How many times will socialism have to fail horribly before people realize that it just doesn't work? I'd rather have a working economy than a broken economy with high ideals.
actually, the free software movement works quite well. wikipedia also works well. as soon as you throw away the idea of private property economy flourishes... not in terms of making profit for a few but by providing useful service to all of us...
Are you seriously claiming that it's actually good that nobody can get ahead in socialist societies, because it prevents corruption? That's absurd. When people can't get ahead by playing fair, like they can with a capitalist economy, they'll start playing dirty.
unfortunately in capitalism there are a lot of ways to get ahead by NOT playing fair. some examples:
you earn money by not working and letting others work for you. (e.g. you own a lot of shares of some companies)
you are in the upper management of a company and let the shareholders pay you a lot of money for finding ways of exploiting the working people. (accomplice)
creating artificial demand for something that people do not need by means of marketing
deliberately breaking thing so you get payed to fix it. (e.g. lobbying for yet another war)
creating an artificial shortage of knowledge and information by using so called "intellectual property"
micr$oft
etc...
if you look close enough: not playing fair is the only way to make money within capitalism except maybe for winning the lottery and maybe getting the money from your parents who got it by not playing fair...
instantly i like the idea of openiso.org but i am sceptical:
there is no way to fix capitalism. money can buy you influence. even here. if you have enough money that you can pay 40000ppl worldwide you can alos afford to pay a few more to subvert openiso.org if it ever becomes necessary. it will make it hardare but it will not make it impossible. most likely it will not become necessary since they just buy the governments and tell them to ignore openiso.org at all. see all the legislation that is in favor of corporations like microsoft and others that is going on in the EU, the US and everywhere... most political parties in power there are already in line with capitalist interests.
what would make such an approach useful is that in the process of finding sane standards the people involved will learn about the deficiencies of the capitalist regime. capitalist regime is corrupt per definition: it means that money can buy you what you want. which is plain corruption. the more money you have the more human labor and natural resources you can command...
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
> Raw power is not what will make computer as smart as we are.
OTOH: without enough raw power the good software will not deliver good results. with more then enough raw power even medicre software will bring some good results.
so i think the raw power of the humain brain is an important milestone on the way to intelligent computers.
the raw power of the human brain. the human brain has about 100 million neurons. they can send out impuleses about 200 times every second. every neuron has about 1000 connections to other neurons. if you describe every impulse with a floting point number you have: 200*1000*100Gigaflops = 20000 Teraflos or 20Petaflops.
in case goolge will have 450000 servers installed with a computing power of 2gflops then that raw pwoer will still be 22 times lower then the raw power of the brain. doubling every 24 month the data center built in 9 years will have that raw power, though...
good point. this is exactly what privacy is all about: the imbalance of power that results from the imbalance of information. information is power. if those who are powerfull/rich know all about you but you do not know enough about them the imbalance of power is increased... and they get even more powerfull/rich...
"Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any
IP-based society," he said. "And we are an IP-based society. If there is no
way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP."
actually, as a communist i kind of appreciate this kind of FUD.
these people equate free software with communism/socialism as a means of
spreading FUD against free software, but as a side effect they make the idea
of communism/socialism interesting for people who do not like the idea of
"intelectual property".
and the equation is not that far off:
socialism/communism => the means of production should be not privatly owned but
in the hand of the public:
free software => source code (the most important means of production
for new software) should be in the hand of the public
where of course the therm "socialism" is not really exact here because the
"in the hand of the public" means in the phase of socialism that it should
be owned by the state. where "free software" means not owned by the state
but really owned by the public, that is: belonging to anyone who wants to
make productive use of it. this form of "free association of working people"
is a hallmark of communist socity and not of socialist:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the
narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and
society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs!
Karl Marx, 1875 in "Critique of the Gotha Program"
so the SAP Fud is wrong i think. it is rather not "IP socialism" but "IP
communism". where the P in "IP communism" is still an oxymoron of course.
