Thats why I have always disagreed with the current policy, not because I support the vile people that create such images, but I fear that it would be too easy to frame some one who is innocent.
There is this Japanese urban legend that when a corporation or Yakuza wants to off someone, they have the sucker win a trip to Indonesia. Then at the airport they slip some drugs in his bag and then give an anonymous tip to the Indonesian authorities.
The thing is... The penalty for drug possession in Indonesia is death.
You just got a government to carry out a mob hit for you.
That said, if you didn't like someone in particular and had a vendetta, putting these images on their machine would be a good way to get rid of them for a long time... Or at least ruin their career and family life.
I'm surprised the same Russian mob types behind spamming haven't created a scheme to put images on peoples computer and threaten to report them to the FBI if they didn't pay up.
I dunno. This is one of those cases where two things appear to be related but its actually something else that is key.
Maybe it would be more true if you say "The fact that certain teens can't have sex because they are social dejects leads to them focusing on other things such as schoolwork and hobbies like computers and D&D which results in higher IQ."
Given the choice, I'm sure all of us would have sex over schoolwork not because we are smart but because... Well... We have social akwardness.
Yeah, but I'm not dealing with legal systems, nor am I concerned with the degrees of legal retribution.
Huh? Then what would be the ramifications of the US congress either abolishing copyrights tomorrow or enacting the death penalty for it?
The reasons the copyright argument exists is because there is a legal definition for it.
If you hit a pedestrian with a car would you rather be charged with murder or manslaughter? Either way... You killed him intentionally or not, but your punishment is going to be determined on which one of those definitions a jury of your peers apply to you.
Certainly you would hope to get a jury with an understanding with the difference. This is why people need to understand the difference between copyright infringement and theft.
By law they are two completely different violations of the law and the trying to say theft and infringement are one and the same is like saying murder and manslaughter are exactly the same.
And it matters because public opinion does affect the legal system one way or another.
Infrastructure is generally the responsibility of government, not private enterprise. If a city feels that it is becoming overcrowded and needs to expand into adjacent lands, it will plan and fund infrastructure to support that expansion.
Yes it is a job for government... But not the Federal Government.
Do you not understand between the roles and responsibilities of the State and Federal government? This is clearly something that falls under the jurisdiction of the state of Alaska unless of course this is an interstate project that is needed for interstate commerce.
In my state, we have crappy roads because our state has a crappy budget. Recently we've started a casino initiative that will pay for the roads.
If Alaska needs the same help, they should fund their own initiatives rather than burden the other states who actually could use the money for millions of more people who don't happen to live in Alaska.
No, but it is the difference between "murder" and "aggravated assault".
Don't joke around with meanings of words when you deal with the legal systems. One set of words will get you a slap on the wrist, the other might get you life.
People put time and money into making these products, and they have a right to be compensated for their services.
Actually, the original intent of the copyright clause in the US constitution was to promote "useful arts and sciences" but not to guarantee anyone the right to make money.
No one guarantees you the right to anything other than freedom and personal property. Unfortunately, copyright laws are being used in order to have a planned economy of intellectual property and in a sense is no better than socialism in that these organizations use government to earn money rather than have to actually work to create new works which would promote culture and science.
Heck... I'm fine with limited times on copyright, recourse in civil suits for infringement, and the right for authors to take protective measures against piracy, but when those measures include the abuse of others freedoms and the exploitation of government to enforce their policies in order to simply make a profit at the expense of the innocent then I strongly disagree.
so apple has to advertise that the battery is not user replaceable.
I suppose if we had to do car analogies, it would be like buying a car that you couldn't change the oil yourself.
You could put more oil in if you were running low but you could never do a full service oil change out unless you took it too a dealer ship. Then again... You have to do that with SAABs I think. Of course they are usually upfront about that whole deal.
