Perhaps you ought to READ those AC posts. You see, the reason they pop up is not because they're nationalist bigots, its because the Chinese government parallels the Open Source community-is-all model behind Linux and such things that Slashdotters love very closely. Now, the important thing is that any suggestion of such a thing is harshly moderated in favor of preserving the good image of Open Source. Now, if the moderators thought there was nothing wrong with China and communism, they wouldn't moderate down... but they always do... like they'll do to this post 3 seconds after I hit submit...
Esperandi You don't post under your account when you expect to be moderated down if you're a karma whore.
Now how, exactly, is sending one man into orbit going to start a space race with countries that have space stations, people landed on the moon 30 years ago, probes going to Mars, etc?
I mean, a new space race would be cool, but this is not even minutely close to a race... it will take the Chinese longer to catch up to us than it will take us to colonize Mars unless conditions improve and all of a sudden their ground sprouts forth all kinds of bounty and such... one of the primary reasons China is so poor (the Chinese people are poor because of communism, but this is about the country itself) is because they don't have much of anything in the way of natural resources. They've got lots of people if you consider that simply a natural resource (they do) but that won't help put people into space... the average joe can't do fluid dynamics equations.
Esperandi Let's see if they can even get it off the ground before we start imagining the Chinese colonizing Jupiter.
The US has a monopoly on space? Since when?!?! I seem to recall hearing about a Mir thing some time ago.. you know, first space station or something. Oh, and Sputnik, I think that went up first didn't it? The US has never had a monopoly on space.
Oh, and competition only works when some form of profit is involved. As far as I can see, there isn't much here, its mostly just something we do because we can.
Esperandi But we'd better do it, because I want to live on Mars dammit
I use keyboard shortcuts all the time... but I don't have a Windows key... my keyboard is on the order of 10 years old... built like a tank and works great (except the trackball on the far-right... a REAL trackball, size of a baseball... doesn't work).
And you defeat yourself on this point, which is faster, hitting the windows key or saying "Open start menu"?
Esperandi I admit I didn't know about the average rate of speech, but I couldn't imagine saying 60wpm as being sensible if you count the words the same way you count them when typing... still, it will take more talking than typing unless you're doing word processing or posting on slashdot... and then reading out the HTML tags would take forever...
Comparing PCs to consoles is generally a dangerous game. You say you'll get better fill rates with consoles... now why is that? There was a whole camp of people who said that the Nintendo 64 would never be emulated because it was more powerful than the PC. Now there is an emulator that emulates the Nintendo 64 on the PC and runs at realtime speed on an AMD K6-2 350MHz machine with 128MB of RAM and a crappy voodoo2 card. It can easily get much faster than the N64 with a better computer or better video card. I don't see computers being outstripped by consoles any time soon, computers operate differently and there is a LOT of room for acceleration while on a console there isn't (you can't cache textures on the N64 into a large video memory buffer, they are loaded from the cart every single frame!).
I think the current trend of releasing more games for the consoles goes back to what you mentioned at the top of your post... no boot time to speak of, big huge screen, surround sound, no worrying about technological difficulties (mostly, if you ignore the Dreamcast crashing), etc. Also, its simple, theres a bigger market for it. But the breakthrough games like Half Life, System Shock 2, Quake 3, etc, will come out on the PC first and the console versions will be less detailed. I imagine by the time 50" HDTVs become common, 50" monitor with quadruple the resolution will be common.... unless the monitor community continues their absolutely abyssmal technological progress and price-cutting rate (just compare it to anything else in the computer insustry and try not to wonder what those guys are smoking).
Why? You can type 60wpm if you're good and talk maybe 20... then you get into the mouse. Faster to click the Start button (since we know MS will do this first and Linux will follow, we'll go with MS here) or say "Press the Start Button" or "Open the Start menu".
Monitor prices didn't even budge for like 20 years until LCD panels came out recently. Unlike everything else in the computer world, the people making monitors are slow as hell at innovating anything, so it takes decades for any prices to come down.
