For one thing, someone who drives twice a month gets a lot less practice driving than someone who drives every day. It's for this very reason that pilots must fly a certain number of hours each month.
An automobile is not an airplane.
When you're in your twice-a-day commute, you eventually get complacant and stop paying attention. Really, once you've achieved proficency, no ammount of time is going to degrade your ability to drive--although you might need to take a few minutes to learn the car, which can actually be done in a parking lot or driveway.
While in the store, I was told I could just bring the stick in for a new one, should it malfunction
I bought my first palm from Best Buy, with a service plan. When the backlight started not working, I brought it back and got it replaced with a same-dollar-cost model of my choice--which then lasted until the screen broke.
I also asked if their warranty covered breakage, and they said no.
Save the binary and install the package. Now, since you didn't agree to said EULA when you purchaced the software package, you are only bound by the laws of copyright. Under those laws, you are allowed to modifiy that which you purchace, as long as you do not distribute. If the software company's no-longer-existing EULA is binding, then so is yours.
Common contract law holds that each revison of a contract is a new offer. Your revision of the contract would not be binding on [company] unless they agreed to it. In fact, there would be no contract at all until they do agree, since by drafting a new agreement you obviously did not agree to the extant EULA.
Which means that you'd be guilty of fraud, and potentially liable for a significant sum--possibly the maximum ammount of damages [company] could have suffered from your fraud--$4 bililon.
What's interesting here is that the onus of responsibility falls on the GPL to allow these derivatives rather than taking the authors of the OGL to task for writing a GPL-incompatible license
I could take them to task, except that we discussed this very thing in the early drafts of the OGL and the issue was settled by a very simple fact. "If we take this rules-copyleft and extend it to everything, no one will ever use the OGL." [paraphrased.]
As it is, nearly every player in the RPG market has done at least something with regards to Open Gaming, with the exception of Games Workshop and a few small projects that predated the OGL. And vast majority number of those Open Gaming projects not only follow the letter of the OGL, they also follow its intent. (If the GPL had anything close to this effect, IE would have been GPL'd when MS decided to give it away.)
Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. GNU predates the release of the Linux kernel. The existence of GNU and/or the Linux kernel does not prevent Microsoft from continuing the development of their UNIX-like system nor does it prevent them from writing MS Office for any OS they wish (including any free software OS).
1: I did not say that Linux was an OS. I did, however, say that it was the last signifcant piece of the first Free Software OS. And it was.
2: Before there was a Free Software OS, there were just a bunch of free software tools--it was very much a hobbyist project, that still relied upon an underlying non-copyleft OS.
3: If you think that MS could have continued the development of MINX given Linux's popularity, you probably also think that RedHat could simply sell copies of their OS with no support and survive.
Adapting to free software would have been a wholesale reworking of MS's business model. Remember that at this time there was still a good deal of naturally occuring FUD about the implicaitons of the GPL on code written to work with a GPL'd OS. MS didn't need to exaggerate, they merely needed to state their claims.
Now, had RMS et al not been as overzealous, MS may have actually given the GPL a fair consideration. Given their corporate culture they would have rejected it anyway--but you can feel free to substitute any other company, such as IBM or Apple or Sun, and the certainty of corporate rejection of the "maybe this would be a good PR move" fails. As it was, "this would mean would could never sell software again" (or worse, "this would mean no one could ever sell software for [our OS]) was totally and at the time rightly rejected outright.
It seems to me that Microsoft's decision to can a program you appear to want is best addressed by talking to them, not chastising RMS. It appears that the Free Software Foundation is not interested in throwing aside their goals for mere popularity:
You commit a serious logical fallacy. RMS's freedom is in no way impunged if his tools are used to create new non-free systems. In fact, in a roundabout way he is denying even partial freedom to those who for whatever reason cannot abandon their non-copyleft system.
RMS's goal is "software freedom" for himself and all the world. While changing the world is always good, refusing to compromise has historically never yielded results more pleasing than compromise. He forgets the goal while focusing on the small elements of inertia--by insisting that we exercise the rights he holds dear, he is denying us the real use of those rights, and hurting his cause as disinterested parties shun his words.
