Okay, I'll concede that it may have unknown benefits - we know that there is no measurable negative side effects to removing it (and a massive positive in that it can save your life if you have appendicitus) but we don't know for sure that it may not have some unknown secondary effect that remains useful. One thing that becomes clear if you actually study what we know about evolution though is that a great deal of things are used for different purposes to what originally let the mutation survive - evolutions is an unpredictable (emergent) process that can and will take any available path (if only because animals will use any advantage they can to survive - those that don't fell out of the chain right at the start). I read an article a while ago about a piece of research that found that genetically the human crab lice which most slashdotters never need to fear getting are descended from the lice species that gorillas carry all over their bodies - only, there is a major catch. Human and Gorilla lines split up some 9 million years ago - but crablice only split up from gorilla lines some 5 million years ago. the best theory as to why suddenly 4 million years later the lice would split off into a species that attacks humans - and then only in one area, is that humans didn't evolve pubic hair before that point. The bare downy fur we got is not suitable for lice - and so we were basically immune to them - until hair that is quite ideal for lice infections returned to us - in a localized growth. Chances are those early infections came from sleeping in abandoned gorilla nests - and soon, we had our own species that spread primarily through sex. Which raises the very interesting question - if we didn't have pubic hair once we started thinning our fur, and getting them made us a target for a parasite we had previously become immune to - why would we get it later on ? Most likely explanation is that it serves another purpose which is a much more definite advantage. Doctors still argue about what the advantages and disadvantages of pubic hair are though (most viable theory to me is that it acts as a friction absorber preventing chafing of the pubic area during sex, thus allowing more frequent sex).
The article ended with the suggestion that this means the current fashion for shaved pubic areas may have a bona-fide health-benefit by making us significantly less likely get crab-lice infections - if indeed friction control is the primary purpose of having them in the first place, our other major evolutionary power (known as "the ability to create technology") provides a wonderful alternative in the form of KY-jelly:P
Anyway - enough semi-serious science and sex jokes (alliteration FTW) my point originally was simply that evolution isn't intelligent and it's not easy to predict, it doesn't have to make sense or make an easy-to-tell story. Unlike creationism... it has to describe what HAPPENED, there is no natural law that bends natural history to fit our sense of narrative. We can identify likely advantages or disadvantages that a given gene may have had at a given time - but we can't ever say "we evolved X because of Y" - because the real world just isn't that simple.
Logic fail yourself amigo. A handful of people who die from appendicitis before breeding > Zero people who get any benefit from having an appendix. It's a small evolutionary pressure indeed, but it's non-zero. Well it used to be, since we invented appendectomy's the evolutionary pressure in humans have effectively become zero since we can entirely prevent the negative aspect from impact on the likelihood of breeding.
"Assuming that everything genetic can be explained as having an evolutionary purpose" - A patently false assumption - humans have had no evolutionary purpose for an appendix for millions of years - but our DNA hasn't gotten rid of it - even though, prior to modern medicine it was in fact a detriment (it can get infections and kill you - dead people don't breed). Evolution is the PRIMARY driver of genetic factors but by no means the sole one. Often a genetic factor will survive or develop which is good for one use and be kept despite occasional disadvantages. One example is the sickle-shape of red-blood cells, this shape has certain anti-infection advantages which let it develop and survive despite the fact that it's not the ideal shape for their job (when it goes too far - you get sickle-cell anaemia).
Having said that, evolution remains the primary driver of genetic change and preservation and in this case there are numerous evolutionary advantages to having a small percentage of the tribe in a sleep-cycle directly out of synch with everyone else. You mentioned acting as sentinels - indeed, some being awake at night would make them more readily aware of threats to the tribe - and they could then wake up others up, regardless of whether it was a conscious plan or just coincidence - it added survival. Moreover the gene would have other obvious survival advantages. Ability to steal food and mates when the majority of the tribe is asleep for example. Reduced competition for resources since most of your fellow tribesmen aren't around to chase you off.
And you can bet your left testicle that Rupert Murdoch would try to make sharing a newspaper illegal if he thought he could get away with it. After-all - you may have just cost him a dollar-fifty.
Mind you... that metal undershirt of his probably helped too. Reducing the damage from getting hit and the risk of actually being wounded in the first place significantly increases your odds of having a second shot.
The "for all intensive purposes" clearly refers to the main point (the "whom" is in disuse) - but you still used the phrase "begs the question" to mean "leads one to ask the question/makes one wonder" - and that's *not* what begging the question *means*.
