Until Linus himself comments on this, I'm going to have to assume that this whole thing is a scam, and that their claiming to be acting as "agents of Linus Torvalds" is simply a lie.
It looks like a scam, sounds like a scam, and is spearheaded by a guy who's previous internet comments make him look like a loon.
I seriously doubt that this is in any way legit. Seems like a SCO-like scam, with less finesse and even less of the veneer of respectibility than the SCO scam.
We no longer have slavery (officially) in the United States.... even though slavery was highly profitable.
We also no longer allow 10-year-olds to be worked 12 hours a day in the textile mills.... even though that was also highly profitable.
We also have made it illegal (technically) for large corporations to dump high concentrations of known carcinogens into our rivers and streams... even though these regulations cut into profits.
When your quest for profits starts to infringe on the basic human rights of those around you, then something has gotta give way.
Either you're gonna make less profits, or people are goping to have to give up their human rights so you can go out and buy a second yacht.
Guess which kind of world most people would rather live in?
So, since Human Rights have nothing to do with profit, as you say, then you'd have no problem with investing in a company that (for the sake of argument) used stolen human organs and blood drained from kidnapped orphans to make a profit?
That'd be ok, wouldn't it? Because, as you said, your investments to make profit should be somehow seperated from your feelings on human rights?
Ok, so how about we cut to the chase, then? How about I offer you $1,000,000 tax-free (pure PROIFIT!!!) for your wife and daughters, so they can be used in a fatal and painful medical experiment?
That should be cool with you, shouldn't it, since you are a guy who likes to seperate his financial considerations from his morality?
They have a word for people who place profitabiliy and money above concerns of human rights and basic morality.
Within 12 miles of my house, I know of at least 3 bordellos/massage parlors/whorehouses that are pretty much openly run by various Vietnamese criminal gangs, and which have been in continuous operation for over ten years.
And those are just the ones that I know about. I assume that there have to be hundreds of others that I don't know about.
Now, if *I* know about these places, just from hearing it on the grapevine, then why is it that the places haven't been discovered and shut down?
Um... obviously because they pay their protection money to the local authorities on time.
What these fools who are lambasting the video game industry for its content are *trying* to do, is figure out a way to extort protection money out of legitimate bussinesses......I'm sure the punchline to this whole incident will be when the anti-video-game crusaders set up some sort of "watchdog group" that (for a very hefty fee) will give a seal of approval to games coming out.
Follow the money. It's probably all about extortion.
It's amazing to me how many people will swallow the corporate PR that is fed to them without a peep... but as soon as a person says something that goes against the corporate PR machine, they're suddenly disparaged.
It's a sad, sad, comment on Human nature. Sort of like the "house slaves" back in the plantation era, who felt the need to argue for their master's rights.
If the person who posted the grandparent post had issues with the article's logic or reasoning, that'd be one thing. But the grandparent poster didn't even care to address the issues involved, but simply reflexively defended his masters.
Cat Byte said: Why do people not count Hussein as a terrorist?
Because the English language has a hundred thousand words in it. We have specific words for things. You could make the case for Sadaam being a dictator, a megalomaniac, a mass murderer, and quite a few other things. "Terrorist", however, has specific conotations that simply do not apply to Sadaam Huessein.
Cat Bytes said: Chemical weapons, torture, murder, mass graves, invading a neighboring country then burning the oil fields as he left...the list goes on and on. He was a terrorist.
Chemical weapons. Check. We and the British sold him the precursor chemicals to make those weapons, and looked the other way when he used them on Kurdish civilians and on Iranian soldiers.
Torture. Check. Sadaam was a bastard. However, he never did boil people alive.... like the current leader of Uzbekistan who we rent an airbase from.
Mass Graves. Check. Like the mass graves that half the Taliban taken prisoner by our allies in the Northern Alliance ended up in?
Invading a neighboring country. Check. Like when he launched a war of aggression on Iran, with the support and backing of the US?
Cat Bytes said: How many hundreds of thousands of murders do you have to commit before people think you're a bad guy these days?
