Yeah but the original quote was "loose your money in the market" which if read literally, that is in this context "according to strict contemporary spelling rules," is a pleasantly fresh unboring usage - unleash, take off you, get along green lil dogies! Hey where yall goin?! - nicely put, even poetic.
Yes, sadly that's true, but Republican leadership don't really care about the president as an individual anyway. For crying out loud they ran Reagan, his head as hollow as a Bell jar, twice. What's more they judge this personally perfectly blank hack actor's reign to have been their high point of effectiveness in the last half century. It doesn't matter whether a Republican politician has any brains or character at all, because anyway all their decisions are made, all their speeches are written, all their legislation is crafted by corporations and lobbyists, so all the "leader" has to do is smile at the camera and read off the Teleprompter. And, um, sign things.
True Republicans have faith that the corporate boards who jointly compose all that nasty, tricky legislation are, indeed, highly intelligent men of reliable character. Sucker Republicans, that is those voters who vote against the interest of their own lowly economic class, contemptibly, merely fall for the moronic self-contradictory rubbish in the campaign's TV ads.
This is a distinction versus the Democrats, as miserable a lot as they are, because in contrast to the virtually inanimate Republican corporate knee-puppets any given Democratic politician is assumed to be personally responsible for his own actions. Thus in that logic, for example, it make perfect sense that a Henry Hyde should angrily assail a Bill Clinton over the dreadful unforgivable crime of sexual immorality.
> You can pay $200 for an upgrade copy of W2k, wow.
If you buy a motherboard & CPU you can get Windows 2000 Pro OEM, the full package, not merely an upgrade, for $135. I just did last week, and it arrived yesterday.
I haven't installed it yet, but I must say, the CD is beautiful! They put a "holographic" image on it. If it were a Pokemon card, it would be worth $100 easy. My SGI/Debian CD looks positively dowdy in comparison. So even if the OS is unusably bad, which isn't very likely, I feel I will have gotten my money's worth.
> I want to become filthy-rich from a program > that I will design and sell, with no-source, and on > whatever OS i choose.
Forget about it. Microsoft will squash you like a bug.
> If I create a killer app for linux, "the > public domain" owns it, not me.
You don't say? Well, I guess that means I can put a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux on an ftp site somewhere, because according to my expert lawyer (you) it has now entered the public domain. Won't Cowpland be pissed? Tough luck, Cowpland!
> the US was built on capitalism, and the only > thing open-source will do is destroy it.
Capitalism sucks, and I think it would be just great if open-source software would somehow magically wipe capitalism out or at least club it down a bit, but of course that's not going to happen.
> Read up on your history kids, and pay close > attention to china and russia.
If you had read your history, focusing particularly on the nineteenth century when capitalism developed, you'd never have posted such nonsense. But do pay attention to Russia, especially now that they have traded in their sinister old postwar gangster socialism for an even worse gangster capitalism.
No, no, no! What is with you people? Can't you at all grasp the idea of the possibility of human interactions which are not driven solely by the profit motive? Here Stallman goes on and on about software sans profits, and despite all his talking you still think the validity of the whole concept must be measured in terms of money profits.
Stallman's idea has nothing to do with any programmers making a profit, much less making a profit for distributors. Stallman's idea is that, by licensing their works under "copyleft," his unique subversion of the copyright laws, people can make a large and dynamically self-sustaining body of programs, all including full source code, so that computer users wouldn't have to be bound and restricted by proprietary licensing schemes.
No, a real test of Stallman's ideas would be to see if a bunch of volunteer developers could actually create a solid, high-quality operating system, complete with useful applications, the whole mess being under the GPL. And by golly, so they have, so I guess Stallman's idea was valid after all. It's called Linux, or if you want to be linguistically complusive about it, GNU/Linux.
> Placing software under the GPL license does > not make the software GNU! Aaaargh!
OK, then, suppose I were to write a good enough piece of software that I wanted to license it under GPL. Not very likely, because I can't program my way out of a wet paper sack. What few little halfassed hacks I've ever put out on line - mostly AutoLISP - have been released to the public domain, as anything else would be embarrassingly immodest.
But let's just suppose, and let's suppose further that I wanted to label it as a genuine, certified piece of GNU software. So what would I have to do? Would I have to sign up somewhere or something? Is there an official roster of "official" GNU developers?
I saw a post down the way about "Stallmanite purges" but I assumed it was another silly troll. You know, for laughs people like to make Stallman out to be, like, Lenin's grandma or something like that.
Good heavens, did I miss something? Have RMS and his gang seized the U.S. government in a coup d'etat, and are they now dismantling the entire country's commercial software industry by police force?
Just who is forcing you to release any program you write as "free-software"? For that matter, has "free-software" made such inroads into the profitability of the commercial software industry that that industry is threatened by bankruptcy? Is Microsoft becoming insolvent? Has NASDAQ crashed?
If you want to talk about a bunch that is destroying the opportunity of small entrepreneurs to get a foothold in the commercial software business, then lets talk about Microsoft and their notorious competition-crushing business tactics. Certainly Microsoft has done more to wipe out the software small-businessman than the FSF ever has.