A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Communism. [...] Where is
the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its
opponents in power? (from the communist manifesto)
you can use a hash algorithem as 2 way encryption:
produce a bit stream from:
k0=key
k(n)=hash(k(n-1))
and xor your plaintext with the stream of k(1),k(2),...
or something similar, including the plaintext or the cyphertext of the last step in the next step. this is not a good encryption if the hash algorithem is not specially designed for that purpose..
the capacity of your brain. your brain has about 100Gig of neurons. each with about 1000 connections to other neurons each associated with a "weight" that store the information. so if we assume 16bit weight.. we have a raw 200TByte of information storage in your brain...a lot of this is propablay wasted for basic live functioning....
leftwing parties (communist, sozialists, trotzkists) from the GUE/NGL fraction and/or the EL (european left)
and the european greens voted completly against software patens and against IP enforcement directive, etc..
all other parties where split.. usually social democrats where worse then peoplesparty..
liberals where split: some liberals where totaly pro software patents others totaly against..
so my recomendation:
vote for levtwing parties: communists, etc.. or vote vor greens. (the only thing that speaks against greens that they did not manage to change the vote of germany in the council of ministers (voted pro software patens) even thought the greens are in the government coalitions in germany...
yes. and this is why publically owned companies are a good thing. the more companies are owned by the public the more the economy can be controled by democracy. that means that your vote counts more then in a system where democracy is reduced to a frace because all important decissions are done by big corportations. so if you want democrcay you should opt for publically owned corporations. if you prefere dictatorship of catpital and profit then maybe not..
copyright in cuba
copyright protection = state protection of burgeois interest = capitalism.
protecting the right of people against capitalist interest = no copyright protection = communism.
... the only alternative is to vote communist here.. at least then we do not have to fear the extention of property rights (here intelectual property).. lg mond.
linux and DRM pros/cons
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
i think linus has a good point on this issue. there is nothing wrong that linux supports signing binaries etc.. it could be of good use for firewalls and security critical applications... etc..after all as long as i have the source i can compile a different cernel that does no restrict what i do not want to have resctrictec..
the other thing is the other DRM that the alliance of music, media and software industry wants to produce.. where every content is digitally signed.. where you can not change the operating system on your hardware anymore etc... this are extremly bad things for linux and free software... we have to stop this whereever we can.. or else in a few years we will not be able to do anything useful on linux anymore...
there is an excelent clone of matlab under GPL. it is called "octave". octave does not have all feautres of the later matlab version.. but those are mostly not necessary for numeric simulations anyway... i love octave...
there are 2 xeon 2ghz CPUs in the system with hypertrheading activated thus pretending there are 4 CPUs
in the case of 4 or 8 parallel prozesses the execution time is still about 0.70 percent of what one would expect from only 2 CPU's that means about 40% more performance.. not too bad..
...i guess he wantes to avoid this kind of problmes. since we have a rightwing-rightextremists regime in austria that does nothing else then shifting power towards big corporations, i am afraid this could work...
actually every missile you send will make "the enemy" much stronger: every missile you send will inspire more hate. will turn people who where moderate before into fundamentalists and fanatics. for every person you kill you will have 10 times more idiots which stand up in his place.. then you have 10 times as much atrocities and then again 10 time that much of hate on the other sides..and so on.. and within a short time we have world war III.
well. the supernatural things are not that important. you could ignore it. you could choose to interprete all of it in a way that would not require any supernatural things at all. if it helps you. on the other hand: believe in supernatural things does not hurt neither.
what people here forget: not everyone who is a follower of some religion is so stupidy as to say: "i am sure of the existance of god" or thinks that he/she has a proof of existance etc.. for most followers of a religion the question is unanswerable from a scientific point of view. what most of us do is: we live our life as if there would be a god. usualy we do not do it because we are sooo convinced about it but because we think that the rules are good for our society.
so in the end: all that people who claim to be atheists or agnostics or whatever: all those people believe in some religion (e.g. as a philosophy that tells us who to live our life). some people have quite good ideas they believe in humanism and altruism. others only belive in egoism, hedonism, etc...
