It would be more like eXistenZ, posting to your blog from within a MMORPG subgame of GTA running on a virtual linux machine, that is being simulated within the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise that in turn is...
I think the idea is let govenments and large people wanting government contracts to tick the ODF checkbox, but in such a way that ODF doesn't become a defacto standard (as well as an ISO one).
I have a document, and want to send it to some random person who likely has MS word. So do I:
a. Send it as.doc which is old default standard b. Send it as MS-XML and hope they have this years version of Word c. Send it as ODF and include a half page set of instructions for how to download and install the ODF extension and open the file.
Being a geek who cares about these issues, I'd likely pick C, but I'm not everyone.
Your implication being that software freedom and software profit can never co-exist. That users must be dependant and non-free before they would be willing to pay you money.
The real issue is that the traditional business model of selling copies is dying - but thats not to say that there are not plenty of other business models that do work well and allow the end user to have freedom.
Copyright was originally created to break the monopoly on the printers Guild and for a writer to offer some protection / ability to negoticate against the control of publishers.
Because of the cost of running a printing press, most of them where business run for profit and obayed copyright law, but as the average joe on the street didn't have a printing press and wasn't trying to make money, copyright law was never applied to him (at least in practice).
What has changed in the last decade and the advent of computers and the internet is that the average Joe now has a virtual printing press with the potentual to rival that of a major newspaper (in terms of readership). And doubly so, with the digital age, a copy can no longer be moved, accessed or shared without creating a copy in the process.
Copyright law is now being applied to the average joe as if he where a money making competitor of the publishers - a rival rather than a customer.
Us slashdotters on internet time, see these changes and very quickly in temrs of weeks or months, the large corperations adapt to change more slowly, usually only changing once the business case is obvious and the market established which can take years, but governments and laws move slowest of all, often taking a decade or more to address significant new issues.
Now when will Dell start offering Linux as an alternitive on their main line laptops and desktops.
And more importantly when will their tech support stop trying to use the "we don't support linux" when you phone up for an obvious hardware issue under a warranty (like a dead cmos battery).
Welcome to World of Jesus, you have just found the magic scroll "Walk on Water" and "Reserection after Crucifiction". To the east is a large table containing several loaves of bread and many bottles of wine. To the north is a hill where convicts are being crusified. To the south is a shallow lake. To the west is a garrison of 5 roman soildiers walking towards you. You have 97 hit points and 42 magic points remaining. You smell a wumpus is nearby. What do you wish to do?
Asking the RIAA (or more precicely the record companies) directly to stop imposing DRM on apple will not get you very far, they own the market and they are using other means to stamp out alternitives (like allofmp3.com, P2P filesharing networks and inde music). They are used to a system where they are in control, they loan X to a band to create a song, spend Y on advertising it and freebies to get it on the radio and the result is Z in record sales. They have a monopoly of music so they set the price based on what the market will bear because customers have nowhere else to go.
The internet is intangable to them, there is no control or even just statistics over who is listening to what. While at one time it offers the chance to massively expand the market as a whole, it also removes the vestages of artifical scarcity over music, and at the same time threatens to undermine the status as the universal middleman, taking their cut/tax out of everything.
Look at the animal rights activists who target animal testing centers, they are remakably sucessful (which is why the govenment is trying to rush in new laws to stop them - if they just did ineffectual protests they would just get ignored). One of their tatics is not just to target the center itself, but the whole network that supports them, both economically and physically. They target the staff, the suppliers and the buyers.
Apple's DRM is good for apple because it locks people into iTunes and iPod, but bad for the RIAA because they can't control it.
The only real way to break the cycle is public education over DRM and enough of a market for non-RIAA music that they simply fade into obsolesence.
But if laptop and an internet connection to wikipedia they would be able to find out more about malaria, how to avoid it, where to go for treatment and a google maps lookup of nearest clinic.
As a westener, I have learnt far more via the internet than I learned in school. OLPC will IMHO have a large impact, on education, culture and democracy.
Then only option would be to create adverts that people actually wanted to watch (and thus wouldn't skip), rather than ones people are forced to watch.
