Short memory. Can you put those "thousands" of low tech jobs Amazon might have created in the Seattle area against the loss of thousands of jobs they caused within the independent bookseller's trade?
Amazon's jobs are in danger to be "uncreated" anytime Amazon can't convince Wall Street with their "aggressive" accounting methods, speak potential hanky-panky with numbers. Mind you they were not the "transparency open source code fans" to begin with and most probably are neither very much for transparency in their accounting numbers either.
I like companies, who make a profit and I like companies, who are for transparent sources, and I actually like Amazon.com as a bookseller. What I don't like is when someone gambles with the thought that most people, who can read, can't count. And if the numbers are "aggressive", I refuse to count them. There are no "aggressive" accounting methods, there are only honest or dishonest numbers and only open and truthful or obfuscating and potentially false accounting methods.
I would say, an open, transparent KISS for Mr. Bezos' accounting methods is the best PR advice one could give him.
Congratulations nevertheless. Hopefully it was more than a 4rth quarter Christmas Season profit, but the begin of a steady profit for years to come.
1. Free Software is both inside and outside capitalism. On the one hand, the social basis for Free Software clearly would not exist without a flourishing capitalism. Only a flourishing capitalism can provide the opportunity to develop something that is not for exchange. On the other hand, Free Software is outside of capitalism for the reasons I mentioned above: absence of scarcity and self-unfolding instead of the alienation of labor in a command economy.
pretty much agree...
2. It seems you're talking about the difference between use value - the use of goods or labor - and exchange value - reflected in the price of the commodities that goods or labor are transformed into by being sold on the market.
nice distinction
3. In Free Software because the product can be taken with only marginal cost and, more importantly, is not created for being exchanged, the exchange value of the product is zero. Free Software is worthless in the dominant sense of exchange.
yes, seems to be true
4.The more production is done by machines the less human labor is needed in the production process.
Human labor is always needed for survival. Robots won't give birth and won't raise children to adults to be capable of surviving. Argument is uptopian and irrational.
5. A GPL Society would not be based on exchange, there would be no need for money anymore.
I think it explains quite nicely the necessity to give any commodity, be it human labor, tangible goods or intangible goods, not only a use value, but also an exchange value expressed in monetary units. Even the caveman needs money, actually it's the first thing he tries to "invent and make" after he has eaten. And he kinda works pretty hard to make a living. Of course, if we all bomb ourselves back into the stone ages and into a money-less society, then your utopian idea of a society based on self-enfolding work to produce commodities or labor, which have no exchange value, might work. Just I think the caves have no hardware. Eeeeck. Whatta do next ? Better make something, which has an exchange value > 0.
Yes, gaming addiction is real. So is information addiction. It's pathetic the amount of time I spent sucking down worthless piles of information on the net.
True. I got into it through my job. I had to read a bunch of newspapers, magazines, wire service ticker stories, watch four TV networks and CNN constantly and do online research for others as my bread and butter job. I couldn't handle it anymore after six years and quit, but during the last two years started using the net privately. Started to build a site, started to think about programming, started to read usenet, started to read/.
It clearly caused depression and a constant stage of "anger". Later it made me addicted in the sense that I tried to get all info through the web and could not avoid to get "upset" all the time. Because most news suck, it also is very depressing to become a news junkie. It has damaged my capability of focussing on one subject. It is so bad that I am convinced that I can't become a programmer BECAUSE of the net. I was shortly exposed to scientific programming in the early seventies and thought there is nothing much to it. I never considered it a very difficult thing (Fortran) and would have continued, if I would have had a job which would have required programming from me (in a science field).
Today, for some reason I hate the net so much that I don't want to program anything, which is related to and dependent of the net. Stupid, may be, but that's what the net did to me. I simply can't stand it, because it makes me dependent. I hate it. I know the only way to stop it, is to disconnect from the net. I haven't figured out, if one can still afford to do so. But I seriously consider a "complete change of life style" with only printed news, books and radio. The war right now showed me that I am well "addicted" to CNN and MSNBC. It's horrible.
The Net alone is a real addiction... Yep, to the point. What would you do, if in the next five minutes the net would die for ever, and there would be NO computer anywhere accessible and connected to the net in the future ?
kill yourself ?
kill someone ?
spontaneously be cured from schizophrenia ?
all of the above ?
I hope they start a "war against games", put the pushers into jails together with a PC and ONE game only, which they have to play 12h/d. It would work like this: they never can win, they never can be rewarded and they get punished each time they loose, by the request to try it again. There is NO escape to be a looser all day long.:-)
Enjoyed to read both their comments and I am glad that not every guru takes himself (and his intelligence) too serious.
