...) and learn how to network * Enter into professional social networking sites like LinkedIn * Make sure your fellow members in societies and social networking sites are aware when you go job-hunting * A webpage which is entirely professional smells like lies. Always put facts about your personality and hobbies in your webpages, eg explain your love with poetry, software programming, etc. Do *not* separate your personal and professional lives, as you should be proud for both of them. * Unless you are in great financial need, you should carefully choose your employer: If you work for someone who has very different and incompatible personality with you, then problems will occur. Try to find employers who share your views, eg if you like free software go work for a free software shop rather than a closed-source megacorp. This means that you *want* to put facts about your personal life and opinions in your webpages, to enable incompatible employers to self-filter themselves out. It's better to not take up a job with a culturally incompatible employer rather than take it and quit or get laid off after a week because of personality clashes with your boss! * Don't care that much about what others think about you, be yourself and enjoy company with people similar to you. If I go hiring, I would prefer a person who is not afraid to state their opinions and hobbies freely and proudly, rather than a drone who has learnt to think like a slave and believes that they need to project a specific image to the world rather than their true self. * Print out a Google results page for a term, eg 'management expert', and show it off along your CV if any of your webpages make it to the first page * If you fail at something in your career and you are asked about it, say what you learnt from it and how it made you a better professional. Don't hide up facts.
And my best advice is: * Start your own business: Self-create your success rather than wait for others to give it to you s a ready meal!
This idea, that you should take care of 'good' customers more than 'bad' customers, is lesson 0 in any selling course, taught from the very first day. So, now to get a patent, one has only to take an established idea and computerise it?
I first learnt about WD's green drives from their site and I remember they clearly explained the RPM rate spectrum of a green drive. I check now the link you provided and I don't see the rate. Did they remove it? Why? Whose marketer's idea was this? As a customer I would never consider a dynamic RPM drive if I don't know the rate range, no matter what they call it. Even though the rotational speed may change, it still has got to have a range, eg between 5400-7200 etc, and as consumers we want to know it. This IntelliPower kinda reminds me of the PR CPU metric, or even the current Intel/AMD model numbers where the actual MHz/GHz rate is downplayed. When the manufacturer tells you the MHz or RPM rate, you as a consumer have the power to take a meaningful decision after critically analysing the product specs (more MHz doesn't equal more performance, but the metric works between identical CPUs), but when the manufacturer cites a benchmark they do or a marketing term they thought of then it's like they tell you "buy our product on faith alone, as we guarantee you it's good for you, you don't need scientific details about our product". I consider this a consumer rights issue and I believe the consumer has a right and an expectation to be told actual measurable scientific properties of their product. My view is that a person who buys a product becomes its new rightful owner and as such has a natural right to be told everything about the product and its internals, and this right also extends to before the actual purchase as the consumer needs to be able to take the right decision. If this trend with marketing speak continues we will soon have to buy drives by their "holds thousands of image files" metric rather than by GBs!
How many users use Google *because* of the I'm Feeling Lucky button? How many users would Google lose if it removed the button?
My view is that this button differentiates Google from much of the competition and attracts a good number of users who otherwise would use another engine.
p2p is a legitimate technology, but it is used in the wrong way by some people and this makes it look as a liability from the ISP's standpoint. The solution to end the discrimination against P2P is only one: To make P2P mandatory. For example, we could use a P2P overlay over HTTP rather than the normal HTTP/1.1 to make the Web P2P as well. This would shut off the mouth of everyone criticising P2P. I don't just say to camouflage P2P as HTTP - I suggest to make every Internet technology P2P-based. If you think a bit about it, it's really stupid to host anything on a central server and not use the power of the crowds to disseminate your Web site files or your new GNU/Linux distro. We really don't use the Internet at its full potential without P2P. In fact if everyone used P2P for disseminating webpages and ordinary Internet traffic, the Internet would feel much more speedy than it is now.
Free/libre and open-source software is a product of freedom natives, people who regard freedom as a fundamental non-negotiable human value. Many freedom natives have been born in environments where they were in interaction with lots of other freedom natives.
A freedom native will make money with free software by offering great user support.
