The physical factors account for some of it, but not much. For one thing, the suburban qualities of America doesn't give much insight into why it is that city dwellers in most of America still have broadband speeds that pale in comparison to those in much of Europe and Asia. Remember that according to the FCC, broadband means anything over 200kbs, so talking about "broadband" in America and South Korea is really talking about two completely different things.
The "America is so huge" argument doesn't work when you also recognize that most Americans only have two broadband providers to choose from. The consolidation of the telecom market means that it is a losing proposition for one carrier to enter a geographic market that another carrier has already taken. Usually it comes down to "competition" in the form of a choice between the dominant local telecom and whichever cable operator has the contract for the area. You can drink anything you want, as long as it is Coke or Pepsi.
By defining broadband as an "information service" the FCC and the Supreme Court (in the Brand X decision) turned the incombent telecos and cable companies loose. They no longer had to lease excess capacity to new entrants in the market. The anti-competitive measures taken by the Baby Bells in the late 1990s were essentially excused and ratified, and almost all of the plucky broadband competitors that sprung up to bring broadband to the masses were squashed by the giant, slow-moving, ever-consolidating telecom entities.
The South Korean approach worked in part because the government created an initial infrastructure and allowed carriers to compete on top of it. Here in the US, we talk about the free market incessantly, but in reality we have coddled the Baby Bells. They are the severed pieces of the old AT&T, which was essentially a government-protected monopoly for decades. So when the heads of these companies talk about how pissed off they are at Google, et. al., for using "their" networks, just remember that they were born rich. Sure, they built the fiber optic networks and invested billions in infrastructure, but were it not for government intervention in the early years of telecom, they would have been in the same place as Covad and all the other newcomers. Anyone can compete in the broadband market in theory, but in reality if the incumbents have a decades-long lead on you and billions of dollars, how in the hell are you going to get the funding necessary to compete? Of course, with that nice head start, the mutant offspring of the Baby Bells are fervent supporters of free market competition. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Look up broadband prices in the US from 10 years ago, five years ago, and now. Evidence of a truly competitive market? Check prices per megabyte in the US against those in the OECD report linked to below. Something isn't right.
I could go on and on about this, but Copps is right. The US is getting its ass kicked in broadband, and the "hands off" approach the government has taken over the last ten years has clearly not worked. Sure, we're a big country, but the technical aspects are the smallest part of the equation. After all, the Internet was started here. DSL was invented here. Fiber optic cable was first put to practical use here. We screwed up politically, and now we're paying for it.
GAO report on broadband (PDF) - takes the FCC to task for failures in its methodology for determining broadband penetration.
Governments and education are the big problem
on
AIDS Can Fight AIDS
·
· Score: 1
If you're stupid enough to be having sex with a stranger without protection you really deserve to contract whatever you get.
You're talking about AIDS from the perspective of someone in the West. We've known about AIDS for more than two decades, and still plenty of people are getting AIDS here. There are a lot of people dying of AIDS who, as you said, should have known better. But many of them women who are getting infected by their husbands. Is the wife at fault for the actions of the husband, who cheated on her without her knowledge? As a precaution, should all married couples use condoms?
As for Africa, Eastern Europe, and other places where AIDS is running rampant, they often have governments that don't have the funds or inclination to properly educate the population about even the basics of AIDS. Then you have places like South Africa, where the leadership is in complete denial. In many parts of Africa, women don't have any real say about when or how sexual intercourse occurs.
Sure, there are people out there deliberately ignoring the risks. But there are likely far more people worldwide who don't even know what the risks are, or have no power to stop risky behavior even if they do know the risks.
... for this to turn into something big, but I think it's a hopeful start. A lot of people are laboring under the mistaken belief that the drug cocktails available now will somehow stop AIDS. But even if somehow made available inexpensively worldwide (which ain't gonna happen any time soon), it still wouldn't be enough. We need radically better treatment. It needs to be inexpensive, easy to administer, and something that only needs to be administered once.
