I don't think you are ever going to get homosexuals teenage boys to fit into a group of paramilitary heterosexual teenage boys, regardless of my position or the position of the BSA.
I think you're still buying into outdated stereotypes about homosexuals. Sure, some intentionally act effeminately, but certainly not all. I also know two that can kick my butt, and I'm not exactly an easy mark. There are a lot of homosexuals these days that are into weight lifting and martial arts... a lot of persecuted cultures seem to do that. From there, a lot of them become interested in guns, archery, camping, etc., just the things the the boy scouts tend to teach.
Certainly, children tend to be cruel and pick on those different than them. In 1974 many boy scout leaders argued that black children could not be integrated into "mixed race" boy scout troops because the white kids would not accept blacks as equals. To some degree, they were and are still correct. But for the most part blacks kids are now accepted by the majority of their white peers. Until you allow kids to socialize together and overcome their prejudices, all you're doing is making the prejudice worse by promoting and exploiting ignorance.
After considering the issue this evening, I believe the wisest course would be for the BSA to officially change its stance to allow anyone in regardless of religious affiliation (or lack thereof) or sexual orientation. The situation will sort itself out socially.
I applaud your position. I have every confidence such a move by the scouts would eventually "sort itself out" just as it did with the issue of race.
What about japan? They have extremely strict gun laws, as far as i remember, and very low rates of violent crime compared to other countries.
Yup. There are also countries with very high gun ownership rates like Norway, that have incredibly low rates of violent crime. That's why I said strict gun control laws tend to produce a very slight increase in violent crime. There are other factors that correlate very strongly with rates of violent crime, however, and where these are different you'll see drastically different rates regardless of gun control laws. The primary one is wealth disparity, which is why socialized healthcare funded with a tax on the very wealthy is likely to greatly decrease violent crime in the US, much more so than any gun control legislation. The correlation, however, is harder to understand so politicians get more mileage out of an emotional appeal about gun control (pro or con).
"Strict gun-control, stupid "hate speech" laws" Only an american could list those as bad things.... *sigh*...
Declaring those to be problems with the EU is fairly idiotic, since those are by no means uniform in the EU. That said, it is easy to take issue with both of them.
The best studies of gun control indicate strict gun control laws tend to result in a very slight overall increase in murder and other violent crime (which is what is the normal justification for such laws). Anyone who does their research will see this issue has been well researched at this point in both cause and effect studies and correlations between laws and crime levels normalized for other factors. The only people who believe otherwise are people with an agenda or who buy into intentionally misleading "gun violence" studies that misstate the problem. Still, these laws persist in the US as well as some of Europe.
As for "hate speech" that is simply value judgement as to how to mitigate the conflicting rights of two groups. These laws exist in parts of the US as well.
I did not think it was necessary to say this on Slashdot, but for your benefit I will point out that I was using the word "normal" in a statistical sense. Homosexuality is not the normal condition. This is not to say it is not a natural condition, which of course it is.
Being chinese american is not statistically "normal" either. It is not the common condition. Thus, the analogy is perfectly appropriate.
Except being black has no bearing on your ability to play with model trains, or anything else. Being homosexual has a large bearing on the ability of the Boy Scouts of America to guide you in the process of growing up to be a homosexual man.
The boy scouts are a camping and paramilitary survivalist organization, not a making heterosexual men organization. Or so they claim. What do you think a "scout" is?
The way you're getting defensive and trying to rationalize away my analogy is interesting. Starting to feel uncomfortable about your prejudice and intolerance? I hope so.
I sympathize with individuals who feel same sex attraction. But I also feel God has plainly stated that sexual relations should be confined within the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman.
So you're promoting specific religious beliefs. Have fun with that. Now tell me, why should someone who does not hold the same beliefs give you free labor so you can spend more money promoting that religion? More importantly, how is it just that the government take my money from me, at gunpoint if need be, and uses it to promote your religion?
Would it be fair if someone taxed you and used that money to promote services for people with last names longer than eight characters. After all, people with short last names are untouchables and don't deserve benefits as many gods have told us.
I think my point was pretty plain. Scouting is a place to help boys grow up to be men. NORMAL men.
And you think being homosexual is abnormal. How about being chinese american? I that normal enough for you? 'Normal' is a subjective term and it is only your opposition to homosexuality that leads you to single out that one subset of society for discrimination.
It would be like going to a model train club and expecting help to build radio controlled airplanes. It's not their forte.
No it would be like going to a government funded model train club while black and expecting to build model trains with everyone else, instead of being told that black kids aren't normal enough to be model train engineers.
I take it you did go out of your way to make waves. I believe the problem is when you stand up and scream you are an atheist and want everyone else to change what they are doing to do it your way, is when there are problems.
This is not at all my personal experience, nor is ti the policy of the BSA. I was a boy scout as a child. At the time, I was an agnostic, with a strong interest in all sorts of religions. I never brought it up at scouts, specifically because it was clear it would be a problem (likely to get me expelled). Our meetings were held at a church and we were asked to help out at official events of that church. Meetings of the group included prayers, vows, and pledges all with christian themes.
I think for the most part when you are "different" from a group of people and you elect to be involved with them. That you will be accepted as long as you try to fit in and look for common ground.
If by "fit in" you mean censor yourself so you never mention any of the topics where you differ from them, ever, even if the topic is brought up. Heck, my girlfriend is leaving her job at a publicly funded university lab right now because she doesn't "fit in" by which I mean she doesn't go to the same church as all of the other people she is working with. Although she's never mentioned her religion, or said a word on the topic, her co-workers have decided at different times that she is muslim and then wiccan and made derogatory comments about both. They also refused to communicate with her to a degree that it interfered with her job (her boss not telling her about meetings).
