The biggest annoyance about this is that everyone is a bad guy who is involved in this:
1) TPB sucks, because they're just leechers making money off of other people's copyrighted work, all the while disengenuously crowing about "freedom".
2) The MPAA sucks, because of their tactics
3) Sweden sucks because they allowed themselves to be a tool of the USA
4) The USA sucks, because of their overreaction to file sharing, and being a tool of the MPAA.
5) Slashdot sucks, because most people here don't see the immorality of file sharing, and don't see that incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money. We might actually be seeing the fall of good video programming. It may not exist in 10 years, except for amateur junk.
In any case, Microsoft hardly 'allowed' their operating system to 'copied freely'. It may have been ultimately good for them, but they hated it nonetheless (hence the copy protection it has now). But so what? All other competitors to Microsoft in the early days enjoyed the same 'advantage'. They could all be pirated, so Microsoft didn't get any more boost from it than anyone else.
Just as the point of DRM isn't to be completely bullet proof (there's always the analog hole), the point of a captcha is to be enough of a nuisance that someone doesn't spend the time to crack it. Obviously, for a site like Yahoo and it's zillions of sites, it pays to spend time breaking the captcha. But for your average site, the captcha just has to be "good enough" such that someone won't bother to write a crack to spam a small fish.
Blanket advertising helped microsofts level of market penetration. Not everything MS does is bad.
You're joking, right? A lot of things contributed to Microsoft's success, but advertising isn't one of them. Microsoft doesn't even do that much advertising, and what they do do, completely sucks.
But if you'd like your eye candy open source and downloadable now, check out Lunapark6's review of the current version of Ubuntu Dapper, with "emphasis placed on helping someone set up the system for everyday desktop usage."
And this is relevant to the article how... ?
It does nothing good for the Open Source movement to desperately insert some plug at any opportunity. It just reinforces the notion that it *needs* the desperation (which may not be false, but that's another subject). See also: religious cults, Amway (or any MLM), smokers who quit, Libertarians, and the Apple Macintosh. If people just want you to Shut Up Already, you're not helping your pet movement.
Given that ATI and NVidia both possesss or have access to electron microscopes (I cannot imagine any chip fab would not have access to at least one) and can buy each others' products anonymously OTC at the nearest Best Buy or Frys, and can decompile and reverse engineer each other's drivers, what "competitive advantage" would each be losing for the other?
Sheesh. Spoken like someone who has never disassembled ('decompilers' don't exist to any useful extent for machine-compiled languages) a significantly complicated program. Why do you think the WINE project is so hard?
And I'm no IC geek, but I would imagine that shining an electron microscope at a tiny portion of millions of transisters doesn't exactly reveal the secrets instantly.
By the way, something else I forgot to say... you mention homeschooled children and seem to be making that equivalent with unschooled. I have no problem with the concept of homeschooling. I think parents can do just as well as teachers (and often better), as long as they're willing to put in the time and effort to give their children a well-rounded education. The key is the parents -- putting in the time and effort.
The big problem I have with unschooling is the lack of parent involvement.
Despite my sig, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this idea. My public school education SUCKED. You could even call me unschooled to some extent. My parents weren't that involved, and generally speaking I did well in the things I was interested in, and did terrible in the things I wasn't. I was smart, so I did the minimum possible required to get by in the classes I didn't like. I took early college classes in high school because I was interested in them, not because anyone was pushing me to do it. I'm also a college drop-out, because I didn't really respect my computer science college professors, who seemed very isolated and "ivory tower", and I was out in the real world.
So why my.sig? Two reasons:
1) Very few people are like me. You have to be smart to learn on your own, and you have to be very self-motivated. I think you're making the logical fallacy of evidence based only on your own personal experience. It's worked for you, so it must be able to work for anyone, even though you also recognize that it hasn't worked in a lot of cases (e.g., the inner city). As you say, the home environment for this is critical, but I would argue that genetics have some significant play in this as well. You and your wife are this personality type, so it worked out.
2) The second reason for my sig is that my education is not very well-rounded. I did extremely well in the things I was interested in, but not well in other things. My grammar was atrocious, which I had to fix later in life. I read a lot, but mostly science fiction, which was scientifically stimulating but ultimately a pretty shallow representation of literature. I recognize now that someone SHOULD have been kicking me in the ass to work hard and not just stay in my comfort zone.
