Many Americans find the concept of monopolies offensive. Unlike Europeans, we don't tend to view capital as uniquely exploitative. If anything, many of us realize that a lot of workers will exploit their employers to demand pay and benefits well beyond what their productivity is worth. That's a critical part of the reason why the Big 3 are failing now. Say whatever you will about their cars not selling, part of the reason is that because of the amount of money the Big 3 have to spend on benefits for retirees AND current workers, American cars cost, on average, at least $1,000 more than the average Japanese car (most of which are now made in America when sold in America!)
We also tend to find it offensive when we are forced to join organizations against our will or interests. Why should a worker have to join a union to work at a particular company? There is no morally acceptable reason why this is so.
Practice being sarcastic in a way that sounds a lot like how you normally talk. When you do it more with body language and word choice than tone of voice, it's amazing how many people will fail to pick up on it.
People need incentives to buy products, and open source software doesn't give people that incentive outside of the enterprise realm where paid support is a big money maker. Let's get closer to regular users here. What incentive do home users have to buy StarOffice when OpenOffice is more than good enough? How about pay anything for WordPress when it's free and easily installed by CPanel? I can't see any, aside from altruism, and only economically-clueless nerds tend to put much stock in altruism as a source of revenue (this also explains why so many think that bands will still sell large amounts of recorded music, even though most of it can be downloaded for free on a P2P network).
In the case of MySQL, a big part of their problem is that Sun isn't dumping a lot of R&D money into them to make MySQL 6 really competitive on an enterprise level with PostgreSQL. A pure open source approach isn't going to allow Sun to make good money on their R&D investment, but if they were to dramatically improve MySQL and provide high quality tools at reasonable prices, that sort of hybrid approach would work. Companies that want to make their core software open source are going to have to make compelling products that interact with them if they want to be able to sell more than consulting and support services.
Open source advocates need to be realistic. If you do work outside of the enterprise realm, chances are you will end up doing it for free and never seeing a dime from it unless your users are feeling overly generous. That's just because most users outside of the enterprise realm have no incentive to buy anything you might be selling related to your open source product.
I keep hearing how we need NN regulations because there is so little competition, but I also don't see much being done by NN advocates to eliminate local and state franchising laws which make it harder for companies to enter cable and broadband markets. If Google were more libertarian than liberal, I would expect them to be proposing a referendum in California to sweep away all of the franchising laws so that there are no local or state limits on who can enter what Internet or TV market.
Part of the logic behind franchising laws is that they give more revenue to local governments, but so what? Most local governments can do without, and if you really need to help them with funding, then the obvious solution is to give them more latitude to tax their residents.
Actually, it doesn't matter. In a world where millions of people are providing software for hundreds of millions of other people, being a niche player is perfectly viable.
If that's your goal, then fine. However, nothing I have ever heard from the Perl developers has suggested that they are trying to target just a niche.
As someone who works on Movable Type, a perfect example of what Perl can do, I want to see Perl 6 succeed and eventually have Perl 5 modules and apps ported to it. I would love to be able to switch to using Python 3k for writing objects, and use Perl 6 to access them in scripts on the same VM, but these guys aren't working on the same timeframe that the rest of us are...
It sounds almost like they're hoping that Santa will drop it down the chimney on a flash drive for them. In the time it has taken Perl 6 to get where it is now--fairly close to release--Mono has gone from being scraps of C and C# code, to being a fairly complete and compatible.NET development environment that has a fairly active developer base on Linux. I'm not going to say that Perl 6 is irrelevant, but if it is not out, in a final release within 6 months to a year, it probably will be since even PHP will be grown up with 5.3 and 6.0 by then.
to spend whatever it takes to build the infrastructure for the military to completely close off and protect its important systems? Even if it costs $50B/year, will you be willing to seek support in Congress to ensure that the military is as secure as the current state of IT can make possible?
If you refuse to let the company manage your PC's power use, your annual raise will be docked $75-$100 to compensate for you not being a team player by insisting that your work is sooooo important that you couldn't leave your PC even in sleep mode at night when you're at home. The percentage of corporate PC users who need to leave their PCs on overnight probably never goes above 1%.
You've obviously never seen the copious amounts of information out there showing that education majors--the majority of public school teachers--are one of the bottom five majors when ranked by intelligence and test scores...
NewsZip.com is registered in Delaware, and this is a state court from another state, attempting to impose a court order outside of its jurisdiction. What, pray tell, gives them a basis to even think about doing this? I'd like to see the federal statute...
