Let's see, what would be a better way to go out of business than to give product away? What "free product" does is essentially make the market value zero. No more advertising, no more distribution rights, no more anything.
The problem is trying to figure a way out of the "download everything for free" mentality that seems to have come up. There are lots of bad ways out of it, but not very many good ones. Actually making everything free isn't one of them.
Sorry, but you make an excellent case for why there shouldn't be such privacy.
People are affected by what you write on the wall or post online. Making your posting anonymous (a) removes credibility and (b) allows you to pretend that there are no consequences to your actions. There are consequences.
Yes, if someone comes by and sees you writing "hey fuck all of you fags" on a wall they might beat the crap out of you. That would be some consequences, wouldn't it? Actions, big or small, have consequences - they just appear not to on the Internet.
This means that if you relentlessly stalk someone through message boards and forums to the point where they commit suicide perhaps the stalker should be convicted of murder.
There are some justifications for anonymous actions, but not many. Most of the time it is just as you point out in your post that you want to escape the consequences. Sorry. Free ride time is over.
The YouTobe (and Google) business model is built on the idea that people will supply your business with content for free and you will reap the rewards of showing it with other stuff that you charge people for. Right now, ads.
It is like having a machine you turn the crank on and dollar bills come out. You turn faster and more money comes out. You never put anything in because the "user community" is keeping you supplied.
If it were possible to build such a machine, we would all be millionaires. If long-term the Google plan was reasonable, we could all be selling ad space to each other and never have to work again. Sorry, but the "everyone gives us stuff and we make money" approach is fatally flawed and it is about time Google found that out.
Well, I suppose a standard could be created based on the documentation from Microsoft. It is hardly an independently-implementable standard, however.
Alternatively, a workable standard that is truely interoperable could be accepted that is not anything Microsoft would implement.
I seriously doubt there is much middle ground between these two positions. Microsoft is after all in a position to just say no.
The real problem is that even with (X)HTML/CSS it is not currently possible to take two different implementations and produce the same printed output from the same source material. This is a far, far simplier standard than anything being discussed as a word processing format, and yet there is no common implementation. I am not even sure there is today an accepted "correct" implementation for printing HTML.
How are we going to have a multi-implementation standard for word processing that produces identical formatted documents? I would say it is clear we are not going to have this. This makes the "standards" process a joke.
If you somehow believe that the "presentation" can be separated from the "content" in important documents, you probably need to have more familiarity with government processes.
The problem is that the so-called alarmists want to make changes, possibly irreversable changes, in how people live across the planet. People are going to die to make these changes.
Yes, there is a potential that if they are correct an equal or greater number of people could die if the changes are not made. But that's not the point of the skeptics.
The skeptics would like to understand where we are and where we are going. There clearly isn't enough information or knowledge to be able to make changes as drastic as what is being proposed. Maybe not quite so many people have to die.
Alternatively, maybe it is necessary - really necessary - to get the population down to a sustainable level in the next 20-30 years. That is going to mean really hard times for a lot of people, but at least we will know it is necessary before killing off 70-80% of the population of the planet.
The problem is that both the US and Soviets had an interest in maintaining their population of workers. Starting, or even fighting a war that involved loss of 10% of the population wasn't considered to be reasonable.
This is far, far less of a concern in other parts of the world where citizen and martyr can be used interchangably.
A serious consideration in the US attacking civilian targets in Soviet Russia was that the civilians were not exactly taking an active part in government. Do you really think that even in the face of a nuclear attack on Israel there would be a massive US retaliation on civilian targets? Especially if the attacking force was a stateless body like Hizbollah? Further, if a post-attack retribution bill was introduced into the US Senate, would a majority vote to wipe Iran off the face of the earth? Or maybe just try to find a few important targets?
Iran has nothing to fear from a US retalitation, and we have spent the last 20 years proving it. We either stop them on the front end, or we will do... nothing. And they know it.
How about the difference between the company that charges Google because people connect to their service and the company that just raises their service price?
Assume the same amount of money is received by the ISP in both cases and allows them to deliver their service.
