Right. It should also be noted that Moore's law can be generalized (without losing too much accuracy) to:
"Technology improves exponentially."
In other words, any given component is going to double in speed/capacity/coolness, and/or halve in size/price.
So, yeah, the $100 laptop is a confirmation, not an exception.
At the risk of starting a "My distro is better than your distro!" flame war, I just wondered, have you tried Ubuntu?
It has everything you say you would like in Linux. You rarely have to compile from source. Never, if you aren't looking for the kind of things only someone who knows how to compile from source would be looking for. Your choice of desktops. (I seem to recall, at least in GNOME that unzipping is as easy as right-click > extract-here). And this is the kicker, a really friendly community. I have gotten help many times on the forums and never once heard the phrase RTFM. I also spent the night before Feisty Fawn was released staying up and posting in a thread created just to have fun psyching out about the update (of course this fanboism was completely unwarranted, but it's always fun just to kick back and geek-out once in a while).
So I would suggest you give it a try. After all, it's Linux, the worst that happens is you decide you don't like it and wipe the partition. The only thing wasted is the CD you installed it on. =^)
broken (br'kn) v. (snip)
10. Not functioning; out of order: a broken washing machine. When something non-trivial breaks, my first reaction is to try to fix it, not to throw it away and start over. I would consider a 200 year old system of government non-trivial, so I plan on doing my best to fix it before attempting to toss it out with the garbage. I still consider it to be broken, my views on what to do with something broken are just different than yours.
Are you disputing the fact that a system can become broken?
What you have said so far is that anyone who refuses to work with the system is helping it to break, and if you think the system is broken, there is no reason to try to work with it.
So what should someone who believes the system is broken do? I can't do nothing because that makes me a fascist, and I can't work within the system for to try and improve it because that makes me a hypocrite. The only options left, that I can see, are working outside the system by manipulating the vote, or a second revolution, which I am hesitant to initiate until all other options have been tried.
Is there another option I've missed? Or are you just argueing to argue now?
Just because I point out the flaws in the current system, doesn't mean I don't try to do anything to change it. I vote for those I see as the lesser of the two evils, and encourage my friends and family to do the same. I write letters to my congress-people whenever a vote about something I care about comes up.
If you know of anything else I can do to help bring about change I would be more than glad to hear it. But accusing me of helping to create a fascist state is not constructive, nor is it going to change the fact that this country's political system is broken; very, very, broken.
It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
What I heard was: "Neither Republicans nor Democrats represent 98% of the country."
I don't see how that is slanted. If you still think it is, could you pleas tell me which way?
The problem isn't with the lawyers. It's with the political parties.
When was the last time you saw the Republicans or the Democrats actually do something that helped the common man instead of the corporations that pay for them to get back in office?
Look, it's common sense really. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Congress-Person. You get a nice paycheck and your name on TV. Your mom is so proud. Now it's crunch time: you actually have to pass a law. You can go two ways on this. You can go one way, and make a couple of your constituents happy, or, you can go the other way and make (insert big-name corporation here) happy. If you pass a law that helps out the individual voters, you might get an extra 10,000 votes next time around, if you're lucky. But, if you make the corporation happy, you will get plenty of money to pay for a campaign that will give you those 10,000 votes, but you can now target those votes in the area/state that will make the most difference to you getting elected. Keep in mind that your competition is going to be getting money from the corps and will be targeting the important states. Now, your choice boils down to this: Do you vote to make people in general like you (by doing what is in their best intrest), or do you vote to make the people in the important areas like you (by targeting them with your campaign)?
And just to keep the system working, anyone who decides to 'do the right thing' and help out the people, doesn't get elected next term. I just love American Politics.
ideology (d-l-j, d-)
n. pl. ideologies
1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.
2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.
So what you are saying is:
Republicans and Democrats are different because they have different political beliefs, so you are an idiot for suggesting that underneath, neither one represents the people.
