The oil industry know exactly how much oil is left in the ground. They also hold blocking patents on every alternative technology to prevent anyone using them. Of course, car manufacturers aren't innocent; when Ford had got lean-burn technology perfected {an engine that uses excess air in combustion, so leaving no unburned fuel or CO in the exhaust} a consortium including GM and VW {who were still building vehicles which used excess fuel, chuffing out CO and unburned hydrocarbons} got together and demanded legislation requiring catalytic converters. Not just requiring particular limits of various pollutants, but actually requiring a catalytic converter, and thereby at a stroke ruling out any alternative means to achieve that same end. Not only would the Ford lean-burn unit not have needed a catalytic converter to exceed the prevailing emissions standards, it would not even work with one: a cat needs unburned fuel and CO to function. Therefore, Ford's lean-burn engine was killed before it got off the ground. {Another example of this phenomenon is the way how the Germans tout arse-end-drive as though it were a positive thing. Even a pre-school child knows this is just ridiculous: you push something, it can go in any direction; you pull something, it can only come towards you. The fact is they are just jealous of the French, who figured out how to transmit power through steerable wheels. Everybody thinks the British invented front wheel drive, but this was just the calling-in of a favour: we let the French take the credit for the metric system, in return for the right to claim a future French invention that also would one day be used by everyone in the world as our own.}
Anyway, the oil companies know their time is nearly up. The only way they can keep the rest of the world dependent on them is to be the first to supply alternative energy; the cost of which will fall sharply once there is an established demand. They know how much demand there is going to be, they know what it is going to cost them to meet that level of demand, and they know what price per kWh the market will bear. The price of energy is going up as the amount of oil remaining is going down. Large-scale alternative energy generation will eventually be much cheaper per kWh than oil extraction. But the longer the oil companies leave it before making the switch, the more profit they will eventually be making from non-oil energy {you can bet your arse the price of a litre of fuel won't go down, ever}.
According to Google, Unleaded in the UK is just shy of US$2.
Yes, but VCR clocks go from 0:00 to 23:59, so midnight would be displayed as 0:00. Or does 21:00 mean nine o'clock in the morning in America? That would make a kind of sense {you seem to hate doing anything the same way the rest of the world} but it'd still be a bit daft, because you would finish work "before" you had started {21:00 to 05:00 as opposed to 09:00 to 17:00}.
What's this whole "best thing since sliced bread" thing? Sliced bread is absolutely minging -- it's like some sort of packing material! Give me an unsliced loaf, cobs or a baguette, anyday.
Get yourself a breadmaker. I can recommend Panasonic -- I've had mine four years and it's still going strong. A sachet of instant dried yeast, strong flour (2 parts white to 1 part wholemeal; too much wholemeal has trouble rising, even on the dedicated slow wholemeal programme, whereas too little lacks flavour), 3 parts sugar to 1 part salt (5ml. salt per 400g. flour), water (70ml. per 400g. flour plus 10ml. for the pot); and two hours later, you will be waiting for the best bread you ever tasted to cool down so you can eat it. And, although it's been cooked by electricity, it doesn't seem to have the usual "electric" flavour that often comes from this mode of cooking.
Now, if you were saying KIOslaves were the best thing since the breadmaker, I'd have to agree with that:)
Most of the copies of Windows out there are pirated. Microsoft know this. They'd still rather you were using a pirated copy of Windows than a fully-paid-up copy of a non-Microsoft operating system.
Most of the copies of Windows out there are infested with adware already. People still use them.
Advert-supported Windows could be made freely-redistributable; perhaps even as a downloadable ISO alongside your favourite Linux distro. Now GNU/Linux doesn't even have the price advantage. Ordinary users can distribute copies of Windows to their friends and keep a clean conscience. Microsoft will still get paid.
Even in countries where there are different words for "free" and "free" so there is no "no-cost / uncaged" ambiguity, most people still don't understand why Source Code matters to a non-programmer; after all, you don't get the source code with Windows, and that never stopped anyone copying it.
