> Literally twice the age at which you said he had completed "all his greatest work"
Newton's greatest work was the theory of optics, NOT principia. Principia is much more famous work but it was a far less impressive and world-changing theory than his theory of optics and he himself readily admitted that and decried the fact that his later work paled in comparison to what he did as a young man. The ultimate proof of that ? The vast majority of Newton's theory of optics is still held as valid today while the laws of motion have been replaced entirely.
The only thing we changed with optics was to discover the underlying structures that made them happen (quantum physics), and throw away that 7th color in the rainbow he made up because he was too much of a theist to be a scientist. Specifically he was a Spinozan, I said that in my post - Spinozan's are a form theism. What they are NOT are deist.
Either way - you suggested Newton as proof that religion and science can mix - I showed you that Newton wasn't a scientist which completely refutes your position, and furthermore that even in his most scientific work he was greatly HAMPERED by his spiritualist thoughts. If anything his religious views caused him to make embarrassing mistakes (well they weren't seen as such in his time but would be today) - like adding a clearly non-existent extra color to the spectrum because 7 is a holy number and 6 isn't -even though to do so he had to violate the very mathematical principles of colour mixing that he himself had discovered (three primary colors cannot make 7 secondary colors) or spending decades upon decades lost in pursuit of alchemical results.
Point being - Newton wasn't religious in the way you think of the concept - he was religious more in the way of Arthur C. Clarke - and even THAT religious viewpoint was a major hamper to his work - and part of the reason he was NOT and never should be DEEMED a scientist. Religion and science can co-exist, but they sure as fuck cannot and should not mix.
>"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." --Isaac Newton
Would that be the same Newton who was spent most of his career on a fruitless attempt at alchemy ? The man did all his greatest work by the age of 22 and spent the rest of his life on a road with no destination. Alchemy was fraud with paganistic rituals and supernatural causation - the very reasons why it was such an abject failure. Contrary to popular opinion- it also didn't become chemistry, chemistry was born from early physics. The only good thing that came out of alchemy was some useful devices which early chemists didn't have to reinvent (like the mortar and pestle).
Which brings us to the next problem with your chosen authority: Isaac Newton was NOT A Christian, never in his life - he specifically refuted Christianity. At that time you weren't allowed to hold a chair at a university in Britain unless you were Christian - they made an exception for Newton specifically (it was quite the scandal at the time) on the basis of his incredible work with optics and the laws of motion. So why would he say what you quoted ? Because you quoted him out of context. He wasn't talking about the God of Christianity as an intelligent being - his religious views were much more Spinozan, a type of "God in the mechanics of the universe itself" view. Newton could see God in the way light shimmers on a drop of water, not as a person but as part of the universe itself. While Spinozan thought is very interesting and popular among many scientists (the ones who aren't outright atheists) it's definitely not religion in the general sense of the word - since a Spinozan God has no wisdom, authority, laws, personality or indeed - mind.
Which brings us to the biggest problem of all. Your argument is a call-to-authority "Somebody famous for his expertise in the field said it, therefore it's true". That's a fallacy and the most roundly rejected fallacy in all of science. The single most dearly held dream of every scientist is to prove the great authority in his field was WRONG, he sure as hell will not assume that being the authority made somebody right - even if he respects that person's works greatly - it's through proving the authority false that you become an authority.
Finally - Newton is a horrible choice for an authority when it comes to science. He wasn't a scientist. He was a natural philosopher - which is a sort of early fore-runner of science. The scientific method was only really finalized into it's present form in the past two centuries - nothing before that was really science. Some of it was very scientific and laid foundations which later real scientists used (such as Newton's work) at least initially - but none of it was really science yet, it couldn't be because science as a concept didn't exist yet. Newton was no authority on science - he lived before science existed. Even then a philosopher of science is a better source than a scientist for understanding science as CONCEPT - since that is what philosophers of science study. Scientists study the world by doing science - philosophers of science study the scientists and work out what they do and what works (and what doesn't).
It's long been a basic principle of science that you cannot consider anything which claims a supernatural cause to be science. That doesn't mean a scientist can't be religious - many of them are - but it does mean that he has to keep his religion out of his work, or his work stops being science.
>1. Use of the word homophobe to describe an anti-homosexuality position. The problem is there's no good word to describe this but it always grates when people use a slanderous term that assumes a psychological motivation to describe a political position.
