Allchin is a lunatic. It doesn't take any intelligence or balls to rebut a lunatic. It takes no originalty to take something that no one agrees with, hold it up to scrutiny, and announce that you yourself also disagree with it. It's like ridiculing the mentally handicapped. It lacks all tact and propriety.
Stop giving Allchin his soapbox. Let Allchin's ludicrous statements fall on deaf ears. Everyone knows that Microsoft is dead in the water in three years, and everyone knows that Linux and the open-source movement will replace them. These things are beyond refutation, so stop pretending you're so innovative for pointing them out.
When a company like Microsoft makes such ridiculous comments, just ignore them. Let the press decide to report on them however they want; don't sully your own reputation by stooping to Allchin's level. The truth will out, as it has been shown throughout history. Passive resistance is a far more powerful tool than vocal outrage. Just ask Gandhi.
In short, this "rebuttal" was unnecessary. I hope it's the last of its kind we'll be subjected to.
In as much as corporations are "natural persons" under Federal law, Nike must be held to the same standards that other individuals are held to: Nike must receive the death penalty for its crimes against humanity.
Nike has engaged in countless acts of child labor abuse. They've not only failed to produce any benefits for the society that gave them corporate status; they've actively harmed that society. And other societies. It makes the US look like one evil corporate behemoth instead of the peaceful land of freedom our forefathers envisioned and drafted in our Constitution.
When individuals kill other individuals, they receive the death penalty. When corporations do the same, they get to keep teh proceeds and profits? Even serial-killers are denied that right under most state laws.
Anti-trust law is good and all, but it doesn't go far enough. Nike must receive the corporate death penalty (having its charter of incorporation burnt and its board members tried for criminal activities) not because they've harmed other corporations (as antitrust law concerns itself with) but because Nike has harmed actual living and breathing human beings.
Corporations like Nike have no place in any modern civil society. They are as good as dead.
Instead, the dissent suggests that the Congress -- or rather, many successive Congresses -- might in effect confer a perpetual copyright by stringing together an unlimited number of "limited Times," although that clearly is not the situation before us. The temporal thrust of the CTEA is a good deal more modest.
This is plainly illogical on its face. The argument is that many small acts will be strung together into one big result. The Court responds that the instant act is in fact a small act. The fact that the instant act is indeed a small act (and one of many such acts) is entirely consistent with the fear that many more small acts will arrive in the future as they have in the past.
Preserving access to works that would otherwise disappear -- not enter the public domain but disappear -- "promotes Progress" as surely as does stimulating the creation of new works.
Why will these disappear? Libraries won't burn down tomorrow if this act gets overturned. There are projects that exist for the sole purpose of preserving these works once they enter the public domain.
Massive copyright extensions don't infringe the first amendment, because copyright protects speech?
This is false, because the categorical response to speech has always been to have more speech, which copyright prevents. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court made copyrights categorically immune from First Amendment attacks in United Video, Inc. v. FCC. That's the precedent, and the DC panel has refused to undermine it.
Similarly, the "limited times" response by the Court is absurd:
Their idea is that the phrase
"limited Times" should be interpreted not literally but rather
as reaching only as far as is justified by the preambular
statement of purpose: If 50 years are enough to "promote
... Progress," then a grant of 70 years is unconstitutional.
The Court's response to this argument? A meager reference to precedent in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., controlling because of the Feist's court's failure even to account for the clause.
The principle of stare decisis is an important one in angloamerican law, but it's hardly an absolute rule. If precedents fail to allow for the manifestly correct verdict, then they should be overturned. It's that simple.
I take small consolation in the fact that this is merely a three-judge panel of the DC Court of Appeals and not the complete bench.
Do you want to give away your work for free? If not, don't create Open Source work. Simple.
But what about 'dumping'? Dumping (selling goods far below cost in order to put one's competitors out of business in the meantime) is illegal under US law. Isn't giving away your source code a similar attempt to drive closed-source businesses out of business?
And it is a fine document. I really mean that. The US constitution is a fine blueprint for how any fair demcracy should be styled.
