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Why Richard Stallman Was Right All Along
jrepin sends this excerpt from an opinion piece at OSNews:
"Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia — but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality."
Perhaps not the best spokesperson to get behind.
It is funny that you complain the article is logically flawed when you make an argument from authority and complain about the messenger instead of the message.
... leads to the concentration of wealth and power which naturally leads to dictatorship.
GPL3 licensed code in the Linux kernel would have made a huge difference to people building their own versions of android to install on phones. But Linus didn't want to go there.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I have yet to see a nation or government take the official stance that Occupy are terrorists. Squatters, freedom-of-speech-abusers, illegal encampments, yes, but not terrorists.
While I decry the NDAA and SOPA as much as anyone, I'll not buy into the Occupy claims of victimization and persecution when they squatted for TWO MONTHS before the police were sent in to clear them out. You have a right to protest, to share your ideas, and to educate the public. You do NOT have the right to squat in public spaces until the world does things your way, or we'd still have grey-haired hippies camped out all across the nation demanding that you "free the weed."
I certainly won't buy any paranoid claims that they're going to be locked up as terrorists.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The detention legislation was attached to the military spending bill for the next year and he did release a signing statement specifically stating that he didn't like it.
Here let me quote RMS on voluntary pedophilia:
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
He's sceptical of the argument against it but he didn't say it should be legal. My understanding is his judgement is reserved and he wants clarification of why it should be illegal.
It's almost as if you are spreading misinformation about him.
According to TFA's TFA
"The administration also pushed Congress to change a provision that would have denied U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism the right to trial and could have subjected them to indefinite detention. Lawmakers eventually dropped the military custody requirement for U.S. citizens or lawful U.S. residents"
I haven't checked the text of the legislation, but this seems to indicate that it's still only foreigners Bush IV can lock up forever.
they used the Patriot Act against the Occupy Wall Street protestors :). This folks, is why I'm a left wing socialist. And for those of you keeping score Obama centrist leaning to the right (or a liberal without the stomach for a good fight, but same thing really).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Stallman said:
prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced.
Meanwhile, Tea Party groups have been labeled with every epithet the left and mainstream media could throw at them and are actually more peaceful and law-abiding than the average Occupy *** protest. Welcome to the club. You're not special.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
GPL3 licensed code in the Linux kernel would have made a huge difference to people building their own versions of android to install on phones.
While I wish we had that - a GPL3 licensed Linux kernel would not have been used in android. It probably would have been a BSD derivative.
It's a little more complicated than that. If he signs it it means he thinks
signing the legislation is a better option than not signing the legislation --
not that it's a good law. Sometimes tradeoffs are made, especially
in the f**ked up federal legislature that runs (poorly) the US right now.
Funny, the captcha was "corrupt".
Its amusing that the only time I hear this is from someone on the other side
Yea sure, red candidates can forget one of their three major campaign points, and that is ok, they are just human ... Obama on the other hand misses a button on his coat and its the fucking focus of his incompetency on Fox New Radio for a week
There's no relationship between government overstepping the mark and buying a proprietary product from a company you respect because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice unrestricted access to its innards.
Yes there is. The relationship is risk.
HTH.
Deleted
This article is nothing but flamebait. It's misleading and incorrect and designed only to generate mass negative posts. Enough already, I know this is slashdot but this is too much.
Lots of other people also pointed to a loss of more and more freedom. (Libertarians have been doing it for longer than Stallman has, for instance, and they're consistent instead of obsessing about one issue.) To pick out this one issue and claim that it means "Stallman was right" doesn't make any sense. Stallman might not trust government, but then, many other people also don't trust government -- and they don't necessarily agree with Stallman's views. So it's some pretty screwy logic to claim that this proves Stallman was right about anything.
Agreed. Not only would free software not protect you but it's the wrong approach.
Open source software doesn't stop the government from infringing your constitutional rights. What you need to do is protect those above all else. And that requires *ACTION* on the part of the people. There wasn't enough outcry to stop it. If there was it wouldn't have happened.
Furthermore the obsession with open source software as a catch-all ignores the fact that it's unlikely that my 3D modeling application is going to infringe my constitutional rights somehow just as my closed source washing machine probably has minimal impact of my privacy.
Lastly you can install Linux all you want, but that won't protect you from the government installing a rootkit, unless you magically re-compile your kernel every morning and even then it's possible to sneak in a back-door. The simple truth is that if someone wants to spy on you... they will. What's important isn't whether they spy on you but that you protect your rights in a court of law so that none of that is admissible.
And even then the entire chain has to be secure... which is impossible. So if you ever attach your computer to a network you are probably using a closed insecure network. Everything is becoming a computer. To say that computers is the future is of course accurate, and Stallman I suppose is accurate in that regard... but just because my refrigerator is networked and a computer doesn't mean I need to be able to see the source code for the temperature control.
It's his claim that we shouldn't listen to Stallman because Stallman is a nut-job. It's a sort of reverse argument from authority, where he claims that the other side is so insane, you should listen to him (he's comparatively authoritative). Stallman's general utter lunacy isn't a legitimate test of the validity of any specific argument he makes.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia" should be legal, including possession of child pornography.
While I definitely disagree with him about child porn, I may be in the minority if I say I don't have anything against necrophilia. No, I have no interest in corpses myself, I'm disgusted by them, but that shouldn't be the only basis for denying other people that. A corpse is a corpse, simple as that, and a corpse doesn't care anymore what happens to it. Just have it illegal to rob graves or such, but leave the actual act of necrophilia legal for those who have obtain their corpses legally, ie. by e.g. people who like the idea that someone will hump their dead corpse after their gone themselves. People are so strange that there is bound to be people like that, too.
I guess you're saying that Richard Stallman is the modern day Thomas Paine?
Stuff like this is why I have no idea how you fight this sort of thing. The average person doesn't care. The people I talk about this to in RL look at me and ask what the problem is as it would never be them that gets targeted. Oh no.
All of this has gotten so bad that you look like a tin hat wearer just trying to explain what is going on now.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
How about this: The messenger in this case [RMS] has nothing to do with the current state of affairs. There is no correlation. No prognostication.
Is that a satisfactory summary?
Gasp! You mean the Obama-messiah is less than divinely perfect? Whoa... gonna have to sit down... re-evaluate my religious beliefs...
Never fear, there's still the Paul-messiah to believe in! I'm convinced he would never let messy political realities factor into his political decisions...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Do you mean that the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I believe that's argument from incredulity. It's usual form is something like, "This guy's ideas are wrong because he can't properly format a hyperlink and is therefore retarded and because of his idiocy his ideas are also wrong." While it's true the GGP can't properly format hyperlinks, that doesn't make his conclusions wrong; it just makes him either stupid, ignorant or lazy.
Yeah that's pretty much the definition of "last year". Would you prefer they wrote "this year" so as to be incorrect?
What Stallman? the founder of GNU? Jesus Christ! That man is a maniac. Don't tell me that a person who doesn't know what a graphic user interface is and that is communist can think and is normal...
The article started not that bad, but not through the end "This is why you should support Android " Seriously ??? Quoting mr RMS : "Even though the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones, they cannot be said to respect your freedom." http://digitizor.com/2011/09/20/richard-stallman-android-free-software/ I am not here for bashing android, but where are the GNU phones folks ? openmoko ? meego/maemo ? tizen ?
-- http://rzr.online.fr/
While it's true the GGP can't properly format hyperlinks, that doesn't make his conclusions wrong; it just makes him either stupid, ignorant or lazy.
You left out an option. Perhaps he thought he had it right, checked over it twice to be sure, but simply made a mistake anyhow. Happens all the time. This is why two personnel are required to double check tasks in some environments.
Really, you shouldn't make comments about logical fallacies if you don't know what they actually are. There is no argument from authority. He points out the fact that nothing Stallman has said or done would have any effect on the legislation nor on what is being said about the Occupy protesters. He also points out Stallman's obviously poor thinking in numerous things.
At best he engages in some ad hominem.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
A corpse is a corpse
Of course, of course. But no one can talk to a corpse, of course.
(posted A.C. because I've already moderated)
Don't tell me that a person who doesn't know what a graphic user interface is and that is communist can think and is normal...
you are the fucked up moron here, and your ilk is the one continually voting morons who are passing such dastardly bills into power.
in any other part of the world, after spending this sentence, you wouldnt be even labeled politely with the label of 'stupid'. people would think you were either
a) moron
b) bloodthirsty fascist
but thankfully, in america it is free to be a fascist and then claim to the contrary that everyone else is.
rejoice ! capitalists are going to throw you in infinite detention without cause, LEGALLY, OPENLY, and merrily.
in all kinds of twisted country which bastardized communism with dictatorship, such things were done secretly, behind the doors, without there being anything in the open - they were not particularly compatible with the political ideals.
but, mind-fuckingly, doing such things seems completely compatible with the political ideals of 'freedom' that exists in capitalism ! rejoice !! did i tell that it is going to be openly legal to do so too ?
Read radical news here
in a veto-proof manner, after Obama had the language softened, and it doesn't apply to any random American, and it doesn't apply to anyone labeled a 'terrorist', only to people associated with specific terrorist groups.
I don't agree with the slippery slope this legislation started, but please, Enough With the Sensationalism.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Broken? I was going to say that even a batshit crazy clock can be right every couple decade.
RE: "You do NOT have the right to squat in public spaces until the world does things your way, or we'd still have grey-haired hippies camped out all across the nation demanding that you "free the weed." "
Actually everyone has the right to squat in public spaces for as long as they want for any reason. That is, if you support the Constitution.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I also like Gary Johnson who is now running Libertarian. Although I don't like Ron Paul's foreign policy it could save us trillions and would make a lot of anti war people happy. I'm worried about what might happen as we remove ourselfs from the rest of the world. Them 2 (Paul and Johnson) are the only 2 politicians thus far that I trust speak their minds.
Yea sure, red candidates can forget one of their three major campaign points, and that is ok, they are just human
Heh, by 'ok' you mean his popularity dropped like a rock after that?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is very unlikely that the software itself would directly protect against the police state mentality, BUT, the philosophy underlying the Free (as in speech) software movement is deeply rooted in individual rights (to know, to learn, and to tinker) as well as social mores that encourage cooperation. Closed source software values include the use of big-money and power to bludgeon competitors into the dust (e.g., look at the whole patent debacle), a value fully in line with the assumption of tyrannical powers by the Bush and Obama administrations with respect to civil liberties. Had those administrations been permeated with a care for individual freedom and human rights, their administrations would have looked wholly different, and if there were more people who bought into the Free software philosophy, there might not have been enough gullible voters to elect these neo-cons.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I directly addressed the message in the very first paragraph of my post: free software wouldn't have stopped the government behavior that's being criticized here.
The article is about the messenger. It's called "Why Richard Stallman Was Right All Along." I pointed out other beliefs of Stallman's that are not so obviously right to illustrate the fact that just because someone spends 30 years being paranoid about everything, and then an event occurs that justifies a portion of that paranoia, it doesn't automatically mean all of his philosophy is correct or that his solutions are the right ones. For crying out loud, the guy thinks possession of child pornography should be legal.
"Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities"
Are there examples of this?
