The role of the government is also to protect the weak. If the government notice that the vast majority of people do not understand the consequences of their actions, it is the government duty to protect them, with a laws/regulation if necessary.
Note that basically what the French goverment asks, is interoperability between DRM. That's not so unreasonable considering that the whole entertainment industry are willing to use some DRM. That would be a first on/. that interoperability is considered to hurt innovation.
"If forces you to upgrade. I've gone through several Windows machines this decade, but the Mac I bought my wife in 2000 is still kicking, and still quite useful."
This story looks like the soap melodrama of the/. geek. Not far from the "Brian had been left by Alison and start drinking. Hopefuly Brenda just left Jason after he got his brain tumor and start looking after him..."
I also bought a computer to my girlfriend in 2000. It was a WinME version, probably the worst Windows ever at the very bottom of the software quality scale, on a cheapo "bottom of the range" laptop. And it is also still kicking and still quite usefull. Actually it is even more usefull than before because we are using it to play music/movies in the bedroom over the wireless, what was not its purpose before.
My father thinks computers are unnecessary, and he has never used one (except in case of life or dead )...
The amount of crap he doesn't have to deal with is even more astounding. Off course he knows that other people ( like me ) chose differently but he doesn't care and I also noted that he doesn't find other people reasons convincing.
And in Irak ? It seems we tried very hard to impose our standard to them and we didn't really respect their opinion. ( ok, they didn't like the US. But that's not the only country in the world. ) Not saying that it was wrong or not to invade Irak but there was not civil war. The majority of people looked resonably happy with their government. There was some problem and persecutions but overall they were doing "fine" ( fine as in not too bad compared to China, or some other place of the world )
You are right that we should not impose our standard to everybody: democracy, religion, economic system are far to be perfect so it's fine to choose another one. However when talking about human rights, that's different matter. The whole purpose of Human Rights is to define what's common to the whole human race and what should be guaranteed to anybody: arab, black, hispano, chinese,...
If a society as a whole decide that it's fine to censor some information like childporn that's ok: the vast majority of the population aggree to that, and everybody knows that this "information" exists but is censored. Tomorrow if some breakthrough in science shows that child porn is good for kids ( yeah very very very unlikely ) and mentality evolve, this censoring could be reviewed.
Now I doubt that the vast majority of Chinese agree to have history rewritten for them, and probably the vast majority of them don't know.
I just wonder if the guy was really so dumb... After he did nothing to avoid "ends up suffering some form of retribution over this stunt". He should know very well what could happen since after all he used the same kind of information building his stunt.
So I start to wonder, if the guy provided real personal information. Or if the guy didn't provide the real information but of somebody he didn't like. Just imagine you hate one of your coworker. You just need little : build a little trick like this one and say you are your coworker.
The dark age you are talking about where Windows NT 4.0/2000 times. It was essentially because the majority of development ( especially "consumer" development ) were made for Windows 95/98/Me. Most applications not specifically designed for NT/2K required some sort of tweaking. Yet, even at the time, a lot of companies with a semi decent sysadmin were able to make everything work for the end-user, in normal user mode.
Since Windows XP, the vast majority of major products works perfectly fine in normal user account. There is still some occasional tweaking (generally give the program write access in its installation folder) to do for some small sharewares or for small open source software but nothing like before. There has really been a huge improvement in the last years. In day to day usage you will probably never have to use the "RunAs" command for anything else than system settings and program installations ( and... games thanks to those copy protection ).
Doesn't mean that's easy to *setup* Windows to use it with a normal user. And it is certainly beyond Joe User ability ( default Dell, HP configuration doesn't help either ) But for a power user or power user wannabe, there is absolutly no excuse to run windows in administrator mode.
"You sound as if you think there has never been an alternative tried to public education."
True. I should have said that there was a European bias there. In some European countries, private schools are for all purpose inexistant ( like only the 10 top private schools are really better and generally very expensive and only for "son/daughter of") while the rest ( middle-class affordable ) are not significantly beter that state school in the same kind of environment and therefore are not exactly looked after. Some special needs are fulfilled by private schools : religion, international/foreign school, sport school,...
