> There are many things that I hope to see in my lifetime, but that I
> fear will never come to fruition due to inherent faults in human
> nature. Still, I'll list some of them here in hope that some
> improbabilities may yet occur.
> 1: I hope to see humankind mature to the point that it no longer
> needs or wants organized religion or creationism.
That you think these are even remotely similar means you haven't found
out much about what religions are good for.
> 2: I hope to see humankind mature enough for people to stop trying
> to force their personal opinions (including religious beliefs and
> personal definitions of morality) onto everyone else, and instead
> mind their own business without feeling a need to take away everyone
> else's rights and freedoms.
I have plenty of beliefs that involve doing just exactly that. When
savages, and I use that word advisedly, feel it's OK to mutilate
women's genitalia or put children to work in brothels, that's
something worth stopping with great force and no negotiation. The
world is just *crammed* of evils like that.
> 3: I hope to see the United States (and in fact, all countries in
> the world) become a true democracy with choices made by the general
> population, rather than a representative republic biased in favor of
> corporations, the wealthy, and/or old white men.
Great. Lacking representation, you will have about 26 hours worth of
decisions to make about your local, state and national government each
day. Don't forget your day job & life, 'cause those are in addition
to the stuff you'd have to do as a citizen of a direct democracy.
> 4: I hope to see backwards and artificial notions of "land
> ownership" and "intellectual property" abolished, and to see land
> and creative ideas once again free and open and shared cooperatively
> and courteously by people.
I see somebody doesn't understand the tragedy of the commons or read
any history. More evidence of this below.
> (We could take a few lessons from the native American indians here.)
You mean like the Aztecs, for whom cannibalism was a significant chunk
of their yearly protein intake? Or like the plains peoples, who
tended to hunt buffalo by driving herds of them off cliffs and carving
off only the choicest bits? Maybe it was all the tribes that operated
by right of conquest, occasionally wiping out other ones.
Or are you talking about some ahistorical PC hallucination of what
those "noble savages" might have been like?
> 5: I hope to see all people fairly compensated for their work by the
> economy. No one should have to struggle and wear themselves to the
> point of near-insanity just to be able to feed themselves or their
> children or to have an adequate place to live.
I'd love to see it, but labor law would need about 30 years of drastic
change to make this happen.
> I find it strange that these companies are based > on the US in the first place.
> Why wouldn't they move to another country where > no limits to satellite image resolution exist?
Because:
1. Moving to another country is a very chancy and expensive proposition, and
2. Unlike naif idiots, these companies realize that any country that doesn't have agreements with the US is also un-bloody-likely to be any good for their business. Some libertarian paradises without such agreements include North Korea, Iraq and Russia.
Will people here get their head out of their ass or, equivalently, out of _Atlas_Shrugged_ and look around, please?
The address to write to isn't slashdot. It's enforcement@sec.gov.
ESR has been playing fast and loose long enough, and it's long past time he got called on it.
You're right. It does sound childish. And extremely naif. The technical problem of figuring out what's on those servers often has a solution that's also technical. Don't let the person sleep--most other ways are nastier--until she gets you what you want.
There are no technical solutions that make people free 'cause freedom is a political thing, not a technical thing. The sooner people get it out of their heads that some magical whizzy toy rather than hard work and sacrifice get and keep freedom, the better.
How is it different and why? Are telephone calls "a kind of pseudo-reality?" They don't recognize political borders very well either, but they're regulated in your country if you're lucky.
Speed is not the most important attribute a RDBMS has. >/dev/null has plenty of speed, but it's no damned good for keeping accurate records. Neither is MySQL.
Languages like Mandarin or Hindi *do* have high numbers of speakers, most of whom would like to learn English. What's the future of learning Mandarin if you speak Hindi, or vice versa? The answer is "esoteric knowlege" in both cases, where the future of learning English is obvious: you can open the world's doors.:)
No, I'm not a monolingual American--my first language is French and I can muddle along pretty well in 4 other languages. Trade-wise, they're only important in terms of being polite to people whose language isn't English.
Oh, the rafts and cartloads of licensarian fertilizer that pervade this industry...
"Property" is a social construct, and when you break the social contract, as Microsoft has, you may quite reasonably expect to get it taken away.
Personally, I don't believe that breaking up Microsoft is a good idea--it would just do what the Baby Bells have done, i.e. grow ever huger and screw over the little guy ever more. The DOJ really ought to consider the corporate death penalty.
Re:Keep the Govt. out of Linux and Linux out of Go
on
Auditing for Linux?
·
· Score: 1
> Atlas Shrugged, he didn't bend over and grease up.
