Your gas prices are already extremely low as it is. Here in Europe we pay two to three times as much - and that's if we have a good day. In the same way, we only use half to a third as much per capita as you do and still enjoy a higher median quality of life than you do. And still, any effort at being environment friendly is quite half-assed over here compared with what is technologically and economically feasible. The point being: even if one doesn't switch over to alternative energies, you can without any problems use at least 75% energy less - but you won't, unless you have to pay four times the price. So you don't really need "low cost fuel", you just need to get a better infrastructure: in many places in the US you can't even get to the store without a car because it's far away and there aren't any buses - which is because of misled infrastructure decisions, primarily those after the second world war and has nothing at all to do with the average US population density being lower than the population density in Europe (which is an argument slashdot loves very much, especially when concerning broadband - completely ignoring that many rural areas of Europe [not even speaking of Japan or South Korea] have better broad band than NY or LA).
Green technologies may not be ready yet, but if you don't stop using so much, it won't be ready before the fuel runs out - and you won't be able to restart the industry because there aren't any ressources anymore for a second industrial revolution. However, pollution is not a fee for lower gas prices, but it is a symptom of a general unwillingness of people in general and the US specificially to accept change, ignoring long-term payouts because of a short-term investment, even knowing that their standard of living will drop to zero if they continue this way and using more fuel efficient technologies can only mean an improvement - after all, you are able to do more things with the same amount of fuel. Put differently: You can get more production using less energy and creating less production. And this already ignores the industry needed to produce the environment-friendly technology needed, because that would sound too much like a broken window fallacy (even though the long term payout would, in contrast to the fallacy, be positive), because you have to buy it from Europe, anyway, because the US chose to severely to lag behind the rest of the world in developing alternative energies or more efficient mechanisms.
Returning to the issue at hand: Any waste can be recycled and used for further profit. Just consider the aluminium industry: You need about twenty times as much energy to refine aluminium from raw ores than you need to recycle it. Therefore, if you are in the aluminium industry, recycling it means you have a big competive advantage meaning bigger profits. This is true pretty much anywhere where "waste" is created. But only nearly anywhere, not everywhere: Sometimes, at least with current technology, you can't recycle it. Of course, filtering the water and air and disposing of "hazardous materials" in a proper way is significantly cheaper than cleaning a lake (and should be affordable by the profits of the oil industry in any case). But companies (or people, for that matter) don't do that: because the former would need to be paid by the company, while the latter is paid for by taxes. Still, letting them do that is pretty much equivalent to saying that nuclear waste shouldn't be deposed of properly but instead be randomly dumped around the country without any shielding, warning signs or anything (and, in the same way as the waste refining oil creates, nuclear "waste" could still be used but isn't because it isn't wanted).
In the same way, the human contribution of greenhouse gasses is neglible compared to the amount created by plants, volcanos and, above all, the sun.
It's just that the environment is in an equilibrium: If we hadn't the sun, it would be as cold on earth as it is on Mars, and the plants take the CO2 they produced back in (except when they are burned down). In the same way, the ammonia from fish poop is in an equilibrium with the rest of the ecosystem (most importantly, bacteriae and algae).
However, those equilibria tend to be very instable ones compared to extreme heat (Venus) or extreme cold (Mars): if some of the factors are changed just a tiny bit it might cause a chain reaction sending it from that equilibrium away to another, less desirable one. That amount of ammonia might just be enough to kick the system out of balance, causing the lake to die. To see just how easily that happens, try and set up an aquarium without following the proper guidelines. Your fish won't stay below the water line for long.
All "waste" actually can be considered a valuable resource (for example, nuclear "waste" isn't, but could be used in appropriate reactors to produce several times more energy than it did until the point where we currently depose of it). Its just that in the very, very short term it is easier and maybe even cheaper to dump it somewhere and poison the environment instead of using it and make more profit.
Another example: In Europe (I don't know how it is in the US) farmers get paid for not producing, where one might think that for the same price one could eliminate hunger in the world.
So it all really is not something of "it's to idealistic to work" or even just "but I'd make less money that way" but "I don't want it to work on ideological grounds".
The biggest problem is Second Life tries to build an economy based off of real world money. It just doesn't work, people don't want to pay money to get virtual money. On the other hand World of Warcraft has an economy based off of fake money earned from doing spending time in the game. This way advertising in WoW could work.
First you say that Second Life fails because people don't want to buy fake money with real money and then you point to WoW for which people buy fake money with real money on eBay. Can you say cognitive dissonance?
Ok, explain how giving electoral power to a body of people with LESS experience of the consequences is going to change things for the better.
I don't need to because I didn't claim so. I just pointed out that you have not explained how they are supposed to make it worse because all you did was lamenting the current state of affairs which they didn't cause.
Where did this "deserve to live" crap come from? All I said was why should I pay towards people who CHOOSE to have 6 kids knowing they can't support them?
What else would you do? Not giving them money or means of living in some other way when they can't afford living just makes sure that those kids either die or turn to crime.
And as for people having an easy life off my money, it is in no way propaganda. [some anecdote]
You didn't read what I wrote. I didn't say that such people do not exist. Indeed, I acknowledged that this is the case. I just pointed out that you, the media and the politicians overstate that problem and do nothing to solve it but instead go after the legitimate using the cases of misuse as justification.
Your last statement is just stupid. How is expecting a pension you have paid for "leeching"?
I didn't say it is, but it is the perspective younger people have, according to what you wrote, on the elder; the point being that everyone accuses the other of wasting the money even if it is not the case because of prejudice and propaganda planted by interest groups to make you go against each other so they can do what they want without ever becoming a target.
Where do you draw the line?
If they can hold the pen and make their mark, they're eligible to vote. Even if their voting behaviour were random or stupid, I really don't see how it would get better with age. After all, what use is experience if you don't learn for it - but nobody ever does.
In the UK at least, you reach the age of majority at 18, which means your parents are no longer responsible for you. Are we to say that parents cease being responsible for their offsprings wellbeing at 16 or 12?
