You can't control ephemeral things, like code, songs, culture, or ideas. We ignore your claims to own them, and will continue to work to remove the regime of punishment for sharing.
Or we could go with a different notion of freedom, where sharing is natural, and licenses are trying to force people to do unnatural things.
I live in that different notion, as do many others. From here, it looks like proprietors of information are those who are trying to restrict our freedom. We'd love to knock over the IP protection racket, making license terms meaningless and freely ignored, and many of us freely ignore them and encourage others to do so in our personal lives. The GPL is another tactic we pursue at the same time, hopefully to deflate the commercial software market enough that there will be less funding of politicians contrary to the freedoms we'd like to get by peeling away those bad laws.
What gives you the right to restrict my use of my computer that way?
The phrasing of rights is kind of a muddled way to think about these things, as in any discussion, someone could shape one of their interests into the phrasing of a "right", and then assert that right.
It is not content free. It points out that CodePlex does not particularly care about freedom, is designed to whitewash a bad company's trojan horse technology, and is harmful to the open-source community.
Are there personal attacks? Only if you consider an attack on your life's work personal. Some time back (around when we first met at an O'Reilly Convention), you used to be involved in the production of software (like Gnumeric) that was unambiguously good for the community. Ever since you got into Microsoft's Java clone and its reimplementation, your actions have been not-so-clearly-good for the community - you encourage us to adopt patent-risky technologies that break greatly with Unix tradition, you strongarm the GNOME folk into adopting lousy technical decisions (we have a binary registry now? Oy) and continue to push them to making mono a required component of GNOME, and you keep telling us to cozy up with a company that has done its very best to undermine Linux, undermine Free Software, and drop legal and technical obstacles in our way. You want us to be technically just like them, and you want us to like them.
I don't see any criticism of you in your personal life - these are not personal criticisms, they are criticisms of the way you act in the community. You may have once done good for us, but you're certainly harmful now. For many of us, the best and most clear choice is to continue to try to avoid catching Mono, advocating its removal from our preferred distros and from GNOME, ideally removing you from any influence over GNOME as well. If you would simply go away, you would spare us the trouble.
That's a fair thing to want. Be sure it's fair to ask that of them knowing that there are a lot of people who are a lot less reasonable than you - the example of approaching their car is a great example, because a number of people have attacked police that way. To protect their safety, you are generally expected to act in a way that can't be threatening.
You will never be two students working on the same project - the police have a lot more legal knowledge and they have the task of bringing people into compliance with the law. There are times when they will need to talk to people to figure things out, but their relationship to someone who may have done something illegal or may possibly do something illegal cannot be that of an equal.
Most of the police I've met actually are respectful in most circumstances. There are a few bad eggs in any police department, but I've generally seen more people disrespecting the police than vice versa.
I think a lot of it is people resent the notion that their are limits to their ability to do whatever they want, no matter how stupid what they want or reasonable the restraints might be, and they react to police like an angry child.
To whatever extent you're serious about the mutuality, I likely would agree with you.
The police should be liable too. I don't think tazers are appropriate weapons given the number of people with heart conditions who could easily be killed by them.
I happen to have a heart problem that would mean that my chances of surviving being tazed are much lower than being hit with a police baton. I'd rather take my chances on the latter.
New Legislation yields Legislation is never a solution to anything. It is a terrible idea and I reject it. yields response This legislation is entirely benign yields Well, legislature is inherently malign, so... this is really just legislation designed to undo other legislation which distorted the free market and is inherently good.
I generally don't like the inclination to scream about privacy at the drop of a pin, but collection of GPS records do make me rather uncomfortable and I don't think it should be done.
I don't think the private sector should do this either except possibly in the broadest sense (e.g. it is ok for them to monitor if you're leaving the state because it might impact their insurance, the probability you're stealing the vehicle, etc, but not ok if they're trying to collect detailed information on where you go).
And if you buy land, you can pour toxins into it so long as your destruction stays local or your neighbours don't mind?
Society depends on people being reasonable - wasting resources on a shitty car that takes an inordinate amount of nonrenewable resources to keep it going is a lousy use of those resources. SUVs should be banned.
We have one habitable planet, and we only have so many resources to spend on each person. The "I've earned the right to be an asshole" way of living needs to be stopped.
Bullshit. "Terrorist" groups do not do what they do just for laughs. They have a reason.
I've participated in various direct action groups, years ago - they're full of devoted, caring people. Not all of them are as clued as they should be, but they're not people who just like blowing things up.