Which is better? That is the question that is coming. All this talk of blocking, monopoly and censorship is so much rubbish. It's all about the money.
And raising customer prices isn't going to happen. Not with anyone that wants to stay in business.
The problem is that pricing has been pushed down to the point where it is almost a losing game to win market share. That's nice for the consumer and it was nice that all this service could be provided without much hardware investment.
That was great when the connections were not being used much.
The issue today is who is going to pay. And nobody wants to just raise end-user prices. While that might be the fairest way to do it, it would shrink market share and be a shakeup for the entire ISP industry.
We could have government subsidies pay for it all, as is mostly done in other countries to keep prices low. That means taxes pay for cheap Internet service. So the people that don't have it have to pay - not so fair.
Someone came up with the bright idea of charging the other end. Google is paying almost nothing for their connection (check prices on OC-192 connections) and is making billions off the people looking there. Maybe they could pay more?
Of course, making Google, CBS Sports and CNN pay more for their connections just comes back around to the consumers anyway. There is no escaping that prices are going up. The consumer is going to end up paying, one way or another. The only question is how many middlemen are involved.
We're still fighting the Korean war. It isn't over by a long shot. Check how many US troops are sitting on the border waiting for the invasion that hasn't happened yet.
Israel is still at war also. Every country that was in the Six Day War still has a no-trade policy with Israel and pretty much is supporting people killing Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Bank privacy laws. The minute you leave the US, most banks will never disclose who owns a given account. Tracking transactions is impossible through just one layer of banks in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland.
Sure, the SEC and FBI can get Germany or UK to cough up some information. That doesn't work elsewhere. Russia? Probably not. Russia through A Cayman Islands bank? Forget it.
There are two kinds of "credentials" in today's world.
The first kind is what most people are talking about and consist of some kind of degree or certification. This proves nothing and is destructive to society and education in general.
The second kind is conveyed by intelligent people being able to look at a body of work and being able to say someone actually knows what they are talking about. You get this from being published and your work reviewed. You get this by having the respect of coworkers that know you are more right than wrong.
The second kind is hard to get whereas the first is easy for some to get. It used to be that you didn't get the second kind without the first kind. That changed when universities churned out people with degrees that knew nothing. A problem in the education system today is mistaking that the first kind has meaning and the second does not. It's not an uncommon mistake to be made.
Today it is difficult prove that you have the second kind. Proving you have the first kind is easy and meaningless.
Wikipedia would like to have people with the second sort of credentials contributing. Figuring out to prove that is going to be a real challange. Allowing people to contribute their opinions, no matter how well backed up by other people with the same opinion does not result in truth or correctness.
Yes, there is a conflict here. The problem is that in an open, unverified, anonymous world nobody can be trusted. I think most people over the age of 25 figured that out along the way. The folks that haven't are running wiki-??? and finding out the hard way.
The other side of this is while wikipedia is a nice concept, what is it for?
If you were in school and about to take an important test, would you trust it as a reference to study from?
If your doctor used it as a reference source, would you continue going to that doctor?
As nobody is going to allow it to be used as a reference for a academic work of any sort, why is it important?
So, while it shows a great deal of "community" and we can all feel good about the contributions people have made to this, what good is it?
Vonage's businss model depends on Verizon, SBC and the other existing phone companies. It depends on utilization of their facilities without paying anything for the use.
It also depends on the customer independently having broadband Internet service, often over a conventional telecommunications companies facilities.
Vonage has pretty much no facilities of their own. They rely on the facilities of their competitors being used at no cost to them. This is hardly a case of competition - more of leeching.
Let's assume that Vonage were to be overwhelmingly successful against Verizon, to the extent that Verizon were to cease operations. Vonage would be unable to service the customers that were using Verizon lines to get on the Internet. Interesting. Vonage relies on Verizon to exist to provide free services so they can service the customer.
This doesn't sound at all fair or equitable. I don't see this business model surviving very long in any case.
Has the certificate covering the signer been revoked?
Are you installing some Nokia application or are you installing a disguisted copy of Claria adware? If I get my hands on the private key for the company Nokia is using to build their application, I can sign anything I want as that company. It is up to them to revoke the certificate. Wouldn't you like to know?
