I really like Logo too. It teaches programming, but it also is very much about teaching mathematics, geometry, pre-algebra, and algorithmic thinking in general. Thus Logo can satisfy both the people who want academics (math), and people who want vocational aspects (programming).
Some scattered thoughts:
You can use MSW Logo for free (GPL even). It's hardly the best interface or anything, but it will do. MicroWorlds is a very popular commercial Logo environment. If you have the budget, you might use it. HyperStudio, which they probably already have, has a Logo inside it too. But don't use that, as it's a really lame environment, not to mention a crappy implementation.
I would also like to reemphasize that you should do things in a hands-on manner. Start out right on the computer, and try to keep them working with the computer as much as possible. Try very hard to get a one-to-one computer-to-student ratio, even if it means kids get less total time on the computers. Of course this doesn't mean you should force the kids to stay at their computer -- if you are doing something fun, the kids will want badly to show each other what they are doing. If they don't want to show each other, you are doing the wrong project.
Against my previous advice, you should do physical practice with Logo turtle commands -- i.e., have the kids order each other or you around using Logo commands. Like, have the kids navigate you around the room by using just left, right, forward, and back commands. This amuses them, because they can make you bump into tables and walk out the door. It is useful, because they'll have an easier time imagining themselves in your place than they will have imagining themselves in the turtles place.
Of course, if you have access to Lego Logo stuff (which is expensive), use it. You'll probably enjoy that as much as the kids.
Don't start out too quickly -- just have them draw pictures at first. Kids are surprisingly easy to amuse this way. If you have enough time, kids might be able to make games too, but very possibly not:-( MicroWorlds would make game-making much easier.
Oh, and if you have older kids, Star Logo is a neat environment for experimenting with massively parrallel computation. And if you feel a bit more adventurous and have Macs available, maybe try Boxer, a somewhat more visual programming language with the same goals as Logo.
The free market system is based on the trust of people in general, the concept that most people are
basically decent human beings and are capable of solving problems.
This is why I don't like corporations either. Drawing the line that governments and planned economies are bad, but corporations aren't -- I don't think that's fair. Governments at least try to have some accountability, some representation. Sometimes it works. Planned economies are reasonable if they really do derive from the willful consent of their members. Sometimes that works too. And limited liability can be helpful to encourage progress by limiting risk. Sometimes that works too.
But what I really don't like is when people are divorced from the results of their actions. Corporations do that this people. The US foreign policy reflects this abstraction. Militaries cultivate such automation every way possible. Those are the enemies of freedom.
What are you talking about? When you were young and wanted all the toys for yourself, did your mother reward you? Or maybe she took the toys from you to keep for herself -- teaching by example.
God, I hope not. But if not, when did you learn that being selfish was okay? Capitalist rhetoric has made people forget the most basic moral lessons. Well, not really -- most people still act decently in their private lives. But somehow people change the standard when they move into public life.
I'm an atheist, but this is the sort of thing that makes me want to preach religion. In a society where the strongest voices speak for materialism and selfishness, religion seems to be the one place where basic moral standards are applied to the public sphere.
Making things people want is fine. Hell, it's good. But being selfish is not good.
You have a moral imperative to be thoughtful and conscious of the effects of your actions. You have a moral imperative to help others and make your world a better place. I don't say this because I have a direct line from God telling me this -- I say it because this is how people have lived their lives and continue to live their lives, everywhere. You will live up to your moral imperative if you let yourself, and if the world doesn't hold you down.
(and making you unaware of the effect of your actions holds you down)
So I'll say it once again: selfishness is not okay.
The Republican and Democrat divide is just a game, a distraction. I really can't understand why everyone in government gets labelled as a Democrat or Republican -- as though there is some intrinsic nature to it all. There aren't Democratic lawyers -- just lawyers who have aligned themselves with the Democrats. Ditto Republicans. Ditto administrators.
When I think Right Wing, there's really two things -- the social conservatives and the economically, well, political right. For no compelling reason, these two groups have aligned themselves with each other.
