Since almost all medical knowledge is open and available to all
No, it isn't, as I asserted in my root post. To gain access to it, you have to pay more than a third of a million dollars for more than a decade to one of a very small number of "qualified" institutions. The high rate of failure among those seeking admittance both to medical school and within medical school itself ensures that the supply of practitioners will always be restricted.
In contrast, open-source software exists in super-abundance. Anyone can replicate it and provide for her or his own software needs. It's an entirely different approach and philosophy.
That's a generalization, of course, but it's a necessary starting point for discussion. Currently in the US, medicine is the province of an elite cabal of practitioners protected from competition by rigorous liscensing requirements imposed by states. Open-source software is the province of a diverse field of programmers, excluding no one who applies for admittance. The barrier to entering the medical community is more than a decade of higher education and several years of apprenticeship (my friends call it slavery). The barrier to entering the open-source community is merely a demonstrably useful piece of code or a neat project idea. Achieving status within the medical community confers the title of "Doctor". Achieving status in the open-source community, if you're lucky, conveys the title of TLA (RMS, ESR, etc).
Open-source software might help lower costs or improve the quality of health-care, but there are big social and philosophical barriers that must first be overcome. With current political clamorings for unionizing and liscensing among programmers, I fear we may meet on their terms, not ours.
I get that a lot with my own comments, and it's hurtful. Are you so sure of your own righteousness that all opposing viewpoints must be trolls? You just illustrated Anne Marie's First Law of Slashdot:
"As a Slashdot discussion grows more controversial, the probability of an allegation of 'troll' approaches one." (Anne Marie's First Law of Slashdot)
What saves Linux is exactly the fact that no one enforces even the licenses.
Well, that's a sad statement if true. If the only way for you and me to get along is for us to violate each others rights consistently, then that can hardly be called civilization.
First that many people if not most people would like to have a more direct rewarding system.
Besides GPL is a philosophy. And most licenses, in one way or the other reflect some sort of philosophy. Are you telling me that everyone should go to the ONE philosophy?
No, but everyone must have compatible philosophies if we are to coexist and accomplish anything together. To take your example of communism, if you are an ardent communist and therefore believe that everything I own belongs to us both in common and so you're free to take it without my permission, whereas I'm an ardent believer in Lockean property interests and will defend my personal property to the last breath, then can we possibly coexist? If you are a BSD fanatic and ardently believe that everyone should be free to steal your code and incorporate it into closed software, whereas I'm a GPL fascist and demand that only other GPL fascists use my code, then can we possibly coexist? We'd be constantly violating each other's rights and biting each other's heads off.
Yes there should be interagreements between them. But let's hope no one manages to enforce a "ONE" license.
By the nature of these liscenses, no interagreement is possible. The only solution is to agree on a common liscense that neither side likes but is willing to accomodate, like the LGPL or maybe the Artistic liscense. To do otherwise is to pursue your own bigoted political ends at the expense of meaningful progress.
If someone really, truly wants to die, they will succeed in killing themselves.
That may be true, but it's the same of any crime against the state and legal order.
You have to understand the historical significance of laws against suicide: you cannot kill yourself, because you are your king's subject, and you are not allowed to kill any of the king's subjects. We live in a world where individuals are given (and correctly given) greater autonomy to determine the destiny of their own bodies, but are you sure we want to take that last step and give them the right to destroy their bodies?
Sure, you start dying as soon as you're born, so you're just postponing the inevitable by not committing suicide now. But at the same time, by committing suicide now, you're just showing your own impatience with that same natural biological and, again, inevitable process.
Hiding guides on efficient ways to do it doesn't stop jack shit.
Most suicides fail the first time (or second, or third). Each failure is another opportunity to get the person into counseling and convince her or him that it's in her or his best interest (and society's best interest) for her or him not to commit suicide.
Here're some clear images of EB173 captured by the Fort Bend Astronomy Club. It seems they imaged it without necessarily knowing EB173's significance at the time.
And while I'm at it, here's a considerably grainier shot taken at the Klet observatory.
If a customer operates the computer in a safe manner, there shouldn't be any problem.
Indeed. Any computer that's sitting with its bare ass out on the net with a static (or even dhcp-assigned) address with all ports open, unnecessary services running, and without a firewall for protection, is just begging to be pillaged.
