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They've just had their bits swapped.

Surgery is just one relatively small part of the transition process. It's mostly about living as your gender in day-to-day life. Imagine if you, as a man, decided to dress in women's clothing, shave your legs, put on make-up, get a feminine hair-cut, speak with a feminine voice, and ask that people use female pronouns, for the rest of your life. Imagine you were quite successful and people treated you just like any other woman. How much difference would it make in most of your daily interactions if you hadn't also had the surgeries?

Why don't we have a genderless way to refer to people?

You refuse you to use new pronouns like ze and hir, but ask why we don't have a genderless way to refer to people. Unfortunately we are where we are, gender does matter to most people, English isn't going to change overnight.

Richard Stallman wrote an interesting article about this, where he suggests "person", "per" and "pers". Not sure any of it will catch on, but he is also very clear that if someone asks him to use particular pronouns he will, regardless of what they are.

The only times it matters what someone's gender is: when police are trying to ID someone, when you're trying to fuck someone, or when someone is trying to qualify for gender-specific sports.

None of those examples work I'm afraid. The police don't really care what gender someone is, only what they look like and what their fingerprints and DNA are.

When it comes to procreation it's far more complex than just gender, and many normative male/female couples struggle.

In some sports gender doesn't or shouldn't matter, in others gender is really just a bad way of creating divisions, little different to different weight categories in sports like boxing. In the best sports such things are unnecessary, e.g. there is no weight division in Grand Sumo and 100kg guys can and do beat 200kg guys at the very top level. Maybe it's time to re-think these things.

I think it was supposed to mean that the "h" was lowercase in the featured article but uppercase in the quotation. The corresponding sentence in TFA begins as follows: "Basically, what this means is that hackers are taking advantage of a vulnerability..."

But in this sense, the word was was used in the sense of electronic intruders, not people who enjoy playful cleverness. I personally would have marked the entire first word as rephrased: "[Intruders] are taking advantage of a vulnerability..."

Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:

• Apple iTunes flaw went unfixed for years and allowed remote access which enables spying and a lot more. There was also news of a hidden backdoor API in OS X for years which granted root privileges. This too could have enabled spying and a lot more.
• Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
• As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
• There are many more vulnerabilites listed here and here which could be turned into privacy violations depending on how these vulnerabilities or backdoors are used.

Typically reiterating the Free Software Foundation (from 2010) or Richard Stallman's sentiments (dating back to 2011 and revised as news is published) doesn't go over well on corporate media tech sites. And then bad things happen and people eventually come around to realizing that the more principled approach (and attendant conclusions) was foreseen years ago.

Are you sure? I have it on good authority that's not quite the case ...

NVidia not making profit here? Let's look at why. 1) You need to be able to understand what the hardware/software stack below you is doing in the cryptocurrency world. Because more often than not, that one black box that you don't understand is where your bitcoin / other cryptocurrency is going to get stolen from. And yet Nvidia is actively hostile to those of us who live and die by drivers that are FLOSS. Nevermind that NVidia drivers are buggy as hell, we can't fix the official ones.
2) NVidia has been openly hostile to cryptocurrency miners, expressing publicly that they would prefer their cards go to gamers. They are not content to shut up and take our money, they didn't want it.
3) Their contact/support blocks tor users Which, guess what? There's a significant overlap with cryptocurrency users, given the concern we have over our privacy.
tl; dr nvidia didn't care when one of the biggest windfalls ever hit them, and now the market is starting to move past them. Good.

Stop projecting your ignorant fallacies on to people who have actually accomplished something worthwhile in this world. You are so goddamn pathetic.

Stallman is clearly of the left. FFS he named his most famous creation "copyleft"

Here's what he has to say about Why we need a state:

• providing food, clothing and shelter to the poor
• providing medical care and education to all
• building roads, train lines, water pipes and sewers
• funding research, including testing of pharmaceuticals
• protecting public health
• defending the nation
• prosecuting perpetrators of crimes whether committed on a street or in a bank office
• regulating businesses so they don't harm our health or our environment
• ensuring workers can form unions; preventing exploitative working conditions
• making sure employers don't steal employees' wages
• inspecting foods for safety
• Making sure products contain what they claim to contain and the stated amount, too
• banning digital products that do DRM or censorship
• reducing CO2 emissions to save us from global heating disaster
• ensure that chemical products are not toxic
• and protecting human rights for all

(This list is not meant to be complete or exclusive.)

