As in that ad they ran a while ago with the scruffy guy with shifty eyes in a trench-coat walking around a grocery store, stuffing things into his pockets. As he walks out the door, the security guard stops him -- to hand him his receipt.
That's what this technology is leading to: no lines at checkout. Just push your cart through the scanner, either swipe your card or hand over the cash, and leave. Or, if you really trust the newfangled "radio bank card" that will shortly follow, just walk on out (or maybe press the yes button when your "watch" beeps and displays the charge amount).
Sure, it might make your purchases a little more trackable, if you pay electronically, but I doubt the option to use good old anonymous cash is going away any time soon. And these tags themselves are exactly equivalent to bar codes WRT privacy. ---
One of the great advances of web standards is that they have re-introduced the strict separation of structural markup from display markup.
Now they just have to throw out that display markup, Java, Javascript, Flash, and all the other idiotic plug-ins, and the web will be usable again! ---
Standards organizations are a scam. A (relatively) small group of people get together and say "This is the way it's going to be from now on." It's bullshit.
I've seen a lot of standards written, and rewritten, and rewritten, with never a fully-compliant implementation. No standards-body should ever release a standard without a fully-functional reference implementation; otherwise, the natural ambiguity of human language will always leave doubts about what is and isn't compliant. Standards are mostly useful when everyone who is expected to follow them has a part in making them (i.e. such as if all memory manufacturers get together and agree to make standard interchangeable chips); this is impractical for something like the WWW.
The WWW was defined by the first web-browsers. There has, in fact, been no truly useful addition to HTML since the first few years of development. It has only had gobs of useless and annoying eye-candy piled on top of (obscuring and interfering with) the content and navigation.
Every new browser worth mentioning still works with this original core functionality. This is the defacto standard
Defacto standards compliance:
-it works in every major version of IE and Netscape
-you can navigate with images turned off
-it works with Java turned off
-it works with Javascript turned off
-it works in Lynx
It's not hard to make a web page that everybody can use. Avoiding all the new features will generally make a better, less frustrating interface, too.
That's the problem: it's very easy to write good HTML. "Web designers" like to pretend that it's hard, that's what gives them a career. They sell flashy, expensive garbage that looks good to a manager viewing a local copy for the first five minutes. That's where the majority of the profit is, anyway. There's certainly a need for navigational interface designers and back-end programmers, but they hardly care about HTML features.
I'll grant that SATs are less than ideal. Like any test, you can cram for it and raise your score temporarily above what you would get on a typical day. So if you want to get a fair comparative appraisal, everybody has to do about the same amount of cramming (i.e. spend all their time cramming immediately before the test), and even then it'll be warped toward cramming ability. Unfortunately, that's the way the whole system is run: testing procedures in general reward cramming. If nothing else, being able to cram for a test demonstrates the ability to quickly assimilate and apply large amounts of information.
At any rate, students who can't study for and take tests won't do well in university courses, unless they take a total basket-weaving education. SATs are a reliable predictor of later test performance.
"Reforming" the admission process without reforming the general evaluation process won't produce good results, it'll just cause a lot of people to be let in and then fail. Even an ideal test of true ability would probably pass mostly the same people, it would just free up some of the time they have to waste on cramming (a big step forward if you ask me).
I'm afraid, though, that we'll never see real testing reform: it'll just be more excuses to let people through and not hurt their feelings by telling them that they're not smart enough, or haven't worked hard enough, or just plain haven't learned enough to get a degree.
This is just one more step in the general trend toward poorer formal education. A university degree means less and less a certain level of education and intelligence, and more and more a willingness to play along with irrational requirements and not offend anybody for years on end. The degree signifies that you've spent several years without rocking the boat enough to get kicked out.
