That's true, but in all fairness, people already know that Kerry changed his
mind about Vietnam and that Bush changed his mind about the Department of
Homeland Security. (Those are just examples.) No one really needs the
candidates to come up with examples, the question was just to put them on the
spot and dare them to commit political suicide.
Ask a trick question, get a tricky answer (or no answer).
"If Links or Lynxs are vulnerable, it's not like their lack of integration in a shell of
choice means they're going to be prevented from that vulnerability."
Well, that's a tautology: if they're vulnerable, they're vulnerable. The point
is that vulnerabilities are more likely, and more likely to be serious, in a web
enabled shell than a plain web browser.
You see, "web enabled shell" means that the same piece of software is both your
web browser and your application launcher. That makes it much easier for a flaw
to cross over between the two uses, i.e. a flaw on the browsing side causing a
(malicious) application to be launched.
Web enabled shells are a bad a idea because they combine two things that don't
need to be combined in a way that creates a lot of risk. Browsers and shells
work just fine when they're separate, for example Lynx and Bash.
"The sarcastic statement in the story was pointless. it's a 'so what' statement. May as well say in response to a linux PHP vulnerability for
example, 'Aren't you glad your web browser is php enabled'. It's a nothing
statement."
As far as I know, no such thing exists. If it did, it would get a lot of
sarcastic comments, and for a similar reason: PHP is run on the server side
because that's where it belongs. As a result, it's very unlikely that even a
serious PHP vulnerability will affect data that is stored on your
desktop. Putting PHP in the browser would be risky, which is probably why
it hasn't been done (as far as I know).
It's more like, "Aren't you glad your lawn mower is toilet enabled?" You should
have them both, but not as an integrated unit.
"Repeat after me: 'You have no right to privacy in public.' (especially when
you are outdoors)"
Truth through repetition is bad for the brain.
If you're in public, you can certainly be
looked at by the other people around you, but that doesn't mean you have no
right to privacy at all. Should the government be randomly stopping people on the street and checking
their pockets, or maybe strip-searching them? Should anyone who speaks in
public be forced to answer questions about their medical history? No? I
guess there is some privacy in public after all.
There is reduced privacy in public because there has to be; the whole point
is that a bunch of people are all out there together, and they can't be
expected to close their eyes. I don't see any
reason to extend that to people who use special equipment to watch invisibly
from miles away.
"Its not over priced just because its more then you want to spend. Untill
you figure out how basic economics work, there's just no helping you."
He's not the only one. In fact, his point was that lots of other people are
unwilling to pay that much, and that's the reason they use unlicensed
copies. The price is so high (according to the grandparent post) that
the company would make more money with a lower price.
"Bad luck, the usual US bullying that work with small countries doesn't work
with France and the EU, they're too big, you'll have to live with other
people's opinions for a change"
I already live with other people's opinions. I live with the French
government's opinion that everything with a swastika on it is bad, and I live
with the Neo-Nazis' racist nonsense opinions. I just don't let either one
dictate my life.
I know a guy who owns a small sword with a swastika on it. He's not a Nazi,
he's a collector of old weapons. If he decides to sell it on the Internet
to another collector in the USA, or even to a Neo-Nazi, then the French
government can go sit on its thumb. They've got no business doing this.
'In light of such actions, how can one associate "liberty" with "liberal"
anymore?'
"liberal" != "disagreeing with the Republicans"
There are very illiberal people who disagree with the Republicans.
Eric Rudolph
comes to mind.
These guys aren't liberals, they're just arrogant bozos. It doesn't even
make sense to DDOS the Republican website during the convention. Anyone who
wants to know what the Republicans think can just turn on the television.
It's easy to spot people who are criticizing that movie without having seen it.
They regurgitate some talking points without adding anything personal. That
would be credible if the talking points were a knock-down ironclad rebuttal, but
they always seem to miss the forest for the trees. To anyone who's actually
seen the movie, they sound like: "Aha! Moore shows Bush hugging the Saudi
ambassador and implies that it happened in the Oval Office. In fact, it
happened in Saudi Arabia." Most of it is beside the point and "debunks" things
that I neither believed nor thought that the film was trying to make me believe.
I don't buy Moore's conspiracy theories, but the film has a lot more to offer.
The re-creation of the attacks is the most propagandistic part of the film, but
it's
also the best and the least anti-Bush. If you haven't seen the movie, watch it
for that--and for the interviews. Moore spends a surprising amount of time with
his own mouth closed.