You do realize that your sig uses "begs the question" wrongly, don't you ? Rather hypocritical for a sig that's making a statement about grammar and vocabulary I thought...
No, the point us free software guys have made for years is that "better" isn't even worth ASKING until AFTER you asked "is it free" Non-free should never even be considered... in an ideal world, it won't EXIST - if you believe that proprietary software is fundamentally harmful to society, individual freedom and human rights (as we do, and make some persuasive arguments to support) then non-free software doesn't get considered. No matter *how* technically good it is, non-free is always worse than free. A free program that does 1% of the features of a non-free one is still better because (to use a line from the oath doctors take): first, do no harm.
That is the argument you keep misunderstanding. This is why free distributions like kongoni, gnewsense, blag and all the others do not include non-free apps in our repositories, use a kernel that doesn't include, and in fact cannot even load, non-free firmware and refuse to help people who want to install non-free programs with our forums - we will however, happily suggest the best free alternatives for them.
For 20 years now, I've heard everyone talk of how free software will never be big, will always be some little side project for eccentric hippies, and each of those years, I've seen it get bigger, and stronger - seen people get rich off it - seen government and corporate uptake of it... basically, we're winning. We'd be stupid if we let the smartphone revolution undo all our hard work. Indeed writing code is one powerful way to combat it, it's what got us here. We didn't lobby governments to deny copyright on software, or demand source-availability - we wrote free replacements, piece by piece - and now, we have fully free operating systems on which many, many people are able to do everything they need to do without ever using a non-free program - and each day, more people get added to the list who "has everything they need with freedom", heck, these days it's even becoming possible to do this on machines where all the hardware specs and the BIOS is free as well ! But it was never *all* we did. we also did advocacy, gave lectures and warnings and studied laws and licenses - the article, rightfully, calls for us to remember these new platforms in that part of our efforts, platforms we currently are not supporting well.
Hah, too easy. REAL programmers hold the drive up in the air and wait until they fork into that universe where cosmic rays hit the platters just right to produce a code that does what is needed. All you need is chaos theory, quantum mechanics and a near infinite deadline.
>You do know that the "high power" mind of Sir Conan Doyle believed wholeheartedly in fairies? "History concurs", my ass!
That's a bit of a bad juxtaposition. Conan Doyle only started believing in mysticism in his old age, after the death of his wife - and it is widely believed that his "conversion" was a reaction to severe depression and PTSD. That is a very different time in his life compared to the man who practically invented the idea of using science to solve crimes. Just reread chapter one of "A study in scarlet" sometime and remember that this was written several decades before the first forensic department opened it's doors, not to mention that his character's habit of deducing details about people from their appearance and mannerisms has a striking parallel to modern criminal profiling.
So yes, Conan Doyle was a highly intelligent and scientifically minded person, who also happened to be a skillfull and entertaining author - sounds like a pretty high-powered mind to me. That he abandoned this out of a desperate longing for dead person, and with it a desperate desire to believe that there was some way to contact her does not change this. Such things happen to the best. Newton became a mystic in his older years too - and dedicated much of his last years to the study of alchemy, at a time when the rest of the world were already quite busy abandoning it. The man who set us on the route to understanding the universe as obeying laws which can be explained in maths more than anybody else, genuinely believed that the combination of elements can be affected by spirits.
Houdini, after a similar personal loss, went to see a "psychic". Being an expert illusionist, he recognized her fraud quite easily and in anger spent the greater part of his remaining life on an unprofitable and unpopular quest to find and expose fraudulent spiritualists. In this case, his disillusionment ripped him towards a new path of logic, but he only got on it because he was about to abandon it first.
In short, the philosopause happens - it does not negate the work done in a man's life that, being only human, old age can weaken old resolves.
It is fundamentally contradictory to be both an evolutionist AND a libertarian. Darwin's most cited source, the research on which he built his own research was the theory of Maltus. . Maltus showed that the human population grows exponentially, while resources like food grow linearly. Darwin expanded this to all species, and stated this as the source of scarcity, which creates competition - without which, evolution cannot happen.
But Maltus implies that poverty is almost NEVER the result of "laziness", "providence" or the influence of a deity. Poverty happens because human population grows faster than our food supply (and other resources). This can change now - we have technology that didn't exist in Maltus' time, birth control. However it's an easily checkable fact that family planning only happens above a certain education threshold even now. So free education is a form of enlightened self-interest. More educated people means less people struggling for resources that will never be enough.