I think the best thing I've ever read on the subject is part of Robert A. Heinlein's essay "The Happy Days Ahead" (available in the collection "Expanded Universe", one of my favorite books), in which he explains how to get a degree from the University of California without learning anything. He makes the valid point that there is nothing preventing one from getting a good education, just that "educators" are perfectly happy to give you signed documents saying that you've had an education without actually checking whether you've learned anything. It's starting to show it's age, however, in that the situation wasn't as bad when he wrote it around 1980. I don't believe he uses the term "politically correct" once, which any good modern essay on the sad state of university education would. ---
(maybe more accurately 2b, since it's part of the same issue)
You know, there's no reason we can't just pay people for making good stuff. They don't need a way to force them to pay, just a good argument that it is in the donor's own personal best interest to pay. ---
There's no way to add extra padding to your brain. It still has to slosh up against your hard skull. Also, your organs slosh against your rib cage, et c.
This sets a hard maximum limit on the level of acceleration that a human can survive. ---
Did I write one word about government intervention? No.
Did I say Open Source projects always kill proprietary competitors? No, I talked about how it happens often enough to discourage proprietary development. ---
NASA has been screwing up space flight for decades.
Private companies have long been willing and able to develop cheap commercial space flight, if only NASA wasn't involved. They wrap fifty tons of red tape around any project. Similarly troublesome agencies exist in practically every country with a space program. Since NASA went to the moon, every government thinks they must be doing things right, so they model their agencies after them.
But just look at the space shuttle: the ultimate hangar queen, and so damned complicated that one little easily-overlooked mistake causes the whole thing to blow up. Just look at that monstrosity: underpowered main engine, so solid rockets are needed to launch, extremely heavy frame drastically cutting down payload, etc. . Now, it's pretty good for their first try at a reuseable vehicle, but instead of learning from their mistakes and building something better they decided to build several copies of this disaster. Hell, even the Russians beat them at it: building one that could fly without humans onboard (sure they had the advantage of seeing the American one, but so did the Americans, after building the first one!).
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of smart people at NASA, but they are all stepping on each others' toes on a handful of projects. Every damned NASA toy is designed by committee, guaranteeing inefficiency and lots of failures.
Space flight isn't that hard! The V2 rockets were space-capable, and the Nazis were pumping them out by the thousands during war-time shortages, 60 years ago. All these years later, we ought to be able to produce orbit-capable rockets for the same price or cheaper. We would be able to, if a small team of good rocket scientists were given sufficient freedom and money to build a factory for these things (the price of one shuttle-launch would suffice).
Except for government intervention, any number of companies would have already done so. Wilder plans, such as beam propulsion and space catapults would follow quickly. We'd have people living on the moon and mining asteroids within the decade.
The question is, is it unintentional incompetence, or do governments prevent space travel because of their love of "stability"? It's all well and good to have one tangled bureaucracy sending out the occasional Mars probe, but having a million people living free up there who could drop big rocks on the old countries is enough to give anyone concerned with defense the screaming heebie-jeebies. ---
It is too obvious a joke to have originated in an unproduced movie script. I've heard it from so many sources that I suspect any "definitive" claim about its origin is constructed from pure weapons-grade bolognium.
Anyway, upsidasium is a far superior material for building spacecraft. ---
The big one is cloning. Every time a really good new program idea comes out and someone tries to sell it, a thousand hackers jump on it and clone it, guaranteeing that the originator won't make a dime. Sometimes, the clone is even inferior, but at $0 it's impossible to compete against.
Don't get me wrong, proprietary software companies do this too. In particular, MS has done this many times, so the entire software industry is terrified that if they try to sell a new product based on a new idea that it'll hardly be on the shelves before MS has their own version with a giant marketing budget and a hundred tied-sales.
The important question is, does Open Source innovation outweigh the Open Source threat of cloning?
I'm not convinced that it does right now. The conflict between open and closed source models is wasting a lot of effort and discouraging many people from creating. However, when the conflict is resolved, I'm sure the situation will be much better than an all-proprietary market.
Programmers need to be paid, somehow; there are some altruists, but in general people need a reward to expend their time and energy. While there are many indirect ways for Open Source software to be paid for, there is still no way to guarantee that just because you make a good piece of software that is widely-used by people who can afford to pay for it, that you will be paid for it. This is the heart of the conflict: Open Source is kicking out the old sources of income and hasn't fully established new ones.
