Religion is non-testable and hence is not science, and cannot be argued for or against using a scientific paradigm.
Religion and science have historically been in conflict. The view that they are not is a modern one, summed up nicely as God of the Gaps.
The same applies to any ideology in fact, but religion is on everybody's mind these days.
Right, that's why all beliefs are respectable in a modern world? Witches, vampires, werewolves -- you can't disprove any of them, but what would your opinion be of somebody who firmly believed in any of them? Fortune tellers, faith healers, Scientology -- the list goes on and on.
I don't see how talking about "spirits" is any different, especially as the scientific evidence of how consciousness relates to the material brain keeps on piling up.
Re:Market. People. they decide. and they did.
on
Django 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Interestingly, Django was developed roughly parallel to Rails (but didn't go open source until a couple years ago) and came up with many of the same conclusions about web framework design.
It's not exactly rocket science. "Hey look, this is all boiler-plate. Can the computer automate it?" Unfortunately, crap like this is what passes for software patents these days, but I digress...
Gold Five: Stay on topic. Gold Leader: *We're too close!* Gold Five: Stay on topic! Gold Leader: [shouts] Loosen up! [he too is picked off by Vader and Company; Gold Five tries to escape but is fatally winged] Gold Five: Gold Five to Red leader, lost Tiree, lost Dutch. Red Leader: I copy, Gold Leader. Gold Five: It came from... behind! [crashes]
That's the thing about communicating, you have to *want* to understand what the other person is saying. Otherwise we all have to talk to each other in legalese.
The thing about communicating is you have to use words with the right connotation and avoid easily confused ones if you want to get your message across. Otherwise you end up with: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
When I read your original post it sounded exactly like special pleading to avoid being censored: Here's the sentence again: "Just cause you don't like it, doesn't mean you have the right to silence others."
You talk about Slashdot culture. Well Slashdot's culture is all about open-ended criticism. Whining about how somebody has no "right" to say such a thing on Slashdot is a joke.
"We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well."
Re:Who's censoring now!?
on
Blown to Bits
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· Score: 1
What does fact checking have to do with conservative or liberal?
I registered a domain name about 6 years ago with the intent of starting a company [...] but I had a pipeline of about 20 other web projects in front of the one I was considering for this domain
Just out of curiosity, how many of these projects have you completed in the six years since?
You seem to be of the opinion that only negative freedoms count as freedom. And this is always the case in this debate, as I mentioned at the beginning of this thread.
To be honest, I had never heard of the idea of "negative freedom" and "positive freedom", and had dismissed it as spin from the FSF camp. However, since your reply I have taken a look on the web and read up on it.
It seems to me the use of the word freedom to mean "positive freedom" is a modern usage popularized by Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s. It's certainly not the common usage of freedom. It's more indirect than the most basic, "negative" freedom. I also find the "negative" and "positive" terms to be loaded.
The problem with "positive" freedom is that it's too esoteric, prone to spin and abuse. You can trample on all kinds of basic freedoms in the name of "positive" freedom, ending up with Copyright is Freedom. Drug Laws are Freedom. The Patriot Act is Freedom. Slavery is Freedom. Fuck that shit. It's no good when an oppressive government does it, and neither is it good when Stallman does it.
I'm not interested in a philosopher's debate that end up corrupting words that have a common, useful definition. We have other words besides freedom to talk about stuff like requiring source code: "enable", "empower", "enhance potential", "maximize utility". But there's no way I'm going to accept a requirement of giving source code as a condition of freedom. That's completely corrupt.
I don't understand why you keep making the gift analogy.
I never said "gift" once in my post. I assume you are talking about this phrase: "In the case of the GPL, something is given and accepted freely". What I mean is the giver wasn't compelled to make the offer, and the receiver wasn't compelled to accept the offer. I'm contrasting that to your "kill" analogy.
The idea is really based on contract law
Contract laws applies to individuals, not to society as a whole. The GPL rests on copyright, not contract law.
contracts freely entered into by both parties can never be a restriction of freedom
You wouldn't call a contract that removes freedoms "freer" than a contract that doesn't. If two people are selling hammers under contract, and one says "You can only pound nails sold by me", and the other says "Do whatever you want with your hammer", it's obvious to critique the contracts as regards freedom.
My point is, when it comes tax time, you don't simply have to pay the standard deduction minus what the government took from your paychecks.