Now people who believe in control (control freaks) have learnt about the free software community and try to monetise by building upon its spectacular success. But being freedom immigrants, and keep being in interaction with other control freaks, they cannot comprehend how you can make money without using control. They think that the essence of capitalism is to squeeze the customer, lock users in proprietary platforms, etc. Thus, even though they adopt the free software insignia (they may use the GPL and place wikis on their sites), their mindset is still that of a control freak (they use their trademarks abusively, etc). They aren't true freedom natives.
So, a freedom immigrant will try to make money with free software by maintaining a dual-licensing scheme for corporate clients, by maximising as much as possible their grip on their trade marks, by making shadow deals with distributors, etc. And if they succeed to create a cash flow with these methods, their user support may suck.
When I evaluate a free software application for use in my personal and business machines, I try to understand whether it is made by a freedom native or a freedom immigrant. I prefer software written and supported by freedom natives, even if the freedom immigrants use the same licence.
What's to stop competitors from using the unmodified code
Nothing. And this is no problem.
Let's say I get Drupal to implement an e-commerce site. If another competitor also uses Drupal, we both have the same technological base, so we compete only in terms of quality of offered services and company policies. If the competitor modifies their code to add a new technological facility, let's say the ability to forward price quotes to an SMS number, then they will grab users who need this technology, even though the users may dislike their corporate policies or their customer care. The competitor does not release the modified source because they know that if they do I will copy it and I may improve it and I may also refrain from releasing my own modifications. But with AGPL, we will both have to release our modifications, which will cause our sites to use the same technological base and compete only in what has real value, ie customer care, quality of offered services, and corporate policies.
Users should choose the best businesses in the marketplace, ie those who offer good products and sane privacy policies etc. If one business creates some proprietary technology and uses it to grab users, then the whole marketplace suffers, because then the company stops competing in what has value and instead focuses on forcing users needing this technology to buy from them ("you want 3G access? Great, please sign away all your privacy rights because that's what our privacy policy says... and no, you have no alternatives because we are the only business in town offering you the 3G technology so if you have a real need for it you cannot disagree to our policies"). If a company gets its hands on exclusive superior technology, then they can get lazy and stop caring about their customers.
It is my view that competition with technology is bad, and competitors should solely compete in the quality of their services/products, the quality of their customer care, price, and the saneness of their corporate policies, which is actually what has real value and what makes a good capitalist look different than a leech. I also have the view that technology is (or should be) more controlled by the society and humanity as a whole rather than by closed groups who wish to limit the diffusion of innovation. This is also one of the reasons I don't like copyrights and patents in general.
Thus, AGPL can help Internet innovation and new network-based technology to be diffused among companies and nations, thereby helping create a technological equality among competitors, which will be a good thing because it will make them compete on what should be the core competencies of every business: Namely customer care and value creation.
I often work from the middle of the sea on a ship with a laptop and a 3G HSDPA Internet connection, or from beaches, mountains, etc literally in the middle of nowhere on remote islands, so I essentially combine vacations with work and this is everyday reality for me (in fact I log more hours outdoors rather than in my home office), and managers working for big companies still debate whether telework can be done. Not only it can be done, but it is the best most optimal to work which leads to great benefits for the employee, the employer, the environment, and the economy. Managers who don't support telework are not worthy of their positions.
RMS founded FSF to protect computer users. GPL protected users until the proliferation of the Web made it possible to run a modified program on a network without revealing the source. The new AGPLv3 not only protects users but it also protects Web 2.0 businesses. For example, if I release the code of a blog site under GPL then I run the risk of a competitor improving the code to run a better site without revealing their source. But with AGPLv3, businesses can now safely release the code of their Web 2.0 sites without worrying about competitors. This creates a technological equality in the marketplace where the most successful sites will be those offering the best customer care, or the most sane privacy policies etc, which is actually what matters most in a Web business. How many times did you feel you had to use the services of a site which you disliked some of their policies but offered some features (ie technology) not present in competing sites? If competitors get to compete on customer care and the quality of offered products rather than technical features, then this will be good for the marketplace overall. Furthermore, with the greater adoption of Web 2.0, more and more of your software is going to be network-based, so at some point in the future instead of Matlab, Photoshop, and SPSS you will simply access a website. How would you feel if your mathematical and statistical calculations were done by software which you could not verify their source code because it is hidden behind the network? What if a future voting platform uses networked software? What if all future computers work with a network OS? Users get no protection when their software inner workings are hidden behind a network. AGPLv3 is one of the most wonderful developments in copyleft (but of course credit has to go Affero as well for conceiving the first Affero licence), and I actually immediately started offering generous discounts to any client of my software consulting business willing to release the resulting work under AGPLv3, and actually my discount rate for AGPLv3 is higher than that of classic GPL.
