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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
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.
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
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
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.
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 ----
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
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
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
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
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.
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."
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
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?
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."
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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!