Religion is meme reproduction, an idea which reproduces itself.
Genes and religious memes in the past probably had a symbiotic relationship that was benefical to both. But no more.
For example, in a primitive society, if you are afraid of demons, you are more likely to obey your local witch doctor. This increased willingness to obey also causes better social organization as a side-effect. And that organization is a big win for you. Even if the demons were only a figment of your imagination. And even if the price is you having to watch Tammy Fae Baker reruns on late night TV.
But for intelligent, educated people, religion is a big loss. It is essential to meme reproduction that the host not ask itself why it is bothering to spread the Word. But smart people can not afford to give up that critical thinking which is essential to any enlightened society. Blind faith and intelligence do not mix.
In fact, sufficiently intelligent people do not need government at all... they already know how to self-regulate their own behavior for the betterment of the whole race.
You clearly don't realize how troublesome the problem of cheating is.
The problem lies in the fact that the clients need to have complete, godlike awareness of the current state of the game world at all times. The server can't just send a graphics feed to the client... even the bandwidth for a tiny B&W TV image would kill most modems. So instead it sends changes to the game world database a little bit at a time using tiny codes. "Player one moves to position 123,777,999" but in binary so it looks more like "1m123777999", or even shorter and more cryptic.
The client then can use local CPU power to generate the game graphics from the locally-stored game database. This is fast and looks good without killing the network.
Now back to cheating.
If the client has complete godlike awareness of the entire game world, SO DOES THE USER, at least in theory. It's the user's computer. There is absolutely NOTHING a game designer can do to prevent the user from writing a program that allows him to cheat. Anytime some company claims to have fixed the cheating problem, all they have really done is scrambled their data so that it's harder for hackers to find the data they need to cheat.
The only true solution to this problem is to send real-time video over the internet to each client. This obviously will not happen for a long time. And by then people may have Artifical Intelligence to play the games for them anyway.
A partial solution would be to have servers only send that data which is supposed to be visible on the screen. But this would not, for example, do anything to hinder Quake aimbots.
There is no such thing as a natural monopoly. In the U.S. a few monopolies exist with the blessing of the state because of historical reasons, and because the powerful people in control of those monopolies refuse to relax their death-grip on the public dependance.
Phone lines no more need to be monopolized than do the highway system. For example, local governments could provide telephone poles as a public resource, similar to roads. Then you allow any interested businesses to run lines on those poles, possibly subject to simple zoning regulations. (Which would be analgous to the traffic laws that govern the public road system).
That's just an example of a non-monopoly solution to the phone company problem, off the top of my head. If running wires on those poles turned out to be too expensive for individual companies to be able to run their own lines, well perhaps the government should run public copper as well, and let people connect to the local switching station for the service provider they prefer.
There is always a better solution than a monopoly. Centralization always brings huge problems with it simply due to human nature. The less centralization the better.
What, if anything, is the Free Software Foundation doing to promote the employment of programmers developing Free Software?
I understand of course that the FSF's main priority is seeing that Free Software gets developed, by any means, even by volunteer work.
But looking to the future... it would be nice someday if most or all programmers could all work on Free Software for a salary. Is the FSF leading any efforts in this area? How far away is this?
The GPL does NOT infect ANYTHING, EVER. Not even in any symbolic sense.
The GPL simply says that you can only use my GPL'ed code in your program if your code is also GPL'ed. You are completely free to not use my code. Yet so many people like you seem to feel that you should have the right to use my code under terms I never agreed to.
If I offer you a free ice cream cone... you would do well to not later accuse me of ruining your diet. Your diet is your problem. I didn't shove the ice cream cone down your throat.
United States citizens are taught as children in public schools to believe that the US was the first free country and that it is still the freest country in the world.
This may have actually been true 100 or even 50 years ago, before the rise of uncontrollable federalism. Around the turn of the century, when the national income tax was passed, a US congressman was laughed at for suggesting that a 10% maximum be encoded into the law. He was mocked because nobody believed that a single American citizen would ever agree to give up a whopping TEN PERCENT of their income to their government.
