As the submitter of this story, I'd like to say a couple of things:
1. Sorry. It wasn't meant to be submitted anonymously, I realised I'd done it only after I hit the final submit button. I assume I'd highlighted my name on the submission form or something and hit space, or otherwise cleared it. Either that or there's a bug in Slashcode...;-)
2. The original was a little longer, and people complaining that I didn't read the article I linked to would have seen that the comment about the US agreeing to a 7% cut in emissions was coupled with a comment implying they'd gone back on their word. I assume the Slashdot editors thought I was trolling or something - no, I'm just pissed off about the issue. The US did agree to such a thing, that is, that's what they negotiated and agreed to at the Kyoto summit. They then went back on that agreement, with the legislature and Bush both rejecting what they'd signed up for.
What's most interesting about the government's assertion is what it doesn't say: It argues that filters successfully blocks unwanted Web pages. What it doesn't say is that the filters also block legitimate websites.
then why doesnt he advocate the use of the term "GNU/FreeBSD" or the generalized "GNU/*BSD"
Because the BSDs use the BSD user-land. Most have a few tools from the GNU project, but essentially the userland is the BSD core and BSD will work without any of the GNU tools being installed at all.
It's that simple. Take the GNU operating system. Add the Linux kernel (because the GNU kernel, HURD, wasn't ready when Linux was written). What do you have?
If you're a Slashdot AC troll, GNU + Linux = Linux. If you're RMS, Deborah or Ian, me, or half a dozen other people who feel that credit should be given where credit is due, it's GNU/Linux. BSD is BSD, it isn't GNU + anything, therefore it doesn't have GNU in the title.
It would be perfectly possible, incidentally, to create a BSD/Linux, which uses the BSD Init (no, Slackware's is not the same thing), uses the BSD Login and getty routines, logins boot into ASH or KSH, etc. I wish someone would, the Linux kernel has so much support, and the BSD userland is just so logical and pleasant to use.
(Incidentally, how long before this gets modded down? Every time I post anything remotely of the "RMS is not an eye-swivelling loony" variety I get modded down. It's very disheartening, and a somewhat ludicrious position when agreeing with the person who has done more for the free software community than any other living person (not to mention, though he'd hate it being said, the open source community too), is opening yourself up to accusations of trolling and flamebaiting.)
I'll probably be modded down for this, but what the hell...
I get all my news from slashdot and all my religious teachings from fortune. Am I a nerd yet?
No, it just explains why you think a piece of pseudo-libertarian hogwash should be moderated to +143 Insightful.
Let's deal with his points though:
Envy and Rightousness
This one's bizarre. The New Deal was about reconstructing America and preventing a potential revolution that would have destroyed capitalism in the US for good. It was dealing with a time in which most people were have-nots, and they were have-nots not because they, personally, had done any wrong, but because chronic mismanagement of the stock market, until then largely left to market forces, had resulted in a collapse of the American economy, with thousands of employers forced to close, and tens of millions thrown out of work. Savings and other pools of cash that might have saved the economy were wiped out because those who did the right thing, and kept their money in the banks, ceased to keep their assets when the banks were wiped out due to blind panic by others.
In such circumstances in other countries, be it Russia, whose economy was crippled in World War One, and Germany, whose economy was crippled by a house-of-cards effect from the US collapse, revolutions are made from. Russia's people went into armed revolt, resulting, evetually, in the Soviet Union and the world's first attempt at Communism. Germany's business leaders twisted the arm of the Kaiser in a "peaceful" revolution that put Hitler and the Fascist Nazi party in power. And in America, as the Hoover administration wound down, Communists began to organise in the US and the US was in serious danger of seeing its own violent and bloody revolution.
Big Government the result of Envious people wanting to steal from the successful? Erm, nope. Government reorganising to place faith back in the capitalist system to prevent people living in poverty through no fault of their own overthrowing the government in favour of a temporary and stupid solution? Yes. Exactly it.
