This is actually quite elitist. I see what you're getting at, but this requires that you go to the effort to make sure that you're communications are private which assumes:
I find your idea of what is elitist deeply disturbing. By extension, anything that gives the person willing to think and work towards an end an advantage over he who doesn't is elitist. It figures you are European (disclaimer: so am I) because this is a very Euro-Socialist way of thinking.
Personally, I find your attitude towards this arrogant. I do not presume myself to be any more intelligent than most people, and I don't give myself the right to decide who of the stupid people(sic) is most in need of my forcing protection on them. The "vast majority who do not think about these issues" do so by choice, they are perfectly capable of behaving intelligently regarding issues that are important to them. It is not my place to tell them that privacy should be.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I know politics is a difficult concept to grasp for your americans, but fascism and communism, tho both extremes, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
You can't blame them though, after living in a politically empty one party system for so long (and America has never had more than one political direction, different policies maybe, same politics) it becomes a difficult and abstract concept to grasp.
In many ways, it is no different from the Chinese people I know...
Saying that fascism and communism are on opposite ends of the spectrum is a little misleading though. They were on the opposite sides of extreme radical change vs nationalistic regretion, but none of that holds any longer. Today, they together represent the ever present part of politics that strives to attack and deprive the inidividual, opposite of which you find liberiterians and ultimetly anarchism, which strives to free the individual at any cost to society.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Interestingly, last time I said this on Slashdot it was regarding a very different issue (police on Usenet I believe) but here goes again:
It is wrong to enforce with violence that which can be ensured with intelligence.
The technology (intelligence) to stop ANYONE from imposing on your communication is there already. If you want to be sure that people are not imposing on your communications the choice is yours (see GPG, pgpPhone, etc). Making this a law (violence) can only be harmful, the effort is better spend allowing the technologies to mature and proliferate.
What worries me is when governments like the American attacks the use of intelligence with violence as the have in the Crypto issue.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
And I order you and Slashdot to immediately seize and desist all usage of our internationally copyrighted phrase "... for dummies". We have court decisions backing IDG's exclusive right to address the dummies of the world.
Though, given how in line your advice is with other IDG publishings, we may consider giving you a book contract for this one...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I have to start wondering exactly what is up with the American patent office. Do ANY patents get turned down? Or do they just stamp everything and wait for a court battle (which the defendant might not afford) to decide the validity of a patent.
Politically, I am against the whole idea of patents. I believe that thought should be free, period, and that we should model our society with that at the core, not as an afterthough: but that is not even the issue here. Whether you like patents or not, their purpose is fairly clear: to give back to the inventor of something for the disadvantage he has on spending money inventing the thing.
Medical patents are the best example. Companies spend millions of R&D of a new drug, and the only way they can afford to do that is if they can sell it exclusively for a period. But this? How many millions did CDnow spend thinking up the idea that you could put forms on the net where people can order songs that are then burned to cd?
They should have come to me, I would have "consulted" them on it for only around 100K.
Yes, implementing the system might be difficult, but they don't need a patent to protect them from that. Anyone copying their invention would incur the same costs. No one (well, except a bunch of american lawyers) said patents were around to make the inventors of something rich: only to make it fair. Patents are not an "I thought of this first so I should get rich" thing, they are an "I incured great costs developing this, so I should have a chance to regain them" thing.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This all boils down to one question: Can you run an httpd on an NT Workstation box using none of the NT Server code implemented by Microsoft that you did not pay to license?
If the answer is Yes, then you are correct and MS behaved badly. If the answer is No, even for a handful of DLL's, drivers, API's, whatever, then MS is completely within the law.
In theory, if Microsoft offers a "lite" version of Windows98 with a license that says you can't use it to connect to the Internet and disabled tcp/ip, you are not allowed to use it for that even if you get a third party winsock program.
A license can put limits on how you use code as well as whether you can use it. Some licenses won't let you use the code to make money, some will let you see the source but not modify it, etc etc. It stinks, but its how our current legal system works.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Like any large computer system that handles orders, production, and shipments, of course it is rather tricky to implement.
