That's all well and good, and I can see the point behind it. But then there is the tragedy of the commons. For example, if there is a river that runs through my property, I don't have the right to dam it up and deny people downstream the use of that river, because that river is a common, shared resource.
You're missing the distinction - if I dam a river that is partly on my property and partly on your property, I've used my property such that I've damaged your property. In other words, I've deprived you of use of something that you have a legitimate claim to.
However, even if you have a right to use of the river when it runs through your property, that still doesn't give you the right to come over and make use of the portion of the river that resides on my property. If someone owns as piece of beach-front property, it's still private property. You don't have a right to use it simply because it's adjacent to a commons.
Similarly, any wealth I acquire didn't come from a commons, it came from an exchange of my labors with other individuals and organizations for money. My labor, unlike a river, is not a commons. I didn't acquire my wealth by depriving you of it. You won't be any richer if I go broke. Therefore, acquisition of wealth is not analgious to use of a river.
Look at copyright: Copyright is (supposed to) expire, because there is no such thing as an idea in a vacuum. The idea came from the combined experiences and environment provided by society. Giving up exclusive control of a creation after a certain amount of time is how we pay back society.
No, giving up exclusive control is how we pay back "society" for granting us a temporary monopoly on that work, which was given to us in exchange for making that work public in the first place.
I'll point out that the root of word "patent" is "to make public". Before there were patents, inventions were protected by keeping their workings a trade secret. That is why nobody knows how to reproduce a Stradivarius violin. The idea of a patent was to grant a limited monopoly on an invention in return for making the process of it's creation public. If patent had been available to Stradivarius, we would know the process he used to make violins.
The problem with Libertarianism is that it assumes we all exist in a vacuum. "It's my money, and society has no right to it unless I give it." If that's your philosophy, then you have no rights to the benefit of society. Note that I said society, not government.
That's fine with me, because I have no dealings with "society" as an aggregate in the first place. I have dealings with my employer, who gives me money in exchange for my labor. I have dealings with my grocer, he gives me food in exchange for money. I have dealings with my friends, they give me their companionship in exchange for my own. But dealings with the majority of the 280 million people who live in this country? Nope. I deal with very, very few of them.
Any benefit I derive from society, is derived through mutual exchange with specific individuals who compose it.
And that's all "society" is: an aggregate of mutual relationships between individuals. It isn't a discrete entity like a football team.
If New City fell off of the face of the earth, I doubt the Amish would even notice. Nor would most New Yorkers notice if the Amish fell of the face of the earth. They have few points of contact.
The concept of "society" when considering a political entity, such as the United States, is largely meaningless. Most of us have little to do with the population as a whole.
War may have been a catalyst, but what brought an end to the great depression was the New Deal.
Then you might want to explain why we were still in a depression up until the war when most of Europe, who weren't beneficiaries of the New Deal, had already recovered from it.
Without this "goverment-sponsored theft", I wouldn't be making $70K right now and contributing $20K per year to Uncle Sam... I might even be on welfare...
That's fine for you and Uncle Sam. However, as one of the people who was forced to pay taxes to provide that education that allows you to make $70k a year, I'd like to know when I'm going to get my chunk of that $20k a year back for my "investment"?
Bank robbery? Try a loan. The government is 'borrowing' money to you with the expectation that you will 'pay them back' after you graduate. They give you $40000 and you give them $10000 a year for fourty years. I'd say the terms are pretty good, wouldn't you?
And where do you think the government gets the money to "borrow" to them? And when do the people who were forced to make this "loan" get their money back?
I don't recollect ever getting any of the money I "loaned" out back.
I know it's fashionable these days to claim to be a libertarian of one stripe or another, but the fundamental philosophy of libertarianism -- "greed is the ultimate good" -- is to share a large part of the blame here.
Then you apparently know nothing of libertarianism. The most fundimental premise of libertarianism is the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle). The NAP is the premise that no individual may justly initiate force against another individual.
actually there was a PPC port of NT years ago. It was dropped beacause...the answer is no. No one will switch:-)
Well, it didn't help that there was a dearth of commodity PPC hardware to run it on. I think there was one PPC Thinkpad that cost an ungodly sum of money, and no PPC desktop systems (other than RS6000's).
PPC NT was primarily a server product. As far as desktops went, there wasn't exactly a level playing field for comparison
As much as our Constitution was designed around States' rights, that all went out in 1865. Sorry.
Not quite. You're confusing the attempt to secede on the part of several states with the ability of 2/3 of the states to ratify a Constitutional amendment disolving the federal government.
