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RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More
alphadogg writes "According to Richard Stallman, godfather of the free software movement, Facebook is a "monstrous surveillance engine," tech companies working for patent reform aren't going nearly far enough, and parents must lobby their children's schools to keep data private and provide free software alternatives. The free software guru touched on a host of topics in his keynote Saturday at the LibrePlanet conference, a Free Software Foundation gathering at the Scala Center at MIT.
Weird
Any link? Who are these "editors"? What a piece of shit this website has become :-)
I mean, seriously? No link to the keynote or to any article discussing it?
This place is really turning into a crapfest thanks to the silly editors...
This is just a headline. Is there a link to an actual story?
This seems like a new low for slashdot. I mean, I know we all aren't going to read the article or anything, but a link to it should still be there so that we can feel like we read it!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I saw some (i'm assuming) teenager post some angsty thing on a social page the other day and it occurred to me that we built this huge network that lets you reach out and speak to basically any other human being on the planet and people seem lonelier than ever. Odd, how that works...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This seems like a new low for Slashdot. I mean, I know none of us read the articles, but still, the link should at least be there so we can feel like we read it!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Link to story, please?
Where's the TFA?
But I disagree with the having Stalman as the locus of free software. There was free software before him (BSD, etc) and will be free software after him. Maybe capitalize it right. Yeah, he created the Free Software Foundation. Just call it that.. godfather of the FSF.
Stalman has done a lot, but sometimes his ideas get in the way of actual software. Hurd? after decades still not shipped. gcc? Got out of hand until it got taken over by egcs. Was also the "Cathedral" in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as the example of what NOT to do. emacs? Witness the hassle with xemacs and emacs.
Is this where a helpful /.-er is supposed to post a link to TFA?
Edith Keeler Must Die
On so many counts, it's scary.
When can we destroy the voluntary panopticon?
Is there an actual story here? Like anything with a link?
Or do we just get a one line snippet that says "RMS says Facebook evil 'n Stuff".
Come on guys ... two sentences and no links. That's not an actual "story".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Very read. Much informed. No article link?
21 now
As of this writing, TFS contains no links and shows no comments, despite "Read the 14 comments" being displayed on the front page. Therefore, the most intelligent comment I can make about it is this:
"First post."
I hope that won't bother anyone more than the other 14 comments already have.
and its your fault.
And the link to his speech is where??? Please provide the link(s) to a video or text copy of his speech.
Thank you!
...and I'm not seeing a single one.
First Post?
You keep on fighting the good fight, grandpa.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Facebook solved the problem of contact management very nicely. I remember the days of sending mass emails to all your contacts with new contact information... unless you manually updated your contact database then it was over and you didn't have great control over who's emails you would see and you couldn't discover old friends online...
To retain some small semblance of our privacy though we really need a set of Internet communications protocols for updating and managing address books and some sort of open directory infrastructure where people could register and look up and discover friends. But keep the information about who is connected to who private and not mediated by an all knowing third party who is selling that data to the highest bidder where it is really being used against our interests.
All it would really take is some protocol for sending or attaching updated contact info in an email or over any other protocol that a client would then use to automatically update a local/server copy of your friends list. People still rely on web mail primarily so the data would likely remain vulnerable to snooping, but at least people would have the option of keeping their data on privately owned hardware.
Stallman being Stallman... By the way where is the link of his full speech?
After all, he says he doesn't use a web browser.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If anyone is counting
Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way of linking us to additional information on the topic so that we could see his quotes in context? A shame that these things don't exist. They'd be hyper neat.
this is basically incitement to flamewar :)
From TFS: According to RMS, Facebook is a "monstrous surveillance engine,"
Frankly, I think he's being excessively kind on Facebook there and that's the last thing I would have expected from him!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Has RTFA become so absent that we just don't bother with TFA anymore?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
parents should also lobby their children to not talk to creepy longbeards screaming about his privacy in public.
Stallman is being Stallman... By the way where's the link to the full speech?
Missing the article links...
Not Scala Center
In the end, the fact that citizens of the EU and of Canada reside in the US and, under the separate US/Canada and US/EU Data Treaties can not have their privacy rights stolen without specific item by item agreement (not Click To Accept), will be what saves the US Internet from itself.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
For shame, an article (especially about Stallman) should have a link to the source.
I dare you to make less sense.
you obviously didn't listen to his talk, he uses icecat with tor now.
You don't need a browser when you have emacs.
See how this works is you give people something to read, then the people ignore your links and comment without reading it anyway. Still, you can't expect us to bother to write decent comments if you can be bothered to provide source information we won't read.
