There is always a tension between different freedoms. Most people realize this, and strive for a reasonable balance. Zealots like RMS emphasize one right at the expense of all others.
I fail to see how RMS' position is unreasonable, let alone why he'd be called a "zealot".
Personally, I think a creator's right to decide what parts of his creations he wants to reveal, and at what terms, trumps somebody else's right to know how exactly how he created (in fact I think the latter is barely a "right" at all, even if it may be desirable under some circumstances).
I do not, but I can't see how it applies to the situation at hand.
Do you think you have a (moral or legal) right to the Coke recipe just because Coca Cola offers the final product for sale?
Yes, I do. Most countries *do* force disclosure of the ingredients used in any product marketed as food, Coca Cola included, so my opinion isn't uncommon either.
You DO have the right to decide for yourself if you want to use software for which the source isn't available to you, but you DO NOT have the right to compel others to tell you something they don't want to.
I do have the right to try and get enough votes to pass legislation as such. However RMS has not done that or even hinted at having intentions to do so, so as above I don't know how your post relates to the argument at hand.
I've seen the "freedom means no restrictions at all" argument plenty of times here at Slashdot, and it makes me wonder whether we truly are a community of intelligent, reasoning geeks. Simply put, if we define "freedom" as "lack of any restriction whatsoever", freedom contradicts itself.
Its easy to see why if we modify the Liar's Paradox a little: do you have the freedom to take away others' freedoms? if so, then people can be restricted, therefore there is no freedom, but if not, you're restricted from doing so and, therefore, there's no freedom.
If, however, we define "freedom" as "the sum of potential actions for each individual", its easy to see how restricting one's freedom to take away others' freedoms would, in the end, result in a higher freedom except in the case where nobody would use said freedom, in which case such restriction is irrelevant.
The latter seems to be Stallman's definition of "freedom", and is one that I agree with. But if you have another potential definition that does not fall prey to the same paradox, I'll be glad to hear it and consider it. And honestly, I think the same goes for RMS.
My comment was in reference to an old quote, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics". Growth rate is irrelevant, if I sell a computer last month and sell six this month, I've achieved a 600% growth rate in sales as well but that doesn't change the fact I've only sold 7 computers in total, out of millions being used worldwide.
Same thing for Apple. It doesnt matter how fast they grew over a trimester, as long as Nokia sells more phones *they* are the ones you should look towards to learn how to do things "right", not Apple.
Why is the GP modded Troll? if you can get refunds of Windows from Dell et al, it stands to reason you'd be able to get a refund of OSX from Apple as well.
Hell, if I had money to spare (on both computer and lawyer) I'd test it out myself.
Microsoft's aim is not to make XP users upgrade, its to make 7 users (ie, anyone getting a new computer over the next ~6 years) not downgrade back to Vista/XP. And since 7 is actually better than either, I think they'll succeed at that with ease.
Besides, there *is* an important technical improvement in Windows 7 that by itself makes it worth getting: its the first usable 64-bit Windows OS being sold to regular customers.
Err, didn't we have an article a couple weeks ago about how easy it was to deduce the first digits of somebody's social security number based on his place of birth and current age? apparently we did.
Your problem is that you're using the incredibly broken and corrupt health care system in the US as 'proof' that governments funding medical research is impractical. Simply put, even if such relationship *could* be proved (a tall order by itself), it would not hold for every other country which *does* have a functional health care system.
I agree with the GP, medicine should be treated just as mathematics is today: as a field of science so essential to our well-being as a human species that it should be exempt from any and all measures that would damage people's ability to use knowledge gained from it.
I believe it depends on the public's perception of them. If there's a new implementation of the language out there, is it instantly compared to:
- The language's standard? if so, its an "open language", or "standardized language". Examples are C, Common Lisp, and Javascript. - A reference open-source implementation? if so, its an "open-source language". Examples are Python, Ruby and Perl. - A reference closed-source implementation? if so, its a "propietary language" or "closed language". Examples are C#, Visual Basic and Delphi
Arbitrary, stupid, and it leads to unintuitive things such as C# being a "propietary" language despite having both a published, open standard and an open source implementation simply because everyone instantly compares it to the propietary.NET runtime, or Javascript going back and forth between "standardized" and "open-source" depending on the ratio between the "its a published standard" and the "the standard is irrelevant, how it works in Gecko and Webkit is what matters" camps, but thats how its defined, as far as I can see.
