Uhh, last I checked Canonical hasn't actually turned a profit yet. Its just being funded by someone who has very deep pockets. It could be years before he recovers his investment, if it ever happens.
Typically when we encounter such circumstances, the thing to do is to make it publicly funded. It's worked pretty well in the past...
A seemingly irrelevant quote [wikipedia.org]: "Strangely enough, Hungarians living outside of Hungary - especially those living overseas - never really understood Hofi's message. This wasn't because of a language barrier: it was a consequence of drastically different experiences regarding certain historical events."
He became a legend not because he was critical, but because he said what everyone in the country was thinking anyway.
Every crazy leader you've ever heard of was like that. We get more and more dissatisfied with living under the system we're in, until one day, some madman who doesn't care about political correctness stands up and says "We're all thinking the same way, lets get those motherfuckers!", and everyone follows them because they were the sanest person who was willing to lead them against their enemies.
It has to be a madman, because they're the outsiders. The insiders are paralyzed into indecisiveness by what they stand to lose, and are crippled by their tendency to use traditional methods to achieve their goals, which is a liability when you're trying to create a fresh new system.
I can't build the infrastructure by myself, and I can't build it fast enough for my liking. That's about it. Making progress though, in the designing, in the recruiting, and in the raising awareness...
Maybe it's time to move off these carriers completely and use a communications infrastructure that can't be metered or switched off at a central point because it's technologically impossible to do so?
Preventing vendor lock in. Ensuring privacy of sensitive data. Neither of these is possible with any cloud computing product available.
The cloud is great if you want to have 10,000 boxes gathering data, then ask 10,000 boxes for their opinion, and return a summary of the opinion of those boxes that returned in a timely enough fashion. For problems that are best solved in this way, clouds are great.
Great for Google spitting out a list of links with no hard requirement that they be anything but crap, great for Amazon spitting out a list of products that you might like with no hard requirement that you actually do. Not so practical for your traditional web app though...
Yeah, I'm fine with having my eyes poked out so long as everyone else gets their eyes poked out too.
Don't know how you go from "everyone has the blinders torn off at the same time" to "everyone gets sticks in their eyes". Do you have reading comprehension problems?
It's seems the UK government is constantly trying to do some and more to stop it's citizens having any kind of privacy.
While it's great that people like the ORG and JRRT are standing up to them and other organisations doing the same, you have to wonder, what can they really do when half the population is too ignorant to care?
Take all the data that the government is collecting and make it public information that any citizen can view. Then, the population will not have an excuse to be ignorant. I think exposing my communications in exchange for being able to see the business and political leaders communications sounds like a great deal. Letting them spy on me while they reside in the shadows, not so much...
At the risk of obvious ridicule he doesn't give the reasons behind this choice, but that's not really important here. Stallman is truly out of touch with the real needs of people who actually use computers on a daily basis. He is out of touch by his own choice. What really burns my taters is that so few properly chastise Stallman for this foolishness. Even worse, some actually defend it.
For personal reasons, I do not watch videos off cable television or DVDs, but download them off the internet. I also do not have cable television. To look at a video I POST a request to a demon which runs bittorrent and places the video on my file server. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
I am truly out of touch with people who use televisions and DVD players on a regular basis. I am out of touch by my own choice.
You're right, it is. If he hadn't taken action to solve the problem he was yelling about, people would have suffered enough to show some respect. He should have just gone into the forest to be a hermit and left you to get screwed so you would learn. Now you can just pretend there wasn't a problem that he didn't mitigate on your behalf and talk like an idiot, and most people won't realize or catch you at it.
He's concerned about vendor lock-in. He's concerned about a small group of people being able to hold the rest of the world hostage by threatening to cut them off from the infrastructure they depend on, and he's concerned about a vast group of people being abandoned by those they trusted to handle their essential infrastructure.
It's a valid concern, it's not hard to understand, and it's not easy to dismiss either. The fingers-in-the-ears-going-la-la-la tactic seems to be the standard approach for a lot of people.
