Gates Nose-Dives at CES 1451
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.
McCarthyism for the shareholders (Score:2, Insightful)
That's pretty funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with communism? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds just as bad to me.
Propoganda (Score:0, Insightful)
Bzzt (Score:4, Insightful)
It would *REALLY* be nice to see someone in the media finally get this right.
SB:
Out of touch.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember: If you don't buy from Micro$oft you are a Communist!
How Bill can succeed... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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]
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.
Re:Propoganda (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Propoganda (Score:3, Insightful)
Now to me, this doesn't sound like propoganda, but rather, who he actually is.
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.
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on... People have killed more in the name of religion, but that doesn't make the concept of religion a bad thing (or, to give an example, a cross is a perfectly fine symbol). The sad thing about communism was that in some countries it delved into dictatorships and so on. Some countries have a more palatable socialistic governments that are doing pretty fine.
It is sad though that Bill Gates thinks that by associating GPL with an "american taboo word of the 20th century," he can accomplish something. Now, he seems to be taking the role of Steve Ballmer. May be time to see Bill Gates jumping up and down screaming "Developers... Developers... Communists... Develpers..".
S
Re:Welcome to the revolution! (Score:2, Insightful)
NOT
Rather, America was founded on the idea that each person could retain control over what they had created/built/earned/believed without someone "more deserving" taking that control away from them.
People chose to contribute to the common effort because they believed in it, not because they had to.
re: Communists (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, he pretty much just said that if you don't support IP then your a Communist. What a douchebag. That statement is going to haunt him for a long time and rightly so. The world's richest man and still as greedy as ever. Again, what a douchebag. Oh btw for the 12 year olds among you who can't think like adults yet, yes you can still be a douchebag and be philanthropic at the same time.
Re:Your parents told you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Of course Gates would claim communisim... (Score:3, Insightful)
One comment? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not one comment. This is him openly claiming:
1. The current IP system is what makes America great. Yes, that's what he's saying.
2. The current IP system doesn't need reform, except perhaps making better patent systems. Note Microsoft has been dealing with Eolas and others regarding patents so Bill is only seeing the light only when it serves his company.
3. He calls those who call for IP reform "new communists." That's just an insult and trivializes the real concerns many have with using the law (think DMCA and others) to maintain monopoly status and crack down on how one can use one's machine and software.
He spoke like a perfect monopolist. He knows IP laws help him and help maintain the status quo, thus creating a nice and healthy (for him) barrier to entry. He only diverged from the party-line when it came to patents and it should be obvious why.
Of course, he may be right about patent reform, but its soley in his interest and in the interest in his monopoly, comrade.
I will give MS credit, they are the perfect monopolists. Perfect. No wonder he uses such outdated and misused terms like "communism." MS has shown that ruthlessness pays off and Bill might be seeing himself as Ayn Rand, say versus Karl Marx, when he's just an old fashioned monopolist. Monopolies are of course, a symptom of a market failure or corruption. This is called irony.
I find this rhetoric to be common amongst the wealthy business class and conservatives in general. Such as: Commies! X makes America great! Sure there will always be a debate on Y, but lets not jump to conclusions! etc
Re:I see**2 your point but... (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a time when the new government in this continent did something that had not been done before or since: They *gave up power*, placing that power in the hands of people. Since then, the concept has fallen on hard times. Today, we have oligarchs like Mr. Gates trying to restore Traditional Values: Own and control access to *fucking everything*. And they have enough financial resources to buy off what passes for government these days. And the only people doing anything about it (in information technology, they are FOSS advocates) eschew government and political process. Too busy writing actual reliable code, I suppose...
I don't like arbitrary authority, so I don't like big centralized government. On the other hand, I cannot think of another way to slow down the assholes who want to charge me for the privilege of working (using "their" "intellectual" "property"). It's a dilemma that I don't know how to resolve.
Re:That's pretty funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Personally... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are lots of good ideas that have a lot in common with the ideals of socialism and communism. Marx would no doubt be happy with programmers (petty bourgeois though they be) creating wonderful software to share with everyone instead of having their labor exploited by capitalists. This is socialist, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The trick is that when people hear "Communist" they think "evil, megalomaniacal dictators who couldn't care less about the workers in whose name they're killing anyone who opposes their rule" instead of "people working together for the common good instead of for the profit of the few".
