The health-care portion is probably less on average than what the average insured American pays for the same. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have really nice insurance in the US might be better off - it's depends on specifics (I happen to work for a University in an area that has a health insurance plan/medical network run by a local university-spawned medical organisation that's considered one of the best in the country for service/cost - I am very happy with my private insurance and healthcare. Most people and places are not nearly that fortunate).
Socialised medicine, as a general rule, is right for society, even if the wealthy and/or fortunate have something better.
Regardless of whether the articles about it were built on fabricated quites or not (and if they are, it is a pity), given what I have seen of Japanese phones and conversations I've had, it is true that mid-to-high-end Japanese phones have a much richer feature set than the iPhone (even if their interface is not as nice). Is the iPhone hated? I doubt it - it's overpriced for the pricerange it's in, but it does have a very nice interface (and Apple has pushed the envelope enough here that other phone vendors are going to pay more attention towards their interfaces as well). It can't compete well with mid/high-end Japanese phones on features though.
Unwanted to whom? Not all geeks care that much about privacy. There may be a loud portion that's always talking about PGP and privacy plugins for pidgin, including a (much smaller) contingent that hides away from cameras in real life and tries to obscure their features there. There's also a fair set of just-as-clued-and-geeky folk who are resigned to privacy being not worth the pain, as well as those who value radical openness and push for far less privacy than tradition has given humanity in the past.
It wasn't that bad...
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
Back then we still had a functional usenet, people generally used IRC a lot more, altavista was one one of the most popular search engines, anon.penet.fi was still up, and the personal webpage was a lot more important than today.
We may overall be better off today, but where we were had its own charms, some of which are now lost.
He started some pretty successful projects (even if some of the most notable examples are no longer directly maintained by the FSF), and provided the world a license that's at least one player in keeping computing open (for one definition of open, anyhow). I'm not sure how you're judging "radical" or "no idea how the real world works", but the products of his approach suggest he's successful by at least some measures.
Likewise, some people might consider Jordan Hubbard or Theo de Raadt to be radical geeks who don't understand how the real world works, but when we look at what they've produced, it suggests that by at least some measures they're successful (while OpenBSD and OpenSSH are my particular favourites for the high-visibility things, the code audits done by the OpenBSD folks are probably more important over the long run when they end up making their way back upstream into the large number of separate high-visibility projects).
I'm not saying you don't care about the public good. I was commenting on Linus, not you (I would not have mentioned theo if I thought the BSD license was a bad one - theo is obviously looking at "big picture" issues, and has a clear position, while linus's position is at best muddled and not a major concern in what he does).
For what it's worth, I'm not particularly a booster of the GPL or the BSD license. I like aspects of both of them, but tend to release my code into the public domain instead.
I don't think the use of the word "gift" implies that at all. It's more of a reference to the idea of a "gift economy".
On the dual-licensing, that's not really about the GPL versus other licenses so much as it is purely about how copyright works. The forms of the BSD license that required attribution had this characteristic as well, which were also (maybe a bit more loosely) an example of unequal rights. Dual-licensing also has social costs - it creates a tension between external contributors and the primary developer. If the primary developer wants to accept external patches, they either need to mandate copyright assignation or give up on the ability to dual-license, and it's quite doable for the community to establish their own repository and do a source-fork if the author requires assignation.
I don't think this is necessarily linux PR, although it is written from the perspective of the OSI folk (distinct from the FSF perspective, which would've written this article rather differently, and also distinct from the BSD-license folk). You can't really expect articles to be written from "no" perspective, can you?
Linus is unfortunately one of the typically "can't we all just get along" geeks - he doesn't seem to care for the social good so much as being able to continue to work on his projects. Such people are certainly useful - "not seeing the big picture" isn't a barrier to being an effective technical leader (and by pretending such problems/disagreements don't exist or minimising them, they better enable people with substantive differences in the area to work together).
For people who do care about the public good, the best thing to do is to look for other people for inspiration on matters of licenses and large-scale strategy (like rms, BPerens, esr, theo, or one of several others, depending on one's particular inclinations). There's a lot of positions one might take on these matters, most of them better than playing ostrich..
More like killed the Roman Empire and held society back until the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment finally pried society from their control.
Fortunately, the modern Catholic church is nowhere near as regressive as it once was (they're kind of the middle of the road when it comes to Christianity, nowadays), but it was never something to be proud of.