One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Just look at the US where in many places you can only drink after becoming 21, even though you usually can vote earlier. To claim that gaining one right requires losing another does only make sense if you already believe that the current system is perfectly just. I could write my opinion regarding this, too, but it is not only to far from the topic but you will also again not understand it because it also would be too far from your imaginary black-and-white world.
I wonder if Microsoft is busy abandoning the software business.
Nah, they're not abandoning the software business. They're just not satisfied with having one monopoly but want to be the one monopoly for everything. So they are just using their software monopoly as leverage for trying to kill Sony with the X-Box, Apple with the Zune and now those ads being yet another attempt at killing Google (because the chairs seem to have not worked). Of course, the very same got them a lawsuit when they tried to kill Netscape with IE (because chairs weren't yet invented back then).
The best thing, of course, is that they don't even need a quality product, because they're Microsoft: Having been in the right place at the right time to deplace IBM, nobody is getting fired for buying from Microsoft. Just put in a good dose of FUD, and nobody will even want anything else, provided they even know that there is anything different.
Let me get this straight - you say letting 16 year olds vote is a stupid idea because they don't understand the importance of having a pension in old age and to support it you point to how the current system screwed it up? You know, that's a really idiotic argument. I absolutely can't see
how letting younger people vote would make it any worse than it already is; or how they would have any more weight than any other societal group
or why they should be worth less as human beings (by disallowing them the right to vote) just because they haven't yet enough "experience" (so you'd like to disallow them voting when they go to college because they haven't any real world experience yet?)
or how them voting should be responsible for a crappy system which was created without them voting.
And don't even get me started on how completely worthless voting is because we only vote on "representatives" who don't instead of the real issues: I do understand it, but what good does that to me if it is not me who votes on it but someone who is paid to vote in a specific way? And even if they aren't paid tend to be informed about as well as your average person: If people are too stupid to make correct decision, what could make anyone think that they could possibly vote for good representatives?
As for your other grievances: I think a big part of the problem is simply the lack of education and perspective we provide your young. In fact, your education should start with yourself, realizing that all that talk about people having an easy life off of your money is absolutely nothing but propaganda, designed to divide the people (between "old" and "young", "haves" and "have nots", always saying that the other are unfairly better off) and make them toe the party line. Don't get me wrong, there surely are some people who intentionally misuse social support. But I really have yet to see any proposal which really curbs the misuse instead of simply making it harder for those who really have a problem. Indeed, one might compare it to copy protection: It makes legetimate use difficult while doing nothing to make illegal use harder after someone has taken the first hurdle.
As an aside: I don't really see why we still have to put up with this insane idea that people have to "deserve" to live. Applied to your example: You seem to prefer to let the children die because their parent can't afford them. I think that you work hard and "they don't" should really solved in another way than hoping for them to die or cruelly providing for them too little to live, too much to die. Indeed, your pension being so small doesn't come from teenagers voting for immediate pleasure but from the idea that old people should hurry up with dying and not leech money off of society. After all, if you worked all your life but haven't made millions to retire on, you can't have worked all that hard, can you?
Yeah. What Linus actually is saying here is that he doesn't want the law to change, but rather that it stays as it is, because he seems to believe that, even tough he doesn't murder people, he shouldn't take from others the "freedom" to murder people. Or rather, he doesn't want people to tell others that they may not murder in their house and they should go elsewhere - after all, the GPL is just a license, not the law. Of course, if he does dislike the GPL so much, one has to ask why he didn't simply use BSD.
Anyway, if laws were not to enforce what is ethically correct, what for would they be? Either they would be doing nothing, or they would be enforcing what is ethically wrong. Of course, one can have differing conceptions as to what is right and what is wrong, but those in any case serve as the basis to what is law, which is not so much about enforcement but rather codifying it to have a standard for society instead of letting have everyone his own, for otherwise people would do things, well, commonly held as being bad. Thus, one rather should address the ethical preconceptions at the foundation than just the fact that laws are individual ethics made into those of the whole society.
Removing the "or later" creates more problems than it solves because you can't possibly move to another license unless you first create a procedure for doing so (or do the senseless work of rewriting the code). A possible method, of course, would be assigning the copyright - but if you don't trust the FSF to not change the license in a bad way, you won't trust it to make good use of your copyright. However, if you don't trust a benevolent organization like the FSF, how will you trust anyone else to do it right? There is quite a difference between informed caution and being paranoid, you know.
While one might need to ask a lawyer, I think it would be held that changing to a license completely different in spirit would not be in the intent of the licensor and thus be held invalid. If not, you can still try something like "...or later, provided the spirit of the license is preserved.".
Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that.
The term "viral" was coined to claim that the GPL would "infect" everything else, i.e. it is claimed that if you had a GPL application, the whole userland and kernel would need to be GPL, too. Thus no, everyone who has read the GPL denies that it is viral, because it doesn't do such thing. It only does make sure that if one makes his software free, it stays free, not affecting any seperate software. Of course, some commercial interests who are not willing to adapt have problems with that, so they resort to FUD.
As a side note, it is to be pointed out that DRM is, indeed, viral, if it forces any software and data, including GPL'd and CC'd, under its "protection".
Wow, you're such a nice person. How can you stay that nice knowing that the majority of slasdot disagrees with you because it holds change necessary or impossible? I am so unworthy of answering you, because I'm using strawmen and stuff, while you are so incredibly unbiased and objective, but still, here I go:
1. "Value" is not something an object or concept has but what is attributed to it by determining how much people are willing to pay for it. However, with the advent of the Internet, information can be reproduced near cost-free and arbitrarily often, such that it becomes a commodity and thus its value approaches its marginal cost.
2. This is, however, not wanted by those "producing" the "goods" because this means that they don't make as much profit. Therefore, they need to create scarcity such that they can charge higher prices. For information, the tool of choice is, of course, DRM.
3. Going off of an tangent: If one is at that point where one needs to create artificial scarcity not only at one point but everywhere (agricultural subventions in the western world, for example), it is obvious that "Hippie Culture" wouldn't work because the means don't exist but because the people don't want it.