For the record, Stallman is very left wing.

Erm... after reading that I think it's clear that you don't know what left wing is.

Nowhere in that page has he asked for collective ownership or limitations on personal property. You know, actual very left wing ideas. If anything, he's centre right.

There are informative links to relevant stories about Foxconn and Pegatron (the sweatshops Apple switched to after Foxconn) on Richard Stallman's website. Some on Amazon's worker exploitation as well.

There are informative links to relevant stories about Foxconn and Pegatron (the sweatshops Apple switched to after Foxconn) on Richard Stallman's website. Some on Amazon's worker exploitation as well.

"We need a law...there's no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us."

So Richard Stallman wants to ban websites that allow you to enter information about yourself. Facebook is just one of millions of sites where you can add personal information. It just happens to be the most used.

Most people don't want to go through the weird wget nonsense that Stallman uses https://stallman.org/stallman-...
"I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/g...) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation). "

or socialist. Yeah, this is slightly off topic, but folks get confused so much when they hear this term that I think it's worth pointing out. Neoliberal is in line with the "Clintonian" or "Corporate" side of the Democratic party. e.g. Low regulations, free trade, legalize things that aren't directly harmful like drugs, etc. It's like a pro-corporate libertarian.

For the record, Stallman is very left wing.

Objecting to Facebook on the basis of surveillance? That's hardly new. Software freedom fighters got there years ago.

Free Software Foundation got there earlier. From publishing https://www.fsf.org/facebook published on on Dec 20, 2010. FSF & GNU Project founder Richard Stallman has been rightly objecting to Facebook for years in his talks and on his personal website.

Long-time former FSF lawyer Eben Moglen rightly called Facebook a monstrous surveillance engine in talks and he pointed out the ugliness of Facebook's endless surveillance (at length in part 3 but in other places in the same lecture series as well). See http://snowdenandthefuture.info/ for the entire series of talks.

Hmm... While my decision a while back to to begin transitioning away from Google for most searches was a good one, it may only be a temporary personal solution (or act of resistance) against a company that, frankly, already has way too much say about what is available on the 'net and how it's viewed. Isn't the explosion of ads and the gratuitous use of silly Javascript effects that litter every web page (hell... some sites' pages require Javascript just to implement anchors/links) one of the major reasons that web page loading has gotten slow? They don't really believe I'll be thrilled that ads and even more Javascript will be downloaded nearly instantaneously onto my phone, do they? (Or onto my desktop because, most assuredly, it won't be limited to just mobile.)

I'm beginning to think Richard Stallman's got the right idea about using/browsing the web. (See here) Probably time to begin adopting some of his practices.

The IT world needs your commentary, Mr. Stallman.

Give him some time. He needs to wait for his cron job to finish. He surfs the internet as follows:

"I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/g...) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)."

Purchasing CDs with cash allows one to buy anonymously without an account (such as one uses with Amazon or Apple both businesses one has good reason to consider not doing business with at all anyhow, given how they treat the public, their employees, and vendors).

And for all we know the shift to DRM-free media will turn out to be revisited ultimately moving audio back to DRM-riddled media built on uncritical acceptance from people endorsing doing business with abusers like Amazon and Apple. The big difference being that DRM'd audio was hard to justify while widely-playable audio CDs were being sold everywhere consumers were likely to shop (such as big box retail stores). If audio CDs are not being sold much anymore from large vendors (including online) and people are willing to buy into here-and-gone-again walled gardens known as app stores and streaming services, it seems likely to me that business greed will remain. Businesses will still want to push how much more control over the user they can achieve by no longer distributing audio in DRM-free audio codecs. There may even come a day when people can be convinced to rebuy the same media multiple times again (VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming for video; cassette, CD, streaming for audio). This strikes me as something an uncreative and nervous investor would find to be a desirable outcome and right in line with what they've been pursuing for decades.

Purchasing CDs with cash allows one to buy anonymously without an account (such as one uses with Amazon or Apple both businesses one has good reason to consider not doing business with at all anyhow, given how they treat the public, their employees, and vendors).

