This is incredibly misguided, and that is the most charitable way of putting it.
There is no way in hell you're going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff with such a volume of random input
Oh really? So from your own point of view, there is no way in hell such a thing as Slashdot can work, all those random comments from idiots who can't even RTFA! Not mentioning such a ludicrous idea as an open encyclopedia where every other ignorant can edit an article.
Yes, a lot of suggestions are going to come from homeopathy and spiritual healers. And you know, then, maybe these people will learn more in the process than if they were being outlawed and chased by lawyers.
Iaconesi mentions the word 'harmony' in reference to the whole process, where you just see a mess. You know, life itself can be seen as just a mess. Yet...
I can't help thinking that they are being politically correct not to mention the one thing that has already brought great civilisations to barbarism as one of their threats; Islam.
Well, Christianity was well on its way to do the same, but in this case, civilization won. Still, its drive for domination is undaunted, and what about major religions and thousands of smaller sects who could also go rogue?
Actually, there are center of studies in most universities for these kind of threats. These programs are called 'history', 'sociology', 'political science', etc, and are generally regrouped under the term 'humanities'.
Unfortunately, we are busy cutting the funding for those, as they are deemed economically worthless.
It's an important step forward, but only in Japan would hugging a chicken be an intermediate step.
You have to take account of the proverbial Japanese indirectness. What the professor wants to demonstrate becomes clearer when you think of the following distinction: eroticism is when you use a feather; pornography is when you use to whole chicken.
Just got out of mod points, when I needed the most...! Please mod parent up! Grandparent got modded +5 insightful with a defeatist tirade. The parent got it right.
Oh, and furthermore, what an interesting timing, just when Google in under concerted attack by Apple and others, in view of destroying Android!
I really do hope some Democrats will wake up and tell someone responsible in this administration that they should check what kind of crap some civil servants are moving.
Please begin with enforcing the anti-trust case brought against Microsoft, which in this case was justified, proven and concluded, and then we might perhaps consider those new claims by the FTC against Microsoft's rival, which Ballmer promised to destroy. Doing otherwise might likely bring shame and discredit to the FTC itself, and the current Democrats administration.
I have mod points, but since you are well on your way to +5 insightful, I just want to add some data to this. I am interested in this topic, and I have noticed a series of articles in influential venues, like the Economist, the New York Times, etc. beginning a couple of years ago. They all have a common point: they are reporting some kind of controversial news, like here "doctors are prescribing drugs to poor kids to help them, is this good or bad", while the underlying message is unquestioned, that is, whether those drugs work at all. The underlying message is that they do and that would go without saying.
In the case of the Economist article, unfortunately for the drug companies and the PR firms probably doing this work for them, the reader comments were devastating for this underlying assumption. This article was asking whether it was fair that some students could have recourse to "brain enhancing drugs" bought illegally (like the one used in the treatment of ADHD). Dozens of people having taken drugs as students in the hope of helping at exam times reported their horror stories, and shredded every point of the article.
Big pharrna is financing PhD students in prestigious universities around the world, for work on the use of drugs, not for therapeutic purposes, but for enhancing the brain. This is something that I have myself confirmed meeting one of them.
Now it is the Slashdot crowd being targeted. According to the comments I am reading already, I would say this is another mistake of theirs...
How interesting! It sounds like school might have been a boring experience to you, and somehow getting stoned made it a bit more interesting.
I am not sure if my experience is similar to yours or could be compared. I had been an above-average student --I would not say above in terms of intelligence, just above-taking-it-seriously-enough-to-attend-classes-and-to-cram-material-before-exams. One course that was not going well was calculus. I am naturally anxious, and my expectations about calculus just made the whole thing so scary that I was not learning anything, and I was getting more and more behind. I did not choose to do so but I happened to attend a class while being quite high. I was fascinated by the world of abstractions that the professor was unfolding just by talking and writing on the board. Not that I understood anything, but I was relieved of my anxiety, had a sense that this could be fun and how to use my imagination, and I caught-up pretty quickly with the material after that experience.