If Microsoft don't end up making money on the adverts, they will be able to blame "click fraud" for the failure of their business model in the way the RIAA / MPAA blame "piracy" for the failure of their business model; and eventually have laws passed mandating a harsher sentence for failing to view an advertisement than for beating a pensioner senseless, then raping her up the arse when you discover she has only 38 pence in her purse.
12:00? Your VCR thinks it's lunchtime? Weird (but may explain a few things about septics and food). All of mine used to flash midnight if the clock was unset. I've also seen 88:88 on old Beta machines.
I never had trouble with gFTP when I've used it. Having said that, since I went with KDE, I got used to using the kbear KIOslave; in any KDE application, just use "kbearftp://login@server.somewhere.on.net/path/to/ filename.ext" and it will prompt for a password and get the file. Not much help if you're using GNOME, though!
Then again, I never demanded that an FTP client be graphical. As often as not, I'll just drop into an xterm and use ncftp {which supports tab-completion on remote filenames}. Give the command line a go; you may find it's a lot less clunky than graphical applications for some purposes. Up-key command history, line editing and tab-completion mean you don't actually have to do a lot of typing {and you can always use the mouse to highlight text, then paste in a copy by depressing the scroll wheel}.
Also, you'll be hard pushed to beat
$ for i in `ls *.jpg | grep -v mini`; do convert -resize 160x120 "$i" "`basename $i.jpg`.mini.jpg" && echo "shrunk $i"; done
timewise using any photo editor. (It takes any.jpg files in the current directory without "mini" in their name, and makes thumbnails 160x120, with.jpg replaced by.mini.jpg.)
2. Unless its in a.deb/.rpm, it is not an option. Compiling it manually is out of the question unless you are a programmer (and even then it is highly annoying if it doesnt compile because of yet another issue with different distros - do you really expect Joe Sixpack to fix this?)
When was the last time you actually built a package from a source tarball? No, seriously. Which bit of
$ tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz
$ cd foo
$./configure
$ make
$ su
(give root password)
# make install
do you have problems with?
It's actually no more complex than double-clicking on an icon {in fact, there's no reason why someone couldn't write a generic tarball installation wrapper script, which is associated with.tar.gz files and does the above steps..... and being Linux, it would only need a single click to start! But you would have to enter the root password, so there's your other click}.
Of course, it's also possible for the coder who feels their work should have been Open Sourced to release an Open Source version {through underground channels if necessary; many people would rather not put their name to it, lest they be thought of by the OSS community as some kind of sell-out}. The Company needs the work the Workers do, more than the Workers need the wages the Company pays.
Who are you to lecture NVidia on whether open sourcing their driver code would make them sell more hardware? They obviously disagree, and they have every right and standing to do so
Actually, they don't have any right. The owner of a physical object is, by virtue of ownership, automatically privy to any secret embodied in that object. By not providing proper documentation, nVidia are violating the common-law property rights of everyone who buys one of their cards. The reason nVidia don't provide documentation is because to do so would expose a scam that they are pulling. Do you seriously suppose that a £300 graphics card really has ten times more stuff in it than a £30 one? Someone with the right knowledge could make a £30 card behave like a £300 one..... nVidia don't want that. They hide behind all manner of legal bullshit, but at the end of the day, they just want to rip you off.
I'm currently using the open source "nv" driver without problems. Ideally, I'd prefer a truly open graphics card, with proper documentation and full Open Source drivers. A choice of masters is not freedom.
Could someone fork glibc and libstdc++ and release these new libraries under the "full" GPL, rather than the LGPL? Or does the LGPL constrain library developers to allow anyone to ride roughshod over their work?
No, it's more like time for the closed source community to CURL THE FUCK UP AND DIE SCREAMING IN AGONY.
When the OLPC initiative is up and running, there will be at least a few hundred or thousand kids, out of the millions who receive subsidised laptops, who go on to become programmers (some might well just sell their machines to rich Western geeks and use the money to buy important things like food and clean drinking water..... but if you plant enough seeds, some of them are bound to grow). They will never have known the damage that closed source software does; and when they get out into the world and find that other countries are embracing closed source, they will be..... well, pick anything from "bewildered" to "physically sick".
What they won't be, is in any measure averse to forcibly opening any closed source software they may encounter.