It's like sex. Would you have sex without a condom or suitable barrier? You might out of laziness (or the mistaken thought that you're not getting the full experience), but if you do, nine times out of ten, you'll be coming home with an STD. It's the same with firewalls and network security. You might not run one out laziness, or the mistaken thought the firewall will impede your performance by constraining your movements, slowing down your "bandwidth", or impeding your access to others' ports, but nine times out of ten, you'll be coming home with a cracked box.
I tell all my lovers, "No glove, no love", and I encourage all of you to tell your sysadmins, "No firewalls, no thigh-or-balls, er, I mean, no service."
AT&T won't support linux, but that's far from saying it won't work at all if you know what to do yourself. Here's one person's experiences with successfully hooking his linux box up to his @Home service.
Slashdot is essentially a committee of 250,000 usernicks, and by its very nature as a committee, it will generate results inconsistent with past statements and declarations. Slashdot is enormous compared to its size one year ago, much less two or three years ago, and the influx of new users alone would account for the change in pary line (or at least commanding philosophy).
With that said, I have to pick your point about "One License, one GUI, one Platform". To be sure, "One GUI" and "One Platform" are counterproductive, but "One Liscense" has its benefits. Some of the biggest problems and fights in the open-source movement have come from the selection of different and incompatible liscenses -- a defacto standard (like the GPL or LGPL) would ensure that if your efforts on your neat project and my efforts on my neat project don't have to be mutually exclusive or incompatible.
I'll even go so far as to say we should stop arguing about forks and mutations altogether. As long as the source (and therefore the structure) is disclosed, any incompatibility can be overcome within a single generation. It's just not a problem.
slavery against abortion (obviously both being about human rights)
They're both about human rights, but not in the sense you have in mind. The fetus isn't a human possessing rights. It's not yet born -- it's a potential human but not an actual human. The valid human-rights are the ones of the woman. And the analogy is much closer than you give it credit. The woman who is pregnant but not permitted to terminate her pregnancy is experiencing a sort of slavery.
Where in the constitution does it state that a person has the right to kill their own children. Please point me to the reference.
It's not born, therefore it isn't a child, and your premise is invalid. (You can't kill something that isn't yet alive). With that said, look at the penumbras and emanations of Ammendments III, IV, V, IX, X, XIII, XIV, and XIX. For directions as to how you should read those ammendments, consult Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird.
Be-fan criticized someone's use of "babe", saying it should be reserved for referring to women and not to software. If you disagree with his conception of "babe", then take it up with him, not me.
Your swift, misled, unthinking, and ad-hominem attacks against me, combined with a knee-jerk resort to dictionary.com and the inability to format your italics tags correctly, are consistent with possessing a small penis. In fact, the possibility isn't excluded one bit. Tut tut tut.
First, I'd ask you to find even half a dozen feminists on slashdot.
Second, I ask why you even bother to write stuff like that, much post it with your +1 bonus. Does it contribute to the collective intelligence of slashdot? Does it make this a more inviting community for people already grossly unrepresented in slashdot's readership? Does it actually help anyone? Do you just find some kind of vicarious pleasure in being "politically incorrect", some sense of freedom in having complete unabashed disregard for the impact and consequences of your words on others?
I don't have the energy to be pissed off by people like you. You just make me sad.
That makes me wonder if he would want to see Roe V. Wade overturned on the grounds that it puts undue restrictions on the laws states can pass.
For starters, Roe v. Wade is no longer the binding precedent and hasn't been since 1992. The case you mean to cite is Planned Parenthood v. Casey. With that said...
Either Browne is a libertarian or he isn't. If he is, then he's against all government intrusion into private and personal matters, not just federal intrusion. It'd be like saying the 13th amendment unduly restricts states' powers to enact slavery. Of course it does; that's the whole point. They have no legitimate power to enact slavery, and they have no legitimate power to enact prohibitions against abortion. You don't see this difference in his rhetoric about drugs, and you shouldn't see it in his rhetoric about abortion.
They'll just adapt to their new environment and find new employment singing in Disney adaptations of Hans Christien Andersson stories. There's precedent, you know.
It's US's NASA which has always been good at crashing things into oceans -- the US is surrounded by two, so they make convenient landing targets.
Russia/USSR never had much in the way of navagable ocean -- Vladivostok is frozen for half the year, and that's as far south as they can get on the Pacific, while Europe blocks most of the Atlantic (and the Black Sea is too shallow). So whereas the US could just aim for an ocean, Russia had to land on terra firma, a much greater challenge.