And for all we know the shift to DRM-free media will turn out to be revisited ultimately moving audio back to DRM-riddled media built on uncritical acceptance from people endorsing doing business with abusers like Amazon and Apple. The big difference being that DRM'd audio was hard to justify while widely-playable audio CDs were being sold everywhere consumers were likely to shop (such as big box retail stores). If audio CDs are not being sold much anymore from large vendors (including online) and people are willing to buy into here-and-gone-again walled gardens known as app stores and streaming services, it seems likely to me that business greed will remain. Businesses will still want to push how much more control over the user they can achieve by no longer distributing audio in DRM-free audio codecs. There may even come a day when people can be convinced to rebuy the same media multiple times again (VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming for video; cassette, CD, streaming for audio). This strikes me as something an uncreative and nervous investor would find to be a desirable outcome and right in line with what they've been pursuing for decades.

https://www.stallman.org/archi...

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."

That's irrational because it's unreasonable to expect children to be able to consent to a sexual act.

Having seen him speak in person he's irrational. His basic philosophy is that if you don't control the source for the software and the hardware then you've given away your freedoms. He got upset at the ACS guy running the cameras recording the event because they used closed source MP4 codecs.

On that example alone - there's no single chip provider that makes hardware based codecs in open source chips - and this was long before the open source cinematic camera (which I would argue btw relies heavily on closed source chips as well).

...The current display is a simple "join the dots" affair with symmetrical RMS band overlaid...

No one escapes Stallman!
I had no idea he had a band...
He sure seems to stay busy https://stallman.org/

On topic, I do love Audacity. Just the ability to make a ringtone or alert sound at the drop of a hat is priceless... not to mention the actual work you can do with it. Good job Audacity team!

You are referring to hacking as if it is a bad thing. Learn the true definition of hacking from Richard Stallman.

The word that you are looking for is cracking. A safe cracker breaks into the bank vault. Unfortunately, the news media uses the wrong definition.

The people who won this contest did not crack, they hacked. No laws were broken and no money was stolen. The bitcoin was intended to be given away.

Congrats to msmash for getting the definition right. If we could only get copyright infringement and piracy used correctly.

the user does need to download and run the app [...] And, since it's unsigned, I'm assuming it won't work for most users by default

No on both counts—the app demonstrated in the movie is for proof of existence. The relevant code could exist in any application, even apps MacOS users already have and have been using (since this security flaw is old and also affects earlier variants of MacOS). In other words, sensitive data could have already been uploaded somewhere including changes to those credentials.

Apple's security is not only totally unimpressive here, Apple has a horrible track record as well. Wardle was quoted as saying he's "continually disappointed in the security of macOS...", "...every time I look at macOS the wrong way something falls over", and "Apple marketing has done a great job convincing people that macOS is secure, and I think that this is rather irresponsible and leads to issues where Mac users are overconfident and thus more vulnerable". I don't know precisely what Wardle was referring to to draw that conclusion. Perhaps he is referring to the time Apple chose to leave a 3-year old remotely exploitable iTunes bug unfixed after being informed about the problem. As Richard Stallman pointed out, "During that time, governments used that security hole to invade people's computers.".

But the worst part is that the software in question is proprietary (in other words, it's user-subjugating and non-free). So even technical users who are motivated to fix this, capable of fixing the problem, and willing to help others by distributing copies of their fix to other MacOS users in an easy-to-install package are rendered helpless. Such technically-inclined and helpful users can't help themselves or their community. They can either switch to a free system where their software freedom is respected or wait for Apple to fix the problem. And as the article says, "Apple did not say if or when it will patch the bug.".

That's actually a non-sequitur but you offer it as if it were a proper response to the point the grandparent post made. That's no justification for Apple's choices. Be it employing Foxconn, a firm with worker labor standards so low they installed suicide nets on the building outer wall after a spate of worker suicides came to public attention, or Pegatron which seemed to have lower standards than Foxconn, forbidding recycling extractable & usable spare parts from old computers, freeing the source code to systems they're not distributing anymore such as the Newton (distributing non-free code is bad as well), setting up devices to be bricked if non-authorized repair workers work on the device like they do with the iPhone 7, campaigning against right-to-repair laws, practicing censorship, spying on users, or pioneering tax avoidance techniques, there are lots of good reasons to not do business with Apple.