4. DRM doesn't not only mean a problem for the consumer but also for every company: If Microsoft can arbitrarily revoke their licenses, every company is de facto under control of Microsoft. If I lead a company, I would not want that. I want to trade on my terms, not having them forced upon me by the other party.
5.... You know, screw that. You don't give a shit about what I'm saying, anyway. You're not interested in learning anything, you just want to wallow in your self pity because slashdot doesn't agree with you in every point, lumping everyone into one (can you say straw man?)...
Yeah, its easier, but it is by far not as expressive. Ever tried composing a letter just by mouse? Let it be said, it's possible, but very tedious. This is a pattern which is consistent about all uses of the mouse: it is learned easily simply because you can't do much with it. It holds for anything, not just computer interface paradigms, that to do something, you can make it more difficult than it needs to be (like composing a letter with the mouse or drawing with the keyboard), but there is a threshold you cannot make it easier anymore - but Windows attempts to do that and still doesn't even get close: the more complex the job, the more complex the steps to be used.
I guess I wanted to go anywhere with that, but I don't remember where... anyway:
As your father preferred Windows one can find people who never used a computer before and yet prefer Linux. It may not warrant claiming that Linux is easier, but in the same way it doesn't warrant claiming that Windows is easier. Also, in my experience RedHat is rather... well, let's better not go there.
My point is: "who's easier" isn't really that relevant, either. Though it has to be said that I haven't that much experience with people completely new to computers, because they either don't want to use computers at all, no matter which OS, or they already used Windows and therefore are completely unwilling to even try something else. Even if they try Linux, they quit it at the first problem they encounter - while having no problem at all with searching the whole internet for some driver for Windows.
While everyone may prefer one system over the other and while every system is far from perfect, I don't believe that it is about which system is easier but simply about which system is sold: For every single person who objectively prefers Windows there are thousands who don't even know of any alternative and just buy what is offered.
I don't really have a problem with people chosing the one or the other system. However, there are two things which really anger me, not only with respect to operating systems, but being an integral trait of society: Firstly, the complete unwillingness to learn anything. Secondly, that it is made intentionally difficult to use something else than what "everyone" uses.
When people are taught about Windows and not computers, it's just like if one wasn't taught in school about religions in general and the positives and negatives of each, but only a single one: one cannot choose, not knowing that others are available - and those who use others being put on no-fly- or dont-sell-to-lists. When they hear of the rituals of the other religion, they say that they won't convert to it, because they think those rituals are too restricting - but doing their own ones and making up stories about how the others are eating children and stuff.
Anyway, I'd better stop ranting now...
As to the "holy grail" of interfaces, IMHO, I would have to say that would be telepathic and not voice.;)
Though one has to wonder: would telepathy be more like a GUI or more like a CLI?;)
Well, I'm not a fanboy of any kind, either. I just use the best tool for the job. It's not my fault that it always happens to be Linux - except for games, but there are better ways for wasting time. Lurking on/., for example.
Linux can easily be used without the shell, enabling everything you can do with Windows and more. Though I personally prefer using the shell, which is why using Windows is exceedingly painful to me because there are many things you can't do with Windows.
Still, your post just proves my point.
The child is willing to learn something new, the old people not. Most people, including you and I, were raised on Windows, thus it seems intuitive to us when it is not. But this is learned behavior:
If one's first language is English, one's going to prefer speaking English instead of learning French. Respectively, if one's first language is French, one's going to prefer speaking French instead of learning English. But because English is the lingua franca, the English speaker feels justified in his unwillingness to learn new things. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of French as a language and everything with the prevalence of English.
This, of couse, isn't just valid for Linux vs Windows, but also for GUI vs CLI. Indeed, using a GUI is a much more primitive method of interaction: Little babies point and moan. Grown ups speak. Also consider that the "holy grail" of interfaces, voice recognition, is a command line interface.
If you really think that names mean anything, I've got a bridge to sell.
If you believe that the Soviet Union was socialistic because it said so, you surely must believe that it was democratic because it said so, no? Of course you don't: After all, your government stands to gain from emphasizing the difference between your capitalism and their "socialism", thus creating a powerful image of an enemy, but didn't had any interest in claiming that you both are democratic, for otherwise you might realize that both the USA and the Soviet Union (and every other country, for that matter) is oligarchic, not democratic, and that it doesn't make any difference if you have one party or two. Indeed, what the Soviet Union called socialism was simply capitalism. That the Soviet Union "lost" the cold war was solely a consequence of it being more totalitarian than the United States.
What change, exactly, did capitalism mean compared to feudalism? In the end, it still is structured according the principle that some people are more free than others, entitled to infringe other's freedom. As you said, capitalism didn't really create the super rich. Indeed, it actually mostly just shifted the rankings of the rich and the unscrupulous. Didn't you ask yourself why that is? It is because capitalism is simply the adaption of feudalism into an industrialized society, like we are now seeing the adaption of it into an information society in form of "intellectual property". Above all, you should realize that the free market is indeed the very antithesis of capitalism or the so-called "socialism" of the Soviet Union or even China: for one is only truly free if nobody else will infringe on this freedom. But capitalism, as any feudalistic society, is founded on the principle that some people, be it by heritage or money, are entitled on infringing on others freedom.
He believed that the economy was like a cake, and it can be shared equally or otherwise. Its not - its like a fire - if you take out all the hot coals, and share them round, it goes out!
Then why do you take all the hot coals out of it, distributing it so a few people can warm on their ceasing fire instead of keeping it burning and warm everyone?
Until Linux is as easy to use and as widely supported by OEMs as Windows is...
Your second point is correct: The lack of support Linux experiences leads to people staying with Windows: after all, if they can only get Windows on hardware crippled so it only works with Windows, they're staying with it. Your first point, however, is utterly wrong: It is not Linux which is not ready, it is the people who are not ready for Linux - and be it because the people don't want to use Linux because it comes not preinstalled because the people don't buy Linux because... you get the idea. Therefore, whether Linux succeeds or not does depend not in the least in the qualities of Linux itself, but rather in the perception of being the king of the hill. After all, this is how Windows succeeded: not by delivering quality, but by marketing.