Incidentally, this isn't because Bill Gates is uniquely evil (he might be, but that would be irrelevant) or any such nonsense as that. It is just a natural tendency in any capitalist economy, in the absence of government controls to the contrary, that power in any field of business should tend to concentrate in any company with the biggest market share, thus making that market share even bigger, and so on in a feedback loop that leads inevitably to monopoly. Read all about it in Marx's Capital - don't worry, it's just a book, it won't hypnotize you or bite you or anything like that...
Stallman's insistence on seeing the word "gnu" all over the place is rather cloying. But what does the phrase "GNU software" mean, exactly? As far as I can tell, the term "GNU software" would have to mean "software licensed under the GNU Public License". Well, as we all know, Mr. Torvalds's Linux kernel happens to be licensed under GPL, for which generous act we are all grateful.
So if I interpret the phrase "GNU software" correctly, then your statement
Take all the non-GNU stuff out of Redhat, SuSE or Debian, but keep the kernel...
> Freedom means you can do whatever you want > and this is clearly something else.
Somewhere in his novel "Annals of Klepsis" R. A. Lafferty asserts:
The ultimate freedom imaginable is the freedom to own slaves.
and it appears that this is the radical sort of "freedom" to which you refer. You apparently would like to be free to grab someone else's source code, modify or extend it, and then resell it as a proprietary, binaries-only product, so you could gather profits, those profits enforced by copyright law.
Well, that certainly is an extreme form of "freedom." Another similarly extreme form of "freedom" would be if I could readily stroll into the bank vault and stuff my pockets, and if I could shoot any pesky bank guard dead who tried to interfere with my getaway. Or if I were free, when I happened to see an attractive woman walking down the sidewalk, to grab her and...well, you get the point. Alluring as the word "freedom" may be, the whole notion of private property - your private property, that is - is a denial of my "freedom" to grab your goods and make them mine. Do you propose, then, in the tradition of Proudhon and Pol Pot, that society should purge itself of the notion of property altogether?
Your Franklin quote is irrelevant. Franklin was derogating the notion of a citizen signing away a freedom which he himself currently possesses for security's sake. But no one gives up any freedom at all when he gets hold of someone else's software licensed under GPL, because it isn't his software to start with, so since it was in no way his property to start with - since his original share of ownership of that GPL'd code was zero - he has absolutely no rights to lose. Neither does anyone who comes up with an original program lose any freedom whatsoever if he decides to license it under GPL, because his choice of how to license his original work is entirely a free one.
I haven't seen it and I probably won't but it's hard to believe that American Beauty could be more of a "feel-good" movie than Fassbinder's Merchant of Four Seasons.
Someone please tell me where I can buy a video of that movie, please! I mean the Fassbinder one; I know where to get the Hollywood thing - in fact I can hardly swing my damn arm without slapping up against another videotape store. Hollywood everywhere, everywhere, aaagh!
...to the OSU students who live elsewhere than in the un-cabled, un-air-conditioned dorms (do they have indoor plumbing?), that even at a state university, paid for by all the citizens of Oklahoma in common, the administration maintains specially-made student slums, so the nobler classes can have someone near at hand to look down upon... Why should up-and-coming yuppies, those privileged sh*ts, have to wait until after graduation to enjoy the pleasures of economic class stratification?
> So they're a bunch of musical instruments? Wow, I never knew =P
I guess you never heard French people talk - pure music.
In fact, that's why blockheaded envious Anglos can't ever understand French philosophers, because they think a book of philosophy should sound when read like a 1950s IBM technical manual. Even Germans have more sense than that. Dim Anglos! Have you no hearts for art? Oh well, whatever, nevermind.
As for the moron above you in the thread, yeah sure, that land which blessed this dismal ball, as it doesn't deserve, with Brigitte Bardot and Laetitia Casta, now that there's obviously a country fulla faggots, sure, you bet, like duh, you moron.
Look, everybody is going to die. That's about all you can be sure of. But you go read what Cassie writes and you'll have to realize, she loves him. And sooner or later he'll get his wits back, and then he'll come to know that.
People talk about love all the time like it's a common ordinary thing. Why I don't know, maybe it's a hangover from imbibing all that romance fiction as we modern people do, but look at the real world around you, it certainly is not. To be loved like that even for a moment is so valuable a thing, it's what one lives for, yet it seems to be so impossibly rare in our Sisyphean lives (as opposed to in fiction) that it practically never happens.
So you might say, "Poor guy," and "What bad luck fell on him" but near as I can tell Jason Haas had already hit the jackpot.
I've always been dubious about all this virtual stuff the entertainment industry keeps trying to foist on my kids. Seems like kind of a rip-off; we get a bunch of expensive synthetic images, they get all the waterfront real estate. However...
You can't step on a Lego car on the stairs, have your leading foot fly out from under you as the toy car caroms off the wall, fall on your ass, bounce all the way to the bottom, and permanently fuck up your lower back, either. Whereas you CAN do all that with a real toy car, as I did.
