No, he meant what he wrote. The point was to contrast then with now, originally, publication was expensive and now it is practically free (thus the whole "marginal cost of zero" thing).
and neither does it mean that just because you paid for the hardware the company should help you rewrite its controlling software.
But it *does* mean that if they use some of the code I wrote, in their product, that I get to dictate the terms by which they are allowed to use my code. If my terms say they must make it possible for people to rewrite the controlling software then they have a choice - either they do so, or they go find some other code that is not so licensed. That is all there is to this debate.
And, I for one, am probably far happier as a software engineer in a capitalistic society than I would ever have been in the communistic software world that RMS and his fanboys imagine.
Anyone who equates the GPL with communism is a troll. The GPL is capitalism of the purest form - private ownership of the means of production. The labor that goes into creating software is the capital, the software is just the end product. I expect you are about to claim that software is capital too, but it is not for the simple reason that it is non-rivalrous and often non-excludable. It's widely believed, almost to the point of canon, that capitalism and free-markets are the most efficient way to manage rivalrous and excludable goods. It's also well understood, but mostly only by economists, that private ownership of non-rivalous and/or non-excludable goods is not neccesarily, or even usually, the way to acheive maximum utilization.
I expect that you've heard the phrase, "Freedom is not free," right?
Well, the manufacturer is a business and they are going to have costs. If they think the costs of fielding all your hypothetical support calls for unsupported software is more than the sum total of benefits using GPL'd software - at a minimum free code plus expanded customerbase - then they are free to go spend the bucks on a proprietary system.
Either way they gotta pay. The question is which way do they think is better for their bottom line and are they capable of making the right decision.
reiterate my claim that to compare India with a country like the USA is loaded and unjustified.
Then ignore each line of stats that says USA - that was for the guy who started with the USA comparisons. Concentrate on the part of each India line that applies to males and then the part that applies to females.
That is the ONLY comparison that matters when answering the question - "Is Indian society regressive towards women?"
When you accept that the answer is "yes," -- not "foo is worse" -- then you have arrived at the truth that started this entire thread.
This simply is not true. The NSA does not put backdoors in encryption algorithms;
You are the second poster to thoroughly misunderstand the OP's point.
It isn't about algorithm backdoors, DES was long finished before Clipper was even a twinkle, much less a failed initiative.
You need to think along the lines of DVD6C - the guys who control the patents for DVD players. If you want to manufacture and sell a conforming DVD player, you must license DVD6C's patents and as part of that license you MUST implement all those annoying restrictions like unskippable advertisments, region coding, etc.
The OP's point is that if you license DES, then the NSA is going to require that your device have a backdoor outside of DES itself that they can exploit.
Note, I don't even know if his claim about the NSA owning the patent to DES is true. But if it is, that's how it would be leveraged to put backdoors in DES-using devices.
The wifi router's job in life is to route - which means either pass packets or drop packets. That's all it does. A retarded kid is not dedicated to the job of guardian of the lawn. He is not designed, not even intelligently designed, to route people to his lawn or anywhere else.
the greater poverty of a semi-theocratic dictatorial pseudo-democracy like Pakistan is ignored...
List of some countries (with India in it) ranked by Gini index (bear in mind that lower gini index is better)
India 32.5 Pakistan 33
Looks like the Gini Index has a flaw if the "greater poverty" of Pakistan is only a half-point worse. Not that it matters, since Pakistan's problems regarding repression of women are Pakistan's problems, not India's. The question at hand is simply, is India's society regressive towards women - not is India better than Pakistan.
For the other guy reporting crime statistics and asking which is the more regressive country - India or the USA? Did you read the note on nationmaster about the true relevance of their crime stats? I bet you didn't, because it completely undermines your implication. Heck, it actually reverses your implication. Here I'll quote it for you:
Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.
Unsurprisingly, India has the 2nd lowest number of police per capita of any reported country.
