My reply to ClosedSource cites the conventional wisdom, that most paid programming work is custom and not for general resale. Your experience must be evaluated in light of this fact, so the GP's claim is hardly obvious on balance.
I don't doubt that conventional wisdom one iota -- but it's not to say that the custom work in question doesn't substantially build on Free infrastructure, and thus result as a matter of course in enhancements and fixes to the infrastructure in question. Considering the market share Linux, Apache and like products hold in server space, there's no question that they sit underneath a huge amount of custom, not-for-resale software.
Oh! Your counterpoint is that the majority of the donated effort in question likely comes from this (in-house/custom work running on Free infrastructure) as opposed to development of proprietary, off-the-shelf software running on Free infrastructure? I can see that.
Now if you are claiming that most free software (or open source) is funded by nonfree (or proprietary) software, I will not hold my breath on any substantiation for it.
That claim is very consistent with my experience. Much Free Software is used as underlying infrastructure for companies whose products are proprietary. While viral licenses may prevent direct copying of code, less direct usages (such as a proprietary EHR which calls to HylaFAX when it wants to send a fax, or commercial software companies running Linux in their datacenter, or web services running on Tomcat, or employees using OpenVPN to telecommute) abound, and in all of these cases there are paid programmers and sysadmins responsible for Making It Work -- which very frequently involves developing and pushing back patches, or paying an outside developer (or one of the project's maintainers) to do the same.
I myself believe that most open source is ultimately funded by closed-source projects, by programmers who are able to create open source in their spare time because somebody else is paying them to create something private.
I have been paid to write open source software for the last seven years. The first few years were spent in the employ of a company founded around OSS; the last several have been for employers making proprietary software. Why? Because when writing proprietary software, one can do it better and cheaper when one's underlying infrastructure is flexible, modifiable and freely redistributable.
Particularly when I was working on OpenVPN, I saw a lot of this; most of the folks using the software were doing so for some commercial purpose, and much of the development was either done by the lead maintainer under contract to an organization making commercial use, or (in the case of minor patches) by individual users in the employ of some commercial entity. HylaFAX is similar, in that a strong majority of those involved (in terms of headcount) were directly working for other (non-OSS-centric) employers, and that those most tightly involved in maintaining the software were doing so for personal enjoyment -- but also very frequently under contract. Likewise, a very large number of the folks working on the Linux kernel are paid to do so; for well-established, vibrant projects, it seems to be more the rule than the exception.
In short -- in my experience, the idea of the open source developer being someone who works at night without pay is highly overrated. This holds not only for myself, but also for the many contacts I've maintained from my OSS-centric former employer (who is, incidentally, still in business -- the same business, for that matter).
No YOU display massive ignorance... These laptops will all be resold by third parties on ebay... you OLPC nut-jobs are living in lala land.
Resold to whom? They're kids' computers, and very much meant for the task -- they have keyboards means for small hands, and are small and colorful enough that any adult using one will be obviously (ab)using a computer which was meant for a child -- and thus, hopefully, publicly shamed. There are also significant security features built in at a hardware level. As an example, the laptops can be set to brick themselves if they don't show up at school.
The Jungle is a worthwhile read -- but there's historical context to it, as well. It followed the lives of immigrants in the meatpacking industry, and was intended to promote socialism -- but, as Mr. Sinclair put it, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach". By publicizing the massive health violations rampant within the industry at the time, it sparked massive public outrage (and, consequently, government regulation) over the meatpacking industry and food production in general -- but not much of the sympathy for the laborers which had been the book's intent.
How many US schools teach the full history of the US army genocide of native american indians? Do they talk about how the cavilry would ride in to an indian village and shoot anyone they saw, women and children preferably? Burn whole villages? Slaughtering whole nations? Round up the rest and put them in concentration camps (called reservations)?
Mine covered all of that. Covered the use of Smallpox-infested blankets, covered the Japanese internment camps during WW2, covered the Spanish slaughtering the Aztec, and a great deal more besides.
I attended high school in California, and the US history coverage was quite solid. Not complete -- I grew up associating Woodrow Wilson with the League of Nations, having no idea of all his [substantially effective] efforts to set back racial equality -- but very good. Indeed, I thought that most public school educations in the US were on par, and was rather surprised to find out that my wife managed to grow up without reading The Jungle, or Heart of Darkness, or Brave New World (which required parental consent... actually, I think Heart of Darkness did too), or much else of the literature that's influenced the Western world.
