Like it or not, Sun is dispensable.... Sun's customers don't need Sun nearly as badly as Sun needs them.
This is the precise difference between the commercial business model and the free software model. IMNSHO, any business that can only thrive when their customers need them deserves extinction.
a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for contributions to charity.... Would that not provide the safety net that you (and myself) wish for?
The libertarian platform says: "We oppose all government activity that consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from individuals in violation of their individual rights." So a tax credit doesn't guarantee the safety net indefinitely -- because in theory, there could someday be no taxes -- although it would probably be a good transitional measure.
We need to nail this down ASAP. Finding some way to show genuine compassion for people in a pure theoretical libertarian framework would go a long way to bringing us into an alliance with the people who share our veneration of freedom of the individual, the left of the conventional left-right axis. Assurances of care in a libertarian system would also establish a framework in which the left could be truer to their own purest ideals; they could move to the center and let go of big government because the safety net would be there.
Libertarians have been unfairly associated with the right. (A lot of people hear libertarian and think "gun nuts" or "racists", that sort of thing, at least in my personal experience.) But who, in practice, sides more with individualism and freedom? Which side of the conventional debate displays more actual diversity? Radical libertarians have much more in common with the left than the right, and with a good plan, they would see this too.
I flirted with libertarianism when I was in college, but soon realized the fundamental problem with it: all success is predicated on people behaving a certain way, a way which 10,000 years of human experience shows is antithetical to human nature.
I still think of myself as libertarian, but my position has been moderated by thinking along these lines. The libertarian economic model is based on the Adam Smith assumption that people make the decision that maximizes their long-term welfare, but in fact, people make the decision that maximizes their short-term satisfaction. This has been proved to me over-and-over again by seven years in the private sector.
Also, I've gotten older and, I hope, wiser. The individual is the atomos of civilization. Some libertarians don't allow for saving everyone, or at least trying to. I hesitate to unqualifiedly support a political philosophy that some people use as support for so-called "Social Darwinism". I think we can build a society that has the freedom to strive, and possibly fail, but doesn't leave out compassion for those who haven't yet found the strength of character to fend for themselves.
Why [do] people keep equating Open Source = Linux?
For the same reason end-lusers think all computers are from Microsoft or that AOL is the internet. Although I didn't equate Linux and free software, I can see how a quick reading of my post might cause one to infer that. I really didn't feel like typing "Linux (or FreeBSD or whatever)". My bad.
Or maybe i'm [missing] the meaning of "commerical"?
You can't charge for free software, only for repackaging, redistribution, support, et cetera. This is an important point. Instead of producing one item and selling... and selling... and selling... like you're waiting for an exit visa, you have to become part of a social network to earn a living. Instead of being rewarded for increasing isolation, you're rewarded for increasing participation.
Free software is never going to completely catch up in the arena of commercial games. Some games simply have no replay value.... However, we could catch up in something like FPS....
Good point. Monthly-subscription MMORPGs like EQ and SWG seem like candidates as well.
In fact, the most innovative thing about "open source" is the model itself, not any results from it.
That's because free software is still catching up in a few areas: luser-friendliness, market share and commerical games. Once we have everything under Linux that we have under Winblows, we're not going to stop, we're going to build on that. We'll advance from there at the much faster free software rate of development.
In mathematical terms, on the innovation = f(t) scale, the curves are about to cross. The free software curve has an exponential curve, while commercial development is linear. Commerical software is over.
The only way the commerical model can survive is through the application of force and deceit, which is why we're seeing things like lobbying to support the M$ monopoly, the SCO suit, and the FUD spread by zero-summing fatcats who don't know how to make a living without taking from others.
And I'm sorry, but Sorbo wanted it to be "Hercules...in space!"
Which is sad. Sorbo said that the plots were "too complicated and too clever for the rest of us to understand". That's true in comparison to a lot of television shows, but you didn't need a degree in rocket science to follow along. I also suspect that Sorbo wanted Dylan to be a less ambiguous, more straightforward character. (Mr. T also only wanted to play overt good guys. Smooth move, Sorbo. Good luck with that "acting" career.)