His advice? In no uncertain terms, delete your account immediately.

This is far from a unique opinion.

Isn't this how RMS 'does his computing'?

Which makes sense, because Stallman's personal politics are somewhere out in Chomskyville, that rarified region of the political spectrum between Karl Marx and transdimension beings from the Elemental Plane of Communism.

Seriously, go read the politics page on his personal website.

Indeed; there are many reasons not to do business with Apple and many reasons to never use proprietary, user-subjugating software. Contrary to one of the follow-ups to the parent post, this has everything to do with TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, and any other free software to which one entrusts their sensitive information. There's nothing these programs can do to fix the real problem. The user has to switch operating systems to a fully free software, user-respecting OS and install only free software on top of that to do the best we can do to avoid the aforementioned problems. So while nobody can blame these free software programs for leaked keys, passphrases, and other leaked information there's no reason to trust the underlying proprietary software these free programs rely on to do everything they do when running on non-free OSes.

You know in some points Trump has better positions than even the democrat frontrunner Clinton. For example on the election system, which Trump repeatedly called "rigged" (RMS btw used that term himself: https://www.stallman.org/repub...), and he promised to change it (esp. the caucus system where people don't vote) to make the votes more equal.

Clinton is mostly silent on the topic.

Both Trump and Sanders don't use money from super PACs, with funnily both of them claiming that they are the only candidate doing that. Clinton gets funded by few rich people. And we see the result of Obama being funded by the oil industry, as he pushed forward fracking or when he was so lax against the BP leak.

Yes Sanders has a past alliance with the NRA, and Trump has funded politicians himself, but both have changed. Unlike Clinton who still gets funded by the rich and wealthy.

Both Sanders and Trump are against trade deals which is a good thing. Clinton still spreads the lies about them.

And don't get me started with Cruz. He is the worst of the 4 remaining people with a chance of becoming president.

So yes, Trump would rank second on my personal list after Sanders and before Clinton. But then, I'm european and can't vote, but even if I had US citizenship I could just vote for R or D and most likely my vote wouldn't count either because my state weren't a swing state.

It was all more fun back then because everything was NEW. It was AWESOME. Today ... meh.

But to your point about what the world would look like without Stalman ...

[rant]
1. No GPL. So Linus would have released his software under his original license, which was free for home users, paid for commercial users.
2. No GPL hassles. Anyone who wanted truly free software would build upon the *BSDs.
3. Given a choice between (1) and (2), businesses would all have opted for (2), because they can actually build upon it to make products users will pay for, like Apple (OSX) and Sony (Playstation 3/4) do.
4. Anyone else could also build upon the *BSDs, and either release the source or sell the combined software, or whatever combo they wished to do.

The printer driver problem that Stalman ran into was not really all that big a deal. Someone gives you state of the art equipment to play around with (a cutting-edge laser printer) and they would naturally expect that if there were problems, you would tell them, they would fix them, and improve their product. No just give you and everyone else the source code to that other companies can use it without any sweat equity.

Stalman's snit shows just how juvenile his thinking really is. He took personal offense because they exercised their freedom to not give the source. He doesn't want freedom - he wants control under his terms. F*ck you, Stalman.

The same people who decry closed software don't object to closed software for games, or for making closed software when they can make a buck out of it (apps apps apps). Stalman thinks everyone should live like he did, living in his university office, because making profit from working on/selling proprietary software is somehow evil ...

Until around 1998, my office at MIT was also my residence. I was even registered to vote from there.

and

I was just kind of curious. I can be "strange/non-conformist". I don't do deodorant. Don't do telephones (e.g. i rarely carry my cellphone and only use my landline for recruiters to spam my phone). I tried natural toothpaste because I don't like the effects of fluoride.
I don't feel so bad. Richard Stallman doesn't look like he bathes, shaves, plus he lived out of the MIT lab. Some people are stranger than me.
Bot Berlin
July 15th, 2008 2:28pm

Yes, and Charles Manson kills people -- that doesn't mean we want to compare ourselves to him.
SaveTheHubble
July 15th, 2008 2:29pm

The guy is an asshole. Remember when he wrote this:

