But in elementary school??? Pffft, why bother. You might as well have a TV and a nintendo too while you're at it.
Well, if you use the computer like a TV or a Nintendo, then yeah. And alas most educational software doesn't rise even to that level. But if the computers were used as real data-loggers, real info-miners, and real automation-control units, then those kids would be learning to cope in the world of 2025 (their eventual home) than currently is the case. Computers are way more important for their conditional-logic abilities than for number crunching... and no matter how well the old pen-and-paper has served us in the past, it clearly is not the info tech of the future.
I've never seen a union actually improve anything to be honest.
Spoken like someone who's gained the benefit and didn't even know it. Ever hear of the 40-hour work week? How about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? Unions were -- and, I believe, remain -- a crucial part of establishing the dignity of labor in the industrialized West. Like most organizations that grow powerful, a lot of decay has set in, but that doesn't negate their positive impact. If anything, the heartbreak of modern unions is how much they've forgotten their roots and their achievements.
And what the heck is wrong with employing third world labor? You mean they should go without jobs?
No, I think third world laborers should go without having to work in the disgusting conditions they work in. I think they should go without breathing filthy air. I think they should work ten (not 14) hour days. I think they should get at least their country's minimum wage so that they can begin to take care of their own health.
Amen to that. Ironically, however, the path to that happy state almost certainly lies in increased involvement in the world economy, and that at first is going to come through Western companies. So it's OK to pressure Wal-Mart, Nike, or whomever, but recognize the irony... Here in the industrial West, we reached more human working conditions through strife and struggle; it's unlikely to happen smoothly anywhere else. The worst thing is, the transnationals seemed to have learned a lot of lessons about stopping the process, but we are not transmitting the right lessons about moving it forward.
So barriers to trade were created and capital did not flow to the third world to precisey exploit the beefits that their cheaper labour bring
Well, to be fair, many trade barriers were in effect before Bretton Woods. It's more the case of an old system being allowed to persist, than some new nefarious one being constructed.
Globailization is neither good nor evil. A lot of the practices of global corporations are evil, as well as short-sighted and fundamentally flawed.
Are you so certain that Wal-Mart has not priced commonly purchased products at below-cost so as to drive out competition?
Not so much a fan of WalMart, but... Do you have evidence that they have? I think it's pretty clear that the burden of proof is on those charging misdeeds. Crying "monopolist!" while getting whupped in the marketplace is almost as easy as crying "witch!" when getting whupped farming. It's entirely possible that Wal-Mart has legitimately leveraged their volume -- plus their documented operational efficiency -- into lower prices. I sympathize with people who bemoan the loss of the small American downtown... but those people seem to shop at the ole Box'N'Shop as well.
It is my understanding that "The Times" refers to the Times of London. The "New York Times" is different from "The Times".
Depends on your background and context. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I will always think of the New York Times when hearing "The Times". Logically enough, someone from the UK would be probably think of the "The Times of London". I don't think there's a "right" way, anymore than there's a "right" assumed area code for a phone number like xxx-1212.
he wrote the ST:TOS episode "City on the Edge of Forever".
Well, strictly speaking, he wrote a script that contained the nucleus of "City...", but had creative differences. The script was extensively reworked into what appeared on film. And despite what Ellison screams, loudly, the script also massively improved once he was no longer part... I had the opportunity to read his script (in a book published, what, five years ago, I think), and it stank. IMHO and YMMV but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Most people who have embraced what I affectionately call, 'The Programming' automatically assume a position of denial and disbelief, regardless of their actual feelings... my automatic response is to doubt and scorn them! I actually have to work in order to listen without automatic negative judgement!... Geeks and technically savvy individuals, who I believe are critical vectors in the determination of the current state of this reality paradigm, have by far the most powerfull 'blanking' programs and 'rationalization' programs installed
Or, perhaps, it's just what Carl Sagan calls our "baloney detection kit". The essence of science -- and the reason it has lead to four hundred years of success, versus millenia of stagnation before -- is that it makes things rest on proof, not faith. What we can talk about, scientifically, may be a miniscule part of what's Out There. But what we say, can be said with confidence.
Maybe geeks and techheads are more doubting because (a) they are more trained in scientific ways; (b) they are in fields that require judicious doubt and problem-solving skills to look for the simplest explanation; and (c) they are disproportionately likely to have gotten their fantasy fix by actually reading (honest) fantasy and sci fi, so the mystical worlds spouted by paranormal believers -- worlds which IMHO are much less transcendant than the fiction I read, let alone the actual Universe as revealed through science -- simply do not offer anything worthwhile.