Good question.
Call me old fashioned, but in my opinion, murdering just ONE innocent and defenseless person makes you a bad man.
How many unarmed, unindicted, and untried prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo have died during interogation?
Is the number greater than zero?
Cat Bytes said: And if the polls are showing people thinking Bush is "evil" I'm losing faith in the mindset of the left even more than ever.
Now, hold on. A minute ago, you asked "how many thousands of murders do you have to commit to be considered a bad man?".
Well, how is it that you can pose that question in one paragraph, and then wonder why people dislike Bush in the very next paragraph?
Please don't take this response as any kind of flame, and please don't take what I'm saying as some sort of smarmy putdown.
I've seen your posts on Slashdot, and you make a lot of good points. I can't even argue with anything in the parent post, and the great-grandparent post that you wrote. But even so, you're looking at the situation from the wrong angle.
You're seeing the situation that most woorking people find themselves in, seeing all the crappy social norms that are boxing you personally in, pointing at the way out of the box... and then crawling back into the box and closing the lid on yourself.
Looking at things from the angle that you are, it wouldn't matter if you won the lottery tommorrow morning. A million dollars in your bank account, with no self-directed goal or purpose in life, would simply go to fuel a brand new drug habit... like all of the supposedly "succesfull" Hollywood stars who spend their lives in and out of rehab, hopping from one kooky fad religion to another, and marrying and then dumping each other a year later for the amusement of the tabloids. Because they litterally have nothing worthwhile to do with their lives, and lots of money to not do it with.
Life when you have no goals, or purpose, or something that makes you happy, isn't gonna be any different with a fortune in the bank than it is when you're flat broke.
Fix that, and everything else becomes simple in comparison.
Judging from your posts, you can write and tell a story. Maybe that's something you can build on?
I worked at a company doing QA work for a while. Long hours (like 80 hour weeks). Low pay. 30 people crammed into workspaces that more ideally fit 10 or 15 people max.
After a while, crammed in with the same people in close proximity for 6 days out of 7 for weeks on end, the rough edges of everyone's personality starts to grate on your nerves.
Then we started setting up LAN games of Ghost Recon: Desert Seige during the lunch hours. It was great.
For an hour a day, I wasn't a sardined-in cog in a corporate machine... but I was ZANG, mighty hunter of the eviiil otherpeople, ownz0ring each game map with my trusty sniper rifle, or M60 machine gun... striking terror into those unfortunate or foolish enough to be in my path. Lots of adrenaline, and shouting back and forth between sections of the cubes.
Then the lunch hour would end, and it'd be back to checking out a few hundred more entries in the database searching for dupes, and wading through a couple dozen more non-sensical blathering emails from clueless upper management posers.
But, after the massive adrenaline rush and mental escape provided by each day's LAN game, things went smoother.
Personally, I think that there would have been a lot more problems and breakdowns in the work group structure if there HADN'T been the "release" of video-game violence every day at lunch time.
Same thing with kids and video-game violence. Better that the local 16-year-olds be all at home playing at being imaginary thugs in GTA, than be hanging out bored in front of the 7-11 at 10 at night looking for something to do.
How would I put a "spin" on the mandatory back alley chainsaw assasination mission in GTA?
I can think of two ways right off the bat:
1) There is no chainsaw. There is no back alley. There were no assasinations. It's a game. None of it is real.
or...
3) You *are* the main character, and you *are* commiting horribly unspeakable crimes, but it's solely for the purpose of rising to the top of the criminal underworld as part of a long-running secret operation to completely dismantle the criminal organization afterwards, so that evil things like what you yourself are commiting will never again be possible. You selflessly commit chainsaw assasinations, in order to forever end the horrific practice of... chainsaw assasinations.;)
His observations on how it's not the game itself, but what you bring to the game, is right on the money.
As an example, how many people have played Civilization III?
So... what's it about?
Is it about a brave tribe of people who are struggling to establish a civilization under your benevolent leadership, and advance their learning and culture while they peacefully expand, only to be constantly attacked by less enlightened and/or more warlike cultures?