The real tragedy of this is that Robert Hewitt Wolfe was making a gem of a show that I would still be watching and pitching to this day. As it was, I stopped watching when RHW left. I won't waste any time on shows with Sorbo or shows from Tribune anymore.
i, started out a radical liberal. But then, as I got older, smarter and grew up, I discovered the simple undeniable fact... that liberalism... does not work
The shift to conservatism with age is a classic trope, but the opposite is sometimes (often?) true. As I wrote in orthogonal's straw poll:
I normally vote libertarian, but my support for libertarian views has been moderated by seven years in the private sector. The Adam Smith assumptions of free information flow, no barriers to entry, and so on, aren't realistic. The most important assumption, that people make the decisions that maximize their long term profits, just isn't true; they maximize their short-term satisfation.
The individual is the atomos of Western civilization. The invisible hand is not sufficient to the profound compassion required by a truly ethical culture.
So let's face, the invention of human cylons is a big horrible mistake and one of the worst sci-fi cliches ever.
It's not the cliche, it's the execution.
Look at Buffy or B5. Either one of those shows was cliched in the extreme if you look at the one-liners: "cheerleader finds out she's a magical vampire killer", "a United Nations in space". The execution was brilliant in each of those cases and turned lame cliches into great television. Joss or Joe could announce they were writing a show where two guys would sit in a room with a table and two chairs and read the phone book to each other and I would tune in religiously.
BG could be a piece of crap with meaningless space battles and unresolved daytime-soap suspense about "Who's the Cylon?" Or it could be a profound exploration of human identity and evolution... about how advancing technology will affect human life... about what it's like to be a leader without any rational hope having to create hope for the 50,000 people who are all that's left of humanity.
So the real question is not whether or not BG is cliched. The question is: what will Ron Moore and David Eick bring us? For my two cents, Moore wrote some cool episodes of Star Trek ("The Defector", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "In Theory", "The First Duty", "Tapestry", "The Pegasus"), and I liked the first, non-suited half of American Gothic a lot.
Of course, it's a matter of taste, but this is my desktop (which I find good-looking)
That's actually really nice. I like it too.
But you're right, my big deal -- and I always get ragged about this:-) -- is that I want huge amounts of information on the screen at once or quickly accessible. I run really small fonts, gkrellm, FvwmPager, many workspaces and so on, so the end result is often less than attractive but also less twitchymaking for me. There's nothing wrong with default Gnome, it just makes me crazy because I can't organize things the way I like.
The JC Lawrence screenshot was my biggest influence, as well as the fact that all of those different looks are possible in fvwm. One of these days I'll sit down and see if I can make the Andre Bonhote or Cameron Simpson desktop look work for me.
Also, fvwm can be made to look a little better with some tweaks like making the windows flat, the corner handles invisible, et cetera. The default fvwm looks like early HTML tables with huge borders and those really obvious shaded buttons with the "light" coming from the upper left.
Instead of fighting for one [single] UI, Gnome should have two modes: beginner and expert.
Gnome already has an expert mode, it's called fvwm.:-)
I much prefer the emacsiness of fvwm -- like 16 million workspaces with 6 desktops each, complete access to all of that with any keyboard or mouse combinations I configure -- but I kept trying gnome because the gtk apps all use the gnome-control-center display settings. Then I added/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon to my.fvwm2rc startup, and voila, the best of both worlds.
I configure gtk apps like firefox by running gnome-control-center, and the rest of the interface, like mouse and keyboard, with.fvwmrc. I added gnome-control-center right next to 'restart fvwm' in my fvwm desktop menu so it's always handy.
Here are a few screenshots from the fvwm screenshots page (these were my inspiration to start learning fvwm): 12345.
It looks like I jumped the gun... stories from "Games" don't seem to be in the RSS feed. Has anyone noticed any other topics missing?
Also, Slashdot moves a lot of information. I can get home from work and find the rss 'expired', so to speak. I think there should be more stories in the rss. Boing Boing has 30 in their feed, for example.
"Fat, dumb and happy" isn't an insult. It's a traditional way of referring to the bread-and-circuses attitude, "I'm okay, so what's the big deal?" Which attitude your original post has in spades.
Apparently it's not too bad, since you just did it. For real censorship, see China or, perhaps, Syria.
There are two problems with this.
First, countries don't go downhill overnight. If Bush and Company had a press conference where they all twirled their thick black mustaches and laughed, "MUAHahahahaha!", everyone would know they were the bad guys.
