Hopefully fossils like him will just die off or (even better) get thrown out of office and replaced by people who aren't utterly clueless.
What we need is to elect (to Congress) a bunch of 25 year olds who are young enough to be technologically brillient and inexperienced enough not to be "bought" by corporate america.
That would be a pipe dream though... smart *and* moral *and* technologically savvy? Keep dreaming...
I saw that my post last week got modded Insightful, and thought I'd circle-back on this dead thread...
I agree with you that Otto seemed to be Trolling, though with semi-thought out arguments. When he tried to say "Pay $200 now and $10 per month..." is cheaper than "Pay $500 now" he was wrong.
What is more wrong is that the device isn't worth $500. With any level of technical expertise, you be able to pay $200-300 to get the hardware and then Flash a Kernel with a File System onto the box and having a functioning Tivo. Is it be worth it to most people to let Tivo do this at a $200-300 premium? Yes, TV without commercials is worth that much. Satellite Radio bases their business model around the fact that people will pay to avoid commercials. What I think is wrong is that Otto seems to feel that "evil companies/individuals" are going to undermine Tivo by producing the $200-300 boxes and distributing them without the built-in "subscription" that Tivo charges.
As far as razors go... a better analogy is needed. For the last 3 or 4 years I've been buying the throw-away 3-blade ones that come 4 in a pack for like $7. I get about 2 months out of each razor before it becomes to abrasive for me. Mind you, I shave every other day, unless professionalism demands otherwise, but I think spending $10-15 per year on razors is completely affordable.
What gets me is cellular telephone vendors selling you a phone and then telling you that you need to pay $0.15 every time somebody wants to send a text message, and if you don't like it... the solution is to add a $5/month "plan" so that receiving/sending more than 30 of these tiny messages per month is "affordable". That adds $60 to my bill per year... so screw that. I asked them to turn off the damned service on my phone, and they can keep it off until they understand that 500 text messages on their network takes up the same bandwidth as 1 or 2 minutes of talk time... and it should be priced that way.
Yes, but Windows 8 is going to address that issue.
Why should they constrain themselves to following a normal, pre-establishing versioning system? They could turn to the Alphabet to get their next version name "Windows H". Or Roman Numerals would be a change of pace "Windows VIII" (like the Super Bowl). Or even spelling out the number as in "Windows Eight".
Most likely, they will pull some randomness out of thin air like they've done 3 times already (resorting to year in 1995-1998-and-2000, random two letter combinations for ME-XP, and a full word Bob-Vista).
After "Windows 7", I've got my fingers crossed for them using an onomatopoeia for their version name, as in "Windows Woof-Woof" or "Windows Thud".
Does it support licensing options for books that author's want to keep some control over? For instance, can a work that is Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs be posted there?
We do have robots to do farming for us... they still require at least one operator, though. There are farms where they fire up their tractor that gets its location from the GPS and goes to work, while a guy sits behind the wheel as a purely safety measure. (I can't cite anything off the top of my head... though automation is something I looked at in college - the aspect of automating something productive (like farming) gets my attention when it comes up on the Discovery Channel.
asking RMS how you are going to pay your rent/mortgage is just irrelevant.
No, it is not irrelevant... perhaps I didn't make my point as clearly as I could have. Somebody said Stallman squats in MIT to live. That's fine for him, but not fine for Joe "Proprietary Developer" Blow, who has a family and mortgage in the suburbs. Joe needs these things taken care of, and despite his best efforts, he has been unsuccessful in finding a job with Red Hat or Sun - where getting paid to program open source is an option. Joe needs his job at XYZ Corp, which produces proprietary software.
Thus, despite having the opinion that Closed Source is bad, Joe eeks out a living to support his family - so his kids can get advantages that he never had - by writing Closed Source code.
Thus, I made my point about the Alcoholics in Seattle... which you missed... as an answer to the follow-up question (What other way?) to the answer you gave, "Do it some other way".
Then again, the answer I gave is very similar to the suggestion Galileo made that the Earth revolves around the Sun -- in that it goes against the grain of conventional wisdom... so it is reasonable if you didn't understand.
I've read through the conversation between QuantumG and Valacosa dating back to this post.
The whaler analogy bad, but this is insightful:
Church: You can't say the Sun is the centre of the universe. It's amoral.
Galileo: But all the evidence says it is!
Church: That's not our problem.