It seems to me that this is a prime example of mistaking the model for the system.
Welcome to modern science. When you institutionalize someone for over 20 years and never let them see the world for themselves, what do you expect them to do?
Science graduates are to real scientists as burger flippers at MacDonalds are to a master chef.
The GPL license is just about protecting individuals who want to develop and use software in freedom. It's up to you to take advantage of this protection or not
The best protection is public domain. Retaining ownership to force an ideological end is silly.
So, ditch the ownership laws. Then it's all public domain. Easy. Get on the phone to your representative and make it happen...
So the Roman Empire grew large, and that shows that its electoral system worked? How so? How is the total power accumulated by the government a measure of that government's reflection of the people's will? China has gotten quite powerful; does that mean that their model of government is a working democracy?
Clearly, their model of government has demonstrated itself to be superior to any contemporary socio-economic system.
BTW, it's a nice rhetorical trick to imply (without quite saying) that the empire fell by replacing open balloting with secret ballot, but I think we both know that isn't what happened.
I didn't imply any such thing. I simply drew attention to the fact that it wasn't the Emperors that brought Rome to their apex, it was direct democracy without secret ballot.
Now tell me -- did everyone in Rome vote their own mind, or was their pressure (from the politically powerful, from gangs, thugs, and bullies, etc.) that changed how people voted? Do you have enough insight into Roman society to answer that question, or did you merely cherry-pick an ancient example in hopes of skirting the specific issues that were raised?
I don't see how that's relevant. Social pressure is an inherent part of every human society, it is inevitable, and it is not a flaw to be overcome.
For extra credit, go have a look at some current examples of what happens when the ballot isn't secret.
I already know. Two faced double dealing and shady back-room deals that carry the force of law. I don't know if you noticed, but the world has gone to shit, over and over again for the last hundred years. This doesn't happen because we aim wisely and miss the mark. It does this because our social system are so incredibly fucked up that these crisis' are inevitable.
How many cycles of angry citizens shoveling banksters into gas chambers do you think appropriate before we recognize what's going on and do something about it?
The solution is to figure out exactly what you think gettnig rid of the secret ballot will do to reduce voter fraud, and find another way to do it.
Create enough forensic evidence that any attempt at large scale vote tampering without trace is impossible, allow individuals to personally verify that their vote was tabulated correctly, allow voters to have enough insight into the minds of those who they are voting for to bring their wisdom to bear rather than operating in relative ignorance, allow voters to express that they are revoking their vote if they are betrayed by their representative.
There was no secret ballot in the Roman empire. They ascended to dominance with public and open voting system. When they lost it, they fell inside a few generations. So, don't claim to me that it can't work, because history demonstrates that it can. The question is, how can we use modern technology to do it even better than they did. In Rome, you had to leave and go to the capital to raise your hand, so if you had responsibilities, you couldn't participate. That is a problem that modern information technology should be able to resolve.
There is no evidence that anything other than "now" exists in some sort of magical ideal timeless suspension. There isn't even any evidence that "now" itself exists in a timeless suspension (and a lot of evidence to the contrary).
I think the evidence indicates that the universe is a finite object with a finite number of possible permutations, all of which are connected by the singularity, the black hole, the big bang, of which there is only one. Gravitation is a name we give the tendency to revert back to the singular state, and from the singular state, all possibilities erupt, like petals on a flower, to inevitably connect back to the singularity. The infinite universe pattern doesn't jive with what we see around us.
Seems to me, The Object, all of reality, it IS what God is. The God framework is a convoluted metaphor for the object that is the universe, and an effort to describe it's nature.
Free will doesn't exist. We think it exists because we don't understand the nature of time and space. We think there is a "now" that is real, and that the past and future don't really exist. In reality, the past and the future exist forever in timelessness. The march of time is an expression of our growth, not our transformation.
Read flatland, or watch it. Contemplate a line erupting from a point, or a square from a line, or a cube from a square. Is the line transformed when a square erupts from it? Does it cease to exist? It does not. It is, forever.
