I uh, I am laughing my ass off. That is a great post and it is more or less true. I truly don't know if you are joking or not, but what you said true, except for Cox and Torvalds not being 'l33t'. The post reminded me of last years ALS (Atlanta Linux Showcase) where there were companies like IBM, Sun, and Compaq and fuck AOL is going to be there this year! Anyway most people were jumping all over the Linux bandwagon and there was this one lonely guy in the corner in an OpenBSD booth. His was one of few booths that didn't have people crowded around it trying to make everyone else know how cool or smart they were. I hung around him for a while and he was honestly one of the best parts of the whole thing.
You're right, in capable hands it IS a weapon. And those hands don't have to be all that capable with the programs you can find on warez sites. What I don't want to see is government get involved in the Internet any more than it already is. Politicians make lousy sysadmins. I don't want people to lose the freedom to start a radio station from their dorm room on the Internet. I could rig up a tower outside my house and start broadcasting but the FCC would be on me pretty quick. But on the 'net I can do basically that without breaking any laws, right now but I might not be able to if hackers, err excuse me, crackers get their exploits on the news a couple of times a month and really start scaring people. If that happens then the policing would really start and then the 'net turns more commercial and restricted than it already is.
Umm, I don't want to give the illusion that I agree with what you said but...
I was watching the Screen Savers on ZDTV. It was while Leo was away for a few days and they had that other guy I don't know his name but something he said made me think about Linux and the open source movement. In a comment about something a comment by Eric S Raymond he said something like, some people (geeks) are so deep into the technology that they think the average person is going to pick up Linux and start using it, when in reality that WILL NOT happen. And after thinkg about this, I think he may be right.
Most people out there may not come up to the standards, albeit low standards, we give them credit for, and will not be able to use Linux or even understand why it is important. Most people may feel like the unfortunate person that I am replying to and just hope someone else works it out for them.
I have to agree with you about there not being many people with superior technical knowledge in schools. I am 24 and have recently taken up volunteering at my old high school just to have something to do until I go back to college next spring. The current computer teacher is just a Spanish teacher with an extra period so they stuck her in the computer lab and called her a computer teacher. And I, having a great deal more experience with computers than she, lent my knowledge to the school to get a network set up and get ready to connect to the Internet. I had high hopes of filling young minds with excitement over their upcoming broadband connection (they are about to receive a donated T-1 line at the school) and all the things that can be done with that kind of bandwidth. But all I got was mostly bored kids that had no interest in it whatsoever. I would have been drooling at the thought, but most of them didn't seem to care.
I live in the sticks just like our friend in Trout Run, and interestingly enough my town was called Trout Creek when first incorporated, and I have a pitiful connection speeds ranging from 21k to 28.8k, which is made more unbearable by the fact that I just moved from a large city that where I had an ADSL connection. I am digging around trying to find the point here.
I think that in the grand vision of the future everyone will have 10Mbps connections in their cell, excue me, digital phones and will be wired all the time, but until then, there will always be some who are left behind by the availability of technology. Ok, there I pointed out the obvious.
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I uh, I am laughing my ass off. That is a great post and it is more or less true. I truly don't know if you are joking or not, but what you said true, except for Cox and Torvalds not being 'l33t'. The post reminded me of last years ALS (Atlanta Linux Showcase) where there were companies like IBM, Sun, and Compaq and fuck AOL is going to be there this year! Anyway most people were jumping all over the Linux bandwagon and there was this one lonely guy in the corner in an OpenBSD booth. His was one of few booths that didn't have people crowded around it trying to make everyone else know how cool or smart they were. I hung around him for a while and he was honestly one of the best parts of the whole thing.
I am just curious, what city/state is this in?
You're right, in capable hands it IS a weapon. And those hands don't have to be all that capable with the programs you can find on warez sites. What I don't want to see is government get involved in the Internet any more than it already is. Politicians make lousy sysadmins. I don't want people to lose the freedom to start a radio station from their dorm room on the Internet. I could rig up a tower outside my house and start broadcasting but the FCC would be on me pretty quick. But on the 'net I can do basically that without breaking any laws, right now but I might not be able to if hackers, err excuse me, crackers get their exploits on the news a couple of times a month and really start scaring people. If that happens then the policing would really start and then the 'net turns more commercial and restricted than it already is.
Most people out there may not come up to the standards, albeit low standards, we give them credit for, and will not be able to use Linux or even understand why it is important. Most people may feel like the unfortunate person that I am replying to and just hope someone else works it out for them.
I have to agree with you about there not being many people with superior technical knowledge in schools. I am 24 and have recently taken up volunteering at my old high school just to have something to do until I go back to college next spring. The current computer teacher is just a Spanish teacher with an extra period so they stuck her in the computer lab and called her a computer teacher. And I, having a great deal more experience with computers than she, lent my knowledge to the school to get a network set up and get ready to connect to the Internet. I had high hopes of filling young minds with excitement over their upcoming broadband connection (they are about to receive a donated T-1 line at the school) and all the things that can be done with that kind of bandwidth. But all I got was mostly bored kids that had no interest in it whatsoever. I would have been drooling at the thought, but most of them didn't seem to care.
I live in the sticks just like our friend in Trout Run, and interestingly enough my town was called Trout Creek when first incorporated, and I have a pitiful connection speeds ranging from 21k to 28.8k, which is made more unbearable by the fact that I just moved from a large city that where I had an ADSL connection. I am digging around trying to find the point here.
I think that in the grand vision of the future everyone will have 10Mbps connections in their cell, excue me, digital phones and will be wired all the time, but until then, there will always be some who are left behind by the availability of technology. Ok, there I pointed out the obvious.