"Just under $2000" is right about what most of the prepackaged Asterisk vendors will charge for a fully supported turnkey solution with a T1 card built in, so we're about even on price -- if you're going through a vendor. If you're paying someone in-house to do maintenance, there's certainly a man-hour cost -- but what that buys you is flexibility.
You're moving between offices, you want staff to be able to work from both locations, but your telco doesn't want to have PRIs at both ends live at once? Put an Asterisk server at each end and trunk them over IAX2 -- *without* plopping down another $2K, because the software's free. You want your tech support queue to include employees' cell phones after hours, but only for calls from anyone in the database as having bought a tier-2 or better support contract? Can do. You want to send your support staff an IM with a link into your CRM database ready to log the call whenever they pick up a phone with a customer? Or you want to transcribe any calls made to and from your support line into Speex format and archive them on an internal web server? You want to detect faxes incoming to your users' phone lines, and reroute them to email instead of ringing the phone? You want employees to be able to send outgoing faxes from any PC on your network just by hitting "print"? Just a simple matter of code. And because Asterisk is OSS, there's a massive community out there sharing recipes on how to implement features like the ones I just described. [Yes, every one of those is possible, and most of them I've already implemented... though doing fax detection before even ringing the phone means an extra delay between when an incoming number is dialed and when the internal line rings, which is one downside to using it].
Bought an ancient channel bank off eBay that uses the ancient, next-to-unheard-of TR-08 framing standard? It'll work. Pick up a lot of SCCP-only phones at an auction? They'll be fine. OTOH, if you're having echo on your PRI and you want carrier-grade hardware echo cancellation, Sangoma will gladly sell you that -- and their tech support is top notch. (They paid shipping both ways to get my ancient, TR-08 based channel bank up to their R&D group for analysis; I'm still rather impressed).
Buying a proprietary solution ties you to its vendor. They go out of business, you're hosed; you can buy a new system pretty cheap, but you'll need to reprogram all the phone trees, all the custom rules, all the queues... etc. If you were buying from an Asterisk-based vendor, all your customizations would be immediately portable to any other Asterisk-based vendor's product -- or you could look for a vendor who would support your preexisting installation, rather than needing to replace anything at all.
Having a limit on the number of DIDs supported is silly. That's not a technical limitation, it's a pricing one. (Having a limit on the number of simultaneous channels makes more sense as a technical limitation -- but if your hardware is limited to one PRI, I suppose that bottlenecks you right there). That said, Fonality is somewhat guilty of that kind of silliness too -- their $995 entry-level product has a bunch of Asterisk's core, built-in features turned off!
All that said, it sounds like you're right about commercial products having become price-competitive with Asterisk within the last few years. Even so, on features, flexibility or futureproofing, Asterisk is hard to beat.
You might be right, but I really doubt it. I just entertained 5 offers from 5 vendors for VoIP systems. No OSS, yet every one was 80% cheaper than what was offered just 4 years ago. Am I missing something? If commercial solutions are 80% cheaper since 5 years ago shouldn't OSS solutions be, what, 95% cheaper?
I'd like to think that it's OSS solutions such as Asterisk (and its commercial derivatives) which have brought in the competition which has resulted in those dramatic reductions in price; there's certainly a temporal correlation. In any event -- here's a deal. You give me some general specs on the system you're creating, and I'll give you some numbers on what it would cost to build it with Asterisk -- either DIY in-house or through a vendor with a phone number to call when it breaks.
I have a great deal of respect for C.S. Lewis, but his style of decompressed argument-by-supposition is unconvincing to me; there are substantial assumptions which must be accepted to make those suppositions true, and his arguments generally read more effectively to those previously inclined to accept them. (As an example, his argument against contraception given in the linked piece could be read as applicable against abstainance every bit as effectively as it reads against contraception -- in either case, there are potential future humans who might otherwise be created but instead are denied life on account of decisions made by others).
Take, for instance, his argument that absent an unchanging, unalterable directive, the set of men who are in power will eventually remake morality to conform with their own personal desires. This presupposes that moral directives supplied by religion are in fact unalterable. While no pious individual believes that he or she has the right to change God's word, interpretations do tend to change with the times -- and the set of individuals with the ability to promulgate such differences in interpretation and emphasis is not entirely unlike the set of men in the Lewis's hypothetical scenario with the power to more overtly remake morality as a whole.