The right of secession may be on shaky ground. But the right of the required number of states to ratify a Constitutional amendment isn't. They still have that authority, and no mistake about it.
Yes, we should allow anyone and their SuperSmallAndTrivial Party to show up at the debates and speak!
You don't have to necessarily let "anyone" into the debates.
But anyone that's on enough state ballots that they could theoreticly be elected is certainly a legitimate candidate, and should therefore be allowed to participate.
Oh, you want to go back to 100 years ago? I hope you enjoy your 60 hour work week, slave labor conditions, goods produced by companies with monopolies that cost ungodly amounts, corporate scamming that makes Enron look like a child's game, pathetic literacy rates, etc.
That sure sounds awful!
Now, let's go back to *200* years ago, to the pre-industrial era where you had a minimal chance of even surviving into adulthood.
It's all very well to compare the present to 100 years ago and say how much better off you are. But try a more honest evaluation - compare 100 years ago to 200 years ago, and you can see what a drastic improvement 100 years ago really was to what came before it.
It's all very well to compare an iPod favorably to a Victrola. But a Victrola was still an improvement over what people had before that. Which was nothing.
So a CEO who is facing going in the red won't, say, "cook the books," decrease QA spending while shareholders are happy that they're now seeing profits, glossing over the decrease? Everything is rosey when you are making money. I think you underestimate the power of greed and its ability to cloud judgement.
Yeah, it's a good thing we have government to prevent that sort of thing now. Else we might wind up with another Enron.
He says people are ready for radical change. If that is the fact why doesn't his party get > 1% in the general election?
Well, for a start, he didn't say people are ready for radical change. He said, "my election would prove that America is ready for radical solutions", indicating that his election would be a litmus test of the premise, not that it was a foregone conclusion.
Did you ever think that it's indicative of a real problem when the poor make up that large a voting block?
Not really. I think it's more indicitive of the fact that people will try to get something for nothing.
"Poor" is a relative term. I'll point out that, in this country, the poor aren't exactly starving to death. In fact, of all demographics, the poor have the greatest incidence of obesity.
Easy solution: Pay people a living wage.
I'm not even going to get into the economic reasons why minimum wage laws are a bad idea, but I will point out that everyone has the right to accept or reject a job offer if they don't like wage. If you can't find someone to pay you what you think you're worth, that's a good sign you're not worth what you think. As a software engineer, when was the last time someone even thought about offering you a minimum wage? They don't, because your skills justify significantly more than that.
Require that employers provide health insurance or (God forbid) that the government do it.
Why should that be the employer's responsibility? Dude, an employer is someone that gives you a mutually agreed upon compensation for providing an agreed upon service. They aren't your nanny. They only pay you for providing a service, as long as it's mutually beneficial. They didn't agree to adopt you.
Penalize companies that lay off American workers.
Why?
Taxes aren't punishment. They are the way that we fund our government. Not everything which affects you in a negative way is a "punishment."
Okay, I'll refrain from calling it a "punishment". But in this case, it's certainly a penalty. You're proposing to make Party A pay a penalty for Party B's decisions and behavior. Personally, I think everybody should bear the responsibility for their own decisions and behavior. And, yes, I understand that not all circumstances are under the control of the individual. But that in itself is a fact an individual needs to take into account before they act.
So if one of the parents makes the "mistake" of contracting cancer, losing their job, and draining the family's resources, the kid should become a ward of the state?
As I've said before, those things are an unalienable part of the human condition. Everybody is subject to those possibilities, and you ought to take them into account before assuming responsibilites.
I'm willing to bet that a lot more welfare recipients would get jobs if that didn't mean the loss of health insurance and a lower income. If they take a job at Walmart, they lose the insurance and take home a lower paycheck.
A lot more welfare recipients would get jobs if welfare wasn't an available option. A fact that's been bourne out by the results of Clinton's welfare reform.
When we have capable, skilled and hard-working Americans being laid off and their jobs being handed over to foreign workers, yes, I do think that's treasonous. When there's no one in this country that can do the job, then hand it to an overseas worker, but Americans should get the first crack at the jobs. It's shameful when American workers who have helped build up huge, profitable companies like Dell Computers suddenly find themselves out of work and their job shipped overseas.
So you want to burden employers with minimum wages, taxes, regulations, labor unions, force them to provide health care, etc., and then you're surprised when they decide you're more of a pain in the ass to deal with than you're worth, and ship your job overseas?