Actually, those two journals are print journals I normally pick up in a bookstore. As for online sources, I'm not aware of any academic journals that are freely available online (unfortunately). For free online stuff, reading a nice variety of newspaper-like sites is probably as good as one can get. A few worth reading:
In all the years I've used, administered, and helped people using Linux, from the clueless to fellow systems geeks, I've never met an Evolution user. I think it's part of GNOME largely for political reasons (before starting to make lousy stuff like Mono and gconf, Miguel made a few nice programs like gnumeric).
In case the tone of my post was not clear, I believe it's very important that things like this be published - we should have as much government transparency as we can (I would far rather have a transparent liberal autocracy than a secretive representative liberal democracy).
Even from the perspective of a socialist who wants a large government that does a lot of things, McCain is admirable for trimming things that were actually wasteful. I don't particularly like the McCain that I saw in the election (Palin terrified me, and the xenophobic crowds he was forced to play to worry me), and still think Obama's a bit better on issues I care about, but I think McCain would've made a good president and hope he stays in politics (even as he's a bit old to run for the presidency again). I hope the future of the Republican party looks a lot more like John McCain and less like Rumsfeld, Ron Paul, or Sarah Palin (even as they represent different factions of the party).
There's also the issue that nobody agrees on what's interesting or bad. Because Americans don't talk much about politics in public, we have these little isolated communities that believe that "if only everyone else knew what I knew they'd come over to my side" ranging the spectrum from libertarians to socialists (and also including smaller-issue matters). To some people, the notion of banks using a fractional reserve is part of a huge conspiracy, and to most people reading a fairly standard academic world affairs journal would blow open their perspective on how the world works (if they could manage to sink their teeth into it and understand the implications).
As a people, we very well may be held away from knowledge by conspiracies we can't see, but we're certainly held away from knowledge by not reading things that are perfectly available to us, published in the clear (Middle East Journal and Far Eastern Affairs are examples of good current events journals that would be great for people to read and discuss if they want to understand the world).
For the.01% of the people who would actually read stuff like this, this is fantastic. It's important that the public has access to this, and a shame that no suitable politician has decided to request all the reports and publish the whole lot (is there any reason this is not the case? Contact your representatives!).
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at, and it'd already be a fulltime job to even try to read everything in a field.
I can't think of circumstances where "imbecile" would be appropriate - in psychology the term used to have a defined meaning, but that's long past.
"crackpot", like "charlatan", would most likely only be useful when criticising (peer review or combating something that manages to get published somewhere it shouldn't) fringe science that's done in a way that suggests that the practitioner is not knowledgable/committed to the practice of scientific standards of inquiry or is being blatantly dishonest (respectively). Crackpot would likely be more out-of-place in a paper (although more because peer review and academic practice ideally filters out papers where it would apply, and papers only rarely comment on or build on research that is not peer reviewed). I would not be at all surprised to see papers that refute parts of Steven Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" to use the word crackpot, it being the rare work that's managed to achieve prominence in intellectual circles while avoiding peer review and being bad science.
"Charlatan" and "crackpot" certainly would not be thrown around as much in a paper as they would be in a debate - papers are expected to be data-driven, with the conclusion (and possibly abstract) being the most likely places these would show up. It is possible to use these terms in ways that would not be inappropriate in a paper though - academic papers are not sterile.
This isn't moral judgement. It's a normal conclusion based on their research. Things like this happen all the time in science - it would not be at all out of place in the conclusions part of their paper.
I think you've got me all wrong - it was presumably someone else who talked about Egypt and WW3. I don't think Egypt is likely to start WW3, even were the Muslim Brotherhood to take power there. I feel that if they were in power they would institute Sharia law, resulting in a much worse government than Mubarak's rule, as well as one which is much more difficult to depart from. I'm not sure what they'd do regarding Israel, and it's possible that that would lead to regional conflict, but that's not something I've speculated about much - the more direct concern for me is the extension of strict Sharia and theocratic politics over more people.
On Israel, no, I don't advocate divestment from it - it's up there with Syria as being the most politically advanced semitic state, and while Israeli society and government have a number of ugly racist and theocratic things, the alternatives are worse. Progress is most often made by choosing the best of feasable options. I think Israel should be pressured to reform, marginalising Shas, UTJ, and similar parties and ending the Law of Return.
