I have no problem with the content of what he said. I have a problem with the tone he took to say it.
There is such a concept as "polite disagreement" you know, even if the American political parties and the media are intent on stamping it out. You can speak up without insulting the people you disagree with. It's called maturity.
You accused someone of being a liar or a shill without a shred of evidence simply because you disagreed with what they said.
Scoble was paid to evangelise Microsoft Windows Technology. He was open about it, so he's not a shill, and he may have been honest, so he's not a liar. But he's still not a trustworthy source, because "Scoble was paid to evangelise Microsoft Windows Technology". People working in PR are mainly honest, but I still don't trust what they say, because they're being paid to say it.
It sounds to me like he's suggesting that Scoble was an evangelist. One who absolutely believes in something, and will stop at nothing to spread the Good News. Sorry, I don't go to the Pope for impartial news on Catholicism, and I don't go to the White House Press Secretary for impartial news on the Bush Administration. Why should I go to an self-described "Microsoft Evangelist" for impartial news on Microsoft.
Normally, of course, evangelists aren't swayed solely by the big paycheck but by a core belief and principles. This is the modern way.
Au contraire. I'm being rude about someone who was rude. That's far more acceptable than being rude to someone who was being extremely patient. If you behave like a child, you get treated like a child. If Theo wants to be treated with respect, he needs to learn to treat other people with respect.
One can stick to one's principles without being a whiny little shit about it. Do you suppose Gandhi stooped to immoderate language like that?
The opinions that de Raadt expressed could have been expressed far more clearly and far more politely. Being a tosser alienates people, and anyone who alienates people when there is no need to is basically a sociopath.
Well OpenBSD only exists because deRaadt couldn't play nice with the NetBSD team. See section 18.3. His inability to keep a civil tongue in his head is legendary: that might be excused as charmingly idealistic in a 20 year old, but its embarassing as a balding rocker with a pony tail in a man pushing 40.
I've seen plenty of evidence that one does not have to have reached "the last straw..." before Theo will escalate a discussion in a screaming flamewar/bitchfest. He has repeatedly proven himself chronically incapable of dealing with people whose opinions differ from his own.
That was my point. If the workers have a genuine choice, then whatever they decide should be respected and not second-guessed by people who are ignorant of those workers' lives.
He was a sort of newspaper ombudsman as well as their connection to the blogosphere. Someone who could take heat from the public without stonewalling it, who could act as a cheerleader for company products without coming across as too much of a shill.
In the true Tom Wolfe sense of the phrase, he was flak catcher. An employee whose job it is to deal with and assuage the complaints of customers/constituents (i.e. keep them away from the people who make the decision), whilst being wholly complicit in the fact that nothing ever gets done about those complaints.
But negotiating without a backing of force is useless against places like North Korea or Iran. There's no common ground.
So, you're saying is that you need a military in order to coerce other countries into doing what you want them to do, as opposed to what they want to do? In any other walk of life, that would be a protection racket.
That's how XPS will work too. It's a patent encumbered "open" standard. Everyone who asks gets a patent license, but a developer can't transfer their license to end users. So it can't be used.
Oh, and the fact that its a pointless re-invention of an already well-supported, trul open standard (PostScript), using an entirely unsuitable XML schema, is neither here nor there.
Probably some of these dollars are paying for education for the children of those women.
You really don't appreciate what "living hand to mouth" means, do you? If you really think these women are using their new-found disposable income to send their kids to school... then I admire you fresh faced naivety.
Sweatshops are GOOD. Of course it doesn't seem that way seen from our first-world perspective, but is better than hunger.
One can say the same thing about slavery. Being better than the worst thing imaginable (death by starvation) does not make something good. It makes it not the worst, which is an entirely different matter.
And no one can "work their way out of poverty" on sweatshop wages. It's living hand-to-mouth. You might as well recommend that someone "work their way out of poverty" by collecting 5c deposits on Cola bottles.
we in our short sightedness think it came out of the Renaissance from the 15th century.
Do we? If we did, wouldn't we have called it the Naissance? Besides, the Renaissance is overrated. The things that set us apart from the ancients came out of the Enlightenment rather than the Renaissance. With all due respect to the Greeks, the Natural Philosophers (primarily Britons such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton) were the first to do science as we understand it.
The Italians got the lovely paintings and 200 more years of agrarian economy. The Britons got science, and an Empire that spanned the globe.
Yes, but that money has to come from somewhere: specifically, it comes from students.
What good does it do to have excellent professors, if 50% of your population can't afford to be educated at a decent college. How much does it cost for a three year undergraduate course at Stanford or Yale? Despite Grahams assertions of class mobility, the finest educations in America are largely (a small number of scholarships aside) the exclusive preserve of the upper middle classes and above.
When a hands-off, rational minded government or political climate takes place, economies do better.