Now, I don't know your kids, but I would bet that while they are very good in narrow areas, like science, they are not very good in other areas -- not coincidentally, the areas that you and your wife probably don't think are important. Look at how science-heavy you describe them. But I don't want this to turn into you having to defend your children. How "broad" someone's learning is hard to judge, so let's say I might be wrong. But my point is that I'd bet most unschooled children don't end up with a broad base.
I would also bet that most unschooled children have a very low tolerance for frustration, and don't tend to work hard on things that don't come easy to them. They were never pushed to learn anything that didn't come natural to them.
So while I'm happy that your kids have turned out OK, I'm not prepared to say that it's worth the risk. We'll never know, but I'd bet your kids would have done as well -- or better -- in a standard educational curriculum with properly involved parents. Maybe they wouldn't have gone to college early, but I don't consider that a bad thing. The big question is whether you could have been "properly involved", since you seem proud of the fact that you didn't have to be involved.
I'm not saying that a parent has to be a buddy, but if a parent can't convince their child to do something by presenting a superior argument as to why they should do that thing, maybe their position on the issue needs to be reconsidered.
You can't possibly have kids of your own.
You seem to think that kids are just little logical Spocks that require only a bit of reasonable argument. Sheesh. Kids typically do NOT see the long view.
You don't have to go to lessons, but I'd reccomend you get some knowledge or you'll be bored all your life." is infinitely better than the one who says "Go to lessons or I'll take away your phone/car/right to have fun.".
Yeah, and what if your child says to you (in a snide voice), "I DON'T WANT TO LEARN TO READ. I hate reading, it's too hard. I won't be bored, there are way more fun things to do than read."
Maybe you'll say to your kids, "That's OK, junior, I won't force you to learn to read. It's all up to you." In that case, you're one of those parents I'm referring to in my sig.
On the other hand, I tell MY kid, "Yes, you WILL learn to read, and you'll do it, even though it's hard. You don't understand it now, but almost everything else hinges on being a good reader."
And in fact, that's almost the exact conversation I've had with my kid, so it's not theoretical to me. I fully support explaining why something is good for kids, and in fact I do that. But if the explanation doesn't work, they STILL have to do it, because I'm the parent. I'm not perfect, but I'm going to damn well do my best to make sure they get a well-rounded education so that when they're adults, they'll have had a wide enough sample of everything to decide what to do on their own.
I come to this conclusion by the fact that football team is singled out in his statement over other sports, and the reason I come up with for him doing that is that high school football scores are what make it into the paper.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from this. What's in the newspaper is what a broad section of people are interested in. Now, I'm very interested in how well my kid did on his science paper. I don't care at all how some anonymous kid did on HIS science paper.
On the other hand, I do care about how various other schools in my kid's sports league are doing, because that matters in the context of the entertainment of sports.
Now, does that mean I don't care about science, or that I care about sports more than science? No, it just means that specific news about sports has a broader interest than specific news about schoolwork.
Note that academic competitions do make the paper occasionally, because those have a broader interest. But are they supposed to print the grades of every student in the area?
I'd say that rather than change newspapers to somehow reflect what's "objectively" more important in society so that kids understand what's important, we ought to educate kids to understand exactly what newspapers are.
Because it basically comes down to neglect. The vast majority of children are not capable of planning their own educational curriculum, and will tend to gravitate to either 1) things that are easy for them (and thus avoid anything challenging), or 2) basically things that are entertainment.
Unschooling is bad for the same reason we don't release kids into the supermarket and let them pick out anything they want to eat.
What's amazing is that unschooling advocates don't even understand that we already have this "great experiment" in progress right now -- it's called "inner city schools". The schools basically don't give a damn and let the kids do whatever they want. Take a look at the results of the "exit exam" recently instituted in California. The kids can barely read, and their math skills are atrocious.
I'm not saying public schools don't suck in a lot of ways, but they're one of those things that you get out what you put into it, and it requires the parents to make sure the kids are working hard. If the kids have other interests that they want to pursue, then fine, let them pursue them. But they should ALSO get the foundational education.
That's what happens when the most important part of your 'academic' life is the Football team.
Is this some ironic example of the lack of science reasoning or something?
You don't like sports, fine, I get that. But to think that somehow liking sports is inversely proportional to academic ability is just stupid. In fact, I argue that sports are part of being a well-rounded individual.
The truth is that kids are doing worse because parents are worse. They're too afraid to discipline their kids and insist they work hard. They're too afraid to take away privileges if their kids screw up. They're to afraid to be seen as "controlling bastards" by their spoiled, screaming children. They want to be their buddies instead of parents.
Which is why we need an amendment guaranteeing the right to privacy.