The closed source community may have broken our balls (why the fuck doesn't someone at least just post a disassembly of the closed nVidia Linux driver, or the Apple codec, as a starting point for discussions? Enough with cursing the darkness, light a fucking candle already!) but as long as certain people hold onto their vision, it won't have corrupted those kids. They will already be used to just taking the source code and giving back something useful. The closed source community isn't going to know what's hit it.
Four reasons why there is no future for Closed Source software, on Linux or any platform:
THE RIGHT TO ENJOY
We believe that everyone has the right to use software that they have legitimately acquired, for any purpose: it is for the user to determine whether it is suitable for a particular application. If the supplier of a program were somehow unfairly to impose their will upon the user, perhaps by stipulating that the program should not be used for certain purposes, that would constitute an act of violence.
THE RIGHT TO STUDY
We believe that every user of a program has the right to study how that program works. If the user of a program wishes to replicate a particular piece of functionality from that program, they have the right to examine the program in order to determine how the functionality is performed. Nobody should be forced to re-invent the wheel. The supplier of a program does not have the right to keep secret from any rightful user how the program works: by allowing someone else to use the program, they have invited that person in on the secret.
If the creator of a process wishes to keep secret the details of a process, then that is their prerogative. Effectively, they are providing a service: a customer supplies the materials; the provider of the service takes them away, does something secret, and later returns a finished product to the customer. The customer has certain rights in respect of the transaction, including the right to decline the transaction altogether based upon the level of secrecy expected by the supplier. Where the right to study a program is denied, the user {customer} is expected to provide the supplier with not just the raw materials {input to the program}, but also the resources to carry out the process {computer time and disk space}. This diminishes the quid pro quo, and so is potentially an unfair transaction.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
THE RIGHT TO SHARE
We believe that all the fruits of all human endeavour properly belong to all of humankind.
Software can be shared without being diminished by the act of sharing: if I give a copy of a program to my neighbour, I still have a copy. {Of course, I no longer have the exclusive use of that software. This exclusivity is a form of artificial scarcity.} Nobody has the right to impose their will on my neighbour and say that they should not use a particular program: to do so would be a form of violence.
THE RIGHT TO ADAPT
We believe that every user of a program has the right to adapt that program to their own needs. Nobody should be forced to adapt their method of working to suit the way that someone else believes that the job should be done that would constitute unfairly imposing one's will on another, which is a form of violence.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
RIGHTS, NOT PRIVILEGES
These are not privileges granted by some licence: they are your birthrights and mine, human rights every bit as fundamental as the right not to be discriminated against for your sex or skin colour, punished without due process of law or held in slavery, which spring directly from the existence of software. We believe that, whenever these rights are violated, the use of reasonable force -- as little as possible, but as much as necessary -- in their pursuit is absolutely justified.
POLITICS VS. TECHNOLOGY
Although these are clearly political issues, technology has the power to go behind the back and over the head of politics. Technology does not obey the laws of humans, answering directly to the laws of Nature. It is technology that shapes the future; politics occasionally contrives to slow it down, but in the end, technology will win out. We get our human rights because, in the end, it's just too darn difficult to deny u
Yes, but the problem is, the little runts are hard. Back in the '70s, it was understood that any adult could legitimately discipline any child. And most of us behaved ourselves. Nowadays there is a small hard core of utter shits who make life genuinely unpleasant for everyone else, but nobody can legally do anything about them. The Old Bill go after easy targets. Since they are paid for arrests, it actually makes more sense for the police to arrest relatively harmless people {who won't give them any grief} than to go after real criminals {who probably will punch them in the knackers and then sue for damage to their fists}.
This situation has come about because of many short-term fixes to long-term problems {e.g. emphasis on defendants' rights as a response to corrupt arresting officers}, and sorting it out properly is going to take more effort than any politician is prepared to expend. It does not help that the media want us to believe that the streets are not safe; because, basically, happy, fluffy kittens don't sell papers unless they're being torn to pieces by a felicidal maniac. {Or poisoned by feeding them on vegan food for about three years till they go blind and die in agony, but that's another story.}
Exactly. This is what happened when a bricklayer saw a little girl wandering in the street.