So, let's look at some numbers that are less likely to be distorted and are actual comparisons between male and female treatment by society as a whole. I'm gonna throw in the USA numbers as a baseline, just in case the lack of gender EQUALITY isn't clear.
Male/Female ratio of Secondary school enrollment: India: 60/40 USA: 51/49
1) How many dowries are paid each year in India?:Some, but mostly voluntary
Voluntary? Get a grip. People don't "voluntarily" pay dowries, it is purely social pressure. You know, from a regressive society.
2) How many bride burnings are there each year in India?:Less than in Pakistan and Bangladesh
And orders of magnitude more than in any 1st world country. This discussion is not about Pakistan, Bangladesh or Antarctica. Do NOT even try to excuse such behaviour by saying others are worse.
3) Who killed Phoolan Devi?:A bandit and murderer (the fact that she got screwed herself does not justify criminality, at least not in Indian Law, dunno about where you come from, though)
You've done a poor job of sidestepping the issue -- the environment that created Devi and then killed her. An environment which persists in mistreating women at every stage of their lives. Please address the issue at hand or keep your mouth shut.
fairly generous proportion (no pun intended) of Indian women.
None of those women are from the lower castes. I don't think any of them could even claim to be "middle class." None of them would have come anywhere near qualifying for an OLPC. Its the attitudes of the vast numbers of the poor that are the issue here - they are the communities that would receive the OLPCs and they are the communities that are likely to reject it for upsetting the status quo.
think people like you like to bash India because you don;t have the guts to criticize countries where atrocities against women DO take place in large numbers
Bite me. I don't make excuses for America's problems by saying India is worse, so why don't you stop with trying to excuse the problems in India by saying other countries are worse.
I'm sure all of your points successfully demonstrate that the Indian government is banning the free distribution of laptops to school-kids because it isn't progressive enough.
If you actually had a point, you would be justified in your snideness. But clearly you are not wise enough to put 2 and 2 together. So I will spell it out:
The point is that regressive attitudes are pervasive enough that even if the educated elite at the top levels of politics think it is a good idea, they know enough to expect plenty of pushback from their constituents that they could easily decide that it is not worth the fight.
I've read a number of other observations that birth control is easily available in a lot of India, but totally unavailable in other parts. The availability is strongly correlated with the political power of the local religious leaders, as it is in much of the rest of the world.
I admit this is hearsay, but at least I've heard it a couple of times. In the Philippines, probably the strongest bastion of catholicism left in the world, there are no condom factories. This is also a country where families regularly have 5-6 kids and are so dirt poor that the girls often have to go to the cities and work as prostitutes in order to support their parents and the rest of the family back in the provinces causing Manila to have the highest proportion of prostitutes of any city in the world (more hearsay, but if they aren't #1 they gotta be closeo).
That whole cycle is just so effed up. When an arbitrary interepretation of some phrases out of a book that nobody really knows the origin of is more important than the real world suffering and pain of so many real lives I don't know of any other way to describe it besides "Evil."
I married a girl from India. I have plenty of standing to say that culturally India has a long way to go.
Sure the educated elite tend to have modern values, although there are still plenty of dark undercurrents that manifest in ugly ways. But the vast majority of the population that is still gripped in poverty is also still gripped with regressive social attitudes.
As I said in a similar rebuttal:
1) How many dowries are paid each year in India? 2) How many bride burnings are there each year in India? 3) Who killed Phoolan Devi?
Come back to me when the answers are 0 and 0 and the environment that created and then saw Devi murdered is gone.
All this discussion over some BS from a marketingdroid? Are you really all such suckers?
Let me translate from marketing-speak to plain English for y'all:
droid:two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need. translation: We have a two core product available now, we will have a 4 core product available in three years but we don't yet have a plan for an eight core product.
(both tenets of the feminist ideology regarding men)
You've got a real stick up yer rear, dontchya? It sure must comfort your pride to believe such things.
Do you have any evidence that there are any significant number of people that think that "women are only good for babies"
Nope. Because they tend to think they are good for housework too.