I think the answer is the simplest possible one: just give money both to the people who make the best implementation, and the ones came up with the idea behind the software; by rewarding them, you encourage future innovation for your benefit. It's called Mass Market Busking.
If you hold on to your money unless someone finds a way to pry it from your hands, you can expect that people who want your money will try to pry the money from your hands. If you give money to anyone who benefits you, you can expect that people who want your money will just do work that benefits you. It's that simple.
Just as the people who bought Wolfenstein paid for Doom, and the people who bought Doom paid for Quake, Half-Life probably wouldn't have been made if nobody had paid for Quake. It isn't just the people you're paying who are being encouraged to do work for your benefit, but anyone who is capable of similar work. ---
Actually your argument that programmers would go impoverished without companies running the business is bullshit
I made no such argument (although Stallman himself flatly states that programmers will make less money with Free Software, as quoted). I'm well aware of the inefficiencies of proprietary software. I support the practice of writing free software (public domain, in particular), but not the demented Free Software theory of the FSF.
Stallman argues that programmers should put public interest before any self-consideration beyond survival, that they should make Free Software whether they profit from it in any way or not. If you don't believe me, go read the GNU manifesto and other documents at the FSF philosophy page. I didn't make those quotes up. --- Karma casino, place your bets!
...is that it tends to be promoted by lunatics and thereby lose its credibility.
Global warming makes sense in very simple terms: more CO_2 in greenhouse means a hotter greenhouse, so at first glance it should work that way on a planet. Of course, in the real world then you have to consider natural climate drift, the plants that absorb CO_2, and all sorts of other factors. We don't know all those other factors, so of course we don't know for sure what releasing CO_2 at the current rate will do. It's a big, tricky problem and "scientists" who act as if it's solved are impostors.
To put that in short form: I agree about the doubts expressed (though I'm skeptical about the conspiracy; "scientists" have been confidently wrong too often in the past for me to just assume a conspiracy is needed).
However, I imagine a lot of people skimmed this message (that I am replying to) and thought "Hmm, a creationist thinks that global warming is a leftist conspiracy. What a crackpot!" and moved on, disregarding any evidence presented, and subconsciously blacklisting future suggestions that global warming is less than scientific fact.
Whether you are a creationist, or just found the creationist site interesting or amusing, it hurts the case for skepticism about global warming to link to a site which criticizes evolution while criticizing the science behind global warming.
This isn't meant as criticism or a suggestion, just an observation. I wonder how many reasonable ideas get dismissed because they're promoted by people primarily identified by the unreasonable ideas they hold.
(incidentally, the linked creationist website was full of really bad logic; I'm not 100% percent convinced that evolution is correct (for that matter, I occasionally wonder if I'm a brain in a jar living a simulation... I'm 100% certain of no physical fact), but if it's not then our world was certainly created by a trickster god because there is no rational explanation for such things as ancient fossils without an alien intelligence playing a huge prank on us. Arguments that He did such a sloppy job that we can catch him at it are contrived and unconvincing.) --- Karma casino, place your bets!
Is Microsoft The Great Satan? Apparently they're just one unusually large and nasty demon in the horde of Hell-spawned proprietary developers.
This guy is a seriously demented nutcase, as are his followers. I've been saying so for years.
There's a difference between reasonable free software supporters who see advantages in efficiency, education, and security, and Free Software fanatics who see a moral crusade against evil monsters releasing programs without giving away the source code (horrors!).
Various RMS quotes (gathered from the philosophy page at the FSF):
"GNU will remove operating system software from the realm of competition. You will not be able to get an edge in this area"
(Now where would someone see a threat to innovation in such an innocuous remark?)
"If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."
"it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now."
"All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax: Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development."
(and he claims not to be a communist!)
"[in some utopian future where people work 10 hours per week] There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming."
(there never was a need; any programmer could survive flipping burgers now)
"The economic argument goes like this: ``I want to get rich (usually described inaccurately as `making a living')...''"
