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Man Tries To Live an Open Source Life For a Year
jfruh writes "Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand filmmaker living Berlin, will, on the 1st of August, begin an experiment in living an open source life for a year. But this is going way beyond just trading in his Mac for a Linux machine and Final Cut Pro for Novacut. He's also going to live in a house based on an open source design, and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.""
...if you try, why not go a year without DRM?
But... but... hasn't Stallman been doing this for years already?
Will he be only eating foods that are non-GMO? (good luck with that, unless he can grow them himself. :/)
I really don't want to know is how one programs in toilet paper. Worse, visions of managers telling me I have to eat more taco bell because my... production... is too low. Oh, the puns, the humanity. -_-
More seriously, it would be more accurate to say that he is trying to live a lifestyle in which only products that are part of the public domain or the mechanisms by which it operates must be made available for inspection, and any changes documented and also similarly made available, without cost. Considering how I have even found 'patent pending' stamped on spoons and forks (really, I mean... really?)... I don't imagine he'll be able to survive the year. At least not without a lot of rationalizing and hair pulling.
But while the experiment will probably ultimately fail, it will at least show beyond any doubt how deeply corporations have penetrated into every faucet of daily living. It is simply not possible to live in modern society without giving the devil his due.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Suck it (literally).
No woman for this guy. I guess they want the finer things in life!
You do realize that "Open Source Women" are the one with the pretty old professional skill set??? What about open source babies(whatever that means)?
It's not worth doing, not for a year. Or the Colonel's Secret spices. Or the Special Sauce. Or whatever they put in Taco Bell's food.
Sure, my life will be short, but it'll be good while I live it.
condoms? Oh wait its moot....
and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process."
I'm completely in favour of free/open source software and related concepts wherever possible, but there is such a thing as taking it too far. Wherever the line is, demanding open source toilet paper is way over it.
I don't touch proprietary software and am in the computer industry. I contract with manufacturers to product freedom friendly products to developing tid bids of software.
It can be done. It's not that hard actually.
I took a dump today.. Seriously this is just attention seeking, link bait. If I didn't know better I'd think it was a paid /. add.
He should try weaning himself off with shareware before going pure open source.
Was the house open source? Was his food open source? His water?
Oh right, that's hardware. That's different.
Fuck you motherfuckers.
While public domain, a complete listing of the laws of physics has not been made available to the public. He's going to have to find an alternate universe for his scheme.
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
http://pastebin.com/irj4Fyd5
Sections Overview:
1. COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum
2. Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
3. Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
4. How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent)
5. Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
Please excuse me if this is a stupid question, but since when has toilet paper had source code? I love open source software, and I've been a long time supporter of the movement, but I feel it weakens the open source software movement when you generalize it's meaning in such a way, because in order to change someone's mind, you need to have a clear and concise point! But whatever I'll get back to selling jewelry made out of found items and shopping at whole foods.
Why has this made its way to the main page ? Slow news, or people fishing for news ? This is just dumb and dumber!
Open source toilet paper is no problem although it may not be easy to find other than special order from a paper mill. Just use undyed crepe paper. Crepe paper has been patent free for around a hundred years now. I'm not sure whether the paper mill dyes the crepe paper or whether it is dyed by a craft supplies company. If the latter, then it should be possible to buy some of the undyed crepe paper from the craft company, but again, it may be special order only.
This is the common toilet paper that was used in the Soviet Union and you can still find it on sale in every town in the former Soviet Union in their central markets. Of course nowadays it competes with more westernised toilet paper but many still prefer the cheap undyed stuff. It is also a greener product since it is not bleached.
If somebody would start a fad, then undyed crepe paper could once again become a common thing to buy. For instance, what if people made their own dyes from household ingredients like beetroot, onion skins, blueberries, and then used that to print decorative patterns on undyed crepe paper as a GREEN alternative to party decorations. Suddenly their would be a new market and the open source toilet paper users could discretely buy their supply from any craft supplies store.