I'm not. If I were an employer, I'd leave, too. I think it's the smartest thing they've done in a long time. In fact, I'd like to see them all leave, and take out a full page ad in the New York Times:
Dear Entitled,
It has come to our attention that you have now decided that you have a "right" to a job, health care, food, housing, to demand to be paid more than you're worth,
Thank goodness MS does copy Mac now and then. Old guys like me who remember early versions Windows (I think up to v.3.0), will remember an odd system of cut copy and paste commands with the insert, delete, shift and control keys that few could keep straight. They got tired of the complaints and switched to the Mac system of X, C and V where C was copy and the V was like the editors markup to insert something where the 'arrow' was. It was of course arbitrary too, but most people with early GUI experience had used a Mac.
I think in at least a few cases, Apple should return the favor. It would help out a lot if Apple would make a concession to the fact that most people trying out their machines for the first time probably have Windows PC's as their frame of reference. A few small concessions, such as a multi-button mouse and conventional key placements on the keyboard would go a long way in making a Mac easier to use for potential Windows refugees, without really losing the flavor of the Mac experience.
It might be argued that the Mac method of doing things is easier and more intuitive, but that's a little like arguing that Esperanto is easier than English. It might be true, technically, but all the same, there would be little benefit for me to drop English in favor of Esperanto. English is what I'm familiar with, English is commonly spoken in the circles I hang out in, if I want to post something to Slashdot, English is the common language used to communicate here. There would be little use posting to Slashdot in Esperanto, "easier" or not. Likewise with a Mac - you can argue all day that human interface research proves that a one-button mouse is easier to use, but that's of little use to me when I'm confronted with a computer that doesn't interact with me in a manner in which I've become accustomed over the last 20 years or so. It wouldn't hurt Apple to recognize Windows is the lingua franca of interface design, and adopt some of it's more common conventions.
Mac's have a lot of cool features, a UNIX based OS with a friendly GUI, a RISC processor, and great hardware. But somehow the whole doesn't pan out to equal the some of it's parts. I still find Mac's awkward to use, mostly because Apple has chosen to ignore the conventions I've become accustomed to though years of using Windows and UNIX machines.
It may well be true that if you put an inexperienced user in front of a Mac, he'll find it easier to learn than a Windows box. The problem with that idea is that there aren't really that many inexperienced users anymore. Most people have at least rudimentery computer skills these days, and the convention they've usually learned is Windows. I like Apple's stuff, but I get the feeling they go out of their way to do things differently just for the sake of being different, and that can be really annoying.
It would cause lawsuits with MS patents. That is the problem. MS is a large corporation with many lawyers. Most GPL authors are not, so MS would end up winning by default because the Free author would not have the capability to defend themselves.
Again, I thought we were discussing what would happen if Linux were re-licensed under BSD. I fail to see how a GPL license protects against bogus patent suits anymore than a BSD license. As far as I know, developers that release their code under the GPL aren't able to afford any better lawyers than those who release their code under a BSD license.
This could easily result in Linux being so burdened with lawsuits that no one would want to distribute it. Look at the SCO mess now, and just imagine if SCO actually had $50 billion, instead of $50 million, and imagine if they actually OWNED some patents and copyrights.
Exactly how would the situation with SCO be any different if Linux were licensed under BSD rather than GPL? Neither license grants immunity for appropriating intellectual property or contract violations, which are the issues at stake in the SCO suits. A violation of a patent is a violation of a patent, regardless of what license the results are released under.
Cygwin lets you do that now, and has for several years. Run Xwindows, perl, all the utilities (grep, gawk, bash, etc) and even run daemons. And yes, its released under the GNU/GPL.
Thank you, I've been using Cygwin for years. While it's certainly useful for some functions, I'd point out that it's quite the resource hog, and it's hard to ignore that the experience isn't quite as smooth as it would be if the capabilities were built in to the base OS. Also, Cygwin only addresses userland utilities. It certainly doesn't add any kind of Linux functionality to the Windows kernel.
Market position and monopoly play a more important role here. Microsoft would happily take Linux and then patent all competing distros out of existence.
They could only patent their own proprietary extensions. Of course, other distro vendors can do the same thing. None of which has any effect on the code base as currently available. If Microsoft patents their own refinements, so what?
It would be a bad thing because it is completely against the license that all the code was developed and distributed under.
I thought we discussing what might happen if Linux was relicensed under the BSD license. If that were to happen, then obviously it would no longer be against the license.
But for your larger point, it won't happen because MS can't comply with the terms of distribution for Linux. It's nice that your life would be made simpler - things are often simple when there is no consumer choice - but until Windows is made free software, it just can't happen.
I fail to see how Microsoft using Linux code in Windows would deny me the choice of running "pure" Linux instead, if that's what I wanted to do.