I mention this because, quite frankly, I'm tired of this sort of bullshit intolerance being given a free pass. People can discriminate all they want at private institutions for all I care. The very instant you start taking federal funding (at a university or the boy scouts) you should be banned from religious discrimination or that funding should be removed.
As opposed to stressing how you are different and they should change who they are, what they have always done, and what they believe so as to make you happy.
Who I am does not matter so much if most people are intolerant jackasses. If they insist on being such, fine, but if they act on it, let them get thier funding from somewhere other than my taxes.
And many private organizations receive federal dollars. For example, every time the Federal Government buys a product from a private company...
Halt! Buying things from private companies/organizations and providing federal grant dollars as donations to private companies/organizations are very different things. I have no problem with the feds buying things from whoever gives them the best deal (with certain limitations). That's very different to just handing away tax dollars they force me to pay, to an organization that promotes a given religion or religious ideal.
The big question here is what happens when the commercial vendors of this stuff are gone?
Commercial vendors will likely never be gone. They'll just be commercial vendors creating OSS instead of closed and proprietary tools.
And think about the IDE situation. Eclipse is a special case that was effectively created by IBM, not some rogue group of "for the people" programmers, but IBM.
I think you're making an incorrect assumption. In my experience, most OSS is done by commercial companies like IBM. Many of them are smaller and make proportional contributions. For the most part though, they're doing it for profit.
So as I understand your theory, you fear that if only OSS solutions are left, they will suck for usability. So IBM has thousands of people using some OSS tool and the usability is poor. Do you think they're going to just ignore that wasted money and not pay someone to improve the usability? Do you think the same is true for all the big and small users of the tool? I don't think so. One or more companies will always step up to improve tools because they need to use those tools to make money and improvements mean more efficient use of workers' time.
The right economic model to deliver this is communism, without currency. No taxes. All contributions to be paid in labour, all people to contribute to each industry that sustains life to the best of their capacity.
Everyone, from the top to the bottom, does their time in the industries that create our food, our shelter, our power, etc.
First, I'm not sure I'm understanding your terminology. Communism (as an economic term) refers to pooled labor and resources within a cell. This cell size can be anything from the atomic family unit, in very minimalist communism, to an entire state, in extreme communism. It sounds to me that what you're describing sounds more like 'socialism' (the economic term) which is resources and labor shared by the entire economy.
I don't think extreme communism or extreme socialism is a viable or sustainable economic model. The problem with your utopian vision is that in order to have everyone working together, there has to be government control over that labor and resources. Even in a pure democracy, this easily leads to a tyranny of the majority, where the masses select subsets of society to do more or less appealing work. Such centralized control almost always devolves into a totalitarian regime, simply because already being centralized it is easier for a totalitarian regime to take over, and lacking the power of money, there are fewer with enough consolidated power to stop it.
You talk about representative power being transferred, but that consolidated power can begin creating its own misinformation and controls. People aren't all brilliant or interested in being informed. A lot are willing to abdicate responsibility to their priest and the resulting decisions are something the rest of us still have to live with. In the US, if we were a strict democracy, blacks would still be slaves, women would not be able to vote, and homosexuality would be illegal... because in each of these cases the majority of the people (as defined at the time) were opposed to allowing minorities to have rights.
Now I've spent time thinking about models for utopian societies and seeing where past attempts have succeeded and failed. I think the real key to a sustainable and ideal economy is moderation. Keep capitalism, socialism, and communism all balanced and directed as they are most effective. I'm all for a a more direct democracy, but not a simple, majority rules one. Rather, think the most sustainable society is one where the socialism is directed to provide for necessitates and to prevent capitalism from resulting in consolidation. That should, in fact, be a primary goal of the government, to prevent wealth from consolidating, especially in ways that are not based solely upon merit (inheritance). I think money is a very useful tool in our society, just not one that should be applied to basic necessities or rights.
A lot of our society's great advances were motivated by self interest and greed and as a society we should exploit that resource. If a woman invents a way to provide cheap power without pollution, well she deserves to be living in luxury the rest of her life. That does not imply that said person's children should not have to work to get luxuries. It does not imply that if a person is average or below average and never comes up with any sort of great idea that they should have to work a thousand times as hard and be constantly stressed as they just try to find enough money to keep their family fed and indoors.
What I find really interesting is that my very moderate position, describing what has really worked to provide the best standards of living elsewhere, is considered radical in the US.
Dell has the bucks and "political" power to get some of the big commercial software packages ported to Linux.
I don't think they have the expertise. I'd bet on Sun, IBM, Sony, or HP before Dell at managing to do this well.
Maybe they can convince Adobe to port all their stuff. If Linux had the Adobe apps (and Flash, for God's sake) and Quicken, that would go a long way to filling the major gaps in the software library.
Adobe is very, very resistant to change. For the most part they seem to have liked and encouraged the Windows monoculture, even going so far as to buy up software companies making good money selling non-Windows solutions and then killing the non-Windows versions. Right now they seem confused as to what to do. MS is bundling more and more competing products with their monopoly and slowly squeezing the life from Adobe's offerings in those markets. At the same time, Apple got tired of Adobe's poor support on OS X and started providing their own competitors, in some cases doing serious damage to Adobe's share in those markets. So Adobe seems to want to punish Apple, by supporting OS X less, and at the same time stop MS from holding all the cards... but they haven't figured out how. Someone there could wise up and launch a company-wide effort towards Linux, but I doubt it. Frankly, I think they're going to lose share on both ends gradually becoming less and less relevant as new companies, Apple, and MS all start eating away at their markets until they collapse and are bought up (probably by MS or less possibly Apple) or they reinvent themselves around whatever products they still make that still have any relevance. Right now, their ability to make strategic decisions seems to be nil.