1. A virtual samaba server on a windows machine in order to access ext3 / reiserfs partitions on a local hard disk.
2. A virtual browser testbed, multiple virtual machines each running different Browser / OS combos (Linux / Windows / MacOSX), with a script to grab screenshots of each browser and to allow interactive testing of each combo.
3. Cross platform virtual compile farm.
4. A virtualized router / firewall within a server - almost as safe as an external box if it gets cracked.
5. A virtualized DRM media player for redirecting the video/audio data from a virtual monitor/speaker to a virtual digital input.
6. A virtualized testbed for massivly distrabuted systems. Like testing the routing efficency of freenet over a variety of network link speeds.
1. If I have a server with a passwords, firewall etc, they are there to keep others out of the bits I don't want them to access. The restrictions are under MY control and I can CHOOSE to remove them at any time.
2. If I now sell this server to YOU, but keep all the passwords, access controls and everything else in place (without giving you full access), then these restrictions are NOT under YOUR control, you may OWN the SERVER, but I control it. YOU may NOT remove the restrictions because you don't have CONTROL.
With physical items, the rules of ownership have generally followed situation #1, if you own somethng then you control it and can do anything you like with it.
Now with digital items, the "media" distrabutors are trying to change the rules of ownership to situation #2 - you own it, but we still control it.
The real issue here is one of scarcity vs abundance. Which is more valuable, diamonds or air. Diamonds are scarce, they look pretty, but we could live without them. The air is needed for life, but is in great abundance. Air is more valuable than diamonds, but people will pay far, far more money for a diamond than for a bottle of air.
Money is also a scarce commodity, while there may seem to be alot of money out there, if you ask most people if they have enough money such that they don't need to worry about it, then you likely get the answer of NO. Try asking the same question about air.
We are genrally only willing to trade scarce money for something that is equally scarce. Though it should also be noted that time and convience are also genrally scarce (sometimes more so than money).
With digital media, there is no longer the inate scarcity associated with physical items. The P2P networks have shown that where there is one copy, you have a million for practically zero cost.
The whole issue of control over digital media is that of trying to create an artifical scarcity, and to maintain an artifical price point on a digital copy.
The media companies have not learnt to operate in a market governed by abundance. A persons time and their convience are the new scarce items, and that is why people will still pay money.
This is only a taste of the future, when we get replicators than can copy physical items for almost zero cost, then we will see all these issues on a much grander scale.
They are not even being told they will get punished if they do it again,
It seems to say, if you do it again, only then will make it illegal so you can't do it a third time.
(Gee, I'll have to try that one next time I get busted by the cops - its only my first offence, officer, you shouldn't lock me up until I've done it at least 3 times)
What they are really saying is that they don't want to be relagated to the role of ISP, or even "content" provider - as these are fields that are becoming too comoditized and thus not profitable.
What they want to be is end to end "entertainment solution" providers, marketing a very specific "solution" for you entertainment needs, that can be specially tailored and marketed to your demographic defined needs. Unless they can control their product from end to end without any interference, redirection or alteration on the consumers end. Otherwise they cannot ensure that you obtain the full enjoyment of the product and maintain their marketing image.
A music CD is only meant to be played in a genuine, authorized and trusted music CD player. If you want to play the music on an iPod, then you must purchase the iPod comptable iTunes version of the song which is available at a reasonable price.
If you happen to want to access your content on a Linux PC, then you will have to wait until Linux users become a profitable and mainstream demographic that is willing to accept our Digital Rights Management software.
1. The RIAA has a monopoly in the mainstream music industry.
2. P2P and digital downloads threaten to undermine their business model, thus they start a propaganda war against P2P.
3. In fighting against P2P, they are pressured into allowing licensed digital downloads, so they claim all the "pirates" are naughty because they now have an alternative.
4. Apple is a niche player in the personal computer market. The RIAA lets Apple into the digital download market, hoping they will remain a niche player but don't want them to be too successful. They force a price of $0.99 per song, higher than that of a physical album CD.
