Free, open, unencumbered use of technology has been the baseline norm throughout most of human history.
It is special monopoly protections of "Intellectual Property" that is the more recent development.
The subject limitations, use limitations and duration of such special monopoly privileges should be reviewed carefully to see how far they should extend to bring the most benefit to society as a whole.
The default baseline should be that any idea is open to anyone to use, to improve upon and to teach to others.
Your right about the possibility of government using tax policies and other legislation as one of the tools to refine how the free market operates to avoid it veering in the direction of amorality, long-term problems (eg, externalities).
As long as there are people willing to carefully consider the evidence and present solutions that are better than what we have now, then there is hope for things to get better.
But it's a real uphill battle because reasoned voices don't get wide audience (which is important if you live in a democratic republic where citizens affect government policy) and because any change that might diminish the financial well-being of any financially-vested party with a strong interest in preserving the status quo (say, drug dealers, K Street lobbyists, casino owners, arms dealers) will be opposed strenuously, even if a careful rational consideration of the policies suggests such a change would be for the better for society in general.
...until such time as Microsoft can release a competing, purportedly open XML format, which they will then poison with proprietary "extensions" that guarantee their continued stranglehold on office applications.
Just having the possibility of a competing "Open XML" format backed by the largest software vendor in the world will delay adoption of any competing ODF.
Not only will the Open version of XML be laden with proprietary extensions, but it will have gaping holes in its interface, its description, the kinds of documents that can be represented unambiguously.
Too many people are unaware of the fantastic power of the free market to find efficiencies that they they did not dream even existed.
While it's comforting to assume the agents in the marketplace of buyers and seller are moral, no such precondition exists. A varnish of plausible morality suffices in most instances.
If buying legislation through lobbying efforts is a cost effective means of preserving or increasing the revenue of your business then you'd be a fool not to do it when your competitors could.
Likewise, in a democratic republic full of gullible voters, if you can spend money to send a message swaying voters to elect people who will represent your financial interests, independent of moral issues such as truth or deceit, then you'd be inefficient not to employ whatever of those techniques are successful.
I'm not surprised by any of the outcomes. Go ahead and be outraged about suddenly revealed amoral behavior. As far as I'm concerned it's just the crudest of the techniques being culled away after the fools discover they've been had. Be assured more effective and subtle techniques are still submerged.
Lincoln:"You can fool all of the people some of the time and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Me:"You can fool enough of the people enough of the time."
The new world of superconvenient RFID credit cards and Passport People Identifiers/Dissident Locators really could benefit from a wallet that gives individuals a modicum of control over what information about themselves is released to governments, corporations, etc.
Of course, the better and harder thing to do is to make governments and corporations more transparent and trustworthy, but that's a much harder thing to do.
Legal risks with using software are a real issue in our world.
That's why it would be in the best interests of all computer users and IT decision makers to explore the issue fully, to look closely at what kinds of risks exist, what kinds of risks tend to occur most often in the real world and what their consequences are.
My experience has been that folks using proprietary software are frequently in the position of bending over backwards (particularly in a large corporate or government environment) to make sure that they have licenses for every piece of software that their employees are running on the their PCs. The IT folks spend some serious time auditing to avoid the even larger risk of a BSA audit.
As for legal risks associated with open source software I have yet to encounter any. All I've seen are press reports of legal actions that show no outcome but to prove they were based on frivolous premises and some PR statements talking about legal indemnification which are excellent marketing strategies for certain vendors of proprietary software keenly afraid of their revenue stream becoming commoditised by free and open source software. About the only genuine risk I've seen with FOSS is for developers that disobey the "Share and share alike" GPL by releasing modified binaries without releasing modified source.
Perhaps I'm missing a serious issue and these folks could show some evidence of real people and real companies that have experienced harm due to lack of vigilance concerning the legal risks of FOSS. And they could explain why my personal experience doesn't reflect reality of serious legal risks with hard statistics concerning how much time and money are lost to risk mitigation and handling legal mishaps with users of FOSS compared to users of proprietary software.
