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Tribalism Is the Enemy Within, Says Shuttleworth
climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote,
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."
The public expectations of software are not particularly rigorous -- it shouldn't crash too often, it should look moderately pretty, and it should get them on the web. Done, done, and done. Can we go back to arguing and tribalism now?
Palm trees and 8
I talked with Mr. Shuttleworth. My impression is that he is not ready for the huge social challenges of running an extraordinarily complex software development effort.
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.'"
This is 90% of what makes the American government unworkable.
My other sig is clever.
use my distro.. It's way better than those other pieces of crap.
If you can figure out how to convince people to reject tribalism and operate in a completely rational manner then promoting free and open software will end up being small potatoes, you've probably got a nobel prize waiting for you.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Ignore him.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Just the sort of intellectual whining I'd expect from an Ubunt-dude.
Tsk tsk.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Would you mind expanding on this comment please my dearest sir/madam?
It is a problem. Tribalism is different than debate, dissent, and competition. It's a state of being unable to engage in meaningful debate or to accept constructive criticism. There is (or should be) a middle ground between a "mono-culture" and the inability to accept new ideas from a member of an opposing group.
My other sig is clever.
Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world.
I guess I hadn't noticed. What's he going on about?
...or, rather, people who design and perpetrate software like:
- networkmanager ...
- dbus
- gconf & gnome
- pulseaudio
- mono
-
we discovered a new way to think.
The Tribalism is blocking me from world domination. Kill him.
ST vs. Amiga
Mac vs. Amiga
Mac vs. IBM PC
Windows vs. Linux
Republicans vs. Democrats
Racists (R) vs. Racists (D)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's called Open Source. Get it right!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i.e. ain't going to happen. And funnily enough, assuming evolution is a universal where life is concerned (alabama excepted), any aliens we come across are almost certainly going to behave in a similar fashion.
Deleted
He didn't seem at all to be saying there should be a mono-culture. He stated that it was a problem that people in each individual clique seem to often, rather than being cooperative and working with the other groups (or even respecting) them, things tend to devolve into "my is better than yours!" attitudes. It's not even always between distributions. At a recent open sources convention I attended, though it wasn't really open hostility, I saw a lot more devotion and mild animosity between Gnome and KDE users than between Ubuntu and Fedora users.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Like when people label me a "racist" because I belong to the local Tea Party.
"But I'm not racist."
"You belong to the TP - you're racist."
"My girlfriend's black."
"You lie!"
"No really here's her photo. See?"
"Lie lie lie!"
"Oh for Christ's sake - forget it."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Strange how he speaks of "lifting Free Software to the forefront", whilst all he's _really_ doing is trying to lift Ubuntu to the forefront.
Mr. Shuttleworth apparently knows that "the internet doesn't forget", yet he (I assume it was him who heralded the changes made) chose to tone down the role of Free (as in freedom) Software in the "Ubuntu Promise" over the years in a very silent yet continuous manner, and led Ubuntu to act against some of the principles of the early (think 2004 to 2006 or so) days of the project; principles that I happen to value. Getting into bed with vendors of proprietary software in a way that doesn't benefit others in the Free Software eco-system is something I despise, for example: Canonical is actually getting proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers before anyone else gets them, probably under NDA or whatnot. I also don't like their "partner"-repository that contains nothing but proprietary software, and is advertised and presented as a Really Great Thing(tm), not as a sometimes (probably) necessary evil. I don't like how Ubuntu's more and more about doing "their thing" without contributing back to the upstream projects they base their product on, and how they actually try to differentiate themselves from their competitors by making technically bad decisions in the wake of all this (think client-side window decorations, and putting window controls to the left because of that - just doesn't make any sense to me). There were many other occasions on which Mr. Shuttleworth and Ubuntu chose to somehow, somewhat upset parts of the Free Software community, either by what they stated or what they did. I just don't think Mr. Shuttleworth is entitled to put Ubuntu under the banner of Free Software, at least not as it stands today. If someone on identi.ca, or whereever else, is arguing against Ubuntu, it's just that: someone arguing against Ubuntu. It's certainly not an attack on Free Software.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Kind of like the Common Climate Pattern deniers?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I cannot bring myself to even try Ubuntu due to the names of its releases.
-Feisty Fanboy
People who think people from another group are 'wrong by default' are wrong!
If this was Startrek the androids head would now explode.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
And apes are tribal.
No fix for this, other than editing the DNA. (Warning: may involve large changes in to the Y chromosome).
So tribalism == politics. Got it!
Thats why I got an Apple.
This is all a bunch of pretty words. Sure, we should avoid "tribalism" arguments. There's some disturbing logical flaws -- tribalism based on nationality is surely more dangerous than tribalism based on preference of sports teams -- but the main issue is that no one accusing Canonical based on that. It's all a big strawman. I'd love to love Canonical.
But forget all that. The important thing is:
What's up with the "Our company is like a successful woman and you're saying we slept our way to the top!" analogy? Where does that even come from? Space madness?
Teabaggers aren't racist, just wrong.
And laugh at everyone posting about how Shuttleworth is wrong by default, and how Ubuntu sucks by default.
Hell, the packaging and bandwidth is more than most, and they also do contribute a fairly large amount of code and infrastructure.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Mark doesn't like it that we don't just all cooperate in making him even more wealthy. We're not his unpaid employees, even if that's the way he treats us.
Bruce Perens.
Ubuntu provides a package that many people have found they prefer - how does that not fit the definition of value-added?
Considering the amount of effort I have had to expend to get Ubuntu 10.04 to work with Exchange server, just because they can't be bothered to include Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning/Pidgin into their repositories properly AND integrated into their notifier applet
All I can say is "ubuntu is more guilty of this than most"
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
That's wrong. And that's what the tea parties are protesting against (in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If ever you want to cause an uproar, hold forth as follows.
Tribalism is what we call the pack instinct in humans. It has served important survival functions in the great apes, canines and probably most pack hunting species. It can be trained out to some degree but it is part of the default social priority structure we are all born with. In humans it is only slightly based on blood relations: the main cues for identifying tribe members are cultural. Most of tribalism is really culturism. If you act the same and look the same and smell the same, you are likely to be accepted.
It protects against disease: if you kill the interloper promptly there is less chance of contagion. It is the framework for competition for resources: if your tribe can defeat another tribe you can commandeer their land, women, etc. That is the evolutionary basis of tribalism and in fact society in general.
Racism, properly viewed, is just tribalism where the tribes happen to have different skin colors. When the colors match, e.g., Tutsis vs. Hutus we call it tribalism or culturism.
Racism tribalism culturism
Unfortunately, he's essentially killed the Debian project, and the rest of Free Software is not far behind as we realize the futility of making ourselves his unpaid employees. I have a large product I'm working on, originally intended to be Open Source licensed. I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.
Bruce Perens.
in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I think I can safely say it's bad, as it was the worst labour civic in Civ4.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Only 52 comments in and it seems there is already a disproportionate number of posts moderated Offtopic, Troll, or Flamebait than a typical /. thread. All this and we're just talking about the possibility of tribalism being a problem in the free software community. Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth is on to something.
So what are you doing to privatize your municipal streets, water, fire, and police?
(Yes, this is OT. Yes, abuse of the language is a personal pet peeve. Mod me down, by all means -- my karma can stand it.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Mr. Shuttleworth was not prepared to deal with the occasional anger of the software contributors, for example. Running a complicated technological business requires an understanding of not only the technology, but also the immense social complications.
Shuttleworth is deeply embroiled in the constant in-fighting between Canonical and Debian, so it's not a big surprise that he sees fragmentation.
And now, it sounds like Redhat has entered the ring against Canonical, too... over contributions to GNOME of all things.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Not exactly, although that is what a lot of politics eventually devolve into, unfortunately.
Remember, Democrats are always wrong on every topic because they murder babies, and you don't want to trust a baby murderer, do you? The sad part is that I've heard more or less that specific argument in the recent past.
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
That's easy to explain. Much like how the grass is always greener on the other side, criticism is louder when it's against your side.
How appropriate considering the topic at hand of Tribalism.
I would love to see these Tea Party guys share in some of the power to see if they live up to their claims. And Libertarians. And Greens. If the stranglehold of the two corrupt powerhouses were to be shaken with some decent 3rd party action without the populace mourning "wasting" votes within my lifetime, I can die a happy man that that the country I love will be on it's way to rediscovering her path.
More Twoson than Cupertino
thats what Shuttleworth wants = to be the "Bill Gates" of Linux, but thats not going to happen.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You have it backwards. Triablism is the opposite of competition. Tribalism isn't "I prefer my project so I will make it better than yours" it's "You are an idiot, why bother competing when I'm already better and always will be". It's not "I like this feature we should do that too" it's "That feature is in Windows, it's garbage, lets not even think about it!"
Also, explain how racism isn't prejudice...
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Want to mod up... so bad... ahhh, but it's so offtopic. Sorry, try again next time.
Right now me just howling naked savage. What are my options? The various tribes and their benefits. Me no run'um Oobuntoo, so me not one of them.
This is what advertisers want. It is what anyone in charge wants. Or indeed anyone who wants to be in charge wants.
something an Ubuntard would say. No sane person would listen to him or use Ubuntu :P.
To be honest, though, I don't like Ubuntu and I prefer SUSE.
This type of action by Bush was the reason his approval numbers were so low - he lost his conservative base. Conservatives were quite outspoken about this. That being said, the fiscal bailout was quite different from the "stimulus" package. The fiscal bailout was almost completely a set of loans and the large majority of those loans have been repaid. The "stimulus" package, on the other hand was mostly a giant boatload of pork-barrel spending.
How about the "fines" you pay for roads/schools/police/fire dept./etc ? Wouldn't you be so much better off if you could just opt out of all of those too?
I see what you did there.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It doesn't because Canonical's patch tribalism forces upstream developers to waste time on adding the value all over again from scratch.
The problem is things like this: Talk to a Os X or Windows (I know they aren't OSS but the concept is the same) user about the other. The arguments they make are so far exaggerated and removed from present reality that it's mind blowingly obvious that they have literally never used the thing they're complaining about.
And this isn't just a few extremists this is the PREVAILING attitude among Windows/Os X users and I'll bet it's the same in the OSS world.
There's this thing called "Other Distributions" that you may want to look at. They have repos too.
Where else would you find people deeply committed as people in free software community? I think this type of tribalism comes with territory, and one of consequential driving forces behind free software movement. We are talking about at least the sweat equity, and the investment of identity -- which are both valuable human assets. Just look at small, infrequent punches that Linux throws at others. We forgive him because he's been a part of significant history, but it becomes harder and louder as you deal with those who may not be as talented or fortunate.
yup, shuttleworth & ubuntu is an interloper
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Redhat and Canonical serve two entirely different groups of people, so it's pretty pointless to bitch about what each have or haven't done for their respective groups.
Yeah except that whole part about making Linux easier to use, and accessable to average users. Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it.
It may not be the distro for you, but to dismiss it as adding very little to the OSS community is intellecutally dishonest. Ubuntu was very helpful to many people for getting started on Linux. I myself started using it a year ago, and recently switched to Arch Linux because I was ready to learn more about how the sytem works. Ubuntu opened the door, and I'm very greatful for that.
They seem to provide source and comply with the GPL, what else did you want?
Mark is telling an old story again, but it is obviously necessary to repeat this very insight especially when it is done so well. In the end it is still the idea that you should use reason and not some prejudgment to classify things. You may read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment to understand the stuff behind it. It find it particular interesting that the Wikipedia article states that the Age of Enlightenment has ended. I strongly recommend to start it all over again (without the mistakes of course that would not be very enlightened).
Killed Debian? Sounds like hyperbole to me...
Already proven by current moderation.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
So the only races that exist are white and black? Indeed, I wonder who the racist here is.
emacs vs vi
It is a problem. Tribalism is different than debate, dissent, and competition. It's a state of being unable to engage in meaningful debate or to accept constructive criticism.
Sounds like proponents of global warming talking about all critics being "deniers" in the grip of Big Oil and being just as bad as Creationists...
Ubuntu is bringing free software to the masses as noone else has done before. Nobody forces you to install proprietary software from the partner repository or anywhere else and when Ubuntu detects that a proprietary driver, for instance, is available for your hardware it tells you that it's not free software and you can choose to ignore and keep using the free one.
Scientia est Potentia
Especially as Ubuntu is rotting from the core. I run Ubuntu, but don't use its bootloader, drivers, bootscrips, or kernel after getting burnt once too often.
I'm not entirely qualified to make a fluid dynamics analogy, but bear with me here..
Tribes are eddys.
If a current within a fluid encourages inter-eddy interaction (dispersal, conjoinment) - no matter how temporary or permanent, yet the tendency is for eddys to exist outside a flow or current system.
How can tribes not also persist outside those social currents not strong enough to induce diffusion?
There are still 'Kolmogrov microscales' when there appear to be no eddys..
I think poor Marky (insert underlying vocal connotations of tribalism) is just upset that people think they don't contribute anything. Here is a quote from an article Mark linked to:
Likewise, I don't think it is fair to undermine Canonical's contributions just because many of them exist outside of GNOME.
I personally think that this IS fair. If they are going off on their own implementing features outside the mainline GNOME project and those associated development routes then that is there prerogative but we absolutely can undermine their work. Any extra work they do just for the whims of their project is going to be by reality less useful to others. The argument can be made that GNOME could be more accepting of the work and interest of others - which in the end they do try to move their additions upstream... Also the definition and application of the word "contribution" is made vague since these contributions are to their community and not to GNOME. As a related side note: this issue of upstream changes and doing what they want to on their own is the VERY reason why I like using Fedora.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Well you heard at least one voice - Mine.
I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans. And then I joined a Tea Party in December of '08. It's not my fault you chose not to hear my voice. You also chose not to hear my voice in 9/12 when I said going to war was a dumbass decision, but was passed near-unanimously by the Congress (both D's and R's).
Oh and by the way the Tea Parties date back to December 2007 when Bush was still in office. It was originally started by libertarian Ron Paul, who then stepped aside after his campaign was finished, but the momentum continued without him.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
...also a tribe. And there assertion that our tribalism is wrong by default, is also wrong.
Long live FREEBSD! DIE MS, DIE LINUX.... ok MacOS can live as long as my BSD commands are availible in Terminal.app. :)
Ok linux can live too as long as they keep making games
I have no idea what Mark is thinking decrying our saphic allies.
Unfortunately, at this stage, changing civics would cause civil unrest, and we're only three turns away from finishing the Oracle, and five turns away from the Pyramids.....
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
>>>the large majority of those loans have been repaid.
And then redirected by the Congress towards other projects, like building more bridges to nowhere. So really the money is STILL spent. They converted the 700 billion bailout cash into 700 billion of pork. It's wasteful.
Current National Debt == $130,000 per US home, and projected to be $140,000 by year's end, and $200,000 by the end of Obama's eighth year.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Tea Party? Is it a new name for an old thing, I mean the KKK? From our True North, you looks very "exotics", say just like the talibans... ::)
Claude LaFreniere aka climenole
I'm guessing you don't care how people perceive you. Good for you, but don't be surprised that the public perception of "tea partier" has morphed.
It's like complaining that people call you a nazi just because you have a big swastika sticker on your car. The symbol may have ancient origins, but it means pretty much one thing to most people.
Oooh- did I just invoke Godwin's law?
Well, completely destroyed any significance of Debian other than as unpaid employees of Ubuntu.
Bruce Perens.
>>>How about the "fines" you pay for roads/schools/police/fire dept./etc ?
Those aren't fines. Those are user fees that I pay, either in advance or retroactively, for the education I received, the police protection, and so on. And in the case of roads, if I don't drive then I don't pay the gasoline/road tax, so it really is an optional tax.
THIS $950 fine I was discussing is an Anti-Choice measure, and it sets the precedent that I can be fined for anything. "You chose not to buy solar panels - fine." "You chose to buy a regular car instead of a hybrid. Fine." "You chose to buy a Honda instead of an American car - fine."
That is not freedom.
This is not Democrat.
I know what this party has become, but it's the polar opposite of what its founded Thomas Jefferson intended (a party to defend the 10th amendment).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A friend and I have recently been discussing tribalism and an idea he called Monkeysphere - I'll quote him here more-or-less verbatim as he's already written it beautifully:
It's [Monkeysphere] a brilliant concept. It came about when researchers noticed a correlation between primate brain sizes (I forget whether it was the whole brain or a key part of it) and the size of their social groups. It was such a strong correlation that they could actually predict how big a group it would be when presented with a brain they hadn't seen before. This group limit has been termed the Monkeysphere.
One day they were given a rather large brain, and guessed a social group size of 150. You might already have guessed which species this brain came from.
Basically, we cannot cope with the idea of more than 150 people - at least, not AS people. We blur the others out. The supermarket
checkouts may as well be staffed by robots for all we care. There are human beings taking away our rubbish every morning, but we don't even think about them. All we think about is the rubbish going out, and then disappearing. Road rage? We simply don't see other drivers as people.
We *have* to work this way, or we'd go mad.
Stereotypes? Racism? That's the Monkeysphere at work. It's much easier to think of a million people far away if we think of them all as the
*same* person.
Now apply this logic to any community. Once the community gets big enough (such as in the Free Software world), it essentially divides into such tribes and you wind up with exactly what Shuttleworth's describing.
The sad thing is, if this Monkeysphere idea is accurate, I don't see how such tribalism in the F/OSS world is avoidable. Indeed, it'll only get worse as more organisations jump on the bandwagon.
How is this any different than any Linux distro? It sounds to me like you're arguing against the basic concept of free software...
I'm part of the tribe that thinks tribalism is for idiots.
Yes, and the way that Ubuntu brings free software to the masses is unfortunate. Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify. Unfortunately when we wrote it, we weren't thinking that we would have gate-keepers who would essentially negate why we wrote it.
Bruce Perens.
R vs. D is Reddit vs. Digg.
I agree that's insulting. Of course you're not racist for being in the Tea Party movement, you're just retarded.
On a more serious note, although it's a bad generalization to say that Tea Partiers are racist, it is valid to say that more participants are racist than you'd expect from an average organization.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
That's because the TEA parties weren't happening yet. Trust me, if you'd listened to talk radio, read the blogs, watched something other than MSNBC or CNN, etc. you would have noticed. By the way, Obama has more than doubled the Bush deficit. Now THAT'S huge, in the way that an elephant's huge until you see a sperm whale.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is the entire reason why Linux and the rest of the Open Sores movement hasn't gone anywhere for more than a decade. If you alienate one another and the people you have every reason to be reaching out to, of course you're not going to make any headway - and nobody alienates prospective new users quite like the Linux community. Deliberately, openly, unabashedly, over the past ten years the pimply oil-soaked face of the Linux community did just about everything it could to appear alien and elite to people that use operating systems that actually work. Nobody is going to want to use your arcane, archaic operating system and the equally nuck-futs backward software that comes with it if you're not even willing to help them try. The complete inattention to usability is a side effect of this, along with their downright pathological inability to relate to the needs of other people with a less advanced grasp of the product than they have. (A symptom of the autism which supposedly pervades most of geekdom, though I suspect largely in imagination only.) Those fags sure got told, didn't they hacker kiddies? Now the only people who give half a rat's last turd about your freetard garbageware are the people who are too cheap to afford anything else - oh yeah, and the companies with corporate sponsors that completely deviate from your Utopian free-software model. Thanks a lot, you fucking tools.
Tribalism is a cancer, and with nobody left to push away, the freetards are attacking each other. Good riddance, and enjoy your decline to (further) obscurity.
Really? HigherEducationQuestionmark.com I think their web developer should be kicked out. That is too long URL.
P.S. I hate long urls. Really.
But let me guess. It would be really swell if everyone joined Shuttelworth's side and redirected their tribalism energies towards all thing not *buntu.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I would be totally fine with a health care that didn't require you to pay anything towards health care, if you singed your name in blood stating that you will never receive free or subsidized care from the state, ever. Which means you can never go to a public hospital. Never go to see any doctors that have received any kind of federal funding for any of their patients, or for there education ( going back to grade school ).
The problem was that many people would opt out before, and not get any kind of health insurance. Then when they go t sick the hospitals absorb the cost, which translates into higher costs for everyone else. So, no you don't get to go back to the way it was so you can free ride anymore. Everyone is paying in, one way or the other.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Hilarious, since what originated this whole "debate" was the report that there isn't a single Canonical developer in the top 25 list of GNOME contributors. But that's not what hits Slashdot -- Shuttleworth's hand-wringing about "tribalism" gets the headline. Classic.
Are you really advocating a Salvation Army model of free software? "Come have this hot meal, and all you have to do in return is listen to our sermon"?
Fixed that for you.
I think that there is inevitably a conflict between the goal of software freedom and the existence of a financially powerful gate-keeper who stands between the financially un-powerful free software developers and the vast majority of users. The goals of the gate-keeper will never align with those of the folks making the software.
Maybe it is time for something beyond the Four Freedoms and the Open Source Definition that deals with this problem while building a viable developer and user community.
Bruce Perens.
Glock vs. 1911, AK vs. AR platform. All are excellent guns, but don't tell that to any of the "purists" on either side!
"He"'s killed Debian? Sorry, but he didn't point guns at anybody to get users and developers. Build a better Debian, don't give us the "it's all Shuttleworth's fault, waaaa!" crap.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
No. Actually RMS did that with the Gnu Free Documentation License.
What I would like to do is foster a large developer community and a large user community without the gate-keepers. I think that might require less rights than you get with Open Source, specifically some terms around paid distribution and distribution as part of a support-for-pay engagement. I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
Bruce Perens.
They don't force you to use proprietary software, but they do include proprietary drivers as well as Ubuntu One by default now.
How about instead of a $950 fine, we raise taxes for everyone? Then you get to deduct (up to some maximum, say $950) the amount you spend on health care?
Or instead of health care, you get to subtract an amount for each kid you have. Or how much interest you pay on your mortgage. Or... hopefully you get my point? I guess you can argue the health care bill is raising taxes on those that don't buy insurance and is deceptive in the way that tax is being levied. I might even agree. The problem is, I fail to see how that's markedly different from other tax/deduction rules. Or at least different enough to motivate me to join protests or political rallies or tea parties.
People are already taxed more for not paying mortgage interest. That makes less sense to me than paying more to subsidize the sick (even though I benefit from the mortgage interest deduction). Why wasn't the mortgage interest deduction upsetting people as much? It effectively "fines" people for not buying real estate on credit.
It's like a segment of our population suddenly woke up and realized they have to pay income taxes following incomprehensible rules. The strange thing is, that awakening seemed to occur at the same time Obama won the election.
He pointed tons of money at them. Hey, I even gave away Ubuntu CDs once or twice. I won't again.
Bruce Perens.
The guy is barely making a buck on the distro he chose to roll (from support etc.), and people are up in arms about getting paid because he uses software which people themselves chose to license under the GPL? You can make as much money supporting Ubuntu as Mark Shuttlesworth can, he doesn't have a proprietary edge over you apart from employing the people who rolled the distro (which can hardly be called an unfair advantage, I don't bitch at programmers for their apparent advantage at altering the program they wrote, when they alter my favorite program in a way I find silly).
And keep the friggin' republican/democrat-bitchfight out.
Love each other, you silly geese ^^.
I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Oh, and by the way -- random capitalization and the co-opting of terms with specific other meanings just makes you look like a lunatic. Might be one of the reasons many of us consider you to generally be trolling.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
Multiple reasons, actually:
1) You're mis-attributing the amplification. Google 'Ron Paul' for more detail.
2) The 'Tea Party movement' was taken over/infiltrated/adopted by 'big tent' Republicans after McCain lost.