Alan also made clear to me why I like Chemistry more than Alchemy and much more than software design...:-) I was always amazed about the amount of trial and error and mutations of code while watching someone develop a project over the years. I think what Linus said is very true and I could observe it without being a software developer myself. Survival of the fittest mutation is also very true.
Well, that's what it is all about. It's so easy for sleeper cells of U.S. right-wingers to point to bad German Nazis and the German's "inate proneness to surpress freedom of speech rights" whenever in the U.S. media talks about new German legislation. They hide nicely behind their "freedom of speech" absolutism to obfuscate a bit from their own true political agenda here in the U.S. Dreck is dreck, no matter how carefully you shove it under the carpet of freedom rights.
Well, I am just wondering then, why many a people in the U.S. these days CAN are very well see the link between al-Qaeda anit-U.S.hate propaganda and anti-U.S. terrorist acts, but CAN'T accept a link between supremacist hate propaganda (what Nazi web-sites promote) and racially based hate crimes. The U.S. has no problem asking to limit the width of broadcast for al-Qaeda material, but not for supremacist's material in the U.S. Why ?
If it's conceivable that ten year old Arab boys are incited to join anti-U.S. "freedom fighter" movements, influenced by online video distribution from al-Qaeda, why is it NOT conceivable that young white caucasian boys world wide are incited to join whatever "Nazi-like" supremacy fighters, all heated up by "cool" supremacist web sites ?
If advertisements on the web incite you to buy something and those pictures and slogans have a subversive effect on your thought process, why should similar propaganda and pictures, when it comes to hate inciting act should automagically have NO effect ?
May be you need to let anybody talk freely, that doesn't mean that you have to allow anybody to shove their talk into anybody else's mouth and help them to broadcast their ideas into your livingroom unasked, just because technology allows them to intrude, impose and proletize their ideas via the web worldwide right now.
You have to realize that many people deliberately agree on giving up certain freedoms (mostly when those freedoms are used to abuse other people's dignity, security and civil liberties) to protect themselves from being harmed. So, get it, your absolute freedom of speech fetischist lovers, your absolutism or "fundamentalism when it comes to freedom of speech" it's not at all "all fashionable" all the times.
And your last argument is not logic at all. Just because you limit the distribution rights of hate propaganda on public media for very specific and known groups, who want to recruit people for hate crimes, doesn't mean you limit automatically the distribution rights of any minority group's speech. And considering that it's almost impossible to censor anything on the web using human brains, it's even not much of a question that 99.9 percent of all minority groups CAN publish and broadcast whatever they want.
It takes usually a looooonng time til a group is identified as being so dangerous in their hate inciting capabilities (remember the Germans needed a holocaust to come up with their restrictions on Nazi hate propaganda in their laws and the U.S. needed a WTC to accept restricitions against al-Qaeda propaganda material) that people think about such restrictive measures at all.
It's in fact not stiffling of speech, it's stiffling of broadcasting your speech worldwide. There is a difference. You can still go on the street and shout out loud and write whatever you want. The distribution of it is another issue.
So, which country do you think knows more about its own Nazi movement ? The U.S. or Germany ?
I am pretty sure the U.S. doesn't know much about its right-wing potential Nazi movement. Here it runs under other names and is nicely embedded and hidden in other political movements, which don't have an equivalent in Germany and don't exist.
Because everybody in the U.S. believes it's an open and free society (as if Germany isn't since over forty years), they can't believe that there might be underground Nazi movements in the U.S, right ?
And the U.S. believes, because Nazi propaganda is forbidden in Germany, the whole Nazi movement in Germany must be underground and therefore is not known in its size, right? You must be kidding. Germany has its Neo-Nazis and then it has a lot of Anti-Neo-Nazis.
The U.S. has Neo-Nazis and then it has a lot of apolitical ignorants, who think ignoring political movements, they don't like, is a solution to everything. Your pathetic usage of freedom of speech to justify any shit is NOT the cure for everything imaginable on earth, you know.
Well, you better look at your own presidential executive orders, after your country has been hit by international terrorism...Me thinks so far Germans have dealt with their own terrorists quite well without resorting to overwriting judicial procedures. Here they are a "done deal" within the stroke of the president's pen.
Just be a little bit more humble and less "smart" and less prejudiced against your perceived German's lack of understanding of civil liberties.
Take a closer look at your own backyard's judicial dealings first, before lecturing Germans and other Europeans about "freedoms".
