Venezuela is neither a communist state nor a dictatorship: Under the elected government of Hugo Chavez, it has engaged in some redistribution policies to help the extremely poor, but that's not the same has having a state-planned economy with Five Year Plans or people getting sent to the gulag for political reasons or Great Leaps Forward.
Also, if we're going to allow references to bad things that have happened in the history of a country, the US has to own up to, since the 1930's alone, Japanese-American internment, Jim Crow and the many lynchings that came out of that, the repeated acts of aggression against foreign countries (many of whom present little-to-no threat against the US, like Grenada), overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with brutal dictatorships (Iran and Chile being the most important examples), and occasional acts of putting down political protests with force (e.g. Kent State, Chicago '67, Occupy Wall St). Communist governments often do really bad things. The US government also often does really bad things. I'm in favor of condemning governments when they commit obvious moral evils, regardless of who they are, but thinking that "my government is always good, and their government is always evil" is not a useful or correct position to take.
So, in short, you're saying that this is Shiny Happy People holding hands (and if you don't understand the reference, learn where REM got the title of that song).
I mean, that's the only thing that could possibly be happening in a worker's paradise like the People's Republic of China, right?
In the case of SO2, this classical liberal move was cooked up by the administration of that well-known liberal Ronald Reagan and signed into law by that other well-known liberal George H.W. Bush.
The difference between the two proposals, which is why I said "or": A carbon tax would be passing something like "1 ton of carbon=$X payment to the government". A cap-and-trade system would say "We're collectively allowing industry X megatons of carbon emissions. Bidding opens at $10,000 per megaton for permits, which can be traded on the open market at any time." They're different policies with somewhat different effects.
When a distro does something stupid, people can vote with their feet and quickly destroy the distro that isn't serving their needs, all without doing a lot of re-learning things or spending a dime.
My machine is not for your commercials. I don't care if I have to patch out these kinds of "features" and compile everything myself, it's my hardware and I will do as I please on it.
It actually doesn't really matter what a carbon tax is spent on to force the economy to adjust, although spending on combating global warming is probably a good idea.
Imagine, if you will, that you're in the market for a car. One car gets 24 km/l and costs $30,000, the other gets 12 km/l and costs $15,000. If gasoline is at about 50.0, and you drive 15000 km per year, then you save $312.50 per year and it will take you 48 years to justify the more expensive car. If gasoline is at about 100.0 (a bit cheaper than now), then you now save $625.00 per year, and it's now 24 years of use to justify the expensive car. But if gasoline is at 300.0 due to a carbon tax, it's now only 8 years of use before the more expensive car was a better deal, so you'll be more likely to make the adjustment, thus reducing your carbon emissions.
Another example: You own a home heated with an oil furnace. You could improve the insulation for $15,000 and cut your heating oil usage in half. If heating oil is $1000, then it's going to take 30 years for that investment to pay off. If heating oil is $3000, that same investment pays off in 10 years, so you're more likely to make it, thus reducing your carbon emissions again.
In neither case did the question of what the money is going to really enter into the calculations: Something that was a stupid economic decision without the tax became a smart decision with the tax, and in both cases you reduced your personal carbon output.
That's where the idea of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade come from: The goal is to take a cost that is currently not being factored into the price and make it part of the price. Then you let the markets do their thing and motivate people to switch to alternatives.
Trouble is, that for most libertarians, this kind of regulation is unwarranted government intrusion on the free and unfettered markets. And for most politicians, this kind of regulation is unwarranted intrusion on the profit margins of major campaign contributors.
I do hold PETA activists in far lower esteem than I do your average corrupt politician, because the majority of them are dangerous lunatics.
That doesn't seem like much of an area of distinction: The PETA activists will make death threats and occasionally blow up a research lab for really stupid reasons, possibly killing a few innocent people in the process. Your average corrupt politician, on the other hand, will advocate and vote for or order the invading and/or bombing of countries on demonstrably false pretenses, killing hundreds of thousands of people. And some politicians are just as loony as PETA is - for instance, in the US many politicians are quite proud of not believing in evolution, climatology, math (especially when it comes to budgets), or other objective facts.