People use their PCs for more than web surfing, ya know, he seems to ignore that. No one wants Q3 on a handheld with a 4" screen. PCs have become a fixture in the home, and they'll stay that way. Televisions are portable now, do you see the TV set going anywhere?
I do not have a compiled version of deCSS and I've never compiled it. I got it off of download.com when it was listed #1 Illegal Download of the Day (strangely, it still shows up on their search but the pages are gone). Apparently you've never looked at the deCSS source code yourself, because its full of Windows API calls. Windows API calls do not work in Linux. Linux does not have hwnds or a winmain() function.
Now, if you had calmed down and told me that deCSS was developed as part of the LiViD project (which I only found out by following your link and reading the EFF stuff), you could have informed me. It doesn't help for you to claim the software doesn't copy the DVD to the hard drive (it does) or to claim that its not for Windows (which it is). Just leave the facts alone, and explain calmly, and let it roll through the courts. Regardless of the outcome, I would bet money there will be a Linux player available before long.
I know that CSS was not created as a copy protection measure and that deCSS was not created to defeat a copy protecting measure (if it had been, it wouldn't have been much of a legal fight since circumventing copyright protection methods is explicitly legal according to the DMCA). What I also know is that the first time I heard of deCSS was when people from a movie-warezing chat room started talking about it. And when I heard about my cousin telling how at his college they've got a machine setup churning out ASF after ASF of DVDs that they rent. Much higher quality and much easier to produce than copies of VHS movies.
I also know that a DVD player has in fact not been written based on this code.
Now, I understand there is a large faction of people who adamantly insist that this was background work for a Linux DVD player. If that were true, it'd be a great work. But I do not see any evidence _at_all_ for this assumption. The closest thing I think that faction should be arguing is that it is a harmless cracking of an encryption standard made to uphold a monopoly. deCSS is obviously simply a proof-of-concept work, nothing more. However, right now, it *IS* being used to copy DVDs, and it is not being used to play DVDs. You can't ignore that fact just because you know the prosecution will like it.
BTW, you have to wonder, how did he know deCSS worked? Did he play the output? Or did he feed the output file into a format converter and watch that output?
My suggestion would be to write a program to *PLAY* DVDs and not a program to *COPY* DVDs. If you wrote a player, there would be much less legal ground to stand on. Writing something that rips the data from the disc and puts it, unencrypted, on the hard drive, cannot be legally construed as anything but a copying device. If it, however, decrypted on the fly and played the movie, well, I don't see where they'd really have a leg to stand on, at least not in the U.S. Remember, he's being tried in his home country where it might be ilegal to even reverse enginner stuff.
"It is entirely clear that DeCSS has been developed in order to watch DVD videos on linux boxen"
Its a Windows program. it doesn't play video or audio. How the hel is it obvious to you that it was developed for Linux and for the purpose of creating a DVD player? deCSS copies DVDs. That's not a speculation on what it might do or could do, that is what it does and its the only thing that it does. And it does it under Windows.
Yeah, it'd be nice if he had written a DVD player for Linux, but he didn't. He wrote a DVD copier for Windows. because of that, this court case is a million times tougher than if he had done the former.
In case your question doesn't get chosen (it probably will, but just in case), you ought to take a second to think about it.... what do you know of the media coverage in his home country? How do you know that over there it wasn't an even more major issue than in the U.S.? Why do you believe this to be a possibility if you only know one side of the fight?
(these are questions to the question-poster, not to the author of deCSS)
When writing deCSS, did you ever consider writing a DVD player application instead of a program to simply rip the information from the DVD and if so, do you believe that writing a DVD player instead of a DVD copying program would have made this legal battle a bit easier?
Ha! Perfect point! (regarding the devils advocate thing) Altho it doesn't address the situation directly (educating someone and then letting them influence a field is much different than letting a totally ignorant person do it as I postualted), it is a valiant answer!
I have a feeling that answer is why my high school teacher was a teacher and you're not;)
Ca-Ching! You've mostly got it! This definitely IS one of the most important things the Internet has brought us. Communities founded on ideas instead of communities based on geography, religion, etc.