The media most certainly is not socially conservative. It is indeed quite liberal. It is very economically right wing and pro-establishment. Sure, there's all sorts of petty crap they bring up... stupid scandals and what-not. The real, and often sinister, workings of the government, corporations, and in general the powers that be, are not covered by the media.
My God -- Echelon should be the news story of the year. The media has finally started mentioning it, but somehow they manage to make a global, ubiquitous spy network into a minor sound bite to be forgotten.
The deliberate lying leading up to the bombing of Kosovo should have been reported on -- maybe the media can get off on just being ignorant leading up to the bombing (even though the lies were obvious), but everything has come out. The US lead UN fact-finding mission lied, all the atrocities happened after the bombing started -- that is a moral travesty, but the media just forgets it ever happened.
The media likes to talk about some of these big legal suits -- like the ten million dollar cup of McDonald's coffee. But they never mention that the plaintiffs never see that much money because judges consistently reduce those winnings.
And where were the muck-rakers in the election? Bush was a draft dodger, why didn't anyone mention that? Because the people didn't care? Unlikely. I'm not claiming the media is Republican, I don't like Al Gore, but Bush is the ultimate figurehead of corporatism and elitism, and the media let him get away with murder.
The political spectrum is far wider and richer than the petty conflicts the media covers.
What if, I really wanted to make the world worse off? What if I wanted to impede progress and keep
the 3rd world eternally impoverished? Y'know... me and a couple thousand of my buddies could block
trade talks that could otherwise raise the standard of living worldwide.
Do you honestly believe those protesters have any malicious intent? Do you honestly think they aren't following their conscience?
I disagree with fundamentalists on a lot of things, but I do respect them for doing what they really think is right. I just wish they would pay more attention to Jesus than Paul... but that's not the issue here. This isn't right vs. left. It's moral vs. amoral. I'm not willing to leave the world in the hands of anything as abstract as the free market or capitalism. I trust people, not institutions.
Your entire post about conservative thought could be summarized, as "this stuff is boring so we will
not read it."
Exciting and insightful is NOT the same thing.
Not just boring, but the conservative ideas aren't novel. They don't add anything interesting to the discussion. They aren't compelling. And they are boring to top it all off. IMHO that's why mainstream press becomes more inane and trivial -- the strong conservative bend to the news means no news (typically) or boring news, and they fill in the increasingly large gaps with fluff.
Again, if you have some material to show me wrong, post it. Right here, right now, you don't need an editor to approve it. I still probably won't agree with you, but I promise you I'll read it, and if nothing else at least I'll see where you are coming from.
The persuit of wealth is NOT evil. Being a bad person is evil. Do not confuse the two.
All that is necessary for evil to succede is for good men to do nothing. Corporations tie up a lot of people in doing nothing.
The problem with the view that just making lots of money is okay, is that it isn't okay. We each have a duty to help make the world a better place. Fuck the libertarians, being selfish is not okay.
In 1999, they employed a combined total of
22,682,166 workers, which is 0.78% of the world's workforce.
Great, we are getting better productivity than ever.
Umm... that's not the point at all. The point is that not only is the control of the economy in the hands of small elite, but even the benefits these corporations give to their employees only goes to a tiny portion of the population. The point is that these corporations are huge and powerful, and yet only represent the interests of an elite few. IMHO (and not necessarily the authors of the paper) this isn't a "damn them for succeding", but a "oh my God, what sort of monsters have we created?"
Is this me or seems like Slashdot seems to be completely dominated by leftists and liberals. When was a
last time you saw any story presented from conservative point of view?
Well, Slashdot has always had an anti-establishment perspective. This is very representative of its readership.
There is almost no interesting conservative anti-establishment material to report on. Perhaps militia groups had some -- but they would agree with this report, and they actually share a lot of ideals and beliefs with leftists.
And even if we didn't limit ourself to anti-establishment material, there is little of interest from the conservative perspective at all. That's the pathetic thing to it... I mean, who's a better read, Sartre or Rand? Dostoevsky or... damn... I ran out of conservative authors after Rand. I suppose fundamentalists and Neo-Nazis have, well, at least novel things to say, but I doubt those are the conservatives you were thinking of. Did you want more articles on how we really need mroe study on this whole "Global Warming" thing? Articles that talk about how dumb those protesters are? That's about sums up the argument against protesters these days -- not, mind you, any material backing up the general proposition that they are a bunch of naive idiots, that would be pandering to them. At least that's how it seems, reading the Conservative Response.
