Funny one that. Way back in 1989 or 1990, I was a student. I saw people in the Computer Science department wearing badges showing the Apple logo surrounded by the words "Keep your lawyers away from my computers". The big corporation everyone treated as the obviously incorrigably evil bastards was IBM. We also knew DOS was a steaming pile, but didn't care. We had UNIX, the way and the truth, with Sequent and Sun boxes falling out of our ears. This was at Edinburgh, Scotland. There was no Internet, only JANET, except for the gateway down at Imperial College in London, England. Wanted to talk to a computer? You needed to 14 digit number and type it into a PAD. Cue Yorkshireman sketch, "You were lucky! We... Kids today don'y know they're born". But I digress...
The point is, we failed to realise what Microsoft would grow into. Sun has grasped a significant amount of the new generation of students with Java, since its a nice and simple enough language for people to be taught how to program. I now make my living writing in Java, its nice and scales well enough for real world programs. I'd read the beta specification, the one with the bugs, in October 1993, just as I was passing from University into wage slavery. Having gained this, Sun has the potential to turn into an organisation as obviously incorrigbly evil as IBM was, and Miciosoft is now.
I appreciate the work of the Blackdown team, since I use Debian GNU/Linux at work, and would probably have to suffer Windows hell to carry on writing code in a language I mostly enjoy. As has been noted on Slashdot in the recent few days, its has its drawbacks. Stupid primitive types instead of programmer defined value types, and lacking parametric polymorphism being a couple of them. I'm less fussed about multiple inheritance, and think that the interface mechanism is a good alternative. It would be an even better alternative if not all of the methods had to be abstract. Of course, such non-abstract methods would only get to use other methods, including the ones left abstract, in the interfaces they extend.
I'm also totally into Free Software, not Open Source, standing up there with RMS on ths one. The Blackdown team agreed to give up their freedom when they agreed to Sun's condition to keep the Java source closed. They should have known what they were doing when they made that agreement. I can't bring myself to feel sorry for them. If they were to take their freedom back, and release the Java source without the consent of Sun, I would support them, and feel sorry for them when Sun's lawyers went for their pound of flesh.
This is just plain silly, and like much in the way of license restrictions, is impossible enforce, and undesirable if it could be enforced.
And what's the beef anyway? I can understand pr0n web sites trying this on, they have to, or they'd get stomped by our detestable and self appointed moral guardians. But Linux? It's only an operating system, it can't deprave, corrupt, or otherwise harm the young and impressionable.
Ahhh, nostalgia, my very earliest memory is seeing a computer maze program when I was about four or five, in 1976. It was so early on in my psychological development I didn't understand the the perspective drawing, even if I could understand the view of the maze from above. By eight I was coding, and have been doing so ever since (hmmmm, the Jesuits didn't get me at that important age, but computers did, a geek for life I guess). It's just plain shocking to think that such an upbringing could be considered something to deny the current generation of young coders.
So the question is, what exactly is going on in the fevered imaginations of Corel's lawyers? Any ideas anyone?
You've gotta be fscking kidding! Amercia bombs the shit out of anybody it wants, on the most spurious of grounds. Whilst I feel little sympathy for the Taliban, since enforcing religous practices on pain of death is just plain wrong in my book, I do feel sympathy for the Sudanese deprived of their major source of medicine. And no. There has been no evidence offered, let alone anything at all credible, that these groups had anything to do with those US embassy bombings.
On-topic though, anonymity is important. Threatening the ability to remain anonymous when you protest about the unethical actions of authoritarian power, be it government or private industry, is an implicit threat to track us down and punish us for doing so.
You might think you're not doing anything wrong, but I'm sure those Sudanese medical factory workers felt so too. And before you bring up the same for those killed in the US embassies, they were there by choice, enforcing genocidal American foreign policy. Fsck them.
The point though, is that censorship can be enforced by economic means. The constitutional ammendment intended to protect free speech isn't worth shit, because governments are able to break their own laws as often as they like. It's important to remember that the constitution isn't really intended to protect citizens, it's intended to protect the likes of Ollie North, and support government actions, illegal or not. Private industry will always bow to government pressure because, well, the people who work there need to eat. Resisting an organisation able to say "As we see it, you've got two options: submit to our authority, or starve" is difficult.
We need to make their unethical actions just as diffcult. The only way to do this is by a collective international response. Sites that are censored should be mirrored in many countires. Governments can collude with each other, but that takes considerably more effort than leaning on a single company, and attracts attention to their unethical actions. They don't want that attention, we need to make it work for us.