But that a system is large and tricky doesn't validate the claim for a patent. Are they doing anything new here? People have been taking orders from "'Frisco, Capetown, Chicago, and Auckland, and minimizing things like production and shipping cost/time" for quite some time now, and usually the systems they have been using to manage this have been large and complicated.
The only new thing about this is that they plugged it to a cdburner, which as the previous post notes, is not that difficult to do. Where exactly is the need for a patent other than an attempt to harass any competition?
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
* I care about today * Most of us have good but not amazing CPU's (overlocked 366 celeries) * Only game worth playing is Quake3 * At normal res, Q3 is geometry limited with above hardware. * Quake3 already supports T&L.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Upon seeing the specs for that baby, part of me just screams I want it, but the other, more rational part of me wonders what the point really is.
I mean, great: gigatexels per second. As much RAM as I currently have on my mainboard. Meaning what? I can now play Quake3 at 4,000*3,000 resolution? Yay. Yes, I know about anti-aliasing, but this is overkill for even that if not running very righ resolutions (1024*768 and above).
Read my lips, 90% of all speed problems with games on current hardware is the geometry setup bogging down the processor. Unless you play at above mentioned resolutions, or happen to have dual athlon 700s and are playing at 100 fps already (and if I am right in assuming that this does not have a Geometry chip like the GeForce) this card will be exactly 0% faster for you.
In my opinion Nvidia have taken a much wiser approach to the whole 3d acceleration concentrating on the weekest pointinstead of just pouring in endless amount of pixel fillrate that the processor can't render anyways unless you are stairing at a blank wall.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I can't disagree with you about the usenet. Even though it has been ages since I last posted there, it does hold a special place in my heart for all those hours spent on it in during the early part of this decade. Having the newsreader download a couple of thousand posts from subscribed groups on my 9,600 baud modem to then go offline and spend several hours reading and writing replies was a daily ritual for a long time for me.
BUT, don't let love blind you. Sometimes even the best things don't work, and, I believe, the Internet just go to big for the Usenet. There is too much shit around today for one system to ever play the role it did.
Yes, the usenet is a great thing in theory, and was indeed great before the spammers and the flamers and assholes and the aolers. But think about what you are saying when you advocate letting authoritarian law, backed by violence, come in and take over its freedom. Is that a price that is really worth paying? Would a Usenet run by gag-orders and threats of lawsuits, with lawyers and police reading every discussion be anymore like the Usenet you love than the alternatives that are around today?
As for slashdot, I agree that this is completely different. Slashdot is a good place to read some intelligent comments on a the daily web stories, and maybe get your own opinion on them heard. Its very different from Usenet, but on the other hand, it does work. Without Police intervention and gag-orders.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It is always wrong to fall back on violence (and the law is based on violence) because technology fails. If you think the usenet does not offer an enviroment for discussion with enough protection against assholes, go elsewhere. The net is full of mailinglitss, www-boards and alike. Slashdot proves that building a moderation system that works well enough for most of us IS possible.
I left the Usenet for this reason, a while later I found slashdot. Now I'm happy.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In my mind RSA is not a company that stands for open solutions. They have horded patents for the last 17 years that allowed them to monopolize the whole concept of assymetric crypto, and even attempted to keep some of their symmetric algorithms as trade secrets.
You could claim that it is more their fault than anything else that crypto didn't become reality for the common man until the last couple of years (though, before I get flamed, they also did make many great discoverees).
I'm not sure I'm happy to see Redhat in bed with them..
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
1979: This will never amount to anything. 1989: Ok, this can be used to make developement tools, but you'll never make a whole OS. 1999: Ok, you could make a whole OS, but you'll never innovate on it.
Wanna bet?
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Why exactly do you need to sue the pants off them? Is it to get revench (the economic equivalent of a pointless punch in the face) or because you have just won on the American wheel of litigation and want the chance cash your reward?
