It has been pointed out (true or not I dont know) that Lucas is considering a 6 DVD set, or that it wasn't going to come out in 2000 anyway. I still think he's mainly afraid of piracy. Reemmber back before the movie came out? I remember this quote from him that I read on wired.com ( a bit butchered probably): "if this movie gets pirated by a lot of people there won't be another movie". Remember how he got the FBI involved as well? Almost everyone I knew had a VCD of The Matrix but almost no one had Star Wars TPM because of all the threats he made. I don't particularly support movie pirating but I think he got much too paranoid.
I love the star wars series of course, but I think all the money he's made has given him a serious lack of perspective. It seems that he just can't get enough money. If there is any movie people really want on DVD, it's the star wars series. He could have easily got the first 3 episodes (or 4 to 6) out by now on DVD no problem. He'd be raking in the money. I think it's all due to the threat (imagined or not) of piracy. I think he's waiting to see what happens in the digital world, particularly the current DVD situation. He doesn't really have much to worry about. We've been over the DVD issue many times.
For someone who has pushed the technological envelope in the medium of movies, he has really fumbled the ball in the consumer market.
Yes he could have made it that way but he was being reasonable. CmdrChalupa is capable of being reasonable as well. There wasn't anything anyone could do if it was made as a clown, other than, say, have a riot and tear it down (something like slashdotters leaving in droves...we don't have to toast the site since we don't have to see it if we don't want to). I still agree with your conclusion though, maybe it's time to let it grow beyond what it is. It takes a long time to get it right though. It's tough to make this work. I give them a lot of credit for getting this far.
But the fact is, while you retain control of this site editorially, you are stifling its full potential. We will always have the uneasy fear that you or Andover is pulling strings and filtering out stories that don't fit your personal biases. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I'm sure you're doing this.
Pretty strong statement. Worth looking into though. I think some sort of story moderation is an interesting idea, but look at all the downsides. They mentioned their own reasons. The main one being that moderation iteself might become the only topic of discussion ("I can't beleive this story was moderated up when this was was moderated down") effectively killing the SNR ratio.
Keep in mind it IS their site (content control anyway) and they can do whatever they want with it. But if they could pull it off without ruining the discussions which make slashdot one of my favorite sites, it could be really great...the first anarchy/democratic forum that truly has a sense of community. I'd have huge respect for them.
Nice. Just as much propeganda as I've ever seen from a left wing point of view. It's too bad that a common ground between any cutural ideology/religion and relativism can't be reached. Try to force your moral view on other culture's moral views with your gun, and we can have a world war. Try to force relativism, and we can fade into oblivion under laws that take away our humanity. Pick your poison. Either end of the spectrum will lead to the same result.
How does the old argument go....guns don't kill people, people kill people. So what is that gun for again when my enemy shows up at my door?
keep the socialism to a minimum? Uh, only if you agree to keep your libertarianism to a minimim. Hey, we've all got an opinion, and they're all political. There is no neutral ground.
Yes, I am definatly stereotyping. Frankly after giving poiticians a chance (republican or democrat) for a number of years, I'm sick of the lies, the half-truths, etc. Normally I don't see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt when I've been lied to so many times.
Also note I'm calling for something reasonable, don't try to pull me to one end of the "all or nothing" on this issue. I think they should pay for an ergonomic setup, and if you are doing, say, home assembly, and their tools cause you to get injured, they should be liable if the tools are deemed unsafe. Things like that. I'm not calling for this "liable if anything in your house causes you to get hurt" that you seem to suggest.
I never quite understood the argument for gun ownership because of living in a police state. I agree that we do indeed live in a police state, but having a gun isn't going to help much. If you get in a shootout with the police, you ARE going to die. Even a whole city of gun owners can't stop much, with our military on the other end. This is a really interesting topic of debate, though.
ok, mix up on my part. I'd still put forth the same comments. The fact that there was enough pressure on them to withdraw a semi-formal letter still worries me a lot.
I was really disappointed to hear this. ONE DAY after it is first proposed? Wether or not you agree with some of the specifics (the staircase example seems a bit much), something HAS to be done when 20 Million people work this way, and yes, it needs to be regulated. If we didn't have an organization like OSHA we'd be back to the 1800's where it wasn't uncommon for people to die in factories on a regular basis.
