We need more control to stop the corruption of our children.
This was a pretty good troll up until this point. You had to do it, though. You couldn't resist the telltale "we must protect the chiiiiiiildren" mantra.
Score: 5 for initial impression, -10 for followthrough. --
When I showed up for my first day at one company, I was presented with a non-compete/intellectual property agreement. I was told that my employment was conditional on my acceptance of the terms of the document and my signature. I never signed the document, but I continued to work there for months.
How did I accomplish this remarkable feat? I reasoned thus: Essentially all non-compete agreements are worded in ways that are grossly unfair to the employee. Accepting the agreement a company puts under your nose as written is roughly equivalent to accepting the first price quoted to you by a street merchant in a middle-east bazaar.
Further, I reasoned, lawyers are like ferrets; they have short attention spans and more teeth than is strictly necessary. So I refused the agreement based upon a few clauses I found objectionable (it's not hard to find something to bitch about in one of these documents). The company sent the thing to their lawyer to have him review it in light of the objections I had made. He made some changes. I found more things to whinge about in the new document. I sent it back.
We played this game for about two weeks until (as ferrets will) he wandered off and found a new toy to chew on.
However, none of the workers showed any symptoms associated with Ebola (i.e. they didn't keel over and die).
It's rather less of a "keel over and die" disease and more of a "disintegrate internally whilst most of your bodily fluids flee through any and all available orifices" disease. --
Type a letter on a typewriter.
Put paper in typewriter, type letter.
Put another sheet in typewriter, because you made typos all over the first.
Get up, go to bookshelf, get dictionary.
Look up how to spell words you should already know.
Re-start letter.
Extract cat from typewriter.
Put cat in closet.
Clean up the correction fluid the cat spilled.
Wait for high from correction fluid to subside.
Go to the bathroom to get tweezers.
Use tweezers to get cat hair out of correction fluid spots on letter.
Continue typing.
While you were getting the tweezers, the kids have poured oatmeal into the typewriter.
Find kids.
Apply duct tape as necessary.
Put kids in closet.
Retrieve cat, which got out of the closet and is eating oatmeal.
Put cat in closet.
Pick up typewriter.
Throw typewriter away.
Resolve never to have any more children.
Drive to Best Buy. (In this scenario, you have no clue)
Find computer with snazziest-looking packaging.
Purchase computer.
Take computer home.
Check on kids in closet.
Laugh as you close the door.
Retrieve cat, which is in garbage can eating oatmeal.
Put cat back in closet.
Do not RTFM.
Attempt to set computer up.
Fail.
Call helpdesk.
Whinge.
Hang up in fury when they tell you to RTFM.
Call up Customer Service.
Whinge.
Hang up in fury when they tell you to call the helpdesk.
Call your brother, who is "a computer person".
Whinge.
Ask him to stop laughing.
Offer him beer or money to come set your computer up.
Go to store.
Purchase beer.
Go back to store, return beer.
Your brother does not consider "Coors Light" to be "Beer".
Purchase an adequate kind of beer.
Return home.
Your brother has the computer set up.
You were only gone 10 minutes, you cretin.
Look like an idiot.
Give beer to brother.
Ignore his derision.
Type the fscking letter, already.
Open web browser.
Go to/.
Try desparately to make a First Post.
Fail.
Post a troll.
No one falls for it.
Make a goatse.cx post.
Fsck it up somehow.
Look like a moron, worldwide, free of charge.
The whole point of business reply mail is that you only pay when it gets USED. Otherwise they'd just buy envelopes with pre-printed stamps.
Nope. Because Business-Reply mail only works when going back to the address pre-printed on the envelope or card. If they just got envelopes with pre-printed stamps on, you could just put an address label over the company's, and use the envelope to send your own stuff to whomever you like.
Dell now manufactures a 1U single-processor machine (the 1400) that's not too long to fit in a standard rack (like the 2450 is). You can get them with DeadRat pre-installed, if that's what makes you happy.
