And MY point is that there are exponentially more Windows users than Linux users, and exponentially more Linux users then all of those other OS's you listed combined. With that miniscule userbase you must again divide by about 7/8 to get the number of actual developers. People who actually will be writing code to maintain and develop Gnome and KDE. The whole situation would end up like the BeOS did. The community vowed to fight on and take the BeOS open source and despite an enthsuiastic start more and more people over time lost the motivation for the sadomasochistic usage of an out of date OS when there are modern and maintained OSs available (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).
Considering Sun has just spend half of their cash on a very risky bet you can't even count on Sun's contribution forever. At some point Sun may go under. If Linux were already gone what then?
The debate isn't whether "free software" should be financed by the government but whether "software" at all should be financed by the government. Seeing as how there are already companies with proven for profit business models that WORK, (Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle) my answer would be no.
Who are you kidding? How many people do you think would continue using Gnome or KDE if Linux were to dissapear overnight? The order of magnitude less amount of BSD users? And considering that developers are always a fraction of any userbase, how long until Gnome and KDE would fall into total disrepair?
Financing is not theft. All killing is not murder. Its really that simple. If you kill to protect, then its not just alright but a very good thing. When the US Government kills people in other nations, its usually to protect Americans. Any logical person would understand that this is perfectly moral.
The national debt is even simpler to understand. Money lent to foreigners and to our own citizens. How can money taken out on loan be immoral? You are using the size of the debt as some form of scandal where there is non of the sort you claim.
There are shades of gray. I am not saying the US Government is without corruption. What I am saying is that the government of Brazil is overwhelmingly more corrupt than that of the United States. To suggest otherwise is to simply lie. People are starving in Brazil. There's widespread lack of jobs and education. Those conditions are rife for endemic corruption. Comparing that to "conflicts of interest" in the US government displays your own lack of maturity.
You basically believe that the existence of violence itself is bad. Therefore if the US government does anything violent that must be bad. Its why you post that America has bombed 24 countries since World War II. You provide absolutely no context whatsoever along with that information. You are relying on the shock value alone to force people to come to improper conclusions.
I am fully aware that the administration lied about its reasons for war. While that act of dishonesty was unwise and poorly carried out, I do not object to the war. The war with Iraq is about much more than Iraq itself. Its about reshaping the Middle East to become more democratic. Since a democratic Middle East would be a good thing for the rest of the world and make the rest of the world and thus Americans safer, I'm all for it.
1. I'm sure I'm not the only person interested in reading your article. Any reason why you couldn't have translated it into English for us?
2. So you honestly see no difference whatsoever in the corruption levels in Brazil contrasted to that of the United States?
Edit:
Ok so I threw your article into Babel fish and was able to read it and it is as I feared. You are confusing actual corruption with your own political opinions. Bush being elected to office does not make the US corrupt no matter how much you dislike the guy. Your article really goes all over the place. One minute you are talking about the percentage of citizens the US has incarcerated to Guantanamo Bay and then the number of people the US has killed sicne World War I. There's no cohesion whatsoever.
I am really really really disapointed in this. I was looking forward to a real, thoughtful discussion on foreign rates of corruption vs our own but instead you use the topic as an opportunity to lambaste everything you think is wrong with US Policy. How on earth you can equate deaths in war to corruption I have no idea. I suppose we should have just let the Germans take over the world in WWI or WWII. The high percentage of incarcerated citizens also has nothing to do with corruption. We're just tougher on drug crimes then other countries are.
Do you even know what REAL corruption means? It means having to pay off a local official in order to get them to do something they already should be doing as per their government salary, or paying them off to break the rules. It can also mean local crime/drug lords having such sway that they are able to get the police to look the other way while they go about their illegal business. The topic does not cover nor is it appropriate to be used as a broad attack on that nation's entire federal policy.
We don't have corporate socialism. What we have is as much of a free market that a society can bear, the rest is made up with limited socialist programs. You can't allow an airline to go down in flames. Too many people work at one. The effect on the economy would be politically unacceptable.
Actually yes you can. The numbers are a central point to abstaining since so very few people are capable of living their lives without sex. Keeping in mind that many people who claim to be chaste are simply lying, the small number of people who manage to make it to marriage without any sexual encounters are not just ineffectual they're also not normal.
So why advocate a type of behavior that most people cannot adhere to considering the stakes which are disease? Its much more logical to give people who are sexually active the information and tools they need to protect themselves then to expect them to live up to some ridiculous conflicted fundamentalist standard of sexuality.