There may be valid arguments to be made against socialist economics, but it's easier to throw pejorative labels around than to actually try to make those arguments.
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)
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:5, Insightful)
Hypocritical at best (Score:4, Insightful)
where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".
Does this make Bill Gates a communist? Xerox and Apple had windows before Microsoft. TCP was borrowed from Digital. Sun for RPCs and J#. Supercalc and other had spead sheets before Microsoft. Does work perect or others get roaylties rom Word for the word processor?
In fact, Linux uses X for it's windows which predates Microsoft. Maybe Microsoft should pay royalties to commercial UNIX and Linux for the RTU of Windows.
And look at Microsoft's legal track record.
This was obviously a hypocritical comment on Bill's part. A typical reaction to a monoplistic looser.
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
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.
Re:How can we trust Microsoft's software... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's tough to set this kind of stuff up for exec demos.
I bet they took some poor tech support person, told them to set up the machine, then gave him them a bunch of drivers which are so bleeding edge that he or she has never seen them before. Then 30 minutes before the presentation, the A/V guy says "hey, the projector's pointer needs this special driver..."
As a techie, the right thing to say to the CxO would be "while it could be used, we intended to <insert planned method here> and the <insert projector here>'s driver stands a slim chance of trashing the machine or making it unstable. We have no time to troubleshoot in the event of a problem."
I had to set up this kind of demo before (not for Microsoft, and not quite as experimental), and part of it was keeping a second machine handy and running which could be swapped out in the event of a catastrophe.
Just imagine what it takes to swap out a live machine with a crashed machine, on a podium during a presentation with roughly a thousand people watching (cat-calling with technical advice), and a CxO which is too preoccupied with their audience to take any special instructions in the event of a failure (i.e. you can't give instructions like, "you were on slide 30", you really need to just get them to that slide).
I never had to do the swap though. No serious problems.
This is the nature of Windows... but the problem isn't really the OS, it's the amount of third-party junk out there and a "just install it, it works on my home machine" kind of attitude.
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.
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.
Blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda (Score:3, Insightful)
So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE, it's just we've got lots of good ideas that can match and move ahead.
Translation: Microsoft no longer innovates. We have massive, crippling market share, so we don't have to innovate. We wait to see what cool things other people come up with, then we steal them and tell everyone we thought of them first. The general public is stupid and doesn't know any better, so they believe us.
In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.
Translation: Microsoft has massive, crippling market share. Competing with us is an exercise in futility, because we will crush you. Ask Netscape if you don't believe us.
All in all, 100% image and 0% substance in that interview. I have to ask: does Bill actually DO anything any more? Or is he just a gloating talking head?
Re:Personally... (Score:3, Insightful)
Competition isn't capitalism if it's not competition for profits. GNOME and KDE being developed at the same time might benefit both of them, but it's because they're able to cooperate and borrow what works from each other rather than because there's financial pressure to create a better product or lose out on profits.
Capitalism works best for consumers with a level playing field, but the goal of the individual capitalist is to create an unlevel playing field so he can personally profit. Antitrust legislation exists to protect society from the capitalists, not to maintain a level playing field so capitalism can flourish. In a true laissez faire system, innovation is only necessary until someone can grab a monopoly position and exploit it; Microsoft is a prime example of the ideal capitalist corporation.
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.
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:
Re:Your parents told you... (Score:1, Insightful)
The natural state of affairs for intellectual property is that it is worthless. If caveman A invents a bow and arrow, caveman B is free to make their own copy without worrying about patent infringement. However, caveman A still invents the bow and arrow because he's tired of running after rabbits and hitting them on the head with a club. It's much easier to shoot from a distance.
If caveman A tells a funny story to caveman B, then caveman B can retell the same story to caveman C, even if caveman A has scrawled it in picture form all over the cave wall. Caveman B is free to copy those pictures onto his cave wall if he likes them, or onto animal skins and sell them for meat, or sex.