Were other leaders insist that all votes be cast, all citizens bear arms, all arrests be challenged, all opinions expressed, and all children aborted, the world would be worse place than it would be if those rights were taken away.
You complained about bootup time. I told you it was irrelevant. Don't change the focus- it's not a pissing contest, it was an argument against your insinuation that bootup time is a major hassle. It's not even a concern.
YOU were the one who took it as a complaint. I noted that there are plenty of uses for Palms. You obviously don't have a use for one. Good for you.
Doesn't mean that PDAs don't have their place. Doesn't mean that they don't fit in very nicely in a number of different setups that could include WiFi.
I'm sure you feel superior knowing that you have a laptop you have with you at all times, and you need something else so rarely that pen & paper make more sense for you. Yay for you.
Cost? Well, that's like a Yugo owner telling a Bentley owner, "your car is inferior, mine costs less."
The Bentley owner does not tell the Yugo owner "your car has no place." And he may even have a number of Yugos--if you count every vehicle that his wealth supports, at least one Yugo and likely many more are numbered among them.
Anyway, enough other threads on this story have given firsthand accounts to prove my point. Sorry I'm not impressed by your collection of pointless hardware and your obsessive attachment to your ibook. As has been said elsewhere, "you can't fit that in a pocket."
I suppose that a slightly more appropriate term is "fork", but even that's wrong.
GNU/Zealotry leads to terms like "you must not remove anything from this license" -- the strong copyleft. Unfortunately, this leads to mimicry (how many strong copyleft licenses exist? How many do we have?) and incompatable schism.
If I wanted to take some GPL'd libraries and framework to create a program for Open Gaming, I'd be unable to--as the GPL is likely incompatable with the OGL (see www.opengamingfoundation.org) despite being very compatable in intent and even outlook & purpose. And so, I wind up just using the OGL (or my own license, or someone else's) and when you want to use my code and RMS's code to make something new, you can't.
How, precisely, is interoperability curtailed by the free software movement?
Before Linux, MS actually sold a flavor of UNIX. Had "Free Software" not ran so contrary to their basic business model, we'd probably have MS Office for UNIX now. Rather that throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the collaborative features that MS Office has had for years might actually work with the Free Software OS RMS and LT happily put together.
MS, of course, is a special case, but they do well to illuminate the concept.
Um...I last rebooted my powerbook for the 10.3.5 system update. Prior to that, I had a 38 day uptime.
The last time my palm "crashed" was when I was mucking about with a new program. Prior to that, I had an "uptime" approaching 6 months. And when it did crashe, it came back up in a matter of moments.
I'll note that you totally ignored the HDD seek, power consumption, and cost arguments. How nice of you.
or write with anything approaching speed or easy of use(I guarantee I can type at least ten times faster than you can "grafiti"). I'd also like to see you fit 60GB of data onto your palm pilot. Even if it was possible- its OS couldn't efficiently handle that much storage.
1: I don't use graffiti for anything but single-line entry. I have a keyboard for that--and the thing keeps up with me as well as anything else I've ever used.
2: I'd like to see you generate 60 GB of real text--or even 256 MB. You can even have a month to do it. (And we'll ignore that the main point of the WiFi card is to eliminate the Palm's native-memory standard. Want an archive of old documents? Just share with the harddrive.)
3: you're right. A palm and an ibook are very, very different tools. An ibook is a computer, a palm is an accessory.
Um, are you seriously suggesting people can just "pick up" grafiti?
No. I'm suggesting that there are people who can use a palm as well as or better than they can use a computer. Graffitti does take time to learn--but it probably took you weeks to stop looking at the keys when you type, too.
With my iPod and phone (Siemens S56) both supporting full contact info and calendaring as well as text notes for things like directions, I sync them both to iCal and Address Book with two clicks. My Visor has been sitting in the closet gathering dust for 3 years.
Nice. I have a 486 that's been gathering dust for years, too.
There is a role for the palm form-factor. It's not for everyone, but it is a distinct role. (This role can be taken by smart phones, and there's some mp3-player overlap, but there are reasons to avoid both of those.)