This article makes it sound like both candidates are engaging in a
campaign of suppression. If you actually follow the links, you find out
that there is (as far as i can tell) only one lawsuit per candidate, and that
the suits were not filed by the candidates.
I think copyright holders are wrong in both cases, but the candidates aren't
necessarily behind it.
If you want to know where a politician stands on an issue, you should ask
them and check their record. It's not enough to find one example where
they've benefitted from someone else's lawsuit.
Come to think of it, how come these suits are only evidence in one direction?
The candidates aren't party to the lawsuits. You could just as easily say that
both candidates are against copyright suits because a movie that helps Kerry is
being suppressed and so is an ad that helps Bush.
"It's skilled repetition, but no more so than drafting or car
repair."
Neither of those is done on an assembly line, in a factory, or with an emphasis
on speed. (They probably also take more skill and creativity than you think.)
What kinds of educational software are teachers using in school these days? Better yet, what kinds would they like to use?
One of the barriers is that most people don't consider it "educational" unless it's clearly designed for kids. There are plenty of Free/Open Source dictionaries, calculators, and typing programs, but I don't think we'll ever have a multimedia "Margaret and Jose visit the zoo."
What are you going to use it for? What apps are you going to run? What hardware will you run it on? How many machines? How many are identical? How long will you use it? Will you upgrade to the next version? Do you have a support contract? etc.
After you get rid of something, you can add up all the money it cost you. You can even try to estimate that before you buy it. But, and this is the key part, it depends heavily on what you're going to to with it.
Case-by-case TCO exists, but the TCO of a product does not. In other words, it's made up.
My experience with in-house work is that the conflicts occur between users and their own bosses.
I have had to explain to people repeatedly that something is not going to be easy to do--in fact it will be impossible--because their boss doesn't want them doing it at all. It's amazingly hard for some people to understand that. People, who would presumably not delete files if they were ordered not to by their boss, have actually yelled at me for following the instructions of that same boss by not including a "delete" button.
When you're writing software that will be used by employees of the person paying for it, users with stupid or wrong demands are not just an arrogant myth. It happens. (Not all the time, of course.)
How many people would the government have hired to build the projects if OSS alternatives didn't exist?
Probably none. The article talks about pretty standard software: office apps, DNS servers, operating systems, etc. If they didn't go Open Source, they'd have just bought it from Microsoft.
That's not really "hiring programmers" because the people who wrote Word and Windows XP have already been paid. They don't get paid more if a government buys a copy.
The Malaysian government choosing to use Open Source has just reduced the amount of money that will go to businesses and therefore employees. Which means lost jobs and/or fewer people being hired on.
I'm sure they'll spend the money on something else. They're not going to just put all the money they save into a big pile and light it on fire.
It's nice that they're using OSS but pretending it's not going to result in less jobs is silly.
I don't think Microsoft is going to fire anyone because of this. (Maybe someone in marketing or PR will be fired for allowing this to happen, but that's different.)
That is to say, the law doesn't change because some people don't obey it. The underlying moral principle of "respect other people's property" still applies. So it'd be easier to argue for changing the speed limit because it's not founded on the same fundamental moral principles as laws such as trespassing (Alan Donagan, "The Theory of Morality").
Isn't it the other way around? Almost no one follows the speed limit and it hasn't been changed.
I think they actually wrote out an exception somewhere saying that you can walk across someone's lawn if it's the only reasonable way to get somewhere you're allowed to be.
I've never heard of him, but does Donagan actually say that property rights are more fundamental than the right to not die because someone else was driving too fast?
. . . that it's mostly in the eye of the beholder:
If you wonder why you should type verbose hard-to-read stuff like "[f for f in n if f < 4]" instead of something like "n.each { |f| f<4 }", the give Ruby a whirl.
To wit -- Here's a little history lesson on why you're wrong. And when Linux starts to get the number and volume of enterprise-level applications that Windows has, these types of history lessons will prove useful. But don't just take the easy way out and say "Yeah Windows sucks" and not try to learn about the mistakes that might just be made again without some perspective.
As another poster has pointed out, Linux is much more likely to take lessons
from other UNIX OS's, which have a longer history with enterprise apps than
Windows and can teach "what to do" as well as "what not to do." You really
ought to check what Linux is doing, and for how long, before you say it needs a
history lesson on
what Microsoft did a few years ago. That kind of wrong assumption can get you
modded as a troll.
Besides, the problem of programs sprinkling things around in odd places during
install doesn't have much to do with the "number and volume of enterprise-level
applications." Goofy little desktop apps and games are some of the worst offenders.
