Silliness, political views, religous views, sexual orientation, or any number of things. I wrote essays in college about the death penalty, legalization of drugs, etc. I've searched for nekkid pictures online. Any or all of this could be used against me when applying for a job, a house loan, or so on. Should it?
Do you want to see people denied employment because they wrote an obnoxious athiest essay when they were 16? Should someone be considered a probable druggie if they wrote a Slashdot post advocating drug legalization? Should they be considered a subversive because they wrote a post saying people shouldn't be held without trial, or that torture is wrong? This isn't just about silliness or stupid stuff, though there is of course enough of that to go around.
Well, that is sort of unethical - of course, you are free to do as you will, but I'd just say that doing so with a clear conscience is usually a good idea.
I've been thinking of this whole "conscience" thing, as least as far as it relates to my job. My employer feels no compunction about using me up and will feel no compunction about throwing me away when I'm no longer profitable. Employers generally feel that their moral obligation is to their shareholders, not their employees.
Granted, they won't harvest your organs, but I've been cheated out of overtime pay, and no one looks to have lost sleep over having done it. They did what was profitable for the company, because that's where their loyalties lie. Well, my loyalties lie where? With me. My self-interest. My bottom line. My quality of life. Why would I, why should I, have a morality, a conscience, a system of ethics that puts me at such a stark disadvantage with my employer?
We're told that corporate managers not only can do the legal but ethically questionable, but they have a moral imperative to do as much as they legally can to maximize profit for the sharholders, even if some hippies may blanch at making money off of totalitarian regimes, human rights violators, and so on.
Well, the main shareholder in my life is me, and I think I'm justified in maximizing my investment of time, effort, education, frustration, and so on. It would be wrong to be less that zealous in looking out for my investments, and though I believe in the benefits of morality, human decency, and integrity, I feel justified in having at least as much flexibility as my employer does when defining those terms for operational use within the context of my working life.
...the project is expected to take about 10 years to complete...
What's the holdup? It only took Noah a few days to get them all on a boat, and we can't even make a list? This is really making us look bad, people. He even had to figure out care and feeding, but we can't even get a list of names together. Sheesh. We're really going downhill here.
Even if the F/OSS leaders were "bought," it wouldn't matter, because the software still exists, and can't be put back in the bottle. Linus, Stallman, etc could all have ephiphanies tomorrow and decide that F/OSS was immoral and fattening, and they still couldn't take GNU/Linux off the market. That's the thing I find fascinating about it. Someone creates a tool, like vi, and goes on with their life, but because it's not locked-down via copyright or whatever, someone else can come along and improve it, re-use it, repackage it as part of a distro, whatever. That's an advantage that commercial software can't match, even if they vast amounts of programming prowess at their disposal.
And there is a risk basing your IT department on it
There is risk in anything. Software routinely gets abandoned, or the vendor changes everything and you have no real choice but to spend more money, institute more change, to get their new offering. Didn't MS recently shift their entire Visual Basic language? Using closed-source software doesn't save you from risk, because vendors go to such great lengths to achieve lock-in via proprietary formats and so on. They still make new versions incompatible with the old, discontinue something you depended on and give you the "option" of upgrading to something you don't want, etc. You are, of course, free to go elsewhere, just as you are with OSS.
Accountability can be achieved many ways. No one said you have to rely on IRC and usenet for "community support" -- if you pay for support, and there are corporate options for it, you will get support, along with the magic toll-free number to call to find someone whose problem it now is that your network is acting weird.
I'm not a utopian idealist, but I do appreciate the worlview that allows OSS to survive and thrive. I'm not faulting business managers for not understanding it, only pointing out that they don't. But pointing out the real risks you take on by using OSS ignores that the same risks exist with purely commercial software. If you use F/OSS and you still want a particular problem fixed, you can pay someone to fix it. If you use commercial software and you want a particular problem fixed, you can pay someone to fix it--it may be the original vendor, or it may be someone else. In neither case are you prevented from paying for support.