How about:
Stallman: Don't pay your mortgage, don't program closed-source software. It's amoral. Programmer: But I need a roof over over my head. Banker: Yeah, we'll foreclose on the programmer's condo if he doesn't pay us. Stallman: All two million programmers in the country? Good luck with that.
The point is that maybe the status quo is wrong. Think of the benefit to the country/world if two million developer's were freed from the status quo of paying their mortgage. Shit... they let alcoholics live in Seattle for next to nothing, so why can't they give it up for a group who actually does public good?
You can argue that the Linux world is actually more visibly attuned to the consumer market, while Windows is more like Communism - the State of Gates decides what the factories will make, and the end users put up with what they are given.
I've always thought of Mega-Corporations like MS, WMT, IBM, etc being like a feudalism with the working class being their serfs.
Also, in Communism the economy works such that everybody is entitled to the same quantity of goods. For the "State of Gates" to be Communistic, you wouldn't pay for it.
What I think you mean is that Windows is Authoritarian or Totalitarian, while Linux operates more like a Free Market. As I pointed out, though, a free market for software (because supply >> demand, drives price to $0) actually is Communistic because the State can offer every member of the society a copy that they wouldn't need to pay for.
I am not an expert on the Tivo situation, so if I got something wrong, I would like to understand why.
I was aware that Tivo did eventually concede and publish their source code on their website (and they should be commended for that), so if I wanted to I could build a "Tivo" system.
I don't understand what is preventing people from writing software and running it on the Tivo box. Is this control of there own hardware what should upset me?
Personally, I have no interest in Tivo (because I don't watch much TV)... but I would want control of other specialized computing devices to do innovative things with.
I expect the Linux SmartPhone that was discussed here within the last week to lead to innovation in this area...
Oh - nevermind - I understand now... Tivo is bad because I can't change the software on it. If Blackberry or iPhone ran Linux, but didn't allow you to change the software on it... they would be just as bad.
Thank you for pointing out where I was wrong... and telling me why I was wrong so that I could understand what is actually going on the in example I tried to cite. Kudos.
GPL 3 reaches past this (some would say overreaches), and controls attempts to control the hardware designs of the user.
If you consider the company that makes Tivo to be a "user", and not the people who are actually watching their digitally recorded television programs, then you would be correct in stating that the controls are over-reaching.
I prefer to view somebody who is using the device a user, though. The company making money off of it is simply a vendor.
And GPLv3 doesn't say "You cannot make money from selling your product" to the Tivo people. They say, "Play fair and share the innovative features that you added to the core software that you paid no money for."
The Tivo company has every right to keep selling hardware with its tailored software on it... as long as they give users the rights to change and continue to innovate it.
This makes it easier for Tivo competition, which would only need to design their own hardware and then run the same software as Tivo. This competition arises not from a "control" of the GPLv3, but because it isn't right for Tivo to "control" the 2% of code that they made to produce their box.
Thank you for the information about MA... here is what I quote them:
To the Government of Massachusetts,
I reviewed the major changes to the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) v4.0, and I would like to offer my comments to an addition that was made to the Information Domain.
I feel that it would be a mistake to add ECMA-376 as a standard on the basis that the standard, as approved by ECMA International, can only be completely implemented by a single organization. The Guidelines section of the Open XML File Format on your page points out that Microsoft, Novell, and Corel will all support the standard, but this hides the fact that there are certain sections of the OOXML specification which cannot be implemented because of (a) software patents held by Microsoft Corporation, and (b) binary embedding within the format by the Microsoft Corporation. The proprietary nature inherent in OOXML does not make for a good standard, because in the end there will be a reliance on Microsoft Corporation and not Novell or Corel to fix data corruption problems since they are the only ones in control of the full body of ECMA-376.
It is worth noting that there is no value added by having OOXML in addition to ODF. These are competing standards which cover the same areas of the Information Domain (that is: Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations). It seems silly to have two standards for doing the same type of things. This is a recipe for chaos. Please standardize on a single standard for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
It is also worth mentioning the track record of the major products that supported the Legacy versions of these information standards. OpenOffice, the most popular suite of office software which supports ODF, has supported (to the best of its capability) the ability to Open, Read, and Modify *.doc, *.xls, and *.ppt since version 1.0. Meanwhile, without a special patch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter), it is impossible to Open, Read, and Modify *.odt, *.ods, and *.odp files in Microsoft Office.
