A constitution that is more strict provides more freedom than one that is more lax. A strictly enforced constitution has more restrictions on search and seizure, and thus provides more freedom for the populace.
The GPL guarantees freedom downstream, by restricting the ability to restrict it upstream.
Your interest in seeing a Nader candidacy compromise Gore's campaign is so obvious and transparent, it's sort of sad. Not unlike, I'll be first to admit, my glee at seeing Perot erode the support from the Republicans - but I never unctiously (and selectively) encouraged possible Republican voters to "vote their hearts" and support Perot. That sort of thing is self-serving intellectual dishonesty. I also do not expect it to work - I think you underestimate how much the left dislikes GWB and is willing to do quite a bit of nose-holding to protect choice. (By the way, has anyone tracked the record of the Supremes on geek-related intellectual property issues? My suspicion is that democratic-appointed justices are less beholden to corporate interests and more likely to protect fair use, but I could be wrong.)
And whatever the errors of Gore's finances, it should be noted that he has not personally boasted of jailing thousands of Americans for similar irregularities. I'm sorry, as far as glaring drive-a-truck-through-it hypocrisy goes, it's no contest. Bush's drug use isn't a rumor - it's grounded in evidence. This is a good summary for starters. The fact is that there are still people in Texas jails for pot possession charges that date back to GWB's era of "youthful indiscretions."
Besides, if we were worried just about Bush's incompetance, that wouldn't be enough to make us vote Gore. I'm sure that he'd be able to select a reasonably bright staff. Most Republican administrations do. (There's a saying that the Republicans pick idiots and back them with smart guys, while the Democrats pick geniuses and back them with dolts.)It's the Supremes, stupid.
If voting were an end in itself - if the purpose of voting were simply the expression of one individual's political perspective - I would agree with you.
But voting is part of a process. It is an action with consequences. To the extent that you can predict the consequences of that behaviour, your choice should be dictated by them.
I want to vote for Nader, and will if either the election has been decided before it reaches the West Coast at the end of the day, or if it looks like California is not going to be battleground state. Otherwise, I will vote for Gore for the reasons expressed elsewhere. Voting for Nader, even if he loses, could have positive consequences; if Nader gets more than five percent of the vote, the Green party will be eligible for matching federal funds for the next presidential election, and the entire Green agenda will become a strong counterweight to the implicit political consensus. However, if my vote has as a consequence a Bush win, that consequence will be less than the negative consequences created by his Supreme Court selections and his willingness for police-state enforcement in the War on Drugs. (I remain completely shocked that the fact that he enjoys a privilege of forgiveness for his wastrel youth, while happily jailing thousands of Texans whose only crime is drug use, hasn't been made a central political issue.)
The explanation you give above, (i.e. "not bad for a volunteer effort" belies the assumption that motivated the release of the Mozilla code - that the Open Source model for development creates more solid software reasonably quickly. Mozilla should be enjoying the best of all possible worlds: a group of paid developers working fulltime in conjunction with a volunteer community. Instead, we have persistent bugs and crashes and unfixed problems.
Now, I'm not complaining per se. Free is free, and I appreciate all they've accomplished. But we really have to revisit the assumptions that we've been touting as Revealed Truth to anyone who would listen: that Open Source development was the golden road to reliability and performance.
Because due to previous limits and freezes on property taxes (especially the infamous proposition 13), the public school system in California is going bankrupt, and Cisco wants an educated workforce and market in California.
I am concerned about how schools, state and federal education departments, and school districts allocate their resources. I'm worried about scenarios in which magnet schools and charter schools get a lot of newer resources, while poorer schools, especially in poorer districts, suffer increasing crowding, underpaid teachers and poorer teacher quality. Unfortunately, both politics and the culture of "computers will fix everything" have made giving out laptops and PC's to wealthier schools the easier fix that taking care of basics elsewhere.
