Why don't we just sic ole Ted on these bastards and blow some of them straight to hell?
On a more serious note, wasn't this kind of thing exactly what our country dealt with around the turn of the (last) century?
Lee
All of the arguments you make only work if Apple were to continue creating and selling proprietary hardware. The truth is that if they want any market share they need to ditch the hardware so they can actually compete. There are a few people out there willing to go buy a new mac, usually because they are either already mac users or quite frankly don't know any better. Anyone who is currently a PC user isn't about to go buy a mac. So where does that leave Apple? Going after the ever shrinking market for first time computer buyers.
But if they ditch the hardware they won't have to beat both Microsoft and the myriad of PC hardware vendors, they'll be able to leverage the PC just like Microsoft has. This is is why Linux is such a success, it isn't because its free and it isn't necessarily because it is such a great OS. Linux is popular because you can run it on the computer you already own without giving up the OS and software you're already using.
I can assure you that Apple is well aware of this fact and that the Linux phenomena has not been overlooked by them. If they are smart they will choose to compete and stop fooling themselves into thinking that they are somehow special and that the law of the jungle does not apply to them. If they are not smart the law of the jungle will ensure that they die, regardless of what Microsoft does to keep them alive as token competition.
If Apple wants to survive they have to cater to more than what a niche market likes or prefers. Apple has to go for the mainstream because that is the only way they are going to stay alive. Mainstream users are used to the fluid multitasking and efficient behavior of Windows. Sticking with an antiquated OS architecture that just can't keep up is a sure way to make themselves even more marginalized than they are already.
So far OS-X hasn't really delivered. It does multitask better, but it is very sluggish and its user interface behavior leaves something to be desired.
Hopefully they'll do what needs to be done to get the efficiency up and then port it to the PC. If they don't they can kiss their ass goodbye because no one is going to buy slower hardware to run a slower OS just because they want to "think different."
Put something under the GPL and you cast it to the four winds. Forget about using it as a source of income, unless of course you're Redhat who sells the convenience of a linux distribution ready to go on CD. That kind of model won't work for other things that are neither that large nor that complex. Take mozilla for example, is anyone ever going to make money from selling it? Am I supposed to go out and pay money to get it on CD when the download is only a few minutes on my DSL connection? I don't think so. AOL is never going to make any money of Mozilla, it exists soley as a trump card in their dealings with Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that open source/free software is bad, I'm simply pointing out that the idea anyone is going to get paid for their work is absurd. At most it will be something they can put on a resume so someone else will pay them more to develop software that isn't open source. The handful of exceptions such as developers at RedHat or IBM are just that, exceptions. If an IBM developer is paid to develop GPL'd software it is because IBM is making the money to pay him with non-GPL products. Some guy working in his garage on a pet project isn't going to see one red dime. This is something that we need to accept. Pretending and proclaiming otherwise is simply going to put off those bright enough to see the truth. If there is anything that almost everyone dislikes its being bullshitted. We've grown used to it from people and organizations we don't trust. Getting it from the open source crowd is simply going to make people distrust it as well.
Tell it like it is, not how you think people want it to be.
Lee Reynolds
Deadly gas smuggled in Valentine's day balloons!!!
on
Duct Tape
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· Score: 2
Anyone else catch that his high school principal supposedly believed his girlfriend was using baloons to smuggle funky chemicals to him so he could continue his experiments?
Do you buy this? I'm not sure if I do. Even if the principal was completely clueless about science, which he probably is or he'd be a real teacher rather than an administrator, I have a hard time believing that anyone with a triple digit IQ and a lick of common sense would fear that someone's girlfriend was using baloons to smuggle strange chemicals around. Is this the kind of person we should have running a school?
Ultimately I do believe he was exactly that clueless. Until I'd read this story I'd almost forgotten just how clueless the adults around me seemed to be when I was younger. Their absolute ignorance of anything technical or scientific combined with the strange assumption that I was doing something dangerous made for some very bizzare behavior on their part. I'm sure that many others here know exactly what I mean. To me it was always highly annoying to be treated with awe or fear by someone older simply because I demonstrated the smallest modicum of understanding of something like how a television worked.
The other possibility is that the principal was simply being an utter jerk. He wanted to show that he didn't need an excuse to be a jerk and so came up with the most outlandish and unsubstantiated "reason" he could think of. I've seen that happen a lot too. It would kind of explain why he's a principal and not a teacher.
I can tell from your language alone that I've been around a lot longer than you have. I remember when Microsoft was still making Apple II products and the PC was hardly the clear winner of the desktop race that it has been for the past decade.
You've completely missed my point to boot. Do you know what an open platform is? Microsofts products represent proprietary solutions that became defacto standards because they were tied to a hardware platform that was not proprietary.
I'm dyslexic, maybe he was too. In my case I never had any trouble reading. In fact I was reading on the university level in 6th grade. My problem was with math, specifically with multi-column addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. Once I realized what the problem was I sat down one summer and went through my 8th grade math book and practiced until I could do it well. As a result my natural abilites were no longer hobbled by difficulty keeping the numbers straight on the paper. Unlike many others I know, I am not having a problem with high-level math in college. Rather than being a struggle it is nothing short of an adventure.
