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LUG Pres Resigns Over Military Linux Use
Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is carrying the news that the founder and president of Linux Users Los Angeles (LULA) has resigned because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and the U.S. Armed Forces' use of Linux."
A premise for freedom, software freedom inlucuded, is that it is for everybody. You can't have "freedom, except for those I don't like". That kind of discrimination is actually incompatible with the GPL.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Yet another example of micropolitics in action. That is taking every conceivable act one does, breathing, eating, talking about the weather, being a Linux User Group member, walking or not walking on the cracks on the sidewalk and adjusting one's behaviour based on some pedantic notion that one's choices in these minor manners is having some kind of political impact.
It's kind of an obsessive compulsive form of political activism and the net effect is to annoy the crap out of everyone and make one's political beliefs look silly.
Define 'needless deaths'.
Two years ago, I visited London. Outside of the parliament were huge signs demanding an end to the sanctions against Iraq. Why? Appx. 1,000 Iraqi children were dying each week, and that's only children age 2 or younger. The overall numbers of actual humans dying were a fair bit higher. Since the war started, www.IraqBodyCount.com (Full disclosure: An anti-war site which produced a rather inflated count, at least for a while) claims that, as of April 21, 2004, a min of 8897 and max of 10747 civilians have died. Seeing as the war started over a year ago, I'll round the number of weeks down to 52 weeks. Taking a likely inflated number, dividing by a known deflated number, and I get 207ish people dead a week. Yes, this is a horrid number. Look at it. Realize that each of those 207 people had a family, friends, and a life. Now look back up. Sanctions were killing five times as many people.
What seems to be advocated is a preference for death by inaction, rather than death by action. I'd honestly like to know, why is letting 1000 some odd children die because some asshat tyrant can't be trusted better than having a fifth as many die, while granting freedom and independance?
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
The U.S. is not a direct democracy. The Federal government is a creation of the "sovereign states," and a number of its officials are elected by the state legislatures. The president and vice president, for example, and originally, senators.
So technically, your vote for President matters exactly as much as your state legislature chooses to allow it to matter. States can send delegates to the electoal college using any rules they want, more or less. Your state could, for example, choose to not follow the "winner taks all" rules, and send delegates proportional to the popular vote.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I worked for the "U.S. Military" for 10 years, and 6 of those years has been in either computers or communications in general.
Where does he come off with the statement "...I don't really trust the Pentagon to abide by the GPL." Let me tell you something-we bend over backwards to abide by license restrictions. I can't even download a shareware program (when we deal with Windows, not too many in Linux) copy without demonstrating we've paid for it. I understand the idea of "free as in beer", but I also understand "free as in speech". Speaking of free [rant]haven't people heard of the "Freedom of Information Act"? Just in case you haven't, click here. If you want to know what software we're using ask us! Don't just sit in your field of daisies whining and complaining about things of which you know nothing. And, (just so you know I know what the GPL is) you can't have the modifications I've made to the machine in my office. Why? Because I'm not distributing it...if I was, yes, you can have my source code.[/rant]
Before throwing stones at that "big glass house", realize that much of it is glass. You can see in it (well, maybe not the utility room...well, not that closet either..never mind) more then some company that takes GPL code, puts it in their router, then sells it. That would never happen.
Define 'lied'.
Remember. The French, Germans, and Russians all had vested interests in keeping Hussein in power. Their arguements were not "He might not have WMD's", but rather "The Inspectors should disarm Iraq of WMD's". The Chinese had no vested interest, nor a host of other countries, and their intelligence agencies all reached the same conclusion as the US and UK intelligence: Saddam almost certainly has WMD's, but we can't prove it conclusively. Keep in mind that Saddam did have active programs. Stockpiles, however have not been found, though that does not equal proof they did not exist (There was significant border activity with Syria that they could have been transported out).
So why would all these different intelligence agencies reach the same (Now it looks possibly wrong) conclusion? Well, that's a more complex question than it sounds at first. The first part is quite simply that Saddam had a vested interest in making it appear that he still did have weapons. Iran was (and still is) a larger, more populous country with a historical grudge against Iraq (And I don't mean limited to the last few decades, or even century). While Iraq had a powerful military, it simply didn't have the numbers to defend itself from Iran if they decided to invade in full force. WMD's were the great equalizer, allowing Iraq to become much more powerful than its number would normally allow.
Second would be an intelligence failure. If the programs were indeed active but non-manufacturing, quite simply most intelligence agencies aren't equipped to deal with that possibility, including the CIA.
Third, Saddam was sending clear signals that he *did* have WMD's, even though he officially denied it every chance he got. Authorizing the use of chemical weapons and distributing chemical weapons gear to troops is a fairly blunt signal. For reasons why he, in retrospect, might have done this, see the first part.
That being said, if you want to be mad at the government, be mad at them for not looking at the best interest of your respective country. In the short run, the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Japan, Korea, and a few others got shafted big time in one way or another. Whether you view the long term benefit(s) as worth it is up to you, though.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
and some of the current regime's heavyweights outlined their plans before they even got into office. Then they did it, they followed through with their plans.