In Richmond, CA, last year, a high school had to close due to lack of maintenance funds. They had closets filled with PS/2s and ancient Cisco routers donated by high-tech companies who couldn't be bothered to donate real money. What is maddening is that not only do the schools get nothing useable when they get old PCs, the donating corporations get massive tax write-offs for giving away obselete and unuseable technology, and then congratulate themselves for their largesse.
What if you had two kids? Twins? Of which one of whom was, for some reason, way behind the other?
One wanted a new computer and a Lego Mindstorms set, the other wanted to learn how to read and vaccinations against polio? And you could afford to do only one?
Hysteria mongers? Excuse me, you are post number 17 on this topic. A cursory scan through the previous posts found no hysteria mongering, at least in my +1 filtered view.
Are you imagining voices that don't exist? Are you responding to invisible straw men?
You should not sign something that makes a claim you do not believe is true. "I was an employee" is as useless a defense as "I was only following orders." Essentially, you are suggesting that he commit fraud. Very bad advice.
What good is democracy when you have a misinformed, television-dependent populace? Or a malicious one, or a bigotted one, or a short-sighted one? Democracies are as good as the people in them. Without a strong education, a high literacy rate, a sense of enfranchisement and fairness, and good critical thinking skills in the populace, I'd as well have a benevolent dictatorship or a technocratic oligarchy.
As far as I'm concerned, sharing music would be acceptable even if the RIAA was the most ethical, wonderful organization since Amnesty International. I just think it is too artificial and draconian, and an unacceptable limitation on a healthy and admirable characteristic, to expect us to respect intellectual property claims in the way that RIAA seeks.
However, if you do believe that those intellectual property claims are reasonable, then they are reasonable even if the RIAA is the evilest, vilest pack of scoundrels to roam the planet. Any other stance is mere rationalization of a behavior that you still think is wrong in general.
"Teaching yourself" literature, history, and philosophy is admirable, and better than not learning it at all, but there's a distinct taint of insularity and limited vision that marks most autodidacts.
When you control your own canon - when you decide what you read based on your internal map of the discourse at hand - you are likely to avoid being deeply challenged. You can reduce the discipline you are studying to a game over a limited map, and miss a vast range of alternative perspectives. (Observation: if you say that you've looked at "both sides" of an issue, you likely haven't really looked at the issue at all, but only a sketchy cartoon version of it.)
Many of the autodidacts I've met have much too much faith on the quality of their sources and their interpretations of it, of their initial strategies of dealing with new information, and in the novelty and brilliance of their inferences (I've seen 28 year old self-taught intellectuals congratulate themselves endlessly for observations and discoveries that most undergraduates in a decent liberal arts program had mastered in their first weeks.)
Again, better self-taught than not-taught at all, but don't be naive about the pitfalls of an unguided education.
My enemy is not Microsoft. No more than it is Oracle, or Informix, or Apple, or any other commercial software manufacturer. My enemy is poor quality. It is also the suppression of knowledge and the mercantile resistance to the free exchange of information, which most all commercial software vendors engage in, many more aggressively than Microsoft.
Can you tell me something? Did you use to own an Amiga or use OS/2? Your jihad looks familiar.
Please. How many geeks have had any real influence on the business and legal behaviours of their employers? Virtually none: the closest thing to an exception to that might be some of the cases where software companies opened their source, but frankly, I doubt that, as well. There's thousands of geeks working at Apple, but I still can't see most Quicktime clips in Unix.
There is always a quite-large population of entirely mercenary geeks - in fact, I consider them the rule, not the exception - who will find some way to justify working for virtually any company that pays them well and gives them neat stuff, even if they are in the business of producing land mines and Zyklon B.
I have worked in a part of the software industry that overlaps with the entertainment business (complete with a Santa Monica office) and I gotta tell ya: while I met some nice people in The Business, there's such a self-important clue-deficit there about the way that anyone else works, that it's astounding.