If someone is having problems reading, it isn't always because they were taught poorly. I was taught to read phoentically but I only do that on words I've never seen. Once I've seen a word I remember what it looks like and switch over to the "whole word" method.
Many people who are particularly bright are dyslexic. Exactly why this is I don't know since I'm neither a psychologist nor a neurologist. Many of the so called disabilities that some people have, carry with them greater abilities in other areas. The human gene pool is large enough and our species social enough that specialization can and does occur. This is what things like dyslexia and ADD/ADHD represent, a specialization that leads to greater abilities in some areas with a corresponding decrease or difficulty in other areas. That doesn't mean those difficulties can't be overcome though.
Linux can't be killed by the lousy business decisions of any one company, unlike the Amiga. The Amiga was proprietary, whereas Linux is anything but.
The success of the PC is due to the fact that it was and is an open platform. Microsoft literally rode the wave created by this open standard to where it is now. Linux is a similar wave in and of itself.
Tell me how FreeBSD is supposed to be significantly better than Linux in any way and I just might take you off my Bozo list. The momentum that Linux has along with its massive developer base means that as time goes by any truly significant benefits of FreeBSD have been and will continue to be rendered moot. Using and advocting something like FreeBSD just because its the obscure platform doesn't impress anyone any more than it did when Linux was the obscure platform being advocated.
I use FreeBSD myself as well as OpenBSD and NetBSD on a Quadra 700. I've also got an HP9000 712/100 running HP-UX. Of them all I like HP-UX the best because its performance under heavy load is truly amazing. But I know that as time goes by Linux's performance in this area will overtake and suprass that of HP-UX.
Volunteers will work on the things that they want to work on, to the degree that they want to work on them. They aren't necessarily going to work on the things that you or anyone else would like to see done.
A volunteer is someone who doesn't have to be there. They are donating their time and energy. They can and will pack up if they don't think their efforts are worth it. Most people will judge whether their efforts are worth it by how much the project helps THEM, not how much it helps others. This is why things like GCC get worked on so much, it directly benefits anyone who helps to create it. An open-source floral shop POS system on the other hand isn't going to get worked on by anyone for long. The people who would benefit from it don't know how to develop it, and the people who know how to develop it would not benefit from it. Very few people are going to slave and toil for others just because its the nice thing to do. If that was how people worked then the Soviet Union would not only still be around, but it would be a prosperous nation. They found out really quick that it doesn't work and ened up resorting to trying to force people to play the "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs" game. Forcing someone to play this way is the definition of slavery. It didn't work for them and it obviously would not fly here on any level.
Relying on the generosity and good will of others for your own survival without contributing back is exactly what people living on the street are doing. If an open-source project doesn't contribute to those who develop it, it will not survive any better than people living on the street do now.
I do hope that this is something that ESR understands. I'm assuming he does since the alternative is just too disturbing.
Playing keep away and acting like brats doesn't do anyone any good, just ask Apple. The sole real-world advantage of open source/free software is that it often works better than commercial software. Make it so that it doesn't work, or you're not allowed to make it work and people will simply not bother with it.
Besides, is it really a BAD thing for a company to take some code an build a business off it? I've never heard of anyone storming the offices of BSDI and demanding that the company stop selling its open source derived OS.
To me open source represents a needed increase in competition more than anything else. I don't believe it will take over the world or put an end to commercial software. In fact I don't even believe there is any need to. What is needed is something to shake the industry up and knock some particularly big fish down to size so that everyone has more room to swim.
In a way open source is kind of like a gun. Both give their owners the ability to defend themselves from tyrrany. In the case of guns the tyrrany might be the government, but that doesn't mean that an honest government that is accountable to the people is a bad thing. In the case of open source the tyrrany might be companies like Microsoft that have so much power that they can abuse their customers. Open source provides competitive products that can't be bought out and whose parent companies can't be bankrupted. This forces companies that might otherwise try to exploit their customers to treat those customers with a little more respect. In the long run most people are better off because of this. If we start being jackasses and try to tell people where and how they can use a particular piece of software then how does that make us any different from the customer's point of view than some commercial entity telling them where and how they can use a piece of software?
There are some people who are naturally inquisitive and who will seek out information and knowlege. Then there are others who will not. The presence or abscence of a tool that might help someone do this has nothing to do with whether they actually will or not.
When television first came out it was heralded as a tool for education. There were people who believed that it would be used by the masses to learn. They believed this because they were the type of people who seek to learn themselves, and so they interpreted the motivations of others through their own desire to learn. By and large television has not been a tool for education because most people simply don't want to learn. Their desire to not know is truly bizarre to me, but that is the only expanation I know that fits.
It is true that today we've got things like TLC, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, but how many years did it take after cable tv became popular that networks like these became a profitable enterprise?
If you need further proof of what I'm saying just look at books. Books are educational, yet how many people out there actually read anything? Most people can read, but few actually choose to read anything past street signs and the occassional newspaper.