The average joe won't really care because he won't ever bother doing it himself, but on 99% of the cars out there the option is there. But when the home mechanic discovers he can't do it without the proper tool he's going to flip a lid if no one told him at the dealership.
I'm not saying that Apple has a legal right to do whatever they want one way or another, but I could see where the guy is coming from. Its hard to ever find "lack of feature" listed on any companies website.
It's true. Are you trolling, or have you not bothered to do any research at all on something that you're considering purchasing?
To be fair, most cell phone companies go out of their way (not just Apple) to hide this fact. You would be hard pressed to find 3rd party information on such things, but at least there are work arounds.
I still have to go to the Windows machine occasionally to open a file.
To be fair, many people I've been working with have been having problems opening 2007 Docx files on Word 2003.
The fact that word docs are no longer compatible by default with all versions of office is now a moot point with Office 2007 (unless the user is savvy enough to change the file type when they are saying when they know they are sending to a person of earlier version of office, but that is rare)
After reading over the article, I came away with the impression that Linus appears to be an angry person.
If you grew up in Finland, you'd be angry too.;)
But seriously, I knew one person from Finland who explained to me that due to their proximity to the Arctic circle and lack of daylight made them have a high rate of depression in Helsinki. He lives in San Jose these days so I don't know what is up with that. Maybe its the traffic that gets to him.
The thing about free speech, as protected by the US Constitution, is that it only protects you against the government (not private or public businesses) and it doesn't guarantee you a forum. If the US government chose to censor your blog, that's against the constitution. If Google decided that they don't want your blog on their Blogger service, that's completely within their rights to do and is not a violation of free speech.
Here is the thing that bothers me about this:
Censorship through proxy.
Due to the fact that the lines between government and corporations are getting somewhat blurred, I wouldn't put it past a governmental body using private organizations to "censor through proxy" by simply getting the private organizations that agree with them to curtail your disagreement with the government.
Now this takes a fair bit of collusion sometimes, but often more than not it just takes a individual who happens to agree with powers (more than not being the power that be through lobbying efforts) and simply uses their strength as a private organization to curtail your ability to disagree.
Today it is quite marginal and I don't think you'd see this ever practiced in open, but if trends keep going towards corporate control of lobbyists and that the government is just another arm of the businesses use of Human Resources for the shareholders... Then well...
What is the point of free speech when oppressive private organizations are more powerful than the government?
Imagine a world is which the government is no longer the power that be and that you are simply controlled by your employer who can simply dismiss any complaints about freedom of speech by pointing out they are a private organization even though it is now impossible for you to find work else where.
That is why censorship by proxy is highly dangerous.
Which, by the way, is true of just about every game genre that's ever existed.
I dunno. Ultima Online was rather broundbreaking in what it was trying to accomplish. Yes. A great deal of that was due to Ralph Koster (who made the original Star Wars Galaxy because Sony butchered it), but in general the concept had some lofty goals.
Wheras EQ, AC, and WoW have gone for the same technique for the Diku muds concept of "Kill things to earn loot and XP to kill bigger things to get even more loot and XP to kill even bigger things... etc etc" which is fun for a while, but after going through the same damn thing of kill things for XP to kill more things since Final Fanasty I, II, III...IX, Diablo 1/2, and countless other games that simply have the same formula makes the whole damn genre really boring after a while.
Which is why I don't play online games anymore... Because I can get the same gameplay with single player games.
At least UO had something for a while before it went down hill.
Yeah you may laugh and think now sane court would uphold them, but as the Cardinal Richelieu says "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Suppose (s)he dies in an accident, and their death sparks a tidal wave of interest in the musician. Now what if they had a very young child and widow? Are you suggesting the child and widow should be on welfare or be a working single-parent, when their spouse had more than enough money to support them if only they weren't screwed over by a copyright expiring at the artist's death? I'm pretty sure the dead musician would've wanted his family taken care of.