Nonsense. The Constitution is a horrible blueprint for how any fair democracy should be styled. It leaves very few matters up to direct vote by the citizenry: originally, only representatives in the popular chamber of congress (the House of Representatives) were directly elected. Senators and Presidents were indirectly elected by other representatives (legislatures and electoral colleges, respectively), and judges/ambassadors/etc. were appointed outright. The Seventeenth Amendment extended popular elections to the Senate, but the amendment is unconstitutional on its face under Article V (which prohibits any amendment that would deny states their equal suffrage in the senate; under the 17th amendment, states are no longer represented at all -- only their citizens are).
Then there's the three-fifths compromise (counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of representation) and another obsolete Article V clause prohibiting the prohibition of slavery. And the whole Bill of Rights was tacked on after the fact as an afterthought and one that doesn't go far enough.
I don't suspect anyone in the USA walked up to the ballot box and put an X next to "more taxation".
Actually, we essentially did. The latter half of the 19th century saw the rise of the populists who championed a strong central government as the salvation of many social problems. We'd had federal income taxes of one sort or another off and on for half a century before they were struck down by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust as violative of the Article I mandates of appropriation of direct taxes amongst the states. It took another twenty five years, but the 17th amendment was eventually passed. Albeit, that was back when income taxes were reserved for only the extremely wealthy, and even they payed only on the order of 5%.
England is a democracy (forget the queen woman) and from experience of both systems (though less with the US) I'd say they were both pretty much neck and neck in the fairness/corruption stakes.
England is a parliamentary republic in the most obscene sense. For better or worse, you don't even pretend to have a written codified constitution constraining your parliament. Even the glorious Magna Carta was a mere act of positive law, reversable by a simple majority tomorrow.
As for what I stand for? Well, ruthless self examination and eternal vigilance.
The ssh mark is a significant asset of SSH Communications Security and the company strives to protect its valuable rights in the ssh name and mark.
This is true. Some might go so far as to say it's their only significant asset, but that's a different matter.
SSH Communications Security has made a substantial investment in time and money in its ssh mark, such that end users have come to recognize that the mark represents SSH Communications Security as the source of the high quality products offered under the mark.
Again, this is nothing controversial. SSH has held the mark since 1998, according to the USPTO documents on the site. They've invested money. No one doubts that.
This resulting goodwill is of vital importance to SSH Communications Security. It wants to make sure that you understand the importance of SSH's mark to it, and, by necessity, its need to protect its trademark against the unauthorized use by others.
Again, this is nothing controversial. Companies have to defend (or make the appearance of defending) their trademarks, lest they lose them. This is a mere legal formality.
This part, however, goes too far:
This is why we have contacted Corenic.net, your domain registration provider, to cancel all service on the "openssh.com" domain.
This is prior restraint and flies in the face of the first amendment. SSH Communications Security owns the trademark on "SSH" in the realm of client-server protocols, that does not give it the right to bully openssh about their domain name.
Take down the offending software, perhaps, but domain names aren't mere marks that distinguish products from each other. They're our very language itself. Owning a trademark in one realm of human communication doesn't give you the right to own it in all others.
It doesn't threaten the american way. After all, americans are becoming more and more service oriented each year. With manufacturing plants moving to other countries like Mexico.
Tell that to the families who staff those manufacturing plants. America was built on a bed of manufacturing -- it's what separated us from our mercantile past and it's what turned us into the economic powerhouse we are today. If we turn our backs on that heritage, then we will fail.
Please don't forget our free software fundamentals. Free software is not about price.
Let's not forget that you're describing your fundamentals, not any universal model of what free software ought to be. Richard M Stallman doesn't have any proprietary ownership over the term "free". It's a term that's existed since Old English (more than one and a half millennia). It has always referred to price. That's what it means. That's all.
That is, the American way as defined as the puruit of corporate greed. I'm an American, and it sickens me.
America didn't invent the corporation. But in the 19th century, America went further than any other country in perfecting this glorious instrument of money-extraction. Who else would have thought to give the status of natural personhood to corporations as our Supreme Court did? Who else would have turned the English language into the most imperial language on the earth today, not because of any military conquest (though the US does have plenty) but because of corporate conquest?
Open-source undermines all of that. Third-world countries like El Salvador and India can compile their own operating systems and tools instead of buying them from American corporations like Microsoft. Even within the US, people are turning away from expensive software and to free software. It's just cheaper.
In a world where the lead developer and figure head of the next greatest software is a Finn from Sweden, what hope does the US hegemony have? That's what Microsoft is worrying about here. And they're right.
