This is an exciting time to be alive. I wonder what the next 20 years will bring on this front. It'll be interesting if we can someday map all the output of the motor cortex and build wireless links to get around severed spinal nerves.
You can always leave later. Your data won't always be perfectly portable, but you can keep old versions of Staroffice around and export to various formats.
Being reasonable requires we be willing to draw lines and pass judgement. There are some tools that are mostly legitimate, some that see substantial illegitimate use, and some that are mostly illegitimate. It's fine for a Linux distro to decide not to ship with (or include in repositories) tools that are mostly used for illegitimate ends, even if they have some theoretical legitimate uses. They're not under any obligation to package everything, and "stuff that's mostly used to do harm" is just as reasonable to filter out as "things with ugly licenses".
By analogy, it is usually hard to get lockpicking tools, assault weapons/vehicles, nuclear materials, radar detectors, unsafe foods, homemade alcohols, and many other things in most countries. Can you manage it? Usually, either by legitimate means if you can get a permit, or by making them yourself.
This is entirely different (and much more mild) than blacklisting those applications.
By enforcing international standards and locking people up who break them, we can stop the very process of their looking for places with the very least worker protections.
That's a false choice (between no work and low working standards). It's harmful competition that leads those areas that insist on reasonable standards to lose out to those that don't. Solid rules on an international scale prevent that.
I don't expect everyone to start everyone in the middle class. That doesn't even make sense - even in the western world we don't have complete egality. What we do have is labour standards, won through difficult struggles by labour movements. These are not prizes we can afford to hoard for ourselves - they are inefficiencies that we treasure because they're the right thing to do, and by pushing other nations to adopt similar measures we both prevent them from hurting us in competition and better the lot of people everywhere.
Screw those entepreneurs. The chance to use lower-cost workers may inspire them to hire people in poorer nations, but that should not be confused with allowing a race to the bottom when it comes to working standards. The whole world would be better off if rules like that were global. Let competition be over other things, with good standards for working conditions. Anyone, entepreneur or not, who runs a factory with inhumane working conditions belongs in jail.
1) Pirate isn't quite the right word. Some clones were more-or-less copies, others branched off further. Remember that it was the tension between the (still large) hobbyist/small business market and the giant (IBM) that made the PC revolution possible. Both sides brought technology. 2) Some of this wasn't MS's fault - CP/M's price was largely set by DR, and Xenix wasn't particularly cheap either. 3) Probably the most true, especially as DOS was a cheap clone of CP/M. However, MS did have some of its own expertise, initially in writing BASIC environments (big among hobbyists), and later on, Microsoft Research (the one broadly accepted "good part" of the evil empire) started a tradition of far-reaching research. MS products have not always (or even usually) been innovative, but there have been both good products (MS QuickC, for example) and good research projects from the company.
You're simply wrong. Brush up on your history, and look at the architectures of each. Don't expect slashdot to handhold you through your learning about these things though.
Rode the wave as in was hired by IBM because negotiations with Digital Research for a CP/M license (saying this as charitably as I can) went nowhere. Digital Research wasn't backstabbed - they were arrogant idiots who lost by purposefully pointing their nose at the ground and applying full thrust.
MS actually had a lot of competition, they just had three things that let them win: 1) They were good enough (not necessarily or often better) 2) They were very persistent 3) They had very good marketing/business-savvy
Your history is off too. The VMS roots are even on their face only very lightly there (no code, they just hired a kernel team composed significantly of ex-VMS kernelfolk and some aspects of the VMS design went in), the BSD roots are hardly there at all, and the OS/2 roots were predominant.
I don't have a theoretical objection to a "kill switch" that'd take the nation offline (to the extent that that's even feasable), but I'm not sure such a thing would be useful - the harm in taking our networks down would probably outweigh almost anything but complete loss of network functionality - the internet is almost as fundamental as roads for our society and economy.
I'm curious how community peer networking would change were the internet down for awhile.
I'm more excited by Firefox 4. I already have OpenOffice, and while GoogleDocs isn't opensource, it's not bad either and so far it's free.
