If you disagree with him, name which non-democracy you want to live in. Do remember that his quote included "except those which have been tried from time to time", so don't resort to imagined planned societies -- just past or present societies.
Don't forget the English and Welsh kernel hackers. The last few right-hand men Linus has had were all European.
To be complete, both of you are right. Computing began in academia in England, with Turing and the early generation of hackers. It was by its definition open. Computing also spread to universities all over the West, equally open.
Some companies, mostly American companies (that's where all the money and investment was at) began to make proprietary software -- a perversion from the actual roots. In reaction to this, Stallman created the GPL and began GNU, trying to return to those open and free anarcho-syndicalist computing roots he grew up with. I think this was an ideal approach.
So modern FOSS is American, is a return to the original roots of computing, which began in England. The best you could say is that FOSS is Anglo-American or Anglo-Saxon.:)
Sure. That's totally alien to Europeans. We take pride in our work too, but it is [u]always[/u], under all circumstances, second to our family, friends, and selves.
As a European who studied in the US, this mindset did infect me a bit. Fortunately, I also learnt a lot about the importance of efficiency in the US, and by examining myself, I was able to get rid of most of these instant-gratification impatient tendencies.
You're just a cheap cynic. You think you have no power? You have far more power than you would have had 50, 100, 150, 200.... years ago. Since the inception of democracy, the people have gotten more and more empowered, free and prosperous.
As long as you are working on a social problem, technology won't help you. Someone will still have to sift through the logs; identify people, see where they went and whether their movements or actions are a "point" against them; and ultimately it all has to be translated into legal (in democracies) or police (in dictatorships) effort to go after people.
Technology will *never* help the controllers at a fundamentally different rate than the controlled.
If we spent 10% of what we spend on this kind of crap on actually solving the real problems we face, then we might actually get somewhere. But as long as we live in this ultra-paranoid world filled full of invisable terrorists then we'll never get the chance to overcome the real problems. What a shame and what a waste.
Overcome the real problems? I think some of us already have. Our politicians are fat and rich. And as long as they can keep the rest of us in fear, we'll gladly prop up this state of affairs. Just now, since the Cold War, there is no significant enemy. So the slightest threat has been magnified and trumpeted to keep the average man afraid.
After all, civilised life today has become all about fear in America. Fear of losing your job, fear of being a social outcast, fear of flying, fear of sickness and death. A poor, demoralised man will, whether in America or Africa, Russia or Mexico, will just take orders and hope for the best.
That's just what the well-off want. Is it what you want -- rich or poor? If not, then you must realise that the very act of living your life is political and that cannot be ignored (thanks for saying this, Orwell). You can change the conduct of your life to fit your politics. It's harder than only voting, but it's more effective.
Have you contacted your alma mater? Most will happily continue to forward mail for your old email (it's just a.forward file for them), and Google can be configured to set the From and Reply-To addresses correctly. It's a cheap and easy way to get a professional email address. I have two such (one from the university proper, the second from its computer science department).
You really think he missed the boat? Do you actually think it's that much easier today to monitor people? It's not. Humans still have to go through the data. Computers have just made the collection of the data easier; any analysis they do is purely superficial. Even Orwell predicted that data collection would be trivial.
In 1984, enormous human resources were devoted to monitoring people. Many orders of magnitude more than are devoted by the most extreme government today; several orders more than the Gestapo, the KGB, or the Stasi.
What surveillance in those societies really relied on was the chance of being watched, not the fact of being watched. And that was foreshadowed by Bentham in his Panopticon.
Note that I admire Orwell far more than Bentham. Orwell was politically both astute and wise.
Let me say first of all that I agree with you. But you are taking a short view, the OP is taking a long view. Prior to WWII, mass destruction of civilians in cities was completely unacceptable. Even in the Spanish Civil War, where bombers existed, it was roundly condemned. Before mass gun warfare, the deaths that soldiers inflicted on civilians was roundly their responsibility -- although they would typically go unpunished. Guns and bombs are more impersonal; and responsibility has shifted from the soldier to the army prosecuting the war.
Although I don't think laser weapons will bring us to that stage of precise warfare that you paint, because of the massive damage caused by even diffuse reflection, I do share your vision that we will get there in the future. Wars between completely robotic armies, of course, need have no casualties even in civilian regions, but those countries are unlikely to turn against each other, because the first ones to get there will probably be democracies. Wars between robotic and human armies will probably also become clean w.r.t. civilians, but I can't foresee how, and I know it won't be through lasers.
I wonder how such a flamebait title was modded as insightful. If it were about Muslims or Blacks or any race Americans had been nasty to in the past, collective self-guilt would mod it Flamebait in an instant.
