I'm a software developer, currently employed. I don't care about the copyright status of what I produce, as I can earn money in any case.
Most programming work isn't of the software sold in shops variety, but of the custom coding for a client kind. It doesn't matter to me how many copies of my work exist, as I don't earn money from royalties, I get it from performing the job I was hired to do (which is for instance improving a program to support X). The clients generally don't have much of a reason to care either, as they have specific needs, and don't sell the software I work on.
I have been hired to work on GPL2 licensed software, and it worked just fine for me.
So here you have an example of somebody who has absolutely no problem with "Information wants to be free, man!" as you put it.
Not really. But oh well, one can't be good at everything.
(It was a joke)
It's a joke that nevertheless contains a bit of mistaken understanding of atheism. Some people think that atheists are allergic to anything that references some sort of deity, when many have no problem with using such expressions and reading various religious materials (though they generally treat them as mythology books)
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers.etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
As a software engineer, I don't. I get paid by the hour or by the project. I couldn't care less what happens with my work afterwards.
Most of my work is on custom internal applications and not things sold on the shelf. You can pirate it all you want, but it's not made for you, so you're unlikely to find it useful, and even if you can use it you'll still need to pay somebody to adjust it to your needs.
I've written open source software for money. It's easy. Customer says "I want this software to be able to do X". I look at it, negotiate with the customer, do the work and get the money. Modification gets released under the license of the original project (was GPL2). Maybe some other programmer somewhere will get money in the future for building on my work, and so on.
Take the iPhone for example. The materials that go into making an iPhone and those that go into making your average run of the mill phone are certainly not different enough to justify the price difference. The real difference is in the design - I.e. pure information with effectively no-limits to the amount it can be copied. Yet another company can't just use that information without Apple's permission - I.e. they can't just go off an make their own iPhone. Is this "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity" bad?
Yes. I'd like to have companies competing to make the best phone possible. For that purpose, it'd be best if any company could create a phone with any design it wanted, without being restricted by patents.
Or take Windows or any other peace of commercial software. It's purely information so the fact that I'm not free to copy and use it as much as I want must be "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity". Is this bad?
Yes. Attempting to keep it from being copied imposes a cost on society that I think we'd be better without.
The point is that making this information takes very real time and effort, whether it's designing a phone (or car or whatever), writing software, making a movie/song, or in this case writing a book. So what is so wrong with people having the right to demand payment for allowing people to utilise (Be it for entertainment, business or whatever) the information they have worked hard to create?
I'm not against work being paid for, I simply think work is something that should be paid for at the time it's performed. A programmer can charge by the hour/project, a musician can charge for creating a song, and so on. Then we don't need the entire messy copyright thing.
I have no clue what you're trying to prove by that.
That the US still does science isn't being disputed. Science in the US can be on the decline, while still exploring the solar system, doing research in genetics and funding studies.
Acutally, quite a few atheists use expressions like "oh god".
It's just that they don't take it as a literal reference to a deity, but as a multiword expression where the words aren't used in their literal sense (just like there's no actual kicking or a bucket involved when somebody kicks the bucket).
Sorry, not been trolled in the least. I'm just getting tired of Linux strawmen and logic hoops. I swear the Linux guys around here are getting as bad as the Apple fanboys that will tie themselves into logic knots trying to "prove" that a $4k Mac pro is a "good value" which of course even the Linux guys can agree it ain't so.
Meh. It fits my requirements, I'm not speaking of anybody else's. If it doesn't work for you, then it doesn't, don't see what's there to argue there.
As for your "perfectly good" scanner and webcam? So are many of the things I'd find if I dumpster dove by the local college, but that really isn't a sound business plan, is it? Are those devices sold right now at walmart?
The new ones do as well. The old ones I got obviously aren't sold due to the lack of Windows drivers for XP64 or newer.
But, you made two claims: One is that Linux supports less hardware. This is easily countered by that Windows drops support for a huge amount of hardware at some points (like the 64 bit transition), while Linux keeps supporting it.
The other one was that the requirement of source and specs is of no benefit to a consumer. I explained how it did benefit me as a consumer by saving the need to replace perfectly well working hardware for a stupid reason. Therefore I have personally benefited from the availability of source and specs, and have a good reason to ensure things go the same way in the future.
Now let us compare to Apple and Windows: STEP ONE- Go to store and look at the box. If it has the Winflag or Apple logo that is certified for your OS, put in cart. There is no step two.