Do you have new statistics to show everything is hunky-dory and we should leave things as they are? Exciting. Or an editorial on how the government is stealing our money? How insightful. I haven't heard that idea anywhere. Maybe how technology is helping catch Bad Guys? I love the term "bad guys"... certainly the sign of a media that wants to keep us thinking deeply on the issues.
I mean, if you want to hear conservative points of view intermingled with fluff, go watch TV news. Read CNN. Whatever. Don't ask to bring that drivel here. If you have a good source of insightful conservative news and opinion stories, post it. I'll give it a gander, and maybe some people more sympathetic to that perspective will read it instead of/.
This issue, maximizing profits to run up stock prices,
is only true for publically traded companies, a SMALL portion of corporations.
Most (all?) of the top 200 corporations are publically traded. If anyone knows of a non-public corporation on that list, please respond. These top 200 are obviously very important. As noted, they account for 27.5% of the total sales in the world. There's a lot of non-publically traded businesses, but that doesn't change the fact that big, publically-traded, profit-oriented institutions exist and are able to exert far more focused power than the small businesses.
And while shareholders could vote for something that does not imply greatest profit, it is nearly absurd to think that the institutional investor would do such a thing, and they account for significant amount of stock ownership.
What I don't get is why anyone buys CDs from a retail store. At CD Connection CDs seem to average about $12-14 a CD, and you can find almost any CD you might want -- this probably applies to most online music retailers.
Unlike many products, the only advantage you gain from buying CDs at a store is instant gratification. Looking at the cover doesn't tell you anythhing, and you can't usually listen to the CDs in the store anyway.
CDs should still be cheaper, but people complaining about $20 CDs are just being stupid in their shopping. Music is a commodity item, and retail stores are entirely superfluous middle-men that you should cut out.
The other aspect is that at a retail store you are subject to the marketing influence of the retailers and the labels. Your subjective opinion of what's Good Music probably doesn't match with what they want you to buy. By buying music online you won't ever not buy a CD simply because it's not popular enough to get on the shelves. Actually finding a non-mainstream band that you like is still a struggle, but then some people get off on that.
Not only is his vision potentially scary, I don't believe it is at all possible.
People respond to the world they are placed in. If you actually act on the statistical knowledge you gain, you will have changed the environment significantly and the information you used will no longer apply to the new world you created. Bigger better computers and more powerful algorithms can't change that fundamental fact. Of course, removing people's ability to act in the conscious knowledge of their surroundings could make his vision possible. That's quintessential Orwellian nightmare material.
Humans are just very hard to predict. Even if a child may not be aware of the criteria for being selected as a troublemaker, and may not know what the consequences of that are, the environment will still reflect that interference. Certain members of the population will be removed for remediation, and the adults will be well aware of both criteria and consequences. Children will respond, and what was supposed to be remediation will simply become punishment for a new set of very subtle and always changing crimes.
There's lots that can be done to help people. If we were all doing what we could, right now, without predictive technology, we could make a lot of difference, I don't see how Martin thinks technology will change indifference that much. We can't make statistical models to automate the process of doing good. It won't work. At best it is stupid. At best.
I'm even suspicious of the mantra of early detection -- the idea that anything, if caught early enough, can be fixed easily. Kids don't just "go down the wrong path", implying that somehow if you "get them on track" they will be okay. People become who they are in a constant process of self-invention, they aren't astroids floating through space that can be nudged into different trajectories if only we use great forethought.
he's [RMS] also not that great of
a programmer (ever looked at the emacs code? bloat bloat bloat)
Why are people always dissing RMS's coding? First, Emacs is far more than most critics realize it is. Yeah, it's big, but it does everything you could want and much more. There aren't that many large programs still being so actively used and developed after so many years. Sure, there's legacy systems much older, but Emacs is by no means a legacy system.
