Ok, I'll expose all the problems, not that I disagree with the idea. I think it's in our best interests to hold publicly funded campaigns, and if that means candidates have less total money to spend on the campaign, so be it.
Problem #1: Who qualifies as a candidate? We already have this problem in our current system, so let's consider it. Anybody can be elected if enough people vote for them, right? But the writing on the walls says if you run as a write-in candidate, only an extreme situation (as we recently saw in some state back east where the party candidate on the ballot got ejected due to corruption charges and a write-in won) allows you to win. So to win, you have to be on the ballot. This means you have to qualify to be on the ballot, and there's as much a practical reason as any to limit people on the ballot. To prevent the thing from being nickel and dimed away, and more importantly to ensure that people who do sign up as candidates are serious about running and actually have a chance, it's a guarantee you're going to have to qualify for your share of the money. That's the first place control can be exerted, and we already have this problem without the central pool of money. To get the support of the people necessary to run, you have to have their approval, and this central pool of money won't change that.
Problem #2: Candidates stealing the money. As many loopholes as they've already found, it's a sure bet they're going to find ways to use the money to their own benefit, or their staff is. This is more like "Well, we needed to meet with [these constituents], so we met them at Disneyland" when they could have had the meeting at a public park, a restaurant that didn't cost $20/plate, or wherever. Yeah, I know, fringe benefits and all, but they're not going to spend the money terribly responsibly. Remember, we're talking about giving money to the people that essentially invented the pork barrel.
Problem #3: Collecting the money. Where's it going to come from? We've talked about volunteer donations, but the fact is if the voluntary donations aren't enough, candidates are going to go outside to get the money they need, even if it is illegal. I'm in favor of raising taxes and spending public money on it, who else is in favor of this? Of course, after the bill gets passed, it's a fight already won, but this will be a fight, and I'm not anywhere near convinced that volunteer donations will work. I don't object to having the pool filled with corporate donations, but I do object to corporations expecting to "get their money's worth out of the winner". Letting corporations and other rich folk contribute huge amounts to this pool is only going to exacerbate the problem where they contribute to both sides. Now we're inviting them to contribute to all sides, and to attach their strings to the winner.
Problem #4: Ensuring the money is distributed fairly and spent fairly. Do we give a candidate $10k for every signature they can put on the line saying they want to be elected? Do we give it out evenly to all candidates, equating a radical nazi candidate to a moderate democrat (if there is such a thing)? In our current system, only two candidates have a chance at getting elected. This is because of our voting methods as much as anything else, so it makes sense that the two candidates that are most electable should get the lion's share of the pool, otherwise in a pool of 10 candidates, 80% of the money distributed is waste. Now, you're going to counter with "distributing the money evenly will make at least 2 more candidates in that hypothetical race electable that previously wouldn't have been", and all I can say is that we don't have the data here in the US. Maybe some other country does?
I'm out of problems, I'm sure there's more. I like the idea a lot, but all I see in the future with this is more campaign finance scandals. Of course, if we really wanted to end campaign finance scandals, we'd just legalize everything and there wouldn't be any more scandal, right? I definitely think it's in the public interest to have publicly funded campaigns with no private funding of campaigns allowed. I'd like to see it work, but I suspect we're going to have to go all nutjob riot crazy to get it.
There are numerous problems with DHS being founded to pursue terrorism as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Besides the unabomber and Timothy McVeigh, I mean.
Anyway, whatever the facts are, the WTC was attacked ~'95 by an american psycho, like McVeigh (but obviously not him). Or I'm confusing that with the attack of the olympics, which is possible. My point? What matters as far as I'm concerned isn't the number of times the WTC was attacked, but that 99.99999999% of the time when someone says "the WTC was attacked twice" they're talking about the two airplanes on the same day. If you want to use the earlier attack in your count, that's fine, but you can't use that as a reason DHS was formed, becuase it's not. Only the 9/11 attacks are the reason, and only to avoid the investigation that later happened anyway. (Or at least be in a position to say "Look, we figured it out already and formed DHS, get off our backs!") The earlier attack, as well as the USS Cole bombing are usually brought up to say "9/11 was the continuation of a struggle (aka jihad, since jihad means "struggle")", or to blame Clinton for everything (which is near-sighted at best. I may take too long a view on the whole fight, but at least I'm not taking a near-sighted view).