Apple does not realize the ill-will it is creating with this. It may think this will be limited to a few slash-dotters whining on a forum. The usual stuff. But this is not usual.
I often read on Slashdot that Bill Gates at Microsoft was a good businessman. I don't believe so. Microsoft awful practices have earned it a reputation that has led to its current decline. Apple, as the David against Goliath, use to have a lot of sympathy as a result. But its reputation was also earned on the basis of a preoccupation for the product and for the user experience that was lacking at Microsoft. We believed that Apple was on our side.
If you take Apple as superseding Microsoft on the basis of a better understanding of users' interests, you can then see Google as going further on that account, and greatly benefiting from the confidence they earn as a result. The understanding of the user's interests is much clearer in Google's case, and more sustained (despite all attacks on this account by its enemies) than it ever was in the case of Apple, despite the great show they made of it, 1984 and all.
It may take time, but Apple will pay dearly for what they are doing. They are trashing their name, and their reputation. What a shame.
At no time did NASA need some graduate student from MIT to help them with a Guidance 101 type problem on Apollo 13.
There *was* a very famous "hippy" type guy at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, Don Eyles, who was responsible for much of the Lunar Module's landing program. On Apollo 14 he was instrumental in solving a problem that would have prevented that landing and he did get official recognition for it and there are pictures of him with his long hair and mustache. So that's another part of the Gizmodo crap article that is wrong.
I have read every argument in this story so far, ready to believe this old man. But your informed comment clinches it for me that the story is probably bogus. Then pops the question: why is this story, a controversy soiling NASA's reputation, coming up today, on the day the world celebrates the successful landing of Curiosity? Why the appeal to crowd-sourcing to locate this guy and make as much fuss as possible down in the tubes? Who has interest in doing that? Those who have might get a little surprise, as crowd sourcing, as far as I am reading on Slashdot, is turning from finding the guy to finding who is making up this story and why.
My comment is still quite speculative, I will admit, but this has a strange odor for sure.
After years of running Firefox on Linux I finally got a job and upgraded to Internet Eplorer running on Windows.
It's so much better! Thank you Bill!
After years of running Firefox on Linux I finally got a job and upgraded to Safari running on OS X.
It's so much better! Thank you Steve!
See the alternate picture here, that could have been a reality, or that could come back? I am very grateful to Firefox, an open source/collective, and a very successful, effort to get rid of a Microsoft monopoly, and of the horrid experience that IE6 was. We have yet to appreciate the magnitude and the significance of this, even though we all think we understand it.
For this reason, I am very loyal to Firefox and ready to be patient with minor misdirections.
Firefox usage might have declined somewhat, but Chrome has speeded up the decline of those who think nothing of public standards, and it is a good thing, provided that Firefox remains strong.
On the website I manage at the University of Cambridge (granted, those are pretty well educated users), Explorer, all versions confounded, is down to around 25%. I have watched the steady decline of this number month after month over the past few years, with the same contentment every time.
I am at the University of Cambridge, where outreach activities are quite valued among academics. The Raspberry Pi originates from here, among other educational interesting ideas. I could suggest of few names to help form a committee. Contact me.
A science mission won't return a monetary investment, and no one should expect it to. This doesn't mean that you can't fund it as you would other public works projects.
But there should be some form of return for such form of sponsorship direct from the public. For example, use and prominent display of public domain tools, like GNU-Linux, etc. Advocacy for the public domain nature of the Web and advocacy for net-neutrality. Get to work with Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Web while at CERN (a public institution) and other prominent scientists and advocates of the public domain like Lawrence Lessig.
Get it right and that in itself will help funding and do good for all of us, on top of the science!
Polished piece of work... must have been quite a bit of work, but there is a major inconsistency:
For the major part of the film and during most of the interaction with the girl he is dating, the info he gathers on her is a distraction and makes him look like a dork.
