Freeware was free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-freedom. It's telling that you call it freeware and not free software—free software is a deliberate term of art that RMS coined to describe free-as-in-freedom software. It turned out not to be the best choice of branding because of that specific ambiguity, but that's water under the bridge at this point.
Bell Labs Unix wasn't free. Indeed, the lawsuit against Linux because of Bell Labs IPR is pretty famous, and motivated the groklaw web site, which you may have visited. Bell Labs Unix is what became SCO Unix. So this is about as far opposite the truth as is possible.
It's certainly true that there was free as in beer software prior to the Free Software Foundation, but it wasn't political. Initially it was free because the money was in the hardware: you paid IBM $umpty-gazillion, and you got the operating system for free. Early home computers like the Apple II and Atari 800 came with source code listings for their ROMS.
However, there was no political movement to promote Free Software prior to the GNU Manifesto. And the Open Source movement is not the Free Software movement—in addition to having come quite a bit later, it does something different. If you think there's some other person who should be credited for starting the Free Software Movement, it would be interesting to hear who that would be. The only person I can think of is RMS.
If you read the GNU manifesto, he specifically talks about the problems with the MIT LISP Machine Operating System, which was free-as-in-beer, and which was taken closed by Symbolics, who hired most of the MIT hackers who worked on it. This specific experience is what motivated RMS to start the FSF, so to say that he didn't start the FSF because there was free-as-in-beer software before the FSF was formed is kind of absurd.
Of course, given your/. number, I'm guessing you weren't born then, so it's no surprise that you don't know about this.:)
What do you think killed the last few iterations of this clunker? What killed SOPA and PIPA? Massive public outcry. They don't care all that much about the will of the people, but phone calls? Those they pay attention to, if enough come in. The glare of the spotlight makes them self-conscious.
Nuclear subs are made of metal. Nuclear plants are made of metal and concrete. Radioactive metal is (relatively) easy to deal with. Radioactive concrete, not so much. I can't recall any anti-nuclear activist getting involved in regulating the de-commissioning of nuclear plants. I think you are just talking through your hat.
Oh for fuck's sake, can we please stop talking about "burning" nuclear fuel? It doesn't burn. It fissions, releasing heat and neutrons. If you're going to be pro-nuke, at least learn the science. Given that Project Orion never took off, it's not rocket science, either.
Rowe was constructed before there were widespread protests against nuclear power, and it was still too expensive. The problem is that large portions of the plant are radioactive, so you can't just pound them to dust and put them in a landfill the way you would a similar concrete structure that wasn't radioactive.
Or, instead, here's a thought: go find out if your senator is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. If so, call them and tell them you don't want the bill to get out of committee. Explain why. Extra credit: go read TFA so that you know why before calling. But if you don't want to do that, you can always just tell the staffer that you don't like the bill. Make sure you don't identify it as "CISPA" since that's not its current name.
Huh. The town I live in just refused to approve the budget proposed by the selectboard because they felt there was too much fat in it, and the selectboard is now scrambling to figure out what to cut. If it's not like that in your town, maybe you should run for office.
Comcast couldn't meaningfully throttle Netflix if they didn't own the last mile, because if they did, a competitor could easily steal all their customers simply by offering the same service for a lower price. It's the cost of duplicating the last mile that leads to monopolies.
Right, so the plausible scenario is the one that I outlined up at the top of this chain. That the rich guys aren't trying to wreck the environment—they are just faced with a choice between getting a lot less rich, or wrecking the environment if the global warming scenario is real so naturally they'd prefer to think that it's not. That's a lot more believable than either of the two scenarios you just described.
No, it was because he's refused for several decades to pay his fees, which all his neighbors have been paying, on the theory that he has a hereditary right to land that Nevada specifically ceded to the U.S. as a condition of statehood, a decade and a half before the first of his ancestors arrived in Nevada. He has been granted so much lenience that if I were some poor bastard incarcerated for ten years for having a pot stash, I'd be about ready to riot. The idea that there's some civil rights issue buried in this is hilarious.
Maybe rather than moving, they'd like to stop global warming so that they don't have to move... No, that can't be it. It must be that they are lying. For some reason. Some reason I've never heard articulated. That's much more likely.