However, since they can't use Linux code, I'll point out I am denied the choice of purchasing an operating system that has the capabilities of both Windows and Linux.
If you just want convenience, and don't care about freedom, then buy a Mac.
Well, I've already got a Mac, among several other types of machines. I'll point out that the basis of OS X is, in fact, a BSD derivative, and I don't see how the BSD community is any worse off for the fact. In fact, I'd say they're somewhat better off, because Apple has extended the user base and the potential developer community for BSD far, far beyond what it had been previous to their use of it. I expect a Microsoft branded Linux would do the same thing for Linux. And the original Linux code wouldn't be a whit less free for it.
What I meant was that if Linux switched to the BSD license, Microsoft could release their own proprietary version of Linux. Under the BSD license, such a release would not have to be open at all.
I still don't see a problem. The original code would still be free. Just because Microsoft releases a proprietary version of a free OS doesn't mean anyone is obligated to use it. Anyway, that's essentially what Apple did with BSD, built a proprietary OS on top of an open source infrastructure. In the main, I'd say both Apple and BSD benefited from the arrangement. And if you don't like Apple's extensions, generic BSD is still available.
They already did that with the TCP stack from what I understand. They incorporated the BSD stack in their code and their use of it is not open at all.
So they did, and they were perfectly entitled to. So what damage accrued to BSD or TCP users as a consequence?
By switching to the BSD license, Microsoft could release their own closed and proprietary version of Linux. For example, they could use the Linux code to enhance Windows and make it able to run any and all Linux programs available.
And why would that be a bad thing? It would make my life a lot simpler, that's for sure!
..what this probably just means is that they will be starting to make machines with powerpc cpu and selling them with their os(or selling some ibm made hardware with their own os, knowing fully what hardware it will be running on).
That could be. For many years, IBM was a Sun re-seller (don't know if they still are). There's no reason that deal couldn't work both ways.
Just because they hate each other, doesn't mean they can't have a mutually beneficial partnership.
I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.
This inclines me to believe that if Sun is planning on porting Solaris to Power, they plan on building their own servers based on it, or at least collaborating with a third party who will. If they were planning to support IBM's hardware, it certainly wouldn't be any fly in IBM's ointment, since it would just be one more option IBM could offer on a partitionable server like a P670/P690. The customer would be able to run Solaris, AIX and Linux (and OS/400 in the next iteration) in their own partitions on the same frame. This certainly doesn't do anything to hurt IBM, it just helps them migrate customers off of Sun's equipment on to theirs. The only way this makes sense is if Sun is planning to use Power as the basis for some of their own servers. Otherwise, what's the advantage to Sun? They make their money as a hardware vendor. The revenue from Solaris itself is negligable.
This is pretty unlikely, as I would see Sun adopting Opteron before anything from IBM. More likely is they are either trying to become as platform-neutral as Linux or they are trying to be a thorn in IBM's side, somehow.
Power has the advantage of being an open architecture, as opposed to Opteron. If Sun were planning to do customized implementations of a processor for their hardware, Power would be the logical choice. They don't have the option of extending Optreron.
My experience has been pretty much like the author's. I initially used KDE from it's inception, and found Gnome to be a cluttered mess. About a year ago, though, I gave it another try, and found it had improved a good deal, and I've been using it ever since.
Personaly, I've come to appreciate simple. Maybe it's just a function of old age and crankiness, but I really don't take much of an interest in tweaking my desktop to death any more. Pretty much my only interest in a desktop is an orderly way to click an icon and start an application, a decent implementation of cut and paste and drag and drop, and reasonable window management. Gnome has my needs pretty well covered.
Also, I have to agree with the author's point that while Gnome has become a more coherent desktop, KDE seems to have lost it's coherency. I can't exactly put my finger on it, perhaps it's partly a function of being overwhelmed with options, but I don't think that entirely explains it. Somehow, it lacks the feel of "togetherness" it originally had. It's basic infrastructure is still great, though, and I expect this is just a temporary slump. Both the KDE and Gnome projects seem to go through phases where they lose their focus, but usually correct themselves after getting complaints from their user communities. I'm still looking forward to checking out the next iteration of KDE. Perhaps it will be interesting enough to make me switch back. I suppose I'll continue switching between the two of them as they leapfrog each other. One nice thing about having 2 competing desktops - they keep each other honest.
...from their failure to license the Mac technology. This time around, their going to license their iPod technology to every Tom, Dick and Harry and establish it as an industry standard.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all well and good, and I can see the point behind it. But then there is the tragedy of the commons. For example, if there is a river that runs through my property, I don't have the right to dam it up and deny people downstream the use of that river, because that river is a common, shared resource.