In the meantime though - the simple fact is, poor people are poor because the maths don't work, and the vast majority of them can never be anything else. We HAVE to take care of each other, and accept that the poverty around us deserves pity, as most of the people suffering it, truly have no other option. That is the core result of Maltus' theory - and if you reject Maltus, you cannot hold Darwin as the one is an extension of the other.
The claim that "any government powerful enough to give you what you want, is powerful enough to take everything away" begs the question (in the proper sense of the phrase). It assumes that the state, and legislature and power-holding government must always be the same entity. Why ? Those branches of government that provide services should be maximally enlarged. Those that wield power, kept as small as possible.
And you worry about having to pay some taxes ? In Brazil, tax rate is a flat 20%. And you get 100% of it back at the end of the year. The government takes the money, invests it, and spends next years budget out of the earnings - you get all your taxes back, the only loss is a bit of earnings and inflation. Since there is no way you alone could have earned on your taxes, what can be earned by the combined taxes of everyone - this is the most efficient allocation of the resource. With that, the government can afford, among other things, to provide free medical care to all. And I've been in their hospitals, the state medical in Brazil is of HIGHER quality than the private medical care in South Africa. Preventative care like oxygen tank time for people with a viral infection is standard practice, not something that only happens if you're rich enough to pay for it (and your insurance company doesn't weasel out of their obligations).
All this, for effectively, ZERO tax. Sure, it's 20% monthly, but it's zero yearly. Maltus doesn't mean it's impossible to relieve poverty, it means we cannot blame it on the poor - if poverty is caused by lack of resources, then the answer is to allocate resources more efficiently, which opens up the door to a loophole in Maltus' theory. It assumes the terminal stupidity of our species. Getting more people educated, can reduce stupidity (specifically in family planning) and change the maths.
I was constrasting it with the "download software from random website" approach on Windows. I know repositories work over the internet, and everybody else who read it understood what I meant.
Erm the problem with a certain company from us free-software types is not with the company, it's software or it's sources of information, it's with the company's LICENSING. We say the *same* thing about apple, and about adobe and about every other proprietary program regardless of the source.
The bad feel that the open-source crowd has toward microsoft is granted, a much more blurry line, but you can't pretend the company hasn't deserved it. One good deed does not make up for a million bad deeds.
Now, aside from that - I never actually said what you say I said... in our world - there is no *official* sources of information. Okay, some Linux systems are made by companies, they aren't "more linux" or "more official" than those made (like mine) by groups of volunteers. All I said was, if you come to the kongoni forums and post a question - you can be sure that the reply will be from somebody who knows kongoni, and cares about and wants to make your transition as painless as possible. You can find such information elsewhere, linuxquestions is a very good resource and largely devoid of problem replies too. Putting a link to our forum on the desktop is not coercion - it's a valuable resource for somebody who gets stuck.
Honestly, I fail to see your analogy in fact... nothing like this exists in the windows world, and how is users-helping-users in any way like anything microsoft does ? All I said, was that we should aim to keep those locations where we can moderate the replies, and where the people who care about these projects are active easy to find, so that users do not find malicious misinformation BEFORE they find us.
The number one purpose lugs serve is as teachers - monthly meetings where people share expertise. Sadly, they are more and more growing into some kind of professionals-association in many areas, with most of their focus on sysadmin skills, programming skill etc. and not nearly enough on "how to make an awesome home movie in GNU/Linux" kind of skills.
I agree - this is going to become a problem. It never used to be, howtos were reliable documentation because we were a small community and the people reading them would have at least a basic understanding of what you're doing - howtos were there to get details.
Nowadays... this is going to become an issue. The answer is probably to use the same approach we took with repo's. Make the proper distro forums clearly and prominently available to the user so he finds them first, rather than googling. Lead them to the sources of information that the good guys control, and hope to answer them there with sufficient frequency that there is no point in looking at random blogposts.
I doubt that's a comprehensive answer, but it would at least mitigate things. The other is to ensure that the social aspect of FOSS comes with the disk I guess, when you hand out that ubuntu disk - make sure you hand out details on your local LUG. Get the newbs involved in the community around them, make sure that the person they ask first is somebody they can (probably) trust.