What is objectionable about existing toilet paper from an "open source" point of view? Plain toilet paper isn't a creative work (specialty paper with artwork on it might be), so it can't be copyrighted. And patents only last about 20 years while toilet paper has been manufactured for much longer than that, so any patents on the manufacturing process or the paper itself would have expired some time ago. Shouldn't he be OK if he just buys a generic store brand without any fancy new features or copyrighted art on the package?
Of course any toilet paper brand name is likely to be covered by a trademark, but if that is enough to make it not "open source", then Firefox is not open source software either.
Debit and credit cards are proprietary. Cash is closed source in order to deter counterfeits (like DRM). Bit coin is not suitable for every day use and mining depends on closed source graphics cards.
What I cringe about "open source" that it is used as some kind of synonym for something that makes everything automatically good. I bet that by large the biggest benefit of open source software is that it's usually free in cost.
Nice guy never get the women, good looking (actually, more like showing fertility signs , big breast 8 figure for women, V figure big upper body muscle for men) ,rich, and so forth are the criteria which all sociological study shows make it really easy to find a mate on both side. Nice guy/women, or confident, humour, do not even enter the equation in the top criteria.
http://freebeer.org/blog/about
I guess I live an open source life since long ago and I'm a programmer so it's not as if I barely use my computer. I guess my house design is open source too since it probably was randomly done and you are welcome to copy it.
That guy should go fork himself...
so if he gets a GPL'ed chick and modifies her in some way is he gonna share pics of that to the world as well?
bwahahahaha!
Not as painful as reading this shitty article.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Until the year is up, since there is no readily available open source CPU to run any open source software on.
One is that women are actually people too (I know this seems to amaze many geeks) and as such are varied in their wants and desires. What one woman finds ideal may utterly repulse another. There is no one "What women want," standard. Were there, it would be well known. In all of human interaction there is no One True Way(tm) that makes everyone happy, so any time someone tells you they know what it is all women want, you know they are full of shit.
Another is that women (like all people) lie about what they want. Not just to others, but to themselves too. You will see a woman claim they want one thing in a relationship and yet seek out the exact opposite time and time again. That is no coincidence or happenstance, it is because what they claim they want and what they actually want are not the same thing. This is particularly problematic when they haven't analyzed it for themselves and are lying to themselves, so they aren't even really aware of what it is they are actually seeking out.
So just because a woman says "What I really want is a nice, caring guy," that doesn't mean that is what she actually wants. Also even if she does it doesn't mean that it is a particularly high priority. She may have other attributes she values more but doesn't say. For example she may like a nice caring guy but place a far lower value on that than having a guy who has a lot of money and an "alpha male" personality. She'd take it all if she can get it, but when it comes down to it she'll trade nice for the higher priorities.
Finally there is the problem of unrealistic expectations, which again all humans suffer from but research indicates with regards to relationships women suffer from it more. Women rate the majority of men as below average. That is of course statistically impossible so the real problem is one of perception. A great many women feel they are having to settle for someone who isn't as "good" as they are. They have unrealistic expectations, and and unrealistic assessment of what they bring to the table.
You can see this in online dating profiles where you will have someone who specifies a massive list of must and must nots for their potential partner, something that cuts the potential dating pool down to essentially nobody. Thus they either remain single complaining about how bad everyone is or they "settle" for someone "beneath them" since nobody can meet their unreasonably high and specific standards.
For that matter, "settling" is what you have to do. Nobody is perfect, you have to deal with another person's flaws. Dan Savage has a bunch of great things to say on this topic but one of the best is that there's no "the one" out there, no perfect person for you. There's just the 0.64 that you round up. You find someone you love and you pay the prices of admission, dealing with the things they do that aren't perfect for you, because the whole package is worth it.
use a bidet or as in asia http://www.minishower.net/minish_commode.html
In true open souce spirit he will also not get paid for a year, will help anyone who asks and not het mad when everyone complains that the work he has done for free for them is crap.