The risks of F/OSS are real, but are shared by commercial software. The benefits of F/OSS are real, and are largely not shared by commercial software. Every day at work I have to contend with redundant, mind-numbing data entry into three databases, each of which was designed by the vendor to not speak to other databases, and I know damned good and well that they did it on purpose so my organization would have to "upgrade" by giving them more money, rather than having the option of accessing their data via other tools. Every day I spend hours re-entering data. I know that not all F/OSS offerings are fantastic, and that F/OSS isn't a panacea, but I know that if these databases were comprised of simple text files I, even with my mediocre tech skills, could use simple sed, awk, perl, or whatever to update this stuff with no problem. I'm stuck with this situation because someone chose locked-down commercial software. So maybe I'm a bit biased.
Another example is from when I worked in an emergency room and we bought a telephone recorder. I dropped the CD into the computer, and all the sound files were written in a proprietary format, and the software wouldn't install on the computer, so.... well, you get the idea. Closed-source, locked-down, proprietary, vendor lock-in, and so on. So I admit that, though I'm not utopian "OSS will save the world!" idealist, I am extremely biased in favor of open standards, interoperability, and so on.
It's not that the OSS model is "unsustainable," but that business managers just don't understand the mindsent behind, say, Debian. They don't understand how it can be that someone would write an app or maintain a distro because they find it enjoyable or gratifying, and so they don't find that model predictable, much less harnessable. And if they can't harness it, it must be suspect, inferior, useless, or about to die.
Businesspeople use greed to motivate--it works, is easily understood, easily harnessed, and reproducible on demand. Offer money, and people will show up to work. But since that's the only tool they have, it's the only one they trust.
It's also why so many businesspeople are instinctively against OSS. FreeBSD or whatever may be more stable and secure in the server room, but they aren't going to rely on something that is maintained by hippy visionary volunteers, even if what they're offering is more relaible than the product sold by the guy from MS or whoever. I really think that a considerable part of the resistance to OSS, whether it be GNU/Linux or OpenOffice or whatever, is on principle, not merit. Businesspeople don't understand or trust a product whose existence isn't dependent on someone's search for money.
That's easy. You can make a locked-down distro (or Windows install) with one browser, one editor (which saves in one format), one spreadsheet, and so on, with no configurability. But no one would want it. People don't want dumbed-down, locked-down computers, but all-powerful, do-anything computers with the simplicity of dumbed-down computers, but you can't have it both ways. Like it or not, the options, which people want, add complexity, which they're saying they don't want.
It's sort of like the convenience/security delimma MS faced--many of their technologies, and even their model for installing software, revolves around convenience, but at the cost of security. Having to deal with Unix file permissions and such adds complexity (what the hell is chmod +x and why the hell do I need to know it? oh yeah...) but it provides security that, say, Win98 completely lacked.
Computers aren't calculators. They aren't Palm Pilots. I'm not saying we should all tough it out and never make things easier. I prefer K3b over the command-line tools. I prefer guis and pointy-clicky activities over the command line about 70% of the time. But to use, say, Abiword, you are going to need to know about file types, the "save as" option, and so on. I can't find much sympathy for people who say "but that's too haaaaard!" This isn't hacking the kernel we're talking about.
You're probably right in that, however egalitarian it looked in the beginning, there would be last-minute exemptions for all the normal players. The idea of making everyone suffer equally (and thus nixing the proposal) is sound, but I confess I'm not optimistic about it being actually implemented. The sons of Senators don't get drafted, and Senators wouldn't lose their privacy. The same goes for CEOs and so on. I was just theorizing how we could slow down the encroachment, and I think that if the "we're all in the same boat" idea were implemented it would slow down the downward spiral because the people who run the show (loosely speaking) don't want to lose their own privacy.
It's different in that I know the village wouldn't be destroyed. To stretch your metaphor, right now we have the rich people saying "For the safety of the village we have to burn down all the poor people's houses." I'm saying we should push that to "No, it has to be all the houses," only because I know the rich would say, "Hmm, maybe this house-burning idea is premature. There must be another way to save the village." The rich have no intention of losing their privacy, just as they have no intention of their kids getting drafted and dying for a pointless war. If you push them into a corner where they have to suffer the same as the poor people, they'll decide that whatever it is they wanted wasn't so important after all. And since they effectively run the country, we get saner decisions.
