Open Source is a development model, a way to create a work, usually software. While it does have many pluses compared to other development models, how a program is made generally has little impact on someones decision when they're choosing a program to use. On the other hand, Free Software is based on the Freedoms that a program has, and thus is much more business/government friendly.
Yes, you heard me. The Freedom that Free Software gives you is often the most compelling reason for anyone to switch, you just need to realize that different people value different freedoms. In this case, when talking to a government you need to remind them what freedoms they are giving up by using proprietary software. Here's a brief list of points to get your started.
Any workstation will most likely be using Microsoft Windows XP. If you actually read their license agreement it is very easy to find clauses that would make any government worker with half a brain stem wet themselves. In sections 2.1, 2.4, and 6 you give them permission to snoop on your machine. The text is so broad that you pretty much give them permission to do whatever they want. Section 5 is so ambiguous that technically any file sharing voids the agreement. This is bad news if you allow other people to download/copy documents off your machine in a business setting. When you combine sections 7 and 8 you may be giving them permission to disable your ability to do any networking, including getting on the internet. Note that the final sentence of S8 says "any internet-based service", they didn't say "Any service provided by Microsoft via the internet".
My personal favorite of XP's EULA - Section 9 concerns upgrading and says "After upgrading, you may no longer use the software that formed the basis for your upgrade." This means that if you have a CD of XP SP1 and upgrade to SP2, then according to this agreement you have to buy a totally new copy of Windows to reinstall should your system get hosed.
EULAs are intentionally vague, and chain the user with restrictions so draconian that it's nearly impossible to use the software normally without voiding the EULA. Do some research, it is very easy to come up with a very long list of legal traps that would persuade a user away from proprietary software.
And then you can mention that Free Software does not come with such restrictions. Indeed, one of the basic points of the Free Software definition is that the software should be free to use in any way the user sees fit, without restrictions. A little research into this and you can have one hell of an argument.
Proprietary document formats discriminate against the users, which is a very stupid thing for a government to do. In specific, Microsoft Word files are at best a nuisance. Users of a non-Microsoft OS may have troubles viewing them. Buying the hardware and software necessary to view them can be very costly, and discriminates against the poor. They can be troublesome for people with poor vision. By sending word files to distribute information you strengthen the "everybody uses it" mentality, and thus strengthen Microsoft's monopoly. And so on. Combine this with my first point, and you can have a very convincing argument for Open Office. If you're not making word files, then why buy a $600+ text editor?
Freedom to modify - Why have a browser on a machine when you don't need it? Why have a bunch of services running that only create vulnerabilities since you don't use them? Why should they settle for an unchangable program designed for everybody, when you can use flexible programs designed for your needs? Using a slimmed down system reduces the risks of bugs, crashes, and security vulnerabilities, making the system less costly in terms of time and money.
...And so on, this is but the tip of the iceberg. I'd suggest listening to some
In defense of the state of Kansas (where I am from), the creationism thing was _NOT_ supported by the population. During that period I had not met a single person who supported it, even my uber-religious aunt Wanda was against it. The local opinion polls reflected this, only like 10% of Kansans supported teaching creationism in schools. This was yet another example of the wrong people getting into power, and they were voted out at the next election. Reinstating evolution in classrooms was one of the first things the new education board did.
Kansas as a whole did not support that. A very small (and nowadays vocal) minority did. Cut us some slack.
What the hell is this crap?!
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the Ruby fan myself. However, what the hell kind of story is this? There is little to no real meat to this story, it's just a long winded ad for two Free Software applications! What's to discuss, how great these two things are? Where's the thought provoking stories from the olden days of the site?
Please note that the 2K Workstation's EULA states that you can not have more than five network connections to your machine at once. Failure to do so voids the EULA, and thus makes your paid for version as illegal as a copy downloaded off p2p.
All Free Software/Proprietary Software discussions aside, the Freedom aspects of Free Software alone makes it more valuable to me than closed software. At least I can do what I want with my hardware and still be legal.