The major reason to have standards is to prevent Vendor Lock-in, and it is evident that ECMA-376 is intended to push the Microsoft Office suite of products, so the Microsoft can position itself to sell and resell licenses to the state every couple of years. Please do not opt to take a path down a road that will lead to costly software purchases when there are many residents of Massachusetts who are active contributors to projects that enhance and improve products that support the ODF format everyday. Instead, use the software that is partially developed for you by your taxpayers, instead of using your taxpayers money to buy software that is developed by monopolizing corporations under the false pretensions of open standards.
They're supposed to be setting up mechanisms for cooperation. But all too often they become political battlegrounds, where each member organization tries to warp the standard to make things easier for itself and to sabotage its competition.
But when the member organizations are "Microsoft" and "The Public" it is easy to see which is trying to warp the standard in a greedy way and which is trying to create a genuinely beneficial standard that all can follow.
Never lose sight of what the "P" in GPL stands for... because that is the power which Openness and Community bring to make the world a better place for its own interests (that is, the Public interest) and a worse place for anybody who would compete with it (Private interests - whether they be in Redmond or anywhere else in the world).
And don't applaud IBM to loudly, either. They have a strong set of their own proprietary software tools (Rational comes to mind, and I think they just bought Telelogic).
These brands have tools which put comparable Open Source tools to shame in the professional organizations that IBM sells them too.
No, IBM alone won't sue Microsoft. Nor will Sun or Red Hat. And as long as Microsoft keeps its code closed... you'll never see anything but the remenants of old BSD code packaged with Windows...
The victory will be declared when people wake up and realize the folly in using Windows and the advantages of Linux (and Open Source, as a whole). Unfortunately... there are a lot of software engineers and developers who still don't see this - so it will be a while before "everybody else" can be expected to understand.
Can a lawyer from the EFF or anti-**AA camp find a handful of users who had their personal liberties violated by the malicious installation of MPAA-brand spyware. I don't know if you could attach a dollar amount to the value that stealing your personal information is.... but I would imagine a target of a couple hundred thousand dollars per user would be fair (what's the equal to? about pirating 10 songs, before the extortionary "RIAA/MPAA deal").
Once the MPAA is paying out millions of dollars, maybe they will rethink their business model and start making good films instead of suing their customers.
You also said you would pay an artist directly for their creative energies... which suggests that you find value in their intellect. You would pay to see a band play their music. Wouldn't you find more value in seeing a band come to your neighborhood to play songs that they wrote and are known for, then for a local band to play a concert of mainly cover songs?
What about other intellectual property that is harder to create than a song? You suggest that bands should be paid for their performances, but what about a painter or novelist who cannot "perform" their art?
Living within the economy is as important for an artist as it is for you. Say that you want to destroy the concept that anybody can own an audio recording, but to truly destroy intellectual property would be to destroy the economy as we know it. Anything less than that, is simply a "reform".
I know this makes me a crazy radical, but I think I've had just about enough of being pissed on and told that it's a shower of gold.
Radical? Maybe. Crazy? Not at all. I like how you roll the entire group who buy music into the same group of people who enjoy the "golden shower" fetish. Quite frankly, that downgrades people with that particular fetish, though.
But since you (like me) encourage the reform of "intellectual property", I offer kudos.
With proprietary code, this type of tomfoolery could switch the vote, but still echo the voters proper selection on the slip of paper... unless a manual recount were conducted (and found to be off by 10%!!! or if the code was available to inspect).
Honestly, in addition to code being available... the person loading it must not be paid by the vendor in any way, and must compile and load it onto the voting machine him or herself. Having an open standard that could perform white/black box testing wouldn't be bad either.
any "wins" in other domains (be it copyright law, privacy, etc.) will be tenuous and short-lived.
This is akin to a storyline in the Star Trek universe, when James Kirk "wins" the Kobayashi Maru simulation. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to read further into the Kobayashi Maru... but the moral is if you are faced with a situation where there is no hope of winning, the honest way to achieve victory is by changing the rules of the game, while individuals stand to make significant gains.
Normally, changing the rules of a game would be considered cheating, and would be considered "dishonest". But, against a situation where the current rules prevent any meaningful victory... changing the rules is the right strategy to use.
I support Lessig with his more challenging, broader, more meaningful scope, and I hope that he changes the system so that greedy businesses face significant loses.
the power to create and spend what is basically unlimited money
What is money? It is a symbol that you can trade with the guy at the local sandwich shop for a ham and cheese sandwich.