3) Obama will have presided over one of the worst presidential terms in recent history, and may not have been able to 'do things right' even if he weren't a big-spending, Chicago-style-deal-making Liberal. Which, unfortunately, he is.
I know it's far from perfect and I think it's beyond me trying to argue with you but I rather see free software being largely distributed this way that not at all.
Scientia est Potentia
Ever met a misogamist that had a black girlfriend? Me too. Dating a girl doesn't mean that you don't think she is genetically inferior.
That being said, being a member of the Tea Party certainly is no indication that you are a racist.
The Debian project is alive and doing fine. It's true that it's no longer what comes to mind first or second when you think of a desktop Linux distribution, but declaring it killed is just plain wrong. Really. Calm down.
Hello Bruce, love ElectricFence !
In what way has he killed the DP ? By making its collective brainchild the most popular Linux distribution ? Sounds like it killed it with love, no ?
Er, actually it hasn't; it's been returned to the Treasury. In fact, the bank bailout is projected to return a profit; the part that's a massive loss is the bailout of AIG and all the other CDO providers (collaterallized debt obligations, basically people buying insurance on assets they don't have).
than being related to the granddaddy of racism and sexism.
The tea party was organized pre-Obama.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Sure, but unfortunately Free Software doesn't work unless people have a motivation to make it. And over time the only people left with that motivation, when there are gate-keepers, are going to be the folks working for the gate-keepers and people who have some financial reason to get stuff into distributions, like hardware manufacturers.
Bruce Perens.
Hang on,
I don't see any of what you describe happening with Ubuntu. On the contrary, Ubuntu is very eloquent about why Linux is free and why people should use it.
What would you change, if you were in Shuttleworth's shoes ?
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default'."
This seems to be an appropriate description for the immediate rejection by the slashdot clan of all technology, standards, and business models from Microsoft.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Hey guys/gals, we were discussing software, not tea. K thx bye ;)
By essentially making all past and present Debian developers his unpaid employees. Everything we did was for Ubuntu, not Debian, we just didn't know it. I really wish now that I'd let the project die when Ian Murdock quit. I was a freetard - just like Dan Lyons called them when he did that "Fake Steve Jobs" blog. What an idiot I was.
Bruce Perens.
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
Oh, so you want me to pay to keep the emergency rooms open, so you can use them when you get in a car accident and need them? That "fine" is a fee to keep the hospitals open, so that when you need them they'll still be there. The current situation is that you, and people like you, are opting out of the health insurance market but still expect the emergency rooms to remain on standby, which is why hospitals are going out of business and health insurance companies keep having to raise rates.
It's just like the police or fire department, except that 100 years ago we decided to lump those services together and make them publicly owned--taking the market away from private security firms and fire deparments--while leaving doctors to the tender mercies of the insurance companies. Doctors at the time just didn't have good enough unions to do the same, at least in this country.
Wouldn't 'Free' include enough liberty to elect to use proprietary software?
That's nonsense. It's free software. If Canonical screws up, people will just go elsewhere. Debian is not far away. Having lots of people on Ubuntu makes a million times better campaigning platform than having them on Mac OS X or Windows.
good job, Eve.
rewriting history since 2109
Fedora for me is a very good option. In reality whenever I get a new computer I try both and usually the one that I end up going with was the one released more recently. If Ubuntu slips too much there is competition just waiting to gobble up the market share.
I love when people leave out the September 11th attacks, as if the economic impact of that disaster and the and subsequent military response against the Taliban didn't have any impact on the deficit whatsoever.
People's voices are amplified because we're in a recession, and Obama's stimulus packages haven't worked to address the high unemployment rate or low consumer confidence. Inexplicably, Obama seems to believe he can spend his way through to the other side. His expansion of government powers is something a lot of people disagree with.
I really don't understand why certain supporters, whenever they encounter any criticism, obsessively bring up Bush just as you did, as if it somehow refutes their point about the flaws in Obama's economic policies. Bush hasn't been president for two years now. You're falling to the very tribalism described in this article, attacking people for being part of "the other side" instead of critically addressing their points.
By the way, you'd better get used to hearing these viewpoints because, based on the polls, it's going to be a bloodbath for Democrats in November. Part of living in a democracy is tolerating the existence of opposing opinions, and right now, the public has turned on Obama.
Mr. Shuttleworth seems to using a rather narrow definition of tribalism to illustrate his point. The tribal nations of the past and present were based around a common culture, family and economic interest rather than a simple minded view of other groups being "wrong by default".
One example here. At 2009 joint meeting of Gnome and KDE developers one speaker told audience to cover the Qt logo on the badges because it is associated with KDE. Of course the logo was there because Nokia had *payed* for the event and everyone had benefits from them, but he just could not see it.
Don't ask what I'd change if I were in Mark's shoes, ask how to avoid having more people in his position. I would rather see non-profits in charge of building Free Software distributions and getting them to the people. The Mozilla Foundation is doing this reasonably well, although they have their problems and challenges. Debian as a first pass was pretty good, its main foundering point was that they often carried libertarianism to the point of absurdity and well beyond goals of Free Software. There were arguments about slippery slopes every time something offensive was pulled from the distribution.
Bruce Perens.
The media would never allow the Tea Party to gain a significant share of power. There have even been plants at Tea Party rallies who act racist in front of cameras, and that footage is used in television ads, yet when you watch the unedited footage, you see Tea Party members yelling at and expelling the plant. There's some twisted shit going on in the left in response to the Tea Party movement, and the exploitation of race is just one of the ways they're coping with the threat of the upcoming elections.
Personally, I don't get what the big deal is. People are surprised that there's an anti-tax, anti-government movement when there's a very liberal Democrat supermajority in power? Of course there was going to be a public movement in response. There always is, just like there was under Bush.
What many people don't realize is that this is true for advanced users as well. I know the intricate details of Linux, but don't want to be bothered by them, so I choose to use Ubuntu.
It's the same thing with programming languages. I have programmed in C for over 25 years, but I use Python for many jobs. Having a simpler language to program makes my work more productive for day to day tasks, although I can resort to C whenever Python isn't powerful enough.
The dogmatism of the entire OSS crowd is what makes me love to bash those fucks.
The world hasn't seen bigger goosesteppers since 1945.
I know what you mean. I've been told that because Republicans are always cigar-smoking racists who hate minorities and only care about money, I should support government healthcare.
So the developers left the project for better money and it's his fault for offering them jobs? Fascinating!
You're not helping your case. Is it so hard to point out what the evil was in offering money for jobs? Was the SABDFL all evil like and cackling when he said "Help me DOOM Debian and you'll get 30 silver coins each! BWAHAAHAHA"?
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Isn't it sad that, in an article about the perils of tribalism, the comments to the article quickly devolved to tribalism?
You didn't listen, because of your tribalistic tendencies? You just assumed your opponents were wrong and hypocrites?
Unfortunately, when making selections out of several possible choices reputations of associated groups and thus stereotyping will come in to play.
If you are associated with a group that has a history of releasing poor software, your reputation will suffer if I want reliable software.
Just because something is easier to use and works right without having to FK with it, doesn't mean it sucks for the advanced user.
I thought Aaron Siego's reply to this furore to be about the best I've read:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/07/having-made-our-beds-we-now-lie-in-them.html
I doubt that very many Debian developers are actually working at Ubuntu. It's not that big a company. They're working in lots of places. It wasn't throwing money at developers, mostly at users through marketing, PR and publicity.
Bruce Perens.
The masses are never going to care who wrote whatever software, or why, or what the philosophical underpinnings are. They aren't going to care if it's modifiable, since darn few people have the ability to modify it. They aren't going to notice if it's free to redistribute, because lots of them act as if all software and music was, and most of the rest won't notice that the Free Software is legal to redistribute. They may notice the lack of DRM problems. They may notice that there's neat stuff on Ubuntu's Software Center that they don't have to pay for.
If you want the respect of your peers, then it doesn't matter what Shuttleworth does. If you want the respect of most of the people who use your software, then write software that's hard to use.
Personally, I want to see more Linux adoption, to force hardware and software vendors to be friendlier to Linux. This means I want the masses to use some version of Linux. This means I applaud Shuttleworth's success in pushing Ubuntu.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I think that being the type of scumbag that throws spurious and unsubstantiated charges of racism is just as bad being a racist scumbag in the first place.
In case that was too subtle, I'm saying you're a scumbag. Same as a person who accuses an honest person of lying, or an innocent man of rape.
The 'anonymous coward' posting was a smart move, I'll give you that. Now... try to think about the summary, and what Shuttleworth is saying. Apply it to a realm outside of open-source, and see if you can grow as a person.
So Ubuntu can't promote OSS if it includes even a single proprietary piece of software?
Every "partner" package that Ubuntu includes is a testament of the FOSS movement's failure to create a suitable alternative. In particular, the ATI drivers you mention is included in Ubuntu, because the alternative OSS radeon driver is incapable of even preforming basic 3D acceleration on video cards that were created in the last 2-3 years. If Ubuntu doesn't provide a driver for it, you would be forced to manually download and install the driver. And means a Windows-style "installation wizard" that makes a mess out of a otherwise well organized file system.
after reading some of this summary, I have decided to release the Tribal linux distribution.
Tribalism - and people clinging to beliefs etc are rife.
There is a powerful exercise you can do to show this.... divide people up into groups and give them the task to design their own treasure island. They can put anything on it (library, pool, gym, vinyard)
Then people should present their ideas and try to persuade the other groups to be marooned on their island rather than the one they designed.
What is interesting is - how committed people will be to THEIR island - even though its a theoretical construct they will never exist and they will forget about in a few days and they have only invested about 15 minutes thought in. Most people will not shift - even to far superior designs even with added incentives.
NOW - this concept was shown to me in a work context but I immediately thought about FOSS and OS's. People invest far more into those concepts.
They are incredibly powerful concepts in peoples lives !!
Everyone, please go read Lord Of The Flies. I'll wait whilst you do that.
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
Now do you understand the original post? Thanks.
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
No, what's wrong is the half-assed way that the US has implemented an attempt at socialised healthcare by requiring everyone to buy insurance from privately-owned companies. Congratulations, you've got the worst of both worlds.
If you don't want socialised healthcare and you don't want to buy insurance, then don't come crying to me because you broke your arm and you can't sign a cheque before they even put you in an ambulance. Oh, and enjoy paying more than most people pay for a house for getting a broken arm set.
Ubuntu doesn't actually contribute much source code anyhow. It takes and takes, but returns very little.
I'd like to back up your statement with some facts, since you're not getting much love from the mods.
Around 22:30 in this video you see which companies give back to the Linux kernel
Spoiler: Canonical is not in the top 10. Not by a long shot.
+1 Funny Signature
Well to be honest, Shuttleworth decided to take something that was sorta good, and then involve private corporations just like how Microsoft does it. I love Ubuntu! I used to use Debian but they were so slow to update their software, and were not focused on the desktop end user. Their main focus was stability - the server users. Open source folks have to get used to the idea not everything in a popular OS / distribution needs to be open for it be usable for the masses. The use of software is not really idealogical struggle, and personally I wish people would really stop framing it in that fashion. At the end of the day some people would / will want to be paid for their effort for creating software for your use. Other people believe that everything should open and free for everyone which very awesome, but looking at the material history of the world has never really occurred as everything created has some intrinsic value. All that free software is worth something and someone, somewhere is going to capitalize on it - i.e. Apple for example. IMO the only way that Linux or another open source OS will get big is when they accept that for somethings, you have to pay to have someone create them. Sure there will be some good hearted souls out there that will give stuff away, but you shouldn't really rely on that if you want better software variety and wide adoption. This is one of the driving reason IMO there is no AAA games for Linux, as well as other popular niche applications that are huge industries. On that tangent, if Linux is truly going to take significant market share from other OS's the ability to use other OS's programs flawless or nearly flawlessly will be key in that, as being able to run a vast library of almost anything for costing nothing is a huge advantage. I have been saying this years, if Microsoft was really wise, they would dump whatever OS they are making and like apple, and take some Linux distro and wine and make it work and then slowly phase out the old while embracing Linux as the future.
>>>more participants are racist than you'd expect from an average organization.
You think? I bet there are just as many racist policies in the "Democrat" organization as the Tea Party. Ever stopped to review their policies? A lot of them are anti-black and/or pro-suppression. The sad part is that many of the D's don't seem to realize their policies are keeping black down - it's like a blind racism. They believe they are doing good, but it's actually the opposite.
Example: Not allowing poor blacks to quit crumbling innercity school and go to a suburban public school to get a better education.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A racist considers its own race above any other, generally; besides, as far as I know the TP supporters are accused of being racist against black people specifically.
Dilbert RSS feed
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with him, but for perspective, contrast with with Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, and "Beyond Civilization":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)#New_Tribalist_Movement
http://books.google.com/books?id=bHP9ztHuWmwC
"With the publication of his trilogy of novels (Ishmael; The Story of B; My Ishmael), Quinn became something of a cult figure in visionary fiction. In those books, Quinn explored the self-sustaining nature of tribal societies and his belief that the current worldwide ecological and economic crises are due to the agriculture-based organization of civilized societies. He now turns his hand to nonfiction, with an appeal for universal renewal through a "New Tribal Revolution." Acknowledging that it would be impossible for most civilized humans to return to the hunting and gathering typical of tribes, Quinn argues that modern men and women need to invent a completely different mode of existence. To do this, they must question a basic assumption of all civilized societies: "Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances." Quinn, borrowing from Richard Dawkins, calls this assumption a "meme," the cultural equivalent of a gene. Quinn's main examples are peoples like the Maya and Anasazi, who returned to tribalism after unsuccessful attempts at other types of social organization, and the communal structure of traditional circuses. The author has a knack for stating the obvious with tremendous personal conviction. His articulation of a simpler way of life will appeal to those made frantic by globalization and all the forces conspiring to make people dance as fast as they can. (Oct.) "
As well as someone else's related point:
"New Tribalism" By Royce Carlson
http://www.zenzibar.com/articles/newtribalism.asp
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I find it sad that there are some people that see certain symbology from the founding of our country (such as the teabags, or the 'don't tread on me' flag, etc.) and perceive it as a crass or extreme movement. If your first thought when you hear 'tea party' is the sexual act, moreso than the American revolution, you're either gutter-minded or abysmally ignorant.
Yes, there are modern perceptions, different than past perceptions; but that doesn't mean that all perceptions are equally reasonable or educated.
It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism.
No. This statement displays a complete lack of understanding of what racism and sexism are. They are not about differences. They are about power. They are about one group of privileged people wielding power over another in order to keep their privilege. They are not about individual thoughts, opinions or actions. They are about systemic and institutional bias. This lack of understanding in U.S. culture is why we're still dealing with these problems and why many people don't acknowledge they exists ("well I'm not a racist...").
NEWSFLASH FROM THE MINISTERY OF TRUTH
Tribalism considered a major problem by the Great Guru Mark; Hence all current Ubuntu users are shall immediately switch to Mandriva, Gnome users shall convert to KDE by the end of the week, and EMACS users are advised to switch to VIM by the end of the month, by order of the The Great Guru. Inspections will start shortly.
END OF COMMUNICATION
It's easy for a hardware vendor to be friendly to Linux: just release a proprietary driver, and you're done. Unfortunately, this isn't of much value, closed drivers have lots of problems: they aren't available for all architectures and kernel versions, eventually the vendor stops compiling new versions, and you can't fix their bugs.
It's a lot harder for a hardware vendor to be friendly to Open Source / Free Software and to either document their hardware fully or make an open driver. That's what we really want.
Bruce Perens.
You're unfairly letting insurance companies off the hook.
Their problem is not rising costs. Their problem is that they made bad investments. They're more in the business of playing the market then managing risk.
Also, insurance companies in general are a scam. The try to make any excuse not to pay claims. When they do, it's nearly as bad as Medicare. Insurance companies like to underpay doctors and hospitals while denying claims.
Insurance as a crass sort of business has fundemental problems.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've used both, and other distros, and other Unixes. I don't keep on using Ubuntu just because their leaflets and CDs are shinier. I keep using it because it has less hassles, less fanbois and is more usable.
Not wasting a weekend configuring shit because it already works is a freedom.
Not finding fanbois ready to discuss that "apt is better than rpm, therefore your not debian distro sucks" for hours is a freedom.
Downloading an iso with easy instructions from a polished website, or actually having a CD come to my address for free is a freedom.
Having the system work with most of what I need in a usable configuration in half an hour is a freedom.
Do you need any more freedoms that explain why do I use Ubuntu over Debian?
Apparently, to promote your own distro with your money is a grave misdeed. Fuck me, no, it is not. Sorry you feel suckered into having been their PR, but hey, at least someone started using Linux.
Oh, and responding with 'but all Ubuntu adds over Debian is polish' will get an eye roll. Yes, it might be 'all' it adds. It's still something that Debian hasn't managed to add in years. And it's quite a lot.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
>>>The problem was that many people would opt out before, and not get any kind of health insurance.
Everything dies. That's not a "problem" or tragedy. It's just a fact. If I choose to die by opting-out of the government-paid health or retirement system, that is my right. ----- As for the current system: Anybody can free care from the corporate hospitals, and then not pay the bill. The cost of these unpaid bills comes out of the paying customers, but not all of it. Some of it also comes out of the pocket of the CEO, the various managers, and stockholders (i.e. they get less profit).
I'm okay with that arrangement. The reason hospitals so favor government-paid healthcare is because then they can suck their profits out of the taxpayerd' wallets. It screws us and favors the megacorp.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
A misogamist is someone who hates marriage. You mean a misogynist, who is someone who hates or despises women.
Dilbert RSS feed
I was only on the periphery during the Woody era, but I definitely recall the libertarian slippery slopers whom I read with terrible dismay and a sense of impending doom.
I was using Debian to get stuff done in a startup company setting. There's an equation in book publishing: your readership drops by half with every equation included. Well, the value of the distribution dropped by half for every backport I found myself forced to install. Since I was using the LAMP stack among other things, and the 2002 LAMP stack wasn't working great for me in 2005, I jumped ship, not even knowing Ubuntu existed (first it was Fedora).
But here I am, running Ubuntu today, since I ultimately preferred the Debian infrastructure. Not proud of it on some level, but at least I escaped the orbit of yammering libertarians driving three year release cycles. At the time I felt like I was being negotiated over like a hostage in a hostage drama.
I've always regarded developing for the desktop to be a bit of an Alice in Wonderland proposition. User adoption seems to be inversely correlated with good engineering practice. Maybe you should be grateful that Canonical snarfed the EAT ME biscuit.
In the case of Perl, as least I get what Perl 6 was trying to accomplish. The Woody experience left me shaking my head.
>>>hopefully you get my point?
No because I think deductions are a terrible idea. Why should someone with 5 kids pay less in taxes than I do, if we both earn the same income? Or less tax because he lives in an expensive house while I live in a small two-room unit? It's inequality. Also in a world that's overpopulated already, with suburbs destroying the natural environment, it's ridiculous for the system to be designed to encourage the creation of more humans/sprawl.
I don't think we should have a flat tax, but we should eliminate all these deductions. People should pay the same amount given equal incomes.
Aside -
And on another note, I think the US Income Tax bracket for 0% should be raised from 15,000 to 100,000. Help give some relief to the low and middle incomes, while keeping all other taxes the same.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No, what he's really saying is that he's upset that other people aren't agreeing with him.
This has nothing to do with any real genuine social issues. He's just having a temper tantrum because someone told him he isn't the Kwisatz Hederach.
Liberty can be a scary looking thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What you haven't explained is why I would have the slightest desire to write software for you to use, and not charge for it. You don't share my goals, and neither does the vendor who gives you my software. That's why I, and many like me, feel that we've been used as unpaid employees of Ubuntu.
Bruce Perens.
There are several followups on PlanetKDE too. Aaron Seigo (former president of the KDE e.V. board) has made some remarks here.
> Yeah except that whole part about making Linux easier to use, and accessable to average users.
And what did Ubuntu do in this regard exactly?
Stole someone else's package manager?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Can you choose not to be protected by the police?
Dilbert RSS feed
Silly me, I thought people released software so that people could use it... I had no idea it was to change the world.
Well, enjoy it while it lasts. I'm never giving Ubuntu another line of code, and I doubt I'm alone.
Bruce Perens.
>>>Because free-loaders like yourself...are costing ME money.
Fee-loader? I'd sooner DIE than steal from you. Thieves don't go to paradise (or elysian fields or whatever you believe). I have always paid my own health bills, and will continue to do so. How DARE you sit there and insult me, you worthless piece of shit? I've got almost half a million in the bank, and can easily afford to pay my own bills, thank you very much.
Oh and don't give me that nonsense about "expensive" health costs. My father got a pacemaker installed for just 8000 (yes that was the actual bill). My brother's wife had a hysterectomy for just slightly more $11,000. In other words the procedures were only about 1/6th the cost of the two Lexuses or SUVs or Whatevers in your drive. If you can afford them, you can afford the pacemaker or hysterectomy too.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Basically what you're saying is that Stallman was right and you were wrong all along?
I really wish I understood WTF you're talking about, because good ol' Debian is still there and still installs. Now I find out that my new server is running code written by unpaid Ubuntu employees, when I thought I was running code by unpaid Debian volunteers? D'oh! I wish you told me that sooner, and I would have installed Ubuntu instead of Debian.
(Yes, there's some sarcasm here, but it's all based on not understanding you, Bruce. How is Debian in any way lessened? Everything it ever was, still exists. No? No, really: no?)
I don't have to pay a Fine to keep the Walmarts or Pep Boys or Best Buys of the world open. Why would I need to pay a fine to keep Baltimore General open? Answer: I don't. They can cover their costs the same way the aforementioned stores do - through the prices of the things they are selling.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance."
That'd be OK if you also forfeit your right to call ER if you have, say, a sudden heart attack.
Ubuntu shouldn't be on a top list of kernel contributors.
It should be on a top list of GNOME contributors though.
That is the sort of distribution it is. IOW: it isn't Redhat or SLES.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
it is valid to say that more participants are racist than you'd expect from an average organization.
Why do you think it's valid? Isn't it at least quite possible that you've bought into spin from your favored tribe (to bring this back around to on topic)?
Source? No, seriously, I'm curious do have you links to such footage? It seems extreme, but the mainstream media does often go to great lengths to ignore anyone outside of the two major parties.
Why should someone be "embarrassed' because they prefer emacs over vi or KDE over gnome, any more than someone should be "embarrassed" that they prefer the Mets over the Yankees?
Ok to clarify that statement again without maybe so much joke potential - Shuttleworth seems to imply that you will regret making your allegiance public, that it will somehow harm you down the line in te career world. I don't see how or on what basis he makes that justification.
"I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans."
Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job, without unemployment benefits and in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever. And I'm not exaggerating a bit. Without the bailout money the banking system would have collapsed.
But don't worry! Tea party stupidity has won in the end. And instead of more stimulus spending (which IS needed) USA has budget cuts and 'deficit reduction'. So look forward to enjoying deflation and stagnation! Cause that's what you were asking for.
Rain is wet. No kidding, people dislike/fear that which is different from them or what they like. Anyone recall the the violence over the Twilight books/movies? If you liked the one guy instead of the other guy, people (mostly girls) would get into fights. Sadly, I can also envision slap-fights about differing Linux distros. Repubs and Demos are especially funny when they argue- they both just want to spend money. just on THEIR terms.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Marvelous example. My 50-year-ole encyclopedias, my 60-year-old Oxford English Dictionary, shelves full of books on history, sociology, political science, various online dictionaries, WikiPedia (and all of its cited sources) etc. notwithstanding ...