We'd seriously like it if people could mirror and link to this page and not just the images! Definitally help get us some publicity if you can!!! We appreciate it!
Wow. I knew Bush was bad, but he successfully avoided answering all the questions and replying with bullshit. All of the questions. "What do you think of this important issue?" "America is the greatest nation, a bastion of hope for the world. I am proud to have voted for bill X..."
Kerry sometimes avoided the questions, and sometimes answered them. Fairly decent job, as far as politicians usually go.
Nader actually answered the questions.
The Libertarian and Green candidates not only agreed to be interviewed directly by a random nerd website (/.), but gave well thought out answers to the questions.
Says a lot. I won't go into what it says, as that is on the shoulders of the beholder, but it does say a lot.
Here's a page with information of the director in question. His name is prominently displayed on the page linked in the article writeup, which comes off as really PHB-ish. Having trouble finding his email address, as all I can find is a feedback form.
A few months ago one of my friends in Canada wanted to flash me her tits, so I downloaded gaim-vv and started compiling it. This process ended up costing me three days, six comments on their message boards, and a lot of stress. AIM video chat wasn't implemented yet and MSN didn't work for me, but Yahoo did. In fact, Yahoo! video chat worked perfectly. Many kittens died as a direct result of this.
Gaim-vv has about 6 months until it's perfected, IMO. Meanwhile, the gaim authors could have spent that time polishing the program to a shine. Reverse engineering the AIM protocol to the point where file transfer works as well in gaim as it does in AIM would be a good start. It's very close to feeling complete and professional, it just needs about what, six months worth of work to really polish it up?
But no, it's necessary to jump to 1.0.0 due to 0.83.1 or whatever breaking the normal release numbering system, as noted above. They could have took the time to polish it to a shine that makes you go blind, and have support for video chat to boot. Then they could have released that as 1.0 and create a nice big splash. But no, they chose to release it as 1.0.0 now, "just because".
Why must Free Software continue to shoot itself in the foot like this? *sigh*
While I'm glad to see gaim moving on to a "stable" number, wouldn't it be smart to wait until the boys at gaim-vv got video and voice chat working? Gaim rocks for an instant messaging client, but can't do the major stupid little things that the "official" clients can do. This may turn off users who see 1.0 and expect it to do that...
Then again, I might be paranoid and need to have my morning coffee.
I'm disappointed that it took so long to figure this out.
1) Time 2) Money 3) People
When you want to shoot some people off into space in a tin can, choose three of the above. When you want a concrete answer as to why something as complicated as shooting a tin can into space goes wrong, choose three of the above again.
I agree the term "Hero" is tossed around all too often. However, these men and women put themselves into some very extreme and dangerous conditions in order to advance the human race as a whole in countless different areas, and paid the ultimate price. These modern explorers definately earned the title "Hero" in my books.
Has anybody figured out how to turn off antialiasing of fonts in Konsole? It slows things down to the point that I now use Multi-Aterm because programs compile in half the time. I don't have any other antialiasing turned on in KDE, and for the life of me I can't find out how to turn that crap off.
Other than that KDE3.3 is decent, although I think they should spend a lot more time than they have planned on bugfixing and optimization. It's starting to get bloated again.:( Don't think it's enough for a minor version upgrade, if you're using the 3.2 line then you're not missing too much. Have fallen in love with the "Start in the system tray" option for starting programs, now I can put my konsole, etc into the system tray to save space when I'm compiling or whatnot. I'd consider that my "killer feature that has forced me to upgrade".
I will repeat that I think it's insane that they want to release this so quickly. It needs a lot of polishing, and there's no way in hell anyone can get it feeling all crisp and clean again before the scheduled release date. Otherwise, it's KDE. I'm in love anyways.