Having lived in America for 6 years while I studied, conflict resolution there tends to be either: avoidance, lawyers, therapy, or guns, in about that order. In Europe, including the UK, it is usually manly confrontation and discussion. Guns are right out, therapy is sneered at, lawsuits are not lihgtly initiated, and avoidance is anti-social and cowardly.
Who are you calling spineless pussies again? Are you American?
I only needed to see the tagline of that site "free minds and free markets" to take a good guess at the political views. An American site, run by libertarians. I think I've even come across it before.
Anyway, it's economical with the truth. Why don't you read sources directly, instead of editorials? Gun deaths are down, period.
There used to be a telephone service like that in the UK in the early 90s.
Scratch that, I just looked it up, and the service *is* Shazam. To answer your question, you can do it from any mobile phone (hell, any phone at all), even my cheap and basic $10 Motorola. I love my Motorola, by the way. It does what it says it does; it's a phone and no more, and it's cheap and has good batteries. Functional, cheap and single-purpose. It's a bit lighter than the iPhone.
I quite forgot to say that as you mention macros, they're very useful in vim, and in fact can be edited directly (as commands are no more than text). I had great fun using vim macros as short scripts on text.
It's true that there's more mental load with a modal editor -- initially. In my own case, this lasted for weeks to a month after I started using vim.
During that time, I also took care to learn new vi commands every day, so that by the time I really got used to vim, I was also quite efficient with it.
The thing about vi is not that keystrokes are concise. What it's really about is that it gives you enormous expressive power to manipulate text. The fact that the commands are expressed tersely is necessary because if what it did was expressed in Perl or Java would take paragraphs of verbose code. By contrast, the vi user rarely types anything more than 30 actual control characters in any one command, and typically just 5 or so.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. I'll admit I have no firsthand experience of Romania. I'm Hungarian, and I do know that the Hungarian and Russian traditions are very strong.
I do agree with what you said though -- in Saudi Arabia it will probably gather dust.
Those countries have an extremely strong computational and intellectual legacy. Don't knock them. Saudi Arabia is completely different.
If you disagree with him, name which non-democracy you want to live in. Do remember that his quote included "except those which have been tried from time to time", so don't resort to imagined planned societies -- just past or present societies.
His Americans included "senior IT people from the financial services industry in New York".
I thought that's what all Americans did?
Goes well with your nick? ;)
Don't forget the English and Welsh kernel hackers. The last few right-hand men Linus has had were all European.
:)
To be complete, both of you are right. Computing began in academia in England, with Turing and the early generation of hackers. It was by its definition open. Computing also spread to universities all over the West, equally open.
Some companies, mostly American companies (that's where all the money and investment was at) began to make proprietary software -- a perversion from the actual roots. In reaction to this, Stallman created the GPL and began GNU, trying to return to those open and free anarcho-syndicalist computing roots he grew up with. I think this was an ideal approach.
So modern FOSS is American, is a return to the original roots of computing, which began in England. The best you could say is that FOSS is Anglo-American or Anglo-Saxon.
Sure. That's totally alien to Europeans. We take pride in our work too, but it is [u]always[/u], under all circumstances, second to our family, friends, and selves.
As a European who studied in the US, this mindset did infect me a bit. Fortunately, I also learnt a lot about the importance of efficiency in the US, and by examining myself, I was able to get rid of most of these instant-gratification impatient tendencies.
"Let's do our own version of the Big Bang first"
I see that according to good old Eastern European custom, the smiley has bad teeth. Probably too much vodka...
:)
(Disclaimer: I say this as a Hungarian with bad teeth.
You're just a cheap cynic. You think you have no power? You have far more power than you would have had 50, 100, 150, 200.... years ago. Since the inception of democracy, the people have gotten more and more empowered, free and prosperous.
As long as you are working on a social problem, technology won't help you. Someone will still have to sift through the logs; identify people, see where they went and whether their movements or actions are a "point" against them; and ultimately it all has to be translated into legal (in democracies) or police (in dictatorships) effort to go after people.
Technology will *never* help the controllers at a fundamentally different rate than the controlled.
If we spent 10% of what we spend on this kind of crap on actually solving the real problems we face, then we might actually get somewhere. But as long as we live in this ultra-paranoid world filled full of invisable terrorists then we'll never get the chance to overcome the real problems. What a shame and what a waste.
Overcome the real problems? I think some of us already have. Our politicians are fat and rich. And as long as they can keep the rest of us in fear, we'll gladly prop up this state of affairs. Just now, since the Cold War, there is no significant enemy. So the slightest threat has been magnified and trumpeted to keep the average man afraid.
