This is what always cracks me up about gun advocates--they equate the right to carry with freedom.
Then you don't understand the changes wrought by firearms. Especially the cartridge gun -- it truly was the great equalizer. Consider swords or bow and arrow -- they took immense practice to become good at. Guns don't. Flintlocks were good enough for starters -- look at the US war of independence, or the war of 1812, which pitted farmers against professional soldiers. That access to power, to keeping control of one's own affairs without the bye your leave of the local noble, is what was equalized. If peasants in the 1500s had had guns, they wouldn't have remained peasants for long.
It is the equalizing aspect that counts, not any perceived right to carry. That effect is of diminishing importance these days, being replaced by the web as the great equalizer, but the historical importance of guns in general, and cartridge guns in particular, cannot be exagerated.
The MAFIAA tactic is to threaten to sue, extortion being the common term for this. What they ought to do is get their proof in the form of connection logs, etc, either sue a John Doe and win and then find out the identity, or show some sort of probable cause and let the university / ISP privately contact the John Doe, who could then hire a lawyer to fight, anonymously, disclosure of the logs.
A. He says himself he is not talking about manned space activities, that he thinks that is pretty damned good, he likes it, and colonization might even be practical within the solar system.
B. It sure seems to have touched a nerve within you. Have you somehow transferred your thoughts to me and think that I am one of those fucking morons who favor manned space exploration? For the record, I think manned space exploration is for tourists and ought to be financed by tourists, not by my tax dollars, not at the expense of robotic space exploration, and that President Bush's return to Mars program is just another example of a fucking moron's mind at work.
I mean, did you even RTFA to skip A, or were you just so bent out of shape by your confusion over B that you jumped to a conclusion?
Nothing particularly interesting here; he simply calculates a floor to the energy required to move colonizers to nearby stars and concludes it takes a lot and won't happen with today's technology.
I am not sure why he even wasted his time doing it and setting it in HTML. I don't think anyone has seriously proposed such a journey. It's about as useful as Zak the caveman figuring out how much food he'd need to carry on his log to cross the Pacific and live to tell about it.
I don't think any sci-fi stories postulating generation ships ever even worried about the technology needed.
It may not be worded politely, but Mercedes and BMW have lousy reliability records and are among the most expensive to repair. Detroit as better reliability, for Pete's sake.
OMG I hadn't thought of that.... one botnet to rule them all. Or maybe all the botnets got together to share the NSA botnet so none of them could take over all the others.
Transparent Society is the only work I know of, and as I said, it seems pretty bloated, as if the contract called for a book and he had to pad it out. The basic thesis is easy to explain and maybe no one else thinks they can do better.
You are right about blackmail and social evolution. As a kid, I used to wonder what a world of telepaths would be like, where no one had secrets. It would make birthdays less fun, those kind of intentional and welcome disceptions in general, and life would lose a lot of spice. But all sorts of accidental and intentional disagreements would be impossible. The Web Wide World won't quite to that, but it will sure eliminate most of it. I am sure some replacement for surprise presents will show up. That's part of the anticipatory drool...
Yess! That's what David Brin wrote in Transparent Society, I think it was called. The book is way too long, could've been shortened tremendously, but his basic thesis is that privacy is disappearing, the only question is how to deal with it. It will get to the point where enough people will be walking around with cameras streaming live that mugging one or committing any crime nearby will be shown to the world as it happens. What we don't want is police controlling the cameras; who will watch the watchers? At the very least, you want all police cameras available to the public at all hours, and you also want cameras in the police monitoring room. But that's all moot if every citizen has their own cameras.
Part of me is horrified at the lack of privacy, but the freedom it will simultaneously bring practically makes me drool with anticipation. The worst thing about peasants under the heel of the aristocracy was the waste of talent because that talent would have undermined those in power. I am convinced that one of the reasons for the US rapid growth economically in the late 1800s was precisely because the gun leveled the playing field, and suspect that a lot of gun control, besides being racist (most early gun control was aimed at free blacks), was a reaction to the very idea that the common man could have as much individual power and freedom as the rich and powerful. When the common man suddenly finds he doesn't have to kowtow, it frees his mind to more than just robbing banks. I really look forward to the rich and powerful losing so much more of their control over society. I include here all advocacy groups, where pro- or anti-abortion, pro- or anti-choose-your-religion, all of them.
