These limits to your choices are not a sacrifice for your freedom. As freedom in your example means to be able to make your choices according to your requirements, not the availability of the choices that will fulfil all your requirements.
Here we are talking about freedom on another level, and it is how unrestrained you are in your work with the computer system, and the aim is to create a system in which you don't get any forced restrictions, which can be abused. Being disallowed or prevented to do these things with software is an example of a real freedom restriction.
The hardware is removing part of your freedom. At that moment you aren't affected much by this, as neither this is abused, nor it is limiting anything important that you could do. Still, in the long term, if the issue is overlooked, it might lead to many trouble. And it is already creating issues with creating free systems. So doing something about the issue is good in the end.
It doesn't mean restricting you from using the said hardware, just putting this hardware at a little disadvantage, which will draw the line on what is acceptable, and will push the things in the direction that you get more freedom with the hardware in the future.
The aim to create a free phone is also a step in the right direction. While not really that usable, and therefore not helping anyone, it is taking us in the right direction.
While I entirely agree with your point, can you please give an example of this happening. I don't remember reading of such thing. Are you sure you aren't making the whole "hardware manufacturers suing" thing up? While the final goal should be that proprietary firmware is not included in a free system, unlike with proprietary software in general, proprietary firmware has not created such direct troubles... so far.
The goal is nice, and I'm behind it, but being a bit down to earth, at least by not exaggerating the problem. I have mixed feelings about the requirement that the blobs get excluded. On one hand, it should be clear that they shouldn't be a part of a free system, but on the other, it seems that this is the wrong way to go with the problem. I already bought that hardware, so making it harder for me to get it working doesn't seem to be helping that much, and is certainly not improving the freedom for anyone, at least not in the short term.
I can't say what it will happen in the long term, but I still think that the best way to with this issue is to advocate freedom respecting hardware (or even free hardware, as suggested by another poster in the discussion), and to create a freedom compatible hardware campaign.
Refusing to give a distro the free label, because they chose to help you with the hardware you paid for is a bit harsh. Refusing to give the free label to the hardware in question, on the other hand, if this label has gained a significant recognition, will be wonderful. Of course, that's sounds almost impossible to achieve, but it's a better way, in my humble opinion.
I'm not sure that the idea will work at all. You spent half an hour for the program to learn about your abilities. During this time, it might have correctly guessed some of the settings which will be correct for you, but still it will be far from perfect and you might need to tweak it anyway. And I'm talking about the case when you have serious disabilities, if you don't, the task of this program will be hard.
Tweaking the settings on your own will take you less time, and even if they are not perfect, your false impression that you're fine with the GUI this way will actually improve your productivity. Not so if you spent twenty minutes doing bullshit and end up with a GUI settings that you find horrible at first.
The system might be useful if it does learn while you work, and it tries to guess what improvements to the interface would be necessary. One problem that in both cases this will be very hard to get right. I don't say it's impossible, it's good that someone is trying to do it, but unless they do take this very seriously and spend enourmous amount of time and money on research, this won't work.
And I'm sure that this time could be spent on researching what problems users actually have with the GUIs and in creating a suitable way for them to tweak them. Which means spending the time in actually improving the GUI itself.
Now, if tech support has troubles because of the changes, I think it will be the least of the problems. If the UI changed that much, the nightmares for the user will be guaranteed. Unless the user has serious disabilities, in which case the changes will actually help, even with tech support issues.
As a user, I'm politely asking to stop making fun of me. It was only once that you, software designers, made us stupid with this any key thing. Do I have to remind you of your muffs, you know, things like "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue?" I'm sure we scored more than you at this game!
It's great someone actually did this. I've seen that idea at MENSA Entrance Test on Uncyclopedia, with the challange there juuuust a bit more difficult, and I loved it.
Given the velocity of the Sun and the Solar system, Ancient Rome should be about an light year away, and you fail to take that into account in your calculations.
Sure, I see many ways you can use software means to improve democracy. Hell, I also see many ways to do this by using social-only means, using the currently established online communities... I can even develop a perfectâ software solution that fixes all known problems with democracy... And let's us do what you mention.