That is the nature of your life. That is what your experience of time is. When you die, you will not cease. You will become complete, and you will exist, endlessly.
We are not changing. We are growing. We do not die, we become complete. We have all the free will of a plant reaching for the sun.
If it is impossible to catch how did they catch these guys? Election fraud has always happened and always will, no matter what the method of voting. And some people will get caught while others get away, just like it's always been. There are reasons to oppose electronic voting - and reasons to support it. At least be a little realistic in your opposition.
Want to get rid of election fraud? Get rid of secret ballots. You don't need a secret ballot to have an election.
Identify the valid reasons why people want secret ballots, find other means to alleviate those concerns, and get rid of the secret ballot. That's the only way to have a fair election. Considering that current election methods are not proof against corruption, there is no reason to think that those who are in power represent the popular vote, and therefore, their election does not grant them any sort of moral authority to speak for anyone. May as well claim that your right to wield power came from the flip of a coin, it holds no less validity.
Do you have an equal share of the company as the owners? No? Then I hope the pats on the head are worth it.
You're the sort of guy who thinks having the deed to the Mona Lisa is the reward. I'm the sort of guy who thinks having painted the Mona Lisa is the reward. I could give a shit about the pats on the head... I draw comfort from knowing that my influence reaches out with invisible fingers to wrap the globe like a giant fist and keep my stupid, ungrateful little children safe and warm. That is my reward, and no bankster will ever deprive me of it.
I still don't quite get it. What good is a 10Mbit connection if i can only average 1Mbit? I have a 2Mbit and i average in a high month 1.8Mbit. I don't need more as i don't mind waiting for the larger stuff. But i would be rather unhappy with a 2Mbit link were i am only suppose to average 200kbit or something.
It's really easy to understand. The ISP business has been engaged in systematic fraud since the beginning. They sell what they cannot provide. In the beginning, shady characters who felt they would never get caught did it. Then people who didn't do it couldn't stay in business, so they either went out of business or did the same thing. Fast forward a few years, and now it's normal for the industry, and you get professionals sounding very technical as they go about explaining how it all works and how to use more technically complex tricks to allow ISPs to continue the behavior as though there was never anything wrong with it.
But, at the end of the day, the ISPs are all engaged in garden variety fraud. Including the one that employs the original submitter of the story. They're not different from the guy who rents his cabin to 3 dozen different people for the summer, hoping that no more than one will show up at a time.
In the long run, the entire society is going to pay dearly for having allowed this to happen.
You stop being a quirky genius soon as you declare yourself as one. Since then you're just a wannabe poser.
Yeah, and what if the owner of the company declares you one, and it happens in more than one company, and you regularly live outside the traditional chain of command of the company, answerable only to the owners?
And the vast multitudes of people living their lives wrapped in the organizational framework you conceived for them, day after day, month after month, year after year, focusing entirely on what you decided was important long ago and ignoring anything that doesn't appear on their screen as though it didn't exist in the world... their significance just dwindles away?
We're just wannabe posers. Who happen to run your lives in ways that you will never, ever understand, and you will never even acknowledge us, let alone be grateful.
Because it's not enough to stand on the shoulders of giants. They won't be satisfied until they've managed to put a bridle on.
Thing is, the wise genius developer will realize, when the whole world is standing on your shoulders, you're already the ruler, forever and ever amen. They're nothing but little ants, and the situation will never change. Not because you hold them captive, but because without you, the quirky genius, they will be back in the muck where they belong, and their greed and self-importance will never allow that to happen. They are not the ones with intrinsic power, they are nursemaids for genius, or they are nothing at all. And they know it, that's why they're there.
As a quirky genius, I have to say, if you don't like the way we do it... go fucking do it yourself. Should be good for a laugh...
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, last I checked Canonical hasn't actually turned a profit yet. Its just being funded by someone who has very deep pockets. It could be years before he recovers his investment, if it ever happens.
Typically when we encounter such circumstances, the thing to do is to make it publicly funded. It's worked pretty well in the past...
