If you're going to post a pointlessly abusive comment, please, from now on, use a more appropriate version of "you're." While "you're" is technically correct, it is far easier to dismiss your response as trash if you use "your":
"Your an idiot."
"Your a fag."
I don't appreciate you mucking up an otherwise shit post with proper grammar. In the future, try not to be a sociopath and make your post suck completely and consistently.
"The point is that GPL/GNU members are fanatics when it comes to defending their "cause""
No less so than the opponents of the GPL, if tech forums such as this are any indication.
"Heck, they usually can't even stand to have someone say "oh, wait a moment, this GPL license thing isn't really about free software after all, it's about forming and maintaining a socialistic collective to use legal force to keep software and all it touches within the collective." Nope, they just hate the truth, which is one sign that they are in a cult."
This is your own prejudice. It's a fair point of view, but there have always been differing definitions of freedom. Their point of view is it's not freedom unless you restrict people from restricting the freedoms of others. You can agree or disagree with that definition (and it's obvious where you stand) but your characterization says nothing more to me than you have a contrary opinion. You don't actually make a cogent argument against their point of view as much as employ charged language ("socialist collective?" Do you really believe that this has *anything* to do with any understanding of the system of government known as socialism? I don't see any social safety net, regulation of industry, or wage control issues in the GPL. What I see is a voluntary software license, nothing more. There's a big difference, to me, between being forced to live under a system of government or administration, and choosing to join a sort of collective or commune of one's own free will. If we accept your characterizations, the GPL is certainly more the latter than the former.)
"The BSD license was in existence LONG BEFORE RMS showed up on the world stage."
According to Wikipedia, the BSD license as we know it (as a "free" software license) dates to 1990. According to Wikipedia, the GPL was written in 1989.
"Version 1 of the GNU GPL, released in January 1989, prevented what were then the two main ways that software distributors restricted the freedoms that define free software."
1990 (Right sidebar, with link to an article, which links to another one discussing this in part)
"True freedom is based upon the notion that you don't need a system of control!"
This seems to be true in some kind of anarcho-capitalist sense but in no other that I am aware of. On the most basic level, any organization I've encountered has rules or a charter or constitution which at very least restrain authority, or the state. You can't, for example, enslave someone, or take their stuff without asking. The GPL seems to want to restrain people who adopt GPL software from using the labor of others and then keeping the resultant product to itself. I agree that what you say is one definition of freedom, but it is certainly not the only one. Each side of this argument jumps up and down and argues semantically that only their definition of freedom is correct (this is equally true in political science to some degree).
What I find most unconvincing about the anti-GPL arguments is that we are discussing a voluntary license. Someone who creates software chooses the license they like (a freedom which, I take it, you agree with - you don't, for example, support restricting the rights of software authors in terms of the licenses they choose, do you? That would seem to be contradictory.)
Once that has been chosen, people are free to use or not use the software under those terms. I don't really have a lot of sympathy for an individual, entity, or organization that wants to use someone else's work, but not abide by the terms of use.
So long as the use of software and the choice of licenses for software is voluntary, I find the anti-GPL argument unconvincing. I make no counter-argument to the BSD license; to me, that is ju
I don't really care as I'm not a programmer but, easily, 2 out of every 3 messages I read here or on any other tech site are people complaining (or ranting) about RMS, not defending him. He seems to have far more vocal detractors than he does vocal supporters.
Like the people who can't go 5 minutes without frothing about the bread and circuses sideshow that is the Scientology "controversy," people who have strong objections to Richard Stallman are for more numerous than those who comprise his so-called "cult-like" following and post messages about how they want to hug him and kiss him and be his girlfriend (so to speak).
Second point:
I don't think any of the opinions I've read in this thread are trolls. I've encountered very few trolls either way about Richard Stallman. Some people honestly like him and the GPL, and some do not.
Unless I am horribly mistaken, these two terms are misused regularly now:
A "troll" is a message posted with the explicit and sole purpose of causing trouble, generally by causing a flood of responses and otherwise derailing a sober thread.
"FUD" is a *marketing tactic* whereby you sell more of the product you are representing by manufacturing "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about your competitor's product. It has exactly zero to do with holding a negative opinion of something out of experience or ignorance, especially by people who are not pushing a product for financial gain.
Neither of these has anything to do with having an honestly held negative opinion about something. The minute people accuse other posters on tech forums of spreading "FUD" or "trolling" because they have a strong dislike on something, I just skip over the rest of what the message says.
I really think these kinds of threads could be far more valuable if people just learned to live with the fact that people have differing opinions and learned to respect that and learn from it, or at least tolerate it. The anti-Stallman screed that started this thread or subthread or whatever is one I disagree with, but one which is certainly reasonable.
Third point:
As to Stallman, I guess you could count myself on the pro-Stallman side, if only because people who write code have a choice about what license to use. They also have a choice to use or not use, contribute to or not contribute to, GPL software. I think the free software landscape would look a lot different, and be a lot less vibrant, without Stallman/GNU's involvement. I guess I feel about, say, BSD style licenses vs GNU ones like I do the Left and Right in any political system. It is the tension between the two sides, the opposing forces, that create stability and a working system. I'm not sure I'd like to see either dominate. So, too, with software licenses.
Oh horseshit - there is no greater disservice than people in the news pretending they don't have an opinion. What *that* leads to is crap like Fox News appropriating the laughable "fair and balanced" tagline and playing the "objective" news in a supposed sea of liberal bias.
I want to know the biases of media types up front - left, right, or corporate (and no, I do not necessarily equate corporate suckups with conservatives). I do not think that having an opinion and stating it has any bearing on news reporting except to suggest that true neutrality is damn near impossible.
In order to be objective (or as close to it as is possible), reporters and producers need to understand their own biases - more importantly, they need to know the kind of biases which emotionally affect or overwhelm them. In my experience, everyone has an issue or two that drives them completely batshit. Coming to terms with this, and being open about it, is the only hope we have - it is the only way we can have "faith" in (don't like the word) the professionalism of the journalist in question. What makes a quality journalist, in part, is what makes a quality judge - understanding that he is human and fallible, and working on ways to keep that out of his work.
Journalists are not holy men; they are fallible like anyone else. To the extent that the best among them keep biases they are cognizant of out of news stories, that serves the higher purpose of a quality press. But for us, the viewers, having access to blogs like this allow us to decide for ourselves not only whether the journalist is professional enough to keep his or her opinions out of her reporting, but whether there may be a subconscious at work that we should be wary of.
Lastly, CNN is tabloid news reporting. Any credibility it once had has steadily evaporated. Like its competitors, it leads with the stuff he mentions - Anna Nicole Smith, Britney's problems, and so forth. CNN is far more impressed with itself than is any member of the public *I've spoken to* who has actually been paying attention.
Sucking neocon cock, pandering to the dumbest among us - these are all biases I hold in equal contempt. I still think there is a place for professional journalism, and I think it may well rise again. I shudder to think of blogs replacing this (few bloggers, if any, have the time or money to do the kind of traveling, research, and so on, that is important enough to cover a story completely - the medium (the internet) doesn't, obviously, bother me).
