It should be up to the consumers to make the necessary trade-offs to determine what they want. To suggest government should make decisions for consumers, or even to 'correct' false ones is audacious and ridicules the consumer.
Ah, the old cultural rift between the New World and the Old World.
You see, over here in Europe, we, the people, are still in charge of our governments, so we have no reason to distrust it. You over in the US started out as revolutionaries and still haven't quite gotten over it, so anything that's a government earns distrust.
Now in a real democracy (which in real life we only approximate), the people are the government, and the government does what the people want. People == consumers.
What I'm saying is: Only to the paranoid is "regulation by customers" and "regulation by government" a fundamental difference.
Bundeling the power of many into one fist certainly is what government is all about. Demanding that customers fight back against corporations individually is insane. To make it an equal fight you would also have to demand that all corporations be abolished and their employees fight just as individually.
If they don't accept the GPL, then they need permisson of the copyright holder in order to copy or distribute.
Since that permission has been explicitly not granted, they can't even claim ignorance.
So they're guilty of copyright violation. The GPL doesn't even appear. Oh yes, and copyright violation is a crime with massive penalties, thanks to our friends over at the RIAA and MPAA.
The Hitler was there to invoke Godwins Law. I guess it's true what they say, that you can't invoke it intentionally.
What people like is only relevant if they have full information and choice.
Here's a non-nazi example:
People like green, healthy forests. They also like gas-slurping SUVs. People also like low taxes and getting low-cost health insurance.
In all these cases, the things don't mix.
People certainly like convenient, integrated software components. They also like free markets, competition, low prices and choice. They also like the jobs, income and economy boost that a non-monopolized market brings. Last not least, they'd certainly like the 50 bio. that Bill has in the bank to be returned to circulation. It would definitely not hurt the economy to have 50 bio. more in spending power, instead of a dead bank account.
Got it by now? What people "like" isn't a good measure of what should be done. And if the same people had to give an actual, well-considered view based on full information and consideration of all the consequences, including long-term, then many of them would arrive at a different conclusion.
Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging?
You know, many mid-20th century Germany liked Hitler. They even elected the guy as prime minister. You guys nevertheless came over to get rid of him.
I hope this involved Godwins Law and ends this horrendeously stupid point once and for all. Heck, it was the main argument that Bill Gates made. In case you don't know the guy, he owns a small software company that is a convicted criminal. If I were you, I'd be a little more careful about whose arguments I make my own.
Oh yes, reliving a traumatic experience is one great way to cure people.
The approach is quite controversial in psychology. There is enough indication that it will only dull instead of cure, and that in some cases it will increase the trauma.
Why is the USofA the #1 spam haven of the world? No, it isn't because it has the majority of users, that was 1998, by now Europe has passed the US (it has more population total, so that makes it easier).
The problem of spam will persist until one of two things has happened:
a) it has destroyed e-mail b) we understand that it's not a technological problem and not an economical problem
We've seen dozens of solutions about how to completely redesign half the Internet so we can pay 0.10 cents per e-mail and get rid of spam......for the 3 weeks it takes the spammers to circumvent the system and find loopholes to either send mail for free or at someone elses expense.
I have a simpler solution: Shoot the top-20 spammers. On primetime TV. Not in the head, but somewhere painful and slow.
Spam would drop to pre-1995 levels within 48 hours. If it starts to rise again, shoot another spammer.
We know who they are. Our problem isn't how to deal with spam. Our problem is that we don't deal with the spammers.
'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'
Eh, maybe I'm dense, but so frigging what?
It's not like making profit is the meaning of life, you know? As we're talking about the US here, could someone check where in the Constitution the word "profit" appears?
any restrictions imposed will almost surely never see light in the US.
So what? They don't have to. Microsoft is incorporated in several european countries. If the EU puts a fine on them, they can either pay up, or have their shops closed down and their assets confiscated.
Obviously, that won't happen overnight, but the threat for M$ is very real, and "but we're a US company" won't help them the least.
If I was running Microsoft, I'd just pull out of Europe.
Damn, why aren't you? Nothing better could happen to the european IT sector.
I am totally against ethically dubious practices to achieve a monopoly. But I don't consider "bundling" anti competitive behavior.
As so many, you missed the point. Achieving a monopoly isn't illegal. Leveraging it to undermine the free market in other areas is.
but isn't it time we focus our energy into producing a better product???
Just like the last 200 or so small tech companies who tried and were either bought or run over?
That exactly is the problem. Try selling a competitor to windos commercially. The second your product makes a blip on the market share radar, you're as good as out of business.
The sole reason why Linux is still around is that it can't be bought and can't be bancrupted.