That said, this is hardly the place for the debate. I appreciate the link provided, and apologize for any misinterpretation of the argument therein.
who wants to fuck around doing all that just to play some mp3's or print a letter?
Someone does. If I'm bored, I do. And only one person has to fuck around, come up with a fix, submit it upstream and get it merged for everyone else to have their problem solved.
It's very liberating to be able to fix your own problems instead of being at the mercy of a vendor who doesn't care.
Maybe, but we're not talking about whether Microsoft rules the world. We're talking about whether Asterisk wins over Nortel.
You talk about Linux winning only in the server and embedded markets; PBXes are effectively an intersection of the two. Or, to take a different argument: While the VoIP geek crowd may be comparatively small portion of the slashdot crowd, slashdot readership makes up a great deal of the VoIP geek crowd. More to the point, CEOs tend to listed to VoIP geeks when we tell them we can build them a vastly more flexible phone system for 1/4 of what they'd spend on a big-budget vendor -- mine did.
No doubt, a great deal of the online community overestimates their influence -- but OSS-centric VoIP geeks (who are the folks with the really excellent value proposition behind them these days, and thus the ability to make an outstanding business case) are a remarkably poor example to pick when trying to make that point.
Kind of like the mighty hand of the nerd vote. The power of the blog did wonders in '04. Oh, wait... it didn't.
Don't know if you've noticed, but nerds tend to have a lot more influence over phone systems than they do over Presidential elections. Funny thing, that.
Next thing we know, people'll be claiming that civil engineers have purchasing influence in the CAD/drafting industry, or that physicians influence prescription drugs.
Denying that drug use is a victimless crime is astonishingly ignorant... of the definition of "victimless crime".
Drug abuse does increase the likelihood of other crimes which do have victims, but drug use in and of itself is indeed victimless. (Hint: If you're consensually engaging in behavior which harms you, you're not a victim. Stupid, yes. A victim, no).
Because, if he had been black, he would have been on the other end of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression.
How does being on the receiving end of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression justify making statements which affirm the hateful, misguided views of those behind that oppression?
Cricket, MetroPCS and others include unlimited text messaging (as well as unlimited domestic voice calls) in plans running $45/month or less.
I really, really don't understand why more folks don't get off of the major carriers (unless they travel much or need data service functionality the little guys don't provide).
Why not? How do you know it WAS close? That's kind of the whole point of election fraud.
I know it was close because there were exit polls, and statisticians comparing them with the real results (and raising flags, but not ones big enough to say with certainty that the election was stolen). I know it was close because there were precincts where paper ballots were used, and individuals from opposing parties overseeing the counting.
I don't expect change. I hope for it. Perhaps it won't be favorable, as you say. However, just because your situation could end up worse than it is is no reason to mutely accept your situation. What comes next MAY be bad. What we have now assuredly IS bad.
There's not just "good" and "bad"; there's "bad" and "worse". If you ignore everything else in the hopes of getting "good", don't be surprised when you end up with "worse".
There's a chance of getting a Libertarian-aligned President this next cycle -- a fellow whose party calls him "Senator No" on account of his refusal to vote the party line when his principals don't agree (which is often). How did he get into office? By accepting that he was going to need to run under the banner of a major party, doing so, but then refusing to accept that party's demands as to how to vote. If Ron Paul gets the office of President (and thus the veto), that will be real change.
If I vote for Ron Paul, I'm not voting Republican, and I'm not voting for any kind of evil at all. I'm voting for small, restrained government that keeps its hands off of social matters. (Although Ron Paul himself is personally socially conservative, he doesn't believe it's the government's place to legislate that viewpoint -- and so he votes against any bills attempting to do so).
Ron Paul, in this case, is an allegory for change from within. If enough good people get themselves into office -- whatever the banner they run under -- we have a chance of real change. If that doesn't happen, nothing short of revolution will get us there.
So -- you want change? Bite the bullet and run for office. Sure, you'll need to do so by aligning yourself with a party whose beliefs you don't agree with -- but make it clear to the voters where those beliefs differ, and stand by them once you're in office. If enough people who believe like you do the same, there might be a chance of getting something done. Or, if you're not up for doing so yourself, at least find out about any candidates who are, and support them at the voting booth. Refusing to vote for evil is one thing; refusing to vote at all because any candidate with a chance is running under an evil banner (though they themselves may personally be good) is another.
That's a rather gross oversimplification. What about the unification of the two major parties to lock third parties out of the process? There are other factors.