My conclusion is basically this: if you suck at computers and are gullible and unwilling to investigate things for yourself, Vista sucks. Otherwise, Vista is quite neat and very handy. Wow, Windows used to be the OS for people who didn't have a clue about computers. I guess with Ubuntu filling that particular niche, MS is moving into Linux's traditional realm of, "Yeah, It works great if you know what you're doing. Otherwise, go with the easy option."
The $20 would be a one-time fee to copyright it in the first place, only $1 a year after that. Keep in mind that I just pulled those figures out of my @**, if it was actually going to be codified into law, I would prefer relying on some professional economists to get the final figures.
The copyright isn't to RMS himself, it's the FSF who would be footing the bill, and I have a feeling they would pay for the most important ones and let the others go PD. Which is the idea. In a way, Stallman is just as bad as the people he is accusing of trying to control what others do with his code. (there goes my karma) If he has a serious problem with someone using the code of, say, 'cp' in a way he doesn't like he should have no problem paying for that protection. I didn't say this would be ideal for the FSF, the Free Software Movement, or for RMS, I said it would be better for society in general, a concept Stallman seems to have lost in his endless crusade against the EVIL of Closed Software.
As for your pictures, if you don't want someone using it in a way other than how you specify, don't give it to that someone. If you are putting the pictures online, do you really believe a copyright notice is more likely to stop people than a simple "Please ask me if you would like to use these pictures."
If you want to use copyright as more than a deterrent, aka - actually following up infringements with legal action, It's going to cost you a lot more than 20 bucks.
But I wonder, why do you want to limit what other people can do with your pictures in the first place? What can they possibly do with your photographs that would hurt you? Does preventing that from happening justify removing the good that could be done by giving your art back to the society that inspired it?
Please don't take any of this as being inflammatory towards you or anyone else, I am really curious as to the answers and am willing to change my opinion if there is something I have missed.
What can be better in a world where a free market is build in a society, where the liberty of speech, the choice of religion and the private property are guaranteed by the law and the law treats people as equal? You are confusing a "free society" with a "free market". The only thing guaranteed by a free market (out of the things you listed) is private property. All the others (freedom of speech and religion, equality under the law) are separate from the concept of a free market. They are, however central to the constitution, and the founding-fathers' concept of a free society.
People always get confused, thinking capitalism is the same as democracy, Americanism, patriotism, etc. Pure Capitalism is actually a rather brutal concept, where only the strong survive. (Strong here meaning the companies who have the most money to begin with) Remember that things like anti-trust laws and consumers rights are socialist concepts. Capitalism by itself eventually leads to a government run by corporations. (note the growing trend in the US)
You seem well versed in this field Thank you! But I'm really just an interested researcher, you could probably get the same by reading wikipedia.
Yes. That is, I think he should, if he wants it to stay out of the public domain. I'm not sure if you were asking me if he should or would. I really don't know what he would do in that situation.
But, like I say, If the FSF doesn't care enough about the copyright on the GNU stuff to pay a dollar a year, why bother?
I never understood why copyrighting the GPL was necessary in the first place, if someone tried to use it with changed words, and still called it the GPL, wouldn't that be libel? (maybe not libel, whatever law it is that says you can't misrepresent yourself in a legal document)
You're right, I've never bought a manual for a car (never been a car person) nor did I realize that one could do so.
But I still don't see the need for copyright on things that are going to be given away for free (is that manual in my glove box actually free, or did I pay for it with the car?)
Anyway, I still believe (and I've said it before) that copyright should cost the copyrighter. Not much, maybe 20 bucks the first time, then a dollar every year after that you want it to remain copyrighted. If you don't plan on making $20 on whatever it is you are copyrighting, there's really no reason to copyright it and if it ever stops making more than a dollar a year, it can go to the public domain where it belongs. This would allow for things like 'freebie' manuals to be copied online by the strange sort of people who do that kind of thing (thank you, whoever you are) so that the rest of us don't have to worry about manuals for things we find at garage sales.