But a bigger problem is anti-scientists who deliberately fail to differentiate between theory, hypothesis, and that first-step sense of wonder which is at the root of discovery
But if they stopped caricaturing science then it would be much harder to oppose what they've been opposing since the Enlightenment. They have to build a case, go on the offensive, and attack the scientific/methodologically materialistic way of looking at the world, which they can't credibly do if they don't "fail to differentiate between theory, hypothesis, and that first-step sense of wonder which is at the root of discovery".
They have to jumble it up so they can quote-mine any sentence made by any science-type person, at any time, on any subject, out of context to show their audience, "Look how silly scientists are! They think they're smarter than God!" They can't make a case without caricaturing science, because they have no case of their own, and science works so well (as they plainly see, looking around them). So they're stuck with misrepresentation--i.e. bearing false witness.
...is universality. Sort of the same reason some Democrats were pushing for a military draft without as many exemptions--if it applies to everyone, a lot fewer people are willing to go down that road. If everyone's information is available, with no exceptions for being a Senator or CEO of a fortune 500 company or a famous actor or famous conservative talk-show host, then enough important (i.e. rich) people will be opposed to scuttle it and inadvertently protect the privacy of us little people. But if your military record can magically become inaccessible, or the number of times you've been arrested for DUI can vanish, just because you're running for President, then we're screwed because the rest of us will still have no privacy. The only way to defeat the encroachment is to make the loss of privacy universal.
I do like KWord, but there is something elegant about the simplicity of Notepad or Leafpad. It does only one thing. I want KWord (and all the rest) available, but sometimes I think better when writing in a simple text editor. Vi in a transparent terminal, green on black, is nice to compose in, especially with syntax highlighting. GUI word processors are almost always black on white. But like I said, I want all of them to be available. I usually go crazy with apt-get and end up with Openoffice, Abiword, Scribus, KOffice, TexMacs, Kile, TeXmaker, Winefish, and who knows what else. Some people have a lot of cats; I have a lot of editors.
Notepad is great. I've written many papers with that great little program. Word proessors are distracting because they keep trying to "help" you, and MS Word in particular makes everything screwy. The quotation-marks-into-question-marks magic trick is especially nice. A co-worker and I were taking online courses together and I kept telling her to compose her posts and assignments in Notepad, not in the browser window. I saw her lose a 20 page paper she had written in an IE textbox. After that she asked "Where is Notepad again... under accessories, right?"
Strangely, Notepad is still my favorite editor. I've tried Edxor, Notetab, and I don't know how many other text editors, but when I'm on Windows that's the main one I use. The only one I've found on Linux that starts up (almost) as quickly is Leafpad. The only killer text-editor function I really lust after is column-selection, and I've only found that in a couple of (non-free) editors anyway. If someone could point me to a Linux editor with column selection I'd be thankful.
It's a personal preference. I don't do any high-level LaTeX but I prefer the text-only approach over the GUI. I have templates I can copy/paste, and I prefer that over configuring the document via menus and pointy-clicky stuff. I tend to forget where stuff is in a menu, but a text file of "put this in the header when you want block paragraphs separated by one line" or "put this in when you want a drop cap" is fairly idiot-proof. I don't KNOW LaTeX, but I can find solutions to copy/paste with modifications from comp.text.tex or wherever. Plain text rocks for formatting. Menus have to be remembered. Text can be mindlessly copied over and over with ctrl-c ctrl-v.
You might might want to look into LaTeX. There is a learning curve, but part of the reason I use it is because of the excessive "help" that word processors try to give me. Text editors are a bit less intrusive. Learning a markup language may seem daunting, but for basic paper writing it only takes a few hours of learning.
I had to write 170 pages of notes for an online course and using LaTeX (which I had only been dabbling with for a month or so) was much easier than Word would ever have been. I wrote the whole thing as an outline, and I can only imagine how crazy 170 pages of nested numbered lists would have driven me in MS Word or Openoffice. But \begin{enumerate}...\item{stuff}...\item{stuff}... \end{enumerate} is easy to keep track of visually, especially if you properly indent.