Mhm. This attitude is precisely why my brother ends up with a bunch of hardware that is crap and often can't use anymore and I don't.
Research is necessary always, for any OS. We're not yet at the point where you can just get the first product off the shelf that fits the requirements and be 100% sure that it will actually work well.
But well, it's your money and your problem if you shop in such a shortsighted way.
I'm just really sick of the bullshit. I WANT Linux to be good. I WANT to sell it on shelves next to Win7 and OSX, but I can't because of SCoN! and paperweight roulette and guys that think "CLIRoxorz!"
But that's precisely why I like it! For me Linux is good precisely because of what you call "SCoN" (never heard anybody else use that term) and the commandline.
If Linux somehow morphs into a Windows-like sort of thing, I'll simply drop it and start pushing HURD or whatever takes Linux's place (not BSD because I much prefer the GPL's philosophy)
See, it seems to me that you should logically have the same position towards any other thing whose existence you can't disprove.
Thus, Santa could possibly exist somewhere. And maybe Zeus is hiding somewhere on Olympus after all. And when my socks disappear that could indeed be of the Invisible Pink Unicorn's doing, if I can't prove it's not Her fault. And so on.
If I came to you and said that an invisible pink unicorn has been stealing my socks lately, would you say "well, it *could* exist, we can't prove it doesn't!" or just think I had gone crazy and demand proof?
Ignosticism in my understanding isn't about the lack of agreement of what 'god' means, but about the lack of a coherent definition of 'god'.
For instance take the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Invisibility is a trait that's mutually exclusive with being pink. Such a definition isn't coherent, in the same manner as a 4 sided triangle is nonsensical. If you told me you've seen a building in the shape of a 4-sided triangle I couldn't begin to imagine what on earth you're talking about.
So even when presented with the full explanation of what IPU is I could still say "I have no clue what you're talking about, come back when you have a definition that actually makes sense".
Atheism states that there is no higher power in the world. That there is no god, gods or any higher form of life. And such gods cannot exist based on a few arguments.
That would be strong atheism - actually stating "there is no god". There exist other positions.
One is weak atheism - "I don't believe in a god". This would mean that though a deity can conceivably exist, I don't currently believe in any.
Another is agnosticism - "It's not possible to know if there is a god or not". I consider this to be a strange position to hold, as there are many things that are unknownable. For instance, unvisible pink unicorns as well as pretty much every deity. It seems to me that it'd be a colossal waste of time to think about the countless entities which can't be proven not to exist, when one can simply take the position of "I'll believe in it when it shows up".
And yet another one is ignosticism - "I don't know what you mean when you say 'god'". This would be a variety of weak atheism in that it doesn't recognize a deity either.
As such, its a natural conclusion based on scientific evidence that if there was no god, gods or higher forms of life other than man, that the existence of man is to benefit the species of man. To carry on the normal functions of life, to help others of the same species, to then die. Those are the logical conclusions.
While strong atheism does have some of the characteristics of religious belief, it still prescribes nothing. Nowhere does it say that there's a purpose "to benefit the species of man".
There exist nihilists, who probably wouldn't agree. For a stronger example, see the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who believe that the planet would be better off without us, and choose not to breed. This would go rather counter to the "benefit man" idea, and I don't think there's any religion that accepts such a philosophy.
A troll? Wow, thanks, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! You go STRAIGHT to the name calling without even bothering to read what I said
Well, it's pretty hard to extract meaning from your ranting. You've even managed to somehow include Reagan in a discussion about software.
Though given your reaction maybe you're the trolled one, though that'd be mostly of your own making.
We are talking devices being SOLD NOW, not a decade ago. I'll be the first to admit if you dumpster dive for your hardware the latest Linux will support it,
Which is why I mentioned the printer and scanner. Both are perfectly modern devices, maybe a couple years old, perfectly capable of doing their job, and for which it would be hard to find a significantly better replacement.
Unlike CPUs, things like printers and scanner don't get better at the same rate, and a $400 printer in two years isn't going to make a $400 printer from today look completely obsolete.
And I just looove how you say you "don't care about manufacturers drivers". I gues you would rather have some hacked shit written by some guy in his basement than by the engineer that actually built the thing, hmmm?
Actually, yes.
The guy in his basement usually also an user who wants the device to work well, while the manufacturer wants to get the device out of the door as quickly as possible and to spend as little time as possible on maintenance afterwards.
