Basically, I couldn't care less about so-called "open source". For me, it is and always has been about Freedom. Every time someone chooses a proprietary format, they limit the freedom of others. That needs to be stopped, or at least only done with awareness of the consequences to every member of society.
There's only one reason to favour IIS-based sites, and it's unquestionable, for any search engine wanting to make it big.
Obviously, the folks who build world-class, mission-critical websites on a webserver as prone to issues as IIS are gifted individuals, whose content is guaranteed to be superior.
Heh.. if they want to favour IIS-based sites, I say let 'em. It'll only seal their fate as a useless search engine.
Are you kidding? Have you seen how badly Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill have AGED. I definitely don't want to see her in that gold bikini again....not as grandma Leia....
Don't worry, Jennifer Aniston will be happy to do it. I'm sure her acting and genuine interest in the sci-fi genre will be comparable with Fisher's, too;)
I agree with most of your points here. In fact, they're similar to thoughts I've had myself on this subject.
However, there is the question of which jobs are the most boring for a human being. Many people who work indoors dream of switching to something completely different, like landscape gardening. I myself have switched from software development to forestry. Despite losing most of the intellectual stimulation that I thrive on in IT, I loved that simple work much more, and only switched back because of the lack of jobs in that field.
So, I agree that there will always be jobs for humans. But the question arises: will those jobs make us happier, or more miserable?
RMS has been a visionary for a long time. Linux wouldn't be too usable without his foresight so many years ago, and most of the current Free Software (and what some people call Open Source) wouldn't be here either. Most likely, a lot of great websites like CreativeCommons.org wouldn't be around either, and our rights would be on even shakier ground than they are now.
Basically, the people here insulting RMS are akin to unappreciative children insulting the father that gave them a home for so many years.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil. I still like Google, but, unfortunately, they're already starting to lose that core principle of "don't be evil." I wonder how long they'll remain likable for?
we should expect to find this evolutionary trait in quite a few species out there.
While I agree, I think you do not go far enough. If we all just accepted that humans are related to other flora and fauna on the planet, we might save ourselves a lot of time proving obvious similarities. Then, we could actually investigate more of the divergence between species.
Tiger copies that shipped out early will not be supported
Seems to me that this is probably the whole point. OS X has a software update tool, so they could easily update pre-release copies to be compatible. If they aren't doing so, it suggests to me that either: a) the software update system itself is broken, or b) the copy protection/serial authentication/registration is broken.
Of course, we have models inside our heads anyway. That's how we work out any problem. Computer modelling just makes complexity easier to cope with, and more accessible to people who don't grasp the entirety of the model. I agree that they can be dangerous. However, when done well, with a well understood problem -- I think pandemics are well understood, just hard to control --, they are enormously useful. Even if incomplete, they can be used well when the flaws are kept in mind. Just think weather;)
Even if a disease starts in the US, it seems to me that people from the area where an outbreak starts will be travelling abroad long before the infection is detected.So, while it is cured in one place, it may develop and spread in parallel elsewhere.
So then, the problem is that worldwide flights and other forms of human travel must be taken into account, not to mention trade of food, materials, animals, etc.
This software is probably a great help, and I welcome it.
I also welcome the fact that it's available on Linux. On the other hand, Free Software fan as I am, I hope it's not limited solely to Linux, since everyone who can use this should have access to it. Actually, that makes me feel better about the KDE port to Windows, too.
Overall though, I think we have a long way to go with this technology, and hopefully others will contribute to this tool.
Umm, there are many ways to get HIV: irresponsible orgies, making love to your committed gay partner of the last nineteen years, being born with it, providing emergency medical aid without proper precautions, or even having it cross a species divide from your pet monkey. The incubation period is long, so you may not recognise the people who are carriers.
Now, sure... you could lock up all those people who you consider a threat. But then... what about smokers? Aren't they a threat to themselves, and people who are irresponsible enough to passive smoke around them? What about the young AIDS sufferers who will die soon? Do we lock them up because of our (mostly unfounded) fears of infection, denying them any chance to a life before they die?