I don't get the point of the !liberty tag here. Technically your liberty went out the window the moment you had to get licensed to drive in the first place, making this a moot point viz-a-vis liberty. That said, this can be a good thing because one of the controversies in Britain has been with making Muslim women take off their veils to get a state ID. Only in multicultural, bureaucratic lala land could a photo of a woman with a veil be considered part of a photo ID, but with this sort of thing in place, hopefully tactics like that can be avoided before they become a contentious issue.
They're doing this for all of the wrong reasons, but some good can indeed come out of it.
is that drug users who commit crimes won't be really punished. I think that's a fair concern because people who drink and drive, and then cause property damage or kill people don't get treated as severely as they deserve. IMO, one of the precursors to drug legalization that advocates need to pursue is that voluntary intoxication cannot be introduced into court except in extreme cases like someone rapes a woman who is passed out.
Aside from those rare cases, if we treated all parties as though their intoxication were no defense of their behavior, I think we would have the legal infrastructure in place to allow for the initial crime problems as the public gets accustomed to legalized drugs.
Ironically, I've found that many of my somewhat law-and-order conservative acquaintances have found this law-and-order libertarian tendency to be disturbing. Not sure why, since personal responsibility should not be thrown out the window just because you're intoxicated unless you can prove that it wasn't by your own doing.
It also results in insane amounts of slander and libel. Rumours get posted as fact, fact checking is non-existant (is your average joe blogger really likely to have contacts who would be able to officially deny or confirm something?).
You mean like how the mainstream media reports things like how lots of children get killed every year by handguns, only to find out from more informed sources that most of those "children" are late-teenage gangbanger? How about the way that the media reports incidents like what happened in Jena Louisiana? Then there's the blatant partisanship of the media during most elections.
How would you like it if you were a musician, and I started bootlegging every single last piece of merchandise that you every produced and gave it away for free or at just cost? Your t-shirts, your stickers, your cds, everything. Oh, and I stood there recording every live performance in high quality HD and gave it away for free to anyone too lazy or cheap to go to your show?
I may not be denying you your music, but I sure as hell am cheating you out of any reasonable compensation for your work by creating conditions where no one has any incentive other than maybe the goodness of their heart toward a starving musician to give you any money.
How about I just take your latest source code and market it as my own? It's just a bunch of bits, I'm not denying you any rights by just walking away with your hard work and selling my own version of it. You still have your copy. Why should I be able to copy anything you own, but not be able to sell it?
I'm not misunderstanding the situation at all. I happen to be of the opinion that copyright is a real property right, and should be subjected to the same rights and regulations as physical property. That's why I have no problem with your state government charging you with grand theft if you pirate Adobe Creative Suite for shits and giggles.
What you clearly don't understand is that there are many sides to this issue, not just yours and theirs. There is nothing inconsistent between my position and opposing a blanket tax and surveillance policy which treats all students as potential criminals. That is absurd and unconstitutional in any scenario involving public universities, regardless of what the Supreme Court has ever ruled on similar issues.
I'm one of the minority on Slashdot who actually thinks that file sharers who trade in thousands of dollars of goods deserve to be charged (criminally) as thieves, and even I have to say "fuck you" on this. If they do this, I'll have no problem ripping every DVD and CD that was made by Warner and giving copies to every friend and family member that wants them.
Tax me and spy on me to preserve your business model? That's going way too far and enough to make me say it's time to let slip the dogs of war on them.
The only software that provides people with true political power to counterbalance that of others is software that gives them actual power in the political realm. That means software that can take control of resources or kill people and break things. You know what would be a program with political implications? A semi-sentient AI that a rebel group could use to infiltrate its government's command-and-control systems and intelligently make them target their own forces.
A distributed repository has no political implications that mirroring in general don't have already have.
Most firearm owners I've ever known are stable people. They really don't like the thought of having to shoot someone, but they're not so stupid as to say to a violent criminal "oh, I see you are a victim of poverty. Here, let's discuss the social issues and see if we can channel your rage against the capitalist machine into something that doesn't end up with me getting raped|robbed|murdered."
People like you are the reason we have a problem with violent crime. On the hand, you'll say "violence never solved anything," but on the other hand, you won't ruthlessly deal with someone who commits a serious violent felony.
When people say to me that the death penalty is no deterrerant, you know what I tell them? If people knew that first degree murder **always** resulted in execution, and that nothing less than life could be given for second degree murder unless there were extreme extenuating circumstances, it would be.