5. They force Apple to have a closed format DRM that locks the customers out and forces them to use only approved software/hardware (itunes/ipod) to access their music.
6. Apple becomes too successful, the RIAA now want to up the pricing model, but can't apply enough pressure because Apple is the market leader.
7. The RIAA (and Microsoft) are fed up of NOT being in a monopoly position and yet at the same time don't want to simply support an open(ish) format such as MP3 because while it would undermine apples control on the market, it would also undermine their own.
8. A proxy for the RIAA sues Apple for being a monopoly and getting in the way of the RIAA's monopoly.
Or searching for $PRODUCT_ID REVIEW and getting a large pile of comparision sites (like kelkoo) saying "0 users have reviewed this product, would you like to be the be first to write one".
For some things you end up getting far better results doing the search on google groups than on the web, and a discussion thread is often more informative than a single webpage.
Once the infrastructure is in place, and assuming that the network isn't being taken beyond capasity, the cost of providing access to a third party is negligable.
Charging money for something isn't free, and requires additional effort to setup and maintain a billing system. When the unit costs are so low, it can actually be more cost efficent to reduce the cost to 0 and eliminate the billing / metering system. And at 0 cost, the utility and benifit provided by a system can be greatly increased.
I have always offered my wifi for public access, and what you get in return is not money but the hope that others will also offer theirs for free, for when I am in need.
I recently moved house, and without a phone line or ADSL, having a neibours open-AP was a livesaver, until I could get a more perminant connection.
If the files are securely DRMed and require a remotely authenticated licence to play (don't like the concept, but playing devils advocate here), then making any number of P2P copies of the DRM file would be fair-use for backup purposes (you can't use it without the licence).
A second P2P net would be implemented where everybody puts their media licences into a pool, and offers a time-limited borrowing of their licence. I lend you my licence for the Matrix for 3 hours (just long enough for you to watch your copy), and then it is automattically returned to me (by the DRM server).
Now we create a mod for XMMS or winamp, and it puts out a request to borrow a licence for the next song on your playlist for a period of 5 minutes.
If everybody played fair, you would only need a few licences for each title to make it work. This assumes that people do not try to hoard licences due to scaricty (better grap it now before its gone).
The RIAA / MPAA would consider it to be cheating the system, though IANAL but it should be perfectly legal. Their responce would be to place bots on the network that flood the networks with licence requests and try to hoard all the licences on their own computers to deny others the chance to share (this would then be followed by blacklists and smaller trust based networks to counter attack).
With XHTML/CSS websites using tableless layouts, NS4 will usally not only display something unreadable, but something that is very ulgy as well (things like a giant black div covering 90% of the page - with a few other overlapping divs in for good measure).
The best solution for NS4 is to simply give it an unstyled page, either via user agent detection, or by simply declaring all my stylesheets media=all - which NS4 doesn't reconise and thus ignores the stylesheet.
His "deal" doesn't seem to violate any of his "commitments" in that statement.
He hasn't created and forced the use of a bittorrent patch to track what is being shared or report it.
He isn't (as far as I am aware) giving the MPAA access to his server logs or allowing them to evesdrop on his servers.
He isn't adding DRM or watermarking files being shared via bittorrent.
Detecting drug use doesn't even enter the picture here.
The last item on the list is censorship. While you could argue the free speech vs copyright angle, the video files are not being removed from "the internet", just the links to them in his search engine, and its not like the MPAA are trying to hide these video from the public (they are just trying to maintain a monopoly in distrabution).
Bram Cohen's deal will have a negligable effect on people wanting to copy hollywood movies, but as a businessman he managed to earn himself a few brownie points with the MPAA and it looks like he is trying to sell Hollywood in using Bittorrent to distrabute "licenced" copies of their movies (No doubt in higly controlled DRM files that you can freely copy, but you will need to pay for the licence file to open it). I do not see this (everything apart from the DRM) as a bad thing.
I use ubuntu at home (gentoo requires too much time for maintainance), I find that KDE gives me more flexability and features (things like being able to move/rename/delete files within an open file dialogue, a terminal window within knoqueror) and so on. Though I freely use GTK apps within KDE.