Now, the real kicker is when you look at these communities. The "capitalist community" if you wish to call it that, with patents and copyrights and such, are basically just keeping to themselves. The Open Source community is trying to start a war. They're disappointed with their own progress and are attempting to bully themselves in on someone elses turf. At the same time, they're protecting their turf vigorously. Most anti-Open Source posts on slashdot get moderated into oblivion, check the viral GPL license, other such things.
Heh, got read by me;) personally, I think the post (not yours, the original) is disgusting, but you don't seem to actually believe much of it, you just say you do or think it sounds nice.
Anyhow, about half-duplex... this reminds me of when a teacher told me he could take devils advocate to any position at all, so I took him up on that. I told him my position was that someone who was totally ignorant in a certain field should not be allowed to influence the field. He couldn't do it. He always assumed they could bring something to the table by drawing analogies and such... which would require them to not be totally ignorant of the subject, etc.
Anyhow, I "lurk" on all sorts of mailing lists that I do not have the knowledge to make a profitable conversation in that arena. In others, I reply to every post because I know the matter at hand. I think you can agree with me that on the lists on which I lurk, no one is being short-changed. I'm not withholding anything, I simply do not have anything to give. In reality, this is the way it works. You shouldn't converse with everyone because everyone doesn't have something to contribute.
The key to becoming a ful human being is knowing and acknowledging and not being ashamed of NOT contributing. Those lists which I lurk on and learn... I realize fully that I do not have the knowledge the people there do. I'd admit it to anyone who asks, and I don't feel the slightest bit embarrassed about it. There are a lot of people out there who would rather LIE about something than admit they are totally ignorant of the subject. I'd rather have those people realize their own limitations and capitalize on their abilities than try to fake and squirm and disseminate all kinds of false information just so he doesn't feel he's letting the community down by running in "half-duplex" mode.
By giving people the exact credit they deserve, no less and certainly no more, you help them grow. By giving them an abundance of credit, they stand still.
Esperandi Maybe if we give him lots of free stuff for a long time he'll get sick of it and get motivated!
I praise you for this reply sir, you're one of the very few who understands humanity and doesn't want to bend it to accomodate freeloaders.
BTW, Open Source can be defended by this viewpoint, but I don't want posers who can't figure it out for themselves defending Open Source under the guise of capitalism and man as a heroic ideal and then turning around and going back Marxist on everyone.
"Open source has made it possible for people with ideas and a message to build tools that either embody it or enable it if they have the talent. "
False. Bill Gates got Windows out there, as well as writing a book about his ideas in the computer realm. The idea that Open Source created this ability is laughable. Open Source came after.
If reality didn't exist, you'd have a chance. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Microsoft is playing by the logically applied laws of reality in most cases (not when they stifle competition, but when they put out a product and people buy it) while you are taking as your first premise a perversion of reality.
Work must be paid for. Workers must be paid according to their value. All workers are not equal. All work is not equal. Anyone who denies payment for work or demands overpayment for work will be eliminated. Selfishness is the only instinct and should be followed always. If you INSIST on looking at how this affects other people, do so. But do so with the real definition of selfishness which is to act in ones best interests at all times. Killing people is not in your best interests because you will be punished and you are attempting to profit by force and not by merit. Ignoring your family is not selfish because it deprives you of happiness. You can trace back all bad behavior that people now call selfish and find that it is actually the action of a selfless person... a person acting againt their own interests. There is no value in that, only death.
It's not pragmatic, it's logical... Pragmatism isn't what its current bastardized version seems to be. Ask the average person what pragmatism is and they'll say its the ability to bend on any moral issue to make the current situation "work out." In reality, pragmatism is a world view that says that if something must be true for you to accomplish a goal, it IS true and that reality is based on that.
yes, it sounds insane, but lots of people believe this more deeply than they know.
I disagree with this post and I'm going to go about diagreeing with it in this post, so if you agreed with it and believe that everyone else in the world ought to as well, and wish to prevent people reading with a threshhold level of 1 from seeing my thoughts, moderate down now. I'm not going to lie about this post in the name of karma.