We are to conclude that all the world uses the word wrongly and only you know its true meaning. You are, indeed, a master.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"if he weren't a big-spending, Chicago-style-deal-making Liberal. Which, unfortunately, he is."
Obama has NOT spent much enough. Read Krugman's excellent analysis: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/
It's more that politics is an area which is frequently prone to devolving into tribalism. Just look elsewhere in this thread; there are all sorts of assumptions about "different = obviously wrong and clearly inferior" showing themselves. Politics doesn't have to be like that, just like sports don't have to be like that... but it seems the easiest way to control people and consolidate power is by convincing people that, by following you, they demonstrate their superiority over them (whoever 'them' is).
Insecurity drives much; as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that fragile egos, and the desire to feel superior, is one of the primary sources of bad decisions in life. It drives most political partisanship, racism, xenophobia, as well as more trivial stupidities like thinking your linux distribution is clearly superior to their linux distribution, or that they are obviously idiots because they didn't like THAT movie. It's a problem that affects the intelligent as frequently as the less intelligent, also.
You should perhaps get the textbooks, dictionaries, encyclopediae, etc. corrected before blaming others for not using your definition.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"I love when people leave out the September 11th attacks, as if the economic impact of that disaster and the and subsequent military response against the Taliban didn't have any impact on the deficit whatsoever."
I love when people leave out the Iraq war as if the economic impact of that disaster (which had nothing to do with 9/11) didn't have any impact on the deficit whatsoever.
"People's voices are amplified because we're in a recession, and Obama's stimulus packages haven't worked to address the high unemployment rate or low consumer confidence."
Obama's package HAD worked. We're out of depression now (i.e. the economy grows). It hadn't worked well enough because it was _small_.
Read here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/
Fedora, Opensuse and Mandriva users are so different? Before installing the CD they get an education about Free Software?
I didn't know that, probably because I use the evil Ubuntu I think the software dropped from the sky.
Back when I was in school in the mid-late '90s I tried out dozens and dozens of distros and spent time learning all I could about the nitty gritty aspects of the OS. Back then I had the spare time to devote to these projects of learning. Nowadays I still try to keep up and learn what I can but I just don't have the time to sit down for hours on end configuring and compiling everything by hand and going through the process of trial and error only to have to do it again when another major software release or patch comes up. I've been using Ubuntu for the past few years now and love it, it just works out of the box and is hassle free. If I still want to compile my own software or configure something by hand I can that's the beauty of it. I could still run Slackware or Linux from Scratch if I really wanted to but alas I find it harder to have the time to really sit down with it.
He killed it by forking it, and ending up more popular than the original? Isn't that what people are *supposed* to do with free software when they want to improve it and their changes aren't wanted upstream? I guess you could say Linus Torvalds was an unpaid employee of the Debian Project as well.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
bullshit.
You DO realize how much of everyone's paycheck goes to medicare and medicaid right?
You are doing what many people do. You are trying to reduce a complex social phenomenon to one word.
Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify.
Because they don't care about that stuff, and that's why Ubuntu's so popular. Maybe me or you might use it as leverage in picking Debian or Fedora or Ubuntu as our distro, but for someone who needs software working despite the legal and religious ramifications of the choice? They could care less, and it's a lost cause trying to convince them otherwise.
Who said that changes weren't wanted upstream?
Bruce Perens.
Wow you actually fell for that? We know know the stimulus wasn't too small because of common sense logic. Every dollar that government spends must necessarily take away from other productive capacity - every dollar government spends must necessarily be taxes, either directly, through inflation, or through borrowing (borrowing takes away from private investment, where else does the money come from?). Also consider that the boom we were in wasn't a good thing, it was unsustainable and distorting capital structures. The problem isn't that we aren't spending enough currently, it is that were were spending too much previously (for instance, warmongering, a 1% Fed Funds rate for years following 2001, a form of price fixing... Econ 101, what does price fixing cause?). The fix is a recession, where we pay off debts, where prices drop back down to to sane levels, and where we repair our capital structure to something more in line with what the public wants and less in line of what the government wants (like housing for everyone that Bush, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd alike all wanted so badly).
Wonder what the public key field is for?
No, it's not the same at all. The people who accept scientific consensus on climate change are backed up by research. That's not the same as blind faith leading to monoculture and non-acceptance of contrary ideas. It's up to the deniers to prove the research is wrong and to this date, they haven't.
That's easy to explain. Much like how the grass is always greener on the other side, criticism is louder when it's against your side.
How appropriate considering the topic at hand of Tribalism.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Commodore is consistently anti-government, whatever shape, form or label it may have. He's a libertarian, and I think he's absolutely delusional, but he's more than consistent enough in his views to deserve not being called a hypocrit :-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
As far as my understanding of the founding of Ubuntu goes, Shuttleworth initially started releasing six-monthly snapshots of Debian in order to provide an alternative to Debian's notably conservative release timeframe.
As people wanted more recent versions of software that weren't available even on the six-month snapshot, Ubuntu added them, and eventually became incompatible with Debian.
I don't follow the ins-and-outs of the Debian Project, but it seems to me that Shuttleworth wanted a rapid release cycle, but the Debian Project didn't. So he did it himself, and it eventually evolved into Ubuntu. If the Debian Project had moved to a more rapid release cycle themselves, then Ubuntu may have never been forked.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I did some math. For the price of the stimulus package, we could have cut income tax in half, public and private, all brackets, for three years. The reduction in revenue would have been the same as the stimulus cost... except that cutting taxes would been FAR better for the economy and employment. The primary reason for the stimulus package was, I'm sure, did not have much to particularly do with stimulating the economy.
No, what's wrong is the half-assed way that the US has implemented an attempt at socialised healthcare by requiring everyone to buy insurance from privately-owned companies. Congratulations, you've got the worst of both worlds.
Hmm, odd. My country has a similar system where we have to have healthcare insurance but can pick and choose where we get it from. Yet somehow I get decent quality healthcare at an affordable price.
Quite frankly I think there's other factors in play...like for every doctor in the US there's three lawyers hovering over his should just waiting for him to slip up so they can start a million dollar lawsuit.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
"Every dollar that government spends must necessarily take away from other productive capacity - every dollar government spends must necessarily be taxes, either directly, through inflation, or through borrowing (borrowing takes away from private investment, where else does the money come from?)."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The price of money CHANGES over the time. During the depression it's EASY to print money because it doesn't increase the inflation. And in fact it ADDS to the productive capacity.
Please, read Krugman's analyses. He correctly predicted the economy's response to the stimulus, and I'm willing to bet he correctly predicts the coming deflation (unless no spending).
Arguments about the housing bubble are irrelevant. We're not trying to recreate it, we're trying to make economy grow again.
The whole argument going on is just plain stupid. But of course, the lower the stakes, the nastier the politics. In the commercial world you don't see this stuff much, because a company can just come right out and say plainly "they are our competitors, they do things differently than we do, we think we have a better product than they do."
What's the whole point of the argument - amount of code going upstream? That's a completely meaningless metric to the actual users. The different companies have different goals; apparently to Red Hat contributing upstream is what they feel is important. There's nothing at all wrong with another company not contributing as much upstream as someone else, or to even not contribute at all. An argument of "take and take and give nothing back" is stupid because open source is not about requiring giving something back, or giving back in only a few narrow ways.
So apparently this "upstream contribution" issue is just a proxy for a deeper issue. What I think we have is the underlying politics poking up - who is a "true" open source contributor and who is not, who is staying true to principles and who is a sellout, and so forth. So it really is tribalism, the us versus them argument. Possibly there's jealousy there too; hard working company sets the standard for how distributions should do things, then an upstart becomes incredibly successful while doing things differently.
If open source people want to have arguments, then they should argue about stuff that's important.
"The reduction in revenue would have been the same as the stimulus cost... except that cutting taxes would been FAR better for the economy and employment."
Nope. A lie.
Taxes and employment are not directly linked. US had 3-4% unemployment during the periods of very high taxes, for example.
Also, cutting taxes works much worse than direct stimuli.
The equilibrium point for hospitals is a few small, overworked hospitals in dense urban areas treating the masses who can't afford the services of a concierge doctor, and who are forced to let many people die when an unexpected situation arises, like a natural disaster, epidemic, terrorist attack, etc.
We build in an overabundance in the hospital system for exactly this reason, and keep them around even if they're not needed at that moment, so nobody dies from a lack of doctors when they are needed. It's the same reason we build in an overabundance of policemen or firefighters or public utility workers (what was the first thing that happened when California privatized electricity? Rolling blackouts).
What we really need is public healthcare, just like we need public roads, public firefighters, and public police officers. The current healthcare bill is a stopgap measure, just like mandatory health insurance was in Europe a hundred years ago, before it got replaced by public healthcare. The only reason we've gotten away without it for so long is our standout economy; we've succeeded in spite of, not because of, our outdated model of private healthcare fiefdoms.
Sorry, no Lexuses or SUVs here...we have a single Toyota Matrix.
As for expensive health costs, a knee replacement is about $18K, or the cost of my car. Hip resurfacing and ankle replacement is about the same.
As a worst-case scenario, the drug Elaprase (used to treat Hunter syndrome) costs about $657,000 per year for a patient massing 35kg.
I have run Debian "unstable" for 12 years and only had one downtime day because of it. Its quality is pretty close to that of a released distribution. And it is updated daily. Perhaps the failure was that Debian didn't market it.
Bruce Perens.
For a year I used Kubuntu, as well as the Linux Mint version based on it, for my workstation. I switched because KDE on Debian, of which I'm a big fan, had become so unstable in the spring of 2009 as KDE4 was being introduced. I'm grateful to Mr. Shuttleworth that I had this option. I was forced to move back to Debian because there are currently too many bugs in the Ubuntu packages that I need to support a distributed file system based on Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS. This all works with Debian (lenny or squeeze), so I figure Ubuntu is just too focused on the desktop to care about it.
That's a pity for two reasons. First, I definitely had it easy for a while as far as the desktop is concerned. I've been back with Debian for a month now and there are still a number of rough edges to my desktop experience: I've spent far too much time adding missing functionality and trying to get it all to behave properly. It's such a waste of effort when you know that it doesn't have to be like that anymore. Linux Mint is so easy, even a relative noob can install it and have all kinds of basic desktop functionality running and configured in just a few hours.
The second reason is because Linux workstations deserve better file server support than just NFS and SMB/CIFS. Imagine an office building that will soon house 2.000 employees and being offered the opportunity to set it up with workstations and servers using only open source software. Would you feel comfortable doing that with NFS or Samba? I wouldn't. OpenAFS, on the other hand -- now that's a capable file system. I know that I would be able to rely on Debian and OpenAFS for the file servers, but I would also prefer a distro for the workstations that would likely result in the lowest number of help desk calls. I doubt that would be Debian, but it would be great if it could be something based on Debian. With OpenAFS and distros like Ubuntu, I figure we're almost there.
From this perspective, I find it really strange that so many long-time Debian users can be so hostile towards Ubuntu. It's not like anyone is forcing them to use it. IMHO, if it's so easy to use that it not only gives normal users the necessary confidence to make the switch from Windows, but also to fix (most of) their own problems afterwards, how can that be a bad thing? Furthermore, if the Ubuntu project continues to succeed where the Debian project has not, perhaps the latter should look to the former for a little inspiration every once in a while.
The alternative is to let you go without healthcare.
If we do that, you, and most people like you, will almost certainly still be yowling at the head of the queue when your appendix suddenly bursts, or you find a malignant lymphoma in your armpit, or Diabetes rears its head and you find out that the only decent med (Byetta) costs more per month than you have to spare in four months. You'd get care you can't afford, run up medical bills you can't pay, declare bankruptcy (or just game the collection agencies and creditors), and the rest of us will then pay higher insurance rates because YOU figured you could game mother nature using your only playing card, relatively good health at the moment, as the key trick.
But you know what? Mother nature's gonna get you anyway. So people a great deal smarter than you are are trying to come up with a way to keep you as healthy as possible without screwing up everyone else. Which is to say, get you to contribute small amounts as long as you can, so that if and when the time comes to spend a lot on you, it can be justified. Or perhaps that money will be spent on your lady's breast cancer (or your fella's testicular cancer... or your child's crossed eyes. Etc. Ad fucking infinitum. Mother nature is a bitch.) In any case, spread the money out, focus the care. It's simple; it's sensible; and it is as pro-society as enforced education and sanitation are.
Is the current bill optimum? Not by a long shot. Too many idiots fighting against what we actually need. But it's a step in the right direction. Be much obliged if you'd use that melon on your neck to think ahead further than your nose.
The Tea Party's got a few good points here and there, but arguing against the healthcare bill... that's definitely not one of them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In other words, Ubuntu delivers the software but not the politics.
Well of course private insurance companies are a scam, and are designed to extract the most money from people at the most vulnerable times in their lives. The better solution is to make healthcare infrastructure a public good, just like firefighters and police.
Unfortunately Joe frickin' Lieberman killed that idea back in September, when he killed the public option. So we don't get to have nice things like low-cost pharmaceuticals, or hospitals who don't have to employ twice as many insurance reps as doctors, like the rest of the civilized world. We get to share a healthcare model with Mexico and Iran, which results in us paying three times as much for a lower life expectancy than any European nation.
You're still playing the lottery, pal. There are plenty of diseases and injuries that could eat that half million in just a fraction of the time it took you to collect it. Multiplied by the number of people in your family. Know how I know? I *used* to have a seven figure bank account, that's how. I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
And... frankly... if you've got 500k in the bank, I don't even care to hear you whine about a $900 tax delta, regardless of the reason. You discredit yourself instantly. Buy some bloody insurance, they won't charge you the tax, you get great value for your money.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Thanks to Mark Shuttleworth for comparing a tech industry issue to a social issue. That always ends in healthy debate. Godwin's law in 3... 2... 1...
Pain is God trying to be funny. That's how out of touch It is. -- Jeff Lint
Redhat didn't enter the ring with Canonical over their contributions, that's entirely the wrong way to look at the situation. Canonical just can't seem to figure out why it's them verses everyone else. Canonical's all keen to wax philosophical about tribes, while the "tribes of old" so to speak have more or less met in the middle, broken bread and made up.
/. conversations. Now Canonical needs to decide if it wants a future with the community, or not.
You see, what Canonical is now realizing is that they're in a tribe all by themselves. And they can't handle this revelation becoming public, because it really shows just how little they've contributed back to the community over the past few years. This recent GNOME survey just shows how little they've done for GNOME. The Linux Kernel survey showed much the same numbers. And if we ran around to the rest of the big free software communities, I'm certain we'd see much the same numbers, yet again.
Canonical, with its Secret Invite-only Design Team e.g., has built a nice big brick wall around themselves, doing lots of work within, but very little escaping at the border. They try to say they're doing "Upstream Desktop Software" work with things like Notify-OSD and their indicator mess, but both are so incredibly bad that no other operating system is using them, and their patches have been entirely rejected likewise. (Namely due to the absolute poor quality of the patches. I've reviewed a number of them myself, and in almost every case they break some of the software's functionality so that they can integrate their junk, which absolutely won't work outside of Ubuntu's environment. That shit wouldn't fly anywhere else, but they're Canonical, so we should merge their patch anyways, right?)
Furthermore, they knew this was going to happen from the outlay; their upstreams set out visions, had meetings, and collectively decided as a community "We're going this way". Canonical then chooses to go an entirely different direction, and are pissed that nobody followed them.
So yeah, they can whine until the cows come home about how people "fight with them", but until they prove themselves to be members of the community at broad and not members of their own kingdom, nobody is going to take them seriously. The big wars are over; GNOME and KDE have reconciled their differences and are working together. Vi vs Emacs is a funny anecdote for
I don't keep on using Ubuntu just because their leaflets and CDs are shinier. I keep using it because it has less hassles, less fanbois and is more usable.
You're funny.
Oh and btw, pretty much no major linux distro takes a weekend to install, or get things working on. Here's a trick though - follow these steps:
apt-get install postfix
apt-get remove postfix
rm -rf /etc/postfix
apt-get install postfix
Tell me how that turns out for ya. Oh, and when anything at all goes amiss, and stupid farking Upstart just...hangs...when attempting to do something. Why is it that when I do a ctrl-C when "start mysql" hangs, Upstart thinks mysql is now running? That's a fun question. And if apparmor was necessary because selinux was just so gosh darn hard, why is it that it randomly stops working and causes upstart jobs to hang?
When I build a machine from scratch, or use anything other than Ubuntu, I don't have these problems. Then there's the minor detail that Ubuntu doesn't submit upstream patches to things; they just change stuff, and put the source on their own tree. Oh, I could go on...but point is, Shuttleworth spent a lot of money to get to do things *his* way, to hell with what was working better already. He disrespects the OSS culture, and now comes whining about people turning on him. Well waaah, maybe he should have actually attempted to become part of the OSS community, instead of making his own. I gave away Ubuntu CDs at public LUG meetings years ago, it's not like I didn't give him a shot.
They deliver their own politics.
Bruce Perens.
That's what your tribe says, LOL !
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
No one forces you to release free software - some people purport that it an idealogical struggle so by releasing software they are fighting against a future owned by corporations that create for profit software. Others do it just because the see a niche need for software they would like so they create and give it away. How you decide to release software is mostly a personal decision, but in some rare cases some business decide it would better to release the source code to some product so they no longer have to actively maintain it. So in your 'unpaid employee' example, nobody is forcing you to make updates, or commit to churning out new code. If you feel taken advantage of, the by all means don't bother really. It's not hard to do. But if your feeling moody because someone else took your work that you freely gave away and made it popular, well maybe you shouldn't have gave it away in the first place, no?
Also I would like to add the purpose behind free software is that you can freely modify, change and update the code as you see fit, the fact you didn't get paid to create the software is another issue that is separate.
Have anyone been forced to work in a field cutting sugar cane or picking cotton because of the Linux distribution they prefer?
Perhaps it's not really a "great-granddaddy of racism".
I'd sooner DIE than steal from you.
I seem to recall you collecting unemployment benefits, and even complaining about some aspect of it. True or not?
Exactly. The problem is that Canonical / Ubuntu are just the kind of corporation I was trying to fight. If Open Source / Free Software won't fight them, I need something else that will.
Bruce Perens.
And he's pretty much wrong all around, so ....
So? I'd hazard to say most of what Ubuntu touches isn't the kernel.
That's not a valid metric. It's only a piece of the larger picture.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
If Wall Street speculators can gamble away the world so badly that it leads to the worlds worst depression ever, then the system already is so rotten from within that bailout money will only prolong the suffering.
Football Odds
Yes, and the way that Ubuntu brings free software to the masses is unfortunate. Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify. Unfortunately when we wrote it, we weren't thinking that we would have gate-keepers who would essentially negate why we wrote it.
Yes, but you also have developers who clearly haven't read and understood the GPL, for example. People who get pissed at commercial redistribution despite the fact that it is explicitly permitted. People who claim that RedHat is a proprietary distribution because you have to pay for binaries, even though the srpms are available and easily compiled and many free software projects are only made available as source.
Not long ago it was hard to find a bank in my country whose website worked with free software. Now most do work. I'm pretty sure that the volume of users who brought about that change was not 100% free software advocates but also had a significant portion of people who just liked firefox or another browser than IE. Now the business I started working in a few months ago has firefox as the default browser on their desktops, I haven't questioned why. I doubt they understand much about the licence or free software.
Not everyone that read one of the new printed books would have understood the significance of the printing press to society. If books had only been read by those that did understand, there would probably not have been an industrial revolution. Software freedom requires that free software can be used in everyday life, which requires a certain amount of interoperability (such as being able to use banking websites), which requires a user base large enough to make that interoperability a priority to businesses and developers who may not have free software interoperability as a goal at all but will prioritise it to gain access to the free software users. At that point, the reason people are using the software is less relevant than the fact that they are using it at all. The people who do know what it is all about have their software freedom.
The majority of people don't think or care much about freedom at all, much less software freedom. I think it's unlikely to ever happen to get them to understand and desire it. If you want software freedom, it has to be compatible with that majorities apathy and ignorance. Ignorant users are the battleground, not the troops.
Thanks for all the work you've done. Since you post under your real name, I'm Rohan Walsh. Not the investment manager, if you look me up I don't have much online presence, but I will check back to see if you reply.
What I would like to do is foster a large developer community and a large user community without the gate-keepers. I think that might require less rights than you get with Open Source, specifically some terms around paid distribution and distribution as part of a support-for-pay engagement. I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
This statement really piqued my interest. Don't think I've ever agreed with "something I read on Slashdot" more wholeheartedly. Are you (or is anyone you know of) trying to work the out real-world parameters of such a system? What might it look like? How can we help?
So let's shoot all ER patients. After all, they are already ill.
Yes, without bailout money some of the worst Wall Street speculators would have crashed and burned. But all the economy would have crashed and burned along with them.
Now we have time to reform and contain badness in the global financial markets (not only Wall Street is guilty). However, a curious thing happens - conservatives do not want to apply tough regulations to financial players. Because it's bad for business.
To fix this:
and
then
Obviously, replace all instances of YOURCOUNTRYTLD in the first command with your country's TLD (so if American, use "us", if British, use "gb", if Canadian, use "ca", if Australian, use "au", if New Zealand, use "nz", etc).
This configures apt to prefer to use stable repositories, but to use unstable or testing repositories when necessary. Also, you can force testing or unstable repositories by "sudo apt-get -t testing install blahpackage" or "sudo apt-get -t unstable install blahpackage".
Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job, without unemployment benefits and in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever.
All money has to come from somewhere. Stimulus spending comes from the future, ie: it doesn't "solve" the problem of a recession so much as spread it out over a greater period. The argument is that this makes it more bearable (fair enough) but while a recession without stimulus would be more severe it is less likely to last as long.
Without the bailout money the banking system would have collapsed.
This would perhaps have been the greatest benefit to not having the bailout. We now have the same people running the system that presided over the crash. It's craziness to think that's a good idea. Personally, I think that so long as we have a fiat currency that the issue of it belongs in the hands of the government, not some hybrid structure of GOV/FED/banks. Worthwhile financial system reform would look very similar to the collapse or abolishment of the banking system. As it stands, you can look forward to more of the same.
and $200,000 by the end of Obama's eighth year.
...and presumably reduced to $1 per household if a Tea Partier is elected in 2012..
I saw a lot more devotion and mild animosity between Gnome and KDE users than between Ubuntu and Fedora users.
That's because Gnome and KDE users suck.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I've got almost half a million in the bank
Good for you.
Oh and don't give me that nonsense about "expensive" health costs.
You've been lucky, and you aren't thinking about the possibilities, you're really not. My father also had a pacemaker, but he also suffered total renal failure and was on peritoneal dialysis. Very expensive process, and he was on it 'til the day he died. Fortunately, that's one of the very, very few conditions for which Medicare will pick up the costs no matter what your age (he died fairly young.) He was also on a drug that, at the time (this was almost two decades ago) cost about $15,000 year, in addition to the twenty grand a year his insurance company premiums went up to, because they wanted him to go away. We ran though my savings, my retirement funds, all of his money and had to sell his home. He then lost his insurance (Aetna, may they rot in Hell) and we had to bear all the costs after that. You can be proud of your half million, but if you find yourself in need of any significant level of care, you will burn through it fast. So don't get cocky.
... a tune-up would probably cost ten grand.
You simply cannot compare the relatively insignificant costs of specific medical procedures with the long-term costs of having a serious (or, in his case, multiple) medical condition(s). Now, I will agree, medical costs are definitely inflated because of the middleman insurance companies (in effect, they've completely divorced the cost of medical care from our actual ability to pay.) Imagine if your automobile insurance was responsible for vehicle maintenance
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you think about the problem for more than a half-second, you'll realize that sexual division necessarily preceded "tribalism", and that sexual conflict is at the root of all social conflict.
