The only economically sustainable solution is to have a labor force that matches labor requirements. What Marx didn't foresee was the tremendous medical advances the world has seen in the past 100 years, allowing unsustainable population growth while the need to unskilled labor declines. No amount of sharing, unionization, or wealth transfer will help when there are billions of people with no demand for their labor.
Don't let ideology blind you. People don't need jobs. People need food, shelter, medical care, and several other things. Jobs is one of the ways you can get those. If there _are_ enough resources for everybody, probably we can come up with way to distribute them effectively, even one that doesn't need busywork. It's not an easy problem, but seems solvable.
Regardless of the users IP, Hulu can track those users and sell their information, VPN or not. They've got those subscribers billing credentials, after all. A VPN is useful if you don't want someone else looking into your connection, but for the site you're visiting, especially one that needs your credit card, a VPN isn't meant to be a protection from them getting your info. Your ISP won't (or at least shouldn't) have a clue that you're visiting Hulu, should you be using a VPN, though.
You are mostly right. About your ISP, it would probably be very easy to know what you're up to, by comparing your data usage pattern against other online video users usage. Hulu and other services with heavy traffic probably have a specific traffic usage signature that they can identify, even if you are using a VPN.
I live in Uruguay. We export lots of soy and wheat. In the most productive lands, Cargill sells seeds, finances, rents machinery, and buys the result. Of course, farmers are independent, but Cargil controls the price, and what they grow. From the outside, it's as if they _are_ the producer. Something very similar happens in parts of Argentina.
Monsanto has a large presence here, also.
It's not a long shot to think that they might end up managing all our crops, if they tried really hard.
Single core atom, and pipelight is not very pretty or reliable. If I change the hardware, it's gonna be an android tv box , or a tablet I have lying around.
I've never understood the popularity of git. It may be useful for open source by supporting distributed development but it seems far less useful for a traditional corporate environment. SVN just makes far more sense to me in terms of command structure. If I wanted a DVCS I would probably go with Mercurial. Git is just awful.
I am working in a traditional corporate environment right now. SVN sorks great, even when you use branchs. The problem is that merging is just not worth it. Right now, we use SVN, and the equivalent of a pull request in github or similar, is a manual process, with several pain points, that works against the grain of development. We need to have separate code reviews for commits, and then count on developers merging code that is accepted. We also have problems creating branches, destroying them.
I think SVN was OK for the enterprise when the enterprise didn't need all the pretty things modern development processes bring. Right now, they want to deploy every few days, automated testing, decentralized development, and SVN doesn't fit well.
About Git being awful, that might be true, even though I doon't see it. There might be a need for better tools, but the command line client is good, specially compared to the svn client. In any case, it's the dominant player in DVCS, it's the safest investment.
The thing is that you are worried about computing in the current world. RMS is worried about the future of computing, and has helped shape it, winning several battles, even though he is losing the war.
Of course there are IP laws/contracts/whatever that don't let you link to GPLed code. That's why it's GPLed, so the work of free software developer does not help those who want to shrink our freedom.
You can use our work, if you share, if you don't share, go build it yourself. It _is_ us versus them, and RMS sees it very clearly.
Fifteen years ago, RMS rants about a dystopian future looked exaggerated. Right now, they look like old news.
You are right that the GPL is a PITA when you want to work with proprietary software, that's not a bug, it's a feature, which BSD software lacks. That's because the GPL is supposed to have a long term effect.
I agree. At my second interview for a job, I was told that, if hired, I would be on trial for 3 months. I replied that I welcomed the opportunity of getting to know the company before making a long term decision, they replied that _I_ was expected to commit long term from day one. We ended up working together for three years, but I had to help them fix their hiring process and expectations a little bit.
The great mistake of society is a desire to eliminate the poor.
You make sense. But it's a very subversive thing to say, for an American. Your point is that if someone is to be rich, then someone else needs to be poor. Plus, you don't really care about poverty, you just care about your standards of living. But following your ideology, if one were to get rid of poverty, one would first need to get rid of the rich. You can't have everyone living above poverty levels, if you don't first get rid of the rich.
You discovered marxism. Congratulations. And good luck implementing that in the United States.