Have your facts straight. If you target the wrong people, or if your science is bad, you're sacrificing credibility and making people angry for no good reason.
They won't turn homeschooled people away, and there still is generally a problem with how to measure their accomplishments. Most universities will accept them if they seem suitable, but saying that they're preferred or judged the same as A-students from public schools is simply and laughably wrong.
It is possible to do better than public schools, and in rare circumstances, home schooling might manage to do so. Most of the time that is not the case, and the universities know it - they'll let them apply so they can try to catch the kids that actually belong in university, but that's it.
Apart from the rare exception, most of the time homeschooling is a disservice to the kids, and is often done because one or both of the parents are religious fanatics.
No, they don't. With the possible exception of sham universities (unaccredited christian universities that are deathly afraid of proper education), no university seeks out homeschooled kids.
What happens when our court and legal systems are not reasonable? We suffer a bit, and try to fix them. This is no different. We probably want to have this mostly handled by the judiciary so as to have less dependence on those seeking reelection. Our legal system already has the power to regulate behaviour and decide what's dangerous or reasonable - this is little different.
Sometimes fear is reasonable.
Groups that are harmful enough to society, I think, merit the muzzle. You may march right alongside them in Europe as they strive to ignite racial tensions, fabricate a history with no Holocaust, and encourage people to ban Gypsies from being allowed in stores. You might march with the most radical of Muslims who admire the Taliban and want to bring that style of government to Europe and the Americas, who brag of forcing women back behind the veil, etc. Not everyone would. I think taking free speech as an absolute is irresponsible and despicable. I suspect you think that not doing so is overcontrolling and dangerous.
When I entered this discussion, I knew that we would not convince each other, but I believe it is productive not to allow the dominant American political ideas to go unchallenged. The best way to do that, I think, is to turn any objectionable and extreme ideas typical in American discourse into a discussion so people see that not everyone is behind it - people will conclude that reasonable folk can disagree.
I hold that free speech, like many other "rights", makes an excellent default, and that both current law and what I'd like the law to be should do a lot of soul-searching and take a lot of care in its departures from it in areas where appropriate. The law already does this with free speech ("clear and present danger", speech as action, etc).
Most of our legal framework comes from British common law.
As I noted, not everyone has such an extreme view of freedom of expression. There are plenty of people, particularly non-Americans, who are happy with a more moderate stance. Perhaps you can't condone it, but you're not the only person in the world. I'm not suggesting stifling the politically correct, but I suggest that stifling some of the dangerous is ok. Like having laws and police at all, abuse is possible, but the costs of doing nothing can in some cases be quite high. I am not interested in silencing "just anybody" or in fact many groups. In most European countries, the moderate limits to freedom of expression are sensible and work well. It is fair to have discussions over these limits, and they do.
Scientology as an organisation has broad patterns of abuse of its members, former members, and critics. As with Christian Scientists, they also deny the reality of some kinds of illness, promoting abusive denial of medical treatment for both consenting adult members and nonconsenting child members. Their abuse of the legal system and use of spies to infiltrate governments that have investigated these things threaten society. All three of these are serious matters - while they're not quite the same kind of threat as the neo-fascist movements in Europe, they are broadly harmful to society and this has led to a lot of legal troubles for them in Europe.
Who gets to decide what our laws are in general? Are you against the law if you do X? Y? Z? Building foundations of law is a difficult task, but in the end we managed - "who is to say" is not really much of an argument. The danger that it would banish speech that is politically unpopular is a better point - it is a dangerous tool to have, and it does make me a bit nervous to suggest we weaken our existing strong tradition against its broad use, although the cost of not doing so could be quite harmful. Like the basic costs of having laws and courts (what if we make a mistake?), it is a muddy water into which we must tread gingerly.
And yes, to a certain extent we do need to be protected from them, not like a bunch of children, but rather like a bunch of humans. We have seen times in history when people have been captivated by the ideas of these groups. Would you deny history?
No, I'm not proposing a magic number system:) Apart from Scientologists, I would not muzzle any of those groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like I was wrong about some of this, although...
Wasn't gconf1 binary? I thought it used BDB as its backend.
You can't control ephemeral things, like code, songs, culture, or ideas. We ignore your claims to own them, and will continue to work to remove the regime of punishment for sharing.
Or we could go with a different notion of freedom, where sharing is natural, and licenses are trying to force people to do unnatural things.
