From looking at their website, you would be led to believe that all they do is sell hard drives to consumers and set top boxes to cable companies. So, if you refuse to buy external hard drives with the model numbers:
That should allow you to reward them appropriately.
Is there anything else they sell? From reading their presidents statement, they seem to go in and out of the business of making X over and over again and partner up with a series of corporate boyfriends because they don't have the talent to make things in house. Not someone whose institution I'd want to fund...
Incredibly enough, I find the logo to be quite spiffy, and the CDs' artwork rather fine - considering the distro generated in a country where large parts of the population live (and die) in concentration camps
Why is that relevant. Zend has a nice logo, and they created PHP in a country with similar conditions.
To simply say that "nothing non-free can even enter the conversation" is ridiculous. Are your clothes free or open source? Your car? Your house? Your shampoo, your radio, your computer's processor, your keyboard?
Would you invest in developing something that would cost you too much to maintain if it became successful? If you need to scale your application up to thousands of nodes to maintain acceptable service levels, are you still going to be able to afford the licensing fees?
If the answer is no, I wouldn't be able to afford to scale it up because of the licensing fees, even though it's technically feasible, then nothing non-free can even enter the conversation. Even if it was possible to make it work, chances are pretty good that someone else who isn't hampered by the necessity to pay those fees will be able to deliver more for less and drive you out of business.
This is something that just bugs me about the attitude some people have about DRM and piracy. People will take the approach of "this DRM sucks, ergo I'm going to pirate it, instead of paying for it". This isn't a boycott, nor is it voting with your wallet. This is taking the approach that two wrongs make a right, and that pirating the game somehow "punishes" the makers of it for the sin of screwing over legitimate users.
If civilization breaks down, and everyone is scavenging for food, and you come across some guy with a shotgun guarding the only store in town claiming that it is "his property", and you sneak past him and grab some food, is that also two wrongs making a right?
i want the 15 seconds on my life back i spent reading your nonsense.
you have a twisted, fucked up view of the world if you think effort in exchange for payment makes you someones tool. i suspect you'v never worked a day in your life, nor have you ever had anyone working for you.
My work in the medical translations field has brought medicine and understanding of how it works to billions of people around the world. Thousands and thousands of people work from home each day as independent actors in a decentralized team that spans the globe, and they co-ordinate their daily lives with my software. I have improved the quality of your life in such fundamental ways that you will never understand, and you will never know who I am, and I am still a reasonably young man with my greatest work ahead of me.
On the contrary. I consider the very concept of private property to be fundamentally evil.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're willing to own stuff anyway, with some convoluted explanation of how convenience trumps not being evil.
You'd be wrong. I don't own any private property whatsoever. I consider it wrong. I invest my excess wealth in giving gifts to my friends, family and larger community and generating goodwill.
You probably think the fact that I have a bed to sleep on means you caught me in a bullshit lie. That just reveals that you don't understand the difference between private property and personal possessions. Maybe you need to do some reading.
If open source is a bad gift for you, then feel free to drop it. I choose to accept it.
On the contrary. I consider the very concept of private property to be fundamentally evil. To support private property is to think of a pile of plastic and steel as though it were a part of your self, and to think of your fellow man as though he were part of the oncoming storm. I WANT people who think that way to be powerless and helpless to affect the world in even the slightest way. That's why I support giving gifts to everyone EXCEPT the capitalists.
FOSS is not compatible with Capitalism. Capitalism is not offering to perform a service that people could do for themselves. Capitalism is controlling the tools and making people pay a tribute that they might enjoy the privilege of serving themselves.
People who create and release FOSS are dictators. They do not dictate by holding a gun to your head. They dictate in a way that is most insidious and much more difficult to resist. They dictate by giving you gifts that they wish you to use, because the use of those gifts modifies your behavior in ways that they desire. All you can do to fight them is drop the gift on the ground and impoverish yourself in the process.
To make an analogy, if a man has two sons, and he gives one son his plow, and the other his sword, he dictates their fate by his choice of gift.
A man who will work for your money, he is a tool, not a person. He is malleable. He'll do any damned thing you ask. By contrast, trying to do the same thing with someone like Richard Stallman is like trying to bully Gandhi.