Additionally, the guy in the basement releases the source, which means that if there's something wrong with it, it can be fixed, even after the manufacturer came up with a new model and stopped caring, which in my experience doesn't take long at all.
The manufacturer's driver won't be built by "the engineer who actually built the thing", anyway. Making hardware and making software are different areas of expertise, so the same person isn't going to do both jobs at the company, unless it's a very small one making a niche product.
Now compare that to Linux: pop quiz hotshot: 35% of the devices in walmart work in Linux, can you tell me without trawling some crappy forum or Googling your ass off which ones they are? Times up, you can't.
I'd like to know the source of that statistic, especially considering that the Linux kernel has a "free drivers" project that offers to make drivers for any device manufactuerer that asks for them. All they have to do is to give some specs (they'll accept a NDA even), and they'll get a free Linux driver.
And folks wonder why Linux just don't sell in retail.
I don't really wonder, no. The market isn't very big, and most Linux users I know buy their hardware in pieces. Some because they like unusual components (I buy server boards that support ECC for my desktops), some because they already have hardware lying around and it's cheaper that way.
Still, I don't get what the point of your rant is. You seem to be really angry at somebody or something, but I'm at a loss at why would you care.
let me give an example: I sell computers, both new builds and refurbs, yet I will NOT sell Linux machines. Why? Because the devices in Best Buy, staples, and Walmart have around 35% that are "functional" if you include devices that you have to put in 3 pages of CLI gibberish on, and may/may not work if a new rev has come out, as functional. Can you tell by looking at the boxes which ones don't work? Nope, you can't. You can't, I can't, and the poor kid working behind the counter sure as hell can't.
Haha, what a troll. But oh well, I'm bored.
No, actually most current hardware works great on Linux. In fact, device support on Linux is actually better than on Windows these days.
This is because many devices stopped to be supported on Windows at different points, like the 64 bit switch. I've got a Creative Webcam 5 lying around for instance. It won't work on XP64, since Creative has long stopped caring about something they made maybe 10 years ago. Yet plug it into a Linux box and it works perfectly fine.
This isn't reserved to old devices though. I've accumulated a nice collection of hardware worth about $1000 thanks to my brother being unable to use it on his new box, this includes a perfectly modern scanner, and a color laser printer.
Why is it like this? Why are the other two "inferior" OSes so far ahead when it comes to ease of use and ease of purchase? Because the Linux driver model of "Give us all your specs and code (SCoN!) and we'll put it in the kernel" is a giant can o' fail with a side order of pointless, because most companies don't want to play your little reindeer games and even if they did by the time the drivers "trickle down" (which works even less than Reaganomics) from the tree to the distros your device isn't being sold in stores anymore, therefor it is worthless to consumers.
It's not so in my experience.
All your ranting aside, Linux's emphasis on open source and specs means that I get to have a free printer that'll keep working until it physically breaks, unlike my brother, who can buy a new one every time the manufactuer decides that it won't make new drivers. And why should it, when it could just make people throw perfectly good hardware away, and get them to buy a new, imperceptibly better (often worse) version?
Why is there no stable ABI so manufacturers can put drivers on CDs and penguins on the box? Read the kernel mailing list and they basically say "Its about freedom, man!(SCoN!)"
There's no stable ABI because it would slow down progress. It'd mean backwards compatibility with every bug and misdesign made in the past, until at some point it'll have to get broken anyway. But why bother with maintaining a mess like that, when with the source available you can just fix bugs and design as needed, and then correct whatever breaks? You get a much cleaner codebase without piling up hacks on top of hacks.
I don't really care about the manufacturer's drivers btw. They're invariably crap. They install some 200MB.NET monstrousity that wants to sit in the taskbar, and pops up a message every time you print a page because there's only 50% ink left. Screw that. In Linux every printer is supported in the same manner, in a boring but very functional and onbtrusive way that doesn't get into my face.
This is completely fine if everyone would stop that "year of the Linux desktop!" garbage and accept they have no chance in hell against MSFT and Apple in the desktop space, but the SCoN! want their cake and to eat it to. They think "users are frightened" and "if they would just try CLI they would embrace the power" like they are monkeys staring at the fricking monolith or something...bullshit, complete and utter bullshit. The consumer wants, easy, they want to shop at Walmart, they do NOT want to input a bunch of CLI gibberish, or to see a bash prompt EVAR!
The GPL3 is what Stallman wanted to make in the first place, he just didn't go far enough.
