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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
Posted by
michael
on Thu Jan 06, 2005 08:50 AM
from the look-out-below dept.
from the look-out-below dept.
Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.
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I spy a new meme (Score:5, Funny)
boingboing.net/images/copyleftcommie.gif [boingboing.net]
Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
To the barricades!
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Funny)
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Run screaming from this!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
NONONONONO!!! I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm not laughing... The last thing free software proponents need is to associate themselves with a failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide. Free Software has nothing to do with statist communism and everything to do with individual freedom of association and collaboration. When Bill Gates frames the debate between the capitalists on his side and communists on the other, the last thing to do is embrace the presuppositions of his frame! Down that road evokes an ideological wasteland of failure! Do copyleft supporters want to associate themnselves with that? --M
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Re:Run screaming from this!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with communism/socialism is not the people who are running it, it's people. We just don't work that way in groups larger than a high school study group, and that's why it fails every time.
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you aware of a major form of government that is NOT responsible for killing millions of people?
Finkployd
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Anarchist, dammit (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:5, Insightful)
BUT, you have to acknowledge that Soviet-style Communism isn't really Communism, it's totalitarianism. USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, either, but that's another matter...
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's keep it that way. The middle class is currently shrinking in a dramatic way. The upper class is not growing appreciably, but they are making more money. The poor class, on the other hand, is growing. This suggests a shift of power away from the middle class to the upper class. This is not a good thing. As the powerful amass more power, they will abuse it to the detriment of everybody else. That is why power should reside in the largest segment of the population as possible -- to help ensure that as few people as possible face abuse from the rest of society.
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
However, anti-copyright is not socialist, because socialism is ENFORCED public sharing/ownership. The absence of copyright means that there's no legal protection for works, not that you're required to share them. (As an aside: patents as well as registered copyrights require disclosure["sharing"] as a requirement).
The RIAA is an industry organization made up of record labels. It doesn't directly interact with artists in any way, but people (at least on Slashdot) will refer to "the RIAA" when they mean "record labels and/or the music industry as a whole", as well as the RIAA per se. Any artist with any signifigant amount of distribution (ie, outside their home county) will have to sign with an RIAA member, because record labels control access to all the major means of distribution - you won't get your album into stores and you won't get radio play without a record deal with a major label. One more note: despite there being a whole shit-ton of record labels, they're mostly subsidaries or imprints of each other. There's a fairly small set of people who control the music industry and while they compete with each other to a degree, they mostly collude.
In summary: Grandparent is wrong to call copyrights communist (or socialist), but your rebuttal is equally wrong pretty much everywhere.
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Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
With available tech people steal the material. If people are legally allowed to steal the material (now it is not stealing, it is just taking for free) - they will do so. In all honesty - how many people are going to pay for something, when they can get it for free legally? Hell how many people out there pay for something when they can take it illegally with little risk of capture?
It is not our property - we did not make it, we have ZERO say. It is like if I knit a sweater. I can charge nothing for it(give it away), I can charge 5 bucks or I can charge 5,000 bucks. My choice. Your choice is to pay or not pay for it. If i see that people are not buying my sweaters I can either reduce the price or leave it as is. Again I have a choice to sell at the price that I want to sell, you have the choice to buy it or not. I can't see why this concept is so hard to grasp?
Please note I am not trying to incite you to anger, I am just trying to figure out why people have a problem with someone setting a price that they want on their property.
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Lesson for Gates (Score:5, Funny)
Using Windows.
You see, this just proves it. (Score:5, Funny)
That's pretty funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's pretty funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed - the last paragraph of that sfgate piece really sez it all:
"While Microsoft's goal is to turn the PC into a superhub that does everything -- plays music, works as a cell phone, stores your photos -- they're running up against the fact that most people buy discreet components that do particular things."
Personally, I kinda like having seams of one sort or another. They are boundries around systems that restrict their awareness and let me take control of them again when I need to.
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Re:That's pretty funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Only one device I've ever really had repaired was my Minidisc player, twice, and that was under CircuitCity's own extended warrenty. Took weeks to get it back, though thankfully it did come back fixed, or at least with an explaination as to a point of failure like the power adaptor. TV, Microwave, my Clie.. it's almost cheaper to just buy a new one since it is generally designed to just barely outlive it's warrenty)
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What's wrong with communism? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds just as bad to me.
I see your point but... (Score:5, Insightful)
b) Arguing that "Communist" is not a pejorative is likely to go down like a lead balloon in much of America. The McCarthy witchhunts were ludicrous but they happened for a reason. Communists *were* the enemy - defending them carries the same overtones as defending Naziism to the French.