There is one simple problem, all of these might work in theory, but in practice the systems that would keep all of these running would be set up by people and will be run by people. And the people who will take the decisions about them will be the ones in the government, or exactly the part of the current system that requires improvements. It is not of much use to try and prove the axioms of a system within the system itself, likewise you can't rely on the system to provide you the means to fix its mistakes...
Let's say someone designed and wrote the perfect software that fixes all of the world's problems (which is absolutely doable in theory), it won't work. Enough mistakes will be made during the implementation that would render it absolutely useless. Enough mistakes will be made on purpose to make it work against its purposes and have a negative effect in the end. And only Slashdot would notice! You would be more successful if you tried to give that someone the full executive power...
Saw that new site that this new president launched? It's a great example of something you can do to improve the democracy, and it seems to be done correctly. Do I need to tell you that it won't work that way at all?
To improve democracy we should put more effort in what we've already been doing. Expressing our freedom of speech, or launching campaigns, participating in everything that can lead to improvement. And that lately happens online, through software, "social" software, if you like. It doesn't seem to work great, but it's all we can do.
I wish this lady good luck with her ideas, though. It doesn't matter how much you think something won't work, it might be worth trying. I don't know what exactly she wants to do, I tried to RTFA, but couldn't, too much text and nothing of substance in the first few paragraphs, and lots of occurrences of words like "twitter", "social" and "web 2.0", which only confuse me, so I don't know whether she's doing something worth, but it's good that's she's trying to do something about it. Maybe we all should, in case she's doing it wrong.:)
I think there is an error in the summary, I believe that 256 cores is the minimum requirement for Windows 7, not the supported number of cores, so your machine might actually be fine with 7.
And thank you. As long as the DRM continues to be broken quickly as this, we will be able to exercise the freedoms that it was designed to take away from us. Yes, it doesn't solve the problem, but it brings a relief, when the unpleasant possibility that the DRM scheme might actually work this time is crushed. DRM or not, you will still be able to exercise your right to play the movie you bought, your fair use rights or whatever you believe you are in the right to do.
I don't think this is so much of a bad news for the MAFIAA, as their benefit from the DRM scheme will still be whopping, but it's good news for everyone that would have been hurt by it.
Your word meaning pedantry, whether correct or not, is of no importance. Whether the robots explore or not, they do the same thing a human would for the exploration. Only slower and in a less spectacular and satisfying manner. For any practical purposes, what the robots do is still an exploration, only less time effective one.
However, there are two things that the robots can't do alone. One's the human adaptation to other worlds. You can't create and test extraterrestrial human habitats without the humans, you know⦠The second is the satisfaction of the spiritual needs of the mankind, which was given the role of the sole landlady of the solar system. The thing is that we want to go there, we want that 'there' to become our new 'here'. And everything that gets us closer to this, makes us feel better, feel more self-confident and strong.
That's where the grand-parent got it wrong. Without humans in space you can't do very important things for us -- break our complete dependence on this little fragile biosphere sticked to the bottom of our stormy gravity well, and gain us the confidence that we can survive away from it. And that's what the grandparent got wrong.
But don't worry, we'll get to that, sooner or later. However, it's still important for us to increase the money spent for space exploration. News like this are one of the best we read here on Slashdot, the fact that private companies are getting interested to participate in space exploration in any way, means that we are walking in the right direction. Kudos to all private ventures who dare to take part in this very expensive undertaking with the highly uncertain possibilities of any investment returns.
The open airwaves is one of things that will inevitably happen one day, but it will happen slow. Very slow. I wish Google would make it faster, but aren't we overtrusting their power (and good intentions)?
And, by the way, I feel more comfortable when I read "we will", "we might", than "they will", "they might", or even worse "I hope they will". In a sense, we are together in this struggle, and the outcome depends on me and you, too.:)
Many of us have named many of their local machines with a short name having no dots. Maybe as many use have a search setup for their local domain. So what happens if I happen to have a local machine named "tube", and someone decides to register the "tube" TLD and puts an A record on it, which he most likely will -- after all, if you owned a TLD, wouldn't you put your website there?
You got it right, a big mess. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind that open TLD registration might disturb.
I don't have any problem with TLDs being a mess. There is no way to put such a big system as the world DNS in good order and keep it tidy, and after you are used to it, it doesn't make much difference. It might even be better, or at least no worse, than it would have been if there were strict rules about who and what.
