People get killed in prisons. People get killed outside, because prisons force them to become a part of the criminal world (talk about rehabilitation). People die by ODing on street drugs (a problem created solely by enforcement). People can't ever hope to get a good job, and so die from health issues. They commit suicides. These deaths may be hard to quantify, but they are a direct consequence of the political incarceration. But you seem to be too taken with "humanely".
You are also quick to dismiss the comparison only because of death rate, as if killing is the worst thing you can do to a person. Dooming them to a life of unpaid slave labor in prison, wage slavery outside, and taking away political rights is just as damaging as killing, as long as you do it to enough people and with enough prejudice.
Their attempts at plugging leaks are as earnest as they are pitiful, IMHO. People like Manning, Drake, and Snowden came forward because they grew up believing in the right to freedom of expression. If the administration keeps reacting this violently, though, then the next stream of leaks will be by anons. And it will be wider, bigger, deeper stream, if only because there's more to leak as the time passes, and the copying friction keeps approaching zero. I'd bet 1:1 the next big leak will be anonymous, thanks in large to Snowden's widely publicized treatment.
In the age of the Net, the only way to stop leaks is by reducing organization size. Systematic lawbreakers will have to become very small (may be hundreds of people, more likely dozens), just so that they can be kept secret. Which is great for all of us.
They are totally comparable. Stalin's government was more authoritarian and ruthless, but if we start adding up all of the political injustice, Obama's administration may just take the cake. In 2011, more than quarter million prisoners in US were doing time for drug offenses. Most of them -- pot, all of them political. In many cases, the actual crime was having brown skin, which makes them even more political. Give this machine 30 years of Stalin's term, and you arrive at similar numbers. This time, though, the turkeys are killed humanely:)
And while we are at it, may be we can give our kids cheaper toys, running a full-featured free software OS and free educational software, which the kids can study. Using non-free software to educate (really, to program) the students is a clear sign of corruption. I suspect a traditional kind of corruption, when inferior, overpriced products are adapted in exchange for some kind of kickback. And for sure, there is a corruption of the pedagogical ideal here. What can a black box really teach a student? "Never you mind how I work, what I think, or how much I spy on you. Be a good girl and follow the directions on the screen."
I don't want to ruin your optimism, but samizdat did not influence Soviet politics at all.
How do you even figure? What with books like The Gulag Archipelago and Master And Margarita, and all the rest of the forbidden literature which questioned the political, economical, and cultural status quo. Whole generations of Soviet intelligentsia were affected by samizdat, and while most dissidents never had a chance to develop a political career, they still influenced the public opinion in profound ways.
Never going to happen. The Internet is becoming more commercial, true, but it's also becoming more non-commercial and free. No contradiction here: both segments are growing. The cable control is also irrelevant. China has a very robust firewall. Some countries opted to cut cables and have an intranet. But when it comes to copying 1GiB of arbitrary data from point A to point B, it's getting easier every day, even if point A is in China and point B is in Syria. So their Internet is not as free as ours, but it's still getting more free every day, even for them.
Even at the lowest point of Stalinist regime, under extreme censorship, and with a constant risk of being ratted out, Russians still managed to exchange politically-sensitive information via samizdat, by reprinting works on typewriters. If Stalin wasn't able to can this activity, what chance do the smaller tyrants have, once the cost of secure & private peer-to-peer communication went to zero? Removing the friction associated with copying information is the main product of the global network, and this friction is still very much near zero, even if the cables are cut in a few places and the laws favor censorship.
I predict the collapse of the copyright and patent monopolies in the very near future (40 years or so). All it takes is for the older generations to die off. 40 years from now, people in charge will be today's schoolchildren, with much less patience for censorship and artificial barriers to expression.
Uh... For me, at least, the main problem with Apple is not that it works around the labor laws, but that their devices spy on me (location, sound, video, web browsing) pretty much around the clock. If a Chinese company can deliver a phone running all free software, I'll buy it even if they have to kill a baby panda for each one made. As long as it's within the international law, of course.
I don't know where OSI would stand on this merger, but Richard Stallman appears to be categorically opposed to the movement, as he thinks it is based on wrong values, among other things.