That actually doesn't prove anything. The Pentagon has legions of people who draw up all manner of contingency plans. So some day some guys in the Pentagon sit down at a table and say, "What if Iran makes an amphibious assault on Saudi Arabia?" or, "What if Syria attacks Jordan?" or you name it. Then it goes out to battle planners who look at current military capabilities and make a plan. Part of the report goes to the DLA (logistics) who check materiel requirements against what is stocked and if necessary order stuff to stick in the colossal wharehouse complex in, e.g., Columbus.
So when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 somebody walked aver to a file cabinet and pulled out a plan. Right next to 8,347 others that never got used (thank goodness).
You realize that there was a rather simple way to get the access to that "sea of oil under Iraq"?
All we had to do was get the UN to rescind the sanctions. Hell, look at the sweetheart deals that Total-Final-ELF had negotiated back when it was still a French-owned company.
Sorry to go and ruin a perfectly good diatribe with facts...
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Actually, there were many thousands of absentee ballots in California that were not counted because all the elections there were already determined with the votes they had counted. Since absentee ballots generally trend Republican, it has been theorized that there might well have been enough of them there to tip the popular vote in Bush's favor.
And if Bush had won the popular vote but Gore had won the electoral college? Damn straight I would have said that Gore was the president. Just as if my favorite football team rolls up 3x the yardage as their opponent, but loses on the scoreboard, then they've lost the game, and I can bemoan the missed opportunities, but the scoreboard determines the winner.
The Republicans did lose a very close election before, in 1960, and you didn't see Republicans whining about the result like the Democrats still are about 2000. And recent analysis even shows that Nixon probably won the popular vote-- due to the Democratic electors in Alabama being half 'generic Democrat' and half for Kennedy; check out this url for details: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4275
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
That post is internally inconsistent.
.... Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.
Without the Electoral College a few things would happen.
If there was no electoral college, he couldn't "carry Virginia". To "carry a state" means to win all its votes, which only happens as a consequence of winner-take-all Electoral College.
very rarely lose their home state.
Again, you are somehow assuming that winner-takes-all would still be practiced without EC. But elminating that practice would be the most important result of abolishing EC! (Yes, that practice could be removed while keeping the EC, as two states have already demonstrated)
In reality, removing the Electoral College would mean that canditates don't campaign by state anymore, but by region. They'd aim for big cities. Rhode Island is small but dense, so it'd be visited. Virginia has large cities which would attract attention, but the rural parts would be ignored.
It's not much, but ultimately the EC makes things a little fairer for the smaller states, which is exactly why it was created.
Wrongo. The real reason the EC was created is that the logistics of counting 50 million nationwide votes in a short time was unmanagable in 1776. They needed to do things hierarchally.
(The reason you give, "fairness to smaller states", is why Senators are nonproportional)
No, they were establishing a republic of federated states.
A principle which Abraham Lincoln thoroughly demolished. Moving right along...
Kill, in modern english, is an all encompassing verb that covers taking life in any form. For example, look at the following two statements:
"The bank robber killed the teller."
"We killed our old lawn, so that we could lay down new sod."
Clearly there are two different concepts being conveyed in these examples. I would certainly hope that you are not implying that God would be opposed to the latter example.
Kill, as we currently use it, would be expressed in hebrew through the word "harag". The sixt hcommandment, however, use the word "ratsach", which is a completely different concept.
Ratsach is used only a few times in the Old Testament. (Judeges 20:4, 1 Kings 21:19, 2 Kings 6:32, Job 24:14, Ps 62:3, Prov. 22:13, and Hos 6:9). Based on the context of these verses, most scholars believe that Ratsach is more akin to our word for murder.
While quite a few special interest groups have taken the 6th commandment and used it to support their cause, in doing so they overlook the multiple instances in the bible in which God condones or commands war, animal sacrifice, and capital punishment. In other words, the argument contains no internal logic.
ThisIsAnExampleAccountGL@yahoo.com
The full text of the resignation e-mail can be found here.
sigs are a waste of space
In the article only a portion of the resignation email was posted, but only one line mentioned his opposition to the war. And the interview centered on the war issue. The lion's share of the email quote dealt with his unhappiness with LULA.
It seems (from the email snippet) that he resigned because of some disillusionment with LULA the Linux community in general, "My one regret is that more and more it has become an insular collection of geeks..."
or
"I feel that Lula no longer reflects the vision I have had for it and has in fact belittled itself as an organization for change and progress."
Granted, the email wasn't completely presented, but one would imagine if there were more to the war issue, that would have been reported instead. But then, "I'm Tired of Being in Charge of a Group of Detatched, Narrow Geeks.", really isn't news, is it.
Quomodo cogis comas tuas sic videri?
First read my whole statement not excerpts. Then respond. NewsForge and Slashdot could have provided a link to the source but it seems in this case they elected not to give you full access.
Clay Claiborne, Producer Vietnam: American Holocaust Linux Beach (310)581-1536