However, opening the main namespace for open registration sounds to me like a bad idea. That's a big no-no for me. Especially when it is everyone's main domain namespace, and we are already using it excessivly for a lot of stuff.
The good thing is that the impact wouldn't be that big as, while many companies could afford a TLD of that price, I hope there won't be a huge rush for registrations, and honestly, I don't have any boxes named 'ms' and 'ibm', and even if I have, renaming one or two wouldn't be much a trouble.
It is far more difficult to manipulate the activity of a program by modifying the system libraries, than modifying the program itself. And Python makes it harder to insert a backdoor into the code without raising the suspicion of those reading it, while you can do very neet tricks to hide malicious activity into the visible source of a C program.
In the end, whatever you do, there is always a way to manipulate the result. You could in theory modify the hardware to guarantee the manipulation of the result. But that's not easy -- in practice, a short 500-line Python program, running on some unmodified popular *nix system and checksummed libraries, a quick audit can give you a very good assurance that the program's performance on this system is not manipulated.
There is, however, one very big problem, which I've yet to see a solution for -- a feasable way to verify that the voting machines are really using the given software, and are not themselves modified.
Even if you find a solution for the latter, having in mind the track record of people dealing with electronic voting, the governments and the technical savviness of the different reincarnations of the average Joe througout the world, the tamper-proof voting machine seems to resemble some kind of mythological creature, which exists only in fiction...
OpenMoko is a very ambitious project, and, in my humble opinion, very important. But the quality of the result from the development of the software stack has been mediocre. I still have my hopes set that it will lift off, but it's still nowhere.
Qtopia rocks, and it's free software, it's working, and it's cool, but the OpenMoko distributions aren't there yet, and I have the feeling that the effort is not focused. The old distro was cool, but it was abondoned. ASU is far from being usable (it is not even developer-friendly, not talking about user-friendly). FSO is still not mature.
Now, this sets my hopes up. One commercial venture is interested in improving the phone. That for me means that one of the most important goals of the whole project has been achieved. Whatever the quality of the software stack is, we will have our free (as in speech) phone.
Slashdot Mirror
These limits to your choices are not a sacrifice for your freedom. As freedom in your example means to be able to make your choices according to your requirements, not the availability of the choices that will fulfil all your requirements.
Here we are talking about freedom on another level, and it is how unrestrained you are in your work with the computer system, and the aim is to create a system in which you don't get any forced restrictions, which can be abused. Being disallowed or prevented to do these things with software is an example of a real freedom restriction.
The hardware is removing part of your freedom. At that moment you aren't affected much by this, as neither this is abused, nor it is limiting anything important that you could do. Still, in the long term, if the issue is overlooked, it might lead to many trouble. And it is already creating issues with creating free systems. So doing something about the issue is good in the end.
It doesn't mean restricting you from using the said hardware, just putting this hardware at a little disadvantage, which will draw the line on what is acceptable, and will push the things in the direction that you get more freedom with the hardware in the future.
The aim to create a free phone is also a step in the right direction. While not really that usable, and therefore not helping anyone, it is taking us in the right direction.
While I entirely agree with your point, can you please give an example of this happening. I don't remember reading of such thing. Are you sure you aren't making the whole "hardware manufacturers suing" thing up? While the final goal should be that proprietary firmware is not included in a free system, unlike with proprietary software in general, proprietary firmware has not created such direct troubles... so far.
The goal is nice, and I'm behind it, but being a bit down to earth, at least by not exaggerating the problem. I have mixed feelings about the requirement that the blobs get excluded. On one hand, it should be clear that they shouldn't be a part of a free system, but on the other, it seems that this is the wrong way to go with the problem. I already bought that hardware, so making it harder for me to get it working doesn't seem to be helping that much, and is certainly not improving the freedom for anyone, at least not in the short term.
I can't say what it will happen in the long term, but I still think that the best way to with this issue is to advocate freedom respecting hardware (or even free hardware, as suggested by another poster in the discussion), and to create a freedom compatible hardware campaign.
Refusing to give a distro the free label, because they chose to help you with the hardware you paid for is a bit harsh. Refusing to give the free label to the hardware in question, on the other hand, if this label has gained a significant recognition, will be wonderful. Of course, that's sounds almost impossible to achieve, but it's a better way, in my humble opinion.