I've heard them labeled as (paraphrasing) shiftless, stupid, smelly losers costing taxpayers money.
I know this is probably to late to post this, but hopefully this will enlighten some people.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/the-ndaa-the-good-the-bad-and-the-laws-of-war-part-i/
So if I'm a paranoid nut job, I'm supposed to trust a Chinese Lemote notebook not to spy on me?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.
stallman said this. and it is happening - private corporations and governments are separately and in conjunction trying to control everything.
so far so good, right ? and you are asking, 'what does this have to do with free software', right ?
are you idiots ? what are we turning to, as this trend gets more serious ? software that is free, and uncontrollable, and circumvents any kinds of bans/gateways/filters ? from tor to proxies, to free oses that thankfully run these ? imagine what would have happened if instead of linux, some jacked up windows nt server was the basis for the web at large today ? all it would take microsoft to twist us in the balls would be to prevent certain software (proxy, vpn) from running on their servers with a 'security update' when local governments requested it and voila !
dont at a moment think that 'they wouldnt do that'. they DO that. we have seen endless cases of repression cooperation, user-busting, shady dealings get to news in slashdot and we discussed under their summaries here, altogether. so, dont at a moment dumb down and think they wouldnt - they ARE doing it.
and what would happen if stallman did not come with those 'radical' ideas, and relentlessly pushed for them ? we would be living in a more closed, private internet, and we would have been already grabbed by our balls long ago. At least now, we are on the cliff's edge - with all this sopa and shit. we maybe have a chance.
so wise up. world history has been exclusively changed for the better by radicals in the last 2 centuries. here's another, and he is talking good stuff. the fact that these stuff may be too futuristic or utopic for you, would just put you in early 1900s moron's shoes if you come up and claim that he is nuts. everyone ranging from wright brothers to nikola tesla were dubbed as nuts at some point. even thomas paine, was shamefully labeled as a lunatic. now noone can dare argue against the principles he had spearheaded, in a scientific environment - they have become de facto basis of freedom of scientific thought from dogma and religion.
if you did not know who even thomas paine was, i am wondering what the fuck you were doing in a thread, labeling someone who was a radical visionary, as a nut.
Read radical news here
His inability to not appear to be a raving madman insured that his message would be lost to the masses.
If no one listens, who cares if you are right or wrong?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is stupid. I'm not SharkLaser. Email a Slashdot admin if you don't believe me.
- bonch (posting anonymously because the trolls apparently have moderator points today)
The problem here isn't that some software isn't free as in dollar cost, or even that it isn't free as in "I have the source code." Either of those -- or both at the same time -- can be malware.
The actual problem (here in the US) is that our government has vastly exceeded its constitutionally assigned authority. Either we fix that, or the problem remains. The constitution sets the absolute limits of legitimate authority, and the 4th amendment is very clear that the government is not authorized to obtain the warrant required to poke into our papers, our domiciles, our person, or our effects unless they (1) have probable cause, (2) supported by oath or affirmation, (3) describing the place to be searched, and (4) describing the person(s) or thing(s) to be seized.
We, the citizens, are responsible for this mess: We have repeatedly let the government step out of line, violating the constitution, accepting virtually any excuse the government handed out like credulous idiots.
We have a chance to throw a monkey wrench in this and at least promote a national dialog on the subject by voting for Ron Paul this time around. Regardless of if you agree with his specific policies, he offers us one critical thing that is more valuable than anything else any other candidate brings to the table: He respects, honors, and will obey the constitution. That means he'll serve as a roadblock against further unconstitutional legislation (which we are obviously in dire need of), limiting what gets through to those bills that can muster enough cross-aisle support to override a presidential veto.
Free software isn't going to save us. Only by putting in place a properly constituted and obedient government can we be saved. And that's going to be a much more difficult road, perhaps an impossible one, if we don't step up to the plate and do something now.
The pundits are right about one thing: time has truly run out. If you read these most recent bills, they are stunning in their overreach, blatant violations of the oaths sworn to uphold and defend the constitution by the lawmakers and any other public official who has supported these bills. This time it isn't just the felons, the people on the various government lists, foreigners, and people who want to fly who are going to get screwed.
This time, it's you. What are you going to do about it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Misses a button on his coat? Are you serious? Obama's term looks exactly like a GWB third term would look like. You may not want to believe it, but Obama's policies have been horrid and his record on human rights, heinous.
http://nothingchanged.org/
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Everything he said here was true.
>
Everything he said here was true too.
I guess he cut the deficit in half.
Nobody in his administration accepts gifts from lobbyists, and of course there arent any earmarks any more, and you have 5 days to look at bills before he signs them, and he enumerates which corporations gets tax breaks before he signs those bills as well.
Its amusing that you get modded up for lying about Obama not lying. Even Bill Clinton noted during Obama's election campaign that Obama's constant lying about the Iraq war was "the biggest fairy tale I have ever seen."
Its not like we can go on and on providing seemingly endless links to videos of him lying or anything.
"His name was James Damore."
RMS is a technohippie, an archetypical one. The hippies were right about everything:
Sex
Drugs
Rock & roll
Vietnam, and war in general
Nixon, and politicians in general
Capitalism (as practiced, not as they lie to us in school about it)
Religion, and dogma in general
Computers
Freedom
--
make install -not war
Well, so was countless other paranoid individuals that were saying the same thing. But didn't have a podium.
Even i have been predicting this stuff ( and more which is in the works for coming to pass ) for the last 20 years or so, but that doesn't make me special. It just makes me right.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's not an argument from authority, that's the definition of an ad hominem argument. Instead of attacking the message, you attack the messenger.
For another relatively contemporary example, there are people right now claiming that we should ignore all the economic advice of John Maynard Keynes because he wrote something that might conceivably be construed as anti-Semitic when he was 17.
You can think RMS is a nutjob, but it's quite possible that RMS is a nutjob and also right about the importance of Free Software.
I am officially gone from
in fact, that same magazine also suggested that child porn be legalized so the real pervs can get their fix and stay in the shadows without victimizing real children
Unless they think that 12 year old children are actually capable of giving informed consent to engage in sexual activities while having those activities recorded.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Pro-SOPA study on DNS filtering cites censorship research A recent paper written by Daniel Castro of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation and promoted by the MPAA on Capitol Hill argues in favor of DNS filtering to block access to copyright-infringing sites. In an effort to argue the effectiveness of DNS filtering, Castro cites research from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society that suggests that "no more than 3 percent of Internet users in countries that engage in substantial filtering use circumvention tools." What is worth noting here is that the countries cited in the Berkman Center paper--China, Iran, the UAE, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam--are all countries that engage in pervasive censorship of the Internet. Therefore, Castro is basically saying that since DNS filtering works for repressive regimes, it can work in the United States too! It is also worth noting that the US Department of State has put significant resources into more than a dozen circumvention tools over the past few years. In other words, those same tools that Castro hopes American citizens won't use to access pirated content are in fact funded by the US government.
see. there are these whoresons (with all due and proper great respect for each and every whore on the planet) who are trying to grab all of you by the balls as hard as they can and screw you up.
and yet you are calling stallman 'nutjob'. then what are you going to call these people ? sociopaths ? what are you going to do ? 'dismiss' them ? do you think it will work ?
maybe it is time that you reconsidered your opinions and the possibility that you would be better off getting behind that nutjob you were calling a nutjob just a few weeks ago with all power you have left.
Read radical news here
from the legislation-starts-as-gibberish dept.
Fixed it for you. :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
True, but how precisely do you get the OK from all those many developers some of whom may no longer be alive to change the licensing terms? Linus isn't perfect, but I think you'd have to be pretty arrogant to suggest that he should be allowed to change the license on other people's code.
What is the mechanism that allows for a pot like this to be deemed "insightful"?
I mean, in the past /. used to be a congregation of quite scientific (not necessarily scientist) dudes, now we've come to posts like the parent -- clearly a very nasty "ad hominem', almost the result of a file on the individual -- and it gets a good ranking on some category which obviously it does not fit!
RMS has my support for his ideas. And Thom is on the spot here, and as one commenter says it better than me, it's greater to admit one's own errors than to be right from the start.
The situation in the US, seen from ouside like where I am, is worrisome. Long ago a source of inspiration regarding Liberties, even and perhaps mainly from Republican governments (like when Lincoln was president), we're seeing an open country become obsessed with winning wars it creates by itself. It's like a "North Koreafication" of the USA, where people are publicly declared enemies of the nation and laws produced to justify attacks on strategic gounds. People are motivated to brainlessly wave flags... how long till the military parades start?
For crying out loud, the guy thinks possession of child pornography should be legal.
And why shouldn't it be legal? It's possession of an image of a criminal act. The criminal is the one engaged in pedophilia. The victim is in the photograph.
Possession of a photograph? There's no victim in the possession of child pornography. There is no crime.
he wants clarification of why it should be illegal.
Lets just say for a second that you are right and he isn't advocating making it legal. However, if he honestly doesn't understand why the abuse of children should be illegal then hes a sick individual.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I enjoyed the ride so far, the problem is how long can it last.
Je me souviens.
But it is a legitimate test of the validity of his philosophy as a whole. If you know a crazy person, and he has one of his predictions validated, are you supposed to suddenly embrace all of his ideas? Because that's what the article is about, that Stallman was right all along about everything and that all of his detractors should be ignored because Obama signed this piece of legislation.
"Sufferin' succotash."
No, it's not about Stallman, the messenger. It's about why the messenger was right. It's about the message, and how that message's prediction has been shown accurate.
Stallman hasn't been "paranoid about everything". He has been scared of the abuse of people by closed software, and his fears now are being proven justified.
His other views, even on child pornography, are irrelevant to that. Because we're not interested in Stallman; we're interested in what he said that was (and is) right. Because he was among the first to say it, was right about it despite widespread ridicule and even condemnation, and what he's right about is important.
--
make install -not war
Yes, because Bush would have ended DADT, passed health care reform, banking reform and worked to close GITMO.
You do realize that it takes more than the President to decide that somethings going to happen for it to happen, right? Unless of course you're seriously suggesting that it's OK for him to just order the doors of GITMO thrown wide open and just allow the inmates to just go wherever they like without being tried.
How did you get +5 Insightful? Allow me to quote RMS from his own blog on June 28, 2003:
"Dubya has nominated another caveman for a federal appeals court. Refreshingly, the Democratic Party is organizing opposition.
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness."
"Sufferin' succotash."
Yeah, but you're forgetting that anti-war people are usually liberals and liberals aren't likely to vote for somebody with the kind of bigotry problem that Ron Paul has. On top of that they're probably not going to be much enthused by his fascist leanings that he tries to disguise as libertarianism.
At the end of the day he's less likely to get votes from liberals than Mitt or even Newt.
If he was right, and nobody payed attention, it's his own fault for his failed messaging strategy.
In this, Slashdot's tilting at windmills war against Microsoft was a big part of why FOSS has never been taken seriously. Companies choose Windows for good reasons. As Munich proves, it's impossible for large networks to replace Windows with Linux... and they were throwing tons of money and manpower at trying to get that dog to hunt.
And yet a small city in Florida has been quietly running Linux for years now.
Perhaps failure to implement is not the same as a failure of the platform?