I'm not sure TOS/EULA was ever really binding. Couldn't someone just claim ignorance.
In contracts of this type, the law isn't concerned about you per se. The test is whether a reasonable person in your circumstance would have seen and understood the terms of the contract.
A number of graphics editing applications may exist for enabling image content to be accessed, edited and/or arranged in various ways. People may often lack sufficient artistic, design, technical and/or other skills, however, which may be needed to leverage such image content to create and/or illustrate stories, for example. For instance, young children who may be extremely bright, imaginative, creative and otherwise ideal story tellers may often struggle with leveraging such content for use in telling stories. A number of factors may contribute to their struggles, such as their lack of physical coordination, manual dexterity or experience.
Call me skeptical, but this looks like an extension of the Microsoft "wizard" mentality. "It looks like you are trying to draw a circle. Would you like me to draw you a circle?"
That you would vote for them indicates a massive failure from the educational system and mass media.
It is possible to understand why people are afraid and still not support fear-based politics. Remember that 48% of American voters in 2004 voted against Bush. I'm getting rather tired of people who don't live in the USA assuming that all Americans are fucking idiots. There has been a huge cultural political battle in America over the last several years. The Moronic Right is still holding on, but with any luck in a few days the balance of power will start to shift.
Side note: If you think that anyone in government, or any voter actually conducts a quantitative risk analysis of the type you mentioned, balancing cost against human lives, you're living in a bubble. People aren't computers; they make most decisions on emotion. Just look at all of the OS Wars in Slashdot, the place where the supposedly rational elite hang out.
About the only drawback is that you'll have to survive basic training.
From what I've been reading, the "kinder, gentler" Basic Training has been becoming even kinder and gentler of late. Air Force Basic Training has never been known as a real ass-kicker anyway.
When people fly two planes into the WTC, and their fellow travellers express the intent to conduct further attacks, the human intention behind it is pretty clear. Accidents happen, of course, but generally people aren't *trying* to get into car accidents. The idea that people are out there dreaming up further schemes involving mass destruction is what freaks people out. Sure, the odds are still absurdly low that you or I are going to get whacked by terrorists, but human beings are deliberately trying to create the destruction. I think it feels much more personal when you realize that human beings are behind these events, rather than random chance or nature.
Utube still has to fight an uphill battle
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
really? if it is so small why are they suddenly gettng 68,000,000 hits a month?
YouTube will argue that this is confusion about an address, not confusion about identity. People who intended to go to YouTube wound up at UTube, but not because they were deceived as to the identity of YouTube in relation to the identity of UTube.
If they loose sales because there service is down they loose money.
Is YouTube responsible for their service being down? Have they induced anyone into going to utube.com? If I prominently display my address as TymSmith.com, and people mistakenly go to TimSmith.com, is that my fault? Do sound-alikes create an obligation to defend against every possible variation? YouTube could also be interpreted as UToob, or EweTube.
There was the Madonne('singer')/Modonna hospital is just one of many examples. Madonna won claiming that her trademark 'Madonna' was more recognizable then Madonna...as in The Madonna.
The facts in that situation were complicated. The hospital was actually caught in the middle between Madonna and the infamous Dan Pirisi. It was also a WIPO dispute, not a US court case.
They have had the domain since 1996, and you don't HAVE to be registered to have a trademark. It just makes proving it easier.
True, it does make proving you have a trademark easier. A lot easier. When YouTube did a trademark search, UTube wasn't in the Trademark Office database.
I think the court will find UTube's argument unpersuasive, particularly because of the slippery slope implications. Anyone starting a new company or creating a new domain name would have to protect themselves from hordes of previously existing businesses with sound-alike names.
Fewer players in the Linux world, and preferably one dominant vendor, means one opponent for Microsoft. Would you rather fight a distributed and decentralized enemy, or a centrally-controlled one with a well-defined center of gravity?