Anyway, RMS wrote more than Emacs. He was the first author of gcc, which even the BSD folks somehow manage to use despite the license. He wrote ls for GNU's fileutils, for instance. His name is also on a lot of other little programs that he wrote out of idealistic dedication, not because they were interesting.
If you don't notice active development from him, it's probably because he hasn't written much in a number of years due to RSI, from my understanding.
And anyway, who looks at code and thinks "bloat"? You look at programs and think "bloat", which is probably all you've looked at in Emacs... if you look a bloated program's code you think "cruft". Get your terms straight!
Fine. Don't restrict. And if I license code under the GPL, I'm saying: if you want to restrict someone, you can't use my code in the process. That's all the GPL says. That isn't a restriction to anyone who isn't trying to restrict someone else. By licensing it that way you are serving the goals of freedom, by depriving benefit to those who oppose it.
And your freedom to swing your fist isn't defined as illegal because it restricts. It doesn't restrict. It hurts. Taking someone's lunch money doesn't restrict either. It deprives. These things aren't as simple as you seem to want them to be. Libertarian, no doubt.
To them, freedom *requires* restriction, which is the whole
point of the GPL.
Well, RMS calls the GPL Pragmatic Idealism. Read the article for more in his words.
Your concept of freedom is a rather empty one. Freedom in a societal sense means the restriction of individuals' ability to restrict others.
A free society restricts individuals' ability to hold slaves, for instance. In fact, one step further -- we restricts anyone from even voluntarily making themselves the slave of another! And that is not trivial -- voluntary slavery is historically rather common. So why won't we let people do it? It's their life to give away, isn't it?
Well, you can figure that out for yourself. But don't mistake your naive notion of freedom with a real freedom for a society. And RMS believes too strongly to create a fragile and disempowered freedom -- let BSDers do that.
he [RMS] would lose solely on the basis that normal people would get freaked
out at the intensity and seriousness of his thoughts and actions.
You are probably right, but it's a shame. People can't deal with someone who actually believes what he is saying, and who believes it with complete sincerity and without apology or compromise. It embarrasses them.
People know how to deal with spin and commercial bull. The educated among them know how to deal with intellectualism and the abstract arguments that go with. But someone who really believes something -- that's rather unusual, and people don't know how to deal with it at all.
The audience will empathize to a degree, as they would for anyone they listened to. It's like trying the idea on for size. But they will feel nervous, because believing something just because of the rightness of it is something that makes you vulnerable. If you are just pragmatic, then you can change your mind and admit no real defeat. Pragmatism is very palatable. Open Source is a pragmatic approach. But to say something is right implies something else is wrong. That actually means something. That has implications. That might lead somewhere you don't expect. It doesn't fit with the postmodernism so many of us have internalized.
It makes them uncomfortable. It is completely uncool. Entirely unmodern. People will dismiss him as a fanatic, which is just the word for anyone considerably less cynical than you are. It's too bad, really.
His [RMS's] persuasiveness should be judged not on how he gets his sycophants
in a frenzy, but on how he persuades people outside his core. He simply has not done this at all.
Gates on the other hand, as much as I dislike the man, has persuaded many people from different
backgrounds in the course of his business.
How so? I mean, Gates has been very successful in business, but that doesn't imply persuasion particularly. I suppose Gates "persuaded" people to use Windows. Just like RMS persuaded people to write Free Software. But in both cases most people couldn't attribute their decision directly to that person.
Gates has had the opportunity to be a highly influential and important figure of real persuasion, but hasn't done anything interesting with it. He's written a couple books, but they weren't particularly insightful, and certainly not influential. Lots of people read the books, sure, but that only makes his lack of success more apparent -- people have read him, and they still don't care. Few people say that about RMS writings, whether they agree or not.
Gates has had a bully pulpit because he is the single most rich person in the world. He can get top billing in just about any medium he wants -- TV, radio, newspapers, even/. -- but that isn't due to his persuasiveness. Just his wealth and influence.
Trying to impose a "death penalty" on
something that is no more than words on a piece of paper is just plain silly.