Right, so it's believable that thousands of scientists would conspire to repeat, re-assert and continue to research a flat-out untruth that they know to be an untruth, year after year, for decades, just to avoid having to change careers? And not one of them would crack and reveal the conspiracy? Sure, I can imagine some of them doing this, but all of them? Just to be clear, not one person has said "I am aware of an actual conspiracy, here is the evidence." Yet according to people who claim global warming proponents are doing it out of self-interest, there are thousands of co-conspirators, any one of whom could blow the whole thing out of the water.
I'm sorry, but this position completely defies reason.
When solar competes on a level playing field with fossil fuels, it's cheaper. That means that you can get loans secured by the future output of your solar panels, because the electricity they generate has value. So in fact there are businesses that will just go install solar for you and then charge you less than what you get back in energy savings and dollars per kwh of excess, so that you spend less money than you would have without solar. The business takes out the loan, and owns the solar panels, and makes a profit on the percentages. You get cheaper power. It's a win-win proposition. This is exactly what the Koch brothers are afraid of. If it was just rich geeks like me putting panels on their roof, they wouldn't be worried. All they have to do to prevent this happening is to make sure that the numbers don't work out for solar investors. And that's precisely what they are doing.
When solar competes on a level playing field with fossil fuels, it's cheaper. That means that you can get loans secured by the future output of your solar panels, because the electricity they generate has value. So in fact there are businesses that will just go install solar for you and then charge you less than what you get back in energy savings and dollars per kwh of excess, so that you spend _less_ money than you would have without solar. The business takes out the loan, and owns the solar panels, and makes a profit on the percentages. You get cheaper power. It's a win-win proposition. This is exactly what the Koch brothers are afraid of. If it was just rich geeks like me putting panels on their roof, they wouldn't be worried. All they have to do to prevent this happening is to make sure that the numbers don't work out for solar investors. And that's precisely what they are doing.
So, the point I was making somewhat sarcastically above is that if we really want to do something about global warming, we have to account for all the people whose oxen are going to be gored if fossil fuels are phased out early. That includes coal miners. A solution that just leaves whole towns and whole counties completely fucked is naive in the worst way. But the coal miners shouldn't get to continue doing what they do just so that they can feel like they are doing meaningful work. If it's less harmful to society for them to take a bailout, they should take the bailout, and we should give it to them.
Storing solar heat is a solved problem—you just use mirrors to focus sunlight, and use the heat to heat liquid molten salt. The molten salt is used to boil water to turn steam turbines, and is recycled back for reheating. A reasonably sized reservoir is quite capable of storing enough heat to keep the turbines going overnight. Sodium-sulfur batters are a fairly economical way to store electrical energy from large-scale PV systems (including grid-tied solar in areas where grid-tied solar generation is widespread).
Um. We built a Passivhaus (look it up), and we have solar generation on our roof, and we eat local foods as much as possible (which is very much a lot). I make my own yogurt from locally-produced milk we get in glass containers, because plastic yogurt containers were previously the biggest source of waste in our household. But there's no way to boycott the fossil fuel economy, because it's completely pervasive.
As for your comments about global warming, you're absolutely right. 97% of the world's climate scientists, who are generally not paid very well, agree that global warming is real and a real danger to human existence. They agree because they are in a conspiracy together. The 3% of climate scientists who disagree are doing it out of a selfless desire to help others. And the massive oil industry campaign to suppress global warming science is a heroic effort to stop the conspiracy before the scientists reap their ill-gotten rewards (to wit: continued employment at low wages). Thank G-D for free enterprise!
There's no reason to think Solyndra was anything other than an investment that didn't pan out because the market changed. Accusations of cronyism weren't sustained by any evidence, and if there were evidence it would certainly have surfaced given the brightness of the spotlight that was shone on that failure. The Waltons also invested heavily in Solyndra, and took a beating. That loan program has a lower-than-average failure rate. And Solyndra failed because regular solar panels got cheaper, so glass tubes were no longer economical.
The part of the Nevada desert where that solar plant was going to be built is over a hundred miles from the desert tortoise habitat.
But hey, why let pesky facts get in the way of talking points?
Slashdot Mirror
Freeware was free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-freedom. It's telling that you call it freeware and not free software—free software is a deliberate term of art that RMS coined to describe free-as-in-freedom software. It turned out not to be the best choice of branding because of that specific ambiguity, but that's water under the bridge at this point.