1. Get life insurance like everyone else 2. Chances are the artists recording contract will be worded in such a way that the widow will receive much at all especially if they weren't popular before they were dead. Even if someone sold CDs of the artist in some sort of fund raising type of event for the orphan or widow, they would be sued by the label. And btw... When you sign a record contract they say "perpetual" and they don't expire when the artists die. And royalties only come after expenses have been paid so chances are an unpopular musician would not have had the weight to get a better deal on the next album (which is usually why one hit wonders are usually broke after their first album while people who had continual success get better deals down the road)
So no... Chances are the widow would be better off without copyrights because the artists music could be sold as charity without fear of the record label suing their pants off.
It can be arranged. however, in return, like most musicians you will have to work the first dozen or so years of your life for virtually nothing, with no guarantee whatsoever of ever making a penny from any of it.
Having copyrights does not guarantee you'll make money from it in 50 years either.
What, voting for a third party is somehow going to help? They're just a different color of cat.
Speaking of which. If you care enough about politics.... Register Republican and vote Ron Paul in the republican primary.
He's the only politician that isn't a cat. He's voted no on everything from the Patriot Act, to the Iraq war, and from little things like giving government grants.
Now to be fair, he may not be the world's most brightest when it comes to technology, but many feel for the sure fact that he believes that the federal government should not interfere with economics beyond the letter of the constitution and the fact he wants to get rid of the department of education and get it into the hands of the local governments again would make this issue a moot point.
If you don't know who Ron Paul is... Look him up on Youtube. He was on the Daily Show.
When the Democrats swept into power in Congress I listened to all the liberal commentators talking about how it was Good News and how Things Would Be Different Now and how the Bad Guys were out and the Good Guys were in. And I shook my head and thought of Mouseland.
I'm not a liberal, but I thought it was good news because it would cause a party stalemate.
If you can't vote the cats out, at least make it so they are unable to agree on anything. (Think Clinton and the Republican congress which caused government shutdowns and the first positive budget surplus that hasn't been since before or since)
Cutting you off the campus net is an entirely private decision, no due process required by law.
I dunno... Let's say I have this jock room mate that I hate because he always gets the girls (and brings them to the top bunk when I'm trying to get a good nights sleep) so lets just say I theoretically put P2P software on his unpassworded computer and share out some Boy George songs.
Not only will he get booted off ResNet without recourse, but all the girls will think he's gay now when they look at his MP3 collection.
It is simple - Stallman is a communist. His ideas for free software have nothing to do with freedom, but with the denial of the private property. Whereas the private property is in the foundations of the democracy.
That doesn't make sense. Copyrights are the extension of socialism due to the fact they reward money to a person in the economy who would otherwise have none due to free market forces.
Now, admittedly GPL can't exist without copyrights, but if there were none then we wouldn't have a need for it.
More so, copyrights are a bit communist because they tell you as the consumer cannot do what you please with the product you purchased. If you want to make a copy, you aren't breaking into the authors house to steal another, but rather creating your own using your own resources because the product came with a blueprint to make another.
Copyright is simply the government telling you what you cannot do with your property.
One guy in the audience asked how he was supposed to pay for his university education by releasing free software. Stallman didn't really give him an answer, he just told the student that he didn't have to go to school, and he had no right to release closed source software in an attempt to earn money. Stallman has compared closed source software to "a crime against humanity", yes?
If you believe in Laissez-faire economics, no one has a "natural right" to having money or college education. If you proscribe to the "free trade trumps all" ideals, then copyright actually looks pretty close to socialism in order to secure money for those who would not have gained any due to a truly free market.
Of course in the same regard, if there were no copyrights there would be no GPL beyond those parties who willingly abide by it.
And as sentimental wedding pictures are to you, they don't have a trillion dollar economy around them and are localized mostly to the States.
But if you'll find a copy of MS Windows in every country on the planet (I'd wager someone's got a laptop in Somalia or a PDA with windows mobile)
Although, I don't agree with many things RMS does or says, he's got a point about how these things are and that the other side of the argument does not have your best intentions in mind.
