Interestingly, we recently had a global justice protest here in Chicago (you know, WTO/IMF, etc -- in this case it was an associated organization, Trans-Atlantic Business Dialog). It was rather odd, because by far the biggest publicizer of the event was the Chicago Police. It had far, far more coverage than the Oct 26 peace protests, despite being a last-minute organization effort, much smaller, and generally not a big deal among the leftists in the city.
Ultimately, it has been complete peaceful -- which is not odd, since absolutely no one had suggested any violence whatsoever. The only question was whether the CPD was going to instigate violence, but then with all the publicity they set up there were cameras everywhere. Not that most media won't bend over backwards to avoid showing police violence. But they were actually interupting programming to cover the protest, and the number of police were roughly equal to the number of protesters.
Anyway, it was hard for me to understand why the police and city government would do such a thing. The protest was looking to be pretty minor and not well organized -- the CPD practically saved it. Of course, they did it through fear-mongering (but there's no such thing as bad publicity, yada yada -- some will argue with that, of course).
But I've noticed, especially reading comments here and elsewhere, that a large portion of people have fallen under the sway of these reports. They believe that the protesters are violent thugs, even though by far most violence is caused by police. They believe these protesters are like locusts, who come into their cities and disrupt and destroy before moving on.
I suspect that the government is trying to sway people into thinking that empassioned political speach is inherently violent and should be made illegal. If this law does okay in Australia, I would not be surprised if it came up in the US -- probably under the guise of being anti-terrorist.
However, every state should be allowed the ability to prevent what it considers crime.
The issue is whether the state should be allowed to prevent speach based on the speculation that it may lead to crime. This is absolute immoral, especially since the speach here is specifically political. No state has the right to do this.
Of course I can't present any evidence -- it's hard to present a lack of evidence. Most "evidence" I've seen is only an allusion to "unreleased" evidence and details. There's some confessions -- but I think it's notable that the conditions in Guantanamo were textbook brainwashing conditions.
There certainly have been terrorists in Afghanistan, and still are active ones in Pakistan, but it's not clear what the connection is to 9-11.
And in the case of Iraq, most of the evidence has been straight out lies -- but they keep putting them out there trying to find one that's not demonstrably false. It makes everything look pretty suspicious.
And there's still some very big missing evidence. Remember about the futures trading? Absolutely nothing has come of that, and it doesn't even seem like anyone is looking. I'm suspicious that evidence wouldn't be consistent with their other claims.
The gap between U.S. support of the Afghan mujahedin and al-Qaeda's propping up of the Taliban regime is the same as the time between the end of WWII and the rise of Japan and Germany as democratic economic powers.
The mujahedin and the Taliban acted pretty much the same. The organization that was to become the mujahedin were known for throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear veils -- this was in fact plus to those in the US who wanted to fund them. They were brutal, horrible people. We funded them, and that was morally wrong, no matter what the time.
The US government is actually very consistent -- we consistently create our own enemies, we consistently support evil people, and there is consistency that there is no reprucusion for the people who make these mistakes.
It might be okay to say that the government and military are no longer going to make the same mistakes they did before -- except that there's no reason to believe anything has changed. Many of the same people are influential, no one was punished for anything... how many times does the government have to do the wrong thing before we stop trusting it?
And if you haven't noticed, no evidence has been presented about who the terrorists really are. No evidence about Iraq, only very vague evidence about bin Laden... now we're bringing Columbian rebels into it, and who knows what else. We're all seem to be willing to believe whatever they say, and when they say some group is terrorist we seem ready to let them do anything at all, no matter how unprincipled it is. It's ignorant, insane, and dangerous.
I really am not intending to defend RMS (and that message wasn't actually my composition), but rather I agreed with the sentiment that this hostility is all too reminicent of a bully. There's a lot of people who think they're better than RMS and the bizarre people like him, but they feel that way without any justification. They ascribe to be cool, where apathy is the greatest achievement.
I have often defended Stallman not because he needs it, but because he is one of the most sincere people I can think of. In this cynical society it is very hard to be sincere, and it always opens you up to criticism. But I hate cynicism, and I strive to be more sincere myself. I defend him because that sincerity is something I aspire to.