I know, if you had the source code you wouldn't need a digital certificate because you could compile it yourself and then you would know. After downloading the libraries it uses. And after checking through all of the source code and comparing MD5 signatures to make sure you have the correct version of all of the libraries, not some spyware-infected trojan.
First off, the "guy in a garage" today does absolutely have the breadth and depth to threaten Sony Entertainment. The Internet is all about distribution. One person can utterly wipe out the profit from the sale of a work by anyone, including Sony Entertainment. All they have to do is post it on the Internet for everyone to freely download.
Today, that doesn't happen so much because of a number of factors, the biggest one being a lack of Internet penetration and knowledge. This is changing rapidly making it clearer and clearer all the time that one person can out-distribute Sony Entertainment and beat them at their own game.
Secondly, often the reason behind proprietary software is not "greed" or "market domination" but simply survival. I need to eat and have a roof over my head. Working for companies that publish my works has supported me in the past. Today, I publish my own works and still for some odd reason I need to eat and have a roof over my head.
Some folks would like to make how I live obsolete. I do not accept that people working for the benefit of others work nearly as well (ignoring how hard they are working) as when they are working for their own benefit. This was the essence of the Soviet experiment and it failed miserably. I do not believe the government owes me food, shelter and clothing - nor do I believe it is up to everyone else who is working to provide these things to me. My work has value both to me and to people that pay me for it. Unfortunately, some people believe it is their right (and even their moral obligation) to remove this value from my work and pass it around for free - as if it had no value.
I consider this removing the value from something I have done to be theft. They have taken the value away from me. They didn't give it to someone else, they just threw it away.
Open source starts from the premise that the result isn't worth anything and it must be given away. Sure, there is some kind of communal gain, but it is difficult to measure. The recognition is also difficult to measure as well. The one measurable quality is that it is free, and is therefore treated as valueless by a significant percentage of the community.
I'm not saying that open source is in all cases without value, but it is very difficult to assign a value to it or to measure that value. Certainly the creator thought it was so difficult to assign a value to it that it was given away for free.
Except there are protected classes. You can't use the word Nigger to a black person without potentially being arrested for committing a hate crime in the US. If you refer to someone as a Lesbien in an office you and the employer can be sued.
Two older white men sitting around can call each other anything they want because they are not part of a protected class of people.
Of course it is insane that we have these kinds of divisions. All it does is reinforce that these people are separate and different.
The problem with the sanctions for Iraq was that they had maybe 6 months left before France and every other EU country voted to eliminate them. Some folks in the US government thought they had run their course as well, because it was pretty clear that the sanctions weren't working. Saddam got richer and built more palaces while his people starved.
The whole "Oil for Food" program was a joke as well and certainly eliminated any effect the sanctions had on Saddam and his friends.
So, the floodgates were about to open, one way or another. With Saddam having access to even more cash and no limits on trade and no more monitoring, what do you think would have happened?
You cannot offend people in the US any longer. It is illegal. It is called a "hate crime".
Of course, you have to be a member of a protected class of people in order for this to work. Currently, about the only non-protected class of people are older white men. This means that you can refer to older white men in any way you want.
However, if you say the word "nigger" you can be arrested. Faggot can get you repremanded or arrested as well.
While women are generally considered a protected class, I am not sure what publicly using the workd "cunt" will get you. Do it at work and you will get fired.
Kike? I'm not sure. They aren't brown enough.
Mick? Certainly not.
Spick? Hands behind the back for the cuffs.
We have laws now to ensure that people are not offended by others. You must respect minorities and deal with them in a courteous manner. Or else.
A. you put way too much faith in the jury system. Yes, there are 12 people there, but the jury system applies a filter to weed out the competent and the wise.
B. Everyone knows video is the truth. Seeing is believing. Anyone smart enough to understand all the ways it isn't is smart enough to get out of jury duty or too smart to be left on the jury by the lawyers.
