being licensed under the GPL or BSD licence does not sprinkle magic bug-removing dust on a program
I have fixed many bugs in free software thanks to their GPL or BSD licence which allows me to see and modify the code. I really don't care much if a free software package comes with bugs if I can easily spot the relevant piece in the source code and fix it myself. But I cannot do this with closed-source software, so I avoid it because I know that I will have to live with whatever nasty bugs the manufacturer delivers it with.
there is a problem with buying time, however. In the case of computer software and freedom, there are three kinds of users: the two poles are those who want 100% freedom and those who feel it's ok to use only proprietary software or enslaving software (software that turns the user into a slave of the developer/owner), and in the middle ground between these two poles there are the users who understand that being enslaved to a vendor is a bad thing but still don't see any reason to be vocal about 100% freedom (ie they may feel it is desirable to run a free version of an application they use most often, but they don't mind if this application uses a non-free driver, library, or firmware).
Right now the majority of computer users are technologically illiterate and don't even know that their software is in fact compiled source code. As a result, they don't demand freedom, or only have very vague ideas about what freedom even is, for example they may think that free software is about paying nothing, when in fact it is about being in control of the source code of their applications. So, most people now are in non-free pole (they feel absolutely no need for freedom, or don't even know that freedom exists, or may even not know the notion of freedom), and a few are in the middle-ground but still close to the non-free extreme.
If we help more people to adopt GNU/Linux by making it compatible with their non-free hardware by including non-free BLOBs and other non-free components in it, then what we do is to help those in the non-free extreme to move towards the middle-ground position, so they will understand that, for example, using a non-free web browser is bad but they will not understand that using a non-free driver or even a non-free BIOS is bad as well, maybe because they are not technologically literate enough to know about drivers or BIOSes.
Certainly half-liberty is better than no-liberty from a pragmatist perspective in the short term, but it is worse than true-liberty in the long term. The problem lies in that if a person becomes half-free, they may feel OK in that position and stop demanding more freedom. This will mean that GNU/Linux users who have distros with BLOBs may accept BLOBs and non-free components as a constant fact of life and not as a temporary solution to a problem that should eventually be solved. This will mean that those appreciating freedom will be seen as extremists and the free software movement will be compromised and eventually die, and what we will end up with will be a combination of technological freedom and slavery, ie half-freedom, with slavery getting bigger and bigger as the free software movement dies until we have nothing else than slavery.
Some may feel that a constant state of half-freedom is not much of a problem, but the problem lies in the fact that half-freedom has the tendency to disintegrate towards non-freedom. If a person with unclear ideas about freedom accepts one BLOB when they install GNU/Linux for the first time, they will accept another when they want to buy a new hardware component. Later they will want to install some software to do a new task, but they will happily accept a non-free version if it offers more features than free versions or even if it cleverly masquerades as free software, for example by using a cleverly written "X source/software" characterisation where X is something other than "open" or "free" that still makes freedom-illiterate people think that it's free. In the end, half-liberated users will completely forget what freedom is about and will again convert to 100% unfree software.
Therefore, half-freedom is a direct competitor of true-freedom in the long term, albeit it is often seen as a helper in the short-term. This is why Greeks say "liberty or death" when demanding their freedom, to indicate that anything else than true freedom is just masquerated slavery.
Absolutely no non-free code should be present in a self-respecting free OS, but the user should have the option to easily use non-free software, for example by downloading it from a non-free repository if the licence allows such distribution. This is why I use Debian, because it is DFSG free and yet it gives me the ability to unfree myself if I think I am being forced by reality to do it.
I don't like distros that feed me non-free code by default, even if they allow me to remove it. It is as if they feed me poison by default. The poison may be necessary if it gives me the ability to do a necessary task that cannot be done by free software, but whether I consider the task necessary enough to put myself in chains is something that must be *my* choice, not the choice of anyone else.
I also have a big problem with BIOSes, because they are non-free, which leads to them being full of bugs. The manufacturer only fixes bugs that prevent the most basic operation of the most mainstream OSes, and lets users of other OSes or those who find creative uses of their hardware behind with no option other than to think of hacks to get around the BIOS bugs. A free and open BIOS would solve my problems, but it's not ready yet (which means that we, the people who desire to be free, should work more to get it ready, along with free drivers for anything of course, but there isn't much to do when hardware manufacturers keep their documentation secret).
I really have a big problem with any non-free and non-open software code, whether it is in the OS or in the device itself, because non-open code tends to be buggy, and this happens for two reasons: the first is technical (less developers = less eyeballs to catch bugs = more bugs) and the other is business-related (most users run a mainstream OS and use their hardware for a specific basic purpose = the company can catch the most market share by just catering for these users and cut costs by not supporting users who run non-mainstream OSes and use their hardware in creative ways = non-mainstream OS users and those who use hardware creatively are left behind).