- Web Master: equivalent to server admins, he takes care of the web server, language runtime, framework, database and any other software needed, their configuration, maintenance and upgrade (some businesses have a separate guy for the database though). - Web Developer: equivalent to normal developers, he writes the logic behind the web page, how it interacts with the other servers and writes the code that does the "actual work", so to speak. - Web Designer: equivalent to normal designers, he takes the information the developer's code puts for him, and makes it look 'nicer' for the end-user.
Us amateurs often end up being all three at the same time, but they're *quite* distinct and your anger should be directed only to the incompetents amongst the latter.
Try it, go looking for that magical random seed that creates a 1MB blob of code that does something impressive. Maybe you should expand your idea to first generate a filtering program that can determine if a code sequence, when run over some data, creates a demo?:-)
Its actually much easier than that with quantum computing. All you need are some trivial modifications to the Quantum Bogosort algorithm and some way to let the program know whether it has won the contest or not.
If he does it by himself, yes though it'd still be a PITA. If he just puts a copy of the english/spanish version and asks for volunteers to help him do so (the most obvious way for Free content) he does not and, being under his own domain rather than wikipedia, he'd be liable for copyright infringement.
Seriously, nobody doing something remotely serious enough to warrant license research will be thwarted by the "complexity" of verifying the license on a particular image they like.
You're thinking too small. You're thinking of Joe Average wanting the photo of a goat for his unauthorized George W. Bush biography, not of Juan Promedio, chilean citizen with the crazy idea of putting his own fork of Wikipedia translated to mapudungun.
Checking the license on a single image is feasible for an enterpreneur, doing so for all the content included in a thousand articles is not.
So? here at Slashdot we make jokes of murderers, pedophiles, recently deceased people, people with disabilities, etc. And if we don't care about *those*, I don't see why we'd care about simple domestic abuse.
Plus, it provides some much-needed relief from the endless 2010 allusions being posted here.
The player was actually allowed to input text instead of choosing from some stupid presets.
> look around I don't understand "around" > look at place I don't understand "place" > look You look around you. You can see a tree nearby, and a strange rock on the ground. > pick up rock I don't understand "pick" > get the rock I don't understand "get" > grab the rock I don't understand "the" > grab rock You grab the rock.
And at that point, you start to realize that doing away with presets wasn't as good (or innovative) as you had originally hoped.
I'm sorry, but the fact that you're looking for innovation in a sequel, and a Blizzard one at that, doesn't exactly support your position. Go play Sega's Total War series (I recommend Medieval 2) and Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire, then come back and tell me "RTSes have been done to death".
As for FPSs, the sheer number of them means that they'll all feel "generic" sooner or later, but I still wouldn't say that Red Orchestra and Unreal Tournament 2004 are "largely the same". Innovative new titles, dunno though, I'm saving my money for Sniper Elite which looks unique but only time will tell if it is so, instead of just Call of Duty with a sniper rifle.
No foaming at the mouth tantrums that someone is using your code and not kissing your fat ugly ass in reverence.
You definitely don't know Theo de Raadt.
The efforts the GNU crowd has done to keep open source developers locked into their compiler is sickening from anyone who likes to believe the open source world is some sort of technological marketplace of ideas compared to the Microsoft world.
Yeah, how dare they make a superior product, couldn't they have made GCC suck a bit more so the alternatives wouldn't look so bad?
Every BSD project I've followed or participated with has been a positive experience due to those types of licensed projects attracting engineers who just want to write good code and want their code to be available and free to everyone to make good use of it.
Same here, and the same goes for GPL'ed projects. In all cases, its the users (and the ocassional Slashdot troll) who make them look bad. Well, except for Theo's yearly foaming-at-the-mouth, but he's such a talented engineer we're ready to let that one pass.
They do. On PCs, which is one of the reasons there's no market for used PC games.
I can get a bundle with both Rainbow Six: Vegas 1 and 2 for the PC for $18, while an used copy of the Xbox360 version of Vegas 2 alone would set me back $48. No wonder console owners need an used game market.
Slashdot Mirror
There is always a tension between different freedoms. Most people realize this, and strive for a reasonable balance. Zealots like RMS emphasize one right at the expense of all others.
I fail to see how RMS' position is unreasonable, let alone why he'd be called a "zealot".
Personally, I think a creator's right to decide what parts of his creations he wants to reveal, and at what terms, trumps somebody else's right to know how exactly how he created (in fact I think the latter is barely a "right" at all, even if it may be desirable under some circumstances).
I do not, but I can't see how it applies to the situation at hand.
