While, because of the non-traditional subject matter, these would probably be considered senryu (which has its own long tradition), I posted the three that I thought best approached the spirit of haiku.
I can understand why many hackers feel GUIs aren't very useful, they haven't changed much since they were invented. I think we could do much better and it wouldn't necessarily take more rendering power. I remember seeing on CONNECTIONS how people in the middle ages would imagine a cathedral to memorize large amounts of data. They would form this 3D construct in their minds and then "place" facts in each room. Why couldn't that be done on a screen, a 2D construct which you could move through as if it had depth? There seem to be all kinds of possibilities, but we're stuck in the GUI-as-a-desktop paradigm. Check out AskTog.com for a lot of interesting ideas on usability. The one thing that I read there that I thought was fascinating, was the four spots on the screen that have "infinite depth," so you can hit them easily with a mouse (You know where they are:). I use autohide toolbars whenever I can because I want to be able to use all of my screen real estate. Those four spots seem like perfect places to anchor some. But that's just one possibilty. Why do our files have to act like folders? I'd like to see some of that innovation we keep hearing about.
You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. This page is not here.
-- Cass Whittington
First snow, then silence. This thousand dollar screen dies so beautifully.
-- Simon Firth
The ten thousand things How long do any persist? Netscape, too, has gone.
-- Jason Willoughby
I know this is all in fun so I'm posting these three that I found at some online contest (posted without permission, sorry).
The idea, however, that what you are all making are actually haiku is just silly. Yes, there is generally a turn at the end (more of a spinning outward), and yes, there is traditionally a word indicating a season (kigo), but not just the words fall or spring, there were whole catalogs of words with their traditional seasonal indication. Cats, for instance, indicate a haiku about Spring.
Also, remember the whole 5-7-5 thing comes from Japanese, a language very different from our own. You would be better off trying to write three lines that you could say smoothly in one breath (in other words, not 7 one syllable words). There is so much more involved, though, like alliteration and literary allusions.
I highly recommend you all go read some *real* haiku by the masters: Basho, Issan, Buson, and Shiki, they will explain what haiku is all about far better than I can.
I think the true sickness of the whole IP system today shows up best with the protection of works by authors long dead. Here is an example printed on the web at the bottom of some poems by Elizabeth Bishop, who passed away 21 years ago:
CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
I love the all caps "caution", like the things going to combust or something.
Much of what you say makes sense but I doubt developers will be disappointed if M$ switches to a Linux kernel, because the resulting code will be under the GPL. We don't hate M$, we hate how they do "business".
If some sort of WinLinux came about you would be able to open the hood and have some control over your OS, which is the itch that hackers are really wanting to scratch.
Also, it would be very difficult for M$ to treat users/competitors the way they do now if all they were offering was a cludgy GUI.
As another post in this thread has pointed out pro Linux!= anti M$. Hell, right now I'll take anything over M$ from BSD to Be to Apple, it's just Linux is the closest thing to a free desktop for *all users* we have right now.
You believe that disabling javascript or turning off cookies completely is an acceptable solution to this problem?
If a security hole is found next week, in something that can't be disabled, will your suggestion be: "what's the big deal don't surf for a while. I'm sure Microsoft will have a patch out soon."
While the post you're responding to did ramble, I think that a person is justified in being tired of the poor designs force fed to most of the world by Redmond.
And the idea that we shouldn't get upset, because there will *probably* be a patch to fix the problem makes me sad. With that kind of thinking out there things aren't going to get better any time soon.
This is contrary to what I have read/heard. Of course not every diamond passes through DeBeers' hands, but then not every computer runs M$ Windoze, yet each clearly controls its market. From what I have heard companies prospecting diamonds have to be very stealthy, otherwise DeBeers swoops in and stakes claims all around the potential sites with its huge capital.
I am fascinated by molecular biology, but when I sat down and had a serious talk with one of my profs, I decided to drop out of the bio graduate program. She had informed me that it would take, at least, 9 years to get a doctorate and a position, and told me about what kind of work I could expect to be doing.