Instead, they tell us that we need to be defend against terrorism, or that they're protecting children, or so on. They start by attacking unsympathetic people, advocates of the most radical changes, the most overtly threatening speakers. For instance, those people who worked with Iraq or Afghanistan being held at Guantanamo without access to counsel, or political radicals, or pornographers. They have the right to counsel under US law and US legal tradition. But they're working with the enemy, or anarchists, or sleaze-peddlers, so we can look the other way just a little bit on this whole due process concept, right?
Over time censorship goes up and free speech goes down. A little at a time, a little here, a little there... they sneak it in, so it only offends the strongest free speech advocates, also known as "next on our list". Eventually you can't criticize at all without risking jail time or worse.
And if you think that the current administration thinks of censorship as a necessary evil, something we have to endure for the crisis, remember this: when Bill Maher called US pilots "cowards", White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "... they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." (Emphasis added.)
Second... China or Syria? "Oh, hey, sure we're less free, but look at China and Syria! They're way worse than us!" is not the smartest way to approach this issue. The United States is dedicated to being the most open and most free society ever created. We're supposed to work for something more than "better than these other guys". We're supposed to strive to embody in concrete reality our highest abstract aspirations.
The idea that we can get away with a barely passing grade on free expression is profoundly unpatriotic. It is an abandonment of the rights that were held sacred by the founders of this country.
Slashdot Mirror
Like it or not, Sun is dispensable.... Sun's customers don't need Sun nearly as badly as Sun needs them.
This is the precise difference between the commercial business model and the free software model. IMNSHO, any business that can only thrive when their customers need them deserves extinction.
a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for contributions to charity.... Would that not provide the safety net that you (and myself) wish for?
The libertarian platform says: "We oppose all government activity that consists of the forcible collection of money or goods from individuals in violation of their individual rights." So a tax credit doesn't guarantee the safety net indefinitely -- because in theory, there could someday be no taxes -- although it would probably be a good transitional measure.
We need to nail this down ASAP. Finding some way to show genuine compassion for people in a pure theoretical libertarian framework would go a long way to bringing us into an alliance with the people who share our veneration of freedom of the individual, the left of the conventional left-right axis. Assurances of care in a libertarian system would also establish a framework in which the left could be truer to their own purest ideals; they could move to the center and let go of big government because the safety net would be there.
Libertarians have been unfairly associated with the right. (A lot of people hear libertarian and think "gun nuts" or "racists", that sort of thing, at least in my personal experience.) But who, in practice, sides more with individualism and freedom? Which side of the conventional debate displays more actual diversity? Radical libertarians have much more in common with the left than the right, and with a good plan, they would see this too.
I flirted with libertarianism when I was in college, but soon realized the fundamental problem with it: all success is predicated on people behaving a certain way, a way which 10,000 years of human experience shows is antithetical to human nature.
I still think of myself as libertarian, but my position has been moderated by thinking along these lines. The libertarian economic model is based on the Adam Smith assumption that people make the decision that maximizes their long-term welfare, but in fact, people make the decision that maximizes their short-term satisfaction. This has been proved to me over-and-over again by seven years in the private sector.
Also, I've gotten older and, I hope, wiser. The individual is the atomos of civilization. Some libertarians don't allow for saving everyone, or at least trying to. I hesitate to unqualifiedly support a political philosophy that some people use as support for so-called "Social Darwinism". I think we can build a society that has the freedom to strive, and possibly fail, but doesn't leave out compassion for those who haven't yet found the strength of character to fend for themselves.
Why [do] people keep equating Open Source = Linux?
For the same reason end-lusers think all computers are from Microsoft or that AOL is the internet. Although I didn't equate Linux and free software, I can see how a quick reading of my post might cause one to infer that. I really didn't feel like typing "Linux (or FreeBSD or whatever)". My bad.
Or maybe i'm [missing] the meaning of "commerical"?
You can't charge for free software, only for repackaging, redistribution, support, et cetera. This is an important point. Instead of producing one item and selling... and selling... and selling... like you're waiting for an exit visa, you have to become part of a social network to earn a living. Instead of being rewarded for increasing isolation, you're rewarded for increasing participation.