Enforcing stupid laws does not make him a bad judge
I wish I was still that naive and unaffected by the world I live in. Stupid laws are the personal responsibility of every member of the society without exception. At the absolute least, they are the result of an entire civilization of "good men who do nothing".
If Google wants to "do no evil", they are going to have to stop working within the laws of every society, and they are going to have to play hardball and shoot first with bullets of truth that topple the careers of hypocrites. It's pretty obvious that they have the capacity. If they decide to play with these people, they're going to end up like Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and they're going to deserve it.
These laws don't exist to protect kids with Autism. They exist to protect people like Berlusconi from the consequences of his actions. So, give everyone the truth, and watch your enemies fall to the angry mob.
I'd say it's time for the US to stop relying on Shock and Awe Terrorism and be a good neighbour for a change, but that wouldn't be true. It's too late for that.
I wasn't really talking about being a consultant. I was talking about being an entrepreneur. If you've got 20 years experience as a miner, you're probably still not going to have the cash to buy modern mining equipment and a mine. If you've got 20 years experience as a programmer, chances are you can afford to set up all the tools you need to get started in a spare bedroom.
The information technology business has a low barrier to entry. Anyone who has experience in IT can buy all the tools needed to solve problems independently. Older people with experience who know what they are doing get sick and tired of being told what to do by morons whose skill set amounts to kissing the ass of investors and dumping on staff. Therefore, there is no reason for experienced IT workers to continue to have a conventional job. The only reason to take a conventional job is if you don't have any skills and need direction, or don't have any tools and can't use the knowledge you have effectively for that reason.
It is not doublethink. I am no less vulnerable to propaganda than anyone else.
Every time someone comes up to me all excited about something and I say to them "Thrill a Bite" in the exact same tone as those old commercials, and the image of that fat dude with the hot sauce pops into my head while some guy is cooking bacon naked or some shit, I think to myself, I cut the cable almost half a decade ago, will this inane shit ever stop polluting my head space? And the answer is, no, it won't. It's no different from any of my other scars.
Ayn Rand in particular fucked me up quite a lot. On the one hand, you can't help but feel compassion for Howard Roarks desire to be a creator. On the other hand, his megalomaniacal insistence that all the world should be available for him to use as raw materials, even the refined creations of other men, yet nothing he has touched should ever be available for others to use as raw materials, but should stand eternal and unchanging as a testament to him for as long as he sees fit, which is his entire life. He is the antithesis of the creator, because what he represents is the end of raw materials for all creators everywhere backed up by force of violence. His desire is not to be "a creator", but to be "the last creator".
It took me years of deconstruction to realize just how vicious and devious that woman was and just how badly it screwed me up reading her work at the age of 14 when I had no experience to pit against her manipulations.
Your position is really quite ironic. You accuse me of cynically exploiting bugs in language to make an emotionally loaded argument. Yet you have attempted to re-define words during this dialogue in an effort to avoid conceding that you were mistaken. You pull out propaganda pieces as examples. I will go out on a limb and presume that you like these particular propaganda pieces. They are definitely very popular in certain regions.
On a personal note, I would be more emotionally moved if you had referred to Thomas Spence's "The Real Rights of Man", or Peter Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread".
Perhaps you are not really engaged in a two way dialogue with me, but your intent is to use slashdot as a one way communication medium, and you are attempting to elicit an emotional response from other people who like these examples so they will not consider my statements too closely. Debates are often like that, aren't they?
OK, if we define propaganda that way, that includes influencing the community towards a position it is in their interest to take using entirely truthful and honest means.
It is intellectually dishonest to try to trick somebody into condemning something by using an emotionally loaded term in an emotionally neutral sense. You should make clear that your version of propaganda includes MLK's "I have a dream" speech, and the surgeon general's report linking cigarettes with cancer. You ought to make it clear that your position is that literally anything that is intended to persuade people is morally reprehensible.
This is not some little intellectual exercise where we pretend for a little while that this is what propaganda means. I did not invent this definition, and I am not being intellectually dishonest. Any communication that occurs across a one way medium and is intended to create a pre-determined modification in the attitudes and actions is propaganda. That is what the word symbolizes.