If you want to address those social issues, you have to address crime. You can pump as much money into a poor community as you want via the welfare state, but if the government doesn't bring crime down to very low levels, there won't be an economy there capable of sustaining the community's material needs.
Called the No Electronic Theft Act which makes non-fair use reproduction of copyrighted goods automatically a federal criminal offense? In other words, you're free to share a copy of a history program with your department at college. You share a copy of the latest DVD with your neighbor back home, you've just put yourself in line to have broken the NET Act.
Had the federal government responded initially by cutting taxes and spending, lowering trade barriers and streamlining regulation, it probably would have been just a very bad recession. You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover. What you need to do is calm things down, encourage trade and not experiment with the economy and organizing society.
I'm not going to say that the federal government caused the Great Depression, but it certainly didn't do anything positive to stop it and return the economy back to sanity.
They made us do mostly Java, even though a number of us could do C or C++.
Merit often has little to do with it
on
Censorship By Glut
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There is a certain cliquishness at work in the blogosphere. For example, many of the major bloggers are fairly mediocre writers just like most editorialists fit that mold. There is a feedback effect of the back-and-forth referencing that makes them seem more relevant and better than they really are.
If I had to give one piece of advice to someone that wanted to start blogging today, it would be to simply write for your own enjoyment while making sure that what you write may be beneficial to others if they run across it. Why? Chances are, you won't ever get popular even if you are really good at it. The flaw in the Army of Davids model used to describe publishing content online is that David was very unique, and most people simply aren't that. Even when they are, they're not annointed like David.
I suppose the one thing I'll never understand is why people continue to give a platform to writers like Bill Kristol. There are a lot of them who are just flat out wrong so often that I can't help but think they're a lot like a horoscope, but for politics.
Informative? Try more like "troll" or "flamebait."
Using your stupid analogy, this would be more like threatening to raze the entire city to the ground because no one intervened to stopped the wife from being locked in the bedroom.
You know what I'd like to see happen? Anyone who is caught using uTorrent with this setting gets their broadband internet access contract torn up. Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal. For every Linux DVD image distributed by bittorrent, there is probably dozens of times that much data in blatantly bootlegged content being distributed.
Slashdot Mirror
Many Americans find the concept of monopolies offensive. Unlike Europeans, we don't tend to view capital as uniquely exploitative. If anything, many of us realize that a lot of workers will exploit their employers to demand pay and benefits well beyond what their productivity is worth. That's a critical part of the reason why the Big 3 are failing now. Say whatever you will about their cars not selling, part of the reason is that because of the amount of money the Big 3 have to spend on benefits for retirees AND current workers, American cars cost, on average, at least $1,000 more than the average Japanese car (most of which are now made in America when sold in America!)
We also tend to find it offensive when we are forced to join organizations against our will or interests. Why should a worker have to join a union to work at a particular company? There is no morally acceptable reason why this is so.
Cut spending on education. We now spend, on average, twice per capita after inflation, what we did 100 years ago for the same practical results. To put it bluntly: at least half of the money spent on public education is a complete waste that has brought no discernible benefit to the community or kids.
Practice being sarcastic in a way that sounds a lot like how you normally talk. When you do it more with body language and word choice than tone of voice, it's amazing how many people will fail to pick up on it.
People need incentives to buy products, and open source software doesn't give people that incentive outside of the enterprise realm where paid support is a big money maker. Let's get closer to regular users here. What incentive do home users have to buy StarOffice when OpenOffice is more than good enough? How about pay anything for WordPress when it's free and easily installed by CPanel? I can't see any, aside from altruism, and only economically-clueless nerds tend to put much stock in altruism as a source of revenue (this also explains why so many think that bands will still sell large amounts of recorded music, even though most of it can be downloaded for free on a P2P network).
In the case of MySQL, a big part of their problem is that Sun isn't dumping a lot of R&D money into them to make MySQL 6 really competitive on an enterprise level with PostgreSQL. A pure open source approach isn't going to allow Sun to make good money on their R&D investment, but if they were to dramatically improve MySQL and provide high quality tools at reasonable prices, that sort of hybrid approach would work. Companies that want to make their core software open source are going to have to make compelling products that interact with them if they want to be able to sell more than consulting and support services.
Open source advocates need to be realistic. If you do work outside of the enterprise realm, chances are you will end up doing it for free and never seeing a dime from it unless your users are feeling overly generous. That's just because most users outside of the enterprise realm have no incentive to buy anything you might be selling related to your open source product.
