And here is a textbook example of "ipse dixit". If you're going to challenge parent, uttering a name isn't sufficient.
Besides, there is no heresy. There is a misdirected debate using the words "global warming" instead of "climate change". So "heretics" can just isolate the global temperature, challenge that notion, and get away with the massive non sequitur "if this data is challenged, then the whole issue is challenged". And most interests are on the side of "heretics". It's profitable to make resources scarce and pollution and waste is doing just that. How much we pay for oil and bottled water?
Is the climate changing? Sure, ask anybody over the age of 30. Is this part of some natural cycle? most probably. But is pollution a risk to the development of such cycle or are all the disasters in the news part of the cycle? Chaos theory says little perturbations can lead to big results. Heretics say little perturbations are negligible and disasters are natural. Nobody can challenge that as we don't have an unpolluted earth to experiment with, we're left with models whose results depend on the assumptions and approximations made to build them.
All of this is moot. Pollution is hurting us as we speak and is preparing a debt which might end up as the most effective mean of enslavement. You are already paying for water. What will happen if air is not breathable, cultivations need shielding from the sun and the pollution, and you need therapy to have a little chance to procreate? That makes "1984" look like a bedtime story.
If the result (25% of the estimated installed base) is below the big websites' statistics of user-agent header, then the result or the estimated installed base is surely inaccurate, because the referer doesn't count all the firefoxes with a doctored user agent header.
I'd say that figuring out the downloads (i get it from apt), and then the "activity" is the wrong approach. Active users by definition visit sites. See sites statistics. Get bottom figure. Find how many firefox users change user agent for a statistically significant sample. Apply the correction to the bottom figure. Voila'.
There is no reason not to believe that your experience can be generalized, so I finally found the SUV equivalent. Something happening after colonization is not much relevant to my original post, but I can easily concede this practice probably impacted desertification earlier too. It's all still very different than what's happening here- a stupid example? check the difference between plastic used in some cars or electronics (flimsy) and the one used to package small items that are many times cheaper like an SD card. Africans had been careless, we are being evil:)
> What I'm talking about is that native americans, and most aboriginal cultures were more ecological than us only because they didn't have the technology or knowledge to exploit resources to the point of causing significant damage. There was nothing magical, they weren't especially ecologically minded.
I agree there is nothing magical, and that they had not the same means we have to make significant damage. And even that they were not ecologically minded. Yet the cultural difference stays apparent and saying that they would have made the same things we make if they were given the possibility is quite arbitrary.
>You're dreaming. Life is and always has been a brutal affair.
You're victim of the "law of the jungle" propaganda: Animals with a full belly don't struggle to fagocitate more stuff. They go in the shade and relax. They kill with brutality _when_necessary_. Even the cat playing with mice is not squandering resources. The cat is improving his skill.
> It's the nature of all life to expand until it reaches the limit of the carrying capacity of it's environment. This is the only equilibrium.
The big assumption you do is that there is only one way to expand till the natural limits and we are the expression of it. We have simply prevailed by brute force upon other cultures and it's up to you to prove they would have taking our same choices given the possibility.
did those cliff drives occur when meat was becoming pricey and caused war? Did they have models and simulation for the risks associated to their actions? Is cattle renewable? Did they run cattle off the cliff as a way to say to other peers "look how powerful i am"?
>SUVs do not cause mass extinction or turn large geographical areas into wastelands in a few hundred years or less. We aren't squandering resources.
A non sequitur big as the sahara desert here, you see it?
Anyway In another comment I asked what are the SUVs in those cultures. But I was wrong indeed. Resources squandered for individual greed can probably be found. But our civilization went deeper as it promotes squandering for collective misery. So I ask the revised one: where is the equivalent of an auto maker embracing and extinguishing public transport?
As for oil being waste, that doesn't grant rights to fill people's lungs with more waste crap than necessary does it?
As for we being inventive, other species have ample prior art on recycling waste.
Stereotype? So point me at the equivalent of the seventh generation philosophy http://www.wrpc.net/wyskcul.html in our culture. Let's then examine how did it affect their behavior and ours. Factor in our ability to look at what the seventh generation will have to deal with way better than them.
As for the racist argument you and some other slashdotter brought up, race is not a factor, culture is. If you want to confuse the two to object to an argument, free to do so. You'll just prove our culture has very limited debating skills.
As for the "liberal" word, interesting assumption but there are people residing in places with different political fake dichotomies imposed upon, and I'm one of them.
Then we either need technology and or less people around. I thought i was clear in not considering technology as inherent evil. It is when it's used as a religion, just as religion is evil when it's used outside its scope.