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

s/Jobs/Richard Stalman/g

The GPL actually helps companies like Microsoft maintain their preeminent position because you can't make any real money selling GPL software, so development lags, there's no promotional budget, manufacturers don't care if your software runs on their devices or not. So guess who gets market and mindshare, even for open source software? It's why the free screen readers on Linux are crap compared to this free windows one. It's why decent text-to-speech and speech-to-text on Android actually works - Google is making their profit by getting their apps in front of everyone. If they had tried to sell android, they would have been up against the entrenched players - sun, microsoft, nokia, rim

Apple makes so much money yet has such an ugly history of mistreating the people with whom they do business in a variety of ways large and small: Mistreatment of workers who build their products (continuing in 2015 only changing due to activist and journalists compelling them to), copyright infringement, ebooks that won't work on jailbroken iThings, turning a blind eye to environmental degradation, making it needlessly hard for owners to take apart their products, teaching store staff twisted psychological manipulation, avoiding US corporate tax (which is already quite low), and more. Now we can add conspiring to fix prices. Hardly surprising given how unethical, illegal, and pernicious Apple has been.

Apple makes so much money yet has such an ugly history of mistreating the people with whom they do business in a variety of ways large and small: Mistreatment of workers who build their products (continuing in 2015 only changing due to activist and journalists compelling them to), copyright infringement, ebooks that won't work on jailbroken iThings, turning a blind eye to environmental degradation, making it needlessly hard for owners to take apart their products, teaching store staff twisted psychological manipulation, avoiding US corporate tax (which is already quite low), and more. Now we can add conspiring to fix prices. Hardly surprising given how unethical, illegal, and pernicious Apple has been.

Then you haven't listened to his copyright talks or read any of his articles and stories, so you're really not trying and then get away with flaunting your ignorance of what he says. So I'll point you to some: Copyright vs. The Public talk given at Bern on 2010-02-11 (I imagine a copy of this will show up on https://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/ soon alongside recordings of a lot of his other talks), Reasons not to do business with Amazon, The Danger of E-Books, and his dystopic short story The Right to Read which presciently describes the kinds of anti-reader controls common in proprietary e-books. Your Baen library is not the norm; Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other DRM-laden e-books are sadly the norm. One should address how most readers read e-books to provide an adequate response, not cite the unusual exceptions that respect a reader's privacy and ownership of a copy of the e-book.

As to what you call "childishness", I refer you to "Why Call it the Swindle? because that entire essay addresses your point. Regarding lending, you and another followup poster both missed the point—lending should not require an intermediary, break a reader's privacy, nor set terms on the loan. There's no technical reason why an e-book lending should have one reader reveal to a third party which e-books they are lending to another reader, nor revealing the identities of either side of the loan. And you give away how you miss the point where you try to criticize by saying "even if it is for a lowly 14 days"—if it were really the reader's e-book (like it is with books), the reader/e-book owner should set the terms of the loan for their e-book including the loan period. Giving any intermediary power means tracking and restricting to whom one may lend their e-books, a significant downgrade from books and totally technically unnecessary to boot. These needless restrictions and many others are more than ample reason for renaming Amazon's "Kindle" into Swindle, or pointing out how the Kindle burns your freedoms as well as highlighting that digital restrictions management is anti-reader.

Finally, your use of the word "marketplace" suggests you value market success more than human freedom and people behaving ethically. That's a dangerous value system; I'll point you to the GNU project's commentary on the word "Market" since it's applicable here too, particularly that all DRM schemes are implemented with non-free, user-subjugating, proprietary software.

The Swindle was never a good device to use or own and there remain many reasons not to do business with amazon.com.

People travel, people change citizenship, and people don't deserve different ethics. The objection shouldn't hinge on whether one likes Apple or not. The argument should hinge on what Apple has done and how it treats its customers. Apple has long been a censor regardless of the country in which it does business, see the section labeled "Apple practices censorship. Here are a few examples.", and given how long it takes to fix security issues it knows are being exploited one can't say the company cares about user's security either, see the section labeled "Apple spies on its users, and helps others spy on them.". If Apple cared about "protect[ing] our customers' personal data" as it claims to Apple wouldn't distribute proprietary, user-subjugating software to its users.