So are you trying to do one of those otherwise useless things in this context, or just trying to remind me of an earlier attack that was mosty irrelevant as far as the forming of DHS is concerned?
If you wish to use that bombing, you need to include a lot more than that. How about the 50-year british occupation of the middle east after WWI? The Algerian war for independence, which included numerous french atrocities. The list goes on. This isn't a new fight, and the US has been in it up to its armpits for the last century, not counting whatever it inherited from britain with the rest of its legal structure.
Indeed, this fight isn't new. Some would say it goes back to ancient times. Bandwagon patriotism notwithstanding, if you're only focused on attacks wages against the US, you need to take off your blinders. But then, like the horse with blinders, you might get distracted from your purpose.
Why do all of you bandwagon patriots keep telling us the WTC was attacked twice? It was attacked once, and destroyed, by two airplanes. It was 2 buildings, and the same continuous attack took it down.
This is of course ignoring the fact that whatever else you said didn't have anything to do with what you were responding to.
Give him some patience, he doesn't live in an area that's had to adapt to special civil rights legislation for their previous peculiar institutions, he's unaware of how people really can grow up, eventually.
I'm guessing you live in Austin.:)
In any case, Texas is a huge bastion of Republican goodness, sadly enough. If these folks thiing national politics are ugly, they should take a good, hard look at Perry. Bush is a free-thinker by comparison.
There's something y'all watching need to get through your thick skulls. The behavior of our government is a symptom, but it's not the real problem. Impeach Bush? You know what that would accomplish? It would put him on trial. And at that point, everybody who wanted to impeach him will learn what the word impeach means, complain that Bush is still in office and go do something else.
The problem is when you can't get a job because when someone googles your name and looks at your website, they decide not to even bother calling you. The problem is when you ask some college students to clean up after themselves and they determine you're their mortal enemy. The problem is when parents strike their kids with all of their might and say "You're making me do this!" The problem is when kids are taking behavior-altering drugs due to authoritative pressure to cure their drug habits acquired through peer pressure. There are many more problems.
One big problem is the assumption that since the Constitution limits the powers of the government, you're free to do anything the constitution says the government can't stop you from doing. Where's your free speech when you can't find a job because you spoke your mind on your website? Where's your free press when you only have 3 media conglomerates? Where's your freedom of religion when your own family doesn't invite you to weddings because you're a damn atheist and they perform their ceremonies in a church?
Freedom? We don't know what that word means anymore, we're too busy telling the whole world what to do. And don't try to fool yourselves into thinking we don't do it here, because we do. If you don't actively fight it, every moment of your life will be micromanaged by someone who's not interested in your best interests, and they're not government officials. We don't need government to turn fascist, we're a fascist people.
This is the depressing part about US politics today, but there is some hope. Not all candidates running are about taking more of your money. Most, perhaps, but not all.
Here, let me rewrite that second sentence for you:
Only electable candidates are about taking more of your money. There are unelectable candidates that aren't.
Because the money to get elected comes from the people who want your money.
I'm going to put my own thoughts on this here real quick. Like my penis, my own thoughts on the matter aren't terribly large. We're on a downward spiral that I think is past the point of no return, and I think went past that point some time ago. Both parties aren't fighting for control of this government, they're fighting to replace it with the government of their own choosing, and when they sort it out, we'll either learn what Democratic Fascism is like, or Republican Fascism, and our grandkids will have to sort it out.
So the best thing any of us can do now is make sure to do our damnedest to give our kids training in critical thinking and an environment where they can appreciate and love their freedom, because that's the only way to see those values survive to the generation that will actually have the motivation and the means to fix it.
(not that I'm willing to hang all my hopes on that, I'm doing my part! Minding that with so much to be done, throwing yourself behind Free Software is part of the solution, regardless of whether or not you vote)
Let's see, users are asked to use a commandline and they say "I've got no idea, how much do you charge?"
--compared to--
After a long series of condescending dialogs over what was otherwise a minor problem, the user has now unwittingly completely trashed his system. She's on the edge of a nervous breakdown and doesn't know who to trust, because her 4 calls to Microsoft tech support led her down 8 different blind alleys, and her friends have all told her to just reload, but make a backup first, and she's thinking "wtf do you mean, reload? And how am I supposed to do a backup?"