Bell Labs Unix wasn't free. Indeed, the lawsuit against Linux because of Bell Labs IPR is pretty famous, and motivated the groklaw web site, which you may have visited. Bell Labs Unix is what became SCO Unix. So this is about as far opposite the truth as is possible.
It's certainly true that there was free as in beer software prior to the Free Software Foundation, but it wasn't political. Initially it was free because the money was in the hardware: you paid IBM $umpty-gazillion, and you got the operating system for free. Early home computers like the Apple II and Atari 800 came with source code listings for their ROMS.
However, there was no political movement to promote Free Software prior to the GNU Manifesto. And the Open Source movement is not the Free Software movement—in addition to having come quite a bit later, it does something different. If you think there's some other person who should be credited for starting the Free Software Movement, it would be interesting to hear who that would be. The only person I can think of is RMS.
If you read the GNU manifesto, he specifically talks about the problems with the MIT LISP Machine Operating System, which was free-as-in-beer, and which was taken closed by Symbolics, who hired most of the MIT hackers who worked on it. This specific experience is what motivated RMS to start the FSF, so to say that he didn't start the FSF because there was free-as-in-beer software before the FSF was formed is kind of absurd.
Of course, given your /. number, I'm guessing you weren't born then, so it's no surprise that you don't know about this. :)
To Serve Man?
Hey, if Sherlock Holmes uses it, it can't be all bad, can it?
What do you think killed the last few iterations of this clunker? What killed SOPA and PIPA? Massive public outcry. They don't care all that much about the will of the people, but phone calls? Those they pay attention to, if enough come in. The glare of the spotlight makes them self-conscious.
Nuclear subs are made of metal. Nuclear plants are made of metal and concrete. Radioactive metal is (relatively) easy to deal with. Radioactive concrete, not so much. I can't recall any anti-nuclear activist getting involved in regulating the de-commissioning of nuclear plants. I think you are just talking through your hat.
Oh for fuck's sake, can we please stop talking about "burning" nuclear fuel? It doesn't burn. It fissions, releasing heat and neutrons. If you're going to be pro-nuke, at least learn the science. Given that Project Orion never took off, it's not rocket science, either.
Rowe was constructed before there were widespread protests against nuclear power, and it was still too expensive. The problem is that large portions of the plant are radioactive, so you can't just pound them to dust and put them in a landfill the way you would a similar concrete structure that wasn't radioactive.
No, Rowe was not a government plant.
Or, instead, here's a thought: go find out if your senator is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. If so, call them and tell them you don't want the bill to get out of committee. Explain why. Extra credit: go read TFA so that you know why before calling. But if you don't want to do that, you can always just tell the staffer that you don't like the bill. Make sure you don't identify it as "CISPA" since that's not its current name.
Get real. The NSA isn't allowed to talk about this stuff. Doesn't mean it's not true.
Huh. The town I live in just refused to approve the budget proposed by the selectboard because they felt there was too much fat in it, and the selectboard is now scrambling to figure out what to cut. If it's not like that in your town, maybe you should run for office.
Comcast couldn't meaningfully throttle Netflix if they didn't own the last mile, because if they did, a competitor could easily steal all their customers simply by offering the same service for a lower price. It's the cost of duplicating the last mile that leads to monopolies.
Right, so the plausible scenario is the one that I outlined up at the top of this chain. That the rich guys aren't trying to wreck the environment—they are just faced with a choice between getting a lot less rich, or wrecking the environment if the global warming scenario is real so naturally they'd prefer to think that it's not. That's a lot more believable than either of the two scenarios you just described.
No, it was because he's refused for several decades to pay his fees, which all his neighbors have been paying, on the theory that he has a hereditary right to land that Nevada specifically ceded to the U.S. as a condition of statehood, a decade and a half before the first of his ancestors arrived in Nevada. He has been granted so much lenience that if I were some poor bastard incarcerated for ten years for having a pot stash, I'd be about ready to riot. The idea that there's some civil rights issue buried in this is hilarious.
Maybe you should mention some citations to back up your "facts"...
Maybe rather than moving, they'd like to stop global warming so that they don't have to move... No, that can't be it. It must be that they are lying. For some reason. Some reason I've never heard articulated. That's much more likely.