Technically, I didn't say that all propaganda is morally reprehensible. I said Google are in the business of selling propaganda. However, since you brought it up, I do believe that propaganda is morally reprehensible. My justification for this position is that people who reach conclusions without being critical of the presuppositions that led to that conclusion are insane, a danger to themselves, a danger to others, and in an ongoing state of frustration, internal conflict and suffering. Propaganda is intended to induce and preserve this state of existence, and in my opinion, that makes it worse than murder.
After that display of doublethink, you might want to critically examine your own preconceptions. You throw out some examples of propaganda that in your mind are so obviously "good" to you that, in your mind, they refute my position. A great many people felt the same way about the climate change issue. Except, of course, that they misinformed the entire planet...
You can call anyone a "propaganda machine" if you get to define "propaganda" to suit your case.
You're right. Lets look at the wikipedia entry:
Propaganda
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Propaganda (disambiguation).
Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.
Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels."
--Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996
So, you don't think Google, the worlds largest advertising company, meets this definition? Why?
You guys are chasing a red herring. Everyone knows that google is a propaganda machine. It's the only thing they sell.
If I want to invent a cologne that smells like hippos and spend a bunch of money on a propaganda campaign to make you all think it will get you a promotion and a girlfriend who looks like a supermodel, the folks at google won't tell me that propaganda is evil and they don't do that sort of thing. They will refer me to the sales department.
Of course google are doing propaganda for the US government. Who else would the US government hire?
We should also just get rid of guns because not all bullets are effective.
I've often thought that the common citizenry like ourselves should be bludgeoning in the heads of people who manufacture and sell weapons with rocks when we see them at the mall or out walking their dog. Is that what you mean?
Slashdot Mirror
From looking at their website, you would be led to believe that all they do is sell hard drives to consumers and set top boxes to cable companies. So, if you refuse to buy external hard drives with the model numbers:
HDC-UXW250, HDC-UXW320, HDC-UXW400, HDC-UXW500, HDL-GXW250, HDL-GXW320, HDL-GXW400, HDL-GXW500
That should allow you to reward them appropriately.
Is there anything else they sell? From reading their presidents statement, they seem to go in and out of the business of making X over and over again and partner up with a series of corporate boyfriends because they don't have the talent to make things in house. Not someone whose institution I'd want to fund...
Incredibly enough, I find the logo to be quite spiffy, and the CDs' artwork rather fine - considering the distro generated in a country where large parts of the population live (and die) in concentration camps
Why is that relevant. Zend has a nice logo, and they created PHP in a country with similar conditions.
To simply say that "nothing non-free can even enter the conversation" is ridiculous. Are your clothes free or open source? Your car? Your house? Your shampoo, your radio, your computer's processor, your keyboard?
Would you invest in developing something that would cost you too much to maintain if it became successful? If you need to scale your application up to thousands of nodes to maintain acceptable service levels, are you still going to be able to afford the licensing fees?
If the answer is no, I wouldn't be able to afford to scale it up because of the licensing fees, even though it's technically feasible, then nothing non-free can even enter the conversation. Even if it was possible to make it work, chances are pretty good that someone else who isn't hampered by the necessity to pay those fees will be able to deliver more for less and drive you out of business.
This is something that just bugs me about the attitude some people have about DRM and piracy. People will take the approach of "this DRM sucks, ergo I'm going to pirate it, instead of paying for it". This isn't a boycott, nor is it voting with your wallet. This is taking the approach that two wrongs make a right, and that pirating the game somehow "punishes" the makers of it for the sin of screwing over legitimate users.
If civilization breaks down, and everyone is scavenging for food, and you come across some guy with a shotgun guarding the only store in town claiming that it is "his property", and you sneak past him and grab some food, is that also two wrongs making a right?
i want the 15 seconds on my life back i spent reading your nonsense.
you have a twisted, fucked up view of the world if you think effort in exchange for payment makes you someones tool. i suspect you'v never worked a day in your life, nor have you ever had anyone working for you.
My work in the medical translations field has brought medicine and understanding of how it works to billions of people around the world. Thousands and thousands of people work from home each day as independent actors in a decentralized team that spans the globe, and they co-ordinate their daily lives with my software. I have improved the quality of your life in such fundamental ways that you will never understand, and you will never know who I am, and I am still a reasonably young man with my greatest work ahead of me.