Or is it about a tribe of people who have fallen under your evil domination, who you will then guide forward through the ages in an orgy of conquest, until you stand astride the Earth as its sole Overlord?
Or is it just a bunch of pixels being moved around by the in-game AI, and you're a video gamer with a few hours to kill, amusing yourself by trying to defeat the AI opponents in the game?
It can be any one of those things, depending upon the imagination of the player.
"These are the voyages of the ISS Enterprise. To seek out new life, new slave races, and to boldly expand the Terran Empire."
Throw in some uniforms that vaguely resemble TOS uniforms, but with more militaristic flair. Oh, and the pain booth and agonizers worn by the crewmembers.
Then, tell the alternate versions of all the best shows from TOS.
And remember to have a "security chief" ala Sulu, and cast someone resembling a younger William Shatner as the Captain.
Geomon said: So you only like free speech when it agrees with you?
Um, what in the world are you basing that statement on? Are you actually responding to my post?
Let me break it down for you:
1. I expressed the opinion that you were using a word incorrectly, and outside of the commonly-understood usage.
2. I posted a quite long and detailed explanation of the reasons behind my opinion, and posted corroborating historical facts.
3. I suggested that you might want to use the correct word in the future.
4. I used the words "please", and "thank you", and otherwise remained calm and polite.
So, how'd you make the leap from that, to this new talk of your free-speech rights being violated? You're free to say anything you like, and I never suggested otherwise.
Feel free to say "socialist" when you really mean "fascist", or even when you really mean "authoritarian". Just because these words all have specific understood meanings, doesn't mean you can't call them any old thing you like. You're free to do that, just as I'm free to point out that you're wrong:)
There was another political philosophy, developed by Bennito Mussolini, that fits what you are trying to describe much better.
Bennito Mussolini, when asked to describe his philosophy, described it as follows:
"Fascism could better be referred to as Corporatism, because it is a system whereby the Corporations and the State share power."
Fascism is a system whereby the state directs the overall direction of the economy, but leaves the ownership of industry in a select few private hands. Those who own factories that prefer to work in a strategic direction other than that mandated by the State, will be arrested, and their property siezed and given to private owners who will get with the program. While such a system may bear superficial resemblance to a "free market" system because of private ownership, it is not a free market system because of the cooertion placed upon the putative "owners" by the State.
In addition (see parrent poster's comments on "Socialism" below), many people become confused by the fact that another well-known Fascist government, that of 1930s-1940s Germany, was run by a political party known by the accronym "NSDAP", which stood for National Socialist German Worker's Party. Despite the name, the NSDAP (Nazis) were not Socialists, but modeled their political party very closely after Mussolini's Fascist Party.
The primary reason for the Nazi Party having the word "Socialist" in it's name, was that it's Leader and the person most closely affiliated with the Nazi party in modern memory, Adolf Hitler, was not a founding member of that party.
He was originally a veteran of the first world war, who was sent by the German Army to spy on the small bavarian group that was calling itself the "National Socialist German Worker's Party", because socialist groups had been fomenting rebellion in the post world war one chaos in Germany. Hitler reported back that the group was no threat, and that the name they had chosen was a misnomer.... and then proceded to use his gift of oratory to seize control of the small group and expand it.
The group, despite it's name, was avowedly anti-Socialist and anti-Communist... they also later became involved in some unpleasantness involving mass genocide and the almost complete destruction of large parts of Europe.
So, to correct your statement in the post above mine, please say "Fucking Fascist Bastards!" when refering to the RIAA and MPAA, as "Fascist" is the word that applies, not Socialist.
Unless those people who don't use computers ALSO don't eat food that is shipped via large freight companies in trucks, and ALSO don't use electricity from a central grid, and ALSO don't depend on services like 911, then the loss of computers would seriously screw them.
Imagine a Winter without a centrally-managed electrical grid, and without shipments of fuel.
What kind of idiot is going to answer "Uh, no, but I've used OpenOffice.org" when asked if they can used Word?