If caveman B follows 2 steps behind caveman A and annoyingly repeats everything caveman A says, then caveman A is free to punch caveman B in the face. But as long as caveman B keeps out of caveman A's face, they should get along.
Intellectual property is a totally artificial idea. Any increase in protection for it is a move away from the natural state of affairs. Public perception will decide if this concept grows or dies back. Does protection for intellectual property benefit you?
If, like 99% of us, you don't have any intellectual property then that is a powerful reason to cease protection for it. The only reason to protect it is if that protection provides benefit to the 99% who do not own any. The reasoning behind it is that protection of intellectual property creates incentives to create more intellectual property, and that those incentives outweigh the negative effect on the creation and dissemination of ideas that intellectual property protection entails. Do we have more and better new things and art with intellectual property protection than we would without those restrictions? This has never been tested. Great literature in the public domain is still in print. You can buy the works of Shakespeare, even though his estate doesn't see a dime. Light bulbs are still manufactured even though Edison's estate doesn't see a dime.
And drug companies mostly take drugs that have been discovered by NIH funded studies and tweak them ever so slightly so as not to alter their function but make them sufficiently different from the public domain chemical to be patentable. The term for this is: Me Too Drug. Then sales-babes give free samples to doctors until they are very comfortable/used to prescribing them and they and their patients are nice and hooked, then they charge through the nose. Sounds like the practices of the street pusher to me.
People act like IP is the norm. It's not. Art for art's sake is generally better than art for dollar's sake, and neccessity should be the mother of invention - not a need to game the system or come up with a new marketing gimmick.
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:fp (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pointing out logical fallacies may be useless.. (Score:1, Insightful)
No.
Most copyrights are owned by corporations, not the artists who make the works. Thus the long copyright terms - corporations live longer.
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.
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.
Re:Yes, especially Atheism! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Even simpler... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually never show up at an event with a presentation made under Windows. I'm a network admin at a science museum, and I regularly get called up to more or less make people feel really stupid about embedding videos, decorative fonts, and transition effects into their presentation that the machine playing the presentation doesn't have.
And no, if the new version is 600 MB, about the only way it's going to get from your office to said laptop in time for a 9:00am presentation over the internet. Frankly, if the presentation is on Monday, and today is Friday, you would do better to fed-ex a CD. Not really windows specific, but common enough to merit another snide comment.
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...
Re:Run screaming from this!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
And statist 'communism' as practiced in places like the USSR and China has very little to do with real communist/socialist theory.
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:2, Insightful)
You're perpetuating a false dichotomy.
Communism is an economic system, akin to capitalism. Democracy is a system of government.
"Communism" hasn't killed any more people that "capitalism" has. (cf. Union Carbide) I will, however, agree that "totalitarianism" has killed far more people than "democracy" has.
The sad fact is that democratic communism has just never been tried, even though the theories seem to match up so well.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
in fact by forcing it to be open and free for the public you are saying you should share it
No.
Rather, by allowing free and open commerce in recorded media you are saying let the available technology and the market set the price.
If that price comes down to US$0.32 per Brittney Spears CD, then consumers have benefitted. I think.
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.
Re:It's MS who's communist here, not us (Score:2, Insightful)
They "work" because they are tiny and powerless and are protected by the power of the state within which they exist. They also don't satisfy the conditions for being called "communist" in the sense described by Mark and Engels, ie "Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
>The totalitarian government you had in Eastern Europe was not >really communism, it just went by the name.
Oh, really? As far as I know, the USSR implemented the following:
1 Abolition of property in land (collectivisation)
2 Abolition of right of inheritance (at least houses, land and large amounts of money)
3 Confiscation of the property of rebels and emigrants (and I think rebel in reality just means anyone who upsets the party bosses)
5 Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly
6 Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State
7 Extension of factories annd instruments of production owned by the State; bringing in to production of wasteland and the improvement of the soil (I think they got a bit lost on the last one there, especially around Chernobyl)
8 Equal liability of all to labour
9 Combination of agriculture with manufactoringindustries..... a more equitable distribution of the population over the country (they just didn't ask the "people" if they wanted to be moved across several time zones)
10 Free education for all children in public schools (unless your parents upset the party bosses in which case, no education, at least at university level)
Now THAT is communism, according to its Manifest from 1848. And it looks pretty much like what I hear life in the USSR was like. It also does NOT look like any kibbutz I have heard about.