I went off about this on a friend's journal, which I'll just link to and save me the trouble of copying and pasting. In short - GNU/Linux has a flawed design which makes it great for code monkeys and uber-users, but makes it hell for the average end user. A quote -
Linux is a wonderful OS for people like me - techy users who don't like shitty OSes. Windows is a shitty OS that's halfway decent in the right places - you don't have to think. Just click click click drool done. You have to think with Linux, and that won't do for 99% of the people out there. They just want to click a bloody button and whatever they want is done, reguardless of the quality of the output or experience.
Another snippet...
Take having consistant widgets, for example. Where would one even begin with that? Have KDE and GNOME act friendly with each other? Yeah, but have you used Adobe's Acrobat Reader for Linux? It's coded in straight X. What about ghostview? Same problem. Here's a very basic concept - shit should look consistant - which Windows has had since 1.0. Where would one fix that problem in the Linux toolchain?
I love Linux, but I doubt I'm going to see Ed from marketing using it anytime soon.
However, I will note that that the X based guis have come a hell of a long way. Here's a snapshot of my desktop with the K menu down. Fast, very pretty (look closely and you can see KDE's menu transparancies), very easy. Kicks the sweet bajesus out of Windows, hands down.
As always, welcome to Linux. Damn near an orgasm when it's working, and the definition of hell when it's not.
I would go out, and get so absofreakinlutely drunk that I wouldn't be able to remember my middle name, let alone that I made a $1M error. And then when the lawsuits are about to go to court and I started showing signs of severe alcoholism, I would put my head inbetween my legs and kiss my ass goodbye. 'Cause man, that would really suck.
Started thinking, and virtually half of all video games ever made have depicted violence against "law enforcment officers" --
Zelda 3 - The first dungeon of the game is nothing but killing LEOs. Metroid 3 - You remember that corpse in a spacesuit in front of the door to Kraid? Now, that's most likely another bounty hunter like Samus, and thus could be seen as a LEO. Final Fantasy. Any Final Fantasy - Most notable is Final Fantasy IV, where the first half of the game is spent directly fighting the most powerful nation in the world. Super Mario Bros. - You spend the entire freakin' game flattening goombas and stomping koopas, who are trying to kill Mario by direct order from King Koopa.
The list goes on and on. This is the problem with broad laws - they can be used to cover literally anything if you look at it from the right angle.
Castlevania - The story of a proud nation ruled by the ageless Count Dracula, and it's struggle against the treasonous Simon Belmont. Hundreds - nay, thousands of Dracula's innocent followers have been mindlessly slaughtered by this heartless terrorist who is hell bent on overthrowing the great leadership.
An anonymous reader writes "According to GameSpot, a Q&A with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has him saying that, although the company's Xbox game console isn't making money (or bleeding them dry), the pain has been worth it. 'We have gone from nowhere to a significant player,' he said, adding: 'I am betting we can take Sony in the next generation.
Four hours later...
Thanks to Game Science for its article analyzing Japanese videogame hardware and software sales for the first half of 2004. Of particular interest are the hardware sales for consoles ("PlayStation 2 - 1,365,260... Nintendo Gamecube - 340,204... Xbox - 18,239")
.....Or the author could be releasing it into public domain as an act of good will, freeing it in the most extreme sense of the word in hopes that it will benefit others? 'Cause, that's what just happened.
...Is to make it very easy to turn whatever machine learning features incorperated into 2.0 off totally, with minimum fuss and searching.
It is my firm belief that then #1 rule of UI design is that the program should should look and act consistant. And the number two rule is that the program should never assume anything, or perform any action without the user explicitly telling it to (barring sane default behaviors that will fit > 85% of the users). Every ML feature I have ever seen breaks #1 and #2 with reckless abandon by changing something to make it more 'friendly', which in turns makes it less friendly because I don't know _exactly_ what to expect from my program.
Looking at the comments on that weblog, I can not find a single idea that does not either violate my top two rules, or would otherwise annoy me to no end. If they have to add that to Firefox then please, let me turn that crap off in three mouse clicks or less.