I think it's misleading to say that the major parties became united on several core values (and subsequently found a number of shiny, distracting things to try to distinguish themselves on) with the explicit intent of locking 3rd parties out. The major parties ended up where they are because one who's in power -- and even the "minority" party has a whole lot more power from someone who isn't -- sees things from the perspective of How They Are Right Now, and has an interest in making incremental changes without rocking the boat too much, so their position naturally trends to the conservative (dictionary definition, not American political definition) -- hence they end up in the same place without any real, intentional collusion to do so. As for more unfortunate aspects of How Things Are Right Now, once you're looking at it from the paradigm of the status quo, most of those aren't even visible.
Gee, wasn't this election stolen? Score one for the voting process.
Can't happen if it isn't close -- and there's an ongoing attempt to restore some of the auditing capabilities that were lost in the E-Voting rush. Enough people on the right side of the fence participate, they won't be close enough for plausible deniability.
There you have another fallacy, your worst to date. Just because I do not vote, that does NOT MEAN that I 'sit out' of the process entirely.
I didn't say you sit out entirely. I said that the body politic as a whole sees low voter turnout as a sign of apathy on the part of the voters who aren't turning out; no matter what you're actually out there doing, what they see is the turnout percentage and the talking heads on the nightly news, which certainly aren't talking about how folks are choosing not to vote in protest. And as for what you're actually out there doing -- if the major media doesn't cover it, it's invisible to anyone who isn't already enough of a convert to pay attention to alternate sources.
If voter turnout drops to 1% or less, the system WILL change.
It will never, never happen. The major parties are far too good at "turning out the base". (And as for this change you expect -- how do you know it's going to be a favorable one? Who, exactly, is going to be in control when it happens, hmm? We might just criminalize failure to vote; there's precedent for that).
Really? Voter turnout has been trending UP over the last 20 years?
What does it matter whether it's up or down? It'll never be zero, which is what it would take for nobody to be elected -- or even all that close to zero, since several powerful groups have made a science of "energizing the base". All you're doing is ceding control.
Well, doesn't that kind of show the 'importance' of your vote? Pick one of two horrible options, or one of the two will be forced upon you. I decline to participate in such a cheap charade. So should everyone else.
The options may be horrible, but they aren't equally horrible -- and the consequences of getting the worse of the two can be severe, as recent years should have shown.
Not with that attitude, mister. Rather than playing a rigged game with loaded dice under the house's terms, decline to participate. Voting for even the lesser evil is DIRECTLY condoning evil. The fact that so few people care about that is the reason we're in the situation we're in. Stand up for what YOU believe in, not what you think a majority of other people do. No matter the hype, you are never voting AGAINST someone if you are voting FOR someone else.
Look. Most of what's wrong isn't the options themselves; rather, it's the way we select between them (which is to say -- if the selection methodology were fixed, the options would self-correct). There are plenty of third parties out there, some of whom have solid principals and stand by them -- it's just that they don't get any votes. Why don't they get any votes? Because people who actually care enough to take some kind of effective action are forced into defensive voting strategies to avoid getting steamrolled by larger voting blocks.
Simple plurality voting means that folks who express that (A>B && A>C) are unable to simultaneously express that (C>B). Combine this with winner-take-all and that folks who decide that avoiding a worst-case scenario is more important than promoting a best-case scenario (and frequently, that really is legitimately the case; the damage a bad government can do is much worse than the benefit a good one can have) are pushed into defensive voting, meaning that their true preferences can't be expressed.
It is indeed a bloody mess, and I don't see any effective means to make it change.
But what fucking good does sitting out do? It doesn't convince the body public that elections are corrupt; rather, it just is taken as yet another sign that Generation Whichever is made up of apathetic losers with no sense of civic duty, and the folks who don't sit out go to decide your future for you. Hell, register and then vote Libertarian -- it makes a statement that you don't like either major party, and (at least as importantly) that you actually give a shit, and aren't sitting out on account of pure apathy.
If no one voted, no one could be elected. That directly contradicts your assertion.
And if pigs could fly...
My assertion is made in the context of the real world.
Also, as has been noted previously, the lesser of two evils IS STILL EVIL and should not be supported. Suppose we get the 'lesser evil'; how long do you believe that evil will be lesser?
Given the choice between a lesser evil that increases over time and a greater evil that increases over time, which do you choose? Keep in mind that if you don't pick one, one will be selected for you.
