No way in hell you went from middle class to the 1% No. Way. In. Hell. I can only assume you, like most Americans, have your own definition of middle class, attaching moral values to it, rather than a defined income level. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are talking about an dual income home. In 2003, $67,348 was the median household income for a household with two income earners.
in 2009, $343,927 was the minimum annual income to be considered in the 1%.
So you're telling me you increased your income by 5!? How many years of trading did this take?
What in the hell are you talking about? The Soviet Union was not any more militarized than we are now. What the terrorists accomplished was drawing us into a modern day crusade against Islam, torture, and being feared and looked down upon by the whole world. If you don't think that was their goal, well I think it worked out pretty well for them anyway. America, the torturing colonizer that covers its prisoners in shit and sics dogs on them.
I'd say they are absolutely tied to capitalism in that they are about ownership. There is no way to own the idea of an upgrade button the way you can own a mine, so the government created a fiction that lets corporations treat them the same way.
Officer: I need you to assess these senators and figure out how to convince them more troops and materiel will help us meet our mission. Jones: What's our mission? Officer: To convince them more troops and materiel will help us meet our mission.
I think what is really going on here is that video game designers have to limit the possible game outcomes due to their resources. So they do a good job of disguising the rails. I mean, whether you do A, B, or C, X is going to happen. But they spend a lot of effort making A, B, and C look like real choices. And they spend a lot of time making X look like a consequence. But an unavoidable event is not in fact a consequence.
Those aren't choices. Real choices usually have a lot of context and don't have completely surprising outcomes. How many times have you been playing a game, made a decision, and when you saw the outcome you were, "Huh?"
It's not just you. I remember when I first started using google and how amazingly appropriate its results were if you knew the right search terms. Now days I'm surprised more that it does so poorly on what seems like straightforward searches.
Why is this? SEO must be part. But I also know if anything I'm looking for is even slightly related to a product, forget it, you get pages and pages of shopping results. I too, have to result on my memory and knowledge of where to look for certain things more and more.
That's why I like the term Progressive. My political views are not about spending money but in making our country better. Sometimes that entails spending money (think infrastructure) but many times it can be achieved by being more efficient, trying counter-intuitive policies, etc.
A better name for conservatives would probably be Regresssives. They don't want to keep things as they are, they want to roll them back as far as they can in order to advantage themselves and their allies (think any kind of business regulation). The only defense "conservatives" have when you point out the actual happenings in the world is to say "Well, not all Republicans are conservatives," or "George Bush wasn't a real conservative." Both are fallacious, One True Scotsman thinking.
Mark my words, if we get a Republic president in 2012 we'll be at war within 2 years and our national debt will double in their first term.
Nah, I use OS X at work and Ubuntu at home: right side is the right side. You spend most of your time in a GUI opening, scrolling and closing windows. Putting controls on the left side means you have to cross the screen every time you want to work with a window. How do you accidently close a maximised window? I suppose your argument would make sense if a lot of what people did with windows was drag them all over their screen. Maybe people do. I certainly don't.
Lame. Yeah, he didn't deserve the prize, he also didn't give it to himself. So to immediately quack out the republican talking points of "Big Ego" and "Too Exposed" shows you aren't thinking. Let me ask you this, every time Bush was on TV (which was about every day) were you saying "I wish he'd get back to work"? Or how about when Bush was saying "Bring it on" were you questioning the size of his ego then?
So let me get this straight, you are telling us that, in the middle of the worst economic downturn in probably a century, that the policies we've followed for most of the last quarter of that century are the best possible, and that we should be wary of the risky, scary Obamanomics?
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
This is the weakness of the Republican tactic of fearmongering. If you get people so afraid of the present, which has resulted from following your policies, they don't see anything Obama will do as risky, but risky *not* to try it as a change.
I think the assumptions underlying your idea are questionable. Education isn't about broadcasting knowledge to audiences of student-consumers.
I think you will find the best teachers are not necessarily the most entertaining, but the most able to engage students by teaching differently than the traditional sit-in-your-seat-while-I-tell-you-things model.
The more students in a class the more difficult that is to do, just logistically.