But today, United States citizens pay around 50% or more of their yearly incomes to various taxes, including income taxes, sales taxes, automobile taxes, etc. etc.
Add in the costs of living, and very little disposable income remains, except for the rich. Americans are generating plenty of income, they just don't get to keep any of it. This is similar to slavery, although admittedly the living quarters are better. We do get private homes and cheap TVs, for now.
These delays don't say much about open source development... except maybe that people who work on open source tend to prefer quality releases over early releases.
What these delays really tell us is that predicting the future is inherently difficult. You don't ever know exactly how long some task is going to take until after it is finished. I wish typical managers understood this... as a computer programmer no matter how hard I try to accurately predict when a project will be complete, I'm still just guessing, and nothing can be done about this, it's just the way the universe works.
This, BTW, is why the progress bars in well-written installation-tools are data-based instead of time-based... i.e. when it says 72% it means that 72% of the data has been copied, not that 72% of the total installation time has past. The software knows how much total data there is, and can accurately report a percentage fraction of that data. But the software does not know much total installation time will be required... all kinds of things such as multitasking or hard drive variances or even temperature changes in the CPU can change the total amount of time required to copy the files. So no precentage fraction of the total installation time can be reported, it's an unknown quantity.
Many interesting ideas here about how to write viruses which are difficult to detect. But what if they are out there already? Would we know it? Seriously how difficult would it be to create an "evolver" virus which:
1. reproduces without human intervention 2. is harmless (doesn't try to crash anything) 3. occasionally mutates itself at a random time
We could have a whole virus ecosystem evolving out there right under our noses without us even having a clue. Part of their strategies for surviving would necessarily include not crashing the systems they were "living" on.
In fact this sounds like one of those things that because it CAN happen, it MUST eventually happen. Eventually somebody will do it and there will be no way to undo it once done. Maybe the first Artificial Intelligence created on Earth will be an internet-dweller who has never even met a human being before.
Software licenses will always have these complex problems of intrepretation. If you really want to make your software free, make the source code public domain.
Don't get me wrong... I support the GPL and similar licenses and will take Free Software over the restricted stuff any day.
But the problem with intellectual property is that it doesn't actually exist anywhere except in our heads. So every single person in the world could possibly have their own unique idea of exactly what bits make up a particular piece of software.
If you recompile a program for a different architcture, is it the same program? What if you port it "function-for-function" to a different language? What if you write a program that generates a program? What if you run it on an emulator? What if you run an interpreter on an old program which was originally meant to be compiled? What if you quit your job and write a competing program from scratch, that looks very similar because you wrote the original? What if you conincidentally come up with a piece of code that looks very similar to somebody else's program which you have never seen before?
This is why we have judges in our system, to answer all the silly questions that laws make us ask. But do you really want some stuffy ex-lawyer determining who owns your thoughts? Remember, intellectual property only exists in people's heads. Intelluctual property is dangerous, and will become more dangerous with each technological advance we make.
Besides, copyright laws steal from us all the wonderful benefits of copying. Most people don't miss these benefits because they've never really had them.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of the MessageBox shortcut. Not that it really helps that much.
When I program Hello World in C, it's a tiny step away from being a useful application. I could for example change the code slightly to be:
#include
int main() { int i; printf("hello, world, give me a number\n"); scanf("%d",&i); printf("%d squared is %d\n",i,i * i); }
Thus in C, Hello World is useful, it's an actual program that does bascially everything required to interact with a user in a meaningful way.
Your 6-line Win32 Hello World (actually I would have counted it as being 3 or 4 significant lines) is perhaps useful for notifying the user that a single, non-interactive event has occured.
But it's not even close to being useful for much else. If you want to actually interact with the user (and most programs need to do this) you must open a real window and you are suddenly stuck with the ugly fifty line win32 Hello World.
This in my opinion is unacceptable for a general-purpose programming environment.
BTW I totally agree with you that this is not significantly worse than X under Linux. X under Linux is about as crappy as Win32 under Windows.
Nobody in their right mind should be expected to program either for X or for Win32. Computers exist to make our lives easier, not more difficult. It shouldn't take me fifty lines and hours of study to express the raw concept of "show a written message to a user and read a string of keypresses or mouse clicks".
