RMS's utopia: Academic environment, programmers share all their code, money "just comes from someplace"; usually a grant or something. The source of the money is usually "old money" from the same elitists who run the Democratic Party.
My utopia: 17 year old kid submits simple program to a magazine. Maybe he gets to keep copyright, maybe he doesn't. He's already written some other stuff, which the magazine mentions or maybe even reviews. Kid starts selling the stuff out of his basement and becomes wealthier than most adults twice his age will ever be. Many programs are released; the virtue of competition is upheld. The source of the money is satsified customers.
The Bill Gates utopia: Very similar to my utopia, except that it keeps expanding until it threatens the first utopia. The "old money" sees that meritocracy is replacing monarchy and feels threatened. The "revolutionaries" of the RMS utopia are fashioned as a weapon against the BG utopia, and the shareware/small developer utopia (which threatens to give birth to another BG). Once able to ignore Washington lobbying, cocktail parties, and other nerd-hostile social venues, BG and company are now forced to compete on the same cocktail-party circuit as the "old money" elitists. In fact, he even feels compelled to engage in philanthropy too, but horror of horrors, he just makes the "old money" feel even worse by actually doing useful philantrhopy. For example, helping AIDS and malaria victims in Africa as opposed to, oh... for example... fighting to make sure the teacher's unions and Public School monopoly keep their hold on power in America.
Plainly, the elites must do something to make sure that a true nerd like Bill Gates never gate-crashes the realms of the truly wealthy ever again. The polarization of the intellectual property compromise fits that purpose.
Both the GPL and the USPTO serve the elite's purpose. GPL acts as a barrier to entry by forcing small developers to exceed the capabilities of Free Software before they can release a product. The USPTO acts as a barrier by strewing "land mine" patents in the path of software developers.
Now, Slashdot hates the USPTO and runaway IP laws, but they've yet to catch on to the real purpose of the GPL. Both of them are anti-competitive, and tend to hurt the "garage" in which so many truly great ideas were born.
Thank-you Brett, for being one of the voices that have stood against the rising tide of power-elite oppression over the years. I'd like to shake your hand some day.
Please remain seated until federal agents have come to a complete stop and John Ashcroft has arrived at your domicile.
I can't help but be reminded of the MIT bit about how Santa Clause and his reindeer would be blasted into flaming hypersonic chunks if they actually tried to visit every house.
Usually this means they need to go get some job skills...
Ummm... no. You might think a miner or a machine tender is "unskilled" but if people who fill these positions are being exploited, training them out is not the answer for 2 reasons I can think of quickly:
1. It may not be possible to train them.
2. Even if you do train out the current workers, the jobs will just be filled by somebody else who will still be exploited.
Training is sometimes an appropriate answer for job loss which is entirely different from worker exploitation.
If capitalism is only an effect of liberty, how can they come into conflict?
Dad, can I have the car keys?
How can you equate the minimum wage with liberty.
If wages are too low, then people are more likely to get trapped in situations where they actually lose money just by working. There used to be such things as debtor's prisons, and debt to the company store. Under such a system, it's possible for people to become slaves just because the "free market" doesn't value their labor enough to cover their cost of living, or because a company can finagle them into debt. Minimum wage is just part of the system that prevents that from happening.
I don't see how that qualifies as a liberty, unless you believe that liberty = social justice. In which case you are not really a libertarian. You would be further left
No Leftist am I! In fact, that phrase "social justice" really grates on me. I've only voted D once in my entire life. R most of the time, and I a few times.
I think it was Ayn Rand who drew attention to the importance of deciding what a "unit" of society is. Under what many call "capitalism" it has been shown that liberty tends to acrue to corporations--corporations become the defacto unit of society. Individuals are an obvious choice as the unit, but we find that if corporations don't exist at all then things are not quite so convenient. So, we find that we have to balance collective needs vs. individual needs. This doesn't just happen between corporations and individuals either. It happens between different levels of government and organizations.
If you think about this, you might have less trouble seeing why an "independant Republican" thinks minimum wage is a good idea. This is one of those times when I really hate the whole idea of Left/Right R/D etc. Those are very broad brushes, and not useful here at all.
If you don't want to think about it... just trust me... there's nothing paradoxical about my stand... because there is no Left vs. Right here. That whole paradigm falls apart at some point.
