Free Software Foundation – Anti-Features

Free Software Foundation – Anti-Features:

RAW is an example of an anti-feature. Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort. Unlike real features, producers of anti-features charge customers for not inhibiting access to their products’ full functionality. Technological and legal barriers that keep anti-features away from the users of intentionally less featureful end up costing all users their freedom. It is more difficult for Canon to make cameras that output JPEGs than cameras that output RAW, and it’s not significantly more difficult to offer users a choice.

As the poster points out, one of the nice things about free software is that as a matter of course, and with zero coding effort, it will provide all the “anti-features” that nonfree systems make you pay for.

The Strange Story of Don LaRose

NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas’ News Source:

The story of Don LaRose reads like a script for an old made-for-television movie – Satanism, brainwashing, kidnapping and assumed identity…

For Ken Williams – who has been mayor of Centerton since 2001 and has been a radio personality in the county since the early 1980 s – the story of Don LaRose has been a deep, well-kept secret…

The similarities between the two men are striking – from a resume history of radio personality, ministry and parallel trips to Israel to facial features and a comb-over hairstyle.

There’s a reason for the similarities: Ken Williams is the name Don LaRose assumed when he began a new life before coming to northwest Arkansas in the early 1980 s.

Apparently this fellow has a history of being “kidnapped by Satanists” and disappearing from his old life and starting a new one under an assumed name. It’s happened a couple times. The last time, it lasted for over 20 years, and his former life was only revealed when he, in his new identity, put up a web site about his old identity, not realizing, apparently, that people who knew him in his old identity (in this case, his nephew, Ed Miller of Holland, MI), who found the web site could track him down via the whois information.

Saw the story originally here via Reddit, and tracked down more info with google. This blogger has many many links if it’s details you crave.