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Richard Stallman Falls Ill At Conference
itwbennett writes "Stallman, 59, was speaking at the North Campus of the Polytechnic University of Cataluna when he started to feel ill and called for a doctor. It was originally reported in the Spanish press that Stallman was hypertensive, but it is not yet known what his eventual health status was, just that he left the building later under his own power." He is apparently okay and any significant confirmed updates will be posted here.
Sounds like he is going to GNU/Hell
I am not fan of RMS ideas, but really should you use a first post to insult the man?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Of course Stallman took advantage of medical services without checking first if it was free software. Like ever other hippie, he is an idealist dreamer up to the point where reality hits, like the hippie communes that abandoned technology until they ran out of food and realized that farming is hard work. Stallman's devoted supporters are petulant man-children and will defend him to the bitter end, even as both commercial software and less restrictive free licenses make the GPL irrelevant.
I know answering a troll is bad form, but... I am pretty sure that he wasn't able to confirm that his travel was handled all with open source software either. I know he always stays with people (and not in a hotel), but he has to get there somehow. Boat, plane, etc. - and they don't run those on open source. I'm sure he understands that when it is impossible to avoid COTS, you have to bite the bullet and allow it to be used.
I hope no one gave him a parrot.
Richard Stallman Falls the 3rd is?
Isn't it wonderful that a a capital I looks like a small L? It adds a little 'puzzle element' whilst reading therefore adding more spice to life.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Do you really hold the "first post" to such high standards on the internet?
If you think reprinting ideas from his own blog is insulting the man, then you must hate him and everything he stands for.
I hope they used medical equipment powered by open source software to assist him. Otherwise, he'll die of an allergic reaction.
They call copyleft a viral concept for a reason.
Face it, lots of people in our field die young. Being fat and sitting around all day is not good. I hope it's nothing and he's ok but likewise I wouldn't be that surprised. Just as I wouldn't be that surprised if someone said Gabe Newell had a heart attack. We've got some really awesome people we're risking losing early do to choices of a career.
Shame it can be a fun and healthy career.
Maybe he forgot to bathe.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
"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." - June 2006
That was just a big misunderstanding. He thought he was talking about people who really like feet.
Note that the above gets reposted constantly.
I've got some bad news for you. I think you've been in a coma for six months, as it's May, and Thanksgiving is in November.
Stallman on the stretcher https://twitter.com/#!/Cribstopper/status/200641059389313024/photo/1/large
RMS has spent his life fighting for your rights. And when he gets sick all you can do is pile dirt on him? Sure he has some strange views on some things, but in all cases he pushes for greater personal freedom and less corporate ownership of 'ideas' and less government interference in personal lives.
if he'd stopped after the fourth paragraph, you'd have a point.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
RMS has aspergers, and so, has dificulties on empathy.
He uses the Logic all times, without understanding emotional reactions from people around.
And, unless you are a hipocryte yourself, you must acknowledge that from a pure logic point of view, he's right.
For every one of the "crimes" he sustained should be legal, there was a anciant civilization (or more), that endure more time than our punny one, that allowed it.
You would be astonished if you had, in fact, paid attention on college. The Greeks worth special mention here.
It is actually a good idea to visit webpages that way. If he wants to refer to the source material later he can. Webpages and websites are so dynamic often content is lost, while e-mail can be stored basically indefinitely. If Ballmer was treated with a machine using Linux would he be a hypocrite since he calls the GPL a virus?
He probably has GNUmonia.
Stallman's view is that proprietary software is bad for the user, not that it has some amorphous badness to it that infects everyone in the world. Stallman presumably owns neither the ambulance nor the hospital, so he is not the user. If the people who do own them are using proprietary software, that's their own problem. It'll be they who will be forced to pay thousands of dollars for security updates or whatever, not Stallman.
in principle, he's right about pedophilia. it's just that we believe that the likelihood of coercion is so high, and that it's difficult or impossible to assess accurately for each case, that we ban underaged sex and solicitation entirely. this is, in fact, the very definition of prejudice, not that it's wrong to exercise prejudice in this case. i support these laws, but at the same time recognize their somewhat arbitrary basis.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Notice that the post you are replying to (several paragraphs long and containing a number of links) was posted the very same minute as the story.
Not the first time such a thing has happened to today with posts that seem to be putting forward a particular agenda.
... just that Linux Foundation needs a new leader.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/10/1227229/Richard-Stallmans-Dissenting-View-of-Steve-Jobs
"I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."
-Stallman
We are all hypocrites in our own way, including you. I'm not a fan of Stallman's ideology and never have been, but a difference in opinion is no reason to kick a man when he's down.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software?
What about you? Let's say a bunch of evil communists take over the United States (or your own country), and place all hospitals and roads under their dominion. It would still be relatively easy for you to avoid working at an hospital, or avoid working on the roads, because supposedly, there would still be other types of jobs available, but what would you do if you still wanted to walk outside on the streets, or needed to get treated in an emergency? Would you really place your very life or the very life of your family below the priority of your ideals? I doubt that.
And regarding his personal political views, you do not need to like the guy to appreciate some of what he has done. Case in point, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has been in the past an horrible father and a horrible bully, but that doesn't negate everything else he has done.
He's an anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him.
As your link references, he sees this as a time-management strategy that works for him. He says nothing about suggesting others to do the same. And yes, some people do some pretty weird things to avoid getting distracted by the Internet, but in his case, since he's actually been a very productive software developer, compared to the overwhelming majority of developers which I've run across, he may be someone worth emulating when it comes to getting things done and avoiding distractions.
Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).
RMS is respected by some Techies, yes, for some of his software contributions, and yes, some of his more extreme software licensing views are even respected by some Techies as well, but "worship" is a bit of an hyperbole here.
In any case, I hope he's alright.
Seriously, why are we still using such retarded fonts?
There are 3 ways of doing it, all legitimate. You can subscribe and see the posts early. You can see the posts on firehose and guess which stories will make the front page. Or you can just be aware of the tech news stories of the day, and predict what will come up that way.
Write your opinion.
Then you need to wait for the story to come up. Possibly using a webpage change monitoring app with built in search. Or maybe just by lurking.
Or course you'd only go to that effort if you're either very keen to get moderated up on slashdot and get lots of replies. Or if you really care about the topic really strongly.
And Slashdot is full or both of those kinds of people. Although the specific topic they obsess about varies.
Everyone here that posts has an agenda to put forward.
Wow, who are the idiots with mod points today?+5???
You didn't even bother to argue his points, and your post pretty much amounts to 'pedophile!!! he's a PEDOPHILE!!!'
Sigh.
Note that this is also the same man who wrote on his blog:
...that people should be free to do things we find distasteful, in the absence of evidence that those behaviors are harmful.
RMS is pro-freedom. I am shocked.
Note: he was referring to a Bush court nominee who opined that if choosing a same-sex partner were permissible, then each of the acts on that list may also be Constitutionally protected. I happen to disagree with his statement that those things should be allowed (with the exception of adultery, which we've pretty much all agreed is a household matter and not something for the criminal courts). But within certain very narrow scopes, I see (but not concur with) his points.
So your main complaint with the man seems to be that he doesn't automatically have zero tolerance for situations you may be morally uncomfortable with. I don't like them either, and RMS himself probably doesn't (short of enjoying the reaction others have when he says that he supports them). That doesn't mean that they're off-limit to discussion, if not to allow them but only to suss out exactly why we don't allow them beyond "they're icky!"
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
also, rms has been somewhat forgiving about software that is intended to run only on very specialized hardware. he's mostly about keeping general-purpose computers truly general-purpose.
of course this runs into demarcation problems, since he thinks phones are general-purpose computers and i don't (even if they happen to be implemented as such). still, i think medical equipment is safely on the "specialized hardware" side of things.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The post above is pure bile, disrespectful and unspeakably rude. It makes Slashdot look bad. Please mod it to oblivion.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Notice that the post you are replying to (several paragraphs long and containing a number of links) was posted the very same minute as the story.
Right, and then inexplicably modded up.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
> "worship" is a bit of an hyperbole here.
Not really, he's got a group of extreme cult-like followers that try to quash all criticism of the man. They even imitate his writing style in online posts.
Stallman's main occupation is going around and speaking to these groups. He has personally pissed-off so many leaders in the "foss" community that he has very little direct influence in free software development anymore. Sadly, he's become a sort of outsider gadfly.
Don't you mean barbra? tom is a lady now, please call him by his new name.
How exactly is a 3 year old child supposed to make a logical and informed decision about the merits of allowing a pedo to sexually abuse them?
Pedophilia is evil and unethical, pure and simple. There are no valid justifications, in the same way there are no valid justifications for murder or genocide.
Really? Because a whole lot of what he says sounds very emotional. My guess would be that his early experiences with closed source code scarred him in some way that non aspergers people cannot understand. This is of course just my opinion.
My first thought was "ohmigod, I have yet to shake his hand".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Brilliance doesn't exclude being a bit nuts.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
So, (and this is not the first time) it never ceases to amaze me that the response of some contingent of the Slashdot audience is to dig through his blog and use the worst two comments you can find to smear dirt upon him. He's a libertarian, and yes, if you take Libertarainism to its logical extreme, you might indeed believe that anything that doesn't hurt someone else should be legal. Nobody is accusing him of performing these acts, only of believing that freedom really means all possible freedom.
Like RMS, I'm getting old, and travel a lot to do talks. If I fall ill or get hit by a car, I hope you turkeys never find out.
Bruce Perens.
Why? It's all true.
yes, it's obvious for a three-year old, and stallman would agree with you. it's less obvious for 15, 16, 17 and 18; hence the various conflicting laws by jurisdiction.
let me rephrase what you said, "sexual coercion is evil and unethical, pure and simple." pedophilia is just a specific case.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
See Article 134 of the United States Military Code of Justice. Military officers are still tried and prosecuted for adultery - there have been cases in the last few years.
Bruce Perens.
I disagree. The illness/death of a celebrity should provoke a thoughtful discussion of that person. When Pavarotti died, I was part of a discussion about his life. I should have been tipped off that one of the other posters was all over him, but when I expressed my view (that while his music was beyond comparison, he was a pretty massive dick to everyone in his personal life, often publicly and that made him a bad person) and naturally I was yelled at for having no respect for the dead, which I don't believe should be relevant for the discussion of someones life. I think it is the same in this discussion, except it started off on a negative footing. People are here expressing their views and that is good. We shouldn't indulge in censorship just because of an illness, RMS wasn't a big fan of censorship. As for me, while I don't see eye to eye with him on many issues I still respect him as part of the massive pantheon of heroes who got us to where we are today.
Why? It's all true.
And what I said above is all true. Did you have a point?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
One has to be careful here. The medical definition of pedophilia doesn't reach past the age of puberty. Using this, IMHO the only correct, definition, RMS appears to be batshit insane and I can't disagree here.
Alas, in the U.S., the word pedophilia has been re-appropriated to mean sex with underage persons, where "underage" is 16 or 18 depending on who is being asked. Notice that the notion of local law is completely lost in this re-appropriation, and the usual American view is such that it's their way or prison. Going abroad, where different laws apply, and having sex there is illegal as well (this extraterritorial application of law is batshit insane in itself, but oh well). Given that, RMS seems to hint at the fact that the age of majority for consensual sexual relationships isn't set in stone, and varies quite a bit even in the Western world. In Austria it is, for example, 14 years of age, as long as the person under 16 understands the significance of the act.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Damn right.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
but people kicking their kids in the butts get regarded as bestial, don't they ?