His original issue was the printer driver. Obviously if he had a driver with full source but the machine prevented the fixed driver from working, it wouldn't have been any better.
Personally I like the GPL3 and will preferentially support companies that don't have a problem with it. I want hardware I can mess with. I will pay for that. I won't pay for closed Apple-like systems.
And let us be honest here, okay? If TiVo would have done as RMS demanded and made the TiVo hackable, how many here think they would still be in business? Anyone? Of course not, because in less than a week there would be "Free TiVo by Reloaded" hacks and "How to get all the content off a TiVo and burn it to anything you want!!" tutorials
Wonderful, that's precisely the sort of thing I would gladly pay for, even a larger amount than average.
A box that limits what I can do with it though, isn't worth much to me.
For me it's for easy internet access at any time and any place. It can be handy if I get bored, or want to show somebody a photo I made, or to check product prices online when shopping to make sure I'm getting a reasonable offer.
The quality of a camera isn't measured in megapixels. It depends on the quality of the optics and the sensor. A 10MP camera in a cell phone is only going to give you huge, noisy images.
On my part, I used to be of the "All I want is a phone that makes calls" kind, but since then dropped that attitude.
Years back, a phone could have a web browser, and a camera, but it was very likely that both things were going to be very half assed. So you'd get an expensive phone with bad battery life that'd be a pain to do web browsing on, and which would make really horrible photos. Also they were quite closed, and often the only option you had is to use the included crappy software or nothing at all.
These days though, phones are shifting towards being a mini computer that just happens to make calls, such as the N900 for instance. And that is cool, and I'm looking forward to getting one. The ability of being whatever I want to do with it, including using skype is a huge advantage, and couldn't be had at any price just a few years back.
I have a MP3 player with a tactile screen. It's got the same capacitative touch screen that Apple products have.
Well, it was cool for about a week, after that I pretty much stopped using it, and stick to the buttons it fortunately has.
Why? Well, for one, you can't really use the screen with gloves on. They make my fingers too big to accurately hit anything, and mess with the capacitative function. Though sometimes it works even through the leather case, which is annoying. I'd prefer it to never work at all, as then I could keep it unlocked but in the case, and still be able to use the buttons.
Then there's that it accumulates all the oils from my fingers and I need to clean it any time I want to watch any video on it.
Now my usage of the device is as follows: turn on, use the touch screen to navigate to a playlist/etc, close the leather cover around it, then use the next/prev physical buttons if I want to change the track.
My biggest annoyance with the device is the lack of an option to disable the touch screen.
With the current level of polemic, those who point out holes in your arguments are painted as akin to holocaust deniers, flat-earthers and creationists and now as apparently so cynical that they care more for a cup of coffee than for people who see their land go underwater.
Any holes are holes in the small details. The big picture is that retaining more heat will make things get hotter. That's about as clear as that the earth is round.
The arguments about the specifics of what exactly is going to happen, but just because somebody got some of that wrong doesn't invalidate the big picture. The weather report may be wrong about that it's going to rain tomorrow, but that doesn't disprove that it rains a lot in London.
It seems so hysterical at times that if someone tries to object to this coffee claim by pointing out that it seems likely that the coffee plant would be able to *adapt* to climate change, the way it and everyone else on this planet has been doing for quite a while, it would almost not surprise me to see him labeled a "creationist"...
Do you realize that "adaption" is a potentially very nasty process?
People talk of "adaption" as if in the case of coastal cities getting flooded people would just grow gills all of a sudden and happily live underwater.
Adaption for humans will also be a messy thing. Suppose coastal cities get flooded. Well, we'll adapt, sure, through massive migrations, massive rebuilds of architecture destroyed by floods, and massive creation of new engineering projects like levees to prevent it. We'll definitely manage. However that won't happen for free, and you're going to end up paying for it, with your taxes, for instance. Some people will pay for it with their life for not getting out of the way soon enough, or will have their enconomic situation majorly screwed up.
Other life no doubt will adapt, but that doesn't mean everything will just get used to the new conditions and otherwise stay the same. It could well mean a species we like dying off and getting replaced with some weed that doesn't mind the new conditions. Over enough time things will rebalance themselves, but not necessarily in a way we will find convenient.
Furthermore, it's a fairly safe assumption that by 2030, all computers still functioning will use 64 bit ints, and your code will have been recompiled and debugged for 64 bit, which will incidentally remove the 2038 issue.
