You call this communication? I guess you must either be a politician or one of these ivory tower university types. Just spin everything so that it has no real meaning, and call it communication.
Real communication actually does imply agreement, but as you spin it, agreement does not necessarily imply real communication. Can you see the difference here? It's not the same thing. Or is the artistic component of the language you use interfering with this communication also?
2+2=4, this is a precise communication about which there is agreement by most people. Why because it means pretty much the same thing to most of them. But there can be people who can read the same sentence and have no agreement about what it means. That is why mathematics and not language is the main communication method of scientists and engineers.
Your logic is a bit hard to follow here, you seem to place a lot of importance on language, and then question the value of life? Drugs or what? Simple logic, a 5 year old could understand, "no life no language", artistic or otherwise. So by you circular logic language is also not that important. Adolf your hero, used very articulate and artistic language, to communicate hatred and violence, it appealed to emotions, but not to logic and reason. Is this the erroneous use of language that you are always correcting?
And how many people has artistic fed? And how many lives has "beautiful nuance" saved?
You the see the essence of "artistic" is "egotistic" because art is supposed to be up the the interpretation of each individual. (individualistic / egotistic as many "artists?" are.)
When a language is that way it is totally DIVISIVE, which is exactly the societal condition that you are complaining about.
In case you forgot language is about communication, which should lead to common understanding, which should lead to AGREEMENT. As someone who facilitates common understandings and AGREEMENTS, I deal with this inadequacy of language every day, especially when these understandings have to be recorded in writing, and understood the same way, by different parties 5 years from now.
Contrary to what you imply, it is the social and cultural mores that drive the form of language and not the other way round. So you only think that you understand Shakespeare, or the Bible for that matter, if you don't understand the social and cultural context.
Maybe a new language should be invented, that is logical and has no redundancy. Do you want to build a better horse buggy or do you want to build a car or an aeroplane?
What is the point to having a language, that has 20 different meanings for one word, and 20 words with one meaning. Words that sound the same but have different meanings. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Fix that before you make comments about spelling and grammar. Because if you fixed that, then maybe the spelling and grammar issues would fix themselves, and a picture would not need a thousand words. (notice I used "would not" instead of "wouldn't". Just a space and an "o" instead of an ' difference, no big problem.)
"Cynicism or Critical Thinking" does not pass for intelligence or objectivity. But it can pass for just plain "Critical" or even "prejudiced". Or any of the thesaurus alternates such as: "biased, intolerant, bigoted, narrow-minded, discriminatory, unfair, opinionated, partisan, blinkered (disapproving), unjust."
As alluded to in one of the other postings about the love/hate comparison. Actually that is one of the peculiarities of "objective?" thought, that it is in fact only relative. It always needs contrast to operate at all such as good/bad, up/down, etc. So then that might mean that Linux is beyond compare, absolute and perfect if you will.
Also by current general thinking, "hate" is not the other polarity of love, but "fear" is. So maybe they fear Linux, but are too afraid to post this. Me, I am loving it more all the time, especially what the KDE4 boys and girls are doing.
If you wait for a "pure" version of Linux that "just works" it will be a long time before you can use Linux aggravation free.
I use Kubuntu and I believe they use some combination of open and proprietary drivers. But it does in fact "just work" with my hardware. But that is only a recent phenomenon, for the longest time the printer could not be made to work, the internet was hit or miss, and the display required tweaking each time I booted.
That is all gone now, Kubuntu detects the hardware, things "just work" and the OS idiosyncrasies are not so in your face noticeable. Less aggravation more pleasure.
The steering wheels in cars are circular in shape. That is an automotive industry standard. They make millions of cars with this functionality standard. In the past there were attempts to make these steering wheels various non-circular shapes, that were stylish and "look good" sexy. But in the end there seems to be consensus on a circular shape standard. Why? Because in comparison to all other considered design options, and for general public usage application, this standard works best. Why? Because the user mostly doesn't notice it when operating a vehicle, which is the way all standards should be, and should be applied.
The math, the math, India is the No.2 most populous country and Brazil is No.5, with India expected to be No.1 within 15 years, because of China's population control measures. The opinion of a significant market of PC and smart phone users, probably does matter to MS.
I'm all for that, a very sensible law. You mean that the government elected by the people actually represents the interests of "the people" and not Big Money Corporations.
What a novel concept, it must be called democracy or something, they think it originated in America, instead it is an ancient Greek idea.