Mozilla Labs makes some pretty neat things, and I'm quite happy with Firefox. It'd be a lot more "brilliant" if Stuart Turton would stop thinking that Firefox is an also-ran.
I can't blame distributions for not following the GNOME project in all their technical decisions - some parts of GNOME are (and continue to be) neat, but several, particularly those bits tied with Mono and other attempts to wear Microsoft's leash, are lousy (plus some bits duplicate functionality better done elsewhere, e.g. Empathy over Pidgin).
GNOME is still a pretty decent development environment, and there are a lot of nice applications that use the GNOME libraries. Still, there's no reason distros need the detault GNOME desktop to run them, and people/distros can be perfectly happy taking GNOME components and standards piecemail.
That may work, although paying simple restitution is not enough. We should rather have them pay a bit more than the inverse of the expected profit-including-risk to the owner of each bike they can be proven to have stolen, their name should be in a publicly accessible list of known stealers of bikes, *and* they should be forced to do community services.
The ability to raise capital is the other major role of the stock system (although whether one considers that part of the "stock market" or not depends on definitions). They did develop in the context of bank and government interests - "just evolved" is oversimplistic. It doesn't matter whether the financiers care what's really going on - the academes generally have it right, as always.
Honest Livings are reasonably justifiable in terms of the public good. If one has to dance around considerably to even try to do that, or one cannot, one probably is not making an honest living.
These things are on a scale - there are things that are worse than living comfortably (or particularly well) without contributing meaningfully to society. I probably would not use the word "despicable" very readily for this, but I do think they deserve some scorn.
I'm not sure why you'd want me to define society for you - don't you live in one?
Slashdot Mirror
"Bad" is attempting to see the world through such a simplistic lens .. oh, wait..
This is an exciting time to be alive. I wonder what the next 20 years will bring on this front. It'll be interesting if we can someday map all the output of the motor cortex and build wireless links to get around severed spinal nerves.
The story makes me curious as to why they were earlier ordered to shutdown. Anyone have the story behind that?
What if they don't want to maximise their profit? What happens if people are not jerks? Are you going to demand that of them?
Answer is simple: Capitalism at work is so wrong.
Paper, pencil, paintbrushes.
Libertarian politicians are government-created monstrosities ^_^
Is it presently fashionable to make a big deal out of this stuff? Seems to be a non-story to me.
You can always leave later. Your data won't always be perfectly portable, but you can keep old versions of Staroffice around and export to various formats.
Being reasonable requires we be willing to draw lines and pass judgement. There are some tools that are mostly legitimate, some that see substantial illegitimate use, and some that are mostly illegitimate. It's fine for a Linux distro to decide not to ship with (or include in repositories) tools that are mostly used for illegitimate ends, even if they have some theoretical legitimate uses. They're not under any obligation to package everything, and "stuff that's mostly used to do harm" is just as reasonable to filter out as "things with ugly licenses".
By analogy, it is usually hard to get lockpicking tools, assault weapons/vehicles, nuclear materials, radar detectors, unsafe foods, homemade alcohols, and many other things in most countries. Can you manage it? Usually, either by legitimate means if you can get a permit, or by making them yourself.
This is entirely different (and much more mild) than blacklisting those applications.
By enforcing international standards and locking people up who break them, we can stop the very process of their looking for places with the very least worker protections.
That's a false choice (between no work and low working standards). It's harmful competition that leads those areas that insist on reasonable standards to lose out to those that don't. Solid rules on an international scale prevent that.
I don't expect everyone to start everyone in the middle class. That doesn't even make sense - even in the western world we don't have complete egality. What we do have is labour standards, won through difficult struggles by labour movements. These are not prizes we can afford to hoard for ourselves - they are inefficiencies that we treasure because they're the right thing to do, and by pushing other nations to adopt similar measures we both prevent them from hurting us in competition and better the lot of people everywhere.
Screw those entepreneurs. The chance to use lower-cost workers may inspire them to hire people in poorer nations, but that should not be confused with allowing a race to the bottom when it comes to working standards. The whole world would be better off if rules like that were global. Let competition be over other things, with good standards for working conditions. Anyone, entepreneur or not, who runs a factory with inhumane working conditions belongs in jail.