Instead of protecting the consumer by outlawing every evil feature a computer might possibly have, they should simply mandate free and open source software in all consumer electronics. It will make all software cheaper, spur the competition, and provide adequate protection from all evil features, even the ones we can't imagine today.
A major problem is not whether Wayland supports old X applications but instead that new Wayland applications are not going to be network transparent like X ones. That limits them to one to one network connection via third party hacks like VNC instead of the many to one and one to many options that X gives you. It's a backwards step to the non-networked, single user, single platform mindset.
You want network transparency? Why does the display server have to provide you with it? You want to drag networking, authentication, and encryption code/hooks into the display server. So much for the UNIX philosophy. There is already a "network transparency" protocol which your applications can use: https+xhtml+javascript. Fire up the transmission Web server/client to see a stellar example. You will never, never, never obtain the efficiency and the responsiveness of a Web app through the display server. A cutting-edge Web app can do real-time 3d-rendering, for chrissake, and anything with just forms and dialogs will fly like a jet. So if supporting old X applications is not a problem, then there is no problem. The X's approach to gaining network transparency is just plain wrong, and I say it as a user. Using X's "network transparency" to run a GTK or QT app across the Internet is every bit as annoying as running it over VNC, and is often slower. I hope to god Wayland will take off and GUI app developers will become aware that they are in the best position to provide network transparency. It's easier for them, as writing Web interfaces is arguably easier than using a toolkit, and it's obviously better for users.
And if you are stuck with the software that (1) has no shell interface and (2) insists on using a modern toolkit such as QT for rendering 3D widgets to a local screen, then you are stuck with an application which is not intended by the authors to be network-transparent, and Wayland isn't designed to solve this problem. Wayland is for drawing pixels to a local screen. Give it the right kind of app, and it will render it a browser window with 3D shadows, animations, and anything you bloody want, with no tearing, no flicker, no lag of any kind.
You are almost certainly right, about the motives as well as about the likely effect.
To this I may add, the submitter's bias (or complete lack of effort to present the NPoV) is clear in the blurb. Patent trolls are "disrupting competition"? Really? The whole point of the patent system is to disrupt the competition, by giving out almost life-time exclusive rights for implementing ideas. Yet patent lovers keep repeating the same nonsense: in their world, monopolies spur the competition.
Another piece of nonsense which is not in the blurb, but certainly is in TFA, is the assumption that patents improve innovation. How can they possibly do that? A patented thing can only be improved by the rights holder, usually a very small entity, of which the R&D team is again a tiny fraction. Libre things can be improved and brought to the market by researchers, engineers, and manufacturers anywhere in the world. Even a dummy can understand that the only serious incentive provided by the patent system is to misappropriate as many broad ideas as possible, so that no one can even sneeze without paying royalties.
Wake me up when they start tearing down this house. This law is almost certainly another step backwards for the consumer and the small inventor.
GNU is considerably larger than Linux. My paper napkin calculations show the entire kernel to be roughly half the size of gcc. No, not including g++, just gcc. So if a distro is built and distributed with gcc as the default compiler, then it's already more like GNU/Linux. Most Linux-based distros, though, easily come with 10 times as much GNU.
Hehehe. I, for one, don't understand for the life of me why it is OK to share videos of soldiers shooting at children with automatic weapons, for real. Or what Lucas did with kids in the prequels. How is that OK, and a depiction of a fictional sex abuse act is not OK? I think children involved in actual acts would strongly agree with me, too.
Or what about any movie where a super-villain is trying to destroy the world? Why are we OK with looking at that imagery? Isn't that the worst fucking thing that one can try to do? Why do people get gold prizes for depicting this, and prison time for monkeys with no clothes on?
This. I think there is a fundamental limitation on passwords: human brains suck at remembering good ones. This excuse will make a ton of sense in the future world, where digital security is taken seriously. At least as seriously as locking doors today.
Even though I would love to see every racketeer prosecuted to the full extent of the law, a more useful approach would be to end the war on sharing. Only legalizing non-commercial file-sharing will protect the public from these sharks.
This whole bit of FUD is based on taking two words out of context in a list of features that Samsung could have changed to not infringe in the German design patent infringement case. Specifically, Apple said that their patent claimed A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H, etc. with one of those things being rounded corners.