He honestly seems to support that programmers should be materially impoverished, not enriched, by their rare and highly useful talents. They should do it "for the good of humanity". To Hell with a new computer every year, high-speed internet, and a comfortable home for your family.
There's every bit as good a reason to argue that people should let any stranger come along and take his car whenever one wants (see how much more use it gets! there's a profit for society!), or farm and give away all the food beyond what they need to survive (how evil to be willing to let it rot if nobody is willing to pay for it!).
But none of those ideas make sense. People want more money than they need to survive; generally the more the better. People can be selfless in emergencies, but on the whole, they look out for themselves first. Telling people that they shouldn't follow their own self-interest may be met with public applause but will be disregarded in action, assuming that they won't serve themselves is just plain wrong.
These economically unsound ideals are exactly why the Free Software movement is so often compared to communism: if you go by the FSF propaganda, it is based on the same wrong assumptions about human nature!
Aside from a few fanatics and students (who make lousy stuff because they're just learning how), people program for some benefit from the final result. Many free software programmers just want the software they're working on. Some want to build up their resumes, others plan to sell documentation, service, or even merchandise. Some hope for donations or sweetheart stock deals.
The reality is generally quite sensible. We're still working out how to properly reward innovation, and there's still a lot of unsound FSF rhetoric infecting most discussions, but when you look at actions rather than words, progress is occuring toward a reliable system of rewards.
While I think RMS tells himself he's being self-sacrificing and noble by not "getting rich by cheating his neighbors", I think he's got some ulterior motive. Namely, I think he wants to be a celebrity. He's a ruthless self-promoter through putting his name on everything GNU and FSF then pushing the GNU name (anyone remember LiGNUx?). Like communist revolutionaries, idealistic rhetoric masks private ambition.
RMS and the FSF are threats to any reasonable economic behavior WRT software, whether free or proprietary. We have to be ready to denounce such lunatics if we don't want to be tarred with the same brush. --- Karma casino, place your bets!
Whether it's registered or not, it's clearly been promoted by the holder as a general term, and the "trademark violation" has been knowingly tolerated for a year or so without action. He doesn't have a leg to stand on.
But the one that kills me is "trademark pending" on Secure Shell.
How utterly pathetic.
Have I mentioned my pending trademarks on "Word Processor", "Web Browser", and "Operating System"? I'll be busy sending out letters like his for a while myself. ---
Sounds like a litho-fab scanning tunneling microscope. Lots of people have been talking about them. It's about time someone talked about production. ---
Maybe you should study a little more humor, before you go shooting your mouth off about things you obviously know nothing about.
First of all, it was clearly a joke.
Secondly, Jeebus made the world in his sacred image, which mortals are not permitted to look upon. However, he doesn't take offence at the attempts, he just sends his microscope gnomes to fake all the results of particle physics, just as he sends telescope gnomes to hold pictures of galaxies up between the astronomer and the big cow's hide with holes poked through it to let in the light of the phlogiston. He enjoys it, and loves silly people like scientists. ---
There is also no conclusive proof that there are no invisible Telescope Gnomes who (delightful tricksters!) remove the lenses from telescopes and hold up carefully painted pictures of supernovae between the observer and the big hide with the holes poked in it.
Don't laugh until you've done the research. Plane'arium workers consistently have large gardens, with many garden gnomes. Coincidence?
Unlike others of their kind, they worked out Step 2 early in the game. ---
Slashdot Mirror
As in that ad they ran a while ago with the scruffy guy with shifty eyes in a trench-coat walking around a grocery store, stuffing things into his pockets. As he walks out the door, the security guard stops him -- to hand him his receipt.
That's what this technology is leading to: no lines at checkout. Just push your cart through the scanner, either swipe your card or hand over the cash, and leave. Or, if you really trust the newfangled "radio bank card" that will shortly follow, just walk on out (or maybe press the yes button when your "watch" beeps and displays the charge amount).