Besides, 6 billion people won't be around for long if tech breakthroughs are not made available (note I don't use "discover") s is anyway so what's the greatness of this achievement? It's like indebting yourself bloodless to get a porsche at age 23. Feasible? yes. If you pay up the interest, you'll think you are a genius, if you don't you'll consider yourself a failed man. The difference between the two being hard work and circumstances. But the porsche here is the earth and we're betting it on hard work and circumstances.
> So exactly what would you like to throw out, since throwing out ALL...
I said something in the lines above which is a starting point. Geothermal against nuclear if you need something practical. Besides you having written "throwing out ALL" is a convenient 100% recycled straw man argument.
I was talking about the philosophy of life and you talk about objective impact. Anyway let's stick to the impact. Where is the squandering of resources in the civilizations I talked about? What are Indian or African SUVs? Isn't there a difference?
Human nature in the western culture, you mean. IIRC American Indians, many African cultures, and even our old agricultural society were much respectful of the environment. Current myopic stance started with the industrial revolution, which i suspect was carried off by few powerful people.
As a side note, i also think we've been trained to think that the possibilities are communism, fascism, or the status quo (which is not capitalism and with no real free market, both being result of what the banking and insurance big fish decide). Instead scientific and technological development didn't need to victimize the environment, or replace spirituality, or try to replace religion.
> For instance, I saw a TV show where the new speaking CCTV cameras interrupted some guy getting the shit kicked out of him. The attacker realised he was on CCTV and ran off. The camera operator simply followed him from one camera to the next, constantly reminding him he's been videotaped, the cops have his description and are en route, and that he really can't get away. He was caught. CCTV is a great technology.
CCTV is indeed a great technology. Even with a crappy usb camera an old laptop and an always on internet connection one can monitor his home. On linux there is the simple "webcam" software and the sophisticated http://zoneminder.com/.
But does a great technology makes a great deployment? A hi tech camera network can be used for all sorts of misdeed, it all depends on who's managing it. Will it be the police? will it be private employees, like it happened in a delicate operation like Iraq war?
Second is: "I saw this piece on TV where CCTV stopped a crime...". One episode amplified by the media might be significant, it might also be mere propaganda. This one smells of propaganda: once the speaking camera stopped the crime, the operator should have simply followed the perpetrator. Telling him he's framed makes him more alert, more likely to think about ways to defeat the system (getting in smaller roads, stealing transport, clothes.
Also, if a system is made to fight terrorism you simply don't tell the public it's been deployed for that purpose. Make it a system to check traffic violations or regulate it. To defend private buildings. It will be more effective. Well terrorism seems to me the troll that lets the governments do whatever they like so this one point is irrelevant.
In fact if I got TFA it has similarities with what the mac could have been if Apple didn't practically kill hypercard and left the newton and opendoc to wither. The monolithic app is what commercial software vendors want, while a document or object centric environment is very exciting from the power user point of view. In fact is kinda translating the unix philosophy of making specialized tools work together for complex tasks in a GUI and OO.
If it can be done and they also find ways to integrate the now ubiquitous web applications' data, database, and other languages in that environment we could end up, for example, having a set of remote EJBs and Rails's active record objects, a couple local database rows and some emails being processed by a filter written in c that once belonged to openoffice calc, ending up in a nice graph.
Anyway, Gnome's bonobo, netbeans and probably lots of other projects wanted to achieve something like this as a primary or secondary goal, maybe people don't want such a paradigm shift.
Well if berners lee developed on windows he'd have to integrate his browser into the OS. If he developed on mac, users who surfed with http would have had their sexual orientation questioned. If he developed on unix nobody would have left telnet and gopher for http, unless it had either perl or remote exploits. That leaves the amiga and the next.
What else have you been working too at a PC besides Office? I think officeXP, the one i used extensively, provides one of the worst user experience ever. Pick a shareware mac application, 9 times out of 10 it is better designed than office. Basic usability errors (no feedback on save?), lame online documentation, slow operation compared to OO under linux on same hardware, more unstable in a dedicated workstation with less then 10 apps installed than OO beta on debian unstable with a thousand packages installed.
Anyway, back to the topic: the school district is not in a vertical market with peculiar needs for data formats. Forcing office, the latest, means their IT department sucks. Let students deal with multiple data format: THEY WILL HAVE TO, IN REAL LIFE LATER.
Just hope for the sake of your kids that the rest of the organization is better.
>> * Are we guaranteed that the code is patent-free and will always be open for continued use?
>You are not guaranteed that with any other free software program.