I switched to a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction, not anymore money or job opportunities, but I figured I might as well try to do something I enjoy, is meaningful, and I can do now, not in 9 years:)
Thanks for the link, this should be a news item on/.
you deserve the 4 not Tom
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
You summed it up nicely, thanks for posting.
Re:Disinfecting the GNU General Public Virus
on
Feature:GPL vs BSD
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· Score: 1
Perhaps this debate has been raging for years because it's not quite as simple as you believe it to be. I think there is a place for proprietary software as well, just not *every* place. Also, there seems to *be* quite a bit of robust, useful software created under the GPL, which is I suppose, a subset of RMS' "utopia", you refer to.
You are apparently confusing the idea of libre, or liberated software, with public domain software, if you consider freedom as being able to do whatever you want with it.
The point of liberated software, or what the FSF refers to when it says Free Software, is that it has been released from the bindings of property. No one can *own* it any longer. You can use it, copy it, share it, modify it, sell it, or ignore it, but you can't own it. This is frightening to many people because it shakes the foundations of our intelectual property beliefs.
If this bothers hackers out there, ignore the GPL and use a different license.
As far as what word should be used to refer to these different types of software, there is no good solution, the Enlish language is fluid and dynamic, what means one thing this year might mean something entirely different next year . . . good luck.
I think the problem that RMS touched on in his article is that you can GPL the representation of the design, but to protect the ideas would require a patent, a much more difficult and expensive thing to get.
The method you suggest would probably be far easier and practical to use than straight base pair encoding. Although, you would be able to store less info per strand, it would be relatively quick and easy to read it.
This is pretty far fetched, but how about storing information in the three-dimensional aspects of proteins. We don't have the means of calculating the shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence yet, but if we did...
How about storing information in the number/position of cell receptors, then you could do some kind of immunoassay to search for certain limited messages.
Your idea is definitely more feasible. I had actually thought of writing a science fiction short story in which espionage was committed in much the same way as described in the article, but what held me up was where would you store the DNA? You have encoded your message, the people at the other end have their gels ready, you put the message-DNA in the carrier...where? It would have to be somewhere it wouldn't get digested but you could retrieve it for decryption, any ideas?
I don't know squat about cryptography, but I find this cool. I had actually thought of writing a science fiction story along these lines a while back but well, blah, blah, . . . I didn't.
The cool part about it is no one expects a message. If you send someone a CD, papers, e-mail, anything than it suspect. But if it's in DNA, inside someone, they pop in, leave a drop of blood or a skin scrape, voila message delivered.
Or how about using someone (something? . . . dogs, cats) as an information repository. They walk around with all this data encoded in them and who would know? *They* might not even know.
One thing that's pretty cool is you can layer information in DNA sequences by making a one base pair frameshift. There are viruses that use this technique to pack as much genetic information into there small head capsules as they can.
It looks like this: ACG ACG ACG ACG CGA CGA CGA CGA GAC GAC GAC GAC
Of course, that's if your using 3 base pair codons, it might be easier to encode using straight base pairs. Which would allow for more storage? You might have to use natural codons though, in order for them to exist/be replicated in your snazzy new BioDrive (TM).
. . . Act now!! Store all your pr0n, ROMs and MP3s in the privacy of you own DNA, never leave home without them again!!
If I work for a month to write a book it is a significant investment of my time and talents. I own what I produced and people pay me for the right to use my book. Pretty simple, right?
Nope, what people pay when they purchase a book (and almost any other commodity) goes almost entirely towards the cost of production and distribution of the book.
You don't see Stephen King down at Kinkos getting ready for the next run of one of his novels do you? How much do you think an author gets per book? Certainly not the $32.30 I just paid for an O'Reilly book.
The problem with software is that the cost of production and distribution is almost zero. If I coded for a month, my program could be distributed to every person on Earth (theoretically now, as net connection increases it becomes more and more feasible) in a matter of days.
It still took me a month of my time and talent, so the problem becomes how much is my time worth? Does a person who writes software deserve payment from every person on Earth for his software? Is his/her time worth that much? So much more than the author who writes a book, or a teacher, or cook? I'm not sure. Maybe it is, but I *do* know, it's not as cut and dried as you seem to think it is.