Or is this one of the "blame the victim" excuses used to deny men basic rights?
Of course it is, what else could it be? Teaching women that douching after sex does not prevent pregnancy and how to effectively say no to sex when the man won't use a condom is clearly denying men their basic right to sex on demand.
And judging by public information on similar 'aid' schemes, she was almost certainly sent to teach them an ideology of hate and fear, to pander to their existing prejudices and chauvinism and generally massage their already bloated female egos.
Have you ever met a filipina? As rule, the culture of marianisma teaches them to have no ego, especially out in the provinces.
No wonder the men were "not happy". What does this tell you about the attitude to men she was teaching?
That they were used to getting their way without question and that nobody likes the loss of power that comes from having their authority questioned, especially when that authority is regularly abused.
Why don't you think about the fact that your ideology tells you that men are not only not exploited but actually privileged yet you know of a case where a girl was sent to teach third world women and no men were sent to teach third world men?
I had to save this bellyshaker for last. You are complaining that the underprivileged get something that the overprivileged do not? Oh how unfair, the overprivileged are being denied a privilege!
Technically, it wasn't Forbes making a claim; it was SCO.
It's really not that all that different. Choosing to report a story or not is one form of editorial bias. I admit that I haven't searched very hard, but I got the impression that Forbes was the only one to pick up SCO's claims and run with it. A more objective editor would probably have decided that after all their silliness, SCO's claims require independent confirmation before being reported.
It's interesting that some of SCO's most ardent public supporters feel that they can't so blatantly deny the obvious any more but it seems more like rats abandoning a sinking ship than anything else.
Forbes defaming linux? In an article written by Daniel Lyons? Who would have thunk it?
The guy has a well established reputation for being wrong that you can pretty trust anything he writes about linux to be exactly 180-degrees out of sync with reality.
Ordinarily I would want some of whatever he's been smoking, but it sure seems to make you mean and spiteful as a side-effect.
Not funny. Insightful. Do you know how much ignorance there is in developing nations about STDs, birth control, pregnancy, etc?
Which may be one of the reasons countries reject these laptops. Regressive idealogies, particularly the ones that think women are only good for babies tend to reject that kind of knowledge. I know a girl who used to teach that stuff to women in the villages at the southern end of the philippines and the men there were not happy to have her around (she's a "radical feminist" by/modern/ filipino standards which would make her about average if she lived in the in US).
Beyond reproductive health and self-dominion, there are lots of areas of knowledge that many societies would rather not give their children (or adults) access to. Like a pastie-covered boobie at a sporting event.
Firefox doesn't 'compete' with a MS product. Firefox allows IIS applications to run in Linux. The windows equivalent is the Internet Explorer, which is a free download. If anything, MS has a motivation to improve Firefox as having Firefox perform as well on Linux as Internet Explorer does on Windows will increase the penetration of IIS development tools in non-windows environments, thus increasing the market share of IIS, and other paid for development tools. Not only that, but more IIS developers in Linux means more developers to train, more seminars to hold, more control over the business sector software development area.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you meant "expAnsive", vice "expensive".
No, he meant what he wrote. The point was to contrast then with now, originally, publication was expensive and now it is practically free (thus the whole "marginal cost of zero" thing).
"laptops are evil because you can get porno".
Where the hell did I say that?
Are you reading some sort of alternate universe bizzarodot?
and neither does it mean that just because you paid for the hardware the company should help you rewrite its controlling software.
But it *does* mean that if they use some of the code I wrote, in their product, that I get to dictate the terms by which they are allowed to use my code. If my terms say they must make it possible for people to rewrite the controlling software then they have a choice - either they do so, or they go find some other code that is not so licensed. That is all there is to this debate.
And, I for one, am probably far happier as a software engineer in a capitalistic society than I would ever have been in the communistic software world that RMS and his fanboys imagine.