Yeah, I'm queer, a freak and a geek. I wasn't at all happy being called a geek for quite a long time, and I'm still not happy being called a "nerd" at all, let alone a "spod", which might be a word particular to Great Britain, having only negative connotations. I'm getting happier with "geek", but only if other geeks use it. On the other hand, I'm happy for non-queers to call me queer, so I expect it's just a matter of time before we get to reclaim it fully... On the whole though, I'm happiest with "freak". It's a good term, that has lost it's specificity, and just means not-of-mainstream-culture nowadays. In the recent past though, it was used almost entirely as a synonym for "hippy", especpially when you think of Hunter S. Thompson running for sheriff, on a "freak power" ticket. Hmmm, I can just see rallies; "Throw your fist in the air, let me hear you shout 'geek power'":-) On a final note, not wanting to fan the flames, and definately not wanting to spawn a sub-thread that rehashes the details of that debate, but does it strike other readers that the effort to reclaim "geek" has gotten a whole lot mightier since the Colorado incident? I've got a feeling this is true, even amongst my fellow geeks who live in Great Britain.
I've always thought that the Soviet/Russian/Kazahkstani space program was much more serious than the US media driven events. They spent the last ten years maintaining a continuous human presence in space. Yes, I know Mir is not functioning any more, and yeah, it got pretty shaky up there towards the end, but what they achieved there remains the single most important and impressive aspect of any space program that there's been so far.
The Chinese should be congratulated n what they've achieved just recently, and hopefully they'll rise to the challenges of having people live in space too.
I've been moving from lynx to w3m myself recently. For sure, it isn't for everyone, but since I spend my time on the reading, it suits me fine. It's small, fast, reliable, and has never once crashed on me.
It's great for checking slashdot every 15 minutes, especially if you use the "light" and "no icons" options.
Is it just me, or has ESR really lost it? I can't think of anything worthwhile to come from the fsckwit since that whole "you can have my job" fiasco.
However, he's right to denounce China. Supporting a totalitarian regime is wrong. Not speaking out against things that are wrong gives them tacit support. This is not to say I support his politics. I think his brand of Liberatarianism is just as wrong as a totalitarian regime, whether it's Communist, Fascist, or the supposedly democratic choice we have in the west of exchanging one tyrant for another every few years.
Linux has been built democratically. Not democracy in the sense of choosing one out of a number of tyrants. I mean democracy in the sense of the community having an effective voice in how things are to be done, with the knowledge that some people might be better than us as that work, and letting them do it instead.
Linux has been a fine demonstration of the power that can be unleashed in everyday people, organising autonomously, working as and when they want, towards a common goal. These principles can be compared to those that underpin socialism, and we have a responsibility to answer questions that start with that comparison. My answer? Yes. The principles are the same. Linux as an entity is not socialist, and the people that work on Linux may not consider themselves socialist, but the very working methods they use are socialist.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny one that. Way back in 1989 or 1990, I was a student. I saw people in the Computer Science department wearing badges showing the Apple logo surrounded by the words "Keep your lawyers away from my computers". The big corporation everyone treated as the obviously incorrigably evil bastards was IBM. We also knew DOS was a steaming pile, but didn't care. We had UNIX, the way and the truth, with Sequent and Sun boxes falling out of our ears. This was at Edinburgh, Scotland. There was no Internet, only JANET, except for the gateway down at Imperial College in London, England. Wanted to talk to a computer? You needed to 14 digit number and type it into a PAD. Cue Yorkshireman sketch, "You were lucky! We... Kids today don'y know they're born". But I digress...
The point is, we failed to realise what Microsoft would grow into. Sun has grasped a significant amount of the new generation of students with Java, since its a nice and simple enough language for people to be taught how to program. I now make my living writing in Java, its nice and scales well enough for real world programs. I'd read the beta specification, the one with the bugs, in October 1993, just as I was passing from University into wage slavery. Having gained this, Sun has the potential to turn into an organisation as obviously incorrigbly evil as IBM was, and Miciosoft is now.
I appreciate the work of the Blackdown team, since I use Debian GNU/Linux at work, and would probably have to suffer Windows hell to carry on writing code in a language I mostly enjoy. As has been noted on Slashdot in the recent few days, its has its drawbacks. Stupid primitive types instead of programmer defined value types, and lacking parametric polymorphism being a couple of them. I'm less fussed about multiple inheritance, and think that the interface mechanism is a good alternative. It would be an even better alternative if not all of the methods had to be abstract. Of course, such non-abstract methods would only get to use other methods, including the ones left abstract, in the interfaces they extend.
I'm also totally into Free Software, not Open Source, standing up there with RMS on ths one. The Blackdown team agreed to give up their freedom when they agreed to Sun's condition to keep the Java source closed. They should have known what they were doing when they made that agreement. I can't bring myself to feel sorry for them. If they were to take their freedom back, and release the Java source without the consent of Sun, I would support them, and feel sorry for them when Sun's lawyers went for their pound of flesh.
This is just plain silly, and like much in the way of license restrictions, is impossible enforce, and undesirable if it could be enforced.
And what's the beef anyway? I can understand pr0n web sites trying this on, they have to, or they'd get stomped by our detestable and self appointed moral guardians. But Linux? It's only an operating system, it can't deprave, corrupt, or otherwise harm the young and impressionable.