Sure, it might make your purchases a little more trackable, if you pay electronically, but I doubt the option to use good old anonymous cash is going away any time soon. And these tags themselves are exactly equivalent to bar codes WRT privacy.
---
One of the great advances of web standards is that they have re-introduced the strict separation of structural markup from display markup.
Now they just have to throw out that display markup, Java, Javascript, Flash, and all the other idiotic plug-ins, and the web will be usable again!
---
Standards organizations are a scam. A (relatively) small group of people get together and say "This is the way it's going to be from now on." It's bullshit.
I've seen a lot of standards written, and rewritten, and rewritten, with never a fully-compliant implementation. No standards-body should ever release a standard without a fully-functional reference implementation; otherwise, the natural ambiguity of human language will always leave doubts about what is and isn't compliant. Standards are mostly useful when everyone who is expected to follow them has a part in making them (i.e. such as if all memory manufacturers get together and agree to make standard interchangeable chips); this is impractical for something like the WWW.
The WWW was defined by the first web-browsers. There has, in fact, been no truly useful addition to HTML since the first few years of development. It has only had gobs of useless and annoying eye-candy piled on top of (obscuring and interfering with) the content and navigation.
Every new browser worth mentioning still works with this original core functionality. This is the defacto standard
Defacto standards compliance:
-it works in every major version of IE and Netscape
-you can navigate with images turned off
-it works with Java turned off
-it works with Javascript turned off
-it works in Lynx
It's not hard to make a web page that everybody can use. Avoiding all the new features will generally make a better, less frustrating interface, too.
That's the problem: it's very easy to write good HTML. "Web designers" like to pretend that it's hard, that's what gives them a career. They sell flashy, expensive garbage that looks good to a manager viewing a local copy for the first five minutes. That's where the majority of the profit is, anyway. There's certainly a need for navigational interface designers and back-end programmers, but they hardly care about HTML features.
So let's turn the tables. Everybody use Lynx!
---
[NC = No Content]
---
I'll grant that SATs are less than ideal. Like any test, you can cram for it and raise your score temporarily above what you would get on a typical day. So if you want to get a fair comparative appraisal, everybody has to do about the same amount of cramming (i.e. spend all their time cramming immediately before the test), and even then it'll be warped toward cramming ability. Unfortunately, that's the way the whole system is run: testing procedures in general reward cramming. If nothing else, being able to cram for a test demonstrates the ability to quickly assimilate and apply large amounts of information.
At any rate, students who can't study for and take tests won't do well in university courses, unless they take a total basket-weaving education. SATs are a reliable predictor of later test performance.
"Reforming" the admission process without reforming the general evaluation process won't produce good results, it'll just cause a lot of people to be let in and then fail. Even an ideal test of true ability would probably pass mostly the same people, it would just free up some of the time they have to waste on cramming (a big step forward if you ask me).
I'm afraid, though, that we'll never see real testing reform: it'll just be more excuses to let people through and not hurt their feelings by telling them that they're not smart enough, or haven't worked hard enough, or just plain haven't learned enough to get a degree.
This is just one more step in the general trend toward poorer formal education. A university degree means less and less a certain level of education and intelligence, and more and more a willingness to play along with irrational requirements and not offend anybody for years on end. The degree signifies that you've spent several years without rocking the boat enough to get kicked out.
I think the best thing I've ever read on the subject is part of Robert A. Heinlein's essay "The Happy Days Ahead" (available in the collection "Expanded Universe", one of my favorite books), in which he explains how to get a degree from the University of California without learning anything. He makes the valid point that there is nothing preventing one from getting a good education, just that "educators" are perfectly happy to give you signed documents saying that you've had an education without actually checking whether you've learned anything. It's starting to show it's age, however, in that the situation wasn't as bad when he wrote it around 1980. I don't believe he uses the term "politically correct" once, which any good modern essay on the sad state of university education would.
---
Oh, you mean kinda like what Microsoft did to Netscape with explorer?
Yeah like I talked about in the second fscking paragraph!
You know, the one that starts with "Don't get me wrong...", as you just did...
