I disagree. The problem, as I see it, is that we have too many people who do not contribute back to the projects they use.
The problem isn't even that they don't contribute back (which is fine in and of itself), but that they complain when feature X isn't there and then do nothing to help get feature X there.
GNU is NOT MS. This is volunteer software development. If you want a feature, volunteer (alternatively: Put up, or shut up.).
Obviously not everyone can submit code. You can donate funds, and ideas (saying Alsa sucks is not an idea. Giving detailed, thought out explanations of what Alsa doesn't do that you need, and how what you need might be incorporated is). For that matter, just learn to code and start working on the problem. It's not that hard, and its better than reality television anyway.
I do not want GNU software to become the monolith, with feature sets designed by marketing departments. If you want that, use something else. If you want GNU, but GNU doesn't have what you need, then lend a hand so it can get it.
I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.
Yes, but slashdot has this section where we're talking right now. And the errors get brought up, made fun of, and discussed in a far more meaningful matter than any newspaper ever will. The summary itself? Hardly worth much. I'd say that part is the SAME as the current state of newspapers. The discussion? Worth a whole lot. And that is why I use Slashdot as an example of something better.
You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.
I don't condemn for not being infallible. Everyone makes errors. Including me. Its inescapable. I condemn them for pretending to be something they are not (which isn't infallible, but reliable/honest/doers of due diligence).
Another way is for the ISP's to bundle access to pay websites with internet access - and maybe offer tiers of access; similar to cable.
That thought occurred to me as I was writing my post. I dislike it for a number of a reasons (anti-trust/competition ones mostly), but concede that it may be a 'least unpleasant' scenario.
The problem is not with the corporations being replaced; it's that the essential function of a news gathering organization - reporting facts and providing informed commentary - is being replaced with a vast sea of information of greatly varying amounts of accuracy and that is often designed to push a certain POV and as such ignores anything that does not agree to that POV.
This is where I think you are dead wrong. People have this fairy tale fantasy of what they think newspapers are, and its bullshit. If we've learned anything over the last decade, it should have been that journalists are incompetent hacks. More accurately, what I mean is that the skills current journalists are trained in are abso-fucking-lutely worthless if you want any of the the virtues you just listed. The whole system needs to die if we're going to get trustworthy media again. Propping it up against changing technology is not the answer, and will not help anything.
The corporate news rooms DO NOT DO THE ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS OF NEWS GATHERING. Not in any meaningful, useful fashion. They generate infotainment for ratings. They are trained in that one pursuit, and as such no longer possess the skills to do socially useful work. This is why most newspapers are nothing more than regurgitated press releases, AP feeds, and fluff pieces. Reporters who bother to type their own stuff any more get caught plagiarising wikipedia (which is wrong on at least two levels), simply report 'he said,' 'she said' without any insight or analysis of the issue at hand, and get embarassed by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Further, I object to your claim that "respectable" news media aren't pushing their own POVs and ignoring anything that doesn't fit--or are you seriously going to tell me with a straight face that 24 hour coverage of Michael Jackson's death was socially valuable, and anything other than the news organizations pushing their agenda (ratings and advertising dollars) at the expense of the public good?
Your argument does not address the one important factor that will keep good news sources alive - quality. Sure, any random blogger or independent journalist can write about the news, but newspapers and large news sites don't just publish news, they edit and check it (at least in theory).
No they don't, and if you think they do you are living in a fairy tale. Time and time again over the last decade it has been made clear that they do not do this. They quote wikipedia in their articles, take corporate/political press releases at face value/unquestioningly, and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Take Slashdot, for example. The stories are submitted by non-journalists and checked/edited by non-journalists, and the result is many a biased headline or summary
Yup. And in my experience it's still higher quality than any newspaper article. I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Journalists are rarely qualified to understand the subjects they report on, so journalism is little more than the ability to write pyramid-style articles that fit the column width and stick to a 'so-and-so said.....' formula. The only thing you can trust is that so-and-so said that, and that is on a good day.
At least with the BBC you can be reasonably sure they checked their facts and tried to present it in a more or less neutral way.
Again, only if you're living in a fantasy.