You're missing the distinction - if I dam a river that is partly on my property and partly on your property, I've used my property such that I've damaged your property. In other words, I've deprived you of use of something that you have a legitimate claim to.
However, even if you have a right to use of the river when it runs through your property, that still doesn't give you the right to come over and make use of the portion of the river that resides on my property. If someone owns as piece of beach-front property, it's still private property. You don't have a right to use it simply because it's adjacent to a commons.
Similarly, any wealth I acquire didn't come from a commons, it came from an exchange of my labors with other individuals and organizations for money. My labor, unlike a river, is not a commons. I didn't acquire my wealth by depriving you of it. You won't be any richer if I go broke. Therefore, acquisition of wealth is not analgious to use of a river.
Look at copyright: Copyright is (supposed to) expire, because there is no such thing as an idea in a vacuum. The idea came from the combined experiences and environment provided by society. Giving up exclusive control of a creation after a certain amount of time is how we pay back society.
No, giving up exclusive control is how we pay back "society" for granting us a temporary monopoly on that work, which was given to us in exchange for making that work public in the first place.
I'll point out that the root of word "patent" is "to make public". Before there were patents, inventions were protected by keeping their workings a trade secret. That is why nobody knows how to reproduce a Stradivarius violin. The idea of a patent was to grant a limited monopoly on an invention in return for making the process of it's creation public. If patent had been available to Stradivarius, we would know the process he used to make violins.
The problem with Libertarianism is that it assumes we all exist in a vacuum. "It's my money, and society has no right to it unless I give it." If that's your philosophy, then you have no rights to the benefit of society. Note that I said society, not government.
That's fine with me, because I have no dealings with "society" as an aggregate in the first place. I have dealings with my employer, who gives me money in exchange for my labor. I have dealings with my grocer, he gives me food in exchange for money. I have dealings with my friends, they give me their companionship in exchange for my own. But dealings with the majority of the 280 million people who live in this country? Nope. I deal with very, very few of them.
Any benefit I derive from society, is derived through mutual exchange with specific individuals who compose it.
And that's all "society" is: an aggregate of mutual relationships between individuals. It isn't a discrete entity like a football team.
If New City fell off of the face of the earth, I doubt the Amish would even notice. Nor would most New Yorkers notice if the Amish fell of the face of the earth. They have few points of contact.
The concept of "society" when considering a political entity, such as the United States, is largely meaningless. Most of us have little to do with the population as a whole.
War may have been a catalyst, but what brought an end to the great depression was the New Deal.
Then you might want to explain why we were still in a depression up until the war when most of Europe, who weren't beneficiaries of the New Deal, had already recovered from it.
Without this "goverment-sponsored theft", I wouldn't be making $70K right now and contributing $20K per year to Uncle Sam... I might even be on welfare...
That's fine for you and Uncle Sam. However, as one of the people who was forced to pay taxes to provide that education that allows you to make $70k a year, I'd like to know when I'm going to get my chunk of that $20k a year back for my "investment"?
Bank robbery? Try a loan. The government is 'borrowing' money to you with the expectation that you will 'pay them back' after you graduate. They give you $40000 and you give them $10000 a year for fourty years. I'd say the terms are pretty good, wouldn't you?
And where do you think the government gets the money to "borrow" to them? And when do the people who were forced to make this "loan" get their money back?
I don't recollect ever getting any of the money I "loaned" out back.
I know it's fashionable these days to claim to be a libertarian of one stripe or another, but the fundamental philosophy of libertarianism -- "greed is the ultimate good" -- is to share a large part of the blame here.
Then you apparently know nothing of libertarianism. The most fundimental premise of libertarianism is the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle). The NAP is the premise that no individual may justly initiate force against another individual.
actually there was a PPC port of NT years ago. It was dropped beacause...the answer is no. No one will switch :-)
Well, it didn't help that there was a dearth of commodity PPC hardware to run it on. I think there was one PPC Thinkpad that cost an ungodly sum of money, and no PPC desktop systems (other than RS6000's).
PPC NT was primarily a server product. As far as desktops went, there wasn't exactly a level playing field for comparison
As much as our Constitution was designed around States' rights, that all went out in 1865. Sorry.
Not quite. You're confusing the attempt to secede on the part of several states with the ability of 2/3 of the states to ratify a Constitutional amendment disolving the federal government.
The right of secession may be on shaky ground. But the right of the required number of states to ratify a Constitutional amendment isn't. They still have that authority, and no mistake about it.
