I'd say most of the third world is up to their neck in trouble, but it's not because of exploitation or pauperization. Overpopulation, instability of governament and tradition in civil war are much more severe causes for poverty.
This is completely wrong.
First of all, one of the major causes for instability and "civil wars" on third world countries is the intervention of former colonial powers. You know, like the US arming guerrillas to overthrow a government that puts its people's interests above those of US corporations. Or supporting a brutal, murderous dictatorship because it supports corporations robbing the people. Can you say Guatemala, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Indonesia, etc.?
Also, the industrialized nations put great economic pressure on the third world. Suppose you are the president of a third world republic, and you want to develop your country. You need capital to do this, which you lack. So you turn to the financial institutions of the industrialized world for help (World Bank, International Money Fund, etc.). They might offer you money, if they like you, but, you have to comply with several conditions: you have to set up a "free market economy", eliminating governmental subsidies, opening up you country's economy to external investors, and eliminating tariff protections for your country's products.
Which means that foreign investors get the upper hand at every stage--- they have more capital than local investors, and there are no compensating government subsidies for the locals, so they get beat on investments; since you have no import tariffs, your local products can't compete against those from first world companies (which are frequently subsidized by governments). The outcome is all too familiar.
This technocratic ideology ("a future world where everyone dedicates themselves to having fun") is quite sadly not questioned by most of the people who post here.
I would have to point out to everyone that, hey, there's a world outside the industrialized nations (hell, considering the/. demographics, outside the USA, I'd say). Where do third world countries fit into this whole story?
The economical abundance of the industrialized countries, and the concommitant techonological advances, like it or not have been built on the exploitation and pauperization of the third world.
The driving motor for technological advance, in general (apart from the possible intentions of individual inventors) has not been a desire to make people have more time for entertainment, but rather to diminish the wage costs of production. Yes, the reason the money for developing and building industrial robots has appeared is not because the industry wants laid-off workers to have fun in the free time the robots create for them...
And don't get me started in the american "entertainment" industry.
All this is just an egotistical "I just wanna have fun" fantasy, with no concern for reality. In fact, I think that a society where everyone could just have fun would take a lot of work to set up and maintain, and not the kind of work doable by a machine. Yeah, for example, can anyone here volunteer to learn Yoruba and translate all the Linux documentation into it, so Yoruba speakers get the same opportunities for fun we do? Care to coordinate the translations for the thousands of langauges found in the world? Hell, for that matter, care to coordinate translations of all documentation in your system for all languages spoken in the USA?
BTW, try reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, you might find it interesting. It describes a society somewhat along "entertainment" lines (although people still work).
Well, I would have to agree that these couple of recent pieces by him have been VERY good... And they have provoked a lot of nice comments from people.
I wish I'd read this story when I was back in high school. I was at a Jesuit school in Puerto Rico; it was hell, and I really wanted to kill myself. Luckily I had a couple of very good friends who were into what I was into--- playing music, electronics, and computers.
Anyway, I escaped that hell, and went to college. I had a FUCKING BLAST!!!! Studied literature, math, philosophy, programming, art, psychology, and more. I got to meet lots of bright people.
Now I have some advice for all the geeks still stuck in those hell holes. Finish high school early, and go to college. I skipped my senior year--- took the courses I needed from that in summer--- and it was definitely worth it.
Then, you got to pull the strings right to get the most out of college--- otherwise, it can really suck, as I've seen it has done for many people. Go with the brightest, most challenging professors. Try not to be locked in to some particular program, say, CS--- you'll learn more from a general studies program where you carefully pick classes all over the field with the bright professors than from a structured program with lots of requisite courses you don't want, taught by mediocre guys. If you're going for grad school, anyway, the most important thing is not what area your degree is in, but what courses you've taken, what books you've read, what good stuff you've written, and, overall, what you know.
If you're not going for grad school, still, spend college doing that, plus teaching yourself stuff. Think of all the people who write in slashdot that got sysadmin or programmer or whatever jobs, and are not only self-taught, but have a degree in something seemingly unrelated--- economy, political science, philosophy. You'll be happier that way.
Well, there is a serious problem people on this discussion aren't addressing.
The issue of how much time parents have available for their kids is an economic and social issue. In a society where, in low-middle class families, both parents have to work to make ends meet, some people have to have more than one job, and so on, parents may have to make this choice: spend quality time with your starving children, or work all day.
Think of it. If a parent stays home and dedicates him/herself exclusively to care for the children, the system considers that person to be unemployed!!!