Money is essencially an abstracted member of the old-fashioned "barter" system. Once upon a time, two people would trade a piece of clothing for a couple weeks of food. At one point, gold and silver was money. Then, money was metal, pressed by special machines into recognizable shapes. Then, money became fancy paper printed with green (in America) ink. Now, money is a series of digital 0's and 1's.
And the abstraction of money, though less fair then the barter system, is generally a good thing. Globalization depends on being about to manage transactions among nations on a very large scale.
The "power" to create infinite money (that you speak of) is a symptom of nations running unchecked. There are some balances in the system (devaluation of the dollar versus the Euro) but I would be surprised if there weren't banks in Europe that allow more money into circulation for their citizens to "grow their wealth", as well.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned about the "inequality" of the monetary system, there are individuals and businesses who control a much larger piece of the pie than others. Are you familiar with Pareto's Principle? It applies to Capitalism, to the dismay of the masses. I could go on and on... but what it adds up to is a correlation between money/power/public-policy which becomes greed and corruption when under the control of the wrong people.
Thus, there are two possible alternatives to the corruption. (1) Change the people, or (2) Change the rules of the monetary system.
The smart money is on the fact that Lessig (and anybody else who is sane) wants to change the rules of the monetary system (to balance them).
And I, for one, would support him (as he has previously demonstrated much towards the virtues that the public needs to embrace to improve itself).
As far as I know, the only major players in America's Cable game are Comcast, IO (the old Cablevision), Time Warner Cable, Direct TV, and Dish (if they are even still around). That's five companies servicing approximately 100 Million households.
It is no wonder that certain people get crappy service.
For that price, people should really demand better service.
And, who hasn't ever seen the pixelated boxes on their digital television connection? I've had IO and DirectTV in the last six months and both signals show the pixelated boxes often enough to be annoying... but not bad enough that I would be prompted to call up to complain. I just accept the mediocre service (and don't watch all that much TV in the first place).
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is to elect (to Congress) a bunch of 25 year olds who are young enough to be technologically brillient and inexperienced enough not to be "bought" by corporate america.
That would be a pipe dream though... smart *and* moral *and* technologically savvy? Keep dreaming...
I saw that my post last week got modded Insightful, and thought I'd circle-back on this dead thread...
I agree with you that Otto seemed to be Trolling, though with semi-thought out arguments. When he tried to say "Pay $200 now and $10 per month..." is cheaper than "Pay $500 now" he was wrong.
What is more wrong is that the device isn't worth $500. With any level of technical expertise, you be able to pay $200-300 to get the hardware and then Flash a Kernel with a File System onto the box and having a functioning Tivo. Is it be worth it to most people to let Tivo do this at a $200-300 premium? Yes, TV without commercials is worth that much. Satellite Radio bases their business model around the fact that people will pay to avoid commercials. What I think is wrong is that Otto seems to feel that "evil companies/individuals" are going to undermine Tivo by producing the $200-300 boxes and distributing them without the built-in "subscription" that Tivo charges.
As far as razors go... a better analogy is needed. For the last 3 or 4 years I've been buying the throw-away 3-blade ones that come 4 in a pack for like $7. I get about 2 months out of each razor before it becomes to abrasive for me. Mind you, I shave every other day, unless professionalism demands otherwise, but I think spending $10-15 per year on razors is completely affordable.
What gets me is cellular telephone vendors selling you a phone and then telling you that you need to pay $0.15 every time somebody wants to send a text message, and if you don't like it... the solution is to add a $5/month "plan" so that receiving/sending more than 30 of these tiny messages per month is "affordable". That adds $60 to my bill per year... so screw that. I asked them to turn off the damned service on my phone, and they can keep it off until they understand that 500 text messages on their network takes up the same bandwidth as 1 or 2 minutes of talk time... and it should be priced that way.
One 9/11-esque attack could change that.
And for those without a sense of humor, I would never actually suggest this. It's funny, laugh.
Why should they constrain themselves to following a normal, pre-establishing versioning system? They could turn to the Alphabet to get their next version name "Windows H". Or Roman Numerals would be a change of pace "Windows VIII" (like the Super Bowl). Or even spelling out the number as in "Windows Eight".
Most likely, they will pull some randomness out of thin air like they've done 3 times already (resorting to year in 1995-1998-and-2000, random two letter combinations for ME-XP, and a full word Bob-Vista).