But a submarine patent is not in the interest of a free software developer (severe loss of face) while M$ would benefit greatly from embracing and extinguishing FOSS.
Besides WTF are you accepting so passively? If a patent ends up implemented in OSS one should prove the implementation has been stolen or the patent should have expired/not have been awarded in the first place. You are accepting a DISEASED status quo as normal, jeez! We've always been at war with eastasia.
> In fact, it's almost guaranteed >that it does infringe software patents (both those existing now, and those that will be granted in >the future).
It is almost guaranteed commercial software infringes patents belonging to someone else. In fact with commercial software they sell you protection. One big mob of companies faking some fight between themselves. Well i can't tell somebody to rebel, it's your money. But you're paying an unfair tax. Get back to copyright and let people charge for superior commercial software, not for the right to use the double linked list.
>> * Does their shared-source license allow easy mixing with other FLOSS code, eg GPL and BSD licenses?
>The GPL doesn't allow easy mixing with code under any other licence.
It doesn't when the result wouldn't be free. Fair enough for me, it's the whole point of it. People don't choose the GPL to interoperate with any other friggin' licence. They choose it because they want their stuff to stay friggin' free. Want to deal with OSS from Microsoft? while you're at it why not learn about christian theology in Saudi Arabia. It's less risky.
Well one could have separate graphics sound and IO processors in an appleII. DSP too. The strength of the Amiga was that nobody had such powerful graphics back in the time (3D and photorealistic HAM mode was quite impressive at the time) and that the c64 crowd flocked to it. I guess couldn't be a serious contender with pcs and macs because for the first years it crashed often, and at that time people were used to much more stability.
1. get a technology adopted by most of the linux community, no matter if it's FOSS 2. Suddenly, Microsoft recalls it has a patent covering that technology. 3. Now everyone who wants to keep using the technology in those unfortunate countries where software is patentable must get a deal with linspire or microsoft. 4. Profit!
I guess that's what will happen with a bigger fish like Novell.
Slashdot Mirror
And here is a textbook example of "ipse dixit". If you're going to challenge parent, uttering a name isn't sufficient.
Besides, there is no heresy. There is a misdirected debate using the words "global warming" instead of "climate change". So "heretics" can just isolate the global temperature, challenge that notion, and get away with the massive non sequitur "if this data is challenged, then the whole issue is challenged". And most interests are on the side of "heretics". It's profitable to make resources scarce and pollution and waste is doing just that. How much we pay for oil and bottled water?
Is the climate changing? Sure, ask anybody over the age of 30. Is this part of some natural cycle? most probably. But is pollution a risk to the development of such cycle or are all the disasters in the news part of the cycle? Chaos theory says little perturbations can lead to big results. Heretics say little perturbations are negligible and disasters are natural. Nobody can challenge that as we don't have an unpolluted earth to experiment with, we're left with models whose results depend on the assumptions and approximations made to build them.
All of this is moot. Pollution is hurting us as we speak and is preparing a debt which might end up as the most effective mean of enslavement. You are already paying for water. What will happen if air is not breathable, cultivations need shielding from the sun and the pollution, and you need therapy to have a little chance to procreate? That makes "1984" look like a bedtime story.
> 25% still seems very low.
If the result (25% of the estimated installed base) is below the big websites' statistics of user-agent header, then the result or the estimated installed base is surely inaccurate, because the referer doesn't count all the firefoxes with a doctored user agent header.
I'd say that figuring out the downloads (i get it from apt), and then the "activity" is the wrong approach. Active users by definition visit sites. See sites statistics. Get bottom figure. Find how many firefox users change user agent for a statistically significant sample. Apply the correction to the bottom figure. Voila'.
I think it's also relevant to ask oneself: "What would Jesus do?"
There is no reason not to believe that your experience can be generalized, so I finally found the SUV equivalent. Something happening after colonization is not much relevant to my original post, but I can easily concede this practice probably impacted desertification earlier too. It's all still very different than what's happening here- a stupid example? check the difference between plastic used in some cars or electronics (flimsy) and the one used to package small items that are many times cheaper like an SD card. Africans had been careless, we are being evil :)
> What I'm talking about is that native americans, and most aboriginal cultures were more ecological than us only because they didn't have the technology or knowledge to exploit resources to the point of causing significant damage. There was nothing magical, they weren't especially ecologically minded.
I agree there is nothing magical, and that they had not the same means we have to make significant damage. And even that they were not ecologically minded. Yet the cultural difference stays apparent and saying that they would have made the same things we make if they were given the possibility is quite arbitrary.
>You're dreaming. Life is and always has been a brutal affair.
