It's called free as in "not only you can make choices, but everyone else too". And you look like someone who has a hard time accepting that kind of freedom.
All evil needs is for good men to do nothing.
The BSD license is "doing nothing" so long as the Bill Gates of this world want to destroy the freedom to code and to share. There is no way in which helping him wipe out your fellow programmers 's freedoms is allowing people to make choices.
Get out of Utopia and look at the real world; we're in trouble and the enemy has billions to throw into his war-effort, so at least stop giving him free tanks. It'll be rolling over your house tomorrow.
I on the other hand, find it rewarding that someone found value in my effort, regardless what they ultimately do with it
Which shows that amorality is not a neutral standpoint when compared to a moral one, just because it's not overtly immoral. It still isn't moral.
Helping Microsoft (let's call a spade a spade, here) to destroy other fellow programmer's livelihoods is not a positive or even a genuinely neutral action. Simply walking away and decrying all responsibility does not change the fact of what you have done.
The legal system is designed by lawyers, run by lawyers, and judged by lawyers all for the benefit of lawyers, no one else. If they could get away with it they'd roll dice for the results and tell you to wait with the meter running for the rest of your life and collect from your children.
This is actually the way the system evolves in real life if governments do not step in now and then to stop them. Dickens' "Bleak House" is a haunting description of exactly that point in a legal system where justice for the public has finally been totally eliminated from the equation.
It's always nice to hear that Linux/WINE users can download updates from Microsoft.com, menwhile my legit Windows 2000 install can't.
MS doesn't care about Linux users because they're obviously non-customers. You, on the other hand, are a "known mug" and so they think they can force you to "upgrade" and hopefully shell out more cash for them to rub on Bill's tummy at night (after a while they can't use it anymore because it gets "sticky", so they need fresh stuff).
If that image doesn't keep you awake at night I don't know what will...
why the rebulican party wants to kill local businesses, seeing that is what they say they stand for
No, the republican party stands for the republican party, that's all. Professional politicians are the last people you should turn to to run a country.
there is no such thing as free trade with the usa.
Nor for that matter, and for the same reasons, does America ally with anyone. America has lots of allies that will and do help it out, but the US is totally unreliable when the boot's on the other foot. American treaties, of all kinds, aren't worth the paper they're written on.
The most persecuted Religion in the world is Christianity. More Christians are killed in more parts of the world because of their Religion than any other, every year.
All religions are the same and all are causing hundreds of deaths every day; Christianity is one of the worst with its track record of encouraging AIDS. The bottom line is that if you carefully develop a system of training people to believe whatever some "eldar" tells them then sooner or later some such eldar is going to tell them to kill people who don't agree with him.
Very few murderous rabble have ever been recruited from people who always ask why they should do as they're told.
As to mass murder, the current US ruling class are quite happy to see it if it supports their economic aims. They gave Saddam power, bioweapons and chemical weapons as long as he was killing Iranians with them. Today they're happy bombing the shit out of Iraqi civilians as long as they know that if push comes to shove with China, the US can walk in and take the Iraqi oil-fields. 100000 dead? They're foreigners, they don't count. 1000+ dead Americans? Canon fodder protecting the wealthiest 1% of the world's population - throw some more on!
It's hardly my fault, is it? It's not up to me to stop them sucking, it's up to them. If IE7 is good then great, it'll be the first time they've produced a good product in-house and might herald a new age of customer giving-a-shit for them. Which would be good all-round; I've no problem with that, I'm just saying that after 20 years of third-rate products it's reasonable to NOT give them the benefit of the doubt.
What were they thinking? There hasn't been a reason to buy Intel for higher-end machines for a long time now. Why the hell is AMD only at 10% of sales?!
So what you're saying is that it's been FAR too long a wait for them to fix anything but that it's slander to point this out while we all waited SIX YEARS for them to do something about it?
MS fan-boys are a sad bunch; it's no wonder MS has so much money. Do you even wait for them to produce a product, or do you just send 10% of your income directly to them every month?
As to any argument that you want to print stuff out and have it untracable back to you - why?
Say you knew their identity of someone powerful who ratted out a CIA agent and you wanted to put a journalist onto the scent but didn't want to get caught when the powerful person started threatening to put people in jail for telling the truth about him. Just as an example.
But seriously, when 85%+ of your audience uses a particular browser, doesn't it make sense to design pages with it in mind?
