I see 'progress' holds higher priority to you than freedom, but for many of us the reverse is true. You seem to just want an operating system gratis without any concern over the value structure that has created this operating system in the first place.
I'm sorry you don't value software freedom (it's your choice). However, implying that F/OSS software has some manifest destiny to take over the world and that any decision must advance that goal is just silly. Why do we need an alternative to Office then? Because it's expensive? What about Windows? It comes with most computers and I hear these days it's pretty stable.
This is probably the greatest argument I've seen against making Windows ports of free software--people get hooked but learn nothing of the value of software freedom. Without those values, users often adopt a very selfish "gimme gimme" attitude.
And once morethe FOSS community illustrates how it kills itself.
Nonsense. Once more the free software community demonstrates that it is unwilling to stop working until a completely free desktop is available. Many distributions that don't care so much about software freedom are more than welcome to add whatever proprietary junk they're legally entitled to; for those who choose to prioritize software freedom, I hope they also get what they want.
Gnumeric is a piece of junk. It crashed during the first five minutes after I started trying it out.
Agree about AbiWord, disagree about Gnumeric. Gnumeric is stable does everything I need. I've heard about professors using it to teach spreadsheet classes (instead of Excel) because of it's pretty impressive featureset.
I don't know what distribution and version you're running, but I've built Gnumeric from source many times, and used it on several distributions, and it has always been really stable for me.
I actually think wobbly windows could be done right to acheive a really cool feel. If they changed the way the windows "wobble" to be more dependent upon the direction of the windows, and lessened the extent to which windows wobbled overall, it would give the effect of windows "flying" across the desktop.
But it would have to be way less than what's in the videos.
Actually, the law just requires that ISPs provide a certain extra, optional functionality.
I am personally against this form of censorship (but for some reason I was attacked ceaselessly in the last story on this bill), but it's a logical leap to say that they're outlawing anything.
I wonder if he's going to spout off any more of his high-brow, green-loving, neopagan leftist tripe this time around. Face it, global warming is just nature running it's course. Bill Nye was a political activist who wanted to use public television and school systems to shove his ridiculous ideology down our children's throats.
)
* No really, he was comparing and contrasting "illicit drug use" with "domestic violence". When I contrast those two I see two very distinct categories of action, one reality avoidance through personal sensory deprecation and causing harm to others through means of physical harm. He didn't not expand on that to any satisfactory degree for me or you to conclude that we shouldn't be making those camparisons. Now I have this "drug use abuses others" argument left hanging in the air. That is more inflamatory then illustrative so I called him on it.
I'll completely agree that the whole drug abuse causes societal decay argument is just plain stupid--but he was responding to someone who presupposed he held that opinion. Therefore, it is that great-grand-parent (I get so lost trying to reference this stuff) who started it all when he brought up the whole "society crumbling" nonsense--even if he didn't agree with it. The original parent certainly didn't make much out of it, I'll give you that.
For me all topics are on the table, with the caveat that we at least stay on topic for it's discussion. The GP had been seeking to illumate ways of better arguing his position on drug use. If he could not determine any good points of argumentation, it becomes a belief not based on reason and he should drop it. It is OK to have those beliefs if you do not confuse them with facts, but mixing them leads to frustration by all.
His problem is not that he lacks evidence to support his claims, it's that he lacks publicly available scientific research to back his claims. He has a lot of anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, this has more than likely made him biased.
sidenote: Running for president and not answering that "lame" question would be political suicide. Voters just seem to eat up decisive stances no matter how untenable they may be.
That's one big reason the political climate in this country is so "lame."
You're an atheist with an anti-drug point of view (at least at the surface, that's all anyone notices)?
Impossible! No, no, I must toss you into another category of person which I can easily attack. I hereby dub thee religious right conservative heretoforth!