You're up to your usual high standards. I especially liked the parts where "people who are too poor to buy his books are ipso facto too stoopid and morally defective to deserve to read Shakespeare" and "none of Faraday's fraudulent theories outlasted his lifetime." That last reminds me of some of the crackpot shit that those anti-Kommunists sent the FBI regarding Einstein's "anarchistic," "metaphysical" theories. Just delightful!
But hey d00d I just gotta tellya like don't f**k with Project Gutenberg, d00d. I'd like take it personal 'cause I just this last weekend scanned volume one of Haldane and Kemp's English translation of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea, all 568 pages of it, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner Publishers, 1909. Only two more volumes, a mere thousand pages to go. And they're really only appendices anyway; volume one is the complete core of World as Will and Idea. I bet you'd get a kick out of Schopenhauer. I've got three short books of his essays on my web page, two of which that haven't been proofread, hint, hint. They're free for the downloading. However, a special charge for downloading applies to Randites: five dollars, or two hundred rubles, per volume. We accept Visa.
Here's tonight's straight line for Randite Man:
Why, it so happens that as a contribution to Project Gutenberg, I myself have scanned all of volume one and, thus far, 250 pages of volume two, of Papa Karl's Capital, Charles Kerr Publishers, 1906. (This is actually true, too, but I quit doing Capital for a while because a guy emailed me volunteering to proofread Schopenhauer's magnum opus. I'm tellin ya, proofreading is a lot of work and proofreaders are hard to come by, so if someone volunteers you bet I'm going to take advantage of his offer.) I'm proud to have contributed my time and effort to this splendid project. All people, no matter how oppressed by poverty (OK I'm pushing it there - oppressed by poverty, yet with Internet access!) should have the opportunity to study and learn from this ground-breaking, magnificent work of economic theory.
You've got to read pages 22 and 23 of the first Einstein document. To get to page 22 you read 21 pages of wild, filed accusations, more or less to the effect that Einstein is sort of a super-Lenin who could conceivably destroy this Fair Republic should he ever step foot across the border, so no, NO, NO he must NEVER be permitted admission to these blessed United States. There's a letter from a mad professor at Princeton which claims that Relativity has a (left-wing) "metaphysical factor and if that is the case it can have no physical validity whatsoever." 21 pages thus far of 92 in document number one of twelve. Them's a lot of pages, folks.
OK! On Page 22 the Sheriff of Ventura County California send a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, asking for reassurance:
Several of (Einstein's) admirers in this County have approached me and asked me to establish if possible definitely whether or not there is any basis for these statements (that Einstein is a Communist). These particular people are very good Americans and do not care to allow their children to idolize him if he is of this character."
To which the Director replied:
Dear Sheriff:
I am in receipt of your letter dated April 24, 1934, with reference to Communistic activities to this country on the part of Dr. Einstein.
There is no Federal legislation in effect at the present time under which so-called radical or Communistic activities are subject to investigation on the part of this Division, and the files of this Division, therefore, contain no information relative to the activities of Dr. Einstein in the United States in connection with the Communist Party.
I regret that I am unable to furnish you with the information desired. Inasmuch as Communist activities are handled by local law enforcement agencies, it is possible that the New York City Police Department may have some information concerning the subject matter about which you inquire.
You're doing pretty good. I admire your work. But pick it up, please? It's that off-the-road-into-the-mud lurch toward the end that really yanks my neck around and gets me off whenever I read your stuff, of course I have base lurid tastes. Come on, I'll throw you a bone: Hey what about them Roman Catholics, hey? They also deny salvation by unsupported faith! OK, how's that?
Christ if that ain't enough how's this: "Hey I seen Adolf Hitler on that list you ain't callin him a leftist is you huh is you?!!!1!"
I have one of those for my home PC. The deciding factor that made me choose a Matrox card was their good support for Linux. Thanks Matrox! I bought my dual-head G400 (not the MAX card, just the regular one) for my home PC from Dee One Systems for $178 a while back. I like that vendor; they're good-n-cheap and reliable too, I've been buying stuff from them for years now and they haven't messed up any orders yet.
In my office we've got a couple of Microstation users who have dual Hitachi 19" monitors, and one of them is using a G400 - looks great. He's running both screens at 1600x1200 in "true color" mode (I think that means 32-bit but I'm not sure). In NT you can drag dialog boxes from one screen to the other, or if you maximize a window it stretches all the way across both screens. There's a landscape-aspect Playboy centerfold scan (Dinah Willis, 12/65) that makes a cool background bitmap for that system.
I haven't ever hooked my G400 at home up to a TV set yet, but it came with a cable so I can. I'll bet text mode on a big screen TV is real easy on your eyes; combine that with the Logitech wireless keyboard I've got and I could potato out on the couch while hacking away. At last, a useful purpose for that damned TV set!