I suspect you should track down whomever actually fits your criticism here and present it to them.
Personal autonomy has never been the only value of a society. All the structures of society compete with each other, and personal autonomy, at least in practice, has never been the only factor considered. If you believe that a good society places personal autonomy as it's prime virtue, and never considers other values that would conflict with it, you can. I think such a society would be anarcho-primitivist in nature (or possibly anarcho-capitalist if you allow the structures needed for capitalist economics to take place). In my judgement, when you're making Libertarians look moderate, you're arguing for very scary things.
In my political world-outlook, our notion of the public good is composed of a lot of separate ideas/values, all of which comprimise with each other, and personal autonomy is just a member of the gang.
There is a lot of nuance on this matter that would lead to a very long conversation if we were to explore it in-depth. It should suffice to say that I believe the disintegrating Ottoman empire did intentionally practice genocide on the Armenians. That was tragic (and fortunately, many Armenians survived, although many did die). I don't believe Kemal Ataturk was involved nor was he complicit in it. It's possible I'm wrong - if you'd like to point me at some research linking him to it, I'll read up on the matter.
I agree with your first claim. I don't agree with the second, and believe that in fact many (practically all) reasonable societies you might point out have *some* degree of qualifications for office, restraints on democracy, and limits on speech. I also claim that some societies are in a state where they have a political system that is better than that that we would see from them were they more democratic, and that some political leaders who have pushed very hard in nondemocratic ways have well served their people by doing so (Kemal Ataturk being a good example, Tito another).
I would hope that people like you keep their eye out for the emergence of actual bad government, either from the masses or imposed from above. I don't think that going against raw democratic will is in itself definitionally tyranny. If I see something on the horizon that looks like tyranny to me, and you recognise it as tyranny as well, trust that I would be doing my best, like you, to avert its rise. I just don't agree with you on this rule of thumb that electoral eligibility and/or restrictions on speech are part of a likely path to tyranny.
Slashdot Mirror
If the way that they restrict the number of doctors is to exclude the unqualified, it's probably a good thing. :)
The health-care portion is probably less on average than what the average insured American pays for the same. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have really nice insurance in the US might be better off - it's depends on specifics (I happen to work for a University in an area that has a health insurance plan/medical network run by a local university-spawned medical organisation that's considered one of the best in the country for service/cost - I am very happy with my private insurance and healthcare. Most people and places are not nearly that fortunate).
Socialised medicine, as a general rule, is right for society, even if the wealthy and/or fortunate have something better.
Ron Paul? Is that you? :)
Regardless of whether the articles about it were built on fabricated quites or not (and if they are, it is a pity), given what I have seen of Japanese phones and conversations I've had, it is true that mid-to-high-end Japanese phones have a much richer feature set than the iPhone (even if their interface is not as nice). Is the iPhone hated? I doubt it - it's overpriced for the pricerange it's in, but it does have a very nice interface (and Apple has pushed the envelope enough here that other phone vendors are going to pay more attention towards their interfaces as well). It can't compete well with mid/high-end Japanese phones on features though.
Unwanted to whom? Not all geeks care that much about privacy. There may be a loud portion that's always talking about PGP and privacy plugins for pidgin, including a (much smaller) contingent that hides away from cameras in real life and tries to obscure their features there. There's also a fair set of just-as-clued-and-geeky folk who are resigned to privacy being not worth the pain, as well as those who value radical openness and push for far less privacy than tradition has given humanity in the past.
Back then we still had a functional usenet, people generally used IRC a lot more, altavista was one one of the most popular search engines, anon.penet.fi was still up, and the personal webpage was a lot more important than today.
We may overall be better off today, but where we were had its own charms, some of which are now lost.
He started some pretty successful projects (even if some of the most notable examples are no longer directly maintained by the FSF), and provided the world a license that's at least one player in keeping computing open (for one definition of open, anyhow). I'm not sure how you're judging "radical" or "no idea how the real world works", but the products of his approach suggest he's successful by at least some measures.
Likewise, some people might consider Jordan Hubbard or Theo de Raadt to be radical geeks who don't understand how the real world works, but when we look at what they've produced, it suggests that by at least some measures they're successful (while OpenBSD and OpenSSH are my particular favourites for the high-visibility things, the code audits done by the OpenBSD folks are probably more important over the long run when they end up making their way back upstream into the large number of separate high-visibility projects).
