What is the point of having values if you dont try to teach them to anyone?
Seems to me that values are for living by, not forcing others to adhere to. Turn the tables. Suppose the fundies take over government, which isn't at all an unlikely scenario. Would you like your kids to be forced to learn all about creationism and how homosexuals are evil, and the only good sex is sex that leads to a child being born?
It goes both ways you know. You give the government a power, and it gets to be used by the will of the majority, or at least by the will of the people who manage to get in power. If you really want the government to have the power to decide what value system your children are indoctrinated with, you deserve what happens.
IMHO, the solution to the problem is to not have schools that are directly publicly funded. That way parents can choose a school to send their kids to instead of having money ripped out of their pockets to pay to teach a value system to which they are violently opposed.
That would've also solved the 'separate but not equal' problem because the government could no longer preferentially allocate money to a school based on whether or not black people attended it. If black people were really determined, they could get together and use their education allocations to fund a really nice school that wass better than any the white people had.
Don't try to force people to change. Arrange the system so that they stupidity of their choice comes back to haunt them. They'll change soon enough.
I also think the Civil War was a bad way to solve the slavery problem. Black people in the south would've eventually revolted, or the south would've eventually collapsed economically because slavery is very economically inefficient. Either way we would've ended up with a much better situation than we had. People in the south would've wanted to change things instead of having that change forced upon them from the outside.
After the south broke away, the north would've stopped having any justification for returning slaves to the south anymore, and would've been free to treat posse's looking for escaped slaves as an invading foreign army and wiped them out as they deserved. Heck, the escaped slaves could be lent the weapons to do it themselves, since it would be clearly a case of self-defense.
They tend to reject rationalism and go in for magical thinking whenever it suits their purpose. It is a creed that is devoid of any value to humanity. It would be much better if they simply stated "All this change, we're worried that it isn't right, and we should carefully rethink our aims and values!". Because basically fundamentalism in America is all about fear of radical social change.
Of course, it doesn't help that many (on all sides) see public school as a ground for indoctrinating young people with their particular values. It was reprehensible when we hauled Native American children away from their families and forced them into western style schools. It's similarly reprehensible to force diversity training and acceptance of homosexuality and all kinds of other social things down the throats of young people who's parents don't agree.
I, personally, think all these are fine values. But I think it's wrong to force them on others. They will come to them in time, since I believe strongly that these values have much greater utility and survivability in the long term than the ones they replace.
As River puts it so eloquently in Serenity: "People don't like to be messed with."
I have come to the conclusion that in the presence of a healthy economy, there will always be more demand for programmers than there are people who can program.
Ahh, but it's not the programmers who make the decisions about what the users run on their machines (other than the program the programmer is writing of course).
Yes, the companies were basically engaging in vigilante justice. I can understand why. They wouldn't want to change laws to make RAMBUS' evil patent strategies unworkable because they themselves might want to use those strategies in the future. So, I guess in the final analysis I have little sympathy for them.
Isn't it interesting how most talk about patents, even by their proponents, are all about restricting competition and keeping a hold on markets, and not about getting new ideas out in the open where people can see them?
I think selling software on a subscription that causes the software to stop functioning if the company dies is unethical. In fact, I think selling any software on a subscription basis is unethical unless its Open Source. Even more so than selling software that isn't Open Source.
This is because of the lock-in issues associated with proprietary software. The cost of ceasing the subscription or having the company that provides it goes out of business is enormous. This means that any provider of proprietary software has a great incentive to charge as much as possible for their subscription, but not so much that it would be more expensive for the user to switch. This will eventually result in all businesses basically being owned by the proprietary software companies that provide their software.
Not a something I ever want to see come into existence.
I think a subscription pricing model fits software better, but I would never buy any piece of proprietary software under that model.
Something different does need to be done in this area. I hate having to have the CD in the drive as well, and I doubt it really helps much. And, as several people pointed out, I suspect it hurts sales by almost as much as it helps them.