Free software is never going to completely catch up in the arena of commercial games. Some games simply have no replay value.... However, we could catch up in something like FPS....
Good point. Monthly-subscription MMORPGs like EQ and SWG seem like candidates as well.
In fact, the most innovative thing about "open source" is the model itself, not any results from it.
That's because free software is still catching up in a few areas: luser-friendliness, market share and commerical games. Once we have everything under Linux that we have under Winblows, we're not going to stop, we're going to build on that. We'll advance from there at the much faster free software rate of development.
In mathematical terms, on the innovation = f(t) scale, the curves are about to cross. The free software curve has an exponential curve, while commercial development is linear. Commerical software is over.
The only way the commerical model can survive is through the application of force and deceit, which is why we're seeing things like lobbying to support the M$ monopoly, the SCO suit, and the FUD spread by zero-summing fatcats who don't know how to make a living without taking from others.
MAXIMISE SHAREHOLDER VALUE
Over what timeframe? Decisions that maximise short-term profit are usually disastrous for long-term profit.
If Bill Gates runs for President, I'll be very sad. "We're not a monopoly... but, uh, we will be your rulers! Where do you want to go today?"
Soviet Russia!!!
Hey now, don't drag Mr. T into this : )
Sorry, comparing T to Sorbo was uncalled for. Didn't mean to dis the T. 8-)
... he doesn't want others to know he's a thief, a backstabber...
Jayne's arc alone should get Firefly Emmys for Joss and Adam. Fox execs must be color-blind to quality. They're quality-blind.
And I'm sorry, but Sorbo wanted it to be "Hercules...in space!"
Which is sad. Sorbo said that the plots were "too complicated and too clever for the rest of us to understand". That's true in comparison to a lot of television shows, but you didn't need a degree in rocket science to follow along. I also suspect that Sorbo wanted Dylan to be a less ambiguous, more straightforward character. (Mr. T also only wanted to play overt good guys. Smooth move, Sorbo. Good luck with that "acting" career.)
The real tragedy of this is that Robert Hewitt Wolfe was making a gem of a show that I would still be watching and pitching to this day. As it was, I stopped watching when RHW left. I won't waste any time on shows with Sorbo or shows from Tribune anymore.
When the crazy guy has a gun you don't point your gun at him and start yelling at him.
What?!? That's crazy talk! What's next, UN protocols and diplomatic measures?
Ugh, this is a terrible idea!!
DON'T PANIC!!! I'm sure it can be turned off!
using streambox vcr suite 2 (windows) it dled the movie through the .mov linking file, nice and easy... freeware too
I looked this up, but it requires something called "Win2k/ Win95/ Win98/ WinME/ WinNT/ WinXP" and I couldn't find any mention of the GPL.
... ran it through cat...
strings farscape_480.mov worked too. We need to have another Ask Slashdot linux tips day, those are always cool.
The shift to conservatism with age is a classic trope, but the opposite is sometimes (often?) true. As I wrote in orthogonal's straw poll:
The individual is the atomos of Western civilization. The invisible hand is not sufficient to the profound compassion required by a truly ethical culture.
I like to call it a "treadmill".
We used to call it a "mouse wheel", but that means something else nowadays.
Archer (dramatic): We can't get there in time! Maybe in your era, ships can make Warp 13, but we can't!
Kirk (laidback): You know, I can show you how to get there on the cheap....
So let's face, the invention of human cylons is a big horrible mistake and one of the worst sci-fi cliches ever.
It's not the cliche, it's the execution.
Look at Buffy or B5. Either one of those shows was cliched in the extreme if you look at the one-liners: "cheerleader finds out she's a magical vampire killer", "a United Nations in space". The execution was brilliant in each of those cases and turned lame cliches into great television. Joss or Joe could announce they were writing a show where two guys would sit in a room with a table and two chairs and read the phone book to each other and I would tune in religiously.
BG could be a piece of crap with meaningless space battles and unresolved daytime-soap suspense about "Who's the Cylon?" Or it could be a profound exploration of human identity and evolution... about how advancing technology will affect human life... about what it's like to be a leader without any rational hope having to create hope for the 50,000 people who are all that's left of humanity.