Anyway, look at the economic indicators for the last 20 years. The situation of the US lower and middle classes has been continuously getting more and more fucked. This with horrible consequences for their children.
Yes, this is in the bibliography. Also, Achilles and the Tortoise mention it a few times--- supposedly, a friend of one of them is writing it.
Anyway, here goes. On page 748, at the bottom:
Gebstadter, Egbert B.
Copper, Silver, Gold: an Indestructible Metallic Alloy. Perth: Acidic Books, 1979. A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and confused--- yet remarkably similar to the present work. Professor Gebstadter's Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of indirect self-reference. Of particular interest is a reference in its well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary, book.
Question: in apt-get a security hole? How does it guarantee it's not fetching evil packages? Is it only because you implicitly trust the servers you set in your conf file? I've wondered this for a while...
All official Debian packages are PGP signed, I believe. Thus, there should be a way of setting up the system so that it installs packages only after authenticating them.
I _know_ some of you guys will figure it out. If you can't, hang around for someone to post an answer, you will get a great example of the power of command lines.
I _know_ some of you guys will figure it out. If you can't, hang around for someone to post an answer, you will get a great example of the power of command lines.
I once tried transalting some spanish into english with babelfish. The damn thing confused a very common noun for a very obscure verb I had never seen before (I am a native spanish speaker). It took me like two minutes of looking at the translation to figure out what the hell was happening, when I finally realized what it was. I looked up the word in question, and then I found out, for the first time in my life, that "tacar" in spanish is a verb, whose first person singular present for is "taco" (as in the mexican dish).
If there are enough handicapped users out there then that should create a great market for handicapped friendly webpages. You could even go so far as to create an organization that tests and awards a 'handicapped friendly' logo to pages that are handicapped friendly. But don't go and use the force (yes, force, as in the barrel of a gun or trigger of a bomb) of Government to make everyone else comply with your own personal adjenda or beliefs. Use the free market. It has been shown to work wonders.
Yeah, right. Handicapped people have been around for as long as civilization has been around. Can you tell me examples of special services for disabled people springing up in free market societies without government intervention?
The point is: Contrary to your first premise in the paragraph above, what if there are not enough handicapped users out there so that it should create a great market for handicapped friendly webpages? (I should add "reasonably priced" to that, too.)
Do you believe that people have a right to know where their taxpayer dollars go? And if so, do you believe that a handicapped person has any less rights in this matter?
Standards, yet, no definition what so ever about how or what is to be standardized. This potentially could mean black in white, with everything written with an H1 tag so it's easy to read. I don't doubt that something that stupid is possable.
I think your being paranoid about it. Think about how modern HTML is supposed to work: your HTML pages have the content, and the formatting is specified in CSS files. Thus, if someone needs huge fonts and b/w, if all the content in the HTML file should be decoupled from the formatting info in the CSS, they can just overrride your style sheet.
And, it doens't say that it's government contracted websites, it seems to imply that it's companies that do buisness with the government. So, if someone in the government want's to buy a copy or Red Hat, then all of the Red Hat sites have to conform? It's not clear, but, again, it's not something that I would put past the government.
I am inclined to think this "business with the government" language is the reporter's bad choice of words;).
The point, IMHO, is that the government, if it wants to buy a product from some company, it should choose one that meets some accessibility standard. Not that companies are forced to meet that standard, but that unless they meet it, the government won't do business with them.
So, if someone in the government want's to buy a copy or Red Hat, then all of the Red Hat sites have to conform? It's not clear, but, again, it's not something that I would put past the government.
It's not clear, you're right. But there could be a case for it. If the government decides to spend its money on Red Hat, shouldn't the greatest number of tax payers be able of seeing what is it that their government spends their money in?
Of course, this argument, in this form, is bogus, since it can give rise to the situation you fear, that is, govt buys a single RH 6.0 copy and demands RH to rewrite their site, at RH's cost.
But make a small change in it. Now, make government restrain itself from buying stuff from companies that don't run accessible sites. Now you have given an incentive to companies for making their sites accessible (otherwise they can't compete for government PO's).
Not that I believe every single purchase government makes should be from a supplier with accessible web pages, BTW. It would be nice, though.
Read the article. This is supposed to affect government websites, or websites of companies that receive federal money. The idea is that disabled people have the right to access government information, or information from companies that receive taxpayer's money.
I'm just adding my voice to this correction. I was over at MIT 2 weeks ago, visitng the Linguistics and Philosophy Department, and I was told exactly that.