One of my favourite Stallman pieces, featuring nasal sex with plants: http://stallman.org/articles/texas.html
The only people who have ever referred to him as "the messiah" are those on the far right. It says more about their simplistic view of the world than it does of their opponents.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
When Gov and Corporations lock down the country they will see America decline into poverty and violence. Watch.... or just look around. We are already well on our way.
If we are smart about it, it can last billions of years. The question is: are we smart?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Lies and damn lies:
Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia // As an Atheist, all he said is "After I'm dead, I don't care what happens to my body, research is my first choice, but necrophilia would be a close second". He also jokes about how he enjoys rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants, AKA: Smelling flowers).
and "voluntary pedophilia" [stallman.org] should be legal, including possession of child pornography. //He's talking about all the cases when somebody goes to jail for fucking a willing 14-15-16-17 years old girl/boy. I wouldn't sleep with someone that young, but if somebody else wants to, and they both consent to it, then let them fuck in peace. He didn't actually support "pedophilia". When he talked about Child Pornography, he didn't support it, he opposed legislation that used the "think of the children" excuse to control the internet.
He doesn't visit web sites [lwn.net]--instead, he sends email to a daemon that wgets the page and emails it back to him. //Most of the time he's on an airplane or some remote location and has no direct internet connection, also, he's old fashioned. He makes the most of his time, using just about every pause he gets to answer email. He gets his mail in daily batches, and it seemed useful to him to get websites he wants to look at in those same batches. Everything without even leaving emacs. Who cares? How does this relate to his political opinions?
Perhaps most infamously, he eats toe jam in public [youtube.com]. //Who gives a fuck? Why do we care about this stuff regarding public figures? Let them fuck, eat and fart as much as they want, we should care about their performance in their actual field of expertise and nothing more.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
So you accuse Thom as 'pandering'. Would you like to enlighten us on exactly what entity he is 'pandering' to?
Linus has made it clear in the past that it should be possible to change the license by broadcasting a proposal on the kernel developer mailing lists. I think is objection has more to do with the desires of corporations using the kernel in embedded applications with signed boot loaders.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That the americans of today are not the americans of over 200 years ago. The ones today really aren't prepared to fight for what is important. They've become fat and complacent, and have no problem bending over and taking it from their government again and again. Despite the fact that they are armed to the teeth, most of them would tire before reaching the end of their driveway and when faced against a modern military using modern tactics, they'd be decimated.
At some point Canada is going to have to man-up, invade, and bring democracy back to the USA.
He already addressed that point. Free software wouldn't have stopped the current behavior of the government.
Stallman absolutely is paranoid about everything. He doesn't use web browsers, for crying out loud, not even open source ones! He genuinely thinks all closed software is "evil," and he uses that religious terminology to describe it.
But he's not right. Free software wouldn't have prevented the government abuse we're seeing. As for his child pornography views, I think it's pretty relevant when an article is trying to prop up Stallman as some misunderstood prophet. Stallman takes an extremist view, and what this article is trying to do is take one single thing and validate his entire philosophy with it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
what I want to know if what does "Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities" mean. Did anyone get procecuted as a terrorist? No? Ho, you mean someone on TV said something that sounded like that. That's moronic. You cannot expect to never hear anyone say something stupid. That doesn't make it an oppressive movement by the authorities. These guys would have never even had time to set down their tent if they were in china. *that's* an oppressive authority.
If an attractive lady(teacher, babysitter, whatever) approached me when I was 12 and asked me to have sex with her, and videotape it, I would have said, "fuck yeah" - especially if she plied me with a little booze.
Had it been legal, and not required me to undergo degrading medical and psychological examinations, not forcing me to testify in a stressful and humiliating trial, and not forever attaching a stigma of victimhood to me, it would to this day have been one of the fondest days of my life. Where were all those naughty teachers when I was in high school?!
I spent my entire 12th year alive trying to acquire HUSTLER magazines(before the internet was feasible for kids like me), and would have given my left nut for the opportunity to be "victimized" by an older woman.
I don't know about the shill accounts, but the post was on-topic and reasonable. So... in this case, don't care one way or the other.
You mean like the Swedish Demoex party?
lol nope. bonch is pro-Apple and most probably a real fanatic, SharkLaser and others are pro-MS and most probably a shill sock-puppet.
I think there is a legitimate objection to contact necrophilia, and that is that a dead body, or body parts, no longer has an active immune system and is therefore very likely breeding little nasties that may not only do the active sexual actor harm, but anyone they come in contact with thereafter. It's a statistical argument, really, but one that holds up well in all other areas of body contact -- picking up a dead animal, for instance, is definitely contra-indicated -- we know this from long experience. And what with the appearance lately of various flesh-eating bacteria and the like, I think a very solid case can be made for ruling out this behavior based on health issues -- no matter how happy it might make the advocate otherwise.
As for the rest, sex and sexually charged activities with teenagers can only legitimately depend upon informed choice/consent, and the fact is, there are many adults who couldn't make an informed choice and/or perform responsibly in a sexual situation, and there are many teenagers who can. The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely. Sex with pre-pubescent teens should be ruled out based on the very real risk of physical damage; I think society owes them protection in that regard, just as we protect the physically immature from other physical harms.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And idea is something that can be tested, abstracted, projected, compared and conditionally analyzed. regardless of whether an institutionalized 13 year old with down syndrome said it, or a 31 year old prodigal savant with tenure wrote a thesis around it. As far as the basis of a philosophy, that's what philosophy is! You start with a scalable logically constructed concept on which to construct an overall basic logic, and then expound upon into all relatable fields. Stallman believes that anyone capable of making an informed an intelligent decision that does nothing to harm or limit the rights of others should be allowed to do so. This philosophy is the core of the point in the /. introduction of the article.
Wallstreet, for example, has been able to expand its investment opportunities based solely on the short-term expansion of opportunities for others while obfuscating the information for an informed decision, all of which has been made legal due to the commercial nature of the US election process. Much of Occupy Wallstreet is about removing the obfuscation and overall ability to hide or control information, and getting rid of the ability to use the profits from those practices to maintain the legitimacy of that process.
The reason ideas are important, ignoring the love of empiricity that found the Enlightenment that found the United States, is because Ideas Stand Alone. They can be objectively and critically reviewed. If you do that with a human being, having all information available, human beings almost always can be made to look like ignorant and twisted individuals. Everyone has a level of undesirable traits at some point in their lives, and if condensed together, almost anyone could be made to look less than the ideal human being.
However, an idea can be shared by anyone, even entirely abstract computer models, and be tested for validity in someway, or otherwise scaled or planned for when the ability comes about. Take the Other Worlds Hypothesis popular in the Enlightenment, we now possess the Drake equation to allow us to theorize the probability of contact long before we might actually visit one.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
The article is flawed because the author listens to conspiracy theory bullshit and fails to do proper research on the NDAA.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s1867pcs/pdf/BILLS-112s1867pcs.pdf
Section 1032 page 362. The bit about it not applying to US citizens.
Actually, his record in this regard is excellent. Perhaps you should take a look before slandering the man.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm not sure when this civil liberties that the US supposed used to be actually existed. Indefinite detentions, targeted killings, invasions of privacy, and infringements of civil rights are nothing new. And statements like "Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities" are just meaningless FUD created by people with a political agenda to advance.
Politicians and political ideologies thrive on creating fear, because it lets them advance their own radical ideas as the only solution to the supposed ills of the country. Don't fall for it. Focus on clear and specific issues: SOPA, PATRIOT, Guantanamo, minimum wage, disarmament, alternative energy, CO2 emissions, whatever you think is important, try to make an argument and convince people. That's the way we make progress.
The more of the world I see happening around me, the more I think this notion of "informed consent" is concocted nonsense. How many grown adults of the legal age are informed enough to make good decisions regarding sex, money, or much of anything else?
Why can he not simply begin distributing Linux under the GPLv3? From the GPLv2:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
(Emphasis added.)
Liberty in your lifetime
Paul-messiah? You mean the Kwisatz Haderach?
The problem is there are lots of crazy people in the world, and we don't have enough time on this planet to refute every bit of nonsense they spew. Fallacies like the argument from authority or the ad hominem make for bad logical proofs, but they're necessary in day to day life.
I can't prove a square has five corners by insulting your mother, but if the wino on the street corner tells me the end is nigh, I'm not going to bother listening to his arguments. You shouldn't believe me if I say 2+2=5 just because I wave around a diploma, but every time you cross a bridge, you're trusting in the authority of those who built and checked it without bothering to check their work.
If Stallman comes across as a nutjob, no one will listen to him. And why should they? There are tons of nutjobs in the media, and you'd die of old age before you could listen to and analyze everything they had to say.
IIRC, that bolded section is not present in the LICENSE.txt included in the linux kernel sources.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I never claimed anything about lying
before you get on your high horse maybe you should figure out what the difference between lying and being wrong actually is
you got the point of my post wrong, using your logic you must be a fucking lair
It also conveniently neglects the fact that most of the internet infrastructure affected by SOPA is run on open source implementations, so the freedom of the software has done NOTHING to prevent governments from trying to abuse it.
Since when did Cisco open-source Cisco IOS? Or Juniper fully release the source for Junos? (it's "partly FreeBSD-based.") Force5 isn't open-source either, nor is Foundry. None of the routers use ASICs and FPGAs for which the code is open source.
I'd be willing to bet that there isn't a single piece of network gear between you and slashdot, or me and slashdot, that is fully under any open-source license (I'll even be generous and exclude proprietary drivers.)
Please help metamoderate.
There is a difference between GPL2 only and GPL2 and later.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
More likely Richard Stallman is a little tired of the speeches and has no real desire to appear in public and thus expresses his discontent with a rather offset sense of humour. Start asking him silly question and his behaviour deteriorates until question time ends. Whilst he supports FOSS he is no a slave to it nor to the ignorance of the majority of users and rather than attacking people he simple takes on a slightly tilted and offensive demeanour to drive people away.
The only people to push Stallman attacks have been M$ in rather pointless retaliation for attacks against Ballmer and Gates. Their reasoning being the use of Ballmer and Gates in M$ marketing being presented as geniuses, which of course made the immediate targets for ridicule and mocking. Thus they reasoned attacks against Stallman and Torvalds would damaged FOSS. Some of the Stallman stuff stuck because it seems he exploited to fend of excessive public appearances. Most of the Torvalds stuff failed no matter how much the M$ marketdroids attempted to twist and exaggerate every public comment he made.
As for trusting closed source proprietary software and interference by a government controlled by the 1%, obviously the two mixed together is a terrible idea. The psychopathic greed of the 1% will twist government to protect themselves and to continue the rape of the planet and the 99%. The question in the digital era is whether we will use technology to bring them down or whether they will use it to enslave us.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
In summary, the law signed by Obama has no effect on the Occupy protesters.
Unless there is a secret interpretation of the law. And don't tell me that doesn't happen.
I am not a crackpot.
Overly Critical Guy is overly critical.
The point I made that you just dismissed is that the post to which I replied said the article is about the person, citing its title, so ad hominems are acceptable. But the article is not about the person, but about why their message was correct. So ad hominems are wrong. As is yours. You might as well say that since Stallman insists on growing out a beard that's certainly not for everyone, he's wrong about software, too. Fallacy.
