The computer (its OS, and the applications) is a means to an end: its metaphors are an attempt to engage and express on a level that a lot of people just don't give a shit about.
Sounds like a great market for full-service IT support: they tell you what they want to accomplish and you tell them how to do it. No arguing over appearance or version numbers, or if something has changed, just get the work done.
But that's not how it works in the real world, because people can't trust IT support to solve their problems. They are charged large amounts for reasons they don't understand. People do think they "understand" how to do their own work, even if all they know are rote steps. It's a variation of the cargo-cult mentality where someone else has shown them the first time, and they just copy it step by step after that. There are only two solutions. Either get them to learn the computer and gain confidence in their ability to figure out the steps, or convince them that you can be trusted to figure out the steps for them. The latter is harder, and the only route for Linux, which is why adoption is so sluggish.
IMHO, Chrome OS and iPhone will teach people to trust unmanaged computers. With the focus solely on their work, they'll be more willing to trust IT support to figure out the steps for them. Now, people have to worry about the cost of hardware replacements, networking, and software costs, before they even get to the work they care about. In the (near) future people will be able to skip those concerns, and they won't care that their browser is running on Linux.
But it seems that hardware makers today want more than selling you their product. They want to make sure you don't use it unless it's in a way they approve of.
This isn't new; companies have always tried to make more by controlling their product after the sale. What's new is including a "service" attached to every product, so they have a new legal basis for demanding control. Adding a service isn't exclusive to computers and software either, it's the same strategy that "voiding the warranty" was in the past.
A win for MS is killing or fragmenting the free, open, standards-based web. They promote native apps by emphasizing IE9 is "native" and HTML5 is "native", while leaving a disaster of browser versions for web based apps to deal with. IE6 became popular by adding lots of non-standard features, then IE was ignored for 5+ years, and now different IE versions will run on different versions of Windows, making it hard on the web and thus better for MS.
Imagine you live in West Virginia. You are a civil engineer, in charge of building the first coal mine. You build it the best you can... It is very dangerous, but effective for a few years. Several other people copy your design and build their own...
Meanwhile, someone else looks at your design and determines the coal mine could be built much safer if you... didn't skip safety checks. You try it out and find it works very well. Meanwhile, people all over West Virginia are dying in the "Gen 1" coal mines. People protest coal mines to the... Senate and elect people who won't allow new coal mines to be built, even with the safety features.
To make matters worse, the existing coal mines are now rotting.... The... Senate funds a study to look into building "Gen 3" coal mines. The engineers come back with designs for gasification coal mines, using the latest in geometry (the arch). The engineering community thinks this coal mine will last for years, be incredibly strong and safe. But because the public has such a bad memory of the existing coal mines, they want nothing to do with them. Meanwhile they demand the Senate fund more wars for oil.
See what I did there?:) The fundamental problem is that expertise is corrupted by money. Why should we trust the engineers saying everything is OK when we know their jobs depend on them saying that, and the companies and trade groups promoting it have a long history of lying?
And how is it not within the spirit of the license to take someone else work, fork it and rebrand it?
Why don't you try that with Java, and let us know how it goes. Red Hat isn't playing nice but they're giving Oracle a (small) part of what it deserves.
Anonymous speech on the internet is not the same as other types of anonymous speech, and it shouldn't be judged by the old precedents. Off the top of my head:
+ It occurs orders of magnitude more often
+ It's the most common form of speech on the internet
+ there's lots of trolling, and people understand that
+ It's international in origination, not just local (so justifications about enforcement that went into the old precedents may not apply)
+ The Streisand effect combined with court investigations promotes the attitude that anonymous attacks should be considered legitimate
Copying an old law and adding "on the internet" is stupid, but so is applying old laws to a new situation. Even with a username most people are still speaking anonymously.
First they complained about amateur contributors, but I didn't speak out because I was one.
Then they said Citation Needed, but I didn't speak out because a blog links don't prove anything.
Finally they started deleting pages, and there was no one left to speak out for the obscure.
While I sympathize, your main point seems to be: "... failure to disclose what I am actually buying, which is a form of deception". So if a movie shows NY is it advertising for NY? Remember that movies are often subsidized by "film boards". How about showing the Rocky Mountains, without getting a subsidy (from Vale CO, etc...)? What if actors wear blue jeans? Does it matter if the movie is paid for that?