And you can't make a chess program that plays better than the people build... Oh you can?
Your analogy is flawed. Programming is still done by humans, so we are not talking about a programming machine comparing to a chess machine. We're talking about programming languages - a critical difference.
In reality, you can build protocols that work in the presence of malicious participants.
True, and we definitely need more of these. They are, however, subject to the same problem: They do elimnate classes of problems, but only those that they were designed to eliminate.
Some programming languages will avoid certain types of problems, due to their design. Unfortunately, being creative and unpredictable, the same programmers responsible for buffer overflows in C will be guaranteed to find similiar, and equally disastrous ways of fucking up their code in C++, Java, C# and any other language you may come up with.
The same thing can happen to an idiot running Mozilla under Linux as root, or running Opera under BSD as root.
True, good point.
Everyone here keeps missing the underlying problem because of their anti-M$ bias.
True as well. However, it does contribute very much that windos very much encourages this unsafe behaviour, while all Linux and *BSD systems I know go to great pains to discourage it.
You could imagine transforms that move code around in memory,
OpenBSD has a randomized malloc() for that very purpose. To quote Theo: "Each time you run a program, different behaviour..."
personally, I think there is a better solution, stop using 'buffer overflow' languages like C, C++. Anything else: perl, python, java, C# is more secure.
Bzzt, wrong. You can fuck up any language. You can't invent a foolproof system. You can't make the system more secure than the people building it.
While the core product is the same, the fact that it runs on dozens of OSs alone makes for a lot of difference. For many low-level attacks, offsets will be different, or compiler flaws exist on one system, but not another.
This is partly true for the windos world as well. Some of the attacks we've seen recently require slightly different code for XP and NT, for example.
I know it's a stupid thing to/. yourself, but here we go:
My paper on worm propagation from last year (just updated with some more data) shows very clearly what a monoculture does.
I assumed 40 mio. vulnerable systems in it and showed how a malicious worm can wipe them out in minutes. Some of the advisories that eeyes still has on the unpublished list estimate 300 mio. vulnerable systems.
We've been talking about flash and warhol worms for years now. With each passing day I'm more surprised that it hasn't happened, again.
The problem is in education more often than in "built-in brain power". If your parents come from a low-income environment, chances are(*) they received not much and not good enough education, and end up in low-income jobs themselves. Which means that chances are(*) you start out in the same situation. It also means that you adapt to the environment you were raised in, and take up the traits, language and beliefs of the lower or middle class. Which is another barrier-of-entry into high-pay jobs and high-class society.
(*) - chances - there are many cases of people who work hard and raise themselves above the class they were born in. They just aren't the norm.
If reading something would "taint" you and prevent you from ever writing something similiar again, then there would be no books because no author could write something without considering the potential lawsuits from every book he ever read.
Copyright specifically refers to the act of copying, not to applying skills and knowledge no matter where you gathered them.
Flawed assumption: There is a direct relation between quality and price.
Why is it wrong? Because in the real world, where some of us still live, many factors aside from quality influence the price. Here is a short list of some:
* Quantity, lowering per-unit-prices * Price perceptions, i.e. brand vs. no-brand * Delivery, packaging and other overhead costs * Regulations, legal costs and other burned money * Intentional price modifications, i.e. dumping
And then, of course, the entire logic only applies to things that are actually sold. Any math person knows that comparisons with zero are always dangerous. Quick, what's two times zero? Maybe we should just double the price for Linux, then (in his eyes) it becomes twice as good.:)
As a matter of fact, if you've read the Memes book, you'd realize that stupid people already do multiply faster than smart people. There's a lot of links, enough to satisfy almost any definition of stupidity, with education, which leads to knowledge of and awareness about birth control being the obvious one.
So for the forseable future, it won't matter whether the stupid get another means of multiplication, as they are already doing well with those they have.
True, but for the timeframe posted,/. is ranked at #10 in the referred list, with just 110 hits. Several search engines rank above it, as well as some webmail services, which indicates word-of-mouth propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically China has immasculated the WTO, and I for one am sick of it. They want all the benefits but none of the costs of free trade.
You spelled "USA" wrong. The first letter isn't "C" and the middle part isn't "hin".
These communists have a clue. Never would've thought that about an overaged regime afraid of change.
And, of course, anything that fucks the WTO is A Good Thing(tm).
It should be up to the consumers to make the necessary trade-offs to determine what they want. To suggest government should make decisions for consumers, or even to 'correct' false ones is audacious and ridicules the consumer.
Ah, the old cultural rift between the New World and the Old World.
You see, over here in Europe, we, the people, are still in charge of our governments, so we have no reason to distrust it.