No they aren't. The 4 food groups are, in no particular order: 1) Sugar - chocolate would fall in this category, as well as other candy and lots of other junk food. 2) Salt - most notably, chips and cheesy poofs would fall into this. 3) Grease - pizza, bacon, etc. 4) Caffeine - soda, coffee, and Tea-Earl Gray-hot.
One potential use of these sorts of materials is to power Washington D.C. on the hot air generated by politicians. Hey, we might as well have them do something useful for a change!
Church is recommended for the ~1% of Slashdotters who actually have a religion. Lots of normal females to meet there.
For the atheists, be aware your views would be welcome at a Unitarian Universalist church too. Just be aware they welcome theists of all stripes as well.
You can't be damn sure before jumping into a relationship.
Some of the things you almost definitely don't know about somebody before you start a relationship, and would sound very weird asking about before you got into one: Do they snore, steal the blankets, or have other annoying nighttime habits? What are they like when they first wake up? Do they like to have the same kind of sex you do? Do they want to have children? If you both want to have children, what kind of parent would they be? Do they have the same expectations of sexual exclusivity or lack thereof as you do? Do they have a crazy and jealous ex? What kind of deep personal conversations do they like to have? Are they a financial spender or saver?
These kinds of issues all have profound effects on whether a relationship will be successful, and you have absolutely no way of really knowing before you get into it.
The more general version of this is that dual relationships (that is, where 2 people have a professional relationship of any kind with a close friend or partner) are risky, because problems in one area tend to spill over to the other. That's why banging your clients is typically barred by professional organizations, and why banging your coworkers is usually at least questionable at many companies. In the case of medical professionals, they're generally advised against treating family members as well except in emergencies. It makes things far less complicated.
Companies should be free to restrict downstream distribution of their software to people who haven't paid for it - deep sixing the 'help your neighbor' clause of the GPL is needed.
1. You've clearly missed (or utterly ignored) my point about the need to be able to fork something, which is all about doing something that an organization with the ability to restrict downstream distribution would most likely do everything they could to prevent. In my example earlier, the upstream package owner could have said they didn't want the modification, and without the ability to say "Fine, I'm just giving away my version on my own", the modification gets lost, and the next company that comes along wanting to do the same thing has to pay for the same modification again.
2. OSS and Free Software are not really competing ideas: Free Software is by definition open source, and there are other open source licenses besides GPL that meet the FSF's definition of Free Software. Generally speaking, RMS and and an open-source guy like ESR will advocate doing the same things for different reasons. And that means that their answers to practical questions for one are thoroughly relevant to the other.
What I think is going on here is that you and I have different goals: My goal is to make sure we have the best software we can muster. Your goal seems to be to make sure that somebody can make money by selling software. I've put forth an argument that my goal is not incompatible with developers making a living. If companies come and go, that's normal in business, and has nothing to do with whether we have good software.
Learn how to discuss in an engaging way non-geeky subjects. Step away from the computer. Clean and groom yourself and your clothing. While single:...Get out of the house on a regular basis....Make it clear from your dress and behavior that you're a man (or lesbian woman) of financial means, education, accomplishment, and interesting conversation relative to other men your age....If you encounter a woman that's both attractive to you and receptive to your attentions, ask her out....While she's fun and fulfilling to be around:......Spend some time with her
A variation of this algorithm modifies the "While single" loop to make some sort of online profile and announce your various attractions directly rather than just behaving like you have them.
Those who have a serious problem doing this usually get hung up on either the "step away from the computer" step, the "clean and groom yourself" step, or the "ask her out" step.
Richard Stallman has actually answered this question several times. Here are some of the counterarguments: 1. The vast majority software developers aren't paid to develop software that is sold on the open market. For example, a major bank or insurance company typically has a large staff of developers who are writing software that not only is specific to their business, but also contains trade secrets. Because they're so specific to their businesses, and have to be kept secret, OSS doesn't have any effect on their need for developers.
2. Companies that sell ancillary services to OSS pay developers to improve OSS packages. Red Hat and IBM in particular hire lots of people to work on Linux, because they sell more Linux-related services if Linux is better. This remains the correct business move regardless of the fact that everyone else also benefits from their improvements.