Belief has very little to do with fact. Belief is best kept in the realm of religon. You can believe you can life Mt. Everest with one arm but all the believing in the world isn't going to make it true. The potential of everyone's brain/mind is in fact limited. There's nothing wrong with admitting that. The pursuit of knowledge, the hallmark of intelligence, requires that dogmatic positions be abandonded. Your position that any human and not just a limited subset of humans is capable of great feats of genius level intelligence is flawed. Genes play an overwhelming role not just where a person begins in intelligence, but in what their capability is to achieve.
Believing that it is some how self defeating or demeaning to entertain the concept that every human has varying levles of cognitive potential is akin to claiming that the theory of evolution is demeaning to the human condition by reducing what for thousands of years was thought to be a glorious heavenly created Garden of Eden Creation story to a process of one celled organisms slowly evolving into multi-trillion celled organisms billions of years.
You are only half right. Some folks have a greater genetic potential for just about anything, and no amount of hard work by others will ever over come that. People born short for example have a tough time playing basketball. Some folks are born with more fast twitch or slow twitch muscle fibers giving them an advantage in certain sports. The same carries for intelligence.
Don't tell me you've never seen someone who regularly goes to the gym yet their body remains flabby. I have. I've also seen people who look like they go to the gym 5 times a week even though they hardly work out at all. Thats genetics. No amount of hard work can overcome that.
Also considering the societal and financial advantages of having and using a lot of intelligence if it was a simple matter of just putting the effort in, then just about everyone who goes to college/university would have a genius level IQ of some sort and most would be multi-millionaires.
Apple didn't abandon the PPC. The PPC manufacturers abandoned Apple. Apple was FORCED to do this.
A product shouldn't just exist to exist, either it has value or it doesn't. PPC on the desktop, doesn't. AMD and Intel provide value on the desktop and they care about the market and thats why those two are advancing. IBM couldn't care less.
You know if all you really cared about was the CPU then you could be running Linux on your Mac right now. Why aren't you? The OS is so much more important than whatever CPU it is.
You are actually a moron. Microsoft does not have enough money to do any one of the things you stated individually let alone all together. First of all there is already enough food on this planet. Its a matter of distribution. Devising cures for diseases requires hundreds of billions of dollars, something MS doesn't have.
Lets just admit that we're not all that good at economics and thats why we're not all rich.;-)
Business acumen thats sorely lacking in the free loading, give me everything for free no matter what it costs you to provide it to me, open source world?
Nerds don't seem to realize...
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: -1, Troll
What geeks don't seem to realize is that most people look at a computer as a machine. And machines are supposed to make work easier. Proprietary software with many features makes work easier. Open source software, free as it may be, often doesn't have the features or ease of use that regular folks are looking for. They also don't get how some nerds equate software licenses with freedom fights for civil rights.
Folks just want the best products. If they're photographers they're going to prefer Photoshop to the GIMP. If they're authors they're going to prefer Microsoft Word to Open Office Write. If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux.
One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is that somehow a core of very intelligent people have somehow convinced themselves that acutally LOWERING their productivity by using incredibly arcane and user unfriendly applications is in some way a GOOD thing and are simultaneously confused and bewildered that the other 99% of humanity disagrees.
To paraphrase Han Solo: "The people aren't in this for your revolution, princess."
Their freedom of expression isn't the issue. Its the sensibility of it. If Netscape pulls the financial plug then it will be a loss for the Mozilla Foundation, not a win.
I went to your website and read some of your stuff. You state that Europeans have higher standards of living than Americans. While I would debate that, how do you excuse the higher unemployment rates they have in comparison to us? Also how do you fight the brain drain that Europe suffers from its smartest and most successful leaving Europe to go to lower tax regions? What solution would you have for the lack of European motivation to achieve great things due to so much being provided for one by the state?
The European Union has shown time and time again that it is unwilling to match the US in military might or spending no matter how much the US pisses the EU off. So I think you are being overly optimistic about Europe. China on the other hand absolutely wants to become a military power but it takes more than willpower to do it. It takes experience, skill and a somewhat free culture that can tell you when you are funding absolutely idiotic and ineffective things....and China doesn't have that yet.
Slashdot Mirror
And MY point is that there are exponentially more Windows users than Linux users, and exponentially more Linux users then all of those other OS's you listed combined. With that miniscule userbase you must again divide by about 7/8 to get the number of actual developers. People who actually will be writing code to maintain and develop Gnome and KDE. The whole situation would end up like the BeOS did. The community vowed to fight on and take the BeOS open source and despite an enthsuiastic start more and more people over time lost the motivation for the sadomasochistic usage of an out of date OS when there are modern and maintained OSs available (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).
