The problem I have with the Motor-Voter law is that it usurps states' rights because the state has to pay (the DMVs are run by the states) for federal registration. If the federal government wants to pay the states the extra funding to handle the paperwork then I have no problem with it. Historically, this has not been the case.
And really if someone is too apathetic to vote, all the better. When 50% of the eligible population votes, that increases my voting power by 100%.
If you don't vote, you get the government you deserve! -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I agree (with the holiday idea). But then again, you know quite a few people have died for rights such as voting, the least which we can do is stop by the library or school or firehouse on our way home and fulfill our citizens' obligations. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Re:How will this affect the parties in power?
on
Voting over the net?
·
· Score: 1
Actually the haves already have most of the power. The have-nots don't vote enough as it is. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Strange that you choose an example of ~7million people during a time of war who lived under anarchism for roughly 3 years during a civil war. Not to dispute any tenets of anarchism itself, you can barely call that a success or a failure. Societies in war times operate significantly different from those in peace times, and although war places undue stress on a society (especially total war), it also grants to the society unusual benefits, the least of which is a coherent idealogical support base. Further, unusual conditions or no, 3 years is no significant amount of time, and 7 million people is no significant amount of people, relatively speaking, especially considering that many of the people fighting in the Spanish Civil War, whether they be anarchists, socialist or communists, were not from Spain and it is debatable whether they would have remained in Spain upon a Republican victory. The Soviet Union had millions of inhabitants, expansive territory and, eventually, significant industrial and military power. It took the Soviet Union 75 years to collapse, no doubt quickened under the stress of the Cold War (which showed capitalism's inherent superiority in production over soviet communism), but the Cold War certainly cannot be blamed for everything. I don't think most people would call the system the Soviet Union operated under (which they labeled unfairly "communism") a success, despite the fact that it survived 75 years. In fact, you are willing to call republican-capitalism a failure even though it has survived in various forms within the United States for over 220 years. Yet 3 years is a success?
Again, I am not saying that the eventual failure in Spain proves anarchy a failure; merely that it's short-lived success does not prove anarchism a success and perhaps you should find a better example if you are going to use examples to prove your point. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Give me the names of these places. Were they entire countries? And if Anarchism cannot defend itself from other powers (imperial or otherwise), then does it require that the entire world convert to anarchism for it to remain protected? In that case, you're talking a little more than seven million people. There's over 7 million people in New York alone.
-- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Libertarian Socialism (Anarchism) is the ultimate in personal freedom, expression, and every aspect of the collective is democracy.
Unfortunately, a trully free individual is free to oppress others.
A person also has no power to dominate another since no hierachal institutions exist.
Since when does a person need a hierarchal institution to dominate? All a person needs is superior body strength, weaponry or charisma. Hierarchal institutions are necessary (and evolve perfectly naturally as part of civilization) to channel and control the human tendancy to seek dominance over his peers.
Of course the automatic responses of crime and acts of hatred are brough up, but it expected that collectively elected constables will exist to deal with major annoyances to society.
Yes, these institutions are the police, the law and the government. Or would you have one institution for the formation, execution and practice of the law? Perhaps you'd like to see vigilante groups running around lynching suspected criminals in true Old West style?
-- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Does the fact that this happened over a holiday weekend have any credence? Not to mention the guy runs a company; he is his own boss and if he can find time to do this over a *holiday* and still run a company, then more power to him. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The roms are the same. If you check out emux.com, you'll notice that there are roms for MAME, not different versions of MAME. The only difference is that you may have to manually unzip the roms as the last time I tried xmame (an older version for sure), it wouldn't detect roms in their zip format. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
There is a danger, and it is one only touched upon in the essays I've read by Stallman.
Raymond and the "open source" advocates point to the inherent superiority of "open source" software products compared to proprietary products. The problem is that if the only reason to use open source is that it is expected to perform better and more stable, then as soon as a proprietary software product is shown to perform better and more stable the whole argument falls apart.
We all have seen the Mindcraft tests which show NT performing better in certain (however unlikely) situations. NT has a higher performance, multithreaded IP stack which scales to mulitprocessor systems better than the unithreaded version in Linux, for example. BeOS, by many indications, can handle high-bandwidth media better than most any other consumer OS on the market. And, of course, there are many proprietary Unices such as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Digital UNIX which tout better reliability and higher performance on high-end machines.