Most Florida residents don't know it, but Florida citizens are required by law to pay taxes on interstate purchases. If, for example, I buy a PC from Gateway 2000, the state sales tax will already be on the bill, because Gateway 2000 has a store in Tampa so they are required to collect the sales tax. But suppose I buy a PC from Computer Gate in California, which has no offices in Florida. Computer Gate will not collect any Florida state sales tax. But then I am obliged by law to get in contact with the Florida Department of Revenue and send them six percent or whatever it is these days.
As you can imagine, most individual Floridians don't pay this tax, if for no other reason than that most Floridians don't even know about that aspect of the state's sales tax law. Somewhere I read that the voluntary compliance with this law is less than one percent! But companies like the one I work for definitely do pay the sales tax, as they get audited. I remember how surprised our head of accounting was, a few years back, when we got a notice from the Florida Department of revenue saying that we were apparently in arrears for an interstate purchase of $180 or so; he too had never heard of this law.
By the way, this article originates from the wholly looney Hudson Institute, originally founded by Herman Kahn, author of that masterpiece of hyper-rational insanity "On Thermonuclear War." (A good commentary on the deranged Herman Kahn worldview is in Philip K. Dick's short story "Null-O".) Right away that should tell you to take whatever they say with a grain of salt - make it a fifty-pound sack, actually.
The article has several details which seem to me at least doubtful and at worst downright mendacious, such as the supposition that taxing "internet sales" would promptly cause them to diminish by thirty percent. While the price difference is an advantage for internet vendors, I doubt that the major factor inducing people to buy products on the internet is just to save a few percent in sales tax - against which you have to weigh the cost of the shipping, the wait for the product to arrive, and the difficulty of returns or service. The real advantage of internet sales is that, even though you might be in your underwear in your living room at 1:00 AM you can still conveniently order a vast variety of goods.
For one example, what makes Amazon Books so great isn't a tax advantage, but their enormous catalog, which beats any brick-n-mortar store I ever saw, even the so-called "superstores". (Boycott 'em anyway! - unpaid political advertisement) It's no big deal if you're ordering a best-seller, but if what you're looking for is somewhat obscure, you'll have to "special order" it at a ordinary store - and it's surprising what you can't order at, say, a Barnes and Noble "superstore". One time they told me they couldn't get a book that was published the year before by the Yale University Press! As though they'd have some kind of difficulty finding so obscure publishing house as that. That's why I prefer to buy books from smaller locally-owned bookstores that are run by real bibliophiles, rather than megacorporations, run by stockholders in the grip of their monomania of greed.
Another advantage to internet sales is that you can get products on the internet that are simply unavailable in any local stores. For example, a couple weeks back I needed a 50-pin internal SCSI terminator in a big hurry to fix my company's network server. The Tampa Bay area isn't exactly the stix, with well over a million residents, but despite making dozens of telephone calls, I couldn't find a terminator anywhere in the area. Of course, I was able to find several vendors on line in about ten minutes, and I ended up ordering it on line and having it shipped FedEx next-day.
Another dubious asserttion in this Hudson Institute article is that it is somehow unconstitutional to charge Florida taxes to a vendor in California who derives no value from the tax. First, the vendor obviously does get value from those taxes: if there weren't for the Florida state road system, how would his package have ever got delivered? and if the customer couldn't get the package, he wouldn't have ordered from that out-of-state vendor, right? And second, it would seem that the state of Florida interprets its sales taxes as weighing not upon the vendor, but upon the customer instead, and the customer does live in Florida and benefit from the taxes.
In my opinion, the guys who profit more than anyone else from the tax-free nature of internet sales are delivery companies like UPS and FedEx; I'd bet that the internet sales phenomenon is really boosting their business. To the extent that interstate sales are stimulated by non-taxation, whatever the customer gains by not paying sales tax, he at least in part loses to delivery charges. So you might consider non-taxation of interstate sales as the equivalent to a subsidy by the state governments for these corporations.
The obvious failure in Anselm's argument is, contary to Anselm's begging the question, it is really easy for something that doesn't exist to be "greater," whatever one might ordinarily mean by that, than anything that does actually exist on this material, sin-drenched ball.
For example, the imaginary zillionaire Gill Bates, who has a net worth of $300-billion, the Nobel Prize for his universal cancer cure, three Oscars, two Grammys and the Booker Prize for Literature, and is also the Senator from Washington state, is clearly "greater" than our existent friend Bill Gates, with his mere $80-billion. Or for another example, the world as it is seen in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, though purely fictional, is better than the one I live in. Or yet another example, the babe you dreamed so hard about last night is even sweeter and lovelier than the one you were checking out down at the topless bar this afternoon. And so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but the original quote was "loose your money in the market" which if read literally, that is in this context "according to strict contemporary spelling rules," is a pleasantly fresh unboring usage - unleash, take off you, get along green lil dogies! Hey where yall goin?! - nicely put, even poetic.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Have you noticed that Bush is somewhat slow?