We don't all live in a Randite fantasy land. The vast majority of us live in a place where, as George Orwell put it, we sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence in our name. Those "rough men" need whatever tools are best, so for our sake, I hope they get Linux rather than NT.
It speaks wonderfully well of how well those "rough men" (and women) do their job that even licensarian kooks can safely express their opinions:)
> The idea that computers would not exist without > government support is ludicrous. By the fifties, > IBM and other companies were already pioneering > commercial uses of computers, and private > universities were engaging in research.
The naïveté of licensarians never ceases to amaze me. Just who do you think IBM's only customer for those "giant brains" was going to be?
That's right--the Government--you know, the people who funded the original research so we could beat the Nazis and the Japanese, then funded a *much* bigger effort so we could beat the Communists.
Read some history that wasn't written by that moron L. Neil Smith and his ilk. It'll do you good.
> Word has a monopoly on the word processing > market - should MS be forced to make the source > code available?
Absolutely! Given their inability to debug their own software, they have to let the rest of us fix things on our own schedule and our own budget.
"Property rights," including those to "intellectual property," are by no means absolute or inviolate in any civil society.
> Apple has a monopoly on the Macintosh market - > should MacOS X be made public?
Yes. Security considerations alone demand that the source be available.
> If MS is shown in a court of law that it is > indeed a monopoly and is forced to reveal its > crown jewels, then it will open a flood gate > of similar attempts of competitors against > market leaders (e.g., Sybase against Oracle) > and ruin the software market.
What mountain were you standing on when you had the divine revelation that companies or individuals have a "right" to keep their software proprietary? The big bucks are in support anyway.
> There will be no economic incentive to develop > software.
What the heck have you been smoking? Proprietary software is not by any means the only, or even the most profitable, way to make money in the industry.
You're also assuming, contrary to the existence of top-quality, category-killing free software, that economic incentives are important to developing good software.
Even assuming that they harvest against your will and use the marketing info in exchange for the bad will that inevitably causes, how inconvenient is it for you to delete unwanted emails from your inbox and pitch out unwanted junk mail at your snail mail box?
From the reactions, you'd think that these people were threatening pull out all your teeth without painkillers.
Slashdot Mirror
A cool use for high-Tc superconductors :)
> There are many things that I hope to see in my lifetime, but that I
> fear will never come to fruition due to inherent faults in human
> nature. Still, I'll list some of them here in hope that some
> improbabilities may yet occur.
> 1: I hope to see humankind mature to the point that it no longer
> needs or wants organized religion or creationism.
That you think these are even remotely similar means you haven't found
out much about what religions are good for.
> 2: I hope to see humankind mature enough for people to stop trying
> to force their personal opinions (including religious beliefs and
> personal definitions of morality) onto everyone else, and instead
> mind their own business without feeling a need to take away everyone
> else's rights and freedoms.
I have plenty of beliefs that involve doing just exactly that. When
savages, and I use that word advisedly, feel it's OK to mutilate
women's genitalia or put children to work in brothels, that's
something worth stopping with great force and no negotiation. The
world is just *crammed* of evils like that.
> 3: I hope to see the United States (and in fact, all countries in
> the world) become a true democracy with choices made by the general
> population, rather than a representative republic biased in favor of
> corporations, the wealthy, and/or old white men.
Great. Lacking representation, you will have about 26 hours worth of
decisions to make about your local, state and national government each
day. Don't forget your day job & life, 'cause those are in addition
to the stuff you'd have to do as a citizen of a direct democracy.
> 4: I hope to see backwards and artificial notions of "land
> ownership" and "intellectual property" abolished, and to see land
> and creative ideas once again free and open and shared cooperatively
> and courteously by people.
I see somebody doesn't understand the tragedy of the commons or read
any history. More evidence of this below.
> (We could take a few lessons from the native American indians here.)
You mean like the Aztecs, for whom cannibalism was a significant chunk
of their yearly protein intake? Or like the plains peoples, who
tended to hunt buffalo by driving herds of them off cliffs and carving
off only the choicest bits? Maybe it was all the tribes that operated
by right of conquest, occasionally wiping out other ones.
Or are you talking about some ahistorical PC hallucination of what
those "noble savages" might have been like?
> 5: I hope to see all people fairly compensated for their work by the
> economy. No one should have to struggle and wear themselves to the
> point of near-insanity just to be able to feed themselves or their
> children or to have an adequate place to live.
I'd love to see it, but labor law would need about 30 years of drastic
change to make this happen.
> I find it strange that these companies are based > on the US in the first place.
> Why wouldn't they move to another country where > no limits to satellite image resolution exist?