BTW, this building is not only computer science. They're gonna have at least Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology there, too.
In Puerto Rico, one of the major newspapers printed a first page headline saying "YELTSIN STARTS THIRD WORLD WAR" (referring to aiming the missiles at NATO nations).
I'm not making this up... When this are the first printed words you see when you wake up in the morning, you jump right out of your morning drowsiness...
The subject says it all. If you want some evidence, look into archives of/. postings.
Seems to be a reasonable, and quite intelligent guy when he keeps his flamethrower off. I must admit that, since he left OSI, my opinion of him has improved greatly.
ESR, on the other hand, keeps sinking and sinking, IMHO.
I think I can give more support to the argument against computer code being a "device".
A computer language, as you rightly said, is a formal language for specifying computational processes/algorithms. And in this connection, it must be pointed out that algorithms exist independently of the existence of computers to execute them.
The point is that if I have, say, RSA coded in Lisp, it is merely incidental that there exists a machine that can carry out the algorithm the program describes. This because Lisp could very well exist without there existing a machine that could execute Lisp programs.
I didn't choose Lisp for no reason. It is an historical fact that there existed Lisp programs before there was a Lisp implementation! McCarthy designed Lisp as a formalism for describing recursion equations, and wrote a Lisp interpreter in Lisp; one of his coworkers then decided to hand-translate it into assembly, and thus was the first Lisp interpreter born.
Of course, I could go on into the ages-old algorithms for finding remainders and such.
The point is, a computer program is meaningful even in the absence of a physical device to interpret it. The people who invent them have a some semantics in mind when they do it, which do not necessarily depend on there existing a machine to carry out some actions.
I don't think source code is any more a form of speech than a recipe for a cake, a set of instructions to make a bomb, or a to-do list to get one through a day.
Is this supposed to be sarcasm? I've always thought recipes were free speech!!!
All this is true. In that case, there would be absolutely no reason to call such a system GNU/Linux, so it's beside the point.
A lot of it comes down to what one calls the OS. Some people obviously go with the maxim "the OS is the kernel"; I don't, but it's a merely terminological issue anyway. The kernel is clearly called Linux. The argument, IMHO, is what the Unix (and think bare-bones Unix system--- not Apache, X, and other such non-essential stuff) clone should be called.
Further, it seems to me that the only sensible place to draw this line is between the kernel and everything else. Anywhere else creates grey areas of significant size. If ls/mv/cp/etc. are part of the OS, what about kfm? If bash is part of the OS, what about fvwm? If gcc is part of the OS, what about perl? If emacs is part of the OS, what about Wordperfect? (And I don't even install emacs on my systems... I'm a joe user. Does that mean my OS is incomplete?)
You haven't read the arguments quite right. Bash is not merely a command-line analogue of fvwm--- a GNU/Linux system will not boot without bash. (Actually, boot floppies do--- but that's not the point.)
Look at your system startup scripts someday. They all are shell scripts run by bash, that call commands like cp, mv, mount, and so on.
Someone once said it very well here in slashdot--- when you think GNU/Linux, thinx Unix V7. The basic, common denominator Unix toolset/environment.
"This is licensed for use under the terms of the GPL, version 2 or later, at your discretion".
Say GPLv3 comes out, and you don't like it. Fine. You can just exercise your discretion and continue to use your GPLv2-licensed software under the same terms.
However, say the GPLv3 added some new feature you really like. Then you can accept the terms of the GPLv3 and benefit from that feature.
Slashdot Mirror
This is completely wrong.
First of all, one of the major causes for instability and "civil wars" on third world countries is the intervention of former colonial powers. You know, like the US arming guerrillas to overthrow a government that puts its people's interests above those of US corporations. Or supporting a brutal, murderous dictatorship because it supports corporations robbing the people. Can you say Guatemala, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Indonesia, etc.?
Also, the industrialized nations put great economic pressure on the third world. Suppose you are the president of a third world republic, and you want to develop your country. You need capital to do this, which you lack. So you turn to the financial institutions of the industrialized world for help (World Bank, International Money Fund, etc.). They might offer you money, if they like you, but, you have to comply with several conditions: you have to set up a "free market economy", eliminating governmental subsidies, opening up you country's economy to external investors, and eliminating tariff protections for your country's products.
Which means that foreign investors get the upper hand at every stage--- they have more capital than local investors, and there are no compensating government subsidies for the locals, so they get beat on investments; since you have no import tariffs, your local products can't compete against those from first world companies (which are frequently subsidized by governments). The outcome is all too familiar.