It's all things we can mitigate but I agree, it won't remove the problem, it can - at best- keep the potential targets few enough to reduce the attractiveness of this vector (and I don't think we're nearly good enough at this stage to even do that, I just think we could become so). Basically - the problem you point out is a social one, social problems require social solutions - and those are never 100%.
I didn't say it *never* happens, I said it's very rare and much harder than cracking individual's machines. It can happen, it has happened, and even then it didn't put the end-users at risk because the distributions instantly shut down the boxes did an audit and released them again only when they were checked - and had the keys replaced to ensure none of the packages that were on at the time of the break-in could install anymore.
There is one crucial difference that really does make linux MUCH more secure, and oddly, it's the one thing nobody mentions when discussing it.
Linux users (hardly ever) download and install software from the internet. We download and install packages from repositories.
A huge amount of Linux security comes from the fact that we've taken the task of identifying malware from the real thing, and given it to trained professionals rather than Joe Sixpack. The average user simply cannot tell the difference between a useful piece of freeware and a bugridden-malware-spreading piece of add-ware.
The people who populate distribution repositories generally can. Then we add other layers on top - like using digital signatures so the client machine can be sure the package you asked it to fetch is in fact the package that got downloaded (thus protecting against somebody replacing a package with a malware program in the same filename on a mirror site) etc. etc.
That grounds up linux is probably a more secure design than windows I don't doubt, I also know that it's far from being anything like as secure a design as we imagine- especially as it moves into the desktop realm. But - and this is a big but, since the easiest way to install anything on linux remains using your distro's provided tools to install from your distro's repositories (for the ubuntu crowd... I mean "using synaptic") - the risk of malware infection is kept remarkably low - not because linux is so secure, but because infecting the repo's will be very hard indeed and the software in those repos are checked by people who are *trained* in computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'll concede that it may have unknown benefits - we know that there is no measurable negative side effects to removing it (and a massive positive in that it can save your life if you have appendicitus) but we don't know for sure that it may not have some unknown secondary effect that remains useful.
One thing that becomes clear if you actually study what we know about evolution though is that a great deal of things are used for different purposes to what originally let the mutation survive - evolutions is an unpredictable (emergent) process that can and will take any available path (if only because animals will use any advantage they can to survive - those that don't fell out of the chain right at the start).
I read an article a while ago about a piece of research that found that genetically the human crab lice which most slashdotters never need to fear getting are descended from the lice species that gorillas carry all over their bodies - only, there is a major catch. Human and Gorilla lines split up some 9 million years ago - but crablice only split up from gorilla lines some 5 million years ago. the best theory as to why suddenly 4 million years later the lice would split off into a species that attacks humans - and then only in one area, is that humans didn't evolve pubic hair before that point. The bare downy fur we got is not suitable for lice - and so we were basically immune to them - until hair that is quite ideal for lice infections returned to us - in a localized growth. Chances are those early infections came from sleeping in abandoned gorilla nests - and soon, we had our own species that spread primarily through sex.
Which raises the very interesting question - if we didn't have pubic hair once we started thinning our fur, and getting them made us a target for a parasite we had previously become immune to - why would we get it later on ? Most likely explanation is that it serves another purpose which is a much more definite advantage. Doctors still argue about what the advantages and disadvantages of pubic hair are though (most viable theory to me is that it acts as a friction absorber preventing chafing of the pubic area during sex, thus allowing more frequent sex).
The article ended with the suggestion that this means the current fashion for shaved pubic areas may have a bona-fide health-benefit by making us significantly less likely get crab-lice infections - if indeed friction control is the primary purpose of having them in the first place, our other major evolutionary power (known as "the ability to create technology") provides a wonderful alternative in the form of KY-jelly :P
Anyway - enough semi-serious science and sex jokes (alliteration FTW) my point originally was simply that evolution isn't intelligent and it's not easy to predict, it doesn't have to make sense or make an easy-to-tell story. Unlike creationism ... it has to describe what HAPPENED, there is no natural law that bends natural history to fit our sense of narrative. We can identify likely advantages or disadvantages that a given gene may have had at a given time - but we can't ever say "we evolved X because of Y" - because the real world just isn't that simple.
Logic fail yourself amigo. A handful of people who die from appendicitis before breeding > Zero people who get any benefit from having an appendix.
It's a small evolutionary pressure indeed, but it's non-zero. Well it used to be, since we invented appendectomy's the evolutionary pressure in humans have effectively become zero since we can entirely prevent the negative aspect from impact on the likelihood of breeding.