Pedophilia != underage sex, although the apparent mixup seems to place you firmly on U.S. soil. Alas, if you seriously think that it's any less "difficult or impossible to assess accurately for each case" when an adult reports a rape, you've obviously never read up on the subject, case law, etc. If there's only two people in seclusion, it's always he-said-she-said, no matter whether people involved are 14 or 60.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Why censor truth? A whole lot of slashdotters have pointed out his reasoning in those cases, no harm done. Yet somehow it still offends you?
OK, you got me there. And that actually doesn't surprise me, the idea being that personal indiscretion can leave you vulnerable to blackmail, which has potential national security implications in this context.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
yeah, i see the distinction, but if we want to get precise: the conditions of pedophilia, hebephilia and ephebophilia are not illegal (yet) anyway. the laws govern the act.
by restricting the case of adults to those who have already reported rape, you are making the error of assuming the affirmative. you will note, obviously, that we do not ban all adult relationships on the basis that there may be coercion involved.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Fight for my right...to eat toejam?
Why? Did you do something noteworthy?
it's less obvious for 15, 16, 17 and 18; hence the various conflicting laws by jurisdiction.
18 years old is of legal age. Also, pedophilia is about attraction to prepubescent children which is hardly what a 15,16 or 17 year old is.
Oh fuck off. RMS hasn't fought for my rights. And regardless of anything good he's done, he still has to stand by his own words, HIS OWN WORDS. He doesn't get a pass on his views on pedophilia simply because you fancy this idea of liberated software. Was Stallman the only person in the word ever to advance the open source cause? No. He was not. He is owed NOTHING. NOTHING.
Are you stupid, or, well, stupid? Federal law prohibits transfer of prescription drugs. Having a prescription drug covered by insurance and then transferring it is also considered to be insurance fraud in may states. Getting a fluid you'll be injecting into your body from someone who posted an ad on Craiglist -- well, stupid it is, then.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
This. I disagree with this end game, and most of his ideology. I'm posting this on an iPad for god's sake.
Yet. I hope he gets better. I hope he can make me see the light or vice a versa. I hope we can continue having this debate. I think some never ending debates bring us down, this one, however, brings us up.
He's a quirky and socially maladjusted but sweet man.
Come on RMS! Pull through!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
last i heard Darl Mcbride was rushed to hospital with an erection thats reportedly lasted well over an hour now.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Why censor truth? A whole lot of slashdotters have pointed out his reasoning in those cases, no harm done. Yet somehow it still offends you?
It offends me deeply. I doubt that you yourself have changed the course of history for the better. Think about it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
RMS has spent his life fighting for his own agenda.
Fixed it for you.
JK
Great, now could you please explain what 15-18 year olds have to do with pedophilia, which is the sexual preference for prepubescent children?
"Average" pubescent developments (ability to ejaculate in boys, and menarche in girls) occur about age 12-13, and this actually occurs somewhat after the onset of puberty, as puberty is the "process" of maturation in an individual from a child's body into an adult's body, and other physiological changes are required before those milestones may be reached.
A sexual attraction for prepubescents thus implies that they are somewhere younger than age 12, and more likely several years younger than that. Not 15-18 years old.
The point is, in the power differential between an adult and a prepubescent child, no "informed consent" is possible. I guess the problem is that Stallman has never mentally and emotionally matured beyond the 12 or 13 year old phase himself, and so he doesn't understand this power difference, which is, I suppose, a common affliction where Aspies are involved. Pedophiles are predators, plain and simple. Ephebophiles (the proper term for a sexual attraction for young-but-pubescent teens, generally held to be in the 14-18-ish bracket) are sometimes (I'd argue often, except for the "of the same age range as the partner") predators as well - man-children who are incapable of having an adult relationship, and so they prey on easily manipulated and influenced teens.
Here's an easy rule of thumb for the Aspies who like to argue that banging 14 year olds is acceptable behavior for a 27 year old man:
((your age/2) + 7) = minimum acceptable age of partner.
That's the youngest acceptable age of a suitable partner for any adult over the age of 18. You go below that age, and you're looking REALLY fucking creepy, you are *probably* a damaged Lost Boy incapable of having an adult relationship, and there's a *good* chance you're downright predatory. For those of you who are spitting Cheeto crumbs of rage at the screen while mashing the "Reply to This" link right now: seek help.
Why? Did you do something noteworthy?
I take it you did. Oh wait, maybe not. If you want to know who Bruce Perens is, look him up in Wikipedia.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Please ignore this comment. I'm posting to this thread because I've mismodded the parent's comment (tried to click "insightful", but clicked "redundant" instead).
And yet you advocate for censorship, the opposite ideal of the man you wish to respect. As gandhi once said, I wish you stallmanites were more like your stallman.
He's not a Libertarian, he's a Socialist. They're both leftist ideologies with much in common, but many differences distinguish them of course.
With that said, I agree with your post regardless.
fair enough, i was using the vernacular meaning of pedophilia.
admittedly, it is very hard for me to imagine pedophilia ever being consensual. hebephilia might be, but as i said it would probably be extremely rare. ephebophilia seems to be where the problems are.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Everyone here that posts has an agenda to put forward.
So, what is your agenda?
He fell GNU/ill
Oh it's very long and detailed. I have an opinion on a lot of things. What's yours?
Nope nobody will be talking about me if I had a heart attack, and I assume that extends to anyone posting on slashdot.
RMS has spent his life fighting for your rights.
No, he has spent his life picking up his toys and going to play in a corner. And he has been freeriding the open source "movement" ever since. I won't argue the impact GPL has made, or the merits it may have - but how many of that *popular* GPL-licensed software was actually done by him? Not much. And how well is that software supported in "non-free" operating systems? Well, at least *BSD ports keep their patches for a given application off the official sourcetree :P. Talking about hipocrisy...
but in all cases he pushes for greater personal freedom
No he doesn't. Not only he talks trash about things he knows nothing about (google the OpenBSD rant), he is clearly pushing his own agenda and his own view of the world as the only valid approach. He is a fanatic, plain and simple, and much of his career was built on the backs (and efforts) of others. And yes, I am surprised how much relevance is given to anything that he says.
Looking through the comments, I'm reminded again why I visit this site less and less. I think this might just be my final post here. This site is a shadow of what it was when I joined, and I came along fairly late...
I advocate for civility and respect. What do you advocate for, your right to twist my words?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Also, pedophilia is about attraction to prepubescent children which is hardly what a 15,16 or 17 year old is.
Depends on the country you live in. A while ago, there was a big fuss about an american 16(?) year old (boy/girl?) that sent naked pictures of herself to a boyfriend. There are also some scandals with teachers and 16/17 year-old students, so I'd guess its not that black-and-white.
He's just logical to a flaw.
I'm starting to have this same problem and I'm not being funny or sarcastic at all.....
I have always had little in the way of empathy and it's more learned than natural. You just sorta learn what people expect you to do when certain things happen. It's kinda sick since I'm not sure what it's like to feel otherwise.
It also means that in various moods I'll have a different reaction to the same emotional stimulus. I'm not consistent with my empathy and sometimes people are confused by that.
Also while walking around I get people telling me to smile. I guess I frown when I walk. Just had someone today tell me that in the parking lot as I walked to my truck.
So I understand RMS and this situation very well. Again without lying or joking or whatever, I'm actually a child programming prodigy and I landed an official 6 figure income before I turned 19 as a high school dropout with no credentials. One interview at a fortune 10 company and I was hired over a 30yr old guy with 15yrs experience. They said I made him look uneducated and had to get their bosses boss to sign off on such a "risky" hire. My 6 month turned into nearly 4 years now and counting.
I say that because it possibly reflects on my brain in some way or another. More and more as I code I'm starting to lose touch with other non-logical forms of thinking. I too am starting to lose my learned societal inhibitions and relearning who I am with my own pure logic. I'm now bi as I realize undiscovered pleasure from both sexes. I'm not religious at all. I feel like people in general are greedy pieces of crap for what they do all over the world to other living creatures. 5 years ago I could never have imagined being bi, or have vegan thoughts when I used to be a burger lover with triples all the time. It's amazing what pure logic does to someone that has a brain capable of removing emotion from the picture.
As odd as it sounds I've had a few random times in my life where I believe I've felt empathy. It's a very strong feeling for sure and I'm not really missing it. Talk about unchained out of the box thinking. Wow. So give RMS a break. Seriously. No one is perfect. I live a happy life as a software developer and people consider me a rather kind and friendly individual... I buy people gifts, participate in birthdays, talk about deceased loved ones. I guess my lack of empathy makes me a good interested listener and I guess I'm doing great at feigning the emotion because people keep coming to me to discuss their problems.
Anyways this is a book. Later.
Your rights maybe, but not my rights. I'm better served by public domain open source, both when I've released software as open source and when I've used others open source.
GPL has only ever restricted what I want to do with open source software, not given me more freedom.
The idea that he's fought for my rights is laughable.
Is RMS actually brilliant? I've never seen anything from him which qualifies.
Once upon a time, long ago, he actually did technical things, but never (to the best of my knowledge) demonstrated either coding or OSS project management brilliance. His contribution was more along the lines of being able to churn out mountains of mediocre code while trying to flesh out a minimally functional GNU clone of the UNIX userland.
The two major applications I know of which he architected and was heavily involved in (emacs, GCC) both have a reputation for horrendous internal design and bad experiences with RMS-style project management. Both have suffered major forks due to contributors getting fed up with RMS/FSF control. In fact, today's GCC is the descendant of EGCS, the fork. The egcs guys were so much better at running the project that pretty soon everyone was defecting from mainline GCC. On the other side, last I looked, xemacs and emacs never merged.
RMS's #1 quality is his monomania about promoting his esoteric definition of "freedom". That is, the way in which he is nuts. You cannot separate it from his public life, because it is the only reason he's famous in any way at all. It's also the reason why his fame and influence is quite sharply limited -- you have to be an ideologue in some of the same ways as RMS to think he's worth paying attention to or following.
Why are you getting moderated down??
Slashdot groupthink at its best.
Steve Jobs has been in the past an horrible father and a horrible bully, but that doesn't negate everything else he has done.
Which was what, exactly? Being a good marketeer? Being a follower of bullshit, sorry, alternate medicine? Being at the right place at the right time, and knowing the exact people? Am I missing something?
And yes, some people do some pretty weird things to avoid getting distracted by the Internet, but in his case, since he's actually been a very productive software developer
I'm eager to see Hurd finished. No, really. I can't stand RMS for various reasons (and some of them were already posted), but Hurd was a promising project that could actually foster innovation, and instead is a dead turd. And most of what he's made is either 1) developed and maintained by someone else 2) running happly on those non-free systems he talks about thanks to in-tree patches.
Stallman's view is that proprietary software is bad for the user
This is his theory. In practice proprietary software beats the pants off free software in user experience. Not all proprietary software obviously. But the best of proprietary software is way out ahead of the best of free software. In design, in localisation, in accessibility, in ease of use.