Sure, there is the possibility of abuse all around. The problem isn't that such video can be misued. The problem is that right now there is an unfiltered, unaccountable way to put video in front of a large number of people - working its way up to just about everyone. TV news at least has some measure of accountability, YouTube doesn't.
The main problem isn't even the lack of accountability but the immediate nature of it. People like mobs. People feel comfortable in large groups. People don't have to think too much in a mob, they can just go with the flow. Do you know a better way to play people than to create a "seeing is believing" video and have it in front of people instantly on their computers, on their cell phones, in their cars and in their homes?
The problem is how strongly do people feel that you should have the right to insult or denigrate Jews or Arabs? Or white folks from Tennessee? Or black folks from Alabama? Or tell Polish jokes?
Today, in the US you will find plenty of people that will say you should not have the right to insult people based on their race, religion or ethnic background. That to do so is a "hate crime".
Just the concept of a "hate crime" is extremely dangerous. We now have criminal prosecutions that are based on violating someone's civil rights when they couldn't be convicted of the original crime of killing them. This allows people to be tried twice for the same crime... well, not really the same crime but the same incident.
Allowing something to exist as a "hate crime" means you can't say or do certain things because it might hurt someone's feelings. And that would be wrong, wouldn't it?
True freedom of speech involves being able to shout out "Stop Nigger!" in Harlem. Today you might get arrested for a hate crime before you were killed by a gang. Fifty years ago, you would just have been killed by the gang. Freedom of speech isn't necessarily safe.
There is a huge potential problem brewing. And almost nobody in the "online community" understands it.
Let's say there is an altercation between a cop and a young minority person. When the dust clears, said minority person is dead. Two hours later a video shows up on YouTube showing the cop beating the person with a large club. This is picked up, played on the nightly news. Everyone in the town sees it.
Cop is convicted because "everone knows" he did it.
The video is later shown to be an utter fabrication by two college students looking for fame.
Under today's law in the US, the college students can't be charged with anything. The video would never be admitted into court as evidence, but it would be fresh in the minds of all the jurors and couldn't possibly be excluded from their minds.
We have skated pretty close to some TV stations doing this kind of thing in the past, but most know better now. They don't accept just anything. Photoshopping pictures is being done, and some people are getting caught. In the US most news organizations are aware of the problem and are somewhat sensitive about it. It probably would take a case like this to really bring it home to the "profressionals", but we are already seeing a lot of amateur content making it out that cannot be verified and is subject to all kinds of fraud.
But "everyone" knows "seeing is believing" and so they are going to take anything that even looks real as the absolute truth.
Perhaps France is trying to slide away from this, just a little bit? We're ripe for some real juicy stuff in the US and until it happens there isn't going to be any restriction on so-called citizen journalists putting video out that purports to show crimnal activity. And it will be impossible to keep it away from a jury, leading to instant convictions.
The problem is there are other costs there than just distributing the product. There might be some development costs, right? There might be some other costs relating to securing legal rights, packaging, trademark and copyright issues and the whole raft of things that you have to consider when you're not just operating out of a basement.
I highly doubt that Mac Office is very profitable, if it is profitable at all. More than likely it is operating at a loss for compatibility sake alone. It is (or was, as this issue is 10 years old) something that the benefits to Microsoft were tenuous at best. You have lock-in and domination of the office suite space vs. the costs to develop, maintain and ship the product.
That's a laugh. Please read some more. Simple infections killed plenty of people until quite recently. Why do you think life expectancy has increased so much so recently? It wasn't because we are so much healthier today - it has mostly to do with simple infections killing off people from minor injuries and the like.
Antibiotics have changed human life in ways that most people today cannot imagine. Read some. Read about life in Europe before the plague. Yes, some lucky people lived to be 60, but many died in their 20s because of infections.
It was the same in Roman times. And a thousand years before that in Egypt. And still existed in the original American Colonies. Most of the people on the Mayflower died from either malnutrition or infections.
Do not believe for a second that infections are some kind of recent thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see, what would be a better way to go out of business than to give product away? What "free product" does is essentially make the market value zero. No more advertising, no more distribution rights, no more anything.
