I'm not sure there's that much link between poverty and terrorism. For example, Osama bin Laden comes from a super-rich Saudi family.
Poor people generally don't want to destroy the USA; they want to move there and stop being so poor.
Terrorism is fed by ideology, not poverty, and the actions of the USA that are used by terrorist leaders to stir up anti-Americanism are generally related to military operations rather than trade or aid.
Linux cannot be a monopoly, by definition. A monopoly is when a single entity has overwhelming power in a market. But Linux isn't an entity, it's a bit of software. (For the same reason, it doesn't make sense to talk about a Windows monopoly, only a Microsoft monopoly.)
Next, the reason monopolies are bad is that they guarantee income to certain people without any need to deliver good value, and prevent other people from competing in that market segment. But mandating Linux wouldn't do that. Anyone who wants to sell Linux can do so. Even Microsoft would be free to compete in a Linux-only market.
Hamas does not keep to treaties. Nor does any other neighbour of Israel. The only muslim country that has EVER shown to keep to international treaties when under the slightest bit of pressure is Turkey, and that era in Turkey is coming to an end.
Do pray tell us more about the strange parallel universe you are visiting from. In our reality, Israel has a neighbour called Jordan, which is a Muslim country that has coexisted peacefully with Israel for many years, even going so far as to abandon its territorial claims to the West Bank, and signed a peace treaty in 1994 that neither side has broken.
Oh, and in our reality, Turkey is a secular state.
Sure, it'd be nice if pretty much everything was free, but that's not how society works [...] to simply take someone else's work while crying "freedom" is simply a display of a sense of entitlement, that things should be free because you like them and you deserve to have them without contributing (i.e. paying).
Queen have been paid. Over and over and over again. Society has rewarded them richly for their creation: the surviving members of the band are wealthy and famous.
How many times do we have to pay for a song, how much money and fame do we have to give to its creators, how many decades will pass, before you will finally acknowledge that they might just have received enough reward, and we can finally have the right to sing it ourselves in a bar without being sued?
I am curious though, what about my examples? Are you willing to argue that Elton John, Yoko Ono (as the current copyright holder to Imagine), and Jello Biafra are immoral for not allowing the scenarios I described above? If not, where does that leave your assertion that copyright beyond 28 years is immoral?
You say elsewhere that you are not arguing that copyright should be perpetual. So where do you draw the line?
For example, if you happen to support the status quo, the question becomes: what exactly will happen 50-70 years after the death of Elton John that suddenly changes the morality of using one of his songs in an anti-homosexual campaign? If it is OK for Yoko Ono to have total control over the use of John Lennon's work many years after his death, why is it OK for that right to vanish overnight in a few more decades? (It's unlikely she'll still be alive, but it's possible; she's only 75, and medicine is getting pretty good these days.)
I can see that you might make an argument for making copyright last for the lifetime of the author: it would presumably be based on the theory that it's not right to stop people from profiting from their own labour. But I have never yet heard anyone give a compelling reason why it should last a day longer.
That's a huge advantage for *BSD. All the command-line stuff feels like it belongs together
The same is largely true of GNU/Linux. See that "GNU" there? That's the name of the single source of the vast majority of the standard Linux command-line tools, which all have a standard interface, take the same options, etc.
The big exceptions are things like Perl and so on, but that's exactly the same in *BSD. At least, the BSDs were still using Larry Wall's Perl last time I checked. Maybe they've completely rewritten their own version from scratch now?
In fact, for some of the most important tools, Linux is more integrated. Next time you're compiling some code on your *BSD, take a look at what you're compiling it with. It's a fair bet you'll be using a compiler whose name begins with a "g". Sure, there's a project to fix that (clang), but there's a long way to go before that's ready.
Linux may be open source, but good luck trying to track down the source code for a random library or utility.
Yeah, it's just so difficult to type "apt-get source [package-name]" and have the exact source code used to build the binary you're using delivered straight to $CWD.
Innovation comes from creativity and possibility(time) to implement it. I do not believe you can buy innovation or that the creative minds stop innovate just because it is an economic downturn.
I think you're talking at cross-purposes here.
You're using "innovation" in the sense of "coming up with novel and creative ideas". TFA seems to be using it in the Microsoft sense of "selling you another version with yet more bloat".