3. When businesses encounters an OSS package that does almost what they want, they can pay people (either as employees or outside contractors) to add in a new feature. Again, if this isn't part of their core business, then giving it back to the community in no way harms the business. An example of this: I worked for a small cell service provider for a while, and we wanted to use an OSS package to improve our service. The trouble was that it had been written for GSM phones only, but we were using CDMA, so we paid a developer to add CDMA features to the package. The developer got paid, we got a solution much cheaper than any of the proprietary options, and the community got a significant new feature.
Here's some of why commercial shared source models don't offer the same benefits as open source: 1. Pay-to-play means that not all developers and users can get in on the act of improving the software. For example, if the OSS cell phone package described above were shared source, somebody would have to pay in order to find out whether we could modify it to do what we wanted it to do at a reasonable price.
2. Shared source models don't generally allow somebody with a contract to fork the project. Forking is critical to improving software if the organization behind the original package gets to be a roadblock rather than a help (e.g. Oracle and OpenOffice).
3. You can't use shared source code as a teaching tool in the same way as OSS code.
That's true, but not terribly important for a lot of the stuff CIOs deal with. For example, if you have a need for a web application, you could write it in any number of languages (JSP, ASP.Net, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc), run it on numerous web and application servers (Tomcat, IIS, Apache, etc), hosted on several OS platforms (Windows, Linux, big iron Unixes), and not one of those decisions is in any way affected by Tomcat being under the Apache license.
Here's my reasoning for why, if I were in their shoes, I'd go for open source where possible: Good techies on average have a strong preference for open source over closed source. That means that if I choose open source, I'll be better able to find and keep great employees. One great admin or developer is often worth 3-5 mediocre employees, so being able to hire those great employees saves me money, and because they're good at their jobs saves me lots of headaches, and (if I do a decent job of managing them) tend to recruit other great techies to work for me. This all leads to a virtuous cycle in which my employees are happy and creating a culture of excellence, that excellence aids in recruiting more excellence, and in the end my company is happy with me because I have a department keeping things running smoothly and solving problems while not being too expensive.
By contrast, if I choose a software stack that nobody really wants to work with (e.g. MUMPS), it's much harder to find great employees, especially anyone who knows anything about the platform. This leads to a vicious cycle where I have to hire either lousy developers who can't get work elsewhere, or old-timers who've utterly refused to adapt to changes in the industry.
Yes, the lack of commercial games is a barrier to Linux. It's not even close to the largest barrier to mass market adoption on the desktop: The largest barrier to Linux adoption, by far, is that your typical computer comes with MS Windows or OS X, and both of those are decent enough to do what most computer users want to do, which is check their email, stay in touch on Facebook, browse the news, view video on Youtube, etc. They don't need to make a change, so they don't.
An obligatory car analogy: If your Ford Pinto is still running reasonably well, even though it gets 15 mpg, you're probably not going to buy a new car.
As far as I can tell, the definition of a "casual" gamer is "anybody who isn't a 15-30 year old male". I mean, I still hear of puzzle adventure players (who tended to be middle-aged women) being seen as casual gamers, while the people who play really quite simple hack-and-slash games (which appeal more to younger men) are considered hardcore. The mistakes, I think, are: 1. to aim most video games at a particular demographic and then wonder why nobody else is getting interested in them, and 2. hire young male game designers and wonder why they can't write a great game that appeals to older people or women.
It definitely has nothing to do with the difficulty or intracacy of the game.
And the reason why everyone isn't arrested is because the police couldn't give two fucks about what you're doing as long as it isn't bothering anyone else or quite obviously dangerous.
Again, if you actually read the post, the reason my hypothetical person was targeted was not because he committed a crime, but because he filmed police doing something that was embarassing to the police and possible illegal. And given that police around the country have been caught harassing people for filming them committing crimes, to think that they would react that way is not a paranoid delusion, it's realistic.
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Venezuela is neither a communist state nor a dictatorship: Under the elected government of Hugo Chavez, it has engaged in some redistribution policies to help the extremely poor, but that's not the same has having a state-planned economy with Five Year Plans or people getting sent to the gulag for political reasons or Great Leaps Forward.