The problem is trying to figure a way out of the "download everything for free" mentality that seems to have come up. There are lots of bad ways out of it, but not very many good ones. Actually making everything free isn't one of them.
So you are a leech? What have you created a torrent for lately?
More to the point, why do you think it is your right to "take" without any "giving"?
Sorry, but you make an excellent case for why there shouldn't be such privacy.
People are affected by what you write on the wall or post online. Making your posting anonymous (a) removes credibility and (b) allows you to pretend that there are no consequences to your actions. There are consequences.
Yes, if someone comes by and sees you writing "hey fuck all of you fags" on a wall they might beat the crap out of you. That would be some consequences, wouldn't it? Actions, big or small, have consequences - they just appear not to on the Internet.
This means that if you relentlessly stalk someone through message boards and forums to the point where they commit suicide perhaps the stalker should be convicted of murder.
There are some justifications for anonymous actions, but not many. Most of the time it is just as you point out in your post that you want to escape the consequences. Sorry. Free ride time is over.
There is a difference between willing and unwilling. Ask any female.
If it is your idea, it is great. If it is someone else's idea it isn't so great.
The YouTobe (and Google) business model is built on the idea that people will supply your business with content for free and you will reap the rewards of showing it with other stuff that you charge people for. Right now, ads.
It is like having a machine you turn the crank on and dollar bills come out. You turn faster and more money comes out. You never put anything in because the "user community" is keeping you supplied.
If it were possible to build such a machine, we would all be millionaires. If long-term the Google plan was reasonable, we could all be selling ad space to each other and never have to work again. Sorry, but the "everyone gives us stuff and we make money" approach is fatally flawed and it is about time Google found that out.
Well, I suppose a standard could be created based on the documentation from Microsoft. It is hardly an independently-implementable standard, however.
Alternatively, a workable standard that is truely interoperable could be accepted that is not anything Microsoft would implement.
I seriously doubt there is much middle ground between these two positions. Microsoft is after all in a position to just say no.
The real problem is that even with (X)HTML/CSS it is not currently possible to take two different implementations and produce the same printed output from the same source material. This is a far, far simplier standard than anything being discussed as a word processing format, and yet there is no common implementation. I am not even sure there is today an accepted "correct" implementation for printing HTML.
How are we going to have a multi-implementation standard for word processing that produces identical formatted documents? I would say it is clear we are not going to have this. This makes the "standards" process a joke.
If you somehow believe that the "presentation" can be separated from the "content" in important documents, you probably need to have more familiarity with government processes.
The problem is that the so-called alarmists want to make changes, possibly irreversable changes, in how people live across the planet. People are going to die to make these changes.
Yes, there is a potential that if they are correct an equal or greater number of people could die if the changes are not made. But that's not the point of the skeptics.
The skeptics would like to understand where we are and where we are going. There clearly isn't enough information or knowledge to be able to make changes as drastic as what is being proposed. Maybe not quite so many people have to die.
Alternatively, maybe it is necessary - really necessary - to get the population down to a sustainable level in the next 20-30 years. That is going to mean really hard times for a lot of people, but at least we will know it is necessary before killing off 70-80% of the population of the planet.
The problem is that both the US and Soviets had an interest in maintaining their population of workers. Starting, or even fighting a war that involved loss of 10% of the population wasn't considered to be reasonable.
... nothing. And they know it.
This is far, far less of a concern in other parts of the world where citizen and martyr can be used interchangably.
A serious consideration in the US attacking civilian targets in Soviet Russia was that the civilians were not exactly taking an active part in government. Do you really think that even in the face of a nuclear attack on Israel there would be a massive US retaliation on civilian targets? Especially if the attacking force was a stateless body like Hizbollah? Further, if a post-attack retribution bill was introduced into the US Senate, would a majority vote to wipe Iran off the face of the earth? Or maybe just try to find a few important targets?
Iran has nothing to fear from a US retalitation, and we have spent the last 20 years proving it. We either stop them on the front end, or we will do
How about the difference between the company that charges Google because people connect to their service and the company that just raises their service price?
Assume the same amount of money is received by the ISP in both cases and allows them to deliver their service.