Considering Sun has just spend half of their cash on a very risky bet you can't even count on Sun's contribution forever. At some point Sun may go under. If Linux were already gone what then?
Do you see all issues in terms of black and white? This is just software you know, not a civil rights issue.
The debate isn't whether "free software" should be financed by the government but whether "software" at all should be financed by the government. Seeing as how there are already companies with proven for profit business models that WORK, (Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle) my answer would be no.
Who are you kidding? How many people do you think would continue using Gnome or KDE if Linux were to dissapear overnight? The order of magnitude less amount of BSD users? And considering that developers are always a fraction of any userbase, how long until Gnome and KDE would fall into total disrepair?
Financing is not theft. All killing is not murder. Its really that simple. If you kill to protect, then its not just alright but a very good thing. When the US Government kills people in other nations, its usually to protect Americans. Any logical person would understand that this is perfectly moral.
The national debt is even simpler to understand. Money lent to foreigners and to our own citizens. How can money taken out on loan be immoral? You are using the size of the debt as some form of scandal where there is non of the sort you claim.
There are shades of gray. I am not saying the US Government is without corruption. What I am saying is that the government of Brazil is overwhelmingly more corrupt than that of the United States. To suggest otherwise is to simply lie. People are starving in Brazil. There's widespread lack of jobs and education. Those conditions are rife for endemic corruption. Comparing that to "conflicts of interest" in the US government displays your own lack of maturity.
You basically believe that the existence of violence itself is bad. Therefore if the US government does anything violent that must be bad. Its why you post that America has bombed 24 countries since World War II. You provide absolutely no context whatsoever along with that information. You are relying on the shock value alone to force people to come to improper conclusions.
I am fully aware that the administration lied about its reasons for war. While that act of dishonesty was unwise and poorly carried out, I do not object to the war. The war with Iraq is about much more than Iraq itself. Its about reshaping the Middle East to become more democratic. Since a democratic Middle East would be a good thing for the rest of the world and make the rest of the world and thus Americans safer, I'm all for it.
1. I'm sure I'm not the only person interested in reading your article. Any reason why you couldn't have translated it into English for us?
2. So you honestly see no difference whatsoever in the corruption levels in Brazil contrasted to that of the United States?
Edit:
Ok so I threw your article into Babel fish and was able to read it and it is as I feared. You are confusing actual corruption with your own political opinions. Bush being elected to office does not make the US corrupt no matter how much you dislike the guy. Your article really goes all over the place. One minute you are talking about the percentage of citizens the US has incarcerated to Guantanamo Bay and then the number of people the US has killed sicne World War I. There's no cohesion whatsoever.
I am really really really disapointed in this. I was looking forward to a real, thoughtful discussion on foreign rates of corruption vs our own but instead you use the topic as an opportunity to lambaste everything you think is wrong with US Policy. How on earth you can equate deaths in war to corruption I have no idea. I suppose we should have just let the Germans take over the world in WWI or WWII. The high percentage of incarcerated citizens also has nothing to do with corruption. We're just tougher on drug crimes then other countries are.
Do you even know what REAL corruption means? It means having to pay off a local official in order to get them to do something they already should be doing as per their government salary, or paying them off to break the rules. It can also mean local crime/drug lords having such sway that they are able to get the police to look the other way while they go about their illegal business. The topic does not cover nor is it appropriate to be used as a broad attack on that nation's entire federal policy.
We don't have corporate socialism. What we have is as much of a free market that a society can bear, the rest is made up with limited socialist programs. You can't allow an airline to go down in flames. Too many people work at one. The effect on the economy would be politically unacceptable.
Actually yes you can. The numbers are a central point to abstaining since so very few people are capable of living their lives without sex. Keeping in mind that many people who claim to be chaste are simply lying, the small number of people who manage to make it to marriage without any sexual encounters are not just ineffectual they're also not normal.
So why advocate a type of behavior that most people cannot adhere to considering the stakes which are disease? Its much more logical to give people who are sexually active the information and tools they need to protect themselves then to expect them to live up to some ridiculous conflicted fundamentalist standard of sexuality.
I'd much rather have pornographers in the world than fundies like you.
How do you define awful and useless?
Belief has very little to do with fact. Belief is best kept in the realm of religon. You can believe you can life Mt. Everest with one arm but all the believing in the world isn't going to make it true. The potential of everyone's brain/mind is in fact limited. There's nothing wrong with admitting that. The pursuit of knowledge, the hallmark of intelligence, requires that dogmatic positions be abandonded. Your position that any human and not just a limited subset of humans is capable of great feats of genius level intelligence is flawed. Genes play an overwhelming role not just where a person begins in intelligence, but in what their capability is to achieve.