The real problem with product placement is the age-old corruption of art for money and propaganda. Consider the concert that charges you for a ticket, then sells the "Live at $CITY" DVD without reducing your ticket price. Or the newspaper that pretends to be unbiased, and is funded by advertisement while also charging you for a copy.
"We only said the IP must be royalty free. We didn't say there couldn't be other conditions attached." (spoken as Microsoft announce a program which will allow anyone to implement MS-XML royalty free on condition that it's implemented in a closed-source, commercial product with no code inherited from any open source project even if the licensing of the project would otherwise allow it. IOW "By all means write your own office app which reads our file format, but you'll have to start from scratch and you won't be able to gain mindshare by giving it away for free")
It's like you held a mirror up to the Oracle-Java-Apache problem. 'We only said you can implement Java openly if you use the test suite, which you can't use openly.'
That ignores the money: there will only be link farms if there are JCPenneys to pay for them. If Google makes noise about penalties, it will constrain the spam by constraining the money. Google could just hire a dozen people to ID link farms manually, and publicly announce all the customer sites (JCPenneys) that will be penalized for hiring the spammers.
It was disappointing to see how they analyzed the questions. To deal with the jokes, puns, etc... they just put in tons of old questions with their answers and trained the system. No general rules about how to determine the importance of a word or phrase; its a Jeopardy-specific heuristic.
The internet makes it different: the volume of data; data retention; timestamps and IP/location info; the unique kinds of info (ex. a rating/score given).
I don't understand why everyone is so quick to defend the government on this (do you hate Facebook that much?). 30 years ago people argued politics with their neighbors and none of it was recorded, or retained, or came with timestamps, or was digitally exact (unlike the neighbors faulty memory). Why should we decide that anything on the web is no more private than a sign you put on your lawn? Consider the problems with "web" data too: if you vote up the AACS key on Digg what's your liability? Should you go to jail for that?
It's not a "flawed premise" but an acknowledgement that the internet is changing things: People now write (or text) where they used to speak on the phone or face to face. Many political, religious and other opinions used to go unrecorded, and even now people use false (or partial) names to avoid exposing their sentiments. The courts may be playing by the same old rules, but the internet has changed what's available. Maybe the rules of evidence and exploration need to be changed for the new environment, similar to Copyright.
This seems like a bad joke - the "Evil bit" but for http headers. It must be a political move, trying to set the boundary for debate.
If this is serious it's a terrible idea: it'll be on by default for everything so it's not a compromise (and could therefore be done with laws banning the tracking); all older software that doesn't send this header would be fair game; sites will simply refuse content unless you turn it off (see AdBlock).
Yesterday I would have agreed there was no reason, but now that you ask, here's a reason: After fighting Oracle they don't want each handset vendor to payout and make separate arrangements, fragmenting Android implementations. Changing the next-big-release to GPL3 would force everyone to play by the same rules - patent agreements included.
Don't forget the flip-side: we also let celebrities go free. Like OJ Simpson. The US justice system participates in the cult of personality just like the rest of the country.
Summary of Floyd Abrams argument against Wikileaks:
1. The diplomatic cables are not a single topic, like the Pentagon Papers.
1.a. The only possible defense is "WikiLeaks' general disdain for any secrecy at all."
2. "WikiLeaks offers no articles of its own, no context of any of the materials it discloses, and no analysis of them other than assertions in press releases or their equivalent."
3. 1917 Espionage Act is so broad it can hurt journalists, but the 2006 compromise was whether journalists "actually intended to harm the U.S. or to help an enemy."
3.a. Mr. Assange might have crossed that ruling and might be convicted.
4. "Mr. Assange [has]... doomed proposed federal shield-law legislation protecting journalists' use of confidential sources"
Empty and hollow. This looks like a "digital divide" argument: it upsets the status quo; readers shouldn't look at primary sources without 'guidance'; he might be in trouble!; but politicians promised journalists some proprietary rights!
... email users have a Fourth Amendment-protected expectation of privacy in the email they store with their email providers...
Individuals and non-governmental organizations cannot argue there is no "expectation of privacy" with email. If they want to justify reading or distributing someones email, they now need a different justification, and the email owner has a positive argument against such actions; i.e. they had an expectation of privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if you are avocation changing the system ...
Avocation: An avocation is an activity that one engages in as a hobby outside one's main occupation. Was that an intentional joke, or spell-check?
The computer (its OS, and the applications) is a means to an end: its metaphors are an attempt to engage and express on a level that a lot of people just don't give a shit about.