Anyone who equates the GPL with communism is a troll. The GPL is capitalism of the purest form - private ownership of the means of production. The labor that goes into creating software is the capital, the software is just the end product. I expect you are about to claim that software is capital too, but it is not for the simple reason that it is non-rivalrous and often non-excludable. It's widely believed, almost to the point of canon, that capitalism and free-markets are the most efficient way to manage rivalrous and excludable goods. It's also well understood, but mostly only by economists, that private ownership of non-rivalous and/or non-excludable goods is not neccesarily, or even usually, the way to acheive maximum utilization.
I expect that you've heard the phrase, "Freedom is not free," right?
Well, the manufacturer is a business and they are going to have costs. If they think the costs of fielding all your hypothetical support calls for unsupported software is more than the sum total of benefits using GPL'd software - at a minimum free code plus expanded customerbase - then they are free to go spend the bucks on a proprietary system.
Either way they gotta pay. The question is which way do they think is better for their bottom line and are they capable of making the right decision.
reiterate my claim that to compare India with a country like the USA is loaded and unjustified.
Then ignore each line of stats that says USA - that was for the guy who started with the USA comparisons. Concentrate on the part of each India line that applies to males and then the part that applies to females.
That is the ONLY comparison that matters when answering the question - "Is Indian society regressive towards women?"
When you accept that the answer is "yes," -- not "foo is worse" -- then you have arrived at the truth that started this entire thread.
You may have the right to try, but the company that created the hardware "damn well" has the right to use technology to stop you if they want to.
Which is EXACTLY why the GPLv3 is necessary.
GNU all started with a Xerox printer and RMS's need to make it do things (report errors) that Xerox did not think of and did not want him to do.
This simply is not true. The NSA does not put backdoors in encryption algorithms;
You are the second poster to thoroughly misunderstand the OP's point.
It isn't about algorithm backdoors, DES was long finished before Clipper was even a twinkle, much less a failed initiative.
You need to think along the lines of DVD6C - the guys who control the patents for DVD players. If you want to manufacture and sell a conforming DVD player, you must license DVD6C's patents and as part of that license you MUST implement all those annoying restrictions like unskippable advertisments, region coding, etc.
The OP's point is that if you license DES, then the NSA is going to require that your device have a backdoor outside of DES itself that they can exploit.
Note, I don't even know if his claim about the NSA owning the patent to DES is true. But if it is, that's how it would be leveraged to put backdoors in DES-using devices.
The analogy is very poor for another reason --
The wifi router's job in life is to route - which means either pass packets or drop packets. That's all it does. A retarded kid is not dedicated to the job of guardian of the lawn. He is not designed, not even intelligently designed, to route people to his lawn or anywhere else.
Big latin words.
I apologize.
Really I do.
For baiting you.
It's just too tempting to tweak people who are so clearly off balance.
A little push always sends your type spinning and spitting.
I should behave better.
Maybe next time.
Looks like the Gini Index has a flaw if the "greater poverty" of Pakistan is only a half-point worse. Not that it matters, since Pakistan's problems regarding repression of women are Pakistan's problems, not India's. The question at hand is simply, is India's society regressive towards women - not is India better than Pakistan.
For the other guy reporting crime statistics and asking which is the more regressive country - India or the USA? Did you read the note on nationmaster about the true relevance of their crime stats? I bet you didn't, because it completely undermines your implication. Heck, it actually reverses your implication. Here I'll quote it for you:
Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.
Unsurprisingly, India has the 2nd lowest number of police per capita of any reported country.
So, let's look at some numbers that are less likely to be distorted and are actual comparisons between male and female treatment by society as a whole. I'm gonna throw in the USA numbers as a baseline, just in case the lack of gender EQUALITY isn't clear.