The 2450's not bad, for a 2U dual-processor box, except that it's 27 inches long and sounds like a city bus. Which is fine for a server room, but sucks when you have one one your desk for testing purposes.
People who do not talk to their bosses are making a grave error. Bosses are, like children and ferrets, very curious creatures. If one does not talk to them, they become curious and begin nosing about where you don't want them.
The proper strategy is to talk early and often to the boss. If you give him enough information (on any topic; it doesn't have to be relevant) to keep his little neurons churning away, he won't have time to ask those pesky questions, like, "Why do you frantically close several windows on your machine whenever I walk in?" and "Why are our network switches melting down and where is all of this traffic on port 6099 coming from?"
I imagine they'll have a lot of problems with protestors outside the facility, whinging about how disenfranchised inner-city kids don't get an equitable share of supercomputer time.
Jesse Jackson will be there, claiming that the very *nature* of the computer is discriminatory: "Ones and Zeros? That's just another way of saying Black and White! We demand that the computer *always* have an equitable number of ones and zeros stored in memory! And if there's a register that has too many ones, by God, we'll send some zeroes *to* that register. On the *bus*!"
From what it sounds like in the article, the Russian crew and the American Commander seem to be getting along about as well as can be expected. It sounds more like the Russian crew and the Russian ground-control people are being catty with one another.
This is likely because the crew on the ISS has been suffering an astonishing lack of Good Russian Vodka (tm).
"Oo vas yest Vodka, tovarishchi? Nyet? HAHAHAHAHA!" --
If EMusic's bot must download a file completely in order to build an MD5 checksum for the file, that means that it has to download essentially every file out there. However, they can't possibly be claiming that every file on Napster is one that EMusic owns the copyright for. Therefore, EMusic's bot is...wait for it...downloading music that *EMusic doesn't own*.
Which means that EMusic is comitting the very act they claim they are attempting to catch other people doing.
All of the posts I've seen in this article seem to express concern for the possibility that Someone Evil (tm) will spoof, jam, crack, overload, or otherwise muck with the system, in order to (presumably) cause a collision.
I submit that the real danger is not necessarily from these sorts of attacks, but from the aggressive financial goals of the airlines themselves.
The article says that each aircraft will (theoretically) have a view of the airspace, and will no longer be reliant upon the cryptic instructions of ATC. However, with no (relatively) impartial authority in control of the situation, *pilots* will become the ones who decide what routes they will take, and, further, whether they have a safe margin for error between their aircraft and another. And commercial pilots work for....big companies. And big companies want....increased profit margins.
How many of you out there have recommended a particular piece of kit, or a particular bit of software, or a particular process to be followed, to minimize risk, and have the corporate beancounters, who know nothing of the practical considerations other than that your proposal has a higher short-term cost than *their* proposed solution, the one that comes from BillyBob's Bait Shack and IT Services Company.
Air Traffic Controllers have the advantage of not having a corporate bottom line to meet, and their decisions will therefore not be coloured by short-term financial gains...
I am a conslutant for a company that needs to support clients using Win95, Win98, NT4, Win2000, and (soon) WinMe.
I, OTOH, prefer to use Linux. The laptop machine my company gave me, therefore, has VMs with all of the required OSen on, so that when I'm at a customer site, I can use my laptop as a similar environment to whatever *they* are using, whilst still having access to all of my tools.
Additionally, since we occasionally get a customer with a *really* bizarre setup, I can create a new VM to duplicate it, do my work for them in it, and then blow it away, knowing that I didn't have to fsck up the settings on my machine, just to cater to their strangeness.
If it affects a company, it affects that comany'e bottom line. And that means that the company will compensate for it in a number of ways. For instance, by reducing benefits packages for employees.
Still don't care, then?
Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it's more often the sign of someone who is frustrated at frequently having his remarks misinterpreted at the most rudimentary of levels.
Remember, my comments are my own opinions. They are worth exactly what you *feel* they are worth.
Comments to the effect of "remarks like this are a sign of a weak argument" have been, in my experience, the refuge of someone who has little useful to add, but feels the need to speak anyway.