The problem with that is defining what "privacy" really means without creating more harm than good from unintended consequences (see the Equal Rights Amendment). For example, a lot of people think "right to privacy" means "right to anonymity", which I definitely would NOT support (how do you collect taxes from people who have the right to be anonymous?)
Oops, actually, to answer myself, I'm wrong. If you were publishing your public key, that would be the product of two primes. A PGP signature is (I think) a hash of the message encoded with the private key that can be verified by the public key.
Still, I think it would be funnier if you published a short public key that was the product of two small primes.:)
Hmm, I know your sig is a joke, but wouldn't a PGP signature have to be the product of two primes? Your signature is [3, 5, 823]. '1234' would work, that's [2, 617]. 1234567 also works, that's [127, 9721].
So I promote, less the unschooling, and more the MORE FREE TIME FOR KIDS AND MORE FREE TIME FOR PARENTS.
That's not so much "more free time" as kicking kids' asses and making them work in the time they have. And that I totally agree with. The whole idea of "unschooling" is the ultimate expression of laziness. They don't want kids to be challenged, they just want them to do whatever the hell they want so the parents don't have to be parents and be involved.
Re:By the sound of it, they will be using optics
on
Looking for Life in Light
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Seriously though, it seems to me that we always have this idiotic need to find ORGANIC life.
This is not just a case of assuming everything has to be like us. The reason we look for organic life is the same reason we're made out of carbon and the same reason carbon (organic) chemistry is an entire subject separate from inorganic (non-carbon) chemistry -- carbon is an amazingly versatile element, totally unlike anything else. Sure, it's possible there might be life made of something else, in the same sense that "anything is possible". But some things are a lot less likely than others.
To have life, you have to have a capability for very complex reactions. It's fun to speculate on "non-coporeal" life in a science fiction novel, but something has to be supporting the mechanisms of life.
I disagree that it was a tactic on face value. I was a part of the RedHat IPO because of some bug contributions but I didn't consider it a ploy.
The Red Hat precedent did occur to me, but that was a bit of a different deal. First, the pool of people who were contributors is much smaller than the (almost) entire Vonage customer base. Second, I think it was limited to much smaller than 5,000 shares (like 100 shares or something?). Third, contributors to Red Hat seems a bit more honest than any customer that happens to have used the product.
Imagine if Red Hat offered 5,000 shares to anyone who had ever purchased Red Hat (not exactly the same; Red Hat's customer base is even much smaller than Vonage).
I'm a Vonage customer, and got the notification that they were "rewarding" their customers by allowing them to get in on the IPO, up to 5,000 shares. I had a few hours of excited thoughts, thinking that maybe I should get in on it.
Then, fortunately, my brain kicked in. Why, if the Vonage IPO was going to be a blockbuster, would they give away so many shares to the unwashed masses?
Unless they needed the unwashed masses to drum up demand.
These finance guys aren't typically stupid. Yeah, sure, it was theoretically possible that they were giving out so many shares out of the goodness of their heart, but my experience in life is that there ain't no free lunch.
I'm glad my suspicians were borne out. I'd have been REALLY pissed if it shot up 10x or something.:D
If your argument is that GNU is an organization, where Linux is a "product" (GNU/Linux ~~ Microsoft Windows), then I can see that being a problem.
That's more-or-less the point as far as the confusion goes, but mostly my point is that RMS has specifically said he wants GNU attached for the publicity. But if Open Source is getting some publicity, that seems to be a bad thing because of potential "confusion". But then, "free software" is incredibly confusing, but he doesn't have a problem with that because (paraphrase), "it is an opportunity to educate people about free software and what it should mean."
That's the historical deriviation of the name. So what?
Yes, I'm pretty sure Linus never figured it would become such a big deal, but he's definitely getting the credit for it.
Of course he gets credit for it; he started it. But the equivalent situation is if Linux started insisting we call it, "Linus Torvalds/Linux". Note that it's perfectly possible to have a Linux completely without Linus by forking the Kernel. Note that it's NOT possible to have a Gnu/Linux without any trace of Gnu tools (which DO exist, by the way).
As the other poster wrote, Linux is just a title for a collection of program that we term an Operation System. There's no implication of ownership or credit. It could just as easily be called "Arglex". RMS introduced the whole concept of pushing politics into the name.
Why did this non-incident generate a large and confused reaction? Perhaps because people do not read these announcements carefully. Ever since the term "open source" was coined, we have seen companies find ways to use it and their product name in the same sentence. (They don't seem to do this with "free software", though they could if they wanted to.) The careless reader may note the two terms in proximity and falsely assume that one talks about the other.