Erm no. The ability to use a few apps which interface with the Linux kernel and type in a shell that something resembles bash (not even close mind you, it's an even more cut down version of sh) does not make Android Linux. Nothing out of the box Linux works on Android. All the libraries except for the ones providing essential hooks into the kernel are missing. Those programs / libraries which do hook into the kernel are also different from their linux counterpart (go copy "mount" from you phone onto your ubuntu box and try boot up the system).
Really there's nothing Linux about Android other than the underlying kernel.
Linux _is_ a kernel. Everything else you are talking about is mostly the GNU part of GNU/Linux. Android has the same amount of Linux than any flavor of GNU/Linux, so the GP is right, even though he uses the wrong terms.
RMS doesn't use that word, "open" a lot. Doesn't use "greed" a lot. Those are probably your preconceptions of what he says.
RMS usually talks about freedom, as in not giving away your freedom. DRM requires you to give some other entity control over your devices, more than what you have. That means giving away freedom, and that's why he is against it. I agree with him, also.
I didn't say in my comment that it shouldn't be an insult, I was just exemplifying why I don't believe there is a left wing in the US.
In Europe, and Latin America, many ruling parties call themselves socialist, so that's a particularly US thing.
I didn't mean conservative as a derogatory term, sorry if I did, English is not my native language. I mean that school of thought that believes that believes strongly in the power of a small state, low taxes, free enterprise, and letting the wealth drip from the top to the bottom, instead of messing with it with taxes or strong intervention.
I don't mean the economy specifically, but it can't be seen apart. A person with a hundred million dollars of course can exercise more civil rights than someone who doesn't have them. Without income redistribution, you can't be left wing. You can call yourself "center", but we all know there's no such a thing. I don't mean it as a bad thing, I was just commenting the article, that it's false to say that people change from left to right.
In the US there are no left wing parties.
As an example, "socialist" can be used as an insult there.
From the outside, all US politicians are right wing (meaning that they are not for wealth redistribution or any other left wing concept). It's not that hard to change from strongly conservative to not that strongly conservative.
You are right.
Free software is good, but needs a community. Android is probably better.
I was thinking more in the line of a full scale government initiative. Here, we have Plan Ceibal, which uses OLPC hardware, and has a lot of government backing. Ceibal was one of the reasons the state owned telco now reaches the whole country with broadband.
If large enough, an effort to just drop technology in the hands of kids can help everybody understand the need of basic infrastructure.
Agree with parent. Here in Peru, Windows is used almost everywhere because it costs nothing (copyright is not enforced). Open-source is also available for enthusiasts, but most people would ask "Why use it?", expecting a practical answer (not an ideological one).
An ideological answer is a practical answer that takes the medium term future into account.
Open source, is not a philosophy/ideology, just a software development thing.
Free software is a philosphy/ideology. And it does take third world people into account.
It's very hard to predict the result of teaching Office for kids.
Of course, teaching Excel may land them jobs in multinationals, to feed their families. But also, it could entrench the influence of foreign companies in their government IT, with large expenses in licenses, that leae the country.
If you teach free software, people can also learn valuable skills for the short term, but also develop a more sustainable IT insfrastructure, which could be one of the basis of future development.
I live in Uruguay, more or less the same situation as Peru with copyrights, but free software is very popular. And most of our software industry (which is growing very fast) is based on free software.
To be fair, all socialism is post-capitalistic. The whole idea of socialism (like what Marx wrote) is that capitalism would succeed against scarcity (for exaple: "the end of money"), so a new model would be necessary that didn't rely on it, but on cooperation. Of course, not all ideas can be implemented nicely, or even at all, but that doesn't mean that socialism is not prepared for "plenty". Penty is onw of its preconditions.
Well, that's your point of view. What I see is that the GPL is one of the most used software licenses in the world, and it represents exacly his idea. RMS has had great, awesome partial successes. His philosophy is shared by a lot of people, in practice, and his work has been key to us having real, viable, modern, free software platforms today. Without his work particularly and him been so "political", I don't think we could have gone this far.
I believe there is a false dichotomy here. You are making my point. My point was that, for this case, markets _could_ solve it. Remember, the first option was: buy locally. What I wanted to say was that markets do work, but some times you don't want the people to get exactly what they ask for, or what they pay for, you want to force them to choose the Right Thing (TM). If you leave it to the markets, people will buy stuff with shit if it's cheaper, that is their choice, so they will force retailers to sell it. Traceability is possible, you can put an RFID in a living cow, and trace their whole lives, until they are BBQed, but markets won't pay for that. People will buy the cheapest, no matter what. I see that as markets working to give people what they want.