The important thing is not if it's a military tribunal or a civilian court, it's that the proposed military trials by Pres. Bush are allowed to be secret trials.
The presidential executive order allows President Bush to overwrite the current military code, which rules the judicial process in military courts. That's what is questionable. There is nothing wrong about using military tribunals, but then they should be used within the legal framework of current military code.
BTW, I would have died (if I had lived at that time) to see Hitler been put on trial. Eichman went through a trial and that was good. And the Nuremberg trials were one of the most educative pieces of documentation the surviving German generation and their off-spring had. If you want to bring someone to justice, you better show that justice to the world.
Secret military tribunals, that is what makes anyone with some common sense suspicious and rightfully so.
But it is exactly the Window-ish thinking that tries to REPLACE a teacher with a COMPUTER through their pretty useless usage of the computer as an encyclopedia made by "the idiocy of the human race as a whole without using human brains to judge the material published in their encyclopedia".
The usage of Red Hat doesn't prevent the school teachers to make the mistake to let the kids "surf the web". Nobody said that computers should be used for such a thing in school. But Red Hat would give the best platform to actually learn how a OS works, how to manipulate data and how to program. That's what kids should learn. That's why kids should use THAT OS and not learn to surf the web for fun. If they do get used to using a Windows box, they later in life would possibly have to "relearn" another OS. The only reason why people want dual boot Win + Linux OS is exactly because they know, right now, if you use the computer on the job, you HAVE to know how to use Win applications.
For the younger kids I would insist on an open *nix OS. It's bad enough that the older folks, if they want to switch to *nix, have to start from scratch and relearn. Don't force your kids into the same situation. There is NO reason to use a closed source code OS or even application, when you start out new. It is not harmful, because whatever you learned from using a *nix box, will just be of value, even if later on you might work with another OS.
BTW, I would even prevent kids from browsing and doing "research" during official school hours.
I didn't mean that EVERY teacher should learn how to program. I meant that every highschool student should (yes be forced) to go through basic programming classes and to learn the functioning of an OS.
Yes, even if you are educating the future doctors, bakess, writers historians, it is still useful for the students to learn HOW their computer "does a good chunk of work for them". They ALL will use the computer in one way or the other in their professional lives and it is very helpful, if they actually know (and can see at the source code level) how they can manipulate data etc. Even if most people will never have time, the need or the desire to actually USE and take ADVANTAGE from the opened source code, some will want to do that and they SHOULD NOT BE denied the possibility to do so.
You don't hide to a pharmacist the sources of how drugs are made and what they consist of. Why would you want to deny the same "scientific" openness to anybody who uses a computer ?
Well, I can't help it if the school's teachers are not capable to teach the kids the basic reading, writing and math skills and usually it doesn't take much longer than til eight grade to do so.
There is no better way of learning logic thinking and focussing on detail than learning to program. It's not that hard.
Knowing how a computer works covers a lot of areas in physics as well. So, I am not talking about the average elementary or middle school teacher. Anyhow U.S. separation of middle and highschool is an abomination anyhow. Why you have to drag the kids twice through different schools in that age is beyond me.
This is the U.S. school system, and though I like Suse's install better, in U.S. schools you should have Red Hat, because it's a U.S. company. You are allowed to be patriotic these days and for a good cause all the more.
Slashdotters seem to like to play traitors and deny to consider the obvious. Here reasons why schools should use Red Hat.
1. Kids should learn how to program. Nothing will help more to learn how to program and understand what an OS does than an Open Source OS like Linux, and yes, it should be Red Hat, because Red Hat is the only company, who might be able to handle the task at hand.
2. Teachers should learn to program and learn to teach how to program. Nothing will help more to understand how to program and how to teach it as having well developed tutorials on CD or online designed to help teachers and students to learn it. Red Hat has started their Training and E-Learning programs and seems to be very well equipped to produce such specific training services and software for schools.
3. Red Hat SHOULD IN NO WAY give up to make a profit on the long run in providing services and e-learning services to schools. Red Hat is a company and may be one of the few left who might make it, which has philosphically stood stead fast for opened source code software.
I consider anybody a hypocrite, who for whatever "uncool" reason thinks that Red Hat is not allowed to make money with what they do. The kids, which will be educated in programming in highschools, are the future programmers, who will go on and become the professionals of the future. They might want to write open source software again. I want them to find a successful company like Red Hat, which is capable of hiring them. So, please, your lovable slashdotting fathers out there, if you want your sons to find a job in programming in the future, don't be so darn stupid to deny Red Hat to make money.