If someone is intelligent and/or inquisitive, then they will use the tools available to them to learn. If they are not then the nature and usefullness of the tools available makes no difference because they aren't going to use them in the first place.
"Put simply, oBSD is the single most secure OS in existance, and fBSD the highest performing."
I agree that OpenBSD is probably the most secure OS out of the box, maybe even the most secure OS period. But the idea that FreeBSD is the highest performing OS is just plain silly. Pick any commercial enterprise level Unix variant at random and it will outperform any open source OS including FreeBSD. When FreeBSD can scale efficiently to 64+ processors like Solaris and AIX then maybe it will be in the same ballpark as these operating systems. Until then its small potatoes.
Of course you could have been trying to say that that it was the highest performing *BSD variant, in which case I'd say you were right.
For a long time now we've been hearing of this supposed information economy, for over twenty years in fact. In order to sell something you've got to be able to control it to the extent that people who aren't willing to pay you for it don't get access to it. P2P sharing of information undermines this.
I personally don't have a problem with this, but only because I believe that freedom of information is more important in the scheme of things thatn whether someone gets paid for that information. I have no problem with the idea that someone should get paid if they produce and distribute something.
The problem is that when you try to base an economy off this when the thing being produced is information, you end up with things being controlled that have no business being controlled, such as the distribution of information on what laws have been passed or enacted, which was in fact covered in a recent slashdot article.
The DMCA is the perfect example of the types of abuses you can expect from an information based economy.
Freedom of information is necessary for freedom of expression because freedom of expression is itself dependent upon freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is in turn once again dependent upon freedom of information because information control is thought control.
Here in the US we are very sensitive to the right that we all have to freedom of expression. But for whatever reason we are not so sensitive to the right upon which it depends, freedom of thought. How can someone truly speak their mind when their ideas are controlled by another?
This is why P2P is an important social good. It allows and encourages the unregulated exchange of ideas and information, which in turn promotes and helps ensure a well informed public, which is something that democracy is itself dependent upon.
It has often been said that the first amendment makes all others possible. I'd argue that the first and the second amendment make all others possible, but for either of them to actually be there and exist, you must have freedom of information.
"In fact if you think about it enough, you might realise that our choices are defined and limited by our genes and environment which means that our genes and environment do partially define who we are."
If you thought about it enough, you'd realize that while the range of choices we have are rarely limitless, what is not limited is our ability to make a good choice. This is true for anyone who is responsible for their own actions.
There are three kinds of problems in life. The first are things that nothing can be done about. Genetics falls into this catagory. The second are problems that you yourself have created. The choices we make fall into this catagory. The third are problems which we either self-perpetuate or otherwise refuse to deal with. The environment falls into the third catagory.
There are people of course who will disagree with this. Who will claim that basically we are all victims and who will in fact encourage us to be so. They're called liberals.
We should be worrying about providing a balanced mental diet for our children so that the occassional greaseburger isn't going to do anything to them overall.
On the other hand if someone eats nothing but bean sprouts then they're going to turn out pretty messed up as well.
As I stated in another post, I believe the 13 year old who killed himself did so in large part because he was sheltered and raised within a context that was at odds with the world he lived in. I've known quite a few people whose parents came here from other countries and all of them were raised as if they were still living in those countries. I think this is what was happening with that poor kid. His world collapsed when he disappointed his parents because he was taught from a young age to always honor and obey his parents, etc. etc. Chances are he really did believe he was going to jail since he wasn't street smart enough to know better. He wasn't street smart because his parents sheltered him from anything that might teach him to be. Thus he ended his life over something that the rest of us would never dream of.
As for people who didn't turn alright, it wasn't because of anything they saw on TV or on the internet, it was because of the choices they made. There is much senseless debate of environment verses genetics in determining how a person is going to come out and what their life will be like. The truth is that we are not a product of our genes, nor are we a product of our environment. Rather we are a product of how we choose to deal with our genes and our environment. If I am execptional in any way it is in that I know and understand this.
Like I said, I've never seen anything that I'd consider inherently harmful to anyone in and of itself. Feed someone a mental diet of nothing but violence and pornography and you're likely to cause some problems. But violence and pornography within a diet of other things that are positive rather than negative are of little consequence.
People are afraid of their kids seeing violence and porn because they themselves are disturbed by it, not because it is inherently harmful. Also they have the inaccurate belief that children are "impressionable." A two year old is impressionable because someone that age does not have any real experience to evaluate what they see and hear with. That soon changes. The older a person gets the more what they see is evaluated against a growing bank of past experiences. Because young people think and evaluate what they see, there is nothing that is going to warp someone unless that is the only thing they see. If on the other hand their experiences in life are balanced then a little porn or violence isn't going to do anything at all to their psyche.
I'm living proof of this. When I was a child and a teenager I worked hard to undermine the censorhip imposed on me by my parents. In fact by the time I was 13 my parents had essentially given up on controlling what I saw or read.
Today I'm a college graduate working for a major university. There are no bodies in my closet, I have no criminal record, and my sexual tastes are less risque than most. If my sex life was an ice cream flavor it would be vanilla. This dispite having seen plenty of XXX porn on satellite by the time I was 16. As for violence I've seen about as much as anyone else.
