Apparently some people can't read this without jumping to conclusions, so let me recap.
I said
And this man was almost president.
Note how there is no "phew!" at the end, or "Holy jesus, thank the lord!". It is a simple statement demonstrating amazement that someone could rise to be vice-president for 8 years, and lose out for the presidency by the slightest of margins...and now he's doing this. Apparently the US has such a schism now that this sort of observation can't be read without people hopping on their idiotic Republican/Democrat high horses.
Political troll list? What kind of douche-bag comment is that?
I'm neither for or against Mr. Gore, but I find it remarkable that the man who was vice president of the US of A for 8 years, and almost became president, is out pimping rather half-baked TV channels.
It is pretty telling that so many are so defensive about their political views that the topic is untouchable.
Saying that Chinese and Soviet technological progress was slow because of poor IP is a huge non sequitur
Well it's a bit difficult to find a counter-example because every capitalist, modern society has intelligent people that generally realize that "hey, let's put some rewards for innovators by offering them IP protections". It's only high schoolers and perpetual-students that imagine this amazing communist world where we all plow the fields and information is free.
For a counterexample, as many other posters have pointed out, the early US made "Yankee ingenuity" a byword in an age when our IP protection was pretty much nil.
Do you have some examples of this? I presume you don't mean inventors such as Bell, Edison, or virtually every other innovator, because they were huge proponents and users of the patent system.
However, even if IP did thrive before IP protections (which it didn't, but I'll play along), 1900 != 2005. Today it is trivial to reverse engineer and duplicate someone else's hard work. In the old days it was often sufficient to simply keep the designs secret.
epinions.com remains a good across-the-board review site
You really think so? Personally I think it's absolutely terrible - apart from the "trying to make a living out of it" so-called-reviewers trying to pad up reviews with a bunch of copy/paste tripe, for serious hardware -- stereos, cameras, cars, whatever -- the reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
I attribute this to two probable causes - one is that when these reviewers actually own the product there is a natural tendency to defend what you bought (even if it turned out to be a dud). If someone saved up for months to buy their Kenwood Shittastic 5000, they're going to be damn sure in their head that it's the world's greatest stereo.
The second problem is that a lot of reviewers seem to correlate their own goals (making money) to epinions goals (making money). Epinion makes most of their money, I presume, from people getting SOLD on a product. Thus it is naturally in every reviewers best interest to shill every POS to unsuspecting visitors.
I've tried to use epinions a few times to help make purchasing decisions, however each time I found it absolutely terrible.
They weight reliability and depreciation quite high in their rankings, and the reality is that the guy who buys a Toyota/Honda will, on average, have far fewer problems and will recoup a lot of his initial expense than the guy with a Ford for instance.
In any case their top ranked small car for a while has been the Ford Focus. Is it possible that you were a little jaded that they didn't pick your pet car/minivan as the best?
The lack of innovation would be expected because people and companies weren't allowed to keep any of the results of their labors, whether IP related or not.
Right, just as Pfizer wouldn't be able to capitalize on a new drug that they spent years researching if not for IP protection laws: Not only would there instantly be a million clones, but those clone companies wouldn't have the anchor of billions in research costs. The same example carries to countless other fields.
Far in the past we really didn't need IP laws because even where a product had a large value-add because of innovation, product copying was limited -- you could pull a KFC and simply keep the spices secret. Nowadays that simply isn't sufficient because of analysis/replicating technology.
Are you saying that if Issac Newton had kept the laws of motion to himself, or Einstein had licensed out his quantum theory equation (E= hv) then India China would be economically better off?
Well, there you've gone and shot my whole premise all to hell - a couple of guys (in this case documenting observations of the universe rather than creating, but what the heck I'll play along) in subsidized situations innovated, so therefore that is satisfactory for the world: Every one of the millions of innovations that give the health, comfort and convenience of your life would just as easily have been created by a couple of academics in suits.
If you really think this, your naivety overfloweth.
It is absolutely, extraordinarily remarkable that these sorts of debates continue despite overwhelming, extraordinary evidence to the contrary - what country or group of countries were responsible for the extraordinary overwhelming number of innovations over the past 100 years? Let me guess - it's only because the non-IP protecting nations were somehow oppressed, right?