I can see supporting the greater evil (directly or indirectly) if you're hoping for things to get bad enough to force a revolution -- but if that's your goal, be explicit about it! We're not getting out any other way.
There was a reason that political parties weren't enshrined in our Constitution, and it wasn't because the FF were ignorant of them.
Well, of course; I've read Washington's fairwell address too. That said, we are where we are; nonparticipation doesn't help anything.
Yes, I'm asking you to support the lesser of two evils when it'd be better if something non-evil were an option. That said, if we don't support the lesser evil, we may well get the greater one -- and that's no fun at all.
Look. Inasmuch as Clinton is concerned, I agree with you -- she's (effectively) just another big-money candidate running for office, making policy decisions based on what she thinks is most likely to get her elected. Obama, on the other hand, is not quite the same thing in different packaging. His party, mayhaps, but not the man himself. He's one of the few folks I see in politics (Ron Paul being another) who evaluates things on principals rather than party lines -- and he makes an effort to understand the opposing viewpoint and make allowances for cases where his party's ideological lines are incorrect where doing so is for the greater good.
Obviously, views of what comprise "the greater good" vary -- but having looked at Obama's voting record and read The Audacity of Hope, I'm reasonably comfortable that Obama is the best option we're going to get this time around (unless Ron Paul wins the Republican primary, in which case either outcome would be happy). In a perfect world, we'd be switching to a voting method allowing ranked lists such that 3rd parties would have a chance (ie. folks wouldn't need to discard their ability to express a preference between major parties to select a 3rd party as their first choice) and the major parties could actually feel some heat -- but we're not in that perfect world right now. That's not an excuse not to do what we can at the moment, however.
Why don't you evaluate the candidates instead of just spewing cynicism without even looking hard first?
gnumeric - great at what it does, but rather featureless.
I think "great at what it does" is the very definition of good software. Throwing in extra features before you've mastered the fundamentals is a problem, see?
I'll grant that Microsoft has some good products -- but I wouldn't call Excel one of them by any stretch of the imagination. It isn't even particularly accurate!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh! Your counterpoint is that the majority of the donated effort in question likely comes from this (in-house/custom work running on Free infrastructure) as opposed to development of proprietary, off-the-shelf software running on Free infrastructure? I can see that.
Particularly when I was working on OpenVPN, I saw a lot of this; most of the folks using the software were doing so for some commercial purpose, and much of the development was either done by the lead maintainer under contract to an organization making commercial use, or (in the case of minor patches) by individual users in the employ of some commercial entity. HylaFAX is similar, in that a strong majority of those involved (in terms of headcount) were directly working for other (non-OSS-centric) employers, and that those most tightly involved in maintaining the software were doing so for personal enjoyment -- but also very frequently under contract. Likewise, a very large number of the folks working on the Linux kernel are paid to do so; for well-established, vibrant projects, it seems to be more the rule than the exception.
In short -- in my experience, the idea of the open source developer being someone who works at night without pay is highly overrated. This holds not only for myself, but also for the many contacts I've maintained from my OSS-centric former employer (who is, incidentally, still in business -- the same business, for that matter).
There are also significant security features built in at a hardware level. As an example, the laptops can be set to brick themselves if they don't show up at school.
The Jungle is a worthwhile read -- but there's historical context to it, as well. It followed the lives of immigrants in the meatpacking industry, and was intended to promote socialism -- but, as Mr. Sinclair put it, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach". By publicizing the massive health violations rampant within the industry at the time, it sparked massive public outrage (and, consequently, government regulation) over the meatpacking industry and food production in general -- but not much of the sympathy for the laborers which had been the book's intent.
I attended high school in California, and the US history coverage was quite solid. Not complete -- I grew up associating Woodrow Wilson with the League of Nations, having no idea of all his [substantially effective] efforts to set back racial equality -- but very good. Indeed, I thought that most public school educations in the US were on par, and was rather surprised to find out that my wife managed to grow up without reading The Jungle, or Heart of Darkness, or Brave New World (which required parental consent... actually, I think Heart of Darkness did too), or much else of the literature that's influenced the Western world.
"Just under $2000" is right about what most of the prepackaged Asterisk vendors will charge for a fully supported turnkey solution with a T1 card built in, so we're about even on price -- if you're going through a vendor. If you're paying someone in-house to do maintenance, there's certainly a man-hour cost -- but what that buys you is flexibility.