Well, they do better than Robert Mugabe, certainly. But the standard of living in Scandinavia, where social democracy and government intervention, are consistently higher than the USA. If you compare yourself to Mugabe, no wonder you do well. It's completely juvenile to compare the best of one system with the worst of another. Government intervention doesn't inevitably lead to the genocidal excesses of Robert Mugabe.
Now, what about the laissez-faire free market that was instituted in Albania after the fall of communism? Answer: the whole economy collapsed under the weight of Ponzi schemes and Enron accounting. Go read "Eat The Rich" by P.J. O'Rourke (hardly anyone's idea of a socialist) and learn that your simplistic reasoning isn't actuall born out by studying a range of countries.
Even more "fortuitously" (for want of a better word), just as the unrestrained laissez-fair US economy of 1900-1920 was beginning to eat itself into a Great Depression, along came a really big war to justify the government intervention deficit expenditure, which helped win the war and artificially stimulate the economy at precisely the time that it needed it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with the content of what he said. I have a problem with the tone he took to say it.
There is such a concept as "polite disagreement" you know, even if the American political parties and the media are intent on stamping it out. You can speak up without insulting the people you disagree with. It's called maturity.
It sounds to me like he's suggesting that Scoble was an evangelist.
One who absolutely believes in something, and will stop at nothing to spread the Good News. Sorry, I don't go to the Pope for impartial news on Catholicism, and I don't go to the White House Press Secretary for impartial news on the Bush Administration. Why should I go to an self-described "Microsoft Evangelist" for impartial news on Microsoft.
Normally, of course, evangelists aren't swayed solely by the big paycheck but by a core belief and principles. This is the modern way.
The true cost of compromise? That Theo had to type his name and address into a company's web page.
Oh, the humanity.
Au contraire. I'm being rude about someone who was rude.
That's far more acceptable than being rude to someone who was being extremely patient.
If you behave like a child, you get treated like a child.
If Theo wants to be treated with respect, he needs to learn to treat other people with respect.
One can stick to one's principles without being a whiny little shit about it.
Do you suppose Gandhi stooped to immoderate language like that?
The opinions that de Raadt expressed could have been expressed far more clearly and far more politely.
Being a tosser alienates people, and anyone who alienates people when there is no need to is basically a sociopath.
Well OpenBSD only exists because deRaadt couldn't play nice with the NetBSD team. See section 18.3. His inability to keep a civil tongue in his head is legendary: that might be excused as charmingly idealistic in a 20 year old, but its embarassing as a balding rocker with a pony tail in a man pushing 40.
I've seen plenty of evidence that one does not have to have reached "the last straw..." before Theo will escalate a discussion in a screaming flamewar/bitchfest. He has repeatedly proven himself chronically incapable of dealing with people whose opinions differ from his own.
That's a typical OpenBSD discussion, in which Theo DeRaadt
i) is basically right
ii) still manages to sound like spoiled whiny tosser in the process.
I am not as ignorant as you.
I'm sorry. You refered to something that happend before 1982 and wasn't related to Star Trek or PDP-11s. Hand in your slashdot membership at the door.
That's how XPS will work too. It's a patent encumbered "open" standard. Everyone who asks gets a patent license, but a developer can't transfer their license to end users. So it can't be used.
Oh, and the fact that its a pointless re-invention of an already well-supported, trul open standard (PostScript), using an entirely unsuitable XML schema, is neither here nor there.
Being better than the worst thing imaginable (death by starvation) does not make something good. It makes it not the worst, which is an entirely different matter.
And no one can "work their way out of poverty" on sweatshop wages. It's living hand-to-mouth. You might as well recommend that someone "work their way out of poverty" by collecting 5c deposits on Cola bottles.
Which "great" universities was Graham refering to? I'll name names when he does.
The Italians got the lovely paintings and 200 more years of agrarian economy.
The Britons got science, and an Empire that spanned the globe.
Hey! That's not fair.
Slashdot editors have been using bad English for years before this article came along.
If you really believe this, explain why Scandinavians are doing so well with their interventionist governments.
Don't just recite libertarian free market dogma to me, and hope that I don't notice that it doesn't actually fit the facts.
Yes, but that money has to come from somewhere: specifically, it comes from students.
What good does it do to have excellent professors, if 50% of your population can't afford to be educated at a decent college. How much does it cost for a three year undergraduate course at Stanford or Yale? Despite Grahams assertions of class mobility, the finest educations in America are largely (a small number of scholarships aside) the exclusive preserve of the upper middle classes and above.
Now, what about the laissez-faire free market that was instituted in Albania after the fall of communism? Answer: the whole economy collapsed under the weight of Ponzi schemes and Enron accounting. Go read "Eat The Rich" by P.J. O'Rourke (hardly anyone's idea of a socialist) and learn that your simplistic reasoning isn't actuall born out by studying a range of countries.
Even more "fortuitously" (for want of a better word), just as the unrestrained laissez-fair US economy of 1900-1920 was beginning to eat itself into a Great Depression, along came a really big war to justify the government intervention deficit expenditure, which helped win the war and artificially stimulate the economy at precisely the time that it needed it.