Disclaimer: I am a Contributing Member of the FSF.
laws against crapy lock in products like this, it's good for the consumer.
It's good for companies as well, because they get to compete on healthy grounds with their customer care, policies, plans, services, etc, which have real value that cannot be imitated, instead of competing with artificial market manipulations such as locks. When a company chooses to lock devices it learns to compete in the wrong way with what it perceives to be easier in the short-term, but this has long-term disadvantages as it leads the company to forget how to compete in the right way with their services, etc. So, a business which relies on device locks will surely file for bankruptcy when a better competitor enters the marketplace supplying lock-free devices and superior services, customer support, etc.
Just kinda closed-source vs open-source... closed-source software companies learn to compete by making people rely on proprietary file formats etc, but when an open-source competitor enters the market everyone who is able to adapt migrates to it at first opportunity.
So, pro-consumer laws help companies as well by making them focus on long-term success indicators and adopting a more enlightened way of doing business.
I am a Contributing Member of FSF, donating them $500 a year, listed in their ThankGNUs 2007, and I fully support their focus on RIAA. And I'm saying this while I am not into filesharing and I don't even listen to much music at all (except for some Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky etc which I have paid for, and rarely a few freely licensed music shared by independent musicians online in Ogg Vorbis format rather than MP3), and in fact I don't sympathise much with those using p2p for swapping copyrighted songs/movies illegally (not that what they do is inherently bad, but I think that their behaviour does not constitute proper citizenship, I mean if they dislike copyrighted music they should create their own free music or vote in the elections for parties that support copyright reform). I, however, know that the criminalisation and marginalisation of p2p can have negative consequences for all computer users (what would you say if your ISP slowed down or cut off BitTorrent traffic - which is of prime importance to every GNU/Linux user downloading new releases of their favourite OS - just because a bunch of kids use it for swapping mp3z?), and it's also a free speech issue. So, I say, full support to everyone being against RIAA et al, at least as long as RIAA continues its questionable practices. If you feel that a free software organisation should focus exclusively on software and not look into the wider free culture issues that affect our digitised society, you are free to found your own organisation.
My proposal is that, at least for security-sensitive products, closed-source software vendors must be forced by law to release their products as open-source after X years from the moment they stop properly handling user complaints. So, if you release a product used in sensitive installations and you stop supporting it after 3 years, you should be expected to open-source it as to allow the user community to maintain it.
This should solve abandonware, which is a very serious problem in security-sensitive software. Releasing closed-source commercial software and then stopping supporting it is bad, especially when it comes down to security. At least, they should give out the code and allow the users to do their best themselves.
Another idea (a bit more extreme) is that, just like patents, closed-source vendors should open-source their stuff X years after the initial software release. Some companies do this voluntarily and it has helped, rather than negatively affected, their sales.
Even though I dislike having too many laws and too much government, I would feel positive about such laws if any lawmakers would be willing to consider them.
Why put something on your laptop when you can implement a server-based approach?
And why use a non-free OS at all?
Imagine a thief faced with a Debian OS (command line and not even bash), an encrypted filesystem, which if they manage to break at all will find a nice cartoon poking fun at them as all the hot stuff lie at a distant secure server, coupled with steganocryptography.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be willing to become an Eee owner, but the possibility that it may not conform fully to the GPL turns me off. Unless I see the full source code as required by GPL, I'm not going to buy Eee.
From when I was only 14 years old I was maintaining my own websites, including e-commerce sites, I was developing my own shareware games and I was promoting them, I was also maintaining forums and mailing lists, and I was also publishing/selling articles and short scifi stories to magazines (and I was also trying to publish my scifi in book form by approaching publishers, but I failed in this, because publishers did not believe in teenage authors). Giving out some contact info, carefully, was required.
Now a child can get educated simply by accessing HTML pages, which means even an old Pentium 133MHz processor will do fine.
But children in the first world will soon be educated from within Second Life and some sort of next-generation post-AJAX interactive Web which will be much more resource-hungry than HTML.
With this in mind, it would be reasonable to except that children laptops should get more powerful soon, even for third world countries. If not, then when in first world children will learn from within Second Life, in the third world children will be stuck with HTML.