I don't like the term "geek" -- somewhere along the line it lost its meaning, because too many idiots took that term for themselves as though it was something cool. It cannot ever be cool to be a geek -- they are opposites. A real geek -- not just a socially awkward person -- has a passion that is not diluted for social ends. I am offended when that passion is ridiculed. And usually that ridicule comes from people who are mediocre and self-centered. But I respond because coolness can be infectious -- or at least the aspiration of cool. I hope only that someone will see how empty that path is.
I have no idea whether the GNU/Hurd does or does not address them, and even if it does, it is 15 year old technology.
The Hurd isn't really a good microkernel -- it's not really a microkernel at all, but a bunch of services built ontop of a microkernel (Mach). Of course, the microkernel is essential to the actual operation, and the services have been written with a specific micokernel in mind... but it's not unreasonable to consider the Hurd running on a different (better, more advanced, faster) microkernel. People in the Hurd community have talked about just this, though of course no one has actually done the hard work of converting it.
But sadly, my impression of what the Hurd has shown, is that just because something is userspace doesn't mean its easy to debug. It seems like code accessibility -- even for original developers -- has not been very good. I think it's in the same way that threaded programming is much harder to debug... a complex set of interworking services is even worse.
And while microkernels allow a certain level of modularity, it really should be possible to achieve a great deal of modularity in a monolithic kernel as well -- just not in as safe a manner. I don't know that safety is the difficult part of Linux development. Well... I'm not entirely clear on what is the difficult part, I've never tried to program on the kernel. Probably an issue of factoring -- when refactoring needs to occur across module boundries (for whatever reason) it requires different developers to communicate and agree on things (which is where the overload is occuring). But that same problem will exist in a microkernel -- only the refactoring will be occuring between processes. That's not a big difference.
Maybe with enough thoughtfulness you can refactor everything in the Right Way, so that interfaces are entirely stable and development can occur without as much interdependence. That's not impossible -- there's a lot of experience from Linux and elsewhere to learn from. But I don't think that is related to monolithic or microkernel design.
Since this stupid joke got to 5, and the retort is still at zero, I'm copying it so its more visible:
I don't find these sorts of comments funny or insightful in any way. And they always show up on Slashdot.
Didn't you get bullied when you were in school? Didn't you have enough of that?
To better understand your comment, I'll rephrase it thusly:
"RMS is funny, and I don't understand him. He says things that cause me to think. He says things that threaten my livelihood. He speaks out where I am afraid to. He is confident in his ideas.
Kick kick kick. I cannot deal with him. Kick Kick Kick.
I am small and by kicking RMS I can be big."
Myself, I wish I could understand and phrase an argument as clearly and succinctly as RMS. I wish I could code as well as RMS. I wish I had made a contribution to my profession 1/1000th as important as either emacs, gcc, or GNU. I wish I had the balls to speak as freely as RMS. I wish I wasn't as enamored of money as I am, maybe then I could follow my dreams of activism, and I thank RMS for following his. I thank RMS for his contributions to our profession and to society, and for making arguments that cause me much grief when I think about them.
Re:Isn't everything in OS X late-binding?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2
It can't be Objective C's fault, and not even the NeXT/OPENSTEP roots -- after all, NeXTSTEP ran on 68k processors, with some of the same overhead that MacOS X has. It was still running BSD ontop of Mach, and it was displaying everything through Postscript (now PDF/Quartz).
I don't know what's changed so much -- in part the widgets have become much more complex, even if the renderer hasn't. It's not running on a four-color display, I suppose. There must be other things as well.
Objective C is a lot better for performance than Java anyway -- Java has late binding down to its core. I think you can have performance without losing flexibility if you allow a heterogeneous program -- any parts that are too slow in Objective C can be easily moved to plain C.
In a lot of places late binding also isn't that big of a performance problem. Good OO design will move a lot of logic that would normally be in if statements into the composition of the objects themselves.
I don't think the analogy is correct. Zip drives suck in large part because you can't exchange them -- they are only a useful exchange medium in a small number of circles.
CDs of course are hugely better -- you don't need a CD burner to read a burned CD, and you it opens you up to another medium and set of hardware (stereo components).
The same is true of DVD. If they served a purpose equivalent to a Zip drive, then they'd suck. But lots of computers are being sold with DVD readers at very reasonable prices, and there's a very large set of non-computer readers.