A single-minded attempt to achieve maximum uptime without regard to other factors, such as security patches, energy use, etc. is wrong. You're right there.
But what is also wrong is like what happens to me when automatic server rebooting policies, which are much more common in the Windows world, cause my open session on a terminal server to disappear over the weekend. IMHO, heavy-handed weekly reboots can erode productivity and should not have to happen. To be fair, I think my Windows server is capable of much greater uptime in 2006 than it was in 1999. Perhaps our policies haven't kept up with improvements in its reliability.
An OS should run as long as you want, as long as you need, as long as it takes for you to optimize the rest of your business needs allowing uptime to range from second to years.
If I had another sysadmin ordering crap for me, that would be great!
Not necessarily.
Sure, many of your sysadmin-users will do their homework and get a WhizzBang hardware that can reasonably be integrated into your systems.
But they can just as well grab a bleeding edge piece of hardware that will require weeks of blood, sweat and tears before you give up. All the while your pride as a sysadmin is on the line to install what someone else thinks is No Big Deal.
No, I prefer to eat dogfood I've order myself rather than let someone else have it delivered to me.
This kind of a question is very difficult to answer.
First, are you and your group reasonably familiar with the project you have ahead of you and what kinds of problems you must surmount to successfully complete the project? Get a few people in your that have the most experience with projects like you hope to tackle with the new framework.
Second, it's clear you don't personally have much experience with using any of the particular frameworks, or you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. But are there a couple people in your organization, new people, perhaps without the domain experience of others but with a familiarity with using particular frameworks in other contexts.
Get all those people in the same room and have them figure out how each framework could contribute and hinder the goals of your project.
It's that easy, and that hard.
To the extent they exist, are free, functional, and that people actually pay attention to them, standards will help make a smooth transition for customers wanting to trade Brand X SQL server for Brand Y SQL server.
I'm not sure how many customers actually migrate downward from a commercial offering to FOSS options like MySQL or Postgres. Upward migration has always been a way out if you outgrow the FOSS, but you can always evaluate whether the increased performance, reliability, features, support are worth the money. That means vendors get their feet held to the fire to provide genuine value-added.
It means it will be increasingly difficult to sell plain old SQL servers to new customers if the "Good Enough" MySQL and Postgres become increasingly capable and set the bar higher and higher every few years.
that the question of when and why to migrate to and from free software to commercial alternatives is being asked, that it can be asked.
It means there are alternatives, that everyone can make a freer decision with more options, that free software provides a baseline commodity level that benefits everyone, and that commercial providers can compete on providing genuine value added on top of this baseline offering.
I'm unlikely to buy a BluRay or HD-DVD player anytime soon, even if they get cheap.
How much data can I store on it?
How much data per Euro can I store on it?
How reliable/durable is my data on them?
Looks to me like just another careful consumer figuring out that neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD meets their needs as well as a RAID-5 array of SATA drives and a broadband connection.
Same applies to the two-minute piracy warning - I paid for the DVD. I am NOT their target audience.
To be sure.
I'm curious, though, (I, too, buy almost-too-exhorbitantly-priced, legal DVDs) whether the cheap pirated DVDs also come with the imposing FBI/Interpol Warning message on them, too? You know, for authenticity's sake:)? I'm sure the producers ands buyers get a smile out of them, too.
Yes, and the difference now is that the Chinese economy is propping up the American government, both by financing our massive debt/deficit and providing our consumer based economy with cheap goods, fueling our economy and tax base. What happens when the Chinese economy hits a wall and that support goes away, eh?
It's the other way.
If the Chinese economy sputters because of, say, the shaky quality of their bank lending practices, there might be a slight hiccup in their supply of cheap exports to the US.