I get tired of people who talk about the Cold War as "defending capitalism" and who refer to the US as a "capitalist country".
Capitalism is at best a secondary player to the real principle that underlies the founding of the Republic: Liberty.
Now, because we have liberty, capitalism tends to arise within that framework, but it's an effect, not a cause in any sense of that word.
When liberty comes into conflict with capitalism (and it often does) it's our moral duty to defer to liberty. For example, that means minimum wage (because 19th century robber barons created virtual slaves without it). A pure capitalist system with no intervention from the government would not have a minimum wage, but it would not uphold liberty. Liberty should always trump capitalism when they come into conflict.
So. I guess you could also say that Libertarianism!=Liberty and Libertarianism!=Freedom as long as they are so abhorent of government intervention that they refuse to employ it in the defense of liberty even when it can be plainly seen that such action is required.
...visiting in a nursing home was assisting one of the elderly residents with her wheelchair so she could get back inside--after smoking a cigarette.
She wasn't the only one either. There was one man in there who could actually walk out to take his smoke. Most people there could not walk at all.
Of course these are the exceptions, not the rule. I think perhaps there are a few people who are geneticly resistant to lung cancer. They can smoke all they want. They won't get cancer.
I've also heard that nicotine can actually help with ADHD. Perhaps, for a very small segment of society, tobacco could be safely "prescribed" as a beneficial medication.
Of course, any scientific proof of such a theory is likely to be met with the same sort of hesitancy that very solid evidence for the benefits of alcohol are currently being met. This is partially because it would only apply to a small number of people, and partially because it goes against the medical orthodoxy.
So. If gran ma smoked a pack a day, drank wisky, and lived to be 110, maybe you shouldn't feel so guilty about smoking and drinking; but don't come crying to me if it turns out you didn't get the lucky gene.
Of course, someday we may find such a gene, which opens a whole new kettle of fish...
The monitoring "goes too far" when it causes problems. Obviously that goes for anything. Of course that's obvious.
Obviously, someone is going to try and top me with something even more obvious.
Obviously, many people won't care to try and top me, or will perceive my prediction that someone is going to try and top me as egotistical and self centered.
Obviously, these are the same twits who will find some gramatical error in this post and correct it.
It's all so obvious, I don't know why I even bothered to post this.
I'd have to go back to calling brokers on the phone, and writing checks, licking stamps, and sending things through the mail. I'd have to sign up at the library if there was something that I had to get from the 'net. That's assuming the library can stand the liability. If they can't, I'd probably be limited to the library's proprietary DBs on their local LAN.
In other words, if you want to kill the 'net, just turn my PC into a slot machine that has unlimited negative payout odds.
This sounds like another example of "letting the terrorists win". It would turn the 'net into a "fascist police state".
Oh... unless there is an OS that is gauranteed secure through every revision, which we all know there can't be.
Now, if they capped the fine it might be reasonable. What would I do? Buy expensive AV software? No. I'd buy insurance against the fine and continue to exercise good practices (e.g., not using OE for mail, not downloading crap software that runs in my taskbar, etc.) Does anybody sell "virus" insurance?
Of course as others have pointed out, there is no pricing info; but let's assume for a minute that the things are priced the same or more than a regular PC.
Why buy one?
Because these things aren't aimed at J. Random Linux Hacker, or even Joe Blow Windows user. They're aimed at corporations who want to keep people locked down. Just try keeping a PC made from standard parts totally locked down. I've even seen standard PCs kludged with locks and keys, which people just ended up jimmying open so they could install a video card they could use to play games when the boss wasn't looking!
With just a stupid thin client on your desk, you have to stay focused on the budget spreadsheet, or the timeline for ordering new timeline forms, or TPS reports, or whatever it is that's infinitely more boring than what a standard PC can offer.
In other words, it's more likely to be secure by design right from the start.
Also, there are fewer players in this space. Basic economics tells us that when there is less competition, prices remain high.
Just to disclose, I do have some stock in Transmeta, and it's doing really well today.
Would I buy such a device? Of course not. I have no need for it. I'm not a corporation that loses $50/employee/day in lost productivity due to PC maintenance and games.