Well, it's an interesting lesson, going from 18% to 1.8% is quite a shock to me. But remember that items like your car purchase are big deductions for one year only.
And I still can't really comprehend how all your deductions add up to 1.8%, but at this point I'd be asking to see your tax return, which of course I'm not asking for. I'll take your word that for your situation, you got a lot back, but I wouldn't extrapolate that to most people, as you seem inclined to do (to the point of calling people lazy).
Do your homework, and you'll probably get most of it back.
Every time I've looked at itemizing it just wasn't worth it. I don't have kids and I rent. I haven't had big medical expenditures. I've had the same car for 9 years running. The standard forms were always adequate.
As an example, let me ask you this: is a society that restricts its members from killing one another more or less free than one that doesn't enforce such restrictions?
It's a really poor analogy, because something is being taken away from the person being killed. Technically I might say that the right to be protected from violence isn't exactly the same as freedom, but it's not really a debate I care to engage in, since obviously you can't have freedom if you're dead:) The main point is the analogy is bad.
In the case of the GPL, something is given and accepted freely, yet the GPL places restrictions on the recipient.
A better analogy would be consumer protection laws. They take away freedom of the seller and the consumer buy restricting under what conditions an item might be sold. An example would be requiring a list of ingredients. We don't enact these laws in the name of freedom, but fully admit them as regulations that take away freedoms for benefits to society.
The same goes for copyright. We don't enact copyright laws in the name of freedom. If, someday, the copyright laws were to go away, it would be important to know which conditions of the GPL were granting freedoms that were taken away, and which are a restriction of freedom. The requirement for source is not about freedom at all, yet Stallman insists it is. This is corrupt.
I'll concede part of the argument though. In a world with copyright, requiring that granted freedoms from copyright be continued is defensible in the name of freedom, because it is restoring natural rights. It's really the "source required" part that I object to.
Even with insurance there are still deductible on such things as ER visits, prescriptions, and there are co pays.
Those don't add up to enough to explain the difference. Even if you were spending $200 a month (which would be a lot if you had insurance), that only amounts to $2,400 for the year.
And I didn't say an average person pays close to 1.8% in taxes, I merely stated that we DID.
You held it up as an example as to how little US citizens pay. If it's just an extreme case then it doesn't matter. If it's ordinary, then you have yet to explain how it is.
I'm going in the opposite direction, from Java to C++, and felt no need to ask for help. Google is fine. There are so many open source projects, blogs, forums, articles, tutorials, you name it, and Google search orders results so well, that it's trivial in this day and age to become an expert on any major topic. 15 years ago you had to be connected and get advice from experts. Today you Just Fucking Google It.
You do, however, need to rub a couple of neurons together if you don't want to be spoonfed. Any developer worth his salt with some basic Google-fu can figure this out. I really hope Slashdot isn't going to be filled with "How do I become an X programmer" stories.
You said you and your wife were making over 100k. You still haven't clarified if that's 100k each or a joint filing, but the 18% figure comes from a joint filing, which would give you the lowest rate. Is your true income 30k?
Do you realize you can deduct things such as medical payments
Most people making over 100k have insurance to cover most medical. You certainly aren't going down to 1.8% with medical expenses without a hardship.
sales tax
Even if you spent a whopping $40,000 on taxable goods (twice what the gov't assumes if you don't want to keep track of all your sales receipts), you'd only end up with a $2,400 reduction with Florida's 6% sales tax.
uniform costs
Now you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. There's no way the average person pays anywhere close to 1.8% in taxes. No way.
It's a simple debate about what "freedom" means. Placing restrictions on users that take away their freedom is NOT freedom, as I've tried to make clear by showing what happens if copyright no longer applies. You may argue that more software with greater freedoms results from this restriction, but that's a 2nd order effect of taking away freedom from the individual.
I think this distinction is important, lest the true meaning of freedom is lost. Freedom does not mean you have to "give back".
If you want to provide real freedom, release your source into the public domain.
That's the general idea, but see below.
Any license relies on copyright law, and limits freedom.
A license is required to abdicate copyright, or so claims at least one lawyer:
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property on a public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of copyrighted works into the public domain, except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, no mechanism is in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
That being said, you can write a license to disclaim all the privileges of copyright.
But no license can claim any kind of moral high ground.
You cannot call one license "more free", as Stallman and the FSF like to do, when it places more restrictions on the recipient. Licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses are pretty close to public domain and contain fewer restrictions than the GPL.