It's not at all silly. A death penalty for a piece of paper is simple: burn the paper. And, along with that, destroy any legal implications that paper gave. That's what this is all about. When you are taking away the corporate charter you are simply taking away the special rights that were given to that piece of paper and the imaginary entity it implied. You are taking away the pretend entity that could go to court, win and lose cases, pay taxes, have gains and losses, etc. Nothing else has been destroyed.
How do you fight the imaginary monster that's underneith the bed? Easy, stop believing in it. That's how you kill a corporation too.
I think there is an important point here -- how would you even charge a corporation? Every bad action would only be traceable back to the individuals who made up the corporation. Even if it means they hired bad individuals, and told them to do bad things, someone chose that hiring and told people what to do.
So how do you give due process to the elimination of a corporation? I believe in due process, as much as corporations tend to manipulate it, and I wouldn't want to give it up.
Another possibility is that you simply make it much easier to charge the individuals in a corporation for their actions. But this has a lot to do with a lack of will on the part of the government, and unfortunately that's very hard to change. There seems like a lot of places where there have been large corporate conspiracies -- and there are specific laws about conspiring across state lines and what-not. But they only get used against organized crime, not organized corporate crime. I blame that on the prosecutors (and of course their bosses). More laws won't get the current laws enforced.
One way to help would be to eliminate much of corporation's right to privacy. I believe this would be quite reasonable, and if it was a true public disclosure then third-parties could raise objections and civil suits against the corporations and individuals when the government (predictably) ignores abuses. And if you want to keep privacy, fine, you just don't get limited liability.
I'm not sure how that would effect trade secrets -- not something I'm particularly happy with anyway, but without secrets it's not easy to gain advantage from novelty, and novelty (i.e., invention) is good.
Still, there's a good comprimise in there somewhere.
Oh, c'mon -- Microsoft, no matter how guilty, is by no means worthy of receiving a death penalty. They cheated and the played the game dirty. But they were still playing the game. Their real, direct actions were not particularly offensive. They did not have people assassinated (Shell). They did not defraud the public, causing death (big tobacco). They did not cause extreme environmental damage (Exxon). There's no big international conspiracies. There is no direct ill-will toward the public. The corporate structure -- while highly competetive and extremely aggressive -- never acted to endanger or seriously defraud the public, besides FUD, which isn't that bad.
I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but really, we need a little more perspective. There's real evil being done in the world -- but it ain't coming from the world of computer operating systems.
There's also a possible:
4) Pay Avery Lee to license his work to SloMedia (assuming he holds sole copyright).
It's pretty common that Free Software programmers write proprietary code for a living. And many of them would be willing to provide non-GPL licenses for money. I believe this has been a major source of revenue for Cygnus (don't know what it is now that Redhat owns them). And it's only fair.
Another important non-technical interpretation of this is intention. It seems quite clear that SloMedia turned the software into a DLL with the intention of circumventing the GPL. I think this will be more important than the spirit of the GPL, because spirit is vague and open to much debate, and no one at SloMedia was obliged to read RMS's writings to understand what he was trying to do with the GPL. But it is possible to pretty much prove what SloMedia's intention was (and hopefully the FSF will be able to do that).
Something basic like Qt or GTK is likely enough to be
on the computer already that you don't need to distribute it with your binaries, so binaries that link
against it are not considered to be derived works.
This isn't the case. GTK is LGPL, so it doesn't matter. Qt most definately is not LGPL -- of you are writing a proprietary program, you cannot link it against Qt without purchasing a seperate license. This is irregardless of the ubiquity of the Qt libraries.
Is it hard to make new widgets in Tk (compared to Motif/Qt/GTK)? Or hard to distribute? Or is it just that the maintainers of Tk dropped the ball when it came to incorporating all the good widgets they should have?
I mean, at some point GTK had less widgets than Tk did. So there must be some reason GTK got ahead.
You are the first person I've seen mention Tcl/Tk in this discussion. What's up with that? It's been around for a long time, before Qt or GTK. It's portable. It has a fine license. So why didn't it become the defacto free widget library? Tcl seems to have encumbered it, but despite that many language bindings exist. I don't know if it has the best set of widgets, but I'm sure that could have been fixed. So what's so bad about Tk?
