No, seriously, I'm not some kind of hippy. To prove my point: The Bush Administration is a symptom, not the problem. I'm leaving even if Obama gets elected.
1. You've obviously never heard of commercial open source software.
I have. I've just never understood why you would pay the author's asking price for them to improve the software when you could take the source for free and improve it yourself, or hire a few cheap coders to improve it for you. I guess whether that really gets you any money depends on the amount of domain knowledge inherent in the project itself?
2. So if I close the source of my program, but still provide it for free (i.e. closed source freeware) then all of a sudden it has magically become better?
Hell no. I didn't say the proprietary model produced better software, I said it responded better to users' needs due to market mechanisms.
For example, Windoze has a stable driver ABI and API. Users, developers, and hardware makers (all, in their ways, Microsoft's customers) demanded one, so Microsoft put one in.
Linux, on the other hand, has consistently lacked one against the wishes of users because the development team doesn't want to constrain themselves to a fixed API or ABI, and because they feel that having to recompile drivers for each new kernel encourages releasing drivers as open-source anyway.
And yet Linux is obviously the better piece of software. But just because the Linux kernel developers find their own wants for the kernel aligned with most of the wants of the user-base doesn't mean they respond to users' wants as well as someone paid to do so.
The magic comes not from closed source, but from someone having to pay the developer to improve the software, giving the developer an incentive to respond to what users want instead of what the developer thinks users need.
OK, I'm just going to clear up one last issue for you. Zionism, the ideology behind Israel, does not consider "Jewish State" to mean "State of the Jewish religion". It means "State of the Jewish people". In Hebrew, these two concepts actually have separate terms to denote them: "Am Yisrael" means the Jewish people and "Yehudut" means the Jewish religion. The Jewish State is a state of the Jewish religion, and if the voters of Israel so desired it the religious courts would be eliminated utterly and completely.
Well if we want to keep using a Tape ARchiver, maybe we should change the damn thing's interface to work on files by default? Why keep a crappy, unintuitive bit of UI if it doesn't work out of naught but inertia?
So why do we still use a tape archiver for our downloaded/uploaded and backup archives in this era when hard drive arrays have totally and utterly outmoded tape drives for the average user?
The problem with your response is that it assumes that the baker in question has "pay products" -- that at some point the baker sells bread to costumers for money. F/OSS software is given away 100% for free, maybe with a metaphorical donation/tip jar left in the user's view. Why should someone who works in an essentially communist economy improve their products?
Note, just to choose one example, that the Israeli police admit (and often seem fairly proud) that torture of suspects is a routine procedure.
Just to clear this up, yes, Israel does torture Palestinian suspects. I don't like it, neither do you. However, that's irrelevant to the balancing of freedom versus security for actual citizens, which they were doing rather well on.
Of course, they could do better on the human rights of Palestinians. No contest there.
And let me bring up, yet again, the fact that Haredi men seem to be empowered to commit criminal assault on any woman who refuses to kowtow to their nutty fundamentalism.
Just because a few Haredi men have gotten away with assault of women doesn't mean the entire country bends to aid Haredi men in assaulting women. Is the USA responsible for when a woman gets mugged and raped in the ghetto? Haredi neighborhoods are not nice places. I don't mean to excuse what these men did, but the entire society is not responsible for a few criminal assaults.
The state pays Haredi men not to work. I think there's quite a bit to not like about a nation that explicitly privileges its most insane religious elements.
The state exempts Haredim from army service, and gives them welfare just like it gives all other poor people welfare. Of course, the Haredim are poor because they refuse to take jobs, but apparently giving them welfare is still better than having a bunch of rioting Haredim.
Brace yourself, I'm going to be giving you a bit of the history of Jewish movements.
Reform and Conservative Jews barely even exist in Israel. In fact, if you talked to an average Israeli about the "Masorti" (Conservative) or "Reformi/Progressive" (Reform) movements, they probably would have to look them up on Google. This isn't because Israelis are crazy-religious; most Israeli Jews call themselves "Chiloni" (translates as "secular").
Instead, it happened because the Reform movement in specific and the Conservative movement along with it have, historically, opposed Zionism up until the 1980s or 1990s, at which point they accepted that Israel will continue existing, and only began openly and strongly advocating Zionism to their own members in the 2000s. I was raised Reform, I know this stuff for a fact.