But if you're one of those people whose ground premise is "I will not learn a markup language" then continue enjoying the "help" that the GUI word processors give you. Some things are easier with a word processor (tables, for example) but for any complex or long document I'd prefer to use LaTeX.
I used to try to sell people on GNU/Linux, Openoffice, Abiword, et al, but now I just wait. Every release by Microsoft is worse than the last. More annoying, more confusing, less compatible, and so on. People are starting to switch not necessarily because the alternatives like OSS or OS X are better, but because Microsoft is worse. MS is doing the evangelizing for us.
That's why I like what I've read (His Master's Voice, Solaris) of Lem's work. He admits that what we encounter "out there" is likely to be largely incomprehensible, and surely won't be able to be just rephrased as another human story.
I wouldn't say it's designed to be sustainable. It's just a money-driven feeding-frenzy. Contractors are making millions because millions are being handed out with very little accountability, not because they have a sound business model that will help the Iraqis in the long-term. It's like the dot.com bubble, but rather than gullible investment bankers it's being financed by "visionary" politicians (who think of themselves as statesmen) who think they can reshape the middle east on the taxpayer dime. War is always accompanied by people who are getting rich very quickly at someone else's expense.
There are 3 physics models (that I know of) currently in use. Quantum for the microscopic, relativity for the really large (planets etc) and old-fashioned Newtonian for everyday objects. They are each dependable within their realm, but all mutually exclusive in the big picture. Whoever manages to reconcile them will be very famous, possibly bigger than Einstein. On a side note, I wish I was smarter.
I think the problem is that quantum theory can only be understood mathematically. Putting it in normal words involves a lot of metaphor and necessarily imprecise descriptions. There is bound to be a loss of precision in any translation.
I refute you with a line from the movie Jesus Camp -- "Science doesn't prove anything, if you think about it!" So there, I've laid waste to your "science." Now, I'll go back to surfing the internet, enjoying my air conditioning, seeing through my eyeglasses, driving my car, bathing in clean water, taking medications when I get sick, and so on.
He didn't "redefine" sex. Getting a BJ is obviously sexual activity, but "having sex" is usually defined as intercourse. Me standing there while a woman kneels doesn't involve me doing anything, and if I didn't DO anything I think saying "no, I didn't have sex with her" would be, though a bit evasive, well short of redefining a word.
As opposed to the current President, who redefined torture, as in what was clearly torture before we were doing it no longer qualifies as torture by the US govt definition. So a Presidential example does exist, just not the one you used.
How many "plane landed safely" stories do you want to hear? I want to hear bad news, though not the type of bad news the news does focus on. The murders in Virginia were tragic, but ultimately that has about 1% as much relevance to my life as the Alberto Gonzales thing, or attempts to undermine habeus corpus, or warrantless wiretaps, or an open-ended war that just might be around long enough to suck my own kids into it.
I don't care about the "human interest" stories such as Anna's baby, and I don't care if I never hear anything about sainted Princess Di, but I want to hear a lot about government corruption, conflict of interests, encroachments on freedom, and so on.
How many basketball players or pianists does the world need? How many kinds of toothpaste? How many models of athletic shoe do we need, for the love of God? There isn't a central job giver-outer that tells people what to do with their time.
With something as interesting and configurable as GNU/Linux, many people are going to tinker and come to the conclusion that the distros out there don't meet their needs, and some of them are going to develop distros that DO meet their needs, and share them. Some of these will be one-man shops, and some will have large communities form around them. People do what they find interesting and rewarding in some way. Why should that be different than all the rest of human existence?
He entered the house? Man, that's burglary! Oh wait, he didn't. And if you're broadcasting to all and sundry, it's public, even if you don't want it to be. You can fire up your CB or HAM radio and everyone with a receiver can hear you, and the fact that you thought you were having a private conversation only makes you incompetent. This guy shouldn't have been convicted.