Denying equal rights to a segment of the population is not a political position - it's bigotry and bigotry is a psychological condition with a known cause: phobia. There may be the odd exception but this is true of the vast majority of racists, sexists, homophobes and everybody else who has ever tried to deny anybody else the right to be equal before the law. Homophobia is a bit of a trickier word for a completely different reason though - most people misunderstand what it even means. Most bigotry is built on a fear of the group being excluded per se. Racists fear black people for what's different about them. Homophobia however refers to a different fear (though certainly some of the more common fear is now prevalent). The original meaning of the word is something else though. It's not a fear of people who are gay. It's a fear of being gay yourself causing people to act out against those who are. Since sexologists will tell you all people are bisexual and it's only a matter of degrees - nobody is so straight that they have never had a gay thought. When your worldview is filled with gay people suffering, and a believe that this suffering is just- such thoughts are very, very frightening, perpetuating the very suffering that caused the fears in the first place.
What about F) Socialist Libertarian in accordance with the 500 year history of libertarianism prior to the invention of Capitalist Libertarianism (quite recently). Or G) Capitalist Libertarian who actually knows his philosophy and therefore believes that since you have to choose between a party that will reduce your civil liberty and one that will reduce your (definition of) economic liberty - that civil liberty is more important than economic and so you vote democrat.
Again, not relevant. The point is the technology that makes an app store predates apple by a very long time. App stores with the kind of names you like were around before apple as well, several. Apple's appstore won the popularity contest, but it wasn't innovation anymore than the shape of my last dump was an artistic endeavour on my part.
Ubuntu built an app store on top of their repositories recently which does both paid-for and free(as in beer in this context) software.
And they didn't do anything but change the GUI to the same underlying technology.
The core concept with repositories (and which one came first is rather beside the point - either way they are more than 15 years old) is that of curatorship - indeed that is fundamentally what lies in the app-store. The big difference is that the apple app store takes the curatorship from simple quality control (i.e. filtering malware, insuring that packages install right etc.) and ease-of-use (automated installations from online sources) to also include business curating to their own (rather than customer) benefit. Nothing stops them from doing software for profit, indeed many (perhaps even most) of them do - they just don't make their profit out of selling licenses.
>What market did Apple create, other than the App Store, again?
Wait... you mean a curated software source with automated installs for ease-of-use, quality control and malware protection ? Linux had that in mid-1990s.
>The only innovator in the consumer electronics market I'm aware of right now is Asus, strongly powered by Google. From what I can tell, the Transformer is the end-all, be-all in that department, and a lot of the up and coming tech appears to pull more features from it than anything else.
Hear, hear. I love my transformer (and it's not even a prime but the one before it) - getting the keyboard attachment for my birthday today if all goes well.
That's the problem with patents of course, a fundamentally wrong belief that innovation happens in isolation and is done by any one person/entity.
Here's a little story. Around mid-2005 I was working on what would become the openlab 4.0 release. Under pressure from my paying customers I had to find a way to build the most robust and easy to deploy thin-client network-computer server with easy-to-use desktop Linux possible.
At the time Linux came in installable-disk and live-CD versions - and ne'er the twine did meet. Ubuntu indeed had promo packs for their first release (came out about a month before OL4 was released) with TWO CD's in - one live, one installable.
Then I had a flash of brilliance. What if a live CD could replicate itself onto a hard-drive, you would have a faster, more reliable and more predictable way to install linux, with much more ease of use on top of all the other live CD advantages.
You may notice that practically ever linux distribution in the world today works this way - an instalable live CD. But when I did it for OL4.0 I had never seen such a thing before. Apparently I invented the modern Linux distribution - because a year later every other distribution had followed suit. But OpenLab was a fairly niche system - aimed at education and mostly deployed in schools, it had very little impact outside that sphere. By the end of that year I saw PCLinuxOS for the first time -and they were the second system I ever saw using this mechanism. The thing is... they may have actually done it before I did.
I have no idea which project did it first, mine or theirs. I have no idea which one was then first copied by a major distro (of 2005) and laid the groundwork for everybody else following suit (odds may well be on them but it's hardly proven).
Point is that a major innovation in Linux distributions was achieved practically simultaneously by two disparate projects neither of whom was aware of the other's work. The same thing happens with all innovation - ever. It's always just the next logical step in the progression and there are always several people who have it.
I'm proud of having been a first person to do something that is now standard fair. But I don't think I ever deserved the right to patent the idea or charge for the concept - if only because somebody else was doing the exact same thing at about the exact same time without us knowing about each other's existence yet. Innovation ? Encouraging innovation ? Stupid concepts. Innovation is an unavoidable consequence of the state of history at any given moment. It cannot be encouraged or indeed inhibited, the only thing stuff like patents can achieve is to make the results more expensive and cause them to take longer to reach the market penetration they deserve.
>Well, sometime around the 2010 releases, they started really going after the UI, and the stability suffered
Which, along with Unity (arguably two sides of the same event coin) is what made Mint's popularity skyrocket and why so many of us Linux dedicated guys switched and stuck.