Which is better? That is the question that is coming. All this talk of blocking, monopoly and censorship is so much rubbish. It's all about the money.
And raising customer prices isn't going to happen. Not with anyone that wants to stay in business.
The problem is that pricing has been pushed down to the point where it is almost a losing game to win market share. That's nice for the consumer and it was nice that all this service could be provided without much hardware investment.
That was great when the connections were not being used much.
The issue today is who is going to pay. And nobody wants to just raise end-user prices. While that might be the fairest way to do it, it would shrink market share and be a shakeup for the entire ISP industry.
We could have government subsidies pay for it all, as is mostly done in other countries to keep prices low. That means taxes pay for cheap Internet service. So the people that don't have it have to pay - not so fair.
Someone came up with the bright idea of charging the other end. Google is paying almost nothing for their connection (check prices on OC-192 connections) and is making billions off the people looking there. Maybe they could pay more?
Of course, making Google, CBS Sports and CNN pay more for their connections just comes back around to the consumers anyway. There is no escaping that prices are going up. The consumer is going to end up paying, one way or another. The only question is how many middlemen are involved.
We're still fighting the Korean war. It isn't over by a long shot. Check how many US troops are sitting on the border waiting for the invasion that hasn't happened yet.
Israel is still at war also. Every country that was in the Six Day War still has a no-trade policy with Israel and pretty much is supporting people killing Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Sounds like to unresolved, continuing wars to me.
Bank privacy laws. The minute you leave the US, most banks will never disclose who owns a given account. Tracking transactions is impossible through just one layer of banks in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland.
Sure, the SEC and FBI can get Germany or UK to cough up some information. That doesn't work elsewhere. Russia? Probably not. Russia through A Cayman Islands bank? Forget it.
There are two kinds of "credentials" in today's world.
The first kind is what most people are talking about and consist of some kind of degree or certification. This proves nothing and is destructive to society and education in general.
The second kind is conveyed by intelligent people being able to look at a body of work and being able to say someone actually knows what they are talking about. You get this from being published and your work reviewed. You get this by having the respect of coworkers that know you are more right than wrong.
The second kind is hard to get whereas the first is easy for some to get. It used to be that you didn't get the second kind without the first kind. That changed when universities churned out people with degrees that knew nothing. A problem in the education system today is mistaking that the first kind has meaning and the second does not. It's not an uncommon mistake to be made.
Today it is difficult prove that you have the second kind. Proving you have the first kind is easy and meaningless.
Wikipedia would like to have people with the second sort of credentials contributing. Figuring out to prove that is going to be a real challange. Allowing people to contribute their opinions, no matter how well backed up by other people with the same opinion does not result in truth or correctness.
Yes, there is a conflict here. The problem is that in an open, unverified, anonymous world nobody can be trusted. I think most people over the age of 25 figured that out along the way. The folks that haven't are running wiki-??? and finding out the hard way.
The other side of this is while wikipedia is a nice concept, what is it for?
If you were in school and about to take an important test, would you trust it as a reference to study from?
If your doctor used it as a reference source, would you continue going to that doctor?
As nobody is going to allow it to be used as a reference for a academic work of any sort, why is it important?
So, while it shows a great deal of "community" and we can all feel good about the contributions people have made to this, what good is it?
Vonage's businss model depends on Verizon, SBC and the other existing phone companies. It depends on utilization of their facilities without paying anything for the use.
It also depends on the customer independently having broadband Internet service, often over a conventional telecommunications companies facilities.
Vonage has pretty much no facilities of their own. They rely on the facilities of their competitors being used at no cost to them. This is hardly a case of competition - more of leeching.
Let's assume that Vonage were to be overwhelmingly successful against Verizon, to the extent that Verizon were to cease operations. Vonage would be unable to service the customers that were using Verizon lines to get on the Internet. Interesting. Vonage relies on Verizon to exist to provide free services so they can service the customer.
This doesn't sound at all fair or equitable. I don't see this business model surviving very long in any case.
Is the executable digitally signed?
Has the certificate covering the signer been revoked?