In this context, I prefer to see $63M spent in 1 school to at least try, beter than experiment on the whole school population.
"That's because nobody in the world knows how to put together a high-tech school?"
I do not agree or disagree. I was hoping that even if that specific school is not profitable that still can be profitable from an "prototype" point of view. I know we are talking about Microsoft so let's assume they will fail miserabily, at least there would be interesting lessons to learn. And even more because they are using "unproven technology, ignoring existing standards, and reinventing everything themselves" ( does that qualify as "innovating" ? )
I guess also this school is a prototype and that a lot of the cost do not need to be duplicated if you need to extend the school ( example to support 2000 students ) or create another one on the same model.
Also the experience itself is valuable. Whenever it is a positive experience or negative experience there will be a lot to learn from the experience for every student in the US ( and even elsewhere ). That's about time that some more R&D happens in the school environment. Hell, nobody complains when a new drug goes into trial or when GM build a new car prototype. Sure tinkofthechildren. But dammage control is easier on 1 school than when the government takes whatever country-wise measure based on phylosophical/religious/political belief.
Not very difficult to avoid spywares. Especially because ROM, once you get them, cannot really be infected since they run in an emulator which is generally an open source project you download from sourceforge directly.
However there is more potential trouble using EBay and you are using real money in the real world. EBay is just an interface that put you in contact with person and you cannot just run "McAffee something" to filter the crap.
That said, I don't think there is a lot of problem on EBay for that kind of product. There is not much money involved and limited market. And I guess finally this just an excuse: it is much more convenient to download several ROM and play everything on you PC whenever you want it, than keeping for 2 or 3 old consoles hooked on the TV.
Or that would be the same than for Graphic card. In the old time of 3DFX 3D card, games used to ship various engine: an accelarated engine and another 100% software engine.
But the main difference with graphic card is that there was an obvious difference between not having the card and having it. ( at the time that meant jumping from 320*200 to 640*480 with more eye candy. Also 3D games were the brand new fashion stuff of the time. ) For physic card, that's already another matter. In current demo, you can't say it is really a striking "must have" experience. Also, there are already many FPS on the market, and more every day. A graphic upgrade is neat but is not enough to make the difference anymore.
For AI cards... well it is even more subtle change. Sure that's fine to have ennemy that aren't stuck in the middle of the street for no apparent reason. On the other hand, you don't want a killer AI that just remove all interest to the game. ( except masters, nobody really want to play against deep blue: no hope to win ) So if we are in a situation where only hardcore gamer training 8 hours per day on a specific game can beat the game at normal difficulty and the rest of the world is left with using lower level of difficulty ( i.e. not using the card ) there is indeed little commercial interest to program your game for the card.
There was an article on slashdot some time ago about this very problem. The point of the article was that the new "preselection" process used effectively lower the overall security. The idea was that, if there is a hidden rule that says what kind of profile are safe or unsafe, it is easy for a terrorist to try to fly a few times. If he is never selected, he knows that his profile is safe and therefore can carry a bomb more easily. That does not happen with completely random check.
Terrorists are not lemmings, they are able to adapt. In your case, the terrorist will simply look for somebody able to pass the screening process to make their dirty job. There are nuts everywhere, for example they can group with some other terrorist group that happen to also want to blow a plane ( for whatever reason ), they can buy some poor chap somewhere,... after all they only need to find one white middle-class woman and they have guaranteed success.
You summarized the wet dream of xxAA, Sony, Microsoft, Apple,... with a minor correction
"we can preserve intellectual property creation as a valid way to make a living"
should be
"we can preserve intellectual property creation diffusion as a valid way to make a living"
Intellectual property creation has been a valid way to make a living since thousands of years. That's diffusion that is a relatively new problem. Intellectual property laws are usefull to prevent diffusion companies to use your Intellectual property to make money instead of you. Idea is not bad in theory, but has been perverted too much in the recent year and nowadays seems to serve only the opposite objectives.
Humm, what you describe is certainly non obvious. That's not far to say that Windows is opensource since you have the unencrypted binary and a computer running it.