I've tried just about every WM in the *nix world and I always come back to KDE. GNOME is slow, hell to upgrade and install, and I have yet to see it working perfectly. There's always some odd bug that is painfully noticable and you are completely lost as to how to fix it. WindowMaker is my #2 favorite, but the UI drives me nuts. I have to minimize everything just to restore a program I minimized. XFCE falls short, it's UI just doesn't fit me. Ditto for everything else out there.
KDE works perfectly for me. Everything just comes together and works without a single complaint, and it's nicely polished to boot. I can live with ugly, but I'd prefer not to if it's at all possible, and KDE can be the prettiest WM if you tweak it right. She's fast, stable, and easy to use to the point where I don't even have to think about stuff, I just do. Customizable enough that if I don't like something I can almost totally change it, while not drowning in a clusterfsck of options. Some have mentioned that it's bloated. I'm on a 500Mhz system and it runs just a notch slower than freakin' WindowMaker. It's more than fast enough for me.:)
Toss in the GPL'ed QT and you have a totally Free Software WM that rocks. It just works.
Ah, but Open Source and Free Software are two totally different things. Open Source is a development model, a way of writing software. Free Software is more of a philosophy, a belief that software should be Free to use in any way I choose, Free to modify, and Free to distribute.
Not all Open Source software is free. Recently Microsoft released several programs on Sourceforge that is OS, but not really Free. Meanwhile, not all Free Software is Open Source. Release early and often does not exactly describe how GCC is made, for example. While the two commonly walk hand in hand and are easily confused as one, they are two _totally_ different concepts and should not be used interchangabally. So in short -
Free beer! - Don't have to pay for it. Adobe giving out free copies of Photoshop would be "Free Beer" Free software - You have the freedom to use this software without any restrictions such as "You can not use our compiler to write competing software". You can share the software with friends as much as you like (registration numbers be damned). And you can use the source code to modify the program, should you find it lacks an ability you want or need. Open Source - The source is available either publicly or semi-publicly, as many eyes looking over the code results in fewer bugs and greater stability. Release early and often.
In fact, if there was a 100% chance of me dieing within an hour of me getting into orbit, I'd still go if given the chance. I mean, every night I look up at the stars and I just wonder. The chance to experience life outside the womb of mother earth for just one minute... yeah, that's worth trading my life for. I am willing to die just to gaze upon the earth, stars and other galaxies from the outside for just one minute.
In that one minute I would see, learn, and experience more than most people see, learn, and experience in their entire lives. I would have an idea of my place in the universe that few currently have.
All of that near infinite universe and the chance to experience it outside the earth? Yeah, that's worth dieing for. An 80% chance of dieing within five years? I'd consider that a bonus - more time to experience it.
I submitted this once as an ask slashdot question (and got rejected), but I think it's of relevance here. I know others want to boycot the RIAA, but it can be difficult to find decent indie bands when every friggin' station in your area is Clearchannel.
In short, I can either piss and moan about how "this is wrong blah blah blah", or I can do something about it. Best I can do in my limited means is boycot. But I need music. What are some good indie bands?
Two of my faves - Rilo Kiley and Azure Ray. Their websites have MP3s of their songs (full length, no DRM bullshit, 100% cool) for you to listen to. Another favorite source of good music is OCRemix. A lot of the Castlevania 1-3 remixes are particularly good.
So, anyone else out there willing to share the music? =)
Slashdot Mirror
Open Source is a development model, a way to create a work, usually software. While it does have many pluses compared to other development models, how a program is made generally has little impact on someones decision when they're choosing a program to use. On the other hand, Free Software is based on the Freedoms that a program has, and thus is much more business/government friendly.
Yes, you heard me. The Freedom that Free Software gives you is often the most compelling reason for anyone to switch, you just need to realize that different people value different freedoms. In this case, when talking to a government you need to remind them what freedoms they are giving up by using proprietary software. Here's a brief list of points to get your started.