But I genuinely believe that having 50 sets of laws and legislatures and whatever else is a bad idea, when it's governing one country.
Show me where our Constitution uses the word "country" or "nation". It establishes no such thing. It describes a "union".
The states are sovereigns. It is the state governments that authorized the creation of the federal government, not the other way around.
In fact, the states have the power to disolve the federal government, the federal government has no such reciprical power over the state governments.
Yes, we should allow anyone and their SuperSmallAndTrivial Party to show up at the debates and speak!
You don't have to necessarily let "anyone" into the debates.
But anyone that's on enough state ballots that they could theoreticly be elected is certainly a legitimate candidate, and should therefore be allowed to participate.
Oh, you want to go back to 100 years ago? I hope you enjoy your 60 hour work week, slave labor conditions, goods produced by companies with monopolies that cost ungodly amounts, corporate scamming that makes Enron look like a child's game, pathetic literacy rates, etc.
That sure sounds awful!
Now, let's go back to *200* years ago, to the pre-industrial era where you had a minimal chance of even surviving into adulthood.
It's all very well to compare the present to 100 years ago and say how much better off you are. But try a more honest evaluation - compare 100 years ago to 200 years ago, and you can see what a drastic improvement 100 years ago really was to what came before it.
It's all very well to compare an iPod favorably to a Victrola. But a Victrola was still an improvement over what people had before that. Which was nothing.
So a CEO who is facing going in the red won't, say, "cook the books," decrease QA spending while shareholders are happy that they're now seeing profits, glossing over the decrease? Everything is rosey when you are making money. I think you underestimate the power of greed and its ability to cloud judgement.
Yeah, it's a good thing we have government to prevent that sort of thing now. Else we might wind up with another Enron.
Oh, wait....
He says people are ready for radical change. If that is the fact why doesn't his party get > 1% in the general election?
Well, for a start, he didn't say people are ready for radical change. He said, "my election would prove that America is ready for radical solutions", indicating that his election would be a litmus test of the premise, not that it was a foregone conclusion.
Not really. I think it's more indicitive of the fact that people will try to get something for nothing.
"Poor" is a relative term. I'll point out that, in this country, the poor aren't exactly starving to death. In fact, of all demographics, the poor have the greatest incidence of obesity.
Easy solution: Pay people a living wage.
I'm not even going to get into the economic reasons why minimum wage laws are a bad idea, but I will point out that everyone has the right to accept or reject a job offer if they don't like wage. If you can't find someone to pay you what you think you're worth, that's a good sign you're not worth what you think. As a software engineer, when was the last time someone even thought about offering you a minimum wage? They don't, because your skills justify significantly more than that.
Require that employers provide health insurance or (God forbid) that the government do it.
Why should that be the employer's responsibility? Dude, an employer is someone that gives you a mutually agreed upon compensation for providing an agreed upon service. They aren't your nanny. They only pay you for providing a service, as long as it's mutually beneficial. They didn't agree to adopt you.
Penalize companies that lay off American workers.
Why?
Taxes aren't punishment. They are the way that we fund our government. Not everything which affects you in a negative way is a "punishment."
Okay, I'll refrain from calling it a "punishment". But in this case, it's certainly a penalty. You're proposing to make Party A pay a penalty for Party B's decisions and behavior. Personally, I think everybody should bear the responsibility for their own decisions and behavior. And, yes, I understand that not all circumstances are under the control of the individual. But that in itself is a fact an individual needs to take into account before they act.
So if one of the parents makes the "mistake" of contracting cancer, losing their job, and draining the family's resources, the kid should become a ward of the state?
As I've said before, those things are an unalienable part of the human condition. Everybody is subject to those possibilities, and you ought to take them into account before assuming responsibilites.
I'm willing to bet that a lot more welfare recipients would get jobs if that didn't mean the loss of health insurance and a lower income. If they take a job at Walmart, they lose the insurance and take home a lower paycheck.
A lot more welfare recipients would get jobs if welfare wasn't an available option. A fact that's been bourne out by the results of Clinton's welfare reform.
When we have capable, skilled and hard-working Americans being laid off and their jobs being handed over to foreign workers, yes, I do think that's treasonous. When there's no one in this country that can do the job, then hand it to an overseas worker, but Americans should get the first crack at the jobs. It's shameful when American workers who have helped build up huge, profitable companies like Dell Computers suddenly find themselves out of work and their job shipped overseas.
So you want to burden employers with minimum wages, taxes, regulations, labor unions, force them to provide health care, etc., and then you're surprised when they decide you're more of a pain in the ass to deal with than you're worth, and ship your job overseas?