FWIW, the Libertarian party is the only political party in the US that's likely to stay far enough out of my knickers to keep me happy.
More to the point, the liberals are overly concerned with what I do with the money I keep in the pockets of those knickers, and the conservatives are far too worried about what I do, and with whom, when I'm wearing no knickers at all.
All I want is a little chunk of land, where if I can see someone from my house, I have the right to prosecute for trespassing.
And I have that.
Happy Gryffon, me.
Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
You didn't read the fine print, kiddo.
I was referring to actual political conservatism and liberalism, not the moral and social constructs built around them.
Political conservatism tends toward a smaller, less invasive government, until you allow the social and moral conservatism to creep in, in which case the government tries to control what people do based upon whether the government thinks its morally right or wrong. THat's why I disclaimed moral and social ethical stances from the argument.
A liberal government tends toward all manner of social programs "for the benefit of the people", which have to be paid for through exhorbitant taxes made all the more burdening by the expense of the immense bureaucratic juggernaut that's invariably put in place to manage the programs.
Do try and keep up with the rest of the class, next time.
Political thought and intellectual philosophy
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
The battle lines between political conservatives and liberals, and between Open Source and its opposite, the commerical software establishment, are drawn along intellectual and moral lines that are, for the most part, similar in nature.
The irony of the thing is, because people have a tendancy not to bother to look beyond what they want to see, few ever see the actual distinctions and where the lines are *actually* drawn.
Political conservatism (here I'm *not* talking about religious or moral conservatism, so Don't Go There) can be boiled down (roughly) to the idea that people can and should be trusted to act appropriately with what they have. They'll help those in need, they'll provide for their kids, they'll be kind to animals, and so forth. In short, they'll act decently.
Political liberalism (same disclaimer as above) can be reduced to the idea that people (defined as "everyone but *me*" by most liberals) are too ignorant, selfish, or cruel to Do The Right Thing on their own, so there must be a (theoretically) benevolent government there to make sure that everyone gets a fair share.
Essentially, those who have plenty, and who gained it legitimately, tend to be conservative, because they believe that they *earned* what they have, and therefore do not owe it to anyone. They will give it generously, when left to do so voluntarily, but will fight viciously when compelled. Those who have little tend to be liberal, because they see that everyone else has more, and they don't think that's "fair".
Similarly, Open- vs. Closed-source philosophies can be deconstructed.
The Open-source movement, for the most part, operates under the idea that individuals have the right to choose what they want to use, how they want to use it, and whether they wish to modify it to better fit their needs. It relies upon the contribution of its members; it could never work as it has if only one person was doing the development, and every one else was just taking.
The Closed-source establishment (commercial software in general) has taken the stance that individual people are not savvy enough to make their own choices about the software they use, and therefore some (theoretically) benevolent company must make the decisions as to what the public will use.
The sharpest minds of the open-source community give freely of their knowledge, yet they are willing to dig in and fight a trench-war over the intellectual theft of an idea that they gave out freely (as is evidenced in the community's uprising in objection to Microsoft's proprietary modifications to the open Kerberos standard).
Conversely, the corporate hacks who produce code for the closed-source establishment hide it furtively, lest some miscreant "steal" the code that they wrote, which code could generally be written by any twelve-year-old hacker who lives in a basement and has no idea what the sun looks like.
So. The lines are drawn thus: Political conservatism and Open Source philosophies rely on the idea that people should have the right to make their own choices, whereas political liberalism and the conventional commercial software establishment depend on the idea that people are dolts and need to be told what to do with their money and their computers. And, to an extent, their minds.
The irony, and the blurring of definitions in people's minds, comes from the fact that the Open source movement is relatively new, in an economic sense, and because many people are still not even fully aware of what the Information Age really means, they misinterpret it. It is seen as socialist, not the culmination of individual freedom. Socialism is, of cource, of a politically liberal nature. Open Source is seen as a haven of pirates, under the misconception that people who believe in giving their own software away for free must also believe it's right to steal the software that others have chosen *not* to give away. Linus Torvalds took a stand to the contrary in his comments regarding the Napster legal turmoil. He chooses to give his work away, but he does not legitimize the theft of that which others have *not* so generously given.