Okay, now I can begin. There are problems with this post too numerous to mention so I'll just hit a few. The author posits the common belief that the life of every man on the planet should be dedicated to sacrificing himself to "them." The person being sacrificed is never one of "them", but "they" are more important than anything he can conceive of.
Why do people come to this conclusion? There are a few reasons. One is that they see it as an easy way to live - you don't have to achieve anything because you can ride on the back of someone smart who swallowed this philosophy (and this is philosophy we're talkin about, read some stuff by Kant and Kierkegaard and Plato and you'll recognize all of these ideas) - and they also see that they will never be sacrificed since they are worthless. What they don't realize is that this philosophy eliminates the best people in the world one by one until THEY are the best person in the world, at which time they must be sacrificed. Kill ever man who makes over $1M a year and the tax brackets will scale so that the person making $900k is paying for everyone else. Kill every man making over $10k a year and the same thing happens, the tax brackets scale.
Another reason people accept this odious philosophy is that they don't understand it. An astonishing number of people on this planet believe that they don't need to think about philosophy. But they pick one up. Everyone MUST have a philosophy or they would die. Now, no one accepts this philosophy completely, if they did they would be dead. To accept this philosophy completely means you would cease eating and spend your last days feeding your neighbor. But no one does that, they simply scream that you need to be pragmatic. Why they want to go along with only the slightest sliver of capitalism and justice as possible and stumble around in poverty, I really have no clue.
I think eventually people will come around to reject this philosophy. They will realize that anything worth doing actually has a reason behind it that is much better than "you HAVE to do it because the human race DEMANDS it of you and if you don't cut your own throat to save them, you're a bad person." Why use Open Source? There are a myriad of GOOD reasons. Any reason which involves benefitting others as your primary objective is a BAD reason. I won't give you those good reasons because I hope you'll be able to think of them yourself, there are quite a few. Its not a silver bullet though, and nothing ever is. I don't say that out of a hatred for absolutism as most people do nowadays (how many people do you know that will not accept a set of beliefs simply because they ARE a set of beliefs?), i say it because its true. Not everything in nature is the same color (but things do have a definite color), just as not every software package can fall under the same license.
Now, why do I think people uphold Linux so highly when their OS is basically irrelevant to the happiness and fulfillment they feel in their lives? Well, personally I think its the "new OS smell" mostly. You use one OS for a year and you get used to it. You use another one and even if it sucks donkey balls for playing 3D games, you'll want them ported. This exact same thing would happen if Linux was widespread... MS OS' would be considered 'cool' because they looked and felt a little different and were a breath of new air (note I didn't say fresh).
Another good reason people feel the need to violently uphold Linux is because they're not doing it based on Linux' merit. They COULD do it on Linux' merit, but it would be very difficult and the people who cling to Linux cannot see the technical advantages, let alone its shortcomings (there is an abundance of both). They uphold Linux violently because they're upholding this philosophy. They choose to do it violently and not reationally because it is an irrational philosophy that basically tells you that the individual is not important and that the collective is all-important. No collective has ever invented anything. Individuals inside of collectives have. No collective has ever helped anyone. Individuals inside collective have helped other individuals. "The collective" is another way of saying "the people who are going to take credit for whatever you do as an individual and who are going to convince you that it is them who deserve the credit."
Look at Open Source. Is Linux a product of a masterful individual? A product of the work of several masterful individuals? No, its the product of a collective, of the "community" as they call it. This is not true. One part of the kernel is by Linus Torvalds, other parts are by other individuals. They all have names. They are not a community.
Esperandi I am not a community. I take credit for my rights and wrongs. Should you try to take credit for either, I will stop producing until you stop stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you ought to READ those AC posts. You see, the reason they pop up is not because they're nationalist bigots, its because the Chinese government parallels the Open Source community-is-all model behind Linux and such things that Slashdotters love very closely. Now, the important thing is that any suggestion of such a thing is harshly moderated in favor of preserving the good image of Open Source. Now, if the moderators thought there was nothing wrong with China and communism, they wouldn't moderate down... but they always do... like they'll do to this post 3 seconds after I hit submit...