Are you installing some Nokia application or are you installing a disguisted copy of Claria adware? If I get my hands on the private key for the company Nokia is using to build their application, I can sign anything I want as that company. It is up to them to revoke the certificate. Wouldn't you like to know?
I know, if you had the source code you wouldn't need a digital certificate because you could compile it yourself and then you would know. After downloading the libraries it uses. And after checking through all of the source code and comparing MD5 signatures to make sure you have the correct version of all of the libraries, not some spyware-infected trojan.
Sounds sort of like a digital signature to me.
Good, but you are missing some things.
First off, the "guy in a garage" today does absolutely have the breadth and depth to threaten Sony Entertainment. The Internet is all about distribution. One person can utterly wipe out the profit from the sale of a work by anyone, including Sony Entertainment. All they have to do is post it on the Internet for everyone to freely download.
Today, that doesn't happen so much because of a number of factors, the biggest one being a lack of Internet penetration and knowledge. This is changing rapidly making it clearer and clearer all the time that one person can out-distribute Sony Entertainment and beat them at their own game.
Secondly, often the reason behind proprietary software is not "greed" or "market domination" but simply survival. I need to eat and have a roof over my head. Working for companies that publish my works has supported me in the past. Today, I publish my own works and still for some odd reason I need to eat and have a roof over my head.
Some folks would like to make how I live obsolete. I do not accept that people working for the benefit of others work nearly as well (ignoring how hard they are working) as when they are working for their own benefit. This was the essence of the Soviet experiment and it failed miserably. I do not believe the government owes me food, shelter and clothing - nor do I believe it is up to everyone else who is working to provide these things to me. My work has value both to me and to people that pay me for it. Unfortunately, some people believe it is their right (and even their moral obligation) to remove this value from my work and pass it around for free - as if it had no value.
I consider this removing the value from something I have done to be theft. They have taken the value away from me. They didn't give it to someone else, they just threw it away.
Open source starts from the premise that the result isn't worth anything and it must be given away. Sure, there is some kind of communal gain, but it is difficult to measure. The recognition is also difficult to measure as well. The one measurable quality is that it is free, and is therefore treated as valueless by a significant percentage of the community.
I'm not saying that open source is in all cases without value, but it is very difficult to assign a value to it or to measure that value. Certainly the creator thought it was so difficult to assign a value to it that it was given away for free.
Except there are protected classes. You can't use the word Nigger to a black person without potentially being arrested for committing a hate crime in the US. If you refer to someone as a Lesbien in an office you and the employer can be sued.
Two older white men sitting around can call each other anything they want because they are not part of a protected class of people.
Of course it is insane that we have these kinds of divisions. All it does is reinforce that these people are separate and different.
The problem with the sanctions for Iraq was that they had maybe 6 months left before France and every other EU country voted to eliminate them. Some folks in the US government thought they had run their course as well, because it was pretty clear that the sanctions weren't working. Saddam got richer and built more palaces while his people starved.
The whole "Oil for Food" program was a joke as well and certainly eliminated any effect the sanctions had on Saddam and his friends.
So, the floodgates were about to open, one way or another. With Saddam having access to even more cash and no limits on trade and no more monitoring, what do you think would have happened?
You cannot offend people in the US any longer. It is illegal. It is called a "hate crime".
Of course, you have to be a member of a protected class of people in order for this to work. Currently, about the only non-protected class of people are older white men. This means that you can refer to older white men in any way you want.
However, if you say the word "nigger" you can be arrested. Faggot can get you repremanded or arrested as well.
While women are generally considered a protected class, I am not sure what publicly using the workd "cunt" will get you. Do it at work and you will get fired.
Kike? I'm not sure. They aren't brown enough.
Mick? Certainly not.
Spick? Hands behind the back for the cuffs.
We have laws now to ensure that people are not offended by others. You must respect minorities and deal with them in a courteous manner. Or else.
A. you put way too much faith in the jury system. Yes, there are 12 people there, but the jury system applies a filter to weed out the competent and the wise.
B. Everyone knows video is the truth. Seeing is believing. Anyone smart enough to understand all the ways it isn't is smart enough to get out of jury duty or too smart to be left on the jury by the lawyers.