I think that copyright law is broken in this regard too. It doesn't reflect the reality of what's easily possible. Games occupy a category that's more closely similar to music than software. Perhaps similar models could be adopted for funding games in a 'copies can't really be controlled' world. I would've pre-paid (in escrow) Firaxis $50 or more to produce them game if there was going to be a Linux version.
And any rule that required the news to be factual by some standard would be a violation of the first ammendment. I would be totally against any such law, much as I dislike Fox News.
I'm also sure the first website you pointed me at has something useful to say. But it is written as a propoganda piece with bright red letters for the stuff that the author thinks is more vitally important than the rest of the vitally important stuff. It is written in a breathlessly wounded style that drains away any credibility it might have.
I think there's probably some point underneath all that, but that website certainly isn't going to convince anybody who isn't already convinced.
Well, that's very interesting, but the idea that they would pull a tag off a cow and put it on a bull for some reason seems pretty odd to me. I can see animals running around without any tags, but not switching them around like that.
Only peripherally relevant to the topic. And you meander a bit and bring in several points that aren't strongly related to one another. But overall the most interesting and insightful set of ideas I've read on this whole thread. You deserve a +6.:-)
I don't understand why anybody would ever think these people shouldn't be allowed up. It seems to me that this smacks of elitism, and I don't think that attitude has much of a place anywhere.
Also, if someone thinks participating in scientific experiments is fun (and I would likely think that about some experiments) then more power to them. I don't understand the question here either. Does the fact that someone paid money to go on a trip somehow invalidate the data?
That doesn't seem a very fair assessment of the discussion. I don't think anybody was specifically against them reselling their code. They were specifically against them relicensing their code under something other than the GPL. I don't feel that's unreasonable at all.
Other than that, there was specific talk of a back-and-forth. Talk of making improvements to an LGPL version of their rendering library if they wanted to do that, and other things. I got the strong impression that the inkscape people would be perfectly happy if Xara used Inkscape code in a GPL version.
It seems to me that it would greatly behoove Xara to try to separate out the things that can't be GPLed and isolate them into runtime loadable modules that can be distributed separately. Then they might be able to get away without dual licensing stuff.
You don't hear about people using Lindows/Linspire because the kind of people who end up with it installed on their box probably don't even have a clue they're running Linux, and certainly aren't going to post in forums that you or I are likely to read, if they post in any forums online at all.
I don't see a lot of strong evidence that that's not the case. One danger in imposing caps and restrictions like this is that it provides a convenient collusion point for all carriers. The government mandates this is the worst we can do, and gosh-darn-it, that restriction is awfully chafin, we would like to do even worse than that, but this stupid regulation prevents us, so we're stuck here doing the worst we're allowed.
While doing things that reduce the barriers to switching to a competing carrier are good, and making sure that no one carrier can ever get a lock on a particular market would also be good, I don't see a lot of point in these other restrictions.
What I would like to see in a 'cell phone bill of rights' are things like "I have the right to not be called for commercial (profit or non-profit) purposes by entitities that I have not given explicit permission to call me. And if you do receive any such calls, you have the right to not be charged the airtime for them.".
Commercials are an ever-present creeping kudzu that will take over any vehicle of communication if given half-a-chance. Even google is starting to put commercials inline with search results and only marking them off with a colored box.
It should be possible to use the OS to put a fence around such programs so people can still run them. SELinux sort of has some of the infrastructure to do that. But moving to a full capability model may be a better choice.
Blaming people for doing stupid things all the time is a very poor approach to security. Computers are for people. People aren't for computers. Things should work with people in such a way that they have to remember as few rules as possible.
In fact, people might react a little better and follow the rules more if you explained to them that the computer was too stupid to distinguish between the program that ran off the net and a program installed by the sysadmin, and so it would let the program from the net do all the same things, so to help the computer out because it's so stupid, they should avoid running things from the net.
This system gives too much power to government officials over legal matters. In this case, it seems quite likely the public officials are being bribed. Either under-the-table, or overtly in the form of promises that this new aircraft will make the economy of their citizens better, and they should ignore some of the formalities in order to make that happen.