I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
The goals of the user should be paramount, not the developer; once you release the code under a suitable GPL, you relinquish a level of control over how that software moves through the ecosystem (keeping only what the license allows you).
You're complaining about (perceived) tribalism in response to your own tribal affiliation. Very ironic.
Mark Shuttleworth is a w*nker. Ubuntu = usurpation of Linux. Canonical seeks to break away from the soul of Linux, probably through an ingenious method of contorting the meaning of Gnu and open-source, and through the acquirement of the new (converted) masses, monopolize. Sound silly? Wait a while. I compare them to google, with their "don't be evil" doublespeak, all whilst they spill their guts to the NSA and any other "authority" who so much as winks at them. Google became very popular, and thus a source of power. Ubuntu I really think, is similar. People just seem unable to handle being big. I would not be surprised to see Canonical partner with the new Cyber-Command. I'll bet Mark Shuttleworth owns a pomeranian, just so he can control it.
I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
Yeah, I know exactly how that goes. Actually, I suppose that self-insurance works great for people who are actually rich (and 500K does not qualify as rich.) Bill Gates, for example, or maybe Rupert Murdoch.
... well, my employer offers decent health insurance. I took him up on his offer.
Me
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Bruce Perens.
Alright, who else read that as "tribadism" and was disappointed...
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
The problem with the user being paramount is that there is often no quid-pro-quo whatsoever with the user. Of course they don't pay us. They don't contribute to the project. They don't help us when we ask for political lobbying against things that hurt us.
This was tolerable when we had a direct relationship with the users, because we could at least sometimes get them to help. When Ubuntu or Red Hat stand between us and the users, we generally can't even communicate with those users.
Bruce Perens.
"unstable" was and is a gamble, most of the time it will work fine, but every now and then it will stop your machine from booting and that is something that is just unacceptable for a normal user, especially when it can basically happen any day at random, not just at the big upgrading to a new distro day.
Ubuntu is simply what Debian stable should have been, but never managed to be. Tough luck for Debian, but they had more then enough time to get their release cycle under control, but failed to do so.
Don't be so prudish. Time to loosen the codpiece and relax your attitudes towards sex. There's nothing wrong with it, you know.
The conservative base - the 30% who consistently backed Bush even at the end of his second term? Even after his "unitary executive" power grabs, torture, warrantless wiretapping, incompetence, lies to justify war, valuing personal loyalty above all, and utter economic irresponsibility (cutting taxes while in the middle of *two* wars and a massive increase in Medicare!)?
Yeah, I don't buy your viewpoint. Teabaggerism is partisanship.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
What would you change, if you were in Shuttleworth's shoes ?
Get rid of UbuntuOne and their other adventures into non-free land. Having proprietary software with the name of Ubuntu that once claimed to be an all Free Software distribution is just a little to weird.
The Gnome census report says Redhat represents 16% of all Gnome upstream contributions while Ubuntu contributes 1%.
http://www.neary-consulting.com/index.php/2010/07/29/gnome-census-report-now-available-as-free-download/
This was NOT a rhetorical question.
I am myself an Ubuntu user but I also realize that most of Ubuntu's niftiness comes from Debian. A good bit is also inherited from the kernel in general as well as GNOME.
Being a former Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake and Debian user, I have a little perspective.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If we as developers and contributors don't wish to withhold our work for a fee, what incentive can we offer users to care about the ecosystem?
They just want to use the stuff we've built. We have to somehow use that to bring them into the fold, develop them into supporters, awaken a sense of responsibility to the ideals that allow them to benefit from our work, groom contributors, etc.
Right now, we're offering the incentive of being able to help improve and shape our projects. Most consumers don't care. They WANT a gatekeeper to say "Here is what is new and awesome. It is what you need, and it costs $199."
We are plumbers who work for free, for reasons we can't seem to articulate effectively to the majority of the public, who don't care anyway. Our perceived value is low to them, because "really quality stuff costs money."
How do we cut the "distance" between us and the users you mention without appearing to be desperate and clingy? If developer goals are to be paramount, what happens when users want something different despite our best efforts to convince them they don't actually want that?
I'm off on a tangent or three. Sorry. I keep thinking a "serve the ideal to gain the benefit of our work" kind of thing might work. Exclusivity can be a powerful attractor to users. Unfortunately, this would seem to require a gatekeeper with sweeping powers.
Need to go off and organize my thoughts more, evidently.
Here's a thought though - is the problem really that there are gatekeepers, or that the current gatekeepers are simply *branded aggregators* at their core?
How can application developers keep aggregators from presenting their work as part of a branded, monolithic whole - without destroying the distribution network?
So next time you go to the hospital you can pay for someone else who choices not to pay for insurance. Nice ...
FYI I absolutely opposed the new health care plans. Just want to show a different side.
http://saveie6.com/
All he did was take a rant about religon and swap words to make himself seem better.
honestly, just what I would expect from someone who thinks they are the spokesperson for linux because they have a popular distro amoungst the masses.
Be seeing you...
Frisky pornstar, you dolt.
So-called "tribalism" is not that big a problem, except to people who want to exert control over the various "tribes" and be seen as the unifying voice, they saviour, the great white hope, whatever ...
It's certainly NOT a problem in the open source world. I poke fun at Ubuntu because it's fugly. So what? I prefer opensuse, because it works (and from the griping of people complaining about ubuntu, I made the right choice). That makes me tribal? Fuddle-duddle! Instead of claiming to use professional designers, Ubuntu users should embrace their gay side and show a bit of style - it worked wonders for Apple :-)
Our job isn't to take over the world, beat Microsoft, or anything else. Our job is to be number two or three, not number one. Then you become #1 when the ones in front of you screw up.
We have the luxury of being able to be diverse. Microsoft can't afford to be. Apple can't afford to be. We can. Embrace it. It's our strength. Stop with the st00pid talk of "tribalism". It underwhelms.
"There are plenty of diseases and injuries that could eat that half million in just a fraction of the time it took you to collect it."
Not to disagree with that, but most of those diseases are probably preventable by good nutrition and good lifestyle choices. See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
What if you have to choose between eating organic food and having a low stress job you care about with no health insurance vs. working at a stressful job you hate and eating junk because you have no time or energy left over just so you can have health insurance? Because the latter is the treadmill a lot of people are on...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I've got almost half a million in the bank, and can easily afford to pay my own bills, thank you very much.
Just wanted to let you know, if you blow through that because of unexpected medical bills (high probability, plenty of people with a hell of a lot more money than you have gone bankrupt because of it), I don't mind my tax dollars supporting your medicaid and emergency services. I mean, I think you're wrong, and shortsighted, but I don't want you to die because of that mistake. Peace.
"Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job, without unemployment benefits and in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever. And I'm not exaggerating a bit. Without the bailout money the banking system would have collapsed.
Some economists from MIT state that FDR extended the great depression by using our current monetary policy of bailouts and socialism to hire people where the private did not.
The bailout money did not go to me. It did not go to majority of home owners under preditary lending terms. It did not go to students with loans either.
Let the bastards and their $200 trillion dollar phony derivative pyramid scheme go down in smoke! The plan was passed in a panic without thinking. Here is what I would have done:
1. Use the $700 billion as lines of credits for businesses instead of banks (let them fail)
2. Use what Eisenhower did when he authorized the highway act. Every penny invested returned more in private sector dollars. It enhanced commerce. Obama's plan does the opposite.
Businesses still can't get lines of credit to hire or expand because the banks still are betting derivatives on a 200 trillion dollar scheme and buying gold. All the bailout did was postpone the inevitable and charge our own government interest from the big banks who loaned it back. People are too much in debt and letting the banks which hold the debt collapse would be beautiful leaving the small credit unions left and businesses could still borrow.
This is not a recession. Its a whole depression. Look at the economic news today? Chicago and Atlanta are going back into recession and during the 1930s the stock market and GDP went up and down many times before it finally ended. It will be 2016 or later before people are hired again. So yes I am not a right wing nut but I agree with the tea baggers on this. Wall street distorts the market rather than strengthens it.
http://saveie6.com/
The problem with the user being paramount is that there is often no quid-pro-quo whatsoever with the user. Of course they don't pay us. They don't contribute to the project. They don't help us when we ask for political lobbying against things that hurt us.
If you want quid pro quo, then I do think you're restricted to either making commercial software or just hiring out your services. You're asking users to pay a price that would actually be higher in many cases than commercial software. They should not be required to sign onto your political agenda, if that was not in the license. I think you are, no offense (and I really am not trying to offend you here) letting self-aggrandizement get the better of you. Just because you write useful software doesn't mean you have the right to command the loyalty of the people who use it.
And sometimes it's just the truth. Case in point - Ubuntu's fugly color schemes. I made fun of them for years, and all the ubuntu fanbois defended them - until all of a sudden "THE WORD" came down that they are going to be changed (without admitting that they're fugly).
Of course, they're still fugly. And my pointing out that a fugly colour scheme will NOT get you into corporate offices is not "tribalism" - it's the truth.
But - and this is important - it doesn't matter. Honestly, if you are so thin-skinned that some criticism of your colour scheme will get you all bent out of shape, no wonder you see tribalism behind every comment, instead of what it is - the usual slashdot-style ribbing. Lighten up, take a chill pill, whatever, it's not that serious.
We need people from across the spectrum, and that includes some of the extremes, including, for example, RMS, despite what some of the "more moderate" people claim.
In other words, people should be less insecure; we will not win the desktop war no matter what. Even if everone worked together starting tomorrow, we will not win it. That's a simple fact. What we have to do is get nice and comfy in second or third place, and then wait for #1 to screw up.
Of course, that goes against the plans of people who *need* to have their distro start returning their investment as a product in and of itself, as opposed as a gateway product into corporate offices. That's the flaw with Ubuntu, and always has been. And trying to zoom off in a dozen different directions isn't helping any.
"By essentially making all past and present Debian developers his unpaid employees. Everything we did was for Ubuntu, not Debian, we just didn't know it."
Mr. Perens, I must admit I respect your opinions quite a lot. But this time, please, talk for yourself. As a general matter, the work at Debian is much more than unpaid work for Ubuntu; much more for lightyears. Regarding specifically Ubuntu, "We" just didn't know it??? That was absolutly obvious from day zero to anyone wanting to look at Ubuntu with open eyes.
It was obvious (and it is obvious) that the major "problem" for corporations regarding Debian is brand recognition, that the "Debian Entity" cannot be tied to any "Debian Corp." (remember Ian Murdock more or less tried that path with Progeny) and thus, no one can take monetary advantage from the Debian brand saying "See? I'm the corporation that brings Debian to you". So Mr. Shuttleworth confronted with the consideration of trying to build a "Linux for humans" or a (hopefully) profitable corporation took the second option and started (quite successfully) a new brand recognition program called "Ubuntu".
That's all the hint needed.
Heck, for a fraction of the money expended on the Ubuntu project now he (or a figurehead) could be Debian Project Leader *and* being in a position of leading Debian, for as far as true meritochracy allows, towards his stated goal of a "Linux for Humans".
Today it could be Debian, not Ubuntu, the one supported on HP, IBM or Dell hardware; heck again, since bussiness is bussiness after all, Debian could be an Oracle certified platform, not Ubuntu; it would be Debian, not Red Hat through Fedora, the one pushing very interesting "enterprisey" projects like Colbber, 389 Directory Server or Spacewalk. He would have pushed Canonical as the best and major "enterprise supporter" for Debian and considered that "control" to be enough instead of inventing Ubuntu out of thin air in the very intent to a) having total control of it and b) reaping benefits from Debian for as long as he could without bad press (by the day Ubuntu started, producing a completly anew distribution bringing new fresh air to the very "distribution" concept after ten years from the first ones shouldn't have been discarded though probably this would have meant talking "real big money" instead of just "big money").
"I really wish now that I'd let the [Debian?] project die when Ian Murdock quit."
I regret disenting to you and now I'll do it twice in the same post. If the above was indeed about Debian, I must say: Bullshit! Ubuntu is at most a lost chance but Debian is still living and on fairly decent health. Don't throu away the suit because that little spot, just clean it.
We still got burned and crushed. Wall Street is not an ER patient more than they are the criminals who started this.
All the bailout did was put money for them more to gamble and create another derivative bubble and bet on Greek treasury bonds losing value. I need a job and do not care about what they do.
Banks need to be illegally prohibited from moving money into the stock market. Glass-steagall needs to come back at all costs and I would love to see these guys fall as it would help the economy overall. The depression would not be that bad as FDIC insurers no runs on the bank like in the 1930s. Debt would be forgiven on many $400k loans for $200k houses and the market could return to normal supply and demand curves not distorted by artificial manipulated debt.
http://saveie6.com/
See, that's why so many people don't use Debian. :-)
I understand what you are getting at in a glance because I used Debian for years. But would the average person understand it? Let alone be able to do that right. Even knowing stuff, it sometimes would take a day to get a machine settled again after doing an upgrade (all sorts of little things would go wrong with fonts or audio or multi-screen support or whatever). Which is why we use Macs now. My wife switched first. Then I did about a year later. Am I happy about that? Not really. I'd rather use all free software. I do use free software mostly on top of Mac OS X. And I use GNU/Linux in embedded hardware. I guess we could have tried switching to Ubuntu instead of Mac OS X, but Ubuntu has its own issues. At some point, I think I'll try running it on my Mac Pro (although the couple times I tried in the past from a bootable DVD, it did not work).
Anyway, the big issue with any typical GNU/Linux system is that changes like you outline are textual at the command line or editor and not in terms of objects and transactions. It's a fundamental problem with the whole model. I never wanted to use GNU/Linux in the sense that I had used UNIX decades before and thought that much better software was possible (such as based on Smalltalk or Lisp or even Forth ideas).
But I jumped on the GNU/Linux bandwagon eventually because of the community. But, at the core, UNIX systems are still messed up compared to what might be possible. Sure, a very knowledgeable user can fix things like you outlined (assuming it works, I just glanced at it), or a less knowledgeable but determined one can solve the problem in an hour or so, but the typical user can not approach the problem oftentimes. And really, what is the point of learning a lot of esoteric stuff you mainly use once and never again? Are you really in control of your machine if you are overwhelmed by complexity and brittleness, even if in theory you can do whatever you want with it? And if something keeps breaking with every upgrade?
Granted we used Debian years ago, and went through major revisions to the X server, to the USB support, to the sound system, and other things, so maybe by now that basic stuff is all settled down?
We need a better underlying architecture for a free OS. And a monolithic kernel just contributes to the problem IMHO. QNX was a much better system way back when in that sense.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well, obviously not command. But I think in general things will work better if they get Free Software from Free Software developers, even if these are non-profit agregators like Debian. It's about lobbying our own users.
Bruce Perens.
"We still got burned and crushed. Wall Street is not an ER patient more than they are the criminals who started this."
So? Shooting them will still make life works for all of us. Not that I'm against it, we just need to make sure it won't hurt us first.
"All the bailout did was put money for them more to gamble and create another derivative bubble and bet on Greek treasury bonds losing value. I need a job and do not care about what they do."
Nope. Derivative bubbles are over, CDS market had essentially disappeared. Bailout helped to start de-leveraging process.
Your ideas about Greek bonds are not based on facts.
"Banks need to be illegally prohibited from moving money into the stock market. Glass-steagall needs to come back at all costs and I would love to see these guys fall as it would help the economy overall."
It probably won't really help much, there were ways around it before it had been repealed. It's probably better just to regulate the maximum leverage. Say, limit it to 12 (which is a historical mean).
"The depression would not be that bad as FDIC insurers no runs on the bank like in the 1930s."
FDIC is broke right now. If there were bank runs, it would have needed government bailout, probably approaching the original bailout in its size.
Moreover, Glass-Steagal can't be reinstated instantaneously. It'll require many years for banks to restructure their investments.
"Debt would be forgiven on many $400k loans for $200k houses and the market could return to normal supply and demand curves not distorted by artificial manipulated debt."
That would mean the economy is foobared completely by the time you start dissolving credit obligations.
Hardly, the whole mess could have been solved without any bailouts at all:
0. The plan below would be publicly communicated, so that everybody knows the implications of a "bailout."
1. Banks under risk of collapse would have a board of governors appointed by the Fed.
2. Bank could draw upon federal loans as needed to operate in the interim.
3. Board of governors would replace the first few tiers of executives with new ones. Bank records would be seized and mined for evidence against the previous round of executives and they'd spend the rest of their lives in court.
4. All bank dividends would be halted.
5. Bank would be operated in a manner to safeguard the federal economy in general, and then to protect depositors, with regard for bank owners being a much lower priority.
6. Once crisis is over, governors would reorganize bank in a manner that is most appropriate to protect the economy (likely chopping it up into a billion parts that no longer represent systemic risk - hiring staff as necessary due to the loss of economies of scale).
7. The re-organized business units would be IPO'ed.
8. An accounting would be taken, and after government loans and operating costs are paid back with interest any net value remaining in the company would be distributed to the former shareholders. Any net deficit would be recovered from the previous company leadership via restitution.
The result is that taxpayers don't foot much of the bill (maybe a little of it), and banks won't be too eager to ask for "help" either. In the future bankers will make their operations a little more boring.
All of this should of course be mixed with healthy regulation. Too-big-to-fail means too-big-to-exist, and there is no reason that banks should be selling insurance or other non-regulated investments. Make banks one industry, insurance another, and investments another. Never the twain shall meet.
"Some economists from MIT state that FDR extended the great depression by using our current monetary policy of bailouts and socialism to hire people where the private did not."
Or "ome economists are idiots". It's rather easy to falsify their assumption: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/modified-goldbugism-at-the-wsj/
Also, look closely at 1937 when FDR had cut fiscal support.
"1. Use the $700 billion as lines of credits for businesses instead of banks (let them fail)"
Bad idea. It would have, essentially, created a big government-run bank, while destroying 401k investments of millions of people.
"2. Use what Eisenhower did when he authorized the highway act. Every penny invested returned more in private sector dollars. It enhanced commerce. Obama's plan does the opposite."
And this is a GOOD idea. Obama's plan tried to do the same, actually, but half-heartedly.
"People are too much in debt and letting the banks which hold the debt collapse would be beautiful leaving the small credit unions left and businesses could still borrow." :) You have a very naive idea about the way economy works. Dissolving the debt would mean dissolving the economy.
"This is not a recession. Its a whole depression. Look at the economic news today? Chicago and Atlanta are going back into recession and during the 1930s the stock market and GDP went up and down many times before it finally ended."
That's because the stimulus was not big enough. We're repeating 1937 now. And this WAS predicted by commonly used economy models.
"0. The plan below would be publicly communicated, so that everybody knows the implications of a "bailout.""
There was no time, literally. A couple of weeks more, maximum.
I totally agree with other ideas. But still, the bailout would be necessary, you just call it "Bank could draw upon federal loans as needed to operate in the interim".
Yes. That is exactly what I mean. Thank you.
I'm going to have to hop in on this as well and add to the noise.
I've been using Debian since pretty much the very beginning (not quite - but REALLY close, just a bit after Bruce Perens left, but before woody), and it was my favorite Linux distro up until squeeze.
No linux distro has ever done more to turn linux from a serious piece of crap fit only for hobbyists and OS geeks than Debian, and no distro has ever had a larger fall. When Debian chose to pull that stupid stunt over Firefox/IceWeasel and then pile drive into the toilet with Squeeze (which literally fails on every computer I own, unlike Lenny), they proved that Debian's day had finally passed.
Ubuntu works. It works on laptops, it works on desktops, it works on netbooks and tablets.
RedHat has a completely solid place in the enterprise - hell, I'm converting 90 AIX boxes to RHEL 5 as we speak, on a project with timeframes more extreme than I can stand. But it *works*, and it's *solid*.
Is this a victory for OpenSource? Yes, just like the rise of "Open Systems" that pushed mainframes into the shadows and forced a radical re-thinking of the entire concept of IT. People used to pay for computing cycles, you know - before the days of Open Systems.
Android, RHEL, and Ubuntu are the result of the insanely hard work of the open source devs. But the devs have *always* sucked at dealing with users. Users want a phone. They don't give a crap who wrote it. Users want farmville. They don't give a crap why it works.
The age of the OS as a primary interface is coming to a close, just like the age of the teletype and the blinking lights was ended by the monitor. The Web Browser is the future interface (warts and all), and in this world where the OS is nothing but the chrome around a browser, Linux is far ahead. Users don't try to install software any more, they check to make sure their sites work and their WiFi is up.
Sorry for the rant. The point is - yes, Debian and Slackware and the rest are doomed to fade into the shadows to be replaced just like the systems and projects they replaced. I don't see you all weeping for CPM, or MVS, or IRIX despite the amazing things they contributed. The X11 project was dropped like a bad habit in favor of Xorg, and I can't even remember the last time I had to use CDE.
Time goes on. Simplicity reigns supreme, and if you're not leading the way on "just works" you'll get run over by someone who is. Debian still doesn't get that, FreeBSD doesn't get that, Slackware doesn't get that.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
except that cutting taxes would been FAR better for the economy and employment.
How so? Trickle-down economics has been thoroughly debunked. Not once has cutting taxes spurred any economic activity. All that cutting taxes does is continue to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, because guess who benefits most from tax cuts? It's a double whammy of the rich paying less into the commonwealth and cutting services to the very people who need them the most.
The CBS Poll shows his approval rating dropping to as low as 20%, so yeah, he lost his conservative base. I think it would be safe to say that quite a bit of that 20% are made up of staunch Republicans, who aren't necessarily conservatives.
Perhaps. But one can't deny that Ubuntu works, and works well, and is bringing the concept of open source software to a lot of people who would not otherwise have seen it.
I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.
You can license any software you write as you like, but if the linux community is closed to the very concept of commercial proprietary software distributors - and there's quite a few of them on the professional side - then linux will die as a base-level operating system. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying. In any case I don't see that the Debian project is dead.
With all due respect to all the people that have made Debian work (and by extension, Ubuntu) perhaps they should figure out a way to work together. From my perspective all this infighting is accomplishing is making it harder and harder for low level people like me (doing home user tech support) to convince the Average User to adopt Linux and stick with it. I'm afraid that I have to agree with Mr. Shuttleworth. If we want open source operating systems to gain any ground in user acceptance, we have to have a cohesive front end on the consumer side.
I've been fixing computers for a long time, too, Bruce. In the last five or six years, the large majority of the work I've been doing is virus removal on windows systems. As I tell my customers, I'd love to be able to spend my time, and their money, just teaching them how to use their computers, rather than teaching them what not to do, and removing the malware. Linux can bring that back - but it's hard to recommend a particular distribution to anyone, other than Ubuntu, because there's no cohesive front end.
I know that you or someone else will say that the strength of Linux is it's diversity. I don't disagree with that - I run a lot of different distributions here. But for the Average Joe User, that's meaningless. They just want it to work. Shuttleworth and all the people who work on Ubuntu have brought that "just works" metric pretty close to being something that Average Joe will use. Personally I don't think he's sacrificed any of the ideology inherent in free/open source software in doing so. Nothing worth crying heretic over, anyway.
Cheers.
GSVEMR
but most of those diseases are probably preventable by good nutrition and good lifestyle choices.
False. Personal behavior is only a small factor in health according to CDC research. The vast majority of your health is affected by things like the kind of environment you live in (do your have parks? Do you live near a freeway and pollution? and so on).
