If he thinks others should be limited in their choices by what he believes to be morally acceptable...
...then his viewpoint is shared by an overwhelming majority. Most people have no problem prohibiting whatever their personal moral code says is wrong. Real, honest-to-goodness "live and let live" is rare. Up to a point, that's fine; I think that murder is not a morally acceptable way to make a living, and I encourage you to find other means of support. I doubt Stallman considers non-Free Software to be as bad as murder, but he clearly prefers that you find other means of support.
To me it seems like RMS totally dodged the question. What is "...there are many people who don't have to make money" supposed to mean in this context?
I believe that Stallman believes that making money by doing bad things isn't acceptable. To him, morality (remember that Free Software is a moral issue to him) sufficiently justifies a Free Software approach.
I wonder why RMS is so opposed to economic acceptance.
I don't see evidence that he's opposed to economic acceptance as a whole any more than antislavery folks are opposed to economic activities as a whole. They're only opposed to economic activities that they consider morally wrong.
* A definitive statement on whether they'll support 64-bit (i.e. "it'll be released at the same time as the 32-bit version" or "it'll be released X months after the 32-bit version" or "it'll never be released"). Sadly, Adobe are somewhat pig-ignorant w.r.t. the 64-bit platform and don't even have a 64-bit version for XP!
They've made their position on 64-bit support pretty clear.
Ignoring the 64-bit world seems shortsighted to me. Sure, most users are 32 bit at the moment, but are new 32 bit machines even sold any more? Old stock, maybe, before current models push it out of the supply chain. Even Semprons are 64 bit now.
Ah. 'No one is arguing that protecting the works of content creators is unnecessary.' Never mind then.:)
Now that you mention it, why is it necessary to protect the works of content creators? It's not like content creators will all stop creating content if all content was public domain. Some industries would fail, but it's not our responsibility to prop them up with artificial business models. Some content, like $300 million movies, might not be created, but people would still make movies, and people would still pay to see movies in theaters. People would still watch TV and listen to the radio, because that's convenient, so those business models might not change much right away.
Follow-up: if it is necessary to protect the works of content creators, why is it necessary to protect them this much? Someone yesterday suggested changing copyright to 7 years. How is the current situation better than that? Or better than 15 years? Or 20 years?
The great spagetti monster exists. I don't have any evidence but that doesn't mean he doesn't, right?
Right. Neither you nor I can disprove the existence of the flying spaghetti monster. The closest we can come is to say "there is insufficient evidence to convince me that the flying spaghetti monster exists."
2) Most things that we accept exist don't have scientific evidence for their existence. Nonscientific evidence outweighs scientific evidence by a large margin. In practice, nonscientific evidence (personal experience, secondhand accounts, even hearsay) often allows us to make useful predictions about life.
Really, like what?
"Smith is terrible. Jones is much easier to work with."
When I drive, if I see a green traffic light ahead turn yellow, I don't know for sure that it will turn red next. Past experience tells me that it will, but nothing proves that it will this time. Nevertheless, I have been conditioned (classical conditioning is a result of pattern-matching ability) to expect it to turn red soon.
I have read about some of the warning signs of identity theft. Nothing scientifically proves that the correlation of events that others say indicate identity theft actually does indicate that; for all I know, I've only read things about identity theft that were written by clueless morons. That won't stop me from taking action if I see any warning signs of identity theft in my own life.
Of course personal experience sometimes leads to wrong conclusions; racism is one result. It is true that correlation does not always equal causation. However, it does often enough for human pattern-matching abilities to have evolved.
Keep in mind too that any scientific knowledge you have not personally verified yourself is, at best, second-hand information. Most of what we believe about life we learn from others, not from science.
2) Most things that we accept exist don't have scientific evidence for their existence. Nonscientific evidence outweighs scientific evidence by a large margin. In practice, nonscientific evidence (personal experience, secondhand accounts, even hearsay) often allows us to make useful predictions about life.
Basically, though, if the God entity loved humans in the normal human sense then it wouldn't want them to suffer and if it was truly all powerful then it could do anything including arranging things so that they didn't suffer.