0 8/0110241&tid=191&tid=14
I hope you did not miss this story yesterday on Slashdot about the European Jews and their increased genetic potential for greater intelligence: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
Believing that it is some how self defeating or demeaning to entertain the concept that every human has varying levles of cognitive potential is akin to claiming that the theory of evolution is demeaning to the human condition by reducing what for thousands of years was thought to be a glorious heavenly created Garden of Eden Creation story to a process of one celled organisms slowly evolving into multi-trillion celled organisms billions of years.
You are only half right. Some folks have a greater genetic potential for just about anything, and no amount of hard work by others will ever over come that. People born short for example have a tough time playing basketball. Some folks are born with more fast twitch or slow twitch muscle fibers giving them an advantage in certain sports. The same carries for intelligence.
Don't tell me you've never seen someone who regularly goes to the gym yet their body remains flabby. I have. I've also seen people who look like they go to the gym 5 times a week even though they hardly work out at all. Thats genetics. No amount of hard work can overcome that.
Also considering the societal and financial advantages of having and using a lot of intelligence if it was a simple matter of just putting the effort in, then just about everyone who goes to college/university would have a genius level IQ of some sort and most would be multi-millionaires.
Apple didn't abandon the PPC. The PPC manufacturers abandoned Apple. Apple was FORCED to do this.
A product shouldn't just exist to exist, either it has value or it doesn't. PPC on the desktop, doesn't. AMD and Intel provide value on the desktop and they care about the market and thats why those two are advancing. IBM couldn't care less.
You know if all you really cared about was the CPU then you could be running Linux on your Mac right now. Why aren't you? The OS is so much more important than whatever CPU it is.
You are actually a moron. Microsoft does not have enough money to do any one of the things you stated individually let alone all together. First of all there is already enough food on this planet. Its a matter of distribution. Devising cures for diseases requires hundreds of billions of dollars, something MS doesn't have.
;-)
Lets just admit that we're not all that good at economics and thats why we're not all rich.
Business acumen thats sorely lacking in the free loading, give me everything for free no matter what it costs you to provide it to me, open source world?
What geeks don't seem to realize is that most people look at a computer as a machine. And machines are supposed to make work easier. Proprietary software with many features makes work easier. Open source software, free as it may be, often doesn't have the features or ease of use that regular folks are looking for. They also don't get how some nerds equate software licenses with freedom fights for civil rights.
Folks just want the best products. If they're photographers they're going to prefer Photoshop to the GIMP. If they're authors they're going to prefer Microsoft Word to Open Office Write. If you play video games you are going to want Microsoft Windows and not GNU/Linux.
One of the most amazing things about the Free Software movement is that somehow a core of very intelligent people have somehow convinced themselves that acutally LOWERING their productivity by using incredibly arcane and user unfriendly applications is in some way a GOOD thing and are simultaneously confused and bewildered that the other 99% of humanity disagrees.
To paraphrase Han Solo: "The people aren't in this for your revolution, princess."
Hey guess what? Europeans watch a lot of TV as well. Humans are fundamentally the same all around the world.
Their freedom of expression isn't the issue. Its the sensibility of it. If Netscape pulls the financial plug then it will be a loss for the Mozilla Foundation, not a win.
And the ones who are able to perform on demand become alphas expressly because of that ability.
Don't bitch about cheap fucks when the very license of the software encourages mass raping on a financial and IP scale.
I went to your website and read some of your stuff. You state that Europeans have higher standards of living than Americans. While I would debate that, how do you excuse the higher unemployment rates they have in comparison to us? Also how do you fight the brain drain that Europe suffers from its smartest and most successful leaving Europe to go to lower tax regions? What solution would you have for the lack of European motivation to achieve great things due to so much being provided for one by the state?
The European Union has shown time and time again that it is unwilling to match the US in military might or spending no matter how much the US pisses the EU off. So I think you are being overly optimistic about Europe. China on the other hand absolutely wants to become a military power but it takes more than willpower to do it. It takes experience, skill and a somewhat free culture that can tell you when you are funding absolutely idiotic and ineffective things....and China doesn't have that yet.
You can upgrade both the CPUs, video cards, RAM and HD's in Dell's latest lineup of laptops (the XPS2 and i9300) so what are you talking about?
Yet he's earning more money and fucking women more beautiful than any university graduate ever will.