Gnome (which I'm currently using) is the only remaining choice on X
You have not justified this assertion.
Really, it's easy to use Gnome without touching anything that's threatened by hypothetical.NET patents. And if you're that worried about patents, you shouldn't be touching Linux with a bargepole, given how many patents Microsoft keeps dropping unsubstantiated hints it might infringe!
KDE, they hung themselves up.
KDE 3 still works just fine until KDE 4 matures.
The sundry windows managers and second tier desktop environments are not worth discussing.
You have not justified this assertion.
it is designed for networking and so it must have drawbacks when networking is not needed. Please don't ask me for technical evidence, I do not have it.
Wow, now you're making an assertion that you openly acknowledge you are unable to justify!
whatever the desktop environment common applications would be slower than equivalent applications on Windows
Another assertion that you openly accept you are unable to support with any evidence. Moreover, it's pretty unimportant. The question isn't "is app X on Linux faster than the completely different app Y on Windows", the question is "is app X on Linux good enough for me to get stuff done". If not, then Linux has problems. Otherwise, who gives a damn about app Y?
I do distinctly remember running around in MI with a ton of items in my inventory that had no sensible use until pretty late in the game (rubber chicken, anyone?)
IIRC you could use the rubber chicken as soon as you made it out of the first town. I wouldn't call that "late in the game".
(Or did the game prevent you from using it until you'd started gathering your crew? I forget. Either way, it was still used in Part 1.)
I'm sure glad Microsoft wanted to make the less-used options more visible, but at the same time they made the most-used options less visible. Atleast IMHO.
YHO is worthless compared to the resources Microsoft poured into actual tests with a wide variety of real users. They found that the most-used option was "Paste". Guess what the first and biggest button on the default ribbon is?
Printing is by no means a universal action, now that documents are increasingly transferred electronically and read on screen; and even where a document is printed, it's usually printed once when the document is finished, whereas pretty much all other commands are used repeatedly while the document is being composed.
I can't believe I'm defending the interface to a program I despise and refuse to use, but there you are. For the people it's aimed at, Word 2007 is actually quite well designed. Don't like change? Deal with it. Change happens, and you can keep up or you can be left behind.
Because "File" is just so intuitive. What could be more obviously related to printing than a word that originally referred to the act of storing paper in a cabinet, and now instead has come to refer to storing bytes in a virtual cabinet? Grandma was certainly going to guess that her printer is related to "filing". Not.
Meanwhile, power users continue to use the keyboard shortcuts to print, instead of wasting time with the mouse. And the keyboard shortcuts remain the same. Microsoft understands muscle memory where it matters. For mouse users, it doesn't matter, because they're already working inefficiently.
he [...] was also a big supporter of the right of the state to detain 'terrorist suspects' for 42 days without any evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever.
Oh, please. I'm right behind you on identity cards -- a stupid waste of our money that will provide no security to anyone at all -- but the 42-days thing was far less cut and dried. It was not "without any evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever"; it was "when the police had a lot of evidence of wrongdoing, but were not yet prepared to lay formal charges". That's a very different thing. You may still oppose it -- a lot of people did -- but please do so on an informed basis.
This guy's attitude makes me cringe. You can't have freedom of speech unless you're willing to stand up and support your most vocal opponent's right to say the most offensive things.
Correct, and that's why he says he's not against free speech, because he's not proposing to restrict his opponents' rights to say the most offensive things.
He is proposing to restrict things like beheading videos. Do you support terrorists' "rights" to kidnap people and post videos online of their brutal murders? Yes? Then you are a sick person. No? Then you support censorship.
Britain is not hostile to free speech. We had the president of Iran, the closest thing we have to a hostile country, on our national TV on Christmas Day delivering a counterpoint to the speech from our own monarch. He hates everything our country stands for, and we are willing to give him a platform to stand up and tell us about his views!
What we object to, and what these proposals are about, is people posting graphic depictions of acts in which they are physically hurting or even killing real people. Rape and murder are not protected speech.
Oh, please. Crysis runs fine with a single GeForce 8800GT, which was a reasonably priced mid-range card even when the game was first released.
The reason massive "gaming rigs" with three GPUs don't sell is because nobody needs one. PC gaming is not dead; the "gaming PC" is, but that's because it was never alive.