(As for your quip that they're good at *crashing*, per se, that's simply not true. Most of their failures either blew up on the ground or blew up in mid air. Very few were successful up-until attempted landings.)
It'd be nice to keep it up there for nostalgic reasons, but that's like saying we should keep the Chernobyl reactors running for nostalgic reasons. It vastly exceeded its projected lifespan and it's coming apart at the seams. Far better is it to bring it down in the ocean than on some populated location (no matter what the MS/Redmond snickers say to the contrary).
Might it have kept running longer under a communist regime? Perhaps, in that reality is a little slower to seep in when making decisions that have a large political component. But at the same time, under a communist regime, there'd probably be a whole new space station up there replacing MIR by now. So either way, it's a moot point.
Metroid doesn't refute anything, because you didn't learn Samus Aran's gender until the very end (or entered the cheat code). They deliberately hid it, which proves either of two reprehensible facts: 1) they knew that her gender would negatively impact sales, so they didn't reveal it at first or 2) it was a mere afterthought, not worthy of our attention.
And like I said, I'm not entirely convinced the stereotyping has stopped. Lara Croft, for example, might be liberated in the sense of freely committing violence normally reserved for men, but she's still chained to an image of large breasts and a sexually inviting pelvis.
I mean weak in terms of physical strength, measured in speed of picking up objects. Toad jumped the shortest but was strongest physiccally. The princess could jump high and float, but she was physically weakest: she struggled and strained to pick anything up. It sent a bad message.
Slashdot Mirror
xdata.org/ip.html. Just type in the domain name, and off you go. The output for slashdot.org, for example, is:
Decimal
8/8/8/8-bit. http://64.28.67.48
8/8/16-bit.. http://64.28.17200
8/24-bit.... http://64.1852208
32-bit...... http://1075594032
Octal
8/8/8/8-bit. http://0100.034.0103.060
8/8/16-bit.. http://0100.034.041460
8/24-bit.... http://0100.07041460
32-bit...... http://010007041460
Since almost all medical knowledge is open and available to all
No, it isn't, as I asserted in my root post. To gain access to it, you have to pay more than a third of a million dollars for more than a decade to one of a very small number of "qualified" institutions. The high rate of failure among those seeking admittance both to medical school and within medical school itself ensures that the supply of practitioners will always be restricted.
In contrast, open-source software exists in super-abundance. Anyone can replicate it and provide for her or his own software needs. It's an entirely different approach and philosophy.
Behold: the Y Window System. Check out the overview. It shows promise, but then, we've been saying that about Berlin for years now.
That's a generalization, of course, but it's a necessary starting point for discussion. Currently in the US, medicine is the province of an elite cabal of practitioners protected from competition by rigorous liscensing requirements imposed by states. Open-source software is the province of a diverse field of programmers, excluding no one who applies for admittance. The barrier to entering the medical community is more than a decade of higher education and several years of apprenticeship (my friends call it slavery). The barrier to entering the open-source community is merely a demonstrably useful piece of code or a neat project idea. Achieving status within the medical community confers the title of "Doctor". Achieving status in the open-source community, if you're lucky, conveys the title of TLA (RMS, ESR, etc).
Open-source software might help lower costs or improve the quality of health-care, but there are big social and philosophical barriers that must first be overcome. With current political clamorings for unionizing and liscensing among programmers, I fear we may meet on their terms, not ours.
Basically, that's a GaAs diode tuned for 420 nm emission...
I would've thought GaAS diodes would be smelly enough in their own right.
I get that a lot with my own comments, and it's hurtful. Are you so sure of your own righteousness that all opposing viewpoints must be trolls? You just illustrated Anne Marie's First Law of Slashdot:
"As a Slashdot discussion grows more controversial, the probability of an allegation of 'troll' approaches one." (Anne Marie's First Law of Slashdot)
What saves Linux is exactly the fact that no one enforces even the licenses.
Well, that's a sad statement if true. If the only way for you and me to get along is for us to violate each others rights consistently, then that can hardly be called civilization.
First that many people if not most people would like to have a more direct rewarding system.
Besides GPL is a philosophy. And most licenses, in one way or the other reflect some sort of philosophy. Are you telling me that everyone should go to the ONE philosophy?