IP law will only maintain the status quo, with the West providing the innovations (due to the relatively high level of education and number of people in tertiary industries), and China and India providing the cheap labor to produce the goods.
Firstly, both China and India have a massive glut of extraordinarily intelligent and educated citizens - they are hardly behind on this count. However without IP protection anything they do can immediately be usurped by Western companies that often have more entrenched networks, and more financial resources to build and market the product.
With IP protection the intelligent talent in India and China can develop the next great processor, or application, or super-storage device, and they can laugh all the way to the bank when the West beats a path to their door to buy it or license it.
Of course we know that very little effort is dedicated toward actually innovating and creating something new in India and China, and that is primarily a cultural thing because of the historical irrelevance of IP: Why use your brain when you can't monetize it, instead you should go make rubber duckies.
India's disregard for pharmaceutical patents has enabled India's doctors and pharmaceutical companies to provide cheaper alternatives to health care
Of course it's cheaper to steal - that's hardly a profound observation. If Pfizer spends $5 billion on a new drug to make you live longer, we'd all love to say "Screw you!" and copy it for free. Of course then Pfizer, and other drug companies, suspend all research and drug development grinds to a halt. I think you only need to look at the drugs India has provided to the world to understand the difference between an IP protection world and one that is not.
IP is a western invention. Information should be free, and India China have their own ways of practicing this philosophy (shown in their "poor IP records").
India, China, et. all, are growing today because of fruits of IP protections in the first world nations -- they aren't developing their technology and infrastructure based upon nothing, and much of that technology/infrastructure would never have been invented if someone at one point couldn't reasonably protect their ability to recoup their R&D.
It's interesting to look historically at nations with few IP protections as a great case study (not in the fawning dream-world that many Slashdotters present) - China and the former Soviet Union: Both of them had a terrible history of innovation in the modern era (yeah China and the USSR constituents both had extraordinary periods far back, but I'm talking in the communist era), and contributed virtually nothing to the global knowledgebase. Instead they both put all of their efforts into sabotage to try to rip off the latest US designs.
There are indications that China is still heavily involved with this, sending patriotic citizens to work for Western companies and send home IP, where suddenly some cheap knock-off will appear. I'm not being xenophobic, but this has been detected both by US intelligence and by Canada's CSIS.
Well if you see yourself as a part of a larger community, it can be construed as a rights issue. Really though it's no big deal - get a passport. The only people who will be hurt are the idiots that don't plan ahead, and then boohoo to the media about how unfair the system is.
It is telling, however, that Canada and the US, two of the most alike and intertwined countries on the planet, are moving apart, while at the same time the enormously diverse European Union acts in many ways like a single country.
I don't really understand the weird Canadian habit of ordering media blackouts
The US has the same thing, only it's even worse because the information truly is suppressed - Grand Jury testimony can be done in private. A media gag order doesn't actually suppress the information - lots of people are at the trial and it's a very poorly kept secret - it just limits the mass spread of the info.
While it does occasionally lead to circuses...
It completely undermines the judicial system, and more often than not it leads to criminals getting off, all because a bunch of news porn fanatics just had to hear the details today.
From what I've seen the bans mostly seem to be used where what comes out in court will be embarrassing to the government or other powerful individuals
Do you have some examples? Media bans have seldom been enacted, and when they have the reasoning is very logical and for the good of the many.
The press is a business - they want salacious headlines now now now to sell newspapers. It's hardly surprising that the press is leading the choir trying to undermine the ban.
You keep telling yourself that there is no difference.
What are you going on about? Yes, it's a problem when users run as admins, just as it's a problem when a Linux user runs as su. What's the big profound difference that you apparently aren't revealing?
Sure, Windows also have its Administrator Mode and you can make users accounts, but it is NOT enabled by default AND it is optional. In a matter of fact, almost all home computers run in the administrator mode all the time.
There isn't an "Administrator Mode", and Windows is precisely the same that all system (and most application) files require administrative access to modify, just as the HKLM branch in the registry requires Administrative access.
Of course the problem is that users run themselves as Administrator to save a bit of hassle, and this is no different from a Linux user running as root to save hassle (and there are, sadly, a lot of Linux users who do exactly that).