Look, greenhouse gases are nothing new. Global warming is nothing new. The earth has been going through phases of warming and cooling for the past couple billion years. It's part of the natural order of things. It's more than natural. It's necessary.
Without these periods of climate flux, we'd have none of the genetic and biological diversity you see among organisms. The world would atrophy -- there'd be little intense selective pressure, and the next time a an asteroid collides with the earth, we'd be unprepared. We'd have forgotten how to select.
It's time to stop pretending that humans are the saviors of the planet. We're not. We're just one species among millions. We're not even the most populous or prevalent. Heck, there are countless species we haven't even discovered yet. Why are we so arrogant?
If the planet wants to warm, if nature has decreed that global warming shall occur, then who are we to stop it? Sure, we might suffer if the world is a few degrees warmer, but why should we change the direction of an entire biosphere just because of our own preference? As if our own preference were the deciding factor. That's human arrogance.
There are better things to spend our time and effort on. Human catastrophes caused by human agencies surround us everyday. Let's work on those before we start trying to play Deity.
Why isn't it being supported as well as the x86 hardware, you ask? I can think of plenty of reasons off the top of my head:
Apple doesn't open up its specs, so coding for linux/ppc largely consists of hacks and other substandard patches.
The platform isn't as popular, so maintaining the ppc tree at the expense of the x86 one would be ludicrous.
The trend has been rightfully away from ppc for the last couple years, since Be decided to abandon the platform.
Several companies (LinuxPPC, YellowDog, etc.) exist to maintain linux/ppc. So why should Linus do their work for them?
PPC was great four years ago, but it's no longer a viable alternative to x86. Part of that has to do with Apple's bungling, and part of that has to do with the realities of the market -- unless hardware has the wide support of a broad community, it can't maintain the same level of support within an open-source system. There just aren't enough eyeballs.
If you want an alternative to x86, then stick with Alpha. Now there's a real platform. The support still isn't as good as with x86, but what can you expect? Linux is still a hobby OS for most people, and unless there's a strong economic motive driving the support, it'll lag. That motive exists for x86 and its large userbase. It'll be years (if ever) before it can exist for other platforms.
I support Linus on this one. I think Paul Mackerras is treading awfully close to a kernel fork, and that's the last thing we need.
When Linux got started, it was a cheesy hacked-up version of Minix, an already feature-complete operating system. But look at linux now! Everyone's heard of it, and companies are bending over backwards to bring new software to it like never before.
Now we see Marathon Infinity running on Linux. This is great news, not just because Marathon was one of the greatest series of its time for its game play, but specifically because Marathon had one of the best story lines of any first-person shooter ever released. Whereas Carmack kept pushing Quake3's release month after month, cramming in those extra framerates and goofy graphics, Bungie developed an elaborate story of the kind you rarely see in most movies these days.
And now it's been GPLed. This is perfect, because games are one of the most successful implementations of the Gnu philosophy: anyone can now redesign the storyline, inserting new endings where only old ones previously existed. Developers can now freely incorporate graphics from even closed-source software, under the GPL: its viralness is precisely what gives it its power.
Long after Descent and Quake have been forgotten, Marathon will live on via its source code. That's the future I'd like to see.
You leave me hanging for two days only to come back and laugh at me? To laugh at my country? To laugh at my hopes and dreams, the glories and aspirations of this great land?
I stand for something. We stand for something. What do you stand for?
Say what you want about the patent process these days; it's nothing like when I first got started in the industry with IBM back in the day. You can get the slightest piece of crap patented if you write it up well enough and pay a fee, and we all know it.
But don't demonize Symantec just because you're angry at the US Patent Office. Symantec is a godsend to consumers and industry giants alike, with their rapid proliferation of virus fixes and breaking news about security compromises. They were the first ones to provide what the industry needed for so many years: a centralized repository of information and knowledge about malicious code -- one that hasn't been replicated (much less supplanted) by even the best efforts of free-software advocates. Symantec's virus institute is so sophisticated that they've managed to release updates for viruses that haven't even been spotted in the wild, yet! Now, that takes a lot of skill, so you know they're doing something right.
Reform the patent process. Don't blame companies who take advantage of whatever they can (before their competitors beat them to it). We'd all be a lot sorrier if someone like Microsoft had gotten this patent than if Symantec had. And we all know it.