In many ways, despite the outcries of free software advocates and zealots, free software suffers more from the "good enough" syndrome than commercial software. Commercial software (often) must remain competitive, so "good enough" means "good enough to match or exceed our competitor's product"; in other words, good enough to get people to buy your product. With free software, "good enough" typically means "good enough to do what I (the developer) originally wanted a program for"; that is, good enough to "scratch the itch" of the developers working on the product. Meeting other, non-developers', needs are almost exclusively a second priority and done when there is time. How many times on/. have you heard someone say how Linux is missing this or that feature, only to have someone else say something to the effect of "well you've got the source, go write it yourself"?
So, there is evidence that there is nothing inherently superior about the performance, stability, or functionality of "open source" or "free" software. Thus, making these issues the cornerstone of free software is dangerous to the movement as a whole, because once it is shown these facts are not *necessarily* true, free software no longer has any appeal to those who bought those arguments in the first place.
No one would be sweating the Mindcraft "failures" if free software were valued because it is free, rather than out-performing non-free software.
Advocating free software in the way Eric Raymond has done is like advocating democracy for its levels of production it can achieve. None of us hold democracy so dear (assuming that most of us do hold democracy dear) because of its commercial value. We hold democracy dear because it elevates us all to equal status (in theory) in society, and adorns its citizens with rights protected by a government in which all citizens have an equal say (again, in theory).
We admire free software for the same reason we admire freedom itself, not for any benchmarks of production. Any such mundane benefits of free software (performance, stability, ingenuity) should be considered side effects of free software, and the benificial outcome of the application of its principles.
Raymond could be a successful disciple of free software if he confined himself to analyzing the processes in the way the "Three Amigos" have done and helping to formulate a repeatable and more or less standard method of development. This seems to be his forte, I think unfortunately his ego has been thrust into the advocacy spotlight by the apparent success of the "Cathedral and the Bazaar".
I see Stallman as a sort of software libertarian, whereas Raymond is a free software economist, and the two could certainly co-exist. The problem is that the two characters have been pushed into advocacy either by perception or reality, and in the light of advocacy neither is a good man for the job.
-- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Re:RMS Never tried to run a company
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
Look if you're doing work that you expect to be compensated for then why release under the GPL, unless you work for a company which is paying you to work on GPL'd code (such as Red Hat, Cygnus, etc), in which case you shouldn't care. Those companies are not selling the code, per se, they are selling their value-added services, and if they didn't feel they could make money off their particular business model they wouldn't be doing business in that way. Unofficial Red Hat distributions can be purchased on the cheap, yet Red Hat is still there and planning on going public. Why? Because enough people still feel they are getting a better deal paying $50-$80 for the official distribution and getting support (however lacking it may be) and manuals, etc than paying $1.50 for a Cheapbytes CD and getting a CD only. Plus, Red Hat (and the other distribution companies) are trying to position themselves in the corporate market, and that will be a much more lucrative endevour than hawking their wares at Electronics Boutique. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Re:RMS Never tried to run a company
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
You are wrong on some points. I'm currently in a programming project involving hundreds, at least, of programmers working in the same company. No project involving hundreds of persons is going to spontaneously unite *and sell a product* without a corporate or institutional overhead to supervise it. Free software works because there is no sales. The sales are done by third-parties providing value-added resources (such as manuals, preparation, packaging, and a CD shipped to your favorite software store).
There are only a small number of folks who can single-handedly write a compiler or a kernel (and now those projects themselves are worked on by many), so the idea that one person is going to be able to control a sophisticated project, even if they are the founder of that project, is ill-founded, especially in a free software environment (where anyone can modify and extend your code).
-- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
It's finaly (more or less) been confirmed that the 21264 Alphas and the K7s will be interchangeable. Now all we need are mobo's with BIOSes that can support both chips. And no ads in them either please! -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Well, I think most audio/visual memories are not stored perfectly (that is, high loss); those with photographic memories probably store them with less loss, but I'm sure there is some loss. I would think the brain would mostly "recreate" the images and sounds, in the same way when most people try to draw a person, their left side of the brain tries to draw the "generic" person consisting of rough ideas of generalized body parts which end up looking very unrealistic. (The right side of the brain seems to be better at recreating actual images.) -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Actually you're wrong. If you examine the FSF's position you'll see that they do indeed consider other licenses such as the BSD, Artistic and XFree licenses to be free. The difference is that they are not copylefted, and the FSF considers copyleft to be a better mechanism for keeping free software free. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
[Sorry if this posted twice, it said there was an error in the first submission]
What's wrong with open source? Now that we don't have to worry about OSI controlling the term, it merely becomes a subjective term. BTW, all these alternatives are more alternatives to "Free Software" than "Open Source" (following the OSI guidelines).