You make me sick. You're the reason America is going to Hell in a handbasket. You're trying to dogmatically force your own ill-conceived views on the rest of us. Hypocritical pig!:)
I think you jumped the gun. He was defending his position that marijuana should not be smoked against the claim that marijuana doesn't do any damage to society as a whole. The hyperbole used was that marijuana was less dangerous than beer, which "hasn't destroyed western civilization yet." He responded that the capacity to ruin society at large should not be the qualitative test to determine the moral ramifications of doing (or not doing) some action.
If you have a hard time finding credible data on the subject, realize that the position is one that isn't defensible and either keep it to yourself (drop the inane comparisons to violent crime). If you can't do that you can always tell people that you have a religous belief on the subject and go from there.
And why can't religious beliefs not be questioned like any other belief? Why is his position not defensible? Remember, he wasn't defending his position as a whole with his comment, merely rebutting another point (the original source of the lame argument).
Now some talking points for you to research could be... Crack, in the 80's in urban locations, led to gang violence and broke up families. A similar phenomena is happening now with methamphetamine in the rural midwest, where people are getting poisoned by mercury and fertilzers during its production.
I appreciate your desire to spread more logical discussion (Slashdot could definately use it), but I think the real problem is that he was attacking a quite elementary point, which of course made his response equally elementary.
If I ran for President, and had all sorts of great ideas about how to change the country, I would do something similar if someone asked me something silly like "what's your stance on euthanasia?" A lame comment begs a lame response.
In that situation, it seems like your only competitive advantage is your cost--which is entirely a hardware issue. The drivers are almost a value-add--even if they accomplish what hardware traditionally does, they're not doing anything new or spectacular.
You know, even if the rest of the script/program would be easier to write in {perl,python,c}, I find myself often using Bash just because of this feature right here.
Why do I feel like thousands of geeks suddenly burst out in laughter?
A lot of free software developers actually assign the copyright to the FSF. This makes it easier for the FSF to defend them in court, since they're the copyright holders.
There's a difference between "this code is copyright ME under the terms of the GPL" and "this code is copyright YOU under the terms of the GPL."
Many individuals have begun this practice as a way to make money off of GPL code. It works fine within existing copyright law.
Sick of people being jealous because gentoo's package management system is better?
Portage is not a package management system. It contains one, but it isn't one. Neither is apt. Neither is yum. Neither is ports.
As for portage as a software distribution system, it is quite good. As for me, I prefer Crux ports, since they're much simpler to hack to my preference.
By the way, I was the original 'sick of Gentoo zealots throwing plugs in unrelated topics?' guy. I took it down because people misunderstood me thinking that I disliked Gentoo. I do not; it is a fine distribution.
It looked to me like you assumed that the original-original parent (eek, this gets ugly, doesn't it?) holds a staunchly Republican view of economics and free markets. His view is held by many other groups, notably Libertarians. The current Republican party does not try to indoctrinate us any of the values he was talking about (i.e. we need a truly free market to keep human nature in check, and only use the government to maintain order). The Republican party values are more "lets give tax breaks to, and ease restrictions on, big companies, to provide incentives for the creation of jobs."
A decidedly different approach, similar to the argument Communists make about how 20th century Communist regimes have perverted and ruined true "communism."
I don't spend every waking minute figuring out how to fuck my fellow man out of another fraction of a percent. THAT is what makes me different.
I asked what made you different, not how you were different. Clearly a difference exists, I want to know why. It is not enough to simply say "these people are evil and these people are not."
Oh gawd, yes. But as soon as you start pointing that out, and actually have the temerity to insist that corporations have other-then-monetary objectives, then people start screaming "Socialist!" and "Communist!"
True, and ironic, since me standing up for my personal beliefs by excersizing my rights as a customer is the only way to protect a free market.
Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you on Tuesday. Thank you on Wednesday. Thank you in the morning. Thank you at night.
Unfortunately, most Slashdotters cannot expand their mind beyond the left-right political dichotomy, where they can quickly attribute any injustice to "the other camp."