Piracy would be irrelevant in a purely open-source environment. Therefore piracy exists as a side-effect of the closed-source establishment. But because the old-school economists are incapable of drawing a distiction between freely giving what you have and forcibly taking what others have, they lump the 31337 W4r3z-d00dz in with the truly generous open-source contributors.
A pirate wants something for nothing. There are many people, of course, who take plenty from the open-source community and give nothing back. But that is a known and accepted thing. The strength of open source, and the corresponding weakness of the commerical software establishment, is this: If you tell everyone what you did and how, no one else has to waste the time figuring out how to do it, and can instead focus on something new. This is why open source has moved so quickly forward in recent years, and why commercial software companies move forward so slowly by comparison.
So it comes down to this: which do you believe? Are you smart enough to know what you want, or do you need a nursemaid to hold your trembling hand as you pretend to live your life?
Do you believe in personal choice, or on decision forced upon you from a faceless entity that has no idea who you are?
The Datapoint corporation developed ARCNet (2-Mbit max, star-physical-topology, token-ring-operation, max 255 nodes on a network) and was using it before Apple ever dribbled a packet onto a wire.
The fact that Datapoint no longer exists in any useful capacity is, of course, beside the point.
Datapoint might not have been first, but they beat Apple. QED.
Good post, but note that the 14th Amendment keeps other levels of Government from infringing your rights also...
True. I had forgotten the 14th amendment.
The point still stands, though, that only government agencies are barred from infringing upon US Citizens' right to free speech; companies and individuals are not covered but this constitutional restriction.
Slashdot Mirror
We need more control to stop the corruption of our children.
This was a pretty good troll up until this point. You had to do it, though. You couldn't resist the telltale "we must protect the chiiiiiiildren" mantra.
Score: 5 for initial impression, -10 for followthrough.
--
When I showed up for my first day at one company, I was presented with a non-compete/intellectual property agreement. I was told that my employment was conditional on my acceptance of the terms of the document and my signature. I never signed the document, but I continued to work there for months.
How did I accomplish this remarkable feat? I reasoned thus: Essentially all non-compete agreements are worded in ways that are grossly unfair to the employee. Accepting the agreement a company puts under your nose as written is roughly equivalent to accepting the first price quoted to you by a street merchant in a middle-east bazaar.
Further, I reasoned, lawyers are like ferrets; they have short attention spans and more teeth than is strictly necessary. So I refused the agreement based upon a few clauses I found objectionable (it's not hard to find something to bitch about in one of these documents). The company sent the thing to their lawyer to have him review it in light of the objections I had made. He made some changes. I found more things to whinge about in the new document. I sent it back.
We played this game for about two weeks until (as ferrets will) he wandered off and found a new toy to chew on.
Problem solved.
--
However, none of the workers showed any symptoms associated with Ebola (i.e. they didn't keel over and die).
It's rather less of a "keel over and die" disease and more of a "disintegrate internally whilst most of your bodily fluids flee through any and all available orifices" disease.
--
Type a letter on a typewriter.
/.
Put paper in typewriter, type letter.
Put another sheet in typewriter, because you made typos all over the first.
Get up, go to bookshelf, get dictionary.
Look up how to spell words you should already know.
Re-start letter.
Extract cat from typewriter.
Put cat in closet.
Clean up the correction fluid the cat spilled.
Wait for high from correction fluid to subside.
Go to the bathroom to get tweezers.
Use tweezers to get cat hair out of correction fluid spots on letter.
Continue typing.
While you were getting the tweezers, the kids have poured oatmeal into the typewriter.
Find kids.
Apply duct tape as necessary.
Put kids in closet.
Retrieve cat, which got out of the closet and is eating oatmeal.
Put cat in closet.
Pick up typewriter.
Throw typewriter away.
Resolve never to have any more children.
Drive to Best Buy. (In this scenario, you have no clue)
Find computer with snazziest-looking packaging.