Dr. Anthony Iton and colleagues from Alameda County, CA cite research (longer presentation here) that indicates genes and access to health care account for about 30% of health outcomes. Wealth has a large impact on health outcomes. Essentially, poor health is more a problem of disparity and discrimination than anything else.
Nonsense. Generalizations, also known as "rules", are a cornerstone of human thinking process. At the same time, as you should have known from grade school, rules have "exceptions". These do not invalidate the rule; just enumerate a relatively small number of cases when the rule does not apply.
Face it: The reason people are perfectly happy to tax you into oblivion and let you think of them as freeloaders isn't because they are lazy and mean: it's because you're a self righteous jackass who thinks that being successful means sneering at everyone else and declaring that people should die rather than ensure that the economic system is more than just a way for you to suck life out of the folks who do all the actual work around here.
If you can't respect the folks who grew your food, made your clothes, built your office and gave you that pretty little haircut, why the heck would you expect them to give a rat's ass about the money it "costs you" to keep them alive?
No, lawsuits affect the cost of health care very little (around 3% of the cost is due to lawsuits, as I recall). The overhead of private insurance is a major cost driver (all that paperwork to deny claims costs money!) as is a crapload of redundant technology (why do two clinics a block away both have MRI machines?). The private insurance industry has 10x the overhead costs of Medicare/Medicaid. The U.S. system is broken because we pay through the nose so private hospitals and clinics can "compete" with each other (i.e. buy the latest gadgets so they can market them) and so that insurance companies can pay for advertisements, lawyers and underwriters.
I'm not prudish; but neither am I ignorant of history. If you mention "battle of the bulge", my first thought isn't going to be that it's a reference to underwear. There are people out there that have no idea of what the Tea Party was, and what it symbolizes. They're stupid and ignorant, and covering for their stupidity by pretending they're 'cooler'.
The link was about the fallacies of using gold as a standard. I do not understand the hoopla of conservatives of screaming gold. The price is very volatile and I do not like that.
The 401Ks and economy that would fizzle would be bets to enslave the world in unsustainable debt. The derivatives market is higher than ever with people betting with everyone else s money. Prices of oil, homes, and even college education are all tied to banks trying to raise and manipulate prices. Eventually people will have no money to spend left which is where we are now because we have to pay back.
Critics of the government claim money can't be created out of thin air, yet the banks are trying to do just that. Most college students today pay $1,000 or more a month in loans making them poorer than working at a Mcdonalds. Houses too are insane and the price correction is badly needed.
The stimulus really did not create jobs at all. The census workers did more help than the bailout. I think a correction is needed because everyone who is retiring has unrealistic views of how this magical wealth got created (it never did). We need more regulations and offering credit to businesses would make sure they would hire again. As long as higher returns can be obtained shorting Greek treasury bonds and betting a few trillion more on pyramid scheme derivatives rather than giving lines of credit the recovery will never happen.
http://saveie6.com/
I sincerely do not understand. What sort of things has Canonical done wrong? I use to use debian starting in 2000 and now use Ubuntu, mainly due to the 6 month release cycle. I prefer things to break once every six months rather than whenever with unstable or taking forever for things to be released with stable. Should I not use Ubuntu? Is there something really wrong with it? I respect you, the work you've done, the way you represent open source software in a professional manner, and your opinion a great deal. I do not understand why you seem to consider Canonical the enemy or what's wrong with them. Is it because they distribute non-free software? So does debian. (I try to avoid non-free especially drivers.) I really don't understand and I really want to.
Also, explain how racism isn't prejudice
Racism (and sexism, etc.) is about power. It's about a group of privileged people using power to keep their privilege and the expense of another group. The emphasis matters. Racism essentially has nothing to do with individuals, individual thought or individual action. Bigotry is abhorrent, but in the end it doesn't oppress people. Public policy that consistently advantages one group over another does. We have structures of racism all over the place in the U.S. and it's been going on since before this country was founded. john powell at the Kirwin Institute has many insightful and helpful papers and presentations about structural racialization (his preferred term since "racism" has essentially been co-opted to the point of meaninglessness).
"The link was about the fallacies of using gold as a standard. I do not understand the hoopla of conservatives of screaming gold. The price is very volatile and I do not like that."
'Tight fiscal policy' people usually like gold standard (which is the ultimate 'tight' policy - quantity of financial gold does not change much).
"The 401Ks and economy that would fizzle would be bets to enslave the world in unsustainable debt. The derivatives market is higher than ever with people betting with everyone else s money."
? Derivate trading now is way less than several years ago. Mostly because the CDS market has collapsed.
"Prices of oil, homes, and even college education are all tied to banks trying to raise and manipulate prices. Eventually people will have no money to spend left which is where we are now because we have to pay back."
But without banks businesses will be hard-pressed to finance new development. So you can either have an economy with growing 'debt' or economy without grwoth. It's that simple.
Tertium non datur.
Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers. It's a matter of their profits coming before principle. It's going to be the same, IMO, for any for-profit distribution - you have to consider that they are in this to operate a profitable company, not to do good for the world. We really should have done something about it before Red Hat became a Billion dollar company, and Ubuntu is no different given Mark's capitalization of Canonical.
I think it would be best for you to use, and assist when possible, a non-profit distribution. That doesn't mean Fedora, they are too thoroughly controlled by Red Hat. Hopefully Debian still has sufficient independence from Ubuntu. I don't know about the others.
Bruce Perens.
I think you should seriously consider that your home users would be better off running Microsoft or Apple systems. Microsoft and Apple do not pretend to be Open Source, they are very clear about being a for-profit company. They don't have a community of free contributors that they abuse. They pay the people who write their code.
Bruce Perens.
Why is it that when I do a ctrl-C when "start mysql" hangs, Upstart thinks mysql is now running?
That issue was fixed in 9.10. The MySQL daemon wasn't fully converted over to Upstart.
Then there's the minor detail that Ubuntu doesn't submit upstream patches to things; they just change stuff, and put the source on their own tree.
Actually, it is currently standard policy for the BugSquad to report the bug upstream. A bug report can not be marked as "Triaged" until a bug report has been filed upstream or the bug has been identified as Ubuntu-specific.
Now, you may have a point that there are people who seem to spend time doing development work on projects downstream rather than upstream. But you would have to ask those individuals why they do so. Personally, I work both upstream and downstream (for both Ubuntu and Fedora). YMMV.
The aspect of how many Slashdotters treat Republicans and Conservatives.
I would love to see these Tea Party guys share in some of the power to see if they live up to their claims.
They did. They're called Republicans. You know, the same way that a clown and a clown carrying an umbrella are the same thing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I agree with you in principle, but I just have to face the reality of the situation.
The worst thing I've ever seen come out of the open source world is the Ubuntu One Music Store. I can understand selling promotional T-Shirts and coffee mugs, but why is an "open source" organization is running a clone of the iTunes Store is beyond me.
Open source is not a monoculture, there are people who like point-and-click GNOME, big-and-shiny KDE, slim-and-flexible OpenBox, and the nuts who don't run X. This is not Windows or Mac where we're given the OS then held at gunpoint being told to like it. Open source is far more diverse. Bickering, elitism, and "tribalism" should be expected. We're coming from totally different perspectives, desiring totally different things from our software. Not everyone wants your idea of a system; get over it.
"Country I love"....now THAT is a staggering display of tribalism...
Why do we have to enable them at all? What good is market share for Linux on these terms?
Bruce Perens.
I supported Bush after all that because it wasn't nearly as bad as you idiots made it out to be. To me, it appeared like Bush was just the fat kid on the school playground and you idiots were making fun of him to suit your own special needs.
And even his incompetence wasn't nearly as Bad as President Carter's incompetence when in office and you same people have made some sort of hero out of him. How in the fuck is anyone supposed to take criticism seriously when you promote Carter as the best leader of the time. Every Idiot I have met who thinks that seems to be either not born when he was president or so young that he can't remember. So for all intends and purposes, most of the shit spouted by Bush was canceled by the shear appearance of political trickery and blind ignorance of the presenters.
First, the correct spelling is Kwisatz Haderach. Yes, the "a" is important.
Second, as one who has read the post (which largely reads as encouragement for free software contributers), I would say your spelling of esoteric fictional figureheads is far from the only thing wrong in your post. Yes, liberty can be scary, but that doesn't mean we idly stand by while others stick their heads in the sand.
I'm not. You're freeloading off of everyone else. The current system privatizes the benefits, but socializes the costs. That is the worst possible system for people who really care about freedom. This really only confuses stupid conservatives. So, it really has been quite fascinating to see them all try sticking together against it. Bernie Maddof was an idiot, if he really wanted to never be caught, he would have advertised on Rush.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Trickle down economics has been thoroughly debunked? When did this happen? I see people attempting to do it but they always fail fast. Perhaps you can point me to something that doesn't disolve into some liberal ranting for reference?
This is a down right lie. The wealth is already distributed before any taxes are involved. What cutting taxes does do it make less profitable ventures more attractive which in turn creates more economic growth which in turn creates more job opportunities. The government can't do that unless it does so by lowering taxes. And lets be clear here, it needs to be the right taxes too. Capitol gains taxes does little other then cause increase trading of existing contracts for the most part. It needs to be income taxes and costs of doing business taxes or fees.
No, the growth spurred by decreased taxes *outside of something like capitol gains taxes, generally grows the tax base which increases tax revenue by proxy. It's the old adage of scale, would you like to sell 100 units at full profit or 1000 units at half profit. In case you are confused by that, lets say the profit is $10. So 100 units making $10 means a profit of $1000. But 1000 units at half that, it $5000 (1000 times half of 10 or $5).
Now capitol gains tax cuts have the short term effect of increasing taxes but only by a limited amount of time. It causes the trading of holdings that wouldn't otherwise have been profitable in which tax gets paid on it. Without the cuts, the taxes would have been paid later in date so it consolidates future payments at lower rates to sooner times. However, once that boom is over, the only other benefit is mostly more frequent payments of a lot less tax which doesn't seem to create more.
Lol.. It's not going to be like you flip a switch and all the sudden people are employed or unemployed. Also the accounting of the unemployed was changed in 93 so unless you are adjusting or normalizing the figures, they arne't directly comparable before that to after.
Anyways, Taxes and unemployment are closely linked but it also depends on growth. Take right after WWII for instance, we had huge amounts of growth because we still have an intact infrastructure where most of Europe's was devastated. Our growth cause lower unemployment rates and part of this is because Rosie the Riveter went home and didn't come back looking for jobs but mostly because of the demand to products in Europe.
This demand overwhelmed the effects of high taxes and made them negligible until well into the 60's when Europe was back on it's feet and the demand started dropping. This is also why one of the few things that Kennedy did in office was to lower taxes which somewhat maintained our prosperity until Cart was in office. But by then Rosie the Riveter was starting to come back out looking for jobs.
I think you could have a non-profit branded aggregator without a conflict of interest.
I don't think you have to prevent it. It's not the aggregation but the motives behind it.
Bruce Perens.
There really isn't much tribalism in the FOSS world. For starters only the OSS and the FS parts disagree and even then only in philosophy not methods. Other than that the general divide is between toolsets like VI vs EMACS, Qt vs GTK+ or Gecko vs KHTML, which everybody admits is about preferences and even they accept that the competitions is doing some things right.
If I had to reaaaaally close in on a controversial issue it would be Mono divide, but, and this is funny. the sides are formed by people who either want Mono for writing new software and people who ALSO want Mono but not for new software.
So this "tribalism" is really just something happening in Ubuntu as you say and even then it only really is happening because Shuttleworth is reading his textbook from Commander Tarkin. He united a lot of people by saying "here! let's work together!" and now he's all "Ubuntu is not a democracy." and now is acting surprised because the ragtag band of rebels he lead didn't like that attitude.
DUH!
But... the future refused to change.
Nice story. Thanks for explaining the circumstances and your qualifications for judging him, and the reasons behind your grand assertion.
I cannot BELIEVE Ubuntu put their window controls on the left side! What a shot over the bow of free software's existence!
Are you fucking KIDDING?
From the very beginning of FOSS, it's been all about the ability to go your own way and try new things and modify as you desire. Ubuntu does its own thing, makes SIGNIFICANT changes AVAILABLE UNDER GPL which upstream could use at their will, but often chooses not to. If GNOME liked what Ubuntu was doing ,they could incorporate it in mainline immediately.
Almost everything Ubuntu does is open source in process and in code. If you're Richard Stallman, that doesn't cut it. For most people, it does.
(P.S. I read RMS interview from reddit... that guy is a fanatic. Truly. I strongly disagree with him on several things, but it's always good to have a fringe group to keep the balance against the other extreme).
Yes, and the way that Ubuntu brings free software to the masses is unfortunate. Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify.
How is debian any different? Apart from the fact that it doesn't have mass appeal?
Ubuntu has all the same tools as Debian to push liberty (apt-get source, etc.). The fact that Ubuntu gives your program wider potential user base should not be held against them.
Ubuntu is the brightest star on the free software landscape. If they eventually become succesful enough to actually sustain their work financially, all the better.
If debian lost all the developers, there are many places Ubuntu could move forward. As an example, they could join the rpm ecosystem and make a polished version of Fedora.
OTOH, I'd rather see Ubuntu embrace Qt and not dwell in the Gtk+ ecosystem that will probably die before 2013.
That's ok because your mom provides a lot of code and by code I mean blow jobs to anyone willing to accept one.
You're the one doing the trolling now, just because Mr. Perens and others like myself are clearly onto your, and your kind's, transparent and obvious multiple accounts for down mods of others and upmods of yourselves type of bullshit.
You PR shills, you really have gall and nerve, you know? You seem to think folks will fall for your outright horseshit like the rest of us are stupid or something.
I mean, lol, to have a "so-called job" in "PR" speaks worlds for who are the stupid ones (you and those LIKE you since that's the best you could manage for a career in your utterly wasted trollish so-called life. Your poor Dad, I feel sorry for him: He would have been better off shooting his sperm on a wall rather than having wasted the time producing the likes of YOU, scumbag).
People think for themselves and we realize your kind is truly the lowest of the low.
See, we don't listen to your type because you're nobody, whereas Bruce Perens IS a "somebody" in this field and he makes some sense in his words (because I have caught others here admitting they have multiple accounts for trolling others), and actually commands some respect, whereas you, a nobody? Does not. Not at all.
I.E. We're all sick of "your kind" (scumbag shills and trolls) here, in case you hadn't noticed, and we're not stupid. We're onto you.
I'm not sure I truly understand the concern here.
The community of developers or developers-to-be who would have been likely to contribute are still there, and still likely to pitch in. The geek-political zeitgeist around free software still exists. We educate others and advocate just like we always would. Mainstream knowledge and acceptance seems to grow daily. So where's the damage? The simple answers like Ubuntu may steal a handful of people who might have otherwise become core community, but let's face it--we're talking about losing a very small fraction at that point. We don't stumble across that many contributors by opportunity--they come to us.
The "gatekeepers" are largely responsible for distributing to users who would otherwise not benefit at all, and who would not otherwise even think of investigating the communities around their software. The key is that the distributors have a huge audience. So if even a small fraction of their audience becomes interested and migrates into contribution, works to understand the ideology, or is even the least bit grateful, I'm willing to bet it's a net win for the core OSS communities. But whatever the case, it's absolutely not a zero-sum game. I think this is a case where we can all have our cake and eat it too.
And you know, I also think having a non-participatory audience is actually kind of key. For one thing, techie folks are absolute crap at determining how software should actually behave. We put up with all kinds of byzantine, inefficient interfaces because we're capable of figuring them out and glossing past them with minimal practice. The mainstream is much better at telling us whether something is of a decent level of quality or not. But more than that, having mainstream impact--with the comparatively huge number of users that involves--ends up defining success for the projects in a way that is integral in building communities around them. Open-source projects have become significantly more ambitious as support has collected behind the successful ones. They've also provided significantly more value to the world as a whole, and isn't that the point?
I don't think we would have come this far without the users, and we should respect and value them for that. We should work to reach them as widely as possible. The distributors reach them better than most of us could alone. Let's not dismiss them so quickly.
You're the one doing the trolling now, just because Mr. Perens and others like myself are clearly onto your, and your kind's, transparent and obvious multiple accounts for down mods of others and upmods of yourselves type of bullshit.
You PR shills, and trolls also: You really have gall and nerve, you know?
You seem to think folks will fall for your outright multiple registered user accounts here to mod yourselves up with and others down with type horseshit, and you think you'll pull one over on us, just like the rest of us are stupid or something.
I mean, lol, to have a "so-called job" in "PR" speaks worlds for who are the stupid ones (you and those LIKE you since that's the best you could manage for a career in your utterly wasted trollish so-called life. Your poor Dad, I feel sorry for him: He would have been better off shooting his sperm on a wall rather than having wasted the time producing the likes of YOU, scumbag).
People think for themselves and we realize your kind is truly the lowest of the low.
See, we don't listen to your type because you're nobody, whereas Bruce Perens IS a "somebody" in this field and he makes some sense in his words (because I have caught others here admitting they have multiple accounts for trolling others), and actually commands some respect, whereas you, a nobody? Does not, you scumbag troll. Not at all.
I.E. We're all sick of "your kind" (scumbag shills and trolls) here, in case you hadn't noticed, and we're not stupid. We're onto you.
The Mozilla Foundation is doing this reasonably well,
The Mozilla Foundation has Google paying for it, Debian has Shuttleworth paying for it.
its main foundering point was that they often carried libertarianism to the point of absurdity
But Ubuntu has a much more pragmatic approach. I struggling to understand why you do not like Ubuntu. (Hence the reason for the two quotes). Debian is too fundamentalist, but Shuttleworth has too much influence over Ubuntu as her is paying for it. Where as Mozillia Foundation, is fairly pragmatic - yet Google pays for it. Do it follow that Google has too much influence over Mozilla ?
With respect, I see you above post as lost of thing that are wrong with others development models, without a clear vision on what is the "Best" solution.
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
It's because, like you, the media generally doesn't grok the arguments that conservatives make and so they can't report them.
For instance, to most conservatives, deficits are a symptom, and the real problem is the burden and intrusiveness of government. In this regard, conservatives have been unhappy with Bush from before day 1. The notion of compassionate conservatism was somewhat offensive in its implications, and smacked of nanny-state totalitarianism. Bush adopted it to genuinely try to find a middle ground with liberals, but he didn't understand that liberals are suspicious of placing any limits on what the government can do, and were highly suspicious of its religious overtones.
The Tea Party didn't spring up overnight. The discontent that fueled the movement began, really, when the Republicans lost the House and Senate to the Democrats two years before Obama came into office. (If throwing the Republicans out of office wasn't enough of an indicator that people were fed up with Bush's performance, I'm not sure what possibly could be, though that is news to most Obama voters.) Obama, completely out of touch with and dismissive of conservative discontent (recall his famous "guns and bibles" remark), then provoked it by using the recession as an excuse for even more massive spending, and an even more intrusive health entitlement than Bush passed. And he forced it through without significant bipartisan support, which has been the norm since FDR.
It is a statistical certainty (p < 10e-11) that there are innocent people being held at Guantanamo Bay.
Many of them were on the battlefield, and aren't charged with crimes because conducting war isn't illegal. The real certainty is that civilians are there because the enemy uses them for cover. The reason we did well enough in Iraq was because the Iraqis' fury at AQI's wanton murder outweighed their fear. It was also because they recognized that Bush was a stubborn asshole who would ignore folks like you.
Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job, without unemployment benefits and in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever. And I'm not exaggerating a bit. Without the bailout money the banking system would have collapsed.
I'd take a few years of depression if it meant a whole generation of chastened investors saying, "holy fucking shit, I'll never do that again!" If we got rid of all the fucked up corporations and banks and started fresh. And if we were forced to cut out a lot of the wasteful government programs and regulations.
As it is, the bailout has softened the pain but also prolonged it, so it's liable to be worse overall, like trying to massage a broken arm. Unemployment is still ridiculous and state governments like California and Illinois are virtually insolvent.
You made a trollish statement about Mark Shuttleworth, and then explained it by talking about a conspiracy theory about unpopular opinions (even though your opinion is quite popular around here). by dangitman on Saturday July 31, @01:40AM
Per my subject above, give us a break you fucking obvious troll. Is your favorite color "transparent" or what? Mr. Perens is popular here because his "opinions" aren't only that. He backs them with facts such as his statements here about "online perception management services" (which is a "politically correct" way of saying "paid for trolls and shills that make it seem like 'the party line' of a corporation or political party is 'in the majority' and 'right', which only leads to another well-known marketing ploy of getting idiots to 'jump on the bandwagon' since they believe anything they read without research). Your problem here was that YOU are a nobody, a non-entity, a nothing ne'er do well online versus a fairly well known online respected persona in Bruce Perens. Folks will lend his words credence versus an obviously exposed piece of worthless shit troll/shill like yourself. Especially scumbag ones like yourself that need to do their eventual "last resort" of ad hominem attacks in your puny and easily seen through insinuation of "it's a conspiracy" when there is actual proofs of trolls and shills that are paid for by (lol -> ) "online perception management services" for Pete's sake. Most everyone here realizes that trolls and shills keep many registered accounts to both mod themselves up with, and to mod others down with, especially those that don't agree with them or put their views into the crapper where they belong). Do you think you morons fool anyone here? Guess again shithead.
See subject line above troll/shill: We've stopped paying you any mind whatsoever here LONG ago here already in this exchange, so give up.
Guess "your corporate masters" won't pay you now for your "trolling/shilling" services, and for using your one of many alternate registered accounts you use for "online perception management services" in trolling or downmodding others that your "masters" fear and those others only tell it how it is about them no less, OR, your "masters" whom you shill for - you both lose/fail, and badly.
Once more - Too bad, you lose/fail, badly, and mainly because you think people are stupid and don't realize how many of those like you use multiple registered accounts to pull off crap like you do that I noted above...
I repeat: You lose, you fail, and so do your "masters' (in their naming Microsoft explicitly in fact!).
To myself and others reading here? Heh, fact is, they doing that? That makes THEM, trolls.
Same old free software against open-source debate. Both are necessary in balanced proportions.
Lesson should have been learned long time back.
We're not interested in your views you transparent and obvious trolling shill. We stopped listening to you the very second you began your baseless ad hominem attacks in fact and realized you're nothing more than just another paid for trolling shill and crony of some "online perception management service" that uses multiple registered accounts to troll others with and to shill for his corporate masters (as well as using said accounts to mod others down with and your other "alter egos" up with). We're not stupid around here shithead, unlike a worthless and skill-less obvious and transparent adhominem attacking PR flunky such as yourself. That's right, I am calling a spade a spade and you what you are. That's no ad hominem attack either. We realize you're just another trolling pawn, so, go away now trolling shill. We'll have none of your bullshit here today.
So, because you have been offered such services, every time you are modded down on slashdot, it must be because of paid PR agents doing it, and Shuttleworth is paying them to do it? Get a grip. - by dangitman (862676) on Saturday July 31, @01:40AM (#33093308)
Ah, the typical trolling shill douchebag's "last resort" - an ad hominem attack on one's mental state. Care to show us your PHD in Psych related fields, as well as your formal examination of others you are libeling? Oh, that's right: YOU DON'T HAVE THAT NOW DO YOU?? Of course not. You're just another worthless "marketing troll/shill" that uses multiple registered accounts to attempt to mod others down with and himself and his "alter egos" up with. Do you think you fool anyone, you transparent little shit? NO, you do not!
You "get a grip", you transparently obvious trolling shill douchebag. You see, I for one (per my subject above), do actually think you are nothing more than a PR shill to be blunt about it.