Sounds like a great market for full-service IT support: they tell you what they want to accomplish and you tell them how to do it. No arguing over appearance or version numbers, or if something has changed, just get the work done.
But that's not how it works in the real world, because people can't trust IT support to solve their problems. They are charged large amounts for reasons they don't understand. People do think they "understand" how to do their own work, even if all they know are rote steps. It's a variation of the cargo-cult mentality where someone else has shown them the first time, and they just copy it step by step after that. There are only two solutions. Either get them to learn the computer and gain confidence in their ability to figure out the steps, or convince them that you can be trusted to figure out the steps for them. The latter is harder, and the only route for Linux, which is why adoption is so sluggish.
IMHO, Chrome OS and iPhone will teach people to trust unmanaged computers. With the focus solely on their work, they'll be more willing to trust IT support to figure out the steps for them. Now, people have to worry about the cost of hardware replacements, networking, and software costs, before they even get to the work they care about. In the (near) future people will be able to skip those concerns, and they won't care that their browser is running on Linux.
Was this published by Social Text?
But it seems that hardware makers today want more than selling you their product. They want to make sure you don't use it unless it's in a way they approve of.
This isn't new; companies have always tried to make more by controlling their product after the sale. What's new is including a "service" attached to every product, so they have a new legal basis for demanding control. Adding a service isn't exclusive to computers and software either, it's the same strategy that "voiding the warranty" was in the past.
A win for MS is killing or fragmenting the free, open, standards-based web. They promote native apps by emphasizing IE9 is "native" and HTML5 is "native", while leaving a disaster of browser versions for web based apps to deal with. IE6 became popular by adding lots of non-standard features, then IE was ignored for 5+ years, and now different IE versions will run on different versions of Windows, making it hard on the web and thus better for MS.
Imagine you live in West Virginia. You are a civil engineer, in charge of building the first coal mine. You build it the best you can ... It is very dangerous, but effective for a few years. Several other people copy your design and build their own ...
Meanwhile, someone else looks at your design and determines the coal mine could be built much safer if you ... didn't skip safety checks. You try it out and find it works very well. Meanwhile, people all over West Virginia are dying in the "Gen 1" coal mines. People protest coal mines to the ... Senate and elect people who won't allow new coal mines to be built, even with the safety features.
To make matters worse, the existing coal mines are now rotting. ... The ... Senate funds a study to look into building "Gen 3" coal mines. The engineers come back with designs for gasification coal mines, using the latest in geometry (the arch). The engineering community thinks this coal mine will last for years, be incredibly strong and safe. But because the public has such a bad memory of the existing coal mines, they want nothing to do with them. Meanwhile they demand the Senate fund more wars for oil.
See what I did there? :) The fundamental problem is that expertise is corrupted by money. Why should we trust the engineers saying everything is OK when we know their jobs depend on them saying that, and the companies and trade groups promoting it have a long history of lying?
And how is it not within the spirit of the license to take someone else work, fork it and rebrand it?
Why don't you try that with Java, and let us know how it goes. Red Hat isn't playing nice but they're giving Oracle a (small) part of what it deserves.
Anonymous speech on the internet is not the same as other types of anonymous speech, and it shouldn't be judged by the old precedents. Off the top of my head:
+ It occurs orders of magnitude more often
+ It's the most common form of speech on the internet
+ there's lots of trolling, and people understand that
+ It's international in origination, not just local (so justifications about enforcement that went into the old precedents may not apply)
+ The Streisand effect combined with court investigations promotes the attitude that anonymous attacks should be considered legitimate
Copying an old law and adding "on the internet" is stupid, but so is applying old laws to a new situation. Even with a username most people are still speaking anonymously.
Oracle wants to obey the GPL license for Java, but not the spirit of the GPL. As you sow, so shall you reap.
First they complained about amateur contributors, but I didn't speak out because I was one.
Then they said Citation Needed, but I didn't speak out because a blog links don't prove anything.
Finally they started deleting pages, and there was no one left to speak out for the obscure.
While I sympathize, your main point seems to be: "... failure to disclose what I am actually buying, which is a form of deception". So if a movie shows NY is it advertising for NY? Remember that movies are often subsidized by "film boards". How about showing the Rocky Mountains, without getting a subsidy (from Vale CO, etc...)? What if actors wear blue jeans? Does it matter if the movie is paid for that?
The real problem with product placement is the age-old corruption of art for money and propaganda. Consider the concert that charges you for a ticket, then sells the "Live at $CITY" DVD without reducing your ticket price. Or the newspaper that pretends to be unbiased, and is funded by advertisement while also charging you for a copy.