These are the dark ages of journalism, indeed. Let's hope for a renaissance or enlightenment on the horizon. And most of all, I hope no one is stupid enough to be buy the sanctimoniousness of the corporate-run news oligarchy when they suggest (or allow the insinuation to go unchallenged) that this has something to do with a commitment to objectivity and unbiased news. What they don't like, is not having a leash on everyone who works for them, and that leash is necessary to ensure that the stockholders can keep controlling the flow of information.
Sorry for the long post, but the guy I am responding to is so profoundly *wrong*, I couldn't help myself.
And don't play like you can speak for the "public," either, you anonymous cockknocker.
You know what, as much as I want Comcast to stop this RST packet shit, this argument, while I guess technically having some merit, isn't very convincing:
(1) Yeah, I agree, they shouldn't advertise unlimited if it isn't. Their equivocation on what "unlimited" means is sleazy, but...
(2) If you feel rooked, you *can* cancel service. What I don't like is I have no alternative to Comcast, but that's a completely separate issue.
(3) I doubt there's any Comcast reader or torrent junkie who doesn't know what Comcast is doing, so I'm a lot less sympathetic to this argument today. Whether they're dishonestly advertising unlimited or not, we know what they're doing, so we all know to seek out alternatives or not sign up.
We're arguing over fine-print. Now unless Comcast works differently in other locations than my own (I am a Comcast subscriber), there are no contracts anyone's locked into. You can cancel, and maybe go with DSL or something else if it is available.
My point is that I don't know how useful this argument is - that they advertise unlimited and goddamit, I'm going to max out my bandwidth 24/7 because of it. All you invite them to do is adjust their advertising verbiage a bit, and continue doing the same shit, which isn't going to help anyone.
We should be looking at why there's not more competition, why there is not more capacity, why the US is falling behind, broadband wise, and what can be done about this situation. As much as the self-righteous guardians of intellectual property rant about how THEY can't use their internet because of Warez kiddies (A situation I've never encountered, nor have I met anyone IRL who this has happened to), it will be interesting to see what they say as television and phone companies start pumping more and more data across the internet, and the same conditions occur because some octogenarian next door watching reruns of The Golden Girls, or some telecommuter is running massive system backups across his pipe.
Comcast has been a poor steward of them tubes, and what I'd really like to see is competition - something needs to light a fire under their ass to invest in their infrastructure - as others have pointed out, there's dark fiber all over the place, and the only thing that, in the long run, is going to make a damn bit of difference, is to hit their stockholders in the wallet. We need to figure out how to create conditions where this is possible. It is not, now, the way cable companies work, at least where I live.
But complaining about "false advertising" is just childish, even if it's true. We all *know* they don't really mean unlimited now, and the kind of people who don't know and sign up for Comcast are probably not people who give a crap about bittorrent. Let's move on; this argument is a tarpit.
I don't even object to paying for bandwidth allotments. I don't even mind throttling as long as they're up front with it. Tier the pricing structure in a reasonable way, and throttle bandwidth.
My objection is the way these RST packets completely disrupt service. I understand the point about people torrenting shit 24/7. There simply has got to be a better, less invasive way of handling this, whether that means jacking up prices for certain kinds of users to fund more capacity, or else using benign throttling.
The 80s was rotten, and that was the decade I went to high school and was the prime demographic for music.
Seriously, I thought the world was going to end in the 1980s. Some people divide time up by the birth of Christ or roughly thereabouts - AD and BC. Some really dramatic people like to do that with 9-11. Before it, and after it.
Me, I divide time up by the moment women started wearing fucking shoulder pads in the 80s, with everything after being the end times.
As the above poster makes clear, everyone says music was better X years ago because they age out of the target demographic for popular music. Pop music - that is, top 40 music aimed at the dumbest among us - has always sucked. Once in awhile something nice gets through but for the most part, what I'm looking for is the end of the age of the pop star. Never liked it, never wanted it. Don't want rock stars either. I want music that moves me, that really fucking matters, when it's 2 AM and I'm driving alone and there's no video in my face, no merchandise to by, and no one around waiting to be impressed or judge me by the music I listen to. You know what was a good 80s album? Master of Puppets. And I'm not even a metalhead. But that's an example of an album that grips you by the nuts on, say, the New Jersey Turnpike at 2 AM. But that album seems, somehow, outside of the flow of time, if you compare it to the trends in marketable heavy metal of the time. It is also precisely what most albums of the 80s were *not* like. I always hated Yes (god I hate Yes) but they are a perfect example, an archetype almost, of a band sinking into the cultural cesspool of that decade. Compare their music then, from, say, the early 1970s. A lot of bands joined the dark side.
Bands in the 80s (that were not underground) that *were* good were bands bucked trends. REM is about as commonplace on the radio now as it gets but at the time when they crossed over, they brought a whole different sound an aesthetic with them which stood in direct contradiction to the other kind of slop being played on top 40 radio. The 80s were a decade to be reacted against, artistically. When bands were celebrating the era or trying to make the most of it, they were awful. This is, of course, all subjective, and undoubtedly some 80s fanboy is just wishing he had mod points to mod me down but seriously, this is a sensitive spot with me. I have about had it with 80s revisionists. From an artistic standpoint, for the most part, it was a shallow, image-obsessed, hairsprayed decade, and fuck its corpse to hell. I hated it then, and I hated it now. I survived, then, mostly on classic rock radio, and that it is its own special purgatory. Then I looked under the surface and saw a whole underground music scene reacting to the excesses of the decade and only then did I get my sanity back.
I am getting tired of people waxing nostalgic for the 1980s. Then as now, there was a lot of good music being made, but it wasn't on top 40 radio. The 80s was a special decade because if you take bands with a lot of longevity - bands that were around before and after the 1980s, most of them made their worst, most forgettable records during that decade. When judging a band's catalog, you almost have to give a universal pass to anything made in those wretched times, because so many people did so much violence against their own dignity, that most bands would be sunk by it.
You know what my prom song was? HEAVEN, by WARRANT.
No, you're confused. We're not crying. It's actually that we're euphoric from doing long, long lines of the ample smugness which results from Windows living up to the absurd caricature we have been criticized for representing it as.
Don't get mad. Most of us will pay for this in lost in the time we spend supporting (enabling?) our coworkers, friends, and relatives who use it and go through these problems. In the end, the joke's on us, really, because however any of us feels about it, it's a fact of life, and we're stuck with it, even if we, ourselves, do not run it at home.
In the end, we will all die from autoerotic consumerfixiation, surrounded by Comcast-supplied cablemodems, Microsoft-supplied operating systems, patents on things like "looking at a computer with the intent of using it" hanging out of our rears, covered in globs of our own sticky checking account statements. Frozen, forever, with smiles on our face and vacant eyes, in the carbonite-like freeze caused by piles of huge plastic objects we've acquired for no reason at all, which have blocked out the sun, and, in so doing, extincted our species.