I'm a Linux and C/C++ programmer, but I've (tried to) program for Windows a little.
IMO, any development arena which does not allow the simple "hello, world" program to be written in less than ten lines of code is BROKEN, at least for mainstream use.
For C-based Win32 it took me several dozen lines of code to do "hello, world". It also took many hours of frustrating trial and error just to learn how to do this. The code was complicated enough that I cannot remember how to do it off the top of my head, I would have to re-read the book to do it again.
For C++-based MFC, I gave up after several very confusing hours.
For MFC code generated by Visual Studio, I was up and running in less than an hour with a sample program out of the book, but I couldn't modify the program to do anything interesting because I didn't understand what I had done.
As a comparison, I recently taught myself PERL from a book. In PERL, writing "hello, world" took less than five minutes after opening the book. I still prefer C++ over PERL for most things, but you gotta love anything that powerful.
(Yes, I just said that simplicity is power).
And of course, in text-based C it takes a mere three statements which I've had memorized for years.
Re:It's far too early for this
on
Quantum Project
·
· Score: 1
Broadband internet access is becoming wildly popular in the areas in which it is available cheap. These movie guys are just trying to get in on the ground floor.
What you say about the pricing makes sense but they may have other large sources of income such as the ad banners on their web site.
Cookies are a very useful tool, not a pain at all.
They for example allow an online-store to remember the products in your shopping cart so that you can pick items one at a time and then buy them all at once when you are completely finished shopping.
They also allow a page with a simple address to be customized to look the way each viewer wants it, instead of exactly the same for everybody.
The only modern problem at all related to cookies is with web pages which both include ads from another site AND sell your personal information to that other site. Imagine for example you go to www.slashdot.org and it includes an ad banner from www.doubleclick.net.
This naturally allows Doubleclick determine a little fragment of information about you (no cookies necessary)... it knows you viewed an ad thru Slashdot. But it doesn't know who "you" are.
So it puts a cookie in your cache for www.doubleclick.net. Then when later you browse to www.cnn.com, and another ad banner is displayed from www.doubleclick.net, Doubleclick reads back in the earlier cookie from Slashdot (because it's really a www.doubleclick.net cookie, not a Slashdot cookie at all) and can say "AHA!" the same person who was just browsing Slashdot is now browsing CNN.
But Doubleclick still doesn't know you you are, until you type your personal information into a site which sells your personal information to Doubleclick.
So you go to www.buy.com and there is another Doubleclick ad. You buy something. Doubleclick now knows that somebody viewed Slashdot, CNN, and then bought something at www.buy.com. If buy.com guarantees your privacy you are fine because Doubleclick still doesn't know who you are. But if you are lazy and don't check buy.com's privacy policy, they may sell your personal information to Doubleclick.
Finally at this point Doubleclick now has valuable marketing information... information which YOU gave them by shopping in the wrong place.
So DON'T TYPE IN YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION except on sites which guarantee your privacy.
This is not a problem with cookies, it's a problem with people's web browsing habits. Place blame where it is due.
Yet the government rules that information is "private" and can not be exchanged freely, and a hundred slashdot posters raise a foolish cheer.
Nobody should be prevented by law from exchanging information which they posess. Information needs to be free before people can be free. Now I'm not saying that you don't have a right to privacy. You may indeed have a MORAL right to privacy.
But it is YOUR responsibility to protect yourself from making bad purchasing decsisions, it's not the government's place to do so. If you deal with companies that are willing to make money off of your personal data, that's your problem.
You clearly have the ability to protect your privacy through your own choices. You could choose to only deal with credit card companies who guarantee your privacy thru their service agreements. You could choose to shop only at stores which advertise a "purchase privacy guarantee" to all of their customers.
But noooooo, if you are a typical American you instead wait until your personal information is being bought and sold all over the world. Next you whine and complain like angry children because the free market system works correctly. And then you beg the government to make it illegal for companies to do what comes naturally in a free market, namely make money off of information they responsibily obtained.
And what do the politicans say? Sure, just re-elect us, and we'll protect you from all the scary bad things that you don't want to think about.