"We only said the IP must be royalty free. We didn't say there couldn't be other conditions attached." (spoken as Microsoft announce a program which will allow anyone to implement MS-XML royalty free on condition that it's implemented in a closed-source, commercial product with no code inherited from any open source project even if the licensing of the project would otherwise allow it. IOW "By all means write your own office app which reads our file format, but you'll have to start from scratch and you won't be able to gain mindshare by giving it away for free")
It's like you held a mirror up to the Oracle-Java-Apache problem. 'We only said you can implement Java openly if you use the test suite, which you can't use openly.'
That ignores the money: there will only be link farms if there are JCPenneys to pay for them. If Google makes noise about penalties, it will constrain the spam by constraining the money. Google could just hire a dozen people to ID link farms manually, and publicly announce all the customer sites (JCPenneys) that will be penalized for hiring the spammers.
So, Content is King? Not with the long tail. There are lots of people who'll pay for Netflix selections and forgo a cable bill.
It was disappointing to see how they analyzed the questions. To deal with the jokes, puns, etc... they just put in tons of old questions with their answers and trained the system. No general rules about how to determine the importance of a word or phrase; its a Jeopardy-specific heuristic.
The internet makes it different: the volume of data; data retention; timestamps and IP/location info; the unique kinds of info (ex. a rating/score given).
I don't understand why everyone is so quick to defend the government on this (do you hate Facebook that much?). 30 years ago people argued politics with their neighbors and none of it was recorded, or retained, or came with timestamps, or was digitally exact (unlike the neighbors faulty memory). Why should we decide that anything on the web is no more private than a sign you put on your lawn? Consider the problems with "web" data too: if you vote up the AACS key on Digg what's your liability? Should you go to jail for that?
It's not a "flawed premise" but an acknowledgement that the internet is changing things: People now write (or text) where they used to speak on the phone or face to face. Many political, religious and other opinions used to go unrecorded, and even now people use false (or partial) names to avoid exposing their sentiments. The courts may be playing by the same old rules, but the internet has changed what's available. Maybe the rules of evidence and exploration need to be changed for the new environment, similar to Copyright.
This seems like a bad joke - the "Evil bit" but for http headers. It must be a political move, trying to set the boundary for debate.
If this is serious it's a terrible idea: it'll be on by default for everything so it's not a compromise (and could therefore be done with laws banning the tracking); all older software that doesn't send this header would be fair game; sites will simply refuse content unless you turn it off (see AdBlock).
Yesterday I would have agreed there was no reason, but now that you ask, here's a reason: After fighting Oracle they don't want each handset vendor to payout and make separate arrangements, fragmenting Android implementations. Changing the next-big-release to GPL3 would force everyone to play by the same rules - patent agreements included.
True. Google however can change the license on Android to GPL3 since all contributions require copyright assignment. What fun that would be.
Don't forget the flip-side: we also let celebrities go free. Like OJ Simpson. The US justice system participates in the cult of personality just like the rest of the country.
Summary of Floyd Abrams argument against Wikileaks: ... doomed proposed federal shield-law legislation protecting journalists' use of confidential sources"
1. The diplomatic cables are not a single topic, like the Pentagon Papers.
1.a. The only possible defense is "WikiLeaks' general disdain for any secrecy at all."
2. "WikiLeaks offers no articles of its own, no context of any of the materials it discloses, and no analysis of them other than assertions in press releases or their equivalent."
3. 1917 Espionage Act is so broad it can hurt journalists, but the 2006 compromise was whether journalists "actually intended to harm the U.S. or to help an enemy."
3.a. Mr. Assange might have crossed that ruling and might be convicted.
4. "Mr. Assange [has]
Empty and hollow. This looks like a "digital divide" argument: it upsets the status quo; readers shouldn't look at primary sources without 'guidance'; he might be in trouble!; but politicians promised journalists some proprietary rights!
... email users have a Fourth Amendment-protected expectation of privacy in the email they store with their email providers ...
Individuals and non-governmental organizations cannot argue there is no "expectation of privacy" with email. If they want to justify reading or distributing someones email, they now need a different justification, and the email owner has a positive argument against such actions; i.e. they had an expectation of privacy.
The EFF has thankfully fought that fight for all of us:
Breaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment
Why is the summary not linking to the original article ...
Because original sources of leaks are terrorism, while rehashed summaries are not.