After "Windows 7", I've got my fingers crossed for them using an onomatopoeia for their version name, as in "Windows Woof-Woof" or "Windows Thud".
Does it support licensing options for books that author's want to keep some control over? For instance, can a work that is Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivs be posted there?
We do have robots to do farming for us... they still require at least one operator, though. There are farms where they fire up their tractor that gets its location from the GPS and goes to work, while a guy sits behind the wheel as a purely safety measure. (I can't cite anything off the top of my head... though automation is something I looked at in college - the aspect of automating something productive (like farming) gets my attention when it comes up on the Discovery Channel.
Thanks, by the way, for being a reader. :)
No, it is not irrelevant... perhaps I didn't make my point as clearly as I could have. Somebody said Stallman squats in MIT to live. That's fine for him, but not fine for Joe "Proprietary Developer" Blow, who has a family and mortgage in the suburbs. Joe needs these things taken care of, and despite his best efforts, he has been unsuccessful in finding a job with Red Hat or Sun - where getting paid to program open source is an option. Joe needs his job at XYZ Corp, which produces proprietary software.
Thus, despite having the opinion that Closed Source is bad, Joe eeks out a living to support his family - so his kids can get advantages that he never had - by writing Closed Source code.
Thus, I made my point about the Alcoholics in Seattle... which you missed... as an answer to the follow-up question (What other way?) to the answer you gave, "Do it some other way".
Then again, the answer I gave is very similar to the suggestion Galileo made that the Earth revolves around the Sun -- in that it goes against the grain of conventional wisdom... so it is reasonable if you didn't understand.
I've read through the conversation between QuantumG and Valacosa dating back to this post.
The whaler analogy bad, but this is insightful:
Church: You can't say the Sun is the centre of the universe. It's amoral.Galileo: But all the evidence says it is!
Church: That's not our problem.
How about:
Stallman: Don't pay your mortgage, don't program closed-source software. It's amoral.
Programmer: But I need a roof over over my head.
Banker: Yeah, we'll foreclose on the programmer's condo if he doesn't pay us.
Stallman: All two million programmers in the country? Good luck with that.
The point is that maybe the status quo is wrong. Think of the benefit to the country/world if two million developer's were freed from the status quo of paying their mortgage. Shit... they let alcoholics live in Seattle for next to nothing, so why can't they give it up for a group who actually does public good?
I've always thought of Mega-Corporations like MS, WMT, IBM, etc being like a feudalism with the working class being their serfs.
Also, in Communism the economy works such that everybody is entitled to the same quantity of goods. For the "State of Gates" to be Communistic, you wouldn't pay for it.
What I think you mean is that Windows is Authoritarian or Totalitarian, while Linux operates more like a Free Market. As I pointed out, though, a free market for software (because supply >> demand, drives price to $0) actually is Communistic because the State can offer every member of the society a copy that they wouldn't need to pay for.
I am not an expert on the Tivo situation, so if I got something wrong, I would like to understand why.
I was aware that Tivo did eventually concede and publish their source code on their website (and they should be commended for that), so if I wanted to I could build a "Tivo" system.
I don't understand what is preventing people from writing software and running it on the Tivo box. Is this control of there own hardware what should upset me?
Personally, I have no interest in Tivo (because I don't watch much TV)... but I would want control of other specialized computing devices to do innovative things with.
I expect the Linux SmartPhone that was discussed here within the last week to lead to innovation in this area...
Oh - nevermind - I understand now... Tivo is bad because I can't change the software on it. If Blackberry or iPhone ran Linux, but didn't allow you to change the software on it... they would be just as bad.
Thank you for pointing out where I was wrong... and telling me why I was wrong so that I could understand what is actually going on the in example I tried to cite. Kudos.
If you consider the company that makes Tivo to be a "user", and not the people who are actually watching their digitally recorded television programs, then you would be correct in stating that the controls are over-reaching.
I prefer to view somebody who is using the device a user, though. The company making money off of it is simply a vendor.
And GPLv3 doesn't say "You cannot make money from selling your product" to the Tivo people. They say, "Play fair and share the innovative features that you added to the core software that you paid no money for."
The Tivo company has every right to keep selling hardware with its tailored software on it... as long as they give users the rights to change and continue to innovate it.