The more standardized and less fragmented Linux is, the more Linux is like the traditional competitors Microsoft is used to crushing. My guess is that Microsoft's current attitude toward Linux is based on this assumption. Will Microsoft's attempts to manipulate the Linux market succeed? Probably not. But that won't stop them from trying.
Utube isn't going to get anywhere with this claim
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
the utube trademark application was not filed until after the problem started
As sribe points out, Utube isn't in a good position on this one. If it looks, smells, and tastes like hogwash, it probably is. These guys don't have a leg to stand on. Likelihood of confusion between YouTube (videos online) and Utube (tubing) is infinitesimally small. Actual damage done by YouTube to Utube is going to be very difficult to prove.
Domain name sound-alikes do not a successful trademark case make. The fact that they didn't even register the trademark until now is not going to fly with the court.
the key question for Google's future is whether it can realize that losing is really one of the best assets the company has
No.
Does Google shoot itself in the foot every time it scores a win with a new product? Of course not. It is not the losing that is important. That's simply a by-product of taking a lot of shots on goal; most of them miss. But Google doesn't celebrate the failures. It celebrates willingness to take chances and try new things, because it knows that such an attitude will lead to more attemps, less staying in the safe zone, and ultimately more successes.
They don't get the Internet, so they're not censoring it. They get their own parallel network that uses the same protocols, but filters out unwanted contact with the grubby, wild and wooly Internet. It is a different animal than the Internet. SinoNet, perhaps.
...don't want to have to choose the 'lesser of two evils', so just don't vote
That's a shame. We're losing our democracy because people can't be bothered. Unfortunately life is often about making choices between distasteful alternatives. But the lesser of two evils is better in the here and now than some pie in the sky candidate who exists only in fantasy land. No politician is going to mirror any thinking person's views on every single subject, just like no job is ever going to be perfect, no spouse is ever perfect, and no individual voter is going to be perfect.
People who are waiting for the perfect circumstances before they vote are hiding behind the easy cover of cynicism. If you're too good for the real world of rough and tumble democratic processes, don't yap later about how disgusted you are with the state of politics. You don't participate, you can complain all you want, but those of us who voted don't have to listen.
And are you trying to suggest that we're not ruled by the rich?
That wasn't the thrust of my point.
Big Media has been winning for a long time now, in the halls of Congress and in the courts. The (supposed) fact that Senators' daughters like YouTube isn't going to affect that one bit. If YouTube prevails, it will be because the law, which has become progressively more well-defined regarding digital media, is on YouTube's side. The DMCA, for all its faults, gives hosting companies a big out in the form of the takedown provision. There is no inducement to infringe. YouTube has obviously learned from the arrogant stupidty of Grokster. Big Media also wants to profit from YouTube and similar sites. They're starting to learn that bashing their customers isn't a smart business model.
Your suggestion that all of these legal, political, and economic factors are less important than an unsubstantiated claim that the children of the rich and powerful love YouTube strikes me as being far too simplistic.
From a lot of the "political" comments on/. it's fairly apparent that most IT people/geeks have no real grasp on governmental affairs.
Everyone was having such a good time stroking each other, crowing about The Cluelessness of Others and the Manifest Superiority of Geeks. Why'd you have to piss on the parade? You, sir, are a traitor to your class!
the daughters of senators and district attorneys and other rich people tell their parents that YouTube is great. Napster was a little too hard for the estemed gentleman's little princess to figure out, but YouTube isn't.
That's right, because district attorneys and "other rich people" (whatever that means in the context of the law) make decisions on the basis of what their "little princesses" tell them. Doubtless that's how lawyers, judges and "other rich people" decide all kinds of things, like what music to listen to ("Justin Timberlake is, like, *such* a good artist!") and what brokerage firms they should use.
All of which makes you wonder how the good films get made. Usually, it's because someone with a really insistent vision, a buttload of money, and enough backing from the studio that they don't get messed with, is at the reins. This seems to be the exact opposite of the studio system so eloquently described by Lee, and of the collective method espoused by those wacky collectivists.