Copy machines and faxes helped break up the Soviet empire. I wonder what ubiquitous web cams will do. It's going to be an unstoppable revolution.
It's like turning over a rock and watching critters scurry away, or turning on a light and watching cockroaches run for cover. Your first impression is that all these critters just magically appeared, but in a few seconds they will be gone. They were there all along, you just didn't know it.
The bad guys are losing places to hide their malfeasance. Turn over enough rocks, open up enough drawers, the critters eventualy run out of hidey holes.
It is my belief that police like nebulous laws, or maybe I should say, the powers that be like the police to enforce nebulous laws. It all comes down to how to intimidate people -- if you can charge them with something nebulous like disturbing the peace, it doesn't matter if it sticks or not. A variation on that old saying to kill them all and let God sort them out -- just arrest them all and let the station or DA sort it out.
There will be a day, 10 or 20 years from now, when there will be no privacy left. Cameras will be so cheap and plentiful and ubiquitous that, just as in Diamond Age, even the insides of homes and offices will be on the internet. I consider this the same mixed blessing as the invention of guns, specifically cartridge guns. They level the playing field. It makes it incredibly harder for the rich to control the poor, for the aristocracy to control the peasants. As much as I dislike the idea of someone watching me take a dump, the reality is that very few people would want to. Faced with zillions of cameras to choose from, the vast majority will watch the rich and powerful rather then me. Paris Hilton will certainly have a ton of watchers, but there will also be watchers for Donald Trump and George Bush and the local mayor and police chief and power brokers.
Police are already backing down from personally deciding to be judge, jury and executioner on the spur of the moment. It's going to get better. I don't like losing my privacy, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.
You don't get it. First, the argument was that there is no difference between BSD and GPL, about as dumb a statement as can be made. Second, the author of the code gets to set the license. If Tivo doesn't like the license, they can use other code, either free and inferior, or proprietary and expensive and quite possibly very hard to customize.
Them what writes the code sets the license. Them what uses the code have to obey the license. Them what don't like that can whine on slashdot and make no difference.
Have you been sleeping under a rock? BSD code changes can be distributed as binaries with no recourse to seeing the source. GPL code changes MUST be distributed with the binaries or at least made accessible. There is a HUGE difference.
As for your personal opinion of the FSF, hoo hah. If you don't like the GPL, don't use the code. He who writes the code chooses the license. You are more than welcome to say in your church of copyright ignoramusses.
Who cares? Linux is not a popularity contest. I use Linux BECAUSE OF the GPL and BECAUSE it is good, not because big corps are using it to save development time and money.
As has been pointed out many times, with the BSD license, any changes you contribute back can be used by your competitors without them having to contribute back in turn. Thus you are giving your competitors a free ride if they are inclined towards the selfish side.
Of course this only applies if you contribute changes back. The penalty for not doing so is the increased hassle over time of keeping your private changes in sync with the mother lode.
As many others are pointing out, Tivo chose Linux because its code base suited them better. They wanted the superior capabilities of Linux for their business, whether because of drivers or license I know not, but they liked it better. Now if they don't like that, they can go with an "inferior" choice like BSD, or they can pay for a proprietary OS which may be better or worse technically. But the technically "superior" free choice now has a cost. Their free ride is over. Cry me a river.
Slashdot Mirror
It matters in a test stand, in a building, with people and equipment all around.
Oh grumble grumble, I have to type this too kill time because slashdot has identified me as a speedup cowboy.
Is this enough time yet?
No it wasn't. piddle piddle widdle widdle a widdle mo time fo a widdle piddle cowboy.
What's a headline?
/.
I'm not used to all these new fangled additions to
You stay the hell away from my dick with that shit.
You stay the hell away from my shit with that dick.
This is what always cracks me up about gun advocates--they equate the right to carry with freedom.
Then you don't understand the changes wrought by firearms. Especially the cartridge gun -- it truly was the great equalizer. Consider swords or bow and arrow -- they took immense practice to become good at. Guns don't. Flintlocks were good enough for starters -- look at the US war of independence, or the war of 1812, which pitted farmers against professional soldiers. That access to power, to keeping control of one's own affairs without the bye your leave of the local noble, is what was equalized. If peasants in the 1500s had had guns, they wouldn't have remained peasants for long.