Not if it doesn't work, no. Supporting it simply means that MS have no pressure to fix it. Look at it this way: MS don't give a toss about web designers complaining, but there's a lot more users. They might listen to them if there's enough complaints. On a good day. With a tail wind. If the intern answers the phone...
We're not in the business of creating an Illustrator clone. We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world.
Well said. The keyboard on Inkscape is good; I couldn't care less how Illustrator works. It's not like Illustrator cares how I work, is it? I mean, where's the Linux version?
Call me crazy, but I think Apple may know what they're doing with their consumer OS and their hardware cash cow.
They never have before.
Well, alright, they seemed to in 1984-85, but it seems to have been a fluke.
To have consistantly had the best consumer OS on the market for 20 years and still be a rounding error on the market stats takes something special, and it ain't knowing what you're doing.
World War Two in Western Europe shows what happens when a Republic goes bad.
As does the British news every day now, it seems. People die when republics slide (inevitably, given the ease with which they are corrupted) into dictatorship. We've not quite reached the point of the elections being canceled due to "the emergency situation" but we're long past the point where the result of the election reflects the way people voted, which is the point where reform is urgent.
As it is, coming on to 60 people in the UK and more overseas have died to protect the interests of a tiny number of very rich people in America. Tens of thousands of foreigners have also died, but they're very poor indeed so they don't matter.
V for Vendetta or any other comic or movie isn't written for people to understand what can go really bad, they are written to make money and soothe the ego of the authors.
You're confusing the reason why comics, books, movies, etc get written with why they get a publisher/distributer. They can be the same reasons but it is possible to write something like this, or 1984 or Oliver Twist, because you want people to look at what's going on and do something about it.
A monopoly is where a company uses it's dominance in the industry to prevent competition by means other than price and performance,
No, a monopoly is a simple observation of market share. What you are describing is the legal concept of monopoly abuse.
Everyone is allowed to capture the market fairly. They are not supposed to be allowed to keep or extend that monopoly unfairly (eg, using their control of a delivery channel to increase the market share of their own products by refusing to carry competitors'). It happens all the time anyway, though.
Besides that, "scientist" and "usually unbiased" don't belong in the same discussion. A scientist should *always* be unbiased--else he is not being objective.
Until such times as we welcome our robot overlords, you'll have to live with this. That's why there is peer review and statistical analysis of results, and a requirement for scientific experiments to be reproducible. These are all safeguards against bias and they're there because scientists know that unbiased objective observation is an impossible ideal which everyone should aim at but never assume they have achieved.
If I were truly objective, I would look at everything on its own merits and draw my own conclusion.
That sounds good but in practise there isn't time and so we all generally fall back on "astounding results need astounding evidence", otherwise every scientist would be bogged down in double-blind tests of whether communion wafers taste like human flesh or if Mr Higgenblack's anus shows signs of extra-terrestrial haemorrhoid cream.
Slashdot Mirror
All evil needs is for good men to do nothing.
The BSD license is "doing nothing" so long as the Bill Gates of this world want to destroy the freedom to code and to share. There is no way in which helping him wipe out your fellow programmers 's freedoms is allowing people to make choices.
Get out of Utopia and look at the real world; we're in trouble and the enemy has billions to throw into his war-effort, so at least stop giving him free tanks. It'll be rolling over your house tomorrow.
TWW
Which shows that amorality is not a neutral standpoint when compared to a moral one, just because it's not overtly immoral. It still isn't moral.
Helping Microsoft (let's call a spade a spade, here) to destroy other fellow programmer's livelihoods is not a positive or even a genuinely neutral action. Simply walking away and decrying all responsibility does not change the fact of what you have done.
TWW
It's called free as in "working for the Man for free.", or "I'm an idiot." for short.
TWW
This is actually the way the system evolves in real life if governments do not step in now and then to stop them. Dickens' "Bleak House" is a haunting description of exactly that point in a legal system where justice for the public has finally been totally eliminated from the equation.
TWW
MS doesn't care about Linux users because they're obviously non-customers. You, on the other hand, are a "known mug" and so they think they can force you to "upgrade" and hopefully shell out more cash for them to rub on Bill's tummy at night (after a while they can't use it anymore because it gets "sticky", so they need fresh stuff).
If that image doesn't keep you awake at night I don't know what will...
TWW
Well, the day the electorate votes based on what people do rather than what they say they do democracy might actually break out somewhere.
No, the republican party stands for the republican party, that's all. Professional politicians are the last people you should turn to to run a country.
TWW
So, in other words, what the Japanese did in China was okay; shit happens.
What point were you trying to make?