Here in the linux world, I think it's perfectly ok to offer only an advanced UI for a task that expects the user performing it to have the necessary skills to do it, or the necessary time to learn the skills. The alternative we've all faced already, some friend/relative shows us a computer that's needlessly fucked because the OS lied to them, by both calling them an idiot and telling them it would fix it for them.
Yes, for all tasks that a user reasonably is expected to perform, Linux does well, imo better than Windows. For more advanced sysadmin type stuff, it also does very well by presenting the user with the simple choice: learn how to do the task or find someone who knows how to do the task. Use Linux and you'll never need your prozac again.
A lot of that lack of clarity you're talking about depends on many external factors. The Army trains to fight in large groups against large groups, Marines train for different missions, and I'm sure we could argue all day long about how useful battlefield snipers are, shooting the heads of the snake and all. My only point was that in many cases, filling the air up with bullets meets the definition of effective that I gave. You are correct that good shooting, aiming for the ideal 1:1 shot:kill ratio will also meet the definition of effectiveness that I gave in many other cases. It's quite telling that the Army (and the Marines, etc) employ both "spray and pray" and snipers on the battlefield.:)
Um, having never been in the army myself, I'll bite. You have to define "most effective". As the GP pointed out, unless you're trying to get 1 kill per bullet, it's a different situation entirely. If I were the one defining "most effective" in terms of fighting a battle and a war, I'd define it as "lowest cost in lives, lowest cost in money, victory is required". So without victory, your effectiveness is very poor, near 0. lowest cost in lives includes both sides, so you kill the minimum amount of enemies required to win the battle and sacrifice the minimum amount of friendlies.
That said, I once read somewhere that it takes $1 million to make a soldier in the Army. That's basic training, ship him to the front. I'm willing to wager that 1 million bullets comes out less than that price. So obviously it's cheaper in terms of money to use bullets rather than losing soldiers. That has the added and very important benefit of saving your own soldiers' lives, since lowest cost in lives is part of the definition.
19th century writers (and early 20th) such as Jules Vernes and Edgar Rice Burroughs at least expressed the feeling that telegraph communications were considered private. Granted, that's not anywhere near a SCOTUS citation, but whatever the law said, chances are the people expected privacy, and telegraph workers were bonded.
Dude, reboot, it looks like you've had a kernel panic. There wasn't anything incendiary in Linus's post unless you're actively trying to be offended, in which case there's very little likelihood Linus would be able to avoid offending you.
Linus presented a ratio, which has a numberator and a denominator.
first off: they may be talking a lot more than they are or ever will be doing.
The ratio is this:
OSS crap Sun's actually doing ------------ OSS crap Sun talks about doing
Linus is saying that this number may be less than 1. You counter by only providing a list of items that belong in the numerator which may or may not be comprehensive of things they've done and/or talked about doing.
The rest is just nitpicking what is an otherwise speculative post on Linus's part, which basically reads to me like "Don't get in bed with Sun, but don't run away from them like they're brain-eating zombies", which is a pretty reasonable position to me.
Google "many worlds theory". Just because a word is given a certain meaning at one point in time doesn't mean that that meaning still stands as we increase our understanding of the (possible) nature of reality.
That's especially true if the universe split after the word was defined, but before it was used, in which case the question is "Which universe has the best sandwiches?"
Heh, I was, but you almost have to an Austinite to get it.:) Maybe you are and still don't, I don't know. Anyway, I took his "live music capital of the US" to be somewhat satirical of what folks here actually say, but used the actual words used here myself to make my own point. Which is basically obvious now, that once you get out of austin, nobody's heard of it and its music scene. There's a lot of pretension here on that subject...
There's nothing wrong with closed source by itself, no reason we should eradicate it. It is a person's right, if they so choose, to not share their ideas with the public. It is also their right, if they so choose, to not let people have a copy without paying them--if they want to be compensated for their work, it's their right.