The problem Murdoch has is that his papers are not much better than the random blogger, or maybe even worse as they systematically distort the truth. People are cottoning on to this and can now easily seek out better news sources.
Murdoch's papers are not any worse than the average.
Your post is EXACTLY part of the problem, IMO. If people didn't have this bullshit hallucination that Old Media actually does anything of value anymore, we'd be a lot better off. Seriously, listening to people delude themselves with this crap--it's like there's a cult of Isis or something--it's that anachronistic.
An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally. Think about it, what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well. The founding fathers believed in it so much that they used 90% of the revenue of the US Post to subsidize the delivery of newspapers.
Codswallop. Well, not the last bit, but that was two centuries ago. The volunteer fire brigade and volunteer militia were also essential then. They aren't now.
You far overestimate the value newspapers have been providing for the last decade or two. You have confused what newspapers COULD do, with what they ACTUALLY do.
Exhibit A: Fox News.
And the general low quality of newspapers and other outlets is beside the point. Not nearly as many people read them as you think. If the average American relied on newspapers the way you think they do, the newspapers wouldn't be going out of business. As you say, "Think about it."
The fact is that newspapers are NOT necessary for anything you describe.
Moreover, the majority of Americans do not use newspapers in any such fashion, even if they were. "Think about it." In the average national election, where people are bombarded by television ads, constant television news coverage, people knocking on their doors to tell them the good news about Candidate Z, what is the turnout rate for registered voters?
The MAJORITY of Americans don't even bother to vote at all. Even if a majority of the minority that do fit your fairy tale of how you think newspapers benefit them, still, it isn't true for the MAJORITY. Most Americans would never notice. Think about it.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people that just don't get it?
I can't speak for anyone but myself but:
I don't expect newspapers to be available for free on the internet--at least I don't expect anything that resembles the sunday print edition of the NYT to be there for free. The problem is that there is no effective way to charge for them the way there is for physical newspapers. Sure you can do authenticated logins and accounts--but all you've done is made electronic versions of the old way of doing it, and nothing has changed then. In fact, it is a step backwards for the flow of information if you could actually make that work--no more borrowing the paper from the guy in the next cubicle. So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago.
The internet is designed to move information from place to place as cheaply as possible. Trying to artificially inflate the price won't work. We can't make computers that aren't good at copying information (they wouldn't be computers then).
I don't know what business model they should come up with. There might not be one, period. Oh well. There wasn't one before the printing press either. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Buggy makes don't have a business model anymore, neither do the people who made player-piano rolls. Nor flint-lock manufacturers. There's a ton of Benedictian monks out of work thanks to the printing press. Just try finding someone to make a good Roman piss-pot for you these days.
What I don't understand is why you think it is a bad thing that this might happen. The de-corporatization of news media is the BEST possible thing that could happen to this country right now. We should not be looking for ways to preserve corporate control of information.
You can test this yourself with a mass spectrometer. All farts are methane; that's why you can light 'em. Cow farts, cat farts, people farts, etc. That smell that shit produces is methane and bacteria.
Methane is odorless, so no. And that is not the only factual error in your post. Methane is uncommon in flatulence (most livestock methane emissions are from belching, not farting). Most flatulence is nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. The smell comes from volatile organic acids and reduced sulfur compounds produced in protein breakdown.
TLDR version: You're talking out of your ass, and it stinks because you eat too much meat.
You've tried explaining the physics involved...but you don't understand how dielectric heating with 2.45 GHz microwaves cooks very differently than the way a hot metal surface does (and why the latter is preferable)?
Your posts are like a moderate Muslim claiming its ok to study Wahhabbi Islam, by advising you not to get taken in by the lunatic portions of it (nearly all of it).
Why not just study non-psychotic Islam (i.e. linguistics/linguistic anthropology)?
There are a lot of impediments to open source projects. One, which you've identified is lack of interest from the programmers in fixing certain bugs. But if that were completely true on the whole, how does an OS like linux even come to exist?
This question displays a total lack of understanding of how bazaar-style volunteer development takes place. The answer is: exactly like that.
Linus wrote the original kernel for his own use, to solve a problem he had. He made it available to everyone else. Some else took it and added another bit of functionality that they wanted. Someone else added another piece. Someone else decided they wanted it to be more secure, so they worked on that part. Someone wanted to add sound, so they wrote a sound stack. Someone else didn't quite like the way the sound stack worked, so they tweaked it with a patch. So on and so forth.