Just say yes, and figure out the differences as you go.
And "Can you use XP?"... what the heck kind of question is that?
What are they asking? Can you find the powerswitch on a computer? Can you press a mousebutton? Can you figure out that the folder marked "My Documents" has documents in it?
You're right.
In a humane world, if people discovered a sheep with a human mind, they'd treat it well... as if it were a person.
Unfortunately, we live in THIS world... where even actual humans have a hard time getting treated as if they were people.
*sigh*
It is common courtesy to give credit where credit is due.
RMS was the visionary who started the free software movement, and the GNU toolset is what allowed the kernel made by Linus to actually DO anything.
Even if you're not courteous enough to actually give credit to those whom it's due... at least don't be so ignoble as to try to take it away when someone else acknowledges the people who made things possible.
It just makes you look like a discourteous and classless ass.
You misinterpreted what they meant by "open minded".
You, mistakenly, thought that "open minded" meant having an open mind, and being open to new ideas.
What *they* meant by "open minded" was that they'd no longer accuse you of witchcraft for being different from your neighbors, or throw you in prison for the crime of "blasphemy", or just come by and burn down your house because you're a filthy non-believer.
The fact that they've allowed you to live, even though you're obviously some sort of eviiil horrible pagan-creationist science-worshipper, shows how open-minded that religious zealots in America have become lately.:)
Slashdot Mirror
They decided to switch from apple ibooks, to machines made by Dell... which is why they had 1000 Apple ibooks to sell.
/hugs my powerbook. //it's shiiiiny. :)
After seeing how popular the ibooks are, I wonder if they'll rethink the change to PCs?
Until Linus himself comments on this, I'm going to have to assume that this whole thing is a scam, and that their claiming to be acting as "agents of Linus Torvalds" is simply a lie.
It looks like a scam, sounds like a scam, and is spearheaded by a guy who's previous internet comments make him look like a loon.
I seriously doubt that this is in any way legit. Seems like a SCO-like scam, with less finesse and even less of the veneer of respectibility than the SCO scam.
We no longer have slavery (officially) in the United States.... even though slavery was highly profitable.
We also no longer allow 10-year-olds to be worked 12 hours a day in the textile mills.... even though that was also highly profitable.
We also have made it illegal (technically) for large corporations to dump high concentrations of known carcinogens into our rivers and streams... even though these regulations cut into profits.
When your quest for profits starts to infringe on the basic human rights of those around you, then something has gotta give way.
Either you're gonna make less profits, or people are goping to have to give up their human rights so you can go out and buy a second yacht.
Guess which kind of world most people would rather live in?
So, since Human Rights have nothing to do with profit, as you say, then you'd have no problem with investing in a company that (for the sake of argument) used stolen human organs and blood drained from kidnapped orphans to make a profit?
That'd be ok, wouldn't it? Because, as you said, your investments to make profit should be somehow seperated from your feelings on human rights?
Ok, so how about we cut to the chase, then? How about I offer you $1,000,000 tax-free (pure PROIFIT!!!) for your wife and daughters, so they can be used in a fatal and painful medical experiment?
That should be cool with you, shouldn't it, since you are a guy who likes to seperate his financial considerations from his morality?
They have a word for people who place profitabiliy and money above concerns of human rights and basic morality.
We call those people sociopaths.
The Warsaw Pact is no longer in effect.
Especially since several of the signatory nations no longer even exist. (Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany).
So, if the definition of "Second World" is membership in the Warsaw Pact, then there are no longer any countries that fit that definition.
I live near San Francisco.
..I'm sure the punchline to this whole incident will be when the anti-video-game crusaders set up some sort of "watchdog group" that (for a very hefty fee) will give a seal of approval to games coming out.
Within 12 miles of my house, I know of at least 3 bordellos/massage parlors/whorehouses that are pretty much openly run by various Vietnamese criminal gangs, and which have been in continuous operation for over ten years.
And those are just the ones that I know about. I assume that there have to be hundreds of others that I don't know about.
Now, if *I* know about these places, just from hearing it on the grapevine, then why is it that the places haven't been discovered and shut down?