Esperandi
You don't post under your account when you expect to be moderated down if you're a karma whore.
Now how, exactly, is sending one man into orbit going to start a space race with countries that have space stations, people landed on the moon 30 years ago, probes going to Mars, etc?
I mean, a new space race would be cool, but this is not even minutely close to a race... it will take the Chinese longer to catch up to us than it will take us to colonize Mars unless conditions improve and all of a sudden their ground sprouts forth all kinds of bounty and such... one of the primary reasons China is so poor (the Chinese people are poor because of communism, but this is about the country itself) is because they don't have much of anything in the way of natural resources. They've got lots of people if you consider that simply a natural resource (they do) but that won't help put people into space... the average joe can't do fluid dynamics equations.
Esperandi
Let's see if they can even get it off the ground before we start imagining the Chinese colonizing Jupiter.
The US has a monopoly on space? Since when?!?!
I seem to recall hearing about a Mir thing some time ago.. you know, first space station or something. Oh, and Sputnik, I think that went up first didn't it? The US has never had a monopoly on space.
Oh, and competition only works when some form of profit is involved. As far as I can see, there isn't much here, its mostly just something we do because we can.
Esperandi
But we'd better do it, because I want to live on Mars dammit
They're sending just one man? What if he starts thinking about how nice it would be to be free? Will they shoot him down upon re-entry?
Esperandi
Is the capsule running Linux? I mean, official OS of the Communist State of China and all....
I use keyboard shortcuts all the time... but I don't have a Windows key... my keyboard is on the order of 10 years old... built like a tank and works great (except the trackball on the far-right... a REAL trackball, size of a baseball... doesn't work).
And you defeat yourself on this point, which is faster, hitting the windows key or saying "Open start menu"?
Esperandi
I admit I didn't know about the average rate of speech, but I couldn't imagine saying 60wpm as being sensible if you count the words the same way you count them when typing... still, it will take more talking than typing unless you're doing word processing or posting on slashdot... and then reading out the HTML tags would take forever...
Comparing PCs to consoles is generally a dangerous game. You say you'll get better fill rates with consoles... now why is that? There was a whole camp of people who said that the Nintendo 64 would never be emulated because it was more powerful than the PC. Now there is an emulator that emulates the Nintendo 64 on the PC and runs at realtime speed on an AMD K6-2 350MHz machine with 128MB of RAM and a crappy voodoo2 card. It can easily get much faster than the N64 with a better computer or better video card. I don't see computers being outstripped by consoles any time soon, computers operate differently and there is a LOT of room for acceleration while on a console there isn't (you can't cache textures on the N64 into a large video memory buffer, they are loaded from the cart every single frame!).
I think the current trend of releasing more games for the consoles goes back to what you mentioned at the top of your post... no boot time to speak of, big huge screen, surround sound, no worrying about technological difficulties (mostly, if you ignore the Dreamcast crashing), etc. Also, its simple, theres a bigger market for it. But the breakthrough games like Half Life, System Shock 2, Quake 3, etc, will come out on the PC first and the console versions will be less detailed. I imagine by the time 50" HDTVs become common, 50" monitor with quadruple the resolution will be common.... unless the monitor community continues their absolutely abyssmal technological progress and price-cutting rate (just compare it to anything else in the computer insustry and try not to wonder what those guys are smoking).
Esperandi
www.moller.com
the 50s are here
Esperandi
Why? You can type 60wpm if you're good and talk maybe 20... then you get into the mouse. Faster to click the Start button (since we know MS will do this first and Linux will follow, we'll go with MS here) or say "Press the Start Button" or "Open the Start menu".
I'll stick with the clicking and clacking.
Esperandi
Monitor prices didn't even budge for like 20 years until LCD panels came out recently. Unlike everything else in the computer world, the people making monitors are slow as hell at innovating anything, so it takes decades for any prices to come down.