Indeed, this is all information (her Facebook profile) he could have read beforehand, which is already possible and happening in the real world. As his prior gathering of info would have been rather uninteresting in the story (although it would surely have been more efficient for him achieving his goal), here it is shown happening in real time. It can only be a distraction, especially in a live conversation, and the film carries this quite well. The guy looks like an idiot.
Then, at the very end, what has been portrayed as a debilitating distraction suddenly turns into an absolute power of manipulation, out of all conventions built during the preceding scenes, and without letting the viewer know what would be the source of that power. He stops her going out of his apartment by a simple voice command, and presumably rewinds her memory to prior her discovery of damning information on him. All of this happens in the very last seconds of the film, where we are suddenly thrown in deep sci-fi territory, in a completely inconsistent way. The film concludes on that little surprise, and it is obvious that it could not have carried on after such a stunt.
So, I see this as a slick flick without much depth, attempting to piggyback on the publicity surrounding Google Glass. Clever.
Mad Magazine had this a long time ago. Pretty funny.
You will be modded funny, but I would mod you insightful.
Beside prior art, you may also look at other capital and publicity intensive spectacle sports, like Formula 1. You would have a few well funded stables, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer; and commentators would speculate non-stop whether which athlete is going to be recruited in which stable. Newspapers would delight in the gore of overdoses, deaths and bio-mechanical accidents of all kinds. Truly dystopian and I hope never to see pharmaceuticals get their way with such a monstrosity. It takes a mobster mentality to think of such a thing, even half seriously.
If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?
Coming from Harvard, a university whose endowment funds are twice those of Cambridge and Oxford taken together, this is significant indeed.
One recent event that may have prompted Harvard to act is a recent blog entry from Thimothy Gower (Gower's Blog), a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which prompted a petition to boycot Elsevier, signed as to the time of this writing by 10,172 researchers, and which has done much to raise awareness across disciplines.
You can read about the petition at The Cost of Knowledge website. Read also the Wikipedia entries on Gower and on The Cost of Knowledge.
You say that the comment I criticize is perfectly valid, while the way you formulate your comment, stating quite well the founding role of Stallman, demonstrates that you perfectly understood the gross injustice to Stallman perpetrated by the comment in question. So the comment, now moderated +5 insightful, go figure, is far from valid.
Stallman's "You're either with us, or against us." ideology would be completely toxic in a leader of a project like Linux.
That's your mistake right there. First, your mis-characterization of Stallman's attitude does not reflect the spirit, and the very practical effect, of the GPL, at all. And second, Stallman's role and influence is not one of a leader of project like Linux. Different roles, different attitudes. You simply reaffirm old saws like "oh he just set out to do something useful without caring about such a nasty thing as ideology". My point is, and I re-assert it: without Stallman and his founding principles (call it what you want, I don't care), there would be no Linux, and without his dogged persistence and his very active and pro-active role as maintainer of the GPL, Linux, and the whole free software eco-system, would not have survived.
I should have said it better: Linux, by sharing his prize with Stallman, would multiply the value of that prize, for both of them, by a factor of one or two magnitudes. He would make history.
Stallman deserves credit too, for the creation of the GPL and the GNU tools Linus used, but his ideology would have prevented the operating system's success and effected the ecosystem that grew around Linux.
You say one thing and its opposite in the same sentence. Linux could exist upon the principles and roots that were the vision of Stallman. You then want to speak about the attitude of Stallman, which some finds not to their taste, but this very attitude, and its concrete fruits in the continuing evolution of the GPL, has been a determining factor in the preservation and growth of this whole open source/free ecosystem.
I find it short-sighted of the jury to have ignored this aspect of things and if I were Linus Torvald, I would share the prize with Stallman in a very public gesture. THIS would do wonders to advance open source/free software in the minds of many.
Libertarians are not the enemy of anyone except Big Brother. Their whole mantra is to leave people to their own devices.
Libertarian nonsense. Who has interest in caricaturing government as such (the principle of government or government as it should work) as Big Brother? You got it: corporations. Corporations, despite the disaster of the 2007 economic crisis, still want even less regulations.