>Drawing conclusions about the validity of real communist >principles from the USSR is like drawing conclusions about the >lifespan of a human by studying how long penguins live.
I am not sure what you think are "real communist principles" if not the ones that Marx et al described and were implemented in the USSR, China etc. "Let's all share everything and be nice to each other" does NOT appear in the communist literature I have read.
Re:Run screaming from this!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
And communist theory has very little to do with reality.
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.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny how often people say this, in spite of the fact that people will and do create stuff for enjoyment without the incentive of money. What do you think Open Source is? There may or may not be more created with copyright - I'm not convinced that copyright is working in that regard.
Metallica, and several other major acts, produce under thier own label, it's true. But you'll find a few things in common: They, almost without exception, did not get to be major artists that way - they created thier own label instead of re-signing or by breaking thier current contract. Second, the "label" they record under is generally merely an imprint or re-branding of another, larger label. I'm not familiar with Metallica specifically, although they are not the norm in the music industry, so I don't know if this is the case for them or not, but it's the general case for artist-owned labels - they don't actually have the infrastructure or contacts that a real label has, it's just a different branding of the same old crap.
Re:Yes, especially Atheism! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:1, Insightful)
There's no such thing as god yet literally millions of people have died in his name.
Re:That's pretty funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
if, God forbid, your TV took a dump on you, then you can't watch TV, a VHS tape or play a game on your console. so all you could do is check your email on your computer...so you almost do have a central point of failure as it is anyway.
i only mention this 'cos my telly just "took a dump" on me and i've been medialess for 2 weeks as i run xboxmediacenter for all my music - and that's dependant on screen-based navigation!
Re:Yes, especially Atheism! (Score:3, Insightful)
First off: retaliation is not defense, no matter how many times national leaders claim it is. When it happens on a small scale people recognize this, I don't get why peoples brains stop working when we talk about religions and nations. There also was more than one, so stop talking about it in the singular.
Second: Where did you learn about the Inquistion? Torquemada's Revision of The Truth School for Retards? The mandate of the Inquisition was the exposure and punishment of heresy. Confession by torture was common place. There's been more than one (and in fact the order of the Inquisition still exists today) and it's not always been about blood and torture and burning but it absolutely DID happen and it WAS under the mandate of the Church and trying to claim that it was about creating fair trials for heretics is so ridiculous it makes my brain hurt. The fact that Church was very heavily involved in secular governments at the time does mean you can always claim it "wasn't about religion", but it's pedantic and silly nitpicking at best, dishonest at worst - you can just define any behavior you don't approve as not about religion, even when religiously motivated and done at the behest of religions authority. The Church was a major secular power in the Middle Ages, something that's hard for people to comprehend now - it had it's own armies, it's own banks, and it essentially ruled huge swaths of land even larger numbers of people. It had it's own courts (yes, of Inquisition) and would try and condemn people purely on it's own authority as well as that of the local rulers. Some rulers didn't allow the Inquisition into thier lands, those rulers faced excommunication. To claim that all this was done in the "name" of religion rather than "for" religion is missing the point.
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:2, Insightful)
Screw the rich.
But then, I must be one of them there "new commies."
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
In your second paragraph you discuss how (generally) artists do not have the infrastructure or the contacts needed in this global industry...well so they are going to the RIAA/MPAA organizations and signing a contract - yes the organizations may get a majority of the profit - but it doesn't seem like the artists are doing too bad. As long as an artist can get one really good hit song out there they are sure to make a ton of cash. It's a trade off. What these guys are saying "You bring the talent we supply the capital taking a risk in you. If you do poorly you lose time but get some money, if you do great you get rich, we get richer. If you do not like the deal we are offering, do it on your own, nobody is stopping you."
The only thing I disagree about the RIAA/MPAA is their price fixing (notice cd/dvd sale prices never drop, even though in an elastic market it should); and possibly their thing about backing up cd/dvd's (though I understand their reasoning, since many people are stealing this material not just simply backing up material).