Pollack,Van Gogh Seurat,Ummm... not sure but google for "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and I could get it Shakespeare Faulkner most likely Somebody funded by the NEA in the past 20 years Ummm... Madonna?:) Andy Warhol ??? Tolkein Salmon Rushdie (rather apt name eh?) I know and it's on the tip of my tongue... he did the Reichstag and some carribean islands... oh got it: Christo. Can't remember the first name, if any. Spielburg ??? Jimi Hendrix ??? Buster Keaton? Janis Joplin.
That was a fun quiz, and as you can tell, I didn't cheat.
Ummm... aren't you missing the rather obvious point that I've been using what you think is an awful mouse for 7 or 8 years, and I don't have any complaints about it?
If I used a "better input device" my wrist would probably lock up inside of two weeks.:)
In other words, if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Now, at my last job I did start to get some wrist strain (this was a company mouse and a company keyboard I was using). There was one of those curvy Microsoft keyboards laying around so I gave it a try. It helped a lot.
I don't do as much keyboarding now as I did then.
The older the mouse, the more force required to move it around, and the more force required to click the buttons
So. Are you pumped from using the mouse?
Sorry. I just had to poke fun a little.
I think some people are prone to problems, and some aren't. You remind me of those people who get something like hypertension or diabetes, and then they start telling other people to cut back on salt and sugar, even when those people are consuming normal ammounts.
Here in the DC metro area, you can ride carpool lanes with a single occupant in a hybrid. There's no telling how long this will last. I suspect that eventually too many people will buy their way into the carpool lanes, but in the meantime the savings in time alone are worth it. Even without that advantage though I'd buy it. In this area we spend way too much time going
Any hybrid drivers in the DC area care to comment? How much time does it spend as a pure electric during a stop-n-go commute?
...is a plain-Jane logitech two-button. The formerly textured plastic on the left side is now worn shiny! Otherwise it works fine. This mouse is about 7 years old. Before Windows95, I either used DOS or didn't have a PC, so the mouse that came with my Win95 system was the first, and it got passed on to the next two systems, which I built myself. I'm planning to use it with a 4th system RSN.
What we need is software that grabs essays off the internet and runs them through the grading software and the cheating detection software, thus gauranteeing an 'A'.
Then we can truly achieve the goal of "knowledge passing from lecturer to paper without passing through any brains".
The only problem is that the machines might achieve intelligence. That must be avoided at all costs. To that end, all students and professors will be equipped with rifles or pistols to take out the machines if necessary. Potential students will be asked to specify weapons preference on their applications.
Now, the shuttle tried to reuse and the expense of reduction and recycling. Maybe this is another "pick any two" scenario... maybe not.
At any rate, it would be interesting to see the situation analyzed in terms of an optimal balance between these 3 environmental goals.
By not having astronauts on every mission, you REDUCE resources used. When you need to lanuch astronauts, you could continue to REUSE spacecraft. Heck, maybe now we will see some truly exciting reusable spacecraft based on public-private partnerships. Beefed-up X-prize winner, perhaps? Anybody remember the sadly canceled Dynasoar program, or for that matter the X-15?
Those were all exciting, and potentially cost-effective techniques for putting people into space, but the all-in-wonder Space Shuttle sucked away resources that could have been used to develop them.
If they go capsule, what says you have to throw away the whole capsule anyway? I mean, obviously you melt down and RECYCLE the metalic parts of the capsule, but control panels and other complex and costly components within the capsule could be flown on many missions, and should be REUSED.
How do you prevent one of your friends from bringing along one of the artist's CDs and playing it over and over again in the car? By the time you get to the concert, you're sick of hearing them.
Why do people do that?
And no, "get new friends" is not an option. It took way too long to get friends in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe you're looking for stupid Slashdot jokes when a rock from space could come down and hit us any mi
NO CARRIER
RMS's utopia: Academic environment, programmers share all their code, money "just comes from someplace"; usually a grant or something. The source of the money is usually "old money" from the same elitists who run the Democratic Party.
My utopia: 17 year old kid submits simple program to a magazine. Maybe he gets to keep copyright, maybe he doesn't. He's already written some other stuff, which the magazine mentions or maybe even reviews. Kid starts selling the stuff out of his basement and becomes wealthier than most adults twice his age will ever be. Many programs are released; the virtue of competition is upheld. The source of the money is satsified customers.