That is how the bazaar works (though not all open source projects function on a bazaar model, the entirety of the GNU ecosystem certainly does--with people volunteering to work on the problem most pressing to themselves.)
I think the bigger problem is a lack of organization/agreement on certain aspects of the OS.
TOE-MAY-TOE, TAH-MAH-TOE.
There are certain things which really just need a total overhaul, and that's really difficult to do in an open source scenario where not everyone agrees what needs to be done.
No, it's easy. You fork or start over from scratch yourself. It is FAR easier than in a closed source in environment. But then you need to convince people that your new version is actually better, and again, your new version will only fix the things you think mattered and not necessarily those that non-programmer users wanted.
Again, we come back to the problem that has plagued Linux ever since evangelism became popular. When users are the makers, they make what works best for them. When non-makers start trying to use it, they're lost. The solution is to either become a maker, or go somewhere else. Why should someone else solve your problems, if those problems aren't theirs? (I'm not saying that developers should avoid solving problems other than their own, but that it is at best rude to presume that volunteer developers should devote themselves to solving the problems of people who don't contribute back to the project--which if they did, the problem wouldn't be as big.)
But "new career"? The person you replied to didn't call himself a sound engineer, and I don't either. Me, I'm a musician. I could probably build a subtractive synthesizer from scratch, with documentation; I do know my way around soldering irons, though not from audio work. But I am there to make music, and "it works" is a hell of a lot more valuable for me than "it's cheap."
The rhetorical 'you' does not refer to any particular person. As I said in my post.
The one big problem with open source projects is that the things that get fixed are things that are problems for the programmers. Professional audio is lacking in Linux because the people who want/need it do not contribute to the effort of building the software.
What happened to the good old days when sound engineers built their audio circuits by hand with soldering irons? If all you (rhetorical you, not referring to any specific 'you') can handle are black-box audio programs, maybe you need a new career.
Choose your cartel, man. Labor or Industry. There are no innocent parties in that debate.
This is exactly my point. The ideologues of either side like to paint the other as a bunch of snidely whiplashes, which is absurd. Business owners are not cackling exploiters of the weak, and workers are not snivelling leeches (sure, there are bad apples in both groups, but these ideological world views are absurd).
Monopolies and cartels are bad, regardless of which side they are on. Unions serve a purpose where workers are indistinguishable, replaceable, and vastly outnumber employers. Numerical parity of consumers and suppliers of labor seems to work better. But unions are just as capable of destructive, exploitative behavior as employers, and neither side has any idea what the moral high ground even looks like.
Think of 'employment' as a good, then consider the effects of monopoly and cartels...
You mean like labor unions that try to be monopolies and cartels of the labor supply?
UAW, Teamsters, Teachers' Unions, etc. Any union where the employer can only hire union workers, workers who only work at the monopoly wage, and in true cartel style, keep the supply of labor artificially low by striking.
The big (legal) win for net neutrality is that it fucks the cable companies good and hard.
Cable companies are as bad as the MAFIAA. They want to prop up their outdated business model (television content) by blocking video content over the internet (which is vastly cheaper for consumers). Net neutrality stops them from being able to do this, and shatters their control over television markets.
Damn Brit was hot as a 17 year old school girl though (before you say anything, I was 16 at the time)
Yup, and Disney made millions off stupid pre/teens who thought that buying her music meant she might sleep with them (it was probably not so clearly planned out in their minds, but it's why sex sells).
Slashdot Mirror
I really should learn to not copy and run bash commands from people's sigs. It's like russian roulette, but you can keep playing even if you lose.
Disclosure: I arrange for doctors to work as consultants for drug companies.
Would you like your execution to be by quartering, or by lions? Because that's the mood of this thread right now.
I disagree. The problem, as I see it, is that we have too many people who do not contribute back to the projects they use.
The problem isn't even that they don't contribute back (which is fine in and of itself), but that they complain when feature X isn't there and then do nothing to help get feature X there.
GNU is NOT MS. This is volunteer software development. If you want a feature, volunteer (alternatively: Put up, or shut up.).