As for what was correct, it's clear that Stallman's "paranoid" predictions about the abuse of people depending on software were correct. The correctness of his predictions about the value of free/open software in preventing that abuse are hard to decide, because free/open software is the small minority, since people didn't heed his warnings, so we can't know whether we'd have less abuse. We can argue about it, as we're doing, but you can't say it's not a valid argument. Expecially not on the fallacious basis you're trying.
--
make install -not war
More to the point, that text (quoted in the GP) isn't actually in the GPL v2. It appears after the terms and conditions of the license proper. It suggests how you should apply the license to your code. The phrase 'any later version' does appear in the text of the license (section 9) and it is clear in that section that the license may be applied without the 'any later version'. At least that is how if read the word "if".
If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version"...
As you say, you have to look at LICENSE.txt (I assume; I never actually did) to see that the license on Linux is GPL v2 only.
Except that his message about software freedoms have nothing at all to do with the problems listed in the article.
Detaining terror suspects without due process: unrelated to software or sharing
Occupy movement called terrorists: unrelated to software or sharing
SOPA: related to software or sharing but really is much more about malware, media control, and so forth
Stallman was not warning about totalitarian states or access to media or censorship of the internet. He was concerned about free software, keeping alive the old 60's/70's tradition of just sharing software freely, being able to modify the software you had. Now the EFF has indeed branched out a lot and is concerned about these newer issues, but that's not the same as claiming Stallman was predicting all this thirty years ago. His enemies thirty years ago were people like IBM and DEC and AT&T, his worries were about the growing proprietary nature of the computing industry.
Whether you agree with RMS or not his views had nothing to do with these current issues and he's only being invoked to promote a blog piece.
Wouldn't that be gastronecrophilia?
The war on terror is permanent. Al-Qaeda has no definite membership or identity. So anyone can be detained forever. Impossible to prove you are not linked to a largely imaginary organization even if the evidence against you wasn't classified. As for 1021e, I'm not a lawyer but it seems to protect police and federal agents from having to hand over people they've arrested to the military if they don't want to. The military already has the power to detain or kill Americans abroad, so a new law wouldn't be needed for that.
Free software couldn't even stop a government from creating a law that says that free software licenses are null and void.
It's as simple as writing "All software licenses are legal, except those that result in software being free." and translating it into proper legal wording.
I think it's even true in general that there will never be a mainstream technical solution to the problem of bad government.
Actually, every candidate HOPES the masses never realize this. Otherwise everyone and their brother would see the candidate for what they are. Nothing more than a lie spewing piece of garbage.
Why else would every single candidate in history promise to " fix " everything that's wrong at the time ? Their BS campaign promises all REQUIRE ignorance on the part of the voters.
The day the masses realize the candidate CAN'T do anything unless Congress is on their side, will be the day we actually get a Government that works. Not the BS we have now.
I think there is a legitimate objection to contact necrophilia, and that is that a dead body, or body parts, no longer has an active immune system and is therefore very likely breeding little nasties that may not only do the active sexual actor harm, but anyone they come in contact with thereafter.
Aye, but if that's the primary criteria for having it be illegal... well, there are plenty of ways one can get all kinds of infections, even deadly, easily-contracted-and-distributed ones, yet those activies are all legal. Similarly there are plenty of even worse ways of harming oneself yet those activities are again perfectly legal. I'm just arguing that either make them all illegal or make them all legal.
As for the rest, sex and sexually charged activities with teenagers can only legitimately depend upon informed choice/consent, and the fact is, there are many adults who couldn't make an informed choice and/or perform responsibly in a sexual situation, and there are many teenagers who can. The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely. Sex with pre-pubescent teens should be ruled out based on the very real risk of physical damage; I think society owes them protection in that regard, just as we protect the physically immature from other physical harms.
The fact is that children not only mature at wildly different rates, they also are easily swayed and made to agree to things they don't even understand. And the fact that this is so can in worst case ruin the rest of that person's whole life. In two relationships I've been my girlfriend had been abused as a child and I can tell that it really leaves you terribly screwed up, the potential damage just is so great that I do agree with childporn et. al. being illegal, even if I generally oppose censorship.
The President loved Animal Crackers.
For fucks sake - this is getting ridiculous. Just how many sock puppet accounts do you have?
Anyway, to drag my comment back on topic, you (plural) are misrepresenting Stallman's POV, perhaps out of ignorance, but more likely to troll. As a prime example:
Stallman absolutely is paranoid about everything. He doesn't use web browsers, for crying out loud,
You make it sound like Stallman doesn't use browsers out of paranoia, but Stallman himself says:
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Meh, I fail at quoting properly.
And suppose two weeks later you found out you had a fatal sexually transmitted disease? Or if you were female, that you were pregnant? We protect the young from adults who would manipulate them for sexual gratification because they don't fully understand enough to protect themselves. If Stallman thinks it's ok to manipulate a child into willingly giving sexual pleasure to an adult, he should have a bullet though his skull.
While it's true the GGP can't properly format hyperlinks, that doesn't make his conclusions wrong; it just makes him either stupid, ignorant or lazy.
You left out an option. Perhaps he thought he had it right, checked over it twice to be sure, but simply made a mistake anyhow. Happens all the time. This is why two personnel are required to double check tasks in some environments.
There's another option:-
I have made a deep emotional investment in a value based belief - therefore I will distort reality by focussing on irrelevant issues in order to avoid re-examining my core beliefs. eg. It's all about free software (not the reasons for wanting free software)
Gold is where you find it - it's value is not decreased just because it's found in yucky dirt.
Sigh - more unnecessary proof that evolution is a fact, and that it's not horizontal
But it is a legitimate test of the validity of his philosophy as a whole. If you know a crazy person, and he has one of his predictions validated, are you supposed to suddenly embrace all of his ideas? Because that's what the article is about, that Stallman was right all along about everything and that all of his detractors should be ignored because Obama signed this piece of legislation.
Focus, try and focus. Instead of going to ridiculous extremes and inventing stuff. People might thing you're not the full quid.
No one is saying Stallman was right about everything, or that those that don't agree with Stallman are wrong about everything.
Sorry but misleading statements about what the government is doing is very different from the Government breaking the law.
How about we ignore him because he was proven to be totally and absolutely wrong when we had stagflation in the 1970's, an event which his economic theory claimed could never, ever happen?
And suppose two weeks later you found out you had a fatal sexually transmitted disease?
...The same scare tactic the establishment uses to prevent sex until marriage. Fuck you. Somebody here hasn't actually lived life.
Hey, sheepdog, can you go back to worrying about yourself and not everybody else? Everybody else shouldn't have to be subject to overbearing parenting just because you were. You can move to Afghanistan or Iran if you want to use religious beliefs to put bullets through peoples' skulls.
1) The corpse belongs to the heirs. Except under rare circumstances, the heirs aren't going to give permission to use it for sex. Furthermore, there are emotional reasons, which are part of being human, why just about nobody wants to will their body to someone who's going to use it for sex, and why grieving relatives are very upset at necrophilia. Ignoring these on the grounds that nobody is actually physically harmed ignores that it is possible to hurt a human being emotionally, and shows a lack of empathy
2) As a practical consideration, you're not going to find anyone who is otherwise a normal person and just wants to have sex with corpses. In the real world, necrophilia is a sign of mental illness, because that's just how human beings are. Normal people don't want to have sex with corpses, even if you don't define "normal people" circularly
If an attractive lady(teacher, babysitter, whatever) approached me when I was 12 and asked me to have sex with her, and videotape it, I would have said, "fuck yeah" - especially if she plied me with a little booze.
...it would to this day have been one of the fondest days of my life.
Perhaps.
Or maybe you are just indulging yourself in an older man's fantasy of rape and seduction, with no real understanding of what the experience would have been like for a twelve year old boy.
I saw Richard Stallman speak at Yorktown High School years ago, here is my account of his presentation.
Ok, get off the high-horse for a second and tell me what is wrong with possessing child pornography? And before anyone breaks out the pitchforks, "possessing child pornography" invariably includes actresses that look younger than they actually are and often times drawn under-age or computer-simulated pictures (i.e., no children involved). Also, it tends to include parent's picture of their 3-year old children in the bathtub. And, finally, my favorite -- if you are 17, it is typically (state to state, long story, but often) ok for you to have sex with another 17-year old. However, if you happen to take a picture, you are now in possession of child pornography.
Perhaps, you meant to narrow it down to a significantly reduced subset of cases? Or, better yet, focus on finding people who harm children by producing child pornography?
Maybe free software wouldn't have helped, but a free software CULTURE would have significant influence had it spread more widely.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Entirely possible. But pedophilia leaves no room for determination of actual harm under the law. Regardless of the circumstances and the outcome, it's a life long punishment.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Or perhaps somebody was never a 12 year-old boy? You know, when the hormones kick in?
Hint: The smarter ones had lives even back then and were able to live happy and guilt-free not being Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Of course, my example was idealized - my fantasies were of women and not male priests. But it's like any sex, really - unlike your foray with Father O' Malley in the rectory basement, people have to want it from the get-go to some degree to really enjoy it.
Actually the war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban is not indefinite. It is up to the US government to declare when the war is at end. If the Taliban and al-Qaeda made statements that they were ceasing operations, denied involvement in any subsequent actions and assisted authorities in apprehending still active terrorists the US Government would be hard pressed to convince anyone that a state of war still exists. Will the terrorists do that? Probably not but the ball in in their court.
As for detainees, there is a provision in 1021f that states "The Secretary of Defense shall regularly brief Congress regarding the application of the authority described in this section, including the organizations, entities, and individuals considered to be ‘covered persons’ for purposes of subsection (b)(2)." This will probably be the Defense Subcommittee. I will bet that there will be people on that subcommittee that will demand proof that the person held is covered under (b)(2). It makes great news when the opposition can show that the Party in power is stupid or is "trampling on people's rights". The burden of proof in in the Defense Department not the detainee.
Are the Constitution and Bill of Rights "existing law". Do those laws have stipulations related to due process and illegal confinement? By Section 1021 E do those laws still apply to " United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States"? The answer is yes to all three. This law does not suspend any existing laws for " United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States". Now non-US citizens and people without lawful resident alien status captures or arrested outside the US have never been covered by US law and may be detained until end of conflict.
I highlighted your bait-and-switch so you can see the problem with your comment. Of course Stalman is opposed to child abuse, he's just not sure that pedophilia necessarily implies abuse. Below a certain age or mental maturity, it almost certainly does, but there's a lot of wiggle room in the teen years where it's not so clear.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You jest, but maybe that is his problem. While I think he is quite a loon, he has two important things going for him: 1) His opinions are pretty much always the same, while most politicians dynamically adjust their opinion to their audience (sometimes several times, going back and forth). 2) He actually tends to act according to what he says. That rules out the candidates who do not suffer as much from problem #1.
It is sad that he is clearly the only candidate who even comes close to meeting conditions #1 and #2 and perhaps that's part of the reason everyone consider him a lunatic. Politicians are supposed to say what you want to hear (rather than their opinion) and then do what they wanted to do (rather than what they promised to).
Nope, the GGP claimed that the Obama presidency looks exactly like the Bush presidency, if anything I went overboard going beyond just one example. One example is all I needed to debunk the GGP's assertion that Obama was doing everything exactly the way that Bush did.