REO Speedwagon will be playing on repeat on some Clear Channel "Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Today!" station on repeat through eternity, a ghostly reminder of our own chosen mediocrity. A passing alien freighter will land (if it can find room amid the vast mountain ranges of used up Wiis, iPhones, and iPods), and attempt to discover how all this happened. They will jack in to the dead, abandoned internet, itself still barely usable 500 years hence, as Windows zombies continue to send out billions of e-mails a day for all of eternity. For a moment they will feel as if they have discovered the holy grail - finally, a planet that has mastered penis enlargement! - only to fall into disappointment and despair as the truth becomes evident.
The last thing the planet will hear is the screams of aliens as their life support and navigation systems die as a result of a torrent of Comcast-supplied RST packets; their own superior, rational civilization's computer scientists never having prepared for or conceived of such a thing.
Earth will be a Death Planet. The souls of the dead will prowl the ruins like wraiths. There will be no light to walk toward.
I would have modded your comment up but I decided to respond instead (you can't do both). Your comments are fair, and I think they represent the typical issues that Windows users face with the Linux desktop.
One of the disconnects, of course, is that the people who are in a position to develop aren't always thinking (or capable of thinking) like a person in your situation. This is a consequence of the way Linux is developed, I suppose.
I was a Windows user since 95 beta, and then moved to Linux in 2001. My attitude, initially, was to play around with Linux on a separate computer, but continue to use Windows as my main desktop. When I discovered that in 2001, with a little work, Linux could replace my GUI desktop entirely, I bit the bullet and migrated.
There was definitely a bit of a learning curve (especially since I decided to run Gentoo Linux early on).
The conundrum for me, is whether or not a desktop can be made to address the "just want it to work now, and work pretty much like Windows" preference some users have, and the "want it to be different from Windows, and I'll take the time to learn to work differently" preference others have. I'm not sure that that gap can ever be bridged, though it seems like that's the sweet spot we're going to need to get to if converting massive amounts of Windows users to Linux users is a goal (and Slashdot comments aside, I'm not sure that this is as much of a motivation among developers as some users think it is).
That said, I agree with you that documentation in Linux is not always the best. The many opportunities for online support (every Linux user should know about the Freenode IRC network - if you don't, google it and check it out) make up for it. I am a great fan of linuxquestions.org and the Gentoo forums, for example. But presumably, it would be better to simply have great documentation.
One of my issues with man pages is that many of them lack *examples*, which drives me nuts, especially when the rest of the man page is written in an unclear fashion. No doubt there can be improvements made here. The other problem I run into is a lot of documentation assumes that you use the application in question frequently and intensely - often the documentation insists on giving you detail after detail, when you only want to know how to use it in a very limited fashion. God bless all the documentation writers who have a "quick start for the impatient" section at the beginning.
Documentation could be improved. It would be helpful if developers would hang out a shingle if they were open to help with this ("This is my application and I wrote the docs for it, but docs are not my forte, and if someone would like to contribute to the documentation or re-write it, I would have no objection."), and also if they would offer explicitly to help out volunteer documentation writers. Maybe the first thing we need to do is identify *specifically* which documentation/man pages suck, and see if we can provide some alternatives. Otherwise we're just speaking generally. Some man pages/documentation are quite easy to navigate (I have never had any issue, for example, with Apache's or PHP's documentation).
Lastly, and this is maybe a little pie-in-the-sky, I would really like some recognition of a "standard Linux desktop solution" - a specific migration path for Windows users to Linux. I've read many complaints about too much choice in terms of distributions, WM/WEs, etc. This choice is a definite advantage to those who know what they want and know what they don't want. 95% of the time, though, we're talking about experienced Linux users. I don't know that newcomers know what they want until they've had time to get familiar with the environment.
I don't use it, but I would nominate Ubuntu as this. It's not perfect, but it seems to have a good track record for first time Linux desktop users. It would be nice for:
(a) those who are Linux evangelists and advocates to kind of agree on this as the "first step" for those mi
And my theory is they're making shit up to appease that wing of their constituencies and that they aren't creationist or intelligent design fans at all.
Can you imagine how refreshing it would be if a candidate introduced himself at the first debate by saying:
"My name is Quag7, and I believe that the best explanations currently available for our origin are Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and the Big Bang. I do not believe in ghosts, UFOs, stigmata, or bleeding statues. I believe in literacy, science, and education, and reason. I believe that there are better and more compelling reasons to lead a virtuous life than the threat of hellfire. I believe in honesty, morality, integrity, and honor, because they serve the self as they in turn serve the public good.
I believe in the open and free exchange of information, oppose censorship, and support the right of each and every human being on this planet to think, worship, and copulate as they like. I believe that the golden rule transcends all civilizations. I believe in the value and power of the individual.
I believe that rights transcend national borders and that if they are valid and apply at all to human beings, that they apply to all human beings equally.
I believe that the real saints of our world are the freethinkers, dissidents, and whistleblowers.
I am inspired by the Renaissance. I am a child of The Enlightenment. I believe that our species should be most concerned with the pursuit of beauty, discovery, exploration, and adventure.
I believe that all human beings are fallible, and that it is necessary to question all of our most deeply held assumptions, and that the greatest example of courage a human being can display is to admit that they are wrong.
I believe that war is truly a last resort, and, when waged, the only thing we should feel about it is regret that it was necessary at all.
I believe in pizza Fridays."
Wouldn't that be refreshing? Especially the pizza Fridays bit?
It seems like an exception can or should be made for this even if it is not how the Debian people define a "security bug." Having guidelines and rules are fine and necessary for maintaining order, but I have to wonder if they need to be followed in such a slavish way, as if they're part of some kind of religious canon.
This doesn't affect me at all, but it seems like something called "stable" in any sense of the word ought to be able to tell time properly out of the box. That the Debian guidelines or rules or whatever don't allow for the direct incorporation of this bug into the stable repository seems secondary to the fact that it ought to be. That this patch is available in volatile is kind of beside the point. Someone downloading and installing this anew in that NZ timezone is going to have problems.
I suppose someone could make some kind of case about regression testing and so on, but I have a hard time believing a simple time zone update will bring Debian's reputation for curmudgeonly stability crashing down.
Ehhh, Arizona would be doing it right if it didn't just make things annoyingly complicated because everyone else in the continent *is* on DST (even parts of Arizona like the vast Navajo reservation up north, possibly because it extends into other states, but I'm not really sure the reason). I live in the Arizona non-DST timezone, and this complicates my schedule because most of the systems and teams I work on/with are in the rest of the country. I'm all for abolishing DST, but as long as people insist on it, we should have it universally.
I don't really buy the "extra hour of sunshine" thing. While increasingly I do find Tucson's punishing, relentless, satanic rape of sunshine a little tiresome now (I've been here 8 and a half years - my discontent grows each year), this is more than offset by the irritation of people never knowing what time it is where I live, calling me at odd times, and the need to switch "time zone math" twice a year because of changes elsewhere.
The other problem is that people outside of the tech community (who have to deal with time on computers) are completely clueless what it comes to time zone nomenclature. No matter what time of year it is, meetings are always scheduled as "EST" (most of my team being on the east coast). Since this comes through on my calendar software, I can never tell whether *they* set it wrong (when we're in daylight time in the east coast) in the computer, or the computer is reporting it wrong, or what. ("ET" is fine - at least then I can make my own assumptions).