You're moving between offices, you want staff to be able to work from both locations, but your telco doesn't want to have PRIs at both ends live at once? Put an Asterisk server at each end and trunk them over IAX2 -- *without* plopping down another $2K, because the software's free. You want your tech support queue to include employees' cell phones after hours, but only for calls from anyone in the database as having bought a tier-2 or better support contract? Can do. You want to send your support staff an IM with a link into your CRM database ready to log the call whenever they pick up a phone with a customer? Or you want to transcribe any calls made to and from your support line into Speex format and archive them on an internal web server? You want to detect faxes incoming to your users' phone lines, and reroute them to email instead of ringing the phone? You want employees to be able to send outgoing faxes from any PC on your network just by hitting "print"? Just a simple matter of code. And because Asterisk is OSS, there's a massive community out there sharing recipes on how to implement features like the ones I just described. [Yes, every one of those is possible, and most of them I've already implemented... though doing fax detection before even ringing the phone means an extra delay between when an incoming number is dialed and when the internal line rings, which is one downside to using it].
Bought an ancient channel bank off eBay that uses the ancient, next-to-unheard-of TR-08 framing standard? It'll work. Pick up a lot of SCCP-only phones at an auction? They'll be fine. OTOH, if you're having echo on your PRI and you want carrier-grade hardware echo cancellation, Sangoma will gladly sell you that -- and their tech support is top notch. (They paid shipping both ways to get my ancient, TR-08 based channel bank up to their R&D group for analysis; I'm still rather impressed).
Buying a proprietary solution ties you to its vendor. They go out of business, you're hosed; you can buy a new system pretty cheap, but you'll need to reprogram all the phone trees, all the custom rules, all the queues... etc. If you were buying from an Asterisk-based vendor, all your customizations would be immediately portable to any other Asterisk-based vendor's product -- or you could look for a vendor who would support your preexisting installation, rather than needing to replace anything at all.
Having a limit on the number of DIDs supported is silly. That's not a technical limitation, it's a pricing one. (Having a limit on the number of simultaneous channels makes more sense as a technical limitation -- but if your hardware is limited to one PRI, I suppose that bottlenecks you right there). That said, Fonality is somewhat guilty of that kind of silliness too -- their $995 entry-level product has a bunch of Asterisk's core, built-in features turned off!
All that said, it sounds like you're right about commercial products having become price-competitive with Asterisk within the last few years. Even so, on features, flexibility or futureproofing, Asterisk is hard to beat.
You might be right, but I really doubt it. I just entertained 5 offers from 5 vendors for VoIP systems. No OSS, yet every one was 80% cheaper than what was offered just 4 years ago. Am I missing something? If commercial solutions are 80% cheaper since 5 years ago shouldn't OSS solutions be, what, 95% cheaper?
I'd like to think that it's OSS solutions such as Asterisk (and its commercial derivatives) which have brought in the competition which has resulted in those dramatic reductions in price; there's certainly a temporal correlation. In any event -- here's a deal. You give me some general specs on the system you're creating, and I'll give you some numbers on what it would cost to build it with Asterisk -- either DIY in-house or through a vendor with a phone number to call when it breaks.
I have a great deal of respect for C.S. Lewis, but his style of decompressed argument-by-supposition is unconvincing to me; there are substantial assumptions which must be accepted to make those suppositions true, and his arguments generally read more effectively to those previously inclined to accept them. (As an example, his argument against contraception given in the linked piece could be read as applicable against abstainance every bit as effectively as it reads against contraception -- in either case, there are potential future humans who might otherwise be created but instead are denied life on account of decisions made by others).
Take, for instance, his argument that absent an unchanging, unalterable directive, the set of men who are in power will eventually remake morality to conform with their own personal desires. This presupposes that moral directives supplied by religion are in fact unalterable. While no pious individual believes that he or she has the right to change God's word, interpretations do tend to change with the times -- and the set of individuals with the ability to promulgate such differences in interpretation and emphasis is not entirely unlike the set of men in the Lewis's hypothetical scenario with the power to more overtly remake morality as a whole.
That said, this is hardly the place for the debate. I appreciate the link provided, and apologize for any misinterpretation of the argument therein.
who wants to fuck around doing all that just to play some mp3's or print a letter?
Someone does. If I'm bored, I do. And only one person has to fuck around, come up with a fix, submit it upstream and get it merged for everyone else to have their problem solved.
It's very liberating to be able to fix your own problems instead of being at the mercy of a vendor who doesn't care.