No. That's not the deal. The deal is this: in a free, capitalist marketplace, it is nearly impossible for someone to produce creative works and make money at it. If they don't make money at it, they have to get a Real Job, and if that happens they won't be terribly productive. If that person happens to be a Great Artist, it would be our loss if he is not able to produce to his fullest capacity because he was busy working. On the flip side, if, in a free, capitalist market, we grant a complete and infinite monopoly on any product, we create a situation where the Great Artist can now legally flog anyone who does something with his work that he doesn't like. Since we have a free, capitalist market, the Great Artist has no intrinsic rights to his work, other than the right to produce it and attempt to sell it.
Since we want the Great Artist to be productive, because we believe that we, as a society and a culture, will ultimately benefit by this, we agree to give the Great Artist a limited monopoly for a limited time on his work. Now he has an opportunity to attempt quite credibly to earn a living and be more productive, and with any luck his great work of art will enter the public domain somewhat before it's useful life has expired (keeping in mind that many Great Works are timeless, but no software is timeless. It's useful life can be measured in years, provided you don't use a number greater than 10).
What makes closed source, copyrighted software inherently bad is that when the copyright expires, the software will have been useless for a great deal of time already, and without access to the source code, the software cannot pass into the public domain. That is a blatant violation of the compromise that *is* copyright!
Copyright was dreamed up to protect works whose useful lifetime can easily span hundreds of years. We're talking sculptures, paintings, books, plays, music, etc. Works that carried a high cost of reproduction and therefore required significant economic boost in order for them to be disseminated and enjoyed, because without dissemination and enjoyment, the Great Artist has done nothing for society worth protecting and encouraging.
Yet the useful life of items originally intended for copyright is very long. I read Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, Tarzan, and quite a few books that were written before my great-grandparents were born. But for some reason, software I used just a few years ago is already obsolete, useless, and inaccessible, but it's still protected by copyright.
Eh? Lots of honest people get elected all the time. They just don't stay honest very long. The business of politics does something to you. It's not just the corruption, it's a hard job. The honest politicians are to be found typically at lower levels, some state politicians (not many), mayors, city councils, county courts, etc. Again, I don't mean to imply that they are all honest, or that even most are honest, just that with as many positions at such levels that come open every election and as many honest people that run for them, it seems likely that some honest folk get elected every time.
You damn kids. In my day we did it with tape drives! (granted, those were very early days even for me, but still!) Nothing beats waiting half an hour for a 5k program to load.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'll expose all the problems, not that I disagree with the idea. I think it's in our best interests to hold publicly funded campaigns, and if that means candidates have less total money to spend on the campaign, so be it.
Problem #1: Who qualifies as a candidate? We already have this problem in our current system, so let's consider it. Anybody can be elected if enough people vote for them, right? But the writing on the walls says if you run as a write-in candidate, only an extreme situation (as we recently saw in some state back east where the party candidate on the ballot got ejected due to corruption charges and a write-in won) allows you to win. So to win, you have to be on the ballot. This means you have to qualify to be on the ballot, and there's as much a practical reason as any to limit people on the ballot. To prevent the thing from being nickel and dimed away, and more importantly to ensure that people who do sign up as candidates are serious about running and actually have a chance, it's a guarantee you're going to have to qualify for your share of the money. That's the first place control can be exerted, and we already have this problem without the central pool of money. To get the support of the people necessary to run, you have to have their approval, and this central pool of money won't change that.
Problem #2: Candidates stealing the money. As many loopholes as they've already found, it's a sure bet they're going to find ways to use the money to their own benefit, or their staff is. This is more like "Well, we needed to meet with [these constituents], so we met them at Disneyland" when they could have had the meeting at a public park, a restaurant that didn't cost $20/plate, or wherever. Yeah, I know, fringe benefits and all, but they're not going to spend the money terribly responsibly. Remember, we're talking about giving money to the people that essentially invented the pork barrel.
Problem #3: Collecting the money. Where's it going to come from? We've talked about volunteer donations, but the fact is if the voluntary donations aren't enough, candidates are going to go outside to get the money they need, even if it is illegal. I'm in favor of raising taxes and spending public money on it, who else is in favor of this? Of course, after the bill gets passed, it's a fight already won, but this will be a fight, and I'm not anywhere near convinced that volunteer donations will work. I don't object to having the pool filled with corporate donations, but I do object to corporations expecting to "get their money's worth out of the winner". Letting corporations and other rich folk contribute huge amounts to this pool is only going to exacerbate the problem where they contribute to both sides. Now we're inviting them to contribute to all sides, and to attach their strings to the winner.