Um... obviously because they pay their protection money to the local authorities on time.
What these fools who are lambasting the video game industry for its content are *trying* to do, is figure out a way to extort protection money out of legitimate bussinesses....
Follow the money. It's probably all about extortion.
Oh, how I wish that I had some mod points today.
It's amazing to me how many people will swallow the corporate PR that is fed to them without a peep... but as soon as a person says something that goes against the corporate PR machine, they're suddenly disparaged.
It's a sad, sad, comment on Human nature. Sort of like the "house slaves" back in the plantation era, who felt the need to argue for their master's rights.
If the person who posted the grandparent post had issues with the article's logic or reasoning, that'd be one thing. But the grandparent poster didn't even care to address the issues involved, but simply reflexively defended his masters.
Sad.
Cat Byte said: Why do people not count Hussein as a terrorist?
Because the English language has a hundred thousand words in it. We have specific words for things. You could make the case for Sadaam being a dictator, a megalomaniac, a mass murderer, and quite a few other things. "Terrorist", however, has specific conotations that simply do not apply to Sadaam Huessein.
Cat Bytes said: Chemical weapons, torture, murder, mass graves, invading a neighboring country then burning the oil fields as he left...the list goes on and on. He was a terrorist.
Chemical weapons. Check. We and the British sold him the precursor chemicals to make those weapons, and looked the other way when he used them on Kurdish civilians and on Iranian soldiers.
Torture. Check. Sadaam was a bastard. However, he never did boil people alive.... like the current leader of Uzbekistan who we rent an airbase from.
Mass Graves. Check. Like the mass graves that half the Taliban taken prisoner by our allies in the Northern Alliance ended up in?
Invading a neighboring country. Check. Like when he launched a war of aggression on Iran, with the support and backing of the US?
Cat Bytes said: How many hundreds of thousands of murders do you have to commit before people think you're a bad guy these days?
Good question.
Call me old fashioned, but in my opinion, murdering just ONE innocent and defenseless person makes you a bad man.
How many unarmed, unindicted, and untried prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo have died during interogation?
Is the number greater than zero?
Cat Bytes said: And if the polls are showing people thinking Bush is "evil" I'm losing faith in the mindset of the left even more than ever.
Now, hold on. A minute ago, you asked "how many thousands of murders do you have to commit to be considered a bad man?".
Well, how is it that you can pose that question in one paragraph, and then wonder why people dislike Bush in the very next paragraph?
Cognitive dissonance much?
The reconstructed neanderthal in the link you provided looks pretty darn human to me.
If there were people like that walking down the street, they'd be pretty hard to tell apart from regular Homo Sapiens.
Please don't take this response as any kind of flame, and please don't take what I'm saying as some sort of smarmy putdown.
I've seen your posts on Slashdot, and you make a lot of good points. I can't even argue with anything in the parent post, and the great-grandparent post that you wrote. But even so, you're looking at the situation from the wrong angle.
You're seeing the situation that most woorking people find themselves in, seeing all the crappy social norms that are boxing you personally in, pointing at the way out of the box... and then crawling back into the box and closing the lid on yourself.
Looking at things from the angle that you are, it wouldn't matter if you won the lottery tommorrow morning. A million dollars in your bank account, with no self-directed goal or purpose in life, would simply go to fuel a brand new drug habit... like all of the supposedly "succesfull" Hollywood stars who spend their lives in and out of rehab, hopping from one kooky fad religion to another, and marrying and then dumping each other a year later for the amusement of the tabloids. Because they litterally have nothing worthwhile to do with their lives, and lots of money to not do it with.
Life when you have no goals, or purpose, or something that makes you happy, isn't gonna be any different with a fortune in the bank than it is when you're flat broke.
Fix that, and everything else becomes simple in comparison.
Judging from your posts, you can write and tell a story. Maybe that's something you can build on?
I worked at a company doing QA work for a while. Long hours (like 80 hour weeks). Low pay. 30 people crammed into workspaces that more ideally fit 10 or 15 people max.