The version you have linked to is not the final version that the president signed.
That can be found here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-1540
The final version contains no provision whatsoever for US citizens.
have you had a bullet through your skull already? someone who is being manipulated into doing something is by definition not doing that thing volunary. Stallmans argument could easily be constructed to mean that he is fine with severe prosecution of offenders if it's proven that someone is being harmed - which to my knowledge is quite easy to with molested children. Either way in *context* it doesn't seem like he's talking about your non-average catholic priest but rather sex between two consenting individuals with a, by the society considered, improper age gap.
Not knowing the *exact* context it is also important to remember that these ages which varies from culture to culture. Is it as harmful for a 18 year old in Oregon (USA) as for a 13 year old (yes I know that varies by perfecture, but it's 13 in the penal code) in japan to have sex?
Crap, forget that. After scanning through it a few more times, I found the provision. It's in section 1022. Please disregard above.
You're right that neither were ever socialist. But neither were ever communist either. They were fascist dictatorships that happen to use Karl Marx's books for rhetoric.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Funny how you skipped right past the "why this article is stupid" first paragraph to the "and other points made by Stallman are also stupid" rest of the post - just so you can pretend the post doesn't explain why this article is stupid. And is it ever.
Fandroids hate facts.
You seem to forget that Obama spent ages in court arguing for DADT. And health care reform? The no insurer left behind act? Gitmo isn't even close to closed and Obama resumed military commissions there.
Things you don't mention are that he's incited 5x as many drone attacks in 3 years than Bush did in 8. He's using the same tactic of secret legal memos to say he has the power of due process free execution, that Bush used to validate due process free detention. He's used the State Secrets Doctrine to prevent people from suing for being wrongly tortured or spied on.
He tried to undermine the Cluster Bomb Treaty ban -- even though the US is not a signatory. The list just goes on and on and on. If all you got is a belated DADT reversal, health care "reform" that isn't, and GITMO -- which is open and operating just the same as always -- what do you have?
Oh -- financial reform -- you mean the castrated bill that experts indicate wouldn't have prevented the financial crisis even if it had been around at the time? That's no achievement -- that's just another example of the cozy relationship Obama has with Goldman Sachs and their lobbyists.
But that's fine, just keep on thinking Obama is a liberal. Self delusion can be very satisfying.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It's been my experience that most people don't have any opinions of their own; they just latch onto belief systems that are attractive to them and parrot arguments they've heard for them, often down to identical catchphrases. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of originality. Intelligent people are by in large no more original than stupid ones. The only thing that sets most clever people apart from stupid ones is how nicely they stitch together their second-hand arguments.
If we chose *prevalence* as the sole litmus test for normality, I suspect it might not be possible to classify necrophilia as "abnormal" without also classifying having original thoughts as "abnormal" as well.
So condemning an idea because it comes from a freak is pointless. Have you ever read about Isaac Newton's experiments on the optics of the human eye? If you're not squeamish, read Will Dunham's "Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics". It's a relief to get Euler, who for once doesn't have freakish behavior to go along with his freakish creativity.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Disagreeing with Keynes because you have evidence that his theories were flawed is not the same thing as disagreeing with Keynes because he was possibly a bit anti-Semitic when he was a teenager. That line of argument is "Keynes says X implies Y, X happened and Y didn't happen, so Keynes was wrong to say X implies Y". That's different from the ad hominem line of argument I was criticizing, which is more along the lines of "Keynes says X implies Y, Keynes is a bigot, so X doesn't imply Y".
I am officially gone from
GPL3 licensed code in the Linux kernel would have made a huge difference to people building their own versions of android to install on phones.
While I wish we had that - a GPL3 licensed Linux kernel would not have been used in android. It probably would have been a BSD derivative.
Why? What is it about GPLv3 that would have dissuaded Google from using Linux?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It is exactly the same thing, in that breaking the law in order to sustain an illegal secrecy, and intentionally disinform the public go hand in hand. The government consistently lying to the public in order to accomplish something that is not legal - is this the USA or the USSR ? It's the 80's all over again.
Typically, it's twice a day (analog anyway).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Stallman is a nutjob in enough ways that it seriously calls into question his entire process of judgment.
So? He might still be right. If a guy in an insane asylum believes that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is approximately equal to 3.14159..., the fact that he's in the insane asylum doesn't make him wrong. If you have a young drug-using new-agey hippie from a broken home who comes to you saying he's got a way of making computers that are much better than anything all the established competitors have, and you refuse to work with him because he's a young drug-using new-agey hippie, you may have just missed your chance to make a great investment in Apple.
The worst possible consequence of RMS being wrong is that we'll have freely available software that's not as effective as proprietary software and thus is a bit of a waste of time and money to create. The best possible consequence of RMS being right is that we'll have freely available software that's high quality and allows users to do a lot of stuff with it (so long as they don't take the freely available stuff and try to steal it).
I am officially gone from
Try this - the article fails to mention where Stallman said *anything* about restricting personal freedoms outside of the computer world. So the current insanity going on in the USA has nothing to do with the gratuitious reference to Stallman that was thrown in as link bait, esp. since 95% of the world is NOT in the USA, and is NOT affected by SOPA, except to the extent that, if SOPA passes, a lot of web sites will move elsewhere, costing the US jobs.
Or maybe you are just indulging yourself in an older man's fantasy of rape and seduction, with no real understanding of what the experience would have been like for a twelve year old boy.
And what would it be like, pray tell? Without the psychobabble bullshit and the real trauma of the circus following it.
A twelve year olds is probably old enough to jerk it, and if he has a hot teacher, she's probably figuring in there somewhere.
in a veto-proof manner, after Obama had the language softened, and it doesn't apply to any random American, and it doesn't apply to anyone labeled a 'terrorist', only to people associated with specific terrorist groups.
And who identifies these terrorist groups? And how does one prove they are not a member of these groups?
I'm thinking there's a shit load of annoying activist type people who have the most tenuous link to that shadowy Anonymous terror organization that can now be made to 'disappear' for a short time, if required.
And how does one get to the necessary judicial assistance to prove that you *are* an American once your in the part of the system that says 'no trials, indefinite secret detention'?
Enough With the Sensationalism.
No, more with the sensationalism. It is now the only way people will listen to anything through the rest of the artificial sensationalism.
And if you think that any legislation that brings your country closer to the workings of the soviet empire of old then hand in your citizen papers and continue assuming they wont come for you.
No, as society we say that is not true when speaking of children, that even if voluntary it is evil for adult sexually molest or have intercourse with children. It is irrelevant whether the child feels harmed or not, irrelevant whether consent given or not.
you can consent to things when you are older, including things that might give you disease or kill you. so what? we as society say there are things for which children are not allowed to give consent, to protect them
The comments are all:
1. Stallman is a nutjob so we shouldn't listen to him.
2. The article has numerous errors, so should be ignored
3. Let's have arguments about arguments. (typical slashdot argument nazis)
The article is making the point that governments around the world are becoming more restrictive in how people use computers. Stallman predicted this, and tried to oppose it by creating the GNU foundation. By putting the source code into everyone's hands and allowing people to use it in however way they want, it helps stop the inevitable slide towards the government control that nobody except those controlling the government want.
Stallman saw the direction that software was heading and saw where it would lead. That is if you don't have control over the code your computer is running then who does? If you don't see the same thing, why not?
we're speaking of children here, not teens. A three year old or a six year old or a twelve year old are not capable of protecting themselves, nor understanding sexual matters, nor should be engaging in sex with adults under any circumstances. This is enforced by law, and I would have it enforced by death penalty since I know victims who have their mental health and lives destroyed.
You'll note other asian countries have older ages of consent. I will go against the politically correct mindset people think we must have and say japan is wrong, that age is too young and they are harming 13 year olds with their culture's bad mindset.
Dude, please read. I wasn't the one saying that, it was the grandparent, who I was replying to, actually refusing his claims.
I agree with you, the whole issue is fucking stupid. Kiddie porn is awful, the only problem is that a huge amount of things are categorized as such. Forcing 7 year olds to fuck and get filmed is one of the most awful crimes I can think of, but it's quite different from getting a consenting 17 year old to make a porn movie and get paid accordingly. I don't think either is right, but while the first case is clearly a crime, the second should be considered unethical, but not criminal.
Either way, it's one of those issues that has been blown out of proportion in order to advance somebody's agenda. Think of the Children and whatnot.
I leave you with this ...
"Child pornography is the only crime that is illegal to watch"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8APlx9btTn8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7_zMdNRAmo
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Where in the article you cite does anyone make allegations that the Government is doing anything illegal? All they allege is that the Government is keeping certain things secret by making misleading statements.
Your regime/politicians prefers you to be poor/subservient/defenseless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority
Casteism
You only have to listen to Senator Levin and Barack Obama's own statements to understand that 1032 does NOT exempt US Citizens. So please do your research as I can tell that YANAL.
Read the Signing Statement. Here he affirms he has the power but promises not to use it.
Watch the movie. Again, he's talking about 1031 which is the detention subsection and NOT 1032 which is the requirement for the military custody.
So because his theory was flawed in some respect, we ignore him completely? Does that mean we completely ignore the free-market fundamentalists that failed to predict the current shit storm that the world is going through?
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
I'm not sure why you're missing the obvious link there, as it's pretty simple:
- All of the things you listed are facilitated by the authorities having control over people's computer devices.
- Control over people's computer devices is facilitated by running closed source software on those devices.
Therefore Stallman's message about software freedoms relates directly to these extremely despotic new measures of government. Such fine grained control over people's lives would be impossible without the help of trackable devices, identifiable communication end points, and wiretapping of conversations on cellphones that are outside of user control.
It's precisely such dangers of closed-source software that Stallman has been warning about for decades. They lead quite inevitably in the direction of police states and dictatorship.
From the link re necrophillia
Dubya has nominated another caveman for a federal appeals court. Refreshingly, the Democratic Party is organizing opposition.
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
Some rules might be called for when these acts directly affect other people's interests. For incest, contraception could be mandatory to avoid risk of inbreeding. For prostitution, a license should be required to ensure prostitutes get regular medical check-ups, and they should have training and support in insisting on use of condoms. This will be an advance in public health, compared with the situation today.
For necrophilia, it might be necessary to ask the next of kin for permission if the decedent's will did not authorize it. Necrophilia would be my second choice for what should be done with my corpse, the first being scientific or medical use. Once my dead body is no longer of any use to me, it may as well be of some use to someone. Besides, I often enjoy rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants).
Emphasis mine... This seems to be a pretty standard libertatrian viewpoint really. As far as child porn is concerned, as long as people under the age of 18 (or whatever majority is where you are) can't legally give consent, nothing here has changed.
If it is issued by US government and it does not apply to US citizens, then to whom it applies? non-US citizens are outside of US jurisdiction.
And suppose two weeks later you found out you had a fatal sexually transmitted disease? Or if you were female, that you were pregnant? We protect the young from adults who would manipulate them for sexual gratification because they don't fully understand enough to protect themselves.