"Assuming that everything genetic can be explained as having an evolutionary purpose"
- A patently false assumption - humans have had no evolutionary purpose for an appendix for millions of years - but our DNA hasn't gotten rid of it - even though, prior to modern medicine it was in fact a detriment (it can get infections and kill you - dead people don't breed). Evolution is the PRIMARY driver of genetic factors but by no means the sole one. Often a genetic factor will survive or develop which is good for one use and be kept despite occasional disadvantages. One example is the sickle-shape of red-blood cells, this shape has certain anti-infection advantages which let it develop and survive despite the fact that it's not the ideal shape for their job (when it goes too far - you get sickle-cell anaemia).
Having said that, evolution remains the primary driver of genetic change and preservation and in this case there are numerous evolutionary advantages to having a small percentage of the tribe in a sleep-cycle directly out of synch with everyone else. You mentioned acting as sentinels - indeed, some being awake at night would make them more readily aware of threats to the tribe - and they could then wake up others up, regardless of whether it was a conscious plan or just coincidence - it added survival.
Moreover the gene would have other obvious survival advantages. Ability to steal food and mates when the majority of the tribe is asleep for example. Reduced competition for resources since most of your fellow tribesmen aren't around to chase you off.
questioning one of the tenents of open-source...
Well he would, wouldn't he ... how is this news ?
And you can bet your left testicle that Rupert Murdoch would try to make sharing a newspaper illegal if he thought he could get away with it. After-all - you may have just cost him a dollar-fifty.
Mind you... that metal undershirt of his probably helped too. Reducing the damage from getting hit and the risk of actually being wounded in the first place significantly increases your odds of having a second shot.
Nope, be fully afraid they'll create half a black-hole. But since 50% of black-hole mass won't actually be a black-hole, we'll probably survive.
I think that's why his plan wasn't actually *made* law ? Even as Cher (working to finish her deceased husbands term) actively tried to make it so.
Personally, I think Sonny Bono may have had a point: it probably *is* wrong to Cher music.
Jack Valenti during his MPAA reign actually proposed working around the "limited" line by making it "forever minus one day".
Mod parent up, I was just on my way to come post the same thing.
The "for all intensive purposes" clearly refers to the main point (the "whom" is in disuse) - but you still used the phrase "begs the question" to mean "leads one to ask the question/makes one wonder" - and that's *not* what begging the question *means*.
You do realize that your sig uses "begs the question" wrongly, don't you ?
Rather hypocritical for a sig that's making a statement about grammar and vocabulary I thought...
We're confident we'll fork into the right universe any day now ! :P
No, the point us free software guys have made for years is that "better" isn't even worth ASKING until AFTER you asked "is it free"
Non-free should never even be considered... in an ideal world, it won't EXIST - if you believe that proprietary software is fundamentally harmful to society, individual freedom and human rights (as we do, and make some persuasive arguments to support) then non-free software doesn't get considered. No matter *how* technically good it is, non-free is always worse than free. A free program that does 1% of the features of a non-free one is still better because (to use a line from the oath doctors take): first, do no harm.
That is the argument you keep misunderstanding. This is why free distributions like kongoni, gnewsense, blag and all the others do not include non-free apps in our repositories, use a kernel that doesn't include, and in fact cannot even load, non-free firmware and refuse to help people who want to install non-free programs with our forums - we will however, happily suggest the best free alternatives for them.
For 20 years now, I've heard everyone talk of how free software will never be big, will always be some little side project for eccentric hippies, and each of those years, I've seen it get bigger, and stronger - seen people get rich off it - seen government and corporate uptake of it... basically, we're winning. We'd be stupid if we let the smartphone revolution undo all our hard work. Indeed writing code is one powerful way to combat it, it's what got us here. We didn't lobby governments to deny copyright on software, or demand source-availability - we wrote free replacements, piece by piece - and now, we have fully free operating systems on which many, many people are able to do everything they need to do without ever using a non-free program - and each day, more people get added to the list who "has everything they need with freedom", heck, these days it's even becoming possible to do this on machines where all the hardware specs and the BIOS is free as well ! But it was never *all* we did. we also did advocacy, gave lectures and warnings and studied laws and licenses - the article, rightfully, calls for us to remember these new platforms in that part of our efforts, platforms we currently are not supporting well.