Excellent post, however I think you misread the intent of my post.
Here's my post in a nutshell:
-The purpose of a gag order is to _limit_ the spread of information before the upcoming criminal trial. It is not to actually supress the information, and there will be plenty of sources reporting on it in depth once the gag order is lifted.
-Of course a gag order can't stop anonymous websites....
-...but that's entirely irrelevant. 90% of Canadians being saturated with the info in headline snippet form (the world without the gag order) is vastly different than 10% of Canadians (and this is being incredibly optimistic) going out and searching out a blog and reading the information.
I find it remarkable that several posters really, truly believe that the average Canadian cares enough about this gag order to go searching for information. I guarantee you that most Canadians will read what's in their paper, but that's pretty much it.
To revisit my closing statement previously:
Why is it that Slashdotters so often have trouble seeing the big picture?
I've seen countless examples of this on Slashdot. Big Company does X to try to limit Y, but some crazy hackerz group achieved Y, and a small subculture now can use it, therefore X is a bunch of dummies and it's all for naught. It's so bizarre of logic it's hard to rationalize that people can really spout it.
People are pissed that $250,000,000.00 was wasted, and $100,000,000.00 went in politically corrupt payments. Multiply by 10 to get an equivalent US figure
Right, but what does that have to do with a temporary media black-out? This information wasn't permanently hidden (I highly doubt the National Post wouldn't have a gigantic multiple issue expose when the gag order was lifted).
Security will always be the winning point of Linux - that's the matter of system design.
Wow, where do you get this stuff from?
What is the amazing system design element of Linux that yields such remarkable security? The reality, you know here in the real world, is that there is nothing special about Linux. In fact the architecture of the NT line of Windows operating system has more embedded and pervasive security functionality. Security is far more of a system design element of NT and greater than it ever has been with Linux, Microsoft just has a habit of grabbing defeat from the hands of victory.
Of course then there is Windows 2003 - I know you're probably arguing based upon the same old tired rhetoric from the '95 days, however 2003 is a rock solid operating system. Apart from being tremendously stable, it is extremely secure by default. SP1, released a few days ago, enhances and improves on the security that was even there.
If you really think security is the big winning point of Linux, then you lost the game two years ago.
Well, it did make the CTV news, and the newspapers across the country...
The fact that the information is on a blog made the news in Canada. The actual information itself did not. There's a rather profound difference.
So, still want to claim that people are too lazy to search for the story?
A tiny subsection of geeks that are "rebelling" by reading this information is hardly the same as millions of Canadians hearing and seeing the information.
People are PISSED!
What are people pissed about? This fantasy that this is all a big cover up is absolutely bizarro-land.
The ban was stupid, and it didn't work. It was inevitable that it wouldn't work.
The purpose of the ban was to avoid widespread dissemination of the testimony to avoid tainting an upcoming trial - if you can't find jurors who aren't already biased by things they've heard, you can't hold a fair trial.
Given this, how much of Canada's population would be aware of this information presented on the nightly CTV/CBC news and across Canadian newspapers. A huge amount. Now how many are going to go searching for some lame American blog to read this info? Hardly anyone. While I might have been exposed to this info if it came across my normal news channels, I most certainly am not interested enough to go reading blogs to get it, nor will the overwhelming majority of Canadians.
In other words the temporary testimony blackout achieved exactly what it was intended to do.
Why is it that Slashdotters so often have trouble seeing the big picture?
No, because your analogy is broken. There are a million consultancies that will happily maintain your SQL Server or Oracle installation, and they don't need the source to do so. These are the auto mechanics of the world -- they aren't building something new, they're just maintaining what is there. In the same vein I have never seen a support group truly offering to customize the code, or to diagnose problems via the code, for open source databases. Instead they do exactly what the maintainers of the closed source products do, and fiddle with the config files, reinstall, and kick the tires.
The point isnt that you as an end-user without programming skill have access to the source, the point is that hundreds of others who *do* have programming skills, have access to the source
Ermm, my contention wasn't that I am "without programming skills". I've been professionally developing for almost 13 years, and am l33t.