Maybe, but we're not talking about whether Microsoft rules the world. We're talking about whether Asterisk wins over Nortel.
You talk about Linux winning only in the server and embedded markets; PBXes are effectively an intersection of the two. Or, to take a different argument: While the VoIP geek crowd may be comparatively small portion of the slashdot crowd, slashdot readership makes up a great deal of the VoIP geek crowd. More to the point, CEOs tend to listed to VoIP geeks when we tell them we can build them a vastly more flexible phone system for 1/4 of what they'd spend on a big-budget vendor -- mine did.
No doubt, a great deal of the online community overestimates their influence -- but OSS-centric VoIP geeks (who are the folks with the really excellent value proposition behind them these days, and thus the ability to make an outstanding business case) are a remarkably poor example to pick when trying to make that point.
(I've heard this argument made many times. I've not yet heard it defended beyond proof-by-assertion).
Don't know if you've noticed, but nerds tend to have a lot more influence over phone systems than they do over Presidential elections. Funny thing, that.
Next thing we know, people'll be claiming that civil engineers have purchasing influence in the CAD/drafting industry, or that physicians influence prescription drugs.
It's the product of someone who used to own them. And apparently still has some influnce.
Denying that drug use is a victimless crime is astonishingly ignorant... of the definition of "victimless crime".
Drug abuse does increase the likelihood of other crimes which do have victims, but drug use in and of itself is indeed victimless. (Hint: If you're consensually engaging in behavior which harms you, you're not a victim. Stupid, yes. A victim, no).
How does being on the receiving end of hundreds of years of slavery and oppression justify making statements which affirm the hateful, misguided views of those behind that oppression?
$15/month just for text messages? That's insane!
Cricket, MetroPCS and others include unlimited text messaging (as well as unlimited domestic voice calls) in plans running $45/month or less.
I really, really don't understand why more folks don't get off of the major carriers (unless they travel much or need data service functionality the little guys don't provide).
I know it was close because there were exit polls, and statisticians comparing them with the real results (and raising flags, but not ones big enough to say with certainty that the election was stolen). I know it was close because there were precincts where paper ballots were used, and individuals from opposing parties overseeing the counting.
There's not just "good" and "bad"; there's "bad" and "worse". If you ignore everything else in the hopes of getting "good", don't be surprised when you end up with "worse".
There's a chance of getting a Libertarian-aligned President this next cycle -- a fellow whose party calls him "Senator No" on account of his refusal to vote the party line when his principals don't agree (which is often). How did he get into office? By accepting that he was going to need to run under the banner of a major party, doing so, but then refusing to accept that party's demands as to how to vote. If Ron Paul gets the office of President (and thus the veto), that will be real change.
If I vote for Ron Paul, I'm not voting Republican, and I'm not voting for any kind of evil at all. I'm voting for small, restrained government that keeps its hands off of social matters. (Although Ron Paul himself is personally socially conservative, he doesn't believe it's the government's place to legislate that viewpoint -- and so he votes against any bills attempting to do so).
Ron Paul, in this case, is an allegory for change from within. If enough good people get themselves into office -- whatever the banner they run under -- we have a chance of real change. If that doesn't happen, nothing short of revolution will get us there.
So -- you want change? Bite the bullet and run for office. Sure, you'll need to do so by aligning yourself with a party whose beliefs you don't agree with -- but make it clear to the voters where those beliefs differ, and stand by them once you're in office. If enough people who believe like you do the same, there might be a chance of getting something done. Or, if you're not up for doing so yourself, at least find out about any candidates who are, and support them at the voting booth. Refusing to vote for evil is one thing; refusing to vote at all because any candidate with a chance is running under an evil banner (though they themselves may personally be good) is another.
I think it's misleading to say that the major parties became united on several core values (and subsequently found a number of shiny, distracting things to try to distinguish themselves on) with the explicit intent of locking 3rd parties out. The major parties ended up where they are because one who's in power -- and even the "minority" party has a whole lot more power from someone who isn't -- sees things from the perspective of How They Are Right Now, and has an interest in making incremental changes without rocking the boat too much, so their position naturally trends to the conservative (dictionary definition, not American political definition) -- hence they end up in the same place without any real, intentional collusion to do so. As for more unfortunate aspects of How Things Are Right Now, once you're looking at it from the paradigm of the status quo, most of those aren't even visible.
Can't happen if it isn't close -- and there's an ongoing attempt to restore some of the auditing capabilities that were lost in the E-Voting rush. Enough people on the right side of the fence participate, they won't be close enough for plausible deniability.