Also, if we're going to allow references to bad things that have happened in the history of a country, the US has to own up to, since the 1930's alone, Japanese-American internment, Jim Crow and the many lynchings that came out of that, the repeated acts of aggression against foreign countries (many of whom present little-to-no threat against the US, like Grenada), overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with brutal dictatorships (Iran and Chile being the most important examples), and occasional acts of putting down political protests with force (e.g. Kent State, Chicago '67, Occupy Wall St). Communist governments often do really bad things. The US government also often does really bad things. I'm in favor of condemning governments when they commit obvious moral evils, regardless of who they are, but thinking that "my government is always good, and their government is always evil" is not a useful or correct position to take.
So, in short, you're saying that this is Shiny Happy People holding hands (and if you don't understand the reference, learn where REM got the title of that song).
I mean, that's the only thing that could possibly be happening in a worker's paradise like the People's Republic of China, right?
Since cap-and-trade is the classical liberal move
In the case of SO2, this classical liberal move was cooked up by the administration of that well-known liberal Ronald Reagan and signed into law by that other well-known liberal George H.W. Bush.
The difference between the two proposals, which is why I said "or": A carbon tax would be passing something like "1 ton of carbon=$X payment to the government". A cap-and-trade system would say "We're collectively allowing industry X megatons of carbon emissions. Bidding opens at $10,000 per megaton for permits, which can be traded on the open market at any time." They're different policies with somewhat different effects.
When a distro does something stupid, people can vote with their feet and quickly destroy the distro that isn't serving their needs, all without doing a lot of re-learning things or spending a dime.
My machine is not for your commercials. I don't care if I have to patch out these kinds of "features" and compile everything myself, it's my hardware and I will do as I please on it.
Every glass bottle is trucked across the country from where it is made to where it is used.
That, in my view, is part of the problem: They could be using freight rail to cover most of the distance and save a great deal of carbon emissions.
It actually doesn't really matter what a carbon tax is spent on to force the economy to adjust, although spending on combating global warming is probably a good idea.
Imagine, if you will, that you're in the market for a car. One car gets 24 km/l and costs $30,000, the other gets 12 km/l and costs $15,000. If gasoline is at about 50.0, and you drive 15000 km per year, then you save $312.50 per year and it will take you 48 years to justify the more expensive car. If gasoline is at about 100.0 (a bit cheaper than now), then you now save $625.00 per year, and it's now 24 years of use to justify the expensive car. But if gasoline is at 300.0 due to a carbon tax, it's now only 8 years of use before the more expensive car was a better deal, so you'll be more likely to make the adjustment, thus reducing your carbon emissions.
Another example: You own a home heated with an oil furnace. You could improve the insulation for $15,000 and cut your heating oil usage in half. If heating oil is $1000, then it's going to take 30 years for that investment to pay off. If heating oil is $3000, that same investment pays off in 10 years, so you're more likely to make it, thus reducing your carbon emissions again.
In neither case did the question of what the money is going to really enter into the calculations: Something that was a stupid economic decision without the tax became a smart decision with the tax, and in both cases you reduced your personal carbon output.
That's where the idea of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade come from: The goal is to take a cost that is currently not being factored into the price and make it part of the price. Then you let the markets do their thing and motivate people to switch to alternatives.
Trouble is, that for most libertarians, this kind of regulation is unwarranted government intrusion on the free and unfettered markets. And for most politicians, this kind of regulation is unwarranted intrusion on the profit margins of major campaign contributors.
Obviously, once this change had gone in, Sophos was correct to identify itself as malicious.
I do hold PETA activists in far lower esteem than I do your average corrupt politician, because the majority of them are dangerous lunatics.
That doesn't seem like much of an area of distinction: The PETA activists will make death threats and occasionally blow up a research lab for really stupid reasons, possibly killing a few innocent people in the process. Your average corrupt politician, on the other hand, will advocate and vote for or order the invading and/or bombing of countries on demonstrably false pretenses, killing hundreds of thousands of people. And some politicians are just as loony as PETA is - for instance, in the US many politicians are quite proud of not believing in evolution, climatology, math (especially when it comes to budgets), or other objective facts.