Yes, sadly that's true, but Republican leadership don't really care about the president as an individual anyway. For crying out loud they ran Reagan, his head as hollow as a Bell jar, twice. What's more they judge this personally perfectly blank hack actor's reign to have been their high point of effectiveness in the last half century. It doesn't matter whether a Republican politician has any brains or character at all, because anyway all their decisions are made, all their speeches are written, all their legislation is crafted by corporations and lobbyists, so all the "leader" has to do is smile at the camera and read off the Teleprompter. And, um, sign things.
True Republicans have faith that the corporate boards who jointly compose all that nasty, tricky legislation are, indeed, highly intelligent men of reliable character. Sucker Republicans, that is those voters who vote against the interest of their own lowly economic class, contemptibly, merely fall for the moronic self-contradictory rubbish in the campaign's TV ads.
This is a distinction versus the Democrats, as miserable a lot as they are, because in contrast to the virtually inanimate Republican corporate knee-puppets any given Democratic politician is assumed to be personally responsible for his own actions. Thus in that logic, for example, it make perfect sense that a Henry Hyde should angrily assail a Bill Clinton over the dreadful unforgivable crime of sexual immorality.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
At least if I were Tux it would be my dream come true.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> You can pay $200 for an upgrade copy of W2k, wow.
If you buy a motherboard & CPU you can get Windows 2000 Pro OEM, the full package, not merely an upgrade, for $135. I just did last week, and it arrived yesterday.
I haven't installed it yet, but I must say, the CD is beautiful! They put a "holographic" image on it. If it were a Pokemon card, it would be worth $100 easy. My SGI/Debian CD looks positively dowdy in comparison. So even if the OS is unusably bad, which isn't very likely, I feel I will have gotten my money's worth.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> I want to become filthy-rich from a program
> that I will design and sell, with no-source, and on
> whatever OS i choose.
Forget about it. Microsoft will squash you like a bug.
> If I create a killer app for linux, "the
> public domain" owns it, not me.
You don't say? Well, I guess that means I can put a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux on an ftp site somewhere, because according to my expert lawyer (you) it has now entered the public domain. Won't Cowpland be pissed? Tough luck, Cowpland!
> the US was built on capitalism, and the only
> thing open-source will do is destroy it.
Capitalism sucks, and I think it would be just great if open-source software would somehow magically wipe capitalism out or at least club it down a bit, but of course that's not going to happen.
> Read up on your history kids, and pay close
> attention to china and russia.
If you had read your history, focusing particularly on the nineteenth century when capitalism developed, you'd never have posted such nonsense. But do pay attention to Russia, especially now that they have traded in their sinister old postwar gangster socialism for an even worse gangster capitalism.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
No, no, no! What is with you people? Can't you at all grasp the idea of the possibility of human interactions which are not driven solely by the profit motive? Here Stallman goes on and on about software sans profits, and despite all his talking you still think the validity of the whole concept must be measured in terms of money profits.
Stallman's idea has nothing to do with any programmers making a profit, much less making a profit for distributors. Stallman's idea is that, by licensing their works under "copyleft," his unique subversion of the copyright laws, people can make a large and dynamically self-sustaining body of programs, all including full source code, so that computer users wouldn't have to be bound and restricted by proprietary licensing schemes.
No, a real test of Stallman's ideas would be to see if a bunch of volunteer developers could actually create a solid, high-quality operating system, complete with useful applications, the whole mess being under the GPL. And by golly, so they have, so I guess Stallman's idea was valid after all. It's called Linux, or if you want to be linguistically complusive about it, GNU/Linux.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Placing software under the GPL license does
> not make the software GNU! Aaaargh!
OK, then, suppose I were to write a good enough piece of software that I wanted to license it under GPL. Not very likely, because I can't program my way out of a wet paper sack. What few little halfassed hacks I've ever put out on line - mostly AutoLISP - have been released to the public domain, as anything else would be embarrassingly immodest.
But let's just suppose, and let's suppose further that I wanted to label it as a genuine, certified piece of GNU software. So what would I have to do? Would I have to sign up somewhere or something? Is there an official roster of "official" GNU developers?
I saw a post down the way about "Stallmanite purges" but I assumed it was another silly troll. You know, for laughs people like to make Stallman out to be, like, Lenin's grandma or something like that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> forcing free-software = no living.
Good heavens, did I miss something? Have RMS and his gang seized the U.S. government in a coup d'etat, and are they now dismantling the entire country's commercial software industry by police force?
Just who is forcing you to release any program you write as "free-software"? For that matter, has "free-software" made such inroads into the profitability of the commercial software industry that that industry is threatened by bankruptcy? Is Microsoft becoming insolvent? Has NASDAQ crashed?
If you want to talk about a bunch that is destroying the opportunity of small entrepreneurs to get a foothold in the commercial software business, then lets talk about Microsoft and their notorious competition-crushing business tactics. Certainly Microsoft has done more to wipe out the software small-businessman than the FSF ever has.