I see somebody else made the same point about buying without a hard drive. I buy my PCs in pieces and build them from the ground up, so no pre-installed OS problem. Unfortunately this method would be a bit of a challenge for most PC consumers, so the law must offer protection for them.
Yes we all use our computers to play games, that's what they are for? They don't make any specialty boxes for that?
You can get an Asus MB for your girlfriend, with Express Gate/Splashtop, with no waiting for Windows boot. And sooner or later the universal mobile OS will be Linux based, because I don't see them forming any Windows standardization consortiums, do you?
They have a heuristic engine that seems to catch most things, before they are recognized to be out there. ("in the wild") If you read all the independent tests it consistently comes out ahead of all others. I have been using it for three or four years, and never had an infection, but with Norton and McAfee I have had infections.
NOD so far has nailed all the web files that I have opened, either accidentally or intentionally. The big red splash screen pops up every time.
A couple or more words come to mind here, "due diligence", "responsibility", "accountability", "stupidity", "intelligence". It has been my experience that when there has been an injury, fatality, or undesirable incident, that some or all of these have been wrongly applied.
Back in the days, I used to buy sound cards, the ones with the gold connectors, that came from Creative. The drivers used to suck, and back then the BIOS or Windows didn't recognize the hardware, then you had all that IRQ priority crap to work with.
So when the separately purchased MBs started coming out with acceptable or good sound capability, and that "just works" feature that everyone likes, no more sound cards for me. But I bet the drivers still probably suck, and are in need of some help.
Market dynamics notwithstanding, I was just trying to differentiate between the protection that should be afforded to those who actually spend R&D time and money, and manufacturing costs to bring a product to market. And thereby try to make an honest profit that way. And those who manipulate the patent and copyright systems themselves, in all of the various devious ways that they do this, to extort money without the risk of having to market an actual product. But are a financial threat (parasite if you will) to those who do actually market useful products.
Since I deal with legal documents and written agreements every day, I always find this to be a relevant question. What is the point of having a written document "agreement" if you will, if its exact meaning and intent is subject to wildly varying interpretations by the parties to it.
Would you not be better off (1) without any document at all? (2) Rewriting it? or (3) as is in most of todays agreements putting exact interpretations on the key words.
1.1 The term "Exclusive Rights" as used in this document shall mean......... 1.2 The term "Useful Arts" as used in this document shall mean....... 1.3 The term "Discoveries" as used in this document shall mean........ 1.4 The term "Progress" as used in this document shall mean........ 1.5 The term "Science' as used in this document shall mean.......
Is the constitution itself not an anachronism in some places, and an impediment to progress? But could you trust todays politicians to redraft it? There would be some other words that would also need interpretation, like "good faith", "power and privilege", maybe even "liberty", "life", "pursuit of happiness" etc. They could also throw in "useful pertinent document".
This is a glib use of the term "rights"? It seems to assume automatic entitlement to them? Rights are something that are granted by the rest of the population, or not. They are definitely not automatic.
Then there is POWER and those that have it can choose not to grant you any rights at all. As I understand the constitution, ORIGINALLY was about a balance of these two things, RIGHTS and POWER, and not the corruption and mockery that they are turning it into now. Blackmail, extortion and power brokering come to mind, both inside and outside of the patent and copyright systems.
Back to copyright, patents etc., these can be seen as RIGHTS or conversely as POWER and privilege, all depends on how they are applied. But did you know that if I invent something that they don't want me to patent they can prevent me, by classifying it as contrary to national security. My "rights"? don't matter then, it is all about POWER.
POWER,GREED and privilege never serve the public good, but rights sometimes do. The only way out is to use their corrupt system against them. Stallman is just taking a page from Gandi's or Mandella's play book. That power, self interest and corruption must fail.
Also did you know that over time the meaning of words change, and even their dictionary definitions change. That is why a lot of contracts contain the specific definitions of the key words as they are used in the document. The Founding Fathers maybe should have considered this. Especially for words like "these truths" and "self evident", because lawyers can put a lot of spin on these.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
So what does this statement actually imply? (1) A public service function, or (2) to make someone fantastically wealthy by a specially devised monopoly method?
As someone deals with contracts and agreements every day, my take is that it is because of this ambiguity of interpretation that we have the problems/misunderstanding today.
Stallman opted for the (1) "public service" interpretation. The "Progress of Science and useful Arts" part. While the rest of business and the legal system supports (2).