The exploitation is clearly still there.
---
I would have to point out to everyone that, hey, there's a world outside the industrialized nations (hell, considering the /. demographics, outside the USA, I'd say). Where do third world countries fit into this whole story?
The economical abundance of the industrialized countries, and the concommitant techonological advances, like it or not have been built on the exploitation and pauperization of the third world.
The driving motor for technological advance, in general (apart from the possible intentions of individual inventors) has not been a desire to make people have more time for entertainment, but rather to diminish the wage costs of production. Yes, the reason the money for developing and building industrial robots has appeared is not because the industry wants laid-off workers to have fun in the free time the robots create for them...
And don't get me started in the american "entertainment" industry.
All this is just an egotistical "I just wanna have fun" fantasy, with no concern for reality. In fact, I think that a society where everyone could just have fun would take a lot of work to set up and maintain, and not the kind of work doable by a machine. Yeah, for example, can anyone here volunteer to learn Yoruba and translate all the Linux documentation into it, so Yoruba speakers get the same opportunities for fun we do? Care to coordinate the translations for the thousands of langauges found in the world? Hell, for that matter, care to coordinate translations of all documentation in your system for all languages spoken in the USA?
BTW, try reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, you might find it interesting. It describes a society somewhat along "entertainment" lines (although people still work).
---
So don't hang around with them. Take classes on other subjects, meet new people, and hang around with those people.
---
Well, I would have to agree that these couple of recent pieces by him have been VERY good... And they have provoked a lot of nice comments from people.
I wish I'd read this story when I was back in high school. I was at a Jesuit school in Puerto Rico; it was hell, and I really wanted to kill myself. Luckily I had a couple of very good friends who were into what I was into--- playing music, electronics, and computers.
Anyway, I escaped that hell, and went to college. I had a FUCKING BLAST!!!! Studied literature, math, philosophy, programming, art, psychology, and more. I got to meet lots of bright people.
Now I have some advice for all the geeks still stuck in those hell holes. Finish high school early, and go to college. I skipped my senior year--- took the courses I needed from that in summer--- and it was definitely worth it.
Then, you got to pull the strings right to get the most out of college--- otherwise, it can really suck, as I've seen it has done for many people. Go with the brightest, most challenging professors. Try not to be locked in to some particular program, say, CS--- you'll learn more from a general studies program where you carefully pick classes all over the field with the bright professors than from a structured program with lots of requisite courses you don't want, taught by mediocre guys. If you're going for grad school, anyway, the most important thing is not what area your degree is in, but what courses you've taken, what books you've read, what good stuff you've written, and, overall, what you know.
If you're not going for grad school, still, spend college doing that, plus teaching yourself stuff. Think of all the people who write in slashdot that got sysadmin or programmer or whatever jobs, and are not only self-taught, but have a degree in something seemingly unrelated--- economy, political science, philosophy. You'll be happier that way.
---
The issue of how much time parents have available for their kids is an economic and social issue. In a society where, in low-middle class families, both parents have to work to make ends meet, some people have to have more than one job, and so on, parents may have to make this choice: spend quality time with your starving children, or work all day.
Think of it. If a parent stays home and dedicates him/herself exclusively to care for the children, the system considers that person to be unemployed!!!
Anyway, look at the economic indicators for the last 20 years. The situation of the US lower and middle classes has been continuously getting more and more fucked. This with horrible consequences for their children.
---
Anyway, here goes. On page 748, at the bottom:
---
Me: I must have missed that part of the GPL. Could you point it out for me?
I was being sarcastic. I already knew there is no such part; I was challenging the original poster's false statement.
Obviously, my intent wasn't clear. But thanks to the people who pointed it out, anyway.
---
All official Debian packages are PGP signed, I believe. Thus, there should be a way of setting up the system so that it installs packages only after authenticating them.
---
I must have missed that part of the GPL. Could you point it out for me?
---
Yeah. That sort of thing is what we love command lines for :-)
Let's see who can figure out this one-liner:
I _know_ some of you guys will figure it out. If you can't, hang around for someone to post an answer, you will get a great example of the power of command lines.
And, if I screwed up, go ahead and point it out.
---
Yeah. That sort of thing is what we love command lines for :-)
Let's see who can figure out this one-liner:
---
Yeah, right. Handicapped people have been around for as long as civilization has been around. Can you tell me examples of special services for disabled people springing up in free market societies without government intervention?
The point is: Contrary to your first premise in the paragraph above, what if there are not enough handicapped users out there so that it should create a great market for handicapped friendly webpages? (I should add "reasonably priced" to that, too.)