The standard answers that I'm familiar with say that even an all powerful being can't do anything that's a logical self-contradiction (make a round square, make a mountain so big that he can't move it.) That opens up many possibilities, but it's not required; a God-entity could love humans, but it could love something else more. Humans are irrational where love is concerned, placing loved ones above all else, but nothing says that a God-entity has to be irrational, or for that matter, to be like humans in any way.
What evidence supports your assertion that no additional causes exist?
Additional causes may or may not exist. For all I know I'm an AI program trapped in a virtual reality and "God" is my programmer.
However, additional causes would contradict mutually agreed upon factual observation which is to say it would contradict science.
Things don't "contradict science"; science can be presented with an assertion, to which it will reply true, false, not enough information, or divide by zero error. What mutually agreed upon factual observations contradict the existence of causes other than laws of physics and random chance? This is really related to the next paragraph; I assert that for all we know, free will does indeed exist (at least some of the time), and would constitute a third fundamental type of cause.
Taking biological evolution at face value, I see no reason why free will couldn't evolve, at least on a tactical level (how one goes about doing something).
The illusion of free will could evolve and even be evolutionarily advantageous. However, fundamentally when you "make a decision" what is happening is that certain molecules bounce together under the guidance of random chance and the laws of physics and this causes some neurons to fire and you have the sensation of "making a decision". Fundamentally, unless you can control random chance at the atomic level or change the laws of physics, you have no control over the "decisions" that you "make".
That's a fine hypothesis, but what evidence do you have that it is true? I don't think human beings even know enough about the nature of intelligence to test that hypothesis. Clearly the firing of some neurons affects the firing of other neurons, so it's not outlandish to speculate that we do have some atomic-level control over what happens in our brains.
Furthermore, if something appears so strongly to be true that we can't tell the difference, then we may as well treat it as true. This is especially true of AI cognition (or will be someday), but it's true of many other things as well. Until we can tell the difference between free will and random neuron firings that only appear to be free will, we will be better able to make accurate predictions about the future if we treat it like free will.
For example, the belief that there is an all powerful God entity that loves all humans is contradicted by the observation of human suffering.
How so? I can think of at least two explanations for why an all powerful entity who loves all humans might allow human suffering.
More fundamentally, the observation that everything that happens (including human behavior) fundamentally happens because of the laws of physics and random chance
I haven't observed everything that happens, and I'm pretty sure that you haven't either. What evidence supports your assertion that no additional causes exist?
Random chance and the laws of physics do not leave room for free will
Why not? Taking biological evolution at face value, I see no reason why free will couldn't evolve, at least on a tactical level (how one goes about doing something).
We have no scientific evidence of any kind of god at all, so we have no reason to think there is a god.
Abstracting away "any kind of god", the statement "We have no scientific evidence of foo, so we have no reason to think foo" is just bad logic. Humans are experts at pattern recognition because in practice it works, even though correlation doesn't equal causation.
I don't buy Dell computers, though I hear that the under-$300 ones are pretty good compared to other under-$300 computers.
I said "#include" to make fun of the inevitable response to your post. For some reason, the idea of people repeating the same threads over and over annoyed me this time.
Why not? This license doesn't prohibit collaborating with or supporting people who harm human beings. It only prohibits using the code to actually harm human beings. Read the license; it doesn't mention pay at all.
That doesn't sound like a "no military use" patch to me. The military does lots of things other than killing people. Sometimes they kill robots.
I don't see a lot of direct-harm-to-humans use for this software, and I don't see how the license change affects indirect harm to humans. How would this license prevent someone from using this software to develop more powerful atomic bombs, which themselves don't actually use the software when they harm human beings? How would this license prevent someone from using this software to control the engine of an armored vehicle? It's not the engine that harms people, it's the weapons that the vehicle carries that harm people. I suspect that the authors did not consult a lawyer when making this new license.
On the flip side: does copyright infringement harm human beings?
Maybe it was the games you liked. I've never had a problem finding the miniatures hall (except for that one year when it was on the other side of the partly-demolished Mecca.)