I've always thought we should just dismiss the pedantry of linking to the article as it's never read anyway.
Here's a transcript: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/GN...
And an article written about the keynote: http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
(Thanks to 2 AC's for pointing these links out.)
The whole event was recorded and streamed, so the keynote video should be available some time soon.
(I can't see any reason why the article summary didn't include the link.)
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
That video is a classic!!!
Kennedy was the last president who tried to do that and return to real, government-issued, debt-free currency. You know how that turned out. Oh, Lincoln did the same thing when he issued the Greenbacks. And Alexander Hamilton was another outspoken critic of central private banks, so he had to be "dealt with" by Aaron Burr, who went to great lengths to arrange a duel that was illegal in most places, and killed Hamilton even after Hamilton discharged his single round and was no longer a threat.
It's amazing the rationalizations people will perform to keep their cherished beliefs about the world intact. Example: you can tell someone that a petty criminal might mug you and shoot you in the process for the $50 in your wallet, and they will believe you. But if you tell people that rich and powerful men will kill to protect trillion-dollar empires, they will call you crazy, even though their incentive is very much higher and their likelihood of ever being brought to trial is non-existant.
The message of the Kennedy assassination was clear: these ... men are so powerful, they can take out a sitting President in broad daylight in front of many witnesses. Therefore, no one is untouchable.
He has a problem with personal hygiene.
Yes, and Hitler never learned how to shave his moustache properly.
Still wondering what that has to do with anything relevant here.
Also, nerds calling out other nerds for hygiene? Those who type on glass keyboards...
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
... or this rant. Since most sites no longer work without javascript, hahahaha. He's still, for all intents and purposes, stuck in the last century.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The Fed is not private. What private bank returns interest profits to the Treasury each year? What private bank explicitly is chartered to work in the public interest, and follow directives Congress gives it? The Fed was created to replace the private central banks ("clearninghouses") that had been evolved to expand the money supply in panics. The private sector realized that it was not good to have an individual such as J. P. Morgan as the lender of last resort, because as a private, profit-motivated individual he was in a position to help only his friends and hurt his enemies.
The Fed learns. In the Great Depression, it misguidedly tried to defend the dollar's gold conversion ratio and did not expand the money supply nearly enough. In the latest crisis, Bernanke expanded the Fed's balance sheet by a trillion dollars in a matter of weeks (and the predicted hyperinflation, from the quantity theory of money theorists, failed to materialize).
The Fed can and should continue to learn, to backstop individuals instead of corporations. The Fed should backstop social security, and local and state governments such as Detroit. We can expedite the learning process by voting in congressional representatives that tell the Fed: "Finance a basic income", for example. The Fed will figure out how, they know they can finance anything.
"monstrous surveillance engine" He left out evil. Should be: "evil monstrous surveillance engine"
But Facebook can be useful: Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you?
Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.
He has a problem with personal hygiene.
If this was intended to make RMS look bad, it has backfired. It just makes his detractors look like a bunch of schoolyard children who can't come up with a real criticism, but decided they just don't like the guy so he must be bad.
Good to see that RMS is now backing libre hardware, I remember the last time Slashdot interviewed him he seemed completely unaware of it and thought that he was being asked about drivers.
The data logger in my sports car is libre hardware & software B-)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Nice try, Alan/Ben/Janet.
> The Fed is not private.
Wrong. The Federal Reserve is not a United States government institution.
> The Fed learns.
Wrong. Had the Federal Reserve truly learned anything, it would have learned the bitter lesson that a credit bubble, such as the one that occurred during the Roaring 20's, results in a devastating blowout. The Federal Reserve intentionally created a credit bubble after the dot-com bust. (Read Greenspan's speech from the early 2000's.) The Federal Reserve also ignored Bagehot's recommendation of what to do during a bank run: make money readily available but on good collateral at dear prices. Instead, the Federal Reserve paid good money for garbage from the banks.
Ponzi scheme is fraud. The Fed is clear on what it does: expand the money supply in times of "crisis".
Here is a link, for those who haven't watched it: https://youtu.be/I25UeVXrEHQ
Yes, and Hitler never learned how to shave his moustache properly.
Interestingly he may have had a "proper" mustache but it interfered with the seal of his gas mask during WW1. He may have cropped off the ends to ensure a good seal. Such cropped mustaches came to represent a man who served in the trenches. Interestingly in the US Navy of WW2 a sailor may have been allowed a mustache/goatee but not a beard for this reason, establishing a seal on a gas mask or firefighting mask. Well allowed by Navy regulations but at the discretion of the ship's commander.