No wonder this country loses more and more freedoms with each passing year. It's being railroaded into protecting the lowest common denominator -- the people who are so weak and stupid that they don't appreciate freedom -- at the expense of the free and the strong. And no wonder our taxes are so high. The government has to waste billions enforcing stupid laws like this.
I had thought that Richard Stallman recently released a version of the GPL specifically for written documentation. But I'm having trouble finding any mention of it at the Free Software Foundation website. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but you might want to look for it.
Everything else important about driving a car is standardized and simple. A key opens the door into the car. A key starts the ignition. A steering wheel steers. The pedal on the right accelerates and the one next to it brakes. And so on.
Asking the average Linux user to do things like configure X or LILO is like telling everybody who buys a new car to:
- Determine what kind of engine they have. - Determine what kind of carberator that engine needs. - Go to the store and buy the correct kind of carberator. - Install the carberator!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Tune the engine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Finally, drive the car for the first time.
And while the average Linux user is struggling trying to figure out why he has to figure out all the confusing settings and commands, the expert Linux community is standing back and saying "learning to install your own carberator is good for you! We give you the option of buying whatever carberator you want! Aren't we being nice to you? Isn't Linux great?"
And meanwhile the sane people are thinking "I don't care about X or LILO or partitions, I'm going to stick to Windows, at least it doesn't ask me baffling questions and it still works OK".
It's simply stupid to expect average users to have to do anything more complicated than: "put in the CD", "turn on the computer", "decide how much disk space to give the new operating system (or take the default size)", "set the time", and "give a name to the computer".
A computer can be useful even to people who know nothing about how computers work inside, just as cars are useful to people who can't install carberators.
Anything too complex for those people WILL fail in the desktop market.
Slashdot Mirror
Religion is meme reproduction, an idea which reproduces itself.
Genes and religious memes in the past probably had a symbiotic relationship that was benefical to both. But no more.
For example, in a primitive society, if you are afraid of demons, you are more likely to obey your local witch doctor. This increased willingness to obey also causes better social organization as a side-effect. And that organization is a big win for you. Even if the demons were only a figment of your imagination. And even if the price is you having to watch Tammy Fae Baker reruns on late night TV.
But for intelligent, educated people, religion is a big loss. It is essential to meme reproduction that the host not ask itself why it is bothering to spread the Word. But smart people can not afford to give up that critical thinking which is essential to any enlightened society. Blind faith and intelligence do not mix.
In fact, sufficiently intelligent people do not need government at all... they already know how to self-regulate their own behavior for the betterment of the whole race.
You clearly don't realize how troublesome the problem of cheating is.
The problem lies in the fact that the clients need to have complete, godlike awareness of the current state of the game world at all times. The server can't just send a graphics feed to the client... even the bandwidth for a tiny B&W TV image would kill most modems. So instead it sends changes to the game world database a little bit at a time using tiny codes. "Player one moves to position 123,777,999" but in binary so it looks more like "1m123777999", or even shorter and more cryptic.
The client then can use local CPU power to generate the game graphics from the locally-stored game database. This is fast and looks good without killing the network.
Now back to cheating.
If the client has complete godlike awareness of the entire game world, SO DOES THE USER, at least in theory. It's the user's computer. There is absolutely NOTHING a game designer can do to prevent the user from writing a program that allows him to cheat. Anytime some company claims to have fixed the cheating problem, all they have really done is scrambled their data so that it's harder for hackers to find the data they need to cheat.
The only true solution to this problem is to send real-time video over the internet to each client. This obviously will not happen for a long time. And by then people may have Artifical Intelligence to play the games for them anyway.
A partial solution would be to have servers only send that data which is supposed to be visible on the screen. But this would not, for example, do anything to hinder Quake aimbots.
Cheating is not going away anytime soon. Sorry.
There is no such thing as a natural monopoly. In the U.S. a few monopolies exist with the blessing of the state because of historical reasons, and because the powerful people in control of those monopolies refuse to relax their death-grip on the public dependance.