Problem #4: Ensuring the money is distributed fairly and spent fairly. Do we give a candidate $10k for every signature they can put on the line saying they want to be elected? Do we give it out evenly to all candidates, equating a radical nazi candidate to a moderate democrat (if there is such a thing)? In our current system, only two candidates have a chance at getting elected. This is because of our voting methods as much as anything else, so it makes sense that the two candidates that are most electable should get the lion's share of the pool, otherwise in a pool of 10 candidates, 80% of the money distributed is waste. Now, you're going to counter with "distributing the money evenly will make at least 2 more candidates in that hypothetical race electable that previously wouldn't have been", and all I can say is that we don't have the data here in the US. Maybe some other country does?
I'm out of problems, I'm sure there's more. I like the idea a lot, but all I see in the future with this is more campaign finance scandals. Of course, if we really wanted to end campaign finance scandals, we'd just legalize everything and there wouldn't be any more scandal, right? I definitely think it's in the public interest to have publicly funded campaigns with no private funding of campaigns allowed. I'd like to see it work, but I suspect we're going to have to go all nutjob riot crazy to get it.
There are numerous problems with DHS being founded to pursue terrorism as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Besides the unabomber and Timothy McVeigh, I mean.
Anyway, whatever the facts are, the WTC was attacked ~'95 by an american psycho, like McVeigh (but obviously not him). Or I'm confusing that with the attack of the olympics, which is possible. My point? What matters as far as I'm concerned isn't the number of times the WTC was attacked, but that 99.99999999% of the time when someone says "the WTC was attacked twice" they're talking about the two airplanes on the same day. If you want to use the earlier attack in your count, that's fine, but you can't use that as a reason DHS was formed, becuase it's not. Only the 9/11 attacks are the reason, and only to avoid the investigation that later happened anyway. (Or at least be in a position to say "Look, we figured it out already and formed DHS, get off our backs!") The earlier attack, as well as the USS Cole bombing are usually brought up to say "9/11 was the continuation of a struggle (aka jihad, since jihad means "struggle")", or to blame Clinton for everything (which is near-sighted at best. I may take too long a view on the whole fight, but at least I'm not taking a near-sighted view).
So are you trying to do one of those otherwise useless things in this context, or just trying to remind me of an earlier attack that was mosty irrelevant as far as the forming of DHS is concerned?
If you wish to use that bombing, you need to include a lot more than that. How about the 50-year british occupation of the middle east after WWI? The Algerian war for independence, which included numerous french atrocities. The list goes on. This isn't a new fight, and the US has been in it up to its armpits for the last century, not counting whatever it inherited from britain with the rest of its legal structure.
Indeed, this fight isn't new. Some would say it goes back to ancient times. Bandwagon patriotism notwithstanding, if you're only focused on attacks wages against the US, you need to take off your blinders. But then, like the horse with blinders, you might get distracted from your purpose.
Why do all of you bandwagon patriots keep telling us the WTC was attacked twice? It was attacked once, and destroyed, by two airplanes. It was 2 buildings, and the same continuous attack took it down.
This is of course ignoring the fact that whatever else you said didn't have anything to do with what you were responding to.
Give him some patience, he doesn't live in an area that's had to adapt to special civil rights legislation for their previous peculiar institutions, he's unaware of how people really can grow up, eventually.
I'm guessing you live in Austin. :)
In any case, Texas is a huge bastion of Republican goodness, sadly enough. If these folks thiing national politics are ugly, they should take a good, hard look at Perry. Bush is a free-thinker by comparison.
There's something y'all watching need to get through your thick skulls. The behavior of our government is a symptom, but it's not the real problem. Impeach Bush? You know what that would accomplish? It would put him on trial. And at that point, everybody who wanted to impeach him will learn what the word impeach means, complain that Bush is still in office and go do something else.
The problem is when you can't get a job because when someone googles your name and looks at your website, they decide not to even bother calling you. The problem is when you ask some college students to clean up after themselves and they determine you're their mortal enemy. The problem is when parents strike their kids with all of their might and say "You're making me do this!" The problem is when kids are taking behavior-altering drugs due to authoritative pressure to cure their drug habits acquired through peer pressure. There are many more problems.