The poster never claimed he hadn't stolen the software, he said that the software companies lost no money because he would not have purchased that software.
That's also an interesting way to try and make an argument . . . actually changing someone's words. I'll have to remember that one.
Your analogy is a good one, if someone is overclocking a Pentium. But why would someone buy a Celeron to overclock it when they can get a Pentium at the same speed?
$$$$ Intel charges what?, x2, x3 (depending on how old they are)as much for a Pentium because it is considered top of the line, it carries the brand-name.
With Celerons performing so well it makes you wonder why the Pentiums are so much more expensive (I know they don't have the same feature, just overall). So not only are you saving money (short term) by overclocking, your avoiding what looks like a nice fat premium tacked on by Intel.
Also, Intel has not been encouraging overclockering, to say the least. If you overclock, you must feel like you're doing something illicit.
I'm just playing Devil's advocate here, sure most people that overclock are probably doing it for simple, straightforward reasons; save cash, better game play, or just plain geekiness,
but don't act so shocked, people often feel like they are being taken advantage of by big corp.s and will do some crazy things if it makes them feel like they are getting back a little.
I read an article a while back where a guy covered every flat surface on the inside of his computer's case with carpet insulation. He also insulated a small box and used it to redirect the air coming out of the power supply towards the floor.
He said it cut the noise way down while only raising the temperature in his case by a few degrees. This was an older article, however, and probably wouldn't work too well with newer hotter cpus.
Tried to search for the original article but no luck, sorry. Hopefully, as chip makers switch to copper interconnects and a.18 micron process someone will start making chips with decent MHz ratings at low voltages and they won't need fourteen fans running on them to let you run a word processor:)
Our "defense" against the killer bug is natural selection; if you survive it you pass on your genes and your offspring are more likely to survive.
If our lifespans are lengthened but not our reproductive ones (i.e. we live 200 years but women can't have kids after ~50) then the bug doesn't really have much more time in it's arms race against us. If our reproductive age is lengthened as well, your right they would have a lot more time to evolve.
Natural selection doesn't necessarily push microbes to be killers, though; the worst form of Ebola virus kills its victims so quickly that they have very little time to spread the virus to others. This kills the virus too, so there is some selection away from the most virulent strains.
I think the most danger is a fluke cross-over from another species (like Ebola and HIV seem to be), then it wouldn't matter how long we were living. Just some thoughts to cheer your day . . .:)
You are right, words change, language is fluid. Copying and using software illegally is an accepted definition of piracy now. But why piracy? Why not software copiers? Or software thieves? The reason that definition of piracy is in your dictionary is because someone decided to start using the word pirate in that way. It wasn't the "pirates", but the software companies that assigned that definition. It is interesting because the word pirate has implications of breaking the law flagrantly, for pure monetary gain. There is also the sense that violence is used when piracy is committed. This is not to justify the use of software illegally, using ROMs of games in production is stealing from the company that makes the games, it's just that the word piracy bothers me. I think underlying the use of the word is the belief in the sanctity of IP, that even though copying code is essentially cost free each and every use of it should produces hefty royalties. That is a different debate, but I find it troubling that when I buy a M$ joystick, they explicitly tell me that I can only install the driver on a second computer if I delete it from the first. So if I want to use the hardware I own on two of my computers without copying and deleting each time, I am illegally copying software, and M$ can label me a pirate. The ways of propaganda are often subtle.
The previous poster said *imposed*
on
ShutUp Software
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· Score: 1
The post you are responding to did not say that there is no decent filtering software in existence, they said that most people don't get a choice. What good is X-STOP if the Utah school system (as an example) decides to use a poorly implemented or biased filter? The students won't have a choice.
With that being said, how are you going to ensure that all the schools, libraries, institutions in the world, use a fair and well designed filtering system?
I hope the librarians and people in charge of these things aren't just like most people, because I think most people (including myself) put in that position would probably want to filter out some of the noise and garbage. This requires them to make a decision about what exactly should be considered noise and garbage. And at that point they start making decisons for every user under them.