Stargate SG-1 just had an episode last Friday ("Avatar") using some in-game footage from an upcoming SG-1 game. It wasn't a particularly effective use of the footage, though - it seemed more like it was wedged in there by marketing than by the writers.
It was actually rather clever, that. Tel'c is in a simulation of battle using an alien machine (from a previous episode), and the crew watches from a human-built monitor. A CGI view on the screen is _more_ appropriate than using straight footage.
* cost of the model * power consumption * familiarity * ease of use
For $1,000 (the cost of a 12" iBook) I can purchase new palms with Wifi cards for myself, my wife, and an extra just for the fun of it.
Even if the iBook had equal power consumption on all components (which is unilkely, given screen size alone), a single palm still uses far less kw/H than the iBook for any given task. Solid-state memory and an always-on OS eliminate both boot-up time and HD seek.
A lot of people can use their palms as easily as a computer. For some folks, it's even easier.
And, of course, if I want to have a palm in the TV room just for random web lookups, I don't need to configure an ibook or leave it out. When i want to pull up the data from a website, I can simply turn on the palm, click on the web-browser program (which can even be bound to a buttom) and go right to the site.
That "zealotry" helped build a license (the GNU General Public License) which in turn helped create a movement. It's funny how people are called names when they advocate for their freedom.
RMS had one too many bad service contracts, so he decided that he never wanted to have software he couldn't fix himself if he needed to. So, he concieved of copyleft, and in a rather tireless manner advocated it and programmed for it and, after LT released the Linux kernal under RMS's license, he had a working, Free-as-in-Speech OS.
This is all well and good, and no one can call anyone names for suggesting that software be editable and fixable by those that use their systems. Heck, they can't even be looked down on for refusing to use "non-free" software.
Unfortunately, there is a limit where advocacy turns to zealotry. If i suggest that you should vote Democratic, and argue any point you would care to discuss in such an end as to point the Democrats in an excellent light, I'm an advocate. When i start saying that you're a bad person if you don't vote for the Democrats, or make unsubstantiated claims about their opponents, I'm a zealot.
GNU/Zealots do NOTHING to advance the purposes of Free Software*; they drive for the splintering of licenses (and thus curtail interopability), and impung the image of copylefted software such that many professional and non-professional computer users simply avoid it, for fear that the touch of "free software" will extend to items that they create of their own (possibly meager) skill.
(About that asterisk: "Free Software" is a counter-intuitive term. An alternate term, such as "Free Computing", can be much more intuitive and not fall asunder of the 'free as in beer' or 'you get what you pay for' fallacies.)
Besides, if slashdot used the real MS logo they're probably get sued into the ground for infringing the trademark every time someone made a bad comment about MS.
Nope. We're allowed to use trademarks (like the name "Microsoft") when discussing the conversation. It's just impolite to use the graphic when you're badmouthing someone, and the Gates-of-Borg icon is funnier.
Uh, most Americans work over 40 hours per week and only get a few weeks vacation after many years of employ.
Got a reference?
I don't know ANYONE who works more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis. The people I know who put in the most hours on a job were EMTs -- and their job consisted of "be ready for calls and take care of the equipment." Many times, they woudl get paid simply to sit and wait on the couch.
And, conversely, I don't know anyone who slaves away for twelve hour days in a factory, or struggles all their lives on a farm.
Even if I accept your "most americans" claim, the simple counter is that "most americans" also retire at age 60 or 65 and never work again--and more and more Americans are retiring sooner, and staying in college longer.
That's because it's not in there. We have a lot of seperate specific rights (right to be secure in one's own home, right to not be arrested or searched without warrant or probable cause of a crime in progress, right to pursue happiness in our bedroom in nearly any fashion we wish) that are elements of privacy, but no broad "right to privacy" exists.
If I want to know who you are, I can physically grab your arm, manhandle you to a local court, and ask you. If I'm a police officer and I ask you to identify yourself, in many states I can arrest you simply for not telling me who you are.