If a company guarantees that something works and it doesn't, then they have broken there promise and should possibly be sued (such legislation being there so people have to stand up for their promises). What does that have to do with whether the software was developed as open or closed source? The guy who forgot the second = was not doing it because negligence, he made a mistake. It is whoever promised you that the system would work that was negligent, and people can promise that for regardless of how it was developed (closed or open source, they better have tested it well).
Personally (but, of course I'm not American) I would prefer if there was no suing going on at all, as long as less people are dying. This is what the thousand eyes reference was about if you missed that.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I think that the need for such as disclaimer is more a result of mentality of the masses then the so called "zealots". In my experience Linux has relatively few really annoying devotees: every time I've seen someone post the flames they recieved after critizing Linux/Open Source, they have been much more mild and intelligent than what I have seen in a million previous debates on the Internet (down to the most trivial matters).
The reason that one needs to buffer an essay with this sort of thing is not that people expect the rest of the essay will be a long flame since it deals with Linux, but because they are so smugg and stuck in there conventional way of doing things that they simply need to hear, "Your way is good too" in order to open their minds to Open Source. Just saying "Open source is always superior to closed" is enough to labled a zealot today, which is ridiculous.
Now, we may need to be pragmatic about how we present our message to people. It IS easier to get your way if you suck up rather than piss off (see ESR vs RMS), but don't blaim the need for sucking up on the people who speak their true opinions.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I thought I would reply just to confirm that I read this sinse it was the only truely interesting responce.
I don't believe in absolute good an evil, what people hold to be good and evil is up to them. But most of us would consider it evil to glutonize like we do in front of people whoom we watch starve, what hypocracy is it not to argue that we are not evil because we keep them out of sight?
I am not arguing for putting a gun to anybody's head either. I believe in freedom over everything. I didn't write anything about forcing anybody, and I would never argue for it either.
Your statement that my philosophy attacks the reasons for morals in the first place, you are completely right. That is exactly what I'm doing. I'm sick and tired of people putting themselves on a moral highground, or believing that they are without guilt because send $10 to the Red Cross every month. There is no moral reason not to murder, because though we are not seeing it, we commit murder every single second. As such the laws by which we build our society are pragmatic and pragmatic only, we should never claim that they represent any form of moral code.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I don't think this is a hollow victory at all, even if the companies go ahead and screw us over with or without the IETF (Did you ever think better of them? The state and the industry have been each others whores for the better part of this century.)
However, this battle was never about whether they are tapping Internet nodes or not. The Internet is already tappable. The FBI can do it, a skilled hacker can do it, and the NSA is most probably already doing it. If you want your communications to be secure: encrypt them. If you don't, there is no reason to think that people aren't, or to argue that they shouldn't be, listening.
What this was about was the integrity of the IETF, and by extension the Internet community. I think that if the IETF had gone ahead with this, many of the ideals that have driven the Internet until today would have been run over once and for all. A yes to collaboration would have been a confirmation that the Net and Web had become nothing more than a PR playground for Disney and Microsoft. But by rejecting this, the IETF has showed that there is more to it than that: that there is still a thread of revolution in the very nature of connectivity, even if you have to dig through a lot of dancing baloney to find it.
That is not a hollow victory...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
So what you are saying is that you are not evil for watching people starve while you live in luxury, because you made the great sacrifice of not getting to fuck some hot college girls?
I feel so sorry for you. I never said that sending all your money was the best thing do to (actually, I said that it wasn't) but that doesn't change the fact that neither of us is doing all we can to save these people. Every second and every cent that we spend indulging ourselves (be it on fucking hot college babes or otherwise) is murder. Plain and simple.
I don't judge you for it, after all I'm every bit as bad: but don't tell me we are not evil.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
There was a tiny mistake in dialect translation during the production of this story, they aren't working on any high-level theoretical physics down in Louisiana, they are working on something much more down to earth:
Backhoes.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the best reason not to have an online purchase (purely, you can already order games online) is that the game is going to be 4-500 megabytes.
Most people are not that "well connected".
PHB's understand sales figures. The developer support for Linux is already there, that is not the problem. Don't overestimate executives...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It's newer.
Duh.