I'm not. If I were an employer, I'd leave, too. I think it's the smartest thing they've done in a long time. In fact, I'd like to see them all leave, and take out a full page ad in the New York Times:
Thank goodness MS does copy Mac now and then. Old guys like me who remember early versions Windows (I think up to v.3.0), will remember an odd system of cut copy and paste commands with the insert, delete, shift and control keys that few could keep straight. They got tired of the complaints and switched to the Mac system of X, C and V where C was copy and the V was like the editors markup to insert something where the 'arrow' was. It was of course arbitrary too, but most people with early GUI experience had used a Mac.
I think in at least a few cases, Apple should return the favor. It would help out a lot if Apple would make a concession to the fact that most people trying out their machines for the first time probably have Windows PC's as their frame of reference. A few small concessions, such as a multi-button mouse and conventional key placements on the keyboard would go a long way in making a Mac easier to use for potential Windows refugees, without really losing the flavor of the Mac experience.
It might be argued that the Mac method of doing things is easier and more intuitive, but that's a little like arguing that Esperanto is easier than English. It might be true, technically, but all the same, there would be little benefit for me to drop English in favor of Esperanto. English is what I'm familiar with, English is commonly spoken in the circles I hang out in, if I want to post something to Slashdot, English is the common language used to communicate here. There would be little use posting to Slashdot in Esperanto, "easier" or not. Likewise with a Mac - you can argue all day that human interface research proves that a one-button mouse is easier to use, but that's of little use to me when I'm confronted with a computer that doesn't interact with me in a manner in which I've become accustomed over the last 20 years or so. It wouldn't hurt Apple to recognize Windows is the lingua franca of interface design, and adopt some of it's more common conventions.
Mac's have a lot of cool features, a UNIX based OS with a friendly GUI, a RISC processor, and great hardware. But somehow the whole doesn't pan out to equal the some of it's parts. I still find Mac's awkward to use, mostly because Apple has chosen to ignore the conventions I've become accustomed to though years of using Windows and UNIX machines.
It may well be true that if you put an inexperienced user in front of a Mac, he'll find it easier to learn than a Windows box. The problem with that idea is that there aren't really that many inexperienced users anymore. Most people have at least rudimentery computer skills these days, and the convention they've usually learned is Windows. I like Apple's stuff, but I get the feeling they go out of their way to do things differently just for the sake of being different, and that can be really annoying.
It would cause lawsuits with MS patents. That is the problem. MS is a large corporation with many lawyers. Most GPL authors are not, so MS would end up winning by default because the Free author would not have the capability to defend themselves.
Again, I thought we were discussing what would happen if Linux were re-licensed under BSD. I fail to see how a GPL license protects against bogus patent suits anymore than a BSD license. As far as I know, developers that release their code under the GPL aren't able to afford any better lawyers than those who release their code under a BSD license.
This could easily result in Linux being so burdened with lawsuits that no one would want to distribute it. Look at the SCO mess now, and just imagine if SCO actually had $50 billion, instead of $50 million, and imagine if they actually OWNED some patents and copyrights.
Exactly how would the situation with SCO be any different if Linux were licensed under BSD rather than GPL? Neither license grants immunity for appropriating intellectual property or contract violations, which are the issues at stake in the SCO suits. A violation of a patent is a violation of a patent, regardless of what license the results are released under.
Cygwin lets you do that now, and has for several years. Run Xwindows, perl, all the utilities (grep, gawk, bash, etc) and even run daemons. And yes, its released under the GNU/GPL.
Thank you, I've been using Cygwin for years. While it's certainly useful for some functions, I'd point out that it's quite the resource hog, and it's hard to ignore that the experience isn't quite as smooth as it would be if the capabilities were built in to the base OS. Also, Cygwin only addresses userland utilities. It certainly doesn't add any kind of Linux functionality to the Windows kernel.
Market position and monopoly play a more important role here. Microsoft would happily take Linux and then patent all competing distros out of existence.
They could only patent their own proprietary extensions. Of course, other distro vendors can do the same thing. None of which has any effect on the code base as currently available. If Microsoft patents their own refinements, so what?
It would be a bad thing because it is completely against the license that all the code was developed and distributed under.
I thought we discussing what might happen if Linux was relicensed under the BSD license. If that were to happen, then obviously it would no longer be against the license.
But for your larger point, it won't happen because MS can't comply with the terms of distribution for Linux. It's nice that your life would be made simpler - things are often simple when there is no consumer choice - but until Windows is made free software, it just can't happen.