And they are deeply threatened by Silicon Valley. Not so much economically - there's money is crap film and bad music that will never go away - but from the fact that silicon has become sexy in a way that celluloid used to be. (I know that's catch-phrasey, but hey.)
Don't expect them to get it. They never will, because if they did, their fragile ego-structures would crumble into dust.
You use that phrase a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Sour grapes" is to take the stance that, upon learning something is unattainable, it must not be desireable. I.e., if I said "Lear Jets are lame. They are ugly and smell funny," it would be sour grapes. If I said "VWs are lame. They are ugly and smell funny," it wouldn't be. Because I can afford the VW. Note that the truth value of either claim is irrelevant to their status as being or not a 'sour grapes' remark.
Who pays the piper, calls the tune.
on
Free For All
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· Score: 4
A lot of the current reporting about the development of our technology is about the CEOs and investors who run the business end of it, rather than the technologists responsible for the actual development. Many CEO's have ghost-written narcissistic, self-serving memoirs about their Brilliant Achievements that often give short shrift to the brains that are actually doing the work.
The motivation for this sort of selective-history is the stock value of the business at hand. Shareholders like to believe in the myth of the Strong Man At The Helm, the alpha-figure who will enrich them and in whom they can trust. They don't like to be reminded about the pale, wan, tempermental and a-social geniuses that are actually the ones to credit (or blame) for a high-tech's fate.
Free Software doesn't have this burden of mercenary mythology.
I don't think this is correct. I believe that the correlation involves stability of levels of testosterone: aggressive behavior is correlated with unstable levels of testosterone, and an absence of aggressive behavior is correlated with stable levels - this is true, at least, in chimps and some other simians, in the study I saw.
Also, correlation doesn't indicate causality - there are a lot of other possible factors at work. It is true, for example, that individuals who are given testosterone supplements as part of some treatment or other (include female-to-male transexuals) report an increase in aggressive feelings.
Guess what - if they simply managed to stop all Napster usage at businesses, major ISP's, and educational institutions, they would effectively kill Napster. Why?
Just what is Napster worth to you by itself? Just sitting on your machine? Without enough other people who are also using it, it's worth nothing. Bupkis. Nada. The fact that a handful of technologically sophisticated individuals can get around it will mean nothing (especially since we could already do file-sharing, anyway) - the value of Napster comes from the critical mass of musically sophisticated people who can use its straightforward and convenient interface without a lot of hunting around. recently I managed to find some new, unusual music (Thinking Plague, Science Group - both of which I have since purchased on CD) via Napster, and I can assure you that I would have been likely to find them or anything else novel or interesting if I only had the tech-geek crowd's collections at my disposal.
If the average income is 10% of what it is in the US - like it is in much of the world - then a $15 CD effectively costs 10x as much as it does in the US.
If you knew what the economics of daily life in the 3rd world were, you'd be stunned. It's not that everything is more expensive here, it's that the range is different - essentially, imports are incredibly unaffordable, because they are priced according to the US market. (I.e., it is more profitable to price according to what 90% of American markets and 10% of third-world markets can pay, than risk letting Americans buy at prices that the 3rd world could afford, and thus losing the profit, even if it were otherwise feasible.)
While it tastes great, Naptster's free beer (music for free) is blocking Metallica's free speech (self-determination on what and how they express themselves to fans).
I have to take issue with this. Metallica's free speech is unaffected - they are still as free as ever to say what they want, sing what they want, and play what they want. The history of their speech after they say it is as issue - they essentially want control in perpuity of any creative act they have had a hand in. I don't see that as a legitimate right - once you have exercised your free speech, that speech has become part of the 'public cloud,' and I don't think it's realistic to attach a little "leash" of ownership to it, at least not without mechanisms of enforcement that are far more draconian. Control is the crux of this issue, not speech.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL guarantees freedom downstream, by restricting the ability to restrict it upstream.