My personal favorite of XP's EULA - Section 9 concerns upgrading and says "After upgrading, you may no longer use the software that formed the basis for your upgrade." This means that if you have a CD of XP SP1 and upgrade to SP2, then according to this agreement you have to buy a totally new copy of Windows to reinstall should your system get hosed.
EULAs are intentionally vague, and chain the user with restrictions so draconian that it's nearly impossible to use the software normally without voiding the EULA. Do some research, it is very easy to come up with a very long list of legal traps that would persuade a user away from proprietary software.
And then you can mention that Free Software does not come with such restrictions. Indeed, one of the basic points of the Free Software definition is that the software should be free to use in any way the user sees fit, without restrictions. A little research into this and you can have one hell of an argument.
In defense of the state of Kansas (where I am from), the creationism thing was _NOT_ supported by the population. During that period I had not met a single person who supported it, even my uber-religious aunt Wanda was against it. The local opinion polls reflected this, only like 10% of Kansans supported teaching creationism in schools. This was yet another example of the wrong people getting into power, and they were voted out at the next election. Reinstating evolution in classrooms was one of the first things the new education board did.
Kansas as a whole did not support that. A very small (and nowadays vocal) minority did. Cut us some slack.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the Ruby fan myself. However, what the hell kind of story is this? There is little to no real meat to this story, it's just a long winded ad for two Free Software applications! What's to discuss, how great these two things are? Where's the thought provoking stories from the olden days of the site?
Please note that the 2K Workstation's EULA states that you can not have more than five network connections to your machine at once. Failure to do so voids the EULA, and thus makes your paid for version as illegal as a copy downloaded off p2p.
All Free Software/Proprietary Software discussions aside, the Freedom aspects of Free Software alone makes it more valuable to me than closed software. At least I can do what I want with my hardware and still be legal.
God bless the moderator that labeled this one insightful. That was just beautiful!
Wow. I knew Bush was bad, but he successfully avoided answering all the questions and replying with bullshit. All of the questions. "What do you think of this important issue?" "America is the greatest nation, a bastion of hope for the world. I am proud to have voted for bill X..."
Kerry sometimes avoided the questions, and sometimes answered them. Fairly decent job, as far as politicians usually go.
Nader actually answered the questions.
The Libertarian and Green candidates not only agreed to be interviewed directly by a random nerd website (/.), but gave well thought out answers to the questions.
Says a lot. I won't go into what it says, as that is on the shoulders of the beholder, but it does say a lot.
Here's a page with information of the director in question. His name is prominently displayed on the page linked in the article writeup, which comes off as really PHB-ish. Having trouble finding his email address, as all I can find is a feedback form.
Yeah, he's a prick.
A few months ago one of my friends in Canada wanted to flash me her tits, so I downloaded gaim-vv and started compiling it. This process ended up costing me three days, six comments on their message boards, and a lot of stress. AIM video chat wasn't implemented yet and MSN didn't work for me, but Yahoo did. In fact, Yahoo! video chat worked perfectly. Many kittens died as a direct result of this.
Gaim-vv has about 6 months until it's perfected, IMO. Meanwhile, the gaim authors could have spent that time polishing the program to a shine. Reverse engineering the AIM protocol to the point where file transfer works as well in gaim as it does in AIM would be a good start. It's very close to feeling complete and professional, it just needs about what, six months worth of work to really polish it up?
But no, it's necessary to jump to 1.0.0 due to 0.83.1 or whatever breaking the normal release numbering system, as noted above. They could have took the time to polish it to a shine that makes you go blind, and have support for video chat to boot. Then they could have released that as 1.0 and create a nice big splash. But no, they chose to release it as 1.0.0 now, "just because".