In fact the other side of the copyright argument has persons who sole job is to extract as much money and freedom out of their customers as possible.
Whether this is done through DRM, laws, contractual lock-ins, lobbyists, or campaign donations... They will never stop and do something for the sake of altruism. It is what they are paid to do. Anything else would be unnatural.
I still haven't made up my mind on GPLv3, but I was under the impression that it was designed to unite, not to fork.
It was never that intention. GPLv3 was created solely to close the loopholes that many of the companies that were taking advantage of the GPLv2 in order to prevent their customers from gaining access from modifying the source. (aka "tivo-ization") in which vendors would simply deny modification of the source they were to provide by using another developers code under GPLv2 by adding hardware DRM.
Or in Microsoft's case by means of patents.
From my understanding there is nothing that compels any developer to upgrade from GPLv2 to GPLv3 unless you desire to use someone else's code that is being upgraded to GPLv3 with code changes (you are still free to hold on to their GPLv2 code without updating)
And the other main beef that people have is the "and later versions" clause in GPLv3, but you are free to remove that if you want as a developer of your own code (Not so much if you are using someone else's code! But no one is forcing to use other people's work instead of making you own!)
Slashdot Mirror
Thats why I have always disagreed with the current policy, not because I support the vile people that create such images, but I fear that it would be too easy to frame some one who is innocent.
There is this Japanese urban legend that when a corporation or Yakuza wants to off someone, they have the sucker win a trip to Indonesia. Then at the airport they slip some drugs in his bag and then give an anonymous tip to the Indonesian authorities.
The thing is... The penalty for drug possession in Indonesia is death.
You just got a government to carry out a mob hit for you.
That said, if you didn't like someone in particular and had a vendetta, putting these images on their machine would be a good way to get rid of them for a long time... Or at least ruin their career and family life.
I'm surprised the same Russian mob types behind spamming haven't created a scheme to put images on peoples computer and threaten to report them to the FBI if they didn't pay up.
HAHAHAHA! Isn't that funny?
I dunno. This is one of those cases where two things appear to be related but its actually something else that is key.
Maybe it would be more true if you say "The fact that certain teens can't have sex because they are social dejects leads to them focusing on other things such as schoolwork and hobbies like computers and D&D which results in higher IQ."
Given the choice, I'm sure all of us would have sex over schoolwork not because we are smart but because... Well... We have social akwardness.
Yeah, but I'm not dealing with legal systems, nor am I concerned with the degrees of legal retribution.
Huh? Then what would be the ramifications of the US congress either abolishing copyrights tomorrow or enacting the death penalty for it?
The reasons the copyright argument exists is because there is a legal definition for it.
If you hit a pedestrian with a car would you rather be charged with murder or manslaughter? Either way... You killed him intentionally or not, but your punishment is going to be determined on which one of those definitions a jury of your peers apply to you.
Certainly you would hope to get a jury with an understanding with the difference. This is why people need to understand the difference between copyright infringement and theft.
By law they are two completely different violations of the law and the trying to say theft and infringement are one and the same is like saying murder and manslaughter are exactly the same.
And it matters because public opinion does affect the legal system one way or another.
Infrastructure is generally the responsibility of government, not private enterprise. If a city feels that it is becoming overcrowded and needs to expand into adjacent lands, it will plan and fund infrastructure to support that expansion.
Yes it is a job for government... But not the Federal Government.
Do you not understand between the roles and responsibilities of the State and Federal government? This is clearly something that falls under the jurisdiction of the state of Alaska unless of course this is an interstate project that is needed for interstate commerce.
In my state, we have crappy roads because our state has a crappy budget. Recently we've started a casino initiative that will pay for the roads.
If Alaska needs the same help, they should fund their own initiatives rather than burden the other states who actually could use the money for millions of more people who don't happen to live in Alaska.
it can't be wrong.