Look at the patent, which, by the way, has 1 content-free claim (you didn't know that?), and a few crude pictures. I remember drawing things like that in high school. All I claim is that it's been thought of before, but nice trolling.
Note that Stallman's solution doesn't include either of those requirements, and therefore lacks the same moral justification.
So his argument is flawed because he didn't chew it up for you like I did? Try again.
It is sickening in the extreme to think that it's possible to deny other people access to information, simply because you thought of it first.
It's worse than that. Patents don't deny access to information, but they curtail our freedom to help each other. And those who register patents almost never think of it first. Did Apple think first of a rectangular device with rounded corners?
As usual, Richard Stallman has a great solution:
We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement.
This will work because a very similar law already works in the medical field. Just like surgeons, who can safely ignore procedural patents to save lives, programmers and distributors of free software deserve complete patent immunity because their work is entirely gratis, and benefits the whole world.
Wired article (gods help you if you don't use adblock and noscript).
Yes, yes, yes. The submitter sounds like he wants to digitize a bunch of files, so I would recommend a good file system. Any stable filesystem will do, like ext4 for instance.
Avoid metadata within a file for as long as possible. It will bury you. If date and bill amount is all you need, then just stick them into the file name.
Now you can pile your files into, say, ~/my-files/ in any way whatever. You can create a category tree, for example, to allow you to find files in a file manager in 3 clicks. For more complex tasks you can just use bash, find, and the rest of the userland. It does not get simpler or more portable than that. In particular, it is trivial to convert this structure into a CVS, which you can suck into a spreadsheet or a database of your choice.
PV solar definitely creates more pollution per MWHr
Irrelevant, even of true. There are much simpler ways that don't have to use any fancy chemistry or manufacturing processes, like solar updraft towers, solar thermal collectors, and concentrated solar power.
Slashdot Mirror
People get killed in prisons. People get killed outside, because prisons force them to become a part of the criminal world (talk about rehabilitation). People die by ODing on street drugs (a problem created solely by enforcement). People can't ever hope to get a good job, and so die from health issues. They commit suicides. These deaths may be hard to quantify, but they are a direct consequence of the political incarceration. But you seem to be too taken with "humanely".
You are also quick to dismiss the comparison only because of death rate, as if killing is the worst thing you can do to a person. Dooming them to a life of unpaid slave labor in prison, wage slavery outside, and taking away political rights is just as damaging as killing, as long as you do it to enough people and with enough prejudice.
Their attempts at plugging leaks are as earnest as they are pitiful, IMHO. People like Manning, Drake, and Snowden came forward because they grew up believing in the right to freedom of expression. If the administration keeps reacting this violently, though, then the next stream of leaks will be by anons. And it will be wider, bigger, deeper stream, if only because there's more to leak as the time passes, and the copying friction keeps approaching zero. I'd bet 1:1 the next big leak will be anonymous, thanks in large to Snowden's widely publicized treatment.
In the age of the Net, the only way to stop leaks is by reducing organization size. Systematic lawbreakers will have to become very small (may be hundreds of people, more likely dozens), just so that they can be kept secret. Which is great for all of us.
They are totally comparable. Stalin's government was more authoritarian and ruthless, but if we start adding up all of the political injustice, Obama's administration may just take the cake. In 2011, more than quarter million prisoners in US were doing time for drug offenses. Most of them -- pot, all of them political. In many cases, the actual crime was having brown skin, which makes them even more political. Give this machine 30 years of Stalin's term, and you arrive at similar numbers. This time, though, the turkeys are killed humanely :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller!_The_Musical
And while we are at it, may be we can give our kids cheaper toys, running a full-featured free software OS and free educational software, which the kids can study. Using non-free software to educate (really, to program) the students is a clear sign of corruption. I suspect a traditional kind of corruption, when inferior, overpriced products are adapted in exchange for some kind of kickback. And for sure, there is a corruption of the pedagogical ideal here. What can a black box really teach a student? "Never you mind how I work, what I think, or how much I spy on you. Be a good girl and follow the directions on the screen."
I don't want to ruin your optimism, but samizdat did not influence Soviet politics at all.