The neuron map of the average human brain looks like this. More evidence for the existence of him!
Some people say some weird things about Eee and GPL, see here and here... I don't know whether what they say is true, but I guess it would be of interest to consumers who care about the GPL.
how about fight flu with drugs and train our immune system at the same time?
My advice is:
...) and learn how to network
* Use a real name and optionally nicknames that map easily to your real name
* get a website, now
* make sure all your nicknames are associated with your site where your real name is visible
* List your website prominently in your CV
* Give examples of your work on your CV with URLs
* Enter into various professional societies (eg I'm in IEEE Engineering Management Society, ACM, BCS, ACS, IET, Chartered Management Institute,
* Enter into professional social networking sites like LinkedIn
* Make sure your fellow members in societies and social networking sites are aware when you go job-hunting
* A webpage which is entirely professional smells like lies. Always put facts about your personality and hobbies in your webpages, eg explain your love with poetry, software programming, etc. Do *not* separate your personal and professional lives, as you should be proud for both of them.
* Unless you are in great financial need, you should carefully choose your employer: If you work for someone who has very different and incompatible personality with you, then problems will occur. Try to find employers who share your views, eg if you like free software go work for a free software shop rather than a closed-source megacorp. This means that you *want* to put facts about your personal life and opinions in your webpages, to enable incompatible employers to self-filter themselves out. It's better to not take up a job with a culturally incompatible employer rather than take it and quit or get laid off after a week because of personality clashes with your boss!
* Don't care that much about what others think about you, be yourself and enjoy company with people similar to you. If I go hiring, I would prefer a person who is not afraid to state their opinions and hobbies freely and proudly, rather than a drone who has learnt to think like a slave and believes that they need to project a specific image to the world rather than their true self.
* Print out a Google results page for a term, eg 'management expert', and show it off along your CV if any of your webpages make it to the first page
* If you fail at something in your career and you are asked about it, say what you learnt from it and how it made you a better professional. Don't hide up facts.
And my best advice is:
* Start your own business: Self-create your success rather than wait for others to give it to you s a ready meal!
I bet Daniel Dennett is happier now
They do it because it is a well-known business practice that is actually being taught as part of selling and business courses.
This idea, that you should take care of 'good' customers more than 'bad' customers, is lesson 0 in any selling course, taught from the very first day. So, now to get a patent, one has only to take an established idea and computerise it?
How long until a clueless lawmaker declares all scientific measurements illegal to "protect" the universe?
I first learnt about WD's green drives from their site and I remember they clearly explained the RPM rate spectrum of a green drive. I check now the link you provided and I don't see the rate. Did they remove it? Why? Whose marketer's idea was this? As a customer I would never consider a dynamic RPM drive if I don't know the rate range, no matter what they call it. Even though the rotational speed may change, it still has got to have a range, eg between 5400-7200 etc, and as consumers we want to know it. This IntelliPower kinda reminds me of the PR CPU metric, or even the current Intel/AMD model numbers where the actual MHz/GHz rate is downplayed. When the manufacturer tells you the MHz or RPM rate, you as a consumer have the power to take a meaningful decision after critically analysing the product specs (more MHz doesn't equal more performance, but the metric works between identical CPUs), but when the manufacturer cites a benchmark they do or a marketing term they thought of then it's like they tell you "buy our product on faith alone, as we guarantee you it's good for you, you don't need scientific details about our product". I consider this a consumer rights issue and I believe the consumer has a right and an expectation to be told actual measurable scientific properties of their product. My view is that a person who buys a product becomes its new rightful owner and as such has a natural right to be told everything about the product and its internals, and this right also extends to before the actual purchase as the consumer needs to be able to take the right decision. If this trend with marketing speak continues we will soon have to buy drives by their "holds thousands of image files" metric rather than by GBs!
How many users use Google *because* of the I'm Feeling Lucky button? How many users would Google lose if it removed the button?