No, but it is the difference between "murder" and "aggravated assault".
Don't joke around with meanings of words when you deal with the legal systems. One set of words will get you a slap on the wrist, the other might get you life.
People put time and money into making these products, and they have a right to be compensated for their services.
Actually, the original intent of the copyright clause in the US constitution was to promote "useful arts and sciences" but not to guarantee anyone the right to make money.
No one guarantees you the right to anything other than freedom and personal property. Unfortunately, copyright laws are being used in order to have a planned economy of intellectual property and in a sense is no better than socialism in that these organizations use government to earn money rather than have to actually work to create new works which would promote culture and science.
Heck... I'm fine with limited times on copyright, recourse in civil suits for infringement, and the right for authors to take protective measures against piracy, but when those measures include the abuse of others freedoms and the exploitation of government to enforce their policies in order to simply make a profit at the expense of the innocent then I strongly disagree.
so apple has to advertise that the battery is not user replaceable.
I suppose if we had to do car analogies, it would be like buying a car that you couldn't change the oil yourself.
You could put more oil in if you were running low but you could never do a full service oil change out unless you took it too a dealer ship. Then again... You have to do that with SAABs I think. Of course they are usually upfront about that whole deal.
The average joe won't really care because he won't ever bother doing it himself, but on 99% of the cars out there the option is there. But when the home mechanic discovers he can't do it without the proper tool he's going to flip a lid if no one told him at the dealership.
I'm not saying that Apple has a legal right to do whatever they want one way or another, but I could see where the guy is coming from. Its hard to ever find "lack of feature" listed on any companies website.
The people elect the mayor.
You mean the 51% of the people who voted.
The other half's opinion doesn't count in a democracy where winner takes all.
The problem with a democracy is that it can represent a small fraction of a society with this type of system.
It's true. Are you trolling, or have you not bothered to do any research at all on something that you're considering purchasing?
To be fair, most cell phone companies go out of their way (not just Apple) to hide this fact. You would be hard pressed to find 3rd party information on such things, but at least there are work arounds.
I still have to go to the Windows machine occasionally to open a file.
To be fair, many people I've been working with have been having problems opening 2007 Docx files on Word 2003.
The fact that word docs are no longer compatible by default with all versions of office is now a moot point with Office 2007 (unless the user is savvy enough to change the file type when they are saying when they know they are sending to a person of earlier version of office, but that is rare)
After reading over the article, I came away with the impression that Linus appears to be an angry person.
;)
If you grew up in Finland, you'd be angry too.
But seriously, I knew one person from Finland who explained to me that due to their proximity to the Arctic circle and lack of daylight made them have a high rate of depression in Helsinki. He lives in San Jose these days so I don't know what is up with that. Maybe its the traffic that gets to him.
Man. I feel akward for the fact I got the joke
The thing about free speech, as protected by the US Constitution, is that it only protects you against the government (not private or public businesses) and it doesn't guarantee you a forum. If the US government chose to censor your blog, that's against the constitution. If Google decided that they don't want your blog on their Blogger service, that's completely within their rights to do and is not a violation of free speech.
Here is the thing that bothers me about this:
Censorship through proxy.
Due to the fact that the lines between government and corporations are getting somewhat blurred, I wouldn't put it past a governmental body using private organizations to "censor through proxy" by simply getting the private organizations that agree with them to curtail your disagreement with the government.
Now this takes a fair bit of collusion sometimes, but often more than not it just takes a individual who happens to agree with powers (more than not being the power that be through lobbying efforts) and simply uses their strength as a private organization to curtail your ability to disagree.
Today it is quite marginal and I don't think you'd see this ever practiced in open, but if trends keep going towards corporate control of lobbyists and that the government is just another arm of the businesses use of Human Resources for the shareholders... Then well...
What is the point of free speech when oppressive private organizations are more powerful than the government?