Esperandi
People use their PCs for more than web surfing, ya know, he seems to ignore that. No one wants Q3 on a handheld with a 4" screen. PCs have become a fixture in the home, and they'll stay that way. Televisions are portable now, do you see the TV set going anywhere?
Esperandi
I do not have a compiled version of deCSS and I've never compiled it. I got it off of download.com when it was listed #1 Illegal Download of the Day (strangely, it still shows up on their search but the pages are gone). Apparently you've never looked at the deCSS source code yourself, because its full of Windows API calls. Windows API calls do not work in Linux. Linux does not have hwnds or a winmain() function.
Now, if you had calmed down and told me that deCSS was developed as part of the LiViD project (which I only found out by following your link and reading the EFF stuff), you could have informed me. It doesn't help for you to claim the software doesn't copy the DVD to the hard drive (it does) or to claim that its not for Windows (which it is). Just leave the facts alone, and explain calmly, and let it roll through the courts. Regardless of the outcome, I would bet money there will be a Linux player available before long.
Esperandi
I know that CSS was not created as a copy protection measure and that deCSS was not created to defeat a copy protecting measure (if it had been, it wouldn't have been much of a legal fight since circumventing copyright protection methods is explicitly legal according to the DMCA). What I also know is that the first time I heard of deCSS was when people from a movie-warezing chat room started talking about it. And when I heard about my cousin telling how at his college they've got a machine setup churning out ASF after ASF of DVDs that they rent. Much higher quality and much easier to produce than copies of VHS movies.
I also know that a DVD player has in fact not been written based on this code.
Now, I understand there is a large faction of people who adamantly insist that this was background work for a Linux DVD player. If that were true, it'd be a great work. But I do not see any evidence _at_all_ for this assumption. The closest thing I think that faction should be arguing is that it is a harmless cracking of an encryption standard made to uphold a monopoly. deCSS is obviously simply a proof-of-concept work, nothing more. However, right now, it *IS* being used to copy DVDs, and it is not being used to play DVDs. You can't ignore that fact just because you know the prosecution will like it.
BTW, you have to wonder, how did he know deCSS worked? Did he play the output? Or did he feed the output file into a format converter and watch that output?
Esperandi
My suggestion would be to write a program to *PLAY* DVDs and not a program to *COPY* DVDs. If you wrote a player, there would be much less legal ground to stand on. Writing something that rips the data from the disc and puts it, unencrypted, on the hard drive, cannot be legally construed as anything but a copying device. If it, however, decrypted on the fly and played the movie, well, I don't see where they'd really have a leg to stand on, at least not in the U.S. Remember, he's being tried in his home country where it might be ilegal to even reverse enginner stuff.
Esperandi
"It is entirely clear that DeCSS has been developed in order to watch DVD videos on linux boxen"
Its a Windows program. it doesn't play video or audio. How the hel is it obvious to you that it was developed for Linux and for the purpose of creating a DVD player? deCSS copies DVDs. That's not a speculation on what it might do or could do, that is what it does and its the only thing that it does. And it does it under Windows.
Yeah, it'd be nice if he had written a DVD player for Linux, but he didn't. He wrote a DVD copier for Windows. because of that, this court case is a million times tougher than if he had done the former.
Esperandi
In case your question doesn't get chosen (it probably will, but just in case), you ought to take a second to think about it.... what do you know of the media coverage in his home country? How do you know that over there it wasn't an even more major issue than in the U.S.? Why do you believe this to be a possibility if you only know one side of the fight?
(these are questions to the question-poster, not to the author of deCSS)
Esperandi
When writing deCSS, did you ever consider writing a DVD player application instead of a program to simply rip the information from the DVD and if so, do you believe that writing a DVD player instead of a DVD copying program would have made this legal battle a bit easier?
Esperandi
Ha! Perfect point! (regarding the devils advocate thing) Altho it doesn't address the situation directly (educating someone and then letting them influence a field is much different than letting a totally ignorant person do it as I postualted), it is a valiant answer!
;)
I have a feeling that answer is why my high school teacher was a teacher and you're not
Esperandi
Ca-Ching! You've mostly got it! This definitely IS one of the most important things the Internet has brought us. Communities founded on ideas instead of communities based on geography, religion, etc.