And whatever the errors of Gore's finances, it should be noted that he has not personally boasted of jailing thousands of Americans for similar irregularities. I'm sorry, as far as glaring drive-a-truck-through-it hypocrisy goes, it's no contest. Bush's drug use isn't a rumor - it's grounded in evidence. This is a good summary for starters. The fact is that there are still people in Texas jails for pot possession charges that date back to GWB's era of "youthful indiscretions."
Besides, if we were worried just about Bush's incompetance, that wouldn't be enough to make us vote Gore. I'm sure that he'd be able to select a reasonably bright staff. Most Republican administrations do. (There's a saying that the Republicans pick idiots and back them with smart guys, while the Democrats pick geniuses and back them with dolts.)It's the Supremes, stupid.
But voting is part of a process. It is an action with consequences. To the extent that you can predict the consequences of that behaviour, your choice should be dictated by them.
I want to vote for Nader, and will if either the election has been decided before it reaches the West Coast at the end of the day, or if it looks like California is not going to be battleground state. Otherwise, I will vote for Gore for the reasons expressed elsewhere. Voting for Nader, even if he loses, could have positive consequences; if Nader gets more than five percent of the vote, the Green party will be eligible for matching federal funds for the next presidential election, and the entire Green agenda will become a strong counterweight to the implicit political consensus. However, if my vote has as a consequence a Bush win, that consequence will be less than the negative consequences created by his Supreme Court selections and his willingness for police-state enforcement in the War on Drugs. (I remain completely shocked that the fact that he enjoys a privilege of forgiveness for his wastrel youth, while happily jailing thousands of Texans whose only crime is drug use, hasn't been made a central political issue.)
Now, I'm not complaining per se. Free is free, and I appreciate all they've accomplished. But we really have to revisit the assumptions that we've been touting as Revealed Truth to anyone who would listen: that Open Source development was the golden road to reliability and performance.
Because due to previous limits and freezes on property taxes (especially the infamous proposition 13), the public school system in California is going bankrupt, and Cisco wants an educated workforce and market in California.
I am concerned about how schools, state and federal education departments, and school districts allocate their resources. I'm worried about scenarios in which magnet schools and charter schools get a lot of newer resources, while poorer schools, especially in poorer districts, suffer increasing crowding, underpaid teachers and poorer teacher quality. Unfortunately, both politics and the culture of "computers will fix everything" have made giving out laptops and PC's to wealthier schools the easier fix that taking care of basics elsewhere.
In Richmond, CA, last year, a high school had to close due to lack of maintenance funds. They had closets filled with PS/2s and ancient Cisco routers donated by high-tech companies who couldn't be bothered to donate real money. What is maddening is that not only do the schools get nothing useable when they get old PCs, the donating corporations get massive tax write-offs for giving away obselete and unuseable technology, and then congratulate themselves for their largesse.
One wanted a new computer and a Lego Mindstorms set, the other wanted to learn how to read and vaccinations against polio? And you could afford to do only one?
Are you imagining voices that don't exist? Are you responding to invisible straw men?
You should not sign something that makes a claim you do not believe is true. "I was an employee" is as useless a defense as "I was only following orders." Essentially, you are suggesting that he commit fraud. Very bad advice.
What good is democracy when you have a misinformed, television-dependent populace? Or a malicious one, or a bigotted one, or a short-sighted one? Democracies are as good as the people in them. Without a strong education, a high literacy rate, a sense of enfranchisement and fairness, and good critical thinking skills in the populace, I'd as well have a benevolent dictatorship or a technocratic oligarchy.
However, if you do believe that those intellectual property claims are reasonable, then they are reasonable even if the RIAA is the evilest, vilest pack of scoundrels to roam the planet. Any other stance is mere rationalization of a behavior that you still think is wrong in general.
When you control your own canon - when you decide what you read based on your internal map of the discourse at hand - you are likely to avoid being deeply challenged. You can reduce the discipline you are studying to a game over a limited map, and miss a vast range of alternative perspectives. (Observation: if you say that you've looked at "both sides" of an issue, you likely haven't really looked at the issue at all, but only a sketchy cartoon version of it.)
