One of the things you seem to be missing in these arguments is the right to due process. It sucks being arrested for one crime when you committed another (less serious) crime.
The meth lab is not a terrorist unit. It just isn't. It is against the law, but not a terrorist activity to make drugs. Now, using the patriot act to convict the guy for terrorism when he was cooking up drugs is wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Once any means justifies the end of putting criminals in jail, the whole judicial system crumbles, because we have to try to avoid putting innocent people in jail. The whole legal system is skewed toward this goal. Move away from that, and we haven't really won anything.
I may be wrong, but I thought that My Girl was arranged by the Temptations themselves (Not written, but arranged). The temptations did a lot of vocal arrangements this way. So, did the Funk Brothers do the music to that, or is My Girl not a relevant tune to your argument?
Why not? I think it's pretty sad the way a lot of people seem to think that all open source projects must have a commercial spin, because that's what will speed adoption. I mean, have you heard of a company called 'Nullsoft'? How strange is that? They'll probably never get anyone to use that free 'Winamp' player they make.
The point of Free Software has never been to 'take over the world', just to provide an alternative. Wacky names are part of the lore (GNU/HURD -- double recursive acronym, come on!). A lot of us find it appealing, and don't particularly care that not many people use it. If it is better, it will get used anyway, regardless of what it is called.
Finding a move is about finding an optimal branch of a move tree. The tree in Go is much wider than with chess -- there are too many possible moves on a 19x19 board with no fixed moves defined for pieces. So the solution is not to look at 'positions', but at patterns on the board (as there could be only a few patterns on a board, all independant of one another). The thing is that these patterns are hard to recognize -- enter the difficult bit. Not the analysis of moves, but the recognition of patterns.
I don't know if you have read much about Stallman, but when he started the GNU project, he was reimplementing the entire unix system on his own. Obviously he needed a system to do this on, so he was using unix. It is a means to an end. In the end he wants to run only free software, but you can't get there easily without using some non-free stuff along the way.
Also, during those starting out times, it was obviously a huge step backward to reimplement a whole system that was working already. RMS is not about using computers as tools and not caring about the ethics, he is all about the ethics of computer code. RMS never wanted to subjugate the masses, just create a free system.
Great post. I agree totally. Just as a funny side note, thought -- RMS is an atheist, so I don't think he would be putting is 'soul' on the line for anything:-)
Hacking has gotten a bad name (as in breaking security measures), but I still like the meaning of improving/changing something, especially software. Check this out for more info.
I just said that the rights are granted by society. In the declaration of independence, I read
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
So you cannot secure your rights without a governing body to appeal to. My post was not Marxist or anti-American, just pointing out that rights are undefendable without a community to recognize them.
The FSF isn't forcing Apple to release their code under GPL, they are just not giving the licence that Apple chose their support as being GPL compatible. Where is the hypocrisy in that?
Remember that RMS is idealist (not really elitist) and definitely single-minded in his crusade to keep (or make) software free. Sounds like you have not really 'gotten' what these guys are trying to do.
Actually, no. If you read the founding fathers and all that, you will find that man has no rights but thos granted by the society. So Society gives you rights, and government is restricted by the Constitution from infringing on these rights. On your own have no rights.
I couldn't surf the web back in the day until I had downloaded a web browser. At least the format's open and you have a few readers with your favourite distro if you use Linux. In fact, there are quite a few open source programs that can generate PDFs (I hear that KOffice is working on a feature that allows you to open PDFs in KWord).
I am very puzzled by the anti-pdf crowd on slashdot. At least it is an open format.
If you have Windows on your system you probably don't mind proprietary stuff on you Linux box. Just download the Nvidia driver, run it from a shell (without X running) and start up X. Works everytime.
It's funny how so many people these days seem to be against getting everything for free. Would you not like to get everything for free? Do you not shop for bargains to get the lowest price possible, sometimes getting the product you want for free as promotion? The thing that gets me is how everyone changes when it comes to copyright (so-called IP). Now they do not want to pay less (or get stuff for free) so that they can feed the starving artists.
I doubt whether anyone on slashdot will expect to get everything for free, but it is the capitalist consumer ideal. You might find a golden thread running throught the more highly modded comments here that suggests that stuff should be cheaper (like commodity pricing) and then we will buy. I agree with your argument about taking first and justifying it (I will not condone breaking the law), but wanting to get everything free is not wrong.