It is the equalizing aspect that counts, not any perceived right to carry. That effect is of diminishing importance these days, being replaced by the web as the great equalizer, but the historical importance of guns in general, and cartridge guns in particular, cannot be exagerated.
Otherwise I'd be correct, but since I'm not, I owe you an apology. You'll probably have to sue to actually collect, though. Nyaah nyaah :-)
The MAFIAA tactic is to threaten to sue, extortion being the common term for this. What they ought to do is get their proof in the form of connection logs, etc, either sue a John Doe and win and then find out the identity, or show some sort of probable cause and let the university / ISP privately contact the John Doe, who could then hire a lawyer to fight, anonymously, disclosure of the logs.
A. He says himself he is not talking about manned space activities, that he thinks that is pretty damned good, he likes it, and colonization might even be practical within the solar system.
B. It sure seems to have touched a nerve within you. Have you somehow transferred your thoughts to me and think that I am one of those fucking morons who favor manned space exploration? For the record, I think manned space exploration is for tourists and ought to be financed by tourists, not by my tax dollars, not at the expense of robotic space exploration, and that President Bush's return to Mars program is just another example of a fucking moron's mind at work.
I mean, did you even RTFA to skip A, or were you just so bent out of shape by your confusion over B that you jumped to a conclusion?
Nothing particularly interesting here; he simply calculates a floor to the energy required to move colonizers to nearby stars and concludes it takes a lot and won't happen with today's technology.
I am not sure why he even wasted his time doing it and setting it in HTML. I don't think anyone has seriously proposed such a journey. It's about as useful as Zak the caveman figuring out how much food he'd need to carry on his log to cross the Pacific and live to tell about it.
I don't think any sci-fi stories postulating generation ships ever even worried about the technology needed.
What is he trying to prove?
Consumer Reports.
It may not be worded politely, but Mercedes and BMW have lousy reliability records and are among the most expensive to repair. Detroit as better reliability, for Pete's sake.
And passing spam -- o eeewwww yuck!
OMG I hadn't thought of that .... one botnet to rule them all. Or maybe all the botnets got together to share the NSA botnet so none of them could take over all the others.
Criminy thsi is skk k kk ary.
A. Everyone "knows" that the NSA is doing its utmost to listen to all internet traffic.
B. It would do the NSA no good to listen to everything without filtering out the 99.999% which is irrelevant. Ergo, they must have pattern filters.
C. Botnets must be a big part of the filtered traffic.
D. NSA must be aware of botnets, their patterns, their control channels, their zombie elements.
E. Yet botnets continue.
F. The NSA must want them to continue unmolested.
The NSA knows how botnets work, and could hijack them at any time. The only reason to do so is to keep them in reserve for their own use.
I suggest the NSA would hijack botnets for counterattack if the US nets were attacked by another country.
That's my conspiracy theory, I hope you like it.
Are you seriously admitting you have no sense of humor?
Transparent Society is the only work I know of, and as I said, it seems pretty bloated, as if the contract called for a book and he had to pad it out. The basic thesis is easy to explain and maybe no one else thinks they can do better.
...
You are right about blackmail and social evolution. As a kid, I used to wonder what a world of telepaths would be like, where no one had secrets. It would make birthdays less fun, those kind of intentional and welcome disceptions in general, and life would lose a lot of spice. But all sorts of accidental and intentional disagreements would be impossible. The Web Wide World won't quite to that, but it will sure eliminate most of it. I am sure some replacement for surprise presents will show up. That's part of the anticipatory drool
Yess! That's what David Brin wrote in Transparent Society, I think it was called. The book is way too long, could've been shortened tremendously, but his basic thesis is that privacy is disappearing, the only question is how to deal with it. It will get to the point where enough people will be walking around with cameras streaming live that mugging one or committing any crime nearby will be shown to the world as it happens. What we don't want is police controlling the cameras; who will watch the watchers? At the very least, you want all police cameras available to the public at all hours, and you also want cameras in the police monitoring room. But that's all moot if every citizen has their own cameras.
