A beautiful sentiment, but naïve. A lot of these "I want to live forever" statements lack wisdom which usually comes with aging, at some point.
It's about time. Time is the most valuable currency we have. We have a finite amount of it. It helps define us and give each moment meaning.
Hypothetical immortality (think Tolkien's elves) would remove all value in time.
Can you imagine a world where people no longer cared about time any longer? They no longer cared about change? I don't think we've met a true conservative until we've met someone who is a thousand years old.
Those who say that life is beautiful and people are wonderful--well yes, the glass is half full. This is so because it's also half empty. If you take away our problems (a key one being mortality), then what is left is not a wonderful, indefinite life. It's simply existing. Forever. Not good. Not bad. Just existing. When you've done everything there is to do, and time has no meaning, you just are.
Sounds like hell, to me.
There must be change, and there must be uncertainty.
For all those out there believing that Google has made a pact with the devil (and possibly so), consider this:
Mr. China (the government) walks up to a businessman named Mr. Google (the company). Mr. China askes Mr. Google for a high-quality piece of the world's best rope, just so long as no manuals are included featuring hangman's knots. Mr. Google gives a thoughtful look at this opportunity, weights the moral and economic consequences, then smiles knowingly and hands Mr. China the rope.
It's only a matter of time before Mr. China's customers figure out how to tie their own hangman's knot around Mr. China's neck.
Google is led by some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people around. They know exactly what they're doing with this business deal. Oh, I doubt there's any outright attempt to "hang" the Chianese goverment, but Google knows full well what just a little bit more freedom of information will do for people over there--if they make a profit doing it, well, so much the better.
The fact remains that regarldess of being villified by some, Google knows that this will make a positive influence on the Chinese people. I applaud their efforts in this.
Dan Bernstein really should take this old saying to heart. He's done an astounding amount of good work for the IT community. His qmail MTA is technologically simple, secure, stable, and generally brilliant, as are his related software packages. His class project to have students find security holes in popular software packages is an outstanding piece of community service (though his practice of failing students for not finding those holes is draconian, if true).
The problem, though, with DJB is that his great work and service is continually marred by his aggressively arrogant attitude. He has on many occasions told appreciative users of his software projects that his software is clearly superior, and that the developers of other software projects (Sendmail, Postfix and BIND, for instance) are incompetent and ignorant idiots. Dan is an academic, so some egocentrism should be allowed, for he is deserving of much praise. If only he would realize that his abusive attitude toward fellow open source community members is a detriment.
Perhaps it isn't Dan's intention to come off as arrogant and egotistical as he does (he's a mathematician, not an English expert, after all), but I do think he would be of so much more help to the community and industry in general if he'd be a little more kind, considerate, and empathetic toward other developers in the future. Intelligence is no excuse for lack of humility and compassion.
I've contacted the offices of my senators and that of Mr. Hatch. Contact yours now and say you did something! If everyone on Slashdot actually followed through and did this, the opinion of many would be known, and known well.
Yes, you can sit back and convince yourself that your opinion doesn't matter, or you can try to make a difference.
"Working the ICANN process is like being nibbled to death by ducks," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president for government relations. "It takes forever, it doesn't make sense, and in the end we're still dead in the water."
Sounds like the last domain transfer I did away from Versign.
Currently, RH Linux takes the US linux user market share by a considerable margin, and the small business user market by a huge margin (surely I'm not only only admin at an ISP/hosting company running dozens of RHL boxes as opposed to any other distro). However, the recent announcement by RedHat to discontinue the traditional all-purpose RHL product line and instead go with the high-end RHEL line (unquestionably geared for large businesses) caused quite a stir here. I completely understand RedHat's desire to devote the most resources to what would hopefully be a more profitable venture (namely RHEL), but I have to ask how much time has been given to considerations of the value of linux small business market dominance. If small businesses who just entered the linux market feel they cannot afford to implement the new RHEL, they may very well have the choice between Fedora and another distro. True, many who are familiar with RedHat and have been keeping track of their product changes may very well choose Fedora, but just as many may at that point decide to jump ship to another distro. It seems to me that by keeping a "baseline" free product just carrying the name "RedHat Linux" RedHat would do better to maintain market dominance, as opposed to possibly losing that lead to another distro just because of the lost name.
To more directly ask the question: Can you honestly say that the number of business users using RHEL + Fedora a year down the road will be near the amount of users now running RedHat Linux? Granted, most of these aren't paying a thing. But market share is a value in and of itself to be sure.
As an admin (like so many of you) for a small to medium sized regional ISP, I'd like to throw out some numbers here to give some people the idea of why ISPs monitoring users for very long is generally massively irritating to try to manage.
For e-mail tracking (as merely my humble example), let's look in our example at an SMTP (not even counting POP, here) server which processes about 60k messages per day. We don't use unusually verbose logging, and we generally keep 24 hours of logs on rotation. Each 24 hours varies from about 120-200 MB. Okay, the math is easy enough to do. Let's monitor all e-mail transactions for 6 months (using the more conservative 120 MB figure): 120 x 7 x 4 x 6 = about 20.2 GB. That's not too bad in terms of our MP3 and DivX collections, but text logs? Yuck! I don't want to keep 20 gigs of logs on my server! If anyone comes to me (from an authority of some sort) and asks for logs that old, I have no problems givng them the explanation, "Sorry, we rotated them out. Buy me a new SCSI hard disk and pay us for the time to install it on our box, then we'll talk about old logs."