What a kid sees on tv or reads in a book is nowhere near as important as the situation in his or her family. If the father is abusive then worrying about seeing violence on tv is about like worrying about a bruised elbow on someone with a compound fracture of their femur.
I don't see much point in saying anything more. Ultimately the difference in our views comes down to how we see children. I see them as thinking human beings capable of discerning things. What you see them as I can't say for sure of course, but I know that some people see them as something like walking tape recorders whose every experience is indelibly marked upon their minds. Why people so easily forget what they were like as children I'll never understand. I know I wasn't a tape recorder and I doubt you were either.
I've never been able to understand how it is that anyone would WANT censorship of anything.
There is no such thing as an idea or a fact that needs to be hidden away from view. If something is a fact then hiding it is not going to change it. If it is an idea then it will stand or fall based upon its merits.
Therefore the only people who are in favor of censorship are those who fear the truth, or whose own ideas do not stand up to cross examination.
Most of the censor happy types will drag out the old argument that there are things in this world that are harmful for children to see. Bullshit. I've never seen anything in my life, and I'm about to turn 30, that I ever thought would be inherently harmful for someone of any age to see. Now if you take something, say violence, and feed someone a died of nothing but violence, then yes I can see how that might be harmful to anyone of any age. But seeing violence or sex or you name it within the context of other things so that an overall balance is created is no more harmful to a 14 year old than it is to a 40 year old. The "save the children" argument is a weak argument that the censorship types fall back on because they don't have anything else to stand on.
Think about it, if censorship was a good idea, would anyone have to resort to a gut-level fear based argument to convince anyone that it was?
This is why I say that censorhip is a crime. It is a crime because it is a lie that is not just told, it is a lie that is perpetrated upon other people. It is an act of violence against the mind of another.
The best way to fight censorhip is to refuse to be silenced and to refuse to be censored. There isn't anything anyone can do to you that would be worse than allowing your sources of information to be controlled. Information control is mind control, don't let your mind be controlled.
At that point the ability to, as Forrest Gump put it "Run like the wind blows" is a definite advantage too.
When I was a very young kid I got beat up on by other kids. I learned how to defend myself and that mostly stopped. There were still a few occassions however when it was clear I wans't going to be able to beat the other person. I was VERY lucky I guess that I inherited my grandfather's ability to run very fast. I'd take off and since I was faster than 99.5% of the population there was no way they could catch me. I could also run longer than most meaning that even if they were almost as fast as me they weren't going to be able to keep going as long as I could.
But really guns and knives are not the thing that most people are likely to deal with. If someone is giving you trouble and they are carrying a gun or knife, don't go to a "teacher," go to the police. Carrying a concealed weapon is a serious crime if you don't have a permit, and they don't give permits to teenaged thugs. Teachers don't really give a damn because they aren't paid to give a damn, the cops however are.
They SUSPENDED him! They didn't have him arrested, beaten with a stick, or even expel him from school. They didn't do anything that hasn't been done to just about every kid with even a millimeter wide streak of rebellion in him.
In other words the school didn't do anything wrong. If the kid is such a mental case that he off's himself over a two week suspension then maybe he was a "special needs" kid in need of special psychotherapy.
So what did your friend do about the guy who was beating up on him?
If he didn't stand up to him, and put up a fight, then I can't say I feel too sorry for him. There will always be bullies in the world, no matter where you go or how old you are. The key to dealing with them is to hurt them, and to keep on hurting them until they leave you alone.
Bullies are people who, among other things, suffer from a lack of respect for themselves as well as other people. The only real substitute for respect is fear, which is why they seek to make others fear them.
Two can play at that game. They may be bigger than you, they may be stronger than you. The question is, are they meaner? The winner of most fights isn't the bigger person, its the person who is more vicious.
I've met people like your friend. Chances are he's making a pretend play at being a pacifist when he's really just plain scared. That's no way to handle the sitution, especially in the long run.
The best thing your friend can do is begin working out and studying some form of martial arts. A consistent work out that includes weight lifting will quickly bulk him up to the point that most bullies will think twice before messing with him in the first place. A knowledge of how to fight hand to hand, especially how to inflict damage on the other person, will mean that any bullies that are stupid enough to mess with him will quickly learn the error of their ways.
Everyone nowadays is lied to by the touchy-feely psychobabble types and told that violence isn't the answer. Well that depends on the question. If the question is how to resolve a dispute with a reasonable person, then violence is not the answer. If the question is how to educate a violent person in how not to mess with you, then violence is most definitely the answer since it is the only thing that type of person understands.
But ultimately the best defense against bullies is to be assertive, to not take any crap off anyone. A bully hitting someone is one of the latter stages of a process that begins the first time that bully insults someone or puts them down and they don't do anything about it.