If you feel outraged about the conclusion to the Microsoft case, I would encourage you to direct that rage in the ballot box -- certainly not sufficient redress, but everyone here should be able to pay attention that long.
Here in Illinois a candidate for governor, Jim Ryan, agreed to the settlement. I wasn't planning to vote for him anyway, but I was reluctant to vote for his opponent as well -- I think this has changed my mind on that.
And of course this all happened because of the Executive's leadership in dealing with corporate crime -- the radical change in direction that the Justice Department took should be be clear to all. Bush isn't up for reelection, but his allies are. This is just one more instance where that party has shown itself an ally of corporate criminals.
Since they mentioned it -- what did Karl find in the records he had to try so hard to get? I was expecting some sort of smoking gun the way the rest of the board was fighting him. Or were they just being stubborn to get Karl to use his time and effort getting something of no great importance?
But Progeny is about as close to Debian as anything but Debian itself. They share founders, they share a commitment to free software, they shared a core operating system at one time... and I've never really heard anyone in Debian say anything bad about Progeny. I don't buy that at all.
I don't quite understand why they aren't using PGI. I browsed the PGI site some, and it looked like a solid, simple tool. It's not a complete installer from what I could tell, but an installer meant to take a system from blank to a very minimal install. With some work on debconf and aptitude (or one of the many other dselect replacements) it seems pretty complete -- all the pieces are there, they just need to be put together.
Sure, PGI doesn't support non-ext2, but from the documentation that didn't seem like a design issue, just an implementation issue.
There is some package (the name of which I can't find) that reports installed packages to judge popularity. It's not installed/enabled on most installations, of course.
Selling a program is not the same as using it. When you sell a program you are not a user, you are a distributor, and the GPL does have restrictions on distribution.
However, the GPL does not take away any rights, because in the absence of a license you have no right to distribute the software anyway. So the GPL only grants rights -- but does so with qualifications. The BitKeeper license places actual restrictions on using the software, which the GPL absolutely does not.
Seems the major problem open source developers are having with the BitKeeper license is that it places a certain requirement on them, just like the GPL.
THIS IS FALSE. The GPL does not restrict users in any way. The GPL has qualifications on the freedoms it grants -- you must fulfill certain requirements if you wish to distribute GPL code. But there are no restrictions on using GPL software. There is no EULA.
The BitKeeper license restricts use of BitKeeper. When Larry compared his restrictions to the GPL he was misrepresenting the GPL (not to mention trying to direct attention away from the real issues involved, which have nothing to do with the GPL).
Granted - Microsoft could be running on its own ethical code. Or perhapse it has adopted ethical codes that have lead other large corporations in to scandle. But in any case, it shouldn't come as much of a suprise if few around here buy in on the idea of Microsoft as "ethical" or "not evil".
If you think Microsoft is evil just because they are an obstruction to interoperability, then you seriously need to get some perspective. Microsoft didn't get anyone killed (Shell). Microsoft doesn't construct killing machines (Lockheed Martin). Microsoft doesn't have horrible working conditions (Nike). Microsoft doesn't even pollute (like countless companies). Microsoft doesn't price fix (ADM). Microsoft hasn't hidden information related to the danger of their product (tobacco companies). Microsoft hasn't destroyed public infrastructure (GM). Microsoft doesn't launder drug money (Banamex, now part of Citibank).
The only people MS has directly hurt are some other software companies. Indirectly, this has created an environment where consumers have less choice, and the choices are of less technical merit. I find that hard to consider "evil" -- evil is one end of the spectrum, and that spectrum goes so much further than that. Calling Microsoft evil would imply there's some equivalence in what they do and in murder. There isn't.
I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to accept your perspective as valid. It shows an ignorance of the real evils in the world and a tremendous selfishness to equate our inconveniences with real suffering.
People are always complaining about MS, but besides business practices it really is a very ethical company. It's a criminal company, but it's not evil, not even close.
And I've been quite impressed with what I've heard about the Gates Foundation. Not just because it's big and gives away lots of money, but it does things that seem constructive and oriented at real change. There's a lot of charities that are totally cheesy and popular with the rich. Charities that deal with Rich Problems, like breast cancer and park beautification. Or ones that just don't change anything, and just enable the social problems. A lot of tutoring and education programs unfortunately fall in this category. I'm sure the Gates Foundation gives to those too, but it gives to a lot of things that are meant to make a real difference.