Hah, too easy.
REAL programmers hold the drive up in the air and wait until they fork into that universe where cosmic rays hit the platters just right to produce a code that does what is needed. All you need is chaos theory, quantum mechanics and a near infinite deadline.
>You do know that the "high power" mind of Sir Conan Doyle believed wholeheartedly in fairies? "History concurs", my ass!
That's a bit of a bad juxtaposition. Conan Doyle only started believing in mysticism in his old age, after the death of his wife - and it is widely believed that his "conversion" was a reaction to severe depression and PTSD.
That is a very different time in his life compared to the man who practically invented the idea of using science to solve crimes. Just reread chapter one of "A study in scarlet" sometime and remember that this was written several decades before the first forensic department opened it's doors, not to mention that his character's habit of deducing details about people from their appearance and mannerisms has a striking parallel to modern criminal profiling.
So yes, Conan Doyle was a highly intelligent and scientifically minded person, who also happened to be a skillfull and entertaining author - sounds like a pretty high-powered mind to me. That he abandoned this out of a desperate longing for dead person, and with it a desperate desire to believe that there was some way to contact her does not change this. Such things happen to the best.
Newton became a mystic in his older years too - and dedicated much of his last years to the study of alchemy, at a time when the rest of the world were already quite busy abandoning it. The man who set us on the route to understanding the universe as obeying laws which can be explained in maths more than anybody else, genuinely believed that the combination of elements can be affected by spirits.
Houdini, after a similar personal loss, went to see a "psychic". Being an expert illusionist, he recognized her fraud quite easily and in anger spent the greater part of his remaining life on an unprofitable and unpopular quest to find and expose fraudulent spiritualists. In this case, his disillusionment ripped him towards a new path of logic, but he only got on it because he was about to abandon it first.
In short, the philosopause happens - it does not negate the work done in a man's life that, being only human, old age can weaken old resolves.
"All your Pope are belong to us ?" - The Vatican.
Nope, but until 3 days ago I was married to a Brazilian. That was how she explained it to me.
It is fundamentally contradictory to be both an evolutionist AND a libertarian.
Darwin's most cited source, the research on which he built his own research was the theory of Maltus. . Maltus showed that the human population grows exponentially, while resources like food grow linearly. Darwin expanded this to all species, and stated this as the source of scarcity, which creates competition - without which, evolution cannot happen.
But Maltus implies that poverty is almost NEVER the result of "laziness", "providence" or the influence of a deity. Poverty happens because human population grows faster than our food supply (and other resources). This can change now - we have technology that didn't exist in Maltus' time, birth control. However it's an easily checkable fact that family planning only happens above a certain education threshold even now.
So free education is a form of enlightened self-interest. More educated people means less people struggling for resources that will never be enough.
In the meantime though - the simple fact is, poor people are poor because the maths don't work, and the vast majority of them can never be anything else. We HAVE to take care of each other, and accept that the poverty around us deserves pity, as most of the people suffering it, truly have no other option.
That is the core result of Maltus' theory - and if you reject Maltus, you cannot hold Darwin as the one is an extension of the other.
The claim that "any government powerful enough to give you what you want, is powerful enough to take everything away" begs the question (in the proper sense of the phrase). It assumes that the state, and legislature and power-holding government must always be the same entity. Why ? Those branches of government that provide services should be maximally enlarged. Those that wield power, kept as small as possible.
And you worry about having to pay some taxes ? In Brazil, tax rate is a flat 20%. And you get 100% of it back at the end of the year. The government takes the money, invests it, and spends next years budget out of the earnings - you get all your taxes back, the only loss is a bit of earnings and inflation. Since there is no way you alone could have earned on your taxes, what can be earned by the combined taxes of everyone - this is the most efficient allocation of the resource.
With that, the government can afford, among other things, to provide free medical care to all. And I've been in their hospitals, the state medical in Brazil is of HIGHER quality than the private medical care in South Africa. Preventative care like oxygen tank time for people with a viral infection is standard practice, not something that only happens if you're rich enough to pay for it (and your insurance company doesn't weasel out of their obligations).
All this, for effectively, ZERO tax. Sure, it's 20% monthly, but it's zero yearly.
Maltus doesn't mean it's impossible to relieve poverty, it means we cannot blame it on the poor - if poverty is caused by lack of resources, then the answer is to allocate resources more efficiently, which opens up the door to a loophole in Maltus' theory. It assumes the terminal stupidity of our species. Getting more people educated, can reduce stupidity (specifically in family planning) and change the maths.
