What, exactly, is a cyberpunk? The very name sounds like "adolescent geeks" in my mind. Is there any way they can try to seem at least a little more legitamate?
Re:Umm.. Lots of Software, not a lot of OSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
I guess I still don't understand. Most likely the economics is more complex that I know.
Of course, the software that the government already has licenses for doesn't need to be rewritten. That would just be wasteful.
But when the government is paying for the software to be developed, couldn't they insist the software be free software? After all, they are the ones paying for it.
Re:Umm.. Lots of Software, not a lot of OSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
"This is all real software that is *really* expensive and really proprietary[...]."
Doesn't it make more sense to use that money to develop free software that is available to the tax payers rather than buying software licenses?
Re:All OSS no better than all CSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
Dude, he linked to that letter. If you said you read it, then you should respond to them points.
What you are basically saying is that free software can't do this, this, or this yet. The letter, however, is saying that the government could maintain software that is available to the public. And if the country of Peru can afford to maintain software, then I'm sure the United States can.
So the letter that was linked to has already rebutted the points you are trying to make.
Maybe your real objection is with the GNU GPL as opposed to a BSD-style license. First, BSD software is free software also. Second, the stance that BSD is more "free" than the GPL has always seemed contradictory to me.
Re:All OSS no better than all CSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
"Requiring the government to use a specific type of software is a bad idea, whether that software be open source or closed source."
"The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state law, such as:
Free access to public information by the citizen.
Permanence of public data.
Security of the State and citezens.
To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.
To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guarenteed due to the availability of the source code.
To guarentee national security or the security of the State, it is indespensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code."
I don't there is anything I can say that can top that. It should be obvious that proprietary software is not a solution for government software.
I don't take pride in this, but there is one big reason I don't vote.
I don't know enough about the issues or the candidates.
I try to be informed, but I don't subscribe to a newspaper...I did once, but the newspaper's went unread because I really didn't have the time to read them (yet, I have time to post to slashdot, go figure).
I've picked up books from my college library, one about israel and palestine. It seemed like a good book introducing some of the issues that are happening over there. But I honestly never got beyond the first chapter. The book was kind of dense for someone with the typical American knowledge on foreign affairs.
And I've heard arguments such as yours, that democracy requires a lot more people voting. But it almost seems to me that having uninformed people vote doesn't make the system more democratic. It just makes the system more arbitrary and more whimsical.
And the politics really gets in the way. For instance, trying to find political information online is difficult, since you can never really trust the source of information. Especially as we got closer to voting time, everyone starts putting up articles supporting their own personal political agendas, and people like me are the worse off, since the uninformed are not going to know much difference between truth and outright lie anyway.
The solution, of course, is to get information from a variety of sources. But then we are back to the same problem of lack of time. Especially with the vast number of candidates and issues we have to decide upon come voting time.
Another thing I've finally figured out. I've tried watching CNN or FoxNews for a while, so that hopefully I would get some insight into what is happening. It took me a while to figure out that I'm not just dumb, but the television station doesn't actually tell you enough of what is happening, and certainly provide almost no context of the issue. And the biggest waste of time are them talk shows where they have a number of "analysts" debating a certain topic. Usually the person hosting the show (who usually gets the most time speaking), either (a) doesn't under the issues anymore than I do or (b) has some political agenda of their own. And given that these shows are on most of the time, television is practically useless for getting information.
So it seems to me that voting isn't just something you do once every two years. Its almost a part time job to keep up with the issues, and then research your candidates. Maybe I'm exagerating. But without spending a good amount of time on this, many of us couldn't tell the difference between one candidate and the other.
It would be great if someone could post where they get thier information from. Is there an unbiased MiddleEast for Dummies book somewhere? Where do we get information about the various political candidates that doesn't come from the candidates themselves?
So I may not be voting this November either. Maybe the best way would be for me to get information on the local politics, and then vote for the local candidates. But I'll have to see.