I would rather have every user make those choices for themselves.
Reading a Newspaper is quite different
on
ShutUp Software
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· Score: 1
Before you decide if you want to read a particular newspaper article you have the opportunity to scan the headlines, blurbs and any pictures relating to the story. These give you an idea of the stories content and let you make an informed decision of whether to read the article or skip on to the next one.
A filter will not give you that option. If you read an article by Mr. Katz and decide he's just a windbag, you can set your preferences to filter him out from then on. You would miss any future articles by him, even if they were on a topic extremely relevant or interesting to you.
While I agree with you that there is too much information noise to deal with it all, this argument supporting the idea of filtering is oddly similar to the issue of GUIs here on Slashdot.
We've heard it hundreds of times: without a user-friendly GUI Linux will have limited penetration on the desktop. The reason? The average user doesn't want to deal with the nuts and bolts of the OS (read noise) to get their work done (read signal).
The inevitable comment that comes up when the GUI is discussed again: all a GUI does is make your choices for you, you can't have a user-friendly OS without eliminating choices.
I don't think I'm alone in disagreeing with this idea. I believe that a flexible, powerful, and easier-to-use OS can and will emerge because of Free Software/Open Source efforts.
I feel the same way about filters; cutting out noise does not mean you must exclude content (and reduce your choices). Here are two suggestions on how it is possible here on Slashdot:
-leave off the filters and decide if you want to read an article based on the summaries that appear on the home page. This could still result in a large amount of articles you don't want to read, but you can decide on a case-by-case basis, and you'll know what everyone else is reading and thinking about.
-a filter-up sytem could be used, in which articles that you prefer would be given more weight, and you would see those first. The other articles would still be there, just lower on the page. Then, if some day you think "I wonder what Foo is babbeling about today?", you will have the choice available to you, to check or not.
So, unless you skip whole sections of the paper without even peeking, the way your brain filters the paper is quite different than the way a software filter would. With wetware you always have a choice, with software you make one and and have to live with it.
I don't care for some of the articles written by Mr. Katz in the past, but I didn't choose to filter him out(apparently you didn't either), and I'm glad because this is an interesting discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
That's cool. Small web, huh?
While, because of the non-traditional subject matter, these would probably be considered senryu (which has its own long tradition), I posted the three that I thought best approached the spirit of haiku.
For what it's worth, you can tell her that.
I can understand why many hackers feel GUIs aren't very useful, they haven't changed much since they were invented. I think we could do much better and it wouldn't necessarily take more rendering power. :).
I remember seeing on CONNECTIONS how people in the middle ages would imagine a cathedral to memorize large amounts of data. They would form this 3D construct in their minds and then "place" facts in each room. Why couldn't that be done on a screen, a 2D construct which you could move through as if it had depth?
There seem to be all kinds of possibilities, but we're stuck in the GUI-as-a-desktop paradigm. Check out AskTog.com for a lot of interesting ideas on usability. The one thing that I read there that I thought was fascinating, was the four spots on the screen that have "infinite depth," so you can hit them easily with a mouse (You know where they are
I use autohide toolbars whenever I can because I want to be able to use all of my screen real estate. Those four spots seem like perfect places to anchor some. But that's just one possibilty. Why do our files have to act like folders? I'd like to see some of that innovation we keep hearing about.
You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
-- Cass Whittington
First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
so beautifully.
-- Simon Firth
The ten thousand things
How long do any persist?
Netscape, too, has gone.
-- Jason Willoughby
I know this is all in fun so I'm posting these three that I found at some online contest (posted without permission, sorry).
The idea, however, that what you are all making are actually haiku is just silly. Yes, there is generally a turn at the end (more of a spinning outward), and yes, there is traditionally a word indicating a season (kigo), but not just the words fall or spring, there were whole catalogs of words with their traditional seasonal indication. Cats, for instance, indicate a haiku about Spring.
Also, remember the whole 5-7-5 thing comes from Japanese, a language very different from our own. You would be better off trying to write three lines that you could say smoothly in one breath (in other words, not 7 one syllable words). There is so much more involved, though, like alliteration and literary allusions.