More worrisome is that their mercantilistic export practices such as artificially holding down their currency relative to the dollar will finally put too many US workers out of work producing anything. Those pissed-off former workers will pressure the US government to enact trade restrictions against China, prices will go through the roof. Most Americans have no idea that Everyday Low Prices mean that the great bargains they're reaping at Walmart come hand in hand with their labor costs being compared to the China price for those labor costs (including health care, taxes, pension, environment protection, etc.)
The US and China are locked into an economic interdependent embrace that neither can let go of without causing big problems for both.
China needs to let its workers take home more of their pay, develop their domestic market, and let their currency float more freely. The US needs to get its fiscal house in order, including higher taxes and lower entitlement spending commitments (try to find any politicians with the guts to tell that truth to voters), and stop dumping a billion dollars a week into Iraq.
If Microsoft is trying to influence legislation in India, thus making the market more favorable to itself, how is that a "free market"?
Hasn't the free market in legislation worked pretty well here in the United States? These days you can get pretty favorable legislation for not too much money, single party control notwithstanding.
Isn't it unfair to deny India the full power of the dark side of the free market? The whole Bhopal disaster shows that the Indian government is fully up to the task of accommodating paying customers.
or to unbundle Excel from Word when you buy Office. It's really stupid.
Well, stupid for Microsoft, I suppose, since it would expose them to greater competition against Excel and Word.
Consumers would benefit immensely if Microsoft made the interface specifications to the their products completely open, free and unencumbered so that consumers could buy bundles in competitive marketplace with lower prices, higher quality products and a faster pace of innovation. As it stands, you can buy your convenient, powerful bundled Word/spreadsheet or Excel/document prepartion software from exactly one source. Sole source means the pricing power is skewed towards the supplier.
There's a favorable argument for bundling based on the convenience it provides. But bundling also provides hidden chains that limit purchasing decisions because you can't move to a better spreadsheet without giving up Excel's interoperability with Word or vice versa.
Bundling the OS with the computer is "convenient", too.
Bundling their way up the application software stack from the OS has worked well for Microsoft over the years and I don't expect them to give up this lucrative strategy easily. If they have to pay South Korea US$32 million or the EU some fine an order of magnitude larger, that's just testimony to how valuable the API is to them. Risking the occasional fine, settling with aggrieved litigants is just a cost to be weighed in the overall accounting.
Too little, too late legal sanctions requiring MS to distribute stripped, unbundled versions long after their competitors have bitten the dust are only a minor blip on the radar. The underwhelming uptake of Windows sans media player in Europe indicates that closing the barn door is being done after the horse has left.
Thomas Penfield Jackson was right; he still says what he thinks. If he had kept his mouth shut when he was supposed to then this agonizing drawn-out process of killing the beast to release its stranglehold on the market would not be necessary.
The trouble here is that Google is reproducing the entire article if you think about it. Imagine if you go to the library every day, and copy a single phrase in a book. If you do this a few thousand times, you've reproduced the whole book, and it's definitely no longer fair use. That's what Google is doing. They have internal copies of everything, and they serve small (but different) pieces to people.
I hate it when the technological tools or providers unfairly become the targets of a crime-prevention program.
Any actual copyright infringment crime is being committed by the pirate that unscrupulously combines Google's snippets into an entire work and re-sells them without permission. Google provides tools that enable this to happen, but others are committing the crime.
Just as with DVD Jon, whose tools can be used legally, or illegally. Rather than go after the actual perpetrators of actual crimes, the *AA associations take the path of least business resistance to outlaw a technical measure or means that is not inherently criminal.
Just like those annoying speed bumps you find in parking lots, it's a technical solution to a social problem.
Let contributors be anonymous, but let them build trust among their audience by repeated demonstrations of responsible behavior (postings).
Everything is moving this direction, in the sense that my system update tool relies upon verifying digital signatures of software packages against a previously downloaded public key (downloaded from a different server, at a different time).
There really needs to be a free, open public key infrastructure with good mechanisms for accumulating and verifying reputation.