They don't have enough space no matter how much you can incrementally shove in
They waste more resources in packaging than other media
And so on.
It's time to grow up. It's time to let go of the old technologies of yesterday. They're called cruft. They're called legacy. They slow us down and they make life harder and more expensive. There is no reason why, in the twenty-first century, that we should still be beholden to technology from decades ago. Power grids are failing in California because of their insistence on using old tech. Why would we inflict that on our own personal computers? Growing up means learning to let go.
How much of this money that's been poured into incrementally improving floppy drives could've been spent on producing the next great thing in holographic storage? How many companies have independently squandered fortunes in this field? (I can count at least six in the past five years.) How far would the state of the art have come if we'd concentrated on what was best for the future of computing, instead of pandering to people's distorted views of what they want (more of the same) and not what they need (something radically different).
Inventing a new floppy isn't relying on tried-and-true designs. It's a whole new beast, with its own bugs and its own manufacturing problems. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle a century ago, he described how countless lives were lost in the meatpacking industry every year in having workers fall into vats of processed meat. How many workers are going to die in the new factories that this new floppy design will require? You can't just tack a new process onto an old assembly line; it'll require massive retooling and reconfiguration. Insurance rates will rise, and the price will become unbearable--unless they sell at a loss and drive competitors out of business, only to raise prices twofold in the end.
Floppies are not the answer to our problem. Old problems don't require old solutions. They require new and exciting ones, ones that push the envelope, that expand the field of human possibilities. Future economies, nay civilizations, will be made or broken on the wheel of technology. Let's not hold progress back by clinging to yesterday's superstitions.
It's the same document it was two hundred years ago precisely because it was intended to last for all time as a universal declaration of human rights in the face of tyranny.
We may have higher taxes than we used to, but that's because we chose to under the 16th amendment. Unlike your country where you're perpetually beholden to the whims of your parliament, we answer to no one but Divine Providence and the letter of Law.
It nearly borders on eugenics: if the bottom portion of the population is doomed to failure no matter what rehabilitative processes we enact, then why shouldn't we just weed them out to begin with? You don't need to be reminded where this kind of thinking can lead.
Education should embrace children's potential. You seem to want to leave them lying in the gutter.
If it's a random phenomenon, then what are we doing wasting our money to try to encourage it? If it isn't a random phenomenon, then why aren't we using methodologies that produce greater successes?
And if we had to pick a modern language to recode our minds in, it'd have to be C -- they use it for kernels for a reason, you know.
How we educate our children has nothing to do with how we punish our criminals, and nor should it even have to do with how we fund our athletics--they're in completely different social spheres, only loosely bound together by a common interest in squandering tax monies.
If studying trivial matters can lead to studying important things like the hard sciences, then I applaud you. But a quick look at death row will find many who found their way to religion by killing people. Is it really worth the expense?
The first set of proposals bears some resemblance to the now-infamous sexual harassment policy of Antioch College, which requires students to get explicit permission at every stage of sexual involvement. "May I kiss you? May I touch your breast? May I tell someone else your name and address?"
How odd it is that they would base their proposal on what is arguably the laughing stock of sexual-harassment policies!
Explicit permission at every step puts an enormous damper on sexual relations (and by extension, on commercial relations). The entire notion of contract presupposes the need to lubricate (no pun intended) financial dealings so that each new transaction is not as the first and most awkward. To throw out these fundamental principles would be to throw out the very foundations of our economy.
Can you imagine what would happen if you had to get explicit permission for every time you wanted to use an article of commerce? You'd be spending so much time negotiating that you'd never get anything done. This is precisely the same criticism that is leveled against Antioch's policies, and it surprises me that they'd leave themselves open to it by design.
Implicit permission is all that is needed, here. It's clear what people want, so just go on assumption and you'll be just fine. If there's a problem after the fact, then raise it in a civil suit the way other breaches of contract have been handled for the past millennium. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, here.
It's not without irony that you choose a commercial to illustrate your point about not letting people tell you what to think. That's exactly what commercials are created to do: to tell you what to think. You could've chosen to cite the original work by Orwel; at least that would've been a reference to an illustration of thought, rather than a mere imperative structure.
If you know what to think, then how to think will follow. Learning is about trial and error, and only by exploring others' truths can you grasp the fundamental principles that underly truth itself.