Incidentally, this isn't because Bill Gates is uniquely evil (he might be, but that would be irrelevant) or any such nonsense as that. It is just a natural tendency in any capitalist economy, in the absence of government controls to the contrary, that power in any field of business should tend to concentrate in any company with the biggest market share, thus making that market share even bigger, and so on in a feedback loop that leads inevitably to monopoly. Read all about it in Marx's Capital - don't worry, it's just a book, it won't hypnotize you or bite you or anything like that...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Stallman's insistence on seeing the word "gnu" all over the place is rather cloying. But what does the phrase "GNU software" mean, exactly? As far as I can tell, the term "GNU software" would have to mean "software licensed under the GNU Public License". Well, as we all know, Mr. Torvalds's Linux kernel happens to be licensed under GPL, for which generous act we are all grateful.
So if I interpret the phrase "GNU software" correctly, then your statement
Take all the non-GNU stuff out of Redhat, SuSE or Debian, but keep the kernel...
makes no sense at all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Freedom means you can do whatever you want
> and this is clearly something else.
Somewhere in his novel "Annals of Klepsis" R. A. Lafferty asserts:
The ultimate freedom imaginable is the freedom to own slaves.
and it appears that this is the radical sort of "freedom" to which you refer. You apparently would like to be free to grab someone else's source code, modify or extend it, and then resell it as a proprietary, binaries-only product, so you could gather profits, those profits enforced by copyright law.
Well, that certainly is an extreme form of "freedom." Another similarly extreme form of "freedom" would be if I could readily stroll into the bank vault and stuff my pockets, and if I could shoot any pesky bank guard dead who tried to interfere with my getaway. Or if I were free, when I happened to see an attractive woman walking down the sidewalk, to grab her and...well, you get the point. Alluring as the word "freedom" may be, the whole notion of private property - your private property, that is - is a denial of my "freedom" to grab your goods and make them mine. Do you propose, then, in the tradition of Proudhon and Pol Pot, that society should purge itself of the notion of property altogether?
Your Franklin quote is irrelevant. Franklin was derogating the notion of a citizen signing away a freedom which he himself currently possesses for security's sake. But no one gives up any freedom at all when he gets hold of someone else's software licensed under GPL, because it isn't his software to start with, so since it was in no way his property to start with - since his original share of ownership of that GPL'd code was zero - he has absolutely no rights to lose. Neither does anyone who comes up with an original program lose any freedom whatsoever if he decides to license it under GPL, because his choice of how to license his original work is entirely a free one.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I haven't seen it and I probably won't but it's hard to believe that American Beauty could be more of a "feel-good" movie than Fassbinder's Merchant of Four Seasons.
Someone please tell me where I can buy a video of that movie, please! I mean the Fassbinder one; I know where to get the Hollywood thing - in fact I can hardly swing my damn arm without slapping up against another videotape store. Hollywood everywhere, everywhere, aaagh!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...to the OSU students who live elsewhere than in the un-cabled, un-air-conditioned dorms (do they have indoor plumbing?), that even at a state university, paid for by all the citizens of Oklahoma in common, the administration maintains specially-made student slums, so the nobler classes can have someone near at hand to look down upon... Why should up-and-coming yuppies, those privileged sh*ts, have to wait until after graduation to enjoy the pleasures of economic class stratification?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> So they're a bunch of musical instruments? Wow, I never knew =P
I guess you never heard French people talk - pure music.
In fact, that's why blockheaded envious Anglos can't ever understand French philosophers, because they think a book of philosophy should sound when read like a 1950s IBM technical manual. Even Germans have more sense than that. Dim Anglos! Have you no hearts for art? Oh well, whatever, nevermind.
As for the moron above you in the thread, yeah sure, that land which blessed this dismal ball, as it doesn't deserve, with Brigitte Bardot and Laetitia Casta, now that there's obviously a country fulla faggots, sure, you bet, like duh, you moron.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Look, everybody is going to die. That's about all you can be sure of. But you go read what Cassie writes and you'll have to realize, she loves him. And sooner or later he'll get his wits back, and then he'll come to know that.
People talk about love all the time like it's a common ordinary thing. Why I don't know, maybe it's a hangover from imbibing all that romance fiction as we modern people do, but look at the real world around you, it certainly is not. To be loved like that even for a moment is so valuable a thing, it's what one lives for, yet it seems to be so impossibly rare in our Sisyphean lives (as opposed to in fiction) that it practically never happens.
So you might say, "Poor guy," and "What bad luck fell on him" but near as I can tell Jason Haas had already hit the jackpot.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I've always been dubious about all this virtual stuff the entertainment industry keeps trying to foist on my kids. Seems like kind of a rip-off; we get a bunch of expensive synthetic images, they get all the waterfront real estate. However...
You can't step on a Lego car on the stairs, have your leading foot fly out from under you as the toy car caroms off the wall, fall on your ass, bounce all the way to the bottom, and permanently fuck up your lower back, either. Whereas you CAN do all that with a real toy car, as I did.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You're up to your usual high standards. I especially liked the parts where "people who are too poor to buy his books are ipso facto too stoopid and morally defective to deserve to read Shakespeare" and "none of Faraday's fraudulent theories outlasted his lifetime." That last reminds me of some of the crackpot shit that those anti-Kommunists sent the FBI regarding Einstein's "anarchistic," "metaphysical" theories. Just delightful!