The person running the wireless connection was broadcasting an unencrypted connection, and the RF waves failed to stop at the walls of his domicile. If you leave your porchlight on, you don't send someone to jail for standing on the street and reading a newspaper by the light you're sending out.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want to see people denied employment because they wrote an obnoxious athiest essay when they were 16? Should someone be considered a probable druggie if they wrote a Slashdot post advocating drug legalization? Should they be considered a subversive because they wrote a post saying people shouldn't be held without trial, or that torture is wrong? This isn't just about silliness or stupid stuff, though there is of course enough of that to go around.
Granted, they won't harvest your organs, but I've been cheated out of overtime pay, and no one looks to have lost sleep over having done it. They did what was profitable for the company, because that's where their loyalties lie. Well, my loyalties lie where? With me. My self-interest. My bottom line. My quality of life. Why would I, why should I, have a morality, a conscience, a system of ethics that puts me at such a stark disadvantage with my employer?
We're told that corporate managers not only can do the legal but ethically questionable, but they have a moral imperative to do as much as they legally can to maximize profit for the sharholders, even if some hippies may blanch at making money off of totalitarian regimes, human rights violators, and so on.
Well, the main shareholder in my life is me, and I think I'm justified in maximizing my investment of time, effort, education, frustration, and so on. It would be wrong to be less that zealous in looking out for my investments, and though I believe in the benefits of morality, human decency, and integrity, I feel justified in having at least as much flexibility as my employer does when defining those terms for operational use within the context of my working life.
Even if the F/OSS leaders were "bought," it wouldn't matter, because the software still exists, and can't be put back in the bottle. Linus, Stallman, etc could all have ephiphanies tomorrow and decide that F/OSS was immoral and fattening, and they still couldn't take GNU/Linux off the market. That's the thing I find fascinating about it. Someone creates a tool, like vi, and goes on with their life, but because it's not locked-down via copyright or whatever, someone else can come along and improve it, re-use it, repackage it as part of a distro, whatever. That's an advantage that commercial software can't match, even if they vast amounts of programming prowess at their disposal.
Accountability can be achieved many ways. No one said you have to rely on IRC and usenet for "community support" -- if you pay for support, and there are corporate options for it, you will get support, along with the magic toll-free number to call to find someone whose problem it now is that your network is acting weird.
I'm not a utopian idealist, but I do appreciate the worlview that allows OSS to survive and thrive. I'm not faulting business managers for not understanding it, only pointing out that they don't. But pointing out the real risks you take on by using OSS ignores that the same risks exist with purely commercial software. If you use F/OSS and you still want a particular problem fixed, you can pay someone to fix it. If you use commercial software and you want a particular problem fixed, you can pay someone to fix it--it may be the original vendor, or it may be someone else. In neither case are you prevented from paying for support.
The risks of F/OSS are real, but are shared by commercial software. The benefits of F/OSS are real, and are largely not shared by commercial software. Every day at work I have to contend with redundant, mind-numbing data entry into three databases, each of which was designed by the vendor to not speak to other databases, and I know damned good and well that they did it on purpose so my organization would have to "upgrade" by giving them more money, rather than having the option of accessing their data via other tools. Every day I spend hours re-entering data. I know that not all F/OSS offerings are fantastic, and that F/OSS isn't a panacea, but I know that if these databases were comprised of simple text files I, even with my mediocre tech skills, could use simple sed, awk, perl, or whatever to update this stuff with no problem. I'm stuck with this situation because someone chose locked-down commercial software. So maybe I'm a bit biased.
Another example is from when I worked in an emergency room and we bought a telephone recorder. I dropped the CD into the computer, and all the sound files were written in a proprietary format, and the software wouldn't install on the computer, so.... well, you get the idea. Closed-source, locked-down, proprietary, vendor lock-in, and so on. So I admit that, though I'm not utopian "OSS will save the world!" idealist, I am extremely biased in favor of open standards, interoperability, and so on.
Businesspeople use greed to motivate--it works, is easily understood, easily harnessed, and reproducible on demand. Offer money, and people will show up to work. But since that's the only tool they have, it's the only one they trust.