Do you think you have a (moral or legal) right to the Coke recipe just because Coca Cola offers the final product for sale?
Yes, I do. Most countries *do* force disclosure of the ingredients used in any product marketed as food, Coca Cola included, so my opinion isn't uncommon either.
You DO have the right to decide for yourself if you want to use software for which the source isn't available to you, but you DO NOT have the right to compel others to tell you something they don't want to.
I do have the right to try and get enough votes to pass legislation as such. However RMS has not done that or even hinted at having intentions to do so, so as above I don't know how your post relates to the argument at hand.
The question is: did those RPG enthusiasts even have the *opportunity* to purchase the game?
Half the games in my PS2 collection is "pirated". Half the games in my PS2 collection have never been sold in my country. Coincidence? not at all.
I've seen the "freedom means no restrictions at all" argument plenty of times here at Slashdot, and it makes me wonder whether we truly are a community of intelligent, reasoning geeks. Simply put, if we define "freedom" as "lack of any restriction whatsoever", freedom contradicts itself.
Its easy to see why if we modify the Liar's Paradox a little: do you have the freedom to take away others' freedoms? if so, then people can be restricted, therefore there is no freedom, but if not, you're restricted from doing so and, therefore, there's no freedom.
If, however, we define "freedom" as "the sum of potential actions for each individual", its easy to see how restricting one's freedom to take away others' freedoms would, in the end, result in a higher freedom except in the case where nobody would use said freedom, in which case such restriction is irrelevant.
The latter seems to be Stallman's definition of "freedom", and is one that I agree with. But if you have another potential definition that does not fall prey to the same paradox, I'll be glad to hear it and consider it. And honestly, I think the same goes for RMS.
Then don't imply its a problem for Linux that you have to use "restricted drivers".
In Windows, all drivers are "restricted drivers".
Would you sign an NDA for a complete stranger before sitting down and have a talk with him?
Neither would I.
My comment was in reference to an old quote, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics". Growth rate is irrelevant, if I sell a computer last month and sell six this month, I've achieved a 600% growth rate in sales as well but that doesn't change the fact I've only sold 7 computers in total, out of millions being used worldwide.
Same thing for Apple. It doesnt matter how fast they grew over a trimester, as long as Nokia sells more phones *they* are the ones you should look towards to learn how to do things "right", not Apple.
Wow, if that trend continues there'll be more iPhones than human beings in less than a decade!
Lies, damn lies, and all that.
Why is the GP modded Troll? if you can get refunds of Windows from Dell et al, it stands to reason you'd be able to get a refund of OSX from Apple as well.
Hell, if I had money to spare (on both computer and lawyer) I'd test it out myself.
Microsoft's aim is not to make XP users upgrade, its to make 7 users (ie, anyone getting a new computer over the next ~6 years) not downgrade back to Vista/XP. And since 7 is actually better than either, I think they'll succeed at that with ease.
Besides, there *is* an important technical improvement in Windows 7 that by itself makes it worth getting: its the first usable 64-bit Windows OS being sold to regular customers.
Err, didn't we have an article a couple weeks ago about how easy it was to deduce the first digits of somebody's social security number based on his place of birth and current age? apparently we did.
Me thinks you'd do well to change it ASAP.
Your problem is that you're using the incredibly broken and corrupt health care system in the US as 'proof' that governments funding medical research is impractical. Simply put, even if such relationship *could* be proved (a tall order by itself), it would not hold for every other country which *does* have a functional health care system.
I agree with the GP, medicine should be treated just as mathematics is today: as a field of science so essential to our well-being as a human species that it should be exempt from any and all measures that would damage people's ability to use knowledge gained from it.
I believe it depends on the public's perception of them. If there's a new implementation of the language out there, is it instantly compared to:
- The language's standard? if so, its an "open language", or "standardized language". Examples are C, Common Lisp, and Javascript.
- A reference open-source implementation? if so, its an "open-source language". Examples are Python, Ruby and Perl.
- A reference closed-source implementation? if so, its a "propietary language" or "closed language". Examples are C#, Visual Basic and Delphi
Arbitrary, stupid, and it leads to unintuitive things such as C# being a "propietary" language despite having both a published, open standard and an open source implementation simply because everyone instantly compares it to the propietary .NET runtime, or Javascript going back and forth between "standardized" and "open-source" depending on the ratio between the "its a published standard" and the "the standard is irrelevant, how it works in Gecko and Webkit is what matters" camps, but thats how its defined, as far as I can see.