You could teach a five year old the "no glove, no love" rule. It's not to protect them from STDs, it's not to protect them from pregnancy, it's to protect them from sex as such. There's a lot of good arguments for that, but that we couldn't teach them how to use a condom isn't one of them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why? What is it about GPLv3 that would have dissuaded Google from using Linux?
The ability to license Android to control-freak companies that don't want you to be able to root your phone? Because the GPLv3 requires that it includes all the information to install your own modified version, no more "our signed binaries only".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A corpse is a corpse but to your family it is much more than that likely.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I hope this isnt too off topic. But I think the biggest risk to the Internet is the fact that we r forced to go through commercial ISPs just to get network access. I dont understand why there isnt already free and open networking within urban areas. I see more then 10 routers everywhere in my city all the time. I cant understand why there isnt a secondary protocol running to allow message passing across the city via these routers when they r not busy handling local requests by their owners. Such a network would allow text, voice and file sharing across the city at no additional cost to consumers and absolutely outside the control of commercial entities. Further, it could provide anyone with a route to their home and subsequent access to the Internet through their home connection. This network could be propagated like a virus from router to router... so it could not be prevented by authority or corporate interests. It would be an ideal setup in cases of disaster or government suppression. It is not paranoid to desire free and non commercial solutions. The last time I read the MS windows EULA, it was clearly that microsoft does retain the right to switch off any and all Internet services at any time. You have agreed to this, so if you dont like providing authority (corporate or government) with a "kill switch" then u should also install Ubuntu or a linux variant onto spare space on your hard drive... in case of emergency. I assure u this is not as difficult as u imagine. Anyhow... my main point is that there is a huge amount of free network bandwidth available right now through all the routers in ur city... y is it that we are not exploiting this huge uncontrolled open network? And y dont I see more people talking about doing this? The only losers would be those who sell bandwidth (ISPs) and those who wish to control and monitor it (gov, police, authority).
He has expressed concerns that government in the west would take a totalitarian turn and was dismissed immediately based on disbelief of that.
Now we see western governments doing exactly that complete with suspension of due process and cameras sprouting up all over public spaces. It might be time to look at the remainder of his arguments a bit closer.
He may be a bit extreme at times, but dismissing his arguments on that basis is one big fallacy.
Would it help if you knew that he has never claimed Chewbacca lives on Endor?
It's his claim that we shouldn't listen to Stallman because Stallman is a nut-job. It's a sort of reverse argument from authority, where he claims that the other side is so insane, you should listen to him (he's comparatively authoritative). Stallman's general utter lunacy isn't a legitimate test of the validity of any specific argument he makes.
Thats more reductio ad absurdum not to mention, ad hominiem as others pointed out.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Right! Put 'em to the wall!
I know for a fact that "the government" was not even listening to the country when it invented the UAS PATRIOT ACT.
I wrote my congresspeople and explicitly and simply asked them _NOT_ to pass ANY laws or regulations in response to 9/11.
I got back a form letter that said that "in response to my concerns" and the concerns of "likeminded americans" congress was working as fast as it could to assemble and pass legislation to (whatever and so-on).
In short, I got the form letter treatment "assuring me" that they were busy doing _exactly_ what I begged them not to do.
So when politicians invoke the public will as revealed by their correspondence, I tend to disbelieve. They don't read the mail, they sort it by category and subject matter, then _weigh_ it apparently. Then they decide that everybody is demanding whatever the letter on top says, ignoring any letter on top that doesn't match the political bias that the politician has already decided makes him look most re-electable.
It's all crap and it is out of control. Everybody is talking. Nobody is listening. and the game is, bought anyway.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Incorrect. Please refer to lines 314 and 315.
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...
The US Government has abrogated to itself the right to create legislation that is, according to it, applicable to citizens of other countries. This is what Empires do, and whether or not US citizens like the idea, the US is currently acting like an Empire - like the Roman Empire in a lot of ways - outside of its borders mostly but more increasingly inside its borders. You still ostensibly have a democracy at the moment but to me it looks like this is becoming less true over the past few decades.
According to the US Government and this legislation, there are US citizens and then there is everyone else in the world who are less than US citizens. They don't get the same rights if they get any at all. Its like an extension of Manifest Destiny - the US is destined by God to do whatever the fuck it wants to whomever the fuck it wants and we had better not question it, or else we can end up renditioned to some ugly US client state.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
... unfortunately lines 9-11 pretty much spell it out :P
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...
The only real requirement of rational law is that of _informed_ consent.
If all parties involved are capable of informed consent, and give informed consent without duress or coercion, then the act should be legal.
Children cannot give informed consent, so child porn, and peadophilia are out. Dead things is tricky since the dead are _things_ and things are not expected to give consent. Prostitution and adultery are no-brainer legal. Beastiality is tricky since the beast cannot give informed consent but some people think animals are things, but since animals can suffer, accumulate experience, and "hold a grudge" then we must assume they deserve to be protected by consent.
Now the thing where we have made haivng "simulated child porn", involving no actual children, illegal is beyond stupid IMHO.
Incest (non-reproductive anyway) is only problematic in that family dynamics often constitute lifelong duress because the obligations and conditioning never go away.
Necrophilia is actually a property crime, oddly enough, though the law outlaws it outright because it is "ichy", which is a whole other kettle of law.
But these problems are, indeed, problems in our looming future. If we gene-tweak animals until they are intellegent enoug to give consent is it beastiality any more? How about if we make machines sentient, then are they still "things" that don't need to give consent? We have varying standards for the age of majority for different things in different places; consider voting, vs sex, vs drinking.
When it comes to morals and ethos, the fundimental problem is that outside a firmly agreed upon center, the only people who _should_ be alowed to do most things are the people who wouldn't actually do them.
Thing is, the people who want to stop other people from doing most things are typically the last people who should be allowed to judge.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely.
So what do you propose? Do you ask a child, "Did you want to have sex?" Suppose the child is smart enough to understand the question, but is also smart enough to understand that if he/she answers "no," his/her parent will go to jail for 20 years. Is this really a better way to determine whether this individual child is "mature enough" to make an informed choice?
I find it hard to understand how Stallman, a man who took great lengths to write not one, not two, but three versions of a copyright contract that would ensure that his software is used in exactly the ways he wants it used, would not understand that in order for a law to be enforceable, it must be written in a very specific, very comprehensible way. The "line in the sand" may not be perfect, but it removes the ambiguity that would otherwise allow a great many children to be raped every year.
Breakfast served all day!
Where in the constitution does it say that one group should have the right to deprive everyone else of a public resource?
Parks are there for everyone, not just for protesters.
> possession of child pornography
Can't fault him there: for example, see my recent post which includes some reasons why making possession of child pornography a crime is downright frightening.
with the kind of bigotry problem that Ron Paul has.
Please enlighten those of us who don't know wtf you're talking about?
Just another day in Paradise
1) The corpse belongs to the heirs.
That's already something I disagree with. If the original owner of the body wants to do with his or her own body something different than the heirs then the heirs should have no say in that.
Furthermore, there are emotional reasons, which are part of being human, why just about nobody wants to will their body to someone who's going to use it for sex, and why grieving relatives are very upset at necrophilia.
I personally couldn't care less what happens to my corpse after I'm gone. If someone wants to have sex with my corpse then go ahead. I mean, I'm not going to use my corpse myself again anymore. And as my relatives know I rather be remembered that lived, not that I died, and thus a burial with all the usual crap it entails
is against what I want.
2) As a practical consideration, you're not going to find anyone who is otherwise a normal person and just wants to have sex with corpses. In the real world, necrophilia is a sign of mental illness, because that's just how human beings are. Normal people don't want to have sex with corpses, even if you don't define "normal people" circularly
What is "normal people"? I mean, a normal person wouldn't beat their spouse either, but that is actually very common. Not to mention how people often stab or shoot their spouses or even throw acid on them, and that is seen as perfectly normal. Or some less extreme examples: a normal person wouldn't just detain someone without any kind of due process just because they happen to dislike that person. Well, that makes for example mister Obama an abnormal person.
My point is that what is defined as "normal" varies wildly, there is no such thing as "normal" that applies to the whole world. It varies based on cultural background, religion, even intelligence, and you don't have the right to tell somebody that they're mentally ill or abnormal just because you happen to view things differently.
summarizes current situation very well.
Read radical news here
...
I can't prove a square has five corners by insulting your mother, but if the wino on the street corner tells me the end is nigh, I'm not going to bother listening to his arguments. ....
But what if he's right?
It is possible for someone to be anti-Semitic and to still produce rational arguments on subjects not dealing with Jews. It is also possible that if he was 17, his ideas changed later and he could be rational even about Jews.
But strangely people can be anti-Semitic and have no problem with Arabs, only Jews. Which is really wierd since the average Arab is far more representative of the Semitic racial type than the average Jew (who typically has a lot of European blood in them).
In fact the hatred many Arabs have of Jews is often referred to as 'Anti-Semitic' which is hilarious considering they are of the same race. I've even heard Jews insult one another by using 'Anti-Semite' in the same context that I might use "bastard!", "asshole!" or "cunt!".
The evident hatred of Arabs among many Americans would also be 'Anti-Semitic' but its rare to hear it described as such.
Ie chances of someone who is anti-Semitic also having poor rationality in general seem fairly high. Racism is a bit like conspiracy theoryism; its not so much about unintelligence as about having ones horizons in thought limited or curtailed in some way.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
So which is it? Seems rather contradictory to me.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You convinced me that no US citizen can be detained indefinitely in Guantanamo.
I'd be very happy to be convinced that US citizens can't be detained indefinitely elsewhere either.
I'm genuinely confused about if it only applies to people whom a Proper Court has Judged to be associated with specific Terrorist Groups, or if it applies to people of whom somebody says they're associated with specific terrorist groups, or something in between.
But if the justice is not involved in deciding whom this applies to, then there's no justice in applying it.
If the [...] al-Qaeda made statements that they were ceasing operations, denied involvement in any subsequent actions and assisted authorities in apprehending still active terrorists the US Government would be hard pressed to convince anyone that a state of war still exists. Will the terrorists do that? Probably not but the ball in in their court.
A pretty ridiculous claim, don't you think? At this point, I can claim to be al-Qaeda and post spam that challenge US government, in effect restrict a whole country indefinitely. Your illusion that this is a real war convinced you that al-Qaeda is an organization equivalent in legitimacy to the USA.
I'm not from US, but here we have ethnic and religious "terrorism" going on for decades, through different groups, including al-Qaeda. Those are just fucking names so that you can vaguely identify what's going on. It's not like asking FSF to close its doors, but asking for the Free Software Movement to cease operation. Who is going to decide that they are dead?
Now I want to rent the movie "Brazil". Does everyone have their form 27B-6 ready?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
You people have the worst reading comprehension.
The requirement to have the military detain someone does not apply to american citizens. The right to do it still applies.That's what your little referenced section says. Re-read it.
Here's your honorable congressman talking about how happy he is that he will be able to indefinitely detain 'homegrown terrorists', americans on american soil, without miranda rights, charges, trial or hearing of any kind.
Go look at what that guy, McCain an Levin said, it's all on youtube. They've even indicated that the white house requested this.
Here's somebody else's take on it.