Too bad you screwed up here so badly already though that your corporate masters won't be paying you (or, for very long when it comes to contract renewal time) for such a huge fail on your part here, while you attempted to to shill and troll others via your multiple registered accounts here in this exchange.
That's right: They won't pay you for such transparently obvious ad hominem attacks you use here since you failed on this one SO badly.
So YOU get a grip, or rather loosen the one on your puny pencil between your legs already chump. You lost this one long ago, as your kind from the "online perception management services" (paid for shills and trolls) always do.
Yes, but we don't need trolls and haters. - by dangitman (862676) on Saturday July 31, @01:40AM (#33093308)
LOL, oh that takes the cake: Trying to play "victim" now, troll? Sorry - the "pity me" tactic won't work now, but it surely shows YOU are on the ropes, BADLY, lmao!
Your kind online? LOWEST OF THE LOW, and the rest of us around here are well aware of your kind, and your tactics/mechanics, so go fuck off now, ok?? Thank you.
> That's what we really want.
Indeed..... for a very specific value of "we".
J.
Problem is that we humans end up identifying ourselves with our ideas, and with how we see ourselves.
We cannot tell ourselves apart from our identity, so we end up defending it just as we would defend ourselves.
This makes very hard for us to open up to different ideas or different ways.
Also, this 'identity' is a criterion that allows us to tell 'us' apart from 'them', hampering our capacity of compassion, ie any capacity of recognizing that those on the other side are, after all, not so different from us.
To convince someone to kill someone else, you always have to create a strong identity that makes the potential victim 'different' than the potential killer.
This is true at any scales, from nations at war to family quarrels.
Your statement makes even less sense than saying something like "knoppix killed debian".
Don't let anger and a feeling of lost control lead you to places that will look petty in hindsight.
I find the teabaggers crass and offensive because that's what they fucking are, you tool. The symbology they use is offensive not because of the symbols, but because of who is coopting them.
And over time the only people left with that motivation, when there are gate-keepers, are going to be ...
Personally I got into open source to scratch my own itches, and trade scratches with other people with the same set of itches; Ubuntu might be taking my work and giving it to an entirely new audience, but that's not stopping me from doing what I've been doing all along. Also I think the issue of them being gate-keepers is somewhat exaggerated -- while they are attracting users with a very shiny gate, the garden has no walls, so even if they locked it up people could still come and go as they please.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Right, but effectively it meant that the government could draw upon its own resources, since the bank was effectively owned 100% by the government at that point (they just won't pay for it until it is all over - since until then it won't be apparent whether the bank is worth anything).
My objection wasn't to keeping the bank running. My objection is to handing billions of dollars to the private citizens who mismanaged it in the first place, and who will run the bank to maximize profit, and not in the public interest.
On your second citation, even by your own statistics, if 30% of health outcomes was from "genes" and "access to health care", 70% of health outcomes would come from something other than genes and access to sick care.
But, when you think about it, "genes" don't act alone in most cases (excepting a very few rare conditions). Genes interact with the environment and your history of behavior. That also includes nutrition.
For example, here is an African-American health care researcher suggesting vitamin D deficiency has had a big impact on the health of people in the USA with darker skins:
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
Some other related research:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/the-black-community.shtml
This is not to argue against social and economic reforms (we need lots IMHO), just to demonstrate how nutrition or outdoor exercise or choice of clothing and so on can have a big effect on your health from even just this one factor, as health emerges from an interaction of genes and environment in the context of our personal choices (and what we know about how their consequences) -- in this case, the CDC has been doing a terrible job for decades at informing people about the connection between vitamin D deficiency and ill-health, or even studying the issue.
Lifestyle choices for anybody that include whether you smoke, how promiscuous you are, how much you exercise, what drugs you use, your connection to nature, how much you drink alcohol, how much you sleep, what sort of job you decide to take or train for, what sort of friends you cultivate, what community you choose to live in, your spiritual practices (including meditation), whether you laugh a lot, what sort of media you watch and how often, as well as what you eat (including whether it is organic), remain dominant factors in how long you live. Still, sure, how polluted your environment is makes a big difference too, but in almost all cases, not as big, and people often still make choices that relate to that as well (like where to live). And, how well your body handles a more toxic environment is also effected to a big degree by nutrition (how well your body can deal with heavy metals or how good it is as preventing cancer).
If the CDC really cared about your health, they would have raised the US RDA for vitamin D by a factor of ten a long time ago.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
I don't see how that CDC page backs up your point. Glancing at that page, how do they quantify "small"? The world "small" isn't even on that page. The major killers in our society are heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and some consequences of obesity, and almost all of those preventable (or for cancer, greatly delayable) by excellent nutrition (which links to behavior, since you control what you put in your mouth). Even Alzheimer's and other dementia is probably greatly reduced by good nutrition. Statistics:
"10 Leading Causes of Death in the U.S., 2004"
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005110.html
Dr. Fuhrman, for example, has built an eating plan that works to reduce lots of disease, based on thousands of scientific studies that say nutrition is a very significant aspect of health:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
BlueZones, as another example, is one approach to building healthier communities that had an immediate significant (one year) reduction of heart disease and mental illness (including by creating parks and promoting healthy nutrition at local restaurants):
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Firstly, when the "fiscal bailout" was given, there was absolutely no hope that it would be repaid back. The banking system was in such a bad shape that these loans were called as bailouts and not loans and were done to make sure that the financial system would not collapse.
And secondly I don't understand what is wrong in pork barrel spending. Agreed that you can always find a $100 million waste project in a 80 billion spending (which budget is perfect?). But overall, rather than handing out free money (unemployment benefits), the stimulus created jobs, built up infrastructure and helped development. Compared to all the other wasteful spending (read as Iraq war), the stimulus was a great idea to invigorate the economy.
Perhaps there is no way to prove it, but I personally feel that both of them were required given the circumstances
Maybe in the future someone would develop accurate simulation models that would prove either which way
To support your point and build on it, see the knol I put together here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
It includes references to things like:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation" by Harvey Cox (a professor of divinity at Harvard University)
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. "
The religious aspect of so much economic thinking is one reason arguments about it are so contentious.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Interesting link to the Kirwin Institute. One page from there:
http://kirwaninstitute.org/research/talking-about-race.php
"At Kirwan, we agree that all too often implicit and explicit race talk has indeed been used to divide and alienate. At the same time, we believe colorblindness, though sometimes urged by people and organizations with the best intentions, is a mistake--one with profound consequences. The critical question is not whether to use race, but how to talk about race in a variety of contexts. That question is an empirical one we engage in through a number of projects. In some cases we specifically examine how people talk about race and how such conversations impact their behavior. In other work we look at how issue "frames" operate. And in still other projects we look at the efficacy of using class-based or universal policy approaches to racial matters."
Thandeka says something related to your point on policy, too: ..."
http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"My point is this. Talk of white skin privilege is talk about the way in which some of the citizens of this country are able to avoid being mutilated - or less metaphorically, to avoid having their basic human rights violated. So much for the analogy. Here are the facts about so-called white skin privilege. First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class.
As did Shirley Sherrod (in the later part of the video related to the controversy, suggesting that racism was invented as a systematic institution to keep poor people of any skin color from cooperating):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk
Howard Zinn says something similar in "A People's History of the United States":
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."
On the general issues of "-isms":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Am I the only one you read 'tribaDism" ? Of course, it is an issue for the perpetuation of male nerds. But did anyone really expect women to wait for you to finish your StarCraft 2 marathon?
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
He should go by his real name, Mark Naziworth.
Context is everything.
I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).
Sure, you forgot some things:
1) I pay no social security or medicare taxes. The taxes paid on my behalf by my employer go into my pocket. I get that money paid in, NOW, as a lump sum.
2) The AMA or any governing body cannot dictate who treats me.
3) The FDA/DEA/ABC/XYZ cannot dictate what or how I consume anything.
4) The federal and state gubblemints cannot dictate I pay anyone some minimum wage for these services (this is for my 24x7 attendant when I get that old).
5) No state, local, or real estate taxes that prop up your education system either.
I think that is fair. Offer that deal and in five years, over half the country would be on that plan.
Who are "these people"? Are you talking about the bankers or just conservatives in general? Are you talking about libertarians? In this context, I'd be more of a libertarian. I complained on Slashdot. We had a huge debate.
testing out my trending skills
I completely agree with that objection.
However, the chance of implementing them was exactly zero. Democrats are too craven to do _anything_ and Republicans are completely sold out.
"I'd take a few years of depression"
Like, 20 years? And it still won't help much.
"As it is, the bailout has softened the pain but also prolonged it, so it's liable to be worse overall, like trying to massage a broken arm. Unemployment is still ridiculous and state governments like California and Illinois are virtually insolvent."
As I've said, stimulus was too small to combat unemployment efficiently. And NOT doing a stimulus would have meant even greater unemployment.
Offtopic, but I was hoping to ask a few questions to an intelligent, rational member of the Tea Party. I'm assuming you qualify, since you are a member of this tribe -- and of course our tribe is very intelligent and rational. :)
A big chunk of the Tea Party platform is adherence to The Constitution and Bill of Rights. I am a studious and zealous fan of those documents. I think their underlying principles, particularly in The Bill of Rights, are surprisingly prescient and noble.
I have heard varying views from high ranking Tea Party members regarding some portions of The Bill of Rights, and while I know that it is a young party and subject to various interpretations, I am interested to hear your take.
What is your take on "Congress shall make no law" when it is in conflict with sections of The Constitution like the responsibility of The President to provide for the national defense? Does the prohibition in The Bill of Rights take precedence, or the obligation in The Constitution?
I am a strong supporter of The Second Amendment. Yet I am tempted to agree that private citizens should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons. The Supreme Court once ruled (in not protecting sawed off shotguns) that the second only applied to weapons of war, though clearly nuclear weapons are weapons of war (or mortars or tanks, for example). Many have argued the "well regulated militia angle", of course. Where do you stand on limitations to The Second Amendment?
What is your take on The Establishment Clause? The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion, yet many (including many high ranking members of The Tea Party) have expressed a belief that religious morals rightly should inform legislation. There are certainly laws which satisfy religious morals while not being an establishment of religion, like the prohibition against murder. Other issues, such as the distinction between civil union and marriage, seem difficult to divide from their religious origins. How should The Establishment Clause be interpreted, and do you feel that The Tea Party as an organization has internalized that interpretation?
Though the bent of my questions may seem hard, I am not trying to be hostile. I genuinely would like to see a party that truly put The Bill of Rights and The Constitution first -- but there are some deep conflicts between those documents and our modern interpretation of civilization. I am interested to hear your views, and your thoughts on whether The Tea Party can find a closer reality to the principles behind those documents.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Choices are important, but the way our society is structured often limits them. For example:
Dr. Fuhrman, for example, has built an eating plan that works to reduce lots of disease, based on thousands of scientific studies that say nutrition is a very significant aspect of health:
Yes, nutrition is very important. That's why where you live really matters. Do you have easy access to fresh foods and vegetables? Is there are farmer's market near you? Or is it a sea of fast-food restaurants? It turns out that in poor and segregated neighborhoods, the most convenient food sources are processed sugary foods from quick-stop gas stations and fast food joints. It's pretty tough to find a farmer's market or organic co-op in poor or racially segregated communities.
Isn't Shuttleworth guilty of doing exactly what he is accussing others of?
"Those people over there are always wrong about accussing others of being wrong." Accusing people of "tribalism" is a form of tribalism itself.
Ubuntu is about Ubuntu That's the point. Here in Austin a month does not pass that we don't get at least one call saying "I tried Ubuntu but I didn't like it, I think I would like to try Linux". Fanboy-ism may be partially to blame here and possibly the marketing measures by Canonical. Ubuntu has not become synonymous with Linux, Ubuntu has become synonymous with Ubuntu. Let the distro wars rage...if MS was correct about anything, it's that the strife between distro users will ultimately prove to be our largest fail-point. And to the point of "freedom". The majority of people we switch to Linux don't care about Free as in speech, fact is many of them see it as a non-issue. They want their computers to work and even after being spoon-fed the meanings in Microsoft EULAs they could care less. For the majority of people, we come off as wild-eyed fanatics when we preach "Freedom".
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
Funny that every time I tried to use Ubuntu (tose were a few), something simply didn't work. Somehow, the free drivers aren't at par with Debian's, but yeah, the proprietary ones work. Who need devices that lack proprietary (first class on Ubuntu) drivers, because the manufacturers publish their drivers at the Linux kernel. I'm not compiling a custom kernel just because a distro wants to make free drivers second class, thank you.
By the way, Debian stable just plain works. You get from the CD to a default set of application in little time more than the one it takes to download everything. And if you miss proprietary drivers, you just need to add the non-free and contrib branches and get them. Yes, it is harder than having they installed from the start, it takes a full 15 minutes of configuring.
Oh, and it is quite funny that you use a Debian distro just because apt trolls tell you they are better. It seems as if (nonsense, I'm sure) they are right, after all.
Rethinking email
Yes, I'll completely agree on that issue of access to fresh food as it relates to social class or segregation, good point.
Isles, inc. is one example group in Trenton that has made a difference fostering community gardens is the inner city for fresh veggies (as well as other benefits): http://isles.org/
Here is a co-op just started in a town as part of regenerating it:
http://www.mohawkharvest.org/
But our society could do a lot more. These issues are all intertwined.
And then these issues are interwoven with product design, advertising, profit-driven commerce, and externalities:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
People with less free time to understand all this then are also at risk (another issue of either income or lifestyle).
So, a complex mix of issues. But, they are systematically addressable, even without massive government involvement (as nice as it would be to throw a lot of resources at the problems). Get you vitamin D, pennies a day, have a garden or at least grow sprouts in your kitchen, buy more vegetables, soak and cook beans, buy frozen fruit instead of ice cream, make green smoothies in a US$100 blender.
http://www.greensmoothierevolution.com/
The most important foods to buy organic (generally, stuff you don't peel):
http://www.greenwala.com/community/blogs/all/6290-The-Dirty-Dozen
In general, it is cheaper and healthier to eat vegetarian. Permanently turn off the TV that mesmerises people into eating more junk.
It can be a positive upward spiral, of one improvement leading to another. First vitamin D, cheap and easy, then smoothies, then other changes... Any small group of people in any US community can make these basic things happen for themselves and their neighbors, as Isles, Inc. shows, as the Mohawk Harvest Cooperative shows, as lots of other examples show.
Still, it can be hard to throw off the mental parasites (like coming through mainstream TV, or even sometimes through school programs influenced by the meat and dairy industry) that keep us down.
* "Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food"
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html
* "Dean Ornish on the world's killer diet"
http://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_on_the_world_s_killer_diet.html
* "Ann Cooper talks school lunches"
http://www.ted.com/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches.html
* "Mark Bittman on what's wrong with what we eat"
http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html
From:
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Unfortunately people like you and me are not really welcome in Ubuntu because it is overrun with those tribalist noobs who just want their pretty desktop, buttons on the left, and other crap like that. They will only tolerate us so long as we spend all day answering their noob problems. As soon as you start pointing out obvious shortcomings in the latest and greatest Shuttleworth idea, they start saying "well maybe an advanced user like you would be happier on Fedora/Debian/Gentoo."
No, the value of money changes over time. A price is an exchange ratio. If you inflate the money supply i.e. print money, it bids prices up, and causes price inflation, prices that are higher than they otherwise would be. If you read the article I cited you would understand it doesn't add to productive capacity, it only increases production at the expense of future production. This is what happens when you engage in price fixing of interest rates, it distorts the long-term production structure over time, since interest is the price of time. If you manipulate it, you are going to hurt production.
I've read Krugman on and off for a while, he makes a very consistent set of fallacies. Arguments about the housing bubble are perfectly relevant, we are doing the exact same thing that we did to cause it. It's going to cause the appearance of a recovery, and then crash again, even worse than now!
Wonder what the public key field is for?
For one thing, gainning market share is the only long term viable protection against the kind of atacks free software is suffering today. Nobody would care if Linux users knew about software patents or not if corporations didn't have enough money to "convince" legislators, for example.
As a for profit gate keeper, Canonical is the less usefull friend of FOSS they can be, but the entry barriers on that market are quite low, so they can't be too harmfull either. If everybody turns against them, they'll be gone in no time (and that is what they are fighting here). Now, about politics, most people simply don't care. They wouldn't start caring if they knew you personaly, and even if they cared, they wouldn't care enough to help. I repeat myself here, the best we can get from them is they not helping the proprietary software makers that want to destroy us.
About why contributing to Debian, I guess they are worth to have an awesome operating system to use. Wasn't that the goal from the begining? (I really don't know, I only met Debian at Woody.) But I can't really say much, since my contributions are much much much smaller than yours, of course.
Rethinking email
"No, the value of money changes over time. A price is an exchange ratio. If you inflate the money supply i.e. print money, it bids prices up, and causes price inflation, prices that are higher than they otherwise would be."
Except for situations when there's not enough money. Like, say, now.
Do you see gigantic inflation even though several trillions of dollars were infused into the economy? That's what is predicted by your model.
So if you are "reality-based" you have to admit that your simplistic model doesn't always work.
"This is what happens when you engage in price fixing of interest rates, it distorts the long-term production structure over time, since interest is the price of time. If you manipulate it, you are going to hurt production."
Again, there's no 'price fixing'. You're conflating two absolutely different things.
You seem to throw words like 'distortion of long term production structure' without saying exactly HOW it is distorted, and why it's bad.
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance; that's wrong.
And that's what the tea parties are protesting against, in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout, and the foolishness of carrying $130,000 per US home worth of debt.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>>>national debt of $200,000/home by the end of Obama's eighth year.
>>
>>and presumably reduced to $1 per household if a Tea Partier is elected in 2012.
You can't pay off the debt that fast but if I were president, I'd end the war immediately, and submit a budget to Congress that cuts all spending by 75% across the board. They'd probably go nuts, debate and argue, and then give me a 25% cut instead, which would give the government about 1500 billion annual surplus. So then do the math:
16 trillion (end of 2012)
-1.5 trillion surplus
+0.3 trillion interest
=========
14.8 at end of 2013
.
13.6 at end of 2014
.
12.4 at end of 2015
.
11.2 at end of 2016
.
and so on. I or another budget-conscious president could have the debt down to ~$60,000 per US home by 2020. And almost no debt by 2025.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job without unemployment benefits
(1) The bailout bill was for BANKERS not the workers. It was Welfare for the Rich, and the Democrats voted unanimously for it. Think about that. The Democrats are the party for the rich. (2) I would still have unemployment benefits. I would be getting $50 less per weak (part of Obama's Feb 2009 Stimulus) but I'll still be getting unemployment benefits from the State government.
.
>>>in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever
We *are* in the middle of the Greatest Depression Ever (second only to the depression of 1920). You think the crash is finished? We're only halfway through and another plummet is coming soon, but this time it will be a Currency Crisis - something the US has never experienced.
Spending a ton of money in a Bailout didn't solve the core problem: Too much debt. All it did was make it worse. We're floating on a bubble right now, propped-up by borrowing from China. When that bubble pops you'll see a crash like you've never seen before..... well, except in 1920s Germany (where it took a wheelbarrow of marks to buy bread). Maybe it won't be that bad, but it sure as hell won't be pleasant.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>I do not understand the hoopla of conservatives of screaming gold. The price is very volatile and I do not like that.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, the money became worthless but the gold and silver still held value. That's why people recommend gold - to protect their wealth when the dollar loses value.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Those might be medical bills from the 1970s, but today's costs are much higher.
Titanium plate in my wife's arm - 56,000. My nerve stim was 67,000 in total.
My grandmother's chemo in 2000-2002 was over 400,000.
Simple:
Follow the Supreme Law as written, and where there is confusion refer to James Madison's opinion, since he authored the thing. Also look to original intent (as Thomas Jefferson recommended) of the men who ratified it in 1786-89.
And if there is still confusion, then amend the Constitution to clarify it. For example: You say private citizens should not have nukes. Fine. Amend the Constitution to strike "arms" and replace with "guns" so that it is specific what they can or can not own.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Ya know, even if you put a hospital on every block, people will still die.
You are trying to cure an incurable disease (mortality), and I think it's foolish.
Even if you spend 10,000 trillion a year out of the US Government's bank account, people would still terminate. You are trying to achieve a goal that is impossible to reach
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>I seem to recall you collecting unemployment benefits,
And I paid $20,000-25,000 a year in taxes since 1997. I'm merely taking back a small portion (capped at 20,000) what I already paid into the Unemployment program. And when I retire, I will also be taking back what I paid-in to Social Security.
But stealing from my neighbors' to buy myself a new car, or new computer, or a new pacemaker is not acceptable. Those expenses should come directly from my own pocket. I have no right to treat my neighbors like my personal slaves, working to buy me new stuff.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>You've been lucky, and you aren't thinking about the possibilities, you're really not. My father
Was old. When I reach an advanced age, say 60, I will buy myself insurance to cover the cost of my failing machine (my body). But to buy insurance when you're in your teens, 20s, or 30s, and still perfectly healthy is insane. It's as stupid as buying a new iPod and wasting money on a $50 extended warranty.
The iPod's new. It won't break when it's still young. Neither will the human body.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"(1) The bailout bill was for BANKERS not the workers."
And tax cuts are only for BANKERS and other parasites. Right?
You see, you have a model in your head, and you ignore anything that doesn't fit into it. For example, you ignore the fact that it won't be the BANKERS who will be hit first.
In fact, the Big BANKERS would have probably lived just fine, like in 1930-s. The first to suffer are invariably working people and small regional banks.
"It was Welfare for the Rich, and the Democrats voted unanimously for it. Think about that. The Democrats are the party for the rich."
I just love how you mangle the facts.
You might remember that Republicans forced a lot of their pork into the bill. And then tried to sink it.
"(2) I would still have unemployment benefits. I would be getting $50 less per weak (part of Obama's Feb 2009 Stimulus) but I'll still be getting unemployment benefits from the State government."
Nope. You won't, cause if the meltdown had happened, there won't be a Social Security to speak of. And individual States would have been the first to fall (probably, starting with Texas and California).
>>>Commodore is consistently anti-government... I think he's absolutely delusional,
No more delusional than Thomas Jefferson, who was also a libertarian (although the label back then was simply "liberal"), and with whose views I agree 99% of the time.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm merely taking back a small portion (capped at 20,000) what I already paid into the Unemployment program.
If you went broke, how would you pay for your medical care? Would you choose to DIE, as you so claimed? You paid into a system, but your medical costs could easily exceed what you paid into it.
Do you propose that emergency services should do a credit authorization before providing service?
When I reach an advanced age, say 60, I will buy myself insurance to cover the cost of my failing machine (my body).
If only people who were 60 bought health insurance, most people wouldn't be able to afford it. The point of insurance is that it spreads the cost out.
The iPod's new. It won't break when it's still young. Neither will the human body.
Dumb analogy. New iPod's do break in some small percentage, but it's not worth the cost of insuring them. Young people get sick too, just not as often as older people. They also get into accidents. It's easy to decide to opt out when you're young and healthy, but who is really willing to face the consequences if they get unlucky?
Wow, ignorant are we? A good starting point would be the dictionary. Racism be a form of prejudice. It also may not be. It is entirely possible to be 'racist' and speak nothing but 'fact' and have no 'ill will' or hate. Racism exists for a reason. Idiots like yourself turn racism into prejudice and hate. Racism is nothing more than recognizing differences in traits between races. There is no denying different races have different traits, and theres nothing wrong with it. Prejudice is when you hold something against someone, combine the two and you have when people hold something against an entire race rather than an individual, and thats stupid and hateful and not the same thing as racism alone, but god fucking forbid your ignorant ass learns what the words he throws around means rather than ranting off like you have a clue.