Re:Yes, especially Atheism! (Score:1, Insightful)
Hate to break it to you... (Score:1, Insightful)
The communism you're thinking of is a Utopian concept that can never exist when people have freedom and choice.
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.
Re:Run screaming from this!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Relatively speaking, yes.
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.
Re:Yes, especially Atheism! (Score:1, Insightful)
If you're living in the United States then your current court system is derived from the English Common Law system formalized under Henry II who famously opposed the separate church courts, (which were defended by Thomas Beckett, then Archbishop of Canterbury.)
The Inquisition did work in England under the Reign of Mary I (Bloody Mary). After Mary's death the state religion of England returned to a protestant form under Elizabeth I.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:2, Insightful)
Hitler may have been anti-Jew, but I don't think he was for any religion other than the worship of Hitler himself.
Regular people don't like it (Score:0, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hate to break it to you... (Score:3, Insightful)
You just totally contradicted youself. None of the countries that claimed to be communist evolved into communism the way Marx and Engels envisioned. The communist manifesto really has nothing to do with the "communism" that those countries practiced. The communist manifesto does not predict that revolution is a necessary step to communism.
If you actaully read the communist manifesto you will realize that we just have not reached that stage yet. Capitalism has to fail, and that hasn't happened yet, not fully at least. There is no way to prove your point when everything has yet to play out. Of course, if it never does play out, then I guess there really is no way to prove it either way, and I can accept that.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:4, Insightful)
Because some people have figured out that intellectual property is not property. It is non-rivalrous, can be reproduced at negligible cost, and it cannot be stolen (ie. you cannot be criminally convicted for theft of IP). In other words it has none of the characteristics of real property.
IP is a legal monopoly on ideas, which is enforced through contracts and civil law (ie. license agreements). Only businessmen attempting to invent a market by means of a false scarcity call it "property".
See here [dklevine.com] if you're really trying to figure this out.
Founded by Programmers... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Microsoft was founded by programmers and is still run by programmers, and the bias of programmers is that software can do anything"
From Donkey [folklore.org]:
"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen
The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:1, Insightful)
No, his choices are to (1) pay $5000, (2) do without, (3) make his own identical sweater using his own yarn and labor, or (4) buy an identical sweater for less from someone who already did #3. Copyright takes away choices 3 and 4, contrary to free market principles.
Copyright cannot be said to support capitalism because a government granted publishing monopoly is the exact opposite of a free market. It cannot derive from property rights because it directly interferes with my right to arrange the magnetic patterns on my hard disk with my electricity into whatever pattern I want. Copyright may still be a good thing (and I believe it is, as long as it stays balanced), but "free market" or "property" it ain't.
The real issue is derivatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously some limited protection is good for the ability of someone to gain reward from a work they spent time on.
But 75+ years? That is too excessive, and the worst thing of all is that it prevents derivative works until long after the creative value of a derivative work might come into play.
You can see a practical effect from this by Disney no longer doing animation of traditional stories and the like - any interesting stories left to cover are now under the copyright flood. So Disney makes attempts to make up stories from scratch - which in fact they are not at all good at, all really good creative story writers work elsewhere now.
You could say that Disney is the prime example of how great things can come from derivative works, for all of the great movies they have done based on traditional tales. So it serves both as an example and a warning.
Religion is exactly the ideological retort to use (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really short on time so I can't fully reply to all of these messages, or even to you. But I'm really not debating the underlying ideologies of communism, capitalism, or even religious expression. I'm talking about a cultural taboo against communism which continues in western cultures today. Look at the success of the Swift Boat Vets red baiting the Kerry campaign as a prime example; McCarthyism continues fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union and fifty years after McCarthy's downfall.
If the Free Software movement willingly accepts Gate's frame as being inspired by communist utopian idealism, the debate is over. Gate's will have won by default. If any of those EFFers or Project GNU folks are listening here (right - *cough*) I would recommend framing project GNU and BSD ideals by referencing simple down-to-earth small town values like church bake sales, community volunteer firefighting, and the Salvation Army. These are examples of community cooperation everyone can understand. And when Gates (or his surrogates) compares writing free software to communist destruction of capitalist intellectual property rights, argue back that his argument is like destroying the church bake sale for the profit-rights of local restaurants. That is an frame which skewer his debate talking points.