A high-quality copy of a movies or music would require motivated people with the right ( read professional ) equipement. Compare that with today when all you need is a small freeware app and less than 10 minutes to make a 1:1 copy of any DVD movie.
This system is not perfect, since only 1 determined pirate is needed to seed BitTorrent. However it would cut straight all semi-legal copying ( eg: copy a movie for a friend or do a temp copy of a DVD you received from NetFlix,... generally morally accepted by everybody )
Unless the world of tomorrow is radically different, it will take some serious legal analysis.
With recent affairs of laptop full a confidential information lost, some companies have become really paranoid about corporate information. I'm not certain they will jump at the first opportunity to store their most confidential documents ( internal memo, contract drafts, internal documentation,... ) on a third party system. Just imagine IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Google,... storing data on each other server ? If each of them need to rewrite the whole suite of applications provided by others, there is no real improvement over Office.
In non IT world ( and in paranoid IT world ) it is already common not having access to online email. So don't even think about an online office suite.
Sounds like an oxymoron. Everybody benefits from the sweatshops except the sweatshop workers. Same apply to slavery.
"would the american economy survive, the lack of sweat shops?"
That's not the right question to ask. You do not build a society optimised for economy, you build an economy that can sustain your society. ( you say "USA has been built based on value of Freedom" And not: "In order to maximise investment return, the USA should accept Freedom as a good starting moral value" ) Here, that's a simple society problem: do we think moral and acceptable to use sweatshops. There is no difference between bringing chinese workers in a US sweatshop or using chinese worker in a chinese sweatshop. However the second one is legal while the first one is considered immoral and banned in our society.
Now off course, the reality is that our economy is sweatshop addict. We hide our moral feeling by saying that sweatshop in China is still beter that starving or that after all we cannot force our "western moral" to Chinese. But that just a convenient facade because solving the moral problem without crashing our economy model is indeed complex.
Currently the only proposed solution is: 1. Give "solidarity" money to evolve mentality. ( like founding school, infrastructure,... ) 2. Exploit those society until their social condition evolve thanks to 1
Off course from a society point of view it is not always very efficient: if (1) goes too well -> no more sweatshop -> outsourcing -> their brand new economy crash and they are back to square one.
In the future the situation should stabilise to something similar to Europe/US/Japan/.... But that doesn't mean that companies like Apple, Dell should not get trashed in the media from time to time, as a "moral" pressure valve.
Especially that planting evidence against you can have tremendous impact. If the hacker can access the private machine of an individual for a while, it is not technicaly very difficult to create evidence that stand up against first examination ( i.e. mixing true family photo with closely looking child,... ), especially if the hacker is motivated by the ex-wife, an employer or concurrent. When you have been investiguated for child pornography you can say bye bye to a normal life. Think about what it can do to your marriage, or about the common belief that if somebody has been investiguated, he is not completely clean ( especially in case like this). And if we are talking about terrorism you can even wake up in guantanamo stripped from all your legal rights.
Internet Connection is quickly beginning an essential element of anybody's life to be able to integrate in the modern society ( try looking for a job without a mail address those days ). In a few years time, not having internet connection would be equivalent of not having running water today.
Some countries considers that if they invest in cheap internet connection for everyone, that will boost its economy and eventually pay off like a Road system. As a part of the economy yourself, you may pay more for the internet connection in taxes but get access to more and cheaper services. One example of that would South-Korea. One counter example would be mobile networks that developped in no time everywhere almost without any goverment help.
Now, as part of the middle class, that doesn't matter since you will certainly pay the same price one way or another. ( either you pay more taxes to bring internet to the lower class, or you pay more because network companies and online services are charged at premium because they have a smaller market )
If you haven't use Windows since Windows 98, indeed that make sense. Today however Windows 2000/XP/... is a "normal" multiuser system with filesystem security,... There has been tons of discussion in 96 about this and technically the NT kernel had a very good potential. ( with the associated flameware about which system is the best ) The result is that it is not much easier to make a rootkit or virus that destroys the system or whatever under Windows than it is under Linux, or MacOSX.