Shuttleworth is just trying to be a sensationalist and its freaking insulting. Comparing infighting within the Linux community to getting lynched are we?
The fact that he even considered making such a retarded fucking statement leads me to believe he is a truely racist fuck himself.
When talking about software, race has no involvement and its either shear ignorance or raw sensationalism that is causing him to bring it up. Eitherway, he's a fucking douchebag for trying it. He needs some perspective and probably some electroshock therapy to his balls.
When we have a GNAA Linux distro, then maybe there will be some sort of racism somewhere buried in a Linux discussion, but not really. Until then anyone who uses terms like OSS or Linux in the same conversation as racism outside this discussion is more or less a moron sensationalizing something in order to get attention. The only intelligent thing to do is entirely ignore anyone who does it to cut them off so they don't get any attention.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
My ex-girlfriend is an oldbagger.
Does that make me sexist?
.
- aqk
F U
You're a very proud little Teabagger neo-Nazi aren't you? I'm guessing you're also the type of fucking brown-shirt goose-stepping Beck fan who claims that all of those racist placards are just a small minority, that a guy showing up to an Obama speech with an assault rifle was just "exercising his rights," that every Hispanic in America should have their "papers" or be deported.
I choose not to hear your voice because I choose not to fall prey to your bigotry and deceit. Everyone who identifies themselves as a Teabagger should be executed for treason, and a day will come when you and your racist, ignorant ilk get what you deserve. Lincoln put the boot to motherfucking traitors like you long ago, the south ain't risin' again my friend. You're not going to get to sit back in your Victorian mansion watching the niggers pick cotton for you, you're going to die out like the fucking brainwashed dinosaurs you are.
And no one will fucking miss you.
Sir, I have read your post about 5 times and I still don't understand what you're trying to say.
no, he just wants the pot to have the name of the person how cooked it, and why they made it for you. Read the sign if you want or not, but at least the sign is there.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Offtopic, but I was hoping to ask a few questions to an intelligent, rational member of the Tea Party. I'm assuming you qualify, since you are a member of this tribe
I'm a tea party organizer and I have spoken at four of them.
What is your take on "Congress shall make no law" when it is in conflict with sections of The Constitution like the responsibility of The President to provide for the national defense? Does the prohibition in The Bill of Rights take precedence, or the obligation in The Constitution?
"Congress shall make no law" literally means Congress shall make no law. The President is the Commander in Chief of the military, the highest general, but he cannot declare a war himself, though it is generally accepted that he can order immediate action to defend the country (that is, if we come under attack, he can order troops into action to defend and doesn't have to wait for a declaration of war. Congress abdicated its power to declare war after WWII, while prior to that, Wilson and FDR blatantly ignored Congress and the American people by trying to lure us into WWI and WWII (they couldn't declare war outright themselves, so they figured if they could get us attacked, they could change public sentiment into giving them the wars they wanted). And that is why Congress alone was to have the power to declare war rather than investing it solele in one person.
The Bill of Rights supercedes anything written in the Constitution, by the very virtue that they are amendments of the Constitution. Therefore, the largely ignored Ninth and Tenth Amendments buttress the claim that, unless the federal government is given the power to do something, they have no such authority to assume that power for themselves.
I am a strong supporter of The Second Amendment. Yet I am tempted to agree that private citizens should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons. The Supreme Court once ruled (in not protecting sawed off shotguns) that the second only applied to weapons of war, though clearly nuclear weapons are weapons of war (or mortars or tanks, for example). Many have argued the "well regulated militia angle", of course. Where do you stand on limitations to The Second Amendment?
People have the right to own arms, and by that, the Founding Fathers meant military weapons... and while they could never conceive of something like a nuclear weapon, they gave us the solution to fix that problem - a Constitutional Amendment. Amendments tend to be hard to pass, but perhaps more importantly, since I doubt anyone would have a problem with banning private ownership of nuclear weapons, the reason why such an amendment isn't passed, is it would lead further credence to the Constitution being the hard written law of the land rather than "a living document" meant to be revisionistly reinterpretted into whatever someone seeking power wants it to read.
What is your take on The Establishment Clause? The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion, yet many (including many high ranking members of The Tea Party) have expressed a belief that religious morals rightly should inform legislation. There are certainly laws which satisfy religious morals while not being an establishment of religion, like the prohibition against murder. Other issues, such as the distinction between civil union and marriage, seem difficult to divide from their religious origins. How should The Establishment Clause be interpreted, and do you feel that The Tea Party as an organization has internalized that interpretation?
I'm somewhere between atheist and agnostic myself (I don't believe there is an all powerful, all knowing deity, but I think there exists something greater than ourselves in a cosmic sense). The federal government should have very little influence over criminal or even civil law, since its purpose is to act on international affairs (diplomacy, war, trade, etc)
Stop Koolaid Politics
I have yet to get ubuntu on a computer or a VM... of course all of those same computers run gentoo quite happily. So in my experience, no ubuntu is not less hassle.
one computer the CD refused to boot in, booted fine in my main desktop, but not in that one. Gentoo and debian CD's were fine.
One computer didn't like my video card (ati pci thing from 2003) best i got was800x600 vesa, on the 1280x768 native panel.
Both vbox and kvm choke on the livecd/installcd.
Also mostly I use XFCE these days, and while I know I can get Xubuntu, all I really want is a vanilla xfce install.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Open source folks have to get used to the idea not everything in a popular OS / distribution needs to be open
Like hell. I will not get used to it, not will I quietly acquiesce and spread my legs for proprietary software. I came to free software to get away from that shit.
The use of software is not really idealogical struggle
How much of your time do you spend connected to some manner of computer during your day? Four hours? Eight? More? Half your life? More?
If you're not free for half your life, you're not free. Maybe you don't care about that. I do.
And you misspelled ideological.
personally I wish people would really stop framing it in that fashion.
I don't care.
At the end of the day some people would / will want to be paid for their effort for creating software for your use
A goddamn lot of people get paid for working on free software. I get paid for working on free software.
Other people believe that everything should open and free for everyone which very awesome, but looking at the material history of the world has never really occurred as everything created has some intrinsic value.
We've never had a magic machine where you could put a loaf of bread into it and make an infinite number of loaves of bread. If we did, would you not say it was inexcusably criminal to withhold loaves of bread from anyone, for any reason?
Well, that's what free software is. Free software is the infinite loaf of bread machine.
Sure there will be some good hearted souls out there that will give stuff away, but you shouldn't really rely on that if you want better software variety and wide adoption
*checks business card* Yup, I still make money working on free software. Do you seriously not get the difference between free beer and free speech? Lots of entities make money selling free speech. Newspapers, for one.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
paid kernel devs, like redhat and suse. Getting hardware vendors on board, like suse and redhat. Getting 3rd party software(like oracle) on board.
Basicly something other than the closed launch pad, and some shiny guis for config files. (that work fine if you are on close to standard OEM desktops, but heaven forbid you have a hardware raid controller and want to run LVM or NFS on /.)
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Dude... you're making no god damned sense. You said:
So you're saying you only contributed to Debian to line your pockets? Really?
Frankly, you sound like an incredible hypocrite. RedHat has been praised for *years* for building a Linux distribution that's built upon the free efforts of thousands of free software developers. But suddenly Shuttleworth is at fault because the Debian guys give away their product under a license that allows Ubuntu to use their output?
Please.
If you give away your product under the GPL, you have no one to blame but yourself if someone manages to profit off that work by packaging it up in a nice shiny wrapper and offering a support contract. Christ, this is the dream of the GPL come true: open source software thats profitable, using a business model that doesn't take away from the freedoms of its users. But now its bad because you're not getting your share? Talk about bullshit.
I've read this entire thread, and I largely agree with the criticisms of Ubuntu that you've laid out. But this particular post I have to give -1 Hyperbole.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
By the way, Debian stable just plain works
It's also old old OLD. It is absolutely *perfect* for, say, a server, but as a desktop OS, it leaves a lot to be desired (I would know, I was a Debian users for years).
If Debian is so worried about their marketshare they'd adopt some of the things Ubuntu is doing. ie, provide a more cutting edge version of their product that has more polish and functionality. If they choose not to do that because its contrary to their philosophy, thats their choice, but they shouldn't begrudge Ubuntu's success.
Oh, I don't disagree with anyone who is pissed at Canonical for their attitude regarding contributors. I was merely pointing out that Canonical, thru Ubuntu, has done more to bring the concept of FOSS to the home user masses than the entire FOSS community has ever accomplished.
That said, Shuttleworth really does need to wake up to the fact that if he abuses the community enough, the community will license him out of existence.
GSVEMR
Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers. It's a matter of their profits coming before principle.
So then fork Ubuntu and create your own project. Hell, take Ubuntus changes and roll 'em back into Debian and create Debian Desktop. Voila, the cross-pollination enabled by open source works again.
Seriously, you just sound like you're suffering from sour grapes. You aren't getting yours, so Ubuntu must be evil...
Given all I've been reading here about how Shuttleworth is still pouring money into Canonical/Ubuntu in order to ensure it's survival, I think it's a big disingenuous to compare Canonical with Red Hat.
As someone else in the comments pointed out, without a userbase, the only thing a open source project is is just a hobby. Which is fine and good for the hobbyists, but the idea of free and open software is to benefit everyone.
I ran Debian Stable on my home machines for years. I considered it the best of the linux dists at the time - but it just wasn't good enough to do everything I needed to do. I spent entirely too much time frakking around trying to make things work for it to be worth it. I run Ubuntu now, because by and large - and I have 6 installations on six different computers - it just friggin' works. I have entirely too much to do nowadays (struggling to survive) to burn tens of hours every week just maintaining the systems that I need to have operating 24/7.
The customers I've turned on to Ubuntu are happy with their systems for that same reason. When the "non-profit" dists get as good as Ubuntu, I'll gladly use one of them myself, and turn people on to them instead of Ubuntu. But they simply aren't there - and yes, Debian isn't there, not in usability, and not in support community (the Ubuntu support community rocks)
GSVEMR
You're talking about people being free. Free Software is software that gives people the Four Freedoms. Proprietary software does not give people those freedoms and is, thus, not Free. You are free to use proprietary software, but that software restricts your freedom in what you may do with it. No one is asking Canonical to restrict people's freedom to use proprietary software. What is being discussed here is Ubuntu coming with proprietary non-Free freedom-restricting software, and whether it's an acceptable compromise or not.
When Ubuntu or Red Hat stand between us and the users, we generally can't even communicate with those users.
With all due respect, Mr Perens, that sounds awfully close to jealousy.
Canonical and Red Hat provide the service and support for those users you so disparage. If the company isn't returning QPQ as much as you feel they should, you have a right to be angry about it. But bitching about the end users not contributing to the project in the same way is ridiculous.
I think that you've lost sight of the fact that without users, software is just a bunch of bits. I think that both those companies (and others) have proved that the larger your userbase, the more demand there is for your code, the more users will contribute back to your code - even if it still is just a small percentage, it's still larger overall.
I still have a great deal of respect for all you've done for Debian and linux overall, but I'm afraid that in this particular venue you are coming across as evangelical and whiny. Now I'm not a coder anymore, save for the occasional quick script or whatever I need, but decades ago, long before RMS, when "free software" was what one wrote and gave away in order to help people out, few of the people I worked with would have thought that anyone would actually complain about not getting rich off of the code we wrote, or complain about the people using the code without signing up to some sort of pseudo religious ideology. We wrote code and we gave it away because it benefited everyone in the long run. That is the point.
I still have a lot of respect for you, but it's less than it was before. I can't speak for anyone else but I suspect from reading the commentary that you've blown a lot of your "street cred" here, and that's a damned shame. I'm starting to see Shuttleworth's "tribalism" remark in a new light.
GSVEMR
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Some of us can't get decent medical insurance at any price, thru no fault of our own. I have a medical problem that will kill me one day - probably within the next ten years or so, I've already way outlived the estimates the doctors gave me when I was a kid - and have been denied coverage because of it.
I'm not rich, but neither am I poor, and I work hard. Really damned hard. I'm reasonably intelligent and raised a daughter on my fucking own who has turned out to be one helluva lot better person than her old man ever dreamed of being. I volunteer my time and labor when others need it, and live well within my means because I think that greed is one of the worst problems in society.
So take your bullshit and stuff, asshole. If you're so concerned about some of your tax money going to help out people who are less fortunate than you are, then drop out of society and go live somewhere else on your own - cut your own firewood, kill your own meat, grow your own food - let's see how far you get with that. (BTW, I do all of those and more)
Sure, there are freeloaders out there. But they are a far smaller percentage of the population than the wags on Fox News and the tea party idiots would have everyone believe.
I won't apologize for my language. Attitudes like this are why I quit the Republican party twenty years ago. It's a selfish, self-centered, arrogant POV and I want nothing to do with it. Society only functions as well as it does because of people who unselfishly give as much of themselves as possible. It's a damned shame that such decency seems to be dying out.
Y'know, it takes one hell of a lot of stupidity to push my buttons nowadays, but you managed to. Congratulations.
GSVEMR
thats not what pro-choice means. douche.
mediocrity rules, man
Remember, Democrats are always wrong on every topic because they murder babies, and you don't want to trust a baby murderer, do you? The sad part is that I've heard more or less that specific argument in the recent past.
Actually, that's not such a terrible argument. If someone has such a fundamental disconnect with your own personal values that they promote something which you consider murder by natural law and common sense, it's very hard to trust them. You're simply too different to deal with one another.
I believe this is actually the same reason WWII ended for Japan in a mushroom cloud... we in the USA simply had no basis for understanding how the Japanese people at the time thought - their culture was too different. It was alien to us that a nation - including civilians - would effectively commit suicide to preserve traditions and a notion of honor that we just didn't understand. I fear the same divide exists between the western world and fundamentalist Islam - we simply can't grok them, nor they us.
"It’s just like someone saying “All black people are [name your prejudice]" and "So, for example, when a woman makes it to the top of her game, “it’s because she slept her way there”."
I really don't like to read things like this in the context of a software discussion.
It is just offensive.
Its just like saying - "It's just like saying Mark Shuttleworth is a dirty thief who smells and has gross stains on his underwear" and "So, for example, when Mark Shuttleworth makes it to the top of his game, "it's because he took it up the ass". Just offensive rubbish that has no place in a blog about software from the founder of a software company. It is just offensive.
I think that there is inevitably a conflict between the goal of software freedom and the existence of a financially powerful gate-keeper who stands between the financially un-powerful free software developers and the vast majority of users. The goals of the gate-keeper will never align with those of the folks making the software.
So all Debian needs to do is figure out all the things Ubuntu focused on that worked (give them some credit, they did some things right - ease of use, marketing, branding, ease of use, advertising, ease of use, outreach, release schedule and ease of use) and do those better than Ubuntu. It's not impossible but it's hard.
The only reason they stand between Debian and the users is that they do some things right. I don't even have to like Ubuntu to see that. That they will be out-competed is only a matter of 'when'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I actually did some research into this very question, and you are right, the volume of stories about the deficit increased dramatically after the bailout (whether it coincided with the bailout or with Obama is hard to tell because they happened roughly at the same time. Certainly there was a lot of criticism of Bush for the bailout before Obama won the election).
I did some research into why, and I think there are a lot of reasons. Part of it is related to party I am sure, but that can't be the only reason, because there was a lot of criticism of high deficits during the Reagan and Bush Sr. presidencies (a major part of the Ross Perot platform was balanced budgets, which helped Bush lose).
Another factor I think is the size: the Reagan deficits were dwarfed by the Bush deficits, but the Bush deficits are dwarfed by the Obama deficits. The smallest Obama deficit is larger than the largest Bush deficit (and I am getting these number from the Obama budget office). Furthermore, in theory Bush always presented his budgets with a plan to close the deficit, but Obama has no such plan. So the deficits are much scarier now than they were even three years ago, although it isn't really Obama's fault.
Also, during the Bush administration, times were good. Times aren't particularly bad now either (dust bowl victims wish for our 'misfortune'), but there are a lot of people worried and lashing out at whatever is the most obvious target. Had Bush remained in office, his approval rating would have dropped even farther, since he would have been the obvious target.
Qxe4
You may not be exaggerating, but you're not right either. It was more than a banking collapse that caused the great depression in the 30s, it was a banking collapse, followed by runs on the bank due to the lack of an FDIC, followed by rampant protectionism, followed by awful monetary policy, coupled with a giant dustbowl. It would be hard to get all that incompetence and bad luck together at the same time again, especially since we learned so much from last time (we are barely showing any protectionist tendencies compared to last time, for example). Without a bailout it wouldn't have become the greatest depression ever, at worst you can claim that things would be worse than they are now, but even that is doubtful. The idea that the banks are too strongly inter-linked, and that the fall of AIG would have caused the fall of all banks has been debunked by now.
Qxe4
They'd probably go nuts, debate and argue, and then give me a 25% cut instead
It doesn't matter. Unless you weigh into the elder welfare programs, the budget can't balance. Take out 100% of military and other federal departments and it still doesn't balance. If you include unfunded liabilities it's $800,000 per household. Tax rates have to rise to a rate so high that not working would be more profitable.
Game, set, match. Either Medicare and Social Security goes or the United States of America does. Sorry you were lied to old folk, I didn't do it. You're going to be pissed when your IRA's are replaced with TIPS based on a bogus CPI too.
I'm happy to see any math that proves this wrong, but I've seen much to support it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/profile/Sam%20Bowles
It may be that altruistic people who do things for society may also present greater tribalism.
At least that was my take on a series of lectures given by Dr. Bowles.
When you have market share, you can then start to dictate your own terms. If Canonical can make Linux on the desktop more viable and attractive to end users and can build a respectable audience, then software and hardware makers will have to take notice. Until then, we have to play on their own terms. Those terms are to either accept their proprietary crap (if available), and/or develop our own open-source drivers and software.
"You may not be exaggerating, but you're not right either. It was more than a banking collapse that caused the great depression in the 30s, it was a banking collapse, followed by runs on the bank due to the lack of an FDIC"
Not really. Large banks generally felt OK throughout the Great Depression. Small banks, however, were very susceptible.
In any case, FDIC can't help you during a massive bank run. It'll be bankrupt in a minute (well, it IS 'bankrupt' now) - it only has about 1.5% of the total deposit value. And you WILL get a massive bank run if you allow banks to start failing.
So you have two options:
1) Capitalize FDIC using government money.
2) Do not allow banks to fail by capitalizing them with the government money.
Both options have pretty much the same cost. Except that keeping banking system alive allows to unfreeze the credit market.
"The idea that the banks are too strongly inter-linked, and that the fall of AIG would have caused the fall of all banks has been debunked by now."
And that's wrong. For example, without AIG's money from the bailout the JPMorgan bank would have failed.
International banking system at one time was 1 millimeter away from crash. At one point of time, banks even stopped accepting letters of credit. SWIFT transactions began to fail because banks couldn't get enough money on correspondent accounts.
Yeah.
Pain is God trying to be funny. That's how out of touch It is. -- Jeff Lint
How can there possibly be "not enough money"?!? If there is a shortage of money, that means that prices are too low, causing a surplus of goods i.e. a shortage of money. And currently, there is no such situation. There is no such thing as "[not] enough money". Everyone wants more money. It is also true that any amount of money works: the number on the money is meaningless. The money fairy could wave the money wand and double all the numbers on money overnight, and nothing would change, except the exchange ratios/prices would double. When problems happen is when you inflate the money supply, by introducing money into one sector, especially investment banking, loans, etc - this distorts demand, distorts production, and distorts supply of one sector at the expense of another. If trillions of dollars were infused into the economy then by definition inflation has already happened. If prices go up or not is irrelevant -- Can you think why this might be? Hint: It has to do with opportunity cost.
To understand what I mean by distorting capital structures, please read my original link. Interest rates are the price of time, it is how much people are willing to pay for things now as opposed to things later. I.e. I am willing to pay 5%/year more to get a car now, rather than saving my money and getting a car 8 years from now. When you change these interest rates, you engage in price fixing (since a price is an exchange ratio, this includes interest rates), and what does basic economics teach about price fixing? What effects does it cause? You can answer that I think.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
"How can there possibly be "not enough money"?!?"
Quite easily.
" If trillions of dollars were infused into the economy then by definition inflation has already happened. If prices go up or not is irrelevant"
Sorry. That's not the definition of the word 'inflation'. Let me quote Wiki for you: "In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.".
And no, there's almost no inflation by any measure. We probably even have a slight deflation by now according to several ways to measure the inflation.
"If there is a shortage of money, that means that prices are too low, causing a surplus of goods i.e. a shortage of money. "
Nope. You're confusing cause and effect, during the 'shortage of money' prices HAVE to fall. Otherwise people just won't buy your products. This in turn causes other prices to fall, reducing profits (and incentives to invest money), so a vicious cycle is formed. And it's not a hypothesis, you just need to look at Japan.
And what's quite scary, it's really hard to terminate a deflationary cycle. Even with large infusions of cash.
You see, economy is counterintuitive. During the crises the _amount_ of money in the economy does not diminish. So everything should be OK, according to Austrians.
The only way to get a crisis according to Austrians is if your economy has skewed markets (for example, skewed towards construction industry) and once you fix this skew everything should be OK.
However, this argument is stupid: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/the-work-of-depressions/
What happens in reality is quite simple. During a crisis economic agents do not want to spend/re-invest money. This reduces availability of credit, which further reinforces the crisis. So the total amount of money remains the same as before the crisis, but money spends more time as 'dead weight'. So the _effective_ amount of money decreases.
PS: Your link is mostly filled with incoherent blabber. Which is the usual state of things from 'Austrian' School. Please, read something better: Keynes and Friedman (they nicely complement each other), Krugman and others.
Sure, we all gave away code when it helped everyone. The problem comes when there's a social imbalance, and two companies collect the majority of benefit (not just payment, but the community and so on) from the work that we all do. IMO it's a real problem.
Bruce Perens.
Excellent responses -- very good food for thought.
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective. You have given me a lot to ponder.
While I may find hints above of things I might disagree with, overall I'm with you. And even if there are points on which we would disagree, I like the amount of thought you are putting into your views.
Be well, and keep working for what you believe in.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I have read and still read Keynes, Krugman, Friedman, Adam Smith, Rothbard, etc, I'm very aware of the arguments. I happen to see where they disagree with each other and where the fundamental disagreements of opinion are.
Search the article for "monetary inflation" for my use. This is why I use one or the other by name. Inflation != price inflation != monetary inflation.
Shortages and surpluses are caused by prices that are not at equilibrium, really, this is econ 101 stuff. A shortage or surplus is caused by prices not at equilibrium by definition. In an unrestricted market, prices will fall if the demand for money increases (i.e. demand for goods falls). If there is a surplus, people will either hold onto their product if they think they can get a better value for it later on (speculation), or simply drop prices until they can get rid of it.
Japan is a first class example of what not to do and why it doesn't work. Where is the example of the depression where we did nothing? Took no action? In the depression of 1920 we literally did nothing and as a consequence that's about how much mention it gets in history texts these days. Unemployment was worse than the Great Depression, certainly that should have spiraled out of control, right? 1990s Japan and 1930s Hoover alike adopted a policy of easy credit, prop up wages and prices, and protectionism (I think Hoover passed the largest tax increase in US History? Or something close).