And, no, I don't care if a person adopts more than one moniker and refuses to let one part of his life correlate with another identity. Even if my government/corporation assures me that requiring absolute identification a particular individual prevents terrorism, stops pedophiles, or prevents rampant "piracy".
At big companies, the problem is NOT a lack of resources, it's resources poorly spent. The quoted ratio is 1:5, one Unix admin can do the work of five Windoze admins.
So, the average IT manager at the average big company has a 5/6 chance of having a Windows admin background and will get feedback on technical and business decisions from 5 Windows admins and 1 Unix admin?
Physical objects are all that property is about: your body, your car, your land, your house. I don't see how anything non-physical can be considered property.
Those categories of personally-owned property have developed over time. Indeed, past concepts have included that many of those physical objects belong to God, to your feudal lord, or to no one in particular or to everyone.
Nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures generally don't have so precise definitions of land ownership as agrarian economies, for example. The Native Americans probably though it was ridiculous to be so anal about property rights that the new immigrants were so concerned about.
As for non-physical objects, there are still areas where we have implicit rights that we expect but which we haven't found the need to claim yet. These could give rise to "property" rights, potentially.
For example, suppose I invent a device to make the thoughts in a particular head conform to my wishes (say, in order to sell a product). We regard our thoughts as our own, but there's not much legal precedent protecting our rights to our thoughts inasmuch as there haven't been sufficiently intrusive technical measures available for exploiting the thoughts of others.
We might think that "rights to thoughts" are ridiculous, but it's not ridiculous - only an artifact of how our society is structured based on supply, demand, and what technology makes possible.
Not long ago I saw a show theorizing that the collapse of Mayan civilization around 820 CE was the result of a severe drought (the scientists in question were examining fossil remains of tiny lakebed creatures that get laid down annually like tree rings) correlated with the loss of this Atlantic conveyor of the Gulf Stream. IIRC, there were periods of severe winters in Scandinavia, but the recorded severe winters in Europe with sometime in the 1400's. Not sure if the historical records of severe European winters went back to the 800s.
"I'm sitting here...wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate or maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC."
When clueless newbies are complaining about drivers for Linux in the same way that they have complained for years under Windows (maybe not printers, but something), I take it as a sign that Linux has arrived.
Slashdot Mirror
Free, open, unencumbered use of technology has been the baseline norm throughout most of human history.
It is special monopoly protections of "Intellectual Property" that is the more recent development.
The subject limitations, use limitations and duration of such special monopoly privileges should be reviewed carefully to see how far they should extend to bring the most benefit to society as a whole.
The default baseline should be that any idea is open to anyone to use, to improve upon and to teach to others.
$0.02
Your right about the possibility of government using tax policies and other legislation as one of the tools to refine how the free market operates to avoid it veering in the direction of amorality, long-term problems (eg, externalities).
As long as there are people willing to carefully consider the evidence and present solutions that are better than what we have now, then there is hope for things to get better.
But it's a real uphill battle because reasoned voices don't get wide audience (which is important if you live in a democratic republic where citizens affect government policy) and because any change that might diminish the financial well-being of any financially-vested party with a strong interest in preserving the status quo (say, drug dealers, K Street lobbyists, casino owners, arms dealers) will be opposed strenuously, even if a careful rational consideration of the policies suggests such a change would be for the better for society in general.
Just having the possibility of a competing "Open XML" format backed by the largest software vendor in the world will delay adoption of any competing ODF.
Not only will the Open version of XML be laden with proprietary extensions, but it will have gaping holes in its interface, its description, the kinds of documents that can be represented unambiguously.
Too many people are unaware of the fantastic power of the free market to find efficiencies that they they did not dream even existed.
While it's comforting to assume the agents in the marketplace of buyers and seller are moral, no such precondition exists. A varnish of plausible morality suffices in most instances.
If buying legislation through lobbying efforts is a cost effective means of preserving or increasing the revenue of your business then you'd be a fool not to do it when your competitors could.