So, with this system its very easy for a judge to randomly squash people who have legitimate concerns and keep their concerns from ever seeing the light of day. Yes, yes, publicity interferes with investigations. Boo-hoo, cry me a river. Public officials fundamentally cannot be trusted, and this is too much power for them to have.
Yeah, and I suppose you think they're going to build a space elevator all at once without doing any sort of testing or preliminary building of anything at all first. Yep, perfect way to design something. Get 100 programmers all over the world to build you modules to spec, put them all together at the end (you don't let them have compilers of course, that would waste their time) and poof, working system!
You know, this is the reason I hate the Republican party. Republicans have been duped into thinking this is actually what the Republican party stands for, and nothing could be further from the truth. I'm not saying the Democratic party is any better mind you. I think our political system is completely broken and corrupt, possibly beyond all hope of repair.
Well, actually, given the way they treated the battle.net clone, this can only really be expected. I saw legions of people on here rabidly defending Blizzard because they made such fantastic stuff when that story first broke. It was the beginning of the end. That was the point at which Blizzard started seeing their customers as the enemy and the other.
OK, I agree your assertion could be interpreted that way. I think it could be interpreted my way too though.:-)
As for whether or not LSB would help Linux on the desktop, I'm not so sure. If it encompassed the GNOME libraries or something, maybe it could. But it would accomplish that mainly by helping binary installs work more predictably.
I'm not so sure that's a good thing to encourage. I don't want lots of binary only software for my system. About the only thing I'm really willing to live with being that way are games.
I'm worried that widespread and easily-installable binary only software will ultimately lead to a spyware problem that's as bad as the one Windows has.
You make a bald, unsupported assertion that Linux will succeed on the desktop if and only if LSB is adopted and rigorously adhered to. I fail to see how this is unequivocally the case.
However, that is plain stupid because the software is the hard part, the part that interests me, the part that I want to be paid for instead of something like support.
I would argue that the job of support, and showing people how to use your software is ultimately harder than creating it in the first place. But, it's in the best interests of organizations that sell support to pay you to write the software because otherwise they would have no software to support.
Slashdot Mirror
Also...
Seems to me that values are for living by, not forcing others to adhere to. Turn the tables. Suppose the fundies take over government, which isn't at all an unlikely scenario. Would you like your kids to be forced to learn all about creationism and how homosexuals are evil, and the only good sex is sex that leads to a child being born?
It goes both ways you know. You give the government a power, and it gets to be used by the will of the majority, or at least by the will of the people who manage to get in power. If you really want the government to have the power to decide what value system your children are indoctrinated with, you deserve what happens.
Yes, more or less.
IMHO, the solution to the problem is to not have schools that are directly publicly funded. That way parents can choose a school to send their kids to instead of having money ripped out of their pockets to pay to teach a value system to which they are violently opposed.
That would've also solved the 'separate but not equal' problem because the government could no longer preferentially allocate money to a school based on whether or not black people attended it. If black people were really determined, they could get together and use their education allocations to fund a really nice school that wass better than any the white people had.
Don't try to force people to change. Arrange the system so that they stupidity of their choice comes back to haunt them. They'll change soon enough.
I also think the Civil War was a bad way to solve the slavery problem. Black people in the south would've eventually revolted, or the south would've eventually collapsed economically because slavery is very economically inefficient. Either way we would've ended up with a much better situation than we had. People in the south would've wanted to change things instead of having that change forced upon them from the outside.
After the south broke away, the north would've stopped having any justification for returning slaves to the south anymore, and would've been free to treat posse's looking for escaped slaves as an invading foreign army and wiped them out as they deserved. Heck, the escaped slaves could be lent the weapons to do it themselves, since it would be clearly a case of self-defense.
Governing people without their consent is wrong.
They tend to reject rationalism and go in for magical thinking whenever it suits their purpose. It is a creed that is devoid of any value to humanity. It would be much better if they simply stated "All this change, we're worried that it isn't right, and we should carefully rethink our aims and values!". Because basically fundamentalism in America is all about fear of radical social change.