You cannot treat the sick like second class citizens, much less rabid animals. Just as a society is judged by how it treats it prisoners, it is judged by how it treats its sick.
True to an extent, but with that sort of stuff, people are willing to buy game guides (a form of tech. support, I suppose), and merchandise like T-Shirts with a game logo, etc. There are also opportunities for innovation there, like perhaps letting someone buy an official T-Shirt with their highscore on it. A model becomes invalid when it is proven not to work, not when it hasn't been fully tried yet. Many companies are successful this way.
components of their programs can be released in a free/open-source format (especially the file format) and then you can sell a more complex version with the real things
Hmm. That sounds more like a shareware model to me. Free Software usually sells optional, non-software extras like 24-hour tech support, consultancy, or installation.
For me, the medication itself isn't very important. I don't really care about sticking an needle in my leg, no matter how often. But there are two big annoyances with diabetes.
The first is being permanently dependant on a drug. This makes me much less useful in the third world, for instance: I can't just decide to go volunteer in Africa, without first checking if that remote village has access to insulin, and if the organisation I want to go with can arrange for provision, and if they'll accept the insurance issues, etc. Basically, I'm a less free, and less capable of helping people, and that sucks. I'm not sure any expensive medication for chronic illness would be better there.
The second is and being permanently in need of medical 'tweaking'. This means that I can't just go for a walk without pre-planning of when I'll be back, how much food I'll take, etc. I'm constantly drawing graphs in my head of medication cycles vs. food cycles vs. exercise and time etc. That kind of constant requirement on a person to plan everything tends to limit fun, and freedom, and tends to wear sufferers of a chronic illness down after a while.
Although anti-rejection drugs wouldn't help with the former problem, and I don't consider them a very good solution... well, they may help a little with the second, if it's a case of just regularly taking pills as opposed to calculating dosages vs. food and exercise etc.
Just because an argument is logically valid does not mean that it is true
Actually, it does. If an argument starts from a faulty premise, it is fundamentally illogical. If it starts from a sound premise, and continues logically to the end, then the conclusion must be valid. That's the whole point of logic. Certainly, there can be other factors to consider, but that only means that the argument deserves further consideration.
If you're trying to say that RMS has said something false, I'd like to see you prove it with something more solid than vague accusations.
6. "Teaching kids IT" in such a way that they can only use one specific word processor from a company that has been convicted of monopoly practices is simply unethical. As an ex-teacher myself, I consider a teacher's responsibility to be greater than just choosing whatever is easiest. And, of course, OpenOffice really is close enough to Office that there is no real difference for most purposes, so you also have issues such as wasting tax payers' money.
What you fail to understand is that K'breel sounds just like a capable warmonger. In fact, I get the distinct impression that K'breel's character is modelled on a president we all know and love. Well, know, anyway.
This isn't new, unfortunately. Islet cell transplants have been happening for many years now. The first cases I heard of were in Russia, using islet cells from aborted foetuses (I gather such things are more readily available in Russia). But they've been doing it on a small scale in the UK for years, too, with success.
I'm not sure why we haven't seen this become a mainstream solution yet, but personally, I'm not holding my breath for any of the diabetes solutions that get mentioned by news reporters regularly. News services seem to like to this story so much that they declare a new "cure" each year... except that it'll be years before most people get it, if they get it.
It seems to me that HTML's font specification system solves this problem nicely. If more apps specified fonts as "GPL Sans, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif", rather than actually including them in the document, this wouldn't be a problem, and would in fact introduce more flexibility and smaller file sizes.
Of course, for printers etc. who may need the exact font the designer used, you would need some sort of 'render integrity' indicator, which shows how many fonts have been substituted.
Maybe with SVG etc., we'll begin to see more apps doing this. Personally, I think it's important that fonts are modifiable and open, so I'm still in favour of the GPL for fonts, if this one problem can be worked around somehow.