Purchase computer.
Take computer home.
Check on kids in closet.
Laugh as you close the door.
Retrieve cat, which is in garbage can eating oatmeal.
Put cat back in closet.
Do not RTFM.
Attempt to set computer up.
Fail.
Call helpdesk.
Whinge.
Hang up in fury when they tell you to RTFM.
Call up Customer Service.
Whinge.
Hang up in fury when they tell you to call the helpdesk.
Call your brother, who is "a computer person".
Whinge.
Ask him to stop laughing.
Offer him beer or money to come set your computer up.
Go to store.
Purchase beer.
Go back to store, return beer.
Your brother does not consider "Coors Light" to be "Beer".
Purchase an adequate kind of beer.
Return home.
Your brother has the computer set up.
You were only gone 10 minutes, you cretin.
Look like an idiot.
Give beer to brother.
Ignore his derision.
Type the fscking letter, already.
Open web browser.
Go to
Try desparately to make a First Post.
Fail.
Post a troll.
No one falls for it.
Make a goatse.cx post.
Fsck it up somehow.
Look like a moron, worldwide, free of charge.
Oh, the embarassment.
--
The whole point of business reply mail is that you only pay when it gets USED. Otherwise they'd just buy envelopes with pre-printed stamps.
Nope. Because Business-Reply mail only works when going back to the address pre-printed on the envelope or card. If they just got envelopes with pre-printed stamps on, you could just put an address label over the company's, and use the envelope to send your own stuff to whomever you like.
--
Dell now manufactures a 1U single-processor machine (the 1400) that's not too long to fit in a standard rack (like the 2450 is). You can get them with DeadRat pre-installed, if that's what makes you happy.
The 2450's not bad, for a 2U dual-processor box, except that it's 27 inches long and sounds like a city bus. Which is fine for a server room, but sucks when you have one one your desk for testing purposes.
--
It would render laser speed detection devices obsolete.
This has already done that.
--
You shouldn't be using Linux if you don't know what sucks about it. The same goes for Windows or any other operating system.
Which is presumably why Windows is so widespread?
--
People who do not talk to their bosses are making a grave error. Bosses are, like children and ferrets, very curious creatures. If one does not talk to them, they become curious and begin nosing about where you don't want them.
The proper strategy is to talk early and often to the boss. If you give him enough information (on any topic; it doesn't have to be relevant) to keep his little neurons churning away, he won't have time to ask those pesky questions, like, "Why do you frantically close several windows on your machine whenever I walk in?" and "Why are our network switches melting down and where is all of this traffic on port 6099 coming from?"
--
Why not? It already can't function with it...
--
I imagine they'll have a lot of problems with protestors outside the facility, whinging about how disenfranchised inner-city kids don't get an equitable share of supercomputer time.
Jesse Jackson will be there, claiming that the very *nature* of the computer is discriminatory: "Ones and Zeros? That's just another way of saying Black and White! We demand that the computer *always* have an equitable number of ones and zeros stored in memory! And if there's a register that has too many ones, by God, we'll send some zeroes *to* that register. On the *bus*!"
--
From what it sounds like in the article, the Russian crew and the American Commander seem to be getting along about as well as can be expected. It sounds more like the Russian crew and the Russian ground-control people are being catty with one another.
This is likely because the crew on the ISS has been suffering an astonishing lack of Good Russian Vodka (tm).
"Oo vas yest Vodka, tovarishchi? Nyet? HAHAHAHAHA!"
--
No, no, no. Just send them to Florida, along with all the others.
--
The were all invented in America!
I know this because they're all *right there* when I click on "The Internet", and my computer is here in Virginia!
--
If EMusic's bot must download a file completely in order to build an MD5 checksum for the file, that means that it has to download essentially every file out there. However, they can't possibly be claiming that every file on Napster is one that EMusic owns the copyright for. Therefore, EMusic's bot is...wait for it...downloading music that *EMusic doesn't own*.
Which means that EMusic is comitting the very act they claim they are attempting to catch other people doing.
