LORAN was a great system, but I'm not sure the decision to shut it down is as shortsighted as you imply. LORAN wouldn't be used much now that GPS receivers are so widespread and cheap. It would still be useful as a backup on ships but if someone wanted to run a ship aground using GPS jamming they could also jam LORAN. There's no reason to think LORAN receivers wouldn't have similar software bugs as GPS receivers. Either way, the appropriate backup for GPS, LORAN or both is a navigator who knows what he's doing and can figure out where the water ends without using electronics of any kind.
"(That above paragraph was sarcastic... the following paragraph is not.)"
I'm glad you included the parenthetical phrase... oh, never mind.;)
Don't let the 13 year olds get to you. And by "13 year old" I don't mean the AC is actually 13, although he might be. He might also be a 35 year old who still lives in his mother's basement but acts like a 13 year old.
A hammer does this effectively as well. The difference is that with the hammer attack, a firmware flash with updated software can't fix the problem.
The GPS makers, particularly the ones who make military and infrastructure systems, are going to have to be a little more careful about bugs in their code.
As Americans are fond of pointing out, there's a bit of a difference between the size of the Netherlands and the size of the US. In this case we're talking about the coastline of the Netherlands versus the coastline of the entire world. Levees might let Manhattan stay where it is but they're not going to work in other places. Lots of people will have to move.
Unless there's some completely new neutrino detection method we don't even have theories for, looking for ETs via neutrino emissions isn't a very promising avenue. To see anything, even purposeful, tight beam communication, would imply not only a big detector but also a completely ridiculous amount of production. Nobody sane would communicate with neutrinos unless they had a REALLY good reason to, like wanting to ram a signal through a light year of lead.
"since here we are in 2012 with SLR having gone up a whole inch (to the nearest inch) in the last decade -- we have to take something like 78 inches and split it up among 88 years. Hmm, if SLR went up by an order of magnitude next year we might just make it."
One should be careful of fitting straight lines to data that likely is not linear. Still, whether sea level rises by 1 m or 2 m, a lot of very densely inhabited land is going to look a bit like Venice by 2100.
"If it where BSD, you'd have something like OS X, where one company would make a locked down version, and no one else would be able to make their own version, and contributing your code in a community would not be viable, because you'd only help your competition, who'd be under no obligation to help you back."
Little problem - the bits in OS X that haven't been contributed back are the bits Apple (or NeXt) wrote themselves, like Aqua (which is probably what you're thinking of). The improvements to open source code have been returned to the community - stuff in BSD, WebKit, LLVM, for example.
You're not. Once it's fast enough to stream TV and talk on VOIP at the same time I'm not really sure why it needs to be faster. Full high def movies download in about ten minutes. Maybe when someone figures out how to do immersive VR properly we'll all want faster connections but right now 1 Gbps seems kind of pointless.
The guy makes a little mistake that really doesn't affect his point much and you start throwing around things like "quasi-intellectualism." Overreact much? And by the way, you misspelled "weak."
30 years ago state of the art in the home was 128kbps ISDN, nearly 100 times as fast as the average home modem.
Arent you glad that we didnt standardize on it?
Are you suggesting we're going to invent something better than fibre in the near future? You know the wires that ISDN ran over are pretty much the same ones we're still using today, right?
Clearly installing cameras in everyone's houses is exactly the same thing as monitoring highways built by the public to make sure people exercising a privilege on those highways aren't posing a danger to that public.
In my experience, places where you can't turn right on a red are more dangerous. Drivers turning right on red lights stop, look, then turn. Drivers who have to wait hit the gas on a green and run over pedestrians. Frequently they only see the green light because they've been texting during the red.
As I stated elsewhere in the thread, I was incorrectly attributing a quote from one of his followers to him. I stand by the rest of my post however, and also point you to attacks Stallman has made on Linus Torvalds for endorsing open source and open source licenses:
"Proprietary software is digital colonization, unjust and evil. Our goal is therefore to eliminate proprietary software. We cannot eliminate it this year, but what we can and must do now is refuse to legitimize it.