The Bill Gates utopia: Very similar to my utopia, except that it keeps expanding until it threatens the first utopia. The "old money" sees that meritocracy is replacing monarchy and feels threatened. The "revolutionaries" of the RMS utopia are fashioned as a weapon against the BG utopia, and the shareware/small developer utopia (which threatens to give birth to another BG). Once able to ignore Washington lobbying, cocktail parties, and other nerd-hostile social venues, BG and company are now forced to compete on the same cocktail-party circuit as the "old money" elitists. In fact, he even feels compelled to engage in philanthropy too, but horror of horrors, he just makes the "old money" feel even worse by actually doing useful philantrhopy. For example, helping AIDS and malaria victims in Africa as opposed to, oh... for example... fighting to make sure the teacher's unions and Public School monopoly keep their hold on power in America.
Plainly, the elites must do something to make sure that a true nerd like Bill Gates never gate-crashes the realms of the truly wealthy ever again. The polarization of the intellectual property compromise fits that purpose.
Both the GPL and the USPTO serve the elite's purpose. GPL acts as a barrier to entry by forcing small developers to exceed the capabilities of Free Software before they can release a product. The USPTO acts as a barrier by strewing "land mine" patents in the path of software developers.
Now, Slashdot hates the USPTO and runaway IP laws, but they've yet to catch on to the real purpose of the GPL. Both of them are anti-competitive, and tend to hurt the "garage" in which so many truly great ideas were born.
Thank-you Brett, for being one of the voices that have stood against the rising tide of power-elite oppression over the years. I'd like to shake your hand some day.
4. If you meet somebody who admits to violating the above, kill immediately.
What happens when even the geeks can't get it work?
I think you answered your own question.
Please remain seated until federal agents have come to a complete stop and John Ashcroft has arrived at your domicile.
I can't help but be reminded of the MIT bit about how Santa Clause and his reindeer would be blasted into flaming hypersonic chunks if they actually tried to visit every house.
Usually this means they need to go get some job skills...
Ummm... no. You might think a miner or a machine tender is "unskilled" but if people who fill these positions are being exploited, training them out is not the answer for 2 reasons I can think of quickly:
1. It may not be possible to train them.
2. Even if you do train out the current workers, the jobs will just be filled by somebody else who will still be exploited.
Training is sometimes an appropriate answer for job loss which is entirely different from worker exploitation.
If capitalism is only an effect of liberty, how can they come into conflict?
Dad, can I have the car keys?
How can you equate the minimum wage with liberty.
If wages are too low, then people are more likely to get trapped in situations where they actually lose money just by working. There used to be such things as debtor's prisons, and debt to the company store. Under such a system, it's possible for people to become slaves just because the "free market" doesn't value their labor enough to cover their cost of living, or because a company can finagle them into debt. Minimum wage is just part of the system that prevents that from happening.
I don't see how that qualifies as a liberty, unless you believe that liberty = social justice. In which case you are not really a libertarian. You would be further left
No Leftist am I! In fact, that phrase "social justice" really grates on me. I've only voted D once in my entire life. R most of the time, and I a few times.
I think it was Ayn Rand who drew attention to the importance of deciding what a "unit" of society is. Under what many call "capitalism" it has been shown that liberty tends to acrue to corporations--corporations become the defacto unit of society. Individuals are an obvious choice as the unit, but we find that if corporations don't exist at all then things are not quite so convenient. So, we find that we have to balance collective needs vs. individual needs. This doesn't just happen between corporations and individuals either. It happens between different levels of government and organizations.
If you think about this, you might have less trouble seeing why an "independant Republican" thinks minimum wage is a good idea. This is one of those times when I really hate the whole idea of Left/Right R/D etc. Those are very broad brushes, and not useful here at all.
If you don't want to think about it... just trust me... there's nothing paradoxical about my stand... because there is no Left vs. Right here. That whole paradigm falls apart at some point.
I get tired of people who talk about the Cold War as "defending capitalism" and who refer to the US as a "capitalist country".
Capitalism is at best a secondary player to the real principle that underlies the founding of the Republic: Liberty.
Now, because we have liberty, capitalism tends to arise within that framework, but it's an effect, not a cause in any sense of that word.