Consumers do have a way of knowing. The can buy locally, and see whether fish are fed shit. Or they could only use brands that are well known for not feeding their fish shit. Even without a brand police, it could be done with badges that are difficult to reproduce, for example, like RFID. Of course, that would be more expensive than buying whatever Walmart sells, and just hope there is no shit in it. In the end, what I believe is that people prefer to buy cheaper and easier, even if there is a possibility of shit in their food.
Free markets are not designed, they just are. Most of the time, free markets are not possible, and you get highly regulated markets, oligopolies or monopolies. But in the cases where there is a somewhat free market, it works.
In this case, it's a free market. If enough people stop buying this kind of fish, sellers will have to come up with a "shit free" badge, so they start buying again. If they do not stop buying, it's because shit does not taste that bad. About hearing about it, it's the same thing. Papers will inform about shit in fish, only if enough people care about that kind of information. In this case, markets are working.
You are right. They let them keep their logos, the only prohibition on brands is that they can't have "modifiers" like a Light version and stuff, they need to sell each version with a new brand name. Of course, they can't advertise on tv, on the streets, and inside the shops all signs also have the ugly images.
They were talking on tv last week about a decrease of more than half of teenage smokers. When al this started I thought it was nonsense, but it's funny how it works. Smokers tend to hide their boxes, because they are unpleasant, and they don't keep them in sight of kids. They even tend to smoke more privately. It should come naturally, without the offensive images, but they seem to work.
Here in Uruguay, we've had that for a couple of years, I think. A quick google images search of "uruguay paquetes de cigarrillos" will show you what that will look like (only the ones in Spanish are Uruguayan: www.google.com/search?q=uruguay paquetes de cigarrillos&tbm=isch).
They say that, in conjunction with a broad prohibition of smoking everywhere inside, it's working very well, esp. with young people
Slashdot Mirror
The only economically sustainable solution is to have a labor force that matches labor requirements. What Marx didn't foresee was the tremendous medical advances the world has seen in the past 100 years, allowing unsustainable population growth while the need to unskilled labor declines. No amount of sharing, unionization, or wealth transfer will help when there are billions of people with no demand for their labor.
Don't let ideology blind you. People don't need jobs.
People need food, shelter, medical care, and several other things. Jobs is one of the ways you can get those.
If there _are_ enough resources for everybody, probably we can come up with way to distribute them effectively, even one that doesn't need busywork. It's not an easy problem, but seems solvable.
Regardless of the users IP, Hulu can track those users and sell their information, VPN or not. They've got those subscribers billing credentials, after all. A VPN is useful if you don't want someone else looking into your connection, but for the site you're visiting, especially one that needs your credit card, a VPN isn't meant to be a protection from them getting your info. Your ISP won't (or at least shouldn't) have a clue that you're visiting Hulu, should you be using a VPN, though.
You are mostly right. About your ISP, it would probably be very easy to know what you're up to, by comparing your data usage pattern against other online video users usage. Hulu and other services with heavy traffic probably have a specific traffic usage signature that they can identify, even if you are using a VPN.
I live in Uruguay.
We export lots of soy and wheat.
In the most productive lands, Cargill sells seeds, finances, rents machinery, and buys the result. Of course, farmers are independent, but Cargil controls the price, and what they grow. From the outside, it's as if they _are_ the producer.
Something very similar happens in parts of Argentina.
Monsanto has a large presence here, also.
It's not a long shot to think that they might end up managing all our crops, if they tried really hard.
Single core atom, and pipelight is not very pretty or reliable.
If I change the hardware, it's gonna be an android tv box , or a tablet I have lying around.
I run ubuntu in my home computer. Also in my work computer.
My kid uses ubuntu also .
My wife uses Windows 8
No dual boot, anywhere.
I am thinking of changing my media center into either android or windows though, damn netflix. But right now it's Ubuntu-xbmc
I've never understood the popularity of git. It may be useful for open source by supporting distributed development but it seems far less useful for a traditional corporate environment. SVN just makes far more sense to me in terms of command structure. If I wanted a DVCS I would probably go with Mercurial. Git is just awful.
I am working in a traditional corporate environment right now.
SVN sorks great, even when you use branchs. The problem is that merging is just not worth it.