There are no accidents. Science has gotten where it is by adhering to the specific demands and casual propositions of a well-ordered universe. Sometimes that structure manifests itself as a "miracle". Sometimes it's as a "discovery". Either way, we're progressing.
Don't be so caught up with your petty notions of competition. We're all in this one together.
Manifest reality. Education through revelation. The world is a beautiful place, but that doesn't make it a complicated one. Most of it is self-evident: history is a collection of incontrovertible facts viewed through the lens of contemporary values.
Go ahead and teach them why to think, also, if you wish. I'd rather not leave that decision up to them. If they don't want to think, then they'll be disciplined until they do think. It's pretty simple.
If money is scarce, then we must have stricter priorities. Scarce quantities must be rationed, lest we not produce the results we intend. If we have the choice between teaching people how to read or teaching them how to draw, then we have a duty to teach them how to read. Literacy is of paramount importance. If we have a choice between teaching them how to do math and teaching them how to play music, then we have an obligation to teach them how to do math. Math skills are of paramount importance.
You're being unrealistic, here. You're saying we should do everything. We simply cannot. We must have our priorities, and the responsible choice is to put extraneous subjects like music and arts lower on our list of priorities than important subjects like reading and maths.
In order to develop kids' brain, you have to give it a nourishing environment. The nourishment you must provide is a rigorous feeding schedule of memorization. It's the basis and matrix for further development.
Games are what you should be playing with your friends. They're not what you should be doing in school. Doesn't school mean anything anymore? Do we just send our children and grandchildren to a massive festival of self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation? Where are the standards? Where is the discipline? How are we supposed to expect them to come out at the end with a sense for where they belong in society?
Teach them skills. Teach them how to put themselves towards useful ends. What you're advocating is the complete abdication of our role as parents and grandparents.
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Allchin is a lunatic. It doesn't take any intelligence or balls to rebut a lunatic. It takes no originalty to take something that no one agrees with, hold it up to scrutiny, and announce that you yourself also disagree with it. It's like ridiculing the mentally handicapped. It lacks all tact and propriety.
Stop giving Allchin his soapbox. Let Allchin's ludicrous statements fall on deaf ears. Everyone knows that Microsoft is dead in the water in three years, and everyone knows that Linux and the open-source movement will replace them. These things are beyond refutation, so stop pretending you're so innovative for pointing them out.
When a company like Microsoft makes such ridiculous comments, just ignore them. Let the press decide to report on them however they want; don't sully your own reputation by stooping to Allchin's level. The truth will out, as it has been shown throughout history. Passive resistance is a far more powerful tool than vocal outrage. Just ask Gandhi.
In short, this "rebuttal" was unnecessary. I hope it's the last of its kind we'll be subjected to.
In as much as corporations are "natural persons" under Federal law, Nike must be held to the same standards that other individuals are held to: Nike must receive the death penalty for its crimes against humanity.
Nike has engaged in countless acts of child labor abuse. They've not only failed to produce any benefits for the society that gave them corporate status; they've actively harmed that society. And other societies. It makes the US look like one evil corporate behemoth instead of the peaceful land of freedom our forefathers envisioned and drafted in our Constitution.
When individuals kill other individuals, they receive the death penalty. When corporations do the same, they get to keep teh proceeds and profits? Even serial-killers are denied that right under most state laws.
Anti-trust law is good and all, but it doesn't go far enough. Nike must receive the corporate death penalty (having its charter of incorporation burnt and its board members tried for criminal activities) not because they've harmed other corporations (as antitrust law concerns itself with) but because Nike has harmed actual living and breathing human beings.
Corporations like Nike have no place in any modern civil society. They are as good as dead.
Why will these disappear? Libraries won't burn down tomorrow if this act gets overturned. There are projects that exist for the sole purpose of preserving these works once they enter the public domain.
This is false, because the categorical response to speech has always been to have more speech, which copyright prevents. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court made copyrights categorically immune from First Amendment attacks in United Video, Inc. v. FCC. That's the precedent, and the DC panel has refused to undermine it.
Similarly, the "limited times" response by the Court is absurd:
The Court's response to this argument? A meager reference to precedent in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., controlling because of the Feist's court's failure even to account for the clause.
The principle of stare decisis is an important one in angloamerican law, but it's hardly an absolute rule. If precedents fail to allow for the manifestly correct verdict, then they should be overturned. It's that simple.