To be perfectly fair, Democratic Socialism has never actually been attempted. So implying that Democracy == Capitalism may be historically correct, but is technically not true.
It is a socialistic idea that the economy (the word is controversial in this philosophy) should be controlled by the state. Actually, it's the Workers (Marx called them the proletariat), who are supposed to control both the property and the means of production. The state is only supposed to be a mediator until the workers can take over completely. Unfortunately, the state tends to become too big for it's britches and decides to implement what is really a form of totalitarianism, or fascism.
Well, that's in Classical Socialism/Marxism, not to be confused with Democratic Socialism, in which the government regulates commerce, but the government is controlled by the workers, or with Pure Communism, in which nobody owns anything, everyone just takes "according to his need" and gives "according to his ability".
Of course, the whole needs/abilities thing is also the goal of the other types of socialism. (notice the small 's'), they just have different ways of achieving it than Communism's idealistic method. Note that this doesn't mean that Pure Communism is impossible, it's likelihood of working is inversely proportional to the square of the size of the population. (Jacob's just-made-up law of communistic endeavors) Many small organizations are actually run in a communistic manner, but don't tell them that if they live in the USA, McCarthy red-scared that word into almost being an explicative a few years back, and we still haven't recovered enough to use some common sense.
I'm not trolling you, I just don't see how your conclusion follows from your first statement.
How would making instructional works copyright-free lower their quality?
The value of a manual (to the company making it) is not in it's royalties. It is usually given away for free, so there are no royalties.
If all you wanted it to do was reload the entire page, that would (has for a long time) work for the comments as well. But the idea is to only reload the new comments/articles.
a separate proprietary kernel, licensed under GPL2. Huh? Did we change the definition of proprietary to "All licenses except THE ONE TRUE LICENSE ordained by RMS, may he continue to bless us with his greatness!"
GPLv2 is still open, as are the BSD's Mozilla, and a few others.
Besides, if Intel merely wanted to avoid GPLv3, all they would have to do would be to grab a version licensed under v2 and use that. The bottom says "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
If Intel uses a GPLv2 release of the source (AFAIK, none of them are GPLv3 yet), they won't be forced to change once (if) Linus decides to do so. They just won't be allowed to use any of the new(GNU?) code.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. It should also be noted that Moore's law can be generalized (without losing too much accuracy) to:
"Technology improves exponentially."
In other words, any given component is going to double in speed/capacity/coolness, and/or halve in size/price.
So, yeah, the $100 laptop is a confirmation, not an exception.
At the risk of starting a "My distro is better than your distro!" flame war, I just wondered, have you tried Ubuntu?
It has everything you say you would like in Linux. You rarely have to compile from source. Never, if you aren't looking for the kind of things only someone who knows how to compile from source would be looking for. Your choice of desktops. (I seem to recall, at least in GNOME that unzipping is as easy as right-click > extract-here). And this is the kicker, a really friendly community. I have gotten help many times on the forums and never once heard the phrase RTFM. I also spent the night before Feisty Fawn was released staying up and posting in a thread created just to have fun psyching out about the update (of course this fanboism was completely unwarranted, but it's always fun just to kick back and geek-out once in a while).
So I would suggest you give it a try. After all, it's Linux, the worst that happens is you decide you don't like it and wipe the partition. The only thing wasted is the CD you installed it on. =^)
I'm sorry, you must have posted on the wrong topic. here you go.
Seriously, didn't we just have this conversation?
(snip)
10. Not functioning; out of order: a broken washing machine. When something non-trivial breaks, my first reaction is to try to fix it, not to throw it away and start over. I would consider a 200 year old system of government non-trivial, so I plan on doing my best to fix it before attempting to toss it out with the garbage. I still consider it to be broken, my views on what to do with something broken are just different than yours.
Are you disputing the fact that a system can become broken?