One big problem is the assumption that since the Constitution limits the powers of the government, you're free to do anything the constitution says the government can't stop you from doing. Where's your free speech when you can't find a job because you spoke your mind on your website? Where's your free press when you only have 3 media conglomerates? Where's your freedom of religion when your own family doesn't invite you to weddings because you're a damn atheist and they perform their ceremonies in a church?
Freedom? We don't know what that word means anymore, we're too busy telling the whole world what to do. And don't try to fool yourselves into thinking we don't do it here, because we do. If you don't actively fight it, every moment of your life will be micromanaged by someone who's not interested in your best interests, and they're not government officials. We don't need government to turn fascist, we're a fascist people.
Here, let me rewrite that second sentence for you:
Because the money to get elected comes from the people who want your money.
I'm going to put my own thoughts on this here real quick. Like my penis, my own thoughts on the matter aren't terribly large. We're on a downward spiral that I think is past the point of no return, and I think went past that point some time ago. Both parties aren't fighting for control of this government, they're fighting to replace it with the government of their own choosing, and when they sort it out, we'll either learn what Democratic Fascism is like, or Republican Fascism, and our grandkids will have to sort it out.
So the best thing any of us can do now is make sure to do our damnedest to give our kids training in critical thinking and an environment where they can appreciate and love their freedom, because that's the only way to see those values survive to the generation that will actually have the motivation and the means to fix it.
(not that I'm willing to hang all my hopes on that, I'm doing my part! Minding that with so much to be done, throwing yourself behind Free Software is part of the solution, regardless of whether or not you vote)
Let's see, users are asked to use a commandline and they say "I've got no idea, how much do you charge?"
--compared to--
After a long series of condescending dialogs over what was otherwise a minor problem, the user has now unwittingly completely trashed his system. She's on the edge of a nervous breakdown and doesn't know who to trust, because her 4 calls to Microsoft tech support led her down 8 different blind alleys, and her friends have all told her to just reload, but make a backup first, and she's thinking "wtf do you mean, reload? And how am I supposed to do a backup?"
Here in the linux world, I think it's perfectly ok to offer only an advanced UI for a task that expects the user performing it to have the necessary skills to do it, or the necessary time to learn the skills. The alternative we've all faced already, some friend/relative shows us a computer that's needlessly fucked because the OS lied to them, by both calling them an idiot and telling them it would fix it for them.
Yes, for all tasks that a user reasonably is expected to perform, Linux does well, imo better than Windows. For more advanced sysadmin type stuff, it also does very well by presenting the user with the simple choice: learn how to do the task or find someone who knows how to do the task. Use Linux and you'll never need your prozac again.
A lot of that lack of clarity you're talking about depends on many external factors. The Army trains to fight in large groups against large groups, Marines train for different missions, and I'm sure we could argue all day long about how useful battlefield snipers are, shooting the heads of the snake and all. My only point was that in many cases, filling the air up with bullets meets the definition of effective that I gave. You are correct that good shooting, aiming for the ideal 1:1 shot:kill ratio will also meet the definition of effectiveness that I gave in many other cases. It's quite telling that the Army (and the Marines, etc) employ both "spray and pray" and snipers on the battlefield. :)
Um, having never been in the army myself, I'll bite. You have to define "most effective". As the GP pointed out, unless you're trying to get 1 kill per bullet, it's a different situation entirely. If I were the one defining "most effective" in terms of fighting a battle and a war, I'd define it as "lowest cost in lives, lowest cost in money, victory is required". So without victory, your effectiveness is very poor, near 0. lowest cost in lives includes both sides, so you kill the minimum amount of enemies required to win the battle and sacrifice the minimum amount of friendlies.
That said, I once read somewhere that it takes $1 million to make a soldier in the Army. That's basic training, ship him to the front. I'm willing to wager that 1 million bullets comes out less than that price. So obviously it's cheaper in terms of money to use bullets rather than losing soldiers. That has the added and very important benefit of saving your own soldiers' lives, since lowest cost in lives is part of the definition.