No, but everyone must have compatible philosophies if we are to coexist and accomplish anything together. To take your example of communism, if you are an ardent communist and therefore believe that everything I own belongs to us both in common and so you're free to take it without my permission, whereas I'm an ardent believer in Lockean property interests and will defend my personal property to the last breath, then can we possibly coexist? If you are a BSD fanatic and ardently believe that everyone should be free to steal your code and incorporate it into closed software, whereas I'm a GPL fascist and demand that only other GPL fascists use my code, then can we possibly coexist? We'd be constantly violating each other's rights and biting each other's heads off.
Yes there should be interagreements between them. But let's hope no one manages to enforce a "ONE" license.
By the nature of these liscenses, no interagreement is possible. The only solution is to agree on a common liscense that neither side likes but is willing to accomodate, like the LGPL or maybe the Artistic liscense. To do otherwise is to pursue your own bigoted political ends at the expense of meaningful progress.
If someone really, truly wants to die, they will succeed in killing themselves.
That may be true, but it's the same of any crime against the state and legal order.
You have to understand the historical significance of laws against suicide: you cannot kill yourself, because you are your king's subject, and you are not allowed to kill any of the king's subjects. We live in a world where individuals are given (and correctly given) greater autonomy to determine the destiny of their own bodies, but are you sure we want to take that last step and give them the right to destroy their bodies?
Sure, you start dying as soon as you're born, so you're just postponing the inevitable by not committing suicide now. But at the same time, by committing suicide now, you're just showing your own impatience with that same natural biological and, again, inevitable process.
Hiding guides on efficient ways to do it doesn't stop jack shit.
Most suicides fail the first time (or second, or third). Each failure is another opportunity to get the person into counseling and convince her or him that it's in her or his best interest (and society's best interest) for her or him not to commit suicide.
The actual paper discussed in the article can be found here .
Here're some clear images of EB173 captured by the Fort Bend Astronomy Club. It seems they imaged it without necessarily knowing EB173's significance at the time.
And while I'm at it, here's a considerably grainier shot taken at the Klet observatory.
If a customer operates the computer in a safe manner, there shouldn't be any problem.
Indeed. Any computer that's sitting with its bare ass out on the net with a static (or even dhcp-assigned) address with all ports open, unnecessary services running, and without a firewall for protection, is just begging to be pillaged.
It's like sex. Would you have sex without a condom or suitable barrier? You might out of laziness (or the mistaken thought that you're not getting the full experience), but if you do, nine times out of ten, you'll be coming home with an STD. It's the same with firewalls and network security. You might not run one out laziness, or the mistaken thought the firewall will impede your performance by constraining your movements, slowing down your "bandwidth", or impeding your access to others' ports, but nine times out of ten, you'll be coming home with a cracked box.
I tell all my lovers, "No glove, no love", and I encourage all of you to tell your sysadmins, "No firewalls, no thigh-or-balls, er, I mean, no service."
AT&T won't support linux, but that's far from saying it won't work at all if you know what to do yourself. Here's one person's experiences with successfully hooking his linux box up to his @Home service.
Slashdot is essentially a committee of 250,000 usernicks, and by its very nature as a committee, it will generate results inconsistent with past statements and declarations. Slashdot is enormous compared to its size one year ago, much less two or three years ago, and the influx of new users alone would account for the change in pary line (or at least commanding philosophy).
With that said, I have to pick your point about "One License, one GUI, one Platform". To be sure, "One GUI" and "One Platform" are counterproductive, but "One Liscense" has its benefits. Some of the biggest problems and fights in the open-source movement have come from the selection of different and incompatible liscenses -- a defacto standard (like the GPL or LGPL) would ensure that if your efforts on your neat project and my efforts on my neat project don't have to be mutually exclusive or incompatible.
I'll even go so far as to say we should stop arguing about forks and mutations altogether. As long as the source (and therefore the structure) is disclosed, any incompatibility can be overcome within a single generation. It's just not a problem.
slavery against abortion (obviously both being about human rights)
They're both about human rights, but not in the sense you have in mind. The fetus isn't a human possessing rights. It's not yet born -- it's a potential human but not an actual human. The valid human-rights are the ones of the woman. And the analogy is much closer than you give it credit. The woman who is pregnant but not permitted to terminate her pregnancy is experiencing a sort of slavery.