However I have installed ubuntu with gnome on the office computer for a small charity staffed by non-techies, and I would remark that it is user friendly and "clean" (more so than KDE) and has gone down very well with the staff there. I wouldn't install KDE on that machine.
Different desktops have their advantages and weaknesses, I think having both (and many others) is actually a good idea, then we can pick the best one for the situation. This isn't the highlander, there can be more than one:-)
The Metro is not subsidized by taxes nor run by the government.
They give the paper away for free (they leave a huge stack of them just before the ticket barriers in the tube). They don't pay for anyone to stand around giving them out, and get a high readership because all people have to do is grab a copy.
They get their money through selling advertizing space in the paper. The higher the readership the more valuable this space becomes.
I could be completly wrong here, but I think the problem could be due to the modular XUL toolkit. In essence, Firefox has to completly reload the app back into main memory before it can display the UI to screen.
Other apps like photoshop, using MFC, can quickly display the UI, and take a few seconds loading the rest of the things into memory (which are not needed for imediate display.)
Assuming that you know what you are doing (ie have done it before), then setting up a linux machine (especally a fairly user friendly one like Ubuntu), can actually take less time overall than installing and configuring Windows, MS Office, Anti-Virus, Windows Updates and various other utilities.
apt-get install is actually a very easy way to install new software on linux. Alot quicker (human time and attention wise) than finding your MS Office CD, typing in the CD code, then going through the 15 minute install process.
However I will admit that some items outside the packaging system, such as Java on Debian proper, can be a little time consuming to setup. I'm actually fairly relieved that there is a copy of dvd::rip in the ubuntu extra's repository, attempting to get it setup on Debian proper was a nightmare, and even I gave up on that one (dvd::rip has about a dozen dependices outside of the debian repositories)
The other thing to note, is that while some people may be money rich but time poor, there are equally many more others who are time rich but money poor.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unlike what TV and movies have told you, you cannot just type in "How do we end poverty?" into a super computer and just wait for it to respond."
:-)
Yes you can, and it only takes 0.41s to respond
It would be more like eXistenZ, posting to your blog from within a MMORPG subgame of GTA running on a virtual linux machine, that is being simulated within the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise that in turn is...
I think the idea is let govenments and large people wanting government contracts to tick the ODF checkbox, but in such a way that ODF doesn't become a defacto standard (as well as an ISO one).
.doc which is old default standard
I have a document, and want to send it to some random person who likely has MS word. So do I:
a. Send it as
b. Send it as MS-XML and hope they have this years version of Word
c. Send it as ODF and include a half page set of instructions for how to download and install the ODF extension and open the file.
Being a geek who cares about these issues, I'd likely pick C, but I'm not everyone.
--
James
Big Brother is watching from the First Post
Your implication being that software freedom and software profit can never co-exist. That users must be dependant and non-free before they would be willing to pay you money. The real issue is that the traditional business model of selling copies is dying - but thats not to say that there are not plenty of other business models that do work well and allow the end user to have freedom.
Copyright was originally created to break the monopoly on the printers Guild and for a writer to offer some protection / ability to negoticate against the control of publishers.
Because of the cost of running a printing press, most of them where business run for profit and obayed copyright law, but as the average joe on the street didn't have a printing press and wasn't trying to make money, copyright law was never applied to him (at least in practice).
What has changed in the last decade and the advent of computers and the internet is that the average Joe now has a virtual printing press with the potentual to rival that of a major newspaper (in terms of readership). And doubly so, with the digital age, a copy can no longer be moved, accessed or shared without creating a copy in the process.
Copyright law is now being applied to the average joe as if he where a money making competitor of the publishers - a rival rather than a customer.
Us slashdotters on internet time, see these changes and very quickly in temrs of weeks or months, the large corperations adapt to change more slowly, usually only changing once the business case is obvious and the market established which can take years, but governments and laws move slowest of all, often taking a decade or more to address significant new issues.
Now when will Dell start offering Linux as an alternitive on their main line laptops and desktops.