Anyway, it's been a headache for me and I wish Arizona would get over its stubbornness in this regard. It is maybe technically the better way to do things, but for me, at least, it has been inconvenient.
This is my feeling in general; I am willing to allow for the fact that concepts exist in cultures outside of my own and manifest themselves in linguistic terms which are perhaps more nuanced or precise than my own. But to me, the solution is to import words or linguistic structures to the degree that it is possible from these cultures, and import them into English or whatever universal language we're evolving to (Chinese maybe? Spanish?)
The advantages of universal language are significant, and from my own limited perspective, would seem to outweigh by an order of magnitude what is lost in terms of "ways of thinking" or "ways of conceiving reality." If concept formation is hindered or distorted by a dominant language, let's have that discussion, and let's modify or extend the dominant language accordingly. Language is fairly elastic thing; as the need arises to express a concept, that need is fulfilled, either by a new word or by importing a word from elsewhere (the word schadenfreude, for example, is one of my favorite imports - it is a phenomenon every culture understands, but for which - for reasons I can't really fathom - there wasn't a word for in English). One place English needs work is in terms of gender-neutrality to take into account social changes of the past 100 years. Every document I write for work has to choose "the customer should do X. If HE or SHE" or else, I have to choose one, and then put this ridiculous disclaimer about how we mean nothing sexually discriminatory. Choosing "he" by default - and I am far from into obsessing about political correctness - seems logically, somehow, wrong. So let's extend the language accordingly.
Then again, maybe my attitude is ethnocentric insofar as this attitude serves my personal needs. But I have to ask why or how languages die if they are as essential to a culture as anthropologists and linguists insist they are. French is not going anywhere, for example, anytime soon. It is a fiercely defended and protected language. It would be, it seems, relatively doable for the French speaking areas of Canada to switch to English (advanced educational system, substantial international and intercultural relationships, proximity to vast English speaking regions, etc), but many of those who speak French have openly refused to do so (except as a matter of bilinguality). I don't see what more it takes, if language is so essential and important to a people, to do the same. I encourage people to do that if their language is important to them.
The article makes this fairly remarkable claim:
"Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it's only in people's heads," he said.
"We are seeing in front of our eyes the erosion of the human knowledge base."
Well then, let's document it. We have computers, databases, and networks for a reason. Clearly we can put together lexicons for these languages and have them on hand. Where are all of these people who have this information in their head going? If this knowledge is not written down (where it can be translated), obviously it is passed from generation to generation verbally. At some point, a new generation speaks a new language, and records the information in the new language. What's the problem with this? The whole whisper-down-the-alley problem; errors in translation? Surely that happens even within a consistent language passed from generation to generation.
I'm obviously missing something here. I admit that this is not a subject I know much about, so please enlighten me, but I don't see how the extinction of languages is a problem unless no one has taken the time to study and document them fully so that texts written in those languages can be read for the next several thousand years. If indeed *that* is the problem, then I'm certainly on board that this is extremely unfortunate.
This is going to come off, possibly, as a little elitist, but I am a bit worried about this and I think I have good reason to be. I don't watch Dancing with the Stars, or Deal or No Deal or Survivor, or anything like those shows. My concern is that the channels I do watch - channels like Discovery, FLIX, Sundance, IFC, Encore, etc - the kinds of movies that don't show *the latest blockbusters* - almost none of which I want to see - will not make enough revenue to survive. I'm not some kind of artiste who only likes stuff no one else does, but I also cannot handle insipid, and if there is one thing the United States has proven in recent years, it's that it loves to get its Stupid on. Big time.
Maybe this is fair and I can understand people making a free market argument here. But as much as I enjoy the prospect of not giving my money to the bottom-of-the-barrel networks like, say, E!, I am afraid that in the long run this may reduce the amount of quality channels available to me.
I'm not at a point yet where I have the energy to hunt down everything I want to see on the internet and put myself at risk by downloading stuff.
All I'm saying is, be careful what you wish for - you might not like what you get. As much as I can enthusiastically envision my cable box de-crufted of idiocy like the Golf channel (you have got to be kidding me, and this is not a slag on the sport itself), I also see a lot of the stuff I like dying away because the amount of subscribers cannot sustain it.
A better model for TV watching might be direct-to-DVD series that you could rent or buy from a Netflix-like operation. Even on the channels I like, I actually watch a very small percentage of the programming they make available. I don't object to the idea of foregoing cable altogether and instead getting DVDs of shows like Mythbusters or Survivorman, as well as the novel independent and foreign films I have come to rely on for sanity. Ditto bigger shows like Lost (maybe the most high-profile show I've ever liked) and The 4400. This might also provide the opportunity to be able to watch a show with all sorts of random crap popping up on the screen, which drives me batshit insane.
Also, completely offtopic, I'd love to see some kind of NIGHT FLIGHT themed channel which shows random weird crap all day. Wouldn't you? I know I'm not the only one who is sometimes too tired and bored to do anything but watch TV. Wouldn't it be great to have a channel that showed random animation clips, obscure music videos, 50s school scare films, acid-drenched biker films from the 60s, and so on, specifically for people who, like me, can easily flip through 200 channels and find not one thing I want to watch? And it should be a channel with an absurdly lax standards and practices department. Lots of titties, guns, Satanism, and kaleidoscopic psychedelic interludes. John Lydon's mug all up in the camera at least once a day. Boyd Rice racing Ivan Stang on a unicycle. Documentaries on anarchists, neofascists, Moonies, Scientologists, and Extropian VR gurus with no hair. Retro commercials, at random. I am talking Preparation H commercials from 1967. Ads proclaiming the lung-cleansing, expectorant effects of Lucky Strikes. Commodore and Atari 8 bit computer commercials from the 1980s. Drug hysteria films from the 1930s that aren't Reefer Madness. And also Reefer Madness. Nick Zedd films shown without comment or context between Terrytoons shorts. Random outbursts of Sonic Youth. Maybe show the Death Valley '69 video every night at 3:00 AM as some kind of tradition. Dog Police. Racist cartoons. Anti-Nazi WW2 propaganda cartoons. Random weird crap from Japanese television. Movies like Fantastic Planet. Documentaries on Raymond Scott, Laurie Spiegel, Esquivel, Can, Magma...insert your artist or band here. Propaganda films. Obscure blaxploitation flicks. Satanic panic documentaries and films which exploited the phenomenon (there are few things more satisfying to me at 3 AM than a movie like The Devil's Rain).
When you say Cambridge and don't put anything after it, such as, "I went to Cambridge," Americans know goddam well where you mean.
I'd wager that there are less Americans who know that MIT is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, than have heard of / know that "Cambridge" is one of the most highly regarded world institutions of higher learning, and is in England.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to post a pointlessly abusive comment, please, from now on, use a more appropriate version of "you're." While "you're" is technically correct, it is far easier to dismiss your response as trash if you use "your":
"Your an idiot."
"Your a fag."
I don't appreciate you mucking up an otherwise shit post with proper grammar. In the future, try not to be a sociopath and make your post suck completely and consistently.
Thanks!
How dare you one up us here in the United States on inflicting government on your own citizenry?
I've about had it with these uppity countries like Britain with their spycams outdoing us on the George Orwell front.