Obviously not everyone can submit code. You can donate funds, and ideas (saying Alsa sucks is not an idea. Giving detailed, thought out explanations of what Alsa doesn't do that you need, and how what you need might be incorporated is). For that matter, just learn to code and start working on the problem. It's not that hard, and its better than reality television anyway.
I do not want GNU software to become the monolith, with feature sets designed by marketing departments. If you want that, use something else. If you want GNU, but GNU doesn't have what you need, then lend a hand so it can get it.
I mean, you use Slashdot as an example of something better. But Slashdot -- and individual editors, contributors, etc -- fuck up constantly.
Yes, but slashdot has this section where we're talking right now. And the errors get brought up, made fun of, and discussed in a far more meaningful matter than any newspaper ever will. The summary itself? Hardly worth much. I'd say that part is the SAME as the current state of newspapers. The discussion? Worth a whole lot. And that is why I use Slashdot as an example of something better.
You can't lump the two groups together. By doing so, you condemn all potential and hypothetical journalists, even those you think are better because they are anything but infallible.
I don't condemn for not being infallible. Everyone makes errors. Including me. Its inescapable. I condemn them for pretending to be something they are not (which isn't infallible, but reliable/honest/doers of due diligence).
Our Mayor isn't a moron, he's an autistic child.
Another way is for the ISP's to bundle access to pay websites with internet access - and maybe offer tiers of access; similar to cable.
That thought occurred to me as I was writing my post. I dislike it for a number of a reasons (anti-trust/competition ones mostly), but concede that it may be a 'least unpleasant' scenario.
The problem is not with the corporations being replaced; it's that the essential function of a news gathering organization - reporting facts and providing informed commentary - is being replaced with a vast sea of information of greatly varying amounts of accuracy and that is often designed to push a certain POV and as such ignores anything that does not agree to that POV.
This is where I think you are dead wrong. People have this fairy tale fantasy of what they think newspapers are, and its bullshit. If we've learned anything over the last decade, it should have been that journalists are incompetent hacks. More accurately, what I mean is that the skills current journalists are trained in are abso-fucking-lutely worthless if you want any of the the virtues you just listed. The whole system needs to die if we're going to get trustworthy media again. Propping it up against changing technology is not the answer, and will not help anything.
The corporate news rooms DO NOT DO THE ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS OF NEWS GATHERING. Not in any meaningful, useful fashion. They generate infotainment for ratings. They are trained in that one pursuit, and as such no longer possess the skills to do socially useful work. This is why most newspapers are nothing more than regurgitated press releases, AP feeds, and fluff pieces. Reporters who bother to type their own stuff any more get caught plagiarising wikipedia (which is wrong on at least two levels), simply report 'he said,' 'she said' without any insight or analysis of the issue at hand, and get embarassed by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Further, I object to your claim that "respectable" news media aren't pushing their own POVs and ignoring anything that doesn't fit--or are you seriously going to tell me with a straight face that 24 hour coverage of Michael Jackson's death was socially valuable, and anything other than the news organizations pushing their agenda (ratings and advertising dollars) at the expense of the public good?
Your argument does not address the one important factor that will keep good news sources alive - quality. Sure, any random blogger or independent journalist can write about the news, but newspapers and large news sites don't just publish news, they edit and check it (at least in theory).
No they don't, and if you think they do you are living in a fairy tale. Time and time again over the last decade it has been made clear that they do not do this. They quote wikipedia in their articles, take corporate/political press releases at face value/unquestioningly, and get humiliated by prank sources (looking at you Dan Rather).
Take Slashdot, for example. The stories are submitted by non-journalists and checked/edited by non-journalists, and the result is many a biased headline or summary
Yup. And in my experience it's still higher quality than any newspaper article. I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Journalists are rarely qualified to understand the subjects they report on, so journalism is little more than the ability to write pyramid-style articles that fit the column width and stick to a 'so-and-so said.....' formula. The only thing you can trust is that so-and-so said that, and that is on a good day.
At least with the BBC you can be reasonably sure they checked their facts and tried to present it in a more or less neutral way.
Again, only if you're living in a fantasy.
