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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?
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
You do realize that "Open Source Women" are the one with the pretty old professional skill set???
Perhaps, but men are the retards that keep paying for a free product.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Honestly depending where he lives, he might not have an issue. Local farms are a source of meat, if you talk to the farmers you can find out what they feed their stock (most of them are more than glad to answer actually). Lots of foods can be foraged (I make trips once a week to forage as a hobby) and during the summer it can yield several pounds of berries at a time. These get canned, preserved, or jellied. I grow a huge garden and what I can't eat immediately gets either dehydrated or canned. Public water here has its contents documented, so we'll consider that open source. I grow my own hops, and brew my own beer with them. Honestly after a good growing season, I'd feel comfortable saying that I could live around 70% off of foraged and homegrown foods. I could easily up it to 90-100% but my fiance would kill me for taking over the yard. Not that my case is the norm (and foraging is a weird, albiet fun and fulfilling hobby to get into), but if he is dedicating himself to it and preparing in advance I don't think it would be that difficult.
No woman for this guy. I guess they want the finer things in life!
You need to get out of the basement more. Women don't want the finer things in life. They want the finer people in life. Most women I know who married a rich guy feel they married beneath them. They went through relationship after relationship, meeting asshole after asshole, and finally they decided that if they couldn't have someone who was intelligent, kind, humorous, and compassionate, they'd settle for getting knocked up by some rich guy... at least their kids will be provided for, and there's some chance of being loved in return then.
This guy is willing to take a year out of his life to experiment with art, to answer a question about existance and meaning. This is a guy who is confident enough in who he is and has a solid grasp of what he wants out of life. Unless he's a 4 bagger, odds are good someone will take him home... idealists tend to be compassionate and considerate, and will likely treat his woman with respect and kindness. Now all he needs is a job, a car that doesn't have the death rattle, and some living space... he'll have trouble keeping the girls away.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I once spent 2 hours walking around with RMS looking for a restaurant that he liked AND served pepsi. This was in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, where most good restaurants have an exclusive deal with Coca Cola. In each place we entered, he asked if they served coke, and in a few places he insisted on speaking with the manager and when he got his way, he explained to him in gruesome details all the atrocities the Coca Cola company did in Colombia to workers.
I firmly believe in Free Software, and I admire RMS for everything he has done for the world. I try to uphold my principles, but this semi-religious thing of taking it to the extreme and avoiding anything even remotely related to something you disagree with, as if it was permanently tainted by immorality, is just plain stupid.
My company tries to free under the GPL as many products as possible, but if we freed certain things, we would be out of business. If I refused to use privative software at all, I couldn't even use a phone (even if the soft is free, the GSM firmware won't be).
What this guy is doing is just a publicity stunt, and a fairly stupid one at that. He thinks he's sending a message, but it's not the one he's thinking about.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It's a lot more than that; plenty of non-GE crops are patented. For example, say you go to buy a Fuji apple. What could be more open source than that right? Not if it is a Gale Gala, a patented bud sport of Fuji, or if he picks up a peach, it might be one of the many patented Flamin' Fury peaches. If he eats a carrot, it might have the patented line S-D813B as a parent, or if he eats a pepper, it might be the patented hybrid 9942815. Lots of plants, not just genetically engineered ones, are patented, so avoiding every patented fruit, vegetable, grain, nut, oil crop, ect. and any food produced with them would be quite the challenge.
I don't know how things are in Germany, but I'd have to imagine they grow their share of patented crops there, and even if they didn't he'd have to watch out for anything imported from countries where those varieties are grown. You'd pretty much have to eat exclusively whole fruits and vegetables that you know the variety, or things where the varieties are very likely to be not under patent like lychee or persimmon, and maybe things that haven't had much breeding work done on them like kiwanos and jícamas.
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.
I'm far more scared of Monsanto than I am of white coats.
Sent from my PDP-11
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.
Was it an open source dump? If not, we don't want to hear about your proprietary shit.
Sounds like he lives on the street.
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.
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings. You could even argue, that the grafted plant is not a single individuum, but in fact two plants, or even more, if you graft more than one scion on the same stock. My parents once had a pear tree with at least five different scions. So grafting would be akin to have two (or more) copies of the same program with individual settings coupled together. I even have a setup like that running at a customer site, where a minimal Lotus Domino installation at one server works as connector between a non-IBM-software on the same computer and the real Domino server. The minimal Domino is grafted onto the original Domino installation.