You're thinking of the Reform Party. Buchanan destroyed the party in a deliberate and malicious manner, no doubt in concert with the Republican Party, where his true allegiances probably remain. The only viability it may have is in Minnesota, where Ventura split it off into the Independence Party, and though he's not running again I believe there is a viable candidate for governor this time around. The split was specifically because of Buchanan.
The Reform Party was never that right-wing. It wasn't much of anything except a platform for certain charismatic, non-party candidates. To the degree it was anything, it was pretty middle-of-the-road -- fiscally conservative (but not radical like Libertarians) and socially liberal (in a hands-off style).
I believe there are very few people fighting wars that want to be fighting wars. The real motivation is coming from the top, the orders of people who aren't involved in combat.
True indeed. It's notable in this light that both the president and vice president were draft dodgers. Well, Bush serving the the National Guard, a position he could only get through priviledge, apparently not even showing up for his duties. Cheney getting repeated deferrals to avoid the draft.
It's frightening, these people are who would lead us to war... I suspect in their hearts they take death of others lightly.
by the end of the Vietnam War pilots were [sic] refused en masse to run bombing missions over
North Vietnam
Surprising this assertion is. I've reviewed a fair number of the primary documents without coming across anything to support this observation. I'm aware of at least two US Navy fliers who got courtmartialed for not following orders whilst in the aeroplane; but their crime was deviation from course and an unauthorized weapons release, not a mission refusal. Can you recall which historian made this claim/when/where/to whom/citing what?
I'm afraid it was mentioned during a radio program, which leaves me only with impressions. They were talking about the book Catch 22, and someone noted that it wasn't really accurate because the Air Force has never forced a pilot or crew to fly a mission -- they always had the option to decline (so there wasn't any court marshals over this). Then I think another guest talked about Vietnam, and I recall him saying something like half the missions were being cancelled toward the end because no one would fly them -- maybe it was more, I can't remember. This was despite the fact that by that time there was no danger to flying those missions, as the North Vietnamese no longer had offensive air capabilities.
It doesn't seem at all surprising -- during WWII, I believe I've heard that when given the opportunity to fire at an enemy, only about one third of the time the soldier actually fire. I believe this was true on both sides in Europe, not sure about the Pacific (I think people would find it much easier to fire on someone of a different race). The military was very concerned about this. I believe they increased that number by the time Vietnam came around.
Those caught doing unethical or downright criminal acts are held accountable. Think Mi Lai or Nuremburg.
Funny you should mention My Lai. From this article:
The My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1968, US soldiers from the Americal Division slaughtered 347 civilians--primarily old men, women, children, and babies--in the Vietnamese village of My Lai 4 (pronounced, very appropriately, as "me lie"). The grunts also engaged in torture and rape of the villagers.
Around six months later, a soldier in the 11th Light Infantry Brigade--known among the men as "the Butcher's Brigade"--wrote a letter telling of widespread killing and torturing of Vietnamese civilians by entire units of the US military (he did not specifically refer to My Lai). The letter was sent to the general in charge of 'Nam and trickled down the chain of command to Major Colin Powell, a deputy assistant chief of staff at the Americal Division, who was charged with investigating the matter and formulating a response.
After a desultory check--which consisted mainly of investigating the soldier who wrote the letter, rather than his allegations--Powell reported that everything was hunkey-dory. There may be some "isolated incidents" by individual bad seeds, but there were no widespread atrocities. He wrote: "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." The matter was closed.
To this day, we might not know about the carnage at My Lai if it hadn't been for another solider who later wisely sent a letter to his Congressman.
(Twenty-five years later Powell gave an interview in which he not only failed to condemn the massacre but seemed to excuse it.)
Though some of my faith in humanity was restored when I heard a historian note that by the end of the Vietnam War pilots were refused en masse to run bombing missions over North Vietnam, having destroyed all plausible military targets. (The military is working hard to make sure something like that can't happen again, e.g., military drones)
What bothers me about the military is there is no accountability when it comes to its past. What happened to the people who ordered LSD testing on soldiers? What happened to the people who used chemical warfare in Vietnam (Agent Orange)? What about the person who wrote the manual to teach the Latin American soldiers to torture? What does it mean that someone who tried to cover up My Lai has become Secretary of State? I don't know what has become of all the past military criminals, but it doesn't seem like much -- and anyone who joins the military now doesn't really know what they are going to be asked to do, or what the ultimate intentions of the leaders are. But past performance gives a pretty damn good idea.