e.g.: as a christian we know that violence only leeds to more violence and that we need to break that vicious circle. so jesus said:
38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth: 39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if
any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy
cloak also. 41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him
twain. 42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of
thee turn not thou away. 43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. 44 But I say unto you, Love your
enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray
for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
mat 5:38-44.
if bush and all the americans who claim to be christians would really be christians they would not start a war now.. and that would prevent WWIII. you see: religion has a lot of relevance to our live. wether god exists or not. we also see: a lot of people who claim to be religious (like bush and many other americans there..) are either idiots (they do not understand ther religion) or liers (they abuse it on purpose) but this is getting a bit offtopic here..
we run about 23 unix desktops here. most of them are only Xterminals with readonly mounted X filesystem from flashdisk (extremly cheap). a few people run their own linux or *bsd on their desktop. the other connect with the Xterminals to one of 2 applicataion servers. one sun/solaris and one debian GNU/linux. there is one mac and one windows 95 box for compatibilty testing only.
i think the X terminal setup is the real killer for large scale usage on corporate desktops: makes admin live easy and reduces TCO. note: you can also convert old desktop PCs to X11-terminals. either creat read-only images on the harddrive or configure them for remote boot...(in both cases: no need for fsck at all...)
i am not suprised by that poll. i also heard that about 70% of americans are for capital punishment.
ironicaly a lot of them probably believe that they are christians.. where it is the most unchristian thing.
38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth:
39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite
thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him
have thy cloak also.
41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn
not thou away.
43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and
hate thine enemy.
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good
to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you;
(mat 5:38-44)
to me it seems that 70% of americans are just barbarians.. not that i think this ratio is much better here in europe..in any case: if most people do not understand that violence only leeds to more violence then we heading for extremly big troubles... mond.
language forms our thoughts. the words and terminology we use influences our
ideas. and not only our ideas: the ideas of the people we talk to as well.
language is our marketing. why whe should call it GNU/linux? not because
stallman made the whole thing possible by providing gcc, bash, etc..etc.
but because we have to promote an idea: the philosophy of freedom
often when people discuss about "linux vs microsoft" they see it as just a
discussion on technical merits. they do not understand that what it is all
about is a matter of freedom. so here it helps to introduce the GNU
philosophy. by calling it GNU/linux the important part of the whole thing is
much more visible. after all: if it where only for technical merits we could
use just about any other unix as well in many cases..
linux is an excelent unix. but so are *BSDs and so is solaris..etc.. what is
the important part, the part that has the power to change our world to be a
better place is that the linux kernel and most utilities are under the GPL.
this is what changes our world. not the technical merits of it.
if in the world today a user wants to fix a broken software. he manages to reversengineer the program (e.g. by decmopiling it..) fixes a bug and gives a version of that to a friend who also wanted that bug fixed.. then in the world of today this would be illegal with proprietary programms: the police might come to your house and arrest you. then that
disturbs your "flerbage" as well. (besides the fact that for some reason you could only use the proprietary programm because it was the only one compatible with some proprietary hardware where no one had specs.. so you had do spend a lot of money even if you would have prevered to write the code yourself... so that also affectes your "flerbage"...) it seems ESR's comparission is seriously flawed because of his right wing attitude...
Slashdot Mirror
- you earn money by not working and letting others work for you. (e.g. you own a lot of shares of some companies)
- you are in the upper management of a company and let the shareholders pay you a lot of money for finding ways of exploiting the working people. (accomplice)
- creating artificial demand for something that people do not need by means of marketing
- deliberately breaking thing so you get payed to fix it. (e.g. lobbying for yet another war)
- creating an artificial shortage of knowledge and information by using so called "intellectual property"
- micr$oft
- etc...
if you look close enough: not playing fair is the only way to make money within capitalism except maybe for winning the lottery and maybe getting the money from your parents who got it by not playing fair...greetings mond.
there is no way to fix capitalism. money can buy you influence. even here. if you have enough money that you can pay 40000ppl worldwide you can alos afford to pay a few more to subvert openiso.org if it ever becomes necessary. it will make it hardare but it will not make it impossible. most likely it will not become necessary since they just buy the governments and tell them to ignore openiso.org at all. see all the legislation that is in favor of corporations like microsoft and others that is going on in the EU, the US and everywhere... most political parties in power there are already in line with capitalist interests.
what would make such an approach useful is that in the process of finding sane standards the people involved will learn about the deficiencies of the capitalist regime. capitalist regime is corrupt per definition: it means that money can buy you what you want. which is plain corruption. the more money you have the more human labor and natural resources you can command...
greetings from vienna,
mond.