The only change I see coming out of this is an end to all the bickering between SPI and OSI and the elimination of rogue organization (such as the OSI, rogue not because they are bad, but more because they broke from SPI and for a long time at least were controlled by two charaters) gaining control of the term "Open Source".
If an institution chooses software because it has a buzzword of Open Source but isn't, then they get what they deserve for not fully understanding the buzzword. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
What's wrong with open source? Now that we don't have to worry about OSI controlling the term, it merely becomes a subjective term. BTW, all these alternatives are more alternatives to "Free Software" than "Open Source" (following the OSI guidelines).
The only change I see coming out of this is an end to all the bickering between SPI and OSI and the elimination of rogue organization (such as the OSI, rogue not because they are bad, but more because they broke from SPI and for a long time at least were controlled by two charaters) gaining control of the term "Open Source".
If an institution chooses software because it has a buzzword of Open Source but isn't, then they get what they deserve for not fully understanding the buzzword. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The FSF is offering to pay $20K for someone to write a GNOME programming manual. I think they probably can afford to hire an intellectual property lawyer (in fact, I think they probably keep one on retainer). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
That's right and when they're done maybe they can go after the pornographers, the gays, the bigots, the pro-choicers and the pro-lifers, the Democrats, and whoever else isn't in power and can't stand up for themselves.
The ends do *not* justify the means, because once justified, the same means may lead to different ends. If we want to curb spam, let's do it right, let's not do it by circumventing the constitution.
-- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Trouble is, most of these bleeding-edge hardware companies opt for copywrite protection rather than patent, because the patent process takes so long that by the time the patent would be granted, the hardware is obsolete. -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Palpatine as Caeser? I think of him much more as a subtle Hitler-figure (Hitler was chancellor, after all). -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Again...what about the virgin birth? If Lucas were concerned about Christian fundamentalists, why would he even approach such a topic? -- Aaron Gaudio "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I have with the Motor-Voter law is that it usurps states' rights because the state has to pay (the DMVs are run by the states) for federal registration. If the federal government wants to pay the states the extra funding to handle the paperwork then I have no problem with it. Historically, this has not been the case.
And really if someone is too apathetic to vote, all the better. When 50% of the eligible population votes, that increases my voting power by 100%.
If you don't vote, you get the government you deserve!
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I agree (with the holiday idea). But then again, you know quite a few people have died for rights such as voting, the least which we can do is stop by the library or school or firehouse on our way home and fulfill our citizens' obligations.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Actually the haves already have most of the power. The have-nots don't vote enough as it is.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Strange that you choose an example of ~7million people during a time of war who lived under anarchism for roughly 3 years during a civil war. Not to dispute any tenets of anarchism itself, you can barely call that a success or a failure. Societies in war times operate significantly different from those in peace times, and although war places undue stress on a society (especially total war), it also grants to the society unusual benefits, the least of which is a coherent idealogical support base. Further, unusual conditions or no, 3 years is no significant amount of time, and 7 million people is no significant amount of people, relatively speaking, especially considering that many of the people fighting in the Spanish Civil War, whether they be anarchists, socialist or communists, were not from Spain and it is debatable whether they would have remained in Spain upon a Republican victory. The Soviet Union had millions of inhabitants, expansive territory and, eventually, significant industrial and military power. It took the Soviet Union 75 years to collapse, no doubt quickened under the stress of the Cold War (which showed capitalism's inherent superiority in production over soviet communism), but the Cold War certainly cannot be blamed for everything. I don't think most people would call the system the Soviet Union operated under (which they labeled unfairly "communism") a success, despite the fact that it survived 75 years. In fact, you are willing to call republican-capitalism a failure even though it has survived in various forms within the United States for over 220 years. Yet 3 years is a success?
Again, I am not saying that the eventual failure in Spain proves anarchy a failure; merely that it's short-lived success does not prove anarchism a success and perhaps you should find a better example if you are going to use examples to prove your point.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Give me the names of these places. Were they entire countries? And if Anarchism cannot defend itself from other powers (imperial or otherwise), then does it require that the entire world convert to anarchism for it to remain protected? In that case, you're talking a little more than seven million people. There's over 7 million people in New York alone.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Libertarian Socialism (Anarchism) is the ultimate in personal freedom, expression, and every aspect of the collective is democracy.