Of course, for Windows it also was significant that Microsoft got a whole new market delivered on a silver platter by IBM. However, the same has already happened for Linux: where Microsoft has the desktops, Linux has embedded devices and servers. However, a market cannot be new twice: There can never be a sudden success of Linux on the desktop, but every single computer has to be fought for, and Microsoft will use all their FUD they can muster to stop Linux.
Thus, don't blame Linux for being perceived as not being easy to use: Were Linux installed by someone else (like the OEMs do for Windows) and the first thing you were taught at the computer (instead of Windows), people would ask why one would want to switch to Windows.
Also, everyone please stop with those predictions about how they're going to be moderated. It makes you look dumb. (And I'll not be read at all, much less moderated.)
Is it really a particular copy if it is done in bulk? It somehow appears to me that it wouldn't apply here. But of course, IANAL, but you obviously are one as you nowhere wrote that you aren't one, so I assume it applies. Therefore:
If 1., it would be completely legal for me to buy mass-produced illegal copies from somewhere in Asia and then sell it. The guy I bought from might get problems, but not me, because I'm only selling it.
If 2., it would be perfectly legal if I were to sell vouchers you could give to some warez-site and get copies of Windows. If he'd get caught, I'd go free because, after all, I didn't do the distributing.
So what you are saying is that it's not freedom unless you may infringe on the freedom of others? That we shouldn't ban murder, slavery and similar things because they'd be diminishing your freedom to harm others? That some people are more deserving of freedom than others? That there shouldn't be any change because it might harm those who are in power now and are deserving of it by virtue of having this power?
Your analogy is crap, anyway: It's more like you'd sell Microsoft Office but let a subsidiary handle the actual delivery chain: Microsoft surely would sue you if you hadn't a contract for this act of distribution, even if you just pocket the money and don't do the actual act of distribution.
As another poster noted, you need to subtract the tax. If you then notice that, due to unsustainable spending (many a country had to learn that war isn't exactly the best way to prop up an economy in the long term) the dollar is growing progressively weaker with respect to other countries, it's actually cheaper.
Write code you love and let it go free. If someone else makes money from it, BFD. "RMS" can go shove it.
How eloquently you trash the GPL when you obviously never read it. "RMS" and we who understand what he wants have absolutely no problems with people making money of software. What we have a problem with is getting software and then being at the mercy of its creator: If we get software, we want to be able to improve it, should the need arise; otherwise, if the company who distributed the non-free software goes under or just doesn't want to deal with us, we won't get the bugs fixed or new features introduced.
Of course, a company who offers no value when redistributing GPL'd software won't make money: They have to migrate from a sense of entitlement ("intellectual property") to facing the fact that they have to offer some additional value instead of intangible, nearly cost-free reproducible data streams. If they manage that and make money of it, all the better. If they don't, good riddance. But that's their problem, it shouldn't be ours.
Indeed, both as a private person and in any position in a commercial or governmental entity, I'd choose GPL3'd software (or, at the very least, demand contractually that the code is handed over to me so I can fix it and the devices won't stop me from doing that - which pretty much amounts to the same), because I don't want to be dependent on some (other) company when there's no need to be.
Or would you like it if Gates (or Jobs or whoever) decides to take over the world and you can't stop him because he revoked the key for the DRM of the devices of your police, military and any other agency which could stop him? Or how about having a bug in medical software but being unable to fix it because of not having the code and, even if you had the code, updating the software being impossible because of the DRM, thus the hospital equipment randomly killing people by switching off life support or overdosing the IV?
Also, you can still release your own code under any license you like, unless you used GPL'd code in the first case. And you also should think of how much more hassle it is with non-free software where one needs first to ask and pay billions for some "intellectual property" before one can get a bug fixed.
What about the child who contracts it from their mother?
Wasn't there something in the bible like "your sins shall be visited onto your offspring unto the seventh generation"? I'd say that's definite proof that it's gods punishment for being... uh... alive or something?
I've never seen an ascii art diagram in the code. And why would you want to do it right of it instead above it or below, anyway? You even could put it before the code.
So you would prefer the assumption "guilty until proven innocent"?
There always are two kinds of error you can make (I probably got the order wrong?): Either you can let him go although he is guilty or you can arrest him although he is innocent. If you want to reduce the former, you're going to arrest the innocent (and thus have two guilty persons running around: first the original perpetrator, secondly yourself for imprisoning an innocent person). If you want to reduce the latter, you're going to let the guilty go free (and thus have one guilty person running around).
Therefore, the responsibility which lies on police is twofold: First, it is to arrest the guilty, thus not making the former error; secondly, it is to let the innocent go free, thus not making the latter error. It is then the job of the courts to determine whether he was correct in doing so: A rational society won't just want one thing or the other, it would want both: the guilty being arrested and the innocent going free.
Where you complain about is that western society is so "ass-backwards" you complain about holding police responsible for acting incorrectly, based on the incorrect assumption that everyone apprehended by the police is necessary guilty. But in reality, a cop can in one case apprehend a perpetrator which is guilty, in which case the perpetrator should be punished and not the cop, or in another case the cop can arrest someone innocent, in which case the cop should be punished, not the innocent person. Indeed, there also is the point that if police uses excessive violence against the "guilty" (like jaywalking doesn't really justify being exe- eh... electrocuted - you really should know that if someone is given power, he is going to use it), it can be necessary to punish the police as well as the perpetrator.
Indeed, I'd maintain that you are right in claiming western society has it "ass-backwards" - but you are "ass-backwards" in claiming the reason for it, because it's "ass-backwards" for the same reason totalitarian states are: They, exactly as you wish, hold one guilty until innocence is proven.
Also, regarding to the question of the grandparent: you should take both manufacturer and police: the former for manifacturing a faulty system, the latter for allowing it into their force.