Sorry, I guess I didn't express myself very well in my post. Science also uses indirect proof. I have seen pictures of New York. I have actually been to New York and am now telling you I saw it.
If you want to get all philosophical about it, we can argue about the existance of existance all we want and still just be convinced that we can think but not much else. That's all semantics. Science seeks proof of all theories, and if new facts come to light that contradict the theory it is refined or discarded.
So, inasmuch nothing in this world is provable beyond doubt (are you dreaming right now/are you in the Matrix/have you been hypnotised or conditioned to see things that do not exist?) everything is about faith. Some proof is just a tad more believable to most people than others. And religious faith is about belief without any proof.
Think about it this way: God asks us to believe. It should be simple for him to prove his existance, but he chooses not to, because belief in New York just does not require as much faith as belief in a Being we cannot see.
I suppose if you think that science is a religion, you could argue your points. However, the definition of religion I get in Meriam-Webster implies faith, which my Sunday school teacher always defined as belief without proof.
Now the idea of science as religion is not new. In fact, there is a nice bit about it in Contact by Carl Sagan, in which the religious guy tells the atheist that she believes in science and does a cool experiment with a Foucault pendulum.
The difference between science and religion is then not that they believe but what they believe. Everyone believes in something. That's what humans do. Science just attempts to get proof, while most religions (I would say all, but I don't know all religions) are characterised by the lack of proof.
The coolest thing about PDF is that the format is open. I don't know what you mean about PDF being proprietary -- anyone can make a PDF viewer or create PDFs. No problem.
I get this argument all the time and it really amazed me in the beginning, untill I started to understand how many people think about software. The thing is this. Walk up to someone and say 'I have a car here. It's compact, I made it myself and I will give it to you free'. They will probably ask a few questions about the strings attached to the deal, but no-one will say 'no thanks, I already have a car'. Because it's free.
Now, walk up to someone who is looking to install an OS (probably Windows) and say, 'you know, I have these disks with Mandrake Linux which also includes word processors, math apps, media players etc, and I will load it for you free of charge.' These people now start talking about the quality of the software.
This beat me until I realised that most people don't pay for software. Not only that, they rely on freely available illegal copies of software. These copies are only available for Windows most of the time.
I think that the Free software argument should be pushed more, 'cos a Free software isn't better than proprietary softare on many real world levels. Many people use Windows and have grown used to it. There will be a learning curve. The same software is not always available. Some of the stuff is beta or alpha and is not as stable as one would think. The thing that Free software has going for it is that it is free.
And I'm talking about both definitions of free here. The free beer will get the people to come to your show to hear the free speech. Or something like that.
On the original topic of choice -- that gets adressed by the Free software thing, too. Free software is much less likely to lead to proprietary formats that lock people in to a certain OS. Ideally, once the proprietary stranglehold is broken, people will have much more choice.
Now, the thing about usability is the target audience. What you are proposing will probably make things more usable for some people (mostly people who are not used to the command line). Other people (like me) have grown fond of the command line. It can be proven mathematically that the command line allows more options with less keystrokes than any GUI.
I am all for it if it is optional and transparent to command line users, but I suspect you have fallen into the trap of thinking that open source tools are (or should be) explicitely developed for newbies.
On the 'designedness' of OSs, I think that some of the aspects of design should be making people feel comfortable. This is why joystick driven cars haven't really caught on. Everybody kinda gets by with the steering wheel, and would have to re-learn driving if they switched. They are not willing to do that, so some stuff (dating from decades ago) stays. Further, I think that power and ease of use are usually diametrically opposed, so by making something really easy to use for a narrow band of uses (one click DVD encoding to 700MB mpeg), you make it harder to use it for other purposes.
I don't know the labour laws in your country, but in mine (South Africa) you would have to have a contractual obligation not to distribute the code (like an NDA) before they could fire you for doing so. If enough people refuse to sign NDAs, they will go away. Perhaps not all that probable, but certainly possible.
I must concede one point to you, though. All this talk of abolishing copyright is not very probable. I guess that's what you're saying. All we are saying is that the world could work without them. Maybe not this one, with the current mindset, but in the future it could work. I think that copyright will blow up eventually as it becomes less and less enforcable. But granted, that is quite a while off.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out multivalent. Still in early development, but it is coming along.
One of the things you seem to be missing in these arguments is the right to due process. It sucks being arrested for one crime when you committed another (less serious) crime.