Another problem I have with non-free and non-open software is the fact that it is not under my control. If I don't have the opportunity to see what commands my computer executes, then I feel as if my computer is owned by someone else who may act against me by effectivelly hijacking my computer with code I cannot see. I want all technology I use to be potentially under my control, which can only happen if I have the freedom to understand and modify the technology (and sharing that understanding and modification greatly assists in achieving that objective). Only when I have complete control over my technology I am a free person.
I want all technology I use to be under my control. Ideally this could be achieved if I were the developer of all of my technology (ie homebrew computers, self-designed PCBs and CPUs, my own OS, etc), but this is not easy (albeit very rewarding, of course) so I often find I have to acquire technology developed by someone else. Free software is about making sure that this someone else respects my desire to control the technology I use, ie to enjoy technological self-determination, technological independence, and technological freedom.
Putting non-free code by default in a mostly free OS is like delivering slavery by default. Thank you very much, but I would prefer slavery as an option, not by default.
So if we are going to saturate our data links with fast SSDs now, why not get the SSD into the CPU die together with a GPU, BIOS, OS, and everything else. There are many embedded SOCs around built in this way, but these are aimed at low-power always-on applications. But I think that the era when we will have a desktop SOC is not so far away if we find a way to keep it cool and cheap.
For you who don't like this feature; what's so hard about just ignoring it? You don't like it, then don't use it. Can't be simpler, really.
It's about network effects, or maybe about reverse network effects.
If a group of people start using a technology and they become the majority, it will be difficult to live without also becoming part of their network.
Think of the telephone. Many people prefer email over the telephone, but they still have to have a phone because of reverse network effects: as the network of telephone users is very powerful thanks to the popularity of phones, the network of telephone non-users is stagnant because its members are so few that they cannot achieve powerful network effects. In essence, when the majority settles on a technology everyone else is at a disadvantage.
Let's say you don't want to be in social networking sites. But if everyone else joins in, you will have to be there as well in the end.
It's similar to software ecosystems. If everyone uses Windows, you must deal with Windows sometimes if you want to be part of society, even if you run Debian GNU/Linux or OpenBSD at home/office.
It's surely not in your best interests to see the majority adopting a technology or anything else that you don't like or feel you can't live with it.
So, if you see a technology which you don't like becoming popular, you feel you have to explain its disadvantages to the people around you, so that you can protect yourself in the case you are forced to use this technology just to order a pizza (telephone, not email), report your taxes ("works only in IE6"), or have the slightest interaction with the wider society.
I don't necessarily say that this is the right thing. I just provide a possible explanation of the motivation that makes some people to try to persuade others not to adopt a technology etc.
Personal supercomputer? Surely it's cool, but how about turning the whole Internet into a supercomputer?
Make Internet fast enough and equip every node with a network operating system to share its resources with all other nodes. Sounds like a security nightmare, but let's focus on the performance part for now. Every one of us has a CPU, a storage device (eg SSD), and some RAM. But not all of us use all of our CPU, SSD, or RAM at the same time. While I play a game effectivelly making my CPU to work at 100% capacity, my neighbour may let their CPU to sleep, but if we had a fast communication link between us and we trusted each other we could just share our work and let my and the neighbour's CPU to work at 50% instead. And two CPUs at 50% deliver faster results than one CPU at 100% if the software is designed to take advantage of multiprocessing and there are no communication overheads.
Similarly for storage: the need to take backup copies would be made obsolete if we could implement a worldwide RAID system of all of our SSDs, HDDs, etc. Our data would be replicated all over the planet's computers in a P2P fashion, and we would never have to worry about backups and lost data. Plus, assuming zero communication costs, such a RAID system would be extremely fast.
The only obstacles to a worldwide supercomputer are communication costs and human trust. Unfortunately with the currently deployed Internet technologies the communication overhead is significant, and we cannot seem to be able to trust our neighbours in this world. The trust problem can potentially be solved (right now whenever you talk on VoIP your data get transmitted through other nodes and yet no one seems to have a problem with this), but I am not so sure about the communication technology and infrastructure. But once we solve the communication problem, the global supercomputer could become reality.
You need to understand that no matter whether you sell software, real estate, potatoes, or cleaning services what you essentially sell is expertise and time, ie work.