Sheesh. Companies don't use the term 'free software' because the name sucks. It's ambiguous.
As for "careless readers", Stallman doesn't seem to mind Gnu/Linux, even though the "careless reader" may assume Gnu wrote the entire Linux package. But Stallman is happy because it gives Gnu more publicity.
Even if the "careless reader" is making false assumptions, how about using the same logic and be grateful that OSS is getting more free publicity? But that would require Stallman to be grateful to something to doesn't involve him and he doesn't control, and we know that won't happen.
Reading comprehension does seem to be a declining skill, alas. Read the usage note and attempt to learn something, though I suspect it's a lost cause in your case. Irony is a tricky concept to understand, which is why it's used wrong in so many cases.
Now, there are varying degrees of phosphor ignition along the way (the same way a CRT fades). Dissipation begins the moment you turn the set on. After 1000 hours of usage a plasma monitor should measure around 96% of its original brightness, which is barely noticeable to the naked eye. At 15,000 to 20,000 hours the monitor should measure around 80% brightness, or to state is technically, 80% of the original phosphors (gases) are being ignited.
Frankly, I think the issues with plasma screens are way overblown.
Slashdot Mirror
1) TPB sucks, because they're just leechers making money off of other people's copyrighted work, all the while disengenuously crowing about "freedom".
2) The MPAA sucks, because of their tactics
3) Sweden sucks because they allowed themselves to be a tool of the USA
4) The USA sucks, because of their overreaction to file sharing, and being a tool of the MPAA.
5) Slashdot sucks, because most people here don't see the immorality of file sharing, and don't see that incredibly expensive shows like 24 and Lost WON'T EXIST if they can't make money. We might actually be seeing the fall of good video programming. It may not exist in 10 years, except for amateur junk.
*sigh*
In any case, Microsoft hardly 'allowed' their operating system to 'copied freely'. It may have been ultimately good for them, but they hated it nonetheless (hence the copy protection it has now). But so what? All other competitors to Microsoft in the early days enjoyed the same 'advantage'. They could all be pirated, so Microsoft didn't get any more boost from it than anyone else.
Just as the point of DRM isn't to be completely bullet proof (there's always the analog hole), the point of a captcha is to be enough of a nuisance that someone doesn't spend the time to crack it. Obviously, for a site like Yahoo and it's zillions of sites, it pays to spend time breaking the captcha. But for your average site, the captcha just has to be "good enough" such that someone won't bother to write a crack to spam a small fish.
You're joking, right? A lot of things contributed to Microsoft's success, but advertising isn't one of them. Microsoft doesn't even do that much advertising, and what they do do, completely sucks.
And this is relevant to the article how ... ?
It does nothing good for the Open Source movement to desperately insert some plug at any opportunity. It just reinforces the notion that it *needs* the desperation (which may not be false, but that's another subject). See also: religious cults, Amway (or any MLM), smokers who quit, Libertarians, and the Apple Macintosh. If people just want you to Shut Up Already, you're not helping your pet movement.
Sheesh. Spoken like someone who has never disassembled ('decompilers' don't exist to any useful extent for machine-compiled languages) a significantly complicated program. Why do you think the WINE project is so hard?
And I'm no IC geek, but I would imagine that shining an electron microscope at a tiny portion of millions of transisters doesn't exactly reveal the secrets instantly.
The big problem I have with unschooling is the lack of parent involvement.
Despite my sig, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this idea. My public school education SUCKED. You could even call me unschooled to some extent. My parents weren't that involved, and generally speaking I did well in the things I was interested in, and did terrible in the things I wasn't. I was smart, so I did the minimum possible required to get by in the classes I didn't like. I took early college classes in high school because I was interested in them, not because anyone was pushing me to do it. I'm also a college drop-out, because I didn't really respect my computer science college professors, who seemed very isolated and "ivory tower", and I was out in the real world.
So why my .sig? Two reasons:
1) Very few people are like me. You have to be smart to learn on your own, and you have to be very self-motivated. I think you're making the logical fallacy of evidence based only on your own personal experience. It's worked for you, so it must be able to work for anyone, even though you also recognize that it hasn't worked in a lot of cases (e.g., the inner city). As you say, the home environment for this is critical, but I would argue that genetics have some significant play in this as well. You and your wife are this personality type, so it worked out.