The meth lab is not a terrorist unit. It just isn't. It is against the law, but not a terrorist activity to make drugs. Now, using the patriot act to convict the guy for terrorism when he was cooking up drugs is wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Once any means justifies the end of putting criminals in jail, the whole judicial system crumbles, because we have to try to avoid putting innocent people in jail. The whole legal system is skewed toward this goal. Move away from that, and we haven't really won anything.
I may be wrong, but I thought that My Girl was arranged by the Temptations themselves (Not written, but arranged). The temptations did a lot of vocal arrangements this way. So, did the Funk Brothers do the music to that, or is My Girl not a relevant tune to your argument?
The resulting fungus that formed distorted the sound of the CDs in interesting and meaningful ways
Whe else thought that the guy imbibed the fungus for these effects?
Why not? I think it's pretty sad the way a lot of people seem to think that all open source projects must have a commercial spin, because that's what will speed adoption. I mean, have you heard of a company called 'Nullsoft'? How strange is that? They'll probably never get anyone to use that free 'Winamp' player they make.
The point of Free Software has never been to 'take over the world', just to provide an alternative. Wacky names are part of the lore (GNU/HURD -- double recursive acronym, come on!). A lot of us find it appealing, and don't particularly care that not many people use it. If it is better, it will get used anyway, regardless of what it is called.
Of course, by posting this question, you can't mod anything on this topic...
Finding a move is about finding an optimal branch of a move tree. The tree in Go is much wider than with chess -- there are too many possible moves on a 19x19 board with no fixed moves defined for pieces. So the solution is not to look at 'positions', but at patterns on the board (as there could be only a few patterns on a board, all independant of one another). The thing is that these patterns are hard to recognize -- enter the difficult bit. Not the analysis of moves, but the recognition of patterns.
I don't know if you have read much about Stallman, but when he started the GNU project, he was reimplementing the entire unix system on his own. Obviously he needed a system to do this on, so he was using unix. It is a means to an end. In the end he wants to run only free software, but you can't get there easily without using some non-free stuff along the way.
Also, during those starting out times, it was obviously a huge step backward to reimplement a whole system that was working already. RMS is not about using computers as tools and not caring about the ethics, he is all about the ethics of computer code. RMS never wanted to subjugate the masses, just create a free system.
Great post. I agree totally. Just as a funny side note, thought -- RMS is an atheist, so I don't think he would be putting is 'soul' on the line for anything :-)
Hacking has gotten a bad name (as in breaking security measures), but I still like the meaning of improving/changing something, especially software. Check this out for more info.
This is a new prototype, unveiled in July 2003. A revisit instead of a new post.
Now go flame the guys posting dupes of a new Mozilla release.
The FSF isn't forcing Apple to release their code under GPL, they are just not giving the licence that Apple chose their support as being GPL compatible. Where is the hypocrisy in that?
Remember that RMS is idealist (not really elitist) and definitely single-minded in his crusade to keep (or make) software free. Sounds like you have not really 'gotten' what these guys are trying to do.
Our rights are innate...
Actually, no. If you read the founding fathers and all that, you will find that man has no rights but thos granted by the society. So Society gives you rights, and government is restricted by the Constitution from infringing on these rights. On your own have no rights.
I couldn't surf the web back in the day until I had downloaded a web browser. At least the format's open and you have a few readers with your favourite distro if you use Linux. In fact, there are quite a few open source programs that can generate PDFs (I hear that KOffice is working on a feature that allows you to open PDFs in KWord).
I am very puzzled by the anti-pdf crowd on slashdot. At least it is an open format.
KDE actually has a similar popup for low disk space. Just saying...
If you have Windows on your system you probably don't mind proprietary stuff on you Linux box. Just download the Nvidia driver, run it from a shell (without X running) and start up X. Works everytime.
It's funny how so many people these days seem to be against getting everything for free. Would you not like to get everything for free? Do you not shop for bargains to get the lowest price possible, sometimes getting the product you want for free as promotion? The thing that gets me is how everyone changes when it comes to copyright (so-called IP). Now they do not want to pay less (or get stuff for free) so that they can feed the starving artists.
I doubt whether anyone on slashdot will expect to get everything for free, but it is the capitalist consumer ideal. You might find a golden thread running throught the more highly modded comments here that suggests that stuff should be cheaper (like commodity pricing) and then we will buy. I agree with your argument about taking first and justifying it (I will not condone breaking the law), but wanting to get everything free is not wrong.