More likely the gap will be filled when some company invests in Linux native, OSS solutions to compete with Adobe apps.
Of course, there is still the problem of games, but I think that is becoming less-and-less of an issue as consoles take over the market.
I don't think so. The big market for games on the PC is the casual gaming market. The entrance of consoles (okay the Wii) into that market will probably expand the market more than it steals it. That said, the casual gaming market does just fine on OS X, with the Sims and other such huge, sellers. As the Linux market grows, these game makers will target it as well.
Hell, Dell should just *buy* Canonical, and spin off their own version of Linux that fixes all the usability problems that make it not-as-good-as Windows for general desktop use.
You're assuming Dell can buy it. It's a private company founded by a rich 'weirdo' on a mission. It's possible, but by no means a foregone conclusion that Dell could buy it. They'd probably be better off contracting Canonical or IBM or someone to create customized solutions for their systems, at least until they gain some experience.
Apple are far worse than MS in many ways, Microsoft lockin was mainly through technical (e.g changing formats every version) & economic ( offering cheaper OEM versions to MS only shops) means, but Apple go the whole hog and have a stupid legal restrictions too.
Lock-in is annoying, but normally something the market can deal with. The reason we complain about MS's lock-in methods are because they are a way of illegally exploiting their monopoly to hurt software producers in other market segments. So long as Apple doesn't have a monopoly, who cares what lock-in strategies they use?
That said Apple do base a lot of their stuff on OSS software (although they wrap it away and have no intention of open sourcing anything they dont have to).
Actually, Apple releases a lot of stuff as OSS that they don't have to. Darwin, the subsystem for most of their OS, was licensed via the BSD license when they adopted the code. That means they don't have to publish any of it, so long as they give credit (MS adopted BSD code for their networking stack, and never republished it). Apple publishes Darwin and many other chunks of OSS code because they understand the advantages of doing so. Your assertion that they only give back what they have to is not even remotely supportable. They give back what they think will benefit them in the long term.
So while Apple weakening Microsoft's dominance is good, I'm not sure if id rather see apple overloards to Microsoft ones.
If MS's dominance in the desktop OS market can be dropped to 70%-50% the entire industry will change. It will reintroduce competition. Investors will have incentive to dump money into Linux, Solaris, and other competitors because MS won't have the leverage to kill them or artificially break them. MS's inability to break compatibility and this investment will lead to renewed innovation, not the current, stagnant market we're dealing with today. At that point, Apple will have to give customers a better solution than everyone else, or they will not become any sort of "overlord" and probably they will not do so unless they stop bundling their OS and hardware and open source more of their core OS.
I, for one, don't want to see MS lose their dominance to punish them. I want to see the desktop OS market advance again and give me a number of better products and innovative solutions. Whether it is Apple or Canonical or a combination of many vendors that does it (as it almost surely will be) I just want a non-monopolized market and hopefully that will be enough to stop Apple from gaining a monopoly right there.
Actually there is a standardized package format, RPM (or more specificially a restricted supset of RPM that is gauranteed to work with alien) which is compatible with all major distros.
I don't think a program to convert between package formats qualifies as distros supporting that format. In reality, a lot of software comes as Deb or RPM, but not both and that really sucks for end users and developers trying to reach general Linux users.
Almost all developers offer both a tar and source, if you cant install software from one of those two your doing it wrong.
It's not easy enough. Sure I can do it. I do it regularly and it even works, most of the time. As a developer, however, it's a shitty way to get software to normal users, since many can't build and install it without help.
OFC using tars means you lose out on package management but you dont even get that on windows.
So if you lose out on package management, how is it superior to Windows again? More importantly, how is it close ot as useful as GNUStep bundles, like the ones Apple uses?
The fact is package management is a great idea, but current package formats are weak and not standardized. Current package managers suck for many use cases and have to be ignored for much software. And convenience and ease of use for software installation is dreadful on most Linux distros for a large number of use cases. This is simply not a strength of current Linux on the desktop distributions.
Maybe the fact their songs are available DRM-free has something to do with their changing of mind...
Nope. They made their statement about refusing to sell on Tunes 5 months after Apple had started offering DRM-free downloads for EMI, Radiohead's label. Their spokesman said they objected not to DRM, but to Apple refusing to require customers to buy the whole album at once, whereas Apple requires each song to be available for sale individually as well. The quote from their spokesman was:
"iTunes insists that all its albums are sold unbundled, but 7 Digital doesn't. Radiohead prefer to have their albums sold complete. The artist has a choice, and if they feel strongly then we respect that."
What I don't understand: is there any advantage to this box over just having my computer output directly to my HDTV (in my case with HDMI) and using full screen with the streaming player on the Netflix website?
You don't have to have your computer in the same room as your TV. You can use a remote control to select movies, play them, pause, etc.
Are people just too dumb to buy a cable for their computer to output to their HDTV?
Not everyone has or wants to have a computer in their living room, or an extra computer sucking down electricity. It's fine for us geeks, but not necessarily for other people. It's not a matter of being "dumb" just priorities.
While there are over ten thousand titles available, it's possible to get through everything you may really enjoy in just a couple of months. Bold highlights added by me. Is this supposed to be the answer for marathon movie watching couch potatoes?
The implication is not that you can watch 10,000 movies in a couple of months, but that there are very few you're interested in watching. There are 260 movies on my Netflix queue. 25 of those are available from this new device to watch instantly. Of those, I need to remove about 15, which are old TV shows available on Hulu.com for free. The remaining 10 are mostly really old, bad movies that are on there for bad movie nights. Seriously, the selection is awful.