Sounds like an abuse of the patent system to me. If I understand correctly, the patent system was made so that inventors didn't have to keep their inventions secret. It just doesn't seem ethical to not allow other corporations use a technology just because someone else discovered it first.
I've been looking through my gnu emacs sources, there's some interesting things in here already that people don't know about, like the strokes package where supposedly you just wiggle your mouse around and that will execute your command.
Now I think gnu emacs supports sound, so who knows elisp and is curious enough to set this kind of thing up?:)
Re:American Culture Not That Bad
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
"What is used to determine truth?"
I don't know. In some ways, determining truth is impossible. Like how do you know you're not the star in The Truman Show or trapped in the Matrix? But just because it may be impossible to tell what truth is doesn't mean they are all true to each individual, as is the meaning of relativism. And given that some truths may be impossible to know, what benefit do our beliefs grant us?
"Do we *really* need a reminder, every time we watch a movie, about the rights we lack with respect to it?"
No silly, the warning is there for their protection, not yours:)
Re:American Culture Not That Bad
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 2
First, let me say that I am generally against abortions. Perhaps there are reasons for abortions under certain circumstances, but surely that doesn't mean that all abortions are ethical and should be lawful, but this is a digression to what I want to say.
And to avoid any sort of ad hominem attacks, I'll say that I am an atheist. But I am not politically active.
"Religion breeds intolerance not because of its belief in a God, however erroneous such a belief may be. It breeds intolerance by its very assertion that it has the 'one true, straight and narrow way' to God, setting its people apart from the rest of the world."
This may be your belief, but it is certainly not mine. There is, perhaps, a One True Way. Relativism simply doesn't hold to reason. I won't digress into my reasons though.
But the difference between people of religious zeal and others who do, in fact, believe in a One True Way is a lack of humility. While complete humility of one's beliefs is almost impossible, it is essential to be humble enough to know that even if you believe there is a One True Way, you aren't completely sure what it is. It is better, IMHO, to pretend to be Socrates and be wise simply by admitting to knowing nothing. That is true wisdom.
So if you want to argue about the ethics of abortion, you must argue it rationally. There IS a single correct answer to this ethical problem. We just have to find it.
As far as tolerance of beliefs goes, you must not be completely tolerant. Most people use such a politically loaded word as "tolerance" as a boolean value. Its not and it mustn't be. I have no tolerance for religious jihad's or international terrorism, no matter what belief system they are rationalized by.
My level of tolerance is what I would call Americanized beliefs. This goes right back to the subject line of this thread, but we Americans are for the most part able to live with other Americans with quite a diversity of beliefs. We have Muslims living in our country who don't seem so interested in attacking countries who aren't theocracies. Black people and women have all the legal rights the rest of us do. We have Christians who aren't hanging witches and seem to have a good amount of tolerance for homosexuals.
So Americanization changes people's beliefs to be compatible with each other.
No page load times, the document is on your hard drive. It has good indexing and its hierarchial structure makes "drilling down deep" easy. And if you want, just throw the source document to TeX for the printout.
I like spaghetti code. I grew up on AppleSoft Basic and GW-Basic (thank you microsoft).
I read books I picked up from the library for free which showed Basic programs threaded back and forth in sequence, for no apparent reason, and like this sentence, confusing the heck out of me. I saw it as a challenge. I also loved condition gotos'. They were evil.
Gosub? Bah. They ran out of memory too much. Because I hadn't the discipline to Return before I Goto'd out of the subroutine. So I used Goto's to simulate procedures. I also eventually used Goto's in a way that I would eventually learn is like structured programming. Set some variables, goto here, do stuff, goto back, set the same variables something else, goto here, do stuff, maybe goto back. Or it would be the end of the program.
Then I got my first C book. I still haven't got the hang of this language. Before the book even mentions "goto" it gives me a lecture on how awful goto's are and that they can produce spaghetti code. But I *like* spaghetti code. And whats with these labels? Line numbers were so much cooler. But I took the man's advice, I used functions.