How about eliminating patents and guaarantee the freedom to innovate so true competition may exist? That way a small inventor won't lose his house when trying to compete with the large companies who buy up all the intellectual real estate on the monopoly board.
No, he'll just go broke when trying to compete with the large companies who wait for him to build something cool and then use their huge existing resources to cheaply mass produce his invention before he has a chance to make a dime off it. Not that either the existing or proposed system is "good", but yours would suck pretty bad, too.
There would still be more small inventors making products than there are now; the current patent system stifles the small inventor, who can't afford a huge patent search and who doesn't have a huge patent portfolio to cross-license with competitors.
Even if small inventors were worse off, society as a whole would be better off, which is the point of the patent system to begin with. If an invention really is useful, then it won't be lost.
Ummmm... If no one is willing to take the jobs to port software to Linux, does it make sense to then turn around and complain that there's not enough commercial software available for Linux?
It doesn't matter, because the condition in your if clause resolves to false.
Even if it didn't, though, I don't see why it wouldn't make sense. Obviously the people doing the complaining are not the people refusing to port proprietary software for ideological reasons.
YMMV, but for me, it just so happened that the default set of packages on Ubuntu closely matched what I probably would have installed anyway, if I had known about them. When I began my transition from Windows, I used Debian testing with XFCE on the desktop, and I didn't have the expertise to add the kinds of "polish" that came with Ubuntu by default (like automount/autoplay functionality). It helped too that at the time, Ubuntu's AMD64 version was easier to use than Debian's, and it had more recent packages.
I still don't know what all of those "polish" programs and settings are, and as long as they work I don't care; for me, Ubuntu strikes a perfect balance between the power of Debian and the ease of use of a sandwich.
That being said I have no reason to look from Debian to ubuntu in the server space but newer Linux admins may find it appropriate.
I'm in a similar situation as you, typically using Debian on servers and Ubuntu on the desktop, and a reason for switching to Ubuntu on the server did recently occur to me: if Debian continues this breakneck release pace (less than two years between releases? Egad!) then Ubuntu LTS might actually force less frequent upgrades.
But it's not going to be the early adopters/videophiles/technophiles (AVTs) who determine which format succeeds.
That remains to be seen, but reviews of new products are necessarily geared towards people who care about new products. Doing a "realistic" test with substandard TV and layout doesn't appeal to the people whose eyeballs are the product being sold by the review site.
I don't think "normal viewers" are going to shell out big bucks for HD-DVD, Blu-Ray or HDTV. Gearing an early review towards early adopters, who are videophiles and technophiles, is appropriate.
I just read a review on Inetl new C2 chips and from the specs, it apparently is faster by almost an order of magnitude than anything AMD has (im not a intel fan boy as everthing i have right now runs AMD)
I do not think that means what you seem to think it means.
Everyone who says that Diebold is too incompetent to create a secure voting maschine is following the wrong trail.
We know they're competent enough to do better because they make gambling machines that are more secure than their voting machines. For whatever reason, they've chosen to make their voting machines the way they have.
Its always been the case that those in highest demand get paid more. That's why CEO's get $50mega bucks per year.
To be fair, a big part of the reason for excessive CEO salaries is that the boards that hire them are dumb. Nobody thinks the person they're about to hire is going to bomb, so they don't mind negotiating golden parachutes that they think will never be used, and they think there is a shortage of competent CEOs who will work for less than $50 million a year, while in fact there are a lot of competent potential CEOs who will work for much less than that.
I prefer the GPL as well; in fact, I'm looking forward to the changes in GPLv3. I even like the changes in this latest draft, and being compatible with tons of Apache Foundation software can only be a good thing.
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...then his viewpoint is shared by an overwhelming majority. Most people have no problem prohibiting whatever their personal moral code says is wrong. Real, honest-to-goodness "live and let live" is rare. Up to a point, that's fine; I think that murder is not a morally acceptable way to make a living, and I encourage you to find other means of support. I doubt Stallman considers non-Free Software to be as bad as murder, but he clearly prefers that you find other means of support.