What you have said so far is that anyone who refuses to work with the system is helping it to break, and if you think the system is broken, there is no reason to try to work with it.
So what should someone who believes the system is broken do? I can't do nothing because that makes me a fascist, and I can't work within the system for to try and improve it because that makes me a hypocrite. The only options left, that I can see, are working outside the system by manipulating the vote, or a second revolution, which I am hesitant to initiate until all other options have been tried.
Is there another option I've missed? Or are you just argueing to argue now?
Here, Here!
I agree with your sentiment, although I would disagree with you on some of your issues.
That's the point though.
Just because I point out the flaws in the current system, doesn't mean I don't try to do anything to change it. I vote for those I see as the lesser of the two evils, and encourage my friends and family to do the same. I write letters to my congress-people whenever a vote about something I care about comes up.
If you know of anything else I can do to help bring about change I would be more than glad to hear it. But accusing me of helping to create a fascist state is not constructive, nor is it going to change the fact that this country's political system is broken; very, very, broken.
Also works for any other political office.
Wow, did you even read the quote?
What I heard was: "Neither Republicans nor Democrats represent 98% of the country."
I don't see how that is slanted. If you still think it is, could you pleas tell me which way?
The problem isn't with the lawyers. It's with the political parties.
When was the last time you saw the Republicans or the Democrats actually do something that helped the common man instead of the corporations that pay for them to get back in office?
Look, it's common sense really. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Congress-Person. You get a nice paycheck and your name on TV. Your mom is so proud. Now it's crunch time: you actually have to pass a law. You can go two ways on this. You can go one way, and make a couple of your constituents happy, or, you can go the other way and make (insert big-name corporation here) happy. If you pass a law that helps out the individual voters, you might get an extra 10,000 votes next time around, if you're lucky. But, if you make the corporation happy, you will get plenty of money to pay for a campaign that will give you those 10,000 votes, but you can now target those votes in the area/state that will make the most difference to you getting elected. Keep in mind that your competition is going to be getting money from the corps and will be targeting the important states. Now, your choice boils down to this: Do you vote to make people in general like you (by doing what is in their best intrest), or do you vote to make the people in the important areas like you (by targeting them with your campaign)?
And just to keep the system working, anyone who decides to 'do the right thing' and help out the people, doesn't get elected next term. I just love American Politics.
Republicans and Democrats are different because they have different political beliefs, so you are an idiot for suggesting that underneath, neither one represents the people.
My first thought when I saw this.
.txt/.rtf formats like Gutenberg does?'
With my second being 'will they support downloading in
The $20 would be a one-time fee to copyright it in the first place, only $1 a year after that. Keep in mind that I just pulled those figures out of my @**, if it was actually going to be codified into law, I would prefer relying on some professional economists to get the final figures.
The copyright isn't to RMS himself, it's the FSF who would be footing the bill, and I have a feeling they would pay for the most important ones and let the others go PD. Which is the idea. In a way, Stallman is just as bad as the people he is accusing of trying to control what others do with his code. (there goes my karma) If he has a serious problem with someone using the code of, say, 'cp' in a way he doesn't like he should have no problem paying for that protection. I didn't say this would be ideal for the FSF, the Free Software Movement, or for RMS, I said it would be better for society in general, a concept Stallman seems to have lost in his endless crusade against the EVIL of Closed Software.
As for your pictures, if you don't want someone using it in a way other than how you specify, don't give it to that someone. If you are putting the pictures online, do you really believe a copyright notice is more likely to stop people than a simple "Please ask me if you would like to use these pictures."
If you want to use copyright as more than a deterrent, aka - actually following up infringements with legal action, It's going to cost you a lot more than 20 bucks.
But I wonder, why do you want to limit what other people can do with your pictures in the first place? What can they possibly do with your photographs that would hurt you? Does preventing that from happening justify removing the good that could be done by giving your art back to the society that inspired it?