In the same way, the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."
""Giving people the power to make choices about free software or not' is not the right way to think of our goal (see above). Our goal was, and is, to liberate the users from proprietary software."
-- Richard Stallman
Your view of what the GPL does is certainly an understandable one. It's also the way I use the GPL. But Stallman wrote and advocates the GPL as a tool towards achieving a much bigger goal than that. You're right in that I was incorrect in my statement of the point of the GPL. The point of the GPL is to aid in attacking proprietary software and ultimately abolishing it. Fortunately it hasn't been entirely effective.
Certainly, if you believe that offering proprietary software for sale (not requiring people buy it, just offering it) is equivalent to slavery, then Stallman's goals are virtuous and right. Stallman says he believes this. The man is certainly remarkably consistent and faithful to his own axioms.
If, on the other hand, you believe there's a difference between selling people and selling software, then he's an extremist.
Ah, very nice job cutting my post up into little quotes you could reply to in isolation (and ignoring the rest). Unfortunately, it's easy to see the REAL post.
I'm not ranting. My post was coherent and, as I said, verifiable. Yours was insulting and that's about it. Unfortunately that seems to be all too common among Stallman's supporters. I think the man himself is too extreme, but the followers he attracts are often completely ridiculous. Much like a lot of religions actually.
I incorrectly remembered something one of his followers said as a Stallman quote. It was not a lie, it was a mistake.
Stallman has stated that that BSD license "is not evil" but he has also implied that using open source and non-current GPL licenses is harmful to freedom. See for example his comments about Linus and his choice of license:
Slashdot Mirror
LORAN was a great system, but I'm not sure the decision to shut it down is as shortsighted as you imply. LORAN wouldn't be used much now that GPS receivers are so widespread and cheap. It would still be useful as a backup on ships but if someone wanted to run a ship aground using GPS jamming they could also jam LORAN. There's no reason to think LORAN receivers wouldn't have similar software bugs as GPS receivers. Either way, the appropriate backup for GPS, LORAN or both is a navigator who knows what he's doing and can figure out where the water ends without using electronics of any kind.
"(That above paragraph was sarcastic... the following paragraph is not.)"
I'm glad you included the parenthetical phrase... oh, never mind. ;)
Don't let the 13 year olds get to you. And by "13 year old" I don't mean the AC is actually 13, although he might be. He might also be a 35 year old who still lives in his mother's basement but acts like a 13 year old.
A hammer does this effectively as well. The difference is that with the hammer attack, a firmware flash with updated software can't fix the problem.
The GPS makers, particularly the ones who make military and infrastructure systems, are going to have to be a little more careful about bugs in their code.
As Americans are fond of pointing out, there's a bit of a difference between the size of the Netherlands and the size of the US. In this case we're talking about the coastline of the Netherlands versus the coastline of the entire world. Levees might let Manhattan stay where it is but they're not going to work in other places. Lots of people will have to move.
Unless there's some completely new neutrino detection method we don't even have theories for, looking for ETs via neutrino emissions isn't a very promising avenue. To see anything, even purposeful, tight beam communication, would imply not only a big detector but also a completely ridiculous amount of production. Nobody sane would communicate with neutrinos unless they had a REALLY good reason to, like wanting to ram a signal through a light year of lead.
"since here we are in 2012 with SLR having gone up a whole inch (to the nearest inch) in the last decade -- we have to take something like 78 inches and split it up among 88 years. Hmm, if SLR went up by an order of magnitude next year we might just make it."
One should be careful of fitting straight lines to data that likely is not linear. Still, whether sea level rises by 1 m or 2 m, a lot of very densely inhabited land is going to look a bit like Venice by 2100.
"If you are implying somebody (e.g. Symbolics) could "own" information, then you already lost all your credibility, before you even started."
Says the anonymous coward. Slashdot isn't what it used to be, but it's still a goldmine of unintentional irony.
Don't forget calling things he doesn't like evil!
Stallman's partial successes are great. So long as he never achieves total success.