I was constrasting it with the "download software from random website" approach on Windows. I know repositories work over the internet, and everybody else who read it understood what I meant.
Erm the problem with a certain company from us free-software types is not with the company, it's software or it's sources of information, it's with the company's LICENSING. We say the *same* thing about apple, and about adobe and about every other proprietary program regardless of the source.
The bad feel that the open-source crowd has toward microsoft is granted, a much more blurry line, but you can't pretend the company hasn't deserved it. One good deed does not make up for a million bad deeds.
Now, aside from that - I never actually said what you say I said... in our world - there is no *official* sources of information. Okay, some Linux systems are made by companies, they aren't "more linux" or "more official" than those made (like mine) by groups of volunteers. All I said was, if you come to the kongoni forums and post a question - you can be sure that the reply will be from somebody who knows kongoni, and cares about and wants to make your transition as painless as possible.
You can find such information elsewhere, linuxquestions is a very good resource and largely devoid of problem replies too. Putting a link to our forum on the desktop is not coercion - it's a valuable resource for somebody who gets stuck.
Honestly, I fail to see your analogy in fact... nothing like this exists in the windows world, and how is users-helping-users in any way like anything microsoft does ? All I said, was that we should aim to keep those locations where we can moderate the replies, and where the people who care about these projects are active easy to find, so that users do not find malicious misinformation BEFORE they find us.
Sorry, there is just no comparison.
The number one purpose lugs serve is as teachers - monthly meetings where people share expertise. Sadly, they are more and more growing into some kind of professionals-association in many areas, with most of their focus on sysadmin skills, programming skill etc. and not nearly enough on "how to make an awesome home movie in GNU/Linux" kind of skills.
I agree - this is going to become a problem. It never used to be, howtos were reliable documentation because we were a small community and the people reading them would have at least a basic understanding of what you're doing - howtos were there to get details.
Nowadays... this is going to become an issue. The answer is probably to use the same approach we took with repo's. Make the proper distro forums clearly and prominently available to the user so he finds them first, rather than googling. Lead them to the sources of information that the good guys control, and hope to answer them there with sufficient frequency that there is no point in looking at random blogposts.
I doubt that's a comprehensive answer, but it would at least mitigate things. The other is to ensure that the social aspect of FOSS comes with the disk I guess, when you hand out that ubuntu disk - make sure you hand out details on your local LUG. Get the newbs involved in the community around them, make sure that the person they ask first is somebody they can (probably) trust.
It's all things we can mitigate but I agree, it won't remove the problem, it can - at best- keep the potential targets few enough to reduce the attractiveness of this vector (and I don't think we're nearly good enough at this stage to even do that, I just think we could become so).
Basically - the problem you point out is a social one, social problems require social solutions - and those are never 100%.
I didn't say it *never* happens, I said it's very rare and much harder than cracking individual's machines.
It can happen, it has happened, and even then it didn't put the end-users at risk because the distributions instantly shut down the boxes did an audit and released them again only when they were checked - and had the keys replaced to ensure none of the packages that were on at the time of the break-in could install anymore.
There is one crucial difference that really does make linux MUCH more secure, and oddly, it's the one thing nobody mentions when discussing it.
Linux users (hardly ever) download and install software from the internet. We download and install packages from repositories.
A huge amount of Linux security comes from the fact that we've taken the task of identifying malware from the real thing, and given it to trained professionals rather than Joe Sixpack. The average user simply cannot tell the difference between a useful piece of freeware and a bugridden-malware-spreading piece of add-ware.
The people who populate distribution repositories generally can. Then we add other layers on top - like using digital signatures so the client machine can be sure the package you asked it to fetch is in fact the package that got downloaded (thus protecting against somebody replacing a package with a malware program in the same filename on a mirror site) etc. etc.
That grounds up linux is probably a more secure design than windows I don't doubt, I also know that it's far from being anything like as secure a design as we imagine- especially as it moves into the desktop realm. But - and this is a big but, since the easiest way to install anything on linux remains using your distro's provided tools to install from your distro's repositories (for the ubuntu crowd... I mean "using synaptic") - the risk of malware infection is kept remarkably low - not because linux is so secure, but because infecting the repo's will be very hard indeed and the software in those repos are checked by people who are *trained* in computers.