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Re:What's wrong with communism? (Score:5, Insightful)
I myself have fairly left-wing views (I'm from Canada and completely agree with universal healthcare, etc), but communism doesn't seem to take one thing into consideration: Humans are greedy, and this includes the ones controlling the government of a communist country. Much like the very purpose of an incorporation (Check out this movie [thecorporation.tv]), there's an underlyting wrongness about communism that doesn't have enough checks and balances (at least not in my country of origin).
Anyway, Bill should grow up and know better than to call people commies. It's unprofessional.
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Is this a metaphor? (Score:5, Funny)
Out of touch.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember: If you don't buy from Micro$oft you are a Communist!
also... (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory Dr. Strangelove Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Search. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, sure, everybody is working on those things, but just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today.
Sounds like someone needs to clue Bill in to using Sherlock under OS X -- that's exactly what I used it for yesterday.
--saint
Re:Search. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Search. (Score:5, Funny)
and i'm in a smallish 20k person suburb, in finland...
but i guess what bill meant was that the he wants an engine that the pizzeria owner needs to pay for to be in and the user needs to pay for use..
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Anything like this (Score:5, Funny)
top secret BSOD (Score:5, Funny)
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Welcome to the revolution! (Score:5, Insightful)
[rant]
Seriously, Bill Gate and Co. continue to try and paint anyone who doesn't agree with their stance on IP as un-American. Who died and made him J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.?
America was NOT founded on the principles of IP but on freedom of choice (religious and otherwise) and the idea that everyone is supposed to contribute to the public good. The recent push to IP, patent, and copyright every little "innovation" (think one-click)is what is hurting our ability to produce something new and better without having to wade through a morass of legalities.
I will continue to support copyleft, OSS, and any other program that contributes to the dissemination of knowledge and ideas.
[/rant]
Re:Welcome to the revolution! (Score:5, Insightful)
People chose to contribute to the common effort because they believed in it, not because they had to."
Very well said.
One of the things that constantly bugs me are the extremists. I'm an author - intellectual rights are very important to me, as a large part of my living right now depends on how they are used in regards to my work. Quite frankly, if I spend a year and a half writing a book, that book is mine, to do with as I please. That's the letter and spirit of the law.
But then you have the extremists on both sides, who abuse the spirit and/or letter of intellectual property law. Companies like Microsoft use it as a weapon to stifle others from innovating, essentially by trying to take their ideas away from them and claim them as their own. The extremists on the other side react by wanting to strip away intellectual property rights entirely, and make any new creation into part of the public domain.
When you think about it, both are theft. To use the chair example, the first group of extremists come to you after you've made a chair and demand that you give it to them and not make any more because they made it first. The second group of extremists come to you after you've made a chair and demand that you give it to them so that it can be contributed to the public good. Neither is terribly respectful to the person who made the chair in the first place, and who should be allowed to sell it if they want, give it away if they want, or just sit in it if they want.
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Your parents told you... (Score:5, Insightful)
But... doesn't sharing mean caring? At least that's what my parents always said.
In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong with a communial society, it's just really really hard to pull off because of human nature.
Dennis Miller called it years ago ... (Score:5, Funny)
Bill bet the farm (Score:5, Interesting)
It's MS who's communist here, not us (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic ideas of capitalism work just insanely effective. When we had communism in Poland, most shops had empty shelves -- and within just months after the communism's fall any shortages were just gone, as if by a wave of a magic wand.
On the other hand, communism is based on monopoly. It's supposed to be a monopoly of the "working class", but in reality in all cases it turned out to be a monopoly of the Party. And then, if you can buy the Party's blessing -- you can have a monopoly in your sector, too!
Whatever you say, you can't ignore the fact that all real-life implementations of communism were based on the control the Party had on the citizens. In fact, it's the control what the communism is about.
So... we have a company who tries to gain the sole control of a sector of industry -- and it's them who dare to call their enemies communists.
Software Communism Good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism and Communism are each at opposite ends of a scale of scarcity- that is to say, Capitalism works great when there is a limited amount of stuff to go around, relative to the population size. It encourages effeciency and results in a population as a whole getting the most of what it wants from a limited pool of resources. Communism on the other hand is ideal for a world where, relative to the population size, resources are unlimited, or at least nearly unlimited. In the perfect theoreticaly communist society, the only limit to how much of something that can be made is the number of people available to make it.
Socialism is basically just the name given to the middle ground.
Now, capitalism is great for a lot of things, because as a society/country/planet today in many areas our resources are still finite. For many aspects of our world, capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
In the world of software however, we have a situation which is more closely related to the communist ideal world. Once a program is written it can be copied over and over again essentially for free. In this case, the only limit to the software that can be developed is the amount of skilled people who are able to work on it.