"Linux" per se is not an OS, it is a set of common libraries and standards that is shared by many OSs.
No, Linux is a kernel.
Heck, binaries compiled for one Linux distro won't even work on half the others
If you compile them in a distro-specific fashion, perhaps. But it is not particularly difficult to produce a Linux binary that will work on practically any distro (for any given processor architecture, obviously).
That said, I happen to agree with your fundamental argument, which is that it's better to recommend people use "Ubuntu" than to tell them "hey, you should try Linux. I wonder which distro you'd like best... maybe you should try Ubuntu, then give SuSE a go, or wait, Fedora's pretty good these days", by which time their eyes have glazed over and they're making a mental vow never to touch anything Linux-related with a bargepole.
The problem with GIMP isn't that it's different; it's that the differences make it hard to use.
Some of the things people hate (like the methods of drawing lines and circles) are not really problems, and people who give it a fair chance and adapt to it learn to like it. Just like Office 2007's Ribbon, or Firefox 3's Awesomebar. Interface innovation does often upset people, but you're right, it is essential and should be encouraged, and we should all work harder to be flexible.
But there are valid complaints. The dreadful window management thing is one. It relies on totally non-portable behaviour that essentially means GIMP only works properly if you're using GNOME and Metacity. The GIMP team claim this is because every single other desktop environment / window manager ever written is "broken". Recommended "solutions" include devoting an entire virtual desktop to GIMP exclusively, or even using Xnest to dedicate an entire X window server to GIMP. Yes, seriously. Ludicrous.
But you can't do #3 out of the box. In fact, you can't do 3 without paying money or breaking the law.
You can do half of it: CD ripping is built into all consumer-oriented Linux distributions, and Fluendo's fully-licensed MP3 codec is a free download. Bingo, not one penny spent, not one law broken, and about 90% of most people's multimedia needs are already taken care of!
If you're lucky enough to live somewhere without software patents, you can get free codecs for anything else. If not, then Fluendo's remaining fully-licensed codecs are cheap enough. And consumer-oriented distros make it very easy to get them. Or you could just buy a commercial edition that comes with them.
So you can't play DVDs out of the box? Well, that's just like Microsoft Windows XP, then, which also can't play DVDs out of the box. And, you know, most people who want to watch DVDs have this thing plugged into their TV called a "DVD player".
Just think of it as a consumable, rather than an asset.
You don't expect to be able to re-sell a restaurant meal, or a pint of beer, or a night at the movies. Do you "own" them? Maybe not, but I don't see many people whining about that.
Honestly, I don't understand this attitude. People -- even students who don't have much of an income yet -- will happily spend the price of Spore on a night out, where the pleasure lasts a few hours at most and is then gone forever. But somehow when it's a video game, they assume that it's not worth paying for unless they can retain the potential to play it forever?
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To the best of my knowledge, fighter pilots -- for all their rare skills and expensive training -- are considered more expendable than the President.
I'm not sure there's that much link between poverty and terrorism. For example, Osama bin Laden comes from a super-rich Saudi family.
Poor people generally don't want to destroy the USA; they want to move there and stop being so poor.
Terrorism is fed by ideology, not poverty, and the actions of the USA that are used by terrorist leaders to stir up anti-Americanism are generally related to military operations rather than trade or aid.
Truly, new Date().getFullYear() + 1 will be the year of Linux on the desktop!
No, it's called the "Smart Location Bar". "Awesomebar" is just a nickname.
Linux cannot be a monopoly, by definition. A monopoly is when a single entity has overwhelming power in a market. But Linux isn't an entity, it's a bit of software. (For the same reason, it doesn't make sense to talk about a Windows monopoly, only a Microsoft monopoly.)
Next, the reason monopolies are bad is that they guarantee income to certain people without any need to deliver good value, and prevent other people from competing in that market segment. But mandating Linux wouldn't do that. Anyone who wants to sell Linux can do so. Even Microsoft would be free to compete in a Linux-only market.
Do pray tell us more about the strange parallel universe you are visiting from. In our reality, Israel has a neighbour called Jordan, which is a Muslim country that has coexisted peacefully with Israel for many years, even going so far as to abandon its territorial claims to the West Bank, and signed a peace treaty in 1994 that neither side has broken.