"If it where BSD, you'd have something like OS X, where one company would make a locked down version, and no one else would be able to make their own version, and contributing your code in a community would not be viable, because you'd only help your competition, who'd be under no obligation to help you back."
Little problem - the bits in OS X that haven't been contributed back are the bits Apple (or NeXt) wrote themselves, like Aqua (which is probably what you're thinking of). The improvements to open source code have been returned to the community - stuff in BSD, WebKit, LLVM, for example.
You're not. Once it's fast enough to stream TV and talk on VOIP at the same time I'm not really sure why it needs to be faster. Full high def movies download in about ten minutes. Maybe when someone figures out how to do immersive VR properly we'll all want faster connections but right now 1 Gbps seems kind of pointless.
The ones that make most of their money from me paying them, rather than the one that makes most of it's money selling me to others.
The guy makes a little mistake that really doesn't affect his point much and you start throwing around things like "quasi-intellectualism." Overreact much? And by the way, you misspelled "weak."
Are you suggesting we're going to invent something better than fibre in the near future? You know the wires that ISDN ran over are pretty much the same ones we're still using today, right?
Maybe he's running Linux in Fusion. With Wine even.
Clearly installing cameras in everyone's houses is exactly the same thing as monitoring highways built by the public to make sure people exercising a privilege on those highways aren't posing a danger to that public.
Not to mention what your body will show.
I was in a low speed accident once and you just had to wait a day to see the seatbelt bruise.
"A complete end to "right turn on red"."
In my experience, places where you can't turn right on a red are more dangerous. Drivers turning right on red lights stop, look, then turn. Drivers who have to wait hit the gas on a green and run over pedestrians. Frequently they only see the green light because they've been texting during the red.
Good. Driving around without valid insurance is worse than stealing cars.
Americans (well, a few of them) take vacations to London and Paris and do it in person while calling the waiter "garçon."
You missed the part where he's a public official driving a public vehicle. It's hard to think of a worse example for the article poster's point.
As I stated elsewhere in the thread, I was incorrectly attributing a quote from one of his followers to him. I stand by the rest of my post however, and also point you to attacks Stallman has made on Linus Torvalds for endorsing open source and open source licenses:
http://spoken-tutorial.org/node/957
"Proprietary software is digital colonization, unjust and evil. Our goal is therefore to eliminate proprietary software. We cannot eliminate it this year, but what we can and must do now is refuse to legitimize it.
In the same way, the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."
""Giving people the power to make choices about free software or not' is not the right way to think of our goal (see above). Our goal was, and is, to liberate the users from proprietary software."
-- Richard Stallman
Your view of what the GPL does is certainly an understandable one. It's also the way I use the GPL. But Stallman wrote and advocates the GPL as a tool towards achieving a much bigger goal than that. You're right in that I was incorrect in my statement of the point of the GPL. The point of the GPL is to aid in attacking proprietary software and ultimately abolishing it. Fortunately it hasn't been entirely effective.
Certainly, if you believe that offering proprietary software for sale (not requiring people buy it, just offering it) is equivalent to slavery, then Stallman's goals are virtuous and right. Stallman says he believes this. The man is certainly remarkably consistent and faithful to his own axioms.
If, on the other hand, you believe there's a difference between selling people and selling software, then he's an extremist.
Ah, very nice job cutting my post up into little quotes you could reply to in isolation (and ignoring the rest). Unfortunately, it's easy to see the REAL post.
I'm not ranting. My post was coherent and, as I said, verifiable. Yours was insulting and that's about it. Unfortunately that seems to be all too common among Stallman's supporters. I think the man himself is too extreme, but the followers he attracts are often completely ridiculous. Much like a lot of religions actually.
I incorrectly remembered something one of his followers said as a Stallman quote. It was not a lie, it was a mistake.
Stallman has stated that that BSD license "is not evil" but he has also implied that using open source and non-current GPL licenses is harmful to freedom. See for example his comments about Linus and his choice of license:
http://spoken-tutorial.org/node/957