I for sure wouldn't want to be seen bringing a builder's van to a stop, picking up a child and driving off somewhere with her. Not in the present climate. Paedophilia, along with racism, is legally a "guilty-until-proven-innocent" offence; but in practice it's more like "guilty-even-in-spite-of-being-proven-innocent".
Yes, DNA can be stored on file forever. A sample can be obtained from any person who has been arrested {not convicted, not even charged, just arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time}. Even an illegally-obtained sample can be stored.
It hasn't quite reached the point where newborn babies are being DNA-profiled. But it's going to come to that. Meanwhile, there are opportunities for someone with the right equipment to frame people using DNA.
Note that if you were arrested, released, but your DNA was held on file, and later convicted for something which was outlawed after your arrest {but which was legal at the time you were arrested} then this may be held by the higher courts to be tantamount to retroactive application of law {which contravenes the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 11 section 2, and therefore the UK Human Rights Act}. However, this is untested TTBOMK, and may fail anyway, since evidence obtained illegally has been held to be admissible in court, for the prosecution {but not for the defence}.
And said patents do not (and never will) apply in Spain, where there is no such thing as software patents, no such thing as conspiracy, five years for drug dealing would be considered a cruel and unusual punishment and shoplifting is legal if you are hungry. Even if Spain legalised software patents, any Open Source PDF generator could be cited as Prior Art to block Adobe's application for them {any existing, falsely-granted patents would not just become valid, since that would constitute retroactive application of a new law..... which is also illegal in Spain.}
Open Source is based around Economics of Plenty, rather than Economics of Scarcity. IR1 promised to usher in the Age of Plenty. IR2 actually created a product which is truly plentiful, having zero cost of replication.
In Economics of Scarcity, some portion of the value of things depends on how hard they are to get hold of. In Economics of Plenty, things are not at all hard to get hold of. Because we've been living in an age of scarcity for so long, we've tended to neglect that portion of value that does not depend on scarcity, and in fact some have sought to manipulate values by creating artificial scarcity: in the most egregious cases, overproducing goods in order to bring down the unit costs through economies of scale {itself taking advantage of Plenty}, then destroying much of the production in order to increase its market value. |Example: it costs little more to make six Widgets than to make three; but if there are four potential customers, then you'll get more money for each one if they are arguing over only three Widgets than if there are enough Widgets to go around.
One of the "counter-intuitive" {though note, there is nothing intuitive about Economics of Scarcity, being purely learned behaviour} things about Economics of Plenty is that the value of goods actually goes up when demand increases. {Side note: we are seeing this same phenomenon with recyclable materials in household waste, which are currently Plentiful. As recycling rates improve, recyclables will begin to obey Scarcity laws again.}
Another -- and this is what really rankles with anyone coming from a background of the Economics of Scarcity -- is that dividends are paid to investors in proportion to the total amount invested, rather than the individual's investment. The Sum Total of Open Source gets better everytime anyone improves an Open Source project; anyone who joins the Movement benefits from all the improvements that have come before, and the later you join, the more benefit you gain.
Now, many people have been brought up to resent the idea that someone else might benefit from their hard work. In the Age of Scarcity, that might have made some sense, since the only way you could get richer was by someone else getting poorer. But in the Age of Plenty it does not matter: one person's gains need not be balanced by another person's losses. Everyone can gain together.
It takes someone with real vision, and who does not mind making a large initial investment knowing that others will eventually benefit from it as much as they did, to see that.
They're x86-based and the hardware is all abstracted behind the standard Linux APIs. You can download the tools you need to develop for them. Basically, Python, libGTK and the Sugar framework.
But you can develop software for it! That's the whole point! You don't need one of the actual machines: you can replicate the development environment on any old PC.
The thing is, "teaching a man to fish" often is used as an excuse to sell expensive proprietary bait..... which is why Microsoft were so keen to get in there and give away cheap Windows software, and why Negroponte and co. were right to flat-out refuse them.
Just because it has an x86-type processor doesn't mean that it will have the old IBM PC addressing schema..... in fact, there are good reasons not to. Separate I/O and memory buses went out with the PDP-11. Lump all I/O and the framebuffer into regular address space, then have the real memory addressed in contiguous pages. Display generation and DRAM refresh can then be done by the CPU itself with only a slight speed penalty (think '80s 8-bit machines, but with enough RAM for a fully bit-mapped screen). In the worst case, you end up carving your addressing space in half; but even just 2**47 words of addressable memory and a 2**46 word framebuffer ought to be enough!