Honestly, I'm not holding my breath. Did you see what apple made of the iphone attempt [slashdot.org]? And it costs $99 to get a cert?
Actually, $99 i pretty low for development fees for cell phones, actually really low. It would be nice if Apple did not charge at all, but I'm not upset either.
Package managers on Linux suck for commercial software developers and as a result are pretty much ignored by commercial developers. You ask most ubuntu people they'll probably tell you it's working as intended. If it's not free it's not GPL & probably not OSS either. Chances are it's a binary blob & that opens up a host of issues. Is it "zealotry" to actually want control over your own computer?
I'm of the opinion that trying to make things hard to do as a security measure, is asinine. People can and still do install "binary blobs" on Linux. They just don't get automated updates to those blobs, so they are more likely to be insecure. They also get people in the habit of running binary installers, which are less secure than a "drag and drop" package that is self contained, like Apple uses. Or, more commonly, people don't install blobs on Linux, they just use Windows instead... which incidentally introduces lots of artificial problems with Windows and ends up hosing networks left and right screwing with people who are using Linux.
Trying to engineer people's behavior by making things people want to do (install closed source games or publishing software) causes a lot more problems than it solves and is wholly ineffective. The proper solution is to make everything users want to do both easy and secure and it's a lot easier to secure closed source software when it is coming from a centrally controlled repository and implementing DRM/registration via an official and OSS channel instead of via dozens of different closed source, proprietary channels. Trying to stop people from running closed source software, is zealotry, by the way. It is trying to impose your decision upon others, despite their wishes, instead of trying to convince them your way is better.
Yeah they're working on it. Did you see the new apt:// protocol [linuxhack3r.com]?
Yeah, there are numerous solutions, but no standard and nothing implemented by multiple distros (who can't even standardize on a package format I might mention). So far the most common workflow for installing software (research on Web then install based upon the info found) is still pretty mythical. A few developers have Web pages that will allow for fairly easy installation, if you happen to be using the right distro, otherwise, it's worse than Windows.
Makes sense? Why? Apple/AT&T says the data plan is unlimited. Give me my unlimited data and let me do what I want with it.
Because it was one of AT&T's conditions for agreeing to sell the iPhone while providing it with all the network services Apple needed to make it work seamlessly. Would we all prefer we could do anything, sure we do. Should AT&T be allowed to place such restrictions, probably not. Now all you have to do is convince our politicians that listening to you and doing what is right for the people is better than letting AT&T do whatever makes them the most money.
The trouble with this is, they would want to do it (as a business) to sell hardware, thus they would be making all those hard decisions and doing all that work on Linux to have software to differentiate and sell their hardware. However since others would be entitled to use their software their hard won advantage disappears quickly.
The advantage is less than for a closed source OS, but then again, the advantage allows them to undercut the price of closed source. Most of the work is already there for them and getting other work, free, from others is ongoing free labor. It is true others could emulate your business model and switch to Linux too, but for stuff you develop you have first mover advantage. You're also more familiar with the code and can thus more cheaply support it and fix bugs. Heck, other hardware vendors may end up paying you to fix their hardware incompatibility bugs.
The main thing is to get over the idea of making the OS your only differentiator from a competitor, just because you're working on it. A lot of people work on Linux already and use it too, on the server, in devices, etc. Companies do quite well using Linux as a component of their hardware sales, and that model could work just fine for desktop computers. You can differentiate yourself with your hardware, added (closed source) applications, and with support and services (anti-malware, software repository, support, other network services, etc.).
Basically, OSS wins on price, but provides smaller margins and less differentiation than a closed source model.
HyperCard is an old application that allowed you to create files that were "stacks" of cards that contained text, media, etc and linked to one another. Consider each card to be a Web page and each stack to be a Web site, Intranet, or Web app rolled up into a single file. This all predated the Web, of course, but was pretty powerful and had a really, really easy development tool that could be used by complete novices.
A lot of early games, especially choose your own adventure style ones, as well as multimedia presentations, and educational tools were created as HyperCard stacks. This Web site is just allowing people to dig them up, dust them off, and play with them again (without paying for one of the commercial HyperCard programs still out there, or using a VM).
My biggest gripe is with repositories. It would be absolutely trivial for MS to set up a repository & kill off 90% of the malware. Apple supposedly cares for its users - an add-remove button like ubuntu's would go a long way towards providing quality applications.
I think what you're talking about is centralized package management. I agree Apple should add it into OS X, as they are doing with the iPhone. There is even some indication they might be planning to do so in the future.
I'm not sure, however, that this is a one sided argument. Package managers are great and useful, in some cases, but all the current ones fail miserably for other workflows, sometimes in ways Apple has already solved. Package managers on Linux suck for commercial software developers and as a result are pretty much ignored by commercial developers. They also suck for installing software on remote drives for access by multiple systems, installing on removable media, easily moving installed applications to other systems, and installing from a Web page.
Right now I'd say Apple has about 50% of the solution we all want, while Ubuntu has the other 50% and neither has gone and integrated the half the other vendor got right. Apple has their half right because they have one, centralized authority willing to make hard decisions and break compatibility with others when needed to make a real advancement. Ubuntu has the other half right because they have diverse contributors and a somewhat democratic, mob like way of making decisions that work for most people. That said, want to bet that Ubuntu gets drag and drop installs and all the other benefits they could get from GNUStep before Apple adds a centralized package manager and repository to OS X?
On MacOS, however, the culture goes like "you pay for everything". Apps are crippled and if you need something good - you pay. In this environment you consider being paid for software natural state of things. Note, I have never in my life used MacOS. What I have just said is more like theoretical observation.