Without copyright, the GPL would be redundant, as there would be no such thing as commercial software.
One of the requirements of the GPL is that source must be distributed. Without copyright, this requirement is unenforceable.
Everyone would simply copy anything they like. Nobody could charge money for software at all.
You could charge money, as the FSF and GPL advocates are fond of stating, though of course past the first sale there is reduced incentive. In addition, withholding source would be a commercial advantage if you wanted to charge people for custom features.
Cuz, I mean, we all remember how well it worked for Netscape. Don't we?
A portal doesn't work well if nobody goes there. Netscape lost massive market share to IE, not that the portal wasn't a revenue stream before IE came along.
And today, nobody gives a shit about AOL's $4,200,000,000.00 start page.
That AOL (itself a company on the decline) paid $4 billion for a dying company speaks about massive stupidity on AOL's part.
The real question is how much was Netscape's portal making them at the top of their game? How much are the current top portals making for companies?
After deductions and such, we got all but 1800 back in our Federal taxes
Are those deductions typical for the average taxpayer? Going from around 18% to 1.8% is pretty damn steep. I'd think you'd have to be under some kind of hardship for that to occur, unless you're hiding your money away somewhere else. I know some money goes towards retirement, but that's just deferred taxation.
I don't count FICA, because everyone pays pretty much the same percentage of these who earns wages.
They count towards the percentage paid in taxes, which you were comparing to with your 50-60% remark regarding other countries.
The worst thing about the economy is that a layperson (or troll or moron) doesn't realise that there are, in fact, trade offs involved.
Yes, there are tradeoffs involved, and you see people who ignore the tradeoffs on both sides of the issue. No need to throw out words like "troll" or "moron".
Slashdot Mirror
Why use tinyurl if you're using a named link? It just hides useful information.
Religion is non-testable and hence is not science, and cannot be argued for or against using a scientific paradigm.
Religion and science have historically been in conflict. The view that they are not is a modern one, summed up nicely as God of the Gaps.
The same applies to any ideology in fact, but religion is on everybody's mind these days.
Right, that's why all beliefs are respectable in a modern world? Witches, vampires, werewolves -- you can't disprove any of them, but what would your opinion be of somebody who firmly believed in any of them? Fortune tellers, faith healers, Scientology -- the list goes on and on.
I don't see how talking about "spirits" is any different, especially as the scientific evidence of how consciousness relates to the material brain keeps on piling up.
Interestingly, Django was developed roughly parallel to Rails (but didn't go open source until a couple years ago) and came up with many of the same conclusions about web framework design.
It's not exactly rocket science. "Hey look, this is all boiler-plate. Can the computer automate it?" Unfortunately, crap like this is what passes for software patents these days, but I digress...
Let's stay on topic shall we?
Gold Five: Stay on topic.
Gold Leader: *We're too close!*
Gold Five: Stay on topic!
Gold Leader: [shouts] Loosen up!
[he too is picked off by Vader and Company; Gold Five tries to escape but is fatally winged]
Gold Five: Gold Five to Red leader, lost Tiree, lost Dutch.
Red Leader: I copy, Gold Leader.
Gold Five: It came from... behind!
[crashes]
That's the thing about communicating, you have to *want* to understand what the other person is saying. Otherwise we all have to talk to each other in legalese.
The thing about communicating is you have to use words with the right connotation and avoid easily confused ones if you want to get your message across. Otherwise you end up with: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
When I read your original post it sounded exactly like special pleading to avoid being censored: Here's the sentence again: "Just cause you don't like it, doesn't mean you have the right to silence others."
You talk about Slashdot culture. Well Slashdot's culture is all about open-ended criticism. Whining about how somebody has no "right" to say such a thing on Slashdot is a joke.
They never were funny, just obnoxious.
Chromium is open source. Chrome isn't.
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/why.html
"We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well."
What does fact checking have to do with conservative or liberal?
I registered a domain name about 6 years ago with the intent of starting a company [...] but I had a pipeline of about 20 other web projects in front of the one I was considering for this domain
Just out of curiosity, how many of these projects have you completed in the six years since?
You got a troll moderation, but yours was the most accurate, succinct, and insightful statement I've seen yet :)
You seem to be of the opinion that only negative freedoms count as freedom. And this is always the case in this debate, as I mentioned at the beginning of this thread.