True, that's why I kept doing it for 6 years. These days though - what use is network-computer style thin-clients ? They were a great idea back then, but not now.
>No, you mean rogue(6), whose magic word was Elbereth .
A word of course that lived on in most of it's children -at least as far as the last proper nethack. I haven't played a proper roguelike since the nethack 3.14 was current so I honestly don't know if any of the later ones kept it.
>The ham radio loving middle-aged pedos who stalked them? Check.
Oh man that reminds me. Until the mid-naughties ADSL was still a rare thing in South Africa with our single government run telecoms provider and their legally protected monopoly.
Sure there were ISPs but getting online meant making a per-minute phone call to them over a modem (this was the days of 56K dialup accounts).
Service from telkom being attrocious most ISPs had a line shortage and could only handle a small number of simultaneous users, in heavy times they would then start randomly disconnecting some to let others dial in for a while... it was hell, and seriously expensive. Some early Erricson cellphones could be used for internet as dialup modems but those were stuck on 9600 and cost even more.
The law officially prohibited sending any communications signal over a public road. You couldn't run a cable past the nearest one. Even wifi networks were deemed a legally gray area for a long time (even as some community mesh networks were being built) before being officially legalized. To this day ADSL lines (our prime home internet now) still depend on telkom for last-mile connections.
Okay - so after all that background - the point of the post... there was one loophole. If you had a HAM-license you could set up a packet radio system, and connect to HAM satellites... and a few of those had internet access via downlinks in other countries.
It was slow - I think the fastest ones were 28K - about half of what modems were doing, and that was in theory, in practise it was much slower... but it didn't run a per-minute cost... for quite a few of my poor student years I got cheap internet because I had a HAM license (now long expired). Hell I remember having to learn morse-code by heart to get that license.
Aawww man I remember both those sites. I got some of my first linux downloads from there.
Though coming from outside, in 1998 when documentation for newbies were scarce (and not knowing anybody who was remotely interested in anything outside microsoft), I wasted many a download on the wrong stuff before I finally invested in an early "many distribution collection" CD-set I ordered. Hell if I can remember which one now, but I do recall it had an early version of debian and redhat on it (pre 5.0) and included slackware 3.something.
I played around a lot but settled on debian to start with. There I was until redhat 5 brought CD-installs a year or so later. Just another year... we were having Linux conferences with free redhat 6 CD-give-aways. Man those were the days. Now fedora has a version number way higher than the last free redhat I had run (the corporate redhat of today uses a new version number set and is actually numbered lower). I think I switched to (then) Mandrake circa 2001 when I got my first real Linux job. Spent the next 6 years developing a derivative thin-client distro for schools and deploying it into schools all over Africa (lots of fun travelling)... Strange to think back now... it was like we were the rebel alliance and we were fighting the empire. A small band of brothers - always advocating, trying to argue away the FUD... now most people have Linux running on their phones and don't even know it.
Man that takes me back... it must be close-on ten years since I last saw somebody mention the difference between baud and BPS in a discussion, let alone thought about it. My how things have changed in this new world of always-on connections that run in MBPS.
>>The Libertarian viewpoint is that, even if some people consider it harmful, people should still have the right to view it. There's a leap from "we think this is bad for your marriage" to "so we won't let you see it" that you're ignoring.
>He isn't saying porn should be banned, he's just saying porn can be harmful.
Actually he didn't even say that much. He would run into way too many problems (as such arguments tend to do) since all the arguments on that bases have been utterly discredited. All he said was that it may be bad for some people's marriages (possibly most). That's a whole different kind of claim. Patently true (because the sample size of marriages is so huge that practically ANYTHING can be shown to be harmful to SOME marriages). "If not most" is more likely a false assessment based on anecdotal data gathered in a too limited sample-set (marriages from a single culture or worse a single community in a culture). So yes, his claim is patently true... and absolutely useless. A marriage is an agreement between two people sharing a household, parts of that agreement is inherrited from culture parts of it is decided uniquely among them. There are virtually no patterns about which parts of the agreement come from where that hold on a large sample-size, the agreement evolves and things that were inherrited become replaced with unique alternatives... essentially no two marriages are really the same. So anything you point out, will indeed be harmful to some and positive to others. These are decision nobody else can even offer useful advice on - it's statistically impossible - you and your spouse have to work it out for yourselves.
If you read the whole thread you would have seen that I specifically said they are not required to actually do anything except get help.
>>Being a socialist libertarian
>Sounds dangerously contradictory. Only to American idiots who don't know what libertarian means. Or socialist for that matter. Here's a hint - neither of their definitions include the word "state".