I have a picture of a family member who fought in the Pacific during WW2. 1943, in uniform, while ashore on liberty. His goatee was a perfect prototype for what I saw in college not long ago.
Unless you've been under a rock since 1983, you already know largely what position he's going to take when you go to his talk.
Complaining about it is like going out of your way to attend a Baptist Tent Meeting and then complaining that they were evangelizing.
I disagree with him on a number of areas (Surprise! Must be the first time someone has disagreed with RMS.), but he's worth listening to. Often there's a kernel of clue in what the more extreme types say.
What non-governmental institution turns over its profits to the US Treasury? What non-governmental institution has to have its head approved by Congress? What non-governmental institution has its charter written by Congress?
The Fed should learn to keep interest rates low. If you look at a graph of interest rates, you'll see that interest rate hikes preceded 8 of the last 9 recessions. Only four out of 12 rate hikes didn't cause recessions.
Why should the Fed raise interest rates now? It just raises costs to borrowers and increases bank profits. Interest rate hikes caused the housing crisis in 2007, because the ARMs adjusted to the increased prime rates instigated by the Fed.
Why is there this mass hysteria that rates have to increase, when clearly rate increases precipitated the most recent crash?
"The Federal Reserve also ignored Bagehot's recommendation of what to do during a bank run: make money readily available but on good collateral at dear prices. Instead, the Federal Reserve paid good money for garbage from the banks."
I would argue that the collateral is good. It was market groupthink that resulted in the crash, gossip in chatrooms hysterically screaming that every mortgage was in default. In fact the vast majority of mortgages didn't default. A few did, which was expected, but irrational paranoiac fear took over, as the market loves to let it.
Bagehot was too conservative with his "at a high rate of interest" dictum. Also, the Fed should bail out individuals, not banks. Even Kenneth Rogoff agrees:
It is up to us to change the political possibilities by educating ourselves and voting in representatives that will tell the Fed to help individuals instead of corporations.
1) He's not made a religion out of it, you've decided that it is easier to "explain away" as a religion and therefore decided it is.
2) You can't build anything. You needed the freedom to use the tools how you wished to use them to create your edifice. If your hammer had an EULA that said you couldn't share the house you built with it and if you left or moved house, then you had to destroy the house or be jailed and/or fined, then you would know how much you need to have the freedom of hammer manufacturers curtailed.
3) Nobody made you use GPL software. You have to agree to MS's EULA which restricts you and what you do (and still pay) to use their code. You have to agree to Sun's EULA to use their code (and give away your patents). And all the GPL does is set the standard payment of "you cannot close the software" as the payment. Do you rip off Microsoft or Sun's code because you feel you should be free to use their code in your software for whatever you want? They disagree. But you only whine about the GPL having a problem with it.
4) FB keep changing their ToS and agreements. Much like Microsoft's network that originally made ANYTHING you discussed on their social media network that was patented a free and gratis grant of license to Microsoft to use, the agreements need serious consideration. And only when lots of people complained about a bad agreement did Microsoft change. You seem not to want this complaint of FB to stand. Is that because FB is sacrosanct, or because it's RMS doing it? Either of those two must be true (or both true) for this double standard.
5) The success of Linux required the GPL. Without it, it would languish like BSD has done. When a competitor can rip off your code and use you as development support, you want some payback, and GPL gave it when BSD doesn't. So only pointless stuff is added to BSD, stuff that doesn't make a difference. In the GPL code you can add your useful technology and get free help from people who are helping you because it helps themselves.
Facebook and Google are far and away the best publicly available advertising tools you will find for a long time. The first place to put your business is on Facebook. And if you're selling really good shit, you cannot fail by putting all those little icons(Twitter, Linkedin, etc.) on your page. Trickle down technology, exploit it for all it's worth. Bring a friend!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There are much worse religions than that.
The ultimate non-sequitur. NOBODY CARES!
Metaphor....
In a few years when digital olfactory transmissions are perfected ...
Modpoints or I'd post in my own name ...
Highly tempted to mod you up but I am terminally unable to decide whether to mod you as "insightful" or "funny"
Did somebody misspell rms?
I mean.. normally i might agree with you, but there is a video of the man eating toe cheese.
"According to Richard Stallman, godfather of the free software movement, toejam tastes good"
The time I start listening to this wackadoodle is the time I suck on the wrong end of a shotgun.
Modpoints or I'd post in my own name ...