"Why?" you ask. Well, the Reform movement formed because Jews wanted to walk, talk, eat, and act like the German and American Gentiles among whom they lived without having to actually convert to Christianity; they were extremist secular Jews who sought to call their secularism a form of religion. The Modern Orthodox movement then formed to oppose the Reform Jews, and the Conservative movement formed to find a middle ground between the Orthodox and Reform approaches. Since the Reform had given up on the whole idea of Jews as an ethnicity or nation, and the Conservative (like the Orthodox) wanted the Messiah to come before we got a Jewish state, both movements opposed the State of Israel's formation. Hell, so did the American Orthodox.
In fact, the whole privileged position of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel came about as a political deal made by David Ben-Gurion's government to secure support for the emerging state from the old, respected Orthodox communities. Back then there were only a few hundred ultra-Orthodox yeshivah boys anyway, so not drafting them wasn't perceived as a big deal.
So we've ended up with an Israel that has three degrees of religiosity officially acknowledged:
1) Secular. The majority, who go to synagogue for the High Holidays at most and don't keep kosher laws or Shabat or anything. 2) National Religious. The Israeli Modern-Orthodox Jews who consider Orthodox Judaism and modern life reconcilable. Their actual range of practice goes from what Americans would call a very religious Conservative Judaism to internationally-acknowledged Modern Orthodoxy. They keep kosher, keep Shabat (ie: no work on Saturday, for a really broad value of "work"), and keep the laws of "family purity" (don't even fucking ask). Those three categories, in fact, form the very definition of Orthodox Judaism as commonly acknowledged by rabbis the world over. 3) Ultra-Orthodox. Crazy fundamentalists and black-hats. Since they "make the Torah their occupation" they get exemption from Army service as a part of that deal Ben-Gurion made. They live off the welfare that (AFAIK) all poor, unemployed families receive in Israel, because they don't respect secular professions and, indeed, don't respect any profession except for Rabbi. Their schools receive funding from both the religion ministry and the education ministry, which pisses off everyone else.
Now you might just see the trap the ultra-Orthodox have set for themselves ideologically. They can't live without secular or National Religious Jews (they really, really hate Arabs) to support them, and a growing number of their far-too-many children leave the fold for Army service and a normal life. The ultra-Orthodox can't take over the government because they don't even like acknowledging the government's legitimacy; they still wait for the Messiah.
So the actual chance of Israel toppling into theocracy in practice is quite low, since that would result in everyone starving to death and Big Business (Israel most certainly has Big Business) would never allow itself to be shut down by a bunch of insolent black-hats.
Stop injecting your fancy-ass "facts", "logic", and "life-experience of the culture" into one of Slashdot's rare opportunities to flame Israel for a legitimate grievance! If the trolls don't get the anti-Zionism out of their system on legitimate stuff like this, they'll just end up going the Reddit.com route and start hijacking every damn discussion of the Middle East to flame Jews.
Out of the worldwide Jewish population fully 60% have chosen *NOT* to live in Israel, and I think that shows a commendable degree of intelligence on their part.
Actually, I was born outside Israel and have been planning to move there for a while. I never made any choice *not* to live in Israel, it just happened that way. It really isn't a hellhole or theocratic, trust me. The religious courts (which I don't like either, but hey...) have an extremely restricted jurisdiction and never rule on things that couldn't be passed along to religious courts in other countries via contract law. And they were doing so well at balancing freedom against security until this total fuckup...
Oh well, it hasn't passed yet. Let's hope the Knesset sees sense and votes it down.
But seriously, criticize the bill rather than flaming my homeland.
Oh fuck. I just shot myself in the foot, didn't I?
Not really, just pick the tinfoil hat back up off the ground and put it on again. Naw, I agree with you. The religious courts, AFAIK, will have no power over this database, so its only real use will be political harassment and tracking of released/paroled criminals.
Actually, this sounds to me like a UK-style security theater -- a failing government thrashing about, grasping at straws trying to sound useful while the populace waits for elections to chuck the bastards out. B'ezrat ha'Shem it won't pass or the Supreme Court will strike it down.