Amen to that! It's funny how all of these phenomena are perceptible to human sense organs yet mysteriously defy technological recording. I once read a book (Faerie Tale by Raymon Feist) that made an interesting plot point: A paranormal investigator is walking around an upstate farm looking for clues and rapid-fire dictating into his handheld recorder. He stumbles on the Wild Hunt. Now, one of the myths is that those who see the Wild Hunt are doomed to forget it. (We'll leave out how there could be any myth about it, then...) This happens to poor investigator.
But later, he plays back the tape, which -- being a machine -- could not be made to mystically "forget". When he hears himself describing the Hunt, he suddenly remembers the experience himself. Technology to the rescue!
For a while, Feist's book shapes up to be an incredible tale posing human tech versus faerie magic in the ultimate showdown. Then for whatever reason Feist flinced and wrote what was -- to me -- a much lesser climax. But the idea has stuck with me: If "paranormal" is real (i.e., interacts with the physical world), then it is susceptible to scientific investigation.
The problem with this study is that it is contingent on the credibility of people who openly admit that they're breaking the law (though that's arguable)
The studies quoted by the RIAA also rely upon self-reporting, a notoriously malleable form of data-collecting. 72% of all statistics are made up.
While the native americans were here, there were no large scale wars.
Hey, and before there were human beings at all, there were also no wars at all! What's your point? If the Americas were less bloody before the Europeans arrived, it was almost entirely because there was simply less blood to shed -- the archeological evidence is, "native" populations fought some long, brutal wars against each other, too...
he did not want to conquer the British Empire or fight America
Ah, yes. I suppose the Amerika bomber project -- given the explicit mandate of developing a plane that could reach New York from Europe with a bomb load and return -- was really meant just to take tourist photos of the Empire State Building.
Hitler's alleged respect for the British Empire stems just about entirely from his bizzarre "peace" entreaty wherein he offered to defend the British Empire if they'd stop being so annoying crying about Poland, and France, and the Low Countries, and... Considering how much Hitler lived his propaganda, I think a single Reichstag speech is a mighty thin reed in which to place such faith.
The goal of the Nazi Reich was a complete overthrow of the existing political realm -- a New World Order -- and there is absolutely no evidence they would have, of their own free will, stopped at anything less.
Maybe writing computer programs in C and compiling them on a computer is illegal.
Isn't that the ultimate goal? The outlawing of general-purpose computers and the reduction of PCs to "media devices", the transformation of the bitstream into a revenue stream?
The animation sequences were too damn short and the action scenes were about on par with "The Littlest Hobo". No good.
If all you were watching for was the animation sequences or the action scenes, then I guess this comment is dead-on. Of course, if all you were watching for was the animation sequences or the actions scenes, then you seriously missed the point! Max Headroom was about computer animation the way that Star Wars is about space flight; that is, just as a hook. The key to Max, the whole essence of the show, was its cynical-yet-so-true jaded view of Big Media and the world we were rapidly approaching, wherein the sheep of the world abdicate their power to the TV... Hmmm. A lot like this world, actually.
Max Headroom might have been "twenty minutes into the future" but it was also twenty years ahead of its time.
Dont try and show me a form they fill out, as printing it, writing in the spaces, and faxing it to you does the SAME THING, as does, just typing on the blanks and re-emaillling it does....
Wait. Spooling to a printer, scrawling information on a dead tree, walking to a phone line, using an obsolencent technology to push a (bad) facsimile of the dead tree through copper wire, having the recipient print out another (nearly illegible) copy on a different dead tree, then store the dead tree in a large metal box.... This is the same as editing a file directly, remailing it to the author, and keeping it in machine-readable form while storing it as a handful of magnetic domains?
There are some things that should be paper-archived. But most things should live in the machine. A golden rule from my days at NASA, learned when a transcription error rendered useless six months of IUE data, was: Nothing that has been entered into a computer should ever be entered again!
2. Build a game where many areas are conceptual and abstract so that people can explore core issues and imagine the details that make up their more general decisions (i.e. fill in your own backstory as you cut the IT budget because you're moving to open source IT tools).