Can't be satisfied with machines that act as quiet servants... have to make them intelligent enough to suffer...
A seemingly irrelevant quote [wikipedia.org]: "Strangely enough, Hungarians living outside of Hungary - especially those living overseas - never really understood Hofi's message. This wasn't because of a language barrier: it was a consequence of drastically different experiences regarding certain historical events."
He became a legend not because he was critical, but because he said what everyone in the country was thinking anyway.
Every crazy leader you've ever heard of was like that. We get more and more dissatisfied with living under the system we're in, until one day, some madman who doesn't care about political correctness stands up and says "We're all thinking the same way, lets get those motherfuckers!", and everyone follows them because they were the sanest person who was willing to lead them against their enemies.
It has to be a madman, because they're the outsiders. The insiders are paralyzed into indecisiveness by what they stand to lose, and are crippled by their tendency to use traditional methods to achieve their goals, which is a liability when you're trying to create a fresh new system.
What's stopping you?
I can't build the infrastructure by myself, and I can't build it fast enough for my liking. That's about it. Making progress though, in the designing, in the recruiting, and in the raising awareness...
Maybe it's time to move off these carriers completely and use a communications infrastructure that can't be metered or switched off at a central point because it's technologically impossible to do so?
Does it say "Born in Texas"?
No.
Does it say "Home of George Bush"?
Yes.
Are you as clever as you thought you were?
No.
Preventing vendor lock in. Ensuring privacy of sensitive data. Neither of these is possible with any cloud computing product available. The cloud is great if you want to have 10,000 boxes gathering data, then ask 10,000 boxes for their opinion, and return a summary of the opinion of those boxes that returned in a timely enough fashion. For problems that are best solved in this way, clouds are great. Great for Google spitting out a list of links with no hard requirement that they be anything but crap, great for Amazon spitting out a list of products that you might like with no hard requirement that you actually do. Not so practical for your traditional web app though...
Yeah, I'm fine with having my eyes poked out so long as everyone else gets their eyes poked out too.
Don't know how you go from "everyone has the blinders torn off at the same time" to "everyone gets sticks in their eyes". Do you have reading comprehension problems?
It's seems the UK government is constantly trying to do some and more to stop it's citizens having any kind of privacy. While it's great that people like the ORG and JRRT are standing up to them and other organisations doing the same, you have to wonder, what can they really do when half the population is too ignorant to care?
Take all the data that the government is collecting and make it public information that any citizen can view. Then, the population will not have an excuse to be ignorant. I think exposing my communications in exchange for being able to see the business and political leaders communications sounds like a great deal. Letting them spy on me while they reside in the shadows, not so much...
At the risk of obvious ridicule he doesn't give the reasons behind this choice, but that's not really important here. Stallman is truly out of touch with the real needs of people who actually use computers on a daily basis. He is out of touch by his own choice. What really burns my taters is that so few properly chastise Stallman for this foolishness. Even worse, some actually defend it.
For personal reasons, I do not watch videos off cable television or DVDs, but download them off the internet. I also do not have cable television. To look at a video I POST a request to a demon which runs bittorrent and places the video on my file server. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
I am truly out of touch with people who use televisions and DVD players on a regular basis. I am out of touch by my own choice.
Chastise me! Whip me, beat me, tell me I'm scum!
That's not corruption baby, that's freedom!
They hate us because of our freedom, but we're going to corrupt their social institutions too, and then everyone will be free.
That's RMS' fault.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf
You're right, it is. If he hadn't taken action to solve the problem he was yelling about, people would have suffered enough to show some respect. He should have just gone into the forest to be a hermit and left you to get screwed so you would learn. Now you can just pretend there wasn't a problem that he didn't mitigate on your behalf and talk like an idiot, and most people won't realize or catch you at it.
He's concerned about vendor lock-in. He's concerned about a small group of people being able to hold the rest of the world hostage by threatening to cut them off from the infrastructure they depend on, and he's concerned about a vast group of people being abandoned by those they trusted to handle their essential infrastructure.