It really doesn't hurt to have high school students knowing a bit of shell scripting and to have an understanding about a *nix based OS. Not only highschools should use Red Hat, but also colleges. It's ridiculous to deny ANY student to look at the source code of a program on their own computer and force them to use a proprietary OS.
4. The argument that there is not enough "educational" software running on Linux written for kids is a phony argument. Linux in itself IS educational. Because kids can discover by themselves how to program, they might develop themselves faster than you think their own "educational programs".
And what the heck are you waiting for ? Can't YOU write the educational software, which might still be missing ?
What more do you want ? Do you want them "TO SURF THE NET", "CUT AND PASTE", "COPY", "STEAL", "CHAT" at school ???? Heaven's sake I rather would teach my kids at home than to let them deteriorate into ADD kids flipping from website to website.
In short, why isn't there an open letter to sign for anybody who would like to give their support for Red Hat's proposal.
What you cannot due is threaten someone directly, or actually arrange for their murder. I can say "Someone should please kill CowboyNeal," but not "I'm gonna kill you, CowboyNeal," or arrange to pay someone else $50 to kill CowboyNeal.
Wow, what a relief. I feel really protected by those limitations of free speech. Your quality of life is mind boggling. I guess I would actually get the message to kill CowboyNeal by the call: "Someone should please kill CowboyNeal" quite nicely and would do so with more confidence, if a couple of thousand webpages and ten thousand of banner adds would distribute the same message. It kind of tells me that it is ok to kill CowboyNeal.
How many more double standards do have to deny that the broadcast of the "someone please kill CowboyNeal" message will have NO influence on people wanting to act on it, but to assume that for example the messages of any advertisement which is asking "someone to buy Red Hat 7.2 Professional Server" HAS and influence ? Does that mean that all the marketing wisdom of ads will automagically not work anymore, just because the message distributed is one of hate ?
Why is it, that if it comes to hate speech and porn, the distribution of images and messages have supposedly NO consequence on your behaviour, but when it comes to drinking budwiser, driving VW and being a hero for the army, the broadcast of those messages HAVE a consequence on your behaviour ?
Do you think that "another Hitler" is more likely somewhere where Mein Kampf is studied, or banned?
First, you can buy and study "Mein Kampf" in Germany, if you would like to do so. There is no ban and burning of that book.
Second, it is known that most Nazis, who willingly accepted any of Hitler and Goebbel's propaganda hate speech to be reasonable, never even bothered to read the book. They hated the Jews before Hitler even told them to do so. All they got in Hitler was someone, who allowed them to act upon their hidden hate thoughts legally.
What you don't see is that people have hate feelings and hate thoughts no matter what. How well you let those thoughts out in the open via hate speech is dependent how much freedom you give people to act upon their hate thoughts. And that freedom to act upon one's hate thoughts is dependent on how much public hate propaganda you are going to tolerate.
There are two sayings: First saying: "Deine Gedanken sind frei" (Your thoughts are free) - note: the freedom of thought is absolute, but it doesn't equate automatically that your freedom of speech is absolute as well.)
Second saying:"If it can't be abused, it's not freedom". Guess what, if you can use your freedom to destroy freedom, then there is unfortunately no freedom left, rather sooner than later. There is no proof or guarantee that the ones, who use freedom to destroy freedom, are always counterbalanced by those, who use freedom to protect freedom. Usually it has been a struggle of epic proportions since existence of mankin. What the majority of people end up doing is deliberately limit their freedom to destroy freedom, and consciously using their freedom to maximize freedom to the extent that it can't be used to destroy it. I guess that's why we have laws.
So, bottom line, saying number one is absolutely true and saying two is a logic fallacy.
(sarcasm on)
Well, just wait til the American Libertarians hunt down every man with common sense, who demand you don't let hate speech go wild on a road rage, and allow those to be chased and shot to death (they don't protect their right to bear a gun for nothing, you know).Of course, if you happen to be the victim of a hate crime, they will tell you, it's not the hate speech and not the gun, which are responsible for your death, it's the man who believed in the hate messages and pulled the trigger, who is. Well, what a smart ass, knee jerk argument promoted all over by Libertarians.
It's funny how Americans, who have never went through the horror of Libertarians taking over the world and beating their pathological freedom of speech interpretation to death, can't stop thinking, they are the only wise cracks on earth.
(sarcasm off)
I hope Europeans don't let themselves troll by those gnomes with guns in their bags.
I highly suggest that people from Europe get a better understanding of what U.S. Libertarians "officially" stand for (don't let yourself confuse by Libertarians from the left-wing and Libertarians from the right-wing - in its extreme form it really doesn't matter ) and what they end up promoting.