It's not so simple. What about various file formats that include timestamps in them? For instance, ext3 has the year 2038 problem.
Just because your CPU can handle a 64 bit number doesn't mean every file format will automatically use one, as that would break compatibility.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the Earth isn't a closed system.
We get an external energy input from the Sun, and emit energy into space. The amount of energy on the planet isn't constant. We could make it grow by reflecting less, or making it shrink by say, launching chunks of coal into space, or reflecting more energy.
That said, "renewable energy" is a bit of a misnomer, as oil will get created, at large enough timescales (though nowhere near fast enough to match consumption). On the other hand, so long the Sun is there we'll keep getting energy from it.
political recrimination gets us nowhere. its cold in the house because someone left the window open?
Bad example. It's not who left the window open, it's determining that the problem is an open window, as opposed to for instance running the air conditioner in winter. Because fixing the problem the right way (closing the window, or shutting down the AC) is much easier than doing it the wrong way (adding heaters for instance).
If the problem is too much CO2, then it's very possible the easiest fix is to reduce the amount of CO2 instead of starting some sort of planet-wide engineering project.
2. who fucking cares if we are heating up or cooling down or not changing
How is your engineer going to fix the problem without knowing what it is? The solutions to "too cold", "too hot", and "not changing when it should" are different. And depending on the amount of change the scale of your engineering project is going to change quite a lot.
Whatever is going to happen doesn't really care about whether you're right or not. If there's global warming then it's going to have consequences, even if not a single person wants to believe it.
You were trying to argue that the D&D concept of crowd control doesn't exist in warfare. I proved that it does (flashbangs, gas, terrain, polished shields, whatever). In what specific situations it's used is of no particular importance. My only argument is that it's not something Gygax pulled out of his ass, and that modern forces do have the equivalent of a D&D wizard's spell set, so there's nothing particularly odd about it.
Also I don't think planes have anything to do with the argument either, since D&D fights happen on the ground. But flying creatures definitely ignore the effects of grease and such, and flying dragons are probably immune to cloudkilll. Then, planes aren't "crowd" so I don't see what they have to do with that discussion.
You were just saying that RPGs aren't about armies. In a RPG the situation is closer to that of a police or army team storming a building. And yes, in such cases they do use flashbangs, smoke grenades, tear gas, and so on. And in such a team there may well be people who specialize in explosives or marksmanship.
mustard gas doesnt debilitate you. it doesnt prevent your abilities to retaliate. your artillery can still shoot, your planes still drop bombs. you shouldnt pick examples from modern warfare, for modern warfare is no longer individual dependant.
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Hi there.
I'm a software developer, currently employed. I don't care about the copyright status of what I produce, as I can earn money in any case.
Most programming work isn't of the software sold in shops variety, but of the custom coding for a client kind. It doesn't matter to me how many copies of my work exist, as I don't earn money from royalties, I get it from performing the job I was hired to do (which is for instance improving a program to support X). The clients generally don't have much of a reason to care either, as they have specific needs, and don't sell the software I work on.
I have been hired to work on GPL2 licensed software, and it worked just fine for me.
So here you have an example of somebody who has absolutely no problem with "Information wants to be free, man!" as you put it.
Not really. But oh well, one can't be good at everything.
It's a joke that nevertheless contains a bit of mistaken understanding of atheism. Some people think that atheists are allergic to anything that references some sort of deity, when many have no problem with using such expressions and reading various religious materials (though they generally treat them as mythology books)
As a software engineer, I don't. I get paid by the hour or by the project. I couldn't care less what happens with my work afterwards.
Most of my work is on custom internal applications and not things sold on the shelf. You can pirate it all you want, but it's not made for you, so you're unlikely to find it useful, and even if you can use it you'll still need to pay somebody to adjust it to your needs.
I've written open source software for money. It's easy. Customer says "I want this software to be able to do X". I look at it, negotiate with the customer, do the work and get the money. Modification gets released under the license of the original project (was GPL2). Maybe some other programmer somewhere will get money in the future for building on my work, and so on.
Yes. I'd like to have companies competing to make the best phone possible. For that purpose, it'd be best if any company could create a phone with any design it wanted, without being restricted by patents.
Yes. Attempting to keep it from being copied imposes a cost on society that I think we'd be better without.
I'm not against work being paid for, I simply think work is something that should be paid for at the time it's performed. A programmer can charge by the hour/project, a musician can charge for creating a song, and so on. Then we don't need the entire messy copyright thing.