Highly tempted to mod you up but I am terminally unable to decide whether to mod you as "insightful" or "funny"
Definitely "Funny", since it's an AC. If it were a logged-in user, I'd use "Insightful" to contribute in some small way to their karma score.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You're not only missing the point, you're also falling for the line that companies like facebook want you to fall for. There's no way to say this nicely and you'll probably hate me and disagree with me, but I have to tell you anyway.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
From an interview on July 2005 about the housing bubble:
INTERVIEWER: Tell me, what is the worst-case scenario? Sir, we have so many economists coming on our air and saying, "Oh, this is a bubble, and it's going to burst, and this is going to be a real issue for the economy." Some say it could even cause a recession at some point. What is the worst-case scenario, if in fact we were to see prices come down substantially across the country?
BERNANKE: Well, I guess I don't buy your premise. It's a pretty unlikely possibility. We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So what I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize: might slow consumption spending a bit. I don't think it's going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
There are much worse religions than that.
I wish most religions placed half that much value on justifying their doctrines.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
s/on/in
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
... and never use software I don't like! My opinions are objective truths of the universe and can never be wrong.
Perhaps this is a generational difference. In school, I was taught not to write "I think this is so" or "I believe this is true" in anything even slightly resembling formal composition. I was taught that, perhaps barring a rigorous scientific publication, anytime you read any written work of any sort in which the author takes a position, what you are reading is exactly that: one person's position. It should be understood as something like an opinion, something that may change at a later date, something with which others may have good reasons for disagreement. This is one part of thinking for yourself, by the way.
The more modern trend is to assume that anytime anyone speaks, they automatically presume to speak for everyone else in the most absolute terms possible unless this is otherwise disclaimed. Therefore much time is wasted bickering about things like "but I'm an exception!" and "that's just your opinion!" and many false judgments against someone's character are made, such as yours. While condemning someone for such a flimsy reason may be a reassuring outlet for the type of insecure people who contribute nothing but love to throw stones, if you are honest, you may have noticed it's not making any progress.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You need to enter your PIN number at the ATM machine to get the link to the TFA.
http://www.ted.com/talks/thoma...
There's perfectly acceptable alternatives out there for £3.95, but he's just got to build his own for £1200. Looks like shit and works for 5 seconds, but he built it himself and that's what's important.
Looking at the kerfuffle around LLVM/Clang you can find more of the same attitude from RMS—he doesn't have the ego invested in the work as his detractors claim he does (often without examples cited at all, sometimes as with the grandparent poster with wrong examples cited):
Those aren't the words of someone who places ego above the good of the project or the public. For software freedom seekers, software freedom and defense of software freedom is the goal and good for the public.
Digital Citizen
Actually, on 2015-03-16 he said he's been using a web browser and Tor. I don't know if the two are related and I don't know when he started using a common browser in a typical fashion.
Digital Citizen
You need to enter your PIN number at the ATM machine to get the link to the TFA.
No thanks, I'll steer clear of the ass-to-mouth machines. ...I'm sure you didn't mean to say "Automatic Teller Machine machine", after all.
Which reinforces RMS's point regarding Facebook. Your 'toe cheese' moment might not be forgotten either.
...voting in representatives that will tell the Fed to help individuals instead of corporations.
You're fucking funny today, my man.
Everyone knows that.
No, that's not how it works in the real world. Most people don't even think it through in the first place.
"peace demonstration"
Interest rates are about managing inflation/deflation and about creating a stimulus tool during difficult economic times. Think of the interest rates as a piggy bank - right now, our piggy bank is empty because we burned all our 'savings' in attempting to spur the economy after the most recent crash. If we hit another recession while this piggy bank is empty, we will lack a tool that helps ease the recession cliff significantly. As far as recessions go, this is the most important tool - if the economy changes too drastically too quicky, people don't have time to adapt and it creates a downward spiral with lots of irreparable damage.
Subject line says it all.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The Fed should learn to keep interest rates low. If you look at a graph of interest rates [stlouisfed.org], you'll see that interest rate hikes preceded 8 of the last 9 recessions. Only four out of 12 rate hikes didn't cause recessions.
That's the worst attempt to interpret data I've seen all month. Nice try bro.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The Fed is not private. What private bank returns interest profits to the Treasury each year?
Typical pro-Fed astroturf.
The Federal Reserve is 99.9 percent private. It has never been audited by any government, so how do we know that the Fed's "interest profits" aren't total fiction?
(Yes, the Fed is regularly audited -- by companies appointed by the Fed. What a joke. It's like asking the court clown to dare to evaluate the King.)