So why your average Windows machine get owned in less than 1 min if plugged on the net ? Because 100% of Windows machine are sold with Administrator user instead of normal user. Since years developer and Microsoft have done nothing to have any machine configured properly out of the box. The situation is so sad that 10 year after Windows NT 4 the vast majority of programs still require Administrator privilege to work perfectly. Today simply running your Windows as a non admin user make you immune to nearly every virus or trojan. If in addition you have a firewall you are almost immune to anything beside yourself ( phishing,... )
MacOSX security is not beter because UNIX is magic. Microsoft would have screwed up any system. MacOSX is beter because Apple decided to use and even improve the security measure available in UNIX. Saying that Windows inferior because of its kernel features is false and only giving Microsoft an excuse.
I don't know in the US. But in some countries of Europe most companies don't want to work for the government. And the one that want generally bill the government *much* more than any other of their client. They also signed clause like they don't take any responsability if they are beyond schedule dates,...
The reason is simple. It is very difficult to get paid. It takes *years* after the project has been started to actually get the money the State owns you. Government has driven a lot of little businesses to bankruptcy. Also often key positions are political which means that all the move doesn't follow a project plan or anything but a political agenda. You project ( and therefore payment ) can be frozen forever. ( By forever, I mean a 6 month development project can be frozen after 5 months of development for 4/6/8 years before being restarted depending on elections schedule )
"Why is it so hard for people to believe that working conditions in the rest of the world simply aren't that bad? "
I guess people tends to believe that because of human nature. They see that employers even in country like EU, USA,... need to be -legally- reminded from time to time than employees are not slaves or pigs. So they wonder what happen in countries where law is not as strong. Also, they know very well that Apple and IBM and other don't go in China in good heart to help local population to develop. They are no ONG, they are business managed by the same sort of people that showed utter disrespect even to their fellow citizen ( ENRON,... ). So they have hard to believe that they behave like choir boys in China.
Everybody is happy if everything is fine in this plant but that's always good to remind companies like Apple, IBM that "Chinese are cool with their people" argument is not enough if they don't want to make the cover of Fox News. At least if they outsource my job, I want guarantee that people that get it are treated fairly and improve their life with it, so that at least not everything is lost.
Actually in the article, they say that for a specific product the average donation was 0.38 cent.
Anyway, who pays ? I pay. I'm a developer so I gladly pay because I know what's behind the development of a software. But I guess I'm the exception rather than the norm. ( yes, I have license for everything on my computer. If I cannot pay (or I don't think the price is right, like DVD) I don't use it. )
But I look in my family and friends that are not in contact with development world. There are 2 categories:
1. What happen if I don't pay. Nothing, so why to pay ? ( the younger in this category generally add some dirty joke about the stupid looser than gave its work for free and how they are 1337 to use it without paying - the parent on the other hand are generally only proud, which is almost as annoying )
2. That's just a {insert any program category}, that's not difficult to do ( we are talking about non developer people, the most they can do is an Excel macro ) why to pay for something so basic. I would pay for something that's really worth it.
And if you little program ( I'm talking small, not apache or linux here ) is used in a big company, just forget it. Don't even dream about it, if there is a way to use legally a program for free, the company will not even consider paying. ( Have you ever worked for a company that pay for winrar ?? )
"If a major company has a multimillion dollar product on the line"... "if a company's competitor has a multimillion dollar product on the line"...
So basicaly the system is doomed: 2 companies screwing the system in their direction doesn't automatically produce the truth or something fair for the rest of the world. Companies will fight using their usual ways : I let you "if then else" patent go through on the other hand you let my "for next" patent in. Also "multimillion dollar" basically means that only patent when there is an ego fight between 2 big companies have some hope of reaching the truth. For Small Company/Small Investor vs Big Company, money still buys the patent.
Slashdot Mirror
"But this is your CHOICE."
/. that interoperability is considered to hurt innovation.
The role of the government is also to protect the weak. If the government notice that the vast majority of people do not understand the consequences of their actions, it is the government duty to protect them, with a laws/regulation if necessary.