Do you believe that people have a right to know where their taxpayer dollars go? And if so, do you believe that a handicapped person has any less rights in this matter?
---
I think your being paranoid about it. Think about how modern HTML is supposed to work: your HTML pages have the content, and the formatting is specified in CSS files. Thus, if someone needs huge fonts and b/w, if all the content in the HTML file should be decoupled from the formatting info in the CSS, they can just overrride your style sheet.
And, it doens't say that it's government contracted websites, it seems to imply that it's companies that do buisness with the government. So, if someone in the government want's to buy a copy or Red Hat, then all of the Red Hat sites have to conform? It's not clear, but, again, it's not something that I would put past the government.
I am inclined to think this "business with the government" language is the reporter's bad choice of words ;).
The point, IMHO, is that the government, if it wants to buy a product from some company, it should choose one that meets some accessibility standard. Not that companies are forced to meet that standard, but that unless they meet it, the government won't do business with them.
So, if someone in the government want's to buy a copy or Red Hat, then all of the Red Hat sites have to conform? It's not clear, but, again, it's not something that I would put past the government.
It's not clear, you're right. But there could be a case for it. If the government decides to spend its money on Red Hat, shouldn't the greatest number of tax payers be able of seeing what is it that their government spends their money in?
Of course, this argument, in this form, is bogus, since it can give rise to the situation you fear, that is, govt buys a single RH 6.0 copy and demands RH to rewrite their site, at RH's cost.
But make a small change in it. Now, make government restrain itself from buying stuff from companies that don't run accessible sites. Now you have given an incentive to companies for making their sites accessible (otherwise they can't compete for government PO's).
Not that I believe every single purchase government makes should be from a supplier with accessible web pages, BTW. It would be nice, though.
---
---
BTW, this building is not only computer science. They're gonna have at least Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology there, too.
---
I'm not making this up... When this are the first printed words you see when you wake up in the morning, you jump right out of your morning drowsiness...
---
---
Seems to be a reasonable, and quite intelligent guy when he keeps his flamethrower off. I must admit that, since he left OSI, my opinion of him has improved greatly.
ESR, on the other hand, keeps sinking and sinking, IMHO.
---
Guile is an implementation of Scheme designed to be an extension language--- you can link it to your application, and code custom primitives in C.
The documentation was not quite there last time I checked, though.
BTW there is another, non-GNU Scheme extension language: Elk.
---
A computer language, as you rightly said, is a formal language for specifying computational processes/algorithms. And in this connection, it must be pointed out that algorithms exist independently of the existence of computers to execute them.
The point is that if I have, say, RSA coded in Lisp, it is merely incidental that there exists a machine that can carry out the algorithm the program describes. This because Lisp could very well exist without there existing a machine that could execute Lisp programs.
I didn't choose Lisp for no reason. It is an historical fact that there existed Lisp programs before there was a Lisp implementation! McCarthy designed Lisp as a formalism for describing recursion equations, and wrote a Lisp interpreter in Lisp; one of his coworkers then decided to hand-translate it into assembly, and thus was the first Lisp interpreter born.
Of course, I could go on into the ages-old algorithms for finding remainders and such.
The point is, a computer program is meaningful even in the absence of a physical device to interpret it. The people who invent them have a some semantics in mind when they do it, which do not necessarily depend on there existing a machine to carry out some actions.
---
Is this supposed to be sarcasm? I've always thought recipes were free speech!!!
---
A lot of it comes down to what one calls the OS. Some people obviously go with the maxim "the OS is the kernel"; I don't, but it's a merely terminological issue anyway. The kernel is clearly called Linux. The argument, IMHO, is what the Unix (and think bare-bones Unix system--- not Apache, X, and other such non-essential stuff) clone should be called.
---
You haven't read the arguments quite right. Bash is not merely a command-line analogue of fvwm--- a GNU/Linux system will not boot without bash. (Actually, boot floppies do--- but that's not the point.)
Look at your system startup scripts someday. They all are shell scripts run by bash, that call commands like cp, mv, mount, and so on.
Someone once said it very well here in slashdot--- when you think GNU/Linux, thinx Unix V7. The basic, common denominator Unix toolset/environment.
---
Say GPLv3 comes out, and you don't like it. Fine. You can just exercise your discretion and continue to use your GPLv2-licensed software under the same terms.
However, say the GPLv3 added some new feature you really like. Then you can accept the terms of the GPLv3 and benefit from that feature.
---