What happened when they did this? Users came out of the woodwork! "Microsoft SUCKS!! Microsoft broke all my apps because they are a monopoly that wants to own the lucrative (insert program market here) market!", they said.
For someone who lectures about history lessons, you have things way out of
sequence. Users were coming out of the woodwork saying that a long, long time
before Win2000 or any security lockdown. I don't need a history lesson on that;
I was there in person.
They're welcome to claim credit for those things, but if any of them try to claim ownership, I'll laugh and continue using them whenever I please and however I please.
"This is added intentionally so that Mozilla contains all of the features of Internet Explorer."
From what I've heard, that may actually be true. Supposedly, they were handing off 'unknowns' to the same OS-level URI handler that IE uses. The only reason I can think of for that is to make exotic designed-for-IE/Windows links work.
Most IE users probably consider running arbitrary code to be a feature. Seriously.
Mind you, I *do* believe that immune deficiency exists and that people die from it. But, examining the many changing claims of the AIDS church has left me with questions, not answers, about the "HIV==AIDS" theory.
No one is claiming that HIV==AIDS. If they were, why would they even have two separate acronyms? The truth is HIV causes AIDS.
"Because what Microsoft is doing here is exploiting the old familiar gratis/libre ambiguity of the word free in yet another way. They're setting up for a claim that free software advocates are lying or deluded because Linux has a nonzero TCO."
In that case, they've outsmarted themselves. If you want a copy of Linux, you
can get it without paying any money, then use it without restrictions.
Arguing it's "not free" because it costs money to pay someone to use it for you
is silly. People will see through this. The whole debate over the meaning of
"free" happened because most people assume that free means giving it away.
Inventing yet another interpretation, this one based on an acronym, isn't going
to change any minds.
"This topic is an irony magnet. If you're defining the environment in terms of
how well it suits humans then you're missing the point. By that logic we should
drain wetlands so we can build towns on the land, kill all the bears and wolves
because they are unfriendly to humans, and we might as well drill away in
Alaska because it wouldn't bother the humans."
Do you want to walk everywhere and live up to your knees in water, with bears
and wolves roaming your back yard? No? Well, now that we've eliminated both of
the ridiculous extremes, we can get back to what I actually said:
An environment that humans can live comfortably in, with natural resources they
can take advantage of in a sustainable way, is a good environment.
Wolves and bears in the wild, the Alaskan wilderness, and wetlands are natural
resources. We'll destroy them if we really have to for our own sakes, but
that's not the same as destroying them for small gain.
Every national park and
preserve we have is there for the sake of humans. So that we can study the
plants and animals, so that we can visit them and enjoy the view, so that
livings things we find valuable have a seed they can be re-populated from.
When senators talk about preserving the Alaskan wilderness for our
grandchildren, they're not talking about the caribou's grandchildren. That is
as it should be.
We humans can either a) protect the environment for our own sake, b) protect the
environment for someone else's sake, or c) not protect the environment. I'm voting
for 'a'.
"Something that is 'good for the environment' is never just that; suppose you
decide that elephants are something you want to protect. Elephants eat trees and
totally trash the ecosystems where they live. Suppose you decide that using
solar cells is better than running a gasoline generator, forgetting that solar
cells generate massive amounts of toxic waste when they are made. Suppose you
decide that damming a river will cause too much damage to the ecosystem, and too
bad that it would generate hydroelectric power."
I argued that the concept of "good for the environment" has meaning. You're
arguing that every action has both positive and negative effects. That may be
true, but the mere fact that you are contrasting the good of hydroelectric power
with the bad of disrupting a river shows that you accept the concept of good and
bad.
There may be many factors to weigh, but there is still weight to be
measured, and a decision can still be made. By analogy, the concept of a "good
investment" exists, even though all investments carry risk. Simply throwing
up our hands and saying "there's no such thing as good for the environment" is
not an option. Not if we want to avoid eating, drinking, and breathing poison.
"Did you even read my post? Paper is made from crop trees - Sitka spruces I think.
If you increase recycling in a dubious economical exercise these plantations will
be less viable and so there will be fewer trees rather than more."
I never said that they weren't crop trees. In fact, I
said, "[A] pound of wood, even crop wood, can be put to much better use than
replacing two pounds of cardboard so it can be thrown away." Unless we want to
needlessly sacrifice our natural resources to create cropland and landfills,
we should avoid (taking other factors into account) using crop trees when trash
will do.