I'd say such preference follows a somewhat logistic curve:
If something is rare, less than about three percent of the populace, you'll see most people rejecting it because it is different (see the prejudice of redheads being in league with the devil etc.) while some like it (collecting something rare) or at least don't care about it (and see the actual personality behind such superficialities).
If it then happens to become reasonably common, like blondeness did some thousand years ago in northern Europe, the appeal of rareness shifts to other things (like asians or blacks), thus it doesn't grow that much anymore: there isn't any rejection by the mainstream anymore, but they aren't a collectors item anymore, either.
This actually is a pretty reasonable concept of keeping the gene pool as rich as possible, which evolved by the dying out of societies which consistently selected one trait no matter its commonness. This also is the reason why eugenic ideologies haven't the least to do with evolution but instead are very unhealthy for the gene pool: If Hitler Germany had won and succeeded in breeding a society of stereotypical blonde and brainless brutes, they'd died out because they had a too shallow a gene pool to adapt to changes in environment, like lacking the intellectual abilities to deal with some unwanted Germans in US exile developing the atomic bomb - oh, wait...
Slashdot Mirror
Your gas prices are already extremely low as it is. Here in Europe we pay two to three times as much - and that's if we have a good day. In the same way, we only use half to a third as much per capita as you do and still enjoy a higher median quality of life than you do. And still, any effort at being environment friendly is quite half-assed over here compared with what is technologically and economically feasible. The point being: even if one doesn't switch over to alternative energies, you can without any problems use at least 75% energy less - but you won't, unless you have to pay four times the price. So you don't really need "low cost fuel", you just need to get a better infrastructure: in many places in the US you can't even get to the store without a car because it's far away and there aren't any buses - which is because of misled infrastructure decisions, primarily those after the second world war and has nothing at all to do with the average US population density being lower than the population density in Europe (which is an argument slashdot loves very much, especially when concerning broadband - completely ignoring that many rural areas of Europe [not even speaking of Japan or South Korea] have better broad band than NY or LA).
Green technologies may not be ready yet, but if you don't stop using so much, it won't be ready before the fuel runs out - and you won't be able to restart the industry because there aren't any ressources anymore for a second industrial revolution. However, pollution is not a fee for lower gas prices, but it is a symptom of a general unwillingness of people in general and the US specificially to accept change, ignoring long-term payouts because of a short-term investment, even knowing that their standard of living will drop to zero if they continue this way and using more fuel efficient technologies can only mean an improvement - after all, you are able to do more things with the same amount of fuel. Put differently: You can get more production using less energy and creating less production. And this already ignores the industry needed to produce the environment-friendly technology needed, because that would sound too much like a broken window fallacy (even though the long term payout would, in contrast to the fallacy, be positive), because you have to buy it from Europe, anyway, because the US chose to severely to lag behind the rest of the world in developing alternative energies or more efficient mechanisms.
Returning to the issue at hand: Any waste can be recycled and used for further profit. Just consider the aluminium industry: You need about twenty times as much energy to refine aluminium from raw ores than you need to recycle it. Therefore, if you are in the aluminium industry, recycling it means you have a big competive advantage meaning bigger profits. This is true pretty much anywhere where "waste" is created. But only nearly anywhere, not everywhere: Sometimes, at least with current technology, you can't recycle it. Of course, filtering the water and air and disposing of "hazardous materials" in a proper way is significantly cheaper than cleaning a lake (and should be affordable by the profits of the oil industry in any case). But companies (or people, for that matter) don't do that: because the former would need to be paid by the company, while the latter is paid for by taxes. Still, letting them do that is pretty much equivalent to saying that nuclear waste shouldn't be deposed of properly but instead be randomly dumped around the country without any shielding, warning signs or anything (and, in the same way as the waste refining oil creates, nuclear "waste" could still be used but isn't because it isn't wanted).
In the same way, the human contribution of greenhouse gasses is neglible compared to the amount created by plants, volcanos and, above all, the sun.
It's just that the environment is in an equilibrium: If we hadn't the sun, it would be as cold on earth as it is on Mars, and the plants take the CO2 they produced back in (except when they are burned down). In the same way, the ammonia from fish poop is in an equilibrium with the rest of the ecosystem (most importantly, bacteriae and algae).
However, those equilibria tend to be very instable ones compared to extreme heat (Venus) or extreme cold (Mars): if some of the factors are changed just a tiny bit it might cause a chain reaction sending it from that equilibrium away to another, less desirable one. That amount of ammonia might just be enough to kick the system out of balance, causing the lake to die. To see just how easily that happens, try and set up an aquarium without following the proper guidelines. Your fish won't stay below the water line for long.
All "waste" actually can be considered a valuable resource (for example, nuclear "waste" isn't, but could be used in appropriate reactors to produce several times more energy than it did until the point where we currently depose of it). Its just that in the very, very short term it is easier and maybe even cheaper to dump it somewhere and poison the environment instead of using it and make more profit.
Another example: In Europe (I don't know how it is in the US) farmers get paid for not producing, where one might think that for the same price one could eliminate hunger in the world.
So it all really is not something of "it's to idealistic to work" or even just "but I'd make less money that way" but "I don't want it to work on ideological grounds".
First you say that Second Life fails because people don't want to buy fake money with real money and then you point to WoW for which people buy fake money with real money on eBay. Can you say cognitive dissonance?
I don't need to because I didn't claim so. I just pointed out that you have not explained how they are supposed to make it worse because all you did was lamenting the current state of affairs which they didn't cause.
What else would you do? Not giving them money or means of living in some other way when they can't afford living just makes sure that those kids either die or turn to crime.
You didn't read what I wrote. I didn't say that such people do not exist. Indeed, I acknowledged that this is the case. I just pointed out that you, the media and the politicians overstate that problem and do nothing to solve it but instead go after the legitimate using the cases of misuse as justification.