After a while, crammed in with the same people in close proximity for 6 days out of 7 for weeks on end, the rough edges of everyone's personality starts to grate on your nerves.
Then we started setting up LAN games of Ghost Recon: Desert Seige during the lunch hours. It was great.
For an hour a day, I wasn't a sardined-in cog in a corporate machine... but I was ZANG, mighty hunter of the eviiil otherpeople, ownz0ring each game map with my trusty sniper rifle, or M60 machine gun... striking terror into those unfortunate or foolish enough to be in my path. Lots of adrenaline, and shouting back and forth between sections of the cubes.
Then the lunch hour would end, and it'd be back to checking out a few hundred more entries in the database searching for dupes, and wading through a couple dozen more non-sensical blathering emails from clueless upper management posers.
But, after the massive adrenaline rush and mental escape provided by each day's LAN game, things went smoother.
Personally, I think that there would have been a lot more problems and breakdowns in the work group structure if there HADN'T been the "release" of video-game violence every day at lunch time.
Same thing with kids and video-game violence. Better that the local 16-year-olds be all at home playing at being imaginary thugs in GTA, than be hanging out bored in front of the 7-11 at 10 at night looking for something to do.
How would I put a "spin" on the mandatory back alley chainsaw assasination mission in GTA?
;)
I can think of two ways right off the bat:
1) There is no chainsaw. There is no back alley. There were no assasinations. It's a game. None of it is real.
or...
3) You *are* the main character, and you *are* commiting horribly unspeakable crimes, but it's solely for the purpose of rising to the top of the criminal underworld as part of a long-running secret operation to completely dismantle the criminal organization afterwards, so that evil things like what you yourself are commiting will never again be possible. You selflessly commit chainsaw assasinations, in order to forever end the horrific practice of... chainsaw assasinations.
Either one of those two will do.
His observations on how it's not the game itself, but what you bring to the game, is right on the money.
As an example, how many people have played Civilization III?
So... what's it about?
Is it about a brave tribe of people who are struggling to establish a civilization under your benevolent leadership, and advance their learning and culture while they peacefully expand, only to be constantly attacked by less enlightened and/or more warlike cultures?
Or is it about a tribe of people who have fallen under your evil domination, who you will then guide forward through the ages in an orgy of conquest, until you stand astride the Earth as its sole Overlord?
Or is it just a bunch of pixels being moved around by the in-game AI, and you're a video gamer with a few hours to kill, amusing yourself by trying to defeat the AI opponents in the game?
It can be any one of those things, depending upon the imagination of the player.
Sorry...
I read through the page, and didn't see the links, and then posted on impulse.
Failure to recognize the links for what they were may be somehow related to my only getting two hours of sleep in the past day and a half.
A downloadable PDF or HTML version of the book would be cool.
Ghost Recon is much better than Counterstrike.... and it is available on OSX.
That's sort of cool.
:)
Now I want talking benches
Something like...
"These are the voyages of the ISS Enterprise. To seek out new life, new slave races, and to boldly expand the Terran Empire."
Throw in some uniforms that vaguely resemble TOS uniforms, but with more militaristic flair. Oh, and the pain booth and agonizers worn by the crewmembers.
Then, tell the alternate versions of all the best shows from TOS.
And remember to have a "security chief" ala Sulu, and cast someone resembling a younger William Shatner as the Captain.
THAT would actually be sort of cool.
Geomon said: So you only like free speech when it agrees with you?
Um, what in the world are you basing that statement on? Are you actually responding to my post?
Let me break it down for you:
1. I expressed the opinion that you were using a word incorrectly, and outside of the commonly-understood usage.
2. I posted a quite long and detailed explanation of the reasons behind my opinion, and posted corroborating historical facts.
3. I suggested that you might want to use the correct word in the future.
4. I used the words "please", and "thank you", and otherwise remained calm and polite.
So, how'd you make the leap from that, to this new talk of your free-speech rights being violated? You're free to say anything you like, and I never suggested otherwise.