It's a valid concern, it's not hard to understand, and it's not easy to dismiss either. The fingers-in-the-ears-going-la-la-la tactic seems to be the standard approach for a lot of people.
It seems to me that this is a prime example of mistaking the model for the system.
Welcome to modern science. When you institutionalize someone for over 20 years and never let them see the world for themselves, what do you expect them to do?
Science graduates are to real scientists as burger flippers at MacDonalds are to a master chef.
The GPL license is just about protecting individuals who want to develop and use software in freedom. It's up to you to take advantage of this protection or not
The best protection is public domain. Retaining ownership to force an ideological end is silly.
So, ditch the ownership laws. Then it's all public domain. Easy. Get on the phone to your representative and make it happen...
Wonder if we'll see the "Year of the GNU Hurd"...
So the Roman Empire grew large, and that shows that its electoral system worked? How so? How is the total power accumulated by the government a measure of that government's reflection of the people's will? China has gotten quite powerful; does that mean that their model of government is a working democracy?
Clearly, their model of government has demonstrated itself to be superior to any contemporary socio-economic system.
BTW, it's a nice rhetorical trick to imply (without quite saying) that the empire fell by replacing open balloting with secret ballot, but I think we both know that isn't what happened.
I didn't imply any such thing. I simply drew attention to the fact that it wasn't the Emperors that brought Rome to their apex, it was direct democracy without secret ballot.
Now tell me -- did everyone in Rome vote their own mind, or was their pressure (from the politically powerful, from gangs, thugs, and bullies, etc.) that changed how people voted? Do you have enough insight into Roman society to answer that question, or did you merely cherry-pick an ancient example in hopes of skirting the specific issues that were raised?
I don't see how that's relevant. Social pressure is an inherent part of every human society, it is inevitable, and it is not a flaw to be overcome.
For extra credit, go have a look at some current examples of what happens when the ballot isn't secret.
I already know. Two faced double dealing and shady back-room deals that carry the force of law. I don't know if you noticed, but the world has gone to shit, over and over again for the last hundred years. This doesn't happen because we aim wisely and miss the mark. It does this because our social system are so incredibly fucked up that these crisis' are inevitable.
How many cycles of angry citizens shoveling banksters into gas chambers do you think appropriate before we recognize what's going on and do something about it?
The solution is to figure out exactly what you think gettnig rid of the secret ballot will do to reduce voter fraud, and find another way to do it.
Create enough forensic evidence that any attempt at large scale vote tampering without trace is impossible, allow individuals to personally verify that their vote was tabulated correctly, allow voters to have enough insight into the minds of those who they are voting for to bring their wisdom to bear rather than operating in relative ignorance, allow voters to express that they are revoking their vote if they are betrayed by their representative.
There was no secret ballot in the Roman empire. They ascended to dominance with public and open voting system. When they lost it, they fell inside a few generations. So, don't claim to me that it can't work, because history demonstrates that it can. The question is, how can we use modern technology to do it even better than they did. In Rome, you had to leave and go to the capital to raise your hand, so if you had responsibilities, you couldn't participate. That is a problem that modern information technology should be able to resolve.
There is no evidence that anything other than "now" exists in some sort of magical ideal timeless suspension. There isn't even any evidence that "now" itself exists in a timeless suspension (and a lot of evidence to the contrary).
I think the evidence indicates that the universe is a finite object with a finite number of possible permutations, all of which are connected by the singularity, the black hole, the big bang, of which there is only one. Gravitation is a name we give the tendency to revert back to the singular state, and from the singular state, all possibilities erupt, like petals on a flower, to inevitably connect back to the singularity. The infinite universe pattern doesn't jive with what we see around us.
Seems to me, The Object, all of reality, it IS what God is. The God framework is a convoluted metaphor for the object that is the universe, and an effort to describe it's nature.
Free will doesn't exist. We think it exists because we don't understand the nature of time and space. We think there is a "now" that is real, and that the past and future don't really exist. In reality, the past and the future exist forever in timelessness. The march of time is an expression of our growth, not our transformation.