And what you do in the military isn't about stupid shit like illegal monopolies. You can do wrong on a scale not normally possible in our everyday lives. Let's be honest: you can do evil. And you might not even realize it... when you flip the switch that drops the bomb, do you know if your cause is really just? Do you know who you are killing? Are you ready to kill a child? Are you ready to kill a mother? Because the military is killing a lot of children and mothers these days, and if the bombs start falling on Baghdad, the number of innocent dead is going to skyrocket, no one can deny it. Are you ready to be part of that killing machine?
It's one thing to bet your own life on a cause, but the military gave up that a while ago -- American soldiers die in accidents, not battle. Now they're betting other people's lives on it. The moral weight of killing is far heavier than the moral weight of dying. I'm not a Christian man, but I have great respect for the teachings of Jesus -- I think we all know on which side of the bomb he'd be on when it falls from the plane, and I think we'd all know which person would receive his blessings.
You take orders regardless of whether they come from a sergeant or your shift manager at the Taco Bell. Live with it.
If your shift manager tells you to do something against your judgement or your ethics, you can always quit. You can't quit the army, and you can't refuse to do what they tell you. The worst things done by humans have always been done under orders.
Personally, I believe I am responsible for what I do, regardless of who tells me to do it. When you volunteer yourself into a coercive situation, you have handed your soul over to another's judgement. Maybe you think the people you take orders from are going to be good caretakers of your will and your soul, but that's one hell of a risk. Do you really know them that well? Do you even know who the hell they are? It's a long chain of command, and in any situation it's hard to know where it ends... do they even tell you where the command comes from? Do they ever tell you why? Are you willing to live blind?
When you spend your time playing games and doing busywork this doesn't much matter. I wouldn't bet on irrelevence anymore, though.
In this case, the bloat is being able to arrange windows in ways that aren't functional. Specifically, I don't find partially overlapping windows useful -- either I want to see the whole window, or I don't want to see any of it. Tiling and tabs are useful -- but the full flexibility of pixel-level free movement of windows isn't useful (and that flexibility makes manual tiling more difficult).
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Ultimately, it has been complete peaceful -- which is not odd, since absolutely no one had suggested any violence whatsoever. The only question was whether the CPD was going to instigate violence, but then with all the publicity they set up there were cameras everywhere. Not that most media won't bend over backwards to avoid showing police violence. But they were actually interupting programming to cover the protest, and the number of police were roughly equal to the number of protesters.
Anyway, it was hard for me to understand why the police and city government would do such a thing. The protest was looking to be pretty minor and not well organized -- the CPD practically saved it. Of course, they did it through fear-mongering (but there's no such thing as bad publicity, yada yada -- some will argue with that, of course).
But I've noticed, especially reading comments here and elsewhere, that a large portion of people have fallen under the sway of these reports. They believe that the protesters are violent thugs, even though by far most violence is caused by police. They believe these protesters are like locusts, who come into their cities and disrupt and destroy before moving on.
I suspect that the government is trying to sway people into thinking that empassioned political speach is inherently violent and should be made illegal. If this law does okay in Australia, I would not be surprised if it came up in the US -- probably under the guise of being anti-terrorist.
There certainly have been terrorists in Afghanistan, and still are active ones in Pakistan, but it's not clear what the connection is to 9-11.
And in the case of Iraq, most of the evidence has been straight out lies -- but they keep putting them out there trying to find one that's not demonstrably false. It makes everything look pretty suspicious.
And there's still some very big missing evidence. Remember about the futures trading? Absolutely nothing has come of that, and it doesn't even seem like anyone is looking. I'm suspicious that evidence wouldn't be consistent with their other claims.
The US government is actually very consistent -- we consistently create our own enemies, we consistently support evil people, and there is consistency that there is no reprucusion for the people who make these mistakes.
It might be okay to say that the government and military are no longer going to make the same mistakes they did before -- except that there's no reason to believe anything has changed. Many of the same people are influential, no one was punished for anything... how many times does the government have to do the wrong thing before we stop trusting it?