Of course, it doesn't help that many (on all sides) see public school as a ground for indoctrinating young people with their particular values. It was reprehensible when we hauled Native American children away from their families and forced them into western style schools. It's similarly reprehensible to force diversity training and acceptance of homosexuality and all kinds of other social things down the throats of young people who's parents don't agree.
I, personally, think all these are fine values. But I think it's wrong to force them on others. They will come to them in time, since I believe strongly that these values have much greater utility and survivability in the long term than the ones they replace.
As River puts it so eloquently in Serenity: "People don't like to be messed with."
I have come to the conclusion that in the presence of a healthy economy, there will always be more demand for programmers than there are people who can program.
Ahh, but it's not the programmers who make the decisions about what the users run on their machines (other than the program the programmer is writing of course).
Yes, the companies were basically engaging in vigilante justice. I can understand why. They wouldn't want to change laws to make RAMBUS' evil patent strategies unworkable because they themselves might want to use those strategies in the future. So, I guess in the final analysis I have little sympathy for them.
Isn't it interesting how most talk about patents, even by their proponents, are all about restricting competition and keeping a hold on markets, and not about getting new ideas out in the open where people can see them?
I think selling software on a subscription that causes the software to stop functioning if the company dies is unethical. In fact, I think selling any software on a subscription basis is unethical unless its Open Source. Even more so than selling software that isn't Open Source.
This is because of the lock-in issues associated with proprietary software. The cost of ceasing the subscription or having the company that provides it goes out of business is enormous. This means that any provider of proprietary software has a great incentive to charge as much as possible for their subscription, but not so much that it would be more expensive for the user to switch. This will eventually result in all businesses basically being owned by the proprietary software companies that provide their software.
Not a something I ever want to see come into existence.
I think a subscription pricing model fits software better, but I would never buy any piece of proprietary software under that model.
Something different does need to be done in this area. I hate having to have the CD in the drive as well, and I doubt it really helps much. And, as several people pointed out, I suspect it hurts sales by almost as much as it helps them.
I think that copyright law is broken in this regard too. It doesn't reflect the reality of what's easily possible. Games occupy a category that's more closely similar to music than software. Perhaps similar models could be adopted for funding games in a 'copies can't really be controlled' world. I would've pre-paid (in escrow) Firaxis $50 or more to produce them game if there was going to be a Linux version.
And any rule that required the news to be factual by some standard would be a violation of the first ammendment. I would be totally against any such law, much as I dislike Fox News.
I'm also sure the first website you pointed me at has something useful to say. But it is written as a propoganda piece with bright red letters for the stuff that the author thinks is more vitally important than the rest of the vitally important stuff. It is written in a breathlessly wounded style that drains away any credibility it might have.
I think there's probably some point underneath all that, but that website certainly isn't going to convince anybody who isn't already convinced.
Well, that's very interesting, but the idea that they would pull a tag off a cow and put it on a bull for some reason seems pretty odd to me. I can see animals running around without any tags, but not switching them around like that.
Only peripherally relevant to the topic. And you meander a bit and bring in several points that aren't strongly related to one another. But overall the most interesting and insightful set of ideas I've read on this whole thread. You deserve a +6. :-)
I don't understand why anybody would ever think these people shouldn't be allowed up. It seems to me that this smacks of elitism, and I don't think that attitude has much of a place anywhere.
Also, if someone thinks participating in scientific experiments is fun (and I would likely think that about some experiments) then more power to them. I don't understand the question here either. Does the fact that someone paid money to go on a trip somehow invalidate the data?
That doesn't seem a very fair assessment of the discussion. I don't think anybody was specifically against them reselling their code. They were specifically against them relicensing their code under something other than the GPL. I don't feel that's unreasonable at all.
Other than that, there was specific talk of a back-and-forth. Talk of making improvements to an LGPL version of their rendering library if they wanted to do that, and other things. I got the strong impression that the inkscape people would be perfectly happy if Xara used Inkscape code in a GPL version.
It seems to me that it would greatly behoove Xara to try to separate out the things that can't be GPLed and isolate them into runtime loadable modules that can be distributed separately. Then they might be able to get away without dual licensing stuff.