No they aren't. The 4 food groups are, in no particular order:
1) Sugar - chocolate would fall in this category, as well as other candy and lots of other junk food.
2) Salt - most notably, chips and cheesy poofs would fall into this.
3) Grease - pizza, bacon, etc.
4) Caffeine - soda, coffee, and Tea-Earl Gray-hot.
One potential use of these sorts of materials is to power Washington D.C. on the hot air generated by politicians. Hey, we might as well have them do something useful for a change!
Church is recommended for the ~1% of Slashdotters who actually have a religion. Lots of normal females to meet there.
For the atheists, be aware your views would be welcome at a Unitarian Universalist church too. Just be aware they welcome theists of all stripes as well.
You can't be damn sure before jumping into a relationship.
Some of the things you almost definitely don't know about somebody before you start a relationship, and would sound very weird asking about before you got into one: Do they snore, steal the blankets, or have other annoying nighttime habits? What are they like when they first wake up? Do they like to have the same kind of sex you do? Do they want to have children? If you both want to have children, what kind of parent would they be? Do they have the same expectations of sexual exclusivity or lack thereof as you do? Do they have a crazy and jealous ex? What kind of deep personal conversations do they like to have? Are they a financial spender or saver?
These kinds of issues all have profound effects on whether a relationship will be successful, and you have absolutely no way of really knowing before you get into it.
The more general version of this is that dual relationships (that is, where 2 people have a professional relationship of any kind with a close friend or partner) are risky, because problems in one area tend to spill over to the other. That's why banging your clients is typically barred by professional organizations, and why banging your coworkers is usually at least questionable at many companies. In the case of medical professionals, they're generally advised against treating family members as well except in emergencies. It makes things far less complicated.
Companies should be free to restrict downstream distribution of their software to people who haven't paid for it - deep sixing the 'help your neighbor' clause of the GPL is needed.
1. You've clearly missed (or utterly ignored) my point about the need to be able to fork something, which is all about doing something that an organization with the ability to restrict downstream distribution would most likely do everything they could to prevent. In my example earlier, the upstream package owner could have said they didn't want the modification, and without the ability to say "Fine, I'm just giving away my version on my own", the modification gets lost, and the next company that comes along wanting to do the same thing has to pay for the same modification again.
2. OSS and Free Software are not really competing ideas: Free Software is by definition open source, and there are other open source licenses besides GPL that meet the FSF's definition of Free Software. Generally speaking, RMS and and an open-source guy like ESR will advocate doing the same things for different reasons. And that means that their answers to practical questions for one are thoroughly relevant to the other.
What I think is going on here is that you and I have different goals: My goal is to make sure we have the best software we can muster. Your goal seems to be to make sure that somebody can make money by selling software. I've put forth an argument that my goal is not incompatible with developers making a living. If companies come and go, that's normal in business, and has nothing to do with whether we have good software.
See, when you type swordfish, it shows to us as *******
The algorithm is well-known:
Learn how to discuss in an engaging way non-geeky subjects. ...Get out of the house on a regular basis. ...Make it clear from your dress and behavior that you're a man (or lesbian woman) of financial means, education, accomplishment, and interesting conversation relative to other men your age. ...If you encounter a woman that's both attractive to you and receptive to your attentions, ask her out. ...While she's fun and fulfilling to be around: ......Spend some time with her
Step away from the computer.
Clean and groom yourself and your clothing.
While single:
A variation of this algorithm modifies the "While single" loop to make some sort of online profile and announce your various attractions directly rather than just behaving like you have them.
Those who have a serious problem doing this usually get hung up on either the "step away from the computer" step, the "clean and groom yourself" step, or the "ask her out" step.
Richard Stallman has actually answered this question several times. Here are some of the counterarguments:
1. The vast majority software developers aren't paid to develop software that is sold on the open market. For example, a major bank or insurance company typically has a large staff of developers who are writing software that not only is specific to their business, but also contains trade secrets. Because they're so specific to their businesses, and have to be kept secret, OSS doesn't have any effect on their need for developers.
2. Companies that sell ancillary services to OSS pay developers to improve OSS packages. Red Hat and IBM in particular hire lots of people to work on Linux, because they sell more Linux-related services if Linux is better. This remains the correct business move regardless of the fact that everyone else also benefits from their improvements.