I take small consolation in the fact that this is merely a three-judge panel of the DC Court of Appeals and not the complete bench.
Do you want to give away your work for free? If not, don't create Open Source work. Simple.
But what about 'dumping'? Dumping (selling goods far below cost in order to put one's competitors out of business in the meantime) is illegal under US law. Isn't giving away your source code a similar attempt to drive closed-source businesses out of business?
Nonsense. The Constitution is a horrible blueprint for how any fair democracy should be styled. It leaves very few matters up to direct vote by the citizenry: originally, only representatives in the popular chamber of congress (the House of Representatives) were directly elected. Senators and Presidents were indirectly elected by other representatives (legislatures and electoral colleges, respectively), and judges/ambassadors/etc. were appointed outright. The Seventeenth Amendment extended popular elections to the Senate, but the amendment is unconstitutional on its face under Article V (which prohibits any amendment that would deny states their equal suffrage in the senate; under the 17th amendment, states are no longer represented at all -- only their citizens are).
Then there's the three-fifths compromise (counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of representation) and another obsolete Article V clause prohibiting the prohibition of slavery. And the whole Bill of Rights was tacked on after the fact as an afterthought and one that doesn't go far enough.
Actually, we essentially did. The latter half of the 19th century saw the rise of the populists who championed a strong central government as the salvation of many social problems. We'd had federal income taxes of one sort or another off and on for half a century before they were struck down by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust as violative of the Article I mandates of appropriation of direct taxes amongst the states. It took another twenty five years, but the 17th amendment was eventually passed. Albeit, that was back when income taxes were reserved for only the extremely wealthy, and even they payed only on the order of 5%.
England is a parliamentary republic in the most obscene sense. For better or worse, you don't even pretend to have a written codified constitution constraining your parliament. Even the glorious Magna Carta was a mere act of positive law, reversable by a simple majority tomorrow.
Good answer.
It doesn't threaten the american way. After all, americans are becoming more and more service oriented each year. With manufacturing plants moving to other countries like Mexico.
Tell that to the families who staff those manufacturing plants. America was built on a bed of manufacturing -- it's what separated us from our mercantile past and it's what turned us into the economic powerhouse we are today. If we turn our backs on that heritage, then we will fail.
Please don't forget our free software fundamentals. Free software is not about price.
Let's not forget that you're describing your fundamentals, not any universal model of what free software ought to be. Richard M Stallman doesn't have any proprietary ownership over the term "free". It's a term that's existed since Old English (more than one and a half millennia). It has always referred to price. That's what it means. That's all.
That is, the American way as defined as the puruit of corporate greed. I'm an American, and it sickens me.
America didn't invent the corporation. But in the 19th century, America went further than any other country in perfecting this glorious instrument of money-extraction. Who else would have thought to give the status of natural personhood to corporations as our Supreme Court did? Who else would have turned the English language into the most imperial language on the earth today, not because of any military conquest (though the US does have plenty) but because of corporate conquest?
Open-source undermines all of that. Third-world countries like El Salvador and India can compile their own operating systems and tools instead of buying them from American corporations like Microsoft. Even within the US, people are turning away from expensive software and to free software. It's just cheaper.
In a world where the lead developer and figure head of the next greatest software is a Finn from Sweden, what hope does the US hegemony have? That's what Microsoft is worrying about here. And they're right.
Look, greenhouse gases are nothing new. Global warming is nothing new. The earth has been going through phases of warming and cooling for the past couple billion years. It's part of the natural order of things. It's more than natural. It's necessary.
Without these periods of climate flux, we'd have none of the genetic and biological diversity you see among organisms. The world would atrophy -- there'd be little intense selective pressure, and the next time a an asteroid collides with the earth, we'd be unprepared. We'd have forgotten how to select.
It's time to stop pretending that humans are the saviors of the planet. We're not. We're just one species among millions. We're not even the most populous or prevalent. Heck, there are countless species we haven't even discovered yet. Why are we so arrogant?
If the planet wants to warm, if nature has decreed that global warming shall occur, then who are we to stop it? Sure, we might suffer if the world is a few degrees warmer, but why should we change the direction of an entire biosphere just because of our own preference? As if our own preference were the deciding factor. That's human arrogance.
There are better things to spend our time and effort on. Human catastrophes caused by human agencies surround us everyday. Let's work on those before we start trying to play Deity.