Phone lines no more need to be monopolized than do the highway system. For example, local governments could provide telephone poles as a public resource, similar to roads. Then you allow any interested businesses to run lines on those poles, possibly subject to simple zoning regulations. (Which would be analgous to the traffic laws that govern the public road system).
That's just an example of a non-monopoly solution to the phone company problem, off the top of my head. If running wires on those poles turned out to be too expensive for individual companies to be able to run their own lines, well perhaps the government should run public copper as well, and let people connect to the local switching station for the service provider they prefer.
There is always a better solution than a monopoly. Centralization always brings huge problems with it simply due to human nature. The less centralization the better.
What, if anything, is the Free Software Foundation doing to promote the employment of programmers developing Free Software?
I understand of course that the FSF's main priority is seeing that Free Software gets developed, by any means, even by volunteer work.
But looking to the future... it would be nice someday if most or all programmers could all work on Free Software for a salary. Is the FSF leading any efforts in this area? How far away is this?
The GPL does NOT infect ANYTHING, EVER. Not even in any symbolic sense.
The GPL simply says that you can only use my GPL'ed code in your program if your code is also GPL'ed. You are completely free to not use my code. Yet so many people like you seem to feel that you should have the right to use my code under terms I never agreed to.
If I offer you a free ice cream cone... you would do well to not later accuse me of ruining your diet. Your diet is your problem. I didn't shove the ice cream cone down your throat.
And GPL'ed code doesn't infect other code.
United States citizens are taught as children in public schools to believe that the US was the first free country and that it is still the freest country in the world.
This may have actually been true 100 or even 50 years ago, before the rise of uncontrollable federalism. Around the turn of the century, when the national income tax was passed, a US congressman was laughed at for suggesting that a 10% maximum be encoded into the law. He was mocked because nobody believed that a single American citizen would ever agree to give up a whopping TEN PERCENT of their income to their government.
But today, United States citizens pay around 50% or more of their yearly incomes to various taxes, including income taxes, sales taxes, automobile taxes, etc. etc.
Add in the costs of living, and very little disposable income remains, except for the rich. Americans are generating plenty of income, they just don't get to keep any of it. This is similar to slavery, although admittedly the living quarters are better. We do get private homes and cheap TVs, for now.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
These delays don't say much about open source development... except maybe that people who work on open source tend to prefer quality releases over early releases.
What these delays really tell us is that predicting the future is inherently difficult. You don't ever know exactly how long some task is going to take until after it is finished. I wish typical managers understood this... as a computer programmer no matter how hard I try to accurately predict when a project will be complete, I'm still just guessing, and nothing can be done about this, it's just the way the universe works.
This, BTW, is why the progress bars in well-written installation-tools are data-based instead of time-based... i.e. when it says 72% it means that 72% of the data has been copied, not that 72% of the total installation time has past. The software knows how much total data there is, and can accurately report a percentage fraction of that data. But the software does not know much total installation time will be required... all kinds of things such as multitasking or hard drive variances or even temperature changes in the CPU can change the total amount of time required to copy the files. So no precentage fraction of the total installation time can be reported, it's an unknown quantity.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
Many interesting ideas here about how to write viruses which are difficult to detect. But what if they are out there already? Would we know it? Seriously how difficult would it be to create an "evolver" virus which:
1. reproduces without human intervention
2. is harmless (doesn't try to crash anything)
3. occasionally mutates itself at a random time
We could have a whole virus ecosystem evolving out there right under our noses without us even having a clue. Part of their strategies for surviving would necessarily include not crashing the systems they were "living" on.
In fact this sounds like one of those things that because it CAN happen, it MUST eventually happen. Eventually somebody will do it and there will be no way to undo it once done. Maybe the first Artificial Intelligence created on Earth will be an internet-dweller who has never even met a human being before.
Software licenses will always have these complex problems of intrepretation. If you really want to make your software free, make the source code public domain.
Don't get me wrong... I support the GPL and similar licenses and will take Free Software over the restricted stuff any day.
But the problem with intellectual property is that it doesn't actually exist anywhere except in our heads. So every single person in the world could possibly have their own unique idea of exactly what bits make up a particular piece of software.