I'm not sure that the idea will work at all. You spent half an hour for the program to learn about your abilities. During this time, it might have correctly guessed some of the settings which will be correct for you, but still it will be far from perfect and you might need to tweak it anyway. And I'm talking about the case when you have serious disabilities, if you don't, the task of this program will be hard.
Tweaking the settings on your own will take you less time, and even if they are not perfect, your false impression that you're fine with the GUI this way will actually improve your productivity. Not so if you spent twenty minutes doing bullshit and end up with a GUI settings that you find horrible at first.
The system might be useful if it does learn while you work, and it tries to guess what improvements to the interface would be necessary. One problem that in both cases this will be very hard to get right. I don't say it's impossible, it's good that someone is trying to do it, but unless they do take this very seriously and spend enourmous amount of time and money on research, this won't work.
And I'm sure that this time could be spent on researching what problems users actually have with the GUIs and in creating a suitable way for them to tweak them. Which means spending the time in actually improving the GUI itself.
Now, if tech support has troubles because of the changes, I think it will be the least of the problems. If the UI changed that much, the nightmares for the user will be guaranteed. Unless the user has serious disabilities, in which case the changes will actually help, even with tech support issues.
As a user, I'm politely asking to stop making fun of me. It was only once that you, software designers, made us stupid with this any key thing. Do I have to remind you of your muffs, you know, things like "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue?" I'm sure we scored more than you at this game!
It's great someone actually did this. I've seen that idea at MENSA Entrance Test on Uncyclopedia, with the challange there juuuust a bit more difficult, and I loved it.
Well, if you run into any problems, you could always the intergalactic laxative.
Given the velocity of the Sun and the Solar system, Ancient Rome should be about an light year away, and you fail to take that into account in your calculations.
Sure, I see many ways you can use software means to improve democracy. Hell, I also see many ways to do this by using social-only means, using the currently established online communities... I can even develop a perfectâ software solution that fixes all known problems with democracy... And let's us do what you mention.
There is one simple problem, all of these might work in theory, but in practice the systems that would keep all of these running would be set up by people and will be run by people. And the people who will take the decisions about them will be the ones in the government, or exactly the part of the current system that requires improvements. It is not of much use to try and prove the axioms of a system within the system itself, likewise you can't rely on the system to provide you the means to fix its mistakes...
Let's say someone designed and wrote the perfect software that fixes all of the world's problems (which is absolutely doable in theory), it won't work. Enough mistakes will be made during the implementation that would render it absolutely useless. Enough mistakes will be made on purpose to make it work against its purposes and have a negative effect in the end. And only Slashdot would notice! You would be more successful if you tried to give that someone the full executive power...
Saw that new site that this new president launched? It's a great example of something you can do to improve the democracy, and it seems to be done correctly. Do I need to tell you that it won't work that way at all?
To improve democracy we should put more effort in what we've already been doing. Expressing our freedom of speech, or launching campaigns, participating in everything that can lead to improvement. And that lately happens online, through software, "social" software, if you like. It doesn't seem to work great, but it's all we can do.
I wish this lady good luck with her ideas, though. It doesn't matter how much you think something won't work, it might be worth trying. I don't know what exactly she wants to do, I tried to RTFA, but couldn't, too much text and nothing of substance in the first few paragraphs, and lots of occurrences of words like "twitter", "social" and "web 2.0", which only confuse me, so I don't know whether she's doing something worth, but it's good that's she's trying to do something about it. Maybe we all should, in case she's doing it wrong. :)
I think there is an error in the summary, I believe that 256 cores is the minimum requirement for Windows 7, not the supported number of cores, so your machine might actually be fine with 7.
And thank you. As long as the DRM continues to be broken quickly as this, we will be able to exercise the freedoms that it was designed to take away from us. Yes, it doesn't solve the problem, but it brings a relief, when the unpleasant possibility that the DRM scheme might actually work this time is crushed. DRM or not, you will still be able to exercise your right to play the movie you bought, your fair use rights or whatever you believe you are in the right to do.
I don't think this is so much of a bad news for the MAFIAA, as their benefit from the DRM scheme will still be whopping, but it's good news for everyone that would have been hurt by it.