>So do I stop if I don't have a cell phone? Yes the law predates cellphones.
>What about my business? The five minutes till the next car arrives will almost certainly not make you broke, but it could mean somebody else dies who would have lived.
You yourself concede a moral responsibility, here the law recognizes that as a legal one.
>What if I miss a wedding, the birth of my child, or an important meeting because the EMS got lost?
Seriously ? Where in the world does the EMS take so long to respond that you could possibly miss more than the first few minutes of any of those things even if they got lost ? I can tell you I - I do NOT want to live there.
>Helping is the moral thing to do, but codifying this in law just begs for abuse
Being a socialist libertarian I am off the opinion that the law should be whatever the community wants it to be. There are no considerations like that in my mind. But I daresay most communities would feel that you do have a legal responsibility to save a life when it's in your power to do so, especially when all it could possibly cost you is maybe half an hour of your time. The nice thing about decentralized self-governances is that the possibility for abuse of power is removed (by removing power - or rather distributing it equally - abuse of power is only possible if somebody has more than you)
Any justice system that does not count 80 years of somebody else's life as more valuable than 20 minutes of yours is fucked up.
That said - how serious is your charge ? How much does this law beg for abuse... well let me think, has there been a single news story of anybody even being charged with this crime in my entire life ? Do I know anybody who has been so much as questioned ? Nope. Clearly almost nobody would break this law anyway (it's merely codifying what for almost everybody is natural behaviour anyway) and the few others raise the critical question of how anybody would even know. Just about the only scenario I could see is if a cop was practically right behind you - in which case he would stop for the accident, and even if he took your plates how would he prove you hadn't seen him (which would absolve you).
Begs for abuse ? Well perhaps, but apparently nobody is generous to give that beggar what he wants - and this in a country with notoriously some of the most corrupt police in the world. Nah, doesn't add up. If this was begging for abuse, it would be getting abused.
>There is some possibility that the rhythmic nature of the sound might have long term effects on health, or that some high frequencies might effect mood and therefore health.
The same is true of a bass drum. But we don't see people marching in the street to ban drummers do we ?... well not often...
I should clarify, there is no requirement to actually do anything, just stop and, if possible, make a phone call.
It's more about being on the scene so that the EMS people can find it more easily, if they get lost,they can call you. As soon as they arrive, you're free to leave. Of course if you have CPR training I would say you are morally obliged to offer assistance but there is no requirement to do so. Your obligation as the person to discover the scene is just to stop and do all you can to get emergency services to the scene.
I'm not a lawyer btw. this question is a requirement for getting a drivers license here so that's how I know this, there is probably a lot more subtlety in the fine details of the law.
For that matter. Running a proxy is not comparable to a link. Your argument may apply to the legality of piratebay but that is not what''s at stake here. What's at stake is people running proxies which simply serve up what users request. The organization in this case is attempting to demand those proxies be modified to block a site they dislike. That's on a whole other level. It's more like saying "The murderer got to the victim's house by using a toll road. Let's threaten to sue the toll company if they don't shut down the turn-pike that connects to the main road of out of the murderer's neighbourhood."
And that is a valid analogy: 1) The toll road, like the proxy providers, are a privately run public service which cannot reasonably be expected to police the destinations of everyone who travels via it. 2) Shutting down access to the neighbourhood of the murderer would also deny access to everybody else in the neighbourhood who committed no crime. Even if this is a high-crime neighbourhood (not really a fait a compli in this case) some citizens are still innocent and do not deserved to be cut off from the rest of the world. Hell even criminals have a right to freedom of speech and movement until convicted. There are many legal torrents on piratebay, which have every right to exist while the copyright regime is effectively trying to force the road operators from allowing them to drive (because some of them are going to commit crimes at their destination)
Do you see how flimsy the attack on proxies are ?
Morally it gets even worse if you go beyond the limits of the analogy. Various forms of proxy (such as ToR) are crucial to protecting the lives and identities of dissidents in autocratic states - efforts like these throw that baby out with the bathwater too. I'd say if it's a choice between a dissident massacre in Iran or a few copyright violations in Amsterdam most people would view the latter as the lesser of two evils. Since the technology under debate here is crucial to the former and merely incidental to the latter, there is absolutely NO grounds to support any action against it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Literally twice the age at which you said he had completed "all his greatest work"
Newton's greatest work was the theory of optics, NOT principia. Principia is much more famous work but it was a far less impressive and world-changing theory than his theory of optics and he himself readily admitted that and decried the fact that his later work paled in comparison to what he did as a young man. The ultimate proof of that ? The vast majority of Newton's theory of optics is still held as valid today while the laws of motion have been replaced entirely.