Well I'm telling.
I'm calling Ed Meese.
"The point is that GPL/GNU members are fanatics when it comes to defending their "cause""
No less so than the opponents of the GPL, if tech forums such as this are any indication.
"Heck, they usually can't even stand to have someone say "oh, wait a moment, this GPL license thing isn't really about free software after all, it's about forming and maintaining a socialistic collective to use legal force to keep software and all it touches within the collective." Nope, they just hate the truth, which is one sign that they are in a cult."
This is your own prejudice. It's a fair point of view, but there have always been differing definitions of freedom. Their point of view is it's not freedom unless you restrict people from restricting the freedoms of others. You can agree or disagree with that definition (and it's obvious where you stand) but your characterization says nothing more to me than you have a contrary opinion. You don't actually make a cogent argument against their point of view as much as employ charged language ("socialist collective?" Do you really believe that this has *anything* to do with any understanding of the system of government known as socialism? I don't see any social safety net, regulation of industry, or wage control issues in the GPL. What I see is a voluntary software license, nothing more. There's a big difference, to me, between being forced to live under a system of government or administration, and choosing to join a sort of collective or commune of one's own free will. If we accept your characterizations, the GPL is certainly more the latter than the former.)
"The BSD license was in existence LONG BEFORE RMS showed up on the world stage."
According to Wikipedia, the BSD license as we know it (as a "free" software license) dates to 1990. According to Wikipedia, the GPL was written in 1989.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnu_general_public_license
"Version 1 of the GNU GPL, released in January 1989, prevented what were then the two main ways that software distributors restricted the freedoms that define free software."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bsd_license
1990 (Right sidebar, with link to an article, which links to another one discussing this in part)
"True freedom is based upon the notion that you don't need a system of control!"
This seems to be true in some kind of anarcho-capitalist sense but in no other that I am aware of. On the most basic level, any organization I've encountered has rules or a charter or constitution which at very least restrain authority, or the state. You can't, for example, enslave someone, or take their stuff without asking. The GPL seems to want to restrain people who adopt GPL software from using the labor of others and then keeping the resultant product to itself. I agree that what you say is one definition of freedom, but it is certainly not the only one. Each side of this argument jumps up and down and argues semantically that only their definition of freedom is correct (this is equally true in political science to some degree).
What I find most unconvincing about the anti-GPL arguments is that we are discussing a voluntary license. Someone who creates software chooses the license they like (a freedom which, I take it, you agree with - you don't, for example, support restricting the rights of software authors in terms of the licenses they choose, do you? That would seem to be contradictory.)
Once that has been chosen, people are free to use or not use the software under those terms. I don't really have a lot of sympathy for an individual, entity, or organization that wants to use someone else's work, but not abide by the terms of use.
So long as the use of software and the choice of licenses for software is voluntary, I find the anti-GPL argument unconvincing. I make no counter-argument to the BSD license; to me, that is ju
First point:
I don't really care as I'm not a programmer but, easily, 2 out of every 3 messages I read here or on any other tech site are people complaining (or ranting) about RMS, not defending him. He seems to have far more vocal detractors than he does vocal supporters.
Like the people who can't go 5 minutes without frothing about the bread and circuses sideshow that is the Scientology "controversy," people who have strong objections to Richard Stallman are for more numerous than those who comprise his so-called "cult-like" following and post messages about how they want to hug him and kiss him and be his girlfriend (so to speak).
Second point:
I don't think any of the opinions I've read in this thread are trolls. I've encountered very few trolls either way about Richard Stallman. Some people honestly like him and the GPL, and some do not.
Unless I am horribly mistaken, these two terms are misused regularly now:
A "troll" is a message posted with the explicit and sole purpose of causing trouble, generally by causing a flood of responses and otherwise derailing a sober thread.
"FUD" is a *marketing tactic* whereby you sell more of the product you are representing by manufacturing "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about your competitor's product. It has exactly zero to do with holding a negative opinion of something out of experience or ignorance, especially by people who are not pushing a product for financial gain.
Neither of these has anything to do with having an honestly held negative opinion about something. The minute people accuse other posters on tech forums of spreading "FUD" or "trolling" because they have a strong dislike on something, I just skip over the rest of what the message says.
I really think these kinds of threads could be far more valuable if people just learned to live with the fact that people have differing opinions and learned to respect that and learn from it, or at least tolerate it. The anti-Stallman screed that started this thread or subthread or whatever is one I disagree with, but one which is certainly reasonable.
Third point:
As to Stallman, I guess you could count myself on the pro-Stallman side, if only because people who write code have a choice about what license to use. They also have a choice to use or not use, contribute to or not contribute to, GPL software. I think the free software landscape would look a lot different, and be a lot less vibrant, without Stallman/GNU's involvement. I guess I feel about, say, BSD style licenses vs GNU ones like I do the Left and Right in any political system. It is the tension between the two sides, the opposing forces, that create stability and a working system. I'm not sure I'd like to see either dominate. So, too, with software licenses.
SCHULTZ! Show Hogan back to his quarters!
I mean barracks!
Oh horseshit - there is no greater disservice than people in the news pretending they don't have an opinion. What *that* leads to is crap like Fox News appropriating the laughable "fair and balanced" tagline and playing the "objective" news in a supposed sea of liberal bias.
I want to know the biases of media types up front - left, right, or corporate (and no, I do not necessarily equate corporate suckups with conservatives). I do not think that having an opinion and stating it has any bearing on news reporting except to suggest that true neutrality is damn near impossible.
In order to be objective (or as close to it as is possible), reporters and producers need to understand their own biases - more importantly, they need to know the kind of biases which emotionally affect or overwhelm them. In my experience, everyone has an issue or two that drives them completely batshit. Coming to terms with this, and being open about it, is the only hope we have - it is the only way we can have "faith" in (don't like the word) the professionalism of the journalist in question. What makes a quality journalist, in part, is what makes a quality judge - understanding that he is human and fallible, and working on ways to keep that out of his work.
Journalists are not holy men; they are fallible like anyone else. To the extent that the best among them keep biases they are cognizant of out of news stories, that serves the higher purpose of a quality press. But for us, the viewers, having access to blogs like this allow us to decide for ourselves not only whether the journalist is professional enough to keep his or her opinions out of her reporting, but whether there may be a subconscious at work that we should be wary of.
Lastly, CNN is tabloid news reporting. Any credibility it once had has steadily evaporated. Like its competitors, it leads with the stuff he mentions - Anna Nicole Smith, Britney's problems, and so forth. CNN is far more impressed with itself than is any member of the public *I've spoken to* who has actually been paying attention.
Sucking neocon cock, pandering to the dumbest among us - these are all biases I hold in equal contempt. I still think there is a place for professional journalism, and I think it may well rise again. I shudder to think of blogs replacing this (few bloggers, if any, have the time or money to do the kind of traveling, research, and so on, that is important enough to cover a story completely - the medium (the internet) doesn't, obviously, bother me).