The units wheel has a peg that engages with a gear that moves on the tens wheel as it advances from 9 to 0. The tens wheel has a peg that does the same for the hundreds wheel, and the hundreds wheel has a peg that does the same for the thousands wheel. All this can be seen through the polycarb. 9999 is a reasonable limit since the machine won't be expected to count that many votes anyway, and you don't want the risk of stiffness in the high digits preventing the low digits advancing.
Introducing redundancy also introduces problems, since there is a risk that one of the redundant systems could operate independently of the other(s). Better to make it robust enough not to need redundancy in the first place. In the worst case you have to make everyone vote again. There is still a presiding officer, as with hand-counted elections, who can intervene if a problem is suspected.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not an idiotic conspiracy theory, it's the truth. Ask anyone in Dagenham, they'll tell you about it.
The oil industry know exactly how much oil is left in the ground. They also hold blocking patents on every alternative technology to prevent anyone using them. Of course, car manufacturers aren't innocent; when Ford had got lean-burn technology perfected {an engine that uses excess air in combustion, so leaving no unburned fuel or CO in the exhaust} a consortium including GM and VW {who were still building vehicles which used excess fuel, chuffing out CO and unburned hydrocarbons} got together and demanded legislation requiring catalytic converters. Not just requiring particular limits of various pollutants, but actually requiring a catalytic converter, and thereby at a stroke ruling out any alternative means to achieve that same end. Not only would the Ford lean-burn unit not have needed a catalytic converter to exceed the prevailing emissions standards, it would not even work with one: a cat needs unburned fuel and CO to function. Therefore, Ford's lean-burn engine was killed before it got off the ground. {Another example of this phenomenon is the way how the Germans tout arse-end-drive as though it were a positive thing. Even a pre-school child knows this is just ridiculous: you push something, it can go in any direction; you pull something, it can only come towards you. The fact is they are just jealous of the French, who figured out how to transmit power through steerable wheels. Everybody thinks the British invented front wheel drive, but this was just the calling-in of a favour: we let the French take the credit for the metric system, in return for the right to claim a future French invention that also would one day be used by everyone in the world as our own.}
Anyway, the oil companies know their time is nearly up. The only way they can keep the rest of the world dependent on them is to be the first to supply alternative energy; the cost of which will fall sharply once there is an established demand. They know how much demand there is going to be, they know what it is going to cost them to meet that level of demand, and they know what price per kWh the market will bear. The price of energy is going up as the amount of oil remaining is going down. Large-scale alternative energy generation will eventually be much cheaper per kWh than oil extraction. But the longer the oil companies leave it before making the switch, the more profit they will eventually be making from non-oil energy {you can bet your arse the price of a litre of fuel won't go down, ever}.
According to Google, Unleaded in the UK is just shy of US$2.
What about 0x000df118?
Yes, but VCR clocks go from 0:00 to 23:59, so midnight would be displayed as 0:00. Or does 21:00 mean nine o'clock in the morning in America? That would make a kind of sense {you seem to hate doing anything the same way the rest of the world} but it'd still be a bit daft, because you would finish work "before" you had started {21:00 to 05:00 as opposed to 09:00 to 17:00}.
What's this whole "best thing since sliced bread" thing? Sliced bread is absolutely minging -- it's like some sort of packing material! Give me an unsliced loaf, cobs or a baguette, anyday.
:)
Get yourself a breadmaker. I can recommend Panasonic -- I've had mine four years and it's still going strong. A sachet of instant dried yeast, strong flour (2 parts white to 1 part wholemeal; too much wholemeal has trouble rising, even on the dedicated slow wholemeal programme, whereas too little lacks flavour), 3 parts sugar to 1 part salt (5ml. salt per 400g. flour), water (70ml. per 400g. flour plus 10ml. for the pot); and two hours later, you will be waiting for the best bread you ever tasted to cool down so you can eat it. And, although it's been cooked by electricity, it doesn't seem to have the usual "electric" flavour that often comes from this mode of cooking.