Looking at it like that, what I see when gates says people who support free software are communists is really his admission that we are using a superior philosophy for our little section of reality.
Microsoft is a State-Sponsored Monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion Microsoft is essentially a state-sponsored monopoly and, as such, represents, little more than a tweaked version of the classic communist state entity.
The rational for this position is the simple fact that although Microsoft has been found guilty of being a monopolistic barrier to free-trade in the software industry it was given tacit state sanction to operate as such when the courts and the DOJ failed to press for meaningful controls on their business practices.
From an objective perspective this is no more than a refined version of the classic communist state monopoly. Like Soviet era monopolies Microsoft must compete in the international market as a representative of the State economy while at home it is given tacit control of the market in exchange for loyalty to the political leadership. Also like Soviet era monopolies, state pressure for reform of business practices amounted to little reform but a large increase in the amount of money passed on to corrupt politicians. Take a look at Microsoft's political contributions post-trial and I think you'll see this pattern is quite obvious.
What's worse is that this "tweaked" form of state control can be conducted legally through Political Action Committees with little need to resort to passing money under the table as occurred in the old Soviet Union.
That's right folks, Microsoft's brand of communism is conducted right under your noses while real innovation and competition in the software industry is systematically squashed through monopolistic trade practices tacitly sanctioned by the state. It's high time that all you Democrats and Republicans out there swallow the blue pill and see things as they are, not how you want them to be. Either we believe in free trade or not and no matter how you dice it monopolies are antithetical to free trade. Those who acquire them will always attempt to redefine competition so that the rules don't apply to them. Ooogedy boogedy people! Look-out! International competition means we have to stick together and support our local monopoly. Oh no! Look over there people, those communist are trying to wreck our good capitalist monopoly. It's total nonsense if you just step back and take a look at it for what it really is.
We're "software terrorists", Bill (Score:5, Funny)
Here's some advice for your public relations folks: We're not communists, we're "software terrorists", Bill, and we're out to kill little babies and children in the name of FOSS. We hate freedom and the American way of life and we're out to destroy it.
Now, if you can get that message across and paint that picture to the American public, you'd kill FOSS forever. Hell, you could probably get the FBI to start raiding the homes of Linux users.
Good luck in your future endeavors, you Capitalist Pig.
I find what he says rather worrying (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, a fair bit of what he says really sits uncomfortably. For one thing what he says about IE and Firefox is, although perfectly true, not quite as clear-cut as he seems to be making it sound.
That's not exactly by choice in all cases. I am confident that were IE trivially uninstallable from a Windows setup then that point would be less valid.
I don't necessarily think that every FF user would uninstall IE if it were easily doable but I do think that in many of the cases where "IE is also on those systems" it's only because there's no simple way of remiving it.
As for his stance on IP rights then I think he hasn't got a clue.
However what I will say is that I'm no businessman and he runs a very successful business. So I freely admit that as much as I disagree with his points of view they obviously work in business. In fact I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't have views like that - many businesses seem to share the "IP Rights are Good" mentality.
Having said that I do think that what's good for business isn't always good for innovation and incentive. And that's why I personally think that the concept of "Intellectual Property" needs a major overhaul. Patents and non-terminating copyrights simply have too many drawbacks.
Like the main incentive for Patents that companies seem to have is that if they have a great idea then not only should they benefit from selling it but they shoudl benefit from anyone improving on it - as they'll have to pay to license it. Great from a business perspective but from a technical perspective this is dreadful because if someone's got great dieas to extend something but no money or Patents to bargain with then the new idea will be lost.
Obviously I find it a bit odd when Bill Gates (or anyone Microsoft spokeperson) talks about things "working together". Unless they're having a complete turnaround in their policies he probably means that when "devices work together" they will always be working via Windows.
Obviously this makes a great quote as he goes down as saying that interoperability is important - or something like that - but it just falls flat as more often than not he isn't tlaking about devices talking with non-Microsoft devices.
Not the red scare (Score:5, Funny)
Favorite quote (Score:5, Funny)
"Last night
Re:Where is that video (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Time of crash (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Bzzt (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, a few game buyers might return their game, but they'll still have an operating system with lurking landmine bugs that will crash in exactly the same way for some other product next week.
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Re:I Don't Get It... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, ok before the guy with the very large user id blows a gasket, I'm only joking, really.
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Pointing out logical fallacies may be useless... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I'll just add one more comment, trying to deconstruct what Gates says about communism and IP:
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Re:Another example of fantastic journalism from /. (Score:5, Insightful)
What *is* interesting is the so-called "world's greatest software company" has a demo crash on their most public figure, and that he resorts to anachronistic political labels for buttressing his argument.
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