I believe that Stallman believes that making money by doing bad things isn't acceptable. To him, morality (remember that Free Software is a moral issue to him) sufficiently justifies a Free Software approach.
I don't see evidence that he's opposed to economic acceptance as a whole any more than antislavery folks are opposed to economic activities as a whole. They're only opposed to economic activities that they consider morally wrong.
They've made their position on 64-bit support pretty clear.
Ignoring the 64-bit world seems shortsighted to me. Sure, most users are 32 bit at the moment, but are new 32 bit machines even sold any more? Old stock, maybe, before current models push it out of the supply chain. Even Semprons are 64 bit now.
Now that you mention it, why is it necessary to protect the works of content creators? It's not like content creators will all stop creating content if all content was public domain. Some industries would fail, but it's not our responsibility to prop them up with artificial business models. Some content, like $300 million movies, might not be created, but people would still make movies, and people would still pay to see movies in theaters. People would still watch TV and listen to the radio, because that's convenient, so those business models might not change much right away.
Follow-up: if it is necessary to protect the works of content creators, why is it necessary to protect them this much? Someone yesterday suggested changing copyright to 7 years. How is the current situation better than that? Or better than 15 years? Or 20 years?
Right. Neither you nor I can disprove the existence of the flying spaghetti monster. The closest we can come is to say "there is insufficient evidence to convince me that the flying spaghetti monster exists."
"Smith is terrible. Jones is much easier to work with."
When I drive, if I see a green traffic light ahead turn yellow, I don't know for sure that it will turn red next. Past experience tells me that it will, but nothing proves that it will this time. Nevertheless, I have been conditioned (classical conditioning is a result of pattern-matching ability) to expect it to turn red soon.
I have read about some of the warning signs of identity theft. Nothing scientifically proves that the correlation of events that others say indicate identity theft actually does indicate that; for all I know, I've only read things about identity theft that were written by clueless morons. That won't stop me from taking action if I see any warning signs of identity theft in my own life.
Of course personal experience sometimes leads to wrong conclusions; racism is one result. It is true that correlation does not always equal causation. However, it does often enough for human pattern-matching abilities to have evolved.
Keep in mind too that any scientific knowledge you have not personally verified yourself is, at best, second-hand information. Most of what we believe about life we learn from others, not from science.
Two reasons:
1) Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack
2) Most things that we accept exist don't have scientific evidence for their existence. Nonscientific evidence outweighs scientific evidence by a large margin. In practice, nonscientific evidence (personal experience, secondhand accounts, even hearsay) often allows us to make useful predictions about life.
The standard answers that I'm familiar with say that even an all powerful being can't do anything that's a logical self-contradiction (make a round square, make a mountain so big that he can't move it.) That opens up many possibilities, but it's not required; a God-entity could love humans, but it could love something else more. Humans are irrational where love is concerned, placing loved ones above all else, but nothing says that a God-entity has to be irrational, or for that matter, to be like humans in any way.
Things don't "contradict science"; science can be presented with an assertion, to which it will reply true, false, not enough information, or divide by zero error. What mutually agreed upon factual observations contradict the existence of causes other than laws of physics and random chance? This is really related to the next paragraph; I assert that for all we know, free will does indeed exist (at least some of the time), and would constitute a third fundamental type of cause.
That's a fine hypothesis, but what evidence do you have that it is true? I don't think human beings even know enough about the nature of intelligence to test that hypothesis. Clearly the firing of some neurons affects the firing of other neurons, so it's not outlandish to speculate that we do have some atomic-level control over what happens in our brains.
Furthermore, if something appears so strongly to be true that we can't tell the difference, then we may as well treat it as true. This is especially true of AI cognition (or will be someday), but it's true of many other things as well. Until we can tell the difference between free will and random neuron firings that only appear to be free will, we will be better able to make accurate predictions about the future if we treat it like free will.
How so? I can think of at least two explanations for why an all powerful entity who loves all humans might allow human suffering.
I haven't observed everything that happens, and I'm pretty sure that you haven't either. What evidence supports your assertion that no additional causes exist?