While more fragile than a book, yes, what is the value of all the books in the world?
Text is the easiest thing for a device like this to store, access, and display. By having one a child could have every text ever digitized available to them. To me that sounds more valuable than $200.
Also, while rugged, physical books are not perfect in a developing, rural environment. How much space would $200 worth of books take to store? How do you keep them from getting wet and dirty?
This comes up over and over; BSD being more free than the GPL. For who? BSD is great if you are a programmer, coder or developer and want to snap up some free code to build on. You can even close it up and prevent anyone else from building on what you build.
But the GPL is about freedom for *users*. If I am using an email app, I know I will always be able to use it and if it gets forked or the license gets changed the existing codebase will most likely be available through continued development by someone.
Users are the people you write software for. There are orders of magnitude more of them than coders. I really couldn't give a damn if a license makes reusing code more difficult for you, I want to know I have the freedom and security to *use* software.
And if the GPL needs a revision to prevent corporations from making an end run around it, essentially nullifying it, I'm all for it.
Stallman is constantly the target of criticism for being so concerned with distinguishing Free software form Open Source software. But the posts above show even the technically literate audience of/. still don't get it.
I think you explained well why TdR would be more deserving of a Free software award than Torvalds.
"If the consumer really weren't benefitting, then they'd seek out alternatives: they do exist, as I'm sure you know."
Then you say:
"Most of the geeks here (myself included) couldn't care less about how easy or hard it is to get Office data into a Linux spreadsheet, but we are a tiny, tiny minority of all people using computers."
So which is it? Do consumers have an alternative that they aren't using because they are satisfied with MS? Or, are they constrained by their need for interoperation and the fact that the "tiny,tiny minority" using that alternative doesn't get full interoperability?
I think you know the answer if you have family you've helped with computer problems. People are not satisfied. People are frustrated with, and fearful of computers (dataloss for ex.) and I'd say the largest contributor to that is MS software. When they say they hate computers, they usually mean they have become very frustrated with MS software and just don't realize that a computer can run other software. That's what happens when you have a monopoly.
Very well put. My original post was pretty poorly expressed. I think you have hit on what I was trying to get at: in my opinion code that can become non-free, is less free. I can see how others might disagree with this, that's fine it's a complex issue.
I think another thing that influences people's opinions on this is whether they come at with a user perspective or a coder. I am a user, when code becomes non-free it is lost to me. I can see how a coder would be happy to take BSD code and form a company around it.
BSD may be more free in the sense that companies can get the code for free, but it certainly isn't more free in the libre sense. How often does BSD code get incoporated into commercial projects that then close the source? The GPL ensures that code will stay free and not disappear.
I'm on a dialup and I find it ironic that AT&T is trying to advertise broadband to me with ads that I would never wait around to see if I hadn't been curious because of this story.
From the article:
And although much of the data will be freely available and researchers can even seek patents on what they find there, there will be limits on the amount of genetic data that can be downloaded by individual researchers and requirements that researchers under some circumstances sign agreements that limit their ability to redistribute or commercialize the data.
That sounds a lot more restrictive than you make it out to be, worse in fact, it sounds intentionally vague to leave room for tightening restrictions. There are "limits," "requirements," under "some circumstances," which does not sound like any non-commercial use is legal. Maybe you should read the article.
I don't know what you consider art, and that could be debated all day. I just thought I'd point out, however, that many artists must have side jobs even within the current system. It is fairly impossible to be a poet or write literary fiction in America without teaching at a university.
So the idea that copyright protects the economic value of an artists production only matters if the artist has mass appeal. In other words, Phil Levine or Rita Dove probably wouldn't notice a difference if copyrights went away, but Brittany and U2 would be forced to make *serious* lifestyle adjustments.
Whether that is a good thing or not is another matter altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
No way in hell you went from middle class to the 1% No. Way. In. Hell. I can only assume you, like most Americans, have your own definition of middle class, attaching moral values to it, rather than a defined income level.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are talking about an dual income home. In 2003, $67,348 was the median household income for a household with two income earners.
in 2009, $343,927 was the minimum annual income to be considered in the 1%.