Agreed, Linus is not evil. On the other hand, though, there is the saying that "all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." When it comes to particular cases of doing the right thing, you're often either doing that, or doing the opposite.
Personally, I'm with Bruce: this sort of thing is the inevitable result of the slippery slope of choosing to use proprietary solutions in a Free Software project.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, I couldn't care less about so-called "open source". For me, it is and always has been about Freedom. Every time someone chooses a proprietary format, they limit the freedom of others. That needs to be stopped, or at least only done with awareness of the consequences to every member of society.
There's only one reason to favour IIS-based sites, and it's unquestionable, for any search engine wanting to make it big.
Obviously, the folks who build world-class, mission-critical websites on a webserver as prone to issues as IIS are gifted individuals, whose content is guaranteed to be superior.
Heh.. if they want to favour IIS-based sites, I say let 'em. It'll only seal their fate as a useless search engine.
Nope, animated linux blog avatars ;)
I agree with most of your points here. In fact, they're similar to thoughts I've had myself on this subject.
However, there is the question of which jobs are the most boring for a human being. Many people who work indoors dream of switching to something completely different, like landscape gardening. I myself have switched from software development to forestry. Despite losing most of the intellectual stimulation that I thrive on in IT, I loved that simple work much more, and only switched back because of the lack of jobs in that field.
So, I agree that there will always be jobs for humans. But the question arises: will those jobs make us happier, or more miserable?
RMS has been a visionary for a long time. Linux wouldn't be too usable without his foresight so many years ago, and most of the current Free Software (and what some people call Open Source) wouldn't be here either. Most likely, a lot of great websites like CreativeCommons.org wouldn't be around either, and our rights would be on even shakier ground than they are now.
Basically, the people here insulting RMS are akin to unappreciative children insulting the father that gave them a home for so many years.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil. I still like Google, but, unfortunately, they're already starting to lose that core principle of "don't be evil." I wonder how long they'll remain likable for?
Yes, especially when those analogue broadcasters have loosely connected cells all over the world...
Nope, that's called sarcasm ;)
Seems to me that this is probably the whole point. OS X has a software update tool, so they could easily update pre-release copies to be compatible. If they aren't doing so, it suggests to me that either: a) the software update system itself is broken, or b) the copy protection/serial authentication/registration is broken.
heh.. Nice to see he's got his priorities straight, considering the lock-in etc. that comes free with MS Office ;)
Of course, we have models inside our heads anyway. That's how we work out any problem. Computer modelling just makes complexity easier to cope with, and more accessible to people who don't grasp the entirety of the model. I agree that they can be dangerous. However, when done well, with a well understood problem -- I think pandemics are well understood, just hard to control --, they are enormously useful. Even if incomplete, they can be used well when the flaws are kept in mind. Just think weather ;)
Yes, this was my first thought too.
Even if a disease starts in the US, it seems to me that people from the area where an outbreak starts will be travelling abroad long before the infection is detected.So, while it is cured in one place, it may develop and spread in parallel elsewhere.
So then, the problem is that worldwide flights and other forms of human travel must be taken into account, not to mention trade of food, materials, animals, etc.
This software is probably a great help, and I welcome it.
I also welcome the fact that it's available on Linux. On the other hand, Free Software fan as I am, I hope it's not limited solely to Linux, since everyone who can use this should have access to it. Actually, that makes me feel better about the KDE port to Windows, too.
Overall though, I think we have a long way to go with this technology, and hopefully others will contribute to this tool.
Umm, there are many ways to get HIV: irresponsible orgies, making love to your committed gay partner of the last nineteen years, being born with it, providing emergency medical aid without proper precautions, or even having it cross a species divide from your pet monkey. The incubation period is long, so you may not recognise the people who are carriers.
Now, sure... you could lock up all those people who you consider a threat. But then... what about smokers? Aren't they a threat to themselves, and people who are irresponsible enough to passive smoke around them? What about the young AIDS sufferers who will die soon? Do we lock them up because of our (mostly unfounded) fears of infection, denying them any chance to a life before they die?
