Comment Re:Are we confusing politics and commerce? (Score 1) 19
Hi, Jonathan!
We would love to have you come down to Shady Grove next week on the 24th and the 25th to talk with us about your doubts as to the strict accuracy of all our claims. Today you and I can boot a free OS on a computer we paid money to take out of CompUSA. No one one will say us nay, not by law, and not by electronics, and not by any interaction of law and electronics. Admittedly, we both know Aproned Masters who would help us, else perhaps we'd not succeed in this paradigm of private ownership of ordinary sized logic devices. Those who do not know even the Exoterica of the Apron are stuck ru(i)nning machines which will never be owned by them, but will for the life of the hardware be owned by Microsoft and a loose collections of retainers, parasite developers, and broadcasters of wormy squirmy cycle and bandwidth sucktorian Trojans, spambots, spywares, and General-Debilitators-of-the-OS, which last category is done for sport and and not mere gain of money. So already we see that the grand issue of private ownership of the means of digital production, that is, the computers in our houses, here touches upon, seemingly, mean questions of regulation of monopolies, perhaps the question of whether $50 is a fair market price for an OS, clearly a question of little direct significance. Yet, if the antitrust laws were enforced, then we likely would still be able to buy in two years hardware which we can use as we see fit, the way we can today, given good relations with the Guild of Sysadmins. Because then we would have, two years out, CompUSA offering for sale freely bootable computers, which CompUSA will not do if we let Microsoft, and the MPAA, and the RIAA, and HomSecPol dictate that CompUSA only offer Palladiated machines. So ancient, traditional,and much praised on the Fourth of July rights of Americans and the bumbling of the antitrust actions and the criminal career of Microsoft are well intertwingled.
To put it plainly, if we do not enforce the antitrust laws against Microsoft and various allied cartels and oligopolies, we will in two years time lose our right of private ownership of computers, and we will also lose our practical power of control, because no matter what a few say, most people will never salvage a Palladiated home device for any private use not approved and overseen by Microsoft.
ad your remark about making distinctions: I agree. Our side has suffered from a conflation of attacks on the public domain, on our rights of free speech and free association, with a different, but multiply related, series of attacks on our right of private ownership of computers. We have two bundles of rights and powers: Rights and powers we exercise outside the walls of our houses, and rights and powers we exercise inside the walls of our houses. We weaken our teaching when we fail to carefully distinguish these two different bundles. And we also fail when we do not speak of these two bundles together, for they are close connected, and the Englobulators know that they must attack both, else their fantastic scheme to seize the whole world's communications infrastructure will fail.
The "technical" issues I speak of in the announcement are exactly the sort of stuff you study, write on, and teach about. We'd be honored to make the case before you next week in Shady Grove. We believe the facts are convincing. We even think the legal, political, economic, electronic, and moral theories of our case are not entirely without a certain charm of gravitas.
I remain, as ever,your fellow WWWhacko,
Jay Sulzberger,
Member of NYFU.
http://www.nyfairuse.org
We would love to have you come down to Shady Grove next week on the 24th and the 25th to talk with us about your doubts as to the strict accuracy of all our claims. Today you and I can boot a free OS on a computer we paid money to take out of CompUSA. No one one will say us nay, not by law, and not by electronics, and not by any interaction of law and electronics. Admittedly, we both know Aproned Masters who would help us, else perhaps we'd not succeed in this paradigm of private ownership of ordinary sized logic devices. Those who do not know even the Exoterica of the Apron are stuck ru(i)nning machines which will never be owned by them, but will for the life of the hardware be owned by Microsoft and a loose collections of retainers, parasite developers, and broadcasters of wormy squirmy cycle and bandwidth sucktorian Trojans, spambots, spywares, and General-Debilitators-of-the-OS, which last category is done for sport and and not mere gain of money. So already we see that the grand issue of private ownership of the means of digital production, that is, the computers in our houses, here touches upon, seemingly, mean questions of regulation of monopolies, perhaps the question of whether $50 is a fair market price for an OS, clearly a question of little direct significance. Yet, if the antitrust laws were enforced, then we likely would still be able to buy in two years hardware which we can use as we see fit, the way we can today, given good relations with the Guild of Sysadmins. Because then we would have, two years out, CompUSA offering for sale freely bootable computers, which CompUSA will not do if we let Microsoft, and the MPAA, and the RIAA, and HomSecPol dictate that CompUSA only offer Palladiated machines. So ancient, traditional,and much praised on the Fourth of July rights of Americans and the bumbling of the antitrust actions and the criminal career of Microsoft are well intertwingled.
To put it plainly, if we do not enforce the antitrust laws against Microsoft and various allied cartels and oligopolies, we will in two years time lose our right of private ownership of computers, and we will also lose our practical power of control, because no matter what a few say, most people will never salvage a Palladiated home device for any private use not approved and overseen by Microsoft.
ad your remark about making distinctions: I agree. Our side has suffered from a conflation of attacks on the public domain, on our rights of free speech and free association, with a different, but multiply related, series of attacks on our right of private ownership of computers. We have two bundles of rights and powers: Rights and powers we exercise outside the walls of our houses, and rights and powers we exercise inside the walls of our houses. We weaken our teaching when we fail to carefully distinguish these two different bundles. And we also fail when we do not speak of these two bundles together, for they are close connected, and the Englobulators know that they must attack both, else their fantastic scheme to seize the whole world's communications infrastructure will fail.
The "technical" issues I speak of in the announcement are exactly the sort of stuff you study, write on, and teach about. We'd be honored to make the case before you next week in Shady Grove. We believe the facts are convincing. We even think the legal, political, economic, electronic, and moral theories of our case are not entirely without a certain charm of gravitas.
I remain, as ever,your fellow WWWhacko,
Jay Sulzberger,
Member of NYFU.
http://www.nyfairuse.org