Just to be clear: The questioner asked if the "FSF will endorse TPP opponents" and the parent response answered in the affirmative them went on to describe how Richard Stallman (RMS) did this. But RMS is not the FSF and vice versa; RMS endorsing candidates isn't the same as the FSF endorsing candidates. I've never seen the FSF endorse a candidate and I don't know of anything that would lead me to believe the FSF will endorse a candidate for a political race anywhere. I'm pretty sure this separation between himself and the FSF is important to both the FSF and RMS, and why RMS maintains his own website and posts some articles there expressing his own views including the text "This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project." on the front page of stallman.org.

Calm down, remember to breathe.

Don't be frightened, the Free Software Movement has your back. Right now you're still allowing yourself to be treated this way, because "nobody ever got fired for choosing MicroSoft," and your boss is an idiot. But don't despair! That isn't a slippery slope, because at any time when it gets too uncomfortable, Free Software will still be right there, waiting to respect your freedoms.

It is never too late to change, so it doesn't matter how awful they become. Whenever it is too awful for your tolerances, you can be Saved.

Praise to Saint IGNUcius!

Holy shit, you're right!
How has he not seen this? (oh, right: he only uses wget https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

apparently he does sometimes access the web with IceCat via TOR, that's relatively new thing for him I think.

https://www.stallman.org/stall...

01 May 2015 (Bernie Sanders running for president)

Bernie Sanders is running for president.

He's going to have my vote.

In fact if you go right to stallman.org it's current front and center at the top.

"Apple bashing"? How inarticulate and ultimately blindly supportive of a known repeat bad actor to keep their customers from controlling the iThings they buy. It's hardly far-fetched to see how the company receives bad press. They've made an ugly history for themselves rife with mistreating workers, users, and harming the environment. They found they could get away with non-freedom in software also exploits app developers "mercilessly" as Richard Stallman put it on his reasons why one shouldn't do business with Apple. Apple also uses digital restrictions management on eBooks which is set up so that those eBooks won't work on jailbroken iThings, stuck users with a U2 album and made it hard to delete, censors bitcoin apps for iThings, deauthorized a Wikileaks access application, banned an erotic novel from iTunes because of its cover, left a security hole in iTunes unfixed for 3 years, and more.

"Apple bashing"? How inarticulate and ultimately blindly supportive of a known repeat bad actor to keep their customers from controlling the iThings they buy. It's hardly far-fetched to see how the company receives bad press. They've made an ugly history for themselves rife with mistreating workers, users, and harming the environment. They found they could get away with non-freedom in software also exploits app developers "mercilessly" as Richard Stallman put it on his reasons why one shouldn't do business with Apple. Apple also uses digital restrictions management on eBooks which is set up so that those eBooks won't work on jailbroken iThings, stuck users with a U2 album and made it hard to delete, censors bitcoin apps for iThings, deauthorized a Wikileaks access application, banned an erotic novel from iTunes because of its cover, left a security hole in iTunes unfixed for 3 years, and more.

Good old dictionary.com says paranoia is baseless or excessive suspicion of the motives of others. There are a few examples where I think Stallman is excessively paranoid. I personally like using the web only over e-mail to avoid "survellance". Wander that deep down the rabbit hole, and the all powerful three letter agencies out to get you will also have secret exploits for Lynx. Seriously, it's all in the Snowden documents! And I totally did remember to take my medication!

However, there are way less examples that seem extreme like that today then there used to be. Re-writing your hard drive firmware with secret monitoring tools? In 2015 evidence that might be happening is reasonable news, not paranoia.

I've seen plenty of examples of companies who do not want to share code unless compelled to. There are software compliance tools for lawyers whose main purpose is checking corporate source code repos to make sure there's no GPL code. But the number of corporate contributors to all the BSD distributions says the GPL is not mandatory to develop open code. Did it help? Sure. I think open source software as a way to share overhead on boring infrastructure code was inevitable though, even if there was no "free software" (tm).

Stallman already has a web page to warn users to avoid Facebook. It's not that the issue needs no more thought, it's that he didn't choose to spend more time discussing it. Like everything in life, it's a balancing act to direct your limited time according the space provided.

I'm pretty sure Stallman would not support your assertion that purchasing from Amazon is "freedom".