If you recompile a program for a different architcture, is it the same program? What if you port it "function-for-function" to a different language? What if you write a program that generates a program? What if you run it on an emulator? What if you run an interpreter on an old program which was originally meant to be compiled? What if you quit your job and write a competing program from scratch, that looks very similar because you wrote the original? What if you conincidentally come up with a piece of code that looks very similar to somebody else's program which you have never seen before?
This is why we have judges in our system, to answer all the silly questions that laws make us ask. But do you really want some stuffy ex-lawyer determining who owns your thoughts? Remember, intellectual property only exists in people's heads. Intelluctual property is dangerous, and will become more dangerous with each technological advance we make.
Besides, copyright laws steal from us all the wonderful benefits of copying. Most people don't miss these benefits because they've never really had them.
Copyright is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of the MessageBox shortcut. Not that it really helps that much.
When I program Hello World in C, it's a tiny step away from being a useful application. I could for example change the code slightly to be:
#include
int main()
{
int i;
printf("hello, world, give me a number\n");
scanf("%d",&i);
printf("%d squared is %d\n",i,i * i);
}
Thus in C, Hello World is useful, it's an actual program that does bascially everything required to interact with a user in a meaningful way.
Your 6-line Win32 Hello World (actually I would have counted it as being 3 or 4 significant lines) is perhaps useful for notifying the user that a single, non-interactive event has occured.
But it's not even close to being useful for much else. If you want to actually interact with the user (and most programs need to do this) you must open a real window and you are suddenly stuck with the ugly fifty line win32 Hello World.
This in my opinion is unacceptable for a general-purpose programming environment.
BTW I totally agree with you that this is not significantly worse than X under Linux. X under Linux is about as crappy as Win32 under Windows.
Nobody in their right mind should be expected to program either for X or for Win32. Computers exist to make our lives easier, not more difficult. It shouldn't take me fifty lines and hours of study to express the raw concept of "show a written message to a user and read a string of keypresses or mouse clicks".
I'm a Linux and C/C++ programmer, but I've (tried to) program for Windows a little.
IMO, any development arena which does not allow the simple "hello, world" program to be written in less than ten lines of code is BROKEN, at least for mainstream use.
For C-based Win32 it took me several dozen lines of code to do "hello, world". It also took many hours of frustrating trial and error just to learn how to do this. The code was complicated enough that I cannot remember how to do it off the top of my head, I would have to re-read the book to do it again.
For C++-based MFC, I gave up after several very confusing hours.
For MFC code generated by Visual Studio, I was up and running in less than an hour with a sample program out of the book, but I couldn't modify the program to do anything interesting because I didn't understand what I had done.
As a comparison, I recently taught myself PERL from a book. In PERL, writing "hello, world" took less than five minutes after opening the book. I still prefer C++ over PERL for most things, but you gotta love anything that powerful.
(Yes, I just said that simplicity is power).
And of course, in text-based C it takes a mere three statements which I've had memorized for years.
Broadband internet access is becoming wildly popular in the areas in which it is available cheap. These movie guys are just trying to get in on the ground floor.
What you say about the pricing makes sense but they may have other large sources of income such as the ad banners on their web site.
Cookies are a very useful tool, not a pain at all.
They for example allow an online-store to remember the products in your shopping cart so that you can pick items one at a time and then buy them all at once when you are completely finished shopping.
They also allow a page with a simple address to be customized to look the way each viewer wants it, instead of exactly the same for everybody.
The only modern problem at all related to cookies is with web pages which both include ads from another site AND sell your personal information to that other site. Imagine for example you go to www.slashdot.org and it includes an ad banner from www.doubleclick.net.
This naturally allows Doubleclick determine a little fragment of information about you (no cookies necessary)... it knows you viewed an ad thru Slashdot. But it doesn't know who "you" are.
So it puts a cookie in your cache for www.doubleclick.net. Then when later you browse to www.cnn.com, and another ad banner is displayed from www.doubleclick.net, Doubleclick reads back in the earlier cookie from Slashdot (because it's really a www.doubleclick.net cookie, not a Slashdot cookie at all) and can say "AHA!" the same person who was just browsing Slashdot is now browsing CNN.