I haven't read the code, so I might be entirely wrong. But my guess is, cutting the IT budget would lead to lower available services and thus inefficiency and more student gripes. But that doesn't (necessarily) model the switch to Open Source. Open Source breaks the financial model of "higher price == better (more) service". In other words, just because you don't pay for the tools, doesn't mean the tools are garbage.
On one level, you could abstract this by saying the IT budget reflects license costs and service costs. If we drive down the license costs, then we can spend more on services in the same budget. But actually the model doesn't work that way. There's simply no way that paying for Office licenses (and Windows licenses) is intrinsically equal to paying for more help desks. If we need to abstract this much, then a very useful sim capability -- test whether Open Source can work as well for less -- is not available.
On the other hand, it's hard to see how you could code for that without simply incorporating your own personal bias towards Open Source (or against it) into the simulation. Is there hard data anywhere?
It seems that whatever there is that the government does for us, there's a tax on it In addition to the general highway robbery that they do on the 15th.
So, paid your "local law enforcement tax" yet? Or your local "textbook buying" tax? Or the emergency response tax? Or city planning tax? Of course not. They're funded out of general revenue. And I'm not sure exactly why it's unreasonable that we actually pay for what government does.
I'd much rather pay a higher gas tax knowing that what money I spend goes to roads, construction, etc than having money out of my paycheck go into the void.
Actually, your gas tax does go to the highway construction trust fund. It's one of the most direct "user fees" around.
Not just have a line item veto, but have line item taxation as well. Be able to choose (to some degree) which items I feel I should be spending my tax money on.... I think that programs should be run and funded by people who believe in what each program means.
For a while in the mid-1990s, I served on the Associated Students at Stanford University (ASSU), which was essentially a student government. As it turns out, the ASSU had exactly this policy: They budgeted for each student group. Then each and every student could review their contributions and choose to raise or -- more commonly -- lower their own contribution to the groups. Sounds like the epitome of direct democracy in action, doesn't it? And maybe it was, but it was also living proof that direct democracy is incapable of governing effectively.
First, people still whined about any fees -- even when they could reduce them to zero. Then they whined when groups said, "If you didn't support us, then you can't attend our functions". Important voices weren't heard because the students, individually, didn't care enough to learn they were out there. Meanwhile, clever groups launched "ad campaigns" to sway voters and retain higher levels. Often these degenerated into "Free Beer!", regardless of the group's mission. And this was only for student activities, far from an essential service. Do you really want police funding, or medical research, or libraries to be that dependent on the whim of the electorate?
The people might be the source of all legitimate power, but they are far from a repository of wisdom. Sometimes it does help to have people actually dedicate time and effort to understanding complex issues.
To quote Jed Bartlet:
You know what we forget sometimes? In all the talk about democracy, we forget it's not a democracy, it's a republic. People don't make the decisions, they choose the people who make the decisions. Could they do a better job choosing? Yeah. But when you consider the alternatives...
And when we do get part of that money, it hardly seems worth highway robbery we face each and every tax period.
You know, I guess I'm the last of the rubes, and proud of it. I don't feel "robbed" every April 15th. Yes, I'd love it if my tax bill could be (responsibly!) lowered, and yes, I cringe hearing about all the spending misfires and pork projects. But I am still proud to contribute to the "general welfare" of the United Stated. Government serves a noble purpose and government, like other things in this society, costs money. As Justice Holmes says, taxes are the price you pay for civilization. I look at the civilization we have built and I think the price is still low -- a few thousand dollars a year in exchange for personal liberty and the rule of law? A bargain by any measure.
After millions spent on aid to other countries and welfare, what do we get back from the government that seems satisfying?
Is this something out of Life of Brian? We get roads, and hospitals, and police protection. And emergency rescue teams and fire stations and national defense. And schools and universities and libraries. And agricultural development and city planning and trade deals. And of course the highest-quality scientific and technological research anywhere, ever, producing and funding such things as the Internet through which you post your screed and through which we suffer to read it.
A sex scandal now and then. That's it.
Well, now we get to the main cause of the trouble. If that's what you find "satisfying", then I am absolutely ecstatic that our government disappoints you. See beyond the animal and perhaps you won't be quite so dismissive.
Just because I write open source software, does not make me a supporter of Communism.
Exactly. And just because you support charity work doesn't, either. Yet the author of the original paper would almost certainly agree with the take on charity and vehemently disagree with the take on open source. Open source is given away? Then the people doing it must be Communist, since only Communists thumb their noses at the free market!