My view is that this button differentiates Google from much of the competition and attracts a good number of users who otherwise would use another engine.
p2p is a legitimate technology, but it is used in the wrong way by some people and this makes it look as a liability from the ISP's standpoint. The solution to end the discrimination against P2P is only one: To make P2P mandatory. For example, we could use a P2P overlay over HTTP rather than the normal HTTP/1.1 to make the Web P2P as well. This would shut off the mouth of everyone criticising P2P. I don't just say to camouflage P2P as HTTP - I suggest to make every Internet technology P2P-based. If you think a bit about it, it's really stupid to host anything on a central server and not use the power of the crowds to disseminate your Web site files or your new GNU/Linux distro. We really don't use the Internet at its full potential without P2P. In fact if everyone used P2P for disseminating webpages and ordinary Internet traffic, the Internet would feel much more speedy than it is now.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Free/libre and open-source software is a product of freedom natives, people who regard freedom as a fundamental non-negotiable human value. Many freedom natives have been born in environments where they were in interaction with lots of other freedom natives.
A freedom native will make money with free software by offering great user support.
Now people who believe in control (control freaks) have learnt about the free software community and try to monetise by building upon its spectacular success. But being freedom immigrants, and keep being in interaction with other control freaks, they cannot comprehend how you can make money without using control. They think that the essence of capitalism is to squeeze the customer, lock users in proprietary platforms, etc. Thus, even though they adopt the free software insignia (they may use the GPL and place wikis on their sites), their mindset is still that of a control freak (they use their trademarks abusively, etc). They aren't true freedom natives.
So, a freedom immigrant will try to make money with free software by maintaining a dual-licensing scheme for corporate clients, by maximising as much as possible their grip on their trade marks, by making shadow deals with distributors, etc. And if they succeed to create a cash flow with these methods, their user support may suck.
When I evaluate a free software application for use in my personal and business machines, I try to understand whether it is made by a freedom native or a freedom immigrant. I prefer software written and supported by freedom natives, even if the freedom immigrants use the same licence.
Nothing. And this is no problem.
Let's say I get Drupal to implement an e-commerce site. If another competitor also uses Drupal, we both have the same technological base, so we compete only in terms of quality of offered services and company policies. If the competitor modifies their code to add a new technological facility, let's say the ability to forward price quotes to an SMS number, then they will grab users who need this technology, even though the users may dislike their corporate policies or their customer care. The competitor does not release the modified source because they know that if they do I will copy it and I may improve it and I may also refrain from releasing my own modifications. But with AGPL, we will both have to release our modifications, which will cause our sites to use the same technological base and compete only in what has real value, ie customer care, quality of offered services, and corporate policies.
Users should choose the best businesses in the marketplace, ie those who offer good products and sane privacy policies etc. If one business creates some proprietary technology and uses it to grab users, then the whole marketplace suffers, because then the company stops competing in what has value and instead focuses on forcing users needing this technology to buy from them ("you want 3G access? Great, please sign away all your privacy rights because that's what our privacy policy says... and no, you have no alternatives because we are the only business in town offering you the 3G technology so if you have a real need for it you cannot disagree to our policies"). If a company gets its hands on exclusive superior technology, then they can get lazy and stop caring about their customers.
It is my view that competition with technology is bad, and competitors should solely compete in the quality of their services/products, the quality of their customer care, price, and the saneness of their corporate policies, which is actually what has real value and what makes a good capitalist look different than a leech. I also have the view that technology is (or should be) more controlled by the society and humanity as a whole rather than by closed groups who wish to limit the diffusion of innovation. This is also one of the reasons I don't like copyrights and patents in general.
Thus, AGPL can help Internet innovation and new network-based technology to be diffused among companies and nations, thereby helping create a technological equality among competitors, which will be a good thing because it will make them compete on what should be the core competencies of every business: Namely customer care and value creation.
I often work from the middle of the sea on a ship with a laptop and a 3G HSDPA Internet connection, or from beaches, mountains, etc literally in the middle of nowhere on remote islands, so I essentially combine vacations with work and this is everyday reality for me (in fact I log more hours outdoors rather than in my home office), and managers working for big companies still debate whether telework can be done. Not only it can be done, but it is the best most optimal to work which leads to great benefits for the employee, the employer, the environment, and the economy. Managers who don't support telework are not worthy of their positions.
That's an insignificant amount of money for a politician, isn't it? I'm not surprised Samsung was caught with that.