You think this is creepy... You should have seen some of the comments here about Steve Jobs when he was dying.
That's all exciting, and yes I am totally jelly as my own coding abilities are less than what they should be. But none of that addresses my point. Non of what he says ever strikes me as logical, it always comes off as simple emotion. Like what a politician would say if they didn't have someone moderating every word. Also, a great deal of hubris. But I don't buy the argument that any of his views cone from pure logic. I am not bashing the guy, it just doesn't click together.
It offends me deeply
You're in the wrong place not to be offended, mate. This is a *discussion* site, so every point of view deserves their space. RMS itself is a firm believer of "freedom" (or whatever he thinks is freedom), so why aren't you?
I doubt that you yourself have changed the course of history for the better.
I doubt he has too, but only time will tell. Maybe his message will be lost in translation and end up like Guy Fawkes. Maybe you will run over the next world dictator with your car, and - never knowing how you changed the course of history for the better - serve a life sentence for murder. Who knows?
Think about it.
Dictator. Car. Or that homeless guy you gave a sandwich when he was plotting a mass murder on a shopping mall. Think about it.
Do you see how vague bullshit works both ways?
I think that everyone can acknowledge that RMS has devoted his entire life to something that has done many people very much good.
What exactly is that something?
Except GIMP. GIMP is by far the easiest tool to use in its genre of software. It is amazing how many people left Photoshop in droves with this last release that gave us the advanced technology of the single window interface.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
So, I was offended by those comments, too.
Bruce Perens.
Well said Bruce, gezondheit RMS und sie, de biede,
if these turkeys had 1 brain cell they would at least understand 30 years of their own specialist culture,
Maybe we should send the to ESR for re-orientation -v- target practice
I doubt that you yourself have changed the course of history for the better.
I doubt he has too, but only time will tell.
Time has already told, or maybe you did not use your phone today, quite probably running software compiled with the compiler he wrote or licensed under the licence he created, which changed the course of history. If you do not recognize such evident facts then you are a dunce, or simply disingenuous. Either way, please do not call me mate, you do not mean it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Civility is one thing, but as much as I may disagree with him, I choose to respect the man by respecting his ideals. Also by turning my fingers into horns and yelling gnu across the warehouse.
Not everyone on /. is like that. Many of us quiet readers idolize folks like RMS and you, Bruce.
-brian
Seriously though, two points:
1. Given his stand in favour of pedophilia, I'm surprised that he's not on a no-fly list, and that other countries give him a visitors' visa;
2. Given his age (59), and apparently that knew he had hypertension, it could be a side effect of medication.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
16 is generally legal, at least in the USA.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm an Aspie myself and often reach absurd conclusions when being logical to the point of ignoring emotion. Different specifics than Stallman, but I definitely understand the concept. Ironically, a lot of negative emotions come about when this doesn't work out.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Which compiler does BSD use for everything? And who wrote that initially? Who wrote a number of utilities that went along with it? Who wrote the GPL? Sure, RMS hasn't done any cool GUI apps or really any notable apps in 20 years. He moved on to running FSF and advocating his philosophy. He built the foundation for something big. It was actually the Open Source "movement" that freeloaded on the idea with a shitload of "approved" licenses.
I do agree that he should stick to his free software philosophy and perhaps anti-DRM stance (tech freedom?) and stay out of more social and political issues.
quite probably running software compiled with the compiler he wrote
I actually doubt that. I have used the compiler "he wrote" (as in the pre-EGCS merge), and by then, GCC was already a collective effort. Have you used it?
or licensed under the licence he created
Yes, he created a new license instead of using the already available (and still available today) open source licenses. And if you believe that crap about "BSD can be close sourced", you aren't using the internet today. Or you do it with a "GPL" shield that acts as proxy between those BSD technologies and yourself.
which changed the course of history
Linux changed the course of (from today's perspective) history. And it is the major GPL-licensed project. Not Hurd, not Emacs, not even GCC. How many lines did RMS contributed?
Either way, please do not call me mate, you do not mean it.
Yeah, maybe I was a bit patronizing, I apologize.
50% Troll
30% Insightful
20% Offtopic
I guess the first rule of slashdot is you don't talk about GNAA or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where I live (EU country) 16 is the legal age for consented sexual intercourse, given that you have the parents consent. If you are older than 18, and you have intercourse with a minor (even if she is 16 and madly in love with you), you can be criminaly charged, if you don't have her explicit parent's consent.
yeah. if it's fair when they're alive/healthy, it's fair when they're dead/sick. News of the death/illness spurs discussion of that person in general.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
And in another post on this very article I said that while I do not see eye to eye with the man, I do respect him as one of a pantheon of heroes who brought computing to where it is today. That of course does not mean that true negative points are removed from the discussion. Arguments can only be countered with fact, it is useless to say "but I don't like it therefore it shouldn't be discussed". And RMS himself would agree.
You presumably develop commercial software. You like to incorporate the work of others (or just extend it) and make a commercial product. That's fine - we all need to make a living. Stallman is looking out for *users* of software. He doesn't feel they should have the restrictions placed on them that you want to place on them. In your developer role, you're not the "user" he's concerned about. Some people don't even "use" the software they develop (it's some business app).
So RMS is looking out for the users, not the developers. There are certainly more users than developers. But then most people who actually read a license are developers. And round and round we go.
RMS has aspergers, and so, has dificulties on empathy.
He uses the Logic all times, without understanding emotional reactions from people around.
And, unless you are a hipocryte yourself, you must acknowledge that from a pure logic point of view, he's right.
The illegality of bestiality is just as legally sound as any animal cruelty laws, because animals can't consent. Consent requires speech, moral development and sexual maturation.
It's well established medically that incest should be illegal because it leads to horrific birth defects, just as society shouldn't condone polygamy because it leads to a shortage of women and then pedophilia.
And while there is room for reforms (a 17 year old who has sex with a 16 year old is not a pedophile) pedophilia should be illegal because children can't consent. Children lack moral development and sexual maturation; yes, people develop at different rates and the ages we pick are arbitrary. That just means the laws are imperfect, it doesn't mean that the fundamental basis of the laws is unsound.
And just as you have a right to do what you will with your body, you have a right to be sure that your remains won't be defiled, so necrophilia is out. Unless someone _actually_ specified in their will, "if you ever get a hankering, yeah, that kind of hankering, please feel free to bone my corpse." And if any funeral home was willing to accommodate those wishes, you've just made an outstanding case for cremation.
If you have a right to engage in a contract, you implicitly have a right for that contract to be legally binding because otherwise you don't actually have a contract. Ergo, adultery, the violation of a contract, has to be illegal for a person to have a right to actually marry. Sex outside of marriage is not illegal in any Western nation, so it's rather beside the point.
As to sex outside of marriage in other customs... well, say if you're a Muslim, of course, you believe that the angel Gabriel came down to Muhammed and dictated precisely how you were supposed to live your life. So from a purely logical point of view, you're a Muslim and you've accepted that it's the indisputable word of God delivered by a divine being and recorded in a perfect language, ergo, it's true.
Logic really only works if your premises aren't bullshit.
For every one of the "crimes" he sustained should be legal, there was a anciant civilization (or more), that endure more time than our punny one, that allowed it.
No, usually there was an ancient civilization accused of such practices by their neighbors, it's rare to find ancient civilizations that boasted of doing truly perverse things themselves, or the physical evidence of it. It's not like it doesn't still happen. For instance, do you think the Chinese are actually grinding up babies and trying to sell the pills to Koreans, as the South Koreans have recently alleged? Might it be more plausible that South Korean officials are spreading rumors about Chinese corruption?
Sure. He was shitty about Steve jobs' death.
But a man's life is in the balance here. Let's try to understand the gravity here.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Actually, Stallman's ideology doesn't say anything about user experience. He believes proprietary software is bad for the user because the user can't use the source code, not because it has worse user experience.
The agent comes into the room, closing the door behind them, and walks up to the front of the room. There is a large desk, and behind it is a large chair, turned to face the window.
The agent stops in front of the desk and waits. "Reporting, sir."
The chair does not move, but a voice comes from the unseen occupant. "Is it done?"
"Yes sir." The agent stands stock still, as several laser dots play over his chest, head and groin. "I mixed the first half of the binary agent in the bottled water at the hotel. No one else should be affected."
"I see. And the second half?"
"I placed that on the end of his underarm deodorant." The agent smiled at his own ingenuity.
There was a sigh from the chair. "Ah. I suppose that explains it, then."
"Sir?"
The chair slowly turned around. It was bright outside, so the occupant was lit from behind, and impossible to see. "He's alive. He's currently at the hospital and doing well."
The agent fidgeted. "Sir, I.." One of the lasers came close to his eyeball, giving him pause.
"He is a geek, agent. Geeks do not use deodorant. Or soap, for that matter." There was a soft clicking of buttons on a phone console being pressed.
"Begging your pardon sir, but you do." All of the laser dots jumped, as if shocked. In the shadowed chair, a pair of Giorgio Armani glasses gleamed in utter silence.
"Indeed I do." There were a few more soft taps, then a final tap, and the laser sights on the agent began to wink out. "Fair enough, agent. Good try, at least. And good recovery."
"Thank you, sir." The agent let his breath out slowly.
"Yes, I like to think I learned a few things from Steve, before he died." The chair began to turn again. "The receptionist will have your payment. We'll have use for you again, I'm sure."
The agent nodded. "Thank you, sir." He turned sharply on his heel and left the room, closing the door behind him. At the desk, the chair slowly turned to face the Redmond skyline.
"Another time, Richard."
[End Of Line]
That is the only thing in the comments of any value - and it's only kinda funny.
Another way to look at it is that the very fact that Richard Stallman has so many detractors who spend so much time trolling sites like Slashdot is a great indication that he has had a fantastic influence on the world. If any of the losers attacking him on slashdot died tomorrow, they'd be lucky to have a dozen people show up to their funeral.
> Like RMS, I'm getting old, and travel a lot to do talks. If I fall ill or get hit by a car, I hope you turkeys never find out.
Lol. Very funny. I hope that when you do get ill (and it will happen to all of us at one time or another) it is a long time from now. Keep up the great work Bruce, and don't let the gobbling of loco turkeys ever discourage you! I must be getting old too, while it is a very slippery slope with paedophilia what consitutes a child depends on where on the globe you are (eg. IIRC, places in the US where a consenting 17 year old and 18 year have the legal threat of statutory rape is madness), so Stallman makes valid points IMHO - people should think about what he's saying rather than always think he means the worse case (acts with children where there is more than a few years age difference).
No one answered my question, so I wiki'd you. It seems like you have been pretty influential over the years, and I don't dislike user Linux. At the same time you seem to be much more of a moderate than RMS. So while I am sure your illness or passing would definitely be newsworthy I doubt people would have as much to say about you that wasn't positive.
I don't see eye to eye with RMS on a lot of things, and I was appalled by his reaction to the death of Steve Jobs, but I certainly hope nothing is seriously wrong with him. There's no doubt he's contributed a lot to technology and it'd be sad to see something happen to him. I like to think heaven has its place for tech visionaries, though. Get well soon, RMS. (One more thing-- not trying to really be funny or condescending here, but I think maybe he should avoid eating toe jam from now on, or whatever he pulled off his foot that time...)