But hey d00d I just gotta tellya like don't f**k with Project Gutenberg, d00d. I'd like take it personal 'cause I just this last weekend scanned volume one of Haldane and Kemp's English translation of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea, all 568 pages of it, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner Publishers, 1909. Only two more volumes, a mere thousand pages to go. And they're really only appendices anyway; volume one is the complete core of World as Will and Idea. I bet you'd get a kick out of Schopenhauer. I've got three short books of his essays on my web page, two of which that haven't been proofread, hint, hint. They're free for the downloading. However, a special charge for downloading applies to Randites: five dollars, or two hundred rubles, per volume. We accept Visa.
Here's tonight's straight line for Randite Man:
Why, it so happens that as a contribution to Project Gutenberg, I myself have scanned all of volume one and, thus far, 250 pages of volume two, of Papa Karl's Capital, Charles Kerr Publishers, 1906. (This is actually true, too, but I quit doing Capital for a while because a guy emailed me volunteering to proofread Schopenhauer's magnum opus. I'm tellin ya, proofreading is a lot of work and proofreaders are hard to come by, so if someone volunteers you bet I'm going to take advantage of his offer.) I'm proud to have contributed my time and effort to this splendid project. All people, no matter how oppressed by poverty (OK I'm pushing it there - oppressed by poverty, yet with Internet access!) should have the opportunity to study and learn from this ground-breaking, magnificent work of economic theory.
Take it away, Randite Man!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Oh Jeez, thanks, what a laugh, bless you. Good night!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You've got to read pages 22 and 23 of the first Einstein document. To get to page 22 you read 21 pages of wild, filed accusations, more or less to the effect that Einstein is sort of a super-Lenin who could conceivably destroy this Fair Republic should he ever step foot across the border, so no, NO, NO he must NEVER be permitted admission to these blessed United States. There's a letter from a mad professor at Princeton which claims that Relativity has a (left-wing) "metaphysical factor and if that is the case it can have no physical validity whatsoever." 21 pages thus far of 92 in document number one of twelve. Them's a lot of pages, folks.
OK! On Page 22 the Sheriff of Ventura County California send a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, asking for reassurance:
Several of (Einstein's) admirers in this County have approached me and asked me to establish if possible definitely whether or not there is any basis for these statements (that Einstein is a Communist). These particular people are very good Americans and do not care to allow their children to idolize him if he is of this character."
To which the Director replied:
Dear Sheriff:
I am in receipt of your letter dated April 24, 1934, with reference to Communistic activities to this country on the part of Dr. Einstein.
There is no Federal legislation in effect at the present time under which so-called radical or Communistic activities are subject to investigation on the part of this Division, and the files of this Division, therefore, contain no information relative to the activities of Dr. Einstein in the United States in connection with the Communist Party.
I regret that I am unable to furnish you with the information desired. Inasmuch as Communist activities are handled by local law enforcement agencies, it is possible that the New York City Police Department may have some information concerning the subject matter about which you inquire.
Sincerely yours,
J. Edgar Hoover
Director
Now wasn't that a lovely lie? God Bless America.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You're doing pretty good. I admire your work. But pick it up, please? It's that off-the-road-into-the-mud lurch toward the end that really yanks my neck around and gets me off whenever I read your stuff, of course I have base lurid tastes. Come on, I'll throw you a bone: Hey what about them Roman Catholics, hey? They also deny salvation by unsupported faith! OK, how's that?
Christ if that ain't enough how's this: "Hey I seen Adolf Hitler on that list you ain't callin him a leftist is you huh is you?!!!1!"
Have a nice day!
Your fan, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I have one of those for my home PC. The deciding factor that made me choose a Matrox card was their good support for Linux. Thanks Matrox! I bought my dual-head G400 (not the MAX card, just the regular one) for my home PC from Dee One Systems for $178 a while back. I like that vendor; they're good-n-cheap and reliable too, I've been buying stuff from them for years now and they haven't messed up any orders yet.
In my office we've got a couple of Microstation users who have dual Hitachi 19" monitors, and one of them is using a G400 - looks great. He's running both screens at 1600x1200 in "true color" mode (I think that means 32-bit but I'm not sure). In NT you can drag dialog boxes from one screen to the other, or if you maximize a window it stretches all the way across both screens. There's a landscape-aspect Playboy centerfold scan (Dinah Willis, 12/65) that makes a cool background bitmap for that system.
I haven't ever hooked my G400 at home up to a TV set yet, but it came with a cable so I can. I'll bet text mode on a big screen TV is real easy on your eyes; combine that with the Logitech wireless keyboard I've got and I could potato out on the couch while hacking away. At last, a useful purpose for that damned TV set!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> > Tax dollars started the ARPA net, provide education, and, if you
> > live in a halfway civilized country, free health insurance.