It's also why so many businesspeople are instinctively against OSS. FreeBSD or whatever may be more stable and secure in the server room, but they aren't going to rely on something that is maintained by hippy visionary volunteers, even if what they're offering is more relaible than the product sold by the guy from MS or whoever. I really think that a considerable part of the resistance to OSS, whether it be GNU/Linux or OpenOffice or whatever, is on principle, not merit. Businesspeople don't understand or trust a product whose existence isn't dependent on someone's search for money.
It's sort of like the convenience/security delimma MS faced--many of their technologies, and even their model for installing software, revolves around convenience, but at the cost of security. Having to deal with Unix file permissions and such adds complexity (what the hell is chmod +x and why the hell do I need to know it? oh yeah...) but it provides security that, say, Win98 completely lacked.
Computers aren't calculators. They aren't Palm Pilots. I'm not saying we should all tough it out and never make things easier. I prefer K3b over the command-line tools. I prefer guis and pointy-clicky activities over the command line about 70% of the time. But to use, say, Abiword, you are going to need to know about file types, the "save as" option, and so on. I can't find much sympathy for people who say "but that's too haaaaard!" This isn't hacking the kernel we're talking about.
You're probably right in that, however egalitarian it looked in the beginning, there would be last-minute exemptions for all the normal players. The idea of making everyone suffer equally (and thus nixing the proposal) is sound, but I confess I'm not optimistic about it being actually implemented. The sons of Senators don't get drafted, and Senators wouldn't lose their privacy. The same goes for CEOs and so on. I was just theorizing how we could slow down the encroachment, and I think that if the "we're all in the same boat" idea were implemented it would slow down the downward spiral because the people who run the show (loosely speaking) don't want to lose their own privacy.
It's different in that I know the village wouldn't be destroyed. To stretch your metaphor, right now we have the rich people saying "For the safety of the village we have to burn down all the poor people's houses." I'm saying we should push that to "No, it has to be all the houses," only because I know the rich would say, "Hmm, maybe this house-burning idea is premature. There must be another way to save the village." The rich have no intention of losing their privacy, just as they have no intention of their kids getting drafted and dying for a pointless war. If you push them into a corner where they have to suffer the same as the poor people, they'll decide that whatever it is they wanted wasn't so important after all. And since they effectively run the country, we get saner decisions.
They have to jumble it up so they can quote-mine any sentence made by any science-type person, at any time, on any subject, out of context to show their audience, "Look how silly scientists are! They think they're smarter than God!" They can't make a case without caricaturing science, because they have no case of their own, and science works so well (as they plainly see, looking around them). So they're stuck with misrepresentation--i.e. bearing false witness.
...is universality. Sort of the same reason some Democrats were pushing for a military draft without as many exemptions--if it applies to everyone, a lot fewer people are willing to go down that road. If everyone's information is available, with no exceptions for being a Senator or CEO of a fortune 500 company or a famous actor or famous conservative talk-show host, then enough important (i.e. rich) people will be opposed to scuttle it and inadvertently protect the privacy of us little people. But if your military record can magically become inaccessible, or the number of times you've been arrested for DUI can vanish, just because you're running for President, then we're screwed because the rest of us will still have no privacy. The only way to defeat the encroachment is to make the loss of privacy universal.
I do like KWord, but there is something elegant about the simplicity of Notepad or Leafpad. It does only one thing. I want KWord (and all the rest) available, but sometimes I think better when writing in a simple text editor. Vi in a transparent terminal, green on black, is nice to compose in, especially with syntax highlighting. GUI word processors are almost always black on white. But like I said, I want all of them to be available. I usually go crazy with apt-get and end up with Openoffice, Abiword, Scribus, KOffice, TexMacs, Kile, TeXmaker, Winefish, and who knows what else. Some people have a lot of cats; I have a lot of editors.
Strangely, Notepad is still my favorite editor. I've tried Edxor, Notetab, and I don't know how many other text editors, but when I'm on Windows that's the main one I use. The only one I've found on Linux that starts up (almost) as quickly is Leafpad. The only killer text-editor function I really lust after is column-selection, and I've only found that in a couple of (non-free) editors anyway. If someone could point me to a Linux editor with column selection I'd be thankful.