OTOH: without enough raw power the good software will not deliver good results. with more then enough raw power even medicre software will bring some good results.
so i think the raw power of the humain brain is an important milestone on the way to intelligent computers.
the raw power of the human brain. the human brain has about 100 million neurons. they can send out impuleses about 200 times every second. every neuron has about 1000 connections to other neurons. if you describe every impulse with a floting point number you have: 200*1000*100Gigaflops = 20000 Teraflos or 20Petaflops.
in case goolge will have 450000 servers installed with a computing power of 2gflops then that raw pwoer will still be 22 times lower then the raw power of the brain. doubling every 24 month the data center built in 9 years will have that raw power, though...
mond
good point. this is exactly what privacy is all about: the imbalance of power that results from the imbalance of information. information is power. if those who are powerfull/rich know all about you but you do not know enough about them the imbalance of power is increased... and they get even more powerfull/rich...
actually, as a communist i kind of appreciate this kind of FUD.
these people equate free software with communism/socialism as a means of spreading FUD against free software, but as a side effect they make the idea of communism/socialism interesting for people who do not like the idea of "intelectual property".
and the equation is not that far off:
where of course the therm "socialism" is not really exact here because the "in the hand of the public" means in the phase of socialism that it should be owned by the state. where "free software" means not owned by the state but really owned by the public, that is: belonging to anyone who wants to make productive use of it. this form of "free association of working people" is a hallmark of communist socity and not of socialist:
so the SAP Fud is wrong i think. it is rather not "IP socialism" but "IP communism". where the P in "IP communism" is still an oxymoron of course.
A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of Communism. [...] Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? (from the communist manifesto)
produce a bit stream from:
k0=key
k(n)=hash(k(n-1))
and xor your plaintext with the stream of k(1),k(2),...
or something similar, including the plaintext or the cyphertext of the last step in the next step. this is not a good encryption if the hash algorithem is not specially designed for that purpose..
octave is a free clone of matlab. http://www.octave.org/ it is compatible with most matlab scripts...
the capacity of your brain. your brain has about 100Gig of neurons. each with about 1000 connections to other neurons each associated with a "weight" that store the information. so if we assume 16bit weight.. we have a raw 200TByte of information storage in your brain...a lot of this is propablay wasted for basic live functioning....
from the analysis of the vote in september it can be seen that:
leftwing parties (communist, sozialists, trotzkists) from the GUE/NGL fraction and/or the EL (european left) and the european greens voted completly against software patens and against IP enforcement directive, etc..
all other parties where split.. usually social democrats where worse then peoplesparty..
liberals where split: some liberals where totaly pro software patents others totaly against..
so my recomendation:
vote for levtwing parties: communists, etc.. or vote vor greens. (the only thing that speaks against greens that they did not manage to change the vote of germany in the council of ministers (voted pro software patens) even thought the greens are in the government coalitions in germany...
yes. and this is why publically owned companies are a good thing. the more companies are owned by the public the more the economy can be controled by democracy. that means that your vote counts more then in a system where democracy is reduced to a frace because all important decissions are done by big corportations. so if you want democrcay you should opt for publically owned corporations. if you prefere dictatorship of catpital and profit then maybe not..
lg mond.
copyright in cuba
copyright protection = state protection of burgeois interest = capitalism.
protecting the right of people against capitalist interest = no copyright protection = communism.
left? well depends on what you call "left". social democrats and european green parties are not left. they are center at best....