I live in that different notion, as do many others. From here, it looks like proprietors of information are those who are trying to restrict our freedom. We'd love to knock over the IP protection racket, making license terms meaningless and freely ignored, and many of us freely ignore them and encourage others to do so in our personal lives. The GPL is another tactic we pursue at the same time, hopefully to deflate the commercial software market enough that there will be less funding of politicians contrary to the freedoms we'd like to get by peeling away those bad laws.
What gives you the right to restrict my use of my computer that way?
The phrasing of rights is kind of a muddled way to think about these things, as in any discussion, someone could shape one of their interests into the phrasing of a "right", and then assert that right.
Punishment? No. But we will not honour the restrictions you claim or would enforce on us, and not honour you for trying to restrict us.
Like IBM was with every piece of software that ran on the IBM PC and its later clones?
No. This is a difficult thing to judge, and the benefits of an open platform are worth the risk.
I don't understand what you're saying - can you rephrase?
It is not content free. It points out that CodePlex does not particularly care about freedom, is designed to whitewash a bad company's trojan horse technology, and is harmful to the open-source community.
Are there personal attacks? Only if you consider an attack on your life's work personal. Some time back (around when we first met at an O'Reilly Convention), you used to be involved in the production of software (like Gnumeric) that was unambiguously good for the community. Ever since you got into Microsoft's Java clone and its reimplementation, your actions have been not-so-clearly-good for the community - you encourage us to adopt patent-risky technologies that break greatly with Unix tradition, you strongarm the GNOME folk into adopting lousy technical decisions (we have a binary registry now? Oy) and continue to push them to making mono a required component of GNOME, and you keep telling us to cozy up with a company that has done its very best to undermine Linux, undermine Free Software, and drop legal and technical obstacles in our way. You want us to be technically just like them, and you want us to like them.
I don't see any criticism of you in your personal life - these are not personal criticisms, they are criticisms of the way you act in the community. You may have once done good for us, but you're certainly harmful now. For many of us, the best and most clear choice is to continue to try to avoid catching Mono, advocating its removal from our preferred distros and from GNOME, ideally removing you from any influence over GNOME as well. If you would simply go away, you would spare us the trouble.
That's a fair thing to want. Be sure it's fair to ask that of them knowing that there are a lot of people who are a lot less reasonable than you - the example of approaching their car is a great example, because a number of people have attacked police that way. To protect their safety, you are generally expected to act in a way that can't be threatening.
You will never be two students working on the same project - the police have a lot more legal knowledge and they have the task of bringing people into compliance with the law. There are times when they will need to talk to people to figure things out, but their relationship to someone who may have done something illegal or may possibly do something illegal cannot be that of an equal.
Most of the police I've met actually are respectful in most circumstances. There are a few bad eggs in any police department, but I've generally seen more people disrespecting the police than vice versa.
I think a lot of it is people resent the notion that their are limits to their ability to do whatever they want, no matter how stupid what they want or reasonable the restraints might be, and they react to police like an angry child.
To whatever extent you're serious about the mutuality, I likely would agree with you.
The police should be liable too. I don't think tazers are appropriate weapons given the number of people with heart conditions who could easily be killed by them.
I happen to have a heart problem that would mean that my chances of surviving being tazed are much lower than being hit with a police baton. I'd rather take my chances on the latter.
All it would take is some unlucky person with a pacemaker getting near your device and you're in for negligent homicide.
s/and is/which is/;
Awesome. We can make a flowchart.
New Legislation ... this is really just legislation designed to undo other legislation which distorted the free market and is inherently good.
yields
Legislation is never a solution to anything. It is a terrible idea and I reject it.
yields response
This legislation is entirely benign
yields
Well, legislature is inherently malign, so
I generally don't like the inclination to scream about privacy at the drop of a pin, but collection of GPS records do make me rather uncomfortable and I don't think it should be done.
I don't think the private sector should do this either except possibly in the broadest sense (e.g. it is ok for them to monitor if you're leaving the state because it might impact their insurance, the probability you're stealing the vehicle, etc, but not ok if they're trying to collect detailed information on where you go).
And if you buy land, you can pour toxins into it so long as your destruction stays local or your neighbours don't mind?
Society depends on people being reasonable - wasting resources on a shitty car that takes an inordinate amount of nonrenewable resources to keep it going is a lousy use of those resources. SUVs should be banned.
We have one habitable planet, and we only have so many resources to spend on each person. The "I've earned the right to be an asshole" way of living needs to be stopped.