I should probably explain a couple of key points about the project. Yes, it is a naive and impossible aim. I am probably not going to have lived 100% open source by the end of year, if that is even possible. But that does not mean that the project will have failed. The project is about the attempt and through that, I want to get the ideas of open source into as many people's minds as possible. As explained in my video, for some aspects of my life I won't be able to find a suitable solution, and I might not be able to be develop one, even with help from experts and others. This project is about trying to find the limits of the philosophy, both the current limits (as in where free software, libre hardware and open source stands today) and also the theoretical limits (could an 'open source' airline ever exist? should we allow access, modification and redistribution of swine flu?) It's also about trying to summarize and define different approaches - for many people, copyleft, permissive licenses, public domain and traditional copyright are unclear terms with unclear consequences, and I hope that by holding these ideas up against different products and services that we use in our everyday lives, people will gain a better understanding of them.
Lay in a stock of those and compost them afterwards, or just use a composting toilet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet
didn't end well. we all wound up going back to DRAM eventually
They went through relationship after relationship, meeting asshole after asshole
Then the statistics are right in front of you. When a person consistently has "problems" with everybody else, chances are the problem is with that one person, not everybody else. Life 101.
they'd settle for getting knocked up by some rich guy
Oh, the horror. They "settled" for somebody "less" than themselves, for the right price. Talk about finding the proof in the pudding! A person who judges the "worth" of other people (as if they have the slightest right) is the lesser human being, not the other way around. Life 102.
You haven't been around the block much, have you? Take it from somebody who's had enough bad luck in life to qualify as cursed: if you must blame somebody, there's only one person in the entire world that meets the prerequisites.
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
Now explain grafting.
Grafting is easy: the recombinant GMO grain industry makes a big donation to a legislator's reelection campaign or to a PAC supporting that legislator, and the legislator ends up pushing policies that help GMO grain producers rent-seek.
Oh, you meant the other kind of grafting. That's analogous to loading plug-ins or creating a pipe between two programs.
he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.
Really, he doesn't know how to dig a hole? The only good toilet is a hole in the ground. Anything else isn't normal for the human body to use. Do you like shitting yourself while sitting on your chair? If you're not squatting to shit, that's what you're training your body to do.
Let me know how those open source antibiotics work out.
The OP is alright in the head. He just wants to take us higher. He's a sly fox though.
I lost interest at "open source" toilet paper......
So, no bank account then. (Most bank computers run Solaris; the few that run Linux still run a lot of closed-source software). And no credit card.
Probably no cash, either - I hear that governments get very protective about their currency when people try to copy it.
Can't buy anything anyway - shops use closed-source cash registers.
Can't drive anywhere - cars use closed-source software, and so do traffic lights. Can't listen to the radio or watch television either. Can't make phone calls. All in all, a pretty dull existence.
More like a single chassis/trunk supporting multiple blades/grafts.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Haven't the Amish been doing this for years?
If he completes the year (to whatever degree is possible), and in so doing chronicles a list of (useful) open-source things that are missing, I can see how this stunt could be useful. Putting aside issues of whether we care about open-source TP and such, he could provide information similar to what the Blender Institute is trying hard to acquire (in their own field): what OSS improvements/additions are missing to make something (life, in this case) fully-operational without the need for proprietary solutions. ...Or it could just be a publicity stunt. Wait and see...
That's one of the reasons I still read /. and I'm quite willing to visit interesting sites like this to see what people have designed. h
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I don't have a TV (and not for well over a decade now) and the only DVDs I have had in the last four years have been christmas presents (ripped and played on Linux). And for 18 years after passing my driving test, I hadn't had a car.
PS DVD players now often use Linux to play, and there's plenty of FOSS software for reading and playing them, so they don't actually count as non-FOSS.
http://flyingdogales.com/
Flying dog is an open source beer. That is a start.
So if we don't allow extreme on one side, then you must remove those extremes on the other. If you don't, then the extremes move away from the RMS side and over to the Randian neo-con libertarian nutcase side.
Your attitude is PRECISELY why the Overton Window shifts.
he knows how to use the three seashells.
Are we sure that David Blaine hasn't already done this?
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
All he needs is a bidet. That mysterious piece of European porcelain solves the problem and saves trees.