However I am grizzled and wise enough to know that knowing "how to program" doesn't give me any domain knowledge of the implementation of databases -- it is highly doubtful that without a significant investment of time I could do more than a superficial change to a database system.
This fallacy -- that if you know C therefore you can just go in there and turn some screws and fiddle with the buttons and suddenly super-biggie size your DB system - is legendary in the open source community: We all can just go in and "scratch our itch" in databases and kernels in this imaginary world. In the real world, even experts wouldn't know where the start without a significant expenditure of time.
If your proprietary DB developer/company 'goes away' (or even just if they decide to discontinue the product in question), you are compeletely SOL and have no choice but to beg them for mercy.
That's why we use data layers and abstract away from the underlying DB-system (using DB-specific features, but having backups if a migration is necessary), but it has to do more with leveraging the best-in-breed more than it has to do with any fear of suddenly being without a DB-system and crying for mercy. If you're heavily tied to some open source database system, and it slowly fades into brutal obsolescence, you're falling behind in the game.
The source is available, you can support/develop it by your own or hire in support/development/warranty, now try that with closed source.
The benefit of having the source is grossly overstated by most FOSS advocates.
Seriously, how many people really want to be developing/modifying their back-end RDBMS? Personally I'd rather just install SQL Server or DB2 and let Microsoft or IBM deal with that - my domain is in a different realm, and the database server simply supports it. I'm not going to spend 100s of hours trying to pretend I'm a database developer as well, and even if there were an itch, I (like the overwhelming majority of non-DB developers) am not skilled in a way to efficiently solve it.
All disadvantages for open source are at least applicable for closed source, closed source has no real advantage on open source.
Your advantage - fiddling with the code - is a close to negligible benefit (it reminds me of the ridiculous story recently about the "open source" rip off of delicious).
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently some people can't read this without jumping to conclusions, so let me recap.
I said
And this man was almost president.
Note how there is no "phew!" at the end, or "Holy jesus, thank the lord!". It is a simple statement demonstrating amazement that someone could rise to be vice-president for 8 years, and lose out for the presidency by the slightest of margins...and now he's doing this. Apparently the US has such a schism now that this sort of observation can't be read without people hopping on their idiotic Republican/Democrat high horses.
You're kidding, right?
Yes, I'm kidding. Those crazy pioneer days when people like Edison and Bell invented all they could for the common good.
I was going to write a long flame about the ad hominem
More likely you're so full of half-truths and nonsense and I'm not rolling over for your communist bullshit.
Ad hominem...non sequitur...come on just one more and you have the holy trinity and you get that action figure you always wanted!
Add this guy to the political troll list...
Political troll list? What kind of douche-bag comment is that?
I'm neither for or against Mr. Gore, but I find it remarkable that the man who was vice president of the US of A for 8 years, and almost became president, is out pimping rather half-baked TV channels.
It is pretty telling that so many are so defensive about their political views that the topic is untouchable.
And this man was almost president.
Saying that Chinese and Soviet technological progress was slow because of poor IP is a huge non sequitur
Well it's a bit difficult to find a counter-example because every capitalist, modern society has intelligent people that generally realize that "hey, let's put some rewards for innovators by offering them IP protections". It's only high schoolers and perpetual-students that imagine this amazing communist world where we all plow the fields and information is free.
For a counterexample, as many other posters have pointed out, the early US made "Yankee ingenuity" a byword in an age when our IP protection was pretty much nil.
Do you have some examples of this? I presume you don't mean inventors such as Bell, Edison, or virtually every other innovator, because they were huge proponents and users of the patent system.
However, even if IP did thrive before IP protections (which it didn't, but I'll play along), 1900 != 2005. Today it is trivial to reverse engineer and duplicate someone else's hard work. In the old days it was often sufficient to simply keep the designs secret.
epinions.com remains a good across-the-board review site
You really think so? Personally I think it's absolutely terrible - apart from the "trying to make a living out of it" so-called-reviewers trying to pad up reviews with a bunch of copy/paste tripe, for serious hardware -- stereos, cameras, cars, whatever -- the reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
I attribute this to two probable causes - one is that when these reviewers actually own the product there is a natural tendency to defend what you bought (even if it turned out to be a dud). If someone saved up for months to buy their Kenwood Shittastic 5000, they're going to be damn sure in their head that it's the world's greatest stereo.