As far as the point about government regulating industry goes, this has been a central plank of government throughout the entirety of the 20th Century and the tail end of the 19th. The railways were regulated. Antitrust legislation, dealing with the abuses of monopolies, were advocated and signed into law by that great Republican hero Theodore Roosevelt. AT&T's president in the early 1900's was quoted as saying that regulation was a necessary burden for any monopoly. FDR's reforms were aimed predominantly at the financial sector, in many cases to ensure dishonest but ungovernable-without-reform practices were wiped out. They worked too - do you have a problem putting your money in a bank? Would you have had the same confidence in 1932?
Further, wanting businesses to be regulated has nothing, zilch, to do with wanting government to spy on private individuals. There is no connection.
Inaction and voting for the GOP
The GOP is not a civil liberties party, there is no connection between "small government" and civil liberties. The GOP hasn't been pro-liberties since the early part of the 20th Century. In fairness, your respondant admits that the GOP is not the party to vote for to protect civil liberties, but does so using the inane and absurd argument that "smaller government" = "more civil liberties".
The party which consistantly avoids "smaller government" tends to be the one that supports restrictions on the behaviour of law enforcement agencies and supports people having control over their own bodies. "Smaller government" doesn't just mean paying lower taxes, but also throwing out the baby with the bathwater - dismantling those institutions and parts of the constitution designed to protect people from those with power, whether that's ensuring that the resources of certain states cannot be used to prevent people of a particular colour from voting in an election to ensuring that the reason someone is convicted of a crime is that they did it, not that they were tricked into a confession.
It gets tiresome to hear the same old crap, that people opposed to government intrusion are natural GOP supporters, despite it being the party of reducing restrictions on government agencies, the party that's trying to use taxation money to fund religion, the party that's most in favour of dictating what people can do with their own bodies (be it through the WoD or the anti-Choice issue.)
It isn't. The GOP is not the civil liberties party. It hasn't been for 70-80 years, and it probably will not be again in our lifetimes.
What, exactly, does the RIAA have to do with any of this? Other than a few DVD Audio discs (both of them) and DVD Music Videos, the honoured members of the RIAA have little or no involvement in DVDs, and almost certainly don't care what the Chinese and Taiwanese do to the format.
"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
CD players use DACs, not ADCs. VCRs probably have DACs too (not ADCs) for outputting their control screens (ie where you set the clock, etc), again not ADCs.
An "intelligent" ADC may add to the costs of digital cordless phones, cellphones, CD burners, and computers, but to the best of my knowledge, only the first is cheap enough for $5 to make a major price difference.
Except that it was at least accurate. Vint Cerf, who, with Jon Postel really can claim to have "invented the Internet", backs up Gore and believes he made a significant difference. Read the Cerf article.
Which would you rather was in the public domain, available for widespread use with no single entity able to control or prevent its use, as fast as possible? Something to cure a horrific disease, or a cartoon mouse?
Yeah, if the part that the Linux kernel fills is so insignificant, then why the hell didn't Stallman finish up Hurd and get a complete "GNU System" out on the street?
It's not insignificant, it's a small part of the whole. I wouldn't drive without tires on a car, and I wouldn't necessarily believe that the team who can design a good engine, body shell, and comfy seats, is also going to be good at building tires. Or are you driving around in a Firestone Expedition?
If it's free (as in speech), then I should be able to call it Boingix if I want.
You can. Nobody's stopping you. RMS is asking you, as a courtesy, to call it GNU/Linux. He's also not doing favours, such as linking to and speaking for, organisations that slap him in the face by refusing to recognise GNU's involvement in the Linux-based OS.
I think he has a right to be annoyed. I think Joel Barr is out of line. He is, of course, entitled to say whatever brain dead crap comes into his head, but equally the rest of us are entitled to consider his output incompetent, unfair, tripe. He proved his worth when he laid into, and lied about, MPlayer, and the anti-Stallman rant has done nothing but confirm the view most of us formed after that debacle.