From my perspective (I use OS X, Linux, and Windows desktops daily) the freeware community for OS X is just as diverse as on other OS's. I just did a search for freeware titles on my favorite OS X application tracking site. It came up with 7800 links to free software applications for download on OS X. This does not include CLI applications, where there are plenty more. Some of that software is very high quality. In comparison, it came up with 7900 links to payware.
Only, I wish those same people putting all that work into OS X applications would instead redirect their efforts to improving GNUStep, making Linux a place that can have the same set of appeals.
Most people work to solve a problem, either their own, personal itch, or what their employer needs done. Those that care about the benefits of GNUStep have mostly moved to the Mac for the desktop. The rest don't know or care about those benefits. Many angrily defend Linux claiming it is better the way it is now than being more "like OS X" which they believe is obviously inferior (although many have no real experience to make this determination). Others understand the benefits of GNUStep for the desktop, but already use OS X for the desktop and really want Linux to be the perfect Server OS for them, and actively oppose any compromise that might add "bloat" without benefitting Linux as a Server. Finally, there are those that would like Linux to be an ideal desktop OS and understand how GNUStep can help, but pragmatically believe compatibility with other Linux distros is more important than the benefits of GNUStep and at the same time believe it is too hard to get all the major distros to buy in to a better way all at once.
I'd love to see GNUStep match and exceed OS X's implementation through integration with package managers and extending packages for that purpose. Sadly I don't think it will happen. Really Linux needs a hardware OEM to champion it on their hardware and work towards making it an ideal desktop, including feature parity with OS X (and interoperability where possible). Basically what would be needed is an Apple like company that had one executive who could make hard decisions and break compatibility with other Linux distros. They could undercut Apple on price by leveraging all the shared work from other Linux developers. Alas, it is just a pipe dream for now.
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And Japan is?
I think you're still buying into outdated stereotypes about homosexuals. Sure, some intentionally act effeminately, but certainly not all. I also know two that can kick my butt, and I'm not exactly an easy mark. There are a lot of homosexuals these days that are into weight lifting and martial arts... a lot of persecuted cultures seem to do that. From there, a lot of them become interested in guns, archery, camping, etc., just the things the the boy scouts tend to teach.
Certainly, children tend to be cruel and pick on those different than them. In 1974 many boy scout leaders argued that black children could not be integrated into "mixed race" boy scout troops because the white kids would not accept blacks as equals. To some degree, they were and are still correct. But for the most part blacks kids are now accepted by the majority of their white peers. Until you allow kids to socialize together and overcome their prejudices, all you're doing is making the prejudice worse by promoting and exploiting ignorance.
After considering the issue this evening, I believe the wisest course would be for the BSA to officially change its stance to allow anyone in regardless of religious affiliation (or lack thereof) or sexual orientation. The situation will sort itself out socially.I applaud your position. I have every confidence such a move by the scouts would eventually "sort itself out" just as it did with the issue of race.
Yup. There are also countries with very high gun ownership rates like Norway, that have incredibly low rates of violent crime. That's why I said strict gun control laws tend to produce a very slight increase in violent crime. There are other factors that correlate very strongly with rates of violent crime, however, and where these are different you'll see drastically different rates regardless of gun control laws. The primary one is wealth disparity, which is why socialized healthcare funded with a tax on the very wealthy is likely to greatly decrease violent crime in the US, much more so than any gun control legislation. The correlation, however, is harder to understand so politicians get more mileage out of an emotional appeal about gun control (pro or con).
Declaring those to be problems with the EU is fairly idiotic, since those are by no means uniform in the EU. That said, it is easy to take issue with both of them.
The best studies of gun control indicate strict gun control laws tend to result in a very slight overall increase in murder and other violent crime (which is what is the normal justification for such laws). Anyone who does their research will see this issue has been well researched at this point in both cause and effect studies and correlations between laws and crime levels normalized for other factors. The only people who believe otherwise are people with an agenda or who buy into intentionally misleading "gun violence" studies that misstate the problem. Still, these laws persist in the US as well as some of Europe.
As for "hate speech" that is simply value judgement as to how to mitigate the conflicting rights of two groups. These laws exist in parts of the US as well.
Being chinese american is not statistically "normal" either. It is not the common condition. Thus, the analogy is perfectly appropriate.
Except being black has no bearing on your ability to play with model trains, or anything else. Being homosexual has a large bearing on the ability of the Boy Scouts of America to guide you in the process of growing up to be a homosexual man.The boy scouts are a camping and paramilitary survivalist organization, not a making heterosexual men organization. Or so they claim. What do you think a "scout" is?
The way you're getting defensive and trying to rationalize away my analogy is interesting. Starting to feel uncomfortable about your prejudice and intolerance? I hope so.
So you're promoting specific religious beliefs. Have fun with that. Now tell me, why should someone who does not hold the same beliefs give you free labor so you can spend more money promoting that religion? More importantly, how is it just that the government take my money from me, at gunpoint if need be, and uses it to promote your religion?
Would it be fair if someone taxed you and used that money to promote services for people with last names longer than eight characters. After all, people with short last names are untouchables and don't deserve benefits as many gods have told us.
True, but this is the Bush administration so they've been doing it anyway. Par for the course.
And you think being homosexual is abnormal. How about being chinese american? I that normal enough for you? 'Normal' is a subjective term and it is only your opposition to homosexuality that leads you to single out that one subset of society for discrimination.
It would be like going to a model train club and expecting help to build radio controlled airplanes. It's not their forte.No it would be like going to a government funded model train club while black and expecting to build model trains with everyone else, instead of being told that black kids aren't normal enough to be model train engineers.