Sure, there is the possibility of abuse all around. The problem isn't that such video can be misued. The problem is that right now there is an unfiltered, unaccountable way to put video in front of a large number of people - working its way up to just about everyone. TV news at least has some measure of accountability, YouTube doesn't.
The main problem isn't even the lack of accountability but the immediate nature of it. People like mobs. People feel comfortable in large groups. People don't have to think too much in a mob, they can just go with the flow. Do you know a better way to play people than to create a "seeing is believing" video and have it in front of people instantly on their computers, on their cell phones, in their cars and in their homes?
The problem is how strongly do people feel that you should have the right to insult or denigrate Jews or Arabs? Or white folks from Tennessee? Or black folks from Alabama? Or tell Polish jokes?
Today, in the US you will find plenty of people that will say you should not have the right to insult people based on their race, religion or ethnic background. That to do so is a "hate crime".
Just the concept of a "hate crime" is extremely dangerous. We now have criminal prosecutions that are based on violating someone's civil rights when they couldn't be convicted of the original crime of killing them. This allows people to be tried twice for the same crime... well, not really the same crime but the same incident.
Allowing something to exist as a "hate crime" means you can't say or do certain things because it might hurt someone's feelings. And that would be wrong, wouldn't it?
True freedom of speech involves being able to shout out "Stop Nigger!" in Harlem. Today you might get arrested for a hate crime before you were killed by a gang. Fifty years ago, you would just have been killed by the gang. Freedom of speech isn't necessarily safe.
There is a huge potential problem brewing. And almost nobody in the "online community" understands it.
Let's say there is an altercation between a cop and a young minority person. When the dust clears, said minority person is dead. Two hours later a video shows up on YouTube showing the cop beating the person with a large club. This is picked up, played on the nightly news. Everyone in the town sees it.
Cop is convicted because "everone knows" he did it.
The video is later shown to be an utter fabrication by two college students looking for fame.
Under today's law in the US, the college students can't be charged with anything. The video would never be admitted into court as evidence, but it would be fresh in the minds of all the jurors and couldn't possibly be excluded from their minds.
We have skated pretty close to some TV stations doing this kind of thing in the past, but most know better now. They don't accept just anything. Photoshopping pictures is being done, and some people are getting caught. In the US most news organizations are aware of the problem and are somewhat sensitive about it. It probably would take a case like this to really bring it home to the "profressionals", but we are already seeing a lot of amateur content making it out that cannot be verified and is subject to all kinds of fraud.
But "everyone" knows "seeing is believing" and so they are going to take anything that even looks real as the absolute truth.
Perhaps France is trying to slide away from this, just a little bit? We're ripe for some real juicy stuff in the US and until it happens there isn't going to be any restriction on so-called citizen journalists putting video out that purports to show crimnal activity. And it will be impossible to keep it away from a jury, leading to instant convictions.
The problem is there are other costs there than just distributing the product. There might be some development costs, right? There might be some other costs relating to securing legal rights, packaging, trademark and copyright issues and the whole raft of things that you have to consider when you're not just operating out of a basement.
I highly doubt that Mac Office is very profitable, if it is profitable at all. More than likely it is operating at a loss for compatibility sake alone. It is (or was, as this issue is 10 years old) something that the benefits to Microsoft were tenuous at best. You have lock-in and domination of the office suite space vs. the costs to develop, maintain and ship the product.
That's a laugh. Please read some more. Simple infections killed plenty of people until quite recently. Why do you think life expectancy has increased so much so recently? It wasn't because we are so much healthier today - it has mostly to do with simple infections killing off people from minor injuries and the like.
Antibiotics have changed human life in ways that most people today cannot imagine. Read some. Read about life in Europe before the plague. Yes, some lucky people lived to be 60, but many died in their 20s because of infections.
It was the same in Roman times. And a thousand years before that in Egypt. And still existed in the original American Colonies. Most of the people on the Mayflower died from either malnutrition or infections.
Do not believe for a second that infections are some kind of recent thing.