I wonder where all the pressure came from. Citizens? Or the business lobby? Given the fact that the two politicians that were quoted were Republicans, it must have been mostly from the business side. If you doubt corporate power, getting this blown away in one day should make you think otherwise.
Also:
Republican leaders had already pledged to scrutinize OSHA after Congress returns from its holiday break because of regulations the agency proposed in November that would require employers to minimize everyday physical - or "ergonomic" - stresses of certain jobs.
What the hell is wrong with this? This is referring to proposed regulations at the company's site, not even at home. Corporations can't even tolerate these minimal expenses (when they might actually save money due to less employee time lost)? When corporate profits are at or near all time highs, why do we allow them to get away with this? Does anyone else find this to be really unfortunate?
One fundamental difference between law as a practice, and technology as a practice, is that law is basically a zero sum game - ie. for every winner there must be an equal but opposite loser. This is the fundamental property of a court decision, and it governs how everyone involved thinks about the law.
I disagree completely. Unless you are referring to money only. If technology that is generally "good" is suppressed by a minorty (think mp3), almost everyone loses. If it is accepted, almost everyone wins. I don't see that as a zero sum.
I think you're right. The longer the constitution has been around, the harder it becomes to apply it to today's world, which is what the supreme court does. They are the final word on law.
The root being that the laws can't keep up with the technology.
Or perhaps it's that our political and economic system can't keep up with technology. Or, at least, apply common sense to new technology, or allow it to flourish (technology like mp3's). I realize the author of the question in this article probably isn't refering directly to what I'm saying here but this is part of the issue as well. Keep in mind that technology over time usually leads to a greater possibility of freedom for the common man. The book 1984 comes to mind for some insight into this. This usually meets resisitance by those in power.
Now, I can't directly claim that lawyers represent "power" and geeks represent the "common man", but when you see that either the government or corporations are usually behind lawyers (almost always in any case the poster is referring to), it becomes a bit more understandable.
So when a "geek" comes up with some invention that is either cool/fun, leads to more efficiency in some process, or allows more freedom for people, the geek won't see any reason not to implement it if it's better than what is currently out there. I don't think lawyers have a tough time understanding technology. As far as the law goes all you really have to know is what it does. Sometimes it gets a lot more complicated, as in the microsoft case, but usually, like with any mp3 lawsuit, there isn't much to know. I think the main problem is the power issue. Institutions want to retain their power, corporations want to retain their profits.
Lawyers aren't dumb, and neither are geeks. I think they just have different goals.
OSHA will be relevant as long as there are private corporations who pay people for their labor.
While telecommuting is a great thing for those who can do it, it has big benefits for the company as well. Less office space, less electricity use, less money out of their pocket, basically. It helps to increase the marginalization of workers that we've been seeing over the past 25 years or so. With sliding labor rights and globalization we've seen workers turn from being treated as somewhat human to commodities. This issue is a small part of that but a part nevertheless. The company saves money, and makes you provide the space, and they may or may not pay for your work area. When they don't need you anymore, they can send you an email and that's that.
There is no reason to reduce the rights of office workers when they work at home. Why give corporations another break? OSHA can help carry this out. Common sense should apply, if you don't clean your house and trip on something that's your own fault. But you should be compensated in some way for having to provide your own office space, and have liabilities for the company if you are hurt somehow while working for them in your own dwelling.
I wouldn't doubt that we'll see articles like this every year until one day they'll have to say that "next year *nix will start to lose its #1 market share." Well, maybe thats wishful thinking, but...
I think it's only a matter of time before CIO's start to see the benefits. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it will happen eventually. I won't got into the reasons since you know them already. Forester is only saying this because of what's true today. I certianly don't look to them for future trends.
These research organiazations are simply too entrenched with the way things are today and how they were yesterday. An open source business model simply doesn't compute in their minds, therefore, it can't work.
Highly profitable open source corporations and widespread use of linux or whatever other flavor don't have to be related. Redhat doesn't need a market capitalization of $100 zillion like microsoft to have a large share of the OS market.
I live here in Minneapolis, and I think it's still got a decent amount of tech jobs around. The old companies leaving is just the changing of the guard, there are still plenty of jobs here.