This is not at all my personal experience, nor is ti the policy of the BSA. I was a boy scout as a child. At the time, I was an agnostic, with a strong interest in all sorts of religions. I never brought it up at scouts, specifically because it was clear it would be a problem (likely to get me expelled). Our meetings were held at a church and we were asked to help out at official events of that church. Meetings of the group included prayers, vows, and pledges all with christian themes.
I think for the most part when you are "different" from a group of people and you elect to be involved with them. That you will be accepted as long as you try to fit in and look for common ground.If by "fit in" you mean censor yourself so you never mention any of the topics where you differ from them, ever, even if the topic is brought up. Heck, my girlfriend is leaving her job at a publicly funded university lab right now because she doesn't "fit in" by which I mean she doesn't go to the same church as all of the other people she is working with. Although she's never mentioned her religion, or said a word on the topic, her co-workers have decided at different times that she is muslim and then wiccan and made derogatory comments about both. They also refused to communicate with her to a degree that it interfered with her job (her boss not telling her about meetings).
I mention this because, quite frankly, I'm tired of this sort of bullshit intolerance being given a free pass. People can discriminate all they want at private institutions for all I care. The very instant you start taking federal funding (at a university or the boy scouts) you should be banned from religious discrimination or that funding should be removed.
As opposed to stressing how you are different and they should change who they are, what they have always done, and what they believe so as to make you happy.Who I am does not matter so much if most people are intolerant jackasses. If they insist on being such, fine, but if they act on it, let them get thier funding from somewhere other than my taxes.
Halt! Buying things from private companies/organizations and providing federal grant dollars as donations to private companies/organizations are very different things. I have no problem with the feds buying things from whoever gives them the best deal (with certain limitations). That's very different to just handing away tax dollars they force me to pay, to an organization that promotes a given religion or religious ideal.
Commercial vendors will likely never be gone. They'll just be commercial vendors creating OSS instead of closed and proprietary tools.
And think about the IDE situation. Eclipse is a special case that was effectively created by IBM, not some rogue group of "for the people" programmers, but IBM.I think you're making an incorrect assumption. In my experience, most OSS is done by commercial companies like IBM. Many of them are smaller and make proportional contributions. For the most part though, they're doing it for profit.
So as I understand your theory, you fear that if only OSS solutions are left, they will suck for usability. So IBM has thousands of people using some OSS tool and the usability is poor. Do you think they're going to just ignore that wasted money and not pay someone to improve the usability? Do you think the same is true for all the big and small users of the tool? I don't think so. One or more companies will always step up to improve tools because they need to use those tools to make money and improvements mean more efficient use of workers' time.
First, I'm not sure I'm understanding your terminology. Communism (as an economic term) refers to pooled labor and resources within a cell. This cell size can be anything from the atomic family unit, in very minimalist communism, to an entire state, in extreme communism. It sounds to me that what you're describing sounds more like 'socialism' (the economic term) which is resources and labor shared by the entire economy.
I don't think extreme communism or extreme socialism is a viable or sustainable economic model. The problem with your utopian vision is that in order to have everyone working together, there has to be government control over that labor and resources. Even in a pure democracy, this easily leads to a tyranny of the majority, where the masses select subsets of society to do more or less appealing work. Such centralized control almost always devolves into a totalitarian regime, simply because already being centralized it is easier for a totalitarian regime to take over, and lacking the power of money, there are fewer with enough consolidated power to stop it.
You talk about representative power being transferred, but that consolidated power can begin creating its own misinformation and controls. People aren't all brilliant or interested in being informed. A lot are willing to abdicate responsibility to their priest and the resulting decisions are something the rest of us still have to live with. In the US, if we were a strict democracy, blacks would still be slaves, women would not be able to vote, and homosexuality would be illegal... because in each of these cases the majority of the people (as defined at the time) were opposed to allowing minorities to have rights.
Now I've spent time thinking about models for utopian societies and seeing where past attempts have succeeded and failed. I think the real key to a sustainable and ideal economy is moderation. Keep capitalism, socialism, and communism all balanced and directed as they are most effective. I'm all for a a more direct democracy, but not a simple, majority rules one. Rather, think the most sustainable society is one where the socialism is directed to provide for necessitates and to prevent capitalism from resulting in consolidation. That should, in fact, be a primary goal of the government, to prevent wealth from consolidating, especially in ways that are not based solely upon merit (inheritance). I think money is a very useful tool in our society, just not one that should be applied to basic necessities or rights.
A lot of our society's great advances were motivated by self interest and greed and as a society we should exploit that resource. If a woman invents a way to provide cheap power without pollution, well she deserves to be living in luxury the rest of her life. That does not imply that said person's children should not have to work to get luxuries. It does not imply that if a person is average or below average and never comes up with any sort of great idea that they should have to work a thousand times as hard and be constantly stressed as they just try to find enough money to keep their family fed and indoors.
What I find really interesting is that my very moderate position, describing what has really worked to provide the best standards of living elsewhere, is considered radical in the US.
I don't think they have the expertise. I'd bet on Sun, IBM, Sony, or HP before Dell at managing to do this well.
Maybe they can convince Adobe to port all their stuff. If Linux had the Adobe apps (and Flash, for God's sake) and Quicken, that would go a long way to filling the major gaps in the software library.Adobe is very, very resistant to change. For the most part they seem to have liked and encouraged the Windows monoculture, even going so far as to buy up software companies making good money selling non-Windows solutions and then killing the non-Windows versions. Right now they seem confused as to what to do. MS is bundling more and more competing products with their monopoly and slowly squeezing the life from Adobe's offerings in those markets. At the same time, Apple got tired of Adobe's poor support on OS X and started providing their own competitors, in some cases doing serious damage to Adobe's share in those markets. So Adobe seems to want to punish Apple, by supporting OS X less, and at the same time stop MS from holding all the cards... but they haven't figured out how. Someone there could wise up and launch a company-wide effort towards Linux, but I doubt it. Frankly, I think they're going to lose share on both ends gradually becoming less and less relevant as new companies, Apple, and MS all start eating away at their markets until they collapse and are bought up (probably by MS or less possibly Apple) or they reinvent themselves around whatever products they still make that still have any relevance. Right now, their ability to make strategic decisions seems to be nil.