I was only pointing out that people donate time and energy in other contexts to the general commonwealth, and it doesn't seem to raise the same alarm that OSS does.
The "voluntary" part is the key word. Charity is far from synonymous with communism. In order for an act to be charitable, it must be done voluntarily.
Yes, of course. I am not trying to equate charity with communism. But the Open Source movement doesn't say that private, proprietary software must be banned. It only says that that's not the most efficient method. It recognizes that people like to share and can gain from sharing.
Open Source is "communistic" in exactly the same way that fundraisers at a church are -- that is, not at all. Yet people will often criticize the former while extolling the latter. It was that hypocrist that I was noting.
Its like saying any time you give something away for free, you are exercising communism. It only becomes communism when you are forced to give stuff away for free.
Indeed, people like the author most likely would get quite agitated if you suggested that their charity work was actually "communistic". Sometimes, even in a free capitalist society, it's good to give to the community.
Look, that's not the issue. The issue is not fuzzy comparatives like "up to five albums", which tells us nothing unless we know what fiducial "album" they are using for a comparative. Much more important are the actual, hard facts: The discs have two sides, holding 250 MB each. Doubling that gets us to 500 MB. A regular CD holds 650 MB of data. 500 compared to 650 is 76.9%. In my eyes, that's not "nearly the same". It's nearly twenty five percent less.
Press releases -- and this story sounded, in part, like it was taken from one -- like to obscure the hard facts behind fuzzy comparisons that cannot be validated and hold, really, no meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you use the computer like a TV or a Nintendo, then yeah. And alas most educational software doesn't rise even to that level. But if the computers were used as real data-loggers, real info-miners, and real automation-control units, then those kids would be learning to cope in the world of 2025 (their eventual home) than currently is the case. Computers are way more important for their conditional-logic abilities than for number crunching... and no matter how well the old pen-and-paper has served us in the past, it clearly is not the info tech of the future.
Spoken like someone who's gained the benefit and didn't even know it. Ever hear of the 40-hour work week? How about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? Unions were -- and, I believe, remain -- a crucial part of establishing the dignity of labor in the industrialized West. Like most organizations that grow powerful, a lot of decay has set in, but that doesn't negate their positive impact. If anything, the heartbreak of modern unions is how much they've forgotten their roots and their achievements.
Amen to that. Ironically, however, the path to that happy state almost certainly lies in increased involvement in the world economy, and that at first is going to come through Western companies. So it's OK to pressure Wal-Mart, Nike, or whomever, but recognize the irony... Here in the industrial West, we reached more human working conditions through strife and struggle; it's unlikely to happen smoothly anywhere else. The worst thing is, the transnationals seemed to have learned a lot of lessons about stopping the process, but we are not transmitting the right lessons about moving it forward.
Well, to be fair, many trade barriers were in effect before Bretton Woods. It's more the case of an old system being allowed to persist, than some new nefarious one being constructed.
Globailization is neither good nor evil. A lot of the practices of global corporations are evil, as well as short-sighted and fundamentally flawed.
As opposed to posting on slashdot, which is powered by Magic Pixie Dust and hence uses no energy and causes no pollution...
Not so much a fan of WalMart, but... Do you have evidence that they have? I think it's pretty clear that the burden of proof is on those charging misdeeds. Crying "monopolist!" while getting whupped in the marketplace is almost as easy as crying "witch!" when getting whupped farming. It's entirely possible that Wal-Mart has legitimately leveraged their volume -- plus their documented operational efficiency -- into lower prices. I sympathize with people who bemoan the loss of the small American downtown... but those people seem to shop at the ole Box'N'Shop as well.
Depends on your background and context. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I will always think of the New York Times when hearing "The Times". Logically enough, someone from the UK would be probably think of the "The Times of London". I don't think there's a "right" way, anymore than there's a "right" assumed area code for a phone number like xxx-1212.
Well, strictly speaking, he wrote a script that contained the nucleus of "City...", but had creative differences. The script was extensively reworked into what appeared on film. And despite what Ellison screams, loudly, the script also massively improved once he was no longer part... I had the opportunity to read his script (in a book published, what, five years ago, I think), and it stank. IMHO and YMMV but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Or, perhaps, it's just what Carl Sagan calls our "baloney detection kit". The essence of science -- and the reason it has lead to four hundred years of success, versus millenia of stagnation before -- is that it makes things rest on proof, not faith. What we can talk about, scientifically, may be a miniscule part of what's Out There. But what we say, can be said with confidence.