Your word meaning pedantry, whether correct or not, is of no importance. Whether the robots explore or not, they do the same thing a human would for the exploration. Only slower and in a less spectacular and satisfying manner. For any practical purposes, what the robots do is still an exploration, only less time effective one.
However, there are two things that the robots can't do alone. One's the human adaptation to other worlds. You can't create and test extraterrestrial human habitats without the humans, you know⦠The second is the satisfaction of the spiritual needs of the mankind, which was given the role of the sole landlady of the solar system. The thing is that we want to go there, we want that 'there' to become our new 'here'. And everything that gets us closer to this, makes us feel better, feel more self-confident and strong.
That's where the grand-parent got it wrong. Without humans in space you can't do very important things for us -- break our complete dependence on this little fragile biosphere sticked to the bottom of our stormy gravity well, and gain us the confidence that we can survive away from it. And that's what the grandparent got wrong.
But don't worry, we'll get to that, sooner or later. However, it's still important for us to increase the money spent for space exploration. News like this are one of the best we read here on Slashdot, the fact that private companies are getting interested to participate in space exploration in any way, means that we are walking in the right direction. Kudos to all private ventures who dare to take part in this very expensive undertaking with the highly uncertain possibilities of any investment returns.
Where is the "+1 What a nice dream" option?
The open airwaves is one of things that will inevitably happen one day, but it will happen slow. Very slow. I wish Google would make it faster, but aren't we overtrusting their power (and good intentions)?
And, by the way, I feel more comfortable when I read "we will", "we might", than "they will", "they might", or even worse "I hope they will". In a sense, we are together in this struggle, and the outcome depends on me and you, too. :)
Many of us have named many of their local machines with a short name having no dots. Maybe as many use have a search setup for their local domain. So what happens if I happen to have a local machine named "tube", and someone decides to register the "tube" TLD and puts an A record on it, which he most likely will -- after all, if you owned a TLD, wouldn't you put your website there?
You got it right, a big mess. And that's just the first thing that comes to mind that open TLD registration might disturb.
I don't have any problem with TLDs being a mess. There is no way to put such a big system as the world DNS in good order and keep it tidy, and after you are used to it, it doesn't make much difference. It might even be better, or at least no worse, than it would have been if there were strict rules about who and what.
However, opening the main namespace for open registration sounds to me like a bad idea. That's a big no-no for me. Especially when it is everyone's main domain namespace, and we are already using it excessivly for a lot of stuff.
The good thing is that the impact wouldn't be that big as, while many companies could afford a TLD of that price, I hope there won't be a huge rush for registrations, and honestly, I don't have any boxes named 'ms' and 'ibm', and even if I have, renaming one or two wouldn't be much a trouble.
But even then, this shouldn't be allowed. At all.
It is far more difficult to manipulate the activity of a program by modifying the system libraries, than modifying the program itself. And Python makes it harder to insert a backdoor into the code without raising the suspicion of those reading it, while you can do very neet tricks to hide malicious activity into the visible source of a C program.
In the end, whatever you do, there is always a way to manipulate the result. You could in theory modify the hardware to guarantee the manipulation of the result. But that's not easy -- in practice, a short 500-line Python program, running on some unmodified popular *nix system and checksummed libraries, a quick audit can give you a very good assurance that the program's performance on this system is not manipulated.
There is, however, one very big problem, which I've yet to see a solution for -- a feasable way to verify that the voting machines are really using the given software, and are not themselves modified.
Even if you find a solution for the latter, having in mind the track record of people dealing with electronic voting, the governments and the technical savviness of the different reincarnations of the average Joe througout the world, the tamper-proof voting machine seems to resemble some kind of mythological creature, which exists only in fiction...
OpenMoko is a very ambitious project, and, in my humble opinion, very important. But the quality of the result from the development of the software stack has been mediocre. I still have my hopes set that it will lift off, but it's still nowhere. Qtopia rocks, and it's free software, it's working, and it's cool, but the OpenMoko distributions aren't there yet, and I have the feeling that the effort is not focused. The old distro was cool, but it was abondoned. ASU is far from being usable (it is not even developer-friendly, not talking about user-friendly). FSO is still not mature. Now, this sets my hopes up. One commercial venture is interested in improving the phone. That for me means that one of the most important goals of the whole project has been achieved. Whatever the quality of the software stack is, we will have our free (as in speech) phone.