The only thing we changed with optics was to discover the underlying structures that made them happen (quantum physics), and throw away that 7th color in the rainbow he made up because he was too much of a theist to be a scientist. Specifically he was a Spinozan, I said that in my post - Spinozan's are a form theism. What they are NOT are deist.
Either way - you suggested Newton as proof that religion and science can mix - I showed you that Newton wasn't a scientist which completely refutes your position, and furthermore that even in his most scientific work he was greatly HAMPERED by his spiritualist thoughts. If anything his religious views caused him to make embarrassing mistakes (well they weren't seen as such in his time but would be today) - like adding a clearly non-existent extra color to the spectrum because 7 is a holy number and 6 isn't -even though to do so he had to violate the very mathematical principles of colour mixing that he himself had discovered (three primary colors cannot make 7 secondary colors) or spending decades upon decades lost in pursuit of alchemical results.
Point being - Newton wasn't religious in the way you think of the concept - he was religious more in the way of Arthur C. Clarke - and even THAT religious viewpoint was a major hamper to his work - and part of the reason he was NOT and never should be DEEMED a scientist. Religion and science can co-exist, but they sure as fuck cannot and should not mix.
Some would argue that the movie is more canonicle.
Now we can teach THAT controversy in literature class.
>"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."
--Isaac Newton
Would that be the same Newton who was spent most of his career on a fruitless attempt at alchemy ? The man did all his greatest work by the age of 22 and spent the rest of his life on a road with no destination.
Alchemy was fraud with paganistic rituals and supernatural causation - the very reasons why it was such an abject failure. Contrary to popular opinion- it also didn't become chemistry, chemistry was born from early physics. The only good thing that came out of alchemy was some useful devices which early chemists didn't have to reinvent (like the mortar and pestle).
Which brings us to the next problem with your chosen authority: Isaac Newton was NOT A Christian, never in his life - he specifically refuted Christianity. At that time you weren't allowed to hold a chair at a university in Britain unless you were Christian - they made an exception for Newton specifically (it was quite the scandal at the time) on the basis of his incredible work with optics and the laws of motion.
So why would he say what you quoted ? Because you quoted him out of context. He wasn't talking about the God of Christianity as an intelligent being - his religious views were much more Spinozan, a type of "God in the mechanics of the universe itself" view. Newton could see God in the way light shimmers on a drop of water, not as a person but as part of the universe itself. While Spinozan thought is very interesting and popular among many scientists (the ones who aren't outright atheists) it's definitely not religion in the general sense of the word - since a Spinozan God has no wisdom, authority, laws, personality or indeed - mind.
Which brings us to the biggest problem of all. Your argument is a call-to-authority "Somebody famous for his expertise in the field said it, therefore it's true". That's a fallacy and the most roundly rejected fallacy in all of science. The single most dearly held dream of every scientist is to prove the great authority in his field was WRONG, he sure as hell will not assume that being the authority made somebody right - even if he respects that person's works greatly - it's through proving the authority false that you become an authority.
Finally - Newton is a horrible choice for an authority when it comes to science. He wasn't a scientist. He was a natural philosopher - which is a sort of early fore-runner of science. The scientific method was only really finalized into it's present form in the past two centuries - nothing before that was really science. Some of it was very scientific and laid foundations which later real scientists used (such as Newton's work) at least initially - but none of it was really science yet, it couldn't be because science as a concept didn't exist yet. Newton was no authority on science - he lived before science existed. Even then a philosopher of science is a better source than a scientist for understanding science as CONCEPT - since that is what philosophers of science study. Scientists study the world by doing science - philosophers of science study the scientists and work out what they do and what works (and what doesn't).
It's long been a basic principle of science that you cannot consider anything which claims a supernatural cause to be science. That doesn't mean a scientist can't be religious - many of them are - but it does mean that he has to keep his religion out of his work, or his work stops being science.
>1. Use of the word homophobe to describe an anti-homosexuality position. The problem is there's no good word to describe this but it always grates when people use a slanderous term that assumes a psychological motivation to describe a political position.
Denying equal rights to a segment of the population is not a political position - it's bigotry and bigotry is a psychological condition with a known cause: phobia. There may be the odd exception but this is true of the vast majority of racists, sexists, homophobes and everybody else who has ever tried to deny anybody else the right to be equal before the law.
Homophobia is a bit of a trickier word for a completely different reason though - most people misunderstand what it even means. Most bigotry is built on a fear of the group being excluded per se. Racists fear black people for what's different about them. Homophobia however refers to a different fear (though certainly some of the more common fear is now prevalent). The original meaning of the word is something else though. It's not a fear of people who are gay. It's a fear of being gay yourself causing people to act out against those who are.