In a lot of ways it's insulting to everyone who fought for liberty and freedom. Needing to say who you are to travel via one method (you do not need ID to hitchhike, or to take a train, and you can borrow a friend's car if you really want to be paranoid) is nothing compared to needing to convince a government offical that you should be allowed to do something.
A passive government that watches and looks for danger is what we want and need, and it isn't Soviet-style tyranny. That would require an Orwellian governmetn--one that actively controls our lives, rather than setting up passive institutions.
The fact is that technology keeps leading to increases in productivity. If we wanted we could carefully regulate workweeks while still producing a slow productivity increase, and as a result we wouldn't have to work so long eventually.
By and large this is what has happened. Productivity has steadily increased, but so has liesure time. (What, you mean the example of the overworked lawyers and coders? They make a sufficient salary that they can either retire early or keep their children in education for a long long time--both of which are "liesure" in a capitalist sense.)
Re:Close, but misses the mark
on
Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, yes, but they have double-digit unemployment too. You can have all the holiday you want if you don't have a job!
"unemployment" is a bad measure. Tracking "per capita poverty" and "per capita productivity" is a much better measure. Or, heck, we could track "per worker productivity."
If your country and my country both have 100 people, and we both produce $1,000,000 in wealth per year, we have the same per-capita producitvity. If you employ 98 of those 100 while I employ 85, and those 2 non-workers in your society live in poverty while only 1 of mine lives in poverty, then picking statistics is even more important.
GDP: $1,000,000 you & me. Per-capita: $10,000 you & me Unemployment: 2% you, 15% me Per-worker: $10,204 you, $11,764 me. Poverty rate: 2% you, 1% me.
(if the conventional wisdom about socialsim and capitalism holds out, of course, your country would have a 1% poverty rate, while mine would be much higher--regardless of the rest.)
If you want a "What MS Office 2003 has over OpenOffice 1.2.1", I can do that (And I'll start with "floating tables, you bastard"). The question was "What does Office 2003 have over 1998?"
Are you telling me there's been any genuinely significant improvement in Microsoft Office in the last 5 years?
Yes. The most obvious being the HTML/XML support, internal program smart tags (2002 and 2003 will actually ask you, in a rather quiet way, if you want them to stop or undo an automatic change), and a slew of things that interoperate with an MS server.
Oh, and Excel's Pivottables, new data formats (in 2000 - four years old, and not likely to go anywhere soon), Frontpage sucking way less than it did in 1999, and a plethora of other minor changes.
That's right. Kid Pix requires Administrator-level rights or it simply will not run.
You most likely mean "Kid Pix was installed in c:\Program Files, and it needs read/write access to run."
Try installing educational software in a different folder, and it should work just fine. If you still have problems, try turning off simple file sharing and manualy set the permissions on the new folder so that Users can read/write/execute.
(I had an interesting situation when reinstalling my holdover PC when my caapcitors blew. The XP service pack 2 folder couldn't be accessed; I turned off simple file sharing, took ownership of the folder, and everything worked fine.)
That EXACT SAME LINE was used in 2000. How many appointments has Bush made? How many SCOTUS justices have left?
Oh, and believe it or not--not everyone who opposed abortion is a "fundamentalist christian." Heck, a humanist who beleives that man is the most divine thing there is might be MORE against abortion than someone who thinks the kid just goes back to heaven.
And, of course, there are "fundamentalist christians" who don't oppose abortion rights. It doesn't take a professional degree in human thought to realize that someone's likelier not to do something if, after you've told them how wrong it is, they have a real choice in their own land.
The anti-drug stance of the IOC and other bodies is pure fascism, and doomed to failure. As long as there is competition people will take performance enhancing drugs.
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For one thing, someone who drives twice a month gets a lot less practice driving than someone who drives every day. It's for this very reason that pilots must fly a certain number of hours each month.
An automobile is not an airplane.
When you're in your twice-a-day commute, you eventually get complacant and stop paying attention. Really, once you've achieved proficency, no ammount of time is going to degrade your ability to drive--although you might need to take a few minutes to learn the car, which can actually be done in a parking lot or driveway.