---
(maybe more accurately 2b, since it's part of the same issue)
You know, there's no reason we can't just pay people for making good stuff. They don't need a way to force them to pay, just a good argument that it is in the donor's own personal best interest to pay.
---
There's no way to add extra padding to your brain. It still has to slosh up against your hard skull. Also, your organs slosh against your rib cage, et c.
This sets a hard maximum limit on the level of acceleration that a human can survive.
---
Did I write one word about government intervention? No.
Did I say Open Source projects always kill proprietary competitors? No, I talked about how it happens often enough to discourage proprietary development.
---
Dump NASA!
NASA has been screwing up space flight for decades.
Private companies have long been willing and able to develop cheap commercial space flight, if only NASA wasn't involved. They wrap fifty tons of red tape around any project. Similarly troublesome agencies exist in practically every country with a space program. Since NASA went to the moon, every government thinks they must be doing things right, so they model their agencies after them.
But just look at the space shuttle: the ultimate hangar queen, and so damned complicated that one little easily-overlooked mistake causes the whole thing to blow up. Just look at that monstrosity: underpowered main engine, so solid rockets are needed to launch, extremely heavy frame drastically cutting down payload, etc. . Now, it's pretty good for their first try at a reuseable vehicle, but instead of learning from their mistakes and building something better they decided to build several copies of this disaster. Hell, even the Russians beat them at it: building one that could fly without humans onboard (sure they had the advantage of seeing the American one, but so did the Americans, after building the first one!).
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of smart people at NASA, but they are all stepping on each others' toes on a handful of projects. Every damned NASA toy is designed by committee, guaranteeing inefficiency and lots of failures.
Space flight isn't that hard! The V2 rockets were space-capable, and the Nazis were pumping them out by the thousands during war-time shortages, 60 years ago. All these years later, we ought to be able to produce orbit-capable rockets for the same price or cheaper. We would be able to, if a small team of good rocket scientists were given sufficient freedom and money to build a factory for these things (the price of one shuttle-launch would suffice).
Except for government intervention, any number of companies would have already done so. Wilder plans, such as beam propulsion and space catapults would follow quickly. We'd have people living on the moon and mining asteroids within the decade.
The question is, is it unintentional incompetence, or do governments prevent space travel because of their love of "stability"? It's all well and good to have one tangled bureaucracy sending out the occasional Mars probe, but having a million people living free up there who could drop big rocks on the old countries is enough to give anyone concerned with defense the screaming heebie-jeebies.
---
It is too obvious a joke to have originated in an unproduced movie script. I've heard it from so many sources that I suspect any "definitive" claim about its origin is constructed from pure weapons-grade bolognium.
Anyway, upsidasium is a far superior material for building spacecraft.
---
The big one is cloning. Every time a really good new program idea comes out and someone tries to sell it, a thousand hackers jump on it and clone it, guaranteeing that the originator won't make a dime. Sometimes, the clone is even inferior, but at $0 it's impossible to compete against.
Don't get me wrong, proprietary software companies do this too. In particular, MS has done this many times, so the entire software industry is terrified that if they try to sell a new product based on a new idea that it'll hardly be on the shelves before MS has their own version with a giant marketing budget and a hundred tied-sales.
The important question is, does Open Source innovation outweigh the Open Source threat of cloning?
I'm not convinced that it does right now. The conflict between open and closed source models is wasting a lot of effort and discouraging many people from creating. However, when the conflict is resolved, I'm sure the situation will be much better than an all-proprietary market.
Programmers need to be paid, somehow; there are some altruists, but in general people need a reward to expend their time and energy. While there are many indirect ways for Open Source software to be paid for, there is still no way to guarantee that just because you make a good piece of software that is widely-used by people who can afford to pay for it, that you will be paid for it. This is the heart of the conflict: Open Source is kicking out the old sources of income and hasn't fully established new ones.
I think the answer is the simplest possible one: just give money both to the people who make the best implementation, and the ones came up with the idea behind the software; by rewarding them, you encourage future innovation for your benefit. It's called Mass Market Busking.