I didn't say you sit out entirely. I said that the body politic as a whole sees low voter turnout as a sign of apathy on the part of the voters who aren't turning out; no matter what you're actually out there doing, what they see is the turnout percentage and the talking heads on the nightly news, which certainly aren't talking about how folks are choosing not to vote in protest. And as for what you're actually out there doing -- if the major media doesn't cover it, it's invisible to anyone who isn't already enough of a convert to pay attention to alternate sources.
It will never, never happen. The major parties are far too good at "turning out the base". (And as for this change you expect -- how do you know it's going to be a favorable one? Who, exactly, is going to be in control when it happens, hmm? We might just criminalize failure to vote; there's precedent for that).
What does it matter whether it's up or down? It'll never be zero, which is what it would take for nobody to be elected -- or even all that close to zero, since several powerful groups have made a science of "energizing the base". All you're doing is ceding control.
The options may be horrible, but they aren't equally horrible -- and the consequences of getting the worse of the two can be severe, as recent years should have shown.
Look. Most of what's wrong isn't the options themselves; rather, it's the way we select between them (which is to say -- if the selection methodology were fixed, the options would self-correct). There are plenty of third parties out there, some of whom have solid principals and stand by them -- it's just that they don't get any votes. Why don't they get any votes? Because people who actually care enough to take some kind of effective action are forced into defensive voting strategies to avoid getting steamrolled by larger voting blocks.
Simple plurality voting means that folks who express that (A>B && A>C) are unable to simultaneously express that (C>B). Combine this with winner-take-all and that folks who decide that avoiding a worst-case scenario is more important than promoting a best-case scenario (and frequently, that really is legitimately the case; the damage a bad government can do is much worse than the benefit a good one can have) are pushed into defensive voting, meaning that their true preferences can't be expressed.
It is indeed a bloody mess, and I don't see any effective means to make it change.
But what fucking good does sitting out do? It doesn't convince the body public that elections are corrupt; rather, it just is taken as yet another sign that Generation Whichever is made up of apathetic losers with no sense of civic duty, and the folks who don't sit out go to decide your future for you. Hell, register and then vote Libertarian -- it makes a statement that you don't like either major party, and (at least as importantly) that you actually give a shit, and aren't sitting out on account of pure apathy.
And if pigs could fly...
My assertion is made in the context of the real world.
Given the choice between a lesser evil that increases over time and a greater evil that increases over time, which do you choose? Keep in mind that if you don't pick one, one will be selected for you.
I can see supporting the greater evil (directly or indirectly) if you're hoping for things to get bad enough to force a revolution -- but if that's your goal, be explicit about it! We're not getting out any other way.
Well, of course; I've read Washington's fairwell address too. That said, we are where we are; nonparticipation doesn't help anything.
Yes, I'm asking you to support the lesser of two evils when it'd be better if something non-evil were an option. That said, if we don't support the lesser evil, we may well get the greater one -- and that's no fun at all.
Look. Inasmuch as Clinton is concerned, I agree with you -- she's (effectively) just another big-money candidate running for office, making policy decisions based on what she thinks is most likely to get her elected. Obama, on the other hand, is not quite the same thing in different packaging. His party, mayhaps, but not the man himself. He's one of the few folks I see in politics (Ron Paul being another) who evaluates things on principals rather than party lines -- and he makes an effort to understand the opposing viewpoint and make allowances for cases where his party's ideological lines are incorrect where doing so is for the greater good.
Obviously, views of what comprise "the greater good" vary -- but having looked at Obama's voting record and read The Audacity of Hope, I'm reasonably comfortable that Obama is the best option we're going to get this time around (unless Ron Paul wins the Republican primary, in which case either outcome would be happy). In a perfect world, we'd be switching to a voting method allowing ranked lists such that 3rd parties would have a chance (ie. folks wouldn't need to discard their ability to express a preference between major parties to select a 3rd party as their first choice) and the major parties could actually feel some heat -- but we're not in that perfect world right now. That's not an excuse not to do what we can at the moment, however.
Why don't you evaluate the candidates instead of just spewing cynicism without even looking hard first?
Gnumeric (unlike Excel) actually gets its numbers right.
I'll grant that Microsoft has some good products -- but I wouldn't call Excel one of them by any stretch of the imagination. It isn't even particularly accurate!
Word, I'll grant you. Excel, no.