I didn't say it is, but it is the perspective younger people have, according to what you wrote, on the elder; the point being that everyone accuses the other of wasting the money even if it is not the case because of prejudice and propaganda planted by interest groups to make you go against each other so they can do what they want without ever becoming a target.
If they can hold the pen and make their mark, they're eligible to vote. Even if their voting behaviour were random or stupid, I really don't see how it would get better with age. After all, what use is experience if you don't learn for it - but nobody ever does.
One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Just look at the US where in many places you can only drink after becoming 21, even though you usually can vote earlier. To claim that gaining one right requires losing another does only make sense if you already believe that the current system is perfectly just. I could write my opinion regarding this, too, but it is not only to far from the topic but you will also again not understand it because it also would be too far from your imaginary black-and-white world.
Nah, they're not abandoning the software business. They're just not satisfied with having one monopoly but want to be the one monopoly for everything. So they are just using their software monopoly as leverage for trying to kill Sony with the X-Box, Apple with the Zune and now those ads being yet another attempt at killing Google (because the chairs seem to have not worked). Of course, the very same got them a lawsuit when they tried to kill Netscape with IE (because chairs weren't yet invented back then).
The best thing, of course, is that they don't even need a quality product, because they're Microsoft: Having been in the right place at the right time to deplace IBM, nobody is getting fired for buying from Microsoft. Just put in a good dose of FUD, and nobody will even want anything else, provided they even know that there is anything different.
So, I gather that was a rhetorical question?
how letting younger people vote would make it any worse than it already is; or how they would have any more weight than any other societal group
And don't even get me started on how completely worthless voting is because we only vote on "representatives" who don't instead of the real issues: I do understand it, but what good does that to me if it is not me who votes on it but someone who is paid to vote in a specific way? And even if they aren't paid tend to be informed about as well as your average person: If people are too stupid to make correct decision, what could make anyone think that they could possibly vote for good representatives?
As for your other grievances: I think a big part of the problem is simply the lack of education and perspective we provide your young. In fact, your education should start with yourself, realizing that all that talk about people having an easy life off of your money is absolutely nothing but propaganda, designed to divide the people (between "old" and "young", "haves" and "have nots", always saying that the other are unfairly better off) and make them toe the party line. Don't get me wrong, there surely are some people who intentionally misuse social support. But I really have yet to see any proposal which really curbs the misuse instead of simply making it harder for those who really have a problem. Indeed, one might compare it to copy protection: It makes legetimate use difficult while doing nothing to make illegal use harder after someone has taken the first hurdle.
As an aside: I don't really see why we still have to put up with this insane idea that people have to "deserve" to live. Applied to your example: You seem to prefer to let the children die because their parent can't afford them. I think that you work hard and "they don't" should really solved in another way than hoping for them to die or cruelly providing for them too little to live, too much to die. Indeed, your pension being so small doesn't come from teenagers voting for immediate pleasure but from the idea that old people should hurry up with dying and not leech money off of society. After all, if you worked all your life but haven't made millions to retire on, you can't have worked all that hard, can you?
Yeah. What Linus actually is saying here is that he doesn't want the law to change, but rather that it stays as it is, because he seems to believe that, even tough he doesn't murder people, he shouldn't take from others the "freedom" to murder people. Or rather, he doesn't want people to tell others that they may not murder in their house and they should go elsewhere - after all, the GPL is just a license, not the law. Of course, if he does dislike the GPL so much, one has to ask why he didn't simply use BSD.
Anyway, if laws were not to enforce what is ethically correct, what for would they be? Either they would be doing nothing, or they would be enforcing what is ethically wrong. Of course, one can have differing conceptions as to what is right and what is wrong, but those in any case serve as the basis to what is law, which is not so much about enforcement but rather codifying it to have a standard for society instead of letting have everyone his own, for otherwise people would do things, well, commonly held as being bad. Thus, one rather should address the ethical preconceptions at the foundation than just the fact that laws are individual ethics made into those of the whole society.
Removing the "or later" creates more problems than it solves because you can't possibly move to another license unless you first create a procedure for doing so (or do the senseless work of rewriting the code). A possible method, of course, would be assigning the copyright - but if you don't trust the FSF to not change the license in a bad way, you won't trust it to make good use of your copyright. However, if you don't trust a benevolent organization like the FSF, how will you trust anyone else to do it right? There is quite a difference between informed caution and being paranoid, you know.
While one might need to ask a lawyer, I think it would be held that changing to a license completely different in spirit would not be in the intent of the licensor and thus be held invalid. If not, you can still try something like "...or later, provided the spirit of the license is preserved.".
The term "viral" was coined to claim that the GPL would "infect" everything else, i.e. it is claimed that if you had a GPL application, the whole userland and kernel would need to be GPL, too. Thus no, everyone who has read the GPL denies that it is viral, because it doesn't do such thing. It only does make sure that if one makes his software free, it stays free, not affecting any seperate software. Of course, some commercial interests who are not willing to adapt have problems with that, so they resort to FUD.
As a side note, it is to be pointed out that DRM is, indeed, viral, if it forces any software and data, including GPL'd and CC'd, under its "protection".
Wow, you're such a nice person. How can you stay that nice knowing that the majority of slasdot disagrees with you because it holds change necessary or impossible? I am so unworthy of answering you, because I'm using strawmen and stuff, while you are so incredibly unbiased and objective, but still, here I go:
... You know, screw that. You don't give a shit about what I'm saying, anyway. You're not interested in learning anything, you just want to wallow in your self pity because slashdot doesn't agree with you in every point, lumping everyone into one (can you say straw man?)...
1. "Value" is not something an object or concept has but what is attributed to it by determining how much people are willing to pay for it. However, with the advent of the Internet, information can be reproduced near cost-free and arbitrarily often, such that it becomes a commodity and thus its value approaches its marginal cost.
2. This is, however, not wanted by those "producing" the "goods" because this means that they don't make as much profit. Therefore, they need to create scarcity such that they can charge higher prices. For information, the tool of choice is, of course, DRM.