PPC was great four years ago, but it's no longer a viable alternative to x86. Part of that has to do with Apple's bungling, and part of that has to do with the realities of the market -- unless hardware has the wide support of a broad community, it can't maintain the same level of support within an open-source system. There just aren't enough eyeballs.
If you want an alternative to x86, then stick with Alpha. Now there's a real platform. The support still isn't as good as with x86, but what can you expect? Linux is still a hobby OS for most people, and unless there's a strong economic motive driving the support, it'll lag. That motive exists for x86 and its large userbase. It'll be years (if ever) before it can exist for other platforms.
I support Linus on this one. I think Paul Mackerras is treading awfully close to a kernel fork, and that's the last thing we need.
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's obsolete.
Even in games!
When Linux got started, it was a cheesy hacked-up version of Minix, an already feature-complete operating system. But look at linux now! Everyone's heard of it, and companies are bending over backwards to bring new software to it like never before.
Now we see Marathon Infinity running on Linux. This is great news, not just because Marathon was one of the greatest series of its time for its game play, but specifically because Marathon had one of the best story lines of any first-person shooter ever released. Whereas Carmack kept pushing Quake3's release month after month, cramming in those extra framerates and goofy graphics, Bungie developed an elaborate story of the kind you rarely see in most movies these days.
And now it's been GPLed. This is perfect, because games are one of the most successful implementations of the Gnu philosophy: anyone can now redesign the storyline, inserting new endings where only old ones previously existed. Developers can now freely incorporate graphics from even closed-source software, under the GPL: its viralness is precisely what gives it its power.
Long after Descent and Quake have been forgotten, Marathon will live on via its source code. That's the future I'd like to see.
You leave me hanging for two days only to come back and laugh at me? To laugh at my country? To laugh at my hopes and dreams, the glories and aspirations of this great land?
I stand for something. We stand for something. What do you stand for?
Say what you want about the patent process these days; it's nothing like when I first got started in the industry with IBM back in the day. You can get the slightest piece of crap patented if you write it up well enough and pay a fee, and we all know it.
But don't demonize Symantec just because you're angry at the US Patent Office. Symantec is a godsend to consumers and industry giants alike, with their rapid proliferation of virus fixes and breaking news about security compromises. They were the first ones to provide what the industry needed for so many years: a centralized repository of information and knowledge about malicious code -- one that hasn't been replicated (much less supplanted) by even the best efforts of free-software advocates. Symantec's virus institute is so sophisticated that they've managed to release updates for viruses that haven't even been spotted in the wild, yet! Now, that takes a lot of skill, so you know they're doing something right.
Reform the patent process. Don't blame companies who take advantage of whatever they can (before their competitors beat them to it). We'd all be a lot sorrier if someone like Microsoft had gotten this patent than if Symantec had. And we all know it.
- They're slow
- They're fragile
- They don't have enough space no matter how much you can incrementally shove in
- They waste more resources in packaging than other media
And so on.It's time to grow up. It's time to let go of the old technologies of yesterday. They're called cruft. They're called legacy. They slow us down and they make life harder and more expensive. There is no reason why, in the twenty-first century, that we should still be beholden to technology from decades ago. Power grids are failing in California because of their insistence on using old tech. Why would we inflict that on our own personal computers? Growing up means learning to let go.
How much of this money that's been poured into incrementally improving floppy drives could've been spent on producing the next great thing in holographic storage? How many companies have independently squandered fortunes in this field? (I can count at least six in the past five years.) How far would the state of the art have come if we'd concentrated on what was best for the future of computing, instead of pandering to people's distorted views of what they want (more of the same) and not what they need (something radically different).
Inventing a new floppy isn't relying on tried-and-true designs. It's a whole new beast, with its own bugs and its own manufacturing problems. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle a century ago, he described how countless lives were lost in the meatpacking industry every year in having workers fall into vats of processed meat. How many workers are going to die in the new factories that this new floppy design will require? You can't just tack a new process onto an old assembly line; it'll require massive retooling and reconfiguration. Insurance rates will rise, and the price will become unbearable--unless they sell at a loss and drive competitors out of business, only to raise prices twofold in the end.
Floppies are not the answer to our problem. Old problems don't require old solutions. They require new and exciting ones, ones that push the envelope, that expand the field of human possibilities. Future economies, nay civilizations, will be made or broken on the wheel of technology. Let's not hold progress back by clinging to yesterday's superstitions.