I also advise people to read the excellent introduction to the role of "rights" in the U.S.constitution versus European constitutions by Mary Ann Glendon, "Rights Talk" to get a better understanding about the differences and priorities set in the U.S. constitution vs.other constitutions with regards to freedom of speech rights and other human rights issues.
Slashdot Mirror
1998 FH Hamburg didn't. Unfortunately. I hope they have changed meanwhile.
I care for the small, individual mail-, file-, name-, secure web-, web- and ftp server, running from people's mini-offices and mini-homes.
Will the boxed Professional Server package disappear completely ? I hope not. Will the network service disappear ? I hope not.
Otherwise I hope RedHat makes good business with large company's Unix/Linux or MS/Linux migrations and makes a real profit.
Good luck.
Short memory. Can you put those "thousands" of low tech jobs Amazon might have created in the Seattle area against the loss of thousands of jobs they caused within the independent bookseller's trade?
Amazon's jobs are in danger to be "uncreated" anytime Amazon can't convince Wall Street with their "aggressive" accounting methods, speak potential hanky-panky with numbers. Mind you they were not the "transparency open source code fans" to begin with and most probably are neither very much for transparency in their accounting numbers either.
I like companies, who make a profit and I like companies, who are for transparent sources, and I actually like Amazon.com as a bookseller. What I don't like is when someone gambles with the thought that most people, who can read, can't count. And if the numbers are "aggressive", I refuse to count them. There are no "aggressive" accounting methods, there are only honest or dishonest numbers and only open and truthful or obfuscating and potentially false accounting methods.
I would say, an open, transparent KISS for Mr. Bezos' accounting methods is the best PR advice one could give him.
Congratulations nevertheless. Hopefully it was more than a 4rth quarter Christmas Season profit, but the begin of a steady profit for years to come.
1. Free Software is both inside and outside capitalism. On the one hand, the social basis for Free Software clearly would not exist without a flourishing capitalism. Only a flourishing capitalism can provide the opportunity to develop something that is not for exchange. On the other hand, Free Software is outside of capitalism for the reasons I mentioned above: absence of scarcity and self-unfolding instead of the alienation of labor in a command economy.
2. It seems you're talking about the difference between use value - the use of goods or labor - and exchange value - reflected in the price of the commodities that goods or labor are transformed into by being sold on the market.
3. In Free Software because the product can be taken with only marginal cost and, more importantly, is not created for being exchanged, the exchange value of the product is zero. Free Software is worthless in the dominant sense of exchange. 4. The more production is done by machines the less human labor is needed in the production process. 5. A GPL Society would not be based on exchange, there would be no need for money anymore
True. I got into it through my job. I had to read a bunch of newspapers, magazines, wire service ticker stories, watch four TV networks and CNN constantly and do online research for others as my bread and butter job. I couldn't handle it anymore after six years and quit, but during the last two years started using the net privately. Started to build a site, started to think about programming, started to read usenet, started to read /.
It clearly caused depression and a constant stage of "anger". Later it made me addicted in the sense that I tried to get all info through the web and could not avoid to get "upset" all the time. Because most news suck, it also is very depressing to become a news junkie. It has damaged my capability of focussing on one subject. It is so bad that I am convinced that I can't become a programmer BECAUSE of the net. I was shortly exposed to scientific programming in the early seventies and thought there is nothing much to it. I never considered it a very difficult thing (Fortran) and would have continued, if I would have had a job which would have required programming from me (in a science field).
Today, for some reason I hate the net so much that I don't want to program anything, which is related to and dependent of the net. Stupid, may be, but that's what the net did to me. I simply can't stand it, because it makes me dependent. I hate it. I know the only way to stop it, is to disconnect from the net. I haven't figured out, if one can still afford to do so. But I seriously consider a "complete change of life style" with only printed news, books and radio. The war right now showed me that I am well "addicted" to CNN and MSNBC. It's horrible.
The Net alone is a real addiction...
Yep, to the point. What would you do, if in the next five minutes the net would die for ever, and there would be NO computer anywhere accessible and connected to the net in the future ?
kill yourself ?
kill someone ?
spontaneously be cured from schizophrenia ?
all of the above ?
can't do that, too busy to read /.
I hope they start a "war against games", put the pushers into jails together with a PC and ONE game only, which they have to play 12h/d. It would work like this: they never can win, they never can be rewarded and they get punished each time they loose, by the request to try it again. There is NO escape to be a looser all day long. :-)
Who says mothers can't be cruel.