The problem Murdoch has is that his papers are not much better than the random blogger, or maybe even worse as they systematically distort the truth. People are cottoning on to this and can now easily seek out better news sources.
Murdoch's papers are not any worse than the average.
Your post is EXACTLY part of the problem, IMO. If people didn't have this bullshit hallucination that Old Media actually does anything of value anymore, we'd be a lot better off. Seriously, listening to people delude themselves with this crap--it's like there's a cult of Isis or something--it's that anachronistic.
An informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Killing the newspapers is going to make the average person less likely to be informed, both nationally but especially locally. Think about it, what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well. The founding fathers believed in it so much that they used 90% of the revenue of the US Post to subsidize the delivery of newspapers.
Codswallop. Well, not the last bit, but that was two centuries ago. The volunteer fire brigade and volunteer militia were also essential then. They aren't now.
You far overestimate the value newspapers have been providing for the last decade or two. You have confused what newspapers COULD do, with what they ACTUALLY do.
Exhibit A: Fox News.
And the general low quality of newspapers and other outlets is beside the point. Not nearly as many people read them as you think. If the average American relied on newspapers the way you think they do, the newspapers wouldn't be going out of business. As you say, "Think about it."
The fact is that newspapers are NOT necessary for anything you describe.
Moreover, the majority of Americans do not use newspapers in any such fashion, even if they were. "Think about it." In the average national election, where people are bombarded by television ads, constant television news coverage, people knocking on their doors to tell them the good news about Candidate Z, what is the turnout rate for registered voters?
The MAJORITY of Americans don't even bother to vote at all. Even if a majority of the minority that do fit your fairy tale of how you think newspapers benefit them, still, it isn't true for the MAJORITY. Most Americans would never notice. Think about it.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people that just don't get it?
I can't speak for anyone but myself but:
I don't expect newspapers to be available for free on the internet--at least I don't expect anything that resembles the sunday print edition of the NYT to be there for free. The problem is that there is no effective way to charge for them the way there is for physical newspapers. Sure you can do authenticated logins and accounts--but all you've done is made electronic versions of the old way of doing it, and nothing has changed then. In fact, it is a step backwards for the flow of information if you could actually make that work--no more borrowing the paper from the guy in the next cubicle. So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago.
The internet is designed to move information from place to place as cheaply as possible. Trying to artificially inflate the price won't work. We can't make computers that aren't good at copying information (they wouldn't be computers then).
I don't know what business model they should come up with. There might not be one, period. Oh well. There wasn't one before the printing press either. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Buggy makes don't have a business model anymore, neither do the people who made player-piano rolls. Nor flint-lock manufacturers. There's a ton of Benedictian monks out of work thanks to the printing press. Just try finding someone to make a good Roman piss-pot for you these days.
What I don't understand is why you think it is a bad thing that this might happen. The de-corporatization of news media is the BEST possible thing that could happen to this country right now. We should not be looking for ways to preserve corporate control of information.
No. Do you have a better one?
Yes. Know of any other data samples we can use?
They're outside of the faraday cage basement you're living in.
You can test this yourself with a mass spectrometer. All farts are methane; that's why you can light 'em. Cow farts, cat farts, people farts, etc. That smell that shit produces is methane and bacteria.
Methane is odorless, so no. And that is not the only factual error in your post. Methane is uncommon in flatulence (most livestock methane emissions are from belching, not farting). Most flatulence is nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. The smell comes from volatile organic acids and reduced sulfur compounds produced in protein breakdown.
TLDR version: You're talking out of your ass, and it stinks because you eat too much meat.
You've tried explaining the physics involved...but you don't understand how dielectric heating with 2.45 GHz microwaves cooks very differently than the way a hot metal surface does (and why the latter is preferable)?
Your posts are like a moderate Muslim claiming its ok to study Wahhabbi Islam, by advising you not to get taken in by the lunatic portions of it (nearly all of it).
Why not just study non-psychotic Islam (i.e. linguistics/linguistic anthropology)?
Respawning as a troll is too good for an Anonymous Cowardon.
In this context, an unambiguous way to convey your point...
You must be new here if you think that's what he wants to achieve.