These are the dark ages of journalism, indeed. Let's hope for a renaissance or enlightenment on the horizon. And most of all, I hope no one is stupid enough to be buy the sanctimoniousness of the corporate-run news oligarchy when they suggest (or allow the insinuation to go unchallenged) that this has something to do with a commitment to objectivity and unbiased news. What they don't like, is not having a leash on everyone who works for them, and that leash is necessary to ensure that the stockholders can keep controlling the flow of information.
Sorry for the long post, but the guy I am responding to is so profoundly *wrong*, I couldn't help myself.
And don't play like you can speak for the "public," either, you anonymous cockknocker.
You know what, as much as I want Comcast to stop this RST packet shit, this argument, while I guess technically having some merit, isn't very convincing:
(1) Yeah, I agree, they shouldn't advertise unlimited if it isn't. Their equivocation on what "unlimited" means is sleazy, but...
(2) If you feel rooked, you *can* cancel service. What I don't like is I have no alternative to Comcast, but that's a completely separate issue.
(3) I doubt there's any Comcast reader or torrent junkie who doesn't know what Comcast is doing, so I'm a lot less sympathetic to this argument today. Whether they're dishonestly advertising unlimited or not, we know what they're doing, so we all know to seek out alternatives or not sign up.
We're arguing over fine-print. Now unless Comcast works differently in other locations than my own (I am a Comcast subscriber), there are no contracts anyone's locked into. You can cancel, and maybe go with DSL or something else if it is available.
My point is that I don't know how useful this argument is - that they advertise unlimited and goddamit, I'm going to max out my bandwidth 24/7 because of it. All you invite them to do is adjust their advertising verbiage a bit, and continue doing the same shit, which isn't going to help anyone.
We should be looking at why there's not more competition, why there is not more capacity, why the US is falling behind, broadband wise, and what can be done about this situation. As much as the self-righteous guardians of intellectual property rant about how THEY can't use their internet because of Warez kiddies (A situation I've never encountered, nor have I met anyone IRL who this has happened to), it will be interesting to see what they say as television and phone companies start pumping more and more data across the internet, and the same conditions occur because some octogenarian next door watching reruns of The Golden Girls, or some telecommuter is running massive system backups across his pipe.
Comcast has been a poor steward of them tubes, and what I'd really like to see is competition - something needs to light a fire under their ass to invest in their infrastructure - as others have pointed out, there's dark fiber all over the place, and the only thing that, in the long run, is going to make a damn bit of difference, is to hit their stockholders in the wallet. We need to figure out how to create conditions where this is possible. It is not, now, the way cable companies work, at least where I live.
But complaining about "false advertising" is just childish, even if it's true. We all *know* they don't really mean unlimited now, and the kind of people who don't know and sign up for Comcast are probably not people who give a crap about bittorrent. Let's move on; this argument is a tarpit.
I don't even object to paying for bandwidth allotments. I don't even mind throttling as long as they're up front with it. Tier the pricing structure in a reasonable way, and throttle bandwidth.
My objection is the way these RST packets completely disrupt service. I understand the point about people torrenting shit 24/7. There simply has got to be a better, less invasive way of handling this, whether that means jacking up prices for certain kinds of users to fund more capacity, or else using benign throttling.
The method they're using is overkill.
Isn't that a bit...metrosexual? For him, I mean?
Ha ha, I'm always happy to hear from someone who even REMEMBERS Millennium.
Your attempt to provoke a seizure in me has succeeded.
Well played, sir.
The 80s was rotten, and that was the decade I went to high school and was the prime demographic for music.
Seriously, I thought the world was going to end in the 1980s. Some people divide time up by the birth of Christ or roughly thereabouts - AD and BC. Some really dramatic people like to do that with 9-11. Before it, and after it.
Me, I divide time up by the moment women started wearing fucking shoulder pads in the 80s, with everything after being the end times.
As the above poster makes clear, everyone says music was better X years ago because they age out of the target demographic for popular music. Pop music - that is, top 40 music aimed at the dumbest among us - has always sucked. Once in awhile something nice gets through but for the most part, what I'm looking for is the end of the age of the pop star. Never liked it, never wanted it. Don't want rock stars either. I want music that moves me, that really fucking matters, when it's 2 AM and I'm driving alone and there's no video in my face, no merchandise to by, and no one around waiting to be impressed or judge me by the music I listen to. You know what was a good 80s album? Master of Puppets. And I'm not even a metalhead. But that's an example of an album that grips you by the nuts on, say, the New Jersey Turnpike at 2 AM. But that album seems, somehow, outside of the flow of time, if you compare it to the trends in marketable heavy metal of the time. It is also precisely what most albums of the 80s were *not* like. I always hated Yes (god I hate Yes) but they are a perfect example, an archetype almost, of a band sinking into the cultural cesspool of that decade. Compare their music then, from, say, the early 1970s. A lot of bands joined the dark side.
Bands in the 80s (that were not underground) that *were* good were bands bucked trends. REM is about as commonplace on the radio now as it gets but at the time when they crossed over, they brought a whole different sound an aesthetic with them which stood in direct contradiction to the other kind of slop being played on top 40 radio. The 80s were a decade to be reacted against, artistically. When bands were celebrating the era or trying to make the most of it, they were awful. This is, of course, all subjective, and undoubtedly some 80s fanboy is just wishing he had mod points to mod me down but seriously, this is a sensitive spot with me. I have about had it with 80s revisionists. From an artistic standpoint, for the most part, it was a shallow, image-obsessed, hairsprayed decade, and fuck its corpse to hell. I hated it then, and I hated it now. I survived, then, mostly on classic rock radio, and that it is its own special purgatory. Then I looked under the surface and saw a whole underground music scene reacting to the excesses of the decade and only then did I get my sanity back.
I am getting tired of people waxing nostalgic for the 1980s. Then as now, there was a lot of good music being made, but it wasn't on top 40 radio. The 80s was a special decade because if you take bands with a lot of longevity - bands that were around before and after the 1980s, most of them made their worst, most forgettable records during that decade. When judging a band's catalog, you almost have to give a universal pass to anything made in those wretched times, because so many people did so much violence against their own dignity, that most bands would be sunk by it.
You know what my prom song was? HEAVEN, by WARRANT.
Jesus fucking Christ.
No, you're confused. We're not crying. It's actually that we're euphoric from doing long, long lines of the ample smugness which results from Windows living up to the absurd caricature we have been criticized for representing it as.
Don't get mad. Most of us will pay for this in lost in the time we spend supporting (enabling?) our coworkers, friends, and relatives who use it and go through these problems. In the end, the joke's on us, really, because however any of us feels about it, it's a fact of life, and we're stuck with it, even if we, ourselves, do not run it at home.
In the end, we will all die from autoerotic consumerfixiation, surrounded by Comcast-supplied cablemodems, Microsoft-supplied operating systems, patents on things like "looking at a computer with the intent of using it" hanging out of our rears, covered in globs of our own sticky checking account statements. Frozen, forever, with smiles on our face and vacant eyes, in the carbonite-like freeze caused by piles of huge plastic objects we've acquired for no reason at all, which have blocked out the sun, and, in so doing, extincted our species.