3. Going off of an tangent: If one is at that point where one needs to create artificial scarcity not only at one point but everywhere (agricultural subventions in the western world, for example), it is obvious that "Hippie Culture" wouldn't work because the means don't exist but because the people don't want it.
4. DRM doesn't not only mean a problem for the consumer but also for every company: If Microsoft can arbitrarily revoke their licenses, every company is de facto under control of Microsoft. If I lead a company, I would not want that. I want to trade on my terms, not having them forced upon me by the other party.
5.
I guess I wanted to go anywhere with that, but I don't remember where... anyway:
As your father preferred Windows one can find people who never used a computer before and yet prefer Linux. It may not warrant claiming that Linux is easier, but in the same way it doesn't warrant claiming that Windows is easier. Also, in my experience RedHat is rather... well, let's better not go there.
My point is: "who's easier" isn't really that relevant, either. Though it has to be said that I haven't that much experience with people completely new to computers, because they either don't want to use computers at all, no matter which OS, or they already used Windows and therefore are completely unwilling to even try something else. Even if they try Linux, they quit it at the first problem they encounter - while having no problem at all with searching the whole internet for some driver for Windows.
While everyone may prefer one system over the other and while every system is far from perfect, I don't believe that it is about which system is easier but simply about which system is sold: For every single person who objectively prefers Windows there are thousands who don't even know of any alternative and just buy what is offered.
I don't really have a problem with people chosing the one or the other system. However, there are two things which really anger me, not only with respect to operating systems, but being an integral trait of society: Firstly, the complete unwillingness to learn anything. Secondly, that it is made intentionally difficult to use something else than what "everyone" uses.
When people are taught about Windows and not computers, it's just like if one wasn't taught in school about religions in general and the positives and negatives of each, but only a single one: one cannot choose, not knowing that others are available - and those who use others being put on no-fly- or dont-sell-to-lists. When they hear of the rituals of the other religion, they say that they won't convert to it, because they think those rituals are too restricting - but doing their own ones and making up stories about how the others are eating children and stuff.
Anyway, I'd better stop ranting now...
Though one has to wonder: would telepathy be more like a GUI or more like a CLI?
Well, I'm not a fanboy of any kind, either. I just use the best tool for the job. It's not my fault that it always happens to be Linux - except for games, but there are better ways for wasting time. Lurking on /., for example.
Linux can easily be used without the shell, enabling everything you can do with Windows and more. Though I personally prefer using the shell, which is why using Windows is exceedingly painful to me because there are many things you can't do with Windows.
Still, your post just proves my point.
The child is willing to learn something new, the old people not. Most people, including you and I, were raised on Windows, thus it seems intuitive to us when it is not. But this is learned behavior:
If one's first language is English, one's going to prefer speaking English instead of learning French. Respectively, if one's first language is French, one's going to prefer speaking French instead of learning English. But because English is the lingua franca, the English speaker feels justified in his unwillingness to learn new things. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of French as a language and everything with the prevalence of English.
This, of couse, isn't just valid for Linux vs Windows, but also for GUI vs CLI. Indeed, using a GUI is a much more primitive method of interaction: Little babies point and moan. Grown ups speak. Also consider that the "holy grail" of interfaces, voice recognition, is a command line interface.
If you really think that names mean anything, I've got a bridge to sell.
If you believe that the Soviet Union was socialistic because it said so, you surely must believe that it was democratic because it said so, no? Of course you don't: After all, your government stands to gain from emphasizing the difference between your capitalism and their "socialism", thus creating a powerful image of an enemy, but didn't had any interest in claiming that you both are democratic, for otherwise you might realize that both the USA and the Soviet Union (and every other country, for that matter) is oligarchic, not democratic, and that it doesn't make any difference if you have one party or two. Indeed, what the Soviet Union called socialism was simply capitalism. That the Soviet Union "lost" the cold war was solely a consequence of it being more totalitarian than the United States.
What change, exactly, did capitalism mean compared to feudalism? In the end, it still is structured according the principle that some people are more free than others, entitled to infringe other's freedom. As you said, capitalism didn't really create the super rich. Indeed, it actually mostly just shifted the rankings of the rich and the unscrupulous. Didn't you ask yourself why that is? It is because capitalism is simply the adaption of feudalism into an industrialized society, like we are now seeing the adaption of it into an information society in form of "intellectual property". Above all, you should realize that the free market is indeed the very antithesis of capitalism or the so-called "socialism" of the Soviet Union or even China: for one is only truly free if nobody else will infringe on this freedom. But capitalism, as any feudalistic society, is founded on the principle that some people, be it by heritage or money, are entitled on infringing on others freedom.
Then why do you take all the hot coals out of it, distributing it so a few people can warm on their ceasing fire instead of keeping it burning and warm everyone?
Your second point is correct: The lack of support Linux experiences leads to people staying with Windows: after all, if they can only get Windows on hardware crippled so it only works with Windows, they're staying with it. Your first point, however, is utterly wrong: It is not Linux which is not ready, it is the people who are not ready for Linux - and be it because the people don't want to use Linux because it comes not preinstalled because the people don't buy Linux because... you get the idea. Therefore, whether Linux succeeds or not does depend not in the least in the qualities of Linux itself, but rather in the perception of being the king of the hill. After all, this is how Windows succeeded: not by delivering quality, but by marketing.
Of course, for Windows it also was significant that Microsoft got a whole new market delivered on a silver platter by IBM. However, the same has already happened for Linux: where Microsoft has the desktops, Linux has embedded devices and servers. However, a market cannot be new twice: There can never be a sudden success of Linux on the desktop, but every single computer has to be fought for, and Microsoft will use all their FUD they can muster to stop Linux.
Thus, don't blame Linux for being perceived as not being easy to use: Were Linux installed by someone else (like the OEMs do for Windows) and the first thing you were taught at the computer (instead of Windows), people would ask why one would want to switch to Windows.
Also, everyone please stop with those predictions about how they're going to be moderated. It makes you look dumb. (And I'll not be read at all, much less moderated.)