TWW
Ah, the old "two wrongs make a right" argument. Lot of that about these days.
Today's false axiom: Hugo award nominations are picked at random in an unbiased way.
Anyone looking at the history of the award would know that this is, or has not been, even close to true.
I agree that Sross' assertion would require some depth of research to make it anything more than idle speculation, though.
TWW
Nor for that matter, and for the same reasons, does America ally with anyone. America has lots of allies that will and do help it out, but the US is totally unreliable when the boot's on the other foot. American treaties, of all kinds, aren't worth the paper they're written on.
TWW
So? Two wrongs make a right or something?
Very few murderous rabble have ever been recruited from people who always ask why they should do as they're told.
As to mass murder, the current US ruling class are quite happy to see it if it supports their economic aims. They gave Saddam power, bioweapons and chemical weapons as long as he was killing Iranians with them. Today they're happy bombing the shit out of Iraqi civilians as long as they know that if push comes to shove with China, the US can walk in and take the Iraqi oil-fields. 100000 dead? They're foreigners, they don't count. 1000+ dead Americans? Canon fodder protecting the wealthiest 1% of the world's population - throw some more on!
Evil is as evil does.
TWW
It's hardly my fault, is it? It's not up to me to stop them sucking, it's up to them. If IE7 is good then great, it'll be the first time they've produced a good product in-house and might herald a new age of customer giving-a-shit for them. Which would be good all-round; I've no problem with that, I'm just saying that after 20 years of third-rate products it's reasonable to NOT give them the benefit of the doubt.
TWW
TWW
MS fan-boys are a sad bunch; it's no wonder MS has so much money. Do you even wait for them to produce a product, or do you just send 10% of your income directly to them every month?
TWW
TWW
Say you knew their identity of someone powerful who ratted out a CIA agent and you wanted to put a journalist onto the scent but didn't want to get caught when the powerful person started threatening to put people in jail for telling the truth about him. Just as an example.
TWW
Not if it doesn't work, no. Supporting it simply means that MS have no pressure to fix it. Look at it this way: MS don't give a toss about web designers complaining, but there's a lot more users. They might listen to them if there's enough complaints. On a good day. With a tail wind. If the intern answers the phone...
TWW
Well said. The keyboard on Inkscape is good; I couldn't care less how Illustrator works. It's not like Illustrator cares how I work, is it? I mean, where's the Linux version?
TWW
They never have before.
Well, alright, they seemed to in 1984-85, but it seems to have been a fluke.
To have consistantly had the best consumer OS on the market for 20 years and still be a rounding error on the market stats takes something special, and it ain't knowing what you're doing.
TWW
As does the British news every day now, it seems. People die when republics slide (inevitably, given the ease with which they are corrupted) into dictatorship. We've not quite reached the point of the elections being canceled due to "the emergency situation" but we're long past the point where the result of the election reflects the way people voted, which is the point where reform is urgent.
As it is, coming on to 60 people in the UK and more overseas have died to protect the interests of a tiny number of very rich people in America. Tens of thousands of foreigners have also died, but they're very poor indeed so they don't matter.
V for Vendetta or any other comic or movie isn't written for people to understand what can go really bad, they are written to make money and soothe the ego of the authors.
You're confusing the reason why comics, books, movies, etc get written with why they get a publisher/distributer. They can be the same reasons but it is possible to write something like this, or 1984 or Oliver Twist, because you want people to look at what's going on and do something about it.
TWW
A damn good innings for someone that was machine-gunned on D-Day.
No, a monopoly is a simple observation of market share. What you are describing is the legal concept of monopoly abuse.
Everyone is allowed to capture the market fairly. They are not supposed to be allowed to keep or extend that monopoly unfairly (eg, using their control of a delivery channel to increase the market share of their own products by refusing to carry competitors'). It happens all the time anyway, though.
TWW
Until such times as we welcome our robot overlords, you'll have to live with this. That's why there is peer review and statistical analysis of results, and a requirement for scientific experiments to be reproducible. These are all safeguards against bias and they're there because scientists know that unbiased objective observation is an impossible ideal which everyone should aim at but never assume they have achieved.
If I were truly objective, I would look at everything on its own merits and draw my own conclusion.
That sounds good but in practise there isn't time and so we all generally fall back on "astounding results need astounding evidence", otherwise every scientist would be bogged down in double-blind tests of whether communion wafers taste like human flesh or if Mr Higgenblack's anus shows signs of extra-terrestrial haemorrhoid cream.
TWW