REO Speedwagon will be playing on repeat on some Clear Channel "Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Today!" station on repeat through eternity, a ghostly reminder of our own chosen mediocrity. A passing alien freighter will land (if it can find room amid the vast mountain ranges of used up Wiis, iPhones, and iPods), and attempt to discover how all this happened. They will jack in to the dead, abandoned internet, itself still barely usable 500 years hence, as Windows zombies continue to send out billions of e-mails a day for all of eternity. For a moment they will feel as if they have discovered the holy grail - finally, a planet that has mastered penis enlargement! - only to fall into disappointment and despair as the truth becomes evident.
The last thing the planet will hear is the screams of aliens as their life support and navigation systems die as a result of a torrent of Comcast-supplied RST packets; their own superior, rational civilization's computer scientists never having prepared for or conceived of such a thing.
Earth will be a Death Planet. The souls of the dead will prowl the ruins like wraiths. There will be no light to walk toward.
Nah, I'm fuckin' with you.
I would have modded your comment up but I decided to respond instead (you can't do both). Your comments are fair, and I think they represent the typical issues that Windows users face with the Linux desktop.
One of the disconnects, of course, is that the people who are in a position to develop aren't always thinking (or capable of thinking) like a person in your situation. This is a consequence of the way Linux is developed, I suppose.
I was a Windows user since 95 beta, and then moved to Linux in 2001. My attitude, initially, was to play around with Linux on a separate computer, but continue to use Windows as my main desktop. When I discovered that in 2001, with a little work, Linux could replace my GUI desktop entirely, I bit the bullet and migrated.
There was definitely a bit of a learning curve (especially since I decided to run Gentoo Linux early on).
The conundrum for me, is whether or not a desktop can be made to address the "just want it to work now, and work pretty much like Windows" preference some users have, and the "want it to be different from Windows, and I'll take the time to learn to work differently" preference others have. I'm not sure that that gap can ever be bridged, though it seems like that's the sweet spot we're going to need to get to if converting massive amounts of Windows users to Linux users is a goal (and Slashdot comments aside, I'm not sure that this is as much of a motivation among developers as some users think it is).
That said, I agree with you that documentation in Linux is not always the best. The many opportunities for online support (every Linux user should know about the Freenode IRC network - if you don't, google it and check it out) make up for it. I am a great fan of linuxquestions.org and the Gentoo forums, for example. But presumably, it would be better to simply have great documentation.
One of my issues with man pages is that many of them lack *examples*, which drives me nuts, especially when the rest of the man page is written in an unclear fashion. No doubt there can be improvements made here. The other problem I run into is a lot of documentation assumes that you use the application in question frequently and intensely - often the documentation insists on giving you detail after detail, when you only want to know how to use it in a very limited fashion. God bless all the documentation writers who have a "quick start for the impatient" section at the beginning.
Documentation could be improved. It would be helpful if developers would hang out a shingle if they were open to help with this ("This is my application and I wrote the docs for it, but docs are not my forte, and if someone would like to contribute to the documentation or re-write it, I would have no objection."), and also if they would offer explicitly to help out volunteer documentation writers. Maybe the first thing we need to do is identify *specifically* which documentation/man pages suck, and see if we can provide some alternatives. Otherwise we're just speaking generally. Some man pages/documentation are quite easy to navigate (I have never had any issue, for example, with Apache's or PHP's documentation).
Lastly, and this is maybe a little pie-in-the-sky, I would really like some recognition of a "standard Linux desktop solution" - a specific migration path for Windows users to Linux. I've read many complaints about too much choice in terms of distributions, WM/WEs, etc. This choice is a definite advantage to those who know what they want and know what they don't want. 95% of the time, though, we're talking about experienced Linux users. I don't know that newcomers know what they want until they've had time to get familiar with the environment.
I don't use it, but I would nominate Ubuntu as this. It's not perfect, but it seems to have a good track record for first time Linux desktop users. It would be nice for:
(a) those who are Linux evangelists and advocates to kind of agree on this as the "first step" for those mi
And my theory is they're making shit up to appease that wing of their constituencies and that they aren't creationist or intelligent design fans at all.
Can you imagine how refreshing it would be if a candidate introduced himself at the first debate by saying:
"My name is Quag7, and I believe that the best explanations currently available for our origin are Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and the Big Bang. I do not believe in ghosts, UFOs, stigmata, or bleeding statues. I believe in literacy, science, and education, and reason. I believe that there are better and more compelling reasons to lead a virtuous life than the threat of hellfire. I believe in honesty, morality, integrity, and honor, because they serve the self as they in turn serve the public good.
I believe in the open and free exchange of information, oppose censorship, and support the right of each and every human being on this planet to think, worship, and copulate as they like. I believe that the golden rule transcends all civilizations. I believe in the value and power of the individual.
I believe that rights transcend national borders and that if they are valid and apply at all to human beings, that they apply to all human beings equally.
I believe that the real saints of our world are the freethinkers, dissidents, and whistleblowers.
I am inspired by the Renaissance. I am a child of The Enlightenment. I believe that our species should be most concerned with the pursuit of beauty, discovery, exploration, and adventure.
I believe that all human beings are fallible, and that it is necessary to question all of our most deeply held assumptions, and that the greatest example of courage a human being can display is to admit that they are wrong.
I believe that war is truly a last resort, and, when waged, the only thing we should feel about it is regret that it was necessary at all.
I believe in pizza Fridays."
Wouldn't that be refreshing? Especially the pizza Fridays bit?
It seems like an exception can or should be made for this even if it is not how the Debian people define a "security bug." Having guidelines and rules are fine and necessary for maintaining order, but I have to wonder if they need to be followed in such a slavish way, as if they're part of some kind of religious canon.
This doesn't affect me at all, but it seems like something called "stable" in any sense of the word ought to be able to tell time properly out of the box. That the Debian guidelines or rules or whatever don't allow for the direct incorporation of this bug into the stable repository seems secondary to the fact that it ought to be. That this patch is available in volatile is kind of beside the point. Someone downloading and installing this anew in that NZ timezone is going to have problems.
I suppose someone could make some kind of case about regression testing and so on, but I have a hard time believing a simple time zone update will bring Debian's reputation for curmudgeonly stability crashing down.
Ehhh, Arizona would be doing it right if it didn't just make things annoyingly complicated because everyone else in the continent *is* on DST (even parts of Arizona like the vast Navajo reservation up north, possibly because it extends into other states, but I'm not really sure the reason). I live in the Arizona non-DST timezone, and this complicates my schedule because most of the systems and teams I work on/with are in the rest of the country. I'm all for abolishing DST, but as long as people insist on it, we should have it universally.
I don't really buy the "extra hour of sunshine" thing. While increasingly I do find Tucson's punishing, relentless, satanic rape of sunshine a little tiresome now (I've been here 8 and a half years - my discontent grows each year), this is more than offset by the irritation of people never knowing what time it is where I live, calling me at odd times, and the need to switch "time zone math" twice a year because of changes elsewhere.
The other problem is that people outside of the tech community (who have to deal with time on computers) are completely clueless what it comes to time zone nomenclature. No matter what time of year it is, meetings are always scheduled as "EST" (most of my team being on the east coast). Since this comes through on my calendar software, I can never tell whether *they* set it wrong (when we're in daylight time in the east coast) in the computer, or the computer is reporting it wrong, or what. ("ET" is fine - at least then I can make my own assumptions).