Now, the real kicker is when you look at these communities. The "capitalist community" if you wish to call it that, with patents and copyrights and such, are basically just keeping to themselves. The Open Source community is trying to start a war. They're disappointed with their own progress and are attempting to bully themselves in on someone elses turf. At the same time, they're protecting their turf vigorously. Most anti-Open Source posts on slashdot get moderated into oblivion, check the viral GPL license, other such things.
Esperandi
Heh, I applaud your troll that was obviously so well constructed and witty that none of the bait caught ;)
Esperandi
Psst, I agree 100%, keep up the subversity
Heh, got read by me ;) personally, I think the post (not yours, the original) is disgusting, but you don't seem to actually believe much of it, you just say you do or think it sounds nice.
Anyhow, about half-duplex... this reminds me of when a teacher told me he could take devils advocate to any position at all, so I took him up on that. I told him my position was that someone who was totally ignorant in a certain field should not be allowed to influence the field. He couldn't do it. He always assumed they could bring something to the table by drawing analogies and such... which would require them to not be totally ignorant of the subject, etc.
Anyhow, I "lurk" on all sorts of mailing lists that I do not have the knowledge to make a profitable conversation in that arena. In others, I reply to every post because I know the matter at hand. I think you can agree with me that on the lists on which I lurk, no one is being short-changed. I'm not withholding anything, I simply do not have anything to give. In reality, this is the way it works. You shouldn't converse with everyone because everyone doesn't have something to contribute.
The key to becoming a ful human being is knowing and acknowledging and not being ashamed of NOT contributing. Those lists which I lurk on and learn... I realize fully that I do not have the knowledge the people there do. I'd admit it to anyone who asks, and I don't feel the slightest bit embarrassed about it. There are a lot of people out there who would rather LIE about something than admit they are totally ignorant of the subject. I'd rather have those people realize their own limitations and capitalize on their abilities than try to fake and squirm and disseminate all kinds of false information just so he doesn't feel he's letting the community down by running in "half-duplex" mode.
By giving people the exact credit they deserve, no less and certainly no more, you help them grow. By giving them an abundance of credit, they stand still.
Esperandi
Maybe if we give him lots of free stuff for a long time he'll get sick of it and get motivated!
I praise you for this reply sir, you're one of the very few who understands humanity and doesn't want to bend it to accomodate freeloaders.
BTW, Open Source can be defended by this viewpoint, but I don't want posers who can't figure it out for themselves defending Open Source under the guise of capitalism and man as a heroic ideal and then turning around and going back Marxist on everyone.
Esperandi
"Open source has made it possible for people with ideas and a message to build tools that either embody it or enable it if they have the talent. "
False. Bill Gates got Windows out there, as well as writing a book about his ideas in the computer realm. The idea that Open Source created this ability is laughable. Open Source came after.
Esperandi
If reality didn't exist, you'd have a chance. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Microsoft is playing by the logically applied laws of reality in most cases (not when they stifle competition, but when they put out a product and people buy it) while you are taking as your first premise a perversion of reality.
Work must be paid for. Workers must be paid according to their value. All workers are not equal. All work is not equal. Anyone who denies payment for work or demands overpayment for work will be eliminated. Selfishness is the only instinct and should be followed always. If you INSIST on looking at how this affects other people, do so. But do so with the real definition of selfishness which is to act in ones best interests at all times. Killing people is not in your best interests because you will be punished and you are attempting to profit by force and not by merit. Ignoring your family is not selfish because it deprives you of happiness. You can trace back all bad behavior that people now call selfish and find that it is actually the action of a selfless person... a person acting againt their own interests. There is no value in that, only death.
Esperandi
It's not pragmatic, it's logical... Pragmatism isn't what its current bastardized version seems to be. Ask the average person what pragmatism is and they'll say its the ability to bend on any moral issue to make the current situation "work out." In reality, pragmatism is a world view that says that if something must be true for you to accomplish a goal, it IS true and that reality is based on that.
yes, it sounds insane, but lots of people believe this more deeply than they know.