I'm not saying you don't care about the public good. I was commenting on Linus, not you (I would not have mentioned theo if I thought the BSD license was a bad one - theo is obviously looking at "big picture" issues, and has a clear position, while linus's position is at best muddled and not a major concern in what he does).
For what it's worth, I'm not particularly a booster of the GPL or the BSD license. I like aspects of both of them, but tend to release my code into the public domain instead.
Exactly! The point of my post was to suggest that geeks need to be jerks! I'm glad you got it perfectly right :)
I don't think the use of the word "gift" implies that at all. It's more of a reference to the idea of a "gift economy".
On the dual-licensing, that's not really about the GPL versus other licenses so much as it is purely about how copyright works. The forms of the BSD license that required attribution had this characteristic as well, which were also (maybe a bit more loosely) an example of unequal rights. Dual-licensing also has social costs - it creates a tension between external contributors and the primary developer. If the primary developer wants to accept external patches, they either need to mandate copyright assignation or give up on the ability to dual-license, and it's quite doable for the community to establish their own repository and do a source-fork if the author requires assignation.
I don't think this is necessarily linux PR, although it is written from the perspective of the OSI folk (distinct from the FSF perspective, which would've written this article rather differently, and also distinct from the BSD-license folk). You can't really expect articles to be written from "no" perspective, can you?
Linus is unfortunately one of the typically "can't we all just get along" geeks - he doesn't seem to care for the social good so much as being able to continue to work on his projects. Such people are certainly useful - "not seeing the big picture" isn't a barrier to being an effective technical leader (and by pretending such problems/disagreements don't exist or minimising them, they better enable people with substantive differences in the area to work together).
For people who do care about the public good, the best thing to do is to look for other people for inspiration on matters of licenses and large-scale strategy (like rms, BPerens, esr, theo, or one of several others, depending on one's particular inclinations). There's a lot of positions one might take on these matters, most of them better than playing ostrich..
More like killed the Roman Empire and held society back until the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment finally pried society from their control.
Fortunately, the modern Catholic church is nowhere near as regressive as it once was (they're kind of the middle of the road when it comes to Christianity, nowadays), but it was never something to be proud of.
Actually, those two journals are print journals I normally pick up in a bookstore. As for online sources, I'm not aware of any academic journals that are freely available online (unfortunately). For free online stuff, reading a nice variety of newspaper-like sites is probably as good as one can get. A few worth reading:
Science:
Eurekalert, Scientific Blogging, National Academies
Politics/Current events:
Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, PressTV, YNet, UN News Service, People's Daily
All this plus heavy use of Google News with custom sections, of course.
None of this is as good as the journals, but it's more current.
In all the years I've used, administered, and helped people using Linux, from the clueless to fellow systems geeks, I've never met an Evolution user. I think it's part of GNOME largely for political reasons (before starting to make lousy stuff like Mono and gconf, Miguel made a few nice programs like gnumeric).
In case the tone of my post was not clear, I believe it's very important that things like this be published - we should have as much government transparency as we can (I would far rather have a transparent liberal autocracy than a secretive representative liberal democracy).
Even from the perspective of a socialist who wants a large government that does a lot of things, McCain is admirable for trimming things that were actually wasteful. I don't particularly like the McCain that I saw in the election (Palin terrified me, and the xenophobic crowds he was forced to play to worry me), and still think Obama's a bit better on issues I care about, but I think McCain would've made a good president and hope he stays in politics (even as he's a bit old to run for the presidency again). I hope the future of the Republican party looks a lot more like John McCain and less like Rumsfeld, Ron Paul, or Sarah Palin (even as they represent different factions of the party).
There's also the issue that nobody agrees on what's interesting or bad. Because Americans don't talk much about politics in public, we have these little isolated communities that believe that "if only everyone else knew what I knew they'd come over to my side" ranging the spectrum from libertarians to socialists (and also including smaller-issue matters). To some people, the notion of banks using a fractional reserve is part of a huge conspiracy, and to most people reading a fairly standard academic world affairs journal would blow open their perspective on how the world works (if they could manage to sink their teeth into it and understand the implications).
As a people, we very well may be held away from knowledge by conspiracies we can't see, but we're certainly held away from knowledge by not reading things that are perfectly available to us, published in the clear (Middle East Journal and Far Eastern Affairs are examples of good current events journals that would be great for people to read and discuss if they want to understand the world).
