i finally understand how the american revolutionaries were able to make the decision to free themselves from a restrictive system when they certainly knew that their decision would entail a long and difficult struggle with relatively low chances for success. when a system injures its constituents repeatedly using the very mechanisms that are designed to protect them, when a system promotes the values of monolithic capitalist entities over individuals by disregarding its own set of rules for fairly resolving conflict (as in the etoy/eToys matter), then rational individuals are forced into the position of attempting to correct the flaws in the system that are injuring them. i don't know what corrections might be made to remedy our current situation, but i do know that if the system resists those corrections, that there will inevitably be conflict.
If you haven't already, you should read some of Philip Greenspun's thoughts about this here. He's an MIT CS prof interested in concepts like this and has put together a toolkit that could be used to build it.
I think this is a great idea. It would seem to solve a lot of the problems that people have with the LDP-- being out of date, being unhelpful because of the wide variety of distros, etc.-- because those problems would be naturally addressed as people used and then discovered the shortcomings or ommissions of a particular piece of documentation. There's a good description of the value of such a reader-correctable process here about halfway down the page.
Slashdot Mirror
i finally understand how the american revolutionaries were able to make the decision to free themselves from a restrictive system when they certainly knew that their decision would entail a long and difficult struggle with relatively low chances for success. when a system injures its constituents repeatedly using the very mechanisms that are designed to protect them, when a system promotes the values of monolithic capitalist entities over individuals by disregarding its own set of rules for fairly resolving conflict (as in the etoy/eToys matter), then rational individuals are forced into the position of attempting to correct the flaws in the system that are injuring them. i don't know what corrections might be made to remedy our current situation, but i do know that if the system resists those corrections, that there will inevitably be conflict.
If you haven't already, you should read some of Philip Greenspun's thoughts about this here. He's an MIT CS prof interested in concepts like this and has put together a toolkit that could be used to build it.
I think this is a great idea. It would seem to solve a lot of the problems that people have with the LDP-- being out of date, being unhelpful because of the wide variety of distros, etc.-- because those problems would be naturally addressed as people used and then discovered the shortcomings or ommissions of a particular piece of documentation. There's a good description of the value of such a reader-correctable process here about halfway down the page.
a nice convention is:
DoS = Denial of Service
DOS = Disk Operating System