Read flatland, or watch it. Contemplate a line erupting from a point, or a square from a line, or a cube from a square. Is the line transformed when a square erupts from it? Does it cease to exist? It does not. It is, forever.
That is the nature of your life. That is what your experience of time is. When you die, you will not cease. You will become complete, and you will exist, endlessly.
We are not changing. We are growing. We do not die, we become complete. We have all the free will of a plant reaching for the sun.
If it is impossible to catch how did they catch these guys? Election fraud has always happened and always will, no matter what the method of voting. And some people will get caught while others get away, just like it's always been. There are reasons to oppose electronic voting - and reasons to support it. At least be a little realistic in your opposition.
Want to get rid of election fraud? Get rid of secret ballots. You don't need a secret ballot to have an election.
Identify the valid reasons why people want secret ballots, find other means to alleviate those concerns, and get rid of the secret ballot. That's the only way to have a fair election. Considering that current election methods are not proof against corruption, there is no reason to think that those who are in power represent the popular vote, and therefore, their election does not grant them any sort of moral authority to speak for anyone. May as well claim that your right to wield power came from the flip of a coin, it holds no less validity.
Do you have an equal share of the company as the owners? No? Then I hope the pats on the head are worth it.
You're the sort of guy who thinks having the deed to the Mona Lisa is the reward. I'm the sort of guy who thinks having painted the Mona Lisa is the reward. I could give a shit about the pats on the head... I draw comfort from knowing that my influence reaches out with invisible fingers to wrap the globe like a giant fist and keep my stupid, ungrateful little children safe and warm. That is my reward, and no bankster will ever deprive me of it.
I still don't quite get it. What good is a 10Mbit connection if i can only average 1Mbit? I have a 2Mbit and i average in a high month 1.8Mbit. I don't need more as i don't mind waiting for the larger stuff. But i would be rather unhappy with a 2Mbit link were i am only suppose to average 200kbit or something.
It's really easy to understand. The ISP business has been engaged in systematic fraud since the beginning. They sell what they cannot provide. In the beginning, shady characters who felt they would never get caught did it. Then people who didn't do it couldn't stay in business, so they either went out of business or did the same thing. Fast forward a few years, and now it's normal for the industry, and you get professionals sounding very technical as they go about explaining how it all works and how to use more technically complex tricks to allow ISPs to continue the behavior as though there was never anything wrong with it.
But, at the end of the day, the ISPs are all engaged in garden variety fraud. Including the one that employs the original submitter of the story. They're not different from the guy who rents his cabin to 3 dozen different people for the summer, hoping that no more than one will show up at a time.
In the long run, the entire society is going to pay dearly for having allowed this to happen.
You stop being a quirky genius soon as you declare yourself as one. Since then you're just a wannabe poser.
Yeah, and what if the owner of the company declares you one, and it happens in more than one company, and you regularly live outside the traditional chain of command of the company, answerable only to the owners?
And the vast multitudes of people living their lives wrapped in the organizational framework you conceived for them, day after day, month after month, year after year, focusing entirely on what you decided was important long ago and ignoring anything that doesn't appear on their screen as though it didn't exist in the world... their significance just dwindles away?
We're just wannabe posers. Who happen to run your lives in ways that you will never, ever understand, and you will never even acknowledge us, let alone be grateful.
I should have gone into medicine...
Because it's not enough to stand on the shoulders of giants. They won't be satisfied until they've managed to put a bridle on.
Thing is, the wise genius developer will realize, when the whole world is standing on your shoulders, you're already the ruler, forever and ever amen. They're nothing but little ants, and the situation will never change. Not because you hold them captive, but because without you, the quirky genius, they will be back in the muck where they belong, and their greed and self-importance will never allow that to happen. They are not the ones with intrinsic power, they are nursemaids for genius, or they are nothing at all. And they know it, that's why they're there.
As a quirky genius, I have to say, if you don't like the way we do it... go fucking do it yourself. Should be good for a laugh...