--Z
Nobody asked him to fight for anyone's rights. He's not owed anything.
In fact, his restrictiveness has hurt the movement and led to Clang and other free-licensed initiatives to replace his narrow ideas of freedom. He has become anti-progress and anti-technology (see his views on cell phones, web browsers, etc.).
The "strange views on some things" you mention is pedophilia, for god's sake. He's saying "voluntary pedophilia" and child porn possession should be legal. Come on.
Linux changed the course of (from today's perspective) history. And it is the major GPL-licensed project. Not Hurd, not Emacs, not even GCC. How many lines did RMS contributed?
In the absence of Stallman, how much of GCC would have been written? In the absence of GCC, how much of Linux would have been written?
In the absence of GCC, how much of Linux would have been written?
Every single line. RMS did not invent compilers, not even open source compilers.
Responding to yourself is OK, but calling yourself a troll?
Also, if you're so fed up with Linux, why are you using it at all? Isn't relegating it to the server room an admission that it works?
How about allowing pics to be taken when kids are young, but being confidential under penalty of death to the photographer who can publish them only after the subject reaches the age of 18(or 21) and gives consent
GCC may be "mountains of mediocre code", but a) how many people can churn out code like that? and b) that mediocre code has allowed other programmers to produce free software.
Suck it, Bruce.
Interesting. RMS tried to find an open-source C compiler, but couldn't. What did he miss? And if there were alternatives, why didn't Linus use them instead of GCC?
I would warn off people anywhere to buy insulin from nonreputable sources.
Getting a fluid you'll be injecting into your body from someone who posted an ad on Craiglist -- well, stupid it is, then.
More like Darwin Award canditate.
How about allowing pics to be taken when kids are young, but being confidential under penalty of death to the photographer who can publish them only after the subject reaches the age of 18(or 21) and gives consent
Uh, penalty of death? Shouldn't that be reserved for things like first degree murder?
He is a fanatic, plain and simple
It's better to be fanatic for freedom than passively allowing its destruction.
Calling him out for the very *creepy* things he wrote isn't a bad thing. (pedophilia, really dude, what f-in universe do you live in?) Ya, the OP should've qualified that with all the good things he did, but that doesn't absolve him in any way shape or form from the disgusting bile that he wrote.
RMS has spent his life fighting for your rights.
No. Richard Stallman has spent most of his adult life:
He shares a disturbing number of qualities with your average cult leader.
It was only until many other more reasonable voices and non-FSF software appeared that the open source movement gained traction. And what was his response? Continual bitterness, which has shown up in him demanding Linux be called GNU/Linux.
While revered by some geeks, he's almost completely ignored by government, academia, and industry and not taken seriously by anyone with power in any of them. He is a sociopathic egomaniac, and while I wish to hell he'd retire to a small corner of the world - I don't want it to be because of poor health, and I hope he's better soon.
Please help metamoderate.
RMS tried to find an open-source C compiler, but couldn't.
Do you even search what you believe? From Wikipedia's GCC page: Richard Stallman's initial plan[10] was to rewrite an existing compiler from Lawrence Livermore Lab from Pastel to C with some help from Len Tower and others.[11] Stallman wrote a new C front end for the Livermore compiler but then realized that it required megabytes of stack space, an impossibility on a 68000 Unix system with only 64K, and concluded he would have to write a new compiler from scratch.[10] None of the Pastel compiler code ended up in GCC, though Stallman did use the C front end he had written.[10]
But Hey, here's a BSD licensed one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_C_Compiler
why didn't Linus use them instead of GCC?
Go ask Linus. Probably because most of the available *nix compilers weren't i386 friendly. Heck, if he *did* have free i386-compatible unix environment, probably you wouldn't have Linux today. Does that mean that closed source and courts (AT&T vs BSDs) foster innovation and improvement?
No, he has not.
He has spent his life trolling around that commercial* software is "bad" and "unethical".
* (and soon some gnussolini nitpicks, "but free software can be commercial as long as the source is open")
on toe-jam.
Oh great, that cute little formula that always gets thrown out by immature people who can't figure out whether something is ok or seriously wrong on their own so they use some random formula and try to force it on others...
Let's play this game then, according to you if I'm 30 years old (which I am) then if I have sex with anyone under the age of 22 then I'm "REALLY fucking creepy". Too bad the drinking and voting ages where I live are both 18 (and the age of consent a few years under that). In fact, a few months ago I met a girl in a bar, I didn't ask for her age and she didn't ask for mine, one thing led to another and we wound up in bed. So, how old is she? Well, I added her to my Facebook friend list, turns out she's 20. I guess in your little imaginary world I am now "REALLY fucking creepy".
As for the Cheeto comment. Nice little pre-emptive ad hominem attack there.
Maybe he ate some infected toe jam. But the big question is: Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software? If not, he's a hypocrite, because he has called all closed source software an "evil system" that should be avoided at all costs.
Make that 'the ambulence and the hospital computers were running free software, or more recently, libre software. Remember, he specifically refuses to be associated w/ open source, and is all about people getting certain rights, regardless of whether they're capable of doing anything w/ it. By which, I'm talking about the vast majority of things. But to answer your question, yeah, he's indeed a hypocrite, b'cos not only does he want 'non-free' systems to be avoided at all costs - he wants them to actually be shut down by government fiat.
Note that this is also the same man who wrote on his blog:
"[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness." - May 2003
In other words, he thinks that children & animals are capable of approving sex acts? But I believe this, having read his wacko blog, which even the Greenies and Communists would cringe reading. But not NAMBLA or any of the Islamic groups now taking over the 'Arab Spring' countries.
"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." - June 2006
RMS fans hate when these get mentioned, and they'll often call them lies without clicking on the links and seeing that they come directly from Stallman's online blog. Stallman is a kook, and he needs to be called out as one. This conference he fell ill at was about the "dangers of a digital society." He's a anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him. Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).
How does this 'emailing a daemon' work? One still needs an internet connection to be able to do that. And one means to say that after everything else that's been tossed into Emacs, it can't contain a simple text based browser like elinks? His computer - a Lemote Yeedong - based on a Loongson CPU - has everything he considers sacred - a free BIOS, one great libre distro 'GNewSense' (since ones like Debian, Red Hat are not really free), and Emacs - what else could he need? Now, he should be admitted into a hospital whose computers have only that configuration, so that even the MRI machines and other computerized equipment are hooked on to only free, sorry libre, computers.
Do you even search what you believe?
My bad, I forgot that from Open Sources
As for pcc, 4.4BSD dropped it in favor of GCC in 1994, and according to your link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_C_Compiler#Current_version
Theo deRaadt says it isn't ready (as of 2007), and it could only build the OpenBSD kernel in 2009. Indeed pcc version 1.0 wasn't released until 2011.
or one about gamemaker
RMS has spent his life fighting for his own agenda.
Fixed it for you.
But then, who doesn't fight for their own agenda, really?
The illegality of bestiality is just as legally sound as any animal cruelty laws, because animals can't consent. Consent requires speech, moral development and sexual maturation.
And what if a horny animal starts trying to have sex with you? Sorry, but there are ways that animals can communicate with you, even if they're simplistic. It isn't just "speech," and "moral development" is nonsensical here since it's so ambiguous.
you have a right to be sure that your remains won't be defiled
Do you? A corpse is simply an object.
Ergo, adultery, the violation of a contract, has to be illegal for a person to have a right to actually marry.
Uh, no, it doesn't. Marriage can mean anything, and there is no logical reason that adultery must be illegal. You can be married to someone and commit adultery. The world will go on, and in some cases, so will your marriage.
Don't waste my time with such trivialities.
Logic really only works if your premises aren't bullshit.
What's especially amusing is that some seem to think that their arguments are logical.
The point is, in the power differential between an adult and a prepubescent child, no "informed consent" is possible.
It's simply highly unlikely.
I guess the problem is that Stallman has never mentally and emotionally matured beyond the 12 or 13 year old phase himself
I think the problem has more to do with random insults.
That's the youngest acceptable age of a suitable partner for any adult over the age of 18.
I'm overjoyed that you're imposing your arbitrary standards upon me. The magical moral fairy speaks through you.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
My bad, I forgot that from Open Sources
So did RMS or did not had an available opensource C compiler?
Theo deRaadt says it isn't ready (as of 2007)
Did RMS start writing GCC in 2007? Was PCC available when he started GCC? Was any other compiler available? How did RMS compiled GCC? Was the first GCC version tainted with "unpure software"? For how long?
What was the most recent version of GCC you ever used under RMS leadership?
n/t
Making people of the internet realise that they are wrong, obviously :)
Oh shut the fuck up with your retarded NAMBLA justifications. Seriously. A fucking 9 year old being pressured and manipulated into having sex with a 20 year old, or a 30 year old, or a 40 year old, IS NOT CAPABLE of giving informed consent. Is not capable of understanding the psychological damage that results. IS NOT CAPABLE of understanding how she's being manipulated, pressured, and coerced into sex. This "it's unlikely," bullshit you're spewing is always followed by, "And I know the sweetest little 9 year old who's SO mature for her age, I really feel like she's almost an adult. She's so mature, and worldly, and amazing to talk to, I think I LOVE her."
Look at me. LOOK AT ME. Are you looking? Good, I'm gonna say this once: You are broken. I'm sorry you're broken. But please don't use your brokenness to justify or advocate for breaking other people. I know in your fucked up head, you think you "love" this child, and that she's really mature for her age. But she's not mature for her age: you're immature for yours. Somewhere along the way, something fucked you up good, and now you're pretty much regressed to an age where a nine year old child seems "mature" and "wise." This says more about your own pathetic, broken state of mind than it does about the child's maturity.
Since you aspies who love to try and justify your lusts for children aren't capable of understanding social norms, I figured a little handy rule like that would be helpful. You're welcome, my system building aspie friend, I just helped you build a new system. Sadly, you think this requires some "magical" wisdom imparted by a "fairy" to understand, when really, it's just common fucking sense. This is why you're a Lost Boy, and I'm a grown adult telling you that you're fucked in the head if you think a child can give informed consent to sex with an adult.
I guess he almost paid a visit to his admired friend Steve Jobs.
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There are also places in the world where adultery is illegal. The punishment for women can even be death. It's one of the major women's rights issues world wide.
Oh shut the fuck up with your retarded NAMBLA justifications.
Nope. I just acknowledge possibilities. I don't see any conclusive evidence that it's 100% impossible for such an event to occur. That's all I was trying to say.
You seem to be jumping to conclusions left and right, though. How amusing. Are you that emotional for the children?
Since you aspies
An internet psychologist, huh?
justify your lusts for children
If seemingly defending a certain group means that I'm a member of that group, then I must be: black, gay, a pedophile, and a host of other things.
aren't capable of understanding social norms
It could be a "social norm" to lynch black people. It isn't always preferable to go with the crowd, so don't try using that as an argument.
it's just common fucking sense
Labeling something as "common sense" doesn't make it common, obvious, or correct. It might be "common sense" that the world is flat. It means nothing when you say something is "common sense."
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Everyone here that posts has an agenda to put forward.