Bullshit.
"Terrorist" groups do not do what they do just for laughs. They have a reason.
I've participated in various direct action groups, years ago - they're full of devoted, caring people. Not all of them are as clued as they should be, but they're not people who just like blowing things up.
Number one rule for direct action:
Have your facts straight. If you target the wrong people, or if your science is bad, you're sacrificing credibility and making people angry for no good reason.
They won't turn homeschooled people away, and there still is generally a problem with how to measure their accomplishments. Most universities will accept them if they seem suitable, but saying that they're preferred or judged the same as A-students from public schools is simply and laughably wrong.
It is possible to do better than public schools, and in rare circumstances, home schooling might manage to do so. Most of the time that is not the case, and the universities know it - they'll let them apply so they can try to catch the kids that actually belong in university, but that's it.
Apart from the rare exception, most of the time homeschooling is a disservice to the kids, and is often done because one or both of the parents are religious fanatics.
No, they don't. With the possible exception of sham universities (unaccredited christian universities that are deathly afraid of proper education), no university seeks out homeschooled kids.
No they wern't! Were you not around during the early days of the web? Spend some time at the wayback machine.
They deserve no IP protection for this, and it is shameful that they sought it.
What happens when our court and legal systems are not reasonable? We suffer a bit, and try to fix them. This is no different. We probably want to have this mostly handled by the judiciary so as to have less dependence on those seeking reelection. Our legal system already has the power to regulate behaviour and decide what's dangerous or reasonable - this is little different.
Sometimes fear is reasonable.
Groups that are harmful enough to society, I think, merit the muzzle. You may march right alongside them in Europe as they strive to ignite racial tensions, fabricate a history with no Holocaust, and encourage people to ban Gypsies from being allowed in stores. You might march with the most radical of Muslims who admire the Taliban and want to bring that style of government to Europe and the Americas, who brag of forcing women back behind the veil, etc. Not everyone would. I think taking free speech as an absolute is irresponsible and despicable. I suspect you think that not doing so is overcontrolling and dangerous.
When I entered this discussion, I knew that we would not convince each other, but I believe it is productive not to allow the dominant American political ideas to go unchallenged. The best way to do that, I think, is to turn any objectionable and extreme ideas typical in American discourse into a discussion so people see that not everyone is behind it - people will conclude that reasonable folk can disagree.
I hold that free speech, like many other "rights", makes an excellent default, and that both current law and what I'd like the law to be should do a lot of soul-searching and take a lot of care in its departures from it in areas where appropriate. The law already does this with free speech ("clear and present danger", speech as action, etc).
Most of our legal framework comes from British common law.
As I noted, not everyone has such an extreme view of freedom of expression. There are plenty of people, particularly non-Americans, who are happy with a more moderate stance. Perhaps you can't condone it, but you're not the only person in the world. I'm not suggesting stifling the politically correct, but I suggest that stifling some of the dangerous is ok. Like having laws and police at all, abuse is possible, but the costs of doing nothing can in some cases be quite high. I am not interested in silencing "just anybody" or in fact many groups. In most European countries, the moderate limits to freedom of expression are sensible and work well. It is fair to have discussions over these limits, and they do.
Scientology as an organisation has broad patterns of abuse of its members, former members, and critics. As with Christian Scientists, they also deny the reality of some kinds of illness, promoting abusive denial of medical treatment for both consenting adult members and nonconsenting child members. Their abuse of the legal system and use of spies to infiltrate governments that have investigated these things threaten society. All three of these are serious matters - while they're not quite the same kind of threat as the neo-fascist movements in Europe, they are broadly harmful to society and this has led to a lot of legal troubles for them in Europe.
Who gets to decide what our laws are in general? Are you against the law if you do X? Y? Z? Building foundations of law is a difficult task, but in the end we managed - "who is to say" is not really much of an argument. The danger that it would banish speech that is politically unpopular is a better point - it is a dangerous tool to have, and it does make me a bit nervous to suggest we weaken our existing strong tradition against its broad use, although the cost of not doing so could be quite harmful. Like the basic costs of having laws and courts (what if we make a mistake?), it is a muddy water into which we must tread gingerly.
And yes, to a certain extent we do need to be protected from them, not like a bunch of children, but rather like a bunch of humans. We have seen times in history when people have been captivated by the ideas of these groups. Would you deny history?
No, I'm not proposing a magic number system :) Apart from Scientologists, I would not muzzle any of those groups.