This is not about communist or capitalist ideology, this is about manipulating public opinion in order to promote - long term - a specific political agenda in Washington. Realize that and all this ideological bullshit smoke disappears like evenscent fog clearing on a sunny day.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
So, yes, communism is about sharing. If the state will do anything, it will be to punish leechers, because they are not giving according to their abilities.
And the audience was eating it up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Props to Conan for his good improv skills and ability to work a crowd, but doesn't it say something weird about our age that Microsoft itself can't keep its own product from going down at a major technology trade show, and that the crowd finds this acceptable, even funny? Remember, Microsoft's product is on warships [theregister.co.uk] these days. Would the crowd have also been yucking like a bunch of doped-up Amsterdam tourists if this had been wargames off the coast of England, and HMS Windows had given them a GPF when they tried to launch a missile? Please, boys: don't believe your own hype, and for God's sake, don't let anybody with a pulse take Ballmer seriously for a nanosecond.
Let me clean up your argument for you. (Score:3, Insightful)
The only sensible thing that can be said about "IP" is that it's a government granted exclusive franchise or monopoly. Copyrights, patents and trademark have about as much in common with each other as they do with the local electric utility. The most natural American thought is to limit all forms of exclusive franchises. This includes "IP" franchises.
It never ceases to amaze me that local, state and federal governments continue to purchase Microsoft. There are many alternatives that cost less and have fewer problems available.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft would be in a tail spin right now if it were not for billions of dollars in government spending. Does anyone think they would have been able to make their "numbers" had the DoD not stepped up to the plate with ridiculous decade long exclusive purchases of software that has yet to be written? I think not and such purchases of inferior goods are the surest sign of state support.
The market, however, is not to be conned. There's only so much impact the government can have. When the limit hits, they will sink without a trace. It will not be a big deal either.
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:1, Insightful)
Failure to prove a claim is de facto evidence that claim is false.
But I have an open mind and can accept new evidence.
Do you have an open mind? If someone proved without doubt that god did not exist, would you still believe in god anyway?
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I am saying that it should be the IP's owners decision, not anyone elses decision, to set the price.
I believe the creator of the content should have the decision to set the price for their work. And they do.
But, the reality of copying and recording technology means that they really only have the right to set the price for the very first copy of their work.
This is much like centuries ago when, after a great composer allowed their work to be performed, it was possible for musicians with good ears and memory to copy down a transcription of a great piece of music.
That it was possible to do this was regarded as reality.
If laws that distort the market by granting exclusive rights to sell duplicated information are reformed, then we might well have artists that would be paid by enough fans getting money together for induce them to perform a First Performance, since that is the only service for which they inherently ought to have the right to charge for. They are permitted to set the price for this First Performance as they wish, they can refuse to play unless the price is to their liking, and they can refuse to perform in the presence of recording equipment. All of those choices are the right of the content creator and I believe those rights should be preserved.
But, when I copy one file of bits to another on my computer and email it to a friend and RIAA demands payment, it's an artificial distortion of the market. Next thing you know, the authors of child-rearing advice books will want cameras in my home to help them charge me in case I actually use on their copyrighted techniques for child-rearing.
"Communists"???? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sheesh.
Re:Anarchist, dammit (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:4, Insightful)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
"Intellectual Property" is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? Property means something that one possesses, and it is very difficult to possess something that only exists in someone's head, in my opinion.
Historically, (as far as I can tell) people have not wrangled so much over the ownership of ideas. It only, as you say, since people have started investing so much money into ideas, to be later confronted with better copying techniques, that this has been a problem. Patrons of the art, for instance, have always existed, but generally have not expected a return on their investments. Nowadays, the patrons are all record producers and software companies and the like.
Did it ever occur to you that it is insane to invest millions of dollars into an intangible work? Probably not, because the industry has us trained to believe that that is normal. You are probably worried that without the current industry there would not be new games and books and recordings. But remember that artists have always worked for thousands of years, and that this industry structure is less than a hundred years old.