Certainly, but some are more forthright about it than others, allowing readers to compensate for the bias. To not do so is just plain dishonest, and generally frowned upon--at least in the society to which I belong.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Ooow, my first troll rating in like... forever. I've met Stallman, appreciate his contributions to the arts and sciences, and while I believe I hit the nail on the head, I guess the truth still hurts.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I'm posting this on an iPad for god's sake.
And of course the iPad is running iOS and apps build with XCode wich uses gcc as the compiler backend. No GNU, no iPad.
Stephan
So do I. To a large part I think he's lost touch with reality and is busy tilting at windmills that nobody else can see. Yes, I use Linux on my computers because I don't see any reason to pay for an OS, pay for applications and then pay a different company for more applications to keep my computer free of malware, especially when I can get an equally good OS and applications for free. But unlike some people, I'm not a fanatic about it. I'm not going to try to push anybody else into Linux unless they're already interested in it. If asked, I'll tell them that whatever OS does what they want the way they like it is the best one for them. I can't imagine RMS doing that, and that's one of the things I don't like about him.
Having said that, I was saddened to hear that he's sick and I hope that it's nothing serious. 59 is much too young for us to lose him, because even though I don't agree with him, he keeps saying things that need to be said and bringing up ideas that need to be discussed.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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).
The italicized part above reflects the interpretation by a court nominee that if the choice of a sexual partner were to be constitutionally protected, the others would be as well, as a consequence. Stallman thought he was wrong about the legal interpretation. However, the nominee in question (the link to the original congressman's site turned out to be a dead link) did not support any of these things - he was just stating that the right to a choice of sexual partners was not there in the constitution - something that he could have been either right or wrong about.
However, the bolded part does represent Stallman's actual views. What he wants done w/ his body is his choice, so I have no comments on that. But it's noteworthy that he didn't bother to explain why he thinks pedophilia should be allowed, and whether he thinks a minor can actually make an informed decision about sex - something that s/he wouldn't regret later.
Oh great! A new interface! Does it have proper color management yet?
I believe XCode uses LLVM and Clang now. Also the GNU GCC project was in fact a fork from the GNU project that was later merged when the FSF realized that no one was using their fork anymore, hardly what I'd call "No GNU, no iPad"
I think that he's on record as stating that he avoids air travel whenever possible, and prefers using the bus or trains. Of course, it's not an option if he's traveling from coast to coast, or to other countries. I'm however surprised that someone w/ his stench would be allowed in a bus or plane - everybody should take the next bus or flight.
Actually, NEXTSTEP was written in Objective C, w/o using gcc, and gcc would not have been necessary in creating Darwin and OS-X either. Apple did happen to use them when it didn't have a problem w/ GPL2. But after GCC was moved to GPL3, not just Apple, but other organizations, like FreeBSD, started Clang and are moving to it, while others, like OpenBSD, stayed w/ a version of GCC that was still GPL2, and would probably fork it under the same license. So soon, the bragging rights of the GPL would be largely eroded, if not eliminated.
That's true, but the GP was painting him as some sort of a saint, such as St IGNUtius. Which he's anything but
...but he's NOT fighting for my rights.
I have ALWAYS had the right to run/modify software that I have a right to run/modify.
Stallman is NOT fighting to protect or give me new rights. He's simply trying to convince people to EXERCISE those rights and choose more permissive software over more restrictive software.
I have every right to choose to use proprietary software and there is NOTHING wrong with making that choice.
Furthermore, Stallman DESERVES dirt because, quite frankly, he's a dirty guy. He was homeless and squatted in a college office for year, he's obese, eats parts of his feet, advocates unrealistic positions that would frustrate average users, and quite frankly seems like a techno-dinosaur. Have you even SEEN the amateur-hour official web site he has?
tomhudson, is that you?
AKA Barbara Hudson AKA Barbara, not Barbie.
Yep, s/he has a right hard^W hate-on for RMS.
It's as if the guy that's written tools used by everyone (even if indirectly) every day is a freak, and the transgendered one is normal.
Hi, bonch.
Nope:
tomhudson, AKA Barbara Hudson AKA Barbara, not Barbie.
Yep, s/he has a right hard^W hate-on for RMS.
It's as if the guy that's written tools used by everyone (even if indirectly) every day is a freak, and the transgendered one is normal.
Hi, bonch!
Did you post the story just for the sake of this comment?
Nope:
tomhudson, AKA Barbara Hudson AKA Barbara, not Barbie.
Yep, s/he has a right hard^W hate-on for RMS.
It's as if the guy that's written tools used by everyone (even if indirectly) every day is a freak, and the transgendered one is normal.
rms wrote some nice software... years ago. now he's just a freak.
Depends where he's coming from. The "maturing" bit seems to suggest that he's talking about kids in their teens, vast numbers of whom have sex with each other anyway. Is there any genuine evidence that a 15 year old is going to suffer more harm having sex with a 40 year old than another 15 year old. I'm not advocating it as a good thing, but for argument's sake, the point is a fair one.
it's less obvious for 15, 16, 17 and 18; hence the various conflicting laws by jurisdiction.
18 years old is of legal age.
Where *you* are, its 'of legal age'.
The fact that 'legal age' varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from nation to nation and even from one place to another within one nation, tells me that theres something arbitrary and fishy with the concept itself.
Are 12 year olds in Alabama really that different from 12 year olds in South Carolina?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I would like to see Hurd as well. Of course, the FSF guys don't care about it, since they are more happy to claim Linux as theirs, despite their differences w/ Linus, but Debian and Arch are working on it. I wish them luch, and hope that they do come up w/ a complete OS. In case of Debian, I hope they do come up w/ their complete kFreeBSD and Hurd, in addition to Linux. In fact, Mach 3.0 is now old - I'd like to see them try doing it w/ Minix 3.0
About Steve, what he did when he was young - disowning his daughter and feigning impotence - was atrocious, but to his credit, he mended fences w/ her later on and accepted her into the family. If someone cleans up their past wrongs, they shouldn't be dinged for it.
Like RMS, I'm getting old, and travel a lot to do talks. If I fall ill or get hit by a car, I hope you turkeys never find out.
I'd miss you, Bruce.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I've been dead for a while, still posting here though.
toejam... sounds like a warner bothers film
Using the term 'Libertarian' to describe him is an insult to Libertarians. Libertarians aren't advocates of pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia or incest, and nor do they - in business - try to delegitimize ways for private citizens to make money. Libertarians are usually about limiting government power, whereas in Stallman's blog, he more often than not wants government to have to power to ban anything that he doesn't like. There is a reason that Stallman backs the Green Party, and has for several election cycles - it's b'cos he's a Leftist, not a Libertarian. How many Libertarians do you see who praise the likes of Hugo Chavez, or Cuba's health care? ESR is a Libertarian. Stallman ain't.
Somehow, I don't know of any advocate either in the Open source movement nor in the Liberated Software movement, who is as in your face as RMS is. Who calls anti-terrorism policies of different countries names, even after deadly terror attacks, someone who openly advocates violating the law - when convenient and someone who is extremely sociopathic, and yet calls for the 'community' to be benefited by whatever happens. I actually support the open source movement. If I were a champion of closed source and proprietary software, I'd just quietly be enjoying the spectacle of Stallman making the entire FOSS crowd looking like a bunch of malcontents, instead of criticizing him like others.
iOS uses clang/llvm FYI
I am really happy to see some of the older Trolls from the great era reposted. We just need a crapflood of "Old Ike" and an issue of Trollback to be complete.
RIP neal'n'bob, ekrout, sexygirl, twitter, fecal troll matter, sllort, trollaxor and any other elder trolls.
Libertarianism tends to be a leftist ideology socially, but a rightist ideology economically. If you have an economic Libertarian group running things, chances are that you'd have government regulations minimized, a simplified tax system and things that would make Conservatives look like practitioners of Fredrich Angels. OTOH, if they were to make laws regarding society, you'd see a lot of things, like drug legalization, porn, easy divorces, same sex marriages and so on get easily approved, which would make even Liberals recoil like Amish nuns.
You are right - in Stallman's case, the only libertarian vibes about him are the social ones, which most mainstream people would consider actually sociopathic, which is why Libertarianism doesn't have much traction. There is absolutely nothing about Libertarian economics that he supports.
Stallman spoke out against the "think of the children" excuse... you shout: "Look he doesn't want to thin kof the children !"
>He's a anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him
Aah yes, because using a technological tool to save you time and fit in with the way you like to work is the mark of a Luddite right ?
> Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software? If not, he's a hypocrite, because he has called all closed source software an "evil system" that should be avoided at all costs.
Stallman in fact did NOT say "at all costs". I asked him, in person, once what a person should do if his job is impossible to do without proprietary software.
He replied: "Get a new job", - and this is where idiots like you stopped listening, because then he laughed and said the bit you always pretend he never says: "We can't stop doing all the jobs for which free software aren't available or we'll never get anywhere. Just like I had to use a non-free unix to write the first GNU software on. But if you are in that position, and you believe in free software, then you should contribute in whatever ways you can towards assisting projects that aim to create a free software replacement for your needs."
How reasonable, how pragmatic... yes Stallman is insistent, his insistence is the only reason we even HAVE free software operating systems. But he's not nearly the self-defeating dogmatic that people like you always paint him as either. It certainly isn't Stallman's position that anybody should refuse life-saving medical care if there isn't free software in use. He has campaigned to have the control software for pacemakers made free - so that patients' lives aren't at the mercy of corporations but he never said that in the meantime nobody should wear a pacemaker - which is the position you are demanding he take.
The first line is pure ad hominem - whether you like his personality, personal habits or social skills are not in fact remotely relevant to whether he is right about things.
All that aside: the man just got rushed into a hospital - for many of us who know him and share his ideals - this is a big deal, I know this will shock the hell out of you but some of us actually LIKE the guy and care about it. ... but if you are going to do exactly the same thing you accuse him of -that makes you a hypocrite.
A personal attack on the day he got rushed to hospital is really, really poor taste. Now granted Stallman has been known for some poor taste at times as well... you even posted an example of one
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Were you also offended by Stallman's comments on your late colleague?
Idolatry is irrational. If you have to take something from what RMS has teach us, it should be to use your brain and be independent.
Of course we're not going to pile dirt on him when he's sick. That would be stupid. You don't put the dirt on top until he actually dies.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Well, people see it right at the top when they start reading this page. That has to mean something.
Sometimes gonna hate arial
ARlAL
ariaI
IoI
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
There is an elephant in the room and it's RMS.
He needs to go on a GNU/Diet.
It's well established medically that incest should be illegal because it leads to horrific birth defects
Source?
From what I have read it requires several generations of inbreeding for the signs to show up. A brother/sister will at maximum share the X chromosome from their mother, but that is only half of them. In some cases of cousins (On the fathers side) it is impossible for the pair to share any chromosomes and inbreeding can continue without any danger.
Apparently the "I'm never gonna wash my hand!!" does not apply with RMS...
Agreed. Also, replying to copypasta troll posts is contraindicated.
Probably just ate a spoiled foot-chip/crisp!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ#t=1m50s
Or course you'd only go to that effort if you're either very keen to get moderated up on slashdot and get lots of replies. Or if you really care about the topic really strongly.
Or if you are getting paid. Gotta get paid, bonch. Gotta get paid.
Well said, wish I had that 5th mod point for this reply...