Why must Free Software continue to shoot itself in the foot like this? *sigh*
While I'm glad to see gaim moving on to a "stable" number, wouldn't it be smart to wait until the boys at gaim-vv got video and voice chat working? Gaim rocks for an instant messaging client, but can't do the major stupid little things that the "official" clients can do. This may turn off users who see 1.0 and expect it to do that...
Then again, I might be paranoid and need to have my morning coffee.
2) Money
3) People
When you want to shoot some people off into space in a tin can, choose three of the above. When you want a concrete answer as to why something as complicated as shooting a tin can into space goes wrong, choose three of the above again.
I agree the term "Hero" is tossed around all too often. However, these men and women put themselves into some very extreme and dangerous conditions in order to advance the human race as a whole in countless different areas, and paid the ultimate price. These modern explorers definately earned the title "Hero" in my books.
Has anybody figured out how to turn off antialiasing of fonts in Konsole? It slows things down to the point that I now use Multi-Aterm because programs compile in half the time. I don't have any other antialiasing turned on in KDE, and for the life of me I can't find out how to turn that crap off.
:( Don't think it's enough for a minor version upgrade, if you're using the 3.2 line then you're not missing too much. Have fallen in love with the "Start in the system tray" option for starting programs, now I can put my konsole, etc into the system tray to save space when I'm compiling or whatnot. I'd consider that my "killer feature that has forced me to upgrade".
Other than that KDE3.3 is decent, although I think they should spend a lot more time than they have planned on bugfixing and optimization. It's starting to get bloated again.
I will repeat that I think it's insane that they want to release this so quickly. It needs a lot of polishing, and there's no way in hell anyone can get it feeling all crisp and clean again before the scheduled release date. Otherwise, it's KDE. I'm in love anyways.
</fanboy>
However, I will note that that the X based guis have come a hell of a long way. Here's a snapshot of my desktop with the K menu down. Fast, very pretty (look closely and you can see KDE's menu transparancies), very easy. Kicks the sweet bajesus out of Windows, hands down.
As always, welcome to Linux. Damn near an orgasm when it's working, and the definition of hell when it's not.
That thirteen bucks was barely enough to buy a nug of some shitty Mexican ditch weed.
I would go out, and get so absofreakinlutely drunk that I wouldn't be able to remember my middle name, let alone that I made a $1M error. And then when the lawsuits are about to go to court and I started showing signs of severe alcoholism, I would put my head inbetween my legs and kiss my ass goodbye. 'Cause man, that would really suck.
Well, you asked.
Here's an interesting article about a man's experiences when he went into North Korea, in case anyone's wondering what's really going on in there.
Started thinking, and virtually half of all video games ever made have depicted violence against "law enforcment officers" --
Zelda 3 - The first dungeon of the game is nothing but killing LEOs.
Metroid 3 - You remember that corpse in a spacesuit in front of the door to Kraid? Now, that's most likely another bounty hunter like Samus, and thus could be seen as a LEO.
Final Fantasy. Any Final Fantasy - Most notable is Final Fantasy IV, where the first half of the game is spent directly fighting the most powerful nation in the world.
Super Mario Bros. - You spend the entire freakin' game flattening goombas and stomping koopas, who are trying to kill Mario by direct order from King Koopa.
The list goes on and on. This is the problem with broad laws - they can be used to cover literally anything if you look at it from the right angle.
Castlevania - The story of a proud nation ruled by the ageless Count Dracula, and it's struggle against the treasonous Simon Belmont. Hundreds - nay, thousands of Dracula's innocent followers have been mindlessly slaughtered by this heartless terrorist who is hell bent on overthrowing the great leadership.
Etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Four hours later...
=)
.....Or the author could be releasing it into public domain as an act of good will, freeing it in the most extreme sense of the word in hopes that it will benefit others? 'Cause, that's what just happened.
...Is to make it very easy to turn whatever machine learning features incorperated into 2.0 off totally, with minimum fuss and searching.