Slashdot Mirror
Some scattered thoughts:
But what I really don't like is when people are divorced from the results of their actions. Corporations do that this people. The US foreign policy reflects this abstraction. Militaries cultivate such automation every way possible. Those are the enemies of freedom.
God, I hope not. But if not, when did you learn that being selfish was okay? Capitalist rhetoric has made people forget the most basic moral lessons. Well, not really -- most people still act decently in their private lives. But somehow people change the standard when they move into public life.
I'm an atheist, but this is the sort of thing that makes me want to preach religion. In a society where the strongest voices speak for materialism and selfishness, religion seems to be the one place where basic moral standards are applied to the public sphere.
Making things people want is fine. Hell, it's good. But being selfish is not good.
You have a moral imperative to be thoughtful and conscious of the effects of your actions. You have a moral imperative to help others and make your world a better place. I don't say this because I have a direct line from God telling me this -- I say it because this is how people have lived their lives and continue to live their lives, everywhere. You will live up to your moral imperative if you let yourself, and if the world doesn't hold you down.
(and making you unaware of the effect of your actions holds you down)
So I'll say it once again: selfishness is not okay.
When I think Right Wing, there's really two things -- the social conservatives and the economically, well, political right. For no compelling reason, these two groups have aligned themselves with each other.
The media most certainly is not socially conservative. It is indeed quite liberal. It is very economically right wing and pro-establishment. Sure, there's all sorts of petty crap they bring up... stupid scandals and what-not. The real, and often sinister, workings of the government, corporations, and in general the powers that be, are not covered by the media.
My God -- Echelon should be the news story of the year. The media has finally started mentioning it, but somehow they manage to make a global, ubiquitous spy network into a minor sound bite to be forgotten.
The deliberate lying leading up to the bombing of Kosovo should have been reported on -- maybe the media can get off on just being ignorant leading up to the bombing (even though the lies were obvious), but everything has come out. The US lead UN fact-finding mission lied, all the atrocities happened after the bombing started -- that is a moral travesty, but the media just forgets it ever happened.
The media likes to talk about some of these big legal suits -- like the ten million dollar cup of McDonald's coffee. But they never mention that the plaintiffs never see that much money because judges consistently reduce those winnings.
And where were the muck-rakers in the election? Bush was a draft dodger, why didn't anyone mention that? Because the people didn't care? Unlikely. I'm not claiming the media is Republican, I don't like Al Gore, but Bush is the ultimate figurehead of corporatism and elitism, and the media let him get away with murder.
The political spectrum is far wider and richer than the petty conflicts the media covers.
I disagree with fundamentalists on a lot of things, but I do respect them for doing what they really think is right. I just wish they would pay more attention to Jesus than Paul... but that's not the issue here. This isn't right vs. left. It's moral vs. amoral. I'm not willing to leave the world in the hands of anything as abstract as the free market or capitalism. I trust people, not institutions.
Again, if you have some material to show me wrong, post it. Right here, right now, you don't need an editor to approve it. I still probably won't agree with you, but I promise you I'll read it, and if nothing else at least I'll see where you are coming from.
The problem with the view that just making lots of money is okay, is that it isn't okay. We each have a duty to help make the world a better place. Fuck the libertarians, being selfish is not okay.
There is almost no interesting conservative anti-establishment material to report on. Perhaps militia groups had some -- but they would agree with this report, and they actually share a lot of ideals and beliefs with leftists.
And even if we didn't limit ourself to anti-establishment material, there is little of interest from the conservative perspective at all. That's the pathetic thing to it... I mean, who's a better read, Sartre or Rand? Dostoevsky or... damn... I ran out of conservative authors after Rand. I suppose fundamentalists and Neo-Nazis have, well, at least novel things to say, but I doubt those are the conservatives you were thinking of. Did you want more articles on how we really need mroe study on this whole "Global Warming" thing? Articles that talk about how dumb those protesters are? That's about sums up the argument against protesters these days -- not, mind you, any material backing up the general proposition that they are a bunch of naive idiots, that would be pandering to them. At least that's how it seems, reading the Conservative Response.