Where were you earlier in the year when the white house assassinated an american and his family abroad with drone strikes without a trial? The 'suspect', and I use that term very loosely, had a 16 year old son who was also killed. Are you following the plot here or what? Did the whole GITMO thing skip your brain? Bush started it, this administration has always claimed it has the right to do it to americans and now congress has somewhat affirmed it.
What really drives me to furious anger is that if people weren't such sacks of shit they could find these things out themselves instead of wasting my time.
Liberty.
I've known Richard for almost 30 years. He's picky, partly because he can be, partly because he knows that his physical appearance and demeanor are easily mocked. He seems quite content to irritate people who are not 100% onboard with his announced belief. I recently chatted with him at a hot dog stand, and he claimed that "Software As A Service" is evil because it keeps people's data from their own control and their own computers. I pointed out that, for my work, our clients don't have the resources and the skills to manage such large and critical databases, but that didn't seem to address his concerns.
The point is that Richard will piss off completely reasonable people if he doesn't tightly control the venue, and it will distract from his core message. He knows this, so he controls his venues very, very carefully.
Read line 296. The following lines are not the license for the kernel - they're instead instructions on how to use the GPL in your own software (instructions that the kernel itself does not follow).
You just do a transition over time. Announce your intent to change. All new contributions get licensed as GPL2+, and you track those. You also ask as many people as possible to tag lines they've contributed as GPL2+. After some period of time you ask anybody who objects to relicensing their code to step forward and substantiate that their code is still included and indicate which lines they do not want relicensed. You rewrite their code so that it is no longer in the kernel. Then you make the switch. If somebody objects after that date you just do the same thing. The dead aren't too likely to sue you.
A solution doesn't need to be perfect to be workable.
You raise an important point. There are two perspectives here and unfortunately, both of them are correct. Stallman's perspective is that computers are so critical that it's unacceptable that users should be prevented from managing their hardware and software 100%. As you note, however, few users are capable of managing their *ware 100%. It follows, however, that unless the user is 100% responsible for managing their *ware, there's no assurance that the responsibility they've delegated isn't being abused.
One can make the same argument about a number of things. My area of interest is food security. Unless one farms and cooks all of one's own food, one must delegate some of one's food security to others - either in the form of grocery stores, restaurants, or a personal chef, to name a few. How many people could really take 100% responsibility of their own food security? Very few, if you ask me. This is the nature of an interdependent society. Specialists develop expertise in narrow fields and then trade services. It's a cornerstone principle of industrialization and technological advancement. Perhaps Stallman IS correct but here is the tradeoff that must be considered then: If we must retain greater responsibility of our computers - possibly up to 100% control - what expertise or efficiency should we sacrifice instead so that everybody can have that level of responsibility?
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Not just that, but post-GPLv3 many kernel contributors have been explicitly and intentionally licensing newly-written code under the GPLv2 only in an attempt to make it as hard as possible. As I recall, there was even a widely-publicized offer to hardware manufacturers to write Linux drivers for their hardware which, in the small print, mentioned that the drivers would be GPLv2-only.
What? We are still run by Keynesians! Where are the free markets? Everywhere you look, there is government involvement in the markets. Government intervention, government bailouts, government funded spending programs, government regulations, government, government, government!
The free market school DID predict the current shitstorm. Ron Paul predicted it in 2002 when they passed the bill that caused the housing bubble. You had Austrian economists shouting at the top of their lungs, trying to warn people about what was coming. But everyone had faith in their "Maestro" and his apprentice, even as their arch-corporatist organization was lowering interest rates to try to reflate the bubble. Rates are still at ZERO for fucks sake! It's like trying to sober someone up by giving them a whiskey enema.
Linus is a great guy and all but he's not a lawyer and there's 5000-20000 contributors with standing to sue if he relicences without their consent and you can be sure many of those rights would be bought up by SCO-like companies. In any case the lead maintainers are all against it, so they haven't made any serious effort to see if it's even feasible. Most likely you'd need to strip it back down to the core and bring systems back online very, very slowly ripping out all code of people that can't be reached or won't relicence. Even if you found some legal theory in some jurisdiction that'd let you do it any other way, it'd be a copyright infringement and legally toxic in the rest of the world.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are tons of nutjobs in the world. Most of them pass for normal.
Stallman comes across as an honest individual with genuine concerns for individual freedom. Compared to him, our elected officials are pathological liars and sociopaths. If you actually listen to what they say, you'll find that Stallmans arguments are based on reason, and political arguments are based on graft. Yet, listening to and voting for those greedy sociopaths is normal in our society. Who is the real nutjob?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What far to many are doing is to easily giving up on some very important documents.
The Declaration of Independence provides us with instructions and real life examples of what to do when government deteriorates.
The founders of the United States foresaw this probability as indicated in the Declaration of Independence, and why they gave us instructions as to what to do about it.
As many programmers know, all systems require a validation feedback loop in order to stay on course. The Founders of the United States knew this too, when they spelled out the "Of the People, By the People, For the People" feedback loop.
For this feedback loop to work as intended, The People need to know what the government is doing. Bradley Manning made an effort to provide such important information, Wikileaks published similar information and the People responded with feed back for the government via Occupy Wall Street with its top two statements of feedback being "End the Federal Reserve" and "Corporate out of Government". Clearly the People pay far more in taxes than corporate sponsored sales pitches leading to an election winner getting to lie to the public for years, instead of the public rightfully telling Government what to spend the tax money on. Not to forget the insider trading unfairness government (for the People???) employees partake in wrongly.
We have seen how this deteriorated government has responded to this feedback loop the founders of the United States intended. It is our right and duty to fire Government and replace its with governance that will work in accord to the founders intended system.
The Declaration of Independence is a very powerful Document (as are the other two founder documents of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights). It has been around a lot longer than recent and current government. There is nothing that gives current government any right or power to disrespect the founders. They only have brute force ...... supplied by..... those of us.....Who are not genuine Americans.....
... leads to the concentration of wealth and power which naturally leads to dictatorship. Fixed that for you. Capitalism let me start my own business last year. Socialism concentrates the wealth I used to do that into the hands of a small minority who then control it's distribution.
After bitterly complaining about changes to Explorer in Win 7 (like many others) and being told over and over to "get with the program and quit bitching", I came to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy to Dumb Down computers, force migration to much more limited devices ("Smart" phones and Tablets) all in order to limit the power of the Personal Computer. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have much less access and file system power as a "basic" PC consumer than I had way back in DOS days. Is there a "conspiracy" to get those pesky power users out of the PC platform and onto a more controllable type of device? Based on the utterly unusable Win7 file system, I think so. And before I get totally trashed for not migrating to Linux, bugger off. Why should I learn a whole new OS when I was perfectly comfortable and capable with my old XP machine. That is exactly the same argument that MS (and it's Tech "Experts") uses to justify the migration to 7. I just want my old Explorer back, and I want to kill Aero without nasty consequences. Sidebar: Just got an i7 2600 w/16gb Ram, Raid 0 array and relatively decent vid card, should be good right? But now that I have disabled Aero, have all kinds of video/desktop performance issues. Counter-intuitive, but true. Why am I forced to look at eye candy when I really don't want it. Jeesh. And I can't even install my "old" copy of XP Pro, drivers for my hardware not available... Not a happy camper
"If the only tool that you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Donny Rumsfeld
OK, we've had a few posts here offering unsubstantiated implications that RMS is guilty of anti-semitism. I just did a bit of googling, and all I found was a few articles regarding his position regarding Palestine. Conflating an opinion on judaism with one on the nation of Israel doesn't work. Most of the world recognises that Israel is behaving badly towards Palestine, and for RMS to say so doesn't mean he's anti-semitic.
I'd like to add that being called a terrorist by some people isn't the same as the government labeling a group as a terrorist movement. Which the submission seemed like it was trying to express.
This sounds like a case of persecution complex.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Capitalism means control of capital by a small, state-backed class of absentee owners -- banksters, landlords, stockholders, etc.
Socialism means control of capital by workers. When workers exercise that control via the state, it's possible for the state to detach from the workers -- exactly what happened in the USSR and China. This "state socialism" ends up just as bad, if not worse, than capitalism.
But state socialism is not the only form of socialism. The state can be removed from socialism, but not from capitalism. Consult your local anarchist for more information.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Is it okay to buy something you know was stolen?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Capitalism can be a lot of things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Types_of_capitalism
Socialism as well of course, but you still end up with a 'central planning' no matter what you do, and socialism tends more towards over reliance on that in the long run. Of the two I think capitalism is less likely to result in an extreme like the ones you mentioned.
Overall I'd argue that any extreme is a bad thing, and both systems have faults.
And what difference would that make? The Android kernel is incompatible with the mainline Linux kernel anyways.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think Stallman is so cautious to condone the criminalization of pedophilia because "think of the children" is a WMD against freedom and he doesn't want to empower it.
I don't agree with his positions on pedophilia or bestiality - children and animals can't give consent (or at the *very* least, it's impossible to be sure that the "consent" wasn't coerced) but I do agree with his position on necrophilia, as gross as it is. If someone wants to sign a form giving someone else permission to hump their corpse, well it's consent between two adults and nobody's being harmed...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Read it again. The section you cite concerns the requirement to hold covered persons in military custody. This requirement is not extended to US citizens. Got that? It is not that US citizens cannot be held in military custody, it is that they are not required to be held in military custody. For other covered persons it is required; for US citizens it is optional. You are not exempt.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Nobody could analyze *everything* *they* have to say. However, it only takes a short time to analyze everything Stallman has to say. He's really only pushing one thing. He's got several stories and several things he'd like people to oppose, but understanding where he's coming from does not take long. He's also one of the only people in the tech world with such a strong opinion, so it's not like he blends in with all the other tech-nuts. Every reader of slashdot should understand Stallmans position by now. You don't have to agree with it, but we should all understand it. Unfortunately even that is difficult for a lot of people.
Actually it is not so far-fetched as you may think as it has worked in Northern Ireland. The IORA was a terrorist organization, disarmed and is now a legetemite part of the Northern Ireland Government. They have recognised leaders so anyone else who calls themselves OIRA can be denounced as not part of their organization as has happened with the PIRA, the CIRA and the RIRA. So as it stands Great Brittain and the OIRA are no longer at war even though other, smaller organizations containing ex-members of the OIRA are still active. Same thing could work with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The only reason I can identify for the OSNews author having thought RMS was being paranoid or nutty is that he was previously highly naïve. The good news is that most people, once they're paying attention, will hopefully be able to follow RMS's logic. The bad news is that many people would rather stay ignorant (temporarily blissful?).
Because the picture is an invasion of the victim's privacy and its existence is an extension of the original molestation.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No, congress (later responsible to the people for its prior actions) has absolute authority to construe and to effectuate the appropriations requirement:
See Reeside v. Walker, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 272, 290-91 (1850); Hart's Case, 16 Ct. Cl. 459, .... ").
484 (1881) ("[A]bsolute control of money of the United States is in Congress, and Congress is respon- sible for its exercise of this great power only to the people."), affd, 118 U.S. 62 (1886); cf. Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 217 (1962) ("textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department
Also, re the constitution, the president is required to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed", but nowhere in the constitution is he given authority to "direct the treasury", as you put it. That power lies exclusively with congress.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Then it's still not worth my time to listen to him, as I have much less of it left than I previously thought!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think you may have confused my post with one of the parents or grandparents to whom I was responding.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You misunderstand. He's asking how those actions are abusive.