Imagine a world is which the government is no longer the power that be and that you are simply controlled by your employer who can simply dismiss any complaints about freedom of speech by pointing out they are a private organization even though it is now impossible for you to find work else where.
That is why censorship by proxy is highly dangerous.
Which, by the way, is true of just about every game genre that's ever existed.
I dunno. Ultima Online was rather broundbreaking in what it was trying to accomplish. Yes. A great deal of that was due to Ralph Koster (who made the original Star Wars Galaxy because Sony butchered it), but in general the concept had some lofty goals.
Wheras EQ, AC, and WoW have gone for the same technique for the Diku muds concept of "Kill things to earn loot and XP to kill bigger things to get even more loot and XP to kill even bigger things... etc etc" which is fun for a while, but after going through the same damn thing of kill things for XP to kill more things since Final Fanasty I, II, III...IX, Diablo 1/2, and countless other games that simply have the same formula makes the whole damn genre really boring after a while.
Which is why I don't play online games anymore... Because I can get the same gameplay with single player games.
At least UO had something for a while before it went down hill.
If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear!
Except vague, strange, and unknown laws from the 1800's that make things you do on a daily basis illegal.
Yeah you may laugh and think now sane court would uphold them, but as the Cardinal Richelieu says "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Suppose (s)he dies in an accident, and their death sparks a tidal wave of interest in the musician. Now what if they had a very young child and widow? Are you suggesting the child and widow should be on welfare or be a working single-parent, when their spouse had more than enough money to support them if only they weren't screwed over by a copyright expiring at the artist's death? I'm pretty sure the dead musician would've wanted his family taken care of.
1. Get life insurance like everyone else
2. Chances are the artists recording contract will be worded in such a way that the widow will receive much at all especially if they weren't popular before they were dead. Even if someone sold CDs of the artist in some sort of fund raising type of event for the orphan or widow, they would be sued by the label. And btw... When you sign a record contract they say "perpetual" and they don't expire when the artists die. And royalties only come after expenses have been paid so chances are an unpopular musician would not have had the weight to get a better deal on the next album (which is usually why one hit wonders are usually broke after their first album while people who had continual success get better deals down the road)
So no... Chances are the widow would be better off without copyrights because the artists music could be sold as charity without fear of the record label suing their pants off.
It can be arranged. however, in return, like most musicians you will have to work the first dozen or so years of your life for virtually nothing, with no guarantee whatsoever of ever making a penny from any of it.
Having copyrights does not guarantee you'll make money from it in 50 years either.
What, voting for a third party is somehow going to help? They're just a different color of cat.
Speaking of which. If you care enough about politics.... Register Republican and vote Ron Paul in the republican primary.
He's the only politician that isn't a cat. He's voted no on everything from the Patriot Act, to the Iraq war, and from little things like giving government grants.
Now to be fair, he may not be the world's most brightest when it comes to technology, but many feel for the sure fact that he believes that the federal government should not interfere with economics beyond the letter of the constitution and the fact he wants to get rid of the department of education and get it into the hands of the local governments again would make this issue a moot point.
If you don't know who Ron Paul is... Look him up on Youtube. He was on the Daily Show.
When the Democrats swept into power in Congress I listened to all the liberal commentators talking about how it was Good News and how Things Would Be Different Now and how the Bad Guys were out and the Good Guys were in. And I shook my head and thought of Mouseland.
I'm not a liberal, but I thought it was good news because it would cause a party stalemate.
If you can't vote the cats out, at least make it so they are unable to agree on anything. (Think Clinton and the Republican congress which caused government shutdowns and the first positive budget surplus that hasn't been since before or since)
Google: I'm going to bid $4.6 billion dollars tomorrow at tomorrows auction.
ATT: Cool... (Crap! I know we can't beat them with cash reserves so I'll bid high and force them to spend their fortune for it!)
*The very next day*
Auctioneer: Here we are with a block of airwaves. Starting bid.... One billion dollars....