I highly recommend you all go read some *real* haiku by the masters: Basho, Issan, Buson, and Shiki, they will explain what haiku is all about far better than I can.
If I was a moderator I'd have upped you.
I think the true sickness of the whole IP system today shows up best with the protection of works by authors long dead. Here is an example printed on the web at the bottom of some poems by Elizabeth Bishop, who passed away 21 years ago:
CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws
and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer
the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
I love the all caps "caution", like the things going to combust or something.
Much of what you say makes sense but I doubt developers will be disappointed if M$ switches to a Linux kernel, because the resulting code will be under the GPL. We don't hate M$, we hate how they do "business".
If some sort of WinLinux came about you would be able to open the hood and have some control over your OS, which is the itch that hackers are really wanting to scratch.
Also, it would be very difficult for M$ to treat users/competitors the way they do now if all they were offering was a cludgy GUI.
As another post in this thread has pointed out pro Linux!= anti M$. Hell, right now I'll take anything over M$ from BSD to Be to Apple, it's just Linux is the closest thing to a free desktop for *all users* we have right now.
You believe that disabling javascript or turning off cookies completely is an acceptable solution to this problem?
If a security hole is found next week, in something that can't be disabled, will your suggestion be: "what's the big deal don't surf for a while. I'm sure Microsoft will have a patch out soon."
While the post you're responding to did ramble, I think that a person is justified in being tired of the poor designs force fed to most of the world by Redmond.
And the idea that we shouldn't get upset, because there will *probably* be a patch to fix the problem makes me sad. With that kind of thinking out there things aren't going to get better any time soon.
This is contrary to what I have read/heard. Of course not every diamond passes through DeBeers' hands, but then not every computer runs M$ Windoze, yet each clearly controls its market. From what I have heard companies prospecting diamonds have to be very stealthy, otherwise DeBeers swoops in and stakes claims all around the potential sites with its huge capital.
I am fascinated by molecular biology, but when I sat down and had a serious talk with one of my profs, I decided to drop out of the bio graduate program. She had informed me that it would take, at least, 9 years to get a doctorate and a position, and told me about what kind of work I could expect to be doing.
:)
I switched to a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction, not anymore money or job opportunities, but I figured I might as well try to do something I enjoy, is meaningful, and I can do now, not in 9 years
Thanks for the link, this should be a news item on /.
You summed it up nicely, thanks for posting.
Perhaps this debate has been raging for years because it's not quite as simple as you believe it to be. I think there is a place for proprietary software as well, just not *every* place. Also, there seems to *be* quite a bit of robust, useful software created under the GPL, which is I suppose, a subset of RMS' "utopia", you refer to.
How can you lose ownership of code that someone else has contributed?
You are apparently confusing the idea of libre, or liberated software, with public domain software, if you consider freedom as being able to do whatever you want with it.
The point of liberated software, or what the FSF refers to when it says Free Software, is that it has been released from the bindings of property. No one can *own* it any longer. You can use it, copy it, share it, modify it, sell it, or ignore it, but you can't own it. This is frightening to many people because it shakes the foundations of our intelectual property beliefs.
If this bothers hackers out there, ignore the GPL and use a different license.
As far as what word should be used to refer to these different types of software, there is no good solution, the Enlish language is fluid and dynamic, what means one thing this year might mean something entirely different next year . . . good luck.
I think the problem that RMS touched on in his article is that you can GPL the representation of the design, but to protect the ideas would require a patent, a much more difficult and expensive thing to get.
The method you suggest would probably be far easier and practical to use than straight base pair encoding. Although, you would be able to store less info per strand, it would be relatively quick and easy to read it.
...
...where? It would have to be somewhere it wouldn't get digested but you could retrieve it for decryption, any ideas?
This is pretty far fetched, but how about storing information in the three-dimensional aspects of proteins. We don't have the means of calculating the shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence yet, but if we did
How about storing information in the number/position of cell receptors, then you could do some kind of immunoassay to search for certain limited messages.