Maybe geeks and techheads are more doubting because (a) they are more trained in scientific ways; (b) they are in fields that require judicious doubt and problem-solving skills to look for the simplest explanation; and (c) they are disproportionately likely to have gotten their fantasy fix by actually reading (honest) fantasy and sci fi, so the mystical worlds spouted by paranormal believers -- worlds which IMHO are much less transcendant than the fiction I read, let alone the actual Universe as revealed through science -- simply do not offer anything worthwhile.
Amen to that! It's funny how all of these phenomena are perceptible to human sense organs yet mysteriously defy technological recording. I once read a book (Faerie Tale by Raymon Feist) that made an interesting plot point: A paranormal investigator is walking around an upstate farm looking for clues and rapid-fire dictating into his handheld recorder. He stumbles on the Wild Hunt. Now, one of the myths is that those who see the Wild Hunt are doomed to forget it. (We'll leave out how there could be any myth about it, then...) This happens to poor investigator.
But later, he plays back the tape, which -- being a machine -- could not be made to mystically "forget". When he hears himself describing the Hunt, he suddenly remembers the experience himself. Technology to the rescue!
For a while, Feist's book shapes up to be an incredible tale posing human tech versus faerie magic in the ultimate showdown. Then for whatever reason Feist flinced and wrote what was -- to me -- a much lesser climax. But the idea has stuck with me: If "paranormal" is real (i.e., interacts with the physical world), then it is susceptible to scientific investigation.
Blockquoth the poster's
In counterpoint, the Philosopher also said:
I guess in a book called "Politics", it makes sense that Aristotle plays both sides of the fence.
The studies quoted by the RIAA also rely upon self-reporting, a notoriously malleable form of data-collecting. 72% of all statistics are made up.
Hey, and before there were human beings at all, there were also no wars at all! What's your point? If the Americas were less bloody before the Europeans arrived, it was almost entirely because there was simply less blood to shed -- the archeological evidence is, "native" populations fought some long, brutal wars against each other, too...
Ah, yes. I suppose the Amerika bomber project -- given the explicit mandate of developing a plane that could reach New York from Europe with a bomb load and return -- was really meant just to take tourist photos of the Empire State Building.
Hitler's alleged respect for the British Empire stems just about entirely from his bizzarre "peace" entreaty wherein he offered to defend the British Empire if they'd stop being so annoying crying about Poland, and France, and the Low Countries, and... Considering how much Hitler lived his propaganda, I think a single Reichstag speech is a mighty thin reed in which to place such faith.
The goal of the Nazi Reich was a complete overthrow of the existing political realm -- a New World Order -- and there is absolutely no evidence they would have, of their own free will, stopped at anything less.
Isn't that the ultimate goal? The outlawing of general-purpose computers and the reduction of PCs to "media devices", the transformation of the bitstream into a revenue stream?
Used MSPaint any time recently? It's got a bunch of annoying glitches. (Edit a B&W drawing for more than a minute or two and you'll see...)
If all you were watching for was the animation sequences or the action scenes, then I guess this comment is dead-on. Of course, if all you were watching for was the animation sequences or the actions scenes, then you seriously missed the point! Max Headroom was about computer animation the way that Star Wars is about space flight; that is, just as a hook. The key to Max, the whole essence of the show, was its cynical-yet-so-true jaded view of Big Media and the world we were rapidly approaching, wherein the sheep of the world abdicate their power to the TV... Hmmm. A lot like this world, actually.
Max Headroom might have been "twenty minutes into the future" but it was also twenty years ahead of its time.
Wait. Spooling to a printer, scrawling information on a dead tree, walking to a phone line, using an obsolencent technology to push a (bad) facsimile of the dead tree through copper wire, having the recipient print out another (nearly illegible) copy on a different dead tree, then store the dead tree in a large metal box.... This is the same as editing a file directly, remailing it to the author, and keeping it in machine-readable form while storing it as a handful of magnetic domains?
There are some things that should be paper-archived. But most things should live in the machine. A golden rule from my days at NASA, learned when a transcription error rendered useless six months of IUE data, was: Nothing that has been entered into a computer should ever be entered again!