Hmm.
--
Zvez'*da*, methinks.
--
All of the posts I've seen in this article seem to express concern for the possibility that Someone Evil (tm) will spoof, jam, crack, overload, or otherwise muck with the system, in order to (presumably) cause a collision.
I submit that the real danger is not necessarily from these sorts of attacks, but from the aggressive financial goals of the airlines themselves.
The article says that each aircraft will (theoretically) have a view of the airspace, and will no longer be reliant upon the cryptic instructions of ATC. However, with no (relatively) impartial authority in control of the situation, *pilots* will become the ones who decide what routes they will take, and, further, whether they have a safe margin for error between their aircraft and another. And commercial pilots work for....big companies. And big companies want....increased profit margins.
How many of you out there have recommended a particular piece of kit, or a particular bit of software, or a particular process to be followed, to minimize risk, and have the corporate beancounters, who know nothing of the practical considerations other than that your proposal has a higher short-term cost than *their* proposed solution, the one that comes from BillyBob's Bait Shack and IT Services Company.
Air Traffic Controllers have the advantage of not having a corporate bottom line to meet, and their decisions will therefore not be coloured by short-term financial gains...
I am a conslutant for a company that needs to support clients using Win95, Win98, NT4, Win2000, and (soon) WinMe.
I, OTOH, prefer to use Linux. The laptop machine my company gave me, therefore, has VMs with all of the required OSen on, so that when I'm at a customer site, I can use my laptop as a similar environment to whatever *they* are using, whilst still having access to all of my tools.
Additionally, since we occasionally get a customer with a *really* bizarre setup, I can create a new VM to duplicate it, do my work for them in it, and then blow it away, knowing that I didn't have to fsck up the settings on my machine, just to cater to their strangeness.
VMware is lovely for that sort of thing.
If it affects a company, it affects that comany'e bottom line. And that means that the company will compensate for it in a number of ways. For instance, by reducing benefits packages for employees.
Still don't care, then?
Actually, it's more often the sign of someone who is frustrated at frequently having his remarks misinterpreted at the most rudimentary of levels.
Remember, my comments are my own opinions. They are worth exactly what you *feel* they are worth.
Comments to the effect of "remarks like this are a sign of a weak argument" have been, in my experience, the refuge of someone who has little useful to add, but feels the need to speak anyway.
FWIW, the Libertarian party is the only political party in the US that's likely to stay far enough out of my knickers to keep me happy.
More to the point, the liberals are overly concerned with what I do with the money I keep in the pockets of those knickers, and the conservatives are far too worried about what I do, and with whom, when I'm wearing no knickers at all.
All I want is a little chunk of land, where if I can see someone from my house, I have the right to prosecute for trespassing.
And I have that.
Happy Gryffon, me.
You didn't read the fine print, kiddo.
I was referring to actual political conservatism and liberalism, not the moral and social constructs built around them.
Political conservatism tends toward a smaller, less invasive government, until you allow the social and moral conservatism to creep in, in which case the government tries to control what people do based upon whether the government thinks its morally right or wrong. THat's why I disclaimed moral and social ethical stances from the argument.
A liberal government tends toward all manner of social programs "for the benefit of the people", which have to be paid for through exhorbitant taxes made all the more burdening by the expense of the immense bureaucratic juggernaut that's invariably put in place to manage the programs.
Do try and keep up with the rest of the class, next time.
The battle lines between political conservatives and liberals, and between Open Source and its opposite, the commerical software establishment, are drawn along intellectual and moral lines that are, for the most part, similar in nature.
The irony of the thing is, because people have a tendancy not to bother to look beyond what they want to see, few ever see the actual distinctions and where the lines are *actually* drawn.
Political conservatism (here I'm *not* talking about religious or moral conservatism, so Don't Go There) can be boiled down (roughly) to the idea that people can and should be trusted to act appropriately with what they have. They'll help those in need, they'll provide for their kids, they'll be kind to animals, and so forth. In short, they'll act decently.