Because:
1. Moving to another country is a very chancy and expensive proposition, and
2. Unlike naif idiots, these companies realize that any country that doesn't have agreements with the US is also un-bloody-likely to be any good for their business. Some libertarian paradises without such agreements include North Korea, Iraq and Russia.
Will people here get their head out of their ass or, equivalently, out of _Atlas_Shrugged_ and look around, please?
The address to write to isn't slashdot. It's enforcement@sec.gov. ESR has been playing fast and loose long enough, and it's long past time he got called on it.
You're right. It does sound childish. And extremely naif. The technical problem of figuring out what's on those servers often has a solution that's also technical. Don't let the person sleep--most other ways are nastier--until she gets you what you want.
There are no technical solutions that make people free 'cause freedom is a political thing, not a technical thing. The sooner people get it out of their heads that some magical whizzy toy rather than hard work and sacrifice get and keep freedom, the better.
How is it different and why? Are telephone calls "a kind of pseudo-reality?" They don't recognize political borders very well either, but they're regulated in your country if you're lucky.
Speed is not the most important attribute a RDBMS has. >/dev/null has plenty of speed, but it's no damned good for keeping accurate records. Neither is MySQL.
Languages like Mandarin or Hindi *do* have high numbers of speakers, most of whom would like to learn English. What's the future of learning Mandarin if you speak Hindi, or vice versa? The answer is "esoteric knowlege" in both cases, where the future of learning English is obvious: you can open the world's doors. :)
No, I'm not a monolingual American--my first language is French and I can muddle along pretty well in 4 other languages. Trade-wise, they're only important in terms of being polite to people whose language isn't English.
"Property" is a social construct, and when you break the social contract, as Microsoft has, you may quite reasonably expect to get it taken away.
Personally, I don't believe that breaking up Microsoft is a good idea--it would just do what the Baby Bells have done, i.e. grow ever huger and screw over the little guy ever more. The DOJ really ought to consider the corporate death penalty.
We don't all live in a Randite fantasy land. The vast majority of us live in a place where, as George Orwell put it, we sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence in our name. Those "rough men" need whatever tools are best, so for our sake, I hope they get Linux rather than NT.
It speaks wonderfully well of how well those "rough men" (and women) do their job that even licensarian kooks can safely express their opinions :)
> The idea that computers would not exist without
> government support is ludicrous. By the fifties,
> IBM and other companies were already pioneering
> commercial uses of computers, and private
> universities were engaging in research.
The naïveté of licensarians never ceases to amaze me. Just who do you think IBM's only customer for those "giant brains" was going to be?
That's right--the Government--you know, the people who funded the original research so we could beat the Nazis and the Japanese, then funded a *much* bigger effort so we could beat the Communists.
Read some history that wasn't written by that moron L. Neil Smith and his ilk. It'll do you good.
Right on the money!
Let's see...RMS writes huge chunks of Emacs, gcc, etc. ESR sells a book on Emacs. Hmmm. Who's doing the hard work and who's grabbing for credit here?
RMS may have some strongly held opinions, but his heart's in the right place and his "radical ideas" are the bulwarks of democracy and modern science.
ESR, on the other hand, proudly proclaims that he is a Libertarian.
Libertarians are right-wing fanatics because they advocate repeating the failed, brutal experiment called laissez-faire capitalism.
Slavery, child prostitution and psychotics with unlimited firepower, anybody? They're all on the Libertarian platform.
> Word has a monopoly on the word processing
> market - should MS be forced to make the source
> code available?
Absolutely! Given their inability to debug their own software, they have to let the rest of us fix things on our own schedule and our own budget.
"Property rights," including those to "intellectual property," are by no means absolute or inviolate in any civil society.
> Apple has a monopoly on the Macintosh market -
> should MacOS X be made public?
Yes. Security considerations alone demand that the source be available.
> If MS is shown in a court of law that it is
> indeed a monopoly and is forced to reveal its
> crown jewels, then it will open a flood gate
> of similar attempts of competitors against
> market leaders (e.g., Sybase against Oracle)
> and ruin the software market.
What mountain were you standing on when you had the divine revelation that companies or individuals have a "right" to keep their software proprietary? The big bucks are in support anyway.
> There will be no economic incentive to develop
> software.
What the heck have you been smoking? Proprietary
software is not by any means the only, or even the
most profitable, way to make money in the industry.
You're also assuming, contrary to the existence of top-quality, category-killing free software, that economic incentives are important to developing good software.
Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch, people!
Even assuming that they harvest against your will and use the marketing info in exchange for the bad will that inevitably causes, how inconvenient is it for you to delete unwanted emails from your inbox and pitch out unwanted junk mail at your snail mail box?
From the reactions, you'd think that these people were threatening pull out all your teeth without painkillers.