I would commend the grand-parent on how well he has been educated by the current regime as well--and by that I mean the corrupt two-party system.
Slashdot Mirror
Get some priorities.
I see 'progress' holds higher priority to you than freedom, but for many of us the reverse is true. You seem to just want an operating system gratis without any concern over the value structure that has created this operating system in the first place.
I'm sorry you don't value software freedom (it's your choice). However, implying that F/OSS software has some manifest destiny to take over the world and that any decision must advance that goal is just silly. Why do we need an alternative to Office then? Because it's expensive? What about Windows? It comes with most computers and I hear these days it's pretty stable.
This is probably the greatest argument I've seen against making Windows ports of free software--people get hooked but learn nothing of the value of software freedom. Without those values, users often adopt a very selfish "gimme gimme" attitude.
And once morethe FOSS community illustrates how it kills itself.
Nonsense. Once more the free software community demonstrates that it is unwilling to stop working until a completely free desktop is available. Many distributions that don't care so much about software freedom are more than welcome to add whatever proprietary junk they're legally entitled to; for those who choose to prioritize software freedom, I hope they also get what they want.
Gnumeric is a piece of junk. It crashed during the first five minutes after I started trying it out.
Agree about AbiWord, disagree about Gnumeric. Gnumeric is stable does everything I need. I've heard about professors using it to teach spreadsheet classes (instead of Excel) because of it's pretty impressive featureset.
I don't know what distribution and version you're running, but I've built Gnumeric from source many times, and used it on several distributions, and it has always been really stable for me.
Three consoles are fiercely entangled!
But it would have to be way less than what's in the videos.
Umm, provided you have some competent SuSE people (which Novell does) then you don't have any costs whatsoever.
Why would someone pay SuSE license fees? You can do an ftp install for free (or at least last time I checked...haven't used SuSE in a while).
Every single post is a comment about the front page screw up. How hilarious!
I am personally against this form of censorship (but for some reason I was attacked ceaselessly in the last story on this bill), but it's a logical leap to say that they're outlawing anything.
I wonder if he's going to spout off any more of his high-brow, green-loving, neopagan leftist tripe this time around. Face it, global warming is just nature running it's course. Bill Nye was a political activist who wanted to use public television and school systems to shove his ridiculous ideology down our children's throats.
) * No really, he was comparing and contrasting "illicit drug use" with "domestic violence". When I contrast those two I see two very distinct categories of action, one reality avoidance through personal sensory deprecation and causing harm to others through means of physical harm. He didn't not expand on that to any satisfactory degree for me or you to conclude that we shouldn't be making those camparisons. Now I have this "drug use abuses others" argument left hanging in the air. That is more inflamatory then illustrative so I called him on it.
I'll completely agree that the whole drug abuse causes societal decay argument is just plain stupid--but he was responding to someone who presupposed he held that opinion. Therefore, it is that great-grand-parent (I get so lost trying to reference this stuff) who started it all when he brought up the whole "society crumbling" nonsense--even if he didn't agree with it. The original parent certainly didn't make much out of it, I'll give you that.
For me all topics are on the table, with the caveat that we at least stay on topic for it's discussion. The GP had been seeking to illumate ways of better arguing his position on drug use. If he could not determine any good points of argumentation, it becomes a belief not based on reason and he should drop it. It is OK to have those beliefs if you do not confuse them with facts, but mixing them leads to frustration by all.
His problem is not that he lacks evidence to support his claims, it's that he lacks publicly available scientific research to back his claims. He has a lot of anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, this has more than likely made him biased.
sidenote: Running for president and not answering that "lame" question would be political suicide. Voters just seem to eat up decisive stances no matter how untenable they may be.
That's one big reason the political climate in this country is so "lame."
You're an atheist with an anti-drug point of view (at least at the surface, that's all anyone notices)?
Impossible! No, no, I must toss you into another category of person which I can easily attack. I hereby dub thee religious right conservative heretoforth!