ATT: $10 BILLION DOLLARS!!
Auctioneer: $10 billion is the current bid. Do I hear $11 billion dollars... Going once...
Google: *yawns*
Auctioneer: Going twice...
ATT: Hey wait a minute!
Auctioneer: Going three times! Sold to the gentleman from ATT for $10 billion dollars.
ATT: But! But! But!
Google: Hey ATT if you don't want those airwaves, give us call us after the opening bell after your quarterly reports and we'll talk.
Cutting you off the campus net is an entirely private decision, no due process required by law.
I dunno... Let's say I have this jock room mate that I hate because he always gets the girls (and brings them to the top bunk when I'm trying to get a good nights sleep) so lets just say I theoretically put P2P software on his unpassworded computer and share out some Boy George songs.
Not only will he get booted off ResNet without recourse, but all the girls will think he's gay now when they look at his MP3 collection.
It is simple - Stallman is a communist. His ideas for free software have nothing to do with freedom, but with the denial of the private property. Whereas the private property is in the foundations of the democracy.
That doesn't make sense. Copyrights are the extension of socialism due to the fact they reward money to a person in the economy who would otherwise have none due to free market forces.
Now, admittedly GPL can't exist without copyrights, but if there were none then we wouldn't have a need for it.
More so, copyrights are a bit communist because they tell you as the consumer cannot do what you please with the product you purchased. If you want to make a copy, you aren't breaking into the authors house to steal another, but rather creating your own using your own resources because the product came with a blueprint to make another.
Copyright is simply the government telling you what you cannot do with your property.
One guy in the audience asked how he was supposed to pay for his university education by releasing free software. Stallman didn't really give him an answer, he just told the student that he didn't have to go to school, and he had no right to release closed source software in an attempt to earn money. Stallman has compared closed source software to "a crime against humanity", yes?
If you believe in Laissez-faire economics, no one has a "natural right" to having money or college education. If you proscribe to the "free trade trumps all" ideals, then copyright actually looks pretty close to socialism in order to secure money for those who would not have gained any due to a truly free market.
Of course in the same regard, if there were no copyrights there would be no GPL beyond those parties who willingly abide by it.
And as sentimental wedding pictures are to you, they don't have a trillion dollar economy around them and are localized mostly to the States.
But if you'll find a copy of MS Windows in every country on the planet (I'd wager someone's got a laptop in Somalia or a PDA with windows mobile)
Although, I don't agree with many things RMS does or says, he's got a point about how these things are and that the other side of the argument does not have your best intentions in mind.
In fact the other side of the copyright argument has persons who sole job is to extract as much money and freedom out of their customers as possible.
Whether this is done through DRM, laws, contractual lock-ins, lobbyists, or campaign donations... They will never stop and do something for the sake of altruism. It is what they are paid to do. Anything else would be unnatural.
I still haven't made up my mind on GPLv3, but I was under the impression that it was designed to unite, not to fork.
It was never that intention. GPLv3 was created solely to close the loopholes that many of the companies that were taking advantage of the GPLv2 in order to prevent their customers from gaining access from modifying the source. (aka "tivo-ization") in which vendors would simply deny modification of the source they were to provide by using another developers code under GPLv2 by adding hardware DRM.
Or in Microsoft's case by means of patents.
From my understanding there is nothing that compels any developer to upgrade from GPLv2 to GPLv3 unless you desire to use someone else's code that is being upgraded to GPLv3 with code changes (you are still free to hold on to their GPLv2 code without updating)
And the other main beef that people have is the "and later versions" clause in GPLv3, but you are free to remove that if you want as a developer of your own code (Not so much if you are using someone else's code! But no one is forcing to use other people's work instead of making you own!)
From my understanding, most of issues that Linus brought up with GPL3 were on a early draft. He did warm slightly when he saw the final draft.
http://www.linux.com/articles/114336