Likewise, in a democratic republic full of gullible voters, if you can spend money to send a message swaying voters to elect people who will represent your financial interests, independent of moral issues such as truth or deceit, then you'd be inefficient not to employ whatever of those techniques are successful.
I'm not surprised by any of the outcomes. Go ahead and be outraged about suddenly revealed amoral behavior. As far as I'm concerned it's just the crudest of the techniques being culled away after the fools discover they've been had. Be assured more effective and subtle techniques are still submerged.
Lincoln:"You can fool all of the people some of the time and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Me:"You can fool enough of the people enough of the time."
The new world of superconvenient RFID credit cards and Passport People Identifiers/Dissident Locators really could benefit from a wallet that gives individuals a modicum of control over what information about themselves is released to governments, corporations, etc.
Of course, the better and harder thing to do is to make governments and corporations more transparent and trustworthy, but that's a much harder thing to do.
I've noticed, too, that what amounts to traditional scientific inquiry is tantamount to reverse-engineering of natural phenomena.
Legal risks with using software are a real issue in our world.
That's why it would be in the best interests of all computer users and IT decision makers to explore the issue fully, to look closely at what kinds of risks exist, what kinds of risks tend to occur most often in the real world and what their consequences are.
My experience has been that folks using proprietary software are frequently in the position of bending over backwards (particularly in a large corporate or government environment) to make sure that they have licenses for every piece of software that their employees are running on the their PCs. The IT folks spend some serious time auditing to avoid the even larger risk of a BSA audit.
As for legal risks associated with open source software I have yet to encounter any. All I've seen are press reports of legal actions that show no outcome but to prove they were based on frivolous premises and some PR statements talking about legal indemnification which are excellent marketing strategies for certain vendors of proprietary software keenly afraid of their revenue stream becoming commoditised by free and open source software. About the only genuine risk I've seen with FOSS is for developers that disobey the "Share and share alike" GPL by releasing modified binaries without releasing modified source.
Perhaps I'm missing a serious issue and these folks could show some evidence of real people and real companies that have experienced harm due to lack of vigilance concerning the legal risks of FOSS. And they could explain why my personal experience doesn't reflect reality of serious legal risks with hard statistics concerning how much time and money are lost to risk mitigation and handling legal mishaps with users of FOSS compared to users of proprietary software.
You're right. And wrong.
A single-minded attempt to achieve maximum uptime without regard to other factors, such as security patches, energy use, etc. is wrong. You're right there.
But what is also wrong is like what happens to me when automatic server rebooting policies, which are much more common in the Windows world, cause my open session on a terminal server to disappear over the weekend. IMHO, heavy-handed weekly reboots can erode productivity and should not have to happen. To be fair, I think my Windows server is capable of much greater uptime in 2006 than it was in 1999. Perhaps our policies haven't kept up with improvements in its reliability.
An OS should run as long as you want, as long as you need, as long as it takes for you to optimize the rest of your business needs allowing uptime to range from second to years.
Not necessarily.
Sure, many of your sysadmin-users will do their homework and get a WhizzBang hardware that can reasonably be integrated into your systems.
But they can just as well grab a bleeding edge piece of hardware that will require weeks of blood, sweat and tears before you give up. All the while your pride as a sysadmin is on the line to install what someone else thinks is No Big Deal.
No, I prefer to eat dogfood I've order myself rather than let someone else have it delivered to me.
This kind of a question is very difficult to answer. First, are you and your group reasonably familiar with the project you have ahead of you and what kinds of problems you must surmount to successfully complete the project? Get a few people in your that have the most experience with projects like you hope to tackle with the new framework. Second, it's clear you don't personally have much experience with using any of the particular frameworks, or you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. But are there a couple people in your organization, new people, perhaps without the domain experience of others but with a familiarity with using particular frameworks in other contexts. Get all those people in the same room and have them figure out how each framework could contribute and hinder the goals of your project. It's that easy, and that hard.