If you try to sell prepackaged software, what you do is to do some work and then to store this work into some software code which you then sell to customers. But once the first copy is sold, it's very easy for this work to be duplicated or immitated. So, it doesn't really make much sense to sell prepackaged software.
Now, what if you sold expertise and time directly? Just say that your hourly rate is such and such and that your specialty is such and such... Then no one could duplicate your work, and you could get paid while the client's order is being developed. This, bespoke software or providing services related to software (support etc), sounds like it solves the duplication problem discussed above.
The only problem with bespoke software and related services is that it requires more effort on your part to scale up. It is for this reason that people tried to prepackage work (such as software, or music, movies, books, etc) and sell it on a disc, and in this way they managed to scale up to millions of customers, but they quickly found out that their work is so easily duplicated that they had to spend too much on anti-duplication enforcement mechanisms (such as DRM, copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets, obfuscation, state-granted monopolies, etc). The enforcement costs make this "prepackaged work" business model unsustainable, especially when the customers have access to advanced copying technology. It makes no sense to try to control information which wants to be free.
There is, however, a way to make bespoke software and services scale up: Instead of prepackaging the software, you should set up as a bespoke software/services provider and prepackage the services.
Identify a large number of potential clients who have similar needs, then develop a business flowchart for a prepackaged service to suit their needs. To be successful, you must do this in a finegrained scale and combine several small prepackaged services into larger packages.
After you do this, you can then just cooperate with freelancers (or hire employees if you prefer, but I believe that freelancing works best) and train them to provide the prepackaged services. When this system is put in place, and if you have successfully identified the needed services and the right granularity, the system can run almost automatically with little modifications, unless some event causes the needs of the clients to change dramatically.
In short, instead of putting software on a disc and selling copies of it (which has the disadvantage, for you, of being unable to control further copying, reverse engineering, or reimplementation), and instead of selling general bespoke services (which has the disadvantage of unpredictability and difficulty in scaling up), put services into a service plan and sell the plan, effectivelly productising the service to allow economies of scale.
The caveat: it is extremely difficult to properly identify the real needs of your potential clients in the right granularity, and a significant percentage of clients will be turned off unless you also continue providing real bespoke services/software. To be successful with such a model, you must effectivelly become a marketing organisation and employ real marketing experts who know what marketing is about (tip: it isn't about advertising or brainwashing). While in the prepackaged software model the marketing ends up becoming mainly the customer's responsibility (in practice the business throws around discs with software hoping that someone will find them useful enough to buy them), in the prepackaged/productised bespoke services model you must do all the marketing yourself. But once you do your marketing research, the business can run on auto-mode as long as the needs of the clients don't change significantly (which unfortunately do!).
In short: make everything open source and free, identify some common needs of your clients, and offer productised service plans targeting these needs, and make sure the identification and targeting of said needs is correct.
I am not a dietician (albeit I have studied a short university course in nutrition science), but I believe that the best diet in the world for health and a sharp brain is the Mediterranean diet, and specifically its traditional Greek diet variety including lots of traditional Greek products.
Not really. I was just referring to some psychology research I was reading recently, specifically in the academic study of the political psychology of genders (the study of how sociopolitical ideologies are affected by one's gender), which shows that males have higher probability to score high on the social dominance orientation metric than females, because of biohormonal factors.
You can do what I have done: rent a powerful dedicated server and ssh or vpn via a netbook on 3G. Do all compiling etc on the server, it's much easier.
only makes sense in a situation where there's no progressive tax
Or when you do the following: let A be the total tax income the government had from all of its tax-payers, and let B be the total population of tax payers, then divide the two. Progressive tax, flat tax, fair tax, unfair tax, or whatnot it doesn't matter: that division always gives the same result.
Inserting adverts, however, is creating and distributing a derived work from the copyrighted material
I am not a lawyer, but what could one say if they said that by merely putting your copyrighted material and their adverts next to each other without changing your material they are only putting two copyright works in a collection rather than creating a derived work? I have the impression that mere collections or aggregations of copyrighted works are not the same as derived works.
I don't mean to support them or anything like that, but only to see what defence one could use against a claim such as that.
Restrictive contracts and policies are examples of a masculine philosophy that many business leaders erroneourly believe in, the idea that business is a kind of war. Essentially what a company does depends on the philosophy of its leaders, but if the philosophy is wrong then their actions will come to bite them in the end. You can only succeed in business, and life in general, if you have a philosophy which is right. But what's wrong with the philosophy that business is war?
Business is what a person wants it to be, and what they want it to be depends on their personality, which is in turn dependent on their DNA and their life experiences. If they are high on the social dominance orientation then business, for them, is war. If they are low on the social dominance orientation then business, for them, is cooperation or servicing the free market. But whatever they think about business, this does not affect what business actually is. Business is business. Whether people frame it as war or cooperation depends on a person's personality.