My suggestion would be that not the inventor, but the "put money at risk" manufacturer should hold the patent, and only if they manufacture a product that incorporates the patent(s). Understanding that an inventor can also be a manufacturer.
Remembering that inventions, and even writings, turned up to be the same in some unassociated cultures. For instance the bow and arrow was already in N America when the white man came. They built similar pyramids in S. America as the Egyptians did.
So inventions are not necessarily exclusive to an individual, but if someone wants to bring an invention to market, when nobody else has, they should be afforded some exclusivity over normal market competition to recover costs and make a profit.
When you get to the top, the only way left is down. That is always inevitable, world domination empires only last for so long and then they are gone. Just some archaeologists digging through the ruins.
Did you know that Bill is not the richest man any more? He has sunk to number 3 because of the Yahoo deal, and corresponding MS share price drop. Buyers/Sellers in the stock market set stock prices, maybe because they are not naive enough to believe what MS reports.
Business is business, nothing special or unique about software, just the "before and after" time curve. The term "sunset industry" was used frequently for the auto industry. But I suppose when they make hardware "quasi live" and "self programing" then software will be a "sunset industry" too!
Give him/her a couple of mod points for the aggravation here!
You think? I remember and have followed a similar kind of scenario, it started over 30 years ago when I was younger. It went something like this: GM was the Biggest of the Big. Had a market share greater than all other automobile manufactures combined. Had revenues higher than the GNP of 90% of the worlds nations. etc. etc. etc. They developed this Business Model called "Planned Product Obsolescence". (Your vehicle was planned to be scrap in about 10 years or before.)
There was also another little automobile manufacturer called Toyota with a very small market share, they made crappy little vehicles, used to be called "piss pots". They had a Business Model called "Continuous Improvement". There was a historic event in 2007 that went quietly unnoticed, Toyota surpassed GM in world market share and revenues.
In general I agree with your theory that the price of software in an inexpensive device will eventually become a purchase choice factor, all other things being relatively equal.
The Moore's Law thing about more for less, probably does apply to both size and price, but not with the same ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
No just new sentences. Or: No, just new sentences.
You call this communication? I guess you must either be a politician or one of these ivory tower university types. Just spin everything so that it has no real meaning, and call it communication.
Real communication actually does imply agreement, but as you spin it, agreement does not necessarily imply real communication. Can you see the difference here? It's not the same thing. Or is the artistic component of the language you use interfering with this communication also?
2+2=4, this is a precise communication about which there is agreement by most people. Why because it means pretty much the same thing to most of them. But there can be people who can read the same sentence and have no agreement about what it means. That is why mathematics and not language is the main communication method of scientists and engineers.
Your logic is a bit hard to follow here, you seem to place a lot of importance on language, and then question the value of life? Drugs or what? Simple logic, a 5 year old could understand, "no life no language", artistic or otherwise. So by you circular logic language is also not that important. Adolf your hero, used very articulate and artistic language, to communicate hatred and violence, it appealed to emotions, but not to logic and reason. Is this the erroneous use of language that you are always correcting?
And how many people has artistic fed? And how many lives has "beautiful nuance" saved?
You the see the essence of "artistic" is "egotistic" because art is supposed to be up the the interpretation of each individual. (individualistic / egotistic as many "artists?" are.)
When a language is that way it is totally DIVISIVE, which is exactly the societal condition that you are complaining about.
In case you forgot language is about communication, which should lead to common understanding, which should lead to AGREEMENT. As someone who facilitates common understandings and AGREEMENTS, I deal with this inadequacy of language every day, especially when these understandings have to be recorded in writing, and understood the same way, by different parties 5 years from now.
Contrary to what you imply, it is the social and cultural mores that drive the form of language and not the other way round. So you only think that you understand Shakespeare, or the Bible for that matter, if you don't understand the social and cultural context.
Maybe a new language should be invented, that is logical and has no redundancy. Do you want to build a better horse buggy or do you want to build a car or an aeroplane?
What is the point to having a language, that has 20 different meanings for one word, and 20 words with one meaning. Words that sound the same but have different meanings. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Fix that before you make comments about spelling and grammar. Because if you fixed that, then maybe the spelling and grammar issues would fix themselves, and a picture would not need a thousand words. (notice I used "would not" instead of "wouldn't". Just a space and an "o" instead of an ' difference, no big problem.)