Note that basically what the French goverment asks, is interoperability between DRM. That's not so unreasonable considering that the whole entertainment industry are willing to use some DRM. That would be a first on
I guess the GP made a reference to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/21/173253
"If forces you to upgrade. I've gone through several Windows machines this decade, but the Mac I bought my wife in 2000 is still kicking, and still quite useful."
/. geek. Not far from the "Brian had been left by Alison and start drinking. Hopefuly Brenda just left Jason after he got his brain tumor and start looking after him ..."
This story looks like the soap melodrama of the
I also bought a computer to my girlfriend in 2000. It was a WinME version, probably the worst Windows ever at the very bottom of the software quality scale, on a cheapo "bottom of the range" laptop. And it is also still kicking and still quite usefull. Actually it is even more usefull than before because we are using it to play music/movies in the bedroom over the wireless, what was not its purpose before.
My father thinks computers are unnecessary, and he has never used one (except in case of life or dead )...
The amount of crap he doesn't have to deal with is even more astounding. Off course he knows that other people ( like me ) chose differently but he doesn't care and I also noted that he doesn't find other people reasons convincing.
And in Irak ? It seems we tried very hard to impose our standard to them and we didn't really respect their opinion. ( ok, they didn't like the US. But that's not the only country in the world. ) Not saying that it was wrong or not to invade Irak but there was not civil war. The majority of people looked resonably happy with their government. There was some problem and persecutions but overall they were doing "fine" ( fine as in not too bad compared to China, or some other place of the world )
...
You are right that we should not impose our standard to everybody: democracy, religion, economic system are far to be perfect so it's fine to choose another one.
However when talking about human rights, that's different matter. The whole purpose of Human Rights is to define what's common to the whole human race and what should be guaranteed to anybody: arab, black, hispano, chinese,
If a society as a whole decide that it's fine to censor some information like childporn that's ok: the vast majority of the population aggree to that, and everybody knows that this "information" exists but is censored. Tomorrow if some breakthrough in science shows that child porn is good for kids ( yeah very very very unlikely ) and mentality evolve, this censoring could be reviewed.
Now I doubt that the vast majority of Chinese agree to have history rewritten for them, and probably the vast majority of them don't know.
I just wonder if the guy was really so dumb... After he did nothing to avoid "ends up suffering some form of retribution over this stunt". He should know very well what could happen since after all he used the same kind of information building his stunt.
So I start to wonder, if the guy provided real personal information. Or if the guy didn't provide the real information but of somebody he didn't like. Just imagine you hate one of your coworker. You just need little : build a little trick like this one and say you are your coworker.
The dark age you are talking about where Windows NT 4.0/2000 times. It was essentially because the majority of development ( especially "consumer" development ) were made for Windows 95/98/Me. Most applications not specifically designed for NT/2K required some sort of tweaking.
... games thanks to those copy protection ).
Yet, even at the time, a lot of companies with a semi decent sysadmin were able to make everything work for the end-user, in normal user mode.
Since Windows XP, the vast majority of major products works perfectly fine in normal user account. There is still some occasional tweaking (generally give the program write access in its installation folder) to do for some small sharewares or for small open source software but nothing like before. There has really been a huge improvement in the last years. In day to day usage you will probably never have to use the "RunAs" command for anything else than system settings and program installations ( and
Doesn't mean that's easy to *setup* Windows to use it with a normal user. And it is certainly beyond Joe User ability ( default Dell, HP configuration doesn't help either ) But for a power user or power user wannabe, there is absolutly no excuse to run windows in administrator mode.
"You sound as if you think there has never been an alternative tried to public education."
...
True. I should have said that there was a European bias there. In some European countries, private schools are for all purpose inexistant ( like only the 10 top private schools are really better and generally very expensive and only for "son/daughter of") while the rest ( middle-class affordable ) are not significantly beter that state school in the same kind of environment and therefore are not exactly looked after. Some special needs are fulfilled by private schools : religion, international/foreign school, sport school,
In this context, I prefer to see $63M spent in 1 school to at least try, beter than experiment on the whole school population.