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
"Like RMS, I'm getting old, and travel a lot to do talks. If I fall ill or get hit by a car, I hope you turkeys never find out." - by Bruce Perens (3872) on Thursday May 10, @08:02PM (#39961113) Homepage
Many of these fools who do as you state are "armchair quarterback" idiots unhappy w/ their own sad lot in life, and it shows. I pity them actually.
However, & in my being an optimist on this note here? Well - They do 1 manage to accomplish 1 "GOOD" thing: They spur controversy (& conversation around it) when they offer their bogus commentary you noted... this in turn hopefully helps "power /." by page hits/views etc./et al!
* Still, that's about it (making lemonade of the "troll lemons" around here on that account).
APK
P.S.=> Good point(s) as usual from you (you're one of my fav. people around here to offer quotes from in fact)... apk
I'm with Brian on this--shoot, I watched RevolutionOS last night by some odd duplicitous coincidence...
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
Uh no.
A brother and sister will on average will share 50% of their chromosomes. Cousins will never be guaranteed not to share any chromosomes.
Where did you get this idea from?
Microsoft now has a polonium lab.
Actually, in many of those places, the codified punishment for men caught in adultery is also death. It just so happens that it rarely actually gets carried out. The woman gets it in the neck, and the man goes on his way.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Yes, I use Linux on my computers because I don't see any reason to pay for an OS, pay for applications and then pay a different company for more applications to keep my computer free of malware, especially when I can get an equally good OS and applications for free. But unlike some people, I'm not a fanatic about it.
What you clearly don't get is that much of the reason you can get a good OS and applications for free is the GPL, for which you can thank RMS. I remember what it was like to install *BSD before the various BSDs were shamed into modernity by Linux. No thanks, you can have that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot's best era was 1998-2002. As somebody who's been reading slashdot since it was called "chips & dips", I can vouch that the quality of discussion has been in a downtrend ever since. Part of it is the teenagers, who unfortunately now compromise the majority here. You can tell by the gradual change in writing style over the years, as well as the focus shift from genuine interest and desire for knowlege to team mentality, "winning" the discussion, and mocking those who hold non-mainstream viewpoints. The median slashdot age has to be at least 10 years below what it was back then.
The other part of it is the quality of the website itself. Slashdot itself was perfected in the early 2000s, but they just couldn't stop "innovating". I wouldn't even know where to start on this one, so let's just say I never browse slashdot with javascript turned on.
I believe there's about as many states where the age is 18 as 16, but I'm too lazy to go survey ageofconsent.com right now.
If you're under the age of 18 and you take a picture of YOURSELF naked you can get busted for posessing child porn. Suck it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The illegality of bestiality is just as legally sound as any animal cruelty laws, because animals can't consent.
That is a lot of bullshit. Animals attempt to initiate sex with humans all the goddamned time. It's trivial to find video of horses and donkeys trying to fuck people without even having to go to a porn site. My Sun Conure, who without her feathers might weigh about a quarter of an ounce, presents to me regularly. And no, I don't encourage it, just in case someone had that comment waiting in the wings. Animals can consent. You can't prove most animals' consent in court, though, because most can't communicate sufficiently.
It's well established medically that incest should be illegal because it leads to horrific birth defects
No, it's well-established medically that you need genetic testing to determine if the offspring of any two people is likely to be born with a genetic defect, whether they are siblings or not, although the odds of a defect go up because of the risk of reinforcing harmful recessives.
And while there is room for reforms (a 17 year old who has sex with a 16 year old is not a pedophile) pedophilia should be illegal because children can't consent.
At 15 I seduced a 20 year old (okay, so she wasn't exactly pure as the driven snow, but let's stay on topic) and we wound up living together for a year and a half. Is that consent? It was certainly illegal. I'd been wanting to screw for at least three years at that point, but I was a social retard. I know lots of kids of both genders who were fucking by twelve, with other kids. But THAT is illegal.
If you have a right to engage in a contract, you implicitly have a right for that contract to be legally binding because otherwise you don't actually have a contract. Ergo, adultery, the violation of a contract, has to be illegal for a person to have a right to actually marry.
No, no it doesn't. The contract doesn't have to say anything about who's fucking who. It can simply assign property rights.
Logic really only works if your premises aren't bullshit.
That is so true. Keep trying!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Socialists and libertarians both oppose corporatism, which is the system we have now. We certainly differ over what we would replace it with, but one substantial and practical point of agreement is that most socialists and libertarians would advocate the repeal of "laws" that constitute special privileges for big corporations. (We libertarians would go much further though, because most of us understand the phenomenon of "regulatory capture," by which megacorps get laws passed ostensibly to protect workers, or the environment, or whatever, but which are so expensive to comply with, that they have the effect of rewarding the megacorp by punishing or even shutting down all of its smaller competitors.)
Nonaggression works!
Believing that "anything that doesn't hurt someone else should be legal" is hardly an extreme view. Believing that "voluntarily pedophilia" does not hurt children is beyond comprehension.
A personal attack on the day he got rushed to hospital is really, really poor taste.
And responding indignantly to that attack is really, really stupid. Because it will just lead to more of them. Why can't you just accept that these people are assholes, defeat their shillery, and then go back to worrying about whether RMS is OK?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually... that's pretty solid advice, you're probably right.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And of course the iPad is running iOS and apps build with XCode wich uses gcc as the compiler backend
iOS has never used gcc. The early iPhones used llvm-gcc, which used gcc for parsing and LLVM for code generation. By the time the iPad was released, the parser had been replaced by clang, so gcc is not involved at all, neither is the GNU linker.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not everyone on /. is like that. Many of us quiet readers idolize folks like RMS and you, Bruce.
-brian
And some of us quiet readers just have a lot of respect for guys like you (which is not exactly the same as "idolize").
The illegality of bestiality is just as legally sound as any animal cruelty laws, because animals can't consent. Consent requires speech, moral development and sexual maturation.
There is so much bullshit in that, it is hard to know where to begin.
If you've ever had a dog try to hump your leg, you will know that animals do, in fact choose to have sex. If we take your reasonong to it's illogical conclusion, you should try to prevent animals ever having sex with each other, since that constitutes animal crueltly, so you implicitly advocate the extermination of anothing closer to us than anphibians, and also quite a number of insects and arachnids, too.
Also, I assume that you are a strict vegan too. If not, do you think that chickens consent to having their unborn offspring stolen and slaughtered? If you're not even a vegetarian, then do you think that animals consent to be eaten? If you're not even that and you don't ALWAYS buy free range produce, do you think that animals consent to being locked into incredibly cramped quarters for their short, miserable lives?
It's well established medically that incest should be illegal
Do you think it's OK if they have undergone sterilisation, then? Do you think it should be illegal for two unrelated people who share a common recessive disease gene to have sex?
just as society shouldn't condone polygamy
Polyamoury is fine. I think society shouldn't have polygamy as a legally supported thing with a special status (like marriage/civil partnerships) since sorting out the inheritance, tax, divorce, etc becomes mind-bogglingly complex, given an arbitrary graph of relations.
Ergo, adultery, the violation of a contract, has to be illegal for a person to have a right to actually marry.
So you advocate illegality for breach of civil contracts? That seems like a dark path to go down.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This is so fresh and funny.
>Actually, NEXTSTEP was written in Objective C, w/o using gcc
NeXTSTEP used gcc. They did try not to use it and asked from a special exemption IIRC, but ended up not having another choice. This is where the Objective-C original support in gcc comes from.
>gcc would not have been necessary in creating Darwin and OS-X either
What would the alternative be? When Darwin appeared and OSX was "ported" from NeXT the only compiler that could be used was gcc.
>But after GCC was moved to GPL3, not just Apple, but other organizations, like FreeBSD, started Clang and are moving to it,
I think that he move to a non-GPL compiler more to do with the GPL in general and less with the specific version. It might eventually have accelarated it in some situations, but overall the issue was always with having a GPL component. not with the specific version. Also consider that at least part of the reasons are technical: Apple needed an Objective-C frontend to LLVM, and Objective-C is not a priority for GCC (and the GCC codebase is also far from easy to change).
Quoting from that same blog comment:
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).
I've always gotten bad vibes from the guy, now I know why!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Nope, it uses clang
http://clang.llvm.org/
wget well soon, Rich.
I'm sure the docs have already told him that (obesity is a contributing factor) but "a waist is a terrible thing to mind."
Much easier to just nail him to his perch and say he's pining for the fjords (just make sure you use Wilson's Nails if you decide to do it before his "best-before date").
After all, he likes parrots. And as one poster in that thread points out, most fatties don't eat breakfast ...
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
First Degree Murder? Is that the name af a McDonald's menu?
No. The death penalty is reserved for paedophiles and copyright violators.
MA/2 + 7 That also means
MA much simpler really.
That simply means that you are assuming somebody having a 15 year difference and having sex is creepy. Like a 45 year old with a 30 year old. Your sense of creepy is really strict. Age tend to "tapper" off after 20. And to really quickly visibly affect you after 40-50 depending on gender. I think your sense of creepy is waaaaay too sensible.
Arn't you "Bonch"?
OpenBSD in their latest release included the last GCC that was based on GPL2. FreeBSD swiched to Clang after GCC became GPL3 - prior to that, both FreeBSD and Apple had few problems w/ GPL. The other reasons you mention, such as needing an Objective-C frontend to LLVM is definitely there, but GCC has always been the crown jewel of the GNU software collection. If the conversion to GCC caused some of its major users to switch to something else, that ought to tell one a lot about GPL3, and the FSF.
I see you shiver with antici
What you clearly don't get is that much of the reason you can get a good OS and applications for free is the GPL, for which you can thank RMS. I remember what it was like to install *BSD before the various BSDs were shamed into modernity by Linux. No thanks, you can have that.
I don't believe you can make the case that Linux wouldn't be Linux without the GPL, had it used some other license. Linux is Linux through force of Torvald's personality. It would be identical if it had used, say, the BSD license. Granted, the tools developed by the FSF gave Linux a good start. But that's software, not a license.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That always makes me smile.
Totally agree, but I was speaking within the context of the US. Maybe I should've been more clear on that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
No GNU, no iPad.
Yes, no one would have ever come up with a compiler if it hadn't been for Richard Stallman.
If anyone should follow an algorithim, maybe the muslim's algorithim is best: if you're 50, and she's pretty and sweet (even if she's 6), marry her.
Sounds like a much more liberating algorithim for men you piece of shit.
Little girls are superior to women for marrying. Little girls can be cute, sweet, thin, inexperianced, they LISTEN. Grown women aren't worth the hassle, that's why you cunts and your men banned little girls.
Btw:
Hey, you. Fuck you.
Ok?
Fuck You.
This is a woman's country, and we live in a woman's world.
Deut 22 28-29
2 Samual 12
Numbers 13
In the hebrew.
Fuck you and your algorithim.
Shut the fuck up, cunt.
Little and young girls aren't cunts like you, that's why they're attractive.
Deuteronomy 22 28-29 says no consent is needed: you rape a young girl you keep her.
2 Samual 12 shows God being angry when a man who took a little girl in (a lamb, in the metaphore) was killed by david (because David wanted to fuck her when she was then older).
Numbers 31 (moses ordering his men to fuck the female CHILDREN) (he rejected the women).