If you hold on to your money unless someone finds a way to pry it from your hands, you can expect that people who want your money will try to pry the money from your hands. If you give money to anyone who benefits you, you can expect that people who want your money will just do work that benefits you. It's that simple.
Just as the people who bought Wolfenstein paid for Doom, and the people who bought Doom paid for Quake, Half-Life probably wouldn't have been made if nobody had paid for Quake. It isn't just the people you're paying who are being encouraged to do work for your benefit, but anyone who is capable of similar work.
---
Actually your argument that programmers would go impoverished without companies running the business is bullshit
I made no such argument (although Stallman himself flatly states that programmers will make less money with Free Software, as quoted). I'm well aware of the inefficiencies of proprietary software. I support the practice of writing free software (public domain, in particular), but not the demented Free Software theory of the FSF.
Stallman argues that programmers should put public interest before any self-consideration beyond survival, that they should make Free Software whether they profit from it in any way or not. If you don't believe me, go read the GNU manifesto and other documents at the FSF philosophy page. I didn't make those quotes up.
---
Karma casino, place your bets!
...is that it tends to be promoted by lunatics and thereby lose its credibility.
Global warming makes sense in very simple terms: more CO_2 in greenhouse means a hotter greenhouse, so at first glance it should work that way on a planet. Of course, in the real world then you have to consider natural climate drift, the plants that absorb CO_2, and all sorts of other factors. We don't know all those other factors, so of course we don't know for sure what releasing CO_2 at the current rate will do. It's a big, tricky problem and "scientists" who act as if it's solved are impostors.
To put that in short form: I agree about the doubts expressed (though I'm skeptical about the conspiracy; "scientists" have been confidently wrong too often in the past for me to just assume a conspiracy is needed).
However, I imagine a lot of people skimmed this message (that I am replying to) and thought "Hmm, a creationist thinks that global warming is a leftist conspiracy. What a crackpot!" and moved on, disregarding any evidence presented, and subconsciously blacklisting future suggestions that global warming is less than scientific fact.
Whether you are a creationist, or just found the creationist site interesting or amusing, it hurts the case for skepticism about global warming to link to a site which criticizes evolution while criticizing the science behind global warming.
This isn't meant as criticism or a suggestion, just an observation. I wonder how many reasonable ideas get dismissed because they're promoted by people primarily identified by the unreasonable ideas they hold.
(incidentally, the linked creationist website was full of really bad logic; I'm not 100% percent convinced that evolution is correct (for that matter, I occasionally wonder if I'm a brain in a jar living a simulation... I'm 100% certain of no physical fact), but if it's not then our world was certainly created by a trickster god because there is no rational explanation for such things as ancient fossils without an alien intelligence playing a huge prank on us. Arguments that He did such a sloppy job that we can catch him at it are contrived and unconvincing.)
---
Karma casino, place your bets!
As in "Life, liberty, and..."
Profit makes me happy, anyway...
---
Karma casino, place your bets!
He does talk that way.
Is Microsoft The Great Satan? Apparently they're just one unusually large and nasty demon in the horde of Hell-spawned proprietary developers.
This guy is a seriously demented nutcase, as are his followers. I've been saying so for years.
There's a difference between reasonable free software supporters who see advantages in efficiency, education, and security, and Free Software fanatics who see a moral crusade against evil monsters releasing programs without giving away the source code (horrors!).
Various RMS quotes (gathered from the philosophy page at the FSF):
"GNU will remove operating system software from the realm of competition. You will not be able to get an edge in this area"
(Now where would someone see a threat to innovation in such an innocuous remark?)
"If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."
"it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now."
"All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax: Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development."
(and he claims not to be a communist!)
"[in some utopian future where people work 10 hours per week] There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming."
(there never was a need; any programmer could survive flipping burgers now)
"The economic argument goes like this: ``I want to get rich (usually described inaccurately as `making a living')...''"
He honestly seems to support that programmers should be materially impoverished, not enriched, by their rare and highly useful talents. They should do it "for the good of humanity". To Hell with a new computer every year, high-speed internet, and a comfortable home for your family.