On the contrary. I consider the very concept of private property to be fundamentally evil.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're willing to own stuff anyway, with some convoluted explanation of how convenience trumps not being evil.
You'd be wrong. I don't own any private property whatsoever. I consider it wrong. I invest my excess wealth in giving gifts to my friends, family and larger community and generating goodwill.
You probably think the fact that I have a bed to sleep on means you caught me in a bullshit lie. That just reveals that you don't understand the difference between private property and personal possessions. Maybe you need to do some reading.
Enjoy.
If open source is a bad gift for you, then feel free to drop it. I choose to accept it.
On the contrary. I consider the very concept of private property to be fundamentally evil. To support private property is to think of a pile of plastic and steel as though it were a part of your self, and to think of your fellow man as though he were part of the oncoming storm. I WANT people who think that way to be powerless and helpless to affect the world in even the slightest way. That's why I support giving gifts to everyone EXCEPT the capitalists.
FOSS is not compatible with Capitalism. Capitalism is not offering to perform a service that people could do for themselves. Capitalism is controlling the tools and making people pay a tribute that they might enjoy the privilege of serving themselves.
People who create and release FOSS are dictators. They do not dictate by holding a gun to your head. They dictate in a way that is most insidious and much more difficult to resist. They dictate by giving you gifts that they wish you to use, because the use of those gifts modifies your behavior in ways that they desire. All you can do to fight them is drop the gift on the ground and impoverish yourself in the process.
To make an analogy, if a man has two sons, and he gives one son his plow, and the other his sword, he dictates their fate by his choice of gift.
A man who will work for your money, he is a tool, not a person. He is malleable. He'll do any damned thing you ask. By contrast, trying to do the same thing with someone like Richard Stallman is like trying to bully Gandhi.
1) Sell the stock short
2) Release via bittorrent
3) Profit!
Enforcing stupid laws does not make him a bad judge
I wish I was still that naive and unaffected by the world I live in. Stupid laws are the personal responsibility of every member of the society without exception. At the absolute least, they are the result of an entire civilization of "good men who do nothing".
If Google wants to "do no evil", they are going to have to stop working within the laws of every society, and they are going to have to play hardball and shoot first with bullets of truth that topple the careers of hypocrites. It's pretty obvious that they have the capacity. If they decide to play with these people, they're going to end up like Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and they're going to deserve it.
These laws don't exist to protect kids with Autism. They exist to protect people like Berlusconi from the consequences of his actions. So, give everyone the truth, and watch your enemies fall to the angry mob.
So it'll only take them 30 years to repay the cost, assuming that money has no time value of course. Sounds like a poor investment to me.
Ahh, but being able to tell the power company to fuck off and never come back, now that's priceless!
I'd say it's time for the US to stop relying on Shock and Awe Terrorism and be a good neighbour for a change, but that wouldn't be true. It's too late for that.
I wasn't really talking about being a consultant. I was talking about being an entrepreneur. If you've got 20 years experience as a miner, you're probably still not going to have the cash to buy modern mining equipment and a mine. If you've got 20 years experience as a programmer, chances are you can afford to set up all the tools you need to get started in a spare bedroom.
The information technology business has a low barrier to entry. Anyone who has experience in IT can buy all the tools needed to solve problems independently. Older people with experience who know what they are doing get sick and tired of being told what to do by morons whose skill set amounts to kissing the ass of investors and dumping on staff. Therefore, there is no reason for experienced IT workers to continue to have a conventional job. The only reason to take a conventional job is if you don't have any skills and need direction, or don't have any tools and can't use the knowledge you have effectively for that reason.
"Customer of Size"? Is that like "People of Color"? Has political correctness come so far that you can't even call someone a fatass any more?
You can call them a fatass if you want. However, it's not a good way to get them to give you their money.
That's what you get for delivering your message with other peoples computers instead of on your own. Would it have killed em to run their own server?
It is not doublethink. I am no less vulnerable to propaganda than anyone else.
Every time someone comes up to me all excited about something and I say to them "Thrill a Bite" in the exact same tone as those old commercials, and the image of that fat dude with the hot sauce pops into my head while some guy is cooking bacon naked or some shit, I think to myself, I cut the cable almost half a decade ago, will this inane shit ever stop polluting my head space? And the answer is, no, it won't. It's no different from any of my other scars.