I hope the above poster gets his little 9 year old wife (kinda like Mohammed with his 6 year old little bride).
We should probably all just convert to Islam so we can kill cunts like you (or whatever you are).
Creepy is what women don't like. Fuck the women.
Or rather don't.
Kill them when they try to put pedophile males in prison.
Marry little girls, assist civilizations that condone this, fight against pro-female civilizations that don't.
You've replied to a post sent from a sock puppet account of one of slashdot's infamous corporate shills: bonch.
Among the known sock puppet accounts employed by bonch are:
- SharkLaser
- DCTech
- Overly Critical Guy
- InsightIn140Bytes
- CmdrPony
and, of course, BasilBrush
My guess is that its a staph infection from eating too much toe cheese.
I was also offended by the New Yorker cover, and I think Richard was too.
Nobody should be surprised that there was much that is negative about Steve. I do oppose Apple's way of business, which is high on DRM and control of the user. Were I writing the same piece, I think I could have said it better than Richard.
I think the saddest part is that Dennis Ritchie, who really invented the stuff of our modern world, died around the same time and in comparison to Steve, was unlamented.
Bruce Perens.
It hits me sometimes to realize that we live in an age of heroes. The people that forged the way that we take for granted today are still alive and kicking. Physicists, chemists, artists, the bulk of their founders and heroes are in the dirt. Geeks? Most of ours are still around. We've witnessed, if not the birth of our field, at least it's explosion into the lime-light.
Don't get me wrong, we have a few ghosts. Ada, Turing, Babbage, Grace Hopper, and now Ritchie. But there have been monumental shifts within our lifetime and people who made those shifts possible. People that have moved metaphorical mountains.
And I'm probably going to outlive them. One day they're going to be gone from this world and it'll be up to us to forge the way and the keep those fires lit. That hits me like a mule kick to the chest.
Yeah, mortality sucks.
>especially when I can get an equally good OS and applications for free. If only that were true. Linux in 2012 still lacks sane disk/volume/filesystem management. btrfs has been "RSN! RLY!" for years. Having to fight with 30 year old MS-DOS legacies gets old quick. Stallman has never fought for my "rights". He has, however, argued in favor of kiddie porn, and appears to love recreational pharmacy as much as he despises showers and combs. He is also not responsible for Linux.
RMS has spent his life fighting for your rights. And when he gets sick all you can do is pile dirt on him?
It's pretty obvious that some people disagree with RMS about what constitutes a "right" (e.g. forcing other people to distribute what they possess under some circumstances). You're probably going to have to get someone to agree that what Stallman advocates is good before you'll get some people to agree that Stallman has spent his life fighting for something good. In short, the fact you and RMS declared RMS to be some kind of selfless crusader for the betterment of the world does not translate to a compelling argument that he is, in fact, such a person. Those who view him as more harmful than good and who believe many of his views are at best misguided and more likely downright unethical or evil are not piling dirt on someone who spent his life fighting for their rights, in their view. If you want to debate whether RMS has been doing good, you'll have to actually debate whether he has been doing good, instead of just declaring it and trying to use that to shame someone for disagreeing with you.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
You are in my prayers RMS! I hope you get hooked up to the most open and ethically distributed hospital equipment they make.
So did RMS or did not had an available opensource C compiler?
In the case of the Pastel compiler, is it really available if you can't physically run it? Perhaps Linus could have used it.
As for the Portable C compiler, while it is now available under a BSD license, was it available that way in the 1980s? This link makes me wonder:
http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/licenses/
as the earliest license is dated 1998.
Free as in beer?
I don't believe you can make the case that Linux wouldn't be Linux without the GPL, had it used some other license.
And I believe that you can, and I believe that it is called FreeBSD.
Linux is Linux through force of Torvald's personality.
I would argue that is largely because his personality led him to reject the BSD license, and to select the GPL. The other part is that he has somehow managed to ride this strangely bucking herd of horses in, if not a consistent direction, at least in a direction (several over time, really) which is pretty amazing in and of itself. However, the personalities of the various contributors are relevant as well, and those personalities are GPL-compatible. If they were BSD-compatible, they'd have contributed to some BSD project, since those predated Linux and there were several to choose from.
It would be identical if it had used, say, the BSD license.
No, no, a thousand times, no. Many Linux contributors have cited the GPL as being instrumental in their involvement. Whatever it would be, it would not be identical.
Granted, the tools developed by the FSF gave Linux a good start. But that's software, not a license.
You still don't get it; the software and the license are inseparable. People do or don't contribute to a project because of its license. When I go looking for software, yes I will use BSD-licensed software, but if there is even an inferior GPL-licensed package which adequately suits my needs I will select it, because I will contribute bug reports and in rare cases even patches (some have gone to drupal modules so government sites could be running my code right now! ph34r!) and I would prefer my work to go into something protected with the GPL. Lots of people more important than I am to the Free Software ecosystem feel the same way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They had problems with the GPL. They just figured that the problems with switching before that point added up to enough to somewhat eclipse the problems with GPLv2, at least enough that the resources they felt they would be justified in devoting to developing a replacement for GCC would not be sufficient to make much progress. Apple, however, did some serious work to that end, and Clang reaching a point of usable maturity closely coincided with the increasing difficulties involved in avoiding the GPLv3 versions of GCC, such that suddenly various projects are abandoning GCC in favor of LLVM/Clang, and others are considering other alternatives than the GCC as well. At least, that's how it looked to me.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
I didn't even bother reading your whole post, because it is very obviously based in ignorance and Right Wing ideology. The fact that you Right Wing people can lie without even seeming to feel guilty about it always amazes me.
The point is, in the power differential between an adult and a prepubescent child, no "informed consent" is possible.
Redd Herring here. This is the common fallacy of the Right Wing prohibitionists. "informed consent" assumes that "children" (however they are defined) do not have free will, and that people who are adults have free will. Of course the concept of "free will" is irrelevant because sexual pleasure is not harmful. In terms of mental capabilities, most people's pre-frontal cortex isn't fully developed until about the age of 30, so according to your argument most people under 30 years of age should not be allowed to have sex.
I guess the problem is that Stallman has never mentally and emotionally matured beyond the 12 or 13 year old phase himself, and so he doesn't understand this power difference, which is, I suppose, a common affliction where Aspies are involved. Pedophiles are predators, plain and simple.
So many logical fallacies here: ad hominom attack and the appeal to emotion stand out the most.
It's always sad and very sick when the Right Wing shills can dominate the discussion and moderation system.
I've just noticed you've used the phrase "REALLY fucking creepy..." and got moderated up for this. It's people like you who should have your faces punched out. You self-righteous, Right-Wing, immoral peace of shit. Enjoy your moderation points.
The next time a Right Winger like yourself gets your tires slashed or your paint job "keyed", think of people like me, who are always looking to even out the score with corporate zealots, Right Wing thugs, and religious cretins.
Shamed into modernity . . . ?
Hardly. The Linux project and the open source BSD Unix project were neck-and-neck in early development. Linus Torvalds just managed to attract a larger crowd for initial interest, while the BSD Unix project was being managed a bit less publicly in an attempt to ensure everything was well-structured when a complete system was unveiled. FreeBSD and NetBSD were actually released the same year as Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution; 386BSD whence FreeBSD and NetBSD were forked was released in 1992, only a few months after the initial release of a not-yet-really-usable Linux kernel in late 1991, and that slight difference in release dates made all the difference in terms of early popularity on which Linux built continuing later popularity.
The various major BSD Unix systems have exceeded Linux systems in terms of "modernity" in many cases along the way, in fact, including the originally very notable -- but now largely forgotten -- fact that FreeBSD had support for the AMD64 architecture well ahead of the Linux kernel. Meanwhile, Ubuntu keeps getting press for growing popularity and dramatic changes in desktop defaults, while PC-BSD advances the state of the art of desktop system management including software management tools, installer capabilities, and other things significantly more important than background image galleries, the corner of the screen used for the menu button, and the default width of the scrollbar.
Linux-based systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all contribute significantly to leaps forward in functionality and presentation, and only someone who is too narrowly focused on Linux-based systems is likely to come to the honest conclusion that Linux is unequivocally, generally more "modern" at any point in its history than the major BSD Unix competitors.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
One major difference is that Linux distributions made it possible for mere mortals to acquire, install, and use a Unixlike OS while BSD was still a superbitch.
I see no evidence that more cutting-edge development is going on in BSDland, there's tons of stuff in Linuxland that is going on that isn't part of mainline... yet.
Statistically nobody cares that FreeBSD supported amd64 before Linux did because by the time anybody really had hardware to run it on, it was working.
There has been room for a Free/Open PC-BSD community since the sources to BSD-4.3-lite were released. It didn't really come together until Linux broke on the scene. The only comfort you have is being ahead of Minix.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's better to be fanatic for freedom than passively allowing its destruction.
It's better to actually advance the cause of freedom than to eventually become a detriment to it, and a parody of yourself in the process, while claiming to advance the cause of freedom.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
He has no sense of context or consequence, apparently. If his reasoning is logical, it must also be exclusionary of much of the evidence necessary to make his logic relevant. Logically, software that is open has benefits over software that is not open. Logically, software that is restricted to be "open" by some narrow definition will not be open in other ways -- so there he fails to take into account more than the most simplistic, narrow application of a basic observation, and as a result his "logic" drives him to the point of incorrect conclusions. It's like there's a natural law that goes something like "If only A, then B, but if A plus C, then D," and ignored the word "only" and everything after B when the most common case is A plus C.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
RMS has spent his life fighting for your rights.
WRONG! He's fighting for rights he says we should have. Worse, calling proprietary software immoral is even more reason to pile dirt on that fat, disgusting asshole. In regards to a particular computer program, if I don't have the right to view the source code, modify it, or distribute it, that's really not a problem for me. I have zero desire or need to do that. A majority of computer users side with me. You need the 'rights' Stallman preaches for all software? Well, that's your problem. Use FOSS and play with your tarballs all night long, arrogant prick. Fuck him and fuck you too.
I really hope that was sarcasm.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
I think that, if you're going to make a point about it being okay to have extramarital sex when it's allowed by the spouse, you should be suggesting that the extramarital sex in this case should not be called "adultery", rather than justifying adultery per se.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
I think pedophilia is generally understood as an adult (usually male*) getting a minor (usually female) to get into bed w/ him. Unlike when she gets into bed w/ another teenager her age, this one is more often than not a case of the adult using his influence on her to get her to submit, and only later is the damage done realized.
* The Mary Kay Letourneau case, and others like it that followed, illustrated it from the opposite end - an adult woman getting a minor boy into bed, but illustrated that this manipulation of kids can happen either way
As for the Portable C compiler, while it is now available under a BSD license, was it available that way in the 1980s? This link makes me wonder:
Please check http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/pcc_history/, and eventually the wikipedia page. PCC development started in the 70's, and was the BSD bundled compiler until 1994 (when it was replaced with GCC).
Oh, by the way, saw your "Webm is just as good as h.264 imho" remark. You're a blinded zealot. Sickening, quite frankly.