I'll agree with the U of MN to a degree. I'm finishing my EE degree there. Most of the engineering departments are really good, nationally chemE is #1, mechE is #8, EE is #20, but comp sci is, frankly, shitty. I don't even know what they're rated, but, having taken a few of their classes, it has to be really low. Remember when Arne Calrson publicly spoke about how bad they are?
Whats happening here is nothing compared to whats happening in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has to completely transform itself from the industrial age to the information age, and it's nearly impossible when they were basically the center of the industrial universe earlier this century.
I can't verify this personally but I recall hearing that the tax rates on corporations are relatively high in MN compared to other states, which can be a barrier for new companies. Of course this might be corporate propeganda as well, I don't know.
Minneapolis/St. Paul is still a great place to live. High speed internet access is still spotty but other than that most everything needed is in place. We have a large number of parks, the highest ratio of museums/art galleries to population in the country (other than Seattle I think), the air is clean, good schools, etc.
Well I'm not from Chicago, but I was looking into getting a job there. I don't think silicon prairie is doing too bad, you've got motorolla, tellabs, and lucent, and probably a few others I can't think of. Chicago is a cool city too...I know they have a lot of problems there as you mentioned, things I can usually take for granted here in Minneapolis. I still think it would be fun to livein Chicago for several years.
Some people in the UK, the EU and several other countries are already rather touchy on the issue of US courts attempting to exert their authority in other people's countries. Some such people are just waiting for an opportunity to show the US courts exactly where their jurisdiction ends. This looks like it might be a promising candidate.
I sure hope other countries tell the US to go to hell on this one, but don't count on it. Keep in mind there are a few sources of pressure.
The obvious source is the US government. Yes, the US is still the undisputed leader of the world, but most countries can tell them no on this issue. The US isn't going to start a trade embargo or war over this.
The slightly less obvious source is multinational corporations, which operate everywhere, and in this case, almost all companies involved are multinational. So even if the US gov't can't stop people internationally, the MC's can by calling up a local politician that they donated big bucks to during the last election, and say "hey, tell the police to shut these guys down or your career is over."
Just keep in mind here that it isn't really our government that is the enemy here, they're more an agent of the enemy (or a co-conspirator maybe).
European countries have resisted the silent corporate takeover of their governments better than the US, but it's still there. Thats the threat in this case, and looks to be through the next century. The battle for the common man is now with the multinational corporation instead of the government. This is unfortunate because I'd much rather deal with a psuedo-democratic organization than a fascist one.
It's important to note the fact that microsoft is a corporation and most open source developers are individuals, and there aren't many developers that have formed oprn-source based corporations, relatively speaking.
When you speak of liability I assume you mean money. If microsoft is held liable for whatever they have done, generally the only penalty would be monetary, at worst they might be broken up.
Since microsoft (and most corporations) are pretty big, the penalties don't do all that much damage. It is extremely rare for a government body to come out and say "you have been found guilty, your company will cease to exist, your assets will be liquidated."
When we get to individuals, however, monetary damages can seriously impede your ability to do anything, such as programming, and often times people are thrown in jail (fraud, malpractice, whatever). Bill gates is most certainly not going to do jail time, even if it were proven his company has broken numerous laws with him knowing it. When you have a number of individuals developing a certain product open source style, with no business relationship, who would be held liable anyway? Try to single out who wrote the offending lines of code? It's not that simple and our law system doesn't cover this very well to my knowledge.
Is there much software out there that has a warantee anyway? I haven't seen any...you basically accept it "as is" as far as I know.
Anyway, I think the bottom line is that open source software is much, much more accountable to begin with than microsoft will ever be for plainly obvious reasons: it's simple to determine whats causing the problem.
Wrong reasons indeed. As absurd as the patent system is, there is an upside. Getting a patent is only 1 step...it has to hold up in court as well. There is no way this would ever hold up, and I don't think the amazon patent will either. The other variable of course is money, which presents its own problems. When it's big corporations duking it out, usually the truth wins, if they have pocketbooks equally deep. Unfortunatly, as the CEO of my last company put it, "the only people who make money off of patents are lawyers.".
The fact that whoever has the most money usually wins can't really be fixed by patent reform either...thats a deeper issue that goes to the core of our political and economic system. I don't see much hope in this area for a long time.
Well, it is cool but for 1000 bucks I'd want more than that. Using your PC for processing power is a great idea though, this can help keep costs down for future robots, as well as the interface it provides.