There's every bit as good a reason to argue that people should let any stranger come along and take his car whenever one wants (see how much more use it gets! there's a profit for society!), or farm and give away all the food beyond what they need to survive (how evil to be willing to let it rot if nobody is willing to pay for it!).
But none of those ideas make sense. People want more money than they need to survive; generally the more the better. People can be selfless in emergencies, but on the whole, they look out for themselves first. Telling people that they shouldn't follow their own self-interest may be met with public applause but will be disregarded in action, assuming that they won't serve themselves is just plain wrong.
These economically unsound ideals are exactly why the Free Software movement is so often compared to communism: if you go by the FSF propaganda, it is based on the same wrong assumptions about human nature!
Aside from a few fanatics and students (who make lousy stuff because they're just learning how), people program for some benefit from the final result. Many free software programmers just want the software they're working on. Some want to build up their resumes, others plan to sell documentation, service, or even merchandise. Some hope for donations or sweetheart stock deals.
The reality is generally quite sensible. We're still working out how to properly reward innovation, and there's still a lot of unsound FSF rhetoric infecting most discussions, but when you look at actions rather than words, progress is occuring toward a reliable system of rewards.
While I think RMS tells himself he's being self-sacrificing and noble by not "getting rich by cheating his neighbors", I think he's got some ulterior motive. Namely, I think he wants to be a celebrity. He's a ruthless self-promoter through putting his name on everything GNU and FSF then pushing the GNU name (anyone remember LiGNUx?). Like communist revolutionaries, idealistic rhetoric masks private ambition.
RMS and the FSF are threats to any reasonable economic behavior WRT software, whether free or proprietary. We have to be ready to denounce such lunatics if we don't want to be tarred with the same brush.
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Karma casino, place your bets!
Whether it's registered or not, it's clearly been promoted by the holder as a general term, and the "trademark violation" has been knowingly tolerated for a year or so without action. He doesn't have a leg to stand on.
But the one that kills me is "trademark pending" on Secure Shell.
How utterly pathetic.
Have I mentioned my pending trademarks on "Word Processor", "Web Browser", and "Operating System"? I'll be busy sending out letters like his for a while myself.
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Sounds like a litho-fab scanning tunneling microscope. Lots of people have been talking about them. It's about time someone talked about production.
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they had to be smoking something to come up with:
"Hey man, let's land this thing!"
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Every once in a while, NASA does something amazing.
Amazing step 1: land non-lander on Eros
Amazing step 2: use same non-lander to carve Eros into giant erotic sculpture.
Amazing result 1: Public interest in space increases by 3000%, as do NASA's budget and high-power telescope sales.
Amazing result 2: New "child safe" digital telescopes that won't point at Eros (or Venus, after the finish that project).
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Have you ever acted in an independent film in which you sat around eating pudding with other... cowboys?
(To MrP: His name is Jeebus! You will burn for your spelling error!)
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Maybe you should study a little more humor, before you go shooting your mouth off about things you obviously know nothing about.
First of all, it was clearly a joke.
Secondly, Jeebus made the world in his sacred image, which mortals are not permitted to look upon. However, he doesn't take offence at the attempts, he just sends his microscope gnomes to fake all the results of particle physics, just as he sends telescope gnomes to hold pictures of galaxies up between the astronomer and the big cow's hide with holes poked through it to let in the light of the phlogiston. He enjoys it, and loves silly people like scientists.
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Devious Carnivore Substitute (the program with 1000 faces)
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There is also no conclusive proof that there are no invisible Telescope Gnomes who (delightful tricksters!) remove the lenses from telescopes and hold up carefully painted pictures of supernovae between the observer and the big hide with the holes poked in it.
Don't laugh until you've done the research. Plane'arium workers consistently have large gardens, with many garden gnomes. Coincidence?
Unlike others of their kind, they worked out Step 2 early in the game.
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...science has faltered in the face of overwhelming religious evidence. Praise Jeebus!
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