When liberty comes into conflict with capitalism (and it often does) it's our moral duty to defer to liberty. For example, that means minimum wage (because 19th century robber barons created virtual slaves without it). A pure capitalist system with no intervention from the government would not have a minimum wage, but it would not uphold liberty. Liberty should always trump capitalism when they come into conflict.
So. I guess you could also say that Libertarianism!=Liberty and Libertarianism!=Freedom as long as they are so abhorent of government intervention that they refuse to employ it in the defense of liberty even when it can be plainly seen that such action is required.
...visiting in a nursing home was assisting one of the elderly residents with her wheelchair so she could get back inside--after smoking a cigarette.
She wasn't the only one either. There was one man in there who could actually walk out to take his smoke. Most people there could not walk at all.
Of course these are the exceptions, not the rule. I think perhaps there are a few people who are geneticly resistant to lung cancer. They can smoke all they want. They won't get cancer.
I've also heard that nicotine can actually help with ADHD. Perhaps, for a very small segment of society, tobacco could be safely "prescribed" as a beneficial medication.
Of course, any scientific proof of such a theory is likely to be met with the same sort of hesitancy that very solid evidence for the benefits of alcohol are currently being met. This is partially because it would only apply to a small number of people, and partially because it goes against the medical orthodoxy.
So. If gran ma smoked a pack a day, drank wisky, and lived to be 110, maybe you shouldn't feel so guilty about smoking and drinking; but don't come crying to me if it turns out you didn't get the lucky gene.
Of course, someday we may find such a gene, which opens a whole new kettle of fish...
The monitoring "goes too far" when it causes problems. Obviously that goes for anything. Of course that's obvious.
Obviously, someone is going to try and top me with something even more obvious.
Obviously, many people won't care to try and top me, or will perceive my prediction that someone is going to try and top me as egotistical and self centered.
Obviously, these are the same twits who will find some gramatical error in this post and correct it.
It's all so obvious, I don't know why I even bothered to post this.
I'd have to go back to calling brokers on the phone, and writing checks, licking stamps, and sending things through the mail. I'd have to sign up at the library if there was something that I had to get from the 'net. That's assuming the library can stand the liability. If they can't, I'd probably be limited to the library's proprietary DBs on their local LAN.
In other words, if you want to kill the 'net, just turn my PC into a slot machine that has unlimited negative payout odds.
This sounds like another example of "letting the terrorists win". It would turn the 'net into a "fascist police state".
Oh... unless there is an OS that is gauranteed secure through every revision, which we all know there can't be.
Now, if they capped the fine it might be reasonable. What would I do? Buy expensive AV software? No. I'd buy insurance against the fine and continue to exercise good practices (e.g., not using OE for mail, not downloading crap software that runs in my taskbar, etc.) Does anybody sell "virus" insurance?
Of course as others have pointed out, there is no pricing info; but let's assume for a minute that the things are priced the same or more than a regular PC.
Why buy one?
Because these things aren't aimed at J. Random Linux Hacker, or even Joe Blow Windows user. They're aimed at corporations who want to keep people locked down. Just try keeping a PC made from standard parts totally locked down. I've even seen standard PCs kludged with locks and keys, which people just ended up jimmying open so they could install a video card they could use to play games when the boss wasn't looking!
With just a stupid thin client on your desk, you have to stay focused on the budget spreadsheet, or the timeline for ordering new timeline forms, or TPS reports, or whatever it is that's infinitely more boring than what a standard PC can offer.
In other words, it's more likely to be secure by design right from the start.
Also, there are fewer players in this space. Basic economics tells us that when there is less competition, prices remain high.
Just to disclose, I do have some stock in Transmeta, and it's doing really well today.
Would I buy such a device? Of course not. I have no need for it. I'm not a corporation that loses $50/employee/day in lost productivity due to PC maintenance and games.
We should get the military involved. We could use some of the same technology they used to track down Osama bin... oh... nevermind.
Pollack,Van Gogh :)
Seurat,Ummm... not sure but google for "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and I could get it
Shakespeare
Faulkner
most likely Somebody funded by the NEA in the past 20 years
Ummm... Madonna?
Andy Warhol
???
Tolkein
Salmon Rushdie (rather apt name eh?)