Is it really a particular copy if it is done in bulk? It somehow appears to me that it wouldn't apply here. But of course, IANAL, but you obviously are one as you nowhere wrote that you aren't one, so I assume it applies. Therefore:
If 1., it would be completely legal for me to buy mass-produced illegal copies from somewhere in Asia and then sell it. The guy I bought from might get problems, but not me, because I'm only selling it.
If 2., it would be perfectly legal if I were to sell vouchers you could give to some warez-site and get copies of Windows. If he'd get caught, I'd go free because, after all, I didn't do the distributing.
So what you are saying is that it's not freedom unless you may infringe on the freedom of others? That we shouldn't ban murder, slavery and similar things because they'd be diminishing your freedom to harm others? That some people are more deserving of freedom than others? That there shouldn't be any change because it might harm those who are in power now and are deserving of it by virtue of having this power?
The GPL is no EULA.
Your analogy is crap, anyway: It's more like you'd sell Microsoft Office but let a subsidiary handle the actual delivery chain: Microsoft surely would sue you if you hadn't a contract for this act of distribution, even if you just pocket the money and don't do the actual act of distribution.
As another poster noted, you need to subtract the tax. If you then notice that, due to unsustainable spending (many a country had to learn that war isn't exactly the best way to prop up an economy in the long term) the dollar is growing progressively weaker with respect to other countries, it's actually cheaper.
How eloquently you trash the GPL when you obviously never read it. "RMS" and we who understand what he wants have absolutely no problems with people making money of software. What we have a problem with is getting software and then being at the mercy of its creator: If we get software, we want to be able to improve it, should the need arise; otherwise, if the company who distributed the non-free software goes under or just doesn't want to deal with us, we won't get the bugs fixed or new features introduced.
Of course, a company who offers no value when redistributing GPL'd software won't make money: They have to migrate from a sense of entitlement ("intellectual property") to facing the fact that they have to offer some additional value instead of intangible, nearly cost-free reproducible data streams. If they manage that and make money of it, all the better. If they don't, good riddance. But that's their problem, it shouldn't be ours.
Indeed, both as a private person and in any position in a commercial or governmental entity, I'd choose GPL3'd software (or, at the very least, demand contractually that the code is handed over to me so I can fix it and the devices won't stop me from doing that - which pretty much amounts to the same), because I don't want to be dependent on some (other) company when there's no need to be.
Or would you like it if Gates (or Jobs or whoever) decides to take over the world and you can't stop him because he revoked the key for the DRM of the devices of your police, military and any other agency which could stop him? Or how about having a bug in medical software but being unable to fix it because of not having the code and, even if you had the code, updating the software being impossible because of the DRM, thus the hospital equipment randomly killing people by switching off life support or overdosing the IV?
Also, you can still release your own code under any license you like, unless you used GPL'd code in the first case. And you also should think of how much more hassle it is with non-free software where one needs first to ask and pay billions for some "intellectual property" before one can get a bug fixed.
Wasn't there something in the bible like "your sins shall be visited onto your offspring unto the seventh generation"? I'd say that's definite proof that it's gods punishment for being... uh... alive or something?
I've never seen an ascii art diagram in the code. And why would you want to do it right of it instead above it or below, anyway? You even could put it before the code.
So you would prefer the assumption "guilty until proven innocent"?
There always are two kinds of error you can make (I probably got the order wrong?): Either you can let him go although he is guilty or you can arrest him although he is innocent. If you want to reduce the former, you're going to arrest the innocent (and thus have two guilty persons running around: first the original perpetrator, secondly yourself for imprisoning an innocent person). If you want to reduce the latter, you're going to let the guilty go free (and thus have one guilty person running around).
Therefore, the responsibility which lies on police is twofold: First, it is to arrest the guilty, thus not making the former error; secondly, it is to let the innocent go free, thus not making the latter error. It is then the job of the courts to determine whether he was correct in doing so: A rational society won't just want one thing or the other, it would want both: the guilty being arrested and the innocent going free.
Where you complain about is that western society is so "ass-backwards" you complain about holding police responsible for acting incorrectly, based on the incorrect assumption that everyone apprehended by the police is necessary guilty. But in reality, a cop can in one case apprehend a perpetrator which is guilty, in which case the perpetrator should be punished and not the cop, or in another case the cop can arrest someone innocent, in which case the cop should be punished, not the innocent person. Indeed, there also is the point that if police uses excessive violence against the "guilty" (like jaywalking doesn't really justify being exe- eh... electrocuted - you really should know that if someone is given power, he is going to use it), it can be necessary to punish the police as well as the perpetrator.
Indeed, I'd maintain that you are right in claiming western society has it "ass-backwards" - but you are "ass-backwards" in claiming the reason for it, because it's "ass-backwards" for the same reason totalitarian states are: They, exactly as you wish, hold one guilty until innocence is proven.
Also, regarding to the question of the grandparent: you should take both manufacturer and police: the former for manifacturing a faulty system, the latter for allowing it into their force.
I'd say such preference follows a somewhat logistic curve:
If something is rare, less than about three percent of the populace, you'll see most people rejecting it because it is different (see the prejudice of redheads being in league with the devil etc.) while some like it (collecting something rare) or at least don't care about it (and see the actual personality behind such superficialities).
If it then happens to become reasonably common, like blondeness did some thousand years ago in northern Europe, the appeal of rareness shifts to other things (like asians or blacks), thus it doesn't grow that much anymore: there isn't any rejection by the mainstream anymore, but they aren't a collectors item anymore, either.
This actually is a pretty reasonable concept of keeping the gene pool as rich as possible, which evolved by the dying out of societies which consistently selected one trait no matter its commonness. This also is the reason why eugenic ideologies haven't the least to do with evolution but instead are very unhealthy for the gene pool: If Hitler Germany had won and succeeded in breeding a society of stereotypical blonde and brainless brutes, they'd died out because they had a too shallow a gene pool to adapt to changes in environment, like lacking the intellectual abilities to deal with some unwanted Germans in US exile developing the atomic bomb - oh, wait...