But Basic spoiled me. I was never an effective programmer since. It wasn't long after I learned of structured programming that I got my first book on C++ and was introduced to object-oriented programming. Now, for someone using structured techniques for a couple years, the need for objects seemed to make sense. But I was lost in a sea of hierarchial classes and virtual methods.
When I first went on the internet, I started learning all kinds of crazy languages, hoping some of them would be simpler. And there were many. Except for forth and common lisp. Except for ML and Smalltalk. So I am still toying with scheme as I speak, still trying to figure out what exactly the difference between a recursive and iterative process is.
Eventually, I'll figure out how to write spaghetti code in this otherwise clean and elegant language too. Continuations sound promising, from what it sounds like.
I wish the best of Dijkstra--hope he rests in peace. Honestly, I've never heard of him until this post to slashdot.
But maybe it is slightly better for him not to know that some of us never learn.
Personally, I think a part of the operating system's success is measured in dollars and cents. But you're right, part of its success is measured in how many people or organizations use the system.
In my opinion, the largest part of GNU/Linux's success is if the mere existance of the system has changed the way people think about software. It has certainly changed my perspective. I know some people don't believe this, but one of the goals of free software (as in speech) is Widespread Social Change. Not so much that software can be developed collobaratively, thats just creamy filling. But that lending out your software CDs to friends, family, or complete strangers doesn't have to be illegal and it doesn't have to be wrong.
This is a rather small element of our society that is going to change. Even so, it has to be done. Its for the better.
"I've already covered this one in part by saying that 'free software' (i.e., GPL'd software) is just as restricted by licensing terms as any other software, and moreso than some."
Slashdot Mirror
What does your sig mean? Does it mean anything at all?
Please, its driving me crazy.
What do we get?
What, exactly, is a cyberpunk? The very name sounds like "adolescent geeks" in my mind. Is there any way they can try to seem at least a little more legitamate?
I guess I still don't understand. Most likely the economics is more complex that I know.
Of course, the software that the government already has licenses for doesn't need to be rewritten. That would just be wasteful.
But when the government is paying for the software to be developed, couldn't they insist the software be free software? After all, they are the ones paying for it.
Hell no.
Note what I said about the system becoming whimsical.
Also, I believe in public education and government regulation. So libretarians isn't the answer.
Neither is arbitrarily choosing third party candidates.
Ignorant, not apathetic.
See the problem?
"This is all real software that is *really* expensive and really proprietary[...]."
Doesn't it make more sense to use that money to develop free software that is available to the tax payers rather than buying software licenses?
Dude, he linked to that letter. If you said you read it, then you should respond to them points.
What you are basically saying is that free software can't do this, this, or this yet. The letter, however, is saying that the government could maintain software that is available to the public. And if the country of Peru can afford to maintain software, then I'm sure the United States can.
So the letter that was linked to has already rebutted the points you are trying to make.
Maybe your real objection is with the GNU GPL as opposed to a BSD-style license. First, BSD software is free software also. Second, the stance that BSD is more "free" than the GPL has always seemed contradictory to me.
Here's an interesting rebuttal:
"The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state law, such as:
Free access to public information by the citizen.
Permanence of public data.
Security of the State and citezens.
To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.
To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guarenteed due to the availability of the source code.
To guarentee national security or the security of the State, it is indespensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code."
I don't there is anything I can say that can top that. It should be obvious that proprietary software is not a solution for government software.
I don't take pride in this, but there is one big reason I don't vote.
I don't know enough about the issues or the candidates.
I try to be informed, but I don't subscribe to a newspaper...I did once, but the newspaper's went unread because I really didn't have the time to read them (yet, I have time to post to slashdot, go figure).
I've picked up books from my college library, one about israel and palestine. It seemed like a good book introducing some of the issues that are happening over there. But I honestly never got beyond the first chapter. The book was kind of dense for someone with the typical American knowledge on foreign affairs.
And I've heard arguments such as yours, that democracy requires a lot more people voting. But it almost seems to me that having uninformed people vote doesn't make the system more democratic. It just makes the system more arbitrary and more whimsical.