We're still quite a ways off from a decent robot for home use. To be more than a novel conversation piece it needs to do a lot of things that depend on AI that just haven't been devolped yet (or at least at an affordable cost). High resolution sensors and powerful servos are just too expensive for the consumer marketplace. It would be really helpful for it to be bipedal as well. I've seen a few bipedal bots developed by scientists but it hasn't got very far beyond the research stage.
I said paranoid to be sarcastic....but you didn't look at the job posts before you wrote that comment did you? With a bit of perspective, you'll see that this really isn't all that amazing. Just a bit amusing.
Before you start getting paranoid, actually go the site and read it. The jobs are for hotmail. Hotmail was running *nix before microsoft bought them. As I remember, they tried to get their servers to run NT but it wouldn't work. Therefore they are stuck with *nix, apparently FreeBSD.
Looks like the jobs are all hotmail support, which shouldn't be too suprising since they couldn't get the system to run on NT when microsoft bought them. I wasn't aware that they were running FreeBSD, though.
I think the reason is that the internet was designed to be trespassed upon.
I agree. How can that be legal if the website is open to the public, even if they have a robots.txt file? Copyright laws and the internet simply don't mesh the way they do in other mediums, otherwise the internet loses most of its benefits. If the ability to "link freely" is lost, the internet becomes more one dimentional like television. If you can't find your way to relatively obscure sites, we're going to end up with nothing more than amazon.com and cnn.com.
If anything websites like this increase competition very directly. Of course ebay doesn't like this for that very reason, and I hope the judge realizes that. These websites help in reducing products to a commodity, which is favorable to the consumer, and bad for the corporation. Ebay reminds me of microsoft in this respect, as microsoft tries to hijack (make proprietary) public protocols (tcp/ip, etc) for it's own profit/control.
On another interesting note, there is a webpage www.dealpilot.com that has the same idea but for online booksellers instead. So don't be suprised if we hear about amazon sueing these guys sometime in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been pointed out (true or not I dont know) that Lucas is considering a 6 DVD set, or that it wasn't going to come out in 2000 anyway. I still think he's mainly afraid of piracy. Reemmber back before the movie came out? I remember this quote from him that I read on wired.com ( a bit butchered probably): "if this movie gets pirated by a lot of people there won't be another movie". Remember how he got the FBI involved as well? Almost everyone I knew had a VCD of The Matrix but almost no one had Star Wars TPM because of all the threats he made. I don't particularly support movie pirating but I think he got much too paranoid.
I love the star wars series of course, but I think all the money he's made has given him a serious lack of perspective. It seems that he just can't get enough money. If there is any movie people really want on DVD, it's the star wars series. He could have easily got the first 3 episodes (or 4 to 6) out by now on DVD no problem. He'd be raking in the money. I think it's all due to the threat (imagined or not) of piracy. I think he's waiting to see what happens in the digital world, particularly the current DVD situation. He doesn't really have much to worry about. We've been over the DVD issue many times.
For someone who has pushed the technological envelope in the medium of movies, he has really fumbled the ball in the consumer market.
Yes he could have made it that way but he was being reasonable. CmdrChalupa is capable of being reasonable as well. There wasn't anything anyone could do if it was made as a clown, other than, say, have a riot and tear it down (something like slashdotters leaving in droves...we don't have to toast the site since we don't have to see it if we don't want to). I still agree with your conclusion though, maybe it's time to let it grow beyond what it is. It takes a long time to get it right though. It's tough to make this work. I give them a lot of credit for getting this far.
But the fact is, while you retain control of this site editorially, you are stifling its full potential. We will always have the uneasy fear that you or Andover is pulling strings and filtering out stories that don't fit your personal biases. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I'm sure you're doing this.
Pretty strong statement. Worth looking into though. I think some sort of story moderation is an interesting idea, but look at all the downsides. They mentioned their own reasons. The main one being that moderation iteself might become the only topic of discussion ("I can't beleive this story was moderated up when this was was moderated down") effectively killing the SNR ratio.
Keep in mind it IS their site (content control anyway) and they can do whatever they want with it. But if they could pull it off without ruining the discussions which make slashdot one of my favorite sites, it could be really great...the first anarchy/democratic forum that truly has a sense of community. I'd have huge respect for them.