Male/Female ratio of Secondary school enrollment:
India: 60/40
USA: 51/49
Male/Female Adult literacy rates:
India: 70% / 48%
USA: 97% / 97%
Primary School drop out rates for females
India: 39% (rank 31)
USA: 1% (rank 96)
(numbers for males unavailable at the site)
Male/Female ratio of mortality age 1-5
India: 41% / 58%
USA: 50% / 50%
I didn't even have to cherry pick those numbers, unlike your (a) irrelevant and (b) backfired attempt.
1) How many dowries are paid each year in India? :Some, but mostly voluntary
:Less than in Pakistan and Bangladesh
:A bandit and murderer (the fact that she got screwed herself does not justify criminality, at least not in Indian Law, dunno about where you come from, though)
Voluntary? Get a grip. People don't "voluntarily" pay dowries, it is purely social pressure. You know, from a regressive society.
2) How many bride burnings are there each year in India?
And orders of magnitude more than in any 1st world country. This discussion is not about Pakistan, Bangladesh or Antarctica. Do NOT even try to excuse such behaviour by saying others are worse.
3) Who killed Phoolan Devi?
You've done a poor job of sidestepping the issue -- the environment that created Devi and then killed her. An environment which persists in mistreating women at every stage of their lives. Please address the issue at hand or keep your mouth shut.
fairly generous proportion (no pun intended) of Indian women.
None of those women are from the lower castes. I don't think any of them could even claim to be "middle class." None of them would have come anywhere near qualifying for an OLPC. Its the attitudes of the vast numbers of the poor that are the issue here - they are the communities that would receive the OLPCs and they are the communities that are likely to reject it for upsetting the status quo.
think people like you like to bash India because you don;t have the guts to criticize countries where atrocities against women DO take place in large numbers
Bite me. I don't make excuses for America's problems by saying India is worse, so why don't you stop with trying to excuse the problems in India by saying other countries are worse.
I'm sure all of your points successfully demonstrate that the Indian government is banning the free distribution of laptops to school-kids because it isn't progressive enough.
If you actually had a point, you would be justified in your snideness. But clearly you are not wise enough to put 2 and 2 together. So I will spell it out:
The point is that regressive attitudes are pervasive enough that even if the educated elite at the top levels of politics think it is a good idea, they know enough to expect plenty of pushback from their constituents that they could easily decide that it is not worth the fight.
I've read a number of other observations that birth control is easily available in a lot of India, but totally unavailable in other parts. The availability is strongly correlated with the political power of the local religious leaders, as it is in much of the rest of the world.
I admit this is hearsay, but at least I've heard it a couple of times. In the Philippines, probably the strongest bastion of catholicism left in the world, there are no condom factories. This is also a country where families regularly have 5-6 kids and are so dirt poor that the girls often have to go to the cities and work as prostitutes in order to support their parents and the rest of the family back in the provinces causing Manila to have the highest proportion of prostitutes of any city in the world (more hearsay, but if they aren't #1 they gotta be closeo).
That whole cycle is just so effed up. When an arbitrary interepretation of some phrases out of a book that nobody really knows the origin of is more important than the real world suffering and pain of so many real lives I don't know of any other way to describe it besides "Evil."
I married a girl from India. I have plenty of standing to say that culturally India has a long way to go.
Sure the educated elite tend to have modern values, although there are still plenty of dark undercurrents that manifest in ugly ways. But the vast majority of the population that is still gripped in poverty is also still gripped with regressive social attitudes.
As I said in a similar rebuttal:
1) How many dowries are paid each year in India?
2) How many bride burnings are there each year in India?
3) Who killed Phoolan Devi?
Come back to me when the answers are 0 and 0 and the environment that created and then saw Devi murdered is gone.
All this discussion over some BS from a marketingdroid? Are you really all such suckers?
Let me translate from marketing-speak to plain English for y'all:
droid: two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need.
translation: We have a two core product available now, we will have a 4 core product available in three years but we don't yet have a plan for an eight core product.
Think before you Troll.
Read before you freak. You should have noted at least one reference to pasties in America.
1) How many dowries are paid each year in India?
2) How many brides are burned each year in India?
3) Who killed Phoolan Devi?