No, it wouldn't. Maybe a small part of the engine, but as basic, complex, components from the shell to the compiler were built by GNU, it's reasonable to suggest that GNU is responsible for 90% of what we'd now call, misleadingly, a Linux system.
(And, yeah, I know about XFree86. I also know about GNOME. X is only the device driver.)
Look, if you designed a car and hadn't quite finished the tires yet, and someone else designed a tire, and the car was promptly released, sold, and named after the guy to made the tire, without any mention of your design, wouldn't you get a little peeved?
Wouldn't you be doubly peeved if the project you put together to design the car was, in your eyes, more important than the end product, with the end product essentially being to validate the model you'd used? And yet your project is never mentioned, but the guy who made the tires is. And worse, the guy who made the tires isn't just getting the credit, but announcing that the methodology you used to design the rest is bunk?
Don't know. This is the first Niven I've read too. Generally friends tell me to steer clear of his co-authored stuff, but that seems to be general advice (Pohl and Asimov also apparently suffer when coauthoring.) I can't comment as I haven't actually read the stuff.
You're right, he's first class. Easily read with a lot of things to think about.
FWIW, most DVDs are not "protected" with Macrovision, not in my experience anyway. It took me six months before I had to buy an RF converter for mine, before that I hooked the DVD player up to the TV through the VCR.
Studios who use Macrovision have to pay for the privilege. This is why CSS is almost ubiquitous and Macrovision isn't. Interestingly, I'm finding a lot of recent releases of "old" (ie British-made Hitchcocks, etc) and horror movies are being released in budget form in regionless, CSS-less, DVD form.
Sun has not indicated it will enforce patents against implementors of Java. Microsoft has. They're on record of saying they will. THAT is the difference.
Solaris was not really a sci-fi movie. Yes, visually and superficially it had all the characteristics of a sci-fi movie : space travel, aliens, technology from the future, etc, but that wasnt the point of the movie. The director was really exploring the boundaries between perception and reality. If your mind is convinced that something is real, is that reality distinguishable in any way from a "reality" that exists outside of your mind?
One could make the same comment about eXistance, even The Matrix, and other pieces most people would consider science fiction.
Good science fiction is rarely simply about the future or space travel or anything like that. These are plot elements, or devices. I've just spent the weekend reading Niven's Flatlander, which nominally is about a detective in the future with a psychic imaginary arm. But the core of most of the stories is about human life, its value, and the many ways in which it can be undermined.
Solaris is arguably soft science fiction, in that the principles and technologies within the story are not really explored. But that doesn't change the setting, or that Tarkovsky is using a world deliberately unrecognisable through scientific progress in order to explore a set of ideas.
It's certainly as deserving of the tag as, say, The Phantom Menace. And, in its ability to make the viewer think, is a much better film.
Out of interest, when did Kurt express opposition to a fork?
My limited understanding, and perhaps things have moved on since then, is that Kurt wants control over his own project, but he must have GPLd it for a reason, and I always assumed that would have been so that others who wanted to try other things with his code can do that without needing him to change the direction of his work.
Is there a mailing list posting from Kurt clarifying his position?
Nice AOS4 screenshots. No, honestly. They had a whole range of looks, and it's pretty clear what you can customise. And to my eyes at least, they've done a good job - they've gone in the opposite direction to the trend at present, which is a good thing, because the current trend is to disguise buttons as background and hide critical user interface functionality in order to "prettify" it.
The Hyperion people seem to have gone for colour and textures instead, as subtle or unsubtle as the user wishes. So the GUI stays user friendly.
GNU is the name of the operating system project started by Richard Stallman. It is not a "group" that "ported Linux to the 486" or a "licence". The first functional implementation of GNU was created by Linus Torvalds when he ported GNU to run over his Linux kernel. The fact that this combination is largely GNU software yet is called "Linux" is the bone of some contention from Stallman and others who worked on GNU, but that's another thread.