It's a personal preference. I don't do any high-level LaTeX but I prefer the text-only approach over the GUI. I have templates I can copy/paste, and I prefer that over configuring the document via menus and pointy-clicky stuff. I tend to forget where stuff is in a menu, but a text file of "put this in the header when you want block paragraphs separated by one line" or "put this in when you want a drop cap" is fairly idiot-proof. I don't KNOW LaTeX, but I can find solutions to copy/paste with modifications from comp.text.tex or wherever. Plain text rocks for formatting. Menus have to be remembered. Text can be mindlessly copied over and over with ctrl-c ctrl-v.
I had to write 170 pages of notes for an online course and using LaTeX (which I had only been dabbling with for a month or so) was much easier than Word would ever have been. I wrote the whole thing as an outline, and I can only imagine how crazy 170 pages of nested numbered lists would have driven me in MS Word or Openoffice. But \begin{enumerate}...\item{stuff}...\item{stuff}... \end{enumerate} is easy to keep track of visually, especially if you properly indent.
But if you're one of those people whose ground premise is "I will not learn a markup language" then continue enjoying the "help" that the GUI word processors give you. Some things are easier with a word processor (tables, for example) but for any complex or long document I'd prefer to use LaTeX.
I used to try to sell people on GNU/Linux, Openoffice, Abiword, et al, but now I just wait. Every release by Microsoft is worse than the last. More annoying, more confusing, less compatible, and so on. People are starting to switch not necessarily because the alternatives like OSS or OS X are better, but because Microsoft is worse. MS is doing the evangelizing for us.
That's why I like what I've read (His Master's Voice, Solaris) of Lem's work. He admits that what we encounter "out there" is likely to be largely incomprehensible, and surely won't be able to be just rephrased as another human story.
I wouldn't say it's designed to be sustainable. It's just a money-driven feeding-frenzy. Contractors are making millions because millions are being handed out with very little accountability, not because they have a sound business model that will help the Iraqis in the long-term. It's like the dot.com bubble, but rather than gullible investment bankers it's being financed by "visionary" politicians (who think of themselves as statesmen) who think they can reshape the middle east on the taxpayer dime. War is always accompanied by people who are getting rich very quickly at someone else's expense.
There are 3 physics models (that I know of) currently in use. Quantum for the microscopic, relativity for the really large (planets etc) and old-fashioned Newtonian for everyday objects. They are each dependable within their realm, but all mutually exclusive in the big picture. Whoever manages to reconcile them will be very famous, possibly bigger than Einstein. On a side note, I wish I was smarter.
I think the problem is that quantum theory can only be understood mathematically. Putting it in normal words involves a lot of metaphor and necessarily imprecise descriptions. There is bound to be a loss of precision in any translation.
I refute you with a line from the movie Jesus Camp -- "Science doesn't prove anything, if you think about it!" So there, I've laid waste to your "science." Now, I'll go back to surfing the internet, enjoying my air conditioning, seeing through my eyeglasses, driving my car, bathing in clean water, taking medications when I get sick, and so on.
As opposed to the current President, who redefined torture, as in what was clearly torture before we were doing it no longer qualifies as torture by the US govt definition. So a Presidential example does exist, just not the one you used.
I don't care about the "human interest" stories such as Anna's baby, and I don't care if I never hear anything about sainted Princess Di, but I want to hear a lot about government corruption, conflict of interests, encroachments on freedom, and so on.
With something as interesting and configurable as GNU/Linux, many people are going to tinker and come to the conclusion that the distros out there don't meet their needs, and some of them are going to develop distros that DO meet their needs, and share them. Some of these will be one-man shops, and some will have large communities form around them. People do what they find interesting and rewarding in some way. Why should that be different than all the rest of human existence?
The person running the wireless connection was broadcasting an unencrypted connection, and the RF waves failed to stop at the walls of his domicile. If you leave your porchlight on, you don't send someone to jail for standing on the street and reading a newspaper by the light you're sending out.