> s/civilized/socialist/
An excellent substitution! Precisely what the U.S. needs: more civilization.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Most Florida residents don't know it, but Florida citizens are required by law to pay taxes on interstate purchases. If, for example, I buy a PC from Gateway 2000, the state sales tax will already be on the bill, because Gateway 2000 has a store in Tampa so they are required to collect the sales tax. But suppose I buy a PC from Computer Gate in California, which has no offices in Florida. Computer Gate will not collect any Florida state sales tax. But then I am obliged by law to get in contact with the Florida Department of Revenue and send them six percent or whatever it is these days.
As you can imagine, most individual Floridians don't pay this tax, if for no other reason than that most Floridians don't even know about that aspect of the state's sales tax law. Somewhere I read that the voluntary compliance with this law is less than one percent! But companies like the one I work for definitely do pay the sales tax, as they get audited. I remember how surprised our head of accounting was, a few years back, when we got a notice from the Florida Department of revenue saying that we were apparently in arrears for an interstate purchase of $180 or so; he too had never heard of this law.
By the way, this article originates from the wholly looney Hudson Institute, originally founded by Herman Kahn, author of that masterpiece of hyper-rational insanity "On Thermonuclear War." (A good commentary on the deranged Herman Kahn worldview is in Philip K. Dick's short story "Null-O".) Right away that should tell you to take whatever they say with a grain of salt - make it a fifty-pound sack, actually.
The article has several details which seem to me at least doubtful and at worst downright mendacious, such as the supposition that taxing "internet sales" would promptly cause them to diminish by thirty percent. While the price difference is an advantage for internet vendors, I doubt that the major factor inducing people to buy products on the internet is just to save a few percent in sales tax - against which you have to weigh the cost of the shipping, the wait for the product to arrive, and the difficulty of returns or service. The real advantage of internet sales is that, even though you might be in your underwear in your living room at 1:00 AM you can still conveniently order a vast variety of goods.
For one example, what makes Amazon Books so great isn't a tax advantage, but their enormous catalog, which beats any brick-n-mortar store I ever saw, even the so-called "superstores". (Boycott 'em anyway! - unpaid political advertisement) It's no big deal if you're ordering a best-seller, but if what you're looking for is somewhat obscure, you'll have to "special order" it at a ordinary store - and it's surprising what you can't order at, say, a Barnes and Noble "superstore". One time they told me they couldn't get a book that was published the year before by the Yale University Press! As though they'd have some kind of difficulty finding so obscure publishing house as that. That's why I prefer to buy books from smaller locally-owned bookstores that are run by real bibliophiles, rather than megacorporations, run by stockholders in the grip of their monomania of greed.
Another advantage to internet sales is that you can get products on the internet that are simply unavailable in any local stores. For example, a couple weeks back I needed a 50-pin internal SCSI terminator in a big hurry to fix my company's network server. The Tampa Bay area isn't exactly the stix, with well over a million residents, but despite making dozens of telephone calls, I couldn't find a terminator anywhere in the area. Of course, I was able to find several vendors on line in about ten minutes, and I ended up ordering it on line and having it shipped FedEx next-day.
Another dubious asserttion in this Hudson Institute article is that it is somehow unconstitutional to charge Florida taxes to a vendor in California who derives no value from the tax. First, the vendor obviously does get value from those taxes: if there weren't for the Florida state road system, how would his package have ever got delivered? and if the customer couldn't get the package, he wouldn't have ordered from that out-of-state vendor, right? And second, it would seem that the state of Florida interprets its sales taxes as weighing not upon the vendor, but upon the customer instead, and the customer does live in Florida and benefit from the taxes.
In my opinion, the guys who profit more than anyone else from the tax-free nature of internet sales are delivery companies like UPS and FedEx; I'd bet that the internet sales phenomenon is really boosting their business. To the extent that interstate sales are stimulated by non-taxation, whatever the customer gains by not paying sales tax, he at least in part loses to delivery charges. So you might consider non-taxation of interstate sales as the equivalent to a subsidy by the state governments for these corporations.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Amazon has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets.
I will swallow your "fiduciary duty" horseshit just as soon as I get through choking down Adolf Eichmann's "I vas just followink orders!"
Don't hold your breath waiting, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Look, as long as they don't spy on Americans...
Oh stop it! It hurts my ribs to laugh this hard!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The obvious failure in Anselm's argument is, contary to Anselm's begging the question, it is really easy for something that doesn't exist to be "greater," whatever one might ordinarily mean by that, than anything that does actually exist on this material, sin-drenched ball.
For example, the imaginary zillionaire Gill Bates, who has a net worth of $300-billion, the Nobel Prize for his universal cancer cure, three Oscars, two Grammys and the Booker Prize for Literature, and is also the Senator from Washington state, is clearly "greater" than our existent friend Bill Gates, with his mere $80-billion. Or for another example, the world as it is seen in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, though purely fictional, is better than the one I live in. Or yet another example, the babe you dreamed so hard about last night is even sweeter and lovelier than the one you were checking out down at the topless bar this afternoon. And so on.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net