No, it doesn't. Windows is not a product whose copyright is protected through the use of an access control mechanism, and even if it were, producing a modular version, per-se, is not manufacturing a mechanism to bypass such a control mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
As the submitter of this story, I'd like to say a couple of things:
;-)
1. Sorry. It wasn't meant to be submitted anonymously, I realised I'd done it only after I hit the final submit button. I assume I'd highlighted my name on the submission form or something and hit space, or otherwise cleared it. Either that or there's a bug in Slashcode...
2. The original was a little longer, and people complaining that I didn't read the article I linked to would have seen that the comment about the US agreeing to a 7% cut in emissions was coupled with a comment implying they'd gone back on their word. I assume the Slashdot editors thought I was trolling or something - no, I'm just pissed off about the issue. The US did agree to such a thing, that is, that's what they negotiated and agreed to at the Kyoto summit. They then went back on that agreement, with the legislature and Bush both rejecting what they'd signed up for.
Depressing.
What's most interesting about the government's assertion is what it doesn't say: It argues that filters successfully blocks unwanted Web pages. What it doesn't say is that the filters also block legitimate websites.
If it isn't official Cato policy, why is it appearing on their website, with no disclaimer to the affect that it doesn't reflect official Cato policy?
Because the BSDs use the BSD user-land. Most have a few tools from the GNU project, but essentially the userland is the BSD core and BSD will work without any of the GNU tools being installed at all.
It's that simple. Take the GNU operating system. Add the Linux kernel (because the GNU kernel, HURD, wasn't ready when Linux was written). What do you have?
If you're a Slashdot AC troll, GNU + Linux = Linux. If you're RMS, Deborah or Ian, me, or half a dozen other people who feel that credit should be given where credit is due, it's GNU/Linux. BSD is BSD, it isn't GNU + anything, therefore it doesn't have GNU in the title.
It would be perfectly possible, incidentally, to create a BSD/Linux, which uses the BSD Init (no, Slackware's is not the same thing), uses the BSD Login and getty routines, logins boot into ASH or KSH, etc. I wish someone would, the Linux kernel has so much support, and the BSD userland is just so logical and pleasant to use.
(Incidentally, how long before this gets modded down? Every time I post anything remotely of the "RMS is not an eye-swivelling loony" variety I get modded down. It's very disheartening, and a somewhat ludicrious position when agreeing with the person who has done more for the free software community than any other living person (not to mention, though he'd hate it being said, the open source community too), is opening yourself up to accusations of trolling and flamebaiting.)
Let's deal with his points though:
- Envy and Rightousness
This one's bizarre. The New Deal was about reconstructing America and preventing a potential revolution that would have destroyed capitalism in the US for good. It was dealing with a time in which most people were have-nots, and they were have-nots not because they, personally, had done any wrong, but because chronic mismanagement of the stock market, until then largely left to market forces, had resulted in a collapse of the American economy, with thousands of employers forced to close, and tens of millions thrown out of work. Savings and other pools of cash that might have saved the economy were wiped out because those who did the right thing, and kept their money in the banks, ceased to keep their assets when the banks were wiped out due to blind panic by others.In such circumstances in other countries, be it Russia, whose economy was crippled in World War One, and Germany, whose economy was crippled by a house-of-cards effect from the US collapse, revolutions are made from. Russia's people went into armed revolt, resulting, evetually, in the Soviet Union and the world's first attempt at Communism. Germany's business leaders twisted the arm of the Kaiser in a "peaceful" revolution that put Hitler and the Fascist Nazi party in power. And in America, as the Hoover administration wound down, Communists began to organise in the US and the US was in serious danger of seeing its own violent and bloody revolution.
Big Government the result of Envious people wanting to steal from the successful? Erm, nope. Government reorganising to place faith back in the capitalist system to prevent people living in poverty through no fault of their own overthrowing the government in favour of a temporary and stupid solution? Yes. Exactly it.