Please don't take any of this as being inflammatory towards you or anyone else, I am really curious as to the answers and am willing to change my opinion if there is something I have missed.
People always get confused, thinking capitalism is the same as democracy, Americanism, patriotism, etc. Pure Capitalism is actually a rather brutal concept, where only the strong survive. (Strong here meaning the companies who have the most money to begin with) Remember that things like anti-trust laws and consumers rights are socialist concepts. Capitalism by itself eventually leads to a government run by corporations. (note the growing trend in the US)
You seem well versed in this field Thank you! But I'm really just an interested researcher, you could probably get the same by reading wikipedia.
Yes. That is, I think he should, if he wants it to stay out of the public domain. I'm not sure if you were asking me if he should or would. I really don't know what he would do in that situation.
But, like I say, If the FSF doesn't care enough about the copyright on the GNU stuff to pay a dollar a year, why bother?
I never understood why copyrighting the GPL was necessary in the first place, if someone tried to use it with changed words, and still called it the GPL, wouldn't that be libel? (maybe not libel, whatever law it is that says you can't misrepresent yourself in a legal document)
Please see my reply to the AC who replied to the GP. ;-)
You're right, I've never bought a manual for a car (never been a car person) nor did I realize that one could do so.
But I still don't see the need for copyright on things that are going to be given away for free (is that manual in my glove box actually free, or did I pay for it with the car?)
Anyway, I still believe (and I've said it before) that copyright should cost the copyrighter. Not much, maybe 20 bucks the first time, then a dollar every year after that you want it to remain copyrighted. If you don't plan on making $20 on whatever it is you are copyrighting, there's really no reason to copyright it and if it ever stops making more than a dollar a year, it can go to the public domain where it belongs. This would allow for things like 'freebie' manuals to be copied online by the strange sort of people who do that kind of thing (thank you, whoever you are) so that the rest of us don't have to worry about manuals for things we find at garage sales.
To be perfectly fair, Democratic Socialism has never actually been attempted. So implying that Democracy == Capitalism may be historically correct, but is technically not true.
Sorry, just being pedantic. Carry on. =^)
Well, that's in Classical Socialism/Marxism, not to be confused with Democratic Socialism, in which the government regulates commerce, but the government is controlled by the workers, or with Pure Communism, in which nobody owns anything, everyone just takes "according to his need" and gives "according to his ability".
Of course, the whole needs/abilities thing is also the goal of the other types of socialism. (notice the small 's'), they just have different ways of achieving it than Communism's idealistic method. Note that this doesn't mean that Pure Communism is impossible, it's likelihood of working is inversely proportional to the square of the size of the population. (Jacob's just-made-up law of communistic endeavors) Many small organizations are actually run in a communistic manner, but don't tell them that if they live in the USA, McCarthy red-scared that word into almost being an explicative a few years back, and we still haven't recovered enough to use some common sense.
Um, would you care to elaborate?
I'm not trolling you, I just don't see how your conclusion follows from your first statement. How would making instructional works copyright-free lower their quality?
The value of a manual (to the company making it) is not in it's royalties. It is usually given away for free, so there are no royalties.
Sorry, seems a bit of a non sequitur to me.
If all you wanted it to do was reload the entire page, that would (has for a long time) work for the comments as well. But the idea is to only reload the new comments/articles.
I like the Update feature, would it be possible, eventually, to get the main page set up like this too? Just a thought.
Exactly, I moved the task bar on my windows partition because I got tired of always checking the top of the screen for the time...
GPLv2 is still open, as are the BSD's Mozilla, and a few others.
Besides, if Intel merely wanted to avoid GPLv3, all they would have to do would be to grab a version licensed under v2 and use that. The bottom says "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
If Intel uses a GPLv2 release of the source (AFAIK, none of them are GPLv3 yet), they won't be forced to change once (if) Linus decides to do so. They just won't be allowed to use any of the new(GNU?) code.
But IANAL, so I could be wrong.