2) The second reason for my sig is that my education is not very well-rounded. I did extremely well in the things I was interested in, but not well in other things. My grammar was atrocious, which I had to fix later in life. I read a lot, but mostly science fiction, which was scientifically stimulating but ultimately a pretty shallow representation of literature. I recognize now that someone SHOULD have been kicking me in the ass to work hard and not just stay in my comfort zone.
Now, I don't know your kids, but I would bet that while they are very good in narrow areas, like science, they are not very good in other areas -- not coincidentally, the areas that you and your wife probably don't think are important. Look at how science-heavy you describe them. But I don't want this to turn into you having to defend your children. How "broad" someone's learning is hard to judge, so let's say I might be wrong. But my point is that I'd bet most unschooled children don't end up with a broad base.
I would also bet that most unschooled children have a very low tolerance for frustration, and don't tend to work hard on things that don't come easy to them. They were never pushed to learn anything that didn't come natural to them.
So while I'm happy that your kids have turned out OK, I'm not prepared to say that it's worth the risk. We'll never know, but I'd bet your kids would have done as well -- or better -- in a standard educational curriculum with properly involved parents. Maybe they wouldn't have gone to college early, but I don't consider that a bad thing. The big question is whether you could have been "properly involved", since you seem proud of the fact that you didn't have to be involved.
You can't possibly have kids of your own.
You seem to think that kids are just little logical Spocks that require only a bit of reasonable argument. Sheesh. Kids typically do NOT see the long view.
You don't have to go to lessons, but I'd reccomend you get some knowledge or you'll be bored all your life." is infinitely better than the one who says "Go to lessons or I'll take away your phone/car/right to have fun.".
Yeah, and what if your child says to you (in a snide voice), "I DON'T WANT TO LEARN TO READ. I hate reading, it's too hard. I won't be bored, there are way more fun things to do than read."
Maybe you'll say to your kids, "That's OK, junior, I won't force you to learn to read. It's all up to you." In that case, you're one of those parents I'm referring to in my sig.
On the other hand, I tell MY kid, "Yes, you WILL learn to read, and you'll do it, even though it's hard. You don't understand it now, but almost everything else hinges on being a good reader."
And in fact, that's almost the exact conversation I've had with my kid, so it's not theoretical to me. I fully support explaining why something is good for kids, and in fact I do that. But if the explanation doesn't work, they STILL have to do it, because I'm the parent. I'm not perfect, but I'm going to damn well do my best to make sure they get a well-rounded education so that when they're adults, they'll have had a wide enough sample of everything to decide what to do on their own.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from this. What's in the newspaper is what a broad section of people are interested in. Now, I'm very interested in how well my kid did on his science paper. I don't care at all how some anonymous kid did on HIS science paper.
On the other hand, I do care about how various other schools in my kid's sports league are doing, because that matters in the context of the entertainment of sports.
Now, does that mean I don't care about science, or that I care about sports more than science? No, it just means that specific news about sports has a broader interest than specific news about schoolwork.
Note that academic competitions do make the paper occasionally, because those have a broader interest. But are they supposed to print the grades of every student in the area?
I'd say that rather than change newspapers to somehow reflect what's "objectively" more important in society so that kids understand what's important, we ought to educate kids to understand exactly what newspapers are.
Because it basically comes down to neglect. The vast majority of children are not capable of planning their own educational curriculum, and will tend to gravitate to either 1) things that are easy for them (and thus avoid anything challenging), or 2) basically things that are entertainment.
Unschooling is bad for the same reason we don't release kids into the supermarket and let them pick out anything they want to eat.
What's amazing is that unschooling advocates don't even understand that we already have this "great experiment" in progress right now -- it's called "inner city schools". The schools basically don't give a damn and let the kids do whatever they want. Take a look at the results of the "exit exam" recently instituted in California. The kids can barely read, and their math skills are atrocious.
I'm not saying public schools don't suck in a lot of ways, but they're one of those things that you get out what you put into it, and it requires the parents to make sure the kids are working hard. If the kids have other interests that they want to pursue, then fine, let them pursue them. But they should ALSO get the foundational education.
Is this some ironic example of the lack of science reasoning or something?
You don't like sports, fine, I get that. But to think that somehow liking sports is inversely proportional to academic ability is just stupid. In fact, I argue that sports are part of being a well-rounded individual.
The truth is that kids are doing worse because parents are worse. They're too afraid to discipline their kids and insist they work hard. They're too afraid to take away privileges if their kids screw up. They're to afraid to be seen as "controlling bastards" by their spoiled, screaming children. They want to be their buddies instead of parents.