You cannot treat the sick like second class citizens, much less rabid animals. Just as a society is judged by how it treats it prisoners, it is judged by how it treats its sick.
True to an extent, but with that sort of stuff, people are willing to buy game guides (a form of tech. support, I suppose), and merchandise like T-Shirts with a game logo, etc. There are also opportunities for innovation there, like perhaps letting someone buy an official T-Shirt with their highscore on it. A model becomes invalid when it is proven not to work, not when it hasn't been fully tried yet. Many companies are successful this way.
Hmm. That sounds more like a shareware model to me. Free Software usually sells optional, non-software extras like 24-hour tech support, consultancy, or installation.
For me, the medication itself isn't very important. I don't really care about sticking an needle in my leg, no matter how often. But there are two big annoyances with diabetes. The first is being permanently dependant on a drug. This makes me much less useful in the third world, for instance: I can't just decide to go volunteer in Africa, without first checking if that remote village has access to insulin, and if the organisation I want to go with can arrange for provision, and if they'll accept the insurance issues, etc. Basically, I'm a less free, and less capable of helping people, and that sucks. I'm not sure any expensive medication for chronic illness would be better there. The second is and being permanently in need of medical 'tweaking'. This means that I can't just go for a walk without pre-planning of when I'll be back, how much food I'll take, etc. I'm constantly drawing graphs in my head of medication cycles vs. food cycles vs. exercise and time etc. That kind of constant requirement on a person to plan everything tends to limit fun, and freedom, and tends to wear sufferers of a chronic illness down after a while. Although anti-rejection drugs wouldn't help with the former problem, and I don't consider them a very good solution... well, they may help a little with the second, if it's a case of just regularly taking pills as opposed to calculating dosages vs. food and exercise etc.
Actually, it does. If an argument starts from a faulty premise, it is fundamentally illogical. If it starts from a sound premise, and continues logically to the end, then the conclusion must be valid. That's the whole point of logic. Certainly, there can be other factors to consider, but that only means that the argument deserves further consideration.
If you're trying to say that RMS has said something false, I'd like to see you prove it with something more solid than vague accusations.
6. "Teaching kids IT" in such a way that they can only use one specific word processor from a company that has been convicted of monopoly practices is simply unethical. As an ex-teacher myself, I consider a teacher's responsibility to be greater than just choosing whatever is easiest. And, of course, OpenOffice really is close enough to Office that there is no real difference for most purposes, so you also have issues such as wasting tax payers' money.
What you fail to understand is that K'breel sounds just like a capable warmonger. In fact, I get the distinct impression that K'breel's character is modelled on a president we all know and love. Well, know, anyway.
This isn't new, unfortunately. Islet cell transplants have been happening for many years now. The first cases I heard of were in Russia, using islet cells from aborted foetuses (I gather such things are more readily available in Russia). But they've been doing it on a small scale in the UK for years, too, with success.
I'm not sure why we haven't seen this become a mainstream solution yet, but personally, I'm not holding my breath for any of the diabetes solutions that get mentioned by news reporters regularly. News services seem to like to this story so much that they declare a new "cure" each year... except that it'll be years before most people get it, if they get it.
It seems to me that HTML's font specification system solves this problem nicely. If more apps specified fonts as "GPL Sans, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif", rather than actually including them in the document, this wouldn't be a problem, and would in fact introduce more flexibility and smaller file sizes.
Of course, for printers etc. who may need the exact font the designer used, you would need some sort of 'render integrity' indicator, which shows how many fonts have been substituted.
Maybe with SVG etc., we'll begin to see more apps doing this. Personally, I think it's important that fonts are modifiable and open, so I'm still in favour of the GPL for fonts, if this one problem can be worked around somehow.
Agreed, Linus is not evil. On the other hand, though, there is the saying that "all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." When it comes to particular cases of doing the right thing, you're often either doing that, or doing the opposite.
Personally, I'm with Bruce: this sort of thing is the inevitable result of the slippery slope of choosing to use proprietary solutions in a Free Software project.