Unfortunately, a trully free individual is free to oppress others.
A person also has no power to dominate another since no hierachal institutions exist.
Since when does a person need a hierarchal institution to dominate? All a person needs is superior body strength, weaponry or charisma. Hierarchal institutions are necessary (and evolve perfectly naturally as part of civilization) to channel and control the human tendancy to seek dominance over his peers.
Of course the automatic responses of crime and acts of hatred are brough up, but it expected that collectively elected constables will exist to deal with major annoyances to society.
Yes, these institutions are the police, the law and the government. Or would you have one institution for the formation, execution and practice of the law? Perhaps you'd like to see vigilante groups running around lynching suspected criminals in true Old West style?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Does the fact that this happened over a holiday weekend have any credence? Not to mention the guy runs a company; he is his own boss and if he can find time to do this over a *holiday* and still run a company, then more power to him.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The roms are the same. If you check out emux.com, you'll notice that there are roms for MAME, not different versions of MAME. The only difference is that you may have to manually unzip the roms as the last time I tried xmame (an older version for sure), it wouldn't detect roms in their zip format.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
I believe it's Paddington. :)
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
There is a danger, and it is one only touched upon in the essays I've read by Stallman.
/. have you heard someone say how Linux is missing this or that feature, only to have someone else say something to the effect of "well you've got the source, go write it yourself"?
Raymond and the "open source" advocates point to the inherent superiority of "open source" software products compared to proprietary products. The problem is that if the only reason to use open source is that it is expected to perform better and more stable, then as soon as a proprietary software product is shown to perform better and more stable the whole argument falls apart.
We all have seen the Mindcraft tests which show NT performing better in certain (however unlikely) situations. NT has a higher performance, multithreaded IP stack which scales to mulitprocessor systems better than the unithreaded version in Linux, for example. BeOS, by many indications, can handle high-bandwidth media better than most any other consumer OS on the market. And, of course, there are many proprietary Unices such as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Digital UNIX which tout better reliability and higher performance on high-end machines.
In many ways, despite the outcries of free software advocates and zealots, free software suffers more from the "good enough" syndrome than commercial software. Commercial software (often) must remain competitive, so "good enough" means "good enough to match or exceed our competitor's product"; in other words, good enough to get people to buy your product. With free software, "good enough" typically means "good enough to do what I (the developer) originally wanted a program for"; that is, good enough to "scratch the itch" of the developers working on the product. Meeting other, non-developers', needs are almost exclusively a second priority and done when there is time. How many times on
So, there is evidence that there is nothing inherently superior about the performance, stability, or functionality of "open source" or "free" software. Thus, making these issues the cornerstone of free software is dangerous to the movement as a whole, because once it is shown these facts are not *necessarily* true, free software no longer has any appeal to those who bought those arguments in the first place.
No one would be sweating the Mindcraft "failures" if free software were valued because it is free, rather than out-performing non-free software.
Advocating free software in the way Eric Raymond has done is like advocating democracy for its levels of production it can achieve. None of us hold democracy so dear (assuming that most of us do hold democracy dear) because of its commercial value. We hold democracy dear because it elevates us all to equal status (in theory) in society, and adorns its citizens with rights protected by a government in which all citizens have an equal say (again, in theory).
We admire free software for the same reason we admire freedom itself, not for any benchmarks of production. Any such mundane benefits of free software (performance, stability, ingenuity) should be considered side effects of free software, and the benificial outcome of the application of its principles.
Raymond could be a successful disciple of free software if he confined himself to analyzing the processes in the way the "Three Amigos" have done and helping to formulate a repeatable and more or less standard method of development. This seems to be his forte, I think unfortunately his ego has been thrust into the advocacy spotlight by the apparent success of the "Cathedral and the Bazaar".