By the way, "dubious economical exercise"? I though we were talking about
the environment. Besides, I specifically mentioned the waste, and cost, of
shipping out scraps you already have, then buying and shipping in wood to
replace it. I don't think we're at the point where we need to worry about the
total number of trees we have (specific types of trees in specific places are
another story) but if recycling pushes us to that point by reducing the need for
crop trees, we can always plant non-crop trees in the freed-up cropland.
"The point I was trying to make is that environmentalism is essentially a mode of consumption; it doesn't really matter if something is good or bad for the environment - as if such a simple dichotomy made any sense anyway - it's how it makes you feel when you buy it."
Some people are like that, but don't assume that everyone is, and definitely don't use it as an excuse to not care about the environment.
It does make sense to say that something is "good" or "bad" for the environment. The fact that some people say it when it's not true doesn't make it meaningless.
An environment that humans can live comfortably in, with natural resources they can take advantage of in a sustainable way, is a good environment. Anything that moves toward that is good for the environment; anything that moves away from it is bad for the environment.
That's why dumping poisonous mercury into a river is bad for the environment.
"So even if it did make sense to kill the whales, people would not accept the idea. Our attitude towards the environment is totemic rather than rational."
Some people would never accept that idea, but I think you are underestimating the public. I live in an area where the government, the public, and scientists take the environment very seriously. They do a lot of public awareness campaigns, cleanup efforts, and conservation efforts. They also put a lot of effort into preserving some species and exterminating others.
Naturally, some of the exterminations (especially the ones involving mammals) are opposed by zealots like PETA, but the public mostly understands what's being done and why.
"For example, using recycled paper uses more resources and energy than new paper, and it doesn't lock down any carbon. People believe recycled paper is better because a simple lie is easier to accept than a complex truth."
Just because the truth is complex doesn't mean it's the opposite of what people believe. It may take two pounds of cardboard to replace one pound of wood (that's an example, I don't know the real number). It may even take more energy to process it. But most recycling is done at the factory using scraps, so the alternative is to ship the cardboard to a landfill and dump it, then ship in the wood. Even if you're not using scraps, a pound of wood, even crop wood, can be put to much better use than replacing two pounds of cardboard so it can be thrown away.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, but in all fairness, people already know that Kerry changed his mind about Vietnam and that Bush changed his mind about the Department of Homeland Security. (Those are just examples.) No one really needs the candidates to come up with examples, the question was just to put them on the spot and dare them to commit political suicide.
Ask a trick question, get a tricky answer (or no answer).
Well, that's a tautology: if they're vulnerable, they're vulnerable. The point is that vulnerabilities are more likely, and more likely to be serious, in a web enabled shell than a plain web browser.
You see, "web enabled shell" means that the same piece of software is both your web browser and your application launcher. That makes it much easier for a flaw to cross over between the two uses, i.e. a flaw on the browsing side causing a (malicious) application to be launched.
Web enabled shells are a bad a idea because they combine two things that don't need to be combined in a way that creates a lot of risk. Browsers and shells work just fine when they're separate, for example Lynx and Bash.
As far as I know, no such thing exists. If it did, it would get a lot of sarcastic comments, and for a similar reason: PHP is run on the server side because that's where it belongs. As a result, it's very unlikely that even a serious PHP vulnerability will affect data that is stored on your desktop. Putting PHP in the browser would be risky, which is probably why it hasn't been done (as far as I know).
It's more like, "Aren't you glad your lawn mower is toilet enabled?" You should have them both, but not as an integrated unit.
Truth through repetition is bad for the brain.
If you're in public, you can certainly be looked at by the other people around you, but that doesn't mean you have no right to privacy at all. Should the government be randomly stopping people on the street and checking their pockets, or maybe strip-searching them? Should anyone who speaks in public be forced to answer questions about their medical history? No? I guess there is some privacy in public after all.
There is reduced privacy in public because there has to be; the whole point is that a bunch of people are all out there together, and they can't be expected to close their eyes. I don't see any reason to extend that to people who use special equipment to watch invisibly from miles away.
I already live with other people's opinions. I live with the French government's opinion that everything with a swastika on it is bad, and I live with the Neo-Nazis' racist nonsense opinions. I just don't let either one dictate my life.
I know a guy who owns a small sword with a swastika on it. He's not a Nazi, he's a collector of old weapons. If he decides to sell it on the Internet to another collector in the USA, or even to a Neo-Nazi, then the French government can go sit on its thumb. They've got no business doing this.
"liberal" != "disagreeing with the Republicans"
There are very illiberal people who disagree with the Republicans. Eric Rudolph comes to mind.