To the extent they exist, are free, functional, and that people actually pay attention to them, standards will help make a smooth transition for customers wanting to trade Brand X SQL server for Brand Y SQL server.
I'm not sure how many customers actually migrate downward from a commercial offering to FOSS options like MySQL or Postgres. Upward migration has always been a way out if you outgrow the FOSS, but you can always evaluate whether the increased performance, reliability, features, support are worth the money. That means vendors get their feet held to the fire to provide genuine value-added.
It means it will be increasingly difficult to sell plain old SQL servers to new customers if the "Good Enough" MySQL and Postgres become increasingly capable and set the bar higher and higher every few years.
that the question of when and why to migrate to and from free software to commercial alternatives is being asked, that it can be asked.
It means there are alternatives, that everyone can make a freer decision with more options, that free software provides a baseline commodity level that benefits everyone, and that commercial providers can compete on providing genuine value added on top of this baseline offering.
Looks to me like just another careful consumer figuring out that neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD meets their needs as well as a RAID-5 array of SATA drives and a broadband connection.
To be sure.
I'm curious, though, (I, too, buy almost-too-exhorbitantly-priced, legal DVDs) whether the cheap pirated DVDs also come with the imposing FBI/Interpol Warning message on them, too? You know, for authenticity's sake:)? I'm sure the producers ands buyers get a smile out of them, too.
It's the other way.
If the Chinese economy sputters because of, say, the shaky quality of their bank lending practices, there might be a slight hiccup in their supply of cheap exports to the US.
More worrisome is that their mercantilistic export practices such as artificially holding down their currency relative to the dollar will finally put too many US workers out of work producing anything. Those pissed-off former workers will pressure the US government to enact trade restrictions against China, prices will go through the roof. Most Americans have no idea that Everyday Low Prices mean that the great bargains they're reaping at Walmart come hand in hand with their labor costs being compared to the China price for those labor costs (including health care, taxes, pension, environment protection, etc.)
The US and China are locked into an economic interdependent embrace that neither can let go of without causing big problems for both.
China needs to let its workers take home more of their pay, develop their domestic market, and let their currency float more freely. The US needs to get its fiscal house in order, including higher taxes and lower entitlement spending commitments (try to find any politicians with the guts to tell that truth to voters), and stop dumping a billion dollars a week into Iraq.
Hasn't the free market in legislation worked pretty well here in the United States? These days you can get pretty favorable legislation for not too much money, single party control notwithstanding.
Isn't it unfair to deny India the full power of the dark side of the free market? The whole Bhopal disaster shows that the Indian government is fully up to the task of accommodating paying customers.
[Sorry, I'm just too cynical these days.]
Well, stupid for Microsoft, I suppose, since it would expose them to greater competition against Excel and Word.
Consumers would benefit immensely if Microsoft made the interface specifications to the their products completely open, free and unencumbered so that consumers could buy bundles in competitive marketplace with lower prices, higher quality products and a faster pace of innovation. As it stands, you can buy your convenient, powerful bundled Word/spreadsheet or Excel/document prepartion software from exactly one source. Sole source means the pricing power is skewed towards the supplier.
There's a favorable argument for bundling based on the convenience it provides. But bundling also provides hidden chains that limit purchasing decisions because you can't move to a better spreadsheet without giving up Excel's interoperability with Word or vice versa.
Bundling the OS with the computer is "convenient", too.
Bundling their way up the application software stack from the OS has worked well for Microsoft over the years and I don't expect them to give up this lucrative strategy easily. If they have to pay South Korea US$32 million or the EU some fine an order of magnitude larger, that's just testimony to how valuable the API is to them. Risking the occasional fine, settling with aggrieved litigants is just a cost to be weighed in the overall accounting.
Too little, too late legal sanctions requiring MS to distribute stripped, unbundled versions long after their competitors have bitten the dust are only a minor blip on the radar. The underwhelming uptake of Windows sans media player in Europe indicates that closing the barn door is being done after the horse has left.