I keep hearing how we need NN regulations because there is so little competition, but I also don't see much being done by NN advocates to eliminate local and state franchising laws which make it harder for companies to enter cable and broadband markets. If Google were more libertarian than liberal, I would expect them to be proposing a referendum in California to sweep away all of the franchising laws so that there are no local or state limits on who can enter what Internet or TV market.
Part of the logic behind franchising laws is that they give more revenue to local governments, but so what? Most local governments can do without, and if you really need to help them with funding, then the obvious solution is to give them more latitude to tax their residents.
If that's your goal, then fine. However, nothing I have ever heard from the Perl developers has suggested that they are trying to target just a niche.
As someone who works on Movable Type, a perfect example of what Perl can do, I want to see Perl 6 succeed and eventually have Perl 5 modules and apps ported to it. I would love to be able to switch to using Python 3k for writing objects, and use Perl 6 to access them in scripts on the same VM, but these guys aren't working on the same timeframe that the rest of us are...
It sounds almost like they're hoping that Santa will drop it down the chimney on a flash drive for them. In the time it has taken Perl 6 to get where it is now--fairly close to release--Mono has gone from being scraps of C and C# code, to being a fairly complete and compatible .NET development environment that has a fairly active developer base on Linux. I'm not going to say that Perl 6 is irrelevant, but if it is not out, in a final release within 6 months to a year, it probably will be since even PHP will be grown up with 5.3 and 6.0 by then.
to spend whatever it takes to build the infrastructure for the military to completely close off and protect its important systems? Even if it costs $50B/year, will you be willing to seek support in Congress to ensure that the military is as secure as the current state of IT can make possible?
If you refuse to let the company manage your PC's power use, your annual raise will be docked $75-$100 to compensate for you not being a team player by insisting that your work is sooooo important that you couldn't leave your PC even in sleep mode at night when you're at home. The percentage of corporate PC users who need to leave their PCs on overnight probably never goes above 1%.
You've obviously never seen the copious amounts of information out there showing that education majors--the majority of public school teachers--are one of the bottom five majors when ranked by intelligence and test scores...
NewsZip.com is registered in Delaware, and this is a state court from another state, attempting to impose a court order outside of its jurisdiction. What, pray tell, gives them a basis to even think about doing this? I'd like to see the federal statute...
I don't get the point of the !liberty tag here. Technically your liberty went out the window the moment you had to get licensed to drive in the first place, making this a moot point viz-a-vis liberty. That said, this can be a good thing because one of the controversies in Britain has been with making Muslim women take off their veils to get a state ID. Only in multicultural, bureaucratic lala land could a photo of a woman with a veil be considered part of a photo ID, but with this sort of thing in place, hopefully tactics like that can be avoided before they become a contentious issue.
They're doing this for all of the wrong reasons, but some good can indeed come out of it.
is that drug users who commit crimes won't be really punished. I think that's a fair concern because people who drink and drive, and then cause property damage or kill people don't get treated as severely as they deserve. IMO, one of the precursors to drug legalization that advocates need to pursue is that voluntary intoxication cannot be introduced into court except in extreme cases like someone rapes a woman who is passed out.
Aside from those rare cases, if we treated all parties as though their intoxication were no defense of their behavior, I think we would have the legal infrastructure in place to allow for the initial crime problems as the public gets accustomed to legalized drugs.
Ironically, I've found that many of my somewhat law-and-order conservative acquaintances have found this law-and-order libertarian tendency to be disturbing. Not sure why, since personal responsibility should not be thrown out the window just because you're intoxicated unless you can prove that it wasn't by your own doing.
You mean like how the mainstream media reports things like how lots of children get killed every year by handguns, only to find out from more informed sources that most of those "children" are late-teenage gangbanger? How about the way that the media reports incidents like what happened in Jena Louisiana? Then there's the blatant partisanship of the media during most elections.
"Journalistic integrity" is a myth.
How would you like it if you were a musician, and I started bootlegging every single last piece of merchandise that you every produced and gave it away for free or at just cost? Your t-shirts, your stickers, your cds, everything. Oh, and I stood there recording every live performance in high quality HD and gave it away for free to anyone too lazy or cheap to go to your show?
I may not be denying you your music, but I sure as hell am cheating you out of any reasonable compensation for your work by creating conditions where no one has any incentive other than maybe the goodness of their heart toward a starving musician to give you any money.