How do you even figure? What with books like The Gulag Archipelago and Master And Margarita, and all the rest of the forbidden literature which questioned the political, economical, and cultural status quo. Whole generations of Soviet intelligentsia were affected by samizdat, and while most dissidents never had a chance to develop a political career, they still influenced the public opinion in profound ways.
Never going to happen. The Internet is becoming more commercial, true, but it's also becoming more non-commercial and free. No contradiction here: both segments are growing. The cable control is also irrelevant. China has a very robust firewall. Some countries opted to cut cables and have an intranet. But when it comes to copying 1GiB of arbitrary data from point A to point B, it's getting easier every day, even if point A is in China and point B is in Syria. So their Internet is not as free as ours, but it's still getting more free every day, even for them.
Even at the lowest point of Stalinist regime, under extreme censorship, and with a constant risk of being ratted out, Russians still managed to exchange politically-sensitive information via samizdat, by reprinting works on typewriters. If Stalin wasn't able to can this activity, what chance do the smaller tyrants have, once the cost of secure & private peer-to-peer communication went to zero? Removing the friction associated with copying information is the main product of the global network, and this friction is still very much near zero, even if the cables are cut in a few places and the laws favor censorship.
I predict the collapse of the copyright and patent monopolies in the very near future (40 years or so). All it takes is for the older generations to die off. 40 years from now, people in charge will be today's schoolchildren, with much less patience for censorship and artificial barriers to expression.
Skip TFA, folks. If this guy wanted to be read, he'd publish on this side of the paywall.
Uh... For me, at least, the main problem with Apple is not that it works around the labor laws, but that their devices spy on me (location, sound, video, web browsing) pretty much around the clock. If a Chinese company can deliver a phone running all free software, I'll buy it even if they have to kill a baby panda for each one made. As long as it's within the international law, of course.
I don't know where OSI would stand on this merger, but Richard Stallman appears to be categorically opposed to the movement, as he thinks it is based on wrong values, among other things.
Instead of protecting the consumer by outlawing every evil feature a computer might possibly have, they should simply mandate free and open source software in all consumer electronics. It will make all software cheaper, spur the competition, and provide adequate protection from all evil features, even the ones we can't imagine today.
A major problem is not whether Wayland supports old X applications but instead that new Wayland applications are not going to be network transparent like X ones. That limits them to one to one network connection via third party hacks like VNC instead of the many to one and one to many options that X gives you. It's a backwards step to the non-networked, single user, single platform mindset.
You want network transparency? Why does the display server have to provide you with it? You want to drag networking, authentication, and encryption code/hooks into the display server. So much for the UNIX philosophy. There is already a "network transparency" protocol which your applications can use: https+xhtml+javascript. Fire up the transmission Web server/client to see a stellar example. You will never, never, never obtain the efficiency and the responsiveness of a Web app through the display server. A cutting-edge Web app can do real-time 3d-rendering, for chrissake, and anything with just forms and dialogs will fly like a jet. So if supporting old X applications is not a problem, then there is no problem. The X's approach to gaining network transparency is just plain wrong, and I say it as a user. Using X's "network transparency" to run a GTK or QT app across the Internet is every bit as annoying as running it over VNC, and is often slower. I hope to god Wayland will take off and GUI app developers will become aware that they are in the best position to provide network transparency. It's easier for them, as writing Web interfaces is arguably easier than using a toolkit, and it's obviously better for users.
And if you are stuck with the software that (1) has no shell interface and (2) insists on using a modern toolkit such as QT for rendering 3D widgets to a local screen, then you are stuck with an application which is not intended by the authors to be network-transparent, and Wayland isn't designed to solve this problem. Wayland is for drawing pixels to a local screen. Give it the right kind of app, and it will render it a browser window with 3D shadows, animations, and anything you bloody want, with no tearing, no flicker, no lag of any kind.
You are almost certainly right, about the motives as well as about the likely effect.
To this I may add, the submitter's bias (or complete lack of effort to present the NPoV) is clear in the blurb. Patent trolls are "disrupting competition"? Really? The whole point of the patent system is to disrupt the competition, by giving out almost life-time exclusive rights for implementing ideas. Yet patent lovers keep repeating the same nonsense: in their world, monopolies spur the competition.