And more importantly when will their tech support stop trying to use the "we don't support linux" when you phone up for an obvious hardware issue under a warranty (like a dead cmos battery).
Welcome to World of Jesus, you have just found the magic scroll "Walk on Water" and "Reserection after Crucifiction". To the east is a large table containing several loaves of bread and many bottles of wine. To the north is a hill where convicts are being crusified. To the south is a shallow lake. To the west is a garrison of 5 roman soildiers walking towards you. You have 97 hit points and 42 magic points remaining. You smell a wumpus is nearby. What do you wish to do?
Asking the RIAA (or more precicely the record companies) directly to stop imposing DRM on apple will not get you very far, they own the market and they are using other means to stamp out alternitives (like allofmp3.com, P2P filesharing networks and inde music). They are used to a system where they are in control, they loan X to a band to create a song, spend Y on advertising it and freebies to get it on the radio and the result is Z in record sales. They have a monopoly of music so they set the price based on what the market will bear because customers have nowhere else to go.
The internet is intangable to them, there is no control or even just statistics over who is listening to what. While at one time it offers the chance to massively expand the market as a whole, it also removes the vestages of artifical scarcity over music, and at the same time threatens to undermine the status as the universal middleman, taking their cut/tax out of everything.
Look at the animal rights activists who target animal testing centers, they are remakably sucessful (which is why the govenment is trying to rush in new laws to stop them - if they just did ineffectual protests they would just get ignored). One of their tatics is not just to target the center itself, but the whole network that supports them, both economically and physically. They target the staff, the suppliers and the buyers.
Apple's DRM is good for apple because it locks people into iTunes and iPod, but bad for the RIAA because they can't control it.
The only real way to break the cycle is public education over DRM and enough of a market for non-RIAA music that they simply fade into obsolesence.
--
James
But if laptop and an internet connection to wikipedia they would be able to find out more about malaria, how to avoid it, where to go for treatment and a google maps lookup of nearest clinic.
As a westener, I have learnt far more via the internet than I learned in school. OLPC will IMHO have a large impact, on education, culture and democracy.
Then only option would be to create adverts that people actually wanted to watch (and thus wouldn't skip), rather than ones people are forced to watch.
1. A virtual samaba server on a windows machine in order to access ext3 / reiserfs partitions on a local hard disk.
2. A virtual browser testbed, multiple virtual machines each running different Browser / OS combos (Linux / Windows / MacOSX), with a script to grab screenshots of each browser and to allow interactive testing of each combo.
3. Cross platform virtual compile farm.
4. A virtualized router / firewall within a server - almost as safe as an external box if it gets cracked.
5. A virtualized DRM media player for redirecting the video/audio data from a virtual monitor/speaker to a virtual digital input.
6. A virtualized testbed for massivly distrabuted systems. Like testing the routing efficency of freenet over a variety of network link speeds.
The key difference here is in who is the OWNER.
1. If I have a server with a passwords, firewall etc, they are there to keep others out of the bits I don't want them to access. The restrictions are under MY control and I can CHOOSE to remove them at any time.
2. If I now sell this server to YOU, but keep all the passwords, access controls and everything else in place (without giving you full access), then these restrictions are NOT under YOUR control, you may OWN the SERVER, but I control it. YOU may NOT remove the restrictions because you don't have CONTROL.
With physical items, the rules of ownership have generally followed situation #1, if you own somethng then you control it and can do anything you like with it.
Now with digital items, the "media" distrabutors are trying to change the rules of ownership to situation #2 - you own it, but we still control it.
The real issue here is one of scarcity vs abundance. Which is more valuable, diamonds or air. Diamonds are scarce, they look pretty, but we could live without them. The air is needed for life, but is in great abundance. Air is more valuable than diamonds, but people will pay far, far more money for a diamond than for a bottle of air.
Money is also a scarce commodity, while there may seem to be alot of money out there, if you ask most people if they have enough money such that they don't need to worry about it, then you likely get the answer of NO. Try asking the same question about air.
We are genrally only willing to trade scarce money for something that is equally scarce. Though it should also be noted that time and convience are also genrally scarce (sometimes more so than money).