Since sexologists will tell you all people are bisexual and it's only a matter of degrees - nobody is so straight that they have never had a gay thought. When your worldview is filled with gay people suffering, and a believe that this suffering is just- such thoughts are very, very frightening, perpetuating the very suffering that caused the fears in the first place.
What about
F) Socialist Libertarian in accordance with the 500 year history of libertarianism prior to the invention of Capitalist Libertarianism (quite recently).
Or
G) Capitalist Libertarian who actually knows his philosophy and therefore believes that since you have to choose between a party that will reduce your civil liberty and one that will reduce your (definition of) economic liberty - that civil liberty is more important than economic and so you vote democrat.
Again, not relevant. The point is the technology that makes an app store predates apple by a very long time. App stores with the kind of names you like were around before apple as well, several.
Apple's appstore won the popularity contest, but it wasn't innovation anymore than the shape of my last dump was an artistic endeavour on my part.
So whether something is a new idea or not is determined by how many OTHER businesses buy in ?
Ubuntu built an app store on top of their repositories recently which does both paid-for and free(as in beer in this context) software.
And they didn't do anything but change the GUI to the same underlying technology.
The core concept with repositories (and which one came first is rather beside the point - either way they are more than 15 years old) is that of curatorship - indeed that is fundamentally what lies in the app-store.
The big difference is that the apple app store takes the curatorship from simple quality control (i.e. filtering malware, insuring that packages install right etc.) and ease-of-use (automated installations from online sources) to also include business curating to their own (rather than customer) benefit.
Nothing stops them from doing software for profit, indeed many (perhaps even most) of them do - they just don't make their profit out of selling licenses.
>What market did Apple create, other than the App Store, again?
Wait... you mean a curated software source with automated installs for ease-of-use, quality control and malware protection ?
Linux had that in mid-1990s.
>The only innovator in the consumer electronics market I'm aware of right now is Asus, strongly powered by Google. From what I can tell, the Transformer is the end-all, be-all in that department, and a lot of the up and coming tech appears to pull more features from it than anything else.
Hear, hear. I love my transformer (and it's not even a prime but the one before it) - getting the keyboard attachment for my birthday today if all goes well.
That's the problem with patents of course, a fundamentally wrong belief that innovation happens in isolation and is done by any one person/entity.
Here's a little story. Around mid-2005 I was working on what would become the openlab 4.0 release. Under pressure from my paying customers I had to find a way to build the most robust and easy to deploy thin-client network-computer server with easy-to-use desktop Linux possible.
At the time Linux came in installable-disk and live-CD versions - and ne'er the twine did meet. Ubuntu indeed had promo packs for their first release (came out about a month before OL4 was released) with TWO CD's in - one live, one installable.
Then I had a flash of brilliance. What if a live CD could replicate itself onto a hard-drive, you would have a faster, more reliable and more predictable way to install linux, with much more ease of use on top of all the other live CD advantages.
You may notice that practically ever linux distribution in the world today works this way - an instalable live CD. But when I did it for OL4.0 I had never seen such a thing before.
Apparently I invented the modern Linux distribution - because a year later every other distribution had followed suit.
But OpenLab was a fairly niche system - aimed at education and mostly deployed in schools, it had very little impact outside that sphere.
By the end of that year I saw PCLinuxOS for the first time -and they were the second system I ever saw using this mechanism. The thing is... they may have actually done it before I did.
I have no idea which project did it first, mine or theirs. I have no idea which one was then first copied by a major distro (of 2005) and laid the groundwork for everybody else following suit (odds may well be on them but it's hardly proven).
Point is that a major innovation in Linux distributions was achieved practically simultaneously by two disparate projects neither of whom was aware of the other's work. The same thing happens with all innovation - ever. It's always just the next logical step in the progression and there are always several people who have it.
I'm proud of having been a first person to do something that is now standard fair. But I don't think I ever deserved the right to patent the idea or charge for the concept - if only because somebody else was doing the exact same thing at about the exact same time without us knowing about each other's existence yet.
Innovation ? Encouraging innovation ? Stupid concepts.
Innovation is an unavoidable consequence of the state of history at any given moment. It cannot be encouraged or indeed inhibited, the only thing stuff like patents can achieve is to make the results more expensive and cause them to take longer to reach the market penetration they deserve.
>Well, sometime around the 2010 releases, they started really going after the UI, and the stability suffered
Which, along with Unity (arguably two sides of the same event coin) is what made Mint's popularity skyrocket and why so many of us Linux dedicated guys switched and stuck.