You're victim of the "law of the jungle" propaganda: Animals with a full belly don't struggle to fagocitate more stuff. They go in the shade and relax. They kill with brutality _when_necessary_. Even the cat playing with mice is not squandering resources. The cat is improving his skill.
> It's the nature of all life to expand until it reaches the limit of the carrying capacity of it's environment. This is the only equilibrium.
The big assumption you do is that there is only one way to expand till the natural limits and we are the expression of it. We have simply prevailed by brute force upon other cultures and it's up to you to prove they would have taking our same choices given the possibility.
did those cliff drives occur when meat was becoming pricey and caused war? Did they have models and simulation for the risks associated to their actions? Is cattle renewable? Did they run cattle off the cliff as a way to say to other peers "look how powerful i am"?
I still see differences and stand by my point.
I meant to ask what is the equivalent of SUVs in those cultures.
Reserves are not expression of indian culture anymore, the two main reasons being demographic defeat and western media.
I asked a very specific thing if you care to read past the first word.
>SUVs do not cause mass extinction or turn large geographical areas into wastelands in a few hundred years or less. We aren't squandering resources.
A non sequitur big as the sahara desert here, you see it?
Anyway In another comment I asked what are the SUVs in those cultures. But I was wrong indeed. Resources squandered for individual greed can probably be found. But our civilization went deeper as it promotes squandering for collective misery. So I ask the revised one: where is the equivalent of an auto maker embracing and extinguishing public transport?
As for oil being waste, that doesn't grant rights to fill people's lungs with more waste crap than necessary does it?
As for we being inventive, other species have ample prior art on recycling waste.
Stereotype? So point me at the equivalent of the seventh generation philosophy http://www.wrpc.net/wyskcul.html in our culture. Let's then examine how did it affect their behavior and ours. Factor in our ability to look at what the seventh generation will have to deal with way better than them.
As for the racist argument you and some other slashdotter brought up, race is not a factor, culture is. If you want to confuse the two to object to an argument, free to do so. You'll just prove our culture has very limited debating skills.
As for the "liberal" word, interesting assumption but there are people residing in places with different political fake dichotomies imposed upon, and I'm one of them.
>Slash and burn will not feed 6 billion people!
Then we either need technology and or less people around. I thought i was clear in not considering technology as inherent evil. It is when it's used as a religion, just as religion is evil when it's used outside its scope.
Besides, 6 billion people won't be around for long if tech breakthroughs are not made available (note I don't use "discover") s is anyway so what's the greatness of this achievement? It's like indebting yourself bloodless to get a porsche at age 23. Feasible? yes. If you pay up the interest, you'll think you are a genius, if you don't you'll consider yourself a failed man. The difference between the two being hard work and circumstances. But the porsche here is the earth and we're betting it on hard work and circumstances.
> So exactly what would you like to throw out, since throwing out ALL...
I said something in the lines above which is a starting point. Geothermal against nuclear if you need something practical. Besides you having written "throwing out ALL" is a convenient 100% recycled straw man argument.
I was talking about the philosophy of life and you talk about objective impact. Anyway let's stick to the impact. Where is the squandering of resources in the civilizations I talked about? What are Indian or African SUVs? Isn't there a difference?
Human nature in the western culture, you mean. IIRC American Indians, many African cultures, and even our old agricultural society were much respectful of the environment. Current myopic stance started with the industrial revolution, which i suspect was carried off by few powerful people.
As a side note, i also think we've been trained to think that the possibilities are communism, fascism, or the status quo (which is not capitalism and with no real free market, both being result of what the banking and insurance big fish decide).
Instead scientific and technological development didn't need to victimize the environment, or replace spirituality, or try to replace religion.
> For instance, I saw a TV show where the new speaking CCTV cameras interrupted some guy getting the shit kicked out of him. The attacker realised he was on CCTV and ran off. The camera operator simply followed him from one camera to the next, constantly reminding him he's been videotaped, the cops have his description and are en route, and that he really can't get away. He was caught. CCTV is a great technology.
CCTV is indeed a great technology. Even with a crappy usb camera an old laptop and an always on internet connection one can monitor his home. On linux there is the simple "webcam" software and the sophisticated http://zoneminder.com/.
But does a great technology makes a great deployment? A hi tech camera network can be used for all sorts of misdeed, it all depends on who's managing it. Will it be the police? will it be private employees, like it happened in a delicate operation like Iraq war?
Second is: "I saw this piece on TV where CCTV stopped a crime...". One episode amplified by the media might be significant, it might also be mere propaganda. This one smells of propaganda: once the speaking camera stopped the crime, the operator should have simply followed the perpetrator. Telling him he's framed makes him more alert, more likely to think about ways to defeat the system (getting in smaller roads, stealing transport, clothes.