The second problem is that a lot of reviewers seem to correlate their own goals (making money) to epinions goals (making money). Epinion makes most of their money, I presume, from people getting SOLD on a product. Thus it is naturally in every reviewers best interest to shill every POS to unsuspecting visitors.
I've tried to use epinions a few times to help make purchasing decisions, however each time I found it absolutely terrible.
They weight reliability and depreciation quite high in their rankings, and the reality is that the guy who buys a Toyota/Honda will, on average, have far fewer problems and will recoup a lot of his initial expense than the guy with a Ford for instance.
In any case their top ranked small car for a while has been the Ford Focus. Is it possible that you were a little jaded that they didn't pick your pet car/minivan as the best?
The lack of innovation would be expected because people and companies weren't allowed to keep any of the results of their labors, whether IP related or not.
Right, just as Pfizer wouldn't be able to capitalize on a new drug that they spent years researching if not for IP protection laws: Not only would there instantly be a million clones, but those clone companies wouldn't have the anchor of billions in research costs. The same example carries to countless other fields.
Far in the past we really didn't need IP laws because even where a product had a large value-add because of innovation, product copying was limited -- you could pull a KFC and simply keep the spices secret. Nowadays that simply isn't sufficient because of analysis/replicating technology.
Ermmm...Hamilton, ON? Is this a Stelco reference somehow?
Are you saying that if Issac Newton had kept the laws of motion to himself, or Einstein had licensed out his quantum theory equation (E= hv) then India China would be economically better off?
Well, there you've gone and shot my whole premise all to hell - a couple of guys (in this case documenting observations of the universe rather than creating, but what the heck I'll play along) in subsidized situations innovated, so therefore that is satisfactory for the world: Every one of the millions of innovations that give the health, comfort and convenience of your life would just as easily have been created by a couple of academics in suits.
If you really think this, your naivety overfloweth.
It is absolutely, extraordinarily remarkable that these sorts of debates continue despite overwhelming, extraordinary evidence to the contrary - what country or group of countries were responsible for the extraordinary overwhelming number of innovations over the past 100 years? Let me guess - it's only because the non-IP protecting nations were somehow oppressed, right?
IP law will only maintain the status quo, with the West providing the innovations (due to the relatively high level of education and number of people in tertiary industries), and China and India providing the cheap labor to produce the goods.
Firstly, both China and India have a massive glut of extraordinarily intelligent and educated citizens - they are hardly behind on this count. However without IP protection anything they do can immediately be usurped by Western companies that often have more entrenched networks, and more financial resources to build and market the product.
With IP protection the intelligent talent in India and China can develop the next great processor, or application, or super-storage device, and they can laugh all the way to the bank when the West beats a path to their door to buy it or license it.
Of course we know that very little effort is dedicated toward actually innovating and creating something new in India and China, and that is primarily a cultural thing because of the historical irrelevance of IP: Why use your brain when you can't monetize it, instead you should go make rubber duckies.
India's disregard for pharmaceutical patents has enabled India's doctors and pharmaceutical companies to provide cheaper alternatives to health care
Of course it's cheaper to steal - that's hardly a profound observation. If Pfizer spends $5 billion on a new drug to make you live longer, we'd all love to say "Screw you!" and copy it for free. Of course then Pfizer, and other drug companies, suspend all research and drug development grinds to a halt. I think you only need to look at the drugs India has provided to the world to understand the difference between an IP protection world and one that is not.
IP is a western invention. Information should be free, and India China have their own ways of practicing this philosophy (shown in their "poor IP records").
India, China, et. all, are growing today because of fruits of IP protections in the first world nations -- they aren't developing their technology and infrastructure based upon nothing, and much of that technology/infrastructure would never have been invented if someone at one point couldn't reasonably protect their ability to recoup their R&D.
It's interesting to look historically at nations with few IP protections as a great case study (not in the fawning dream-world that many Slashdotters present) - China and the former Soviet Union: Both of them had a terrible history of innovation in the modern era (yeah China and the USSR constituents both had extraordinary periods far back, but I'm talking in the communist era), and contributed virtually nothing to the global knowledgebase. Instead they both put all of their efforts into sabotage to try to rip off the latest US designs.