I see Stallman as a sort of software libertarian, whereas Raymond is a free software economist, and the two could certainly co-exist. The problem is that the two characters have been pushed into advocacy either by perception or reality, and in the light of advocacy neither is a good man for the job.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Look if you're doing work that you expect to be compensated for then why release under the GPL, unless you work for a company which is paying you to work on GPL'd code (such as Red Hat, Cygnus, etc), in which case you shouldn't care. Those companies are not selling the code, per se, they are selling their value-added services, and if they didn't feel they could make money off their particular business model they wouldn't be doing business in that way. Unofficial Red Hat distributions can be purchased on the cheap, yet Red Hat is still there and planning on going public. Why? Because enough people still feel they are getting a better deal paying $50-$80 for the official distribution and getting support (however lacking it may be) and manuals, etc than paying $1.50 for a Cheapbytes CD and getting a CD only. Plus, Red Hat (and the other distribution companies) are trying to position themselves in the corporate market, and that will be a much more lucrative endevour than hawking their wares at Electronics Boutique.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
You are wrong on some points. I'm currently in a programming project involving hundreds, at least, of programmers working in the same company. No project involving hundreds of persons is going to spontaneously unite *and sell a product* without a corporate or institutional overhead to supervise it. Free software works because there is no sales. The sales are done by third-parties providing value-added resources (such as manuals, preparation, packaging, and a CD shipped to your favorite software store).
There are only a small number of folks who can single-handedly write a compiler or a kernel (and now those projects themselves are worked on by many), so the idea that one person is going to be able to control a sophisticated project, even if they are the founder of that project, is ill-founded, especially in a free software environment (where anyone can modify and extend your code).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Well, didn't Bob get booted from his own company? That probably made him more bitter.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
It's finaly (more or less) been confirmed that the 21264 Alphas and the K7s will be interchangeable. Now all we need are mobo's with BIOSes that can support both chips. And no ads in them either please!
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
If Alpha were an English company they would have gotten bought out by SGI instead of Compaq.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
You're kidding...right?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Well, I think most audio/visual memories are not stored perfectly (that is, high loss); those with photographic memories probably store them with less loss, but I'm sure there is some loss. I would think the brain would mostly "recreate" the images and sounds, in the same way when most people try to draw a person, their left side of the brain tries to draw the "generic" person consisting of rough ideas of generalized body parts which end up looking very unrealistic. (The right side of the brain seems to be better at recreating actual images.)
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Actually you're wrong. If you examine the FSF's position you'll see that they do indeed consider other licenses such as the BSD, Artistic and XFree licenses to be free. The difference is that they are not copylefted, and the FSF considers copyleft to be a better mechanism for keeping free software free.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
[Sorry if this posted twice, it said there was an error in the first submission]
What's wrong with open source? Now that we don't have to worry about OSI controlling the term, it merely becomes a subjective term. BTW, all these alternatives are more alternatives to "Free Software" than "Open Source" (following the OSI guidelines).
The only change I see coming out of this is an end to all the bickering between SPI and OSI and the elimination of rogue organization (such as the OSI, rogue not because they are bad, but more because they broke from SPI and for a long time at least were controlled by two charaters) gaining control of the term "Open Source".
If an institution chooses software because it has a buzzword of Open Source but isn't, then they get what they deserve for not fully understanding the buzzword.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
What's wrong with open source? Now that we don't have to worry about OSI controlling the term, it merely becomes a subjective term. BTW, all these alternatives are more alternatives to "Free Software" than "Open Source" (following the OSI guidelines).
The only change I see coming out of this is an end to all the bickering between SPI and OSI and the elimination of rogue organization (such as the OSI, rogue not because they are bad, but more because they broke from SPI and for a long time at least were controlled by two charaters) gaining control of the term "Open Source".
If an institution chooses software because it has a buzzword of Open Source but isn't, then they get what they deserve for not fully understanding the buzzword.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
The FSF is offering to pay $20K for someone to write a GNOME programming manual. I think they probably can afford to hire an intellectual property lawyer (in fact, I think they probably keep one on retainer).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
That's right and when they're done maybe they can go after the pornographers, the gays, the bigots, the pro-choicers and the pro-lifers, the Democrats, and whoever else isn't in power and can't stand up for themselves.
The ends do *not* justify the means, because once justified, the same means may lead to different ends. If we want to curb spam, let's do it right, let's not do it by circumventing the constitution.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Trouble is, most of these bleeding-edge hardware companies opt for copywrite protection rather than patent, because the patent process takes so long that by the time the patent would be granted, the hardware is obsolete.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Palpatine as Caeser? I think of him much more as a subtle Hitler-figure (Hitler was chancellor, after all).
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
Again...what about the virgin birth? If Lucas were concerned about Christian fundamentalists, why would he even approach such a topic?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.