I know and it's on the tip of my tongue... he did the Reichstag and some carribean islands... oh got it: Christo. Can't remember the first name, if any.
Spielburg
???
Jimi Hendrix
???
Buster Keaton?
Janis Joplin.
That was a fun quiz, and as you can tell, I didn't cheat.
Ummm... aren't you missing the rather obvious point that I've been using what you think is an awful mouse for 7 or 8 years, and I don't have any complaints about it?
If I used a "better input device" my wrist would probably lock up inside of two weeks. :)
In other words, if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Now, at my last job I did start to get some wrist strain (this was a company mouse and a company keyboard I was using). There was one of those curvy Microsoft keyboards laying around so I gave it a try. It helped a lot.
I don't do as much keyboarding now as I did then.
The older the mouse, the more force required to move it around, and the more force required to click the buttons
So. Are you pumped from using the mouse?
Sorry. I just had to poke fun a little.
I think some people are prone to problems, and some aren't. You remind me of those people who get something like hypertension or diabetes, and then they start telling other people to cut back on salt and sugar, even when those people are consuming normal ammounts.
Aw crap. I forgot to escape <. Make that "way too much time going... less than 25 mph in stop-n-go traffic". I hope this makes sense now.
Here in the DC metro area, you can ride carpool lanes with a single occupant in a hybrid. There's no telling how long this will last. I suspect that eventually too many people will buy their way into the carpool lanes, but in the meantime the savings in time alone are worth it. Even without that advantage though I'd buy it. In this area we spend way too much time going
Any hybrid drivers in the DC area care to comment? How much time does it spend as a pure electric during a stop-n-go commute?
...is a plain-Jane logitech two-button. The formerly textured plastic on the left side is now worn shiny! Otherwise it works fine. This mouse is about 7 years old. Before Windows95, I either used DOS or didn't have a PC, so the mouse that came with my Win95 system was the first, and it got passed on to the next two systems, which I built myself. I'm planning to use it with a 4th system RSN.
RTFA, all you need is a 7 metre pipe
Well, I guess I'll finally have to respond to some of that spam I've been getting.
How Is This A "Mystery"? Some people thought it would be cool to put tiles all over the place. End of story.
Next on Slashdot, the mystery of strange sticky circular blobs that appear on sidewalks all over the world, and are extremely hard to clean off.
What we need is software that grabs essays off the internet and runs them through the grading software and the cheating detection software, thus gauranteeing an 'A'.
Then we can truly achieve the goal of "knowledge passing from lecturer to paper without passing through any brains".
The only problem is that the machines might achieve intelligence. That must be avoided at all costs. To that end, all students and professors will be equipped with rifles or pistols to take out the machines if necessary. Potential students will be asked to specify weapons preference on their applications.
That's why I specified "Beefed up". See mil-spec std. 156/J-X22, Bilaterally Extended and Expanded Federal Utilization Procedure, AKA BEEFUP.
...not just an environmentalist mantra anymore.
Now, the shuttle tried to reuse and the expense of reduction and recycling. Maybe this is another "pick any two" scenario... maybe not.
At any rate, it would be interesting to see the situation analyzed in terms of an optimal balance between these 3 environmental goals.
By not having astronauts on every mission, you REDUCE resources used. When you need to lanuch astronauts, you could continue to REUSE spacecraft. Heck, maybe now we will see some truly exciting reusable spacecraft based on public-private partnerships. Beefed-up X-prize winner, perhaps? Anybody remember the sadly canceled Dynasoar program, or for that matter the X-15?
Those were all exciting, and potentially cost-effective techniques for putting people into space, but the all-in-wonder Space Shuttle sucked away resources that could have been used to develop them.
If they go capsule, what says you have to throw away the whole capsule anyway? I mean, obviously you melt down and RECYCLE the metalic parts of the capsule, but control panels and other complex and costly components within the capsule could be flown on many missions, and should be REUSED.
See that one over there? It must weigh at least as much as a hot-air balloon. No! I think it weighs as much as the Hindenberg did.
I hope Slashdot gets in a mass of trouble for posting this story.
How do you prevent one of your friends from bringing along one of the artist's CDs and playing it over and over again in the car? By the time you get to the concert, you're sick of hearing them.
Why do people do that?
And no, "get new friends" is not an option. It took way too long to get friends in the first place.