I haven't read the code, so I might be entirely wrong. But my guess is, cutting the IT budget would lead to lower available services and thus inefficiency and more student gripes. But that doesn't (necessarily) model the switch to Open Source. Open Source breaks the financial model of "higher price == better (more) service". In other words, just because you don't pay for the tools, doesn't mean the tools are garbage.
On one level, you could abstract this by saying the IT budget reflects license costs and service costs. If we drive down the license costs, then we can spend more on services in the same budget. But actually the model doesn't work that way. There's simply no way that paying for Office licenses (and Windows licenses) is intrinsically equal to paying for more help desks. If we need to abstract this much, then a very useful sim capability -- test whether Open Source can work as well for less -- is not available.
On the other hand, it's hard to see how you could code for that without simply incorporating your own personal bias towards Open Source (or against it) into the simulation. Is there hard data anywhere?
So, paid your "local law enforcement tax" yet? Or your local "textbook buying" tax? Or the emergency response tax? Or city planning tax? Of course not. They're funded out of general revenue. And I'm not sure exactly why it's unreasonable that we actually pay for what government does.
Actually, your gas tax does go to the highway construction trust fund. It's one of the most direct "user fees" around.
For a while in the mid-1990s, I served on the Associated Students at Stanford University (ASSU), which was essentially a student government. As it turns out, the ASSU had exactly this policy: They budgeted for each student group. Then each and every student could review their contributions and choose to raise or -- more commonly -- lower their own contribution to the groups. Sounds like the epitome of direct democracy in action, doesn't it? And maybe it was, but it was also living proof that direct democracy is incapable of governing effectively.
First, people still whined about any fees -- even when they could reduce them to zero. Then they whined when groups said, "If you didn't support us, then you can't attend our functions". Important voices weren't heard because the students, individually, didn't care enough to learn they were out there. Meanwhile, clever groups launched "ad campaigns" to sway voters and retain higher levels. Often these degenerated into "Free Beer!", regardless of the group's mission. And this was only for student activities, far from an essential service. Do you really want police funding, or medical research, or libraries to be that dependent on the whim of the electorate?
The people might be the source of all legitimate power, but they are far from a repository of wisdom. Sometimes it does help to have people actually dedicate time and effort to understanding complex issues.
To quote Jed Bartlet:
You know, I guess I'm the last of the rubes, and proud of it. I don't feel "robbed" every April 15th. Yes, I'd love it if my tax bill could be (responsibly!) lowered, and yes, I cringe hearing about all the spending misfires and pork projects. But I am still proud to contribute to the "general welfare" of the United Stated. Government serves a noble purpose and government, like other things in this society, costs money. As Justice Holmes says, taxes are the price you pay for civilization. I look at the civilization we have built and I think the price is still low -- a few thousand dollars a year in exchange for personal liberty and the rule of law? A bargain by any measure.
Is this something out of Life of Brian? We get roads, and hospitals, and police protection. And emergency rescue teams and fire stations and national defense. And schools and universities and libraries. And agricultural development and city planning and trade deals. And of course the highest-quality scientific and technological research anywhere, ever, producing and funding such things as the Internet through which you post your screed and through which we suffer to read it.
Well, now we get to the main cause of the trouble. If that's what you find "satisfying", then I am absolutely ecstatic that our government disappoints you. See beyond the animal and perhaps you won't be quite so dismissive.
Exactly. And just because you support charity work doesn't, either. Yet the author of the original paper would almost certainly agree with the take on charity and vehemently disagree with the take on open source. Open source is given away? Then the people doing it must be Communist, since only Communists thumb their noses at the free market!
I was only pointing out that people donate time and energy in other contexts to the general commonwealth, and it doesn't seem to raise the same alarm that OSS does.
Yes, of course. I am not trying to equate charity with communism. But the Open Source movement doesn't say that private, proprietary software must be banned. It only says that that's not the most efficient method. It recognizes that people like to share and can gain from sharing.
Open Source is "communistic" in exactly the same way that fundraisers at a church are -- that is, not at all. Yet people will often criticize the former while extolling the latter. It was that hypocrist that I was noting.
Indeed, people like the author most likely would get quite agitated if you suggested that their charity work was actually "communistic". Sometimes, even in a free capitalist society, it's good to give to the community.
Press releases -- and this story sounded, in part, like it was taken from one -- like to obscure the hard facts behind fuzzy comparisons that cannot be validated and hold, really, no meaning.