Except this hasn't actually happened in the history of the world ever. Lots of "close calls" people try and say, but no proof. Hyperinflation has happened, plenty of times, and is a real threat we are facing today, just ask Zimbabwe. But not one case of prices spiraling down to nothingness. The reasoning is simple, there is an effective several trillion dollars of currency floating around. Who wouldn't buy a house if it were for sale at $1 each? A single person with any savings could buy out the entire country of used houses (indeed this is the case in Michigan). But this would, naturally, increase the marginal price before you could do so and bring prices back up to equilibrium. Common sense and logic dictates there has to be a natural, market decided floor where prices won't fall anymore. It might be hard to see the bottom if demand falls, but it's there. Money isn't something you can endlessly exchange faster and faster, it has real value with respect to time.
It's hard to say with a fractional reserve system, a fractional reserve bank increases the amount of money in the economy by literally creating a new currency that is 1:1 exchangeable (if in limited quantities) for Federal Reserve Dollars. Often during a "panic" the true money supply will be lower than it otherwise would. Even if this weren't the case, a recession would still be likely because the damage has already been done by the previous boom due to artificially cheap credit. You can't wipe out half the capital in the world and expect the economy to still be functional, likewise you can't distort capital structures and expect the economy to still work as it had (for instance, too many houses, too much oil production, consumer goods in general).
The effect of people not wanting to invest money is the cost of time increases, that is, interest rates will go up. This will serve to correct the production structure to become "longer" or "shorter" as necessary. As demand for credit, products changes, prices and supply will change with it, so I don't really see the problem. If a lack of demand was really the problem, then why is the service sector the last to experience the effects of the recession, and why is production the first?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
"Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it. "
For those that want to poo-poo this concept - witness a small 'fruit' company that came into a market saturated and owned completely by dozens of phone vendors with hundreds of commercial phone releases and entrenched service providers. In 5 years it's become the phone of choice. Why? Not because it's based on a unix software, not because it's open, not because it offers choice/DRM-free content/or any other of these niceties. In fact, it does all of these things WRONG - and STILL completely destroys the rest of the market and companies that have done the nice things. Why? Because - really - 99% of the average users just want to play youtube videos, surf the web, post on facebook and have it all supported by some happy fraternety/sorority kids. They could 100% care less about some tech feature-list of a piece of hardware; they want interwebz, youtube clips, instant access to lady gaga's newest music, cool fart apps, and they want it all from one storefront so they don't have to think about. They'll even pay a higher price for the hardware, software, AND DRM'ed content to get it. They. don't. care. about. the. nerd. stuff.
They buy it because it has learned how to be the coolest kid in high school - and everyone wants to be around them. You can hate those kids as much as you want. You can rant against them because they aren't the smartest or fastest. But they are the coolest and/or most beautiful - so they walk charmed lives. Why does this happen? There are reasons and pricinples - but it does - and it will as long as we have human nature; any you better learn that principle as a software engineer if you want to make your own way or start working for someone who does.
I'm a 15 year software professional and I've learned that the race rarely goes to the most 'empirically correct' answer. What good is a solution if nobody uses it? It's got to be written from the standpoint that it *solves a real problem* your users have - and solves in the way *they want/need it solved*. The second you say "well, they should do it this way because..." you have already failed.
I know the intricate details of Linux, but don't want to be bothered by them, so I choose to use Ubuntu.
Then you won't know many intricate details of Linux after some time. Linux is very dynamic, and people not keeping in touch with the developments lose their "expertise". Maybe some essentials remain constant - but knowledge enough to be able to debug and troubleshoot is mostly lost within 1 or 2 years. Not that it is necessarily undesirable - maybe you don't care, which is fine.
Though your C, python case is right - C is not that dynamic.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Some of us can't get decent medical insurance at any price, thru no fault of our own. I have a medical problem that will kill me one day - probably within the next ten years or so, I've already way outlived the estimates the doctors gave me when I was a kid - and have been denied coverage because of it.
I would like to say that I admire the courage and strength it must take to prove all the doctors wrong every day by surviving and prospering. I believe that the same recent health care reform law that introduced the $950 tax for not having medical insurance has also made it so that you cannot be denied coverage because of your preexisting condition, which has always been a ridiculous dodge used by greedy insurance companies. As a result, there is hope that you WILL be able to get "decent medical insurance", though it remains to be seen at what price. I don't believe that the parent was talking about people who are unable to get medical coverage like you, only people like the GP who when offered it (and can afford it) choose not to get coverage, then (for some unknown reason) expect that the rest of us will pick up the tab when misfortune takes them to $PUBLIC_HOSPITAL for a liver transplant ($235K), and forget that while they're getting it, they'll be out of work (and still paying for electricity, heat, mortgage, property tax, food), plus they'll be on $20,000/yr worth of anti-rejection meds, too.
I'm not rich, but neither am I poor, and I work hard. Really damned hard. I'm reasonably intelligent and raised a daughter on my fucking own who has turned out to be one helluva lot better person than her old man ever dreamed of being. I volunteer my time and labor when others need it, and live well within my means because I think that greed is one of the worst problems in society.
And this is why denying you participation in health insurance is so unconscionable. You should have the ability to responsibly prepare for health emergencies, just like anyone else. That the system ever denied participation to you is a symptom of how broken it has become - and why reform was needed. I don't think what we ended up with was ideal, but I'm all for continued reform as we see what works and what doesn't.
If you're so concerned about some of your tax money going to help out people who are less fortunate than you are, then drop out of society and go live somewhere else on your own - cut your own firewood, kill your own meat, grow your own food - let's see how far you get with that. (BTW, I do all of those and more)
While I'm not the GP, I certainly don't mind some of my tax money going to aid those who are less fortunate. I believe that he was replying to someone who was complaining about paying $950 in taxes for not purchasing health care (when that person had such an option) - primarily because choosing to not purchase health insurance is effectively opting into the system of "last resort", where people who have prepared adequately for their own medical calamities end up footing the bill. The $950/yr isn't a "fine", it's merely the premium of the cheapest health insurance that exists - health insurance with a deductible of $(all your assets). Because we know that once you've run through the $500K in the bank with the transplant and all the meds, they're not going to stop treating you, they're just going to pass the cost along to everyone else.
Sure, there are freeloaders out there. But they are a far smaller percentage of the population than the wags on Fox News and the tea party idiots would have everyone believe.
I agree. But being denied health insurance doesn't make you a freeloader, it makes you a victim of a greedy system. Having the option to get health insurance, turning it down, and then expecting that when you run out of assets, the system will continue to provide health care anyway - that would be what the GP was talking about. I believe he was trying to illustr
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
"Who in their right mind would work if 90% of ever dollar earned went to the government?"
Citation needed. See also, for endless citations why what is implied in your first statement is wrong:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
"It's those high income people who buy big ticket items that create jobs."
Citation needed. In reality, this suggests they plow their money into the "casino" economy of derivatives, etc.:
"Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
Poor and middle class people usually spend every dollar they have in the real economy.
"You really think they are going to work 80-100 hours a week like most small businesspeople I know if they know almost everything they are working for is going to be taken away from them? They are going to shut down their business, or at least reduce them in size until they get down to a much smaller tax burden. That means a major loss in jobs for everyone else."
And if the work needs to be done, there will be twice as many 40 hour jobs. Citation to the contrary needed otherwise. Many people don't succeed in business because of this "arms race" of crazy hours. You're suggesting forcing people to work crazy hours and neglect their family and volunteer civic activities in their community is a good thing? It would seem to be something better engineered away. Maybe our society would be a lot better off if such businesses did shut down (in the context of a basic income, or a gift economy, or resource based planning, or stronger self-reliant local communities), since the families and communities of workaholics would be happier?
"The high tax rates are what dragged out the recovery from the Great Depression. The more you tax a person the less money he has to spend."
Citation needed, because progressive taxes work differently, as would a progressive tax redirected to a "basic income".
"The less money he has to spend the fewer products he buys. The fewer products that are bought the more the economy shrinks."
A "basic income" guaranteed to all through the government (along with a high tax on income beyond that) would ensure steady market demand, evenly distributed. That is where I'd suggest most of the tax goes -- back to the people to be more evenly distributed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If 50% of the US GDP was taxed and redistributed evenly, it would still leave a GDP equivalent to what the US had around 1993 to motivate those who wanted more. The 1993 GDP was enough to motivate entrepreneurs then, why should it not be enough now?
"And since it is private business that creates jobs and funds government what's the net effect? Less economic growth."
Citation needed. Governments can get revenues from renting public resources like land, spectrum, and fishing rights; they can tax monopoly patents and copyrights; they can print money which is non-inflationary as long as what is printed is what is needed through economic growth, and so on. When a baby grows physically, parents are happy; when an adult grows physically, it may be cancer. We need to move to economics not so dependent on endless "growth" based on, essentially, a financial pyramid scheme of endless increasing debt.
"Think about it."
I have thought about it. A government with a sovereign currency works differently than the logic of finance for an individual, especially a government with rentable assets (which are often being given away now in corrupt sweetheart deals) and which also has a legitimate right to step in and deal with externalities (whether negative externalities like pollution and risk of war or economic collapse, or positive externalities like healthier peopl
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
First, I'm very impressed with what Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical have done with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. It is my impression that the effect of Ubuntu has been to encourage everyone to fix a lot of configuration and other problems that were, in the aggregate, creating a barrier to beginning to use Linux.
There was a period of of years in which I would load new versions of Linux from several sources and be amazed at how much a new user was expected to know about configuration.
It doesn't matter if Ubuntu and Canonical did the work; Canonical's leadership caused the job to be done.
You said, "Isn't that what Shuttleworth is trying to assess?"
Assessing, being analytical, is what I think Mark Shuttleworth should do. Instead, he is doing very little assessing or analyzing. He is using a common word, tribalism, apparently to avoid taking an interest in all the steps of a complex social phenomenon.
He apparently hopes someone else will do the analyzing and theorizing about how to handle his problem.
In his article, he has made some useful comments. But calling anger a "playground squabble" shows the lack of depth in his thinking. When he says "playground squabble" he is implying that the people to whom he is talking are acting like children. That's an attempt to shame or intimidate; it's not analysis.
What is happening in actuality? My guess is that the anger comes from trying to work on a complicated project with too little coordination. People are blaming each other rather than the cause of the problem. They do that because they don't feel socially empowered to criticize the lack of true leadership.
Notice that Linux Torvalds gets different results. Although Mr. Torvalds sometimes lacks social elegance, he has provided true leadership, and that leadership has provided an atmosphere in which people work together. I am not saying Mr. Torvalds' leadership has been perfect. It has been amazingly good, however. Who would have thought the world would come together and create the kernel of a good computer operating system for everyone to use?
When we talked at OSCON 2008, Mr. Shuttleworth asked me what I thought about how to handle anger. I've done extensive analysis of anger, and I told him what I think. However, as I said in the former paragraph, I don't think anger is the correct fundamental diagnosis of his present problem. The "tribalism" he describes is in this case just a symptom of the lack of sufficient coordination, I'm guessing.
I gave Mr. Shuttleworth printed copies of a 27-page manual that can be downloaded from my web site that shows part of my ability to understand how sociology and technology interact. I have no evidence that he read it.
My understanding is that Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical has never made a profit. For example, see the November 2, 2008 article Canonical founder will wait for profits. Canonical's biggest shortcoming, in my opinion, is the poor marketing and public relations. The article referenced in this Slashdot story is a good example of poor public relations. It says to the business community, "I don't know how to handle this situation well."
I think that, if Canonical had professional marketing and public relations, it would have no trouble making a profit. Numerous articles say, "You can't make a profit selling a desktop operating system", but I think that is not the problem.
In my opinion, Mr. Shuttleworth is facing a problem that, if solved, could be life-changing for him. If he is willing to encounter the difficulties of personal growth, Canonical will be a success, and his life will be enriched. If he is not willing, Canonical may never make a profit.
Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers.
Can you elaborate on this part? I use Ubuntu, but I guess I just don't see how they stand between me and the developers in any negative way. If they deviate Ubuntu packages significantly from their Debian roots and go in a strange direction and/or fail to contribute back to the upstream, they will eventually be unable to accept any of the patches from upstream, and they will then have completely forked and be on their own. If they do that, one of two things is likely to occur. One, they will fail to keep up with new features and fixes that come from the community, and they will stagnate and become useless (likely); or two, they will succeed wildly, because they saw a need that was going unfulfilled, and the market of users (and developers) flocks to what they've done, and eventually Debian drops the original branch of the package and picks up the Ubuntu fork (less likely). Either way, as a user, if I want to step around Ubuntu and get my packages directly from the developer community by pointing to a different repository or building from the source, are they really stopping me? And, they are releasing their source code, right? If they're not, well, then I also would have a significant problem with them.
Is the problem that the developers that Canonical pays are developing things that Canonical wants, not things that you want? And as a result, their patches are not applicable / desirable in the upstream? If so, I would suggest that this is why they pay them - if you don't pay developers, then they produce only what they as developers want to produce (and well they should!) If you wanted Canonical to pay you, you'd have to do what Canonical wants, and not what you want - and really, it sounds like you would not really be happy with that arrangement at all. I can't say I blame you, you have a completely different set of (noble, worthwhile) goals. I guess I just don't see how what they are doing diminishes you or your work in any way, as long as they uphold their part of the agreement and release the source, so that you can (if you should so desire) adapt their work to be useful to you. Yes, it would be nice all around if they could pick up more of the "common ground" work, and perhaps they should be shamed a bit for that. But I think they've been an overall positive factor in advancing acceptance of free & open source software with users.
It doesn't matter. Unless you weigh into the elder welfare programs, the budget can't balance.
Clinton balanced the budget during his term in office. Have elder programs expanded that much in thirteen years?
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
The worst thing I've ever seen come out of the open source world is the Ubuntu One Music Store. I can understand selling promotional T-Shirts and coffee mugs, but why is an "open source" organization is running a clone of the iTunes Store is beyond me.
Probably to make money, and to cater to all the people out there who like things simple. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? I wouldn't calll it "the worst thing," though I can't say I've ever used it.
Not everyone wants your idea of a system; get over it.
Then we can reasonably expect it will fail on its own, no need to be snippy about it. Just wait.
Frisky pornstar
This type of action by Bush was the reason his approval numbers were so low
Let's not rewrite history. George W. Bush had abysmally low approval ratings prior to the egregious incident of corporate socialism you refer to.
Fail. You can't make a verb out of it.
...I believe the blog post that pointed this out is the "stuff that Mark didn't want to hear".
I side with the blogger. Mark shouldn't be a weenie and try and hide behind bad rhetoric.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I never read a more true and insightful a comment.
Case in point - Ubuntu's fugly color schemes. I made fun of them for years, and all the ubuntu fanbois defended them
Umm, no? Seriously, almost every Ubuntu user I know of HATES the color scheme (even the newest one - though I'll admit that it's an improvement). However, it's a very easily changeable option. First thing I did on 10.04 was to flip the buttons back to the right, change the default font sizes, make the color scheme back into a more palatable light grey/blue scheme, new wallpaper and change the icon theme. Took all of 15 minutes tops.
I use Ubuntu because things tend to work well, and software updates are relatively painless. An annoying color scheme that can be changed with a few clicks isn't going to affect my distro of choice much.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm not a big fan of deductions either. My point was that the health care bill is business as usual. I just don't get how it's markedly different than what came before.
I'm sorry you got worked up -- I think you misread my position, and made some assumptions too.
I believe we NEED a public option, to cover people such as yourself, and I have no problem with paying in more than I get out, if I'm lucky enough to stay healthy.
My post was in response to Commodore64_love's stance. He claims he shouldn't have to pay in at all, since he's young and healthy. My response was, ok, fine... but then you should never be eligible for any public healthcare, since you didn't pay in when you didn't need it.
And when I refer to "freeloaders", I'm not referring to people who pay in if they are able to. I'm referring to people like C64_love who don't want to pay in, and yet when push comes to shove, will avail themselves of public aid.
I hope you understand that my position is probably similar to yours, and my post was directed at C64_love as a comment on his idea that he shouldn't have to pay into public health insurance because he doesn't use it.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
If you go back and read my post, you'll see that I was responding to another post. I actually support public healthcare. What I don't support are the jackasses like C64_love who don't want to pay into the system and yet will gladly avail themselves of public assistance should push come to shove. It's the inconsistency of their stance that bothers me...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Thanks for your post -- you're spot on with your interpretation of my post.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Thank you. I apologize for my remarks - I did indeed misread your post; I've heard way too much of the rhetoric from the far right* in the last couple years, I'm afraid, and I jerked my own knee pretty badly ;-[ What really pisses me off about a lot of that rhetoric is that it tends to come from people who are well enough off that they don't have to worry about paying their own way, much less about health insurance or another thousand dollars on their annual taxes. I'm self employed again because my last employer couldn't deal with me being away from work here and there when I got sick. I'm better off for it in some ways, tho, my customers understand. Still scratching pennies, but at least it's MY pennies ;-)...
They just don't understand what it's like to work extremely hard for a living and yet wonder what will happen when the inevitable occurs; and wonder who's going to pay the bills after one is gone.
Again, I apologize. It wasn't YOUR stupidity that pushed my buttons.
GSVEMR
* and others, attitudes like that are hardly partisan
Thanks for your well thought out remarks. As has been pointed out here on slashdot before and is especially transparent in this thread, rational discourse is a rare occurrence in modern society.
Your remarks about partisan rancor on slashdot are spot on, as far as I'm concerned. I've been haunting this site for a long time, and it seems to be devolving into another echo of the partisan idiocy that is sweeping our country lately.
I'd gladly pay four or five times that thousand dollars a year in extra taxes, even at my (under "poverty level") current income, if it gets me at least the level of health care that my friends in Canada and Europe get merely from being taxpaying citizens. As far as I am concerned, one of the things that government *should* be doing is taking care of it's citizens, ensuring they are in good health, and, er, "productive" (yeah, there's some sarcastic irony there...)
You have said more truth in those last two sentence than I have read in a long time.
It's no truth that ain't been said before here.
For what it's worth, which ain't much, I think that Shuttleworth was spot on with what he was talking about - and specifically about the FOSS community.
Keep beating the odds.
I don't know any other way to live.
GSVEMR
>and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
Neither does buying insurance. My current girlfriend worked for the state and had health insurance. She got cancer and went bankrupt within 3 years. The state fired her, her insurance dropped her, and here we are. She's fully recovered, in remission for a couple of years etc, but she's still un-insurable and basically unemployable. She had to start her own company to get a job. She's doing fine without insurance.
You are better off not paying for health insurance because if something serious happens you are fucked anyway. There will be some loop-hole for your employer and your insurance to drop you. If something minor happens, you will be able to pay for it.
So what good does it do again? You've obviously never had a real problem or you wouldn't be writing this drivel.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
There are other Debian based distributions out there, but even as I make that point I know it does not make yours any less relevant. If Canonical is making money off of Ubuntu and Ubuntu is being based off of Debian I don't see how they can possibly push a position of "we support free software and the community" without actually financially supporting Debian or at least contributing development time to the Debian project - which they could then simply integrate directly into Ubuntu so it's just a matter of who's directions and schedules the developers are following.
Yeah, Medicare Part D for one. Thank Bush for that. Plus the baby boom retiring. And unfunded liabilities (even Ross Perot was on about that, Clinton never acknowledged them in his 'balance'). Remember all that talk about the Social Security 'lockbox' in the 90's?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That issue was fixed in 9.10. The MySQL daemon wasn't fully converted over to Upstart.
I'm currently still seeing it in 10.04LTS, after doing something very simple and reasonable that selinux would have been able to handle with no problem. So the "solution" of apparmor being easier still didn't solve anything - I just lost the power of Selinux, and traded it for something that hangs updates. Because hey, after all, if I'm installing mysql-server then OBVIOUSLY i want it to start during the install process, right? And replacing init with Upstart, when it is no where near ready for production use even now several releases later, was a bad move. Mysql is a very basic thing to want to have working on a average, run-of-the-mill, lowend server; ie, the Ubuntu Server target audience. What sort of testing occurred?
And it was also just an example. Maybe you can explain why this bug still exists? Does Canonical think that using ldaps to auth a machine is unimportant? And that's as a *client*, so that means Ubuntu can't be used as a workstation OS where ldaps is in use, unless you do something like I suggested in comment #91. This is the sort of thing that happens when people do feature updates downstream without submitting upstream; Canonical has intentionally fostered a culture of people not doing the right thing (kudos for you for not being among them) with code changes, and as a result has created their own divergent forks that they now have to continuously spend time remerging with their proprietary changes. RedHat does a feature freeze with only bug updates per release; that's *reasonable* because it creates a reliable basis for people to develop upon. How much do they change basic things like apache, mysql, etc - without submitting things upstream? Almost none at all.
I could go on. The point is merely that Shuttleworth is whining about a problem he created; people aren't being unfair to him. He tried to change too much, had too big an ego, and that might have worked anyway (like it does for many others in the OSS community)...if so many basic things weren't broken. Wanting a laptop to start faster (hence Upstart) is no reason to break servers. Solutions should solve the problems they're aimed to; in many cases with Ubuntu tools, the "solution" mainly just makes new problems.
But, they can still turn it around. They do have a large base, after all...and they did hop on the Cloud sooner than others, so they've got a head start there.
ps - I'd really like Canonical to answer some day why removing /etc/postfix means I can no longer install postfix. It's not even enough to just create the directory.
If i *remove* an app, I want it gone. If I'm *installing* an app, do everything necessary to install it. I see no other distribution with this problem...especially ones that use that icky rpm which is supposedly so inferior.
That issue was fixed in 9.10. The MySQL daemon wasn't fully converted over to Upstart.
I'm currently still seeing it in 10.04LTS, after doing something very simple and reasonable that selinux would have been able to handle with no problem. So the "solution" of apparmor being easier still didn't solve anything - I just lost the power of Selinux, and traded it for something that hangs updates. Because hey, after all, if I'm installing mysql-server then OBVIOUSLY i want it to start during the install process, right? And replacing init with Upstart, when it is no where near ready for production use even now several releases later, was a bad move. Mysql is a very basic thing to want to have working on a average, run-of-the-mill, lowend server; ie, the Ubuntu Server target audience. What sort of testing occurred?
It was fixed, but it appears that it broke again (possibly due to some sort of typo in the upstart script, if I understand it correctly). There is an update going out right now to fix this. Please check to see if it solves your issue.
And it was also just an example. Maybe you can explain why this bug still exists? Does Canonical think that using ldaps to auth a machine is unimportant? And that's as a *client*, so that means Ubuntu can't be used as a workstation OS where ldaps is in use, unless you do something like I suggested in comment #91.
Well, that isn't my area of expertise, and the issue doesn't seem to be a blanket "LDAP does work", but rather a particular combination of issues breaks LDAP. But, I could be mis-understanding it, though.
This is the sort of thing that happens when people do feature updates downstream without submitting upstream; Canonical has intentionally fostered a culture of people not doing the right thing (kudos for you for not being among them) with code changes, and as a result has created their own divergent forks that they now have to continuously spend time remerging with their proprietary changes.
Yes, the Ubuntu community has shot from the hip fairly often and just made changes without working them back upstream. Maybe this comes from the mindset that developed while they work on making extensive changes to the desktop and not have those changes accepted back upstream (because the changes weren't mature enough)? Well, we as a community have been working to change that mindset for the past year (at least, I have seen it this way) and are really trying to get developers to think about the upstream more and to improve workflows to make this easier and more reliable.
I do agree that we need better testing and QA. RedHat has an extensive build testing system and has worked hard to develop good release practices and checklists. I would like to see Canonical do the same.
Meh, I have always preferred RPM anyway, even with its faults. It seems that apt is a little too paranoid while rpm is a little too lax. If you are still having issues, I believe doing a forced remove should completely remove postfix from the database and then allow you to reinstall it, but I am hardly an expert with apt/deb.