While in the store, I was told I could just bring the stick in for a new one, should it malfunction
I bought my first palm from Best Buy, with a service plan. When the backlight started not working, I brought it back and got it replaced with a same-dollar-cost model of my choice--which then lasted until the screen broke.
I also asked if their warranty covered breakage, and they said no.
Save the binary and install the package. Now, since you didn't agree to said EULA when you purchaced the software package, you are only bound by the laws of copyright. Under those laws, you are allowed to modifiy that which you purchace, as long as you do not distribute. If the software company's no-longer-existing EULA is binding, then so is yours.
Common contract law holds that each revison of a contract is a new offer. Your revision of the contract would not be binding on [company] unless they agreed to it. In fact, there would be no contract at all until they do agree, since by drafting a new agreement you obviously did not agree to the extant EULA.
Which means that you'd be guilty of fraud, and potentially liable for a significant sum--possibly the maximum ammount of damages [company] could have suffered from your fraud--$4 bililon.
There was a push a few years ago to bring them in as a state. It was congress that blocked it.
Nope. The push was from the PR folks, and they shot it down with a territorial referrendum.
What's interesting here is that the onus of responsibility falls on the GPL to allow these derivatives rather than taking the authors of the OGL to task for writing a GPL-incompatible license
I could take them to task, except that we discussed this very thing in the early drafts of the OGL and the issue was settled by a very simple fact. "If we take this rules-copyleft and extend it to everything, no one will ever use the OGL." [paraphrased.]
As it is, nearly every player in the RPG market has done at least something with regards to Open Gaming, with the exception of Games Workshop and a few small projects that predated the OGL. And vast majority number of those Open Gaming projects not only follow the letter of the OGL, they also follow its intent. (If the GPL had anything close to this effect, IE would have been GPL'd when MS decided to give it away.)
Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. GNU predates the release of the Linux kernel. The existence of GNU and/or the Linux kernel does not prevent Microsoft from continuing the development of their UNIX-like system nor does it prevent them from writing MS Office for any OS they wish (including any free software OS).
1: I did not say that Linux was an OS. I did, however, say that it was the last signifcant piece of the first Free Software OS. And it was.
2: Before there was a Free Software OS, there were just a bunch of free software tools--it was very much a hobbyist project, that still relied upon an underlying non-copyleft OS.
3: If you think that MS could have continued the development of MINX given Linux's popularity, you probably also think that RedHat could simply sell copies of their OS with no support and survive.
Adapting to free software would have been a wholesale reworking of MS's business model. Remember that at this time there was still a good deal of naturally occuring FUD about the implicaitons of the GPL on code written to work with a GPL'd OS. MS didn't need to exaggerate, they merely needed to state their claims.
Now, had RMS et al not been as overzealous, MS may have actually given the GPL a fair consideration. Given their corporate culture they would have rejected it anyway--but you can feel free to substitute any other company, such as IBM or Apple or Sun, and the certainty of corporate rejection of the "maybe this would be a good PR move" fails. As it was, "this would mean would could never sell software again" (or worse, "this would mean no one could ever sell software for [our OS]) was totally and at the time rightly rejected outright.
It seems to me that Microsoft's decision to can a program you appear to want is best addressed by talking to them, not chastising RMS. It appears that the Free Software Foundation is not interested in throwing aside their goals for mere popularity:
You commit a serious logical fallacy. RMS's freedom is in no way impunged if his tools are used to create new non-free systems. In fact, in a roundabout way he is denying even partial freedom to those who for whatever reason cannot abandon their non-copyleft system.
RMS's goal is "software freedom" for himself and all the world. While changing the world is always good, refusing to compromise has historically never yielded results more pleasing than compromise. He forgets the goal while focusing on the small elements of inertia--by insisting that we exercise the rights he holds dear, he is denying us the real use of those rights, and hurting his cause as disinterested parties shun his words.
Were other leaders insist that all votes be cast, all citizens bear arms, all arrests be challenged, all opinions expressed, and all children aborted, the world would be worse place than it would be if those rights were taken away.