Why not? Taking biological evolution at face value, I see no reason why free will couldn't evolve, at least on a tactical level (how one goes about doing something).
Abstracting away "any kind of god", the statement "We have no scientific evidence of foo, so we have no reason to think foo" is just bad logic. Humans are experts at pattern recognition because in practice it works, even though correlation doesn't equal causation.
I don't buy Dell computers, though I hear that the under-$300 ones are pretty good compared to other under-$300 computers.
I said "#include" to make fun of the inevitable response to your post. For some reason, the idea of people repeating the same threads over and over annoyed me this time.
Or good, depending on one's point of view.
#include "how-often-do-you-upgrade-just-your-cpu.h"
Why not? This license doesn't prohibit collaborating with or supporting people who harm human beings. It only prohibits using the code to actually harm human beings. Read the license; it doesn't mention pay at all.
That doesn't sound like a "no military use" patch to me. The military does lots of things other than killing people. Sometimes they kill robots.
I don't see a lot of direct-harm-to-humans use for this software, and I don't see how the license change affects indirect harm to humans. How would this license prevent someone from using this software to develop more powerful atomic bombs, which themselves don't actually use the software when they harm human beings? How would this license prevent someone from using this software to control the engine of an armored vehicle? It's not the engine that harms people, it's the weapons that the vehicle carries that harm people. I suspect that the authors did not consult a lawyer when making this new license.
On the flip side: does copyright infringement harm human beings?
Maybe it was the games you liked. I've never had a problem finding the miniatures hall (except for that one year when it was on the other side of the partly-demolished Mecca.)
There would still be more small inventors making products than there are now; the current patent system stifles the small inventor, who can't afford a huge patent search and who doesn't have a huge patent portfolio to cross-license with competitors.
Even if small inventors were worse off, society as a whole would be better off, which is the point of the patent system to begin with. If an invention really is useful, then it won't be lost.
It doesn't matter, because the condition in your if clause resolves to false.
Even if it didn't, though, I don't see why it wouldn't make sense. Obviously the people doing the complaining are not the people refusing to port proprietary software for ideological reasons.
YMMV, but for me, it just so happened that the default set of packages on Ubuntu closely matched what I probably would have installed anyway, if I had known about them. When I began my transition from Windows, I used Debian testing with XFCE on the desktop, and I didn't have the expertise to add the kinds of "polish" that came with Ubuntu by default (like automount/autoplay functionality). It helped too that at the time, Ubuntu's AMD64 version was easier to use than Debian's, and it had more recent packages.
I still don't know what all of those "polish" programs and settings are, and as long as they work I don't care; for me, Ubuntu strikes a perfect balance between the power of Debian and the ease of use of a sandwich.
I'm in a similar situation as you, typically using Debian on servers and Ubuntu on the desktop, and a reason for switching to Ubuntu on the server did recently occur to me: if Debian continues this breakneck release pace (less than two years between releases? Egad!) then Ubuntu LTS might actually force less frequent upgrades.
That remains to be seen, but reviews of new products are necessarily geared towards people who care about new products. Doing a "realistic" test with substandard TV and layout doesn't appeal to the people whose eyeballs are the product being sold by the review site.
I don't think "normal viewers" are going to shell out big bucks for HD-DVD, Blu-Ray or HDTV. Gearing an early review towards early adopters, who are videophiles and technophiles, is appropriate.
I do not think that means what you seem to think it means.
We know they're competent enough to do better because they make gambling machines that are more secure than their voting machines. For whatever reason, they've chosen to make their voting machines the way they have.
To be fair, a big part of the reason for excessive CEO salaries is that the boards that hire them are dumb. Nobody thinks the person they're about to hire is going to bomb, so they don't mind negotiating golden parachutes that they think will never be used, and they think there is a shortage of competent CEOs who will work for less than $50 million a year, while in fact there are a lot of competent potential CEOs who will work for much less than that.
I prefer the GPL as well; in fact, I'm looking forward to the changes in GPLv3. I even like the changes in this latest draft, and being compatible with tons of Apache Foundation software can only be a good thing.