You don't hear about people using Lindows/Linspire because the kind of people who end up with it installed on their box probably don't even have a clue they're running Linux, and certainly aren't going to post in forums that you or I are likely to read, if they post in any forums online at all.
Network development != R&D. Network development means expansion of the network. And that's exactly what universal service fees are for.
I don't see a lot of strong evidence that that's not the case. One danger in imposing caps and restrictions like this is that it provides a convenient collusion point for all carriers. The government mandates this is the worst we can do, and gosh-darn-it, that restriction is awfully chafin, we would like to do even worse than that, but this stupid regulation prevents us, so we're stuck here doing the worst we're allowed.
While doing things that reduce the barriers to switching to a competing carrier are good, and making sure that no one carrier can ever get a lock on a particular market would also be good, I don't see a lot of point in these other restrictions.
What I would like to see in a 'cell phone bill of rights' are things like "I have the right to not be called for commercial (profit or non-profit) purposes by entitities that I have not given explicit permission to call me. And if you do receive any such calls, you have the right to not be charged the airtime for them.".
Commercials are an ever-present creeping kudzu that will take over any vehicle of communication if given half-a-chance. Even google is starting to put commercials inline with search results and only marking them off with a colored box.
I still call that a broken security model.
It should be possible to use the OS to put a fence around such programs so people can still run them. SELinux sort of has some of the infrastructure to do that. But moving to a full capability model may be a better choice.
Blaming people for doing stupid things all the time is a very poor approach to security. Computers are for people. People aren't for computers. Things should work with people in such a way that they have to remember as few rules as possible.
In fact, people might react a little better and follow the rules more if you explained to them that the computer was too stupid to distinguish between the program that ran off the net and a program installed by the sysadmin, and so it would let the program from the net do all the same things, so to help the computer out because it's so stupid, they should avoid running things from the net.
This system gives too much power to government officials over legal matters. In this case, it seems quite likely the public officials are being bribed. Either under-the-table, or overtly in the form of promises that this new aircraft will make the economy of their citizens better, and they should ignore some of the formalities in order to make that happen.
So, with this system its very easy for a judge to randomly squash people who have legitimate concerns and keep their concerns from ever seeing the light of day. Yes, yes, publicity interferes with investigations. Boo-hoo, cry me a river. Public officials fundamentally cannot be trusted, and this is too much power for them to have.
Yeah, and I suppose you think they're going to build a space elevator all at once without doing any sort of testing or preliminary building of anything at all first. Yep, perfect way to design something. Get 100 programmers all over the world to build you modules to spec, put them all together at the end (you don't let them have compilers of course, that would waste their time) and poof, working system!
You know, this is the reason I hate the Republican party. Republicans have been duped into thinking this is actually what the Republican party stands for, and nothing could be further from the truth. I'm not saying the Democratic party is any better mind you. I think our political system is completely broken and corrupt, possibly beyond all hope of repair.
Well, actually, given the way they treated the battle.net clone, this can only really be expected. I saw legions of people on here rabidly defending Blizzard because they made such fantastic stuff when that story first broke. It was the beginning of the end. That was the point at which Blizzard started seeing their customers as the enemy and the other.
OK, I agree your assertion could be interpreted that way. I think it could be interpreted my way too though. :-)
As for whether or not LSB would help Linux on the desktop, I'm not so sure. If it encompassed the GNOME libraries or something, maybe it could. But it would accomplish that mainly by helping binary installs work more predictably.
I'm not so sure that's a good thing to encourage. I don't want lots of binary only software for my system. About the only thing I'm really willing to live with being that way are games.
I'm worried that widespread and easily-installable binary only software will ultimately lead to a spyware problem that's as bad as the one Windows has.
Ulrich Drepper isn't some random guy. :-)
You make a bald, unsupported assertion that Linux will succeed on the desktop if and only if LSB is adopted and rigorously adhered to. I fail to see how this is unequivocally the case.
I would argue that the job of support, and showing people how to use your software is ultimately harder than creating it in the first place. But, it's in the best interests of organizations that sell support to pay you to write the software because otherwise they would have no software to support.