I fail to see how Microsoft using Linux code in Windows would deny me the choice of running "pure" Linux instead, if that's what I wanted to do.
However, since they can't use Linux code, I'll point out I am denied the choice of purchasing an operating system that has the capabilities of both Windows and Linux.
If you just want convenience, and don't care about freedom, then buy a Mac.
Well, I've already got a Mac, among several other types of machines. I'll point out that the basis of OS X is, in fact, a BSD derivative, and I don't see how the BSD community is any worse off for the fact. In fact, I'd say they're somewhat better off, because Apple has extended the user base and the potential developer community for BSD far, far beyond what it had been previous to their use of it. I expect a Microsoft branded Linux would do the same thing for Linux. And the original Linux code wouldn't be a whit less free for it.
What I meant was that if Linux switched to the BSD license, Microsoft could release their own proprietary version of Linux. Under the BSD license, such a release would not have to be open at all.
I still don't see a problem. The original code would still be free. Just because Microsoft releases a proprietary version of a free OS doesn't mean anyone is obligated to use it. Anyway, that's essentially what Apple did with BSD, built a proprietary OS on top of an open source infrastructure. In the main, I'd say both Apple and BSD benefited from the arrangement. And if you don't like Apple's extensions, generic BSD is still available.
They already did that with the TCP stack from what I understand. They incorporated the BSD stack in their code and their use of it is not open at all.
So they did, and they were perfectly entitled to. So what damage accrued to BSD or TCP users as a consequence?
By switching to the BSD license, Microsoft could release their own closed and proprietary version of Linux. For example, they could use the Linux code to enhance Windows and make it able to run any and all Linux programs available.
And why would that be a bad thing? It would make my life a lot simpler, that's for sure!
read some of Schwartz's blog entries. Sun hates IBM.
Which means what? Until recently, they hated Microsoft even worse.
Desperation makes for strange bedfellows.
That could be. For many years, IBM was a Sun re-seller (don't know if they still are). There's no reason that deal couldn't work both ways.
Just because they hate each other, doesn't mean they can't have a mutually beneficial partnership.
I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.
This inclines me to believe that if Sun is planning on porting Solaris to Power, they plan on building their own servers based on it, or at least collaborating with a third party who will. If they were planning to support IBM's hardware, it certainly wouldn't be any fly in IBM's ointment, since it would just be one more option IBM could offer on a partitionable server like a P670/P690. The customer would be able to run Solaris, AIX and Linux (and OS/400 in the next iteration) in their own partitions on the same frame. This certainly doesn't do anything to hurt IBM, it just helps them migrate customers off of Sun's equipment on to theirs. The only way this makes sense is if Sun is planning to use Power as the basis for some of their own servers. Otherwise, what's the advantage to Sun? They make their money as a hardware vendor. The revenue from Solaris itself is negligable.
This is pretty unlikely, as I would see Sun adopting Opteron before anything from IBM. More likely is they are either trying to become as platform-neutral as Linux or they are trying to be a thorn in IBM's side, somehow.
Power has the advantage of being an open architecture, as opposed to Opteron. If Sun were planning to do customized implementations of a processor for their hardware, Power would be the logical choice. They don't have the option of extending Optreron.
My experience has been pretty much like the author's. I initially used KDE from it's inception, and found Gnome to be a cluttered mess. About a year ago, though, I gave it another try, and found it had improved a good deal, and I've been using it ever since.
Personaly, I've come to appreciate simple. Maybe it's just a function of old age and crankiness, but I really don't take much of an interest in tweaking my desktop to death any more. Pretty much my only interest in a desktop is an orderly way to click an icon and start an application, a decent implementation of cut and paste and drag and drop, and reasonable window management. Gnome has my needs pretty well covered.
Also, I have to agree with the author's point that while Gnome has become a more coherent desktop, KDE seems to have lost it's coherency. I can't exactly put my finger on it, perhaps it's partly a function of being overwhelmed with options, but I don't think that entirely explains it. Somehow, it lacks the feel of "togetherness" it originally had. It's basic infrastructure is still great, though, and I expect this is just a temporary slump. Both the KDE and Gnome projects seem to go through phases where they lose their focus, but usually correct themselves after getting complaints from their user communities. I'm still looking forward to checking out the next iteration of KDE. Perhaps it will be interesting enough to make me switch back. I suppose I'll continue switching between the two of them as they leapfrog each other. One nice thing about having 2 competing desktops - they keep each other honest.
...from their failure to license the Mac technology. This time around, their going to license their iPod technology to every Tom, Dick and Harry and establish it as an industry standard.
Good for them!