There are indications that China is still heavily involved with this, sending patriotic citizens to work for Western companies and send home IP, where suddenly some cheap knock-off will appear. I'm not being xenophobic, but this has been detected both by US intelligence and by Canada's CSIS.
+5 Funny. You should read EURSOC [eursoc.com] some time.
Wow, so you mean everything isn't popsicles and puppy dogs? How eye opening for me.
Well if you see yourself as a part of a larger community, it can be construed as a rights issue. Really though it's no big deal - get a passport. The only people who will be hurt are the idiots that don't plan ahead, and then boohoo to the media about how unfair the system is.
It is telling, however, that Canada and the US, two of the most alike and intertwined countries on the planet, are moving apart, while at the same time the enormously diverse European Union acts in many ways like a single country.
I don't really understand the weird Canadian habit of ordering media blackouts
The US has the same thing, only it's even worse because the information truly is suppressed - Grand Jury testimony can be done in private. A media gag order doesn't actually suppress the information - lots of people are at the trial and it's a very poorly kept secret - it just limits the mass spread of the info.
While it does occasionally lead to circuses...
It completely undermines the judicial system, and more often than not it leads to criminals getting off, all because a bunch of news porn fanatics just had to hear the details today.
From what I've seen the bans mostly seem to be used where what comes out in court will be embarrassing to the government or other powerful individuals
Do you have some examples? Media bans have seldom been enacted, and when they have the reasoning is very logical and for the good of the many.
The press is a business - they want salacious headlines now now now to sell newspapers. It's hardly surprising that the press is leading the choir trying to undermine the ban.
You keep telling yourself that there is no difference.
What are you going on about? Yes, it's a problem when users run as admins, just as it's a problem when a Linux user runs as su. What's the big profound difference that you apparently aren't revealing?
Sure, Windows also have its Administrator Mode and you can make users accounts, but it is NOT enabled by default AND it is optional. In a matter of fact, almost all home computers run in the administrator mode all the time.
There isn't an "Administrator Mode", and Windows is precisely the same that all system (and most application) files require administrative access to modify, just as the HKLM branch in the registry requires Administrative access.
Of course the problem is that users run themselves as Administrator to save a bit of hassle, and this is no different from a Linux user running as root to save hassle (and there are, sadly, a lot of Linux users who do exactly that).
Excellent post, however I think you misread the intent of my post.
Here's my post in a nutshell:
-The purpose of a gag order is to _limit_ the spread of information before the upcoming criminal trial. It is not to actually supress the information, and there will be plenty of sources reporting on it in depth once the gag order is lifted.
-Of course a gag order can't stop anonymous websites....
-...but that's entirely irrelevant. 90% of Canadians being saturated with the info in headline snippet form (the world without the gag order) is vastly different than 10% of Canadians (and this is being incredibly optimistic) going out and searching out a blog and reading the information.
I find it remarkable that several posters really, truly believe that the average Canadian cares enough about this gag order to go searching for information. I guarantee you that most Canadians will read what's in their paper, but that's pretty much it.
To revisit my closing statement previously:
Why is it that Slashdotters so often have trouble seeing the big picture?
I've seen countless examples of this on Slashdot. Big Company does X to try to limit Y, but some crazy hackerz group achieved Y, and a small subculture now can use it, therefore X is a bunch of dummies and it's all for naught. It's so bizarre of logic it's hard to rationalize that people can really spout it.
People are pissed that $250,000,000.00 was wasted, and $100,000,000.00 went in politically corrupt payments. Multiply by 10 to get an equivalent US figure
Right, but what does that have to do with a temporary media black-out? This information wasn't permanently hidden (I highly doubt the National Post wouldn't have a gigantic multiple issue expose when the gag order was lifted).
Security will always be the winning point of Linux - that's the matter of system design.
Wow, where do you get this stuff from?
What is the amazing system design element of Linux that yields such remarkable security? The reality, you know here in the real world, is that there is nothing special about Linux. In fact the architecture of the NT line of Windows operating system has more embedded and pervasive security functionality. Security is far more of a system design element of NT and greater than it ever has been with Linux, Microsoft just has a habit of grabbing defeat from the hands of victory.