I have no clue what you're trying to prove by that.
That the US still does science isn't being disputed. Science in the US can be on the decline, while still exploring the solar system, doing research in genetics and funding studies.
Acutally, quite a few atheists use expressions like "oh god".
It's just that they don't take it as a literal reference to a deity, but as a multiword expression where the words aren't used in their literal sense (just like there's no actual kicking or a bucket involved when somebody kicks the bucket).
Meh. It fits my requirements, I'm not speaking of anybody else's. If it doesn't work for you, then it doesn't, don't see what's there to argue there.
The new ones do as well. The old ones I got obviously aren't sold due to the lack of Windows drivers for XP64 or newer.
But, you made two claims: One is that Linux supports less hardware. This is easily countered by that Windows drops support for a huge amount of hardware at some points (like the 64 bit transition), while Linux keeps supporting it.
The other one was that the requirement of source and specs is of no benefit to a consumer. I explained how it did benefit me as a consumer by saving the need to replace perfectly well working hardware for a stupid reason. Therefore I have personally benefited from the availability of source and specs, and have a good reason to ensure things go the same way in the future.
Mhm. This attitude is precisely why my brother ends up with a bunch of hardware that is crap and often can't use anymore and I don't.
Research is necessary always, for any OS. We're not yet at the point where you can just get the first product off the shelf that fits the requirements and be 100% sure that it will actually work well.
But well, it's your money and your problem if you shop in such a shortsighted way.
But that's precisely why I like it! For me Linux is good precisely because of what you call "SCoN" (never heard anybody else use that term) and the commandline.
If Linux somehow morphs into a Windows-like sort of thing, I'll simply drop it and start pushing HURD or whatever takes Linux's place (not BSD because I much prefer the GPL's philosophy)
See, it seems to me that you should logically have the same position towards any other thing whose existence you can't disprove.
Thus, Santa could possibly exist somewhere. And maybe Zeus is hiding somewhere on Olympus after all. And when my socks disappear that could indeed be of the Invisible Pink Unicorn's doing, if I can't prove it's not Her fault. And so on.
If I came to you and said that an invisible pink unicorn has been stealing my socks lately, would you say "well, it *could* exist, we can't prove it doesn't!" or just think I had gone crazy and demand proof?
Ignosticism in my understanding isn't about the lack of agreement of what 'god' means, but about the lack of a coherent definition of 'god'.
For instance take the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Invisibility is a trait that's mutually exclusive with being pink. Such a definition isn't coherent, in the same manner as a 4 sided triangle is nonsensical. If you told me you've seen a building in the shape of a 4-sided triangle I couldn't begin to imagine what on earth you're talking about.
So even when presented with the full explanation of what IPU is I could still say "I have no clue what you're talking about, come back when you have a definition that actually makes sense".
What do you call the position of lack of belief with no assertion?
I don't assert that there's no deity. I simply don't believe in any of those people speak of.
That would be strong atheism - actually stating "there is no god". There exist other positions.
One is weak atheism - "I don't believe in a god". This would mean that though a deity can conceivably exist, I don't currently believe in any.
Another is agnosticism - "It's not possible to know if there is a god or not". I consider this to be a strange position to hold, as there are many things that are unknownable. For instance, unvisible pink unicorns as well as pretty much every deity. It seems to me that it'd be a colossal waste of time to think about the countless entities which can't be proven not to exist, when one can simply take the position of "I'll believe in it when it shows up".
And yet another one is ignosticism - "I don't know what you mean when you say 'god'". This would be a variety of weak atheism in that it doesn't recognize a deity either.
While strong atheism does have some of the characteristics of religious belief, it still prescribes nothing. Nowhere does it say that there's a purpose "to benefit the species of man".
There exist nihilists, who probably wouldn't agree. For a stronger example, see the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who believe that the planet would be better off without us, and choose not to breed. This would go rather counter to the "benefit man" idea, and I don't think there's any religion that accepts such a philosophy.
Well, it's pretty hard to extract meaning from your ranting. You've even managed to somehow include Reagan in a discussion about software.
Though given your reaction maybe you're the trolled one, though that'd be mostly of your own making.
Which is why I mentioned the printer and scanner. Both are perfectly modern devices, maybe a couple years old, perfectly capable of doing their job, and for which it would be hard to find a significantly better replacement.
Unlike CPUs, things like printers and scanner don't get better at the same rate, and a $400 printer in two years isn't going to make a $400 printer from today look completely obsolete.