Oh, and in our reality, Turkey is a secular state.
Queen have been paid. Over and over and over again. Society has rewarded them richly for their creation: the surviving members of the band are wealthy and famous.
How many times do we have to pay for a song, how much money and fame do we have to give to its creators, how many decades will pass, before you will finally acknowledge that they might just have received enough reward, and we can finally have the right to sing it ourselves in a bar without being sued?
You say elsewhere that you are not arguing that copyright should be perpetual. So where do you draw the line?
For example, if you happen to support the status quo, the question becomes: what exactly will happen 50-70 years after the death of Elton John that suddenly changes the morality of using one of his songs in an anti-homosexual campaign? If it is OK for Yoko Ono to have total control over the use of John Lennon's work many years after his death, why is it OK for that right to vanish overnight in a few more decades? (It's unlikely she'll still be alive, but it's possible; she's only 75, and medicine is getting pretty good these days.)
I can see that you might make an argument for making copyright last for the lifetime of the author: it would presumably be based on the theory that it's not right to stop people from profiting from their own labour. But I have never yet heard anyone give a compelling reason why it should last a day longer.
The same is largely true of GNU/Linux. See that "GNU" there? That's the name of the single source of the vast majority of the standard Linux command-line tools, which all have a standard interface, take the same options, etc.
The big exceptions are things like Perl and so on, but that's exactly the same in *BSD. At least, the BSDs were still using Larry Wall's Perl last time I checked. Maybe they've completely rewritten their own version from scratch now?
In fact, for some of the most important tools, Linux is more integrated. Next time you're compiling some code on your *BSD, take a look at what you're compiling it with. It's a fair bet you'll be using a compiler whose name begins with a "g". Sure, there's a project to fix that (clang), but there's a long way to go before that's ready.
Yeah, it's just so difficult to type "apt-get source [package-name]" and have the exact source code used to build the binary you're using delivered straight to $CWD.
I think you're talking at cross-purposes here.
You're using "innovation" in the sense of "coming up with novel and creative ideas". TFA seems to be using it in the Microsoft sense of "selling you another version with yet more bloat".
You have not justified this assertion.
Really, it's easy to use Gnome without touching anything that's threatened by hypothetical .NET patents. And if you're that worried about patents, you shouldn't be touching Linux with a bargepole, given how many patents Microsoft keeps dropping unsubstantiated hints it might infringe!
KDE 3 still works just fine until KDE 4 matures.
You have not justified this assertion.
Wow, now you're making an assertion that you openly acknowledge you are unable to justify!
Another assertion that you openly accept you are unable to support with any evidence. Moreover, it's pretty unimportant. The question isn't "is app X on Linux faster than the completely different app Y on Windows", the question is "is app X on Linux good enough for me to get stuff done". If not, then Linux has problems. Otherwise, who gives a damn about app Y?
When was the last time you couldn't do that? It's been trivial for as long as I can remember -- certainly for over 10 years.
IIRC you could use the rubber chicken as soon as you made it out of the first town. I wouldn't call that "late in the game".
(Or did the game prevent you from using it until you'd started gathering your crew? I forget. Either way, it was still used in Part 1.)
YHO is worthless compared to the resources Microsoft poured into actual tests with a wide variety of real users. They found that the most-used option was "Paste". Guess what the first and biggest button on the default ribbon is?
Printing is by no means a universal action, now that documents are increasingly transferred electronically and read on screen; and even where a document is printed, it's usually printed once when the document is finished, whereas pretty much all other commands are used repeatedly while the document is being composed.
I can't believe I'm defending the interface to a program I despise and refuse to use, but there you are. For the people it's aimed at, Word 2007 is actually quite well designed. Don't like change? Deal with it. Change happens, and you can keep up or you can be left behind.
Because "File" is just so intuitive. What could be more obviously related to printing than a word that originally referred to the act of storing paper in a cabinet, and now instead has come to refer to storing bytes in a virtual cabinet? Grandma was certainly going to guess that her printer is related to "filing". Not.
Meanwhile, power users continue to use the keyboard shortcuts to print, instead of wasting time with the mouse. And the keyboard shortcuts remain the same. Microsoft understands muscle memory where it matters. For mouse users, it doesn't matter, because they're already working inefficiently.