Do you have new statistics to show everything is hunky-dory and we should leave things as they are? Exciting. Or an editorial on how the government is stealing our money? How insightful. I haven't heard that idea anywhere. Maybe how technology is helping catch Bad Guys? I love the term "bad guys"... certainly the sign of a media that wants to keep us thinking deeply on the issues.
I mean, if you want to hear conservative points of view intermingled with fluff, go watch TV news. Read CNN. Whatever. Don't ask to bring that drivel here. If you have a good source of insightful conservative news and opinion stories, post it. I'll give it a gander, and maybe some people more sympathetic to that perspective will read it instead of /.
And while shareholders could vote for something that does not imply greatest profit, it is nearly absurd to think that the institutional investor would do such a thing, and they account for significant amount of stock ownership.
Unlike many products, the only advantage you gain from buying CDs at a store is instant gratification. Looking at the cover doesn't tell you anythhing, and you can't usually listen to the CDs in the store anyway.
CDs should still be cheaper, but people complaining about $20 CDs are just being stupid in their shopping. Music is a commodity item, and retail stores are entirely superfluous middle-men that you should cut out.
The other aspect is that at a retail store you are subject to the marketing influence of the retailers and the labels. Your subjective opinion of what's Good Music probably doesn't match with what they want you to buy. By buying music online you won't ever not buy a CD simply because it's not popular enough to get on the shelves. Actually finding a non-mainstream band that you like is still a struggle, but then some people get off on that.
People respond to the world they are placed in. If you actually act on the statistical knowledge you gain, you will have changed the environment significantly and the information you used will no longer apply to the new world you created. Bigger better computers and more powerful algorithms can't change that fundamental fact. Of course, removing people's ability to act in the conscious knowledge of their surroundings could make his vision possible. That's quintessential Orwellian nightmare material.
Humans are just very hard to predict. Even if a child may not be aware of the criteria for being selected as a troublemaker, and may not know what the consequences of that are, the environment will still reflect that interference. Certain members of the population will be removed for remediation, and the adults will be well aware of both criteria and consequences. Children will respond, and what was supposed to be remediation will simply become punishment for a new set of very subtle and always changing crimes.
There's lots that can be done to help people. If we were all doing what we could, right now, without predictive technology, we could make a lot of difference, I don't see how Martin thinks technology will change indifference that much. We can't make statistical models to automate the process of doing good. It won't work. At best it is stupid. At best.
I'm even suspicious of the mantra of early detection -- the idea that anything, if caught early enough, can be fixed easily. Kids don't just "go down the wrong path", implying that somehow if you "get them on track" they will be okay. People become who they are in a constant process of self-invention, they aren't astroids floating through space that can be nudged into different trajectories if only we use great forethought.
Anyway, RMS wrote more than Emacs. He was the first author of gcc, which even the BSD folks somehow manage to use despite the license. He wrote ls for GNU's fileutils, for instance. His name is also on a lot of other little programs that he wrote out of idealistic dedication, not because they were interesting. If you don't notice active development from him, it's probably because he hasn't written much in a number of years due to RSI, from my understanding.
And anyway, who looks at code and thinks "bloat"? You look at programs and think "bloat", which is probably all you've looked at in Emacs... if you look a bloated program's code you think "cruft". Get your terms straight!
And your freedom to swing your fist isn't defined as illegal because it restricts. It doesn't restrict. It hurts. Taking someone's lunch money doesn't restrict either. It deprives. These things aren't as simple as you seem to want them to be. Libertarian, no doubt.
Popups can be nice -- for glossary terms, for instance. But only when the user asks for them. Otherwise they are almost universally annoying.
Your concept of freedom is a rather empty one. Freedom in a societal sense means the restriction of individuals' ability to restrict others.
A free society restricts individuals' ability to hold slaves, for instance. In fact, one step further -- we restricts anyone from even voluntarily making themselves the slave of another! And that is not trivial -- voluntary slavery is historically rather common. So why won't we let people do it? It's their life to give away, isn't it?