What separation, exactly, exists between the state of Israel and the religion of Orthodox Judaism?
Actually, ONLY the marriage/family matters go to the religious courts. And you can get married as a Muslim or Christian through the corresponding religious court.
Point is, an assault in Israel gets tried by a criminal court. A lawsuit gets tried by a civil court. And these courts run on Common Law rather than Torah Law.
Not that I'm inclined to defend this ridiculous biometric bullshit. Just saying.
I must not LOL. LOL is the troll-feeder. LOL is the little response that leads to flamey debate. I will face the LOL. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. When it has gone, I will turn the inner eye to its path. Only I will remain.
And if you take the historical Israel : let's not forget that that was quite a bit bigger than the current little spec of land. In fact the original Israel included a few cities that you might have heard of : Damascus, Mecca, Medina, Kirkuk, Amman,...
OK, everyone knows the original Kingdom of Israel was bigger than today's State of Israel, but do you have any source on it stretching from Damascus to Mecca and the Mediterranean Sea to Amman?
What does Michael Smith sound like in Hebrew? I cannot think of a single dirty Hebrew phrase that sounds like Michael Smith, especially since Michael is a Hebrew name ("Mi CaEl"- "Who is like God?" in Hebrew).
I don't think the OP said he actually knew Hebrew. Lay off.
Potz is more of a Yiddish term than Hebrew, though I do believe that most American Jews are of Yiddish-language decent. In any case, nice one! The Kia car company is another funny one in Hebrew, the name means "vomit".
Except that the pun only works if you write it in Hebrew letters, in which peh and feh look exactly alike when unvowelized.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever actually been there, Mr. "Conservative Oppression"?
Ha'eretz shel ha'am sheli: M'dinat Yisrael.
No, seriously, I'm not some kind of hippy. To prove my point: The Bush Administration is a symptom, not the problem. I'm leaving even if Obama gets elected.
But have they raised Cthulhu?
I'm leaving this country as soon as I graduate college. You lot can all get screwed together.
Funny mods don't boost karma.
If I could run my own servers without paying extra a popular OS based on Plan 9 would actually be a good thing.
1. You've obviously never heard of commercial open source software.
I have. I've just never understood why you would pay the author's asking price for them to improve the software when you could take the source for free and improve it yourself, or hire a few cheap coders to improve it for you. I guess whether that really gets you any money depends on the amount of domain knowledge inherent in the project itself?
2. So if I close the source of my program, but still provide it for free (i.e. closed source freeware) then all of a sudden it has magically become better?
Hell no. I didn't say the proprietary model produced better software, I said it responded better to users' needs due to market mechanisms.
For example, Windoze has a stable driver ABI and API. Users, developers, and hardware makers (all, in their ways, Microsoft's customers) demanded one, so Microsoft put one in.
Linux, on the other hand, has consistently lacked one against the wishes of users because the development team doesn't want to constrain themselves to a fixed API or ABI, and because they feel that having to recompile drivers for each new kernel encourages releasing drivers as open-source anyway.
And yet Linux is obviously the better piece of software. But just because the Linux kernel developers find their own wants for the kernel aligned with most of the wants of the user-base doesn't mean they respond to users' wants as well as someone paid to do so.
The magic comes not from closed source, but from someone having to pay the developer to improve the software, giving the developer an incentive to respond to what users want instead of what the developer thinks users need.
Well it's written in Python. It's got a lot of bugs.
OK, I'm just going to clear up one last issue for you. Zionism, the ideology behind Israel, does not consider "Jewish State" to mean "State of the Jewish religion". It means "State of the Jewish people". In Hebrew, these two concepts actually have separate terms to denote them: "Am Yisrael" means the Jewish people and "Yehudut" means the Jewish religion. The Jewish State is a state of the Jewish religion, and if the voters of Israel so desired it the religious courts would be eliminated utterly and completely.
Well if we want to keep using a Tape ARchiver, maybe we should change the damn thing's interface to work on files by default? Why keep a crappy, unintuitive bit of UI if it doesn't work out of naught but inertia?
So why do we still use a tape archiver for our downloaded/uploaded and backup archives in this era when hard drive arrays have totally and utterly outmoded tape drives for the average user?