Indeed libertarians want people left to their own devices: their own individual devices, with any attempt at collective will and power quashed.
We have begun dismantling our public institutions under the Reagan and Thatcher cool-aid. Happily the 2007 crisis has had the effect to awaken people who thought that there was some good in there.
The whole idea of Android is provide Google with access to a market from which it would otherwise be excluded.
Furthermore, as a user, if I care at all about the profits that those companies providing technologies make, my interests lie much more in one that does not make 575$ in profit on a phone it sells me.
That is the whole idea of "opening" technologies, and actively investing markets that are on the verge of closing them.
On this one, I would hope that Google makes more than 2$ on each phone it sells, so that I am not left at the whims of Apple.
If you allow your user base to be diluted by commercial interests, your profits will dwindle as less users come here to socialize and learn. That is why you need to keep the comments off limits for gaming by media and PR companies.
Seconded. I originally came to Slashdot for the quality of the discussion and of the comments, some truly enlightening, and the feeling that a collectivity was forging opinions on subject matters important to us all, reflected by the apt slogan 'Stuff that matters'. I could read Steve Wozniak, NewYorkCountryLawyer, etc, many people at the forefront of stories they were commenting. Not only celebrities, but some pillars of this community, people like eldavojohn, etc. whom you would always count on to intervene wisely in a discussion.
Only Slashdot has managed to attract and cultivate such a community --people who normally don't have time or interest for social networks, so perhaps the term 'socialize' is less apt here than the one of 'community interests'-- and if Slashdot were to lose these people, it would be to never being able to regain them, and to lose its essence. So do all the innovating you want, but please never lose sight of the essential.
Slashdot Mirror
This is incredibly misguided, and that is the most charitable way of putting it.
There is no way in hell you're going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff with such a volume of random input
Oh really? So from your own point of view, there is no way in hell such a thing as Slashdot can work, all those random comments from idiots who can't even RTFA! Not mentioning such a ludicrous idea as an open encyclopedia where every other ignorant can edit an article.
Yes, a lot of suggestions are going to come from homeopathy and spiritual healers. And you know, then, maybe these people will learn more in the process than if they were being outlawed and chased by lawyers.
Iaconesi mentions the word 'harmony' in reference to the whole process, where you just see a mess. You know, life itself can be seen as just a mess. Yet...
I can't help thinking that they are being politically correct not to mention the one thing that has already brought great civilisations to barbarism as one of their threats; Islam.
Well, Christianity was well on its way to do the same, but in this case, civilization won. Still, its drive for domination is undaunted, and what about major religions and thousands of smaller sects who could also go rogue?
Actually, there are center of studies in most universities for these kind of threats. These programs are called 'history', 'sociology', 'political science', etc, and are generally regrouped under the term 'humanities'.
Unfortunately, we are busy cutting the funding for those, as they are deemed economically worthless.
Interesting...
It's an important step forward, but only in Japan would hugging a chicken be an intermediate step.
You have to take account of the proverbial Japanese indirectness. What the professor wants to demonstrate becomes clearer when you think of the following distinction: eroticism is when you use a feather; pornography is when you use to whole chicken.
Just got out of mod points, when I needed the most...!
Please mod parent up! Grandparent got modded +5 insightful with a defeatist tirade.
The parent got it right.
Oh, and furthermore, what an interesting timing, just when Google in under concerted attack by Apple and others, in view of destroying Android!
I really do hope some Democrats will wake up and tell someone responsible in this administration that they should check what kind of crap some civil servants are moving.
Indeed, really?
Please begin with enforcing the anti-trust case brought against Microsoft, which in this case was justified, proven and concluded, and then we might perhaps consider those new claims by the FTC against Microsoft's rival, which Ballmer promised to destroy. Doing otherwise might likely bring shame and discredit to the FTC itself, and the current Democrats administration.