Right now, we use SVN, and the equivalent of a pull request in github or similar, is a manual process, with several pain points, that works against the grain of development. We need to have separate code reviews for commits, and then count on developers merging code that is accepted.
We also have problems creating branches, destroying them.
I think SVN was OK for the enterprise when the enterprise didn't need all the pretty things modern development processes bring. Right now, they want to deploy every few days, automated testing, decentralized development, and SVN doesn't fit well.
About Git being awful, that might be true, even though I doon't see it. There might be a need for better tools, but the command line client is good, specially compared to the svn client. In any case, it's the dominant player in DVCS, it's the safest investment.
If you are trolling, sir, congratulations, it's a beautiful piece.
The thing is that you are worried about computing in the current world.
RMS is worried about the future of computing, and has helped shape it, winning several battles, even though he is losing the war.
Of course there are IP laws/contracts/whatever that don't let you link to GPLed code. That's why it's GPLed, so the work of free software developer does not help those who want to shrink our freedom.
You can use our work, if you share, if you don't share, go build it yourself. It _is_ us versus them, and RMS sees it very clearly.
Fifteen years ago, RMS rants about a dystopian future looked exaggerated. Right now, they look like old news.
You are right that the GPL is a PITA when you want to work with proprietary software, that's not a bug, it's a feature, which BSD software lacks. That's because the GPL is supposed to have a long term effect.
I agree.
At my second interview for a job, I was told that, if hired, I would be on trial for 3 months. I replied that I welcomed the opportunity of getting to know the company before making a long term decision, they replied that _I_ was expected to commit long term from day one.
We ended up working together for three years, but I had to help them fix their hiring process and expectations a little bit.
The great mistake of society is a desire to eliminate the poor.
You make sense. But it's a very subversive thing to say, for an American.
Your point is that if someone is to be rich, then someone else needs to be poor.
Plus, you don't really care about poverty, you just care about your standards of living.
But following your ideology, if one were to get rid of poverty, one would first need to get rid of the rich. You can't have everyone living above poverty levels, if you don't first get rid of the rich.
You discovered marxism. Congratulations. And good luck implementing that in the United States.
Erm no. The ability to use a few apps which interface with the Linux kernel and type in a shell that something resembles bash (not even close mind you, it's an even more cut down version of sh) does not make Android Linux. Nothing out of the box Linux works on Android. All the libraries except for the ones providing essential hooks into the kernel are missing. Those programs / libraries which do hook into the kernel are also different from their linux counterpart (go copy "mount" from you phone onto your ubuntu box and try boot up the system).
Really there's nothing Linux about Android other than the underlying kernel.
Linux _is_ a kernel. Everything else you are talking about is mostly the GNU part of GNU/Linux.
Android has the same amount of Linux than any flavor of GNU/Linux, so the GP is right, even though he uses the wrong terms.
Cool, as long as they don't harm me in the process.
RMS doesn't use that word, "open" a lot.
Doesn't use "greed" a lot.
Those are probably your preconceptions of what he says.
RMS usually talks about freedom, as in not giving away your freedom.
DRM requires you to give some other entity control over your devices, more than what you have. That means giving away freedom, and that's why he is against it. I agree with him, also.
I didn't say in my comment that it shouldn't be an insult, I was just exemplifying why I don't believe there is a left wing in the US. In Europe, and Latin America, many ruling parties call themselves socialist, so that's a particularly US thing.
I didn't mean conservative as a derogatory term, sorry if I did, English is not my native language. I mean that school of thought that believes that believes strongly in the power of a small state, low taxes, free enterprise, and letting the wealth drip from the top to the bottom, instead of messing with it with taxes or strong intervention. I don't mean the economy specifically, but it can't be seen apart. A person with a hundred million dollars of course can exercise more civil rights than someone who doesn't have them. Without income redistribution, you can't be left wing. You can call yourself "center", but we all know there's no such a thing. I don't mean it as a bad thing, I was just commenting the article, that it's false to say that people change from left to right.
In the US there are no left wing parties. As an example, "socialist" can be used as an insult there. From the outside, all US politicians are right wing (meaning that they are not for wealth redistribution or any other left wing concept). It's not that hard to change from strongly conservative to not that strongly conservative.