Part of me is horrified at the lack of privacy, but the freedom it will simultaneously bring practically makes me drool with anticipation. The worst thing about peasants under the heel of the aristocracy was the waste of talent because that talent would have undermined those in power. I am convinced that one of the reasons for the US rapid growth economically in the late 1800s was precisely because the gun leveled the playing field, and suspect that a lot of gun control, besides being racist (most early gun control was aimed at free blacks), was a reaction to the very idea that the common man could have as much individual power and freedom as the rich and powerful. When the common man suddenly finds he doesn't have to kowtow, it frees his mind to more than just robbing banks. I really look forward to the rich and powerful losing so much more of their control over society. I include here all advocacy groups, where pro- or anti-abortion, pro- or anti-choose-your-religion, all of them.
Copy machines and faxes helped break up the Soviet empire. I wonder what ubiquitous web cams will do. It's going to be an unstoppable revolution.
It's like turning over a rock and watching critters scurry away, or turning on a light and watching cockroaches run for cover. Your first impression is that all these critters just magically appeared, but in a few seconds they will be gone. They were there all along, you just didn't know it.
The bad guys are losing places to hide their malfeasance. Turn over enough rocks, open up enough drawers, the critters eventualy run out of hidey holes.
It is my belief that police like nebulous laws, or maybe I should say, the powers that be like the police to enforce nebulous laws. It all comes down to how to intimidate people -- if you can charge them with something nebulous like disturbing the peace, it doesn't matter if it sticks or not. A variation on that old saying to kill them all and let God sort them out -- just arrest them all and let the station or DA sort it out.
There will be a day, 10 or 20 years from now, when there will be no privacy left. Cameras will be so cheap and plentiful and ubiquitous that, just as in Diamond Age, even the insides of homes and offices will be on the internet. I consider this the same mixed blessing as the invention of guns, specifically cartridge guns. They level the playing field. It makes it incredibly harder for the rich to control the poor, for the aristocracy to control the peasants. As much as I dislike the idea of someone watching me take a dump, the reality is that very few people would want to. Faced with zillions of cameras to choose from, the vast majority will watch the rich and powerful rather then me. Paris Hilton will certainly have a ton of watchers, but there will also be watchers for Donald Trump and George Bush and the local mayor and police chief and power brokers.
Police are already backing down from personally deciding to be judge, jury and executioner on the spur of the moment. It's going to get better. I don't like losing my privacy, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.
Ubetcha.
You don't get it. First, the argument was that there is no difference between BSD and GPL, about as dumb a statement as can be made. Second, the author of the code gets to set the license. If Tivo doesn't like the license, they can use other code, either free and inferior, or proprietary and expensive and quite possibly very hard to customize.
Them what writes the code sets the license. Them what uses the code have to obey the license. Them what don't like that can whine on slashdot and make no difference.
Have you been sleeping under a rock? BSD code changes can be distributed as binaries with no recourse to seeing the source. GPL code changes MUST be distributed with the binaries or at least made accessible. There is a HUGE difference.
As for your personal opinion of the FSF, hoo hah. If you don't like the GPL, don't use the code. He who writes the code chooses the license. You are more than welcome to say in your church of copyright ignoramusses.
Oh well, that'll probably not teach me :-)
Who cares? Linux is not a popularity contest. I use Linux BECAUSE OF the GPL and BECAUSE it is good, not because big corps are using it to save development time and money.
Just in case others don't know (I am guessing you do), PNG = Papua New Guinea.
As has been pointed out many times, with the BSD license, any changes you contribute back can be used by your competitors without them having to contribute back in turn. Thus you are giving your competitors a free ride if they are inclined towards the selfish side.
Of course this only applies if you contribute changes back. The penalty for not doing so is the increased hassle over time of keeping your private changes in sync with the mother lode.
As many others are pointing out, Tivo chose Linux because its code base suited them better. They wanted the superior capabilities of Linux for their business, whether because of drivers or license I know not, but they liked it better. Now if they don't like that, they can go with an "inferior" choice like BSD, or they can pay for a proprietary OS which may be better or worse technically. But the technically "superior" free choice now has a cost. Their free ride is over. Cry me a river.