Ahhh, nostalgia, my very earliest memory is seeing a computer maze program when I was about four or five, in 1976. It was so early on in my psychological development I didn't understand the the perspective drawing, even if I could understand the view of the maze from above. By eight I was coding, and have been doing so ever since (hmmmm, the Jesuits didn't get me at that important age, but computers did, a geek for life I guess). It's just plain shocking to think that such an upbringing could be considered something to deny the current generation of young coders.
So the question is, what exactly is going on in the fevered imaginations of Corel's lawyers? Any ideas anyone?
America is a good neighbour to other countries?
You've gotta be fscking kidding! Amercia bombs the shit out of anybody it wants, on the most spurious of grounds. Whilst I feel little sympathy for the Taliban, since enforcing religous practices on pain of death is just plain wrong in my book, I do feel sympathy for the Sudanese deprived of their major source of medicine. And no. There has been no evidence offered, let alone anything at all credible, that these groups had anything to do with those US embassy bombings.
On-topic though, anonymity is important. Threatening the ability to remain anonymous when you protest about the unethical actions of authoritarian power, be it government or private industry, is an implicit threat to track us down and punish us for doing so.
You might think you're not doing anything wrong, but I'm sure those Sudanese medical factory workers felt so too. And before you bring up the same for those killed in the US embassies, they were there by choice, enforcing genocidal American foreign policy. Fsck them.
The point though, is that censorship can be enforced by economic means. The constitutional ammendment intended to protect free speech isn't worth shit, because governments are able to break their own laws as often as they like. It's important to remember that the constitution isn't really intended to protect citizens, it's intended to protect the likes of Ollie North, and support government actions, illegal or not. Private industry will always bow to government pressure because, well, the people who work there need to eat. Resisting an organisation able to say "As we see it, you've got two options: submit to our authority, or starve" is difficult.
We need to make their unethical actions just as diffcult. The only way to do this is by a collective international response. Sites that are censored should be mirrored in many countires. Governments can collude with each other, but that takes considerably more effort than leaning on a single company, and attracts attention to their unethical actions. They don't want that attention, we need to make it work for us.
Yeah, I'm queer, a freak and a geek. I wasn't at all happy being called a geek for quite a long time, and I'm still not happy being called a "nerd" at all, let alone a "spod", which might be a word particular to Great Britain, having only negative connotations. I'm getting happier with "geek", but only if other geeks use it. On the other hand, I'm happy for non-queers to call me queer, so I expect it's just a matter of time before we get to reclaim it fully... On the whole though, I'm happiest with "freak". It's a good term, that has lost it's specificity, and just means not-of-mainstream-culture nowadays. In the recent past though, it was used almost entirely as a synonym for "hippy", especpially when you think of Hunter S. Thompson running for sheriff, on a "freak power" ticket. Hmmm, I can just see rallies; "Throw your fist in the air, let me hear you shout 'geek power'" :-) On a final note, not wanting to fan the flames, and definately not wanting to spawn a sub-thread that rehashes the details of that debate, but does it strike other readers that the effort to reclaim "geek" has gotten a whole lot mightier since the Colorado incident? I've got a feeling this is true, even amongst my fellow geeks who live in Great Britain.
I've always thought that the Soviet/Russian/Kazahkstani space program was much more serious than the US media driven events. They spent the last ten years maintaining a continuous human presence in space. Yes, I know Mir is not functioning any more, and yeah, it got pretty shaky up there towards the end, but what they achieved there remains the single most important and impressive aspect of any space program that there's been so far.
The Chinese should be congratulated n what they've achieved just recently, and hopefully they'll rise to the challenges of having people live in space too.
I've been moving from lynx to w3m myself recently. For sure, it isn't for everyone, but since I spend my time on the reading, it suits me fine. It's small, fast, reliable, and has never once crashed on me.
It's great for checking slashdot every 15 minutes, especially if you use the "light" and "no icons" options.
URL: http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/
Is it just me, or has ESR really lost it? I can't think of anything worthwhile to come from the fsckwit since that whole "you can have my job" fiasco.
However, he's right to denounce China. Supporting a totalitarian regime is wrong. Not speaking out against things that are wrong gives them tacit support. This is not to say I support his politics. I think his brand of Liberatarianism is just as wrong as a totalitarian regime, whether it's Communist, Fascist, or the supposedly democratic choice we have in the west of exchanging one tyrant for another every few years.
Linux has been built democratically. Not democracy in the sense of choosing one out of a number of tyrants. I mean democracy in the sense of the community having an effective voice in how things are to be done, with the knowledge that some people might be better than us as that work, and letting them do it instead.
Linux has been a fine demonstration of the power that can be unleashed in everyday people, organising autonomously, working as and when they want, towards a common goal. These principles can be compared to those that underpin socialism, and we have a responsibility to answer questions that start with that comparison. My answer? Yes. The principles are the same. Linux as an entity is not socialist, and the people that work on Linux may not consider themselves socialist, but the very working methods they use are socialist.