How about I just take your latest source code and market it as my own? It's just a bunch of bits, I'm not denying you any rights by just walking away with your hard work and selling my own version of it. You still have your copy. Why should I be able to copy anything you own, but not be able to sell it?
I'm not misunderstanding the situation at all. I happen to be of the opinion that copyright is a real property right, and should be subjected to the same rights and regulations as physical property. That's why I have no problem with your state government charging you with grand theft if you pirate Adobe Creative Suite for shits and giggles.
What you clearly don't understand is that there are many sides to this issue, not just yours and theirs. There is nothing inconsistent between my position and opposing a blanket tax and surveillance policy which treats all students as potential criminals. That is absurd and unconstitutional in any scenario involving public universities, regardless of what the Supreme Court has ever ruled on similar issues.
I'm one of the minority on Slashdot who actually thinks that file sharers who trade in thousands of dollars of goods deserve to be charged (criminally) as thieves, and even I have to say "fuck you" on this. If they do this, I'll have no problem ripping every DVD and CD that was made by Warner and giving copies to every friend and family member that wants them.
Tax me and spy on me to preserve your business model? That's going way too far and enough to make me say it's time to let slip the dogs of war on them.
The only software that provides people with true political power to counterbalance that of others is software that gives them actual power in the political realm. That means software that can take control of resources or kill people and break things. You know what would be a program with political implications? A semi-sentient AI that a rebel group could use to infiltrate its government's command-and-control systems and intelligently make them target their own forces.
A distributed repository has no political implications that mirroring in general don't have already have.
Most firearm owners I've ever known are stable people. They really don't like the thought of having to shoot someone, but they're not so stupid as to say to a violent criminal "oh, I see you are a victim of poverty. Here, let's discuss the social issues and see if we can channel your rage against the capitalist machine into something that doesn't end up with me getting raped|robbed|murdered."
People like you are the reason we have a problem with violent crime. On the hand, you'll say "violence never solved anything," but on the other hand, you won't ruthlessly deal with someone who commits a serious violent felony.
When people say to me that the death penalty is no deterrerant, you know what I tell them? If people knew that first degree murder **always** resulted in execution, and that nothing less than life could be given for second degree murder unless there were extreme extenuating circumstances, it would be.
If you want to address those social issues, you have to address crime. You can pump as much money into a poor community as you want via the welfare state, but if the government doesn't bring crime down to very low levels, there won't be an economy there capable of sustaining the community's material needs.
Called the No Electronic Theft Act which makes non-fair use reproduction of copyrighted goods automatically a federal criminal offense? In other words, you're free to share a copy of a history program with your department at college. You share a copy of the latest DVD with your neighbor back home, you've just put yourself in line to have broken the NET Act.
Who do you think controls the RPM repository that Red Flag uses? A company in league with the PRC government.
Make DRM breaking illegal only when there is criminal intent, such as to share reproductions with others or to sell bootlegs...
Had the federal government responded initially by cutting taxes and spending, lowering trade barriers and streamlining regulation, it probably would have been just a very bad recession. You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover. What you need to do is calm things down, encourage trade and not experiment with the economy and organizing society. I'm not going to say that the federal government caused the Great Depression, but it certainly didn't do anything positive to stop it and return the economy back to sanity.
They made us do mostly Java, even though a number of us could do C or C++.
There is a certain cliquishness at work in the blogosphere. For example, many of the major bloggers are fairly mediocre writers just like most editorialists fit that mold. There is a feedback effect of the back-and-forth referencing that makes them seem more relevant and better than they really are.
If I had to give one piece of advice to someone that wanted to start blogging today, it would be to simply write for your own enjoyment while making sure that what you write may be beneficial to others if they run across it. Why? Chances are, you won't ever get popular even if you are really good at it. The flaw in the Army of Davids model used to describe publishing content online is that David was very unique, and most people simply aren't that. Even when they are, they're not annointed like David.
I suppose the one thing I'll never understand is why people continue to give a platform to writers like Bill Kristol. There are a lot of them who are just flat out wrong so often that I can't help but think they're a lot like a horoscope, but for politics.
Informative? Try more like "troll" or "flamebait."
Using your stupid analogy, this would be more like threatening to raze the entire city to the ground because no one intervened to stopped the wife from being locked in the bedroom.
You know what I'd like to see happen? Anyone who is caught using uTorrent with this setting gets their broadband internet access contract torn up. Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal. For every Linux DVD image distributed by bittorrent, there is probably dozens of times that much data in blatantly bootlegged content being distributed.