Ayn Rand in particular fucked me up quite a lot. On the one hand, you can't help but feel compassion for Howard Roarks desire to be a creator. On the other hand, his megalomaniacal insistence that all the world should be available for him to use as raw materials, even the refined creations of other men, yet nothing he has touched should ever be available for others to use as raw materials, but should stand eternal and unchanging as a testament to him for as long as he sees fit, which is his entire life. He is the antithesis of the creator, because what he represents is the end of raw materials for all creators everywhere backed up by force of violence. His desire is not to be "a creator", but to be "the last creator".
It took me years of deconstruction to realize just how vicious and devious that woman was and just how badly it screwed me up reading her work at the age of 14 when I had no experience to pit against her manipulations.
Yes, all of them are reprehensible.
Your position is really quite ironic. You accuse me of cynically exploiting bugs in language to make an emotionally loaded argument. Yet you have attempted to re-define words during this dialogue in an effort to avoid conceding that you were mistaken. You pull out propaganda pieces as examples. I will go out on a limb and presume that you like these particular propaganda pieces. They are definitely very popular in certain regions.
On a personal note, I would be more emotionally moved if you had referred to Thomas Spence's "The Real Rights of Man", or Peter Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread".
Perhaps you are not really engaged in a two way dialogue with me, but your intent is to use slashdot as a one way communication medium, and you are attempting to elicit an emotional response from other people who like these examples so they will not consider my statements too closely. Debates are often like that, aren't they?
OK, if we define propaganda that way, that includes influencing the community towards a position it is in their interest to take using entirely truthful and honest means.
It is intellectually dishonest to try to trick somebody into condemning something by using an emotionally loaded term in an emotionally neutral sense. You should make clear that your version of propaganda includes MLK's "I have a dream" speech, and the surgeon general's report linking cigarettes with cancer. You ought to make it clear that your position is that literally anything that is intended to persuade people is morally reprehensible.
This is not some little intellectual exercise where we pretend for a little while that this is what propaganda means. I did not invent this definition, and I am not being intellectually dishonest. Any communication that occurs across a one way medium and is intended to create a pre-determined modification in the attitudes and actions is propaganda. That is what the word symbolizes.
Technically, I didn't say that all propaganda is morally reprehensible. I said Google are in the business of selling propaganda. However, since you brought it up, I do believe that propaganda is morally reprehensible. My justification for this position is that people who reach conclusions without being critical of the presuppositions that led to that conclusion are insane, a danger to themselves, a danger to others, and in an ongoing state of frustration, internal conflict and suffering. Propaganda is intended to induce and preserve this state of existence, and in my opinion, that makes it worse than murder.
After that display of doublethink, you might want to critically examine your own preconceptions. You throw out some examples of propaganda that in your mind are so obviously "good" to you that, in your mind, they refute my position. A great many people felt the same way about the climate change issue. Except, of course, that they misinformed the entire planet...
You can call anyone a "propaganda machine" if you get to define "propaganda" to suit your case.
You're right. Lets look at the wikipedia entry:
Propaganda
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Propaganda (disambiguation).
Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.
Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels." --Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996
So, you don't think Google, the worlds largest advertising company, meets this definition? Why?
You guys are chasing a red herring. Everyone knows that google is a propaganda machine. It's the only thing they sell.
If I want to invent a cologne that smells like hippos and spend a bunch of money on a propaganda campaign to make you all think it will get you a promotion and a girlfriend who looks like a supermodel, the folks at google won't tell me that propaganda is evil and they don't do that sort of thing. They will refer me to the sales department.
Of course google are doing propaganda for the US government. Who else would the US government hire?
Say whatever they want, as long as I get to pick who get to have a megaphone. That's freedom, baby! Keep shopping!
I'd trust the Chinese further than most of my neighbours.
So this is what it's like to be famous and have a stalker. Groovy. Are you spying in my windows?
We should also just get rid of guns because not all bullets are effective.
I've often thought that the common citizenry like ourselves should be bludgeoning in the heads of people who manufacture and sell weapons with rocks when we see them at the mall or out walking their dog. Is that what you mean?