*sigh*
You complained about bootup time. I told you it was irrelevant. Don't change the focus- it's not a pissing contest, it was an argument against your insinuation that bootup time is a major hassle. It's not even a concern.
YOU were the one who took it as a complaint. I noted that there are plenty of uses for Palms. You obviously don't have a use for one. Good for you.
Doesn't mean that PDAs don't have their place. Doesn't mean that they don't fit in very nicely in a number of different setups that could include WiFi.
I'm sure you feel superior knowing that you have a laptop you have with you at all times, and you need something else so rarely that pen & paper make more sense for you. Yay for you.
Cost? Well, that's like a Yugo owner telling a Bentley owner, "your car is inferior, mine costs less."
The Bentley owner does not tell the Yugo owner "your car has no place." And he may even have a number of Yugos--if you count every vehicle that his wealth supports, at least one Yugo and likely many more are numbered among them.
Anyway, enough other threads on this story have given firsthand accounts to prove my point. Sorry I'm not impressed by your collection of pointless hardware and your obsessive attachment to your ibook. As has been said elsewhere, "you can't fit that in a pocket."
What exactly does "splintering" a license mean?
I suppose that a slightly more appropriate term is "fork", but even that's wrong.
GNU/Zealotry leads to terms like "you must not remove anything from this license" -- the strong copyleft. Unfortunately, this leads to mimicry (how many strong copyleft licenses exist? How many do we have?) and incompatable schism.
If I wanted to take some GPL'd libraries and framework to create a program for Open Gaming, I'd be unable to--as the GPL is likely incompatable with the OGL (see www.opengamingfoundation.org) despite being very compatable in intent and even outlook & purpose. And so, I wind up just using the OGL (or my own license, or someone else's) and when you want to use my code and RMS's code to make something new, you can't.
How, precisely, is interoperability curtailed by the free software movement?
Before Linux, MS actually sold a flavor of UNIX. Had "Free Software" not ran so contrary to their basic business model, we'd probably have MS Office for UNIX now. Rather that throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the collaborative features that MS Office has had for years might actually work with the Free Software OS RMS and LT happily put together.
MS, of course, is a special case, but they do well to illuminate the concept.
Um...I last rebooted my powerbook for the 10.3.5 system update. Prior to that, I had a 38 day uptime.
The last time my palm "crashed" was when I was mucking about with a new program. Prior to that, I had an "uptime" approaching 6 months. And when it did crashe, it came back up in a matter of moments.
I'll note that you totally ignored the HDD seek, power consumption, and cost arguments. How nice of you.
or write with anything approaching speed or easy of use(I guarantee I can type at least ten times faster than you can "grafiti"). I'd also like to see you fit 60GB of data onto your palm pilot. Even if it was possible- its OS couldn't efficiently handle that much storage.
1: I don't use graffiti for anything but single-line entry. I have a keyboard for that--and the thing keeps up with me as well as anything else I've ever used.
2: I'd like to see you generate 60 GB of real text--or even 256 MB. You can even have a month to do it. (And we'll ignore that the main point of the WiFi card is to eliminate the Palm's native-memory standard. Want an archive of old documents? Just share with the harddrive.)
3: you're right. A palm and an ibook are very, very different tools. An ibook is a computer, a palm is an accessory.
Um, are you seriously suggesting people can just "pick up" grafiti?
No. I'm suggesting that there are people who can use a palm as well as or better than they can use a computer. Graffitti does take time to learn--but it probably took you weeks to stop looking at the keys when you type, too.
With my iPod and phone (Siemens S56) both supporting full contact info and calendaring as well as text notes for things like directions, I sync them both to iCal and Address Book with two clicks. My Visor has been sitting in the closet gathering dust for 3 years.
Nice. I have a 486 that's been gathering dust for years, too.
There is a role for the palm form-factor. It's not for everyone, but it is a distinct role. (This role can be taken by smart phones, and there's some mp3-player overlap, but there are reasons to avoid both of those.)