Your idea is definitely more feasible. I had actually thought of writing a science fiction short story in which espionage was committed in much the same way as described in the article, but what held me up was where would you store the DNA? You have encoded your message, the people at the other end have their gels ready, you put the message-DNA in the carrier
I don't know squat about cryptography, but I find this cool. I had actually thought of writing a science fiction story along these lines a while back but well, blah, blah, . . . I didn't.
The cool part about it is no one expects a message. If you send someone a CD, papers, e-mail, anything than it suspect. But if it's in DNA, inside someone, they pop in, leave a drop of blood or a skin scrape, voila message delivered.
Or how about using someone (something? . . . dogs, cats) as an information repository. They walk around with all this data encoded in them and who would know? *They* might not even know.
One thing that's pretty cool is you can layer information in DNA sequences by making a one base pair frameshift. There are viruses that use this technique to pack as much genetic information into there small head capsules as they can.
It looks like this:
ACG ACG ACG ACG
CGA CGA CGA CGA
GAC GAC GAC GAC
Of course, that's if your using 3 base pair codons, it might be easier to encode using straight base pairs. Which would allow for more storage? You might have to use natural codons though, in order for them to exist/be replicated in your snazzy new BioDrive (TM).
. . . Act now!! Store all your pr0n, ROMs and MP3s in the privacy of you own DNA, never leave home without them again!!
If I work for a month to write a book it is a significant investment of my time and talents. I own what I produced and people pay me for the right to use my book. Pretty simple, right?
Nope, what people pay when they purchase a book (and almost any other commodity) goes almost entirely towards the cost of production and distribution of the book.
You don't see Stephen King down at Kinkos getting ready for the next run of one of his novels do you? How much do you think an author gets per book? Certainly not the $32.30 I just paid for an O'Reilly book.
The problem with software is that the cost of production and distribution is almost zero. If I coded for a month, my program could be distributed to every person on Earth (theoretically now, as net connection increases it becomes more and more feasible) in a matter of days.
It still took me a month of my time and talent, so the problem becomes how much is my time worth? Does a person who writes software deserve payment from every person on Earth for his software? Is his/her time worth that much? So much more than the author who writes a book, or a teacher, or cook? I'm not sure. Maybe it is, but I *do* know, it's not as cut and dried as you seem to think it is.
The poster never claimed he hadn't stolen the software, he said that the software companies lost no money because he would not have purchased that software.
That's also an interesting way to try and make an argument . . . actually changing someone's words. I'll have to remember that one.
Your analogy is a good one, if someone is overclocking a Pentium. But why would someone buy a Celeron to overclock it when they can get a Pentium at the same speed?
$$$$ Intel charges what?, x2, x3 (depending on how old they are)as much for a Pentium because it is considered top of the line, it carries the brand-name.
With Celerons performing so well it makes you wonder why the Pentiums are so much more expensive (I know they don't have the same feature, just overall). So not only are you saving money (short term) by overclocking, your avoiding what looks like a nice fat premium tacked on by Intel.
Also, Intel has not been encouraging overclockering, to say the least. If you overclock, you must feel like you're doing something illicit.
I'm just playing Devil's advocate here, sure most people that overclock are probably doing it for simple, straightforward reasons; save cash, better game play, or just plain geekiness,
but don't act so shocked, people often feel like they are being taken advantage of by big corp.s and will do some crazy things if it makes them feel like they are getting back a little.
I read an article a while back where a guy covered every flat surface on the inside of his computer's case with carpet insulation. He also insulated a small box and used it to redirect the air coming out of the power supply towards the floor.
.18 micron process someone will start making chips with decent MHz ratings at low voltages and they won't need fourteen fans running on them to let you run a word processor :)
He said it cut the noise way down while only raising the temperature in his case by a few degrees. This was an older article, however, and probably wouldn't work too well with newer hotter cpus.
Tried to search for the original article but no luck, sorry. Hopefully, as chip makers switch to copper interconnects and a
Our "defense" against the killer bug is natural selection; if you survive it you pass on your genes and your offspring are more likely to survive.
:)
If our lifespans are lengthened but not our reproductive ones (i.e. we live 200 years but women can't have kids after ~50) then the bug doesn't really have much more time in it's arms race against us. If our reproductive age is lengthened as well, your right they would have a lot more time to evolve.