This makes it easier for Tivo competition, which would only need to design their own hardware and then run the same software as Tivo. This competition arises not from a "control" of the GPLv3, but because it isn't right for Tivo to "control" the 2% of code that they made to produce their box.
To the Government of Massachusetts,
I reviewed the major changes to the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) v4.0, and I would like to offer my comments to an addition that was made to the Information Domain.
I feel that it would be a mistake to add ECMA-376 as a standard on the basis that the standard, as approved by ECMA International, can only be completely implemented by a single organization. The Guidelines section of the Open XML File Format on your page points out that Microsoft, Novell, and Corel will all support the standard, but this hides the fact that there are certain sections of the OOXML specification which cannot be implemented because of (a) software patents held by Microsoft Corporation, and (b) binary embedding within the format by the Microsoft Corporation. The proprietary nature inherent in OOXML does not make for a good standard, because in the end there will be a reliance on Microsoft Corporation and not Novell or Corel to fix data corruption problems since they are the only ones in control of the full body of ECMA-376.
It is worth noting that there is no value added by having OOXML in addition to ODF. These are competing standards which cover the same areas of the Information Domain (that is: Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations). It seems silly to have two standards for doing the same type of things. This is a recipe for chaos. Please standardize on a single standard for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
It is also worth mentioning the track record of the major products that supported the Legacy versions of these information standards. OpenOffice, the most popular suite of office software which supports ODF, has supported (to the best of its capability) the ability to Open, Read, and Modify *.doc, *.xls, and *.ppt since version 1.0. Meanwhile, without a special patch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter), it is impossible to Open, Read, and Modify *.odt, *.ods, and *.odp files in Microsoft Office.
The major reason to have standards is to prevent Vendor Lock-in, and it is evident that ECMA-376 is intended to push the Microsoft Office suite of products, so the Microsoft can position itself to sell and resell licenses to the state every couple of years. Please do not opt to take a path down a road that will lead to costly software purchases when there are many residents of Massachusetts who are active contributors to projects that enhance and improve products that support the ODF format everyday. Instead, use the software that is partially developed for you by your taxpayers, instead of using your taxpayers money to buy software that is developed by monopolizing corporations under the false pretensions of open standards.
Thank you for your time.
/signed name/
But when the member organizations are "Microsoft" and "The Public" it is easy to see which is trying to warp the standard in a greedy way and which is trying to create a genuinely beneficial standard that all can follow.
Never lose sight of what the "P" in GPL stands for... because that is the power which Openness and Community bring to make the world a better place for its own interests (that is, the Public interest) and a worse place for anybody who would compete with it (Private interests - whether they be in Redmond or anywhere else in the world).
BSD Code released by Microsoft is proprietary, you insensitive clod!
So all we need for FOSS to gain respect amongst PHBs throughout the country is a couple of pricey line-items on the annual department budget?
I think I can support that business model...
Step 1: Establish Enterprise Linux Support Company
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
***
Hint: Step 2 is "Sign up clueless organizations who don't know any better, and choose an appropriate 5 or 6 digit annual fee for them..."
And don't applaud IBM to loudly, either. They have a strong set of their own proprietary software tools (Rational comes to mind, and I think they just bought Telelogic).
These brands have tools which put comparable Open Source tools to shame in the professional organizations that IBM sells them too.
No, IBM alone won't sue Microsoft. Nor will Sun or Red Hat. And as long as Microsoft keeps its code closed... you'll never see anything but the remenants of old BSD code packaged with Windows...
The victory will be declared when people wake up and realize the folly in using Windows and the advantages of Linux (and Open Source, as a whole). Unfortunately... there are a lot of software engineers and developers who still don't see this - so it will be a while before "everybody else" can be expected to understand.
Preemptive strike... SUE THEM!!!
Can a lawyer from the EFF or anti-**AA camp find a handful of users who had their personal liberties violated by the malicious installation of MPAA-brand spyware. I don't know if you could attach a dollar amount to the value that stealing your personal information is.... but I would imagine a target of a couple hundred thousand dollars per user would be fair (what's the equal to? about pirating 10 songs, before the extortionary "RIAA/MPAA deal").
Once the MPAA is paying out millions of dollars, maybe they will rethink their business model and start making good films instead of suing their customers.
You also said you would pay an artist directly for their creative energies... which suggests that you find value in their intellect. You would pay to see a band play their music. Wouldn't you find more value in seeing a band come to your neighborhood to play songs that they wrote and are known for, then for a local band to play a concert of mainly cover songs?