Actually, yes.
The guy in his basement usually also an user who wants the device to work well, while the manufacturer wants to get the device out of the door as quickly as possible and to spend as little time as possible on maintenance afterwards.
Additionally, the guy in the basement releases the source, which means that if there's something wrong with it, it can be fixed, even after the manufacturer came up with a new model and stopped caring, which in my experience doesn't take long at all.
The manufacturer's driver won't be built by "the engineer who actually built the thing", anyway. Making hardware and making software are different areas of expertise, so the same person isn't going to do both jobs at the company, unless it's a very small one making a niche product.
I'd like to know the source of that statistic, especially considering that the Linux kernel has a "free drivers" project that offers to make drivers for any device manufactuerer that asks for them. All they have to do is to give some specs (they'll accept a NDA even), and they'll get a free Linux driver.
I don't really wonder, no. The market isn't very big, and most Linux users I know buy their hardware in pieces. Some because they like unusual components (I buy server boards that support ECC for my desktops), some because they already have hardware lying around and it's cheaper that way.
Still, I don't get what the point of your rant is. You seem to be really angry at somebody or something, but I'm at a loss at why would you care.
Haha, what a troll. But oh well, I'm bored.
No, actually most current hardware works great on Linux. In fact, device support on Linux is actually better than on Windows these days.
This is because many devices stopped to be supported on Windows at different points, like the 64 bit switch. I've got a Creative Webcam 5 lying around for instance. It won't work on XP64, since Creative has long stopped caring about something they made maybe 10 years ago. Yet plug it into a Linux box and it works perfectly fine.
This isn't reserved to old devices though. I've accumulated a nice collection of hardware worth about $1000 thanks to my brother being unable to use it on his new box, this includes a perfectly modern scanner, and a color laser printer.
It's not so in my experience.
All your ranting aside, Linux's emphasis on open source and specs means that I get to have a free printer that'll keep working until it physically breaks, unlike my brother, who can buy a new one every time the manufactuer decides that it won't make new drivers. And why should it, when it could just make people throw perfectly good hardware away, and get them to buy a new, imperceptibly better (often worse) version?
There's no stable ABI because it would slow down progress. It'd mean backwards compatibility with every bug and misdesign made in the past, until at some point it'll have to get broken anyway. But why bother with maintaining a mess like that, when with the source available you can just fix bugs and design as needed, and then correct whatever breaks? You get a much cleaner codebase without piling up hacks on top of hacks.
I don't really care about the manufacturer's drivers btw. They're invariably crap. They install some 200MB .NET monstrousity that wants to sit in the taskbar, and pops up a message every time you print a page because there's only 50% ink left. Screw that. In Linux every printer is supported in the same manner, in a boring but very functional and onbtrusive way that doesn't get into my face.
Meh. I never cared about
The GPL3 is what Stallman wanted to make in the first place, he just didn't go far enough.
His original issue was the printer driver. Obviously if he had a driver with full source but the machine prevented the fixed driver from working, it wouldn't have been any better.
Personally I like the GPL3 and will preferentially support companies that don't have a problem with it. I want hardware I can mess with. I will pay for that. I won't pay for closed Apple-like systems.
Wonderful, that's precisely the sort of thing I would gladly pay for, even a larger amount than average.
A box that limits what I can do with it though, isn't worth much to me.
I don't want to be online all the time either.
For me it's for easy internet access at any time and any place. It can be handy if I get bored, or want to show somebody a photo I made, or to check product prices online when shopping to make sure I'm getting a reasonable offer.
The quality of a camera isn't measured in megapixels. It depends on the quality of the optics and the sensor. A 10MP camera in a cell phone is only going to give you huge, noisy images.
On my part, I used to be of the "All I want is a phone that makes calls" kind, but since then dropped that attitude.
Years back, a phone could have a web browser, and a camera, but it was very likely that both things were going to be very half assed. So you'd get an expensive phone with bad battery life that'd be a pain to do web browsing on, and which would make really horrible photos. Also they were quite closed, and often the only option you had is to use the included crappy software or nothing at all.
These days though, phones are shifting towards being a mini computer that just happens to make calls, such as the N900 for instance. And that is cool, and I'm looking forward to getting one. The ability of being whatever I want to do with it, including using skype is a huge advantage, and couldn't be had at any price just a few years back.
I have a MP3 player with a tactile screen. It's got the same capacitative touch screen that Apple products have.