To be honest, I had never heard of the idea of "negative freedom" and "positive freedom", and had dismissed it as spin from the FSF camp. However, since your reply I have taken a look on the web and read up on it.
It seems to me the use of the word freedom to mean "positive freedom" is a modern usage popularized by Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s. It's certainly not the common usage of freedom. It's more indirect than the most basic, "negative" freedom. I also find the "negative" and "positive" terms to be loaded.
The problem with "positive" freedom is that it's too esoteric, prone to spin and abuse. You can trample on all kinds of basic freedoms in the name of "positive" freedom, ending up with Copyright is Freedom. Drug Laws are Freedom. The Patriot Act is Freedom. Slavery is Freedom. Fuck that shit. It's no good when an oppressive government does it, and neither is it good when Stallman does it.
I'm not interested in a philosopher's debate that end up corrupting words that have a common, useful definition. We have other words besides freedom to talk about stuff like requiring source code: "enable", "empower", "enhance potential", "maximize utility". But there's no way I'm going to accept a requirement of giving source code as a condition of freedom. That's completely corrupt.
I don't understand why you keep making the gift analogy.
I never said "gift" once in my post. I assume you are talking about this phrase: "In the case of the GPL, something is given and accepted freely". What I mean is the giver wasn't compelled to make the offer, and the receiver wasn't compelled to accept the offer. I'm contrasting that to your "kill" analogy.
The idea is really based on contract law
Contract laws applies to individuals, not to society as a whole. The GPL rests on copyright, not contract law.
contracts freely entered into by both parties can never be a restriction of freedom
You wouldn't call a contract that removes freedoms "freer" than a contract that doesn't. If two people are selling hammers under contract, and one says "You can only pound nails sold by me", and the other says "Do whatever you want with your hammer", it's obvious to critique the contracts as regards freedom.
My point is, when it comes tax time, you don't simply have to pay the standard deduction minus what the government took from your paychecks.
Well, it's an interesting lesson, going from 18% to 1.8% is quite a shock to me. But remember that items like your car purchase are big deductions for one year only.
And I still can't really comprehend how all your deductions add up to 1.8%, but at this point I'd be asking to see your tax return, which of course I'm not asking for. I'll take your word that for your situation, you got a lot back, but I wouldn't extrapolate that to most people, as you seem inclined to do (to the point of calling people lazy).
Do your homework, and you'll probably get most of it back.
Every time I've looked at itemizing it just wasn't worth it. I don't have kids and I rent. I haven't had big medical expenditures. I've had the same car for 9 years running. The standard forms were always adequate.
Thief! With your deft counter-argument you've clearly deprived the GP of his sense of self-assuredness.
He stole my heart and that's what really hurts, though the morning sun when it's in his face really shows his age.
As an example, let me ask you this: is a society that restricts its members from killing one another more or less free than one that doesn't enforce such restrictions?
It's a really poor analogy, because something is being taken away from the person being killed. Technically I might say that the right to be protected from violence isn't exactly the same as freedom, but it's not really a debate I care to engage in, since obviously you can't have freedom if you're dead :) The main point is the analogy is bad.
In the case of the GPL, something is given and accepted freely, yet the GPL places restrictions on the recipient.
A better analogy would be consumer protection laws. They take away freedom of the seller and the consumer buy restricting under what conditions an item might be sold. An example would be requiring a list of ingredients. We don't enact these laws in the name of freedom, but fully admit them as regulations that take away freedoms for benefits to society.
The same goes for copyright. We don't enact copyright laws in the name of freedom. If, someday, the copyright laws were to go away, it would be important to know which conditions of the GPL were granting freedoms that were taken away, and which are a restriction of freedom. The requirement for source is not about freedom at all, yet Stallman insists it is. This is corrupt.
I'll concede part of the argument though. In a world with copyright, requiring that granted freedoms from copyright be continued is defensible in the name of freedom, because it is restoring natural rights. It's really the "source required" part that I object to.
Even with insurance there are still deductible on such things as ER visits, prescriptions, and there are co pays.
Those don't add up to enough to explain the difference. Even if you were spending $200 a month (which would be a lot if you had insurance), that only amounts to $2,400 for the year.
And I didn't say an average person pays close to 1.8% in taxes, I merely stated that we DID.
You held it up as an example as to how little US citizens pay. If it's just an extreme case then it doesn't matter. If it's ordinary, then you have yet to explain how it is.