Stargate SG-1 just had an episode last Friday ("Avatar") using some in-game footage from an upcoming SG-1 game. It wasn't a particularly effective use of the footage, though - it seemed more like it was wedged in there by marketing than by the writers.
It was actually rather clever, that. Tel'c is in a simulation of battle using an alien machine (from a previous episode), and the crew watches from a human-built monitor. A CGI view on the screen is _more_ appropriate than using straight footage.
* cost of the model
* power consumption
* familiarity
* ease of use
For $1,000 (the cost of a 12" iBook) I can purchase new palms with Wifi cards for myself, my wife, and an extra just for the fun of it.
Even if the iBook had equal power consumption on all components (which is unilkely, given screen size alone), a single palm still uses far less kw/H than the iBook for any given task. Solid-state memory and an always-on OS eliminate both boot-up time and HD seek.
A lot of people can use their palms as easily as a computer. For some folks, it's even easier.
And, of course, if I want to have a palm in the TV room just for random web lookups, I don't need to configure an ibook or leave it out. When i want to pull up the data from a website, I can simply turn on the palm, click on the web-browser program (which can even be bound to a buttom) and go right to the site.
That "zealotry" helped build a license (the GNU General Public License) which in turn helped create a movement. It's funny how people are called names when they advocate for their freedom.
RMS had one too many bad service contracts, so he decided that he never wanted to have software he couldn't fix himself if he needed to. So, he concieved of copyleft, and in a rather tireless manner advocated it and programmed for it and, after LT released the Linux kernal under RMS's license, he had a working, Free-as-in-Speech OS.
This is all well and good, and no one can call anyone names for suggesting that software be editable and fixable by those that use their systems. Heck, they can't even be looked down on for refusing to use "non-free" software.
Unfortunately, there is a limit where advocacy turns to zealotry. If i suggest that you should vote Democratic, and argue any point you would care to discuss in such an end as to point the Democrats in an excellent light, I'm an advocate. When i start saying that you're a bad person if you don't vote for the Democrats, or make unsubstantiated claims about their opponents, I'm a zealot.
GNU/Zealots do NOTHING to advance the purposes of Free Software*; they drive for the splintering of licenses (and thus curtail interopability), and impung the image of copylefted software such that many professional and non-professional computer users simply avoid it, for fear that the touch of "free software" will extend to items that they create of their own (possibly meager) skill.
(About that asterisk: "Free Software" is a counter-intuitive term. An alternate term, such as "Free Computing", can be much more intuitive and not fall asunder of the 'free as in beer' or 'you get what you pay for' fallacies.)
What about my freedom of choice to use OS X or Linux? Where is Real's support for those operating systems?
OS X
Linux
Scroll down to the bottom of "www.real.com" and you'll see them, clear as day.
Besides, if slashdot used the real MS logo they're probably get sued into the ground for infringing the trademark every time someone made a bad comment about MS.
Nope. We're allowed to use trademarks (like the name "Microsoft") when discussing the conversation. It's just impolite to use the graphic when you're badmouthing someone, and the Gates-of-Borg icon is funnier.
The Olympics are about skill
No, they're not. If they were, tactical assault, "ultimate fighting", and compettive woodworking would be olympic sports.
The Olympics are, and always have beeen, about "performance." And not in general, but performance in a specific test.
Uh, most Americans work over 40 hours per week and only get a few weeks vacation after many years of employ.
Got a reference?
I don't know ANYONE who works more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis. The people I know who put in the most hours on a job were EMTs -- and their job consisted of "be ready for calls and take care of the equipment." Many times, they woudl get paid simply to sit and wait on the couch.
And, conversely, I don't know anyone who slaves away for twelve hour days in a factory, or struggles all their lives on a farm.
Even if I accept your "most americans" claim, the simple counter is that "most americans" also retire at age 60 or 65 and never work again--and more and more Americans are retiring sooner, and staying in college longer.
That's because it's not in there. We have a lot of seperate specific rights (right to be secure in one's own home, right to not be arrested or searched without warrant or probable cause of a crime in progress, right to pursue happiness in our bedroom in nearly any fashion we wish) that are elements of privacy, but no broad "right to privacy" exists.