Now, if you were saying KIOslaves were the best thing since the breadmaker, I'd have to agree with that
12:00? Your VCR thinks it's lunchtime? Weird (but may explain a few things about septics and food). All of mine used to flash midnight if the clock was unset. I've also seen 88:88 on old Beta machines.
I never had trouble with gFTP when I've used it. Having said that, since I went with KDE, I got used to using the kbear KIOslave; in any KDE application, just use "kbearftp://login@server.somewhere.on.net/path/to/ filename.ext" and it will prompt for a password and get the file. Not much help if you're using GNOME, though!
.jpg`.mini.jpg" && echo "shrunk $i"; done
.jpg files in the current directory without "mini" in their name, and makes thumbnails 160x120, with .jpg replaced by .mini.jpg.)
Then again, I never demanded that an FTP client be graphical. As often as not, I'll just drop into an xterm and use ncftp {which supports tab-completion on remote filenames}. Give the command line a go; you may find it's a lot less clunky than graphical applications for some purposes. Up-key command history, line editing and tab-completion mean you don't actually have to do a lot of typing {and you can always use the mouse to highlight text, then paste in a copy by depressing the scroll wheel}.
Also, you'll be hard pushed to beat
$ for i in `ls *.jpg | grep -v mini`; do convert -resize 160x120 "$i" "`basename $i
timewise using any photo editor. (It takes any
$ tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz
$ cd foo
$
$ make
$ su
(give root password)
# make install
do you have problems with?
It's actually no more complex than double-clicking on an icon {in fact, there's no reason why someone couldn't write a generic tarball installation wrapper script, which is associated with
Of course, it's also possible for the coder who feels their work should have been Open Sourced to release an Open Source version {through underground channels if necessary; many people would rather not put their name to it, lest they be thought of by the OSS community as some kind of sell-out}. The Company needs the work the Workers do, more than the Workers need the wages the Company pays.
I'm currently using the open source "nv" driver without problems. Ideally, I'd prefer a truly open graphics card, with proper documentation and full Open Source drivers. A choice of masters is not freedom.
Interesting.
Could someone fork glibc and libstdc++ and release these new libraries under the "full" GPL, rather than the LGPL? Or does the LGPL constrain library developers to allow anyone to ride roughshod over their work?
No, it's more like time for the closed source community to CURL THE FUCK UP AND DIE SCREAMING IN AGONY.
..... but if you plant enough seeds, some of them are bound to grow). They will never have known the damage that closed source software does; and when they get out into the world and find that other countries are embracing closed source, they will be ..... well, pick anything from "bewildered" to "physically sick".
When the OLPC initiative is up and running, there will be at least a few hundred or thousand kids, out of the millions who receive subsidised laptops, who go on to become programmers (some might well just sell their machines to rich Western geeks and use the money to buy important things like food and clean drinking water
What they won't be, is in any measure averse to forcibly opening any closed source software they may encounter.
The closed source community may have broken our balls (why the fuck doesn't someone at least just post a disassembly of the closed nVidia Linux driver, or the Apple codec, as a starting point for discussions? Enough with cursing the darkness, light a fucking candle already!) but as long as certain people hold onto their vision, it won't have corrupted those kids. They will already be used to just taking the source code and giving back something useful. The closed source community isn't going to know what's hit it.
Four reasons why there is no future for Closed Source software, on Linux or any platform:
THE RIGHT TO ENJOY
We believe that everyone has the right to use software that they have legitimately acquired, for any purpose: it is for the user to determine whether it is suitable for a particular application. If the supplier of a program were somehow unfairly to impose their will upon the user, perhaps by stipulating that the program should not be used for certain purposes, that would constitute an act of violence.
THE RIGHT TO STUDY
We believe that every user of a program has the right to study how that program works. If the user of a program wishes to replicate a particular piece of functionality from that program, they have the right to examine the program in order to determine how the functionality is performed. Nobody should be forced to re-invent the wheel. The supplier of a program does not have the right to keep secret from any rightful user how the program works: by allowing someone else to use the program, they have invited that person in on the secret.