RMS founded FSF to protect computer users. GPL protected users until the proliferation of the Web made it possible to run a modified program on a network without revealing the source. The new AGPLv3 not only protects users but it also protects Web 2.0 businesses. For example, if I release the code of a blog site under GPL then I run the risk of a competitor improving the code to run a better site without revealing their source. But with AGPLv3, businesses can now safely release the code of their Web 2.0 sites without worrying about competitors. This creates a technological equality in the marketplace where the most successful sites will be those offering the best customer care, or the most sane privacy policies etc, which is actually what matters most in a Web business. How many times did you feel you had to use the services of a site which you disliked some of their policies but offered some features (ie technology) not present in competing sites? If competitors get to compete on customer care and the quality of offered products rather than technical features, then this will be good for the marketplace overall. Furthermore, with the greater adoption of Web 2.0, more and more of your software is going to be network-based, so at some point in the future instead of Matlab, Photoshop, and SPSS you will simply access a website. How would you feel if your mathematical and statistical calculations were done by software which you could not verify their source code because it is hidden behind the network? What if a future voting platform uses networked software? What if all future computers work with a network OS? Users get no protection when their software inner workings are hidden behind a network. AGPLv3 is one of the most wonderful developments in copyleft (but of course credit has to go Affero as well for conceiving the first Affero licence), and I actually immediately started offering generous discounts to any client of my software consulting business willing to release the resulting work under AGPLv3, and actually my discount rate for AGPLv3 is higher than that of classic GPL.
Disclaimer: I am a Contributing Member of the FSF.
It's good for companies as well, because they get to compete on healthy grounds with their customer care, policies, plans, services, etc, which have real value that cannot be imitated, instead of competing with artificial market manipulations such as locks. When a company chooses to lock devices it learns to compete in the wrong way with what it perceives to be easier in the short-term, but this has long-term disadvantages as it leads the company to forget how to compete in the right way with their services, etc. So, a business which relies on device locks will surely file for bankruptcy when a better competitor enters the marketplace supplying lock-free devices and superior services, customer support, etc.
Just kinda closed-source vs open-source... closed-source software companies learn to compete by making people rely on proprietary file formats etc, but when an open-source competitor enters the market everyone who is able to adapt migrates to it at first opportunity.
So, pro-consumer laws help companies as well by making them focus on long-term success indicators and adopting a more enlightened way of doing business.
It will end when you set up your own business. As long as someone else controls you, time savings due to technology will usually be used against you.
I am a Contributing Member of FSF, donating them $500 a year, listed in their ThankGNUs 2007, and I fully support their focus on RIAA. And I'm saying this while I am not into filesharing and I don't even listen to much music at all (except for some Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky etc which I have paid for, and rarely a few freely licensed music shared by independent musicians online in Ogg Vorbis format rather than MP3), and in fact I don't sympathise much with those using p2p for swapping copyrighted songs/movies illegally (not that what they do is inherently bad, but I think that their behaviour does not constitute proper citizenship, I mean if they dislike copyrighted music they should create their own free music or vote in the elections for parties that support copyright reform). I, however, know that the criminalisation and marginalisation of p2p can have negative consequences for all computer users (what would you say if your ISP slowed down or cut off BitTorrent traffic - which is of prime importance to every GNU/Linux user downloading new releases of their favourite OS - just because a bunch of kids use it for swapping mp3z?), and it's also a free speech issue. So, I say, full support to everyone being against RIAA et al, at least as long as RIAA continues its questionable practices. If you feel that a free software organisation should focus exclusively on software and not look into the wider free culture issues that affect our digitised society, you are free to found your own organisation.
My proposal is that, at least for security-sensitive products, closed-source software vendors must be forced by law to release their products as open-source after X years from the moment they stop properly handling user complaints. So, if you release a product used in sensitive installations and you stop supporting it after 3 years, you should be expected to open-source it as to allow the user community to maintain it.
This should solve abandonware, which is a very serious problem in security-sensitive software. Releasing closed-source commercial software and then stopping supporting it is bad, especially when it comes down to security. At least, they should give out the code and allow the users to do their best themselves.
Another idea (a bit more extreme) is that, just like patents, closed-source vendors should open-source their stuff X years after the initial software release. Some companies do this voluntarily and it has helped, rather than negatively affected, their sales.
Even though I dislike having too many laws and too much government, I would feel positive about such laws if any lawmakers would be willing to consider them.
Why put something on your laptop when you can implement a server-based approach?
And why use a non-free OS at all?
Imagine a thief faced with a Debian OS (command line and not even bash), an encrypted filesystem, which if they manage to break at all will find a nice cartoon poking fun at them as all the hot stuff lie at a distant secure server, coupled with steganocryptography.