If I want to know who you are, I can physically grab your arm, manhandle you to a local court, and ask you. If I'm a police officer and I ask you to identify yourself, in many states I can arrest you simply for not telling me who you are.
In a lot of ways it's insulting to everyone who fought for liberty and freedom. Needing to say who you are to travel via one method (you do not need ID to hitchhike, or to take a train, and you can borrow a friend's car if you really want to be paranoid) is nothing compared to needing to convince a government offical that you should be allowed to do something.
A passive government that watches and looks for danger is what we want and need, and it isn't Soviet-style tyranny. That would require an Orwellian governmetn--one that actively controls our lives, rather than setting up passive institutions.
The fact is that technology keeps leading to increases in productivity. If we wanted we could carefully regulate workweeks while still producing a slow productivity increase, and as a result we wouldn't have to work so long eventually.
By and large this is what has happened. Productivity has steadily increased, but so has liesure time. (What, you mean the example of the overworked lawyers and coders? They make a sufficient salary that they can either retire early or keep their children in education for a long long time--both of which are "liesure" in a capitalist sense.)
Actually, my cell phone quality's just fine.
It's my phone that sucks.
Well, yes, but they have double-digit unemployment too. You can have all the holiday you want if you don't have a job!
"unemployment" is a bad measure. Tracking "per capita poverty" and "per capita productivity" is a much better measure. Or, heck, we could track "per worker productivity."
If your country and my country both have 100 people, and we both produce $1,000,000 in wealth per year, we have the same per-capita producitvity. If you employ 98 of those 100 while I employ 85, and those 2 non-workers in your society live in poverty while only 1 of mine lives in poverty, then picking statistics is even more important.
GDP: $1,000,000 you & me.
Per-capita: $10,000 you & me
Unemployment: 2% you, 15% me
Per-worker: $10,204 you, $11,764 me.
Poverty rate: 2% you, 1% me.
(if the conventional wisdom about socialsim and capitalism holds out, of course, your country would have a 1% poverty rate, while mine would be much higher--regardless of the rest.)
If you want a "What MS Office 2003 has over OpenOffice 1.2.1", I can do that (And I'll start with "floating tables, you bastard"). The question was "What does Office 2003 have over 1998?"
Are you telling me there's been any genuinely significant improvement in Microsoft Office in the last 5 years?
Yes. The most obvious being the HTML/XML support, internal program smart tags (2002 and 2003 will actually ask you, in a rather quiet way, if you want them to stop or undo an automatic change), and a slew of things that interoperate with an MS server.
Oh, and Excel's Pivottables, new data formats (in 2000 - four years old, and not likely to go anywhere soon), Frontpage sucking way less than it did in 1999, and a plethora of other minor changes.
That's right. Kid Pix requires Administrator-level rights or it simply will not run.
You most likely mean "Kid Pix was installed in c:\Program Files, and it needs read/write access to run."
Try installing educational software in a different folder, and it should work just fine. If you still have problems, try turning off simple file sharing and manualy set the permissions on the new folder so that Users can read/write/execute.
(I had an interesting situation when reinstalling my holdover PC when my caapcitors blew. The XP service pack 2 folder couldn't be accessed; I turned off simple file sharing, took ownership of the folder, and everything worked fine.)
Oh, come off it.
That EXACT SAME LINE was used in 2000. How many appointments has Bush made? How many SCOTUS justices have left?
Oh, and believe it or not--not everyone who opposed abortion is a "fundamentalist christian." Heck, a humanist who beleives that man is the most divine thing there is might be MORE against abortion than someone who thinks the kid just goes back to heaven.
And, of course, there are "fundamentalist christians" who don't oppose abortion rights. It doesn't take a professional degree in human thought to realize that someone's likelier not to do something if, after you've told them how wrong it is, they have a real choice in their own land.
You're welcome, and that sounds like an excellent idea.
The anti-drug stance of the IOC and other bodies is pure fascism, and doomed to failure. As long as there is competition people will take performance enhancing drugs.
Tyranny. TYRANNY!
Facism doesn't mean what you think it means