These guys aren't liberals, they're just arrogant bozos. It doesn't even make sense to DDOS the Republican website during the convention. Anyone who wants to know what the Republicans think can just turn on the television.
It's easy to spot people who are criticizing that movie without having seen it. They regurgitate some talking points without adding anything personal. That would be credible if the talking points were a knock-down ironclad rebuttal, but they always seem to miss the forest for the trees. To anyone who's actually seen the movie, they sound like: "Aha! Moore shows Bush hugging the Saudi ambassador and implies that it happened in the Oval Office. In fact, it happened in Saudi Arabia." Most of it is beside the point and "debunks" things that I neither believed nor thought that the film was trying to make me believe.
I don't buy Moore's conspiracy theories, but the film has a lot more to offer. The re-creation of the attacks is the most propagandistic part of the film, but it's also the best and the least anti-Bush. If you haven't seen the movie, watch it for that--and for the interviews. Moore spends a surprising amount of time with his own mouth closed.
This article makes it sound like both candidates are engaging in a campaign of suppression. If you actually follow the links, you find out that there is (as far as i can tell) only one lawsuit per candidate, and that the suits were not filed by the candidates.
I think copyright holders are wrong in both cases, but the candidates aren't necessarily behind it.
If you want to know where a politician stands on an issue, you should ask them and check their record. It's not enough to find one example where they've benefitted from someone else's lawsuit.
Come to think of it, how come these suits are only evidence in one direction? The candidates aren't party to the lawsuits. You could just as easily say that both candidates are against copyright suits because a movie that helps Kerry is being suppressed and so is an ad that helps Bush.
Neither of those is done on an assembly line, in a factory, or with an emphasis on speed. (They probably also take more skill and creativity than you think.)
What kinds of educational software are teachers using in school these days? Better yet, what kinds would they like to use?
One of the barriers is that most people don't consider it "educational" unless it's clearly designed for kids. There are plenty of Free/Open Source dictionaries, calculators, and typing programs, but I don't think we'll ever have a multimedia "Margaret and Jose visit the zoo."
Too many variables.
What are you going to use it for? What apps are you going to run? What hardware will you run it on? How many machines? How many are identical? How long will you use it? Will you upgrade to the next version? Do you have a support contract? etc.
After you get rid of something, you can add up all the money it cost you. You can even try to estimate that before you buy it. But, and this is the key part, it depends heavily on what you're going to to with it.
Case-by-case TCO exists, but the TCO of a product does not. In other words, it's made up.
My experience with in-house work is that the conflicts occur between users and their own bosses.
I have had to explain to people repeatedly that something is not going to be easy to do--in fact it will be impossible--because their boss doesn't want them doing it at all. It's amazingly hard for some people to understand that. People, who would presumably not delete files if they were ordered not to by their boss, have actually yelled at me for following the instructions of that same boss by not including a "delete" button.
When you're writing software that will be used by employees of the person paying for it, users with stupid or wrong demands are not just an arrogant myth. It happens. (Not all the time, of course.)
Probably none. The article talks about pretty standard software: office apps, DNS servers, operating systems, etc. If they didn't go Open Source, they'd have just bought it from Microsoft.
That's not really "hiring programmers" because the people who wrote Word and Windows XP have already been paid. They don't get paid more if a government buys a copy.
I'm sure they'll spend the money on something else. They're not going to just put all the money they save into a big pile and light it on fire.
I don't think Microsoft is going to fire anyone because of this. (Maybe someone in marketing or PR will be fired for allowing this to happen, but that's different.)
Isn't it the other way around? Almost no one follows the speed limit and it hasn't been changed.
I think they actually wrote out an exception somewhere saying that you can walk across someone's lawn if it's the only reasonable way to get somewhere you're allowed to be.
I've never heard of him, but does Donagan actually say that property rights are more fundamental than the right to not die because someone else was driving too fast?
Unless we're talking about two different things, that's been around in bulk for a long time.
As another poster has pointed out, Linux is much more likely to take lessons from other UNIX OS's, which have a longer history with enterprise apps than Windows and can teach "what to do" as well as "what not to do." You really ought to check what Linux is doing, and for how long, before you say it needs a history lesson on what Microsoft did a few years ago. That kind of wrong assumption can get you modded as a troll.
Besides, the problem of programs sprinkling things around in odd places during install doesn't have much to do with the "number and volume of enterprise-level applications." Goofy little desktop apps and games are some of the worst offenders.