Important nuances to each of your points:
1) Pirate isn't quite the right word. Some clones were more-or-less copies, others branched off further. Remember that it was the tension between the (still large) hobbyist/small business market and the giant (IBM) that made the PC revolution possible. Both sides brought technology.
2) Some of this wasn't MS's fault - CP/M's price was largely set by DR, and Xenix wasn't particularly cheap either.
3) Probably the most true, especially as DOS was a cheap clone of CP/M. However, MS did have some of its own expertise, initially in writing BASIC environments (big among hobbyists), and later on, Microsoft Research (the one broadly accepted "good part" of the evil empire) started a tradition of far-reaching research. MS products have not always (or even usually) been innovative, but there have been both good products (MS QuickC, for example) and good research projects from the company.
You're simply wrong. Brush up on your history, and look at the architectures of each. Don't expect slashdot to handhold you through your learning about these things though.
Why would you want to tie your hardware to a specific OS?
Rode the wave as in was hired by IBM because negotiations with Digital Research for a CP/M license (saying this as charitably as I can) went nowhere. Digital Research wasn't backstabbed - they were arrogant idiots who lost by purposefully pointing their nose at the ground and applying full thrust.
MS actually had a lot of competition, they just had three things that let them win:
1) They were good enough (not necessarily or often better)
2) They were very persistent
3) They had very good marketing/business-savvy
Your history is off too. The VMS roots are even on their face only very lightly there (no code, they just hired a kernel team composed significantly of ex-VMS kernelfolk and some aspects of the VMS design went in), the BSD roots are hardly there at all, and the OS/2 roots were predominant.
It ignored the positioning of Windows as a stepping stone to OS/2 as well as the timing and feature migration between them.
On another note entirely, it would've been interesting of DesQView or GEM had won the "Better DOS than DOS" game.
I don't have a theoretical objection to a "kill switch" that'd take the nation offline (to the extent that that's even feasable), but I'm not sure such a thing would be useful - the harm in taking our networks down would probably outweigh almost anything but complete loss of network functionality - the internet is almost as fundamental as roads for our society and economy.
I'm curious how community peer networking would change were the internet down for awhile.
I'm more excited by Firefox 4. I already have OpenOffice, and while GoogleDocs isn't opensource, it's not bad either and so far it's free.
Mozilla Labs makes some pretty neat things, and I'm quite happy with Firefox. It'd be a lot more "brilliant" if Stuart Turton would stop thinking that Firefox is an also-ran.
I can't blame distributions for not following the GNOME project in all their technical decisions - some parts of GNOME are (and continue to be) neat, but several, particularly those bits tied with Mono and other attempts to wear Microsoft's leash, are lousy (plus some bits duplicate functionality better done elsewhere, e.g. Empathy over Pidgin).
GNOME is still a pretty decent development environment, and there are a lot of nice applications that use the GNOME libraries. Still, there's no reason distros need the detault GNOME desktop to run them, and people/distros can be perfectly happy taking GNOME components and standards piecemail.
That may work, although paying simple restitution is not enough. We should rather have them pay a bit more than the inverse of the expected profit-including-risk to the owner of each bike they can be proven to have stolen, their name should be in a publicly accessible list of known stealers of bikes, *and* they should be forced to do community services.
I don't consider myself competent to judge what it would mean to harm a person, as I've never met people, just bunches of cells.
The ability to raise capital is the other major role of the stock system (although whether one considers that part of the "stock market" or not depends on definitions). They did develop in the context of bank and government interests - "just evolved" is oversimplistic. It doesn't matter whether the financiers care what's really going on - the academes generally have it right, as always.
Honest Livings are reasonably justifiable in terms of the public good. If one has to dance around considerably to even try to do that, or one cannot, one probably is not making an honest living.
These things are on a scale - there are things that are worse than living comfortably (or particularly well) without contributing meaningfully to society. I probably would not use the word "despicable" very readily for this, but I do think they deserve some scorn.
I'm not sure why you'd want me to define society for you - don't you live in one?