There are a lot of impediments to open source projects. One, which you've identified is lack of interest from the programmers in fixing certain bugs. But if that were completely true on the whole, how does an OS like linux even come to exist?
This question displays a total lack of understanding of how bazaar-style volunteer development takes place. The answer is: exactly like that.
Linus wrote the original kernel for his own use, to solve a problem he had. He made it available to everyone else. Some else took it and added another bit of functionality that they wanted. Someone else added another piece. Someone else decided they wanted it to be more secure, so they worked on that part. Someone wanted to add sound, so they wrote a sound stack. Someone else didn't quite like the way the sound stack worked, so they tweaked it with a patch. So on and so forth.
That is how the bazaar works (though not all open source projects function on a bazaar model, the entirety of the GNU ecosystem certainly does--with people volunteering to work on the problem most pressing to themselves.)
I think the bigger problem is a lack of organization/agreement on certain aspects of the OS.
TOE-MAY-TOE, TAH-MAH-TOE.
There are certain things which really just need a total overhaul, and that's really difficult to do in an open source scenario where not everyone agrees what needs to be done.
No, it's easy. You fork or start over from scratch yourself. It is FAR easier than in a closed source in environment. But then you need to convince people that your new version is actually better, and again, your new version will only fix the things you think mattered and not necessarily those that non-programmer users wanted.
Again, we come back to the problem that has plagued Linux ever since evangelism became popular. When users are the makers, they make what works best for them. When non-makers start trying to use it, they're lost. The solution is to either become a maker, or go somewhere else. Why should someone else solve your problems, if those problems aren't theirs? (I'm not saying that developers should avoid solving problems other than their own, but that it is at best rude to presume that volunteer developers should devote themselves to solving the problems of people who don't contribute back to the project--which if they did, the problem wouldn't be as big.)
But "new career"? The person you replied to didn't call himself a sound engineer, and I don't either. Me, I'm a musician. I could probably build a subtractive synthesizer from scratch, with documentation; I do know my way around soldering irons, though not from audio work. But I am there to make music, and "it works" is a hell of a lot more valuable for me than "it's cheap."
The rhetorical 'you' does not refer to any particular person. As I said in my post.
The one big problem with open source projects is that the things that get fixed are things that are problems for the programmers. Professional audio is lacking in Linux because the people who want/need it do not contribute to the effort of building the software.
What happened to the good old days when sound engineers built their audio circuits by hand with soldering irons? If all you (rhetorical you, not referring to any specific 'you') can handle are black-box audio programs, maybe you need a new career.
Choose your cartel, man. Labor or Industry. There are no innocent parties in that debate.
This is exactly my point. The ideologues of either side like to paint the other as a bunch of snidely whiplashes, which is absurd. Business owners are not cackling exploiters of the weak, and workers are not snivelling leeches (sure, there are bad apples in both groups, but these ideological world views are absurd).
Monopolies and cartels are bad, regardless of which side they are on. Unions serve a purpose where workers are indistinguishable, replaceable, and vastly outnumber employers. Numerical parity of consumers and suppliers of labor seems to work better. But unions are just as capable of destructive, exploitative behavior as employers, and neither side has any idea what the moral high ground even looks like.
Think of 'employment' as a good, then consider the effects of monopoly and cartels...
You mean like labor unions that try to be monopolies and cartels of the labor supply?
UAW, Teamsters, Teachers' Unions, etc. Any union where the employer can only hire union workers, workers who only work at the monopoly wage, and in true cartel style, keep the supply of labor artificially low by striking.
The big (legal) win for net neutrality is that it fucks the cable companies good and hard.
Cable companies are as bad as the MAFIAA. They want to prop up their outdated business model (television content) by blocking video content over the internet (which is vastly cheaper for consumers). Net neutrality stops them from being able to do this, and shatters their control over television markets.
If the summary is accurate (I must be new here) this is probably the best we can hope for from politicians in the US.
I'm not happy about allowing ANY packet inspection without a warrant, but I don't foresee winning that battle.
Damn Brit was hot as a 17 year old school girl though (before you say anything, I was 16 at the time)
Yup, and Disney made millions off stupid pre/teens who thought that buying her music meant she might sleep with them (it was probably not so clearly planned out in their minds, but it's why sex sells).