He hasn't even been on the world wide Web yet because Xorg and any browser is not free enough.

That's not quite accurate:

From: https://stallman.org/stallman-...

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (but I make sure I have no net connection, so that it won't fetch anything else).

Never used a cell phone either etc.

That's also not quite accurate. From https://stallman.org/rms-lifes...

Cellular Phones

        I see that cellular phones are very convenient. I would have got one, if not for certain reprehensible things about them.

        Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices.

        In addition, most of them are computers with nonfree software installed. Even if they don't allow the user to replace the software, someone else can replace it remotely. Since the software can be changed, we cannot regard it as equivalent to a circuit. A machine that allows installation of software is a computer, and computers should run free software.

        Nearly every cell phone has a universal back door that allows remote conversion into a listening device. (See Murder in Samarkand, by Craig Murray, for an example.) This is as nasty as a device can get.

        From the book Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle, I learned that portable phones make many people's lives oppressive, because they feel compelled to spend all day receiving and responding to text messages which interrupt everything else. Perhaps my decision to reject this convenience for its deep injustice has turned out best in terms of convenience as well.

        When I need to call someone, I ask someone nearby to let me make a call. If I use someone else's cell phone, that doesn't give Big Brother any information about me.

He hasn't even been on the world wide Web yet because Xorg and any browser is not free enough.

That's not quite accurate:

From: https://stallman.org/stallman-...

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (but I make sure I have no net connection, so that it won't fetch anything else).

Never used a cell phone either etc.

That's also not quite accurate. From https://stallman.org/rms-lifes...

Cellular Phones

        I see that cellular phones are very convenient. I would have got one, if not for certain reprehensible things about them.

        Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices.

        In addition, most of them are computers with nonfree software installed. Even if they don't allow the user to replace the software, someone else can replace it remotely. Since the software can be changed, we cannot regard it as equivalent to a circuit. A machine that allows installation of software is a computer, and computers should run free software.

        Nearly every cell phone has a universal back door that allows remote conversion into a listening device. (See Murder in Samarkand, by Craig Murray, for an example.) This is as nasty as a device can get.

        From the book Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle, I learned that portable phones make many people's lives oppressive, because they feel compelled to spend all day receiving and responding to text messages which interrupt everything else. Perhaps my decision to reject this convenience for its deep injustice has turned out best in terms of convenience as well.

        When I need to call someone, I ask someone nearby to let me make a call. If I use someone else's cell phone, that doesn't give Big Brother any information about me.

RMS hasn't been an active developer in years by his own admission. His role is largely advocacy and philosophy, and that appears to be the sole issue here. However, he doesn't seem, based on a reading of the thread, to have any formal ability to block the patch.

"...and kiddie porn [...] never will be legal"

Joop Wilhelmus published child pornography magazine Lolita (Wikipedia info) in the Netherlands for 17 years without being prosecuted. So "kiddie porn" has already been legal. In fact, it still is in several countries, and pedophile activist organizations are not unheard of. Many people, including for example Richard Stallman (source) believe(d) that pedosexual contacts should be legalized. Of course there are various reasons for that, including what we can learn from proper research, but I won't go into that here. All I'm trying to convey is: you can't look into the future, so you cannot tell what will "never" be legal.

To which degree? Providing a fake name, birthdate, and other information, blocking image tags, and posting untagged text information?

By even using Facebook, you grant their service legitimacy, and enable (albeit only slightly, but change has to start somewhere) their unethical behavior. You mention algorithms that Facebook uses to infer connections, which is yet another evil.

Moderation:
-1 Missing angle bracket
+0 Semi-accurate quasi-religious bashing
-1 Accuracy

The FAQ for the Python 1.6 license states that the FSF attorney and Richard Stallman objected to a single clause of the Python 1.6 license specifying a venue for interpretation. I don't know why you would assume that Stallman was speaking without benefit of legal counsel. Also, not being a lawyer does not automatically mean you are unqualified to interpret a license agreement (and vice versa). I would assume that, barring evidence to the contrary, RMS is a subject matter expert in the legal interpretation of the GPL and software licensing in general, seeing as how he's been doing nothing else for the last twenty years.

Aside from ad hominem, do you have any arguments against his expertise in these matters?

I bet most of this is RMS eastereggs.