You over in the US started out as revolutionaries and still haven't quite gotten over it, so anything that's a government earns distrust.
Now in a real democracy (which in real life we only approximate), the people are the government, and the government does what the people want. People == consumers.
What I'm saying is: Only to the paranoid is "regulation by customers" and "regulation by government" a fundamental difference.
Bundeling the power of many into one fist certainly is what government is all about. Demanding that customers fight back against corporations individually is insane. To make it an equal fight you would also have to demand that all corporations be abolished and their employees fight just as individually.
What if SCO doesn't comply?
If they don't accept the GPL, then they need permisson of the copyright holder in order to copy or distribute.
Since that permission has been explicitly not granted, they can't even claim ignorance.
So they're guilty of copyright violation. The GPL doesn't even appear. Oh yes, and copyright violation is a crime with massive penalties, thanks to our friends over at the RIAA and MPAA.
Oh dear, you didn't get it, did you?
The Hitler was there to invoke Godwins Law. I guess it's true what they say, that you can't invoke it intentionally.
What people like is only relevant if they have full information and choice.
Here's a non-nazi example:
People like green, healthy forests. They also like gas-slurping SUVs. People also like low taxes and getting low-cost health insurance.
In all these cases, the things don't mix.
People certainly like convenient, integrated software components. They also like free markets, competition, low prices and choice. They also like the jobs, income and economy boost that a non-monopolized market brings. Last not least, they'd certainly like the 50 bio. that Bill has in the bank to be returned to circulation. It would definitely not hurt the economy to have 50 bio. more in spending power, instead of a dead bank account.
Got it by now? What people "like" isn't a good measure of what should be done. And if the same people had to give an actual, well-considered view based on full information and consideration of all the consequences, including long-term, then many of them would arrive at a different conclusion.
Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging?
You know, many mid-20th century Germany liked Hitler. They even elected the guy as prime minister. You guys nevertheless came over to get rid of him.
I hope this involved Godwins Law and ends this horrendeously stupid point once and for all.
Heck, it was the main argument that Bill Gates made. In case you don't know the guy, he owns a small software company that is a convicted criminal. If I were you, I'd be a little more careful about whose arguments I make my own.
Oh yes, reliving a traumatic experience is one great way to cure people.
The approach is quite controversial in psychology. There is enough indication that it will only dull instead of cure, and that in some cases it will increase the trauma.
Unfortunately not. But then again, it simply doesn't have as many. Check the spamhaus.org link I posted.
It's a social problem, not an economical.
...for the 3 weeks it takes the spammers to circumvent the system and find loopholes to either send mail for free or at someone elses expense.
Why is the USofA the #1 spam haven of the world? No, it isn't because it has the majority of users, that was 1998, by now Europe has passed the US (it has more population total, so that makes it easier).
The problem of spam will persist until one of two things has happened:
a) it has destroyed e-mail
b) we understand that it's not a technological problem and not an economical problem
We've seen dozens of solutions about how to completely redesign half the Internet so we can pay 0.10 cents per e-mail and get rid of spam...
I have a simpler solution: Shoot the top-20 spammers. On primetime TV. Not in the head, but somewhere painful and slow.
Spam would drop to pre-1995 levels within 48 hours. If it starts to rise again, shoot another spammer.
We know who they are. Our problem isn't how to deal with spam. Our problem is that we don't deal with the spammers.
'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'
Eh, maybe I'm dense, but so frigging what?
It's not like making profit is the meaning of life, you know? As we're talking about the US here, could someone check where in the Constitution the word "profit" appears?
any restrictions imposed will almost surely never see light in the US.
So what? They don't have to. Microsoft is incorporated in several european countries. If the EU puts a fine on them, they can either pay up, or have their shops closed down and their assets confiscated.
Obviously, that won't happen overnight, but the threat for M$ is very real, and "but we're a US company" won't help them the least.
If I was running Microsoft, I'd just pull out of Europe.
Damn, why aren't you? Nothing better could happen to the european IT sector.
I am totally against ethically dubious practices to achieve a monopoly. But I don't consider "bundling" anti competitive behavior.
As so many, you missed the point. Achieving a monopoly isn't illegal. Leveraging it to undermine the free market in other areas is.
but isn't it time we focus our energy into producing a better product???
Just like the last 200 or so small tech companies who tried and were either bought or run over?
That exactly is the problem. Try selling a competitor to windos commercially. The second your product makes a blip on the market share radar, you're as good as out of business.
The sole reason why Linux is still around is that it can't be bought and can't be bancrupted.
And you can't make a chess program that plays better than the people build... Oh you can?