And the politics really gets in the way. For instance, trying to find political information online is difficult, since you can never really trust the source of information. Especially as we got closer to voting time, everyone starts putting up articles supporting their own personal political agendas, and people like me are the worse off, since the uninformed are not going to know much difference between truth and outright lie anyway.
The solution, of course, is to get information from a variety of sources. But then we are back to the same problem of lack of time. Especially with the vast number of candidates and issues we have to decide upon come voting time.
Another thing I've finally figured out. I've tried watching CNN or FoxNews for a while, so that hopefully I would get some insight into what is happening. It took me a while to figure out that I'm not just dumb, but the television station doesn't actually tell you enough of what is happening, and certainly provide almost no context of the issue. And the biggest waste of time are them talk shows where they have a number of "analysts" debating a certain topic. Usually the person hosting the show (who usually gets the most time speaking), either (a) doesn't under the issues anymore than I do or (b) has some political agenda of their own. And given that these shows are on most of the time, television is practically useless for getting information.
So it seems to me that voting isn't just something you do once every two years. Its almost a part time job to keep up with the issues, and then research your candidates. Maybe I'm exagerating. But without spending a good amount of time on this, many of us couldn't tell the difference between one candidate and the other.
It would be great if someone could post where they get thier information from. Is there an unbiased MiddleEast for Dummies book somewhere? Where do we get information about the various political candidates that doesn't come from the candidates themselves?
So I may not be voting this November either. Maybe the best way would be for me to get information on the local politics, and then vote for the local candidates. But I'll have to see.
Sounds like an abuse of the patent system to me. If I understand correctly, the patent system was made so that inventors didn't have to keep their inventions secret. It just doesn't seem ethical to not allow other corporations use a technology just because someone else discovered it first.
Linux will solve all your problems.
"...but I can understand why a person whose income depended on their inventions would want to patent things."
Yes, but should we, as a society, let him?
I've been looking through my gnu emacs sources, there's some interesting things in here already that people don't know about, like the strokes package where supposedly you just wiggle your mouse around and that will execute your command.
:)
Now I think gnu emacs supports sound, so who knows elisp and is curious enough to set this kind of thing up?
"What is used to determine truth?"
I don't know. In some ways, determining truth is impossible. Like how do you know you're not the star in The Truman Show or trapped in the Matrix? But just because it may be impossible to tell what truth is doesn't mean they are all true to each individual, as is the meaning of relativism. And given that some truths may be impossible to know, what benefit do our beliefs grant us?
"I believe that the creators of computer programs own their creations."
This is where you and RMS disagree. Stallman puts quite a bit of reason behind why he believes his way.
Why do you believe this?
"Do we *really* need a reminder, every time we watch a movie, about the rights we lack with respect to it?"
:)
No silly, the warning is there for their protection, not yours
First, let me say that I am generally against abortions. Perhaps there are reasons for abortions under certain circumstances, but surely that doesn't mean that all abortions are ethical and should be lawful, but this is a digression to what I want to say.
And to avoid any sort of ad hominem attacks, I'll say that I am an atheist. But I am not politically active.
"Religion breeds intolerance not because of its belief in a God, however erroneous such a belief may be. It breeds intolerance by its very assertion that it has the 'one true, straight and narrow way' to God, setting its people apart from the rest of the world."
This may be your belief, but it is certainly not mine. There is, perhaps, a One True Way. Relativism simply doesn't hold to reason. I won't digress into my reasons though.
But the difference between people of religious zeal and others who do, in fact, believe in a One True Way is a lack of humility. While complete humility of one's beliefs is almost impossible, it is essential to be humble enough to know that even if you believe there is a One True Way, you aren't completely sure what it is. It is better, IMHO, to pretend to be Socrates and be wise simply by admitting to knowing nothing. That is true wisdom.
So if you want to argue about the ethics of abortion, you must argue it rationally. There IS a single correct answer to this ethical problem. We just have to find it.