And if you haven't noticed, no evidence has been presented about who the terrorists really are. No evidence about Iraq, only very vague evidence about bin Laden... now we're bringing Columbian rebels into it, and who knows what else. We're all seem to be willing to believe whatever they say, and when they say some group is terrorist we seem ready to let them do anything at all, no matter how unprincipled it is. It's ignorant, insane, and dangerous.
I have often defended Stallman not because he needs it, but because he is one of the most sincere people I can think of. In this cynical society it is very hard to be sincere, and it always opens you up to criticism. But I hate cynicism, and I strive to be more sincere myself. I defend him because that sincerity is something I aspire to.
I don't like the term "geek" -- somewhere along the line it lost its meaning, because too many idiots took that term for themselves as though it was something cool. It cannot ever be cool to be a geek -- they are opposites. A real geek -- not just a socially awkward person -- has a passion that is not diluted for social ends. I am offended when that passion is ridiculed. And usually that ridicule comes from people who are mediocre and self-centered. But I respond because coolness can be infectious -- or at least the aspiration of cool. I hope only that someone will see how empty that path is.
But sadly, my impression of what the Hurd has shown, is that just because something is userspace doesn't mean its easy to debug. It seems like code accessibility -- even for original developers -- has not been very good. I think it's in the same way that threaded programming is much harder to debug... a complex set of interworking services is even worse.
And while microkernels allow a certain level of modularity, it really should be possible to achieve a great deal of modularity in a monolithic kernel as well -- just not in as safe a manner. I don't know that safety is the difficult part of Linux development. Well... I'm not entirely clear on what is the difficult part, I've never tried to program on the kernel. Probably an issue of factoring -- when refactoring needs to occur across module boundries (for whatever reason) it requires different developers to communicate and agree on things (which is where the overload is occuring). But that same problem will exist in a microkernel -- only the refactoring will be occuring between processes. That's not a big difference.
Maybe with enough thoughtfulness you can refactor everything in the Right Way, so that interfaces are entirely stable and development can occur without as much interdependence. That's not impossible -- there's a lot of experience from Linux and elsewhere to learn from. But I don't think that is related to monolithic or microkernel design.
I don't know what's changed so much -- in part the widgets have become much more complex, even if the renderer hasn't. It's not running on a four-color display, I suppose. There must be other things as well.
Objective C is a lot better for performance than Java anyway -- Java has late binding down to its core. I think you can have performance without losing flexibility if you allow a heterogeneous program -- any parts that are too slow in Objective C can be easily moved to plain C.
In a lot of places late binding also isn't that big of a performance problem. Good OO design will move a lot of logic that would normally be in if statements into the composition of the objects themselves.
CDs of course are hugely better -- you don't need a CD burner to read a burned CD, and you it opens you up to another medium and set of hardware (stereo components).
The same is true of DVD. If they served a purpose equivalent to a Zip drive, then they'd suck. But lots of computers are being sold with DVD readers at very reasonable prices, and there's a very large set of non-computer readers.
Here in Illinois a candidate for governor, Jim Ryan, agreed to the settlement. I wasn't planning to vote for him anyway, but I was reluctant to vote for his opponent as well -- I think this has changed my mind on that.
And of course this all happened because of the Executive's leadership in dealing with corporate crime -- the radical change in direction that the Justice Department took should be be clear to all. Bush isn't up for reelection, but his allies are. This is just one more instance where that party has shown itself an ally of corporate criminals.
Since they mentioned it -- what did Karl find in the records he had to try so hard to get? I was expecting some sort of smoking gun the way the rest of the board was fighting him. Or were they just being stubborn to get Karl to use his time and effort getting something of no great importance?
But Progeny is about as close to Debian as anything but Debian itself. They share founders, they share a commitment to free software, they shared a core operating system at one time... and I've never really heard anyone in Debian say anything bad about Progeny. I don't buy that at all.
Sure, PGI doesn't support non-ext2, but from the documentation that didn't seem like a design issue, just an implementation issue.
There is some package (the name of which I can't find) that reports installed packages to judge popularity. It's not installed/enabled on most installations, of course.
However, the GPL does not take away any rights, because in the absence of a license you have no right to distribute the software anyway. So the GPL only grants rights -- but does so with qualifications. The BitKeeper license places actual restrictions on using the software, which the GPL absolutely does not.