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Why don't we just sic ole Ted on these bastards and blow some of them straight to hell? On a more serious note, wasn't this kind of thing exactly what our country dealt with around the turn of the (last) century? Lee
All of the arguments you make only work if Apple were to continue creating and selling proprietary hardware. The truth is that if they want any market share they need to ditch the hardware so they can actually compete. There are a few people out there willing to go buy a new mac, usually because they are either already mac users or quite frankly don't know any better. Anyone who is currently a PC user isn't about to go buy a mac. So where does that leave Apple? Going after the ever shrinking market for first time computer buyers.
But if they ditch the hardware they won't have to beat both Microsoft and the myriad of PC hardware vendors, they'll be able to leverage the PC just like Microsoft has. This is is why Linux is such a success, it isn't because its free and it isn't necessarily because it is such a great OS. Linux is popular because you can run it on the computer you already own without giving up the OS and software you're already using.
I can assure you that Apple is well aware of this fact and that the Linux phenomena has not been overlooked by them. If they are smart they will choose to compete and stop fooling themselves into thinking that they are somehow special and that the law of the jungle does not apply to them. If they are not smart the law of the jungle will ensure that they die, regardless of what Microsoft does to keep them alive as token competition.
Lee
If Apple wants to survive they have to cater to more than what a niche market likes or prefers. Apple has to go for the mainstream because that is the only way they are going to stay alive. Mainstream users are used to the fluid multitasking and efficient behavior of Windows. Sticking with an antiquated OS architecture that just can't keep up is a sure way to make themselves even more marginalized than they are already.
So far OS-X hasn't really delivered. It does multitask better, but it is very sluggish and its user interface behavior leaves something to be desired.
Hopefully they'll do what needs to be done to get the efficiency up and then port it to the PC. If they don't they can kiss their ass goodbye because no one is going to buy slower hardware to run a slower OS just because they want to "think different."
Lee
Put something under the GPL and you cast it to the four winds. Forget about using it as a source of income, unless of course you're Redhat who sells the convenience of a linux distribution ready to go on CD. That kind of model won't work for other things that are neither that large nor that complex. Take mozilla for example, is anyone ever going to make money from selling it? Am I supposed to go out and pay money to get it on CD when the download is only a few minutes on my DSL connection? I don't think so. AOL is never going to make any money of Mozilla, it exists soley as a trump card in their dealings with Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that open source/free software is bad, I'm simply pointing out that the idea anyone is going to get paid for their work is absurd. At most it will be something they can put on a resume so someone else will pay them more to develop software that isn't open source. The handful of exceptions such as developers at RedHat or IBM are just that, exceptions. If an IBM developer is paid to develop GPL'd software it is because IBM is making the money to pay him with non-GPL products. Some guy working in his garage on a pet project isn't going to see one red dime. This is something that we need to accept. Pretending and proclaiming otherwise is simply going to put off those bright enough to see the truth. If there is anything that almost everyone dislikes its being bullshitted. We've grown used to it from people and organizations we don't trust. Getting it from the open source crowd is simply going to make people distrust it as well.
Tell it like it is, not how you think people want it to be.
Lee Reynolds
Anyone else catch that his high school principal supposedly believed his girlfriend was using baloons to smuggle funky chemicals to him so he could continue his experiments?
Do you buy this? I'm not sure if I do. Even if the principal was completely clueless about science, which he probably is or he'd be a real teacher rather than an administrator, I have a hard time believing that anyone with a triple digit IQ and a lick of common sense would fear that someone's girlfriend was using baloons to smuggle strange chemicals around. Is this the kind of person we should have running a school?
Ultimately I do believe he was exactly that clueless. Until I'd read this story I'd almost forgotten just how clueless the adults around me seemed to be when I was younger. Their absolute ignorance of anything technical or scientific combined with the strange assumption that I was doing something dangerous made for some very bizzare behavior on their part. I'm sure that many others here know exactly what I mean. To me it was always highly annoying to be treated with awe or fear by someone older simply because I demonstrated the smallest modicum of understanding of something like how a television worked.
The other possibility is that the principal was simply being an utter jerk. He wanted to show that he didn't need an excuse to be a jerk and so came up with the most outlandish and unsubstantiated "reason" he could think of. I've seen that happen a lot too. It would kind of explain why he's a principal and not a teacher.
Lee Reynolds
I can tell from your language alone that I've been around a lot longer than you have. I remember when Microsoft was still making Apple II products and the PC was hardly the clear winner of the desktop race that it has been for the past decade.
You've completely missed my point to boot. Do you know what an open platform is? Microsofts products represent proprietary solutions that became defacto standards because they were tied to a hardware platform that was not proprietary.
I'm dyslexic, maybe he was too. In my case I never had any trouble reading. In fact I was reading on the university level in 6th grade. My problem was with math, specifically with multi-column addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. Once I realized what the problem was I sat down one summer and went through my 8th grade math book and practiced until I could do it well. As a result my natural abilites were no longer hobbled by difficulty keeping the numbers straight on the paper. Unlike many others I know, I am not having a problem with high-level math in college. Rather than being a struggle it is nothing short of an adventure.
If someone is having problems reading, it isn't always because they were taught poorly. I was taught to read phoentically but I only do that on words I've never seen. Once I've seen a word I remember what it looks like and switch over to the "whole word" method.