19th century writers (and early 20th) such as Jules Vernes and Edgar Rice Burroughs at least expressed the feeling that telegraph communications were considered private. Granted, that's not anywhere near a SCOTUS citation, but whatever the law said, chances are the people expected privacy, and telegraph workers were bonded.
s/threatened/annoyed and your question answers itself.
Didn't they ban cloning?
Dude, reboot, it looks like you've had a kernel panic. There wasn't anything incendiary in Linus's post unless you're actively trying to be offended, in which case there's very little likelihood Linus would be able to avoid offending you.
Linus presented a ratio, which has a numberator and a denominator.
The ratio is this:
Linus is saying that this number may be less than 1. You counter by only providing a list of items that belong in the numerator which may or may not be comprehensive of things they've done and/or talked about doing.
The rest is just nitpicking what is an otherwise speculative post on Linus's part, which basically reads to me like "Don't get in bed with Sun, but don't run away from them like they're brain-eating zombies", which is a pretty reasonable position to me.
That's especially true if the universe split after the word was defined, but before it was used, in which case the question is "Which universe has the best sandwiches?"
Heh, I was, but you almost have to an Austinite to get it. :) Maybe you are and still don't, I don't know. Anyway, I took his "live music capital of the US" to be somewhat satirical of what folks here actually say, but used the actual words used here myself to make my own point. Which is basically obvious now, that once you get out of austin, nobody's heard of it and its music scene. There's a lot of pretension here on that subject...
I live there, and here people call it the live music capital of the world. Which you'd know if you'd ever been here...
Only people in Austin call it the live music capital of the world.
You ain't very smart, are ya?
Then the local distributor can pay to ship it back to the nation of origin.
No. That's not the deal. The deal is this: in a free, capitalist marketplace, it is nearly impossible for someone to produce creative works and make money at it. If they don't make money at it, they have to get a Real Job, and if that happens they won't be terribly productive. If that person happens to be a Great Artist, it would be our loss if he is not able to produce to his fullest capacity because he was busy working. On the flip side, if, in a free, capitalist market, we grant a complete and infinite monopoly on any product, we create a situation where the Great Artist can now legally flog anyone who does something with his work that he doesn't like. Since we have a free, capitalist market, the Great Artist has no intrinsic rights to his work, other than the right to produce it and attempt to sell it.
Since we want the Great Artist to be productive, because we believe that we, as a society and a culture, will ultimately benefit by this, we agree to give the Great Artist a limited monopoly for a limited time on his work. Now he has an opportunity to attempt quite credibly to earn a living and be more productive, and with any luck his great work of art will enter the public domain somewhat before it's useful life has expired (keeping in mind that many Great Works are timeless, but no software is timeless. It's useful life can be measured in years, provided you don't use a number greater than 10).
What makes closed source, copyrighted software inherently bad is that when the copyright expires, the software will have been useless for a great deal of time already, and without access to the source code, the software cannot pass into the public domain. That is a blatant violation of the compromise that *is* copyright!
Copyright was dreamed up to protect works whose useful lifetime can easily span hundreds of years. We're talking sculptures, paintings, books, plays, music, etc. Works that carried a high cost of reproduction and therefore required significant economic boost in order for them to be disseminated and enjoyed, because without dissemination and enjoyment, the Great Artist has done nothing for society worth protecting and encouraging.
Yet the useful life of items originally intended for copyright is very long. I read Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, Tarzan, and quite a few books that were written before my great-grandparents were born. But for some reason, software I used just a few years ago is already obsolete, useless, and inaccessible, but it's still protected by copyright.
And you're suggesting this makes sense?
Eh? Lots of honest people get elected all the time. They just don't stay honest very long. The business of politics does something to you. It's not just the corruption, it's a hard job. The honest politicians are to be found typically at lower levels, some state politicians (not many), mayors, city councils, county courts, etc. Again, I don't mean to imply that they are all honest, or that even most are honest, just that with as many positions at such levels that come open every election and as many honest people that run for them, it seems likely that some honest folk get elected every time.
You damn kids. In my day we did it with tape drives! (granted, those were very early days even for me, but still!) Nothing beats waiting half an hour for a 5k program to load.
Perhaps you want to read my post in the context of a reaction, where I was, you know, reacting to someone else's post.
That's because the popups for for My Friend's Hot Mom.