Re:It's MS who's communist here, not us (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't say Christian when I mean snake-handling cultist, and I don't say communist when I mean totalitarian. Hey, I don't even say communist when I mean free software zealot. I damn well will jump on people who misuse words and conflate two very different things into one.
I'm not arguing communism has worked at the national level. I don't think it will, as I said in my previous post. However, I pointed out that the principles are applicable on some scales, and that those principles weren't the real guiding principles of the USSR, which operated as a totalitarian oligarchy.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:4, Insightful)
According to dictionary.com
Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.
IP is not physical property, but it is as real as money. Why is it so hard to apply the same thought process we do about money to copyrightable material? That hundred dollar bill is a piece of paper worth less then a penny, but we assign it a great value. You say that because something is not tangeable it is not property? I have some money in the bank - not tangeable at the moment...is that not my property?
Why can't criminal law on theft of tangible property be applied to non-tangible? Because we say so? Because the old laws do not support it? Since when do people in the tech industry, one of the fastest changing industries if not the fastest, resist change to old ideas?
Re:I Don't Get It... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's odd. I use Windows at home. You know what? It just works for me.
I don't get viruses.
I don't get adware.
I don't get random flakiness.
Maybe it's because I continually use the web, obsessively read email, run an intentionally open wireless network? Or maybe it's because I'm not a fucking muppet.
Don't slag off the OS if people don't know how to use it efficiently. Trust me, if 90% of PC owners ran Linux they'd have a malware infested unstable operating system within weeks.
Now I'll concede that using the provided tools (i.e. IE and Outlook Express) will cause problems, and that probably is Microsoft's fault. But knowing they're shite and using them anyway? That's user error.
~Cederic
Re:Religion is exactly the ideological retort to u (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, first of all, it's your blog. So take what I write in the spirit of friendly advice. Basically, yeah - most of the FS community understands what I'm writing. But don't think for a minute that Gates has the FS/geek movement in mind when he speaks to reporters. His words are to set the tone for columnists and other press, the business community elite, government officials, and finally what little public may be paying attention. He doesn't care what we think, he cares about setting a frame of reference for the press to repeat.
With repetition ion the press comes popular belief, leading finally to general consensus opinion. It doesn't matter how rational or irrational the statement, if a statement is repeated enough the population as a whole will usually accept it as fact. And once so, it is the general population who will look at geeks running this flag and misinterpret it as a stand in solidarity for communism. You could even directly state your opposition to communism and it wouldn't matter, because the image evokes such an emotionally powerful taboo. There is nothing rational about this process, but people (as a population) do react in this manner - particularly when an assertion, factual or not, is linked to an emotionally powerful image. --M
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like if you knit a sweater and people, because of new technology, are able to make perfect copies of it at little or no cost. That is good. That is why we developed technology. That's why the the Constitution seeks to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Now that we have this technology we should be allowed to use it. You have been deprived of nothing. You still have your sweater. And we all have sweaters too. You can still sell your sweater, and if it's any good you can probably get a good price for it as an "orignal" (kinda like getting good ticket prices for a live concert).
Wake up man! If groceries started growing on trees would you cry for the grocery stores that went out of business? No. They would find new ways to contribute to society and all of us would be the richer.
Re:Where is that video (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And the audience was eating it up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's MS who's communist here, not us (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm *not* arguing your point re: communism being ineffective at large scales. Please stop saying I am. It hasn't worked, and when it's been attempted, it has invariably devolved into totalitarian/authoritarian structures (USSR, Cuba, China).
Further, you cannot solely cite the founders of an intellectual tradition; you also have to accept the further development of that tradition. Marx is not the sole arbiter of communism; there has been other original thought on the subject since then. Democracy today has many differences from democracy in the time of Plato; would you argue that just because we don't take everything Plato says as gospel, it isn't democracy?