Many people who are particularly bright are dyslexic. Exactly why this is I don't know since I'm neither a psychologist nor a neurologist. Many of the so called disabilities that some people have, carry with them greater abilities in other areas. The human gene pool is large enough and our species social enough that specialization can and does occur. This is what things like dyslexia and ADD/ADHD represent, a specialization that leads to greater abilities in some areas with a corresponding decrease or difficulty in other areas. That doesn't mean those difficulties can't be overcome though.
Lee Reynolds
Linux can't be killed by the lousy business decisions of any one company, unlike the Amiga. The Amiga was proprietary, whereas Linux is anything but.
The success of the PC is due to the fact that it was and is an open platform. Microsoft literally rode the wave created by this open standard to where it is now. Linux is a similar wave in and of itself.
Lee Reynolds
Tell me how FreeBSD is supposed to be significantly better than Linux in any way and I just might take you off my Bozo list. The momentum that Linux has along with its massive developer base means that as time goes by any truly significant benefits of FreeBSD have been and will continue to be rendered moot. Using and advocting something like FreeBSD just because its the obscure platform doesn't impress anyone any more than it did when Linux was the obscure platform being advocated.
I use FreeBSD myself as well as OpenBSD and NetBSD on a Quadra 700. I've also got an HP9000 712/100 running HP-UX. Of them all I like HP-UX the best because its performance under heavy load is truly amazing. But I know that as time goes by Linux's performance in this area will overtake and suprass that of HP-UX.
Lee Reynolds
Volunteers will work on the things that they want to work on, to the degree that they want to work on them. They aren't necessarily going to work on the things that you or anyone else would like to see done.
A volunteer is someone who doesn't have to be there. They are donating their time and energy. They can and will pack up if they don't think their efforts are worth it. Most people will judge whether their efforts are worth it by how much the project helps THEM, not how much it helps others. This is why things like GCC get worked on so much, it directly benefits anyone who helps to create it. An open-source floral shop POS system on the other hand isn't going to get worked on by anyone for long. The people who would benefit from it don't know how to develop it, and the people who know how to develop it would not benefit from it. Very few people are going to slave and toil for others just because its the nice thing to do. If that was how people worked then the Soviet Union would not only still be around, but it would be a prosperous nation. They found out really quick that it doesn't work and ened up resorting to trying to force people to play the "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs" game. Forcing someone to play this way is the definition of slavery. It didn't work for them and it obviously would not fly here on any level.
Relying on the generosity and good will of others for your own survival without contributing back is exactly what people living on the street are doing. If an open-source project doesn't contribute to those who develop it, it will not survive any better than people living on the street do now.
I do hope that this is something that ESR understands. I'm assuming he does since the alternative is just too disturbing.
Lee Reynolds
Playing keep away and acting like brats doesn't do anyone any good, just ask Apple. The sole real-world advantage of open source/free software is that it often works better than commercial software. Make it so that it doesn't work, or you're not allowed to make it work and people will simply not bother with it.
Besides, is it really a BAD thing for a company to take some code an build a business off it? I've never heard of anyone storming the offices of BSDI and demanding that the company stop selling its open source derived OS.
To me open source represents a needed increase in competition more than anything else. I don't believe it will take over the world or put an end to commercial software. In fact I don't even believe there is any need to. What is needed is something to shake the industry up and knock some particularly big fish down to size so that everyone has more room to swim.
In a way open source is kind of like a gun. Both give their owners the ability to defend themselves from tyrrany. In the case of guns the tyrrany might be the government, but that doesn't mean that an honest government that is accountable to the people is a bad thing. In the case of open source the tyrrany might be companies like Microsoft that have so much power that they can abuse their customers. Open source provides competitive products that can't be bought out and whose parent companies can't be bankrupted. This forces companies that might otherwise try to exploit their customers to treat those customers with a little more respect. In the long run most people are better off because of this. If we start being jackasses and try to tell people where and how they can use a particular piece of software then how does that make us any different from the customer's point of view than some commercial entity telling them where and how they can use a piece of software?
Lee Reynolds
There are some people who are naturally inquisitive and who will seek out information and knowlege. Then there are others who will not. The presence or abscence of a tool that might help someone do this has nothing to do with whether they actually will or not.
When television first came out it was heralded as a tool for education. There were people who believed that it would be used by the masses to learn. They believed this because they were the type of people who seek to learn themselves, and so they interpreted the motivations of others through their own desire to learn. By and large television has not been a tool for education because most people simply don't want to learn. Their desire to not know is truly bizarre to me, but that is the only expanation I know that fits.
It is true that today we've got things like TLC, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, but how many years did it take after cable tv became popular that networks like these became a profitable enterprise?
If you need further proof of what I'm saying just look at books. Books are educational, yet how many people out there actually read anything? Most people can read, but few actually choose to read anything past street signs and the occassional newspaper.
If someone is intelligent and/or inquisitive, then they will use the tools available to them to learn. If they are not then the nature and usefullness of the tools available makes no difference because they aren't going to use them in the first place.
Lee Reynolds
"Put simply, oBSD is the single most secure OS in existance, and fBSD the highest performing."