Well, it was cool for about a week, after that I pretty much stopped using it, and stick to the buttons it fortunately has.
Why? Well, for one, you can't really use the screen with gloves on. They make my fingers too big to accurately hit anything, and mess with the capacitative function. Though sometimes it works even through the leather case, which is annoying. I'd prefer it to never work at all, as then I could keep it unlocked but in the case, and still be able to use the buttons.
Then there's that it accumulates all the oils from my fingers and I need to clean it any time I want to watch any video on it.
Now my usage of the device is as follows: turn on, use the touch screen to navigate to a playlist/etc, close the leather cover around it, then use the next/prev physical buttons if I want to change the track.
My biggest annoyance with the device is the lack of an option to disable the touch screen.
Any holes are holes in the small details. The big picture is that retaining more heat will make things get hotter. That's about as clear as that the earth is round.
The arguments about the specifics of what exactly is going to happen, but just because somebody got some of that wrong doesn't invalidate the big picture. The weather report may be wrong about that it's going to rain tomorrow, but that doesn't disprove that it rains a lot in London.
Do you realize that "adaption" is a potentially very nasty process?
People talk of "adaption" as if in the case of coastal cities getting flooded people would just grow gills all of a sudden and happily live underwater.
Adaption for humans will also be a messy thing. Suppose coastal cities get flooded. Well, we'll adapt, sure, through massive migrations, massive rebuilds of architecture destroyed by floods, and massive creation of new engineering projects like levees to prevent it. We'll definitely manage. However that won't happen for free, and you're going to end up paying for it, with your taxes, for instance. Some people will pay for it with their life for not getting out of the way soon enough, or will have their enconomic situation majorly screwed up.
Other life no doubt will adapt, but that doesn't mean everything will just get used to the new conditions and otherwise stay the same. It could well mean a species we like dying off and getting replaced with some weed that doesn't mind the new conditions. Over enough time things will rebalance themselves, but not necessarily in a way we will find convenient.
It's not so simple. What about various file formats that include timestamps in them? For instance, ext3 has the year 2038 problem.
Just because your CPU can handle a 64 bit number doesn't mean every file format will automatically use one, as that would break compatibility.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the Earth isn't a closed system.
We get an external energy input from the Sun, and emit energy into space. The amount of energy on the planet isn't constant. We could make it grow by reflecting less, or making it shrink by say, launching chunks of coal into space, or reflecting more energy.
That said, "renewable energy" is a bit of a misnomer, as oil will get created, at large enough timescales (though nowhere near fast enough to match consumption). On the other hand, so long the Sun is there we'll keep getting energy from it.
Where did you get the "audit" part from? The word doesn't appear anywhere in the AGPL.
Bad example. It's not who left the window open, it's determining that the problem is an open window, as opposed to for instance running the air conditioner in winter. Because fixing the problem the right way (closing the window, or shutting down the AC) is much easier than doing it the wrong way (adding heaters for instance).
If the problem is too much CO2, then it's very possible the easiest fix is to reduce the amount of CO2 instead of starting some sort of planet-wide engineering project.
How is your engineer going to fix the problem without knowing what it is? The solutions to "too cold", "too hot", and "not changing when it should" are different. And depending on the amount of change the scale of your engineering project is going to change quite a lot.
It doesn't matter who wins the argument.
Whatever is going to happen doesn't really care about whether you're right or not. If there's global warming then it's going to have consequences, even if not a single person wants to believe it.
What's that got to do with the original argument?
You were trying to argue that the D&D concept of crowd control doesn't exist in warfare. I proved that it does (flashbangs, gas, terrain, polished shields, whatever). In what specific situations it's used is of no particular importance. My only argument is that it's not something Gygax pulled out of his ass, and that modern forces do have the equivalent of a D&D wizard's spell set, so there's nothing particularly odd about it.
Also I don't think planes have anything to do with the argument either, since D&D fights happen on the ground. But flying creatures definitely ignore the effects of grease and such, and flying dragons are probably immune to cloudkilll. Then, planes aren't "crowd" so I don't see what they have to do with that discussion.
Wait, you're being inconsistent.
You were just saying that RPGs aren't about armies. In a RPG the situation is closer to that of a police or army team storming a building. And yes, in such cases they do use flashbangs, smoke grenades, tear gas, and so on. And in such a team there may well be people who specialize in explosives or marksmanship.
Fine, VX or Sarin then.