If the creator of a process wishes to keep secret the details of a process, then that is their prerogative. Effectively, they are providing a service: a customer supplies the materials; the provider of the service takes them away, does something secret, and later returns a finished product to the customer. The customer has certain rights in respect of the transaction, including the right to decline the transaction altogether based upon the level of secrecy expected by the supplier. Where the right to study a program is denied, the user {customer} is expected to provide the supplier with not just the raw materials {input to the program}, but also the resources to carry out the process {computer time and disk space}. This diminishes the quid pro quo, and so is potentially an unfair transaction.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
THE RIGHT TO SHARE
We believe that all the fruits of all human endeavour properly belong to all of humankind.
Software can be shared without being diminished by the act of sharing: if I give a copy of a program to my neighbour, I still have a copy. {Of course, I no longer have the exclusive use of that software. This exclusivity is a form of artificial scarcity.} Nobody has the right to impose their will on my neighbour and say that they should not use a particular program: to do so would be a form of violence.
THE RIGHT TO ADAPT
We believe that every user of a program has the right to adapt that program to their own needs. Nobody should be forced to adapt their method of working to suit the way that someone else believes that the job should be done that would constitute unfairly imposing one's will on another, which is a form of violence.
Access to the source code is highly desirable in the exercise of this right.
RIGHTS, NOT PRIVILEGES
These are not privileges granted by some licence: they are your birthrights and mine, human rights every bit as fundamental as the right not to be discriminated against for your sex or skin colour, punished without due process of law or held in slavery, which spring directly from the existence of software. We believe that, whenever these rights are violated, the use of reasonable force -- as little as possible, but as much as necessary -- in their pursuit is absolutely justified.
POLITICS VS. TECHNOLOGY
Although these are clearly political issues, technology has the power to go behind the back and over the head of politics. Technology does not obey the laws of humans, answering directly to the laws of Nature. It is technology that shapes the future; politics occasionally contrives to slow it down, but in the end, technology will win out. We get our human rights because, in the end, it's just too darn difficult to deny u
Yes: all British and European farming runs on exactly that principle.
Yes, but the problem is, the little runts are hard. Back in the '70s, it was understood that any adult could legitimately discipline any child. And most of us behaved ourselves. Nowadays there is a small hard core of utter shits who make life genuinely unpleasant for everyone else, but nobody can legally do anything about them. The Old Bill go after easy targets. Since they are paid for arrests, it actually makes more sense for the police to arrest relatively harmless people {who won't give them any grief} than to go after real criminals {who probably will punch them in the knackers and then sue for damage to their fists}.
This situation has come about because of many short-term fixes to long-term problems {e.g. emphasis on defendants' rights as a response to corrupt arresting officers}, and sorting it out properly is going to take more effort than any politician is prepared to expend. It does not help that the media want us to believe that the streets are not safe; because, basically, happy, fluffy kittens don't sell papers unless they're being torn to pieces by a felicidal maniac. {Or poisoned by feeding them on vegan food for about three years till they go blind and die in agony, but that's another story.}
Exactly. This is what happened when a bricklayer saw a little girl wandering in the street.
I for sure wouldn't want to be seen bringing a builder's van to a stop, picking up a child and driving off somewhere with her. Not in the present climate. Paedophilia, along with racism, is legally a "guilty-until-proven-innocent" offence; but in practice it's more like "guilty-even-in-spite-of-being-proven-innocent".
Yes, DNA can be stored on file forever. A sample can be obtained from any person who has been arrested {not convicted, not even charged, just arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time}. Even an illegally-obtained sample can be stored.
It hasn't quite reached the point where newborn babies are being DNA-profiled. But it's going to come to that. Meanwhile, there are opportunities for someone with the right equipment to frame people using DNA.
Note that if you were arrested, released, but your DNA was held on file, and later convicted for something which was outlawed after your arrest {but which was legal at the time you were arrested} then this may be held by the higher courts to be tantamount to retroactive application of law {which contravenes the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 11 section 2, and therefore the UK Human Rights Act}. However, this is untested TTBOMK, and may fail anyway, since evidence obtained illegally has been held to be admissible in court, for the prosecution {but not for the defence}.