The key word was *force*. My understanding of Marx's doctrines is that he was saying "In a communist countty, the population will redistribute itself more equally." That it would be an inevitable consequence, an "invisible hand" effect, if you don't mind mixing your socioeconomic metaphors. The USSR used violence to force these transfers, something that I believe Marx would have felt to be antithetical to the very notion of communism. A totalitarian government has no issue with using violence againsts its citizens to force them into behaviors it considers desirable; a communist government working from Marx's blueprints would have very real issues with the idea that violence against the working class would be necessary to achieve the desired distribution of population.
re: dog and tail - exactly my point. Just because a totalitarian country represents communist does not make it communist.
The lack of checks in the Soviet implementation of communism was the fatal flaw that allowed it to be consumed from inside by totalitarianism. It is not, however, something that is inherent to communism, just like the strong checks and balances in the US republic that make it relatively difficult to subvert are not inherent to the concept of a republic. The idea is that the Party is controlled by the collective will of the people, yes? If you allow the control of the Party to be assumed by one person, you *already have* wounnd up with a dictatorship, ant then you are living in an authoritarian society with a collective economic system. Communism was both a political and economic system; with only one part and not the other, what you have left is not communism. The second Stalin took power, the USSR ceased to be a communist country.
The plural for kibbutz is kibbutzim; Hebrew word, Hebrew pluralization. The proper word for describing a kibbutz (in the general sense) is socialist, though some essentially function as communist organizations. You remain hung up on communism only in the context of nations, whereas it is a blueprint for organization of groups of people. Again, Marx and Engels originated it, but thought has moved on since their time. The countries established under communist systems have *all* failed, true; but their failure was allowing their system to become an authoritarian system. I'm not certain that it's possible to have a communist nation-state that doesn't fail in this fashion, but the truth is - there never has been a communist nation-state, not for more than a few years. Blaming communism for Stalin's abuses is like blaming democracy for the abuses of the French Revolution.
Who's to blame? Stalin. Robespierre. The dictators, the fascists. Not the systems they subverted.
Re:I spy a new meme (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Communists (Score:3, Insightful)
What I find scary is that the United States, as a whole, is so rabidly anti-intellectual. Mention any remotely intellectual activity to an 'uneducated' person (bridge, LUGs, discussion groups), and they'll immediately assume you're a snob.
--Jeremy
Re: Communists (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a liberal (AKA libertarian in the USA), but still: could you name one communist country, past or present, that has existed? USSR? China? North-Korea? Perverted dictatorships that were "communist" in name only. Just because they said they were communists, were they really? USSR was an "Union of Republics", was it really that? You can call yourself whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that you really are what you say you are.
Really, saying "communism doesn't work and it's evil!" is rather pointless, since we haven't had _real_ communist country on this planet. AFAIK the communist manifesto doesn't say one thing about one-party rule or sending people to gulaks. Neither does it say anything about state owning the means of production. Those things were something that Russian revolutionaries and Stalin thought up. Instead of really giving the power to the people, they decided that The Party represents the people and it can have all the power and the means of production. And the fact was that The Party did not in fact represent the people, it represented The Party.
Hell, it's just as pointless to say "capitalism and free-market are the greatest thing since sliced bread!" since we haven't had any pure capitalist or free-market-systems in this planet! USA? Sorry, government interferes in business, you have to think of something else! We can't know for certain that would pure capitalism be all that good, since we haven't had a system that implements it. Same thing with communism. We had one attempt (Russia) that got perverted in it's infancy, and it then spread elsewhere (China, Cuba etc.). Your comment of "Communism sucks, and as proof, I present my girlfriend from Latvia!" misses the mark 100%, since Latvia had very little to do with communism.
Re:And the audience was eating it up? (Score:1, Insightful)
I find that comment almost offensive. I run a Apple Powerbook G4 w/OS 10.3 and I have to say it is just about as simple as turning on tv. NO crashes, NO bombs, NO BSOD, no making excuses to my friends "It must of been a bad driver, no worries!". It just works. It boggles the mind that windows users don't get that.
I never shut my laptop off. Uptimes usually around 30-45 days (OS Software update reboots). I run my machine VERY hard 8-12 hours a day. No crashes, no glitches, nothing. (Wow, kinda like my television...) If you ask any Mac user you will hear the same thing over and over.
Windows users are so blinded by ignorance that they are complacent with crap.
Re:fp (Score:0, Insightful)