Many of the autodidacts I've met have much too much faith on the quality of their sources and their interpretations of it, of their initial strategies of dealing with new information, and in the novelty and brilliance of their inferences (I've seen 28 year old self-taught intellectuals congratulate themselves endlessly for observations and discoveries that most undergraduates in a decent liberal arts program had mastered in their first weeks.)
Again, better self-taught than not-taught at all, but don't be naive about the pitfalls of an unguided education.
If online rape isn't rape, then online deletion or muting of the raping character isn't punishment.
Can you tell me something? Did you use to own an Amiga or use OS/2? Your jihad looks familiar.
There is always a quite-large population of entirely mercenary geeks - in fact, I consider them the rule, not the exception - who will find some way to justify working for virtually any company that pays them well and gives them neat stuff, even if they are in the business of producing land mines and Zyklon B.
For "Media Platform Accesssing Algorithm"
Great. One run-on sentence, and you have a stroke.
And they are deeply threatened by Silicon Valley. Not so much economically - there's money is crap film and bad music that will never go away - but from the fact that silicon has become sexy in a way that celluloid used to be. (I know that's catch-phrasey, but hey.)
Don't expect them to get it. They never will, because if they did, their fragile ego-structures would crumble into dust.
"Sour grapes" is to take the stance that, upon learning something is unattainable, it must not be desireable. I.e., if I said "Lear Jets are lame. They are ugly and smell funny," it would be sour grapes. If I said "VWs are lame. They are ugly and smell funny," it wouldn't be. Because I can afford the VW. Note that the truth value of either claim is irrelevant to their status as being or not a 'sour grapes' remark.
The motivation for this sort of selective-history is the stock value of the business at hand. Shareholders like to believe in the myth of the Strong Man At The Helm, the alpha-figure who will enrich them and in whom they can trust. They don't like to be reminded about the pale, wan, tempermental and a-social geniuses that are actually the ones to credit (or blame) for a high-tech's fate.
Free Software doesn't have this burden of mercenary mythology.
Also, correlation doesn't indicate causality - there are a lot of other possible factors at work. It is true, for example, that individuals who are given testosterone supplements as part of some treatment or other (include female-to-male transexuals) report an increase in aggressive feelings.
Just what is Napster worth to you by itself? Just sitting on your machine? Without enough other people who are also using it, it's worth nothing. Bupkis. Nada. The fact that a handful of technologically sophisticated individuals can get around it will mean nothing (especially since we could already do file-sharing, anyway) - the value of Napster comes from the critical mass of musically sophisticated people who can use its straightforward and convenient interface without a lot of hunting around. recently I managed to find some new, unusual music (Thinking Plague, Science Group - both of which I have since purchased on CD) via Napster, and I can assure you that I would have been likely to find them or anything else novel or interesting if I only had the tech-geek crowd's collections at my disposal.
Followed by the even more unnerving "Parenting for Dummies."
If you knew what the economics of daily life in the 3rd world were, you'd be stunned. It's not that everything is more expensive here, it's that the range is different - essentially, imports are incredibly unaffordable, because they are priced according to the US market. (I.e., it is more profitable to price according to what 90% of American markets and 10% of third-world markets can pay, than risk letting Americans buy at prices that the 3rd world could afford, and thus losing the profit, even if it were otherwise feasible.)
I have to take issue with this. Metallica's free speech is unaffected - they are still as free as ever to say what they want, sing what they want, and play what they want. The history of their speech after they say it is as issue - they essentially want control in perpuity of any creative act they have had a hand in. I don't see that as a legitimate right - once you have exercised your free speech, that speech has become part of the 'public cloud,' and I don't think it's realistic to attach a little "leash" of ownership to it, at least not without mechanisms of enforcement that are far more draconian. Control is the crux of this issue, not speech.