Hiya,
I'm working on the Develop activity that will eventually handle the View Source key. In fact, I'm writing the GUI designer for Develop.
Now, my question: which one is the View Source key? And do you know how the Sugar software currently handles it?
The problem with your response is that it assumes that the baker in question has "pay products" -- that at some point the baker sells bread to costumers for money. F/OSS software is given away 100% for free, maybe with a metaphorical donation/tip jar left in the user's view. Why should someone who works in an essentially communist economy improve their products?
So basically you admit that proprietary software has a business model more responsive to users' needs than open-source?
Not trolling, just trying to note the similarities between being paid to write a software project... and selling a software project to pay developers.
You must be Australian.
Dear Mods,
You fail at sarcasm.
Lehitraot,
Eli Gottlieb
Note, just to choose one example, that the Israeli police admit (and often seem fairly proud) that torture of suspects is a routine procedure.
Just to clear this up, yes, Israel does torture Palestinian suspects. I don't like it, neither do you. However, that's irrelevant to the balancing of freedom versus security for actual citizens, which they were doing rather well on.
Of course, they could do better on the human rights of Palestinians. No contest there.
And let me bring up, yet again, the fact that Haredi men seem to be empowered to commit criminal assault on any woman who refuses to kowtow to their nutty fundamentalism.
Just because a few Haredi men have gotten away with assault of women doesn't mean the entire country bends to aid Haredi men in assaulting women. Is the USA responsible for when a woman gets mugged and raped in the ghetto? Haredi neighborhoods are not nice places. I don't mean to excuse what these men did, but the entire society is not responsible for a few criminal assaults.
The state pays Haredi men not to work. I think there's quite a bit to not like about a nation that explicitly privileges its most insane religious elements.
The state exempts Haredim from army service, and gives them welfare just like it gives all other poor people welfare. Of course, the Haredim are poor because they refuse to take jobs, but apparently giving them welfare is still better than having a bunch of rioting Haredim.
Brace yourself, I'm going to be giving you a bit of the history of Jewish movements.
Reform and Conservative Jews barely even exist in Israel. In fact, if you talked to an average Israeli about the "Masorti" (Conservative) or "Reformi/Progressive" (Reform) movements, they probably would have to look them up on Google. This isn't because Israelis are crazy-religious; most Israeli Jews call themselves "Chiloni" (translates as "secular").
Instead, it happened because the Reform movement in specific and the Conservative movement along with it have, historically, opposed Zionism up until the 1980s or 1990s, at which point they accepted that Israel will continue existing, and only began openly and strongly advocating Zionism to their own members in the 2000s. I was raised Reform, I know this stuff for a fact.
"Why?" you ask. Well, the Reform movement formed because Jews wanted to walk, talk, eat, and act like the German and American Gentiles among whom they lived without having to actually convert to Christianity; they were extremist secular Jews who sought to call their secularism a form of religion. The Modern Orthodox movement then formed to oppose the Reform Jews, and the Conservative movement formed to find a middle ground between the Orthodox and Reform approaches. Since the Reform had given up on the whole idea of Jews as an ethnicity or nation, and the Conservative (like the Orthodox) wanted the Messiah to come before we got a Jewish state, both movements opposed the State of Israel's formation. Hell, so did the American Orthodox.
In fact, the whole privileged position of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel came about as a political deal made by David Ben-Gurion's government to secure support for the emerging state from the old, respected Orthodox communities. Back then there were only a few hundred ultra-Orthodox yeshivah boys anyway, so not drafting them wasn't perceived as a big deal.
So we've ended up with an Israel that has three degrees of religiosity officially acknowledged:
1) Secular. The majority, who go to synagogue for the High Holidays at most and don't keep kosher laws or Shabat or anything.
2) National Religious. The Israeli Modern-Orthodox Jews who consider Orthodox Judaism and modern life reconcilable. Their actual range of practice goes from what Americans would call a very religious Conservative Judaism to internationally-acknowledged Modern Orthodoxy. They keep kosher, keep Shabat (ie: no work on Saturday, for a really broad value of "work"), and keep the laws of "family purity" (don't even fucking ask). Those three categories, in fact, form the very definition of Orthodox Judaism as commonly acknowledged by rabbis the world over.