More likely the gap will be filled when some company invests in Linux native, OSS solutions to compete with Adobe apps.
Of course, there is still the problem of games, but I think that is becoming less-and-less of an issue as consoles take over the market.I don't think so. The big market for games on the PC is the casual gaming market. The entrance of consoles (okay the Wii) into that market will probably expand the market more than it steals it. That said, the casual gaming market does just fine on OS X, with the Sims and other such huge, sellers. As the Linux market grows, these game makers will target it as well.
Hell, Dell should just *buy* Canonical, and spin off their own version of Linux that fixes all the usability problems that make it not-as-good-as Windows for general desktop use.You're assuming Dell can buy it. It's a private company founded by a rich 'weirdo' on a mission. It's possible, but by no means a foregone conclusion that Dell could buy it. They'd probably be better off contracting Canonical or IBM or someone to create customized solutions for their systems, at least until they gain some experience.
Lock-in is annoying, but normally something the market can deal with. The reason we complain about MS's lock-in methods are because they are a way of illegally exploiting their monopoly to hurt software producers in other market segments. So long as Apple doesn't have a monopoly, who cares what lock-in strategies they use?
That said Apple do base a lot of their stuff on OSS software (although they wrap it away and have no intention of open sourcing anything they dont have to).Actually, Apple releases a lot of stuff as OSS that they don't have to. Darwin, the subsystem for most of their OS, was licensed via the BSD license when they adopted the code. That means they don't have to publish any of it, so long as they give credit (MS adopted BSD code for their networking stack, and never republished it). Apple publishes Darwin and many other chunks of OSS code because they understand the advantages of doing so. Your assertion that they only give back what they have to is not even remotely supportable. They give back what they think will benefit them in the long term.
So while Apple weakening Microsoft's dominance is good, I'm not sure if id rather see apple overloards to Microsoft ones.If MS's dominance in the desktop OS market can be dropped to 70%-50% the entire industry will change. It will reintroduce competition. Investors will have incentive to dump money into Linux, Solaris, and other competitors because MS won't have the leverage to kill them or artificially break them. MS's inability to break compatibility and this investment will lead to renewed innovation, not the current, stagnant market we're dealing with today. At that point, Apple will have to give customers a better solution than everyone else, or they will not become any sort of "overlord" and probably they will not do so unless they stop bundling their OS and hardware and open source more of their core OS.
I, for one, don't want to see MS lose their dominance to punish them. I want to see the desktop OS market advance again and give me a number of better products and innovative solutions. Whether it is Apple or Canonical or a combination of many vendors that does it (as it almost surely will be) I just want a non-monopolized market and hopefully that will be enough to stop Apple from gaining a monopoly right there.
I don't think a program to convert between package formats qualifies as distros supporting that format. In reality, a lot of software comes as Deb or RPM, but not both and that really sucks for end users and developers trying to reach general Linux users.
Almost all developers offer both a tar and source, if you cant install software from one of those two your doing it wrong.It's not easy enough. Sure I can do it. I do it regularly and it even works, most of the time. As a developer, however, it's a shitty way to get software to normal users, since many can't build and install it without help.
OFC using tars means you lose out on package management but you dont even get that on windows.So if you lose out on package management, how is it superior to Windows again? More importantly, how is it close ot as useful as GNUStep bundles, like the ones Apple uses?
The fact is package management is a great idea, but current package formats are weak and not standardized. Current package managers suck for many use cases and have to be ignored for much software. And convenience and ease of use for software installation is dreadful on most Linux distros for a large number of use cases. This is simply not a strength of current Linux on the desktop distributions.
Nope. They made their statement about refusing to sell on Tunes 5 months after Apple had started offering DRM-free downloads for EMI, Radiohead's label. Their spokesman said they objected not to DRM, but to Apple refusing to require customers to buy the whole album at once, whereas Apple requires each song to be available for sale individually as well. The quote from their spokesman was:
"iTunes insists that all its albums are sold unbundled, but 7 Digital doesn't. Radiohead prefer to have their albums sold complete. The artist has a choice, and if they feel strongly then we respect that."You don't have to have your computer in the same room as your TV. You can use a remote control to select movies, play them, pause, etc.
Are people just too dumb to buy a cable for their computer to output to their HDTV?Not everyone has or wants to have a computer in their living room, or an extra computer sucking down electricity. It's fine for us geeks, but not necessarily for other people. It's not a matter of being "dumb" just priorities.
The implication is not that you can watch 10,000 movies in a couple of months, but that there are very few you're interested in watching. There are 260 movies on my Netflix queue. 25 of those are available from this new device to watch instantly. Of those, I need to remove about 15, which are old TV shows available on Hulu.com for free. The remaining 10 are mostly really old, bad movies that are on there for bad movie nights. Seriously, the selection is awful.
Actually, $99 i pretty low for development fees for cell phones, actually really low. It would be nice if Apple did not charge at all, but I'm not upset either.