So you're telling me you increased your income by 5!? How many years of trading did this take?
What in the hell are you talking about? The Soviet Union was not any more militarized than we are now. What the terrorists accomplished was drawing us into a modern day crusade against Islam, torture, and being feared and looked down upon by the whole world. If you don't think that was their goal, well I think it worked out pretty well for them anyway. America, the torturing colonizer that covers its prisoners in shit and sics dogs on them.
I'd say they are absolutely tied to capitalism in that they are about ownership. There is no way to own the idea of an upgrade button the way you can own a mine, so the government created a fiction that lets corporations treat them the same way.
"by giving the people enough education to see through demagoguery."
We haven't even achieved that here in the U.S.
More like:
Officer: I need you to assess these senators and figure out how to convince them more troops and materiel will help us meet our mission.
Jones: What's our mission?
Officer: To convince them more troops and materiel will help us meet our mission.
I think what is really going on here is that video game designers have to limit the possible game outcomes due to their resources. So they do a good job of disguising the rails. I mean, whether you do A, B, or C, X is going to happen. But they spend a lot of effort making A, B, and C look like real choices. And they spend a lot of time making X look like a consequence. But an unavoidable event is not in fact a consequence.
Those aren't choices. Real choices usually have a lot of context and don't have completely surprising outcomes. How many times have you been playing a game, made a decision, and when you saw the outcome you were, "Huh?"
It's not just you. I remember when I first started using google and how amazingly appropriate its results were if you knew the right search terms. Now days I'm surprised more that it does so poorly on what seems like straightforward searches.
Why is this? SEO must be part. But I also know if anything I'm looking for is even slightly related to a product, forget it, you get pages and pages of shopping results. I too, have to result on my memory and knowledge of where to look for certain things more and more.
That's why I like the term Progressive. My political views are not about spending money but in making our country better. Sometimes that entails spending money (think infrastructure) but many times it can be achieved by being more efficient, trying counter-intuitive policies, etc.
A better name for conservatives would probably be Regresssives. They don't want to keep things as they are, they want to roll them back as far as they can in order to advantage themselves and their allies (think any kind of business regulation). The only defense "conservatives" have when you point out the actual happenings in the world is to say "Well, not all Republicans are conservatives," or "George Bush wasn't a real conservative." Both are fallacious, One True Scotsman thinking.
Mark my words, if we get a Republic president in 2012 we'll be at war within 2 years and our national debt will double in their first term.
Check out Swords & Wizardry:
http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/
or
Labyrinth Lord:
http://www.goblinoidgames.com/products.html
Either is 1 free book to get your oldschool game one.
WoTC jumped the shark.
Nah, I use OS X at work and Ubuntu at home: right side is the right side. You spend most of your time in a GUI opening, scrolling and closing windows. Putting controls on the left side means you have to cross the screen every time you want to work with a window. How do you accidently close a maximised window? I suppose your argument would make sense if a lot of what people did with windows was drag them all over their screen. Maybe people do. I certainly don't.
I like the earth tones. So now all you people bitching makes them change it to PURPLE!
What the hell!? Let me guess you probably like a blue scheme, like every other fricking GUI has been for decades?
Lame. Yeah, he didn't deserve the prize, he also didn't give it to himself. So to immediately quack out the republican talking points of "Big Ego" and "Too Exposed" shows you aren't thinking. Let me ask you this, every time Bush was on TV (which was about every day) were you saying "I wish he'd get back to work"? Or how about when Bush was saying "Bring it on" were you questioning the size of his ego then?
Yeah, that will be a shame, because the corporate governance we have on this and so many other issues is so awesome.
So let me get this straight, you are telling us that, in the middle of the worst economic downturn in probably a century, that the policies we've followed for most of the last quarter of that century are the best possible, and that we should be wary of the risky, scary Obamanomics?
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
This is the weakness of the Republican tactic of fearmongering. If you get people so afraid of the present, which has resulted from following your policies, they don't see anything Obama will do as risky, but risky *not* to try it as a change.
I think the assumptions underlying your idea are questionable. Education isn't about broadcasting knowledge to audiences of student-consumers.