Sorry, I guess I didn't express myself very well in my post. Science also uses indirect proof. I have seen pictures of New York. I have actually been to New York and am now telling you I saw it.
If you want to get all philosophical about it, we can argue about the existance of existance all we want and still just be convinced that we can think but not much else. That's all semantics. Science seeks proof of all theories, and if new facts come to light that contradict the theory it is refined or discarded.
So, inasmuch nothing in this world is provable beyond doubt (are you dreaming right now/are you in the Matrix/have you been hypnotised or conditioned to see things that do not exist?) everything is about faith. Some proof is just a tad more believable to most people than others. And religious faith is about belief without any proof.
Think about it this way: God asks us to believe. It should be simple for him to prove his existance, but he chooses not to, because belief in New York just does not require as much faith as belief in a Being we cannot see.
I suppose if you think that science is a religion, you could argue your points. However, the definition of religion I get in Meriam-Webster implies faith, which my Sunday school teacher always defined as belief without proof.
Now the idea of science as religion is not new. In fact, there is a nice bit about it in Contact by Carl Sagan, in which the religious guy tells the atheist that she believes in science and does a cool experiment with a Foucault pendulum.
The difference between science and religion is then not that they believe but what they believe. Everyone believes in something. That's what humans do. Science just attempts to get proof, while most religions (I would say all, but I don't know all religions) are characterised by the lack of proof.
The coolest thing about PDF is that the format is open. I don't know what you mean about PDF being proprietary -- anyone can make a PDF viewer or create PDFs. No problem.
I get this argument all the time and it really amazed me in the beginning, untill I started to understand how many people think about software. The thing is this. Walk up to someone and say 'I have a car here. It's compact, I made it myself and I will give it to you free'. They will probably ask a few questions about the strings attached to the deal, but no-one will say 'no thanks, I already have a car'. Because it's free.
Now, walk up to someone who is looking to install an OS (probably Windows) and say, 'you know, I have these disks with Mandrake Linux which also includes word processors, math apps, media players etc, and I will load it for you free of charge.' These people now start talking about the quality of the software.
This beat me until I realised that most people don't pay for software. Not only that, they rely on freely available illegal copies of software. These copies are only available for Windows most of the time.
I think that the Free software argument should be pushed more, 'cos a Free software isn't better than proprietary softare on many real world levels. Many people use Windows and have grown used to it. There will be a learning curve. The same software is not always available. Some of the stuff is beta or alpha and is not as stable as one would think. The thing that Free software has going for it is that it is free.
And I'm talking about both definitions of free here. The free beer will get the people to come to your show to hear the free speech. Or something like that.
On the original topic of choice -- that gets adressed by the Free software thing, too. Free software is much less likely to lead to proprietary formats that lock people in to a certain OS. Ideally, once the proprietary stranglehold is broken, people will have much more choice.
Now, the thing about usability is the target audience. What you are proposing will probably make things more usable for some people (mostly people who are not used to the command line). Other people (like me) have grown fond of the command line. It can be proven mathematically that the command line allows more options with less keystrokes than any GUI.
I am all for it if it is optional and transparent to command line users, but I suspect you have fallen into the trap of thinking that open source tools are (or should be) explicitely developed for newbies.
On the 'designedness' of OSs, I think that some of the aspects of design should be making people feel comfortable. This is why joystick driven cars haven't really caught on. Everybody kinda gets by with the steering wheel, and would have to re-learn driving if they switched. They are not willing to do that, so some stuff (dating from decades ago) stays. Further, I think that power and ease of use are usually diametrically opposed, so by making something really easy to use for a narrow band of uses (one click DVD encoding to 700MB mpeg), you make it harder to use it for other purposes.
gv? xpdf? maybe even the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux?
Strange, but my Linux distro (Mandrake) came with PDF readers, I had to download and install Acrobat Reader for Windows....
I don't know the labour laws in your country, but in mine (South Africa) you would have to have a contractual obligation not to distribute the code (like an NDA) before they could fire you for doing so. If enough people refuse to sign NDAs, they will go away. Perhaps not all that probable, but certainly possible.
I must concede one point to you, though. All this talk of abolishing copyright is not very probable. I guess that's what you're saying. All we are saying is that the world could work without them. Maybe not this one, with the current mindset, but in the future it could work. I think that copyright will blow up eventually as it becomes less and less enforcable. But granted, that is quite a while off.