I have mod points, but since you are well on your way to +5 insightful, I just want to add some data to this. I am interested in this topic, and I have noticed a series of articles in influential venues, like the Economist, the New York Times, etc. beginning a couple of years ago. They all have a common point: they are reporting some kind of controversial news, like here "doctors are prescribing drugs to poor kids to help them, is this good or bad", while the underlying message is unquestioned, that is, whether those drugs work at all. The underlying message is that they do and that would go without saying.
In the case of the Economist article, unfortunately for the drug companies and the PR firms probably doing this work for them, the reader comments were devastating for this underlying assumption. This article was asking whether it was fair that some students could have recourse to "brain enhancing drugs" bought illegally (like the one used in the treatment of ADHD). Dozens of people having taken drugs as students in the hope of helping at exam times reported their horror stories, and shredded every point of the article.
Big pharrna is financing PhD students in prestigious universities around the world, for work on the use of drugs, not for therapeutic purposes, but for enhancing the brain. This is something that I have myself confirmed meeting one of them.
Now it is the Slashdot crowd being targeted. According to the comments I am reading already, I would say this is another mistake of theirs...
The typical terabyte hard drive is equivalent to how many punch cards, and how much would they weight?
--
Ah, the smell of punch cards in the morning!
How interesting! It sounds like school might have been a boring experience to you, and somehow getting stoned made it a bit more interesting.
I am not sure if my experience is similar to yours or could be compared. I had been an above-average student --I would not say above in terms of intelligence, just above-taking-it-seriously-enough-to-attend-classes-and-to-cram-material-before-exams. One course that was not going well was calculus. I am naturally anxious, and my expectations about calculus just made the whole thing so scary that I was not learning anything, and I was getting more and more behind. I did not choose to do so but I happened to attend a class while being quite high. I was fascinated by the world of abstractions that the professor was unfolding just by talking and writing on the board. Not that I understood anything, but I was relieved of my anxiety, had a sense that this could be fun and how to use my imagination, and I caught-up pretty quickly with the material after that experience.
Apple does not realize the ill-will it is creating with this. It may think this will be limited to a few slash-dotters whining on a forum. The usual stuff. But this is not usual.
I often read on Slashdot that Bill Gates at Microsoft was a good businessman. I don't believe so. Microsoft awful practices have earned it a reputation that has led to its current decline. Apple, as the David against Goliath, use to have a lot of sympathy as a result. But its reputation was also earned on the basis of a preoccupation for the product and for the user experience that was lacking at Microsoft. We believed that Apple was on our side.
If you take Apple as superseding Microsoft on the basis of a better understanding of users' interests, you can then see Google as going further on that account, and greatly benefiting from the confidence they earn as a result. The understanding of the user's interests is much clearer in Google's case, and more sustained (despite all attacks on this account by its enemies) than it ever was in the case of Apple, despite the great show they made of it, 1984 and all.
It may take time, but Apple will pay dearly for what they are doing. They are trashing their name, and their reputation. What a shame.
At no time did NASA need some graduate student from MIT to help them with a Guidance 101 type problem on Apollo 13.
There *was* a very famous "hippy" type guy at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, Don Eyles, who was responsible for much of the Lunar Module's landing program. On Apollo 14 he was instrumental in solving a problem that would have prevented that landing and he did get official recognition for it and there are pictures of him with his long hair and mustache. So that's another part of the Gizmodo crap article that is wrong.
I have read every argument in this story so far, ready to believe this old man. But your informed comment clinches it for me that the story is probably bogus. Then pops the question: why is this story, a controversy soiling NASA's reputation, coming up today, on the day the world celebrates the successful landing of Curiosity? Why the appeal to crowd-sourcing to locate this guy and make as much fuss as possible down in the tubes? Who has interest in doing that? Those who have might get a little surprise, as crowd sourcing, as far as I am reading on Slashdot, is turning from finding the guy to finding who is making up this story and why.
My comment is still quite speculative, I will admit, but this has a strange odor for sure.
After years of running Firefox on Linux I finally got a job and upgraded to Internet Eplorer running on Windows.