A person who is high on the social dominance orientation metric is likely to see business as war, and will seek to use any available means to achieve their purposes. They may believe that the economy is a zero-sum game (ie that no new wealth can ever be created), therefore they will seek to exclude others from gaining any advantage over them. Such people are also likely to be high on Machiavelian intelligence (and mayble also in selfishness and greed). They think that rugged individualism is a better strategy because they perceive the economy as a zero-sum game in which only the most competitive individuals survive.
A person who is low on the social dominance orientation metric is likely to see business as cooperation or collaboration, and will only use means that are acceptable by the business and greater social community. They may believe that the economy is not a zero-sum game (ie that new wealth can be created at any time), therefore they will seek to cooperate with others in a collaborative effort to produce more new wealth by joining forces together. Such people are also likely to be high in agreeableness (and mayble also in empathy and altruism). They think that a communitarian spirit is a better strategy because they perceive the economy as a non-zero-sum game in which only the most creative individuals survive (and, as free and open-source software demonstrates, creativity and wealth-creation is much more easier when people collaborate together).
Thus, what business is, to a person, depends on who a person is, but they should not let their own (mis-)conceptions draw them into making claims about what business is in reality, because this is the line of thinking that destroys science and reason, and the first step in science is to not let one's intellect affect their image about the reality (albeit there are, of course, philosophical objections to the feasibility of this endeavour). Just as a colour is not a colour unless perceived by an eye, but different eyes may perceive the same natural phenomenon as a different colour (eg under conditions as colour blindness), business cannot be something other than business unless people perceive it as such, but what people perceive depends on who they are and how they contextualise and frame the reality.
If you ask me, I have never perceived economy as a zero-sum game, and thus I have never seen business as war. What I see, however, is lots of people who have the wrong ideas about the economy and business and try to make war against other people, including against people who have the correct ideas, and in the process they drive into their war people who never had any intention to participate in their war. It is for this purpose that everyone, no matter how they see business, should be ready to defend themselves during an attack (ie walk calmly while carrying a big stick, doing your own thing and never attacking anyone, but be ready to effectively defend yourself when attacked). But other than that
Indie and free are two separate things, albeit sometimes they may overlap. I prefer to speak of free music, free content, or free culture, which is music licensed under such licences as the Creative Commons. Indie could in fact be copyrighted, so it must not be equated with free.
students get caught doing something they knew was illegal
In many cases it is possible to commit copyright, patent, or trademark infringement without having the slightest idea that something illegal is being done.
Let's say you find some music on the web under a free licence and you download it. But if the uploaded lied about the licence and the music was in fact a copyrighted track copied without approval, the downloader may be commiting a crime (IANAL).
It's like shopping: receiving stolen goods is illegal (IANAL), but there is no way you, as a shopper, can know whether the goods you buy at a shop are legit or not. You see some nice clothes and you buy them, but what if the shopkeeper sold you stolen clothes? You can't know that. You just play with probabilities, as finding stolen goods in a good shop is rare, but you cannot be absolutely certain.
This is why anti-possession laws create many unintended consequences, and I think in effect modern intellectual rights laws start behaving a lot like anti-possesion laws (IANAL). If it's illegal to have something, then there are ways in which you may find yourself holding that something without realising what it is or how it ended up on your person. In effect, anti-possesion laws means that some people who are lawful and productive members of our society may find themselves be in trouble out of pure bad luck.
IANAL = I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether my understanding of legal matters makes any sense.
I can tell when content is infringing copyright or not
It is impossible to know whether something infringes on somebody's copyrights, patents, or trademarks in a network that carriers user-generated or user-provided content. Some cases are obvious, like movies, but other cases are outside the ability of a sysadmin to detect. Even content that seems like it was created by a user themselves alone may in fact infringe on an obscure copyright, patent, or trademark. The intellectual rights laws have in effect created a minefield that makes it very costly to provide any network service open to user-generated or user-provided content.
Slashdot Mirror
being licensed under the GPL or BSD licence does not sprinkle magic bug-removing dust on a program
I have fixed many bugs in free software thanks to their GPL or BSD licence which allows me to see and modify the code. I really don't care much if a free software package comes with bugs if I can easily spot the relevant piece in the source code and fix it myself. But I cannot do this with closed-source software, so I avoid it because I know that I will have to live with whatever nasty bugs the manufacturer delivers it with.
there is a problem with buying time, however. In the case of computer software and freedom, there are three kinds of users: the two poles are those who want 100% freedom and those who feel it's ok to use only proprietary software or enslaving software (software that turns the user into a slave of the developer/owner), and in the middle ground between these two poles there are the users who understand that being enslaved to a vendor is a bad thing but still don't see any reason to be vocal about 100% freedom (ie they may feel it is desirable to run a free version of an application they use most often, but they don't mind if this application uses a non-free driver, library, or firmware).