It is my firm belief that then #1 rule of UI design is that the program should should look and act consistant. And the number two rule is that the program should never assume anything, or perform any action without the user explicitly telling it to (barring sane default behaviors that will fit > 85% of the users). Every ML feature I have ever seen breaks #1 and #2 with reckless abandon by changing something to make it more 'friendly', which in turns makes it less friendly because I don't know _exactly_ what to expect from my program.
Looking at the comments on that weblog, I can not find a single idea that does not either violate my top two rules, or would otherwise annoy me to no end. If they have to add that to Firefox then please, let me turn that crap off in three mouse clicks or less.
I've tried just about every WM in the *nix world and I always come back to KDE. GNOME is slow, hell to upgrade and install, and I have yet to see it working perfectly. There's always some odd bug that is painfully noticable and you are completely lost as to how to fix it. WindowMaker is my #2 favorite, but the UI drives me nuts. I have to minimize everything just to restore a program I minimized. XFCE falls short, it's UI just doesn't fit me. Ditto for everything else out there.
:)
KDE works perfectly for me. Everything just comes together and works without a single complaint, and it's nicely polished to boot. I can live with ugly, but I'd prefer not to if it's at all possible, and KDE can be the prettiest WM if you tweak it right. She's fast, stable, and easy to use to the point where I don't even have to think about stuff, I just do. Customizable enough that if I don't like something I can almost totally change it, while not drowning in a clusterfsck of options. Some have mentioned that it's bloated. I'm on a 500Mhz system and it runs just a notch slower than freakin' WindowMaker. It's more than fast enough for me.
Toss in the GPL'ed QT and you have a totally Free Software WM that rocks. It just works.
Ah, but Open Source and Free Software are two totally different things. Open Source is a development model, a way of writing software. Free Software is more of a philosophy, a belief that software should be Free to use in any way I choose, Free to modify, and Free to distribute.
Not all Open Source software is free. Recently Microsoft released several programs on Sourceforge that is OS, but not really Free. Meanwhile, not all Free Software is Open Source. Release early and often does not exactly describe how GCC is made, for example. While the two commonly walk hand in hand and are easily confused as one, they are two _totally_ different concepts and should not be used interchangabally. So in short -
Free beer! - Don't have to pay for it. Adobe giving out free copies of Photoshop would be "Free Beer"
Free software - You have the freedom to use this software without any restrictions such as "You can not use our compiler to write competing software". You can share the software with friends as much as you like (registration numbers be damned). And you can use the source code to modify the program, should you find it lacks an ability you want or need.
Open Source - The source is available either publicly or semi-publicly, as many eyes looking over the code results in fewer bugs and greater stability. Release early and often.
In fact, if there was a 100% chance of me dieing within an hour of me getting into orbit, I'd still go if given the chance. I mean, every night I look up at the stars and I just wonder. The chance to experience life outside the womb of mother earth for just one minute... yeah, that's worth trading my life for. I am willing to die just to gaze upon the earth, stars and other galaxies from the outside for just one minute.
In that one minute I would see, learn, and experience more than most people see, learn, and experience in their entire lives. I would have an idea of my place in the universe that few currently have.
All of that near infinite universe and the chance to experience it outside the earth? Yeah, that's worth dieing for. An 80% chance of dieing within five years? I'd consider that a bonus - more time to experience it.
Yeah, I'm an oddball.
I submitted this once as an ask slashdot question (and got rejected), but I think it's of relevance here. I know others want to boycot the RIAA, but it can be difficult to find decent indie bands when every friggin' station in your area is Clearchannel.
In short, I can either piss and moan about how "this is wrong blah blah blah", or I can do something about it. Best I can do in my limited means is boycot. But I need music. What are some good indie bands?
Two of my faves - Rilo Kiley and Azure Ray. Their websites have MP3s of their songs (full length, no DRM bullshit, 100% cool) for you to listen to. Another favorite source of good music is OCRemix. A lot of the Castlevania 1-3 remixes are particularly good.
So, anyone else out there willing to share the music? =)