Open Source offers great advantages. That doesn't mean it can be shoehorned into every situation.
Politics has always been part of Slashdot. More than a few of us think politics is just as important as technology. After all, a topic like the EU's actions against Microsoft is rife with politics, and Microsoft can't put you in jail, make war on another country, or tax you.
Seriously, I'm English and I don't know what those abbreviations mean.
Apologies. Explaining them briefly leaves out a lot of important info, but here's a quick and dirty:
LLC = Limited Liability Company. Handy because you don't have to have a board of directors or issue shares, but as a business owner you're not directly liable as an individual for the actions of the company.
S-Corp = A corporation that is similar to an LLC. Taxes are "passed through" to the owners, rather than applied to the corporation (usually, but some states do tax S-Corps directly). Used primarily by small businesses.
C-Corp = Traditional corporation. The corporation is taxed directly, a board of directors is required and shares are issued.
It's great and all that they found a new way to organise their company, but I must have missed the part where they actually bring in money.
I'd imagine that depends on who starts up a business with this new model, and whether they're any good at running a business. There are no guarantees with any business structure.
This looks like more of that randomised babble I get from my junkmail folder... Could anyone translate into inoffensive plain english? How is this different from any other business plan? Honestly?
Every business plan I've ever seen (for something beyond a sole proprietorship or partnership) takes for granted that the business will be established as either an S-Corp, LLC, or C-Corp. I'm not sure how business formation works in Canada. However, based on the article, it appears that the idea is to create a business structure that borrows features from a co-operative association (ex: a co-op grocery store or a co-op lending organization), while retaining features of a corporation.
Just because the concept seems a bit convoluted doesn't make it particularly "offensive" to my mind. Many extremely successful businesses have structures that can't be explained in less than 10,000 words, anyway. I'm of the opinion that part of the reason we have companies that do stupid and destructive things is because the legal structures for those companies encourage buck-passing, groupthink, and sublimation of individual responsibility. The article indicates that this new structure attempts to avoid both of those. It will be interesting to see if anyone gives it a try.
but calling him "a strange footnote in the history of computing" is just idiotic.
Anyone who polarizes people to such a large degree, has generated so much passion, and has served as the point man of the free software movement deserves to be regarded as a towering figure in the history of computing. Whether GPL 3 succeeds or fails, Stallman has already left his mark. Again, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with him; he's no footnote.
Slashdot Mirror
The physical factors account for some of it, but not much. For one thing, the suburban qualities of America doesn't give much insight into why it is that city dwellers in most of America still have broadband speeds that pale in comparison to those in much of Europe and Asia. Remember that according to the FCC, broadband means anything over 200kbs, so talking about "broadband" in America and South Korea is really talking about two completely different things.
The "America is so huge" argument doesn't work when you also recognize that most Americans only have two broadband providers to choose from. The consolidation of the telecom market means that it is a losing proposition for one carrier to enter a geographic market that another carrier has already taken. Usually it comes down to "competition" in the form of a choice between the dominant local telecom and whichever cable operator has the contract for the area. You can drink anything you want, as long as it is Coke or Pepsi.
By defining broadband as an "information service" the FCC and the Supreme Court (in the Brand X decision) turned the incombent telecos and cable companies loose. They no longer had to lease excess capacity to new entrants in the market. The anti-competitive measures taken by the Baby Bells in the late 1990s were essentially excused and ratified, and almost all of the plucky broadband competitors that sprung up to bring broadband to the masses were squashed by the giant, slow-moving, ever-consolidating telecom entities.