Another piece of nonsense which is not in the blurb, but certainly is in TFA, is the assumption that patents improve innovation. How can they possibly do that? A patented thing can only be improved by the rights holder, usually a very small entity, of which the R&D team is again a tiny fraction. Libre things can be improved and brought to the market by researchers, engineers, and manufacturers anywhere in the world. Even a dummy can understand that the only serious incentive provided by the patent system is to misappropriate as many broad ideas as possible, so that no one can even sneeze without paying royalties.
Wake me up when they start tearing down this house. This law is almost certainly another step backwards for the consumer and the small inventor.
I hope you are paying royalties to the guy who patented a line, since you used two of them.
GNU is considerably larger than Linux. My paper napkin calculations show the entire kernel to be roughly half the size of gcc. No, not including g++, just gcc. So if a distro is built and distributed with gcc as the default compiler, then it's already more like GNU/Linux. Most Linux-based distros, though, easily come with 10 times as much GNU.
Hehehe. I, for one, don't understand for the life of me why it is OK to share videos of soldiers shooting at children with automatic weapons, for real. Or what Lucas did with kids in the prequels. How is that OK, and a depiction of a fictional sex abuse act is not OK? I think children involved in actual acts would strongly agree with me, too.
Or what about any movie where a super-villain is trying to destroy the world? Why are we OK with looking at that imagery? Isn't that the worst fucking thing that one can try to do? Why do people get gold prizes for depicting this, and prison time for monkeys with no clothes on?
This. I think there is a fundamental limitation on passwords: human brains suck at remembering good ones. This excuse will make a ton of sense in the future world, where digital security is taken seriously. At least as seriously as locking doors today.
Even though I would love to see every racketeer prosecuted to the full extent of the law, a more useful approach would be to end the war on sharing. Only legalizing non-commercial file-sharing will protect the public from these sharks.
And don't forget about the Human horn!
This whole bit of FUD is based on taking two words out of context in a list of features that Samsung could have changed to not infringe in the German design patent infringement case. Specifically, Apple said that their patent claimed A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H, etc. with one of those things being rounded corners.
Look at the patent, which, by the way, has 1 content-free claim (you didn't know that?), and a few crude pictures. I remember drawing things like that in high school. All I claim is that it's been thought of before, but nice trolling.
Note that Stallman's solution doesn't include either of those requirements, and therefore lacks the same moral justification.
So his argument is flawed because he didn't chew it up for you like I did? Try again.
It is sickening in the extreme to think that it's possible to deny other people access to information, simply because you thought of it first.
It's worse than that. Patents don't deny access to information, but they curtail our freedom to help each other. And those who register patents almost never think of it first. Did Apple think first of a rectangular device with rounded corners?
As usual, Richard Stallman has a great solution:
We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement.
This will work because a very similar law already works in the medical field. Just like surgeons, who can safely ignore procedural patents to save lives, programmers and distributors of free software deserve complete patent immunity because their work is entirely gratis, and benefits the whole world.
Wired article (gods help you if you don't use adblock and noscript).
Don't bother.
sed s/CVS/CSV/
Yes, yes, yes. The submitter sounds like he wants to digitize a bunch of files, so I would recommend a good file system. Any stable filesystem will do, like ext4 for instance.
Avoid metadata within a file for as long as possible. It will bury you. If date and bill amount is all you need, then just stick them into the file name.
YYYY-MM-DD.amount.unit.short-description.pdf
2013-04-07.-3975.us-cents.how-much-this-advice-will-cost-you.pdf
Now you can pile your files into, say, ~/my-files/ in any way whatever. You can create a category tree, for example, to allow you to find files in a file manager in 3 clicks. For more complex tasks you can just use bash, find, and the rest of the userland. It does not get simpler or more portable than that. In particular, it is trivial to convert this structure into a CVS, which you can suck into a spreadsheet or a database of your choice.
Have we taken photos of an actual black hole? No.
Lensing effects in visible light should count as a photo of a blackhole, IMHO, since the event horizon is theoretically invisible.
And no, a black hole is not god dividing by zero.
Could easily be a god dividing by every real number other than zero, which would be good enough.
PV solar definitely creates more pollution per MWHr
Irrelevant, even of true. There are much simpler ways that don't have to use any fancy chemistry or manufacturing processes, like solar updraft towers, solar thermal collectors, and concentrated solar power.