I agree that OpenBSD is probably the most secure OS out of the box, maybe even the most secure OS period. But the idea that FreeBSD is the highest performing OS is just plain silly. Pick any commercial enterprise level Unix variant at random and it will outperform any open source OS including FreeBSD. When FreeBSD can scale efficiently to 64+ processors like Solaris and AIX then maybe it will be in the same ballpark as these operating systems. Until then its small potatoes.
Of course you could have been trying to say that that it was the highest performing *BSD variant, in which case I'd say you were right.
Lee Reynolds
Oh John!
Oh Marcia!
Oh John!!
Oh Marcia!!
Oh shit....
For a long time now we've been hearing of this supposed information economy, for over twenty years in fact. In order to sell something you've got to be able to control it to the extent that people who aren't willing to pay you for it don't get access to it. P2P sharing of information undermines this.
I personally don't have a problem with this, but only because I believe that freedom of information is more important in the scheme of things thatn whether someone gets paid for that information. I have no problem with the idea that someone should get paid if they produce and distribute something.
The problem is that when you try to base an economy off this when the thing being produced is information, you end up with things being controlled that have no business being controlled, such as the distribution of information on what laws have been passed or enacted, which was in fact covered in a recent slashdot article.
The DMCA is the perfect example of the types of abuses you can expect from an information based economy.
Freedom of information is necessary for freedom of expression because freedom of expression is itself dependent upon freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is in turn once again dependent upon freedom of information because information control is thought control.
Here in the US we are very sensitive to the right that we all have to freedom of expression. But for whatever reason we are not so sensitive to the right upon which it depends, freedom of thought. How can someone truly speak their mind when their ideas are controlled by another?
This is why P2P is an important social good. It allows and encourages the unregulated exchange of ideas and information, which in turn promotes and helps ensure a well informed public, which is something that democracy is itself dependent upon.
It has often been said that the first amendment makes all others possible. I'd argue that the first and the second amendment make all others possible, but for either of them to actually be there and exist, you must have freedom of information.
Lee Reynolds
"In fact if you think about it enough, you might realise that our choices are defined and limited by our genes and environment which means that our genes and environment do partially define who we are."
If you thought about it enough, you'd realize that while the range of choices we have are rarely limitless, what is not limited is our ability to make a good choice. This is true for anyone who is responsible for their own actions.
There are three kinds of problems in life. The first are things that nothing can be done about. Genetics falls into this catagory. The second are problems that you yourself have created. The choices we make fall into this catagory. The third are problems which we either self-perpetuate or otherwise refuse to deal with. The environment falls into the third catagory.
There are people of course who will disagree with this. Who will claim that basically we are all victims and who will in fact encourage us to be so. They're called liberals.
Only if you mean regular as in metamucil
My point exactly.
We should be worrying about providing a balanced mental diet for our children so that the occassional greaseburger isn't going to do anything to them overall.
On the other hand if someone eats nothing but bean sprouts then they're going to turn out pretty messed up as well.
As I stated in another post, I believe the 13 year old who killed himself did so in large part because he was sheltered and raised within a context that was at odds with the world he lived in. I've known quite a few people whose parents came here from other countries and all of them were raised as if they were still living in those countries. I think this is what was happening with that poor kid. His world collapsed when he disappointed his parents because he was taught from a young age to always honor and obey his parents, etc. etc. Chances are he really did believe he was going to jail since he wasn't street smart enough to know better. He wasn't street smart because his parents sheltered him from anything that might teach him to be. Thus he ended his life over something that the rest of us would never dream of.
As for people who didn't turn alright, it wasn't because of anything they saw on TV or on the internet, it was because of the choices they made. There is much senseless debate of environment verses genetics in determining how a person is going to come out and what their life will be like. The truth is that we are not a product of our genes, nor are we a product of our environment. Rather we are a product of how we choose to deal with our genes and our environment. If I am execptional in any way it is in that I know and understand this.
Lee Reynolds
As a matter of fact I do.
Like I said, I've never seen anything that I'd consider inherently harmful to anyone in and of itself. Feed someone a mental diet of nothing but violence and pornography and you're likely to cause some problems. But violence and pornography within a diet of other things that are positive rather than negative are of little consequence.
People are afraid of their kids seeing violence and porn because they themselves are disturbed by it, not because it is inherently harmful. Also they have the inaccurate belief that children are "impressionable." A two year old is impressionable because someone that age does not have any real experience to evaluate what they see and hear with. That soon changes. The older a person gets the more what they see is evaluated against a growing bank of past experiences. Because young people think and evaluate what they see, there is nothing that is going to warp someone unless that is the only thing they see. If on the other hand their experiences in life are balanced then a little porn or violence isn't going to do anything at all to their psyche.
I'm living proof of this. When I was a child and a teenager I worked hard to undermine the censorhip imposed on me by my parents. In fact by the time I was 13 my parents had essentially given up on controlling what I saw or read.
Today I'm a college graduate working for a major university. There are no bodies in my closet, I have no criminal record, and my sexual tastes are less risque than most. If my sex life was an ice cream flavor it would be vanilla. This dispite having seen plenty of XXX porn on satellite by the time I was 16. As for violence I've seen about as much as anyone else.