Slashdot Mirror
A beautiful sentiment, but naïve. A lot of these "I want to live forever" statements lack wisdom which usually comes with aging, at some point.
It's about time. Time is the most valuable currency we have. We have a finite amount of it. It helps define us and give each moment meaning.
Hypothetical immortality (think Tolkien's elves) would remove all value in time.
Can you imagine a world where people no longer cared about time any longer? They no longer cared about change? I don't think we've met a true conservative until we've met someone who is a thousand years old.
Those who say that life is beautiful and people are wonderful--well yes, the glass is half full. This is so because it's also half empty. If you take away our problems (a key one being mortality), then what is left is not a wonderful, indefinite life. It's simply existing. Forever. Not good. Not bad. Just existing. When you've done everything there is to do, and time has no meaning, you just are.
Sounds like hell, to me.
There must be change, and there must be uncertainty.
For all those out there believing that Google has made a pact with the devil (and possibly so), consider this:
Mr. China (the government) walks up to a businessman named Mr. Google (the company). Mr. China askes Mr. Google for a high-quality piece of the world's best rope, just so long as no manuals are included featuring hangman's knots. Mr. Google gives a thoughtful look at this opportunity, weights the moral and economic consequences, then smiles knowingly and hands Mr. China the rope.
It's only a matter of time before Mr. China's customers figure out how to tie their own hangman's knot around Mr. China's neck.
Google is led by some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people around. They know exactly what they're doing with this business deal. Oh, I doubt there's any outright attempt to "hang" the Chianese goverment, but Google knows full well what just a little bit more freedom of information will do for people over there--if they make a profit doing it, well, so much the better. The fact remains that regarldess of being villified by some, Google knows that this will make a positive influence on the Chinese people. I applaud their efforts in this.
Dan Bernstein really should take this old saying to heart. He's done an astounding amount of good work for the IT community. His qmail MTA is technologically simple, secure, stable, and generally brilliant, as are his related software packages. His class project to have students find security holes in popular software packages is an outstanding piece of community service (though his practice of failing students for not finding those holes is draconian, if true).
The problem, though, with DJB is that his great work and service is continually marred by his aggressively arrogant attitude. He has on many occasions told appreciative users of his software projects that his software is clearly superior, and that the developers of other software projects (Sendmail, Postfix and BIND, for instance) are incompetent and ignorant idiots. Dan is an academic, so some egocentrism should be allowed, for he is deserving of much praise. If only he would realize that his abusive attitude toward fellow open source community members is a detriment.
Perhaps it isn't Dan's intention to come off as arrogant and egotistical as he does (he's a mathematician, not an English expert, after all), but I do think he would be of so much more help to the community and industry in general if he'd be a little more kind, considerate, and empathetic toward other developers in the future. Intelligence is no excuse for lack of humility and compassion.
I've contacted the offices of my senators and that of Mr. Hatch. Contact yours now and say you did something! If everyone on Slashdot actually followed through and did this, the opinion of many would be known, and known well.
Yes, you can sit back and convince yourself that your opinion doesn't matter, or you can try to make a difference.
http://www.senate.gov/
"Working the ICANN process is like being nibbled to death by ducks," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president for government relations. "It takes forever, it doesn't make sense, and in the end we're still dead in the water."
Sounds like the last domain transfer I did away from Versign.
Currently, RH Linux takes the US linux user market share by a considerable margin, and the small business user market by a huge margin (surely I'm not only only admin at an ISP/hosting company running dozens of RHL boxes as opposed to any other distro). However, the recent announcement by RedHat to discontinue the traditional all-purpose RHL product line and instead go with the high-end RHEL line (unquestionably geared for large businesses) caused quite a stir here. I completely understand RedHat's desire to devote the most resources to what would hopefully be a more profitable venture (namely RHEL), but I have to ask how much time has been given to considerations of the value of linux small business market dominance. If small businesses who just entered the linux market feel they cannot afford to implement the new RHEL, they may very well have the choice between Fedora and another distro. True, many who are familiar with RedHat and have been keeping track of their product changes may very well choose Fedora, but just as many may at that point decide to jump ship to another distro. It seems to me that by keeping a "baseline" free product just carrying the name "RedHat Linux" RedHat would do better to maintain market dominance, as opposed to possibly losing that lead to another distro just because of the lost name. To more directly ask the question: Can you honestly say that the number of business users using RHEL + Fedora a year down the road will be near the amount of users now running RedHat Linux? Granted, most of these aren't paying a thing. But market share is a value in and of itself to be sure.
As an admin (like so many of you) for a small to medium sized regional ISP, I'd like to throw out some numbers here to give some people the idea of why ISPs monitoring users for very long is generally massively irritating to try to manage. For e-mail tracking (as merely my humble example), let's look in our example at an SMTP (not even counting POP, here) server which processes about 60k messages per day. We don't use unusually verbose logging, and we generally keep 24 hours of logs on rotation. Each 24 hours varies from about 120-200 MB. Okay, the math is easy enough to do. Let's monitor all e-mail transactions for 6 months (using the more conservative 120 MB figure): 120 x 7 x 4 x 6 = about 20.2 GB. That's not too bad in terms of our MP3 and DivX collections, but text logs? Yuck! I don't want to keep 20 gigs of logs on my server! If anyone comes to me (from an authority of some sort) and asks for logs that old, I have no problems givng them the explanation, "Sorry, we rotated them out. Buy me a new SCSI hard disk and pay us for the time to install it on our box, then we'll talk about old logs."