I'm going in the opposite direction, from Java to C++, and felt no need to ask for help. Google is fine. There are so many open source projects, blogs, forums, articles, tutorials, you name it, and Google search orders results so well, that it's trivial in this day and age to become an expert on any major topic. 15 years ago you had to be connected and get advice from experts. Today you Just Fucking Google It.
You do, however, need to rub a couple of neurons together if you don't want to be spoonfed. Any developer worth his salt with some basic Google-fu can figure this out. I really hope Slashdot isn't going to be filled with "How do I become an X programmer" stories.
If you are paying an 18% tax rate on 30k
You said you and your wife were making over 100k. You still haven't clarified if that's 100k each or a joint filing, but the 18% figure comes from a joint filing, which would give you the lowest rate. Is your true income 30k?
Do you realize you can deduct things such as medical payments
Most people making over 100k have insurance to cover most medical. You certainly aren't going down to 1.8% with medical expenses without a hardship.
sales tax
Even if you spent a whopping $40,000 on taxable goods (twice what the gov't assumes if you don't want to keep track of all your sales receipts), you'd only end up with a $2,400 reduction with Florida's 6% sales tax.
uniform costs
Now you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. There's no way the average person pays anywhere close to 1.8% in taxes. No way.
Is this an IP law debate?
It's a simple debate about what "freedom" means. Placing restrictions on users that take away their freedom is NOT freedom, as I've tried to make clear by showing what happens if copyright no longer applies. You may argue that more software with greater freedoms results from this restriction, but that's a 2nd order effect of taking away freedom from the individual.
I think this distinction is important, lest the true meaning of freedom is lost. Freedom does not mean you have to "give back".
If you want to provide real freedom, release your source into the public domain.
That's the general idea, but see below.
Any license relies on copyright law, and limits freedom.
A license is required to abdicate copyright, or so claims at least one lawyer:
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property on a public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of copyrighted works into the public domain, except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, no mechanism is in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
That being said, you can write a license to disclaim all the privileges of copyright.
But no license can claim any kind of moral high ground.
You cannot call one license "more free", as Stallman and the FSF like to do, when it places more restrictions on the recipient. Licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses are pretty close to public domain and contain fewer restrictions than the GPL.
Without copyright, the GPL would be redundant, as there would be no such thing as commercial software.
One of the requirements of the GPL is that source must be distributed. Without copyright, this requirement is unenforceable.
Everyone would simply copy anything they like. Nobody could charge money for software at all.
You could charge money, as the FSF and GPL advocates are fond of stating, though of course past the first sale there is reduced incentive. In addition, withholding source would be a commercial advantage if you wanted to charge people for custom features.
Cuz, I mean, we all remember how well it worked for Netscape. Don't we?
A portal doesn't work well if nobody goes there. Netscape lost massive market share to IE, not that the portal wasn't a revenue stream before IE came along.
And today, nobody gives a shit about AOL's $4,200,000,000.00 start page.
That AOL (itself a company on the decline) paid $4 billion for a dying company speaks about massive stupidity on AOL's part.
The real question is how much was Netscape's portal making them at the top of their game? How much are the current top portals making for companies?
After deductions and such, we got all but 1800 back in our Federal taxes
Are those deductions typical for the average taxpayer? Going from around 18% to 1.8% is pretty damn steep. I'd think you'd have to be under some kind of hardship for that to occur, unless you're hiding your money away somewhere else. I know some money goes towards retirement, but that's just deferred taxation.
I don't count FICA, because everyone pays pretty much the same percentage of these who earns wages.
They count towards the percentage paid in taxes, which you were comparing to with your 50-60% remark regarding other countries.
The GPL doesn't remove freedom, copyright does.
I agree that copyright removes freedoms.
The GPL gives it back, with stipulations.
The stipulations remove freedom. That becomes obvious if you think how those stipulations would be enforced if copyright went away.
Me and my wife make over 100k and we only pay about 1800 in taxes a year. That's 1.8% for those of you who don't know math from your own ass.
I think it's you who don't understand taxes from your own ass. 1.8%? Are you kidding me? You probably pay something like 18% in federal taxes.
Of course, that doesn't include FICA taxes used to fund Social Security and Medicare.
The worst thing about the economy is that a layperson (or troll or moron) doesn't realise that there are, in fact, trade offs involved.
Yes, there are tradeoffs involved, and you see people who ignore the tradeoffs on both sides of the issue. No need to throw out words like "troll" or "moron".