Right, so it's believable that thousands of scientists would conspire to repeat, re-assert and continue to research a flat-out untruth that they know to be an untruth, year after year, for decades, just to avoid having to change careers? And not one of them would crack and reveal the conspiracy? Sure, I can imagine some of them doing this, but all of them? Just to be clear, not one person has said "I am aware of an actual conspiracy, here is the evidence." Yet according to people who claim global warming proponents are doing it out of self-interest, there are thousands of co-conspirators, any one of whom could blow the whole thing out of the water.
I'm sorry, but this position completely defies reason.
When solar competes on a level playing field with fossil fuels, it's cheaper. That means that you can get loans secured by the future output of your solar panels, because the electricity they generate has value. So in fact there are businesses that will just go install solar for you and then charge you less than what you get back in energy savings and dollars per kwh of excess, so that you spend less money than you would have without solar. The business takes out the loan, and owns the solar panels, and makes a profit on the percentages. You get cheaper power. It's a win-win proposition. This is exactly what the Koch brothers are afraid of. If it was just rich geeks like me putting panels on their roof, they wouldn't be worried. All they have to do to prevent this happening is to make sure that the numbers don't work out for solar investors. And that's precisely what they are doing.
Crap, hit the wrong reply link—that was for the article above yours. Sorry about that.
When solar competes on a level playing field with fossil fuels, it's cheaper. That means that you can get loans secured by the future output of your solar panels, because the electricity they generate has value. So in fact there are businesses that will just go install solar for you and then charge you less than what you get back in energy savings and dollars per kwh of excess, so that you spend _less_ money than you would have without solar. The business takes out the loan, and owns the solar panels, and makes a profit on the percentages. You get cheaper power. It's a win-win proposition. This is exactly what the Koch brothers are afraid of. If it was just rich geeks like me putting panels on their roof, they wouldn't be worried. All they have to do to prevent this happening is to make sure that the numbers don't work out for solar investors. And that's precisely what they are doing.
So, the point I was making somewhat sarcastically above is that if we really want to do something about global warming, we have to account for all the people whose oxen are going to be gored if fossil fuels are phased out early. That includes coal miners. A solution that just leaves whole towns and whole counties completely fucked is naive in the worst way. But the coal miners shouldn't get to continue doing what they do just so that they can feel like they are doing meaningful work. If it's less harmful to society for them to take a bailout, they should take the bailout, and we should give it to them.
Storing solar heat is a solved problem—you just use mirrors to focus sunlight, and use the heat to heat liquid molten salt. The molten salt is used to boil water to turn steam turbines, and is recycled back for reheating. A reasonably sized reservoir is quite capable of storing enough heat to keep the turbines going overnight. Sodium-sulfur batters are a fairly economical way to store electrical energy from large-scale PV systems (including grid-tied solar in areas where grid-tied solar generation is widespread).
Um. We built a Passivhaus (look it up), and we have solar generation on our roof, and we eat local foods as much as possible (which is very much a lot). I make my own yogurt from locally-produced milk we get in glass containers, because plastic yogurt containers were previously the biggest source of waste in our household. But there's no way to boycott the fossil fuel economy, because it's completely pervasive.
As for your comments about global warming, you're absolutely right. 97% of the world's climate scientists, who are generally not paid very well, agree that global warming is real and a real danger to human existence. They agree because they are in a conspiracy together. The 3% of climate scientists who disagree are doing it out of a selfless desire to help others. And the massive oil industry campaign to suppress global warming science is a heroic effort to stop the conspiracy before the scientists reap their ill-gotten rewards (to wit: continued employment at low wages). Thank G-D for free enterprise!
There's no reason to think Solyndra was anything other than an investment that didn't pan out because the market changed. Accusations of cronyism weren't sustained by any evidence, and if there were evidence it would certainly have surfaced given the brightness of the spotlight that was shone on that failure. The Waltons also invested heavily in Solyndra, and took a beating. That loan program has a lower-than-average failure rate. And Solyndra failed because regular solar panels got cheaper, so glass tubes were no longer economical.
The part of the Nevada desert where that solar plant was going to be built is over a hundred miles from the desert tortoise habitat.
But hey, why let pesky facts get in the way of talking points?