Your analogy is flawed. Programming is still done by humans, so we are not talking about a programming machine comparing to a chess machine. We're talking about programming languages - a critical difference.
In reality, you can build protocols that work in the presence of malicious participants.
True, and we definitely need more of these. They are, however, subject to the same problem: They do elimnate classes of problems, but only those that they were designed to eliminate.
Some programming languages will avoid certain types of problems, due to their design. Unfortunately, being creative and unpredictable, the same programmers responsible for buffer overflows in C will be guaranteed to find similiar, and equally disastrous ways of fucking up their code in C++, Java, C# and any other language you may come up with.
The same thing can happen to an idiot running Mozilla under Linux as root, or running Opera under BSD as root.
True, good point.
Everyone here keeps missing the underlying problem because of their anti-M$ bias.
True as well. However, it does contribute very much that windos very much encourages this unsafe behaviour, while all Linux and *BSD systems I know go to great pains to discourage it.
You could imagine transforms that move code around in memory,
OpenBSD has a randomized malloc() for that very purpose. To quote Theo: "Each time you run a program, different behaviour..."
personally, I think there is a better solution, stop using 'buffer overflow' languages like C, C++. Anything else: perl, python, java, C# is more secure.
Bzzt, wrong. You can fuck up any language. You can't invent a foolproof system. You can't make the system more secure than the people building it.
Nah, you missed on the biology comparison.
When M$ finally dies the well-deserved and overdue death, we can still have a lot of diversity without them.
Let's see:
Linux (dozens of distros)
*BSD (several variants)
MacOS
Solaris and other *nixes
Plan9 and other obscurities
I'm not so sure anymore if I can count properly, but that sounds a lot more diverse to me than:
windos (some variants)
uh, whatever those freaks nobody cares about use
Apache is much less a monoculture than windos.
While the core product is the same, the fact that it runs on dozens of OSs alone makes for a lot of difference. For many low-level attacks, offsets will be different, or compiler flaws exist on one system, but not another.
This is partly true for the windos world as well. Some of the attacks we've seen recently require slightly different code for XP and NT, for example.
I know it's a stupid thing to /. yourself, but here we go:
My paper on worm propagation from last year (just updated with some more data) shows very clearly what a monoculture does.
I assumed 40 mio. vulnerable systems in it and showed how a malicious worm can wipe them out in minutes.
Some of the advisories that eeyes still has on the unpublished list estimate 300 mio. vulnerable systems.
We've been talking about flash and warhol worms for years now. With each passing day I'm more surprised that it hasn't happened, again.
True, and a good point.
The problem is in education more often than in "built-in brain power".
If your parents come from a low-income environment, chances are(*) they received not much and not good enough education, and end up in low-income jobs themselves. Which means that chances are(*) you start out in the same situation.
It also means that you adapt to the environment you were raised in, and take up the traits, language and beliefs of the lower or middle class. Which is another barrier-of-entry into high-pay jobs and high-class society.
(*) - chances - there are many cases of people who work hard and raise themselves above the class they were born in. They just aren't the norm.
Oh, please. Stop posting such bullshit.
If reading something would "taint" you and prevent you from ever writing something similiar again, then there would be no books because no author could write something without considering the potential lawsuits from every book he ever read.
Copyright specifically refers to the act of copying, not to applying skills and knowledge no matter where you gathered them.
"You get what you pay for."
:)
Flawed assumption: There is a direct relation between quality and price.
Why is it wrong? Because in the real world, where some of us still live, many factors aside from quality influence the price. Here is a short list of some:
* Quantity, lowering per-unit-prices
* Price perceptions, i.e. brand vs. no-brand
* Delivery, packaging and other overhead costs
* Regulations, legal costs and other burned money
* Intentional price modifications, i.e. dumping
And then, of course, the entire logic only applies to things that are actually sold. Any math person knows that comparisons with zero are always dangerous. Quick, what's two times zero? Maybe we should just double the price for Linux, then (in his eyes) it becomes twice as good.
As a matter of fact, if you've read the Memes book, you'd realize that stupid people already do multiply faster than smart people. There's a lot of links, enough to satisfy almost any definition of stupidity, with education, which leads to knowledge of and awareness about birth control being the obvious one.
So for the forseable future, it won't matter whether the stupid get another means of multiplication, as they are already doing well with those they have.
True, but for the timeframe posted, /. is ranked at #10 in the referred list, with just 110 hits. Several search engines rank above it, as well as some webmail services, which indicates word-of-mouth propaganda.
I use webalizer. I've toyed with analog as well, but I just like webalizer more.
I guess this is in the "Stuff that matters" category then, since it certainly isn't "News" by any stretch of imagination.