Where in the constitution does it state that a person has the right to kill their own children. Please point me to the reference.
It's not born, therefore it isn't a child, and your premise is invalid. (You can't kill something that isn't yet alive). With that said, look at the penumbras and emanations of Ammendments III, IV, V, IX, X, XIII, XIV, and XIX. For directions as to how you should read those ammendments, consult Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird.
Be-fan criticized someone's use of "babe", saying it should be reserved for referring to women and not to software. If you disagree with his conception of "babe", then take it up with him, not me.
Your swift, misled, unthinking, and ad-hominem attacks against me, combined with a knee-jerk resort to dictionary.com and the inability to format your italics tags correctly, are consistent with possessing a small penis. In fact, the possibility isn't excluded one bit. Tut tut tut.
First, I'd ask you to find even half a dozen feminists on slashdot.
Second, I ask why you even bother to write stuff like that, much post it with your +1 bonus. Does it contribute to the collective intelligence of slashdot? Does it make this a more inviting community for people already grossly unrepresented in slashdot's readership? Does it actually help anyone? Do you just find some kind of vicarious pleasure in being "politically incorrect", some sense of freedom in having complete unabashed disregard for the impact and consequences of your words on others?
I don't have the energy to be pissed off by people like you. You just make me sad.
Ukraine has announced Chernobyl's final shutdown date: December 15 (this year). The EU funding did finally come through.
It wasn't a nostalgic reason at all. It was purely economic (having to generate 6% of Ukraine's electricity).
If AOL kills winamp, then more people will switch to freeamp, a free and superior project. I'll be the first to lose no sleep.
That makes me wonder if he would want to see Roe V. Wade overturned on the grounds that it puts undue restrictions on the laws states can pass.
For starters, Roe v. Wade is no longer the binding precedent and hasn't been since 1992. The case you mean to cite is Planned Parenthood v. Casey. With that said...
Either Browne is a libertarian or he isn't. If he is, then he's against all government intrusion into private and personal matters, not just federal intrusion. It'd be like saying the 13th amendment unduly restricts states' powers to enact slavery. Of course it does; that's the whole point. They have no legitimate power to enact slavery, and they have no legitimate power to enact prohibitions against abortion. You don't see this difference in his rhetoric about drugs, and you shouldn't see it in his rhetoric about abortion.
They'll just adapt to their new environment and find new employment singing in Disney adaptations of Hans Christien Andersson stories. There's precedent, you know.
It's US's NASA which has always been good at crashing things into oceans -- the US is surrounded by two, so they make convenient landing targets.
Russia/USSR never had much in the way of navagable ocean -- Vladivostok is frozen for half the year, and that's as far south as they can get on the Pacific, while Europe blocks most of the Atlantic (and the Black Sea is too shallow). So whereas the US could just aim for an ocean, Russia had to land on terra firma, a much greater challenge.
(As for your quip that they're good at *crashing*, per se, that's simply not true. Most of their failures either blew up on the ground or blew up in mid air. Very few were successful up-until attempted landings.)
How can the man call himself a libertarian when he's profoundly anti-choice about abortion?
It'd be nice to keep it up there for nostalgic reasons, but that's like saying we should keep the Chernobyl reactors running for nostalgic reasons. It vastly exceeded its projected lifespan and it's coming apart at the seams. Far better is it to bring it down in the ocean than on some populated location (no matter what the MS/Redmond snickers say to the contrary).
Might it have kept running longer under a communist regime? Perhaps, in that reality is a little slower to seep in when making decisions that have a large political component. But at the same time, under a communist regime, there'd probably be a whole new space station up there replacing MIR by now. So either way, it's a moot point.
Metroid doesn't refute anything, because you didn't learn Samus Aran's gender until the very end (or entered the cheat code). They deliberately hid it, which proves either of two reprehensible facts: 1) they knew that her gender would negatively impact sales, so they didn't reveal it at first or 2) it was a mere afterthought, not worthy of our attention.
And like I said, I'm not entirely convinced the stereotyping has stopped. Lara Croft, for example, might be liberated in the sense of freely committing violence normally reserved for men, but she's still chained to an image of large breasts and a sexually inviting pelvis.
I mean weak in terms of physical strength, measured in speed of picking up objects. Toad jumped the shortest but was strongest physiccally. The princess could jump high and float, but she was physically weakest: she struggled and strained to pick anything up. It sent a bad message.