You make me sick. You're the reason America is going to Hell in a handbasket. You're trying to dogmatically force your own ill-conceived views on the rest of us. Hypocritical pig! :)
I think you jumped the gun. He was defending his position that marijuana should not be smoked against the claim that marijuana doesn't do any damage to society as a whole. The hyperbole used was that marijuana was less dangerous than beer, which "hasn't destroyed western civilization yet." He responded that the capacity to ruin society at large should not be the qualitative test to determine the moral ramifications of doing (or not doing) some action.
If you have a hard time finding credible data on the subject, realize that the position is one that isn't defensible and either keep it to yourself (drop the inane comparisons to violent crime). If you can't do that you can always tell people that you have a religous belief on the subject and go from there.
And why can't religious beliefs not be questioned like any other belief? Why is his position not defensible? Remember, he wasn't defending his position as a whole with his comment, merely rebutting another point (the original source of the lame argument).
Now some talking points for you to research could be... Crack, in the 80's in urban locations, led to gang violence and broke up families. A similar phenomena is happening now with methamphetamine in the rural midwest, where people are getting poisoned by mercury and fertilzers during its production.
I appreciate your desire to spread more logical discussion (Slashdot could definately use it), but I think the real problem is that he was attacking a quite elementary point, which of course made his response equally elementary.
If I ran for President, and had all sorts of great ideas about how to change the country, I would do something similar if someone asked me something silly like "what's your stance on euthanasia?" A lame comment begs a lame response.
Why? You already answered his question.
Actually, you just described basically practically every console RPG that has come out of Japan in the last ten years.
In that situation, it seems like your only competitive advantage is your cost--which is entirely a hardware issue. The drivers are almost a value-add--even if they accomplish what hardware traditionally does, they're not doing anything new or spectacular.
Why do I feel like thousands of geeks suddenly burst out in laughter?
There's a difference between "this code is copyright ME under the terms of the GPL" and "this code is copyright YOU under the terms of the GPL."
Many individuals have begun this practice as a way to make money off of GPL code. It works fine within existing copyright law.
On 2.6, I just use 'cdrecord -dev=/dev/hdc'
If he were to use the subjunctive, I still would have a hard time figuring out what he said...
Just out of curiousity, do you lfs? Err, more specifically, did you lfs before book version 5?
Sick of people being jealous because gentoo's package management system is better?
Portage is not a package management system. It contains one, but it isn't one. Neither is apt. Neither is yum. Neither is ports.
As for portage as a software distribution system, it is quite good. As for me, I prefer Crux ports, since they're much simpler to hack to my preference.
By the way, I was the original 'sick of Gentoo zealots throwing plugs in unrelated topics?' guy. I took it down because people misunderstood me thinking that I disliked Gentoo. I do not; it is a fine distribution.
Or is maturity simply the return to the inner child? The un-learning of all of the garbage picked up in adolescense and early adulthood?
Seriously, though, in Korea only old men mature.
A decidedly different approach, similar to the argument Communists make about how 20th century Communist regimes have perverted and ruined true "communism."
I don't spend every waking minute figuring out how to fuck my fellow man out of another fraction of a percent. THAT is what makes me different.
I asked what made you different, not how you were different. Clearly a difference exists, I want to know why. It is not enough to simply say "these people are evil and these people are not."
Oh gawd, yes. But as soon as you start pointing that out, and actually have the temerity to insist that corporations have other-then-monetary objectives, then people start screaming "Socialist!" and "Communist!"
True, and ironic, since me standing up for my personal beliefs by excersizing my rights as a customer is the only way to protect a free market.
You are using Voluntary very loosely.
Emphasis mine.
Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you on Tuesday. Thank you on Wednesday. Thank you in the morning. Thank you at night.
Thank you, sir, for spelling "loosely" correctly.
I would commend the grand-parent on how well he has been educated by the current regime as well--and by that I mean the corrupt two-party system.