Anyway, it's been a headache for me and I wish Arizona would get over its stubbornness in this regard. It is maybe technically the better way to do things, but for me, at least, it has been inconvenient.
This is my feeling in general; I am willing to allow for the fact that concepts exist in cultures outside of my own and manifest themselves in linguistic terms which are perhaps more nuanced or precise than my own. But to me, the solution is to import words or linguistic structures to the degree that it is possible from these cultures, and import them into English or whatever universal language we're evolving to (Chinese maybe? Spanish?)
The advantages of universal language are significant, and from my own limited perspective, would seem to outweigh by an order of magnitude what is lost in terms of "ways of thinking" or "ways of conceiving reality." If concept formation is hindered or distorted by a dominant language, let's have that discussion, and let's modify or extend the dominant language accordingly. Language is fairly elastic thing; as the need arises to express a concept, that need is fulfilled, either by a new word or by importing a word from elsewhere (the word schadenfreude, for example, is one of my favorite imports - it is a phenomenon every culture understands, but for which - for reasons I can't really fathom - there wasn't a word for in English). One place English needs work is in terms of gender-neutrality to take into account social changes of the past 100 years. Every document I write for work has to choose "the customer should do X. If HE or SHE" or else, I have to choose one, and then put this ridiculous disclaimer about how we mean nothing sexually discriminatory. Choosing "he" by default - and I am far from into obsessing about political correctness - seems logically, somehow, wrong. So let's extend the language accordingly.
Then again, maybe my attitude is ethnocentric insofar as this attitude serves my personal needs. But I have to ask why or how languages die if they are as essential to a culture as anthropologists and linguists insist they are. French is not going anywhere, for example, anytime soon. It is a fiercely defended and protected language. It would be, it seems, relatively doable for the French speaking areas of Canada to switch to English (advanced educational system, substantial international and intercultural relationships, proximity to vast English speaking regions, etc), but many of those who speak French have openly refused to do so (except as a matter of bilinguality). I don't see what more it takes, if language is so essential and important to a people, to do the same. I encourage people to do that if their language is important to them.
The article makes this fairly remarkable claim:
"Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it's only in people's heads," he said.
"We are seeing in front of our eyes the erosion of the human knowledge base."
Well then, let's document it. We have computers, databases, and networks for a reason. Clearly we can put together lexicons for these languages and have them on hand. Where are all of these people who have this information in their head going? If this knowledge is not written down (where it can be translated), obviously it is passed from generation to generation verbally. At some point, a new generation speaks a new language, and records the information in the new language. What's the problem with this? The whole whisper-down-the-alley problem; errors in translation? Surely that happens even within a consistent language passed from generation to generation.
I'm obviously missing something here. I admit that this is not a subject I know much about, so please enlighten me, but I don't see how the extinction of languages is a problem unless no one has taken the time to study and document them fully so that texts written in those languages can be read for the next several thousand years. If indeed *that* is the problem, then I'm certainly on board that this is extremely unfortunate.
Perhaps, in compensation, more graduates of institutions in Cambridge, MA have courage enough to post non-anonymously.
This is going to come off, possibly, as a little elitist, but I am a bit worried about this and I think I have good reason to be. I don't watch Dancing with the Stars, or Deal or No Deal or Survivor, or anything like those shows. My concern is that the channels I do watch - channels like Discovery, FLIX, Sundance, IFC, Encore, etc - the kinds of movies that don't show *the latest blockbusters* - almost none of which I want to see - will not make enough revenue to survive. I'm not some kind of artiste who only likes stuff no one else does, but I also cannot handle insipid, and if there is one thing the United States has proven in recent years, it's that it loves to get its Stupid on. Big time.
Maybe this is fair and I can understand people making a free market argument here. But as much as I enjoy the prospect of not giving my money to the bottom-of-the-barrel networks like, say, E!, I am afraid that in the long run this may reduce the amount of quality channels available to me.
I'm not at a point yet where I have the energy to hunt down everything I want to see on the internet and put myself at risk by downloading stuff.
All I'm saying is, be careful what you wish for - you might not like what you get. As much as I can enthusiastically envision my cable box de-crufted of idiocy like the Golf channel (you have got to be kidding me, and this is not a slag on the sport itself), I also see a lot of the stuff I like dying away because the amount of subscribers cannot sustain it.
A better model for TV watching might be direct-to-DVD series that you could rent or buy from a Netflix-like operation. Even on the channels I like, I actually watch a very small percentage of the programming they make available. I don't object to the idea of foregoing cable altogether and instead getting DVDs of shows like Mythbusters or Survivorman, as well as the novel independent and foreign films I have come to rely on for sanity. Ditto bigger shows like Lost (maybe the most high-profile show I've ever liked) and The 4400. This might also provide the opportunity to be able to watch a show with all sorts of random crap popping up on the screen, which drives me batshit insane.
Also, completely offtopic, I'd love to see some kind of NIGHT FLIGHT themed channel which shows random weird crap all day. Wouldn't you? I know I'm not the only one who is sometimes too tired and bored to do anything but watch TV. Wouldn't it be great to have a channel that showed random animation clips, obscure music videos, 50s school scare films, acid-drenched biker films from the 60s, and so on, specifically for people who, like me, can easily flip through 200 channels and find not one thing I want to watch? And it should be a channel with an absurdly lax standards and practices department. Lots of titties, guns, Satanism, and kaleidoscopic psychedelic interludes. John Lydon's mug all up in the camera at least once a day. Boyd Rice racing Ivan Stang on a unicycle. Documentaries on anarchists, neofascists, Moonies, Scientologists, and Extropian VR gurus with no hair. Retro commercials, at random. I am talking Preparation H commercials from 1967. Ads proclaiming the lung-cleansing, expectorant effects of Lucky Strikes. Commodore and Atari 8 bit computer commercials from the 1980s. Drug hysteria films from the 1930s that aren't Reefer Madness. And also Reefer Madness. Nick Zedd films shown without comment or context between Terrytoons shorts. Random outbursts of Sonic Youth. Maybe show the Death Valley '69 video every night at 3:00 AM as some kind of tradition. Dog Police. Racist cartoons. Anti-Nazi WW2 propaganda cartoons. Random weird crap from Japanese television. Movies like Fantastic Planet. Documentaries on Raymond Scott, Laurie Spiegel, Esquivel, Can, Magma...insert your artist or band here. Propaganda films. Obscure blaxploitation flicks. Satanic panic documentaries and films which exploited the phenomenon (there are few things more satisfying to me at 3 AM than a movie like The Devil's Rain).
God dammit, not one Ron Paul plug in this thread yet. You people are slipping.
When you say Cambridge and don't put anything after it, such as, "I went to Cambridge," Americans know goddam well where you mean.
I'd wager that there are less Americans who know that MIT is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, than have heard of / know that "Cambridge" is one of the most highly regarded world institutions of higher learning, and is in England.
Good God, you might be on to something! What *AM* I doing here anyway?
But then what will you do with the time you would ordinarily spend making posts like this?
Oh, but you do, or you wouldn't have taken the time to post.