Feel free to say "socialist" when you really mean "fascist", or even when you really mean "authoritarian". Just because these words all have specific understood meanings, doesn't mean you can't call them any old thing you like. You're free to do that, just as I'm free to point out that you're wrong :)
Um.. have a nice day, and all that :)
"Socialist" is not the word you are looking for.
:)
There was another political philosophy, developed by Bennito Mussolini, that fits what you are trying to describe much better.
Bennito Mussolini, when asked to describe his philosophy, described it as follows:
"Fascism could better be referred to as Corporatism, because it is a system whereby the Corporations and the State share power."
Fascism is a system whereby the state directs the overall direction of the economy, but leaves the ownership of industry in a select few private hands. Those who own factories that prefer to work in a strategic direction other than that mandated by the State, will be arrested, and their property siezed and given to private owners who will get with the program. While such a system may bear superficial resemblance to a "free market" system because of private ownership, it is not a free market system because of the cooertion placed upon the putative "owners" by the State.
In addition (see parrent poster's comments on "Socialism" below), many people become confused by the fact that another well-known Fascist government, that of 1930s-1940s Germany, was run by a political party known by the accronym "NSDAP", which stood for National Socialist German Worker's Party. Despite the name, the NSDAP (Nazis) were not Socialists, but modeled their political party very closely after Mussolini's Fascist Party.
The primary reason for the Nazi Party having the word "Socialist" in it's name, was that it's Leader and the person most closely affiliated with the Nazi party in modern memory, Adolf Hitler, was not a founding member of that party.
He was originally a veteran of the first world war, who was sent by the German Army to spy on the small bavarian group that was calling itself the "National Socialist German Worker's Party", because socialist groups had been fomenting rebellion in the post world war one chaos in Germany. Hitler reported back that the group was no threat, and that the name they had chosen was a misnomer.... and then proceded to use his gift of oratory to seize control of the small group and expand it.
The group, despite it's name, was avowedly anti-Socialist and anti-Communist... they also later became involved in some unpleasantness involving mass genocide and the almost complete destruction of large parts of Europe.
So, to correct your statement in the post above mine, please say "Fucking Fascist Bastards!" when refering to the RIAA and MPAA, as "Fascist" is the word that applies, not Socialist.
Thanks
Unless those people who don't use computers ALSO don't eat food that is shipped via large freight companies in trucks, and ALSO don't use electricity from a central grid, and ALSO don't depend on services like 911, then the loss of computers would seriously screw them.
Imagine a Winter without a centrally-managed electrical grid, and without shipments of fuel.
What kind of idiot is going to answer "Uh, no, but I've used OpenOffice.org" when asked if they can used Word?
Just say yes, and figure out the differences as you go.
And "Can you use XP?"... what the heck kind of question is that?
What are they asking? Can you find the powerswitch on a computer? Can you press a mousebutton? Can you figure out that the folder marked "My Documents" has documents in it?
It'd be a sad, sad, day if someone answered "No."
You're right. In a humane world, if people discovered a sheep with a human mind, they'd treat it well... as if it were a person. Unfortunately, we live in THIS world... where even actual humans have a hard time getting treated as if they were people. *sigh*
It is common courtesy to give credit where credit is due.
RMS was the visionary who started the free software movement, and the GNU toolset is what allowed the kernel made by Linus to actually DO anything.
Even if you're not courteous enough to actually give credit to those whom it's due... at least don't be so ignoble as to try to take it away when someone else acknowledges the people who made things possible.
It just makes you look like a discourteous and classless ass.
You misinterpreted what they meant by "open minded".
:)
You, mistakenly, thought that "open minded" meant having an open mind, and being open to new ideas.
What *they* meant by "open minded" was that they'd no longer accuse you of witchcraft for being different from your neighbors, or throw you in prison for the crime of "blasphemy", or just come by and burn down your house because you're a filthy non-believer.
The fact that they've allowed you to live, even though you're obviously some sort of eviiil horrible pagan-creationist science-worshipper, shows how open-minded that religious zealots in America have become lately.