Also, if a system is made to fight terrorism you simply don't tell the public it's been deployed for that purpose. Make it a system to check traffic violations or regulate it. To defend private buildings. It will be more effective. Well terrorism seems to me the troll that lets the governments do whatever they like so this one point is irrelevant.
And both ubuntu and red hat desktop linux having no pact with microsoft is good news too.
Well all you need is a bunch of 300 marines then. Nothing compared to the carnage in iraq.
In fact if I got TFA it has similarities with what the mac could have been if Apple didn't practically kill hypercard and left the newton and opendoc to wither. The monolithic app is what commercial software vendors want, while a document or object centric environment is very exciting from the power user point of view. In fact is kinda translating the unix philosophy of making specialized tools work together for complex tasks in a GUI and OO.
If it can be done and they also find ways to integrate the now ubiquitous web applications' data, database, and other languages in that environment we could end up, for example, having a set of remote EJBs and Rails's active record objects, a couple local database rows and some emails being processed by a filter written in c that once belonged to openoffice calc, ending up in a nice graph.
Anyway, Gnome's bonobo, netbeans and probably lots of other projects wanted to achieve something like this as a primary or secondary goal, maybe people don't want such a paradigm shift.
Well if berners lee developed on windows he'd have to integrate his browser into the OS. If he developed on mac, users who surfed with http would have had their sexual orientation questioned. If he developed on unix nobody would have left telnet and gopher for http, unless it had either perl or remote exploits. That leaves the amiga and the next.
What else have you been working too at a PC besides Office? I think officeXP, the one i used extensively, provides one of the worst user experience ever. Pick a shareware mac application, 9 times out of 10 it is better designed than office. Basic usability errors (no feedback on save?), lame online documentation, slow operation compared to OO under linux on same hardware, more unstable in a dedicated workstation with less then 10 apps installed than OO beta on debian unstable with a thousand packages installed.
Anyway, back to the topic: the school district is not in a vertical market with peculiar needs for data formats. Forcing office, the latest, means their IT department sucks. Let students deal with multiple data format: THEY WILL HAVE TO, IN REAL LIFE LATER.
Just hope for the sake of your kids that the rest of the organization is better.
Since he also may be innocent until found guilty, parent posters have a point nonetheless, don't they?
>> * Are we guaranteed that the code is patent-free and will always be open for continued use?
>You are not guaranteed that with any other free software program.
But a submarine patent is not in the interest of a free software developer (severe loss of face) while M$ would benefit greatly from embracing and extinguishing FOSS.
Besides WTF are you accepting so passively? If a patent ends up implemented in OSS one should prove the implementation has been stolen or the patent should have expired/not have been awarded in the first place. You are accepting a DISEASED status quo as normal, jeez! We've always been at war with eastasia.
> In fact, it's almost guaranteed
>that it does infringe software patents (both those existing now, and those that will be granted in
>the future).
It is almost guaranteed commercial software infringes patents belonging to someone else. In fact with commercial software they sell you protection. One big mob of companies faking some fight between themselves. Well i can't tell somebody to rebel, it's your money. But you're paying an unfair tax. Get back to copyright and let people charge for superior commercial software, not for the right to use the double linked list.
>> * Does their shared-source license allow easy mixing with other FLOSS code, eg GPL and BSD licenses?
>The GPL doesn't allow easy mixing with code under any other licence.
It doesn't when the result wouldn't be free. Fair enough for me, it's the whole point of it. People don't choose the GPL to interoperate with any other friggin' licence. They choose it because they want their stuff to stay friggin' free. Want to deal with OSS from Microsoft? while you're at it why not learn about christian theology in Saudi Arabia. It's less risky.
Well one could have separate graphics sound and IO processors in an appleII. DSP too. The strength of the Amiga was that nobody had such powerful graphics back in the time (3D and photorealistic HAM mode was quite impressive at the time) and that the c64 crowd flocked to it. I guess couldn't be a serious contender with pcs and macs because for the first years it crashed often, and at that time people were used to much more stability.
I'd try the following trick:
1. get a technology adopted by most of the linux community, no matter if it's FOSS
2. Suddenly, Microsoft recalls it has a patent covering that technology.
3. Now everyone who wants to keep using the technology in those unfortunate countries where software is patentable must get a deal with linspire or microsoft.
4. Profit!
I guess that's what will happen with a bigger fish like Novell.
Then try mp2 at sufficiently high bitrate.