You're making my point for me. :-)
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I still disagree with this. It seems to me that you cannot have socialism without a central authority to enforce sharing, etc. The society will fall apart as soon as people are born into it, etc who don't necessarily think like their parents. With capitalist anarchism, there is nothing stopping people from forming whatever kind of social hierarchies they want.
Actually, his record in this regard is excellent.
What do you consider "excellent" in this regard? If you mean that Paul does in fact always stick rigidly to his rhetoric and never lets the facts play a role in his decision making, I'd say that's a terrible quality in a leader. An effective leader needs to be able to realize when his ideology is not going to cut the mustard in the real world, and adapt. (For an example of what happens when leaders can't or won't adapt their ideology to work in the real world, see North Korea)
If, on the other hand, you mean that Paul in fact does make political compromises when necessary... then good for him, but of course that's what every other (sane) politician does also.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm pretty sure most people don't expect ron paul to actually get much of anything accomplished. It would be a step in the right direction though.
I hope you are aware that the whole concept of different human "races" has no scientific base whatsoever.
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No, but it should be legal to have a photo of stolen property.
I'm looking real hard and I'm not seeing that. What I see is
15 (b) APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS
16 AND LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS.—
17 (1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS.—The require-
18 ment to detain a person in military custody under
19 this section does not extend to citizens of the United
20 States.
Which means it's optional to do so, just not required.
Your metaphor is interesting, but somewhat flawed: If Oscar Meier were immune from lawsuits or criminal penalties due to food poisoning, they'll cut all sorts of corners and poison people through negligence, but they have nothing to gain from putting strychnine in the sausage. By contrast, if I'm Apple, and I'm immune from lawsuits or criminal penalties due to privacy breaches, and I monitor a user's preferences and habits, I can sell that information off to other organizations that want to know what my users are doing (advertisers, MPAA, FBI, etc).
In addition, there's a question of how you delegate responsibility. For instance, with stuff distributed by the FSF, I'm reasonably certain that it's safe to use not because I've carefully examined every line of code, but because enough other people have that any obvious problems and even most of the subtle ones would be caught (and I've contributed occasionally to that effort by reading through the code of a GNU package). So I'm delegating responsibility to the population of anybody who cares enough to check. Whereas with proprietary code, I'm delegating all my responsibility to a company that is motivated to act against my best interest.
For food safety, most people have collectively delegated that responsibility to the government. That's not an uncommon, if somewhat imperfect, solution to the problem.
I am officially gone from
Or perhaps somebody was never a 12 year-old boy? You know, when the hormones kick in?
Hint: The smarter ones had lives even back then and were able to live happy and guilt-free not being Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Of course, my example was idealized - my fantasies were of women and not male priests. But it's like any sex, really - unlike your foray with Father O' Malley in the rectory basement, people have to want it from the get-go to some degree to really enjoy it.
No doubt, your condescending tone comes from your meteoric understanding and insight into what "cool" really is. Or you're a fing drama queen.
While Richard Stallman is not paid directly by the Free Software Foundation, they do support his work in numerous ways. You can read some of the ways in which the FSF supports RMS in this recent fundraising appeal published by the FSF.
Oh, he is a bigot because he helped black people back in the seventies that nobody else wanted to help, and he also took care of the charges for them. Total bigot.
You can't handle the truth.
Ron Paul ... what a racist.
You can't handle the truth.
I think you may have confused my post with one of the parents or grandparents to whom I was responding.
After carefully checking: No, if anyone is confused, it's you.
Fandroids hate facts.
Well, I am confused as to why you think I had anything to say at all regarding this:
"Funny how you skipped right past the "why this article is stupid" first paragraph to the "and other points made by Stallman are also stupid" rest of the post - just so you can pretend the post doesn't explain why this article is stupid. And is it ever."
If anyone skipped past the first paragraph in this chain, it wasn't me. If you think it was, you somehow seriously misunderstood my post in a way so severe I can't see how to clarify it further without a better explanation of what you don't understand about what I posted.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This quote highlights that either you don't know what Keynesian economics are, or you are conflating Keynesian economic policy with a host of other things.
Keynesian doesn't mean "government involvement in markets". It is not the antithesis to free market theory, though those who espouse free market economics have bones to pick with Keynesian economics.
"The Maestro" wasn't Keynesian.
It appears you are very confused. Please do try to educate yourself, your rants are getting sillier and sillier as it becomes apparent that you are profoundly lacking in the education necessary to rationally discuss Keynesian economics.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, that's a bit of a problem with Paul.
He would demand X, Y, and Z from congress and would of course be denied. They'd ride that point of contention right to, and probably through, the deadlines where the federal government shuts down. Since this is more or less equivalent to Paul's platform, he'd call it a net win.
I've no doubt of Ron Paul's integrity. He probably would stick to his guns. It's just that he'd drag us down kicking and screaming into the hellpit of anarchy that would arise if everyone was a hard-liner that refused to compromise. Remember that this is a society and we all have to work together.
Wait, so people who like Apple are fanatics but people who like Microsoft are paid shills? Way to be fucking objective. Stay classy, slashdot.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
A billion times, this! If you don't care about the fact that the image itself is frankly disturbing, then you have to accept that it is a violation of privacy.
(Note; I do believe the age for filming such activities should be aligned with the legal age for performing such activities in the first place though - that deviation confuses me)
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
However, if he honestly doesn't understand why the abuse of children should be illegal then [he's] a sick individual.
You're making a possibly unfounded assumption that it's obviously abusive. At least one post I've seen above says he'd have welcomed this sort of thing when he was a kid. I tend to agree with him. This has to be the strangest thread I've read on /.
The religious are so friggin' hung up on sex. Some people tend to get horribly mangled by bad experiences, leading to years of psychological problems with same. Maybe some people ought not get so hung up on this stuff (ya think?!?)? Maybe a learning experience is just a learning experience, and some people take this stuff *way* too seriously?
It's just bodies. It's just flesh and flesh. Do you really need to focus that much vitriol on something that takes like five minutes, to the point of ruining your life? Sheesh. No, I don't advocate child pron, but I don't think some creepy uncle fiddling with me as a child would have ruined me as a human being.
So what if your creepy uncle did $blah to you? Does that really mean your life is ruined? If so, why?!?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Why not look at what he's actually said before shooting a straw man? "Coercion" is as obvious as any other word in his statement; if there's manipulation going on, there's coercion.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I suppose some of that depends on the quality of the judges and lawyers involved in any litigation. But to a person not trained in the twisted perversities of law, it seems you are correct.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Reading more of the linked file, it seems like things line up very strongly with "kernel is gpl v2 ONLY" regardless of all of the other blather. But, I stand by my other statement. I've had to spend ~$25k to go to an appeals court to get a lower court ruling overturned where the lower court made a blatant error in black letter law.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I hope you are aware that the whole concept of different human "races" has no scientific base whatsoever.
Well thats the most deliciouly ironic part of it all. What we call 'races' are really nothing more than very large extended families.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Wow, are you ever confused. Sorry, can't help you with that, seek professional help. Seriously.
Fandroids hate facts.
Why? What is it about GPLv3 that would have dissuaded Google from using Linux?
The ability to license Android to control-freak companies that don't want you to be able to root your phone? Because the GPLv3 requires that it includes all the information to install your own modified version, no more "our signed binaries only".
Google would actually prefer that control-freak companies not be able to lock users out. In that respect, GPLv3 would have worked better.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Except that's just bullshit. There was already a movement there! Software never used to cost anything and the full source was available until IBM changed their business model. He created a license that the movement used and he tries to claim credit for everything that uses it, include the linux kernel.
I love the GNU license however the amount of bullshit that's been fed to newbies of the FSM for the last 10+ years is such a joke that's it's not funny anymore because they're starting to believe that Stallman did all this on his own. He's trying to go down in history for being this amazing guy that spurred the free software movement which is just wrong.
I'll try to explain it to you, but at this point, I'm fairly sure you're just having fun trolling. Still, I'm bored:
GGP says: Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia [stallman.org] and "voluntary pedophilia" [stallman.org] should be legal, including possession of child pornography. He doesn't visit web sites [lwn.net]--instead, he sends email to a daemon that wgets the page and emails it back to him. Perhaps most infamously, he eats toe jam in public [youtube.com].
Perhaps not the best spokesperson to get behind.
-------------
GP says: It is funny that you complain the article is logically flawed when you make an argument from authority and complain about the messenger instead of the message.
-------------
P says: Failed to see argument from authority. Please quote it for me: I'm a dumbass.
-------------
My post responds to P's failure to see that the GPs 'argument from authority' is likely the stuff about necrophilia in the GGP. My post has nothing to do with the original article. My post references only the chain of discussion starting as far back as the GGP and no further. You then claim (I guess, again, I suspect you're being intentionally vague for trolling purposes) that I'm disputing all of GGP? That would be pretty much the same offense: all of GGP's ideas should be discounted just because he engages in argument from authority?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Well, it's kind of like telling a grown woman who was raped that her attacker was convicted and jailed so she has no right to complain that the video of the rape that someone made is online and that that's what she gets for getting raped where a third party could see it, and besides its evidence of the crime so it should be public domain.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
He created a license that the movement used
Hence he gets much more respect than the average street lunatic in spite of sharing some traits with lunatics.
he tries to claim credit for everything that uses it, include the linux kernel
Citation needed. At best it is your misinterpretation of his statements, at worst you are the raving lunatic you are accusing him to be. On an average - you are letting his personal lack of charm prejudice you against him. Your choice where to stay in the aforementioned stretch of incorrectness.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Yup, being right and winning a legal battle are only loosely correlated. Justice in the US costs money. That is a whole different problem and it certainly ought to be fixed.
Here's the first paragraph you either still ignore, or are too stupid to find
The whole article is a complete non sequitar. Free software wouldn't prevent Obama from signing an indefinite detention bill, nor it would it stop government intrusion on ISPs. There's no relationship between government overstepping the mark and buying a proprietary product from a company you respect because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice unrestricted access to its innards.
Fandroids hate facts.
I don't understand why you think this paragraph is relevant to a discussion of whether or not the post as a whole contained any logical fallacies? Sure, this paragraph didn't. I completely agree with that. But the part I cited did. That seems like the only portion relevant to a question of whether or not the whole contained a logical fallacy.
So what is your point about this paragraph? It doesn't contain a denial of the later fallacy. I mean, if this said, instead, something along the lines of 'I don't believe the following:", then your argument would make sense to me. And true or false, do you think the post, as a whole, contained one or more logical fallacies?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That's true, but the general problem is the power-distance. Meaningful consent is problematic in relationships where one part is significantly more empowered than the other. Age is the obvious example, but for similar reasons there's ethical problems surrounding (for example) professors having sex with their students or bosses having sex with their underlings.
The same problem arise, although in this case there's no laws against it (3 guesses as to why!), if you are in a relationship with someone of wildly differing wealth to yourself, more so the poorer you are. Is it a free choice for a hungry woman living on $1 a day to say yes or no to sex with a guy earning 3 orders of magnitude more ? Isn't her hand forced, or atleast pushed, by the same forces that make us forbid professors from screwing their students ?