Right now the majority of computer users are technologically illiterate and don't even know that their software is in fact compiled source code. As a result, they don't demand freedom, or only have very vague ideas about what freedom even is, for example they may think that free software is about paying nothing, when in fact it is about being in control of the source code of their applications. So, most people now are in non-free pole (they feel absolutely no need for freedom, or don't even know that freedom exists, or may even not know the notion of freedom), and a few are in the middle-ground but still close to the non-free extreme.
If we help more people to adopt GNU/Linux by making it compatible with their non-free hardware by including non-free BLOBs and other non-free components in it, then what we do is to help those in the non-free extreme to move towards the middle-ground position, so they will understand that, for example, using a non-free web browser is bad but they will not understand that using a non-free driver or even a non-free BIOS is bad as well, maybe because they are not technologically literate enough to know about drivers or BIOSes.
Certainly half-liberty is better than no-liberty from a pragmatist perspective in the short term, but it is worse than true-liberty in the long term. The problem lies in that if a person becomes half-free, they may feel OK in that position and stop demanding more freedom. This will mean that GNU/Linux users who have distros with BLOBs may accept BLOBs and non-free components as a constant fact of life and not as a temporary solution to a problem that should eventually be solved. This will mean that those appreciating freedom will be seen as extremists and the free software movement will be compromised and eventually die, and what we will end up with will be a combination of technological freedom and slavery, ie half-freedom, with slavery getting bigger and bigger as the free software movement dies until we have nothing else than slavery.
Some may feel that a constant state of half-freedom is not much of a problem, but the problem lies in the fact that half-freedom has the tendency to disintegrate towards non-freedom. If a person with unclear ideas about freedom accepts one BLOB when they install GNU/Linux for the first time, they will accept another when they want to buy a new hardware component. Later they will want to install some software to do a new task, but they will happily accept a non-free version if it offers more features than free versions or even if it cleverly masquerades as free software, for example by using a cleverly written "X source/software" characterisation where X is something other than "open" or "free" that still makes freedom-illiterate people think that it's free. In the end, half-liberated users will completely forget what freedom is about and will again convert to 100% unfree software.
Therefore, half-freedom is a direct competitor of true-freedom in the long term, albeit it is often seen as a helper in the short-term. This is why Greeks say "liberty or death" when demanding their freedom, to indicate that anything else than true freedom is just masquerated slavery.
Absolutely no non-free code should be present in a self-respecting free OS, but the user should have the option to easily use non-free software, for example by downloading it from a non-free repository if the licence allows such distribution. This is why I use Debian, because it is DFSG free and yet it gives me the ability to unfree myself if I think I am being forced by reality to do it.
I don't like distros that feed me non-free code by default, even if they allow me to remove it. It is as if they feed me poison by default. The poison may be necessary if it gives me the ability to do a necessary task that cannot be done by free software, but whether I consider the task necessary enough to put myself in chains is something that must be *my* choice, not the choice of anyone else.
I also have a big problem with BIOSes, because they are non-free, which leads to them being full of bugs. The manufacturer only fixes bugs that prevent the most basic operation of the most mainstream OSes, and lets users of other OSes or those who find creative uses of their hardware behind with no option other than to think of hacks to get around the BIOS bugs. A free and open BIOS would solve my problems, but it's not ready yet (which means that we, the people who desire to be free, should work more to get it ready, along with free drivers for anything of course, but there isn't much to do when hardware manufacturers keep their documentation secret).
I really have a big problem with any non-free and non-open software code, whether it is in the OS or in the device itself, because non-open code tends to be buggy, and this happens for two reasons: the first is technical (less developers = less eyeballs to catch bugs = more bugs) and the other is business-related (most users run a mainstream OS and use their hardware for a specific basic purpose = the company can catch the most market share by just catering for these users and cut costs by not supporting users who run non-mainstream OSes and use their hardware in creative ways = non-mainstream OS users and those who use hardware creatively are left behind).
Another problem I have with non-free and non-open software is the fact that it is not under my control. If I don't have the opportunity to see what commands my computer executes, then I feel as if my computer is owned by someone else who may act against me by effectivelly hijacking my computer with code I cannot see. I want all technology I use to be potentially under my control, which can only happen if I have the freedom to understand and modify the technology (and sharing that understanding and modification greatly assists in achieving that objective). Only when I have complete control over my technology I am a free person.