Enjoyed to read both their comments and I am glad that not every guru takes himself (and his intelligence) too serious.
Alan also made clear to me why I like Chemistry more than Alchemy and much more than software design...:-) I was always amazed about the amount of trial and error and mutations of code while watching someone develop a project over the years. I think what Linus said is very true and I could observe it without being a software developer myself. Survival of the fittest mutation is also very true.
I liked the comments quite a bit.
Thanks.
Well, that's what it is all about. It's so easy for sleeper cells of U.S. right-wingers to point to bad German Nazis and the German's "inate proneness to surpress freedom of speech rights" whenever in the U.S. media talks about new German legislation. They hide nicely behind their "freedom of speech" absolutism to obfuscate a bit from their own true political agenda here in the U.S. Dreck is dreck, no matter how carefully you shove it under the carpet of freedom rights.
Well, I am just wondering then, why many a people in the U.S. these days CAN are very well see the link between al-Qaeda anit-U.S.hate propaganda and anti-U.S. terrorist acts, but CAN'T accept a link between supremacist hate propaganda (what Nazi web-sites promote) and racially based hate crimes. The U.S. has no problem asking to limit the width of broadcast for al-Qaeda material, but not for supremacist's material in the U.S. Why ?
If it's conceivable that ten year old Arab boys are incited to join anti-U.S. "freedom fighter" movements, influenced by online video distribution from al-Qaeda, why is it NOT conceivable that young white caucasian boys world wide are incited to join whatever "Nazi-like" supremacy fighters, all heated up by "cool" supremacist web sites ?
If advertisements on the web incite you to buy something and those pictures and slogans have a subversive effect on your thought process, why should similar propaganda and pictures, when it comes to hate inciting act should automagically have NO effect ?
May be you need to let anybody talk freely, that doesn't mean that you have to allow anybody to shove their talk into anybody else's mouth and help them to broadcast their ideas into your livingroom unasked, just because technology allows them to intrude, impose and proletize their ideas via the web worldwide right now.
You have to realize that many people deliberately agree on giving up certain freedoms (mostly when those freedoms are used to abuse other people's dignity, security and civil liberties) to protect themselves from being harmed. So, get it, your absolute freedom of speech fetischist lovers, your absolutism or "fundamentalism when it comes to freedom of speech" it's not at all "all fashionable" all the times.
And your last argument is not logic at all. Just because you limit the distribution rights of hate propaganda on public media for very specific and known groups, who want to recruit people for hate crimes, doesn't mean you limit automatically the distribution rights of any minority group's speech. And considering that it's almost impossible to censor anything on the web using human brains, it's even not much of a question that 99.9 percent of all minority groups CAN publish and broadcast whatever they want.
It takes usually a looooonng time til a group is identified as being so dangerous in their hate inciting capabilities (remember the Germans needed a holocaust to come up with their restrictions on Nazi hate propaganda in their laws and the U.S. needed a WTC to accept restricitions against al-Qaeda propaganda material) that people think about such restrictive measures at all.
It's in fact not stiffling of speech, it's stiffling of broadcasting your speech worldwide. There is a difference. You can still go on the street and shout out loud and write whatever you want. The distribution of it is another issue.
So, which country do you think knows more about its own Nazi movement ? The U.S. or Germany ?
I am pretty sure the U.S. doesn't know much about its right-wing potential Nazi movement. Here it runs under other names and is nicely embedded and hidden in other political movements, which don't have an equivalent in Germany and don't exist.
Because everybody in the U.S. believes it's an open and free society (as if Germany isn't since over forty years), they can't believe that there might be underground Nazi movements in the U.S, right ?
And the U.S. believes, because Nazi propaganda is forbidden in Germany, the whole Nazi movement in Germany must be underground and therefore is not known in its size, right? You must be kidding. Germany has its Neo-Nazis and then it has a lot of Anti-Neo-Nazis.
The U.S. has Neo-Nazis and then it has a lot of apolitical ignorants, who think ignoring political movements, they don't like, is a solution to everything. Your pathetic usage of freedom of speech to justify any shit is NOT the cure for everything imaginable on earth, you know.
Well, you better look at your own presidential executive orders, after your country has been hit by international terrorism...Me thinks so far Germans have dealt with their own terrorists quite well without resorting to overwriting judicial procedures. Here they are a "done deal" within the stroke of the president's pen.
Just be a little bit more humble and less "smart" and less prejudiced against your perceived German's lack of understanding of civil liberties.
Take a closer look at your own backyard's judicial dealings first, before lecturing Germans and other Europeans about "freedoms".