The South Korean approach worked in part because the government created an initial infrastructure and allowed carriers to compete on top of it. Here in the US, we talk about the free market incessantly, but in reality we have coddled the Baby Bells. They are the severed pieces of the old AT&T, which was essentially a government-protected monopoly for decades. So when the heads of these companies talk about how pissed off they are at Google, et. al., for using "their" networks, just remember that they were born rich. Sure, they built the fiber optic networks and invested billions in infrastructure, but were it not for government intervention in the early years of telecom, they would have been in the same place as Covad and all the other newcomers. Anyone can compete in the broadband market in theory, but in reality if the incumbents have a decades-long lead on you and billions of dollars, how in the hell are you going to get the funding necessary to compete? Of course, with that nice head start, the mutant offspring of the Baby Bells are fervent supporters of free market competition. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Look up broadband prices in the US from 10 years ago, five years ago, and now. Evidence of a truly competitive market? Check prices per megabyte in the US against those in the OECD report linked to below. Something isn't right.
I could go on and on about this, but Copps is right. The US is getting its ass kicked in broadband, and the "hands off" approach the government has taken over the last ten years has clearly not worked. Sure, we're a big country, but the technical aspects are the smallest part of the equation. After all, the Internet was started here. DSL was invented here. Fiber optic cable was first put to practical use here. We screwed up politically, and now we're paying for it.
Broadband Reality Check II (PDF)
OECD report on broadband access in several countries
GAO report on broadband (PDF) - takes the FCC to task for failures in its methodology for determining broadband penetration.
If you're stupid enough to be having sex with a stranger without protection you really deserve to contract whatever you get.
You're talking about AIDS from the perspective of someone in the West. We've known about AIDS for more than two decades, and still plenty of people are getting AIDS here. There are a lot of people dying of AIDS who, as you said, should have known better. But many of them women who are getting infected by their husbands. Is the wife at fault for the actions of the husband, who cheated on her without her knowledge? As a precaution, should all married couples use condoms?
As for Africa, Eastern Europe, and other places where AIDS is running rampant, they often have governments that don't have the funds or inclination to properly educate the population about even the basics of AIDS. Then you have places like South Africa, where the leadership is in complete denial. In many parts of Africa, women don't have any real say about when or how sexual intercourse occurs.
Sure, there are people out there deliberately ignoring the risks. But there are likely far more people worldwide who don't even know what the risks are, or have no power to stop risky behavior even if they do know the risks.
... for this to turn into something big, but I think it's a hopeful start. A lot of people are laboring under the mistaken belief that the drug cocktails available now will somehow stop AIDS. But even if somehow made available inexpensively worldwide (which ain't gonna happen any time soon), it still wouldn't be enough. We need radically better treatment. It needs to be inexpensive, easy to administer, and something that only needs to be administered once.
I'm not sure TOS/EULA was ever really binding. Couldn't someone just claim ignorance.
In contracts of this type, the law isn't concerned about you per se. The test is whether a reasonable person in your circumstance would have seen and understood the terms of the contract.
That's what computers are for, silly!
Call me skeptical, but this looks like an extension of the Microsoft "wizard" mentality. "It looks like you are trying to draw a circle. Would you like me to draw you a circle?"
At least in the U.S...
To see just how far the court will extend the right of publicity, check out White v. Samsung. Be sure to read Judge Kozinski's dissent.
That you would vote for them indicates a massive failure from the educational system and mass media.
It is possible to understand why people are afraid and still not support fear-based politics. Remember that 48% of American voters in 2004 voted against Bush. I'm getting rather tired of people who don't live in the USA assuming that all Americans are fucking idiots. There has been a huge cultural political battle in America over the last several years. The Moronic Right is still holding on, but with any luck in a few days the balance of power will start to shift.
Side note: If you think that anyone in government, or any voter actually conducts a quantitative risk analysis of the type you mentioned, balancing cost against human lives, you're living in a bubble. People aren't computers; they make most decisions on emotion. Just look at all of the OS Wars in Slashdot, the place where the supposedly rational elite hang out.
About the only drawback is that you'll have to survive basic training.
From what I've been reading, the "kinder, gentler" Basic Training has been becoming even kinder and gentler of late. Air Force Basic Training has never been known as a real ass-kicker anyway.