The problem with that is defining what "privacy" really means without creating more harm than good from unintended consequences (see the Equal Rights Amendment). For example, a lot of people think "right to privacy" means "right to anonymity", which I definitely would NOT support (how do you collect taxes from people who have the right to be anonymous?)
Still, I think it would be funnier if you published a short public key that was the product of two small primes. :)
Hmm, I know your sig is a joke, but wouldn't a PGP signature have to be the product of two primes? Your signature is [3, 5, 823]. '1234' would work, that's [2, 617]. 1234567 also works, that's [127, 9721].
That's not so much "more free time" as kicking kids' asses and making them work in the time they have. And that I totally agree with. The whole idea of "unschooling" is the ultimate expression of laziness. They don't want kids to be challenged, they just want them to do whatever the hell they want so the parents don't have to be parents and be involved.
This is not just a case of assuming everything has to be like us. The reason we look for organic life is the same reason we're made out of carbon and the same reason carbon (organic) chemistry is an entire subject separate from inorganic (non-carbon) chemistry -- carbon is an amazingly versatile element, totally unlike anything else. Sure, it's possible there might be life made of something else, in the same sense that "anything is possible". But some things are a lot less likely than others.
To have life, you have to have a capability for very complex reactions. It's fun to speculate on "non-coporeal" life in a science fiction novel, but something has to be supporting the mechanisms of life.
The Red Hat precedent did occur to me, but that was a bit of a different deal. First, the pool of people who were contributors is much smaller than the (almost) entire Vonage customer base. Second, I think it was limited to much smaller than 5,000 shares (like 100 shares or something?). Third, contributors to Red Hat seems a bit more honest than any customer that happens to have used the product.
Imagine if Red Hat offered 5,000 shares to anyone who had ever purchased Red Hat (not exactly the same; Red Hat's customer base is even much smaller than Vonage).
Then, fortunately, my brain kicked in. Why, if the Vonage IPO was going to be a blockbuster, would they give away so many shares to the unwashed masses?
Unless they needed the unwashed masses to drum up demand.
These finance guys aren't typically stupid. Yeah, sure, it was theoretically possible that they were giving out so many shares out of the goodness of their heart, but my experience in life is that there ain't no free lunch.
I'm glad my suspicians were borne out. I'd have been REALLY pissed if it shot up 10x or something. :D
That's more-or-less the point as far as the confusion goes, but mostly my point is that RMS has specifically said he wants GNU attached for the publicity. But if Open Source is getting some publicity, that seems to be a bad thing because of potential "confusion". But then, "free software" is incredibly confusing, but he doesn't have a problem with that because (paraphrase), "it is an opportunity to educate people about free software and what it should mean."
That's the historical deriviation of the name. So what?
Yes, I'm pretty sure Linus never figured it would become such a big deal, but he's definitely getting the credit for it.
Of course he gets credit for it; he started it. But the equivalent situation is if Linux started insisting we call it, "Linus Torvalds/Linux". Note that it's perfectly possible to have a Linux completely without Linus by forking the Kernel. Note that it's NOT possible to have a Gnu/Linux without any trace of Gnu tools (which DO exist, by the way).
As the other poster wrote, Linux is just a title for a collection of program that we term an Operation System. There's no implication of ownership or credit. It could just as easily be called "Arglex". RMS introduced the whole concept of pushing politics into the name.
Sheesh. Companies don't use the term 'free software' because the name sucks. It's ambiguous.
As for "careless readers", Stallman doesn't seem to mind Gnu/Linux, even though the "careless reader" may assume Gnu wrote the entire Linux package. But Stallman is happy because it gives Gnu more publicity.
Even if the "careless reader" is making false assumptions, how about using the same logic and be grateful that OSS is getting more free publicity? But that would require Stallman to be grateful to something to doesn't involve him and he doesn't control, and we know that won't happen.
Reading comprehension does seem to be a declining skill, alas. Read the usage note and attempt to learn something, though I suspect it's a lost cause in your case. Irony is a tricky concept to understand, which is why it's used wrong in so many cases.
Now, there are varying degrees of phosphor ignition along the way (the same way a CRT fades). Dissipation begins the moment you turn the set on. After 1000 hours of usage a plasma monitor should measure around 96% of its original brightness, which is barely noticeable to the naked eye. At 15,000 to 20,000 hours the monitor should measure around 80% brightness, or to state is technically, 80% of the original phosphors (gases) are being ignited.
Frankly, I think the issues with plasma screens are way overblown.