3. When businesses encounters an OSS package that does almost what they want, they can pay people (either as employees or outside contractors) to add in a new feature. Again, if this isn't part of their core business, then giving it back to the community in no way harms the business. An example of this: I worked for a small cell service provider for a while, and we wanted to use an OSS package to improve our service. The trouble was that it had been written for GSM phones only, but we were using CDMA, so we paid a developer to add CDMA features to the package. The developer got paid, we got a solution much cheaper than any of the proprietary options, and the community got a significant new feature.
Here's some of why commercial shared source models don't offer the same benefits as open source:
1. Pay-to-play means that not all developers and users can get in on the act of improving the software. For example, if the OSS cell phone package described above were shared source, somebody would have to pay in order to find out whether we could modify it to do what we wanted it to do at a reasonable price.
2. Shared source models don't generally allow somebody with a contract to fork the project. Forking is critical to improving software if the organization behind the original package gets to be a roadblock rather than a help (e.g. Oracle and OpenOffice).
3. You can't use shared source code as a teaching tool in the same way as OSS code.
That's true, but not terribly important for a lot of the stuff CIOs deal with. For example, if you have a need for a web application, you could write it in any number of languages (JSP, ASP.Net, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc), run it on numerous web and application servers (Tomcat, IIS, Apache, etc), hosted on several OS platforms (Windows, Linux, big iron Unixes), and not one of those decisions is in any way affected by Tomcat being under the Apache license.
Here's my reasoning for why, if I were in their shoes, I'd go for open source where possible: Good techies on average have a strong preference for open source over closed source. That means that if I choose open source, I'll be better able to find and keep great employees. One great admin or developer is often worth 3-5 mediocre employees, so being able to hire those great employees saves me money, and because they're good at their jobs saves me lots of headaches, and (if I do a decent job of managing them) tend to recruit other great techies to work for me. This all leads to a virtuous cycle in which my employees are happy and creating a culture of excellence, that excellence aids in recruiting more excellence, and in the end my company is happy with me because I have a department keeping things running smoothly and solving problems while not being too expensive.
By contrast, if I choose a software stack that nobody really wants to work with (e.g. MUMPS), it's much harder to find great employees, especially anyone who knows anything about the platform. This leads to a vicious cycle where I have to hire either lousy developers who can't get work elsewhere, or old-timers who've utterly refused to adapt to changes in the industry.
Of course somebody with a name like "PNutts" would say that!
The solution to your problem is to find a woman that being with counts as "play".
Yes, the lack of commercial games is a barrier to Linux. It's not even close to the largest barrier to mass market adoption on the desktop: The largest barrier to Linux adoption, by far, is that your typical computer comes with MS Windows or OS X, and both of those are decent enough to do what most computer users want to do, which is check their email, stay in touch on Facebook, browse the news, view video on Youtube, etc. They don't need to make a change, so they don't.
An obligatory car analogy: If your Ford Pinto is still running reasonably well, even though it gets 15 mpg, you're probably not going to buy a new car.
It's not that they can't, it's that the kind of guys who try to become video game designers usually don't.
As far as I can tell, the definition of a "casual" gamer is "anybody who isn't a 15-30 year old male". I mean, I still hear of puzzle adventure players (who tended to be middle-aged women) being seen as casual gamers, while the people who play really quite simple hack-and-slash games (which appeal more to younger men) are considered hardcore. The mistakes, I think, are:
1. to aim most video games at a particular demographic and then wonder why nobody else is getting interested in them, and
2. hire young male game designers and wonder why they can't write a great game that appeals to older people or women.
It definitely has nothing to do with the difficulty or intracacy of the game.
And the reason why everyone isn't arrested is because the police couldn't give two fucks about what you're doing as long as it isn't bothering anyone else or quite obviously dangerous.
Again, if you actually read the post, the reason my hypothetical person was targeted was not because he committed a crime, but because he filmed police doing something that was embarassing to the police and possible illegal. And given that police around the country have been caught harassing people for filming them committing crimes, to think that they would react that way is not a paranoid delusion, it's realistic.