... the only alternative is to vote communist here.. at least then we do not have to fear the extention of property rights (here intelectual property).. lg mond.
the other thing is the other DRM that the alliance of music, media and software industry wants to produce.. where every content is digitally signed.. where you can not change the operating system on your hardware anymore etc... this are extremly bad things for linux and free software... we have to stop this whereever we can.. or else in a few years we will not be able to do anything useful on linux anymore...
mond
there is an excelent clone of matlab under GPL. it is called "octave". octave does not have all feautres of the later matlab version.. but those are mostly not necessary for numeric simulations anyway... i love octave...
running factor 12344322343342231127
number of parallel processes / total executiontime
1 2.87000000000000000000
2 2.99500000000000000000
3 3.53000000000000000000
4 4.00500000000000000000
5 5.12600000000000000000
6 6.05500000000000000000
7 7.31285714285714285714
8 8.04875000000000000000
there are 2 xeon 2ghz CPUs in the system with hypertrheading activated thus pretending there are 4 CPUs
in the case of 4 or 8 parallel prozesses the execution time is still about 0.70 percent of what one would expect from only 2 CPU's that means about 40% more performance.. not too bad..
mond.
at least we head some protests here:
protest against microsoft by austrian comunist party
actually every missile you send will make "the enemy" much stronger: every missile you send will inspire more hate. will turn people who where moderate before into fundamentalists and fanatics. for every person you kill you will have 10 times more idiots which stand up in his place.. then you have 10 times as much atrocities and then again 10 time that much of hate on the other sides..and so on.. and within a short time we have world war III.
mond.
well. the supernatural things are not that important. you could ignore it. you could choose to interprete all of it in a way that would not require any supernatural things at all. if it helps you. on the other hand: believe in supernatural things does not hurt neither.
mond
so in the end: all that people who claim to be atheists or agnostics or whatever: all those people believe in some religion (e.g. as a philosophy that tells us who to live our life). some people have quite good ideas they believe in humanism and altruism. others only belive in egoism, hedonism, etc...
e.g.: as a christian we know that violence only leeds to more violence and that we need to break that vicious circle. so jesus said:
mat 5:38-44.
if bush and all the americans who claim to be christians would really be christians they would not start a war now.. and that would prevent WWIII. you see: religion has a lot of relevance to our live. wether god exists or not. we also see: a lot of people who claim to be religious (like bush and many other americans there..) are either idiots (they do not understand ther religion) or liers (they abuse it on purpose) but this is getting a bit offtopic here..
mond.
i think the X terminal setup is the real killer for large scale usage on corporate desktops: makes admin live easy and reduces TCO. note: you can also convert old desktop PCs to X11-terminals. either creat read-only images on the harddrive or configure them for remote boot...(in both cases: no need for fsck at all...)
greetings from vienna. mond.
38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. 41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. 43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. 44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; (mat 5:38-44)
to me it seems that 70% of americans are just barbarians.. not that i think this ratio is much better here in europe..in any case: if most people do not understand that violence only leeds to more violence then we heading for extremly big troubles... mond.
often when people discuss about "linux vs microsoft" they see it as just a discussion on technical merits. they do not understand that what it is all about is a matter of freedom. so here it helps to introduce the GNU philosophy. by calling it GNU/linux the important part of the whole thing is much more visible. after all: if it where only for technical merits we could use just about any other unix as well in many cases..
linux is an excelent unix. but so are *BSDs and so is solaris..etc.. what is the important part, the part that has the power to change our world to be a better place is that the linux kernel and most utilities are under the GPL. this is what changes our world. not the technical merits of it.
greetings from europe. der mond.
if in the world today a user wants to fix a broken software. he manages to reversengineer the program (e.g. by decmopiling it..) fixes a bug and gives a version of that to a friend who also wanted that bug fixed.. then in the world of today this would be illegal with proprietary programms: the police might come to your house and arrest you. then that
disturbs your "flerbage" as well. (besides the fact that for some reason you could only use the proprietary programm because it was the only one compatible with some proprietary hardware where no one had specs.. so you had do spend a lot of money even if you would have prevered to write the code yourself... so that also affectes your "flerbage"...) it seems ESR's comparission is seriously flawed because of his right wing attitude...