As far as the point about government regulating industry goes, this has been a central plank of government throughout the entirety of the 20th Century and the tail end of the 19th. The railways were regulated. Antitrust legislation, dealing with the abuses of monopolies, were advocated and signed into law by that great Republican hero Theodore Roosevelt. AT&T's president in the early 1900's was quoted as saying that regulation was a necessary burden for any monopoly. FDR's reforms were aimed predominantly at the financial sector, in many cases to ensure dishonest but ungovernable-without-reform practices were wiped out. They worked too - do you have a problem putting your money in a bank? Would you have had the same confidence in 1932?
Further, wanting businesses to be regulated has nothing, zilch, to do with wanting government to spy on private individuals. There is no connection.
- Inaction and voting for the GOP
The GOP is not a civil liberties party, there is no connection between "small government" and civil liberties. The GOP hasn't been pro-liberties since the early part of the 20th Century. In fairness, your respondant admits that the GOP is not the party to vote for to protect civil liberties, but does so using the inane and absurd argument that "smaller government" = "more civil liberties".The party which consistantly avoids "smaller government" tends to be the one that supports restrictions on the behaviour of law enforcement agencies and supports people having control over their own bodies. "Smaller government" doesn't just mean paying lower taxes, but also throwing out the baby with the bathwater - dismantling those institutions and parts of the constitution designed to protect people from those with power, whether that's ensuring that the resources of certain states cannot be used to prevent people of a particular colour from voting in an election to ensuring that the reason someone is convicted of a crime is that they did it, not that they were tricked into a confession.
It gets tiresome to hear the same old crap, that people opposed to government intrusion are natural GOP supporters, despite it being the party of reducing restrictions on government agencies, the party that's trying to use taxation money to fund religion, the party that's most in favour of dictating what people can do with their own bodies (be it through the WoD or the anti-Choice issue.)
It isn't. The GOP is not the civil liberties party. It hasn't been for 70-80 years, and it probably will not be again in our lifetimes.
Rant over.
It's illegal to make unsolicited commercial calls to cellphones in the US (one of the few countries that has the receiver-pays regime)
So, yeah, there is a precedent here - it's against the cellphone equivalent of "spam", even in the country with the First Ammendment.
I've looked at both the GNU and Debian websites and can't find a list of device drivers/supported devices. Does anyone have a link?
What, exactly, does the RIAA have to do with any of this? Other than a few DVD Audio discs (both of them) and DVD Music Videos, the honoured members of the RIAA have little or no involvement in DVDs, and almost certainly don't care what the Chinese and Taiwanese do to the format.
That's why.
CD players use DACs, not ADCs. VCRs probably have DACs too (not ADCs) for outputting their control screens (ie where you set the clock, etc), again not ADCs.
An "intelligent" ADC may add to the costs of digital cordless phones, cellphones, CD burners, and computers, but to the best of my knowledge, only the first is cheap enough for $5 to make a major price difference.
Except that it was at least accurate. Vint Cerf, who, with Jon Postel really can claim to have "invented the Internet", backs up Gore and believes he made a significant difference. Read the Cerf article.
Perhaps that's the right way around.
Which would you rather was in the public domain, available for widespread use with no single entity able to control or prevent its use, as fast as possible? Something to cure a horrific disease, or a cartoon mouse?
I think he has a right to be annoyed. I think Joel Barr is out of line. He is, of course, entitled to say whatever brain dead crap comes into his head, but equally the rest of us are entitled to consider his output incompetent, unfair, tripe. He proved his worth when he laid into, and lied about, MPlayer, and the anti-Stallman rant has done nothing but confirm the view most of us formed after that debacle.
No, it wouldn't. Maybe a small part of the engine, but as basic, complex, components from the shell to the compiler were built by GNU, it's reasonable to suggest that GNU is responsible for 90% of what we'd now call, misleadingly, a Linux system.