The problem with that analogy is the FF/IE is not required to run 'IIS Applications'
Yeah, because a webserver is soooo useful without a web browser.
(both tenets of the feminist ideology regarding men)
You've got a real stick up yer rear, dontchya? It sure must comfort your pride to believe such things.
Do you have any evidence that there are any significant number of people that think that "women are only good for babies"
Nope. Because they tend to think they are good for housework too.
Or is this one of the "blame the victim" excuses used to deny men basic rights?
Of course it is, what else could it be? Teaching women that douching after sex does not prevent pregnancy and how to effectively say no to sex when the man won't use a condom is clearly denying men their basic right to sex on demand.
And judging by public information on similar 'aid' schemes, she was almost certainly sent to teach them an ideology of hate and fear, to pander to their existing prejudices and chauvinism and generally massage their already bloated female egos.
Have you ever met a filipina? As rule, the culture of marianisma teaches them to have no ego, especially out in the provinces.
No wonder the men were "not happy". What does this tell you about the attitude to men she was teaching?
That they were used to getting their way without question and that nobody likes the loss of power that comes from having their authority questioned, especially when that authority is regularly abused.
Why don't you think about the fact that your ideology tells you that men are not only not exploited but actually privileged yet you know of a case where a girl was sent to teach third world women and no men were sent to teach third world men?
I had to save this bellyshaker for last. You are complaining that the underprivileged get something that the overprivileged do not? Oh how unfair, the overprivileged are being denied a privilege!
Technically, it wasn't Forbes making a claim; it was SCO.
It's really not that all that different. Choosing to report a story or not is one form of editorial bias. I admit that I haven't searched very hard, but I got the impression that Forbes was the only one to pick up SCO's claims and run with it. A more objective editor would probably have decided that after all their silliness, SCO's claims require independent confirmation before being reported.
It's interesting that some of SCO's most ardent public supporters feel that they can't so blatantly deny the obvious any more but it seems more like rats abandoning a sinking ship than anything else.
It turns out that Forbes.com was wrong...
Forbes defaming linux? In an article written by Daniel Lyons? Who would have thunk it?
The guy has a well established reputation for being wrong that you can pretty trust anything he writes about linux to be exactly 180-degrees out of sync with reality.
Ordinarily I would want some of whatever he's been smoking, but it sure seems to make you mean and spiteful as a side-effect.
And for those less technically oriented..that's pronouced "JIGGA-watts"
That's only what the marketing people say to fool you into thinking you are getting more watts than you really do.
If you want to be technically correct you would use the ISO standard and say, "JEBI-watts."
Not funny. Insightful. Do you know how much ignorance there is in developing nations about STDs, birth control, pregnancy, etc?
/modern/ filipino standards which would make her about average if she lived in the in US).
Which may be one of the reasons countries reject these laptops. Regressive idealogies, particularly the ones that think women are only good for babies tend to reject that kind of knowledge. I know a girl who used to teach that stuff to women in the villages at the southern end of the philippines and the men there were not happy to have her around (she's a "radical feminist" by
Beyond reproductive health and self-dominion, there are lots of areas of knowledge that many societies would rather not give their children (or adults) access to. Like a pastie-covered boobie at a sporting event.
Firefox doesn't 'compete' with a MS product. Firefox allows IIS applications to run in Linux. The windows equivalent is the Internet Explorer, which is a free download. If anything, MS has a motivation to improve Firefox as having Firefox perform as well on Linux as Internet Explorer does on Windows will increase the penetration of IIS development tools in non-windows environments, thus increasing the market share of IIS, and other paid for development tools. Not only that, but more IIS developers in Linux means more developers to train, more seminars to hold, more control over the business sector software development area.
Of course not. That's why it would be really good youtube fodder if he did.
"Please give me written proof I am on your secret list ..." Probably not going ot happen!
No, but a video of the kid fighting it out over the teddy bear with the TSA would be ideal youtube fodder.