If he does sue, then your remark is libelous, and then he can sue you.
"Cynicism or Critical Thinking" does not pass for intelligence or objectivity. But it can pass for just plain "Critical" or even "prejudiced". Or any of the thesaurus alternates such as: "biased, intolerant, bigoted, narrow-minded, discriminatory, unfair, opinionated, partisan, blinkered (disapproving), unjust."
As alluded to in one of the other postings about the love/hate comparison. Actually that is one of the peculiarities of "objective?" thought, that it is in fact only relative. It always needs contrast to operate at all such as good/bad, up/down, etc. So then that might mean that Linux is beyond compare, absolute and perfect if you will.
Also by current general thinking, "hate" is not the other polarity of love, but "fear" is. So maybe they fear Linux, but are too afraid to post this. Me, I am loving it more all the time, especially what the KDE4 boys and girls are doing.
If you wait for a "pure" version of Linux that "just works" it will be a long time before you can use Linux aggravation free.
I use Kubuntu and I believe they use some combination of open and proprietary drivers. But it does in fact "just work" with my hardware. But that is only a recent phenomenon, for the longest time the printer could not be made to work, the internet was hit or miss, and the display required tweaking each time I booted.
That is all gone now, Kubuntu detects the hardware, things "just work" and the OS idiosyncrasies are not so in your face noticeable. Less aggravation more pleasure.
Maybe there are less wildfires around Seattle because of all the rain. So it would cost less to insure your less expensive house.
The steering wheels in cars are circular in shape. That is an automotive industry standard. They make millions of cars with this functionality standard. In the past there were attempts to make these steering wheels various non-circular shapes, that were stylish and "look good" sexy. But in the end there seems to be consensus on a circular shape standard. Why? Because in comparison to all other considered design options, and for general public usage application, this standard works best. Why? Because the user mostly doesn't notice it when operating a vehicle, which is the way all standards should be, and should be applied.
The math, the math, India is the No.2 most populous country and Brazil is No.5, with India expected to be No.1 within 15 years, because of China's population control measures. The opinion of a significant market of PC and smart phone users, probably does matter to MS.
I'm all for that, a very sensible law. You mean that the government elected by the people actually represents the interests of "the people" and not Big Money Corporations.
What a novel concept, it must be called democracy or something, they think it originated in America, instead it is an ancient Greek idea.
I see somebody else made the same point about buying without a hard drive. I buy my PCs in pieces and build them from the ground up, so no pre-installed OS problem. Unfortunately this method would be a bit of a challenge for most PC consumers, so the law must offer protection for them.
Yes we all use our computers to play games, that's what they are for? They don't make any specialty boxes for that?
You can get an Asus MB for your girlfriend, with Express Gate/Splashtop, with no waiting for Windows boot. And sooner or later the universal mobile OS will be Linux based, because I don't see them forming any Windows standardization consortiums, do you?
They have a heuristic engine that seems to catch most things, before they are recognized to be out there. ("in the wild") If you read all the independent tests it consistently comes out ahead of all others. I have been using it for three or four years, and never had an infection, but with Norton and McAfee I have had infections.
NOD so far has nailed all the web files that I have opened, either accidentally or intentionally. The big red splash screen pops up every time.
You might try ESET NOD 32.
A couple or more words come to mind here, "due diligence", "responsibility", "accountability", "stupidity", "intelligence". It has been my experience that when there has been an injury, fatality, or undesirable incident, that some or all of these have been wrongly applied.
Back in the days, I used to buy sound cards, the ones with the gold connectors, that came from Creative. The drivers used to suck, and back then the BIOS or Windows didn't recognize the hardware, then you had all that IRQ priority crap to work with.
So when the separately purchased MBs started coming out with acceptable or good sound capability, and that "just works" feature that everyone likes, no more sound cards for me. But I bet the drivers still probably suck, and are in need of some help.
Market dynamics notwithstanding, I was just trying to differentiate between the protection that should be afforded to those who actually spend R&D time and money, and manufacturing costs to bring a product to market. And thereby try to make an honest profit that way. And those who manipulate the patent and copyright systems themselves, in all of the various devious ways that they do this, to extort money without the risk of having to market an actual product. But are a financial threat (parasite if you will) to those who do actually market useful products.
Since I deal with legal documents and written agreements every day, I always find this to be a relevant question. What is the point of having a written document "agreement" if you will, if its exact meaning and intent is subject to wildly varying interpretations by the parties to it.