I want all technology I use to be under my control. Ideally this could be achieved if I were the developer of all of my technology (ie homebrew computers, self-designed PCBs and CPUs, my own OS, etc), but this is not easy (albeit very rewarding, of course) so I often find I have to acquire technology developed by someone else. Free software is about making sure that this someone else respects my desire to control the technology I use, ie to enjoy technological self-determination, technological independence, and technological freedom.
Putting non-free code by default in a mostly free OS is like delivering slavery by default. Thank you very much, but I would prefer slavery as an option, not by default.
So if we are going to saturate our data links with fast SSDs now, why not get the SSD into the CPU die together with a GPU, BIOS, OS, and everything else. There are many embedded SOCs around built in this way, but these are aimed at low-power always-on applications. But I think that the era when we will have a desktop SOC is not so far away if we find a way to keep it cool and cheap.
a UMPC, such as an Eee PC or a Wind
Eee and Wind are not UMPCs, they are netbooks.
Firefox 3 adds support for tagging bookmarks
Epiphany has this for ages now.
For you who don't like this feature; what's so hard about just ignoring it? You don't like it, then don't use it. Can't be simpler, really.
It's about network effects, or maybe about reverse network effects.
If a group of people start using a technology and they become the majority, it will be difficult to live without also becoming part of their network.
Think of the telephone. Many people prefer email over the telephone, but they still have to have a phone because of reverse network effects: as the network of telephone users is very powerful thanks to the popularity of phones, the network of telephone non-users is stagnant because its members are so few that they cannot achieve powerful network effects. In essence, when the majority settles on a technology everyone else is at a disadvantage.
Let's say you don't want to be in social networking sites. But if everyone else joins in, you will have to be there as well in the end.
It's similar to software ecosystems. If everyone uses Windows, you must deal with Windows sometimes if you want to be part of society, even if you run Debian GNU/Linux or OpenBSD at home/office.
It's surely not in your best interests to see the majority adopting a technology or anything else that you don't like or feel you can't live with it.
So, if you see a technology which you don't like becoming popular, you feel you have to explain its disadvantages to the people around you, so that you can protect yourself in the case you are forced to use this technology just to order a pizza (telephone, not email), report your taxes ("works only in IE6"), or have the slightest interaction with the wider society.
I don't necessarily say that this is the right thing. I just provide a possible explanation of the motivation that makes some people to try to persuade others not to adopt a technology etc.
Personal supercomputer? Surely it's cool, but how about turning the whole Internet into a supercomputer?
Make Internet fast enough and equip every node with a network operating system to share its resources with all other nodes. Sounds like a security nightmare, but let's focus on the performance part for now. Every one of us has a CPU, a storage device (eg SSD), and some RAM. But not all of us use all of our CPU, SSD, or RAM at the same time. While I play a game effectivelly making my CPU to work at 100% capacity, my neighbour may let their CPU to sleep, but if we had a fast communication link between us and we trusted each other we could just share our work and let my and the neighbour's CPU to work at 50% instead. And two CPUs at 50% deliver faster results than one CPU at 100% if the software is designed to take advantage of multiprocessing and there are no communication overheads.
Similarly for storage: the need to take backup copies would be made obsolete if we could implement a worldwide RAID system of all of our SSDs, HDDs, etc. Our data would be replicated all over the planet's computers in a P2P fashion, and we would never have to worry about backups and lost data. Plus, assuming zero communication costs, such a RAID system would be extremely fast.
The only obstacles to a worldwide supercomputer are communication costs and human trust. Unfortunately with the currently deployed Internet technologies the communication overhead is significant, and we cannot seem to be able to trust our neighbours in this world. The trust problem can potentially be solved (right now whenever you talk on VoIP your data get transmitted through other nodes and yet no one seems to have a problem with this), but I am not so sure about the communication technology and infrastructure. But once we solve the communication problem, the global supercomputer could become reality.
You need to understand that no matter whether you sell software, real estate, potatoes, or cleaning services what you essentially sell is expertise and time, ie work.
If you try to sell prepackaged software, what you do is to do some work and then to store this work into some software code which you then sell to customers. But once the first copy is sold, it's very easy for this work to be duplicated or immitated. So, it doesn't really make much sense to sell prepackaged software.
Now, what if you sold expertise and time directly? Just say that your hourly rate is such and such and that your specialty is such and such... Then no one could duplicate your work, and you could get paid while the client's order is being developed. This, bespoke software or providing services related to software (support etc), sounds like it solves the duplication problem discussed above.