You are right. Free software is good, but needs a community. Android is probably better. I was thinking more in the line of a full scale government initiative. Here, we have Plan Ceibal, which uses OLPC hardware, and has a lot of government backing. Ceibal was one of the reasons the state owned telco now reaches the whole country with broadband. If large enough, an effort to just drop technology in the hands of kids can help everybody understand the need of basic infrastructure.
Agree with parent. Here in Peru, Windows is used almost everywhere because it costs nothing (copyright is not enforced). Open-source is also available for enthusiasts, but most people would ask "Why use it?", expecting a practical answer (not an ideological one).
An ideological answer is a practical answer that takes the medium term future into account. Open source, is not a philosophy/ideology, just a software development thing. Free software is a philosphy/ideology. And it does take third world people into account. It's very hard to predict the result of teaching Office for kids. Of course, teaching Excel may land them jobs in multinationals, to feed their families. But also, it could entrench the influence of foreign companies in their government IT, with large expenses in licenses, that leae the country. If you teach free software, people can also learn valuable skills for the short term, but also develop a more sustainable IT insfrastructure, which could be one of the basis of future development. I live in Uruguay, more or less the same situation as Peru with copyrights, but free software is very popular. And most of our software industry (which is growing very fast) is based on free software.
To be fair, all socialism is post-capitalistic.
The whole idea of socialism (like what Marx wrote) is that capitalism would succeed against scarcity (for exaple: "the end of money"), so a new model would be necessary that didn't rely on it, but on cooperation.
Of course, not all ideas can be implemented nicely, or even at all, but that doesn't mean that socialism is not prepared for "plenty". Penty is onw of its preconditions.
Well, that's your point of view.
What I see is that the GPL is one of the most used software licenses in the world, and it represents exacly his idea.
RMS has had great, awesome partial successes. His philosophy is shared by a lot of people, in practice, and his work has been key to us having real, viable, modern, free software platforms today. Without his work particularly and him been so "political", I don't think we could have gone this far.
I believe there is a false dichotomy here. You are making my point.
My point was that, for this case, markets _could_ solve it. Remember, the first option was: buy locally.
What I wanted to say was that markets do work, but some times you don't want the people to get exactly what they ask for, or what they pay for, you want to force them to choose the Right Thing (TM).
If you leave it to the markets, people will buy stuff with shit if it's cheaper, that is their choice, so they will force retailers to sell it. Traceability is possible, you can put an RFID in a living cow, and trace their whole lives, until they are BBQed, but markets won't pay for that. People will buy the cheapest, no matter what. I see that as markets working to give people what they want.
Consumers do have a way of knowing.
The can buy locally, and see whether fish are fed shit. Or they could only use brands that are well known for not feeding their fish shit. Even without a brand police, it could be done with badges that are difficult to reproduce, for example, like RFID.
Of course, that would be more expensive than buying whatever Walmart sells, and just hope there is no shit in it.
In the end, what I believe is that people prefer to buy cheaper and easier, even if there is a possibility of shit in their food.
Free markets are not designed, they just are.
Most of the time, free markets are not possible, and you get highly regulated markets, oligopolies or monopolies.
But in the cases where there is a somewhat free market, it works.
In this case, it's a free market.
If enough people stop buying this kind of fish, sellers will have to come up with a "shit free" badge, so they start buying again. If they do not stop buying, it's because shit does not taste that bad.
About hearing about it, it's the same thing. Papers will inform about shit in fish, only if enough people care about that kind of information.
In this case, markets are working.
You are right. They let them keep their logos, the only prohibition on brands is that they can't have "modifiers" like a Light version and stuff, they need to sell each version with a new brand name. Of course, they can't advertise on tv, on the streets, and inside the shops all signs also have the ugly images.
They were talking on tv last week about a decrease of more than half of teenage smokers. When al this started I thought it was nonsense, but it's funny how it works. Smokers tend to hide their boxes, because they are unpleasant, and they don't keep them in sight of kids. They even tend to smoke more privately. It should come naturally, without the offensive images, but they seem to work.
Here in Uruguay, we've had that for a couple of years, I think. A quick google images search of "uruguay paquetes de cigarrillos" will show you what that will look like (only the ones in Spanish are Uruguayan: www.google.com/search?q=uruguay paquetes de cigarrillos&tbm=isch).
They say that, in conjunction with a broad prohibition of smoking everywhere inside, it's working very well, esp. with young people