You haven't been using computers very long, have you
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is actually quite elitist. I see what you're getting at, but this requires that you go to the effort to make sure that you're communications are private which assumes:
I find your idea of what is elitist deeply disturbing. By extension, anything that gives the person willing to think and work towards an end an advantage over he who doesn't is elitist. It figures you are European (disclaimer: so am I) because this is a very Euro-Socialist way of thinking.
Personally, I find your attitude towards this arrogant. I do not presume myself to be any more intelligent than most people, and I don't give myself the right to decide who of the stupid people(sic) is most in need of my forcing protection on them. The "vast majority who do not think about these issues" do so by choice, they are perfectly capable of behaving intelligently regarding issues that are important to them. It is not my place to tell them that privacy should be.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I know politics is a difficult concept to grasp for your americans, but fascism and communism, tho both extremes, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
You can't blame them though, after living in a politically empty one party system for so long (and America has never had more than one political direction, different policies maybe, same politics) it becomes a difficult and abstract concept to grasp.
In many ways, it is no different from the Chinese people I know...
Saying that fascism and communism are on opposite ends of the spectrum is a little misleading though. They were on the opposite sides of extreme radical change vs nationalistic regretion, but none of that holds any longer. Today, they together represent the ever present part of politics that strives to attack and deprive the inidividual, opposite of which you find liberiterians and ultimetly anarchism, which strives to free the individual at any cost to society.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Interestingly, last time I said this on Slashdot it was regarding a very different issue (police on Usenet I believe) but here goes again:
It is wrong to enforce with violence that which can be ensured with intelligence.
The technology (intelligence) to stop ANYONE from imposing on your communication is there already. If you want to be sure that people are not imposing on your communications the choice is yours (see GPG, pgpPhone, etc). Making this a law (violence) can only be harmful, the effort is better spend allowing the technologies to mature and proliferate.
What worries me is when governments like the American attacks the use of intelligence with violence as the have in the Crypto issue.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
And I order you and Slashdot to immediately seize and desist all usage of our internationally copyrighted phrase "... for dummies". We have court decisions backing IDG's exclusive right to address the dummies of the world.
Though, given how in line your advice is with other IDG publishings, we may consider giving you a book contract for this one...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I have to start wondering exactly what is up with the American patent office. Do ANY patents get turned down? Or do they just stamp everything and wait for a court battle (which the defendant might not afford) to decide the validity of a patent.
Politically, I am against the whole idea of patents. I believe that thought should be free, period, and that we should model our society with that at the core, not as an afterthough: but that is not even the issue here. Whether you like patents or not, their purpose is fairly clear: to give back to the inventor of something for the disadvantage he has on spending money inventing the thing.
Medical patents are the best example. Companies spend millions of R&D of a new drug, and the only way they can afford to do that is if they can sell it exclusively for a period. But this? How many millions did CDnow spend thinking up the idea that you could put forms on the net where people can order songs that are then burned to cd?
They should have come to me, I would have "consulted" them on it for only around 100K.
Yes, implementing the system might be difficult, but they don't need a patent to protect them from that. Anyone copying their invention would incur the same costs. No one (well, except a bunch of american lawyers) said patents were around to make the inventors of something rich: only to make it fair. Patents are not an "I thought of this first so I should get rich" thing, they are an "I incured great costs developing this, so I should have a chance to regain them" thing.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This all boils down to one question: Can you run an httpd on an NT Workstation box using none of the NT Server code implemented by Microsoft that you did not pay to license?
If the answer is Yes, then you are correct and MS behaved badly. If the answer is No, even for a handful of DLL's, drivers, API's, whatever, then MS is completely within the law.
In theory, if Microsoft offers a "lite" version of Windows98 with a license that says you can't use it to connect to the Internet and disabled tcp/ip, you are not allowed to use it for that even if you get a third party winsock program.
A license can put limits on how you use code as well as whether you can use it. Some licenses won't let you use the code to make money, some will let you see the source but not modify it, etc etc. It stinks, but its how our current legal system works.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Like any large computer system that handles orders, production, and shipments, of course it is rather tricky to implement.