The BitKeeper license restricts use of BitKeeper. When Larry compared his restrictions to the GPL he was misrepresenting the GPL (not to mention trying to direct attention away from the real issues involved, which have nothing to do with the GPL).
The only people MS has directly hurt are some other software companies. Indirectly, this has created an environment where consumers have less choice, and the choices are of less technical merit. I find that hard to consider "evil" -- evil is one end of the spectrum, and that spectrum goes so much further than that. Calling Microsoft evil would imply there's some equivalence in what they do and in murder. There isn't.
I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to accept your perspective as valid. It shows an ignorance of the real evils in the world and a tremendous selfishness to equate our inconveniences with real suffering.
And I've been quite impressed with what I've heard about the Gates Foundation. Not just because it's big and gives away lots of money, but it does things that seem constructive and oriented at real change. There's a lot of charities that are totally cheesy and popular with the rich. Charities that deal with Rich Problems, like breast cancer and park beautification. Or ones that just don't change anything, and just enable the social problems. A lot of tutoring and education programs unfortunately fall in this category. I'm sure the Gates Foundation gives to those too, but it gives to a lot of things that are meant to make a real difference.
The Reform Party was never that right-wing. It wasn't much of anything except a platform for certain charismatic, non-party candidates. To the degree it was anything, it was pretty middle-of-the-road -- fiscally conservative (but not radical like Libertarians) and socially liberal (in a hands-off style).
It's frightening, these people are who would lead us to war... I suspect in their hearts they take death of others lightly.
It doesn't seem at all surprising -- during WWII, I believe I've heard that when given the opportunity to fire at an enemy, only about one third of the time the soldier actually fire. I believe this was true on both sides in Europe, not sure about the Pacific (I think people would find it much easier to fire on someone of a different race). The military was very concerned about this. I believe they increased that number by the time Vietnam came around.
What bothers me about the military is there is no accountability when it comes to its past. What happened to the people who ordered LSD testing on soldiers? What happened to the people who used chemical warfare in Vietnam (Agent Orange)? What about the person who wrote the manual to teach the Latin American soldiers to torture? What does it mean that someone who tried to cover up My Lai has become Secretary of State? I don't know what has become of all the past military criminals, but it doesn't seem like much -- and anyone who joins the military now doesn't really know what they are going to be asked to do, or what the ultimate intentions of the leaders are. But past performance gives a pretty damn good idea.
And what you do in the military isn't about stupid shit like illegal monopolies. You can do wrong on a scale not normally possible in our everyday lives. Let's be honest: you can do evil. And you might not even realize it... when you flip the switch that drops the bomb, do you know if your cause is really just? Do you know who you are killing? Are you ready to kill a child? Are you ready to kill a mother? Because the military is killing a lot of children and mothers these days, and if the bombs start falling on Baghdad, the number of innocent dead is going to skyrocket, no one can deny it. Are you ready to be part of that killing machine?
It's one thing to bet your own life on a cause, but the military gave up that a while ago -- American soldiers die in accidents, not battle. Now they're betting other people's lives on it. The moral weight of killing is far heavier than the moral weight of dying. I'm not a Christian man, but I have great respect for the teachings of Jesus -- I think we all know on which side of the bomb he'd be on when it falls from the plane, and I think we'd all know which person would receive his blessings.
Personally, I believe I am responsible for what I do, regardless of who tells me to do it. When you volunteer yourself into a coercive situation, you have handed your soul over to another's judgement. Maybe you think the people you take orders from are going to be good caretakers of your will and your soul, but that's one hell of a risk. Do you really know them that well? Do you even know who the hell they are? It's a long chain of command, and in any situation it's hard to know where it ends... do they even tell you where the command comes from? Do they ever tell you why? Are you willing to live blind?
When you spend your time playing games and doing busywork this doesn't much matter. I wouldn't bet on irrelevence anymore, though.
In this case, the bloat is being able to arrange windows in ways that aren't functional. Specifically, I don't find partially overlapping windows useful -- either I want to see the whole window, or I don't want to see any of it. Tiling and tabs are useful -- but the full flexibility of pixel-level free movement of windows isn't useful (and that flexibility makes manual tiling more difficult).