Well, you can figure that out for yourself. But don't mistake your naive notion of freedom with a real freedom for a society. And RMS believes too strongly to create a fragile and disempowered freedom -- let BSDers do that.
People know how to deal with spin and commercial bull. The educated among them know how to deal with intellectualism and the abstract arguments that go with. But someone who really believes something -- that's rather unusual, and people don't know how to deal with it at all.
The audience will empathize to a degree, as they would for anyone they listened to. It's like trying the idea on for size. But they will feel nervous, because believing something just because of the rightness of it is something that makes you vulnerable. If you are just pragmatic, then you can change your mind and admit no real defeat. Pragmatism is very palatable. Open Source is a pragmatic approach. But to say something is right implies something else is wrong. That actually means something. That has implications. That might lead somewhere you don't expect. It doesn't fit with the postmodernism so many of us have internalized.
It makes them uncomfortable. It is completely uncool. Entirely unmodern. People will dismiss him as a fanatic, which is just the word for anyone considerably less cynical than you are. It's too bad, really.
Gates has had the opportunity to be a highly influential and important figure of real persuasion, but hasn't done anything interesting with it. He's written a couple books, but they weren't particularly insightful, and certainly not influential. Lots of people read the books, sure, but that only makes his lack of success more apparent -- people have read him, and they still don't care. Few people say that about RMS writings, whether they agree or not.
Gates has had a bully pulpit because he is the single most rich person in the world. He can get top billing in just about any medium he wants -- TV, radio, newspapers, even /. -- but that isn't due to his persuasiveness. Just his wealth and influence.
To his credit, Bill Gates has written a number of essays, even an article on genetically modified food.
How do you fight the imaginary monster that's underneith the bed? Easy, stop believing in it. That's how you kill a corporation too.
So how do you give due process to the elimination of a corporation? I believe in due process, as much as corporations tend to manipulate it, and I wouldn't want to give it up.
Another possibility is that you simply make it much easier to charge the individuals in a corporation for their actions. But this has a lot to do with a lack of will on the part of the government, and unfortunately that's very hard to change. There seems like a lot of places where there have been large corporate conspiracies -- and there are specific laws about conspiring across state lines and what-not. But they only get used against organized crime, not organized corporate crime. I blame that on the prosecutors (and of course their bosses). More laws won't get the current laws enforced.
One way to help would be to eliminate much of corporation's right to privacy. I believe this would be quite reasonable, and if it was a true public disclosure then third-parties could raise objections and civil suits against the corporations and individuals when the government (predictably) ignores abuses. And if you want to keep privacy, fine, you just don't get limited liability.
I'm not sure how that would effect trade secrets -- not something I'm particularly happy with anyway, but without secrets it's not easy to gain advantage from novelty, and novelty (i.e., invention) is good.
Still, there's a good comprimise in there somewhere.
I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but really, we need a little more perspective. There's real evil being done in the world -- but it ain't coming from the world of computer operating systems.
4) Pay Avery Lee to license his work to SloMedia (assuming he holds sole copyright).
It's pretty common that Free Software programmers write proprietary code for a living. And many of them would be willing to provide non-GPL licenses for money. I believe this has been a major source of revenue for Cygnus (don't know what it is now that Redhat owns them). And it's only fair.
Another important non-technical interpretation of this is intention. It seems quite clear that SloMedia turned the software into a DLL with the intention of circumventing the GPL. I think this will be more important than the spirit of the GPL, because spirit is vague and open to much debate, and no one at SloMedia was obliged to read RMS's writings to understand what he was trying to do with the GPL. But it is possible to pretty much prove what SloMedia's intention was (and hopefully the FSF will be able to do that).
I mean, at some point GTK had less widgets than Tk did. So there must be some reason GTK got ahead.
You are the first person I've seen mention Tcl/Tk in this discussion. What's up with that? It's been around for a long time, before Qt or GTK. It's portable. It has a fine license. So why didn't it become the defacto free widget library? Tcl seems to have encumbered it, but despite that many language bindings exist. I don't know if it has the best set of widgets, but I'm sure that could have been fixed. So what's so bad about Tk?