Also may be RedHat's e-commerce platform. Comes also with sweet support.. Would be GREAT !
The important thing is not if it's a military tribunal or a civilian court, it's that the proposed military trials by Pres. Bush are allowed to be secret trials.
The presidential executive order allows President Bush to overwrite the current military code, which rules the judicial process in military courts. That's what is questionable. There is nothing wrong about using military tribunals, but then they should be used within the legal framework of current military code.
BTW, I would have died (if I had lived at that time) to see Hitler been put on trial. Eichman went through a trial and that was good. And the Nuremberg trials were one of the most educative pieces of documentation the surviving German generation and their off-spring had. If you want to bring someone to justice, you better show that justice to the world.
Secret military tribunals, that is what makes anyone with some common sense suspicious and rightfully so.
Of course.
But it is exactly the Window-ish thinking that tries to REPLACE a teacher with a COMPUTER through their pretty useless usage of the computer as an encyclopedia made by "the idiocy of the human race as a whole without using human brains to judge the material published in their encyclopedia".
The usage of Red Hat doesn't prevent the school teachers to make the mistake to let the kids "surf the web". Nobody said that computers should be used for such a thing in school. But Red Hat would give the best platform to actually learn how a OS works, how to manipulate data and how to program. That's what kids should learn. That's why kids should use THAT OS and not learn to surf the web for fun. If they do get used to using a Windows box, they later in life would possibly have to "relearn" another OS. The only reason why people want dual boot Win + Linux OS is exactly because they know, right now, if you use the computer on the job, you HAVE to know how to use Win applications.
For the younger kids I would insist on an open *nix OS. It's bad enough that the older folks, if they want to switch to *nix, have to start from scratch and relearn. Don't force your kids into the same situation. There is NO reason to use a closed source code OS or even application, when you start out new. It is not harmful, because whatever you learned from using a *nix box, will just be of value, even if later on you might work with another OS.
BTW, I would even prevent kids from browsing and doing "research" during official school hours.
I didn't mean that EVERY teacher should learn how to program. I meant that every highschool student should (yes be forced) to go through basic programming classes and to learn the functioning of an OS.
Yes, even if you are educating the future doctors, bakess, writers historians, it is still useful for the students to learn HOW their computer "does a good chunk of work for them". They ALL will use the computer in one way or the other in their professional lives and it is very helpful, if they actually know (and can see at the source code level) how they can manipulate data etc. Even if most people will never have time, the need or the desire to actually USE and take ADVANTAGE from the opened source code, some will want to do that and they SHOULD NOT BE denied the possibility to do so.
You don't hide to a pharmacist the sources of how drugs are made and what they consist of. Why would you want to deny the same "scientific" openness to anybody who uses a computer ?
Well, I can't help it if the school's teachers are not capable to teach the kids the basic reading, writing and math skills and usually it doesn't take much longer than til eight grade to do so.
There is no better way of learning logic thinking and focussing on detail than learning to program. It's not that hard.
Knowing how a computer works covers a lot of areas in physics as well. So, I am not talking about the average elementary or middle school teacher. Anyhow U.S. separation of middle and highschool is an abomination anyhow. Why you have to drag the kids twice through different schools in that age is beyond me.
OK, off-topic.
This is the U.S. school system, and though I like Suse's install better, in U.S. schools you should have Red Hat, because it's a U.S. company. You are allowed to be patriotic these days and for a good cause all the more.
Dear God, give me the power to be free or give me the freedom to have power, whatever comes first.
/. Gods first, if they give me the freedom to tell you.
God: What do you want to do with your power?
Me: I want to defend my freedom.
God: What do you want to do with your freedom?
Me: Hmm, I have an idea, but I better ask the
1. Kids should learn how to program. Nothing will help more to learn how to program and understand what an OS does than an Open Source OS like Linux, and yes, it should be Red Hat, because Red Hat is the only company, who might be able to handle the task at hand.
2. Teachers should learn to program and learn to teach how to program. Nothing will help more to understand how to program and how to teach it as having well developed tutorials on CD or online designed to help teachers and students to learn it. Red Hat has started their Training and E-Learning programs and seems to be very well equipped to produce such specific training services and software for schools.
3. Red Hat SHOULD IN NO WAY give up to make a profit on the long run in providing services and e-learning services to schools. Red Hat is a company and may be one of the few left who might make it, which has philosphically stood stead fast for opened source code software.