But Doubleclick still doesn't know you you are, until you type your personal information into a site which sells your personal information to Doubleclick.
So you go to www.buy.com and there is another Doubleclick ad. You buy something. Doubleclick now knows that somebody viewed Slashdot, CNN, and then bought something at www.buy.com. If buy.com guarantees your privacy you are fine because Doubleclick still doesn't know who you are. But if you are lazy and don't check buy.com's privacy policy, they may sell your personal information to Doubleclick.
Finally at this point Doubleclick now has valuable marketing information... information which YOU gave them by shopping in the wrong place.
So DON'T TYPE IN YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION except on sites which guarantee your privacy.
This is not a problem with cookies, it's a problem with people's web browsing habits. Place blame where it is due.
Gee so much for this being a free country.
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE.
Yet the government rules that information is "private" and can not be exchanged freely, and a hundred slashdot posters raise a foolish cheer.
Nobody should be prevented by law from exchanging information which they posess. Information needs to be free before people can be free. Now I'm not saying that you don't have a right to privacy. You may indeed have a MORAL right to privacy.
But it is YOUR responsibility to protect yourself from making bad purchasing decsisions, it's not the government's place to do so. If you deal with companies that are willing to make money off of your personal data, that's your problem.
You clearly have the ability to protect your privacy through your own choices. You could choose to only deal with credit card companies who guarantee your privacy thru their service agreements. You could choose to shop only at stores which advertise a "purchase privacy guarantee" to all of their customers.
But noooooo, if you are a typical American you instead wait until your personal information is being bought and sold all over the world. Next you whine and complain like angry children because the free market system works correctly. And then you beg the government to make it illegal for companies to do what comes naturally in a free market, namely make money off of information they responsibily obtained.
And what do the politicans say? Sure, just re-elect us, and we'll protect you from all the scary bad things that you don't want to think about.
No wonder this country loses more and more freedoms with each passing year. It's being railroaded into protecting the lowest common denominator -- the people who are so weak and stupid that they don't appreciate freedom -- at the expense of the free and the strong. And no wonder our taxes are so high. The government has to waste billions enforcing stupid laws like this.
This news makes me sick. Devolution in action.
Doesn't the Beanie Award include a cash prize?
Therefore each Weenie Award should include a fine. It makes sense.
I had thought that Richard Stallman recently released a version of the GPL specifically for written documentation. But I'm having trouble finding any mention of it at the Free Software Foundation website. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but you might want to look for it.
Think about one of your examples, that since users have to learn to drive to use a car, they also should have to learn to install and configure Linux.
The main interfaces in all cars are compliant to one of two standards:
1. stick shift transmission
2. automatic transmission
Everything else important about driving a car is standardized and simple. A key opens the door into the car. A key starts the ignition. A steering wheel steers. The pedal on the right accelerates and the one next to it brakes. And so on.
Asking the average Linux user to do things like configure X or LILO is like telling everybody who buys a new car to:
- Determine what kind of engine they have.
- Determine what kind of carberator that engine needs.
- Go to the store and buy the correct kind of carberator.
- Install the carberator!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Tune the engine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Finally, drive the car for the first time.
And while the average Linux user is struggling trying to figure out why he has to figure out all the confusing settings and commands, the expert Linux community is standing back and saying "learning to install your own carberator is good for you! We give you the option of buying whatever carberator you want! Aren't we being nice to you? Isn't Linux great?"
And meanwhile the sane people are thinking "I don't care about X or LILO or partitions, I'm going to stick to Windows, at least it doesn't ask me baffling questions and it still works OK".
It's simply stupid to expect average users to have to do anything more complicated than: "put in the CD", "turn on the computer", "decide how much disk space to give the new operating system (or take the default size)", "set the time", and "give a name to the computer".
A computer can be useful even to people who know nothing about how computers work inside, just as cars are useful to people who can't install carberators.
Anything too complex for those people WILL fail in the desktop market.
"Slashdot isn't just Linux News, its 'News for Nerds'"
That's a direct quote from the Slashdot FAQ.