It's the same document it was two hundred years ago precisely because it was intended to last for all time as a universal declaration of human rights in the face of tyranny.
We may have higher taxes than we used to, but that's because we chose to under the 16th amendment. Unlike your country where you're perpetually beholden to the whims of your parliament, we answer to no one but Divine Providence and the letter of Law.
It nearly borders on eugenics: if the bottom portion of the population is doomed to failure no matter what rehabilitative processes we enact, then why shouldn't we just weed them out to begin with? You don't need to be reminded where this kind of thinking can lead.
Education should embrace children's potential. You seem to want to leave them lying in the gutter.
If it's a random phenomenon, then what are we doing wasting our money to try to encourage it? If it isn't a random phenomenon, then why aren't we using methodologies that produce greater successes?
And if we had to pick a modern language to recode our minds in, it'd have to be C -- they use it for kernels for a reason, you know.
How we educate our children has nothing to do with how we punish our criminals, and nor should it even have to do with how we fund our athletics--they're in completely different social spheres, only loosely bound together by a common interest in squandering tax monies.
If studying trivial matters can lead to studying important things like the hard sciences, then I applaud you. But a quick look at death row will find many who found their way to religion by killing people. Is it really worth the expense?
Explicit permission at every step puts an enormous damper on sexual relations (and by extension, on commercial relations). The entire notion of contract presupposes the need to lubricate (no pun intended) financial dealings so that each new transaction is not as the first and most awkward. To throw out these fundamental principles would be to throw out the very foundations of our economy.
Can you imagine what would happen if you had to get explicit permission for every time you wanted to use an article of commerce? You'd be spending so much time negotiating that you'd never get anything done. This is precisely the same criticism that is leveled against Antioch's policies, and it surprises me that they'd leave themselves open to it by design.
Implicit permission is all that is needed, here. It's clear what people want, so just go on assumption and you'll be just fine. If there's a problem after the fact, then raise it in a civil suit the way other breaches of contract have been handled for the past millennium. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, here.
It's not without irony that you choose a commercial to illustrate your point about not letting people tell you what to think. That's exactly what commercials are created to do: to tell you what to think. You could've chosen to cite the original work by Orwel; at least that would've been a reference to an illustration of thought, rather than a mere imperative structure.
If you know what to think, then how to think will follow. Learning is about trial and error, and only by exploring others' truths can you grasp the fundamental principles that underly truth itself.
There are no accidents. Science has gotten where it is by adhering to the specific demands and casual propositions of a well-ordered universe. Sometimes that structure manifests itself as a "miracle". Sometimes it's as a "discovery". Either way, we're progressing.
Don't be so caught up with your petty notions of competition. We're all in this one together.
Manifest reality. Education through revelation. The world is a beautiful place, but that doesn't make it a complicated one. Most of it is self-evident: history is a collection of incontrovertible facts viewed through the lens of contemporary values.
Go ahead and teach them why to think, also, if you wish. I'd rather not leave that decision up to them. If they don't want to think, then they'll be disciplined until they do think. It's pretty simple.
Keep it in perspective. We must have priorities.
If money is scarce, then we must have stricter priorities. Scarce quantities must be rationed, lest we not produce the results we intend. If we have the choice between teaching people how to read or teaching them how to draw, then we have a duty to teach them how to read. Literacy is of paramount importance. If we have a choice between teaching them how to do math and teaching them how to play music, then we have an obligation to teach them how to do math. Math skills are of paramount importance.
You're being unrealistic, here. You're saying we should do everything. We simply cannot. We must have our priorities, and the responsible choice is to put extraneous subjects like music and arts lower on our list of priorities than important subjects like reading and maths.
In order to develop kids' brain, you have to give it a nourishing environment. The nourishment you must provide is a rigorous feeding schedule of memorization. It's the basis and matrix for further development.
Games are what you should be playing with your friends. They're not what you should be doing in school. Doesn't school mean anything anymore? Do we just send our children and grandchildren to a massive festival of self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation? Where are the standards? Where is the discipline? How are we supposed to expect them to come out at the end with a sense for where they belong in society?
Teach them skills. Teach them how to put themselves towards useful ends. What you're advocating is the complete abdication of our role as parents and grandparents.