But that a system is large and tricky doesn't validate the claim for a patent. Are they doing anything new here? People have been taking orders from "'Frisco, Capetown, Chicago, and Auckland, and minimizing things like production and shipping cost/time" for quite some time now, and usually the systems they have been using to manage this have been large and complicated.
The only new thing about this is that they plugged it to a cdburner, which as the previous post notes, is not that difficult to do. Where exactly is the need for a patent other than an attempt to harass any competition?
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Where I'm coming from on that:
* I care about today
* Most of us have good but not amazing CPU's
(overlocked 366 celeries)
* Only game worth playing is Quake3
* At normal res, Q3 is geometry limited with above hardware.
* Quake3 already supports T&L.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
9&% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Upon seeing the specs for that baby, part of me just screams I want it, but the other, more rational part of me wonders what the point really is.
I mean, great: gigatexels per second. As much RAM as I currently have on my mainboard. Meaning what? I can now play Quake3 at 4,000*3,000 resolution? Yay. Yes, I know about anti-aliasing, but this is overkill for even that if not running very righ resolutions (1024*768 and above).
Read my lips, 90% of all speed problems with games on current hardware is the geometry setup bogging down the processor. Unless you play at above mentioned resolutions, or happen to have dual athlon 700s and are playing at 100 fps already (and if I am right in assuming that this does not have a Geometry chip like the GeForce) this card will be exactly 0% faster for you.
In my opinion Nvidia have taken a much wiser approach to the whole 3d acceleration concentrating on the weekest pointinstead of just pouring in endless amount of pixel fillrate that the processor can't render anyways unless you are stairing at a blank wall.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Actually, it's war that is silly. Laws are quite serious...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Or use programs to toggle the caps lock key in morse for output (yeah, I may have gotten that from some book).
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I can't disagree with you about the usenet. Even though it has been ages since I last posted there, it does hold a special place in my heart for all those hours spent on it in during the early part of this decade. Having the newsreader download a couple of thousand posts from subscribed groups on my 9,600 baud modem to then go offline and spend several hours reading and writing replies was a daily ritual for a long time for me.
BUT, don't let love blind you. Sometimes even the best things don't work, and, I believe, the Internet just go to big for the Usenet. There is too much shit around today for one system to ever play the role it did.
Yes, the usenet is a great thing in theory, and was indeed great before the spammers and the flamers and assholes and the aolers. But think about what you are saying when you advocate letting authoritarian law, backed by violence, come in and take over its freedom. Is that a price that is really worth paying? Would a Usenet run by gag-orders and threats of lawsuits, with lawyers and police reading every discussion be anymore like the Usenet you love than the alternatives that are around today?
As for slashdot, I agree that this is completely different. Slashdot is a good place to read some intelligent comments on a the daily web stories, and maybe get your own opinion on them heard. Its very different from Usenet, but on the other hand, it does work. Without Police intervention and gag-orders.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
It is always wrong to fall back on violence (and the law is based on violence) because technology fails. If you think the usenet does not offer an enviroment for discussion with enough protection against assholes, go elsewhere. The net is full of mailinglitss, www-boards and alike. Slashdot proves that building a moderation system that works well enough for most of us IS possible.
I left the Usenet for this reason, a while later I found slashdot. Now I'm happy.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
In my mind RSA is not a company that stands for open solutions. They have horded patents for the last 17 years that allowed them to monopolize the whole concept of assymetric crypto, and even attempted to keep some of their symmetric algorithms as trade secrets.
You could claim that it is more their fault than anything else that crypto didn't become reality for the common man until the last couple of years (though, before I get flamed, they also did make many great discoverees).
I'm not sure I'm happy to see Redhat in bed with them..
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I do see that, and I considered that very fact when I wrote it. But it just so happens that this statement is true, absolute or not.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
1979: This will never amount to anything.
1989: Ok, this can be used to make developement tools, but you'll never make a whole OS.
1999: Ok, you could make a whole OS, but you'll never innovate on it.
Wanna bet?