I think you will find the best teachers are not necessarily the most entertaining, but the most able to engage students by teaching differently than the traditional sit-in-your-seat-while-I-tell-you-things model.
The more students in a class the more difficult that is to do, just logistically.
While more fragile than a book, yes, what is the value of all the books in the world?
Text is the easiest thing for a device like this to store, access, and display. By having one a child could have every text ever digitized available to them. To me that sounds more valuable than $200.
Also, while rugged, physical books are not perfect in a developing, rural environment. How much space would $200 worth of books take to store? How do you keep them from getting wet and dirty?
This comes up over and over; BSD being more free than the GPL. For who? BSD is great if you are a programmer, coder or developer and want to snap up some free code to build on. You can even close it up and prevent anyone else from building on what you build.
But the GPL is about freedom for *users*. If I am using an email app, I know I will always be able to use it and if it gets forked or the license gets changed the existing codebase will most likely be available through continued development by someone.
Users are the people you write software for. There are orders of magnitude more of them than coders. I really couldn't give a damn if a license makes reusing code more difficult for you, I want to know I have the freedom and security to *use* software.
And if the GPL needs a revision to prevent corporations from making an end run around it, essentially nullifying it, I'm all for it.
Stallman is constantly the target of criticism for being so concerned with distinguishing Free software form Open Source software. But the posts above show even the technically literate audience of /. still don't get it.
I think you explained well why TdR would be more deserving of a Free software award than Torvalds.
Oh come on. First you say:
"If the consumer really weren't benefitting, then they'd seek out alternatives: they do exist, as I'm sure you know."
Then you say:
"Most of the geeks here (myself included) couldn't care less about how easy or hard it is to get Office data into a Linux spreadsheet, but we are a tiny, tiny minority of all people using computers."
So which is it? Do consumers have an alternative that they aren't using because they are satisfied with MS? Or, are they constrained by their need for interoperation and the fact that the "tiny,tiny minority" using that alternative doesn't get full interoperability?
I think you know the answer if you have family you've helped with computer problems. People are not satisfied. People are frustrated with, and fearful of computers (dataloss for ex.) and I'd say the largest contributor to that is MS software. When they say they hate computers, they usually mean they have become very frustrated with MS software and just don't realize that a computer can run other software. That's what happens when you have a monopoly.
Very well put. My original post was pretty poorly expressed. I think you have hit on what I was trying to get at: in my opinion code that can become non-free, is less free. I can see how others might disagree with this, that's fine it's a complex issue.
I think another thing that influences people's opinions on this is whether they come at with a user perspective or a coder. I am a user, when code becomes non-free it is lost to me. I can see how a coder would be happy to take BSD code and form a company around it.
BSD may be more free in the sense that companies can get the code for free, but it certainly isn't more free in the libre sense. How often does BSD code get incoporated into commercial projects that then close the source? The GPL ensures that code will stay free and not disappear.
That's great. But what happens when your workplace decides to upgrade to Windows XP 2003 and there's no longer an option to disable automatic updates?
I'm on a dialup and I find it ironic that AT&T is trying to advertise broadband to me with ads that I would never wait around to see if I hadn't been curious because of this story.
From the article:
And although much of the data will be freely available and researchers can even seek patents on what they find there, there will be limits on the amount of genetic data that can be downloaded by individual researchers and requirements that researchers under some circumstances sign agreements that limit their ability to redistribute or commercialize the data.
That sounds a lot more restrictive than you make it out to be, worse in fact, it sounds intentionally vague to leave room for tightening restrictions. There are "limits," "requirements," under "some circumstances," which does not sound like any non-commercial use is legal. Maybe you should read the article.
I don't know what you consider art, and that could be debated all day. I just thought I'd point out, however, that many artists must have side jobs even within the current system. It is fairly impossible to be a poet or write literary fiction in America without teaching at a university.
So the idea that copyright protects the economic value of an artists production only matters if the artist has mass appeal. In other words, Phil Levine or Rita Dove probably wouldn't notice a difference if copyrights went away, but Brittany and U2 would be forced to make *serious* lifestyle adjustments.
Whether that is a good thing or not is another matter altogether.