For someone who lectures about history lessons, you have things way out of sequence. Users were coming out of the woodwork saying that a long, long time before Win2000 or any security lockdown. I don't need a history lesson on that; I was there in person.
They're welcome to claim credit for those things, but if any of them try to claim ownership, I'll laugh and continue using them whenever I please and however I please.
From what I've heard, that may actually be true. Supposedly, they were handing off 'unknowns' to the same OS-level URI handler that IE uses. The only reason I can think of for that is to make exotic designed-for-IE/Windows links work.
Most IE users probably consider running arbitrary code to be a feature. Seriously.
I wonder what would happen in the area of (real-world) vandalism. It'd be easy to catch people doing it, but almost no one would care or even see it.
Yeah, we only complain when we care. Don't you?
In that case, they've outsmarted themselves. If you want a copy of Linux, you can get it without paying any money, then use it without restrictions.
Arguing it's "not free" because it costs money to pay someone to use it for you is silly. People will see through this. The whole debate over the meaning of "free" happened because most people assume that free means giving it away. Inventing yet another interpretation, this one based on an acronym, isn't going to change any minds.
Do you want to walk everywhere and live up to your knees in water, with bears and wolves roaming your back yard? No? Well, now that we've eliminated both of the ridiculous extremes, we can get back to what I actually said:
An environment that humans can live comfortably in, with natural resources they can take advantage of in a sustainable way, is a good environment.
Wolves and bears in the wild, the Alaskan wilderness, and wetlands are natural resources. We'll destroy them if we really have to for our own sakes, but that's not the same as destroying them for small gain.
Every national park and preserve we have is there for the sake of humans. So that we can study the plants and animals, so that we can visit them and enjoy the view, so that livings things we find valuable have a seed they can be re-populated from. When senators talk about preserving the Alaskan wilderness for our grandchildren, they're not talking about the caribou's grandchildren. That is as it should be.
We humans can either a) protect the environment for our own sake, b) protect the environment for someone else's sake, or c) not protect the environment. I'm voting for 'a'.
I argued that the concept of "good for the environment" has meaning. You're arguing that every action has both positive and negative effects. That may be true, but the mere fact that you are contrasting the good of hydroelectric power with the bad of disrupting a river shows that you accept the concept of good and bad.
There may be many factors to weigh, but there is still weight to be measured, and a decision can still be made. By analogy, the concept of a "good investment" exists, even though all investments carry risk. Simply throwing up our hands and saying "there's no such thing as good for the environment" is not an option. Not if we want to avoid eating, drinking, and breathing poison.
I never said that they weren't crop trees. In fact, I said, "[A] pound of wood, even crop wood, can be put to much better use than replacing two pounds of cardboard so it can be thrown away." Unless we want to needlessly sacrifice our natural resources to create cropland and landfills, we should avoid (taking other factors into account) using crop trees when trash will do.
By the way, "dubious economical exercise"? I though we were talking about the environment. Besides, I specifically mentioned the waste, and cost, of shipping out scraps you already have, then buying and shipping in wood to replace it. I don't think we're at the point where we need to worry about the total number of trees we have (specific types of trees in specific places are another story) but if recycling pushes us to that point by reducing the need for crop trees, we can always plant non-crop trees in the freed-up cropland.
Some people are like that, but don't assume that everyone is, and definitely don't use it as an excuse to not care about the environment.
It does make sense to say that something is "good" or "bad" for the environment. The fact that some people say it when it's not true doesn't make it meaningless.
An environment that humans can live comfortably in, with natural resources they can take advantage of in a sustainable way, is a good environment. Anything that moves toward that is good for the environment; anything that moves away from it is bad for the environment.
That's why dumping poisonous mercury into a river is bad for the environment.
Some people would never accept that idea, but I think you are underestimating the public. I live in an area where the government, the public, and scientists take the environment very seriously. They do a lot of public awareness campaigns, cleanup efforts, and conservation efforts. They also put a lot of effort into preserving some species and exterminating others.
Naturally, some of the exterminations (especially the ones involving mammals) are opposed by zealots like PETA, but the public mostly understands what's being done and why.
Just because the truth is complex doesn't mean it's the opposite of what people believe. It may take two pounds of cardboard to replace one pound of wood (that's an example, I don't know the real number). It may even take more energy to process it. But most recycling is done at the factory using scraps, so the alternative is to ship the cardboard to a landfill and dump it, then ship in the wood. Even if you're not using scraps, a pound of wood, even crop wood, can be put to much better use than replacing two pounds of cardboard so it can be thrown away.