That's not my view. Basically OSHA does more good than bad for the average worker, therefore I support it. I'm not applying a strict ideology.
Nice. Just as much propeganda as I've ever seen from a left wing point of view. It's too bad that a common ground between any cutural ideology/religion and relativism can't be reached. Try to force your moral view on other culture's moral views with your gun, and we can have a world war. Try to force relativism, and we can fade into oblivion under laws that take away our humanity. Pick your poison. Either end of the spectrum will lead to the same result.
How does the old argument go....guns don't kill people, people kill people. So what is that gun for again when my enemy shows up at my door?
keep the socialism to a minimum? Uh, only if you agree to keep your libertarianism to a minimim. Hey, we've all got an opinion, and they're all political. There is no neutral ground.
Yes, I am definatly stereotyping. Frankly after giving poiticians a chance (republican or democrat) for a number of years, I'm sick of the lies, the half-truths, etc. Normally I don't see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt when I've been lied to so many times.
Also note I'm calling for something reasonable, don't try to pull me to one end of the "all or nothing" on this issue. I think they should pay for an ergonomic setup, and if you are doing, say, home assembly, and their tools cause you to get injured, they should be liable if the tools are deemed unsafe. Things like that. I'm not calling for this "liable if anything in your house causes you to get hurt" that you seem to suggest.
I never quite understood the argument for gun ownership because of living in a police state. I agree that we do indeed live in a police state, but having a gun isn't going to help much. If you get in a shootout with the police, you ARE going to die. Even a whole city of gun owners can't stop much, with our military on the other end. This is a really interesting topic of debate, though.
ok, mix up on my part. I'd still put forth the same comments. The fact that there was enough pressure on them to withdraw a semi-formal letter still worries me a lot.
I was really disappointed to hear this. ONE DAY after it is first proposed? Wether or not you agree with some of the specifics (the staircase example seems a bit much), something HAS to be done when 20 Million people work this way, and yes, it needs to be regulated. If we didn't have an organization like OSHA we'd be back to the 1800's where it wasn't uncommon for people to die in factories on a regular basis.
I wonder where all the pressure came from. Citizens? Or the business lobby? Given the fact that the two politicians that were quoted were Republicans, it must have been mostly from the business side. If you doubt corporate power, getting this blown away in one day should make you think otherwise.
Also:
Republican leaders had already pledged to scrutinize OSHA after Congress returns from its holiday break because of regulations the agency
proposed in November that would require employers to minimize everyday physical - or "ergonomic" - stresses of certain jobs.
What the hell is wrong with this? This is referring to proposed regulations at the company's site, not even at home. Corporations can't even tolerate these minimal expenses (when they might actually save money due to less employee time lost)? When corporate profits are at or near all time highs, why do we allow them to get away with this? Does anyone else find this to be really unfortunate?
One fundamental difference between law as a practice, and technology as a practice, is that law is basically a zero sum game - ie. for every winner there must be an equal but opposite
loser. This is the fundamental property of a court decision, and it governs how everyone involved thinks about the law.
I disagree completely. Unless you are referring to money only. If technology that is generally "good" is suppressed by a minorty (think mp3), almost everyone loses. If it is accepted, almost everyone wins. I don't see that as a zero sum.
I think you're right. The longer the constitution has been around, the harder it becomes to apply it to today's world, which is what the supreme court does. They are the final word on law.
The root being that the laws can't keep up with the technology.
Or perhaps it's that our political and economic system can't keep up with technology. Or, at least, apply common sense to new technology, or allow it to flourish (technology like mp3's). I realize the author of the question in this article probably isn't refering directly to what I'm saying here but this is part of the issue as well. Keep in mind that technology over time usually leads to a greater possibility of freedom for the common man. The book 1984 comes to mind for some insight into this. This usually meets resisitance by those in power.
Now, I can't directly claim that lawyers represent "power" and geeks represent the "common man", but when you see that either the government or corporations are usually behind lawyers (almost always in any case the poster is referring to), it becomes a bit more understandable.
So when a "geek" comes up with some invention that is either cool/fun, leads to more efficiency in some process, or allows more freedom for people, the geek won't see any reason not to implement it if it's better than what is currently out there. I don't think lawyers have a tough time understanding technology. As far as the law goes all you really have to know is what it does. Sometimes it gets a lot more complicated, as in the microsoft case, but usually, like with any mp3 lawsuit, there isn't much to know. I think the main problem is the power issue. Institutions want to retain their power, corporations want to retain their profits.