The only problem with bespoke software and related services is that it requires more effort on your part to scale up. It is for this reason that people tried to prepackage work (such as software, or music, movies, books, etc) and sell it on a disc, and in this way they managed to scale up to millions of customers, but they quickly found out that their work is so easily duplicated that they had to spend too much on anti-duplication enforcement mechanisms (such as DRM, copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets, obfuscation, state-granted monopolies, etc). The enforcement costs make this "prepackaged work" business model unsustainable, especially when the customers have access to advanced copying technology. It makes no sense to try to control information which wants to be free.
There is, however, a way to make bespoke software and services scale up: Instead of prepackaging the software, you should set up as a bespoke software/services provider and prepackage the services.
Identify a large number of potential clients who have similar needs, then develop a business flowchart for a prepackaged service to suit their needs. To be successful, you must do this in a finegrained scale and combine several small prepackaged services into larger packages.
After you do this, you can then just cooperate with freelancers (or hire employees if you prefer, but I believe that freelancing works best) and train them to provide the prepackaged services. When this system is put in place, and if you have successfully identified the needed services and the right granularity, the system can run almost automatically with little modifications, unless some event causes the needs of the clients to change dramatically.
In short, instead of putting software on a disc and selling copies of it (which has the disadvantage, for you, of being unable to control further copying, reverse engineering, or reimplementation), and instead of selling general bespoke services (which has the disadvantage of unpredictability and difficulty in scaling up), put services into a service plan and sell the plan, effectivelly productising the service to allow economies of scale.
The caveat: it is extremely difficult to properly identify the real needs of your potential clients in the right granularity, and a significant percentage of clients will be turned off unless you also continue providing real bespoke services/software. To be successful with such a model, you must effectivelly become a marketing organisation and employ real marketing experts who know what marketing is about (tip: it isn't about advertising or brainwashing). While in the prepackaged software model the marketing ends up becoming mainly the customer's responsibility (in practice the business throws around discs with software hoping that someone will find them useful enough to buy them), in the prepackaged/productised bespoke services model you must do all the marketing yourself. But once you do your marketing research, the business can run on auto-mode as long as the needs of the clients don't change significantly (which unfortunately do!).
In short: make everything open source and free, identify some common needs of your clients, and offer productised service plans targeting these needs, and make sure the identification and targeting of said needs is correct.
I am not a dietician (albeit I have studied a short university course in nutrition science), but I believe that the best diet in the world for health and a sharp brain is the Mediterranean diet, and specifically its traditional Greek diet variety including lots of traditional Greek products.
Sexist
Not really. I was just referring to some psychology research I was reading recently, specifically in the academic study of the political psychology of genders (the study of how sociopolitical ideologies are affected by one's gender), which shows that males have higher probability to score high on the social dominance orientation metric than females, because of biohormonal factors.
You can do what I have done: rent a powerful dedicated server and ssh or vpn via a netbook on 3G. Do all compiling etc on the server, it's much easier.
governments have [...] other expenses than just spending (eg, destruction of currency).
Bah, that's so demonde... nowadays governments just sell their currency to the Chinese.
only makes sense in a situation where there's no progressive tax
Or when you do the following: let A be the total tax income the government had from all of its tax-payers, and let B be the total population of tax payers, then divide the two. Progressive tax, flat tax, fair tax, unfair tax, or whatnot it doesn't matter: that division always gives the same result.
I believe that philosophy and civics are separate.
They are inseparable, and in fact there is nothing that is separate from philosophy, because philosophy encompasses everything.
Even posting on Slashdot is a philosophical act.
Elected officials scored a 44 percent while ordinary citizens managed an amazing 49 percent on the 33 questions
For FSM's sake! I am from the birthplace of democracy and I scored nearly double than that.
Everyone knows very well that dark matter alone is to blame when we face inflation, and printing presses are totally innocent.
Inserting adverts, however, is creating and distributing a derived work from the copyrighted material
I am not a lawyer, but what could one say if they said that by merely putting your copyrighted material and their adverts next to each other without changing your material they are only putting two copyright works in a collection rather than creating a derived work? I have the impression that mere collections or aggregations of copyrighted works are not the same as derived works.
I don't mean to support them or anything like that, but only to see what defence one could use against a claim such as that.
why make a complaint about a product on the manufacturer's website and not your own website or a third-party website that accepts such complaints?