After all, civilised life today has become all about fear in America. Fear of losing your job, fear of being a social outcast, fear of flying, fear of sickness and death. A poor, demoralised man will, whether in America or Africa, Russia or Mexico, will just take orders and hope for the best.
That's just what the well-off want. Is it what you want -- rich or poor? If not, then you must realise that the very act of living your life is political and that cannot be ignored (thanks for saying this, Orwell). You can change the conduct of your life to fit your politics. It's harder than only voting, but it's more effective.
Just one minor correction: EPC, not EC. EC is the European Community, EPC is the European Patent Convention. Cheers for the explanation though. :)
Have you contacted your alma mater? Most will happily continue to forward mail for your old email (it's just a .forward file for them), and Google can be configured to set the From and Reply-To addresses correctly. It's a cheap and easy way to get a professional email address. I have two such (one from the university proper, the second from its computer science department).
You really think he missed the boat? Do you actually think it's that much easier today to monitor people? It's not. Humans still have to go through the data. Computers have just made the collection of the data easier; any analysis they do is purely superficial. Even Orwell predicted that data collection would be trivial.
In 1984, enormous human resources were devoted to monitoring people. Many orders of magnitude more than are devoted by the most extreme government today; several orders more than the Gestapo, the KGB, or the Stasi.
What surveillance in those societies really relied on was the chance of being watched, not the fact of being watched. And that was foreshadowed by Bentham in his Panopticon.
Note that I admire Orwell far more than Bentham. Orwell was politically both astute and wise.
Let me say first of all that I agree with you. But you are taking a short view, the OP is taking a long view. Prior to WWII, mass destruction of civilians in cities was completely unacceptable. Even in the Spanish Civil War, where bombers existed, it was roundly condemned. Before mass gun warfare, the deaths that soldiers inflicted on civilians was roundly their responsibility -- although they would typically go unpunished. Guns and bombs are more impersonal; and responsibility has shifted from the soldier to the army prosecuting the war.
Although I don't think laser weapons will bring us to that stage of precise warfare that you paint, because of the massive damage caused by even diffuse reflection, I do share your vision that we will get there in the future. Wars between completely robotic armies, of course, need have no casualties even in civilian regions, but those countries are unlikely to turn against each other, because the first ones to get there will probably be democracies. Wars between robotic and human armies will probably also become clean w.r.t. civilians, but I can't foresee how, and I know it won't be through lasers.
When I posted, he was still +5 Informative, and they were all Informative points. Anyway... :)
It worked!
I wonder how such a flamebait title was modded as insightful. If it were about Muslims or Blacks or any race Americans had been nasty to in the past, collective self-guilt would mod it Flamebait in an instant.
Having lived in America for 6 years while I studied, conflict resolution there tends to be either: avoidance, lawyers, therapy, or guns, in about that order. In Europe, including the UK, it is usually manly confrontation and discussion. Guns are right out, therapy is sneered at, lawsuits are not lihgtly initiated, and avoidance is anti-social and cowardly.
Who are you calling spineless pussies again? Are you American?
I only needed to see the tagline of that site "free minds and free markets" to take a good guess at the political views. An American site, run by libertarians. I think I've even come across it before.
Anyway, it's economical with the truth. Why don't you read sources directly, instead of editorials? Gun deaths are down, period.
There used to be a telephone service like that in the UK in the early 90s.
Scratch that, I just looked it up, and the service *is* Shazam. To answer your question, you can do it from any mobile phone (hell, any phone at all), even my cheap and basic $10 Motorola. I love my Motorola, by the way. It does what it says it does; it's a phone and no more, and it's cheap and has good batteries. Functional, cheap and single-purpose. It's a bit lighter than the iPhone.
I quite forgot to say that as you mention macros, they're very useful in vim, and in fact can be edited directly (as commands are no more than text). I had great fun using vim macros as short scripts on text.
It's true that there's more mental load with a modal editor -- initially. In my own case, this lasted for weeks to a month after I started using vim.
During that time, I also took care to learn new vi commands every day, so that by the time I really got used to vim, I was also quite efficient with it.
The thing about vi is not that keystrokes are concise. What it's really about is that it gives you enormous expressive power to manipulate text. The fact that the commands are expressed tersely is necessary because if what it did was expressed in Perl or Java would take paragraphs of verbose code. By contrast, the vi user rarely types anything more than 30 actual control characters in any one command, and typically just 5 or so.
Not to be combative, but there's far more to vi than keybindings or editing modes. Hell, zsh has vi keybindings, modal and everything.