So, you can just walk into a shop and buy a book full of child porn?
No? Hmm, sounds like the US government can ban books. Oops.
Oh, please. I'm right behind you on identity cards -- a stupid waste of our money that will provide no security to anyone at all -- but the 42-days thing was far less cut and dried. It was not "without any evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever"; it was "when the police had a lot of evidence of wrongdoing, but were not yet prepared to lay formal charges". That's a very different thing. You may still oppose it -- a lot of people did -- but please do so on an informed basis.
Correct, and that's why he says he's not against free speech, because he's not proposing to restrict his opponents' rights to say the most offensive things.
He is proposing to restrict things like beheading videos. Do you support terrorists' "rights" to kidnap people and post videos online of their brutal murders? Yes? Then you are a sick person. No? Then you support censorship.
Britain is not hostile to free speech. We had the president of Iran, the closest thing we have to a hostile country, on our national TV on Christmas Day delivering a counterpoint to the speech from our own monarch. He hates everything our country stands for, and we are willing to give him a platform to stand up and tell us about his views!
What we object to, and what these proposals are about, is people posting graphic depictions of acts in which they are physically hurting or even killing real people. Rape and murder are not protected speech.
This has been built into Internet Explorer for, what, about 15 years now?
Nobody uses it because it doesn't solve any problems.
Never attribute to corruption that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Oh, please. Crysis runs fine with a single GeForce 8800GT, which was a reasonably priced mid-range card even when the game was first released.
The reason massive "gaming rigs" with three GPUs don't sell is because nobody needs one. PC gaming is not dead; the "gaming PC" is, but that's because it was never alive.
No, Linux is a kernel.
If you compile them in a distro-specific fashion, perhaps. But it is not particularly difficult to produce a Linux binary that will work on practically any distro (for any given processor architecture, obviously).
That said, I happen to agree with your fundamental argument, which is that it's better to recommend people use "Ubuntu" than to tell them "hey, you should try Linux. I wonder which distro you'd like best... maybe you should try Ubuntu, then give SuSE a go, or wait, Fedora's pretty good these days", by which time their eyes have glazed over and they're making a mental vow never to touch anything Linux-related with a bargepole.
The problem with GIMP isn't that it's different; it's that the differences make it hard to use.
Some of the things people hate (like the methods of drawing lines and circles) are not really problems, and people who give it a fair chance and adapt to it learn to like it. Just like Office 2007's Ribbon, or Firefox 3's Awesomebar. Interface innovation does often upset people, but you're right, it is essential and should be encouraged, and we should all work harder to be flexible.
But there are valid complaints. The dreadful window management thing is one. It relies on totally non-portable behaviour that essentially means GIMP only works properly if you're using GNOME and Metacity. The GIMP team claim this is because every single other desktop environment / window manager ever written is "broken". Recommended "solutions" include devoting an entire virtual desktop to GIMP exclusively, or even using Xnest to dedicate an entire X window server to GIMP. Yes, seriously. Ludicrous.
You can do half of it: CD ripping is built into all consumer-oriented Linux distributions, and Fluendo's fully-licensed MP3 codec is a free download. Bingo, not one penny spent, not one law broken, and about 90% of most people's multimedia needs are already taken care of!
If you're lucky enough to live somewhere without software patents, you can get free codecs for anything else. If not, then Fluendo's remaining fully-licensed codecs are cheap enough. And consumer-oriented distros make it very easy to get them. Or you could just buy a commercial edition that comes with them.
So you can't play DVDs out of the box? Well, that's just like Microsoft Windows XP, then, which also can't play DVDs out of the box. And, you know, most people who want to watch DVDs have this thing plugged into their TV called a "DVD player".
Just think of it as a consumable, rather than an asset.
You don't expect to be able to re-sell a restaurant meal, or a pint of beer, or a night at the movies. Do you "own" them? Maybe not, but I don't see many people whining about that.
You probably won't still want to play Spore.
Honestly, I don't understand this attitude. People -- even students who don't have much of an income yet -- will happily spend the price of Spore on a night out, where the pleasure lasts a few hours at most and is then gone forever. But somehow when it's a video game, they assume that it's not worth paying for unless they can retain the potential to play it forever?