Yes, the current PCC version is a major rewrite, and their target is mostly building the base system (make world). You can build OpenBSD kernels with PCC since 2009. FreeBSD has integrated CLANG/LLVM into the base system since the last version (v9), so it is expected that GCC will be moved to the ports tree as an optional package (like it was done with Perl).
From what I understand, Libertarians are interested in reducing the power of government to a minimum so that corporations have no use for them, and don't stand to be hindered by them either. But they're definitely not anti-Corporate. Heck, Libertarians are pretty much there w/ Conservatives in wanting the repeal of regulations on corporations on the grounds that it's not a constitutionally defined role of government. That's very different from Liberals, who support government power being used to bring corporations to their knees. The best example of a Libertarian platform is Ron Paul's. I don't endorse him for a variety of reasons, but his economic platform is very much a Libertarian - but not Liberal - agenda.
One major difference is that Linux distributions made it possible for mere mortals to acquire, install, and use a Unixlike OS while BSD was still a superbitch.
When is this "was" of which you speak?
I see no evidence that more cutting-edge development is going on in BSDland, there's tons of stuff in Linuxland that is going on that isn't part of mainline... yet.
How is it my problem that you aren't paying enough attention to notice developments in the BSD Unix world?
Statistically nobody cares that FreeBSD supported amd64 before Linux did because by the time anybody really had hardware to run it on, it was working.
. . . except all the people who cared.
There has been room for a Free/Open PC-BSD community since the sources to BSD-4.3-lite were released. It didn't really come together until Linux broke on the scene. The only comfort you have is being ahead of Minix.
What the heck are you talking about? Are you aware that PC-BSD is the name of a particular distribution of FreeBSD? Are you aware that FreeBSD arrived as a contemporary of Slackware, with both systems being (finally) usable systems? Is there some point you're trying to make that is getting lost in the haphazard way you hand-wave away facts and just make vague pronouncements that are difficult to nail down to having a particular meaning reflective of reality?
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
I checked out the cartoon - that doesn't answer my question. Regardless of whether you approve of Apple's policies, or even Jobs', were you offended by these remarks of Stallman's about Jobs “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing?" Yes or no?
Dennis Ritchie was very much lamented, as was John McCarthy, creator of Lisp, in these pages. Since both of them were less famous than Jobs, they got less coverage.
I'm not going to give you a yes or no, because I don't have to. This is Slashdot, not a grand jury. And, because the answer is more nuanced.
Although Steve is gone, Apple is continuing everything that both Richard and I didn't like about their business. So, Steve's malign influence on people's computing continues unabated.
Like I said, I could have written it better than Richard, because Richard has problems with empathy. Had I written it, it would have been more graceful.
Steve also had no shortage of head problems. What an idiot for not retiring when he was first diagnosed - but I guess the public Steve Jobs was the only Steve Jobs there was, and he couldn't stop. Besides his foolish continuance of work, an eating disorder contributed to his demise. He did end up becoming the richest guy in the graveyard.
Bruce Perens.
I saw that page. I clicked on the licenses link. None of which told that pcc was released under the BSD license before 1998. Before 1991, much of BSD code was still legally encumbered as belonging to AT&T. Did one have to be an AT&T licensee to use pcc before The Jolitzes' public release of 386BSD in Jan. 1992 (a bit late too help Linus)?
As for the Wikipedia article, it mentions that the current version is under a BSD license. The original version was by Stephen Johnson, who then worked at Bell Labs. Did AT&T permit him to release it under such a license?
As for what compiler Stallman used to produce GCC, he was using UNIX at the time, so he might have compiled C using a proprietary compiler.
Libertarians aren't advocates of pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia or incest,
Some of them are though - there is a large branch of Libertarianism that believes that the government should not have the power to regulate interactions between consenting individuals, which is what the laws on consensual necrophilia and incest do. Bestiality is a bit different, because there is the issue about whether the animal consents, but some of them clearly do, and in a world where it is legal to kill an animal, it is hard to justify why the less worse crime of "consensual" sex with an animal should be illegal. The issue of pedophilia is again one of consent, and there are many Libertarians who believe the government should not be outlawing sex between consenting people - the law as it stands is black and white, but clearly are some underage people who are capable of consenting to sex - many Libertarians believe that the government should not be regulating the sex lives of these individuals.
and nor do they - in business - try to delegitimize ways for private citizens to make money.
They do if those ways of making money are against the principles of liberty - for example, most Libertarians would be against slavery, even though it is a way for private citizens to make money.
The libertarian agenda is very different from corporatism, and almost all libertarians recognize that businesses should not have greater rights than individuals. I along with many (though not all) libertarians oppose the existence of limited-liability corporations in the first place. Limited liability is the mechanism by which companies can keep profits for themselves while "socializing" the costs of externalities such as harm to workers or to the environment. I also oppose most forms of "intellectual property," another somewhat controversial but far from unusual opinion among libertarians.
Nonaggression works!
That is a lot of bullshit. Animals attempt to initiate sex with humans all the goddamned time.
And if a small child has a sexual problem and tries to have sex with you, as the adult you're responsible. Similarly, if an animal wants to have sex with you, you're the thinking, rational being, and thus the it falls on you not to. Animal urges are not the same thing as human consent.
No, it's well-established medically that you need genetic testing to determine if the offspring of any two people is likely to be born with a genetic defect...
After a few generations of in-breeding, the population of in-breeders will start to get genetic defects. The law is a blunt instrument, but it is perfectly reasonable to ban incest generally to prevent sub-populations from giving their children horrible birth defects.
Is that consent? It was certainly illegal.
As I said, the law isn't perfect, and I'm not trying to nail down the specifics here.
The contract doesn't have to say anything about who's fucking who. It can simply assign property rights.
You get distracted easily. I could sign a contract that divvied up property rights with my brother, and obviously adultery laws wouldn't apply to that. But if you're going to have a contract that specifies monogamy, a marriage, you have to be liable for violating that monogamy to be liable or you didn't have the right to enter into it.
Keep trying!
You really just need to work on your critical thinking and reading comprehension. What I showed was that there is nothing fundamentally wrong, from a natural law basis, with banning all of the above. You ran off on tangents, or couldn't see that laws sometimes govern larger social issues and don't always apply to individual rights. If you try reading things to learn rather than showing how clever you are, you'll find it can be quite rewarding.
I looked the article that Stallman commented (http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/dutch-paedophiles-to-launch-political-party-1.279664). The article used the term pedophiles, but they defend "to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12" (so I guess they are Ephebophiles). And yeah, they are creepy.
Actually, it's not even about the source code, since Stallman opposes any association w/ the Open Source movement. It's about what he calls 'software freedom' and has 4 freedoms that he considers essential. Two of them - the right to help one's neighbor, and the right to modifiy the code and help one's neighbor - are what are problematic for a number of companies that may not have a problem releasing the source code, but do have a problem allowing the code - source or binary - to be re-distributed w/o due compensation.
Pedophiles are predators, plain and simple. Ephebophiles (the proper term for a sexual attraction for young-but-pubescent teens, generally held to be in the 14-18-ish bracket) are sometimes (I'd argue often, except for the "of the same age range as the partner") predators as well - man-children who are incapable of having an adult relationship, and so they prey on easily manipulated and influenced teens.
Why is it that our society thinks only men can be sexual predators, while women, who do the same thing are harmless, and the little boys who were raped by them got lucky. In fact it's so acceptable that we have movies making fun of it:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/02/there-nothing-funny-about-rape-and-adam-sandler-new-movie-that-my-boy/
Imagine the outrage, if the sexes were reversed.
What the heck are you talking about? Are you aware that PC-BSD is the name of a particular distribution of FreeBSD?
Yes, it was a fucked up thing to name a distribution that, almost as fucked up as naming something the Open Source Initiative.
Are you aware that FreeBSD arrived as a contemporary of Slackware, with both systems being (finally) usable systems?
I'm aware that when you could first trivially find someone you didn't even know to tell you how to find and download Linux that if you asked some neckbeard where to get and how to install BSD they'd launch into some epic explanation. And when I said "Well, this is how I did this easy thing on Linux" I'd get a five-page explanation of how you'd do it on BSD. Today this is different; BSD is perfectly usable, it just has no reason to exist outside of people who want their work to be used by others without getting ANYTHING back, even fixes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> socially maladjusted
That's a feature, not a bug. Nowadays, the socially well adjusted should either go to jail or the asylum.
JK.
They should go to the asylum inside a jail.
Yeah... a freak - but we keep combing through his rants for those little notions that ring true. They're obtuse truths most of the time and you don't have to agree with a bit of it, but it's an interesting perspective. Let's hope it was an open source malady.
Most of the stuff on
Steve Jobs has been in the past an horrible father and a horrible bully, but that doesn't negate everything else he has done.
Which was what, exactly? Being a good marketeer? Being a follower of bullshit, sorry, alternate medicine? Being at the right place at the right time, and knowing the exact people? Am I missing something?
He founded Apple, and he founded Pixar, and he founded NeXT. That in itself more than most people have ever achieved in their lives. If you think Steve got to where he got by just being a good marketer, then you are seriously deluded. Yes, the guy wasn't an engineer, but he was certainly a visionary.
And he had his flaws, really big flaws, but he achieved a lot nonetheless.
At the risk of Godwinning this thread, I have one word for you. Hitler!
He founded Apple
No, he was one of the founders, and not even the most important. Without Wozniak's genious, the company would never started. Granted, we was the "guy with the vision", but you get those at dime a dozen. Very few of those who try succeed, but the relation of Steve Jobs and Apple is being at the right place at the right time.
and he founded Pixar
No, he bought what would become Pixar from LucasFilm. Regarding Pixar as we know today, he was one of the founders, and not even the most important (again!). Ed Catmull was the genious and the vision, Steve was the guy with a bag of money.
and he founded NeXT
Yes, he did. He founded NeXT by following an idea of Paul Berg, that suggested the market for a professional workstation. So, again, he was the guy with the bag of money. The inital team was composed of ex-Apple employees, and most of what we know as NeXT today is a mashup of multiple talents, such as Avie Tevanian (a Mach kernel engineer from Carnegie Mellon), Rich Page (Apple Lisa hardware division), and the case designed by Frog Design Inc (also used by Apple), but apparently under Job's supervision.
Yes, the guy wasn't an engineer, but he was certainly a visionary.
That's an opinion that I don't share. Apple probably started the personal computer revolution, but many others shared the same vision. Job's talent was to identify talent (every company mentioned had a genious), and being able to capture investment, aka being a marketeer. He was the frontman, and aparently very good at it. Just don't credit for stuff that wasn't made/invented/conceptualized by him.
Alas, the real world does not much seem to match up with how you describe it.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
A lot of people in our field have lousy health and when they die young is a bit of a loss for us all.
Geeks can do a few simple things to protect their health without becoming gym rats.
Reducing calories by only 250 calories a day can lead to weight loss of over 20 lbs a year. 250 calories is about one soda, a juice, etc.
Learn to drink a low calorie source of caffiene, like lightly sweetened tea / iced tea. Drink only water at other times.
Don't go vegetarian or anything, but try to reduce animal products in your diet. It is good for the environment too. You can get more information here from tryveg.com
These suggestions aren't enough to give you bullet proof health, but they require very little time away from a computer and can keep you alive over the long term.
Don't forget "The Hacker's Diet", a diet plan made for geeks.