It's so much better! Thank you Bill!
After years of running Firefox on Linux I finally got a job and upgraded to Safari running on OS X.
It's so much better! Thank you Steve!
See the alternate picture here, that could have been a reality, or that could come back? I am very grateful to Firefox, an open source/collective, and a very successful, effort to get rid of a Microsoft monopoly, and of the horrid experience that IE6 was. We have yet to appreciate the magnitude and the significance of this, even though we all think we understand it.
For this reason, I am very loyal to Firefox and ready to be patient with minor misdirections.
Firefox usage might have declined somewhat, but Chrome has speeded up the decline of those who think nothing of public standards, and it is a good thing, provided that Firefox remains strong.
On the website I manage at the University of Cambridge (granted, those are pretty well educated users), Explorer, all versions confounded, is down to around 25%. I have watched the steady decline of this number month after month over the past few years, with the same contentment every time.
Evil is not all powerful.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but...
I am at the University of Cambridge, where outreach activities are quite valued among academics. The Raspberry Pi originates from here, among other educational interesting ideas. I could suggest of few names to help form a committee. Contact me.
A science mission won't return a monetary investment, and no one should expect it to. This doesn't mean that you can't fund it as you would other public works projects.
But there should be some form of return for such form of sponsorship direct from the public. For example, use and prominent display of public domain tools, like GNU-Linux, etc. Advocacy for the public domain nature of the Web and advocacy for net-neutrality. Get to work with Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Web while at CERN (a public institution) and other prominent scientists and advocates of the public domain like Lawrence Lessig.
Get it right and that in itself will help funding and do good for all of us, on top of the science!
Polished piece of work... must have been quite a bit of work, but there is a major inconsistency:
For the major part of the film and during most of the interaction with the girl he is dating, the info he gathers on her is a distraction and makes him look like a dork.
Indeed, this is all information (her Facebook profile) he could have read beforehand, which is already possible and happening in the real world. As his prior gathering of info would have been rather uninteresting in the story (although it would surely have been more efficient for him achieving his goal), here it is shown happening in real time. It can only be a distraction, especially in a live conversation, and the film carries this quite well. The guy looks like an idiot.
Then, at the very end, what has been portrayed as a debilitating distraction suddenly turns into an absolute power of manipulation, out of all conventions built during the preceding scenes, and without letting the viewer know what would be the source of that power. He stops her going out of his apartment by a simple voice command, and presumably rewinds her memory to prior her discovery of damning information on him. All of this happens in the very last seconds of the film, where we are suddenly thrown in deep sci-fi territory, in a completely inconsistent way. The film concludes on that little surprise, and it is obvious that it could not have carried on after such a stunt.
So, I see this as a slick flick without much depth, attempting to piggyback on the publicity surrounding Google Glass. Clever.
Oh dear, you really don't get it. For any technical writing, LaTeX is just better than those office suites.
I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.
Arrgh! Please let me forget my past!
It was a long time ago though, 1990... but still a painful memory.
Mad Magazine had this a long time ago. Pretty funny.
You will be modded funny, but I would mod you insightful.
Beside prior art, you may also look at other capital and publicity intensive spectacle sports, like Formula 1. You would have a few well funded stables, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer; and commentators would speculate non-stop whether which athlete is going to be recruited in which stable. Newspapers would delight in the gore of overdoses, deaths and bio-mechanical accidents of all kinds. Truly dystopian and I hope never to see pharmaceuticals get their way with such a monstrosity. It takes a mobster mentality to think of such a thing, even half seriously.
If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?
Coming from Harvard, a university whose endowment funds are twice those of Cambridge and Oxford taken together, this is significant indeed.
One recent event that may have prompted Harvard to act is a recent blog entry from Thimothy Gower (Gower's Blog), a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which prompted a petition to boycot Elsevier, signed as to the time of this writing by 10,172 researchers, and which has done much to raise awareness across disciplines.