Package managers on Linux suck for commercial software developers and as a result are pretty much ignored by commercial developers. You ask most ubuntu people they'll probably tell you it's working as intended. If it's not free it's not GPL & probably not OSS either. Chances are it's a binary blob & that opens up a host of issues. Is it "zealotry" to actually want control over your own computer?I'm of the opinion that trying to make things hard to do as a security measure, is asinine. People can and still do install "binary blobs" on Linux. They just don't get automated updates to those blobs, so they are more likely to be insecure. They also get people in the habit of running binary installers, which are less secure than a "drag and drop" package that is self contained, like Apple uses. Or, more commonly, people don't install blobs on Linux, they just use Windows instead... which incidentally introduces lots of artificial problems with Windows and ends up hosing networks left and right screwing with people who are using Linux.
Trying to engineer people's behavior by making things people want to do (install closed source games or publishing software) causes a lot more problems than it solves and is wholly ineffective. The proper solution is to make everything users want to do both easy and secure and it's a lot easier to secure closed source software when it is coming from a centrally controlled repository and implementing DRM/registration via an official and OSS channel instead of via dozens of different closed source, proprietary channels. Trying to stop people from running closed source software, is zealotry, by the way. It is trying to impose your decision upon others, despite their wishes, instead of trying to convince them your way is better.
Yeah they're working on it. Did you see the new apt:// protocol [linuxhack3r.com]?Yeah, there are numerous solutions, but no standard and nothing implemented by multiple distros (who can't even standardize on a package format I might mention). So far the most common workflow for installing software (research on Web then install based upon the info found) is still pretty mythical. A few developers have Web pages that will allow for fairly easy installation, if you happen to be using the right distro, otherwise, it's worse than Windows.
Because it was one of AT&T's conditions for agreeing to sell the iPhone while providing it with all the network services Apple needed to make it work seamlessly. Would we all prefer we could do anything, sure we do. Should AT&T be allowed to place such restrictions, probably not. Now all you have to do is convince our politicians that listening to you and doing what is right for the people is better than letting AT&T do whatever makes them the most money.
The advantage is less than for a closed source OS, but then again, the advantage allows them to undercut the price of closed source. Most of the work is already there for them and getting other work, free, from others is ongoing free labor. It is true others could emulate your business model and switch to Linux too, but for stuff you develop you have first mover advantage. You're also more familiar with the code and can thus more cheaply support it and fix bugs. Heck, other hardware vendors may end up paying you to fix their hardware incompatibility bugs.
The main thing is to get over the idea of making the OS your only differentiator from a competitor, just because you're working on it. A lot of people work on Linux already and use it too, on the server, in devices, etc. Companies do quite well using Linux as a component of their hardware sales, and that model could work just fine for desktop computers. You can differentiate yourself with your hardware, added (closed source) applications, and with support and services (anti-malware, software repository, support, other network services, etc.).
Basically, OSS wins on price, but provides smaller margins and less differentiation than a closed source model.
A lot of early games, especially choose your own adventure style ones, as well as multimedia presentations, and educational tools were created as HyperCard stacks. This Web site is just allowing people to dig them up, dust them off, and play with them again (without paying for one of the commercial HyperCard programs still out there, or using a VM).
I think what you're talking about is centralized package management. I agree Apple should add it into OS X, as they are doing with the iPhone. There is even some indication they might be planning to do so in the future.
I'm not sure, however, that this is a one sided argument. Package managers are great and useful, in some cases, but all the current ones fail miserably for other workflows, sometimes in ways Apple has already solved. Package managers on Linux suck for commercial software developers and as a result are pretty much ignored by commercial developers. They also suck for installing software on remote drives for access by multiple systems, installing on removable media, easily moving installed applications to other systems, and installing from a Web page.
Right now I'd say Apple has about 50% of the solution we all want, while Ubuntu has the other 50% and neither has gone and integrated the half the other vendor got right. Apple has their half right because they have one, centralized authority willing to make hard decisions and break compatibility with others when needed to make a real advancement. Ubuntu has the other half right because they have diverse contributors and a somewhat democratic, mob like way of making decisions that work for most people. That said, want to bet that Ubuntu gets drag and drop installs and all the other benefits they could get from GNUStep before Apple adds a centralized package manager and repository to OS X?
From my perspective (I use OS X, Linux, and Windows desktops daily) the freeware community for OS X is just as diverse as on other OS's. I just did a search for freeware titles on my favorite OS X application tracking site. It came up with 7800 links to free software applications for download on OS X. This does not include CLI applications, where there are plenty more. Some of that software is very high quality. In comparison, it came up with 7900 links to payware.
Most people work to solve a problem, either their own, personal itch, or what their employer needs done. Those that care about the benefits of GNUStep have mostly moved to the Mac for the desktop. The rest don't know or care about those benefits. Many angrily defend Linux claiming it is better the way it is now than being more "like OS X" which they believe is obviously inferior (although many have no real experience to make this determination). Others understand the benefits of GNUStep for the desktop, but already use OS X for the desktop and really want Linux to be the perfect Server OS for them, and actively oppose any compromise that might add "bloat" without benefitting Linux as a Server. Finally, there are those that would like Linux to be an ideal desktop OS and understand how GNUStep can help, but pragmatically believe compatibility with other Linux distros is more important than the benefits of GNUStep and at the same time believe it is too hard to get all the major distros to buy in to a better way all at once.
I'd love to see GNUStep match and exceed OS X's implementation through integration with package managers and extending packages for that purpose. Sadly I don't think it will happen. Really Linux needs a hardware OEM to champion it on their hardware and work towards making it an ideal desktop, including feature parity with OS X (and interoperability where possible). Basically what would be needed is an Apple like company that had one executive who could make hard decisions and break compatibility with other Linux distros. They could undercut Apple on price by leveraging all the shared work from other Linux developers. Alas, it is just a pipe dream for now.