So the real question is not whether or not BG is cliched. The question is: what will Ron Moore and David Eick bring us? For my two cents, Moore wrote some cool episodes of Star Trek ("The Defector", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "In Theory", "The First Duty", "Tapestry", "The Pegasus"), and I liked the first, non-suited half of American Gothic a lot.
Of course, it's a matter of taste, but this is my desktop (which I find good-looking)
:-) -- is that I want huge amounts of information on the screen at once or quickly accessible. I run really small fonts, gkrellm, FvwmPager, many workspaces and so on, so the end result is often less than attractive but also less twitchymaking for me. There's nothing wrong with default Gnome, it just makes me crazy because I can't organize things the way I like.
That's actually really nice. I like it too.
But you're right, my big deal -- and I always get ragged about this
The JC Lawrence screenshot was my biggest influence, as well as the fact that all of those different looks are possible in fvwm. One of these days I'll sit down and see if I can make the Andre Bonhote or Cameron Simpson desktop look work for me.
Also, fvwm can be made to look a little better with some tweaks like making the windows flat, the corner handles invisible, et cetera. The default fvwm looks like early HTML tables with huge borders and those really obvious shaded buttons with the "light" coming from the upper left.
Instead of fighting for one [single] UI, Gnome should have two modes: beginner and expert.
:-)
/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon to my .fvwm2rc startup, and voila, the best of both worlds.
.fvwmrc. I added gnome-control-center right next to 'restart fvwm' in my fvwm desktop menu so it's always handy.
Gnome already has an expert mode, it's called fvwm.
I much prefer the emacsiness of fvwm -- like 16 million workspaces with 6 desktops each, complete access to all of that with any keyboard or mouse combinations I configure -- but I kept trying gnome because the gtk apps all use the gnome-control-center display settings. Then I added
I configure gtk apps like firefox by running gnome-control-center, and the rest of the interface, like mouse and keyboard, with
Here are a few screenshots from the fvwm screenshots page (these were my inspiration to start learning fvwm): 1 2 3 4 5.
... because the main rss has all the stories.
It looks like I jumped the gun... stories from "Games" don't seem to be in the RSS feed. Has anyone noticed any other topics missing?
Also, Slashdot moves a lot of information. I can get home from work and find the rss 'expired', so to speak. I think there should be more stories in the rss. Boing Boing has 30 in their feed, for example.
Thanks for upgrading the rss code. Now I don't have to load the RSS for all the subsections separately, because the main rss has all the stories.
Thanks for the nice personal insult though.
"Fat, dumb and happy" isn't an insult. It's a traditional way of referring to the bread-and-circuses attitude, "I'm okay, so what's the big deal?" Which attitude your original post has in spades.
Apparently it's not too bad, since you just did it. For real censorship, see China or, perhaps, Syria.
There are two problems with this.
First, countries don't go downhill overnight. If Bush and Company had a press conference where they all twirled their thick black mustaches and laughed, "MUAHahahahaha!", everyone would know they were the bad guys.
Instead, they tell us that we need to be defend against terrorism, or that they're protecting children, or so on. They start by attacking unsympathetic people, advocates of the most radical changes, the most overtly threatening speakers. For instance, those people who worked with Iraq or Afghanistan being held at Guantanamo without access to counsel, or political radicals, or pornographers. They have the right to counsel under US law and US legal tradition. But they're working with the enemy, or anarchists, or sleaze-peddlers, so we can look the other way just a little bit on this whole due process concept, right?
Over time censorship goes up and free speech goes down. A little at a time, a little here, a little there... they sneak it in, so it only offends the strongest free speech advocates, also known as "next on our list". Eventually you can't criticize at all without risking jail time or worse.
And if you think that the current administration thinks of censorship as a necessary evil, something we have to endure for the crisis, remember this: when Bill Maher called US pilots "cowards", White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "... they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." (Emphasis added.)
Second... China or Syria? "Oh, hey, sure we're less free, but look at China and Syria! They're way worse than us!" is not the smartest way to approach this issue. The United States is dedicated to being the most open and most free society ever created. We're supposed to work for something more than "better than these other guys". We're supposed to strive to embody in concrete reality our highest abstract aspirations.
The idea that we can get away with a barely passing grade on free expression is profoundly unpatriotic. It is an abandonment of the rights that were held sacred by the founders of this country.