(And, yeah, I know about XFree86. I also know about GNOME. X is only the device driver.)
He wants credit.
Look, if you designed a car and hadn't quite finished the tires yet, and someone else designed a tire, and the car was promptly released, sold, and named after the guy to made the tire, without any mention of your design, wouldn't you get a little peeved?
Wouldn't you be doubly peeved if the project you put together to design the car was, in your eyes, more important than the end product, with the end product essentially being to validate the model you'd used? And yet your project is never mentioned, but the guy who made the tires is. And worse, the guy who made the tires isn't just getting the credit, but announcing that the methodology you used to design the rest is bunk?
That's what RMS is complaining about.
Don't know. This is the first Niven I've read too. Generally friends tell me to steer clear of his co-authored stuff, but that seems to be general advice (Pohl and Asimov also apparently suffer when coauthoring.) I can't comment as I haven't actually read the stuff.
You're right, he's first class. Easily read with a lot of things to think about.
FWIW, most DVDs are not "protected" with Macrovision, not in my experience anyway. It took me six months before I had to buy an RF converter for mine, before that I hooked the DVD player up to the TV through the VCR.
Studios who use Macrovision have to pay for the privilege. This is why CSS is almost ubiquitous and Macrovision isn't. Interestingly, I'm finding a lot of recent releases of "old" (ie British-made Hitchcocks, etc) and horror movies are being released in budget form in regionless, CSS-less, DVD form.
Sun has not indicated it will enforce patents against implementors of Java. Microsoft has. They're on record of saying they will. THAT is the difference.
Good science fiction is rarely simply about the future or space travel or anything like that. These are plot elements, or devices. I've just spent the weekend reading Niven's Flatlander, which nominally is about a detective in the future with a psychic imaginary arm. But the core of most of the stories is about human life, its value, and the many ways in which it can be undermined.
Solaris is arguably soft science fiction, in that the principles and technologies within the story are not really explored. But that doesn't change the setting, or that Tarkovsky is using a world deliberately unrecognisable through scientific progress in order to explore a set of ideas.
It's certainly as deserving of the tag as, say, The Phantom Menace. And, in its ability to make the viewer think, is a much better film.
(But what film isn't)
I would assume you mean as in "They're rising on Earth, but they're falling on Mars."
Or could this be an elaborate troll by a pro-GW advocate to try and ridicule the anti-GW lobby...
Out of interest, when did Kurt express opposition to a fork?
My limited understanding, and perhaps things have moved on since then, is that Kurt wants control over his own project, but he must have GPLd it for a reason, and I always assumed that would have been so that others who wanted to try other things with his code can do that without needing him to change the direction of his work.
Is there a mailing list posting from Kurt clarifying his position?
Nice AOS4 screenshots. No, honestly. They had a whole range of looks, and it's pretty clear what you can customise. And to my eyes at least, they've done a good job - they've gone in the opposite direction to the trend at present, which is a good thing, because the current trend is to disguise buttons as background and hide critical user interface functionality in order to "prettify" it.
The Hyperion people seem to have gone for colour and textures instead, as subtle or unsubtle as the user wishes. So the GUI stays user friendly.
If only they'd port AOS to the PC...
To respond to you both:
The GPL is the licence you're thinking of.
GNU is the name of the operating system project started by Richard Stallman. It is not a "group" that "ported Linux to the 486" or a "licence". The first functional implementation of GNU was created by Linus Torvalds when he ported GNU to run over his Linux kernel. The fact that this combination is largely GNU software yet is called "Linux" is the bone of some contention from Stallman and others who worked on GNU, but that's another thread.
Have I been trolled?
And you don't want to know what's revealed in Episode 8. All I can say is Solo and Leia better not have got to first base yet...
No, it doesn't. Windows is not a product whose copyright is protected through the use of an access control mechanism, and even if it were, producing a modular version, per-se, is not manufacturing a mechanism to bypass such a control mechanism.