When people fly two planes into the WTC, and their fellow travellers express the intent to conduct further attacks, the human intention behind it is pretty clear. Accidents happen, of course, but generally people aren't *trying* to get into car accidents. The idea that people are out there dreaming up further schemes involving mass destruction is what freaks people out. Sure, the odds are still absurdly low that you or I are going to get whacked by terrorists, but human beings are deliberately trying to create the destruction. I think it feels much more personal when you realize that human beings are behind these events, rather than random chance or nature.
really? if it is so small why are they suddenly gettng 68,000,000 hits a month?
YouTube will argue that this is confusion about an address, not confusion about identity. People who intended to go to YouTube wound up at UTube, but not because they were deceived as to the identity of YouTube in relation to the identity of UTube.
If they loose sales because there service is down they loose money.
Is YouTube responsible for their service being down? Have they induced anyone into going to utube.com? If I prominently display my address as TymSmith.com, and people mistakenly go to TimSmith.com, is that my fault? Do sound-alikes create an obligation to defend against every possible variation? YouTube could also be interpreted as UToob, or EweTube.
There was the Madonne('singer')/Modonna hospital is just one of many examples. Madonna won claiming that her trademark 'Madonna' was more recognizable then Madonna...as in The Madonna.
The facts in that situation were complicated. The hospital was actually caught in the middle between Madonna and the infamous Dan Pirisi. It was also a WIPO dispute, not a US court case.
They have had the domain since 1996, and you don't HAVE to be registered to have a trademark. It just makes proving it easier.
True, it does make proving you have a trademark easier. A lot easier. When YouTube did a trademark search, UTube wasn't in the Trademark Office database.
I think the court will find UTube's argument unpersuasive, particularly because of the slippery slope implications. Anyone starting a new company or creating a new domain name would have to protect themselves from hordes of previously existing businesses with sound-alike names.
Fewer players in the Linux world, and preferably one dominant vendor, means one opponent for Microsoft. Would you rather fight a distributed and decentralized enemy, or a centrally-controlled one with a well-defined center of gravity?
The more standardized and less fragmented Linux is, the more Linux is like the traditional competitors Microsoft is used to crushing. My guess is that Microsoft's current attitude toward Linux is based on this assumption. Will Microsoft's attempts to manipulate the Linux market succeed? Probably not. But that won't stop them from trying.
the utube trademark application was not filed until after the problem started
As sribe points out, Utube isn't in a good position on this one. If it looks, smells, and tastes like hogwash, it probably is. These guys don't have a leg to stand on. Likelihood of confusion between YouTube (videos online) and Utube (tubing) is infinitesimally small. Actual damage done by YouTube to Utube is going to be very difficult to prove.
Domain name sound-alikes do not a successful trademark case make. The fact that they didn't even register the trademark until now is not going to fly with the court.
the key question for Google's future is whether it can realize that losing is really one of the best assets the company has
No.
Does Google shoot itself in the foot every time it scores a win with a new product? Of course not. It is not the losing that is important. That's simply a by-product of taking a lot of shots on goal; most of them miss. But Google doesn't celebrate the failures. It celebrates willingness to take chances and try new things, because it knows that such an attitude will lead to more attemps, less staying in the safe zone, and ultimately more successes.
They don't get the Internet, so they're not censoring it. They get their own parallel network that uses the same protocols, but filters out unwanted contact with the grubby, wild and wooly Internet. It is a different animal than the Internet. SinoNet, perhaps.
That's a shame. We're losing our democracy because people can't be bothered. Unfortunately life is often about making choices between distasteful alternatives. But the lesser of two evils is better in the here and now than some pie in the sky candidate who exists only in fantasy land. No politician is going to mirror any thinking person's views on every single subject, just like no job is ever going to be perfect, no spouse is ever perfect, and no individual voter is going to be perfect.
People who are waiting for the perfect circumstances before they vote are hiding behind the easy cover of cynicism. If you're too good for the real world of rough and tumble democratic processes, don't yap later about how disgusted you are with the state of politics. You don't participate, you can complain all you want, but those of us who voted don't have to listen.