You can read about the petition at The Cost of Knowledge website. Read also the Wikipedia entries on Gower and on The Cost of Knowledge.
For a moment, I thought this was a libertarian article about the Middle Ages being the crowning achievement of human evolution, or civilization...
I hope I am not giving them an idea...
You say that the comment I criticize is perfectly valid, while the way you formulate your comment, stating quite well the founding role of Stallman, demonstrates that you perfectly understood the gross injustice to Stallman perpetrated by the comment in question. So the comment, now moderated +5 insightful, go figure, is far from valid.
Stallman's "You're either with us, or against us." ideology would be completely toxic in a leader of a project like Linux.
That's your mistake right there. First, your mis-characterization of Stallman's attitude does not reflect the spirit, and the very practical effect, of the GPL, at all. And second, Stallman's role and influence is not one of a leader of project like Linux. Different roles, different attitudes. You simply reaffirm old saws like "oh he just set out to do something useful without caring about such a nasty thing as ideology". My point is, and I re-assert it: without Stallman and his founding principles (call it what you want, I don't care), there would be no Linux, and without his dogged persistence and his very active and pro-active role as maintainer of the GPL, Linux, and the whole free software eco-system, would not have survived.
I should have said it better: Linux, by sharing his prize with Stallman, would multiply the value of that prize, for both of them, by a factor of one or two magnitudes. He would make history.
Stallman deserves credit too, for the creation of the GPL and the GNU tools Linus used, but his ideology would have prevented the operating system's success and effected the ecosystem that grew around Linux.
You say one thing and its opposite in the same sentence. Linux could exist upon the principles and roots that were the vision of Stallman. You then want to speak about the attitude of Stallman, which some finds not to their taste, but this very attitude, and its concrete fruits in the continuing evolution of the GPL, has been a determining factor in the preservation and growth of this whole open source/free ecosystem.
I find it short-sighted of the jury to have ignored this aspect of things and if I were Linus Torvald, I would share the prize with Stallman in a very public gesture. THIS would do wonders to advance open source/free software in the minds of many.
Libertarians are not the enemy of anyone except Big Brother. Their whole mantra is to leave people to their own devices.
Libertarian nonsense. Who has interest in caricaturing government as such (the principle of government or government as it should work) as Big Brother? You got it: corporations. Corporations, despite the disaster of the 2007 economic crisis, still want even less regulations.
Indeed libertarians want people left to their own devices: their own individual devices, with any attempt at collective will and power quashed.
We have begun dismantling our public institutions under the Reagan and Thatcher cool-aid. Happily the 2007 crisis has had the effect to awaken people who thought that there was some good in there.
Nonsense.
The whole idea of Android is provide Google with access to a market from which it would otherwise be excluded.
Furthermore, as a user, if I care at all about the profits that those companies providing technologies make, my interests lie much more in one that does not make 575$ in profit on a phone it sells me.
That is the whole idea of "opening" technologies, and actively investing markets that are on the verge of closing them.
On this one, I would hope that Google makes more than 2$ on each phone it sells, so that I am not left at the whims of Apple.
If you allow your user base to be diluted by commercial interests, your profits will dwindle as less users come here to socialize and learn. That is why you need to keep the comments off limits for gaming by media and PR companies.
Seconded. I originally came to Slashdot for the quality of the discussion and of the comments, some truly enlightening, and the feeling that a collectivity was forging opinions on subject matters important to us all, reflected by the apt slogan 'Stuff that matters'. I could read Steve Wozniak, NewYorkCountryLawyer, etc, many people at the forefront of stories they were commenting. Not only celebrities, but some pillars of this community, people like eldavojohn, etc. whom you would always count on to intervene wisely in a discussion.
Only Slashdot has managed to attract and cultivate such a community --people who normally don't have time or interest for social networks, so perhaps the term 'socialize' is less apt here than the one of 'community interests'-- and if Slashdot were to lose these people, it would be to never being able to regain them, and to lose its essence. So do all the innovating you want, but please never lose sight of the essential.