True, that's why I kept doing it for 6 years. These days though - what use is network-computer style thin-clients ?
They were a great idea back then, but not now.
This was my baby: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=openlab
ER... I think you hit reply on the wrong post.
>You son of a bitch! That was *my* dream job!!!111
That's what I said in the job interview: "This is my dream job and I won't leave here until you hire me"(they liked the enthusiasm).
That said - if it helps, the money was terrible. All our customers were charities with no money.
>First, they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Boring out here now, isn't it? Pathfinders R Us. :-)
Yeah, we need a new crusade and bad guy...
>No, you mean rogue(6), whose magic word was Elbereth .
A word of course that lived on in most of it's children -at least as far as the last proper nethack. I haven't played a proper roguelike since the nethack 3.14 was current so I honestly don't know if any of the later ones kept it.
>The ham radio loving middle-aged pedos who stalked them? Check.
Oh man that reminds me. Until the mid-naughties ADSL was still a rare thing in South Africa with our single government run telecoms provider and their legally protected monopoly.
Sure there were ISPs but getting online meant making a per-minute phone call to them over a modem (this was the days of 56K dialup accounts).
Service from telkom being attrocious most ISPs had a line shortage and could only handle a small number of simultaneous users, in heavy times they would then start randomly disconnecting some to let others dial in for a while... it was hell, and seriously expensive. Some early Erricson cellphones could be used for internet as dialup modems but those were stuck on 9600 and cost even more.
The law officially prohibited sending any communications signal over a public road. You couldn't run a cable past the nearest one. Even wifi networks were deemed a legally gray area for a long time (even as some community mesh networks were being built) before being officially legalized. To this day ADSL lines (our prime home internet now) still depend on telkom for last-mile connections.
Okay - so after all that background - the point of the post... there was one loophole. If you had a HAM-license you could set up a packet radio system, and connect to HAM satellites... and a few of those had internet access via downlinks in other countries.
It was slow - I think the fastest ones were 28K - about half of what modems were doing, and that was in theory, in practise it was much slower... but it didn't run a per-minute cost... for quite a few of my poor student years I got cheap internet because I had a HAM license (now long expired). Hell I remember having to learn morse-code by heart to get that license.
Aawww man I remember both those sites. I got some of my first linux downloads from there.
Though coming from outside, in 1998 when documentation for newbies were scarce (and not knowing anybody who was remotely interested in anything outside microsoft), I wasted many a download on the wrong stuff before I finally invested in an early "many distribution collection" CD-set I ordered. Hell if I can remember which one now, but I do recall it had an early version of debian and redhat on it (pre 5.0) and included slackware 3.something.
I played around a lot but settled on debian to start with. There I was until redhat 5 brought CD-installs a year or so later. Just another year... we were having Linux conferences with free redhat 6 CD-give-aways.
Man those were the days. Now fedora has a version number way higher than the last free redhat I had run (the corporate redhat of today uses a new version number set and is actually numbered lower). I think I switched to (then) Mandrake circa 2001 when I got my first real Linux job.
Spent the next 6 years developing a derivative thin-client distro for schools and deploying it into schools all over Africa (lots of fun travelling)...
Strange to think back now... it was like we were the rebel alliance and we were fighting the empire. A small band of brothers - always advocating, trying to argue away the FUD... now most people have Linux running on their phones and don't even know it.
Man that takes me back... it must be close-on ten years since I last saw somebody mention the difference between baud and BPS in a discussion, let alone thought about it.
My how things have changed in this new world of always-on connections that run in MBPS.
>>The Libertarian viewpoint is that, even if some people consider it harmful, people should still have the right to view it. There's a leap from "we think this is bad for your marriage" to "so we won't let you see it" that you're ignoring.
>He isn't saying porn should be banned, he's just saying porn can be harmful.
Actually he didn't even say that much. He would run into way too many problems (as such arguments tend to do) since all the arguments on that bases have been utterly discredited. All he said was that it may be bad for some people's marriages (possibly most).
That's a whole different kind of claim. Patently true (because the sample size of marriages is so huge that practically ANYTHING can be shown to be harmful to SOME marriages). "If not most" is more likely a false assessment based on anecdotal data gathered in a too limited sample-set (marriages from a single culture or worse a single community in a culture).
So yes, his claim is patently true... and absolutely useless. A marriage is an agreement between two people sharing a household, parts of that agreement is inherrited from culture parts of it is decided uniquely among them. There are virtually no patterns about which parts of the agreement come from where that hold on a large sample-size, the agreement evolves and things that were inherrited become replaced with unique alternatives... essentially no two marriages are really the same.