Of course then there is Windows 2003 - I know you're probably arguing based upon the same old tired rhetoric from the '95 days, however 2003 is a rock solid operating system. Apart from being tremendously stable, it is extremely secure by default. SP1, released a few days ago, enhances and improves on the security that was even there.
If you really think security is the big winning point of Linux, then you lost the game two years ago.
Well, it did make the CTV news, and the newspapers across the country ...
The fact that the information is on a blog made the news in Canada. The actual information itself did not. There's a rather profound difference.
So, still want to claim that people are too lazy to search for the story?
A tiny subsection of geeks that are "rebelling" by reading this information is hardly the same as millions of Canadians hearing and seeing the information.
People are PISSED!
What are people pissed about? This fantasy that this is all a big cover up is absolutely bizarro-land.
The ban was stupid, and it didn't work. It was inevitable that it wouldn't work.
The purpose of the ban was to avoid widespread dissemination of the testimony to avoid tainting an upcoming trial - if you can't find jurors who aren't already biased by things they've heard, you can't hold a fair trial.
Given this, how much of Canada's population would be aware of this information presented on the nightly CTV/CBC news and across Canadian newspapers. A huge amount. Now how many are going to go searching for some lame American blog to read this info? Hardly anyone. While I might have been exposed to this info if it came across my normal news channels, I most certainly am not interested enough to go reading blogs to get it, nor will the overwhelming majority of Canadians.
In other words the temporary testimony blackout achieved exactly what it was intended to do.
Why is it that Slashdotters so often have trouble seeing the big picture?
See the problem?
No, because your analogy is broken. There are a million consultancies that will happily maintain your SQL Server or Oracle installation, and they don't need the source to do so. These are the auto mechanics of the world -- they aren't building something new, they're just maintaining what is there. In the same vein I have never seen a support group truly offering to customize the code, or to diagnose problems via the code, for open source databases. Instead they do exactly what the maintainers of the closed source products do, and fiddle with the config files, reinstall, and kick the tires.
The point isnt that you as an end-user without programming skill have access to the source, the point is that hundreds of others who *do* have programming skills, have access to the source
Ermm, my contention wasn't that I am "without programming skills". I've been professionally developing for almost 13 years, and am l33t.
However I am grizzled and wise enough to know that knowing "how to program" doesn't give me any domain knowledge of the implementation of databases -- it is highly doubtful that without a significant investment of time I could do more than a superficial change to a database system.
This fallacy -- that if you know C therefore you can just go in there and turn some screws and fiddle with the buttons and suddenly super-biggie size your DB system - is legendary in the open source community: We all can just go in and "scratch our itch" in databases and kernels in this imaginary world. In the real world, even experts wouldn't know where the start without a significant expenditure of time.
If your proprietary DB developer/company 'goes away' (or even just if they decide to discontinue the product in question), you are compeletely SOL and have no choice but to beg them for mercy.
That's why we use data layers and abstract away from the underlying DB-system (using DB-specific features, but having backups if a migration is necessary), but it has to do more with leveraging the best-in-breed more than it has to do with any fear of suddenly being without a DB-system and crying for mercy. If you're heavily tied to some open source database system, and it slowly fades into brutal obsolescence, you're falling behind in the game.
The source is available, you can support/develop it by your own or hire in support/development/warranty, now try that with closed source.
The benefit of having the source is grossly overstated by most FOSS advocates.
Seriously, how many people really want to be developing/modifying their back-end RDBMS? Personally I'd rather just install SQL Server or DB2 and let Microsoft or IBM deal with that - my domain is in a different realm, and the database server simply supports it. I'm not going to spend 100s of hours trying to pretend I'm a database developer as well, and even if there were an itch, I (like the overwhelming majority of non-DB developers) am not skilled in a way to efficiently solve it.
All disadvantages for open source are at least applicable for closed source, closed source has no real advantage on open source.
Your advantage - fiddling with the code - is a close to negligible benefit (it reminds me of the ridiculous story recently about the "open source" rip off of delicious).