Meanwhile, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is satisfied with dog and pony shows that will have negligible impact on the competitive landscape. Indeed, time is on the side of MS as they roll-out Innovative© bundled new products and multi-year licensing schemes to their corporate captive audience that build up barriers to migration on multiple fronts. It used to be that competitive products had to work just like Word or Excel. As new entries like OpenOffice and Mozilla/Firefox provide good functionality and reasonable MS interoperability to address to those old barriers to migration, new barriers get put up. Most corporations are too wedded to Exchange, Active Directory or have already bought a multi-year license agreement that make migration away from Microsoft uncomfortable.
Thomas Penfield Jackson was right; he still says what he thinks. If he had kept his mouth shut when he was supposed to then this agonizing drawn-out process of killing the beast to release its stranglehold on the market would not be necessary.
I hate it when the technological tools or providers unfairly become the targets of a crime-prevention program.
Any actual copyright infringment crime is being committed by the pirate that unscrupulously combines Google's snippets into an entire work and re-sells them without permission. Google provides tools that enable this to happen, but others are committing the crime.
Just as with DVD Jon, whose tools can be used legally, or illegally. Rather than go after the actual perpetrators of actual crimes, the *AA associations take the path of least business resistance to outlaw a technical measure or means that is not inherently criminal.
Just like those annoying speed bumps you find in parking lots, it's a technical solution to a social problem.
What Wikipedia really needs is trust
Let contributors be anonymous, but let them build trust among their audience by repeated demonstrations of responsible behavior (postings).
Everything is moving this direction, in the sense that my system update tool relies upon verifying digital signatures of software packages against a previously downloaded public key (downloaded from a different server, at a different time).
There really needs to be a free, open public key infrastructure with good mechanisms for accumulating and verifying reputation.
And, no, I don't care if a person adopts more than one moniker and refuses to let one part of his life correlate with another identity. Even if my government/corporation assures me that requiring absolute identification a particular individual prevents terrorism, stops pedophiles, or prevents rampant "piracy".
So, the average IT manager at the average big company has a 5/6 chance of having a Windows admin background and will get feedback on technical and business decisions from 5 Windows admins and 1 Unix admin?
That pretty well sums it up where I work, too.
Amen.
Is it just me, or is the Big Picture non optimal?
You know, Intel's wonderful state-of-art 65 nm fab line producing dual core Opteron's would be nice:)
Those categories of personally-owned property have developed over time. Indeed, past concepts have included that many of those physical objects belong to God, to your feudal lord, or to no one in particular or to everyone.
Nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures generally don't have so precise definitions of land ownership as agrarian economies, for example. The Native Americans probably though it was ridiculous to be so anal about property rights that the new immigrants were so concerned about.
As for non-physical objects, there are still areas where we have implicit rights that we expect but which we haven't found the need to claim yet. These could give rise to "property" rights, potentially.
For example, suppose I invent a device to make the thoughts in a particular head conform to my wishes (say, in order to sell a product). We regard our thoughts as our own, but there's not much legal precedent protecting our rights to our thoughts inasmuch as there haven't been sufficiently intrusive technical measures available for exploiting the thoughts of others.
We might think that "rights to thoughts" are ridiculous, but it's not ridiculous - only an artifact of how our society is structured based on supply, demand, and what technology makes possible.
Not long ago I saw a show theorizing that the collapse of Mayan civilization around 820 CE was the result of a severe drought (the scientists in question were examining fossil remains of tiny lakebed creatures that get laid down annually like tree rings) correlated with the loss of this Atlantic conveyor of the Gulf Stream. IIRC, there were periods of severe winters in Scandinavia, but the recorded severe winters in Europe with sometime in the 1400's. Not sure if the historical records of severe European winters went back to the 800s.
When clueless newbies are complaining about drivers for Linux in the same way that they have complained for years under Windows (maybe not printers, but something), I take it as a sign that Linux has arrived.