So anything you point out, will indeed be harmful to some and positive to others. These are decision nobody else can even offer useful advice on - it's statistically impossible - you and your spouse have to work it out for yourselves.
If you read the whole thread you would have seen that I specifically said they are not required to actually do anything except get help.
>>Being a socialist libertarian
>Sounds dangerously contradictory.
Only to American idiots who don't know what libertarian means. Or socialist for that matter. Here's a hint - neither of their definitions include the word "state".
>So do I stop if I don't have a cell phone?
Yes the law predates cellphones.
>What about my business?
The five minutes till the next car arrives will almost certainly not make you broke, but it could mean somebody else dies who would have lived.
You yourself concede a moral responsibility, here the law recognizes that as a legal one.
>What if I miss a wedding, the birth of my child, or an important meeting because the EMS got lost?
Seriously ? Where in the world does the EMS take so long to respond that you could possibly miss more than the first few minutes of any of those things even if they got lost ? I can tell you I - I do NOT want to live there.
>Helping is the moral thing to do, but codifying this in law just begs for abuse
Being a socialist libertarian I am off the opinion that the law should be whatever the community wants it to be. There are no considerations like that in my mind. But I daresay most communities would feel that you do have a legal responsibility to save a life when it's in your power to do so, especially when all it could possibly cost you is maybe half an hour of your time.
The nice thing about decentralized self-governances is that the possibility for abuse of power is removed (by removing power - or rather distributing it equally - abuse of power is only possible if somebody has more than you)
Any justice system that does not count 80 years of somebody else's life as more valuable than 20 minutes of yours is fucked up.
That said - how serious is your charge ? How much does this law beg for abuse... well let me think, has there been a single news story of anybody even being charged with this crime in my entire life ? Do I know anybody who has been so much as questioned ? Nope.
Clearly almost nobody would break this law anyway (it's merely codifying what for almost everybody is natural behaviour anyway) and the few others raise the critical question of how anybody would even know.
Just about the only scenario I could see is if a cop was practically right behind you - in which case he would stop for the accident, and even if he took your plates how would he prove you hadn't seen him (which would absolve you).
Begs for abuse ? Well perhaps, but apparently nobody is generous to give that beggar what he wants - and this in a country with notoriously some of the most corrupt police in the world. Nah, doesn't add up. If this was begging for abuse, it would be getting abused.
>There is some possibility that the rhythmic nature of the sound might have long term effects on health, or that some high frequencies might effect mood and therefore health.
The same is true of a bass drum. But we don't see people marching in the street to ban drummers do we ? ... well not often...
I should clarify, there is no requirement to actually do anything, just stop and, if possible, make a phone call.
It's more about being on the scene so that the EMS people can find it more easily, if they get lost,they can call you. As soon as they arrive, you're free to leave. Of course if you have CPR training I would say you are morally obliged to offer assistance but there is no requirement to do so. Your obligation as the person to discover the scene is just to stop and do all you can to get emergency services to the scene.
I'm not a lawyer btw. this question is a requirement for getting a drivers license here so that's how I know this, there is probably a lot more subtlety in the fine details of the law.
For that matter. Running a proxy is not comparable to a link. Your argument may apply to the legality of piratebay but that is not what''s at stake here. What's at stake is people running proxies which simply serve up what users request.
The organization in this case is attempting to demand those proxies be modified to block a site they dislike. That's on a whole other level.
It's more like saying "The murderer got to the victim's house by using a toll road. Let's threaten to sue the toll company if they don't shut down the turn-pike that connects to the main road of out of the murderer's neighbourhood."
And that is a valid analogy:
1) The toll road, like the proxy providers, are a privately run public service which cannot reasonably be expected to police the destinations of everyone who travels via it.
2) Shutting down access to the neighbourhood of the murderer would also deny access to everybody else in the neighbourhood who committed no crime. Even if this is a high-crime neighbourhood (not really a fait a compli in this case) some citizens are still innocent and do not deserved to be cut off from the rest of the world. Hell even criminals have a right to freedom of speech and movement until convicted. There are many legal torrents on piratebay, which have every right to exist while the copyright regime is effectively trying to force the road operators from allowing them to drive (because some of them are going to commit crimes at their destination)
Do you see how flimsy the attack on proxies are ?
Morally it gets even worse if you go beyond the limits of the analogy. Various forms of proxy (such as ToR) are crucial to protecting the lives and identities of dissidents in autocratic states - efforts like these throw that baby out with the bathwater too.
I'd say if it's a choice between a dissident massacre in Iran or a few copyright violations in Amsterdam most people would view the latter as the lesser of two evils.
Since the technology under debate here is crucial to the former and merely incidental to the latter, there is absolutely NO grounds to support any action against it.