Restrictive contracts and policies are examples of a masculine philosophy that many business leaders erroneourly believe in, the idea that business is a kind of war. Essentially what a company does depends on the philosophy of its leaders, but if the philosophy is wrong then their actions will come to bite them in the end. You can only succeed in business, and life in general, if you have a philosophy which is right. But what's wrong with the philosophy that business is war?
Business is what a person wants it to be, and what they want it to be depends on their personality, which is in turn dependent on their DNA and their life experiences. If they are high on the social dominance orientation then business, for them, is war. If they are low on the social dominance orientation then business, for them, is cooperation or servicing the free market. But whatever they think about business, this does not affect what business actually is. Business is business. Whether people frame it as war or cooperation depends on a person's personality.
A person who is high on the social dominance orientation metric is likely to see business as war, and will seek to use any available means to achieve their purposes. They may believe that the economy is a zero-sum game (ie that no new wealth can ever be created), therefore they will seek to exclude others from gaining any advantage over them. Such people are also likely to be high on Machiavelian intelligence (and mayble also in selfishness and greed). They think that rugged individualism is a better strategy because they perceive the economy as a zero-sum game in which only the most competitive individuals survive.
A person who is low on the social dominance orientation metric is likely to see business as cooperation or collaboration, and will only use means that are acceptable by the business and greater social community. They may believe that the economy is not a zero-sum game (ie that new wealth can be created at any time), therefore they will seek to cooperate with others in a collaborative effort to produce more new wealth by joining forces together. Such people are also likely to be high in agreeableness (and mayble also in empathy and altruism). They think that a communitarian spirit is a better strategy because they perceive the economy as a non-zero-sum game in which only the most creative individuals survive (and, as free and open-source software demonstrates, creativity and wealth-creation is much more easier when people collaborate together).
Thus, what business is, to a person, depends on who a person is, but they should not let their own (mis-)conceptions draw them into making claims about what business is in reality, because this is the line of thinking that destroys science and reason, and the first step in science is to not let one's intellect affect their image about the reality (albeit there are, of course, philosophical objections to the feasibility of this endeavour). Just as a colour is not a colour unless perceived by an eye, but different eyes may perceive the same natural phenomenon as a different colour (eg under conditions as colour blindness), business cannot be something other than business unless people perceive it as such, but what people perceive depends on who they are and how they contextualise and frame the reality.
If you ask me, I have never perceived economy as a zero-sum game, and thus I have never seen business as war. What I see, however, is lots of people who have the wrong ideas about the economy and business and try to make war against other people, including against people who have the correct ideas, and in the process they drive into their war people who never had any intention to participate in their war. It is for this purpose that everyone, no matter how they see business, should be ready to defend themselves during an attack (ie walk calmly while carrying a big stick, doing your own thing and never attacking anyone, but be ready to effectively defend yourself when attacked). But other than that
Well, entrepreneurship is about taking risks :)
Just quit your job and start a business. Problem solved.
Indie and free are two separate things, albeit sometimes they may overlap. I prefer to speak of free music, free content, or free culture, which is music licensed under such licences as the Creative Commons. Indie could in fact be copyrighted, so it must not be equated with free.
students get caught doing something they knew was illegal
In many cases it is possible to commit copyright, patent, or trademark infringement without having the slightest idea that something illegal is being done.
Let's say you find some music on the web under a free licence and you download it. But if the uploaded lied about the licence and the music was in fact a copyrighted track copied without approval, the downloader may be commiting a crime (IANAL).
It's like shopping: receiving stolen goods is illegal (IANAL), but there is no way you, as a shopper, can know whether the goods you buy at a shop are legit or not. You see some nice clothes and you buy them, but what if the shopkeeper sold you stolen clothes? You can't know that. You just play with probabilities, as finding stolen goods in a good shop is rare, but you cannot be absolutely certain.
This is why anti-possession laws create many unintended consequences, and I think in effect modern intellectual rights laws start behaving a lot like anti-possesion laws (IANAL). If it's illegal to have something, then there are ways in which you may find yourself holding that something without realising what it is or how it ended up on your person. In effect, anti-possesion laws means that some people who are lawful and productive members of our society may find themselves be in trouble out of pure bad luck.
IANAL = I am not a lawyer, so I don't know whether my understanding of legal matters makes any sense.
I can tell when content is infringing copyright or not
It is impossible to know whether something infringes on somebody's copyrights, patents, or trademarks in a network that carriers user-generated or user-provided content. Some cases are obvious, like movies, but other cases are outside the ability of a sysadmin to detect. Even content that seems like it was created by a user themselves alone may in fact infringe on an obscure copyright, patent, or trademark. The intellectual rights laws have in effect created a minefield that makes it very costly to provide any network service open to user-generated or user-provided content.