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Why exactly do you need to sue the pants off them? Is it to get revench (the economic equivalent of a pointless punch in the face) or because you have just won on the American wheel of litigation and want the chance cash your reward?
If a company guarantees that something works and it doesn't, then they have broken there promise and should possibly be sued (such legislation being there so people have to stand up for their promises). What does that have to do with whether the software was developed as open or closed source? The guy who forgot the second = was not doing it because negligence, he made a mistake. It is whoever promised you that the system would work that was negligent, and people can promise that for regardless of how it was developed (closed or open source, they better have tested it well).
Personally (but, of course I'm not American) I would prefer if there was no suing going on at all, as long as less people are dying. This is what the thousand eyes reference was about if you missed that.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I think that the need for such as disclaimer is more a result of mentality of the masses then the so called "zealots". In my experience Linux has relatively few really annoying devotees: every time I've seen someone post the flames they recieved after critizing Linux/Open Source, they have been much more mild and intelligent than what I have seen in a million previous debates on the Internet (down to the most trivial matters).
The reason that one needs to buffer an essay with this sort of thing is not that people expect the rest of the essay will be a long flame since it deals with Linux, but because they are so smugg and stuck in there conventional way of doing things that they simply need to hear, "Your way is good too" in order to open their minds to Open Source. Just saying "Open source is always superior to closed" is enough to labled a zealot today, which is ridiculous.
Now, we may need to be pragmatic about how we present our message to people. It IS easier to get your way if you suck up rather than piss off (see ESR vs RMS), but don't blaim the need for sucking up on the people who speak their true opinions.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I thought I would reply just to confirm that I read this sinse it was the only truely interesting responce.
I don't believe in absolute good an evil, what people hold to be good and evil is up to them. But most of us would consider it evil to glutonize like we do in front of people whoom we watch starve, what hypocracy is it not to argue that we are not evil because we keep them out of sight?
I am not arguing for putting a gun to anybody's head either. I believe in freedom over everything. I didn't write anything about forcing anybody, and I would never argue for it either.
Your statement that my philosophy attacks the reasons for morals in the first place, you are completely right. That is exactly what I'm doing. I'm sick and tired of people putting themselves on a moral highground, or believing that they are without guilt because send $10 to the Red Cross every month. There is no moral reason not to murder, because though we are not seeing it, we commit murder every single second. As such the laws by which we build our society are pragmatic and pragmatic only, we should never claim that they represent any form of moral code.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I don't think this is a hollow victory at all, even if the companies go ahead and screw us over with or without the IETF (Did you ever think better of them? The state and the industry have been each others whores for the better part of this century.)
However, this battle was never about whether they are tapping Internet nodes or not. The Internet is already tappable. The FBI can do it, a skilled hacker can do it, and the NSA is most probably already doing it. If you want your communications to be secure: encrypt them. If you don't, there is no reason to think that people aren't, or to argue that they shouldn't be, listening.
What this was about was the integrity of the IETF, and by extension the Internet community. I think that if the IETF had gone ahead with this, many of the ideals that have driven the Internet until today would have been run over once and for all. A yes to collaboration would have been a confirmation that the Net and Web had become nothing more than a PR playground for Disney and Microsoft. But by rejecting this, the IETF has showed that there is more to it than that: that there is still a thread of revolution in the very nature of connectivity, even if you have to dig through a lot of dancing baloney to find it.
That is not a hollow victory...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
So what you are saying is that you are not evil for watching people starve while you live in luxury, because you made the great sacrifice of not getting to fuck some hot college girls?
I feel so sorry for you. I never said that sending all your money was the best thing do to (actually, I said that it wasn't) but that doesn't change the fact that neither of us is doing all we can to save these people. Every second and every cent that we spend indulging ourselves (be it on fucking hot college babes or otherwise) is murder. Plain and simple.
I don't judge you for it, after all I'm every bit as bad: but don't tell me we are not evil.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
There was a tiny mistake in dialect translation during the production of this story, they aren't working on any high-level theoretical physics down in Louisiana, they are working on something much more down to earth:
Backhoes.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.