Natural selection doesn't necessarily push microbes to be killers, though; the worst form of Ebola virus kills its victims so quickly that they have very little time to spread the virus to others. This kills the virus too, so there is some selection away from the most virulent strains.
I think the most danger is a fluke cross-over from another species (like Ebola and HIV seem to be), then it wouldn't matter how long we were living. Just some thoughts to cheer your day . . .
You are right, words change, language is fluid. Copying and using software illegally is an accepted definition of piracy now. But why piracy? Why not software copiers? Or software thieves? The reason that definition of piracy is in your dictionary is because someone decided to start using the word pirate in that way. It wasn't the "pirates", but the software companies that assigned that definition. It is interesting because the word pirate has implications of breaking the law flagrantly, for pure monetary gain. There is also the sense that violence is used when piracy is committed. This is not to justify the use of software illegally, using ROMs of games in production is stealing from the company that makes the games, it's just that the word piracy bothers me. I think underlying the use of the word is the belief in the sanctity of IP, that even though copying code is essentially cost free each and every use of it should produces hefty royalties. That is a different debate, but I find it troubling that when I buy a M$ joystick, they explicitly tell me that I can only install the driver on a second computer if I delete it from the first. So if I want to use the hardware I own on two of my computers without copying and deleting each time, I am illegally copying software, and M$ can label me a pirate. The ways of propaganda are often subtle.
The post you are responding to did not say that there is no decent filtering software in existence, they said that most people don't get a choice.
What good is X-STOP if the Utah school system (as an example) decides to use a poorly implemented or biased filter? The students won't have a choice.
With that being said, how are you going to ensure that all the schools, libraries, institutions in the world, use a fair and well designed filtering system?
I hope the librarians and people in charge of these things aren't just like most people, because I think most people (including myself) put in that position would probably want to filter out some of the noise and garbage.
This requires them to make a decision about what exactly should be considered noise and garbage. And at that point they start making decisons for every user under them.
I would rather have every user make those choices for themselves.
Before you decide if you want to read a particular newspaper article you have the opportunity to scan the headlines, blurbs and any pictures relating to the story. These give you an idea of the stories content and let you make an informed decision of whether to read the article or skip on to the next one.
A filter will not give you that option. If you read an article by Mr. Katz and decide he's just a windbag, you can set your preferences to filter him out from then on. You would miss any future articles by him, even if they were on a topic extremely relevant or interesting to you.
While I agree with you that there is too much information noise to deal with it all, this argument supporting the idea of filtering is oddly similar to the issue of GUIs here on Slashdot.
We've heard it hundreds of times: without a user-friendly GUI Linux will have limited penetration on the desktop. The reason? The average user doesn't want to deal with the nuts and bolts of the OS (read noise) to get their work done (read signal).
The inevitable comment that comes up when the GUI is discussed again: all a GUI does is make your choices for you, you can't have a user-friendly OS without eliminating choices.
I don't think I'm alone in disagreeing with this idea. I believe that a flexible, powerful, and easier-to-use OS can and will emerge because of Free Software/Open Source efforts.
I feel the same way about filters; cutting out noise does not mean you must exclude content (and reduce your choices). Here are two suggestions on how it is possible here on Slashdot:
-leave off the filters and decide if you want to read an article based on the summaries that appear on the home page. This could still result in a large amount of articles you don't want to read, but you can decide on a case-by-case basis, and you'll know what everyone else is reading and thinking about.
-a filter-up sytem could be used, in which articles that you prefer would be given more weight, and you would see those first. The other articles would still be there, just lower on the page. Then, if some day you think "I wonder what Foo is babbeling about today?", you will have the choice available to you, to check or not.
So, unless you skip whole sections of the paper without even peeking, the way your brain filters the paper is quite different than the way a software filter would. With wetware you always have a choice, with software you make one and and have to live with it.
I don't care for some of the articles written by Mr. Katz in the past, but I didn't choose to filter him out(apparently you didn't either), and I'm glad because this is an interesting discussion.