With digital media, there is no longer the inate scarcity associated with physical items. The P2P networks have shown that where there is one copy, you have a million for practically zero cost.
The whole issue of control over digital media is that of trying to create an artifical scarcity, and to maintain an artifical price point on a digital copy.
The media companies have not learnt to operate in a market governed by abundance. A persons time and their convience are the new scarce items, and that is why people will still pay money.
This is only a taste of the future, when we get replicators than can copy physical items for almost zero cost, then we will see all these issues on a much grander scale.
So they have not been punished for their crime,
They are not even being told they will get punished if they do it again,
It seems to say, if you do it again, only then will make it illegal so you can't do it a third time.
(Gee, I'll have to try that one next time I get busted by the cops - its only my first offence, officer, you shouldn't lock me up until I've done it at least 3 times)
What they are really saying is that they don't want to be relagated to the role of ISP, or even "content" provider - as these are fields that are becoming too comoditized and thus not profitable.
What they want to be is end to end "entertainment solution" providers, marketing a very specific "solution" for you entertainment needs, that can be specially tailored and marketed to your demographic defined needs. Unless they can control their product from end to end without any interference, redirection or alteration on the consumers end. Otherwise they cannot ensure that you obtain the full enjoyment of the product and maintain their marketing image.
A music CD is only meant to be played in a genuine, authorized and trusted music CD player. If you want to play the music on an iPod, then you must purchase the iPod comptable iTunes version of the song which is available at a reasonable price.
If you happen to want to access your content on a Linux PC, then you will have to wait until Linux users become a profitable and mainstream demographic that is willing to accept our Digital Rights Management software.
1. The RIAA has a monopoly in the mainstream music industry.
...
2. P2P and digital downloads threaten to undermine their business model, thus they start a propaganda war against P2P.
3. In fighting against P2P, they are pressured into allowing licensed digital downloads, so they claim all the "pirates" are naughty because they now have an alternative.
4. Apple is a niche player in the personal computer market. The RIAA lets Apple into the digital download market, hoping they will remain a niche player but don't want them to be too successful. They force a price of $0.99 per song, higher than that of a physical album CD.
5. They force Apple to have a closed format DRM that locks the customers out and forces them to use only approved software/hardware (itunes/ipod) to access their music.
6. Apple becomes too successful, the RIAA now want to up the pricing model, but can't apply enough pressure because Apple is the market leader.
7. The RIAA (and Microsoft) are fed up of NOT being in a monopoly position and yet at the same time don't want to simply support an open(ish) format such as MP3 because while it would undermine apples control on the market, it would also undermine their own.
8. A proxy for the RIAA sues Apple for being a monopoly and getting in the way of the RIAA's monopoly.
9.
10. Profit ???
Or searching for $PRODUCT_ID REVIEW and getting a large pile of comparision sites (like kelkoo) saying "0 users have reviewed this product, would you like to be the be first to write one".
For some things you end up getting far better results doing the search on google groups than on the web, and a discussion thread is often more informative than a single webpage.
Once the infrastructure is in place, and assuming that the network isn't being taken beyond capasity, the cost of providing access to a third party is negligable.
Charging money for something isn't free, and requires additional effort to setup and maintain a billing system. When the unit costs are so low, it can actually be more cost efficent to reduce the cost to 0 and eliminate the billing / metering system. And at 0 cost, the utility and benifit provided by a system can be greatly increased.
I have always offered my wifi for public access, and what you get in return is not money but the hope that others will also offer theirs for free, for when I am in need.
I recently moved house, and without a phone line or ADSL, having a neibours open-AP was a livesaver, until I could get a more perminant connection.
If the files are securely DRMed and require a remotely authenticated licence to play (don't like the concept, but playing devils advocate here), then making any number of P2P copies of the DRM file would be fair-use for backup purposes (you can't use it without the licence).
A second P2P net would be implemented where everybody puts their media licences into a pool, and offers a time-limited borrowing of their licence. I lend you my licence for the Matrix for 3 hours (just long enough for you to watch your copy), and then it is automattically returned to me (by the DRM server).