"That's because nobody in the world knows how to put together a high-tech school?"
I do not agree or disagree. I was hoping that even if that specific school is not profitable that still can be profitable from an "prototype" point of view. I know we are talking about Microsoft so let's assume they will fail miserabily, at least there would be interesting lessons to learn. And even more because they are using "unproven technology, ignoring existing standards, and reinventing everything themselves" ( does that qualify as "innovating" ? )
I guess also this school is a prototype and that a lot of the cost do not need to be duplicated if you need to extend the school ( example to support 2000 students ) or create another one on the same model.
Also the experience itself is valuable. Whenever it is a positive experience or negative experience there will be a lot to learn from the experience for every student in the US ( and even elsewhere ). That's about time that some more R&D happens in the school environment. Hell, nobody complains when a new drug goes into trial or when GM build a new car prototype.
Sure tinkofthechildren. But dammage control is easier on 1 school than when the government takes whatever country-wise measure based on phylosophical/religious/political belief.
Not very difficult to avoid spywares. Especially because ROM, once you get them, cannot really be infected since they run in an emulator which is generally an open source project you download from sourceforge directly.
However there is more potential trouble using EBay and you are using real money in the real world. EBay is just an interface that put you in contact with person and you cannot just run "McAffee something" to filter the crap.
That said, I don't think there is a lot of problem on EBay for that kind of product. There is not much money involved and limited market. And I guess finally this just an excuse: it is much more convenient to download several ROM and play everything on you PC whenever you want it, than keeping for 2 or 3 old consoles hooked on the TV.
Or that would be the same than for Graphic card. In the old time of 3DFX 3D card, games used to ship various engine: an accelarated engine and another 100% software engine.
... well it is even more subtle change. Sure that's fine to have ennemy that aren't stuck in the middle of the street for no apparent reason. On the other hand, you don't want a killer AI that just remove all interest to the game. ( except masters, nobody really want to play against deep blue: no hope to win ) So if we are in a situation where only hardcore gamer training 8 hours per day on a specific game can beat the game at normal difficulty and the rest of the world is left with using lower level of difficulty ( i.e. not using the card ) there is indeed little commercial interest to program your game for the card.
But the main difference with graphic card is that there was an obvious difference between not having the card and having it. ( at the time that meant jumping from 320*200 to 640*480 with more eye candy. Also 3D games were the brand new fashion stuff of the time. )
For physic card, that's already another matter. In current demo, you can't say it is really a striking "must have" experience. Also, there are already many FPS on the market, and more every day. A graphic upgrade is neat but is not enough to make the difference anymore.
For AI cards
There was an article on slashdot some time ago about this very problem.
... after all they only need to find one white middle-class woman and they have guaranteed success.
The point of the article was that the new "preselection" process used effectively lower the overall security.
The idea was that, if there is a hidden rule that says what kind of profile are safe or unsafe, it is easy for a terrorist to try to fly a few times. If he is never selected, he knows that his profile is safe and therefore can carry a bomb more easily. That does not happen with completely random check.
Terrorists are not lemmings, they are able to adapt. In your case, the terrorist will simply look for somebody able to pass the screening process to make their dirty job. There are nuts everywhere, for example they can group with some other terrorist group that happen to also want to blow a plane ( for whatever reason ), they can buy some poor chap somewhere,
You summarized the wet dream of xxAA, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, ...
with a minor correction
"we can preserve intellectual property creation as a valid way to make a living"
should be
"we can preserve intellectual property creation diffusion as a valid way to make a living"
Intellectual property creation has been a valid way to make a living since thousands of years. That's diffusion that is a relatively new problem. Intellectual property laws are usefull to prevent diffusion companies to use your Intellectual property to make money instead of you. Idea is not bad in theory, but has been perverted too much in the recent year and nowadays seems to serve only the opposite objectives.
Humm, what you describe is certainly non obvious. That's not far to say that Windows is opensource since you have the unencrypted binary and a computer running it.