And are you trying to suggest that we're not ruled by the rich?
That wasn't the thrust of my point.
Big Media has been winning for a long time now, in the halls of Congress and in the courts. The (supposed) fact that Senators' daughters like YouTube isn't going to affect that one bit. If YouTube prevails, it will be because the law, which has become progressively more well-defined regarding digital media, is on YouTube's side. The DMCA, for all its faults, gives hosting companies a big out in the form of the takedown provision. There is no inducement to infringe. YouTube has obviously learned from the arrogant stupidty of Grokster. Big Media also wants to profit from YouTube and similar sites. They're starting to learn that bashing their customers isn't a smart business model.
Your suggestion that all of these legal, political, and economic factors are less important than an unsubstantiated claim that the children of the rich and powerful love YouTube strikes me as being far too simplistic.
From a lot of the "political" comments on /. it's fairly apparent that most IT people/geeks have no real grasp on governmental affairs.
Everyone was having such a good time stroking each other, crowing about The Cluelessness of Others and the Manifest Superiority of Geeks. Why'd you have to piss on the parade? You, sir, are a traitor to your class!
the daughters of senators and district attorneys and other rich people tell their parents that YouTube is great. Napster was a little too hard for the estemed gentleman's little princess to figure out, but YouTube isn't.
That's right, because district attorneys and "other rich people" (whatever that means in the context of the law) make decisions on the basis of what their "little princesses" tell them. Doubtless that's how lawyers, judges and "other rich people" decide all kinds of things, like what music to listen to ("Justin Timberlake is, like, *such* a good artist!") and what brokerage firms they should use.
All of which makes you wonder how the good films get made. Usually, it's because someone with a really insistent vision, a buttload of money, and enough backing from the studio that they don't get messed with, is at the reins. This seems to be the exact opposite of the studio system so eloquently described by Lee, and of the collective method espoused by those wacky collectivists.
Open Source offers great advantages. That doesn't mean it can be shoehorned into every situation.
Since when did Slashdot become a political forum?
Politics has always been part of Slashdot. More than a few of us think politics is just as important as technology. After all, a topic like the EU's actions against Microsoft is rife with politics, and Microsoft can't put you in jail, make war on another country, or tax you.
Seriously, I'm English and I don't know what those abbreviations mean.
Apologies. Explaining them briefly leaves out a lot of important info, but here's a quick and dirty:
It's great and all that they found a new way to organise their company, but I must have missed the part where they actually bring in money.
I'd imagine that depends on who starts up a business with this new model, and whether they're any good at running a business. There are no guarantees with any business structure.
This looks like more of that randomised babble I get from my junkmail folder... Could anyone translate into inoffensive plain english? How is this different from any other business plan? Honestly?
Every business plan I've ever seen (for something beyond a sole proprietorship or partnership) takes for granted that the business will be established as either an S-Corp, LLC, or C-Corp. I'm not sure how business formation works in Canada. However, based on the article, it appears that the idea is to create a business structure that borrows features from a co-operative association (ex: a co-op grocery store or a co-op lending organization), while retaining features of a corporation.
Just because the concept seems a bit convoluted doesn't make it particularly "offensive" to my mind. Many extremely successful businesses have structures that can't be explained in less than 10,000 words, anyway. I'm of the opinion that part of the reason we have companies that do stupid and destructive things is because the legal structures for those companies encourage buck-passing, groupthink, and sublimation of individual responsibility. The article indicates that this new structure attempts to avoid both of those. It will be interesting to see if anyone gives it a try.
but calling him "a strange footnote in the history of computing" is just idiotic.
Anyone who polarizes people to such a large degree, has generated so much passion, and has served as the point man of the free software movement deserves to be regarded as a towering figure in the history of computing. Whether GPL 3 succeeds or fails, Stallman has already left his mark. Again, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with him; he's no footnote.
Heh heh, I guess I'm not alone in thinking this is proof of a slow news day.