Now we create a mod for XMMS or winamp, and it puts out a request to borrow a licence for the next song on your playlist for a period of 5 minutes.
If everybody played fair, you would only need a few licences for each title to make it work. This assumes that people do not try to hoard licences due to scaricty (better grap it now before its gone).
The RIAA / MPAA would consider it to be cheating the system, though IANAL but it should be perfectly legal. Their responce would be to place bots on the network that flood the networks with licence requests and try to hoard all the licences on their own computers to deny others the chance to share (this would then be followed by blacklists and smaller trust based networks to counter attack).
With XHTML/CSS websites using tableless layouts, NS4 will usally not only display something unreadable, but something that is very ulgy as well (things like a giant black div covering 90% of the page - with a few other overlapping divs in for good measure).
The best solution for NS4 is to simply give it an unstyled page, either via user agent detection, or by simply declaring all my stylesheets media=all - which NS4 doesn't reconise and thus ignores the stylesheet.
His "deal" doesn't seem to violate any of his "commitments" in that statement.
He hasn't created and forced the use of a bittorrent patch to track what is being shared or report it.
He isn't (as far as I am aware) giving the MPAA access to his server logs or allowing them to evesdrop on his servers.
He isn't adding DRM or watermarking files being shared via bittorrent.
Detecting drug use doesn't even enter the picture here.
The last item on the list is censorship. While you could argue the free speech vs copyright angle, the video files are not being removed from "the internet", just the links to them in his search engine, and its not like the MPAA are trying to hide these video from the public (they are just trying to maintain a monopoly in distrabution).
Bram Cohen's deal will have a negligable effect on people wanting to copy hollywood movies, but as a businessman he managed to earn himself a few brownie points with the MPAA and it looks like he is trying to sell Hollywood in using Bittorrent to distrabute "licenced" copies of their movies (No doubt in higly controlled DRM files that you can freely copy, but you will need to pay for the licence file to open it). I do not see this (everything apart from the DRM) as a bad thing.
I use ubuntu at home (gentoo requires too much time for maintainance), I find that KDE gives me more flexability and features (things like being able to move/rename/delete files within an open file dialogue, a terminal window within knoqueror) and so on. Though I freely use GTK apps within KDE.
:-)
However I have installed ubuntu with gnome on the office computer for a small charity staffed by non-techies, and I would remark that it is user friendly and "clean" (more so than KDE) and has gone down very well with the staff there. I wouldn't install KDE on that machine.
Different desktops have their advantages and weaknesses, I think having both (and many others) is actually a good idea, then we can pick the best one for the situation. This isn't the highlander, there can be more than one
The Metro is not subsidized by taxes nor run by the government. They give the paper away for free (they leave a huge stack of them just before the ticket barriers in the tube). They don't pay for anyone to stand around giving them out, and get a high readership because all people have to do is grab a copy. They get their money through selling advertizing space in the paper. The higher the readership the more valuable this space becomes.
I could be completly wrong here, but I think the problem could be due to the modular XUL toolkit. In essence, Firefox has to completly reload the app back into main memory before it can display the UI to screen.
Other apps like photoshop, using MFC, can quickly display the UI, and take a few seconds loading the rest of the things into memory (which are not needed for imediate display.)
Assuming that you know what you are doing (ie have done it before), then setting up a linux machine (especally a fairly user friendly one like Ubuntu), can actually take less time overall than installing and configuring Windows, MS Office, Anti-Virus, Windows Updates and various other utilities.
apt-get install is actually a very easy way to install new software on linux. Alot quicker (human time and attention wise) than finding your MS Office CD, typing in the CD code, then going through the 15 minute install process.
However I will admit that some items outside the packaging system, such as Java on Debian proper, can be a little time consuming to setup. I'm actually fairly relieved that there is a copy of dvd::rip in the ubuntu extra's repository, attempting to get it setup on Debian proper was a nightmare, and even I gave up on that one (dvd::rip has about a dozen dependices outside of the debian repositories)
The other thing to note, is that while some people may be money rich but time poor, there are equally many more others who are time rich but money poor.