Political liberalism (same disclaimer as above) can be reduced to the idea that people (defined as "everyone but *me*" by most liberals) are too ignorant, selfish, or cruel to Do The Right Thing on their own, so there must be a (theoretically) benevolent government there to make sure that everyone gets a fair share.
Essentially, those who have plenty, and who gained it legitimately, tend to be conservative, because they believe that they *earned* what they have, and therefore do not owe it to anyone. They will give it generously, when left to do so voluntarily, but will fight viciously when compelled. Those who have little tend to be liberal, because they see that everyone else has more, and they don't think that's "fair".
Similarly, Open- vs. Closed-source philosophies can be deconstructed.
The Open-source movement, for the most part, operates under the idea that individuals have the right to choose what they want to use, how they want to use it, and whether they wish to modify it to better fit their needs. It relies upon the contribution of its members; it could never work as it has if only one person was doing the development, and every one else was just taking.
The Closed-source establishment (commercial software in general) has taken the stance that individual people are not savvy enough to make their own choices about the software they use, and therefore some (theoretically) benevolent company must make the decisions as to what the public will use.
The sharpest minds of the open-source community give freely of their knowledge, yet they are willing to dig in and fight a trench-war over the intellectual theft of an idea that they gave out freely (as is evidenced in the community's uprising in objection to Microsoft's proprietary modifications to the open Kerberos standard).
Conversely, the corporate hacks who produce code for the closed-source establishment hide it furtively, lest some miscreant "steal" the code that they wrote, which code could generally be written by any twelve-year-old hacker who lives in a basement and has no idea what the sun looks like.
So. The lines are drawn thus: Political conservatism and Open Source philosophies rely on the idea that people should have the right to make their own choices, whereas political liberalism and the conventional commercial software establishment depend on the idea that people are dolts and need to be told what to do with their money and their computers. And, to an extent, their minds.
The irony, and the blurring of definitions in people's minds, comes from the fact that the Open source movement is relatively new, in an economic sense, and because many people are still not even fully aware of what the Information Age really means, they misinterpret it. It is seen as socialist, not the culmination of individual freedom. Socialism is, of cource, of a politically liberal nature. Open Source is seen as a haven of pirates, under the misconception that people who believe in giving their own software away for free must also believe it's right to steal the software that others have chosen *not* to give away. Linus Torvalds took a stand to the contrary in his comments regarding the Napster legal turmoil. He chooses to give his work away, but he does not legitimize the theft of that which others have *not* so generously given.
Piracy would be irrelevant in a purely open-source environment. Therefore piracy exists as a side-effect of the closed-source establishment. But because the old-school economists are incapable of drawing a distiction between freely giving what you have and forcibly taking what others have, they lump the 31337 W4r3z-d00dz in with the truly generous open-source contributors.
A pirate wants something for nothing. There are many people, of course, who take plenty from the open-source community and give nothing back. But that is a known and accepted thing. The strength of open source, and the corresponding weakness of the commerical software establishment, is this: If you tell everyone what you did and how, no one else has to waste the time figuring out how to do it, and can instead focus on something new. This is why open source has moved so quickly forward in recent years, and why commercial software companies move forward so slowly by comparison.
So it comes down to this: which do you believe? Are you smart enough to know what you want, or do you need a nursemaid to hold your trembling hand as you pretend to live your life?
Do you believe in personal choice, or on decision forced upon you from a faceless entity that has no idea who you are?
Apple did not create Local Area Networking.
The Datapoint corporation developed ARCNet (2-Mbit max, star-physical-topology, token-ring-operation, max 255 nodes on a network) and was using it before Apple ever dribbled a packet onto a wire.
The fact that Datapoint no longer exists in any useful capacity is, of course, beside the point.
Datapoint might not have been first, but they beat Apple. QED.
Good post, but note that the 14th Amendment keeps other levels of Government from infringing your rights also...
True. I had forgotten the 14th amendment.
The point still stands, though, that only government agencies are barred from infringing upon US Citizens' right to free speech; companies and individuals are not covered but this constitutional restriction.
-Cael