What a kid sees on tv or reads in a book is nowhere near as important as the situation in his or her family. If the father is abusive then worrying about seeing violence on tv is about like worrying about a bruised elbow on someone with a compound fracture of their femur.
I don't see much point in saying anything more. Ultimately the difference in our views comes down to how we see children. I see them as thinking human beings capable of discerning things. What you see them as I can't say for sure of course, but I know that some people see them as something like walking tape recorders whose every experience is indelibly marked upon their minds. Why people so easily forget what they were like as children I'll never understand. I know I wasn't a tape recorder and I doubt you were either.
Lee Reynolds
I've never been able to understand how it is that anyone would WANT censorship of anything.
There is no such thing as an idea or a fact that needs to be hidden away from view. If something is a fact then hiding it is not going to change it. If it is an idea then it will stand or fall based upon its merits.
Therefore the only people who are in favor of censorship are those who fear the truth, or whose own ideas do not stand up to cross examination.
Most of the censor happy types will drag out the old argument that there are things in this world that are harmful for children to see. Bullshit. I've never seen anything in my life, and I'm about to turn 30, that I ever thought would be inherently harmful for someone of any age to see. Now if you take something, say violence, and feed someone a died of nothing but violence, then yes I can see how that might be harmful to anyone of any age. But seeing violence or sex or you name it within the context of other things so that an overall balance is created is no more harmful to a 14 year old than it is to a 40 year old. The "save the children" argument is a weak argument that the censorship types fall back on because they don't have anything else to stand on.
Think about it, if censorship was a good idea, would anyone have to resort to a gut-level fear based argument to convince anyone that it was?
This is why I say that censorhip is a crime. It is a crime because it is a lie that is not just told, it is a lie that is perpetrated upon other people. It is an act of violence against the mind of another.
The best way to fight censorhip is to refuse to be silenced and to refuse to be censored. There isn't anything anyone can do to you that would be worse than allowing your sources of information to be controlled. Information control is mind control, don't let your mind be controlled.
Lee Reynolds
At that point the ability to, as Forrest Gump put it "Run like the wind blows" is a definite advantage too.
When I was a very young kid I got beat up on by other kids. I learned how to defend myself and that mostly stopped. There were still a few occassions however when it was clear I wans't going to be able to beat the other person. I was VERY lucky I guess that I inherited my grandfather's ability to run very fast. I'd take off and since I was faster than 99.5% of the population there was no way they could catch me. I could also run longer than most meaning that even if they were almost as fast as me they weren't going to be able to keep going as long as I could.
But really guns and knives are not the thing that most people are likely to deal with. If someone is giving you trouble and they are carrying a gun or knife, don't go to a "teacher," go to the police. Carrying a concealed weapon is a serious crime if you don't have a permit, and they don't give permits to teenaged thugs. Teachers don't really give a damn because they aren't paid to give a damn, the cops however are.
Lee Reynolds
Want to know more about these kinds of places?
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http://www.teenliberty.org/An_American_GULAG.ht
They SUSPENDED him! They didn't have him arrested, beaten with a stick, or even expel him from school. They didn't do anything that hasn't been done to just about every kid with even a millimeter wide streak of rebellion in him.
In other words the school didn't do anything wrong. If the kid is such a mental case that he off's himself over a two week suspension then maybe he was a "special needs" kid in need of special psychotherapy.
Lee Reynolds
So what did your friend do about the guy who was beating up on him?
If he didn't stand up to him, and put up a fight, then I can't say I feel too sorry for him. There will always be bullies in the world, no matter where you go or how old you are. The key to dealing with them is to hurt them, and to keep on hurting them until they leave you alone.
Bullies are people who, among other things, suffer from a lack of respect for themselves as well as other people. The only real substitute for respect is fear, which is why they seek to make others fear them.
Two can play at that game. They may be bigger than you, they may be stronger than you. The question is, are they meaner? The winner of most fights isn't the bigger person, its the person who is more vicious.
I've met people like your friend. Chances are he's making a pretend play at being a pacifist when he's really just plain scared. That's no way to handle the sitution, especially in the long run.
The best thing your friend can do is begin working out and studying some form of martial arts. A consistent work out that includes weight lifting will quickly bulk him up to the point that most bullies will think twice before messing with him in the first place. A knowledge of how to fight hand to hand, especially how to inflict damage on the other person, will mean that any bullies that are stupid enough to mess with him will quickly learn the error of their ways.
Everyone nowadays is lied to by the touchy-feely psychobabble types and told that violence isn't the answer. Well that depends on the question. If the question is how to resolve a dispute with a reasonable person, then violence is not the answer. If the question is how to educate a violent person in how not to mess with you, then violence is most definitely the answer since it is the only thing that type of person understands.
But ultimately the best defense against bullies is to be assertive, to not take any crap off anyone. A bully hitting someone is one of the latter stages of a process that begins the first time that bully insults someone or puts them down and they don't do anything about it.
There isn't much else I can say.
Lee Reynolds