Esperandi
I disagree with this post and I'm going to go about diagreeing with it in this post, so if you agreed with it and believe that everyone else in the world ought to as well, and wish to prevent people reading with a threshhold level of 1 from seeing my thoughts, moderate down now. I'm not going to lie about this post in the name of karma.
Okay, now I can begin. There are problems with this post too numerous to mention so I'll just hit a few. The author posits the common belief that the life of every man on the planet should be dedicated to sacrificing himself to "them." The person being sacrificed is never one of "them", but "they" are more important than anything he can conceive of.
Why do people come to this conclusion? There are a few reasons. One is that they see it as an easy way to live - you don't have to achieve anything because you can ride on the back of someone smart who swallowed this philosophy (and this is philosophy we're talkin about, read some stuff by Kant and Kierkegaard and Plato and you'll recognize all of these ideas) - and they also see that they will never be sacrificed since they are worthless. What they don't realize is that this philosophy eliminates the best people in the world one by one until THEY are the best person in the world, at which time they must be sacrificed. Kill ever man who makes over $1M a year and the tax brackets will scale so that the person making $900k is paying for everyone else. Kill every man making over $10k a year and the same thing happens, the tax brackets scale.
Another reason people accept this odious philosophy is that they don't understand it. An astonishing number of people on this planet believe that they don't need to think about philosophy. But they pick one up. Everyone MUST have a philosophy or they would die. Now, no one accepts this philosophy completely, if they did they would be dead. To accept this philosophy completely means you would cease eating and spend your last days feeding your neighbor. But no one does that, they simply scream that you need to be pragmatic. Why they want to go along with only the slightest sliver of capitalism and justice as possible and stumble around in poverty, I really have no clue.
I think eventually people will come around to reject this philosophy. They will realize that anything worth doing actually has a reason behind it that is much better than "you HAVE to do it because the human race DEMANDS it of you and if you don't cut your own throat to save them, you're a bad person." Why use Open Source? There are a myriad of GOOD reasons. Any reason which involves benefitting others as your primary objective is a BAD reason. I won't give you those good reasons because I hope you'll be able to think of them yourself, there are quite a few. Its not a silver bullet though, and nothing ever is. I don't say that out of a hatred for absolutism as most people do nowadays (how many people do you know that will not accept a set of beliefs simply because they ARE a set of beliefs?), i say it because its true. Not everything in nature is the same color (but things do have a definite color), just as not every software package can fall under the same license.
Now, why do I think people uphold Linux so highly when their OS is basically irrelevant to the happiness and fulfillment they feel in their lives? Well, personally I think its the "new OS smell" mostly. You use one OS for a year and you get used to it. You use another one and even if it sucks donkey balls for playing 3D games, you'll want them ported. This exact same thing would happen if Linux was widespread... MS OS' would be considered 'cool' because they looked and felt a little different and were a breath of new air (note I didn't say fresh).
Another good reason people feel the need to violently uphold Linux is because they're not doing it based on Linux' merit. They COULD do it on Linux' merit, but it would be very difficult and the people who cling to Linux cannot see the technical advantages, let alone its shortcomings (there is an abundance of both). They uphold Linux violently because they're upholding this philosophy. They choose to do it violently and not reationally because it is an irrational philosophy that basically tells you that the individual is not important and that the collective is all-important. No collective has ever invented anything. Individuals inside of collectives have. No collective has ever helped anyone. Individuals inside collective have helped other individuals. "The collective" is another way of saying "the people who are going to take credit for whatever you do as an individual and who are going to convince you that it is them who deserve the credit."
Look at Open Source. Is Linux a product of a masterful individual? A product of the work of several masterful individuals? No, its the product of a collective, of the "community" as they call it. This is not true. One part of the kernel is by Linus Torvalds, other parts are by other individuals. They all have names. They are not a community.
Esperandi
I am not a community. I take credit for my rights and wrongs. Should you try to take credit for either, I will stop producing until you stop stealing.