BTW:
- Web Master: equivalent to server admins, he takes care of the web server, language runtime, framework, database and any other software needed, their configuration, maintenance and upgrade (some businesses have a separate guy for the database though).
- Web Developer: equivalent to normal developers, he writes the logic behind the web page, how it interacts with the other servers and writes the code that does the "actual work", so to speak.
- Web Designer: equivalent to normal designers, he takes the information the developer's code puts for him, and makes it look 'nicer' for the end-user.
Us amateurs often end up being all three at the same time, but they're *quite* distinct and your anger should be directed only to the incompetents amongst the latter.
Try it, go looking for that magical random seed that creates a 1MB blob of code that does something impressive. Maybe you should expand your idea to first generate a filtering program that can determine if a code sequence, when run over some data, creates a demo? :-)
Its actually much easier than that with quantum computing. All you need are some trivial modifications to the Quantum Bogosort algorithm and some way to let the program know whether it has won the contest or not.
If he does it by himself, yes though it'd still be a PITA. If he just puts a copy of the english/spanish version and asks for volunteers to help him do so (the most obvious way for Free content) he does not and, being under his own domain rather than wikipedia, he'd be liable for copyright infringement.
Seriously, nobody doing something remotely serious enough to warrant license research will be thwarted by the "complexity" of verifying the license on a particular image they like.
You're thinking too small. You're thinking of Joe Average wanting the photo of a goat for his unauthorized George W. Bush biography, not of Juan Promedio, chilean citizen with the crazy idea of putting his own fork of Wikipedia translated to mapudungun.
Checking the license on a single image is feasible for an enterpreneur, doing so for all the content included in a thousand articles is not.
So? here at Slashdot we make jokes of murderers, pedophiles, recently deceased people, people with disabilities, etc. And if we don't care about *those*, I don't see why we'd care about simple domestic abuse.
Plus, it provides some much-needed relief from the endless 2010 allusions being posted here.
"wow, its so small and cute"
That it happens was known, that it can happen as a result of a change in a single gene was not.
So, like Fallout 3 or Oblivion? or just like playing Guild Wars on an European server?
The player was actually allowed to input text instead of choosing from some stupid presets.
> look around
I don't understand "around"
> look at place
I don't understand "place"
> look
You look around you. You can see a tree nearby, and a strange rock on the ground.
> pick up rock
I don't understand "pick"
> get the rock
I don't understand "get"
> grab the rock
I don't understand "the"
> grab rock
You grab the rock.
And at that point, you start to realize that doing away with presets wasn't as good (or innovative) as you had originally hoped.
I'm sorry, but the fact that you're looking for innovation in a sequel, and a Blizzard one at that, doesn't exactly support your position. Go play Sega's Total War series (I recommend Medieval 2) and Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire, then come back and tell me "RTSes have been done to death".
As for FPSs, the sheer number of them means that they'll all feel "generic" sooner or later, but I still wouldn't say that Red Orchestra and Unreal Tournament 2004 are "largely the same". Innovative new titles, dunno though, I'm saving my money for Sniper Elite which looks unique but only time will tell if it is so, instead of just Call of Duty with a sniper rifle.
No wacky and nutty GPL kooks.
But in return you get wacky and nutty BSD kooks.
No screaming diatribes over 'purity' of ideology.
You don't know who Theo de Raadt is?
No foaming at the mouth tantrums that someone is using your code and not kissing your fat ugly ass in reverence.
You definitely don't know Theo de Raadt.
The efforts the GNU crowd has done to keep open source developers locked into their compiler is sickening from anyone who likes to believe the open source world is some sort of technological marketplace of ideas compared to the Microsoft world.
Yeah, how dare they make a superior product, couldn't they have made GCC suck a bit more so the alternatives wouldn't look so bad?
Every BSD project I've followed or participated with has been a positive experience due to those types of licensed projects attracting engineers who just want to write good code and want their code to be available and free to everyone to make good use of it.
Same here, and the same goes for GPL'ed projects. In all cases, its the users (and the ocassional Slashdot troll) who make them look bad. Well, except for Theo's yearly foaming-at-the-mouth, but he's such a talented engineer we're ready to let that one pass.
They do. On PCs, which is one of the reasons there's no market for used PC games.
I can get a bundle with both Rainbow Six: Vegas 1 and 2 for the PC for $18, while an used copy of the Xbox360 version of Vegas 2 alone would set me back $48. No wonder console owners need an used game market.