... generally morally accepted by everybody )
A high-quality copy of a movies or music would require motivated people with the right ( read professional ) equipement. Compare that with today when all you need is a small freeware app and less than 10 minutes to make a 1:1 copy of any DVD movie.
This system is not perfect, since only 1 determined pirate is needed to seed BitTorrent. However it would cut straight all semi-legal copying ( eg: copy a movie for a friend or do a temp copy of a DVD you received from NetFlix,
Unless the world of tomorrow is radically different, it will take some serious legal analysis.
... ) on a third party system. Just imagine IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Google, ... storing data on each other server ? If each of them need to rewrite the whole suite of applications provided by others, there is no real improvement over Office.
With recent affairs of laptop full a confidential information lost, some companies have become really paranoid about corporate information. I'm not certain they will jump at the first opportunity to store their most confidential documents ( internal memo, contract drafts, internal documentation,
In non IT world ( and in paranoid IT world ) it is already common not having access to online email. So don't even think about an online office suite.
"So mostly we benefit from these sweat shops"
... )
Sounds like an oxymoron. Everybody benefits from the sweatshops except the sweatshop workers. Same apply to slavery.
"would the american economy survive, the lack of sweat shops?"
That's not the right question to ask. You do not build a society optimised for economy, you build an economy that can sustain your society. ( you say "USA has been built based on value of Freedom" And not: "In order to maximise investment return, the USA should accept Freedom as a good starting moral value" )
Here, that's a simple society problem: do we think moral and acceptable to use sweatshops. There is no difference between bringing chinese workers in a US sweatshop or using chinese worker in a chinese sweatshop. However the second one is legal while the first one is considered immoral and banned in our society.
Now off course, the reality is that our economy is sweatshop addict. We hide our moral feeling by saying that sweatshop in China is still beter that starving or that after all we cannot force our "western moral" to Chinese. But that just a convenient facade because solving the moral problem without crashing our economy model is indeed complex.
Currently the only proposed solution is:
1. Give "solidarity" money to evolve mentality. ( like founding school, infrastructure,
2. Exploit those society until their social condition evolve thanks to 1
Off course from a society point of view it is not always very efficient:
if (1) goes too well -> no more sweatshop -> outsourcing -> their brand new economy crash and they are back to square one.
In the future the situation should stabilise to something similar to Europe/US/Japan/.... But that doesn't mean that companies like Apple, Dell should not get trashed in the media from time to time, as a "moral" pressure valve.
Especially that planting evidence against you can have tremendous impact. If the hacker can access the private machine of an individual for a while, it is not technicaly very difficult to create evidence that stand up against first examination ( i.e. mixing true family photo with closely looking child, ... ), especially if the hacker is motivated by the ex-wife, an employer or concurrent.
When you have been investiguated for child pornography you can say bye bye to a normal life.
Think about what it can do to your marriage, or about the common belief that if somebody has been investiguated, he is not completely clean ( especially in case like this).
And if we are talking about terrorism you can even wake up in guantanamo stripped from all your legal rights.
Internet Connection is quickly beginning an essential element of anybody's life to be able to integrate in the modern society ( try looking for a job without a mail address those days ). In a few years time, not having internet connection would be equivalent of not having running water today.
Some countries considers that if they invest in cheap internet connection for everyone, that will boost its economy and eventually pay off like a Road system. As a part of the economy yourself, you may pay more for the internet connection in taxes but get access to more and cheaper services. One example of that would South-Korea. One counter example would be mobile networks that developped in no time everywhere almost without any goverment help.
Now, as part of the middle class, that doesn't matter since you will certainly pay the same price one way or another. ( either you pay more taxes to bring internet to the lower class, or you pay more because network companies and online services are charged at premium because they have a smaller market )
With the steadily increasing time Microsoft takes between 2 releases of products this will soon not be a problem anymore :-)
If you haven't use Windows since Windows 98, indeed that make sense. Today however Windows 2000/XP/... is a "normal" multiuser system with filesystem security, ... There has been tons of discussion in 96 about this and technically the NT kernel had a very good potential. ( with the associated flameware about which system is the best )
... )
The result is that it is not much easier to make a rootkit or virus that destroys the system or whatever under Windows than it is under Linux, or MacOSX.