And said patents do not (and never will) apply in Spain, where there is no such thing as software patents, no such thing as conspiracy, five years for drug dealing would be considered a cruel and unusual punishment and shoplifting is legal if you are hungry. Even if Spain legalised software patents, any Open Source PDF generator could be cited as Prior Art to block Adobe's application for them {any existing, falsely-granted patents would not just become valid, since that would constitute retroactive application of a new law ..... which is also illegal in Spain.}
Exactly!
Open Source is based around Economics of Plenty, rather than Economics of Scarcity. IR1 promised to usher in the Age of Plenty. IR2 actually created a product which is truly plentiful, having zero cost of replication.
In Economics of Scarcity, some portion of the value of things depends on how hard they are to get hold of. In Economics of Plenty, things are not at all hard to get hold of. Because we've been living in an age of scarcity for so long, we've tended to neglect that portion of value that does not depend on scarcity, and in fact some have sought to manipulate values by creating artificial scarcity: in the most egregious cases, overproducing goods in order to bring down the unit costs through economies of scale {itself taking advantage of Plenty}, then destroying much of the production in order to increase its market value. |Example: it costs little more to make six Widgets than to make three; but if there are four potential customers, then you'll get more money for each one if they are arguing over only three Widgets than if there are enough Widgets to go around.
One of the "counter-intuitive" {though note, there is nothing intuitive about Economics of Scarcity, being purely learned behaviour} things about Economics of Plenty is that the value of goods actually goes up when demand increases. {Side note: we are seeing this same phenomenon with recyclable materials in household waste, which are currently Plentiful. As recycling rates improve, recyclables will begin to obey Scarcity laws again.}
Another -- and this is what really rankles with anyone coming from a background of the Economics of Scarcity -- is that dividends are paid to investors in proportion to the total amount invested, rather than the individual's investment. The Sum Total of Open Source gets better everytime anyone improves an Open Source project; anyone who joins the Movement benefits from all the improvements that have come before, and the later you join, the more benefit you gain.
Now, many people have been brought up to resent the idea that someone else might benefit from their hard work. In the Age of Scarcity, that might have made some sense, since the only way you could get richer was by someone else getting poorer. But in the Age of Plenty it does not matter: one person's gains need not be balanced by another person's losses. Everyone can gain together.
It takes someone with real vision, and who does not mind making a large initial investment knowing that others will eventually benefit from it as much as they did, to see that.
They're x86-based and the hardware is all abstracted behind the standard Linux APIs. You can download the tools you need to develop for them. Basically, Python, libGTK and the Sugar framework.
But you can develop software for it! That's the whole point! You don't need one of the actual machines: you can replicate the development environment on any old PC.
The thing is, "teaching a man to fish" often is used as an excuse to sell expensive proprietary bait ..... which is why Microsoft were so keen to get in there and give away cheap Windows software, and why Negroponte and co. were right to flat-out refuse them.
Just because it has an x86-type processor doesn't mean that it will have the old IBM PC addressing schema ..... in fact, there are good reasons not to. Separate I/O and memory buses went out with the PDP-11. Lump all I/O and the framebuffer into regular address space, then have the real memory addressed in contiguous pages. Display generation and DRAM refresh can then be done by the CPU itself with only a slight speed penalty (think '80s 8-bit machines, but with enough RAM for a fully bit-mapped screen). In the worst case, you end up carving your addressing space in half; but even just 2**47 words of addressable memory and a 2**46 word framebuffer ought to be enough!
The units wheel has a peg that engages with a gear that moves on the tens wheel as it advances from 9 to 0. The tens wheel has a peg that does the same for the hundreds wheel, and the hundreds wheel has a peg that does the same for the thousands wheel. All this can be seen through the polycarb. 9999 is a reasonable limit since the machine won't be expected to count that many votes anyway, and you don't want the risk of stiffness in the high digits preventing the low digits advancing.
Introducing redundancy also introduces problems, since there is a risk that one of the redundant systems could operate independently of the other(s). Better to make it robust enough not to need redundancy in the first place. In the worst case you have to make everyone vote again. There is still a presiding officer, as with hand-counted elections, who can intervene if a problem is suspected.