Lawyers aren't dumb, and neither are geeks. I think they just have different goals.
OSHA will be relevant as long as there are private corporations who pay people for their labor.
While telecommuting is a great thing for those who can do it, it has big benefits for the company as well. Less office space, less electricity use, less money out of their pocket, basically. It helps to increase the marginalization of workers that we've been seeing over the past 25 years or so. With sliding labor rights and globalization we've seen workers turn from being treated as somewhat human to commodities. This issue is a small part of that but a part nevertheless. The company saves money, and makes you provide the space, and they may or may not pay for your work area. When they don't need you anymore, they can send you an email and that's that.
There is no reason to reduce the rights of office workers when they work at home. Why give corporations another break? OSHA can help carry this out. Common sense should apply, if you don't clean your house and trip on something that's your own fault. But you should be compensated in some way for having to provide your own office space, and have liabilities for the company if you are hurt somehow while working for them in your own dwelling.
yep, you called it. check it out...it's been 2000 in new zealand for about 25 minutes:
? Chatham,New=Zealand
http://www.swissinfo.net/cgi/worldtime/clock.pl
I wouldn't doubt that we'll see articles like this every year until one day they'll have to say that "next year *nix will start to lose its #1 market share." Well, maybe thats wishful thinking, but...
I think it's only a matter of time before CIO's start to see the benefits. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it will happen eventually. I won't got into the reasons since you know them already. Forester is only saying this because of what's true today. I certianly don't look to them for future trends.
These research organiazations are simply too entrenched with the way things are today and how they were yesterday. An open source business model simply doesn't compute in their minds, therefore, it can't work.
Highly profitable open source corporations and widespread use of linux or whatever other flavor don't have to be related. Redhat doesn't need a market capitalization of $100 zillion like microsoft to have a large share of the OS market.
I live here in Minneapolis, and I think it's still got a decent amount of tech jobs around. The old companies leaving is just the changing of the guard, there are still plenty of jobs here.
I'll agree with the U of MN to a degree. I'm finishing my EE degree there. Most of the engineering departments are really good, nationally chemE is #1, mechE is #8, EE is #20, but comp sci is, frankly, shitty. I don't even know what they're rated, but, having taken a few of their classes, it has to be really low. Remember when Arne Calrson publicly spoke about how bad they are?
Whats happening here is nothing compared to whats happening in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has to completely transform itself from the industrial age to the information age, and it's nearly impossible when they were basically the center of the industrial universe earlier this century.
I can't verify this personally but I recall hearing that the tax rates on corporations are relatively high in MN compared to other states, which can be a barrier for new companies. Of course this might be corporate propeganda as well, I don't know.
Minneapolis/St. Paul is still a great place to live. High speed internet access is still spotty but other than that most everything needed is in place. We have a large number of parks, the highest ratio of museums/art galleries to population in the country (other than Seattle I think), the air is clean, good schools, etc.
Well I'm not from Chicago, but I was looking into getting a job there. I don't think silicon prairie is doing too bad, you've got motorolla, tellabs, and lucent, and probably a few others I can't think of. Chicago is a cool city too...I know they have a lot of problems there as you mentioned, things I can usually take for granted here in Minneapolis. I still think it would be fun to livein Chicago for several years.
Some people in the UK, the EU and several other countries are already rather touchy on the issue of US courts attempting to exert their
authority in other people's countries. Some such people are just waiting for an opportunity to show the US courts exactly where their
jurisdiction ends. This looks like it might be a promising candidate.
I sure hope other countries tell the US to go to hell on this one, but don't count on it. Keep in mind there are a few sources of pressure.
The obvious source is the US government. Yes, the US is still the undisputed leader of the world, but most countries can tell them no on this issue. The US isn't going to start a trade embargo or war over this.
The slightly less obvious source is multinational corporations, which operate everywhere, and in this case, almost all companies involved are multinational. So even if the US gov't can't stop people internationally, the MC's can by calling up a local politician that they donated big bucks to during the last election, and say "hey, tell the police to shut these guys down or your career is over."