As far as tolerance of beliefs goes, you must not be completely tolerant. Most people use such a politically loaded word as "tolerance" as a boolean value. Its not and it mustn't be. I have no tolerance for religious jihad's or international terrorism, no matter what belief system they are rationalized by.
My level of tolerance is what I would call Americanized beliefs. This goes right back to the subject line of this thread, but we Americans are for the most part able to live with other Americans with quite a diversity of beliefs. We have Muslims living in our country who don't seem so interested in attacking countries who aren't theocracies. Black people and women have all the legal rights the rest of us do. We have Christians who aren't hanging witches and seem to have a good amount of tolerance for homosexuals.
So Americanization changes people's beliefs to be compatible with each other.
This, I believe, is a good thing.
You want Texinfo.
Really.
No page load times, the document is on your hard drive. It has good indexing and its hierarchial structure makes "drilling down deep" easy. And if you want, just throw the source document to TeX for the printout.
Actually, I think it is. I tried Visual Basic for a little while.
But then a slashdotter told me Microsoft was evil.
I like spaghetti code. I grew up on AppleSoft Basic and GW-Basic (thank you microsoft).
I read books I picked up from the library for free which showed Basic programs threaded back and forth in sequence, for no apparent reason, and like this sentence, confusing the heck out of me. I saw it as a challenge. I also loved condition gotos'. They were evil.
Gosub? Bah. They ran out of memory too much. Because I hadn't the discipline to Return before I Goto'd out of the subroutine. So I used Goto's to simulate procedures. I also eventually used Goto's in a way that I would eventually learn is like structured programming. Set some variables, goto here, do stuff, goto back, set the same variables something else, goto here, do stuff, maybe goto back. Or it would be the end of the program.
Then I got my first C book. I still haven't got the hang of this language. Before the book even mentions "goto" it gives me a lecture on how awful goto's are and that they can produce spaghetti code. But I *like* spaghetti code. And whats with these labels? Line numbers were so much cooler. But I took the man's advice, I used functions.
But Basic spoiled me. I was never an effective programmer since. It wasn't long after I learned of structured programming that I got my first book on C++ and was introduced to object-oriented programming. Now, for someone using structured techniques for a couple years, the need for objects seemed to make sense. But I was lost in a sea of hierarchial classes and virtual methods.
When I first went on the internet, I started learning all kinds of crazy languages, hoping some of them would be simpler. And there were many. Except for forth and common lisp. Except for ML and Smalltalk. So I am still toying with scheme as I speak, still trying to figure out what exactly the difference between a recursive and iterative process is.
Eventually, I'll figure out how to write spaghetti code in this otherwise clean and elegant language too. Continuations sound promising, from what it sounds like.
I wish the best of Dijkstra--hope he rests in peace. Honestly, I've never heard of him until this post to slashdot.
But maybe it is slightly better for him not to know that some of us never learn.
Personally, I think a part of the operating system's success is measured in dollars and cents. But you're right, part of its success is measured in how many people or organizations use the system.
In my opinion, the largest part of GNU/Linux's success is if the mere existance of the system has changed the way people think about software. It has certainly changed my perspective. I know some people don't believe this, but one of the goals of free software (as in speech) is Widespread Social Change. Not so much that software can be developed collobaratively, thats just creamy filling. But that lending out your software CDs to friends, family, or complete strangers doesn't have to be illegal and it doesn't have to be wrong.
This is a rather small element of our society that is going to change. Even so, it has to be done. Its for the better.
Thanks, you should follow this guy around to translate him for those of us who don't use drugs.
buah hah hah
like 99 bottles of beer?
(define hypocracy 100)
(define (pot call)
(if (< call hypocracy)
'()
(cons '(call kettle black) (pot (- call 1)))))
(hypocracy 2000)
; haven't checked the code though...
"I've already covered this one in part by saying that 'free software' (i.e., GPL'd software) is just as restricted by licensing terms as any other software, and moreso than some."
YHBT. WHW. HAND.