So why your average Windows machine get owned in less than 1 min if plugged on the net ? Because 100% of Windows machine are sold with Administrator user instead of normal user. Since years developer and Microsoft have done nothing to have any machine configured properly out of the box. The situation is so sad that 10 year after Windows NT 4 the vast majority of programs still require Administrator privilege to work perfectly. Today simply running your Windows as a non admin user make you immune to nearly every virus or trojan. If in addition you have a firewall you are almost immune to anything beside yourself ( phishing,
MacOSX security is not beter because UNIX is magic. Microsoft would have screwed up any system. MacOSX is beter because Apple decided to use and even improve the security measure available in UNIX. Saying that Windows inferior because of its kernel features is false and only giving Microsoft an excuse.
"Because anything, at all, that hurts Microsoft is good for the rest of the industry. Period."
/. ?
You mean like a sort of "Think Of the Children" applied to
I don't know in the US. But in some countries of Europe most companies don't want to work for the government. And the one that want generally bill the government *much* more than any other of their client. They also signed clause like they don't take any responsability if they are beyond schedule dates, ...
The reason is simple. It is very difficult to get paid. It takes *years* after the project has been started to actually get the money the State owns you. Government has driven a lot of little businesses to bankruptcy. Also often key positions are political which means that all the move doesn't follow a project plan or anything but a political agenda. You project ( and therefore payment ) can be frozen forever. ( By forever, I mean a 6 month development project can be frozen after 5 months of development for 4/6/8 years before being restarted depending on elections schedule )
"Why is it so hard for people to believe that working conditions in the rest of the world simply aren't that bad? "
... need to be -legally- reminded from time to time than employees are not slaves or pigs. So they wonder what happen in countries where law is not as strong. ... ). So they have hard to believe that they behave like choir boys in China.
I guess people tends to believe that because of human nature. They see that employers even in country like EU, USA,
Also, they know very well that Apple and IBM and other don't go in China in good heart to help local population to develop. They are no ONG, they are business managed by the same sort of people that showed utter disrespect even to their fellow citizen ( ENRON,
Everybody is happy if everything is fine in this plant but that's always good to remind companies like Apple, IBM that "Chinese are cool with their people" argument is not enough if they don't want to make the cover of Fox News. At least if they outsource my job, I want guarantee that people that get it are treated fairly and improve their life with it, so that at least not everything is lost.
Actually in the article, they say that for a specific product the average donation was 0.38 cent.
Anyway, who pays ? I pay. I'm a developer so I gladly pay because I know what's behind the development of a software. But I guess I'm the exception rather than the norm. ( yes, I have license for everything on my computer. If I cannot pay (or I don't think the price is right, like DVD) I don't use it. )
But I look in my family and friends that are not in contact with development world.
There are 2 categories:
1. What happen if I don't pay. Nothing, so why to pay ? ( the younger in this category generally add some dirty joke about the stupid looser than gave its work for free and how they are 1337 to use it without paying - the parent on the other hand are generally only proud, which is almost as annoying )
2. That's just a {insert any program category}, that's not difficult to do ( we are talking about non developer people, the most they can do is an Excel macro ) why to pay for something so basic. I would pay for something that's really worth it.
And if you little program ( I'm talking small, not apache or linux here ) is used in a big company, just forget it. Don't even dream about it, if there is a way to use legally a program for free, the company will not even consider paying. ( Have you ever worked for a company that pay for winrar ?? )
"If a major company has a multimillion dollar product on the line"...
"if a company's competitor has a multimillion dollar product on the line"...
So basicaly the system is doomed: 2 companies screwing the system in their direction doesn't automatically produce the truth or something fair for the rest of the world. Companies will fight using their usual ways : I let you "if then else" patent go through on the other hand you let my "for next" patent in.
Also "multimillion dollar" basically means that only patent when there is an ego fight between 2 big companies have some hope of reaching the truth. For Small Company/Small Investor vs Big Company, money still buys the patent.