What about other intellectual property that is harder to create than a song? You suggest that bands should be paid for their performances, but what about a painter or novelist who cannot "perform" their art?
Living within the economy is as important for an artist as it is for you. Say that you want to destroy the concept that anybody can own an audio recording, but to truly destroy intellectual property would be to destroy the economy as we know it. Anything less than that, is simply a "reform".
Radical? Maybe. Crazy? Not at all. I like how you roll the entire group who buy music into the same group of people who enjoy the "golden shower" fetish. Quite frankly, that downgrades people with that particular fetish, though.
But since you (like me) encourage the reform of "intellectual property", I offer kudos.
What could be simpler and less prone to manipulation or error?
if (input == "John Kerry") {
rand(time) > 0.9 ? vote = "George Bush" : vote = input;
}
With proprietary code, this type of tomfoolery could switch the vote, but still echo the voters proper selection on the slip of paper... unless a manual recount were conducted (and found to be off by 10%!!! or if the code was available to inspect).
Honestly, in addition to code being available... the person loading it must not be paid by the vendor in any way, and must compile and load it onto the voting machine him or herself. Having an open standard that could perform white/black box testing wouldn't be bad either.
This is akin to a storyline in the Star Trek universe, when James Kirk "wins" the Kobayashi Maru simulation. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to read further into the Kobayashi Maru... but the moral is if you are faced with a situation where there is no hope of winning, the honest way to achieve victory is by changing the rules of the game, while individuals stand to make significant gains.
Normally, changing the rules of a game would be considered cheating, and would be considered "dishonest". But, against a situation where the current rules prevent any meaningful victory... changing the rules is the right strategy to use.
I support Lessig with his more challenging, broader, more meaningful scope, and I hope that he changes the system so that greedy businesses face significant loses.
What is money? It is a symbol that you can trade with the guy at the local sandwich shop for a ham and cheese sandwich.
Money is essencially an abstracted member of the old-fashioned "barter" system. Once upon a time, two people would trade a piece of clothing for a couple weeks of food. At one point, gold and silver was money. Then, money was metal, pressed by special machines into recognizable shapes. Then, money became fancy paper printed with green (in America) ink. Now, money is a series of digital 0's and 1's.
And the abstraction of money, though less fair then the barter system, is generally a good thing. Globalization depends on being about to manage transactions among nations on a very large scale.
The "power" to create infinite money (that you speak of) is a symptom of nations running unchecked. There are some balances in the system (devaluation of the dollar versus the Euro) but I would be surprised if there weren't banks in Europe that allow more money into circulation for their citizens to "grow their wealth", as well.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned about the "inequality" of the monetary system, there are individuals and businesses who control a much larger piece of the pie than others. Are you familiar with Pareto's Principle? It applies to Capitalism, to the dismay of the masses. I could go on and on... but what it adds up to is a correlation between money/power/public-policy which becomes greed and corruption when under the control of the wrong people.
Thus, there are two possible alternatives to the corruption. (1) Change the people, or (2) Change the rules of the monetary system.
The smart money is on the fact that Lessig (and anybody else who is sane) wants to change the rules of the monetary system (to balance them).
And I, for one, would support him (as he has previously demonstrated much towards the virtues that the public needs to embrace to improve itself).
These are the only programs that Microsoft has done that work right. They are SUPPOSED to be simple, and they aren't BLOATED like the rest of Windows.
The DHSS will just get broken into, then the hackers will use the DHSS backdoors to get into the DHS information.
At that point, you'll suggest DHSSS, won't you? Except you'll call it DHS3.
As far as I know, the only major players in America's Cable game are Comcast, IO (the old Cablevision), Time Warner Cable, Direct TV, and Dish (if they are even still around). That's five companies servicing approximately 100 Million households.
It is no wonder that certain people get crappy service.
You can look at the competitive numbers for DTV, Comcast, Dish, and TimeWarner. Combined, they bring in $60B, which is $600 per year from my estimated 100M serviced households.
For that price, people should really demand better service.
And, who hasn't ever seen the pixelated boxes on their digital television connection? I've had IO and DirectTV in the last six months and both signals show the pixelated boxes often enough to be annoying... but not bad enough that I would be prompted to call up to complain. I just accept the mediocre service (and don't watch all that much TV in the first place).