I consider anybody a hypocrite, who for whatever "uncool" reason thinks that Red Hat is not allowed to make money with what they do. The kids, which will be educated in programming in highschools, are the future programmers, who will go on and become the professionals of the future. They might want to write open source software again. I want them to find a successful company like Red Hat, which is capable of hiring them. So, please, your lovable slashdotting fathers out there, if you want your sons to find a job in programming in the future, don't be so darn stupid to deny Red Hat to make money.
It really doesn't hurt to have high school students knowing a bit of shell scripting and to have an understanding about a *nix based OS. Not only highschools should use Red Hat, but also colleges. It's ridiculous to deny ANY student to look at the source code of a program on their own computer and force them to use a proprietary OS.
4. The argument that there is not enough "educational" software running on Linux written for kids is a phony argument. Linux in itself IS educational. Because kids can discover by themselves how to program, they might develop themselves faster than you think their own "educational programs".
And what the heck are you waiting for ? Can't YOU write the educational software, which might still be missing ?
What more do you want ? Do you want them "TO SURF THE NET", "CUT AND PASTE", "COPY", "STEAL", "CHAT" at school ???? Heaven's sake I rather would teach my kids at home than to let them deteriorate into ADD kids flipping from website to website.
In short, why isn't there an open letter to sign for anybody who would like to give their support for Red Hat's proposal.
Smart Heads need Red Hats.
Wow, what a relief. I feel really protected by those limitations of free speech. Your quality of life is mind boggling. I guess I would actually get the message to kill CowboyNeal by the call: "Someone should please kill CowboyNeal" quite nicely and would do so with more confidence, if a couple of thousand webpages and ten thousand of banner adds would distribute the same message. It kind of tells me that it is ok to kill CowboyNeal.
How many more double standards do have to deny that the broadcast of the "someone please kill CowboyNeal" message will have NO influence on people wanting to act on it, but to assume that for example the messages of any advertisement which is asking "someone to buy Red Hat 7.2 Professional Server" HAS and influence ? Does that mean that all the marketing wisdom of ads will automagically not work anymore, just because the message distributed is one of hate ?
Why is it, that if it comes to hate speech and porn, the distribution of images and messages have supposedly NO consequence on your behaviour, but when it comes to drinking budwiser, driving VW and being a hero for the army, the broadcast of those messages HAVE a consequence on your behaviour ?
Any answer to that one ?
First, you can buy and study "Mein Kampf" in Germany, if you would like to do so. There is no ban and burning of that book.
Second, it is known that most Nazis, who willingly accepted any of Hitler and Goebbel's propaganda hate speech to be reasonable, never even bothered to read the book. They hated the Jews before Hitler even told them to do so. All they got in Hitler was someone, who allowed them to act upon their hidden hate thoughts legally.
What you don't see is that people have hate feelings and hate thoughts no matter what. How well you let those thoughts out in the open via hate speech is dependent how much freedom you give people to act upon their hate thoughts. And that freedom to act upon one's hate thoughts is dependent on how much public hate propaganda you are going to tolerate.
There are two sayings:
First saying: "Deine Gedanken sind frei" (Your thoughts are free) -
note: the freedom of thought is absolute, but it doesn't equate automatically that your freedom of speech is absolute as well.)
Second saying:"If it can't be abused, it's not freedom".
Guess what, if you can use your freedom to destroy freedom, then there is unfortunately no freedom left, rather sooner than later. There is no proof or guarantee that the ones, who use freedom to destroy freedom, are always counterbalanced by those, who use freedom to protect freedom. Usually it has been a struggle of epic proportions since existence of mankin. What the majority of people end up doing is deliberately limit their freedom to destroy freedom, and consciously using their freedom to maximize freedom to the extent that it can't be used to destroy it. I guess that's why we have laws.
So, bottom line, saying number one is absolutely true and saying two is a logic fallacy.
It's funny how Americans, who have never went through the horror of Libertarians taking over the world and beating their pathological freedom of speech interpretation to death, can't stop thinking, they are the only wise cracks on earth. (sarcasm off)
I hope Europeans don't let themselves troll by those gnomes with guns in their bags.
I highly suggest that people from Europe get a better understanding of what U.S. Libertarians "officially" stand for (don't let yourself confuse by Libertarians from the left-wing and Libertarians from the right-wing - in its extreme form it really doesn't matter ) and what they end up promoting.
I also advise people to read the excellent introduction to the role of "rights" in the U.S.constitution versus European constitutions by Mary Ann Glendon, "Rights Talk" to get a better understanding about the differences and priorities set in the U.S. constitution vs.other constitutions with regards to freedom of speech rights and other human rights issues.
It will open your eyes.