Just keep in mind here that it isn't really our government that is the enemy here, they're more an agent of the enemy (or a co-conspirator maybe).
European countries have resisted the silent corporate takeover of their governments better than the US, but it's still there. Thats the threat in this case, and looks to be through the next century. The battle for the common man is now with the multinational corporation instead of the government. This is unfortunate because I'd much rather deal with a psuedo-democratic organization than a fascist one.
It's important to note the fact that microsoft is a corporation and most open source developers are individuals, and there aren't many developers that have formed oprn-source based corporations, relatively speaking.
When you speak of liability I assume you mean money. If microsoft is held liable for whatever they have done, generally the only penalty would be monetary, at worst they might be broken up.
Since microsoft (and most corporations) are pretty big, the penalties don't do all that much damage. It is extremely rare for a government body to come out and say "you have been found guilty, your company will cease to exist, your assets will be liquidated."
When we get to individuals, however, monetary damages can seriously impede your ability to do anything, such as programming, and often times people are thrown in jail (fraud, malpractice, whatever). Bill gates is most certainly not going to do jail time, even if it were proven his company has broken numerous laws with him knowing it. When you have a number of individuals developing a certain product open source style, with no business relationship, who would be held liable anyway? Try to single out who wrote the offending lines of code? It's not that simple and our law system doesn't cover this very well to my knowledge.
Is there much software out there that has a warantee anyway? I haven't seen any...you basically accept it "as is" as far as I know.
Anyway, I think the bottom line is that open source software is much, much more accountable to begin with than microsoft will ever be for plainly obvious reasons: it's simple to determine whats causing the problem.
Wrong reasons indeed. As absurd as the patent system is, there is an upside. Getting a patent is only 1 step...it has to hold up in court as well. There is no way this would ever hold up, and I don't think the amazon patent will either. The other variable of course is money, which presents its own problems. When it's big corporations duking it out, usually the truth wins, if they have pocketbooks equally deep. Unfortunatly, as the CEO of my last company put it, "the only people who make money off of patents are lawyers.".
The fact that whoever has the most money usually wins can't really be fixed by patent reform either...thats a deeper issue that goes to the core of our political and economic system. I don't see much hope in this area for a long time.
Well, it is cool but for 1000 bucks I'd want more than that. Using your PC for processing power is a great idea though, this can help keep costs down for future robots, as well as the interface it provides.
We're still quite a ways off from a decent robot for home use. To be more than a novel conversation piece it needs to do a lot of things that depend on AI that just haven't been devolped yet (or at least at an affordable cost). High resolution sensors and powerful servos are just too expensive for the consumer marketplace. It would be really helpful for it to be bipedal as well. I've seen a few bipedal bots developed by scientists but it hasn't got very far beyond the research stage.
I said paranoid to be sarcastic....but you didn't look at the job posts before you wrote that comment did you? With a bit of perspective, you'll see that this really isn't all that amazing. Just a bit amusing.
Before you start getting paranoid, actually go the site and read it. The jobs are for hotmail. Hotmail was running *nix before microsoft bought them. As I remember, they tried to get their servers to run NT but it wouldn't work. Therefore they are stuck with *nix, apparently FreeBSD.
Looks like the jobs are all hotmail support, which shouldn't be too suprising since they couldn't get the system to run on NT when microsoft bought them. I wasn't aware that they were running FreeBSD, though.
I think the reason is that the internet was designed to be trespassed upon.
I agree. How can that be legal if the website is open to the public, even if they have a robots.txt file? Copyright laws and the internet simply don't mesh the way they do in other mediums, otherwise the internet loses most of its benefits. If the ability to "link freely" is lost, the internet becomes more one dimentional like television. If you can't find your way to relatively obscure sites, we're going to end up with nothing more than amazon.com and cnn.com.
If anything websites like this increase competition very directly. Of course ebay doesn't like this for that very reason, and I hope the judge realizes that. These websites help in reducing products to a commodity, which is favorable to the consumer, and bad for the corporation. Ebay reminds me of microsoft in this respect, as microsoft tries to hijack (make proprietary) public protocols (tcp/ip, etc) for it's own profit/control.
On another interesting note, there is a webpage www.dealpilot.com that has the same idea but for online booksellers instead. So don't be suprised if we hear about amazon sueing these guys sometime in the near future.