Certainly true. Occasionally I see references in journals to things like this - the more sources we can get like that, the better.
For the .01% of the people who would actually read stuff like this, this is fantastic. It's important that the public has access to this, and a shame that no suitable politician has decided to request all the reports and publish the whole lot (is there any reason this is not the case? Contact your representatives!).
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at, and it'd already be a fulltime job to even try to read everything in a field.
I can't think of circumstances where "imbecile" would be appropriate - in psychology the term used to have a defined meaning, but that's long past.
"crackpot", like "charlatan", would most likely only be useful when criticising (peer review or combating something that manages to get published somewhere it shouldn't) fringe science that's done in a way that suggests that the practitioner is not knowledgable/committed to the practice of scientific standards of inquiry or is being blatantly dishonest (respectively). Crackpot would likely be more out-of-place in a paper (although more because peer review and academic practice ideally filters out papers where it would apply, and papers only rarely comment on or build on research that is not peer reviewed). I would not be at all surprised to see papers that refute parts of Steven Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" to use the word crackpot, it being the rare work that's managed to achieve prominence in intellectual circles while avoiding peer review and being bad science.
"Charlatan" and "crackpot" certainly would not be thrown around as much in a paper as they would be in a debate - papers are expected to be data-driven, with the conclusion (and possibly abstract) being the most likely places these would show up. It is possible to use these terms in ways that would not be inappropriate in a paper though - academic papers are not sterile.
This isn't moral judgement. It's a normal conclusion based on their research. Things like this happen all the time in science - it would not be at all out of place in the conclusions part of their paper.
I think you've got me all wrong - it was presumably someone else who talked about Egypt and WW3. I don't think Egypt is likely to start WW3, even were the Muslim Brotherhood to take power there. I feel that if they were in power they would institute Sharia law, resulting in a much worse government than Mubarak's rule, as well as one which is much more difficult to depart from. I'm not sure what they'd do regarding Israel, and it's possible that that would lead to regional conflict, but that's not something I've speculated about much - the more direct concern for me is the extension of strict Sharia and theocratic politics over more people.
On Israel, no, I don't advocate divestment from it - it's up there with Syria as being the most politically advanced semitic state, and while Israeli society and government have a number of ugly racist and theocratic things, the alternatives are worse. Progress is most often made by choosing the best of feasable options. I think Israel should be pressured to reform, marginalising Shas, UTJ, and similar parties and ending the Law of Return.
I suspect you should track down whomever actually fits your criticism here and present it to them.
Personal autonomy has never been the only value of a society. All the structures of society compete with each other, and personal autonomy, at least in practice, has never been the only factor considered. If you believe that a good society places personal autonomy as it's prime virtue, and never considers other values that would conflict with it, you can. I think such a society would be anarcho-primitivist in nature (or possibly anarcho-capitalist if you allow the structures needed for capitalist economics to take place). In my judgement, when you're making Libertarians look moderate, you're arguing for very scary things.
In my political world-outlook, our notion of the public good is composed of a lot of separate ideas/values, all of which comprimise with each other, and personal autonomy is just a member of the gang.
There is a lot of nuance on this matter that would lead to a very long conversation if we were to explore it in-depth. It should suffice to say that I believe the disintegrating Ottoman empire did intentionally practice genocide on the Armenians. That was tragic (and fortunately, many Armenians survived, although many did die). I don't believe Kemal Ataturk was involved nor was he complicit in it. It's possible I'm wrong - if you'd like to point me at some research linking him to it, I'll read up on the matter.
I agree with your first claim. I don't agree with the second, and believe that in fact many (practically all) reasonable societies you might point out have *some* degree of qualifications for office, restraints on democracy, and limits on speech. I also claim that some societies are in a state where they have a political system that is better than that that we would see from them were they more democratic, and that some political leaders who have pushed very hard in nondemocratic ways have well served their people by doing so (Kemal Ataturk being a good example, Tito another).
I would hope that people like you keep their eye out for the emergence of actual bad government, either from the masses or imposed from above. I don't think that going against raw democratic will is in itself definitionally tyranny. If I see something on the horizon that looks like tyranny to me, and you recognise it as tyranny as well, trust that I would be doing my best, like you, to avert its rise. I just don't agree with you on this rule of thumb that electoral eligibility and/or restrictions on speech are part of a likely path to tyranny.