Would you not be better off (1) without any document at all? (2) Rewriting it? or (3) as is in most of todays agreements putting exact interpretations on the key words.
1.1 The term "Exclusive Rights" as used in this document shall mean.........
1.2 The term "Useful Arts" as used in this document shall mean.......
1.3 The term "Discoveries" as used in this document shall mean........
1.4 The term "Progress" as used in this document shall mean........
1.5 The term "Science' as used in this document shall mean.......
Is the constitution itself not an anachronism in some places, and an impediment to progress? But could you trust todays politicians to redraft it? There would be some other words that would also need interpretation, like "good faith", "power and privilege", maybe even "liberty", "life", "pursuit of happiness" etc. They could also throw in "useful pertinent document".
This is a glib use of the term "rights"? It seems to assume automatic entitlement to them? Rights are something that are granted by the rest of the population, or not. They are definitely not automatic.
Then there is POWER and those that have it can choose not to grant you any rights at all. As I understand the constitution, ORIGINALLY was about a balance of these two things, RIGHTS and POWER, and not the corruption and mockery that they are turning it into now. Blackmail, extortion and power brokering come to mind, both inside and outside of the patent and copyright systems.
Back to copyright, patents etc., these can be seen as RIGHTS or conversely as POWER and privilege, all depends on how they are applied. But did you know that if I invent something that they don't want me to patent they can prevent me, by classifying it as contrary to national security. My "rights"? don't matter then, it is all about POWER.
POWER,GREED and privilege never serve the public good, but rights sometimes do. The only way out is to use their corrupt system against them. Stallman is just taking a page from Gandi's or Mandella's play book. That power, self interest and corruption must fail.
Also did you know that over time the meaning of words change, and even their dictionary definitions change. That is why a lot of contracts contain the specific definitions of the key words as they are used in the document. The Founding Fathers maybe should have considered this. Especially for words like "these truths" and "self evident", because lawyers can put a lot of spin on these.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
So what does this statement actually imply? (1) A public service function, or (2) to make someone fantastically wealthy by a specially devised monopoly method?
As someone deals with contracts and agreements every day, my take is that it is because of this ambiguity of interpretation that we have the problems/misunderstanding today.
Stallman opted for the (1) "public service" interpretation. The "Progress of Science and useful Arts" part. While the rest of business and the legal system supports (2).
My suggestion would be that not the inventor, but the "put money at risk" manufacturer should hold the patent, and only if they manufacture a product that incorporates the patent(s). Understanding that an inventor can also be a manufacturer.
Remembering that inventions, and even writings, turned up to be the same in some unassociated cultures. For instance the bow and arrow was already in N America when the white man came. They built similar pyramids in S. America as the Egyptians did.
So inventions are not necessarily exclusive to an individual, but if someone wants to bring an invention to market, when nobody else has, they should be afforded some exclusivity over normal market competition to recover costs and make a profit.
When you get to the top, the only way left is down. That is always inevitable, world domination empires only last for so long and then they are gone. Just some archaeologists digging through the ruins.
Did you know that Bill is not the richest man any more? He has sunk to number 3 because of the Yahoo deal, and corresponding MS share price drop. Buyers/Sellers in the stock market set stock prices, maybe because they are not naive enough to believe what MS reports.
Business is business, nothing special or unique about software, just the "before and after" time curve. The term "sunset industry" was used frequently for the auto industry. But I suppose when they make hardware "quasi live" and "self programing" then software will be a "sunset industry" too!
Give him/her a couple of mod points for the aggravation here!
You think? I remember and have followed a similar kind of scenario, it started over 30 years ago when I was younger. It went something like this: GM was the Biggest of the Big. Had a market share greater than all other automobile manufactures combined. Had revenues higher than the GNP of 90% of the worlds nations. etc. etc. etc. They developed this Business Model called "Planned Product Obsolescence". (Your vehicle was planned to be scrap in about 10 years or before.)
There was also another little automobile manufacturer called Toyota with a very small market share, they made crappy little vehicles, used to be called "piss pots". They had a Business Model called "Continuous Improvement". There was a historic event in 2007 that went quietly unnoticed, Toyota surpassed GM in world market share and revenues.
In general I agree with your theory that the price of software in an inexpensive device will eventually become a purchase choice factor, all other things being relatively equal.
The Moore's Law thing about more for less, probably does apply to both size and price, but not with the same ratio.