3) Ultra-Orthodox. Crazy fundamentalists and black-hats. Since they "make the Torah their occupation" they get exemption from Army service as a part of that deal Ben-Gurion made. They live off the welfare that (AFAIK) all poor, unemployed families receive in Israel, because they don't respect secular professions and, indeed, don't respect any profession except for Rabbi. Their schools receive funding from both the religion ministry and the education ministry, which pisses off everyone else.
Now you might just see the trap the ultra-Orthodox have set for themselves ideologically. They can't live without secular or National Religious Jews (they really, really hate Arabs) to support them, and a growing number of their far-too-many children leave the fold for Army service and a normal life. The ultra-Orthodox can't take over the government because they don't even like acknowledging the government's legitimacy; they still wait for the Messiah.
So the actual chance of Israel toppling into theocracy in practice is quite low, since that would result in everyone starving to death and Big Business (Israel most certainly has Big Business) would never allow itself to be shut down by a bunch of insolent black-hats.
Stop injecting your fancy-ass "facts", "logic", and "life-experience of the culture" into one of Slashdot's rare opportunities to flame Israel for a legitimate grievance! If the trolls don't get the anti-Zionism out of their system on legitimate stuff like this, they'll just end up going the Reddit.com route and start hijacking every damn discussion of the Middle East to flame Jews.
Out of the worldwide Jewish population fully 60% have chosen *NOT* to live in Israel, and I think that shows a commendable degree of intelligence on their part.
Actually, I was born outside Israel and have been planning to move there for a while. I never made any choice *not* to live in Israel, it just happened that way. It really isn't a hellhole or theocratic, trust me. The religious courts (which I don't like either, but hey...) have an extremely restricted jurisdiction and never rule on things that couldn't be passed along to religious courts in other countries via contract law. And they were doing so well at balancing freedom against security until this total fuckup...
Oh well, it hasn't passed yet. Let's hope the Knesset sees sense and votes it down.
But seriously, criticize the bill rather than flaming my homeland.
Oh fuck. I just shot myself in the foot, didn't I?
Not really, just pick the tinfoil hat back up off the ground and put it on again. Naw, I agree with you. The religious courts, AFAIK, will have no power over this database, so its only real use will be political harassment and tracking of released/paroled criminals.
Actually, this sounds to me like a UK-style security theater -- a failing government thrashing about, grasping at straws trying to sound useful while the populace waits for elections to chuck the bastards out. B'ezrat ha'Shem it won't pass or the Supreme Court will strike it down.
What separation, exactly, exists between the state of Israel and the religion of Orthodox Judaism?
Actually, ONLY the marriage/family matters go to the religious courts. And you can get married as a Muslim or Christian through the corresponding religious court.
Point is, an assault in Israel gets tried by a criminal court. A lawsuit gets tried by a civil court. And these courts run on Common Law rather than Torah Law.
Not that I'm inclined to defend this ridiculous biometric bullshit. Just saying.
I must not LOL.
LOL is the troll-feeder.
LOL is the little response that leads to flamey debate.
I will face the LOL.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
When it has gone, I will turn the inner eye to its path.
Only I will remain.
And if you take the historical Israel : let's not forget that that was quite a bit bigger than the current little spec of land. In fact the original Israel included a few cities that you might have heard of : Damascus, Mecca, Medina, Kirkuk, Amman, ...
OK, everyone knows the original Kingdom of Israel was bigger than today's State of Israel, but do you have any source on it stretching from Damascus to Mecca and the Mediterranean Sea to Amman?
What does Michael Smith sound like in Hebrew? I cannot think of a single dirty Hebrew phrase that sounds like Michael Smith, especially since Michael is a Hebrew name ("Mi CaEl"- "Who is like God?" in Hebrew).
I don't think the OP said he actually knew Hebrew. Lay off.
Potz is more of a Yiddish term than Hebrew, though I do believe that most American Jews are of Yiddish-language decent. In any case, nice one! The Kia car company is another funny one in Hebrew, the name means "vomit".
Except that the pun only works if you write it in Hebrew letters, in which peh and feh look exactly alike when unvowelized.